Asimov's SF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "What do you think?” Tom said, with obvious pride, like he'd painted the scene himself just for her. Like a child with a new creation, he was desperate for her to be pleased.

  "It's so different,” she said, immediately realizing that wasn't right. Not enthusiastic enough. Not happy enough. “It's beautiful. I can't wait for you to show me around."

  He kissed the top of her head. This was right, she told herself. Coming here was definitely the right thing to do.

  Tom's older brother Chris was waiting for them at the tram station with the car. Without leaving the driver's seat he opened the back, so Tom could throw in her luggage.

  "Is that all you brought?” Chris said at Alice's one suitcase and shoulder bag. Not even a hello first.

  "The rest is being shipped,” Tom said.

  "I figured there'd be steamer trunks. We could have taken the bus."

  She had no idea what to say to that. “Don't bring more than I can carry, that's the rule."

  "Huh. Maybe she will survive out here,” Chris said to his brother.

  Alice stared at Tom, trying to initiate one of those silent conversations that married people were supposed to be able to have: what is he talking about?

  Tom kissed her and hurried her into the back seat, sliding in next to her. Apparently they hadn't been married long enough for the telepathy to start working. It was just the time apart. They had to get used to each other again. They loved each other, everything would be fine.

  They set off.

  "How was your flight?” Chris looked over to the back seat. “No trouble?"

  "No, none at all.” She had an accent, she suddenly realized. She sounded different than the brothers: more clipped, softer R's. She'd never noticed it before.

  For the rest of her life—or as long as she stayed here—she'd be the one with the accent.

  * * * *

  Tom's parents lived in a newer part of town, which meant their house was fifty years old rather than a hundred. Tom had told her some of the history of the place, the stringent growth controls that made building permits as hard to get as immigration visas. Finding any construction younger than about thirty years was hard. Businesses had learned to adapt and use existing structures. Colorado had rebuilt its economy to strike a balance between business and preservation. The whole state was a carefully maintained park, now. It had also become a status address for the wealthy, who paid for the privilege of living here.

  Upon entering the well-kept ranch-style home, Alice was mobbed. A couple of big dogs barked and jumped, a handful of people yelled at them to get down, and everyone in the living room stood, calling out and saying hello. Tom waved back, Chris pushed past her to herd the dogs away, and Alice froze, stunned. Then Tom's mother Connie appeared in front of her and hugged her.

  She'd acquired a whole new family.

  Tom introduced her to the various aunts and uncles and cousins she hadn't met yet, and the only reason she remembered names was because Tom had prepped her beforehand. He'd been talking about these people for as long as she'd known him.

  The scent of cooking she couldn't identify filled the house. Dinnertime revealed roast chicken and mashed potatoes, three different vegetables, and a Jell-O salad.

  For some reason Alice had expected something more rustic. More exotic. Slabs of venison maybe.

  After dinner, the family retired to the living room for coffee. This was when the real conversation started. Alice sat close to Tom on the sofa.

  "Alice, you ever been to Colorado before?” one of the aunts, Katie, asked.

  She was happy to answer yes. “When I was about twelve my family came here for a ski trip."

  Katie's husband, Joey, snorted. “That's not really Colorado. Probably took the shuttle straight there from the airport and never left the slopes. Where'd you go? Aspen?"

  She found herself blushing, because he was right. They had taken the shuttle, and they'd never left the town. “Um, yes."

  A cousin, who was either Pete or Paul, Alice suddenly couldn't remember, said “I thought that was the way everyone wanted it—show the tourists the ski resorts, then herd ‘em back to the airport, and leave the good stuff for the rest of us."

  Tom leaned in to whisper to her, “This is the obligatory political argument. Happens every time.” He wore a tight-lipped grimace that was probably supposed to emulate a smile.

  "That's right,” Joey said smugly. “Now we finally have the water and infrastructure to support what we have without worrying about what it's going to be like in twenty years."

  "I think some of you would be just as happy going back to the frontier days."

  Some of them practically had. Alice remembered Tom's stories: Joey and Kate owned a ranch and raised cattle. Chris managed an organic food distributor, and Pete/Paul was a back country pilot. Tom was a biologist for the forest service. Most of the state's jobs were in agriculture, service industries, or small business. This had become a state of entrepreneurs—people made their own jobs. It all seemed like an adventure.

  Joey said, “You're too young to remember what it was like. Believe me, this is better. We finally have things under control."

  "It's a damn socialist state is what it is—"

  Tom interrupted. “So, Aunt Katie, how's Stuart liking school? He's at Boulder, right?"

  Katie opened her mouth, but Joey spoke first. “Damn straight. Didn't think he had to leave the state like some people."

  Tom glowered. He and Alice had met as students at Harvard.

  This sounded like a long-running argument. Alice wasn't the cause of it, only the current catalyst. She had to keep reminding herself that.

  "You kids just don't remember what it was like,” Joey grumbled again.

  "At least we stopped the Texans from coming,” one of the older uncles, Harry, said. Half the room—the older ones, Tom's parent's generation—laughed.

  It hardly seemed fair, when states like North Dakota were paying people to move in. She knew better than to say that out loud.

