Emerald Sky: January 2013

Sky

emerald

Sneak Peak: The Shifting (Coming This Year)

Another Sunset

Starlight, Her Seplechre Photographic Memories

Welcome Back to

Emerald Sky

Dear Readers, It’s been a short three months since the last issue of Emerald Sky. During that time, we’ve grown a lot. Our staff has grown in numbers and our submissions pile has grown to monstrous proportions (keep those stories coming, authors). Most importantly, I feel that our stories have grown with us. I hope you agree.

This issue features three science fiction stories ranging from the near to the far future. “Photographic Memories” is possibly the perfect title for a story about retrieving memories from photographs. “Starlight, Her Sepulchre” is a story with Lovecraftian overtones set against a backdrop of interplanetary war. “Another Sunset” is a more literary tale of one young man’s longing to see an alien sky.

Finally, I am pleased to introduce what we hope will become a regular feature of Emerald Sky Magazine: a sneak-peek sample chapter from an upcoming Emerald Sky Books novel. This month we are pleased to present a chapter from The Shifting, Allison Hymas’s debut novel of a stunning, magical America you might wish you could live in. The full novel should be available from TM Publishing a little later on in 2013.

We hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as we enjoyed editing them. If you like what you read, please take a moment to visit the authors’ websites linked in the bios at the end of their stories. We couldn’t make this magazine without the submissions of great writers, and it wouldn’t be worth making without support from you, our readers.

Thanks for reading.

Daniel Friend

Managing Editor, Emerald Sky Magazine

Contributors Authors Janka Hobbs Stephen Case Josh Turner Allison Hymas Managing Editor Daniel Friend Layout Design Chris Taney Editor Jill Bickham Copyeditors Chris Anderson Sam Butler Liz Friend

Credits Cover art by Paul Bica and Jonathan Kos-Read. Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.

Flickr.com/paul bica & Flickr.com/ Jonathan Kos-Read

That was the memory I wanted to keep.

Table of Contents

Photographic memories

75

Sneak Peak: the shifting

And then the screaming began.

Starlight, her seplechre

Every day I die again.

Another sunset

49 7 23

“What did you bring back?” Is this what’s down there, killing our men?”

13

Flickr.com/dailyinvention & Flickr.com/B.S. Wise

photographic memories Janka Hobbs

Never Doubt Yourself Again!

Do you have fading memories? Ones that are important to you? Memories you fear could be lost? Save them now! Avail yourself of our new Memory Enhancer and watch them regain their sparkling clarity!

The ad was done up like a newspaper headline, so you’d start reading it before you noticed it wasn’t the news. I clued in on that, but kept reading anyway.

Now, for a limited time only, we are offering a discount on our newest service, Memento-aided Enhancement. No pre-screening necessary.

Now, I’m a grown woman. I ought to know better than to fall for some scam like that. But as my Grandma Brown, who raised me, used to always say, sitting on the couch won’t change what you see out the window. And, I had just enough money saved up that rent and the phone bill wouldn’t go begging if I went for it.

The “Memory Mechanics” were running out of an old doctor’s office down on Fourth. They had the same chrome tube chairs and watercolor landscapes on the wall as they did when the place had been a podiatrist’s.

At first, I thought they ought to have redecorated, but then I decided they left it looking doctorly on purpose. Made it look official and scientific and all that. I signed in with the receptionist and sat down.

It didn’t take but a few minutes before a clean-cut young man in a lab coat and black-framed glasses pushed open the door from the back and read my name off a clipboard. “Brenda Freeman.”

I stood up, and he gave me a professional smile and juggled his clipboard to his other hand so he could shake mine. “Hi. I’m Chris.”

I smiled back at him and shook his hand, then handed him the ad and my memory booster: a faded and creased Polaroid of a little brown-haired girl in pigtails and overalls holding on to a pink bicycle with training wheels. A youngish man in a flannel shirt and jeans is standing behind her. They’re both grinning. Even if it were in better condition, it wouldn’t be that good a picture—she has her eyes closed, and you can’t see most emerald sky - 7

of his face because of the shadow from his baseball cap.

Chris looked at it. “This looks pretty fragile. Um, it might not survive the process.”

It was kind of sweet how concerned he looked, though I suspect he was thinking about his commission. I also kind of surprised myself by hesitating. Like I said, it wasn’t that good a picture, and it was creased so bad you could hardly tell what it was about. I’d found it under the dresser at my Grandma Brown’s house when I went to live with her after my parents died in the accident. It must have been taken just before that, on my fifth birthday.

8 - January 2013

A Saturday, because my Dad stayed home for once to teach me how to ride my new bike. When I looked at the picture, I could just about smell the lilacs blooming on the far side of the house.

Chris noticed my hesitation.

“This looks like you’ve spent plenty of time with it. That’s good. The memories will have soaked into it pretty well. But if it would upset you too much to risk it, you can still change your mind. No obligation.”

I just stood there. I was trying to dredge up other memories that went with the picture, but it probably looked like I was deciding if I had enough of them already. I didn’t. Grandma Brown didn’t

like to talk about my parents. She never mentioned my dad, and when she did talk about my mom, it was always stories from when she was a little girl. Like she’d never grown up.

Chris cleared his throat. “Do you still want to go through with it? I’ll make you a copy of the picture.”

“As long as I still have something to look at.”

Under that was a brick of lawyerese in about six point type. I could have raised a stink and asked for a magnifying glass, but the idea that I might remember more about my folks was just too tempting. I signed at the red arrow and held out the clipboard to Chris.

He took it and lowered the helmet over my head. It snugged itself down around my ears. Then

The idea that I might remember more about my folks was just too tempting.

Flickr.com/majorvols

“It’s a deal. I’ll even clean it up for you.”

He led me to one of the old exam rooms. They’d left the medical cupboards and desk, but replaced the exam table with a recliner that looked like a cross between a dentist chair and one of those old-fashioned hair dryers they used to have at beauty shops. Chris motioned me to sit in the recliner and handed me the clipboard and a pen.

“Make yourself comfortable and sign at the bottom.” He turned away to slide the photo into the machine.

The top half of the paper said pretty much what the ad did.

there was a whirring noise that felt like a cross between a scalp massage and a swarm of mosquitoes caught in my hair. A shield lowered itself over my eyes.

I was looking in on the scene from the picture.

My husband had finally taken a day off, and was teaching our little girl to ride her new bike. I had to get this on film.

The scene shifted slightly, and my cousin Kelly rode by on her shiny purple bike. The little pink bike was tipped over on the lawn. I pulled it upright, climbed on, and tried to pedal after Kelly. She whizzed by again. I reached the emerald sky - 9

driveway and careened down it into the street. A car horn blared. Mommy screamed.

That couldn’t be right.

The scene shifted again. It was a sunny day. I’d just turned five, and my daddy was going to teach me how to ride my new bike.

Mommy ran out with the camera and made us stand still and look into the sun. When the picture came out, Mommy counted to one hundred real slow, peeled the paper off the picture, looked at it, frowned, and took another one. She did the same with the

I shut my eyes tight. I blinked again.

I stood on the steps and tried to open my eyes so Mommy could take her picture, but the sun was too bright. I could smell the cake in the oven indoors and Daddy’s cigarettes. Daddy pinched me and my eyes opened.

“That should be a good one,” Mommy said.

I agreed.

I closed my eyes. The memory machine whirred, and I felt little pinpricks all over my scalp as the wires pulled themselves loose. I

“I can remember what my fifth birthday cake smelled like.” next one. And the next.

Finally, Daddy growled, “You’ll burn the cake!” and she went inside.

I didn’t like the idea of my daddy being mean like that, so I blinked my eyes. I was riding the pink bike again, down the driveway and into the street.

I forgot how to make it stop.

The car horn blared, Mommy screamed, the car brakes squealed. The curb came up in front of me, and I ran into it and flew over the handlebars.

10 - January 2013

made sure to keep my eyes closed until Chris came up next to me and told me I was done.

Then I opened my eyes and smiled at him. “I can remember what my fifth birthday cake smelled like.”

He smiled back at me. “I hope it smelled good.”

“It did.”

He walked me back out to the waiting area and handed me a copy of my photo, just like he’d promised. The card stock it was printed on was a hair too thin to feel like

a Polaroid, and the bike was red.

Otherwise it was pretty close.

I waved at the receptionist and went out to my car. I sat there and closed my eyes, remembering the smell of the cake and of Daddy’s cigarettes and the roses along the side of the house.

It was a great old memory.

Except that now I recognized the house. It was the one my cousin Kelly grew up in.

I started up the car and drove over to Kelly’s place. I wasn’t really expecting her to be home, but her car was in the driveway, so I went up and rang the bell.

Kelly answered the door. I handed her the picture.

She laughed. “Where did you get that? Though I do remember my mom taking about a hundred of them.”

I must have gotten a funny look on my face, because she stopped talking and put on her “concerned” look. “I hope you didn’t get it copied just for me. I’ve got better ones in the album.”

“Can I see them?” I tried to sound normal, but I think my voice squeaked.

Kelly smiled. “Sure, come on in. I’ve got a few minutes.” She led the way into the den, pulled a thick photo album off of a top shelf, and flipped through it.

“Here they are. The pictures from my fifth birthday. You were just a baby then.”

She handed me the album.

There was a whole series of fading Polaroids, the colors bleeding orange and green, but in the better pictures, the man was unmistakably her dad, and the house the one she lived in growing up.

I sat down on the couch and flipped through the pictures. I wasn’t about to admit to her what I’d done. It was too stupid. She’d think I wanted her memories instead of my own. I also remembered showing the picture to Grandma Brown. She could have told me it was Kelly and not me.

“Whatever happened to that pink bicycle?” I asked, just to fill the space.

Kelly sat down on the couch next to me and took a deep breath. “What do you remember from before you went to live with Grandma?”

“Not much. Grandma never talked about it.” I almost felt like running to check that Grandma wasn’t listening at the door, or gardening just outside the window, but I sat still. Like I said, I’m not a child anymore. “There was some sort of car accident, and my parents were killed. I do remember people telling me emerald sky - 11

I was a very lucky little girl, but I don’t remember anything else about it.”

Kelly cleared her throat.

“Grandma didn’t want you to know, but that’s not exactly what happened. Your family was coming over. I’d just gotten a new bike, and my dad got the pink baby bike out of the garage so you could ride it. I guess your mom and dad had been fighting, because he just dropped the two of you off and zoomed down to the end of the street to turn around. You hopped on the bike and tried to ride it down the driveway. It rolled into the street, just as your dad was barreling back through. He missed you, but hit your mom. He never stopped, and as far as I know, nobody ever saw him again.”

I tried to pull up some memory of my dad that wasn’t just a generic version of Kelly’s dad. I didn’t have one. “You mean he

might still be alive?”

“He might, but he didn’t want you to find him.”

I remembered all the daddaughter activities at school, tagging along with my uncle, or worse, with some classmate’s father when Kelly got too big to go. “How do you know that?”

“I know that when they opened up your old apartment, all the pictures of him were missing.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes.

