Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  He glanced back. Murph lifted her chin by way of acknowledgement. “There’s that.”

  They fell quiet for a while, with just the creak of the van and the scrape of its wheels and the camels’ feet on the gritty road surface.

  Rhone said, “Do you think they know what they’re doing to us?”

  Barnestable glanced at her. “The Interlopers? You mean like maybe enslaving and sucking the life out of people might be just their way of saying ‘hello’?”

  She shrugged a shoulder. “Or maybe there’s no mind behind it at all. Maybe they’re just things, forces of nature.”

  “Like fire,” said Murph.

  A fire waiting in a room without enough air, Barnestable thought, and suddenly someone opens the door. Whoosh! Only the fire’s cold.

  But who knew what an Interloper really was? All that came through that you could sense was that damned voice and the sudden loss of heat from the victims and all around them. As if the tear in the Veil—in the candidate’s mind—was a drafty open door and all that energy was fleeing through it into a much colder world.

  A memory leapt up in his mind’s eye, the sort that sears into a person’s brain and never fades, of half-frozen bodies, walking dead, staggering out of a factory dorm where an Interloper had come through.

  “No,” he said. “There’s a mind. They know what they’re doing.”

  Murph said, “Does it matter?”

  They found Turtle where Barnestable thought they would, camped out at the abandoned military base inside one of the old barracks shells. His woman’s parents were with him, and the young girl. They all stood as Barnestable and his companions approached. The girl slipped her hand through Turtle’s.

  Barnestable eyed the kid. “She doesn’t look much like you, you know.”

  Turtle smirked lopsidedly. “They don’t build us to breed true, Barnes,” he said.

  “Tinas are dead,” Barnestable said. “Interloper got them.”

  The smirk vanished. “Me being there wouldn’t have changed that.”

  “Go to hell, Turtle,” said Murph, without any particular rancor.

  “We gotta take her in,” said Barnestable.

  Turtle was already shaking his head.

  “You can’t protect her,” said Barnestable.

  “He can’t,” said Rhone quietly. “But I can.”

  She moved over to stand beside Turtle. Barnestable stared in dismay. “Hey, what about you and me, love?”

  Rhone gave a short laugh. “There is no you and me, Barnes.”

  He sighed, def lating. His hand waved randomly. “Yeah, well.”

  Rhone went on, “And I can teach her to protect herself.”

  “She’s born,” Barnestable said. “She can’t protect herself without her nervous system shielded. She’d need to be remade.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Rhone replied. The kid’s grandmother gently pulled her back behind Turtle. Barnestable stared at Rhone, wondering if that was true.

  He looked up at Murph.

  She finished picking her teeth, ran her tongue around them inside closed lips. “So can I kick his ass now?”

  Turtle grunted. “You can try.”

  She showed him a grin a shark would’ve been proud of and glanced at Barnestable. “Well?”

  Barnestable ground his molars as he regarded Turtle, then Rhone, the girl, her grandparents. “How’re you going to hide?”

  “Plenty of runaways out in the desert,” Turtle said. “Born and made. I’ll get work cracking heads or rocks for one of the miners, easy enough.”

  Barnestable nodded. His eyes felt hot, the emotional load of the past day and night rising up. He got a lid on it. “We’ll leave you the van.” He drew in a shaky breath. “Come on, Murph. We got a long walk back. Should be enough time to get our story straight.”

  Murph snorted. “Walk? That wasn’t in the job description.” To Turtle, she said, “One day, big boy.”

  She prodded his buttock with the toe of her boot. “Faster, piggy.”

  Copyright © 2010 Ian McHugh

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  Short Stories

  ASHES ON THE WATER

  Gwendolyn Clare

  Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is in the process of adding another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in the Warrior Wisewoman 3, Abyss and Apex, Flash Fiction Online, and Bull Spec. Gwen can be found online at gwendolynclare.com. In her first story for Asimov’s, we accompany a young woman on her long journey through a future India and watch her strive to keep her promise to spread . . .

