Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  As everyone was leaving, the lawyer patted his jacket and said, “If you don't mind, I'll give this to you now.” He handed Alison the magic wallet.

  Though she'd never held it before she knew exactly what was expected of her and exactly how to behave, like magic. She opened the wallet but he waved her off.

  “No time,” he said. “I'll send my bill in the mail.”

  The caterer, however, needed to pay her staff. She wiped her hands on her apron, and held them out as Alison plucked dollar bill after dollar bill after dollar bill from the magic wallet. The leather was smelly brown, with fingerprints and worn spots from being pried apart.

  “I'm hoping to get home before next week,” said the caterer, eyeing the thickening bundle.

  “Sorry,” Alison said. “It takes a while.” She took out another dollar, and another, and another, and another until she had counted out three thousand. The wallet produced one dollar at a time. It would never be emptied, but you had to wait a second for it to refill. You could only pay for what you bought, not save for what you wanted. The process was slower than a dot-matrix printer. Her feet were swelling from the squeeze of pantyhose and dress shoes. If time was money, what good was a magic wallet now, when even a good cup of coffee, meaning a latte, cost $3.75, plus tip?

  “Well,” Ellen said on her way out, “Great to see you all. Guess we'll talk again when Mom's house goes on the market.” Ellen looked more relaxed than she had in years.

  “Bye,” Alison said. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Oh, she will,” said Ellen's husband, which was not at all reassuring.

  There was nothing else to say. They had entered a new stage of life, one in which their roles were reversed and Ellen would no longer be “the responsible one.”

  “Do you mind if we stop by the BMW dealership on the way home?” Jeff asked.

  “Of course I mind!” she said, ready to bite him. What was he thinking? Did he have no idea of how long it would take to count out forty-five thousand dollars? She did. Twelve and a half hours. She had watched her mother pay Ellen's medical school expenses, had heard her mother say she'd never do that again. And when it was Alison's turn, her mother had steered her to a one-year program as an animal health technician at Santa Ana College. Her mother had justified it all by reminding everyone of the hours it had taken to cover the bill for the complications resulting from Alison's Caesarean birth.

  Her boys appeared out of nowhere and asked Alison for twenty dollars each to go paintballing. “No,” she said. “Not right now.”

  “Why not?” they asked.

  “Because,” she said, but she knew they would press her until she caved, and she couldn't bear the fuss right here, right now. She opened the wallet to count out money into their open palms.

  “Well,” Jeff said. “Guess I'll quit my job.”

  He was right. She could pull his yearly salary in two eight-hour shifts. She'd quit her job at the animal hospital because no one could pay her as much as she could pay herself, but she'd miss some of the work, some of the people, and all of the dogs and cats.

  They left the hall and headed to the car to drive home.

  In the back seat the boys grew tired of fondling their money and began to argue. “I'm gonna make you eat paint,” said the oldest. “I'll gog you,” said the little one. “In your dreams,” retorted his brother. They paintballed on opposite teams and by the end of every game, the younger boy was in tears. It was an unfair match. The little one burst into tears now, as if resigned to his fate.

  “Where do you want to stop for dinner?” Jeff asked.

  “Hard Rock. Hard Rock,” the boys chanted. They would never again want to go anywhere without a gift shop.

  The magic wallet had been given to her mother by an aunt angry after not being invited to the baby's christening. At first the family had viewed it as a gift and not the curse that it was meant to be. Now it belonged to Alison. She decided to treat herself to a massage the next morning. Her husband was smiling, dreaming, no doubt, of Patek Phillipe watches and a bottle of the Macallan sixty-year-old single malt. The children took turns punching each other and stealing one another's money. Alison saw their lives unfold; the childhood bickering that would escalate until the day something as thin as a wallet with a one-dollar bill came between them.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Leslie What

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  * * *

  Poetry: RETURN OF ZOMBIE TEEN ANGST

  by Mike Allen

  In the halls, she won't even say Hi.

  She doesn't even know I'm not alive.

