Water! He needed to get water from the sink.
He lost more seconds before he remembered the pump didn’t work without electricity.
His blanket! He could smother the flames.
He rushed scurrying rat-like through the tunnels to the Grotto.
Thrilling enough for you, Irwin?
He ripped the blankets free which started a minor avalanche. Coonts, Crichton, and Cussler fell on him in alphabetical order as he scrambled out of the collapsing tunnel like Harrison Ford with an armload of gold idol.
He took a breath and gagged. That was almost it. He started to panic. Trapped and without air his mind fragmented. He couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything more than the broken record skipping over the same moronic thought — Meep! Meep! He just stared as he watched the fire consume his living room. Yellow where the flames danced along the tops, orange where they bit deep into the pages, blue along the spines. And smoke churned across the ceiling, black as ink, rolling like a summer thunderhead.
A new thought arrived the way a car on ice is saved from going off a cliff by another car sliding on ice. I’m going to die! That one coherent estimation of the situation put Irwin’s feet back under him. He pressed the blanket to his face, fell flat to his belly, and shimmed like a snake working back toward the window, back toward the fire.
He was too late. The wind had spread the fire too far. Flames coursed up the Cliffs of Fiction — his living room a forest fire of Arthur C. Clark, David Eddings, Berry Malzberg, Mark Lawerence, and Raymond Fiest. Still he tried. He threw the blanket and himself upon the flames rolling as he tried to at least extinguish the floor, but the fire adored the neat stacks and raced up their heights.
Laying on his back, burned and choking, Irwin cried. The tears soothed his smoke filled eyes, but despite the brilliance of the growing inferno he couldn’t see anymore. Still, he knew where the shattered window was.
He couldn’t let them all go. Even if he couldn’t cross into that promised land with them, he had to save some. Irwin felt blindly for any book. His tortured fingers found a trade paperback and he threw it with a guess and a hope. He heard it bounce off the wall. He reached for another. He had no trouble finding candidates for escape. He just wished he could see — he’d hate to end up having only saved The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. What kind of world would that throw up in its wake? What kind of legacy?
Irwin couldn’t breathe anymore. It felt almost like drowning, something he’d almost accomplished in grade school and had allowed him to add hydrophobia to his list of fears. He was burning too. People always said that in a fire you’d pass out from asphyxiation before you’d actually burn, but that apparently didn’t apply to people trapped in a narrow, flaming canyon of paperbacks being fanned by a winter’s gale.
It didn’t hurt as much as he would have expected, which just meant he was finally succumbing to the smoke. He wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore except — he had a book in his hand. He felt the narrow spine. A paperback, one of the old ones he could tell by the semi-matte finish, the curled edges and the size. It was small. Not even two hundred pages. It didn’t have a chance but he gave it a flick anyway spinning it, using the spine the way a baseball pitcher uses the raised stitches.
It flew.
Irwin heard it flap, like wings on a bird, freed at last. He waited for it to strike the wall, or the ceiling. It didn’t. A perfect swish. Nothing but air.
And outside the wind howled, and wailed, wailed and howled.
The little house burned, a bright spot in an endless void of black. Snow hissed as it said hello to the now adult flame and the two did battle. Elements wrestling in an empty world that man had stepped out of. In the flicker of that fight, on its back in the snow lay a single book. The wind, now a spectator in a fight it helped provoke, brushed the pages that fanned out and closed again, fanned and closed, as if the whispering wind was trying to read the words there.
On the cover, a stylistic impression of flames was dominated by three numbers.
Four, five, one.
LIAM BALDWIN
Silver Sky
Liam Baldwin is 53, and is still waiting for the shiny, wonderful Future promised him as a kid to arrive. This is the 21st Century? He is married, has three kids and hates talking about himself in the third person.
Silver Sky is a love story at heart, but don’t hold that against it. It’s also a glimpse into the future where our fellow mammals work alongside us, but long held beliefs and dogma still hold sway.
It was midnight and the sky was silver. It shone from horizon to horizon in a single gleaming blue-white sheen. Beyond the mountains, a cobweb of ice gleamed; delicate, bright, brittle gossamers that spread, as they rose, fanning out and thinning to invisibility; at the zenith, a small, warm, fuzzy reddish blur, Earth’s shadow.
“My God…” Clara Letoza said, her voice small in the stillness of the night. Though she had worked on the Project all her professional life this was her first visit. The first time she had seen it. Allan had timed her first sight of the Sail perfectly, keeping her indoors, tied up with endless technical details, till the moment was right. He had waited till midnight, then suggested they take a break. “Let’s get some fresh air, take a stroll outside,” he had said casually. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Clara stood and stared upwards, gazing awestruck at this beautiful, sky-spanning wonder she had helped build. It was minutes before she spoke. “I’ve seen the simulations and I saw it from the ship as we docked. It was just a structure up there, vast, but still a construct… all beams and engineering and stresses. I never…” Reverentially, she said, “I never thought it would be so… so beautiful.”
“I never thought it would be finished,” said Allan.
She laughed, the moment gone. “You are a pessimist.”
“Maybe. But I’m also a politician. It’s part of my job as Coordinator to make sure—” He paused, looking past her at something far away. She followed his gaze. “What’s that?” he said, and pointed skyward to the south. Something bright. A fading flash. “What the hell was that?” he repeated.
They stared at the disappearing light till it was no more than a faint after-image.
“There’s another!” she said and pointed. “Off to the left! See it?” For a moment a sharp yellowy brightness lit the sky like summer lightning, before leaving an expanding, fading core at its centre. An explosion of some kind.
“And another!” Clara pointed again.
“What the hell?”
They stood looking at the fading lights.
“Whatever they were, they were a long way up,” Allan said.
“Big too, if we could see them from down here.”
“We need to get back inside.” His voice was cold.
It was three in the morning when communications with Top Side were finally re-established. They were in Allan’s office. Allan, coffee mug in hand, switched from one news channel to another in frustration; Clara, calm and composed, sifted through what little hard data they had and tried to relate it to a schematic model of the Sail. It had become clear, very quickly, that someone had tried to destroy the Sail with nuclear bombs. Five of them, in a coordinated attack. What no one knew was who had done it and how much damage had been caused.