Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I see,” Bill Carver said slowly. “Yes, I see. Yes, it does get lonely.”

  Clearly he did not see, because loneliness was not the problem. He would never see, and yet, as she studied him with eyes sore from tears, a sort of understanding developed.

  “It's not for me,” Angie said. “It's for the kids.”

  He nodded and said again, “Yes. It does get lonely, doesn't it?”

  She forced thoughts upon herself, assembling them in her mind as she had once assembled geometry proofs in high school. Bill's wife had died ages ago, well before the Crisis. He had no children. He was getting old, he wasn't strong, he was missing several teeth and had a wart beside his left eye. But he owned a store and had connections to the trade routes, and he wasn't so old as to be a burden on others. Above all, he was trustworthy.

  “If you ever need anything...” he was saying, “Some rare goods ... maybe a place to stay while you're in town...”

  As though examining a fruit before picking it, she reached out and touched the lobe of his ear, lifting it slightly on her finger. His skin, in this small place, was soft and smooth as a child's.

  “Oh,” Bill said feebly. “Oh, Angie...” At the small provocation of her touch his deep voice lost all its power and authority. His clumsy fingers, lifted to her shoulder, burrowed into the folds of her dress. With horror she saw tears on his cheeks. The nausea that rose in her at the sight lifted into her consciousness a surmise more appalling than any that had occurred to her that day: it was as though half the world stared at her through those weak, weeping eyes.

  “Angie,” Bill stammered, “You know, I could be good to you. If you'd let me. You'd never have to worry. Why, I'd ... When I knew your mother, years ago, I used to see you coming to the store ... but I never thought, never in a million years ... oh, if you'd only let me, you know you wouldn't even have to...” He swallowed the end of the sentence and said in its place, “You have no idea what it would mean to me.”

  When she drew away, he shuddered as though she had pulled a vital organ from his body. “Angie!” he cried at her retreat, not in protest or appeal but as a simple expression of pain. She stood and gazed down at him impassively. None of the strange male charm remained in his voice; it was thin and strained as an infant's. His watering eyes mooned up at her like a dog's. How had she thought she could wake every morning to those insatiable eyes, to their pitiful gratitude?

  Bill soon recollected himself. His gnarled hands fell to his potbelly and nursed each other there with clumsy caresses. “What am I saying? I'm sorry. But if you do need anything, please, Angie, anything at all...”

  She forced herself to smile, to offer her hand, to support him as they passed through the house and down the sagging porch steps.

  * * * *

  Angie put the children to bed early that night. She had given them lollipops by way of the promised “surprise.” Only Tom had seemed disappointed.

  With Maya tucked in, with Tom reading by candlelight, with the doors of the bedrooms shut, Angie tiptoed into Mom's room, opened the nightstand, and took out the steel box that contained the gun. It was a small weapon, intended for home defense. There were no bullets. She carried it to the screened porch and sat in the dark in her wicker chair, sinking slowly into the drowsy semi-alertness that served her these days as sleep. Her thoughts recursed with a regularity almost relaxing over familiar concerns as her eyes monitored the shaggy border of the forest.

  Shame: that was what she felt. Shame, above all. What would her mother say? Had Angie actually considered moving the children into Bill Carver's store, linking herself to that body lapsing day by day into a second infancy? Yet even now a part of her regretted her decision, the promptness with which she had thrown away the blessing of that charmed deep voice. And this of course was what her mother would have despised most: any hint of regret.

  But it went beyond that. Her shame was not private; it was part of a collective experience. A historical moment had passed unrecognized. In retrospect it was frightening how quickly the change had come, like a drawn bow reverting to form. It was only when she reflected in hindsight on the years of the Crisis that she recognized contingent steps in a great development. Overnight, it seemed, the streets had grown raucous with violent men. They had abandoned themselves to savagery almost before the bombs had done their work, as though the war were merely an excuse, a license to indulge latent primitivism. Almost as quickly, every woman Angie knew had seized one man for her own, latching herself to a set of broad shoulders, a deep voice, as hastily and with as much instinctive pragmatism as she might have tied a house key to her wrist. As a girl Angie had been disgusted, like her mother, by the weak desperation of these women, by what she regarded as their acts of cowardice. It was only later that she came to see their desperation as a greater betrayal than weakness or cowardice—more sympathetic, perhaps, but harder to forgive.

  Was this all it amounted to, then—her mother's world? A short golden age: one, perhaps two generations, of a beautiful faith in progress? Or perhaps it had only been a game that people played for a time, and the illusion of progress was merely a myth that appeared in retrospect. Perhaps that was true of all golden ages.

  A scene recurred to her from shortly after the Crisis. Dad had left, Maya was not yet born. They still had the car, and Angie's mother had taken her and Tom and Emily on a trip to Hartford to see if a cousin was still alive. The car broke down on a back road, and Angie's mother instinctively reached into her coat pocket and took out her defunct cell phone. After staring a moment at the dead screen, she laughed suddenly and hurled the phone into the forest. It was a characteristic and lovely gesture in its giddy reproach of the past. It lodged in Angie's mind as the moment the world truly changed. It was as though the whole family had suddenly been set free of an unrealistic assumption. The particular detail that seized her imagination every night and made her sick with regret was the tone of her mother's laugh: so bold, so unrestrained, like providence reduced to a sound.

