Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Poetry: GENE'S DREAMS

  by Joe Haldeman

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Between the stunned vacuum

  after Jack Kennedy's murder

  and the astonishment of our

  men walking on their moon,

  —

  the small screen showed big dreams,

  once a week. Kirk with his odd

  postures, Spock with his eyebrows,

  and the rest of the gang

  with their earnest hopes

  —

  and the writers with their

  earnest hopes, and the directors,

  the producers, all wishing

  —

  that their futures might cure

  the present.

  —

  If I'd been a child that year

  instead of a soldier in the mud

  would I have played the pointy-eared

  explainer, the foil? Or the hero

  with his gun and girdled gut?

  —

  We should all of us be Mister Spock,

  who always kept his cool,

  and found the whole world

  fascinating.

  —

  —Joe Haldeman

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  * * *

  Short Story: THE MESSENGER

  by Bruce McAllister

  Bruce McAllister has brought back into print his 1989 science fiction novel, Dream Baby (www.dreambabynovel.com)—based on the novelette that was a Hugo- and Nebula-Award finalist—because people seem interested in reading it again. He's happy to report that the book's trailer/teaser (a short film by his son Ben) went viral at YouTube. Bruce has fantasy and SF short stories forthcoming in Albedo One, Asimov's, Cemetery Dance, and a “re-defining” urban fantasy anthology to be edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Landsdale for Tachyon. In his latest tale for us, time travel gives a man a brief opportunity to be . . .

  I go to see my parents yesterday. They're thirty-five. I'm fifty. This kind of thing is easy with the Non-Paradoxical Time Channel you subscribe to if you've got the money for a portal and don't mind spending real-time in the past. I just haven't done it before. When you've got your own kids, you prioritize: Your parents already raised you, and now your children need you to raise them.

  They're living in a house I don't remember. I don't remember ever seeing stills or video of it either—because that's where it probably happened, and my father didn't want reminders. A big Spanish thing—a century old at least—two stories, courtyard, fan palms, terracotta tiles. The kind my mother would have loved, I know, and that my father, a successful partner in a big product-liability law firm, could have afforded. He did love her, I tell myself.

  Don't know why the big pots on the travertine patio by the front door catch my eye, but I'm leaning over, trying to figure out why someone's let the flowers in them die, when I look up and there's my mother walking up the steps toward me in slacks and a red blouse. I've seen the pics from their wedding, one vacation video from a little later, and all sorts of childhood and college shots of her (in those bright red dresses she loved); so I know her even if I don't remember her.

  I stand up, nervous. I smile. There are lots of people around, going up and down the steps, grabbing things from vans and trucks—as if they're getting ready for a party or fixing the house to sell it. She glances at me. Just once. No reason she should recognize me—I haven't even been born—though maybe she'll think I look familiar, like the men from my father's family. But, no, she glances at me once and walks by.

  As she passes, time slows a little—just a little—and I see that distant look in her face, that unhappiness you could see in those snapshots from college. (I'm thinking of one where she's sitting on a park bench in winter, not looking at the photographer; and another, on the deck of a boat owned by her father, looking into the distance too.) A look you'd only know the importance of if you could see the future.

  Remember, this is my first time. Some people who've had the channel for years—they get good at it. They have fun with their parents—who don't recognize them (since they haven't been born yet)—socializing, getting drunk with them, even pulling childish pranks on them for the hell of it . They have fun because they know it won't change anything. It can't. It's Non-Paradoxical. Anything they do is already in the temporal loop.

  Or they visit for weeks, even months if they can afford it, become neighbors, close friends, or just strangers watching from a distance, trying to get over grievances and hurts, feeling whatever love they can, understanding better the two people who brought them into this world. And they always come back wiser, make conversation of it in the present, even art, write about it, publish the writing, or at least carry it back it to their children as the miracle it is—the wonder of it.

  All in the loop, of course. Pre-set.

  If you actually went to change things—say, to tell your mother lies about your father so she'd marry someone else, so you wouldn't be born because you hate your life in the present—you wouldn't be able to do it. Something would always get in your way no matter how many times you tried.

  Time is ingenious.

  * * * *

  But this is my first time, and I've got something I need to do. Loop or no loop.

  I head up the stairs and into the house. It doesn't feel like a dream at all. It's real, and I'm seeing it as I never would as a child. It has to be preparations for a party, I tell myself. Workmen are fixing a mantelpiece in the living room and oh-so-perky men and women in black and white uniforms, who've got to be caterers, are setting things up in the dining room.

  In the kitchen a man I know—I know his back even in a shirt I've never seen him in—turns from a workman he's talking to and looks at me, wondering what I want, who I am if I'm not in a uniform and don't have tools in my hands.

  Those brown eyes and long lashes. I see them in the mirror every morning, but the face before me is thirty-five, not fifty. It's not mine.

  “I—” I start, but don't know what to say, so I blurt out a stupid: “I just saw Mom.”

