Aeon Twelve Read online

  She moaned; real or feigned, Fitzwell couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He lost himself in the feel of her, the rhythm of her body, the smell of her skin. He moved within her and it felt like no other woman he’d been with, a sensation beyond simple pleasure, nothing like sex at all. He felt whole, complete, at peace.

  Cassandra nibbled his left ear and whispered, “Are you ready?” Her eyes rolled back into her head, just the whites showing. Her skin grew hot. Her voice dropped an octave and she hissed “Academia is a liquor store.”

  Fitzwell’s bliss dissolved into simple lust. He shook his head without disturbing his pace. “What?”

  She giggled up at him, her skin merely warm now, her voice and eyes normal again. “That’s your metaphor. Swirl it around a while, you’ll see.”

  A liquor store? Fitzwell grimaced as he kept fucking. A liquor store? And yet, it made sense. It all fell into place. The university was just so much alcohol, each department just a different kind of booze. The administration was brandy, the provost and president nothing more than bottles of cognac. The business school was gin. The engineering school was scotch. In his mind’s eye he surveyed the various departments of the college of arts and sciences and saw every variety of distilled spirits: vodka in biology, tequila in psychology, on and on, until he envisioned himself walking through the halls of his own department’s building and saw Irish whiskey all around him.

  “I’m a fifth,” he grunted to Cassandra.

  She responded with a faint moan and nodded encouragingly. “A fifth?”

  “A fifth of Irish whiskey. Untenured. At tenure you become a quart. Those old bastards who have been around forever are even larger bottles, aged in oak casks, smooth and smoky.”

  Cassandra giggled, wrapping her legs more eagerly around him. “What else?”

  “My TAs, they’re…they’re like those little bottles you get on airplanes. They have just enough learning to know they’re whiskey. Not a lot, little more than a taste, but whiskey just the same. That’s all grad students are, all of them, they’re just those tiny little bottles.”

  He rode her faster now, harder, his passion mirroring his newfound insight.

  “What else? What else?” She gripped him more tightly.

  “Tenure…I understand it now.” He gasped, it was so close, so real. “It’s not ‘publish or perish’ at all. Tenure is just mixed drinks.”

  “Mixed drinks?” Cassandra was panting now. “Tell me!”

  “Tenure is making a new drink, a cocktail, with the departmental liquor as the main ingredient. Then you serve it to the tenure review committee, and if it knocks them on their asses, you get tenure!”

  “Go on, go on,” she was screaming now. “Finish it!” Her nails clawed his back.

  “Undergraduates…”

  “Yes?”

  “Seniors are bottles…juniors individual cans…sophomores are six packs…”

  “What? Cans?”

  “Beer. Undergraduates are nothing more than beer!”

  With the last word he came, pushing into her with one final thrust as the metaphor gripped him, squeezed him, wrung him dry, and his world view altered for all time. The old imposing, impenetrable, unscalable castle wall of academia had transformed. Every barbican, every portcullis, that he had built up in his mind, that stood between him and his goal of tenure, crumbled and collapsed. A new metaphor held sway. Those lofty ivory towers, so impossible to climb, had been replaced by fluorescent-lit store aisles and row upon row of labeled bottles.

  And Fitzwell understood booze. He knew his way around a liquor store, and realized that by extension he knew how to make the university give him what he wanted: tenure. Laughing helplessly, he collapsed onto her, all his fears vanishing with new understanding. He rolled off her and lay on his back staring blankly at the ceiling. So simple, a liquor store, a cocktail, beer. Tenure would no longer be a problem. The solution was obvious to him now, effortless.

  “You okay?” Cassandra asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine. Thanks.”

  “Be right back,” she said, and vanished into the bathroom. A few minutes later she walked back in. Fitzwell enjoyed the sight of her, naked as she crossed the room and squatted to open the mini-bar. She took out a can, popped the top, and took a long drink. Then she glanced at him over her shoulder, blue eye twinkling again, green eye serious. “You want a beer?”

  “No thanks,” he said, smiling, wondering what it would take to make her green eye twinkle as well, and trying to remember some lines from Keats. “I just had one.”

