Friday, February 22, 2013

Marswalker



Marswalker
by
Bobby Derie

The blue of night gave way to the murky pink of day, lit from behind by a sun four light minutes farther out than earth. Kim saw the black shadows dapple the strewn field, lumps of rust-brown nickel-iron weathering the Martian dawn, and finished her seated forward bend.

She found the murder at the base of the cliff. The suit was mostly gone, scavenged already, but the fall had ripped too much and bent the collar beyond repair. Kim turned it over and saw a square hole in a spiderweb of cracks, caked with something a couple shades darker than Martian dirt. The body would have been recycled, of course. There was a print near the head from a different make of boot from the rest of the dead man’s suit.

Six wheels bounced and rumbled on the dust and gravel behind her, the solar-powered cart loaded down with meteorite fragments. The road was pitted and worn, a well-traveled path between two walls of volcanic clay. At one bend the wall was soft; over a hundred gloved hands had been pressed there in passing over the years. Kim counted the number and shape of the fingers, picking out suit models she knew.

Mos Station was empty when Kim arrived; it was too early in the season for the Keter Group to arrive, too late for the Francesquois. The ground around it was warm, wet, and green-black from the bacteria it spewed. There were tracks in the soft mass around the vents, which had a week’s growth on them. Kim cleaned the vents and checked the filters before tapping a little water, air, and soy sauce. It was the only source of salt for a week in any direction.

There was a pile of stones at the fork in the road to Mons Jun-Eris. Kim added her own before moving on, for luck.

The wind had picked up and was howling by the time Kim caught up to the group of bargainers. They were camping in the lee of the hollowed hill that was going to be Zos Kia Station, before the stars fell; a dozen solar tents and lean-tos, a couple trackmounts with lifebeds. Their suits were old Russian things, clear shatterproof helms showing bald heads scraped clean every other day, to keep the lice down. Kim tried signage, hands and elbows moving as the red storm swirled, and they answered in the same. They shared water and salt.

Kim caught up with the tail end of the Francesquois at Go Station; a dozen thin-suits and square-faced helmets turning the soil over while the yeastmaster checked her gauges. They said there had been a mutation in the yeast and they had to clear the contamination and reseed the beds and make sure it took. The entire route depended on Go-yeast for their daily caloric intake in bread and booze. She hadn’t been the only traveler; another had gone ahead. They pointed out his tracks.
The wind had died down at night, and the little cart trundled on behind her. Soft sand had blown over the hardpacked road, filled in or blown away any tracks. Kim stretched as she meditated. The migration route led south, but there was a spur heading west around the Mons—a cut made by those who fell behind, and could spare the oxygen for hard exertion. A man might try that, if he were desperate. Kim placed five rocks in an arrow, to let anyone that might care know which way she was going, and took the spur.

The murderer had fallen into a sandtrap, a volcanic chamber collapsed and filled with soft blowing dust. Easy to mistake for just another valley between dunes. Especially if you were desperate. Kim fetched out the tether and tied herself off for the descent.

He’d asphyxiated, in the end. Oxygen bottle damn near zero, and from the settings he’d been on a low mix for a while. Kim pondered whether the nitrogen build-up had made him careless. Hauling the body up the slope again had cost her, and Kim knew she’d have to backtrack to Go Station and resupply. Her cart would carry the murderer, at least until she could find someone with a use for it.

The sun set, all pinks and pale purples as Kim moved into the downward dog, sipping salty water through the plastic nipple in her helmet. The blue star of Earth crept up above the edge of the horizon, small and far away.

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Friday, February 15, 2013

The Girl Who Conquered Hell



The Girl Who Conquered Hell
by
Bobby Derie

After eight years on earth and to the surprise of no one, even her mother, Ashleigh found herself on the outskirts of limbo, where the shades of mothers too sinful to see their departed children calmed the screams of the unbaptised. Ashleigh stood before the gates of hell, which were wrought in damnation’s flame from black pearl to mirror those other gates, and which was guarded by two hundred score angels and thrones in permanent camp and siege before the only official entrance to perdition.

A soft, bright voice seemed to call to her, and Ashleigh’s face twisted with all the mad, black fury of an eight year old girl, undiluted by subtlety or fine distinctions, unconstrained by wisdom or experience of the world. The girl’s shade vibrated, resonant with anger, and she turned her face from the light and strode boldly into hell.

There is a force of personality to the young which it tempered only with age, and beyond the gate of Dis this force is no less powerful or inexorable as gravity. Each step Ashleigh took brought her closer to hell, but each step also brought hell closer to her. The stream of shades thinned as their lesser sins were caught in the girl’s aura; the wings of angels scorched in the endless war greyed a little as she passed, and even the archangels cried strange, sweet tears as their burning gaze caught her between the shoulder blades, and Ashleigh carried a bit of their bright rage in her wake.

