“Key Insight”
by P. Orin Zack
(11/18/2009)

“Spit it out, Stephen.”

The twin on Lou’s left made a face. The cake his father had made wasn’t anywhere as good as the ones his mother used to make, but that wasn’t any reason to not finish it. He pointed at his full mouth. “Hmmm?”

His brother Alan, who was seated across from him, quickly swallowed so he could laugh. “Not the cake, stupid. Anyone can tell something’s been eating you. Finish eating Dad’s latest science experiment, and then spill.”

Lou glared at him, but could only keep a straight face for a few seconds. “Science experiment?”

“Well, yeah. You did stray from the recipe, didn’t you?”

“You can tell?”

Stephen had finished his dessert by this point, so he tapped his glass a few times with his fork. “Yeah, Dad. Of course we can tell. But then, mom played variations on recipes all the time. It’s just that yours are, shall we say, out of key?”

“Hey,” Lou said defensively, “at least I tried. Cooking isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

The twins glanced at one another. “We know.”

“But you’re right,” Stephen added a few seconds later, “something has been on my mind. I’m just not sure how to explain it.”

“You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you?”

Stephen sat back. “Trouble? Oh… no, nothing like that. It’s more along the lines of a spiritual conversion.”

His brother smirked. “What, again?” Stephen had been sampling the world’s religions with the staccato passion of a serial monogamist ever since the two had graduated from their respective colleges, and family gatherings had turned into a sporadic series of weekend seminars.

“It’s different this time.”

Lou took a sip of dessert wine. “Different,” he said flatly.

“Well, yeah. This time it isn’t about sampling a religion. But it was a conversion, of sorts.”

Alan eyed his brother briefly. “Then you’ve finally decided on one?”

“A religion? Of course not. This is different. It’s um… I’ve become a Martian.”

“You’re…” Lou hazarded, “you’re going to move to Mars… leave us forever and live in a dome on another planet?”

“What?” Alan said at nearly the same time, his hands spread on the table. “You’re going to be a colonist?”

Stephen shook his head. “God. Don’t you two ever listen? I said I’d become a Martian, not that I was planning to move there.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yeah, there’s a difference. It’s more a different way of looking at the world, a different way to solve problems.”

“And, um,” Lou prompted warily, “how exactly did you come by this conversion? Was it someone you’ve met? A new girlfriend, perhaps?”

“Well, yes and no. Rachel convinced me to go camping with her last weekend, but she didn’t have anything to do with it. It was the camping trip itself, actually.”

“Okay,” Alan said, “now you’ve got me completely confused. What does a camping trip have to do with becoming a Martian, whatever that means?”

“Everything, actually. Do you remember our first camping trip in the scouts?”

Sensing a lengthy digression, Alan dragged his father’s experimental cake closer and cut himself another piece, while his brother set the groundwork for his weekend camping story. He’d taken that ‘be prepared’ motto to heart, and refused to even hit the woods for a bathroom break without going through a detailed checklist, and making sure he could handle just about any eventuality.

“Just cut to the chase, okay?” Alan said between bites. “We both know how painfully anal you were as a kid.”

Lou raised his eyebrows. “You were only a tad less anal, yourself, you know.”

“Sure, but I did finally get over it. Well, mostly.”

“Anyway,” Stephen said, in a bid to regain control of the floor, “you get the idea. So we were all set to spend the weekend in the woods. The car was stuffed to the gills with food, clothing, a bunch of different weight jackets, bug spray, cooking and cleaning supplies, three first-aid kits, sleeping bags, a couple of folding chairs, and so forth. I even insisted on bringing a spare tent, just in case one sprang a leak, and it wasn’t even supposed to rain that weekend.”

“Let me guess,” Alan said, waving his fork in the air, “you forgot the bear repellant?”

“Close. It was raccoons, actually.”

Lou had crossed his arms and his eyelids were starting to droop, but the possibility of there finally being some point to the story brought him back to alertness. “Raccoons,” he said with interest. “I take it they got into your stuff?”

“Boy, did they ever,” Stephen said, laughing. “Of course, at the time, I didn’t think there was anything funny about it. Not in the least.”

“Why,” Alan said, “what did they do?”

“Not ‘they’ so much as he. There was this old grey raggedy-looking raccoon that was missing his tail. I guess he lost it in a fight or something. Anyway, the guy was fearless. Nothing would scare him off. After a while, we started calling him Stumpy, just so we could warn each other about what he was up to.”

“And what was he up to?” Lou asked.

Stephen looked each of them in the eyes for several seconds before answering. “Stealing the keys,” he said slowly and quietly.

“So you had to hike out to the ranger station?”

He nodded. “Worse. When we tore out after him, he managed to press the lock button on the key-fob. Our packs were in the car, so we couldn’t carry much for the hike out.”

Alan, who had been struggling to restrain himself, finally burst out laughing. “And that’s why you decided to become a Martian?”

“No,” Stephen said, looking mortally wounded, “I decided to become a Martian because of what happened next. Rachel could tell I was in distress, cut off as I was from all of the stuff we’d brought along to deal with what we’d undoubtedly run into on the way to the ranger station. So she started telling me about how her ancestor, a Canadian trapper, made do with whatever he could find while he was out for months on end catching and skinning animals to trade. Well, that led to a discussion of Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old frozen mummy they found in the Alps back in ’91. From what they could tell, the guy’d been fitted out like an ancient space traveler with the most exquisite exploration gear you can imagine. Back then, surviving a trip across the Alps must have been as challenging as colonizing Mars until someone finally realized that you didn’t really have to bring everything with you.”

“Well at last!” Lou said, relieved. “You finally got around to mentioning Mars. Now if you could please tell us how comparing a Paleolithic explorer to the folks at the Mars colony convinced you to be one with them, maybe we’ll have a shot at understanding what the heck you’re talking about.”

“I’m getting to that.”

“Well, speed it up then, Stephen,” Alan said, waving his fork, with the last bit of his second piece of cake, at him. “Or we’re going to send you there ourselves.”

“All right, all right. So anyway, we had to stop for the night, out there in the woods, and get some sleep.”

“And did you? Get any sleep, I mean.”

“Come on. You know me better than that. I was petrified. Of course I couldn’t sleep. So I had all night to think about what we’d been talking about. Those people on Mars really do look at things different than we do. I mean, down here on Earth, we’ve got all the resources we might want, either immediately available, or shipped in for the right price. It’s not much different on the Space Station, really, except that some things are prohibitively expensive to ship, so they either make do without, or they figure out some workaround.”

Lou was smiling happily. He’d spent a good bit of the twins’ childhood teaching them how to think through a problem. Watching Stephen relate his thought processes gave him enough satisfaction both for himself and for his late wife. “What about the bases on and around the moon, then?”

Stephen nodded. “Exactly. They showed us the limits of maintaining a forward base with supply runs. And they turned out to be just as economically foolish as any of the far-flung military outposts over the centuries that one nation or another attempted to keep running exclusively with supplies shipped in from home. The only solution was to cut that umbilical and have the soldiers or settlers make do with what’s available to them locally. They’ll either adapt, or they’ll die. And that’s the essence of the strategy used by the folks who dreamed up the Mars Direct scheme for colonizing Mars.”

“Well,” Alan said, “except for that monumental fly in the ointment.”

“Fly?”

“Lack of them, really. Forward outposts on Earth had breathable air, arable land, and potable water. It wouldn’t have taken a whole lot of ingenuity to make a place like that work, once you set your mind to it. But Mars? It’s dead.”

“It was dead,” Stephen corrected him. “And all it took was commitment, and a whole lot of ingenuity. I mean, look. The original plan included a way to make rocket fuel and air from the local rock and a small amount of stuff from Earth. The important thing was a different way of looking at the world, a different way of approaching problems. Once the people working on the problems facing the creation of a sustainable colony on Mars changed their perspective like that, solutions just started to appear out of thin air!”

Lou thought about that for a few moments. “So that’s what you meant, that you’ve changed your perspective? Is that how you’ve become a Martian?”

He grinned broadly. “It is. And I owe it all to that tailless raccoon.”

“Pretty cool,” Alan said. “So what happened to your car?”

“It all ended happily. The ranger drove us back. He had a jimmy for such emergencies, and some tools for tricking it up so we could start it without the key, but we didn’t end up going to all that trouble. Stumpy had returned in our absence, and left the keys on the hood.”

“That’s quite a tale, son,” Lou said.

“Yeah. It does make me wonder, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. After Stumpy lost his tail, he must have had to learn how do some things differently. It would have changed his ability to balance in tricky places, for example. But it also would have enabled him to get into places that a raccoon with a tail couldn’t. I wonder if raccoons tell stories.”

THE END

[Author's Note: This and my other Mars-related short stories will also be available at MarsNews.com starting in January 2010. If you're interested in Mars, space flight, and the colonization of Mars, please click over and explore the site.]

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

“Accommodation”
by P. Orin Zack
(11/16/2009)

Mission Commander Sarah Ping glanced at the MarsLift transport capsule on the nav screen, and then resumed glaring at Insky. “You’re damn lucky the elevator was near enough to completion for us to use it this trip.”

“Why?” he asked defensively. “What’s the big deal? We could have just stuck to the mission profile. It’s not like this ship can’t land normally.”

“It’s a matter of trust,” Glencoe said quietly. As the colony’s new botanist, he was acutely aware of the importance of trust in such a hostile environment. “And none of us trust you.”

People on both Earth and on Mars had become increasingly polarized over how to deal with Loren Insky when the colonization craft he was on finally reached the red planet. Of course, people on both worlds had the luxury of distance to think it all through calmly and rationally. The same could not be said of the other members of the mission, who’d been cooped up with the outed suicide bomber for months.

Commander Ping chuckled. “Oh, we’re planning to set down as planned,” she said, “just not with you aboard.”

“Not with me…?”

“That’s right. You’re going to be testing the elevator for us. That’ll give us the chance to land and discuss your fate with the rest of the colony before you arrive. You have put us all in a very awkward position, after all.”

“You’ve got that right,” Glencoe said. “Though I really do have to hand it to you. Making it all the way through the training, and a month into the crossing without anyone catching on to why you were really here.”

He looked away. “And I would’ve succeeded if it hadn’t been for that idiot who forged my credentials. Not that it should have mattered which school I got that degree from. But then, that’s exactly the sort of elitist crap I came to Mars to expose.”

“Oh, give it a rest. If all you wanted to do was expose an interplanetary old boy’s club, you wouldn’t have spent all that time working out how to destroy the colony’s closed-loop recycling system. And believe me, the folks who rely on that system to stay alive are not going to take too kindly to your subterfuge. That threat is a whole lot more theoretical to the brass back on Earth than it is to your Martian welcoming committee. A lot of them have been asking for blood.”

Just as such confrontations had done since the transport reversed orientation to use the VASIMR ion engine for braking on the approach to Mars, this one sputtered to an awkward end.  Once they’d gotten Insky safely aboard the capsule, and signaled the surface to start his descent down the carbon-fiber mesh, the Mars transport started de-orbit ops and the crew prepared for a landing at Port Thoris.

Most of the colony had gathered in the port complex to welcome the newest members to Mars. One of the big displays had been set up as a countdown clock to remind everyone of how long they had until Insky arrived: not very.

“You should have killed him when you first found out what he was up to, Commander!” someone shouted from the back of the room.

“It figures you’d say that, Chris,” another voice boomed. “The guy deserves a trial, just like he would on Earth.”

“A trial?” some else said incredulously. “You volunteering to be the judge, then?”

Commander Ping pleaded for quiet, but the irrational bellowing continued on for more than a minute before people started to notice that she had left the knot of command-level officers and was standing in front of the MarsLift airlock.

“Someone suggested,” she said into the lull, “that we space Insky en route. Correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I had thought we all volunteered to live on Mars because we’re explorers, not murderers. Is that really the sort of precedent you folks want to set?”

“You’re damn right,” another colonist said among the murmur.

As the crowd drifted towards her, she noticed that Glencoe was chatting excitedly with a man with the same specialty insignia that he wore. “She’s got a point,” he said, grinning slyly. “I’d have killed him myself if I’d had the chance. But spacing him? Not on your life. That would’ve been a terrible waste of good fertilizer!”

“I’m serious,” she said sharply. “I checked the colony logs. There’s never been a murder on Mars, and every other dispute that’s come up has been handled with either a negotiated settlement or some sort of community service.”

The man who was acting mayor this month spoke up. “Well of course. There are far more important things to deal with around here than setting up any sort of penal system. And besides, we don’t have any spare quarters to dedicate to being a jail. Well, not at Port Thoris, anyway.”

“But we have to do something. You’ve all heard the arguments and read the action plans submitted by the various governments in the Mars Coalition. Hell, they can’t even agree on whose jurisdiction it falls under, much less which body of laws to apply. Remember, Insky hasn’t actually committed any crimes, aside from misrepresenting himself. The best charge anyone’s even suggested is conspiracy to commit terrorism. But unless and until he actually attempts to carry it out, it’s still only a potential crime.”

“Don’t give me that,” Glencoe said angrily. “Once we knew what he was planning, every breath we took on that ship could have been our last. And if he gets his hands on the ‘ponics plant or scrubber tanks, the same goes for every soul on Mars.”

An alert tone first drew everyone’s attention to the countdown display, and then to the airlock, which had already begun to cycle. As the crowd spread out around the airlock door, Commander Ping turned to look at the faces, most of which flickered between anger and dread. Then, when the pressure differential hissed and the door slid open, she straightened and pivoted smartly towards Insky.

He took a tentative step forward, glancing left and right for an exit that wasn’t there. Most of the colonists had adopted an aggressive stance: legs slightly apart, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the greatest threat to their safety ever to set foot on Mars. Nodding slowly, he stepped close to Ping and smiled. “What are they going to do?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re not going to kill you, despite the fact that you had every intention of killing them.”

He made eye contact with several colonists. None of them blinked first. “I see. Then what happens? Where do I go? What do I do?”

“That does appear to be the question, doesn’t it?”

“I take it, then, that I won’t be assigned shared quarters.”

Several people laughed nervously. “And risk having your roommate’s throat slit in their sleep?” someone called out. “Not a chance.”

“Private quarters, then?”

Ping nodded, her eyes fixed on his.

He shrugged. “Fine. If you’re not going to kill me, then show me this cell you’ve got picked out.”

“Oh, it’s not a cell,” the mayor said lightly. “In fact, you could say it’s something of a local landmark.”

