Asimov's SF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “You got that gun, boy?”

  Hayden pulled the Atomic Disintegrator pistol out from his belt, where he had tucked it away earlier. It felt warm, humming and sparkling with energy, as if it were coming alive in his hand.

  The lights continued their approach.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Forrest Aguirre

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: BENEATH SUNLIT SHALLOWS

  by Derek Kunsken

  Derek Kunsken built engineered viruses in graduate school before switching careers to work with street children in Central America. After spending five years in Colombia and Cuba working for the Canadian government, he now calls Ottawa home and writes around parenting activities. Derek has sold stories to On Spec and Black Gate. This devastating look at some of the potential consequences of genetic engineering is his first sale to Asimov's.

  Beneath Sunlit Shallows

  Vincent dreamed again that he swam behind a child-like Merced, out of the cold dark, rising toward an unknown sun. He didn't see the sun, which could only penetrate two hundred meters of water. He wanted, the way one does in dreams, to see it, ignoring the fact that if he saw even its depth-attenuated blue light, he would already be dead. The dream ended inconclusively and he dreamed inconsequential things. When he woke, he remembered the first dream as if his waking had cut the ending. It had been a long time since he'd thought of Merced. She'd been his best friend, but memories of her only reminded him of how he'd never been brave enough to follow her.

  His room was black and cool. He felt the heating coils, not by their warmth, but by the electric current and the way they bent the local magnetic field. The electrical sense, for all that he'd been born with it, felt strange, off angle, while his sight always seemed to be the first thing he turned to when waking.

  Don't trust instinct, he'd been told all his life.

  His eyes yawned, seeing nothing. Beneath layers of blubber and muscle and rib lay two columns of muscular disks called electroplaques. Plagiarized from electrical eels, they stored electrical charge. Vincent sent a weak current along his left electroplaque. A sensor in the wall detected the change and lit the clear water of his room, showing flakes of white silt.

  His tired gills churned. Months might pass before his blood adapted to the oxygen starvation of the ocean floor. They'd told him not to rush, to adapt to his new home slowly, but that's not why he nearly returned to sleep. Loneliness gnawed at him. Indecision exhausted him.

  He felt something odd in his right side and shrugged at it. It was more than a twinge. He pushed a charge through the electroplaque under his ribs and found an unexpected resistance under his skin.

  To protect him from the intense cold of the alien ocean floor, Vincent's designers had left room in the blubber layer to retract his arms into its warmth. That was how he slept, and he now pushed his arms out and felt around his torso. The thick skin, engineered from walrus and shark DNA, slid under his fingers. At first, he found nothing more than a film of algae, a hygienic faux pas, but over his ribs, he found a lump that hadn't been there a month ago.

  He'd spent the last month descending through layers of ocean. The magnetic field shifted direction and strength slightly at each depth. He hadn't become used to any single pattern long enough to notice changes within himself. Until today. No more moving. It was day thirty of the move, day one on the floor, but only a fraction of the interminable night of his life. The feeling that he was a coward rose again.

  Beneath the mottled grey skin of his forehead, instinct tried to frown, but the massive engineered scalp immobilized inadequate muscles. He twisted his inexpressive face to look at the blubbery rib cage. He couldn't see anything. He'd check himself with the CAT scan later.

  Although they'd been designed to thrive in the benthic zones of the ocean, there was a chance that one organ or another had herniated because of some pressure imbalance. He stretched, chubby grey arms wide, blunt head back, flukes twisting and extended, gills open enough to eat a fish. He knew he was a monster, but he didn't have the courage he needed.

  * * * *

  Vincent spent a lot of time thinking about the people whose decisions had, generation after generation, put him at the bottom of the ocean of the world they'd named Indi's Tear. He could not sum the series of seemingly well-intentioned choices with a result he clearly considered immoral. Where was the breakdown? He thought he knew where to lay the blame, but was blame even meaningful?

