ASIM issue 55 Page 9

  “South!” I heard him yell. “I can’t see. The safeguards are too strong. I can’t see its face!”

  “Wrong Righters! You have lost!”

  I felt a stab of guilt. I had sent North to extinction.

  Behind me, once again, a hatch swung open and a shaft of light illuminated the now dimmed ex-brightly lit cargo bay. The bay ceased to rotate. Containers and boxes and chain hooks and all manner of junk rained down from the ceiling. We had gravity. Luckily, nothing landed on me. For once.

  A wave of flame burst through the open hatch door. A figure stepped through. A female figure holding a flamethrower. “What bitch do I torch?” she snarled.

  “Ridley!” I yelled.

  “Ah yes,” came the Literaliser’s voice. “The Strong Feisty Female.” It was gloating. “This is dénouement, Wrong Righters, the perfect balanced final moment! It is over. Let the power of the Spoiler DESTROY!”

  “Help us,” I said as best I could.

  Ridley looked magnificent: all sweat and indeed (apologies, North) badass.

  Except something was wrong. She dropped the flamethrower. It clanged to the ground. “Oops.” She looked up. “God,” she moaned, “what is that thing?”

  “Torch it!” I yelled.

  Ridley was a mass of indecision. “I don’t—How do I—” She turned to me with a pleading look. “How do you turn this fire gun thing on? Look, I’m frightened.”

  I was stunned. “You can’t be.”

  “What is happening?” bellowed the Literaliser/Spoiler. “This is impossible.”

  But it was possible. I got it. I started to laugh. Ridley jumped, afraid of my chuckles. “It’s gone too far,” I told her. “It got too greedy! Got distracted and literalised too much.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Ridley.

  I tried to stand. No, too dizzy. Just hang in there.

  “Literaliser! You’ve messed up. You’ve gone too literal; you’ve taken a chunk of a universal constant and now you’re going to pay the price.”

  For once, the booming voice was hesitant; afraid even. “No. It’s your fault; I didn’t know.”

  The bright light at the top of the chains dimmed. It was that rare, almost impossible moment: the Literaliser had self-doubt. Its safeguards were down. Wouldn’t last long though.

  “North, now. Do it now!” I sank back, exhausted.

  “Hello,” said North. His voice boomed around the silent chamber. “Nice to see you. To see you nice.”

  The scream was so intense it stopped me falling unconscious.

  * * *

  I collapsed in a heap. My body was a mass of bruises. The light was dingy now and the spaceship smelled like an old aircraft factory. Through the pain, I realised Right was restored. We had won.

  North dropped down from the hanging chains. He squeezed his aching muscles.

  “Help me up then, oaf,” I said.

  “All right,” said North. “Never mind the name-calling.”

  “Would someone like to tell me just what the hell kind of shit went down there?”

  Ridley stood up; hands on her hips. She wasn’t about to take any nonsense from anybody. North gave me a discreet thumbs up. She was herself again.

  I heard a distant crash as a heavy metal object hit the floor somewhere in the Conrad. Something loud and angry squealed with a murderous violent intent. Human voices began to scream. Gravity had returned.

  “All back to normal,” said North happily.

  I nodded. I tried not to hear the alien rampage sounds.

  “I got to rescue my crew,” said Ridley. She bravely hoisted the flamethrower on her shoulder. She looked gritty and determined. “I’m back.”

  The door hummed shut as she dashed into the corridor. Indeed oh yes, glorious day. The SF Female was very, very back.

  North and I activated our mission status wrist devices, which beeped nice and affirmatively.

  “Chalk another case up to us,” said North.

  “Thanks to me,” I said.

  “Thanks to us,” he said. “For once, we worked as a team.”

  “No we didn’t—” I stopped. His words were true. I remembered the compassion I felt for him; I admired his bravery. I looked at his big, clumsy face and realised I had real feelings for him.

  “This can’t be—” I began.

