Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014

by Penny Publications

  Not even Quentin had enough books to fill the available space.

  Here was a challenge worth taking.

  There weren't many local jobs for biologists, particularly if they happened to be males in their early twenties. Everybody asked Quentin why he wasn't serving the military or some other good public post, but honest answers didn't win over employers who had already made up their minds. Thankfully a nearby factory coveted young backs. Quentin was hired on the spot. Days were dusty and often hot but he was paid well enough, and every evening he stuffed filthy clothes inside an old white duffel—a family relic with great-uncle Clovis' name and army unit stenciled on the sides. Whenever the relic was ready to explode, Quentin would drive or walk to the neighborhood laundry, and those days were like any other: Nothing interesting happened, and the rest of his life looked to be just as relentlessly bland.

  One evening, a familiar face passed through the laundry door. Quentin and the newcomer exchanged polite smiles. That would be that, he assumed, tossing socks into the washer. He was reading a Johnsgal novel when the woman happened past, saying, "Good evening, Mr. Maurus."

  He rose and bowed. "Good evening, Dr. West."

  The professor had given him a P-minus in Ancient Governments, and now she was dropping bras into an adjacent washer. That was worth a secret laugh. Reclaiming his plastic chair, Quentin read another two pages of battling starships. Then he looked up to find Dr. West standing closer than he'd expected, that small smart face showing something completely unexpected: A distinct, endearing nervousness.

  The woman was supposedly brilliant and undoubtedly she was demanding, as inflexible as an old Roman wall or the Mongolian bureaucracy. The history of the world lived inside her head, and while lecturing, Dr. West needed neither notes nor punctuation, nor any air. Drop your pen, her students joked, and a full century would slip away.

  Quentin was nervous enough to laugh.

  The woman found some reason to laugh with him.

  She was shorter than he recalled—the difference between being a tenured professor and a forty-year-old lady. There were no rings on any finger, steel or gold, and the watery brown hair was tied up in a chignon, and her oyster-shaped glasses hadn't been in style for several years. And like quite a few effective speakers, the woman knew what it felt like to be shy.

  She glanced at Quentin's book, at the obligatory rocket ship.

  He took a long walk to the dryers.

  When he returned, she said, "I suppose you're following the Mars mission."

  "Always."

  So they discussed the ambitious Mongolian space program, and then they talked about their government's moon base. Dr. West sat beside the graduate, only one empty chair between them. Not a gesture or word was improper, yet Quentin had to wonder what the woman was thinking. He tried to guess what was inside his own busy head. Meanwhile his clothes continued baking inside the dryers, and he finally saved them just before they scorched.

  Folding nothing, he stuffed hot shirts and socks inside the duffelbag.

  The professor studied the Clovis' name, the unit markings.

  "My uncle helped build the Aleut Road in the twenties," he explained. "When he wasn't fishing for grayling, that is."

  Dr. West smiled. She was smiling at her own clean clothes. Her basket had fewer items, and she hadn't cooked them. In a world built on coincidences, the two of them finished their laundry at the same moment.

  "Back into the cold," Quentin announced, throwing the hot bag over his shoulder.

  It was only November, but snow was falling again. Looking into the darkness, the lady asked, "Would you like a ride home, Mr. Maurus?"

  What surprised Quentin was his lack of surprise.

  "That would be nice," he said.

  An old yellow Trailbreaker was waiting at the door. Two minutes later, they pulled up in front of the plain white house. Quentin turned to her, saying, "Thank you very much, Dr. West."

  Garish Christmas decorations were burning in the neighbor's yard, making the woman's face red. With a nervous little grin, she said, "It's been my good pleasure, Mr. Maurus."

  She leaned toward him, and he leaned toward her.

  And because they were smart people, they hesitated, doing nothing for a moment while each considered a universe full of immeasurable ramifications.

