Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite

by Gardner R. Dozois

  The young man in the bluejacket was lying still, with one of the women in a silver Lurex jumpsuit kneeling beside him. “Is it all right?” the young man said, and the woman said, “Yes, it is fine,” though when one hundred percent polyester begins to smell like that, all the fabric softener in the world is no use.

  In the camp of the rebels, they are drinking generic beer and eating sandwiches on white bread filled with the pasteurized food product of the cheese. The American has connected a guitar to the portable generator and is singing “Cielito Lindo” and the theme from The Patty Duke Show.

  One of the rebels pulls my sleeve, a very young one in pajamas with a picture of a Japanese robot that sometimes becomes a Buick Electra. “Are you going back to America soon?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, “soon.”

  “Tell them we know they love us, no matter what the media says,” the very young one says. He is so small to know words like “media,” I have no heart to point out that it is a plural noun. “I know they love us in America. I have a picture of the President’s wife.” He shows me the picture, which is autographed, and I nod and agree with him that it is very fine. There is no way that I can tell him that the woman in the picture is Fawn Hall.

  Glitz in the Afternoon

  The mall is a cold place in the middle of the day. Those who have gone into the mall are all in the restaurants eating the burgers and the drinks that fizz, and the wide corridors are empty and the air conditioning makes them very cold then. The people in the stores are cold too, because they all wish they were doing the lunch-break thing. It is then that a man knows whether he has come to the mall to do the hanging-out, or the shopping.

  Even at the cold hour there are many people in the mall. There are the women, and the children, and the skateboard ones, and the old ones with their cheap wine in the bags of paper. The elevator music is very loud and the restrooms are for those with steel in their hearts. It is much like the bazaars of the east except that the children are not for sale.

  There are other men there, but there are never many. Most look straight ahead, thinking only of the thing they have come to buy, and plan a route that leads them on a true line from the trackless seas where their cars are parked to the store where they must buy the thing. Their eyes may be drawn aside by the stores that sell the good lingerie, or by the young ones who wear the high-heeled shoes, as in the videos of the heavy metal, but they do not stop. They order the good lingerie by mail, which a man may have many reasons to do, and they know well about the charge of the messing around with the a little bit too young ones in the spike heels. They go only to the store where the thing they want is, and they buy it and go away.

  That is good and clean and honest. But it is not shopping.

  To shop is to go into the mall alone, carrying only the card and a little cash for food from the places that will not accept the card. A man does not know what he will shop for before he sees it, but when he sees it he will know. It may be in a window or on a table or behind a glass case, but it will call to him. Maybe he has seen it before, in the possession of another at a restaurant where the tablecloth tastes better than the food does, or in the magazine with the pages that fold out of the middle, the pages that fold out suddenly when you are trying to buy it and stick it inside a copy of the National Review. The thing he shops for will smell good and it will please the eye and it will probably be matte black. It will cost like a bastard. Men know this. It is why so few men shop well.

  I went through the mall, watching the young ones play the games of video and shoplifting and the sales ones chasing them and the display ones setting up the Christmas decorations, for it would be October soon. There was a strong smell of bayberry, and the sharp cry that the Styrofoam makes when it is wounded. I went back and forth, past the cards and the cheese and the Benetton of many colors and the good lingerie. I went many times past the good lingerie.

  I knew the thing before I saw it. I turned, already reaching for my card, and there it was, just between the two pillars that make the terrible noise when the sales one forgets to remove the tag. I have seen pillars like that in Egypt. I do not know if their sales ones ever forgot to remove the tag, but the Pharaohs were hard men and it must have been very bad when they forgot.

  I went in. The sales one, who was a young one, said “May I help you?” but she had the look that said she knew she could not help me and the clothes that asked to be helped with and the body that said if I offered to help her with the clothes she would hit me hard in the places that when they are broken do not get strong again soon.

  I moved around the store. You must stalk the thing even though you know it is there. There is a chance that another man. one of those who already knows what he wants, will come in and make the buy before you, and when this happens you must let him do it. This is the difference between those who shop and those who only buy. If you then go back into the parking lot before him and do the small wrench thing to the brakes of his BMW, this is all right, too.

  No one came in. I took the thing, took it to the counter and laid it down. It looked helpless there, as the animal that shows its throat, but men who shop know this is a lie. The truth about the thing only comes when you have thrown away the store receipt and cannot return it anymore.

  “Will that be cash or charge?” the sales one said. I did not speak, but took out my card of platinum and put it on the counter. The sales one shoved it into the machine, and then began what the true shoppers call the moment of truth. Either the machine will make the good beep that means your purchase is approved, or the bad beep that means you have shopped more than a man may shop. Some cannot stand the pressure, and take back the card and throw down the money that folds. In the great stores of the Champs Elysees they call it le card cafard. and it is a worse thing than to wear les soldiers bruns with le smoking.

  The machine made the good beep. The sales one put the bought thing in a shopping bag, a big one with the name of the store on the outside, so that all the other men in the mall would know that I had made my buy.