  North began to laugh. “It’s the Literalist. His essence. You know what’s happened, don’t you?”

  “Stop it, North. It’s not true.”

  He really chuckled. “You’ve developed empathy.”

  I struck a pose. I looked brooding and mysterious, like I’d been trained. “Nonsense. Impossible.”

  “Yes you have. Just a little teeny-weeny bit of empathy. So have I for that matter.” North patted his donkey jacket, as if empathy were a real thing you could put in your pocket. He looked back at me. “I think it’s great you’ve stopped strutting about like a queen.”

  “I do not strut.”

  “Yes you do. Or maybe I just don’t mind it as much. Gosh. We like each other. Come on, admit it, South. We do.”

  I said nothing and looked away.

  “You’re smiling …” North teased.

  I couldn’t hide it. I was. This needed to be nipped in the bud. I had to lay down the law.

  “Okay,” I admitted. “But not a word back at base, understand?”

  North gave me a mock salute. “Oh, of course, sir. Three bags full, sir.”

  We stared at each other. The Wrong Righters. We shook hands.

  I jumped away. North coughed into his fist. “We’d better go,” he said.

  I activated my wrist dial. We waited.

  “So, what did it look like, then?” I asked.

  “The Literalist?” asked North.

  “Yes, idiot. The Literalist.”

  North scratched his nose. “Not much really. Like a fat, white blob with four eyes.”

  “A classic example. By the book,” I replied. “They can’t function when they’re face to face with their victims. Without the energy box to filter the communication. They have a natural aversion to other life-forms. Just shrivel up and disappear.”

  “I knew that.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  A few moments later, once more, the air on the spaceship fizzed. It blurred and wobbled. We disappeared—North and South: the Wrong Righters.

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards

  A Serial in Four Parts

  …Tom Holt

  Part Three

  The flypast was led by the flagship, UPF Rainbow Nation. In her wake, sixteen thousand brand new Class F destroyers ripped through the stratosphere like a meteor shower, causing tropical storms and a moderate tsunami on the uninhabited southern continent. “Impressive,” Burnt Umber muttered. “But will it be enough?”

  The pre-emptive strike force was the biggest assemblage of military hardware in galactic history. Seven per cent of the population and fifty-six per cent of the total wealth of the Union was in those ships, along with a hundred per cent of its hope. If they should fail, there would be nothing standing between seventy million inhabited planets and the invasion fleet from the Rice Pudding galaxy.

  “The thing of it is,” said Puce 88788, the Central Command deputy liaison, “we just don’t know. Could be that one bolt from a therion lance will blow them all into space dust. Or we could be throwing pebbles into a black hole.”

  “We’ve done our best,” Rose Madder said. “Everything we possibly can. From now on, it’s a matter of survival of the most luminous. If we fail and our evolutionary journey turns out to be a dead end—well, it’s been fun.”

  Burnt Umber shone at the admiral. “Any progress from the analysis team?”

  “Substantial progress,” Aquamarine replied. “The new linguistics program did the trick. We can now read their language.”

  Suddenly he had their undivided attention. “So?” snapped the archbishop. “What does it say?”

  “Ah.”

&nb
sp; Burnt Umber flared dangerously bright. “This isn’t a good time for reticence, admiral. You can actually read the document?”

  Long pause. “Yes. We think so. What I mean is, we’re getting out what appear to be coherent sentences, paragraphs, whole pages. But they don’t make sense.”

  “A glitch in the software?”

  “We don’t think so,” the admiral said wearily. “We’re pretty sure the program is operating at something like 97.6% efficiency. There’s a word here and there it can’t crack, but mostly—what I’m trying to say is, it reads like it should make sense, but it doesn’t. It’s—”

  “What?”

  The admiral oscillated with evident distress. “The conclusion we’ve been forced to,” he said, “after inputting all the possible linguistic variables and cross-comparing with our anthropological, sociological, psychological and xenoethnographic databases, and allowing for observer effect, cultural and conceptual deviations and textual corruption, is—” He dwindled away into a tiny glimmering spot. “We don’t think it’s true.”