  Toys

  Dev Agarwal

  “A starting point for this story was the term ‘pockets of resistance.’ I first saw that phrase in a Michael Moorcock novel I read in India as a child. Long after I understood the term, I began thinking how grim it might be to be overwhelmed by your enemy but with just enough soldiers around you to have to keep fighting.

  The protagonist, Rebecca, kept growing till she became one third of a novel about the Salusa set during the aftermath of the war.”

  SHE CROUCHED IN A long, smooth trench with soldiers to her left and right. The trench ran through a housing project that had been hit by something early on—the giant fist of a screamer or a pillar-of-fire. Concrete chunks the size of cars littered its streets.

  The Salusa had bombed first, then attacked with huge land machines and subsurface burrowers whose tunnels ran for miles and miles, exposing Mannheim’s underside. Man-made drains and cellars and jumbled fibre-optics gaped within the channel’s smooth bore. They looked clumsy and misshapen compared to the tunnels’ flawless curves. The tunnels wound through Mannheim like the arc of a circle of infinite length.

  Hiding inside this one, Rebecca stood face to face with the war. She had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. She’d fought to be ringside, front row. What she’d got was raw sewage and vivid injuries and her bowels loose with fear. She was trapped behind the enemy’s lines, too scared to sleep, suffocating under an endless, sickening noise.

  Salusan engines churned through her. Their drone and pitch shook her body and burned her head with migraine.

  Rebecca had never seen any of the machines up close. They were just black shapes in the air, or giant pyramids shaking the city apart as they rumbled on the horizon. But she knew what they were. They were Salusan warmachines—all trying to kill her.

  Rebecca tried to keep busy. She tagged her latest dispatch, Deep War. Her inbuilt hardware was junk in the Salusa’s dampening field, but she was still writing. She pictured her ’ware’s yellow graffix in her mind.

  Rebecca’s boyfriend Bernie had said, “You go to Germany, all you’ll get is a hundred UN jocks talking sports cars, football, and you onto the nearest flat surface.” Bernie couldn’t see the romance of a foreign war. He was an image consultant for JAL suborbital.

  To Bernie, history was a fashion accessory and fashions came and went with eye-blink speed. Cyberspace had opened the planet like an x-ray, irradiating every corner and shadow of the globe. But what people found with the whole world open to them was that they needed someone else to tell them what it meant.

  Rebecca was a face—both critic and reporter. She was the guiding interface between virtual experience and the vast global audience. Faces like Rebecca Miller travelled Business Class, sifting world culture and packaging it into simple, intense hits of sensation.

  The hottest trend for thirty years had been the Salusa. They were marvels. American and Japanese labs developed them from human DNA and kinked them for super intelligence. They had been vatgrown servants to humanity in the wars on poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. They were also man’s indentured servants, his corporate slaves.

  In the warzone, Rebecca worked on her second Pulitzer. It was an award for a world she hoped was still there to return to, somewhere beyond the unwavering drone of the Salusa at war.

  An hour later and the thudding syncopation of the engines drained away in one long sonorous hum. The Salusa had switche
d off the noise. The silence slammed Rebecca till she stumbled and fell. The soldiers were on their knees too, gagging and spitting. Someone was vomiting—and that meant Rebecca could hear their heaving grunts. The soldiers nearest her were smiling at the sound—at any sound—teeth bright in their camouflage paint as they helped her up. Rebecca breathed the sharp, cold air, enjoying the silence.

  Eventually, the unit’s Major summoned her. She scuttled, head down against snipers, to his command post.

  Major Belgo held his command in a square where four housing projects had once met. The remains of apartment blocks carpeted the ground in broken bricks.

  The Major sat with his sergeants, Saul and Tate, while the unit’s medic inspected a wound on his head. The soldiers had painted their faces till they resembled stylised Apaches. The designs were all unique—emerald ziggurats, butterfly wings, and yin-yang symbols. They were strictly non-reg, but Rebecca had decided Belgo knew what he was doing, bonding the men through their belief in warpaint.

  “We have a sighting, a klick to our whisky,” Belgo said, seeming to enjoy his own jargon. He was a small man, stone bald, with large, striking blue eyes.

