Asimov's SF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  One night after a drug-and-buzz session he was lying empty in his room. D&b interrupted the bad dreams. It did other things, too. On the bedside table there was a thick sketchpad and a Library Book with blank pages. The book didn't look anything like Joe's head but they had a lot in common. When the post-session ache subsided and the little pinwheel lights retreated from his vision Joe reached for the Library Book. He inserted a memory wafer and a text selection emerged on the inside front cover. He chose a biography of Dondi White, the great twentieth century graffiti artist. The SmartPages filled with words, then Faye walked into the room; her eyes were wrong.

  Joe quickly placed the open book over his boxers. Besides emptying his head d&b sessions typically left him with an erection. Of course, Joe was eighteen, so erections were a frequent occurrence anyway. At least when he was alone.

  Faye grinned. “What are you reading?"

  "Nothing. I mean I just turned it on."

  "Looks like it."

  Faye was only nineteen though she looked ten years older, tall, with glossy blue side-slashed hair. The different thing about her eyes was some kind of hectic light and twitch that hadn't been there before she'd escaped Fairhaven. She and Joe had been sequestered in adjoining rooms of the ward. Now she had been gone for weeks, and Joe was tired of having no one to talk to except the staff and Mr. Statama, who visited only occasionally. The other inmates mostly fell short of the ability to carry on coherent conversations. And Joe never liked the way Statama patted his shoulder or asked how he was doing, leaning in close, his breath too minty. Fairhaven Home wasn't the orphanage, and Mr. Statama wasn't the priest with blunt violating fingers. But Joe equated them, or his blood did. They were both fathers of a sort, and Joe hated and yearned for them despite himself.

  "Let's get some coffee,” Faye said.

  "I thought you ran away."

  "I walked. Same as you can. Want to?"

  "Just walk out."

  "Yes."

  "And go where?"

  "I have a place."

  Joe drummed his fingers on the back of the Library Book.

  Faye crossed the room and stood over him. “Look, do you want to come or not? We have to hurry."

  "What's the difference?"

  "The difference is between being dead and being alive. Get it?” Faye lifted the book off his lap but didn't touch him. “My opinion? You want alive."

  As Joe's head began to fill up again he remembered that she was right. He dressed with his back to Faye and then followed her out of the room.

  "Where's the guy who walks around at night?” Joe asked.

  "You'll see."

  They descended the back stairs, followed an empty corridor, stopped by a door near the exit. Faye keyed the lock and it snicked back and the door swung in on a dim room and a slumped figure that looked like potatoes in a blue jumpsuit, which was the guy who walked around at night. Unwatched screens monitored Fairhaven's corridors and rooms. Faye tucked the passkey into the potato man's breast pocket and patted it.

  "Is he okay?” Joe asked.

  "Sure. Juan likes me. We had some wine, only his was special. Anyway, he let me in and out but I knew he wouldn't let you leave. Come on."

  She took his hand and led him to the exit. The outside smelled wet. Joe looked up. A scythe of white moon rode the night. Staring at it, Joe felt lonely, like he wanted to go back inside.

  "Come on,” Faye said, tugging at his hand. “Be a big boy."

  * * * *

  Thirty years earlier a man or something like a man fell out of the sky. He fell a very long way, especially if you included the distance he came before the sky unzipped and dropped him. The body happened to land on a targeting range maintained by the Affiliated States of Western America. Medical functionaries examined the remains, determined them to be splattered and non-terrestrial. This begged the question of origin. The airspace above the range was restricted and regularly swept. No vehicles, terrestrial or otherwise, had passed overhead. They calculated the alien's trajectory and eventually discovered the portal. It had created a faint energy signature. By reckoning backward along that signature they determined the point of origin was likely in a region of space occupied by the double star Albireo. The bad news? The portal was a one-way proposition: Albireo to a point almost a kilometer above Earth. Observers waited for more doomed visitors to drop in, but none did.

  * * * *

  The Deluxe Diner overlooked the pulseway. Computer-directed traffic streaked by like channeled lightning. The diner's lights dimmed and brightened almost imperceptibly. Joe drank coffee and sopped egg yolk with a piece of burnt toast. It was better than Fairhaven's food. Faye smoked a cigarette and watched him.