  —Mike Allen

  Copyright (c) 2008 Mike Allen

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  * * *

  Short Story: 'DHULUMA’ NO MORE

  by Gord Sellar

  Although the idea had been taking form for a long time, Gord Sellar tells us this story “kind of gelled while I was staring down into the Northern Pacific—I don't think it was quite the Arctic Ocean at the time—on a flight from Seattle to my home in Korea. I was born in Malawi, but my family left when I was a toddler and I've never been back to that country. I grew up hearing stories about that continent, however. I guess that's why Africa is almost completely offstage here—that's how it's always been to me; very important to the world but far away, neglected, mostly imagined or photographed by people passing through, or recounted in stories. Especially terrorist stories! The chaos of decolonization that my father witnessed all around him, of resource scrambles and coups and frightening governments suddenly seizing power, reminded me of the future I've imagined here. From what I've read, the effect of global dimming—which is the principle used in the climatech in this story—seems to be real. I get the feeling that whatever technologies we implement to deal with global warming in the next decade or two may have downsides, and if they do, I wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of those difficulties was expected to be borne by the developing world."

  What I wanted was to catch the slate-grey of the ocean, and the pale, forlorn bergs floating in it—to capture that coldness and distance that haunted everyone here, but especially the Mozambicans. But the gentle pinks and oranges of the toner-choked sunrise kept growing, deepening, and I couldn't drive it out. They were ruinously stunning, those rich hues brought out by all the gunk pumped into the atmosphere. It was the kind of scene amateur photographers had been snapping every sunrise and sunset since the first big stacks had gone online. Useless to me. I was still fiddling with the bugcam settings, jumping from one feed to the next, when Ngunu found me.

  “Beautiful, isn't it, Mister Illingsford?” he said. With that accent of his, I couldn't tell whether he was aiming for sarcasm.

  “Yeah, but we don't want beautiful,” I said, without removing my cam goggles. I left a couple of the nearby cams running, in case he said anything interesting. “We want the grey and cold. It's a psychological effect. Pretty landscape lessens people's empathy. They'll think, what's so bad about Africans having to floecomb here?” I gestured east toward the Greenland coast, its majestic glacial cliffs, imposing bergs floating in the foreground. “That's beautiful, they'll think when they look at that. People won't see dying glaciers, just white majesty.”

  “White majesty,” he echoed with an ironic laugh, and handed me a plastic mug of coffee. Black. No sugar, I figured. Bitter, a little burned, probably.

  “Thanks,” I said, and sipped it. I was right.

  I sipped a little more, watched the brightly colored tugs all around hurrying after bergs, slowly chugging them off to some hydrotanker. Around us, parka-clad Africans hurried about the deck of Ngunu's tug, yelling to one another in Portuguese and Kiswahili.

  “How'd you and your men get into ice salvage, Ngunu?” I tried not to sound too impatient. It wasn't just my curiosity. Making a documentary is storytelling, and I had only a vague idea of what story I'd been hired to tell.

  Ngunu just smiled and said, “What do you mean? I bought a permit, m
y friend, that's all. It's good business ... there aren't many good businesses open to people like us.” It was a non-answer, and he knew it.

  I caught myself searching his face for those other, long-ago faces of his. The shell-shocked kid, an abandoned child soldier who'd been found in a ditch and brought to the clinic cot in the Lichinga refugee camp. That was the face I remembered best, the one I'd snapped a shot of, that had ended up on the cover of Time. My most famous photograph, and probably the reason he'd offered me this gig. It'd turned eleven-year-old Ngunu into the whole world's raging guilt trip for almost a week.

  Or the angry young man I'd seen on the CNN-World webcast in Singapore, with his fierce, intense eyes staring out of the hotel's wall-size display at me, cajoling his fellow Mozambicans to rise up and crush the government man, the natural gas and deep-oil miners, the Chinese and American and European mosquitoes sucking Mozambique's blood away. We must rise up, my brothers, be men and smash them! How I'd squeezed Laura's hand when I heard him, and said, Oh my god, that's the kid ... my Time cover!

