Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Fermi 3. They came and left.

  Bingo, I thought. They came and left flowers scattered in their wake. Strictly, though, that was Fermi 53, the only choice left. The ancient intelligent dinosaur hypothesis.

  Fermi 6. We are interdicted.

  Fermi 10. They are still on their way here.

  The starship had blown that one, and others like it, clear out of the water. Time to trim the list, methinks.

  Fermi 21. They're listening, only fools are transmitting.

  Fermi 22. Dedicated killer machines destroy everything that moves, anywhere in space.

  Fermi 28. The Vingean Singularity takes them ... elsewhere.

  No Singularity back near the end of the Cretaceous, I thought. Judging by the remote viewer's sketches, that saurian pilot was advanced, but not sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.

  Fermi 38. Earth is the optimal place for life, just by chance.

  Could be. And for intelligent life, at that. Hey, look, we've seen it twice: the smart dinosaurs and Homo sap.

  Fermi 48. Language is vanishingly rare.

  Ha! Yeah, right. Blah blah blah. Still, maybe so. The skies are awfully silent, which is where we came in...

  Fermi 49. Science is a rare accident.

  Not as rare as I am, I thought, touching the etiological chains and vortices all around—and no scientist ever predicted me. Most of them still didn't even know about me, thanks to all those Above Top Secret restrictions. Damn it.

  Namgoong cleared his throat at the podium. Voices, in clumps and then one by one, fell silent. Hey, maybe that's it. God tapped His microphone, and the cosmos shut up to listen. And they're still listening, bent and cowed by the awfulness of what they heard. But not us, we haven't heard from God yet, despite a thousand revelations claimed and proclaimed. Or if we have, there's no way to search through the babbling noise and extract the divine signal. Funny way to run a universe.

  I could feel the dinosaur calling to me, even so, through the appalling cold of Titan's snows and the void of fifty or a hundred million years. And the entwined memory of my son, sacrificed for nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Those are the classic guesses—most of them wrong.” The Director flicked his finger; the display went to blank gray. “We still have no idea why the galaxy, indeed the universe as a whole, is quiet. Why the stars are still shining, spilling out their colossal energy resources, when intelligence should be collecting it. Calculations you're all familiar with prove that a single intelligent species arising anywhere in the galaxy within the last billion years would by now have colonized all its trillion stars and associated bodies, turned the sky black with Matrioshka shells—or perhaps obliterated the stars in vast, wasteful wars.”

  I pricked up my ears. A political subtext? Perhaps not; maybe our director was just a tone-deaf drone. I glanced around; several people near me had dropped their eyes, more than one held fists clenched tight. Okay.

  “One of the equally classic Great Filters must screen out potential intelligent life and leave the heavens exactly as they'd have to be if there is no life at all out there. No intelligent, starfaring life, anyway.

  “So now we're faced with a new paradox. Fermi remains unanswered—and yet we have this old vehicle made by beings not of our own species, but apparently related. The likelihood of that coincidence being due to chance alone is impossibly small. I see only three remaining possibilities.”

  “Barney did it,” someone called, muted but clear across the room. A wave of tittering. I felt my jaw tighten, and a flush creep into my cheeks.

  “A previous civilization sprung from dinosaur stock on Cretaceous Earth, or even earlier, yes,” said Dr. Namgoog evenly. “The opinion represented here today by our guest, Sensei Park.”

  A pattering of polite applause, some even more muted groans.

  “We have evidence in the form of preliminary scans by our Naval remote viewer, Colonel Meagle, that the creature ... the being, forgive me ... in charge of the craft has just such an origin. Leaving aside the improbability of parallel evolution. If so, this leaves the earlier and larger Fermi question unanswered: where are its kindred now, why haven't they conquered the whole galaxy? Tipler and others proved decades ago that this could have been achieved at achievable sub-light speeds within a million years. If they have, why don't we see them?”

