Asimov's SF, October-November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I squirmed to a quick crouch, suddenly afraid, squinting into bright yellow light, craning my neck around so I wouldn't bump ... uh. No ceiling. Not anywhere nearby. Maybe far above, far far away ... In the corner of my eye, I saw Oddny scrambling to her feet, reassuringly herself, reassuringly naked and ... “Mr. Zed!"

  I half rolled toward her, then onto my feet, looking the way she faced, face lit with alarm. I ... oh, shit.

  The kaldane barely came above my knee, bulging lidless blue eyes fixed on me, breath whistling through a twin-slit nose, anal mouth pursed as if for a perpetual whistle, long, thin many-jointed arms with sawtooth chelae lifted menacingly.

  It really did whistle, soft and low, before it said, “So. Machine Men! I thought the little bastards were lying."

  Its voice was flat, with a kind of midwesternish ... who ... Raymond Massey? Ridiculous. And, ever the loon, I said, “Ghek? And, what? No rykor?"

  I don't know what I expected. I act like that to cover up my ever-present sense of utter incompetence. What it did was make a long, whistling giggle. “No, my name is Wark Fan'shih, and I know more than you think.” It looked us up and down, focusing longer on Oddny than me. “Well, definitely not a female Machine Man, and hardly likely to be a Dream Person.” At me again, “Who might you be?"

  I said, “You can call me Mr. Zed.” No reaction. Uh-oh. “And this is my good friend and colleague, Oddny Ylvasdottir."

  Nothing to read in those orby eyes of course, but it looked at her, stayed looking at her. “Ylva? Ylva Johanssen?” Then at me again. “I'm sorry. I'd forgotten the Honored Ancestrix's Companion liked to call himself Mr. Zed..."

  I thought, Well ... crap. Now what?

  Towering over the little monster, Oddny said, “You do understand I'm not actually Ylva Johanssen?"

  Its mouth stretched sideways into a peculiar grimace I thought might be an attempt at a smile, showing an irregular assembly of toothless pink gums. “Yes, I see. A Body Double, then?"

  "Correct."

  "Still, an aspect of the Revered Ancestrix, if not quite so dangerous to ongoing reality."

  Oddny said, “I know Ylva Herself is nowhere nearby, or I'd ... hear her."

  "Interesting,” it said. “No, the Revered Ancestrix transformed to an Imago when she destroyed Earth."

  I said, “Imago?"

  "A software ghost whose continued existence is supported only by the noosphere."

  "Oof."

  Another grimace. “I see you understand."

  Oddny, eyes filled with subtle pain, said, “Why did she kill herself ?"

  "No one knows. Nor why she chose to take with her all the Immortals except we few who'd moved to Mars.” It was incapable of anything like a facial expression, but you wanted to read some kind of wistfulness into those huge eyes. “We weren't planning to stay here once we finished our Second Flowering project, but ... well, there wasn't any warning."

  I said, “So you and your kind made the little people living around Jupiter and Saturn."

  "Their ancestors. We set them up on Mars about seven hundred million years ago. They were moved to Jupiter some little while back, after we lost interest in maintaining the project and Mars started to revert."

  "How many of you were involved in this?"

  "In the beginning? Maybe a few thousand. Most long ago killed themselves, of course. All but a few of those who remain lie dreaming in their cells, waiting for who knows what, maybe nothing. I'm probably the last Immortal up and about, these days."

  The Last Immortal, and I am ... uh. I said, “Am I among the dreamers, or merely the dead?"

  "You...? Oh, I see. No, Mr. Zed. If I remember aright, you never came home from the Wars."

  Cold chill, then. “Killed?"

  "I don't think so. The story is, you cast your lot with the survivors of the Spinfellow empire, with the last of the Starfish, the optimods and all the robot children of the Machine Man Era."

  "But not Ylva?"

  "My supposition is, you told her to look after the surviving humans, and she did that by creating the Immortals."

  Oddny said, “Why'd you make the little people?"

  A soft chuckle. “Out of boredom. Nothing more."

  I could imagine it: So much time. So little to do. It's no wonder they started killing themselves. It's no wonder Ylva killed them in the end. “What did you do with Vaad and Aruae? With all the crewmen?"

