Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I'm afraid, young man,” drawled Frank, now in his world-weary “English” voice, and there was a quick shuffle and the sound of a punch.

  At that, the crowd erupted in recriminations till a piercing whistle stopped the noise. “Quiet, please!” screamed the reedy voice again. “There's a big fat button here, by this panel. And it's got something scratched on it.”

  “Let him look! Get back!” the most authoritative voice commanded, and everyone scrunched again.

  Outside, the Chicago wind howled through the city, but the human banging on the outside of the craft had stopped hours ago. Inside now, only the faint breathing of the air mover could be heard.

  “It's crude,” the reedy voice announced, and people craned their necks to see the speaker, a thin-haired youth with a neck like a wrung chicken. “And it looks like it was scrawled real fast. But yes. It's an eff. A capital eff.”

  “Whad's that mean?”

  “Press it!”

  “No! Don't!”

  And a whole lot of other things, screamed at the same time, till no one could hear what anyone said, till one woman's voice soared above all the tumult, and it was Maud's. “Just open the damn door!”

  At that, the crowd pressed forward toward the door, but either there was no way to find the opening mechanism, or the wild panic that ensued when it didn't open directly caused too many people to shove against each other, and then slip on the shiny floor, and they became bodies that were trampled anyhow, as others stepped on them and stroked the walls, trying to find a latch, anything that stuck out, and there wasn't any, and the walls grew wet with sweat, and more people fell, and there was so much punching and yelling and unholily high screaming, you couldn't hear a thing.

  In two uncountable minutes, half the people were dead in a pile, and Mr. Schlumpfer lay against the opposite wall, his face poking out of his coat like a potato out of a burst sack—and as grey.

  When the door finally opened, half the rest of them killed the others in the rush out.

  * * * *

  Few of the living ever questioned how the door opened, or cared to mention their participation in the incident, and it is a shame that experiments as fruitful as this have been besmirched by so-called ethical considerations.

  The inventiveness and bravery of Maud Pickett and Franklin Hoffstedder in undertaking this psychological study have never been fully appreciated, except by Professor Eugene Thomas, who followed Pickett out the back way as soon as she disappeared, leading his father, who in trying to wrench his son toward the door everyone was pressing toward was himself crushed to death almost, and would have been if Eugene had lost his grip.

  Without discussing it between them, Jules and his son came to an agreement. Agnes, Eugene's mother, Jules’ wife, never got the goods on the story of what happened to Jules’ coat (and his right arm, strained at the shoulder) the night her son and husband were gone till way past a boy's bedtime, let alone a husband's duty to home. And Jules refrained from saying anything to back up Agnes’ insistence that Eugene eat an even larger load of vegetables every year he lived at home. Eugene would eat his reeking pile of greens in silence, his face letting on nothing of his thoughts, his disgust, while his mother regarded him with consummate pride. Her other friends had sons they couldn't control, one who, when his mother found him pouring his glass of milk into the aspidistra, gave in to his hatred of milk and stopped making him drink his allotted dose. Agnes roiled at that lack, enjoyed a well-earned gloat. Her son wouldn't end up as a delinquent, uncared for, unguided.

  As Eugene ate, she smiled at her plate. It wouldn't do to smile at him, giving him the sin of pride.

  And as Eugene ate his spinach, Jules, his father, also hid his smile. He knew, though it would make Agnes unbearable to live with, that he owed his life to spinach.

  And when Eugene moved to California to be an important scientist, Jules spent his days waiting for the hours when he was let out of the apartment for some errand, when he'd roam the streets, looking. Never to anyone, not even to the memory of Mr. Schlumpfer, would he have said for what. Certainly not to Agnes—nor, to his everlasting regret, to Eugene, his once-so-promising son. For the older Eugene grew, and the greater Eugene grew, what Jules saw was something he tried so hard not to think about, but he had to just accept. Eugene's strength was his weakness. His solid mind, that lack of imagination, that willingness to succumb to the hard cold dull-eyed fact, to grasp an explanation, that addiction to the real. It hurt Jules. Hurt him in the stomach, like eating a cold, hot-mustard slathered sausage.

