She curled her sticklike fingers, as if clawing for purchase— but there was nothing but air, blisteringly hot, a wind from Hades propelling her along past the freak show, haunted faces looking up, past the arcade, children agape, past the fortune teller’s tent, the line of suckers somehow parting just in time to permit her passage barely above their heads, farther and farther still, toward—
—toward the Ferris wheel, it rotating in one plane, she tumbling head over heels in a perpendicular plane.
She’d thought for sure that she would slam into the spokes of the Ferris wheel, knocking herself unconscious, but that didn’t happen. Instead, she found herself reaching out instinctively with her feet, and hanging like the bat she’d become from one of the spokes, and—
No.
No, he could not be that cruel, that wicked…
But, if he could not, who could be?
It was as though her ankles were pierced through, like Christ’s, and yet not like Christ’s, for hers were joined now by a small axle, a spindle upon which she hung, rotating along with the great wheel, always facing down, pointing head-first toward the ground.
She thought briefly of a butterfly, pinned on a collector’s sheet. He was a collector, too, of course…
The wheel rotated on, and she hung from it, a macabre bauble, with skeletal fingers that once had supported flight membranes now hanging limp, like the boughs of a dead wallow.
He had won, of course. Angela imagined he always won— and, she supposed, always would win. And, as she hung upside down, a pendant, she thought of her Poppa, and her fear of falling, and of failing him. No, things hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, but, still, this wasn’t so bad; the old fears were indeed dead.
The wheel continued to turn. She felt sure it would always turn; no fireman could cut her free, no ladder would ever reach her. She rather suspected that the devil did not leave fingerprints, that she—indeed, the whole damned wheel, and its other occupants, whom she caught only horrid glimpses of—could only be seen when the lighting was just so, when it was not quite dawn, or just past dusk, when you weren’t really looking.
She was up high now, the wheel having rotated her to her topmost position, the zenith of the cycle, the pinnacle of her punishment. Here, facing down, looking at the ground, at the hard, unrelenting earth—the crust over the underworld, the veneer over the furnace from which the wind that had propelled her along had doubtless come—here, it was frightening, for if the spindle broke, if her ankles slipped off the axle, an axle greased with her own blood, she would plummet face first to the hard, hard ground.
But that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t ever happen.
The wheel continued its rotation, with Angela always pointing down. At the nadir of the cycle she was indeed rather close to the ground, the ground that had shattered Carlo’s spine, the ground that she had feared for so long.
But then she started upward again.
Had Poppa seen any of it? Had Momma? Had Carlo looked up long enough to see her transformation, her fall, her flight, her capture? Or had it all happened somewhere outside of human perception; certainly, she, just nine when it had occurred, hadn’t seen anything unusual when Carlo fell—jumped—from the high wire.
Poppa would now have to do what he’d always feared—bring an outsider into the act, take on someone new to be the pinnacle of the pyramid.
She hoped whoever it was would look after Carlo.
The wheel took her down once more, bringing her close again to the ground.
It really was a comfort knowing that she was never going to hit it.
The Shoulders of Giants
I love to get out into the country to write, and most of this story was written at a cottage my wife and I had rented near Parry Sound, Ontario; during the same cottage trip, I wrote the outline for my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy of novels. The germ for this story came from Marshall T. Savage’s fascinating nonfiction book The Millennial Project, in which he said only a fool would set out for a long space voyage on a generation ship…
This story ended up being the lead piece in the anthology Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers. Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson are two of my closest friends in the Toronto SF-writing community; Star Colonies marked the first time any of us had appeared together in the same anthology with new (rather than reprint) stories, making it rather a special book for the three of us.
It seemed like only yesterday when I’d died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago. I wish the computer would just tell me, dammitall, but it was doubtless waiting until its sensors said I was sufficiently stable and alert. The irony was that my pulse was surely racing out of concern, forestalling it speaking to me. If this was an emergency, it should inform me, and if it wasn’t, it should let me relax.
Finally, the machine did speak in its crisp, feminine voice. “Hello, Toby. Welcome back to the world of the living.”
“Where—” I’d thought I’d spoken the word, but no sound had come out. I tried again. “Where are we?”
“Exactly where we should be: decelerating toward Soror.”
I felt myself calming down. “How is Ling?”
“She’s reviving, as well.”
“The others?”
“All forty-eight cryogenics chambers are functioning properly,” said the computer. “Everybody is apparently fine.”
That was good to hear, but it wasn’t surprising. We had four extra cryochambers; if one of the occupied ones had failed, Ling and I would have been awoken earlier to transfer the person within it into a spare. “What’s the date?”
“16 June 3296.”
I’d expected an answer like that, but it still took me back a bit. Twelve hundred years had elapsed since the blood had been siphoned out of my body and oxygenated antifreeze had been pumped in to replace it. We’d spent the first of those years accelerating, and presumably the last one decelerating, and the rest—
—the rest was spent coasting at our maximum velocity, 3,000 km/s, one percent of the speed of light. My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.
But both would agree that twelve hundred years and 11.9 light-years were equally staggering values. And now, here we were, decelerating in toward Tau Ceti, the closest sunlike star to Earth that wasn’t part of a multiple-star system. Of course, because of that, this star had been frequently examined by Earth’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But nothing had ever been detected; nary a peep.
I was feeling better minute by minute. My own blood, stored in bottles, had been returned to my body and was now coursing through my arteries, my veins, reanimating me.
We were going to make it.
Tau Ceti happened to be oriented with its north pole facing toward Sol; that meant that the technique developed late in the twentieth century to detect planetary systems based on subtle blueshifts and redshifts of a star tugged now closer, now farther away, was useless with it. Any wobble in Tau Ceti’s movements would be perpendicular, as seen from Earth, producing no Doppler effect. But eventually Earth-orbiting telescopes had been developed that were sensitive enough to detect the wobble visually, and—
It had been front-page news around the world: the first solar system seen by telescopes. Not inferred from stellar wobbles or spectral shifts, but actually seen. At least four planets could be made out orbiting Tau Ceti, and one of them—