Asimov's SF, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

As he had a thousand times before, the director brought the band to attention, hands raised, ready for the downbeat. He inhaled deeply. A good breath, he thought. Let's all start on a good breath. Soon, they were deep into the Beatles medley. Elise had changed the music so radically the original tune vanished at times, then resurfaced later in unexpected ways. The clarinets swelled with the “Yellow Submarine” bridge as the trombones's improvisational bars ended. Later, out of a melodious but unrecognizable tune, the xylophone led them into “Hey Jude."

  They moved through song after song. Never had the band's sound been so tight. Every solo hit right. Even the tricky transitions flew until they reached “The King's Feast,” the second to last piece. He wiped sweat from his forehead before leading them into the opening bars, and it wasn't until he neared the end that he realized the French horns had played their part exactly on beat. Thomas had hit his entrance on cue. Cowdrey almost laughed in relief as he brought them to the conclusion. Thomas was safe.

  Cowdrey put the baton on the podium and nodded to Elise, who had already stored her flute on the stand next to her chair. She came forward solemnly, climbed the platform, then picked up the baton. Shuffling their papers, the band switched to her wedding march music. The baton's tip pointed up. She took her own deep breath. The march began, a lingering intro that sounded nothing like a march or wedding music, but soon the drums rose from behind. Cowdrey hadn't realized they were playing at all. He'd been paying attention to the odd harmonics in the flute and clarinet section. But there the drums were, dancing rhythms that made him shift his look to them. Then the brass opened, and the tune bounced from side to side, all in a few bars, all too quick before fading for the ceremony. Cowdrey closed his eyes. “What was that?” he thought. He almost asked her to play it again.

  He stood to the side on the floor a foot below the director's platform, Taylor and Liz's wedding vows ready to read. On cue, the two held hands and came forward. Music swelled around them as they made their way toward the front. The musicians played with part attention on Elise and part on the young couple.

  Cowdrey read a preamble, his heart in his throat, Elise's wedding march still in his ears. Taylor and Liz exchanged vows. They kissed. As they exited, arms around each other, two drummers threw confetti, and the band played the wedding march's coda, seeming to pick up without losing a beat. Nothing Cowdrey had ever heard sounded like this. Clarity of notes. Surprising shifts in scale. A moment where a single cornet carried the music before the band swallowed it whole, repeating the notes but changing them round so what was bright became dark, and the dark exploded like fireworks. The music filled Cowdrey's chest, pressed cold compresses of notes to his fevered head, made him sway in fear that it would end or the band would break, but they didn't. The music ascended and swooped and pressed outward and in. At the end, the sound flooded the room, as if to push the windows open to free the band from captivity and give them the grassy pastures Elise talked about so often, rushing toward the triumphant climax they'd been practicing for the last three days. Cowdrey heard wind caressing the tips of uncut grass. He smelled the meadow awash with summer heat. The music painted Earth and home so fully Cowdrey nearly wept from it, but then it ended. Elise held them on the last note, her face lit with concentration and triumph. Her fist closed, cutting the band off, leaving the memory of her composition lingering in the air. Cowdrey could still hear it, ringing. The lights began to flicker. They loved it, he thought. He turned to salute Elise, the ringing emanating from the middle of his head.

  Then he recognized the sound in the strobe-effect lighting. It built until he thought it would burst him open, and he fell.

  A short soft shock of waking.

  His cheek rested against cool metal. A weight pressed against his other side. Groggily, Cowdrey sat up. He was in a bus parked in the dark. The student leaning against him groaned, rubbed her eyes, then sat up too. Other bodies stirred in front and behind them. Outside the window, a street light showed a long chain link fence and a sign, POLICE EVIDENCE YARD.

  “My god,” said someone in a voice filled with disbelief. “We're home."

  Someone started crying. Their voices mixed. Some whooped and yelled. Some laughed, all at once, voices and sounds mixing.

  They poured from the bus into the parking lot, still in uniform, holding on to each other. A boy rattled the gate locked by a large chain and a hefty padlock. A head poked up in the lit window of the building beyond. A few seconds later two policeman carrying flashlights ran out the back door. Cowdrey started counting heads, but someone noticed before he did.

  “Where's Elise?"

  For a second, the happy noise continued.

  “Where's Elise?"

  Cowdrey stood on the step into the bus, looking over the crowd. One by one, they stopped talking. They didn't appear so old now, the street light casting dark shadows on their faces. He stepped down, walked through them, checking each expression. No crooked glasses. No clipboard tucked under the arm.

  Cowdrey pictured her alone in the empty auditorium. Were the lights still flickering? She, the one who wanted to go home the most, stood now, among the silent folding chairs, staring back at the swirling smoke behind windows. What had they wanted from us? What had they wanted?

  The band looked at each other, then down at their feet, unable to meet each other's gaze. They looked down, and Cowdrey couldn't breathe.

  He moved through the darkness surrounding the band, turning the ones toward him who faced away, searching their faces, but he had already accepted it. He'd lost her. Elise was gone.

  As the cops unlocked the gates, shouting their questions, Cowdrey could see the days coming: the interviews, the articles in magazines, the disbelief, the changes in his life. One day, though, after the story had passed, he'd stand in front of another junior high band. He'd raise arms high before the first note, encouraging the players to take that first good breath. But Cowdrey could already feel in his chest the tightness, the constriction, and he knew he'd never be able to make the music good again.

