June and Jitter (The Bugs)

june and jitter (the bugs)

A Novel

by David J. Keffer

written August-October, 1993

Minneapolis, Minnesota

immodestly tinkered with in 2012 & 2013

Knoxville, Tennessee

Copyright © 2013 David J. Keffer

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

See the moon? It hates us.

--Donald Barthelme

from See the Moon?,

collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968.

june and jitter (the bugs)

Table of Contents

1

(Spachowicz and Wrzesinski 1: wreck)

& (Janet and Degtyaryov 1: marshmallow) &

& (Veglia and Legion 1: carnivals) &

& (Sadie 1: greetings) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 1: hospitality) &

& (Shuck 1: tucked) &

& (crew 1: waking) &

& (alien 1: welcome) &

& (Moon 1: hi) &

2

(Spachowicz and Wrzesinski 2: hypotheses)

& (crew 2: vines) &

& (Sadie, Veglia, and Legion 2: lampshades) &

& (Sadie, Janet, and Degtyaryov 2: boots) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 2: helmets) &

& (alien 2: kelp) &

& (June 2: jars) &

& (shuck 2: freak) &

3

(Wrzesinski and Jitter 3: guns)

& (alien and Spachowicz 3: procession) &

& (Legion and Veglia 3: places and ideals) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 3: Pond) &

& (Janet, Sadie, and Degtyaryov 3: heroes) &

& (June 3: bluebeard) &

4

(Jitter and Wrzesinski 4: relating)

& (Spachowicz and the aliens 4: sorts) &

& (Janet, Sadie, and Degtyaryov 4: ramparts) &

& (Veglia and Legion 4: Baba Rama) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 4: afterbirth) &

& (June 4: Chuckie) &

& (Shuck 4: hawks and owls) &

5

(Wrzesinski and Jitter 5: dandelions)

& (alien and Spachowicz 5: intellectuals) &

& (Legion and Veglia 5: lint) &

& (Janet, Sadie, and Degtyaryov 5: heroes ii) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 5: brother) &

& (June 5: lie) &

6

(Wrzesinski 6: whupass)

& (Jitter 6: independence) &

& (Spachowicz and the parent 6: nameless) &

& (Veglia and Legion 6: jail) &

& (Janet and Degtyaryov 6: walls (heroes iii)) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 6: bible) &

& (Sadie 6: clouds) &

& (June 6: xenon) &

& (Shuck 6: centers) &

7

(Wrzesinski and Jitter 7: decree)

& (Spachowicz and the parent 7: reunion) &

& (Veglia and Legion 7: switch) &

& (Elizabeth and Jerome 7: queen) &

& (Janet and Degtyaryov 7: scene) &

& (June 7: farewell) &

& (Shuck 7: voyeurs) &

Author’s Foreword

In publishing novels twenty years after they were written, I have as a rule modestly tinkered with the original, accepting that I may not agree with some of the sentiments or style but respecting the intentions of the author who wrote those books and who no longer exists. In june and jitter (the bugs), in the interests of producing a more readable manuscript, I have exercised more than modest tinkering. In fact, I have removed large sections of the original manuscript. To the best of my recollection, these sections were, for the most part, short stories that either predated the novel or were written simultaneously but independently and were inserted as a whole into the novel. In retrospect, many of these insertions were too long, creating cumbersome distractions that did not aid in moving the novel forward. I maintain some reservations regarding the damage these excisions have done to the artistic merit of the original work, despite the undeniable and marked improvements in readability. Specifically, significant portions of the following sections were removed: Ronald McDonald, Mortician (Janet, Sadie, and Degtyaryov 3: heroes), Jackanapes, Mountebanks & Blackguards (Spachowicz and the aliens 4: sorts), and Baba Rama: An Historical Account (Veglia and Legion 4: Baba Rama).

1.

(Spachowicz and Wrzesinski 1: wreck)

‘Are we dead?’ Spachowicz asked as he leaned back, propping himself on his elbows, inside the charred hull of the wrecked spacecraft.