  When a fifty-year-old man—one you've never seen before—maybe there's something familiar about him, maybe not (he looks like your Louisiana uncles?)—stands in front of you and says, “I just saw Mom,” you don't hear the word. He couldn't possibly have said it. He must have said, “I just saw Don?” or “I just saw Tom?”

  “What?” he asks. Not annoyed. Always his calm self. Just a little puzzled.

  I think fast and say, “Sorry to intrude like this, but I need to talk to Theresa about a school matter.”

  He's looking at me like he should know me, but doesn't, but should pretend he does. I know her name, after all, and I've said “school.” I'm someone from where she teaches, down at St. Mary's—isn't that where she taught the year before I was born?

  “Sure,” he says.

  He's decided he doesn't need to recognize me. I'm new to the school. He's never met me, and if I'm rude not to introduce myself, so what? He's busy. If I've driven over instead of calling to talk school matters with her, it's because teachers are that way. “Touchy-feely,” as he always put it. “About as far from attorneys as you can get, Tim.”

  “She's not feeling well,” he says. I know what this means. I can hear the weight of it in his voice. “But you'll find her upstairs probably. I'm Jim, Theresa's husband,” he adds, holding out his hand.

  I take his hand as I've taken it so often, and I say it—my real name. “I'm Timothy.”

  I wait. Nothing. I turn to leave as he turns too—back to the workman.

  It will be the name they use, yes, but he'll forget this meeting. I'll ask him when he's old and dying, and he'll say he doesn't remember, and he won't. Maybe it's my saying it that does it, maybe not. Maybe the name is already in him—in them both—a name they love—so they use it. However it happens, it's set.

  * * * *

  I find her in the hallway upstairs, looking dazed. Som
eone is leaving her when I approach—another workman with paint on his pants, looking puzzled, as if she's said something that made no sense.

  I stand in front of her, and, sure, I'm making her look at me. I want her to look at me even if she doesn't understand why, even if she'll forget this moment.

  She looks pretty in her red blouse, vulnerable with eyes that won't stay still. The faint Asian fold of her eyelids—those are from her mother. I understand now why he loves her. Always did and always will. I wish I had her eyes.

  “Do you love him?” I say.

  “What?” Her eyes stop on me now, though it's difficult. They've always needed to be somewhere else. The old photographs don't lie.

  “Do you love him, Theresa?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I think you know.” If anyone could see the truth with those flitting eyes, it would be her. I've known this for a long time. It's one of the reasons I'm here.

  She cocks her head, peers at me, touches her collar nervously, drops her hand in self-consciousness, and takes a breath.

  “Perhaps I do . . .” she says at last.

  She stares at me. A faint smile appears on her lips, passes, then she says:

  “When I look past things around me . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “When I look past things around me, I see people. People like you.”

  “I know, Mother.”

  She doesn't jerk at the word. She knows.

  “I don't know whether they're real or not, but I see them. . . .”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “It's difficult to be here . . . in the way I should be here.”

  I nod.

  “With him, I mean. . . .”

  “Yes. . . .”

  “How can you be real?” she asks suddenly. “You aren't here yet, and perhaps you'll never be. . . .”

  “It doesn't matter, Mother. I'm here and I'm sorry, but I've got two questions. . . .”

  “The one you just asked?”

  “That's one.”

  “Do I love him?”

  I nod.

  She closes her eyes. “Sometimes I think I do. . . . And sometimes I think I can't love anyone, not here in this world.”

  “But that isn't his fault, is it.” I don't say it as a question.

  “No. It isn't.”

  I take a deep breath and ask the harder one:

  “If you do what you're thinking of doing—”

  “Yes?”

  “—it won't be because you don't love him, right? That won't be the reason, right?”

  “No, it won't, Tim.”

  I do it—I jerk. Of course I do. She knows who I am, and to hear my name from her voice is like an old, old dream.

  “He loves you,” I blurt.

  “I know. . . . I just don't want to be here anymore. Can you understand that?”

  I can't, but I nod.

  They'll have me in the hope that it will make her happy—happy enough not to leave this life—but it won't.

  “I have a favor to ask of you, too, Mother,” I hear myself say. “Just one.”

  She finds this funny and smiles. “Yes?”

  “That you not do it—that you not do what you're thinking of doing—until I am born. . . .”

  It's a silly thing to ask. I was born and am talking to her now, so it was already done, in the loop, settled; but I say it because it feels good to—as if we both have the power, we both can decide it together—that I should be born. Something that lovers would decide.

  Her eyes aren't dancing away. They're looking at me as if I'm really here, and there's a kindness in them—one that's not in the photographs—one that is unbearable.

  “Of course not,” she says, almost laughing.

  “I'd never do that,” she adds.

  For a moment I want to step to her and take her in my arms—because I never have, though she must have held me those first six months. But that would be awkward. I'd want to stay, which would be impossible.

  I kiss her on the forehead—that's all I do—and as I leave she's already gone, looking at the window's bright light at the end of the hallway.

