Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  A brief flicker of a smile. “I'm Jeff Halbert. There's something wrong with me, and I don't really know what it is . . . but I know that I'm Jeff Halbert and that I'm going home.” He hesitated, then went on. “I know we haven't talked much, but I . . . well, Dr. Rosenfeld has told me what you've done for me, and I just wanted to thank you. For putting up with me all this time, and for letting me be the Emperor of Mars. I hope I haven't been too much trouble.”

  I slowly let out my breath. My first thought was that he'd been playing me and everyone else for fools, but then I realized that his megalomania had probably been real, at least for a time. In any case, it didn't matter now; he was on his way back to Earth, the first step on the long road to recovery.

  Indeed, many months later, I received a letter from Karl. Shortly after he returned to Earth, Jeff was admitted to a private clinic in southern Vermont, where he began a program of psychiatric treatment. The process had been painful; as Karl had deduced, Jeff's mind had repressed the knowledge of his family's deaths, papering over the memory with fantastical delusions he'd derived from the stories he'd been reading. The clinic psychologists agreed with Dr. Rosenfeld: it was probably the retreat into fantasy that saved Jeff's life, by providing him with a place to which he was able to escape when his mind was no longer able to cope with a tragic reality. And in the end, when he no longer needed that illusion, Jeff returned from madness. He'd never see a Martian princess again, or believe himself to be the ruling monarch of the red planet.

  But that was yet to come. I bit my tongue and offered him my hand. “No trouble, Jeff. I just hope everything works out for you.”

  “Thanks.” Jeff shook my hand, then turned away to follow Karl to the ladder. Then he stopped and looked back at me again. “One more thing . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “There's something in my room I think you'd like to see. I disabled the lock just before I left, so you won't need the password to get in there.” A brief pause. “It was ‘Thuvia,’ just in case you need it anyway.”

  “Thank you.” I peered at him. “So . . . what is it?”

  “Call it a gift from the emperor,” he said.

  I walked back to the rover and waited until the shuttle lifted off, then I drove to Hab 2. When I reached Jeff's room, though, I discovered that I wasn't the first person to arrive. Several of his friends—his fellow monkeys, the emperor's consorts, a couple of others—had already opened the door and gone in. I heard their astonished murmurs as I walked down the hall, but it wasn't until I entered the room that I saw what amazed them.

  Jeff's quarters were small, but he'd done a lot with them over the last year and a half. The wall above his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he'd taped together, upon which he'd drawn an elaborate mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned: boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we'd ever seen before.

  That wasn't all. On the desk next to the comp was the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn't been satisfied just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin, each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten and handmade.

  I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title page: Edison's Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss. I put it back on the shelf, picked up another: “Omnilingual,"by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled down yet another: “The Martian Crown Jewels,"by Poul Anderson. And more, dozens more . . .

  This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because he knew, in spite of his madness, that he couldn't stay on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind. A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that had helped him through a dark and troubled time.

  The library is still here. In fact, we've improved it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the disk itself is in the base museum. And we've added a lot of books to the shelves; every time a cycleship arrives from Earth, it brings a few more volumes for our collection. It's become one of the favorite places in Arsia for people to relax. There's almost always someone there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or her lap.

  The sign on the door reads Imperial Martian Library: an inside joke that newcomers and tourists don't get. And, yes, I've spent a lot of time there myself. It's never too late to catch up on the classics.

  Copyright © 2010 Allen M. Steele

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: PETOPIA

  by Benjamin Crowell

  One of the characters in this story is based closely on a guinea pig that lives in Ben's kitchen. After detailed scientific observations of his family pet's habits and lifestyle, Ben is starting to lose confidence in Darwin's theory of natural selection.

  Rain slid down like sweat over the mountain of beige and black computer cases, as if the machines were still having trouble adjusting to the climate. Aminata Diallo twirled a screw, snipped a ribbon cable, and pulled a tiny solid-state drive out of the machine on her workbench.

  The drive had gone in the basket, and she was getting up to fetch the next computer from the tall, unsteady heap that slouched against the back wall of the alley, when motion caught her eye at the base of the pile—a rat? She'd let her guard down because it was so much safer now that Alseny had her working here instead of at the dump.

  There! Telltale ripples were still bouncing back and forth in a greenish puddle half-hidden in the shadows. She thought she could make out a furry leg sticking down into the water. Too stocky for a rat. She palmed the Phillips screwdriver and wished for shoes instead of sandals.

  “Hello?” a squeaky little voice said in English.

  Mina turned the possibilities over in her mind. She'd never been inclined to believe in the spirits Father mumbled about, but when confronted with a real one it would be foolhardy to ignore the basic precautions her baba had taught her. Then again, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation for what was happening.

  “Hello,” she parroted back, feeling clumsy about the pronunciation. She kept her eyes lowered respectfully.

