Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  Taylor tossed the grapefruit in the air once, like a big league pitcher testing the ball's weight, then unceremoniously thrust his arm into the hanging pool of fire, which neatly severed it at the elbow.

  Rob-o clapped. Matilda screamed a hysterical little laugh before clapping both hands over her mouth, and John-john shrieked girlishly and jumped into his chair, shielding his face against the books. I realized that my heart—which had been beating a little quickly—suddenly seemed silent, and I wondered Did I just die?, the thought as clear and concrete as a jagged pebble in my shoe.

  Taylor seemed unimpressed by having lost his good right arm. "Man," he said, "I love the impact of that gag. It always kills." Rob-o leaned forward so that he and Taylor could slap a high five, and then Rob-o spun on his heel, doing a giddy little schoolboy dance.

  Taylor stepped back, his arm materializing as it pulled out of the fiery pool. Once his arm was clear, the portal dissipated like time-lapse footage of a pond evaporating. When it was gone, I realized it had made a sound, a sort of crackling, like running your hand through the cushion of static electricity on the screen of a big ole TV that's been running for hours.

  Taylor looked at his watch. "Let's no one move for sixty seconds or so, just in case. Like I said, the resolution isn't great on these old-ass GPSes, and I'm not really sure how the portal handles the fact that it wants more significant digits than Magellan can offer." John-john unwound, bashfully stepping down from his perch, but no one else moved.

  "I, um, don't usually do a demo in such a little place," Taylor explained. He was talking just to fill the dead air, I think. I wasn't really processing. "No offense," he added, "This is a really swell bookshop, but, um, FYI: This business model isn't super solid. What are you studying?" It took a beat or two before I realized he was looking at me.

  "Comp Lit," I said automatically. Guys asked my boobs this question daily when I was working the register. "I'm into alternative feminist recasting of traditional narratives."

  "Comparative literature?" He nodded his head appraisingly. "Cool," and he actually seemed to think it was cool—most guys just told my breasts they thought that was "really cool," and then they asked my breasts if they'd like to go get coffee, and presumably be grabbed afterward. Oddly, Taylor focused all of this chit-chat at my actual face, behind which I keep my brain, within which I wondered why I was going deep into hock just to argue semantics in the morning, buy back unopened women's studies textbooks in the afternoon, and torch ATMs at night. When his eyes finally wandered down, they seemed more into what was on my shirt than what was in it.

  "You did 4-H?"

  "Yeah." I still couldn't feel my heart beating. "As a kid. My family raises sheep outside Paxton. I raised and showed goats."

  "You should totally consider starting a petting zoo," he said wistfully, "whisk me away from all this."

  And then Taylor's portal returned. He dipped his arm into the fiery water-light again, despite John-john weakly gasping " Don't!", then rooted around for a moment, like a guy trying to fish his car keys out of a koi pond.

  Taylor pulled a dingy tennis ball out of the shifting, hanging puddle, which again evaporated, leaving only the dim shadow of its crackling.

  But, of course, it wasn't a tennis ball. It was the grapefruit, covered in mold, desiccated with age, as though it had spent a month at the back of a dorm-room mini-fridge.

  "Ta da!" he said, gingerly holding it aloft between thumb and index finger. I could clearly see Bill's black scrawl under the mold.

  "That's a trick," militantly skeptical Matilda said with absolutely no conviction. Buffalo Bill had taken the grapefruit from Taylor and was carefully inspecting it.

  "All the siggies are here," he said. John-john came over to look while Rob-o spun on his heels one last time, muttering "so sweet" in apparent ecstasy.

  "My dad was a Burger King magician," Matilda said. "Kids' parties and stuff, on the little stage in the non-smoking section. He did a trick like this—but with an orange that turns out to have a dove inside. Or to seem that way. But the same thing, where the birthday boy signs his name on it to ' prove ' "—she used air quotes—"that it's his orange. It's a trick."

  Buffalo Bill unclipped the gravity knife from his pocket, flicking the blade out with an icy click. He crouched on the linoleum and cut the grapefruit in half.

