The Storm Fishers and Other Stories Page 5

posture, stared at the cameras and said, “SPE-cial. In-EV-i-TA-bility.”

  “Should we just go with incompetent?” said the judge in a kind and exhausted voice.

  “Unless the law allows one to plead ‘Dumbass,’ it’ll have to.”

  “Incompetent he is.”

  “No!” Futter jumped up and down with both feet, gritting his teeth.

  “Son sit down!”

  “But. Dad.”

  “I am ashamed to be called your father. For the first time in my life I’m ashamed of my son.”

  “I only wanted to make our name famous. Centuries from now they’ll say ‘Fate before Futter was like gravity before Newton.’”

  “Sheriffs,” the judge slammed his gavel over and over, “Sheriffs! Subdue the accused and prepare my hair and makeup.” The judge announced to the audience, “You’ll all be pleased to know I’ve decided to upload a behind the scenes video commentary after court.”

  “No. The laws of inevitably and fate are real! Judge you’re jealous and you want to take my credit. I saw it coming from a parsec out. It was inevitable my experiments led us here. And uh, um, uh, I thought the experiment—”

  “—arson-”

  “—experiment! Would result in inevitable social change when people realized we could control our own fate by adjusting a few simple behavioral variables. It was a perfectly executed experiment. Today was inevitable.” The sheriffs finally wrestled him to the ground.

  “Just like your wife moving back in with her mother was inevitable?” said the judge to the cameras and smiled.

  “Is that where she went?” Futter stopped fighting back.

  “Wasn’t it inevitable?” And the audience laughed with the judge.

  “Take him away.”

  The world revved back to work as Futter was led back to the jail house. The sheriff sat him on the bench adjacent to the front desk for a moment, and wandered off to drop an asteroid in the porcelain crater. People came and went ignoring Digby. He looked over at the desk and saw the electronic key. The clerk had left it just within reach. This couldn’t be chance. From the beginning of his life, this moment was inevitable.

   

  A VIEW WITHOUT SEASONS

  From the full sized starboard windows of The Flower of Kent a cascade of starlight fell like gold and crimson leaves caught in a September wind across the tinted glass illuminating the entire pod. Undulating waves of light crept down the dust colored wall and flowed across the dark wooden floor. When the ship listed, the view of the Sun lit the room like dawn, noon and dusk all at once. When the Sun had passed the family room faded to black until the next revolution.

  Pitch Outcrop had tried to replicate his wife’s eye for design, at least until Ingot was old enough to understand. A pulsing hum penetrated the dense acrylic walls, a row of silver streamers waved in front of the cool air from the rebreather vent. The circulation stirred the smell of orange, pepper and peach through the pod. Pitch had left a one-shift-pot of coastal stew on the stove top to welcome Inga home from school on that specific afternoon. Beside the stew was a note. She never noticed the notes preferring to pour herself a bowl, rush to the family library, and thumb through the books from the old world.

  Pitch would be home soon and she could always ask him what the letter said then.

  Ingot’s best friend from school, Kelvin Slurry, had curly black hair that seemed matted to his head, he wore long eyed glasses that had been long out of style, he dug for nose gremlins when he thought she wasn’t looking. Inga, as her father sometimes called her, was curious. She was always looking at something. Kelvin came up to the Outcrop family’s pod a little later than usual, given that school had just let out. She poured him a bowl before they disappeared into the library.

  The Slurry family worked in excavation, sifting through minerals for building materials. As such they took trips to the surface of Earth quite often. Kelvin often returned with small souvenirs smashed from sandstone. One time he brought an imprint of a nautilus to class. Its diameter was larger than any of the fifth grade hands that passed it around. Once, after his family returned from what was called mainland China he brought Inga a violet and crimson geode. It flashed to a heliotrope when she held it to the lamp overhead and smiled. But she protested, “I can’t take that. It’s too valuable.” He insisted, “They’re everywhere. It’s nothing. I can find hundreds of them. Thousands. They’re all over the place down there.” After two days of asking she finally relented. She never saw Kelvin with anything as beautiful again.

