Asimov's SF, January 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It isn't as if I could offer her a hot cup of tea before she goes.

  I catch a fish and this time cook it for myself. There are still hot coals in the fire ring so it's easy to start it again. I haven't had cooked trout since I got here. It's delicious but I feel ungrateful and disloyal for all the wild has done for me.

  I catch up with her when she's almost to the cliff. She's been climbing slowly, looking for money along the way. Her face is dirty and tear-streaked. I'll bet she's thirsty now.

  She says, “I found a packet of hundreds, and a couple of single bills, but that's all.”

  I say I'll help.

  “You owe me thirty or forty thousand dollars.”

  I can't help but laugh again. “Good luck,” I say. “But I will help.”

  She stops to rest and I go off looking for more money. I find three more packs. Not without taking risks. I keep wondering, is a pack of hundred dollar bills worth a bad fall?

  I come back for her to help her up the last steep cliff. At the top, she gets her pack, puts in what we found, and starts counting, while I climb down the other side to see what I can find over there. The loose bills are as if alive, waiting till I'm almost up to them and then blowing away, but I do get some.

  It's late and I'm hungry. She must be even more so, what with rushing off with no breakfast.

  She keeps saying, “This won't do,” and, “It was hardly worth it.”

  I'm still angry that she brought nothing but money, but I'm trying to be nice. “Come on, we'll go down and eat.”

  I didn't want to yearn for anything of that old life but now I do in spite of myself. Mostly for the foods. Is the rental car still on that side road waiting? But then I'm thinking: If I could bring down a deer.... Then use the skin for a carrying case. But I wanted the freedom of not doing all those things. I wanted to be naked. I wanted to be an animal.

  “Can we stay down there again tonight?”

  She's meek now. I suppose she's beginning to realize where she's landed. And it sounds as if she looks up to me, but that's because I'm the only person she can rely on for help. Or is it because I'm risking my neck climbing around looking for the money?

  “We'll stay down there all day tomorrow. We'll make a basket and bring up fish, and maybe find a way to carry water.” I don't dare say, Let's use your money bag for carrying fish.

  What am I doing? I don't even know her name and I'm not sure I want to.

  Even though I've been out here hardly a month ... (I'm guessing. I haven't kept track. And, actually, I want to be done with time.) ... I've gotten used to being alone. I was happy with my view and my four note flute. I particularly don't want somebody around who stole money and is hiding out with maybe police following her. Maybe I should just go find another mountain top that isn't afloat in hundred dollar bills. But, “Come on,” I say. “You must be hungry.”

  We round the cliff to the scary ledge. I grab the back of her pants again but I don't look this time. Still, I feel her bare skin. I feel her warmth.

  On the way down I see a few more single bills but I don't mention them. I don't know if she sees them, too, but she doesn't say anything either.

  We get back to the clearing by the stream. We sit and rest there a few minutes. The jay is squawking. The stream is bubbling along. She says, “It's nice here.”

  I'm thinking, Damn right, and it was even better before you came.

  Then we get to work.

  She knows enough to pick willow branches along the stream. I give up and do the fishing and fire-making. I have a little rat-like creature caught in one of my traps—still alive. I don't want her to see it until it's skinned and cut up.

  This time we both eat cooked fish and tiny scraps of tough meat. There's extra but how hide it from other hungry creatures? I don't know what the Indians did. I decide to bury it with stones on top of it.

  But I'm changing and I don't like it. Am I looking at my view and playing my flute?

  With her around I need different things. I know where there's obsidian, I could make myself some knives. Maybe make some arrowheads. I could begin civilization over again from the bottom. Reinvent a hut, an animal-proof storehouse, a bow, find clay.... But I don't want any of those.

  When we sit down to rest, she hands me a hat. She's woven it in the same way as the basket, but with the leaves left on. A wide, green leafy hat. She's proud of herself. I can see that as she gives it to me. She wants to be thanked. I put it on, but I don't really want it. I don't like what's happening. I came here to live as part of the forest.