Insky gave him a weary look. “Whatever. As long as you’re not going to kill me, I’ll be fine. Just show me where it is.”

One of the colonists stepped forward and handed him a map. “It’s marked. You can’t miss it.”

“Then it’s not at Port Thoris?”

“Not even close,” the colonist said, tapping the sheet of digital paper. “But you’ll have plenty of air for the hike, if you don’t mind towing a trolley-full of spare tanks. Well, unless you get lost out there and tangle with a dust storm. One crater does tend to look a lot like the next until you’ve been here for a while.”

“All right,” he said nervously. “A joke’s a joke. Where are you sending me?”

“I’ll tell you,” Glencoe said, running his finger across the map. “Touchdown Alpha: the first Mars base, a cluster of the original Mars Direct habitat canisters. Telemetry reports that life support is still operative. It’s been brewing fuel, so you’ll be able to use the mars-buggy, once you’ve figured out how to fix it. And the greenhouse automation system reports that you’ll have plenty of food, water and air… well, as long as you don’t do anything stupid like you were planning to do here.”

“I get it. Solitary.”

“Uh-huh,” Ping said. “Well, until you’ve either managed to kill yourself, or you decide you’d really rather do something constructive with the rest of your life. It’s up to you, really.”

Insky looked at her for a long moment. Then he glanced at Glencoe and at several people in the crowd. “You’re awfully trusting, then. I mean, assuming I fix the buggy, what’s to stop me from driving back here and killing you all?”

“Mars.”

THE END

[Author's Note: This and my other Mars-related short stories will also be available at MarsNews.com starting in January 2010. If you're interested in Mars, space flight, and the colonization of Mars, please click over and explore the site.]

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

This is a follow-up to the story “Grounded”.

“Eye of the Beholder”
by P. Orin Zack
(11/12/2009)

“There it is,” Peter whispered when he spotted the stylized ‘Z’ on the launcher’s handgrip. He cleared away the pile of disremembered keepsakes stacked atop the pair of tethered metallic canisters sitting beside it, each about five inches across and an inch thick, and extracted them from the condo’s basement storage unit. After setting them down in the hallway, he reached back in and carefully extracted the launcher itself, which was kind of a cross between a forked casting rod and an atlatl, one of the world’s oldest weapons. Unlike an atlatl, though, which offered leverage for throwing a stone or a dart, it was used to launch the tethered canisters, a scale model of the two-part cylindrical spacecraft that had ferried his late Aunt Angie to Mars ten years earlier.

Peter hadn’t played with the thing for years. For that matter, he wasn’t all that sure it still worked. But then, he was hardly an expert on electronics. Senior year of high school was enough of a problem without begging for trouble by taking on an extra-credit program if you didn’t have to. But then, school wasn’t why he’d gone spelunking in the bowels of the complex. That honor belonged to his older brother Daniel, who’d just signed on to join the Mars colony.

On his walk to the schoolyard, which was the closest spot large enough to try a launch, an old friend drew up alongside him and bent to get a look at the gear he was carrying. Peter had known Rod since before his aunt had boarded a real Zubrin-designed spacecraft, and the two had played with the model throughout her months-long trip across space. “Hey,” he said at last, “that’s your aunt’s ship, isn’t it? I heard she died out there.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, picking up the pace.

“You planning to destroy it or something? You know. Bad memories?”

He stopped short. “No. I’m going to fly it. What bad memories?”

“That she’s dead. It’s what I’d probably do, anyway.”

Peter scowled, and took off at a run. By the time Rod caught up with him, he’d activated the electromagnets in the tips of the launcher’s fork, used it to scoop up the tin cans by the blob of metal at the half-way point of the cord between them, and was whipping the launcher up and down to get the cans spinning. Before Rod had a chance to say anything, Peter brought his hand up, angling the fork behind him, and then quickly whipped it forward. Just as the spinning cans were right over his head, he pressed the release, and they sailed away, spinning one over the other in a high arc across the ball field.

Rod took off downrange, as he’d done countless times years earlier, his head craned, waiting for the sensor in the hub to realize it had stopped climbing and separate the cans. Peter yelped as the hub snapped and the cans flew apart on their tangential paths, sending the crew can rising yet higher, while dashing the habitat towards the ground. A second later, a small parachute popped out of the habitat, slowing its fall. Meanwhile, the crew canister had reached the top of its arc, and its chute deployed as well.

Rod managed to snag the habitat canister just before it hit the ground, and ran towards Peter, who had just stopped running below the other one, and had his hands out to snatch it out of the air. But instead of handing the canister back to Peter, Rod held it up and glanced sidelong at his friend. “Ever wonder what it was like for her on that trip?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, spinning like that.” He twisted the canister in his hand a few times, pressed the chute-retractor button, and then handed it back to Peter. “I realize it gave the colonists a bit of gravity for the trip, but I’d have spent all my time heaving if there were any windows in there. And if there weren’t… well, talk about claustrophobia!”

“Don’t know. She never mentioned it in her videos. Mars was all she ever talked about.”

“Yeah, right,” an unfamiliar voice said from nearby.

Peter turned to look at the man. He guessed the stranger to be about Daniel’s age. A pair of particularly ugly forearm tattoos reinforced his belligerent stance. “What do you mean?” he asked, with an unsettling edge to his voice.

“Like anyone’s really ever been to Mars, much less colonized the place. It’s all a hoax, if you ask me.”

“Well, I haven’t. So if you’ll just leave us alone…”

“And let you spread lies about people living on another planet? Not likely.”

Rod had begun eying the stranger in that manner he always had before starting a fight. Peter had warned his friend not to telegraph his intentions so broadly if he ever wanted to surprise an adversary, but this time he just let it go. “Look,” Rod said sharply, taking a step towards the guy, “we’re just out here playing with an old toy. Nobody asked your opinion, anyway. And if the sight of technology bothers you so much, go live in the woods, you freakin’ Luddite!”

Peter winced at the man’s twitchy reaction, and raised open hands to get him to lower his fist. “Come on,” he said calmly, “there’s no reason to fight over this, either of you. The Mars colony is as real as this city. My aunt lived there for ten years, and my older brother’s already started training to go.”

“That’s rich. And I suppose your aunty climbed into a can like that to get there. Well, I’ve got a news flash for you buddy. She never went anywhere, and neither will your brother. The whole thing’s a hoax.”

Peter brandished the crew canister in front of the guy’s nose, its chute still hanging loose. “It’s no hoax, moron. Where’d you get that idea, anyway?”

“Get that thing out of my face.” He snatched it and flung it across the field. But because the chute was still out, it didn’t get very far before the canopy filled and it floated down to a soft landing in the grass. “It’s obvious, twerp. The whole fantasy they’ve spun is all about living off the land, but the place is barren. There’s nothing there. Hell, there isn’t even any air, just like on the moon!”

“No air?” Peter laughed. “The natural atmosphere may be almost all carbon dioxide, but the colonists brewed an oxygen-nitrogen mix from the rocks, and it’s maintained by all the plants they grow for food. Besides, all the breathable air they make is kept inside the colony.”

“They’d like you to believe that.”

“So tell me something, then,” Rod said, cooling a bit. “What would you accept as proof? What would convince you that the Mars colony is real, and that people have been living there for years? Obviously all the news footage hasn’t done it.”

“Of course not. Pictures can be faked.”

“Sure,” Peter said, keeping the tempo up like a tag-team handoff, “but why would anyone go to all that trouble? What’s the payoff of sustaining a hoax that complex for so long? There wouldn’t be any point to it.”

“Sure there is,” the guy said, his face revealing some defensiveness.

“Good,” Peter said, like he’d just checked an opposing king. “Name it.”

The guy bit his lip and snarled. “There are plenty of reasons. Keeping all you gullible idiots occupied watching the fake news feeds ensures eyeballs for the vidfeed’s ad stream for one.”

“What, are you nuts?” Rod exclaimed. “You think propping up some company’s business model is worth the expense of mounting a multi-year hoax? Next?”

“It’s the government, then,” he said flatly. “The government uses it to keep people from getting all bent out of shape about their intrusive policies.”

Peter gave the guy a withering look. “You’re grasping at straws, you know. I’ll tell you what. You go figure out what you think, and why, and meet us back here next week. Okay?” He picked up the launcher and calmly started walking towards where the crew canister had landed. It took a second or two for Rod to follow.

“You’re really coming back next week?” Rod asked.

“Of course not. But he’ll probably show up. Maybe by then he’ll have had enough time to check in with whoever fills his head with that crap.”

They’d reached the other canister, so Rod bent to snatch it up. He pressed the chute retractor button, and then handed it to Peter. “So what about you, Pete? What convinced you it was real?”

“My aunt’s vids, of course.”

“Come on. Like the dope said, pictures can be faked. So what was it really?”

“I’m serious, Rod. But it wasn’t the pictures that did it; it was the person in the pictures. I knew my aunt wouldn’t lie to me. Its real, all right. You could see it in her eyes.”

THE END

[Author's Note: This and my other Mars-related short stories will also be available at MarsNews.com starting in January 2010. If you're interested in Mars, space flight, and the colonization of Mars, please click over and explore the site.]

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

“Grounded”
by P. Orin Zack
(11/11/2009)

“Would you go see who that is, Pete?”

Peter Warren looked up from the Wikipedia entry on Conestoga wagons on his tablet and glanced towards the condo door. Judging from the anguish in her voice, his mother was still pretty stressed-out from dealing with the funeral last month. It was one thing to have an empty-coffin ceremony when the deceased was never found or mutilated beyond recognition, another thing entirely when she died on another planet. “Sure thing, mom.”

It was Daniel, Peter’s older brother, and for some reason he was grinning like a dirt-caked maniac. “Hey, tone it down, man” he breathed. “It’s bad enough you left in the middle of the funeral. Don’t go looking for trouble. Where’ve you been anyway? Mom’s been worried sick!”

Daniel closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When he opened them, his expression had taken on a respectful somberness. “It’s me, mom,” he called into the apartment, “Daniel.”

Peter winced at the sound of glass shattering, and turned in time to see Mrs. Warren rounding the corner from her elder son’s old bedroom, which she’d converted to an art studio. “What was that?”

“Nothing irreplaceable,” she said as she approached, “I’ll clean it up later.” She slowed precipitously and stopped mere inches from Daniel, her face a dance of indecision. “I don’t know whether to be angry or relieved.”

He smiled cautiously. “Can I come in? I’m kind of tired and could use a hot drink.”

Relieved must have won, because she threw her arms around him. “Of course you can come in. How many times do I have to tell you? However far away you might go, you’re always welcome under my roof.” Spotting the dirty backpack he’d set beside the door, she added, “Put that in the bathroom and wash your face. I’ll have coffee waiting in the dining room.”

A few minutes later, Daniel slipped into the empty seat across from his mother, where she’d set his Aunt Angela’s old Mars Direct mug. The tethered ‘tin cans’ of the early colonization ships were spinning on its heat-activated video screen. He bent to watch the animation for a few seconds before lifting it and taking a sip. “Thanks. I’d almost forgotten how she’d gotten to Mars. The new ionic drive is cool, but pioneers like Aunt Angie made the crossing in true pioneer style.”

Mrs. Warren waited for him to set the mug down before speaking. When she did, it was with trepidation. “You’ll… you’ll have to forgive me, Daniel. After you bolted in the middle of her funeral, I wasn’t sure how you felt about her, whether you’d even want to talk about her. Anyway, I used that mug to break the ice, hoping that you’d give me some kind of clue.”

“Yeah, Daniel,” Peter said, “what happened? Why’d you leave like that?”

“And camping?” their mother asked. “As far as I know, you haven’t gone camping in forever. Well, at least since before you graduated high school.”

He bit his lip. “I, um… I kinda went to commune with my Aunt Angie. The funeral just didn’t seem right. She was a pioneer — an explorer. And here everyone was focused on everything about her but the one thing that made her so special, the fact that she was willing to say goodbye to everything and everyone she knew, family and friends, to take a one-way trip across space. So I got some gear together and spent the past few weeks trying to emulate her.”

“I don’t understand. What does living in the woods for a few weeks have to do with…?”

Daniel set his mug down and spread his hands. “It has everything to do with it, mom! The thing that made the Mars Direct missions so much different from keeping the space station manned for years was that they didn’t have the luxury of supply runs from home.” His eyes widened with excitement. “I mean, god, they manned that thing in shifts. Nobody stayed up there the whole time. Pioneers like Angie were really on their own. Sure they could bring some stuff with them, but to survive any length of time – and she was there for ten years – they had to know how to turn what they had and what they could find into what they needed. They were pioneers, mom.”

“Oh, I get it,” Peter said suddenly. “That’s what you were doing in the woods. Living off the land, like the settlers I’ve been reading about for my history paper.”

“Actually, Pete, it’s more like the people they displaced. They carried an awful lot of stuff in those wagons. Most of them were really city folk, after all.” He looked again at Mrs. Warren. “I mean, if her life meant anything, it was to prove that people are more important than things, that what he have up here,” and he tapped his head, “is so much more valuable than anything we can make, than any technology we invent.”

Mrs. Warren was weeping quietly, tears dripping into her smile. “That’s sweet. Angie would be proud of you.”

Daniel grinned, and glanced at his brother. “Not half as proud as she’s going to be. I’ve signed up to join the Mars colony!”

Her jaw dropped and she went pale. “You’re what?”

“I’m going to Mars.”

“But you’re only twenty-three!” She was livid. “And besides, I just lost my sister-in-law – your aunt — to that hellhole in space. You can’t seriously expect me to just sit here and let you waste your life like she did following someone else’s dream!”

“She did not waste her life,” Daniel said forcefully.

“But she’s dead.” Mrs. Warren slumped. “She dead, just like your father, and we never got a chance to pay our respects. Not really. I mean, how could we? She was millions of miles away! And now you expect me to look forward to doing the same for you someday? That’s a one-way trip. You don’t have the option of returning home. I’ll never see you again. I’ll…”

Peter sat frozen in fear, glancing nervously from one of them to the other.

Daniel reached across the table and gathered their mother’s shaking hands in his. “There’s a better way to look at this, mom,” he said gently. “I don’t for one second believe that Aunt Angie wasted her life. I’m as proud of her as I am of dad. They both gave their lives in the course of doing something that they fervently believed in. You know that. I know you do. You’ve told me countless times how proud you were of dad. Remember, he saved a dozen people that day. He didn’t waste his life; he gave it so that others could live.”

She nodded haltingly, a smile struggling to assert itself.

