Asimov's SF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Much later, Renald and Amanda found Vincent before an inactive work station in a still lab. They were winded. They gulped the oxygenated water, listening to the electrical movement in the room.

  “We've gotten everything ready outside,” Amanda said. “We can detach the main building from the sea floor whenever you want.”

  Vincent had no authority over them, but it was indicative of their relationship that they cleared most plans with him before acting. He considered not responding, but didn't want to be artificial, affected.

  “I've figured out what our problem is,” he said.

  “How bad is it?” Renald asked.

  “Bad enough. Our immune systems were initialized, so to speak, under one pressure. They're not set for this new depth. Benign tumors that were being controlled under the weight of the middle ocean have now escaped immune surveillance on the bottom. And I think our immune systems are probably attacking our bodies too, although it's too early to see symptoms.”

  “Can we fix it?” Renald asked.

  “Maybe,” Vincent said.

  His companions shot forward.

  “If you think it's possible, that's great!” Renald said.

  “Is it?” Vincent swung his expressionless face toward them. “Look at you. What are you? What are we here? We're freaks on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “It's better than being dead,” Amanda said.

  “Is it? Where we grew up was barely better than being dead. And it certainly wasn't for our friends. Was it for Colin, or Darla, or Sergei?”

  He didn't calculate the comment to bite, but the names carried emotional weight. They summoned memories of childhood friends with painful, wasting autoimmune diseases. Torturous, experimental therapies were ineffective and the playmates expired, faded to nothing by genetic errors.

  “We aren't free,” he said, more quietly. In his mind, he saw Merced, his best friend at ten years old, a horrifying barracuda-faced girl who'd wanted to see the sun and who had risen into the photosynthesizing zone in the top two hundred meters of the ocean. Designed for the ocean floor and barely surviving the limited pressure in the upper dark zone of the sea, all her proteins had denatured in the reduced pressure, the opposite of what had happened to their immune systems on the bottom. She'd floated dead while the townspeople, those who weren't cursed at conception to exile on the bottom of the ocean, collected her. There was no starker reminder that none of the survivors of Vincent's generation would ever see the sun.

  “We aren't really alive,” he said. “The people who made us sacrificed everything human just so we could exist. We're human brains living in alien bodies that don't connect right. There's no beauty, no attraction, no love. We don't have parents. We don't have children. We don't have family. Humans on Earth and on other colonies, even the most worthless exile or prisoner, can taste food, see and feel sunlight, look in the mirror and not frighten themselves.”

  “We're your family, Vincent,” Amanda said.

  “What are you saying?” Renald asked Vincent.

  “We've surrendered too much, suffered too much. We don't live in dignity because those who came before us were not brave enough to accept that their runs were over.”

  “You're not going to make the cure?” Renald said.

  “I'm saying we have a chance to right a mistake.”

  “I'm not ready to die, Vincent,” Amanda said.

  Renald stared silently at Vincent. “The three of us dying won't accomplish anything,” he said finally. “Towns across the world have the plans to make more of us, literally more of you and me.”

  Vincent swished his arm like an ax chopping.

  “Stop thinking about accomplishment! It's not about the dream or the goal or extinction. Too much has been done for the sake of fear masquerading as vision. This is about us, as people, and only about us. Think about this as people. Not the vilest criminal on Earth has to live like this.”

  “I think it's immoral to throw away lives for no reason,” Renald said.

  “You've bought the company line without thinking, Renald. Think!”

  “I haven't bought anything, Vincent. I'm just willing to stick it out.”

  “Kent's words.”

  “Mine. And I'm not going to absolve you.”

  Vincent and Renald stared at each other.

  “What does that mean, Renald?” Amanda asked.

  Neither answered.

  “What does that mean, Vincent? What about absolving? Is this about the germ cells you destroyed in Charlotte's Web?”

