Stop! Stop! I’m leaving them, we all say. Deena stops shooting.
“Then do it,” she says. I run them a few blocks away, and then I leave them. Deena’s standing still. I hear her breathing, punctuated by the rain that begins to spatter the ground in irregular blots.
“It’s just me now,” I say from my hiding place.
“Christ,” she says. She sounds so broken-down and low. “It’s not like I can file a restraining order against you, you know?” Then she laughs, but it’s not the good kind.
“I know. Deena, I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
“It is your fucking fault,” says Deena.
“I wanted you back, Deena, I didn’t know what to do.” I don’t know what to tell her that will fix everything. I don’t know why Deena was the only woman that ever made me feel like this, all itchy and angry and desperate.
Deena said, “With every person I date from now on, I’ll only think of you. That was rotten. You have no idea.”
Her shadow stretches like black taffy against the alleyway, and my breath stutters in my throat. I’m all twisty inside. At the sight of Deena, even after everything, sense will always leave me and again I will wish I could be someone she loved. Oh, it’s so fucking ridiculous and it will never end.
What would Mel say? I imagine Mel’s face filling the narrow rectangle of sky between buildings, like the lion dad in The Lion King. I wish he could yell at me, remind me that there are other women in the world besides Deena, and ask me why I have been so monstrous. Or demand to know how, with such great magic in my life, I’d managed to screw up so badly. Anyway, Mel is not saying anything.
I clap my hands over my mouth and try to quiet my breathing. The wet ground has seeped through my jeans and my butt feels cold and dead and detached from me. I reach down into my sock, where I’ve rolled a small tube of potion, and squeeze some out onto my palm. It stings. I move my hand up and down, like I’m weighing it. But I’m all out of options, aren’t I? And with that thought, something tremendous seems to loosen inside me, and I stop shivering. I wonder, what will it be like to look out of Deena’s clear eyes, to look at myself and see my adoration shining out, reflected back and forth in a swimmy, swoony feedback loop? I could it do it. I could do it forever.
Her feet crunch into the wet pavement. “I’m here,” she says in a weird singsong. But she’s not that good at playing the villain. She clears her throat awkwardly.
“Deena,” I say, potion at the ready, eyes closed. “Deena, Deena, Deena.” I know where my eyes will open next, how my heart will thud inside my borrowed, stolen body; and to be utterly and completely honest with you, I am looking forward to it.
THE ART OF ALCHEMY
TED KOSMATKA
Sometimes when I came over, Veronica would already be naked. I’d find her spread out on a lawn chair behind the fence of her townhome, several sinewy yards of black skin visible to second-story windows across the park. She’d scissor her long legs and raise a languid eyelid.
“You have too many clothes on,” she’d say.
And I’d sit. Run a hand along smooth, dark curves. Curl pale fingers into hers.
The story of Veronica is the story of this place. These steel mills, and the dying little city-states around them, have become a part of it somehow—Northwest Indiana like some bizarre, composite landscape we’ve all consented to believe in. A place of impossible contrasts. Cornfields and slums and rich, gated communities. National parkland and industrial sprawl.
Let it stand for the rest of the country. Let it stand for everything.
On cold days, the blast furnaces assemble huge masses of white smoke across the Lake Michigan shoreline. You can still see it mornings, driving I-90 on the way to work—a broad cumulous mountain range rising from the northern horizon, as if we were an alpine community, nestled beneath shifting peaks. It is a terrible kind of beauty.
Veronica was twenty-five when we met—just a few years younger than I. She was brilliant, and beautiful, and broken. Her townhome sat behind gates on the expensive side of Ridge Road and cost more than I made in five years. Her neighbors were doctors, and lawyers, and business owners. From the courtyard where she lay naked, you could see a church steeple, the beautiful, dull green of oxidized copper, rising over distant rooftops.
The story of Veronica is also the story of edges. And that’s what I think about most when I think of her now. The exact line where one thing becomes another. The exact point where an edge becomes sharp enough to cut you.
We might have been talking about her work. Or maybe she was just making conversation, trying to cover her nervousness; I don’t remember. But I remember the rain and the hum of her BMW’s engine. And I remember her saying, as she took the Randolph Street exit, “His name is Voicheck.”
“Is that his first name, or last?”
“It’s the only one he gave me.”
We took Randolph down to the Loop, and the Chicago skyline reared up at us. Veronica knew the uptown streets. The restaurant on Dearborn had been her choice of location—a nice sixty-dollar-a-plate Kazuto bar that stayed open till two A.M. Trendy, clubby, dark. Big name suppliers sometimes brought her there for business dinners, if they were also trying to sleep with her. It was the kind of place wealthy people went when they wanted to get drunk with other wealthy people.
“He claims he’s from Poland,” she said. “But the accent isn’t quite right. More Baltic than Slavic.”
I wondered at that. At how she knew the difference.
“Where’s he based out of?” I asked.
“Ukraine, formerly, but he sure as hell can’t go back now. Had a long list of former this, former that. Different think tanks and research labs. Lots of burned bridges.”