  Deathly silence. “Admiral?”

  “It’s false. It’s all lies.” The admiral got a grip and slowly brightened into a coherent beam. “We’ve analysed the information which the various documents contained in the artefact provide us about their worlds and the societies that inhabit them. The inconsistencies are so wild, so huge, so gratuitously divergent that we can only conclude that it’s all made up. To put it crudely, we’re dealing with a society of compulsive habitual fibbers.” His voice nearly cracked; he caught it just in time. “We just don’t understand how anybody could live like that.”

  Burnt Umber was, to her credit, the first to recover. “Admiral, are you absolutely sure? Do you need more time? More money? Further analysis—”

  “We’ve done everything,” the admiral snapped. “Every test, every conceivable simulation. They all lead to the same conclusion. These creatures lie to each other for fun.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rose Madder said. “No society could function—”

  “Good news, surely,” Puce put in; his voice was shaky but upbeat. “If they lie to each other all the time, they must be hopelessly disorganised and weak. We’ll go through them like a laser through custard.”

  “Your weak, disorganised liars have built inter-galactic passenger liners,” Cobalt Blue pointed out icily. “I wouldn’t write them off just yet if I were you. Admiral,” she went on, “have you managed to establish anything at all that looks reliable?”

  “We think so,” the admiral replied. “For example, we’re now fairly certain that the barren land-mass where the artefact originated is called Australia.”

  A dim glow followed. “That’s a pretty name,” the archbishop muttered.

  “Incidentally,” the admiral went on, “we’ve had further and better data from our probe. Australia is, to all intents and purposes, our idea of hell. It’s unspeakably hot, unendurably dry and predominantly yellowy-brown. We’ve estimated ambient surface glare at 8.78 on the Lavender-Indigo scale. Running this data through our xenobiological comparables database, we’ve reached the conclusion that the dominant species must be reptilian, probably not exceeding 4.6 centimetres in length, sightless, invisible and almost certainly nocturnal. That’s what we’re up against, ladies and gentlemen. A race of super-evolved intelligent blind lizards. Except—”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s not how they see themselves,” the admiral said, his voice cracking under the weight of his frustration. “Not according to the artefact documents, at any rate. They seem to think they’re mammalian anthropoid bipeds. Most of the time, anyhow. The exopsychologists are talking about mass delusion on a pandemic scale. It’s inconceivable. A whole species that believes it’s something else.”

  “There could be a perfectly rational explanation,” suggested Terracotta 112887, professor of xenoluminescence at Avocado State University. “For example, we could be dealing with a society with more than one evolved sentient species; one lizard species, these Australerons or whatever you want to call them, and another species descended from primates. For some unknown cultural reason, the Australioids prefer to write about the primate-descendants rather than themselves. I can think of vaguely similar literary conventions in our own distant past.”

  “Yes, but we didn’t lie,” grunted the archbishop.

  “We don’t know that’s what the Australioids are doing,” the professor objected mildly. “All due respect to your experts, admiral, but this is something I’d quite like to examine for myself. Would it be possible for you to upload me a copy of the translation? A few fresh beams on the subject—”

  “Be my guest,” the admiral replied, picking out a series of buttons on a console. “There. I’ve transferred our entire dossier to your personal terminal at Avocado State. If you can make anything of it, I for one would be delighted to hear. Meanwhile—” He paused to concentrate their focus on him. “The question is, does any of this change our decision to launch the Fleet against the Australeron homeworld?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Cobalt Blue. “A sane, rational invader’s bad enough. If they’re all sparkling mad—”

  “It certainly casts grave doubts on the likely success of a diplomatic solution,” said Puce. “If they’re lizards who believe they’re monkeys, which lot do we talk to? I mean, no good offering them flies if what they really want is bananas.”