‘Kind of,’ Wrzesinski answered, passing his translucent hand through the twisted aluminum beam which had crushed his torso and snapped his spine.

‘Then what are we doing inside the ship?’ Spachowicz gazed down at the remains of his corpse in which he was reclining, and surveyed the damage. ‘It appears that during the landing, the main support in the cargo bay collapsed and severed both my legs, one just above the knee, the other just below. It’s hard to tell exactly, since my body has been burned so badly, where the flesh ends and the metal begins.’

Wrzesinski glanced through the wreckage at the ruin of his comrade’s body and the shimmering, ethereal image poised above it. He peered down at his own corpse. Not only was the ribcage shattered and the chest caved in, but the head had been pierced from behind by a jagged shard of grating that had once lined the floor of the cargo bay. A barb of metal barely emerged from one of the sockets of the blackened skull. ‘You think that’s something, come over here and take a look at me.’

Spachowicz crawled across the bay floor. Where the ceiling had collapsed, he was forced to slither forward on his belly to reach his comrade. Even then, his shoulders and back slid unresistingly through the crushed metal above him. Crouching beside the translucent Wrzesinski, Spachowicz had to agree, ‘Whoa. You got it in the head.’

‘It was probably an instantaneous death, no time to be painful,’ Wrzesinski surmised, consoling himself.

‘You don’t remember?’ Spachowicz asked, trying to recall, if he could, the instant of his own death. He couldn’t. The last thing he remembered was the ship shuddering violently as it descended from orbit into the atmosphere and racing alongside Wrzesinski to the cargo bay where the escape pods were located.

Wrzesinski considered; the last thing he could remember was chasing after Spachowicz, shouting that their best chance of survival would not be in the escape pods, which they never reached, but in the structurally reinforced quarters in the center of the ship. ‘No, I don’t remember dying although I would be hard pressed to argue any other conclusion.’ Looking at the sorry state of his body, he concluded, ‘But I’m thankful I did.’

As Spachowicz contemplated his partner’s mangled remains, he felt a strange sensation of unreality, not simply the novelty of being dead or the lack of physical substance, but a feeling of being less than whole which surpassed that. ‘How come only some of our senses are working?’ he asked.

‘What?’ Wrzesinski was attempting to give himself a proper last viewing but had difficulty mustering what he considered to be an appropriate attitude.

‘I can see your body but I can’t smell the stench of burnt flesh.’ Spachowicz reached down and pressed his hand through the bubbled residue of Wrzesinski’s brains. ‘And I can’t feel your body but I can hear the ship creaking and twitching as the metal cools.’

‘Well that leaves taste,’ Wrzesinski pointed out for the sake of completeness. ‘Go ahead and lick up some of my brains and see if you can taste them. If you can, tell me if they taste as bad as they look.’

Without attempting the taste-test, Spachowicz stood up quickly, the crown of his head merging with the fallen ceiling above them. He grimaced at his partner.

Wrzesinski stepped around the bent beams and smashed walls, heading for the hatchway that led farther into the ship.

‘Where are we going?’ Spachowicz asked, following.

‘I want to see how the crew quarters fared,’ Wrzesinski responded as he stepped through the metal door when it failed to automatically open for him.

‘Why?’

‘I want to see if we would have survived if we’d stayed in our quarters like I told you we should have,’ Wrzesinski answered, turning to watch Spachowicz emerge through the door. ‘I want to see if you killed me.’

Spachowicz followed Wrzesinski through the crushed corridors. The original trapezoidal shape had been deformed into an uneven hourglass, the sides pinched together, the top bulb smaller than the bottom; the controls to the door were plastered to the wall in a glassy film. ‘Will you be mad if we would have survived there? Will you blame our deaths on me if it really is all my fault?’