“His sister was a lot like him, you know. Only instead of saving people from danger, she spent her life giving the rest of us something to believe in, a dream that others could someday step into. Her life was just as much an adventure as it was a job. And you know what? I want to honor her dream. I want to honor it by following her into the future she saw so clearly that she was willing to say goodbye to all of us and live it, one day at a time. That’s why I decided to follow her to Mars.”

Peter had caught his breath, and was staring at the mug. “Daniel?” he said in the awkward silence.

He turned to look at the teenager. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. But if you’re really going to do this, can I ask a favor?”

“Sure. Just remember I can’t bring much, and I won’t be coming back.”

“You won’t have to. What I’d like… what I’d like you to do is to visit her grave, the real one, the one on Mars.”

He shrugged. “Sure, Pete. But why? What do you want me to do there?”

“Say a prayer. Yeah, I know we did that down here, and I know that her fellow colonists gave her a grand send-off as well, but there was still something missing.”

“But a prayer? Since when did you become religious?”

He chuckled. “I’m not. But then, the prayer I had in mind isn’t so much religious as it is appropriate. And it’s pretty short, so I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to remember it.”

Mrs. Warren had calmed down a lot, and was watching her son curiously. “What’s the prayer, then?”

“It’s the Balloonists Prayer, but I think it will work. It goes like this.

‘The winds have welcomed you with softness,
the sun has blessed you with his warm hands.
You have flown so high and so free,
that god has joined you in laughter,
and set you gently again,
into the loving arms of mother earth.’

Do you think she’d like that?”

She broke into delighted laughter. “I do. I think she’d like it a lot, almost as much as I do. Thank you, Peter. And Daniel, you have my blessings. I’m proud of both of you.”

THE END

[Author's Note: This and my other Mars-related short stories will also be available at MarsNews.com starting in January 2010. If you're interested in Mars, space flight, and the colonization of Mars, please click over and explore the site.]

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

The military have predator missiles. Businesses have predators of a different kind, but they are just as deadly.

“Fair Game”
by P. Orin Zack
[09/16/2009]

The ranks of sign-carrying protesters arrayed outside ‘The Suasive Experience’ had grown quickly in the hour since a dozen or so grey-haired mall-walkers streamed through the just-opened glass doors. Photojournalist Margot Güernsbach had been on hand, because she wanted to provide her readers at the crowd-sourced news site she reported through with the sense of purpose the activists expressed, even when they were idly chatting with the elderly indoor exercise enthusiasts.

She smiled, and raised her hand to catch the attention of a happy-looking couple in matching blue-and-white striped jogging suits. They had walked briskly past two of the mall’s security guards, and were now warily approaching the protest. “Good morning,” she said brightly, and introduced herself. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

The woman, who was a few inches shorter than Margot, nodded, and peered uncomfortably at the gathering. One of the protesters, a burly young man whose sign read, ‘Retirees are not Fair Game’, grinned back at her. She started, then shrunk a bit and pointed tentatively at him. “What does that mean? What’s going on here?”

Her mall-walking companion, a lanky gentleman with a fringe of white hair, who identified himself as Arthur Fischer, gestured at the store’s façade. “I’d heard there was some big financial-services company behind the mall’s new gaming center. They say it’s a recruitment tool, kind of like that video game in the movie, ‘The Last Starfighter’. So what’s wrong with that?”

“Those are exactly the sorts of questions I want to answer for my readers. You’re right, sir. It is a recruitment tool. But unlike the ‘The Army Experience’, which lured kids into volunteering for a far more dangerous job than what they were shown in the game, this one’s supposed to entice shrewd twenty-somethings into taking call-center jobs convincing seniors to invest their nest-eggs in high-risk securities.”

After Margot got permission to quote them in her report, Mrs. Fischer complained about the incessant telemarketing calls they got, despite being on the no-call list, and asked if it had become so hard to find what she called ‘script kiddies’ to fill corporate call centers. Margot chuckled at the new use for the derisive term for malware tinkerers, and reminded herself to use it in her report. “I think,” she said, “we can both benefit by speaking with a few of the protesters about that.”

The young man who had grinned at Mrs. Fischer lowered his sign when he saw them approaching and extended his free hand to her husband. “Hi,” he said, “have you come to join the protest?”

Fischer glanced at the callused hand but did not accept it. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and grimaced. “You protesters make me sick,” he said tightly. “You’d think that in a bad economy like this, you’d have the decency to let a law-abiding company go about its business, and not stick your nose into their hiring practices.”

Fearful of letting the exchange turn ugly, Margot quickly asked the young man, a specialty welder named Stan, to explain why he’d come to the protest, and whether it was a personal or a principled matter for him.

He eyed Fischer’s expensive walking shoes for a moment before answering. “I’m blue-collar,” he said, “so I actually work for my pay. So was my father. But during the bubble, he made the mistake of believing all the hype and lost his retirement fund to one of those ‘law-abiding’ con artists this company hires. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it moral.”

A news crew from one of the local TV stations had just arrived, and the reporter immediately launched into a hasty standup in front of the still-growing crowd of protesters that Margot could see behind Stan. She excused herself for a moment to get some reaction shots of the protesters, but before she’d had a chance to resume the conversation, three black-suited men emerged from the storefront and accosted the TV reporter.

“I just spoke with the General Manager of your station,” one of them said with an air of superiority, “and was assured that you were here expressly to do a puff piece on the gaming center.”

“You can’t –,” the TV reporter trailed off, his mike wavering unsteadily, which Margot interpreted to mean their assertion was news to him. He snorted, tightening his grip on the mike. “You can’t give me orders. I’m here to report on the protest.”

Another of the men thrust a cell phone towards his face. “Here. He’s on the phone. Ask him yourself.”

Margot got a series of shots, including two zoomed close-ups of the stand-up, the first when he was enraged by the corporate goon’s claim, and the second when he was on the phone with his boss. The TV reporter reddened as he handed the phone back. Then, after closing his eyes briefly, he feigned a smile and followed the three into the storefront, where a very satisfied-looking and overdressed woman waited.

Stan came up beside her and gestured towards the woman, who was clearly preparing for her close-up. “What I wouldn’t give for the chance to get her away from her publicist,” he whispered.

“You’ve read about Estelle Klamath, then?”

He snorted. “The CEO of the travesty behind this charade? Why do you think I’m here? Before she was elevated to head shark, that creature ran herd on the call centers they’re trying to staff up with this operation. She’s a bloodless vampire, that woman is.”

Margot took a picture. “Mind if I quote you on that?”

“Be my guest. I actually spoke with her once, you know. Of course she was a lot more accessible when she was simply the highest level of management willing to deal with an irate customer. Or the relative of one,” he corrected himself. He rattled the sign in his hand. “This is really about my dad.”

A wave of disturbance coursed through the protest as two things happened nearly at once. The first was the arrival of a second local video news crew, which was immediately surrounded by a good third of the protesters, for whom the story had now grown to include the corporate sidelining of the first one. The second thing was the arrival of quite a few armed and uniformed police officers from a different direction. One of them reminded Margot of Mr. Fischer, but when she looked back towards where the mall-walkers had been standing, they were nowhere to be found.

“Hey!” a voice called out over the din, “leave them alone!”

Sensing news in the making, Margot quickly excused herself and zigged through the loose crowd towards the disturbance. The police officers had started corralling some of the protesters, putting plastic cuffs on them and escorting them towards the exit. But the couple they were presently intent on adding to their haul weren’t here to protest.

Mrs. Fischer looked terrified as she stood there with her arms tied behind her back, and her husband had just raised his fist in a foolish bid to protect her. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said loudly enough to stir an echo.

Almost without thinking, Margot raised her camera. She’d only had enough time to take two shots of the Fischers and one of the arresting officer when a firm hand gripped her shoulder.

“Hand me the camera, ma’am.” The baritone from behind her was an inflectionless monotone.

She craned to look. It was the corporate goon who’d pushed his cell phone at the first TV reporter. “I’m with the press, sir. The camera stays with me.”

He shrugged. “It’s your choice.” Then he twisted her free arm behind her and pushed her towards a nearby police officer. “This one, too. Oh, and hold the camera for us. Our lawyers will want to see it.”

Margot clutched her camera and glared at the officer. “You’re not taking this camera.” Then she turned to face the goon again. “And where do you come off giving orders to the police, anyway?”

He laughed. “Where do you think, cutie? They’re off-duty. It’s our dime.”

“Hired?” She quickly glanced around at the officers, and then squarely faced the one she’d been pushed towards. “Then you can’t arrest anyone, can you?”

The officer shook his head. “No ma’am, but we can detain you until an on-duty officer arrives to arrest you, or ask you to leave the premises.”

“In that case,” Margot said, her eyes narrowing, “I’m not leaving, and you’re still not getting this camera. Oh, and one other thing: your fellow mercenaries seem to have collared some innocent bystanders along with the protesters your corporate employer hired you to rough up. But don’t worry. I’ve already interviewed them, and I’ve got pictures, too. So what are you going to do? Cart me off to wherever you’ve brought the Fischers, or let me do my job?”

Before the officer had a chance to reply, the goon swept in and grabbed her wrist. “Neither, Ms. Güernsbach. You’re coming with me.”

She tightened her arm and looked up at him. “A personal invitation. I’m impressed. And I suppose you know who I work for as well?”

He nodded towards the storefront. “My boss does. She’s got him on the phone.”

As they approached the glass-fronted gaming center, Margot watched Estelle Klamath’s angry face. She was speaking quickly to whoever was on the phone, presumably the news site’s founder and publisher. When the goon pulled the door open, and Klamath’s tirade spilled out, one thing became increasingly clear: she was not getting the sort of satisfaction she was used to. Margot smiled.

Furious, the company’s CEO thumbed the phone off and disgustedly tossed it to one of her aides. “I cannot abide a manager with so little control over his employees. Now then,” she said as Margot was forcibly stationed in front of her, “as to you, Ms. Güernsbach, I’ve just spoken with your boss. He claims to have no control over what you do here, but there are still ways I can get you to do what I want.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“Report the news, which is the opening of our newest gaming center, not the rabble trying to demonize us.”

Margot considered the request. “I see. Unfortunately, I’m not a business reporter, like the man you primped for a few minutes ago. I’m also not a captive corporate employee. So how exactly did you intend to get me to back off?”

“How did you think?” She chuckled. “By threatening your boss, of course. And that ludicrous website of his. It wouldn’t take much to ruin him. He’s already having trouble covering the cost of running the site. Or would you prefer I make it a bit more personal, and threaten your family?”

“Either way, it comes down to the same thing: a company declaring war on citizens. Bully tactics. Exactly the same thing this so-called game is supposed to cultivate in the people you entice to play it. And the same tactics that they’ll be hired to use against the people you laughingly call your customers. You’re vile, and so is your company.”

“Am I.” Klamath crossed her arms and solidified her aggressive stance.

In the brief pause, a subtle grin of inspiration crossed Margot’s face, followed by a grimace of faux resignation. “Look,” she said suddenly, “since you’re determined to find some way to keep me from reporting anything I find out anyway, how about answering a few questions? I’ve already seen what The Army Experience’s battle sim is like, so I’m really curious about what sort of social sim your developers cooked up to weed out the most talented prospects. I’m sure it’s groundbreaking tech, and your marketing folks are probably already figuring out how to license it.”

“Well,” Klamath said, warming to the strokes, “we are rather proud of it. And you’re right, there are endless licensing possibilities.”

Margot looked around the storefront, taking in the slick posters and the propaganda loop running on the fifty-inch flatscreen over the entrance to the dimly lit sim in the rear. “For instance,” she said as a dynamic infographic flooded the big screen, “the army realized that they had to draw the focus away from the gore inflicted on the CG enemy by the sim’s firepower in order to keep the adrenaline rush focused. I imagine there’s a similar need in a business sim like this to be certain that the potential recruits don’t notice the economic pain inflicted on the targets of the more subtle weaponry used by the sort of social predators you’re looking for.”

Klamath’s botoxed face softened. “You are perceptive,” she said, and looked away to cover the look of admiration that had crept into her eyes. A moment later, she nodded, and turned to face Margot. “All right. I’ll play that game. As long as you realize there’s no way you’ll ever report a word of it.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your honesty. So what can you tell me?”

“One of our subsidiaries did participate in the development of the DoD’s sim. It was valuable experience, and we used a good deal of the underlying team support code when we laid out the sim we’ve fielded in these new gaming centers. In fact, there are plans afoot to extend the idea into other venues as well.”

“Um,” Margot interrupted, “weren’t there restrictions on what you could do with your knowledge of the IP in the Army’s sim? I mean, that’s usually the deal, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “It is when you’re contracting on classified projects. Their sim, however, was merely confidential, so we were free to do whatever we wanted.”

“Even though it included details on how certain controlled munitions work?”

“Ah,” she said, with a devious grin. “They hadn’t noticed that, and we weren’t about to point it out.”

“Just like your recruits aren’t supposed to point out to their marks when they’ve misrepresented, or even outright lied about the financial vehicle they’re pitching?”

“We’re hardly the only business to present its case in a positive light, Ms. Güernsbach. And besides, every lobby group in DC does the same thing to members of congress. Not that you’ll be able to tell anyone.”

Margot nodded agreeably. “You’re right, you’re right. Well, I do thank you for sharing that with me. I probably shouldn’t take up any more of your time, then. Did you want your thugs to actually threaten me before I go, or should I just take it as read?”

Klamath escorted her to the door. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary. Just remember this: we can ruin your life any time we want to. Play our game, and you can keep your job. Get out of line, and you’ll be on the street before you knew what hit you.”

Margot was a few feet beyond the door before she turned back. “Oh, yes. I understand entirely. It’s just that I won’t have to report anything. You’ve already done that.”

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I left my camera on. It’s been uploading our conversation to the site.”

THE END

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

If there’s a fine line between madness and genius, what lies at the edge of the abyss of mob rule?

“Terrifying Vindication”
by P. Orin Zack
[08/16/2009]

“Listen,” Corwin Farragut blurted, ignoring the carefully worded question, “could you bring me a book on your next visit?”

Bernard Katzmarek, still aching from the train ride to nowhere, looked up wearily from his notes and considered the jumpsuited prisoner. “A book?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Lovecraft. “’Through the Gates of the Silver Key’ was in an anthology I used to own. I’d like to read it again.”

“You’re serious.”

“Sure. Why?”

