Many Moons Read online

  MANY MOONS

  Scott Azmus

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface: Reflections in Period Glass

  Reflections in Period Glass

  Preface: Starphires

  Starphires

  Preface: Department 17

  Department 17

  Preface: Egging

  Egging

  Preface: Red Moon

  Red Moon

  Preface: The Catafalque

  The Catafalque

  Preface: Dining Out

  Dining Out

  Preface: Cooler by the Lake

  Cooler by the Lake

  Preface: Raise All Your Happy Voices

  Raise All Your Happy Voices

  Preface: Oceans Above

  Oceans Above

  Preface: Oh, Europa…

  Oh, Europa, Please Trust and Take Me In!

  Preface: When the Morning Stars…

  When the Morning Stars Sang Together

  Preface: Backspin

  Backspin

  About the Author

  Also by Scott Azmus

  One Last Thing…

  MANY MOONS Copyright © 2018 by Scott Azmus.

  All Right Reserved. Published in the United Stated of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. For more information contact: www.scottazmus.com.

  Cover design by ramz art.

  Hawk’s Grove Press

  First Edition: November 2018

  Writing “…reminiscent of the fine tales of Ray Bradbury or Zenna Henderson—the kinds of stories that will always be in demand.” —Dave Wolverton, Writers of the Future Volume XII.

  Created with Vellum

  Some of the stories in this anthology were previously professionally published as follows:

  • “Starphires,” in Space & Time (#84), edited by Gordon Linzner, Emerald City Publishing, New York, Fall 1994, p. 22 - 34.

  • “Reflections in Period Glass,” in Writers of the Future (Volume XII), edited by Dave Wolverton, Bridge Publications, Inc., Los Angeles, 1996, p. 95 - 107.

  • “Department 17,” in Galaxy, edited by E.J. Gold, Nevada City, California, February 1998.

  • “Egging,” in Little Green Men (No. 4), edited by Greg Meronek, Small Publisher’s Co-Op., El Toro, California, Fall/Winter 1998, p. 47 - 51.

  • “Red Moon,” in Writers of the Future (Volume XIV), edited by Dave Wolverton, Bridge Publications, Inc., Los Angeles, 1998, p. 399 - 438. An award-winning story.

  • “The Catafalque,” in Aboriginal Science Fiction (Issue #61, Vol. 10, No. 1), edited by Charles C. Ryan, 2nd Renaissance Foundation, Inc., Woburn, Massachusetts, Spring 1999, p. 26 - 32.

  For Dora

  Foreword

  I love science fiction anthologies and have collected thousands of great short stories over the years. Going to the bookshelf, I can grab down most any author collection or best of year distillation and, looking at the table of contents, immediately see which stories I have read (or reread!) and which I still haven’t found time for…yet.

  And I can see how each story or novella impacted me as a reader. I unfailingly rate each story on a subjective scale, 1 to 10 (with ten being the most evocative or incredibly mind-bending story) and yet that hasn’t always been adequate. I’ve also found a number of elevens along the way!

  Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Ted Chiang, Nancy Kress, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Dean Whitlock, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Gene Wolfe, Frederik Pohl, C.L. Moore, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury….

  I wish I could “channel” even one of them!

  This collection contains six previously published stories. Most I like. One is just…well, blah, but here for “completeness.” You’ll know it when you see it. So sorry.

  Finally, this collection contains three super short pieces (less than 1000 words each), several first appearances, plus one “hot” off the word processor.

  I hope at least one story snags a higher than average rating for you!

  ~Scott

  Preface: Reflections in Period Glass

  This is almost certainly my most popular story. At just over 2000 words, it is short and to the point. There are a few small things I wouldn’t mind changing, but I’ve decided to leave all of my published stories exactly as they first appeared in print.

  The story’s central idea is based on an actual, very large glass jar. It looks like a pickle jar, and it is full of many coins and sitting across the room from me at the moment. In preparation for a household move (Annapolis, Maryland to Naples, Italy), I had decided to recycle the jar.

  “Wait a minute! What are you doing? Where are you going with that?”

  As it turned out, the jar had great meaning for my wife and to her extended family. Unbeknownst to me, the jar had come from Dora’s grandparent’s general store and post office back in the rolling hills of West Virginia. When Dora shared a little more about the jar’s history, I started writing. I borrowed my grandmother’s voice as narrator, jumped the setting to Boulder, Colorado, and the ferret mentioned, “Pashtran,” was probably stealing my socks or underwear from the laundry pile while I wrote.

  I think I wrote the first draft in just a few hours, and “Reflections in Period Glass” rapidly became my second professionally published story. Because I managed to slip it into a well-known anthology series, the sale brought a great deal of local attention. Our newspaper printed a large article. I read the story a few times at schools, bookstores, and libraries. I was even a guest on a local TV talk show. (It’s nice to live in a small-town!)

