Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Until finally nothing reaches you at all.

  * * * *

  "Dental X-rays.” I answered.

  "For what?” the boy asked.

  "For your third front tooth."

  "What do you mean?” the boy said, probing the gap with his tongue. His top two front teeth were missing.

  "You've got what's called a mesiodens, an un-erupted central incisor."

  "My gums feel fine. How do you know I have it?"

  "You usually do."

  "What causes it?"

  "Genetics. It's not all that rare. About one percent of people have supernumerary teeth of some kind. It happens."

  "So I'm going to have an extra tooth?"

  "Probably,” I said.

  "But maybe not,” the boy said slowly.

  "There's not a one-to-one association between gene and expression. Sometimes, instead of a mesiodens, it expresses as extra cusps on the back of your top teeth—what's known as ‘talon teeth’ because they look like an eagle's claw. Sometimes in identical twins, one twin will have the extra cusps, and the other will have the extra tooth. Same genes, different expression. The trait doesn't have a particularly high concordance rate. You don't have talon teeth though, so now we need to do x-rays to see how things are arranged in your gums."

  "What will they do for it?"

  "Surgery, probably, unless the tooth is posterior enough to allow both normal incisors to erupt."

  "I still don't understand."

  "The gene doesn't really cause a third front tooth. It's more accurate to say the gene causes certain developmental disruptions in the mesenchyme that affects the dental lamina in complex ways. Usually though, that's an extra tooth."

  "I don't want surgery."

  "I don't blame you. It all depends how everything is arranged in your gums."

  "If it's the same genes, why would it be different each time?"

  "Oh, John, that is the question, isn't it? That is the question."

  * * * *

  You're left-handed, usually. The lefties have more problems. Emotional problems. Memory problems. They are also the more gifted. The original John was left-handed.

  You don't like milk. You don't sleep well. Your IQ ranges between 126 and 132, which is high but doesn't explain what you're able to do with numbers. It doesn't explain the tacke drive.

  Your fingerprints differ each time, as does the rotation of the cowlick in your hair. You always have freckles, but the pattern changes. Very often, but not always, you have a mole on your cheek.

  Seventy-two out of ninety-seven times you ended up as so much dissolution in nutrient media—having ceased dividing before the blastocyst stage. Other times you failed to implant. Once, you were a miscarriage, a corruption of the process, a monster.

  Those versions of you who remained were blonde, blue-eyed, square-faced—Dutch looking. Or my idea of it. Every time.

  * * * *

  The boy woke up crying and puking in the recovery room. I held him and rocked him until his tears subsided into a slow series of hitches. He moaned.

  When I thought he'd gone back to sleep, I tried to lay him down, and he clutched at me, crying again. He wanted to be held. His mouth was stuffed with gauze, and he tried to take it out. I stopped him. When I tucked it back under his upper lip, I got a look at the wound—dark hamburger and stitches. The mesiodens had been most unfortunately positioned. It had been necessary to remove most of his maxillary baby teeth. Poor kid.

  The moaning started again. Holding him like this, he was no different than any other hurt child. Pain is the ultimate equalizer.

  I'd comforted so many before him just like this. He would be the last.

  "Hurts,” he moaned, his breath fetid and sick.

  "Shhh, don't talk, little one. Don't say anything. Go to sleep."

  The boy continued to moan, but his eyes remained closed. I bent closer, and his left hand reached for mine. I kissed him softly on the forehead.

  "I love you,” I said.

  * * * *

  The next few days were hard on the boy, and he lost weight. I brought him ice cream, but he barely touched it.

  On the third morning I found him standing at the window looking out over the courtyard. Cement and Kentucky blue. My skin crawled.

  His eyes were sad when he looked at me. They were eyes older than his ten-year-old face. Most of my hair had fallen out from the treatments, and I wondered how I must look to him: a thin, balding old man. He turned back toward the window.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the bones beneath his skin. I followed his gaze out the window at the gathering dusk. Beyond the glass, the sunset lay buried in a dark bank of cloud, shadows deepening between the dark hills in the distance. It struck me as oddly familiar, like a face seen on a father, and then a son. “November skies of lead and gray,” I whispered.

  "What?” the boy asked.

  "A poem,” I said. “Something I remember from ... somewhere. November skies of lead and gray, I love this dying of the day."

  On the hills, dark trees swayed in the wind, undulating like a living thing.

  "Where do you go when you die?” the boy asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Do you believe in God?"

  "Almost every day."

  "What do you believe most about him?"

  I looked closely at the boy. “That he sticks his finger into the mind of every child conceived, and gives one good counterclockwise swirl."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean there are mysteries still. Unknowable things."

  "I don't want you to die,” the boy said.

  "We all must die, little one. We're each given only so much time."

  "Not all of us."

  "All of us."

  "No,” the boy shook his head. “Some of us get extra.” The boy's eyes changed. “Who was he?” he asked. His voice was odd.

  I realized who he meant. Who he had to mean.

