Iterations and other stories (collection)

“What do you mean, ‘Goodbye’? Jesus Christ, Paul—”

Rackham’s brow was slick with sweat. “Goodbye.”

The temperature continued to rise. Rackham reached down and undogged his helmet, the abrupt increase in air pressure hurting his ears. He lifted the great fishbowl off his head, letting it fly across the cabin. He then took off the Snoopy-eared headset array. It undulated up and away, a fabric bat in the shaft of earthlight, ending up pinned by acceleration to the ceiling.

Paint started peeling off the walls, and the plastic piping had a soft, unfocused look to it. The air was so hot it hurt to breathe. Yuri’s body was heating up, too. The smell from that direction was overpowering.

Rackham was close to one of the circular windows. Earth had swollen hugely beneath him. He couldn’t make out the geography for all the clouds—was that China or Africa, America or Russia below? It was all a blur. And all the same.

An orange glow began licking at the port as paint on the station’s hull burned up in the mesosphere. The water in the reticulum of tubes running over his body soon began to boil.

Flames were everywhere now. Atmospheric turbulence was tearing the station apart. The winglike solar panels flapped away, crisping into nothingness. Rackham felt his own flesh blistering.

The roar from outside the station was like a billion screams. Screams of the starving. Screams of the poor. Screams of the shackled. Through the port, he saw the Kristall module sheer clean off the docking adapter and go tumbling away.

Look below, the voice had said. Look below.

And he had.

Into space, at any price.

Into space—above it all.

The station disintegrated around him, metal shimmering and tearing away. Soon nothing was left except the flames. And they never stopped.

Ours to Discover

Author’s Introduction

John Robert Colombo edited the first-ever anthology of Canadian science fiction, Other Canadas; it came out in 1979, my last year in high school.

In 1981, the special SF collection of the Toronto Public Library system was known as the Spaced-Out Library (it was later renamed The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy—the precise wording of which was my coinage). Back then the Friends of SOL held its first-ever public event: readings by local writers Terence M. Green, Andrew Weiner, and Robert Priest, all introduced by John Colombo. I met all four gentlemen for the first time that day, and Terry, Andrew, and John went on to become close friends (my novel Frameshift is dedicated to Terry and his wife; this collection is dedicated to Andrew; and Tesseracts 6, an anthology of Canadian SF I co-edited with my wife, is dedicated to John).

John remembered me in 1982, when he sold LeisureWays, a glossy magazine for members of the Canadian Automobile Association, on the idea of running three short-short stories set in Ontario’s future. He tapped Terry and Andrew for two of the stories—excellent choices, as they had both already published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—and he took a chance by asking me for the third. The result is “Ours to Discover” (the slogan on Ontario license plates is “Yours to Discover”). It may leave non-Canadians scratching their heads, but I confess I still get misty-eyed whenever I read this one aloud.

* * *

Old man Withers was crazy. Everybody said so, everybody but that boy Eric. “Mr. Withers is an archeologist,” Eric would say— whatever an archeologist might be. Remember that funny blue-and-white sweater Withers found? He claimed he could look at the markings on it and hear the words “Toronto Maple Leafs” in his head. Toronto was the name of our steel-domed city, of course, so I believed that much, but I’d never heard of a maple leaf before. The same maple leaf symbol was in the center of all those old flags people kept finding in the ruins. Some thought a maple leaf must have been a horrendous beast like a moose or a beaver or a trudeau. Others thought it was a kind of crystal. But crystals make people think of rocks and uranium and bombs and, well, those are hardly topics for polite conversation.

Eric wanted to know for sure. He came around to the museum and said, “Please, Mr. Curator, help me find out what a maple leaf is.”

Truth to tell, I wasn’t the real curator. I’d moved into the museum, or rom (as some called it), because it was such a nice building. No one ever used it, after all, and with so few of us under the Dome you could live just about anywhere you chose. Well, we looked, but Eric and I didn’t have any luck finding a real maple leaf among the few intact exhibits. “It must have been something very special,” Eric said. “It must have meant something to our ancestors, back When Times Were Good.” He looked up at me with innocent eyes. “If we could find out what a maple leaf was, maybe times would be good again.”