  "You're a beautiful boy,” she said.

  "You're not so old."

  "Who said I was?"

  Later when she undressed Joe saw all the scars on her breasts, her arms, her belly, thighs, none more than an inch long. Some were still moist.

  "I started doing that,” she said, touching her breasts. “I don't know why."

  Joe tried to be a big boy for Faye but couldn't. Leaving the institution hadn't changed that. She told him to do the other things to her and he did them. When she fell asleep he stared at the ceiling. After effects of the d&b would deny him sleep until the next day. Absently he smelled his fingertips, touched his chin, the sketchy beard. He began to feel lonely again and almost woke her up. Instead he carefully moved away from her and got out of bed, pulled on his shorts and shirt, and went exploring. He wanted something to read.

  The floors of the old apartment creaked. Rain dripped from the ceiling and plopped into carefully positioned pans and cups. There was a moldy smell. He couldn't find a Library Book and he didn't want to turn on the VideoStream, which was somehow worse than being lonely. In the kitchenette he saw the NewZ-Prints stuck to the wall. CiNFox stories about some guy who went berserk at the Pike Place Market, running through a crowd with a stainless steel cleaver he'd lifted from Kitchen Stuff. Having gotten everybody's attention, the man had then proceeded to chop his left hand off. Joe touched the photo on one of the NewZ-Prints. Somebody's retinal repeater had caught the scene. A man came to jerky life, face speckled with blood, screaming silently while a black-uniformed cop struggled to wrest the cleaver away. The crawl under the photo read: Police restrain Market Maniac, Barney Huff. Huff had bled to death.

  Joe left the kitchenette and started opening doors. Behind one he discovered a bathroom. A girl wearing a black T-shirt and nothing else was making faces at herself in the mirror, moving her jaw up and down in an exaggerated manner. A candle stuck in a hard puddle of smooth wax on the drainboard lit her in soft yellow tones. She was about sixteen, and she didn't act surprised when Joe walked in. She stopped doing the jaw thing and simply looked at him, head cocked to the side. Joe liked her hair, crinkly pale gold, the way it fell over her gray eyes. If he ever Scrawled her he'd probably exaggerate the hair. Wild corkscrews and zigzags and her face represented by a few sharp lines plus two wavy ones for the mouth. Tricky to pull off but he could do it. Of course—except in his mind—Joe hadn't Scrawled anything in over a year.

  Another door directly across from Joe stood open to a messy bedroom. He noticed a real book with real paper tented open on the floor beside the mattress.

  "Sorry.” Joe started to pull the door shut.

  "That's okay. You're Joe?"

  "Yeah."

  "I'm Anthea. Faye said you were coming."

  "Yeah. Well, good night."

  "Night."

  He backed out, pulling the door shut, but then stood there thinking about the girl and the book. After a while he heard the door to the other bedroom shut. Joe hesitated, then re-entered the bathroom. The candle flame fluttered. After a moment's hesitation he knocked. Anthea opened her bedroom door and looked up at him.

  "I was wondering—” he said.

  "Hmm?"

  "I saw you had a book. I like to read, Faye's asleep, and—"

  "Come
in, Joe."

  Her mattress was on the floor, like Faye's. There was a lamp next to it and a cardboard box filled with ancient paperback books, the covers stripped off every one. Anthea nudged the box with her toe.

  "I work in this recycling place? Lots of crap passes through. These were going to get shredded so I grabbed them."

  Joe leaned over the box and started picking through the books. “It's mostly junk,” Anthea said. “I just like real books sometimes."

  "Me too."

  Joe pulled out a skinny one with yellowing pages that was in pretty good shape, the glue still holding. A detective story, The Maltese Falcon, in a mid-twenty-first century edition.

  "Can I borrow this?"

  Anthea shrugged. “Why not."

  He zipped the pages with his thumbnail while he looked around the room. A guitar with one too many holes in the sound board leaned against the wall, a pair of black panties snagged on one of the tuning knobs. Clothes (all black) hung from a naked water pipe. He spotted the Scrawl gear on top of a salvaged school desk. His heart surged, like he was thinking about Scrawling and suddenly the gear was just there.

