Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014

by Penny Publications

  Diviya had bribes. The workers smuggled innumerable tiny nuggets of frozen volatiles to him. This struggle with his soul could not go on.

  And then, he saw it again.

  In the distance, the brief, hot shine of a soul, looking this way. The sleet of radioactive particles stilled his soul.

  Diviya shut his eye, shuttering the emissions of his own soul.

  "Open your eye!" his soul said.

  "You can guess as well as I what that was," Diviya whispered.

  Diviya's soul laughed. "More unionists have been picked up by hive drones," the soul guessed. "The rascals must have spoken of an ensouled committee member dispensing fratricidal treason from a mound in the slums."

  "It is rich that you would call me fratricidal, when I have never hurt another skate, while the hive beats, imprisons, and kills my brothers," Diviya said. "Your disloyalty endangers every skate and princess in the hive. Open your eye." Diviya descended the mound with his eye closed. Tejas was with him, as were Barini and Ugra. They did not have souls and were accustomed to Diviya's silences while he communed with his own. With his eye closed, the world was dark, but loud, filled with the Hero's Voice and the scraping vibration of his own movement. But in this way, he was invisible to the other ensouled skate in the slums. "What are you doing, Diviya?" Tejas asked. "An ensouled skate has been moving at the edge of the slums," Diviya said to Tejas.

  "I have seen him several times today. He is looking for something." "Or someone," Tejas said.

  "I saw only one skate. Perhaps an ambitious tax farmer seeks favor by catching a union leader."

  "Hide!" Tejas said. "We must get you away." "Me?" Diviya said.

  "You're the key to the revolution," Tejas said. His voice was charged, tense. He believed what he was saying. And Diviya felt as he had when he'd first spoken at the rally. Exposed. Undeserving.

  "Tejas, Barini, and Ugra," Diviya said, "lead me closer, so that we can see, but not be seen. You will need to be my eye."

  "What are you doing?" his soul demanded.

  Tejas walked Diviya on a winding, blind way around the tailing mounds.

  The Hero was high in the sky, so none of the mounds cast shadows. Diviya heard the Hero's Voice change tone when they turned. Catching the subtleties in the polarization of the radio waves was a different way of experiencing the Hero, one perhaps more primal, and it calmed Diviya, as much as his new resolve.

  Diviya was built for peace, but the princes, and those who spoke in their name, had taken matters too far for Diviya to stay still.

  They were kin, pressed from the same clays, made to launch princesses and some males into the migration. Their success was his success, in the flat equations of biology, but skates had grown. They were no longer the primitives of the sagas. They reasoned. They were more than their instincts. They had grown past the need for souls to tell them how to treat each other. Souls created and perpetuated divisions in the hive. Princes. Landlords. Workers. But the skates carried their own blame for taking what was given to them, as blindly as Diviya was being led through the slums. The souls had their own interests. Not least Diviya's soul.

  Brother and enemy. Family and opponent.

  Diviya's steel fingers sunk into the thick regolith. Pebbles and larger fragments of iron-nickel and hard, volatile-dry silicates were so numerous and uneven as to be stumbled over, especially blind. The four of them walked and hopped. From a distance, they would just be four soulless workers.

  "He is to our left now," Tejas whispered.

  "Take me onto a mound," Diviya said. Tejas led Diviya scrabbling to the top of the hillock.

  "What are you doing? Open your eye!" his soul said.

  "Is he facing us?" Diviya asked.

  "No," Tejas said. "We are facing north. He is facing west."

  The revolution needed to happen. Working with the souls as they had was no longer possible. Diviya lifted a large chunk of iron-nickel in his fingers. He snapped his eye open and thrust, hurling himself toward the ensouled skate.

  "You are wasting breath!" his soul shrieked. "Stop! Stop!"

  Diviya released the iron-nickel chunk as he flew past, as a hive drone would have. It crashed into the other skate with such force that ceramic chips rattled against Diviya's underside.

  "Murderer," his soul whispered.

  Diviya puffed breath sideways to spin, and then thrust to a stop and landed. He hopped to the ensouled skate. His three fellows were already there.

  Diviya's attack had struck the skate's left leading edge, near the eye. A gaping hole exposed the hot soul beneath.

