Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  It takes a month for the Demetrius Colony to recover. The commodore still leads, and there are still twenty-two viable ships. The smaller vehicles have nowhere to dock anymore, but some of the hulks are cannibalized into rolling platforms, and that helps. Five water-carriers are still intact, though there's little protection for them now that there's only one remaining gunship.

  “Find us water,” the commodore orders William, who again stands in the book-lined cabin—which has taken surprisingly little damage. Either that, or he told them to clean it up at the expense of others. “Find us another storm, Lieutenant.”

  “Why? So the Jairasu can just take it away again?”

  “What would you have us do? Go after them?”

  William tosses a tablet on the commodore's desk. “They warned us! Damn you, they told us exactly what they were doing! And you ignored it!”

  “We needed that water,” the commodore says, his voice quiet and deadly. “And you're out of order.”

  “I'm out of order, am I?” William grabs the desk and shoves it; the commodore is knocked onto his back, stuck in his chair. William comes around and kneels beside him. “How does it feel?”

  “Let me up!”

  “No. Not until you learn how it felt for the people who died because you couldn't heed a warning.” He feels his throat go tight. “It was like this for Andie, you know. Trapped on the bridge of the Mighty Mississippi, knowing she was about to die a horrible death.” He rips the rank from the commodore's shoulders. “I'm taking a cruiser and as many others as want to follow, and we're going after the Jairasu.”

  “That's suicide!”

  “Maybe.” William gets to his feet. “But they aren't invincible. We destroyed some of their ships, and now I'm going to wipe them off the face of the planet.” He permits himself a small smile. “And Andie deserves better. Her, and all the others you allowed to die.”

  The commodore calls William's name, but he doesn't turn; he leaves the cabin, leaves the ship, and walks to the Shepherd—formerly the San Diego. Sixteen of the fastest, best-armed cars and trucks are parked near the sleek, powerful vessel. There's also a converted yacht filled with water, courtesy of some of Shanna's connections.

  On the Shepherd's bridge, William takes a moment to check his comm. He already knows what's in there: Rina's message, sent in the middle of the storm—he hasn't changed his comm frequency, so it's not surprising that she was able to get him. “You never came after me,” Rina says, smiling sadly into the video pickup. He's listened to the message more than a dozen times. “I survived, I made myself useful, I worked my way up. I fought to give Demetrius a warning, but you didn't listen. My people had no choice.”

  The first time, William had flung the comm across the parched ground, but Rina's voice had continued speaking.

  “I'm not sorry. We did what we had to do to survive. Just like you.” She pauses. “Don't cross our path again.” It looks for a moment like she's going to say something else, but the message ends there.

  William puts the comm away. Shanna and three young men step onto the bridge a couple of minutes later; the men take stations, and Shanna stands beside William, looking out at the Demetrius Colony. “We're ready,” she tells him. He nods, and she orders the Shepherd Colony to get underway.

  William is pretty sure Andie wouldn't be happy that he's on a mission to avenge her death, but he doesn't care. The Jairasu are going to pay for this.

  Rina's going to pay for this.

  Copyright © 2011 Josh Roseman

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: TWELVERS

  by Leah Cypess

  Leah Cypess used to be a practicing attorney in New York and is now a full-time writer in Boston. She tells us that she much prefers her current situation. Leah's two young adult fantasy novels, Mistwood and Nightspell, were both published by HarperCollins/Greenwillow. Her ability to inhabit the mind of a young person is sharply on display in her first tale for Asimov's. You can learn more about the author's work at www.leahcypess.com.

  Darla Tappin stood in front of her bedroom mirror and practiced losing her temper. She had spent the past five lunch periods paying attention to how the other kids did it: the gradual build-up of irritation, the sullen silence, the sudden explosion. She had all the mechanics down, but still sensed there was something unconvincing about her performance. And it had to be perfect, or the whispers would turn into shouts, and shoves, and eventually frosty silence.