  Hearing it stated so flatly, I was dizzied, as always, by the prospect. Flotillas of starcraft fleeing into the spiral arms at a tenth of light speed, crammed with dragon seed or our own. Or minute nanoscale pods fired toward a hundred million stars by magnetic catapult, or driven on filmy wings by laser light. Yet these, too, were last year's dreams, last century's. We had stepped from Earth to Ganymede to Titan entangled on a light beam, and without waiting to be shoved here by sailboat. The moment entangled luminal portage became a reality for my own species, it opened the yawning cavern: why not for them, as well? What the hell was a starship doing here? Why bother? It was so last week, like finding a steam locomotive under the ice.

  Namgoog was enunciating his other solutions to Fermi, but I didn't care. I was entranced by the mystery of the sleeping creature, sedate under his bedding of live flowers. It was a hunger like my endless appetite for chow. I wanted to step straight through the damned shell of the ship and look the critter in the eye, man to man. Even if it decided to eat me.

  That's what dragons do, isn't it?

  * * * *

  And so to bed. Where I lay in the dark in a lather of fright for fifteen minutes. Fearful and weak. Bleak. Needing a leak. I climbed out and thudded to the sanitary personal. When I got back, after a swab up and down and across with a wet face cloth to dab away the worse of the flopsweat, my door was slightly open. Through it came the never-stopping background clanging and banging of humans and machines keeping the place ticking over. Snapping my fingers, I clicked the room light up to dim. Dr. Jendayi Shumba, chubby string looper, stretched at ease on my bed, clad in sensible pajamas with a mission blaze on the collar. Of course, I jumped and squealed.

  “What the— Is there some—”

  “Hush up, dear man, and come over here.” She grinned.

  “You're not serious. Are you?”

  In evidence, she slithered out of her pjs and raised her eyebrows.

  “Absurd. I'd crush you like a bug.”

  “Myeong-hui, you don't weigh any more, here, than my little boy.”

  “You have a—?” I swallowed, and crept closer. “I had a son once.”

  “Let us be in this moment, Sensei,” she said without reproach.

  “I'm disgusting to look upon,” I said frankly. “And I don't need a pity—”

  She had her fingers across my mouth, and then pulled me down through several clunky jumpy evolutions. “There are other ways to convey one's ... intimacy,” she said.

  “Ulp,” I protested.

  “An easy mouth is a great thing on a long journey, is it not, old fellow?” she said, releasing mine and patting my neck.

  “Ex-cuse me?”

  Jendayi burst out laughing, a slightly husky, wonderfully exciting sound. “A quote from an old British classic about a horse. Nineteenth century, I believe. You might have read it as a child. Black Beauty.”

  “You are the black beauty,” I said, noticing a cue when it smacked me between the eyes. I raised my voice and said, “Door close,” and it did.

  “You've got a way to break into the ship, don't you?” she said, after a time without time.

  I was reeling and reckless. “Yes. Probably.”

  “So you really are a poltergeist.” She stroked my contemptible belly, as if it were a friendly animal sharing the bed with us. “Tony nearly poked his damn eye out.” Her laugh was throaty, dirty, a tonic.

  “Don't blame me,” I said, and found a glass of water, drained it. “It's like being able to wiggle your ears.”

  In the near-dark, she wiggled hers, and more.

  But before she left, Jendayi said, “Bring me
back a sample. A skin scraping, anything with DNA. Just for me, honey, okay?” Oh, so that's why you're here? Had to be some reason. Exploitative bitch. But that's life, right?

  * * * *

  Looking like a well-laid but annoyed and put-upon squat polar bear in my bodyglove, some hellish number of minus degrees on the far side of its skin, I stood gazing down from the edge of the excavation. The spacecraft was unaltered, every bloom precisely where it had been several days before, where it had been, perhaps, several tens of millions of years before. Unless it was salted here recently as a snare for gullible humans. In which case, it might be younger than I. Not so likely, though.

  “Ready when you are, Sensei,” said the political officer, doing Mr. Kim's bidding, and damn the scientists’ caution.

