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Age of Miracles...
or End of Days?
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Millions
watched on television as the mundane tragedy of a hostage crisis
in the town of Indigo Springs turned into something worse... much
worse. But what really happened in Oregon last summer? All most
of us know is that "magic," once the province of fairy
tales and big-budget motion pictures, is now an undeniable reality.
Giant wasps attacked police lines at the site of the hostage crisis
as a woman escaped on a flying carpet. Later, earthquakes shattered
the town's buildings. When the trees began to grow to impossible
heights throughout the town, dozens went missing.
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Of the thousands of survivors
who fled from their homes in time, none has been able to return.
The town of Indigo Springs remains enclosed and inaccessible within
its mystical forest.
Is the woman
known as Sahara Knax really a goddess, as her followers claim, or
is she merely an opportunistic cult leader, a master manipulator
capitalizing on a catastrophe, but one not of her making? Knax has
taken credit for triggering the so-called "ecological Apocalypse,"
allegedly to warn a careless human race to mend our Earth-polluting
ways. Can she really lead us to a cleaner, brighter future, or is
something more ominous at work in the Western United States?
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"Five
Good Things about Meghan Sheedy," up now on Strange
Horizons.
To
hear the Fiends tell it, the agenda of their invasion was simplicity
itself—take over all of Earth, evict every last offworlder,
and bring on the Utopia. They had united Asia behind this goal
before Dinah was born. Wanting an independent Earth was easy to
comprehend, making it a seductive idea. Funny thing, though, their
fine talk of cleansing humanity of foreign contaminants didn't
stop them from buying offworlder bombs. Oh, they pretended they
were just scavenging ordnance from the Demos and their Kabu allies,
but the numbers didn't track—anyone could see the Fiends
had offworld sponsors just like the Demos. In Dinah's books, that
made them hypocrites.
And
they'd merrily assassinate anyone with Kabu ties.
And if you enjoy "Meghan Sheedy," don't miss my other
squid stories, "The
Town on Blighted Sea," in the August 2006 Strange
Horizons and "Time of the Snake," in Fast
Forward 1, Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited
by Lou Anders.
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photo by Kelly Robson
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