Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I tottered across the trash-strewn pebbles. I could walk! I shouted in triumph, and disturbed a magpie busy pecking at the freshly revealed soil on the new shoreline. It chittered reprovingly as it flew away.

  Then I must have blacked out for a while. Later, I woke with a weak sun shining in my face. My first thought was to return to the landslip and move the rocks to retrieve my missing foot.

  My second thought was—where is it?

  The whole coast was a jumble of fallen boulders. The cliff had been eroding for years, and last night's storm was only the most recent attrition. I couldn't tell where I'd fallen, or where I'd been trapped. Somewhere in there lay a chunk of flesh, of great sentimental value. But I had no idea where it might be.

  I'd lost my foot.

  Only at that moment did the loss hit home. I raged at myself for getting into such a stupid situation, and for going through with the amputation rather than summoning help, like a young boy too proud to call for his mother when he hurts himself.

  And I felt a deep regret that I'd lost a piece of myself I'd never get back. Sure, the exo-skin could replace it. Sure, I could augment myself beyond what I ever was before.

  But the line between man and machine seemed like the coastline around me: constantly being nibbled away. I'd lost a foot, just like the coast had lost a few more rocks. Yet no matter what it swallowed, the sea kept rising.

  What would I lose next?

  * * * *

  I turned south, back toward town, and walked along the shoreline, looking for a spot where I could easily climb from the beach to the path above the cliff. Perhaps I could have employed my augments and simply clawed my way up the sheer cliff-face, but I had become less keen on using them.

  The irony did not escape me. I'd embarked on this expedition with the intent of pushing the augments to the full. Now I found myself shunning them. Yet the augments themselves hadn't failed.

  Only I had failed. I'd exercised bad judgment, and ended up trapped and truncated. That was my entirely human brain, thinking stupidly.

  Perhaps if my brain had been augmented, I would have acted more rationally.

  My steps crunched on banks of pebbles, the peg-leg making a different sound than my remaining foot, so that my gait created an alternating rhythm like the bass-snare drumbeat of old-fashioned pop music. The beach smelled of sea-salt, and of the decaying vegetation that had fallen with the landslip. Chunks of driftwood lay everywhere.

  The day was quiet; the wind had dropped and the tide was out, so the only sounds came from my own steps and the occasional cry of the gulls far out to sea. Otherwise I would never have heard the voice, barely more than a scratchy whisper.

  "Soon, my darling. Soon we'll be together. Ah, how long has it been?"

  I looked around and saw no one. Then I realized that the voice came from low down, from somewhere among the pebbles and the ever-present trash. I sifted through the debris and found a small square of plastic. When I lifted it to my ear, it swore at me.

  "Arsewipe! Fuckflaps!"

  The voice was so tinny and distorted that I couldn't be sure I recognized it. “Katriona?” I asked.

  "How long, how long? Oh, the sea, the dear blessed sea. Speed the waves...."

  I asked again, but the voice wouldn't respond to me. Maybe the broken chip, which no longer projected a hologram, had also lost its aural input. Or maybe it had stopped bothering to speak to passers by.

  Now I saw that some of the driftwood planks were slats of benches. The memorial benches, which over the years had inched closer to the eroding cliff-edge, had finally succumbed to the waves.

  Yet perhaps they hadn't succumbed, but rather had finally attained their goal—or would soon enough when the next high tide carried the detritus away. I remembered the holograms lighting up last night, how they'd seemed to summon the storm. I remembered Katriona telling me about her husband who'd drowned. For all the years of her death, she must have longed to join him in the watery deeps.

  I strode out toward the distant waves. My steps squelched as I neared the waterline, and I had to pick my way between clumps of seaweed. As I walked, I crunched the plastic chip to shreds in my palm, my exo-skin easily strong enough to break it. When I reached the spume, I flung the fragments into the sea.

  "Goodbye,” I said, “and God rest you."

  I shivered as I returned to the upper beach. I felt an irrational need to clamber up the rocks to the cliff-top path, further from the hungry sea.

  I'd seen my own future. The exo-skin and the other augments would become more and more of me, and the flesh less and less. One day only the augments would be left, an electronic ghost of the person I used to be.

  As I retrieved my clothes from where I'd cached them, I experienced a surge of relief at donning them to rejoin society. Putting on my shoes proved difficult, since I lacked a right foot. I had to reshape my exo-skin into a hollow shell, in order to fill the shoes of a human being.

  Tomorrow I would return to the launch base. I'd seek medical attention after we lifted off, when they couldn't remove me from the colony roster for my foolishness. I smiled as I wondered what similar indiscretions my comrades might reveal, when it was too late for meaningful punishment. What would we all have left behind?