  On the other hand this hat does look to be part of the forest. It's like wearing a bush. But I'm too angry to thank her.

  “So what do you need all this money for?”

  She turns away. I think she's starting to cry again.

  “And why bring it way out here to a mountain top? Are you expecting to stay until people forget about you? How did you expect to live?”

  No answer. Of course no answer.

  “Why here? Why my mountain? And it would have been nice if you'd brought just one little thing I could use. Just one thing.”

  She's still turned away.

  “Without me you'd already be dead.”

  She whispers, “I know.”

  “If you want a car to get away in, I've got one.”

  Is it still there? Could I find the keys? I tossed them in the roadside bushes first thing in my joy at being away from it and people, and everything civilized. Especially people like she is.

  “This isn't what I wanted to do, spend all my days helping you. You're the one owes me. At least an answer.”

  I slap my hand on the ground so hard I hurt myself. “Answer!”

  And she does.

  “It was just sitting there. I picked it up. I thought it should have been guarded and they deserved to lose it. And then I was thinking: It belongs to the people not the bank. I wasn't going to use it all for me.”

  “That's not true.”

  It probably is, but I'm feeling contrary.

  “I've never done anything like this before.”

  “Maybe.”

  That's most likely true, too.

  “That first night in the woods I walked all night. I mean I ran. I must have fallen down a hundred times. I never knew it could be so dark. I was scared. I didn't know what it was like way out here.”

  “You took it for yourself.”

  “But I thought they'd catch me right away, so first I bought myself this purse.”

  She holds up that useless little red purse. She's kept it hanging on her shoulder all this time even as she slept.

  “It's a Gucci. I thought maybe they'd think it was mine from before I took the money and would let me keep it. And when they still didn't catch me, I went to eat in a fancy French restaurant. Stuff I'd never had before. Snails and champagne. I thought they'd pick me up any minute. I wanted to get in one really good meal first. They couldn't take that away. But hours went by and when they didn't come I started thinking I could get away with it, so I bought the car.”

  “You left a car?”

  “A red convertible. But I was driving too fast. It went off the road on one of those hairpin curves. I couldn't believe I wasn't hurt. I don't think they'll find it for a while though. It's kind of hidden. I got these shoes, too, but look, they're ruined.”

  I flop back, squashing my new hat I'm sure, and look up into the trees.

  “What do you have in that little purse anyway?”

  “Money. But if I'd known I was going to end up here, I'd have bought myself some boots. I'd have brought you things, too. I'm sorry I didn't. I really, really am.” Then she gets all dreamy. “I was going to take my mother out for a French meal, too. I wanted her to have snails. Though I suppose she wouldn't even taste them. I was going to get her a new car. It wasn't all just for me.”

  I'm thinking of snails and of me eating slugs.

  She says, “I wonder if they found the car. I wonder if they even know the m
oney's gone. They were so careless. They deserve not to have it.”

  I'm still looking straight up the tree trunk. Not how you usually see a tree. Very nice. And I'm dreamy, too. I wish she'd keep quiet. This is all exactly what I ran away from.

  I want to ask her, how long is she going to stay and why right here with me? If they're not chasing her why doesn't she go back to where she can have the kind of life she obviously likes? Where little red purses are.... But then I wonder if it holds water? Not much, though.

  I get up. I need to get away and think. Or maybe play my flute and not think.

  My feet aren't yet ready to go barefoot, but I take off my shoes anyway, on principle, though I don't know what principle, and walk away. I hope she has enough sense not to come after me. I shed my clothes. That'll keep her away. I find a sheltered spot and sit alone and eat ants for a while. One at a time.

  I stay away all night. I miss my mountain top, but I don't go there in case she does. Though I don't know how she'd manage crossing that ledge by herself. Maybe she'll go around to the far side and crawl up the rocks as she did when she first came.

