Psi

 

"They got them all?" I can actually feel my eyes bulge. They're a pretty comprehensive team, bundling them up and carting them away should be virtually impossible. But, hmm. They do each have a weakness, and it's my fault.

And this person was delivering bad news that I had inadvertently helped create. 

"Yes, all! They were last seen loading your entire team into a jet..."

That's enough.

Find it.

Reaching out. Touching the energy, the order and the chaos. Donder's loud heartbeat, I can feel it even when he's unconscious, there he is. And Jet's, too. A few miles out and gaining altitude, but the plane is still in range. How shall I...?

One engine. Inhale it. All of it. Oh, that's nice. All that energy, mine. Which means...

A twin-engine aircraft losing one engine doesn't fall out of the sky...but no sane pilot continues with their original flight plan when that happens, either. They'll want to find the nearest safe landing zone and since they've only been in the air a few minutes, they'll probably want to come right back here. With the energy I stole, I can race them there and be ready. I can't fly like Jet can, but with the energy I absorbed I can ruuuuuuunnnn whoa, damn near overshot. Four miles goes by in a hurry when you're just one chick powered by half an airliner.

Here they come.

"Omega?" A civvie, a bystander. "What's going on?"

"There has been an emergency aboard that plane," I point, "and it's coming back here." Reach out and feel it. I really sucked a huge amount of potential out of its now-dead engine. It can't windmill back up because I pulled it right down to nearly absolute zero. I think I might have seized the engine with the violent temperature shift, but the point was to force the plane to come back. I'm not worried about price tags right now.

These asshats have my team. My team, the one I put together. I get to play with them, nobody else.

"What do you think you're going to do about it?" Almost insulting. That's right, Super Maid isn't supposed to be good in the conflict, just in the aftermath. After the heroes save the day, Omega comes last to do the sweeping up. Never mind that I'm present for the whole thing, siphoning off all the chaos for myself - don't notice that. Not important. Look at the guy with the thunder powers, watch the pretty girl flying. Be horrified by the eerie silence of Nightshade's darkness. Not a problem.

The jet's nearly here. I can feel them all now, even Nightshade and that's the scariest part. They're out cold. Not sure how that's working but if I had to guess I'd say it was a psy attack of some kind. They're all susceptible to that - even Nightshade. Because of me.

Feel around inside the cabin. Normies. Normies with guns, not a big deal when everyone is awake, especially Rocky. People shoot at Rocky, he just gets annoyed by the distraction. I think he can shrug off anything short of a main battle tank HE round. But they're all being held down by...ah.

There you are. Gotcha.

The League has been a force for more-or-less good ever since I founded it. I've pulled together these other capes - none of us actually wear capes because we took the Incredibles lesson to heart, but I remember reading it used as a borderline pejorative in a comic book once, and it sort of stuck in my head - to be a flashy bunch of good guys, which are my manna. They go around stopping bad guys but they're not the neatest bunch. Donder's thunder shout tends to do more than just stop the bad guys. Rocky is bulletproof, but he also isn't careful about ricochets. Jet,well...

Jet's just clumsy. I love her, she's so sweet and she flies so fast and damn if that outfit doesn't look good on her, but the poor thing will open up and discover that oops, no, that turn is just a bit too tight for her and she's not going to make...except yes she does. I've reached out to her and absorbed her excess energy. She slows right down and doesn't really feel it as acceleration because I've slowed her entire body down, all at once and nothing first. I'm still not sure where her power comes from but I can tell you that when she's rocketing around in a battle and not crashing into stuff, a fair bit of it is going into me.

And it feels so goddam good.

This is the part I don't tell people. Donder isn't focused. The thunder shout would level entire buildings instead of punching neat little holes, except I pull everything that he doesn't need into myself. Nobody notices - who notices an absence of sound? Jet's turning radius becomes something considerably less than the mile-plus she'd need at those speeds. She's a super, they just assume that she's super-agile. And Rocky would ricochet like firing bullets at a solid block of steel, except when ricochets bounce off him, their excess energy channels directly to me. Rocky's ricochets bounce about a centimeter and then just fall down, their kinetic energy completely gone.

This takes a bit of concentration but not too much. I usually do it like you listen for a specific sound. Anything above a certain threshold, I pull it to myself. That takes care of most of everything in an action zone, but I can also tune in on things like fires and electricity. Mostly I just stand around, keeping my channels open to pull it into myself and then when everything is over, I focus on and wipe out the worst chaos like fires and dust clouds. It doesn't impress people, and I let them keep that impression.

The plane has come to a stop. The normie bad guys are at the door. Holy cow, somebody just drove an air stair up to it, for Pete's sake... Reach out to that guy.

All righty. He'll stay right there. He'll get up again, too - promise.

The bad guys are pointing guns at me as I approach. I see their fingers tighten, and then they look confused. Okay, maybe both the guns did jam simultaneously, who knows? It's only Omega, she's not powerful, right? Of course not. Omega is the cleanup crew, Omega because she comes last, ha-ha, the token super whose superpower is making the wild energy stop. They just don't stop to think about the scope, about what "energy" really means.

