Asimov's SF, January 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He stood there for a few uncomfortable moments. “You said you have some data.” Cayla took a deep breath, and was about to launch into her prepared speech, when he said, “Write it up, send it to me,” spun on his heel, and marched away, leaving Cayla feeling all twisted inside.

  * * * *

  Cayla found it hard to focus as they anxiously awaited the scan results. Rish was pacing again, muttering to himself. “I'm not one to create catastrophes,” he said at one point, “but what if it's serious? Is just waiting around for weeks really a good idea?”

  In the meantime, Cayla forced her attention on the paper, although sometimes the words swam before her eyes and she found herself crying with frustration and fear. She imagined Maune saying, It's the worst rubbish I've ever read, Miss Kalinauskas. She sighed and soldiered on.

  When she couldn't stand the sight of her sentences any more, she sent it to Maune by v-mail. He'll probably tear it to polite bits, then tell me it was a good exercise.

  And she waited.

  She heard nothing.

  As the hours and days ticked past, she felt an uncomfortable tide of rage rise inside her. “He could at least acknowledge he received it,” she said to Rish. “All this waiting is terrible.” Then she quickly added, “It's not like you having to wait, which is really terrible.”

  “Ahh, we're both on edge,” Rish said. “Years from now, I'll still be waiting for the results of my hundred and twentieth scan, and you'll still be sitting, watching your v-mail icon. Terror fades into dull boredom. Are you going in tomorrow? It's Wednesday.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  * * * *

  Cayla dragged herself onto campus with a sense of dread she could not explain, most of all to herself. But Maune did not show at nine-thirty, or by ten. Cayla didn't dare call him at home, not after her previous fiasco.

  Wandering the halls, she saw an open office door. “Professor Huerta?” she said, peeking in.

  She expected a scowl, but instead Huerta smiled broadly. “Cayla! Come in. I'm on sabbatical this year—Princeton—but came back this week for a Ph.D defense. How are you doing? I'm having lunch with Howel today, and I was going to ask him how your research is going. But you can tell me yourself.”

  Cayla eased herself into a chair, hugging her arms close to her body. “Okay, I guess.”

  “That doesn't sound very promising.”

  “Well, I have these odd events I've found.”

  Huerta folded her hands and leaned back. “Tell me.”

  So Cayla repeated her story about the bursts, ending with the rate of energy deposition. Huerta laughed aloud. “Oh, wow, that's marvelous! So you think you've discovered dark energy?”

  Cayla ducked her head. “It's probably just a coincidence or something,” she mumbled.

  Huerta scratched her arm. “I don't believe in coincidences. But do you have a mechanism? Can you explain why your picobursts cause dark energy?”

  “Well, actually . . .” Cayla started, then stopped.

  “You have a mechanism?”

  “It's pretty crazy.”

  “Crazy is better than none.”

  That's not what I remember you saying, Cayla thought. But she plunged on. “Remember that, uh, crazy paper I did for your seminar? The one that took the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics seriously, and suggested that dark energy was the pressure from multiplying worlds?”

  “Of course. But the power was several orders of magnitude too low to be detected.”

  “Uh-huh. But that's only if the power is distributed evenly—linearly. I went back and reread that paper. And they used a linearized approximation.” She stood up. “The whole point is, you only get a coupling between different, whatever, universes through a nonlinearity.” Quickly she wrote out Schrodinger's wave equation on Huerta's e-board, with a nonlinear term. “But they never checked the stability of their linearization. It's not stable at all. You should get Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, just as in shock waves in the interstellar medium. And the instabilities are going to be larger and faster in galaxies, because there are more quantum events.”

  Huerta held up a hand and shook her head. “No, no. As appealing as this is, it's too much to swallow. Surely we'd see some effect in quantum mechanics. But all the searches in beryllium frequency shifts in the 1990s failed.”

  “About that . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I dug around a bit, and about ten years ago some experiments found that if you measured the Casimir effect with a cavity filled with radon, the force was significantly different. It was published in an obscure journal and no one connected it to nonlinearities in the Schrodinger equation. But the magnitude of the effect is exactly right.”