‘No,’ laughed Wrzesinski, ‘I won’t be mad. It’s just a matter of principle, now. It’s just something I can good-naturedly hound you about for the rest of eternity if this afterlife turns out to be less than it was cracked up to be.’

‘Oh.’ Spachowicz appraised the destruction; smoke was still trapped inside the ship as they ventured farther in. It appeared that, on the unlikely chance they had survived the initial explosion, the subsequent fire or at least smoke inhalation would have killed them.

They stepped through the hatchway leading to their quarters and found the room compressed to the size of a refrigerator or coffin. Leaning against his comrade, Spachowicz was relieved to announce, ‘We would have been dead here too.’

Wrzesinski bent over the shattered remains of a frame which had held a photograph of his wife on Earth. The photograph had been incinerated along with the rest of their belongings. ‘I would have liked to have a photograph of her,’ he sighed.

‘Me too.’ Spachowicz agreed, wishing he had had a wife to want the photograph of, but glad that he didn’t, now that he was dead.

‘You too?’ Wrzesinski asked surprised, ‘Why would you want a picture of my wife?’

‘I always thought she was hot,’ Spachowicz explained matter-of-factly in a tone indicating that he felt there was no need for Wrzesinski to be indignant.

‘A real doll,’ Wrzesinski agreed, ‘a real live doll.’

‘Don’t let it bother you. You couldn’t take the picture with you anyway. It would have slid through your hands when you tried to pick it up.’

‘Who can say?’ Wrzesinski argued for the sake of arguing. ‘We still have our uniforms. He paused and glanced down at his belt. ‘And our pistols.’ He drew his weapon from the holster at his side. It felt solid.

Spachowicz did the same, weighing his gun in his hands. ‘It feels like it died too.’

‘Well, if we’re dead and we have dead guns, can we kill each other?’

‘I suppose we could.’

‘Do you want to try?’

‘Not just yet,’ Spachowicz hesitated, ‘Let’s see how this eternity thing pans out.’

Wrzesinski stepped through the wall into a bundle of snapped wires and the remnants of the electronic reactor control. The sexless voice of the computer, Lynn as it had been named despite its lack of gender, repeated the message, ‘Reactor breach has occurred. The current radioactive level is twenty thousand percent of the lethal exposure limits.’

‘I guess that confirms our deadness,’ Wrzesinski spoke to himself as he stepped through the wires toward the bridge.

‘Where are we going now?’ Spachowicz asked, somewhat anxious to leave the ship and the drone of the computer reminding them they were dead dead dead repeated endlessly. Vainly he kicked at the intercom speaker, his foot passing through it and the wall behind it.

‘To see if any of the rest of the crew survived,’ Wrzesinski replied. He doubted it. The bridge would have crumpled long before the cargo bay. ‘Or if they’re dead, to see if they are dead like us and still here.’

They made their way to the hatchway outside the bridge. The emergency doors had closed, sealing the bridge from the rest of the ship. Wrzesinski stepped through it, expecting to find the suffocated corpses beyond, but instead discovered that the entire bridge had been torn from the rest of the vessel. Since it was gone, there was no floor beneath him and Wrzesinski fell ten meters to the sand below. Shortly thereafter, Spachowicz landed soundlessly on top of him. ‘The bridge is gone,’ he informed Wrzesinski.

Above them, the large red sun of Simuliidae sat in the sky, the clouds hung thin, flat, and stringy, colored a pale, dingy gray with a tint of tan, around it. Ahead of them, all Spachowicz and Wrzesinski could see were dunes of a fine, dark gray sand stretching off to the horizon. Although, he couldn’t feel the heat, Spachowicz could see the hazy waves of it rising from the dunes in the distance. With their backs to the ship, they scanned half the horizon, without finding a break in the desert or detecting the slightest movement or sign of life. No sparse vegetation pocked the dunes, no burrowing rodents or reptiles crept out of their niches into view. Even dead, Spachowicz and Wrzesinski were disappointed to have landed in such a desolate area. They circled the ship, however, and on the other side of the ship, mountains could be seen rising in the distance. They appeared to be composed of black soil and rock against the gray dunes beneath them and the gray sky above.

