Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Once in the corridor, panicky apprehension condenses in my stomach. The closer we get to the wraith, the less I'm able to think about anything else. It's hard to stay angry when all my thoughts are about one thing. Instead, I simply try to breathe without vomiting. I remember the first time I was here. The fear is even worse now, since I already know how bad it will be.

  The end of the hallway approaches too fast, and I feel far less prepared than I felt five minutes earlier. I want to turn back, but Ryan is already pushing on ahead. I want him to stop—or at least slow down—and the anger comes back in a great wave that takes me around the last corner.

  We come to a large room. It looks almost exactly the same as I remember. The far wall is entirely taken up by an enormous window that looks in on an equally large tank. With an internal explosion of dismay and regret, I see that the wraith has taken up a place in the tank directly in front of the glass wall, glaring down at the onlookers from such a height—and with such a size—as to consume the entire room with its presence.

  Unlike the other banshees, the wraith doesn't have a single face. Instead, it's more like a great ball of boiling energy, with an endless stream of howling mouths always rushing to the surface. They swoop out of the wraith's murky innards and then leap forth at the edge before bursting on themselves and disappearing again. The effect is such that, even when it's standing still, the wraith appears to be running you down.

  There's hardly anyone else in the room, and it's too dark to see clearly the few people who are. Suddenly, I notice that there are no lights, and that the dull glow pervading the room is coming from the wraith. Under this eerie light, Ryan takes a couple of steps forward. The expression on his upturned face is impossible to read—it looks utterly blank, as though his face were nothing but a surface to reflect the glow of the wraith.

  Slowly, my grip loosens on whatever little anger I had left. I feel naked, as if the most vulnerable parts of me are being exposed one after another. Soon there's nothing except the terror that I feel—a fresh, insistent, and ever-renewing terror that washes over me as regularly as if it were pumped out of some organ of my soul.

  This terror is the natural effect of the wraith on anyone who sees it, and it's the reason why the exhibit is limited to adults. As terrible as the sight of the wraith is, this fear is inflated out of all proportion to what it ought to be. Having experienced it once before, I know it'll wear off as soon as we leave the exhibit, but knowing this does nothing to calm me so long as we stay here. This overwhelming fear wipes out every emotion and every concern that I have. All of my irritation, all of my pride, and all of my self-consciousness are gone. I'm open only to fear, and a new one grips me as well—the fear that my anger will come back as soon as the terror is gone. Standing with Ryan now in front of the wraith, it seems like a petty and stupid anger. It seems like an unjust anger.

  An array of thin protrusions—something like tentacles—extends from the periphery of the wraith, grappling with the walls of the tank. As I watch, two or three of these tentacles grope their way to the glass partition. The individual limbs pull taut and melt together into a single thicker cord as the wraith strains along them.

  Suddenly, the wraith surges forward, its face devolving into a single great mouth. That bass rumbling follows, the walls of the tank trembling as the wraith howls in its rush. It seems almost as if the wraith has jumped into the room, and I turn away too fast in the face of its lunge. Ryan suddenly clamps his hands onto my arm, and pain shoots up to my shoulder. This sudden contact, and the inadvertent support that it provides, is all that keeps me from completely losing my balance.

  "Dad,” says Ryan, looking up into the face of the wraith. He only says one word, but his voice is unmistakable. All the traces of manhood have evaporated from it. It's only the voice of a child now.

  Ryan and I stand a moment longer together in the full fury of the wraith. Even though the edges of my soul shrink back, I feel different than I did when I was a boy. The more deeply Ryan's fingers dig into my arm, the more sure I am that the wraith cannot touch the center of me. I'm aware, lucidly aware, that this is only a moment. It's a moment of terror, but it's a short one. It will pass, and when it does, I need not take it with me. I raise my eyes to the mouth of the wraith.

  "I'm scared, too,” I say. The words sound tiny and empty, but they carry out of me all the anger and resentment. The fear and nausea remain, but so does the feeling of separation from that fear. The wraith roars for a few seconds longer, and then it collapses, spent. The moment ends, and Ryan and I remain.

