Asimov's SF, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The spidery machine deployed more eyes.

  “Let go of me and run,” Crockett advised.

  “Quiet,” said Doom.

  “I'm slowing you down,” Crockett argued.

  Then his companion yanked the jointed legs, threatening to cut his body in two. And very softly, Doom said, “One is with us. The tall one is here."

  With both fists, Crockett wiped at his eyes. Then he forced the lids to open, but he saw nothing except for the perfect blackness. The universe was him and this apparition that refused to release him, plus nothingness without end or purpose, comfort or hope. But at least his anaerobic metabolisms were awake now. He had enough strength to stand, and from that new perspective, he realized that he could hear the boiling lake lying straight ahead.

  He took three increasingly small steps, feeling for the edge.

  Each motion caused Doom to pull his legs in close again, but the creature didn't offer so much as a whisper of advice.

  With the third step, a new shape appeared before Crockett—a geometrical simple shape composed of dark lines joined together, each line moving slowly according to its own desires. Too late, he understood what he was seeing. The beautiful tall killer was standing directly in his path, probably fully aware of his presence and his hopelessness. Yet Doom chose that moment to speak again—in an abrupt, rather loud voice—telling his companion, “Run. Past her, and jump over the edge—"

  “I'll die,” he interrupted.

  “My saviors will not let that happen. I promise."

  Even if the alien was telling the truth—if the Luckies would willingly digest his brain and volunteer their computing power to let an extra illusion walk their nonexistent moon—this wasn't what Crockett wanted. Never. With both hands, he grabbed the encircling legs, hard tugs accomplishing nothing while he cried out, “Get off me. Drop!"

  The alien refused.

  Crockett sucked in the hot black air and screamed. “Here I am! I've got him here. Here!"

  Doom pulled his legs close, crushing the human guts.

  The tall girl stepped closer, and then she set off a floating flare that lifted several meters overhead, throwing a hard bluish glare across the black rock of the shelf. A transparent mask lay over her pretty face, allowing her to breathe slowly and naturally. As always, she looked like a supremely happy soul. With a warm joyful smile, she watched Crockett fighting with his companion. She seemed utterly amused by the situation. Without question, she had won, but why didn't she use the plasma gun riding in her long left hand? Then another figure emerged from the fumes—a short strong human, badly burnt but already beginning to heal.

  The second killer said “Hello” to her partner.

  She wasn't wearing a breathing mask. It was lost or destroyed, or maybe she didn't feel it was necessary anymore.

  “I was waiting for you,” the tall girl allowed.

  “Thank you.” That beautiful face had been destroyed, eaten to the bone by the firestorm. A sloppy mouth remained, withered lips and the stump of a tongue barely able to speak. “You almost made it,” she managed, studying Crockett with a pair of freshly grown eyes. But she was speaking to the alien. She said, “Mr. Doom,” and broke into a mocking laugh.

  Too late, Crockett stepped toward the lake.

  The tall girl had a second weapon—a tiny kinetic gun that neatly shattered both of his shins, leaving him sprawled out on his right side.

  “You want your friend pulled off ?” the tall girl asked.

  The short girl fell to her knees. For a moment, she teased Crockett with that brutalized mouth, threatening to give him a dry, sooty kiss. Then she reached around back and used a special tool, and the machine-spider released its grip and fell helplessly onto its back.

  “Make sure,” the short girl advised.

  The tall girl deftly opened the armored carapace, and what she saw made her pause. Crockett couldn't see the lovely face against the glare directly overhead, and perhaps she couldn't see anything well enough because of her own shadow. Then she rocked backward, letting the full light of the flare fall into the cavity—a cavity designed to carry a mind that was most definitely missing.

  “The crafty shit,” the tall girl muttered.

  “A second lifeboat,” her partner muttered. “There must have been, and I didn't notice—"

  “You didn't,” the tall girl agreed testily.

  From the beginning, Crockett realized, he had been carrying an empty vessel—a package of programs and contingencies that was masquerading as a poor miserable soul facing death.

  “He lied to me,” Crockett complained.

  The short girl laughed at him, or herself.

  “The shit,” said the tall girl once again.

  Then the two of them traded glances, and the short girl climbed to her feet and moved out of the way. And her partner said, “Nothing personal,” and pointed her plasma gun at Crockett's cowering face—

  The empty spider flinched and leaped high.

  When it detonated, the six long legs were driven hard into both women, cutting through spines and bones, leaving them in mangled wet piles ... and allowing Crockett just enough time to crawl into a crevice where he wedged his own battered body, the next moment or two spent thanking his own considerable luck.

  And with that, the caldera exploded.

  * * * *

  8

  Watching the eruption from below, various neighbors recalled having seen three friends accompanying clients to the ridge. Did they return in time? No? Well, incidents like this always seemed to happen, and usually more bodies were involved. But neither the hottest water or deepest snow could kill, and from experience, they understood that it was best to wait several days, letting the new mountain build itself to where its foundation was stable and as predictable as could be hoped for.