  "Dude," Taylor said uncertainly, "I totally wouldn't eat that; it's gonna have been in my cubicle's mini-fridge for nine weeks." But Bill didn't acknowledge him. Johnjohn crowded close over Bill's shoulder, but you didn't need to be close: I could see the glints of metal in the still slightly moist flesh of the fruit from where I was standing.

  "What are those?" John-john asked, "like, chrono-cicles?"

  Taylor, for the first time that evening, was as saucer-eyed as the rest of us. "Yeah; what are those? What are chrono-cicles?"

  Buffalo Bill continued to ignore them both, rooting through the citrus flesh with his grease-stained fingers. "Six," he said, "Seven. Nine." He stood, holding out his palm so we could all see the sticky straight pins. "They're all here. This is legit. This guy is legit."

  Matilda plopped heavily into one of the chairs.

  "Why does the Department of Agriculture have a time machine?" I asked numbly.

  "Time machines," Taylor answered, his confidence restored after the brief off-script stage business with Buffalo Bill's straight pins. "Basically, to do this: Test preservatives, culture samples, whatever. Make time for stuff that takes time."

  "I thought it would look like a DeLorean," I said lamely. I'd sort of meant it as a joke, but once I said it I realized I'd also sort of meant it for real.

  "Yeah," Taylor said. "Everyone does. I mean, after 1985 they do. Then before that there's a phone booth period, and before that you get burned as a witch. The funny thing is that I've never even seen that old movie—" "

  You've never seen Back to the Future? Everyone's seen Back to the Future!"

  "Maybe," he smiled his honest smile, "Maybe you could show me Back to the Future?"

  I could feel myself blushing, because this was the most awkward way I'd ever been asked out. "Maybe—" I began, but Rob-o cut me off, mock-yelling through his cupped hands:

  "Maybe you could get a room, Suze!"

  "Right!" Taylor exclaimed, clapping his hands and turning back to his audience. "Rob-o is right; I'm not here to drop ye olde timey pop-culture references. I'm here because Deke and I have a master key to the labs, and we're 99 percent sure that you guys can think of something 100 percent better for humanity than insta-rotting citrus."

  This caught us off guard; in all the late-night-TV demo shenanigans, it had sort of slipped into the background that we'd been meeting to talk about our next direct action. We'd been planning to firebomb unoccupied cop cars. That suddenly seemed like small potatoes.

  Predictably, it was Buffalo Bill who regained his equilibrium the quickest.

  "We should kill Hitler," he said decisively. Taylor pulled a face upon hearing this. "I've got a Kalashnikov at my place," Buffalo Bill stood. "I can be back in ten minutes."

  Taylor grimaced and held up a hand to stop him. "Yeah, that's good instincts—and I like your pluck," he smiled encouragingly, "But... why... why not think... bigger?" Taylor nodded as he said bigger.

  "How big?" Bill asked, his interest genuine and intense. "How big can the portal get?"

  Taylor looked around the room. "Pretty big. And we can pop it up wherever."

  Bill sat back down to think.

  "Big enough to drive a truck through?" Bill asked. "A van?"

  Taylor smiled and nodded eagerly, "Hell yeah, bro!"

  "And is it stable? There's no crazy heat spike or weird compression as you pass through?"

  "Safe as houses," Taylor assured us.

  "So we could drive a van full of propane tanks and blasting caps through it? Pop up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1992?"

  "Or McDonald's headquarters back before the clown ate the world
?" Rob-o asked.

  "Or Nixon's White House!" John-john marveled.

  Bill never looked away from Taylor, but he wasn't seeing him, either. He was seeing everything he could tear down with that portal to do his bidding. It was as though none of us were there. Bill seemed to mostly be talking to himself when he finally said, "Or the World Trade Center?"

  I don't think anyone else saw it when Taylor's face faltered. Just for an instant his real smile dropped, and he quickly pasted that big marketoid smile over it. But it wasn't in his eyes. His eyes were like a dog's when he jumps off a pier and then realizes how high the climb back up to solid ground is.

  "Sure!" He fake enthused, stepping up to slap Buffalo Bill's thick shoulder. "You guys are thinking big. I like that. I love that! But think about big impacts. You can go small and subtle, and have a big result—remember, you've got all the time in the world to run this gag."

  And then Matilda, God bless her atheist heart, said, "How far back can we go?"