My fingers wrapped around the handlebars of my new, bright red bicycle. I squinted into the sun and gave Mommy my best toothy grin. Daddy put his hand on my shoulder and I took a deep breath, smelling the birthday cake that was just about to come out of the oven. The camera clicked and whirred.

That was the memory I wanted to keep. It was bought and paid for, and I liked it.

Janka Hobbs Janka grew up roaming the desert around Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She now lives in the rainforested Puget Sound lowlands, where she studies Botany and Aikido when she’s not playing with words. This is her first published story.

12 - January 2013

Advertisement emerald sky - 13

Flickr.com/Nasa

starlight, her sepulchre stephen case

Our job was putting together the bodies

they sent us from the Rim. It rarely took more than watching and monitoring: adjusting the nutrient matrix a bit here, tweaking a bone or a muscle graft there. For the most part, we were left to our own devices on the medical frigates. The only things to see were the winking lights of the fleet outside the portals and the growing, sleeping forms of the regenerating within their resurrection pods.

Officers would sometimes inquire about the status of specific soldiers, though rarely. When they did, I would translate the growth rate of tissue into the number of days or weeks remaining.

“The cluster of pods we received from the battle over Arkham? Most of those soldiers will be ready for a memory dump and re-briefing in three days. You should have them back on the line by the end of the week.”

And so on.

In my mind, the war was fought by faceless men and women in large armored suits. When the suits were destroyed and the flesh within shattered, the remnants would wander back here, and the regeneration units would stitch them together so they could go fight again.

It always surprised me when officers came in person to see about a specific regeneration.

“Ensign Jens Grale.”

The tall, dour-looking man wore the uniform of a pilot, which meant that he commanded a whole wing of suits. I didn’t look close enough to see whether his insignia designated him air or ground assault. I consulted the display before me.

“She’s in C-47,” I read. “Regeneration only twenty-four percent complete.”

“Can I see her?”

I glanced up at him again. It was hard to read expressions in the dim light of the med bay.

“We usually recommend against it. The patients don’t develop skin until the final stages of the process. Most find the sight of a regenerating—” emerald sky - 15

“I’d like to see her.”

I shrugged. He had the appropriate clearances. “Follow me.”

The medical bay was large and divided by long rows of the resurrection pods. There were dozens of such bays on our frigate, the Mountstuart Elphinstone, each with the capacity for perhaps four hundred units. Bodies were suspended in the units horizontally, so those patients near the end of the process seemed to simply sleep under a canopy of glass.

The form in C-47, however, was nowhere near that stage. In her re-gen unit there was only a hint of bones and tissue drifting in the nutrient fluid with groupings of bud-like organs still too small to identify.

I heard the man’s intake of breath behind me.

“Will she remember?” he asked after a moment.

“Patients have no memory of their time regenerating.” I wasn’t sure if that was what he meant. “She’ll remember everything up to her last memory scan. We get the files sent over from Command, and we structure them into the patient’s cortex just before we revive.”

“Memory scan,” the man mused.

I nodded. “The ones you usually do before each mission.”

16 - January 2013

“So she won’t remember . . .”

“Dying? No.” He was staring at the form with an expression I still could not interpret. “How did it happen?”

“We were three hundred klicks over one of the colony worlds, well outside of atmo. You’d have thought,” he said absently, “our Mother would have seen a whole wing on her screens, but they came out of nowhere and cut through the entire van before we had formed up. She held off an entire squadron of Colonials for the minutes it took us to pull back.” His voice grew in strength.

“I wouldn’t have made it back if it wasn’t for her. I saw her suit go up, and I thought, ‘Oh God, there’s not going to be enough; they won’t be able to get her back.’”

I checked the display on her unit. “There was plenty of residual material. Usually we obtain a successful regeneration with as few as half a dozen sound cells.”

He blinked. “I appreciate you letting me see her.”

When he was gone, I went back down the rows, checking and rechecking the monitors of various active units. Some, like hers, contained only rumors of flesh and bone, tendrils of tendon and congealed blood. Others near the very end slept fitfully. Muscles

One of the other men leaned forward and muttered something, and the first nodded. “May we see Ensign Grale?”

I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t take them to regeneration unit C-47. The units were not exteriorly numbered, and I assumed the officers would have little knowledge of the bay’s organization. I took them to a random • pod that contained a half-formed “You have a soldier in here.” female body.

I glanced up from checking the “Will it kill her, stopping the levels on a unit that had consis- regeneration?” tently been reading low. There I shook my head. “Removing were more navy men. The tall the growth catalysts won’t destroy man from the week before was what’s already re-formed, but it not among them. will retard the regrowth until the “I’m sorry?” order comes to resume.” twitched under naked skin as they were slowly reconditioned.

I wondered idly if the process could operate in reverse, if one could lie down in a unit to sleep, let the fluid fill around you, and then dwindle until you were only a half-dozen cells scooped off the transparent steel of a suit’s evac pod.

“There’s not going to be enough; they won’t be able to get her back.”

“An Ensign.” The man in the center checked a digital readout he held. “Jens Grale.”

“Ah. Yes, sir.” I had to check my own display again. “C-47.”

He handed me the readout.

“This is an order to discontinue regeneration until further notice.”

I took it without looking at it.

“May I ask why?”

“Command jurisdiction.”

The men were staring through the glass at the woman.

“Has there been anything unusual in the process?”

I looked down at the unit blandly. “Right now there are almost two hundred patients in this bay alone. The regeneration process is controlled largely automatically.” I touched a few buttons on this particular unit’s emerald sky - 17

display, careful that the woman’s true name was not visible.

“Everything seems to be in order with this one.”

They thanked me and left, conferring among themselves.

When they were gone I walked to the correct unit and looked down at the form inside. Her heart had begun to pulsate, and crimson threads were pushing into still-translucent extremities.

I hovered uncertainly and then made the adjustments to suspend regeneration.

•

The Mountstuart Elphinstone was a standard medical frigate with a crew of around one hundred, half of us medical staff.

We were tethered to a cluster of singularities several parsecs back from the front with the other support ships, so it was unlikely we would see any action ourselves. We were as tightly linked with the feeds as any other ship, though, and news traveled fast.

“Did you hear what they’re finding on the campaign worlds?”

Donovan said, taking a seat across from me in the mess. He wore the brash grin he usually did when he was looking for an argument.

18 - January 2013

I shook my head.

“Ruins,” he told us. “There are ruins on those planets.”

“Colonial?”

“The Colonials are saying they don’t know anything about them. These worlds weren’t even in the first wave of colonization anyway. And the eggheads they’ve sent down with the troops are saying they’re old as anything they’ve ever seen.”

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I cleared my throat. “How old is that?”

The grin became a scowl.

“Don’t you get it? They haven’t released a lot of images, but from what I’ve seen they’re sure as hell not natural. Twisted. Weird angles.

Something out of a bad dream.

But definitely artificial.” He barked a laugh. “We find the first irrefutable signs of alien

intelligence right here in the middle of a war.”

Tsai-Chan spoke at my elbow.

“I saw them too. Carbon dating won’t work, because there’s nothing organic down there predating the Colonials.” She had joined up just before this tour, and her eyes had the hollow look of someone still getting used to always seeing night outside the windows.

“Uranium-lead dating, though,

emerald sky - 19

puts estimates on the order of billions.”

“Four or five billion years old!”

Donovan bellowed, waving his fork over his tray. “There was something out here building on these planets before Earth had even fired up its own plate tectonics.”

We waited.

“It’s like the Mariana Trench,” he muttered. “We blunder on out here, and we find something like this and realize we have no idea how deep things really are. How old. How big. Billions of years.

Just sitting here, and these planets don’t even have suns anymore.”

Soon the images were on all the feeds, and I saw what he was talking about. The campaign worlds were honeycombed with caverns and chambers and within them—laced up and down the walls and even hanging impossibly from the rocky ceilings themselves—immense ruined cities. The size of the cities was only magnified by the expanse of the caverns themselves: gulfs that opened into carved abysses large enough to swallow an entire troop transport.

“They’ll quarantine them,” TsaiChan said the next day. “Folks back on Earth aren’t going to like it if we wipe out the first proof of 20 - January 2013

non-human intelligence in the process of bringing the Colonials back in line.”

Someone snickered, and Donovan shook his head.

“Those evac pods we’re getting in right now? They’re coming from one of those worlds.

They’re saying the Colonials have dug into those cities like warrens.

Whatever alien architecture is out there, you can bet it’s going to get smashed to hell if they’re hiding inside it.”

“It seems a shame, them lasting so long,” Tsai-Chan said, “and us just kicking them over like anthills now.”

•

But no one was kicking over the anthills. From what we could tell from the information released, the ruins were huge, and their images filled me with a sense of dread. I had dreams of wandering through them, lost in the half-light of those dead planets. The angles of the stones didn’t sit right in the eye or mind.

Their roots ran deep, and if the Colonials had dug into them, it was going to be hell pulling them out.

“Is Ensign Grale still here?”

It was the tall man again. He seemed slightly breathless as

he leaned over my console and squinted at the readouts. Did he think she would have already been discharged, or had he heard her regeneration was suspended?

“She’s here,” I said slowly.

“Can I see her?”

I nodded. It was unusual but not unheard of for someone to make repeated visits to the regeneration units. I wondered about him, though. He was a pilot, which meant that even if he were stationed on another ship in the fleet, he would be able to come to the Elphinstone regularly. And he obviously had clearance to do so, or he wouldn’t be here now.

His brow furrowed when he saw her.

“Shouldn’t she—Is she healing correctly? I mean, shouldn’t she be making . . .”

“Better progress? The regeneration units are a tricky business,” I explained truthfully,

He nodded absently, his grey eyes scanning her form. I followed his gaze.

Odd. I had indeed cycled down the growth catalysts in the unit when I received the order to halt. That had been a couple days ago now.

Yet there were clear signs of further development. What had been gauzy wisps of tissue yesterday had firmed into ribbons of ligament. Threads marking the questing ends of regenerating veins and arteries quivered in the circulating fluids and seemed to extend even as I looked on.

The man watched hungrily.

“She was important to you?” I asked, primarily to cover my own sudden interest in the form under the glass.

“She saved my life down there,” he said quickly. “Our wing had gone pretty far into one of the caverns. I thought I’d be buried

“Is she healing correctly?

I mean, shouldn’t she be making . . .” “Better progress?” trying to sidestep his question.

“Often it takes quite a while to determine the right cellular patterns for optimal growth.”

when the Colonials brought the rocks down, but she burned her way through and held them off long enough for us all to get out.” emerald sky - 21

“Buried? I thought you said her suit was destroyed in space.”

He glanced around the bay.

“No, we were in the tunnels.”

A low warning klaxon sounded, indicating another cluster of evac pods had been received and was en route for regeneration. I hurried off to see to them, and when I returned the man was still there, leaning over the glass.

He seemed not to hear me when I told him he needed to leave.

them go wrong. Not enough cellular material left, or the units don’t get the patterns matched in time to sustain. Lots of flatlines.”

He paused.

“Oh God, don’t tell me you’re all the way out here and you’ve never lost one before?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve lost plenty. It’s not that.”

“Then why the stupid question?”