She stepped past the gate without looking back, the soft voice less than a whisper, but its memory drove her on like a nail in the skull. The breath of hell blew through the gate like an oven, a hot, poisonous exhalation that eroded spiritual substance, but she weathered through the gale, drawn on and in to the welcoming darkness.

On the other side of the gate, she paused for a moment, backlit against the gate, to survey the antechamber of hell. The light from heaven burned her; the soft young skin on the back of her body and limbs crisped to craggy charcoal, broken here and there by volcanic veins to show the fires burning within, but she did not scurry from it as the lesser shades did.

Now did Ashleigh meet her first demons, the wardens and jailors of that place, the idle speculators in souls and the merely cruel who wished to spend a while inflicting eternal torments, the artisans searching for raw materials, and the few free shades who had won the freedom of their souls, but not escaped their damnation. Perhaps they paled a little as she surveyed the sorry lot, demons of fire and shadow and cruelty, for all were older than the world and a little tired, and the greatest and angriest of them could not match the rage of an eight year old girl. She smiled, and perhaps a few of them shuddered. One warrior stared into her eyes, fingering the cruel barbed hook at its side, but its gaze slipped. Her eyes narrowed and darkened. Ashleigh drew in the hot air of hell in great gasps.

She screamed.
There are no insubstantial ghosts in hell, for it is as real a place as any world where pain and fire and darkness may exist, and hell is a realm of rock and ice, iron and foul waters, and the shades of hell are clothed in durable bodies which rend and tear and repair themselves. They must be durable, for the strength of a soul is not just in their limbs but their inner fire, the hate that drives men to become demons, the lust of succubi, which is sapped by sorrow and loss that twists and hollow them out until there is nothing left…and that nothing may last to eternity, or until the cold, bleak promise of forgiveness for those that would allow themselves to be forgiven, if they could ever forgive themselves.

Ashleigh’s scream heralded her rage. Unmitigated, heedless of the cracks that webbed her skin, she vented forth the full force of her young life on those wretches there. The blazing souls were extinguished as candles in a hurricane, then were lost and blown away as tiny sparks from the forge. The demons lasted longer, each a pillar of dark power, but the young girl’s anger was as the wind of ages, and they could do not but weather that sheer elemental power. They stood as statues as their outer forms crumbled away, the temporal masks discarded as her rage literally ate away at all the pretense and flaws that had brightened and shaped their darkness for millennia. Pillars of black rock crumbled, and the black earth of hell cracked as though itself wounded by Ashleigh’s rage and pain.

When she stopped, the demons were little more than molded stumps, black glassy statues in vague parody of their former shape, against which surface a stark face could sometimes be seen reflected, looking out from their dark prisons.

So Ashleigh walked through hell, and hell fled before her. The generals of hell at first tried to match her darkness with darkness, but the armies they sent were swept before her by the black wind that flew from her soul. Darkling spies reported the cruelties she inflicted on those shades she knew in life, who were chained and made to follow her. The Queen of Whores thought to find a shred of innocence in her, a crack in her shell to exploit and humble the girl and so sent succubi and incubi despoil her with terrible lusts, or let themselves be despoiled if it would ease her fury. Their carcasses were found nailed in obscene positions along the main avenue of hell, and the armies of the damned retreated before her.

Lucifer met Ashleigh on the steps to his imperial palace, a dark giant surrounded by the nimbus of a star. The trek through hell, the battles with his legions, had left their mark on her—skin the color of dark smoke, black scars where infernal blades or fire had kissed her, the wounds leaked ugly, thin black fluids that left streaks in the ash that clung to her naked body and hair. She carried a long-handled axe of black steel, the weapon of some great general fallen in battle, longer than she was tall. Lucifer drew out his own blade, a ghostly and beautiful thing, curved into a gentle crescent more reminiscent of a sickle than a sword.

She threw the axe at the fallen angel’s head; he batted it aside, but by then she was upon him. There was no grace to her combat, no bravado or ego, only a brutal and vicious skill that reminded Lucifer of nothing less than the ancient Erinyes. Ashleigh bit and clawed and howled and screamed, and the storm of her fury tore at the dark giant as much as her nails and teeth did. He could not grapple with her properly, as his size was to his disadvantage, and her force was all the more concentrated for her small body. So he struggled and scratched and stabbed, and they scrabbled on the steps of the palace while hell looked on. She found his unmentionables, and sought to unman him; she gouged at eyes, ears, nostrils and armpits, wherever a vulnerable spot might lie. It was the combat of a young girl, and all the millions of years of battle with his brother angels had not prepared Lucifer for this simple ferocity.

