Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  As I talked, Dan was peeling the label from his beer bottle with one grubby fingernail. He seemed to be considering the concept. “Competition,” he said after a while. “That's the thing, isn't it. Everyone has to have more money, more women, more stuff than the next guy. Why don't they understand that all a man really needs is clean air, sturdy boots, and fresh flowers on his table? But in this world, without money you're nothing.” He balled up the little strip of shiny paper and tossed it into the undergrowth. “You gotta have money to get any respect. Dignity. Y'know? That's why I gotta find him."

  “Don't worry, Dan,” I said, “we'll find him. We'll find Bigfoot."

  I think I was trying to reassure myself as much as him.

  * * * *

  I awoke in the night, as I often did. Dan snored in his sleeping bag on the kitchen floor, the rifle nearby.

  There was a painful itch on my right arm, just below the wrist. It wasn't just the usual discomfort of the manacles. I stared at the itchy spot and saw a small, dark lump. A flea, or possibly a tick.

  I stood the itch as long as I could. Finally I had to do something about it. I strained my head and my hand, the collar and the manacle biting painfully into my skin, until I could seize the parasite between my teeth. I bit down with a crunch, tasting my own blood.

  After that I fell back, sobbing. As quietly as I could.

  * * * *

  On day six, I found a deer trail that the creatures seemed to be using with some frequency. We constructed a blind at a clearing along the trail, and stocked it with supplies to last a couple of days. Now we waited. I suspected the creatures were crepuscular—active at dawn and dusk—but wanted to keep a twenty-four-hour watch to cover all bases. Dan and I slept in alternation; I was chained to a stake by one ankle, the chain short enough that I couldn't reach Dan while he slept.

  At dawn on day eight, I shifted on the log I was using as a chair and peered out of the blind. Dan snored quietly behind me; I hoped the sound would not be audible from too far away.

  It was going to be a clear day. The rising sun slanted through the trees and raised streamers of mist from the undergrowth. Trillium flowers were just beginning to open for the day, and the tight-curled foliage of fiddlehead ferns glowed green in the early morning light.

  I heard a sound. A lip-smacking noise. Then a slight rustling of undergrowth.

  I held my breath.

  A creature emerged into the clearing, moving slowly, with the sinuous grace of modern dance. It had the reddish color of an orangutan, but it was not an orangutan. The pelt was much thicker than an orangutan's sparse coat, and shorter; the skin beneath was black, not an orangutan's sandy gray.

  I had never seen anything like it.

  I wished fervently for a video recorder, a camera, even pencil and paper ... but all I had was my eyes, my ears, and my brain. I tried to drink in all the details.

  The creature's head was big-jawed and angular; there was some evidence of a sagittal crest. Its ears were small, smaller than human—suggesting that it did not use sound for communication—but it had prominent earlobes like the large-eared chimpanzee. The thin lips were closed, allowing no glimpses of dentition. And the eyes ... the eyes were large, brown, and somehow sad.

  Like a gorilla, it appeared to be built for quadrupedal locomotion rather than brachiation. This would be consistent with its mass, which I estimated at fifty kilos—too heavy for swinging from branches. As it walked, it moved only one limb at a time, a cautious gait that made almost no sound. The hands were held in fists, more like the orangutan than the gorilla's knuckle-walk. I peered hard, trying to see if it exhibited dermatoglyphs—fingerprints—on the outer walking surface of the hand.

  The feet were not big. They were consistent with the prints I had found, about thirty centimeters long with barely prehensile toes: further evidence that this species did not brachiate. Though the feet did not resemble the supposed Bigfoot print casts I had seen, another aspect of the Bigfoot legend appeared to be true: the creature had a pungent odor, a combination of skunk and garbage, which punished my nose even from a distance of fifteen meters.

  Now a second creature emerged from the forest, bars of sunlight sliding along its flanks as it moved. This one was larger—maybe seventy kilos—with peculiar flarings of tissue above its eyes and a prominent throat pouch. A male? Then came three more like the first, but smaller; females, presumably. One of them was walking on three limbs, clutching an infant to its breast with the remaining arm. Frustratingly, the older creature's head and shoulder hid most of the infant from my view.

  By now the first creature had seated itself, a hairy Buddha. The largest one, the male, flowed up onto a fallen log and probed it with a stick, displaying an almost scientific curiosity. Looking for ants? One of the smaller females settled down and began to tear off the tender heads of fiddlehead ferns, stuffing them one by one into her champing jaws. The other two females sat together; the one with the infant began to groom it, while the second female groomed the first.

  “Beautiful,” I breathed.

  And then, all at once...

  The sound of a rifle, apocalyptically loud in the enclosed space—

  A splash of red on the alpha female's chest—

  The other creatures slipping away into the forest like a dream being forgotten—

  Dan's face clenched in concentration above the rifle stock.

  “You bastard!” I shouted, suffused with anger, beyond care for my own life. I thought I'd convinced him to use the tranquilizer gun.

  “Couldn't let him get away,” he said, swinging his rifle to target the retreating male. He cursed as the big male vanished behind a tree, and moved to one side for a better shot.

