Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  He cranked, stopped, did as he was told, until the man closed up for the night.

  perry was sleeping soundly when tom got home. tom knew the best thing to do was simply leave him alone. He found a scrap of blue, one of perry’s suit, and wrapped up outside against the night.

  It was funny how a sex would keep you awake. There was something about it that worried at your head. The last thing tom liked to do was worry at his head. All it did was get your mind stuck on something and that flat messed up the day.

  tom had been with another perry once. All he did was think about this, think about that: He thought about nu-ju flying overhead, genderella and the dorf. tom had finally had to knock him in the head.

  * * *

  The job at the hut took nearly all night, and big tom turned off jimmie and the others and let them sleep till noon. jimmie felt fine. He found another nub in the pile out back and screwed it in his mouth real good.

  Later in the day, two things happened at once. jimmie could scarcely remember anything like that. First, a herd of bhugs rumbled by just over the hill. More bhugs than he’d ever seen before: lumbering beetles with great, snapping jaws, long, slithery centipedes with dark, brassy scales, mites, ticks, skinny bhugs that looked like sticks. The earth seemed to tremble, and the air was full of sounds like chit-chit-buuuzzzzz-buuuuz whiiiir. jimmie saw a bhug with big red eyes, and when it looked at jimmie he saw maul tom in its scissory jaws.

  Just before dark, all the jimmies, and a lot of peeples too, came out to watch the big truck grind up the hill. When it stopped, the bed slanted up and spilled dozens of brand new toms and perrys to the ground.

  One began to whirl around and dance. One got hungry and tried to eat a rock. Most simply studied their naked parts and wondered what to do next. A few gave up at once, fell down and died.

  jimmie wandered off, the smell of new peeple heavy in the air. Next week, he knew, or the week after that, another truck would come and dump shiny jimmies on the ground. And then, after that . . .

  After that, jimmie thought, after that, they’d do it all again. A little spark sizzled in his head. He’d never, ever had a thought like that before: There were afters, but they didn’t happen all the time. And if that was true—there had to be befores, where anything could happen in between!

  jimmie knew this was much too much to think about all at one time. He decided he’d walk back to K H I D S and take a nap, or see if any jimmies were around, then think on this new stuff a little later on. He glanced back up at the hills, and wondered if mawl perry had made it, or if the bhug had eaten him too . . .

  Copyright © 2011 Neal Barrett, Jr.

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  SHORT STORIES

  God in the Sky

  An Owomoyela

  GOD IN THE SKY

  An Owomoyela

  An Owomoyela tells us that “after the July 2009 Jupiter impact, I got into an argument over how NASA and the other professionals could miss what was then estimated to be a Europe-sized object hurtling through space. Never mind that Jupiter, thirteen thousand times the volume of Earth, is as small as a star in our night sky. Any stellar feature large enough to be obvious would have to be impossibly large or impossibly close.” Thinking about that argument led to the author’s first story for Asimov’s. An is a graduate of the University of Iowa and the 2008 Clarion West Workshop. The author’s publications include stories in ChiZine, Fantasy, and Apex Magazine. An can be found online at http://an.owomoyela.net.

  Three hours after the light flared into the sky, I finally got in touch with Dad. We were frantic, both talking at once: he said, “But we don’t have much information yet,” while I was saying, “There are already theories on the internet”; I said, “This isn’t the Dark Ages, this isn’t an omen,” when he started laughing, saying “People are lining up at church already.” That was Tuesday.

  Two hours after that, when I reached my grandfather, we spoke in similar breathless terms. After he invited me to his ranch home, though, just before he hung up, he said words I’d only heard before in pop politics.

  Allahu akbar.

  Seventy minutes on the interstate took me to my grandfather’s. The light in the sky was indistinct—in daylight you could mistake it for a smudge of cloud, except it was too perfectly round and looked farther away than the blue sky. I pulled in on the gravel road, handling my car like the horses my mother loved to ride, and when I got it lined up by his old Chevy, he was waiting for me on the wood porch with a grin that went up to his eyes. He was seventy-eight. His salt-and-pepper hair was giving way to salt and his dark face was laced with wrinkles, but he trotted down and opened my door for me. When we hugged, it felt like life took nothing out of him except the fat from his middle age and weight from his step.