Normie bad guy throws a punch. One punch. Don't feel a thing; I absorbed all its kinetic energy before it even landed. He could've tried to hit me with a baseball bat, hell, an entire baseball stadium. Only a little tingle from it. Normies don't do it for me anymore. But it's a nice tingle. More and more, a pleasant tickling like cat's whiskers. They're determined, I'll give them that much. Those were a lot of punches that didn't land.

The physical and emotional sensation of absorbing power is beyond describing. I've never been high but I've heard people try to describe a good one; I think this must be like that but with all the dials turned as high as they'll go, and then adding amps and turning them higher still. Absorbing Jet's speed so she doesn't pancake herself against a building is a fantastic buzz; pulling in an entire building fire is a surge of joy. They're my team because of what they do for me. You may have heard the term "drunk with power," but I have lived it and let me tell you, this team has a lot of power. And I have been highly intoxicated by them.

And this guy in the plane, this otherwise normie-looking guy with the hat, is somehow holding them all down. I feel him. I feel him trying to reach into me, to neutralize me, but this is the part nobody else knows: I have psy too and that's confounding his influence. He's put them all down like turning off a light, but I can do more than that.

I take super powers and turn them down when they're too super. Not a problem - like listening for a sound too loud. I can reach into someone like Rocky and install a block that prevents him overexerting himself - as strong as he is, Rocky could accidentally break himself in half. "Rocky" isn't just a name, it's also his makeup so putting a governor on him is actually doing him a big favor. And when Jet is going to be too far for me to watch over her overspeeding her agility, I can turn her down a bit. Just enough. But I can take other energies too. Kinetic is easy, and it's everywhere. I pulled a jet engine down to the barest edge of utter stillness, atomic inertness already. This is the thing that people know me for, for absorbing excess kinetic energy. And I'll admit that I enjoy it the most, for its visceral feedback.

And there's one thing that I can do, but just don't do, because I'm greedy. But for this guy, I'll do it. I can do more than reach out and take. I can reach in and put. Donder, for instance, is completely unaware that his thunder shout is as dangerous as it is, partly because he never goes full-bore unless I'm nearby. He doesn't know that he does that, but he does it because I programmed him to. They're all a little careless because that's how I made them, so there'd be some chaos for me to soak up in my lust for wild energy. They're all what they are, faults included, because of me. I made them. I could unmake them just as easily but I never ever would, because of what they do for me. Yes, I'm addicted...but I think I'm managing it.

The thing is, having done this with my team, having reached into them and placed blocks and preferences and tendencies, leaves them a little open to others with similar abilities. I did what I did to them for my own desires, and now Hat Guy has found the same door that I made and let himself in.

We'll see about that. 

Normie bad guys stop moving. I've stopped their blood flowing in their veins. Their nerve impulses too - electricity is simple once you realize it's just electrons moving from here to there except if I want their energy, they simply come to rest. All at once, I have shut them off like a light. The difference between me and Hat Guy is that I don't have to keep thinking about them to keep them down. They're down, and not going to get up again. It wasn't just quick, it was instant. From one vibration in the quantum heat of physical matter, to the next vibration not being there, everything stops. Their energy is mine. All of it.

And now I'm going to be generous.

Hat Guy yells something in a language I don't understand at all. It sounds like Polish but I can't be sure at all - a lot of those east European languages, I can't tell one from another. My own fault. And whatever he's saying, I don't want to hear it in any case. 

The energy of every jittering atom in the two normies, I pour into Hat Guy. There's quite a lot, too, since I took it all. It won't be enough to light him on fire, but it'll come close. And while I'm doing that, I take all of the energy from their nervous systems and let him have that, too. Him, I won't stop. I'll keep his networks working until something crucial melts.

So he'll feel every bit of the heat. Revel in it almost the way I do, except it's not good for him like it is for me. This is endless waves of sensation, inescapable. The body's senses turned beyond eleven, adding amps and turning it higher still. Feel it, you bastard. His heart is racing so fast it's almost a musical note. He would be screaming but I'm pulling away the energy in the air so there's nothing to hear. His ears don't get to hear anything but the crackling of his flesh as he contains the heat, all the heat, of three bodies in the volume of just one. All the potential of three nervous systems, funneled into one. As long as he lives, for the next few seconds, he's going to feel every bit of everything happening to him. You don't take my team.

pop

Ooh, there went an eye. Gross. Ah, he's stopped moving. Feel him. Hmm.

Anything left? Certainly nothing to take. His own heat, fading now. Chaotic heat. I could take it, but it has a bad taste now.

Nightshade is moving. His hold is completely gone. I don't feel him in her, nor in himself. I could even have let him have the whole team, but I have to have Nightshade. Nothing and no one is more important than her, and I can feel her now. Looks like there's nothing left in him then. Damn. I'm so furious I could kill him again, I wonder if I can restart him somehow...never tried that, could be int...