“I don’t mean a flatline. I mean sort of the opposite. Regeneration occurring too quickly, even when you’re trying to stop it.”

He seemed not to hear me

when I told him he needed to leave.

He stared at me.

“She sleeps,” he whispered, “for “The rate of regeneration,” he so long. She sleeps so deep.”

Below, the half-formed flesh said slowly, as though I was indeed a first-year medical stuhung suspended. dent, “depends on the density of • the nutrient matrix. Cells can’t “Have you ever had a regenera- build themselves faster than you tion go wrong?” give them material to work with.

Donovan looked up from the You shut off the flow, and you screen in his cramped bunk. shut off mitosis.”

“What?”

“I know all that.”

“A regeneration.” I stepped “And you’ve checked the through the doorway. “Have you unit itself ? Run the standard ever had one go wrong?” self-diagnostics, made sure “What kind of first-year ques- the nutrient flow controls tion is that? Of course I’ve had weren’t faulty?”

22 - January 2013

“Of course.”

He shrugged and turned back to his screen.

“What if there was—I don’t know—a malignancy?

Contamination of some sort?”

“The bio-filters would have picked it up. Nothing dirty gets into a re-gen unit.” He tossed down his screen. “What’s this all about?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got—” The klaxons went off again.

Another influx of evac pods.

Donovan swore under his breath. “This is getting ridiculous.”

•

The evac pods came up through the night like flotsam stirred from deep sea beds. They drifted to us in a steady stream all the rest of that evening and into the morning hours of the following cycle.

The Elphinstone and the other frigates opened their bay doors to accept them, and we went to work over the twisted, broken forms.

“Doctor.”

I was passing my control panel in the medical bay when the hologram flickered to light. It was the image of one of the men who had ordered the suspension of Ensign Grale’s regeneration.

Tiny text floating beside his form

identified him as a commander in the Eighth Fleet, the fleet from which we were now getting most of the new pods.

“I have an order from Command,” the image told me, “regarding patient Jens Grale.”

I waited.

“You are to terminate immediately.”

The image was grainy and blinked unsteadily, which bespoke either great distance or a large amount of interference. Even with the poor quality of the image, though, I could tell the officer’s face was worn. If the Eighth Fleet was engaged in a battle, both his expression and the pods still making their way to us indicated that things were not going well.

I asked him what was going on.

“The order alone should be clear, Doctor. Command will not authorize the release of memory scans for Ensign Grale. You are to terminate her biological regeneration.”

“I’m going to need a bit more information than that. I’ve never been asked to terminate a patient.”

The man hesitated, and his image wavered.

“Fine.” He paused. “We have reason to believe that Ensign Grale is in fact dead.” emerald sky - 23

24 - January 2013

failed nearly a full solar day before the evac pod launched.”

He gave me a moment to let that sink in.

“Command doesn’t take a termination lightly. But it looks like whatever cellular material was in that pod cannot belong to Grale.”

There was movement in the background of the image, and the officer turned to speak to someone outside the field

Flickr.com/piece of beauty

I snorted. “Of course she’s dead.

What I want to know is why she shouldn’t be regenerated. A soldier’s contract guarantees it if at all possible.”

He shook his head. “What I mean is that we’ve been looking at records of what took place on the surface when Grale was killed. We have information indicating that her suit was compromised and that her vitals

a full-scale investigation of this as soon as possible. We suspect a Colonial agent may have gained access to Grale’s pod and seeded it with material from one of their own dead officers.”

Another burst of static.

“But it won’t matter without a memory scan,” I said. “I should test the DNA again.”

“Negative. If the genetic database was indeed compromised, then it’s likely we’re dealing with internal Colonial sympathizers. If they have access to that database, it’s possible they could have a memory scan of their own ready for when the regeneration is complete.” He paused. “I don’t have time for this. Terminate immediately.”

Suddenly the tall man’s repeated visits to the regeneration unit and his conflicting stories made sense. of view. Portions of his torso “Understood,” I said. The image dissolved into static. faded.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Doctor.

At unit C-47 I stared a moment We’re in the middle of operations through the glass. Whoever the out here or I would have visited Colonials were trying to bring the frigate again in person. I trust back, she was huge. Her skeleton, you’ll carry out the order.” nearly complete now despite my “This is ridiculous,” I pressed. reduction of the nutrient matrix “The signature of the cells in the pod to the bare minimum required for matched Grale’s DNA perfectly.” life support, was half-sheathed in The man frowned. “That’s tissue. It was large enough that it what worries us. I’ll be ordering was already curled slightly below emerald sky - 25

the glass, legs bent like a fetus.

The eyes had formed, but the eyelids had yet to grow, so she seemed to stare out at me blindly.

I shuddered and deactivated the unit.

•

Donovan joined me in the corridor by a row of portals, through which I could see the winking lights of the rest of the fleet. We had been receiving still more evac pods throughout most of the night. The bays of the Elphinstone were nearly filled to capacity, and from what I heard it was the same with the other frigates.

“Things must be getting pretty bad out there,” Donovan said.

I nodded wearily.

“It’s not just the number of pods,” he went on, “though that’s bad enough. Have you seen the shape of some of the bodies?”

“I’ve seen them.” I was trying to decide whether I needed sleep or food more before the next wave of pods arrived. “Whatever the Colonials are doing down there, it’s getting nasty.” I decided on food, and Donovan trailed me to the mess.

He kept talking the whole way. “I just memory-dumped and discharged about a dozen 26 - January 2013

pilots that came in with the first wave. They weren’t nearly ready to go.” He scowled.

“Command sent over their memory scans with orders to get them back on the line as soon as possible, so I dumped the memories and woke them up. Some of them could hardly stand. We brought them out of it too quick.”

“And?” I had been doing the same thing for days now.

“And one of the pilots went nuts. An orderly brought her to me because she was screaming that she wasn’t going to go back. I got her sedated, but she started spilling her guts before the guys from Intelligence showed up.”

The view beyond the portals was largely devoid of stars. Dust falling into the cluster of singularities below obscured those that were still visible this close to the Rim. The green and red lights of the other frigates seemed lost on a sea of ink.

“They haven’t found any Colonials down there.”

I turned back to Donovan.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you what she said.

She said that on the planets with the ruins, they weren’t finding any active Colonial cells.”

“Then who the hell are they fighting?”

He shook his head. “She said the Colonials had been there, but the camps they were finding in those caverns were empty.”

I waited, trying to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

“She said the ruins were swallowing whole platoons.

Ships were getting lost down stone throats.”

bodies we had coming through, so it took me some time to realize that Command had started sending over old memory scans.

Whatever had happened to these soldiers on the campaign, their memories were being reset to the very start of combat operations.

That scared me.

We were too busy to think much of it, though when I told Donovan he just nodded

“She said the ruins were swallowing whole platoons. Ships were getting lost down stone throats.” grimly. “Otherwise they’d have a lot more trouble getting them to go back.”

I had forgotten the tall pilot amid the rising tide of dead until he reappeared in the med bay.

“What did you do to her?”

• He looked down at her regenStill the evac pods flowed in. eration unit. Opaque brown fluTransports docked with our frig- ids circulated beneath the glass. ates to shuttle revived soldiers It usually took a terminated unit back to the front. None of the several days to fully discharge soldiers that I woke said any- the organic materials and cleanse thing about what was happening itself in preparation for the next on the planets. In fact, none of culture. them said anything about those “Is she dead?” planets at all. We were all run I ignored the question and pretty ragged with the amount of asked who he was, careful to “She had a faulty dump, Donovan. She was trying to sort out her memories. And you had just drugged her. If there are no Colonials down there, who’s butchering these soldiers?”

emerald sky - 27

remain on the opposite side of the long row of glass coffins.

“You can’t kill her,” he said, laughing softly. He bent over the unit until his forehead rested against it.

“The termination order came through days ago from Command. There was nothing I could do. She’s definitely dead now. Dead again, I suppose.”

He did not seem to have heard, though he raised his head. “Some of us knew.” His fingers were splayed on the surface of the unit as though reaching for what was within. “Some of us saw. Knew she would come back. Even though it had been so long. Even though all her worlds were dead.”

He fixed me with a stare that went too deep, and I thought again of the sightless eyes of the body in C-47. He seemed to be looking past me, through the walls of the frigate itself to something only he could see swimming toward us through space.

I had been inching backward, but suddenly I froze.

There was movement in the unit. The man saw it and stroked the surface lovingly.

“Down there,” he whispered, “all we heard were her echoes. All we saw were her shadows. But it 28 - January 2013

was enough. She has been dreaming for so long.”

The brown fluid surged like a swollen river.

It was impossible. Nothing could still be alive in there.

“We brought her back!” His tone had risen in pitch but not volume. “We found her cold in her house of stone, but we brought her back.”

“What have you done?” I asked.

The low klaxons sounded again.

Beyond the hull of the ship, I knew more evac pods were rising from the deep with their carrion cargoes.

His laughter was low.

“Resurrection.”

There was another sound, this one strangely like stone on stone.

Something inside the pod was tapping on the glass.

“It’s impossible,” I said again.

Nothing had overridden my commands to the pod. The nutrient flux had been shut down, and the cleansing enzymes should have scrubbed the interior of any organic matter.

The pod was still between us, but now there was a pistol in his hand.

“Open it up.”

I shook my head.

“She’s alive. You said so yourself. All it takes is as few as half a dozen cells.”

The release mechanism was simple, but he obviously did not want to risk doing damage to whatever was inside the pod by trying to open it himself. All I could think of were those graveworlds coughing up the broken bodies of the rows on rows of soldiers all around me. It wasn’t bravery that made me suddenly stall for time; it was an overpowering fear of whatever was waiting behind that glass.

“What did you bring back? Is this what’s down there, killing our men?”

only those who hear her voice and those who do not.”

The tapping came again, louder this time. Something like a shard of bone dragged along the inside surface of the glass.

“Open it,” he said again.

The doors at the far side of the bay hissed apart as incoming pods slid into the few remaining positions. His eyes glanced that direction for a moment, and I broke for the entrance to the corridor. It was a long sprint. I was only halfway there when I heard the sound of shattering glass.

“What did you bring back? Is this what’s down there, killing our men?”

“They’re killing themselves.

Or each other. It doesn’t matter.”

He laughed again. “She slept, but we heard her. The whispers were enough. Her shadows did the rest.

Do you know how long it took, how deep we had to dig, before we found enough for your pods?”

I thought of the other medical frigates. “Who are you?

Colonials? You want to use this as a weapon?”

“Colonials or hegemony—it doesn’t matter. Now there are

“She is here,” he was saying over and over again. His voice rose even higher, a sort of agonized, ecstatic keening, only to end suddenly in a strangled scream.

There was no question of turning to look.

I met Donovan in the corridor.

“I was coming to find you.

Something’s jammed our contact with the rest of the fleet, and even intra-ship—What the hell is going on?” This last was as I elbowed past him and slammed emerald sky - 29

30 - January 2013

They brought something back.”

He slumped against the wall and visibly tried to collect himself. “What are you saying? Who brought something back?”

“I don’t know who. They found remains of—of whatever built those ruins on those planets, and they’re using our re-gen pods to—to culture it or something.”

