Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5 Read online

  So yeah, all right, I like the kid. And the clerk at the resettlement office gets up my nose in about thirty seconds flat. "Name?" she says, without looking up at either of us, and he doesn't answer, so I say it for him. She taps it into her interface and frowns. "MacDonald's a pretty common last name. Parents? Street address?"

  I look at him. He shrugs, shoulders squared, hands in his pockets. Cat's got his tongue. "What if you can't find his family?"

  "He'll stay at the camp until we can find a foster situation for him." She still hasn't lifted her eyes from the interface. "It might be a while. Especially if he won't talk. Where'd you find him?"

  "Downtown." Five more seconds, and I'm going to be as silent as the kid. I fold my arms and lean back on my heels.

  "Look." She pushes back from her desk, and I catch her eyes, contacts colored blue-violet with swimming golden sparks. Distracting as hell. "We get a couple dozen porch monkeys through here every week. Either you can help me out, or—"

  The kid presses against my side, and it's a good thing he's in the way of my gun hand, because there's a rifle across my back and if I could reach it, she'd never have gotten to the second syllable in "monkey."

  "Or I can try to find his parents myself. Thank you, miss."

  She's a civilian, more's the pity. And they won't do a fucking thing about her, but I'm still going to file a complaint.

  God, I hate these people.

  I take the kid back to my billet. Halfway there, as we're trudging along side by side, I run into Brody. "New boyfriend, Casey?"

  I look at the kid. The kid looks at me. "He's like a mascot, Sarge."

  "Like the camp cat, Casey? Not gonna happen."

  But Brody's okay on a lot of levels, laid back and easy-going with a full measure of sun- and laugh-lines. He likes to talk about his grandkids, though he can't be much more than fifty-five.

  Yeah, so at eighteen, fifty-five is like the end of the world. The light from fifty-five takes a million years to reach eighteen. Brody sighs and hooks his thumb in his belt and says, "Get some dinner in him. And some breakfast. Tomorrow, you get his ass home, you understand?"

  "Yes, Sarge," I say. "Thank you."

  "Don't get too used to it, Casey."

  One more shake of his head, a self-annoyed grunt, and he's gone.

  * * *

  We all want to die at home.

  Geniveve gets close, but even her stubborn isn't quite enough to pull off that one. There's the hospital and then there's hospice care and Genie's way too young for this, and too sick, because she's stressed out and flares up. Don't ever tell me babies don't understand.

  So God help Gabe, he's mostly with Genie, because somebody has to be and she wants her Papa. She wants her Maman too.

  And Leah and me, we stay with Geniveve. I haven't really got a lot to say about it.

  Except, Geniveve is so fragile by the end, a soap bubble. You know in movies where there's a Chernobyl event and then people die, crying from the pain in their joints, bruising in huge terrible flowers anyplace their bones press the inside of their skin?

  That's leukemia. That's how leukemia kills you.

  You know that thing where they say that God never gives you more than you can shoulder?

  It's a vicious, obscene lie.

  * * *

  You know what happens. What with one thing and another, he stays a night, and then three nights, and then by four days in he stops being "Casey's kid" and turns into the whole camp's mascot. They call him half a dozen stupid nicknames—mouche-noir, first, which turns into Mooch overnight. Moustique, which is "mosquito" and also "punk." One of the guys starts singing the black-fly song at him—a-crawlin' in your whiskers, a-crawlin' in your hair, a-swimmin' in the soup and a-swimmin' in the tea—and pretty soon the whole camp is doing it, which drives him as nuts as the black flies would've.

  Poor kid.

  I ply him with hockey cards and cigarettes, and even get him half-interested in the games. We get them on satellite, and it's a camp-wide event when they're on. You really have to piss somebody off to draw picket that night. They're the old-fashioned cards mostly, you know the ones with the limited memory and just a little chip screen, maybe 90 seconds of highlights? He's fascinated by a couple of the "classic" ones—Bill Barilko, that kind of stuff—players from the previous century in grainy black and white, images set to radio broadcast clips. There's more highlights on those, and he listens to them for hours, curled up in the corner with his elbows on his knees.

  And then after a week of this, I get my leave. Thirty-six hours, back in Toronto, and a unit transfer.

  Everybody knows what that means.

  I guess I'm going to get my wish. I'm going overseas.

  Between us, Hetu and me hack one of the hockey cards—they have an uplink so you can check these dedicated web pages with scores and biographies and stuff—so the kid can use it for email. I show him the trick; it's awkward, but hey, it's free, right? Last thing I do, before I shake his hand, is rip the unit patch off my shoulder and hand it to him.

  I won't be needing it anymore.

  He takes it, crumples it in his fist until I can't see it.

  "You gonna be okay?"

  Jerk of his chin.

  "Really okay?"

  And he gives me this stiff little nod. He's not going to cry. He's not even going to look like he wants to cry.