Katzmarek glanced around the Spartan glass-walled interview room, and nodded towards the two uniformed guards in the hallway. “Have you lost your mind?” he said tightly. “You have no privacy here. What do you think your chances of reversing that terror conviction will be once the corporation that owns this place tells the press that the man responsible for terrorizing the political debate they underwrote amuses himself reading horror stories?”

“Come on. It’s just a story. I’ve got to do something to pass the time.”

“It may be ‘just a story’ to you, but once the right-wing echo-chamber gets hold of it, the airwaves will be full of fantasies about how you’re conjuring demons out here. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to help you to poison your chances of finally getting a fair hearing. What’s so important about that story anyway?”

“Call it a craving. Have you ever read it?”

“You’re kidding, right? The only thing I’ve had time to read since the ACLU pried those CIA documents out of Dick Cheney’s chamber of secrets are case files.” He jabbed the thick folder with his finger. “Like yours. So, if you really want to challenge that verdict, I suggest we get back on point. Are you going to answer my question, or not?”

“Okay, okay. Like I’ve said before, I did not release a hallucinogen into the civic center’s air system.”

“Was it something else, then?”

Farragut closed his eyes and sighed. “Nothing. Hell, I’m not so sure there even was a hallucinogen. I certainly didn’t have a trip that day, and I was supposed to have been the person that released the stuff.”

“Consider yourself lucky, Mr. Farragut. I’ve spoken to some of the people who did. The shrink who coined the phrase ‘meltdown mob’ at your hearing knew what he was talking about. Regardless of what really went down that day, two-dozen people have still not been released from treatment.”

“Maybe so, but I’d still like to know what kind of trip those people had. Nobody ever talked about that at what passed for a trial. It was always hidden behind a steel wall of doctor-patient confidentiality. All they ever did was toss around vague generalizations about demons, and – oh, I see your point.”

“Good.”

Farragut’s right hand tightened. “Okay, okay. But if you actually spoke to those people, did you at least get some idea of what they experienced, of what caused them to need treatment in the first place? Lots of people have recovered from bad trips without much more than a good night’s sleep.”

Katzmarek sighed, and started digging through the overstuffed folder.

“What’s with all the paper, anyway? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just keep all that on a laptop?”

The investigator pulled out a few sheets of paper and held them limply in his hand. “Of course it would have been easier. Why do you think they wouldn’t let me bring one in? You’re on private property here, outside the jurisdiction of the committee to force the issue. Anyway, here’s what I found out, for whatever good it might do us.”

As he read through the notes, and Farragut pressed him to draw inferences from some of the wording, a pattern emerged: by far, the majority of the bad trips were rife with religious references, most notably possession and variations on the idea of being godlike. In fact, the same word kept cropping up again and again as he read through the summaries of what the members of the ‘meltdown mob’ had experienced that day: blasphemy. And according to the psychiatrists’ reports, it had been this attack on the central core of their beliefs that had made the experience so devastating to the more religious members of the group.

“Hold it, hold it,” Farragut said when he’d finished the last report. “Every single one of those people was Christian. Weren’t there any Jews there? Moslems? An atheist, maybe?”

“Of course there were. But the Jews either recovered or were kept off-limits by the ultra-orthodox rabbis that swept in to keep any taint of association out of the press. There was one group that attempted to capitalize on what happened, though. Mormons. They considered the ravings of the two latter-day saints in the group to be some sort of coded message from God, and set up a cloister in Utah to pick them apart. Well, you know how protective the LDS church is. They weren’t even represented in the case.”

The prisoner’s expression had clouded over, so Katzmarek gave him some time to digest the reports. About a minute later, he leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “I think what you just told me… was that the people who snapped were all faced with the same quandary: either they’d had a religious experience that invalidated the core of their beliefs, or they’d been drugged.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“So to save their souls, they needed someone to pin the drugging on. Me.”

“If, as you say, you are innocent, then yes.”

“Which means that our only hope of reversing the verdict is to convince them that their blasphemies were legit?”

“Well,” Katzmarek said lightly, “either that, or there was some other explanation for what happened to them.”

*     *     *

On the cramped train ride home that night, Katzmarek opened his netbook and launched into an Internet search for people who had experienced something at the ill-fated debate but who were not among those who needed treatment afterwards.

He turned up an old post by a local blogger by the name of Gina Heuff, who had an annoyingly lyrical writing style. In it, she compared a civil crowd to the smoothly flowing water in a stream, the chaos of mob rule to white-water turbulence, and what happened that day to a descent into what she called ‘the fractal social void’. He paused after reading the phrase, and, while gazing out the window at the shifting constellations of headlights, streetlights and office lights, tried to imagine what she meant by it. All he got for the effort was a headache.

Clicking to her home page, he scanned her most recent post, which was about her plan to attend the next day’s healthcare reform town hall meeting. She’d been watching the insurance-industry’s orchestrated ‘grass-roots’ crowds that had been disrupting Democratic congressmembers’ attempts to discuss the public option during the summer recess, and mused that the explosive, yet strangely controlled, situation could cause a recurrence of what she believed had happened the night of the meltdown mob. Katzmarek committed the placid face in the picture to memory, and resolved to seek her out the next day so he could ask her some questions.

There was already a snarling mob of sign-brandishing political puppets outside the high school gymnasium when he arrived, so he slowly walked past them, wincing at the illogic of their canned deceit, while looking for the brunette in the picture. Considering her desire to re-enter that fractal void, he could imagine her joining the angry mob, even if she opposed what they were doing. Satisfied that she wasn’t among them, he headed inside, to tackle the considerably more difficult job of first spotting her from a distance, and then angling an interview in the midst of all the shouting.

The memory of Heuff’s stilted prose colored his perception of the crowd as he drifted with it through the floodgates of the open gym doors and into the turbulent, echoing reservoir in which the scent of a different sort of competition stirred the subconscious of the crowd, energizing them for combat.

He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Then, blinking free of the borrowed claustrophobic imagery that had overtaken his normally analytic mind, he made his way towards the right side wall, from where he could see the majority of the crowd. He was intently examining each of the female faces across the gym, when he felt someone come up close beside him.

“Aren’t you…?” a woman’s voice quavered uncertainly. “Aren’t you that guy who’s been tracking down the meltdown mob?”

He turned to look at her. “Yes, I —.”

“What are you doing here?”

Katzmarek grinned in amusement. It was Gina Heuff. “Looking for you, as it happens.”

“Me? Why? I wasn’t a party to the case.”

The sound system came on with a squeal of feedback, and someone from the school system started fawning over Congressman Woburn by way of introduction. A scattering of catcalls turned the amplified remarks into a staccato of fractured sentences.

“I wanted to ask you about your theory,” he said close to her ear, “about what might have happened that day.”

She looked at him quizzically. “My theory?”

Woburn, a Democrat who had presented the image of an active Post Office retiree during his campaign by not coloring his thick white hair, took the microphone, and asked the crowd to raise their hands if they had health insurance. Then he asked those who had private insurance to lower their hands. “The rest of you with your hands up,” he said, “all have government-run health care.”

A scattering of epithets crisscrossed the crowd.

“Okay, then,” he said, slowly scanning the raised hands, “how many of you are opposed to allowing other people to also have government-run health care?”

Gina Heuff smiled, and gestured excitedly towards the speaker. “He’s pretty sharp.”

He watched as Woburn kept the opposition dancing on the edge of chaos for a while longer before resuming the conversation. “Yes, your theory,” he said finally. “I’ve read your blog. If there’s anything to it, or if I can convince the judge that there is, then I may be able to appeal Corwin Farragut’s conviction.”

As she watched parts of the crowd stir into agitation and then subside like waves caressing a beach, her face slowly softened, becoming as placid as it had seemed in the photo on her blog. Then her attention was drawn to a knot of people near the podium who were angrily waving their signs, and she bit her lip. Turning to face him, she nodded, and pointed towards the doors. “Outside.”

He followed her through the gym door and towards the building exit, where she slowed, and then stopped. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Katzmarek.”

“Bernard. I’d like to keep this friendly.”

She nodded. “Bernard, then. Do you honestly doubt that any drugs were involved, or is this just a means to an end for you?”

“Why? Does it make a difference?”

“Very much so. I do not appreciate being used. If you simply wanted to offer my insights to the court as a way to free Mr. Farragut, and do not sincerely believe the validity of them, then I’ll have to ask you to refrain from doing so. What I see happening has serious consequences, and the possibility of a recurrence is growing, especially with people like Congressman Woburn beginning to counter the covert puppetry of the right-wing talking heads.”

Katzmarek frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Think about it like this. The meltdown mob was a fluke. The level of social feedback among the people in that crowd was balanced right on the edge of slipping into a chaotic mob mentality purely by accident. Both sides had prepped the attendees with memes – viral talking points, if you will – and sent them into the cauldron. The candidates then played to those memes, which kept the crowd in a perpetual froth, swaying back and forth over the abyss of mindless mob action. That was why it happened. Those people you’ve been investigating experienced what should have been a profound spiritual event, but because what they found there violated the precepts of their religion, to them it was as frightening as what H. P. Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter found when he went through the Gates of the Silver Key.”

Katzmarek’s right hand rose, and he mouthed, “Lovecraft?”

“You’ve read ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’, then?”

He shook his head. “No. But Corwin Farragut just asked me to bring him a copy.”

She smiled. “Good. He understands what happened.”

“I don’t think so. He wasn’t too clear on why he even wanted to read it.”

“Do me a favor, Bernard. Bring him the book. Lovecraft pulled off an amazing feat of literary magic. He wrote something that was simultaneously a horror story and a tale of visionary enlightenment, and your experience of it is entirely a matter of the beliefs that you bring with you into that cave. Which is precisely what happened to the people in the meltdown mob. They found a horror. I found enlightenment. But the event itself was neither. And both.”

Katzmarek turned to look back at the gym doors, and then outside, at the array of angry protesters. “And you think it will happen again?”

She smiled. “I do. Does that make me a ghoul?”

“No. And to answer your question, I don’t think drugs were involved.”

“Good. So what was your question?”

“Back there,” he said, indicating the gym, “I was going to ask you whether it would be possible to repeat the event under controlled conditions as proof of Farragut’s innocence. But now…”

“Yes?”

“Now I think I’m more interested in taking that trip myself. To experience what you did. Well, what the meltdown mob did, but with what you brought to it. I’d like to have the transcendent, not the horrific. Is that possible?”

“I think so, yes. But to do that, you’ll need a strong grounding in ways of looking at the world, and of understanding what happens in it, that might run counter to whatever religious training you may have had. Are you game for that?”

He stared at the floor for a long moment. It had been years since he’d regularly attended church, but the memories were all there — the battery of questions, the ready answers. It was the basis for an awful lot of choices he’d made, and for how he looked at everything, at matters of life and death, of economic policy, and even the course of his career. How could it be? How could any of that cause him to see unspeakable horror in an event that she might see as ineffably illuminating? And yet, that’s exactly what she had suggested.

“You’re asking a lot,” he told her.

“I am. But is it too much? What’s really important to you?”

A pedestrian stopped to speak with a few of the protesters. Katzmarek pushed the door open to listen. He stood there for a moment, frozen in indecision, and then turned back towards her. “The adventure,” he said. “The adventure is what’s important to me. How do I start?”

“Well,” she said, stepping past him, “we could go and talk to these people for a while. If you’re going to follow Randolph Carter and discard your sense of self in a dive through the limitless fractal void at the edge of some mindless mob mentality, then you’ll need to be able to swim on both sides of the divide.”

He actually had to look down at his left foot, the one still inside the building, before it was willing to release its figurative grip on an old reality, so that he could step into a new one. He took a breath, and strode towards the angriest member of the group, a man brandishing a sign that had the word ‘change’ in a crude red circle with a slash through it.

“What sort of change are you opposed to?” he asked, as non-threateningly as he could.

“The kind that takes what’s mine. Jeez. You whiny liberals are all alike.” The man glared at him, his face contorted in a menacing sneer.

Gina Heuff pushed into the standoff. “In what way, sir? I’m genuinely curious.”

“Are you trying to prove my point by being all cold and logical, lady? Look. I’m emotionally invested in the things I value – my God, my family, and my country. And you seem to think you can get all up in my face and argue me out of it? What the hell planet are you from, anyway?”

“We really do want to discuss this,” Katzmarek said, trying unconvincingly to put some emotion into his voice. “For example, how did you learn about the health care reform proposal that Congressman Woburn is in there talking about?”

“How the hell do you think? I watch the news. Those guys are paid to spend the time I don’t have figuring it out.”

“And you trust them?” Gina said.

*     *     *

“Here’s that book you wanted,” Bernard Katzmarek said as he pulled the paperback out of his case.

Corwin Farragut looked a bit rough around the edges. His eyes were dark from a lack of sleep, and he squinted against the bright lights in the interview room. “Thanks,” he said, riffling the pages with his thumb. “So, have you gotten any of the meltdown mob to recant and take ownership of their blasphemy?”

“No, but I did speak with someone who actually had what you might call a good trip that day.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, a blogger by the name of Gina Heuff. Fascinating person, by the way. She’s firmly convinced that there weren’t any drugs involved. In fact, to hear her tell it, you were railroaded to cover up a mass religious experience that everyone but the Mormons was afraid would damage their credibility.”

“Ah, here it is,” Farragut said, holding the open book out to Katzmarek, “’Through the Gates of the Silver Key.’”

“I read it on the train ride over. The whole sequence of Randolph Carter stories, in fact. Miss Heuff says that Carter’s loss of individuality can be taken as either a horror story or a journey of enlightenment, depending on your point of view. So I’ve been wondering. Which is it for you?”

“She what? Come on. Lovecraft was a horrormeister, pure and simple. And this blogger thinks he’s some kind of guru? Are you sure you want to involve a wacko like that in my defense?”

“Look. If I can convince the judge that her claims have merit, that there is another explanation for what happened, I think we can at least get your sentence reduced, if not vacated entirely.”

Farragut crossed his arms. “And what are you going to offer as proof? Can you get anyone — well, anyone but her and those two Mormons — to testify that they communed with God at that debate?”

Katzmarek grimaced. “If she’s right about what happened, we might not have to.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“You know how there’s a fine line between insanity and genius? Well, she figures the meltdown was the flip side of an uncontrolled mob, that because both sides of that raucous crowd were being played so expertly against one another, what could have been a descent into mindless violence instead became a brief encounter with the divine.”

“Sounds to me more like you’ve had an encounter of your own. Man, have you listened to yourself lately?”

