should have gone with her!” And I hit him again, and again, and again, until he grabbed my fists to make me stop and I dissolved in weeping. Then he held me close and we both wept until, exhausted, we finally slept in each other’s arms; and our dreams echoed with the whisper of Saronda’s anguished wails.
What a story it would be, if it ended there. You would understand, then, and perhaps believe, all the legends that surround Artie and his Angels. You would think that he devoted the rest of his life to protecting the children of B9, and eventually of other sectors, and that he restored pride and honour and—dare I say—chivalry to a society that had lost all that. That was his intention, certainly. But he never had the chance.
We had known for months there was a Reaper hanging with the Big Dogs, one who had escaped death on the day of their invasion. We knew because the Reapers’ insidious philosophy began creeping out of A12. When the assault was made on the shuttle, though, we all supposed that was him, and the assailant’s death put an end to the threat.
We were wrong.
It was six months later, and Artie was in his shop building a bicycle for a kid who had just come in from outside. I was in my room, just across the street, studying Taninger’s treatise on folk myths. Although I was never accepted for advanced schooling, Artie had insisted that I keep studying remotely. With his help, I was working at the first-year university level in math and science, and higher in social studies. It had just occurred to me, reading Taninger, that the Arthurian cycle had many parallels to the Christ cycle, when I heard the double shotgun blasts.
I bolted for the door, not even pausing to look out my window. Though the sound was foreign to me, and I wouldn’t know until much later what had made it, I was seized with a dread conviction that it had come from Artie’s shop.
The Reaper hadn’t stuck around, but his handiwork was all too evident. The fiberforced glass in the storefront window was not meant to withstand the onslaught of outlaw projectile weapons; it had shattered into a million harmless shards that crunched under my feet as I stumbled through the wreckage to the back of the room. Artie was on the floor between the truing stand and his frame building jig, in a litter of primalloy tubing and joining patches. His chest was shredded where the brunt of one blast had caught him, and spots of blood glistened on his legs and arms from a spray of pellets.
Someone else entered behind me—Louis, it turned out. “Get a doctor!” I screamed. “Call for med-evac!”
But the light was already fading from Artie’s eyes. “Wanted to take you with me,” he slurred, blood foaming with the words from his lips.
“Don’t talk,” I commanded. “Lie still. Help is coming.”
“Said I’d go if you could, too,” he managed.
“Shut up, Artie!” I shouted. “Don’t you lay that on me! Don’t you do it!” Then, impossibly, he smiled. “Morgan LeFey,” he whispered. “Take me to Avalon…”
The story goes that we got him to a hospital, and the doctors were able to stabilize him enough to put him in a cryogenic chamber. That chamber went on the next transport ship to a distant world where Saronda was waiting, and where they have the medical science to heal him. Someday, when he’s recovered, he’ll come back to Earth again, to KanHab. In the meantime, Artie’s Angels are still here, seeing that what he started doesn’t die.
That’s the story. But Artie died in my arms that night, and no med-evac bothered to come. Not to B9. Louis and I took him underground, to a place where a collapsed tunnel had left only a crawl space. We laid him in there and sealed it up, and we didn’t tell anyone else. Then I concocted that story about the cryogenic chamber. Ha. As if KanHab had any such thing.
So that is the truth of what happened to Artie D’Angelo, but don’t try to tell that to anyone in KanHab. He has become larger in death than he ever was in life—I have seen to that. A brutal act of nihilism deprived me of my friend, my pack leader, my guiding light, but I will not let it deprive KanHab of hope. The stories of Artie’s exploits grow richer with each telling; and in them he succeeds, in ways he could only dream of, in protecting the helpless and improving the lives of those he left behind.
For us, he turned down a chance to live hundreds of years in comfort and peace with his beloved. I will give him, in its place, immortality.
Sleep well in Avalon, my Arthur. KanHab will not forget.
JUDGMENT PASSED
by Jerry Oltion
Jerry Oltion is the author the novels
“Judgment Passed,” which is original to this volume, tells of the Biblical day of judgment from a rationalist viewpoint; a starship crew returns to Earth to find that the rapture has occurred without them. Oltion has strong views on religion—namely that it’s a scourge on humanity—that led him to write this story, which speculates on whether or not being “left behind” would be such a bad thing.
It was cold that morning, and the snow squeaked beneath my boots as I walked up the lane in search of Jody. Last night’s storm had left an ankle deep layer of fresh powder over the week-old crust, and her tracks stood out sharp and clear as they led away through the bare skeletons of aspen trees and out of sight around the bend. She had gone toward the mountains. I didn’t need to see her tracks to know that she had gone alone.
Except for Jody’s footprints there was no sign of humanity anywhere. My boots on the snow made the only sound in the forest, and the only motion other than my own was in the clouds that puffed away behind me with every breath. Insulated as I was inside my down-filled coat, I felt an overwhelming sense of solitude. I knew why Jody had come this way. In a place that was supposed to be empty, she wouldn’t find herself looking for people who weren’t there.
I found her sitting on a rail fence, staring out across a snow-covered field at the mountains. She sat on the bottom rail with her chin resting on her mittened hands on the top rail. Her shoulder-length brown hair stuck out below a green stocking cap. There were trenches dug in the snow where she had been swinging her feet. She turned her head as I squeaked up behind her, said, “Hi, Gregor,” then turned back to the mountains. I sat down beside her, propping my chin on my hands like she had, and looked up at them myself.
Sunlight was shining full on the peaks, making the snowfields glow brilliant white and giving the rocks a color of false warmth. No trees grew on their jagged flanks. They were nothing but rock and ice.
The Tetons, I thought. God’s country. How true that had proved to be.
“I’d forgotten how impressive mountains could be,” I said, my breath frosting the edges of my gloves.
“So had I,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”
Twelve years. Five years going, five years coming, and two years spent there, on a dusty planet around a foreign star.
She said, “There was nothing like this on Dessica.”
“No glaciers. It takes glaciers to carve up a mountain like that.”
“Hmm.”
We stared up at the sunlit peaks, each thinking our own thoughts. I thought about Dessica. We’d waited two months after landing to name it, but the decision was unanimous. Hot, dry, with dust storms that could blow for weeks at a time—if ever there was a Hell, that place had to be it. But eight of us had stayed there for two years, exploring and collecting data; the first interstellar expedition at work. And then we had packed up and come back— to an empty Earth. Not a soul left anywhere. Nothing to greet us but wild animals and abandoned cities full of yellowed newspapers, four years old.
According to those papers, this was where Jesus had first appeared. Not in Jerusalem, nor at the Vatican, nor even Salt Lake City. The Grand Teton. Tallest of the range, ruggedly beautiful, a fitting monument to the son of God.