  "He was a scientist,” I said. “A physicist by training, but the media called him a mathemagician. Ultimately, he was a singularity."

  "And he invented something,” the boy said.

  "It would be more accurate to say he half-invented it."

  "What was it?"

  "It had many names, but he called it the tacke drive. Some physicists still call it the god engine, and it was supposed to take humanity to the stars."

  "Was he a great man?"

  "He was."

  "Will I be great, too?"

  "No, little one, you will not."

  The boy turned back to the window. The sky had completely darkened before he spoke again. “But I am him."

  "You are yourself,” I said.

  * * * *

  "Mathematics is metaphor,” you'll tell me. It will be something I have heard before, in those exact words, in that exact tone—and so I'll listen carefully to what you have to say, searching for concordance here, too, and you'll rub the teenage acne on your chin, pacing in front of the blackboard. “But this is real,” you'll say. “This is testable."

  You'll pick up the chalk, pointing to the schematic you've drawn—a thing of wonderful, opaque beauty. It could be art, or science. I won't be able to tell.

  "The local space immediate to any antenna is subject to both wave-physics and circuit physics,” you'll begin. “But tucked between the near-field and far-field maths is a tract of scientific real estate that hasn't been so systematically explored."

  You'll speak quickly, excited by what you are revealing. Your mention of an antenna will worry me, though, because antennas are a common fixation among the disturbed. I'll wonder if you're hearing voices already.

  "Tesla didn't follow his work through to its obvious conclusion,” you'll say. “Maybe he didn't fully comprehend the underlying physics, but then how could he? Quantum mechanics, as it now stands, tells us that a resonant atom acts as if expanded to the area of its entire near-field region when viewed in terms of its function as a half-wave antenna. Th
is is accomplished by the accumulation of a virtual-photoelectric field. Do you understand?"

  I'll nod.

  "It's well documented that atoms disperse half the light they contact,” you'll continue. “But what about the other half? When atoms resonateselectromagnetically at a frequency identical to the incident light waves, then the atom's oscillating field will store the attendant EM energy. And when this field is phase-locked with the incoming light, the atom's field will cancel most near-field E. That energy doesn't disappear; Einstein proved that. Instead it's stored up inside the atom. Thus, tiny atoms can pull energy from huge undulating light waves."

  "You lost me,” I'll say.

  But you won't even slow for breath. You'll push forward, rushing to get it all out. “And the really strange things start happening when you apply this to Beaty's work on coupled-resonator theory. His quantum mechanical coherent systems could almost be thought to analogize atom photon transfer.” Your hair will fly around your head as you turn back to the blackboard, pointing again with the chalk. “Taking this into account, he's already theorized it might be possible to increase transmitter modulation beyond the carrier frequency. You could receive a signal at the resonator without the use of radio transmissions."

  "Radio?” I'll say, wondering if I missed the shift in subject.

  "But the fascinating thing, the incredible thing,” you'll tap the chalk on the board. “Is what would happen if, after such a circuit were oscillating, the transmitter were removed from the loop. The atoms within the near-field would no longer be able to radiate the incoming waves, and if the transmission happened to intersect the field of a small antenna—in other words, some mass of molecularly aligned atoms phase-locked to incoming long waves—then logic requires the antenna change from oscillation to effluxion. Instead of absorbing E, it would periodically discharge. It might be possible to construct a heat source from such principles."

  "A heat source,” I'll say.

  "Or a simple propulsion source,” you'll say. “Or a bomb."

  "From mere light,” I'll say.

  "And atomic resonance."

  When I leave, I'll be unsure what to think. I'll shut your study door softly behind me and walk to my room. That night the physicists will look at your schematic, and they won't dismiss it out of hand as I expect. They'll photograph the blackboard. A team will spend a week crunching the numbers before giving up with a collective shrug, saying they needed more data. “We have no idea if he's right,” they'll say. “Maybe in another century we'll have the technology to test it."

  The next time I see you, you'll be in your underwear, sweating in front of the same blackboard, mania burning in your eyes.

  "What is this?” I'll ask, pointing at the mathematical symbols. The old schematic is gone, erased, supplanted by something more purely mathematical.

  "A proof,” you'll say.

  "What kind?"

  "It's a proof of God's existence."

  "That's a worthy ambition,” I'll say. I will pull a chair out from a table. I will sit. I will wipe my eyes with my handkerchief.

  But for all my sadness, this new work, too, will be taken seriously by the teams.

  "It's brilliant,” Mike Sebrams will tell me the following day, once his mathematicians have had their time.

  I'll wave that off. “Do you think it is useful?” I'll ask.

  "No, I said brilliant, but the work is self-referential. It proves itself, given itself, through eighteen steps. But, given that God exists,” he'll say. “I have no doubt that this is how he would exist."

  * * * *

  The boy's left hand slid into mine. His blue eyes brimmed with tears, and when he blinked, they fell in twin bursts down his cheeks. This time, I was the sick one needing comfort.