  “More nulls?” she asked.

  “Salusa. On foot.” He was Belgian and spoke English with the precision of a second language. “We will be moving to reconnaissance them and re-establish contact with Fox company, then pass our intel back to UN Command. Are you able to go forward with the advance party?”

  She nodded, too vain to admit her fear.

  “Corporal Miller, then,” Belgo said. He smiled and his dull-eyed men laughed dutifully.

  “Cool. I got rank,” Rebecca said.

  “Battlefield promotion.” Sergeant Andy Saul walked over. He slipped his kevlar helmet off. Beneath it he wore a gold earring and a bandanna torn from a piece of parachute silk. The silk flowed over his head like an old flatscreen movie star’s desert headress.

  Behind him, Belgo twinged as the female medic slapped a glistening worm of sealant onto his skull.

  Belgo’s eyes met Rebecca’s. “My men—each of them knows he is going to die. He accepts this as fact. Do you?”

  Rebecca blinked, unprepared. “No.”

  Belgo nodded. She’d given a good answer. “You are unsure of yourself. Unseated from your role as voyeur, yes?”

  She was on surer ground now with this old argument and said nothing.

  The British sergeant—Tommy Tate—looked up from working the moving parts on his machine gun. He had a thick, unpleasant face and sticky, hostile eyes.

  “I am in the business of protecting my people,” Belgo was saying. “I cannot want unsure, confused people unseating me from my objectives.” He allowed his words to linger while the female medic, Roper, settled his helmet over his bruised head. A building without an outer wall hung behind them. Its second story, Rebecca noticed, was a bedroom. The floor bowed in a drunken “V,” as if the weight of its queen bed had grown too huge for it.

  Belgo wiped a greasy thumb over the lenses contoured into his helmet. The pop-down night vision, comm channels, and antilaser flash were all useless now.

  “The Salusa scrambled our tactical displays. Their weapons are more sophisticated. Our force is cut off, surrounded and the inferior in size. But we will succeed.” He nodded, emphatic. “We will, because every member of Dog company is an asset—must be an asset to one another.” He glanced at Saul and the sergeant approached, swinging his carbine up.

  The unit only had projectile weapons. Dependable, twentieth century tech that the Salusa couldn’t fuck with through their damping field.

  “Hey, Daisy.” Saul only ever called her Daisy, and appeared to have no idea of her real name. “Do that up now,” he said in drawling SoCal. He began zipping up her flak jacket. His hand pressed her breast indifferently.

  Belgo talked over Saul’s shoulder. “Your cyberspace implants are disabled, but you have surgically perfect vision. I need you to forward-observe the enemy and see what he is doing.”

  In the army, Rebecca had learned, the commander’s orders were the voice of God. For all any of them knew, he was the last officer left in Mannheim.

  Rebecca’s stomach tightened with fear.

  Seeing her flinch, Saul said, “Daisy, you shoulda stayed home, you didn’t wanta get yo’self killed.”

  Rebecca laughed nervously.

  “This ain’t VR over here, don’t you know.” Saul’s eyes wrinkled, assessing her as a dilemma he had to fix for the unit. The whole squad watched. Rebecca laughed again and said she knew that. Tommy Tate laughed as well, but at her, in a sarcastic bark.

  Saul smiled and slapped her flak jacket. And the unit all saw that he had nothing else to say if she wouldn’t listen.

  Rebecca was travelling down a gentle left-hand curve. The air was mausoleum-cold, but devoid of the bone numbing wind that raced above ground.

  Rebecca sat in the back of a flatbed truck, crowded with silent Germans. They were rolling down and round in an empty never-ending curve. Always turning left, with the truck’s headlights bouncing on sloping concrete. There was no sense of space, just endless grey on grey. They were turning and turning till the world could tip and spill her into a silent colourless ocean.

  The Salusa had attacked as soon as the unit pulled out of the trench. She had been crouching beside Saul and a young black soldier called Drucker. Someone tripped a sonic screamer and two grunts burst apart like an exploding butcher’s shop.

