Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  As angry as if it were Ben, Alexandra threw her weight into the stack of barrels. The eetee toppled to the floor along with all the rolling, tumbling sections of its unstable perch. The pistol flew from its hand, fell and struck Alexandra’s hip. Her first instinctive reaction was to bat the horrible object away from her; then, fumbling, she grabbed for it and caught the wrong end.

  The eetee scrabbled to its feet, heaving barrels aside. Alexandra reoriented the pistol with two clumsy, shaking hands, and took aim. She clearly did not inspire fear: Instead of ducking behind a barrel or throwing itself to one side, the eetee fixed Alexandra with its egg-yolk gaze.

  Icy blackness swept her mind, it stopped her breath and froze her limbs—

  But the eetee didn’t, it surely …

  The overwhelming weight of her terror crushed the half-finished thought toward nothingness, and all that Alexandra could grab hold of was her desperate rage. She was so tired of being on the sidelines, the one not in control. She realized she had squeezed her eyes shut. She forced herself to open them. There was no blackness except on the backs of her eyelids.

  Mind control she understood.

  She pressed the button on the red pistol and the eetee exploded, showering the wall above her with great gobs and ropy drips of what looked like snot.

  “Take that, Ben,” she whispered.

  Civilization is a wonderful thing, but survival trumps it every time.

  Then a human soldier, a black woman, pushed through the barrels toward her to offer a hand. “The warehouse is burning! Come on!”

  The soldier took the red pistol from Alexandra’s now nerveless hands and tugged her through an obstacle course of tumbled communications equipment, pooled blood, dead human and alien bodies, and furiously burning sacks of dried peas. At last they burst onto the smoke-filled parking lot. The remains of the Army’s fuel trucks still blazed brightly. Soldiers pushed her down behind a tank.

  “This the one who let the militia in?” one of them said.

  “She splattered the froggy with the fearmonger,” her rescuer told them. “Lucky for you.”

  But there had been no fearmonger.

  As the flood of paralytic terror receded, dragging cold shakiness in its wake, Alexandra’s last thought but one rose back into sight. The eetee hadn’t carried a fear gun. It hadn’t needed one to shoot her full of abject terror.

  Noise and commotion went on for a long time after that: the burning diesel, eetee aircraft sweeping overhead, explosions, missiles screaming into the sky, shouts, rattling gunfire. Alexandra knew Ben’s plan had gone entirely wrong, and she was, plainly and simply, screwed. Ben and his deputies were even more screwed, if they weren’t already dead. Now Lewisville really would suffer a military occupation. They would all be herded into camps.

  Still, right at the moment she felt like God looking down on creation. She had killed an eetee.

  Her brain could not leave alone the image of that clouded alien face at the moment she had pressed the trigger.

  All this time she’d been hearing about Ben and his deputies—so brave to venture out, over and over, against such a terrible weapon—and it turned out there was no such thing as a fear gun.

  The red pendants must be just some kind of officer’s insignia. It said you were authorized, you had the ability or the training to wield terror. But as for the fear itself—

  It all begins and ends in the mind.

  7

  Fred crossed the dry, thistly lawn and stopped in front of the old brick building with the flagpoles that Harvey would never let him piss on. In hot weather the children stayed away and the building usually sat empty, but now the strangers had brought grownup people there. Fred hoped Harvey might be one of them.

  Fred dropped his burden to sample the air for Harvey’s scent. The air was still heavy with the acrid taste of yesterday’s conflagration. He reared on hind legs to put his nose to the windows. No one had opened the mesh coverings, but the sashes had been raised so he could smell all the guests packed inside. There were even more than at the big barbecues Harvey and Susan used to hold. The people were not enjoying this party, though. Many stood in line in front of a table. The rest sat around on cots or folded blankets, glum, angry, or fearful.

  Fred recognized some of the people. Mister Mayor drifted along the line of people, talking. Fred could tell that Mister Mayor felt glum and fearful, too, but he soothed the others with his warm smooth voice that had always reminded Fred of cow fat.

