Asimov's SF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And what sort of things was I writing about, thirty years ago in those old Galileo columns?

  In the first one of all I noted that science fiction writers, long a notably underpaid crew, were suddenly getting huge advances from book publishers and many were now able, for the first time, to make their livings as full-time writers, something that only a handful of us had been able to manage when I broke in in the 1950s. “I am not, repeat not, in any way objecting to the sudden prosperity that has engulfed nearly all science fiction writers,” I said. “But I do feel some qualms about the ease with which young writers can make themselves self-supporting these days. I know that beyond doubt that I was injured as a writer by having things too easy in my twenties ... Maybe the best science fiction really is written by part-time writers.” Well, time has taken care of that problem. Most new SF writers now get very modest sums indeed for their work, and very few are able to set up shop as full-time pros. Even a lot of veterans are returning to their day jobs. We no longer have to worry, most of us, about the agony of excessive prosperity.

  I had more to say on the same subject in the second column. In the third, I talked about the packaging and marketing of SF books as it applied to my own Lord Valentine's Castle, which was about to appear. “Of course we're not going to market the book as science fiction,” my editor had told me. “We'll handle it as a straight mainstream novel.” It was a noble attempt to break me out of the science fiction ghetto, which had been so constricting for us all. But I did point out to him that the novel takes place on a planet umpteen light-years from now and some fifteen thousand years in the future, which made mainstream handling a bit questionable, and in the end they marketed it as science fiction and did reasonably well that way. Today SF remains what they call “category fiction"—that is, ghetto stuff—and the advent of computerized bookselling makes it most improbable that that will ever change.

  In the fourth column I noted the death of the New Wave, that school of highly experimental, even avant-garde SF, that had its little era between 1966 and 1972 or thereabouts. I expressed no regrets for the excesses of the New Wave, but suggested that it had at least succeeded in boosting the general literary level of SF beyond the old pulp standards, and the effects of that would probably be permanent. By and large, I think I was right.

  Column five continued to examine the New Wave's rejection of old-fashioned notions of plot in favor of stylistic experimentation, and said, “We stand at the threshold of the 1980s; we have survived a time of revolution; we have, I hope, integrated our divergent excesses into something more harmonious; now let us produce a science fiction that avoids both elitism and subliteracy, fiction that holds readers so that they stand spellbound as we tell our tales, and cannot choose but hear.” Did we? I surely hope so.

  And in the sixth and last Galileo column, in the magazine's final issue, dated November 1979, I grumbled about the spelling errors in some recently published books and cited the legal phrase, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus—"False in one thing, false in everything.” If a writer doesn't know how to spell, can we trust him to know anything else? And if a publisher doesn't bother to correct the writer's spelling errors, how much attention is the publisher paying to other aspects of his book, like inconsistencies of plot? I still feel that it's a writer's job to get everything right, from the spelling of words to the name of the capital of Albania. But here we are, thirty years later, and—well, I don't want to get started on the current state of knowledge of such things as spelling and grammar, let alone geography. If I get myself properly wound up I might spend the next ten columns in one long vast lament.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Silverberg

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  * * *

  Novelette: IN THE AGE OF THE QUIET SUN

  by William Barton

  For almost forty years, William Barton has written science fiction books and stories, including the award-winning novel Acts of Conscience (Warner Aspect, 1997) and several stories for Asimov's—most recently, “The Rocket into Planetary Space” (April/May 2007). Regarding his latest tale, the author says, “This story emerged from the last, much as that one did from ‘Harvest Moon’ (September 2005) before it. From a past that never was but could have been, to a future close enough to taste, to ... what? When does today become tomorrow and that real future slip over to one only imagined? This is one answer. One out of many, perhaps."

  When I was about fifty years old, I read a novel whose narrator began by saying, “I have always loved the stars.” I don't remember much else about the story, title and author long forgotten, but I do remember the phrase, how it resonated within me, how it began the changes that pushed me out of an old, stale life and into a new one, so unexpected, so terrifyingly wonderful.