  The good people at Writers of the Future then paid for a roundtrip flight to Houston, Texas, where I attended a week-long writing course, toured NASA facilities, and met several dozen prominent science fiction writers and agents. Algis Budrys and Dave Wolverton critiqued our workshop stories and the awards ceremony was really fabulous.

  The best part was actually holding the anthology in my hands for the first time. I was shocked when I read the editor’s introduction, and I remember being incredibly impressed by Gary McClusky’s artistic interpretation of the story. It was perfect!

  The thing that amazed me most, however, was this quote from Dave Wolverton’s introduction:

  “The story you are about to read, a finalist in a hard-fought quarter, is reminiscent of the fine tales of Ray Bradbury or Zenna Henderson—the kinds of stories that will always be in demand.”

  Cool, right?

  Now, please enjoy “Reflections in Period Glass.”

  Reflections in Period Glass

  I automatically slide my magnifying glass aside as Danny calls, “Grandma! You’ve got to come out to the lab. It’s all ready!”

  I close the stamp album on today’s clippings from the Rocky Mountain News. The lab? Oh, the shed. He wants me to head out to the shed. It’s funny how the same thing can mean different things to different people. His father used the shed for reloading shells. His grandfather, as a carpenter’s shop.

  My arthritic hip aches, but I lever myself out of my rocker and follow the dogs, Sasha and Turbo, out the back. Danny is an industrious boy, but I wish he’d repair the grape arbor or repav
e the walk instead of spending all his time in the shed. The bird feeders could use some work, too.

  The gate squeals as I push through to the back alley. The ground is already pocked with ant lion pits. An old prescription bottle rolls in the breeze. A trace of late snow lingers along the fence.

  Danny pops his head out. “Grandma, you gotta see this! It’s working.”

  My sense of smell isn’t what it once was, but as I enter I know two things at once. Danny has “fried” more than a few electronic components, and at least one of his girlfriends has just left. I try to recall which one wears so much perfume, when Danny lifts his ferret off an old lawn chair and guides me into it like I’m some kind of invalid. When he has me positioned, he drops his ferret, Pashtran, on my lap and begins to pace.

  “Okay, I haven’t got the internal diagnostic working yet, but think I’ve got most of the bugs worked out. The dates are relative vice absolute and the color’s not the best, but I’m getting close. Also, I haven’t figured out how to slow the images, but that’s probably a software problem….”

  I stroke Pashtran’s belly. She sleeps through this with her head tucked, so I guess she’s heard it all before. I nod for Danny to continue as it is almost time for my nap.

  When he stops in front of the workbench, he breaks into a grin that shows he’s proud of whatever it is he’s done, but doesn’t want to admit it. I know that look well. It was his father’s look and his father’s. He’s secretly afraid I won’t be impressed.

  He whips a cardboard barrier aside. “Ta-da!”

  An opposing set of metal hemispheres, looking for all the world like a pair of colanders, dominates the workbench. Of course, they wouldn’t be any use as colanders because all the holes sparkle with tiny lenses. Red and blue-striped cable ribbons run from both sides to a panel of digital readouts and chromed slide bars. The panel reminds me of the holocube reader Danny wanted so desperately last Christmas. I look closer and see that it is the holocube reader, only not quite as I remember seeing it just three months ago.

  None of that bothers me. What does vex me, though, is that my glass pickling crock stands between the colanders. It’s a barrel-shaped jar almost two feet tall. He’s stuck blobs of gray putty all over it.

  “That was passed down from my grandmother,” I say.

  Danny slides a copper wire into one of the blobs. “Come on, Grandma, it’s just an old jar.”

  I look at my grandson. His hair is longer than it ought to be, which probably comes from growing up with his mother in California. Normally full of jokes and sporting a huge grin, he is now intent on the instruments before him. Can this be the same boy who last autumn burst through my front door announcing something wrong with all the neighborhood trees?

  What kind of child doesn’t recognize the changing of seasons when he sees it?

  He brushes the hair out of his eyes with a casual raking of his fingers. The red comes from his mother’s side. God knows our family never had a lick of red.

  I ask, “What does this contraption do?”

  “I’ll show you.” He whispers to his laptop computer and an image of the paired colanders instantly hovers over its projection stage. “This is a project for my archeology class. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt your jar.”

  “I hope not. It’s valuable, you know.”

  “How old is it?”

  “Let’s see. It used to be in my grandfather’s old country store. Twenty years or so before I was born. I remember seeing it for the first time when I was around, oh, five years old?”

  His face gets a look like Wow, ancient history, but he asks, “What year would that be?”

  “Has to be at least eighty years ago, now. It was there when they cleaned out the old post office and turned it into a coop.”

  He aims something the size of a car key. Rosy laser light plays over the jar. “Fifty-six centimeters high . . . diameter, thirty.”

