Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Sabor didn't need a message from Colonel Jina to advise him the rules had changed. He could see it in the way the three hardbodies held their hands as they closed. Purvali was fast and she was stronger than the curves of her body and the silkiness of her skin indicated. But she couldn't survive an attack from three purpose-nurtured soldiers who had decided they could remove an obstacle without fretting about the damage they inflicted on it.

  Sabor wedged his gun between a pair of cargo bins. He rose to a crouch and jumped, feet first, on the hardbody who was slipping behind Purvali's back.

  It was an impulsive act, but his body knew what it had to do. His boots slammed into the hardbody's helmet. His target shied away from him as the blow hit and he threw out his arms and grabbed at anything he could get his hands on.

  His fingers dug into the hardbody's uniform. His left heel pounded on the hardbody's foot. It was a weak effort, but it did the job. The odds against Purvali were reduced to two to one. It was only a momentary respite, but it could be all Purvali needed.

  Unfortunately, the hardbodies immediately realized he had placed their true objective in reach. The hardbody facing Choy abandoned his opponent and danced toward Sabor. The other two hardbodies slipped around Purvali. A hardbody twisted Sabor's arm behind his back. Three hardbodies formed a wall in front of him.

  Sabor jerked his head toward Choy. “Stop her. Don't let her attack. They'll kill her."

  Choy stepped behind Purvali. He gripped her wrist and trapped her in the same kind of hold the hardbody was using on Sabor. Purvali tensed and then let herself relax.

  "You'll just get yourself killed,” Sabor said. “And I'll still be a prisoner."

  "It's the only hope you have, Sabor. Why couldn't you stay out of it? We could have handled them."

  The pain in Sabor's arm suddenly disappeared. The four hardbodies moved before his brain could adjust to the change in his situation. Choy tried to defend Purvali and a hardbody stepped behind him.

  Colonel Jina smiled out of Sabor's display. “Good afternoon, Honored Sabor. We seem to have a change in the fortunes of war. Possessor Dobryani has occupied Possessor Khan's personal abode. It is now obvious Possessor Khan can no longer fulfill his contractual obligations."

  "You've been a formidable opponent, Colonel. I'll be certain to recommend your services in the future."

  "Your associate destroyed one of my most valuable capital assets. In spite of our agreement not to exceed certain limits."

  "I'm afraid she has a tendency to become overzealous."

  "I understand, Honored Sabor. Our relationships with the other sex can become difficult to control, in spite of our best efforts. But I think I'm entitled to some reasonable compensation."

  "How much did you have in mind?"

  Purvali straightened up. “Don't be a fool, Sabor! Pay him a ransom and you'll have to defend me against every hoodlum on the planet."

  "We're not discussing a ransom,” Sabor said. “He's asking me for compensation for the soldier you killed."

  "He was trying to destroy you. They would have succeeded if I hadn't done that."

  "She managed to destroy my asset because we were exercising restraint,” Colonel Jina said. “We would have killed her before that if we hadn't accepted your bargain."

  Data flowed across Sabor's vision. A hardbody could be replaced in approximately eleven standard years at a total cost of four hundred and sixty thousand Fernheim neils. Colonel Jina's estimated cash flow indicated each hardbody generated approximately fifty-four thousand neils per standard year. The lifetime of the hardbody was, of course, unknown, but one could estimate the cost of the maintenance required over an eleven year period and that, obviously, should be subtracted from the total cash flow....

  "I can offer you one million, four thousand neils,” Sabor said.

  "I believe you are underestimating the loss of business I may suffer. Every contract requires a carefully calculated number of personnel. If I need five hardbodies for one assignment, for example, and three for another, and I only have seven, I may be forced to refuse one of the assignments. According to my figures, I should ask you for at least one million, two hundred and fifty thousand."

  Sabor studied the numbers the colonel presented him. “I really must point out that you're overlooking the interest you'll be earning each year on the unused portion. Your figure for lost employment seems a bit inflated, too, if you don't mind my saying so. But I'll offer you another hundred thousand anyway."