  I used to read a lot of what was called science fiction in those days, tales of far futures, splendid futures, horrible futures, patently impossible futures, not because there was any hope one of those futures might come true, but because in our stale old world it seemed certain no future would come true, good, bad, or indifferent. If you'd asked me, I would not have predicted I would be alive and well almost a half-century later, and if I had, I would have anticipated that same stale old world, grown staler and older still.

  And yet, here I sit in the command pilot's chair of Anabasis, a somewhat elderly AndrewsSpace Model A mk. IX staged Z-pinch fusion-initiated nuclear fission drive scoutship, looking out through a live-action freeze frame window at an infinitely deep black sky aswarm with those same steely bright stars I'd always known I loved.

  Numbers and graphs danced like sugarplums in my little horseshoe of displays, while Ylva, the ship's organic AI system whispered sweet nothings in my earbuds, secure in the employ of Standard ARM, who'd stolen that terrifyingly wonderful life from me, took my wealth, killed my best friend, and threw me in prison to rot, while my wife languished in a nursing home and died from old age and penury, just when salvation was at hand.

  Mostly, I wanted to forget all that'd happened, get on with my new life and new name. Just live. That's all you have to do. I glanced over the freeze-frames, determined to take my own advice for the ten-thousandth time, and Ylva's sultry voice whispered in my right ear, “Coming up on six hundred kilometers from Hector, Mr. Zed. Are you all right?”

  “Fine sweetie. Too much time on my hands. When you're as old as I am...”

  Voice softening, she said, “I'll never get to be as old as you.”

  “Sorry.”

  She said, “When my heart stopped and they harvested my organs, that particular clock stopped ticking for me. Bastards.” Official view is, they're just computers with some dead human nervous system tissue added in, but when you hear that bitterness in your ear...

  I shrugged. “There are worse things than being thirty-nine forever, sweetie.”

  She laughed in my ear then, familiar, warming those cockles we all hope we have. “The drugs will get better, and you'll get back what you lost.”

  She knows what I really lost. The rest of it ... Well, the Maunder Minimum came on schedule, no more sunspots, cooler climate ameliorating that famous global warming, and no more solar magnetic storms, helping bring on the Great Age of Solar System Exploration.

  Of course, there was a corresponding increase in the cosmic radiation flux to go along with it, but we can do things about that. Drugs to make your cells tougher and harder to damage. Drugs to encourage your DNA to do a better repair job, when damage does occur. Side effects? Well, yes. That shiny, beady, lizard-like skin. That complete loss of hair, body and pate. Oh, and the “dramatic reduction in primary sexual characteristics,” that too.

  And one other side effect they liked to call an “undocumented feature,” as if the drugs were developed by software engineers. Harder to damage? Better repair at the cellular level? They'd started giving me the drugs while I was in prison and volunteered to be a medical test subject in exchange for being let out while I was still shy of eighty.

  That wa
s twenty years ago.

  Ylva said, “We got a laser intersect from Mars. Standard HQ want to download our databases.”

  “A little early, isn't it?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “They say why?”

  “No. They never do.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A pip from Vesta just after the laser started. ‘Message for Murph’ routed through an OPEL ship crossing Jupiter's orbit.” Jenny Murphy, my senior commodities specialist, still had family, three grown children back on Earth, kids she'd had with the husband who died in an accident on Callisto last year, the one who'd bestowed the embarrassing flight-handle Candyfloss on her. Probably letting her know she was a grandma now. Something like that.

  You could get private messages through the Outer Planets Exploration Laboratory. Technically, they were a US government organization, but affiliated with MIT and Cal Tech, not quite so beholden to agencies, politicians, and corporate money. Almost, but not quite. Trivial messages. The sort of thing a company would tell you was “a misuse of private resources.”

  Jenny and her husband had been planning on going home when their contracts were up. Go home, stop taking the drugs, turn back into human beings again. I guess if I stopped taking them, I'd turn into a corpse.

