“Darfang” by John Cowan

Illustration: “Darfang” © 2005 by Patrick Stacy.

Peter Beckin was positive he’d never been so cold in his life. Or this scared.

The tunnel stretched for half a kilometer through the dark reddish rock, curving in a downward slope to disappear in a blue glow of lighting tubes that illuminated the mine. He paced back and forth on the hard ground, his legs exhausted and his feet aching. Each puff of breath from his dry throat faded in the half-darkness. He glanced often at the locked security gate behind him, toward the lift that could take him up to warmth and safety. Then he forced himself to look back down the tunnel. His eyes burned from lack of sleep. His heart thudded with every step he took, as if reminding him that each beat could be the last one.

Author: Derek Smith

Dear Editor: Your readers may remember my story “Searching for the Ferryman”, published in Planet last year. “Ferryman”, together with all of my other previously published short stories, have been gathered into a collection titled Retribution and other Reactions. In addition, several new stories were written especially for the collection. It is available from Equilibrium Books. More details can be found on my website.
Thanks,
Derek Smith

“Elevator to Eternity” by Greg Guerin

Illustration: “Scanman” © 2005 by Romeo Esparrago.

“We used his soul to mend the hole
bound the fabric of time…”

When he first came to us, his mind was contorted by conflicting ripples of thought. His tiny body arrived packaged carefully in amniotic fluid, the limbs curled and foetus-like, the head grossly expanded. A genetic defect had caused the cranium to develop rapidly in the womb, sucking sustenance away from the withering body. If we had allowed the child to be born he would have died, the tiny heart and lungs unable to pump oxygen to the oversized head.

So left, his mind had grown in on itself, stagnating with the lack of external stimulation. It was a mind gone circular, insane yet of vast intellect.

We did what we could to unravel the thought pathways that had built up — constricting logic — while the boy lay unborn in the still-bag. We diverted unnecessary cross-links in the neural patterns, replaced them with ones that would impart a basic understanding of language, fed the mind enough information to interpret environmental stimuli.

We spared no effort to retrieve him from his inner world; we had foreseen that one like him could help us. If not for that knowledge, we may have faltered in our search for him in the crowded human world of Hubbab. Knowing the stakes, our seers forwent recuperation to maintain the search.

We concocted a suitable body, and having removed the boy’s cranium and tail-like spinal column from the useless body, employed a team of Nuverhanian neurosurgeons to fuse the two together.

We named him Elam, in our language “healer”. We faced ruin, not the end of an era, but annihilation from the fabric of time.

We watched as they put Elam together, waiting for our turn with him.

Old Sayings #1

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

Red sky at night, sailors take fright.

Red sky at midday, sailors completely freak out and look for a new line of work.

“The Magic Crystal” by Joe Vadalma

Illustration: “Dancing Flame” by Steve Cartwright (c) 2005

Five black candles were set on the points of a pentagram, in the center of which stood a lonely, desperate young man obsessed by the occult and the black arts. In his mind, necromancy seemed the only way to obtain that which he desired: friends who respected him, an attractive woman who would love him, power, and his own money to spend. As Craig said the words of summoning, a mystical darkness, evil and strange, surrounded him. He shivered in terror. There was real danger. If he was successful, an awful power would threaten his very being, his soul, his aura. If he lost control of that power, he would be sucked into the vortex to be lost and damned forever, to suffer excruciating torture for eternity. In order to prevent the demon that would appear from touching him or tricking him in any way, he needed to concentrate mightily. Nonetheless, if he succeeded, he would have the stupendous power of a dark angel at his beck and call.

In a loud and sonorous voice he called out the names of power and repeated the incantation that he had memorized from an ancient book. A loud clap of thunder sounded like the clap of doom, the room suddenly brightened from a flash of lightning, a torrential rain beat against the walls, and a howling wind tore at the ancient Victorian mansion where Craig had lived alone for years. The old house creaked and groaned.

“Just Twelve, and No More” by Danielle Ste. Just

Illustration: “Joes vs. The Cat” by Romeo Esparrago (c) 2005

There were twelve of us. Just twelve, and no more. We lived in the box, only let out once every 365 days. The fresh air revived us, barely enough to sustain our life throughout the long year.

One year, we were put away on a damp spot on the cellar floor. Toward May, Number 5 said, “The cardboard is weak around me from the moisture.”

Being Number 1, everyone looked to me for direction. “Let us act on this,” I commanded.

We dug and scraped, wiggled and writhed, until Number 9 gasped, “I feel a slight draft!” This inspired us to new lengths, and before long a fresh breeze blew through the box.

“Onward, eleven soldiers!” I cried, and we broke free.

The cellar was huge and cavernous. A bright square at one corner revealed a window high in the wall. “We’ll make for that,” I said, pointing with my gun.

“U, Robot, and The Totally Unremarkable Paper” by NoMan (A.L. Schuhart)

U, Robot sat in a room.

(As will be learned later, it is here that U stopped reading)

It was a big room, not that size was important, which it wasn’t. After all, the size of the room had nothing to do with the size of the robot, nor with how important the robot was, which it was. The robot, I mean.

So, the robot sat in the room. Well not sat, really, at least not the way people sit. I mean, its body, well what a robot means when it says “body”, had adopted the position of sitting, although, really, it wasn’t sitting on anything. Really, its feet were on the floor, its knees bent, back straight, and all that. Just like sitting, except there was no chair. Not even a bench. It was sitting, though, on the power tube because, well, it had to. After all, it got its power from the power tube. And the power tube was just a tube filled with power that stuck up out of the floor upon which, well, the robot sat.

In the room were an astounding number of power tubes, but amazingly only one robot. The tubes stood up as straight as straight is, exactly thirty-two inches tall and thick as a fist. There were exactly eight-hundred and fifty power tubes, arranged in ten rows of eighty-five. The robot called them editing stations. Occasionally the robot would slowly raise itself from one, stand, take three medium steps down the line, and sit on the next one. When it stood, the vacuum seal would go shtuk when it released and then hiss slightly as the pent-up gasses escaped. The robot referred to this as unshtukking, and would laugh about it with the other robots at the robot bar. “Har Har” they would laugh, “Har Har.” The robot bar also had power tubes upon which not to sit. But in the totally unremarkable room where it worked, when it came to the end of the row, it crossed to the next one. When it came to the last editing station in the room, it went home, or to the bar. And that was that.