Author's Note: The limerick that begins this story is one I remember from a DC comic. I don't even remember the name of the book but it was a reprint of previous stories and had a giant pink space dragon on the front cover. If you know the one I'm talking about, please let me know lest I get in trouble for being a copy cat rat. If you push the Ptero at the bottom, you may send me a note (and I wish you would)... Thank you.

THE ADVENTURES OF
LIGHTSPEED MARY

Star Light, Star Brighton

By John J Gabarron, IV

"I started that one myself."

"Yeah, Mary. Tell us another one."

"I did! I was doin the Oort Station - Barnard's run. Came outta light too fast, whipped around the Puff Ball and timewarped all the way back. Can you imagine me in Twennieth? Einstein had just layed on with the Way. Someone, Yokel you know, asked me what the hell was with that and I explained. The lights were off so I made up the poem. When the lights came on upstairs, we had a good talk. The horizontal kind.

"Twennieths may notta been smart but this one could lay on with the propulsion! Keep! More beer!'

Nero grinned and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Mary, you're too too. Nobody's ever gone back to Twennieth."

Nero always fell into her trap. Coulda been 'cause he was in love. His friends called him Nero the Hero. That was 'cause he was the only survivor of a freighter crash in the Belt. Back end of the ship hit a 'roid and he wound up in a sled with no brakes. He fell all the way to Earth tryin to make a left turn at Albuquerque. Fact is, he had timewarped fifteen back and his ship was about destroy itself. That is, his ship was on a collision course with the Dock where construction was takin place on the selfsame vessel in Earth orbit. In one of his fits of brilliance, he executed what is now called Nero's Splits. He turned his sled sideways and separated the Warehouse from the Jockey's tank and main engines. The inertia carried the two pieces farther apart and they passed on opposite sides of the Dock.

Unfortunately, the Warehouse fell into the sky and boom! The cargo was lost on re-entry -- primarily because it was a volatile crystalline compound very sensitive to temperature. The tank was collected by Docklaw and impounded. Nero was quickly exonerated, given the Silver Saddle, and returned to his proper era, not necessarily in that order.

Mary was defending herself. "Did so make it back. It was a long warp."

"Whadda you think, Clyde? She go Twennieth?"

"Dunno. Most I ever slid was forty. And that was forward. Godawful ugly buildings we're gonna hafta live with."

"Never been forward," he said, puttin his big hand in my lap.

"You been plenty forward," I said, pushing into his grope. He may have been in love with Mary, but he and I had done our share of horsing around. He rode long and hard too.

"No law says you gotta believe me but the facts stand." She started tickin off points on her fingers. "Name's Bright. I'm a Jockey. I'm a 'she' too ya know --" I snorted and Nero poked me in the bits a little too hard. "-- I fly faster than light. I left in the day and came back the night before. Case closed." She folded her arms across her substantial chest and grinned her toothy, canary-eatin grin.

I didn't care any more. I just wanted to play Buckin-Bronc with Nero. That was when she said: "I found treasure."

"Wha-a-a-at?" Nero and I leaned forward, slackjawed. "Where? When?"

"Who's buyin the beer, boys?"

"Keep!!" we shouted. Then she told us.

Every Space Jockey wants to be in space. Nero and Mary and I almost never left. Mary in particular. She had said once that she never wanted to feel dirt under her heels again. The closest she ever got to sayin why was a cryptogram she laid on Nero once. She said, "Sink your roots and they cut down your tree." That was all.

They called Nero the Hero. They called me Snide Clyde. She was Lightspeed Mary. And she'd been to Twennieth. See, I knew it was true. She brought me a present. She said she was there a week-er-ten tryin to fix her sled. All the while she had to keep herself secret from the Yokels -- that's what we called the natives -- and still get the stuff she needed to fix the fritz. While she was on the hunt one day she found my present. Ain't been any a them for centuries. She got off her Sled -- Twenty-two hours before she left for her run to Barnard's -- and dropped it in my arms. I got dizzy and my knees went out. I ain't never cried in my life except that once and once before. See, my Sled is called Rosebud after my Mom and my sister, may they rest. Mary knew. She knew. And she didn't just bring me a rose. She brought me a rose BUSH. It was alive!