Spachowicz considered the prospects of an eternity stranded on this rock with Wrzesinski. ‘This is a distinctly unfortunate beginning to the afterlife.’

‘Our prospects are nothing short of bleak,’ Wrzesinski was forced to agree.

‘Dismal,’ Spachowicz added.

‘Abysmal,’ Wrzesinski topped, not to be outdone.

‘I think we’re in Hell,’ Spachowicz concluded, prepared to drop in his tracks until the Father of Lies found them loitering in his domain and put them to work in the forges of Hell, heat-treating tridents for the Prince to run through his laborers.

Wrzesinski studied the shallow trench the craft had left in the sand upon its arrival. It pointed toward the mountains. He took a few steps in that direction and waited to see if Spachowicz would come out his sun-struck daze and follow him.

Spachowicz waved vaguely toward the mountains. ‘Why do you want to go to the mountains?’

‘You have somewhere else to go?’ Wrzesinski asked, as the wind picked up and blew sand through them.

‘I think spirits, dead like us, would find what they are looking for in the loneliest of places, a place like the very center of the desert, where nothing lives.’ Spachowicz shrugged at Wrzesinski’s blank stare. ‘Just what I think. No facts or statistics to support it.’

‘You may be on to something there,’ Wrzesinski replied, But I have another idea.

"Look,’ Wrzesinski said, pointing to the trench, ‘the ship came in from over the mountains. The bridge was obviously separated from the ship while still in flight. The bridge is lighter than the rest of the ship and less aero-dynamic. My guess is that it did not travel as far as we did. It’ll be back there, toward the mountains.’

Spachowicz was slightly shocked. The last sort of argument he had expected in the afterlife was one based on technical reasoning. It seemed unfair to him that Wrzesinski had more of a grip on what was going on than he did. It was only somewhat reassuring that at least one of them knew what they should do and Spachowicz walked over to Wrzesinski and agreed, ‘Let’s go.’

‘Now that we’ve decided where we’re going,’ Wrzesinski asked as he walked beside his comrade, ‘why are we going there?’

‘You said we were going to find the others," Spachowicz answered.

‘And why are we looking for them?’ Wrzesinski persisted.

‘I thought you had the answers,’ Spachowicz accused him.

‘Well, you agreed with me. I thought you had a reason for agreeing,’ Wrzesinski countered.

‘No, you tricked me.’ Abruptly, Spachowicz dropped back to the ground. Lying on his back, he shouted, ‘Here I am, Father of Lies, put me to work. Run me through to quench your white-hot glowing tridents.’

Wrzesinski watched the sand shifting and building inside Spachowicz as he lay against the dune. The thought crossed his mind that it might be possible to go crazy even when you were dead. ‘What are you talking about, Spachowicz? What tridents?’

Without moving the rest of his body, Spachowicz turned his head to glare at Wrzesinski, ‘The tridents, man. The three-pronged pitchforks that the horned and horrid Father of Lies carries around in Hell and plunges through the souls of the damned, day in and day out for the rest of eternity.’

‘Oh.’ Wrzesinski considered. The prospect that Spachowicz described seemed a less pleasant alternative than searching for the remainder of the ship. In fact, it was decidedly less pleasant. Wrzesinski simply had to convince Spachowicz of it. ‘Okay, okay. This is the reason we should go look for the bridge. Number one is if the rest of the crew are still alive then they can come on out here and bury our remains so our spirits can rest in peace.’

‘That’s a crappy reason,’ Spachowicz commented, ‘based on speculation and myth. Besides, how could we even contact them? We’re dead and besides that, look at the ship.’

Already sand drifts were forming against the metal hull. In a few hours, the ship would be completely covered in sand, disguised as yet another dune, lost to the world and naturally buried.

