The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 8

  He stopped the truck on the hilltop. Before them, a lake rippled in the wind, filling the valleys so that what she had thought were other hills earlier she could see were islands.

  Elizabeth gasped. “Liquid water.”

  “Do you want to go fishing?”

  “Really?”

  Henry rested his forearms on the steering wheel and looked out onto the lake. “Kind of a joke. No, not this time. There are thermophilic shrimp, though, and adapted corals, engineered crabs, modified algaes, mutated anemones, evolved sponges, and dozens of other heat-happy organisms who like water just short of boiling. About the biggest thing out there that we know of is a heat tolerant eel that grows to a foot or so. I’ve been boating at night. Almost all the species we introduced bioluminescence. It makes them easier to keep track of. Blues, yellows, greens. The boat’s wake is a trail of fire.” He sounded meditative. His fingers dangled, nearly touching the dashboard. Elizabeth had never noticed before how strong his hands looked. Calluses marked the fingertips. A line of dark grit was under his fingernails. “On land, we’ve introduce lichens, soil bacterias, nothing complicated. They do best near the lakes. Rain is undependable.”

  “How long did you say you were awake before you woke me up?”

  He didn’t turn his head. “Six years. I wanted to make sure everything was ready for you.”

  She looked at the lake again. A film of black dust piled at the corner of the window like a soot snow drift. The wind picked up, tearing froth off the tops of waves, and it moaned, passing over the truck. Elizabeth couldn’t imagine finding anything attractive in the desolate landscape. Dry, toxic, inhospitable except for the most primitive of life. She pictured its surface in six hundred years, when she awoke. Brush would cover the hills and heather would fill the valleys. Willows would line the bank of this heated lake. What did Henry see in it now?

  Henry said, “The doctors are worried about putting you to sleep for so long. Your system didn’t respond the way they would like.”

  Outside a bank of clouds moved across the sun, casting the lake and hills into a weird, maroon twilight. Dust devils twirled off the road before beating themselves into nothingness in the rocks higher on the hills. If the wind uncovered a bizarre version of a cow’s skull, dry and leering, by the road, Elizabeth would not have been surprised. Nothing was right about the planet yet. Nothing was done.

  “I can’t stay here, Henry. I have to see it to the end.”

  Henry nodded, but before he put the truck in gear to take them back to Laputa, he faced her. “Do not try to change me again as we sleep. Do not, ever, be so impertinent again.”

  For a second, Elizabeth thought she saw hatred there, just a glimpse that flashed in the back of his dark eyes, and she respected it.

  But two weeks later, when it came time to sleep, she met with the doctors. She gave orders. Just a touch, a tweak, a fine tuning. Henry wouldn’t mind, she thought, if he loved her like she knew he did, he wouldn’t mind at all.

  In the six-century dream, Elizabeth, watched the rain from comets covering Venus. The water ice started beyond Neptune’s orbit, like ghostly icebergs drifting in space so distant that the sun was merely a bright star among other stars. Gently nudged, they began their long journeys inward, finally, catastrophically for them, exploding into Venus’s atmosphere, contributing water to a planet long without.

  Rain fell. It fell in spurts, in squalls, in flurries, in long sizzling sheets that worked their way into cracks beneath the surface, nourishing the alien life planted there, until there came a time when the rain didn’t just fall on rock. Plants grew, their leaves upturned, catching the water as it fell, spreading it to roots.

  The rain eroded. Cut through stone. Carried silt. Formed rivulets, creeks, streams, rivers. Gathered in pools, ponds, lakes, seas. Evaporated, formed clouds, fell again.

  And then, finally, in the highest of high places, appeared the first snow.

  Elizabeth saw herself standing in Venus’s snow, the perfect crystals falling on her bare arms, one by one pausing for a moment as petite sculptures before melting. Snow cleared the dust and smelled crisp as a fresh apple. She ran through the white blanket, splashing her legs as she ran, looking for her brother. Where was he? This was water he could play in. This water wouldn’t harm him. She’d made it safe in her dream. At a lake’s edge, she stopped, looking both directions as far as she could, but he wasn’t there, just the silent snow falling onto the red-tinted water. Each snowflake, when it met the lake, glowed for a second, until the water’s surface itself provided the only light in the dream. Plenty of light to see him if he was there, but he wasn’t.

  She stood at the lake’s edge for centuries.

  “She’s awake.”

  Soft light fell all around, like snow. Time passed. Darkness. Light again. I’m under the snow, she thought. Darkness.

  “She’s awake.”

  Her arms were moved. Light was provided. A question was asked. A tube was pulled from her throat. She was hurt. All very passive. Darkness.

  “She’s awake.”

  Elizabeth forced her eyes open. An older man sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand. Beside him stood a medical technician in a lab coat. The man holding her hand had a haggard face. Worry lines across his forehead. A little baggy in the jowls. It wasn’t until she blinked her vision clear that she could see his eyes.

  “Henry?”

  He mouthed a silent, “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  He patted the top of her hand. “Six hundred years.”

  She tried to sit up. Before she was halfway, though, her calves cramped.