  At the table at the head of the line sat the woman vet who had kept Fred tied up in the cold hard room. With her was the otherwise nice man who had helped with the big, long, nasty needle. Now the vet-woman had a lot more needles with her, and the nice man—as well as some of the strangers—were helping her, sticking needles in each person and writing things down.

  Near the table Fred noticed Alexandra, who had stopped coming out to Harvey’s a long time ago. Alexandra hadn’t liked Fred’s nose, even when he’d sniffed her crotch in the friendliest way. Alexandra had already gone through the line and now she was smiling and being friendly to some of the strangers.

  Ben was not talking to the strangers or to Alexandra. Ben had a leash between his feet and hands and he could only shuffle along. Several strangers led him forward to get stuck with a needle. Fred hoped Ben would be okay. The night before, he had smelled Ben, angry and afraid, through a basement window in the building with the big statue.

  At last, in the far corner, Fred located Susan, and nearby, Harvey. Harvey sat on a cot and stared miserably at the wall.

  Fred remembered the old days when he and Harvey had romped for hours in the cool of the evening, when the two of them had been joyously happy together. Then Harvey had grown afraid: so afraid of the world and of Fred, he thought he should kill Fred, even though he didn’t want to.

  Fred so much wanted Harvey and Susan to be happy again. When Harvey got the present Fred was trying to give him, he would quit being so miserable and alone. He would know that he didn’t have to be afraid of Fred.

  Fred picked up the present in his jaws again and loped around the corner of the brick building. A couple of the strangers’ trucks pulled out of the driveway. Their occupants paid no attention to him.

  Toward the back of the brick building it was cooler and shady. A cat turd lay under a bush. For a moment, he thrust his nose against it, intrigued. Then he recalled his mission. He would not be able to go home if he failed, not while Harvey and the vet-woman wanted to kill him.

  He continued to the back door of the place where the children used to eat. The sweet odor of old garbage lingered here, but there were also fresh smells where cans of oil, bags of potatoes, and crates of stale crackers and raisins had rested on the cement for a few moments. Most interesting was the delirious scent of raw meat. Someone had recently killed a cow.

  From inside the building, Fred could smell boiling potatoes. He trotted up to the door itself. Two sweaty strangers guarded it. Fred put down the present and wagged his tail.

  Hello, he said to them, in the new way he had learned.

  They glanced down. “Hey, boy,” said one of the strangers. Fred wagged his tail some more and the stranger patted him on the head. The stranger liked him. Most people liked Fred.

  I like you, too, Fred told him, wagging some more. Will you open the door, please?

  The stranger pulled open the door. He didn’t look down as Fred picked up his present and trotted inside. It was just the way it had worked with Harvey and Susan, and at the big building that was kind of like the vet’s. The nice man hadn’t noticed he was letting Fred out. It was because he had wanted Fred to be happy, even though he was afraid Fred was sick.

  None of them would be afraid of Fred anymore if they understood that Fred wasn’t sick, he had just learned to do some new things.

  They would learn new things, too. They would all be happy once they understood each other. They would stop being afraid of each other, and hating each other, and trying to mak
e each other do things. Like him, they would take off their leashes and run joyously, rapturously free.

  At least, that’s what he hoped they would do. But people were sometimes unaccountable.

  Fred followed the scent of raw meat into a big kitchen where there was a lot of stainless steel. Men and women chopped potatoes and onions, and big pots of water steamed on the burners. More strangers with guns stood around, making sure the men and women didn’t go outside. The strangers were looking forward to the meat, too.

  Don’t bother about me, Fred told them, and no one did, because they didn’t want to. It was a little sneaky, a coyote trick.

  Off to one side, one of the men was spilling a bowl of stinky chopped onions into a big vat of ground-up raw meat, ruining its smell. Why don’t you stop and talk to your friend? Fred asked him, knowing, because of the new way, that it was what the man really wanted to do.

