Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Nothing happened. Adola sighed and sighed again, holding her breath, and then she sat back, putting air between them before saying, “No.” With a slow, hard voice, she told him, “That isn’t going to happen. No, no, no.”

  Brenda asks by not asking.

  With a smiling voice, she says, “You look nice today.”

  “Thank you.”

  She waits and then asks, “How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine,” he says.

  “Wonderful.”

  Tito sits at one end of Brenda’s enclosure, listening to the deep-cat discussing some issue with nobody. Deep-cats are solitary creatures. They can entertain themselves all day with puzzles and mathematical conundrums. Adola claimed that they stalked problems like earthly cats attack mice. It is very rare for cats to visit one another, which must make them easier to care for than social, endlessly insecure humans.

  Brenda drags her chair close to Tito’s chair and sits.

  He says nothing.

  Her breathing is shallow and quick. She doesn’t touch him, but he feels the heat of a hand near his face, and then the hand is gone.

  “Your whiskers need a trim,” she says.

  “They do?”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  He waits a moment before saying, “No thank you.”

  A slow exasperated sound ends in silence. She waits a very long while before asking, “Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why can’t I trim your little beard?”

  “You said I looked nice,” he says. “I thought you did.”

  “It’ll make you even nicer,” she says.

  The deep-cat has stopped talking. Maybe he is watching them.

  Brenda shifts her weight. Then with each word flat and simple, she says, “Our day is almost done.”

  Tito nods. He says, “It feels late.”

  “And have I asked?” She leans closer. “Have I pestered you at all?”

  “You’ve been very good,” he admits.

  “Good enough?”

  Tito smiles in the direction of the deep-cat.

  “You’re just teasing me, aren’t you?” Brenda touches herself. He knows the sound she makes when she touches her own body, and he waits for her voice to change, growing slower and distracted. “I hate being teased. I do.”

  “I’m not teasing.”

  “You are.”

  He smiles at her voice and says, “She likes my beard.”

  “Who does?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  Brenda stops rubbing herself. A sour, angry sound comes out of her, but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t trust herself to talk.

  “I think about the master,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Day by day,” he says. “Isn’t it amazing what the master can do?”

  “The master is incredible,” she says.

  Tito nods and scratches his scalp, his face, and then his ragged beard. “Why do you think it does all of this?”

  “Does what?”

  “Everything.” He makes a sweeping motion with his arm. “It must be a lot of work, one creature caring for all of us.”

  “Yet the master does it.”

  “But only us. At least there aren’t any others that we can see.”

  “You can’t see anything,” she teases.

  Tito ignores her. Imagining the deep-cat, he says, “Obviously the master likes this work, this burden. But no matter how fantastic its powers, our keeper has only so many hands and so much patience.”

  “The master is great,” Brenda says.

  “And it loves this work,” he says.

  She says, “Well, good then. Thank you, Master.”

  “It loves having us here,” he says.

  Brenda refastens her trousers. She isn’t sure what to make of this conversation, much less how to react.

  “But,” he says. “But I don’t think it really loves us.”

  She sighs.

  “No, I don’t think it can love.” Tito nods and puts on a big sad smile, telling Brenda, “We’re possessions, and of course we’re thankful for being saved, and the master loves being the powerful ruler of this place and all of these complicated prizes.”

  “Prizes?”

  “Us,” he says. “The master is a collector. I think. Being nice to us is just part of the game it plays.”

  “The master loves me,” says Brenda. “Every morning and every evening, that’s what it tells me.”

  “‘Love’ is a sound. It’s a word keeping us happy in our cages.”

  “That’s just crazy.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Brenda tells him.

  He shrugs as if admitting that she might be right. Then he faces her voice and smiles in a different way, saying, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.”

  Brenda moans.

  “Ever again,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re disgusting and mean, and I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you, and I never want to touch you again.”

  She hits him.

  “That didn’t hurt,” he says.

  Then with the scissors that she would have used on his beard, she does quite a bit more than hit him.

  * * *

  The boy woke up in the middle of the night. He was alone in bed. The tall woman liked to sleep beside him. That would keep him safe, she said. But she was gone and someone was making noise in the bathroom, and he climbed down and crossed the hallway to see her kneeling, throwing up into the toilet. Some kind of bug had gotten inside her. That’s what she told him. Her belly kept trying to empty itself even when nothing was left inside, and he watched her agony and felt sorry and felt other ways too.

  He was still six, but an older six. He noticed more now. The woman finished throwing up but the sweat kept coming out of her face and from under her long arms, and she sobbed and said she was better when she wasn’t, and she tried to stand but couldn’t. Her legs went out from under her, and he backed away, and she looked at him in that way that meant quite a lot. She said, “Stay.” Pointing a wet finger, she said, “Don’t. You. Move.”

  He sat in the hallway, waiting.

