Stars that Fall to Earth: And Other Science-Fiction Tales of the Macabre, the Humoresque, and the Human

STARS THAT FALL TO EARTH:

AND OTHER SCIENCE-FICTION TALES

OF THE

MACABRE, THE HUMORESQUE, AND THE HUMAN

JEREMY BALFOUR

TENTH STREET PRESS

THIS EDITION

© Copyright 2014 Jeremy Balfour

Published by Tenth Street Press 2014

Cover design by Tenth Street Press featuring Beauty Trap (cave) by Charles Browning 2011.

ISBN-10: 0-9925529-2-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-9925529-2-3

formatted for Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names and persons mentioned are both real and fictional characters. Any resemblance to actual events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in an literary sense. Any resemblance to other actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

This book is sold on the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold or circulated by any traditional or electronic means or have any original content contained herein reproduced in any form without prior written consent from the copyright holder.

TENTH STREET PRESS Ltd.

MELBOURNE LONDON

www.tenthstreetpress.com

Email: contact@tenthstreetpress.com

CONTENTS

The Descent of the Synaesthete

Whatever Happened to Mickey and Rose?

Quant. Suff.

The Certified Public Accountant

Beyond the Couch

The Caffeine Man

The Android Dilemma

The Holy Mountain

The Stars are Rigged: The Sirius Paradox

Stars that Fall to Earth

Under an Ashen Sky, part one: The Next Day

Part two: The Almond Tree

Part three: Dread at the Coming of Babylon

Part four: The Ineffable Sky

The Descent of the Synaesthete

Vladimer Karpov was six years old, and sat before the television in his parents humble flat in Brooklyn Heights. The television was speaking. What are you doing? it said. Where are you going? But the television was not on.

Mommy, do you know what the television just said?

Not now, dear. Not when I’m cooking dinner. The incident faded into the mist of Vladimer’s childhood memories.

Yet what stayed was Vladimer’s music. His parents had forced him to pick up the violin. This he practiced assiduously, and by the time he was thirteen was fairly proficient.

He stared down at the calculus equations before him, and they made the most beautiful, heavenly music he had ever heard. He listened with an intense rapture, and the violin turned to guitar even as he listened. He chose then to switch his practice to classical guitar, but he would tell no one of this experience. He knew what they would say, but he quickly took this advent into musical notation for later.

He walked out of high school that day, and the wind through the leaves was like an orchestra, the appearance of lampposts was like a wailing horn section, and the sun itself was like a pulsating drumbeat. He turned a corner on his way home and the music ceased. There was merely the humming of car engines and the smell of exhaust. Yet he had his command from on high. He was thirteen years old, lucky number thirteen, yet also the number of death. Little did he know that death would follow luck, and luck could not follow death.

The year was 2026, and the Cold War II between the United States and China was heating up, with flawed rhetoric on both sides leading the Earth down an inevitable path, as words so often determined fate, yet this time with a seeming finality.

Yet with all the intimations of war it was still a long way off. Vladimer stumbled on his bad leg to school every day, limping along with his guitar. His hair was neatly combed and his bow-tie straight. A rose bush asked him What’s in a name? But he was waiting for more music.

Vladimer! the professor at New York University nearly swore, rapping his ruler on the desk. What did I just say? But sound was far away for the seventeen-year-old, there was only dancing color and light, and finally the taste of quinine and the smell of sulphur. He walked out of class early in a trance, with the professor staring. Vladimer was nearly blind, but he could sit in the park and play guitar quietly. Sometimes it sounded like the music of birds, sometimes like the rush of an avalanche, or the staccato of machine-guns. Yet in any event he graduated from his class with honors. No one knew how he came up with answers so quickly. His guitar was his only companion, others were like the distant barking of hound dogs. He lived alone, and let the water drip in the tap for a rhythm, sometimes slow, sometimes quick and hot, but never medium.

The year was 2042, and war was about to break like. The tension of differences had overcome commonalities, and the macabre rhetoric, full of half-truths leading to full lies, had reached its penultimate realization: We don’t condone torture, the head of British Intelligence said on the TV, as barbecues were being lit on the 4th of July. But torture they did practice. Within living memory were many massacres of civilians, and the dropping of napalm on children.