  I hoped that Ranjeet’s friends were as disreputable as promised. Ranjeet himself was late, of course. I’d asked him to park his car out on the road and meet me behind the house—my cousin is, shall we say, out of favor, and I couldn’t afford to get caught with him. So I sat on the dry, cracked ground in the shadow of the house, waiting where Father wouldn’t think to look for me. A meter away, heat rose off the sun-baked earth, wavering like water, as if the dormant land dreamed of monsoon season. I shut my eyes against the image. For years now, each summer has come harsher than the last.

  Soft footsteps in the dirt, and Ranjeet strolled around the corner of the house, calling, “You’ll never make it across the border, kid.”

  I stood up and brushed the dust off my jeans, annoyed. Seventeen and he still calls me a kid. “Why don’t you say that a little louder? I don’t think the neighbors could hear you clearly.”

  The closest neighbors live on the other side of a one-hectare vacant field that used to be the mango grove, before the mango trees withered. I used to sit on Father’s shoulders to help with the harvest when I was small. He keeps saying we’re going to replant the grove, but nobody’s all that eager to dig up the dead roots.

  Ranjeet folded his arms and leaned back against the side of the house. “You know it’s true.”

  “Did you get the papers for me or not?”

  He pulled a thick envelope out of the inner pocket of his cream-colored sport coat, but he held on to it, turning it over in his hands. “What are you planning to do, smuggle it in your shoes? You’re going to get caught.”

  I held out my empty palm impatiently. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. This is a family matter, Riti.” He passed the envelope reluctantly. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got this.”

  My fingers itched to open the envelope, but it would be rude to check the quality of the forgery with Ranjeet watching. “You know I have to go. I owe her that much.”

  “She wouldn’t have asked you for this.”

  “She didn’t need to.” I would have given her much more without her asking. I wished I could trade places and let her be the one to live, but I couldn’t. All I had was this one thing left to do.

  The day Priya died, I saved my water ration for washing the body.

  Father did not approve. He said we didn’t have the luxury of adhering to the old customs anymore. He said I was being foolish, hurting myself for the sake of my dead sister. Her soul had moved on, after all. The body was just an empty shell. He said that God had taken her.

  Mother didn’t say anything at all. She went out to sit on the balcony overlooking the almond grove. Hands folded in her lap, she stared into the distance with dry, tired eyes. The youngest of the almond trees were planted when I was seven, and Mother used to sit up there to watch Priya and me watering the saplings through their first difficult summer. I wondered if she thought about that, now. She refused to eat or drink, or even sleep. I think she scared Father.

  That left Grandmother and me to wash Priya and change her clothes. Grandmother’s fingers look as brittle as old sticks, but she held the sponge steadily, patting it against Priya’s cold skin with a serene gentleness. Mine were the hands that shook while I brushed
out my sister’s lustrous dark hair.

  At least her eyes were closed. There had always been something in her eyes— a deep compassion, as if she really saw not just me, but everyone—and I didn’t want to know if it was gone now. Easier to pretend she was asleep, with her eyes closed.

  Grandmother set the sponge aside and gave me a warm, sad smile. “You must be happy for your sister. She has continued on her journey with God.”

  “She went too soon. She wasn’t done yet.” My voice trembled, and I bit the inside of my cheeks to hold onto all the things that wanted to come tumbling out.

  Grandmother paused, lips pursed, then said, “Do you want help braiding her hair?” I suppose she doesn’t have an answer for everything.

  I could feel Priya lingering. Her patient awareness seemed to sit in the corner, silent and unobtrusive yet pricking at my senses like a misfired nerve. Even after the funeral, it felt like she was waiting for us to decide what to do with her. I wondered, from the pinched look on Father’s face or the strain in Mother’s eyes, if perhaps they felt it, too. Maybe moving on to the next life is not an easy task.

  I asked the Water Commission, but they said no. Formal petition denied, bribe taken without recompense, pleading met with scorn. Despite everything Priya had done, they refused to make an exception for her. After my third trip to their off ice in town, I gave up hope of getting legal permission, and went directly to the river itself.

