Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  We had special breakfast: rashers of bacon and individual omelets. It was because today was Pitch Day.

  Aline said, “As you may have guessed, this is a very special day. You four have been chosen on the basis of staying power, and although some of you think production is the main issue here, you might as well know that there's a lot more to writing a book than writing it.” Aline Armantout, first-ever Strickfield winner and international bestseller, loved this! She went on with that convicted winner's fuck-you glow.

  “There's more to publishing your book than just getting published.” I would swear she went: a-hem. “Starting with the pitch. Futures hang on promotion. Who makes it and who doesn't.”

  Then she scared me. “You aren't just selling a book. Who wants a book? There are billions of them out there begging for people's time. They don't need your book.”

  I looked at Roger. We were both freaking. OMG, OMG, OMG!

  “You're selling yourselves. Today, we work on the pitch.”

  She flashed a savage smile. “Now, you need to pound protein. Caffeinate, add lots of sugar. Dextrose for energy, darlings. Sparkle! If you put on writing clothes, go put on something classy. Not you, Roger, that craggy look will help you sell, sell, sell.”

  “Think marketing. Think saturation. Think sales.” Then she said the scariest thing since Miss Nedobity sobbed out her story last night, including the Or Else. “Your futures depend on it.”

  Interesting, they downloaded web components for us to work on, for judging only. Aline said, “Understand, you won't see your postings uploaded, you have to win. Only the winner's postings go up on the web.” Then on the way into the next meeting, she grabbed my elbow so tight that I squeaked and she whispered. The words came into my ear in splinters, like truth squeezed through a cheese grater:"Understand, the winner will be sworn to secrecy, under pain of—you don't want to know." But she only told me, so, wow, wow!

  I aced them all, including photo upload and necessary links, OMG I'm posting a new eyecatcher that, the minute they decide I'm the winner, goes up on my blog! Besides, I've had FB, MySpace, Friendster pages since I was ten, so when I win, Cormac McCarthy and Junot Diaz and all my other invisible friends will be the first to know; before I came to Strickfield and lost my connection I texted a gazillion people daily and I'd tweeted squatrillion tweets that got re-re-tweeted around the world, and if I need to give lap dances on Second Life to sell me as a writer, Aline has my demo, although maintaining my Internet presence may cut into work time once I'm famous, and the rest?

  I scored at dinnertime schmoozing, wardrobe less so, but if I sell anything that will change, unless they expect me to steal to stay gorgeous, which I am totally prepared to do. Personal interview: I used the pitch that got me into Strickfield, although I haven't exactly written the novel: Score! Video presentation: Score. So I'm sitting here in the Confessional after a long day on no sleep saying okay, guys, so far so good, and I'd like to thank you all for . . .

  Okay, I did what I had to, to make it this far.

  Bottom line. I ratted out Alvin and Serena at dinner. Alvin left screaming, but tonight it's boiled down to Roger and me.

  * * * *

  Only two of us left, and if Roger won't concede so we can be together, I'll . . . Eeek, is this really me? Promotion means a lot more in this world than I thought when I wrote my very first story in first grade, and the world is bigger and a harder place for artists like me than I thought. When I won grad school prizes for Creative Writing I thought my dreams had come true. Then I got into Strickfield and I thought I had it made!

  Yeah, right. After Pitch Day I know. It doesn't matter how good you are, it's how you sell it. The world is a harsh, judgmental place. If I can't make it here, I won't make it anywhere.

  I love making words do what I say, and I love making things up, but if I have to win this to get them out there, then fine. Whatever it takes.

  * * * *

  Dear Davy, Turn back. I mean it. There are some things you have to do alone.

  Writers try to tell the truth, but some things are too terrible to tell. Fiction expresses what we know, but are reluctant to admit. Sooner or later the things too terrible to talk about, things we're ashamed of and all the things that frighten us transform themselves, and surface in our work.

  * * * *

  You can't be here!

