Asimov's SF, April/May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Would you like me to leave?” he asked solicitously.

  "Could I ask you a favor?"

  "Anything."

  "My father used to tell me a bedtime story when I went to sleep,” said Julia. “Would you tell me a fairy tale?"

  "You've never asked me for one,” I blurted out.

  "You don't know any,” she replied.

  I had to admit she was right.

  "I'll be happy to,” said Philip. “Shall we lower the light a little—just in case you fall asleep?"

  She nodded, spread her pillows out, and laid her head back on one of them.

  He reached for the lamp in the wall above the nightstand—the only thing I'd added to the room since he'd left. When he couldn't find a switch, he remembered that it worked by voice command and ordered it to dim itself. Then, in the same room where she had told him a fairy tale almost every night, he told one to her.

  "Once there was a young man,” he began.

  "No,” said Julia. He stopped and looked at her curiously. “If this is a fairy tale, he has to be a prince."

  "You're right, of course. Once there was a prince."

  She nodded her approval. “That's better.” Then: “What was his name?"

  "What do you think his name was?"

  "Prince Philip,” said Julia.

  "You're absolutely right,” he replied. “Once there was a prince named Philip. He was a very well-behaved young man, and tried always to do the bidding of the King and Queen. He studied chivalry and jousting and any number of princely things—but when his classes were done and his weapons were polished and put away and he'd finished his dinner, he would go to his room and read about fabulous places like Oz and Wonderland. He knew that such places couldn't exist, but he wished they could, and every time he found a book or a holo about a new one he would read it or watch it, and wish that somehow, someday he could visit such places."

  "I know just how he felt!” said Julia with a happy smile on the wrinkled face that I still loved. “Wouldn't it be wonderful to walk along the yellow brick road with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, or to have a conversation with the Cheshire Cat, or visit the Walrus and the Carpenter?"

  "That's what Prince Philip thought too,” he agreed. He leaned forward dramatically. “And then one day he made a wonderful discovery."

  She sat up and clapped her hands together in her excitement. “He learned how to get to Oz!"

  "Not Oz, but an even more wonderful place."

  She leaned back, suddenly tired from her efforts. “I'm very glad! Is that the end?"

  He shook his head. “No, it isn't. Because you see, nobody in this place looked like the Prince or his parents. He couldn't understand the people who lived there and they couldn't understand him. And they were afraid of anyone who looked and sounded different."

  "Most people are,” she said sleepily, her eyes closed. “Did he wear a Halloween costume too?"

  "Yes,” said Philip. “But it was a very special costume."

  "Oh?” she said, opening her eyes again. “How?"

  "Once he put it on, he could never take it off again,” explained Philip.

  "A magic costume!” she exclaimed.

  "Yes, but it meant that he could never be the King of his parents’ country, and his father the King was very, very angry at him. But he knew he would never have another chance to visit such a wondrous kingdom again, so he donned the costume and he left his palace and went to live in the magical kingdom."

  "Was the costume uncomfortable to put on?” she asked, her voice very briefly more alert than it had been.

  "Very,” he answered, which was something I'd never thought about before. “But he never complained because he never doubted that it was worth it. And he went to this mystical land, and he saw a thousand strange and beautiful things. Every day there was a new wonder, every night a new vision."

  "And he lived happily ever after?” asked Julia.

  "So far."

  "And did he marry a beautiful princess?"

  "Not yet,” said Philip. “But he has hopes."

  "I think that's a beautiful fairy tale,” she said.

  "Thank you, Julia."

  "You can call me Mother,” she said, her voice sharp and cogent. “You were right to go.” She turned to me, and somehow I could tell it was the old Julia, the real Julia, looking at me. “And you had better make your peace with our son."

  And as quickly as she said it, the old Julia vanished as she did so often these days, and she was once again the Julia I'd grown used to for the past year. She lay back on the pillow, and looked at our son once more.

  "I've forgotten your name,” she said apologetically.

  "Philip."

  "Philip,” she repeated. “What a nice name.” A pause. “Is it Halloween?"