  He wouldn't be able to breathe.

  Copyright (c) 2007 James Van Pelt

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  * * *

  RESERVATIONS SUGGESTED

  by G.O. Clark

  In the future,

  cars will be powered

  by thought, distances

  measured by the duration of

  a song, and vacation hideaways,

  each priced accordingly, either

  real-time, virtual, or tucked

  away in one of eleven

  parallel universes.

  Accommodations

  will range from Motel 6 retro

  to Cloud City modern, the staff,

  whether robot, human, or hybrid,

  professional in every way.

  Traditional time shares

  will be the norm, calculated on

  multiple levels, a complicated piece

  of work at best, if not for your

  standard dashboard AI.

  For those back home,

  virtual postcards will help take

  the longing out of those wish you

  were here postscripts, and entice

  the addressee to follow.

  Reservations are

  suggested, as in all plans

  dealing with the future, but

  control of the weather and the

  times will still prove elusive,

  so, pack accordingly.

  —G.O. Clark

  Copyright (c) 2007 G.O. Clark

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  THE PROPHET OF FLORES

  by Ted Kosmatka

  Ted Kosmatka tells us he's a lab rat from the north coast of Indiana. Since his first sale to Asimov's—"The God Engine” (October/November 2005)—his stories have sold to both literary and science fiction markets. He has tales forthcoming from Ideomancer and City Slab, and the play that he co-wrote, Steel and Roses, has been
performed in Illinois, Indiana, and New York City. You can check out his website at www.tedkosmatka.com. Ted explores the multiverse in his third story for us and finds a dangerous road not taken by our own scientific revolution.

  If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?—Voltaire

  When Paul was a boy, he played God in the attic above his parents’ garage. That's what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That's what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

  Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he'd found behind the garage, and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. While his father was away speaking at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he'd drawn during the last day of school.

  Because he wasn't old enough to use his father's power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother's sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father's unused workbench.

  One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. “What are you doing up there?” she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

  Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. “I'm just playing around with some tools,” he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn't lie to his mother. Not directly.

  “Which tools?"

  “Just a hammer and some nails."

  She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain re-glued subtly out of alignment. “Be careful,” she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools and about his father.

  “I will."

  The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. In reality, the cages were enormous, over-engineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they'd be holding. They weren't mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletop-sized enclosures that could have housed German Shepherds. He spent most of his paper route money on the project, buying odds and ends that he needed: sheets of plexi, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked.

  He bought exercise wheels and built walkways; he hung loops of yarn the mice could climb to various platforms. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.

  While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept the mice in little aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. On the day he finished the last of the big cages, he released the mice into their new habitats one by one—the first explorers on a new continent. To mark the occasion, he brought his friend John over, whose eyes grew wide when he saw what Paul had made.

  “You built all this?” John asked.

  “Yeah."

  “It must have taken you a long time."

  “Months."

  “My parents don't let me have pets."

  “Neither do mine,” Paul answered. “But anyway, these aren't pets."

  “Then what are they?"

  “An experiment."

  “What kind of experiment?"

  “I haven't figured that out yet."

  * * * *

  Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.

  “This represents the number of daughter atoms. And this...” He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. “This is the number of parent atoms.” He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. “Can anyone tell me what the point of intersection represents?"

  Darren Michaels in the front row raised his hand. “It's the element's half-life."

  “Exactly. Johnson, in what year was radiometric dating invented?"

  “1906."

  “By whom?"

  “Rutherford."

  “What method did he use?"

  “Uranium lead—"

  “No. Wallace, can you tell us?"

  “He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium."

  “Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?"

  “That was Boltwood, in 1907."

  “And how were these initial results viewed?"

  “With skepticism."

  “By whom?"

  “By the evolutionists."

  “Good.” Mr. Finley turned to Paul. “Carlson, can you tell us what year Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species?"

  “1867, Paul said."

  “Yes, and in what year did Darwin's theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?"

  “That was 1932.” Anticipating his next question, Paul continued. “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the earth wasn't as old as the evolutionists thought."

  “And in what year was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?"

  “1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old."

  * * * *

  Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father's old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul's father was a doctor, the Ph.D kind. He was blond and big and successful. He'd met Paul's mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm. They had worked on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul's father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

  Paul's father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul's mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

  Paul's father was a force of nature, a cataclysm; as unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. The attic was a good place to hide, and Paul threw himself into his hobby.

  Paul studied his mice as though they were Goodall's chimps. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. He found that, within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Timothy learned, could kill each other.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations expanded to fill the new worlds he'd created for them. The babies were born pink and blind, but as their fur came in, Paul began documenting colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, and banded, and broken marked. In later generations, colors appeared that he hadn't purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

  Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transfer of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next. In school they called it divine transmission.

  Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn't enough to just have them, to o
bserve them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. Because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.

  Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics—but he wasn't sure what characteristics to look for.

  He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the seventeenth mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he'd written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he'd ever weighed.

  * * * *

  In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That's not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.

  It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.

  “Just messing around."

  They were in his father's car on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there."

  Paul fought back a surge of panic. “I built a fort a while ago."

  “You're almost twelve now. Aren't you getting a little old for forts?'

  “Yeah, I guess I am."

  “I don't want you spending all your time up there."

  “All right."

  “I don't want your grades slipping."

  Paul, who hadn't gotten a B in two years, said, “All right."

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.