Anyway, I nearly fainted. She helped me pick me up and saw to it I got home. An hour or so later, she called and asked if I was okay and I said, Sure, and she said she wanted me to meet someone and could they come over and I said, Sure. Well, that was Nero. I was gone in love with him in a nano. He stayed with me the entire night and most of the next week, holdin me and talkin to me in short sentences and makin slow, passionate love with me. I owed her big for all this, roses and Nero, all in a day. She made me promise never to tell the truth. That was her recompense. There would be too many questions and she had made a promise to the man who helped her. She gave him a piece of paper with a tiny bit of writing on it and he financed her repairs. His name was Albert.

Mary got her nickname because of some dope copilot on a run from Endor to Andor. Everytime the board would go green to jump, he'd yell at her if she didn't move quick enough: "Light speed, Mary. Light speed, Mary! LIGHT SPEED, MARY!!" He got his nickname from her. Everybody still calls him Fuck-You-Ron.

I loved her -- especially when she wore her rayguns.

So we were back up. We flew in formation -- well, we were all goin the same way anyway. Mary was bein enigmatic, not givin us coordinates. She told us her service would call our service. She also told us that there were always others lookin for treasure and she was pretty sure a baddie knew she knew. She was proctectin us, she said.

I never been one for bein protected. I always figured if I got myself in I could get myself out. I knew Mary could. Except for his occasional flashes,Nero needed every edge he could get. He was loyal and strong and handsome in a big, hairy, bruiser kind of way, but he was short on brains. Well, a little short. He got recompense in other areas though, big recompense.

Anyway, Mary's computer called ours and instead of laying in longs and lats, our boards just went green. Then we sat. I got on the comm at the same time Nero did and we yelled, "LIGHT SPEED, MARY!!"

"Fuck you," she said, and we jumped.

The jump ain't pretty. The stars don't streak by. That's all that Twennieth Scifi bullroar. First, the stars go out. Then everything turns kinda pink with black and yellow streaks. Then you're there. Nobody ever figured that light speed travel would short out the universe. The computer's take the destination and the origin and draw a line between them. That's called the Wave. Certain mathmatics apply -- I'm a Jockey not a Brain -- and the engines match the frequency of the Wave. Bang, you're there. They tried to say it was folding space but it was closer to rippin it. That's why it's so easy to timewarp. If you rip it up or down instead of straight, you wind up havin lunch twenty years away.

When the stars came back, we were in a Little Red system. The classification of star had once been refered to as a red dwarf. Back in Twennieth it became improper to address people by their size or race or religion. The whole deal broke down when people were referred to as "persons of gender" or "people of ethnicity." Some Jockey a long time ago decided it wasn't proper to call dwarf stars dwarfs so they became Little Whites, Reds and Browns. By the way, it was once common to call solar systems "stellar neighborhoods." Down home, ain't it? They became simply 'Hoods.

We aerobraked in the Puff Ball -- all Little Reds have a big gas giant companion, no one knows why -- and eased into orbit around this system's prize: an Earth sized and environmented planet. It was awful old. Most of the landmasses had been eroded into the sea. Our boards went green again and Mary brought us in.

We landed on a broad plateau. The grass was black and there were no trees. The sky was a gruesome red streaked with clouds a thinned out variant of the same color. Near the center of the plateau was a ruin.

No one had ever found a ruin before. Mary flashed her canary-eatin smile at us again. "Motherlode," she whispered.

"Mother of God," Nero said, and dropped to his knees. He bowed his head and put his cap over his heart. I could hear him whispering under his breath.

I just stood there. Lightspeed Mary had just secured a pivotal place in human history. And she had dragged Nero and me along to share the glory. Nero rose and put a big arm around my shoulder and pulled me to him. His eyes were wet with tears. "Never seen nothin beautiful as this. Maybe 'cept you." I looked up at him. He was wearin a face I'd never seen before. Then he kissed me for the first time. He never had before. That was for love, he told me once.