That very year Vladimer Karpov won the Segovia Competition in Andulucia, in a crushing defeat of the much older Japanese grandmaster. Vladimer had strolled onstage quite drunk, the buzz like echoes in caves that made his flesh tingle. Vladimer was suffering from progressive Acute Synaethesia, the crossing of the senses, yet no one guessed this or his drunkenness, they only listened as though to the Rapture, as sounds poured forth like raindrops in pools, like the cascading of waves, like the mournful weeping of a dozen small waterfalls at once. He forgot his guitar backstage, and wandered under stars that tasted like dust and smelled like scorpion venom, and weaved his way finally to a park bench, and sat.

Missiles broke the sound barrier above him, like baritone oboes suddenly dropped on wooden planks. He had remembered one last beer in his pocket. He fumbled slightly, and twisted the cap like the setting of the moon, and drank to his heart’s content. The missiles were sounding like the beating of his own heart, and there, on the bench, he went to sleep. He had not slept for days.

That morning, the park was swarming with army commandos and other assorted military personnel. But as he awoke, all Vladimer Karpov could see were statues blooming giant roses, and a tear came to his eye. He then became overcome with a mysterious disgust, and threw his last bottle to the pavement. It shattered like Gabriel’s very trumpet sounding.

A man with a dark green beret in dark green fatigues stood over him. You there! screamed the man, like a rusty cog. Don’t you know any better? These were the first words Vladimer had heard for days. He rubbed the tears from his eyes, and reached to pluck one giant rose. But the rose was an automatic rifle. You can go, if you can get up and walk away! the major ordered. Vladimer took his giant rose and began tenuously following his previous path back to his hotel, slowly, ever so slowly, like a zombie, he thought. It was no laughing matter. He reached his hotel room and turned the TV and the tap on for music. He could tell by the music, music deep and soulful sweet like the finest dirge, that the world was ending outside.

Love one another, he said, as his hotel was struck by a missile, and Vladimer passed away like a ghost who had barely arrived.

Whatever Happened to Mickey and Rose?

Mickey and Rose walked hand in hand towards The Palladium. In the world of 2026 knife-throwing and hypnosis and other vaudeville acts were again gaining popularity. Mickey kissed Rose on the cheek, and she blushed.

Bobby McDonald was in front of them in line. He never failed to go to the Palladium. He turned around and caught a glimpse of Rose, and stared. He was not very bright, his I.Q. was only 98, but he knew beauty when he saw it, and Rose was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

The crowd poured in for that nights entertainment, two old favorites, the master knife-thrower Gregory Drake and his lovely white-haired albino assistant Astrid, who also worked with the crystal ball. Bobby surreptitiously sat next to Rose and continued to stare, until the lights went down and the curtain went up, and there was Astrid poised against a backdrop, awaiting the knives.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for prodigious acts of daring and accuracy, as our stars tonight, Gregory Drake and his ravishing assistant Astrid shall perform for you a scene to amaze and delight!

The first balanced knife was thrown overhand, and whizzed through the air. The audience gasped collectively as the knife just missed Astrid’s left ear.

Whew! That was close, Layla thought from backstage. He’s losing his touch.

The second knife was thrown from behind the back. It landed right next to Astrid’s right ear.

Not another! thought Layla, pulling back her red hair.

Gregory Drake turned his back on Astrid, and proceeded to throw over his shoulder without looking. The knife parted her hair and drew blood. There was much applause from the audience. Gregory Drake bowed in his coat-tails and exited stage right.

Jesus Christ! Astrid complained bitterly, then put her hand to her mouth for the curse. Did it have to be that close? That was nearly William Tell! Astrid wiped some blood off with a kerchief.

I didn’t sleep well last night, Gregory lied. Really, he was having unusual pain in his side. Astrid had left him to be on stage again for her hypnosis act.

I should see a psychiatrist, Astrid thought. Later she would go to the Chapel of Love for a confessional with Friar Lawrence Dreedle, an eminently trustworthy and stalwart priest to most, but really a very bad gossip. He must, of course, break with the confidentiality of the confessional if a crime was involved. Little did the friar know where the future would lead him.

The show closed for the evening after some light vaudevillian buffoonery. Bobby McDonald, as though in a trance, followed Mickey and Rose up the aisle and out into the nighttime bustle of Times Square, which glared with more neon than ever, a sign of the times.

There’s another woman, Astrid complained through the shutters to Friar Dreedle, and she’s pushy and demanding, and can’t be trusted. Gregory and I were to be married years ago, but he keeps on putting me off. I highly suspect... but there she trailed off.

Another woman? came Friar Dreedle’s query.