So finally he yielded. The black wings stooped and the black halo’s radiance grew dim, and he who had not bended knee since before the fall bent full at the waist, and presented his sword to that rebellious spirit that outshone his own.

Ashleigh took the blade in both hands, for it was taller than her, and marveled at it for a heartbeat – and then swung it back at the fallen angel full force, and his stately head rolled in the dirt of hell, blinking in surprise.

Now the throne of hell sits on a peak, the westmost and tallest hill in that city, which was laid on the bones of Azazel before the fall of man, and it was known as Golgotha, for there Azazel’s skull was laid, to stare forever at the gates of heaven, even as Lucifer’s palace went up over and around it, until the encroaching construction cut off even that sight. Ashleigh sits there now, and terrorizes hell with her fits of pique. Above the throne she has set the head of Lucifer on a pike.

She dresses his locks in painful braids with black ribbons, and painted his face like a whore, and pierced his ears with her own hands, and cut off his eyelids so he could no blink. Sometimes she sets it too look once more at that eternal glory evermore denied it, and else she turns it about so that Lucifer can see what has become of his kingdom. But never was there a tomboy that tortured an insect who was more cruel and disaffected than Ashleigh with her great plaything, and never did any of the devils in hell ever once think of rescue, for the long hours she spent at play with her toy were the only respite they had from that unholy terror, the girl who conquered hell.

###

Friday, February 8, 2013

Giantfall

Giantfall
by
Bobby Derie

Past the purple nebula it came, where a cluster of six dying stars shone their ruddy light through sedate clouds whose differing electrical potential can give birth to cosmic lightning, the ion trails of which persist for millenniums in slow diffusion, so that the strange light shadows a forest of ghostly smoke-signals, each remembering some ancient eruption of power, each greater in magnitude than the entire energy-usage of most civilizations.

For a few light-years it followed the broken remnants of a near-light speed spacecraft, slowly disintegrating into cosmic rays as it hurtles through the void, massive with its accumulated velocity. The insides as impenetrable a mystery as beyond the event horizon of a black hole, time so warped relative to its space that perhaps only centuries have passed within since it left its birth crèche. On one pale world, the long-suffering astronomers were rewarded when the forward shielding finally collapsed, giving partial view of the half-decayed pilot still strapped to its seat; an entire new discipline was born from the data they captured before the craft continued its journey past the range of their telescopes.

It arrived at last at a bare outcrop of stone, a quasi-moon cast when the planet it half-circles was first being born, the half-molten rock cast up from some furious eruption or dire impact, yet caught in the inexorable interplay of gravity, to forlornly circle its parent body. The quasi-moon was hot when it erupted, and the liquid mineral core cooled slowly beneath the crust as it spun through the heavens, crystallizing from a dozen seed points. At some point, the body had been strangely irradiated—perhaps nuclear testing, or some massive solar flare from the nearby star—which stripped away some of the outer crust, and laid bare the strange-colored unpolished gemstones, rippled rainbows and shadows caught within their radioactive facets.

It was not alone, and considered the other omnipotents.

There was a humanoid of easy grace, a hollow skin of unfathomably exotic stuff holding captive a nuclear fire, crafted in gentle curves and pendulous breasts, almost faceless. At first it believed that perhaps this power source was her, but on reflection It thought it more likely the intellect was contained within those few millimeters of skin. And there was a childlike titan with trifold symmetry, contained in a bubble of air that it no longer needed to breath; the nanite aura surrounding it had already begun reshaping the quasi-moon, etching bare rock into the semblance of a street beneath his bare feet, crafting gems into figurines of dead corporate presidents of the republic. Perhaps there was a third, on the edge of It’s perception, for in orbit of the quasi-moon was a mobile point of non-perception, an alien datapoint only visible for its distinct absence; weighing the possibilities It considered that if the third had not wished to be known, even this gap would not have been apparent, and thus classified it as probably non-hostile.

Silently, they regarded the giant.

Even at this distance, it stretched beyond sight, and sent strange echoes in other wavebands. Its scars alone could have engulfed continents; the broken and shattered remnants of planets trailed in its wake. The very presence of the giant in this system had terminally disrupted the equilibrium. Moons, asteroids, and dwarf planets pulled from their orbits; the upper layers of gas giants stripped to form a strange tail as it passed too close; planetary electromagnetic fields collapsed, shifted, and realigned as nature tried to balance the incursion of the giant’s own massive EM presence. The native life in the system probably collapsed after the first few decades as the giant’s coronus began to affect their worlds. It vaguely wondered if any of them had lived to stare at the sky and wonder at the death it heralded for them.

