Forever Magazine Issue 37 by Michael Bishop

Author:Michael Bishop [Bishop, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nita: “Dead End might be a better name.”

Indira: “Or Crater Quake.”

Pete: “Or Pot Hole. Or Acid Bath.”

Nita: “Gloomandoom!”

Indira: “Bitter Pill! Or maybe—”

Bao: “That’s enough!”

Odenwald: “Easy, Bao—I was about to propose an irreverent name of my own.”

Bao: “Sir, the purpose of this session is to brief you, not to divert ourselves.”

Odenwald: “Maybe we should divert Annie to another planet in this system.”

Nita: “Which? Jelly Belly? Red Hot?”

Pete: “The gravity on Jawbreaker would crush us. We’d do as well to set down on Eppie herself.”

Nita: “Or as ill.”

Bao: “We should continue to New Home. First-hand studies of the environmental aftermath of an asteroid strike this large are virtually nonexistent. We should follow up.”

Indira: “But for whose sake?”

Odenwald: “You all have your work. I have mine. And my first duty is to break the news.”

Nita: “You’ll break hearts as well.”

Pete: “A better time might be—”

Odenwald: “Traveling at nearly a million klicks per hour, there’s no time like the present.”

Bao halted the recording.

“Nita was right,” I said. “The news has broken my heart. And it’s sure to break others.”

Bao toasted me with an imaginary shot glass, then slugged back its imaginary contents.

Lily broke the bad tidings to Dean. She insisted on her prerogative in this. In his self-appointed role as goduncle, Kaz tagged along.

We took Dean to a glade in the atrium, a stand of sycamores bonsai’d artfully near a waterfall encased in a sort of panpipe of clear plastic. In this secluded place, the falling water, pump-driven and -recirculated, made its tremulous woodwind and brook music.

Kaz lifted Dean to a notch in one of the sycamores and then tactfully wandered away. Lily took up a post beside Dean, to catch him if he slipped, while I sat on a bench masquerading as a ledge on the face of our miniature cascade.

Finches warbled, and, not far away, another party murmured among themselves, their talk a faint counterpoint to the water noise and the nonstop background hum.

“DeBoy, I have to tell you a very unpleasant thing,” Lily began. “New Home won’t be our new home, after all.” She told him about our discovery of the recent asteroid strike and its meaning for everyone aboard our remaining ships—namely, either a frustrating wait until environmental conditions improved on Eppie’s second planet or another long interstellar journey to another solar system with potential for settlement, most likely the Tau Ceti system.

None of this seemed to impress Dean. He sat in the dwarf sycamore gazing upward, and all around, for a glimpse of one of the finches.

“Do you understand me?” Lily asked. “We’ve come all this way, DeBoy, and New Home may be denied us.”

“Yessum.” Dean gave her a grudging, shifty-eyed nod.

“It’s all right to feel sad. It’s even all right to cry.”

Our ingrate son kept rubbernecking for birds.

“Dean!”

So quickly did Dean’s gaze snap back to Lily that he had to grab a limb. “I like id here,” he said. “Now thad evvybody’s ub . . . up . . . I like id jes fine.”

Almost against my will, I guffawed.

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