  She had heard the first whisper just a week ago, minutes after Ms. Hastim announced her latest pop quiz. It had come from behind, a barbed hiss: Twelver. She had not turned to see who'd said it, not shown any reaction at all, thinking that would make her seem less guilty. Mistake. Anyone normal would have been furious.

  And then yesterday, Leora had cut in front of her on the lunch line, jabbering with one of her new friends. Darla had remained still, bound by the ridiculous hope that Leora would turn and include her in the conversation; and while she stood there, the other girl looked straight at her and mouthed it: Twelver.

  She had to do something. She faced the mirror, clenched her fists—then loosened them, because it hurt her fingers—and imagined Leora stepping right in front of her, as if Darla didn't exist. The memory made her sad and bewildered, but not angry. She drew in her breath and spat out, “You think you're better than everyone else, but you're just a short ugly loser!”

  Unfortunately, at that moment her mother pushed open the bedroom door.

  Half an hour later, Darla was on the living room couch being subjected to a long, carefully-planned lecture: Darla wasn't ugly, she wasn't a loser, there was nothing wrong with being short, and why would she think she was better than everyone else? Darla didn't bother explaining that she hadn't been yelling at herself in the mirror; her mother was a psychiatrist and would never believe her. Besides, explaining what she had really been doing wouldn't make her mother feel much better. Explaining things to Darla's parents very rarely made them feel better, though sometimes Darla felt compelled to try anyhow.

  “I don't think I'm better than everyone else,” she said about halfway through Speech #4, in one of those fruitless attempts. “I think I'm worse.”

  “Darla!” her mother wailed.

  Darla's father gestured at the voice-transmitter at her mother's throat. “You should turn that off,” he said. “We don't want the baby exposed to any negativity.”

  Her mother nodded, flicked the switch, and gave Darla a reproachful look.

  Darla didn't get that—if the point of the voice-transmitter was to simulate the in-utero experience, shouldn't the transmitter be left on all the time? Back when women had carried their fetuses around inside them, the babies must have heard everything. But she knew better than to bring up her brother, gestating in an artificial womb in New Jersey. Nothing was more guaranteed to lead to the topic of why her brother was only going to be gestated for nine months, instead of twelve like her. And no topic was more guaranteed to lead to another round of speeches about how there was nothing wrong with her.

  Only this time, they would be speeches her parents didn't believe any more than she did.

  * * * *

  It started again in Ms. Hastim's biology class. Darla was taking notes on the reproductive cycle, and trying to avoid staring at Ms. Hastim's protruding abdomen, when something sharp jabbed into the small of her back.

  She yelped. Everyone turned to stare at her, and Ms. Hastim—who was always short-tempered these days—snapped, “Something you want to share with the class, Darla?”

  “No,” Darla said. “Sorry.”

  Ms. Hastim glared at her and waddled over to the blackboard. As soon as the teacher turned her back, the jab came again; but this time Darla was prepared for it. She slid her hand behind her back, grabbed the pencil, and pulled.

  Carl Green pulled back. The pencil broke. This time it was Carl who made the sound; and, after being subjected to a nasty
look by Ms. Hastim, he hissed at Darla, “Twelver.”

  Darla didn't turn around to look at him, but she couldn't help glancing at Leora, who was watching with what might be sympathy. Of course, since Carl was Leora's ex-boyfriend, the sympathy probably had less to do with Darla and more to do with who her tormentor was.

  “Don't be pathetic, ice-bucket,” Carl whispered. “Stick to your own social level.”

  Darla quickly refocused on the front of the classroom, just in time to meet another of Ms. Hastim's weary, irritated looks.

  She had been giving those looks a lot lately—which was, Darla thought, Ms. Hastim's own fault. It would have been difficult enough to maintain discipline while teaching the reproductive system to a classroom of seventh graders. Ms. Hastim had put herself in an impossible situation by doing it while pregnant. Not pregnant like Darla's mother and most other women were pregnant, but pregnant the old-fashioned way, with the baby right there inside her body.

  “What really freaks me out,” Leora had whispered to Darla, on one of those days when she was deigning to be nice to her, “is that when they do it naturally, the baby could come out at any time. What if it just popped out in the middle of class?”