I just don’t know. But she can’t be trusted, and I’m having doubts about Gregory. They flirt together.

Perhaps it is just friendship, the good friar suggested. But if you wish: Genesis 3:6: ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.’

Layla is just that type, always meddling and cajoling, said Astrid bitterly. Thank you, friar, and she put a few coins into his box.

Gregory was busy taking morphine. He had shooting pains in his side, and knew his kidneys were failing. Layla burst in on him backstage. What is it, honey? she whined.

Kidney failure, he confessed.

Layla was furious: she had wanted to marry Gregory. She decided then and there to seek a wealthier gentleman, but she took his arm, and guided him out the backstage door. Astrid then crept in from the alleyway, and began planting hidden microphones. She had to have her answer.

I am concealing kidney failure from my fiancée, confided Gregory in the Chapel of Love. She will never forgive me.

The friar was deeply sympathetic. Repeat after me, from Psalm 71: ‘In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust: let me never be put into confusion. Deliver me in thy righteousness...’

I think I’m attracted to another woman, Gregory Drake interrupted. I don’t love her, but there’s a sexual matter between us. Nothing literal so far, though.

Ah, then, the friar replied, that is another matter. You must remain innocent, and pray to God for your impure thoughts.

I haven’t got long to live...

Nevertheless... replied the good friar. If not now, when?

Thank you. Gregory tipped the friar.

Jeremy Careidas was owner of the Palladium. He had been outside in the bushes listening with a boom microphone. So that’s it! he exclaimed to himself. This is the place to be! He entered for the first time for his first confessional. He did have something serious to confess, although, he was an atheist.

Friar, he began, I’ve been a gambler all my adult life, and I’m heavily in debt to the mafia. They want my business.

I will pray for you, my son. You must look elsewhere for your livelihood.

Look, if I don’t pay up, my life is in jeopardy.

‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death... But Jeremy Careidas had exited.

How can I marry Layla now? Jeremy wondered as he walked to the nearest bar. Little did he know that Layla had placed a microphone in the lining of his jacket. She was now doubly infuriated, having worked so long without a potential alimony to capitalize on.

The next night Gregory Drake aimed his knife at Astrid. With a dull thunk it collided with her forehead, and she slumped to the stage, bleeding. The crowd gasped in horror. But Astrid stood up and wiped the fake blood from her brow, her silver eyes twinkling at the ruse. Gregory bowed as usual, and they exited stage right.

The next morning, a stage hand discovered Gregory Drake stone cold dead backstage and many curious onlookers witnessed the Palladium being sealed off as a crime scene. Gregory Drake had received fatal blows to his kidneys.

The friar read about it in the Times. One of my best clients, too, he mused. I must report this to the bishop. I may know something. Client confidentiality was not active if a crime was involved.

Bishop Thomas listened patiently. They’re all your clients? he repeated, to ascertain he knew the facts.

They tell me everything, the friar replied. Well, almost everything. He related what he had heard, so the bishop would know in case of police involvement.

Forty-five minutes later, Rose and Mickey entered Friar Lawrence Dreedle’s private chambers. We want to get married! Mickey blurted out, only to find Friar Dreedle lying on the carpet, a throwing knife in his brow.

Send them in, one by one, Sergeant Somkin said into his intercom wearily. Mickey and Rose entered with Mickey’s family lawyer.

All we have are the fingerprints on the door-knob, the sergeant explained.

They reported the body immediately, the lawyer interrupted. The evidence is purely circumstantial. They had just arrived to be married.

Just don’t leave town, the sergeant warned.

Layla did it! Astrid nearly screamed to the sergeant. Gregory and I were to be married, and she was jealous. Then I told the friar...

A crime of passion, no doubt, said Sergeant Somkin dubiously.

At that very moment, the Martian Lander was rising over the eastern horizon. Commander Lenard Greyson, the only crew member, looked down literally and figuratively on planet Earth. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there The crystals he had sneaked onboard gave off a reverse Doppler Effect, and he landed unnoticed in a grove of cypress in Central Park. Now for a glass of wine, or perhaps champagne.

Layla sat down for the sergeant. And what’s your excuse? Sergeant Somkin queried.

It was Jeremy, she stated somewhat flatly.

And why?

He’s going bankrupt, and he needed the publicity. He has a gambling debt.

And how would you know that?

He told me so, Layla replied.

No doubt. Keep your cell phone on you so we can contact you later.