  * * * *

  That evening, instead of having dinner with Daphne and our daughters and whisking them away to the Halloween carnival at the school where I teach, as I do every year, I go to the hospital to see him. We'll be taking him to hospice care the next day (there are some things money can't buy, and he'd be the first to say it—and often does), but I want to spend the night with my father, just him and me, the way it's always been.

  “Well?” he says, IV tubing rustling at his wrists like toy snakes, his voice no louder than the thing growing in his chest, stomach, and liver will allow.

  Those brown eyes again, and the lashes. She'd have loved them the first time she saw them.

  I take a breath.

  “You weren't the reason,” I tell him.

  He nods, but he needs the other too.

  “Of course she loved you,” I say.

  He looks at me, and it takes a great effort. He isn't sure—I can tell from his eyes. It's hard to give up a fifty-year-old fear, one that feels just like the thing eating at your body now.

  “Would you lie to me, Tim?”

  I look at him and hold his eyes. “No, I wouldn't. You just feel bad that she did it, felt it was your fault, which it wasn't; feel bad that you lived on when she couldn't, and so you doubt what I'm saying because you've doubted yourself for so long.”

  “Nice speech.”

  I manage a smile. “I've been practicing, Dad.”

  “You were always good at that.” He coughs. He's always coughing. “Making people feel good, I mean.”

  He's right, of course. I'd have lied.

  I keep smiling. What else can I do?

  “I'd have gone myself, you know,” he says. “But I couldn't.”

  He means his body, that he can't walk, but he also means—and he wants me to understand this—that he couldn't stand seeing her alive—he just couldn't. But he's forgotten the other thing, too, because he wants to—because he wanted it to be his choice: You can't visit a time after you're born. There can't be two of you. The portal won't let you through.

  “I know, Dad,” I tell him. And I do. It's hard thinking all those years that you weren't important enough to keep someone in this world. And it's hard thinking you're the only one who can see past the things around you to people who aren't there, but might be some day.

  He lies back, tired, and doesn't close his eyes. When I come back from the nurse's station with the little folding cot, so I can stay the night, his eyes are still open, but they're no longer unsure. He's remembering what she was like when she was here—really here—and it does feel like love.

  And isn't that the point? To do what we need to do to help them. To help them believe, I mean.

  Before they leave.

  Whether it's in the loop or not.

  Copyright © 2011 Bruce McAllister

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  AUGUST ISSUE

  Our August lead story gives you the chance to revisit Majipoor with science fiction Grand Master, Robert Silverberg. While all may not be going well, at “The End of the Line,” you'll find it's the same evocative world that inspired the author's blockbuster bestseller. In ourcover story by Lisa Goldstein, Elizabethan spies, Arab scholars, and Japanese homunculi reveal why “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.”

  ALSO IN AUGUST

  Will Ludwigsen returns to our pages with an offbeat tale about why “We Were Wonder Scouts"; World Fantasy Award winner Melanie Tem takes a harrowing look at a little girl's “Corn Teeth"; new author Zachary Jernigan's “ Pairs” offers us hope (and revenge) during humanity's darkest hour; another new author, Philip Brewer, gives us a stinging tale about how to recover from the end of life as we know it in “Watch Bees"; and Hugo and Nebula winner Michael Swanwick breaks our hearts as only he can in “For I Have
Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not be Back Again.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg's “Reflections” column reveals why “Earth Is the Strangest Place"; Peter Heck contributes “On Books"; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our August issue on sale at newsstands on June 21, 2011. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—byvisiting us online at www.asi

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  * * *

  Novelette: THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION

  by Paul Cornell

  With nominations for two Doctor Who episodes, “Father's Day” and “Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood"; a comic, Captain Britain and MI-13: Vampire State; and a novelette, “One of Our Bastards Is Missing,” Paul Cornell is the only person to be a Hugo finalist in all three media. Paul's thrilling new tale of daring espionage in a timeline somewhat different from our own is his first story for Asimov's and his third in a series concerning Jonathan Hamilton. Paul is also the author of two novels, Something More and British Summertime, from Gollancz. A third book will be coming out from Tor in 2012.

  The best time to see Kastellet is in the evening, when the ancient fortifications are alight with glow worms, a landmark for anyone gazing down on the city as they arrive by carriage. Here stands one of Copenhagen's great parks, its defense complexes, including the home of the Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, and a single windmill, decorative rather than functional. The wind comes in hard over the Langeline, and after the sun goes down, the skeleton of the whale that's been grown into the ground resonates in sympathy and gives out a howl that can be heard in Sweden.

  Hamilton had arrived on the diplomatic carriage, without papers, and, as etiquette demanded, without weapons or folds, thoroughly out of uniform. He watched the carriage heave itself up into the darkening sky above the park, and bank off to the southwest, swaying in the wind, sliding up the fold it made under its running boards. He was certain every detail was being registered by the FLV. You don't look into the diplomatic bag, but you damn well know where the bag goes. He left the park through the healed bronze gates and headed down a flight of steps toward the diplomatic quarter, thinking of nothing. He did that when there were urgent questions he couldn't answer, rather than run them round and round in his head and let them wear away at him.