  * * * *

  Barking dogs split the night. Sirens. Flashing strobe lights, proscriptions in place and threats carried out exactly as warned, inscribed, memorized and forgotten, along with the crumpled green RULES sheet. Ivy LaMont, nearing the top of the Hartfield colony shortlist, is BANG: awake without knowing what woke her or what brings her to her feet in a single bound. She finds herself teetering in front of the bedroom window. Blinking, she leans out into the glare, afraid of what she will see.

  She hears a tortured roar. Billy! Her boyfriend Billy is on the near wall of the enclosure, he came all this long way to rescue her. He really loves her; he does! Now he is suspended, halfway in, halfway out, caught on the razor wire, with the great jaws of the leaping Dobermans clashing all too close to his hands yet in extremis as he is, Billy isn't yelling for help. He's calling her name.

  "Ivy!"

  Oh, Billy, not now.

  The boy Ivy loves and left behind has come this long, hard way to get her back. He's risked everything to rescue her, signifying that this is true love. Ivy LaMont, methodically climbing the Hartfield colony shortlist, is up against it now.

  "Ivy!"

  What she says and does now determines whether she stays or goes and where she should be running downstairs and out into the garden to beg them to call off the dogs and save the boy she thought she loved. If she does, she loses. Miss Trefethen will keep the promise she made to the devil that keeps Hal Harter alive and for so many years, has kept the colony at Hartfield safe. She will feed Ivy, this year's last remaining loser, to what's left of her huge, mangled lover, the greedy, raging Thing in The Lake.

  Poleaxed, Ivy thinks:

  The Outside Event is nothing like I thought. It comes out of nowhere and it is, as it turns out, specific to me.

  Not for the first time, she has to make a decision. If Ivy, who began colony life without guessing how much it would demand of her, pushes through to win the title, and she will or die in the attempt, she'll make such decisions tonight and again and again every day for the rest of her working life.

  Copyright © 2011 by Kit Reed

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: THE MUSIC OF WEREWOLVES

  by Bruce Boston

  * * * *

  * * * *

  is a wrenching heavy metal refrain

  framed by the crescendo and

  decrescendo of screeching chords

  —

  as each incarnation transpires

  with the rising of the moon

  and is reversed in its falling.

  —

  The music of werewolves

  is rife with a raucous chorus

  of howls and blasphemies,

  —

  a scherzo of wilding violins

  and pounding kettle drums

  in a thunderous blood beat.

  —

  It is burning-full-moon music,

  rich in claw and fang and drool

  and the rampaging hunt,

  —

  a savage onslaught in which

  all of your rage can be released

  and your basest hunger sated.

  —

  Yet when silence returns,

  you can never remember

  a single note.

  —Bruce Boston

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: THE PASTRY CHEF, THE NANOTECHNOLOGIST, THE AEROBICS INSTRUCTOR, AND THE PLUMBER

  by Eugene Mirabelli

  A few months ago, Eugene Mirabelli was delighted to learn that he had been given a vodka toast on his e
ightieth birthday by a group of SF writers who were gathered around the editor of Esli—the distinguished Russian science fiction magazine. Gene's latest novel, Renato, The Painter, will be out soon from McPherson & Co., publishers. In addition to his fiction, the author writes journalistic pieces on society, politics, and culture for an “alternative newsweekly.” For some years he presided over the website Critical Pages, and recently resurrected it as a place to post his grumpy articles on economics. In his second story for Asimov's, Gene charms us with this tale of an unlikely quartet.

  1

  One Monday morning Samantha discovered that when the kitchen faucet was running it made strange new sounds. “Wow, the kitchen faucet sounds different,” she told Cy. “Listen.”

  He paused and listened. “It sounds all right to me,” he said. He resumed briskly buttering his toast.

  She turned off the water. “It didn't used to make those sounds,” she said, puzzled. Samantha had been renting the little flat for two years.

  “It sounds the same as always,” Cy said. He had moved in with her a month ago. “Sounds just like water coming out of an old faucet—burble, burble, burble.” He raised his empty coffee cup in the air to show it needed filling.