  “You can help me sort the lentils,” he said.

  We both glanced up before we went in.

  “Your father called,” my grandfather said, kicking off his sandals to walk barefoot on the red carpet. “He said you called him. What a kick. I think each person in this family has tried to call everyone else, but no one’s heard a peep from your mother. Have you talked to her?”

  “She’s working on an education initiative in Monrovia,” I said. “Their networks went down. I got a really short email this morning to let me know she was alive, but other than that . . .”

  “She’s probably out there, annoyed that she knows we’re worried,” my grandfather said. “She was always too independent for anyone, your mother. That’s why Paul couldn’t hang on to her. Come on.”

  We headed into the kitchen to commit what my mother used to call atrocities against American cuisine: pizza topped with lentils and caramelized onions, rice on the side, bottles of peach homebrew pulled out from his fridge, and frozen grapes for dessert.

  “I found,” he said, when we’d put the lentils on to simmer and retreated to his patio to watch the empty stable yard, “my old telescope hiding up in the attic, put away with your dad’s old schoolbooks. We should bring it down.”

  “We should,” I agreed, though neither of us got up from our conversation until we went back in for our food.

  My grandfather talked with his hands. He often said, “If you cut off my hands, I’d go mute!” Today all his gestures tended toward the sky, toward the pale half-dollar sitting opposite the moon. Over pizza, I finally asked.

  “Are you converting to Islam?”

  That surprised him. I reminded him of what he’d said on the phone, and he laughed. “Oh, that. I don’t know. I was in a state. I don’t know why I said it. I never really thought about converting back.”

  “Back?”

  “You didn’t think I was agnostic as a boy in Egypt, did you?” he chided. “I came over here and I decided to be American through and through. First that meant being Christian and owning a business. Then all the people I knew became agnostic and I did too.”

  I laughed. “You go with whatever religion’s in vogue?”

  He feigned offense. “I’m easily convinced by articulate individuals.”

  “And you’re meeting a lot of articulate Muslims here on the ranch?”

  My grandfather gave me an annoyed look. That one wasn’t feigned. “No, of course not. As I said, I was in a state. It was a few words from my childhood.” At that, the annoyance faded. “It’s an old man thing, Katri. One day you’ll get old and start reminiscing too.”

  He tossed a grape at me. I ducked to catch it in my mouth, but it hit my chin and bounced off. My grandfather hopped to his feet.

  “I’m going to pull down that telescope,” he said. “Then you’ll have to stay until the sun goes down.”

  “I’ll drink all your beer and have to stay all night,” I told him.

  “I’ll convert back to Islam just for you,” he called from the door. “To keep the evils of homebrew out of your hands.” And with that he vanished inside the house, and I was left wondering why the jibe turned sour in my ears. />
  We had to clean both lenses of the telescope, and setting it up took us until the sun was down. The base had to be screwed together, and most of the screws had gone missing. Of course, we found the screwdriver behind his entertainment center around the time the last colors of sunset were fading from the sky—it’d probably been there since he’d put the TV hutch together.

  Always a gentleman, my grandfather made me take the first look, although he also insisted I look at the light before I tried to see anything else.

  I don’t know what I expected; more powerful telescopes than this had already failed to reveal any information. Through the lens, the object was just diffuse light, like a flashlight shining through paper. I let out a breath and stepped back to let my grandfather see.

  “It’s a bit of a disappointment.”

  “Only you would say that about the most . . .” He waved at the night sky, taking the telescope. “What would you call it? Miraculous? Terrifying? Only you would say that about the most interesting object up there.” He adjusted the focus. “What do you suppose it is?”

  I leaned back. “Something new, probably,” I said. “Something no one’s invented a word for yet.”

