Asimov's SF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Yesterday's news. Who cares? Even though she knew she was flat-out imagining that mean thought, it infuriated her. She turned off the TV and when that wasn't enough bent at considerable risk of falling and found the cord and dangerously jerked it loose from the plug.

  For the next few days and nights, Inez's mind was so muddled and so full she couldn't tell whether she was receiving any thoughts from anyone else. The streak of colored lights was probably a memory of a Christmas, of many Christmases. The travel plans might have once been hers; she'd never been to Italy but for years she'd thought about it, read brochures, taken Beginning Italian at the community college.

  She slept a lot and when she awoke could make no sense of her dreams. She was careful to retrieve the brown bags that Meals on Wheels left on her porch, so nobody would worry about them accumulating, and she ate a little from them. She brought in the mail, changed her clothes at least once, did her best to keep track of when the shopper was due to come back. Right now, of all times, she couldn't risk appearing incompetent and somebody moving in to take charge of her life. She sat on the couch and looked out the picture window, waiting to see what would happen next.

  What happened was that Clarence Eng showed up at her door. The minute she saw him she guessed who he was, because she didn't know anyone else Oriental; talking to him on the phone she hadn't realized he was Oriental, but with a name like Eng and the reference to Yo-Yo Ma, he could hardly have been anything else. And of course he'd be a smart one. Catching herself in that little bit of racism, she tried and failed to chalk it up to a stray thought from someone else's mind. Embarrassment made her awkward when she invited him in, made him some tea, worried that it wouldn't be good enough for an Oriental man who probably knew all about tea, spilled the water but didn't call attention to her clumsiness by wiping it up, just made a mental note of it so as not to slip in it later.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Casey,” said Clarence Eng.

  Trembling, Inez set her cup down. “You believe me, then.”

  He didn't say yes or no, exactly. He said, “We're pretty sure where he is. We know his trajectory, the general area of space, his location within a million miles or so. Many of the readings you gave me make no sense, in terms of what the sensors were programmed for. But what they tell us provides us with enough clues, at least for a theoretical understanding.”

  “What will you do? You'll find him? You'll get him back?”

  “He's too far away, moving too fast.”

  “I don't understand,” she said, although she did understand, her head swam and her heart thudded with the awful understanding.

  He wasn't looking at her. He wasn't drinking his tea, either. There must be something wrong with it. Realizing she was whistling, Inez made herself stop. “There's nothing we can do,” he said at last.

  “But he's still alive.” She gestured vaguely, hands and arms both stiff and shaking. “Out there somewhere.”

  “I know.”

  “There's no hope of rescue, then?” The least she could do, in honor of the Lost Astronaut, was say the terrible words out loud and insist this man acknowledge them.

  He met her gaze. She thought that very brave of him. “No,” he said, and his voice broke. “There is no hope of rescue.”

  “What will happen to him?”

  “He will just keep drifting until the systems shut down or there's some sort of collision.”

  “And then he'll die.”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone.”

  She thought he'd say some platitude about how we all die alone, but to his credit he didn't. “Yes,” he said, and she saw that his cheeks were wet. “Casey must know that. He's no fool. He just wanted us to know what happened to him. He wanted me to know. I thank you.”

  They were silent together for a while. Inez's mind wandered as she imagined the Lost Astronaut wandering through endless space. After a while she thought she'd better bring herself back to earth, which was, after all, where she still lived. Almost coyly, she said to Mr. Eng, “You weren't all that slow to accept what I had to say.”

  “We've seen something like this before.”

  “Really?” She found herself both pleased and disappointed that she might not be the only one after all.

  “There are two hundred or so like you, registered. None, I believe, with your degree of control.”

  She snorted. “I have no control at all.”

  “We could register you, Inez, track your abilities. But I can't honestly recommend it. I've told no one about you. Believe me, I think that's for the best. And I must ask you not to tell anyone else about Casey. If you do, I'll have to deny it.”

  This was so like something out of an old movie that Inez actually laughed. “Lucky for you everybody would just think I'm a senile old woman.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't be. This is a secret I've been keeping all my life.”

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  They didn't have anything more to say to each other. She could see that he didn't know how to take his leave, so she helped him out. “I'm very tired,” she told him, which was true. “I'm afraid I have to rest now.”

  Hours later when she awoke, a stack of mail was on her coffee table, alongside three newspapers in different colored plastic bags. Inez had long since given up trying to get the newspaper people to stop sending her the Sunday papers, but she had managed to get over feeling obligated to read them just because they appeared in her driveway. Whoever had brought them in, along with her mail, must have felt doubly good about doing her the favor, never mind that she'd rather have just let them accumulate out there than have to figure out something to do with them in here. Through the green and blue and orange bags—was there some sort of color code?—she didn't see anything about Casey Liebler, just comics and ads.

