The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 7

  Off on a Starship

  William Barton

  Vivid, colorful, and packed with more Sense-of-Wonder evoking moments than most author’s trilogies, the story that follows sweeps us along with a young man who’s embarked on the greatest adventure of his (or anyone else’s) life, one as full of dangers, marvels, and enigmatic mysteries as any boy’s heart could yearn for—and a few surprises that even the most imaginative young man couldn’t have suspected were in store for him!

  William Barton was born in Boston in 1950 and currently resides in Durham, North Carolina. For most of his life, he has been an engineering technician, specializing in military and industrial technology. He was at one time employed by the Department of Defense, working on the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet, and is currently a freelance writer and computer consultant. His stories have appeared in Aboriginal SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Amazing, Interzone, Tomorrow, Full Spectrum, and other markets. His books include the novels Hunting On Kunderer, A Plague of All Cowards, Dark Sky Legion, When Heaven Fell, The Transmigration of Souls (which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award), and Acts of Conscience, and, in collaboration with Michael Capobianco, Iris, Fellow Traveler, and Alpha Centauri. His most recent novels are White Light, in collaboration with Michael Capobianco, and the solo novel, When We Were Real.

  It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?

  It was, oh, I guess the middle of November 1966, that night, maybe seven P.M., dark out, of course, cold and quiet. The sky over Woodbridge, Virginia, was flooded with stars, so many stars the black night, clear and crisp, had a vaguely lit-up quality to it, as if ever so slightly green. Maybe just the lights from the gas stations and little shopping centers lining Route 1, not far away.

  I was walking home alone from the Drug Fair in Fisher Shopping Center, up by the highway, where I’d read comic books and eaten two servings of ketchupy French fries, moping by myself. I’d stayed too long, reading all the way through the current Fantastic Four so I could put it back and not pay. I was supposed to have been home by six-thirty, so my mom could head out on her date.

  Out with some fat construction worker or another, some guy with beery breath and dirty hair, the sort of guy she’d been “seeing” (and I knew what was meant by that), one after another, in the two years since she’d run off my dad, leaving me home alone to look after my two little sisters, ages three and seven.

  I remember thinking how pissed off she was going to be.

  I was standing on the east rim of Dorvo Valley, looking down into the shadows, thinking about how really dark it was down there, an empty bowl of land, looking mysterious as ever. Murray and I named it that when we’d discovered it three years ago, maybe a half-mile of empty land, cleared of underbrush, surrounded by trees, called it after a place in the book we’d been trying to write back then, The Venusians, our answer to Barsoom, though we’d kind of given it up after Pirates of Venus came out.

  Murray. Prick. That was why I was at Drug Fair alone. There’d been a silence after I called his house, then his mother had said, “I’m sorry, Wally. Murray’s gone off with Larry again tonight. I don’t know when he’ll be home. I’ll tell him you called.”

  I felt hollow, remembering all the times we’d sat together at Drug Fair, reading comics for free, drinking cherry cokes and eating those ketchupy French fries. Remembered last summer, being here in Dorvo, the very last time we’d “played Venus” together, wielding our river-reed swords, lopping the sentient berry clusters from the Contac bushes we called Red Devils, laughing and pretending we’d fallen into a book. Our book.

  Murray’s dad was the one named them Contac bushes, telling us they were really ephedra, and that’s where the stuff in allergy medicines came from.

  But then school started, eleventh grade, and we’d met Larry. Larry, who was going steady with Susie. Pretty blonde Susie, who had a chunky girlfriend named Emily, who wore glasses.

  Something like this had happened before, when we were maybe ten or eleven, and Murray had joined Little League, telling me it would help him find his way as an “all-around boy.” This time, I think, the key word would be pussy, instead of baseball.

  I stood silent, looking out across the dark valley, the black silhouette of the woods beyond, above them, the fat golden spire of Our Lady of Angels Catholic Church, floodlit from below, where I’d been forced to go before my parents split up. In the Dorvo Valley mythos, on our wonderfully complete Venus, lost Venus, we’d called it the Temple of Venusia, and the city at its feet, no mere shopping center, but the Dorvo capitol, Angor, portmanteau’d kiddy-French Angel of Gold.

  I realized I’d better get going. Through the black woods, down the full length of Greenacre Drive, past Murray’s house, where his parents would be sitting, silent before the TV, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, across the creek, up Staggs Court to my furious, desperately horny mom.