  The colonel frowned. Sabor concentrated on the colonel's calculations and carefully avoided looking at Purvali.

  "One million, one hundred and seventy-five,” the colonel said.

  Sabor hesitated. It was a large sum. His mother would have haggled for another hour just to keep a few more thousand.

  "It's getting late,” Sabor said. “If you'll agree to keep the whole sum in your account with my institution until it's paid out, I'll consider the extra hundred and seventy-one thousand a small honorarium to a valued customer."

  The hardbodies released Purvali and stepped back. Sabor gave his system a signal and one million, one hundred and seventy-five thousand neils jumped into Colonel Jina's account.

  Colonel Jina beamed. “What other bank would I patronize?"

  Sabor crossed the distance that separated him from his concubine. He put his arms around Purvali and felt her soften at his touch.

  "You're a fool, Sabor."

  She said the same thing again after they had struggled back to the guest quarters in the Galawar Commune and he had proved to his satisfaction (and hers, by all the signs) that he had successfully discarded his warrior mode.

  "Is there any possibility,” Sabor responded, “just the slightest possibility, you will ever realize you mean just as much to me as I mean to you? That you ignite—in me—exactly the same kind of feelings I provoke in you?"

  "But I was designed to feel that way, Sabor. You have choices."

  "Somehow, my dove, I never seem to feel I have a choice. And I am quite confident—annoyingly confident—I can offer you some assurance I never will feel I have a choice. Never. Not ever."

  She would never fully believe him, of course. He could glance at her face and see that. But she was there. She was alive. His hand was resting on her stomach. His display was running projections of the demand/profit curve for the line of crabs the Galawar Commune was bidding on, assuming the most plausible ranges of the six most relevant variables. Sabor Haveri was focusing his attention on his two major interests.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Tom Purdom.

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  Memory Work by L. Timmel Duchamp

  A Novelette

  L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of The Grand Conversation (2004), a collection of essays; Love's Body, Dancing in Time (2004), a collection of short fiction; and Alanya to Alanya (2005), a novel. She has been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Homer, and Nebula awards, and has been short-listed four times for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. An ample selection of her critical writing as well as a few of her stories can be found at ltimmel.home.mindspring.com. In her powerful new story, the author explores how humanity might survive even the most devastating alien invasion.

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  Each time “I” speaks, a virtual self is born.

  —Amanda S. Fielding

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  1.

  She called it the End of the World, a designation that marked the limits of her attempt to comprehend the intolerably incomprehensible. On January sixteenth, the world was much as it had been the previous day (which is not to say what it had been the previous year, given the rapidity of change in her world), but on January seventeenth it began to collapse, and a few days after that it was gone, irretrievably. From perhaps January nineteenth on she began to think that though the means bringing about the End were not any she could ever have imagined, the feel of her tenuous da
y-to-day survival was exactly what she remembered experiencing in the many End-of-the-World scenes she had been dreaming since childhood.

  January seventeenth was a gray, cold, gloomy day in her city. At around noon reports of “widespread wildness” of youth began to filter into her office from around the world. At 3:30, she and her coworkers were dismissed early so that there would be no chance that any of them would be out and about after dark. The “wildness” had arrived in her city, too.

  She spent the evening chatting on the phone, explaining it all to friends and relatives as simple mass hysteria exacerbated by the copycat syndrome, and that the news media were making too much of it. She had been glued to CNN since arriving home from work, tearing herself away only for telephone solace and to cruise the Internet for additional, less official, information. She was not at first overly concerned, because the media initially portrayed the “wildness” as a sort of global gang World War, organized along racial and ethnic lines, and also because she was used to watching catastrophic situations on CNN, whose anchors had been trained to keep viewers’ fear and despair aroused but distanced.