  But in his eagerness to bag the male, he made a mistake: he stepped inside the circle of my chain. With a wordless shriek I jumped him from behind, pulling my manacles across his throat. We fell together to the damp, loamy earth, but Dan held onto the rifle.

  The coarse metal of the manacles bit into my wrists as we struggled, tumbling over and over in the mud. I pulled with desperate strength, grinding the chain against Dan's neck; he gurgled harshly as he tried to reverse the rifle. Then he gave up on that tactic and tried to hit me with the stock instead. But by now I was on top, my knee between his shoulder blades, my ankle chain wrapped around both of his legs—he couldn't get a good angle with the rifle, but didn't want to let go of it either. Grimly I kept the pressure up, cutting off his air, remembering the structures of the primate trachea. His struggles weakened, becoming sporadic and finally halting. But I didn't let up until I was sure he was unconscious.

  Gasping for breath, covered with mud, and bleeding from the wrists and neck where the manacles and collar had lacerated my skin, my first concern was the female Dan had shot. I untangled myself from Dan and crept out to the limit of my ankle chain.

  Too late. There was no pulse.

  But as I felt her chest I noticed something anomalous tangled in the long hair under her breasts.

  It was a kind of pouch, or sack, the size of my two fists. Crudely woven from strips of bark, and attached to the female's belly by cords braided right into her hair. There were some hard lumps inside it.

  I teased the sack open. It contained a stick, one end stripped of bark and ground to a point. Several splinters of volcanic rock, each with a shiny, almost serrated edge. Braided cords of vegetable fiber. And a scratched fragment of something that might be flint.

  Flint.

  A firestarter?

  I couldn't be sure.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said aloud.

  Trembling from more than just exhaustion and terror, I collapsed to the ground next to the cooling body.

  Bigfoot. A tool-using primate. Maybe even a fire-user.

  Dan groaned. He'd be conscious soon if he wasn't already. I scrambled back to him and pulled the rifle out of his reach.

  But as I felt the rifle's hot metal I paused, and thought about the origins of life.

  D
an coughed and started to sit up.

  And I shot him in the head.

  * * * *

  Hampered with the manacles as I was, it took me the rest of the day to drag the female deep into the forest and bury her, then nearly another full day to find my phone and the keys. I yelped with joy as I pulled the phone from its hiding place under the cover of Dan's water pump.

  But before I called anyone I thought ... was I doing the right thing? Burying the greatest primatological discovery in a hundred years?

  I thought again about the origins of life. How new life, the great self-organizing principle, might constantly be arising spontaneously, but was always being destroyed by other life, life that had the advantage only by virtue of having arrived on the scene first.

  What if that new life could somehow be protected, hidden away from the competition, until it could establish itself ?

  What if, given the chance, it might turn out better?

  If word got out, this forest would soon be swarming with scientists and government officials. Well-meaning idiots like me, who'd “protect” the species into near-extinction like we had the mountain gorilla and the Sumatran orangutan.

  Bigfoot had managed to stay hidden for thousands of years without any help.

  What had we accomplished during that time?

  I shook my head while my opposable thumb picked out the digits 9-1-1.

  Copyright © 2006 David D. Levine

  * * * *

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  * * *

  THE TWO FRIENDS

  —for Alice

  The two friends considered

  themselves to be human.

  Intellectually they understood

  that that

  was not the case. They were human

  only in the way

  Mafia dons

  are Catholic.

  But don't call it pretending.

  Why should a concept like

  humanity be limited to a few

  lucky souls who just

  happen to have noses?

  In fact, the two friends

  did have noses, and they would bleed

  if you pricked them.

  Some say a sense of humor

  is the defining characteristic

  of a human being. Maybe so,

  maybe not. The two friends

  shared a sense

  of elevated well-being

  when something exploded or fell

  down the stairs, but does that constitute

  a sense of humor? Another theory

  has it that an opposable thumb

  is the main criterion

  separating man from beast.

  But what kind of word is beast!

  Why should thumbs

  be put on a pedestal?

  Humans have thumbs, to be sure,

  but can they fly? Of course,

  the two friends couldn't fly

  either, but you see the point.

  The essence of humanity,

  its sine qua non, so to speak,

  is a capacity for friendship,

  and in that

  the two friends had no equal.

  It's sad to think

  they're dead now,

  but all of us will die

  some time or other.

  Did you know that?

  —Tom Disch

  Copyright © 2006 Tom Disch

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  GODBURNED

  by Karen Jordan Allen

  Karen Jordan Allen lives in Maine with her husband and daughter. Her fiction has appeared in such venues as Black Gate and The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age. She has worked as a Quaker pastor, an art school admissions office manager, a high school Spanish teacher, and a pianist. She has a master's degree in religion from Yale. At Yale, she tells us, she took an anthropology course on “Ancient Mexican Thought” with archaeologist Michael Coe. “This sparked my interest in the Aztecs. Some years later I spent a week in Mexico City, where I visited the sites mentioned in ‘Godburned,’ got a sunburn in the rain, and watched a young man put his hand on the Sun Stone.” These experiences all provided inspiration for her first story for Asimov's.