  Yes, Eugene turned into a brilliant scientist. Everybody said so. But with too much Agnes, he would never see Neptune, never feel the comet's tail snapping in his face as he rides that cow over that big old so-close moon. Always be himself, weighty as an encyclopedia, stodgy as mashed potatoes.

  One day, Jules thought as he turned the key in the apartment door and said, “I'm home, dear. I had to go to 59th Street” (or “48th Street,” or “Park Avenue,” or “the third hardware store I tried"), “sweet, to get a fitting for the lamp.” (Or “the replacement” or whatever the errand was for, and sometimes he forgot and got in quite a stink of trouble.) One day, he thought especially at that time when he missed Eugene the most, and remembered just how the boy's hand felt in his when they were riffing their jazz, waiting for the shining moment—the lurch of takeoff !—If, when I turn a corner and see another spaceship parked and waiting, I'll have to board alone.

  Copyright © 2010 Anna Tambour

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  JULY ISSUE

  Our July issue features a sprawling new novella by reader favorite Robert Reed—and it's sprawling in both size and the reach of its far-future extrapolation. In “A History of Terraforming” Reed examines the multi-multi-generational journey of some very long-lived humans and their valiant (and sometimes catastophic and nefarious) schemes to make our Solar System a more habitable place. Along the way, we follow an earnest scientist, Simon, on his journey through some of the most inhospitable environments we know today, suddenly made positively Edenic. This story goes from Mars to Saturn's moon Iapetus, to far, far beyond: this is one trip you won't want to skip.

  ALSO IN JULY

  The venerable Tom Purdom returns with the taut and suspenseful “Haggle Chips” wherein an urbane and dashing merchant is held captive against his will in the midst of a bitter border dispute between two intractible societies; newcomer D.T. Mitenko submits the funny (though a little scary, too) story of “Eddie's Ants"—they're not ants at all, but a clever, unkillable alien hivemind living amongst the unwitting humans of a college campus. And what can you do when an alien ant farm starts dating your ex? Kristine Kathryn Rusch also pursues the lighter side of alien relations with her indispensible guide to intergalactic cruise tourism,"Amelia Pillar's Etiquette for the Space Traveler,” an invaluble resource for those who've yet to get their “space legs"; acclaimed new talent Aliette de Bodard returns with her second piece for us, the dramatic and historically dizzying, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” that describes a fascinating alternate future in which the Aztec culture remained ascendent in the south; and Alice Sola Kim, making her Asimov's debut, deftly explores the trials and travails of a young woman who must contend with psychically transmitted messages from somewhere, courtesy of “The Other Graces.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg's Reflections joins the hunt in “The Search for Other Earths"; Paul Di Filippo contributes “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our July issue on sale at newsstands on May 11, 2010. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in classy and elegant paper format or those new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!

  COMING SOON

  new stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick, Alan Wall, Carol Emshwiller, Sara Genge, Robert Reed, Will McIntosh, Ne
al Barrett, Jr., R. Neube, Ian Creasey, Eugene Mirabelli, Don D'Ammassa, Nick Wolven, Gregory Norman Bossert, and many others!

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  * * *

  Novella: EARTH III

  by Stephen Baxter

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Map illustrations by Tim Foley

  * * * *

  "Earth II” (Asimov's, July 2009) and “Earth III,” two stories about human exploration and discovery in the far future, are separate pendants to Stephen Baxter's novel Ark, which has just been published by Ace Books in the United States. About the time Stephen's latest tale sees print, he'll be “anticipating the UK launch of the next novel, Stone Spring (from Gollancz), the first of an alternate-prehistory saga.” He'll also be “looking forward to attending major conferences on H.G. Wells and on the search for aliens!"

  I

  At the foot of the ladder Vala paused, one slender hand on an iron rung, her face raised up to the tower's curving wall and the hulk of the Star above their heads. “Oh, Brod—what are we doing? This is the Eye—the holiest place in all the world!” And she murmured a prayer to the Sim Controllers.

