A bulky shape appears ahead. Halliday has to squint to see that it is not natural rock. As he approaches he recognises that it is a sculptor.
He groans. The sculptor is tilted to one side and its bulky chassis appears warped. Has it sunk into soft ground? No, beneath the dust layer the rock seems firm. The suction funnel is low to the ground. It had been in the process of hoovering up the regolith, ready for it to be reconstituted as sculpture.
But what was it sculpting before it became trapped? Did this sculptor dream his dreams?
He skirts around it, keeping it at arm’s length in case of serious malfunction.
The rear panel of the sculptor hangs open at ninety degrees. It must have been mid-way through compressing and carving the regolith. Halliday bends to examine the object that lies on its side within the tray.
It is a tulip with cupped petals half-open.
He reaches out to touch it. The tulip is cold and hard. It means nothing to him. If he dreamt, he would not dream of tulips. He would dream of…
But the only images that occur to him are of aye-ayes and sculptors. Sculpting, dreaming. His obsession, for years now. His life.
He notices that there is something peculiar about the machine. On closer inspection the chassis appears totally off-kilter. It is a distorted caricature of its usual appearance.
Hesitantly, he places a hand on the chassis. Instead of metal he feels cold, pressed sand.
He begins to weep.
This is not a sculptor, but a sculpture.
Tim Major’s time-travel thriller novel, You Don’t Belong Here (Snowbooks) is available now, as are his two novellas, Blighters (Abaddon) and Carus & Mitch (Omnium Gatherum). His short stories have featured in Interzone and numerous anthologies. He is the Editor of the SF magazine, The Singularity, and blogs at www.cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com
A review of You Don’t Belong Here is available on the Shoreline of Infinity website.
An Infinite Number of Me
Dan Grace
According to Grandma my mother first died when I was twelve. I’ll admit I didn’t notice at the time, but with hindsight I can spot the changes. She stopped taking sugar in her tea. I had presumed she was on a diet or that her chronically sensitive teeth had finally worn her down. She dressed a little differently too; more colour, wilder, a little more free. I was outwardly mortified, but secretly pleased. I’d always thought her choice of clothes a little drab. And she was certainly around more, picking me up from school most days, despite my protests.
“Things have slowed down at work,” were her words.
We weren’t close. Up until that point I had been more or less raised by my Grandma. I didn’t resent it particularly. Mother was a clinical, sharp woman, as befitted her profession. Many of my friends had much more interesting and convoluted family situations than me. ‘Dad’ had never been more than an abstraction or an object of confusion; something other people had that I understood in principle, but couldn’t see the precise purpose of.
Mother had been immensely practical when it came to having a child. The facts of my conception were laid out before me as soon as I was deemed old enough to understand their meaning. Sperm donation from a series of suitably excellent candidates, egg screening at the most advanced and, therefore, expensive clinic.
“I chose you darling. From all the available options, I picked you. Doesn’t that make you feel special?”
It did. Although, in a childish way, I sometimes wondered what happened to those she didn’t choose.
*
Despite these changes she still lived for her work. She was a genius, or close to it, according to Grandma. According to many people. She had sailed through school and university. A female physicist is still a rare thing, in all places it would seem, and she made capital from that fact.
I remember one particular tearful episode. I was eight, or maybe nine. Mother was late home again. She’d promised to be back in time for dinner and I, unwilling or unable to understand the importance of her work, had unleashed my full fury at poor Grandma. Undaunted, she reared up at me, finding those extra inches the elderly seem to lose as they go about day-to-day tasks, finger pointing, wattle of skin below her chin quivering with anger.
“You listen here young miss, you understand this. Your mother cares the world about you. She would do anything for you. Do you understand? What she’s doing, her work, she does it for you. So we’ll have no more of this. Am I clear?”
She was very clear. My young mind couldn’t fully understand that there were things greater than my need for a mother at the dinner table, but I knew I was wrong.
*
I’ve tried to read the papers she published, but they make no sense to me. They don’t get to the heart of her work anyway. All that stuff is under lock and key somewhere.
Art is my thing, my gift. I paint, people buy it, praise it. It makes me happy. That’s enough, isn’t it?
My work is very public, maybe too public I feel sometimes, the polar opposite of my mother’s. She wasn’t a shy person by nature, but she would never talk of work, of where she worked, of who she worked with. I understood that it was important. That was enough.
Wasn’t it?
*
The defect remained though, a microscopic spanner in the works, and it took her from me again when I was only fifteen. I saw it that time, although I didn’t know what it was that I saw. The changes were more noticeable, the differences greater. Coffee, not tea. Alcohol in the house for the first time. Clothes all too similar to what I was wearing. And a renewed need for contact, for my company, that only infuriated my teenage self.
“Why are you behaving like this, Mother?”
“Behaving like what darling?”
“Just, you know, following me around, texting me constantly. I mean, just leave me alone.”
“But I love you darling. I just feel so lucky to have you. That isn’t so bad, is it?”
“Ugh. Mother.”
