John Argo - Harps

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2024-11-20 0 0 44.19KB 12 页 5.9玖币

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Harps

a sf short story

by John Argo

The icon hovering in Eon's dream was the face of a young woman, eyes downcast, with a tear on

one cheek. Something about her brooding beauty: serene, sad, filled with possibilities.

Eon Reely slept, but lately he did not feel-rested.

He did not know the biosynth feared for her life. And his.

* * *

Pilon P67 turned slowly in space. Its tempestuous guts were full of sound and steam, scattered

l!ght beams and screeching steel. Its power pools and rainbows of raw energy sucked up the

waking hours of Eon Reely's days. Still lean of body and crisp of face, he was a maggner in the

heart of Pilon P67. His tedious job, dreadful like all P67 jobs, was to keep the maggn aligned

with the countless pilons holding up the Galactic Bridge. The Bridge used gray wormholes in

alternetic space so 55th Century civilization could travel on the underpinnings as if distances

between stellar objects were seconds rather than lightyears.

How did a man fall so far from hope? No maggner spoke of the misfortunes that brought him

under the Bridge, and hardly any of the maggners had any dreams left. P67 was a vast black

cylinder rotating in empty space at the rim of the galaxy, devoid of joy. Around it swept seventy

polygons of polished glass that amplified the waves of the obersole as it sang like a whale in the

sea of stars.

* * *

"I know pour name," the girl in the crisp uniform and rakish cap said with sensuous fondness.

She sat on a fallen log in a forest among fireflies in Eon's sleeping mind. The was elegantly

attractive in a way he'd forgotten women could look.

A single moon's puffy face looked over her shoulder, and the place smelled like , what?, pines in

a mountain wind (what did that mean?).

Eon Reely rubbed his eyes and sat up. "I have to get my sleep."

She grinned at him. "Eon, this is very important." Her voice had dry, personable warmth.

Laughter underneath. She had mischievous blue eyes and sensuous lips. Her dark hair was cut

neatly , dangling to the eyes in front, over the ears , just covering the neck in back. She had a

beauty mark on one of her prominent cheekbones.

"What are you doing in my mind?"

She shrugged. "Getting to know you, is all." She drew in the dirt with a stick as she spoke. Her

skirt barely reached her knees, and she had fine legs, shiny black high-heeled shoes; a mossy dark

uniform, snowy blouse and smile, green-white-orange bow tie. The heavy, folded lapels had an

ancient look.

"This is P67 and I must have lost my mind," Eon said. "Finally, I have snapped, this is it." But he

regarded her with fascination.

She pursed her lips and shook her head, "Nope, you're okay. ? Trust me."

"But I'm sleeping!" he cried. "This is crazy. That's not a real planet, is it? That's a bright round

ball with a face on it., like a man saying 000HHH."

"Yes, that's the moon. THE moon," she said, "the moon, the only moon, the moon of the old

Earth. Have you really forgotten?"

Eon rubbed his eyes. "I don't know what you are talking about. Yes, there are those old stories,

but nobody believes them, do they?"

"Don't be cross, Eon. I like you now that I've gotten to know you."

"Was that you staring at me out of that mandala all along?"

A whisper: "Yes. "

"You had a tear under one eye." A pretty face, he thought, too pretty to look so sad.

"Because I saw what happened to you."

He tried angrily to sit up at this invasion of his deepest pain, but his body was inert. "Nobody has

a right! I may be a maggner, but -- "

"Hush, my darling, I just want to make you happy." Darling. Nobody had said that to him in

years. He turned away.

"It's still possible, you know. In a different way, of course." She added after a moment: "My

name is Bridget. I'm sorry that you lost your wife and daughter."

He took a deep breath. That was with him every day, especially at night going to sleep. Boating

on Miramair IV where they'd had a cabin on a lake, he and Lana and Lanalana. A sudden rain, a

wind, had turned the boat over. Eon had somehow gotten tangled in the rigging while his two

women had vanished under the glassy green water. He'd awakened to find himself tangled

upright against the overturned hull. Golden sunshine silence had returned after the sudden squall,

but the lake surface was opaque. Cutting himself free, he'd dived and dived for nothing. The

bodies only bobbed up a day later, pale, relaxed, as though asleep. It had been quick for them,

was his only comfort. He'd sat by the lake for hours, which turned into days. And dark tortured

nights. He might have starved to death sitting there, an easier fate than his subsequent life. But

he'd gone out of his mind. Wandered the roads, the cities, finally striking out on the Galactic

Bridge. More wandering; but there was really only one last fate for a broken man: finally, this

P67 pilon. "Go away, Bridget. I have to sleep,"

"I want you to take me away from here, Eon."