  As the soldiers scattered, Rebecca panicked, rearing up and kicking Drucker away. Then the next she knew, she was flat on her face, mouth numb with the impact. She didn’t even feel the explosion that knocked her down.

  The Salusa got her. Not the actual, genuine article, but their slaves. The nulls, as Belgo’s men called them.

  Now fear dug a fist through her gut.

  Small tears had frozen in her eyes. They stung in the slipstream as the truck sped on. The descent finally levelled out and they burst into a vast cavern. It was the size of an aircraft hanger, with a distant ceiling lit by giant strip lights.

  The Germans spoke softly among themselves. They were stoic on their way to the Salusa, or perhaps they didn’t know what awaited them. Without her inbuilt ’ware, Rebecca didn’t have a German lexicon and was helpless.

  The automated truck pulled to a stop by one wall and parked itself beside a bulky cuboid shape. There were nulls waiting for the truck. Their footsteps stumbled as they came out of the shadows—a whole forest of them. The nulls were clumsy from poor depth perception and damaged motor control. But their faces were peaceful, with none of the cares of Belgo’s men.

  The prisoners were herded off the truck by the mob of nulls dressed in the clothes that the Salusa had found them in. She was roughly jostled by men in soiled denim and Dior suits, and by women in uniforms of delivery girls and waitresses.

  They had all been human once, till some machined process stamped Salusan grafts through their temples. Now they were nulls. The ultimate slave labour. They worked without complaint through frostbite and injuries and starvation, hunting rogue humans with clubs improvised from railing spikes and knives of broken glass.

  They were the Salusa’s own army and their minds were mush.

  A light rose in the far distance and approached in silence. It grew in a widening bubble, becoming diffuse at its edges. In the endless dark yard, she couldn’t tell if it was tiny or huge, floating or rolling. The globe shifted, elongating sideways, and raced towards her. It became the headlights of an electric jeep that pulled in by the other side of the shadowed cube.

  Two men climbed out, their movements within the vast chamber miniscule and dainty.

  Something in their walk, or their cowled, monkish tunics told Rebecca’s hindbrain that they were Salusa before conscious thought caught up. One was hidden behind an LCD visor while the other’s face was baby-smooth, his small features set around two stunning black eyes. She’d almost forgotten that: Salusan eyes were black tunnels, devoid of any w
hiteness.

  Rebecca’s teeth chattered, the fear coming hard. She wanted to disappear, to evade the Salusa’s searing attention.

  The visored Salusan strode along the line of prisoners. His hand twitched, selecting here, here and here.

  He stopped in front of Rebecca. He hadn’t stopped before. His visor was a gentle convex, moulding to the face within. The blue surface burned with alphanumerals. He jabbed his fingers at her, marking her as well, then he stepped back to his companion. They spoke together, their voices filled with slithering, nonsense words. “Retam ca kasser arir nir paredispo shangalis.”

  It was more than a code—they had their own language now.

  They spoke on and on, she didn’t know for how long. But while they talked no one was doing anything to her. Rebecca stood with the other prisoners, docile and not daring to move. She could barely even look about her. She’d been chosen. What did that mean? She had been a face in her other life. Her job had been to find out what was going on. With an act of will, she looked at the machine in the shadows of the wall. It was huge, three times the height of the nulls beside it, and fashioned from black alloy. But she had no idea what it did, what it meant.

  The Salusa had stopped talking. They walked to their car, their feet silent in fur-lined moccasins. Everything about them was controlled and hushed. When they sped away in their jeep, its wheels ran softer than their voices in the smooth chamber. The nulls closed on the prisoners. They pulled out the four people that the Salusa had selected. Rebecca didn’t resist. Something blurred within her. It was the distinction between what was happening and what she wanted. With just the smallest shift she was a child again, celebrating New Year during Rosh Hashanah, bored but safe. An animal instinct within her knew that she might live an extra minute by cooperating with the nulls.

  The machine woke. The cube hummed with a familiar vibration. It was the deep drone that had sunk through her body for the last four days. A null switched on a halogen light and a wonky vertical of buttery light flooded the chamber. It fixed the captives like museum exhibits.