  "You are beyond redemption," his soul said. "I will not rest until justice is done." "I know," Diviya said.

  Diviya removed medical pliers and a small pry from his gullet. Dust caked them. He had been ensouled to help skates, to mend their minor wounds, to make them well enough to get back to the mines and farms. The hive had taught him anatomy and science for a skill he hadn't practiced in weeks.

  "Do not touch that soul!" his soul said. Both Diviya and his soul could plainly hear the electrical panic of the soul in the fallen skate. "Report this to the hive! No one may touch a soul without the authorization of the princes."

  Diviya reached into the corpse, prying away the bands around the soul. He lifted it gently, leaving the inside of the carcass warm and hollow.

  "No!" his soul said.

  "You must be destroyed, Diviya!" the soul said. "You are the most vile criminal ever fired in the hive."

  Diviya reached into his own gullet with his pliers. Diviya's own soul screamed as he pried it loose and pulled it from his mouth.

  And then, Diviya was a worker again, for the first time in a long time. He had no sensitivity to most of the wavelengths of radiation and energetic particles. The world was quiet and cold. The stars were colorless. The souls before him were gray lumps, hotter than the regolith, but otherwise unremarkable.

  Diviya set his soul in the cold, dry dirt. The temperature stresses crackled in the radio bands. He put the other soul carefully in his mouth and onto the mounting. As Diviya lowered the bands to hold it into place and clipped it tight, the beauty of the spiritual world washed back in. And he was himself.

  The new soul spoke immediately, more timidly than Diviya's soul. "What are you doing?" it whispered.

  "Do not leave me here!" his old soul cried from the cold regolith. "Summon the hive!"

  Diviya took his own soul in his fingers and inserted it into his gullet where its shine would not show.

  "Bury the body," Diviya said to his co-conspirators. "When it is completely frozen, we will take whatever volatiles it may have."

  Diviya launched himself from the surface of the asteroid. It did not take much breath. The microgravity of the asteroid barely pulled the dust back to the surface. As the hive receded, he exhaled again and sailed away from his home and from the Hero.

  His former soul was apoplectic.

  "I might have migrated with you," Diviya said to his soul. "I had even thought of putting you into another worker, for the revolution, for more workers to migrate." Diviya removed the soul from his mouth. "But you are too dangerous, too intransigent, too willing to stamp upon workers with my fingers."

  His soul was incandescent in its anger, fear, and hate. Diviya released it. For a time, they drifted away from the asteroid, traveling the same path. Then Diviya turned back to the Hero and thrust back toward the hive. His soul continued out into the cold of space.

  Present

  Their new hive would need an asteroid in the gravitational stillness behind the Hero's Voice, preferably a slow-turning one, so that they could walk around it, always under the radiance of the pulsar, and one that was freshly cracked by an impact or one whose radioisotopes and volatiles had not been harvested in centuries. There were thousands of asteroids in the archipelago, but not so many that a single, determined shaghāl could not find a hive eventually.

  In some sagas, princes and princesses made a second migration, right after
the first, to escape from shaghāl following too closely. But Diviya and the princess were exhausted. Little breath remained to them and with his cracks, Diviya could never again survive the crush of the Maw.

  Diviya and the princess retracted their sails from time to time to drift silently and listen for the shaghāl. They could not hear him, but he could not be that far. He might already have ended his careening deceleration and be waiting even now in the archipelago of asteroids. Diviya spread his sail, and the Hero's Voice pushed him outward.

  "How much breath do you suppose you have left?" Diviya asked.

  "I did not use all of it."

  Diviya explained his plan as he turned away from the Hero. He disgorged the soul he'd taken from the murdered prince and held it in his shadow. It shrieked. His own soul cried out. The princess' soul made a sound of revulsion. A soul was an ugly thing, a complex, layered brick of radioisotopes, humming with its own heat and shining with hard radiation. That light would draw the shaghāl as soon as Diviya revealed the soul to the asteroid field.

  "This will not work!" the princess said. What Diviya asked was dangerous, perhaps impossible, but it was their only chance. "I do not even have the strength you want!"

