Of Gods and Globes

Of Gods and Globes

a cosmic scifi and fantasy anthology

edited by

Lancelot Schaubert

Of Gods and Globes

Copyright © 2018 by Lancelot Schaubert

All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Lancelot Schaubert

Cover image In the Eyes of the Creator by Malinda Rathnayake from Flickr.com via Creative Commons 2.0 license which allows sharing, copying, redistribution, adaption for any purpose, even commercially — dated May 4th 2018.

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors and used here with their permission.

Publisher’s Note:

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

For more information, contact Lancelot Schaubert:

lancelot@lanceschaubert.org

lancelot.nyc

table of contents

intro: a cosmic anthology

Ed. Lancelot Schaubert

perpetual silence

LJ Cohen

an incomplete assignment

Anne Greenwood Brown

celestines

Emily Munro

the bells are ringing

Anthony G. Cirilla

four umbrellas

FC Shultz

army men

Juliet Marillier

00:08:23

Lancelot Schaubert

bios

a Cosmic Anthology

Lancelot Schaubert

Growing up, I enjoyed hearing three nurses and two pharmacists tell stories from their professions but I always assumed they told one particular lie. The full moon story. They all had them — stories of once-docile dementia patients now running amok, grown men intentionally pulling out their catheters (and leaving a trail of clumpy blood in their wake), little kids getting tangled in IV tubes, wily old women stealing a hospital floor’s entire stock of the juice meant for treating low blood sugars. From all of this nonsense we get the words lunacy and lunatics: the tidal influence of the moon upon the mind. Despite the cosmic origins of these words, many claim it comes from a woman’s monthly cycle. That critique potentially applies to monaðseocnes month-sickness, but that’s a different word from a different language. It doesn’t work for the root word in question:

Lunacy.

Madness inspired by the tidal influence of the moon. You know, like Loony Luna Lovegood, the character we meet in the book about the werewolf.

Anyways, I kept thinking these medical professionals and their full moon stories were loony through college.

THEN I graduated and got a job working the night shift as a nurse’s aid — what the old guard called an orderly — at St. John’s 6E. 6E stood for six east, the orthopedic floor that only dealt with broken bones and Oxford knees and hip replacements. At least half the time. With the other half of our time, we became a catchall floor for medical. The nurses never — ever — complained so much as when our precious island of orthopedics turned into a medical catchall.

During one such stint, I experienced my first full moon.

And I immediately regretted mocking my aunts and uncle and cousins for their having claimed that the moon influences folks. It does. We had a near-empty floor — like three patients apiece — that filled up within the hour. For those that don’t know, one of the most time consuming activities on a hospital floor is patient intake because you have to get all of the data right in order to treat well. So each team suddenly starts doing data entry on six patients apiece while trying to maintain medicine and catheter care and vital rounds on everyone else. Then the madness hit: restraining belts for violent patients, a sixteen-year-old football player that suddenly refused to wipe his own ass, two separate patients at opposite ends of the hall pulling out their pick lines and bleeding all over the place.

Madness.

From the moon.

It happened every month: the floor as a whole lost its collective shit.

We humans didn’t used to live so blind. We used to take into account the tidal affect of heavenly bodies a little more. In the medieval education system, they applied the intransitive arts of logic and rhetoric and grammar to four subjects: time (math / numbers) plus the application of time in music, and space (geometry) plus the application of space in astronomy. Those together gave them pause when planets aligned or comets passed.

Imagine if all of our high school freshmen could recite tenets of planetary dynamism.

We’ve lost so much…

They believed back then that the sheer gravity of these colossal bodies in what they called the heavens or the womb of the worlds or the waters above the skies but what we call outer space, the gravity of the planets in the heavens actually had tangible effects here on earth. For a mother to move heaven and earth to see her dying child, therefore, would be for her to move not just Earth but Saturn too as well as the whole of the firmament and its countless stars that break upon the abyss. Planets, moons, and distant suns all messed with us and therefore influenced her dying child’s illness, for good and ill. Our word influenza, as Lewis pointed out, comes directly from this idea: that of a heavenly influence on our health.

And from what we have relearned in recent history about the way magnetism, gravity, centrifugal and centripetal force, as well as the many other forces of one giant body upon another — we know the medievalists had it right all along.

When the moon gets too close and too bright, it makes us crazy.

In that spirit, I rounded up sci-fi and fantasy writers to write about cosmic influence. The fantasy writers took a more mythological approach, speaking of the symbolic (or perhaps godly) Mercury and Mars and Neptune. The sci-fi writers tell you what it’s like to live on Jupiter and Uranus. All of them, though, speak of the influence of what one writer called the music of the spheres. These are stories Of Gods and Globes. They’re quite the ride: I enjoy each of these stories differently. They made me laugh and cry and chilled me to the bone with terror and one of them made me long for a home that… well for a home I don’t think I’ve ever been to before.

Come fly with us. Let’s fly. Let’s fly away.

Or, if you prefer, to appeal from Sinatra to Sinatra:

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars.

