Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014

by Penny Publications

  "Ah, there you are." The man has a soft, pleasant voice, like a nursery facilitator in the Gymnasium. He's shorter than Kip and even paler than Bud. "Step this way, please, we don't have much time if you want to earn that bonus."

  Kip stops. "I lost the package. I'm not earning anything."

  "Oh no, oh no." The man laughs gently. Kip's skin crawls. "It's a purloined letter, dear. Come here, please." He waves her toward the robot, which is turning its head back and forth, its antennae flicking this way and that.

  "How'd you know I'd make it? That woman might've let me drown."

  > The voice isn't the man's. It's someone else's, somewhere else.

  > The dummy. Goddamn it. The robot's needle pricks her briefly, draws out some blood. Its face lights up. > Its ambient presence sounds cheerful. Whoever decided to give robots humanlike expressiveness should be shot.

  And the rest of the agreed amount, bonus included, hits Kip's account. She almost doesn't notice. "What did those two fuckers put in me?" >

  The man looks surprised. "Just a key. That's all."

  "A key." Knowledge floods her at this response, but she can't make sense of it. DNA sequences and genomes and genetic codes and—>

  "Nothing you need to worry about." The man smiles in a way that is probably meant to be reassuring. "Your friends had some important data to send. They used your own genome to hide it from some other friends who would very much like to get their hands on it. Then they made you the key."

  She looks down at her arm, where the blood draw came out. "Oh." She could've just handed the dummy over, and not done all that work of evasion...

  >

  "Well goddamn it." She wants to punch this kindly little doctor or whatever he is in the face. The robot would probably shoot her full of anesthesia if she tried it, though. Then she thinks of something else.

  "The woman. Phidippus Audax. She kissed me. That means she got my genetics."

  The doctor shrugs. "Doesn't matter. Your genome? That's on the ambient along with everyone else's. She stole a key, but she can't access what it unlocks. No one can, but the intended recipient. Don't worry," he says again. "You made the delivery. Your job is done." Behind her, there's a whisper of moving air. "You can go now."

  Kip, who knows a dismissal when she hears one, starts to walk away.

  "Unless," he continues, "you find that you like this sort of work."

  Kip stops. Turns back. Looks at the man again. "What?"

  "You're talented. We recognize that. There might be opportunities for something... more consistent."

  Kip stares. "But I failed."

  "I keep telling you. You didn't."

  She knows what he's saying. Bud and Ahmad play everybody. It's what they do. She didn't fail, not really, even though it feels like she did. The public story of her run, of how she almost made it but was caught at the last second, already flickers across the ambient. But it's just a story. The Garage's client has some code, or data, or something that no one else but Kip knows they have. And who'd listen to her, since from the ambient's perspective, she's lost?

  Fucking PR.

  And she knows what he's offering. She can run. But they want to know if she can be a courier, and that's something else entirely. One where her public legacy is of failure, and she disappears.

  They want her to be like Phidippus Audax.

  It beats the alternative.

  "Where do I sign?"

  * * *

  THROUGH PORTAL

  Dominica Phetteplace | 2948 words

  Dominica Phetteplace tells us, "In addition to writing I also dance. My favorite 'genres' are ballet and contemporary. Dance is the interaction of space, time, and the body. This story is about the disruption of all three."

  I

  It all began with a picnic. A flat, grassy plain on the muggy surface of Omega-Alpha-III. Volcano to the north, algae-green forest on all sides. Sparkling wine in plastic cups for Cail and Akhtar, pear juice for Emmy. An afternoon on land to relieve the boredom of geosynchrous orbit.

  Cail rested his eyes as Akhtar examined the exotic grass, in its prebudding stage. An eerie silence crept up on them.

  They looked at each other, then looked around the picnic site, and back at each other.

