Jared McDaris

Carnifex lay quietly gasping on his rock. It was only a few seconds, though, before he managed some deep, calming breaths. He would not beg or whimper or give up. He would not let her break him. He lied there, trying to blend into the rock by virtue of stillness. There was no point in camouflaging himself: they both could see body heat, and both had the ability to pierce through any illusion he conjured if they had a mind to look.

That was Carnifex’ life in a nutshell. He’d been raised on stories of heroes who could summon fires to fly into the distant Sun or lift enormous rocks over their heads. He began to see himself in these heroes, and thought his power over visions to be a sign of his own greatness. How perfectly fitting, that the only other people on Europa were virtually impervious to his special gifts. When your sister could fry you to death by pointing a finger, and your mother could immobilize you with unspeakable pain at the flick of a wrist, it was difficult to take pride in a little impotent legerdemain.

Of course, the stories were not for him. Lorelei was not his sister, and Fortunato was certainly not his mother; but he was raised alongside the girl, it was only natural to assume. With no other boys around, he had assumed the male of the species just looked very different from the female. Carnifex had assumed a lot, and Fortunato had been perfectly happy to let him assume; at least, to the extent that any of Fortunato’s decisions could be described as ‘happy.’

It was only in the last few years that he had finally and embarrassingly begun to notice fissures in the familial facade he had constructed. On the one hand, even Fortunato and Lori had clear divergences in their appearance, so it seemed not unreasonable that he should be so different. And if Fortunato’s rare indulgences and acts of decency seemed reserved solely for her daughter, well, what parent did not submit to a little favoritism? The parents in Fortunato’s stories certainly did. And every time that she, with a flick of the wrist, sent him writhing in pain and scampering into some crevice, as though he could outdistance her power, he told himself it was a punishment he had earned, rather than a condemnative expression of disdain that (he only recently noticed) had not once been leveled upon his sister.

And Lorelei. His sister. He remembered with knife-like clarity the day that illusion fell away. It had begun like any other: after sharing a breakfast, she went down to the cave for her morning lessons, while he set about cleaning the incubators. By lunchtime, after he had finished maintaining their life-support instruments, she would have finished her morning education. He would whip up a quick lunch, and she would share what she had learned with him. Carnifex often felt that he understood the principles of physics, geometry, linguistics, and astronomy better than Lori did, but of course he was being taught by his compassionate and motivated sister, not by the implacable and impenetrable Fortunato; besides, Carnifex learned at an early age that most self-evaluations were motivated in no small part by vanity.

But this lunch, not two years past, was very different. She arrived as always, he prepared their lunch as always, and they sat to eat as always. She described some basic principles of biology and anatomy to him. Such lessons were uncommon, and almost always took place after lunch, so Carnifex rarely learned anything of biology. Fortunato was often nearby at dinner, and very clearly disapproved of Lorelei’s teaching. But for this lunch, Lori seemed well prepared. She had diagrams of Carnifex’ own anatomy, as well as a diagram of some alien biped.

Mirrors were not plentiful on Europa, but Carnifex had seen himself on occasion, and Fortunato had made it quite clear from an early age that his appearance was bizarre and frightening. His great jaws, his glassy eyes, his tail, all his various aquatic features served to make him a thing of disgust. Yet he was not resentful of this; on the contrary, it had made him all the more appreciative of his sister’s attention and affection.

But that day, her attention and affection seemed to have evaporated. Breakfast had been perfectly normal, but now she discussed anatomy with a distant, reserved air. She described Carnifex’ inner workings with a calculated and tentative manner. At length, he asked her about the second diagram. She explained that it described the anatomy of a human male.

Neither of them said anything. They were both, he decided, humiliated to have thought for so long that they were of the same species, that they were sister and brother. Neither of them ever commented on it. Indeed, they still referred to each other as siblings. Just not very often. Anymore.