  I raised one thumb and let myself drift. Cause and effect unbraided, started their long, looping dance of etiological distortion, swirling, curdling. I was the still center of the spinning world. Certainties creaked, cracked. A favorite poem entered my heart, by Ji-Hoon Cho, “Flower petals on the sleeves":

  * * * *

  The wanderer's long sleeves

  Are wet from flower petals.

  Twilight over a riverside village

  Where wine is mellow.

  * * * *

  Had this saurian person below me, trapped now in timelessness, known wine? Crushed release and perhaps moments of joy from some archaic fruit not yet grape? I thought, with a wrenching mournfulness:

  * * * *

  When this night is over

  Flowers will fall in that village.

  * * * *

  “Hey!”

  And there went the flowers, drawn up and tossed away from the hull of the starship. They were scattering in the methane wind, lifted and flung by the bitter gusts, floral loveliness snap-frozen, blown upward and falling down in drifts into the alien snow.

  “The stationary shield is discontinued,” said a clipped voice in my ears.

  I stepped forward, ready to enter the ancient, imprisoned place. To meet my dinosaur, who had either died or even now lived, freed from timeless suspension. A hand caught my encased arm.

  “Not yet, Sam. We have a team prepped. Thanks, you've done good here today.” I turned, hardly able to see through my tears, and it was not that bastard Tony Caetani groveling his apologies, the universe could not be so chirpy as that. I hadn't met this one before, although he'd picked up my dining room nickname and used it with a certain familiar breeziness; some beefy functionary of some armed service division, grinning at me in his bluff farmboy way. I nodded, and watched the team of marines go down, and remembered my dear boy and the way he had gone forward fearlessly into darkness and then into the fire falling from the sky. It did not matter one whit that I thought his cause wrong-headed. I remembered a poem in that book I'd found in the ruined library, a poem by an Englishman named Kipling that had torn my heart as I sat before Song-Dam's closed coffin. There was no comfort this tide, the poem warned me, nor in any tide, save this:

  * * * *

  he did not shame his kind—

  Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

  * * * *

  Without shame, I sobbed, but then drew myself up and turned back to Huygens agora. Perhaps, I told myself, ten or sixty million years ago, another father had laid his son on these cruel snows and bade him farewell. I murmured to that reptilian father, offering what poor borrowed comfort I might to us both, across all that void of space and time: “Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!”

  I looked straight up above me, at the photodiode display before my eyes in the viewmask, swallowing hard, to follow the streaming tide of blossoms on the wind, and there was Saturn, old Father Time, hanging in the orange smoke of the sky, an arrow through his heart. I gave him a respectful nod, and raised one gloved thumb in salute.

  Copyright © 2009 Damien Broderick

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  JUNE ISSUE

  Next month we celebrate an auspicious anniversary—that of the twenty-fifth anniversary of James Patrick Kelly's famed June stories. Not only have these June stories offered some of Kelly's most honored works over the years—the Hugo winning “Think Like a Dinosaur” and “1016to 1” and the Nebula nominated “Undone,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and “Men Are Trouble” are some notable examples—they've also proven to be some of the most popular stories in our annual Readers’ Award polling. You like him, you really like him, and we are glad to not only bring you both his twenty-sixth consecutive June story, but also a written celebration of his talent and vivacious presence in Asimov's.

  We begin the celebration with a special Thought Experiments column featuring several notable contributors, including perennial favorite Connie Willis,who will wax poetic about Kelly's lauded career in SF. We then present his newest June story, “Going Deep.” In Jim's own words: “a teenager in training to join the crew of a starship begins to question whether the sacrifices she will have to make are worth the thrill of scouting new worlds. But can she turn her back on space and the expectations of her Moon community, her family, schoolmates, and boyfriend?”