  That thought didn't make it any easier to concentrate, even after Darla had looked it up and realized it wouldn't happen like that. The way it would happen was disturbing enough.

  Carl spent the next ten minutes jabbing Darla's back with his pencil and hissing unoriginal insults. Darla had no reason to think he would get bored with that occupation before class was over. She sighed and did her best to ignore it, sinking instead into a daydream that involved her doing something so incredible that Leora would beg to be her friend again. . . .

  “Twelver,” Ms. Hastim said.

  Darla jerked to attention, suddenly wide awake. Around her, her classmates were snickering and exchanging snide looks; apparently, the lesson had become interesting some time ago, while she had been too wrapped in her sad little daydream to notice.

  “Twelvers,” Ms. Hastim went on, “are the perfect examples of the unintended consequences when scientists think they can do better than nature.”

  “Yeah,” Carl muttered behind Darla, “obviously you think so.”

  He said it dangerously loudly, and half the class snickered, but Ms. Hastim either ignored him or didn't hear him. She waddled to the z-board and pulled up a chart showing how many women in the United States gestated their children in artificial wombs.

  Darla sank lower into her chair, trying to hope that this wouldn't be bad. Ms. Hastim was a member of the Hystera Sisterhood—obviously—and she made no attempt to hide her opinions. It seemed entirely possible that she would spend the entire lesson going on about how natural and beautiful it was to grow another body inside your own. Maybe they wouldn't get back to Twelvers until the next class. Maybe Darla could pretend to be sick and skip school tomorrow.

  “It has long been suspected,” Ms. Hastim lectured, jabbing at the chart in a way that reminded Darla of Carl (who was still occasionally poking her), “that the human gestation period is too short, limited by the need to get over-large heads through the narrow female pelvis. When artificial wombs were ‘perfected’ “—her tone placed sarcastic quote marks around the word—"the companies sold it as a unique opportunity to correct this problem. Those women who could afford it jumped at the opportunity to have the first three months of their babies’ lives—the so called ‘fourth trimester’ with its frequent feedings, colic, and fussiness—take place in utero.”

  Those women, her tone implied, were clearly unnatural creatures who probably didn't deserve to have children in the first place. Darla risked a quick glance around the classroom. Leora was looking at her again, but Darla couldn't read the expression on Leora's perfectly made-up face. She probably should have summoned up an expression of her own—rolled her eyes, maybe—but by the time she thought of it, Leora was facing forward again, her hand raised stiffly in the air.

  Ms. Hastim paused. “Yes?”

  “I really don't think,” Leora said primly, “that you should be saying negative things about Twelvers in the classroom.”

  The room was suddenly completely silent, as if a blanket of stillness had been dropped over it. Carl even stopped in mid-jab, the point of his pencil pressing into Darla's back. Darla didn't reach around to grab it. She was, like everyone else, staring at Ms. Hastim.

  Whose face was very red. “I'm teaching you science, which is my job. Not propaganda pushed by artificial womb companies.”

  “That's not science,” Leora said, and now everyone was staring at her. Of all the people in the classroom, Darla was probably the only one who knew that Leora's parents were neo-hippies. They were always the first to complain about students being exposed to any hint of prejudice (or religion, or ethnocentrism, or artificial food coloring) at school. And once, Leora had been just as fierce about those opinions.

  That had been over a year ago, though. A year since Leora had suddenly started wearing clothes she wouldn't lend to Darla, reading magazines they had once made fun of together, making plans with popular kids—usually boys—and lying to Darla about what she was doing. It had been several months since she had even bothered lying, or been anything other than a complete stranger. But now, as Leora sat up straight and braced her hands against her chair, Darla could finally see a hint of her old friend beneath the sleek hair and heavy makeup.

  “The artificial womb is the perfect environment for a fetus,” Leora said. “No one should try to make women feel guilty for using them, or force them to go through pregnancy instead.”

  “Really? What do you know about pregnancy, Ms. Kalten?”