  The chainlink fence stretched for kilometers in each direction, winding alongside the river valley like an endless, diamond-scaled snake. Razor wire topped the fence, so climbing over wasn’t an option. I would need bolt cutters and a security lag long enough to use them.

  I twined my fingers through the chainlink fence to trip the system and checked my watch, testing the lag time before a guard arrived. Beyond the crosshatched steel, I could almost see the water. Nimm trees grew wild in the valley, choking what remained of the river within. The branches harbored hundreds of hard green fruits, waiting patiently for the summer rains to come before they ripened, and curtains of narrow leaf lets blocked my view, but I knew the river was there. You can’t hide a river, not from me. I can feel the water the way a bird feels north. Priya taught me how.

  Boots crunched on gravel behind me, and I checked my watch again: nine minutes. Not nearly enough time to cut a hole in the fence, sneak through, and make it back out again.

  “Miss, this is a restricted area. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” If I’d been a grown man, he might have shot me in the back instead of asking. I suppose I should have felt scared, or grateful, but I didn’t feel anything at all.

  “Sorry,” I lied. “I was just looking.”

  When I went home, I told my family that we couldn’t send Priya’s ashes down the river. That’s when Mother finally cried.

  They talked about keeping the ashes, or maybe scattering them on the wind. That river took our ancestors’ ashes for centuries, until the government tightened the water regulations, and now no one knew what to do. I spoke up when Father suggested we bury the urn; I couldn’t bear the thought of Priya eternally trapped in a jar under the ground, unable to find her way back to the sea.

  Oh, I know they’re just her physical remains, not the soul that made her Priya, but all life comes from water and should go back to it when it’s done. Priya went to university to become an oceanographer. She supported her reverence for the ocean with knowledge, and she dedicated herself to restoring our country’s collapsed marine fisheries. In death, as in life, she belonged to the water.

  I ran my finger down the slick side of the jar that held her remains, thinking. There had to be a way—if not here, than somewhere.

  “Don’t worry, Priya,” I said to the jar. “It’s my turn to take care of you, now.” Priya always did the right thing, the difficult thing, and so would I.

  The border guard tilted my IndPass to make the holograms catch the light. Ranjeet’s guy must have done a good job with the forgery, because the guard nodded and handed it back to me. I gave him a bland smile and opened my duffel bag for inspection. He took out the top jar, popped it open, and checked the contents against the “declared items” list on my customs sheet. Dried figs, as stated. I reminded myself to breathe. I’d buried Priya’s jar beneath several layers of legitimate produce; the guard would get bored long before he found it, so long as I didn’t do anything to make him suspicious.

  He opened another jar, looked at the list, put it back. I made a show of checking my watch. Better to look impatient than nervous.

  He finished with the duffel bag and, while I zipped it up, raked his eyes over my motorcycle and me. He dismissed me with a curt wave of his hand a moment later. I tied the bag down to the luggage rack of the motorcycle, hopped on, and kicked the engine to life.

  Haryana reeked of petrol exhaust. In Punjab, hardly anyone used petroleum-based fuel anymore, but here the pollution clung like a dirty gray veil, dulling the little city of Mandi Dabwali. I stopped to recharge my batteries and had to wait in line for two hours to earn myself a scant thirty minutes at the plug. The electric power infrastructure definitely left something to be desired on this side of the state border.

  I made one more stop to stock up on food and water, then said good riddance to Mandi Dabwali. After all, I hadn’t come to Haryana for the people.

  As the highway passed over the Ghaggar, I got a glimpse of the bone-dry riverbed below. I had expected it to be dry at this time of year, so the sight didn’t disappoint me. I wasn’t interested, anyway. The Ghaggar empties into the Thar Desert. It dries up and disappears, even at the peak of monsoon season; I wanted to find a river that would take her all the way to the ocean.

  I zipped through the towns like a two-wheeled wind, stopping only when my battery charge demanded it. After Hisar, a mid-sized city choked with sweat and petrol fumes, I left the national highway for a dusty, cracked route through Bhiwani district. The highways splay out from Delhi like the arms of a brittle star, and Delhi had nothing to offer me.