It happened gradually then, his becoming separate from them. Indeed, though Lorelei grew distant and estranged, Fortunato had not altered her behavior toward the boy in any concrete way. Rather, his comprehension of her treatment became clearer. The cold looks, the lack of any sentiment, the chores that he alone performed while Lorelei received an education, the painful punishment for wrong-doings actual and imagined and assumed; all made perfect sense now. He was not a son, he was a servant.

Carnifex used to entertain Lorelei at breakfast and dinner with his illusions. He would craft tiny people and animals, bereft of detail, and have them dance and fight and perform all manner of wonders. They would prance around dishes or seem to swim in a paste as she was about to eat it. Neither child seemed less amused than the other. Their senses of humor were identical. These antics stopped that day, and Carnifex’ ability to craft illusion became largely obsolete.

Naturally, he began to wonder who he was and where he had come from. Somehow, these things didn’t matter back when he assumed the three had come from the same place, from the same people. He knew nothing of his origins and assumed that Lori knew nothing either. Now he understood that his story was very different from hers, and he began to wonder: were there things that Lorelei had failed to tell him, not through absentmindedness or lack of interest, but rather by deliberation?

Carnifex now spent what leisure time he had alone. He cleaned and maintained the equipment quickly to spend more time away from the Nest. Europa was vast, but he could not go far without being missed (at least, without his labor being missed), so he found what abandoned crags and promontories he could and made them his. In a world of three people, privacy was not hard to come by, despite his chores.

There, alone, Carnifex began to craft new illusions. Sitting atop a great ice-cliff, he would cast swathes of people in the valley below: people like him, villages of little metal huts filled with wizards, warriors, commanders, and humble farmers, living out their lives. Sometimes, he would create an illusion of himself and place it down with the others. The illusory Carnifex was always smaller than the others, duller, and damaged, hobbling in no particular direction. The other illusions ignored it.

The thought of being ignored in effigy brought him back to the present. It was morning as he recalled, though he had not examined his watch recently. Both Lorelei and Fortunato possessed internal mechanisms that allowed them to tell the time at any instance, while Carnifex must rely on his chain and fob. Even this galled him, but slowly he returned to his senses and listened. They were not at lessons, despite the presumed hour. No, Lorelei had birthed the storm; rather, Fortunato had used her to birth the storm. Even now, the skies roiled and raged in multifarious shades, beautiful and terrifying, but far away. The two were talking, Carnifex all but forgotten.

Lori was as close to shouting as she ever got; which is to say, she spoke in a clear voice without murmuring. “Who were they?” she demanded, almost.

Her answer was as leathery as her neck. “My enemies.”

“Who?” she countered. “What enemies? Who are they? Who – who are you?”

Fortunato’s hesitation was palpable. Carnifex breathed, calmly, quietly, invisibly. If the woman remembered him, looked at him, and saw him awake and attentive, he was certain there would be no revealing of secrets here. He stared off into space, and eventually, the old magician continued.

Fortunato’s lens softened into green. “I’ve tried to be a good mother to you, Lorelei. It was never in my nature to nurture,” she smirked with ostensible self-deprecation, “but I tried. I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”

Lori nodded, without hesitation. Whether she was well-trained or genuinely thought the sorceress had been anything more than just and severe with her, Carnifex was unsure. But then, perhaps a just and severe mother was a good mother. And of course, the daughter’s only means of comparison was the incapacitated beast that lay nearby, still struggling not to gasp lest he be remembered.

The mother rasped on. “You are kind, though you did not learn that from me. I am grateful for it all the same.” She made a show of looking up at the slowly calming sky. “Very well. The people who have come, whom Providence has delivered into our seas, are those who abandoned us here two decades ago. They are our jailors, foolishly returned to confirm my death. Instead, I will confirm theirs. Slowly.”

“This…” Lorelei struggled to maintain eye contact. “This is a prison? Are you unhappy here, mother?”

Her face grew darker still, and she seemed suddenly larger than she was. “A gilded cage,” she began. Then, just as suddenly, the sense of enormity was gone. She was again an old, bizarre creature. “But,” she finished lamely, “you know the expression.” The irony, not surprisingly, was lost on Lorelei

Fortunato performed a half-shrug of sorts, glancing around like a bird of prey. Luckily, her sights were focused on the sky. “Lorelei, your mother was once a proper scientist: the Head of Research and Development for the Europa Project.”