  The deep lake continued to explode upwards, and the thick white steam cooled, falling again as waves of snow and delicate formations of ice. Gas bubbles and volcanic soot complicated the complex, ever-changing layering. No two mountains were ever the same, and this particular eruption built the tallest peak in memory—a lofty, single-vent ice volcano that looked as if it was willfully reaching for the ceiling, and with that, trying to touch the painted stars.

  Steam was still pouring upwards when the rescue party found the burnt-out cable car, and shortly after that, the two dead AIs.

  What had seemed routine was not.

  More volunteers joined in the desperate efforts. Portable heaters cut half a dozen tunnels up the ridge and down the other side. Two more days passed before the next body was discovered: One of the temporary security officers, horrifically maimed but conscious enough to point at her colleague. “It was the alien,” she managed to say with her frozen, half-healed face. “Watch for him, and be careful,” she warned. Then someone asked about Crockett's whereabouts, and she paused for a moment, in thought, before directing them toward the shelf's edge, into the scorching depths of the caldera itself.

  “The poor bastard,” was the general consensus.

  The other officer's body was dug out of the ice, and both victims were carried back down to the hamlet; and after a full day of intense medical care, the two ageless women got out of bed and grabbed each other by the hand, and a few moments later, they walked to the tram and rode away, leaving the habitat for places unmentioned.

  A few hours later, one of the local vespers was hired to bring a married couple into the temporary ice tunnels. It was the woman, Quee Lee, who discovered Crockett's mangled body. With her husband's help, she dragged the lucky man into a convenient chamber. The vesper wanted to leave Crockett there and chase after help. But the humans decided to feed the man their modest dinners, and by keeping their patient warm and comfortable, it took only a few hours for him to recover to where he could stand on his own and walk slowly.

  Crockett told them what had happened. He claimed that he wanted to go home immediately, but at the last moment, standing inside an empty car, he had a sudden cha
nge of mind.

  “But I wish to leave now,” the vesper snapped.

  “I'm staying here for a while longer,” said Crockett. Covering his head with a makeshift cap, he turned to his saviors, adding, “You're welcome to walk with me."

  “What's the fee?” asked the husband, with a suspicious tone.

  “Perri,” his wife snapped. “Does it matter—?"

  “For nothing,” said Crockett. Then he smiled weakly, adding, “For the fun of it. How would that be?"

  Tourists were exploring the new landscape—a giant gray-white dome of ice and air pockets and vantage points that would never exist in quite this way again. In another few weeks, the residual heat of the eruption would begin melting the mountain's bones. Small quakes and a few large ones would cause spectacular avalanches. Eventually the caldera would fill with slush and dirt and the sleeping Luckies too, and the lake would be reborn, and a civilization that was already ancient when Earth was ruled by single-celled life would gracefully begin all over again.

  But for this particular moment, three humans could walk safely on the face of the mountain.

  Again, Crockett told his story.

  Slowly, carefully, Perri and Quee Lee asked little questions, forcing him to explain those points that were hardest to explain. The sun was down, as it happened. And the nearest moon had risen just an hour ago—an almost full circle of ice and warm villages and unreal cities and teeming millions. Assuming that he had reached the lake, Doom was living there now. Or at least some elaborate bottle of intelligence, with his name and identity, believed that it was living on that spot of light cast up on that finite sky.

  “He isn't safe,” Crockett muttered.

  His companions listened patiently.

  “His enemies ... they won't stop just because of this ... inconvenience...” A keen sorrow ran through the voice. Quietly, he said, “One year from now, or in a thousand and one years ... somebody will pass through the hamlet, pretending to be like all the others who want the Luckies’ tricks. The stranger will want to make his family rich, or maybe he won't have anything else to lose. The reasons don't matter. All that counts is that he'll walk up a trail and surrender his body to the aliens, and the Luckies will put him up on that moon there, and in another year, or fifty thousand years, he'll finally accomplish what he was hired to do.” Crockett sighed, gesturing at that patch of cold light. “One way or another, Death is going to find its way there."

  “It's the same for all of us,” Perri whispered.

  Crockett glanced at him. For a moment, his face twisted with genuine horror; but then the horror slowly faded, replaced by a strange, bright expression that looked like pure wild joy.

  During the eventual cable car descent, Crockett asked his new friends if they often traveled around the Great Ship.

  “Sometimes we stop wandering,” Quee Lee replied with a self-deprecating laugh.

  “Name your hundred favorite destinations,” said Crockett. Then he added, “The warm, bright places, I mean. Alien and human both."

  Perri quickly supplied a list of more than a hundred habitats.

  The car slid into its berth, and Crockett thanked both of them for everything, and then he walked out of the station, past his home and the little party of friends and neighbors who were waiting inside to surprise him ... past them and out of the hamlet entirely, stepping onto the first tram available, and without one backward glance, leaving behind the unreal for those things that truly had to matter.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Robert Reed

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  * * *

  CENDRILLON AT SUNRISE

  by Jo Walton

  Creeping out from her ash-bed

  In the earliest dawn

  She stands, grime-streaked,

  Wringing her rag in her hands,

  To see the dew-gilded unicorns

  Slipping away between the trees.

