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Authors: Joseph Erhardt
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into drive and roared out of there, wheels spinning and gravel flying. I might be a physicist, but when I got back to Boyer State my first stop would be the biology department. I’d grab the department head, plunk him down at his desk, and tell him all about— punkin’ vipers!
Afterword
“Punkin’ Vipers” first appeared in Futures V.3/#22 (April/May 2001), as by T. Rex. The publication still exists as Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine , and is worth checking out.
There are stories that are Great Fiction, and there are stories with Great Meaning. “Punkin’ Vipers” is a Halloween story, full stop. There are no Great Meanings to be culled from its pages.
So go ahead: drop a rock in my trick-or-treat bag. I can take it.
Evensong
“Do what you can, yourself. Forget automation. Unhealthy. Sedentary. It’s why no one uses ‘bots these days—unless they have to. Understand?”
Yeah, yeah, Ferguson thought as he shuffled across the unlit bedroom. The surgeon’s advice and his own stubbornness had sped his recovery, but there had to come a time when practicality superseded the dictum.
He’d still be in bed now, not gliding about in icy slippers, if only he’d asked the house computing unit to close the window for him. A simple voice command. So why hadn’t he done it?
Maybe he wanted the excuse to get up, to sort it out once more, to put the matter behind him—if he could. He hadn’t been asleep anyway when the storm began.
As he stepped to the window, raindrops invaded the opening and pricked his bare shins like cold metal darts.
He thumbed the sash control and the lower frame dropped smoothly to the sill.
His right leg twitched uncomfortably, but he fought the urge to strap on the automatic crutch. It would be too easy to get used to it again.
Instead, he pulled a chair to the window and sat.
Storms here were sporadic curiosities, rarely violent. But violence, natural or deliberate, could never be wholly held back, not even in the whitewashed, house-and-garden hamlet in which he lived.
A long flash of lightning lit up a steeple, barely visible in the distance. To the rear of that church lay the cemetery. And in that ground, awkwardly tipped in adjacent plots, lay the one close friend he’d had.
—
Ferguson met Tar F’set on the shuttle that bridged the twenty million kilometers from the hyperspace transfer station to the planet’s spaceport. He had been looking out the forward view panel, trying to keep his back to the other humans on the ship, trying to ignore the stares and the thoughts he knew were there: That’s Jack Ferguson, the man who put six billion out of work. An exaggeration, surely. Sixty million was closer to the mark, and the layoffs that resulted from his unwitting discovery had lasted but a quarter.
Yet the feeling of being shunned persisted, and Ferguson wondered how much of it was real, and how much was overreaction—a psychological callus borne of the frictions that followed his disclosures.
So he kept his eyes on the view panel, two thirds of which showed a fraction of the system’s huge red giant. The star was passing slowly to the right and looked through the viewfilters like a great hairy blanket, all afire. At the far left, his destination appeared as a small brown dot.
In the reflection of the panel, Ferguson eyed the other travelers, and he saw Tar F’set, the shuttle’s one alien, approach. Ferguson would have ignored him as well, but with the size and bulk of a garden tractor, the creature projected a presence hard to ignore.
“The world seems far too close to its sun, Human.” The alien’s voice crackled in the air. It wasn’t really a voice, but the work of vestigial wings stridulating over the creature’s carapace. Eons of evolution had replaced the beat-points on the creature’s back with a complex matrix of knobs and rills, giving it the ability to mimic speech. Ferguson had heard of the ability but until that moment had never
Afterword
“Punkin’ Vipers” first appeared in Futures V.3/#22 (April/May 2001), as by T. Rex. The publication still exists as Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine , and is worth checking out.
There are stories that are Great Fiction, and there are stories with Great Meaning. “Punkin’ Vipers” is a Halloween story, full stop. There are no Great Meanings to be culled from its pages.
So go ahead: drop a rock in my trick-or-treat bag. I can take it.
Evensong
“Do what you can, yourself. Forget automation. Unhealthy. Sedentary. It’s why no one uses ‘bots these days—unless they have to. Understand?”
Yeah, yeah, Ferguson thought as he shuffled across the unlit bedroom. The surgeon’s advice and his own stubbornness had sped his recovery, but there had to come a time when practicality superseded the dictum.
He’d still be in bed now, not gliding about in icy slippers, if only he’d asked the house computing unit to close the window for him. A simple voice command. So why hadn’t he done it?
Maybe he wanted the excuse to get up, to sort it out once more, to put the matter behind him—if he could. He hadn’t been asleep anyway when the storm began.
As he stepped to the window, raindrops invaded the opening and pricked his bare shins like cold metal darts.
He thumbed the sash control and the lower frame dropped smoothly to the sill.
His right leg twitched uncomfortably, but he fought the urge to strap on the automatic crutch. It would be too easy to get used to it again.
Instead, he pulled a chair to the window and sat.
Storms here were sporadic curiosities, rarely violent. But violence, natural or deliberate, could never be wholly held back, not even in the whitewashed, house-and-garden hamlet in which he lived.
A long flash of lightning lit up a steeple, barely visible in the distance. To the rear of that church lay the cemetery. And in that ground, awkwardly tipped in adjacent plots, lay the one close friend he’d had.
—
Ferguson met Tar F’set on the shuttle that bridged the twenty million kilometers from the hyperspace transfer station to the planet’s spaceport. He had been looking out the forward view panel, trying to keep his back to the other humans on the ship, trying to ignore the stares and the thoughts he knew were there: That’s Jack Ferguson, the man who put six billion out of work. An exaggeration, surely. Sixty million was closer to the mark, and the layoffs that resulted from his unwitting discovery had lasted but a quarter.
Yet the feeling of being shunned persisted, and Ferguson wondered how much of it was real, and how much was overreaction—a psychological callus borne of the frictions that followed his disclosures.
So he kept his eyes on the view panel, two thirds of which showed a fraction of the system’s huge red giant. The star was passing slowly to the right and looked through the viewfilters like a great hairy blanket, all afire. At the far left, his destination appeared as a small brown dot.
In the reflection of the panel, Ferguson eyed the other travelers, and he saw Tar F’set, the shuttle’s one alien, approach. Ferguson would have ignored him as well, but with the size and bulk of a garden tractor, the creature projected a presence hard to ignore.
“The world seems far too close to its sun, Human.” The alien’s voice crackled in the air. It wasn’t really a voice, but the work of vestigial wings stridulating over the creature’s carapace. Eons of evolution had replaced the beat-points on the creature’s back with a complex matrix of knobs and rills, giving it the ability to mimic speech. Ferguson had heard of the ability but until that moment had never
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