  Vincent regarded the colonists who left Earth as crazy, but didn't think that they had crossed any ethical line. Earth had successfully launched many colony ships. The one to Epsilon Indi was certainly among the most ambitious, but they were trusting proven technology and skills. The risk was acceptable. Vincent was even prepared to accept as ethical the decision to permanently cut off their future descendents from Earth. No matter which way you looked at it, any trip that took more than a thousand years was a one-way trip. Most of the original colonists had died of old age before they'd even left the solar system.

  But their children and grandchildren, who now ran the colony ship, were still human, even if they'd never see Earth again, or any humans other than the ones they'd brought with them. He felt that there was a lot of weight in that choice, but accepted it as reasonable, even responsible. He understood the argument that the farther humans colonized, the more likely that they as a species, a culture, and a civilization would persist.

  * * * *

  The door slid into the wall and Vincent left his room. He was shocked by water so cold that only pressure kept it from freezing. A snap of his body propelled him into the middle of the dark camp. No lights were on, which meant that Renald and Amanda hadn't yet risen, but that wasn't surprising. It was early yet.

  He didn't need light anyway. He navigated as an electric eel or fish would, orienting himself by the way the camp equipment distorted the planet's magnetic field. He glided over the powdered sediment floor of the ocean, grabbing a hand lamp from a pile of boxes. Without lighting it, he surged ahead, leaving the cluster of cylinder shelters and containers.

  Chill water squeezed through his gills, offering little oxygen, but his hyperactive hemoglobins seized even the trace amounts. The water held other scents. He smelled the stale odor of sand mixed with carbon dioxide, the stink of decaying amides and the taint of sulfur as he approached the smoker.

  He switched on the light as he felt the water get warmer. It lit the white ocean floor and a lumpy reddish-black tube of rocky mineral deposits that thrust five meters out of the sand. It was called a smoker, and they'd surrounded and penetrated it with wires. One hundred and fifteen degree water burned out the top, rippling against the dark, benthic world. An algae-coated turbine in the smoker provided the limited power for their settlement. It would be months and years before they could build a full geothermal plant.

  Robots crept in and around the superheated water, culling worms, clams, and little lobsters. The harvest required prodigious processing to remove toxic minerals and heavy metals, but the eventual slush was to be a staple of their ocean-floor diet. Once more electricity was available, they would grow modified plankton in deep sea greenhouses. It was difficult to imagine food more revolting than what they'd eaten growing up, yet here he didn't need to imagine. Vincent flexed away, gliding farther afield.

  He left the light on, following the depressing endlessness of sand. Ahead of him, he saw a dim glow and felt an electrical disturbance. Bait. A dozen fine-meshed cages stood on mounds of sand. Inside each one hung a rolled metal screen covered in bioluminescent bacteria. Their light was fuzzy, as if out of focus, mostly blue, but some patches hazing to lime. The color didn't really matter. Any light would draw deep ocean fish.

  Two of the traps had sprung. In the first trap, expressionless black eyes similar to his own regarded him from over serrated, bony lips. The scaled body was spiny and thin, mottled by some filamentous, fungal infection. It beat against the cage, reacting to Vincent's lamp. The
second trap had caught a transparent ball covered with fine threads.

  Both animals were native to Indi's Tear and were unfortunately edible, meaning that they weren't toxic, but weren't wholly digestible either. Some of the amino acids in the animals and plants of Indi's Tear were identical to those in Vincent's body. Others were different, but digestible. But there were enough amino acids that couldn't be metabolized that each meal fulfilled a sickening, cramping promise.

  He returned the catch to camp, but arrived short of breath. His large gills churned, sucking chill water, scavenging oxygen. There would never be more oxygen at the bottom of the ocean than there was now, and he knew his body wouldn't adapt until it was forced. But the suffocation worsened. His heart beat faster and he felt himself dizzying.

  He waited, but, finally, he swam to the wall of the main building and fitted his face into a mask-shaped hollow. A stream of oxygenated water poured out of the emergency station, and the pressure on his chest slowly abated. He thought that maybe today he would have the courage he needed.