  With a sharp afternoon sun at my back, I followed the little-used district route along the northern margin of the desert. A row of sad acacias squatted along the roadside to my right. They’d been assigned the thankless duty of serving as a shelterbelt to keep back the sand. It didn’t work very well. Twice, I needed to slow down and swerve around a dune that had begun to crawl over the pavement. Perhaps this explained why the route was nearly abandoned: all the locals knew the desert would soon consume it.

  Three hours and a few route changes later, I pulled into a small town just west of the Yamuna River. Old nimm trees stood guard here and there around the buildings, heavily cultivated at some point in the past. I took that as a good sign—if the residents had enough water to keep the nimm trees alive, maybe they had river access around here.

  I stopped at the petrol station to recharge the motorcycle, then went across the street to a little dhaba for some food. At the counter, I gave my order to a middle-aged Sikh gentleman who was probably the owner.

  With shrewd eyes, he took in my long, tangled hair and my dust-worn clothes, pegging me for a traveler. He said, “If you’re headed for Delhi, you’re about fifty kilometers too far south.”

  I shrugged ambiguously. “Guess I’m not headed for Delhi, then.”

  He called my order at a harried kitchenhand not much older than myself, took my money, and made change.

  I pocketed the coins and said as casually as I could, “So many nimm trees. You must be very lucky, living so close to the river.”

  The dhaba owner shook his head. “The patrols start back up before the fruit ripens, so the trees are on their own. You know how it is—damned Water Commission.”

  Which meant that the patrols didn’t run all year long. I shook my head, too, pretending to commiserate and hiding my excitement. This could be it.

  My food arrived, and I took the plate of lentils and paratha and turned away to find a spot at the tables. The spicy aroma made my stomach gr
umble impatiently.

  “Hey, kid.” I looked back over my shoulder, and the owner gave me a slight, knowing smile. “Whatever you’re looking for, I hope you find it.”

  We could never lie to each other, Priya and I. The truth always passed between us, even if the words themselves conveyed a falsehood. So when she told me she was feeling better, I knew she meant that she was dying.

  I sat beside the bed, her clammy fingers intertwined with mine, and she told me, “Don’t worry, Riti. It’ll work this time.”

  “Of course it will,” I agreed, by which I meant, I’m not ready. The latest round of antibiotics sat in their white plastic bottle on her nightstand. Mother methodically removed the old prescription bottles after each attempt, as if trying to expunge the failure of modern medicine from the room.

  The latest little white bottle sat alone on the table like a terrified vanguard facing an onslaught of millions. Such a small thing to place my hope on.

  I said, “Do you remember our vacation on the coast, when I lost my sandal?”

  “We were—” She coughed. Wet, body-wracking coughs that had once made me cringe, but I was used to them now. “We were climbing around and you slipped, and it fell down a hole between the rocks.”

  “You slid down to get it so Father wouldn’t yell at me.” I said. “You got soaked. And you almost couldn’t climb out again.”

  Priya laughed, though the air sounded like sandpaper in her throat. “I couldn’t get a foothold with all the algae. I was so scared he’d catch me down there.”

  “You were never scared.” I squeezed her hand.

  It was pure chance that Priya had been home for a visit when the illness hit. A town in the next district over had contaminated drinking rations. She grabbed her test kits, borrowed Father’s car, and rushed out to help. The Water Commission was thrilled to have a scientist on site so quickly; it would have taken a whole day to get someone up from Delhi.

  She traced the contamination to a hospital immediately upriver from the town and saved a lot of lives. But by then, she was already sick.

  When the first prescription didn’t work, I looked it up. The process of researching, designing, testing, and marketing a new antibiotic takes one or two decades. Think about it: that’s pretty much an aeon in the evolutionary history of an organism with a generation time as short as fifteen minutes. Some bacteria even steal antibiotic resistance genes by gobbling up DNA from other bacteria.