ASIM issue 55 Page 17

  “Go on,” the admiral said.

  “My colleagues in the psycholinguistics lab devised a quantum parafractal dissociative interval algorithm,” Terracotta said. “Essentially, we were looking for fractal patterns in the intervals of the numerical sequences built into the text. To give you an example; here’s a random grouping of words from the original artefact text.” He cleared his throat and recited, “‘ The cavernous mouth emitted a shattering scream’. Now, then. The first word contains three characters. The second word, nine, the third word five, then seven, then one, then ten, then six. If the spaces between words count as four—the average number of claws on the reptilian foot—we get a numerical sequence, 3 4 9 4 5 4 7 4 1 4 10 4 6 4. Group the numbers into sets of four, add them and multiply the product by four, and you get 80 80 78 20. Now, multiply the square root of each of those sub-groups by Apricot’s Constant—”

  “I see,” the admiral said. “Perhaps we could skip all that. You’re saying, you did all that and you got something that made sense?”

  “Absolutely.” The professor beamed happily. “We applied the formula to one of the data instalments in the original artefact, and got the message lizards distant going star boldly kill kill kill. I think,” he added serenely, “that more or less speaks for itself.”

  The room was almost dark. The admiral flared weakly. “Yes,” he said, “I should think it does.”

  “So,” the professor went on, “we reverse-projected the code, ran it through the QuanPaDisInAl program, and fed in a message of our own.”

  Dead silence. Then Burnt Umber whispered, “What did you say?”

  “Star monsters kill lizards abort mission abort,” the professor said happily. “Well, when the computers had done their stuff, we were left with about six thousand words of counter-intuitive practically meaningless drivel, which we duly transmitted to asimsubmissions@gmail.com. And this—” He gleamed briefly on the viewscreen. “— is what we got back.

  Dear Ms Violet,

  I’ve read your story and I’m delighted to say that I’ve accepted it for inclusion in ASIM 55. I’m sorry to say we can only pay peanuts, but I’m sure the honour of having your work appear in Australia’s premier speculative fiction magazine will be recompense enough.

  I quite understand your reasons for not wanting it to appear under your own name. Many of our contributors seem to feel this way. Just let me know what you’d like to be called, and I’ll get a contract out to you in the next day or so.

  I have to say, I’ve never read anything quite like your story, but I think I can confidently say it’ll appeal to our readers. They’re like that.

  Cordially,

  Jacob Edwards

  Editor, ASIM #55

  “Peanuts,” Puce said triumphantly. “Told you so.”

  “You said bananas,” Burnt Umber reminded him.

  “Bananas, peanuts, whatever. Told you it was monkeys.”

  Every light in the room was focussed on Terracotta’s refractor, creating a well of luminescence so deep that for a moment it seemed as though a new star had been born. Then Cobalt Blue said, “Purely out of interest, why Violet?”

  “My niece,” the Professor mumbled. “She writes poetry. Actually, some of it’s—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  The admiral cleared his throat. “Professor,” he said, and his voice was calmly brittle, “Do you really think—?”

  “Oh yes,” Terracotta said, as though replying to a polite enquiry about his health. “Look at that line, ‘ but I think I can confidently say it’ll appeal to our readers.’ The xenopsycholinguists reckon it’s pretty unequivocal. Reading between the lines, as it were, I’d say they’ve heeded our warning and called off the invasion.”

  Burnt Umber gleamed with a searing inner flame. “Are you sure about that?” she said. “No disrespect, but this is neither the time nor the place for educated hunches.”

  “I think so, yes,” the professor replied calmly. “You see, in the last hour, just before this meeting convened, we received a further transmission through the relay network. Apparently we now have a PayPal balance of sixty-eight dollars eighty Australian. We can of course only guess what that means, but I’m interpreting it as some sort of formal acknowledgement; in which case, they would appear to have accepted what we told them at face value, and they’re not coming.”

  Seven seconds passed. In certain contexts, seven seconds can be a very, very long time. Then the admiral focussed himself on the intercom button. “Message to the Fleet,” he said. “Tell them to stand down.”

  * * *

  The room erupted into a kaleidoscope of dancing, weaving colour. Puce turned himself into a firework display, and Rose Madder blazed so bright he actually cut a small section out of a fortuitously unimportant wall. The admiral sank into a refractor and just glowed. Just as the lightshow seemed about to reach its climax, the professor flicked across to an open photoelectric terminal, said, “Well, if you’ll all excuse me,” and quickly faded from sight.

  “That man,” said Burnt Umber, “has just saved the Union. We ought to do something for him, you know?”

  “Such as?” said Cobalt Blue.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Tenure, maybe. Possibly even a pay rise. Or maybe a nice card. We could all sign it.”