  "Emmy," they both said at once. Emmy, who was gone. After a scan of the horizon, Cail saw an Emmy-shaped silhouette walking toward the volcanic caves. He sprinted after her, calling for her. She did not stop. She seemed very determined to explore. She had always been that way.

  The cave was illuminated by an Ancient portal, glowing purple.

  Emmy walked in, without looking back.

  Cail did not dare follow. The portal was the advanced machinery of a long-dead civilization. Emmy might already be dead.

  Akhtar called for backup. Dr. Mwaru Monroe arrived with a two-person team. He set up his instruments a safe distance from the portal, twenty feet back, almost at the cave entrance.

  After an hour of analysis, he declared, "It's a time portal."

  "How far back is she?" asked Akhtar.

  "Five to ten thousand years," said Dr. Monroe.

  "Was the planet even habitable then?"

  "According to my calculations, yes."

  "Was it inhabited?"

  "There's no evidence that it was."

  Akhtar gasped. "She's only eight years old. She won't be able to survive on her own for very long."

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  II.

  Before we were we,

  I was I.

  On one side of the portal I was a solitary girl. I didn't fall in. It wasn't an accident.

  I walked through because Portal asked me to.

  One the other side, I became many. Once I entered, Portal closed. There was no going back.

  For a brief moment it was terrifying. But I was only alone for one heartbeat. I was right behind me. And behind me. One is I and two is I, but three makes we.

  III.

  Cail had a minor lobotomy to take the edge off his grief. Akhtar opted for a modified ECT. There is no ridding yourself of sadness, but technology can make your tragedies smaller and more manageable. Akhtar dreamt about Emmy, alone in the wilderness. The dreams were sometimes nightmares.

  Cail and Akhtar asked Dr. Monroe if they could throw some supplies through the portal. A water purifier, a nutrient bar. Dr. Monroe said no. Every disturbance of the portal's surface made it unstable. It could bubble up and consume the whole planet.

  "Ridiculous. Has such a thing ever happened before?" asked Cail.

  "Theoretically, it is possible," said Dr. Monroe.

  IIII.

  And then another came through, exactly the same as the two of us.

  We already knew about heartbeats, how to count and how to keep time.

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...

  In our old life we had a name for this sequence, but it was a name no longer needed and thus discarded. Then we made up our own name. We called it the I-I sequence, since one and I were the same. One beat, the first of us.

  One beat, the next.

  Two beats, another. Three, again.

  Five, again.

  We never forgot how to count.

  We arrived so close together at first. Then farther apart, beat by beat. And though the gaps between us were growing larger, we were still filling up the cavern.

  IIIII.

  Visiting scholar Dr. Coyo Tran had published several papers on chrononautics. He met with Cail and Akhtar immediately upon his arrival at SpB-Baikal.

  "It's not likely she's still alive," said Cail. "She fell through the portal seven months ago."

  "Yes, but if I can calibrate my instruments properly, I think I can retrieve her moments after she disappeared." Cail wanted to look over the specs. Akhtar wanted to start right away. "No," Cail said to her privately. "This has to be done right. There are so many ways to get mangled crossing the portal."

  Akhtar watched Cail scroll through the plans. He furrowed his brows as
he read, making a show of his skepticism. Akhtar didn't believe Cail truly understood what he was looking at. Mechanics aboard space bases have to do a little bit of everything, which makes them think they can do anything.

  To Akhtar, the choice between giving up on Emmy and attempting the improbable was really no choice at all. She didn't understand how it could be otherwise for Cail.

  Dr. Tran's device looked like a giant vacuum cleaner and sounded a bit like one, too. Everyone present had to wear hazmat suits. They looked like a bunch of astronauts. Akhtar wondered if the portal decided to suck up the whole planet, would it take them too, or would it leave them behind? And which would be worse?

  Dr. Tran had assured her the odds of such an implosion were "vanishingly" small. He was trying to be funny.