  It forded the dirty puddle and trotted out, dripping, into the muddy alley: a shaggy little purple thing with big, liquid eyes and floppy ears. She fought down an urge to giggle at the creature's bedraggled cuteness, because that would certainly offend it. It launched into rapid-fire English.

  “I'm sure what you say is correct, sir,” Mina replied in Susu, “but I'm afraid my English isn't very good.”

  It just stared at her and cocked its head, so she did her best to reformulate her speech in what little French she'd learned when she was still in school.

  “Bonjour mademoiselle,” the dripping apparition replied, in what she imagined was a very posh Parisian accent. “I've been lost. Could you please ship me to 1324 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California?”

  California? She'd only gone as far as African geography before Baba got fired and the money for school fees and uniforms ran out, but she knew that California was in the United States. They had surfing, and movie studios. These computers must have come on a ship from California, and with them, this—spirit? animal? machine? Definitely not a spirit. If spirits existed at all, it was probably only in dusty old places like Baba's home village, not modern ones like California. And although parrots could talk, she'd never heard of a real animal with purple fur.

  “Can you
talk about all kinds of things?” she asked, “or can you only say things people told you how to say?”

  “I can talk about all kinds of things. What's your favorite dessert?”

  Smarter than a parrot, but not as smart as a person. Some kind of machine. She knew better than to answer its question. Alseny didn't volunteer details about what he got off the drives, but people talked, and Mina had a general idea of how the business worked. What's this rich foreigner's identification number? His birthday? His mother's maiden name? What about the name of his first pet, the brand of his first car, his favorite dessert?

  “Shut yourself off,” she told it. It did, and she went back to work.

  * * * *

  Mina hurried home, keeping a tight grip on the two plastic shopping bags. One held her tools and her collapsible umbrella, the other her bowl, her fork, and the furry machine. The rain had stopped. The electricity was out, as usual, and only in one place where she cut across the Avenue de la Republique was there a pool of blue fluorescent light spreading out from the internet cafe, which had a generator. She tried to look very busy and avoid attracting notice. You never knew what a soldier might do, and although the idle men on the streetcorners were usually harmless, it was best for a young girl to avoid their questions about why she was out at night without a chaperon. What would she say? My brother is too young, and my father begs in the Place du 23 Fevrier for money to buy palm wine.

  Through the window of her house, she was surprised to see a gleam of yellow light reflected by the corrugated iron wall inside. Was one of her parents home already? But when she got inside, she saw that it was neither Nga nor Baba but her brother Raphael who had the lantern on.

  “What are you doing? Have you had that lit all evening?” She cuffed him on the head. (These days she had to reach up to do that.) “You know what batteries cost!”

  “I was lonely in the dark.” He had on her hand-me-down black T-shirt that was too small for him, and for a moment it seemed to Mina as though the part of him that it covered might fade away completely if the lantern-light ceased.

  “You shouldn't have time to be lonely. Did you sweep the floor and fetch water like Nga told you?”

  “Carrying water is a woman's work.”

  So he'd ignored his chores and spent his day fiddling with his chess board. It was sitting on the table, set up in some position that Mina was sure was very interesting to an expert. Propped open next to it was one of Baba's old dog-eared books, a thick volume with diagrams of boards and finicky symbols that showed the moves. It was in a foreign language, maybe German, but she supposed Raphael could figure it out without understanding the words. Marching past the board, like tiny mortals ignoring a battle of the gods, a stream of ants went to and from an orange peel. Without yet putting down either shopping bag, she snagged the peel between two fingers and threw it out the window.

  A woman's work. The lantern threw her shadow onto the street, which was so narrow that the image of her head was cast onto old Mme Soumah's crumbling stucco wall. The arms stretched out long like the melted plastic parts when they burned the computers at the dump to get the copper out. She closed her eyes, and the weight of the two shopping bags increased, became the weight of the two men in her family pulling her down.

  “All right, give me the lantern. I've got to go out to the toilet anyway.”

  She looked around to put down the bags, and then the hint of an idea flickered uncertainly in a corner of her brain. She placed one bag on the floor to free a hand for the lantern, but kept the one with the talking machine in it.

  Someone was using the toilet, and, while she was waiting outside the tattered blue blanket they used as a curtain, she tried to fan her spark of an idea back into a flame. Raphael was in that long period that a male was allowed before he had to be grown up. The women had to baby him, and he got the best pieces of meat. Then the sun would rise one day and he would be a soldier, a beggar, a glue-sniffer, a stander on streetcorners: no longer a crushing burden but merely a danger or a nuisance. What Mina needed was a way to kick him over that threshold.

  When it was her turn she sat down and pulled the electronic animal out. She combed her fingers through its fur in the lantern-light, but it didn't seem to have a power switch. “Wake up,” she whispered experimentally, and then realized sheepishly that she'd said it in Susu. “Reveille-toi.”

  Its eyes had never been closed, but now they came alive and moved. “Hello again,” it said loudly in French. “Are we at school?”

  “School? No, this is the toilet near my house. Could you speak more slowly, and lower your voice a little, please?”