  "It is this or nothing, Princess! This is all we have. A strong, fast, hungry shaghāl lurks somewhere in the archipelago. While he is here, no hive is safe."

  They moved farther and farther from the Hero, into an orbit where they would intersect the archipelago of asteroids at its outer edge, far from the best fields. They slowed over hours, risking creating radio reflections with their sails. The shaghāl would be closer to the pulsar, where the voice of the Hero would feed it and drown out their echoes. Every so often, Diviya turned toward the Hero, exposing the second soul. The soul's sharp, multi-rayed brightness would be very visible from far away. Then Diviya would turn back, hiding it again for a while, before exposing it once more.

  Bait.

  Finally, an angry glare answered. The hot harsh light of the shaghāl's soul was much closer to the pulsar. It made for them. Diviya held the second soul visible, letting the shaghāl see their trajectory. Then, he hid the soul from the shaghāl's sight.

  The asteroids neared, including a large, uneven ovoid, pocked with craters.

  The princess took the wires of Diviya's sail in her steel fingers. They passed into the shadow of the asteroid, and out of sight, and Diviya released the second soul. The princess thrust, decelerating them. The soul hurtled onward, screaming. The tremendous deceleration bent Diviya's sail, and stabbed new pain into his underside. Diviya and the princess both groaned, sharing the pain of the unnatural maneuver.

  Her thrust flagged.

  She had almost no breath left and they would soon emerge from the shadow of the asteroid. But the soul was not far enough away.

  "Don't stop!" he said.

  "There is nothing more!"

  "Then turn!" he said. "Into the asteroid!"

  "We'll crash!"

  They still traveled very fast. The regolith might be composed of deep powdered grains or it might hide nuggets and boulders of nickel-iron and hard ices that would shatter their carapaces.

  "You are brave!" Diviya said. "It is the only way, Princess!" She did not turn. He waited. The thrust sputtered. "Please!"

  The wires tightened and swung him as she aimed at the asteroid. They lurched as her breath expired. The regolith, even under microgravity, was frightening at their speed.

  Diviya plunged deep in an explosion of dust, tumbling in the powder and pebbles, before being wrenched to the surface in a jarring, snapping stop.

  He was on his back. His underside hurt. He could not feel his sail. Some of his fingers were bent. He wiggled them and began digging at the dust until he was right side up. A deep channel gouged the asteroid. Dust rose, swirling on its own static.

  The princess had not let go of him. They had plowed the great furrow together before she herself had been driven by their speed into the regolith. She pulled herself free of the dirt. She had filled herself with dust, as had he. His insides. Her insides. Their souls were covered and, for once, silent. They spewed regolith, thickening the rising clouds. "You did it, Princess," he said.

  "You stopped us. You are a hero."

  She spat another gout of dirt from her gullet. Her anger and fear still crackled.

  "Look!" Diviya said. The princess followed the line of his gaze.

  Far in the distance, just a point now, the second soul sped onward, on a trajectory that would take it past the gravitational eddy and back toward the pulsar. From this distance, it looked like a tiny part of a distant migration.

  On a course to intercept it, thrusting hot gas, was another sharp point of radiation: the shaghāl. By the time it realized what it was chasing, the shaghāl would be committed to a trajectory that would take it all the way around the black hole. It would be years before it returned. In that time, the new hive would have risen and matured and launched its own migration into the future.

  * * *

  THE LONG HAPPY DEATH OF OXFORD BROWN

  Jason K. Chapman | 8763 words

  Jason K. Chapman lives in New York City where, as the IT director for Poets & Writers, he gets to indulge his two main interests, computers and literature. Short fiction publications include sales to Cosmos, Clarkesworld, and Bullspec. His second appearance in Asimov's came about when two Simon & Garfunkel tunes collided with a song by Bread at a really bad intersection in the author's brain. He tells us, "The title, of course, is just because I love Philip K. Dick."

  To Oxford Brown, dying was getting to be more annoying every day. He eased himself into the chair across the desk from the young blond woman. The off ice was cramped and shabby, as if someone had hastily thrown a few pieces of furniture into an unused mop closet. He shifted uncomfortably. The chair hadn't been designed to coddle his seventy-three-year old bones.

