Short Fiction

Asir

Asir of Franic survives execution only to be scarred as an outcast and banished from the plains, his hands still leaking through bandages as he staggers to Welkir's door. What he carries is worse than the wound: thief's wisdom that the air is boiling away into the sky, and that the vaults hold the key to rekindling the Blaze of the Winds. The council will not hear him, the vaults are guarded by a sleeper called Big Joe, and dawn will find him in the hills — yet he keeps talking, because the alternative is a world that strangles its own children.

John Smith XVI

John Smith XVI sits down to a historic broadcast with Ivan Ivanovitch, the masked chieftain of the Asian League, and finds his careful disarmament preamble met with a gutteral 'Why?' and an accusation of talking Achesonian. The Red knows things he shouldn't — that Smith cannot speak the Russo-Asian dialect, that his prepared text is a shield rather than an offer. The seventh man to carry his name, he is learning that a title inherited sixteen times over buys no leverage in a conversation where the other side has already stopped pretending.

Inspector Norris

Inspector Norris drives his district with a radiophone that never brings Anne's voice, chasing a memo from Chief Franklin: find and test every Bermuda-K-99 born in July 2234, because Delmont passed one nonstandard unit and may have passed more. He has eleven empty cages and forty-nine occupied by the previous inspector's unclaimed inventory awaiting destruction. A class-C man allowed no children of his own, he knows exactly what it means to be measured against a normalcy test — and the deadline is seven days.

Big Hogey Parker

Big Hogey Parker is dropped off on a barren stretch of Great Plains highway, drunk, legs failing him, duffle bag lost twice, insisting he's okay to a bus driver who has two daughters and a job he should quit. He used to be a tumbler; now he has to be a hoofer, on account of li'l Hogey, and Marie is going to be sore that he's a week late. Nobody knows he's coming — it's a surprise — and the sun is going down forge-red over dust that hangs in the air like yellow smoke.

Mitch Laskell

Mitch Laskell has always gotten along in the Navy — the undersea equivalent of a fighter pilot, a man who grinned when he streaked in for a kill — and he has never needed a philosophy to do it. Then a message crackles through the command-set and something in him refuses, and he sits on the floor of a tiny compartment with the microphone dangling, trying to explain to himself why quitting feels less like cowardice than going back. He suspects Garson, he suspects himself, and he knows the word coward will make him wince either way.

Spaceman Old Donegal

Old Donegal lies paralyzed in his own rented flat, listening to the Keith mansion's servants set up the terrace for late afternoon guests, while his wife Martha squeezes a hand he can barely feel and begs him to let her call the priest. He knows the operations failed, knows the cancer is climbing his spine toward his brain, and has decided to let them keep the secret they think they're keeping from him — because Martha could bear his death, but not his calm. So he jokes about the moon-run at sixty-three, and mutters requiescat over his own hand, and calls himself a maudlin ass for it.