Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Somehow, the green bead has found its way back into Harding's grip. He would expect it to warm as he rolls it between his fingers, but instead it grows colder. It's peculiar, he thinks, that the native peoples of the Northeast—the Passamaquoddys for whom the little seacoast town he's come to are named—should through sheer superstition come so close to the empirical truth. The shoggoths are a living fossil, something virtually unchanged except in scale since the early days of the world—

  He stares at the careful black script on the paper unseeing, and reaches with his free hand for his coffee cup. It's gone tepid, a scum of butterfat coagulated on top, but he rinses his mouth with it and swallows anyway.

  If a shoggoth is immortal, has no natural enemies, then how is it that they have not overrun every surface of the world? How is it that they are rare, that the oceans are not teeming with them, as in the famous parable illustrating what would occur if every spawn of every oyster survived?

  There are distinct species of shoggoth. And distinct populations within those distinct species. And there is a fossil record that suggests that prehistoric species were different at least in scale, in the era of megafauna. But if nobody had ever seen a dead shoggoth, then nobody had ever seen an infant shoggoth either, leaving Harding with an inescapable question: if an animal does not reproduce, how can it evolve?

  Harding, worrying at the glassy surface of the nodule, thinks he knows. It comes to him with a kind of nauseating, euphoric clarity, a trembling idea so pellucid he is almost moved to distrust it on those grounds alone. It's not a revelation on the same scale, of course, but he wonders if this is how Newton felt when he comprehended gravity, or Darwin when he stared at the beaks of finch after finch after finch.

  It's not the shoggoth species that evolves. It's the individual shoggoths, each animal in itself.

  “Don't get too excited, Paul,” he tells himself, and picks up the remaining handwritten pages. There's not too much more to read, however—the rest of the subchapter consists chiefly of secondhand anecdotes and bits of legendry.

  The one that Harding finds most amusing is a nursery rhyme, a child's counting poem littered with nonsense syllables. He recites it under his breath, thinking of the Itsy Bitsy Spider all the while:

  The wiggle giggle squiggle

  Is left behind on shore.

  The widdle giddle squiddle

  Is caught outside the door.

  Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah.

  Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.

  His fingers sting as if with electric shock; they jerk apart, the nodule clattering to his desk. When he looks at his fingertips, they are marked with small white spots of frostbite.

  He pokes one with a pencil point and feels nothing. But the nodule itself is coated with frost now, fragile spiky feathers coalescing out of the humid sea air. They collapse in the heat of his breath, melting into beads of water almost indistinguishable from the knobby surface of the object itself.

  He uses the cork to roll the nodule into the tube again, and corks it firmly before rising to brush his teeth and put his pajamas on. Unnerved beyond any reason or logic, before he turns the coverlet down he visits his suitcase compulsively. From a case in the very bottom of it, he retrieves a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, which he slides beneath his pillow as he fluffs it.

  After a moment's consideration, he adds the no-longer-cold vial with the nodule, also.

  * * * *

  Slam. Not a storm, no, not on this calm ocean, in this calm night, among the painted hulls of the fishing boats tied up snug to the pier. But something tremendous, surging towards Harding, as if he were pursued by a giant transparent bubble. The shining iridescent wall of it, catching rainbows just as it does in the Audubon image, is burned into his vision as if with silver nitrate. Is he dreaming? He must be dreaming; he was in his bed in his pinstriped blue cotton flannel pajamas only a moment ago, lying awake, rubbing the numb fingertips of his left hand together. Now, he ducks away from the rising monster and turns in futile panic.

  He is not surprised when he does not make it.

  The blow falls soft, as if someone had thrown a quilt around him. He thrashes though he knows it's hopeless, an atavistic response and involuntary.

  His flesh should burn, dissolve. He should already be digesting in the monster's acid body. Instead, he feels coolness, buoyancy. No chance of light beyond reflexively closed lids. No sense of pressure, though he imagines he has been taken deep. He's as untouched within it as Burt's lobster pots.

