Asimov's SF, December 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  “Run,” Bakri says . . .

  Irena gets up to three hundred and seven deaths before she takes Bakri at his word.

  She thinks about shooting The Save Point to end it all. But Bakri barely got it working, and Sammi's told her there's a shutdown sequence. What if she unplugs it and everything freezes but her? Her brother's technology is as vicious and unpredictable as Sammi himself. She doesn't dare.

  Her aim's improved, though. She stops shooting Bakri and goes off to start in on the soldiers again. She's getting closer; she can catch the sniper on his wooden tower one time out of three now, and she almost always kills hard-ass or babyface. Though she's shot them enough that she no longer thinks it's their fault.

  It's the damn machine. It puts them into position like chess pieces. If it wasn't for the machine, they could see the sunset, quench their thirst with tea, do something other than be railroaded into a shootout. The machine reduces them to inputs and outputs.

  Was Sammi ever angry?

  She doesn't think so. That thought slides under her skin like a splinter as she re-runs the four blocks to the prison. When her mother died, Irena didn't have time for anger. She had to feed her family. She hustled pirated DVDs, waited tables, whatever it took. But she cried when no one was looking.

  Sammi never cried. He just played videogames and built bombs. She'd yelled at him for playing the Americans’ videogames, but he went on about how well-designed they were.

  “Run,” Bakri says.

  As she runs, she remembers a conversation: “Does it ever bother you that your bombs kill people?” she'd asked Sammi one night, as he harvested yet another Xbox for parts.

  “That's the goal,” he agreed, not looking up.

  “No, but . . . what if it kills the wrong people?”

  “Bound to happen.” He plucked a chip out, held it to the light. “Sometimes people are in the wrong place.”

  Irena flushed with anger. "Mother was in the wrong place.”

  He frowned, seemed to notice her for the first time. “Well, yes.” He cocked his head and squinted at her, confused. “She was."

  “Run,” Bakri says. Those four blocks are getting longer.

  She'd told herself she couldn't judge Sammi's genius by the standards of other people. Besides, the bombs paid for their apartment. But now, running, she wonders: did Sammi make bombs to avenge his dead mother? Or was it a convenient excuse to make things that interested him?

  “Run,” Bakri says. She's always running for Sammi.

  And by luck more than skill, she finally shoots all three. Clean headshots. They fall to the ground, the sniper toppling from his roost.

  Irena stands over their bodies, dumbfounded. I'm just a girl, she thinks. How did I kill three wary soldiers? Then she remembers how long she's been doing this. Months. Maybe years.

  She's almost forgotten what she's supposed to do now. She searches the older soldier's body for the key, praising God that this is just a holding location—a real prison would have thumbprint scanners and cameras—and she wonders why reinforcements aren't charging out of the gates. Then she realizes: this has all taken perhaps ninety seconds in their time. Nobody knows yet.

  She flings open the door to see a dank prison lobby in dreary bureaucrat beige, plastic bucket seats and buzzing fluorescent lights and a battered front desk. A receptionist sits at the desk—not a soldier, a local boy in an American uniform, looking strangely out of place. He glances up, surprised, from a phone call.

  “Where is Sammi?” She smiles. It's been so long since she had a new conversation.

  She aims the gun at him. He puts down the phone.

  “S-Sammi?” he stammers. She's surprised he doesn't know already, then remembers this is all new to him. It's a pleasant reminder that the whole world hasn't been reduced to Sammi's Save Point.

  “Samuel Daraghmeh.”

  “He's . . .” He looks it up. “In cell number eight.”

  “And that is where?”

  He points down a hallway with trembling fingers. She presses the gun barrel to his temple, whispers in his ear:

  “If you alert anyone, I will kill you every time from now on, and you will never know why.” She removes the gun from his holster, shoots the phone. She hears a wet dribble on the tile as he pees himself.

  The prisoners see the young girl with the gun walking through the halls. They rise, bruised and bleeding, begging her to save them. Their words are canned. They will say the exact same thing whenever she returns. She ignores them.

