| THE LORELEI SIGNAL |
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| Written by Mary Lowd / Artwork by Marge Simon |
| Harvesting Wishes |
Most genies offer three. Where do they get them? The Harvester is an old woman, who wears a four-leafed
clover in her locket and a garland of dandelions on her hair. The locket was a gift from a suitor, many years
before, bought at the Crossroads Station bazaar. The dandelions have to be supplied fresh, daily. So, she
keeps a greenhouse in the aft of her ship. The Harvester tells her genie customers the wishes she harvests
come from the overripe gold flowers gone to fluffy white seed. This, of course, is not true, but the genies love
it.
Occasionally, a particularly sneaky genie will ‘pocket’ a sample of the dandelions, hoping to grow a harvest of
his own. But, the Harvester altered the dandelion DNA long ago, and the flowers will only grow in a soil laced
with her secret mix of protein supplements.
The most ingenious genie the Harvester ever encountered tried to track down the original planetary source of
dandelions. He reasoned it must be a magical world full of happiness, rainbows, and joy. Unfortunately, the
founders of New Earth erased all traces of the original Earth’s location during a nasty legal battle with Earth
IX. Neither planet won exclusive rights to “Paris” or “Rome”. New Earth won the rights to “New York.” The
genie won nothing and skulked his way back to the Harvester to buy a year’s supply of wishes, packaged in
bundles of three.
So, where do the wishes come from? The Harvester disables her shipboard navigation systems every time
she begins the trip. So, in the strictest sense, even she does not know. But she can find her way. At the
bluish star, she taps the thrusters twice. When there’s the triangle of pinkish stars, she hangs a hard right.
Then, right at the edge of the dust cloud, where the icy specks merely tickle the hull of her ship, the Harvester
turns the hyper engines on full. She doesn’t watch the ship clock or count the seconds. When enough time
has passed, the Harvester just knows, and she brings the ship to a full stop.
Outside, the space is clear. Her path brings the Harvester to the nadir of an orbit perpendicular to the plane
of asteroids orbiting her own, secret, deathly silent black hole. An extra second on the hyper drive and her
ship would be too close, but the Harvester never gets it wrong.
From her vantage point, the Harvester scans the rings of asteroids, but she almost always finds what she’s
looking for by the naked eye. So, with her graying tresses mirrored, shadowy in the glass, the Harvester
looks past her reflection and watches the asteroids through the ship windows. Together they circle the black
hole, swirling toward it, until they disappear. Except for one. She’ll spot one, and, then, after watching long
enough, she’ll spot another.
Individual asteroids following their own, bizarre gravitational rules. Ignoring the pull of the black hole.
The Harvester notes these aberrations down, and when she’s found enough of them...She harvests. Inside
each aberrant asteroid, sometimes a canker on its surface and sometimes a heart in its very core, a geode of
hypercrystals resides. The Harvester chips them off or cracks the asteroid wide, freeing the hidden crystals.
The crystals, when she finds them, are coupled to complimentary geodes in complimentary asteroids orbiting
entirely different gravitational wells in entirely different, alternate universes. The asteroids, while reigned by
their geodes, follow these alternate gravity paths, creating their telltale, seemingly illogical orbits. Why so
many there? Mixed into the field of asteroids around that black hole? The Harvester doesn’t know, but a
hyperstar exploded there. Back when the black hole began.
The Harvester breaks the geodes open, shattering the crystalline pattern, and decoupling the hypercrystals.
They sparkle, each tiny crystal feeling and dallying with the pull of hypercrystals in alternate universes fanning
across potentiality.
The rest of the process is easy. A milli-mole of hypercrystal, soldered to a positronic picochip encased in a
language processing micro-computer...The Harvester packages them in hand sewn pouches, made from
Antarian arachnid silicon-silk. In threes, the wishes clack inside their pouches, each tiny computer housed in a
pleasing, cheerfully colored aluminum shell. They look like marbles.
The Harvester discovered her wish farm eons ago. She’d been harboring a genetic errant on her ship. His
crime was old, and he’d hid from it so long, changing his mind and body so many times, that the Harvester felt
he could no longer be held responsible. The azure-skinned, Buddha-bellied alien with the deep laugh who she
knew was hardly the wispy green Aniliidaen who had eaten his own mother anymore. Most of his memories
from that time had been erased by the constant genetic phasing, and she knew he would never dare commit
any crime—other than running—again.
Nonetheless, the errant and his booming laugh, after weeks in the asteroids, drove the Harvester nearly
crazy. She stopped tending her shipboard garden, which came up all weeds in her neglect, and turned to the
out of doors. Out of the ship.
The Harvester floated, peaceful and serene, in her spacesuit. She kept herself tethered to the now loathsome
ship and its unwanted tenant but otherwise bounded lightly from one hanging asteroid to another. As her
suited hand brushed one of the rocky surfaces, a dome of brittle rock crumbled at her touch, revealing the
sparkling hollow of crystals beneath. Thinking the crystals pretty, the Harvester chipped them out of their
cranny in the asteroid, stored them in a pocket of her spacesuit, and brought them back with her.
