Radio Sphere Read online

  Radio Sphere

  Devin terSteeg

  Dedication

  Just as from Niflheim there arose a coldness and all thing grim, so what was facing close to Muspell was hot and bright, but Ginnungagap was as mild as a windless sky. And when rime and the blowing warmth met so that it thawed and dripped, there was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power source of heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Xmir.

  Rime Giant

  www.RimeGiant.com

  First published by Rime Giant.

  First printing, May 2015

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblence to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Devin terSteeg

  All rights reserved

  Cover, illustrations, and book design provided by Hollie DeFrancisco. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Hollie DeFrancisco.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portion thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This book, honestly, is for me.

  Thank you for reading.

  1

  Forbearer—

  I am unsure how well received this letter will be. I understand that emotions— outright outrage and terrible frustrations— are all we parted with. I hope time has devoured our sins.

  It was difficult for me to say goodbye to our planet’s timber skies, truth be told, despite what false front I’d managed at the time.

  The inescapable, constant hum of machines and solid black out the windows once frightened me greatly. Our destination is the effulgent blue pearl; their solar system is not much different from others we’ve observed. Now I’m actually happy to be out here, our people were never much for exploration and now I can see why; the depths of space are severely lonely. I keep remembering why we left and I am sorry it pushed us apart.

  Great hope and wonder now fills me.

  These Refulgent Creatures hold many mysteries. I’m excited to meet them! Each day I try to imagine a little about how they think, what they value, what they enjoy. How far have they come since the transmissions we’ve seen? How fictional are the scenes they play out? While traveling at such great speeds we are unable to certify any transmissions since we left.

  How bottomless is the chasm of perspective we can learn from them, and the other way around?

  — With love,

  À¥ÐŁŒ

  2

  I had a dream that I was making love to a woman in the bath tub. Her face was familiar, somehow, but I could not place it. The water was warm, right out of the tap. It wasn’t candle but electric light illuminating the room. She started apologizing because, she said, only now did she start to find me attractive and I ignored her because I was busy.

  Thrusting and grunting, but that was automatic, I was busy reflecting on the history of this room. It was my bathroom and at the same time not. Colorful blue and orange sunset wallpaper covered everything and the tub still stood on its feet. She got offended, but what could I do? There was no blood to lubricate my dream—thoughts, there was only an instinctual command line that resonated through me that demanded a child come from this union. Instinctual, but yet I wondered how the walls looked so clean and bright unlike anything I’d ever seen before. She got out of the tub.

  “Just because we can fit together,” she said as the water and soap bubbles cascaded down from her lopsided breasts, “doesn’t mean we are a team to fight injustice or both wear skirts.”

  Now I recognized her, Samantha from work and she was beautiful down to the scar that tore through her left thigh and curved to the top of the butt cheek on the same side stopping short of her spine.

  We hadn’t finished, and my brain demanded at least some of the blood back to figure out why. Samantha walked into the hallway, into the bedroom, then locked herself in the closet to cry, which was ironic to me because she had wanted a door—less walk—in style closet but that might have been a different dream. As she walked across the carpet, all I could think of was those droplets of water still falling from her curves would find their way down into the long fibers to discover ancient dust and commingle into mud.

  I awoke in my ecru colored world with its painted blood—brown walls and I felt like a woman on her deathbed, and I was Elizabeth again. I didn’t choose the decor. Out my window, the Boston sky was the color of raw cinnamon, as it always was. It was a million degrees because I rented this old couple’s attic, and through the center of the room scorched a chimney that mathematically meant I never got cold up there. They always kept a fire going, my rented old people, who owned and operated a museum in their retirement out of the old Faneuil Hall, in nearly everything else they were sparse.

  It was delightful to be in my own skin again, even if it was barely sub—volcanic, because I had grand plans that I needed to get to if I was going to make it to mom and dad’s before curfew.3

  I started the day by retracing the path my dream woman— I meant the woman from my dream, not the woman of my dreams— Samantha, took from the tan tiled bathroom with painted, not wallpapered, walls decorated by my old people with Jesus4 sayings and cleaned at least seven times weekly by me. I got really excited because a few months after moving in I started working on a disinfectant to purify my home, and it was nearing perfection. I think I was weirded out; it was strange because I was a man in my dream… but stranger? She called me Sarah which isn’t even my name.

  I was given a record player seven months ago for my nineteenth birthday and moving out present from Chad with a few 45s,5 so I took the Bowie Earthling album I’d been listening to a lot over the last week off and put on Nena’s 99 Luftballons, whoever had it before had been a fan of German6 stuff, other albums included In Trance by Scorpions and Somewhere Far Beyond by Blind Guardian. If I were a boy I’d want to be called Anslem or Marcel or Tholand because those names sound strong.

  The carpet could not have been defiled by a dream, but I scrubbed it with diluted hot vinegar mixed with nahcolite and ethanol for twenty—five minutes anyway. It’s not like I could just get a new carpet.

  Ever since the simultaneous nuclear detonations above the clouds7 people have been strange, Grandpa says, like never before.