  “Vincent's looking for a moral out,” Renald said. “He knows that I can't figure out the treatment to this immune problem, not like he could. I think he's getting ready to tell us he's ready to kill himself after talking about it for so long. The problem is that if he kills himself now, he takes us with him. He's trying to find a way out of being a murderer by inaction. So much for the brave and ethical Vincent.”

  Vincent said nothing and Amanda stared at him with her huge, vacuous eyes. He thought of Merced. The path she'd taken, intentionally or not, had always been open to him. And now it seemed to be closing again. He'd never ended things when he should have, made his statement, made his choice the way he'd always argued that the first human colonists should have taken.

  He cracked inside, the sadness, the frustration trapped, as much as laughter was, aching for release from a bulky, fleshy prison. He was and was not the person he'd thought he was, wanted to be. He was neither the courageous forerunner like Merced, not the protector like Kent. He was weak and strong, just like everyone else, but in the wrong places. His tearless, lidless eyes stared uselessly at Renald and Amanda. He cried without physical release, for lost friends, lost dreams, and lost self.

  Others thought that Merced had gone crazy, had cracked like so many others. But he and Merced had known that the sun's light contained the trappings of humanity that had been stripped from them: beauty, pleasure, passion, love.

  “Amanda and I will finish unhooking the base from the sea floor,” Renald said. “The asteroid is due sometime in the next ninety minutes. You decide what you're going to do. Come on, Amanda.”

  “I've already decided what I'm going to do.”

  Their faces, like dead fish in the dark, carried no nuance, nor had Vincent inflected the statement with any hint of his choice. They waited and even he waited.

  “I'm following Merced.”

  Copyright (c) 2008 Derek Kunsken

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: GABE'S GLOBSTER

  by Lawrence Person

  Lawrence Person lives in Austin, Texas. In addition to Asimov's, his short fiction has appeared in Analog, Postscripts, Jim Baen's Universe, Fear, and several anthologies. His nonfiction has appeared in National Review, Reason, Whole Earth Review, The Freeman, The World & I, Science Fiction Eye, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. He is also the once and future editor of the critical SF magazine Nova Express, which he would like everyone to know isn't dead, but is merely resting and pining for the fjords. Lawrence owns so many SF first editions he had to buy a two-story house to put them in. Some of his admiration for at least one past master of the craft is evident in...

  Gabe's Globster

  Gabe unknotted tarp tie-lines, propped open the lean-to, and thrust a dozen blinking chickens up into the Caribbean sun. That accomplished, he poured himself two fingers of rum, lit a spliff, and walked out of the storm trench. Later he'd attend to the necessities of breakfast and bowels, but for now he was content to fortify himself with hair-of-the-dog and gaze into the endless blue morning.

  Last night's tropical storm should have scattered a good assortment of driftwood for his carvings along the beaches. Since fleeing both his commercial banking job and his carping hellshrew of a wife, such art (sold under a nom de plume) had been his sole source of income, and was now sufficient to keep him in pot and rum without dipping into his Cayman Islands account.
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  Fortification accomplished, Gabe stripped and waded into the ocean for his morning ablutions.

  * * * *

  Three eggs and a small pot of beans later, Gabe, re-clothed, made his way along the beach. This part of the coastline was too rough for the tourist trade, filled with rocky outcroppings and scattered, narrow, seaweed-strewn beaches insufficiently picturesque for hordes of his pasty, overweight, Nikon-bearing compatriots to waddle across. Nor was it more than sparsely inhabited by natives, the nearest harbor deep enough to support even a modest fishing fleet a good five miles away. His closest neighbors were goat herders a mile or so inland. Once a month he paid them to drive him into town in their rickety pickup truck for hookers and supplies, and to send off his carvings and pick up payments for same. The isolation suited his misanthropic outlook to a T.