“Is he the guy, or just the contact?”
“He’s playing it like he’s the guy, but I don’t know.”
She hit her signal and made a left. The rain came down harder, Chicago slick-bright with streetlights and traffic. Green lions on the right, and at some point, we crossed the river.
“Is he bringing it with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But he said he was actually bringing it?”
“Yeah.” She looked at me. “He said.”
“Jesus.”
Her face wore a strange expression in the red glow of dashboard light. It took me a moment to place it. Then it hit me: in the year and a half I’d known her, this was the first time I’d ever seen her scared.
I met her at the lab. I say “lab” and people imagine white walls and sterile test tubes, but it’s not like that. It’s mostly math I do, and something close to metallurgy. All of it behind glass security walls. I check my work with a scanning electron microscope, noting crystalline lattices and surface structure micro-abrasions.
She walked through the door behind Hal, the lab’s senior supervisor.
“This is the memory metals lab,” Hal told her, gesturing as he entered.
She nodded. She was young and slender, smooth dark skin, a face that seemed, at first glance, to be more mouth than it should. That was my initial impression of her—some pretty new-hire the bosses were showing around. That’s it. And then she was past me, following the supervisor deeper into the lab. At the time, I had no idea.
I heard the supervisor’s voice drone on as he showed her the temper ovens and the gas chromatograph in the next room. When they returned, the super was following her.
I looked up from the lab bench and she was staring at me. “So you’re the genius,” she said.
That was when she pointed it at me. The look. The way she could look at you with those big dark eyes, and you could almost see the gears moving—her full mouth pulled into a sensuous smile that wanted to be more than it was. She smiled like she knew something you didn’t.
There were a dozen things I could have said, but the nuclear wind behind those eyes blasted my words away until all that was left was a sad kind of truth. I knew what she meant. “Yeah,” I said
. “I guess that’s me.”
She turned to the supervisor. “Thank you for your time.”
Hal nodded and left. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened. The laboratory supervisor—my direct boss—had been dismissed.
“Tell me,” she said. “What do you do here?”
I paused for three seconds before I spoke, letting myself process the seismic shift. Then I explained it.
She smiled while I talked. I’d done it for an audience a dozen times, these little performances. It was practically a part of my job description since the last corporate merger made Uspar-Nagoi the largest steel company in the world. I’d worked for three different corporations in the last two years and hadn’t changed offices once. The mill guys called them white-hats, these management teams that flew in to tour the facilities, shaking hands, smiling under their spotless white hardhats, attempting to fit their immediate surroundings into the flowchart of the company’s latest international acquisitions. Research was a prime target for the tours, but here in the lab, they were harder to spot since so many suits came walking through. It was hard to know who you were talking to, really. But two things were certain. The management types were usually older than the girl standing in front of me. And they’d always, up till now, been male.
But I explained it like I always did. Or maybe I put a little extra spin on it; maybe I showed off. I don’t know. “Nickle-titanium alloys,” I said. I opened the desiccator and pulled out a small strip of steel. It was long and narrow, cut into almost the exact dimensions of a ruler.
“First you take the steel,” I told her, holding out the dull strip of metal. “And you heat it.” I lit the Bunsen burner and held the steel over the open flame. Nothing happened for ten, twenty seconds. She watched me. I imagined what I must look like to her at that moment—blue eyes fixed on the warming steel, short hair jutting at wild angles around the safety goggles I wore on my forehead. Just another technofetishist lost in his obsession. It was a type. Flame licked the edges of the dull metal.
I smiled and, all at once, the metal moved.
The metal contracted muscularly, like a living thing, twisting itself into a ribbon, a curl, a spring.
“It’s caused by micro- and nano-scale surface restructuring,” I told her. “The change in shape results from phase transformations. Martensite when cool; Austenite when heated. The steel remembers its earlier configurations. The different phases want to be in different shapes.”
“Memory metal,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see this. What applications does it have?”
The steel continued to flex, winding itself tighter. “Medical, structural, automotive. You name it.”
“Medical?”
“For broken bones. The shape memory alloy has a transfer temp close to body temp. You attach a plate to the break site, and body heat makes the alloy want to contract, thereby exerting compressive force on the bone at both ends of the fracture.”
“Interesting.”
“They’re also investigating the alloy’s use in heart stents. A coolcrushed alloy tube can be inserted into narrow arteries where it’ll expand and open once it’s heated to blood temperature.”
“You mentioned automotive.”
I nodded. Automotive. The big money. “Imagine that you’ve put a small dent in your fender,” I said. “Instead of taking it to the shop, you pull out your hairdryer. The steel pops right back in shape.”
She stayed at the lab for another hour, asking intelligent questions, watching the steel cool and straighten itself. Before she left, she shook my hand politely and thanked me for my time. She never once told me her name. I watched the door close behind her as she left.
Two weeks later she returned. This time, without Hal.
She drifted into the lab like a ghost near the end of my shift.