  She had been hesitant all the way, as the two of them had climbed up from the Eighth Temple—hesitant, Brod knew, but excited too, thrilled on some deep level to be joining in this illicit adventure. She wouldn't have been here if she hadn't wanted to come—hadn't wanted to be with him.

  He dared to take her hand, touching her for the very first time, and she shuddered as if from the shock of it. “Oh, come on,” he said gently. “We've come this far. Let's just climb to the top of this wall, and we'll be closer than anybody else in the whole world to the Star—”

  “Which is why it's so holy! Which is why we mustn't do this!”

  “But if we're quick, we can be back in the Colloquy sessions before anybody's even missed us. Who would ever know?”

  “Nobody keeps secrets from the Sim Controllers.”

  “Well, I hope that's not true—”

  She seemed genuinely shocked. “Brod!”

  He had strayed too far into heresy for her, and he murmured reassuring noises. Brod had grown up with the theology of the Designers and Controllers, those strange silent figures who had designed the world and created all the people in it, and who watched everything unfold from behind invisible glass walls in the sky. Brod supposed he believed. It made more sense to him than the competing idea you heard bandied about in the taverns sometimes, that people had come to this world from—somewhere else. But what was real was the woman before him, her soft scent, and the way the breeze off the ocean caught the pale, milky wrap she wore, and the loose strands of red hair. She cast virtually no shadow, for on this island called the Navel, uniquely on all of Earth III, the Star was directly overhead—always was, and always would be.

  Vala was twenty Great Years old, a couple of Greats younger than Brod himself, and, as a daughter of the Speaker of Speakers and a Sapphire, he knew she was a hothouse flower. Yet he had lusted for her from the moment he set eyes on her, as he never had for the world-weary whores of Port Wilson, or any of the women he'd talked into bed during his raucous careering around the island nations of the Middle Ocean. The fact that as a Sapphire she was destined to spend her life celibate made her all the more achingly desirable.

  And he knew, under all the dancing around and the meaningless words, that she felt the same about him.

  He kept trying. “Just a little further and we'll be there. Imagine the stories you can tell the other Sapphires—”

  “Oh, them.” She pulled a face. And then her mood seemed to switch, abruptly. “I'll do it!” And she grabbed the rungs and began to climb.

  This was so sudden and impulsive she left him standing in surprise—and he wondered who was seducing who. But he scurried up the ladder after her, relishing the glimpses of a pert behind through the robe's billowing folds.

  * * * *

  They soon came to the top of the ladder, and climbed onto a walkway, of roughened wooden slats set in basalt blocks. Brod had never been to the Navel before this Colloquy; he knew nothing of its treasures. Now he saw that the top of this cylindrical tower enclosed a kind of shallow dish perhaps a hundred paces across, a bowl coated by what looked like a thin, black layer of Slime.

  And they weren't alone up here. Bulky animals were set out along one radius of the circular dish—he counted twenty of them, spaced a few paces apart. They were working their way around the bowl, the row of them sweeping around the dish like a clock hand—he saw that the outermost had to move faster than those nearer the center to keep the line straight. And they were scraping up the Slime layer as they went, exposing a surface that gleamed like the wing of a mirror-bird. Big brutes, each coated in thick brown-black hair, snuffling and snorting and their squat legs working—he recognized them as tractors, with their big gouging jaws and spade-like multiple tails, used in the fields around Port Wilson for plowing the fields and digging ditches. Whatever else he'd expected to find up here, it hadn't been these mundane beasts! And it must have been quite a challenge, he thought, to get them up here in the first place.

  “You can see the whole island from here,” Vala said, turning around, her gown billowing about her. “And the other islands beyond.”

  Brod glanced around indifferently. The Navel was a scrap of land in a sea like a burnished shield, one of a chain that stretched off to the west. There was really nothing special about the Navel—save that it sat precisely at Substellar, making it the holiest point on the whole planet, and the reason why tens of thousands of pilgrims made their way here every Great Year. So, despite the Navel's smallness, isolation, and poor harbors, the warehouses, hotels, restaurants, palaces, and churches that served an industry of holiness lapped right up to the walls of this central complex of temples and towers.

  A bell chimed, marking the end of another eight-hour watch.