  It was nearly sunset before I found my car in the big lot. It was not always so, when a man would drive all day in a car with the big fins and the name of a jungle animal. Now the cars have no fins and names like the old ones give to poodles.

  When it was all over and I was home again, I sat before the box. The box was dark and quiet but I could see the numbers on the dial, and it was tuned to the channel of those who sell shoddy things to those who do not go into the mall.

  There must be many reasons why a man will not go into the mall, alone as a man should, with only his card of platinum and the sizes of his women. Yet I have seen the very old ones go in, though they could no longer see or hear because of the neon and the elevator music. And the young one who wrote funny, Jack Kerouac, would have gone into the mall, and when the blue light flashed for a special on motor oil, he would have bought motor oil.

  I sat before the silent box, and cleaned the remote control. It was cool in my hand. I rested my finger on the button.

  PICKMAN’S MODEM

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Pickman 's Modem" was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the February 1992 issue of Asimov’s. Although Watt-Evans was already a well-known novelist, and had sold some short fiction to gaming magazines, he made his first short fiction sale to a mainline science fiction magazine in 1988, with his widely popular Asimov’s story “Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers, ” a story that won our annual Readers' Award, and later went on to win a Hugo Award as well. A frequent contributor since then, Watt-Evans has won the Asimov’s Readers' Award on two other occasions as well, including a win for the year's Best Poem. He has also published widely in markets such as Amazing, Pulphouse, Aboriginal SF, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His many books include the novels The Wizard and the War Machine, Denner’s Wreck, The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, With a Single Spell, Shining Steel, and Nightside City, the anthology Newer York, and a collectio
n of his short fiction, Crosstime Traffic. He lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.

  In the wry but Eldritch story that follows, he warns us of an Indescribable Horror that could even now be traveling over your telephone line. . . .

  * * *

  I hadn’t seen Pickman on-line for some time; I thought he’d given up on the computer nets. You can waste hours every day reading and posting messages, if you aren’t careful, and the damn things are addictive; they can take up your entire life if you aren’t careful. The nets will eat you alive if you let them.

  Some people just go cold turkey when they realize what’s happening, and I thought that was what had happened to Henry Pickman, so I was pleased and surprised when I saw the heading scroll across my monitor screen, stating that the next post had originated from his machine. Henry Pickman was no Einstein or Shakespeare, but his comments were usually entertaining, in an oafish sort of way. I had rather missed them during his absence.

  “From the depths I return and greet you all,” I read. “My sincerest apologies for any inconvenience that my withdrawal might have occasioned.”

  That didn't sound at all like the Henry Pickman I knew; surprised, I read on, through three screens describing, with flawless spelling and mordant wit, the trials and tribulations of the breakdown of his old modem, and the acquisition of a new one. Lack of funds had driven him to desperate measures, but at last, by judicious haggling and trading, he had made himself the proud owner of a rather battered, but functional, second-hand 2400-baud external modem.

  I posted a brief congratulatory reply, and read on.

  When I browsed the message base the next day I found three messages from Pickman, each a small gem of sardonic commentary. I marveled at the improvement in Pickman’s writing—in fact, I wondered whether it was really Henry Pickman at all, and not someone else using his account.

  It was the day after that, the third day, that the flamewar began.

  For those unfamiliar with computer networks, let me explain that in on-line conversation, the normal social restraints on conversation don’t always work; as a result, minor disagreements can flare up into towering great arguments, with thousands of words of invective hurled back and forth along the phone lines. Emotions can run very high indeed. The delay in the system means that often, a retraction or an apology arrives too late to stop the war of words from raging out of control.

  These little debates are known as “flamewars.”

  And Pickman’s introductory message had triggered one. Some reader in Kansas City had taken offense at a supposed slur on the Midwest, and launched a flaming missive in Pickman’s direction.

  By the time I logged on and saw it, Pickman had already replied, some fifty messages or so down the bitstream, and had replied with blistering sarcasm and a vituperative tone quite unlike the rather laid-back Pickman I remembered. His English had improved, but his temper clearly had not.

  I decided to stay out of this particular feud. I merely watched as, day after day. the messages flew back and forth, growing ever more bitter and vile. Pickman’s entries, in particular, were remarkable in their viciousness, and in the incredible imagination displayed in his descriptions of his opponents. I wondered, more than ever, how this person could be little Henry Pickman, he of the sloppy grin and sloppier typing.

  Within four or five days, both sides were accusing the other of deliberate misquotation, and I began to wonder if perhaps something even stranger than a borrowed account might not be happening.

  I decided that drastic action was called for; I would drop in on Henry Pickman in person, uninvited, and talk matters over with him—talk, with our mouths, rather than type. Not at a net party, or a convention, but simply at his home. Accordingly, that Saturday afternoon found me on his doorstep, my finger on the bell.

  “Yeah?” he said, opening the door. “Who is it?” He blinked up at me through thick glasses.

  “Hi, Henry,” I said, “It’s me, George Polushkin—we met at the net party at Schoonercon.”