  "You Scrawl?” he said.

  Anthea shrugged.

  He forced himself to quit staring. “Anyway. Thanks for the book."

  He turned to leave, and she said, “I go out late sometimes. The cops around here are real bastards, though. You Scrawl? How do you do it when you're locked up in that head shop?"

  "Before,” Joe said.

  "Oh."

  "You good?” Joe asked.

  She made her little shrug again and said, “I just started."

  "Okay."

  "Look, I'm new but I'm not a toy."

  He regarded her blandly.

  "Next time I go,” she said, “I'll tell you, maybe."

  "Good."

  Faye screamed a couple of rooms away. Joe jumped but Anthea didn't even turn her head.

  "She does that every night, don't worry about it."

  * * * *

  Faye was sitting up on the mattress, her breasts pimpled with sweat, fingers fumbling with a cigarette and matches. Joe took the matches out of her hand, struck one, held it to the trembling end of the cigarette.

  "Fucking clone dreams,” Faye said. “Mine's in some kind of hell, and she's old. But I don't think she can die, not where she is."

  Joe was kneeling beside her, holding the dead match, smelling burnt sulfur and Faye's fear sweat. He knew about Faye's nightmares, which were like his own, but he had never heard her refer to them as “clone” dreams.

  "Hey,” she said. “The bad part about being free is that all that shit comes into your head and you start thinking about sharp objects or jumping off something high. The good part is everything else. I'm glad you came out, Joe. There's only two of us left."

  Joe didn't know what she meant by “two of us left” and he didn't want to ask. All his life, he had felt on the verge of knowing things he didn't want to know. Besides, Faye was saying a lot of crazy stuff lately. He slipped under the covers with her and held her while she finished her cigarette.

  "You met Anthea?” she said.

  "Yeah."

  "This is her place. Some old guy gave it to her."

  "Why?"

  "She was on the streets, got desperate and tried to sell her ass. The old guy bought a piece then felt bad because she was just a kid. So he kept buying but he never touched her except that first time. Sick. He owns all these cruddy buildings. He set her up but he never comes around. I found Anthea in a bar and she brought me home. Guilt makes the world go round, Joe. Promise you won't fuck her or whatever, at least not without me?"

  "I promise,” Joe said.

  Once she fell asleep again Joe got up and sat by the window. He opened the Hammett book. The pages were stiff and brittle. He began reading by the diffuse street light.

  * * * *

  Cygnus: Head of the Swan. Pretty name for the double star Beta Cygni, a.k.a. Albireo. Pretty, but almost too far even for Tachyon Funnel Acceleration, which was the fastest method of space flight that human engineering had ever managed to achieve. Sixteen years too far. And never mind that no human could survive TFA, the forces involved. Certainly acquiring access to the alien portal system between stars was desirable. But to start off, a human being was required to investigate the technology presumably based in Cygnus space. Which was impossible. They considered robots. But robots couldn't be operated remotely over that distance, nor could they return once they'd decelerated at their destination. TFA vessels required massive launch facilities. So two avenues to Albireo existed, the alien portal and TFA, and both were one-way propositions in opposite directions. At least until a University of California professor named David Statama saw a way of turning his failure in life-prolongation research into a solution to the Cygnus problem. Statama, a genetics expert, had been working under a government grant. He was obsessive about his work, his special interest in genetics having grown out of his own diagnosis of sterility.

  * * * *

  Post-d&b exhaustion overtook Joe the following afternoon. He fell asleep on the unmade bed to the sound of pulseway traffic and a thunder squall. In his mind a door rose up. It had six panels and was dark green, the paint blistered and cracked like lizard skin. The handle was tarnished brass with a thumb-pedal latch release. It was on a street of row houses, squat buildings hazed in smoky dusk light. Old-fashioned, maybe going back two centuries, which didn't make sense. I have lived here, he thought (wished), but it didn't feel true, just something he wanted: a memory of home.