“Aren’t you my mother?” To a stranger, it might have made her look dull-witted, but Carnifex sensed the subtle coyness underneath.

Fortunato flattened her lips into the straight line that often stood in place of a smile. “Well done. Yes, less poetry. I was the Head of the Europa Project. I lived on Earth.”

Now Lori looked genuinely out of her depth. “Earth is… is real?”

Carnifex had wondered himself sometimes, but the affection and more often resentment with which Fortunato described Earth, the home of so many of her stories, made it appear unique, giving it an air of authenticity that other story-lands lacked. “It is, and their concern was Europa, and the endless supply of water to be found here. I was in charge of researching colonization: the prospect of living on Europa,” she appended unnecessarily, betraying the bottomless underestimation she had for her daughter’s linguistic prowess. “I was part of the first manned mission. There were errors of foresight, which I later realized to be deliberate. I was marooned upon this ocean in a sea of stars, alone.”

He could see his nominal sister’s hesitation. Her desire for validation was at war with her need to comfort her mother. In the end, her mother won, as always. “I’m sorry. I never knew.”

Fortunato stuck her jaw out and nodded. “As was my design, for good or ill. Your innocence was a great comfort to me, Lorelei. The joy and wonder you felt made this frozen wasteland seem a paradise, producing life out of infinite death.”

Carnifex could practically feel Lori radiating at this praise. “I had a good childhood,” she answered, somewhat equivocally.

There was a frisson of tension in the air. The sensor that had replaced one of Fortunato’s ears seemed to sway erratically. Her eye lens faded into a mottled bronze-and-gold that Carnifex had never seen before. “It’s time to begin,” she said, abruptly abandoning her anemic poesy.

Fortunato stepped away several paces. A click of her fingers brought Lorelei up behind her, her slight frame eclipsed by the sorceress’ voluminous robes. She flicked her wrist and Carnifex gasped. No pain came.

He held his breath. Fortunato tensed further, and he knew then that she had heard. She turned her neck a sickening degree and looked directly into his eyes. She did not speak, but it was painfully clear that Carnifex was expected to vanish. He covered himself with light and stayed in place. Seemingly satisfied, Fortunato turned back.

She was looking toward a dune of grooved ice, bereft of defining detail, waiting. Lorelei clung at her back like a marsupial upon its mother’s belly. And Carnifex lay alone, invisible and hoping to be forgotten.

In less than a minute, someone crested the dune.

http://scitechdaily.com/new-herschel-images-of-the-andromeda-galaxy/

LetsGo was a stupid name for a robot.

To say that LetsGo was a triumph of Form at the expense of Function would be only half correct. It was the epitome of the tin-can tinker-toy, puttering about the frozen fields in seemingly arbitrary directions. “Skitter” was probably a more strictly accurate term, as the device’s twenty legs were decidedly spiderlike: delicate, multi-jointed, fine-tipped, and simultaneously disturbing and whimsical. All the same, as he watched the blue-and-bronze cylinder move purposefully a meter or two in one direction, then stop and rotate, only to move another meter or so in another unpredictable direction, the word “putter” invariably leapt to mind. It teetered both in motion and at rest, its rounded faux-trapezoidal head rotating like a satellite dish atop its segmented neck, regardless of direction, and several times it seemed likely to tip over. A drunken robot. Or deranged. Or senile from disuse.

Perhaps “lurch” was a better term.

