And just as he was getting into his stride, the scheduled maintenance happened. Voth was stripped bare, his bulb removed, his shutters and mirrors unclipped and examined. One day he heard the men who were fiddling with his insides talking.
“Funding cuts, isn’t it …”
“What’s that?”
“The Bishop. They say he’ll fall into the sea if they don’t do that maintenance.”
“It’ll cost a fair few bob…”
“You can say that again. Best do it now, while the weather’s good.”
“They’ll wait until it turns, mark my words…”
And then he thought he saw it. The Bishop and his friends were to fail on purpose. The coastline would be damaged, but Tater Du would soak up most of the blame – it would mostly fall on her patch. Their status would be elevated, they would be regarded as essential. The maintenance would happen sooner. That was assuming they somehow managed to sabotage the GPS systems as well. Did they also want to attract the usual Cornish tourists? Pull them to unspoiled Scilly instead so they could bask in human admiration? Was that another part of their plan? There had to be another way, he thought. Why all this senseless damage to the coast?
The 7th of July rolled around, and the 12th—both nights were clear; the stars bright and almost three dimensional, scattered over the sky like a sprinkling of fine powder. But as the 18th approached, Voth couldn’t see more that a few metres through the thick fog. Even his platform wasn’t visible. The nearby Agnes was useless as well, her light guttering after a few hundred meters. The Bishop, whose glare usually sliced through the fog like a meteor across the heavens, didn’t seem to be working. When he tested the GPS and found it was down, a sense of something like fear collected along his spiral staircase.
“Skerryvore, it’s happening. Thick fog. GPS has somehow been disrupted. Their plans are reaching fruition,” he emailed up to his Hebridean friend.
“Hang in there Voth,” was the short reply.
He listened, his hearing more acute in the fog. In the distance, he could hear the wail of foghorns.
And then, as if from nowhere, beads of brilliant ethereal light appeared in the mist. The tanker, which was about to smash against the rocks, changed course, following the makeshift beacons. A second tanker, also about to prang the North Cornish coast, later described the sight: “Like chunks of the full moon had been sent down, to guide us on our way.”
Months later, the plot was unravelled. The Stevenson collective had decided to inform the moon and the moon was angry: angry with The Bishop Rock. It took her a great effort to deal with human affairs, especially to deal with errant lighthouses wilfully switching themselves off and disrupting GPS systems for their own egregious purposes. Nefarious. All three of them, complicit in this crime, were barred from attending the conference for the next twenty years.
The near misses were logged and described by the two captains. The ‘power cut’ which had affected the Cornish trio, combined with the temporary failure of the GPS, meant that humans began to take the remaining lighthouses more seriously. The Bishop, The Wolf and the Longships got their wishes for upgrades. And Tater Du had escaped unscathed, to Wolf’s chagrin, Voth presumed. Added to which, the surge of interest in lighthouses had resulted in the BBC commissioning a drama series set on Round Island itself.
At the next conference, Voth was lauded as a hero. He found himself enjoying his new status, although mindful of The Bishop, retained his modest nature. And it turned out Skerryvore had been wrong about Tater Du – her liaison with Mevagissey had been brief and unfulfilling. She looked at him with new eyes. They swapped numbers. He returned to Round Island a changed lighthouse.
As he sat on the hump of rock, casting his beam over the fishermen and trawlers of the Scillies, and even further into the major shipping lanes, he felt a strong sense of pride. The moon appeared from behind a cloud and winked at him. He looked out across the islands and realised that this was happiness. His future was bright: brighter than his current 42,945 candles, he mused to himself.
………………………………………………
Guy T Martland is a British SF writer and poet based in Bournemouth. He has published short stories in a number of magazines, including Perihelion SF, Encounters, Albedo 1, Fiction Vortex and Imaginalis. His first SF novel ‘The Scion’, will be published by Safkhet later this year.
Broken Glass
Joseph L Kellogg
Glasses clinked in five identical sets of hands, between five identical husbands and wives, distinguished by only their clothes and the colored bands they wore around their wrists. RedBrian watched all the other Brians like fragments of a carnival mirror, reflections of himself from other universes, moving out of sync with him as they talked over the noise of the bar, wishing each other a happy birthday. Five Pats echoed congratulations at them, blond hair shimmering in the light from neon beer signs. A hand reached over and pulled his face to the side.
“Happy Birthday,” Janice said, kissing him briefly on the lips. The sole brunette at the table, she nuzzled his nose for a moment, then pushed back her chair. “I’m going to make room for another drink.”
YellowBrian leaned over and blew beer-soaked breath into RedBrian’s ear as he spoke. “So what’s the news with Janice?” he asked, chuckling. “You ever gonna make an honest woman out of her?”
“Eventually, I guess,” RedBrian said. “I’m just waiting for the right time, you know?”
“You’ve been dating for what, three years now? What else could you be waiting for?”
At the end of the table GreenPat brushed her hair back, and words popped up unbidden from RedBrian’s subconscious. I’m waiting for her. Just behind her ear he caught a glimpse of the scar from that car wreck when Pat was a kid. Each of the different Pats had almost identical scars, hidden under their hair, reminders of their brush with death. All of them except for RedPat; in a different universe, a different song was playing on the radio, she was dancing to a different beat, and the shard of glass hit her in a different spot, cutting right through her jugular instead. RedPat, the girl he was supposed to marry, was currently drifting toward the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, her cremated body fertilizing seaweed instead of wishing him another happy birthday.
YellowBrian interrupted his brooding. “I’ve heard her talking at the office,” he said. “She’s getting tired of waiting for you to pop the question. You’d better make your move before she does, if you know what I mean.”
“You really think so?” asked RedBrian, dragging his finger listlessly through the icing on his slice of cake. Red mentally kicked himself for not being ready to get married. Janice was a great girl, and in other circumstances he probably could have lived quite happily. But when the other universes were discovered, and Slide Stations started popping up around the world, he met his five doppelgängers and saw how nauseatingly happy they were with their Pats. After a few months of searching for his own, all he’d found was the small plaque in the cemetery and a couple of parents who still cried over their little lost angel.
Janice sidled back up to Red at the table, and brushed a lock of hair from his forehead. “Are you feeling alright?” she asked.
“I think I might be coming down with something, actually,” he replied. “Sorry. You mind if I go ahead and take you back to the Station?”
“No, of course not,” Janice said coolly, scratching at her yellow wristband.
“We might as well catch a ride with you,” said YellowBrian as he slammed down the last of his beer and helped YellowPat to her feet. “I’ve got to be at work bright and early tomorrow. Come on, sweetie.”