  “But there's another sound inside that sound,” Samantha said. She brought the coffee to the table, filled their cups, then went to the sink and turned on the water again. “Can you hear the other sounds sort of under it or inside it?”

  Cy squinted at the faucet and listened intently for a moment, then shook his head no. “Maybe you're just hearing things,” he suggested.

  Samantha turned off the water, sat at the table, and sipped her coffee a while. “It's Italian,” she declared, setting down her cup, smiling.

  “You bought Italian coffee?”

  “The sounds in the water. It sounds like somebody speaking Italian. What a relief!”

  Cy put down his cup and looked across the table at her. “You speak Italian?”

  “No. But my father always wanted me to learn. He spoke beautiful Italian.”

  “Then how do you know the faucet is speaking Italian?”

  “Because it sounds like Italian. You don't have to speak Italian to know what it sounds like.”

  “And you think it's speaking Italian.”

  “Yes. Exactly. Isn't that amazing!” she said, clearly surprised and delighted.

  Cy studied her a moment. Since moving in with Samantha he had grown acquainted with her odd disconnects—like, right now her hair clip had flipped open and was hanging in a tangle of hair, but she didn't even notice it —and her even odder connects, like her belief that the plants on the windowsill grew better because she talked to them. Now she was taking a jumble of liquid sounds to be the syllables of a language she didn't understand.

  “We can get it fixed,” he told her. “Call a plumber.” He stood up, tossed his car keys deftly from one hand to the other. “But I've got to go. Call a plumber.”

  “No, no,” Samantha said hurriedly. “I don't mind it or anything.”

  “But if you keep hearing it,” he said, heading down the hall to get his coat.

  “It doesn't bother me,” she said, trailing after him. “And you don't hear it. Why don't we just leave it alone?”

  Cy had climbed into his goose-down parka and was already pulling on his gloves. “All right,” he said, brushing her cheek with a kiss as he went out the door.

  * * * *

  2

  Cy and Samantha first met at the reception party given by the Nature & Technology Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Samantha was standing by the coffee table in a white dress that she had made herself, which may explain why it looked somewhat crooked, and Cy was drawn to her as to a crookedly hung picture that needed to be straightened up. He introduced himself by saying, “I'm in nanotechnology.” Samantha waited for him to finish, but when he didn't add anything more, she began to say, “That must be very interest—”

  Before she could finish, Cy smiled and told her, “Your earrings don't match.”

  Samantha lifted a hand, tentatively touched one earring, then the other. “Oh. You're right,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

  “Can I get you some wine?” Cy asked.

  She smiled as if the offer surprised her. “Oh, that's so kind of you. But no.”

  Cy clapped his hand flat on his chest, saying, “Cyrus Kleiner. Cy, for short.”

  “And I'm Samantha Giardino.” She smiled.

  “That's a pretty name, Sam.”

  Samantha got as far as, “Actually, I prefer to be called—” But by then Cy was saying, “What's your line?”

  “My line?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Like me, I'm in nanotech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And you? You are?”

  “Oh!” She laughed. “I'm the pastry chef at the Café Mondello.”

  “Really?” He was surprised. “Oh. Well. That's perfectly allright. That's nothing to be ashamed of. But how come you're at this conference? It's for scientists, not for sweet things.” He smiled, meaning that she herself was a sweet thing.

  “We were hired. The Café Mondello caters parties like this.” Her bra strap slipped from her shoulder and she tucked it back into place. “That sometimes happens,” she said apologetically. “Sorry. Tell me about your no-no-technology.”

  “No-no technology?” He laughed and thought she was pretty. “A nanometer is a billionth of a meter and nanotech is all about controlling really small but important things, like molecules and atoms.”