The rest is history. Or fable, according to the authorities at Crossroads Station, but everyone suspects the
Harvester paid them to play it that way.
While shining the crystals, buffing them with a sonic-razor, the Harvester noticed they looked awfully similar
to the crystalline nodes in an elasti-particle wired compu-chip the errant was fiddling with. He’d been trying to
upgrade her shipboard computers with worse than mixed success. The Harvester asked the errant if she
could have one of the burned out boards and tried wiring one of her shiny new crystals into the place of the
fizzled node. It was delicate, tricky work, and the errant, in his overbearing way, hovered over her. Heckling.
“I wish you’d leave me alone,” she muttered and felt the strangest spark of electrical activity under her
fingers. Then, even stranger, though the errant leaned closer and boomed at her about how she’d fried the
crystal and needed to be more careful, the Harvester felt his presence back away, move across the room, and
leave her alone. Exactly as she’d wished. It was a duality of moment, as if she were living in one universe and
simultaneously hallucinating the reality of another.
But the moment ended, and the errant was still hovering. His pudgy girth bumped her, jostling her arm as the
Harvester inserted a new asteroid crystal. This time she exclaimed, “I wish you’d go away and turn yourself
in!”
The duality happened again. In reality, the errant laughed a deep, jovial, bubbling laugh. But in her
hallucination, he was taken aback. His eyes turned down, and after a moment of serious thought, the errant
said, “You're right. I should pay for my crime.” After a long sigh, “I can never live peacefully with it hanging
over my head...”
But then the duality faded.
The intensity of the experience did not.
“Hell,” the Harvester exclaimed, “I’ve burnt out another crystal.”
When the Harvester finally got the next crystal wired, she was careful not to make any wishes. Unlike the
others, the third crystal didn’t burn out, blackening with fine crack lines. No, it sparkled finely in the
compu-chip, and the Harvester inserted it into the hardware of a palm computer. A smooth, egg-shaped
device with voice recognition and the most powerful actuator chip she could find.
That was the first fully manufactured wish.
Over the years, the Harvester fiddled with the specs until she got them down from egg-sized to marble-sized,
using the weakest actuator chip that could actually couple universes, producing results instead of mere
hallucinations.
She sold them, but she never tried one herself, except to test them. Those wishes were always simple—“I
wish my wilted dandelion was fresh again”—nothing that mattered.
And then her suitor returned. He told her he wanted to buy wishes, and the Harvester told him she didn’t
deal with customers. Only genies.
“I’m a genie,” he said. “Sell me the usual package. That’s three, right?”
“Multiples of three,” she answered, thinking she should get back to her ship and out of the crowded
Crossroads Station bazaar. Unconsciously, she fingered the four leaf clover pendant at her neck.
“One multiple will do.”
“You’re not a genie,” she said. “Your phenotype is exactly the same as it’s always been.”
He refrained from answering cheekily with something like, “You mean I’m still handsome?” But he could see
her eyes measuring him. Liking what she saw. As she always had.
“Besides, you haven’t committed any crimes to run away from,” she added, dropping the pendant suddenly. It
fell back against her throat.
“I’m the old kind of genie,” he said. “You’ve got me trapped in a bottle.”
“You mean a lamp.”
“Let me out,” he said.
“I don’t sell wishes,” she said. “Find a real genie and threaten to turn him in. There’s your wish.”
But her suitor followed her through the bazaar. As she neared her ship, she was skipping, running through
the crowd. Her dandelions fell out of her hair. But her suitor kept her in sight nonetheless.
He gathered the fallen dandelions, one by one, into a droopy bouquet. He stood at the edge of her airlock,
bouquet in hand. It could have been twenty years ago, when he had last pursued her. When she was newly
the Harvester. A young Harvester.
Seeing her suitor there, feeling that loopy sense of time folding back on itself, being reminded of her younger
self...She couldn’t help but let him in. For old time’s sake. For the younger self that was gone, subsumed
inside an older woman.
Another choice. Another life...Surely, there was a universe out there, across the multitudinous massless
masses, where a young Harvester and a young suitor...
No, she would give her suitor no wishes. Nor would she make wishes for him.
The Harvester and the suitor sat together. They drank tea. They talked. It was quiet and the Harvester didn’t
feel she had recaptured her lost youth. Only looked at it from a new angle.
“Give me another chance,” her suitor said. He put his hands out, old and worn. And the Harvester, with only a
slight hesitation, took them.
It was the same universe it had always been. But completely different. And the Harvester wouldn’t have had
it any other way.
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| Celebrating our 5th Year of Publication |
Mary E. Lowd lives in Oregon with her husband, daughter, five cats, and
three dogs. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, and she
released her first novel, Otters In Space: The Search For Cat Havana in
July, 2010. She also updates her lolcats-meets-space-opera webcomic,
SPACE HOUNDS!, twice weekly. For more information and links to more
of her stories visit www.marylowd.com
three dogs. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, and she
released her first novel, Otters In Space: The Search For Cat Havana in
July, 2010. She also updates her lolcats-meets-space-opera webcomic,
SPACE HOUNDS!, twice weekly. For more information and links to more
of her stories visit www.marylowd.com