  What flaws would we take with us? And what would remain of us, at the last?

  Now we approach the end of my story, and there is little left. As I once helped a shadow fade, long ago and far away, I hope that someday you will do the same for me.

  Copyright © 2009 Ian Creasey

  * * * *

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Poetry: MONSTERS by Geoffrey A. Landis

  * * * *

  * * * *

  I saw Count Dracula

  dangling from a tree

  his pointy teeth protruding

  from a goofy smile

  underneath a googly-eyed stare.

  —

  His skin was a pale green

  and his tuxedo was perfect.

  —

  In front of the next house

  three laughing ghosts glowing

  like sixty-watt bulbs

  hovered over an inflated pumpkin.

  —

&nbs
p; Your myths have been defanged.

  Spooks are cross-eyed and harmless

  and the boogy man

  is afraid of you.

  —

  When goblins take pratfalls

  and only want to be loved

  how could terrors lurk

  invisible in the shadows?

  Your head full of Count Chocula

  and pixelated bumbling snowmen

  you will never see

  what steals up behind you.

  —

  Dracula's skin was not green

  and he never wore a tuxedo

  nor a crooked grin.

  —

  If you can't see me

  that doesn't mean I'm not there.

  My tattered cloak wraps me in darkness

  blacker than the shadows of a moonless night

  silent like the wings of a bat

  and in the night I am

  watching.

  —

  And very real.

  —Geoffrey A. Landis

  Copyright © 2009 Geoffrey A. Landis

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: FLOTSAM by Elissa Malcohn

  Elissa Malcohn burst into our pages in November 1984 with her intensely powerful story “Lazuli.” Although another tale appeared in our Mid-December 1986 issue, we've been waiting twenty-three years for the third. We're delighted that the hiatus ends with “Flotsam,” a story that was partly informed by Elissa's employment at a government contractor during some of those intervening years. Covenant, the first volume of her Deviations series, was published by Aisling Press in 2007. More information and free downloads of the author's work may be had at Malcohn's World [home.earthlink.net/~emalcohn/index.html].

  Mercedes would remember July 8, 1973, as The Day of Dead Fish.

  Her parents remembered other such days, and this would not be the last one for Mercedes. But it was her first, when she was old enough to know that something was different and very wrong.

  The day began with little fanfare and many hugs. An early high tide meant a pre-dawn Mass, when all of the grownups looked to Maria to intercede and tell Jesus to make the fishes multiply again.

  Mercedes floated through the sermon. The censer whispered past her and she inhaled holy air in a room filled with glittering jewels. More angels peeked down at her from their high stone recesses at night. All the candles burned brighter. The Heavenly Host paid more attention to everyone—Mercedes and her brothers, their parents, her aunts and uncles, and their neighbors, who then went home and traded their best clothes for worn jeans and thin cotton shirts. They dressed more like Jesus, who wore simple things, and then they all went to the beach.

  Bare-chested men already lined the seawall, dangling their hands between their knees as they sat on concrete blocks and faced into the bay. Cigarette butts littered the sand close to the road. More ashes trailed a line of folding chairs curving along the water's edge. Tubular steel frames backed away from fading imprints that told Mercedes the tide was still coming in.

  Her brothers tied lures and practiced with the lines on their own small rods. Mercedes would learn, too, when she got bigger. For now, she cradled her orange play pail to her coveralls. She gazed beyond the crescent of chairs with their gaily colored, frayed webbing and their many cast lines, out to a skyline of gray smokestacks pouring their innards into the clouds.

  "It's bad today."

  Everyone tossed off talk of the air the way they cast their lines. Most times no one mentioned it at all. The air was better inside the apartment, which smelled like cooking; and best at Mass, which smelled like Maria.

  Mercedes left the other little children and went in search of shells. Pretty fragments lay on the old jetty reduced long ago to a pile of rocks. Mercedes slipped her flip-flops back on, easing around jagged edges and pausing to watch the clams spit. In time the line of chairs receded and the air smelled worse.

  That's when she saw the fish. The sea reclaimed them now, but hundreds remained washed ashore, open-mouthed and bloated and covered with sores. They stared in all directions. Some stared back at Mercedes, as though they were still alive.

  They stank, but they weren't frightening. Mercedes clutched her orange pail and edged among them. The priest should be here, waving his censer over the stench and blessing them all, they looked so sad. One gasped, twitching beneath the rising sun and slapping still-wet sand. Mercedes edged closer.

  Its gills fluttered on its neck above a flat, heaving chest discolored with bruises. Little arms fell limp at its sides. Instead of a tail, Mercedes gawked at a fin tapering to a single point, with skin pale enough to see through.