  Cy told her a lot about nanotechnology, not everything and not right there at the conference, but later that evening over dinner at the Gandhi. While they were eating their vegetable curry he told her about his PhD dissertation on water and chlorophyll and the harvesting of light—"Harvesting light,” Samantha echoed. “That's so cool."—and about his post-doctoral success at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley where he was on the team that worked on nanotech membranes for the desalinization of water, and just this week he had come from California to Massachusetts to join this MIT project on nanotech water purification, his area being hydro-turbulence and laminar flow. Over a dessert of kulfi he informed her that in a few years people were going to run out of fresh water, because there wasn't enough on the planet— “Oh, that's not so cool,” Samantha murmured—so it was essential to find ways to desalinate and purify water, which was why his project was so important.

  Samantha hesitated to tell Cy about pastry, for fear it would bore him and, besides, making pastry wasn't very important. But while they were sipping the sweet milky Indian coffee she did talk a bit about her brother and his wife and their new baby, how they had moved to Connecticut where she visited them on weekends. And outside, before they parted, she told him about her best friend who had been her apartmentmate till she got married this past June and moved to Arizona. Samantha was afraid she sounded lonely—in fact, she was lonely—but she was relieved to see that Cy hadn't noticed at all.

  * * * *

  3

  Now, Cy liked Samantha, maybe not as intensely as he had a month ago, but he still liked her. His girlfriend back in California had been a forensic accountant, a woman who could pluck a thirty dollar fraud from a three million dollar budget, a woman most difficult to live with. As Cy would tell you himself, Samantha was easy to live with. And though he was discreet and would never tell you this, he had discovered she was very easy in bed—wonderfully, luxuriously easy. But, as he had also discovered, the same easygoing, laid-back acceptance of everything meant she forgot tidiness and kept a messy kitchen. He was trying to correct that, but it was hard. The battered old sink always held a few pots, pans, and bowls, or an assortment of choppers, beaters, strainers, and spoons, or maybe some dishes, spatulas, and bottles. These things would stay there even when sparkling clean until she got around to putting them away.

  But she loved to cook and she was good at it. He had seen her roll out pastry dough, roll it out thin as a wafer, then paint it with butter,
fold it, roll it out and paint it with butter again, fold it again, roll it out again—sweating over it for an hour at least. Then, having shut this buttery concoction in the oven, she'd not use the timer but, relying on instinct, she'd flip open the oven door, take the now translucent leafy golden shell and transmute it to a delicacy filled with creams or comfits and topped by powdered sugar, all of which she'd then eat, adding back to herself the few ounces she'd subtracted by rolling out the dough. Still, she had a splendid body. Or, to be precise, she would have if she shed a dozen pounds, or even just ten—yes, a mere ten.

  The MIT motto is Mens Sana In Corpore Sano, a sound mind in a sound body, and Cy liked it. He figured that if Samantha could be led to discipline her body, she'd discipline her mind at the same time. Now this morning she had said she heard running water speaking Italian as it came out of the faucet, and if she wasn't crazy—his California girlfriend was crazy, but not Samantha—then she certainly needed to exercise her thinking and firm up her mind. So when he got to the lab that morning he opened a phone book, went searching for gyms, and found a place near the Café Mondello called Hard Buns Aerobics. Cy enrolled Samantha in an aerobics class that met five days a week.

  * * * *

  4

  Monday was the only day of the week that the Café Mondello was closed, so, after Cy sped off to MIT that morning, Samantha was able to leisurely wash the breakfast dishes, all the while listening to those new sounds the water made as it poured into the sink. She felt unreasonably happy. If you paid no attention you heard only the usual garbled burbling water, but if you focused and listened carefully you could hear an unhurried stream of words. She couldn't understand the words but, as she could have told Cy, you don't have to understand a language to know you're hearing words. She shut the faucet slowly and gently, feeling it would be rude to turn it off abruptly. In the bathroom she turned on the washbowl faucet—first the cold water tap, then the hot, then both at once. She listened attentively each time, but heard only the familiar sounds of rushing water, and when she flushed the toilet she heard nothing out of the ordinary there, either.