  * * * *

  Vincent supposed that those who had arrived at the star Epsilon Indi, after a voyage of eleven hundred years, were still human. A millennium was too short a period of isolation to produce a new species, but he found it telling that he had to ask the question. Humanity had to be more than biological compatibility. What referents could a town of colonists share with humans on Earth if they'd spent thirty-seven generations in a steel cylinder, never seeing sun or moon, never feeling wind?

  But he pitied those colonists in their metal case. He couldn't imagine the communal and cultural horror of looking through their telescopes and seeing Indi's Eye, their destination planet, devastated by a hit from a rogue moon. They couldn't turn around. They couldn't change course. They'd accelerated in Earth's solar system on disposable boosters and carried enough fuel to brake at their destination, eleven hundred years later.

  Did they understand that they were a population whose death was only a formality? He guessed that they didn't. Otherwise their choices would have been not only unethical, but deliberately cruel.

  * * * *

  Too exhausted to wash, he moved to the side doorway of the shelter and swam through. The dim lights that lit for his entry seemed overbright. His huge eyes had been designed a generation earlier, a preliminary step to humanity's expansion to the deeper ocean of Indi's Tear. The water inside was three or four degrees warmer, and oxygenated to simulate the rich upper ocean where he'd grown up.

  Vincent couldn't stomach the thought of breakfast and went to his workstation. A network of sonar stations that transmitted in frequencies Vincent couldn't hear connected the fifteen aquatic communities on Indi's Tear and this camp. The nearest was Charlotte's Web, the town of four hundred souls where Vincent, Amanda, and Renald had grown up. It floated five hundred meters below the surface of the ocean and exactly two kilometers above where Vincent was now. Two messages waited on his desktop.

  He opened the first. An electrical echo formed, invisible to ears, eyes and smell, but leaving a faint tangy taste in the water and a clean image in his electrical receptors. It was a likeness of his lawyer perceived through his electric organs. Tiny crackles of static discharged from the display: language, borrowed conceptually from dolphins, but electrical instead of acoustic. It was a recording of his lawyer's electrical voice.

  “Vincent, I've spoken with the prosecutor and convinced him not to press charges. Given your current service to the community and the impossibility of re-offending, we've agreed that it would be a waste of time. Congratulations.”

  The electrical image faded. Vincent felt nothing. He hadn't been worried.

  The next message was in text. The faint blue letters were from his psychiatrist. He'd listed some times when Vincent could call for his mandatory therapy. One of them was now. Vincent's inexpressive face sucked water. He chattered electrically to the sensor and the call was made. He might as well get it done—it would only take half an hour.

  The psychiatrist answered and an electrical image formed. The face was less fishlike, more human, more flexible and evocative. Vincent had seen the psychiatrist many times and knew that the image forming, although mostly correct, wasn't accurate. It was a psychiatrist trick, using hints of what humans used to look like to trigger positive emotional responses in patients.

  “Vincent,” the doctor said, “congratulations on reaching the bottom.”

  The image formed something like a smile. Vincent felt himself react to the artifice, but beat down the feeling. The doctor was as incapable of smiling as Vincent, but his communication system was programmed to alter the image, evoking reactions locked into thousands of generations of human evolution, recalling shadows of joy.

  “I didn't do anything special,” Vincent said. “We just sank for a month.”

  “You underestimate your accomplishment. The whole town is ecstatic.”

  The doctor waited, but Vincent was determined not to cooperate today.

  “How are the others?” the doctor asked finally.

  “Still asleep.”

  “And on the trip?”

  “Same old irritating.”

  “They aren't like you,” the doctor said. “They aren't as talented, or as independent as you are. Everything that comes hard to everyone else comes easy to you. They look up to you, even Renald, who wishes he were more like you.” The psychiatrist paused, trying to pry a response from Vincent with silence. Vincent was quiet. “I don't think they understand why you won't speak to them,” the psychiatrist finished.