  By daybreak she understood that the situation had gone beyond even the possibility of control. Throughout the night a constant barrage of gunfire and bursts of screams, shrieks, and bellows had been carried to her on the wind. In the morning she saw from her fourth-floor windows that a significant portion of the city was ablaze. Local television stations advised people not to call 911 or indeed any municipal or county numbers at all. “The authorities are overwhelmed,” they said at frequent intervals. A tape of the mayor pleading with people to keep their adolescent children home for their own (and the community's) safety reran every fifteen minutes.

  All morning she tried to get through to the friends and relatives she had spoken with the night before, but the circuits were always busy. A few minutes before noon, her phone went dead. CNN reported that most national guard units and much of the regular armed forces had been rendered ineffectual by so many of their members having themselves “gone wild"—while in possession of tanks, rifles, and other fierce armaments the Secretary of Defense declined to specify. By late afternoon, terrible things were happening within view of the windows of her apartment. Shivering, her muscles knotted painfully with tension, she wondered whether “they” ever slept.

  When dark fell, not much before five, she debated the wisdom of turning on her lights. Since other windows in the neighborhood were dark, hers, if lit, would stand out, inviting, as it were, “their” attention. But if her apartment windows were dark, “they” might think no one was in the apartment and feel free to loot and vandalize it. In the end, she elected to close the blinds and put on a few low lights away from the windows. She could not bear the thought of waiting with her terror in the dark alone.

  A knock rattled her door at around six-thirty. “Hello?” a voice called through the door. “Is anyone home? It's Mrs. Mathers, from across the hall. Hello? Hello?"

  Recognizing the voice, thin and creaking and tinnily resonant, she opened the door to the stooped and scrawny lady who had been living across the hall from her for the last six years. Their entire relationship consisted of exchanging polite greetings and accepting UPS deliveries for one another, and of the occasional borrowing and lending of an egg or tablespoon of baking powder or cup of milk. “My phone has been out since noon,” Mrs. Mathers said. “And I'm growing most concerned about the disorder.” The old lady's eyes were bleak with fear, but retired English teacher that she was, she spoke as correctly as ever. “Unless you'd rather be alone, I thought we might sit together for a while, to keep up our morale."

  She wondered then why she hadn't thought of that herself. It certainly made more sense than crouching in a corner, straining to hear the sounds of approaching danger. “Please, do come in,” she said. She hadn't used her voice in hours and was dismayed to hear the wobble in it.

  They sipped their way through several pots of tea. Mrs. Mathers said that it was the apparently global occurrence of the “disturbances” that frightened her. “I hardly know what to think,” she said. “We're used to youth disturbances, of course, with all those Second-Echo Baby-boomers always so angry because the state legislatures won't fund higher education any longer, but the disorder we're seeing now, I fear, is something on an entirely different scale.” The old lady's sharp black eyes bored into hers. “I have been cudgeling my brains all day to find a plausible explanation. Do you think some outlandish secret military chemical has been inadvertently unleashed?"

  The experts on CNN all characterized the disorder as “copycat behavior on a scale never before experienced.” But then the media was focused entirely on the President's declaration of a National State of Emergency and his urging parents to rein in their own children. “It's a matter of individual, personal responsibility,” the President said in a constantly rerun sound-bite, words every commentator and anchorperson repeated almost every time they opened their mouths.

  Even under the imminent threat of the End of the World, Mrs. Mathers was proper as proper could be. Her long brown and pink fingers, though trembling visibly, still managed to look school-teacherly with every sip she took from the blue and gold handmade mug. She, wanting to speak of ordinary, neutral things, asked Mrs. Mathers how long she had lived in the city.

  "Oh my dear,” Mrs. Mathers said. She smiled and shook her head and sighed all at once. “I've lived here more than fifty years, if you can believe that.” Oh yes, and had taught in the public school system for thirty-five of those years.

  The two women exchanged particulars, much of which both had already deduced about the other in their day-to-day neighborly observances. They told one another about their families and not-too-personal details of their individual histories. She remembers that much.

