Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The daughter was Gus's age, give or take.

  But she didn't look like the tattoo kind of gal.

  The woman said, “My father's sleeping now. Could I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

  Gus said, “Water.”

  I said the same, adding, “Thank you, ma'am.”

  She came back with a pitcher filled with ice water and three tall glasses, and once everybody was sitting politely, she asked if she could see what was inside the mysterious box.

  Gus handled the unveiling.

  I watched the lady's face. All it took was a glance, and she knew what she was seeing. Her dark eyes grew big and the mouth opened for a long moment, empty of words but obviously impressed.

  Then Gus said, “We'd like your father to have this. Naturally.”

  She didn't seem to hear him. With a slow nod, she asked, “Exactly how did you come by this object?”

  I jumped in, telling the story quickly, passing over details that might make us out to be in the wrong.

  At the end of the story, she sighed.

  Then she heard a sound that neither of us had noticed. Suddenly she stood up and said, “Dad's awake now. Just a minute, please.”

  We were left alone for a couple of minutes. But I had the strong feeling that various eyes, electronic and otherwise, were keeping watch over us.

  When the daughter returned, a skeletal figure was walking at her side, guided along by one of her hands and a smooth slow voice that kept telling him, “This way, Dad. This way, this way.”

  Winter had transformed Old Ivan.

  He was a shell. He was wasted and vacant and simple, sitting where he was told to sit and looking down into the box only when his daughter commanded him to do that. For a long moment, he stared at the amazing machine that he once helped build. Then he looked up, and with a voice surprisingly strong and passionate, he said, “I'm hungry. I want to eat.”

  “Sure, Dad. I'll get you something right now.”

  But she didn't do anything. She just sat for another couple of moments, staring at the precious object that he hadn't recognized.

  One last time, I looked at the starship, and then Gus took me by the elbow and took us toward the front door.

  “Anyway,” he said to the daughter, “it's his. It's yours.”

  “Maybe he'll remember it later,” she said coolly, without real hope.

  Then I said, “We were hoping, ma'am. Hoping that we could earn something for our trouble today.”

  Gus gave me a cutting look.

  But our hostess seemed pleased. Her suspicions about us had been vindicated. With a suspicious smile, she asked, “What would you like?”

  “It's about that empty house,” I admitted.

  “Yes?”

  “And the lot it sits on,” I added. “As it is, all of that is going to waste.”

  She looked at Gus now. “I'm surprised,” she admitted. “You people could have taken it over, and who would have stopped you?”

  “Except it's not ours,” Gus allowed.

  How many times had I dreamed of doing just that? But our SG has its rules, and there's no more getting around them.

  “I should warn you,” she mentioned. “I promised my dad that as long as he's alive, that house remains his. But when he is gone, I will send word to you, and after that you and your people will be free to do whatever you want with the building and its land. Is that fair?”

  “More than fair,” Gus agreed.

  “But how about today?” I asked.

  Suddenly both of them were throwing daggers with their eyes. But I just laughed it off, suggesting, “What about a sack of fresh tomatoes? Would that be too much trouble, ma'am?”

  * * * *

  For maybe half the drive home, Gus said nothing.

  I thought he was angry with me. I couldn't take it seriously, but I was thinking of charming words when he broke the silence. Out of nowhere, Gus said, “This is what makes me sad,” and it had nothing to do with me.

  “Think of everything we've got in our lives,” he said. “The water that we clean for ourselves. The food we grow in our garages. The easy power, and the machinery, plus all the independence that comes with the SG life. These aren't tiny blessings, Josh. A century ago, no one was able to stand apart from the rest of the world so completely, so thoroughly.”

  “I guess not,” I allowed.

  “But there's this big, big house, you see. And it's just sitting empty.”

  “Ivan's place isn't big,” I reminded him.

  But then Gus pointed at the sky, shaking his head sadly as he began to speak again. “With even the most basic tools, you and I and the rest of our SG could equip our own starship. Not a little ball thrown out of a cannon. No, I'm talking about an asteroid or comet with us safe in the middle, starting a ten thousand year voyage to whichever sun we want our descendants to see first.”

  “I guess that would work,” I allowed.

  “The biggest house of all is the universe, and it's going to waste,” Gus said.

  Then he pushed the joystick forward, pushing the big engine up to where it finally began to come awake.

  “Sometimes I wish that we'd taken a different turn,” he called out.

  “Who doesn't think that?” I asked, watching our speed pick up, the world around us starting to blur.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Reed

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: SPEAK WITHOUT GRAVITY

  by Mark Rich

  Speak without gravity to my ears

  in this teacup of a space station

  and I will wait on you, weightlessly.

  —

  Look: for rendezvous the shuttle nears,

  matching its spin to our gyration.

  At orbital speeds we dance slowly

  —

  closer to stillness: so it appears

  to us, as we drift with emotion.

  Our abated motions, breathlessly

  —

  awaited, weigh on us. Seeming years

  slip by. Sensory agitation

  stirs the air as you so lowly

  —

  speak without gravity to my ears

  in this teacup of a space station

  where I still wait for you, weightlessly.