  I ran my hand around the freeze-frames, brought up a telescopic image of Hector on the main channel, just below the live-action window. Dark gray, dimly lit up by the tiny sun, largest of the Fore-Trojan Asteroids, paler, soft and rounded on one side, darker and more angular on the other. Good compositional sign, of course, letting us know there might be a discrete tidal warming zone inside the body.

  Standard Asteroid Resources Mining had staked a claim to the entire cluster, not long after they killed Willie and threw me in the slammer, not long after they'd taken control of the company, taken over the name we'd so cleverly made up.

  Time to make good on the claim. Oil for the engines of Earth? Hard to believe I was the marketing genius who thought that one up, more than forty years ago.

  * * * *

  Floating weightless in my sleeping bag, hanging from one wall of my closet-sized stateroom, I could hear Jenny chattering away out loud with Ylva, the two of them giggling like happy young girls. Her version of Ylva, so different from mine, maybe fourteen years old, with bright blue eyes and ripe-wheat hair, pigtails spiraling around each ear, Princess Leia-style. Jenny's forty years younger than I am, Ylva younger still, but I guess they keep revising the saga, keeping it current, keeping it popular.

  I'd seen the real Ylva, in an old photo in a file I got using up-to-date hacking skills Standard ARM doesn't know I have.

  The photo is from 2038, the year she died, and shows a thin, angular, far-from-pretty woman just shy of forty, arm of a tall, severe-looking man around her shoulders, her own hands on the shoulders of two children standing in front of her, a boy of about twelve, a girl maybe eight, both with that same ripe-wheat hair, rather than the man's dark brown. No one's smiling in the photo, but they all look ... secure. Yes, that's the right word. In the background, there's a small house and a cheap compressed-air hybrid car, beyond a dry-looking field and a stand of parched timber.

  The dim darkness around me flickered and my own little Ylva slid out of the air, looking flat for just a second, then inflating to 3D.

  She was a little like the girl Jenny talks to, a little like the woman in the picture too. Fortyish. But fuller, sleeker, prettier, only the ripe-wheat hair just the same. Today, she was dressed in a more or less colorless, form fitting knit outfit, sweater and slacks clinging to her just so, sweater outlining full breasts, slacks clinging suggestively to her crotch.

  She dimpled a smile, subtle eyespots able to determine just where I was looking.

  I'd racked my drug-addled brain trying to figure out why this version of Ylva looked so familiar to me. Finally, I realized she was mimicking some TV personality from back in the 1990s, though I couldn't remember exactly which one. A girl with a Hispanic name, belied by hanging tresses of this same ripe-wheat hair.

  Maybe she was still on TV when Ylva was a girl, not long after the turn of the century. Maybe in reruns? Or maybe the damn computer can read my mind.

  She said, “You look sad, Mr. Zed. Are you thinking about Sarah today?”

  Ylva knows I loved my wife. Loved her more than there are any words to say. Knows I miss her. Knows I think I killed her, just the same as I think I killed my friend Willie Gilooly, even though the one died in a Social Security Home, died from old age when I did not, and the other died because when the FBI came to our offices, he took out a pistol and ordered them off the premises. Died defending what was right, while I meekly held out my hands for the cuffs and toddled off to Federal prison.

  God damn it.

  I said, “No, actually I was thinking about you.” Giggling from the next compartment. “This you. That you. The real you.”

  She stretched, arching her back, belly sinking in, breasts pushing out hard against the stretchy knit cloth. “The real me? You old fool.”

  Behind her, a misty image formed, a bullet train crossing the landscape of 2038 America, running the fast track between Chicago and Kansas City, a two-hour express trip. Inside, that secure woman sat with a child on either side of her, the three of them reading an old coffee-table book together. It was something from the middle of the twentieth century, with Bonestell paintings of outer space, with fantastic illustrations of conical Von Braun rockets, men in Tin Woodman spacesuits here and there.

  Voice ever so wistful, my Ylva said, “Orm and Helga both wanted to be astronauts. Wanted to grow up and work for Standard ARM, go to Mars, Venus, Jupiter, maybe explore the moons of Saturn when that day came...”

