Wondrous Strange: 12 Amusingly Unexpected Tales

By Sean O'Brien

In these twelve short stories by science fiction writer Sean O’Brien, you’ll find a character trying to find the meaning of his own life through an alien artifact called the Godbox; a brainy high school geek with an unusual football ability; an interstellar war veteran looking for redemption years after his tour of duty; a pop star with a unique pedigree that is both limitation and advantage; a living sofa—and much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean O'Brien
• Release date: Mar 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465945884

Sean O'Brien

Sean O’Brien’s poetry has received numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize (three times), the E.M Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. Europa is his ninth collection. His work has been published in several languages. His novel Once Again Assembled Here was published in 2016. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Wondrous Strange

12 Amusingly Unexpected Tales

By Sean O’Brien

Wondrous Strange: 12 Amusingly Unexpected Tales

Sean O’Brien

Copyright 2011 by Sean O’Brien

Smashwords Edition

For Sue

Table of Contents

The Godbox Comes for Kirby Martin

A Little Touch of Cinnamon

The Road from Calvary

Relative Time

The Fall and Rise of Ashley Phoenix

To Each His Dulcinea

Have You Been Saved?

A Head for the Game

The Gift

We’re Hoping for an Ottoman

The Cave

Just Out of Reach

The Godbox Comes for Kirby Martin

Kirby Martin was fourteen years old when he had lost his virginity. No, not lost—traded it. He had tried to trade it in for a sense of direction and purpose: not just to his own life, but to life in total. For that brief moment of orgasm, he thought he had found what he didn’t even know he was looking for. But the moment passed, and as soon as he slid off the girl (who was also fourteen and looking for something quite different than Kirby) he knew what he sought could not be found between a woman’s legs.

When he was twenty, Kirby realized that college was a treadmill. He sat in the front row of all his classes in order not to miss The Moment if and when it came, fully formed, from his professors’ mouths. Three days after his twentieth birthday, in the spring of 2154, Kirby calmly walked out of his sophomore philosophy class and never returned to Sonoma State University.

The woman he had married eight years after leaving college was beautiful, kind, loving—everything a man could hope or dream for in a mate. Allyson had a sheen to her. She loved him without reserve and without qualification, filling his life with color and joy and, finally, a sense of purpose and direction. For the first six years.

Sam had been born when Kirby was thirty-five. The child was not a person as much as he was a last-ditch Maginot line Allyson and Kirby had dug against their encroaching estrangement. Kirby knew the marriage was retreating, but he saw a possibility in his son--the bright eyes of a child might succeed where all else had failed. Sam grew up into a fine young man, and when he was eleven years old, he adored his father. He ate peas the way Kirby did and wanted to grow up to become an insurance man himself.

Kirby loved his son as all daddies do. He disciplined his son and felt the barely concealed pain of guilt when Sam cried at him. He protected him too much, like a good parent often did, but found it in himself to let go when he needed to. And Kirby loved his wife, even if the passion that had blossomed so rapidly upon their meeting had faded. But Allyson and Sam knew that Kirby had not stopped looking for something else. Not another woman, certainly not another son, but something that even the calm love of a family did not provide him. For seventeen years, he had tried to convince himself that he ought to be satisfied—how dare he feel unfulfilled! But the gnawing void overcame his self-deception.

The divorce was friendly, as divorces went, and when he parted ways with Sam and Allyson, she said the most loving and most hurtful thing he had heard in his forty-seven years of life.

I know you loved me once. Thank you for giving me Sam, she said.

And so he kept looking. At fifty he quit his job and wrote a book. It stayed in a drawer for nine years. At fifty-two he sank all his capital into asteroid mining: he bought a one-man mining ship and spent three years in the weightless nether region of spinning nickel and iron. At fifty-five he used some of the money he had earned to buy a new body for himself, perhaps forgetting that he had not been able to find fulfillment even when he had a younger one.

And when he was fifty-nine/twenty-six (depending on how one counted the years—on the age of his body or soul) the Godbox came.

In 2194, the NASA Systemship Clara Barton boosted to within one kilometer of the Godbox’s apparent position. Passive and active scans revealed nothing at all about the black cube’s composition or even its exact location. It was hovering somewhere around one hundred and twelve million kilometers from the sun, based on spectral obstruction calculations taken form tiny, expendable automated probes that had been dispatched when it had first arrived. The cube (if the three-dimensional word applied to such an anomaly) was completely without reflectivity—a hole in space sixteen kilometers across that changed shape as the observer moved around it. Many speculated that it wasn’t a solid object at all. Probes sent to land on its surface came back with no data—not even registering contact at all.

The sixty-seven crewmembers who had been aboard the Clara Barton when it winked out of existence had no way of knowing how swiftly death, if that was what it was, would come for them. The Godbox mocked every investigatory tool the minds on board the ship could devise and finally, in a single action that had stunned the System, had vanished the ten thousand ton cruiser in the space of time between two instants.