  “They know why. Whether they choose to understand is their problem.”

  “You hurt a lot of people with your principles, Vincent, including yourself. Part of life is about understanding how to balance a moral stand with other things that are important. None of us chose to come to Epsilon Indi. We're living the consequences of decisions made by our ancestors. We're just trying to survive.”

  “I'm not bringing children into the world who have to live like this.”

  “You won't be separated from your children, Vincent.”

  “I won't have any.”

  “You don't have the right to decide that. We're trying to survive as a species.”

  “What species? Homo sapiens? They're on Earth and colonizing other planets. Homo indis? We're not even one species. We're costalis, pelagius and now benthus. How many limping, pathetic things have to suffer through short lives so we can say we succeeded?”

  “Have you dreamed of Merced again?”

  Vincent felt himself gulping for oxygen, gills churning. Anger was a hormonal state that didn't mesh with the hemoglobins modified for deep sea survival. Genetic engineers would modify either the hemoglobins or the hormones in the next generation of Homo sapiens benthus to avoid this problem, but Vincent, Amanda, and Renald were stuck with it. Vincent also guessed that the change would cause other problems that were just as likely to wipe out dozens of embryos or babies. Vincent calmed himself, but it was an artificial solution.

  “No,” he said.

  The psychiatrist paused, waiting for more. “It appears your wishes in the end will be respected and they won't even press charges,” the doctor said finally.

  “I knew they couldn't press charges. They need me. They would have tolerated far worse.”

  “Destroying your stored germ lines deprived society of other safe successes.”

  “I'm not a success! You're not a success. We're successful relative to miserable, painful failures. We're awful.”

  “Do you still have a plan?”

  “What?”

  “Do you still have a plan to kill yourself ?”

  Vincent filled the room with silence for a meaningful, revealing time.

  “Of course I do,” he said. Then he cut the connection.

  He huffed at his anger, his gills flexing. This was only the most recent of a lifetime of unpleasant conversations. He'd chosen at some point not to take them personally. These conversations were
very much about him and very much not about him.

  * * * *

  The colonists arriving at Espilon Indi had weighed their options and picked the only one that made any sense. There was too much debris orbiting Indi's Eye to set up orbital habitats, but the same amount of fuel could stop them at Indi's Tear, a heavier, colder world, farther from the dim star. They set up an orbital colony there and set out to weigh their next steps. The asteroid that struck next was not thought to be more than sixty centimeters in diameter, but had been traveling at better than twenty-six kilometers per second. It killed half the orbiting community instantly. It was also not alone. There was far more debris in the system than they'd guessed. The only thing that could protect them from most of the impacts was a thick atmosphere, like the one on the world beneath them. So they'd abandoned their habitat and descended to the chill surface of Indi's Tear, despite its three crushing gravities.

  * * * *

  Vincent left the habitat, gliding into the cold, anoxic darkness. The currents had shifted and, unfortunately, he smelled a nearby kitchen. He glided toward a cylindrical habitat set away from their compound and the smell intensified. The door of the habitat slid away as he approached and he passed into the concentrated stink of fishy nitrogen compounds and sulfur. In sealed boxes incapable of containing the smell were the slurries and pastes of the catches made yesterday by robots. Although they were ground to mush and leeched of heavy metals, most of the cramping minerals, and sulfur, they were still repellent.

  The first box had his name on it and he pulled it from the shelf with his hands. It was slick with a bacterial growth on the outside, but he set it on the table and opened it. He could not close his eyes or escape the smell. His jaws opened with designed efficiency, and he shoveled the slurry in, gulping clumps around a gag reflex his designers hoped to remove in the next generation. The cartilaginous grounds lodged under his tongue and at the edges of his throat. The handfuls of sulfurous flesh were like bite after bite of rotting eggs. He emptied the box without vomiting, but the bloated queasiness that accompanied every feeding lurched in him.