  Gabe had cleared the few hundred feet of beach within view of his lean-to for aesthetic reasons, but out of his sightline there was no end to the flotsam and jetsam staining the far from pristine sands. Old plastic milk cartons, discarded beer cans, and Styrofoam packing peanuts all had their place in the trashscape clustering there. Amidst that morning's refuse he found three good pieces of driftwood. He was already thinking about how one might be whittled into a mermaid when he scrambled over an outcropping and stopped dead in his tracks.

  He'd seen lots of strange things washed up, but he'd never seen anything like that. It was an irregular oblong, at least twenty feet long and roughly seven wide and five high, a dirty, translucent gray glistening wetly in the sunlight, like the inside of a clam.

  Gabe scuttled closer, wondering what the Caribbean had vomited up this time. It looked like no aquatic creature he'd seen or even heard of. He thought it might be a decaying hunk of whale, but that didn't explain why it was so smooth and devoid of features. He grabbed a short stick, walked up and poked it. It sank into the translucent mass a full foot before meeting some sort of resistance. Mere inches from the surface, his hands felt a distinct chill around the thing, and he wondered what depths it had been hauled up from. But weren't most deep-dwelling creatures small due to the tremendous water pressure?

  Just then the thing seemed to shudder ever so slightly, its wet flesh rippling like jelly. Strange, as Gabe couldn't feel any wind.

  He stared at the thing a few minutes more, trying vainly to figure out what it might be. Unable to, he mentally shrugged and turned to go when he caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. A fiddler crab scurried slowly across the sand toward the glob, presumably the first of many scavengers to start pecking at it. He wondered how difficult the gelatinous flesh would be for claws to rend. But as it reached the mass, the thing's “skin” seemed to ripple again, flowing over and encasing the crab in its translucent embrace.

  Gabe watched to see how it struggled, but all was still, the crab now entombed in the thing, unmoving.

  * * * *

  After a lunch of beans, rice, and rum, Gabe dug his ancient PowerBook out of its sand-proof case, then splayed the solar strip out beside it on his folding table. Normally he only powered it up long enough to e-mail carving pictures to his agent (his equally ancient Nikon digital camera, along with his seldom-used satphone, being the only other technological baubles marring his Robinson Crusoe existence), but this time he wanted to find out what the mystery lump on the beach was.

  He ran a cord to his phone, waited for the Mac to connect to the sat signal, and pulled up a search page. Results for ocean mystery lumps tissue brought up a lot of pages on fish tumors. Ocean globs creatures seemed a bit closer to the mark, where he quickly came across the words “cryptozoology” and “globsters.”

  Cryptozoology seemed a fascinating mixture of real zoology and The Weekly World News, unknown animals like wild hogs and new shark species rubbing shoulders with Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. Globsters were strange, unclassified masses of rotting flesh washed up on shore. After a closer look, most weren't unknown; a surprising number of globsters initially thought to be plesiosaurs actually turned out to be decaying basking sharks, while others were found to be hunks of whale blubber, or beached whales. But a few still defied easy taxonomical assignment:

  — In 1896, a giant fibrous mass some 18 feet long and 7 feet wide washed up in St. Augustine, Florida. It was initially identified as a sperm whale, but was later thought a previously unknown species of giant octopus.

  — In 1960, a roundish carcass some 20 feet long, 18 feet wide and about 4 1/2 feet thick, with an estimated weight between 5 and 10 tons, covered in fine hair with a strange lump in the middle, washed up in Tasmania. “A strong acidic reek came off the flesh, very similar to battery acid, and dogs and horses were unwilling to approach it.” Later thought to be the remains of a whale shark.

  — In 1965, one 30 feet long and 8 feet high, covered in thick wooly hair, washed up in New Zealand. The head of Auckland University's zoology department didn't know what to make of it.

  — In 1988, an 8 foot long, 3 foot thick blob described as “very white and fibrous ... with five arms [like] a disfigured star” washed up in Bermuda. Most seemed to think it shark skin.