  As the wraith recedes from view, the pain in my arm dulls. Ryan has a grip near the inside of my elbow, and his fingers dig into the soft tissue there. His teeth are clamped tightly shut, his cheeks gaunt. Ryan doesn't move or release my arm until the wraith is fully out of sight. When nothing remains of it but a faint reflection of its glow on the ceiling, I break into a cold sweat. As my fear dissipates in the darkness, the desire to vomit goes with it.

  The lights are raised, and Ryan and I both look toward the exit as soon as it seems safe to move. We walk out of the exhibit like a couple of old men. The other onlookers seem equally dazed, and we push away from the slightest touch of strangers with revulsion. I have a hard time adjusting to the sunlight and the warmth outside. Ryan sees Ethan and Noelle, and I follow him over to the information booth.

  I can see that Ryan is shaking off the experience more easily than I'll be able to. We still haven't spoken more than those few words to each other since we argued in the banshee house. Our only communication was that moment, facing the wraith, when Ryan fiercely gripped my arm.

  Now Ryan stands quietly near his brother and sister. Ethan sidles up next to him and sights his chin along Ryan's thigh while he quizzes him about the wraith. Ryan answers Ethan's questions quietly, but I can hear the confidence returning to his voice. Noelle watches her brothers with wide eyes, but doesn't move away.

  I look at my children for a moment, waiting to see if the anger returns. It doesn't, and it seems strange to me to think that it should. I wonder again what would have happened if I had told Ryan that I was frightened of the wraith before we'd gone in. I wonder what would have happened if I'd admitted as much when I first saw it as a boy. I'd still have nightmares—that wouldn't change—but they might have been fewer and shorter. They certainly wouldn't have taken the same shape.

  I turn to my children to ask if they want ice cream. At the mere mention of the words, Ethan detaches himself from Ryan's leg and throws himself at mine. “Ice cream!” he yells. He has one arm wrapped around my calf while the other waves in the air above his head. I take him by the wrist and pull up gently. Ethan squeals and lets go of my leg, skipping a little ways toward the exit of the park. Ryan chases him down and ends by sweeping Ethan off his feet and tucking him underneath his arm. Now upside-down, Ethan is still half yelling and half laughing.

  Noelle still hasn't said anything. I turn and look at her. “What do you think?” I ask. “Get some ice cream?"

  Noelle raises her dark eyes and smiles a little. “Sprinkles?” she asks. I nod, smiling now myself. Together we follow Ryan and Ethan into the parking lot. I'm still thinking, still curious to know what my nightmares will look like tonight. I'm curious too to know whether I'll describe them to my wife. They're strange questions that I've never thought about before. I don't know yet what the answers will be.

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  Copyright © 2005 by M. Bennardo.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The God Engine by Ted Kosmatka

  A Short Story

  Ted Kosmatka is a laboratory analyst for the steel industry. He grew up a few miles from the dunes of Lake Michigan and earned his degree studying biology, anthropology, chemistry, and genetics. Ted has done research for the National Biological Survey and the Field Museum. In his spare time, he developed a decidedly unusual strain of mice that are now part of Jackson Labs’ Craniofacial Mutant Resource. “The God E
ngine” is his first story for Asimov's.

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  You'll kill yourself at age thirteen—your first votive act, you'll call it in the note because you know only I will understand what you mean. And because you know how much it will hurt me to read it.

  And they'll page me over the intercom during my meeting with physics, and I'll see you spread boneless out across the courtyard in reds and pinks, precious brain spilled like so much loose change on concrete, orderlies trying to resuscitate what doesn't even look like a boy anymore. And the report will state simply that the four-story fall was incompatible with human life. Incompatible, I'll think, saying the word over and over in my mind. Incompatible. And they'll bag you up, and mop you up, and there will be another meeting scheduled on just what went wrong this time.