  Huerta stared at Cayla, then chuckled.

  Cayla hung her head. “I know, I know it's silly. . . .”

  Huerta waved a hand. “No, no. I was just laughing because I had told Howel you were the best student I'd seen in five years. I was wrong. You're the best I've seen in twenty years.”

  “You don't think this theory is stupid?” Cayla asked.

  “Have you written it up?” Huerta asked.

  “Yeah, although I imagine Professor Maune will want me to take out the crazy bits.”

  “Has he said so?”

  Cayla looked down at the stained carpet in Huerta's office. “I sent it to him, but he hasn't said anything.” She almost blurted out, I think he hates it, but she couldn't bring herself to confess that to Huerta.

  “I'm sure it gave him a lot to think about. He—oh, good morning, Howel.”

  And there was Maune, in Huerta's doorway. He looked so pale he was almost translucent.

  “Howel, Cayla has been telling me about these bursts she's found in the LMC and in the Milky Way, and this most extraordinary theoretical interpretation she has. It's fascinating, don't you think?”

  Maune's eyes took a moment to focus on Cayla. “Yes, Miss Kalinauskas has done some good work, yes, good. . . .” He gave the smallest of smiles. A picosmile.

  Standing up, Huerta said, “Listen, Howel, if you don't mind, why doesn't Cayla join us for lunch?”

  After what seemed like a long pause, Maune nodded again. Cayla felt anxiety, and anger, rise inside her. “I don't have to, really,” she said.

  “Cayla, I would like you to,” Huerta said.

  “Okay, let me get my wallet.”

  She ran up two flights of stairs to her office and found Rish sitting at her desk. He stood up and hugged her, which surprised her; the office was full of other grad students and Rish was not one for public displays of affection. “Good news,” he whispered in her ear. “The scan, it's not malignant, not even a benign tumor; just fatty cells. I didn't quite understand all of the diagnosis, but the lump's nothing to worry about.”

  “Come to lunch with us,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Please. With me and Maune and Huerta. We can celebrate.”

  “Sure,” said Rish as they walked down the stairs. “But let's just keep it to ourselves, shall we? I'm a little uncomfortable discussing my testicles in public.”

  Cayla laughed, feeling light-hearted for the first time in weeks. “I'm going to need you at lunch. I told Huerta about my work and she didn't yell or laugh at me, and she's very smart, as smart as Maune, and very tough. But he's acting strange.”

  “Stranger than usual?” Rish asked as he draped a warm arm around Cayla's shoulders. She didn't answer, only leaned against Rish, burrowing into the fragrance of his body.

  They ate at the new faculty club. Huerta ordered sparkling wine with which to toast Cayla's work. At Huerta's urging, Cayla recited the facts of her data, the way she had used Maune's own trick to sift the events from the data. But Maune seemed inert, almost glassy-eyed.

  Then he suddenly rumbled, without looking at Cayla, “While your data are solid, I'm sure, it might be good to speculate on possible mechanisms for your bursts.”

  There was a cold silence. “But I put that in my paper.” She wasn't
sure if she wanted to yell at Maune or run out of the room. She took a deep breath. “Did you even read it?”

  Huerta interjected, “She's got quite a puzzle, and quite a story. The power is similar to dark energy, and she thinks—” Huerta broke off. “Cayla should tell you herself.”

  Maune pushed the food around on his plate with a knife. Rish said, “Actually, you've never really explained your big idea to me, either.”

  So, slowly, Cayla laid out her explanation, adding technical details for Maune and Huerta and translating for Rish.

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” Rish said. “You're talking about alternate universes? Where China colonized the Americas, the Nazis won World War Two, that kind of thing?”

  “When you say it like that, it sounds crazy,” Cayla said.

  “A mistake,” Maune said with a hollow voice. He was hunched over, like a curled bit of dried meat.

  Cayla's heart turned to a block of ice. “My . . . mechanism?”

  Huerta said with some urgency, “Listen to her, remember what we talked about,” but Maune shook his head.

