Asimov's SF, February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Shamed, Moser walked quickly back to his dorm room. To think he had wanted to brag to her about his experiment. His roommate Aaron got up from his bed and punched Moser in the arm playfully when he saw Moser's dour look. He asked Moser what was wrong. He asked whether he'd eaten breakfast yet.

  "Got chewed out by Reynolds. She really respected me, you know? I should have kept my mouth shut."

  Aaron made a farting noise, called Reynolds a jackass, and told Moser not to worry about it. Aaron was on the MBA track and probably had not met Moser's favorite professor.

  Moser listened with only half his brain. The other half quietly purged some of the more far-fetched ideas from his head. Becoming an astronaut. Developing new sustainable energy sources. These ideas were slow-acting poisons, he'd realized on the walk back to his dorm room, and he had wasted far too much time on them. He was twenty years old with twenty years wasted, twenty poisoned years he could never get back.

  Moser picked up his notebook and ripped out page after page, tossing them at the trash. Aaron stood over his shoulder as he did so. Aaron smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer, as though he hadn't brushed his teeth or washed his face since his date of the previous night.

  "What's with all the triangles?” Aaron asked.

  Moser had pages of them, simple illustrations of rounded-corner triangles with numbers scribbled in the margins. It was just an idea, and each triangle he'd designed and refined now represented a girl he could have hooked up with. Each one was a party he could have attended with Aaron. In the future, Moser would look for rounded triangles on all potentially poisonous ideas, just as he looked for the V-shaped heads to identify venomous snakes back home.

  Moser didn't want to explain anything, waste another breath on a silly project, but he felt he shouldn't just close up the one time Aaron showed actual interest in what he was working on.

  "It's a mirror,” Moser said.

  "Oh."

  Moser hesitated. Aaron probably wasn't studied enough to laugh at him. Worst case scenario would be scaring Aaron into never asking him another question, and frankly Moser could use the alone-time. He decided to risk it.

  "It's a space mirror, light enough to launch into orbit inexpensively. If we ever terraform Mars into something habitable, a relatively small number of these mirrors orbiting Mars could help trap the Sun's heat within the planet's atmosphere."

  "Cool,” Aaron said, and then nodded blankly.

  Moser considered whether he should explain what it meant to terraform Mars, how incredibly huge and important a task like that could be. Aaron wasn't stupid, but sometimes he lost himself in his get-rich-quick schemes as surely as Moser probably lost himself in poisoned science and invention.

  "Mars can suck it, man,” Aaron said finally. “I'm cold right now. Will this thing work on Akron?"

  Moser didn't know. He had never thought of that.

  "Breakfast?"

  * * * *

  EIGHT: ADVENTURES IN ISOLATION

  Tara was twenty-five when she told Bhuvana, her lover of two years, that she needed more privacy than she currently enjoyed in their Rochester, New York apartment.

  Tara had realized and accepted in college that she was a lesbian. Later Tara accepted that she'd probably never be able to quit her receptionist job and write poetry full-time. But it took her longer to accept that part of her that was introverted.

  Tara felt ashamed of her social anxiety, her sometimes-reluctance to go to parties with friends, her exhaustion and irritability after attending those parties, and the cloud corrupting her ability to think as clearly when anyone else—even Bhuvana, who she often loved to spend time with—was in the room. These were symptoms of a phobia (perhaps it was even a disease?) that Tara could never view as normal, at least not in the way she could view her sexuality. She had told her father she was a lesbian when she was a college junior; she could barely even admit to herself that she was an introvert.

  But now she told Bhuvana, who looked at Tara exactly as Tara feared she would look at her: with a disappointed frown, a tightened brow, and remote eyes whose brown color faded into the black of their pupils. Bhuvana's eyes told Tara that it was wrong to want to be alone, even for just an afternoon hour, and especially for an artist's retreat, which was just plain selfish.

  "I'm looking at a six week fellowship,” Tara said, after preparing her words in private. “Eight tops. You can come visit. I just need to get out of the cubicle for a while."