  Shouts and triumphant howls. Woody thumps, as if clubs struck trees. More shouts, the low and heavy rumble of many feet pounding the earth.

  Pearl tried to push herself up, but a large wooden disk strapped to one arm impeded her. She fell back to the ground and tried to think.

  Was this it? This noisy place?

  She hadn't expected to be conscious of anything. At most, a bright light, a soundless void. Never had she dreamed it would be like this—raucous, dusty, dimly lit. Perhaps she had been wrong not to believe in hell.

  She pushed herself up again with her free arm. A coarse grit shifted under her fingers and dug into her knees.

  Must be the medication, she thought. Goddamned stuff. I told them not to give me any more. I told them to let me die.

  A thin light shone, too pale to permit her to distinguish colors. Gray earth, gray skin, gray round object bound to her left arm. No, this couldn't possibly be it. Could it?

  * * * *

  Pearl squinted into the crooked hotel-room mirror and winced. Pink—God, had her face ever been such a flaming pink? Or she so stupid? Yes, clouds had blanketed the sky. Yes, rain had spit on her while she stood atop the Pyramid of the Sun. But she was in Mexico, in the tropics, for pity's sake. She should have known better than to leave her sunscreen in her room.

  She parted her gray hair carefully to cover the painful scarlet strip on her scalp, and rubbed a little SPF-30 cream into the new white part and the roasted wrinkles around her eyes. I looked like a goddamned steamed crab, she thought. She turned from the mirror in disgust. Not that she really minded about her looks. She glanced down at her travel-worn sandals and the ugly crossed toes that protruded from them. It had been a long time since she'd cared much about her appearance. But being thought stupid, even by Mexicans she would never see again—that would rankle. Gringa estúpida, they would think. Gringa idiota. Viejita gringa idiota.

  But she had no time to waste anticipating insults on this, her last full day in Mexico City, with the Great Temple of the Aztecs and the anthropology museum yet to visit. They were the heart of her trip, her reasons for coming, and she was annoyed with herself for leaving them for last. Of course there had been distractions: the shrine of Guadalupe, the Frida Kahlo museum, the markets, the pyramids. She had even visited the great central plaza, the Zócalo, to see the cathedral and the National Palace, right around the corner from the Temple. Why had she neglected the Temple itself ? Was she afraid of being disappointed? Or just saving the best for last?

  Oh, don't kid yourself, Pearl, she scolded. You just don't like being reminded of all that death. She had read most of the Florentine Codex and knew all about Aztec sacrificial death: the cutting of hearts, the flaying of skins, even the killing of children—

  She shook herself, plopped her faded canvas tote-bag onto the bed, and checked her day's supplies. A bottle of water. Two juice boxes. Granola bars, raisins, a stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a roll she had risked buying at a bakery. Surely Moctezuma could not exact revenge with a roll. She had wondered, when she opened her suitcase full of food and drink in customs, what the young man there would think. But he had gazed on the contents only briefly, his face expressionless.

  “I suppose I'm being silly,” she said out loud. And in her mind she could hear Burney say, Silly woman, his imagined voice so clear it sent a pang through her heart. Poor Burney, Mexico had not been kind to him on their honeymoon here, years ago. They had both been sick, but he had suffered more than she. A week together in a Mexican hotel little bet
ter than this, taking turns in the bathroom—it hadn't been much of a start for a marriage.

  Got sick a few days ago, he had written from Korea, not long before he was killed. Stomach bug. Pretty bad, but Mexico was worse.

  She inspected the roll for dirt and insect parts, and returned it to her bag. She wished she hadn't taken half a century to come back to Mexico. After the disastrous honeymoon, she had vowed to return to see everything she had missed, everything she had longed to see since studying Spanish in college with the young and dashing Señor Rueda—Raúl Moctezuma Rueda Tinoco. She whispered his name and smiled, remembering his sculpted chin, his outstretched hand, his eagle's gaze that searched the air as he shared the words of Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Texcoco:

  * * * *

  Cuix oc nelli nemohua in tlalticpac?

  An nochipa tlalticpac

  Zan achica ye nican.

  * * * *

  Perhaps we truly live on the earth?

  Not on earth forever,

  Just for a moment here.

  * * * *

  Then Señor Rueda had lowered his arm, leaned on Pearl's desk, and looked into her eyes. “I once recited this poem with my hand on the Sun Stone,” he said quietly. “It is a very special thing, to touch the Sun Stone."

  From that moment Pearl had longed to visit Mexico. Señor Rueda lent her a book of Aztec poetry, and she read it aloud, over and over, even stumbled through the original Nahuatl. Then he gave her a history of the Aztecs and a travel book, and she imagined herself strolling the streets of Texcoco or Tenochtitlan, bargaining in the plazas, approaching the Sun Stone with her hand outstretched.

  But she could not possibly have imagined being here today, seventy-three and retired, her life largely behind her.

  Retired. Re-tired—tired again. What an awful, dull word. She didn't want to be retired. She preferred the Spanish word, jubilado, which looked quite jolly. “Jubilant,” she always thought. That was what she wanted to be. The jubilant retiree.