Jeremy Careidas sank into the chair opposite the sergeant. It must have been Layla, he explained cautiously. She’s hot-tempered, uneven, passionately so, he said for the record, thinking of her flowing red hair. He resisted a look of distraction. She was jealous of Astrid, and Astrid must have told the friar. Astrid might even have known, and revealed the plot.

The bishop didn’t say, put in the sergeant.

Well, look, there may be gaps, and many grey areas, but they were clearly crimes of passion.

The timing is odd. The friar, according to the coroner, died right before Drake. Perhaps Drake did it, and then was murdered for the crime.

Except... Jeremy trailed off.

Except what? queried the sergeant.

Gregory already had kidney failure. Whomever murdered him must have known.

And who would know?

Layla. They flirted a lot. He might have told her anything.

And Astrid? Was she jealous?

Well, they were supposed to get married, but she loved him dearly, and she’s not the type to murder a priest. Jeremy was now hoping to marry Astrid, the way things looked for Layla.

Layla confronted Jeremy Careidas backstage that evening. You’re bankrupt! she yelled at her only available means of potential alimony.

I told no one, he complained.

You told the friar, she stated simply. And you must have told Drake. That’s why they’re dead! she spat.

Astrid floated in. The show must go on. The crowd is waiting for the crystal ball. She strolled boldly onstage, a detective obvious in the first row.

Calumny! she cried, as she peered into the crystal. Schemes against schemes! A woman out for money, and a man out for the same! Then she appeared to faint, and she fell to the stage, and so the curtain descended.

A distinguished grey-haired gentleman in peak physical condition entered backstage. Are you Jeremy Careidas? I’ve been reading a lot about you lately. The Star, the Enquirer...I have a proposition, and he turned pointedly to Layla and Astrid, which needs to be discussed in private.

Do be quick, said Jeremy, it’s been a long day of reporters and detectives.

It’s simple: my Martian rover is over there in Central Park. It’s supplies won’t last forever, but it will get you off of this rock.

I’ve got to marry Astrid, Jeremy complained unwisely. Both Astrid and Layla were listening by microphone, separate yet nearby.

All your money for the lander, Greyson immediately offered. He was desperate, too.

Layla was drinking furiously at the bar next door. Astrid was hailing a taxi for Central Park.

Jeremy decided, like a gambling man, to accept and not hesitate. He abandoned all hopes of marriage as if an unpleasant mirage. He rapidly signed the deed to the Palladium over to the sophisticated astronaut, who he himself recognized from the papers. With equal alacrity he grabbed his cigarette case and wide-brimmed hat and raced out of the Palladium to hail a cab.

Jeremy Careidas jogged as quickly as he could around the lake in Central Park. On a park bench sat Mickey and Rose, and there next to them was Bobby McDonald, like a mesmerized moon-calf. He had followed the young lovers home and trailed them to the park. He was in love with Rose.

I know you two, gushed Jeremy in exhaustion, from the police line-up. A light went off in his head and his eyes flashed. Come with me now, the evidence points to you!

It’s only circumstantial, Rose complained.

People have died for less. Recently, Jeremy pointed out. Come with me, not to lovers lane, but up to the moon! I’ve got a lander waiting!

The two lovers looked at each other, doubtfully, then intently, then joyfully, and got up to join the former millionaire in his haste. Bobby McDonald looked after them uncomprehendingly as they raced off in the direction of the cypress grove. Jeremy pressed the control module into Mickey’s hand, and clapped him on the back. Innocence never dies! he cried in reformation, not needing a priest.

They entered the grove together, and there, waiting, as always waiting, was Astrid. She held three razor-sharp throwing knives in her sweat-free palm.

Then it was you! Rose cried.

Jeremy remembered the last knife he would ever carry, and with one leaping, darting lunge against the onset of Astrid’s three, he lodged his throw deep into her neck.

Rose and Mickey kissed each other on the cheek. The moon is better, Rose comforted. They entered the lander, never to be seen again.

Jeremy watched the lander rise into the sky and pass into some clouds. He certainly could not marry Astrid now, and he certainly would not marry Layla, she was too hot-tempered. Not as hot as Astrid, though, he thought, and he had thought she was cool. He decided it was the better part of wisdom to flee. Perhaps the Bahamas, he mused, counting his last money, and heading to the docks to rent a boat.

Sergeant Somkin sifted through the reports on his desk. Everyone either dead or missing, he mused to himself. Except the Bishop Thomas, he jested almost merrily.

Lenard Greyson sat in the park