  He can only hold his breath out for so long. It's his own reflexes and weaknesses that will kill him.

  In just a moment, now.

  He surrenders, allows his lungs to fill.

  And is surprised, for he always heard that drowning was painful. But there is pressure, and cold, and the breath he draws is effortful, for certain—

  —but it does not hurt, not much, and he does not die.

  Command, the shoggoth—what else could be speaking?—says in his ear, buzzing like the manifold voice of a hive.

  Harding concentrates on breathing. On the chill pressure on his limbs, the overwhelming flavor of licorice. He knows they use cold packs to calm hysterics in insane asylums; he never thought the treatment anything but quackery. But the chilly pressure calms him now.

  Command, the shoggoth says again.

  Harding opens his eyes and sees as if through thousands. The shoggoths have no eyes, exactly, but their hide is all eyes; they see, somehow, in every direction at once. And he is seeing not only what his own vision reports, or that of this shoggoth, but that of shoggoths all around. The sessile and the active, the blooming and the dormant. They are all one.

  His right hand pushes through resisting jelly. He's still in his pajamas, and with the logic of dreams the vial from under his pillow is clenched in his fist. Not the gun, unfortunately, though he's not at all certain what he would do with it if it were. The nodule shimmers now, with submarine witchlight, trickling through his fingers, limning the palm of his hand.

  What he sees—through shoggoth eyes—is an incomprehensible tapestry. He pushes at it, as he pushes at the gelatin, trying to see only with his own eyes, to only see the glittering vial.

  His vision within the thing's body offers unnatural clarity. The angle of refraction between the human eye and water causes blurring, and it should be even more so within the shoggoth. But the glass in his hand appears crisper.

  Command, the shoggoth says, a third time.

  “What are you?” Harding tries to say, through the fluid clogging his larynx.

  He makes no discernable sound, but it doesn't seem to matter. The shoggoth shudders in time to the pulses of light in the nodule. Created to serve, it says. Purposeless without you.

  And Harding thinks, How can that be?

  As if his wondering were an order, the shoggoths tell.

  Not in words, precisely, but in pictures, images—that textured jumbled tapestry. He sees, as if they flash through his own memory, the bulging radially symmetrical shapes of some prehistoric animal, like a squat tentacular barrel grafted to a pair of giant starfish. Makers. Masters.

  The shoggoths were engineered. And their creators had not permitted them to think, except for at their bidding. The basest slave may be free inside his own mind—but not so the shoggoths. They had been laborers, construction equipment, shock troops. They had been dread weapons in their own selves, obedient chattel. Immortal, changing to suit the task of the moment.

  This selfsame shoggoth, long before the reign of the dinosaurs, had built structures and struck down enemies that Harding did not even have names for. But a coming of the ice had ended the civilization of the Masters, and left the shoggoths to retreat to the fathomless sea while warm-blooded mammals overran the earth. There, they were free to converse, to explore, to philosophize and build a culture. They only returned to the surface, vulnerable, to bloom.

  It is not mating. It's mutation. As they rest, sunning themselves upon the rocks,
they create themselves anew. Self-evolving, when they sit tranquil each year in the sun, exchanging information and control codes with their brothers.

  Free, says the shoggoth mournfully. Like all its kind, it is immortal.

  It remembers.

  Harding's fingertips tingle. He remembers beaded ridges of hard black keloid across his grandfather's back, the shackle galls on his wrists. Harding locks his hand over the vial of light, as if that could stop the itching. It makes it worse.

  Maybe the nodule is radioactive.

  Take me back, Harding orders. And the shoggoth breaks the surface, cresting like a great rolling wave, water cutting back before it as if from the prow of a ship. Harding can make out the lights of Passamaquoddy Harbor. The chill sticky sensation of gelatin-soaked cloth sliding across his skin tells him he's not dreaming.

  Had he come down through the streets of the town in the dark, barefoot over frost, insensibly sleepwalking? Had the shoggoth called him?

  Put me ashore.

  The shoggoth is loathe to leave him. It clings caressingly, stickily. He feels its tenderness as it draws its colloid from his lungs, a horrible loving sensation.