  But she has no memory of what happened after that. She knows only that the next night, or maybe it was the night after, she was crouching in the alley, behind the Dumpster, crowded up against the bare winter branches of the lilac bush, shivering violently with cold, so stiff she could hardly move, her clothing wet through to the skin except for the parts protected by her Gore-tex jacket—alone. The stench of burning plastics was so thick in the air that her throat was raw and her stomach heaving with nausea. She also smelled the urine and vomit on her jeans and could not stop thinking about how wonderful it would be to die clean and dry in her bed. Her hope of escaping (to where? All the world had become hell) had sunk so low that the very idea of a “good death” had become a kind of promise to herself. If they've finished their vandalism, and if I can get back to the apartment, then I'll take a bath, get into bed, and kill myself. Either by taking every tablet of every medication in the medicine cabinet—which, cumulatively, at least, should make a lethal dose—or by cutting my throat with the large Sabatier.

  At least the apartment building hadn't been burned to the ground.

  The noise bothered her most. The shrieks and screams and hysterical laughter and gunfire never stopped, while it seemed that every car stereo and boom-box in the city was thumping, thumping, thumping at maximum volume, like the drum roll accompanying a firing squad.

  "Kid, no, don't do it!” The voice, hoarse and male, sounded shockingly near, and she at once recognized it as belonging to Mrs. Mathers’ favorite grandson, a tough-ass, plainclothes police officer who two years back had introduced himself as “Lieutenant Creighton” when he'd knocked on her door to ask her to call him if she saw anyone trying to enter Mrs. Mathers’ apartment during the latter's stay in the hospital.

  She peered around the Dumpster. Creighton stood with his back to the apartment building and his legs spread wide. He gripped an ugly snub-nosed weapon at arm's length from his body with both hands. Because it was dark she didn't at first see the girl, but, by following the line of Creighton's arms and weapon, she spotted her about three yards from the man, dancing crazily in the rain, hands milling spastically in the air over her head—brandishing a hand grenade.

 
"Easy, girl, easy. Set it down, gently, on the ground."

  Though Creighton's voice remained wonderfully steady and authoritative as he tried to talk her into sanity, the girl's dance grew frenzied. She wondered if she should risk bolting. She thought the worst thing would be to be wounded and not killed. There was no damned way anybody was going to be fixing any injuries.

  Creighton opened fire without warning. The kid collapsed. As she went down she dropped the hand grenade, which hit the concrete, bounced, and rolled a few yards down the alley, toward the Dumpster.

  She closed her eyes, fearing the worst. Though her ears rang and buzzed from the shock of the gunshot, she heard footsteps pound around the corner, into the alley. She opened her eyes in time to see Creighton, bent low to the ground, head straight toward her. Six quick shots rang out, thundering in her ears, sounding closer even than Creighton's had. Creighton crumpled into a heap, near enough for her to glimpse an expression of surprise on his face. Since he was looking straight at her, it could be either because he was surprised to see her lurking behind the Dumpster or surprised to have been shot.

  "My granny,” she thought he said.

  "Hey, the sucker's still alive!"

  She pressed back into the lilac branches, so far back that she could no longer see Creighton. The alley resounded with another, louder burst of shots. She thought, Maybe I should make a noise and they'll shoot without looking and blow their chance to torture me.

  Because of the ringing and roar in her ears, she heard nothing for a while, not even the constant distant whine of armored helicopters fighting fires. She perceived only the stench of burning, the sick orange of the sky, the cold, the drizzle, the darkness. Time dragged on, beating at the terminal verge. Her despair weighed more heavily on her at that moment than she had ever imagined possible.

  Eventually she decided the alley was probably as safe as it was going to get. She knew that if she didn't move soon, she likely never would. Slowly, painfully, stiffly, she eased herself out around the Dumpster. When she saw the heap of clothing and blood Creighton had become, she took care to keep her eyes averted from where she thought his head must be.