  At the long table the following day, I'll hold it in like it doesn't matter, choking on the words I don't say to the dozen important men. They'll sit with their eyes pointed at me, morning light spilling in behind them through wall-sized windows that look out across the vast grounds from a vantage exactly one floor below the one you jumped from, and I'll answer the suits about their money, and I'll answer the white-coats about possible undetected somatic recombination, and I'll answer the sweaters about their fucking Jungian revisionism and their conveniently postmortem prodromal phase diagnosis, and when John Sabrams mentions experimental confounds again, I'll try to take his head off with a reckless roundhouse that knocks him cold but leaves him breathing—and before I can remedy that detail, Stephen will tackle me from behind, and they'll all pile on while I scream, “Incompatible!” at the top of my lungs—kicking over leather boardroom chairs, face crushed to the light brown carpet while one eye notes the delicate upside-down parabola described by a falling sheet of paper.

  But still, they'll say you're the crazy one.

  * * * *

  I concentrated on the feel of the road, the subtle vibration of the steering wheel in my hands. I tried very hard to blank my mind. Outside the car window, the hills were black under the weight of predawn purple. It had been a long night driving.

  At the guard shanty, the face under the blue officer's hat was young, unfamiliar. He looked at me, my I.D., then back at me again. He squinted but finally gave the pass back and waved me though. I glanced briefly at the laminated card before replacing it in my wallet. No wonder, I thought. It was a younger man staring up at me from the plastic rectangle. Time for a new pass. How long had it been? Six years? Eight, I decided. The boy was eight years old now.

  I was struck again by a wash of déjà vu as I pulled into the complex. The buildings never changed. The same gray brick, the same carefully manicured grounds. It looked like the campus square of a small university. But there would be only one student here. One very special student.

  Dr. Sidaque met me in the lobby. His limp had gotten worse since the last time I'd seen him. Rheumatoid arthritis. His canted hand slid into mine for a firm shake.

  "Welcome, Dr. Michaels,” he said.

  "How is the boy?” I asked.

  "As well as can be expected. None of them do well the first couple of nights here, but we've done our best to make him comfortable. The adjustment can be difficult."

  "The whole thing is difficult."

  "Yes, well, it can't be helped. Would you like me to take you to your room?"

  "I want to see the boy."

  Dr. Sidaque led me through the building, and I was struck again by the familiarity of it all. Like I'd never left. “How much does he know?” I asked.

  "The standard. There's been no deviation."

  Of course. There were protocols. There was nothing left to chance, nothing the sociologists hadn't scripted out decades ago; and we all had our parts to play.

  I followed Dr. Sidaque into the activity room. Only the carpet had changed. The boy's face was so familiar I almost didn't need to see it. Blonde, square-faced—the boy looked Dutch, or like my idea of what Dutch looked like. Growing up Lutheran in North Dakota, I'd seen a hundred similar faces staring out from between the pews of my childhood. His blue eyes wheeled toward me, and in them I found his true mark of distinction. They were eyes I'd spent most of my adult life looking into.

  "Leave us,” I told the caregivers.

  The two women complied with a huff, gathering their clipboards and papers. They hadn't liked me last time, and the span of years had done nothing to temper their distaste. It had done something to me though. Yes, something to me.

  This would be the last time for us all.

  I descended to my creaking knees. “What are you building?” I asked.

  "A spaceship,” the boy answered, looking up from his model. He had no fear of strangers. Not yet, anyway.

  "Oh, a spaceship. That's a fine ambition."

  "These are the wave-particle reactors,” the boy said, touching a pair of oblong struts that ran alongside the fuselage.

  "You're a special little boy,” I said. “Do you know that?"

  "Yeah."

  I smiled at his modesty and then glanced toward the door to make sure no one was looking. The women were gone, the door shut. If there were cameras in the room, I couldn't see them. I leaned forward, putting my mouth close to the boy's ear, and then I said the first thing ever uttered to him that hadn't been written by sociologists and approved by the board. “Our time is short, little one.” I said. “I'm dying."