  The device fired up. The room was briefly heated with a flash of bright light. Once Akhtar adjusted her visor settings, she could see a girl being sucked out of the portal. She was struggling, trying to get back in. She appeared to be in pain. The portal turned lavender, than pink. Once the girl was through, the portal flashed green. She tried to run back through, but it wouldn't accept her. Green did not mean go, not to the Ancients.

  She screamed. The wail was unfamiliar to Akhtar. She had never heard this voice. That did not mean this was not Emmy. It clearly was, only much older. Girl might not be the right word. Possibly a woman. It was hard to tell.

  IIIIII.

  Because the cave was crowded, we ventured out into the forest. There were trees and a stream and fruit.

  Some of this fruit was poison, we had to learn the hard way. The hard way was the only way. Later, we made a burial ritual.

  Later, when we grew out of our clothes, we made our own. We fashioned dresses from the skin and bones of the wolves and dragons we killed.

  Our bodies changed until we reminded ourselves of Mama.

  Mama. Mama. Mama.

  One of our old words that we kept. We didn't keep very many. We didn't need very many.

  As the heartbeat gaps between us grew, as the I-I sequence marched on, we arrived just the same as we always did. Red overalls, clean skin untouched by the grime of survival. We are always confused when we arrived, always asking about Mama.

  IIIIIII.

  Dr. Mwaru used a genetic test to confirm that the recovered girl was Emmy. Tissue tests were supposed to determine her biological age, but the results were mixed.

  Wilderness survival ages a body both rapidly and unevenly, not to mention the unknown side effects of passing through a time portal twice. No one had ever done it before. Dr. Tran's work had been purely theoretical until today.

  "It worked," said Dr. Tran.

  "Then why is she eighteen and not eight?" asked Akhtar.

  "Experimental error," said Cail. Obviously, he wanted to say, but didn't. Taxonomists like Akhtar sometimes forget that science is more than just making observations. Science occasionally involves experiments, he wanted to say, and those experiments occasionally go awry.

  "There is no way to get her back then," said Cail. "Our Emmy, eight years old, is gone forever."

  Dr. Tran paused. It was as if he sensed he should apologize somehow, but he wasn't sure what for. And Cail felt something parallel. As if he should be thanking Dr. Tran for all this, though he couldn't find anything to be grateful for.

  They should have waited until the science was more developed. It might have taken a hundred years or more, but they had nothing if not time. If they had waited, they could have had her back, intact.

  Now they had this Emmy. Unkempt, unhappy, feral looking. Wearing a feathered pelt that looked like it came from a dinosaur. Asleep, because only sedation would stop her from screaming.

  This Emmy had completely lost her ability to speak. Cail and Akhtar wanted to fit her with a translator chip, but there were sanity, age, and consent guidelines, and it was not likely that this Emmy would meet any of them. It wasn't even clear that a chip would work in her case. She seemed to speak in patterns, but those patterns might be gibberish. If she was using language, it must have been one she made up herself.

  IIIIIIII.

  I was I again. I understood this place. I used to live here.

  Mama.

  Papa.

  They looked the same.

  I understood them.

  They did not understand me.

  I was out of practice with words. In the other place, we were all so similar, we barely needed language at all. And when we did, we clicked our tongues, tapped our fingers, rolled our eyes back, popped our wrists. Everything quiet, or almost. We always managed to get our point across. Not here.

  Here we had no voice. Ears and no voice. It's enough to make you scream.

  It's enough to make you stab somebody.

  IIIIIIIII.

  SpB Baikal was a small, research oriented base. There weren't any extra personnel on hand to give speech therapy or administer mental health care. They put in a request for extra staff, but in the meantime, Cail and Akhtar had to care for Emmy mostly by themselves.

  Emmy's modes of screaming contained many variations. The unifying theme was anger.

  "It's almost as if she didn't want to be rescued," said Cail.

  "Children prefer the familiar, even if it is worse," said Akhtar. "She just needs time to adjust."