  “So I'm wrong,” Cayla said, and she could not keep the tremulousness out of her voice. “Could you at least tell me where I went wrong?”

  “I shouldn't,” Maune rasped. He turned to Huerta. “Shouldn't have taken her on.”

  Cayla felt faint. Her mouth was dry as she said, “I'm sorry I wasn't good enough. I tried so hard,” she added, her voice rising, even as she was astonished at the words coming out of her mouth, “I spent every second of it trying to live up to your standards, but I'm sorry I was such a disappointment you didn't even bother to read my paper—”

  “You didn't—” Maune's mouth hung open and his eyes fluttered upward, as if looking for his next line. “It's like . . . like . . . a bit of Las Vegas, gone bad. Betting the odds will go your way. More than a little bit of wish fulfillment. . . .”

  Cayla drew in a sharp breath. “You think I'm making this up?” Maybe he means I was a bad bet as a student, she thought.

  “I think we're all just making . . .” He pushed back his chair and stood. To Huerta he said, “I wasn't ready. I tried, but I keep thinking, if only, if only . . .”

  People were staring at them. Maune said to Huerta in a tight whisper, “I have to go to the cemetery.” Maune drifted out through the door of the faculty club, a stick figure listing to one side.

  Huerta quickly settled the bill and they went out into the brilliant sunlight. They could smell the salt scent of the sea on a light breeze.

  “Cayla,” Huerta began.

  “He didn't even listen to me, did he?” Cayla said. “So I was wrong to think I'd discovered something, something huge. I mean, I know I'm just a student, but he didn't even read my paper.” Inside she was thinking, And all this time I was agonizing over Rish and I didn't let it show, I didn't let it affect me. . . .

  Huerta's dark eyes tightened, and Cayla's stomach jumped, but the wine kept her words flowing even when she knew she should stop: “So he's sad about his dog, but why snub me like that and rush out to the pet cemetery? It's childish.”

  The professor's head tilted slightly to one side, just like all the times in seminar when she corrected Cayla. Huerta said, “He's not going to the pet cemetery,” and Cayla felt a very cold spot at the back of her skull.

  Huerta paused, looked up at the blue, blue sky. “Howel is a very private man, so I am reluctant to talk about it. But you don't know. He is going to his wife's grave. She died about five years ago. Six years now.”

  The sun shone and Cayla thought she could feel the world spinning beneath the sun, but that could have been the alcohol. Huerta continued, “It was an aneurysm. I was having dinner with them when it burst. She just slumped—” Huerta took a deep breath, blew it back out. “It was her dog. His last link to her.”

  “I didn't—”

  “I told him to take a student, you, a project to occupy his mind. I—” Huerta fidgeted. “I should go after him, make sure . . .” and she hustled away.

  Cayla stared after Huerta. Her stomach was a wet cloth, twisted into a knot. “Let's go,” Rish whispered.

  But Cayla did not move. She wished she could take back her words, scrub them from her mouth, but, oh God, she could not see how. And although Rish was standing right next to her, and she could feel the warmth of his body and feel the pressure of his arm against hers, and she could feel the breeze in her hair and the sun on her face, she also felt alone, a small speck in the cold and empty universe.

  Copyright © 2011 C.W. Johnson

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  * * *

  Short Story: FRIENDLESSNESS

  by Eric Del Carlo

  Eric Del Carlo's fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Futurismic, and many other venues. He has written novels in collaboration with the late Robert Asprin, including the pre-Katrina New Orleans mystery NO Quarter (DarkStar Books), and on his own, such as Nightbodies (Ravenous Romance). Readers can find out more about his work at www.ericdel carlo.com. Eric tells us that “Friendlessness,” a story of social isolation that is his Asimov's debut, is inspired by that rusty old saw: “Write what you know."

  Daric Dandry spent the final forty-two minutes of his fifty-five-month Friendship with Maddox Colburn pleading, with rapidly dwindling dignity, for Maddox not to leave him. Daric knew his last payment was running out. He couldn't afford Maddox anymore. But even so, he begged and sniveled at their familiar table at the retro coffeehouse.