‘Or if they’re dead,’ Wrzesinski continued, ignoring his partner’s objections, ‘we’ll have more company. The more, the merrier, no?’

‘You don’t like my company?’ Spachowicz asked.

‘I really, really like your company,’ Wrzesinski assured him. ‘It’s your optimism that appeals to me more than any other feature.’

‘Thanks. I might as well just kill myself.’

‘I don’t think you’ve given the afterlife a fair shake yet.’

‘In that case, let’s go.’ Spachowicz pushed himself up and stubbornly tromped off through the dunes toward the tallest mountain. ‘If this doesn’t work out, the next place we go is the center of the desert and we stay there for 40 years like Moses. Okay?’

‘Sure. Just like Moses. When we see the pillar of fire, we’ll follow it,’ Wrzesinski agreed, in order to placate his friend.

‘Except for the circumcision part,’ Spachowicz modified the proposal, ‘We can fore-go that particular aspect of the Moses analogy, if it comes to that.’

& (Janet and Degtyaryov 1: marshmallow) &

Captain Janet, head of the expedition that intended to survey the planet, Simuliidae, was in control. As she unhooked the safety strap which held her to the captain’s chair and turned to assess the damage, she could see only by the light that flooded into the bridge from the doorway that should have led to the rest of the ship. This distressed her but Captain Janet maintained control for her own sake as well as that of the crew. None of the other crew members had revived yet, each still strapped in their chairs, and so they could not witness how well their captain was taking the bad news.

She checked each of the seven other members aboard the bridge for signs of life, either noticing that their heads, slumped forward and resting on their chests, rose and fell gently with each breath, or placing her hands in front of their mouths and feeling for breath. All those on the bridge had survived, eight of the ten members. That left Spachowicz and Wrzesinski who had not been on the bridge when the reactor failed.

Explosion. Janet didn’t know what had caused it; there had been no signs of trouble from the engines prior to the disaster. Just blew. Undiagnosed catastrophic failure was what it was called in the technical manuals.

As for the missing Spachowicz and Wrzesinski, they were the military presence on the expedition. Long ago Janet had decided that these exploratory missions did not require a military presence, but as the original protocol for first-time landings had prescribed it and those protocols had never been changed, she acquiesced to their presence. All it amounted to was two more people to keep her company during the long passages through space. Nothing wrong with that. Besides, Spachowicz and Wrzesinski amused her, often as not. Janet was worried for them now. She knew she had no reason to be. If they were alive, then no one had better training than they to stay alive, and if they were dead, there was nothing further to worry about. The fact that they might exist somewhere in between life and death of course never crossed her mind.

Finishing her inspection of the bridge, Janet returned to her chair. As she did so, she felt the bridge shift beneath her. She had a horrible feeling that the bridge was perched precariously on the edge of a sheer cliff and, should she move the wrong way, they would all plummet to their deaths. She would be the only one awake to scream. She wouldn’t scream though, she told herself. She was in control.

Carefully she inched her way toward the open door to see just how serious their situation was. Standing in the doorway, Janet looked up at the grey sky, the red sun dotting it and the landscape surrounding her. They had landed in a valley surrounded by black mountains dotted with stiff straight trees trunks adorned with sparse patches of greenery. Inside the valley, the ground was smooth and vanilla colored with darker brown splotches scattered across it. The ground rose in small, circular hills, each no more than a hundred meters in diameter and twenty tall. As each hill ended, it was met on all sides by at least six similar hills rising next to it.

Avoiding the twisted metal snags, Janet hopped from the bridge onto the hill. The ground was spongy like a giant balloon filled with syrup and not at all moist. It sloped downward beneath the weight of the bridge. She circled the bridge waiting to discover the imagined cliff, but it did not exist. The bridge had come to a rest on the side of one of the hills. Perhaps it had landed on a different hill and bounced here, so springy was the ground. Certainly the forgiving terrain had cushioned their fall. The movement she had felt inside must have been the ground adjusting to the change in distribution of weight.

