At first he thinks that the glitter frogs are catching up with him as he walks, but then he realizes that these are new frogs. More frogs. He can’t see where they’re coming from, but there are more, and more, until the ground is a shifting mass of glittering sparks.
He stops, waits for the others to catch up with him, waits for Tristan to be close so he can grip the other boy’s hand tight in his. They are barely breathing for the anticipation. Karen takes Aaron’s other hand, and J takes Tristan’s. Together, they wonder what the ship will be like, the stars, the swiftly receding earth.
All around them, spread out for miles as dense as carpet, the glitter frogs begin to sing.
DARK HEAVEN
Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. He has published forty-two books, mostly novels.
The body was bloated and puckered. The man looked to be in his thirties maybe, but with the bulging face and goggle eyes it was hard to tell. His pants and shirt were gone so he was down to his skivvies. They were grimy on the mud beach.
That wasn’t unusual at all. Often the Gulf currents pulled the clothes off. Inquisitive fish or sharks came to visit, and indeed there was a chunk out of the left calf and thigh. Someone had come for a snack. Along the chest and belly were long raised red marks, and that was odd. McKenna hadn’t seen anything like that before.
McKenna looked around but the muddy beach and stands of reeds held nothing of interest. As the first homicide detective there it was his case, and they were spread so thin he got no backup beyond a few uniforms. Those were mostly just standing around. The photo/video guy was just finishing with his systematic sweep of the area.
The body didn’t smell. It had been in the salt water at least a day, the medical examiner had said, judging from the swelling. McKenna listened to the drone of the ME’s summary as he circled around the body, his boots scrunching on the beach.
Outside Mobile and the coastal towns, most bodies get found by a game warden or fisherman or by somebody on a beach party who wanders off into the cattails. This one was apparently a wash-up, left by the tide for a cast fisherman to find. A kid had called it in. There was no sign of a boating accident and no record of men missing off a fishing boat; McKenna had checked before leaving his office.
The sallow-faced ME pointed up to a pine limb. “Buzzards get the news first.” There were three up there in the cypress.
“What are those long scars?” McKenna asked, ignoring the buzzards.
“Not a propeller, not knife wounds. Looks swole up.” A shrug. “I dunno for now.”
“Once you get him on the table, let me know.”
The ME was sliding the corpse’s hands into a metal box with a battery pack on the end. He punched in a command and a flash of light lit the hand for an instant.
“What’s that?” McKenna pointed.
The ME grinned up at him as he fitted the left hand in, dropping the right. “I thought the perfessor was up on all the new tech.”
McKenna grimaced. Back at the beginning of his career he had been the first in the department to use the internet very much, when he had just been promoted into the ranks that could wear a suit to work. He read books too, so for years everybody called him the “perfessor.” He never corrected their pronunciation and they never stopped calling him that. So for going on plenty years now he was the “perfessor” because he liked to read and listen to music in the evenings rather than hang out in bars or go fishing. Not that he didn’t like fishing. It gave a body time to think.
The ME took his silence as a mild rebuke and said finally, as the light flashed again, “New gadget, reads fingerprints. Back in the car I connect it and it goes wireless to the FBI database, finds out who this guy is. Maybe.”
McKenna was impressed but decided to stay silent. It was better to be known as a guy who didn’t talk much. It increased the odds that when you did say something, people listened. He turned and asked a uniform, “Who called it in?”
It turned out to be one of the three kids standing by a prowl car. The kid had used a cell phone, of course, and knew nothing more. He and his buddies were just out here looking, he said. For what, he didn’t say.
The ME said, “I’d say we wait for the autopsy before we do more.” He finished up. Homicide got called in on accidental deaths, suicides, even deaths by natural causes, if there was any doubt. “How come you got no partner?” the ME asked.
“He’s on vacation. We’re shorthanded.”
McKenna turned back to the beach for a last look. So the case was a man in his thirties, brown hair cropped close, a moustache, no scars. A tattoo of a dragon adorned the left shoulder. Except for the raised red stripes wrapped around the barrel chest, nothing unusual that McKenna could spot. But those red ridges made it a possible homicide, so here he was.
Anything more? The camera guy took some more shots and some uniforms were searching up and down the muddy beach but they weren’t turning up anything. McKenna started to walk away along the long curve of the narrow beach and then turned back. The ME was already supervising two attendants, the three of them hauling the body onto a carry tarp toward the morgue ambulance. “Was it a floater?” McKenna called.
The ME turned and shouted back, “Not in long enough, I’d say.”
So maybe in the Gulf for a day, tops, McKenna figured as his boots squished through the mud back to his car. Without air in the lungs, bodies sank unless a nylon jacket or shirt held a bubble and kept them on the surface. More often a body went straight down to the sand and mud until bacteria in the gut did its work and the gas gave lift, bringing the dead soul back into sunshine and more decay. But that took days here so this one was fresh. He didn’t have to wait on the ME to tell him that, and except for fingerprints and the teeth that was probably all the physical evidence they would ever get from the poor bastard back there.
The ME caught up to him and said, “He’s real stiff, too, so I’d say he struggled in the water a while.”
McKenna nodded. A drowning guy burns up his stored sugar and the muscles go rigid quickly.
Two uniforms were leaning against his car, picking their teeth, and he answered their nods but said nothing. This far from Mobile McKenna was technically working beyond his legal limits, but nobody stood on procedure this far into the woods. Not on the coast. The body might be from Mississippi or even Louisiana or Florida, given the Gulf currents, so jurisdiction was uncertain, and might never be decided. A body was a body was a body, as an old New Orleans cop had told him once. Gone to rest. It belongs to no one anymore.
People started out in life looking different. But they ended up a lot alike. Except this one had some interesting ridges.
McKenna recalled being called out for bodies that turned out to be parts of long-drowned deer, the hair gone missing from decay. People sometimes mistook big dogs and even cows for people. But he had never seen any body with those long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh on anything. At least those made this case interesting.
He paused in the morning mist that gathered up from the bayou nearby and watched the impromptu funeral cortège escort the body away, prowl cars going first, crunching along the narrow oyster shell road. The kids were staring at the body, the uniforms, eyeing every move.