  The result of the explosions in the upper atmosphere knocked out most of the electronics as far as Monsantonia,8 Grandpa knew all about it and most of what devices survived seemed random to me. I didn’t use a lot of electricity, so I never had to worry about using up my power rations, plus I had the hand crank.

  I spent five hours at The Laundromat playing DS,9 I mean washing clothes, but I finished a ton of Yoshi’s Island10 and just felt awful accomplished.

  The only remaining washateria in Boston looked like an old homeless city, an outdoor sprawl of rusted machines lit by torches11 and covered by whatever tarps they could find. The oxidized washers filled the Common12 in jagged clumps that ran off generators brought in by Logan at the end of each month. A large sign posted exchange prices for goods— ethanol, water at various qualities, grain, fuel and workers. It was difficult to focus on the game at times because this clunker of a dryer sounded like it was popping giant kernels of popcorn. I had to keep getting up to switch loads and fold because I hadn’t washed clothes in three months, kept noticing this guy with sunken eyes in a gaunt face watching me fold as if I were teaching him how; he thought I didn’t notice him studying me until I mistakenly looked up and caught his eye.

  “I’m leaving at three to go pick apples,”13 he said.

  I returned a self—comforting smile.

  The place alone gave me goosebumps, it had a disquiet that was easy to m
istakenly overlook— hundreds of people all around yet alone, so I was glad to have some clean clothes and could leave. That creeper was easy enough to ignore the rest of the time even though I knew he kept staring at me.

  Mom and dad had me over for dinner, I hadn’t seen them in seven months, since moving out, but most importantly Chad would be there. Chad had these pectoral muscles that must have been so comfortable to lean into, to fall asleep on, that he could use to protect me.

  His hair had this one brawny Superman14 curl that danced around his forehead as he moved and he had that faux—mountainous15 smell of a clean man. My own One from City of Lost Children.16

  Chad got along well with my dad ever since his own father passed— which meant he started going over to our house. I could see in dad’s eyes a calm he never had years ago whenever he and Chad had their long mentorus talks in the study. Chad was only four years older than me. Mom, who was pushing 232 years old, and birthed me at 213, grew up with Chad’s dad back before the world changed from blue to brown. We figured mom was among the last still alive— from before the bombs went off— in Boston at least.

  I completed more of Yoshi’s Island, sitting on the duffel of clean clothes, while I waited for the T17 which came late because it had been stalled by another jumper—18 people having trouble coping with one thing or another. The trains only ran for three hours in the morning and again for three hours in the evening, so jumpers completely messed up the schedule. Mom once told me that people looted until they realized the TVs they’d stolen wouldn’t work, after that there wasn’t a lot of crime. Mom had said it was better now, that I could live happily, but I could tell she always missed something from before. She almost never spoke about what it was like in her youth. Logan had men there, lifting, moving, hammering; they all wore jumpsuits of mismatched colors— green, orange, blue— and operated in ordered groups of four or five. The colors didn’t seem to correspond to anything at all.

  Nobody spoke to them and they spoke to nobody, the men with guns watched from all corners. The men with guns usually patrolled on foot between, and at, the train stations. From the John courthouse, Boylston, Dartmouth, and down to Union Park the soldiers made triangular patrol routes. You could see them clearly from high enough— when reading The Giver on the topmost accessible floor of the remains of John Hancock Tower— I could watch the clusters of dots blithely roam. Some jumpsuit men came from down track with plastic gloves and containers covered with tarps or canvas or something. Even after the Callahan tunnel collapsed Logan kept regular patrols and the general appearance of order. Grandpa and dad worked very hard to hold the city together; each held high positions at one time. They kept the city from ruin.

  Greater Boston became a figurative island, surrounded by a sea of chaos and ignorance, except the occasional caravans that came in through Mass Pike from nowhere towns not on the old maps.

  The trucks were like clothing; scraps stitched together and lumbering around like Frankenstein’s monster— things that didn’t seem to fit in the world.

  The trucks were cobbled together from Logan’s hoarded tires; most had a bed built from a picnic table and children’s park equipment since all they needed to do was haul Great—paste from where ever they were grown.

  I watched the trucks because they rumbled and made no sense. How can piles of debris be energized to life— they were more than the sum of their parts and had a great usefulness— but were nothing like Wenji and her family. Of the eight trucks— Kitahn, Copley, Perry, Shaw, Lowry, Nena, Hepburn, and Dean— that motored about the city from time to time, Nena was my favorite. She had two silver slides on her side to wall the back of the truck and monkey bars that soldiers would dangle their legs through to gate the hatch. Nena limped the most and, when the soldier’s would remove the plastic green turtle shell of a hood to see and fix what may have gone wrong, she was loved the most by her companions.

  The soldiers who drive the trucks brought news bulletins and announcements from Logan, posted in public areas. The thin paper sheets and paint—like ink rendered the missives lives short, so most communities had a reader or two to relay the news.