She hopped up and down on the hill. The gravity of this planet was comparable to Earth’s but the resilient ground lifted her high up into air. As she jumped, Janet placed her hand over her mouth, feeling the exhilarated breath. She was alive.

‘Janet?’ a voice spoke as if disturbing her from a dream. She closed her eyes and dropped to the ground, bending her knees to absorb the spring that would have otherwise bounced her back in the air. Opening her eyes she found Degtyaryov, her second-in-command, standing next to her.

‘Are you okay?’ Degtyaryov asked, looking at her and then looking at the sun in his dark glasses.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Janet answered her first officer.

‘I thought that was the most peculiar earthquake I had ever experienced,’ Degtyaryov said, referring to the bouncing of the ground which had awakened him. He looked out over the vanilla hills and the mountains surrounding them. Glancing at his watch, Degtyaryov said, ‘Not a bad place to wake up when you’ve slept late into the afternoon, especially when you consider the alternative was not waking up at all.’ He closed his eyes and the lids hid the calm, brown irises from the sun. His face, wrinkled and lined as some faces are without age, held the same expression as it would at a drowsy crew meeting after lunch, at the breaking or entering of orbit, at the first feet placed upon a new planet, or at any moment. His expression never changed from one of mild interest or mild disinterest, depending upon the disposition of the one viewing his face. Degtyaryov’s composure was not compromised by the abrupt change in circumstances, the unplanned sectioning of the ship, the turbulent fall to the surface, the waking in the valley of foam-rubber hills and dark mountains. Like Janet, Degtyaryov maintained tight rein over his emotions. The officers were selected and trained for discipline. He continued scanning the horizon, rotating slowly taking in every direction, searching for some familiar landmark, a peak that reminded him of a peak on Earth, a light fragrance of the distant vegetation like those at home, a break in the eerie red glow of the sun.

Janet followed his gaze. ‘I don’t see the rest of the ship.’

‘We separated pretty high up. The rest of the ship could be miles from here. If it didn’t land in as conveniently springy a location as these foam hills then it could very well be in far worse condition. I don’t think we can rely on it for our supplies.’

Janet hadn’t considered relying on it for supplies, only for reaching it to discover the fate of the rest of her crew. ‘Spachowicz and Wrzesinski,’ she announced, leaving the implication open-ended.

‘I don’t think we can rely on them to help us either,’ Degtyaryov said as he rocked ever so slightly back and forth from the toes to the heels of his boots. Degtyaryov also had believed that a military presence was unnecessary. He had not been as reserved as Janet in stating his opposition to their continued company. He did not appreciate their company either, as Janet did. There was only so much room aboard a craft hurtling through space and if he wanted to be surrounded by people, he could have stayed on Earth. This outspoken behavior had not been responsible for his never rising to the rank of Captain. His air of mild interests and disinterests seemed a more likely culprit. He hadn’t ever pushed for the promotion and that was alright. If he had, he might not be standing here right now, might be on some other ship on some other unexplored planet, might not be sharing the sense of helpless discovery with some comrade altogether less pleasant than Captain Janet.

Janet added a touch of command to her voice, not that it was needed to exact obedience from Degtyaryov, but rather to get his attention. ‘We need to find the ship because they may need our help.’

Degtyaryov nodded to himself, unmotivated to strike out into the formidable mountains. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, he felt particularly at ease and even slightly drowsy on the hemispherical hills.

& (Veglia and Legion 1: carnivals) &

At the engineering station, Veglia and Legion reclined back in their chairs, their legs stretched out before them as if they were simply napping on the job. When Legion, the craft’s mechanic awoke, he nudged the computer technician with his elbow in her ribs. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey what?’ Veglia asked groggily back, squinting at her unkempt comrade, grease-splotches across his baggy coveralls and underneath his fingernails, uncombed hair poking in all directions, sweaty forehead, stubbled chin. Captain Janet was lax with her crew when it came to personal hygiene. Veglia straightened herself in her chair, stretched, yawned, generally woke to the new world. Her back and neck were stiff from having slept strapped in the chair. She removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and replaced them. Tilting her head about, she gazed around the bridge, quickly noticing that the bulk of the ship was missing.