  The hospital room smelled of antiseptic, and death. Or perhaps the latter was my imagination, just me getting ahead of myself again. Lately, it had sometimes been difficult for me to tell where I was, when I was. Things had begun to blur; but now, here in this bed, looking up at the boy, there was no mistaking that our time together was coming to a close.

  I tried to sit up but the pain was too much. My throat was sore from all the talking. Hours of talking.

  "Why are you telling me all these things?” the boy asked.

  "Because I love you,” I said. “And because I'm tired of knowing things about you which you do not."

  "These stories cannot all be true."

  "They all happened, each one. A catalogue of your possible futures. You're the youngest, and you will be the last."

  "Why I am the last? Because you are sick?"

  "No, because the experiment is a failure."

  "What am I going to do without you?” he said.

  "I don't know. That will be something new. I have always been here, each time. I don't know what will happen."

  "But you seem to know everything."

  "Not everything.” I touched his forehead, swiping away a blonde lock. “Only the unimportant things. The small things."

  "And the big things?"

  "We're just learning to ask the right questions."

  "Then I have a question,” the boy said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  "A big one?"

  "Who are you?” the boy said. “To me. Who are you to me?"

  I sighed. Not just a question then, but the question, finally. I took a deep breath. “In all the ways that matter, I am your father,” I said. “And in all the ways that don't, I am your son."

  "I don't understand."

  "We're kin, you and I. I knew you suspected."

  "Are we..."

  "No,” I said. “Not the same, you and I. Not like you and the others. There was a girl at Stanford sixty-eight years ago. She was young. She was in love. And there was a young physicist, not yet sick, already making his mark on the world. By the time I was born he'd ... I never got to meet my father. He never held me. But I've held him now, versions of him, dozens of times."

  "You're saying ... I am your father?” There was horror in his voice.

  "It is semantics,” I said, shaking my head. “We have half our genes in common, like any father and any son, and I don't think it matters which of us possesses the ancestral set, and which the descendant. It is enough to say our genes have a common source. Water doesn't care which way the river flows, only that it reaches the sea."

  "What will I do now, without you?” the boy asked.

  I clenched his small hand tightly. “You have a mind like a detonation, little one."

  "You are my only friend,” he said.

  "And that is why I'm telling you this,” I said. “Your time is limited, like mine is limited. That is my gift to you. This knowledge. You only have a few more years. Don't waste it on formulas. My gift to you is yourself."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Copyright © 2005 by Ted Kosmatka.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Overlay by Jack Skillingstead

  A Short Story

  Jack Skillingstead's latest story is about an unusual sort of timesharing. He tells us he got the idea for it while “wondering where my ego-consciousness went when my body was asleep. That made me think of the time I went on vacation and asked a friend to housesit. He wound up trashing the place."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Bad memories haunted me. I kept my good ones in a box under the bed. It was a small box.

  Sweating in the coffin-sized apartment that Northeast News Stream Services provided, I sat in my underwear and fingered listlessly through the meager selection of loops. I was wasted, but couldn't sleep. A Rider had borrowed my body the previous night. Rubbing the back of my neck, I could feel the hard little button that Thixton's people had implanted under the skin at the base of my skull: the portal.

  As with everyone else, my deepest memory impressions occurred before my twelfth birthday, and it was only from that rich memory soil that Dreamloops could be readily fashioned. So I had none of my wife, Cy
nthia. There was a way of altering near-memory engrams to make them more adaptable to loop technology, and I was working on that. But, for now, I picked out one of my childhood favorites. Long ago, when I was little “Scottie” Kriegel, I'd gone Halloweening for the first time. Lying back, I dropped the loop into the player and closed my eyes.

  Run the spooky shadows, wind-sway of birch branches under arc sodium light. My right fist tight around the handle of my plastic pumpkin bucket. Big brother James holding my left paw. Sweat and rubber stink inside the mask. We approach the door, which has six panels and is swaged with cotton cobwebs. James tells me to ring the bell, which I do.

  And that's where it goes wrong.

  Because there's another door overlaying the one in my memory loop. It's a slate-gray slab with the number 207 stenciled at eye level, and it opens because I've just swiped a key card. It swings in, slightly out of sync with the Halloween door. And then I'm having some kind of schizophrenic mind-split experience. I'm seven years old, trick-or-treating my little heart out, and I'm thirty-eight years old, stalking into a strange co-op. A woman turns from the window. Her body is barely concealed by a gossamer shadow that clings to her skin and halts at mid-thigh. There's a home-rolled cigarette between her fingers, and smoky light ladders up the half-open blinds to the accompaniment of helicopter chop. Her lips are black, her tightly razored hair gleams like tarnished copper, and Mrs. Henneke from across the street is wearing a pointy witch hat but smiles like my grandmother and says I'm the cutest little thing. The woman with black lipstick says, Did you kill that boy? and I show her my hands. A miniature Snickers bar drops into my virgin bucket—

  The loop had run to the end of its maximum two-minute duration.