He stared at the alarm screen, trying to make sense of the flashing icons. Then he let out a whoop. One of his Aeolus traps had slammed shut, and the inertial magnets were registering a point-mass on the order of a million metric tons.
He did his usual happy dance, not caring how many times he bashed his knuckles into corners or how tangled he got in the ivy vine that had taken over the cabin. He located his now thirty-nine-year-old bottle of Scotch and took a big pull, then doubled over coughing and choking.
He wanted to tell Maureen, but she would be in hibernation for at least ten more days. There was no one else he wanted to tell. Maybe he could get her computer to override her presets and wake her up.
Or he could surprise her. He could use the black hole to fly out to her ship in short order. Link with her and fly both of their ships back in-system. Sure, they’d be very old when they got back, but she could still set up her charity with the money they made off the sale. And they could be together.
If they ever fought like Kwon and Solange, they could separate and let their momentum carry both ships back home separately. He’d still have saved her.
He carefully reeled the trap in close, then jettisoned his ship’s rear cowl to reveal the fusion rocket that all fishers carried in their guts and dreamed about. He settled the black hole at the focal point of the rocket and adjusted his magnetic fields until it was stable. Then he fed it the Aeolus trap. His sensors registered a tiny burst of radiation as the black hole fed, not enough to propel the ship but enough to give him a better picture of the black hole’s size and rotational velocity. He reeled in the other eleven traps and fed them in one by one, calibrating and adjusting the focal point of the rocket after each one.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the view screen that showed nothing but the cold steel and aluminum rocket. He marveled that he had one of the primordial powerhouses of the universe nestled in the palm of his hand and he couldn’t even see it.
How long until Maureen woke up? Too long. There was no time like the present to fire up the engine and see if it worked. He furled his sails in tight and rolled them into their interior compartments, then recorded a goodbye message for Maureen in case his ship exploded.
He ramped the generator slowly up to one hundred percent and deployed the electromagnetic ramscoop from the nose of the ship, then waited in breathless silence for something to happen. Was this region of space dense enough in ions to make the engine work? It had to be. People caught black holes and powered their ramjets all the time.
With a bang that rattled his teeth, Max slammed backward into his seat and hung on for the ride. He could barely think. He’d been weightless for decades, and he felt the nausea of tremendous acceleration distorting his body. He fought the G-forces just to extend his hand and hit the diagnostic button.
His coasting velocity had been well above the ramjet’s minimum requirements, and the scoop was snatching ionized hydrogen out of the void like a charm. The ions sluiced down the magnetic field lines, compressed into a hot gas at the base of the scoop and shot out across the face of hyperdense gravitational fields at the edge of the black hole, fusing instantly. A plasma jet stretched behind the ship for miles in an explosive release of energy that shook the ship.
Max whooped, then gasped as the ship surged forward. The ejecta trail increased in intensity and length. He must be pushing through a denser pocket of hydrogen. Slowly, agonizingly, he made his way to his bed. The velocity-to-drag ratio should balance itself in a few days and the acceleration would decrease to a more comfortable level. Until then, he would just be miserable.
Two weeks later, when Maureen was up and about and drinking a lot of water to push the hibernation poisons from her body, he excitedly told her the news. She, in turn, was ecstatic for him until she realized he was coming to get her.
“You can’t,” she said, looking genuinely horrified. “You have to take it and head back in.”
Gray shot through her red hair now, and laugh-lines limned her face. Max thought she looked beautiful. “I don’t want to go back, remember?” he sent back. “The only way I’ll go back is with you. Now spread your sails as a brake, because I’m comin’ in hot. I bet I can reach you in under two years. C’mon, whatya say?”
“You’re crazy. We’ll never make it back alive. And what if we end up clawing each other’s eyes out like Kwan and Solange?”
“We’ll be flying faster than normal. My ship might need more fixing than your corporate models, but her ramscoop is a sight to behold. With my bigger generator, it’s two dozen kilometers wide.”
“Now you’re boasting about size?”
“I’m serious. I’m coming to get you, and I can pack on speed like you wouldn’t believe. We’ll be a success story, the anti-Kwon/Solange. Give these folks out here hope. Who knows, maybe everyone will fish in tandem after we’re gone.”
“What if you don’t like me in person?” She was strapped into her chair, and she looked smaller than Max had ever seen her.
“Are you kidding? How could you think that? You’ve been alone too long; you’ve gotten used to it. You dragged me out of my shell, so now I’m dragging you out of yours.”
She looked unconvinced. He was hurt by her lack of excitement, but figured she was scared.
He had to tell the fisher community soon after he told her, because his ship had gone red on everyone’s screen as soon as he deployed his ramscoop. Congratulations poured in, a mix of joy and jealousy, as they always were. And then when it became clear another week later, that he wasn’t turning, he had to tell the crowd about his rescue mission. He was heading for Maureen.
That saddled his idiocy with a romantic twist that enthralled the community. Most people cheered him on. His position was continuously tracked. Maureen’s gradually slowing velocity was calculated as she braked against nothing more than the ethereal galactic wind.