  He was six and watched television when she let him, usually after he was good all day, and he had noticed that most people wore special clothes to bed. They were clothes meant for sleeping in. But the tall woman insisted that they had to keep their normal clothes on all of the time. There might be an emergency. Bad people might come and try to steal him. He was that important, that valuable. She wouldn’t let anyone take what was hers, and she didn’t like him watching television because it was full of the wrong ideas, and he wasn’t as good as he used to be. She said this more and more. She shook a finger at his sorry face, and she made him wear normal clothes to bed, and she didn’t want him out of her sight, even when her insides began aching again.

  She sat on the toilet the next time, and the next. It was almost morning when there wasn’t anything left of the bug inside her, and she went to bed slowly and called him, “Such a good boy,” and he stretched out beside her. She smelled wrong. Her skin was sour and her breath stank, and she said that she would take a little nap and then they would get up together and get busy with their day.

  The tall woman never slept long or deeply.

  Except that day was different. Her eyes closed and he lay still beside her, watching her eyes moving under the dark exhausted lids, and sometimes she muttered words and sometimes she only breathed. He watched her breathing and listened, and his mind ran in dangerous ways.

  The sun came up, and he watched her.

  Birds were singing outside, and they sang in his head. That’s what happened when you heard anything. It happened in the world and it happened in your head. Then from past the bird songs came the purposeful rumbling of a school bus coming up the street, and before he could think, the boy was out of bed and running, count
ing the mighty steps toward the front door of a little house.

  The master cured his aches and bandaged the wounds, managing to say nothing through the long process. Then Tito was placed on a bed inside the infirmary, suspended between sterile sheets, and maybe the master had left him. Or maybe it was close. He lay still and listened to the soft moaning of a hawk-beast freshly arrived from its horrible home world. Then to the silence, he said, “Blame me, Master. Please don’t punish Brenda.”

  “She struck you,” said the voice of rock. “If I hadn’t intervened, you would have died.”

  Tito nodded, fingers lightly touching the closed gouge on his neck. “But you saved me. As always.”

  “Such a sorrowful day,” the master said.

  Tito closed his scabbed mouth.

  “It will be a very long time before your friend can be trusted with anyone. And forever, I will have to take precautions.”

  “What about me, Master?”

  “What about you?”

  “You should punish me. I knew what I was doing. Nothing but words, but I made the woman furious.”

  “All right, Tito. What kind of punishment would be appropriate?”

  “Don’t let me visit other people.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  It is a remarkable thing, saying words to the master and not hearing an immediate, perfectly reasoned response. The voice isn’t flustered when it returns, but there is a stiffness that Tito has never noticed before. “You are guilty of much, yes. But both of us realize that nobody else poses the same danger as Brenda.”

  “Are you certain? Did you hear me speaking to her?”

  “I know what you said, Tito.”

  “I might have said worse.”

  Silence.

  “What if I tell the next person that the master doesn’t pick up the injured and maimed? I could claim that you visit the Earth and these other worlds just to watch the misery. Tragedies unfold beneath you, and what you like best you snatch up to bring here.”

  “Who would believe such a tale?”

  “I do.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I have never asked, Master. When did you first see me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was it when the house exploded into fire, or before that? Did you see the tall woman catch me? Or did you watch me run out to catch the purple bus? Or maybe you watched me for days and days, using your wisdom, knowing that something awful would happen soon.”

  “Tito. I do love you.”

  “Don’t trust me with the others,” he said. “I will tell them whatever it takes, and they won’t look at you in the same way again.”

  “Then you won’t visit anybody again.”

  “And I’ll die of boredom and loneliness.”

  A second pause ends with the sensation of breath against the face. Then the weary voice asks, “What do you want from me, Tito?”

  “You know,” he says

  Then after a moment, he adds, “Or you know nothing at all about me.”

  The bus nearly drove past. The little boy stood at the curb and waved, and it was the children in back who noticed him and screamed with one great happy voice, a dozen curious faces staring down through dirty glass. The fat woman stomped on the brakes and opened the door as he ran alongside, and then he leaped up onto the bottom step, too happy and too breathless to speak.

  “Now are you going to school?” she asked.

  He nodded, believing that was best.

  The driver had a nice smile, and then she wasn’t smiling. Her gaze lifted, and she squirmed uneasily in the chair. To somebody else, she said, “Hello there.”

  A smelly hand grabbed the boy by the elbow, and the tall woman yanked hard enough to pull him off his feet.

  The driver said a bad word.

  “Why are you out here?” the tall woman asked. Then she shook him hard and pulled him down onto the curb, and she grabbed both shoulders, trying to shove him down into the weedy, uncut lawn.

  “What are you doing?” the driver asked. “Lady. What are you doing?”

  “Come with me,” said the tall woman.