  The Outcrop family pod, docked at a lower deck reserved for the mudfoot class, had five comfortably sized rooms (that’s the more polite starborn term) including an old world repository of antiques. College boys collect bottle caps, businessmen collect fine shoes and ties, machinists collect pictures of vehicles they’ll never own.

  Pitch collected memories.

  Some of his family, some of a past not his. At the center of the room was an antique writing desk and a deep red leather chair embossed with an unfamiliar design and finished with brass tacks. On the far wall hung a massive map of the world in Magellan’s day. Tree books encircled the room on two walls. When Kelvin visited he always noticed the geode laying under covered glass on a shelf too high to reach without the stepladder.

  Depending on whom one asked Pitch’s love was for a past that never existed except in legend. And he had passed his love for the golden age of science and exploration on to Inga. After her first day of school she returned to the pod to find a photo gallery of great minds hanging on her light blue wall. She put Faraday at the center. She was fond of mimicking her father when he said, “Newton laid the foundation, but all modern knowledge flows from Faraday.”

  The front door slid open and Pitch shouted to Ingot, “Did you eat already?”

  Kelvin rushed through the family room and out the door before her dad could wave goodbye. Inga ported both empty bowls straight through to the kitchen. Pitch caught up with her, and put away the bowls himself. He gave her a kiss on the top of her short haired blonde head.

  “Argh dad knock it off!”

  “Too old to say hello to your father?”

  “Hello.”

  “I take it Kelvin brought you another dinosaur bone?”

  “No we were looking at the old maps of the solar system.”

  “Did you eat enough supper?”

  “Yes,” she had become more curt as she recognized the limits of her father’s ability to speak her language. That familiar emptiness returned, the absence she felt while decorating her room. She kept adding posters, the great scientists; adding figures, the funny old maps; adding music, even music about the princess in the high castle. The emptiness never left. She snapped at her father believing he didn’t see the void she saw.

  “Maybe we could have some cookies,” he said.

  “Only if they are those cinnamons you make.” She handed him her grandmother’s cookbook with leaflets stained yellow from years of butter and flour. She wasn’t too old to spend the evening making cookies with dad, and that made him smile, though she rarely saw.

  “Why is this called cinnamon?” she said stirring the tan mixture.

  One of the most important lessons Pitch taught her was no question is ever off limits.

  “Why is a dinosaur called a dinosaur?” Easy one.

  “What makes some flowers white and some pink and some both?” A little harder. But Silt, the grandfatherly horticulturist next door, told the neighborhood kids about Mendel and the punnit square.

  “How does carbon come from hydrogen.” That took some thought, not because it was difficult. Indeed it was right in his wheelhouse, being a core scientist, but how to explain quantum mechanics to someone barely old enough for physical chemistry. Einstein said if you can’t explain it to your grandmother you don’t really understand it. But of course Bohr said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics. Pitch elegantly said, “Well honey, there
is a lot of gravity and electricity, then boom! Like a baby, a carbon pops out.”

  But questions about cinnamon (or what’s in cheezie bites or what makes poop purple sometimes, hint: it’s the cheezie bites) made him regret, for just a half a second, that lesson.

  “Um. Cinnamon. It sounds like a word from the Indian subcontinent.”

  Ingot was good at questions. But Pitch had become adept at distracting her, “So you never told me if Kelvin brought you a dinosaur bone.” At least she didn’t ask about her life before her memories formed.

  “He didn’t bring me anything.”

  “He didn’t bring you anything this time. Don’t play. I know where you get your little artifacts,” he tossed a sprinkle flour in her blond hair. She shook it out with a touch of annoyance in her voice, “Daaaaaad.”

  The timer dinged and he pulled the first sheet of cookies from the oven and the cinnamon flowed through the house, hovering in the air way past Inga’s bedtime.

  So continued their lives until one day a wave came over the satellite. The Flower of Kent would be intercepting the IRV Rosalind’s Credit. They were set to rendezvous in forty eight hours. They would dock for twenty hours that would be long enough to resupply the research ship and exchange physical data too sensitive to transmit via satellite.

  Down in the core an excited energy broke out from the news. The Credit had a reputation so illustrious scientists waited decades for approval for the transfer. Gossip spread. People