For the next eight years, religious panic threatened to tear the System apart. Prophets of every stripe declared the Godbox (no one could remember exactly which sect had first coined the term) the cosmic manifestation of Sin, or Wrath, or Judgment, or some other apocalyptic portent. Attendance at religious services of every kind was up drastically. No one was surprised when a smug atheist statistician looked at the attendance data and discovered that most supplicants had committed faithfully to many different sects at once. Boxing the Exacta won the Pulitzer when it was published that year in the New York Times.

NASA declared off-limits any approach to the Godbox closer than ten kilometers. There had been a few elaborate suicides in the first few years: men and women throwing themselves into the Godbox in ships or even in simple thruster suits only to emerge utterly dead—not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead, an insensitive pop-culture pundit had said on the newsweb. But even the suicides stopped as the novelty of the Godbox began to fade. Eyes gradually turned back down to the ground as years passed and human beings found other diversions. Six years after the Godbox had sent the Clara Barton to oblivion, it was a tired mystery that only a vanishingly small percentage of people cared to solve.

What do you suppose it is, then? Sarah asked, the annoyance in her doppelganger-voice poorly masked by her love for Kirby. She had been force-grown to full maturity just three years ago from a mélange of his nerve, muscle, and organ cells as yet another of his attempts to fill the void that was his life. She looked like he would have looked (sandy hair, a remarkably square face and thick fingers) had he been born a woman. Sarah, like all doppelgangers, had been computer-educated in her three years of life to a semblance of humanity that was all the more grisly because of its near-perfect (but not completely perfect) realism. She knew who she was—a genetic plaything whose entire life had been constructed for him. But she didn’t mind (and that, too, she knew was part of her construction).

Kirby did not answer immediately. He withdrew his face from the eyepiece of the telescope and sighed. The two were sitting outside their home late at night, looking at the sky: Sarah gazing vapidly at the stars, Kirby looking pointedly at nothing. It’s a box, hanging in space, he said.

Sarah snorted. Of course it’s that.

Kirby didn’t answer.

But what does it do? Sarah persisted. "It’s just a void, an big empty…thing."

Yes. It is that, at least. Just like life.

I wonder who sent it, Sarah said distantly.

Maybe no one did, Kirby mused, mostly to himself. He spoke aloud mostly form a sense of obligation to his doppel-wife. Maybe it’s a natural phenomenon. Or maybe we somehow created it ourselves.

You mean like a government conspiracy?

Kirby sighed inwardly. No. I mean…maybe it’s just something that we…called into existence somehow.

Why?

I have no idea. Like you said, it’s just a void. And as he spoke the words, something started in his mind. He felt the beginnings of an idea. It would take many years for the thought to bloom fully in his mind, but he started the process that night.

He would find the answer to his personal void in a greater one.

He had broken off his relationship with Sarah exactly one year ago, having swallowed the guilt at severing the bond between himself and his genetic twin. He knew she had been created specifically for him, but the search was too important to allow her to hold him back. He had spent the year fighting off the urge to reclaim her, like a lost pet, and take her back in. He knew that if he did, he would never again let her go. He could not reject the same person twice, especially when that person had been grown from his body. And he knew that if he did take her back, her life with him would be an exercise in torture as she watched the void slowly, inexorably, eat away at him. He let her go for her sake, or so he told himself and even believed from time to time. Now, he had lost track of her. He hoped she had somehow found someone else.

He had sold his asteroid mining ship twenty-four years ago. No matter—personal Systemships were now quite commonplace and inexpensive. He withdrew a surprisingly small sum from his bank account and purchased a one-man craft from one of the more reputable dealerships. There were no questions asked—such transactions were commonplace. The dealer did not know, nor did he need to know, about Kirby’s plans for the ship. Had he been privy to the knowledge, he might have just smiled indulgently and nodded. The Godbox had been in the System for seventeen years and was no longer even worth discussion.

Kirby took his ship, his seventy-six year old mind and his thirty-three year old body, and shepherded it toward the Godbox.

No System Patrol craft stopped him in his trajectory. No Earth-Venus ferry asked him about his destination. He approached the Godbox almost unnoticed.

There were, of course, those in the System watching the Godbox—there were over ten billion human beings to account for, and no statement concerning the disposition of all of them collectively could possibly be valid. But on the whole, humanity had turned its back on the Godbox, more in indignation than in fear. So Kirby drove his ship, unchallenged, to within a scant hundred meters of the Godbox’s assumed position and simply stared at the blackness. Through his viewplate, he could see stars on the extreme top, bottom, right and left and then only if he bent his body awkwardly to do so. He had approached the Godbox in such a way as to place the sun directly behind the void, eclipsing his little ship for the duration of the journey.

He repeated the question Sarah had asked three years ago but addressed it at the Godbox. What are you?

He got no answer; but then, he wasn’t expecting one. Not like that.

The spacesuit was more comfortable that he had expected. He told the little ship what he intended to do. The computer assured him that it would take care of the ship (and, therefore, of itself) for as long as he required. Then, calmly, without fuss, Kirby stepped away from his ship and thrusted gently toward the Godbox.

