Shoreline of infinity 20, p.1
Shoreline of Infinity 20, page 1
Contents
Celebrating International Women’s Day 2021
Shoreline of Infinity is Evolving…
The Ghosts of Trees: Fiona Moore
The Cuddle Stop: Laura Watts
Vast Vast Slow: Bo Balder
Multiverse: T.D Walker
Transmitting tales of the future into the future: Pippa Goldschmidt
Reviews
About Shoreline of Infinity
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Celebrating International Women’s Day 2021
Shoreline of Infinity
Award-winning science fiction magazine
published in Scotland for the Universe.
ISSN 2059-2590
© 2021 Shoreline of Infinity.
Contributors retain copyright of own work.
Submissions of fiction, art, reviews, poetry, non-fiction are welcomed: visit the website to find out how to submit.
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Publisher
Shoreline of Infinity Publications / The New Curiosity Shop
Edinburgh
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060321
Shoreline of Infinity is Evolving…
You are reading the pilot issue of our new monthly digital edition of Shoreline of Infinity Science Fiction Magazine. it’s a compact issue, of 3 stories, poems, a book review, a non-fiction piece. – regular fix of science fictional wonderfulness.
This’ll be the core of every digital edition, what you’ll see every time, but the beauty of digital publishing means that you never know how things will evolve. But there’s one way to find out – reat yourself to a subscription, or make a point to buy yourself a copy every month.
There are more details of our plans on the Shoreline website
I’ll step aside, and leave you to read Fiona Moore’s tale, The Ghost of Trees.
Noel Chidwick
Editor-in-Chief
Shoreline of Infinity
The Ghosts of Trees
Fiona Moore
It was Itch’s fertility problems that started it all. Not the ones with getting the cactus splices in Environment Twelve to cross-pollinate, the other ones.
“Seriously, Cee, could you cover the early shift for me so Tina and I can go to the clinic?” Dr Shuichi Sakai, brown eyes wide, solemn, innocent. “It’s going to take the whole morning, starting from seven, so I can’t cover the midnight to eight.”
As project leader I could have pulled rank, insisted one of the assistants cover it. This close to completion, it would mean eight hours doing nothing but staring at monitor feeds of plant beds and going over reports on promising specimens, suitability for a Martian environment, terraforming utility, et cetera et cetera, for our corporate masters (though come to think of it, half of the project’s funders are governments, so I ought to come up with a better name). But I was spending as little time as I could at our apartment – my apartment – and didn’t mind an excuse to stay late.
For appearance’s sake, I extracted a promise from Itch that he’d cover some of my teaching when term started, and booked a room near the desert so I didn’t have to go all the way back for the night.
If I hadn’t, I’d never have seen the ghosts of trees.
The alarm sounded around 4:45 AM, indicating the failure of a sensor pack in Environment Thirty-Nine.
The trip out from the base in Area 1 took twenty minutes, all of them confined, cold and clammy: the rover reeked of mouldy vegetables. My biohazard suit reeked of something worse.
I parked the rover, entered the passcode on the keypad. Outer door. Inner door. Replaced the sensor pack, bagged the old one (it had a suspicious coat of whitish dust, presumably spores or pollen, which might be the cause of the failure), glanced around the black-green interior, the silent rows of plant beds with their cargo of experimental cultivars. Back through the two protective doors again, unzipped my hood to take a few deep breaths of non-reeking cool dry pre-dawn air. And then I saw the trees.
They looked real: that was what struck me. Like a plantation of pines, the kind you see from the window of a train or a smartcar when you ride through the rural north. About a kilometre square, and close by. Just sitting, branches occasionally waving in a breeze I couldn’t feel.
I knew for certain there hadn’t been trees there yesterday.
As I watched, wondering, they bent forwards, as if pushed in a strong wind, then instantly snapped backwards, the wind changing direction and increasing force.
Except there was no wind.
I ducked as a cloud of twigs and needles flew towards me, but I felt nothing, not even a handful of dust in the air.
Then there was just the occasional rustle of lizard or bird, or possibly the specimens in Thirty-Nine.
In front of me, a tangle of pine branches, one or two stripped-bare trunks still upright. One slowly bent and snapped under the weight of its crown. Then it all faded, like the end of a film.
Like (the realisation hit me all at once), The Footage.
We’d all seen The Footage of course, everyone on the project. The nuclear tests were the reason we were here, in this particular desert. From a time when people were fantasizing about terraforming projects – and at the same time changing their own soil and atmosphere – until the overground tests had to be abandoned amid a flurry of lawsuits from sheep farmers, their flocks dying of radiation sickness.
Mo had sent Archive links. We made a movie night of it, with drinks and crisps and grass and shirt collars unbuttoned. We set up a projector, clicked links at random. Somebody, probably Tack, complained that the test sequence from Indiana Jones was more exciting. Somebody else, probably Itch, made a stupid joke about nuclear families. Vera got into a snit and wouldn’t talk to either for days. We ran the slider back and forth to watch that two-storey house blow apart, come together again, and blow apart again.
