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Copyright Information
Copyright © 2000, 2011 by B.A. Chepaitis
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
Quotation
It all started with the moon. If only the earth could have gone around the sun by itself, unperturbed by the complications....which the moon introduced....
Chaos Bound — Katherine Hayle
Prologue
Home Planet, Ranalli, Connecticut
Mary Lambert’s favorite part of the week was her walk home after work on Fridays.
The rest of her evenings filled up with appointments, seminars, or therapy groups, but she reserved Fridays for herself, and walked the two miles from office to home. It was good exercise, and it took her through a pretty part of town. She particularly liked strolling the pedestrian walkway of the Ranalli River Bridge, sometimes stopping to stare at the water and clear the week from her mind.
This Friday she moved a little faster than usual as she crossed it. She’d been kept at work late with a suicidal client, and by the time she closed her office doors it was almost sunset, with a gibbous moon visible in the northern sky.
She kept her head down, her thoughts focused inward on the case she’d just left. She clipped right past the man sitting on the railing, aware of him only peripherally.
Then, she slowed. Something was odd.
It wasn’t unusual to see people standing on the walkway, leaning their elbows on the railing and gazing down at the river, but she’d never seen anyone actually sitting on the railing. That’s what he was doing. Sitting there, swinging his legs, tossing a stone up and down.
She twisted her neck to look over her shoulder at him.
He didn’t seem upset. He tossed the stone up, caught it, tossed it again. Might as well be whistling, she thought. He had the look of an educated man. Wire-rimmed glasses. Tousled sandy hair shot through with a little grey. Nice face. Friendly. He reminded her of her brother. But her brother had committed suicide.
Her training as a psychologist, and the fact that she’d spent the afternoon talking another man off the cliff gave her pause. It wouldn’t hurt, she thought, to say hello.
She turned back and walked to him, leaned against the railing.
“Hey,” she said, pulling a cigarette from her jacket pocket. “Got a light?”
He caught his stone, held it for a moment, stroking the surface. Then he turned his face to her and pointed up at a sign over their heads. She craned her head back to read.
No smoking, drinking, running, skating or dogs on the walkway.
She shrugged. “Nobody’s around. How about it?”
“Fine by me,” he said.
He pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it into flame and held it up. She let the flame touch the tip of her cigarette and pulled in smoke.
“Thanks,” she said, and made herself comfortable, looking out over the river. The setting sun kissed the surface of water and bounced up to them. The moon began to glow in the darkening sky. The silver ribbon of water ran under them as smooth as liquid glass. There was no wind to disturb it today. Pretty river. Pretty sky.
“Nice view,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought this would be right.”
“Right?”
“As the last thing I see,” he said, smiling at her.
Mary felt cold run through her. That’s what she thought.
“You’re going to kill yourself?” she asked.
He held up the stone he was carrying, rubbed at it with his thumb. “Yes,” he said. “I’d rather. It’s a lousy world, isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” she agreed.
She took a good look at his face. It was young and old at the same time. The smoothness of his skin placed him at thirty, tops. But the smattering of gray in his hair, the brooding in his eyes and heaviness in his mouth made him look older. Like her brother. The same look of mingled calm and despair. The gnawing sorrow of his death relived itself here, in this man’s face and eyes. Too much grief. Too much hopelessness. She turned her head away.
He said nothing. Continued to toss the stone up and down. Up and down.
“Why is it a lousy world for you?” she asked.
He shrugged. “The usual reasons. An absence of love. An absence of hope for anything but stupidity. Look what we’re doing to the ionosphere. The Hague’s decision to allow it. T-waves, and their results. All the people who pour poison into the earth for the sake of a pretty lawn. We survived the Killing Times, but I doubt we’ll survive our own vanity. I doubt we should.”
She took a long drag off her cigarette, flicked it away and watched it hit the water below while her mind busied itself with categories to place him in. He had none of the physical markings of a mutoid – no blue skin patch, no shriveled hand or twitching that revealed the genetic anomalies of those caught in the biobombs of the Serials.
No. Not that. Intergenerational trauma was her first guess. That’s what got her brother. He wasn’t even born during the massive urban violence known as the Killing Times, when serial killing rose to epidemic proportions and murder became the norm in city streets. He didn’t experience the violence, but their parents did, and something of their trauma seeped into him. She saw a lot of that in her practice. She imagined it was the same with this man.
“Maybe you should stick around and try to make things better,” Mary suggested.
He turned the stone over and over in his hand. “What for? All improvement becomes the next point of disaster.”
“That’s how you see it?”
“That’s how it is. Jesus wanted to make change, and we got the Crusades, and genocide for the sake of conversion. Genetic engineering causes new anomalies as fast as it cures diseases. Pesticides, meant to cure world hunger, poison the earth and all its creatures. But maybe none of that bothers you.”
“It bothers me,” she said. “But I don’t despair of change.”
“Yes, you do,” he said.
The words entered her softly, like seduction, like sex. She watched him toss the stone up and down. As it moved through the air it seemed to shed dust that billowed out, moving toward her.
Yes you do. You despair of change. You just keep yourself so busy you won’t feel it except in the odd Friday afternoon when the sun slants a certain way and you know you’re alone in the world.
“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t. There’s – there’s good things in the world. Even just walking home on a day like today, or talking with someone like you, people helping each other.”
He held the stone up. It was so near her face she could almost smell it, a cool, metallic scent. “And when you leave here?” he asked. “Then what?”
“I won’t leave until I know you’re safe,” she said, touching his arm lightly, infusing her voice with sincerity and compassion.
He smiled, gazed at the river. “Once I’m safe - will you go home?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
He turned his face to hers. “Alone?” he asked.
She saw her apartment as if it was reflected in his eyes. The empty refrigerator. The frozen dinner waiting for her. Last night’s leftovers still on the coffee table in front of the TV. Alone.
Alone. Utterly and absolutely alone is how you’ll live and die, and you will die after coursing out your meaningless life trying to kid yourself that you matter at all. That anybody matters. But deep down you