Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 68 (May 2012) by Wyrm Publishing

Author:Wyrm Publishing
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2012-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

I take out Buggy 2. I tell the others I’m going for a drive through Hell’s Half Acre. I tell myself, if I can cut through the mold inside Tchaikovsky’s ship, there might still be some vodka left to sip on. I’m sporing like fuck.

The moon looks dead and nothing and grayscale, all everywhere forever. Rilles, ash cones, dark-halo craters, basaltic lowland seas, a deep regolith of iron and magnesium. The whole Oceanus Procellarum. It’s enough to lie down and never get back up, but not right now. Right now, there’s all this water, inside the moon, where we can’t even see it. And this mold, canary or freedom or piss yellow, is growing out of it, growing right now! I drive straight toward Tycho, fast. Leave it all behind. I drive and lean back in my seat and am satisfactorily lightweight because instead of thinking about the moon, I’m thinking about what’s gone. Denver. Donner Pass. Nights in winter. I’m reciting lines over a defunct vidchannel: “ Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks, goodnight little house and goodnight mouse. “

I daze out. My eyes close while I speed across an ancient seabed. Crystal clear, I remember lying in their bed, the nightlamp warming my face, their cold feet crowding around mine. My wife comes in to check on us. I don’t need her to smile to know that if the world ended at that exact moment, there’d be nothing she’d change. When I open my eyes, all thoughts go, like air through a crack in my helmet.

There’s the moldline, as sick and as yellow as ever.

The latitude’s all wrong; the Russian’s ship is still four miles south. But here, at the edge of that advancing fungal bloom, stands Tchaikovsky.

It’s him all right. Not flesh and silver and Kevlar; instead, he’s made of mold, completely and utterly.

Mold: Jesus.

After I climb out of the buggy, I don’t know whether to ask him for the secret of sustainable water or cleave him to pieces.

“Ve vant to vin,” he says in a gurgling version of his accent. How I can hear him with the radio out, I am at a loss to explain. He opens his fist to reveal a toppled king piece carved of mold. I think of Vinegar Tom knocking over my own king and that dredges up all the ire the sporing had anchored down.

“You’re not going to vin this time,” I say. “No hallucination could, cosmonaut or not.”

“No hallucination.” He pounds his inflated chest once with a fist that could easily be mistaken for a cheese wheel. “Ze cosmetic is ready!”

“That’s what a hallucination would say.”

He shrugs.

I don’t have the patience for this kind of high. My eyes itch, my sinuses suddenly burn. I tilt my head back until it passes. All across the sky, stars flash. In-between them don’t flash millions of other stars, dark, as if forgotten or not even there. Below, the Earth looks painted on space. Out of the blue, I miss things. Afternoon thunderstorms. Playgrounds and fruit snacks.

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