Let me see what spring is like

On Jupiter and Mars…

Fill my heart with song

And let me sing forevermore

You are all I long for

All I worship and adore…

Lancelot Schaubert

Brooklyn, New York

2018

Perpetual Silence

LJ Cohen

"Sound is a vibrational process of air and can, therefore, never exist in the absence of the latter. For this reason, a perpetual silence exists in empty space."

— The Problem of Space Travel by Hermann Noordung

Marisol stared unblinking at her computer’s display. A single green line traversed a path across the screen looking like the EKG of a patient who wasn’t ever coming back.

Jeremiah leaned over her. What the hell?

Exactly. There was something seriously wrong with the Mercury CQ communication array, but not in any way that made sense. Picking up her empty coffee cup, she frowned at the dried brown ring inside.

Let me. Jeremiah slipped the cup from her hand and crossed the quiet lab to fill it. The industrial pot had been going non-stop, just as they had, from the launch nineteen hours ago. The celebration was long over. The angel investors and the rest of the team had gone home. Now it was just the two of them back in the control room. All the monitors had gone dark except for Marisol’s and Jeremiah’s. Hers monitored the comms program; his the satellite’s orbital trajectory.

Thank you. She took the refilled cup from her colleague and wrapped her hands around it, inhaling deeply.

We’re long past the go/no go mark, Marisol. If Merc isn’t fully back on line in a few hours, we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.

Putting the program back in sandbox mode had been her call, but Jeremiah would be just as liable as she was if they jeopardized the mission. Hell, just being here they were technically in violation of company policy, but their whole startup was founded by and filled with aerospace engineers and computer geeks. No one would be surprised to see the two lead scientists pulling an all-nighter in support of their most ambitious project. Worried about losing your job?

No. I’m worried about Merc and whether or not we can bring it down in one piece. The big oval table in the center of the room was filled with print outs and maps. He glanced over at the disorganized pile and back to her. If you’re right, we have to try to retrieve it and we don’t have a huge window to make that happen.

If she was right, the state of the satellite would be the least of their concerns.

• • •

The registrar’s email had given her no choice. She was four credits short in gen-ed requirements and if she wanted to graduate, she’d need to take a humanities class. Marisol had had enough trouble scheduling the courses she needed for her double major in astronomy and physics. She petitioned for a waiver, but it was denied. Even her adviser couldn’t help.

Scouring through the course listings, she found one that would fit into her tight schedule. The Problem of Space Travel. Essentially astrophysics for dummies and she figured she’d get an easy A.

So confident she could wing it, Marisol hadn’t bothered to review the syllabus before the first session. Instead of a lecture hall, the course was held in a library conference room. Less than a dozen other students gathered around a large table. She groaned. A discussion course.

Even worse, the class was an in-depth analysis of a single book written in the 1920s that had only recently been translated into English. It took all she had not to walk out. Her frustration grew as Professor Lorens started the process of dissecting the text, considering the author’s theories as if they were actually relevant. How could she take something written decades before the first successful rocket tests seriously? It was ridiculous.

After class, she headed straight over to the professor’s office and waited for him, practicing what she could say to get her out of what had to be a colossal waste of time.

Questions already? Professor Lorens unlocked his door and waved her in. It usually takes a few weeks before anyone takes me up on my office hours.

Marisol sat in the offered chair and glanced around the room. Lorens looked like a stereotypical philosophy professor: tall, stooped, complete with wild silver hair and a shabby tweed jacket. But his bookshelves were anything but expected. He had some of the same astronomy and physics books that she had, along with old dusty monographs and tiny models of all the Apollo spacecraft.

I need to drop your class, Marisol blurted out, her carefully thought out arguments forgotten.

He sat down at his desk, frowned, and picked up a replica of the moon lander. What do you think is the single largest barrier to meaningful exploration of the stars?

Excuse me?

You’ve spent three and a half years studying the deepest mysteries of the cosmos, Ms. Suarez. Surely, it’s a question you’ve grappled with.

Of course it was. She’d been dreaming about space travel since she’d been a little girl. It’s what had led her to the university and the reason she was sitting here. Communication across space. If we can solve that, the rest is just logistics.

I don’t often get pure science students in one of my classes. He nodded and motioned for her to continue.

Despite her annoyance with him and his nearly hundred year-old source text, she matched his enthusiasm with her own. It’s all about connection. Even if the journey takes a lifetime, if we can stay in contact, we can make it work.

I don’t think so.

Professor?

Your answer. It’s a perfectly good one, but I don’t think you really understand the question.

That was the kind of psychobabble she hated about humanities classes. Look, my spot will be much better served by a philosophy student. She’d have to find some other course to satisfy the registrar.

On the contrary. I think your perspective will be quite an asset to your classmates and to me. See you on Friday.

• • •

With a knot of men and women in tailored suits watching the room and the rest of her team clustered behind her work station, Marisol enabled the quantum communications program and held her breath as it passed its preliminary error checks.

After years of work, after multiple failures including a fire during the last launch that nearly sank them, they’d finally gotten Mercury up and ready