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    Painsharing and Other Stories
    Painsharing and Other Stories
    Painsharing and Other Stories
    Ebook211 pages3 hours

    Painsharing and Other Stories

    By John Walters

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    About this ebook

    After nuclear war, a survivor of the monster-populated ruins of Oakland California joins the crew of a clipper ship sailing the waters of the Pacific; a typhoon shipwrecks him on a tropical island whose inhabitants share a bizarre secret.

    An unlikely team investigating the deaths of the crew of an interstellar spaceship near Pluto are confronted with a life-or-death conundrum stranger than anything they could have imagined.

    On a distant planet the ultimate civil punishment is to be genetically deformed into an abhorrent beast and forced to live in the forbidden compound called Purgatory as slaves of the State. When authorities arrest and condemn the woman he loves, a man determines to find and save her, even if he must descend into Purgatory itself.

    In these and other gripping science fiction tales John Walters explores possible futures on Earth and other worlds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Walters
    Release dateJul 11, 2011
    ISBN9781465787101
    Painsharing and Other Stories
    Author

    John Walters

    John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

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      Book preview

      Painsharing and Other Stories - John Walters

      Painsharing and Other Stories

      by

      John Walters

      * * *

      Published by Astaria Books at Smashwords

      Copyright 2011 by John Walters

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold reproduced, or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

      This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons places or events - except those in the public domain - is purely coincidental.

      Contents

      1. Painsharing

      2. Leilani

      3. State of Grace

      4. The Orpheus Equation

      5. The Coma Killings

      6. The New World

      7. The Left-Handed League

      8. Fearful Symmetry

      9. Beyond Purgatory

      10. Afterword: Here, There, and Everywhere

      11. Acknowledgments

      Painsharing

      In a transparent protective cocoon, twenty-four met to mourn the dying Earth. The bloated sun above them cast its pale red light on the charred landscape.

      The invitation had been sent to members of all the outer colonies, but most had ignored it, or scorned it, or been unable to understand it.

      The mourners came from many different worlds, and had adapted themselves to suit the environment in which they lived; no common ground could be found, therefore, until they agreed, in honor of the occasion, to assume classic human form, half of them female and half male.

      What requiem can we offer? one said.

      Many ideas were proposed.

      We can close the Earth in sealant, protecting it for all eternity.

      But look at what is left. Is it really worth preserving?

      We can dance! We can create a multi-sensory display and each of us can perform a farewell ballet.

      But several said that they did not know how to dance, nor did they desire to.

      We can inject antimatter into the core, causing a tremendous explosion, and send copies of the event to all the outer colonies as memorials.

      But such an action could be misinterpreted. It is one thing to allow the Earth to die; it is another to kill it ourselves.

      We can commit suicide one by one, each in our own unique aesthetic manner, thus symbolizing the death of the Earth.

      But we have not come here to end our lives, but only to offer our respect to the planet that gave birth to our ancestors.

      They argued back and forth but could reach no agreement, until one of them who had decided to call herself Hileila said, We are missing the point. The importance of Earth to us is not the ball of matter itself, but the people who once called it their home. We have a database of everyone who has lived and died on this planet since records were kept. I propose that we slip through time and find them one by one and show them appreciation by loving them.

      All of them?

      How else can we be impartial? How can we judge one more important than another?

      Do you mean have sex with them?

      With some, yes. But many died while still under-aged, and many equated love with activities other than sex.

      But we are so few. It would take hundreds of thousands of years of subjective time to accomplish such a task.

      Some have suggested elaborate suicides. Why should we not instead stay alive and offer ourselves in this way? Consider the significance of what we are commemorating. The requiem needs to be worthy of it.

      Finally they agreed to try Hileila’s plan and meet again after a certain period of time to assess their progress.

      So they divided up the names in the database according to chronological and geographical location, and slipped back.

      * * *

      Veracrystal, who had been given the list for North America in the early millennia, chose her first person at random. His name was Samuel Cantor. He was born in 1926, grew up in the Great Depression, fought in World War II (and since then, said the medical records, had suffered from nightmares about gutting a German with a bayonet), married and raised four children, died in 1980.

      Veracrystal made contact with him in 1971, three years after his wife had died. His children were all grown and gone, and he lived alone in a small apartment.

      It was not difficult for her to seduce him, though she wasn’t too sure of what she was doing, and he was incredulous that she should be doing it. They walked, they talked, he invited her home. It wasn’t long before they were holding each other, and then in bed together.

