Archive for the ‘Jon Hansen’ Category
Looking Up
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
I miss hearing my name, but not Dr. Helfinger’s elbow in my ribs. “Astrid! Get up!” he hisses in my ear. I stand and smile and shuffle across the stage to the podium. Without looking I pull my index cards from my lab coat pocket and launch into the speech. One of Turner’s, some rousing claptrap about our eternal quest to push back the frontiers of science. Even as I give it, I hear not a word. I am too busy waiting for him.
They say every great thinker does his best work when he’s young and unrestricted by experience. And then in the next breath they say I am the exception that proves the rule. Sixty-five years of steady work has brought me much: twenty-odd doctoral degrees in as many disciplines. Five noble prizes. Enough research funding to buy me a medium-sized country (say, France), not to mention an army of graduate students eager to run it for me. They all look up to me. Well, all but one.
As I finish, a sonic boom overwhelms the applause and a sudden whiff of ozone fills my nose. I turn my head. There he is, striding towards me, the applause changing to thunderous cheers. A smile automatically comes to my face and our arms reach for each other. Professor Astrid and Captain Formidable. As of last year, Eugene Eng, my former student. My greatest gift to the world, my greatest failure.
We hug, and every hair on my body stands up.
He was one of a hundred faceless students I had on the Project. We had calculated the way to break into the Sidereal Plane, the proper procedure to infuse its energies into a human body, and the experiment eighteen years in the making to test it. And then Eugene, distracted by a text, had stepped where he should not have when he shouldn’t have. The universe changed and he was remade.
Him.
The Dean awards him his honorary degree, the Ph.D. he had left incomplete. He shakes my hand and thanks me, as he has every time he sees me, and then he is gone with a flash, into the sky. And I am left like the rest.
Looking up.
The Kosmomancer’s Apprentice
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
I stood at the top of Zhezh Mountain. Below me lay the fires of the city, littering the plain like fallen stars, and the Palace the brightest of them all. In there, somewhere, slept the Overlord. I clenched my fist around the hilt of my sky dagger. The memory of him burned in my heart, all asprawl on his throne, his fingers waving dismissively at my master as they dragged him off to meet the axe and then for me, the coal to my left eye. Mercy, he called it.
Beside me the goat gave a low bleat, and I came back. “Tonight,” I whispered.
I led the goat to my makeshift altar, a simple flat rock the length of me. On the goat’s side I painted the constellations with elderberry juice. The Archer. The Dragon. The Dagger. Each of them circled the star-shaped blackness in the white of the goat’s chest. Then I readied the dagger.
If I fled afterwards, they might not catch me, but it would not be enough.
Chanting quietly, I slit the goat’s throat and let the blood pour out on the altar. I drew the forbidden patterns with trembling fingers. Then I flung up my hand with a cry, facing the night for the first time.
The stars wheeled overhead as I waited and despaired. Then I saw it, faint at first, then stronger: the hairy star, the star of ill omen, the falling star, the comet with its tail pointing down at the palace like a dagger. All would see and know the Overlord’s end writ large in the stars, and though he might thrash and rage as I did when they took my eye, it would do him no good. Soon he would sleep forever in the crypts.
I sat on the cold ground and waited for them to find me.