  Brave little toaster. But I'm dumb enough to push it. "I'll come back if you want me to. After. I'll come get you." What am I gonna do with a kid? What is Carlos going to want with some American refugee kid with PTSD who cries in his sleep like a puppy? How the fuck old are we both going to be before I could come back?

  Fuck it. Sometimes you just have to pretend you're not lying.

  But he stares right through me and says, "You won't come back." The finality of abandonment, of somebody who knows the score.

  I don't argue. "Write me?"

  And he licks his lips and jerks his chin down once, like he was driving a nail. Sure thing, Casey.

  I don't lose my shit, myself, until I'm on the transport. Until I'm safe in Ontario, getting off the bus, and then it's okay because Carlos thinks I'm crying over him and it never does any harm to let your fianc think you can't live without him.

  Carlos has lousy feet and worse ankles. He works for the quartermaster. He's not going anywhere. From each according to his ability.

  I get my orders for Pretoria. And the rest is history. I dear-john Carlos from the hospital, after burning half my fucking face off in South Africa. I never have the heart to find out if he makes it through the war.

  Dwayne doesn't write. It's three months before I figure out that he'd been too proud to tell me he didn't know how.

  * * *

  I stick around Toronto for a little while after the funeral, until things are settled and the girls aren't constantly asking when Maman is coming home. I want to stay forever.

  I . . . can't. Every time I look at Gabe now, I hear Geniveve telling me to marry him, and the hell of it is, boy, it would make the kids happy. It would even make me happy, for a little, until the whole thing went pear-shaped. As you know it inevitably would. Love affairs forged in crisis, they're like trashfires. They burn out hot and leave a lot of stink behind.

  He says he'll call. I tell him I'll come visit for Leah's birthday, which is May. It's only a five-hour drive from Hartford. There's a lot of rundown old dumps there, and I buy one. On the worst street in the worst neighborhood of town, but who's going to give me a hard time?

  It's barely got electric.

  They call that area the North End. It's the kind of place where men in bedroom slippers drink forties of malt liquor from paper bags on bus benches that haven't seen service since the war. It's full of immigrants and poor blacks and West Indians. Which is fine with me; you can never have too much Jamaican food.

  It's exactly what I want. A hole I can crawl into and pull up snug.

  That's a joke, isn't it? Vets going back whe
re they fought, where they served. Marrying a brown native girl who only speaks horizontal English. Happens every day.

  It's the peak experience, maybe. Or maybe the thing where we can't go home and we can't stay here. Wherever here might be. Maybe they ought to just shoot the warriors when we come home.

  That way, it would be over quick.

  Anyway. I'm standing on a street corner smoking my last cigarette when I see him. This gangster, and he's like a kick in the chest. Threat response, predator response, because he's the king of the street. Swaggering down Albany Ave in a black T-shirt, boots, jeans, and a black leather jacket zinging with chains. His shaved head's glossy in the sun. Pink proud flesh catches the sun on his crown; he taps knuckles with a skinny guy headed the other direction. He's huge; shoulders bulging the seams of his jacket. And he's flanked by two toughs that trail him like pilotfish after a shark.

  I'm supposed to be impressed.

  One falls back a half-step to have a word with the guy the big man deigned to notice, and that's when I catch a flash on the head man's shoulder. Red and white and gray, sewn to black leather.

  It stops me in my tracks. I stare uncomprehendingly and take a step forward. That sharp pink scar, the heavy neck, the massive hands, the swagger. The way he dips his head when he turns to his friend and half-nods.

  The friend catches me staring and moves in. The big man turns, notices my face, recoils. I'm used to that, but it stings from him. If it is. Him.

  The scars, of course. And I'm in mufti. I hope I can talk my way out of this before I get my head handed to me.

  They move toward me, the big man and both his toughs, and the newcomer trailing like a remora hoping to attach itself to an apex predator. Four of them.

  I can do it.

  I can't promise to keep that many safe.

  They pause three meters distant, the big one sizing up my scars and my face. His pistol's under his jacket, a hilt-down shoulder holster. I can tell through the hide.

  I wear mine in plain sight, strapped to my thigh.

  "There a problem?"

  Right on script, but he reads it too softly. It could be an honest question.

  I treat it that way. "No problem. I was wondering if you knew a Dwayne MacDonald, grew up near here." Pause. "He'd be about your age."

  The silence stretches. He looks at me, into my eyes, at the shape of my shoulder and the angle of my nose. "Beat it," he says, finally, and he's not talking to me. I catch a glitter, steel teeth behind his lips. Some sort of cosmetic mod.

  Not cheap.

  Without protest, with a few unanswered promises to catch-you-later-man, the other three recuse themselves. Dwayne stands there looking at me, hulking behemoth with his hands shoved in his pockets. I think I could get a ting! out of the tendons on his neck if I flicked them with a thumbnail.

  "What do you go by now?"

  "Huh?" As if I've shattered his concentration. "Oh. Razorface." The sibilants hiss through his teeth. "They call me Razorface. This my street." A shrug over his shoulder. Sure. Lord of all he surveys. "War's over, Casey."