  Before he could answer she was asleep. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek with his misshapen lips, then stood up and walked to the door.

  "I'll leave now,” he said as I followed him out of her room.

  "Not yet,” I said.

  He stared at me expectantly.

  "Come on into the kitchen,” I said.

  He followed me down the shabby hallway, and when we got there I pulled out a couple of beers, popped them open, and poured two glasses.

  "Did it hurt that much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It's over and done with."

  "There really are crystal mountains?"

  He nodded.

  "And flowers that talk?"

  "Yes."

  "Come into the living room with me,” I said, heading out of the kitchen. When we got there I sat in an easy chair and gestured for him to sit down on the sofa.

  "What is this about?” he asked.

  "Was it really that special?” I asked. “That much of an honor?"

  "There were more than six thousand candidates for the position,” he said. “I beat them all."

  "It must have cost them a pretty penny to make you what you are."

  "More than you can imagine."

  I took a sip of my beer. “Let's talk."

  "We've talked about Mother,” he replied. “All that's left is the Pythons, and I haven't kept up with them."

  "There's more."

  "Oh?"

  "Tell me about Wonderland,” I said.

  * * * *

  He stayed for three days, slept in the long-unused guest room, and then he had to go back. He invited me to come visit him, and I promised I would. But of course I can't leave Julia, and by the time she's gone I'll probably be a little too old and a little too infirm, and it's a long, grueling, expensive trip.

  But it's comforting to know that if I ever do find a way to get there, I'll be greeted by a loving son who can show his old man around the place and point out all the sights to him.

  Copyright © 2011 Mike Resnick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: THE FNOOR HEN by Rudy Rucker

  Rudy Rucker, who returns to our pages with another fun story about biological nanotech run wild, is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He received the Philip K. Dick award for his novels Software and Wetware, which were recently reissued as part of the Ware Tetralogy. His autobiographical memoir, Nested Scrolls: A Writer's Life, is appearing this year, as is his latest novel, Jim and the Flims. In recent times, Rudy has taken up painting, and has had three shows in San Francisco. More information is at Rudy's blog, www.rudyrucker.com/blog.

  Vicky was a cheerful, lively woman, given to moments of deep inattention. She had a strong sense of fashion, and she made the most of her slim wardrobe. Her cute husband Bix worked as a freelance programmer, picking up a couple of contracts a year, and Vicky earned a little money teaching yoga classes at a studio off Valencia Street in San Francisco. The biggest factor in their lives these days was their two-year-old son, whom they'd named Stoke. The name had been a last-minute inspiration.

  One rainy Tuesday afternoo
n in April, Vicky met up with Bix and Stoke at a funky coffee shop called the Scavenger. The Scavenger was a good place to hang, and it was near the spot where Vicky taught. A hyperactive guy named Cardo ran the place, and you could buy his third-hand furniture right off the floor if you wanted.

  Cardo was a study in contrasts. His family back in Manila ran a business called Gloze, which made quick-turn-around knock-offs of the latest biogadgets. Gloze was supporting Cardo as their San Francisco rep, but instead of renting an office, Cardo had chosen to open a grungy coffee shop for his workspace. He looked like a thirty-something businessman, in that he wore shirts with collars and had his hair slicked back. But he lived like an impoverished slacker, and spent most of his time talking about the new pepster music.

  As it happened, Cardo and his wife Maricel lived just a few doors away from Vicky and her husband. Quite recently, Bix had been doing some consulting for Cardo and Gloze, but last week there'd been a falling out—Bix wanted extra money for something unexpected he'd discovered. Cardo would have been willing to give Bix the bonus, but his family back in Manila wouldn't approve the overage. So Bix had resigned, sort of—even though he was still hanging out in the Scavenger, and even though he'd kept his not-actually-in-production-yet Gloze squidskin computer. Cardo still had a biogadget link for copying Bix's work off his rectangle of autonomous cephalopod tissue. But for now, Bix had stopped telling Cardo how to use his cryptic new program.