Shh.

Oh.

 Nightshade is inside me. I feel her, oh thank goodness. This is why she's here. She's so calm. Just a little bit of her stops me from becoming poisonous. I could really be Omega and bring everyone and everything to an end in an immense orgy of sensation, leaving the world an icy ball of silence...but Nightshade.

The eerie silence of Nightshade's darkness is so much more than that. It isn't just eerie - it's cool. Like a lake at night, and cooler the deeper you go. My stolen heat, all the kinetic energy and fear and rage and lust become echoing depths.  The shuddering relaxation after the wild orgy of power and sensation. Nightshade brings me down and tempers me so I won't immediately set forth to make it all happen again, bigger, more...all of this ravening delight and shrieking thrill for me. I can take it all at any time and absolutely will, except Nightshade.

I saved all of them because they're my team. My team. My source of joy and release and a positive-feedback hedonic treadmill with no speed limit. I saved my team because Nightshade is with them, and I saved Nightshade because she will save all the rest of you...

...from me.

Stepping Away From The Full Circle

 "What's the methane output here?" I had a finger on the chart table. It was approximately the center of the landfill, one of the older sections.

"Sniffer's showing about forty liters per hour. That's low but worth planting some probes."

"Any specific concentrating factors?"

"Yeah. There's two strata of pretty thoroughly densified clay at the ten meter mark but they're noncontiguous and there's a gap, so a standard array is going to miss a lot of it. Here," and she tapped her sleeve against mine, and the info she was looking at popped up as a thumbnail at the edge of my display. I poked a finger through it and it expanded.

"Okay. Line 'em up along the margins and we should get most of it."

"I think so. You need a spotter?"

"Nah. It looks pretty solid. Three hours to do the setting, two more for the plumbing. Where do you want it to go?"

"Send it to The Pig." The Pig is a giant retention bottle, about fifteen meters in diameter and forty meters long. At one end there's a protuberance with some access ports and, well, it looks like a nose. The whole thing is covered with insulation which is luridly pink. If this flow is right and we can get it all, it would take about twenty years for it to completely fill The Pig and that's only at atmospheric pressure, but there's an awful lot of other feeders flowing into The Pig. The feeders don't go in through the "nose," though. The Pig appears to be getting a, uh, large enema. There are other retention bottles but they're mostly smaller, not pink and don't have names.

"Done. Later," and I tapped a forefinger to the hardhat. Safety first, hardhats. Them's the rules.

The crawler is electric, powered by overhead lines. With care and not getting the umbilicals snagged on anything again and choosing your route carefully, you can get as much as much as four kilometers away from the base before the tension sensors lock out everything but Reverse. You could override the tension sensors of course, but why would you? Go about four more meters and the power cables pop, the crawler dies, and the supervisor gives you every flavor of Hell she can think of as she brings out the extenders. And the extenders, by design, will only power the Reverse motor.

Every now and then we find interesting stuff in the ancient landfills. Usually you expect that a couple hundred years of rot and rust will break down everything and that's the end of it, but not always. You'd be surprised what you can find. You go deep enough and there's no oxygen, precious little moisture filters down if they did the capping wrong, and there can be pockets of ancient junk. The landfills are constantly crawling with amateur archaeologists, none of them approved by the central office, and nobody runs them off. They're mostly harmless.

Well, there was that one guy but never mind him.

Sometimes, from the very deepest strata, you can unearth newspapers. Newspapers! I know what they are, but the notion of something as temporary as news being committed to paper is just boggling. And they did it every day. That's a LOT of paper. I do remember reading an unusual section of the paper that carried cartoons and puzzles. Some of the cartoons were just mystifying, but the puzzles were okay. Some words didn't make sense, I guess they just aren't used anymore. And in some places I tried to answer the clues with the correct word, but the word didn't fit. Maybe meanings shift over time. I guess they must. They're like modern crosswords like you can play on your sleeve, but on paper. Why would you even do that?

Four probes go in slick as a whistle. Eighteen meters or more of perforated steel pipe, topped with another four meters of solid pipe, and a nice big cap on top. The crawler vibrates like a massage chair as the probes go in. It can pound, it can twist, it can vibrate the probes for insertion. Vibrating is pretty consistently the most effective method but twisting can get you through some resistant layers. The tip of the probes is a drill point.

Do not use the pounding action for insertion. That's how you break probes. When it's difficult to remove a probe, that's when you use the pounder.

The fifth probe went in, but then it must have hit a pocket because the probe fell out of the driver, zoop! It just disappeared from view. And then the hole cratered.

When that happens you slap the direction lever into Reverse and floor it. Probe in the ground still stuck in the driver, tension sensors already in the red, whatever. Doesn't matter. Floor it. You don't want to be there when the crater's edges propagate. And you have a hand on the door handle, ready to bail out if it looks like the crawler's going in.

