Yondering Page 2

  “There’s no way this is legal.” Zack shakes his head.

  I bring the brim of my ceramic mug to my lips, letting the scalding liquid slip down my throat and trying to ignore the lens I can now tangibly feel boring into my back.

  * * * *

  Henry put in the last algorithm, paused, and called up the original—not just the quills’ cell, but the base file of the original 78. He listened to it one last time through—the chunky high twang of the guitar strings, Henry Thomas 1928’s clotted voice, the trilling of the longer notes on the quills—and decided, yes, except for that bothersome exuberance, it was quite a perfect little cell. Henry keyed in the commands to send the file off to the DNA of this distant Brandon-something for computation.

  * * * *

  “I heard a rumor,” Zack lifts his own cup, “that the guy didn’t even do it himself. He got the codes for the virus and the information to hack into the security system from some student in the computer science department who always does all his work for him. He’s only a front; nobody home. This other student, whoever it is, is the real brain. What do you think?”

  “I didn’t think anyone believes that Brandon was tech-savvy enough to break through one of the country’s most complex computerized barriers anyway,” I say, unable to look at him. The camera seems to be zooming in on me now.

  * * * *

  The file was coming back…but slowly. Why would that be? Henry wondered. The file would have to be enormous, or the modem somehow compromised. But he had sent specs for a modest 990-note file, and algorithms for rendering a simple two-part fugue with harmonies in perfect fifths; the modem claimed it was working at normal speed. When the file had finished downloading, Henry read the K’s and whistled. It was roughly four times the size he had expected. Puzzled, he opened it and keyed it to play.

  What was this? The first minute was familiar enough, a statement of the quills’ cell: the thirty-three note theme, at Henry Thomas 1928’s tempo three repetitions a minute, ninety-nine notes. Then it began to expand, to flower—but too soon for a ten-minute, two-part fugue. It refolded itself, became a three-part fugue, went through its variations as smoothly as a finger running along a Möbius strip, but then folded itself again and became a four-part fugue. Four parts were a singularity, almost an impossibility for a fugue, and Henry sat listening, fascinated and delighted, wondering almost subconsciously how his algorithms had created this beautiful lotus of sound. What was it Saint-Saëns had said about a fugue? “A piece in which the voices come in—and the listeners go out—one by one.” But Henry couldn’t go out, couldn’t turn it off, or even turn his head. After four minutes had passed there came another fold—a harmonic impossibility, he would have thought, but there it was, dazzling, capturing his thoughts completely—forcing out even the curiosity about how it had come about, forcing out even the wonder at its existence.

  The distant DNA hadn’t scrubbed the emotion from the quills’ cell—it had raised it, made it an exponential complex of exuberance, one that filled every part of Henry that had ever experienced music: his ears, his mind, and heart, his skin, and then the music went deeper, and even deeper, until it felt like it was a needle piercing his own.… But that was impossible; didn’t the agency guarantee single-vector access? He felt as if he were somehow being lifted up out of himself, and didn’t know the way back, but the music made him happy to be traveling freely, as free as a breath blowing over a cane quill. He felt his every Uncle Fester spine, every self-isolating quill, becoming instead an antenna, picking up every nuance of the music, picking up the happiness Henry Thomas 1928 so brightly broadcast over the ninety-year arc, picking up even the intellectual satisfaction and pride of whoever had compromised and re-marked his simple algorithms, taken them far beyond his understanding, and those emotions filled every part of Henry Thomas 2018 and carried him out of himself.…

  * * * *

  “Well, whoever is smart enough deserves to graduate…with honors.”

  “Yeah, and go on to a fabulous career in the state penitentiary.” I chuckle, attempting to mask the irrepressible sense of pride swelling up in my chest and the intermingling jolt of terror-induced adrenaline hijacking my pulse. “Listen, I’m going to step outside for a second, okay?”

  THE GIZZARD WIZARD, by Rory Barnes

  Being a short sequel to that admirable novel, Space Junk, in which we learn the fate of Ned Malley and his friend Emceesquared Gonzalles della Harpenden following their abrupt ejection from the planet Earth.

  Ned Talking

  A guy in uniform appeared out of the darkness and pointed a light through the open window of the car.

  “Evening, Ms. Harrison,” he said.

  “Evening, Stan,” Sue-Ellen said and waved her hand at me and Em in the back seat. “These two are the Special Ambassadors of Youth.”

  “Are they drunk?” the guy said.

  “I don’t think so,” Sue-Ellen said.

  “Other substances?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Look this way, please,” the guy said.

  We looked at him. We were already looking at him. He shone the light straight into our eyes. First me, then Em.

  “Normal pupil contraction,” the guy said. “I haven’t seen that for a while. OK, on your way. Have a nice trip.”

  He pulled his head out of the car’s window and lifted the barrier. The Gamma surged smoothly through the gap in the security fence and picked up speed on the approach road. At first the headlights showed nothing but more bitumen and desert. Then, in the distance, we could see a cluster of bright lights, some of them flashing, a few low buildings, and the dark bulk of a spacecraft. It didn’t look very big. In fact, it looked pathetically small.

  “What the…?” I said. “Are we really meant to go all the way to Newharp in that?”

  “That’s just the runabout, you fool,” Sue-Ellen said. “The Delegate is in orbit. They couldn’t land it if they wanted to. Which they don’t. It’s spinning.”

  “Now they tell me,” I said. “And anyway, what’s all this about Ambassadors of Youth?”

  “That’s what you are,” Sue-Ellen said. “It’s the pitch I had to make to Ulrike Lewis to get you on board. You are carrying youthful messages of peace and goodwill to the distant corners of the universe.”

  “What messages?” I said. “We’ve got no messages. We haven’t even got any luggage.”

  “Make them up, for godsake,” Sue-Ellen said. “Brothers and sisters of the cosmos, we extend to you the hand of friendship in which we hold the sweet dove of eternal peace in the sure and certain knowledge that our two planets are bound together in a common destiny and a common ancestry, blah blah blah.… Just stress the fact that everybody’s ancestors came from Earth—everybody’s human, they love that. That and the dove of peace.”

  “Grab hold of a dove,” I said, “and the thing will crap on your hand. Or it’ll peck your eyes out.”

  “Words, Neddy-boy,” Sue-Ellen said. “All you’ve got to do is sprout words. No one is going to ask you to handle birds.”

  “So how come Em’s an ambassador as well?” I said. “She comes from Newharp in the first place. She can hardly be an ambassador to her own planet.”

  “You aren’t going straight to Newharp,” Sue-Ellen said. “You are stopping at Skyros and then Kovalev along the way. You are the Special Ambassador of Youth from Earth. Em is the Special Ambassador of Youth from Newharp. Got it?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “It’s all a bit sudden.”

  “Listen, kiddo, if you’re still on this planet by daybreak, you’ll end up in clink. Your current status is fugitive. And if you’re caught: finito.”

  “True,” I said, and resigned myself to being an intergalactic fugitive from justice. That and an Ambassador for goddamned Yoof.

  * * * *

  Sue-Ellen brought the Gamma to a halt in the bright lights of the apron. The scene was a shambles. There were drunks falling out of busses, singing, cheering, c
hundering.

  “Gawdalmighty,” I said. “These are the guys who are going to fly the tub?”

  “’Fraid so,” Sue-Ellen said. “You should feel right at home.”

  Canola rollers by the dozen were parked all over the apron in no pattern at all. Guys with clipboards were trying to check the loads before they were snatched off the trucks and carted away by forklifts with flashing lights and cursing drivers. Drunks were trying to pilfer whatever was left unattended.

  I watched one guy lever the corner off a crate with a screwdriver. The crate splintered, the guy got his hand in, but couldn’t pull anything out. He stood there jerking and twisting, you’d think his wrist was caught in a trap. A Newharp shore patrol officer pounced on him, hauled his arm out of the crate, and twisted it up behind his back. The drunk laughed and stumbled as he was propelled towards the boarding ramp. The shore patrol guy let him go as soon as he was safely on his way up the ramp. The authorities weren’t making arrests tonight, just moving things along. I looked back to where the splintered crate still sat on the tarmac. Quick as a ferret a runty little guy in a huge overcoat split from a group of merrymakers, sidled up to the crate, and made a lightning gesture with his hand and sidled away. What a pro! You’d need the eyesight of a hawk to have seen the sleight of hand. I’ve got the eyesight of a hawk.

  “OK, you lot. Stop gawking,” Sue-Ellen said. “Out.”

  The three of us climbed out of the Gamma. There was a cold desert wind blowing the blackness of the night straight through the bright lights of the apron. The noise level was infernal. Em and Sue-Ellen embraced, kissed. Then Sue-Ellen turned to me and ruffled my hair.

  “Just don’t stuff things up, Neddy-boy,” she shouted.

  “What things?” I shouted back.

  “Any bloody things at all,” she said and spun on her heel and climbed back into the Gamma. Five seconds later she was gone. She didn’t look back.

  “Well, there’s a vote of confidence,” I said. “One of the great farewell speeches of all time.”

  “Come on,” Em said. “Let’s try to get good hammocks.” Her voice cracked. I looked sideways at her. She was crying.

  “You’re going home, for godsake, Em,” I yelled. “I’m the one that’s meant to be bawling my eyes out. I’m being sent into exile. This is my planet we’re leaving.”

  “Shut up,” Em said. She took my hand and started to pull me roughly through the crowd towards the boarding ramp. I didn’t say anything. She was crying for her brother Harri. I knew that. At the last moment I’d taken Harri’s place on this loony intergalactic mission. Em had arrived on Earth with Harri, she was leaving with me. I just hoped she didn’t blame me for the substitution. It was Harri, after all, who’d chosen to remain on Earth. And it was me who couldn’t afford to remain on the damn planet.

  We were almost run over by a forklift loaded with crates. The driver swerved, cursing in good English. She yelled at me and Em, calling us a pair of lame-brained mutants. She was just a local, she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. It occurred to me that these were the last words in English I’d ever hear spoken on Earth by a fellow Earthling. I was going to say something about this to Em, but a mob of singing, cheering space crew engulfed us. We all surged towards the runabout. Em and I went up the ramp with drunken strangers’ arms around our shoulders, an obscene parody of the Homecoming Song being bawled in our ears.

  The inside of the runabout was an even greater shambles than the apron. It was one dim cavern. There were tiers of webbed hammocks—bright orange in the gloom. Stores were all over the floor: some were already tied down with more orange webbing, some were still being tied down by a gang of loaders who yelled and kicked at the pilferers. But their hearts weren’t in it; it wasn’t their stuff, and either way it would end up on the intergalactic. The crew member who had his arm round Em’s shoulder yelled something about share my nest and I’ll take off my vest.

  “Not tonight,” Em said.

  “You can only try,” the guy said. He was a drunk, but he was an amiable drunk.

  Em disengaged herself. She said to me, “Top tier.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Grab a top hammock.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the g-forces, you idiot.”

  What she said made no sense to me. But she was already climbing a scramble net making for the top tier of hammocks. Various others were climbing. One guy fell off. There were cheers and catcalls from those who were already occupying hammocks. As we climbed we passed a hammock with a couple in it—the woman waved a hip flask at us.

  “Drink to the heroes of the schlock rock brigade,” she said. “Have a swig, why doncha?”

  “Later,” Em said.

  “Later?” the woman said. “Later will be too later, sister.” But Em was out of reach. The woman grabbed my arm. “You’ll drink, won’t you, darling, you’ll drink to the schlock rocks.”

  “Go on, have a swig, you young hoon,” her companion said. “It’ll do you good.”

  I took the flask and put it to my lips. Whatever it was ripped most of the skin off my throat and found its way into my nose. I spluttered and handed the flask back. There were tears in my eyes by the time I reached the top of the scramble net. All the hammocks at this level seemed to be taken.

  “You’ll have to share mine,” Em said.

  I clambered across into the hammock Em was already occupying.

  “Cozy,” I said.

  “Bloody hell, Earth-boy,” Em said. “Just fix those clips there. We have to be completely enclosed.”

  “Suits me,” I said.

  “There’s a zero-g component to this trip,” she said. “You don’t want to float away, do you?”

  I fixed the clips that secured the top webbing. Em and I were now in a sort of open weave basket with a lid. We could have been kittens.

  “This isn’t quite how I’d imagined it,” I said.

  “Imagined what?” she said.

  “Going to bed with you.”

  “Oh shut up, Ned,” she said. But she settled herself with her head on my shoulder. I put my arms around her, kissed her hair. I had half a mind to tell her I loved her, but she already knew that. And I also knew that she didn’t love me. So I asked her a technical question instead.

  “So how come the g-forces are less in the top hammocks?”

  “They’re not, dingbat. It’s just that if anybody chunders during takeoff, it’s best to have them below you rather than above you. Get it?”

  “The voice of experience,” I said.

  “Common sense,” Em said.

  There was a garbled announcement from half a dozen speakers. I looked down through the webbing. The loading gang was leaving, waving a mock good bye. Then they were gone, and I could hear the whine of the hydraulics as the boarding ramp was raised. The bright lights from the apron sent a wedge of brilliance into the runabout. The wedge shrank and disappeared. There were no windows in the craft. The dim cavern could have been deep underground; we could have been miners, or refugees in a bomb shelter. There were noises of locks engaging. More garbled announcements. In their hammocks the crew cheered and burst into song. Then I had the feeling that the runabout was floating gently, it was swaying, it could have been a boat on a tranquil sea. Suddenly the g-forces hit. We were accelerating and accelerating fast. The singing died. Em and I were forced down onto the webbing. And forced down onto the webbing, and forced down onto the webbing. It was hard to breath.

  “How long,” I gasped. “How long’s this going to…?”

  “As long…as it takes.”

  * * * *

  Em Talking

  By the time the acceleration had cut out and we’d negotiated the zero-g component and then gone into synchronized spin, Ned was looking a bit pale. But, as soon as we’d docked with The Delegate, he managed to make it through the airlock and down the radial elevator without a major regurgitation event. The muster room at the end of the elevator was full of drunken crew regai
ning their composure.

  “Magnets?” Ned said.

  “What?” I said.

  “There’s gravity in here—do they do it with magnets?”

  “No, no. We’re spinning. The whole ship is a giant centrifuge. It’s one big barrel.”

  “Of fun?”

  “Who knows,” I said.

  “Behold,” said a voice beside me, “the fresh-faced innocence of youth.”

  I turned. There was a small guy in a large overcoat. He looked like a walking tent.

  “I trust,” the tent said, “that you two are new additions to our esteemed crew of psychopaths and alimony evaders—we will have the pleasure of your company in the long drear months ahead?”

  “Keep your hands in your pockets,” Ned said to me. “This guy will rob you blind. I’ve seen him at work on Earth.”

  “Young man, that was uncalled for,” the little guy said, but he didn’t sound offended. “I am an honest trader, a merchant of the space lanes. My reputation can stand any scrutiny.”

  “What do you sell?” Ned said.

  “What do you want?” the guy replied.

  “Hard to say,” Ned said. “We own nothing.”

  “Then I am your man,” the runt said. “Everything the heart desires can be yours.”

  “At a price?” Ned said.

  “At a very reasonable price,” the guy said. “The name’s John Doe. Delighted to have made your acquaintance. Do not hesitate to seek me out if there is anything you desire. And now, if you’ll excuse me.…”

  The guy scuttled off, passing through the only door out of the muster room, announcing himself to the log-in scanner as “Maintenance Leading Hand Doe, John. At your service.” This was a more civilized announcement than other people were making. Most of the drunks, as they left the room, yelled out a funny name or bawled a bit of ribald verse. They also made silly faces at the scanner. It was a standard voice recognition and retina scan barrier: it just checked your voice print and the patterns on the back of your eyeball, it didn’t know or care what you actually said or did. I hadn’t seen one since I left Newharp, but they are common enough at home.