      The world confuses me, he said. I used to be self-assured, when I had my family to support and everything was going smoothly. Now I don’t understand anymore. Then later, when they were making love, he said, Why are you doing this? Why?

      She said, Because I love you.

      And when he accepted her love, let go of his loneliness and frustration and fear, the emotional surge was so strong she momentarily stopped breathing, and felt like a hand was squeezing and twisting her heart. She clung to him and wept, and thought to herself, It hurts, oh it hurts; I didn’t know it would hurt like this…

      I love you, I love you… he said, over and over.

      She knew that time would fold back on itself and erase this snippet she had spent with him; it was the way history had of maintaining its continuity. But she hoped that somehow the remainder of his life would be brightened by what they had shared.

      Perhaps it’s not always like this, she thought. Perhaps the next one will be easier.

      But it wasn’t.

      * * *

      Morphalendus found himself in Rwanda in 1994, picking his way along a road crimson with blood through bodies that had been shot, clubbed, machete-slashed. Some corpses were dismembered; some were beheaded; some were unrecognizable as human.

      He heard a whimper. In the back of a thatched mud hut he found a naked little boy: stick-thin, with bloated belly. Morphalendus sat on the dirt floor and took the boy up into his arms and held him. As he did, the boy looked at him with large frightened eyes, then buried his face in Morphalendus’s chest and clung to him with all of his negligible strength. Morphalendus wanted to talk to him, to tell him that it was all right, that he didn’t have to be afraid, but he was so overwhelmed by the boy’s heartache and terror that he couldn’t speak.

      Soon afterwards the boy died in his arms.

      It seemed there were endless numbers of children in many times, in many places, who had been caught up in war or natural disasters or abject poverty. They just wanted to be held, to know someone was there for them. So he would hold them, while their grief and loneliness and fear burst from within in shuddering throbs, until they had spent it all and would lie quietly in his arms.

      * * *

      Shelada walked slowly down the aisle past rows of cots on which lay dying women in plain white cotton gowns. The plaster wall was whitewashed; the cement floor was spotless; the beams under the corrugated metal roof were free of dust or cobwebs. The silence was punctuated only by the shuffle of her sandaled feet, the quiet clicking of the overhead fan, an occasional cough, the rasping sound of someone laboring to breathe. I’ll come back earlier for these, she thought.

      Alone in a tiny room in the back a white-robed woman knelt, wrinkled hands clasped together, her eyes closed, her lips moving. Before her on the wall was a picture of a woman in blue holding a baby, both of whom had faint mysterious smiles and golden halos around their heads.

      Eventually the woman raised her head, opened her eyes, turned.

      She does not want to have sex, Shelada thought. Nor does she want to be held.

      Who are you? the woman said.

      I have come from beyond, Shelada said. To love you.

      The woman’s expression changed from puzzlement to wonder and relief. Shelada moved forward, and placed the fingertips of her right hand on the woman’s brow. The force of the woman’s emotional release almost caused Shelada to faint.

      * * *

      At the agreed-upon time, the twenty-four met.

      I can’t do it anymore. No matter who I love it’s always the same. It hurts too much. And then they forget.

      It’s frustrating.

      It’s discouraging.

      It’s pointless. If they remembered it would be different.

      For a time they were silent, in the light of the bloated red sun that shone on the empty world. Then Hileila said, I know they won’t remember us, but I have to believe that they’ll remember the love.

      Seventeen of them gave up and left for the outer colonies. After they were gone, Hileila said, With so few of us, we will never complete our task. But I don’t care anymore. Our ancestors need us more than I ever thought they would. Compared to them we are immortal; I will use this gift. I will continue to love them until my energy and substance dissipate.

      Each of the rest of the seven agreed with her. So they again slipped back into the past, this time without hope of ever returning to the lives they had once lived.

      * * *

      From those early millennia, they moved forward through human history: through the period of nuclear warfare, the near decimation of the population, and the rebuilding; through the period of first contact and interstellar exploration; through the wars with extraterrestrials, the discovery of time-slipping, the gradual abandonment of Earth for other worlds.

      Though each period of history was unique, reactions to their love never changed.

      But there came a day, far in the future in objective time, when every human being in their database had been found and loved. And they met together again, in their transparent protective cocoon on barren Earth. The ruby sun had swollen further, and had become so large that it had almost swallowed Mercury.

      Their ancestors had equated the heart with love. Blood was red too…

      They looked at each other and they saw the pain that each of them had absorbed, the pain that in their past lives they had all but forgotten.