  He laughed. “Well, what good is that? All the important events in life—love, birth, death, family—all of them have had names for thousands and thousands of years. All these new ideas like virtual economies and carbon offsets? Those are only important in the day-to-day.”

  “Yeah, we live day to day,” I pointed out. “Life’s day to day.”

  “Katrina,” he said, looking at me. “You just remember that whatever happens out there is nothing compared to what happens down here,” he said, and patted his chest just above his heart.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll make a motivational poster with the light and that quote.”

  “Good.” He grinned. “Market it. That’s my granddaughter, off to be an entrepreneur! I want a share in your profits.”

  I chuckled. “Of course you do.”

  It wasn’t late, but by then I was missing my bed and my girlfriend, and I’d had time to sober off the beer. I excused myself, and my grandfather walked me to the door. He kissed me on the cheek. “Give Josey a kiss for me!”

  I laughed and told him I would.

  MAYOR CALLS NIGHT-SKY OBJECT “GOD,” read the headline in the paper the next day. The bold pull quote said MAYOR MCMAHON OF SAN ANGELO, TEXAS, CAUSED AN UPROAR SATURDAY BY SAYING “THIS LIGHT IS CERTAIN PROOF OF GOD; IT MAY BE GOD IN HIS GLORY.”

  I read it when Josey put her laptop down on the kitchen table in front of me. It was only seven and we were both up, both in robes, her with the morning’s first cup of coffee and me with a phone to my ear. Josey turned back to the window after handing off the laptop, her powder-blue robe looking softer in the early morning light.

  “Yeah,” I said into the mouthpiece, like I’d been saying any time my advisor let me get a word in edgewise. “No. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. I hope so too. Okay.” I counted on him running out of stuff to explain after a while, and after a while, he did. We hung up. “The research office is going on hiatus,” I told Josey, who looked back with the sort of bleary-eyed tired interest I used to get from my grandfather’s old dog. “The other assistant bailed. He doesn’t know if this is what he wants to be doing. Said he wanted to spend time with his mother.”

  “Because the world is ending,” Josey said.

  “Something like that. Dr. Greene says he’ll find work for me to do, keep me paid, but who knows what. Maybe loan me out to another department. Rain gauges in the Chihuahuan, or something. Trapping and tagging snipes.”

  Josey rolled the mug between her hands, watching the reflections in the coffee, then shook her head. “Here.” She sashayed up to the table and slipped into the chair beside me. “I thought you’d be interested. There’s a science section. They say in twenty years . . .”

  She reached across to click a link, calling up some Flash page blinking with layman’s statistics. I put away the phone and took a look at it—most of it was the same stuff I’d been reading for days; how the light had appeared, how many people had called it in to NASA, but there was some information I hadn’t seen before. I read through most of it with detached interest until one item gave me pause. “Whoa.”

  “Nelly?” Josey said. I grabbed a stray envelope and looked across the table for a writing implement, but nothing was in evidence. “Yeah. In twenty years? It’s supposed to fill the night sky.”

  The way she said that, it was almost a question. Like maybe she hadn’t read that right. I frowned at the screen. “You have a pencil?”

  “I hid a few in your robe pockets,” Josey said. I looked down and rummaged in one: sure enough, there were a pair of golf pencils waiting for me. Josey leaned over, brushing hair off her shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Arc seconds,” I said, and started a line of calculations. Josey rested her chin on my shoulder, hanging on the movement of the lead. I finished the calculation and re-read it before answering. “Okay. Yeah, if it keeps growing the way it is. I mean, the Earth turns, it’s gonna rise and set, but the math’s right. Horizon to horizon.”

  Josey pulled away and looked down into her mug, running her thumb around and around the circumference. “What happens to us then?”

  I paused in the middle of putting the pencil back. “What makes you think anything will happen?”

  Josey shrugged and mumbled some indistinct syllables.

  I drummed the pencil against the table. “Actually, what makes you think that it’s even gonna happen?”