  The guards inside don't wear bulletproof vests, making this easy. The prisoners cheer as she fires.

  And there, bunched in with ten other sweaty, beaten men, is Sammi. He looks miserable; the other men have crowded him out until he's perched on the dog-end of a cot. His lower lip sticks out as he stares at a urine stain in the corner, so concerned with his own fate that he hasn't even noticed the other men cheering. No wonder she has to rescue him. He's supposed to be reclined in a La-Z-Boy, a game controller in hand, not in a place where people actually get hurt.

  She motions the other prisoners aside, presses her face against the rusted bars. “Have you ever seen one of your bombs go off ?”

  He registers the voice, not the words, jumping up with the same boyish thrill he gets whenever he beats a final boss. "Irena!" he shouts, running to the bars. His eyes well with tears of relief.

  She unlocks the cell door. “The rest of you run,” she tells them. “I need to talk to my brother.”

  “Irena.” Sammi's chest heaves. “I knew you'd come for me . . .”

  “Always. But listen. Bakri is dead.” That much, she thought, was true; she'd taken to strangling Bakri and burying his body under the garbage as a matter of routine. “How do you shut down the machine?”

  “Oh, it's better than I'd thought,” he says, eyes shining. “You're a part of my project! How many iterations did it take to get in? A thousand? Two thousand? You must have improvements . . .”

  “I do,” she agrees. “I want to understand how it works. Tell me how to exit the loop.” He does. It's simpler than she'd thought.

  She hugs Sammi.

  “You did it,” she whispers. “Your machine is perfect. It makes an untrained girl into an unstoppable killer.”

  He squeezes her in triumph. She lets him ride his moment of absolute perfection, judging when her brother is happiest. Then she jams the gun against the base of his neck and pulls the trigger.

  His face explodes. She clutches his body until it ceases quivering. Then she drops him.

  Should she be sorrier? She probes her numbness and feels nothing. She shrugs, starts the walk back to The Save Point to shut it down and dismantle it.

  It's not until she gets to the lobby that the tears come. It takes her a moment to understand what's triggering them. From under the desk she can hear the muffled sobbing of the receptionist. He must have hidden when the prisoners escaped. She pauses long enough to tug him out, struggling, from the desk, then embraces him tightly. He shivers, a frightened bird, as she nuzzles him, wetting his shoulder with tears.

  “I don't have to kill you,” she says, smelling his hair, feeling his clothes, loving him more than anyone she's ever loved before.

  Copyright © 2011 by Ferrett Steinmetz

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  Elizabeth Bear is well known to Asimov's readers. Two of her previous appearances, “Tideline” and “Shoggoths in Bloom,” resulted in Hugo Awards for best short story and novelette. She returns to our pages with a knockout novella set in an exquisitely realized future India. Police Sub-Inspector Ferron and Senior Constable Indrapramit must look for clues both in the real world and the virtual if they are to track down a clever murder. “In the House of Aryaman a Lonely Signal Burns” is a tale you won't soon forget.

  ALSO IN DECEMBER

  Long before she
became the extremely competent shuttle pilot of Jack McDevitt's novels, Priscilla Hutchins received her training on a “Maiden Voyage"; new author Katherine Marzinsky gives us a heart-stopping look at what a robot might consider “Recyclable Material"; new author Eric Del Carlo examines just how hard it is to live in a world of “Friendlessness"; almost-new author Zachary Jernigan shows us why there is no cause for rejoicing when “The War Is Over and Everyone Wins"; new author for Asimov's, though well known at Analog, C.W. Johnson reveals the terror behind “The Burst"; and the Arthur C. Clarke- and John W. Campbell Memorial-award-winning author, Paul McAuley, takes us to a distant planet to show us why criminals who are born to run will follow their hungry hearts through the badlands to discover if they will be the last to die or live to see the light of day in the awesome “Bruce Springsteen.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg's “Reflections” tracks down “Rare Earths, Getting Rarer"; James Patrick Kelly's “On the Net” delivers the “Son of Ebooks, the Next Generation, Vol. III"; and we'll have Paul Di Fillipo's “On Books” column. We'll also feature our Index of 2011 stories, poems, and columns; our annual Readers Award Ballot; plus an array of poetry and other items you're sure to enjoy. Look for our January issue on sale at newsstands on November 8, 2011. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in paper or downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www. asimovs.com. We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebook store.sony.com's eReader and from Zinio.com!