  There were a few more like that; mysterious corpses washed up on shore, no one exactly sure what they were. All well and good, but it didn't tell him anything about his mysterious beach corpse.

  He looked up the names of a couple of marine biologists in Miami specializing in the Caribbean, stowed away his PowerBook, then hauled his Nikon out of its sand-proof case and headed back down the beach.

  Despite a couple of intervening hours, Gabe could discern no signs that scavengers had been at work on the globster. No hungry birds pecked or tore at its flesh, and he couldn't smell any decay below the usual aroma of saltwater.

  He removed the lens cap and started taking pictures, slowly moving closer. He wondered what anyone would be able to tell from them, given the formlessness of the mass. Maybe a careful dissection would be able to make out internal structures, but he certainly couldn't.

  He moved right up next to it, trying to get a close-up in case the camera could pick up some deeper structure eluding his naked eye. Despite the balmy Caribbean afternoon, the chill around it seemed to have spread. It was notably, unaccountably cold within three feet of the thing. He wondered what it would be like to stick his hands into the amorphous mass, to let himself sink slowly into its cold, enveloping embrace...

  He shook off the strange thought, then moved back to get another angle on the thing when a seagull swooped down to the beach and waddled toward the globster. Suddenly, some five feet away from it, the bird stopped, then jerked, as though its foot were suddenly caught and it was trying to free it. For a few seconds it staggered around in a most un-birdlike fashion, as if drunk. Finally, it stopped staggering, then walked slowly straight toward, and then into, the globster, disappearing from view.

  For several seconds, Gabe was too stunned by this distinctly un-avian behavior to even move. Finally, he turned to leave when he felt a prick on his big toe. Looking down he saw a half-dozen fiddler crabs surround his feet, and an equal number making their way across the debris-strewn sand toward him. It was an easy matter to step over them, but at every step they all changed course to intercept him in uncanny unison.

  He had to fight the urge to run, realizing there was no way the crabs could catch him if he just kept stepping over them at a brisk pace, and they were precious little threat if they could catch him. What are they going to do, pinch me to death?

  He felt a strange sense of relief as he scrambled on top of the outcropping, but then heard a distinct plop behind him.

  He turned to see the seagull, its body still faintly glistening, leave the globster's embrace, the hole it had escaped (been expelled?) from quickly sealing back into a smooth, amorphous mass. The bird staggered briefly across the sand, then stopped and folded its wings, its body still as its head swiveled slowly around out to sea, then back again, taking in the rest of the beach.

  Until it was looking straight
at him, when its head stopped rotating, its beady little bird eyes fixed on him with unwavering attention.

  * * * *

  Back on his own beach, Gabe sipped rum while e-mailing globster pictures off to the marine biologists without much hope of a reply, pondering what to do. Whatever his other flaws (and there were many, all of which he could enumerate at length to his exceptionally rare visitors), he had always lacked a penchant for self-delusion. He might be a reprobate, misanthropic, drunken beach bum, but he was far from stupid. Whatever it was, the globster was a deeply unnatural thing, and was obviously controlling the creatures he had seen that morning. Strange and improbable, but it was still the most obvious explanation. The question was what to do about it.

  The reasonable, logical thing to do would be to remove himself to another part of the island, or tell the local constable (who came around once a month to sell him pot) and let him take care of it. But if he were reasonable and logical, he'd still be a married banker.

  What to do? he wondered. To answer that question, he was going to need a lot more rum.

  * * * *

  When dinnertime rolled around, he put aside the half-finished mermaid his hands had been carving while he mulled over the problem, spilled the remainder of the bottle into his glass, and went off to check his drift lines. No fish having been kind enough to impale itself on one of his hooks, Gabe went looking for a chicken to slaughter instead. Preferably Roberta, since her egg-laying had dwindled the last few weeks.

  However, when he switched on his solar lantern, none of his chickens were anywhere in evidence. After a few minutes of looking for them a suspicion formed.