Asimov's SF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Crispin yawned.

  "Leave me alone,” she shrieked. “Leave me.” People began to crowd around her, but she couldn't tell which of them were living and which were dead.

  As she trots toward Howell Junior High, Lisa decides to take the long way home. For some reason, Crispin closes the gap between them until he is only a few steps behind. Lisa still thinks of him as Crispin, rather than Brice. She has accepted that there is no way she can know for sure that he was the boy in the other car. Lisa skirts the perimeter of the soccer field and dodges behind the six rows of bleachers that face the football field and the new track oval. When she rounds the bleachers at the forty-yard line, she spots her mother doing a slow lap. This is only the second time Lisa has seen her. The first time she had just caught a glimpse of her mother from across the Squamscott River.

  Her mother is wearing the faded blue jersey with USA in red letters that she had worn in the Rome Olympics. She was always so proud to have been an Olympian, even though she'd finished dead last in her preliminary heat in the 200 meters. Her favorite story while she was alive was how in that very same heat, the great Wilma Rudolph kicked her way into the finals and a world record. “Wilma was running so hard, I was lucky she didn't lap me.” She liked to laugh at herself, her mother did, especially when she was drinking. Her story would always end like this: “And you know what Wilma's time was? Twenty-four seconds flat. There's a sophomore in high school in Minneapolis who runs a 23.9. Imagine, a sophomore. So don't you listen when they say kids these days are no good.” When Lisa was in college, she'd gone into the stacks at the library and discovered an old Life magazine with pictures of Wilma Rudolph winning this race. Lisa's mother wasn't in any of them. It turned out that she had run in a different heat. And it wasn't a world record; Rudolph only set an Olympic record. Lisa had never corrected her mother, even though she sat through the Wilma Rudolph story many, many more times before her mother died. She could never bring herself to call her on the lie.

  Lisa glides effortlessly around the Poly-Mat track, catches up to her mother and slows to match her shuffling pace. She does not appear to notice Lisa. Instead she stares down at the red polyurethane surface of the track as if searching for a lost dime. Lisa can see grapy veins under her wax paper skin. Strands of gray hair have flown loose from the bun that is held in place by her favorite silver hair fork. Her mother ran right up until the end. She probably would've preferred to drop dead on the track rather than to have wasted to a stick in the hospital.

  "Mom, it's me.” Lisa doesn't know how being dead works, but if Billy Ward can talk to her, then maybe her mother can too. Just then Crispin races past them, gets a lead of maybe twenty feet and then starts running backward, facing them.

  "Mom,” says Lisa, “you know now. You must. About Crispin. Everything.” Even though they are moving at a crawl, Lisa is gasping for breath. “I'm a mess. I try, but he's always there. Always."

  Her mother is making a small, moist rasping sound as she jogs. He-he-heep. Lisa has a thousand questions but her entire miserable life seems stuck in her throat. “Maa?"

  Her mother shakes her head and continues to plod on.

  Lisa stops then, although this goes against everything her mother taught her about running. You never stop unless you're hurt or someone needs your help. Stopping means that you're not a serious person, that your will is weak, your spirit flawed. Lisa expects the certain rebuke, but her mother has moved on. Annette Schoonover passes Crispin, who now runs in place, studying Lisa.

  Suddenly Lisa is on her knees. Then on her elbows. Then her forehead is pressing against the nubbly surface of the track. Sobs bubble out of her. It isn't fair. Crispin won't go away. The DVDeal will close. Matt will leave. She isn't strong enough. Nobody can help. She'll wind up in Kirkwood again. And die in an asylum, with Crispin watching.

  There is a feather tingle at the small of her back and Lisa jerks upright. Her mother has slogged an entire circuit around the track and come up behind her. Padding in place, she offers Lisa a hand. Lisa reaches for it but there is nothing for her to hold on to. Her mother shakes her head again and gives her a sad smile.

  "Don't stop,” Annette Schoonover says and then slides around her daughter and begins another slow lap.

  Lisa hauls herself up, even though it feels as if there is a Saint Bernard on her shoulders. And suddenly the track seems tilted up at a sharp angle. Still, she staggers after her mother. She has it in her mind to catch up to her but on the curve ahead of Lisa, Annette Schoonover is scattering into the twilight. Her legs are mist and the blue jersey goes up in smoke and puffs toward the bleachers. The letters U, S, and A are as faint as Lisa's memories of her father and the silver hair fork is the last gleam of the dying day. And then her mother is gone and Lisa is alone.

  With Crispin.

  He watches her come toward him, his expression unreadable as always. As she passes him, she lashes out at his face, her fingers spread and curled. It's a slashing blow that would have raked bloody lines across his cheek, but there is no more to Crispin than there is to Annette Schoonover. You can't touch the dead, Lisa thinks. And they can't touch you. She veers off the track and sprints between the bleachers. Crispin has to hustle to keep up.