      They could do nothing but love one another, and share it. Otherwise it would overwhelm them.

      Then they departed, to share the love and pain of humanity with the outer colonies.

      No one was there when the sun consumed the Earth, and then shrank to an insignificant white dwarf.

      Leilani

      As the waves form foamy crescents on the sand and palm fronds rustle in the breeze and hidden birds sing ethereal melodies, Leilani in a sleeveless knee-length translucent white gown runs along the water's edge, her golden hair rippling behind her like the wake of a ship.

      Stepping out of the jungle, I block her. Come with me, I say. At first, I automatically extend my four-fingered claw-like hands, but then, embarrassed, I hide them behind my back.

      Her eyes have the blue of the sky and of the ocean, but also a blue uniquely their own. By her expression she pities me, she fears hurting me, yet she doesn't comprehend how I feel. I can't come, she says. I'm getting married in a few hours. Please try to understand.

      It's you who don't understand. Further talk is useless. I grab her and bind her hands behind her back, then carry her to my boat, which is already supplied with food and water. She pleads, then threatens, then screams, but I ignore her. When we reach the center of the lagoon I hoist the sail and head for the break in the reef.

      * * *

      The nightmares that haunted me every night when I was young were not of melted eyes and skin, of the screams of those who slowly died, of the smell of rotting corpses; those were my parents' nightmares, not mine. They would never describe them to me, but they would talk in their sleep, then awaken trembling, wet with sour-smelling sweat. What brought me to the edge of sanity usually began innocuously enough: I would see my parents in the old house in Oakland, coming to greet me as they used to when I would return from playing in the charred ruins of the city - but they would never quite reach me. Just as they were about to touch me I would wake up grasping into the void, the sense of loss causing my heart to pound until it ached.

      When I was born the birth itself was such a novelty that my abnormalities were overlooked. Later as other births occasionally occurred, somehow managing to cheat the mass sterilization brought about by the radiation, my physical variations, in comparison, turned out to be relatively slight. Some babies had reptilian-looking skin; some had their stomachs on the outside; some had bulbous warty growths all over; some had three eyes or four arms or fourteen toes, and some had no eyes or arms or toes at all. The monster generation, the oldsters called us. But most of them died the slow death of the contaminated, while we survived. We didn't seem to be able to reproduce, but perhaps it was just as well.

      I was only seven years old when my parents died. Afterwards, I begged and scrounged in the streets like everybody else. The monster zoo, the oldsters called the city. But by that time we outnumbered them.

      One clear spring morning a three-masted clipper ship sailed into San Francisco Bay. I had never seen anything so beautiful: slim and sleek and swift, white canvas extended like the wings of a seagull; it looked as if it could glide right into the sky. The next day I signed onto the crew, just to get away from where I was. The captain was an oldster, a former naval commander who knew how to keep things organized and under control. The ship had no particular destination or itinerary. We headed up north hunting seals and whales until ice began to crust on the deck; then we turned southwest. We had the whole ocean before us, and very little competition. As far as we were concerned, the atomic war seemed to have done us a favor and given us the seas to ourselves. We were riding high, free and easy...until the typhoon, that is.

      We ran before the storm for three days before the ship sank and we took to the lifeboats. I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew, but I ended up with the captain and the second mate. Day after day we drifted in the hot sun, and night after night in the immense blackness of the ocean with thousands of stars overhead. Our food and water ran out. The captain died, and we threw him over; then the second mate died, and I threw him over. I started to lose consciousness myself; I figured I'd die in the boat and drift forever.

      * * *

      When I awakened I thought I was in heaven. Bending over me with a concerned expression was Leilani. Her waist-length blonde hair fell down over her shoulders, almost touching me; she wore a scant slip of a blue dress and a necklace of pink and white flowers.

      Realizing my hands were exposed, I quickly slid them under the sheet. I couldn't hide my oversized ears, pointed nose, or slanted eyes, but it was the best I could do to make a good first impression.

      Then I heard a sound that brought tears to my eyes. It was not the melody of birds that surprised me, because birds sang even in the ruins of the city. No. It was children laughing. Such a strange sound. It came from hearts without fear, from joyful hearts.

      Are you in pain? Leilani asked.

      No, I... Where am I?

      This is the House of the Sick, but you are the only patient. The school is next door; I hope the noise doesn't disturb you.

      No. No, I don't mind. Who are you?

      My name is Leilani. It's

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