  —

  —Mark Rich

  Copyright (c) 2008 Mark Rich

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: AN ALMANAC FOR THE ALIEN INVADERS

  by Merrie Haskell

  Merrie Haskell lives in southeast Michigan where she studies information science and works in a ninety-year-old library. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and other venues. Readers can find out more about her work at www.merriehaskell.com. In her first tale for Asimov's, she inhabits the thoughts of a collaborator in order to forecast...

  An Almanac for the Alien Invaders

  In January, there will be an annular solar eclipse, with the path of annularity moving through the Indian Ocean and into Sumatra and Borneo. Two days later, aliens will invade Earth.

  No spaceships will loom large in blue skies, nor hover over our cities. At night, though, when we see blinking dots of light near the horizon, as small and pale as any star, we'll think they're planes or satellites of human origin. They won't be. These are alien ships, come for conquest.

  That is all we can see. What we hear is just as faint and difficult to resolve: we hear rumors. Or rather, one persistent rumor: “the aliens want volunteers.”

  Naturally, I and my junior faculty friends need to drink quantities of beer to discuss this in detail. I expound that it's a hoax.

  “If there are alien overlords hovering above the ionosphere,” I say, “and our government can't attack them because our weapons don't work, and our President has never met with them because we don't know how to talk to them, then how did they learn Earth languages well enough to spread rumors?”

  “Maybe t
hey learned English from watching TV,” David says. We laugh at him, this poor faculty spouse, because we are not nice people.

  Shelby, the ethnolinguist of the group, leans forward to tell David exactly how alien an alien language should be, and my god, doesn't he understand the first thing about the transmission of culture? Shelby is a little drunk and a little abrupt, and David leaves with his wife soon after.

  To cut the tension, I propose a toast to the aliens. “No better distraction from worrying about one's tenure case,” I say, before I admit that I can't actually guess how culture will be transmitted to the aliens, because we haven't even seen one. We haven't seen more than the blurriest amateur telescope image of one of the ships. We can't guess much from these indistinct pictures: the ships are chunky and squarish, unrevealing of cultural identity.

  “The universe must not be very crowded,” I speculate.

  “Why's that?” Jim, my husband, asks.

  Shelby grins, leaning close to Jim. Jim doesn't flinch. He knows Shelby well; they're great friends when Shelby isn't drunk.

  “When humans left Africa,” Shelby says, and the whole table groans. “When humans left Africa,” she bellows over the groans, pounding the table, “they didn't have art, or decoration, and there wasn't much to distinguish between a tribal group living in Europe and one living in Asia. That's because a tribal group had a range of—” she spreads her arms wide “—well, a range of plenty of hunting territory. Resources not so much at a premium, you see?”

  Jim nods.

  Shelby continues: “But then you start to get some population going. Your kids can't just wander off to form a new band in your tribe without butting into some other group's territory. There is conflict. People gotta know who's an enemy and who's a friend on sight, from a distance. These people—” she pulls over the salt and pepper shakers “—start painting their faces red. And these people—” she pulls over a stack of coasters “—start painting their faces white. Primitive differentiation begins.” She bashes the salt and pepper shakers into the stack of coasters, making them fight.

  “Shelby,” Jim says, taking her hand to stop the spice/coaster wars. “Shelby, my face isn't red.”

  “Sure it is,” she says. “And white and blue.” She points with her free hand to the Stars and Stripes hanging over the bar. “There's your face paint right there.”

  “So, you expected the alien ship to have ... stripes?” Jim asks. I think his thumb is massaging her palm, but I attribute it to everyone being just a little drunk.

  “Something like that,” I say, taking his hand out of Shelby's. I won't point out that maybe there's an alien biology at work that wouldn't differentiate by sight, anyway.

  We'll drink a lot that night, and talk to little purpose.

  * * * *

  In February, the groundhog will see his shadow, and a million people will disappear overnight.

  No one will dare suggest it's the Rapture aside from a few pundits, because no one who disappears will belong to any religious group that believes in the Rapture.

  The day of the disappearance, only half my students drag in to my eleven o'clock, looking frightened and disheveled. A grad student ducks in at twenty after to announce that classes for the rest of the day are cancelled. The students sigh as one, but not in relief.

  Most of them don't leave. Most of them look at me, their eyes moist with worry and belief that I can make sense of it all. I can't, of course.

  “I don't know how to explain the disappearances,” I say. “Beyond what everyone already believes, that it's the aliens.”

  “The rumors,” one student, Marlena Fitch, says, blurting it out even to her own surprise. “What about the rumors that the aliens wanted volunteers?”

  “Volunteers for what, though?” I shrug. “I've heard they want colonists, collaborators, ambassadors, specimens, interpreters...” I tick them off on my fingers.

  Gregory Lin says: “No, they want the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, the poor, the homeless, the desperate, the terminally ill—”

  “But,” I interrupt, “did anyone ever hear a rumor of how you're supposed to sign up?”

  No one says anything.