  The computer draws. After a moment, the image is complete with glass ribbing and a cursive “Duriglas” across its base. It looks real. As he runs his finger over the little pad by the keyboard, the false glass swirls with iridescence.

  “A coop?” he asks.

  “A chicken coop. They cleaned out the post office and took everything to the barn. My mother found a lot of old stamps—”

  “Okay, so it’s at least eighty years old. What was it used for?”

  “Probably closer to eighty-five. There was an old bell, too. The kind they rang to call the farm hands in for supper.”

  “I thought farmers used a triangle.”

  “No, it was a bell. At least on our old family farm it was a bell. Sometimes the hands rang it if they wanted something. Like a lump of brown sugar or water for—”

  “There. That does it. Fully calibrated.”

  Pashtran yawns and snuggles down. Danny tabs a key and commands, “Begin regression sequence.”

  The jar between the colanders looks the same, but the one on the stage begins to change. Light glares off it and something seems to form inside.

  “The projection will steady out in a second,” Danny advises. “The regression is running at a year a minute. That’s roughly a month every five seconds, but we won’t see much more than a blur until the jar settles down. I tried this with some Neolithic ceramics, but found it works best with transparent objects that have sat still for long periods. This jar’s perfect because it probably didn’t move around too much. I mean, it probably weighs something close to ten pounds, empty.”

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The image solidifies and over the space of the next few minutes fills with mittens and then suddenly empties. I used to knit mittens every year and give them out at Halloween, but had to stop because of the arthritis.

  I ask myself, “What’s Danny up to?” but never answer. Rubber bands have replaced the mittens. They are green and red like the ones that used to come with the daily newspaper. Their level dwindles.

  “Don’t forget that this is running in reverse. When the level falls it means that in real-time, someone was adding stuff to the jar.”

  I nod numbly and edge closer. The jar swirls with light and for the first time I notice that the outer surface is reflecting images of its own. Half-seen shapes move briefly and disappear. The motion is swift, but at times I imagine seeing my own face. Sometimes I think I see my kitchen before the new cabinets.

  Green. A band of green runs vertically up the center of the jar. One side holds a gravelly darkness; the other, eddies of fog.

  Danny checks his watch. “It’s been twenty minutes. That makes this something close to 1980.” He types the number in and it floats at the bottom of the display, regressing rapidly. “Recognize any of this?”

  At first I don’t, but then remember lending the jar to the neighbor girl for a school project. That was just after Danny’s father left home. I guess it was before I’d decided it was an antique.

  I peer hard at the image. Tiny fern fronds are tucking themselves back into fiddleheads before plummeting into the soil. Patches of moss shrink back. “It’s a terrarium.”

  Danny tilts his head at the display, then gazes at the jar. “This is great! If only I could slow the projection. Maybe if I use QuickLook seven point oh and…”

  I stop listening as the image goes completely dark. When brief flashes occur, I recognize the inside of my pantry. Another eight minutes pass before the projection stage shines. Rainbows glint and small, shrimp-like creatures fly around the interior. Sometimes they swarm like gnats; sometimes they dwindle to just a few pairs. Each grows progressively smaller before disappearing. After less than a minute, the jar returns to darkness.

  “What the heck was that?”

  I laugh. The digits at the bottom of the display have spun down to 1971. “You’re father was a boy then. He would have been nine or ten.”

  “So?”

  “Those were Sea Monkeys.”

  “You’re kidding. My dad had Sea Monkeys?”

  I nod as the im
age shifts through earlier volumes of bottle caps and rocks, shells and glow-in-the-dark Superballs. Once or twice I see my boy’s reflection as he gloats over his various collections.

  When the digits reach 1965, the hologram clouds before revealing a bramble of worn paint brushes. As the months tick by, they grow newer and I see hints of the many layers of paint—yellow before blue before yellow, again—that Dad, my husband, Danny’s grandfather, painted our home. Once or twice I catch a vision of him crafting something in his workshop, but the images are faint and fleeting. I feel a sudden twinge of guilt at having allowed all his tools to rust to nothing.

  Tears well and I rush to wipe them. Guess I forgot how much I miss the old goat.

  I’m still lost in the memory of his spicy cologne and the taste of his sweat when a blur of orange forms and spirals through the jar. Occasionally, there are two or more swaths of twisting-veering orange.

  Danny claps his hands. “Goldfish!”

  “Moby and Goldie and Bubbles,” I recall fondly. It was the 1955 state fair. I was fifteen, acting sixteen. Billy Kramer won them for me by tossing Ping-Pong balls at their bowls. I never knew what happened to him after his mother died and his family moved back East.

  Marbles came next. Hundreds of them, lasting for almost eight full minutes. Baked clay at the bottom, grading up through alabaster to beautiful glass puries, lacy shooters, and cat’s-eyes. My father, so proud to finally “sire” a boy, began the collection. Robbie, my baby brother, had to finish it alone. Green and silver, yellow and blue. Swirls of scarlet.