  "Marrying in's practically the only way to get residency without paying the fees anymore,” Connie said to Alice. “You're very lucky you met Tom."

  Yes, she was, she wasn't going to argue with that. But Tom's mother made it sound like she'd married him just to get into Colorado—not that she was only here because of Tom. She already missed the ocean.

  "I told him that would happen when he went to college out of state,” Connie continued, inevitably. “I told him as soon as people found out he's from Colorado, the girls would swarm him trying to get in."

  Tom was clenching his hands in his lap. His knuckles were white.

  Connie's older sister Jane was close enough to pat Alice on the knee. “Don't mind her, she always hoped Tom would marry that Doyle girl from La Junta. Never expected him to drag back an Easterner."

  Tom was right. They should have just gone home from the airport.

  His family didn't know how long she and Tom had discussed her coming here, how many pages they'd scribbled out the pros and cons on, all the hair-pulling, tearful late nights. They didn't know how much she'd given up. They only saw people clamoring to get in. They only knew their pride in their place. Their pride in their history.

  "This all started with those Pioneer special interest license plates,” Tom muttered. “You start marking people, giving them status, it all goes down hill from there."

  "I had ancestors on the Mayflower,” Alice said weakly.

  Jane smiled. “Sorry, honey, that doesn't mean anything here.” She stood and went to the kitchen for more coffee.

  Connie sighed. “At least you came here instead of stealing him away. That would have been hard to take."

  Alice put down her cup of coffee. “Would you excuse me a moment?"

  She went outside, to the back porch. Culture shock, that was all it was. She didn't have to like Tom's family. She and Tom had a place of their own, a house downtown that had belonged to his great-grandfather. She'd have her own office, h
er own space. She could start rebuilding her life.

  Pioneers, they called themselves, even now, when they had indoor plumbing and power and wireless, when they'd been rooted in the same spot for two hundred years, when they'd turned their state into a New Frontier triumph. Didn't they realize she was the real pioneer? She was the one who'd left everything behind to start fresh in a strange place. Even the air smelled different here: dry, dusty. Half a mile away, the neighborhood ended and the prairie started. The wind from there was sharp. She could just make out the gray smudge of mountains to the west, where the sun had started to set.

  The door to the back porch opened. Tom emerged, and joined her on the railing. “You regret it already, don't you? Me dragging you out here, into the middle of a family you don't know and a place you don't like."

  "I have to say, it's a bit of an adventure,” she said. Tom bowed his head, disappointed. He really wanted her to like it here. She didn't want to disappoint him. She hooked her arm around his. “I didn't say I didn't like it, Tom. It's just different. People told me that coming out here is like traveling to a different country. I guess I didn't believe it."

  "We'll take a drive tomorrow. Into the mountains. I'll show you the good stuff."

  "I'd like that."

  The sun set further, and the light changed, becoming more golden, more diffused, reflecting off and filtering through a few puffy clouds that had gathered around the mountain tops.

  Tom said, “Back East—you have cathedrals, monuments, history. That's what people go there to see. Here—we have the land. That's all we have. The families who've been here a long time take a lot of pride in that. They don't like the idea of people coming in and taking it away from them."

  The colors of the sunset changed: the clouds turned orange, pink, purple, lighting up in vaporous wisps, all glowing. They were the colors of a Maxfield Parrish painting, pure and joyful, splashed across a vast, huge sky. Alice had never seen such colors in life. And then, after only a few moments, the sun dropped a couple more degrees, and the colors faded. Just like that, the sunset ended, all gone, leaving gray clouds.

  Tom sighed, and Alice wrapped her arms around him. He held her close. That sunset—that was the welcome she'd been looking for, the one she'd hoped to find. This felt like coming home.

  Copyright © 2007 Carrie Vaughn

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  ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGY by Neal Asher

  Neal Asher lives in a village near Maldon in Essex, Eng-land, with his wife Caroline. His most recently published books have been Prador Moon and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, with Hilldiggers in the pipeline. Presently, he's working on his ninth book for Macmillan: Line War, which, he hopes, completes the Cormac sequence. Neal tells us he's been accused of overproduction (despite spending far too much time ranting on his blog, cycling, and drinking too much wine), but doesn't intend to slow down just yet. Having done numerous jobs ranging from programming machine tools to delivering coal, he rather likes this one. “Alien Archaeology” fits neatly into the Polity universe of his books, and gives readers a chance to sample that somewhat fraught and dangerous future.

  The sifting machine had been working nonstop for twenty years. The technique, first introduced by the xeno-archaeologist Alexion Smith and frowned on by others in his profession as being too blunt an instrument, was in use here by a private concern. An Atheter artifact had been discovered on this desert planetoid: a species of plant that used a deep extended root system to mop up platinum grains from the green sands, which it accumulated in its seeds to drop on the surface. Comparative analysis of the plant's genome—a short trihelical strand—proved it was a product of Atheter technology. The planet had been deep-scanned for other artifacts, then the whole project abandoned when nothing else major was found. The owners of the sifting machine came here afterward in the hope of picking up something the previous searchers had missed. They had managed to scrape up a few minor finds, but reading between the lines of their most recent public reports, Jael knew they were concealing something and, breaking into the private reports from the man on the ground here, learned of a second big find.