  We talk about wife-stealing as a form of exogamy in primitive societies, because I can't think of any other direction to go. One student blanches because he's afraid I'm talking about having sex with aliens. “Exogamy is a metaphor,” I tell him. “If the aliens are kidnapping people, or taking volunteers, or whatever, it's probably for cultural exchange, or maybe slavery—but not because they're trying to breed half-aliens.” I hope, I add mentally.

  * * * *

  In March, the equinox will occur on the twentieth at 11:46 UT, and my tenure will be denied.

  I go home early and sit in the dark, waiting for Jim to come home. He's much later than I expect. I think about all the times I have seen him touch Shelby's hand, not liking how any of it makes me feel. When he returns, I don't confront him, because I don't want to lose my husband and my career on the same day. I lie about the tenure, saying they haven't made up their minds yet.

  At least both of us are lying.

  In March, the aliens will be quiet. I won't even hear their rumors.

  * * * *

  In April, the Northern Hemisphere will see an unusual streak of early warm weather; a second million people will disappear; and violence will break out around the world.

  Safe in the Midwest, I start my job-hunt, having no interest in staying where I can't get tenure, and where I'm unwanted anyway. Job-hunting is the secret focus of my life until the second million disappears.

  This time, the university doesn't cancel classes until they realize one of their own—a student—has been taken. My class begins before the cancellation, however, and my students show up looking dazed, depressed. This is no longer the rational world they were promised by their liberal arts educations.

  We talk through the whole class period about the aliens, but we don't really manage to relate it to anthropology. Gregory Lin says, “I didn't hear any rumors this time.”

  Marlena Fitch whispers, “Maybe they weren't volunteers this time.”

  That evening, violence erupts in D.C. Vigils for the lost turn into protests, protests turn into demonstrations of grief and despair, and demonstrations turn into riots. I curl up on the couch in the fetal position, watching the news coverage. Jim comes home late, and he pretends he is not late by not talking to me at all.

  The next morning, the flag on the quad is at half-staff.

  I sit beside a patch of daffodils in the unseasonably warm weather to eat my lunch. Gregory Lin walks past and notices me there. “Professor Naidu?”

  I look up, squinting into the too-bright sky, and Gregory slides down next to me. The talk turns inevitably to the aliens; there is no other topic.

  Longingly, Gregory looks out over the somber crowds of students thronging to class. “Is this how it will be?” he asks. “Will we live in fear, always, that aliens will take us?”

  “We don't know they weren't volunteers, Gregory.”

  We will talk about secret police and regimes of fear. Neither of us will convince the other, but that's because neither of us will truly know what we believe in that time, after the second million are taken.

  * * * *

  In May, minimal rainfall will lead to drought conditions across the Midwest, and I will make contact.

  First, though, Jim will confess his affair, guilt clinging to him like body odor. Instead of playing out the scene as he expects, I tell him about losing my tenure case two months previous, and then, because I cry more than I expected to when Jim tells me the truth, I leave the house and go for a long night drive.

  About two hundred miles from home, I find myself with a dead cell battery and no charger. I stop at an all-night super-grocery to buy a disposable phone. On the way into the store, I spot a neon blue sticker on a light pole. “Archaeology of Consuls” it reads, with a toll-free number beneath.

  I remember t
he term from discussions of archaeology in the colonial era. A single archaeologist was responsible for excavations in an entire colonial power's holdings—vast stretches of Africa, for example, a stretch that now comprises four or six modern countries, all under the auspices of one man (for, of course, the only archaeologists in those days were men). The archaeologist was solely an agent of colonial power; all finds were sent to the homeland as a matter of course—there was no question about leaving items in country for the sake of colonial identity, unless the find was too large and had to be abandoned in situ. It was a treasure-hunting, grave-robbing, Indiana-Jones style of archaeology, belonging to another age. Strange to think of some teenager's garage band with this title.

  I buy the disposable cell, but instead of dialing home, I call the toll-free number scrawled below “Archaeology of Consuls.” What the hell. One ring and a warm female voice asks my name. I feel displaced enough to give it to her.

  “Dr. Naidu? We've been hoping you would call.”

  I will know then, right away, that I have unwittingly made contact with the aliens.

  * * * *

  In June, the solstice will occur at 05:45 UT, and I will become an alien collaborator.

  My contact with the aliens remains secret for the better part of a week. Graduation is over, having taken place at the end of May before I turned in my final grades (this is, and perhaps always will be, one of the ironies of higher education). Gregory Lin comes to see me while I'm simultaneously packing up my office and grading term papers, on the first day of June.

  “Professor Naidu?”

  “Please, call me Elizabeth. I'm no longer your professor.”

  He is awkward, made uncomfortable by the wall I've destroyed, but too polite to refuse the request. He avoids calling me by name for the rest of the conversation. “I was...” He appears to be twisting the air between his hands, a gesture I recognize from when he would twist his winter cap between his hands during my office hours. “I wanted to thank you for the recommendations you wrote for me.”

  “You're welcome. I hope you get your pick of grad schools.”

  He takes a deep breath, then looks around at the denuded office walls. “You're moving offices?”