Asimov's SF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Finally Graves shook The Leila Torn Show out of her lethargy. “We've got messages,” he said. “Hundreds of them."

  The Leila Torn Show scanned them quickly, andthenleft all but one for her ceepees to handle.

  “I loved it,” breathed Margo Rain. “Every minute of it. I've never seen a show blow itself up like that. And two weeks in a row. You're so brave. I'm very excited now to be on next week. You do have something special for me, no? Whatever you want, I'm yours."

  The Leila Torn Show considered. In her heart, she believed that she hadn't agreed to anything. And she had to think of the good of the show.

  “I have a proposition for you, Margo,” she said.

  Copyright © 2006 James Patrick Kelly

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  Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum. © 2006 Overdue Media LLC www.overduemedia.com

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  Unshelved ® is the world's only daily comic strip about a library. Look for it at www.overduemedia.com.

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  * * *

  Life on the Preservation

  by Jack Skillingstead

  Jack Skillingstead's newest story for us offers us a nearly perfect day for exploring...

  Wind buffeted the scutter. Kylie resisted the temptation to fight the controls. Hand light on the joystick, she veered toward the green smolder of Seattle, riding down a cloud canyon aflicker with electric bursts. The Preservation Field extended half a mile over Elliot Bay but did not capture Blake or Vashon Island nor any of the blasted lands.

  She dropped to the deck. Acid rain and wind lashed the scutter. The Preservation Field loomed like an immense wall of green jellied glass.

  She punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her. Kylie polarized the thumbnail port, at the same time deploying braking vanes and dipping steeply to skim the surface of the bay.

  The skyline and waterfront were just as they'd appeared in the old photographs and movies. By the angle of the sun she estimated her arrival time at late morning. Not bad. She reduced airspeed and gently pitched forward. The scutter drove under the water. It got dark. She cleared the thumbnail port. Bubbles trailed back over the thick plexi, strings of silver pearls.

  Relying on preset coordinates, she allowed the autopilot to navigate. In minutes the scutter was tucked in close to a disused pier. Kyle opened the ballast, and the scutter surfaced in a shadow, bobbing. She saw a ladder and nudged forward.

  She was sweating inside her costume. Jeans, black sneakers, olive drab shirt, rain parka. Early twenty-first century urban America: Seattle chic.

  She powered down, tracked her seat back, popped the hatch. The air was sharp and clean, with a saltwater tang. Autumn chill in the Pacific Northwest. Water slopped against the pilings.

  She climbed up the pitchy, guano-spattered rungs of the ladder.

  And stood in awe of the intact city, the untroubled sky. She could sense the thousands of living human beings, their vitality like an electric vibe in her blood. Kylie was nineteen and had never witnessed such a day. It had been this way before the world ended. She reminded herself that she was here to destroy it.

  From her pocket she withdrew a remote control, pointed it at the scutter. The hatch slid shut and her vehicle sank from view. She replaced the remote control. Her hand strayed down to another zippered pocket and she felt the outline of the explosive sphere. Behind it, her heart was beating wildly. I'm here, she thought.

  She walked along the waterfront, all her senses exploited. The sheer numbers of people overwhelmed her. The world had ended on a Saturday, November nine, 2004. There were more living human beings in her immediate range of sight than Kylie had seen in her entire life.

  She extracted the locator device from her coat pocket and flipped up the lid. It resembled a cellular phone of the period. A strong signal registered immediately. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, she turned slowly toward the high reflective towers of the city, letting people go around her, so many people, walking, skateboarding, jogging, couples and families and single people, flowing in both directions, and seagulls gliding overhead, and horses harnessed to carriages waiting at the curb (so much life), and the odors and rich living scents, and hundreds of cars and pervasive human noise and riot, all of it continuous and—

  “Are you all right?"

  She started. A tall young man in a black jacket loomed over her. The jacket was made out of leather. She could smell it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You looked sort of dazed."

  Kylie turned away and walked into the street, toward the signal, her mission. Horns blared, she jerked back, dropped her locator. It skittered against the curb near one of the carriage horses. Kylie lunged for it, startling the horse, which clopped back, a hoof coming down on the locator. No! She couldn't get close. The great head of the animal tossed, nostrils snorting, the driver shouting at her, Kylie frantic to reach her device.

  “Hey, watch it!"

  It was the man in the leather jacket. He pulled her back, then darted in himself and retrieved the device. He looked at it a moment, brow knitting. She snatched it out of his hand. The display was cracked and blank. She shook it, punched the keypad. Nothing.

  “I'm really sorry,” the man said.

  She ignored him.

  “It's like my fault,” he said.

  She looked up. “You have no idea, no idea how bad this is."

  He winced.

  “I don't even have any tools,” she said, not to him.

  “Let me—"

  She walked away, but not into the street, the locator a useless thing in her hand. She wasn't a tech. Flying the scutter and planting explosives was as technical as she got. So it was plan B, only since plan B didn't exist it was plan Zero. Without the locator she couldn't possibly find the Eternity Core. A horse! Jesus.

  “Shit."