“More importantly, have you looked in a mirror? You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

Farragut slumped in his chair, and nervously stole a glance at the guards in the hallway. “I haven’t. Like you said, this is a private prison. They don’t seem to care that the White House has finally banned abusive treatment at federal lock-ups. And they’re pretty up-front about why they’re doing it, too.”

Katzmarek set his pen down. “Oh?”

“You.”

*     *     *

When Katzmarek returned, he met Gina Heuff at her local coffee shop to assess the best combination of factors for producing a recurrence of the meltdown mob phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, Congressman Woburn turned out to be their best shot at energizing the progressives in any crowd, even if many Democrats thought he was dangerously extreme. Identifying his most effective foil, however, was not such an easy matter. After all, they were not so much interested in a good outcome as they were an unstable proxy fight.

“Here’s your double-tall,” he said, setting it on the small table. “So who’s in the mix?”

She told him that she had narrowed the field to three contenders, none of whom was scheduled to have a public face-off with the congressman in the foreseeable future. As she ticked each one off, she laid a photo on the table. The first, Congressman Ian Corbham, was the unrepentantly vociferous defender of the shadowy religious power fraternity that had shut Woburn out of his first run for office. It was a good match, but it was also far too likely to turn into a personal fight, rather than a proxy one, and that would defeat the purpose. The second was Francine Chen, the CEO of the largest payday loan company in the state, a corporate cheerleader who had become the public face of the industry that Woburn had staked his career on controlling. And the third, Matthew Fields, was a former clergyman who had left the church in disgrace, only to forge a publishing empire that catered to the same deviant interests that had gotten him sacked in the first place.

“Okay,” he said after draining the last of his mocha, “if those are our best bets, how can we instigate a face-off between Woburn and one of them? The wingnuts at that private prison have been leaning on Corwin Farragut pretty hard since I took up his case, and unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They’ve been shielded from prosecution and oversight, and believe me, they’ll do anything short of actually killing him to protect their butt.”

While Katzmarek kept in touch with Farragut by phone, they spent the next few weeks working the fringes like a pair of sheepdogs on a mission. His time was doubly limited, because there were other cases he was putting off in order to force the issue on this one, and because there was just so much abuse Farragut could take before he’d confess to whatever else they wanted to charge him with.

Finally, they caught a lucky break. Whether it had been good or bad luck remained to be seen, because the proxy match they’d cajoled into being was with Ian Corbham.

On the run-up to the event, both congressmen spent a great deal of time and money building up their respective base’s confidence, and pumping them with round after round of empty catch-phrases, meaningless sound-bites, and ready responses to the other side’s arguments. Because the subject was the proper role of government, the media predicted that each of the men would go into the debate emotionally prepared to tear into the other without regard for the consequences. The radio and television outlets that were planning to broadcast the event live had billed it as the political fight of the decade, and were pricing ad time accordingly.

Gina Heuff arranged to have time away from her regular duties so that she could focus on preparing Katzmarek for what he’d likely experience, and for what he might have to do if the crowd engaged as strongly, and were as evenly matched, as they hoped.

“Since you’ve read the Lovecraft,” she said, “we can make use of some of the imagery in it. When Randolph Carter passed through the gates, he encountered a guide. By this time, of course, Carter had transcended what he’d thought to be the only reality, and found that he had neither substance nor a fixed position within his own life. That was what I experienced that day, the incomprehensible void that the meltdown mob found itself in at first, but without a guide.”

He swallowed hard. “Good god. Why didn’t you go mad, like the rest of them?”

“Meditation,” she said, as if it was as obvious as day. “It wasn’t all that different from the state I try to achieve when I’m in need of some perspective.”

“You gain perspective by losing it?”

“In a way, yes. For them, though, it was a nightmare, and it may turn out to be one for you as well. Nevertheless, since we’re the only ones who will be prepared to experience this, we will have to serve as guides for anyone else who slips into the chasm that separates sane self-awareness from the madness of a mob mind.”

Katzmarek’s eyes widened. “A guide? You expect me to be calm enough to guide someone else? I’ll be a wreck!”

“Maybe so, Bernard, but you’ll be a damn sight better at keeping it together than they will. They have no idea what they’re in for, and you do. So, when you start to feel their thoughts –.”

“When I what?”

“This is the flip side of a mob, remember? Only in the usual kind, people give in to the over-mind. Here, it’s more like a mental Internet chat room. No boundaries. The whole group intermingled. That’s the loss of individuality. Lovecraft wrote about it, and if all goes well, we’ll experience it.”

He sat in dazed astonishment for a moment. “But… but what about those reports of feeling god-like? That was the core of the blasphemy, after all.”

“Oh, that.”

“’Oh that’?” he parroted. “I ask about the single most devastating part the nightmare all those people lived through, and all you can say is ‘oh, that’?”

“Well, yeah,” she said lightly. “it’s silly, when you think about it.”

“Silly?”

“Of course. Think about it. Here you are, floating in the void. You’ve just lost all sense of individuality, you’re embedded in a community consciousness, and you could be identifying with anyone in the group at any moment in their lives. I don’t know what you’d call that, but to me it’s a pretty good stand-in for omniscience. Toss that at someone who isn’t prepared for it, and you’re darn right they’re going to mistake it for being God. I thought it was the single greatest experience in my life, and I hope you’ll feel the same way.”

Katzmarek pushed back into his chair, and wondered if Farragut was right about her being a nutcase after all.

*     *     *

By the afternoon of the public face-off between congressmen Woburn and Corbham, their deft exploitation of the media had whipped the expected crowd into a matched set of hair-trigger cheering sections. Each of them had held rallies prior to the televised debate, at which they honed their call-and-response control over the human megaphones who would be echoing and amplifying their carefully field-tested arguments in lock-step reflection of the sound-bites that had been fed to the media. Each of them was emotionally invested in the views that they would be arguing, though doing so was newer to Woburn than it was to his Republican opponent. And each of them believed that winning this intentionally freewheeling debate would stand him in good stead to be nominated for president at some point. There was a lot at stake, and the media were making even more of it in order to drive up their audiences and ad revenues.

Katzmarek and Heuff stood near the entrance to the new high-tech sports stadium, watching the excited crowd streaming in.

“I don’t think I have to tell you,” he said, fingering a new quarter, “how incredibly nervous about this I am.”

She smiled easily and glanced at a few of the people walking past. “You’ll be okay. Trust me. Either nothing will happen, in which case we can either wait for a new opportunity or try to force one, or a good part of this crowd will melt into an egoless stew, and nobody will be able to claim that Farragut had anything to do with it. Come on, flip it.”

He brought his hand up and opened his palm. “Okay. Heads I take Woburn, tails it’s Corbham.”

It was Woburn.

She wished him well, and disappeared into the crowd, close behind a knot of Corbham supporters who were taunting those they passed with the catchphrases they’d been fed by the right-wing media.

Bernard Katzmarek closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He thought about Randolph Carter, and about the shadowy shapes he had encountered on his fictional journey beyond the gates, the guides who had helped to make sense of what was happening to him. Then he stepped into the image, and, as Gina had directed, faced Carter as one of those guides. It was an unsettling feeling, but she had assured him that practicing it beforehand would give him a place to stand when the world closed in on itself and he slipped into the illimitable darkness of the fractal social void.

Emerging from his reverie, he opened his eyes, and realized that more time had passed than he had realized. The crowd had thinned considerably, and echoing waves of concerted voices were falling over one another in the stadium before which he stood.

Steeling himself, he strode forward, and let his ears lead him to the loudest, most insistent source of the carefully crafted catchphrases that expressed the humanity of spreading a social safety net beneath the populace. He started mouthing the lines before he emerged into the vast bowl of the indoor sports stadium, and eagerly gave voice to them as he found a seat. By the time the announcer greeted the assembled crowd, he was unselfconsciously screaming at the people who were just as determinedly denouncing government support as pandering to the fallen. His heart raced, his voice cracked, and his spirits soared.

In the lull, that followed, those around him hastily greeted one another, offering first names and happy handshakes in exchange for the reinforcing camaraderie of communal solidarity, even if it was of the most fleeting and superficial kind. He joined in, split between wholeheartedly embracing the ideological carnage to come, and the feeling that he might soon be reaching out to those around him from the depths of a chasm few would have the faintest hope of comprehending.

Then he thought about Gina Heuff, and he spent a few moments fruitlessly scanning the crowd for a glimpse of her, before realizing that there was no point to it. If what she described really did happen, then he would not only be one with his own past and future self, but with hers and who knew how many others as well. So he sat back, and gave himself to the excitement of the verbal conflict that was getting underway on the wooden floor below, and reflected on the video screens overhead.

Each congressman in turn was given time to address the crowd, and each of them used it to good advantage. The massed gathering played the part that had been predefined for them by echoing the words they’d been fed, and directing their anger at people they might otherwise be sharing a restaurant or an emergency room with.

And then the conflict began in earnest. Because this wasn’t a debate in the usual sense, the combatants were permitted to talk over one another, to interrupt and to fulminate and play to the audience in any way they chose. Both men tore into the conflict like a raptor attacking its chosen prey, and the audience ate it up.

Time stretched.

The glorious energy of it infused the stadium, enrapturing combatants and audience alike.

It seemed to go on forever.

And then, with a blinding flash of internal light, Katzmarek froze, caught himself up briefly, and gaped. His vision had subtly changed, as if he’d suddenly sprouted more eyes. He felt a heightened sense of those around him, a sense of familiarity that went far beyond anything he could possibly have known about them. But before he’d even had the chance to wonder about it, the world fell in on itself, and everything went black.

He screamed in panic, but heard nothing.

He held what he hoped was his hand in front of what he hoped were his eyes, but neither felt nor saw anything.

He flailed about, desperately trying to find something solid, but failed to even find himself.

All at once, memories started unreeling though his mind. Memories of his childhood, of school, and of the train ride to Corwin Farragut’s prison. They spun about chaotically, in no particular order. He tried to hold onto one, and then another of them, hoping that he could at least find a figurative place to hide. But just as he was about to fall into one of them, a second wave of memories overwhelmed him, memories of things that were, at one and the same time, both familiar and utterly foreign. One of them seemed to include a mirror, but when he leaned into the memory, and caught a glimpse of a reflection, he realized that it was a memory of some future that hadn’t happened yet, because a very much older self was looking back at him.

That was when he realized what had happened, when he realized that he, and who knew how many other people, had been sucked into the void, had found the secret that lay just this side of the madness of crowds.

Just as the thought of the crowd he was in struck him, so did a tsunami of inarticulate terror, for the void had also swallowed countless others, and only he and Gina Heuff stood between them and the same sort of perpetual darkness that had swallowed the much smaller meltdown mob.

But where was she?

Daunted, he struggled to return to the image he’d conjured before entering the stadium, to put himself in the place of Randolph Carter’s guide, so that he could play that role for the terrorized multitude that shared the void. He struggled, but failed. Being his own savior was hard enough. But playing that part for who knew how many others? The idea was repulsive, and the image eluded him.

Awash in soundless screams, Katzmarek withdrew into himself. His mind pleaded for rationality, his gut wrenched with fear. All of the past and future memories of those who were sucked with him into the void were joined by layer upon layer of the false memories of stories read and heard by bits and pieces of the growing consciousness in which he was embedded. But one of them kept popping to the surface of Katzmarek’s fragmentary self, one fictional reality that resonated far more strongly against what was happening than any of the others.

Lovecraft.

Randolph Carter.

And then he was one with Carter, looking up at the cloaked figure on the pedestal in the murky world beyond the Gates of the Silver Key. He begged for help, threw himself on the mercy of the nameless forces that had trapped him here.

In response, the figure moved, and started to draw back its cloak. Katzmarek shuddered, feeling Carter’s fictional anguish.

And then it spoke.

It addressed him.

The voice was unexpectedly soothing, calming, which only frightened him the more.

But yet, there was something familiar about the voice. And so he gathered his nerve and forced himself to look upon the face that had been revealed.

“Take it easy, Bernard,” the gentle voice told him.

He breathed.

He looked again.

And he smiled. He laughed. He wept.

It was Gina.

Everything would be all right.

THE END

Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

In the new model of journalism, reporters aren’t the only people digging up leads. (I’ve made a video reading of this story. Here are part 1 and part 2.)

“Anushka’s Lament”
by P. Orin Zack
[6/19/09]

Alec Warnock arrived early for his meeting with freelance reporter Grandy Holman, so he funneled the energy of the live Celtic violin duo on stage into a spirited sail through the mall’s food court in search of spicy smells. He stepped away from the counter of the new Indian kitchen after ordering the chicken vindaloo special, and pivoted to face the café area.

“That was Fitzwater and Collins,” the young man at the mike said when they’d finished, smiling appreciatively at the duo. “Let’s give the ladies another round of applause while they pack up. If you enjoyed them as much as I did, come on up and buy one of their CDs.”

Alec winced when someone jabbed him on the shoulder.

The bearded man behind him gestured towards his newly filled tray. “Hey! Wake up. Your lunch is ready.”

He mumbled an apology and returned to the counter. While he was getting utensils and condiments, he noticed the picture on the cover of the guy’s scandal magazine — Rachel Gwynn, the ‘naked journalist’ whose reputation had recently been trashed, decimating the ranks of her, until-then, dedicated following. “So tell me,” he asked evenly, “why do you think she gave in to those bullies?”

“Why the hell do you think? The bitch knew she was beaten. Serves her right for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.” He dropped the magazine on the counter. “Here. Read it for yourself. I was going to toss the rag anyway.”

Alec tucked the crumpled magazine under his arm and headed back towards the stage, where the next act was getting ready to start. He’d asked Holman to meet him here in time to hear ‘Anushka’s Lament’, the song that ‘Union Dues’ was slated to open with, but so far he hadn’t turned up. The front table was empty, so he got comfortable and dug into his vindaloo while the band sang the sad tale of a young Russian immigrant, and the choices she’d been forced into.

By the time Holman finally arrived, the band was halfway through their set, and Alec was slurping the last of his mango lassi. “So what’s this all about, anyway?” the reporter wheezed as he fell, breathlessly, into the chair opposite Alec, his back to the stage. “What was so important that I had to be here at two on the dot?”

“Which you didn’t bother to do, I might point out.”

“I was busy on another story. Sue me. So what is it?”

Alec handed him the band’s flier. “Look at their opening number. Does the name ring a bell?”

“No. Should it?”