He and Maureen tried to maintain normal conversations, but the excitement of the community was infectious. The chance to go home was overwhelming, though Max readily admitted he still had no interest in setting foot on Earth again.
A year and a half into the run, he diverted the ion stream away from the black hole to stop the fusion and used the scoop as a friction drag to slow himself. He was going too fast to use his sail as a brake—the filaments would have disintegrated under the pressure. Countdown timers appeared on the screens of the fisher community.
One year, ten months and eleven days after Max started his run, he caught sight of Maureen’s tiny ship for the first time. He brought the scoop in tight to half a kilometer and his deceleration eased. By the time he was a hundred meters behind her, the scoop was gone and his sails were out for more precise steering.
“I’m here,” Max said when he was above her, his velocity matched with hers. It was so nice talking to her without a time lag.
“Are you sure this is a good idea? I’m getting pretty old, you know. Set in my ways.” She looked flustered.
A clunk reverberated through both ships as the automatic pilots clamped their docking ports together.
“Maureen, you old bat, I love you. I’ve loved you for years with no hope of ever seeing you. I’m old too, by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed. Please, can I come in?”
“I guess.” She gave a nervous smile.
Max grabbed his bottle of Scotch and pulled up the floor plates over his docking hatch. Pressing the release sequence, he watched as the wheel atop the hatch plate spun. The hatch opened with a hiss and he backed up. Maureen’s hatch swung down a moment later with another hiss. He pulled himself through, careful not to touch anything. The metal was dangerously cold from space.
“Hello?” he said to the back of her chair. The light was muted in the chamber. Everything smelled musty, but he assumed that his ship stank too, only he couldn’t smell it anymore.
She tur
ned to face him slowly, sheepishly, and he was stunned to see a wizened old woman in the chair. Her fluffy white hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail.
“Hi, Max,” she said, and it was her voice. Her nervous smile.
“Maureen?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” She held up her hands. “In the flesh.”
“But how?”
“I’m eighty-two. I’m afraid I’ve been lying to you all these years. Projecting a somewhat younger image of me.”
She smiled her familiar smile from the deep folds of her face. Max shook his head and smiled back. “Come here. Give me a hug.”
She pushed up to him and they embraced and hung onto each other tightly, desperately. Her console beeped over and over again, as fishers queried what was going on. They knew the ships must be united by now.
“I just couldn’t tell you,” she said, her voice muffled in his sleeve. “After a while I figured it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going home. Neither of us was.”
Max kissed Maureen on the forehead and then on the lips. “I told you before, I’m in love with you. Nothing else matters.”
Tears streamed from her eyes, floating in a glistening constellation.
“Stop that, love. It’s a bear to clean it up. Relays could short out.”
She laughed. “Can I see your ship?”
“Come on up.”
“Wait a second.” She pushed back down to her communications array. “Leave us alone, boys and girls,” she said in the voice he knew. “We’re busy.”
They climbed into his ship, where she got to see what two rooms were like instead of just one.
All the rocket flight back through the void, past hundreds of fishers they knew so well, they were cheered on and waved forward. Messages were given to them to deliver back home. Prayers were requested for successful fishing journeys. Maureen was eighty-seven years old when they rocketed over the Kuiper Cliff and back into the denser regions of the asteroid belt.
Max steered them safely through. It wouldn’t do to catch an asteroid in their ramscoop, and they passed Pluto not long after Maureen’s ninetieth birthday. Together, they answered the friendly hails of the research outposts around Neptune and filed their proper reports with the flight authorities as they passed Saturn.
Two months shy of her ninety-eighth birthday, Max brought the twinned ships in to dock at the massive commercial shipyards orbiting the Moon.
“Told you I’d bring you home again,” he said to her, smiling down at her thin face. She lay in the bed, wrapped in netting to ease her body as they decelerated.
She glanced at the ceiling above them where the Swedish ivy swayed. “I’m dying. I can’t believe that damned plant is going to outlive me.”
“No, it won’t. It’s part of this ship. There’s no way to get it out now. When they pull apart the ship to wrestle the black hole out, the plant will die.”
“It’s your wife’s plant.”
“It was part of my promise to her, never to talk to anyone again. After that, it was part of my memory of her.” He sighed and looked up. “I’ll take a cutting of it with me and replant it. You shouldn’t discard memories. Especially good ones.”
“Am I a good one?”
“The best. Thank you for coming with me.”
“Thank you for rescuing me, though I didn’t want to be rescued.”
“Let’s go collect our money and get ourselves a nice apartment.”
“You are such a dreamer, Max Getty. I’m not going anywhere but a hospital for the terminally old.”
“And you are a cranky woman, Maureen O’Shea. Cranky. Now come on. I hear there’s a place on this station with more than three small rooms. Even a window where you can watch the Earthrise behind the Moon. I’ll get you some new teeth so you can chew food.”
She smacked him in the arm like she always did.
Max lifted Maureen and carried her from the ship as torch men began cutting the hull away from the black hole. They both looked back more than once.