“Oh my God.” He brought his

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down the manual lock to the med bay entrance.

When I turned back to him his face was grey as stone.

“There was . . .” He was struggling to find words. “In the bay, standing over one of the re-gen units . . .” He started shaking.

“They brought something back, Donovan.” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Look at me. I didn’t see it. Obviously you did.

hands to his head slowly. “Oh my God, I hear her. I hear her in my head.”

The entire corridor seemed to slope, and I braced myself beside Donovan. It felt as though I was sliding further and further into a nightmare. Donovan was right—there was something outside, something beyond the door, beyond the surface of my mind, and it was as though it was slowly,

methodically trying different frequencies one by one until it locked on and was able to get a clear and overpowering message through. The voice was growing clearer, and I remembered what the pilot had said about those who could hear her voice.

I fought down an overpowering urge to turn and release the lock. Instead I pulled Donovan to his feet, and we ran farther down the corridor.

Where the corridor branched, Donovan stopped and shook himself. “We’ve got to . . .” He licked his lips. “We’ve got to get a warning to the rest of the fleet, and then we’ve got to selfdestruct the Elphinstone.”

Farther from the med bay it was easier to think.

“What about opening the spaceside bay doors, evacuating it?”

He nodded. “That might work.

But from the command deck, not from down here. I can’t go back there.”

It was like running in a dream.

It took a huge effort just to move farther down the corridor. Before we had gone far Tsai-Chan emerged from another med bay, walking as though asleep. When we tried to hold her back, she started screaming, and by this time more crewmembers had emerald sky - 31

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32 - January 2013

spilled into the corridor. They all drifted toward the locked entrance.

“Why not us?” I asked.

“I saw her before I heard her.” Donovan pushed me into the med bay Tsai-Chan had just exited and locked the entrance behind us. It was empty besides us and the hundreds of regenerating soldiers.

“You’re too scared. No one else knows what’s happening.” He shrugged. “Or maybe we’re just too damned stubborn.”

I wondered what she would look like to them when they opened the door to the med bay.

An alien intelligence, resurrected after billions of years. Something so incredibly old, something that had crafted the sublime stones in the warmth of those caverns unspeakable eons ago. Something sleeping for so long returned— “Oh, no you don’t.” Donovan caught my hand where it had been drifting toward the entrance release.

I bit my tongue until I tasted blood and willed myself to remember the expression on the tall pilot’s face. Clarifying fear rose up again.

“There’s no way to get to the command deck now,” Donovan was saying, “and there’s no way to send a message from here if

she or whoever is out there has jammed transmissions.”

“A memory scan,” I said. The terminals waited above each re-gen unit, and it would be easy to reconfigure for a scan instead of a dump. “They couldn’t have taken down the memory net. The nodes in each ship are quantum-resonance tethered.” It was the closest thing in space to being hardwired. Command had gone to the utmost to ensure they’d be able to dump the consciousness of their soldiers back into their bodies wherever they ended up being regenerated.

“Fine, but what good will that do without a body to dump it into?”

There were human voices in the corridor now, and they sounded angry.

“That’s our way out,” I explained, motioning to the doors at the far end of the bay where the evac pods docked and transferred their contents to the regeneration units. “You first. You saw it; you’ll be able to tell others.” I pushed him toward the nearest memory terminal before the implications could sink in.

The terminal made contact, and his eyes glazed with the brief but overpowering sense of déjà vu emerald sky - 33

At the end of the row, I found an empty pod and put what was left of Donovan inside. I set it for stasis and watched the nutrient bath flood up around his broken form. There was a code to enter that would reverse the evac process, push the pod back into the outer airlock and launch it. With any luck it would find its way to another frigate away from the fleet.

I stared at the keypad, trying to recall what I was doing.

The screams outside continued, but now there was singing as well.

Donovan had seen her.

Wherever his body was resurrected, his memory would find its way, and he would be able to warn others.

I pressed the buttons, and the pod slid away.

Behind me, the door to the corridor opened, and I heard her clearly. Her voice was cold and piercing, like the starlight.

Stephen Case Stephen Case is a graduate student in the history and philosophy of science, a part-time planetarium director, and a father of four kids below the age of six. His fiction has most recently appeared in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His website can be found at https://sites.google.com/a/nd.edu/stephencase/ 34 - January 2013

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that a memory scan entails. The nearest blunt object was a canister of flame retardant, and before his eyes cleared I brought it down with all the strength I could summon. I was not strong, but I was a doctor.

He struggled. It took longer than I would have liked, and when he was finally still my arms ached and her voice was hissing even louder in the back of my head.

My plan would not work with a live body. The evac pods weren’t lifeboats. They were tombs. They served only to preserve organic matter until it could be regenerated.

I pulled Donovan’s body along the long row of sleeping soldiers, some barely more than pulsating bundles of nerves and tendons. This was a charnel ship. This had always been a charnel ship.

The voices in the corridor were louder, and there were screams as well.

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Another Sunset Josh Turner

Every day I die again.

Under an alien sky I gasp my final breath each night, and every morning I open my eyes to the same view of rocks stretching far into the distance on a world not my own.

As a boy I’d dreamt of other planets, following the idols of my youth as the new space race pushed humanity further and further towards distant stars.

I’d never quite got past that first gasp of euphoric understanding as a child that the lights that shone down from our skies were other worlds. I’d dashed home from school to tell my parents, certain that they could not know, living their mundane lives from day to day as they did, and showing no sign of excitement at the prospect uncovered by this revelation: that out there were new sunsets never before seen by man.

I had burst through the door, exclaiming, “Guess what!” in that breathless enthusiasm that a child is so wont to show on the discovery of something magnificent. My father turned, caught in the act of kissing my mother hello as he always did at his evening return. She was busy closing her own day’s tasks, removing the eyepiece she was working through and closing the projected image on the far wall. My father smiled at me, a quirk tugging at the side of his lips, his eyebrows rising to wrinkle the brow beneath his dark brown hair.

“Somebody’s excited then! What is it today, Little Jake?” He grabbed me in a hug to welcome me home and complete his daily ritual. He was a small man, but somehow those hugs always made him seem emerald sky - 37

like a giant. I took great comfort in the feel of my face pressed against the coal-black jacket of his suit, my cheek resting against smooth fabric that carried the lingering smell of his favorite cigarettes.

I wrestled free of my father’s embrace. This was far too important to be distracted from. Grinning from ear to ear, I proudly announced, “I learnt about stars today, and how some of them are actually planets we might visit one day!”

Liberated to have shared this knowledge, I stood impatiently, awaiting their startled reaction to the opportunities

exciting present on my birthday.

“That’s pretty sweet, Son,” my father responded in that awkward way of an old generation desperately trying to hold on to the outdated words of their own youth. I understood enough, however, to realize that this wasn’t fresh news, that somehow they already knew.

Looking back, I see now how happy they were with the life they had, living in rare comfort in such a crowded world. Yet the more I grew in that environment, with my parents’ joy at what we had, the stronger became my desire to experience more. Since then I could never suppress my longing to travel out amongst the stars.

I stood impatiently, awaiting their startled reaction to the opportunities of the universe. of the universe. I’m not sure what I expected, perhaps that they might leap to their feet and immediately start packing in their own excitement to see these distant horizons. Instead they just looked on with the same amused expressions they had when looking at my glee as school broke for the summer or when I opened a particularly 38 - January 2013

That first night after my revelation, I rushed out to watch a sunset that spread wide, like a sea of orange across the thick clouds of an autumnal sky. I imagined the red and gold of the fall leaves spiraling upward from the trees to cover the heavens, a colorful, silken bedsheet pulled over the day as it lay down to rest, all the while wondering how sunsets

might look on a faraway planet.

What do the fall leaves look like reflected in the dusk of another world? Every night from then on, I would sit after school with my back resting against the garden fence and watch the sun gradually slip below the horizon, seeding crimson across the evening sky. As the darkness slowly spread with the onset of night, I’d strain to hold my eyes open until they itched to close, hoping for a glint of light that signaled a rocket heading out, or the passing glimpse of a space station orbiting above. I kissed a girl for the first time under that fence and beneath that sky, frightened I was somehow doing it wrong, elated that I was getting the chance, and wondering all the while if she would notice me watching with one eye the stars over her right shoulder.

I travelled widely and often throughout college, using the breaks from my schooling in astrophysics as an opportunity to see the different sunsets of our Earth. I watched the amber glow of sunset in Bangkok, the sky alive with bright copper and blazing yellow, silhouetting the dikes that ringed the city and kept it safe from the water battering daily at its door. I made love to

my college sweetheart as the twilight merged into rolling waves of color over Sognefjord, the aurora borealis lighting up the sky while giant ocean cruise liners flickered like candles floating in the water below. So many nights I spent watching Earth’s space industry twinkle in the foreground of the heavens while the stars stretched limitlessly into the tempting beyond.

But humanity was now a species that lived on a precarious knife-edge of its own making, a fact of which I was keenly aware.

I had played a small part amidst my travels, one long, humid, tortured summer in the ten-year project to resettle Bangladesh.

Enlisted by my conscience, I toiled with other volunteers as sweat streamed from our bodies, flies thick in the air, and surrounded by the cloying rotten stench of a thrown-away country being swallowed by rising waters. The dubious success of the project was but one of many portents of a more difficult future ahead. Recent leaps forward in nanotechnology had extended the lifespans of those who could afford it but had done nothing to solve the mounting problem of sharing limited resources amongst an increasing global emerald sky - 39

population. Humankind needed a more certain foothold, and so we were chosen—young and proud and so very eager, the ideal fit for what was required.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of completion it gave me when I was accepted for a position in Long Range Research. I was to be a vital instrument in our journey to the stars. I knew from my studies that it would take hundreds of years to travel to even the closest likely candidate for habitation, but when the project to send suitable volunteers finally clawed its way past the partisan politics of global policy meetings and into reality, I applied without hesitation. In the lectures that followed, they repeatedly stressed the importance of what we were doing. I spent months alongside those other hopefuls, working through the rigorous tests to prove my suitability for man’s greatest leap into the unknown. The offer of my inclusion hit me with the same force as that first time you wake up next to someone and realize you’re in love. I grinned for a week. I’d been traveling on that same smile since that day at school when my desires were first kindled. I’d travelled with it each night I’d spent watching from our world 40 - January 2013

the other worlds I so longed to touch. Now, finally, I’d travel with that smile to one of those distant worlds. Like the canaries that miners of previous centuries had used to test the air in mines, we were sent to test the galaxy for humanity. So that was what they called us—the Canaries.

•

My last view of an Earthbound sunset took place on the base platform of the United Nations Space Elevator, a shining metal island anchored in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t as brilliant or colorful as some I’d seen, yet standing there with my future rising above me and the knowledge that this would be the last time I watched the sun fall on the planet of my birth seemed to make it all the more vibrant.

I sat on the observation deck and gazed on until the sun’s final glimmer dropped below the horizon and the last ruby ribbon trailing in the evening sky was swallowed by blackness. The wind ruffled my cropped, brown hair, and the smell of the ocean filled my nostrils until, after sitting there for hours absorbing the quiet, the crisp bite of night air on the water drove me indoors.