No one else had risen yet.

They unbuckled themselves and approached the doorway filled with red-light. Legion hopped out and Veglia followed. Each awkwardly rebounding on the hill beneath them.

Legion turned and looked the bridge over, nodding and sucking air through his closed teeth, as he paced about it. ‘It’s going to take more than a wrench to get this thing flying again.’

Veglia glanced at their admittedly meager portion of the ship. She felt she ought to have some opinion of the situation, even if was as obvious and under-stated as the mechanic’s, but her attention was diverted by the scenery around them. Gingerly, she bounced up and down on the hill wanting to experiment further but wary of being chided by Legion for such frivolous behavior in the face of such a serious situation. ‘Janet,’ Veglia thought, ‘would not disapprove,’ as she bounced a little higher.

It was enough to distract Legion from the impossible task of repairing the ship when ninety percent of it was missing, including the engines. ‘It’s like the moonwalk tent at carnivals,’ he said, trying out a few hops to validate his comparison.

‘A carnival,’ Veglia agreed, the lightness of the comparison lightening her mood.

‘Where’s the freak tent, though? Where are the stuffed, two-headed lambs and calves kept? Where’s the tattoo lady, the fat lady, the fire-breathers and sword-eaters, the Siamese twins, the snake man shedding his skin, the pretzel man tying his limbs in knots, the midgets and the giants? Where are they all?’ Legion asked the technician.

‘If this world is a carnival,’ Veglia thought to herself, ‘and this whole valley is just one attraction, then perhaps the dark mountains around us are populated with Legion’s freaks.’ The thought unsettled her and she stopped bouncing and frowned at Legion.

‘What?’ he asked innocently.

‘Did you go to the freak shows when you were a kid?’ she asked.

‘Sure, I did,’ Legion answered, without a tone of defense, as if he was simply stating the obvious, something which he did quite well in his opinion, something which had got him through a mechanic’s career so far without major mishap.

‘And did you gawk and gape at their deformities?’ Veglia asked, trying not to get up on a soapbox but unable to prevent it. What she wanted was for the conversation to end but she had asked the question anyway. What she wanted was to return to the wonder of the strange, alien countryside and instead she ended up locking herself inside old images of Earth. How these things happened, how you could want one thing and up with something entirely different, were the sorts of mysteries that perplexed and tormented Veglia.

‘I paid my dollar,’ Legion replied, this time without hiding his defensive tone. ‘You’d’ve gone to, if you were a kid, and you could’ve.’

‘Maybe,’ Veglia trailed off, wondering if she would have. Real carnivals had not appeared in the urban neighborhood of her youth. There had been fairs which set themselves up in the parking lots of closed-down grocery stores but they didn’t really qualify as carnivals and certainly had no freak tents.

‘You would have,’ Legion insisted. ‘You’d’ve been a kid like I was, eager to see all the bizarre and marvelous manifestations of the world.’

Veglia decidedly changed the subject, ‘It is bizarre and marvelous,’ she said, sweeping her hand at the red-tinged mountainous expanse around them.

Legion smiled, showing his shiny gold tooth. The red sun glinted off it. If the freaks hidden out there in the mountains were smiling back, they were covering their grins with their hands and hiding the glitter of their own gold, silver, or steel teeth.

& (Sadie 1: greetings) &

Sadie, the craft’s navigator, awoke at her console. Her head had lain against the dead monitor, her mouth open, drooling slightly, saliva running into the ponytail folded beneath her head. She dried her chin with the back of her hand. Since she occupied the front position in the bridge, she could not see the other members of the crew. As she unlatched