Kampus, p.17
Fiction River Presents, page 17
Maybe this was the reason old Tom67 had chosen to sleep away.
“Migrants?” I said. “They were compensated. My lawyers saw to it.”
“But they have nowhere to go. All nearby worlds are heavily populated!”
Her raised voice made some heads turn our way.
Well-behaved guests were supposed to chit-chat. Political rants had no place in a festive event. I could summon security bots to take her away, but old Tom was a friend.
So I opted for an efficient counter-strike.
“And are you not actually enjoying the privilege, despite the so-called migrant plight?”
Color suffused her cheeks like a too-potent drink. As she was searching for a rejoinder, I put my arm out to Callas300, which she gracefully accepted. We turned away from the naïve young thing,
Time to get this show on the road.
Once we reached the center of the room, I dropped Callas300’s arm and clapped.
The bar came alive with a flourish, sparks coursing up and down the streaming counter top. Then, the tables’ soft lighting toned down to a smattering of dark pastilles, leaving the majestic view gracing the Bar window.
A dying sun was an excellent show.
The normal sequence of events took billions of years, which was a lot more time than even the Big Bang could allow for a bash. So the process had been sped up by drawing more elements from the star’s core.
Like overdrawing a bank account.
“Should be any time, now,” I said.
Callas300 piped up.
“I hope so,” she said, “the mag-stasis is difficult to maintain.”
As a BBB Gold member, Callas300 knew a lot about the inner workings of the Bar. Beyond the backroom, a small black hole was rotating at 30,000 revolutions by second, producing a powerful magnetic shield.
All eyes were turned to the window, but the change on the G2 sun was imperceptible at first.
I used the lag to walk along the spiralling alley, making small talk to the guests my baby holdings were milking off just a few light years away.
By then, the G2 star’s diameter had expanded into a fat orange ball. The sun could no more compensate its collapse by outward radiations than I could give back money I already spent.
It had no choice but to inflate its credit line.
The black dot of the planet was engulfed like a marshmallow in a campfire. The sun had reached its red giant phase, way ahead of schedule.
“Murderers!”
It was Loren, afire herself, green eyes burning with anger. She was holding a glass of wine, but hadn’t touched it.
“There were still people on the surface!”
That was the recurring problem with evictions.
Not everyone wanted to leave their homes. So the truly stubborn stayed. And the lazy forgot about the deadline, despite periodical ten-year reminders.
“They were duly warned,” I said, modulating my voice in the casual flippant tone the media loved to hate.
“The eviction notice was clear. If some elected to stay, well, that’s on them.”
As I expected, the last sentence triggered off Loren’s last restraints.
She threw her wine at me, splattering red blotches, like blood, on the front of my white tux. Then she smashed the glass against the hard surface of a nearby table. The globe shattered, leaving the stem.
She grabbed my left lapel.
“You—” she hissed.
She didn’t finish her statement.
The Big Bang Bar prided itself as a safe zone. Any violent outburst, whether a drunken brawl, an assassination attempt, or a nerve crisis, was met with the same efficiency. I had gotten away with hitting a drunken Andrew65 only because I was the paying patron, and a BBB Gold member.
Two round lanterns materialised over her while she was raising the broken glass’s stem.
I heard a puff of air.
The naïve young thing’s eyes rolled over, her fingers releasing my tux and the glass. She collapsed to the floor in a heap of fabric and disarrayed hair.
I picked her up, sending a discreet order for the Bar to scan for any other troublemaker among the guests.
Then, I carried her limp form to the Bar’s detox bay.
There was a powerful glamour in that gesture. As a plus, I relished the envious gazes shot from the male guests.
Callas300 sailed behind, dispensing curt answers that the guests would spin into wild tales. She had too much to drink. This show was so emotional. She needs a short detox.
The wood-paneled reception area opened, revealing the detox’s complete emergency bay. The door swooshed shut at my back.
A bed sprung from the floor to gather the unconscious body. A doc spider stood at the ready to follow on the nanobes, one noodle-like appendage holding a palm-length ruby cylinder.
“Your orders, sir?” the spider asked. “Storage or disposal?”
I considered the young thing, so full of a passion that was, to me, a remote memory.
Loren was beautiful of course, otherwise TomFinn67 wouldn’t have considered bringing her. Her firm body, her dark lustrous mane, her swan-like neck, her parted cherry-red lips, they all tugged at an animal remnant inside me.
She wasn’t the first protester to infiltrate one of my get-togethers. My finger followed her cheek.
“Storage,” I said finally.
An army of lawyers could have handled the other option. Disposal meant a safeguard failure, a detox accident: sad, very sad, but those things happened.
I thought about the newsreels. They would love a human-interest story. Maybe this idea was only a rationalisation rising from long-suppressed desires.
I hadn’t had a wife for a long time.
“Initiate the first stage of cognitive adjustment,” I commanded.
The Bar’s AI shone through the wall, level with my eyes.
“This was not included in the deal,” a mellifluous voice intoned, coming from myriads of wall cells.
“I will assume the cost. Begin the procedure.”