Doctor Andromeda was still shaking, and watching LetsGo wobble about was not helping. Not that he could imagine anything that would help. He sat upon a stool-sized promontory of ice outcropping from the ground (as-it-were; there was nothing but frozen seas as far as he beheld), contemplating the enormity of their folly. They were dead; all of them. Shortly after the SS Icarus burst into the atmosphere, the entire bridge of the ship had snapped apart from its body, hurdling like a discus toward the moon’s surface. In the wild turbulence of his view, Andromeda felt certain he had seen the rest of the ship pulled wholly back up out of the atmosphere. Tendrils of lightning seemed to descend from that inky blackness and wrap about the ship, like some devil of cyclopean proportion drawing their souls into perdition. The irony of imagining a devil as something above him was lost on Andromeda in his musings, as was the unusually poetic mindset to which his fancies were suddenly turned by the wreck.

The Pilot was dead. No one could find Daedalus “Deuce” Divine as they prepared to breach the atmosphere. Why he had left his post, where he had gone, and where he now rested were mysteries. Most of the crew remained in the body of the ship and had no doubt suffocated. The imbecilic Titan and Sponde had been safe inside the bridge, but the Captain had sent them out to search for Divine, and now they too were gone. Andromeda wondered briefly how Gonzales felt about sending those two simpletons to their deaths.

Resting his chin in his hands, Andromeda glanced over at Gonzales. She stood feet apart and fists on hips, as was her habit, no doubt inspired by the music-hall heroines of their youth, staring off into the shifting vermilions, chartreuses, and crimsons of the horizon. Presumably, she too was listening to LetsGo rattle off insubstantial statistics about the atmosphere and environment. Yes, the air was breathable; thank you LetsGo. Yes, the gravity was only slightly weaker than standard; thank you LetsGo. Yes, the terrain was composed of hard-frozen fresh-water; kindly piss off, LetsGo. The robot’s predictably monotone, retro-fashionably tinny voice only exasperated further. There was a visible, even palpable tightness in the Captain’s shoulders. Clearly, she too felt that the robot’s comical capering was undercutting the severity of the moment.

Perhaps inevitably, LetsGo chose that instant to trip over one of the corpses.

There were only three; three crewmen who were still on the bridge when it broke apart, and each one had foolishly decided to try leaping from the bridge as it fell. What possessed them to carry out such an idea was beyond him. Ensigns Santez, McMahon… he couldn’t remember the third one’s name. They were only ensigns.

First Mate Ferris was conspicuously absent. The last to jump ship before impact, one would expect his body to be closest to the wreckage. Perhaps he had survived. Inwardly, Andromeda shrugged. Ferris would benefit no one in life, nor sorrow anyone in death. He was gone for whatever that was worth, but his whirligigging foppery lived on in the ambling LetsGo.

“LetsGo,” the Captain ordered in a surprisingly firm alto, “begin a search for signs of life.”

Actual bells and whistles sounded within the tin-can, before the robot’s monotone responded, “But Captain, I have not completed my soil analysis. Soil analysis!”

“There is no soil.”

More bells. More whistles. “Analysis complete. Beginning analysis for signs of life.”

There was more scuttling, lurching, and puttering to ruin the funereal silence. At length, Captain Gonzales finally said the inevitably and thoroughly unhelpful. “We have to bury them.”

Several cruel responses came to mind. ‘Do you have an icepick?’ or ‘I’ll not stand in your way,’ or of course ‘Burial at sea; how fitting.’ Andromeda said none of these things, as the Captain had no doubt foreseen them and had a suitably acidic response for each. Even though she wasn’t looking at him, he raised his eyebrows inquisitively. “Within the wreck, perhaps?”

The bridge was largely in good order, though it was incapable of doing much when separated from the rest of the ship. It had independent lighting and access to most of their navigational records and history, but there was no food to be found there. It could certainly serve as shelter from the elements, but despite the biblical storm that raged miles above them, their immediate environment was idyllically calm. Still, sleeping in a chair was preferable to sleeping on grooved, twisting ice. Much of it was smooth and even elegant in its flow and warp, but it was still ice. There was no telling how long they might spend marooned on Europa, and Andromeda had no desire to give up his comfort to a trio of insensate bodies. Hopefully, the usually-pragmatic Gonzales felt the same.

The Captain was still standing, staring. “We will bury them.”