  "Mama!” piped Stoke, noticing Vicky the instant she stepped into the coffee shop. Bix was fiddling with his polka-dotted Gloze squidskin. Father and son were sprawled on a fat vinyl couch.

  Bix smiled up at Vicky, cheerful as usual. He never seemed to mind taking care of the tot—if anything, two-year-olds were closer to Bix's wavelength than were most grown-ups. Employed or not, Bix was pushing forward with the discoveries he'd made on the Gloze prototype. Something about using pictures to model real-world systems. Bix called his new program a morphon muncher.

  "Hiiiii,” said Vicky, making her way across the room.

  "Tweety!” called little Stoke with a wild laugh.

  "You didn't show him those ancient Tweety and Sylvester videos, did you, Bix?” asked Vicky, flopping down with her family. “Those old-time cartoons are so violent. So unaware. And kind of seedy, don't you think?

  "Birdseed,” said Bix in his idea of Tweety's voice. “Actually we're munching morphons. Stoke just thinks this one looks like Tweety. It's a model of the Shanghai stock exchange. Cardo's family are especially hot for me to explain this one.” Stoke was poking Bix's squidskin, slowly warping the bulbous canary-yellow shape.

  "You're always talking about morphons these days,” said Vicky, feeling cozy with the vague old word, which had something to do with chaos or math. “And I thought people just used morphons on T-shirts anymore. Hi Stokie.” She loved the sight and sound and scent of her husband and her little boy.

  "Morphons are due for a huge comeback,” said Bix. “Even though the old morphons are too obvious. Homeless stoners draw them in chalk on the sidewalk. But my new morphons—"

  "A fashion tsunami!” said Vicky. “Right, Stoke? A big, big wave!” She raised her voice an octave and bounced the couch cushions to make Stoke giggle.

  "I'm paddling into position,” said Bix. “I'm building my morphon muncher into a universal emulator! As of today, I can flip my morphons into superexponential mode and the screen shudders and pukes Jello-cube pixels the size of your thumb. And each of them stands for something real. In a few minutes I'm gonna use this demo for another try at convincing Cardo's stingy-ass relatives to pay me the bonus.” Bix glanced over to where Cardo sat behind the counter with earbuds on, poking at his phone slug and dancing in his seat.

  "The practical core,” said Vicky, smiling at Bix. “The method behind his seeming madness."

  "Tweety bonk!” said Stoke, leaning in close to Bix and smacking the squidskin's screen as hard as he could.

  The yellow blob splattered and rearranged itself, taking on the appearance of a spiky sea-urchin. Endless parades of pastel elephants were marching into the slits between the sea-urchin's spikes. Ragged St. Elmo's fire swept up into the masts and the rigging that reticulated the space outside the urchin.

  "Nobody could compute like this before the squidskins,” said Bix. “Our society ignored universal dynamics for thirty or forty years, see, and while we were gone, the morphons grew wild in our vacant lots. They got all crooked and stinky."

  "Papa stinky,” chortled Stoke, and Bix made a shocked face that sent the boy into happy laughter.

  "What's all that pink junk under the sea-urchin shape?” asked Vicky, getting interested in the image on Bix's screen. “It looks odd there. Like fish eggs? With little starfish in the eggs."

  "I call that kind of stuff fnoor,” said Bix. “Batshit weirdness, seething dog barf, morphons to the max. It shows up where your virtual world is being clipped by computational constraints. The fnoor is indirectly telling me to ramp up my paravirtualization so that my apps are running full-tilt on the Gloze bare meat."

  "Too much coffee for you,” said Vicki, finishing Bix's cup. “Paravirtualization? Maybe I can use that word when I talk to my yoga students about getting in touch with their—bare meat?"

  "The physical reality underlying the illusion,” said Bix. “The embodied wetware."

  Vicky looked around the friendly coffee shop, with all the lively people doing stuff together, techies and bums, the words and smells in the air, the dusty furniture, the nurturing rain running down the windowpanes, and the big city spring stirring outside, green sprouts in all the cracks of the alleys. It was nice to be here with her son and her man, her muscles loose and relaxed from her class.