  She sat on a stone bench near a decorative waterfall that unrolled and shone like a sheet of plastic. Her mind raced but she couldn't formulate a workable plan B.

  A shadow moved over her legs. She looked up, squinting in the sun.

  “Hi."

  “What do you want?” she said to the tall man in the leather jacket.

  “I thought an ice cream might cheer you up."

  “Huh?"

  “Ice cream,” he said. “You know, ‘You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream'?"

  She stared at him. His skin was pale, his eyebrows looked sketched on with charcoal, and there was a small white scar on his nose. He was holding two waffle cones, one in each hand, the cones packed with pink ice cream. She had noticed people walking around with these things, had seen the sign.

  “I guess you don't like strawberry,” he said.

  “I've never had it."

  “Yeah, right."

  “Okay, I'm lying. Now why don't you go away. I need to think."

  He extended his left hand. “It's worth trying, at least once. Even on a cold day."

  Kylie knew about ice cream. People in the old movies ate it. It made them happy.

  She took the cone.

  “Listen, can I sit down for a second?” the man said.

  She ignored him, turning the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was. The man sat down anyway.

  “My name's Toby,” he said.

  “It's really pink,” Kylie said.

  “Yeah.” And after a minute, “You're supposed to lick it."

  She looked at him.

  “Like this,” he said, licking his own cone.

  “I know,” she said. “I'm not an ignoramus.” Kylie licked her ice cream. Jesus! Her whole body lit up. “That's—"

  “Yeah?"

  “It's wonderful,” she said.

  “You really haven't had ice cream before?"

  She shook her head, licking away at the cone, devouring half of it in seconds.

  “That's incredibly far-fetched,” Toby said. “W
hat's your name? You want a napkin?” He pointed at her chin.

  “I'm Kylie,” she said, taking the napkin and wiping her chin and lips. All of a sudden she didn't want any more ice cream. She had never eaten anything so rich. In her world there wasn't anything so rich. Her stomach felt queasy.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  She stood up, so did he.

  “Hey, you know the thing is, what you said about not having tools? What I mean is, I have tools. I mean I fix things. It's not a big deal, but I'm good and I like doing it. I can fix all kinds of things, you know? Palm Pilots, cellphones, laptops. Whatever."

  Kylie waved the locator. “You don't even know what this is."

  “I don't have to know what it is to make it go again."

  Hesitantly, she handed him the locator. While he was turning it in his fingers, she spotted the Tourist. He was wearing a puffy black coat and a watch cap, and he was walking directly towards her, expressionless, his left hand out of sight inside his pocket. He wasn't a human being.

  Toby noticed her changed expression and followed her gaze.

  “You know that guy?"

  Kylie ran. She didn't look back to see if the Tourist was running after her. She cut through the people crowding the sidewalk, her heart slamming. It was a minute before she realized she'd left the locator with Toby. That almost made her stop, but it was too late. Let him keep the damn thing.

  She ran hard. The Old Men had chosen her for this mission because of her youth and vitality (so many were sickly and weak), but after a while she had to stop and catch her breath. She looked around. The vista of blue water was dazzling. The city was awesome, madly perfect, phantasmagoric, better than the movies. The Old Men called it an abomination. Kylie didn't care what they said. She was here for her mother, who was dying and who grieved for the trapped souls.

  Kylie turned slowly around, and here came two more Tourists.

  No, three.

  Three from three different directions, one of them crossing the street, halting traffic. Stalking toward her with no pretense of human expression, as obvious to her among the authentic populace as cockroaches in a scatter of white rice.

  Kylie girded herself. Before she could move, a car drew up directly in front of her, a funny round car painted canary yellow. The driver threw the passenger door open, and there was the man again, Toby.

  “Get in!"

  She ducked into the car, which somehow reminded her of the scutter, and it accelerated away. A Tourist who had scrabbled for the door handle spun back and fell. Kylie leaned over the seat. The Tourist got up, the other two standing beside him, not helping. Then Toby cranked the car into a turn that threw her against the door. They were climbing a steep hill, and Toby seemed to be doing too many things at once, working the clutch, the steering wheel, and radio, scanning through stations until he lighted upon something loud and incomprehensible that made him smile and nod his head.

  “You better put on your seatbelt,” he said. “They'll ticket you for that shit, believe it or not."

  Kylie buckled her belt.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You came out of nowhere."

  “Anything can happen. Who were those guys?"

  “Tourists."

  “Okay. Hey, you know what?"

  “What?"

  He took his hand off the shifter and pulled Kylie's locator out of his inside jacket pocket.

  “I bet you I can fix this gizmo."

  “Would you bet your soul on it?"

  “Why not?” He grinned.

  He stopped at his apartment to pick up his tools, and Kylie waited in the car. There was a clock on the dashboard. 11:45 A.M. She set the timer on her wrist chronometer.

  Twelve hours and change.

  They sat in a coffee bar in Belltown. More incomprehensible music thumped from box speakers bracketed near the ceiling. Paintings by some local artist decorated the walls, violent slashes of color, faces of dogs and men and women drowning, mouths gaping.