  "I sent them to join the Second Expedition."

  "To Uranus?” The people onboard that ship were dead.

  The big eyes fixed on me for a moment. “What do you mean, Uranus? I put them in a closed time loop."

  That shut me up for a minute, bouncing around among staggering implications, then I told Wark Fan'shih about the derelict, and how we'd gotten to here and now.

  Great eyes simply staring. It said, “Oh, that's bad,” in a sibilant whisper.

  "Why?"

  "Ahhhh. The technology is old. Very old. It doesn't always work the way I expect."

  Oddny said, “And you dumped a piece of the future, your own present, into the direct past."

  Conformal paradox? I wondered.

  It said, “Oh, that's not the problem. The problem is that you got here at all. If the derelict went to the past, and you found it, a new thread should have emerged from that cusp, paralleling my own, and you should have wound up in the future of that. As it is..."

  I said, “As far as I know, conformal time travel is impossible."

  It said, “As far as I know too, but the chances ... the dangers..."

  "What are you going to do with us?” said Oddny.

  Long pause. “Well ... I can't send you back the way you came..."

  I said, “Why not?"

  Yet another grimace. “Even if it worked, which is unknowable without making the attempt, that would mean we were ourselves stuck in a timeloop, which I may have created when I tried to put the Second Expedition into same."

  "Big problem."

  "Yes. My fault. And my problem to solve. No, even if I could, you two, especially you, Mr. Zed, now know entirely too much of time to come. You might forestall it, or accelerate it, or guarantee it ... all of those things might nip my own thread off into a loop and ... no. Too risky."

  "So?"

  "Oh, I suppose I'll put you someplace where you can, hopefully, spawn a new thread of your own. One too early to affect me."

  There was a soft ripping sound, and a door opened in the air, door opening on darkness, a cool wind blowing in, reeking of damp, decaying vegetation. “Come,” said Wark Fan'shih, gesturing toward a tear in the fabric of spacetime, “Time to go."

  An invisible hand pushed us through the door in the air, inertial fingers pulling us down hard on the other side, to stand shivering in the cold, damp dark, tiny sharp bits prickling underfoot. Light shone through the rip in spacetime, beyond it, Wark Fan'shih lifting a crabclaw as if in farewell. The kaldane called out, “Good luck..."

  The rip sutured itself shut and was gone, leaving us in soft-whispering night.

  I heard Oddny take a deep breath, then she said, “The air smells poisonous, and...” I could see her dim outline bounce gently up and down, white skin gleaming in some wan glow. “Gravity right around one gee. We may even be on Earth."

  I sniffed cautiously. “Hmh. Mold and...” Oddly familiar, as if ... oh. I said, “Hydrocarbon combustion byproducts.” My eyes continued to dark adapt, until I could see the outline of trees around us, skylight filtering through, brighter in some directions than others. Starlight. Moonlight perhaps. That orangey ... “Let's go this way."

  "Why?"

  "Because something in me recognizes sodium vapor light.” I could see the glint of her eyes looking at me. “Streetlamps."

  "So you think you know where we are."

  I said, “Come on."

  We walked off among the trees, ground sloping underfoot, tending downhill, while the night grew steadily clammier, the breeze colder, blowing in our faces. Finally, th
e woods gave out abruptly and we were standing at the top of a long, grassy hill. All around the bottom of the hill and lining it along one side were small, boxy houses, houses of a sort I hadn't seen since leaving Earth for good, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  "Mr. Zed?"

  I sighed. This place. This time. So hard-focused in memory, so ordinary and so unforgettable.

  "Do you know where we are?"

  "Yes. Midway up the eastern seaboard of the United States. Not far from Washington, DC. As for when..."

  Oddny looked around, at the scenery, the houses, the starry sky overhead. “The memories I have from Ylva look a little like this."

  I said, “She was a child a half century after me. Things changed."

  Beyond the houses at the foot of the hill, a car slowly grumbled along the street, headlights illuminating dark corners obscured between streetlamps. As it passed, I saw a dark shape blur before it, car slowing abruptly, then speeding on. Cat? Raccoon? I said, “Those flat fins at the back ... maybe a 1959 Chevy Biscayne? My dad had one of those when I was a kid."