This was becoming tiresome. “Perhaps–”

A particularly loud collection of bells and whistles sounded, and LetsGo nearly fell over again as it announced, “Signs of life located, Located! approximately two-point-seven kilometers north-by-north-east.”

Gonzales looked over her shoulder, just barely catching the Doctor in her eye. “What do you think?”

Andromeda paused and took stock of himself. He was no longer shaking. “You are the captain.”

At this, she turned to face him fully. “You, Doctor, have been uncharacteristically laconic since the maelstroms first struck my ship. What reason have you, I wonder, to set yourself so morosely. Was Ferris a close friend of yours? Was Divine or Titan? Sponde? Did you have any bosom companions on this voyage, Doctor? What is the genesis of this newfound depression?”

For the first time since impact, they looked at each other: squarely, directly, and completely. Gonzales’ gown was an electric blue with gilded crinoline and cuffs, and bronze-colored embellishments along the hems; but the cut and even the colors were not particularly unusual for a starship captain. Even her silver tatted collar and bodice, while a touch showier than one would expect from a woman of such stern and direct demeanor, were well within the bounds of modesty. Her face, though a trifle less painted than other highborn ladies, and certainly more drawn with cares and set with the strength of her office than (say) the madam of some estate, Elena Gonzales’ appearance was not so unusual as to arrest such a prolonged stare from the Doctor.

Nor, likewise, were the Doctor’s garments so bizarre as to cause the Captain’s eyes to widen. His frockcoat and double-breasted vest were a muted crimson and rich burgundy, respectively. They, combined with his black boots and charcoal breeches, did make him somewhat resemble a vaudevillian ne’er-do-well, but his pomposity was of such a demure and reflective nature as to dispel any such superstitious assumptions. Even his black top hat, forgotten for the moment by the still and skull-like remains of the bridge, could inspire fear and wonder only in the most unimaginative of spectators. Pale where Gonzales was dark, grey-eyed where she was blue, and fair-haired where she was ebon, they cut contrasting but beautiful pictures. All the same, there was nothing in either’s visage to justify such gawping.

No, the unusual thing was that, in spite of the hellacious crash, their garments were in flawless condition. Neither passenger had suffered so much as the proverbial scratch. Not even a single hair seemed out of place.

Andromeda thought back to the horrific, gut-displacing sensation he felt just as the bridge had, with a teeth-rattling twang, separated from the body of the Icarus. Both he and the Captain had flung themselves into nearby chairs. Or been flung, he wondered to himself. It was difficult to separate the impulses of adrenaline from the happenstance of gravity (such as it was), and of course memory of such a harrowing few moments could hardly be trusted. He was fairly certain one of the ensigns had been seated as well.

The Doctor hummed. “Wasn’t Ensign… Ensign… Thingy there… wasn’t she seated?”

Gonzales made a face at him commensurate with having been asked for intimate knowledge of the mating habits of midshipman fish. “Ensign Thingy,” she spat, not unlike a king cobra, “was desperately trying to stabilize the gyroscopes.” After a silent second, in which multitudes of articulate disdain were communicated, her face fell and she looked over to one of the corpses. “Hardly her area of speciality,” she added mournfully, “but I appreciate the effort, nevertheless.”

“I’m sure she appreciates the appreciation.” It had been a thoughtless platitude, bereft of inflection and meant more to conclude the conversation than offer comfort. Gonzales, sadly, took it in neither in the spirit in which it was offered nor the design in which it was constructed. Rather, she took it much the same way a terminally ill stonemason might take a demand to just stop with the vomiting already and get back to marble-cutting. If looks could kill, Andromeda would surely not be around to contemplate the vastly differing sentiments a trio of dead bodies can arouse. Far more likely, he would have been incinerated into fine dust and blown into the snuffbox of one of London’s more mucus-prone dilettantes. Fortunately for the Doctor, looks could not kill. Nor, evidently, could starship crashes; at least not with one-hundred-percent reliability.