  Hearing her name called harshly:

  "Cendrillon! Now!”

  She turns back to the dark house.

  Glancing up at the clear sky

  The rays of the sun-flash

  Catch gold wings of a dragon's plunge.

  And though the links of her fetters clink

  She knows in her secret heart

  (Where godmothers rescue, where she dances with princes),

  Drudgery is endurable with sunrise, with dragons.

  She shuffles indoors, smiling.

  Now this, this, is what happiness is.

  —Jo Walton

  Copyright (c) 2007 Jo Walton

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  * * *

  MY HEART AS DRY AS DUST

  by Kim Zimring

  In the course of obtaining an MD/PhD degree, Kim Zimring previously focused her writing on science fact, particularly in the area of cardiac allotransplantation. After graduating and discovering the joys of producing work that required neither figures nor chi-squared analyses, she turned her attention to submitting science fiction. In her first story for us, she details the horrifying consequences of a deeply disturbing solution to a deadly problem. By the time this tale comes out, it will be the author's third story in print; her first appeared in the April 2007 issue of Analog and her second in this year's Writers of the Future Anthology, Volume XXIII.

  By the time they reached the execution grounds it was no more than nine AM and yet already so hot Adija could scarcely imagine how badly the noonday sun would burn.

  She had every intention of finding out, however. She was not going to die this fine morning, no matter what the sentence of the court. It was wrong, unfair, unjust, unthinkable that she should be put to death.

  Besides, her lawyer had delivered and she'd had one unguarded moment to inject the implant and then discard the cartridge. It sat now, a hard knot just behind her left ear, nearly indistinguishable from the lumps and bumps her Ghanan jailors had given her every time the UN looked away.

  The stadium, on arrival, had been something of a disappointment, to be honest: smaller, dingier, and in every way less impressive than the place she had seen once as a child. Still, this time Adija got to enter through the central gates, the shadow of the concrete arch cool and deep above her as she passed within.

  She raised her head as they emerged on the other side, wincing as the implant burrowed a little deeper, searching for the internal jugular. The guards didn't seem to notice; they just led her out into that wide and sandy place where sometimes they killed the enemies of the state and sometimes they played soccer.

  Usually when they had a woman to execute they did it quietly, in the courtyard of the jail, and as for soccer—well, they never let them play. She was a pioneer, then, for setting foot on these hallowed grounds, even if it was an honor that would never be listed in her National Academy of Sciences biography.

  That amused her enough to make her calm as she looked out across the crowd. They were packed dense, standing room only all the way down to the chain-link fence that lined the edges of the field. It formed an aisle and Adija almost expected a wedding chant as she processed in slowly with her guards, heading with ceremonial slowness for the gallows at the other end.

  The spectators were silent, though, not even buzzing up until the moment she climbed the stairs and appeared atop the hanging stand. A cheer rang out then, a victory cry, as if someone, somewhere, had scored a winning goal.

  At that, Adija thought she might pass out. The wood was smooth beneath her bare feet and she wished for a moment it was rough, as it seemed too slick for her to keep her balance.

  The hangman gestured and she moved to the center of the stage. He was bare-faced, which surprised her somehow. Adija had pictured him as hooded, afraid to face the soon-to-be ghostmade with an open profile.

  He gestured again, and she inched forward, her foot catching as she moved to stand atop the square outline of the trapdoor, just a little larger than herself. It made her almost sick to look down at it, to think of falling and all these pe
ople watching, not one of whom would catch her. It was still better to look down at that, though, than at the rope, dangling there, thick and rough, just at the level of her chin.

  How did people face this without the reassurance of the implant? Without it she was sure that she would run screaming, would throw herself from the front of the gallows and try wildly to escape down that straight, clear path.

  Or perhaps not. Now that she was up here it was as if she were the prima ballerina, the first voice in the opera. It would be hard, so hard, to go against the script.

  And then the rope was around her neck. She had a moment's panic; the hangman looked just like her uncle—the same round face, the same trace of laugh lines around his eyes. Surely he was Dangbani, the same tribe as Adija, and she worried it would soften his heart, make him try harder for the quick neck-breaking death.

  That was the only thing she truly had to fear; there was nothing the implant could do for the snapping of a spine.

  The hangman moved behind her then, pulling her wrists together and binding them, one to the other. She disliked his touch, disliked all touch, to be honest, which was something, someday, she might even choose to work on, but today she almost welcomed it—the bindings kept her from rubbing the space behind her ear, from giving in to the almost irresistible impulse to check that the implant was still there.

  The hangman finished with her hands, straightened, and, still from behind, tightened the rope around her neck. It itched, first at the back of her neck and then around her whole throat as he cinched it in.

  She had expected more, somehow. Speeches, maybe. Politicians ingratiating themselves with the crowd, offering the association of their faces with her death.

  Nothing, though. Nothing but herself and the hangman and the vastness of the waiting crowd. Surely out there somewhere there were cameras, recording this for the pleasure of the continent and the ratings of the newsnets, but Adija couldn't spot them.