Mary was grinning at us. "The Matchmaker gets a point. Let's go get the goods."

"The goods?"

"Yeah! Look, if you're not gonna listen to all the words then you can just stay home. I didn't bring us all the way here just to look at black grass and a broken down town. I want TREASURE!" She turned and started off across the plain toward the ruin.

Nero looked down at me. The lights were off. "Come on you big ox. We can't let her get all the good stuff."

It took us a lot longer to get there than I thought. It had looked much closer. In fact, it was much, much larger than it looked. There was a tall bank surrounding the jumbled structures, and once we got to the top we saw that the bank surrounded a deep ditch. Around the rim of the ditch, evenly spaced, were tall monoliths arching inward. Then there was a field of broken buildings and in the very center a tall spire of stone and glass.

Mary stood at the top of the bank, hands on hips lookin out over the chaotic landscape. She had a victorious look in her eyes, and a satisfied smile just turning up the corners of her mouth. At first I didn't notice the tears.

"My beautiful boys," she sobbed, "welcome to Brighthenge."

I turned to her, my jaw hanging. "Mary?"

I don't know what I was thinkin, I had never touched her intimately before. My arm just went around her. Not surprisingly, so had Nero's. But she turned to me and said, "This is my rosebush." Nero just looked at me emptily waitin for an explanation. I put my arm around his big neck and pulled him closer until Mary was closed tightly in our embrace.

We stood there for a long time.

We took a quite a while threading our way through the debris field, makin for the spire. When we got there, we found it surrounded by yet another stone circle, these stones, about twice Nero's height, were arched outward. There were three apparent entrances into the spire and a glow from within. I opened my scanner and waved it in front of one of the openings. I whistled. "What the Hell? Nero! Mary! Have a peek at this."

Nero looked over my shoulder. "That's a gravity wave."

"Yup."

"Big one," Mary said. "Way, way big."

"Yup."

"So why ain't we standin on it instead of here?" Nero asked. Mary turned back to the spire.

"Dunno."

"I do." Mary pointed into the entry. "Treasure! Come on boys." She walked through the entryway with Nero hot on her heels. The wave was way too big. It should have been a star. "Clyde! You gotta see this!"

I put the scanner away and ran after. Mary and Nero were standin on opposite sides of what appeared to be an altar in a vast room with a mile high ceiling. In the center of the altar was a cone of ceramic topped with threecurved fingers. There was somethin perched on the tips of the fingers but I just couldn't see it. "I can't see it. What is it?"

"Scan it."

"Aw, Mary, I just put the darn thing away. Why do you always wait--"

"SCAN IT, SCAN IT, SCAN IT!"

"Geez, no sense a humor." I watched the little lights roll up and down the face of the scanner. "Big gravity wave. Nothin else."

"Pinpoint scan."

"That WAS a pinpoint scan. Except for gravity, there's nothin there."

"Oh yes there is!" She reached out and -- just as she got her hand near it, her fingers seemed to extend as though they were bein sucked into it. Then her hand vanished altogether.

"MARY!" Nero shrieked and lept toward her.

She calmly put her hand up, the one we could see, that is. He stopped. She made a tossing gesture with the invisible hand and it came back in view until she made like to catch. "I got a riddle, Clyde. What has a gravity wave big as e Eridani and is invisible?"

"Uh."

"Good guess. Nero?"

Nero grinned. He put one enormous paw to his chin and toussled my hair with the other. "Hole!" he exclaimed and grinned even bigger at me.

"I think it's a Hole in a bottle, gents. And I think it'll make me rich!"

"I think, rather, it shall make me rich." We turned to face an enormous man, even by Nero's standard, pointing a very mean lookin raygun at us. "Hand it over, Mary." He strode boldly over, thrust his open hand at her, and put the point of the raygun under my chin. Nero made this terrifying sound in his throat. Mary dropped the nothing into the guy's hand, which promply vanished.