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emerald sky - 41

The ride up the elevator the next morning seemed like calm routine after the carnival of cameras I’d left beneath. Canaries were sent off into space one by one rather than en masse, so there were no groups of weeping compatriots torn apart by last goodbyes. My own had been a simple kiss on the cheek from my mother and one last hug from my little giant of a father. I’d had friends and lovers throughout college, but they were all shortlived affairs; they’d all sensed the same need in me, knew that the only thing I truly wanted would take me far away from them. So it was that on my last day on Earth, the only loved ones present were my parents. I imagine that for them, watching me ride up into the sky was just a difficult but expected final chapter after the years they had spent contemplating a little boy sitting with his back against the garden fence, looking up to the stars. Inside, as the elevator ascended, I stood with a smile on my face, a dream of what was to come, and the memory of the smell of the ocean at sunset.

As the doors opened, I could feel the growing pressure of excitement edging me forward.

Others pushed by me and on 42 - January 2013

with their own lives, a last brush with faceless humanity. I paused at that threshold to the final staging point of my journey, travelling on that smile to the goal of a lifetime so far away. With all this in my mind, I took a hesitant first step out of the elevator.

The welcome hall was a sterile affair, yet to me in that moment it was the thrilling gateway to the cusp of long-held desire. Along one wall stretched a viewing window down to Earth below, already distant in my thoughts. Opposite and above on the roof were fitted a series of small metal rungs that ran the length of the uniform white hall and continued off in to the station’s depths, an aid for those who decided to float freely in the zero-g environment, certainly not something I had been keen to attempt. Directly in front of me, two doors allowed access to different sections of the station, and ahead of that, striding towards me, was a tall man in a tight-fitting white suit, the only person to receive me. His gait, despite the electromagnetic boots that gave him purchase on the floor, was steady and practiced, a feat I fervently hoped I could match. He had dark skin and short, wiry black hair, serious brown eyes, and the kind of

awkward smile you might see on a face it doesn’t frequent often. I offered my hand.

“Welcome to the staging point, pilot.” He greeted me in an understated Australian accent, shifting uncomfortably as if unsure how to address me, and proffering his hand in return. I grasped it in my own and shook it, reciprocating his firm grip. Smiling broadly, I endeavored to share some of my barely suppressed excitement with my somber guide.

“Eager to head out, Sir.”

bereaved relatives or lost lovers. What should be understood is that our assignment did not come with a ticket for return travel—we would be giving our lives for a solitary journey out to the unknown, and while so many of us had aspired to this mission, it seemed incomprehensible to those who did not. Outsiders looking in saw us as brave but foolish souls on a suicide mission. Only other Canaries really understood how differently we saw it. We were being given the

What should be understood is our assignment did not come with a ticket for return travel.

I was dressed in a standard gray jumpsuit, my arm adorned with the small yellow ribbon that the Canaries had taken as their own. It had been apparent early on that a certain social awkwardness occurred when we were seen in normal regulation outfit, indistinguishable from so many other workers. Revealing you were a Canary invariably brought stammered apologies from the enquiring party, like the uncomfortable discovery in conversation of

most amazing chance, one that came with enormous risks and, ultimately, a sacrifice. But I knew I would give up all the opportunities of our own world just for the chance to lead the way for others, to see one faraway sunset.

My guide turned to lead the way and I fell in behind him, my attention focused on imitating his stride in the hope of not starting my journey with an ill-fated fall. He turned slightly to look over his shoulder. “We’re ready to emerald sky - 43

get you shipped up and sent out as soon as you’ve been to Medical.”

I’d already been poked and prodded by the great and the good. The big send-off with banners and bunting had taken place below, now thankfully a repressed memory that I feverishly hoped wouldn’t resurface in nightmares of hors d’oeuvre and strained small talk. I was one of the first rounds of Canaries to be sent out, so along with briefings and lectures, physical training and psych evaluations had come handshakes and smiles in front of the eager eyes of the world.

Politicians from every nation had clamored to stand by my side as rows of journalists equipped with optical recorders trailed my every move. They stalked me like hunters seeking their prey, one eye their own and the other a targeting sight, framed by technology and shared with the public at large. The last of these vacant handshakes had been down on the platform far below with the Secretary General of the UN himself. He had paused slightly as if the world held its breath before both he and the media turned away from me for the final time.

As I walked through the bare, white corridors, the memory of sea air gradually seeped away to 44 - January 2013

be replaced by the sterile, metallic smell of the space station.

Each step was accompanied by the clank of our boots on the panels below echoing around us like the marching beat of drummers playing me towards my fate. I walked my voluntary green mile 36,000 km above the Earth with my feet attached to the floor while everything from my ankles up attempted to travel in all directions but the one I intended.

We approached the gleaming door ahead, which opened silently to reveal the medical center. A solitary doctor, also dressed in white, awaited me on a stool riveted to the floor with both her legs hooked under a bar beneath, her blonde hair tied in a bun.

The room itself was as uniformly bland as the rest of the station, with various undefined pieces of equipment locked in around its edges. It was dominated by a large chair in the center that seemed like some nightmarish combination of dentist furniture and hospital bed. As we entered, the doctor looked up from the small table arrayed with instruments at her side, then opened one arm wide, welcoming me to take my seat in front of her. A hand on my left shoulder made me jump slightly. I realized I was

on edge, perhaps because of the menacing presence of the chair tickling the periphery of memories that encompass the dental horrors present in any childhood.

I grinned, abashed, as I turned to my guide. Despite my earlier impressions, he happily reached to shake my hand again.

“Good luck, Jake,” he addressed me, dropping his arm back to his side. “Remember that there are those who truly appreciate what you are doing.” And with that he

my face in farewell as the last person I’d ever say goodbye to went about his usual day. It occurred to me I’d never learned his name.

Then there was just me and the doctor. She looked at me with green eyes, friendly but somewhat sad. A single stray lock of blonde hair stretched down the left side of her face. She addressed me softly. “I’m Dr. Hill. It’s good to meet you.”

“Good to meet you too,” I said as I turned and sank into the chair

A gentle eddy of air stroked my face in farewell as the last person I’d ever say goodbye to went about his usual day. granted me the second-to-last smile I’d ever see, other than my own.

I stammered my thanks, a mumble of words stuck in that strange confusion felt by those people who feel the pressure of the moment to say something grand but are silenced by doubt as to what it should be. “Thanks, and goodbye,” I eventually managed, raising my arm in a halting wave.

He turned to exit, and as the doors slid quietly closed behind him, a gentle eddy of air stroked

by her side. Lying back and shutting my eyes, I tried to imagine it was just a regular checkup, like the hundreds I’d suffered through in the run-up to this day, rather than a final goodbye to my home.

“Do your worst, Doc.” “Now you know how this goes from here, but I’ll just talk through the process quickly.”

Her hand lightly covered my own on the arm of the chair.

I kept my eyes closed and strained to catch every word and hold it in my mind. What she was emerald sky - 45

46 - January 2013

the size and shape of a cigar in her hands.

The small item she held would render me humanity’s instrument in the most literal sense. The universe was full of unknowns, so many factors and potential threats to the fragility of the human condition. The only way we could accurately gauge whether a planet was truly safe was with a test subject. Each Canary would

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saying wasn’t as important to me as the sound of a voice in my ear, the feeling of another person by my side. I wanted to hold on to that moment like a mental freeze frame for the years to come. My ardent desire to travel on in no way made me blind to that which I would leave behind.

“You’ve had nanobots in your system for the last six months to test for any negative immune responses,” she continued. My eyes were still shut, and in the unusual, sterile atmosphere and lack of gravity, it was only the faint warmth of her hand on my own that detracted from the impression of being addressed by an unsettling disembodied voice.

“You’ve responded as well as we could hope, and we’re happy to move ahead and ship you out.”

I opened my eyes at that. I’d gone through my briefing down below, but this was the final step.

As my eyes refocused, I could see her twisting to one side, reaching over for something out of my line of vision.

“So here we’ll give you your last injection of bots, and then you’re ready for sedation and the journey ahead.” A clink as she pulled an object free of its restraint. She turned back with an innocuouslooking white instrument about

be flooded with nanobots which would fully adapt to our bodies over the course of our travel.

When we arrived we would be the ultimate testing apparatus, saturated with microscopic machines.

The technology that had been developed to cure any ill would be the very method of our study for continued existence amongst the stars. The millions of tiny sensors that ran through our systems

would assess the stress of travel, the impacts on our anatomy and ultimately our reactions to other worlds, constantly updating in real time as they transmitted every tiny change back to be studied on the Earth of my future.

This was the source of sorrow in my doctor’s eye, the uneasy hesitation in any conversation about my mission, the reason why, down below and soon to be emerald sky - 47

a lifetime away, my parents’ final hug had lingered that second or two longer than any that had come before. We weren’t strictly even due the title of Pilot that our uneasy status had allotted us.

Once the doctor had injected me I would be sedated and placed in

I opened my eyes on a distant planet, the illustriously named K92d that was to be my destination. Behind me, at my origin, would linger an Earth I no longer knew, populated by nobody I’d ever met, living in the hope that someday a message from me

“Behind me ... would linger an Earth I no longer knew, populated by nobody I’d ever met.” the protected core of a ship. My only companions would be the minuscule hitchhikers I carried and the faint concern about our method of travel. Despite ever more radical attempts to bridge the theoretical gap to better forms of transportation between the stars, the only solution available was that of nuclear pulse propulsion. My journey to a distant world would occur over hundreds of years of induced coma, as blast after blast of atomic explosions carried me through the centuries. Nanobots would keep my body working through years of mental shutdown; they would maintain my internal organs and my muscles and keep my bones from decaying to porcelain in the gravity-free environment until 48 - January 2013

would find its way home, beckoning others to a far-off world. My dream, however, had ever been a thirst for new horizons, my destination more important than the journey.

A quick, sharp stab in my arm drew me from my reflections. The doctor was turning again to settle the instrument to one side, leaving the fading sensation of pain. I tried to imagine I could feel the tiny machines coursing through my blood, but as I strained to sense their presence, all that grew evident was the persistent background buzz of the station, ever present and until now unnoticed, the mood music to my goodbye.

She placed her hand over mine again, one last offer of human affection. In her other hand she

held the instrument that would bestow upon me my future, like a poisoned apple from a fairy tale just waiting for that bite to steal a hundred years.

“Are you ready?” she asked gently as she leant over one final time. Her face crowded my view with compassion. She smiled a wearied smile, and I could see it was strained, creases assailing the corner of her eyes, but I appreciated her attempt more than I could ever say. As I think of that day, I still

whispered voice that seemed to come from so far away.

“Good luck, Pilot.”

•

A moment later and 200 years had passed.