  Perched on a boulder, she stepped down the magnification of her eyes to human normal so that all she could see was the machine's dust plume from the flat green plain. The Kobashi rested in the boulder's shade behind her. The planetary base was some ten kilometers away and occupied by a sandapt called Rho. He had detected the U-space signature of her ship's arrival and sent a terse query as to her reason for being here. She expressed her curiosity about what he was doing, to which he had replied that this was no tourist spot before shutting down communication. Obviously he was the kind who relished solitude, which was why he was suited for this assignment and was perfect for Jael's purposes. She could have taken her ship directly to his base, but had brought it in low below the base's horizon to land it. She was going to surprise the sandapt, and rather suspected he wouldn't consider it a pleasant surprise.

  This planet was hot enough to kill an unadapted human and the air too thin and noxious for her to breathe, but she wore a hotsuit with its own air supply, and, in the one-half gravity, could cover the intervening distance very quickly. She leapt down the five meters to the ground, bounced in a cloud of dust, and set out in a long lope—her every stride covering three meters.

  Glimmering beads of metal caught Jael's attention before she reached the base. She halted and turned to study something like a morel fungus—its wrinkled head an open skin of cubic holes. Small seeds glimmered in those holes, and as she drew closer some of them were ejected. Tracking their path, she saw that when they struck the loose dusty ground they sank out of sight. She pushed her hand into the ground and scooped up dust in which small objects glittered. She increased the sensitivity of her optic nerves and ramped up the magnification of her eyes. Each seed consisted of a teardrop of organic matter attached at its widest end to a dodecahedral crystal of platinum. Jael supposed the Atheter had used something like the sifting machine far to her left to collect the precious metal, separating it from the seeds and leaving them behind to germinate into more of these useful little plants. She pocketed the seeds—she knew people who would pay good money for them—though her aim here was to make a bigger killing than that.

  She had expected Rho's base to be the usual inflated dome with resin-bonded sand layered over it, but some other building technique had been employed here. Nestled below an escarpment that marked the edge of the dust bowl and the start of a deeply cracked plain of sun-baked clay, the building was a white-painted cone with a peaked roof. It looked something like an ancient windmill without vanes, but then there were three wind generators positioned along the top of the escarpment—their vanes wide to take into account the thin air down here. Low structures spread out from either side of the building like wings, glimmering in the harsh white sun glare. Jael guessed these were greenhouses to protect growing food plants. A figure was making its way along the edge of these towing a gravsled. She squatted down and focused in.

  Rho's adaptation had given him skin of a deep reddish gold, a ridged bald head, and a nose that melded into his top lip. She glimpsed his eyes, which were sky blue and without pupils. He wore no mask—his only clothing being boots, shorts, and a sun visor. Jael leapt upright and broke into a run for the nearest end of the escarpment, where it was little more than a mound. Glancing back, she noticed the dust trail she'd left and hoped he wouldn't see it. Eventually she arrived at the foot of one of the wind generators and from her belt pouch removed a skinjector and loaded it with a selection of drugs. The escarpment here dropped ten meters in a curve from which projected rough reddish slates. She used these as stepping stones to bring her down to the level of the base, then sprinted in toward the back wall. She could hear him now—he was whistling some ancient melody. A brief comparison search in the music library in her left-hand aug revealed the name: “Greensleeves.” She walked around the building as he approached.

  "Who the hell are you?”
he exclaimed.

  She strode up to him. “I've seen your sifting machine; have you had any luck?"

  He paused for a moment, then, in a tired voice, said, “Bugger off."

  But by then she was on him. Before he could react, she swung the skinjector round from behind her back and pressed it against his chest, triggered it.

  "What the...!” His hand swung out and he caught her hard across the side of the face. She spun, her feet coming up off the ground, and fell in ridiculous slow motion in the low gravity. Error messages flashed up in her visual cortex—broken nanoconnections—but they faded quickly. Then she received a message from her body monitor telling her he had cracked her cheekbone—this before it actually began to hurt. Scrambling to her feet again she watched him rubbing his chest. Foam appeared around his lips, then slowly, like a tree, he toppled. Jael walked over to him thinking, You're so going to regret that, sandapt. Though maybe most of that anger was at herself—for she had been warned about him.

  Getting him onto the gravsled in the low gravity was surprisingly difficult. He must have weighed twice as much as a normal human. Luckily the door to the base was open and designed wide enough to allow the sled inside. After dumping him, she explored, finding the laboratory sited on the lower floor, living quarters on the second, the U-space communicator and computer systems on the top. With a thought, she summoned the Kobashi to her present location, then returned her attention to the computer system. It was sub-AI and the usual optic interfaces were available. Finding a suitable network cable, she plugged one end into the computer and the other into the socket in her right-hand aug, then began mentally checking through Rho's files. He was not due to send a report for another two weeks, and the next supply drop was not for three months. However, there was nothing about his most recent find, and recordings of the exchanges she had listened to had been erased. Obviously, assessing his find, he had belatedly increased security.