  A noise drew her attention to the forest. Her hand crept over the gun in her lap. Even without bullets, it had its use—as a bright, familiar emblem, like a small hard piece of the law.

  Another sound, a rustle. Something was moving at the edge of the yard. She rose and went to the screen. Her eye picked out a dark shape browsing beneath the trees.

  A bear? They had multiplied since the Crisis by feeding on garbage—black bears, easily startled; a shout usually frightened them away. Clouds shifted and the moonlight shone brighter. As the scene gained clarity her mind grew clear as well, so that when she recognized the form at the edge of the yard she was calm, strengthened by a morbid conviction. An echo of her mother's laugh rolled through her mind, releasing her from illusion and refining her spirit into a will to violence. In the cold access of moonlight, she admitted finally that the Crisis, with all its bombast and overtones of apocalypse, had chiefly been a means to an end. She understood now the freedom it had granted her, a soldier's freedom to hate with abandon. She found herself thinking, You've done it at last.

  The darkness of the forest birthed a shadow that loped across the lawn. She tightened her fingers on the empty gun, not in fear or anticipation but merely in a kind of recognition. She was surprised to find herself, at this realization of her nightmares, filled with contentment, a patience dangerous as the practical gaze of a wolf.

  The shadow paused. She lifted her weapon. The gun caught the moonlight so that her movement cast a flash of silver on the screen, a fleeting spark like something small, precious, and unnecessary cast away. She gave her mind up to an irrational, indomitable confidence. Her weapon might be moribund, but the hand that held it was a woman's, calm and terrible.

  Copyright © 2009 Nick Wolven

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  * * *

  Poetry: THE WORLD'S ENDING AGAIN IN 2012

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Oh dear, the world's
ending again.

  Mayans this time. Their calendar

  runs out in 2012, after which,

  in the timeless void, it hardly matters

  whether we are showered with stones or

  eaten by jaguars; the end is the end

  and the rest is silence,

  except that the Amazing Randi once compiled

  a helpful list of such prophecies to suggest

  that the world ends in most years, or at least

  often enough, dooms striking our troubled planet

  with the regularity of waves lapping against a rock.

  AD 64 and 1000 hardly need mention.

  As ever, Nostradamus stirs in his musty vault,

  adaptable to any purpose; and we may gloss over

  pyramids and pharonic dooms, or the latest revisions

  of Mother Shipton, and only shrug that Jeane Dixon

  promised a cometary collision in the 1980s

  and failed to deliver.

  I have my own favorites, among them

  William Miller, who got to do it three times,

  twice in 1843 and once again in 1844, leading his flock

  to sell their goods (Why? What would they do with the

  money?), put on ascension robes, and wait

  for the City of God, like a freight elevator,

  to descend and carry them to glory.

  And I have to admire the chutzpah

  of the Korean cult leader who invested the cash

  in certificates that didn't come due

  until after the appointed date.

  Now that's what I call optimism.

  So, if the world's going to end in 2012,

  I think we can pull through.

  Let's talk about this again in 2013.

  —Darrell Schweitzer

  Copyright © 2009 Darrell Schweitzer

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  * * *

  Short Story: LEAVING THE STATION

  by Jim Aikin

  For more than thirty years, Jim Aikin has written about music technology for Keyboard and other leading music magazines. He is the author of Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming, as well as two novels—Walk the Moons Road and The Wall at the Edge of the World. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, F&SF, and elsewhere. For more information visit his personal website, www.musicwords.net and his blog at midiguru.wordpress.com. In his first story for us in twenty-three years, Jim takes a haunting look at some mysterious characters who may soon be...

  "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."—William Faulkner

  By the time she turned forty, Joan had mostly managed to forget that when she was young she had seen ghosts. She had thrust the ectoplasmic intrusions that roiled her childhood into a big old trunk in the back of her brain, had locked the trunk and thrown away the key.

  But then Uncle Frederick died and left her the antique store.

  She had never been close to Uncle Frederick, though they lived less than twenty miles apart. He was her mother's brother, and was too wedded in spirit to the inexplicable and pointless enthusiasms that had infected and ultimately shredded her parents’ lives. Her parents had grown up in the sixties. Mom read Tarot cards, played the flute while sitting cross-legged on the floor, and changed her name twice because her guru told her to. Daddy made origami sculpture, fetishistically and inexpertly, and sold it with indifferent success at an endless string of grimy street fairs. Crushed and mutilated birds and frogs made of folded yellow and purple paper littered the floor of Joan's childhood.

  She far preferred Uncle Ray, her father's brother. Uncle Ray had inherited the same obsessive gene, but turned it to better use: He taught high-school math. At fifteen, weary of moving from one cramped, noisy apartment to another, weary of her parents’ penniless, stoned friends and their droning reminiscences of long-ago Grateful Dead concerts, Joan stormily divorced her parents and stomped off to live with Uncle Ray and his brood, where she cheerfully slept on a futon on the living room floor until she went away to college. She learned trig and then calculus sitting at Uncle Ray's kitchen table, ignoring Aunt Mary's diffident, though unceasing, attempts to interest her in cooking. At college she majored in math. She became a computer programmer.