  For bugs I cover myself with mud. In the morning I eat roots. I eat raw minnows that I chase into the shallows. Then I make two new flutes, a big one and a little one. Four holes in each. After playing them for a while, I hide them in the crotch of a tree. I'm wonderfully calmed down. Living as I do is soothing.

  In the afternoon I head for my mountain. I leave the mud plastered all over me. First I check on our resting place by the stream. But she's gone. There's the hat she made me. I put in on but I leave my shoes there though my feet are in bad shape. Again, it's the principle of the thing. I don't know why.

  Mud and big hat like a bush, scraggly beard, naked, bloody feet, limping, lurching ... I'm enough to scare anybody. Especially a person already scared.

  I don't mean to. I'm thinking about my poor feet ... of my soft sandy bed under the overhang. I'm hoping she won't be there. Though where else would she feel safe at night all by herself ?

  She screams. Throws up her hands. Then off she goes, backward, over the steep side.

  * * * *

  The camping season begins. The place is full of hikers, though not so many this far out. No one comes to my mountain. It's not an important peak and there's no decent path to the top. Nobody likes climbing up unstable piles of shoebox-sized stones.

  My feet are hardened by now. I can even leap up the rocks. All I wear is a leafy hat and a little red leather purse across my shoulders. (In it there are hundred dollar bills.) Otherwise I'm dressed in mud. I smell of ferns. I have a flute in the notch of dozens of trees. Some sound high and squeaky and some are low and mysterious—scary in the middle of the night. I see people come out of their tents on moonless nights to listen and wonder.

  I could have stolen knives or canteens and ordinary food dozens of times. All summer long, I could live off the campers, but I don't. I don't want anything they have. I'm finished with all that. I do the opposite. I leave hundred dollar bills. I put them in shoes or in a pocket of their packs. If they've left their hats handy, I stuff one or two into their hat bands.

  When I lean to drink, as an animal would, I see myself, shaggy and plastered with mud. I look at my reflection and I see exactly who I am.

  Copyright © 2010 Carol Emshwiller

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  * * *

  Poetry: LOUISA DRIFTING

  by Mark Rich

  * * * *

  * * * *

  How can I regard your efforts as sincere

  drifting as you are the other way

  strangely vectoring

  from our breakapart event?

  "No, Louisa,” you say

  on suit-to-suit,

  "look at me spinning uncontrollably

  beyond that whisper of gravitation

  we called our ship,

  another victim of the same

  unavoidable accident."

  No, Charles, I say back to you:

  I recognize the erratic wobble

  of your form

  growing small though it is,

  barely lit by sunglare

  around this moonlet. I know your walk,

  your talk, your deviations

  from our norm. Now your distance

  has greater physical manifestation:

  an increasing void-distance

  satisfying at least in promising ending—

  your retorting complaints at last

  growing faint and broken

  with the static

  of past acts. Around the other side

  our expended shells may meet again

  in another as you say

  unavoidable

  accident

  and your heart will not quiver then

  either.

  —Mark Rich

  Copyright © 2010 Mark Rich

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  * * *

  Novelette: THE JEKYLL ISLAND HORROR

  by Allen M. Steele

  Allen Steele's first published story, “Live from the Mars Hotel,” appeared in our Mid-December 1989 issue. A regular contributor ever since, he's had two Hugo winners in Asimov's—"The Death of Captain Future” (October 1995) and “'...Where Angels Fear to Tread'” (October/November 1997). Coyote Horizon is Allen's most recent novel; coming soon is Coyote Destiny, the final volume of the Coyote series (Coyote and Coyote Rising, first appeared in our pages as a long-running series). The author still lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and dogs. He tells us that his latest tale is a true story. Only the facts have been changed.

  Foreword

  The following story is not my own but someone else's, one that was passed to me under unusual circumstances.