“Well, considering how much time you’ve spent researching Rachel Gwynn’s downfall, I thought you might have at least learned her first name.”

He shook his head. “What? Look, just because her name’s similar to the one in that song doesn’t mean –.”

“Anushka,” Alec said sharply, sliding the scandal rag across the table, “was Anniska Rachel Gwynn’s grandmother. She let those bastards ruin her career to protect her family.”

Holman craned around to look the band over for a few seconds, and then shook his head derisively. “A song lyric, huh? And how do you know there’s any truth to whatever story they sing about her?”

Alec leaned towards his guest. “Look. Considering how small a following you have at the naked journalist site you work through, I don’t think you have much call to accuse one of your own followers of goose-chasing you, especially on a story that’s so central to your focus.”

“All right, all right,” he said, raising his hands defensively. “I’ll hear you out. But I’m still going to have to confirm whatever lead you think you’ve got through other sources. So what’s this song about, anyway, and how does it explain why she let those creeps roll over her like that?”

The band had just finished a rousing song about the Carnegie steelworkers who were massacred by Pinkerton security thugs during the Homestead strike in 1892, so Alec joined the crowd in an encouraging round of applause before launching into his story. He had just started to explain how he’d noticed similarities between the events in ‘Anushka’s Lament’ and some offhand comments that Holman had pulled together about Gwynn’s background, when Holman made a face.

“You’ve got to be kidding, right?”

Alec stared at him dumbly.

“Look, I don’t have time for conspiracy theories. Anyone can cherry-pick a few facts here and there to craft whatever pattern they want. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything to it.”

“Okay. I’ll lay it out for you. But I don’t see why I should be coaching a journalist I’m supposed to be following.”

“You don’t, huh? Did you happen to notice that the model of journalism that TrueSlant pioneered couldn’t work without the active participation of our followers? That’s the whole point of ‘naked journalism’: to crowdsource the publishing context and jettison the constraints of working for some corporation with who knows what ties to the people and the organizations we cover. So spill.”

“Sure, but I’ll start at the beginning, with Rachel Gwynn’s grandmother, Anushka. She was born in 1917, right after the October Revolution. By the time she was a teenager, her folks had become staunch anti-Stalinists and gave little Anushka early training in mass actions. She joined them in voicing their opposition to the General Secretary’s growing power, and his use of coercion to bring non-Russian republics into the USSR.”

“Oh, right,” Holman said. “Like she had any choice in the matter. She was just a kid, after all.”

“Exactly. And that set her up for being drawn into situations beyond her control for the rest of her life. That’s why she always seemed to get herself into defensive situations, why she was never in control of her life, just like the fix her grand-daughter got into.”

Holman glanced around the food court in annoyance. “Oh, for the love of… what planet do you live on, anyway? Reporters are never in charge of the situations they cover.”

Alec straightened. “Maybe not the situations they cover,” he said, “but a good reporter had damn well better be able to maintain control of his interview or he’ll end up being used as a transcriptionist like all the sycophants who helped the Bush/Cheney administration get away with so much crap. Forgive my French, but that may be why you’re still working through a second-tier naked journalist site, rather than a major aggregator like Gwynn did before she was attacked.”

The journalist angrily rose to his feet, palms still planted on the table. “That was uncalled for. If you’re going to insult me, then there’s no point in going any further.”

The emcee suddenly appeared and snapped his fingers at them. “If you two can’t be civil,” he said tightly, “you’ll have to take your squabble elsewhere. We’re trying to run a café here.”

Holman apologized, and slid back into his seat. But before he had a chance to say anything further, one of the musicians, a slight man carrying a mandolin, dragged a chair over and plopped into it. He pointed at the journalist and smiled. “I know who you are,” he said with a Scottish brogue. “I’ve seen your face over your byline.” Then he turned to Alec. “But who are you?”

“Let me guess,” Alec said quietly. “You wrote “Anushka’s Lament.”

“The same. But what are you two palaverin’ about that’s got your friend here so excited. It is just a song, after all.”

“Not exactly.” He held out a hand. “I’m Alec Warnock, by the way. You seem to already know Grandy.”

The musician shook hands heartily. “I’m Janus Hawthorne. They won’t be needin’ me for this last number, so we can talk a bit. So tell me… what’s your interest in the Russian immigrant?”

“It’s her grand-daughter we’re interested in, really, but Anushka’s story explains a lot about what’s happened to her and why.”

Hawthorne’s eyes defocused for a moment. “Her grand-daughter, you say? Who’s that?”

“Rachel … Gwynn,” Holman said, pausing between words, “the business reporter. Her first name is really Anniska. Warnock here claims she was named after your immigrant.”

“Damn,” Hawthorne breathed. “No wonder she didn’t want those rascals digging up dirt about her family. Her granny went through enough grief as it was, what with the fallout from the McCarthy hearings and all.”

“Hold on, wait a minute,” Holman said. “McCarthy? What did Gwynn’s granny have to do with the HUAC witch-hunt?”

“Nothing directly. But then, a lot of people had their lives ruined by the idiots who thought they were being patriotic and emulated that moronic Senator. I mean, come on. She’d been active in the socialist labor movement, after all. Couldn’t help it, what with her upbringing and how much her parents hated Stalin. That was why they came to the states, you know.”

“Geez, Janus,” Alec said, clearly impressed. “You must have spent quite some time researching that song. And you didn’t know she had a famous granddaughter?”

He shook his head. “Not a shred. But it leaves me to wonder. I mean, if she knew the truth about her namesake, why’d she back off when those corporate goons threatened to expose her family’s bones?”

“Well,” Holman replied, with a pained expression, “maybe she didn’t. Maybe her folks kept it from her.”

“Maybe?” Alec said in disbelief, “maybe? Good grief! Have you been so focused on digging up the facts about what happened that you completely spaced on understanding Rachel Gwynn’s motivation? I don’t know, maybe I ought to find some other journalist to follow.”

“Hey,” Hawthorne said, “lighten up. He gets it now, doesn’t he?”

“Sure, but what the hell good does that do Gwynn? What are we going to do, call her up and say her mom’s been lying to her about her gramma? That’d work real well.”

“But if her mother kept all this from her when she was growing up,” Holman said haltingly, “why couldn’t Anushka tell her herself.”

“Can’t now,” Hawthorne said, shrugging. “Dead since ‘91. Like it says in the lyric, she outlived the Soviet Union by a grapefruit slice. Woke up the following morning and died after breakfast. But there may be another way to break the happy news to her.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. I guess ‘Anushka’s Lament’ wasn’t quite finished after all. Another few verses ought to do it, maybe a parallel tale about a similar situation from not too long ago. I figure an awful lot of kids have been brought up believing the official tripe about what went down in New York on 9/11. So imagine if you will, that our intrepid reporter kept the truth she knew about who was really responsible for that from her kid. Kid’d grow up with a whole different perspective on how trustworthy government folks are, and be willing to buy into whatever phony crap they tried selling to her generation. That kid’d be pretty well pissed at her folks when that truth finally came out, too.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Alec said after a pause. “How would a new version of your song convince Rachel Gwynn of the truth about her grandmother?”

“Yeah,” echoed Holman.

“Simple,” Hawthorne said, drawing his thumb across the mandolin strings. “First off, she doesn’t have a daughter.”

Holman nodded vigorously. “I knew that. I knew that.”

“And because of that,” he continued, “she’d unconsciously put herself in the position of the child. Lyrics can whisper in your ears what your mind doesn’t want you to know. Make something taboo, and people only want to know more about it. Trust me. She’ll know this song is about her grand the moment she hears the final verse. And when she does, I wouldn’t want to even be standing behind those people who went after her.”

THE END
Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

You might as well make stuff up about the things you find. That way, the truth won’t be quite so startling.

“Disarmed”
by P. Orin Zack
[5/11/2009]

Jerry rose, ashen, when he saw what he’d unearthed. The shovel slipped from his hand. He stared uneasily down into the hole, and gaped at the root fragment left from whatever had grown in his backyard before the grassed-in dwarf plum he was clearing a bed for. It was as if he’d fallen into one of the surreal worlds that hung, framed, on the walls of his house, because the root insisted on looking back, peering unblinkingly up at him through the inexplicable agency of a chipped glass eyeball.

“Something wrong, Jerry?” his neighbor Sam called as he approached the rail fence, his chocolate retriever, Mousse a few steps behind.

“Yeah.” He nodded, gesturing earthward.

Sam straddled the fence and joined him by the hole. “Bizarre. How do you suppose that got there?”

“I’m not sure I want to know.” He bent to grab the shovel, rose, and drove the blade into the pile of freshly dug soil. “In fact, I don’t think I really want to finish opening this bed any more.”

“Because of this?” His neighbor knelt beside the hole, wrestled the root fragment free, and aimed the trapped glass sphere up at him like it was some kind of flashlight. “Come on, Jerry. Your plum needs better irrigation more than your yard needs a buried eyeball.” He pivoted as he rose, whistled for his dog, and tossed the root to the far corner of his own yard. Mousse tore off after it. “There. Consider it taken care of.”

Mousse died about a week later. Jerry found him in late afternoon. Sam hadn’t yet returned from work, and his wife, who does contract editing through the Internet, was off on an errand somewhere with their daughter, so Jerry was the first to spot him, inert, on the back porch. The eyeball was a few feet away, staring at the late chocolate lab from under a bush. Jerry might not have noticed it, except that when he knelt to examine the dog, he absently followed Mousse’s glazed stare.

The eye somehow looked pleased with itself.
*     *     *

When the phone started ringing again, Jerry just turned up the stereo and poured himself another drink. The reprieve gave him a chance to fade back into the surrealistic alcohol haze he’d been husbanding ever since he’d staggered back from Sam’s yard, until the banging on his back door started, anyway.

“I know you’re home!” Sam yelled during a break in the noise. “You dropped your mail on my back deck, so I know you’ve seen my dog. What are you hiding from?”

Jerry opened the door and inched warily past his neighbor. He turned towards Sam’s deck and pointed at the bush where the eyeball lay. “That thing I found. I think it may have killed your dog.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a hunk of glass. Besides, Mousse made a pretty sloppy mess of the thing –.” He stopped himself, and looked Jerry in the eye. “Look. Do you know what happened to him? He was fine when I left this morning.”

“All I know is that they were staring at each other when I found them. Staring at each other from beyond the grave.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?”

Jerry grabbed his wrist. “You know what it is, don’t you! I remember what you said.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh come on. The only thing you found strange about it was that the eyeball was in my yard. Like you knew it was supposed to be somewhere else. So spill it. What aren’t you telling me?”

He bit his lip. “I think I’ll have to show you.”

“Show me?” Jerry thundered. “Just what the hell kind of secrets have you been keeping, anyway?”

Sam didn’t say anything further until they’d reached his basement. But when he did, he made Jerry promise not to reveal what he was about to see. While leading his neighbor to a stand with a cut-open burlap sack over it, he made small talk about the paintings in Jerry’s house, and asked about the auction house where he had bought them. He didn’t interrupt, waiting for Jerry to finish his answer before grabbing the edge of the burlap.

“I bought this piece a few years before you moved in,” he said quietly, “at an auction house in New York that specializes in a rather peculiar kind of artifact.” With that, he raised the cloth, revealing the stylized head and trunk of a person. The head was built on a framework that Sam explained was a carved cocoanut. It’s right arm, which was made from the woven branches and roots of several kinds of tree, was held in front, with the open palm facing up. The hand held a sizeable uncut emerald. It’s left arm, however, was missing.

“And the missing left arm?” Jerry prompted, his fingers a hair’s-breadth from the place where it had been broken off.

Sam nodded. “Yes. Well, you’ve already seen that.”

“The tree root I dug up?”

“The same.”

“So the glass eye was originally part of the sculpture?”

“It was. And you can imagine my surprise when it finally turned up under your new plum bed.”

“Well, yeah. So what happened to it? Did Mousse break it off and bury it when he was a puppy?”

“That’s my guess, especially considering where you found it.”

Jerry pointed at the stone in the thing’s right hand. “Okay. So if it had a natural emerald in one hand, and a glass eye attached to the other, then I’ve gotta ask you what they were for. What kind of a statue was this, anyway, and what did that auction house specialize in?”

“That’s, um… that’s the part I need you to keep quiet about, Jerry. The auction house is on the up-and-up, of course, but it handles this sort of thing off the books, you might say.”

Jerry inched back. “Why? Is it stolen? Is it illegal for you to even have this thing? And one other thing: if that root I found was part of this expensive piece of art you bought, why’d you toss it to your dog, rather than bringing it back in and re-attaching it?”

Sam raised his hands in protest. “Oh, no. That would definitely not be a good idea, not if I’m right about what happened after Mousse ripped that arm off of it.”

“Why? What happened?”

“The PNAC lost control of our reality.”

What?” Jerry shook the cobwebs out of his ears. “What did you just say?”

“I don’t expect you to believe me. I didn’t believe it myself at first. But if there was something to what they told me when I picked it up, I wasn’t about to risk them regaining control of it again. Not now. Not after the presidential election. Not after their house of financial cards finally collapsed.”

“Hold it. Hold it!” Jerry said forcefully. “Are you telling me that this thing has some magical connection to world events?”

“Well, indirectly. But I can’t think of any other reason for Cheney to be acting like he’s been since Obama took office. Hell, I never even thought he’d agree to leave office, not after he declared himself to be above the law.”

“Back up a minute. That root – this thing’s left arm, had a glass eye embedded in it. If this is some sort of magical totem, what was the eye all about? What was it supposed to be? What was it supposed to do?”

Sam tapped the emerald. “I’m not certain, but I think this rock was supposed to anchor the magic to the version of Earth that they were taking for a joyride. The other arm had originally been held out in front, palm forward, so the eye could see where they were taking us. It was also magically connected to the collected minds of the people behind that evil we all just escaped from.”

Jerry squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re kidding, right? They actually made an evil eye?”

“Yeah. Kinda. So anyway, I’m not too keen on putting it back together, just on the chance that they’d regain their power, whatever it was.”

“I’m with you on that,” Jerry said. “But one thing still eludes me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. What happened to Mousse? How did it kill him, and why were they looking at one another afterwards?”

“Oh, that,” Sam said, shrugging. “I figure when Mousse managed to finally chew the thing out of the root it had been embedded in, whatever connection it still had to the cabal we all just escaped from grounded itself through his brain. I guess he spit the thing out after that, and it rolled under that bush. But if Cheney and his people got a final jolt when that happened, all they’d see was the last few minutes of the dog that had done them in.”