  Somewhere along in there, the ghosts tapered off. Maybe they sensed that she really didn't want them hanging around, or maybe something had changed in her that made her less receptive.

  When she was little, she hadn't known they were ghosts. They didn't shriek or walk through walls, though they did appear and disappear with alarming insouciance. Only gradually did it dawn on her that she was seeing people nobody else could see. The woman with the burned hand, for instance, or the old man mowing his lawn day after day, and the lawn standing up just as long behind the mower as in front of it. Sometimes they spoke to her, but not in the normal way—"Hello, little girl.” It was as if she had turned on the TV in the middle of a show and was being treated to random scraps of dialogue. “I killed my brother,” a young black man said to her. That scared her, but he didn't look so much scary as just sad and lost. She knew he was a ghost because she always saw him at the same street corner, and he always said the same thing. Sometimes the ghosts would ask her questions, and if she replied they would look puzzled, as if that wasn't what they were expecting (hoping?) to hear. Mostly, though, they just ignored her and went about their business, whatever that was.

  When Mom found out about the ghosts, they became a Big Deal. At the age of eight, Joan was expected to lead seances. But she couldn't summon ghosts; they came and went according to their own whims, and not very often at that. The seances were a flop. Her mother seemed to take this as a personal affront, as if either Joan or the ghosts (or both, conspiring) were hoarding some Ultimate Truth rather than share it with her.

  The seances stopped, but her mother never stopped pestering her to know what the ghosts had said. Every spectral utterance, no matter how banal, was poked and prodded in an effort to force it to reveal its veiled cosmic import. After a while Joan started making stuff up and claiming a ghost had said it. When her mother caught on (and that didn't happen for several years), it turned into a kind of game. “Did they really say that? Really? Or is it something you made up? Joanie, tell me the truth, now.”

  Maybe the ghosts had gone away because she started lying about them. That was a thought. Only now they were back, and the antique store was to blame. It attracted them.

  The store was called Station House Antiques. It was housed in an old building that had once, when the town was much smaller, been an actual functioning train station. The train line had been moved down by the bay before World War II, and the rails torn out. New streets had been laid down when the freeway came, leaving the former station perched in isolated and rapidly fading nineteenth-century small-town civic architecture grandeur on an awkwardly shaped lot with inadequate parking.

  The main room was large, high-ceilinged, and crammed with tables, shelves, and display cases. Every available surface, not omitting the walls, was overflowing with merchandise. Faded brown photos in plain frames, a butter churn, cavalry swords, a dressmaker's dummy, a model merry-go-round made of painted tin. Hundreds of pieces of china and glass, some chipped and some pristine, no two alike. Tattered magazines, silver pepper mills, stuffed birds perched in an ornate cage, four or five assorted umbrella stands. The light from the street acquired a patina of dust as it passed through the broad front window, and quickly lost itself among the crooked aisles. Smaller side rooms were packed with dark, heavy furniture and used books.

  As a young adult, pursuing her lackluster career in Silicon Valley, Joan was only hazily aware that Uncle Frederick had ventured into the antiques business. Before that he had owned a bicycle shop, which went broke. She had visited the antique store exactly once, and found the teetering stacks of tarnished junk depressing and a little creepy. Having gone to some lengths to unencumber herself of the baggage of the past, she couldn't fathom why anyone would want to sur
round themselves with old stuff. She hadn't seen any ghosts on that visit, but looking back on it, her urge to get out of the place quickly might have been a clue that they were hovering nearby, dreaming about her.

  At thirty, goaded by long-submerged urges, she had swum up out of the depths of database code maintenance long enough to get married, to an individual she now referred to exclusively as “that asshole.” Six years later she learned, because he didn't try very hard to hide it, that that asshole was sleeping with his admin. He had also caught herpes from the admin, and bestowed it on Joan as a little amorous gift.

  After he trudged off, padded so thickly in injured dignity that her screams of rage had no chance to penetrate, she went through the apartment with furious energy, seizing and removing any item that was even faintly stained by its former nearness to that asshole. She hauled down to the dumpster the pictures he had bought for the walls, the plates he had eaten off of, even the tins of shoe polish he had left under the bathroom sink. She was left with an almost bare apartment. The wind blew through uncurtained windows, and there was no past to weigh her down. Except for the herpes, of course.

  And then the company she worked for got acquisitioned and downsized, and she got laid off. The severance package dwindled, and all the programming jobs were moving offshore. But within days after she gave notice on the apartment and started looking around in a gloomy, half-hearted way for a roommate situation, Uncle Frederick providentially died.

  Like her parents, and like Uncle Ray and Aunt Mary, Uncle Frederick had lived his life from month to month, never managing to scrape together more than a few dollars in savings. But he had owned the antique store outright, and he left it to her.