  In March 2008, my wife and I drove to Jeykll Island, Georgia, to attend my niece's wedding. One of the “Golden Isles” on the Atlantic Coast just north of the Florida state line, it's also—among other things—a wildlife sanctuary. My niece is an avid birdwatcher, so she'd been there many times, and for that reason she'd decided to be married in this place. I was looking forward to a family reunion and also a break from the last days of a hard New England winter, but anticipated nothing else.

  Because the bridegroom wanted to have a traditional Jewish wedding, the ceremony was scheduled to begin at sundown Saturday evening. That gave my wife and me plenty of time to wander around. I'd visited Jekyll Island several years earlier, when I was a guest author at a science fiction convention held at one of the island's seaside resort hotels, and thus was already familiar with the place and its history. Linda had never been there before, though, so we spent the morning exploring the historic district on the mainland side, where the State of Georgia had preserved the “cottages"—small mansions, really—built at the turn of the last century by the millionaires who'd once claimed the island as their winter retreat.

  These second homes lay inside a fenced-in compound that surrounded the sprawling manse of the Jekyll Island Club. In its heyday, the Jeykll Island Club had been one of the most exclusive in America, its roster limited to one hundred members and including such notables as John Pierpoint Morgan, William Rockefeller, Marshall Field, Joseph Pulitzer, William Vanderbilt, and Cyrus McCormick, Jr. Their cottages, usually echoing the Victorian architecture of the clubhouse but sometimes also modeled after Swiss chateaux and Spanish haciendas, line the white gravel footpaths that wind through the surrounding pine groves. The club had its own indoor and outdoor tennis courts, swimming pool, eighteen-hole golf course, and other luxuries, and the compound's isolation was assured by the lack of permanent residences elsewhere on the island. Most of Jekyll Island was uninhabited when it had been the preserve of the wealthy and powerful, and because the first bridge to the mainland wasn't built until the mid-twentieth century, the only way to get there was aboard a small private steamer from Brunswick, where the winter residents would arrive by train at the beginning of the season.

  After
walking around the compound for a while, Linda and I paid a visit to the island's only bookstore, located in what had once been the club's private infirmary. As usual, I checked to see if any of my novels were there, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of them on the shelves. Since I'm in the habit of signing my books when I'm on the road, I took them to the front counter, where I introduced myself to the proprietor.

  This turned out to be a gentleman in his late sixties, George Hess. He was only too happy to let a visiting author autograph his books, and as I did so, Mr. Hess and I got to talking. He told me that he'd been born and raised on the island, and that his late father—who'd also written a few SF stories himself, during the pulp era—had once been the valet of a New York magazine publisher who'd joined the Jekyll Island Club in the early 1930s. His father remained on Jekyll Island after the club closed down during World War II, where he married a former servant who'd once worked at the club.

  Our conversation then took an interesting turn. Mr. Hess asked if I thought there was intelligent life beyond Earth. As a science fiction writer, this is a question I've heard more times than I like to remember; suppressing a sigh, I responded that, yes, I considered this to be a very strong possibility, and indeed would be surprised if there were no other races inhabiting our galaxy. But when he asked if I thought aliens had ever visited Earth, I shook my head. No, I replied, I rather doubt that; UFOs are little more than modern myths, if not outright hoaxes, and theories of so-called “ancient astronauts” are usually misinterpretations of legends and archeological artifacts. In any case, there is no indisputable proof that extraterrestrials have been to our world, now or in the past.

  Mr. Hess politely heard me out, but I couldn't help but notice his wry smile. What sort of evidence would you need to make you change your mind? he asked. It would have to be pretty strong, I said. Stronger than anything I've seen so far, at least.

  By then, Linda had returned to the counter with a biography she'd heard about. While I bought it for her, we briefly discussed where to have lunch. Mr. Hess recommended the Jekyll Island Club; now a resort hotel, its restaurant was open to the public, and he said that we'd probably enjoy the menu. Linda and I decided that this would be our next stop, so we left the bookstore and walked across the compound to the hotel, where we got a table on its courtyard terrace.