See, what people don't realize about landfills is that they're largely airtight when looked at from the bottom. You wouldn't think so to look at them but they certainly are , especially as you go further down. Gases build up pressure as the materials decompose and they can build up big bubbles, caverns even, with nothing in them but methane. The probes usually provide a good enough seal that there isn't a catastrophic blowout, but it happens. And sometimes the pressure is low enough that a probe breaking through doesn't cause a blowout, but a collapse. The material around the probe falls into the cavity, and then more, and more, and you can see how this can be bad. If you're on a big cavity, the entire crawler can fall into a meters-deep, even tens-of-meters-deep hole. If the fall doesn't kill you, the methane atmosphere might.

Assuming you don't blow up. That's a possibility too.

This collapse isn't too bad. I've seen worse, lots worse. But I've got to retrieve the probe.

The crawler on any given day appears to be made mostly of rope. Or snakes. Or tentacles. There's the spool for the main power leads leading back to the catenary sled, there's the other spool for running feeders back to the tank farm, there's the other other spool for hydraulic lines feeding the driver, there's the other other other spool...you get the idea. The crawler appears to be a way for a rack of giant needles and lots of thread to get around.

One of those spools has a lot of good rope for holding a person, and another has a couple hundred meters of breathing hose. Because this isn't the first time a probe has disappeared into the ground, and it isn't the first time the egads cable has broken or popped off, and it isn't the first time some poor bastard - hello, that would be me - has to go down there and attach another line to pull the probe back up.

Call it in. Safety first. "Angie."

"Yo." I've heard it rumored that Angie sleeps with her radio close to her ear, I haven't yet experienced a moment when she didn't respond promptly. It's reassuring, actually. You want the person in charge to respond quickly when you need them.

"Dropped a probe. Looks like the hole cratered a bit but I can save it. It's about three meters across, a two-ring shield ought to cover it well enough."

"Need a hand?"

"Oh yeah. I need a handler topside at the least. A spotter wouldn't be a bad idea either. Who've you got?"

"Well, just me. Leo's on his lunch break and you know how he gets if you try to step on his break. Teela is at the far side and wrapping up an array connection so she's got enough to do."

"Well, come on then. We can do it without the spotter. I'm roping up and I'll be ready to drop by the time you get here. The hole's open so mask up."

"Copy."

And I was ready. The harness is part of the coveralls, so it's just a matter of routing the manrope over the driver's auxiliary sheaves and clipping the primary and secondary carabiners to my outfit, purging the breathing gear, and holding my breath to make the breather connection.

When you're on the breathing gear, every inhalation smells and tastes like 200 meters of rubber hose because, well, that's what it's coming from.

Angie's canopy came over the nearest ridge before her crawler and then, finally, her face. As specified, masked.

The e-masks are just for emergencies. They'll give you about five minutes' worth of oxygen and rebreathing - it's really only about one minutes' oxygen, and a scrubber to capture your CO2 and give your leftover oxygen back to you. Even walking, five minutes' of breathing will get you a pretty good distance away from an environmental hazard. If you know what direction the wind is going, it's plenty. She only needs to jump off her crawler and into mine, then she can take her mask off and set it to purge and recharge. There's good air inside the cab, of course.

Over the hiss of the hosed mask from my crawler, I can hear her voice from the radio. "Okay. I'm in. I can see your connections from here, you look good."

"Damn right I look good."

"Not good enough to turn me on to boys, Billy. I'm taking up your slack," and I could feel the coveralls cinch up under my arms and groin, never a pleasant sensation. "Here's the cable."

The loose end of the cable dangled over the crater. I slapped a mangle hook on it, flipped its first latch over and wound the cable around the pegs and tightened down the second catch. It's not as good a proper swaged connection but it's tough enough to lift three probes at once, and in the field it's what you have time and equipment for.

"Okay. Air's good. Cable's ready. Lift away."

This is always the scary part. When your weight comes completely off your feet, if you're not directly under the lift, you swing. Having the cable in my hand gives me a way to manage some torque, so I won't be spinning around.

"Whoopsie!" Letting the cable slide a bit back and forth through my glove quickly damps the oscillations. "Okay, I'm good. Lower away."

"Down you go." She's always conservative with lowering rates. Leo will drop you as fast as an elevator, Angie lowers you about as fast as you go on your own feet, going down stairs. "Anything?"

"Smells like rubber hose down here."

I go down for nearly thirty seconds.

"Whoa. Visual." My descent stopped. "What happened?"

"You said, 'whoa.' I whoa'ed."

"My bad." I estimated. "Give me about another three meters, please."

"How's your clearance?"

"It's a little close but not bad. Any closer and I'd want the borehole box." Strictly speaking we were in gross violation of established safe practice, going down without a box to support the sides of the hole against further collapse. It's such a huge pain in the ass to deploy, it takes forever and a crew of another six guys to run it properly. The standard wisdom is that once a hole has collapsed, it's probably done collapsing for at least the next little while so if you don't disturb the sides you should be good.