  ALSO IN JUNE

  That's certainly not all! Chris Willrich returns to our pages with his exciting, sweeping space opera, “Sails the Morne"; Tom Purdom presents an unsettling tale of future morality in “Controlled Experiment"; UK novelist Eric Brown, making a fine Asimov's debut, spins a tale of a love that cannot be, amidst harsh “Cold Testing"; Sandra McDonald, makes her Asimov's debut, the chilling fable of “The Monsters of Morgan Island"; and John Alfred Taylor, after too long an absence, warns of the “Bare, Forked Animal” and his unfortunate dependence on futuristic technology.

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg, in his Reflections column, examines an unusual African fantasy work from “In the Bush of Ghosts"; James Patrick Kelly referees yet another generational conflict within the SF field in his On the Net column, “Mind the Gap"; Peter Heck brings us “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our June issue on sale at your newsstand on April 7, 2009. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—by mail or online, in classy and elegant paper format or new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!

  COMING SOON

  brand new stories by Stephen Baxter, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, R. Garcia y Robertson, Robert Reed, William Barton, Bruce McAllister, Elissa Malcohn, Steven Popkes, Sara Genge, Michael Blumlein, Christopher Barzak, Michael Cassutt, Jerry Oltion, Damien Broderick, and many others!

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: EXEGESIS

  by Nancy Kress

  Nancy Kress just completed teaching a semester at the University of Leipzig. She says that nearly all of her German students confessed to not reading much SF before the course began—but they do now. Her most recent book is Steal Across the Sky (Tor, February, 2009), which involves aliens, space flight, atonement for mega-crimes, and the nature of what we think we know about reality. The following story, however, is in an entirely different vein: a light-hearted look at what we think we know about language.

  1950

  from Branson's Quotations for Book Lovers

  ed. Roger Branson, Random House

  "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." One of the world's most famous quotations, this is the film version of Rhett Butler's (Clark Gable) immortal farewell to Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, a crowning achievement of American literature. It occurs at the end of the film when Scarlett asks Rhett, “Where shall I go? What shall I do?” if he leaves her. The print version does not include the word “frankly,” which was added by director David O. Selznik. The line was bitterly objected to by the Hays Office, but remained in the 193
9 film, due to a last-minute amendment to the Production Code.

  * * * *

  2050

  from Critical Interpretations of Twentieth Century Literature, Random House,

  eds. Jared Morvais and Hannah Brown

  TEXT: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”

  1 Line from a twentieth-century American novel, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, now largely dismissed as both racist and romanticized. The male protagonist, Rhett Butler, speaks the line to the abrasive heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, as he leaves their marriage.

  * * * *

  2150

  Dictionary of Modern Sayings for the Faithful

  Church of Renewed Enlightenment

  ENTRY: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”

  Line from a twentieth-century novel written by Margaret Mitchell in Southern Ezra (a section of the former United States of America), in which a man, Rhett Butler, abandons his legal wife, an adulteress ("scarlet woman"). The passage is a stark illustration of the sinfulness and irresponsibility of pre-Ezran so-called “Christianity.” Praise!

  * * * *

  2250

  from Studees in Lawst Litrucher, Reformd Langwij Co-ullishun, Han Goldman

  SUBJECT: “Franklee, my der, I dont giv a dam.”

  Line frum Pre-Kolapse novul—awther unown—that twoday iz mostlee fowk sayeen in Suthern Ezra. The prahverb means—ruffly—that the speeker wil not giv even wun “dam"—wich may hav bin a tipe of lokul munee—to by a “der,” an xtinkt meet animul. Implikashun is that watever iz beein diskused is over prised. This interpretashun is reinforced by the tradishunul usoceeashun of the line with peepul hoo served meels, nown as “butlers.”

  * * * *

  2350

  Harox College Download 6753-J-ENLIT

  TEXT: “Frankly1, my dear2, I don't give a damn3.”

  New research sheds interesting light on this folk saying from Mubela (formerly Southern Ezra). The Pre-Collapse Antiquarian Grove humbly makes this offering to the Forest of Enlightened Endolas: