The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  “You,” Jenny grunts. She is blank with detestation. Tenderly, she touches her skull. “You.”

  Eddie Rostow lurches upright. Swaying, exposed, he falls into the corridor. The same young student, returning, regards him with astonishment and abhorrence. The boy reaches out a hand, changes his mind and pelts away in search of aid. It is all a grainy picture show, a world-sized monitor screen. They’ll fire him for this. Oh, shit, Jenny, you don’t understand; I love you.

  In fugue, Rostow pitches down the corridor.

  The cleaver is lying where Donaldson left it on the bench, a ripple of bunny blood standing back from its surgical edge. Rostow’s self-contempt has no bounds. As he lifts the blade, there is one final lucid thought. I’m an animal, he tells himself. We can’t be trusted. The cleaver’s handle slips in his sweating fingers. He tightens his grip and with a kind of concentration brings the thing in a whirling silvery arc into the tilted column of his neck. Shearing through the heavy sterno-mastoid muscle, in one blow it slashes the carotid artery, the internal jugular and the vagus nerve, before it’s stopped by the banded cartilage of the trachea. He scarcely feels his flesh open: all pain is in the intolerable impact. A brilliant crimson jet spears and spatters, but Rostow fails to see it: he collapses in shock, and the fluid pulses out of his torpid body until he is dead.

  His corpse lies cooling until half a minute after 4:37.

  A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.

  Rostow screams.

  There is nothing banal in this plunge upward into instantaneous rebirth. It is overwhelming. It is transcendental. It is a jackhammer on Rostow’s soul.

  Like a thousand micrograms of White Lightning, life detonates every cell of his brain and body. He has been to hell, and died afterwards. Let me stay dead. Let me be dead.

  Catharsis purges him of every thought. Eddie cradles the white rabbit in his arms and sobs his heart out.

  At length he is sufficiently composed to reflect: I never cried when Tania left. Everything wise within me insisted that I should cry, but I turned my back. He realizes that he hasn’t wept freely since he was a child. Dear Jesus, does it take this abomination to lance my constricted soul?

  And his spirits do indeed soar. Without denying the reality of what he has done, his pettiness and spite and ignominy, he encompasses a mood of redemptive benediction. It brings a wide, silly grin to his mouth.

  “Bunny rabbit,” he declares, lofting the animal high over his head, laughing as its big grubby hind feet thump the air, “ain’t nobody been where we wuz, baby. Let me tell you, buster, I like this side a lot better.”

  Eddie feeds the rabbit a strip of lettuce and steps through the tedious details of shutdown. He meditates on his humbling and his bestiality, flinching at memory.

  The frailty at his core yearns to interpret it all as a stress nightmare, an hallucination. Denial would be not merely futile and cowardly; it would betray what has been offered him. Rather piquant, eh? Holy shit. Still, it is a point of access. Eddie Rostow confesses to his worst self that he needs all the help he can get.

  The next cycle brings swifter recovery. Rostow splashes tepid water from the flask into his face, dabbing at his reddened eyelids. Soon he must spend some time figuring how to replicate the loop condition after he gets off this one. Fertile conjectures multiply; he suppresses them for the moment. Nerving himself, he walks edgily to the Software Center, nodding companionably to the passing student. The directors have ascended to their solace. His knock is tentative.

  Jennifer’s smile startles him with its warmth. She lowers her hairbrush. “Well, hello, sailor.”

  Eddie stands in the doorway, drinking her unbruised face. Despite himself he flushes.

  “Don’t just loiter there with intent, man. You’re the unsung hero of the moment. It was sensational.” She frowns. “I hated it with the rabbit, though.”

  “Jennifer,” he says in a rush, “I’m sorry about the party. You know.”

  “That. Yeah. You were rather blunt.”

  “You inspire the village idiot in me.”

  “Sailor, that’s the sweetest thing anyone ever. Coming up to poach on the Professorial Entertainment Allowance Fund?”

  Eddie melts disgustingly within, wallowing in amnesty. “I happen to know a place.”

  “You’ve got a fifth of Jack Daniels squirreled in your locker.”

  “I’ve always admired your mind. Passionately.”

  “That wasn’t the part you molested in public.”

  “I am,” he tells her, “truly sorry.” Her hair flows in his fingers and he puts his face against hers for a moment. Jenny touches his hand.

  “While we dally,” she tells him, “Stan is up there screwing you,”

  “No argument. He’s like that. All scientists are lunatics and swindlers. I intend to fight. More to the point, are you screwing Dr Singh? Oh Christ, don’t answer that.”

  “I will not. It’s none of your business. For God’s sake, don’t get snotty. Here, let me help you off with your—”

  “Shouldn’t we shut the door?”

  “Kick it, you’re closer. Why did it take you so long to get here?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Hmm. You know, I thought you were going to throw a tantrum in the lab.”

  Eddie tries to keep his tone light. “Upon my soul, Miss Barton, that’d be no way for a besotted genius to contest his rights.” Shortly he asks: “Won’t the printouts get runkled?”

  “There’s more in the computer, you fool.”

  On the next loop, abandoning his dazed inertia for an instant, Eddie glances at Jennifer’s wrist watch and ensures that the flash comes as the flash comes as the flash comes . . .

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THY STING

  Sf is chockful of black jokes about the End of the World as We Know It. Is nothing sacred?

  A friend fetched home from Japan an agreeable curio which gave me a fresh perspective on the ingenious and broad-minded people of that island nation. Who else could have conceived, let alone constructed and marketed, the God-Jesus Fortune-telling Robot?

  This useful, egg-shaped chap is mounted on little wheels. A bishop’s mitre perches atop his beady eyed knob of a head, and he holds a handsome cross in one of his thin robotic arms. Across his chest is emblazoned his name, just in case it slips your mind: ‘God-Jesus’.

  Thus far, I suppose, we have no more than your standard bionic icon. The best is yet to come, combining in an ecumenical spirit the wisdom of Shinto, the I Ching, and dynamic or non-meditative Buddhism, or perhaps est.

  Acting on the imperfectly translated instructions, you set your God-Jesus on a level surface, preferably inside an origami paper temple. With suitable piety, you sink into a state of prayer and supplication, forming a clear unambiguous wish (I always use binary computer format). As you can see, already we have a clear advance over previous oracles, especially the Delphic or heavily hermeneutic variety.

  With a spontaneous gesture from the unclouded heart, you bring your hands together in a sharp crack of applause.

  The God-Jesus responds instantly, unusual in a divinity. A tiny microchip within his ovoid torso whips into life. He whirs about the table on little spinning wheels, waving his cross with furious energy. Abruptly he stops cold in his tracks. The moment of revelation is at hand. Watch his head intently, his beady red glowing eyes. His mitred head moves! It nods or shakes, shakes or nods for a no or a yes—if not a perfect answer to your prayer, at least a definitive electronic omen.

  Japan’s God-Jesus is no mere worker of brute miracles—parting seas, smiting dead the first-born, dropping manna to feed the hungry or multiplying loaves and fishes. He’s an information saint, patron of the seekers of the fifth generation. He gives me hope for a world in which people can laugh like loons instead of maiming one another in their dour convictions. Let’s have mo
re like him. My own reincarnated Christ, I suspect, would smile darkly.

  ~ * ~

  Stop me if you’ve been this one before ... See, there’s a Catholic, a Buddhist and a Communist. They’re sitting at a bloody enormous conference table, members of their staffs on every side, shaven monks in saffron robes, Opus Dei operatives gliding suave as barracudas, jowly apparatchiks muttering into tiny Japanese discovers, and everyone except the Catholic terribly grim and serious.

  So the Catholic says, ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news,’ pushing back his satin skullcap and propping his elbows on the table.

  ‘Let’s hear the good news first, your Holiness,’ says the Dalai Lama with a little shudder, because for months now they’ve all had their scouts out, ever since James the brother of Christ turned up in the Leningrad clinic (if you could believe the Russians about anything, let alone that), and then Mary three days ago in Chile, a pious peasant selling tea-towels of herself as the Virgin of Guadelupe.

  ‘The good news is that we’ve found Him, thanks to your Chinese pals.’

  You know that kind of silence in a room. So finally:

  ‘I would not have thought you’d find that good news,’ says the Communist, a lean academic type in his mid-thirties, just a trace of guttural Georgian there in his voice. As well as being front-runner for both Physics and Medicine Nobels for his discovery (though there are whispers) of Gravitino-induced Intron Recovery, he’s the sole known current reincarnation of Josef Stalin (there are whispers about that, too), a universal genius utterly without fear but not altogether innocent of humour. He grins with great pleasure. Thin lips and no moustache.

  ‘The Pope is a notable ironist,’ the Tibetan remarks irritably, and pushes his round glasses up on his small Mongolian nose. ‘You’re sure it’s a valid Jesus Christ?’

  ‘No doubt about it. We’ve got a ream of validated cross-indexed material from His brother and His mother.’

  ‘I hope you don’t think it indelicate of me to ask, but who was His, uh—’

  ‘Mary Mag—’

  ‘. . . genetic partner?’

  ‘—dalene, of course.’

  ‘Oh. You’re not surprised?’

  ‘We’ve had documents under lock and key for upwards of sixteen centuries,’ the Pope says.

  ‘How many children at demise?’ Stalin asks acutely, taking a pocket calculator from the outstretched hand of an assistant.

  ‘Unknown. We have a Primogenitary Line Revenant, from slightly less than one year into His ministry.’ The Pope gives a rueful chuckle. ‘He may have been tempted in the desert but evidently He kept His legs crossed until remarkably late in the piece.’

  The Russian glares, scandalized. Five years at the close of the nineteenth century in the Tiflis Theological Seminary rises in his blood to darken his face, to sharpen a repugnance for blasphemy he learned in that century, that lifetime, from his doting mother.

  And the Dalai Lama just broods on the Arigutarra Nikaya: ‘There is one who, having been one becomes many, appears and vanishes, unhindered he goes through walls, he dives in and out of the earth as if it were water.’ He sits back in his chair, clearly at a loss. ‘You accept this claim, then?’

  ‘Looks watertight, Padmasambhava.’

  ‘Hmm. And the bad news?’

  ‘I withdraw that remark. You would certainly consider it in poor taste.’

  ‘Certainly we have gone beyond taste, for good or ill,’ growls the revenant of J. V. Dzhugashvili. ‘What is the balance of your news?’

  ‘It’s the old gag. Embarrassing. Enough to make you believe in prophecy.’

  ‘Gag?’

  The Pope sighs. ‘The bad news is, She’s black.’

  ‘Oh God,’ cries the Dalai Lama, who until three months ago has truly believed himself the lineal descendant of his saintly predecessors and now can’t deny that for a hundred generations he’s been no greater than a clod in the fields. ‘Oh God,’ cries the Dalai Lama, who knows his Hegel and his Marx at least as well as the frowning Russian across the table from him, ‘the first time as tragedy,’ cries the sad little Dalai Lama, ‘and the second time as farce!’

  ~ * ~

  And there’s these other three people, see, sheltering from the sun under a rag strung on a stick and a length of ratty rope in the middle of an almost motionless sea of human misery in hottest bloody driest darkest Africa. There’s a white man, a black man and a yellow man.

  I tell a lie. The yellow man is a swarthy good-looking fellow from the Beijing Television Centre, a poet who specializes in science reporting. That bit is true. But the white man is actually a nun, and she’s not exactly white, being a quadroon from Miami named Sister Concepción Ortiz. And the black man is really a skeletal adolescent girl. The adults argue while she lies perfectly still, flat on her back in the scant shade, eyes huge and passive in a face like a skull.

  ‘Keep your stinking hands off this child,’ the nun screams. ‘Bloodsuckers! Liars! Goddam creeps!’

  The handsome man is sweating. The ground is foul with sludge and the sun drives up wavering sheets of humidity. Here they all are, poor bastards, twenty or thirty thousand of them and more arriving every day, perishing from thirst and hunger as the wobbling world, God’s spinning top, drives the scorched Sahara farther and ever farther into the heartland of Africa, and the appalling random thunderstorms spill damfuls of useless water into the eroded dust, into the trampled, pissed-in, shat-in mud. ‘We saved her life,’ he explains patiently, his Yale American classier than Concepción’s.

  ‘Listen, buster, what makes you think life is what’s important here?’ Her arm embraces the filthy muddy plain of numb, silent, doomed human refuse. ‘You’re trying to kill their souls, you bastards.’

  ‘You’re an educated woman,’ he begins again.

  ‘How can you . . .’

  ‘Pitiful. You’re pitiful. Reductionist crap. You think that’s science?’ The child’s head is capped with a crown of wires, transmitting gravitino-induced data to a briefcase of microprocessors in the cooler cabin of the Chinese’s Toyota where the Intron tech is drowsing. ‘Why not just cut the top off and stir her brains with a stick?’

  ‘You’re defending a paradigm that’s dead and gone, Sister. Your trendy holism doesn’t have a single valid response to Intron Recall. So you abuse us wicked communists for saving a child’s life.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ She is quite beside herself. ‘Let me tell you, I’ve marched against corporations that send their stinking drugs here for testing, and what you’re doing is exactly as bad. If it’s so safe, get the hell back to the re-education camps in Taiwan and burn out a few brains there, instead.’ Then Concepción sits down in the mud, shaking her head and weeping, and holds the black child’s hand against her breast.

  ‘Sister, we are taking the child into Addis Ababa under your religious superior’s express instructions. I have shown you the documents. Please stand aside and let me get her into the vehicle.’

  ‘Those pricks.’ She clutches the child to her. ‘You’re insane,’ she tells the man. ‘Lysenko and all that commie crap. My God.’

  ‘No. You know better than that. The surplus DNA in the genome was not even dreamt of in Lysenko’s ...’

  ‘You can’t inherit someone else’s memories,’ the nun says through gritted teeth. ‘That’s voodoo, not science. There’s not enough DNA.’

  ‘Quantum non-locality,’ the Chinese intones tiredly. ‘Bell Theorem connectivity. Reverse transcriptase Intron coding. You’ve seen our videodisks, Concepción.’ His tone sharpens. ‘It’s this child, of course. You can swallow Popes and birth control and heaven and hell and miracles and virgin births, but you can’t face the one fragment of truth that makes it all such a sham.’

  ‘Shut up.’ She puts the child’s arm aside and walks toward the Toyota. The journalist follows her, throws open the tailgate. They hear snores.

  ‘She’s a reincarnation of His, Sister, and t
hat’s it. We have all the preliminary probes on disk. You’ve seen the Academy’s provisional evaluation.’

  ‘Bullshit. A phoney juggler? A first-century card-sharp? A political opportunist with his hand in the till? You think a fraud like that could create a world faith that’s still alive after two thousand years? A user of whores.’ She leans against the stinging hot metal, eyes squinting. ‘I mean, your own so-called theory doesn’t hold up. This is a girl, haven’t you noticed? I thought the memories were supposed to be passed down along with the sex chromosome.’