That was when the walls began to move.

It sounded kind of like metal boots on cobblestones and when we looked we saw three red orbs in an inverted triangle between each of the three entryways. They were twelve or fifteen feet above the ground. Then they started to come toward us. The new guy jerked the gun out from under my jaw, scratchin me, and started to fire at the approaching orbs. They came at us faster.

Then we could see them. Huge stone Golems with three eyes in big, squarish heads, enormously muscled torsos, movin on sinuous snaky tentacles, with huge arms ending in three shiny, scimitar-like talons converged on our adversary. He squeaked, threw the treasure at one of them and ran for the exit.

We didn't see it of course, but we heard it hit the lead Golem. It made a sound like a glass gong, and when it hit the ground, it rang again. The Golem bent and retreived it and went to place it back on the pedestal when it suddenly stopped. It turned and looked down on Nero, then lowered itself so that it could look directly into his eyes. Nero didn't move, but his eyes darted fearfully about, first to me, then Mary, then me -- then the Golem.

He looked shocked, then smiled. The Golem made a sound like ripping paper and Nero laughed out loud.

The Golem tilted its head like one might do when smilin at someone who means a great deal to them. The others did the same. Then the monster dropped the treasure into Nero's hand, put its enormous talons to the side of his head, and retreated back to the wall.

Mary and I were in utter awe. I walked over to the wall when I had finished starin at Nero and found no trace of their existence. None. I walked back.

"First things first," I said to Mary. "You let that bastard point a raygun at me and I AM NOT HAPPY! WHO the HELL is HE?!"

Mary sighed and looked a bit remorseful and a lot disgusted. "His name's Bartholomew Ligeti. He's my ex -- my ex-husband, my ex-partner, my ex-pilot --"

"Pilot?!"

"Well, who do ya think taught me to fly?"

I shook my head. "Must be good," I said.

"The best."

"We gonna see him again?"

"Probably."

"Shit." I rubbed my eyes and turned to Nero. "Well, lover, what the Hell was that?"

"They heard me prayin."

"What?"

"They heard me prayin."

"I heard that. What does it mean?"

Nero doesn't do it very often but -- he looked at me like I was an idiot. He ennunciated very carefully and spoke very loudly: "It means, they heard me pray-in-guh." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then he continued: "When we first got here, it looked like the place where god lives and so I asked to be forgiven if I was trespassing, but, hey god, you don't get to Heaven every day so I'm gonna look around, okay? And so, when they got the Orb back from Barty --"

"He hates to be called that --"

"Sh," I hissed.

"-- so when they got it back and were gonna put it away, well, I was wonderin if they were angels, because they looked a little like what I thought angels would look like except they didn't have wings. Anyway, they heard me and asked me why I thought they were angels and I told them because I thought they were beautiful and because they protected us because that's what angels are supposed to do. Well, they told me they thought I was beautiful too and I just had to laugh because if felt so nice to hear an angel say that. So, they told me to keep the Orb, no one else just me, and if I ever needed them they would be there.

"Mary, I got Guardian Angels!"

"I guess so." She looked broken hearted.

"Oh! Oh! They said to give you somethin. Where is it? Where is it?" He fumbled around the edge of the altar. We heard a click and he pulled open a drawer. There was a metal scroll tube inside. Nero popped off the cap and removed the document. "I can read it, just like they said!" He cleared his throat.

"This dim star. This dark world. It's dark brother giant. These things to the inheritor Bright. This gift do we give."

Nero showed her the document. At the top were three circles, a sun and two planets perhaps -- or perhaps, rather, the eyes of Guardian Angels. Forming a circle below that was a braid of roses in bloom. In the center of the circle of roses was a tree.

Mary smiled a teary smile of victory and embraced Nero and me.

Mary filed her claim at the Governor's Claim Office on her birthday. She christened the star Brighton, after a city with pebbly beaches to which she had never been but had always liked the name of.

The system was known forever after as the Little Red Brighton 'Hood.

The End.

Minneapolis, Minnesota
September 30, 1995

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