  "So..."

  "It's a hint when precisely we might be.” As if I didn't already know. I said, “We better find some clothes. If anyone sees us like this, the police will rape you, then turn us both over to the Air Force."

  "Air Force. Why...?"

  I laughed softly. “Look at me, Oddny. Do I look like a human being? The Project Blue Book people will shit themselves. Come on. That car looked pretty new to me. And if it's some time not long after 1959, there will be clotheslines in every yard. Some people were too lazy to take them in at night, and the dew will just have made them damp."

  She said, “Are we stranded here?"

  I shrugged. “If we are where and when I think we are, that damned idiotic kaldane was going for another timeloop. Which shows he hasn't got a clue how this stuff works."

  "Do we?"

  "We damned well better."

  * * * *

  It turned out to be surprisingly easy to make a living in a here and now I remembered as difficult and dangerous, scary and so hard to understand. Perspective, I suppose. Selective memory. Once we'd stolen clothes from unwatched clotheslines, we had a largely empty world to ourselves. Tracts of scruffy woodland with no one in them. Homeless people still decades in the future, hoboes largely confined to the movieland mythology of the past.

  All those endless square miles of little boxes. Children confined to so-called schools. Housewives drinking coffee and picking feuds with each other. Hardly any deliverymen left to dally with, now that the milkman had been bankrupted by the chain supermarkets and newspapers were delivered in the dark by children. I remember my mother and her friends were driven to near lunacy by the isolation of Marumsco Village, no one to talk to but babies and each other.

  Was it just a coincidence Wark Fan'shih dropped us here and now? No way to know. No one to ask. Coincidence seems improbable.

  Up along Route One, just south of the Occoquan River, there were ramshackle businesses, trailer parks, older tract housing where poorer sorts of white people had to live. I went there to get money, leaving Oddny in hiding, and robbed a drunk walking by the railroad tracks. He saw me plainly by the light of a full Moon, of course, slobbering and cursing me as I turned out his pockets. Called me a boogie, which let me know where the police would go looking for the assailant, if they bothered at all.

  One chilly morning, we went to the Rexall Drugstore, not far from the original entrance to Marumsco Village, at the beat up fragment of a shopping center on Route 123, what denizens of the early twenty-first century would call a strip mall, with its Texaco station, Handy Dandy No. 2, and Manny's Moon Pizza, and bought copies of the newspapers they had.

  Amazing variety. Washington Post, the Evening Star, the Daily News,JournalMessenger, Potomac News, others I didn't remember at all. When had they died, with their conglomerations of chatty prose?

  The date was December 3, 1962, and the news wasn't what I remembered at all. Similar, but ... I remember Vostok 3 and 4 had flown their co-orbital mission in August, but hadn't the next two been 5 and 6, that last with a woman, almost a year later? Apparently, in this particular here and now, Vostok 5 had gone aloft with a two man crew on Thanksgiving Day, and Pavel Popovich and Vladimir Komarov were still aloft, rounding out their first week in space, complete with a live TV broadcast, with pictures from orbit of smoke from the fighting going on along the border between Austria and Hungary.

  President Kennedy, said the Post's lead story, was considering authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons if Soviet troops didn't halt their advance on Vienna within twenty-four hours.

  In my memory, by this time the Cuban Missile Crisis was already over and people were breathing a sigh of relief, realizing they might indeed live to celebrate one more Christmas.

  The fat girl running the cash register, the one with pimples on her cheeks and dyed red I Love Lucy hair, who I vaguely remembered in a sort of double image, was staring at me, hesitating to take the coins from my hand, until Oddny leaned forward, and angrily whispered, “Please! My father is very embarrassed about his skin condition. It's not contagious!"

  The girl mumbled a curt, “Sorry...” but still hesitated. I slapped the money on the counter and turned away. Stopped short.

  Three boys had come in the store and were turning into the newsstand alcove by the front door, where the newspapers and magazines stood against one wall, near a comic carousel and paperback book rack. One of them, tall and rather plump, with stiff black hair sticking up in all directions, was already reaching down a Playboy, which, in these innocent days, didn't have a plastic wrapper. The shorter, good looking, brown-haired and snubnosed kid stood behind him, smiling, looking over his shoulder at a sleek, overweight, neatly airbrushed young model.