  Cobalt Blue glowed softly. “I think he’d like that.”

  * * *

  Terracotta refracted back to his office. There were 1,067 messages on his voice mail. Tomorrow, he promised himself. He focussed on his data terminal and started to read a fascinating new paper on single-cell polymer-based life-forms recently discovered living in the deleted files folder of the central computer at the First Union Bank.

  A flash on his console interrupted him. He looked up. The screen wobbled and turned a sort of greyish colour.

  “Well?” asked Taupe 9.

  “They’re happy,” Terracotta said. “And they’ve called off the pre-emptive strike. So that’s all right.”

  Taupe hazed a little; the department’s VDUs were old and needed replacing, but funds were tight. Maybe that would change now. “Did you mention what we talked about?”

  “No.” Terracotta glittered a little. “They all seemed so delighted and relieved, I didn’t want to spoil it. Besides,” he added, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we were wrong, at that.”

  “Surely not,” Taupe said. “As far as I can see, it’s a simple case of applying Primrose’s Razor. What’s the more plausible explanation? A transgalactic invasion army using an incredibly overcomplicated code to deliver basically meaningless orders? Or—”

  “Quite,” Terracotta agreed. “I do take the point. I’d like to think that the artefact was just some nice little book the Australioids wrote to amuse themselves, and we nearly blew them to bits because we got hold of entirely the wrong end of the wavelength; it’d make me feel all warm and shiny inside, thinking about how I saved millions of innocent lizards from a horrible and undeserved fate. There’s just one thing that doesn’t gel with me.”

  “Go on.”

  “The sixty-eight dollars eighty Australian,” Terracotta said. “I’m assuming it’s some form of payment for the story.”

  “Well?”

  “It arrived practically by return,” Terracotta said gravely. “Come on, Taupe, you’ve been contributing to periodicals on and off for two thousand years. I don’t care which galaxy you’re in, have you ever known an editor pay up that quickly?”

  The screen dimmed, then brightened again. “Um,” said Taupe.

  “Quite. That aside, they played their hand brilliantly. It’s just that one small slip that gave them away.”

  “You mean—” Taupe’s voice was suddenly tense. “You think there really is an Australeron invasion fleet out there?”

  Terracotta oscillated gently. “I don’t think they’re coming for us,” he said. “Not right now, at any rate. One day, perhaps—Ah well. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

  “But, Professor.” Taupe w
as glowing bright, something that, in the very nature of things, she had great difficulty doing. “We’ve got to do something. Prepare. Get ready. We can’t just—”

  “Done it,” the professor said. “It’s all we can do. I just hope it’ll be enough. Look.”

  He angled his light onto his data terminal, highlighting the words—

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  And If …

  …David Knopfler

  And if my easy rhythm fails tonight

  a thousand flights from sacred land

  under strange or artful, curving earth

  what’s left, for any raw regret?

  Finally, I found you! my one Luminescence.

  What’s death but a vanishing point in infinite sky

  my wonderful; my treasured you.

  And why it shook each tortured branch

  from my bleeding tree to understand the secret

  root of life, the cadence of a million pleading psalms

  a Shaman-Starman’s lifetime, to awake the dance;

  always, you were worth each single kiss.

  You were the only heart-beat to my tale

  my bliss, my grail, my only you.

  And because I knew your incandescence

  mistakes and mandrake-fears all fell away

  and stark, alone this troubled night, if I’m done

  don’t mourn the living cost of the dying lost

  but celebrate the loving life well lived, Artemis.

  And if I don’t, you know … and probably

  I won’t … well then … Woohoo!

  Soul Blossom

  …Lisa A Koosis

  I still felt Magpie. Not in grief’s sly way though: the dream-visit, hearing a hint of her laugh in that of a stranger’s, her scent resurrected in a whiff of perfume. Rather, I felt her in the stillness between breaths, between heartbeats, and I knew she was still there, that her soul, or whatever thing made her Magpie, hadn’t yet moved on.

  Her name was Maggie—Margaret if you wanted to be formal, but I’d called her Magpie since I was twelve. Sitting on a log by the pond at a summer camp where neither of us wanted to be, we’d watched the other kids swim and splash when neither of us knew how.

  “What’s your name?” I’d asked, sullenly. After all, sitting there stuck with someone was bad enough. That it was a girl sucked beyond words.

  “Maggie,” she’d said, her voice equally sullen.

  “Magpie?”

  Though she’d rolled her eyes at the play on her name, a small smile rose like a seedling breaking through earth. And I saw something in her in that moment, something beautiful, something amazing. Maybe it was only an indication of my approaching, testosterone-drenched teen years, or maybe it was something that the fragile shell of her body just couldn’t contain. But two things happened in that moment. One, I fell in love. And the other, the name, Magpie, stuck.