  Bhuvana said, “I'm not here for your life experience.” It was an argument for a different insecurity, but it stung Tara anyway.

  So Tara said again how “it's not about us.” She knew there was a better way to explain it, a way Bhuvana would understand, but Tara could not find it in the cloud of her lover's presence. Tara had become an expert with words when she could prepare and revise them in isolation. But between work and Bhuvana, she did not get that isolation often enough anymore. And the consequences to her mental health were cumulative, like sleep deprivation. She needed the tiniest of vacations.

  "I'm so sorry I ever got in your way,” Bhuvana said. “Good luck to you."

  After Bhuvana left their apartment for the last time, Tara found them, the words that might have convinced Bhuvana to stay. When Bhuvana had come out to her traditional Hindu family, they had responded that she would get used to living with a man if she would just find a husband, or even let them find her one. Asking Tara now to live a life always in front of others was like asking Bhuvana to live with a man and just get used to it.

  Tara wrote the analogy down in her notebook, where it didn't seem so trite and useless. Maybe tomorrow she'd work it into a poem that Bhuvana would someday read and understand and feel bad enough about to call her. Someday.

  Today Tara wished she had an anagram to get through the first few hours alone. Bhuvana used to create anagrams for her when Tara donated blood or visited the gynecologist. Working out the anagram would keep Tara's mind off the otherwise unsettling experiences. Her poet's pride made her feel guilty about escaping into her mind rather than staying present and mindful at important life events. But she believed the alternative would be a poetry cluster about barf bags and cowardice. She hated confessional poems.

  Now this was an anagram moment with no Bhuvana. So she opened a bottle of Shiraz before pulling out her manila folder of applications for fellowships, writer retreats, and artist colonies. She reordered them so that the ones closest to Rochester, which would have been closest to Bhuvana, were no longer at the top of her list. Now Tara wanted to get far away from Rochester, from Buffalo, from New York. Something in a jungle would be nice.

  By the end of the night, she decided to apply to four: two on the West Coast, one in Louisiana, and one sponsored by NASA.

  NASA wanted to put a poet in outer space. The application was the only one she'd ever seen that asked for her weight in addition to the usual bibliography and writing samples.

  Tara couldn't think of anywhere more isolated than outer space. And she was a little tipsy.

  * * * *

  For three years, Moser spent seven months out of twelve alone on Great Bear Lake in northwestern Canada, doing the hour-per-day upkeep at an off season resort. Twice per month he received delivery of groceries, mail, and books. Otherwise his only contact with the outside world was through his computer.

  Moser spent most of his day doing research, learning conversational Spanish, training with free weights, and typing up patent applications and proposals. He emailed the proposals to Aaron, his former roommate and now a successful entrepreneur. Aaron found practical uses and unexpected implementations for Moser's designs and ideas, which turned out to be not so poisonous after all. If anyone ever laughed at anything Moser came up with, Aaron never told him about it.

  Aaron and Moser were both multi-millionaires, largely because of a pen-sized transmitter Moser had designed and patented. The device could block cell phone signals within a thirty-yard radius. Variations of the device could
knock out wireless microphones and other transmitters as well. Moser liked to believe that spies counted on his device for espionage missions all over the world, but Aaron had told him that regional theaters made up the bulk of their clientele.

  Moser handled everything through Aaron, except for a construction project he managed from afar. In fact, Aaron knew nothing about that project. Moser felt it was better this way. If Aaron had known where Moser was dumping his half of the fortune, the least Aaron would do was laugh.

  So Moser spent seven months of each year in solitude, not because he liked the work or needed the money, but because he wanted the practice and needed to prepare.

  During the five months he wasn't at Great Bear Lake, Moser divided his time between his construction site and tedious meetings with Aaron's investors who kept asking him to “come up with another pen,” meaning another device as successful as the pen-shaped transmitter, but not at all similar to it. They wanted him to come up with solutions to non-problems, which could make money. Which is why Aaron was better at this side of business than Moser ever could be.

  Also in those five months, Moser spent a great deal of time at the bottom of swimming pools.

  There, too, he was preparing.

  * * * *

  SEVEN: SPACEPOET

  Tara was twenty-seven when NASA launched her into orbit.

  The ten-month training was the antithesis of what she wanted in a writing retreat. When they weren't poking her with one thing, they were pushing her into something else. She trained fourteen hours or more every day, with homework besides and not even a graduate degree at the end of the rainbow.

  The constant engagement (the constant people!) had kept her mind off Bhuvana, but it also kept her from dealing with the breakup as deeply as she'd needed to. She found herself reaching out to strangers for company at moments when she would have much preferred solitude. And she feared that she'd written Bhuvana into every poem of the last year.

  Not that Tara had written all that many poems in the past year. But she told herself it would be worth it in the end to spend some time away from the world, practically alone in the sky.

  There was a moment, as two men had lifted Tara out of a G-forces simulator, when it had dawned on her that the prodding and attention could be just as bad in orbit, that the confined quarters of the International Space Station would lend themselves to even less privacy than she had had in training, and that constant watch from 220 miles below wouldn't be much better than someone physically looking over her shoulder. She also felt nauseated from the simulator, and she thought about the slow stroke with which Bhuvana's hands might massage her stomach after a heavy meal. “Effleurage,” Bhuvana had called it. Tara would never be so loved again.

  The rough hands of these two men, yanking her out of the simulator by her armpits, were a poor substitute for Bhuvana's, but Tara felt convinced that if she dropped out of the space program, she would never be touched by anyone again. Nobody was that introverted.

  NASA had wanted a poet, because someone up high felt that all Americans, even non-readers, respected poetry. An administrator told Tara in confidence that no one trusted journalists to be independent anymore, and the fame of a well-known fiction writer would certainly eclipse the attention NASA wanted for itself. And if something went wrong? Well, how many living poets could the average American name anyway?

  So they wanted a non-threatening poet to communicate to the masses the importance and adventure of space travel, and to capture experiences rather than tell fanciful or exploitative stories. In a perfect world, Tara might well become the most widely read poet of her generation (not that that was saying much), and NASA would gain renewed interest in the space program. And even if no one was interested in the end, Tara still got an eight-month vacation on the International Space Station out of the deal. Which, if Tara was lucky, could offer more privacy than her training had.

  All throughout the preparation that didn't agree with her, Tara had expected the poet-in-space program to be canceled. She was sure that they would realize that no one, not even those who bought rare editions of Reinaldo Arenas and Edna St. Vincent Millay to decorate their condominium end-tables, actually read poetry anymore. Or worse, they would find some controversial, explicit haiku she'd written in high school that wouldn't test well with white America. It would be a glorious end to both poetry and space travel, an end that could only be eclipsed by an explosion on the launch pad.

  But now she was on the launch pad (so far, so good), in the third most important seat of the shuttle. She sat back vertically, excessively strapped into an uncomfortable chair, facing up. She had endured the training, the invasion of her personal space, and now would come the big payoff. She wanted to throw up, but mostly in a good way.

  Right on cue, Tara heard Mission Control in her headset, saying one of those things that made her want to throw up in a bad way:

  "Are you ready to put poetry in space, Tara?"

  Alistair, the astronaut in the chair above her, turned and offered her a thumbs-up and tongue-over-teeth smile. He was the type, Tara decided in training, who confused annoying with charming. He wore a “body spray,” which Tara gathered was a perfume for men. As long as he didn't wear it on the space station, she didn't care what it was.

  Tara looked over at Pia, their captain, who weighed almost as little as Tara did. She was four-foot-two with normal bones, so far as Tara knew. Tara pleaded with her eyes ("don't make me say it"), but Pia shook her head and went back to her checklist, as always too busy to deal with Tara's little drama.

  So Tara cringed and closed her eyes. Was she ready to put poetry in space?

  "There's always been poetry in space, Mission Control,” she said finally, each word deliberate and exaggerated. “I'm just here to bring some of it back to Earth.” She hoped that anyone she respected would hear the sarcasm in her voice. Why again did they want a poet if they were just going to script this bullshit for her to say? She tried to stroke her belly through her coveralls. “Effleurage,” she whispered.

  The shuttle shook even before the countdown started. Tara reminded herself that this was probably normal. But what kind of shaking was atypical for a launch? In the simulators she could never even tell when exactly she was supposed to be airborne, which surely was a failure as an astronaut as well as a poet, whose job it was to observe things.

  She felt herself sink back deeper into her seat. They must be in the air now. NASA had evaluated Tara's bone structure and decided she should be fine for space travel. They had machines to help prevent bone mass deterioration, and she should be more vigilant about using them regularly. But if she hadn't broken anything in a quarter century of living, a shuttle launch probably shouldn't crush her or anything. Probably, they said. Or anything, they said.

  Radio transmission was nil—even if they could have received transmissions, they wouldn't have been able to hear anything on their headsets over the rumbling of the ship. This, Tara felt, must be what it would feel like to be truly unreachable. Not for the first time, Tara felt bad about being an introvert, sorry for not wanting to hear human voices every second of every day. She felt a sudden panic. Perhaps as punishment she would never hear a human voice again.

  Tara had broken her characteristic introversion earlier in the week by asking Pia for an anagram to work on during the launch. Pia had said she was too busy—her usual response to anything involving Tara “The Space Tourist” Jones—but later Pia had cheerfully handed Tara a slip of paper with “SLOWED T BRIDE” written on it. She even told Tara a clue: “This is why you shouldn't be scared that our well-designed equipment isn't going to blow us all up during launch."

  But instead of the anagram, Tara thought of something a college girlfriend had mentioned after taking a world religions class: that the Buddha was what connected people to the earth. Tara didn't know if he did, but she wondered what would happen if the reincarnated Buddha was launched into orbit. Would this doom the souls of mankind? Would everyone on Earth
die?

  Tara imagined a thousand Buddhist warriors discovering at the last minute that Tara was their reincarnated prophet, about to launch her not-quite-hollow bones into space. In order to save the world, they would have to stop her and destroy the shuttle. But it's a sin to kill the Buddha, so first they would have to meditate on this conundrum.

  This could be her first poem from space, Tara thought. And then NASA would replace her with a young pop-singer/model-type whose palatable lyrics wouldn't challenge or offend. They could make the diva compete on a reality-TV show where she'd have to vote other anorexics off the shuttle.

  Tara solved the anagram suddenly. “LOWEST BIDDER!” she yelled. She called Pia all the names she would not have been allowed to call her if the radio microphones or Pia could hear her. Tara would let those words be the last she screamed before leaving Earth's atmosphere.

  The sky faded to black in the window ahead of her. It took Tara a minute to realize that this was a good thing. When the radio in her headset came back on, signaling that they and the people of Earth were still alive, Pia said the hardest part was over. Tara did not have the hardest parts, but she was unbroken.

  "How does it feel, Tara,” Mission Control asked in her headset, “being the first poet in space?"

  "I'm not the Buddha,” Tara said.

  She wanted to throw up. But her twenty-eighth birthday was next week and she still hadn't broken a bone. In lieu of cake, she would be in orbit around the Earth, as isolated as currently scientifically possible.

  She pretended her hand was Bhuvana's.

  "Effleurage,” she whispered.

  * * * *

  Just before leaving Canada, Moser sent a large, flat envelope to Aaron. The envelope contained a copy of his will, and a large advertisement to be placed in the New York Times and in several prominent science periodicals once it was all over. There was also a sticky-note with the words: “Gone out for Cherrygale."

  Moser sent a second envelope to NASA, containing a letter and a cashier's check. He set up his mail and e-mail to forward to Aaron's addresses. He forwarded his phone calls to Aaron's voicemail. He disappeared.