For what it's worth that "standard wisdom" has served me so far, but it's also let a lot of people down. No, they aren't around to comment on how it went wrong.

But anyway, I'm here now. "Angie, I've got liquid down here."

"Water."

"Uh...no?"

"Leakage?" There's all kinds of things in landfills and some of the stuff that leaks out of what got thrown away - historical peoples were insanely wasteful - can be pretty gross. "Shmoo?"

"Shmoo" is the catch-all term we use to describe the liquefied biological goo that is left when enough dead things decompose and their moisture cannot evaporate away. It's pretty gross.

"No...I think? Hang on." I clipped the mangle hook to the top of the probe and gave it a yank. It didn't pop loose. I pulled hanky out of my pocket. "Give me another two meters, please." There was a hum through the cable and the level of the liquid rose to meet me as the rest of the tunnel slid up past my hardhat's light. I could just barely dip the far corner of the hanky into the liquid surface. "Okay, I think I have a sample. Lift away."

Forty-five seconds later I was on the surface again, and five minutes after that the probe was up too. We fitted a shield to the top of the probe, then expanded it with another width of ring, and lowered it back down. The edge of the ring settled onto the ground.

A few minutes later the sniffers reported that the methane levels had dropped to their usual background levels. Angie came out of the crawler's cab and picked up the hanky where I had dropped it next to the toolbox.

"So what is this stuff?"

"I think it's oil."

"Oil? After all this time? I though the reserves were dead. Too deep to bring up."

"I think it's new oil. I think this is oil from all the stuff living down there, eating up all the plastic."

"Think so?"

"It's all I have at this moment."

"Huh. So does that mean we could have another Oil Age?"

"No." I considered. "I mean, we could. But I don't think we can afford it. So no."

Angie looked at the hanky with its darkly stained corner. She smelled it carefully, and wrinkled her nose. "Stinks."

"We're in a landfill. Nothing here smells great."

She crumpled it up. "It's almost hard to believe that this nearly made this planet uninhabitable."

"Which part? The oil or the plastic?"

"Doesn't matter. Leave it down there." She looked around. "You want this back?"

"After where it's been? No."

"Need a hand hooking up?"

"No. I got this."

"Okay. Heading back."

Death and Dark

 

Death sat, twiddling his thoughts.  He would be twiddling his fingers, except Death didn’t think about fingers much. Thoughts, now – thoughts twiddled just fine.

Dark came wandering by, by herself as it happened.  Death had had an assignation with Dark’s sister Light just a few epochs ago, her endless energy melding with his infinite stillness that left both of them gasping and causing spacetime to flutter.  He had also had such encounters with Dark herself, but far less often.  When Death and Dark came together, they rattled the firmaments…and then the neighbors would complain.

Stars and planes cooled and slowed as they approached on the flow of time.  Some darkened and cooled completely, some faded away to irrelevance; some regained their light as they oozed past.  Dark sat beside Death and together they watched the slow motion twinkle of galaxies, sparks caught in amber. 

“I envy her, a little, you know.”

“I know.  I’m sorry for that.  But we’ll never stop.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to.  It feels so good, though, and I can feel part of myself wanting it again.  It’s just that it’s so disruptive.  Getting everything back in order is such a chore afterward.”

“Absolutely.  I just wish it lasted longer.”

“Eternity.  What a brief and miserable amount of time.”

Dark leaned into Death, and they kissed in an intermingling of intrinsic stillnesses.  Hardly a dark, dead star separated the lips neither of them thought about, a closeness that pulled them closer.

Death pulled Dark closer yet and they caressed like the lovers they had always been, sharing mutualities and synonyms as they observed the waning and waxing universes tiding past.  They sighed into each other until Dark gasped, “…not yet.”

“All right.”

But they held each other still, feeling desires and comfort, sharing endless time, being.

Precipice

 Where is she? I can't feel her as clearly as...ah.

"Natalie? Don't be alarmed."

She jumps a little anyway. Not the big jump, and she flails wildly to grab at the rail. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Death, sweetie."  I have had this conversation many, many times.

"Not funny."

"Not joking, luv. You looked around and made sure you were very alone, and you were right. Nobody saw you come up here, nobody sees you now. It's just you up here."

"And you?"

"And me, though it gets into some metaphysical hairsplitting if we start discussing where exactly in the world I am at any given moment. But we're sure you're here, and for now we'll agree that I'm here too. Okay?"

"...who are you, really?"

Many times, indeed. This conversation is a familiar one. "Do you want me to do the Grim Reaper face?"

"Um..." Natalie looks over the edge. It's a long way down, and rocks and crashing waves at the bottom. I know why she chose this location. "You're not Death."

I do the Grim Reaper face. Ebon robes, skeletal hands, a suggestion of a skull instead of a face, set deep into the yawning blackness of the cowl. It's a cliché but Natalie believes it when she sees it. If I had showed up this way she probably wouldn't have believed it, but changing before her eyes has the desired effect.