“The one that buried them, so to speak.”

“Uh-huh. Thank dog.”

THE END
Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

Something you have may be more valuable than you know.

“On Balance”
by P. Orin Zack
[04/22/2009]

“It’s just a silver rock?” the pudgy, white-haired man muttered as he pressed himself upright with the doorknob cane in his left hand. A moment earlier, he’d been hunched over, carefully tracing the intricate curves of the object on the right side of the balance scale, but now he just glared at it and balled his fist. “That’s ridiculous,” he added, with a disgusted shake of his head. Turning away, he scanned the other exhibits on display in the small gallery, and hobbled off.

Victor Scollimenti, the artist whose initials were carved into the bottom of the odd-looking sculpture the man was berating, had been mentally cataloging the reactions of the few people who drifted past his latest work. This one screamed of disdain. Utter disbelief seemed to be winning, though.

He watched the old guy totter across the room. Curiously, when he stopped to let a knot of yammering yuppies pass by, he surreptitiously glanced back at the scale before continuing towards a colorful yet surreal still life by one of the painters that Victor shared the weekend showing with.

Traffic at the downtown community gallery space had been sparse since it opened Friday night. He’d actually gotten more questions about his dyed Mohawk and the fractal tattoos on his palms than about any of the pieces of found-art sculptures that he’d put up for bid, but what most interested him were the reactions to this latest work, which wasn’t for sale… at least not yet.

The tinkle of the handmade door-chimes drew his attention to the woman who had just entered. She wore a light woolen jacket, which Victor guessed to be vintage Pendleton from the distinctive red pattern. He pegged her to be in her forties. She stopped a few feet inside and raised one hand, palm forward, as if to stop some nonexistent traffic. Then she closed her eyes and swept her open palm in an arc, from left to right, and then back again. If she’d been holding a flashlight, the beam would now be pointing directly at Victor’s scale. Opening her eyes again, she walked directly to it, and stopped, her face growing paler by the second.

Victor warily approached. “Is… is something wrong, ma’am?” he asked lightly. “You seem to be disturbed by my work.”

She blinked a few times and looked up at him, her expression a tangle of anxiety and fear. “You made this.” Her right hand hovered a few inches over the signed sculpture on the tray.

He shrugged. “Sure. Why?”

She withdrew her hand. “It’s just that… do you know what this is?”

“It was supposed to be art. I –.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head vigorously, “I mean, do you know what the shape represents?”

“Not really. I just tried to embody what I sensed when I held the other stone near… hold on a minute.” He dug in his pocket and drew out a smooth, black, kidney-shaped stone with tracery of grey lines. “When I held it near this one, which I suspect might be slightly magnetic.”

“May I see that, please?”

“Sure, but…”

She reached into her pouch and pulled out a stone somewhat like Victor’s. Hers was round and flattened, something like a biscuit. He placed his stone into her empty right hand, which she’d extended, and crossed his arms to watch. She held each one gingerly, between thumb and two fingers, about a foot apart, and then slowly drew them together. At about six inches spacing, she wobbled her right hand to and fro, as if there were a spring between the stones, and nodded, a sparkle of satisfaction in her eyes.

“What?” he asked, perplexed, as she returned his stone.

“You’re right. It’s slightly magnetic. But, like mine, it’s not strong enough, or organized well enough, I guess, to do anything useful like attracting a paper clip. That’s why what you’ve done is so interesting.”

“Interesting? When you first came in, there was a bit more on your face than merely ‘interesting’. You looked like it had you spooked. So tell me… what’s so frightening about this lump of silver clay that made you go pale like that?”

Her posture softened, and she glanced away self-consciously. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Marjorie Nicolette, Mr. Scollimenti. And I would have been here sooner, but I had to drive quite a distance to get here after I felt you setting up this display.”

Victor peered at her curiously. “Felt?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Felt. You did set this scale up for the first time this morning, didn’t you? At about… I think it was a bit after nine, wasn’t it?”

“I guess. I’d set everything else up on Friday. This was the only new piece I brought with me this morning. But how could you possibly have felt me setting it up?”

“You misunderstand. I didn’t feel you. I felt it, or rather… them. But tell me, why did you decide to use a scale?”

He chuckled. “I’m not sure, really. I had it around, and needed a way to suggest a relationship between them, so I just grabbed it out of the den and winged it when I got here. Is there something I should know?”

“I think so, but maybe we should take this somewhere else. Would you mind joining me for dinner after the show closes?”

“Why wait? It’s not like I’ve got a line of people clamoring for autographs. Besides, I have a key to the place, so we can come back later to pack up after closing, if it gets that late.”

When Marjorie turned to go, Victor snatched the rock from the left side of the scale, and replaced it with the one he’d shown her. During the short walk to a local Italian restaurant that he suggested, she asked him about the city, and about the other pieces he’d brought to the showing. He tried to get her to tell him some more about herself, but she kept deflecting the conversation and he eventually gave up. So, it was a bit of a shock when, after being seated and having their order taken, she launched right into it spontaneously.

“I’m a teacher in my spare time,” she said as the waitress turned to go.

“In your spare time? How do you do that?”

“Online. It’s kind of a correspondence school with a rather unusual curriculum.”

“Unusual? Why, what do you teach, cuneiform calculus?”

When she stopped laughing, she took a sip of water and glanced around to see if anyone was paying too much attention to her. “Good guess, but nothing that arcane. One of the classes is related to your sculpture, though. It’s about the power of shapes.”

“Seriously? Shapes? Tell me about it.”

Their salads had arrived, and between bites she wove an explanation of the web course she’d created. It started off with a breathtaking video that a friend of hers had put together about the endless repetition of certain kinds of patterns in nature. She was describing the video collage of fractals in the shapes of plants and so forth, when he interrupted to show her the tattoos on his palms. The remainder of the video concerned the shapes of the things mankind creates.

“The material is admittedly scattershot,” she said before the last bite, “but it’s the first in what I hope could be a series.”

“Okay, I get that there’s some serious mojo in shapes, but what does all that have to do with this thing?” He pulled out the rock from his display and set it down between the salt and pepper in the center of the table.

She studied it for a moment, and then looked up at him. “What you sculpted,” she said, almost too quietly for him to hear over the chatter in the restaurant, “was the shape of the energy field embedded in this rock. The two resonate when they are in the right position.”

“They resonate?”

She nodded, but waited until the waitress swapped their empty salad bowls for plates loaded with pasta before continuing. “Yeah. But so far, they haven’t been in precisely the right position, so all that’s happened so far is a warm-up to the main event.”

Victor took a bite of his lasagna while mulling that over. “Okay,” he said, waving his empty fork in the air, “if you felt me putting the two together this morning from that far away, and they weren’t really in the right position yet, what’ll happen when they are? I mean… is it going to be dangerous? Should I destroy this one right now? Should I toss the other one in the kiln and melt it down? What?”

It took her several minutes, and most of her dinner, to respond. When she finally did, she set her knife and fork down first, and picked up the rock. She held it over her plate, cupped in both hands. “Is it dangerous? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. This is new.”

“Okay,” he said, “answer me this, then. Assuming that something does happen if we set the two up correctly, couldn’t it also be good thing? I mean, whatever the effect is, couldn’t it have creative uses, not just destructive ones?”

Marjorie nodded, and handed it back to him. “Sure, if it’s in the right hands. But…”

He sagged. “Yeah, maybe so. But I’d still like to find out. Couldn’t we just do the experiment, align them once, and then, if we get freaked by what happens, smash this thing?”

They argued the pros and cons until well after desert, but they still kept returning to the same gambit: try it, align the rock and the sculpture, but be ready with a hammer. Having worried the argument threadbare, they returned to the gallery, which was closed and dark. Victor unlocked the door and turned on the lights. But when he looked at his table, alone in the empty room, his jaw dropped. “Shit. It’s gone,” he said, breaking into a trot. “Someone’s stolen it! Now we’ll never find out.”

“Well,” she said, joining him near the table, “you could just make another one.”

“That’s not the point. As long as that sculpture is still out there somewhere, there’s still the chance that whoever has it could get their hands on this rock. And if having the both of them does turn out to be dangerous, I’ll be ultimately responsible for whatever happens.”

Marjorie drew her fingertip across the empty scale. “Maybe there is a way to find it. Can I have the rock for a minute?”

He handed it to her. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well, if just putting them on the scale together was enough to give me a jolt, then maybe we can use this rock to find its mate.” She closed her fingers around it and shut her eyes briefly. Then she raised her other hand, as she had when she’d entered the gallery, and pointed her invisible flashlight around the room.

Victor stood quietly and watched her for nearly two minutes. “Well? Do you feel anything?”

“No. Nothing.” She handed it back in frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe you ought to try feeling for it. It was the resonance between the two that led me to the gallery. But that only happened because you’d set them up close to the right alignment. Now, all we’ve got to go on is the fact that your sculpture has a kind of kinship to this rock. Maybe you’ll be able to feel the linkage. After all, you’re a lot more familiar with what your rock normally feels like than I am.”

He stared at the rock in his hand. “Okay. What am I looking for?”

“Well, I’ve got a rock back home that feels like it’s trying to dig through my fingers whenever I hold it. It’s the damnedest sensation. Anyway, I had it with me when I was visiting some friends in Chicago some time back. I’d just taken it out to show someone, when I discovered that the sensation was stronger when I was facing one direction. So we got in my car and just started driving. This is going to sound crazy, but that rock led us directly to the main accelerator ring at Fermilab.”

“Any idea why?”

“Not really. Our best guess was that it was reacting to one of the superconducting magnets down in the tunnel. I’m hoping this’ll work the same way. Tell me if it seems to be stronger in one direction, and we’ll see where we end up.”

He shook his head doubtfully, and shrugged. “Okay. Here goes.”

While Marjorie watched, Victor closed his eyes and slowly turned around in the nearly empty room. He stopped when he was facing the right side wall, and pointed at it. “That way, I guess.”

A few minutes later, they got into Marjorie’s car. She drove while Victor gave a running commentary on which direction he thought the rock was pointing. The highway through town went in that general direction, so they got on and drove until Victor called out that they were coming even with it, at which point Marjorie stopped in the breakdown lane to give him a chance to determine whether their quarry was moving or not. Happily, it wasn’t, so she pulled off at the next exit, and they started prowling the streets, with Victor calling out direction changes.

The neighborhood they were cruising through was one of those pockets of in-city quaintness, the kind of place where storefronts had been zealously protected from the suction of big box stores in the ever-growing chain of shopping malls that ringed the city. A lot of the shops offered services of one sort or another, as that helped to ensure that the price of goods that might also be found at the mall stores wasn’t the only reason for all the people lining the sidewalks to shop locally.

Marjorie slowed to a crawl and started reading the signs aloud. A few seconds later, the driver in the van behind them leaned on his horn. When Victor turned around, the guy gave him the finger and shouted something undoubtedly obscene. He looked at Marjorie as they stopped dead. She was staring at the storefront on the left, with an anxious look on her face.

“Is something wrong?” Victor said worriedly. “Maybe we should pull over and let this guy pass.”

Marjorie nodded, and they rolled into an empty space a few cars ahead. As the van passed, the driver spat in their direction, and squealed his tires in a jackrabbit start, only to screech to a halt at the corner, where the light had just turned red.

She pointed at the storefront across the street. “You see that occult supply store over there? ‘The Philoscarpher’s Stone’?”

“What about it?”

“I know the guy who owns it. Reprobate named Oscar. Professionally, he’s an astrologer. He caters to the big money types; casts horoscopes for land developers, things like that. But he’s also known as a class ‘A’ jerk when it comes to selling overpriced trinkets to suckers. I’m surprised the city lets him stay in business, what with all the horror stories I’ve heard about him.”

Victor studied the window display for a moment. “You think he might have something to do with this?”

She nodded. “Yeah. If he didn’t steal the thing himself, he probably knows who did, or even hired out to have it done. Give me a reading. Which direction is your rock pointing at now?”

He brought his hand up and looked at it for a few seconds. “Up ahead. And I think it’s moving.”

“Can you tell how far?”

His hand drifted rightwards. “It’s got to be pretty close to change direction that quickly. Whoever has it is probably in the neighborhood, and most likely on foot. Should we check in the store, or follow the rock?”

“The rock. No question.”

After feeding the meter, they set off down the street. A few blocks up, Victor stopped in front of a bar and looked up at the sign. “I think it’s in here.”

“Well, then,” Marjorie said, grinning. “I think I could use a beer. What about you?”

The place was decorated in faux-Celtic kitsch, and felt about as authentic as a movie set. The lights were low so patrons could see the canned soccer match on the cable feed, and there was a long bar to the left, with a few people hovering over their drinks. The rest of the room was cluttered with tables, half of which were occupied.

Marjorie nudged Victor. “Well? Who is it?”

He raised the stone for a few seconds, and motioned towards the bar. He stopped cold after a few more steps and craned to see something that lay across the counter, a cane with a head made from an old cut-glass doorknob. “It’s him,” he said quietly. “I saw this guy at the gallery just before you got there.”

Just then, the pudgy man rotated on his bar stool, his eyes fixed on the silvery sculpture in his hand.

They stepped closer, and Victor crossed his arms. “I believe that’s mine.”

He looked at them blankly, and then peered at the rock in Victor’s hand.

“Hello, Oscar,” Marjorie said. “When did you decide to add art thief to your resume?”

He opened his fingers and held it out towards them. “What is this thing? And why did it just start buzzing?”

“You stole it, and you don’t even know what it is?” Victor said incredulously.

“All the signs told me to go to your art show. The stars… the cards… even my runes. They all kept saying that there was something important for me, that I should take the initiative.”

Marjorie shook her head in disbelief. “Do you expect us to buy that lame excuse? Look, I know you don’t have the highest morals in the business, Oscar, but I thought even you drew the line at actually stealing something. Don’t your clients pay you well enough any more for giving them a calendar of when’s the best time to cheat their own customers and employees?”

“Please!” he implored Victor. “Tell me what this thing is. I could feel it had some sort of power when I examined it on that scale of yours. But for the love of God, man, give me some kind of explanation for what it just did.”

“Oh, please,” Marjorie scoffed. “Twenty five years selling magic crystals to rubes, and you don’t have a clue when something real lands in your lap? Is everything you claim to be as fraudulent as the certificates of authenticity you peddle?”