  Desire impelled him up the three stone steps. He reached out and touched the blistered paint, and the door dissolved. He looked into a distorted black mirror, his face reflected in aged decline, shrunken body engulfed by a bulky spacesuit. Joe's heart pounded, and it felt out of sync with the withered muscle laboring in the breast of the old man. This is how his real father would appear, an older version of himself. Joe knew because he'd sketched it numerous times, tapping into some zapped unconscious residue. Then he was seeing the door from the other side, and it was a black rectangle, breathing and depthless, subtly moving like a hanging sheet. There were dozens of such sheets, or doors, or—the word appearing in his mind—portals, and the old man stood indecisive among them. Exhausted, aging at a greatly accelerated rate, starving, abandoned, lost in an alien labyrinth, his mind unraveling, longing. He wanted to step through but was paralyzed by fear.

  Joe thrashed awake, chest heaving, sweat turning cold on his skin. Faye sat in the chair by the window, smoking.

  "Pretty bad?” she said.

  "Yeah."

  "Talk to me. It's worse if you don't talk. You might end up like Barney. Anthea listens but she's not one of us."

  Joe looked up. “Who's Barney Huff, besides the ‘Market Maniac'?"

  "The first of us. He got crazy. That's why Statama came for you and me. We were supposed to be forgotten."

  "I don't get it."

  All Joe knew was that after years as a ward of the state a guy named David Statama showed up with papers and a ride to Fairhaven, where they administered drugs and zapped Joe's head to make the bad dreams go away—which was good. It had been that way for the last year.

  Faye regarded him appraisingly then shook her head. “Never mind, you don't really want to know. Tell me more about your dream."

  He told her about the dream. Faye nodded, eyes darting. She kept hitching her shoulder. Tics.

  "Mine was in that portal chamber, too,” she said, looking away distractedly. “Finally she stepped into the wrong one. Now she can't die, and everything I get out of her is a nightmare cutup. Nothing's right. Even the shapes are wrong, like they have an extra dimension. You're always reading. You ever read H.P. Lovecraft? Never mind."

  "They're just bad dreams,” Joe said. He was thinking he should have stayed at Fairhaven. He had always felt different, out of alignment with the world, with people. Then the dreams started last year, like the overlaying of an accele
rated and abnormal consciousness.

  Faye snorted. “You don't know anything. And by the way, your green door? Forget about it."

  "Why? Maybe I lived there when I was real little and don't remember."

  "You didn't. You don't come from anywhere like that. It's nothing but a gene memory. Statama told me things. I begged him to tell me. Why do you think I left that lunatic asylum?"

  The hectic light in her eyes was also in her speech, agitated, jumping around. Joe stood up. He was trembling. Faye dropped her cigarette into the dregs of her coffee and went to him, tried to hug him. But she was right: he didn't really want to know things. He turned away.

  "I have to shower,” he said.

  "Joe—"

  "I have to shower."

  He walked stiffly to the bathroom, shut the door and locked it. In the mirror he searched his eyes.

  * * * *

  Statama had been tinkering with telomeres, attempting to imbue them with extended longevity, allowing chromosomes to reproduce infinitely instead of succumbing to so-called “programmed cell death.” He discovered it was easier to accelerate the telomere's degradation in a controlled fashion that wouldn't produce progeric freaks. Interesting but of little practical application; no one wanted to grow old faster. When the problem of the Cygnus portal arose, Statama thought he saw a way of using his discovery. Perhaps it would be possible to accelerate the total growth of a human being, from the cellular level up. Telescope a fully developed life cycle into, say, a one year period? Statama was confident it could be done. But he knew he'd have to first create a “pure” clone, a generic template strained as close as possible to sui generis from which to harvest the next generation's cells.

  * * * *

  "Go ahead,” Anthea said. She handed him the Scrawl rig, which consisted of a short, finely tapered wand and a flexible coil attached to the xplasma source, kind of like a big kidney bean strapped around his waist under his loose coat. Originally intended for architectural design application and almost immediately co-opted by graffiti hounds later morphed to Scrawlers. The wand felt good in Joe's hand. The way it used to. Before Mr. Statama collected him from the orphanage Joe had been in the habit of sneaking out to hang with a loose affiliation of Scrawlers. Joe had never slept well, he'd had trouble concentrating, except on his sketchpads and books. Crazy Joey, everybody called him. Made more crazy by Father Orpin. That phrase: We're all the family you have, Joey.