  “Oh, yeah!” he said, enlightenment dawning visibly on his face.

  “May I come in?” I asked.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a few uncomfortable silences and various mumbled pleasantries, we were both sitting in his living room, open cans of beer at hand, and he asked, “So, why’d you come, George? I mean, I wasn’t, y’know, expecting you.”

  “Well,” I said, “It was good to see you back on the net, Henry ...” I hesitated, unsure how to continue.

  “You're pissed about the flame war, huh?” He grinned apologetically.

  “Well, yes,” I admitted.

  “Me, too,” he said, to my surprise. “I don’t understand what those guys are doing. I mean, they’re lying about me, George, saying I said stuff that I didn’t.”

  “You said that on-line,” I said “But I hadn’t noticed any misquotations.”

  His mouth fell open and he stared at me, goggle-eyed. “But, George,” he said, "Look at it!”

  “I have looked, Henry,” I said. “I didn't see any. They were using quoting software; they’d have to retype it to change what you wrote. Why would anyone bother to do that? Why should they change what you said?”

  “I don't know, George, but they did!" He read the disbelief in my face, and said, “Come on. I'll show you! I logged everything!”

  I followed him to his computer room—a spare bedroom upstairs held a battered IBM PC/AT and an assortment of other equipment, occupying a second-hand desk and several shelves. Print-outs and software manuals were stacked knee-deep on all sides. A black box, red lights glowering ominously from its front panel, was perched atop his monitor screen.

  I stood nearby, peering over his shoulder, as he booted up his computer and loaded a log file into his text editor. Familiar messages appeared on the screen.

  “Look at this,” Henry said, “I got this one yesterday.”

  I had read this note previously; it consisted of a long quoted passage that suggested, in elaborate and revolting detail, unnatural acts that the recipient should perform, with explanations of why, given the recipient’s ancestry and demonstrated proclivities, each was appropriate. The anatomical descriptions were thoroughly stomach-turning, but probably, so far as I could tell, accurate—no obvious impossibilities were involved.

  The amount of fluid seemed a bit excessive, perhaps.

  To this quoted passage, the sender had appended only the comment, “I can’t believe you said that, Pickman.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, I didn 't say that,” Pickman said. “Of course I didn’t!”

  “But I read it...” I began.

  “Not from me, you didn't!”

  I frowned, and pointed out, “That quote has a date on it—I mean, when you supposedly sent it. And it was addressed to Pete Gifford. You didn't send him that message?”

  “I posted a message to him that day, yeah, but it wasn’t anything like that?'

  “Do you have it logged?”

  “Sure.”

  He called up a window showing another file, scrolled through it, and showed me.

  “PETE,” the message read, “WHY DO’NT YUO GO F*CK YUORSELF THREE WAYS ANYWAY.”

  I read that, then looked at the other message, still on the main screen.

  Three ways. One, two, three. In graphic detail.

  I pointed this out.

  “Yeah,” Pickman said, “I guess that’s where they got the idea, but I think it’s pretty disgusting, writing something that gross and then blaming me for it.”

  “You really didn’t write it?” I stared at the screen.

  The message in the window was much more the old Henry Pickman style, but the other, longer one was what I remembered reading on my own machine.

  “Let’s look at some others,” I suggested.

  So we looked.

  We found that very first message, which I had read as beginning, “From the depths I return and greet you all.
My sincerest apologies for any inconvenience that my withdrawal might have occasioned.”

  Pickman’s log showed that he had posted. “Back from the pits—hi, Guys! Sorry I wuz gone, didja miss Me?”

  “Someone,” I said, “has been rewriting every word you’ve sent out since you got your new modem.”

  “That’s silly,” he said. I nodded.

  “Silly,” I said, "But true.”

  “How could anyone do that?” he asked, baffled.

  I shrugged. “Someone is.”

  “Or something.” He eyed the black box atop the monitor speculatively. “Maybe it’s the modem.” he said. “Maybe it’s doing something weird.”

  I looked at the device; it was an oblong of black plastic, featureless save for the two red lights that shone balefully from the front and the small metal plate bolted to one side where incised letters spelled out. “Miskatonic Data Systems, Arkham MA, Serial #RILYEH.”

  “I never heard of Miskatonic Data Systems,” I said. "Is there a customer support number?”

  He shrugged. “I got it second-hand," he said. “No documentation.”

  I considered the modem for several seconds, and had the uneasy feeling it was staring back at me. It was those two red lights, I suppose. There was something seriously strange about that gadget, certainly. It buzzed; modems aren't supposed to buzz. Theories about miniature AIs rambled through the back corridors of my brain; lower down were other theories I tried to ignore, theories about forces far more sinister. The brand name nagged at something, deep in my memory-

  “It probably is the modem that’s causing the trouble,” I said. “Maybe you should get rid of it.”

  “But I can’t afford another one!” he wailed.

  I looked at him, then at the screen, where the two messages still glowed side by side in orange phosphor. I shrugged. “Well, it’s up to you,” I said.