  I saw traces of those other Ngunus, but he was so much older. Calmer, quieter. Where has your rage gone, I foolishly wondered.

  “You know what I mean,” I said, shaking my head. “You were a general at twenty! You've got powerful friends. You could be president of Mozambique someday if you want. So why are you salvaging ice with these ... kids?”

  Ngunu exhaled a thick draught of steam and closed his eyes for a moment. Without opening them, he said, “President? Of what? Have you seen what's left of my country these days? It hasn't rained in eleven years. Anyway, what good are presidents?” He opened his eyes wide, intense. I was glad I'd left my cams running. “They get to skim a little money, for a while, but they always have to die. Bang, one night. Heart attack. It's never really a heart attack, though. Bang!” Ngunu said, slamming his hand onto the railing of the tug, and he looked across the sea to the west. “Me, when I die, it will be for something worthwhile.” Then he smiled.

  “Okay,” I said, and decided to change the subject. “So, what are we doing now? Looking for a big berg?”

  “Today?” Ngunu said, staring off at the other busy tugs. “No. There's something happening, big, up north. Today, we will go north.”

  * * * *

  The men were wary—each refused to give me a tour belowdecks—but a few of them were friendly enough. One old trick of the trade helped: I'd lock the controls, and get someone else to wear my cam goggles during the interview. That way, they relaxed enough for me coax decent interviews out of a couple of them, the ones who spoke English.

  Rafael Lokondo, especially. He was first mate, a close friend of Ngunu's from way back, and his story had been downright moving. I realized during his interview that, if I could just get the right archival footage—buy, bribe, whatever it took—this documentary might even have a shot at being award-worthy.

  Not that awards would make the world care. A lifetime of making award-worthy reports on one bloody mess after another had taught me that people don't even get shocked anymore. They'd see the documentary, or download it, at least. Crowds would clap at some festival or other, comment like mad on the website, some popstar would start a foundation, and a couple of newspaper reports might get written on poor floecombers. Then they'd all go on with their lives.

  Hell, I would go on with my life, too, after I finished it, so how could I blame them? And there was Laura's voice in my head, clear as a klaxon, what she said to me that night in Jaipur, in the shadow of A.C.T.'s half-built dimmer stack, the city full of billboards with their pie-in-the-sky promises in several languages advertising how the toner from the stack— “a blend of hypoallergenic, specially designed particulate matter tuned to the needs of the local climate"—was going to save our broiling world. And I realized, there on that tub of Ngunu's, that Laura was still right. I had to do what I was doing now. What else could I do?

  I shoved Laura's sad eyes out of my mind, along with the eerie pale-pink walls of the city, and forced my thoughts back to the problem of figuring out how to make the world give a shit about Ngunu's men, their families, their lake, their shattered world. Who would care about a few black Africans on a gigantic tugboat salvaging icebergs off the coast of Greenland? People had mortgages. Their alternative-fuel stocks were pogo-sticking up and down as new climatech companies were diving headfirst into the market. China was playing tough guy again. Anyway, everyone loves a toner-choked sunset. How can anything so beautiful be bad? And the emissions were helping to slow down warming, at least in the Northern hemisphere. Hell, too few people were even allergic to the stuff for anyone, even governments, to muster much objection.

  I watched Lokondo smoking a quick cigarette with a couple of crewmen, their hoods pulled back so they could see one another's faces. The world would look at them and say, That's not a plight, that's a job. People who flew to the other side of the Earth once a month for meetings or conferences would think they knew what it felt like to be far from everything they loved. But they wouldn't. They wouldn't know the cold, the bob of the tug, the endless, uncrossable distance.

  Could I make them feel that? Landscape, maybe, I thought, looking out to sea. The murky, toner-dimmed sky hung above, faint clouds a grimy off-white. Greenland was just a distant white strip on the eastern horizon. To the west, the distant, gloomy silhouette of an offshore mining rig hunched down against the sea. Closer by, an enormous berg drifted slowly out to sea to melt, like a forgotten country drifting off the map, with only the tug chasing behind to connect it to the world.