  How much time?, he wanted to ask. And what if she never adjusts? But there was no point in asking. Akhtar didn't know the answers to the questions any more than he did.

  "Something happened to her, on the other side of the portal," said Akhtar. "Something changed her."

  "It could have been Dr. Tran's botched vacuum job that damaged her."

  Akhtar didn't want Dr. Tran to be the villain in all of this. Because if he was, then so was she. He had proposed a plan, she had insisted they follow through, and now that it had gone wrong, Cail felt like his skepticism somehow made him heroic.

  For Akhtar, the villain was the portal. Passing through, living on the other side or passing back. One of those three things, possibly all of them, had permanently altered Emmy.

  The legal issues of consent and guardianship still needed to be worked out. Once they were, they could fly out and have Emmy treated by specialists. Brain surgery of some kind seemed in order. Until then, they searched for ways to calm her without sedating her completely.

  She liked to look out the windows, into the blackness of space. That could keep her quiet for as long as twenty minutes. In the Simulacrum Hall, the forest tableau could engage her for up to an hour.

  After five days, she stopped screaming completely. She was compliant, cooperative, yet still stubbornly silent.

  Cail was relieved. Akhtar was unnerved. She could see the way Emmy's eyes darted around. Taking everything in. Emmy was plotting her escape. It was clear to Akhtar, but there was no point in warning Cail. He would just dismiss her.

  How could a mentally impaired cavewoman escape from a space base?, he would want to know.

  I don't think she's human anymore, Akhtar would reply.

  And Cail would dismiss that notion, too, if she ever were to raise it. There was no intelligence in the Universe that was not human, at least none that was able and willing to make contact. Only the million-year-old ruins of the Ancients hinted at an alternative sentience, and with the ways they learned to manipulate time, it was possible that the Ancients were neither alien nor ancient. They could have been humans, too, from far in the future.

  Maybe Emmy was one of them now, thought Akhtar.

  Don't be ridiculous, Cail would say. He said that a lot.

  On the third day of quiet Emmy, they decided to take dinner in the mess hall.

  "How do we know that OaIII was uninhabited five thousand years ago? Maybe Emmy found a civilization to live with. Maybe she wants to go back to them," said Akhtar. Emmy was sitting quietly, food untouched as her eyes moved around the room rapidly.

  "Unlikely," said Cail. Unlikely was the word Cail used when he really wanted to say ridiculous.


  "And what makes that unlikely? Did you go over the geographic reports yourself?" asked Akhtar.

  Cail didn't respond. He hadn't. In retrospect, he should have. But how to say this without sounding like an idiot?

  Dr. Mwaru walked by, tray in hand. His greeting was cheerful, he was oblivious to aany marital tension. Emmy stood up as Dr. Mwaru passed, not to greet him, but to stab him in the eye with her chopstick.

  IIIIIIIIII.

  I had to make them understand.

  I was I.

  They were they.

  We were not we.

  I had to make them cast me out.

  "Portal," I said to Mama after the stabbing. It's the only word of mine that she can understand.

  IIIIIIIIIII.

  Emmy would need to be confined in the jail for the rest of her time at SpB Baikal. She would be leaving soon. Captain Alastair had assigned a robotic transport. Cail was in charge of verifying her flight plan and conducting the pre-flight inspection.

  The mourning process began again for Cail and Akhtar. The place she was going, it wasn't quite a prison, but it wasn't your standard rehabilitative and reparative center. It was a little of both, halfway between each. It would be far away, they would see her only once a season or less. Akhtar tried to convince herself this was the right thing, but she couldn't.

  Emmy didn't belong to this world any more. She never would.

  Akhtar had one last choice to make for her daughter. She wanted that choice to be an act of love.

  She stole a few minutes of port time, just enough to get them down to the surface of OaIII, down next to the inactive volcano, into the cave, quiet, dark, and dry. Back to the portal. Back through the portal.