  “What, the news?” she asked.

  “Josey,” I said, turning on my chair to tilt my head at her. “Name one entity in the universe that just grows and keeps growing forever. I mean, other than the universe.” I dug the pencil point into the envelope. “It flared already, and now it’s slowed down. Stars explode and then they collapse again. Gamma bursts flash up, make a lot of noise, and then vanish. This light is not gonna keep growing; it’s not gonna fill the night sky.”

  Josey shrugged. She raised her cup and downed the rest of the coffee in one gulp, then set it down hard and gave a defiant look at the face I’d pulled.

  “Your lab isn’t happening. I don’t have class until this afternoon. You know what? Let’s go back to bed.”

  I rolled my neck. “Josey . . .”

  “Just snuggle!” Josey protested, and shut her laptop. I closed my eyes. “The world might be ending.”

  “It’s not ending.”

  “Just come be with me,” Josey said.

  I opened my eyes again. “It’s not God and it’s not gonna end the world,” I said, but I got up and followed Josey into the bedroom anyway.

  I usually tried to make it out to my grandfather’s ranch once a month or so, but I drove up later that day. A two-hour round trip wasn’t bad, with my lab canceled and me with nothing else to do. Not as bad as the half-hour spent waiting for a gas pump, or the clogged street in front of the grocery store where the entire community was buying water and canned food. My grandfather and I followed form from last time, sitting out back and watching the sky after we’d eaten, waiting for it to get dark enough to look through the telescope again. Except for the almost-imperceptible growth, the light looked the same as it had the day before, and the day before that.

  “All those stars and galaxies seem little,” my grandfather said, blocking the light with his thumb. “See there?” He waggled his thumb at me. “Only as big as the deck lamp.”

  I snorted. “It’s a lot farther away, gramps.”

  “And how far would that be? Hmm?” He tilted his head at me, smile roguish. “You being the expert.”

  I stared at him for longer than I should have. He was joking, though it struck me that he was right. I was the first generation on my father’s side to study the sciences. My grandfather had come from Egypt and gone into business, and my father had studied history and become a teacher. I was the authority.

  I pu
t my drink aside and pulled him up from his chair. “Here. Look at this.”

  I pulled him to the spot on the patio that gave us the best view of the night sky, uncut by trees or the line of the roof.

  “Objects look smaller the farther away they are, right?”

  “Yes; I know that,” he said. I searched among the stars for a certain speck and pointed up toward it.

  “You could line up twenty-two Earths in a row, and that’s how wide across Jupiter is,” I told him. “And look. Up there, in the sky, it’s only that big. Okay?”

  He nodded. “Very far away,” he agreed.

  I searched out another point in the night sky and guided him to it, describing the line through a constellation until I knew he saw what I saw. “Jupiter orbits the Sun. Think Jupiter’s big compared to the Earth? The Sun’s five Jupiters across. And all of our planets and their orbits describe a solar system that make the sun look like a marble in a kiddie pool, and the space between solar systems makes those solar systems look like . . . I don’t know.” I was running out of metaphor. “The galaxy is big, gramps. We don’t have words for how big it is. But that pinprick, right there? That’s not a star. It’s a galaxy.”

  I heard him take a breath.

  I shivered, and looped my arm through the crook of his elbow. I’d never had a sense of agoraphobia until taking astronomy classes in undergrad, but the universe yawned open on every side of the Earth. It seemed designed for something bigger. All the planets and all the stars were grains of sand scattered in an ocean, and that half-dollar light was supposed to fill the night sky.

  “We can calculate how far away that galaxy is,” I said, and my voice was so soft that I didn’t know if he’d hear it. “But we can’t work out the math for that light. Sometimes we can tell how close a star in a galaxy is, but we’re not seeing any stars. Or we can tell how redshifted a galaxy is—the more red, the farther away—but that light’s not redshifted at all, not that we can tell. That means maybe it’s not part of our expanding universe . . . .”