“On whose personality anchor?”
“Myself.”
It was just a simple matter of tinkering with her cognitive pathways. In a few hours, her politics would not matter anymore. She would perceive the world’s order just as I did. The red giant’s death would become a necessary evil.
Her loyalty would be faultless. I could even place her in control of the new subsidiaries financed by this excursion.
Before leaving her to the ministrations of the bots, I bent over her bed.
“So long, darling,” I whispered, my lips brushing her ear. “When you wake up, we’ll choose your wedding dress.”
The bed closed over her peaceful face, its shell hardening to form a life-support pod.
When I came back to the conical room, the marshmallow planet had been reduced to a spatter of blackened rubble.
A gravitational pulsation sent a small tremor on the Bar. The star was emptying its accounts, each time gaining a short-lived reprieve before the final bankruptcy.
Soon, the red giant would shed its outer layers in a spectacular explosion that would be the apex of the party.
Its glorious fireworks would represent a defeat, an ironic symbol that most of the guests were missing, for now.
Somehow, I felt a deep sadness that my future wife couldn’t share this moment.
I started planning to remove some of my modifs in order to enjoy our upcoming wedding. I pictured a white-hot sparkling dress, a nebulous veil and a river of blue pearls.
Outside, the dying globe was puffing up like a red balloon, its hue matching the Bar’s lanterns. The window’s filters continually adjusted to the rising photon load. If we were facing only a thin glass window, our retinas would have burned.
The sun’s equator had been peppered with derelict barges full of violet catalyst colorant, matching my holding’s logo. The resulting explosion should produce the nicest purple hoop, as if a star-sized giant had blown a smoke ring.
Callas300’s voice pierced my bubble.
“Shouldn’t the Bar speed away from the upcoming nova?”
She was still seated near the window, filled by a furious orange glow.
As a BBB Gold member, she had used a private channel.
I called up my personal hologram and checked the numbers. Yes, the Bar’s velocity vector was wrong.
Dead wrong.
Instead of pushing itself to an outer orbit, the Bar was staying on the same orbit, which would be engulfed inside the red giant last-stage radius.
The radiation levels hitting the Bar were already off the charts. I called the AI bartender. The striped-vest man appeared to my right, his face neutral.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying not to let my irritation show.
His face squeezed into a contrite expression.
“Sir, the Big Bang apologizes for the delay. We are conducting a series of tests on the thrusters.”
I closed my eyes. The rest of the conversation proceeded at quick speed, with Callas300 listening in.
“Is this the right moment? Outside radiations are rising.”
“An internal flux problem, sir. The Pulse manifold has been deformed.”
“Meaning,” Callas300 piped in, “that if the Bar tries to leave, the pressure on the bent thrusters would make them burst.”
“So we’re stranded here.”
I revised my options.
“Emergency evacuation?”
“Not possible at this time.”
“Why not?”
“Irregularities in the peak emissions of the harnessed Schwarzschild have been detected,” The AI bartender answered in his even tone.
“In Standard, please?”
“The Bar lost control of its black hole,” Callas300 said, her voice calmer than the rest of our guests who were now beginning to panic. “It is spinning out of axis.”
Just as this piece of good news sank in, the window went white hot, then pitch black. I guessed the outside cams were overloaded as the Big Bang Bar was about to be gobbled up by its victim.
“We’ll burn inside the damn star!” Andrew65’s voice called out from somewhere behind me.
In another incarnation, my younger self would have replied “Brilliant deduction, Einstein!” But now I was concentrating on hedging my bets. The powerful radiations were gnawing away at the Bar shield like mice burrowing in cheese.
The only option was to use the emergency boats located near the detox bay.
Andrew65 ran in front of me to the back room where they were housed. Callas300 followed, in a more dignified pace.
The escape pod door was closed. Locked.
Andrew65 banged on it, while sending request upon request to be let through.
“The damn door won’t budge!” he spat.
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” the Bar’s calm AI voice intoned. “Please accept these with our compliments.”
The bartender presented us a serving tray loaded with tubular glasses of blue whisky. Similar glasses materialised from the counter top, on all its snaking length.
Andrew65 snatched one and took a long swallow.
“Now that’s something,” he said, clacking his tongue.
His mood had taken a 180-degree turn. He smiled as he downed the rest of the liquid.
“Phew!” He whispered. “Best whisky in my whole life, counting the clones. You should try some your…”
Andrew65 shook, as from a sudden cold draft. He blinked, once, and fell sideways, slowly like a cut tree, a rapt expression clinging to his face.
I did not need my augmented senses to see that he was dead.
I turned to the striped-vest AI. Beyond him, guests dropped here and there after drinking similar shots. “It was the compassionate thing to do,” the bartender said. “The Big Bang Bar is closing.”
The guests who hadn’t tasted the offer were scrambling for the exit, grabbing one another, cursing, crying, screaming.
Callas300 walked back through the panicking crowd, a calm Madonna instead of a diva. She stood in front of the dark window, enjoying the zoo. The hovering couch had drifted from its lofty position, landing close to her still form.