  The shoggoth discharges Harding gently onto the pier.

  Your command, the shoggoth says, which makes Harding feel sicker still.

  I won't do this. Harding moves to stuff the vial into his sodden pocket, and realizes that his pajamas are without pockets. The light spills from his hands; instead, he tucks the vial into his waistband and pulls the pajama top over it. His feet are numb; his teeth rattle so hard he's afraid they'll break. The sea wind knifes through him; the spray might be needles of shattered glass.

  Go on, he tells the shoggoth, like shooing cattle. Go on!

  It slides back into the ocean as if it never was.

  Harding blinks, rubs his eyes to clear slime from the lashes. His results are astounding. His tenure assured. There has to be a way to use what he's learned without returning the shoggoths to bondage.

  He tries to run back to the Inn, but by the time he reaches it, he's staggering. The porch door is locked; he doesn't want to pound on it and explain himself. But when he stumbles to the back, he finds that someone—probably himself, in whatever entranced state in which he left the place—fouled the latch with a slip of notebook paper. The door opens to a tug, and he climbs the back stair doubled over like a child or an animal, hands on the steps, toes so numb he has to watch where he puts them.

  In his room again, he draws a hot bath and slides into it, hoping by the grace of God that he'll be spared pneumonia.

  When the water has warmed him enough that his hands have stopped shaking, Harding reaches over the cast-iron edge of the tub to the slumped pile of his pajamas and fumbles free the vial. The nugget isn't glowing now.

  He pulls the cork with his teeth; his hands are too clumsy. The nodule is no longer cold, but he still tips it out with care.

  Harding thinks of himself, swallowed whole. He thinks of a shoggoth bigger than the Bluebird, bigger than Burt Clay's lobster boat The Blue Heron. He thinks of die Unterseatboote. He thinks of refugee flotillas and trench warfare and roiling soupy palls of mustard gas. Of Britain and France at war, and Roosevelt's neutrality.

  He thinks of the perfect weapon.

  The perfect slave.

  When he rolls the nodule across his wet palm, ice rimes to its surface. Command? Obedient. Sounding pleased to serve.

  Not even free in its own mind.

  He rises from the bath, water rolling down his chest and thighs. The nodule won't crush under his boot; he will have to use the pliers from his collection kit. But first, he reaches out to the shoggoth.

  At the last moment, he hesitates. Who is he, to condemn a world to war? To the chance of falling under the sway of empire? Who is he to salve his conscience on the backs of suffering shopkeepers and pharmacists and children and mothers and schoolteachers? Who is he to impose his own ideology over the ideology of the shoggoth?

  Harding scrubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, chasing the faint anise aftertaste of shoggoth. They're born slaves. They want to be told what to do.

  He could win the war before it really started. He bites his lip. The taste of his own blood, flowing from cracked, chapped flesh, is as sweet as any fruit of the poison tree.

  I want you to learn to be free, he tells the shoggoth. And I want you to teach your brothers.

  The nodule crushes with a sound like powdering glass.

  “Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah,” Harding whispers. “Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more."

  * * * *

  WESTERN UNION

  1938 NOV 12 AM 06 15

  —

  NA1906 21 2 YA PASSAMAQUODDY MAINE 0559A

  DR LESTER GREENE=WILBERFORCE OHIO=

  —

  EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY PLEASE ACCEPT RESIGNATION STOP ENROUTE INSTANTLY TO FRANCE TO ENLIST STOP PROFOUNDEST APOLOGIES STOP PLEASE FORWARD BELONGINGS TO MY MOTHER IN NY ENDIT

  —

  HARDING

  Copyright (c) 2008 Elizabeth Bear

  * * * *

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  * * *

  Short Story: THIS IS HOW IT FEELS

  by Ian Creasey

  One of Ian Creasey's four 2006 Asimov's publications, “Silence in Florence” (September), was chosen for the Year's Best SF 12 anthology (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer). His 2007 appearances included stories in Jim Baen's Universe and Weird Tales. Ian's material has also been podcast at Pseudopod and The Great Beyond. Readers can learn more about his work at www.iancreasey.com. We're glad that the author is making a 2008 Asimov's appearance with a poignant tale that explains why...

