An Excerpt of

Spiders from Mars

Featured in A Hundred Shattered Stars

2170 WAS NOWHERE. 1970, that was where it was at. Tommy Stardust was born two-hundred years too late. Stretched out in his wrinkled, white satin trousers, tucked into starry platform boots, floating off the cusp of Earth’s outer orbit, Tommy manned the cockpit of what Stevie called the biggest heap of metal in the galaxy.

“Why don’t you get a new rig?” Stevie always pestered him, said she wouldn’t overnight with him until he got a better ship. Truth was, he liked it this way, alone with his old things. Some people wouldn’t know a priceless antique if it was sitting on them. Tommy gazed out at the firmament through the mottled cockpit. The stars understood him. The vast silence, the spaces between civilizations, that was the place he belonged.

His eye caught on a slight rustle under the pizza box he’d had z-linked for dinner.

“Sentient pizza,” he mused, and thought that might make a good title for his second novel; if he ever wrote it. “Yeah, Sentient Pizza…augh!” His hand smacked down on the emerging spider before he could even identify what it was. Now it was a black pulp with yellow innards oozing out on his dashboard. Spiders in space. Was that even possible? Maybe it had come in with the pizza.

“Heh.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s from Mars.” He reached up to his carefully ordered ingots of data, more than 100,000 songs from the only decade in the only millennia that mattered. “B…B…Bowie, yeah, that’s the one.” He slipped the right ingot out and made to insert it in his pristine replica 2130 player. But he missed and accidentally activated his com link, which had been flashing for the better part of a month.

“Tommy?” Stevie’s face appeared on the screen. “Thank God you picked up. There are some guys here. Something about a bordello in Colony 9 and an unpaid bill. I told them, you’re not that kind of guy.”

“Good thinking.” A flush of remembered pleasure rippled through his body. Colony 9 bordellos, now that’s where a man really lived. Green tits and purple love kits, that was the tag line of Martian Kink, his favorite bar. His tab there was substantial. But he always paid, eventually. Brock Fez, bouncer and part-time exotic dancer, should know that. “Tell Brock I always pay,” he said before he remembered who was on the other end of the line.

“You mean…” Stevie’s voice faltered. “You actually went there?”

“Research, honey.” He coughed. “For my novel.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Okay.”

“You settle up for me,” he said.

“I can’t.” She looked miserable now. “I don’t have any money.”

“What does that mean?”

“I spent my last three paychecks on your silver boots. You said you needed them.”

“For the album cover.” He nodded. “My expenses are extensive. You said you were all in, Stevie. All in.”

“Yeah, but I don’t get paid until next week.”

“I think it’s time to consider…” he let the words hang, ominous, “an open relationship.”

“What? No, I won’t—”

“An open relationship with your current job.” He hit the ball home. “You need to work for other people. More than one person. Play the field. See if Vanya will give you some shifts at the cryo-plant.”

Stevie was quiet for a few beats.

“You know I’m taking you with me, when I hit it out of the galaxy with this album.”

She nodded.

“Extra shift,” he said with subtle tenderness before switching off the com.

Stevie was a slender slip of a woman with angelic eyes, blond hair so big it rivaled the supreme being’s, but her voice…Tommy could not string together words to encapsulate the sounds she made on stage. Except that Typhoid Goat Debacle would not be an undue name for her first record. She had the funny idea she was the reincarnation of a singer from that most holy of decades, and Tommy was too polite to tell her that if reincarnation or time travel were possible, he’d already be on stage, he’d be a rock god. Still, in her fawn-colored platform boots and white lace, Stevie caught as many looks as he did. It was a shame about her ports. But he was a gentleman. When he made it big, he’d buy her new ones, glow-in-the-dark sparkle ports.

The call with Stevie had him stressed. Tommy’s groove was ruined; he might as well get it over with. He pressed play on his messages. Thirteen from creditors. Delete. Two from fans. Those was worth following up on. He was polite and punctual with fans. Three from Spacelink, informing him that his card had hit its limit and did he have any way to pay for his intended three- month rotation around Earth? Something about being towed out of orbit if he failed to pay. Another about being shot of out orbit if he didn’t pay immediately. He skipped those. One message from Racine, then another, “Where are my chapters?” yadda yadda, “Where are my goddamn chapters you fucking whore,” yadda yadda. She really needed to relax. He wasn’t even working on his novel. No. First, his debut album. Once that launched, all his financial problems would dissolve. This work was so radical, so pure, so historical it was futuristic.

“I need to relax, man.” He flipped gravity off, let it all float. He drifted out of the captain’s chair, up into the cabin. The pizza box, the Bowie ingot, the spider carcass, everything floating around him. His hookah, perhaps his best friend in the universe, floated by, and Tommy partook. Smoke was technically a fatal liability in most space ships, but his ship was used to it. Tommy exhaled, and watched the smoke twirl in chaotic, weightless ribbons. There was no “up” in space. The smoke wrapped around him. For a minute, he thought he saw smoke outside the cockpit window, a thin veil of it, a scarf of white drifting across the glass. Then the quick flash of a face, dark eyes looking at him. It reminded him of someone, but the name slipped his mind. A spider floated past him, all eight legs wiggling. A string of silver woven in its wake, landed on him and stuck.

Tommy took another inhale of the hookah, and let his mind slip, let his consciousness drift out of his ship, into the quasars and black holes and dark matter of space. He was everywhere. He understood everything. If only he could weave it together, drop it onto the page as words. Maybe Racine would get off his case then.

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A Hundred Shattered Stars