  Taylor frowned as he thought about it. "All the way, I guess."

  "Okay. Because I was reading this article about how junk food is basically addictive, right? Twinkies, for example, they're all full of fat and sugar. That's super hard to get in nature, so when we find it—" she faltered.

  "I read this, too!" I jumped in. "Fat, sugar, and salt are really important when food is scarce: The fat is lots of calories in a small package, the salt is electrolytes—because so many famines are caused by droughts, dehydration is a problem—and the sugar is quick energy that's easy for the body to extract."

  "Yeah!" Matilda said, getting excited, "So this is why people love bacon, or just mindlessly munch chips or M&Ms until the snacks are all gone and they bloat up: Evolution selected for the cavemen that ate all the sugar, salt, and fat they could find because it gave them a survival edge."

  "Oh!" Rob-o suddenly sat upright. "That article from Utne Reader!"

  "Or Harper's, " Matilda said. "One of them. But now the thing is that those foods aren't scarce, and it turns out that eating a ton of it is super bad for you. Cavemen never had a chance to eat themselves fat because they never found that much fat or salt or sugar. Like, seriously, how much bacon is on one boar? And how many folks were sharing it? But we live longer and can buy all the salty-sweet fat we want, and our prehistoric edge is killing us. Obesity, heart disease—all of that."

  Bill squinted. "What's this have to do with revolution?" It was a cagey question. I think he already saw where Matilda was going.

  "What if we go back to paleolithic Europe, or whatever, with Twinkies. Tons of Twinkies."

  "They'll pig out," Rob-o marveled.

  "And fatten up," I said. "Lots of them will, the ones most susceptible to putting on weight, like how Polynesians are. The ones that diabetes doesn't get, sabertooth tigers will."

  "We can crater the population," Bill said admiringly.

  "Exactly!" Matilda agreed. "Think about how far we'd wind back scarcity if we took just 10 percent off the base population pool forty-five thousand years ago."

  "Oh!" I shouted to be heard above everyone. "And —damn!— and whoever makes it through does it because they're genetically hardened against—shit, what did the article call it?"

  "Diseases of affluence," Matilda said with finality.

  Taylor clapped, "Hot damn! Humanity's best Twinkie defense is a good Twinkie offense! I love it! I knew you were my dream team on this. Now there's just the logistics. Sounds like we need a crapload of Twinkies. Any of you guys know a Twinkie farmer?"

  And we started planning how to finance this, how to supply it, when and where to meet next. At 11 o'clock Taylor's watch started to beep, and he excused himself—but not before asking me when I'd be working next. I told him I had the afternoon shift at the register the next day, and he said he'd bring me lunch—something healthful and devoid of the Devil's salt, fat, and sugar.

  The rest of us stuck around until 3 A.M., drinking beers and eating fatty, salty cheese pizza, and planning out how we'd finance burning the village to save it.

  I took a few minutes to tidy up after everyone left—I didn't want the owner, Karl, to think we'd been partying—and then went out the alley door, so I could dump the pizza boxes in the dumpster. Someone shuffled in the alley behind me as I was locking up.

  "Hey Suze." The voice was timid, but I still whirled around. Taylor was standing next to the dumpsters, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a different jacket, one too light for the weather, which was sort of weird.

  "Shit, Taylor; you scared the shit outta—"

  But when he stepped into the light I saw how terrible Taylor looked—haggard and sallow, his hair limp, almost grey under the yellowish security light. This guy was way too old to be Taylor.

  "Oh, God, I'm sorry. Are you... like, Taylor's dad, or something?"

  That didn't seem right, either; he didn't seem old enough to be Taylor's dad, but...

  "Naw," he said, "I'm Taylor."

  I smiled uncertainly, creeped out but still hoping this was just a really weird gag Taylor was pulling. He sort of seemed like the kind of guy that might do that. "You're a little bit old to be Taylor, mister."

  He shrugged and smiled in sort of a crooked way that made my blood run cold, because it was so much like Taylor.

  "I'm Old Taylor is all."

  I thought about Taylor, and the slightly off-beat things he'd said, calling a new-inbox GPS "old," expecting us to have cell phones. "Do you mean, like, from-the-future Taylor?"