The first signal of the final stage was the sudden expansion of the datagap—the Third extending itself, presumably. Almost in response the woman-skin rippled and flowed, instruments erupting and forming until she looked caught within a matrix of burnished chrome. The titan only stared at the interface point, where the vast bulk of the giant brushed the other surface of the alien sun; his aura spawned smaller swarms that continued the xenoscaping without his conscious volition or direction.

This was what they had come to witness. To see if the giant had come here to die…or to feed.

###

Friday, February 1, 2013

Et in Arkham ego

Et in Arkham ego
by
Bobby Derie
We met at last in witch country. I found him on Flint Street, discoursing with a solid black cat of the old line, who might have been burned as a familiar in another century. He was cordial in his greetings rather than warm, but then I had known him only through his writings. As the midnight tom took his leave, we wandered down the tree-lined avenues of the Federal houses, and made our ambit of the old places. Down Charter Street to the Pickman House, and not far from there to pay our respects at the Memorial, and took a stroll through the lovely old boneyard. The Jonathan Corwin House was out of season, but we peeked through the windows at the museum, and he made light of how the house had been moved since last he saw it, and the gambrel roof which sheltered that terrible room had changed. Then we moved on.
There were other houses, and some museums still open. We paused for a moment before one display of an accused witch being pressed to death, the waxen head grimacing in frozen agony. He looked wistful at the sight, and I laid a penny on the rail next to his hand, which occasioned a smile.
“These poor unfortunates,” he said “They are only victims now. Yet once they were inspirations of holy terror, the devil’s lieutenants clothed in flesh, walking unseen among their neighbors. Then later they became initiates to that Old Religion, martyrs to a strange primeval faith handed down among secret families, the last of the virtuous pagans keeping alive the mysteries of the Horned God and the Triple Goddess, magicians whose powers came down from the stunted troglodyte race that had preceded true mankind, and which still dwelt for a little while in seclusion during the period of his dominance, and by rude custom joined with man, and so their alien powers might survive in strange, hybrid generations. Now we know better; Scratch seeded no serpents in this city on a hill, and the old Faith was no more than the daydreams of a silly woman. Yet look here,”
He pointed surreptitiously at two young women, in fishnets and tall heels, streaks of false silver in their hair, mass-market talismans on finger and wrist and breast. They were quiet, if not somber, and their eyes drank up the displays, and read every line of every placard.
“They acknowledge something greater than the weight of history, cloaked as it may be in hokum and mummery. They see these victims as their ancestors in the Craft, witches in truth if not in fact. For them, it is the story that is important. Not the people.”
So saying he slipped the penny in his pocket, and we went out into the sun once more.
We visited the graves then, the strange faded old tablets and obelisks in their uneven rows, smelled wet grass and new-turned earth, and joked of the ghouls’ larder left beneath the tumbled hills, where a consumptive virgin might be aged for a century before she was ripe enough for a refined palate. As the afternoon came to twilight we found a devil’s seat, as even in death some pour soul felt the need to contribute some small comfort to his fellow creatures, and I stopped to rest my weary legs, and fetch the vial from my pants pocket.
His eyes hardened at the sight, and I wondered at the story they used to tell of him in Brooklyn. He dropped an antique round of steel into my hand, that gleamed like silver in the darkness, with Liberty and One Cent on its face.
“Cancer.” I told him. “Of the pancreas. Not long ago, but the rates of recovery…”
He only nodded. “The illness is long, and painful?”
“Yes.” My voice fell as the word came out, like I had stifled a sigh.
We looked for Gallow’s Hill, but could not find it from where I sat and where he stood, and the light slowly failed us. There were no lamps here, only a pale sliver of moon and the aura of the city, which lit the horizon in a hazy glow.
“Where do we go, from here?”
“I can only speak for myself,” he said after a moment. “But I will walk down that path there, and out through the lichgate to witch-haunted streets with strange names, past houses with gabled roofs going slowly to ruin, torn down to make way for modern apartments to house the teeming multitudes, and along a dark river that drains into the sea. There are churches there older than this country, whose doors I never darken on a Sunday, but whose yards and burial grounds are well familiar to me. There is a campus there for the university, and a library that has received as gifts many old and strange books that I have learnt to read. It is a living place, where battles are fought in city chambers over raising up new buildings and razing others, to preserve a certain character about certain streets which have come to be beloved for the charm and quaintness that comes with age, and always there are those that come there as strangers, and fall in love with it, so they come back again and again, wishing they could stay.”
I laid the empty vial in the grass.
“I wish I could walk those streets with you.”
He smiled then, so like a cat in the darkness, like a piece of the night had come and bound itself to him forever.
“You already have, and will again.”
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