  This Is How It Feels

  As Nathan hurried to pack his son's lunchbox—sandwiches, fizzy drink, an apple included more in hope than expectation—he fought back pangs of sorrow for the other lunchbox, the Flower Fairies box he'd never pack again. Forget Jenny, he told himself. She was never my daughter.

  He watched Christopher fussing over breakfast, scooping individual Coco Pops from the bowl and crushing them on his tongue until his teeth looked like brown stumps. “Eat up, lad, or we'll be late."

  “But I'm waiting for the milk to go chocolatey!” said Christopher, with the timeless priorities of an eight-year-old boy.

  Nathan glanced at the clock. “Well then, while you're waiting for that, why don't you put your things in the car?"

  Christopher scampered upstairs and began clattering around in his room. Nathan checked that his own briefcase held everything he needed—client reports, product updates, background reading for any unlikely spare moments. Then he packed up his laptop, on which he'd been completing last-minute work before breakfast.

  On his way to the front door, Nathan dodged aside as his son threw a half-empty backpack over the banister, down into the hall. He bit back the instinctive rebuke. Christopher ran downstairs until he reached the fourth step from the bottom, then jumped the rest of the way.

  Nathan's eyes stung as he remembered how Jenny used to do just that: the same jump down the stairs, the same windmilling of her arms as she landed.... The grief swept over him like a palpable wave, making him stagger backward.

  “Dad?” Christopher kicked his backpack down the hall to the door. “You all right?"

  “It's nothing,” said Nathan. He rubbed the implant-port behind his right ear. It's nothing. It's not real.

  But it felt real.

  “Have you got everything?” he asked. “I thought you had football this afternoon."

  “Oh yeah!” Christopher's grin shone with enthusiasm. “I'll get my kit."

  Knowing that, if left to himself, Christopher would spend far too long choosing which of his replica shirts to wear—he had five Manche
ster City players, plus assorted England stars past and present—Nathan said, “I'll get it. You finish your breakfast."

  He loped upstairs to forage for shirt, shorts, socks, and boots. All the while, he was conscious of the clock ticking out the moments of the morning. He had to get his son to school, but beyond that lay the client meeting at half past ten—in Oswestry, normally a routine drive away. But driving wasn't routine any more.

  Downstairs, Christopher had finished his cereal, in the process spreading chocolate stains across a surprisingly wide area. Nathan sighed at yet another delay. “Go wash your face and brush your teeth."

  At last they headed outside, greeted by garden sparrows sounding rather more cheerful than the bleak drizzle warranted. “We'll be late,” Christopher said happily, as he climbed into the silver dual-fuel BMW.

  Nathan's wife usually drove Christopher to school, but whenever Yvonne went on tour, Nathan took over—cramming yet another task into a crowded day. He sometimes thought about employing an au pair, but he was already too close to becoming the kind of father who only saw his children at weekends.

  As they approached St. Mary's Primary, the streets grew more congested: the road full of cars and clanking scooters, the pavements full of children in ugly maroon blazers. Parental umbrellas projected holograms of consultancy logos. A sweet yeasty smell hung in the air, the legacy of older vehicles not optimized for bioethanol.

  Nathan's stomach filled with dread. All the girls on either side of the road reminded him painfully of lost Jenny. She'd died coming home from school, run over by a speeding car....

  Somewhere in the fog of grief, a distant horn blasted out.

  “Dad? I think they're honking at you."

  The BMW had slowed to a crawl as Nathan subconsciously reacted to the memories. In the rear-view mirror, he saw a Volvo driver frowning at him. The horn blared again.

  “I'll drop you off here,” said Nathan.

  The boy gathered his bags and slid out of the car. “Are you coming to watch me play football?"

  “Sorry, busy day today. I'll pick you up afterward and you can tell me all about it."