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  * * *

  Novella: ALL ABOUT EMILY

  by Connie Willis

  Connie Willis's most recent novel, a two-volume work entitled Blackout and All Clear, is set in World War II, in the middle of the evacuation of Dunkirk, the intelligence war, and the London Blitz. It won the Nebula Award and is a current finalist for the Hugo. In reviewing Blackout, the Washington Post described Connie as “a novelist who can plot like Agatha Christie and whose books possess a bounce and stylishness that Preston Sturges might envy.” She is currently working on a new novel about Roswell, alien abduction, cattle mutilations, and Area 51. It is, of course, a comedy. These books have, unfortunately, distracted Connie from writing her annual Christmas story. Luckily, this year she took some time between novels to fashion a holiday story . . .

  "Fuck The Red Shoes. I wanted to be a Rockette."

  * * * *

  All right, so you're probably wondering how I, Claire Havilland, three-time Tony winner, Broadway legend, and star of Only Human—ended up here, standing outside Radio City Music Hall in a freezing rain two days before Christmas, soaked to the skin and on the verge of pneumonia, accosting harmless passersby.

  Well, it's all my wretched manager Torrance's fault. And Macy's. And the movie All About Eve's.

  You've never heard of All About Eve? Of course you haven't. Neither has anyone else. Except Emily.

  It starred Anne Baxter and Bette Davis, and was the first movie Marilyn Monroe appeared in. She played Miss Caswell, a producer's girlfriend, but the movie's not about her. It's about an aging Broadway actress, Margo Channing, and the young aspiring actress, Eve Harrington, who insinuates herself into Margo's life and makes off with her starring role, her career, and very nearly, her husband.

  All About Eve was made into a musical called Applause and then into a straight dramatic play which was then made into another musical (Broadway has never been terribly creative). The second musical, which was called Bumpy Night and starred Kristin Stewart as Eve and me as Margo, only ran for three months, but it won me my second Tony and got me the lead in Feathers, which won me my third.

  Macy's is a New York department store, in case you don't know that either. Except for Emily, no one today seems to know anything that happened longer than five minutes ago. Macy's sponsors a parade on Thanksgiving Day every year, featuring large balloons representing various cartoon characters, the stars of various Broadway shows waving frozenly from floats, and the Rockettes.

  And my manager Torrance is a lying, sneaky, conniving snake. As you shall see.

  * * * *

  The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving he knocked on my dressing-room door during intermission and said, “Do you have a minute, dear one? I've got fabulous news!”

  I should have known right then he was up to something. Torrance only comes backstage when: one, he has bad news to deliver, or two, he wants something. And he never knocks.

  “The show's closing,” I said.

  “Closing? Of course not. The house is sold out every night through Christmas. And it's no wonder! You get more dazzling with every performance!” He clutched his chest dramatically. “When you sang that Act One finale, the audience was eating out of your hand!”

  “If you're still trying to talk me into having lunch with Nusbaum, the answer is no,” I said, unzipping my garden party costume. “I am not doing the revival of Chicago.”

  “But you were the best Roxie Hart the show ever had—”

  “That was twelve years ago,” I said, shimmying out of it. “I have no intention of wearing a leotard at my age. I am too old—”

  “Don't even say that word, dear one,” he said, looking anxiously out into the hall and pulling the door shut behind him. “You don't know who might hear you.”