I opened my eyes to the bright sky of another world. A sun rode high in the distance, paler and further away than the one I’d left behind. The sky, a more intense blue than any I had ever seen, stretched wide in greeting above me. That I had awoken at all was

“Are you ready?” she asked gently as she leant over one final time. remember, clearer than anything else, that gift of a smile. I smiled back at her to show her I was okay and tried to talk, but again the words caught in my throat, so I nodded and managed to croak, “Ready,” and, after a pause, “Thank you,” the latter in response to that final gesture which seemed to cost her so much, but was given freely all the same. Closing my eyes, I felt a scratch on my arm, the pressure increase in my hand, and just before I drifted in to unconsciousness, the

its own blessing; the bots inside me had been designed to revive me only in the right circumstance.

I was one of the lucky ones. We had all known that even with the recent advances in long-distance observation it was still a galaxysized game of roulette to find the conditions suitable for life. The planets we had been sent to were the most likely candidates that our technology and our experts could locate, but this still offered no guarantee. It had not been my destiny to be euthanized on a distant planet, bathed in the glow of emerald sky - 49

radiation or surrounded by the toxic fumes of a poisonous atmosphere, but how many of my fellows resided now in sealed metal sarcophagi scattered through the nearby systems, their last thought that of a doctor tenderly holding their hands and wishing them good luck?

I envisioned, high in the heavens overhead, the shell of the rocket that brought me here, circling the planet, my very own Esmeralda. My senses were nearly overloaded after so long unused. The daylight fell warm and welcoming on my face even as my eyes shied away. A metallic smell permeated my surroundings, providing a sliver of continuity from my last moments aboard the station, yet below that lay a strange and exhilarating scent of something indescribably exotic. My mind was at a loss as to how to define that alien odor, crisp and bitter and so amazingly

beckoned me onwards. I raised my arm and grasped the edge of the opening with my right hand.

I had travelled over twenty lightyears between my last conscious breath and the one I then gasped, yet for me, standing up, and with that most simple of movements emerging from the pod to view the world around me, was the greatest journey I’d ever taken.

I smiled that same smile as my body straightened, flushed with a feeling of joy and achievement that made my heart thump hard in my chest as my eyes sampled that first glimpse of a new world.

Rocks stretched onward to the horizon. My pod had landed in a barren landscape of dark red stone. Pockmarks and small crevices seemed to indicate the presence of precipitation on the planet, while in the distance, the uniform terrain was broken by a range of small hills that crowded the horizon. I lowered myself

The pod that had carried me to the surface had opened pointing straight up to the sky, which beckoned me onwards. new. The pod that had carried me over the edge of the pod and to to the surface had opened point- the ground. My feet came to rest ing straight up to the sky, which and drew my attention down, my 50 - January 2013

heart suddenly beating faster still at what I spotted in a crack in the rock just below me. I gently went to my knees, my body protesting so much I could almost imagine hearing the joints squeal in pain at the unfamiliar activity, despite the care of the bots through my sleep. There, in a small crack in the shadow of the sunlight, was a section of grey moss with tiny, almost indiscernible pink flowers beginning to bud, proof of some form of sustainable life. I jumped

twenty years time, when in some remote control room the readings spiked and my consciousness was relayed back in intricate detail to those who might be waiting. I studied my reflection in a section of burnished metal, my hair exactly the length I remembered it and my face clean-shaven, a two-hundredyear-old smile reflecting back and through me. I repeatedly walked around the pod, a dull silver cylinder barely five meters

“I’M HERE!” to my feet, all the hours spent agonizing over what my first words on a new world should be forgotten, and yelled in wordless wonder before ending with a roar of “I’M HERE!” at the top of my voice. The sound echoed on and on around the rocky landscape.

My hands in the air, I spun laughing round and round until falling to the ground, dizzy and ecstatic.

I spent the day checking diagnostics and confirming that communication links were still active for data transfer. Hundreds of years of static later, I could scarcely envision the reaction on the distant Earth in another

in length that had cocooned me through lifetimes amongst the stars, trying to frame in my mind the idea of travelling so far for so long. It was a concept which had barely troubled me before, but in retrospect seemed so staggering. I played Bowie’s “Starman” in my audio implants and sang at the top of my voice without the smallest hint of shame for my song choice or my performance.

I named my pod Bertie and had amusing one-sided conversations with him as I went about my work. It was refreshingly liberating, being the single source of decency for twenty light years. I emerald sky - 51

was an ethical despot, drunk on my power to command every human on the planet, all one of them—King of K92d, a planet with no real name. Mine was not a vast empire, yet the power to name a world lay in my grasp, a responsibility that should surely not be rushed.

The first day stretched on before me still, my readouts showing that almost three Earth days would pass for a single day on my new home. I rested on a rock and basked in the warmth of a new world, so very grateful for the fate that had delivered me to one where I could do so. For hours I sat, torn between staring at the distant horizon and focusing on the displays of my optical implant, scrolling through details of software updates and relevant data broadcast from Earth or collected by my ship as I had travelled. It was decided before we left that while communications would travel faster than I myself would, personal messages would be inaccessible for one Earth month after a successful landing to prevent any possibility of negative reactions, and to allow time for initial mission arrangements. Instead, I had details of atmospheric content and radiation levels, rundowns of climate 52 - January 2013

zones and water deposits as surveyed by the ship in orbit, suggested sites for habitation and points of note for further study.

My only approved communication was a predictable yet disappointing message of generic congratulations.

I also had information on processing and resolution enhancements for my optics, the invisible mechanisms built into my eyes

Flickr.com/Jonathan Kos-Read

that granted both an internal computer presentation and a microscopic accuracy to my sight. They provided an overlaying interactive display on what I could see and afforded me nearperfect visual data capture for the purpose of my mission. I used them to better scrutinize the distant hills, which showed further signs of varied flora. I scanned the moss again in stunning detail,

the crisp tendrils of dry grey matter hugging the shadows and punctuated by delicate, pink, sixpetalled flowers with tiny yellow stamen barely glimpsed through the cracks in its colorful shell.

They seemed so precariously attached to the moss itself, and moved erratically in the gentle, barely perceptible breeze. All the while electronic annotations projected over my eye as the optics

emerald sky - 53

gathered information and relayed it through to my brain.

I marveled too at the improvements to my bots. Hundreds of years of being updated with new research and development had enhanced them to the point where the efficiency with which they could maintain their host astounded me; their ability to assimilate the basic requirements of my existence from the world around truly astonished me. Not only would the information transmitted home be that much richer, but many of the risks to and limits of my own

for recollections of those I had left behind, now so many years before.

I worked sparingly that day, my body unused to the rigors of simple movements after so long in stasis. I constructed the temporary shelter based around my pod and slept fleetingly, finding I needed little. Forty-eight standard hours elapsed while I checked sensor readings, browsed a small slice of two centuries’ worth of updates, and marveled at the wonder of my predicament. As the local day went by, my strength grew, and eager to explore my new

As the local day went by, my strength grew, and eager to explore my new home, I set off. body were of much less concern. I considered the Earth of today, wondering where humanity stood on that precipice now and what the impact of the technological advancements that my upgrades barely touched on had been. I shied away from the idea that they might even indicate the obsolete nature of my own mission, carefully filing the thought away in the same portion of my memory reserved 54 - January 2013

home, I set off. Enlivened by the thought of my first foreign sunset, I decided to seek a better vantage for my once-distant dream, now so close as to make me feel the breath of its expectation on the back of my neck. I made for a prominent ridge that my optics calculated as being six miles away, under the silvery yellow orb of that alien sun. The weather had remained calm and unchanging throughout my time here. Above,

still aglow with a brilliant azure, a sky like none on Earth. That walk felt like the most perfect walk on the most perfect sunny Sunday afternoon. A feeling of calm contentment wrapped around me like my father’s hugs as I strolled over the rocks, surrounded by flourishes of pink and grey amongst the shadows of the cracked red ground.

As the hours passed, the sun

its caress to reveal a glorious yellow on their upturned petals. The unknown smell that had hovered on the edge of my senses became a deep rich aroma that enveloped me with the coming of the wind and the new-found freedom of unleashed color. There I stood in the warmth of distant sunshine as pink and yellow floated in the evening air, pirouetting around me and drifting upwards, then

There I stood in the warmth of distant sunshine as pink and yellow floated in the evening air. stretched towards the horizon. The slight breeze of the day picked up as cool evening air began to rush over the landscape. Sparse clouds twisted amidst the upper atmosphere, clouds that would have been called cirrus on another planet so far behind me. Approaching the ridge, I was gifted the most welcoming display of the land that was now my home. As the wind gusted through the tiny cracks in the rock, it plucked the pink buds from the moss, whisking them up in to the air. As each bud emerged from the shadow and danced out into the sunlight, they opened wide and bright at

dropping slightly from the sky only to be grasped once more in this kaleidoscopic waltz and spirited off into the distance. One solitary flower drifted lazily past my eye to rest on my chest before alighting to glide off slowly and join its companions once more.

This extraordinary show went on for a full half hour before the last flower was whisked off from my sight and the evening wind danced once more without a partner.

I knew so clearly in that moment that the choice I had made was the right one, that the smile from years ago was still as much a part of me as at any emerald sky - 55

time in my ambitions. I had been embraced by a captivating display of natural beauty before the first sunset on my new home, a prelude to a main event after waiting a lifetime for my ticket. I walked the remaining distance to the edge of the ridge and took my seat, thinking back to all those nights staring at other worlds.

Now I’d get to stare right back. So as I sat on the threshold of that cliff, I was also on the threshold

bots flashed up alarms, details of information about active-threat invasion. My breathing became more labored. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to move my right arm. And in the distance the sun sank lower in the sky.

More red lights flashed up, superimposing over my vision a stream of information about a microbiological incursion. Sites of infection were highlighted—more and more as the minutes passed.

More red lights flashed up, superimposing over my vision a stream of information.

of finally realizing what I’d strived for. I felt like that little boy again, sitting under that fence for the very first time, so much so that I could almost imagine I felt the wooden slats pressing against my back. I’d chased my own destiny out into the stars and grasped something wonderful in doing so, a pioneer so far from home but so close to all I had worked for.

•

It crept up on me slowly, sitting so still and at ease as I was.

A red light started to blink at the corner of my eye. I began to realize something was wrong. The 56 - January 2013

Bots shut down greater areas of my systems in an attempt to slow the spread. I tried to twitch my toes but to no avail. Red text scrolled faster.

The infection had been slowed.

My central nervous system was isolated and protected. But inside me, a war on an infinitely minute scale dictated my survival. Bots adapted to the aggressive invasion. They attempted new tactics and redesigned themselves to send new waves of machines into battle. My breath grew raspy and a pressure built in my chest. Still the sun sank lower and the wind kept blowing around me as I sat, unable to move.

An hour or more passed with me fixed there on the rock, my body locked in rigid pause while the world carried on around me. The challenge to my control of my own fate blinked over and over in red text in my eye. As the

hills, turning to a deep violet that crowned their tops like colorful kings. A planet emerged in the darkening distance, sparkling and alive as it glowed orange amongst the shifting colors, the shade reminiscent of an autumn dusk I’d seen on Earth so long

My very existence was besieged, and I was utterly impotent to combat it.

bots cleared a small section of infection another site opened.

A perpetual chase ran through my body—a twitch of a finger before motion was lost again, a muscle spasm in my back before the sensation fled. My very existence was besieged, and I was utterly impotent to combat it. My only hope resided in the ingenuity of the tiny machines that coursed through my veins.