  She hardly ever got letters anymore; practically every letter-writer she'd known in her life was dead by now, or had switched to email. So Inez almost missed the small brown envelope with an actual postage stamp instead of a meter mark. There was no return address and she couldn't read the postmark. The ridiculous fantasy flashed through her mind that it was from the Lost Astronaut. But when she opened it she saw that it was, almost as amazingly, from Daniel.

  “Dear Grammy.” None of her other grandchildren called her that.

  Once when I was a little kid Mom said something that I think means you're the only one I can talk to about this. Maybe I didn't understand what she said, or maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but do you sometimes have thoughts that aren't yours? In languages you don't know, or about things you couldn't possibly know about? Because I do, I have for as long as I can remember, and it's driving me crazy. Literally. The other day I got somebody else's suicidal thoughts. I have never been suicidal in my entire life, but I got why it was attractive to whoever it was. And I'm getting drums, with some kind of chanting or calling in some weird language. Middle of the night, middle of class, walking down the street, hanging out with my girlfriend. This sucks. I tried to call you but kept getting a busy signal. Too bad you don't have IM or texting or at least email, or even call waiting. Too bad we can't just read each other's minds when we want to, but I've never been able to do that, have you? Please write back.

  Love, Daniel

  After his signature were his address and phone numbers. Below that was what had to be—she smiled—his email address.

  Stiff and off-balance, she tried to make sense of it. Had Donna known about her peculiarity, then? Who else knew? Was it obvious, like a deformity? Did she act funny without knowing it?

  Then the important details of the letter started to come into focus. Daniel wasn't dead. He hadn't been toying with killing himself. He hadn't been playing the drums, either. She'd evidently been picking up from his mind thoughts he'd picked up from somebody else's mind. On top of everything else, this was just about more than she could take in.

  Then there was the real shocker: Daniel was like her.

 
Rousing herself, she searched a little wildly through bedroom, bathroom, kitchen drawers for paper and a pen, finally settling for a sheet of purple gift wrap she'd smoothed and saved and a not very sharp pencil she found in with the pots and pans. The wrapping paper had a white underside. The pencil tore a little but did make visible marks. Inez lowered herself onto a kitchen chair and pushed aside the bowl of overripe oranges and bananas, ignoring the cloud of fruitflies that went with it.

  She began with “Dear Daniel” at the very top of the page, then moved way down to the bottom and wrote, “I love you, Grammy,” liking the look of it and the sound of it as she said it aloud. Then, whistling, she set about filling in the white space in between with her handwriting made cramped by Parkinson's and blurry by the dull pencil.

  It took her a long time because she wanted to say it right, and because both her concentration and her grip on the pencil kept slipping. Finally, though, she'd filled all the space available to her and done the best she could to tell him what she knew. Carefully folding and smoothing the purple paper, she slid it into an envelope from one of the pieces of junk mail, re-sealed it with Scotch tape, crossed out the address and replaced it with Daniel's, crossed out the used postage and stuck on a stamp from the new book the shopper had bought for her. All this exhausted her, but she was determined to make the trek to the end of the driveway, put the letter in the mailbox and raise the flag before lying down again.

  When she opened the door, Clarence Eng was standing there, carrying a cello case. “Oh,” they said at the same time. “Hello.” Suddenly aware of how unkempt she must look, Inez smoothed her hair.

  “I thought you might like—I wanted to play for you.” Mr. Eng looked shy. “I wanted to play for Casey.”

  It took her a moment, but when she understood what he meant her heart soared and her eyes filled with tears. “Please,” she said, stepping carefully onto the porch, “walk with me to the mailbox. My great-grandson is waiting for this letter. Then we'll have ourselves a concert.”

  He didn't quite know what to do, so Inez took the lead, leaning lightly on his arm and directing him with her own movements around the potholes, newspapers, boxes, lawn chairs, tires. This might well be her last journey outside, and she was glad for the slow pace so she could savor the smell of the sunshine, the squawking of the jay, the bright yellow house across the street that had been gray the last time she'd noticed. For just a moment she thought of telling Mr. Eng that apparently Daniel was just like her, but she decided not to.

  When they got to the top of the driveway he gallantly opened the mailbox for her while she laid Daniel's letter inside, then closed it again. She raised the rusted metal flag.

  By the time they got back to the house Inez was weak and profoundly fatigued. Gentleman that he was, Mr. Eng must have noticed, for he offered to postpone the cello concert until another day. But she could tell how much he wanted to play now, and she understood why the timing was so critical. “No, no,” she protested. “I want to hear the music,” and that was as true as anything she'd ever said or thought.

  She lay on the couch and closed her eyes. Mr. Eng sat in her rocker with his cello between his thighs. There was silence. Then music like liquid chocolate poured into her living room and into her heart. At first she sang along, the melody vaguely familiar. But after a while she just let it be.

  Far away, drifting farther, just at the edge of where she would be able to reach him, the Lost Astronaut was hearing the music, because she was. Inez didn't try to send it to him. She just made herself as open as she could and let it pass through her to him.

  She floated into deep space, too. Soon he would drift beyond her ability to track him. Soon, she thought, she herself would drift beyond her ability to come back.