At this moment, during his approach, he knew he was asking the Godbox for everything. Not just for answers, but for the reasons behind his quest. What did he seek? He had been searching for so long he had forgotten the question. He only knew that the great void he had felt in his life might have finally met its match in the void he was soon to enter.

Or had he entered it already? Twisting his head in his suit, he could no longer see the starfield around him. He activated the thrusters on one side of his suit and pivoted around. He saw nothing and realized that once the momentary push of his thrusters ceased, he had no way of knowing if he was turning, spinning, or hanging motionless in space. At least the starfield had given him enough of an anchor to know that much. But there was no starfield in any direction.

A sudden chill came over him. He was inside the Godbox.

When and where he had passed through whatever membrane that separated the Godbox from the universe was a mystery he was not likely to solve. His instincts told him he should be able to see stars behind him—his eyes flatly contradicted that instinct.

He shifted uncomfortably inside his suit and felt the friction of its innermost layer against his skin. He listened and heard the sound of his own breathing, then the sound of his own heart. He was still alive, evidently.

Kirby dragged his hand across the faceplate of his helmet until it met the toggle switch that activated the helmet lamp. With only the barest of hesitations, he turned on his helmet lamp to behold the interior of the Godbox.

The helmet’s polarizers couldn’t work fast enough to prevent the near-blinding light that jumped out of the nothingness from dazzling him momentarily. Kirby blinked watery eyes and turned his head away. The inevitable greenish-purple optical illusion slowly faded from his field of vision as his retina healed itself and he squinted into the light.

He saw a gigantic, elongated silver…man. That was the only word to describe the image. It twisted oddly in places and bulged in others, but it was clearly a humanoid. Kirby thought there was something familiar about the man. Kirby reached out a hand to try and touch the figure, and as he did so, the figure raised its own hand in similar, although freakish, imitation.

Kirby let his hand drop and watched the manikin do the same. Precisely the same. It was his reflection. The light he had seen had simply been his own helmet lamp endlessly reflected in the interior of the Godbox.

He spun around using his thrusters and was confronted with his own carnival-mirror image at every turn. The elongation of the image suggested that he was inside a vast sphere, not a cube. The geometry of the Godbox again mocked his human understanding. Kirby could not help wondering if its purpose would be even more incomprehensible.

Kirby fought to keep himself sane inside the funhouse. He remembered his own purpose in coming here and asked, almost angrily, What is all this?

He had expected no answer and was therefore stunned almost beyond his mind’s ability to accept when he heard…felt? an answer.

What is all this?

He had not really heard the answer as much as he had felt it inserted into his brain. There was no voice, no flashing green text in front of him, just the mere repetition of his own question.

Who are you?

Who are you?

Am I alone?

Am I alone?

Somehow, as he felt the words in his mind, he knew he was not hearing an echo of his own question. He was hearing something else…a presence was here, in the Godbox. Kirby asked his next question without sound—he simply thought.

Is there anyone else here?

Is there anyone else here?

The thought came back to him in precisely the same manner as the verbal questions had. He repeated the same questions, asking them out loud and silently, with anger and with mounting frustration, opening the void he had sought to fill to the presence inside the Godbox.

After a timeless period of shouting—he couldn’t say how long, for time and space had ceased to have any meaning for him—he was finally reduced to a wordless longing for answers.

The longing came back to him, wordlessly.

Kirby could feel his mind, his soul, at the breaking point. The dark gibberings of insanity waited just outside his consciousness and yet he could sense he was about to go mad. To have his emptiness echoed with such perfect clarity and depth was almost more than his mind could handle.

The darkness of insanity gathered itself to leap upon him and was just as suddenly banished by activity inside the Godbox. Something was happening to his reflection. The silver-white image was…reaching out. As he watched, Kirby saw a tendrils of light detach themselves from his reflection. They undulated slowly toward him in a manner that had to be purposeful. The tendrils were connected to one another in shifting, almost formless pools of light that themselves mutated and changed as the image came towards him. The light finally detached itself from the curved wall of the Godbox and hovered in space before him.

Kirby stared at the light-creature. There was no way of telling how large it was, or how far away it was. He could only float inside the Godbox and watch as the light-creature extended its tendrils towards him.

For a moment, he felt cold terror paralyzing his bowels. In that moment, he could not think of his suit thrusters, could not entertain the possibility of evasion. And a moment was all the light-creature needed. One of the tendrils snaked out and enveloped his faceplate, plunging Kirby into a world of blinding light.

There was a presence in the Godbox. The Godbox was a vessel for a being or force that sought the same thing Kirby did. Only another mind as empty and as searching as its own could understand, and Kirby Martin was just such a man. The men and women of the Clara Barton and the various suicides had died when the pilot/passenger inside the Godbox had drained them of all their knowledge in the vain hope that somewhere among the knowledge would be the answer it sought. And it had come away from each encounter just as empty as it had been before. Kirby felt the loneliness of