So, as the sun continued its descent and I sat there immobile, I sent the mental command to turn off the diagnostic reports that were clouding my eyes and watched as the sunset claimed my vision.

The sky gleamed red along the horizon, and as another hour passed, it shone above the distant

ago, but the sky so much larger and alive with more colors than any sunset I’d seen before. The flow of light swallowed the wandering clouds above, reflecting bright and vivid from the stray wisps high amid the sky and threading the awesome tapestry of light together with a brilliant crimson thread. Lustrous yellow emerged behind like molten gold swelling upwards from the peaks until the different hues reached out towards my vigil in a banner of vibrant color across the evening sky. I sat there watching that first alien sunset, a lifetime’s dream followed from boyhood, while inside me a conflict raged on, unchanging.

Day waned, and as the sun at last dropped from sight, a emerald sky - 57

flare of emerald sparked briefly amidst the flourish of purple and gold on high. With the glow of that sunset reflected bright in my eyes, a small smile tugged slightly at the corner of my mouth before becoming frozen in that moment, as I sat there content under that exotic sky. Color faded and night moved onwards to darkness.

The battle inside me was lost for a moment, then won back from the brink with the first gasp of dawn’s breath.

•

And so time passes. I have my wish. Now every night I watch the vivid, iridescent waves of a foreign sun’s goodbye as death claims me for another day. I have seen the sunsets of a year go by, and an unknown eternity of sunsets stretch before me. And here I sit, with the feel of a fence at my back, on a ridge of rock on another world, pointed towards the dying sun—and content on my face, that frozen smile.

Josh Turner Josh Turner is a fledgling author with a passion for speculative fiction that was kindled by stories of Bradbury’s rocket ships heading for Mars and the darkened rooms of Arthur C Clarke’s Tales from the White Heart—stories that would make anyone stop and think. He is based in the UK, where it rains less than people think but more than he would like and where he indulges his passion for writing speculative fiction as an alternative to talking about the weather. You can find his writing updates on Twitter: @Josh_turner13

58 - January 2013

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Sneak Peek: the shifting

Sarah smiled.

(excerpt from Chapter 3) Allison K. Hymas

It felt great to go to the Jersey Shore and know she wouldn’t have to reapply sunscreen every five minutes to squirming toddlers while her parents got a well-deserved rest. She looked forward to her night of freedom.

Ryan had been early picking her up, but John hadn’t minded. At least she thought he didn’t; he hadn’t looked up from his puzzles when Sarah told him she was leaving. Hopefully he’d look up when one of the younger kids needed him.

Sarah wore a simple T-shirt, green windbreaker, and jeans over her swimsuit just in case it got cold later. And sneakers, of course, in case there was a hike. Ryan wore his swim trunks, a yellow polo, his red jacket, and flip-flops. The ride was two hours long, and Ryan spent the whole drive alternating between teasing Sarah about how long it would take her to strip down to her swimsuit and talking about his big idea without actually saying anything. It would be a surprise, he said, and what kind of friend would he be if he spoiled that for her?

They arrived a little after five at Atlantic City. It was still light out, so the casinos still looked like any other building, and the souvenir shops, with their brightly painted surfboard signs, were still open. The air smelled like cigarette smoke, sea salt, and vinegar from boardwalk fries. The partwood, part-cement boardwalk stretched between the stores and the pale sand, where families were beginning to pack up their things and go home.

Ryan swung out of his black Jeep and raced across the boardwalk to the piece of the beach his parents had rented for the evening. “Hey, everyone!

The party’s finally here!” He was instantly mobbed by teenagers.

Sarah followed, recognizing almost everybody. It looked like everyone from their school was there: the jocks, the rich kids, even the brainy ones. There were a surprising number of people here early, all busily wishing Ryan a happy seventeenth birthday and getting his approval on activities they wanted to do. About seventy percent of the guests were girls, but that was to be expected at one of Ryan’s birthday parties—in emerald sky - 61

fact, Sarah guessed that the only reason guys were here at all was because they were dating some of the girls.

“Didn’t see you in magic class yesterday,” a girl said to Ryan, pouting. “Did you skip without inviting me?”

“I had a field trip for my second magic class—to Gettysburg to learn about the magic used during the Civil War. Boring.

No, skipping without telling you implies I would have forgotten about you, which I could never do,” Ryan told her before moving on. “Hey, look! Isn’t that spot over there perfect for a bonfire!” Ryan ran off on a new whim and left Sarah alone on the beach.

“Hey, Sarah.” The speaker was a girl from Sarah’s physics class the year before.

“Grace. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Well, I was invited and my parents said it was okay to come. I got a ride with Peter and his girlfriend.” Grace pointed.

“Oh. What’s her name, anyway?”

Grace giggled. “I have no idea!

I’ve never seen her alone! It’s like she doesn’t exist without him. So, my mom got me a tutor to help me with physics over the summer, but I’m still not getting it.

Did you understand what Ms. 62 - January 2013

Minton taught about the five forces in the universe?”

Sarah nodded. “If you understand the rules for one, you understand them all.”

“You’re better at that kind of thing than me. I get magic, but the other four freak me out.”

“It’s really all the same,” Sarah began. “If you think about it, magic and the electro-magnetic force follow the same rules of nature. Magic users are conductors that allow magical energy to manipulate other objects, moving them, altering brain signals to create illusions, and sometimes exciting molecules so they glow or catch fire.”

“But it’s more than conducting. Magic users keep a store of energy inside them that runs out and takes time to renew,” Grace said. “I remember that.”

“Yep. I could help you study if you want.”

“Hey, Grace!” Peter called.

“We’re going to play no-hands volleyball! Wanna play?”

“Sure!” Grace yelled. “One minute! Sarah, you should be on my team. I need all the help I can—oh,” she said, suddenly remembering.

“I can’t play no-hands,” Sarah said. She pointed to herself.

“Double recessive.”

Don’t do it, she thought. Grace, don’t you dare do what you’re about to do.

“I’m sorry. I should have been more sympathetic.” And then Grace looked at Sarah with— there it was—pity in her eyes.

“Grace! Are you coming?” Peter called. He didn’t seem to notice Sarah.

“In a minute! Go back to your girlfriend! If you want,” Grace said to Sarah, “You can still play. It doesn’t really matter how you hit the ball, as long as it goes over the net.”

air before catching it. “Here, you serve first. Grace is hopeless at it, but she’s good at blocking.”

“Fine, Peter. Whatever you say.”

Grace smiled and she and Sarah traded places.

“Excuse me,” a voice called from the other side of the net. “You do realize this is a no-hands game, don’t you?”

A girl from Sarah’s English class approached the net, her face twisted in a sneer. Renee.

Not a double dominant, yet she seemed like she felt that having magic made her a better per-

And then Grace looked at Sarah with—there it was—pity in her eyes.

Sarah eyed the players. At home with her family she played volleyball without magic, and she was getting pretty good. Maybe she could manage in a magical game.

“Okay. Why not?” Sarah said, and Grace grinned.

“I call serving!” Grace yelled as she ran to join the game, and, laughing, Sarah followed.

“Sarah! Nice of you to join us!”

Peter said as Sarah took a place under the net. He floated the ball to her, and she bumped it into the

son than the double recessives.

Sarah wasn’t sure if even the magic in old stories was powerful enough for that.

“Lighten up,” Peter said. It sounded like a threat and for a moment Sarah almost volunteered to leave.

Renee shrugged. “Whatever.

Makes things easier for us.” At least her team had the grace to look ashamed of her as she sauntered to her place in the back.

Peter shook his head. “All right. Serve it, Sarah.” emerald sky - 63

64 - January 2013

had paid off; Sarah didn’t feel like an outsider in this magical game.

Until she was moved up to the front row, that is. Renee sent a nasty toss, barely grazing the top of the net, right over Sarah’s hands. Sarah jumped for it, but it was too high, and she fell back into the sand.

“What was that?” A guy on Sarah’s team who had joined later in the game was scowling at her.

Flickr.com/tim geers

She did, and smiled as the ball bounced off her hand and arched right into the center of the other team. They sent it flying back, but Grace blocked it. 1-0.

Eventually the other team scored a point and Sarah had to stop serving. Renee’s team caught a few more points, but overall the game went well for Sarah. It looked like all the running and weightlifting for cross country

Waves of sand flew over his feet as marched to where she sat. “You had it! It was right there in front of you! Do you want us to lose?”

“Dude, it’s just a game.” Peter was holding the ball under his arm.

“What’s with her? Playing the game like a double recessive like she’s too cool for magic, and then she won’t even stop a ball that’s right in front of her.”

“She is a double recessive,” Grace whispered.

“What?”

“She is a double recessive.”

The guy froze and his face turned white. Sarah braced herself for the pity, the “oh man, I didn’t know,” but instead the guy scowled again and asked, “Then why’s she playing with us? This is a no-hands game.”

“Oh, yeah. Like you cared about that when her serves were earning us a bunch of points.”

No more. “You know what?”

Sarah said, standing up. “I think I’m going to eat something and then go swimming for a little while.”

“Are you sure? We still have half a game left.” Grace smiled, but her eyes were nervous. When Sarah nodded, Grace said, “I’ll join you after the game.”

Brushing sand from her clothes, Sarah walked away from the volleyball net. She was aware of the eyes on her back, following her.

Who knew what the owners of those eyes were thinking? Renee stage-whispered, “Like anyone really expected anything of her.”

Sarah looked back once at the players levitating the ball back and forth over the net. It didn’t look as much fun to her as actually touching the ball, but what emerald sky - 65

did she know? It wasn’t like she’d ever played that way. She was, after all, defective in the one way the world valued most.

Over at the water Ryan was throwing broken shells into the waves. A shallow bowl has been dug into the sand behind him.

“You know it’s illegal to have a bonfire on the Shore,” Sarah said, stepping beside him.

“Do you see anyone here to stop me?” Ryan asked, laughing.

among collectors. One of her works, named Arthur and the Twrch Trwyth, was currently on display in New York City. If Sarah remembered right, there was some kind of party in her honor that night.

With all that prestige, the Montgomerys were rich enough to take vacations whenever they wanted or drop a bundle on their son’s birthday parties. As Ryan was their only child, he would

“Do you see anyone here to stop me?”

It was true; there wasn’t much of a chaperone squad at the party.

It wasn’t that surprising that Ryan’s parents weren’t at their son’s birthday party. Both parents were double dominant magic users and had the high-level lifestyle and work schedules to prove it. Mr. Montgomery was in the government, how high up Sarah could never remember. He would be swamped with paperwork. Mrs. Montgomery was a well-known modern artist. Her paintings were enchanted with illusion spells so no one who looked at them saw exactly the same thing and thus were in high demand 66 - January 2013

have his choice of college, whatever the expense, in a year or two.

Sarah was studying hard for the SATs so she could get a scholarship, and even then it was a tossup whether she’d be accepted anywhere.

“The people in the shops will see it, and they’d have to turn you in.”

Ryan shook his head. “They won’t. You know why? Because people don’t care enough. Calling me in would mean getting involved, and getting involved is uncomfortable. As long as I don’t set the boardwalk on fire, they’ll turn a blind eye. Just watch.”