  I kept records at the water dispensary, they’d set us up in Old South Church, which wasn’t too far a walk from my apartment. Many of the old churches were converted into water dispensaries since running water had been cut off to the city two centuries ago due to contamination, radiation. It was supposed to be clean water. The serosity was impure. I’d often watch the particles float in the water and dance across sunlight and wonder what they were. It had to be something gross; from a dead fish, frog poop, mud, or human bits.

  We kept handwritten records on paper, so we had a sizable staff to keep everything organized and accounted for. The city had re—purposed a lot of space around the financial district for workers to make paper, ink, and other necessities. Grandpa taught me cursive, but those weren’t allowed at work because nobody could read them. Handwriting died out at least two generations ago— we revived it; we were chosen because our hand—eye coordination allowed for the most legible writing in Boston. I got fed for working; it beat some of the other jobs people needed doing. Grandpa taught me most of my lessons growing up since he was already retired and lived with us, he was one of the few to have lived for over 30019 years. He was a leader at Logan, an archivist, a strategist, the last of a certain type of educated man, a teacher.

  Dad told me there used to be a time, long ago, when people craved the knowledge to read and write, but that even Grandpa wasn’t old enough to have seen it. The whole city was saddened by Grandpa’s decline, how the radiation affected his memory, and the medicine that allowed for his extended life began to run out causing rapid decay and irreparable aging. The same happened to mom, the supplies at Mass General20 waned, the last reserved for those already on the treatment. They won’t get enough— no more was going to come— causing synaptic function to decrease more than anything physical, the older you were the harsher the decline. The elders became husks, first like children, then like barely living mannequins until they finally died.

  When the T came I put away my DS and entered the screeching car. They’re kind of amazing. The whole subway smelled of the old world; sun and rust and rain; the green and gray cars looks like they’ve traveled it whole.

  I lugged the duffel into the center of the train car. The creeper from the laundromat had followed me. They say the sudden emptiness of the world had affected people’s brains, Grandpa called them beat—brains; most of the people who were badly affected had already died off, but some still lived and their brains flow like an icebound river. They can’t even figure out basic Van Hiele,21 then suddenly they can see things we can’t, insights and the like, as if their brains were reconstructed in a different way— a broken yet beautiful calamity. Grandpa came across many in his time working at Logan and he was one, in a way, as he died. They all were, the aged ones, as they no longer got the medicines that kept them.

  He coughed like he wanted to keep even the air out, but gave up for a while because his body made him; try, try again.

  “Don’t you what I know regret toast?” Grandpa muttered to his own photograph from ninety years before. He giggled to himself, took a sip of water that dribbled down his shirt, and flicked the photo across the room with a tear in his eye.

  In his younger elderly years, he was often harsh and cold because he wanted more from people and they rarely lived up to his expectations. He didn’t care about how you did something but, rather why you did it— if you messed up constantly for the right reasons he came close to giving you a pass.

  “I do like toast, don’t you miss it Lizzie?” I wasn’t sure what toast was I just placated him and he rocked back and forth with a grin. I picked up his photograph and he asked me what I had in my hand.

  “It’s a kind of bird, Grandpa, have you’ve seen these kind before?”

  “Oh yes, long ago we had a bird bath in our yard and those and all kinds of birds hopped on all fours… they
bathed and dad shot them with pellets. I thought them all extinct, didn’t you Iola?”

  We were alone so I knew he forgot I wasn’t my mother, but it wasn’t the first time so I knew not to fight back. Things got bad when I didn’t play along.

  “Well Grandpa, if these birds are so rare maybe we can follow them home— maybe there are more there and we can go on an adventure.”

  “I’m too old for adventure.”

  “One last adventure!”

  “You’re too young to leave the house.”

  “That’s the thing you remember?”

  “Where is your mother? Sarah? Sarah?!”

  “Sarah’s not my mom. Who is Sarah?”

  “Sarah?!”

  The spittle flew from his mouth because he knew Sarah was dead, but he also thought she was in the next room. My mother heard his shouts and joined us.

  “Papa, it’s me— Iola.”

  “I know that. You’re right over there,” he pointed at me.

  “That’s Liz, your granddaughter, Papa,”

  “Yes, little Lizzie. That’s right.” He leaned in and whispered “Lizzie and I are going on an adventure. She thinks the photo is a bird.”

  The boy from the laundromat kept staring at me, and soon I could smell the mix of fecal and mint odors he carried with him.

  “They’re not green, your sister saw the sky that isn’t hers— threw a seahorse at them all!”

  I mistakenly giggled.

  “Hush! The plum poppies don’t know anything yet.”

  He descended upon me with his aggression palpable, almost condensing on the windows. The enclosed train car left me with no place to escape to. He held a red, uneaten apple22 in one hand hanging off a limp arm as he raised the other hand above his head. The train cart rocked gently as it rolled down the track and I ran to the door.

  I got as far away from him as I could, my back to the wall, he still stood on the other side of the car looking at me with a gloss over his eyes that I’d seen in Grandpa’s eyes that meant nobody was home. The door was locked. There were no other people on the Earth, for a single moment; I was alone with erratic behavior personified.