  Katerini Tan was the most famous, most scandalous scientist in the Western world. In her autobiography, The Principles, she wrote about growing up as the genius child of a Han woman and an Egyptian man. Vivid tales of her affairs with famous men and their beautiful wives led to the making of a bestseller. Dr. Tan often claimed that her extraordinary talents with mathematics and with sex came from a profoundly masculinized brain. Who else could write such amazing ideas? Quentin read the book twice in college, and he reread it a third time afterward, but what was the strangest and best about The Principles was Tan's cosmology:

  The universe was built on its own desperate infinity.

  Matter and energy occupied every possible position, every mandated state, and in its fundamental heart, existence was nothing but a series of intense, perfectly rendered photographs.

  Dr. Tan claimed that human opinion was built entirely on human ignorance.

  Even the greatest people were nothing but alignments of soulless atomic particles, and similar particles could line up in nearly identical ways, pretending to be joined by something called Time.

  According to the mathematics, time did not exist.

  Every life and every potential history were nothing but the lines that could be drawn between unvanquishable, eternally frozen faces.

  The warm bag rode Quentin's right shoulder.

  Ten quadrillion slices of reality portrayed two people on the staircase.

  Dr. West watched her companion fish keys from his pocket and unlock the door, and saying nothing, she followed him inside.

  Quentin dropped his laundry on a slumping old chair. She looked at the chair and his hands and the air beside his face—everywhere but directly at his eyes—and then she quietly told somebody, "I should leave."

  "No," Quentin said. "Stay."

  Her hands grabbed one another.

  One reading lamp had been left burning. Quentin turned off the light and kissed her mouth while reaching inside her heavy brown coat, and she pushed him away until he reached again.

  "Wait," she said.

  Leaning forward, she wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed—not a hug so much as a wrestler's confining pose. Quentin felt her breathing, felt her heart working. A lot of professors generated scandalous rumors. Not this professor, at least nothing he could remember. And after nothing changed for what seemed like too long, Quentin began to believe that yes, maybe she should leave.

  Then the woman took one deep breath, her right hand running down the front of his pants.

  She didn't f ling him onto the mattress, but Quentin felt f lung, and she deftly climbed on top of the naked man, assuming the Feast of the Sabbath position. Her climax was quick and loud, and she returned the favor with desperate, self-absorbed intensity. Then she allowed him ten seconds of calm before demanding another round.

  Then they pulled apart, and they dressed.

  Quentin mentioned not knowing her first name.

  "Sandra."

  He repeated the name carefully.

  She put on her brown coat and Quentin put on his jacket, and with an edge to her voice, Sandra said, "You don't have to walk me out."

  "But my car's parked back at the laundry," he said.

  She had a fine laugh. Yet this time she didn't offer transportation.

  In the snowy street, she said, "Good night, Quentin."

  "Good night, Sandra," he said, the name still uncomfortable to say.

  There was no touch of gloved hands. No last look. The lady was embarrassed, or maybe astonished by what she had done. Or maybe she did this kind of thing all the time, and she was disappointed or already bored with him. Unless Sandra was wracked by guilt o
r some weird despair. Quentin couldn't guess anything about her nature.

  With a deep bark, the old Trailbreaker pulled away—an emblem of the miserable pay for professors—and Quentin began his cold walk.

  A large, loud family lived across the street. But in late November, with fresh snow on the ground and wind slicing from the Polar Star, that big plain house was eerily peaceful. Quentin paused, staring at the decorative lights, reds and whites predominating. The traditional manger was built from cheap pine that was badly weathered. Over the years, dolls and toy animals had replaced critical players. The wrong sort of camel stood in the snow, and one of the Wise Men had enjoyed an earlier career as a toy soldier. But the baby looked original. A bright spotlight shone on the plastic straw, and the Child of God lay swaddled in plastic cloth, her face not just feminine but exceptionally pretty, smiling bravely at the incandescent, softly humming Christmas star.