I stepped back from the guests massing themselves against the closed exit.
That’s when I noticed the detox bay’s gaping door.
I rushed inside the small room, looking for the pod where my future wife waited.
The room was as bare as a defrauded stockholder.
No cot, no spider, no treatment pod.
Instead, two golden high heels lay on the floor. There was something different about them. I picked them up.
The golden snake straps were gone.
My BBB gold member status gave me a few perks. Among those, avoiding another compassionate act from the AI. As I came out of the detox bay, all non-gold status members lay incapacitated on the floor, sedated by the lanterns.
Picking my way around the bodies to join Callas300, I asked the AI to divert a remote satellite feed to the display window.
The Big Bang Bar appeared, a black dot against the orange-red giant, the angles of the thruster’s apparatus spiking out like a cactus shape. There was a time delay to the transmission, so we witnessed a speck getting away from the Bar, its crude thrusters accelerating away from the red giant.
Callas300 and I sat side by side on the no-longer-floating couch, facing the display.
“So, Tom67’s little friend got away,” she said.
A statement, given without hatred nor regret.
I nodded. TomFinn67 was nowhere in sight. I did not feel like searching the press of bodies now clogging the exit door.
“I was wondering about the timing, too,” I said.
Loren had made a show of looking up maps during the transfer. Every step of her crisis had been cleverly choreographed. She may have been an actress.
When I thought her tucked away in detox, the preprogrammed snakes must have slithered and short-circuited the spider, opening the treatment pod. The young activist probably slipped through the back door, and then carried out her real goal: terminating the Bar’s operation.
“Such naivety,” I said.
Another bar, or a chic café, would replace the Big Bang. None would ever surpass it.
Until my brain closed its final account, I would record the end of this gallant institution, a legend in the civilised galaxy.
Callas300 shrugged. She had seen a lot.
“Weren’t you as idealistic when you were Guess1?” she asked demurely, her dark eyes twinkling.
The view from the satellite feed was rolling on. The explosion was as stupendous as I expected, the purple ring expanding like a smoke puff. The outer rim reached the Big Bang.
I heard a deafening crack as the Bar’s black hole freed itself of its shackles. A brutal wind of decompression sent Callas300’s hair flying up, while she laughed voicelessly.
Callas300 and I were not holding hands like schoolchildren as high-energy radiations were zapping our bodies out of existence.
Very old friends didn’t need to.
Introduction to “The Verdant Gene”
Marcelle Dubé writes science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fiction. Her short stories have appeared in magazines and award-winning anthologies, and her novels include Backli’s Ford, an A’lle Chronicles novel and the Mendenhall Mystery series.
Her most recent short story publications are “Skywalkers” in On Spec Magazine and “Bloodhound” in Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe. The fifth in her Mendenhall Mystery series will be published in late fall 2017.
“The Verdant Gene” was originally published in Fiction River: Moonscapes and will be available as a podcast from StarShipSofa in fall 2017. To find out more about her work, go to www.marcellemdube.com.
Marcelle grew up near Montreal and now lives in the Yukon where, and says: “‘Place’ can be an important part of a story, whether the story is set on Earth or off. I moved to the Yukon over 30 years ago. While I’ve found something to love in every place I’ve been, no place has been ‘mine’ like the Yukon. This place—its frigid lakes and dangerous rivers, its incredible, subtle beauty and awe-inspiring mountains, its wildlife—it’s seeped into my bones, ruining me for anywhere else.”
We Earthlings are unified in our fascination with the moon and its influence upon us. In “The Verdant Gene,” Marcelle takes the concept of a moon and makes it very foreign indeed.
The Verdant Gene
Marcelle Dubé
We landed on Verdant one hundred and three years ago, in what turned out to be Year Three of the thirty-year Cycle.
In a stroke of cosmic bad luck, the probes that explored Verdant and mapped its solar system did so at apogee, when Castor and Pollux, the twin moons, were stable in the sky at the farthest they would be from Verdant, and each other. How were we to know that this stability would only last a year?
It took the original colonists a few years to realize that Verdant’s moons were slowly drawing closer to each other and to the planet. The attendant tides and wild weather soon made the colonists relocate the settlement to higher, more protected ground, but it was only at Year Fifteen of the Cycle, at perigee, that the colonists understood the full impact of the moons’ strange dance.
There have only been three Perigee Years since we landed on Verdant. With each one, we were better prepared to survive the physical onslaughts of storm and surge. But with each one, we lost more and more people to the Cycle madness.
Rachel was on the tube train before she realized that she’d left her coat at the lab. The argument with Aisha—Dr. Aisha Bennatro, friend and colleague—had knocked it from her mind.
She shivered a little, crossing her arms over her chest in an effort to warm up. It was full summer in the capital city of Haida, which should have meant humidity and heat, but perigee was tonight, and cold air had rushed in as soon as the winds rose.
Rachel glanced out the window. The storm was getting worse. The lush vegetation for which Verdant was named whipped frantically in the wind, flinging twigs and flowers in the air.