  “What my mother told me.” Leora flushed suddenly. “What her mother told her.”

  Ms. Hastim straightened, her abdomen jutting out in front of her. “I assure you, back before the artificial wombs became so popular, when all children were gestated the natural way, pregnancy wasn't considered such an ordeal.”

  “That's not,” Leora said, her face still red, “what my mother said.”

  “Your mother has bought into corporate-influenced—” Ms. Hastim checked herself, as if suddenly realizing she had gone too far.

  With that hesitation, the power balance in the classroom shifted suddenly and subtly. Leora sat up straighter. “I don't think any of our parents would be happy about your teaching us that their choices were wrong.”

  Finally Ms. Hastim turned back to the z-board. Leora slumped and, as if suddenly overwhelmed by what she had done, buried her face in her arms. Whispers rose up around the classroom, those students who had been dozing went back to sleep, and Carl went back to jabbing his pencil into Darla's back.

  * * * *

  By the time class was over, Darla felt as if her back was a z-screen. It didn't matter; Carl wasn't in any of her other classes, and Darla wanted to talk to Leora. Or rather, to see if Leora would talk to her.

  But Leora, in the hall outside the classroom, was surrounded by people. Darla leaned against a row of lockers to wait.

  “You were so right!” one of Leora's hangers-on was saying loudly. “And I'm going to tell my parents what she's doing. She shouldn't be pushing her weird viewpoints on us like that.”

  “And that stuff she was saying about Twelvers was pure prejudice,” added another boy, a tall redhead who was angling to be Leora's next boyfriend. “I mean, I don't like Twelvers any more than anyone, but that kind of talk is probably illegal.”

  Leora turned with a swing of long brown hair. “Why don't you like them? Have you ever met a Twelver?”

  There was a moment of silence, during which the redhead's face matched his hair. Darla felt her heart expand with hope . . . even though it had done that dozens of times over the past year, every time Leora acted nice to her for three seconds or more. It was stupid, she knew; but it was also impossible to believe that the same girl she had whispered with and giggled with and had sleepovers with for almost her entire life had turned so sud
denly and completely into a stranger.

  There was only one solid basis for that hope: that Leora had never, despite the growing rumors, told anyone Darla's most dangerous secret.

  “I don't mean I don't like them,” the redhead stammered. “I mean, I think it was a mistake to gestate anyone for twelve months, and there were some negative effects, obviously. But it's not their fault.”

  “Really,” Leora said icily. “What negative effects, exactly?”

  “They didn't come out right. They've got no feelings. Everyone knows—”

  The bell buzzed, and nobody got a chance to hear the redhead's version of what everyone knew. They all scattered, and for a moment Leora was alone in the hallway.

  This was her opportunity, but Darla made no move toward her old best friend. She stood where she was, her throat tight.

  Everyone knows.

  The ironic thing was it wasn't true. Twelvers had feelings; if they didn't, Darla's stomach wouldn't be coiling itself into a small hard knot. They just didn't display stress reactions—or at least, not often. No anger or terror or loss of control in response to threats.

  Too bad junior high was one long series of threats, implicit and explicit. It made her condition somewhat difficult to hide.

  When Darla had been friends with Leora, it hadn't seemed to matter. But then Leora started avoiding her and all at once, everyone else began noticing how Darla never seemed to lose her temper, how being at the bottom of the popularity chain never made her cry, how she wouldn't break down no matter how hard she was bullied. She had been that way before, of course; the only thing that had changed was that now she was alone, and easy prey.

  She wasn't angry at Leora, though. Confused, hurt, but not angry. She didn't get angry very easily.

  Which was the entire problem—and something, thanks to Ms. Hastim's lesson, that she was going to have to work extra hard to hide.

  * * * *

  On a cool Thursday morning, exactly as planned, Darla's parents brought home her baby brother. He was small and blotchy and bald, with wide startled blue eyes and tiny clenched fists. He weighed exactly seven and a half pounds, and Darla's parents couldn't stop exclaiming over how small he was. Darla had weighed nearly thirteen pounds when she was born.