Lightspeed: Year One

The ship’s oxygen is low enough that they’re gasping and cold, but it’s a pleasant sensation, like floating. Words no longer echo. Sound is gone. Thought is gone, too. It’s just images, reflections, memories of the past and present and very near future with no particular distinction.

She doesn’t want to do it. All her instincts tell her not to do it, just as they told her not to leave those women in Scottsbluff, and not to operate on Blunder, but instead to slit his monster throat. Just like they told her not to feed her husband and children human flesh. “There are fates worse than death,” Joe argued that first time, but even then, weeping, they’d known how it would end. They’d taken their rations, and told the kids it was chicken.

Joe’s hand is on her shoulder. He straps her in, then himself. There’s no time to kiss goodbye. They will lose their love, she knows. Its ineffable constancy will not translate into the machine. She is wet with regret.

The upload is quick. Suddenly, she sees her body from the outside, looking in. She races through the ship, looking for her family.

But the ship is a slurry. It opens up, and breaks free from the Earth’s crust, hurtling toward Black Betty.

Her babies. Where are her babies?

She sees inside the anomaly, even though she doesn’t have eyes. It’s ghosts in there. Three billion people. Flipper children eating poison rice, garbage rings, birds circling a gyre. It’s her family in there, looking back at her. It’s that moment on the road, when they shared blood, and did not know that the hardest time was also the best time. It is past, and present, but not future. It is Betty’s Disease, and like everyone else before her, Sarah Vaughan is drowning in it.

The Second Coming and Black Betty collide.

Sarah knows now, what drove her patients mad. It is the unspeakable truth about what caused Black Betty. It’s Second Coming, so dense with the ghosts of humanity’s regret, that she weighted through time and tore the past to warn them. Black Betty is the Second Coming.

Sarah remembers the doctors who killed themselves, and the women at her office, and the babies, all those babies, piled like rocks. It was their future she was marking, stolen from them by their idiot parents. It was the end of the world she was reminiscing, though she did not know it.

Black Betty and the ship crash together. The two become one. All things become one. There is no sound. The anomaly splatters across space, black and beautiful.

“My babies,” Sarah cries, as she swims through an ocean of infinitely dense ghosts.

And then, like a star, the anomaly collapses, as if it never was. It sucks past and present and future, and makes all of humanity unborn.

TIGHT LITTLE STITCHES IN A DEAD MAN’S BACK Joe R. Lansdale

From the Journal of Paul Marder

(Boom!)

That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane.

No. Probably so I can read it and feel as if I’m being spoken to. Maybe neither of those reasons. It doesn’t matter. I just want to do it, and that is enough.

What’s new?

Well, Mr. Journal, after all these years I’ve taken up martial arts again—or at least the forms and calisthenics of Tae Kwon Do. There is no one to spar with here in the lighthouse, so the forms have to do.

There is Mary, of course, but she keeps all her sparring verbal. And as of late, there is not even that. I long for her to call me a sonofabitch. Anything. Her hatred of me has cured to 100% perfection and she no longer finds it necessary to speak. The tight lines around her eyes and mouth, the emotional heat that radiates from her body like a dreadful cold sore looking for a place to lie down is voice enough for her. She lives only for the moment when she (the cold sore) can attach herself to me with her needles, ink and thread. She lives only for the design on my back.

That’s all I live for as well. Mary adds to it nightly and I enjoy the pain. The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost-like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears.

That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.

Each night I bare my back eagerly to Mary and her needles. She pokes deep and I moan in pain as she moans in ecstasy and hatred. She adds more color to the design, works with brutal precision to bring Rae’s face out in sharper relief. After ten minutes she tires and will work no more. She puts the tools away and I go to the full-length mirror on the wall. The lantern on the shelf flickers like a jack-o-lantern in a high wind, but there is enough light for me to look over my shoulder and examine the tattoo. And it is beautiful. Better each night as Rae’s face becomes more and more defined.

Rae.

Rae. God, can you forgive me, sweetheart?

But the pain of the needles, wonderful and cleansing as they are, is not enough. So I go sliding, kicking and punching along the walkway around the lighthouse, feeling Rae’s red tears running down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my much-stained canvas pants.

Winded, unable to punch and kick anymore, I walk over to the railing and call down into the dark, “Hungry?”

In response to my voice a chorus of moans rises up to greet me.

Later, I lie on my pallet, hands behind my head, examine the ceiling and try to think of something worthy to write in you, Mr. Journal. So seldom is there anything. Nothing seems truly worthwhile.

Bored of this, I roll on my side and look at the great light that once shone out to the ships, but is now forever snuffed. Then I turn the other direction and look at my wife sleeping on her bunk, her naked ass turned toward me. I try to remember what it was like to make love to her, but it is difficult. I only remember that I miss it. For a long moment I stare at my wife’s ass as if it is a mean mouth about to open and reveal teeth. Then I roll on my back again, stare at the ceiling, and continue this routine until daybreak.

Mornings I greet the flowers, their bright red and yellow blooms bursting from the heads of long-dead bodies that will not rot. The flowers open wide to reveal their little black brains and their feathery feelers, and they lift their blooms upward and moan. I get a wild pleasure out of this. For one crazed moment I feel like a rock singer appearing before his starry-eyed audience.

When I tire of the game I get the binoculars, Mr. Journal, and examine the eastern plains with them, as if I expect a city to materialize there. The most interesting thing I have seen on those plains is a herd of large lizards thundering north. For a moment, I considered calling Mary to see them, but I didn’t. The sound of my voice, the sight of my face, upsets her. She loves only the tattoo and is interested in nothing more.

When I finish looking at the plains, I walk to the other side. To the west, where the ocean was, there is now nothing but miles and miles of cracked, black sea bottom. Its only resemblance to a great body of water are the occasional dust storms that blow out of the west like dark tidal waves and wash the windows black at mid-day. And the creatures. Mostly mutated whales. Monstrously large, sluggish things. Abundant now where once they were near extinction. (Perhaps the whales should form some sort of GREENPEACE organization for humans now. What do you think, Mr. Journal? No need to answer. Just another one of those little scientist jokes.)

These whales crawl across the sea bottom near the lighthouse from time to time, and if the mood strikes them, they rise on their tails and push their heads near the tower and examine it. I keep expecting one to flop down on us, crushing us like bugs. But no such luck. For some unknown reason the whales never leave the cracked sea bed to venture onto what we formerly called the shore. It’s as if they live in invisible water and are bound by it. A racial