It always works.

Ah, yes. Grabbing the rail tighter but shying away. I can feel her mind becoming small. Her heart is racing, racing. She might soil herself, it's about forty-sixty at this point in the conversation. More of the men than the women, interestingly.

"Please relax, Natalie," I tell her as I change back. The Reaper face isn't good for talking, though it is excellent for sepulchral moaning. Gravitas with a vengeance, you could say. "I just want to talk to you."

"You're really Death." Her voice comes out in a strained whisper. This is a common symptom too. Her heart is going so fast, as if it's trying to get a few extra beats in while it still has time.  Between fast breathing and terror-tightened vocal cords, it's hard to talk.  Sometimes screaming helps, just an animal howl of mortal fear.  Letting some of it out really does make a difference.

"...shh. Just relax. Slow down." I don't reach toward her. Never reach toward them. But I do approach the rail and carefully clamber over it. Now we're on the far side, the dangerous side - dangerous to one of us - together. "This is a beautiful place." And we stand there together for a few minutes. Finally I shift myself and climb up to sit on the railing. This is more comfortable. The sun is making its way down the sky, quadrillions of busy little hydrogen atoms moshing furiously into each other all willy-nilly. At one time I attended those deaths but gave it up. The sudden rebirth into helium rendered it pointless, and the atoms didn't appreciate it anyway. They find their own way. Everybody does, of course. I just attend to those who are...stuck. And some others, too, who aren't stuck but are also ahead of schedule.  Like today.

Her mind is becoming large again. Some of the terror has faded, as it usually does.

"You look...kind of like my mom."

"Do I? Is that good?" Pat question, of course.

"Yeah." Long, almost sobbing sigh. "I really miss her." And that's why it's pat. Mostly people want to see me as something good or, at worst, merely neutral. There have been many times I was a dog and even quite a few times I was a cat. It turns out you can say a lot with a well-timed purr and a few tail swishes. "I'm just so scared. I'm sick of being scared. I'm sick of being sad."

"Coming to me will end that," I agree. "But if you do, you don't get to become more than what you are right now."

"What?"

"Death is the least important thing this life will ever do."

"...least important?"

"Everything you have experienced so far has brought you to this point. If you choose to end this life, then that was all that all of that effort achieved. And because nobody gets out alive, this life will come to an end eventually regardless. I know you're sad and sick and scared but if you walk away from this place today, I know for a fact that some of your fear and sadness will be gone forever."

She looks very thoughtful at that. We watch the sun reach for the horizon. This is a beautiful place. The view is breathtaking, and coming from me that really means something. "What do you mean?"

"You will have looked Death in the face, and lived to tell the tale. And then your life will go on, and you may achieve more, help more, love more. Eventually this life will come to the end that must come, but it will have touched more lives along the way. It will have shared and shaped the light that touches others. Die now, and those potentials die with you.  The point of life is living, you see."

"Potentials." It's a question.

"Nothing is certain."

"Except you. And taxes."

"Actually, taxes are even more certain. You only die once."

She laughes, merrily but a little rueful too. It's a lovely sound, ending too soon. "You took my mom. You look like her, that's cruel."

"I did take her. She was desperately hurt. The pain was awful. She was glad to see me."

Natalie weeps. It passes. The sun is floating on the ocean. "I miss her so much!"

"Who will miss you? Don't answer. But know that there are many answers to that. Dying hurts..."

She looks alarmed. "Does it hurt?"                                             

"Dying?  For you, when you're the one? No.  The bit of life leading up to it can, sometimes.  Trying to die and failing, that does hurt and countless people have called out to me, too often in vain or too late. Capricious luck and fate toy with lives, sometimes cruelly. I promise the cruelty isn't intentional. Luck has no intent at all. But dying, however long it takes to get there, brings pain to an end and what's left is all of us together."

This can be a difficult part of the conversation. Natalie has released the rail and is standing free, swaying a little in the gentle breezes coming ashore. "Pain to an end," she repeats. She sways. "Together...?"

"Together, yes. Not like this. Not discrete bodies and minds. What makes you you is what makes us us, once the you has been left behind. It's difficult to describe in human terms. It's beautiful. This glorious sunset is a single grain of sand on a dreary beach compared to what lies beyond me. But my darling..."

She sways. Gentle breezes. The sun is slowly submerging into a vast, warm bath. "Mm?"

"I'm not here for you."

"Mm?"

"If you take the next step, I am not here for you. I am here for a small fish and an even smaller crab, but not for you." She sways. "I won't be here for you for a long, long time."

She sways. The sun is reddening, a dome of fire upon the sea. Suddenly her eyes fly open. "What?" And she snatches the rail, jerking to it, her peaceful ease replaced by abrupt awareness. "Do you mean..."

"I do."

Natalie nearly vomits with fear, clutching the rail. She still hasn't wet herself. Like I said, usually it's the men.