  Enormous rivers once flowed from the interior of the ancestral Africa. Two billion years ago, the earth was an alien world. Days were swift, the moon too close in the sky, and there were no trees or grass and precious little oxygen. Erosion scoured whatever it wanted, leaving vast deltas of sediment resting against the unnamed seas. In that younger earth, radioactive isotopes had different abundances. Chance and the sorting action of the runoff concentrated uranium into small areas, and the passing river water slowed the escaping neutrons, aiding interactions with neigh-boring fissionables, producing heat as well as a peculiar ash still visible today.

  Eventually the river would boil, geysers towering over the stark wilderness.

  According to Science Queensland, for hundreds of thousands of years those geysers would roar until the sediments dried out, and with nothing to slow the neutrons, the chain reactions collapsed, allowing the delta to cool and fresh water to flow back into the reaction zones, which soon triggered the nuclear blaze to begin all over again.

  Quentin was smiling while he read the article.

  And then a student emerged from the stacks, and his focus jumped.

  She was carrying a book against her chest. He remembered that body and her name, and she remembered his name. Their conversation was polite, leading to the point where she asked why he was here. "Didn't you graduate?"

  "But I can't leave," he said. "These journals have voices. They beg me to come read them."

  The girl didn't quite smile, her body rocking slowly while she looked at the upside-down title. Then with a cluck of the tongue, she said, "That looks horribly boring."

  Quentin remembered that he never liked the girl. Shrugging, he turned to the next article.

  And she made her escape.

  Page after page was filled with color images from the Vanguard probe. Leda was a cratered sphere, airless and cold; giant Europa was wrinkled in places by ancient tectonics. But the smooth white face of Io was tantalizingly young, a realm of thick pack ice and what might be a hidden ocean. And floating in front of glorious Jupiter was the angry, sulfurous orange face of Semele, bathed in radiation, an army of volcanoes trying to tear that moon apart.

  Quentin found her sorting laundry.

  It was the Monday after Christmas. Sandra smiled when she saw him. She smiled out of reflex and then in a warmer, more impressive fashion, pulling her basket out of the way so they could work together, washing and drying their belongings before two cars drove to his apartment.

  As if they had done this a thousand times, they went upstairs and lights were turned off and the yellowed blinds were pulled, and then they stripped out of coats and clothes before duplicating the first coupling. Afterward she turned around on the mattress, her face beside his face, and together, they tried to defeat this persistent silence.

  "I thought of calling you," she said.

  "You could have," Quentin said.

  "I did look up your number."

  "I couldn't find yours," he admitted.

  "Oh, it's unpublished," she said. Was she going to give it to him? Maybe, but there was another practical matter. "We need a system. We can't keep washing clothes, hoping to cross paths."

  Quentin's impression, based on very little, was that the professor didn't want the world to know about them.

  "Yes, a system," he said. "Fine."

  She pulled closer.

  "Fine," was a good word. He repeated it.

  "I'll call before I come here," she said.

  "Here?"

  "Would that be a problem?"

  "No."

  "Monday nights," she offered.

  Quentin nodded, and then he asked, "Can I call you?"

  She became guarded, just a little.

  "No," she said. But that didn't set the right tone. "That wouldn't be any problem, normally. But there are complications."

  Quentin imagined a husband, and that hypothesis was so reasonable that the imagined husband was accepted as fact—an older fellow, bald and bookish, carrying a soft, useless middle into his wife's bed. But Quentin didn't ask about husbands or forbidden phone calls. He didn't want to risk spoiling what this was: A healthy male doing what he was supposed to do, insuring that he was going to get laid.

  The reading lamp was on again. Sandra's rump had vanished inside panties. Putting on glasses, she noticed a cardboard map covering the far corner of the bedroom floor. By all appearances, she was curious.

  Quentin explained. College friends just had a baby daughter, and he was wandering through Treasure City, hunting for a gift. That's when he spotted the game box adorned with armored vehicles floundering in deep snow, handsome Western men shooting at vaguely human shapes marching along the edge of the world. The Europa Campaign was written in red. Blurbs promised a complex, historically accurate rendition of the World's War. But what sold him was a promise: Solitary play quality was deemed Very High.