There was another voluminous, verbose silence. It was eventually punctuated by more bells from the tottering third wheel of their party, for which Andromeda was absurdly grateful. He turned away and looked at the corpses, finding the sight of them infinitely preferable to his Captain’s latest baleful glare. “Was anyone else sitting?”

“No,” she answered instantly, “to our shame. Or to mine, at least.”

Tiring of human company, both mobile and inert, Andromeda turned his gaze to the bridge. It resembled an enormous vulture’s skull with the brainpan removed. The cataclysmic destruction of its working parts, coupled with the faintest scent of early decay in the frozen air, served only to magnify this impression. About where the ocular cavities would rest on this fictional, avian death’s-head, there rested four comfortable chairs: two in each eye, as it were. There was another pair of seats at either right or left extreme, in the pouches of the bird’s “cheeks,” facing the readouts. Rather, there were chairs there once upon a time, in the halcyon days of yester-hour. Now there rested a collection of torn metal and leather shreds imbedded in said metal. Most of what had been the chairs was probably still jostling about in the particolored atmosphere above. In fact, the chairs of the vulture’s right eye, while in considerably better condition than their outlying cousins, showed significant signs of damage. Who knows what might have happened if the Doctor or Captain had collapsed into any chairs other than the specific two in which they had fallen?

The entire event smelt of predestination, which (to Andromeda’s palate) carried a heady aroma of manipulation. He was unsure if it bore further thinking on or if it bore hiding under a rock with one’s fingers thoroughly in one’s ears.

Fortunately, whatever the Captain had been thinking solved the problem for him.

“LetsGo,” she called, apropos of nothing, “how far away is the life form now?”

The bells. The whistles. “Closest signs of life now lay three-point-one kilometers north-by-north-east.”

Gonzales nodded at nothing. “LetsGo, memorize our current coordinates, then lead us to this life form.”

The ambulatory android bobbled and whirred for several seconds, then began lurching along in what Andromeda assumed to be a roughly north-ish-by-north-wobbly direction. The Captain favored him with another over-the-shoulder glance.

“Well,” she said, “let’s go.

Sponde thought of the sunrise. Not because he may have seen his last (which he hadn’t), nor even because he was homesick (which he was). No, Sponde thought of the sunrise because he was watching his gargantuan coworker slowly lift herself up out of the discarded rubble of the ruined escape pod.

Felicia Titan was one of those rare anatomical marvels more often found in too-clever literature than reality: as wide as she was tall (and considerably taller than Sponde), her cauliflower ears and corn-kernel teeth contrasted greatly with her wombat nose and an enormous pair of vibrant blue eyes, which seemed to deliberately mislead an observer into conjecturing that she was sensitive, virtuous, and wise. Each of these conclusions was more erroneous than the last, no matter what order you put them in. The fact that this made no sense was perfectly in-keeping with Titan’s personality and life in general.

The rising sun of Titan’s prodigious sphere of a body was heralded, not by a crowing cockerel, but rather by flatulence of such prodigious length and gravity, that a wiser man might have declared this a rare occasion of the herald outshining the master. Sponde, however, was not a wise man.

Sponde was a small and thin fellow, soft all over and a little feminine in appearance. He sought to occlude this softness by dressing, speaking, and acting in manners crude, boorish, and an octave or so lower than was natural for him. These desperate overcompensations served to make him despised by his superiors (of which there were many), disrespected by his subordinates (of which there were few), and beloved by Titan (of which there was one, but that one tended to occupy the majority of his social calendar).

So it was that, as the bruised buttocks of Cecil Sponde sat upon the ground, he could honestly say that no one could have been happier to see (and hear, and soon enough smell) evidence of Titan’s health.

Not being known for his articulacy, Sponde instead declared, “All right, Tits?”

Slowly rolling onto her side, then onto her stomach, then back onto her side, then somehow giving the back a miss and rolling all the way to her other side, then nearly up onto her head, then finally onto her Olympian glutei, Titan no longer resembled the sun so much as a dislodged boulder. In time, however, she gained purchase on the ground and examined herself.