Maddy Dune’s First
and Only Spelling Bee
written by
Patrick O’Sullivan
illustrated by
MEGHAN MURIEL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
It didn’t take long for aliens to find Patrick O’Sullivan and spirit him away from his St. Louis birthplace for hours at a time. If not for Andre Norton and the crew of the The Solar Queen, he might still be earthbound instead of in seat 5D, the elbow of his pencil-wielding left arm blocking the serving cart.
A software engineer and technology entrepreneur, Patrick is always on the move; one day on Arrakis, the next in Virginia, a few hours on Cyteen, then off to Dublin or Helm’s Deep or Saganami Island or the Florida Keys or someplace new he’s never been, like in print. This is his first published fiction, though he has written more than a roomful of technical documentation over the years (which might explain why he has to keep moving). Patrick never throws anything away even if he doesn’t use it; the BS in engineering, the MA in Irish studies, they’re both under this stack of printouts somewhere.
If he ever grows up, he’d like to see one of his novels spirit others away to alien worlds of adventure. He’s been studying with the best, trying to discover the alchemical magic that will make it happen. Every moonlit signpost, every manuscript written in blood seems to hint at the same formula: one part Writers of the Future, n parts elbow grease, just add readers and stand back.
If n is a number short of infinity and the flight attendants keep the aisle clear, he might just work that magic. Eventually.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Art was Meghan Muriel’s first talent. As early as age two, she would surprise her mother with sketches of horses running on and off the page, as if the images were snapshots taken of a much larger scene. Since then, pencil, pen and ink and acrylics have been her media of choice for illustrating all of the fantasy and science fiction stories she conceived and wrote down in her journal.
After high school, however, she put aside her artistic skill to pursue a degree in creative writing, and only after a ten-year hiatus did she dust it off again, when her husband, a Marine officer, came home from a tour in Iraq and announced that they should cowrite a children’s midgrade fantasy adventure about a wily white weasel who is a professional kat herder in the magical land of OCKT (the acronym stands for “Overly Curious Kritters and Things”). The world turned out so fantastical and the characters so zany that she adopted a new medium: multimedia collage, targeting a colorful synergy of fantasy and reality. A set of these interior illustrations went on to place Finalist twice in a row in the Illustrators of the Future Contest before her current win. Meghan has also done sketches for the website of the popular talk show Coast to Coast AM, and she has semipro sales, both in writing and illustration, in the webzine NewMyths. To this day, Meghan has no formal education in art, but believes firmly that with passion and the right drive, one can translate a thousand words into one heck of a killer picture.
Maddy Dune’s First
and Only Spelling Bee
Maddy leaned her weight into the massive door of St. Anselm’s Orphanage and shoved. It shoved back.
“Isn’t anyone going to help me with this?” Her ridiculous family shuffled their collective feet.
“I don’t like the smell of this place,” Uncle Leo said. He mounted the stairs with a rolling, wobbling gait, as if he were still parading the quarterdeck of a ship.
“I don’t like the looks of it.” Emma mounted the stairs as well, basket in hand. Maddy’s sister ran a gloved fingertip across the door latch. “Rather shabby.” She pursed her lips and studied the resulting grime.
“Kill them all,” her brother Rookhaven croaked. He hopped once on Maddy’s shoulder before he hammered his gray-black beak thrice against
the door.
“Do you have anything to add, Madame Aubergine?” Maddy said. Her father’s familiar sprawled languorously in the basket Emma carried. The blue-black cat knotted a paw and steel claws gleamed in the dim lamplight. Madame Aubergine began to clean the fur between her toes.
A key scratched in the lock and hinges grated in the damp evening. The gas lamp above the doorway gave body to the shadows as the door moved inward a hand’s breadth.
A rusty voice called out, “State your name and purpose.”
“Maddy Dune, here for the Spelling Bee.”
There was the sound of rustling papers, of labored breathing, of a pen scratching on parchment.
“No Maddy Dune listed.”
“Madeleine Dune,” Maddy said. “Of Mundane House.”
“We have a Madeleine Oortsgarten-Quille.”
“That’s me,” Maddy said. Adopted daughter of Eusebius Quille and Nadine Oortsgarten, both away on business. That Quille was away seemed bearable; when he was home, he was never fully there. But Nadine. She had promised to be here for the Spelling Bee. She had given her word.
“Very well.” The door crept open with a squeal. “You may enter this way if you wish, but the human entrance is . . . Oh. How . . . extraordinary. Of course you must come this way.”
Maddy swallowed the lump in her throat and clutched her purse tight in her fist.
Uncle Leo caught her sleeve. “You don’t have to go in there.”
Emma brushed a tear from Maddy’s cheek. “You’re as human as the rest of us.”
“I’ll look for you in the audience,” Maddy said. She squeezed her uncle’s hand. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed her sister’s cheek. She ran her fingers through Madame Aubergine’s luxurious fur.
Rookhaven caught her earlobe and pulled her close. “Kill them all.”
“I’ll settle for outspelling them,” Maddy said. She didn’t have to listen to that little voice inside of her that whispered loudly enough for her brother to hear. She didn’t have to kill them all.