Back at the base, much later, Tack (who is short, and sharp) turned up, coffee cup fused to his hand, an aesthetically bleary look on his blond face. I asked if he remembered seeing any trees in The Footage.
“I don’t remember any trees,” he said. “The house, yes.”
Everyone always remembers the house. The clean, six-windowed two-story clapboard building, shining white in the desert, a big hearselike car beside it, shot from all angles. Then that tornado-fast wind blowing against it, ripping it apart like matchsticks. Then the wreckage. See that? That’s your face, America.
“Oh, and I remember all those damn mannequins. Something Freudian about putting all those mother-and-child groupings in different rooms, then blowing them to pieces.” He chuckled at the memory, “I don’t remember trees, though. Why?”
“Just thinking about it,” I said. I’d checked the monitor feeds for today, and the last few days: nothing. I was also checking the contents of nearby environments for known hallucinogens.
I’d meant to do more, but then Vera turned up with test results. The source of the white powder was a palm-tree splice that had worked fine in the lab but was growing out of control in Environment Thirty-Nine conditions. It was taking over the ecosystem and exuding pollen, which had a mysteriously corrosive effect on the insides of the sensor pack. An argument broke out over what to do about it, and how soon, with one faction arguing it should be killed off now, and others wanting to let it run to see what happened.
But before that could be resolved, a request came in for a progress report from our non-corporate masters, and an e-mail from our corporate masters, telling me the problems with the payload module had been resolved. We could finally, finally, after all the years of work, the false starts, the promising leads that went nowhere, the international cooperation agreements falling through, the permissions that never materialised, we could finally start seeding the fertile stuff on Mars – as soon as we’d finished testing it on poor old infertile Nevada. So naturally, we had to drop everything and finish that.
It should have been a big deal. But I just felt empty.
I was too tired to work any more, but I didn’t want to go home. Home meant facing the absence of him: the clean floor shining, devoid of pathology reports and vintage issues of magazines I didn’t read, coats and boots and socks (at least now I didn’t have to pick them up), coffee-table tomes – The American Cartoon, 1900-2000 – the ebook reader in place. The chair unsat-on, the lamp flicking on and off on its timer. The eerie quiet, an extended version of the silent reproaches he’d been so good at.
So the trees it was.
I’d sent an email earlier to the project historian, Mo. He’d been forced upon us by our non-corporate masters, who felt that since we were working in a World Heritage Site, we should earmark part of the money for historical research. We’d chosen Mo because he hated all scientists. He stayed mercifully out of contact, occasionally firing through the odd paper along the lines of ‘Themes of Incest and Child Abuse in Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover: Nabokov and the Nuclear in Nineteen-Fifties Imaginary,’ just to prove he still deserved to be kept on expenses.
Now I was wishing we’d gone for somebody a little friendlier.
Nonetheless, I asked him for everything he had on which of the tests had involved structures: houses, boxcars, bridges and, by the way, trees.
I don’t know why I felt I had to bury the lede. Mo wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have read anything into a more specific request. But something in me felt strange, embarrassed even, to be obsessing about the trees.
I got back an e-mail with no text
First I looked through a few of the edited films, shot in either black and white or a lurid colour medium that was heavy on oranges and reds. A stern but somehow enthusiastic baritone informed me that this was ‘Survival Town,’ an entire village set up in the desert. And there were Tack’s sadistically charming family groupings, mother mannequins with baby mannequins on their laps, beaming over child mannequins with skipping ropes and pigtails, while father mannequins sat or stood at a suitably patriarchal distance. Another stern voice informing us that the blast took place at 5:20 AM. “Mannequins, supplied by private industry, represent Mister and Missus America,” intoned the authoritative baritone. So, this project had had corporate masters too.
And there were the trees. First a shot of men wandering around a plantation, lowering trunks into prepared holes. Mannequin trees, like the mannequin people. Then a pan from some instrumentation to the forest, all the trees in place: it looked pretty convincing. The film switched to show the buildings being prepared, and I fast-forwarded irritably.
Then, at fifteen and a quarter minutes in, they were back.
A shot of the fake forest as the workmen had left it, fluffy with needles. Cars and jeeps visible within the grove (strange that I had seen no vehicles). Shots from inside the grove, beautiful. Shots of burly men installing and testing the instruments in the trees (again, absent from the ghosts), longer this time and leading in to the dust explosion as the blast hits, the sand flying up in the atom-driven wind. The cameras always seem to go blind just at that critical moment, like they’re blinking. The dust clearing away, showing the silhouettes of the trees standing impossibly upright for a split second. Then bending the other way like grass stems, almost double.
Then the aftermath: the stumps and splinters, one or two shocked survivors against the stark blue sky, the yellow desert. A tree fallen in on itself as if felled by a lumberjack, a dramatic stump poking up amid a tangle of pine branches.