  “Thank you,” was in her mind, moving with the music, back and forth.

  The music was sweet, and sad, but Inez could not think of it as elegiac, exactly. More, it was resolute, solemn in its understanding. Her face was cold and wet.

  The sound of a single string, played solo within the wash of music, caught her attention. It rose and fell in pitch, singing in concert like prayer. It was a solitary thought, a nerve, a vein, a narrow thread of muscle.

  While the body and the world disintegrated around it, it lingered a moment, then dissolved. Thank you.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Melanie Tem & Steve Rasnic Tem

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  * * *

  Short Story: STILL ON THE ROAD

  by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Geoffrey Landis has traveled back and forth across America, in the process visiting all of the states except Arkansas and one of the Dakotas (he's forgotten which one). While not traveling, he is a physicist who works on designing and flying space missions, including missions to Mars, Venus, and the solar corona. Geoff is on a first-name basis with both of the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. He recently spent a year and a half as the Ronald McNair-NASA Visiting Professor of Astronautics at MIT, where he taught graduate students how to design spacecraft.

  Turns out, you know, that old dharma bum never made it off the wheel of karma. He had too many attachments, to the road, to words; and if you love the things of the world of Mara too much you fall back into the world, like gravity pulling back a rocket that doesn't reach escape velocity. Two, three thousand years later, he's still on the road. Really, nothing's changed. And Neal, that old prankster, Neal never really did want to transcend, he loved to see it all streaming past the window, a constant moving circus disappearing in the rear-view mirror, loved to talk, loved it all.

  So there's this guy needs to get to Arcturus, or really the second planet of that little star kinda behind Arcturus if you look—Arcturus itself is a red giant, no planets—place he wants to go is around a star has a number but no name, there's a lot of them like that. Anyway there's this guy and he's got cash but no ride, and the busses don't stop out that way, and Neal says he'll drive if the guy can pay for fuel, and maybe a meal or two on the road, and cigarettes; he says he knows a girl out somewhere past Arcturus, but he really just wants an excuse to roll, and he and Jack and this other guy get in the vehicle—they're not really cars anymore, got a little more capability, and even this little broken-down junker that Neal boosted somewhere can push on past c, get you from the Big Apple to LA in about a microsecond—they get in this rattletrap vehicle and head on out. And it's a long haul, and for the first two days Neal and Jack just trade off driving—this guy doesn't drive, he mostly sleeps in the back or stares out the window—and they're just grooving on the emptiness, the pure pinpoints of stars and the subtle colors of nebulae, barely visible except from the corner of your eyes, and Neal is talking up a storm, but then in two days they're barely halfway there, and they've really even stopped talking, just doggedly pushing c, Neal bleakly twirling the radio trying to scratch up something other than country and western chanting in some kind of Muphrid binary code, and they have to stop for fuel somewhere, and there's this planet out that way that everybody says is worth seeing. So they stop and pay for a fill up, and then drive like fury out into the outskirts, until they're past all the houses or what passes for houses, here in the armpit of Bootes.

  The air's got oxy here, yeah, but it's also got 2 percent ammonia; nobody's going to roll down a window and get a lungful of fresh air. This landscape's just for watching. Long vistas of shimmery blue, like waterfalls coming down from the sky. But then Neal, that crazy fucker, he does roll a window down a crack, saying, hell, gentlemen, hell if it is poison, we're here. He was always full of mad schemes, tremendously excited about everything he saw, every detail of every moment.... By God, I've got to see what will happen, he said, and we all were choking, and shouting Jesus, Cassady, you're going to kill us all, but Neal, this only inflames him, and now he rolls the window all the way down, and you can't really imagine the stink of it unless you had been there, the way you feel it more than smell it, the way it burns burns burns your eyes nose mouth armpits, and Neal's laug
hing like a hyena and he says, this is living, boys, take a deep breath and choke on it, you can't say this isn't living!

  And after a good long while—all of us choking—he rolled the window back up and Jack grabbed the wheel from him and pushed him away and boosted right out of there, and tears are running down everybody's face even though Neal's cranked the air-flow all the way up, and all the time Neal's laughing and choking and saying that's living boys, you can't say this isn't living, and Jack is saying you asshole, you asshole, and that guy in the back, he's really wondering what the hell he got into, just who these jokers are.

  Yeah, that was me, that guy in the back seat, and I was never so happy as when they dropped me off, and I watched them disappear into the ether, Neal with one arm out the window and talking a blue streak, Jack just cranking his seat back and taking it all in, even if they did end up hitting me up for all the scratch they could talk me out of before they lit the big candle and boosted out for who the hell knows.

  And they're still out there, I'll bet, still bouncing around world to world to world, never staying anywhere three nights in a row, still boosting around somewhere.

  And I have to say, yeah, I guess that really was living. At least, that's what I tell people.

  But if I'm ever stuck for a ride, and Neal and Jack drive past and open the door saying jump on in, next time I hope, I really hope, that I'll pass.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Geoffrey A. Landis

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