  “We ought to be getting back,” Vala said nervously. “My brother will be looking for me.”

  That was Khilli, a brute of a man and even more possessive than her holy father. “Oh, but we only just got here. I don't even understand what I'm looking at. What is this place?”

  “We call it the Eye of the Master Controller.” She pointed. “People built the outer wall, and this walkway. But the core of the tower and the great dish is Substrate.” A structure put in place before humans ever came here—or a piece of engineered reality underlying the ephemeral Sim forms, depending on your faith. “And at the end of every Great Year, when the tithe fleets call, we have the tractors peel off the Slime that encrusts the Eye, just as they're doing now.”

  “And then what?”

  She squeezed his hand, playful. “You'll have to wait until the end of the next watch to see! Although mucking about with the Eye is about as exciting as things get around here.”

  “Don't Sapphires have any fun? We have a good time in Wilson. If you came away with me you'd see.” Suddenly he wondered what he was saying—she was, after all, the daughter of Elios, Speaker of Speakers! Again he wondered who was really in control here—and yet there was something in her manner, a mixture of innocence and coquettishness, that led him on helplessly.

  Now she said, “Fun? What kind of fun? Show me.”

  “All right.” He looked around. “We have tractors back home. Sometimes we have a little fun with them.” He stripped off his jacket, revealing a muscled torso creased by the scars of a life of fighting. “Hold my coat—and watch!” He jumped down off the wall onto the surface of the Eye, and took an experimental step. On the bands of Slime the footing was good enough, though the Slime itself was unpleasantly slick and oily, but the mirrored surface beneath was as sheer as it looked. Hopping between the bands of Slime, he sprinted after the nearest tractor.

  Vala called down, agitated. “Brod—oh, Brod! What are you doing? You'll get us into terrible trouble!”

  He just grinned back. As he reached the beast he jumped, slapping the tractor's rump
with both hands, did a back-flip, and landed with both feet on the animal's double spine. The moment of landing was always the trickiest, and he flailed as he shed his momentum, but then he stood proud. The beast lumbered on, indifferent, and he could feel the complex motion imparted by its six limbs, and the ripple of the banks of muscles under its tough hide. He whooped, and looked back at Vala.

  Her mouth was open with shock, and she clutched her cheeks, as if horrified. But then she squealed, and clapped and jumped like a child. He imagined her telling this story to the other Sapphires, pretty virgins like herself gathered like flowers in a breeze.

  But then a voice like a volcano's rumble came echoing up from below the walls. “Vala? Vala! You're supposed to be at the tithe accounting. Vala, where are you? If I find out you've been fooling around with that idiot sailor again . . .”

  It was Khilli, the evil brother. Vala looked down, anxious.

  Brod back-flipped off the tractor and hurried back to her. “You should go,” he said.

  “I know.” Yet she did not move.

  And they kissed. Afterwards he was never sure who made the first move.

  * * * *

  II

  “Vala! Vala. . . !”

  As she waited for the Polar woman, Tripp, to visit her, Maryam listened to the stentorian voice of Khilli echoing through the streets of the Navel's crowded township. Son of the Speaker of Speakers, brother of the most beautiful of all the current crop of Sapphires, and a brute of a man in his own right, Khilli was capable of causing a great deal of trouble if you got in his way, Maryam suspected. And she hoped beyond hope that her son Brod had nothing to do with the strange absence of Vala.

  In the meantime she awaited her visitor. For their private talks, Tripp the Polar would naturally come to Maryam's suite, rather than the other way around. Maryam and Brod hailed from Port Wilson, one of the principal embarkation points on the south coast of Seba, the continent that dominated the northern hemisphere. From the point of view of the Speakers, Wilson was essential not just for the tithes it provided itself but as a conduit through which flowed much of the wealth of the scattered communities of the continent. So Maryam had been given an apartment of several rooms in an upper level of this Seventh Palace of the Sim Designers, laden with fine furniture and with banks of photomoss lighting every dark corner. From here she had a grand view of the Navel in all its crowded complexity, and the flat light of the Star beat down on the world from its eerie position directly above her.