  He shrugged again. "Sure, but Young Taylor is from the future, too; I'm just also old."

  "So, like, you're from farther in the future?" I tried my own crooked smile, because I kind of still expected Taylor to jump out and explain about this being his uncle, or something. And, anyway, he was still sorta cute in the way Taylor was cute.

  But what I said seemed to upset Old Taylor. He ground the heel of one palm into his eye, the way people do when they've been up all night in a hospital waiting room.

  "Yeah, you know, I don't really know which one of us is from farther up the future anymore. I've done this more than him, but... I'm not 100 percent sure we're on the same timeline, or whatever. Just," Old Taylor took a deep breath, and smiled an exhausted smile, "just let's go get a coffee or something. We need to talk about Taylor." So I took him to Denny's, because it was close, and open all night, and always filled with all sorts of caffeinated kids talking all manner of crap. Whatever Old Taylor had to say, no one was going to notice there.

  Standing in the clear light of Denny's I saw that Old Taylor really might be old enough to be Taylor's dad—certainly old enough to be my dad. The waitress paused before walking us back, taking a moment to look at me, then at him, and then back at me. I saw on her face what she thought of grungy me and this creepy old guy coming into her Denny's at 3 A.M. She gave us a crappy booth by the loud conspiracy-theorist teens.

  "So," I asked, leaning over the table, still trying to play it fun and conspiratorial. "Do you really work for the CIA or the FBI or what?"

  "No," he said, sipping his coffee. "You know, you wouldn't think it but it isn't the luxuries you start to miss when you're always bouncing around; it's the cheap-ass little stuff. That's the stuff that goes first. For real: I don't care when you are, but French press coffee tastes the same in New Orleans in 1812 and Tennessee in 2012 and China whenever—I know that as a fact. It's just roasted coffee beans, ground up, and soaked in boiling water. But powdery, vacuum-paced, mass-produced Chock Full o' Nuts? Nothing tastes like that except that." He sipped again. "And these oddly thick, hyperparaboloid-ish coffee mugs they have at Big Boy's and Denny's and college cafeterias and diners? These things are only mass produced because there's this one machine that spins a certain way to force the clay to form, made by one guy in 1948, because he couldn't get the straight cylinder he wanted. They're a total historical accident, and that guy thought up the spinning part when he was a goddamned ball-turret gunner. Seriously, how many contingenci
es is that to get one of these cups?" He cupped the mug in his hands like it was a chalice, like in that last Indiana Jones movie. "I love these cups," he quietly admitted, almost shamefully. Then he spotted something at the wall-end of the booth and brightened.

  "And pencils!" he exclaimed. "Graphite pencils!" He marveled, picking up the Dixon-Ticonderoga someone had left shoved into the little metal rack of individually packaged servings of jelly. "Factories crank out a cuajillion of these every year, and they aren't worth a dime even, not individually, but do you know what a miracle it is to have these? You sharpen it," he pantomimed this, "You jot something down," he scribbled a swirl on his placemat, "you forget it," he ceremoniously straightened his arm and dropped the pencil in the aisle running between the booths and the two-tops, "and you don't give a crap. In some timelines, the pencil never happened. You wouldn't believe the ramifications of a thing like that. There's no Russian space program—no Mir, and so no ISS—in a world without pencils. In a world without pencils Lincoln's Gettysburg Address begins 'So, a while back...' I'm not shitting you," he marveled, "The pencil is a miracle."

  "Oooh-kaay," I said slowly. "But I'm worried about this," I scooted out of the booth in a half crouch and snatched the pencil off the floor. "Someone is going to slip on that." I laid it out on the table in front of us.

  "But who does Taylor—do you—really work for?"

  Old Taylor sipped more coffee, savoring the cheapassness. "Hunh? Oh, Young Taylor wasn't fronting: We're in the Department of Ag. I'm in the Department of Ag—although I'm not here on behalf of them, not right now—and Taylor is in the Department of Ag, and they really did license the portals from the place I used to work in order to culture samples and test preservatives and stuff. Except for a brief thing in China in the future—the future relative to where we started—we're basically with the Department of Ag for all eternity. I mean, so far." He sipped again, and it dawned on me that this guy might or might not be Taylor, and that he also might or might not be sane.