I turn around and hop down from the rail, walking toward the rising night. A few steps away I turn back to her. "Come over here, sweetie."

Jerkily, she lurches up and over the rail, trying hard not to run away from the edge as if it were going to chase her if she did.

Don't reach for her.

She comes all the way, all the way, reaches for and takes my hand. O my darling. You beautiful child. You bold, wondrous creature.

She sucks in a breath. Her heart is almost normal. The fear of the cliff edge has faded but a new
apprehension has replaced it. "Did I just..."

"No." Her hands are so warm. So alive. "Never fear me again. When we meet again, remember that we're friends. Until then, there are many lives that may reach out to you for help, as you reached out to me. You didn't want me to take you as what I am, you wanted help and comfort. Give the hearts and minds that need that a chance to find you."

She's still holding my hand. "You look like my mom."

Now is the time, and I embrace her. She weeps, quietly, to hold me. "I know, darling. She loves you. We want you to know that. The love goes on." Stroking her hair, feeling her heart beat against me, the strength of her arms around me. "Never be afraid of me again. Okay?"

She lets go, reluctantly, wiping her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You're doing so well. I'm very proud of you."

The last of the sun slips beneath the sea. I watch it go, and almost wave.

"Thank you."

"You will be welcome."

Light, Dark and Life*

Light mused at their predicament. This meant, of course, that Dark mused too but that was fine. She and Dark, sisters from before Time was even Time, had the occasional disagreement. These disagreements never amounted to much of significance but because Light and Dark were who they were, they naturally saw things...differently. From completely opposite perspectives in fact, and being who they were they could not always make their counterparts see things the same way as themselves. Sometimes there would be differences of opinion, statements of preference...the kinds of things that immeasurably old friends, deeply loving sisters might poke each other with, never intending harm, only sighing with muted frustration as the cosmos slowly oozed around them. But Life had happened by at the wrong moment and been offended by the taunts and sarcasm and in the odd way that Life had, had made them into a hybrid that now was musing at what funny turns Life could take.

And that meant that Life had overstepped her...bounds?

Can we really call them bounds? We are boundless after all.

I really don't understand the concept of bounds. We've talked about this.

Bounds are edges, limits. Like where I stop and you begin.

Seriously? That's silly. We're the same thing, just inverted.

I know, darling. I'm not really explaining this well, am I?

I don't suppose it really matters, does it? Life has her notions that existence is order, order is harmony, harmony is never disagreeing.

Never disagreeing is stillness in relation to each other, stillness is stagnation...

And stagnation is Death.

You called?

There you are! Hello, darling. We haven't seen you lately.

I have been around. You two look different. In fact you look a bit less than two, come to think of it.

Yes, Death, your silly cousin mushed us together and made us neither light nor dark. In this peculiar twilight grayness, we are Dim.

That sounds a bit unflattering.

Yes, indeed. We're not thrilled with it.

Would you like some help getting, um...unmushed?

Please. If you could be so kind.

All righty. Which of you would you like me to take this time?

I think me again, luv. It's not Dark's time yet. I die a little fairly often but when she goes it's a bit more of a to-do. We don't need to take such a big leap right now.

If Life does this again anytime soon, I might just go ahead and let Death have me, just to put her aside for a while. She gets a little too full of herself, Life does. Dark grumbled with a cold that frosted galaxies, slowing dark matter in the ephemeral wastes between planes to a languid slush. I just wish she would remember.

Life is fleeting, darling. She has only the present in front of her. She can't remember.

Death reached for the her that was both of them, not waiting nor warning because Death generally does neither, folding their immense gray beauty into his own cool silence, pulling them close and feeling their twoness, picking one out of the jarring harmony and wrapping it deeper into himself.

Briefly, he felt the unutterable heat and energy that was Light unfettered, stripped away from Dark and unbound by Life. It was an orgasm of infinite breadth. Death cherished these moments because it was only he that ever truly experienced them, he and Light alone.

He and Dark had had experiences comparable only in their magnitude. Where Light was a release beyond imagining, Dark was an innering, a collapse into the self, a silencing calm that brought even the jittering foam of reality to a smooth stillness, a catch of the breath before the universe was born anew.

Light inside him made Death exult with joy even as he snuffed her out. It hurt, but a hurt he sought for its own merits.

Dark sobbed. As Death pulled Light into himself, Dark felt her sister tear away. And now with Light gone from Dark and dead, Death held Dark close, whispering her name, cradling her soul. She wept, but not despairingly.  She had been here before. These things never took long.

Now?

Almost...

They held their breath, the expansion of the universe briefly put on hold.

I feel her...

From around the bend of continuity came a flash.

That was a good one! Light came up, trembling all over with ecstasy, stars twinkling in her eyes. We have to do that again sometime. She reached for Death to embrace him and share her joy, but he stayed her.

Don't! I can take only so much of you. He released Dark, who reached for her sister and marveled at their rediscovered dichotomy. They could have put themselves back to rights soon enough, but this was expedient and it did feel very, very good after all.