He slumped against the counter behind him. “Not at first. Back then I really could feel the magic in the crystals I sold. Readings poured out of me like I was plugged into the Akashic Records. Hell, I didn’t have to go through all the trouble of casting horoscopes to know what they would say. But that was so long ago. So much has changed.” He put the sculpture down on the bar and lifted his beer mug. “These days? These days I have to drown myself in this just to feel anything at all.”

Victor and Marjorie exchanged glances while he drained his beer.

“Okay,” he said as he set the mug down, “what do you want me to do? Turn myself in to the cops? I’ve never done anything like this before, never actually stole anything. They’ll probably pull my license, shut me down, and I probably deserve it.”

“Do you believe this guy?” Marjorie asked Victor. “Pleading for mercy?” She stepped to the bar and slid the sculpture towards her. “A con artist to the end. I’ll tell you what we ought to do to you. Just for starters, we ought to get your mailing list and let them all know what a fraud you are. There’s probably–.”

“Wait,” Victor interrupted.

“What?” she said. “Are you just going to let him get away with this?”

Oscar rubbed his chubby face.

“No,” he told her. “I have a much better idea.” He held out the rock to Oscar. “Here’s what I want you to do. Take this. Now pick up the sculpture in your other hand and hold them about this far apart.”

Marjorie clapped her hand down over the sculpture on the bar. “What are you doing?”

“Let it go,” he told her.

After she uncovered the silvery sculpture, Oscar picked it up and followed Victor’s instructions. Over the next few minutes, he slowly adjusted the positions of the two objects, and the distance between them, while Victor held his own hands over Oscar’s. “Okay, stop. That’s it. I think they’re lined up now.”

Marjorie shuddered. “You’ve got that right. I wonder how many people are feeling this electricity?”

Victor ignored her, intent on keeping Oscar focused. “Okay. You wanted to know what the thing in your right hand is. And I’ll tell you. The rock in your left hand is slightly magnetic. The sculpture in your right is what I felt to be the shape of that field. Apparently, there’s some kind of resonance between them, based on the fact that they have the same shape, in a manner of speaking.”

Oscar nodded erratically, his breath ragged. “I’ve read about it. I think it’s called a morphic resonance.”

Several people had come over to see what was going on. One of them asked if Oscar was okay, and Marjorie assured them. The bartender had drifted over as well.

“So… now what?” Oscar asked hopefully.

“I was hoping you’d tell us,” Victor said lightly.

Just then, there was a loud crack, and Oscar dropped the sculpture. “Ouch! I think it burned me.” He thrust his other hand at Victor, and opened his fist. “Here. Take it.”

Victor gingerly lifted it from Oscar’s open palm and examined it. The stone was cracked. “Huh,” he said, showing the crevasse to Marjorie. “What do you suppose caused that?”

One of the patrons knelt beside the sculpture. “That’s nothing,” he said, “get a load of what happened to this.” He rose and handed Victor what looked like a flattened puddle of silvery water, with the crown shape of a water drop captured by a strobe. “I don’t know what you just did, but there’s probably some folks that would want to know about it.”

Oscar cleared his throat. “You mean what I did, don’t you?”

Marjorie wheeled on him. “You can’t be serious!” She turned to Victor. “Don’t let him do this.”

“Why not?”

She was incredulous. “Why not? Well, for one thing, he’s a fraud.”

He shrugged. “Maybe, but we both saw what he just did.”

“What he did? Are you nuts?”

“Not at all. Look, whatever it was I managed to make with that silver clay was a fluke. I’m not planning on trying at again, and Oscar here sure as hell won’t be able to. So the best way to bury it once and for all is to let him tell the world it was all his doing. After all, he certainly can’t demonstrate that new power of his, can he? And as you’ve already said, he’s a fraud.”

“You’re sure about this?” Oscar asked him. “You’ll let me claim to have done this all on my own?”

“Absolutely. As a once-in-a-lifetime event, you can make as much of it as you’d like. I think the secret will be safe.”

He nodded acquiescence. “Great. Then you won’t mind if I tell people what I saw when that bolt of energy flashed through me.”

“What?”

Oscar just grinned.

THE END
Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack

Sometimes, a gift exchange is more than it seems.

“Wind-up Pitch”
by P. Orin Zack
[3/30/2009]

It had been four intensely exhausting days since the highly anticipated cultural exchange with the Aliens had begun. Ross Farnum, whose curly red hair and beard made stark contrast to his accustomed green flannel shirt, stood about a foot from the wall-mounted conference room video screen, studying the intricately carved box of seed packets being presented to A. J. Warryn, head of the IntraSystem AgriBusiness Coalition. The foreign dignitary’s elegant presentation, as he lifted each packet and held it reverentially in his cupped hands, sounded far more intriguing than the list of names and dates spoken by the more plainly dressed Alien translator at his side. Once all of the packets had been displayed, and the box had been handed off, Warryn thanked his guest at length, and then he and his contingent retreated to prepare for the offering of Earth’s counterpart to the exchange.

Farnum turned to scan the rank of recently vacated seats flanking the long, paper-strewn conference table behind him. The seeds just presented were the last, and by many accounts, the least important of far too many formal exchanges, which was why, of all the specialists that had been assembled to back up the public face of the Earth delegation, only the three of them remained. Inara Svistrom, the lanky blonde linguist, was busy making herself a cup of Kona at the kiosk they’d installed for the team, and Clyde Newell, who contrasted with her in a variety of ways, was engaged in yet another Internet search.

“So… Clyde,” Farnum said, and waited for him to look up from his laptop, “did you find anything? Are they lining up to hire us after this shindig is over?”

“Hardly, Ross. It’s not like there’s a First Contact every day.”

The earlier, purely political formalities between the two species had, of course, been held under the utmost security, considering how many of the solar system’s most powerful national and corporate leaders were gathered in one place. Nobody was certain how important the Alien dignitaries sent to that event were in their own sphere of influence, but the journalistic consensus was that just the expense of the interstellar expedition warranted the inclusion of at least some members of the ruling elite.

Inara had just taken her seat again when a smaller picture inset itself over the main image. “I think we may have a problem, people.” It was Warryn.

“Yes, sir,” Ross answered, rounding the table and returning to his seat. “What can we do for you?”

“I’m sending a transcript of that last bit over to you. We’ll need an analysis of the cultural loading, and a recommendation on how to couch the return gift for best effect.”

“Clyde Newell here, Mr. Warryn. What will you be offering in exchange for those seeds and that nifty box?”

Warryn shrugged. “More seeds, of course; the best on offer from our labs. The problem is we don’t know what to say about them. We were hoping you could figure that out for us.”

The overlay vanished, and Clyde’s laptop beeped. “Got it,” he said. “I’ll run some hardcopy.”

Inara set her coffee down beside the paper that Clyde handed her a minute later and skimmed it, stopping intermittently to compare wordings. “I don’t get it,” she said when she reached the end of the document. “I mean, they’re making a formal gift of seeds, and yet the spiel that goes with it sounds more like a travelogue. There’s nothing of agricultural substance in here. Not so much as the barest of planting suggestions, things like what kind of soil they need, how much light they need or how close to plant them. Nothing.”

“I see what you mean,” Ross said, flipping through the pages. “What’s the point of presenting someone with seeds if you’re not going to tell them what to do with them?”

“Hold on, Ross,” Clyde said, “that’s not exactly true. But we’re obviously missing something.” He tapped the printout. “This travelogue must have some bearing on the seeds.”

“Oh yeah? Like what? Where they bought them?”

“Maybe not where they bought them, but certainly about where they came from.”

“Doesn’t fit,” Inara said, gazing idly at the wall screen, which had reverted to a live feed of the Alien’s orbiting spaceship. “That wouldn’t explain the dates.”

“Okay,” Clyde, said, “let’s back up a bit here. What is it that the Alien was listing?”

“Planets and star systems, from the wording,” she suggested. “And for some reason, those interspersed accounts of births and deaths.

“I’d have to assume that those are planets his people have been on. But who are the people, and why would that be important? What do they have to do with the seeds?”

“How about this,” Ross said suddenly. “What if those planets trace the seeds’ history? If he were reciting the lineage, then the first item after the various names for the plant being presented would be where that particular seed stock originally came from, and the last one would be the most recent step on the journey. Which could, I suppose, be the planet they’d just come from.”

“Sure,” Inara agreed, “there are cultural equivalents right here on Earth; Peru, for example. But if it’s something like that, this box of seeds wasn’t the ‘piddling afterthought’ that self-important twit Geoffrey — who couldn’t be bothered to stay until the end — made it out to be. I’m beginning to think that this was the real big deal. I think our Alien guests saved their most important gift for last.”

“Or maybe it’s not,” Clyde said, leaning back in his chair. “For all we know, the guy could just have been yakking to hear himself wheeze. In my experience, the idiots with the least to say usually make the biggest deal about saying it, and spend as much time as they can doing it, too.”

“If you have a better explanation, let us know,” she said sharply, and then winced at her loss of control. “Sorry. Anyway, under the circumstances, I vote we go with it. Warryn needs to do something, and at least this gives us a frame to build his presentation on.”

He shrugged noncommittally. “It’s okay, Inara. Don’t sweat it. We’re all a bit edgy. So how do we reply?”

“Yeah,” Ross said, still staring at the spaceship. “If we’re right about the Alien’s laborious agricultural history lesson, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that those seeds of his are the real deal. The people whose names he reeled off must have tended them personally, and all that biblical begetting from world to world means they have an unbroken chain of custody for the seed stock that goes back who knows how many years.”

“And planets,” Inara added. “Don’t forget that. They’ve traced the transplantings across space, for god’s sake. And what does Warryn have queued up to hand him? Frankenseeds, I’ve heard them called, the fruits of endless genetic tinkering. I doubt the labs even know where the original specimens came from, much less kept any once they had improved on it.”

Clyde laid a hand over his keyboard. “If there was time,” he said, “we could get samples from the cryobank flown in. They’ve got the closest equivalent to what the Alien presented.”

“Okay,” Ross said agreeably. “Let’s ask Warryn.”

A few moments later, with Warryn once again on screen, they sketched out their understanding of the Alien’s gift. The man nodded, feigning an understanding that his eyes did not mirror. Then, haltingly, Clyde diplomatically brought up the cryobank idea.

Warryn closed his eyes for a moment and turned his head. When he faced the camera again, they were blazing. “Are you nuts?” he thundered. “How the hell do you think it would look for the representative of the IntraSystem AgriBusiness Coalition to make a formal gift of something we had nothing to do with?”

“But Mr. –.”

“Unless the three of you want to find a different line of work, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come up with a way to present my lab specimens in a way that will appeal to the Aliens.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, and by the way, you’ve got about fifteen minutes to come up with an answer. And it better be good!”

The overlay vanished.

“Quite a challenge,” Inara said with a nervous laugh. “So what have we got? The Aliens have presented us with a cultural history of the their species by way of the journey of their seeds across space and time. Each one tells a story, each one marks the path they’ve taken from world to world, and how long they lingered at each one before pressing on across space. How do we craft a comparable story about genetically modified seeds?”

“Hold on, hold on,” Clyde said, raising a hand. “The story could be bigger than that, you know. After all, if we’re going to try to match the Alien’s tale, we’re going to need to pump some grandeur into it somehow.”

“‘Grandeur’?” Inara echoed dubiously. “Where are you going with this?”

“The Austrian Empire, I should think,” he said with an impish grin. And England, and —.”

“What are you talking about?” Ross said.

“Well,” he shrugged, “unless you think we ought to go back further than that. I mean, after all, there is quite a bit of folklore we could fold in. And scripture. Don’t forget scripture.”

“Clyde,” Inara said, rising and reaching across the table towards him, “spill it. What’s this story you’ve got cooked up. We’re going to need to hear it before you tell Warryn, especially if you expect us to back you up. You do want us to back you up on this, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. If it doesn’t fly, you could plead ignorance and not take the hit. Let me make the pitch, okay? Then, if it doesn’t please him, you can get on with your lives, and I’ll fall on my sword. Come on. Call him back. Do it.”

Ross shook his head doubtfully and alerted Warryn. A moment later, he was staring impatiently from the video screen. “Well?”

Clyde stood and addressed the camera. “Here’s what you do, sir. Start by making a big deal about the seed stock, and be sure to impress upon the Alien that what you are offering him is not merely the product of the same munificent natural forces that he quoted at you, but that they are equally the product of many generations of scientific discipline among members of different branches of humanity.”

Warryn crossed his arms. “Get to the point, would you? We don’t have much time.”

“Yes sir, of course. Now, we can suggest ways to embellish this, but if you want to keep it focused on what’s in your package, I suggest starting with Gregor Mendel, whose work with pea plants led inexorably to Crick and Watson’s revelation about the structure of DNA, which lies at the heart of the work done by all of the corporate labs in the AgriBusiness Coalition.”

“A marvelous idea, Mr. Newell. Yes. I think I can work with that. What sorts of embellishments were you thinking about?”

“Well, sir, considering that our guests have made such a strong point about preserving the seed lines that they have taken with them through their travels across space, I thought it might be appropriate to speak about some comparable efforts on the part of the human race.”

“Oh?”

“Yes sir. Most notably, I would suggest that you mention that we have not only developed the strains which you will be presenting, but that we have also preserved a backup of the progenitor strains from which they were derived. You know, sir, an emergency kit for starting the entire process over again, should that ever be needed.”

Warryn frowned. “Are you suggesting that I mention the cryobanks?”

“Oh, no sir. Of course not. That would never be acceptable to the companies in the Coalition.”

“Well then. If you’re not talking about that, then what do you mean?”

“Weeds, sir.”

“Weeds?”

“Of course. There’ll always be weeds, won’t there. And as long as you don’t specify what that backup is, the Alien will assume that you meant something like the cryobanks, and you’ll have a perfectly good explanation for your colleagues in the Coalition.”

“Well, then. I guess that’s that, then. I’d like to thank you all for your good work.”

After Warryn signed off, Clyde fell into a chair, laughing. “And the best part?” he said, wiping his eyes. “The best part is that the Alien will know he’s full of shit.”

“Why do you say that?” Ross asked him.

“Isn’t it obvious? These guys spend thousands of years hopping from one planet to the next, and throughout their entire history, they value naturally grown strains over anything else. They have to know you can’t corral life. That’s the whole point. That’s why it’s so sacred to them. And Warryn out there, he’s about to show them why they should steer clear of us from now on. Well, or at least until we get over the idea that we can subdue nature.”

THE END
Copyright 2009 by P. Orin Zack