  The misty scene behind her showed the dark haired man waiting at an ultramodern train station in KC, waiting among the throngs for his family to join him in the new city, where the new jobs were. New jobs that would send those children to MIT or maybe Cal Tech, get them the degrees necessary to make their own dreams come true.

  But the bullet train twirled in the air somehow, sprawling across the landscape at four hundred miles an hour, crushing houses, killing hundreds and ... Ylva woke in the wreckage, woke in a dreamlike state, no pain, no feeling of any kind, no movement, but for her eyes. About ten feet away was half of her daughter, beyond, a shoe that looked like one of the ones her son had been wearing. It seemed as though there might be a foot still inside.

  She closed her eyes and went away.

  Woke up inside a machine.

  Like a litany, she said, “When I ticked the box on my driver's license renewal form, agreeing to be an organ donor, I thought I'd be giving something to those in need, corneas, kidneys, a heart ... but the bastards ... The bastards.”

  The misty scene faded, and Ylva stood, stretched again, body moving as if under one gee, then pulled the sweater off over her head, quickly slid down the slacks and stood naked, facing me, watching my eyes go here and there.

  After a while, she said, “I wish I could climb out of the machinery for you, Mr. Zed. I really do.”

  And I whispered, “If you could, I wouldn't be much use to you, would I?”

  Perhaps we will live forever, Ylva and I.

  I guess the joke's on us.

  * * * *

  In time, Ylva slid away, past, present, and future forgotten. I eeled from my sleeping bag, snakeskin making a corduroy sound on the slick cloth, slid aside the roller-blind door of my stateroom, and floated out into the main hab compartment.

  Jenny was naked in the personal hygiene module, in front of the sink and mirror, toes anchored in foot restraints, having a sponge bath. I've seen pre-space pictures of Jenny Murphy, even the one carried by her husband on the day he died, showing why he'd called her Candyfloss. Now, she had gray lizardskin just like mine, hairless here, hairless there, breasts gone without a trace, between her legs perhaps a little less than what's left between mine.

  She looks like a Sleestak.


  When I told her that, she'd had to look the word up. Then we'd gotten a few episodes to watch, and had a laugh about the phrase “routine expedition.”

  She was laughing now, lizardface bright and sunny, “Oh, that's hysterical, Ylva!”

  The ghostgirl hanging in the air was laughing too, laughing like a happy child.

  My Ylva sometimes wonders if there's anything left of her dead children, if they're part of another machine somewhere, some machine she may some day meet. I haven't been able to find a trace, but her husband eventually remarried, a small woman with pretty brown skin and tufty black hair, and they have two beautiful golden children now.

  I pushed over to the med module, flying like a character in a dream, put my toes in the restraints, took out a meter and loaded a test strip, made sure there was a cartridge of lancets in the gun. I fired it into my left palm, a little burn for just a moment while I watched that familiar microliter of blood well up. Dipped in the strip and watched it drink. Hmh. Blood sugar a high 133 mg/dl. B12 a little low. An extra high prescription for three different kinds of antirad drugs. I wonder...

  When I turned and looked at Jenny and Ylva, two distinct blue contrails darted across the room. The images moved with me, like giant floaters, as they faded away. Two high-energy cosmic rays had just transited my eyes, vitreous humor reacting like a cloud chamber, and that meant many more of them were penetrating the hull and polyethylene shielding, passing through my body, my brain ... okay. Ylva knows best.

  I popped an insulin pen into the skin of my belly, not feeling a thing. Pushed an inch-long needle into my thigh, pulled back the plunger to make sure I wasn't in a vein or artery, and pushed in a thousand micrograms of thick red serum. Got out the air gun and three cartridges for the antirad...

  They talk about putting sensors and pumps in us, but talk is cheap and so are needles.

  Behind me, Jenny called out, “You want some breakfast, Zed?” When I looked, she was soaring toward me, still naked, and for just a second I saw the lovely woman I'd met at the cosmodrome, my last day on Earth, who'd just taken her first dose of “space drugs.”