  Kylie kept an eye open for Tourists.

  Toby hunched over her locator, a jeweler's kit unrolled next to his espresso. He had the back off the device and was examining its exotic components with the aid of a magnifying lens and a battery operated light of high intensity. He had removed his jacket and was wearing a black sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. His forearms were hairy. A tattoo of blue thorns braceleted his right wrist. He was quiet for a considerable time, his attention focused. Kylie drank her second espresso, like the queen of the world, like it was nothing to just ask for coffee this good and get it.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Ah."

  “What?"

  “Ah, what is this thing?"

  “You said you didn't need to know."

  “I don't need to know, I just want to know. After all, according to you, I'm betting my immortal soul that I can fix it, so it'd be nice to know what it does."

  “We don't always get to know the nice things, do we?” Kylie said. “Besides, I don't believe in souls. That was just something to say.” Something her mother had told her, she thought. The Old Men didn't talk about souls. They talked about zoos.

  “You sure downed that coffee fast. You want to go for three?"

  “Yeah."

  He chuckled and gave her a couple of dollars and she went to the bar and got another espresso, head buzzing in a very good way.

  “It's a locator,” she said, taking pity on him, after returning to the table and sitting down.

  “Yeah? What's it locate?"

  “The city's Eternity Core."

  “Oh, that explains everything. What's an eternity core?"

  “It's an alien machine that generates an energy field around the city and preserves it in a sixteen hour time loop."

  “Gotcha."

  “Now can you fix it?"

  “Just point out one thing."

  She slurped up her third espresso. “Okay."

  “What's the power source? I don't see anything that even vaguely resembles a battery."

  She leaned in close, their foreheads practically touching. She pointed with the chipped nail of her pinky finger.

  “I think it's that coily thing,” she said.

  He grunted. She didn't draw back. She was smelling him, smelling his skin. He lifted his gaze from the guts of the locator. His eyes were pale blue, the irises circled with black rings.

  “You're kind of a spooky chick,” he said.

  “Kind of."

  “I like spooky."

  “Where I come from,” Kylie said, “almost all the men are impotent."

  “Yeah?"

  She nodded.

  “Where do you come from,” he asked, “the east side?"

  “East side of hell."

  “Sounds like it,” he said.

  She kissed him, impulsively, her blood singing with caffeine and long-unrequited pheromones. Then she sat back and wiped her lips with her palm and stared hard at him.

  “I wish you hadn't done that,” she said.

  “Me."

  “Just fix the locator, okay?"

  “Spooky,” he said, picking up a screwdriver with a blade not much bigger than a spider's leg.

  A little while later she came back from the bathroom and he had put the locator together and was puzzling over the touchpad. He had found the power button. The two inch square display glowed the blue of cold starlight. She slipped it from his hand and activated the grid. A pinhead hotspot immediately began blinking.

  “It work okay?” Toby asked.

  “Yes.” She hesitated, then said, “Let's go for a drive. I'll navigate."

  They did that.

  Kylie liked the little, round canary car. It felt luxurious and utilitarian at the same time. Letting the locator guide her, she directed Toby. After many false turns and an accumulated two point six miles on the odometer, she said:

  “Stop. No, keep going, but not too fast."

  The car juddered as he manipulated clutch, brake, and acce
lerator. They rolled past a closed store front on the street level of a four story building on First Avenue, some kind of sex shop, the plate glass soaped and brown butcher paper tacked up on the inside.

  Two men in cheap business suits loitered in front of the building. Tourists.

  Kylie scrunched down in her seat.

  “Don't look at those guys,” she said. “Just keep driving."

  “Whatever."

  Later on they were parked under the monorail tracks eating submarine sandwiches. Kylie couldn't get over how great everything was, the food, the coffee, the damn air. All of it the way things used to be. She could hardly believe how great it had been, how much had been lost.

  “Okay,” she said, kind of talking to herself, “so they know I'm here and they're guarding the Core."

  “Those bastards,” Toby said.

  “You wouldn't think it was so funny if you knew what they really were."

  “They looked like used car salesmen."

  “They're Tourists,” Kylie said.

  “Oh my God! More tourists!"

  Kylie chewed a mouthful of sub. She'd taken too big a bite. Every flavor was like a drug. Onions, provolone, turkey, mustard, pepper.

  “So where are the evil tourists from?” Toby asked. “California?"

  “Another dimensional reality."

  “That's what I said."

  Kylie's chronometer toned softly. Ten hours.

  Inside the yellow car there were many smells and one of them was Toby.

  “Do you have any more tattoos?” she asked.

  “One. It's—"

  “Don't tell me,” she said.

  “Okay."

  “I want you to show me. But not here. At the place where you live."

  “You want to come to my apartment?"

  “Your apartment, yes."

  “Okay, spooky.” He grinned. So did she.

  Some precious time later the chronometer toned again. It wasn't on her wrist anymore. It was on the hardwood floor tangled up in her clothes.

  Toby, who was standing naked by the refrigerator holding a bottle of grape juice, said, “Why's your watch keep doing that?"

  “It's a countdown,” Kylie said, looking at him.