  She looked back toward the head and met startling green eyes. The creature's arms had risen. Now they waved and wavered in the air, struggling. Tiny, perfect fingers reached out to Mercedes, who dropped to her knees and thanked Jesus for the baby.

  She made a bed of seaweed in her pail, curled the baby up, and tucked it in with a crown of more seaweed cushioning a concealing layer of broken shells. She said goodbye to the dead fish and was almost back to the line of chairs before her mother's call of alarm made her hurry.

  The sun had risen higher and the smells carried farther now. People reeled in eruption-covered catches and threw them back into the water, leaving their own pails empty and their talk filled with Watergate and Managua's slow recovery from the earthquake.

  * * * *

  Somehow, everybody still had something to eat. Food magically appeared up and down the block, pulled from pantries and stretched into casseroles. Apartments shifted like sand with people coming in and out, echoes and laughter carrying down the bare-bulbed hallway.

  Someone slipped a 45 of “El Galleton” onto a turntable. Honking horns melted through the walls as workers left for their shifts. Mercedes swam in currents of sound, following a thin cry that no one else seemed to hear. It clung to her, leaving brine on her tongue.

  She didn't know why she had placed the sea baby inside a garbage bag, or why she had emptied the rest of her play pail and filled it halfway with water from the tap. Knowledge of what to do came first as a gentle prodding and then as a certainty, making Mercedes industrious.

  The wooden step stool hurt her toes as she lifted her load. The pail pulled on her arms as she wove around legs and ribbons of tobacco smoke, trying not to slosh.

  She made the trip eight times, carrying water through clusters of grownups and past stained cinderblock. One look from her and the other children turned away. She descended a cannabis-flavored stairwell, ignored by older boys and girls whose fingers undulated beneath each other's clothes.

  The garbage bag sat inside a rusted metal tub behind the boiler. No one would use the tub until winter, when the boiler had to be bled daily to release the pressure that always built up. Now the nubbly gray walls felt cool and moist, a relief from summer heat.

  The baby still looked sick, but its chest no longer heaved. Mercedes watched the calming rhythm of gills beneath a watery layer. Green eyes blinked at her.

  She reached into the bag and caught her breath as the tiny hand grasped her finger and held on.

  She whispered, “Are you hungry?"

  The creature pursed its lips at her and made sucking movements, as though it understood. Mercedes stuck her other hand into the water and gave the baby her index finger to nurse on.

  She had to find a bottle. Would she have to heat the milk? She wasn't allowed to touch the stove.

  Whom could she tell? If the baby came from Jesus, then why did everything feel so dangerous?

  Mercedes knelt on the damp floor and prayed while the skin on her hands wrinkled and chilled and her fingertips grew numb. The rosary beads in her head turned into barnacles. Salty tears splashed into the bag and made ripples above the bruises.

  * * * *

  The next morning it was all over.

  Mercedes awoke from a dream of placid waters, where she walked in her nightie on the bottom of the sea. Now she rus
hed past the breakfast table, where her brother Elian dawdled over his cereal. Hector, the oldest, was already doing odd jobs at the factory, helping their father with menial tasks and coming home covered in yellow dust.

  Their mother yelled after Mercedes as she hurried down to the basement. Everything agitated inside. She was a massive goose bump, clammy and cold, marveling that her legs could move at all.

  The strength left them as she spied the empty tub. The super had made the boiler room distressingly neat, as though preparing for company. The concrete floor was swept, and the film of fog had lifted from glass gauges and tubing. Even the windows overlooking the dirty alley gleamed, secure in reinforced caulking.

  Mercedes swayed on her feet. Nothing called to her any more. Out in the alley were steel trash cans with their lids off, gaping at the sky. They'd been emptied into the garbage truck, which had lumbered off with loud complaints, wheezing. Carrying junk.

  The sea baby had probably never happened at all. Mercedes accepted that fact later, her bottom smarting from a well-placed slap. Nobody left the breakfast table without permission, and certainly no one ran headlong past the grace of food. She was old enough to know better. What was she thinking?

  Her first Day of Dead Fish and the thin, little cry in her head separated, until only the die-offs remained. Those, at least, repeated and were real. Other people talked about them and then fell silent.

  The episodes of aborted fishing entered Mercedes's mental category of inconveniences, taking their place beside booster shots, scrambling for rent money, and the sight of body bags whenever somebody turned on the evening news.

  * * * *

  On September 17, 1990, everything fell apart.

  Esther Weitz listened to full-throated sobbing and didn't know what to make of the daycare worker on the other side of the desk. The young woman rocked in her chair. Thick black hair brushed her shoulders and stuck to her face.