  * * * *

  You'll kill yourself at age seventeen, when the voices start. Always such an inventive child, and you'll eat the extract of a plant endemic to the project grounds—we'll never really learn which one. It'll be your own special concoction though, condensed and purified in the chemistry room, a subtle, chalky poison you'll spread over your dinner like salt. It will not be a painless death, and afterward, botanists will be called in to clear away flora that might be dangerous. They'll favor Kentucky blue grass, and it will be laid in a carpet from fence to fence within the grounds to the full exclusion of other species. It's hard to kill yourself with Kentucky blue, they'll reason correctly.

  You'll love that grass.

  You'll do polynomials by age eight. Permutations of Avogadro's number by eleven. By twelve, you'll have tackled Poincare geometry. They'll teach you biology, history, economics—you'll read the classics. All in an attempt to round you out, keep you sane, because they learned early on that an emphasis on mathematics, to the exclusion of other disciplines, only speeds the process. By seventeen, just before the voices start, you'll begin working on the problem of the tacke drive. The physicists will move into the complex full-time. The team will work around the clock, going over your formulas. One of them will go mad, and the psychologists will study that for years—how you could do that to him with just numbers.

  You'll never make love to anyone. You'll never cry. They'll find you after the poisoning, writhing in a pool of your own vomit, eyes rolled back in your head, precious mind already baking in a hundred and seven degree fever, leaving, like so many other versions of you, the formulas incomplete.

  * * * *

  "What do you call this one?” I asked the boy. He had turned six today. We'd eaten cake and ice cream earlier, and now he wanted to show me what he'd been working on in the lab.

  "I haven't named it,” the boy said.

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know,” he said.

  The Drosophila clung to the inside of the test tube, walking busy little circles on the glass. Blue nutrient auger carpeted the bottom, a thick porous sponge sealing the top as a lid.

  "What's the mutation combination?” I asked.

  "White eyes, vestigial wings, yellow body."

  "Those are good ones."

  "At least they're visible,” the boy said and held the test tube up to the light for closer inspection. His blue eyes narrowed in concentration. “I was working with a line that had a variant vein structure in the wings, and I had to put them under the microscope to identify the phenotype. I used ether to sedate them. To
o little ether, and they'd wake up before I was done and fly away. Too much, and I'd kill them."

  "Dead fruit flies can be a problem,” I said.

  "The bigger problem was when the ether didn't kill them, but sterilized them. I'd spend days working out breeding programs and doing set-up on flies that weren't going to reproduce. By the time I realized they were sterile, I'd wasted half a week."

  "But these are different?"

  "Yeah, ether toxicity isn't a problem. In fact, I don't need to use ether at all, because I don't need a microscope to identify phenotype. The mutations are easy to see. White eyes, vestigial wings, yellow body—what you see is what you get."

  "What you see is what you get?” I said, tapping a finger on the test tube. “If you believe that, little one, then you've still got a lot to learn about genetics."

  * * * *

  You'll make a breakthrough at age nineteen, adding a full line to the original formula. The future will seem to bloom before us, the final solution just around the next corner. The celebrations in the complex will last for days, and the suits will pass out cigars like new fathers. Cuckolds, I'll think to myself.

  You'll call me in the middle of the night, and I'll meet you in your study. You'll be naked, crying, tearing out page after page from your library, and I'll know it's over. I'll know.

  You'll tell me you can see angels. You'll tell me that Calvin was right, and I'll spend three sleepless nights trying to remember if I told you I was Lutheran.

  They'll give you clozapine to ease the symptoms. “Wooden,” you'll say to me, crying again—and on the drugs you won't be able to manage so much as a quadratic equation. “My head feels wooden."

  And that's the irony, isn't it? The drugs which leash you to reality will prevent you from working your math. Your magic.

  You'll forget your name sometimes. You'll forget to eat. You'll walk the corridors in superheated manias, occasionally scrawling mathematical hieroglyphics across the walls in red magic marker. You'll put the solutions on doors, looking for that rapture of stepping through to the other side—a symbolic gesture. The teams will take to calling it your graffiti, but each mural will be photographed before it's painted over, and mathematicians will go over the formulas meticulously looking for hints of rationality. Increasingly, rationality and your formulas will have less in common with each other, until finally the archaic runes you scribble will carry meaning only in your mind. You'll drift further away from this world into your own.