  Maddox, of course, professionally maintained their Friendship for every one of those forty-two minutes, and so tried to comfort Daric. He flashed his dazzling, assured smile. He encouraged Daric toward nostalgic reminiscences—that wild trip to Reno they'd taken on impulse, the all-night movie and pizza marathons with gales of laughter interspersed by sober grace-note profundities. Those many poignant instances of intense camaraderie had been unsullied by bickering, rivalry, oneupmanship—in fact, untouched by disagreement of any kind. Remembering these interludes just wrung Daric's heart all the worse, knowing they were gone, never to be repeated.

  He made a spectacle of himself, and knew it, and couldn't help it. He had never been suave or socially adept. It was why he had engaged such an aggressively cheerful and confident Friend.

  “What am I going to do without you?” was what he was saying, for maybe the hundredth time since they had sat down, when time was up. Daric looked longingly with swollen eyes across the authentically graffiti-scarred wooden tabletop, catching a final glint of Maddox's consoling smile and gleefully shrewd eyes. Then the broadcast inhibitors kicked in, and that face fuzzed into static, and Maddox turned away, and Daric was simply unable to stare at him any longer, even if he had wanted to.

  He sat where he was for another minute, breathing in the burnt root smell of the “coffee,” feeling a weightlessness—an absence—in his chest. He looked around and saw other heads turn away, embarrassed for him.

  Palming his cheeks, Daric Dandry belatedly remembered to engage a Privacy. His socweb ‘plant emitted a nullifying field. He was, therefore, literally faceless as he slunk away from the table and his erstwhile Friend.

  * * * *

  He had juggled his finances to keep Maddox as long as he could. Well past the time, really, when he could even conceivably afford him. Three nights ago, at one-thirty a.m., a tow truck had slammed across the lip of Daric's driveway and scooped up his car. Utilities were final-noticing him. Next, of course, would be the house.

  And yet he had done everything to retain Maddox Colburn just a little while longer, a little . . .

  * * * *

  They couldn't fire him from his job for his low socweb score, nor for being Friendless. But they could do this:

  “Your latest evaluation is, frankly, abysmal. And it's reflected in your numbers, Dandry. Your productivity is—how do I say this?—unacceptable. I'm afraid the firm has no choice, none at all, but to . . . “

  That was the job.

  * * * *


  He had, he knew by now, taken on too many Friends initially. A flush of acquisitiveness had come with his prestigious position at the firm—thus, the house, the sporty car he hadn't really needed. But what a wonder to be surrounded by companions, confederates, jolly, jovial, rib-nudging, back-slapping chums. Daric had savored their masculine raucous ways, how they always had some rollicking activity in mind. No matter what deep-seated doubts Daric had about himself, his Friends would unfailingly sweep him up and away, off to social adventures the likes of which he had never known before. Never were they cruel to him; never was he challenged or threatened.

  But he had overextended, and his finances had started to crumble.

  In the end he had tried to retain only Maddox, his favorite Friend, the one he'd known the longest, with whom he had shared endless emotional intimacies, who was his supreme confidant. His best Friend, truly.

  The financial troubles he'd created for himself had indeed affected his job performance, and the firm was right to fire him. He knew that. He knew it even as he packed a single bag with a paltry number of belongings, and left the house.

  * * * *

  To say he was socially inept was, he knew, to heap praise on himself. His socialweb score was disastrous. Always had been. Most everyone had several null-sum Friendships, those entered into by parties whose scores canceled each other out. Daric had none of these. So it had been since age sixteen, the year of his first socweb score, which was determined by number and duration of social interactions. He couldn't even start to build a statistical base. Nobody, it seemed, was interested in registering an association with him. And who could blame them? He created awkward silences wherever he went, blurted out non sequiturs at inappropriate moments, couldn't summon any insights, jokes, observations, or complaints that anybody wanted to listen to.

  It became easiest for him to do nothing, to make no socializing efforts. That lack of comradeship left a hollow in him, but he had plans to fill it. He was socially graceless, true, but he had his intellect. He was not helpless.