  Lisa finishes the run with a last spurt of speed and breaks the imaginary finish line at the corner of Bank and Coronet. As she bends over to catch her breath, she catches a glimpse of Mrs. Grapelli on the porch of her house, leaning back on her wicker rocking chair. Only now the house belongs to the Silvermans. Mrs. Grapelli, dead for more than three decades, looks like one of those mummies you see in old issues of National Geographic.

  Lisa walks down Bank, drinking in her drowsy neighborhood. Her mother's house—her house now—is eighth on the left, a light blue Cape with navy shutters and a center brick chimney. As is her habit, she walks around the house three times, cooling down. She brushes her hand across the flat heads of the scarlet sedum and picks a spoon-flowered chrysanthemum and tucks it behind her ear. She notices that Matt has mowed the lawn for her.

  She climbs the porch steps two at a time and lets the screen door slam in Crispin's face. She pauses in the front hall at the entrance to the living room. The message light on her answering machine is flashing. She presses play.

  "Hi sweetie, it's just me,” says Matt's voice. Even on the tinny speaker of the answering machine, he sounds steady. Someone she could lean on. “I stopped by twice, hoping to catch you, but you were out. Probably running, since it rained this morning. I mowed your lawn while I was waiting."

  "Thanks,” Lisa says to the machine.

  "Lisa, I'm worried about you. About us. We've hardly spoken in the last few days. Every time I call, I get your machine. I'm thinking maybe you're screening my calls.” He laughs nervously.

  "I'm sorry, Matt.” She did screen two of his calls yesterday.

  "And when I come into the store, all we talk about are the movies. Have I done something wrong? I just want us to be together. I know you're probably not ready, what with all your ... ah ... stuff."

  Stuff. Crispin is standing in the entrance to the living room, watching her. His hands are braced against the doorjambs.

  The answering machine crackles. It sounds like a cough. Or a sigh. Then there is a long silence and Lisa thinks maybe the message is over, except that she doesn't hear a beep. Finally Matt clears his throat and says, “I love you, Lisa, but I'm not sure now that you love me. And that's important, isn't it? You have to be ready. So if you want, I can stop."

  "No,” she says, glaring into Crispin's dead eyes. “Don't stop.” She gulps air as if she's running again, only now it's like that flying, out-of-control sprint with Coach Ward down Oak Hill. Because there is a tiger chasing her and she absolutely has to get home. But her mother's house isn't where she belongs.

  Lisa has no choice. She picks up the phone.

  Copyright © 2007 James Patrick Kelly

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  RAINSTORM by Debbie Ouellet<
br />
  She announces her coming in the wail of a train whistle,

  ghost sounds sailing over impossible distances,

  tucked into the creases of her gown,

  the smell of worms in damp earth,

  grass leaning westward to catch a whiff of her approach.

  —

  She arrives in a flash of jewels, the golden streak of her crimped hair,

  cloak billowing, snapping like crisply starched satin,

  raising her skirts, letting them fall in shimmering torrents,

  or trickle down, like diaphanous silk across a palm,

  soaking the earth with her scent.

  —

  She leaves, her dark shoulder turned against the sun

  leaving him to follow, clutching the train of her gown

  like an ardent lover. The rustle of her grey taffeta skirt,

  a knowing smile, she tosses her color box across the sky

  as the promise of her return, someday, somewhere...

  on her terms.

  —Debbie Ouellet

  Copyright © 2007 Debbie Ouellet

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  TIDELINE by Elizabeth Bear

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, and nearly named after Peregrine Took. She is the only daughter of a poet and a luthier. The author is both a John W. Campbell and Locus Award laureate, and her books to be released in 2007 are New Amsterdam (Subterranean Press), Whiskey and Water (Roc), Undertow (Bantam Spectra), and A Companion to Wolves (Tor, with Sarah Monette). She lives in Connecticut, with a presumptuous cat. “Tideline” is her first story for Asimov's.

  Chalcedony wasn't built for crying. She didn't have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered-glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.

  Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.

  They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider's palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.

  The beach was where she met Belvedere.

  * * * *

  Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony's trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.

  As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn't raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors that locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.

  He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn't deem him a threat.

  Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.

  * * * *

  The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery, and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.

  * * * *

  "Whatcha picken up?"

  "Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he'd been creeping closer, until he'd begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag. Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prise it open. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.

  Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn't be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.

  He was bony as well as ragged, and small for a human. Perhaps young.

  She thought he'd ask what shipwreck, and she would gesture vaguely over the bay, where the city had been, and say there were many. But he surprised her.

  "Whatcha gonna do with them?” He wiped his mouth on a sandy paw, the broken knife projecting carelessly from the bottom of his fist.