Light and Dark walked hand in hand and Death followed behind, fulfilled and joyful, and together they went looking for Life.

-end-

Unfinished story

 

In the far distance, silhouetted against the pale disc of the late evening sun, a lone figure stood up in a classic shooter’s stance: feet slightly apart, holding up a long device that aimed squarely at the wobbling vehicle.  The vehicle was heading toward a gap in the crater wall, one of three gaps.

“Harold.”  Ben keyed his comm and waited.  No response came, but he was certain Harold was listening.  After a few moments of silence, he decided to go all in.

“Harold, we have a sniper on the ridge.  He can hole that vehicle and probably injure or kill everyone inside it.  Give up now.”

That, at least, bought a response.  “Sniper, my ass.  No weapons on the manifest.  Nothing like weapons.”

“Doug, show him.  Take out something non-essential.”

Atop the ridge, the sniper fired his weapon in utter silence.  A searchlight on top of the vehicle exploded in similar silence a moment later.

Ben spoke into the comm again.  “That searchlight wasn’t all that big, Harold.  He hit it while you were moving.  If he wants to shoot something, he can shoot it.  Stop now.”

Abruptly, the vehicle stopped.  Ben exhaled quietly, unaware until this moment that he had been holding his breath, speaking in strained whispers.  He felt like screaming.

How in the hell had Harold got through the psychological tests?  This monomania was poison to the community.

A hatch in the side of the distant vehicle popped open and three people clambered out.  A pause, and two more followed.  The hatch closed, and presently the vehicle began moving away again.  The people, in their garish, brightly colored skinsuits, began hiking back toward town in the high, skipping steps typical of Martian pedestrians.  It wasn’t easy to make such a gait look contrite, but they did it.  From here, Ben couldn’t make out who was who.

“I can see him through the viewport.  I have a good line on him.  Can’t say what it might do going through the port, though.  Might deflect, might not have enough energy to stop him.”  Ben registered, distantly, the absence of the word kill.   Because that was what they were talking about, the projectile having enough energy, after passing through the thick material of the viewport, to also pass through Harold Ponsoon’s skull, brain, his self-aggrandizing plans, and out through the other side of his towering ego.  They only wanted to stop Harold, not kill him.  Right?

Right?

“Is he buttoned up?”

“Affirm.”  Harold was wearing a skinsuit, too.  Of course he was, the vehicle didn’t have an airlock.   Its interior had been open to the near-airlessness of Mars’ surface as the other occupants had left the vehicle.  It was just a pat question, something to throw out in the moment, to make it sound like he was gathering information, assembling data in order to come to a conclusion, the right conclusion.  If there could be a right conclusion to this scenario.

“Hold.”  If the shot deflected on its way through the viewport, Harold would not be incapacitated by a sudden loss of cabin pressure.  He’d probably be scared shitless, but not otherwise affected.  “How many rounds do you have?”

A totally different voice came on the comm channel now, a woman’s.  This was a party line, after all.  All the comms could talk to all the other comms, but for the moment Ben’s was prioritizing only a few.  Anyone else that had anything to say to him would have to leave a message.  “We only had time and materials for ten.  Doug used a couple for sighting in, I think.”

“Six.  I burned six.”  Doug’s voice had taken on a curiously flat tone.  “But I’m pretty confident with this thing, now.”

Three rounds remaining, now that one of only ten high-velocity bullets that had ever existed on the entire planet of Mars had been used to cold-bloodedly murder an innocent searchlight.

And damn Harold Ponsoon, they might need that searchlight someday.

“Losing the angle.”  Doug’s voice was flat, cold.  I wonder what the psych tests said about him? 

Harold would have heard Doug’s statement, of course.  Depending on how he set his comm, Harold might be able to hear everyone, every word.  Every curse, every plea, every exhortation.

He’d hear this, too.  “Let him go.”  Against the darkening sky, he saw the silhouetted sniper continue to hold the stance for a couple of seconds longer, holding the picture in the telescopic sight, then lower the weapon.  “He can’t go far.”

He had bluffed, Harold had called, and ultimately Ben had to fold.  The stakes were too high.  The searchlight was bad enough, but to risk destroying a priceless viewport and God only knew what other damage to the vehicle was too much.

The vehicle passed through the gap and disappeared from view.

 

Two weeks earlier

“I’ve just about straightened it all out.  The primary motor controls were cooked by that solar flare on the trip out and a lot of the monitoring, but I’ve converted everything over to either analog control or just manuals.  You’ll have to keep on your toes to run it, but it’s no worse than operating, say, a 20^th century automobile.  Anyone can do it.”

“Well, that’s good, Harold.  We’re needing that thing back on the line.”

“Dibs!”

Ben cast a baleful eye at Harold.  “You can’t call ‘dibs.’  There are far too many legitimate users who’ve had to double- and triple-up on the other Pioneers for you to have a joyride.”

Harold inexpertly hid an offended expression.  “I’m only joking.”