  “Probably easier to lay still right now,” Henry said. “The doctors here have some wonderful treatments. Since you’ve made it this far, you should be up soon.”

  Breathing softly, Elizabeth considered what he said for a moment. “There was a doubt?”

  “Big one for a long time.”

  The ache in her legs dwindled to a dim reminder, no worse than the one she felt in her neck and back and chest. She squeezed his hand. “Henry, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “You can take care of her now,” he said to the lab-coated man.

  For the next two days, doctors came and went. They wheeled her from one examining room to the next. Most of the time she couldn’t tell what they were doing. Strange instruments. Peculiar instructions. Doctors nodding to each other over results that didn’t make sense to her. Even their conversation confused her, speaking with a dialect too thick for her to decipher. Although she did have one moment of relief when one asked her to stick out her tongue and say, “Ahh.” The tongue depressor even appeared to be made from wood.

  They weren’t subservient, however. Brisk, efficient and friendly, but not servile. When she saw Henry again, she asked him about it. He met her in a sitting room where other patients sat reading or visiting quietly. The medical techs insisted she stay in a wheelchair, although she walked quite well in a physical therapy session earlier in the day.

  “All that I’ve learned from our strange journey, Elizabeth, is that time changes everything. You’re not a religion anymore. Actually, now you’re kind of a curiosity. I expect someone from the history guild will want to talk with you. Marvelous opportunity, you know, to actually chat face to face with the Elizabeth Audrey.”

  Something in the way he said it caught her ear. “What about my holdings? What about the corporations?”

  Henry covered her hand with his own. “Gone, I’m afraid. Long, long gone now.”

  The tears came unbidden. She thought of herself as a strong person. Finally, she shook the tremors off and dried her face. “We need to get to work then to get it back. How close are we to finishing the project?”

  Henry smiled. She’d always liked his eyes, but now the years in his expression set them off beautifully. “I’ll let you judge for yourself.”

  When he stood, a medical tech who had been waiting a few seats away, rushed over to help.

 
“That’s okay. I’ll take her,” Henry said.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the tech. “I’ll be close if you need me.”

  Elizabeth looked from the tech to Henry and back again. She recognized a power order when she saw one. “How old are you Henry? How long have you been awake this time?”

  He turned her chair toward the exit and began rolling her toward the door. “Twenty-two years. I’m sixty-two now.”

  The door opened into a wide space. A ceiling a hundred feet above enclosed the multiple levels and balconies she saw on the other side. Pedestrians walked purposefully to and fro.

  “What is this, a mall?”

  “More like a business park, but you’ve got the right idea.”

  A pair of woman dressed in dark, functional leather longcoats walked past them. One laughed at something the other said. Pale clean circles surrounded their eyes in faces that were uniformly filthy.

  “Prospectors do a lot of trading here,” said Henry, as way of explanation.

  He wheeled her to a garage a level lower and helped her into a car. This one didn’t appear nearly as heavy as the truck she’d ridden in with him what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “It’s time for you to see Venus in its glory,” said Henry.

  A half hour later he parked the car on what might have been the same hill he’d taken her to before, but now the burgundy sun rested low on the opposite horizon, and where before the landscape was marked by wind, rock and water, plants grew everywhere. Thick-stemmed vines clung to the rocks beside the road. Low bushes dotted the slope to the water’s edge. Here and there, short pine-looking trees poked from the soil, their trunks all leaning the same way and their branches pointing away from the lake. And there was color everywhere. Not only were there the gray and black rocks she remembered, but also tans and browns and yellows. Across the face of the hill to their left, a copper sheen caught the sun, and on the hill to their right, the mossy clumps growing between the rough stones were a vibrant blue.

  But no heather covered the hills. Where she imagined a world with waterfalls, there was only sharp-edged stone. Where she hoped for soft yellow light on fields of flowers, there was a red sun, bloat as a toad on the horizon. She saw a rough land.

  A figure dressed in a leather longcoat, goggles covering the eyes, walked past their car, saw Henry and tipped his leather hat as he continued on toward the lake where a small complex of buildings serviced two long docks and a dozen moored boats.

  Elizabeth tried to contain her disappointment. “This is not even close to what I worked so hard for. I wanted a world that was what Earth should have been, what it could have been if we hadn’t ruined it. Venus could have been paradise!” The outburst left her short of breath. In the car’s confines, her breathing sounded loud and harsh. “I had a brother…”

  “You were an only child.” Henry sounded quizzical.

  “No, I…” Panic rose in Elizabeth’s throat. She did have a brother, didn’t she? It took a second for her to sort it out for herself. A thousand years of dreaming could feel more convincing than a few decades of reality.

  “We have to get out of here. Take me back.”

  “Wait,” said Henry. He reclined his seat a little before folding his hands across his chest. He watched the sun setting on the lake’s other side. Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, her heart thudding hard.

  The sun slipped deeper into the hills behind the lake. Elizabeth relaxed. Could she get the money back again? She knew no one. The game was surely different now. A wind scurried across the water, rocked the boats, and then rushed up the road to toss sand against the car. Shadows lengthened. She felt so tired, so truly, truly old.