  "Yeah." We stand there staring at each other for a minute, grinning. People cross the street. "Call me Maker. I live here now. Hey, you know what?"

  "What?"

  "You should come over some time. And watch a hockey game. In fact, can I buy you a drink?"

  "It's ten in the morning, you fucking drunk," he says, but he takes my elbow and turns me, like he expects me to need the support. "Fuck, you look like hell."

  "Yeah," I say, 'cause it's true.

  But that's okay. Because on the other hand, he looks like he's doing . . . all right.

  So that's something, after all.

  * * *

  Elizabeth Bear is the author of several novels.

  To see this authors works sold through Amazon, click here:

  A Stranger in Paradise

  Written by Edward M. Lerner

  Illustrated by Dean Spencer

  Row upon row of blue-and-green-and-white globes mock me.

  The world below reflects from tumblers and goblets and snifters and flutes, from more types of antique glassware than I can name. Bottles and decanters of amber liquid line other shelves. Seven thousand years is too vintage for my tastes; I'm ignoring my craving for a drink.

  Ama and I first spoke in a place like this—not a derelict starship, but another tavern. Human nature has changed over the millennia, but not in that way.

  No, let me call her Amanda. If those I want to find this memoir do, the old form of the name may be more familiar. My name has no old form; Cameron will do.

  I was alone, my back to the boisterous crowd, when she approached my table. The friends she had come in with were chattering away. Despite pulsing music and her soft tread, I knew she was there well before she spoke.

  "You act like the world is against you."

  I was new there—there meaning Earth, not only the Academy—and homesick and friendless. I held back my reflexive reply: that the world was. Medicine and training notwithstanding, the gravity was killing me. The answer I gave instead made her laugh.

  I had met the one. Some things you just know.

  * * *

  Planets are tough on artifacts mere mortals can build. A few thousand years of weathering and erosion destroys and obscures a lot. It wasn't until we stumbled upon ancient lunar settlements preserved by the vacuum that we realized we—humankind—had been in space before. A whole new science, techno-archeology, was needed to understand. When fragments of data finally began to emerge from the lost civilization's computers, we were even more amazed.

  The Firsters had burst from the solar system with an armada of slowboats and an excess of enthusiasm. Their ships would, in a few generations' time, reach nearby stars thought to warm planets with good prospects for human colonization.

  The solsys-wide civilization collapsed before any of those pioneers could possibly have reached their destinations. Archeologists agree that Earth suffered plagues, famine, global warfare, eco-collapse, and socioeconomic implosion. They just cannot agree on cause and effect.

  Millennia later, humanity has recovered, and more, exploring its galactic neighborhood in faster-than-light ships embodying technologies the Firsters never imagined.

  And none of our nearest interstellar neighbors has a human presence.

  If any of the slowboats narrowcast home as instructed about their first landfalls, no one retained the technology to hear. Some ships, perhaps, never reached their destinations. Some planetary settlements, it was eventually discovered, were started and failed. A few asteroid bases were found orbiting nearby stars—all abandoned.

  But those failures were not the end of the story.

  What is known for certain is that some missions traveled far past their intended stars. Were the original destination worlds too inhospitable for the colonization methods of the time? Interstellar space is a big place—did they simply lose their way? Did settlements split, some staying to defend a hard-won beachhead, others ever seeking a better world? All the above occurred, and more than once, the process repeating until the slowboats could voyage no more.

  The Firster generation ships spread humanity thinly across a million cubic light years, in hundreds of tiny enclaves in as many alien environments. Many groups eventually died out. Some continued to eke out a hard-scrabble existence, their memories of Earth warped or nonexistent. Few retained any vestige of civilization.

  For those who survived, there is the Reunification Corps.

  * * *

  Amanda. . . .

  Whenever she entered a room, heads turned, conversation stopped, men smiled reflexively, and libidos engaged. I knew then, and remember now, that she is physically beautiful. Flowing brown hair. Striking blue eyes ever twinkling with warmth and curiosity. A willowy grace.

  And yet beauty is the least of her charms.

  I should get on subject.

  Finding lost colonies is an art. Few records survive to show wher
e the slowboats went, even on their first, usually failed attempts. There are too many stars, even with FTL drive, to search them all. So, while the Reunification Corps employs a multitude of skills and professions, the rarest and most precious talent is the one that makes all the others relevant.

  Mine.

  It's a peculiar mode of thought, the ability to put one's self into the mindset of a doomed expedition born of an ancient civilization. To think: I'm here, one of the lucky ones, after generations of travel. To realize: this climate, these perils, a lack of vital resources . . . something makes it too dangerous to stay. Extrapolating from that crushing disappointment, and what little we've reconstructed of Firster technology, how they might have reacted to the prospect of moving on. Which of the distant pinpoints of light would seem the most promising? Which would merit entombing myself and generations of my descendants on a slowboat that logic says may not survive another epic voyage but is too complex to replace? Deciding where, with an entire solar system to choose from, the Firsters might have established a base.