  If I was lucky, she’d spend the night with whoever it was, and I wouldn’t have to lay in bed in the dark by myself, listening to their goings-on.

  I blew out a long breath, a long wisp of warm condensation flickering like a ghost in the bit of light from the sky full of stars, and stopped, eyes caught by some faint gleam from deep in the valley of the shadow. I felt my heart quicken, caught in a mythopoeic moment. Look, Murray. A cloud skimmer …!

  Yeah. Right. Where’s Murray now? In a dark movie theater somewhere, with his hand groping up a girl’s dress, like a real grown-up boy.

  But the gleam was there, really there, and, after another moment, I started walking down through the long grass, stumbling over Red Devils and weeds, skirting around holes I could barely see, but remembered from long familiarity with the place, night vision growing keener as I went down in the dark.

  Looking toward the phantom gleam, I thought to shade my eyes with one hand, occluding the Golden Angel, cutting off more light from the stars.

  Stopped walking.

  Thought, um, no.

  I looked away, blinking like a moron. Looked back.

  The flying saucer was a featureless disk, not quite sitting on the ground, maybe sixty feet across. The size of a house, anyway. Not shiny or it would’ve reflected more starlight. There were things in the deeper shadows underneath it, landing legs maybe, and other shadows, moving shadows, rustling in the brush nearby.

  Near me. Something started to squeeze in my chest.

  Something else started to tickle between my legs. A need to pee.

  I slowly walked the rest of the way down the hill, until I was standing under its rim. The moving shadows in the underbrush were things roughly the size and shape of land crabs, a little bigger maybe, with no claws, though I couldn’t make out what was there in their place.

  They seemed to be taking hold of the Red Devils, bending them down, pulling off the little berry clusters. What the hell would clawless land crabs want with Contac berries?

  Robots. In a comic book, these would be robots.

  Anyway, they seemed to be ignoring me.

  I felt unreal, the way you feel when you’ve taken two or three Contac capsules, or maybe drank an entire bottle of Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup.

  There was a long, narrow ramp projecting from the underside of the saucer, leading up to an opening in the hull, not dark inside, but lit up very dim indigo, perhaps the gleam I’d seen from the valley’s rim. I walked up to it, heart stuttering weirdly, walked up it and went inside.

  In movies, flying saucers have ray cannons, and they burn down your city. And in my head, I could hear Murray, jealous Murray, girl on his fingers forgotten, wondering where I’d gotten the fucking nerve.

  But I went inside anyway.

  It turned out, the thing was like the saucer-starship from The Day the Earth Stood Still. There was a curved corridor, one wall solid, the other lattice, wall sloping slightly inward. A little vertical row of lights here, beside something that looked like a door. Around the curve ….

/>   I caught my breath, holding stock-still, heart racing up my throat.

  Held still and wondered again at finding myself here.

  The thing didn’t look much like Gort from the movie. Not so featureless. Real joints at elbows, wrists, knees, hips, but there was nothing where it’s face should be either, just a silvery shield, a curved pentagonoid roughly the shape of an urban policeman’s badge, like the Boston metro badge my Uncle Al wore.

  I stood in front of it, looking up. No taller than my dad, so only an inch or two taller than me. Looking up has to be an illusion. It looked a little bit like the robots I used to draw as part of the Starover stories I once tried to write, the ones that filled the background of all those drawings I did, of hero Zoltan Tharkie, policeman Dexteran Kaelenn, and all the odds-and-sods villains they faced together.

  I remember Murray and I used to sit together at Drug Fair, tracing pictures from comic books and coloring books, filling in our own details, Tharkie and Kaelenn and the robots, Älendar and Raitearyón from Venus. I remember those two had had girlfriends, and …

  Stopped myself, shivering.

  I reached out and touched the thing.

  Cold. Motionless.

  My voice sounded rusty, as I whispered, “Klaatu, barada ….” Strangled off a fit of giggles with something like a sneeze. Patricia Neal, I remembered, couldn’t pronounce the words the same way as Michael Rennie, substituting Klattu, burodda in her quaint American drawl. Quit it! Jesus!

  Nothing.

  I turned away from the silvery phantasm, maybe nothing more than an empty suit of armor? Slid my fingers along the light panel. Just as in the movie, the door slipped open, and I went on through.

  “Ohhhhh …!”

  I could hardly recognize my own voice, shocky and faint.

  There was another corridor beyond the door, and its far wall was transparent, like heavy glass, or maybe Lucite. There was smoky yellow light in the room beyond, lots of water, things like ferns. Something in the steamy mist ….