  It occurred to the admiral, not for the first time, that Puce’s meteoric rise through the ranks had possibly been too rapid for his own good. “We shouldn’t dismiss diplomatic channels out of hand,” he said. “On the other hand, they may not even know we exist yet. That gives us the element of surprise. Given their probable technical superiority, that’s about all we have going for us. I’d be reluctant to give it up unnecessarily.”

  Burnt Umber glinted at Terracotta, who’d spent the last minute or so shining intently on a data transfer port. “Professor?”

  “Sorry,” Terracotta said. “I’ve just been examining the text of the artefact. It’s given me an idea.”

  “Wonderful,” Burnt Umber glistened. “What?”

  “Well.” Terracotta flickered softly for a moment. “This is going to sound downright crazy, but—”

  (continued in Part Four)

  The Moon Is Leaving

  …Chris Hicks

  Earth darkens

  beneath a dimming enlightenment.

  Ra swerves his solar barge closer.

  A bedazzling corona radiates.

  Resolutely oblivious to all—

  mankind’s wearin’ sunglasses.

  On this blinding night

  the Sea of Tranquillity

  still shines.

  The few lifeguards on duty

  see Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins

  flailing

  drowning;

  but in vacuous spaces

  no one hears nuthin’.

  Mankind’s sunglasses are glued in place.

  Widowed, Luna’s losing interest

  drifting away, a little at a time.

  Oh, sure, there will always be

  a special place in her heart

  for that lovely red, white and blue pennon.

  Oh, sure, there will be other

  lacklustre suitors

  —looking for bragging rights.

  Then what?

  Not the life for this girl!

  The intelligentsia

  can squabble over their navels;

  tanning to charcoal.

  The moon is leaving

  and mankind’s sunglasses

  are melted to its face.

  Cullsman #9

  …Michael John Grist

  THE CULL NEEDS YOU

  The signs are everywhere, the only colour in this dry and wasting endopolis. I turn my eyes away, stamp my feet on the cracked bitumen decks heading home. It is cold. There are people lying in the dry gutters, licking at drips of moisture sweating down the walls. The
last Great Rains came long before I was born.

  Waiting for the lowrail to come, I look up through the soft wall canopies overhead, to the planet in the sky. The Second. The remnants of its cities are now just scattered lights, glittering like distant stars around the crevice where the core-moon once shone. I look at the remnants of their ravaged world and wonder how they feel, the Cull nearly complete, as they look up at me and see their life repurposed, for this.

  I scuff a dying weed with the toe of my boot. It is brown, cracked. The air smells of burnt fuel. We are dying too.

  * * *

  At home Sylabry greets me at the door, the warning in her eyes. I am not to speak of it here, not with the girls still watching.

  “Daddy!” calls Glaya, running up to me with her favourite doll held up to my face. “King Trunk missed you!”

  I take the faded toy and give it a hug, then take my daughter and lift her into a hug too. She is so light it pains me, but of course I smile.

  “I missed him too! Now has he been a good Trunk or a bad Trunk?”

  She giggles into my neck as I walk us into the dimly lit living room. “Silly, of course he’s good! He’s the King, everything he does is good.”

  When dinner is done we lower the gas and send the girls to bed. Glaya is scared of the Seconds, the little people from the twinkling sky, but I hush her and promise her sister Foral will watch over her. Foral nods solemnly and follows her to bed.

  In the quiet after they are gone, my wife and I sit. The things I have to tell her cannot wait, but still I hesitate. I cannot bear to bring this to an end.

  “They’re closing the fourth adjudicant soon,” she says. “I heard it from the Sullys.”

  I nod and watch her. She’s exhausted from a day minding the girls, bargaining with the neighbours for food and water. Her hair is rumpled with play, her eyes sleepy, but still she is beautiful to me. The lines growing into her face are softened by the gas light, and I can see beneath them the girl I met long ago in a level two crust bar.

  “Where are you?” she asks me.