  “They won't have to hear me. One look at me in fishnet stockings, and the audience will be able to figure it out for themselves.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, looking appraisingly at me. “Your legs aren't that bad.”

  Aren't that bad. “Dance ten, looks three?” I said wryly.

  He stared blankly at me.

  “It's from A Chorus Line, a show I was in that you apparently never bothered to see. It's a line that proves my point about the fishnet stockings. I am not doing Chicago.”

  “All Nusbaum's asking is that you meet him for lunch. What harm could that do? He didn't even say what role he wanted you for. It may not be Roxie at all. He may want you for the part of—”

  “Who? The warden?” I said, scooping up my garden-party costume into a wad. “I told you I was too old for fishnet stockings, not old enough to be playing Mama Morton.” I threw it at him. “Or Mama Rose. Or I Remember Mama.”

  “I only meant he might want you to play Velma,” he said, fighting his way out of the yards of crinoline.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. I need a role where I keep my clothes on. I hear Austerman's doing a musical version of Desk Set.”

  “Desk Set?” he asked. “What's it about?”

  Apparently he never watched movies either. “Computers replacing office workers,” I said. “It was a Julia Roberts-Richard Gere movie several years ago, and there are no fishnet stockings in it anywhere.” I wriggled into my ball gown. “Was that all you wanted?”

  I knew perfectly well it wasn't. Torrance has been my manager for over fifteen years, and one thing I've learned during that time was that he never gets around to what he really wants till Act Two of a conversation, apparently in the belief that he can soften me up by asking for some other thing first. Or for two other things, if what he wants is particularly unpleasant, though how it could be worse than doing Chicago, I didn't know.

  “What did you come in here for, Torrance?” I asked. “There are only five minutes to curtain.”

  “I've got a little publicity thing I need you to do. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving, and the Macy's parade—”

  “No, I am not riding on the Only Human float, or standing out in a freezing rain again saying, ‘Look! Here comes the Wall-E balloon!’ “

  There was a distinct pause, and then Torrance said, “How did you know there's a Wall-E balloon in the parade? I thought you never read the news.”

  “There was a picture of it on the home page of the Times yesterday.”

  “Did you click to the article?”

  “No. Why? As you say, I never read the news. You didn't already tell them I'd do it, did you?” I said
, my eyes narrowing.

  “No, of course not. You don't have to go anywhere near the parade.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  “Because the parade's Grand Marshal is coming to the show Friday night, and I'd like you to let him come backstage after the performance to meet you.”

  “Who is it this year?” I asked. It was always a politician, or whatever talentless tween idol was going to be starring on Broadway next. “If it's any of Britney Spears’ offspring, the answer is no.”

  “It's not,” Torrance said. “It's Doctor Edwin Oakes.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Of physics. Nobel Prize for his work on artificial neurotransmitters. He founded AIS.”

  “Why on earth is a physicist the Grand Marshal of the Macy's Day Parade?” I said. “Oh, wait, is he the robot scientist?”

  There was another pause. “I thought you said you didn't read the article.”

  “I didn't. My driver Jorge told me about him.”

  “Where'd he hear about Dr. Oakes?”

  “On the radio. He listens to it in the limo while he's waiting.”

  “What did Jorge tell you about him?”

  “Just that he'd invented some new sort of robot that was supposed to replace ATMs and subway-ticket dispensers, and that I shouldn't believe it, they were going to steal all our jobs— Oh, my God, you're bringing some great, clanking Robbie the Robot backstage to meet me!”

  “No, of course not. Don't be ridiculous. Would I do that?”

  “Yes. And you didn't answer my question. Is this the same Dr. Oakes, the robot scientist?”

  “Yes, only they're not robots, they're ‘artificials.’ “

  “I don't care what they're called. I'm not granting a backstage interview to C3PO.”

  “You're dating yourself, dear one,” he said. “C3PO was aeons ago. The reason Dr. Oakes was asked to be the Grand Marshal is that this year's parade theme is robots, in honor of—”