  "When I get enough, I'm going to make necklaces.” She spotted something under a tangle of the algae called dead man's fingers, a glint of light, and began the laborious process of lowering herself to reach it, compensating by math for her malfunctioning gyroscopes.

  The presumed-child watched avidly. “Nuh uh,” he said. “You can't make a necklace outta that."

  "Why not?” She levered herself another decimeter down, balancing against the weight of her fused limb. She did not care to fall.

  "I seed what you pick up. They's all different."

  "So?” she asked, and managed another few centimeters. Her hydraulics whined. Someday, those hydraulics or her fuel cells would fail and she'd be stuck this way, a statue corroded by salt air and the sea, and the tide would roll in and roll over her. Her carapace was cracked, no longer watertight.

  "They's not all beads."

  Her manipulator brushed aside the dead man's fingers. She uncovered the treasure, a bit of blue-gray stone carved in the shape of a fat, merry man. It had no holes. Chalcedony balanced herself back upright and turned the figurine in the light. The stone was structurally sound.

  She extruded a hair-fine diamond-tipped drill from the opposite manipulator and drilled a hole through the figurine, top to bottom. Then she threaded him on a twist of wire, looped the ends, work-hardened the loops, and added him to the garland of beads swinging against her disfigured chassis.

  "So?"

  The presumed-child brushed the little Buddha with his fingertip, setting it swinging against shattered ceramic plate. She levered herself up again, out of his reach. “I's Belvedere,” he said.

  "Hello,” Chalcedony said. “I'm Chalcedony."

  * * * *

  By sunset when the tide was lowest he scampered chattering in her wake, darting between flocking gulls to scoop up coquinas by the fistful, which he rinsed in the surf before devouring raw. Chalcedony more or less ignored him as she activated her floods, concentrating their radiance along the tideline.

  A few dragging steps later, another treasure caught her eye. It was a scrap of chain with a few bright beads caught on it—glass, with scraps of gold and silver foil embedded in their twists. Chalcedony initiated the laborious process of retrieval—

  Only to halt as Belvedere jumped in front of her, grabbed the chain in a grubby broken-nailed hand, and snatched it up. Chalcedony locked in position, nearly overbalancing. She was about to reach out to snatch the treasure away from the child and knock him into the sea when he rose up on tiptoe and held it out to her, straining over his head. The flood lights cast his shadow black on the sand, illumined each thread of his hair and eyebrows in stark relief.

  "It's easier if I get that for you,” he said, as her fine manipulator closed tenderly on the tip of the chain.

  She lifted the treasure to examine it in the floods. A good long segment, seven centimeters, four jewel-toned shiny beads. Her head creaked when she raised it, corrosion showering from the joints.

  She hooked the chain onto the netting wrapped around her carapace. “Give me your bag,” she said.

  Belvedere's hand went to the soggy net full of raw bivalves dripping down his naked leg. “My bag?"

  "Give it to me.” Chalcedony drew herself up, akilter because of the ruined limb, but still two and a half meters taller than the child. She extended a manipulator, and from some disused file dredged
up a protocol for dealing with civilian humans. “Please."

  He fumbled at the knot with rubbery fingers, tugged it loose from his rope belt, and held it out to her. She snagged it on a manipulator and brought it up. A sample revealed that the weave was cotton rather than nylon, so she folded it in her two larger manipulators and gave the contents a low-wattage microwave pulse.

  She shouldn't. It was a drain on her power cells, which she had no means to recharge, and she had a task to complete.

  She shouldn't—but she did.

  Steam rose from her claws and the coquinas popped open, roasting in their own juices and the moisture of the seaweed with which he'd lined the net. Carefully, she swung the bag back to him, trying to preserve the fluids.

  "Caution,” she urged. “It's hot."

  He took the bag gingerly and flopped down to sit cross-legged at her feet. When he tugged back the seaweed, the coquinas lay like tiny jewels—pale orange, rose, yellow, green, and blue—in their nest of glass-green Ulva, sea lettuce. He tasted one cautiously, and then began to slurp with great abandon, discarding shells in every direction.

  "Eat the algae, too,” Chalcedony told him. “It is rich in important nutrients."

  * * * *

  When the tide came in, Chalcedony retreated up the beach like a great hunched crab with five legs amputated. She was beetle-backed under the moonlight, her treasures swinging and rustling on her netting, clicking one another like stones shivered in a palm.

  The child followed.

  "You should sleep,” Chalcedony said, as Belvedere settled beside her on the high, dry crescent of beach under towering mud cliffs, where the waves wouldn't lap.

  He didn't answer, and her voice fuzzed and furred before clearing when she spoke again. “You should climb up off the beach. The cliffs are unstable. It is not safe beneath them."

  Belvedere hunkered closer, lower lip protruding. “You stay down here."

  "I have armor. And I cannot climb.” She thumped her fused leg on the sand, rocking her body forward and back on the two good legs to manage it.