  He bought the game for himself, and for the baby, a wicker dreamcatcher.

  The rigid cardboard map reached from the Rhine to the Tibetan Plateau, from Thule Sea to the Straits of Hormoz. Thirteen hundred years of war had been waged over this shifting boundary. Simple colors defined the very complicated terrain, rail lines and a hundred historic cities adding to the authenticity. Just punching out the brightly colored chits had taken an hour. Each chit represented some famous military unit. Blue Talons. Queen Anne's Faithful. The Fifth Tumen. The Big Red One. Entire evenings had been invested in a rulebook no less cumbersome than life. Then a few nights ago, Quentin finally rolled three dice to create a random number, launching a cardboard war that would take weeks to run its nonhistoric course.

  "We could play," he suggested.

  "Thank you, no," she said, setting down a Mongol tank army.

  "Strip war games," he said, watching her breasts.

  Her sternum deserved a thoughtful scratch. Then she slipped on her bra, asking, "Which side do you play?"

  "Both."

  "Emotionally, I mean."

  "The West, probably."

  She buttoned her blouse and touched his nose with just a fingertip, and he wondered what important thing she would say.

  "Mondays," is what she decided on.

  "Good," he said. And because that seemed inadequate, he added, "Great."

  Quentin was nine when the young teacher steered her class through a civics lesson. What did everybody want to be when they grew up? A forest of eager arms rose high. Girls wanted to be doctors and business owners and maybe president, too. Boys were more focused on their military careers—those ten years of mandatory service, beginning on their eighteenth birthday. Some dreamed of being pilots, others to be stationed onboard famous warships. But a couple of boys in back were ready for the Marines. Marines, they knew, were elite soldiers who conquered islands and didn't back down from any fight.

  Inside all that martial noise, one boy said nothing.

  The teacher asked Quentin what kind of soldier he would be.

  "None," he said.

  That deserved a puzzled moment.

  Then a classmate, knowing the story, called o
ut, "Quentin's the Son-of-a-Hero. He never has to be a soldier."

  The teacher was a Pawnee woman with big wonderful eyes, and her lovely mouth widened while the eyes grew even bigger.

  "Your father is a Hero?" she asked, thoroughly impressed.

  Quentin nodded, and the world around him noticeably warmed.

  Intercourse wasn't permitted. That was Quentin's rule through college. He didn't want mistakes, and he didn't want to give girls the chance to cheat—a reason left unmentioned. Yet not only did Sandra agree to the prohibition, she seemed to relish everything else that was possible.

  But even young men and needy women had limits.

  Even if they wanted, it was impossible to do nothing but have sex and then part ways. So the lovers found comfortable subjects. Rituals were built, fine pleasures cultivated, and sometimes—more than sometimes—both of them took pleasure from what was being said.

  "What did you study?"

  "Study?"

  "For your thesis."

  The smile was sly, girlish. "Greek men."

  Quentin laughed, hiding the squirm.

  His lover sat up in bed. A hard north wind was trying to destroy the adjacent window. Both of them listened to the panes shaking, and then she offered a few senseless words.

  "Greek," he guessed.

  "Byzantine Greek," she said.

  "Okay."

  "Marian IX," she said.

  "One of the Deiparas?"

  "They were called the Theotokos. In the Orthodox East."

  "Should I know her?"

  "You should but you don't."

  Quentin lifted his hand, pretending to hold a pen at the ready.

  She laughed, just a little. "Marian IX led the Orthodox Church for six years and six months before she died. Of cholera, we believe."

  "She was your thesis?"

  "Her foreign policies were. Particularly her balancing act between the Latins in the West and the Maimun kingdoms in Asia. But even that narrow topic held too much ore for me."

  The pen joke was stale. His hand dropped.

  "Scholars will swear: Marian IX achieved nothing. No bulls of note. No recorded incident where she tested the power of her male ministers. She might have been the Christ's representative, at least over the Byzantine world, but she rarely traveled and wrote little and left behind the absolute minimum of history."