  After she died I stocked the pantry with ginger ale and pretzels, closed all the curtains, yanked the phone cord from the wall, and climbed into bed. There, in the quiet of an empty home, I felt her with me, and I planned on never getting out of bed again.

  Eventually, though, even the sharpest blade of grief dulls from constant use. I felt the oil in my hair, smelled the sourness of stale sweat. My bones ached from being immobile for so long. My eyes felt gritty and dry, and the lure of the shower in the next room became a siren song no matter how tight I pressed the pillow against my ears. So I shuffled into the bathroom, let steaming water pour over the clunky body that no longer seemed to belong to me, and shaved off the beard I’d grown over the past few weeks. I found clean jeans and an old concert tee-shirt, reheated leftover tuna noodle casserole from Mrs Jerritson next door, and decided that this couldn’t be my life.

  We’d only been apart once since we were twelve—a brief breakup when Magpie wanted to try out other relationships. Me, I never wanted anyone else, but Magpie being Magpie, she needed to spread her wings and see what else the world had to offer. I’d tried to hold onto her so hard, but she’d taken my hand and said, “Don’t suffocate me, Sam. You can’t hold me if I don’t want to be held.”

  She had eventually come back, and my world had started up again. I’d known then that life without Magpie simply wasn’t an option.

  I knew it now, too, so I emptied my savings account, cashed in my retirement, and went to look for her.

  * * *

  We’d written letters after that first summer—tentative letters, sometimes only a line or two. Camp really sucked. I am SO not going next year. From Maggie. P.S. Write soon. P.P.S. School sucks too. To which I’d responded: To Magpie, Can’t wait until we grow up. Then we can do what WE want. From Sam.

  What sucks, Magpie, I thought now, is death. But I was, indeed, an adult, and I could do whatever I damn well pleased. If right then that meant giving Death the old F U, then so be it.

  Of course there’s no River Styx. I knew that as well as anyone. No Charon would ferry me to the afterlife to find her. And I couldn’t look in the yellow pages and hire a Virgil to lead me through this hell on Earth, hoping to catch sight of her auburn curls.

  But surely, somewhere on this huge planet, someone knew how to retrieve the dead … Talk to her ghost. Find her reincarnated in a newborn babe.

  Standing in her driveway, Mrs Jerritson watched me throw a suitcase into my trunk. In her housecoat and Pooh slippers, her eyes bright and her gaze sharp despite her eighty-some-odd years, she tilted her head, maybe in concern, more likely in curiosity as is often the way of neighbours. For a minute, an image of Magpie, her eyes unfocused, the corner of her lips drooping, pushed its way into my mind. I clenched my fists.

  “It’s good you’re getting away, Sam,” Mrs J called out, a statement, though the inflection of the last word rose in question.

  “Mmmm.” I forced my fists to unclench and slammed the trunk shut.

  Apparently unable to resist, she asked, “Going to stay with family for a while?”

  I planted my feet to show, maybe more to myself than her, that my commitment to this journey was firm. “No. I’m going to bring Magpie home.”

  * * *

  I started in Florida, showing up unannounced at the pink stucco studio of a woman purported to speak to the dead. Palm trees lined the driveway and a plastic flamingo stood in greeting in a small garden. The medium answered the door, wearing dark, bulbous glasses that made her look like a housefly rather than mystical.

  She cluck-clucked, opening the screen door and taking my arm in her long, bony fing
ers. “You’ve had a terrible loss. Come in. Come in.”

  In the Arctic chill of the air conditioning, I followed her down the hall. I wondered if she greeted all visitors with those words. The odds surely held court in her favour, her chosen profession and all. People weren’t showing up here for tax advice. Or hell, maybe they were.

  Her flip-flops made sucking sounds, doing nothing to engender faith in the whole communicating with the dead thing. Of course that really wasn’t fair. Psychics didn’t have a dress code.

  Still, even before we sat down on her floral print couch, even before she nudged the box of tissues across the coffee table toward me, I knew I wouldn’t find Magpie here.

  Afterwards, I sat in my rental car beneath the shade of a palm tree. Closing my eyes, I concentrated, listening in that space between breaths, between heartbeats. She was still there. I clenched my fists and held on for all I was worth.

  * * *

  I’d kissed her for the first time during our second summer at camp, out behind the arts and crafts cottage where we painted balsawood birdhouses and made Christmas ornaments from pinecones. I thought about that kiss on the flight to Arizona, while the landscape far below transformed from palm trees to desert. It hadn’t been awkward, at least not as far as our lips went. Rather, it was my elbows and knees, grown too long and gangly in nine months, that didn’t quite know where to go. But the kiss itself had been sweet and comfortable, a natural progression from fireflies and laughter. She’d tasted like freshly picked blackberries.