I closed the video, looked around the room. I was sure I’d heard something – someone – as if he had come into the lab, looking for me, like he sometimes did if we were both working late. There would be a warm smart-car waiting out front to take us both home to dinner and movies. But he hadn’t, and there wasn’t.
My therapist had suggested some drugs that might help my insomnia, and I decided to try them.
I turned up next day to discover that the faction in favour of letting the palm splice take over had won, with the proviso that if it jumped its beds and started infecting other test sites, they would let Itch’s pyromaniac doctoral student loose on it with a flamethrower.
Our non-corporate masters wanted to know when we’d be finished, please, so everything could get started. Their overcrowding problems weren’t going to solve themselves just because we were dragging our feet. There was a fairly obvious subtext that Californian research institutions should be pretty damn grateful to get largesse of this kind from Asia, and that our only redeeming feature is our willingness to work cheap. I contacted Rocky, the (thin, pale and morose) head of the cryogenics and packing team, to tell him to start set-up. We could at least send them some pictures of the empty tanks, ready and waiting, if they got any angrier.
I spilled coffee over the proceedings of a conference on climate change, grabbed a dish-towel to clean up the mess: it was the one he had brought me back as a present, from Wisconsin, where he’d attended an American Society for Clinical Pathologists meeting. It was bordered with local birds, drawn fat and cute as cartoons, perched on pine branches. I realised it was the two-month anniversary of him leaving. Remembered how, at the start of the relationship we’d celebrated every milestone, one-week, one-month, two-month, six-month. Strange that you also mark anniversaries from the ending, as well as the beginning.
The tea-towel had been an apology for the argument we’d had before he left. Accusations of hypocrisy had featured prominently: on the one side, of putting a career in terraforming ahead of her own family, on the other, of expecting the woman in the relationship to put family ahead of her job. Both, arguably, about continuing the human race: one on the macro level, one on the micro. But neither of us were in a state to admit or even see that.
It might even have been the first of the arguments: another anniversary to celebrate.
To distract myself, I started writing the report we had to provide our corporate masters, calling up their original spec for the project, press releases and concept art. A red Martian landscape with green palm trees and blue sky (the public didn’t have to know that, even at the increased rate of growth, we were looking at several decades, even a century, assuming the funding held up).
I flicked onward through the concept art. Images of farmers like cheerful workers in a Soviet poster, tending animals that looked a bit like cows and a bit like goats, and harvesting monstrous grain. A lush forest, like my pine trees, but with a couple standing in it: man, woman, holding hands. The imagery was pure Book of Genesis. I looked around for the snake.
And on the last page, a science-fictiony, white, two-storey building, a saccharine set of mannequins out front. Mother with baby, father at a benignly patriarchal distance, a couple of children at play. A futuristic vehicle parked beside it. I wondered if the house had a bunker under the stairs like the houses in The Footage. I wondered what the science-fictiony building would look like, blowing apart, coming back together, blowing apart again.
Over the next couple weeks, I made forays around various environments between 5 and 5:20 AM, ostensibly preparing reports on which specimens should be included in the initial payload, but actually determining that there were no ghost houses, no ghost cars, no ghost mannequins, bridges or freight trains. And no more ghost trees. It seemed there had been just the one appearance.
I vaguely remembered themes from horror films and high-school English class: ghosts come back because they want something. What could a tree want?
Propped up on Environment Thirty-Nine, where the palm splice had now eaten everything and then died within a matter of hours – leading to a debate as to whether to destroy it or sell it to the military – I found a shrine of sorts. A desert-worn sheep skull, lashed to a fencepost. Below it, a collection of stones and flowers and little dolls. I started sweating inside my biohazard suit, seeing it. I wondered aloud to myself who had put it there: mainly to try and shake the rising conviction that it had been me.
Uneasy dreams of walking near Thirty-Nine. Sand blowing away to reveal the buried faces of mannequins. I pick one up – a woman, brown hair, expression sweet but cold – and it cracks in my hands, showing a blackened skull. No, not a skull, that’s wrong: the blackened head of a crash test dummy. All around me the poisoned corpses of farm animals, goats and sheep and cows, hairless and bloated like manatees, stacked on racks like the inside of the payload modules.
Waking, something made me go and find the bookshelf in his office. I’d been in there a few times since he left, obviously, but there wasn’t much need. The separation was, supposedly, temporary, so he’d left the books he didn’t immediately need. I found the one I was looking for, an out-of-print history of some American magazine famous for its cartoons, and flipped to the right page. It showed a pair of aliens, antennaed Adam and Eve in a garden on a rocky, barren planet. A man in a spacesuit racing towards them from his rocket-ship, shouting at Eve (brown hair, face sweet but cold) as she reaches for the apple, “Miss! Oh, Miss! For God’s sake, stop!” Underneath it read, Whitney Darrow Jr, 1957.
I sat down, images parading through my head like footage. Or Footage.
I read the caption again. 1957. At the same time they were setting up trees in the desert and knocking them down with nuclear winds, this cartoon had been published.
