“Is that my grandfather’s?”
The governor nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“It is,” she agreed. “This is the template to everything. It is.”
He let her dream, and then with a firm, stern voice, he said, “No.”
“No?” She looked again. “Why is it still wrapped in plastic? I’ve heard. My father told me. It was wrapped in plastic when Grandpa gave it to your father, and I think that’s his signature there.”
“It’s never been opened.”
“Did the governor use the flash-drives?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“Never.” And the new governor laughed. “I know the myth. But this is the truth: Years ago, my father showed me the sealed manuscript and the drives and everything. ‘That poor professor,’ he told me. ‘Dr. Hersh believed he had something of genuine value.’ ”
The young woman was trembling, and maybe she was about to cry.
“ ‘Years of work and hard scholarship on his part,’ my father said, ‘and do you know what it taught that old chemist? It taught him exactly what any good politician knows on Day One. Power and authority are built on many, many little steps.’ ”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
He watched her.
“You’re lying,” she said. “I know you’re lying. My grandfather’s plan is what saved our state from falling apart.”
The governor said nothing. When neither of them spoke, the tomb was wonderfully silent.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He had changed his mind.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
No, he wasn’t superstitious. The next generation was always talking about signs and omens, but to him, this place was nothing but cool and polished limestone that could use a little fun.
Thick Water
KAREN HEULER
Karen Heuler (www.KarenHeuler.com) lives in New York City. She is the author of several novels, including Journey To Bom Goody (2005), The Soft Room (2004), and The Other Door (1995). Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in more than sixty literary and speculative journals and anthologies, including several “Best of” collections. She has received an O. Henry Award and has been short-listed for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the Bellwether Prize, and the Shirley Jackson award, among others. She’s published a short-story collection and three novels. Her latest novel, The Made-up Man (2011), is about a woman who sells her soul to the devil to be a man for the rest of her life—with unexpected results.
“Thick Water,” a story on the edge between sf, horror, and surrealism, was published in Albedo One, the fine SF magazine from Ireland. A crew of four people lands on a Solaris-esque planet. Three of the four go native, but what native turns out to be is very strange indeed.
The sunset was orange again, strange, beautiful, and serene. It had a saffron edge, then it blended down to yellows, getting milder and milder the farther it spread along the horizon. It hung there slowly, spilling its colors gently across the sky, with a thin dash of red or rose blending then fading.
The ocean was almond-colored, and slow. The biggest problem, Jenks said, was that she couldn’t swim in it.
“Like swimming in a pillow,” Brute snorted. “No, the biggest problem is we can’t drink it. Tired of water rations. I mean, I’m okay with water rations unless I have to look at a whole lot of water all day.”
“See, the real problem is, you insist on calling it water. If you stopped calling it water, you’d feel right as rain.” This came from Squirrel, who always thought he had the essential point.
“Rain,” Brute sighed, and they all stared out at the ocean, observing it. Was it water? It spread out wide against the horizon, as oceans did. But the water was thick and rolled; it was theoretically possible to walk on it, if you shifted your weight in the pockets the water formed and if you didn’t go too quickly, which would cause a widespread line of waves, or worse, one of those sinkholes that never even glugged before it covered over.
They hadn’t touched it; they still wore suits. But they had a piece of it in a tube in the lab room, and Sibbetts was writing lots of meticulous things about it in her reports. Good for Sibbetts. Brute didn’t think they needed the suits any more; the air could be handled with just one of the simpler filters, a light mask over the nose and mouth. But Sibbetts was cautious; Sibbetts said wait.
The trolley wasn’t due back for another year. The crew—two men, three women—had a habit of nicknaming everything, and the trolley was their name for the long-range transport.
Jenks, who was head of the exploratory team, said, “Maybe we’re in at the beginning—you know, before life evolves.”
“There’s some kind of seaweed on the rocks,” Darcy pointed out. He was polite and gorgeous and well bred, and Jenks—the reader in the group—had named him Darcy.
Their colony of two and a half domes was on the first shelf of a kind of stepped ascent from the beach. Discarded containers and broken equipment were left in the open next to it. There was no wind so they weren’t careful about securing it.
They spent half the day outside, just poking around and observing, except for Sibbetts who worked on her own inside. One day they gave themselves the task of examining the smooth, cigar-shaped stones that sat around on the lip of the beach.
It was natural, after handling the stones, to want to wash the dust off their gloves. They went to the sea and cupped their hands and pulled out gobs of thick water. It amused them to carry the water around, and eventually they took some of it back to their collection of rocks. Darcy leaned over too far with his hands full, and he made it into a fake fall and rolled onto his back.
“Now look at that sunset,” he said, pointing. His hand, blunted in its dirty tan glove, rose to the horizon.
The sunset was a long line of shadow, a pale hue up in the sky that drove along the surface in a line. It started from one direction and then—unlike an earthly sunset which went down—it shifted around in a 180-degree arc. The light reflected off a series of moons, so it was handed across the horizon from left to right. It took hours. The sunrises were quieter, like pale ribbons. Midday was cream-colored, with hints of salmon along the edges.
“Go get Sibbetts,” Jenks said. Squirrel ran inside, but Sibbetts wouldn’t come out.
“She said she can see it from inside,” Squirrel reported.
Strike one against Sibbetts, Jenks thought.
The rocks seemed smooth, but they must have had an abrasive component to them. Darcy found, one night, a tear in two places on his right glove. He got alcohol and cleaned his hands. Of course, he should report it. He didn’t.
Jenks found a tear in her suit, around her knee. She put it in the daily report. They were out of range, now; there was no one to check with, to discuss it with. She didn’t want to alarm her junior officers.
Darcy got a new glove and saw within a day that it had shredded along the wrist. Nothing had happened to him after the first hole, so when Brute said, “Damn, my suit’s ripped!” he said, “It doesn’t matter. Mine ripped a week ago. I’m fine.”
They were coming inside. Jenks heard them both. She didn’t say anything; she kept thinking about it at dinner. “My suit was torn too,” she said finally. “No signs of anything.”
“You can’t be sure,” Sibbetts said. “An alien bacteria, a disease—who says you would know by now? Take some antibiotics, get some new suits.”
“We’re pretty much already done for, if we’re done for,” Darcy said.
Sibbetts, always in her lab, could be seen as a figure bending over or lifting things, tapping at her computer or putting something in a jar. They could see her through the plexi window; she never seemed to look for them.