"Go away, I want to sleep. It' s like being dead and enjoying it."

"Very well, Eon. But for your information I'm not the cause of your unrest. There is a man under

all that pain trying to get out. I only take a few seconds of your sleep away each night, and I've

been doing it for many nights. I'11 be back, Eon." The scent of pines faded, replaced by the stink

of steamy bodies. There was a constant rustle of strangled snores amid steel girders in the smoky

half-light of the thousand-bed barracks.

* * *

The maggner's lot: You staggered on glassy surfaces, carrying the heavy maggning coil which

you wrapped around stray l!ght beams to tug them back into alignment while pistons pounded

and other maggners' voices chopped ragged messages among tons of gloomy steel machinery.

You wandered home each night, letting the artificial air rake dry your sweaty overalls. You

thought of little else but getting into your bunk after sucking up the swill in the corporate mess.

Once in a while you dawdled over an obscene holo, for there were hardly any women on P67,

and even a maggner had a faint need, little more than a reflex, like the urge to urinate. Or you

gazed in passing display windows late at night, when all the stores were closed but still half lit.

You let the cash pile up in your cred account because you could never figure anything you

wanted to buy and take back to your personal area which consisted of a bunk and a tall, narrow

locker. Why buy anything? What did it matter? That was the mind of a maggner. Still, you

lingered, you looked, your fingertips might touch the glass, because you were human.

"Do you like me?"

The pine forest again, and the huffy moon. She looked crisp and tall as she stood in a provocative

pose on high heels. She held her arms out and rotated slowly.

"What is that you're wearing?"

"Stewardess. Aer Lingus. 2020 A.D. An eon ago, Eon." She giggled. Had a sense of fun, this girl.

"I don't understand what that means," he said. But she filled it into his mind, much as possible.

Aerojets, silver, crossing cloud-dappled star-spangled night under that puffy moon. He shook his

head. "But that's so long ago."

A whisper again: "Yes."

He felt a little sad for her but said matter of factly because he was dead and she was still alive:

"Surely you have been dead ten thousand years now, haven't you? "

Her voice, in his mind, was matter-of-fact, reciting an oft-told tale. "We were on a night launch

from Kennedy to Shannon when the aft barser dimmed. I was just getting ready trays of dim sum

and let long for the sleepy passengers, when the jolt threw me down the aisle. I had been

dawdling over a port window looking at the Manhattan skyline, or the crash would have killed

me like it did the other folks down midsection. I should have been dead, Eon, but they saved a

little of me."

"Oh no."

Again, the whisper: "Yes."

"You're one of those."

She stamped her feet, fine naked calves flexing, on the soft pine needles under the full-moon sky.

She laughed defiantly. "Yes, I'm one a box brain, and I'm still here. Well, not an iota of carbo life

left of me, but what got saved is truly me and migrated onto biosynth and here I am!" She twirled

and ended with a half-kneeling flourish. "Ta-dah!"

"And I'm supposed to be thrilled?"

"Eon, don't be selfish. Think, is your depression a matter of self-indulgence? Look at me, I've put

my troubles behind me."

"It's pretty sad," he agreed, yawning.

"We'll talk again," she said.

* * *

The supervisor slid up close on his smoky sled. "Maggner Eon, you are not in focus," the

disapproving voice said. "Your mind is not on your work lately. Get with it man." The bearded

face was furrowed with worry, but there was no personal concern. The eyes had no special focus,

and did not look directly at him. That was a truly old maggner. Time spent wrestling with stray

l!ght beams had irradiated him until his skin and hair turned white as sugar. That was an old

maggner's fate. Either you fell apart literally, disintegrated into the l!ght that sucked you up into

the pilon, the column doling to the obersole, or you lingered as a dry husk and they made you

supervise newer maggners. The relief of maggners was their sleep, which was like being dead but

enjoying it. Their only hope was for eternal rest.

* * *

Pine scent.

"How did you find me?" Eon asked. He was falling in love with her, and why not? Were they not

both ghosts?

"The music store, the pawn shop, do you remember?"

He thought hard. "Yes, the music store. I pass it each night on my way from work. You are in

there?"

"Think, Eon, think!"

"I walk along, thinking some strange thoughts about a sea that curls up on a shore in tall white

waves that break on the beach outside the gravity drop. I walk on cobblestones and a fog coats

everything with silence. Then I hear a faint music, a singing. I think it's just the music store and I

pause to glance at the window. There are some statues in the dust behind the glass, some knobs

and some crystals, some bows and some papers, some tusks and some watches, some trumpets

and some harps."

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John Argo - Harps

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