  He couldn’t do this to the coyotes. They would have caught on right away. But, except for Harvey, the humans didn’t know yet that Fred was talking to them, or that he was trying to get them to do things, just for their own good. Until then he could be a little sneaky.

  Fred trotted over to the vat of ground-up cow and dropped in the present he had carried all the way from the vet’s.

  “Hey!” the man yelled, suddenly noticing him. “Get away from there! How’d you get in?” But he wasn’t really mad.

  Fred backed away and lay down, wagging his tail. The man began mixing the pungent onions in with Fred’s present. By the grill, a woman shouted, “You almost done with that hamburger?”

  © 2004 by Judith Berman.

  Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Judith Berman’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and Black Gate. She has also published a novel, Bear Daughter, and a collection, Lord Stink and Other Stories. She is also well-known for her essay, “Science Fiction Without the Future,” which appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction. Learn more at judithberman.net.

  Impulse

  Steven Gould

  CHAPTER ONE

  Millie: The Underlying Problem

  It was more of a lodge than a cabin but “cabin” is what they called it. The walls were made of heavy, thick logs, after all. The main living area was a broad space leaking from kitchen to dining area to a two-story-high lounge arranged around a tall, fieldstone fireplace.

  Millie sat on one of the couches, staring out the windows, and frowned. It was snowing outside—big, fat, fluffy flakes—but she really wasn’t noticing.

  She was alone in the room and then she wasn’t.

  Davy was wearing a tropical-weight suit with the sleeves of the jacket rolled up on his forearms. He unrolled them as he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Millie sighed, her eyes tracking up to the ceiling before returning to Davy’s face.

  Davy glanced up to the second-floor landing. “The usual?”

  Millie jerked her thumb up. “Go look at her door.”

  He sighed. “She is an irritation of the spirit …”

  Millie completed the phrase, “… and a great deal of trouble.”

  Davy vanished. After a brief pause Millie heard laughter drift down the staircase. Millie stood and jumped, appearing beside Davy in the upstairs hallway.

  A sign, scrawled on butcher paper, was tacked to a closed bedroom door. It said:

  HELP!

  BEING HELD PRISONER BY TELEPORTING ALIENS!

  KEPT FROM NORMAL LIFE.

  SEND FRIENDS.

  ALSO ICE CREAM.

  Davy was shaking his head and still laughing.

  “Stop it!” Millie said. “You’re not helping!”

  “You gotta admit, she is funny,” Davy said. “Takes after me that way.”

  Millie snapped. “What—you think you’re funny?” She pulled at Davy’s arm, leading him back toward the landing.

  Davy raised his eyebrows at Millie and grinned.

  “Okay, she is funny, but the underlying problem is no less a problem.”

  Davy’s smile faded and he jerked his chin down toward the kitchen, and vanished.

  Millie followed to see him putting the kettle on.

  “What choice do we have?” Davy said. “I mean, really?”

  Millie shook her head. She felt like she should have an answer but she didn’t.

  Davy hugged her and that was good … but the underlying problem was still no less a problem.

  And it could only get worse.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cent: “But it will kill you dead, just the same.”

  I don’t really exist, you know.

  We live in the Canadian Rockies, sixty miles south of the Arctic Circle. I was born here, in this house. Mom and Dad paid a nurse midwife to live with us for the last month of the pregnancy. Dad was prepared to transfer Mom to a hospital if things went wrong, but things “worked out,” as did I, apparently. Mom said it was definitely “work.”

  But there’s no birth record. No birth certificate. No Social Security number.

  We’re in the middle of nowhere. The second largest city in the province is a hundred miles to the southeast, but I’ve never been there. Next nearest town is 140 miles north: Old Crow. No roads to Old Crow, it just has an airstrip and the river.

  No roads to our house, either. It was built by a billionaire as a hunting lodge at the head of a mountain valley using helicoptered labor. We get moose, caribou, deer, wolves, lynx, and rabbits. Starbucks? Not so much.