  "Good morning, Mr. Brown." The woman's smile was smooth and flawless. She must have spent hours practicing it. "I've been assigned as your counselor here at AftrLyf."

  "Like an attorney?" Oxford asked. He didn't care much for attorneys.

  "No, no," she said. "I'm not an attorney."

  A psychiatrist, then. Oxford cared for shrinks even less. "I'm not crazy," he said. "Can I go now?"

  "It's the law, Mr. Brown." The woman seemed to turn up the smug factor on her smile. "As of last month, AftrLyf is required to provide you with a clear explanation of your options."

  "What's to explain?" Oxford asked. "I die. You put my brain in a blender, plug it into the network, and I get to see me wife again. Right?"

  The word "blender" seemed to unsettle her. Good. He was getting tired of her cool, synthetic calm. Oxford prided himself on being able to flap the unflappable.

  "Mr. Brown," she said, "I'm here to make you aware of the alternatives."

  "Alternatives? What alternatives?"

  She folded her hands on the desk in front of her and steepled her fingers. "Are you a religious man, Mr. Brown?"

  If he'd been thirty years younger, he'd have shot to his feet. He settled for leaning forward and frowning. "Heaven? That's your alternative?"

  "AftrLyf is unnatural, Mr. Brown. You should know that it could keep you from reaching the real afterlife."

  "You don't work for the company, do you?"

  "Certainly not, " she said. "I'm with the Interfaith Council on—" "And this isn't mandatory."

  "I told you, the law requires AftrLyf to—"

  "Forget it!" Oxford finally made it to his feet. "My wife is in AftrLyf's system. She has been for three years now, and she'll be there when I arrive. Can you guarantee the same for your— alternative? "

  "As you say, Mr. Brown, your wife is in AftrLyf's system."

  "And God hates competition. I get it." Oxford leaned on the desk, staring down at her. "He sounds like a vindictive bastard."

  She began to tremble and her knuckles turned white. For a moment, Oxford thought she was going to hit him, but instea
d she snatched a clipboard from the edge of the desk and slapped it down between his hands.

  "Sign this," she said. "It states that you've refused counseling."

  Oh, yes. He'd definitely flapped her.

  The night Oxford died, he was sitting quietly in his living room, letting the gloom and the past envelope him. So many evenings he and Emily had spent there, he in his chair, she in hers. They'd read, sipping tea, marking the hours with bookmarks and teaspoons, wrapped in the silence that only two people truly comfortable with each other could share. Theirs had never been a passionate relationship, but it hadn't been unhappy, either. He'd devoted himself to making her happy more than fifty years earlier, ever since that one time in college, when he'd violated her trust completely.

  She'd wanted him to do it, though. He'd always been certain of that. Why else would she have left him alone in her dorm room, with her private journal just sitting there in the half-open nightstand drawer?

  "Had that dream again last night," he'd read. "Sexy! Hands on me. Lips on mine." Embarrassed, he'd almost stopped reading there, but couldn't. "I hate this! It hurts knowing O thinks of me as just another pal in the Pizza and Beer Club. Hurts when we're together. Hurts when we're apart. I'm such a coward! Why can't I just say something? Maybe I just don't deserve to be loved."

  That's when he'd put it back in the drawer, careful to slide the Dickinson collection back on top of it at just the right angle. When she came back, he began watching her more carefully. He studied her the rest of that night as they joined the gang at their favorite off-campus haunt. How could he have missed how sweet her quick, little smile was, or how smoothly she navigated any conversation? By the end of the night, he'd silently vowed to devote his life to making her happy.

  Now, sitting alone in the living room they used to share, he congratulated himself on keeping that vow. He took his nightly pills that AftrLyf had given him and relaxed into the short burst of memory they always caused. The doctors had said something about electrochemical stimulation of myelin production, but Oxford just thought of them as a way to make sure your life flashed before your eyes well before your death. He watched the parade of reminiscences as if it were a slideshow: Emily at graduation, Emily in the backyard garden of the house they really couldn't afford at the time, Emily at the beach house he'd given up grad school for, Emily by the fireplace reading a book of poetry and glowing in the flickering light as if it came from inside her.