Each laborer was clad in an escape suit: a functional cliché of orange nylon, multitudinous pockets, and a classic fishbowl helmet. Each laborer periodically fogged their fishbowl, providing further evidence of their vivacity.

Titan shifted her neck about in improbable positions, rendered all the more improbable by her girth. She eventually came to examine her surroundings. Having been met with Sponde’s underwhelming elocution, and seeing no reason to improve upon it, she pondered aloud, “Bit wintery, isn’t it?”

As understatements went, it was accomplished. It looked very much as though they were sitting atop a frozen ocean. Everywhere she looked, Titan spied smooth ridges of surf and wave: glittering navy and shimmering emerald, more blues than a mono-polar depressive, and every so often hints of brilliant white foam. It all looked flash-frozen, yet ancient and irrevocable. This was all to the good as far as she was concerned, as there was not even a hint of land to be found in any direction. Everything shown, everything glistened, and everything twinkled a billion stars in one, lighting the chilly seascape with a faint, undeniably romantic glow.

Titan glanced briefly at the escape pod. With the possible exception of her churning belly, the former vessel was decidedly the least solid thing to be found. The formerly spherical vehicle was cracked open like an egg, lying in two jagged halves, a mangled leather chair peaking out of either like a pair of twisted, gawky hatchlings.

“Chairs look all right,” Sponde conjectured, ever the optimist. It was at that point that, defying all odds and reason, sparks randomly flew out of each of the pod’s halves, miraculously managing to set both of the flame-retardant chairs afire. Neither Sponde nor Titan was educated enough to appreciate how truly unlikely this event was, being overwhelmed as they were by the loss of their ad-hoc beds. Not wishing to let this sudden source of light and heat dampen his mood, Sponde conjectured further, “Guess supper’s taken care of then.”

In earlier and crueler days of the Earth’s history, those condemned to die by hanging upon the scaffold could take solace only in their brief opportunity to look down on all those who surrounded them, to sneer briefly from their altitude upon those who presumed themselves wiser and more moral. It was a similar gimlet glare that Titan now fixed upon her subordinate-by-virtue-of-inferior-shouting-power. “Sponde, my boy,” she patiently began, with all the wisdom of her thirty-four years glowering over his mere twenty-nine, “Have you ever eaten a chair?”

The soft waif’s normally beady eyes widened a bit as he took a redundant stroll down memory lane. “Nope.”

Titan jiggled her jowls with a tiny nod. “Would you care to eat a chair now?”

At this, Sponde’s eyes narrowed, and Titan briefly wondered if they might roll up into his head as the boy struggled with recursive thought, presumably for the first time in his life. “Well…” he floundered briefly, before settling on, “nope!”

“Well then,” she countered with all the patience of a badger in a beehive, “How says you hurry along and grab our dinner-packs before they burn up, hm?” Grumbling like a boulder, exhausted from her brief supervisory labor and petulantly spiteful of the chilly de-facto floor, Titan relaxed onto her back and stared up at the sky, disturbed only by the sounds of Sponde’s shuffling, rifling, and frequent winces of pain as the fire blithely conspired to murder the blithely unconcerned idiot. Her eyes glazed over as she stared upward.

The sky was a rainbow writ large. Deep violets and rich crimsons swam leisurely with forest greens, golden yellows, and even electric blues. Dotting them all throughout were the piercing glitter of the stars, which seemed to shimmer and dance in the refracting and re-refracting light of the unstable atmosphere.

Titan considered this moon Europa in all her divine majesty, and voiced her approval with a torrential belch. “She’s pretty enough,” she concluded through her gaseous expectorations. “I wouldn’t mind a home like this.”

“It’s freezing!” Sponde both objected and whined, oblivious to the fact that he himself was perilously close to being cooked alive.

Titan’s viscous blue eyes contracted slightly as she continued to examine the sky. “Well natch, it could do with some central heating, but we Titans have been outdoors folk for generations. I could make good use of all this wide open space. Build a palace, I should think, get some servants and a fireplace. Real good. Well.”