  The walls are heavy logs, two feet thick. The roof is steeply pitched anodized steel to keep the snow from piling up. It sloughs off the snow in the winter until the bottom floor windows and doors are buried. One year the snow rose high enough to cover the second floor, but Dad melted it away, making sure that the chimney, ventilation stacks, upper doors, and triple-glazed windows remained clear.

  There’s a log-surfaced helicopter pad, but Dad does nothing to keep it clear, no matter what the season. Moss, brush, and small trees are taking it over.

  Dad doesn’t care. That’s not how he rolls.

  He does spend a lot of the summers fixing up the lodge itself—that and the springhouse out back.

  The springs are the reason the billionaire built the lodge here: one hot, one cold. One tasting of sulfur and one tasting like a deep breath of winter. We don’t need a hot-water heater—the hot spring provides bath, washing, and soaking water―though it leaves mineral stains in the tub. We drink from the cold spring and use it to make showers less scalding. For two-thirds of the year we run hot spring water through radiators to heat the house, and all year round we use the temperature difference between the two springs to generate electricity.

  That was Dad’s doing. I think back when it was a hunting lodge, they had a diesel generator. But it was rusted solid when Dad bought the place. The billionaire had become a mere millionaire during the economic meltdown and a vacation home that required two-hundred-mile round-trips by helicopter became something he couldn’t afford.

  Dad’s not a billionaire, but then he doesn’t need a helicopter to get here either.

  The electrical generator came from an Icelandic power company that built it as a proof-of-concept device at one of their geothermal wells. When they upgraded that installation to the megawatt commercial version, Dad bought the prototype for mere thousands of dollars.

  When I was little, I named it Buzz since that’s what it does, sits in the basement and buzzes. To be fair, it also gurgles, hisses, and thumps, but for a four-year-old, buzz is as entertaining a word as ever there was, especially if you add extra “zzzzzzzzzzzz” at the end.

  And then one day, when I was fifteen, it stopped buzzing.

  I was watching an old anime on my desktop, but the screen blipped out along with the lights and then I was sitting in the dark, listening to the DVD drive spin to a halt.

  I heard Mom yell from her office across the
hall. “Davy!”

  Dad’s voice answered from downstairs, “Yeah, yeah. I’m on it!”

  I felt my way over to the door and opened it. The battery-powered emergency light in the stairwell had come on. The windows were dark—it was late afternoon and October, and what little dusk light was on the southern horizon was blocked by the ridge on the far side of the valley.

  Dad had just come out of the library when I tripped down the stairs. He smiled briefly at me. “Hey, Cent. Pretty dark up there, I bet.”

  “You think?” I said. “What’s wrong with Buzz?”

  He shook his head. “Not sure. Let’s go see.” He reached out to ruffle my hair.

  I was styling it these days with a lot of gel and I slapped his arm away. “Rule one, Daddy! How many times do I gotta tell you?”

  He laughed again. “Don’t touch the hair. Right. Sorry.”

  I swear he does it just to mess with me.

  When he opened the door at the top of the basement stairs, I heard a high-pitched beeping noise, one I’d never heard before. I started to take a step down and Dad grabbed me by my collar and pulled me back.

  “Damn!” Dad said. “Well, at least we know what’s wrong with Buzz. Don’t go down there.”

  “What’s that alarm?”

  “Halogen detector. There’s a leak in the system. The Freon is leaking out.” He was no longer smiling.

  I knew about the Freon. The hot water from the spring boils it to vapor, which expands through the turbine generator. The cold spring water condenses it again. I’m homeschooled, so the generator has been the source of many science lessons: state changes of matter, Boyles law, electromagnetism.

  “Freon isn’t poisonous, Dad.”

  “No. But it will kill you dead, just the same.” The serious look on his face eased at my expression. “Definitely not poisonous. We’re okay up here. Let me give you a clue: Freon is heavier than air.”