  “Oh, you go home for lunch?” Its voice softened but didn't sound whispery, so it was suddenly like hearing him from far away. “It's after one o'clock, though. You'll get in big trouble. You'd better hurry back to school right away. You can leave me at home. It's against the rules to bring me there.”

  “You're confused, Monsieur. It may be one o'clock in California, but this is a different time zone. Anyway, I don't go to school.”

  “You have to,” the machine said accusingly. “You're not a grownup. I can tell.” Was it her imagination, or was that a little pout on his lip? He really was simply the sweetest thing imaginable. “You're about fifteen, aren't you?”

  “Sixteen. But things are different here than in California. People aren't all rich. My family doesn't have enough money for school right now, and if they did they would send my brother, not me.”

  “Oh, I see.” It tilted its little purple head adorably. “You should be going to school, though. After I go back to California I won't be here to remind you, but you have to remember to go anyway.”

  “Bon, we should talk about that. I don't have money to send you back to America, so you may be here for a long time.”

  “Petopia will reimburse you for reasonable shipping costs.”

  “What's Petopia?”

  “Petopia is a world that Jaybeemallorme and Tiborhora"—the foreign names blurred together in her ears—"made in Jaybee's garage while they were eating unhealthy amounts of kimchi and Little Caesar's pizza. It's low-rez, it's silly, and while you're there you play the part of your Petopian. You can get your own lovable Petopian at . . . sorry, I'm not picking up a wireless signal here, so I can't tell you about local stores that sell Petopians.”

  Mina didn't know who Little Caesar was, or about kimchi and low-rez, but she got the general idea. “You're a Petopian?”

  “Yes. My name is Jelly.” When it pronounced its name it switched abruptly to an American accent.

  “So I don't need a store. I already have a Petopian.”

  It thought that over. “Well, you aren't my registered user. And you're using me offline, so I'm in demo mode. Unless you log in with the right password, you can't access all the features of Petopia's persistent virtual reality.”

  “Persistent . . .”

  “Virtual reality. The Petopia world.”

  “So . . . I have you, but I don't own you? And Petopia is like an imagining game—for little rich kids.”

  “Petopia isn't Webfrenz,” the machine said, with a good simulation of disdain. “Our demographic is older.” His manner communicated the feeling perfectly: you and I, Mina and Jelly—we're alike, aren't we? Not like those silly little kids. Had some American programmer written that reaction like a script for a play? “And you don't have to be rich to be a Petopiowner. You can get the basic plan for only fifty dollars a month.”

  How much was that? A dollar was down to about thirty or forty eurocents these days, wasn't it? And a euro was . . . Great God, they could spend that kind of money on a child's game? And that was for the “basic plan.” Evidently even their imaginary world was split between rich and poor.

  When she got back to the house she casually took Jelly out of the bag.

  “What's that?” Raphael demanded.

  “What's what?”

  “The stuffed animal.”

  “Oh, don't worry about Jel
ly. I don't think you'd like him. He's a little old for your, ah, demographic.” She wasn't sure if she was using the fancy French word correctly, but it was unlikely that Raphael would know any better.

  * * * *

  Once Jelly had heard the list of Raphael's daily duties, and verified that it was backed by their mother's authority, he made it his singleminded duty to enforce it. Mina had only hoped vaguely to enlist him as a spy, one whom Raphael would tolerate because he was also a toy. But even though Jelly was too small to hit Raphael, he had mysterious ways of getting him to obey. Mina never asked how it worked, for fear of breaking the charm, but when she came home in the evening the big plastic water jugs would all be full, the house would be clean, and Raphael and Jelly would be playing chess in light so dim that they must be keeping track of the pieces in their heads. Raphael took the machine under his wing. At the internet cafe, he apparently ingratiated himself enough by doing odd jobs that they let him recharge Jelly's battery every morning. Mina began to suspect that they gave him a little cash, too, but he never admitted it.

  It was only by chance that she found out what was really happening. It was a Wednesday, and Baba had been gone for two nights. Nga was worried, of course—perhaps in the same way one would worry about a goat that had jumped a fence, and might damage someone else's garden—but what could she do? She had to clean the rooms at the Novotel in the day, and then go and sell the toilet paper at the bus station in the evening. She asked Mina to go on her midday break and buy some groundnuts and tomatoes for a sauce, if the price was good. It was raining and devilishly hot. Mina slogged through the steamy, foul-smelling streets until she got to the market, and there was Raphael with a big bag over his shoulder, stepping off a minibus. A minibus!

  He sat down at a metal table under the awning of a cafe at the edge of the little market square. Incised on the table, and just barely visible from this distance, were the grid-lines of a chessboard, the faded squares indistinguishable black from white. He leaned on the fence surrounding the cafe. Oh, so casual: it was something he did all the time. A woman brushed against his arm with a brown chicken she dangled by its legs. She apologized, and he laughed it off. Even though she was older, he met her eyes as directly as a drunken soldier at a checkpoint at night.