  The third boy, longish black hair disheveled, dressed in rumpled, dirty clothes, blushed and backed away, turned toward the comics carousel, picking up one with a caveman and pterodactyl on the cover. Turok, Son of Stone? I felt a hard pulse of desire to join him at the carousel, thinking, Christ! I'd give anything to read those ... and here, here and now...

  The boy looked up suddenly, maybe feeling my eyes on him, stared at me hard, no revulsion, just curiosity and ... resentment? Why? I didn't hate adult men, I was merely afraid of them, and what they might do. His eyes moved on, falling on beautiful Oddny, faltered, fell away, looked again longer, blushed, turned away toward the comic book, turning his back, very stiff, very self-conscious.

  I turned to Oddny. “What did you do?"

  "Do? Nothing. Looked him in the eye."

  Hardly nothing! The poor bastard is probably ready to faint with some combination of mortification and desperate desire. And he's already afraid that people, especially women, can read his mind.

  She said, “Do you know those boys?"

  I tried hard to conjure up a memory of this day. Too many such days. We came here at least once a week, to look at comics and drink chocolate Cokes at the soda fountain. God, I can taste them even now! Nothing like that in our latter-day world.

  Would I remember a day when I saw a scaly faced old man looking a bit like Ben Grimm, a man with a really, really bad case of eczema? Probably not. How about a stunning beauty with nice big tits dressed inappropriately in rough men's clothing that didn't fit too well?

  Maybe so. But I didn't. I said, “The big fat kid is named Larry, the cute one is Neal. The creepy one looking at comics is named Alan. The other two call him Burke the Jerk."

  She gave me a spooked look, “Alan Burke? But...” Looked at the three boys again.

  I nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me."

  "Then we're in your past? That doesn't gibe with what the kaldane said."

  I said, “No, but when I was twelve years old, the Cuban Missile Crisis was over. Here and now, it's not. I have an inkling where Wark Fan'shih may have sent us. Start our own thread? The bastard!"

  I'd raised my voice and Alan Burke
turned to look again, eyes blazing with what any of the old hacks I'd loved to read back then might have described as “wild surmise.” Roughly, I said to Oddny, “Come on. We better get out of here before he manages to guess who we are."

  "Surely not possible?"

  "Hell, I don't know. Look. Look what the hell's happened to us. What does possible mean?” Outside, the skies had turned gray, and a soft, freezing drizzle was starting to fall.

  It was hard to know what we should do, what we could do, in this odd version of the past. The woods above Marumsco Village, where I-95 was about to come through, were more or less deserted. I managed to steal a big tarp, and we made a little tent to stay in not far from where the hyperdoor had dropped us off.

  No point in it, but ... what else? Where else? Steal a car? And go where, even assuming in these days of pre-computerization DMVs we didn't get caught? All the old fantasy, things I'd read about and thought about, things that creepy little Alan Burke must be thinking about even now, surfaced, but ... nothing. Sure, steal a car, go to Florida, steal money, invest in certain stocks. Kennedy will die next year and maybe I can...

  Or will he?

  In the daily papers I continued to buy, things grew worse. The Soviets advanced up the Danube and took Vienna. Kennedy did nothing but bluster. The Soviets invaded West Germany and bore down on Munich. More bluster.

  On the Sunday morning before Christmas, I sat at the edge of the woods, looking down the long, lightly snow-dusted slope toward the near edge of Marumsco Village, knowing in the gray house with blue shutters, Alan Burke was wondering if he'd get the hundred-dollar chemistry set he wanted.

  And my Sarah? Where is she now? Somewhere up in Michigan, twelve years old. Imagine if I could go there and meet her. Imagine a whole new life together, I ... Nonsense. Not me. Not the old lizardman approaching the end of his second century. Alan Burke? Burke the Jerk, untempered by decades of sorrow? Hard to imagine.

  There were cars on the streets, dogs barking far away, and I knew we needed to get out of here before someone discovered us and called the cops. On my own again. Time to do or die, as usual. Make the best of it. You always do, no matter what ... But Oddny will die in just a few years. What about that?