He walked around the fire pit

and examined his handiwork.

Then he looked up at her. “Sairs, do you think you can get the wood from the truck? It should be over there in that parking lot by the fudge kitchen. Fudge kitchen, hmmm. Do you think they’ll give me a discount if I told them it was my seventeenth birthday?”

“You could go ask them, but I wouldn’t count on it. And I’m not getting wood for your outlaw fire pit.”

“Fine. I’ll get it myself.” Ryan closed his eyes and chanted in a rhythmic language. The bundle of wood floated over the beach, rocking as the wind from the sea hit it. The logs tipped and fell twenty feet from the fire pit.

“Whoops,” Ryan gasped. He laughed and sauntered off to get the wood. Apparently even the great double dominant didn’t have the strength to control magic long enough for a stack of logs to float all the way down the beach.

“Why do you do that?” Sarah asked.

“Do what?”

“Exhaust yourself. You could go get it with your legs and hands.”

“This is more fun. Besides, Mr. Iffen says I need to work on my incantations.”

“You mean the useless words that are only there to help your mind control the magic so you don’t lose the spell halfway through?” Sarah looked at the spilled logs. “Looks like you need more practice.”

“Plenty of time for that,” Ryan said, his arms full with only a fraction of the fallen wood. “And that means you’ll get another chance to hear me speak Italian again.” He threw his logs into the pit and looked back at the rest, scattered across the sand. “Okay, I know magic is some brave new world for you, but I could really use help with this bonfire.”

“I’d love to, but I don’t support breaking the law. I’m going to get some food.” With that, Sarah turned and walked away.

There was a tent set up with tables and chairs beneath. One table was spread with hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips, watermelon…everything a beach barbeque needed. Sarah wondered which of Ryan’s many admirers got conned into coming early to set this up. She could almost see it—Ryan leaning in close to some giggling girl, grinning, cracking some kind of joke. Then he would touch her shoulder and mention how grateful he’d be if she’d help him set up the tent. emerald sky - 67

Sarah had seen it happen many times before—Ryan was a pro at getting his way.

She grabbed a plate and filled it with anything that would take a long time to eat. Sooner or later the volleyball game would shut down as kids ran out of magic. From where she sat picking at fried chicken, she could hear arguments over whether the ball was out of bounds because a player lost control of his magic or because of the unusually strong beach wind. She’d be more comfortable when everyone swam around without using magic.

Ryan had disappeared by the time Sarah finished eating dinner, but the fire pit was full of wood. Sarah looked around. The sun was beginning to set, so the shadows had lengthened and the light was soft and yellow. Ryan’s long shadow was off by the fudge kitchen greeting some late-arriving guests who must have distracted him from his quest for marked-down sugar. They were girls, of course. A shriek of laughter erupted from them, and Ryan leaned against the shop.

With his charisma, power, and total lack of common sense, Ryan would wind up in prison if he didn’t go to some Ivy League school first, Sarah thought. But 68 - January 2013

where would she go to school?

Hopefully somewhere with a good science program; she loved science’s power to change the world without a single spark of magic. But she’d have to convince admissions to take a chance on a double recessive.

A few kids were getting into the water and Sarah smiled. Now it was time for her to have some fun.

She stripped down to the swimsuit under her T-shirt and jeans and raced into the surf before the sun’s light turned from warm yellow to fiery orange.

There was a group of girls out in the water, splashing and swimming without using any magic.

Grace was with them. She waved Sarah over, and before long all the girls were bobbing and splashing in the water, no magic required.

Sarah smiled and shook water from her hair before diving under a wave. Finally, it felt like summer vacation.

It seemed like no time had passed when the tired, wet girls were summoned from the waves

by Ryan shouting. The sun was about to set, and he wanted everyone to get ready for the bonfire and fireworks.

Sarah was making plans with Grace to get some ice cream later that night when Ryan grabbed

her by the elbow and dragged her away. His hand was wet.

“Sorry, apparently I have to go!”

Sarah called.

“I’ll find you later!” Grace called back.

“Okay, what is it?” Sarah asked Ryan when he stopped beside the bonfire. She sat down and pulled her jeans on over her wet, sandy suit. She knew she would regret that later, but the chill in the wind made it the only choice.

“This is it.”

“This is what?” She tugged the T-shirt on.

“This is it. Remember? I told you I found something that could increase my magic. If I do that, then I could cast a spell big enough to give you magic! This is it.”

means anything can happen now.”

Looking around, Sarah noticed that most of the party guests, if not all of them, were sitting on the sand, watching her and Ryan beside the fire pit. “Why are they here? Did you really need an audience for this?”

He ignored her questions. Oh, yeah, Sarah thought. This is Ryan.

Of course he needs an audience.

This is so awkward. She folded her arms tight across her stomach and wished she and Ryan were the only people on the beach.

“So, when I was sitting on that rock Wednesday,” Ryan said, “I was thinking about you and magic and Midsummer and that’s when I had this idea. What if I cast a spell for power at sunset, at the beach, which is also a liminal

If I do that, then I could cast a spell big enough to give you magic!

Sarah must have looked as space, on Midsummer?” Ryan’s clueless as she felt, because Ryan voice was growing in intensity. rolled his eyes and pointed to the “I’d say you’re basing a lot on sun. mythology and legend.” Sarah “Today is Midsummer. That is tugged her sandy sneakers on, the sunset. It’s what my magical trying to look like she didn’t myth instructors call a ‘liminal care. But she did. If Ryan was space,’ the space between two right, she could go home floatthings, like day and night. That ing the flint pendant that even emerald sky - 69

70 - January 2013

to look at her, grinning. “Well, Flinn, get ready for a whole lot of awesome!”

He raised his hands and the wood erupted in flames. Somewhere to Sarah’s right a girl oohed over Ryan’s magical prowess. Ryan pulled back one hand and pushed forward with the other like he was calling the fire to him and reaching for the sun at the same time. Then he began to chant.

Flickr.com/tobiastoft

at the Shore she wore around her neck.

“Oh, come on! People once thought myths were real, and Mr. Iffen says legends have some truth in them. And I’m not making this up as I go. I know a spell, words and all, that gave people increased power a long time ago. What could it hurt to try? Oh, look, it’s almost time.” The sun looked like a big orange sinking behind the fudge kitchen and the other boardwalk shops.

He looked at Sarah, his eyes lit with the fire of the sunset.

Shadowed by his thick, dark eyebrows, they looked fierce, even possessed. “Come on, Sarah. Let’s try this.”

Sarah took a deep breath and put on her windbreaker like it was armor. She felt as if the hinges of history were beginning to turn, and she was, for once, not relegated to the sidelines. “Okay.”

“Great. You stand here,” Ryan said, putting his hands on her shoulders and guiding her to his right. “I stand here, in line with the fire and the sun.”

For a while Ryan stood still, squinting into the sun, his back to the ocean. Sarah could see the grains of sand in his hair. Ryan took a deep breath and turned

Whatever language he was speaking, it wasn’t Italian.

Even though she didn’t understand them, the words cut into Sarah and froze her blood like a winter wind. Earlier he sounded like he was commanding something that followed natural laws. These new words were harsh and, well, knotted was the best word Sarah could think of to

describe them. It was chaos; it was malice.

But there was no denying that, whatever the spell was, it was working. As Sarah watched, the fire grew into a pillar about ten feet high. In its center a deep red line spread from top to bottom.

A wind grew like a small cyclone around the fire. Sarah’s hands began to shake and her breathing grew labored as she fought emerald sky - 71

the urge to run far away from the fire pit.

“Ryan, stop!” Sarah called.

“Please. No more!”

If Ryan heard her, he ignored her. He continued chanting and rocked from to side to side on his bare feet. The red line in the fire widened and Ryan finished the spell with a primal scream of fierce triumph.

He turned to smile at Sarah.

Look, I did it! He was saying. He may have even said it out loud, but by this time the wind was so strong that the only sounds that cut through the roar were a few loud claps as the watching crowd applauded Ryan’s spell casting skill.

“Ryan—” The memory of humiliating herself during the game of no-hands volleyball stopped Sarah from again asking Ryan to cut off the spell. If this worked, no one would see her as defective. She’d be recognized for her skills and not her faults, just like everyone else. No more glances filled with pity, no more snide remarks. Just belonging.

Besides, she didn’t know anything about using magic. Maybe this was supposed to happen, and when she was levitating the volleyball along with everyone else they’d laugh about how freaked out she’d been.

72 - January 2013

Ryan turned and looked into the fire at the red line. To Sarah it looked less like a line and more like a door. As the wind roared in her ears and whipped her face with her own blonde hair, Sarah watched her best friend thrust his hand into the red flames.

A ball of searing-hot energy suddenly expanded out of the fire, driving the wind before it.

The energy slammed into Sarah and threw her several yards back.

Sparks from the huge fire lit the sky like new stars, and as she gazed up at them, she wondered dimly if the Big Bang had looked like this.

The other party guests were chattering.

They sounded impressed, but nervous. When Sarah sat back up and looked at Ryan, she could see why the others were reacting like that.

Ryan had become part of the fire. Flames danced on his yellow shirt and licked his swim trunks. Sarah watched as it spread to cover him completely.

Yet he wasn’t burning; his clothes and skin were unharmed. It was unlike anything Sarah had seen him do; in fact, she would have said it was impossible for fire to burn without consuming. So then, was this it? Was this the part where she could get magic

power? Shaking, Sarah stood and walked over to where Ryan stood in the flames.

He didn’t notice her approach.

His face stared straight ahead, his mouth curved in a grin Sarah would have called cruel, if Ryan was capable of cruelty.

What should she do? Maybe she had to take his hand. It was a risk; she could get burned by magic fire. If it wasn’t safe, she trusted that Ryan would stop her. Sarah reached out for his lowered hand.

Ryan’s head twisted toward her before she could touch him.

He looked angry, and the fire’s reflection filled his eyes. Sarah’s best friend of over a decade then growled at her and, with the wave of one hand, sent her flying into the sand once more.

“Whoa! Are you okay?” A girl Sarah didn’t know knelt down on the sand.

Sarah brushed sand off her face. “I’m fine.”

“Why did he throw you? What kind of spell is he casting?” The girl sounded scared. “I’ve never seen anyone do something like this before.”

Before Sarah could answer that she didn’t know, Ryan raised his arms and the fire on him flowed into the sky. The sky brightened with red light and then filled with maroon clouds that slowly darkened to black and hung low enough to block out the lights from the top floors of the casinos.

The bonfire was gone, the ashes as black as the sky. Ryan hadn’t moved except to lower his arms and stare at the smoking remains.

Sarah wondered vaguely what the other guests thought of the red light but was unable to turn and look. She could only watch his dark figure stand in the darkness, black on black, head bowed, arms at his sides. Not moving.

Silence.

And then the screaming began.

Allison Hymas Allison Hymas grew up in the green forests of the East Coast before leaving to study English at Brigham Young University. She is currently earning a master’s degree in Creative Writing and looking for new adventures to write about. The Shifting is her first book. emerald sky - 73