  The boy was picked up and carried. But the woman was exhausted from being sick, and she couldn’t hold tight. He managed to slip free and jump back onto the steps, and with a voice louder than anything that had ever come out of him, he screamed, “She’s not my mother. She stole me from my parents.”

  Again, he was carried away.

  Horrified, the driver watched boy and woman wrestle their way across the yard. Then she finally pulled a little phone out of her pocket and punched buttons and started to yell.

  The tall woman dragged the boy inside.

  He hit her and wished he could hit her again, but even sick, she was so much larger and stronger. And all of the anger that she had shown in her life was nothing like the rage that took hold of her now.

  She didn’t stop hitting him until the police pulled up.

  Cursing, she lifted the blind and dropped it and looked hard at this boy that had been so very bad. She explained just how awful he was as she dragged him into the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife and a little pack of matches before hurrying into the basement. Her knee hurt, and the steps were steep, and those were new reasons to be angry. But her thinking was clear. She knew precisely what she was doing. Weeks and weeks ago, she dreamed up this plan for when the worst happened, and the worst always happened. A length of decrepit black hose brought natural gas into the house, and the long knife let her cut through the hose, the gas flowing like an endless stinking breath.

  Bleeding, the boy sat on the floor, too weak to stand.

  The air turned foul and close, and both of them coughed. “This is where you put us,” she said. “You stupid bastard.”

  A knock sounded at the front door.

  The doorbell rang.

  The boy called out, and she struck him.

  He coughed and she coughed harder, and he tried to stand, and she threw him onto his back and said, “Look at me.”

  His eyes were closed. He didn’t want to look.

  “I said look at me.”

  At last the front door was forced open, and big men with powerful, important feet were walking above their heads.

  The boy shook his head and bit her empty hand.

  She never spoke another word. The pack of matches was in her mouth. Using the tip of the knife, she carved away at those hard-closed eyes, at the stubborn lids, even while the face struggled and screamed in her bleeding hand. Somewhere the matches fell away and were lost. It didn’t matter. The front door had been left open, cool morning air slipping inside, and that’s when the ancient furnace decided to turn on—a wet snap and a blue spark becoming a fierce blue explosion that was everywhere at once, and the blast threw a chunk of steel into his flailing arm, and he remained awake and in agony, aware of everything including his endless misery, and he screamed until that strange second light decided to engulf both of them, taking only one.

  “I wish to purchase a ticket.”

  “Destination?”

  “Lagos.”

  The dispatcher looks at him and says nothing. There are several reasons for silence, all good.

  “Lagos, Nigeria,” says the mutilated man.

  “Now, sir.” He starts to laugh and then stops, knowing how that looks. Laughing at a blind man and all. He settles for a meaningful sigh, saying, “There is this problem, sir. We don’t drive there.”

  “I know.”

  “This is a bus station.”

  “Of course it is.” The blind man has one arm and a hidden stump, and he has a little beard, and he’s dressed in a fine suit and wonderful fat tie. A small leather suitcase is set on the floor beneath his hand. There’s money in his appearance, and he doesn’t belong here. Everybody stares. He looks prosperous and helpless, and those who don’t want to rob him are terrified for him.

  “Where did you come from?” the dispatcher asks.
<
br />   The blind man smiles. “That is an interesting story.”

  Then he says nothing.

  Pieces of his face have been burned, and a fresh cut marks his scrawny neck. The dispatcher is thankful for the sunglasses. Blind eyes really creep him out.

  “I haven’t been here very long,” says the customer. “Really, I don’t know much about much. I am sorry. There was something of a rush to get me to this place. But I insisted, and this is where I’ll begin.”

  “All right, sir.”

  “Lagos,” he repeats.

  “That is on another continent, and this is a bus station.”

  “But you know where it is?”

  “In a general way, sure.”

  “Are you a good man?”

  The dispatcher nearly says, “Yes.” But the question is so serious and the customer so unexpected that he stands silent for a moment, considering his response. Then with cautious surety, he says, “Generally good, yes.”

  “I’m thinking of hiring you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Are you black?”

  He takes a breath. He says, “Yes.”

  “Lagos is a black city, as I understand it.”

  The dispatcher looks at the people waiting in line and the other travelers and then at his dumbfounded co-workers. “What are you telling me?”

  “I have money.”

  “Great.”

  From the pocket of his trousers comes a roll of bills. The blind man tries to set them on the counter, and the roll misses and drops, and the college kid behind him scoops up the money, turning in his fingers, and he’s shaking from excitement when he sets the roll in front of the dispatcher.

  “Shit,” says the dispatcher.

  “And do you have a passport?” asks the blind man. “I have been told that we need passports.”

  “I got one. So what?”

  “Of course I have mine.” The little book comes out of another pocket. “And I’m supposed to ask you: Are you on any watch lists?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What else?” The blind man closes his mouth, thinking.

  “You really want to hire me?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll need help to get where I’m going.”