Fiction River: Moonscapes Read Online Free PDF Page A

“It’s not just you, Monica, it’s all of us. We live forever. There’s no want, no challenges . Human beings ... We’ve been twisted into something nature never intended.” He raised the rose, shook it at her. “But with this, we can explore the galaxy, colonize the stars. With this, we can strive . With this, all our lives will mean something again.”
    “Your little found toy, it solves everything, yes?” she said caustically.
    She heard the cruelty in her words, but it didn’t frighten him. There was no way for her to cut him.
    “Say what you have to say,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the truth.” He thought of his little sister, gone without a trace. “In fact, I insist on it.”
    She nodded slowly, her baleful, blue gaze locked on him.
    “All right. Because you love the truth so much.” She drew a deep breath. “The name of this moon is Horus.”
    He blinked. “Yeah. So what? Horus was the son of Osiris.”
    She nodded again. “Falcon-faced Horus, the son of Osiris, the god of sun and protection and one more thing. Do you remember the last thing that Horus ruled over?”
    Saxon frowned trying to remember his Egyptian mythology. None of it really mattered. The gas giant had been given the name Osiris because Osiris had ruled the underworld and the gas giant was a dying world. And once you named a world Osiris it just made sense to name its moon Horus.
    He shook his head. “I don’t—”
    “War,” she said softly. “Horus was the Egyptian god of war.”
    He shrugged, still not seeing her point.
    “Your aliens tore the gas giant from its orbit. Scattered the planets in this system, sent them spinning into the cold of interstellar space. While you were out riding your rover, did you get a good look at the moon’s cratered surface, Saxon? They bombarded this little moon. War, Saxon. They were waging war. And not just here . Everywhere in the sky where there’s a hot jupiter, scores of star systems, and in every single one we’re seeing the remnants of a terrible, apocalyptic war.”
    She tore the rose out of his hands. “And they did it with this .”
    Saxon’s mouth tasted dry, bitter.
    “Can you imagine their power?” she whispered. “Can you imagine their hatred? ”
    “But it’s all just history,” he said, “they’re long gone and—”
    And then he remembered the signal they’d detected upon landing, the alien device calling to its masters across time and space.
    “They’ll destroy us,” she whispered. “Not just our people, but our worlds .”
    The signal, he thought. How had he managed to make himself forget the signal? And suddenly he understood his mother burying her grief, Monica desperately telling herself she loved him.
    For the first time he understood the necessity of lying.
    Because that’s what you did when the truth was unendurable.

 
     
    Introduction to “ The Old Guy”
     
    I bought Annie Reed’s first short story years ago. Since then she’s gone on to sell short fiction in a lot of different genres. She’s an award-winning mystery writer whose stories have appeared in many anthologies as well as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine . But she’s a heck of a science fiction and fantasy writer as well, as her history with Fiction River proves. Even though this is our sixth issue, Annie’s stories have already appeared three times. Her next appearance, after this one, will be in our first special edition, called Crime .
    She wrote “The Old Guy” after reading an article about the futility that men of a certain age are facing as they look for work.
    “Being of a certain age myself, I got ticked off,” she says, “so I sat down at the keyboard and started to write about one of those ‘wrong age’ guys who really does have something special to offer if only people would look past the snow on the roof. Along the way, I discovered an unexpected heart to the story. I love it when that happens.”
    And so do we.

 
     
    The Old Guy
    Annie Reed
     
    Nick