The dancing light of the nearby flames were suddenly obscured be a wiry, thoroughly irritating frame. Standing with all the nervous hope of a cadet who has just fallen off his horse, Sponde presented the blackened dinner packs. Inadvertently, he was also presenting an ignited and slowly smoldering right sleeve.

Titan considered warning Sponde, or at least considered considering it, then snatched the dinner packs away from him. She fumbled with the cellophane sealing for several seconds before overpowering it, popping open the plastic container, and freeing a single tannish nugget that resembled (at least to some extent) chicken. She was presently transporting said nugget to her lips when she realized that a glass fishbowl stood between salvation and herself. “Well, butts,” she muttered.

“I wonder if it’s safe to breathe?”

“Your arm’s on fire, Sponde.”

“Heh?”

“… Never mind.”

A look somewhere between bemused and contaminative sat upon Titan’s face as she stared at the nugget. Fuzzy in her peripheral vision, Sponde could be seen (and heard) dancing furiously about, trying to extinguish the flames in every manner conceivable except those manners taught at him in basic safety classes. At length, the waif collapsed and played dead, incidentally smothering the fire beneath his insubstantial body.

Conserving her energy, Titan allowed her eyes to float over toward Sponde’s inert form. Beneath that skeletal frame was an arm, and upon that arm was a sleeve that very likely had a hole in it. The issue of breathability, and subsequently the issue of eating a nugget of processed chicken, would be resolved the instant her junior partner elected to roll over. The significance of the recently extinguished fire having eluded them both, she instead waited and eyed the boy’s inert frame.

Titan watch.

Sponde remained still.

Titan glared, narrowed her eyes, and attempted to roll the boy over using only her mind. If she did possess any latent psychic manipulative powers, they were choosing to remain latent.

Sponde remained still.

At length, Titan condescended to use a more pedestrian form of manipulation. “Spon!” she barked, “Roll over!”

Sponde moaned.

“That’s moaning,” she admonished, “not rolling. Roll, boy, roll.”

Finally, with all the motivation of a rusty drawbridge, Sponde rolled over. His sleeve was singed, and there was very clearly a smattering of holes burnt into it.

That settled it then. Titan would wait one more minute, and if Sponde (the proverbial canary in the coal mine) was still alive, she would deem it safe to remove her fishbowl and eat.

Suddenly, a distracted and wide-eyed look washed over Sponde’s beady-eyed face.

“Take deep breaths,” Titan advised.

Sponde waved his hands at her as though shooing a fly, his attention still far-off.

Titan’s red face purpled with indignation. “Do you wave your fingers at me, boy?”

Sponde shushed her. Sponde had never shushed her. “Do you… do you hear something?”

“I hear a whining, overgrown infant of limited longevity, growing exponentially more limited by the second.”

Titan had quite a mastery of words, when motivated.

In the silence that followed her useless threat, however, she could indeed hear a hum, a thrum, a musical quality in the air. Like a reed or a flute, it seemed to glide down from the wind above, wending where it might, enticing them to follow.

“It’s so… so… nice.” Sponde had quite a paucity of words, motivated or no.

At least a minute had passed, and the boy appeared thoroughly un-asphyxiated. Throwing caution into the wind, or more accurately into her gurgling stomach, Titan unscrewed her fishbowl helm. It was a sloppy business, the greasy nugget still held firmly between her thumb and index finger, but she managed to remove the helmet soon enough and place the succulent gristle safely in her mouth.

She made a face.

“What do you think that sound is?”

Titan chewed. It was work. “Maybe someone. Maybe someone with food.”

Having heard it spoken, this seemed perfectly feasible to Sponde. He nodded bodily. “Sure, sure. Could be. Maybe we should find out!”

Titan shrugged. She was not looking forward to standing up. Then, she withdrew a second nugget of processed poultry and examined it. “We should,” she conceded. “We should.”

A mere five minutes later, the unlikely pair was trundling off into the unknown, their moods considerably warmer than their environment. Sponde railed off a delightful old sailors’ catch, until Titan thumped him in the head. They trudged on silently.