  I put my nose to the warm glass, bug-eyed, remembering the scene from near the end of Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, maybe my favorite book from the series, where they finally get aboard the robot saucer sent by the Space Friends.

  Little dinosaurs. Little tyrannosaurs. Little brontosaurs. Little pteranodons winging through the mist.

  “Not quite a brontosaurus,” I told myself, voice quiet, but louder than a whisper. “Head’s too long and skinny. Not a diplodocus either. Nostrils in the wrong place.” There were other things moving back in the mist. Babies, maybe? Hatchlings? Would that be the right word?

  I walked on, slowly, going through another door, walking along another hallway. After a while, I began to wonder how they got all this space folded up into a flying saucer little enough to fit in Dorvo Valley.

  Another robot, yet another door, and I found myself in a curved room with big windows on the outside. Ob Deck, the voice in my head called it, pulling another word from another book, as I pressed to the glass, cold glass this time, looking out on greenish night.

  Dorvo Valley. Little land crab robots. Brilliant green light flooding up from the ground beyond the forest. Something odd. It isn’t that bright outside. Can’t be much more than eight P.M.

  Little frozen image of my mother.

  How long before she calls the police?

  Thought dismissed.

  What should I do?

  Get out of here! Run home. Call the cops yourself.

  I pictured that. Pictured them laughing at me as they hung up, as I turned to face my raging mother. You little bastard! she would say. Bob didn’t even wait for me.

  Pictured that other scenario. The cops come, we go to Dorvo Valley. Nothing, not even a circle of crushed vegetation. And, either way, I go to school in the morning. Word would get out, one way or another.

  The lights flickered suddenly, and a soft female voice said, “Rathan adun dahad, shai unkahan amaranalei.” More flickers. Outside, I could see the little land crabs were making their way downhill, dragging their loads of harvested Red Devils.

  Cold clamp in my bowels.

  I turned and ran, through the door, down one corridor, through the next door, up another, around a curve, back through …. Ob Deck! Turned back, found myself facing a faceless robot. Still motionless. Started to whimper, “Please ….” There was a rumbling whine from somewhere down below, spaceship’s structure shivering. The lights flickered again, the lady’s voice murmuring, “Ameoglath orris temthuil ag lat eotaeo.” More flicker. Something started to whine, far, far away, like the singsong moan of a Mannschenn drive.

  I felt my rectum turn watery on me, clenched hard to stop from shitting myself, and snarled, “That’s just a fucking story! Think! Do something, you friggin’ idiot!” As if my father’s words could help me now.

  I turned and looked out the window, just in time to see the ground under the saucer drop away. Suddenly, surrounding the dark woods, the map of Marumsco Village was picked out in streetlights. There was Greenacre Drive, where Murray’s parents would be finishing up their beer. Beyond the dark strip of the creek, halfway up Staggs Court, had to be the porch light of my house, where, by now, my mom would be about ready to kill me.

  It shrank to a splatter of light, surrounded by the rest of Woodbridge, little Occoquan off that way. I squashed my face to the glass, looking north, and was elated to see, from twenty-two miles away, you could still make out the lights of the Pentagon, could see the floodlit shape of the Capitol Dome, the yellowish spike of the Washington Monument.

  City lights everywhere I looked. Speckles and sparks and rivers of light, brighter and more numerous than the stars in the sky. I’d never flown on a plane at night before. I’d never …

  I felt my face grow cool.

  Watched the landscape shrink.

  Suddenly, light appeared in the west, like sunrise.

  No! I’m high enough up the sun is shining from where it’s still daytime!

  Turned toward the blue. On the horizon, the curved horizon, there was a band of blue, above it only black, sunlight washing away the stars.

  Curved?

  Bolt of realization.

  I can see the curvature of the Earth. That means … I shivered again. And then I wondered, briefly, if Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell were somewhere nearby, peering out through the tiny rendezvous windows of Gemini XII, watching my flying saucer rise.

  Whole Earth bulging up below now, looking for a moment like the pictures sent down from Gemini XI, which had gone all the way up to an 850 mile apogee. It turned to a gibbous blue world, getting smaller, then smaller still.

  Something flashed by, huge and yellow-gray.

  Moon! It’s the Moon!

  How fast?

  That was no more than a five minute trip.

  I tried to do the calculation in my head; couldn’t quite manage. I’d never been any good at math. A lot slower than the speed of light, anyway.