  But that wouldn't be enough. Scenery wouldn't make people really care. Perhaps nothing would, I half-thought, just as a loud voice suddenly exploded from the ship's loudspeakers, barking crackly Portuguese. Ngunu's voice. The men hurried belowdecks, their order and discipline astonishing.

  “What's going on?” I asked when Lokondo rushed past, wondering whether we were about to hit the berg.

  “Go to Ngunu!” Lokondo shouted, pointing toward the captain's compartment before rushing off in the other direction. I tore through my cam goggles’ interface menus, visually tagging random crewmen and sending cams flittering after them as they disappeared belowdecks. I sent a few more beetlecams crawling toward the tug's outer hull, and then rushed to Ngunu's boxy console compartment, almost joyful. Finally, something was happening.

  * * * *

  “Brace yourself,” Ngunu shouted as I arrived at the control room. He'd said it into the ship's comm, in Portuguese, but between covering water wars in Mozambique and the rainforest coca insurgencies in Brazil, that was one of the Portuguese phrases I'd learned to react to without thinking. I opened my mouth to ask what was going on, but I never got a chance.

  The explosion came almost immediately, with a massive spray of water, steam, and flames bursting from the side of the tug, and the sweet gassy stink of boiling methanol curdled the air. Smoke poured up from the tug's starboard hull, and shouts rang out belowdecks.

  Ngunu screamed desperately into his radio: “Requesting help! Help us! We have men here! No lifeboat! Permission to dock? Please! Over!”

  I wondered what dock he could mean, for just a moment, and then realized the moment was an audience sympathy goldmine. This demanded conscious camerawork. I cycled through cam views in my left goggle, keeping my right eye on the running capture of Ngunu as best I could. But what I saw in the left goggle distracted me. The men belowdecks were still yelling, but the scene was far from chaotic. Down in the smoky cargo holds, most of the men stood calm, lined up in their work uniforms, bags on their shoulders, unpacking crates.

  They were stuffing guns—big guns—into their shoulder bags, and had that steely look I recognized from the faces of children and men about to rush into battle. The same look I'd seen on Ngunu's face on TV years ago, demanding a revolution.

  Ngunu must have seen the shock on my face, in my staring eyes.

  “I'm sorry, but our regulations are...” a monotone voice said over the radio.

&n
bsp; Ngunu began yelling again as he tapped the touchscreen piloting interface. The tug changed course for the huge mining rig I'd glimpsed earlier, no longer so distant. The red logo for the A.C.T. Corporation grew visible, vivid against the grey of the rig's walls, the grey of the sea and sky.

  When Ngunu finally turned to face me, I didn't get to say much. “You...”

  “This is an emergency!” he hollered into the radio with a slight shake of his head. “Please! Help us!” he yelled. But he kept those calm, blazing eyes of his steady on mine, even as the cloud of black smoke thickened behind him.

  His gaze did not soften during the long silence that followed. He saw the questions in my eyes, but he did not answer them. He just watched me, listening, the radio mic in his hand.

  Finally, the guy in the rig responded. “Permission granted,” the poor bastard said.

  * * * *

  As the tug pulled up close to the dock, a crowd of parka-clad rig workers leaped on board, even before the tug's robotic clamps had fastened to the submerged docking rings.

  “Where is everyone?” one hollered.

  “Belowdecks!” Ngunu hollered. “Fighting the fire!”

  “Fire crew number one, get on it!” the same man yelled, and several others, hauling fire extinguisher backpacks with big red A.C.T. logos on the back, rushed down into the lower decks.

  Heaven help me, I knew those men were going to die. But I didn't say anything. I just looked at Ngunu and he grabbed my arm. The force was crushing.

  “Trust me,” he whispered into my ear. “This is the story of a lifetime.”

  An old reporter once told me that when someone promises you the story of a lifetime, you should refuse it, no questions asked. The story of a lifetime is almost always a horror, he said, reporting it taints you. Sometimes even just seeing it.