  "Real life is my favorite illusion,” said Vicky, giving Stoke a hug.

  "And underneath it—” began Bix.

  "A beautiful dance,” said Vicky. “You should turn off your squidskin and your phone slug and come to yoga class sometimes. Ready to go home and help Mama, Stoke?"

  Bix went over to buttonhole Cardo, and Vicky took Stoke back to their tiny house on a steep, dead-end street in the Mission. Bix had managed to buy it five years ago, after a contract-programming gig for a successful start-up that had paid him in stock.

  The house was kind of a dump, but Bix had made it nice. He'd replaced the rotten floorboards in the kitchen and knocked out some crazy-making interior walls—he'd painted, roofed, plumbed, and wired. He'd built a wooden deck in front, and when the weather was good, he and Vicky put furniture on the deck and driveway and lived outside like Pacific islanders.

  But with a two-year-old, on a cold or rainy day, the house was tight. And if they were to have more children like they wanted to—well, really they needed to find a bigger place. But the prices were so insane. The housing situation was like some unsolvable sliding-blocks problem or word rebus revolving in your head as you tossed and turned through a long night of fever-dreams. Vicky tried not to go there.

  In any case, they were happy in their house for now and Bix—dreamy, optimistic Bix—had been refinishing the attic, even though the roof up there only rose to about four feet above the floor, and every couple of yards there was a cross-bar that you had to crawl under or step over. Bix had added flooring and a couple of vents and a skylight. To get to the attic, you had to climb an aluminum stepladder that Bix had set up beneath the crawl hole in the ceiling of their little hall.

  Sometimes, after a long day of work and child-care, Bix would ascend to the attic with his music player and hang out. “It's rather comfortable, if you lie flat on the floor,” he'd calmly say. “I can imagine people paying to go into a nightclub like that. A room that's only four feet high, with a head-or-shin-bonking rafter every few steps. Party!” For her part, Vicky had only gone in the attic once. She didn't like being cramped.

  When Vicky and Stoke got back from the Scavenger, it was late afternoon and Stoke was a little fussy. Vicky helped him build some block towers, and then she got supper
started.

  When Bix showed up, they shared one of their home-brewed beers. Their circle of friends were into do-it-yourself, like urban pioneers. It was a counterbalance for the ubiquitous biogadgets.

  "So how was your talk with Cardo?” asked Vicky.

  "He's got no clue about business negotiation,” said Bix, shaking his head. “All he really wants is to be a DJ in a Manila nightclub. When we talk about business, he's just parroting whatever his aunts and uncles say."

  "Which is?"

  "Oh—that Gloze owns my new morphon muncher because I developed it on their machine. And that it's my legal duty to give Gloze a user's guide to the program. I'm really eager to talk about the morphon muncher, actually—if I don't explain it to someone pretty soon I might forget how. It's that slippery. But I want money so we can think about a bigger house. Negotiating with Cardo is impossible. He should go back to the Philippines and run a pepster music club like he wants to."

  "I think his wife Maricel's a little cold and unfriendly, don't you?"

  "Yeah,” said Bix. “I just hope Cardo and his family don't try something weird on me. It was almost like Cardo was hinting at that today."

  "Things will look better after we eat.” They sat down and shared the vegetable stew Vicky had made, with Stoke doing pretty well with his rice and beans.

  "Uh-oh, I left the chickens loose,” observed Bix as they finished the meal. He'd built a henhouse against the back wall of their home, and they'd installed four hens, each a slightly different color.

  Most days Bix or Vicky would let the chickens out of their coop to range around the wonderfully overgrown backyard pecking up seeds and bugs. It was fun to watch how a hen would scratch with her claws down under her fat body. After scratching, she'd mincingly walk backward and cock her head to see what she might have unearthed. Like a businesswoman checking the messages on her phone slug.

  It wasn't a good idea to leave the chickens out overnight—all sorts of creatures thought of chickens as being lower than them on the food chain. Dogs, cats, rats . . . and the occasional rogue phone slug.