  “You know,” Harry said, “I talked to the doctors before I went to sleep the last time. It took considerable persuasion on my part, but I discovered you’d told them to work on me again. For a while, I thought the best action would be to go to your bed and kick out the plug. It was tempting.”

  Henry didn’t move while he spoke. His hands stayed still as he watched the setting sun.

  Elizabeth floundered for a moment, unsure of how to reply. When they’d started this project a month ago (“No, a thousand years ago,” she thought), he would have never spoken to her like this, and she would have had no trouble telling him what she thought, but this wasn’t the same Henry, not by any measure. “I’m sorry, Henry. I didn’t think you would mind, really. They were changes for your own good.”

  “I loved you once, but you have a mean sense of perfection, Eliza.”

  The sun’s last glimmer dropped out of sight. “Watch now,” he said. The horizon glowed like a campfire coal, then, as sudden as a sunset can be sudden, low clouds that had been invisible until now picked up red edges, their middles pulsating cherry gold, and the air from the horizon line all the way to nearly directly overhead turned a deep purple with scarlet streaks, changing shades even as she realized they were there.

  A half hour later, still in silence, they watched. Stars appeared in the moonless sky. A boat left the quay, trailing a bioluminescent streak behind it.

  Elizabeth found she was crying again. “My, god, it’s beautiful, Henry, but it’s not what I was trying to make. It’s not better than Earth.”

  “It’s Venus,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be better.”

  By now, night had completely fallen. There were no board room meetings to attend. No calls to make. No projects to shepherd to success. Elizabeth felt very small sitting in the car with Henry. Her muscles ached. She suspected she would never be physically as capable as she once was. A thousand years of long sleep had taken their toll.

  “What about you, Henry. You said you loved me once. Will you stay with me?”

  She couldn’t tell in the dark if he turned to look at her or not.

  “You couldn’t shape me into what you wanted either.”

  He started the car, which turned on the dashboard controls, but made no noise. The light revealed his hands on the wheel.

  “My days of shaping are done, Henry.”

  He drove them the long way home, over hills and around the lake. They didn’t speak. Neither knew what to say to the other, yet.

  DIFFERENT WORLDS

  Ten-year-old Jenny crossed the street first, staying low until she reached the broken wall and had to clamber over. Robbie cleared the rubble in one clean leap, then looked at her, eyes wide, panting, ready for the next adventure. Then his ears flicked up, and he cocked his head to one side. His tail quit wagging. Jenny watched closely. He was her early warning system.

  In a moment, from up the street, came a familiar hum. “Don’t bark,” she whispered. If they caught her, all would be lost: Robbie, her dad, herself.

  Heart in her throat, she stood. Visible above the broken rooftops a block away, the top of one of the alien’s vehicles lumbered toward them, its legs moving. Across the street, Dad peeked through the busted door. She waved her hand in a frantic stop sign.

  “Don’t come, Dad. Don’t come,” she mouthed.

  For a second he paused as if he didn’t understand, and Jenny had a vision of him wandering into the street in clear view. Earlier in the day he’d walked off, talking to himself when she found him. “It’s a states’ rights issue. Just like the old South,” he had been saying. She’d held his hand as she led him away from the open where he could be spotted so easily.

  This time, though, he nodded, then dropped out of sight.

  Jenny knelt, holding Robbie. The dog pressed a wet nose under her chin and licked her once. “You’re safe with me. They won’t get you,” she said.

  The house had no roof, and the sun was a light spot, low in the smoke-filled sky. Jenny crawled to the shattered frame where the picture window had once been. Grit and ash permeated the carpet, itching at her palms; the air tasted oily in the back of her throat, and it burned her nose to breathe. From the window, she could see smoke rising from several ruined houses, but no flame.

  The humming grew louder.

 
; Jenny pushed back out of sight, then drew herself in tightly. I’m a little stone, she thought. They can’t see me if I’m just a little stone.

  The alien craft, with glassy-eyed monitors gyrating this way and that, stepped between her and her father. Jenny stared through a crack in the wall. None of their vessels looked right. They were too broad at the top, inverted pyramids slapped together with wrinkled metal, supported by six spindly legs. They should tip over.

  “Don’t be scared,” she murmured. The vessel stopped. It lowered itself until its narrow base almost touched the street, while its mirrored legs reached above its top, as if the machine had been modeled on a cricket. The metal eyes rotated in their sockets. Jenny trembled, holding the dog close.

  After a long moment, the machine stood tall and resumed its march down the street.

  Jenny peeked both ways, then beckoned Dad across. He stepped gingerly over glass shards on the sidewalk before crossing the asphalt, bent double, holding his book close.

  “It almost got us,” Dad said. “If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d have been in the street.” He squeezed the book to his chest.

  “No it didn’t. We just have to be careful.” But she couldn’t tell if he had heard. His focus, like it had been more and more over the last few days, was on some middle distance. Hardly ever on her.

  Dad cleared rotten sheet rock off the floor before sitting down on the carpet so stained that Jenny had no idea what color it had once been. He leaned against the remains of a couch, its stuffing bursting from a dozen places, oozing a mildewy, fetid smell. Robbie sniffed at it, decided there were no rats, then put his snout on his front paws.