In the two weeks since I’d seen her, I’d learned a little about her. I’d learned her name, and that her corporate hat wasn’t just management, but upper management. She had an engineering degree from out east, then Ivy League grad school by age twenty. She gave reports to men who ran a corporate economy larger than most countries. She was somebody’s golden child, fast-tracked to the upper circles. The company based her out of the East Chicago regional headquarters but occasionally flew her to Korea, India, South Africa, to the latest corporate takeovers and the constant stream of new facilities that needed integration. She was an organizational savant, a voice in the ear of the global acquisition market. The multinationals had long since stopped pretending they were about actually making things; it was so much more Darwinian than that now. The big fish ate the little fish, and Uspar-Nagoi, by anyone’s standards, was a whale. You grow fast enough, long enough and pretty soon you need an army of gifted people to understand what you own, and how it all fits together. She was part of that army.
“So what else have you been working on?” she asked.
When I heard her voice, I turned. Veronica: her smooth, pretty face utterly emotionless, the smile gone from her full mouth.
“Okay,” I said. And this time I showed her my real tricks. I showed her what I could really do. Because she’d asked.
Martensite like art. A gentle flame—a slow, smooth origami unfolding.
We watched it together. Metal and fire, a thing I’d never shown anyone before.
“This is beautiful,” she said.
I showed her the butterfly, my little golem—its only movement a slow flexing of its delicate steel wings as it passed through phase changes.
“You made this?”
I nodded. “There are no mechanical parts,” I told her. “Just a single solid sheet of steel.”
“It’s like magic,” she said. She touched it with a delicate index finger.
“Just science,” I said. “Sufficiently advanced.”
We watched the butterfly cool, wings flapping slowly. Finally, it began folding in on itself, cocooning, the true miracle. “The breakthrough was micro-degree shifting,” I said. “It gives you more design control.”
“Why this design?”
I shrugged. “You heat it slow, an ambient rise, and it turns into a butterfly.”
“What happens if you heat it fast?”
I looked at her. “It turns into a dragon.”
That night at her townhome, she took her clothes off slow—her mouth prehensile and searching. Although I was half a head taller, I found her legs were as long as mine. Strong, lean runner’s legs, calf muscles bunched like fists. Afterward we lay on her dark sheets, a distant streetlight filtering through the blinds, drawing a pattern on the wall.
“Are you going to stay the night?” she asked.
I thought of my house, the empty rooms and the silence. “Do you want me to?”
She paused. “Yeah, I want you to.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
The ceiling fan above her bed hummed softly, circulating the air, cooling the sweat on my bare skin.
“I’ve been doing research on you for the last week,” she said. “On what you do.”
“Checking up on me?”
She ignored the question and draped a slick arm across my shoulder. “Nagoi has labs in Asia running parallel to yours. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“From years before the Uspar merger. Smart alloys with chemical triggers instead of heat; and stranger things, too. A special copper-aluminum-nickel alloy that’s supposed to be triggered by remote frequency. Hit a button on a transmitter, and you get phase change by some kind of resonance. I didn’t understand most of it. More of your magic steel.”
“Not magic,” I said.
“Modern chemistry grew out of the art of alchemy. At what point does it start being alchemy again?”
“It’s always been alchemy, at the heart of it. We’re just getting better at it now.”
“I should tell you,” she said, curling her fingers into my hair. “I don’t believe in interracial relationships.” That was the first time she said it—
a thing she’d repeat often during the next year and a half, usually when we were in bed.
“You don’t believe in them?”
“No,” she said.
In the darkness she was a silhouette, a complication of shadows against the window light. She wasn’t looking at me, but at the ceiling. I studied her profile—the rounded forehead, the curve of her jaw, the placement of her mouth—positioned not just between her nose and chin, but also forward of them, as if something in the architecture of her face were straining outward. She wore a steel-gray necklace, Uspar-Nagoi logo glinting between the dark curve of her breasts. I traced her bottom lip with my finger.
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“How’s that?’
“I’ve seen them. They exist.”
I closed my eyes and slept.
The rain was still coming down, building puddles across the Chicago streets. We pulled onto Dearborn and parked the car in a twenty-dollar lot. Veronica squeezed my hand as we walked toward the restaurant.
Voicheck was standing near the door; you couldn’t miss him. Younger than I expected—pale and broad-faced, with a shaved head, dark glasses. He stood outside the restaurant, bare arms folded in front of his chest. He looked more like a bouncer than any kind of scientist.
“You must be Voicheck,” Veronica said, extending her hand.
He hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t expect you to be black.”
She accepted this with only a slight narrowing of her eyes. “Certain people never do. This is my associate, John.”
I nodded and shook his hand, thinking, typical Eastern European lack of tact. It wasn’t racism. It was just that people didn’t come to this country knowing what not to say; they didn’t understand the context. On the floor of the East Chicago steel plant, I’d once had a Russian researcher ask me, loudly, how I could tell the Mexican workers from the Puerto Ricans. He was honestly curious. “You don’t,” I told him. “Ever.”
The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Page 12
