Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The Chief Executive continued, “Though the perpetrators of this cowardly attack are still unknown, we can take heart from our successes in thwarting their despicable deeds. The public servants and ordinary citizens who have responded so well in this crisis deserve our gratitude. They have all shown the enemies of freedom how resilient we Americans are!"

  Steaman watched the multiple large TV monitors lining the room showing him standing beside the president on the podium and pondered the irony of his situation. The government had decided to cast him as the nation's savior—ignoring the inadvertent contribution his research likely played in producing this disaster.

  The president concluded, “But despite dealing with his own disability, Dr. Steaman persevered until a cure was found. Now I'll let him update all of you regarding the latest developments on eradicating this plague."

  Steaman watched countless pairs of hands applaud him as he replaced the president at the lectern. His images on the scattered TV monitors showed him nervously adjusting the knot in his tie. As he shuffled his notes, the neuroscientist thought for a moment about what had brought him and the nation to this moment.

  Nature had played a cruel prank on him—destroying his other career as a part-time concert pianist by making him go deaf at about the same age as one of his musical idols, Beethoven. But he'd adapted—learning to read lips so well a casual observer wouldn't even realize he could hear nothing. And his personal loss had motivated him to discover all he could about how the brain processes music as a substitute for his inability to ever hear it again.

  But as he started to speak, Steaman's attention was caught by a sudden transformation on the TV monitors. Their screens flickered—replaced by dramatically different images.

  As those myriad displays sucked up more and more of his attention, from the corner of his eye Steaman glimpsed the president's mouth sag open. Drool trickled from its corners as the nation's leader and everyone else in the room studied with mounting fascination the hypnotic pictures emanating from the TVs. Like rigid victims staring at Medusa's smiling face they helplessly absorbed those swirling kaleidoscopic hues into their minds—petrified by hallucinogenic images now forever imprisoned within and endlessly repeating inside their brains.

  Elsewhere across the country and around the world, almost everyone watching the live feed of that news conference on their own TVs grew equally spellbound as their eyes locked on the deadly new program that replaced the scheduled one. Those fortunate enough to be away from a television during the first of this latest wave of terrorist attacks would soon learn a newly coined term describing the weapon that simultaneously paralyzed millions of their fellows.

  Surviving experts on how the human brain processes visual stimuli would dub it an “eyeworm."

  Just before the surreal sights flooding his mind from the TV screens erased his sanity in an eternal nightmare of shifting grotesque colors and shapes, Steaman lamented Nature's last joke on him. He knew with crystal clarity that he felt the agonizing effect of those maddening images more intensely than anyone else in the crowded room. Just as nonmusicians were less affected by earworms than individuals with musical training and talent, those with impaired vision were less tortured by viewing an eyeworm. All of his fellow victims here had those paralyzing pictures on the monitors either diluted by being filtered through glasses or contact lenses, or they possessed at best merely normal eyesight without those aids.

  But although it had heartlessly deleted his hearing, Nature had left Steaman's uncorrected vision much better than 20/20.

  Copyright © 2010 H.G. Stratmann

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  Novelette: FARALLON WOMAN by Walter L. Kleine

  "Relativity” applies to all kinds of variables....

  I gathered my courage and said, “Tara, will you marry me?"

  The ring waited, neatly wrapped and hidden. It had been waiting for a couple of months. Now that I'd gotten the words out of my mind and through my mouth, it seemed so easy that I wondered why it had taken me so long.

  Tara Farallon looked across my dining room table, past low-burning candles and almost-empty wine glasses, smiled the quiet, mysterious smile that seduced me six years ago, and said, “No."

  "No?" I wasn't surprised and didn't know why. Stunned. That was it. Stunned, but not surprised, if that makes sense.

  Her smile became oddly, differently, more mysterious. She came to stand behind me, cradling my head between her breasts as her hair fell like a veil over my face. “You want to know why, Jack,” she said tenderly.

  I tried to say, “Yes,” and the word stuck in my throat. Her hands were cool and gentle, caressing my forehead, down my cheeks, and across my shoulders.

  "I can't tell you,” she said, sad and frustrated, as it had been at first when she spoke longingly of her lost memories—the part of her life that was simply . . . gone.

  "You don't have to,” I said, hearing myself as if someone else was talking.

  "I know,” she said. “That's what makes it so hard.” She squeezed my shoulders, and squeezed again, as if she felt my tension and couldn't let go until she'd kneaded it away.

  She walked to my wide front window and silently looked out on the lights of Berkeley, San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

  A ship moved slowly across moonlit water.

  Pale nightglow outlined her body, while flickering highlights danced across the curve of her back as the candles guttered toward extinction.

  Unable to speak into her silence, as if it was something private and sacred, I remembered our first meeting....

  * * * *

  Sandy Applegate, the director of Project Black Box, had called a staff meeting Friday afternoon. Sandy's official, visible job is with Project SETI. Ten years ago, she'd put together a string of stray radar tracks that others considered “glitches” and realized that a starship had crashed in the Pacific, five-hundred-some miles west of San Francisco. The top-secret replacement for the Glomar Explorer fished it off the bottom—and Project Black Box was born. We all had “normal” jobs and worked at Black Box in our “spare” time.

  Roy Barker, our head of Security, was present, frowning. Not a good sign,

  The meeting was the shortest in the history of the project. “Look,” she said, “we've been working insane hours for ten years. Morale is shot to hell. I don't know why the staff divorce rate isn't 80 percent instead of zero. All we've learned is that this wreckage really is an alien starship. Henceforth, no one will work nights or weekends, unless that's the only time you can be here. Everyone will take the full vacation they're entitled to, including accrued back vacation. There will be no staff cuts, but no new hires. If anyone has problems with that, make an appointment to talk to me on Monday. I want everyone out the door by five, except night security."

  Roy said, “All existing security regs remain in place."

  Free translation: The spooks in D.C. were tired of pouring money into a project that produced no results. The budget and staff cuts would come later. Hell, some idiot might decide to make it public!

  The idiots apparently didn't realize that studying Our Bird had sent most of us off in directions we wouldn't have taken if we weren't trying to figure out how the thing was made and how it worked.

  I went home, spent Saturday walking the hills of Tilden Park, reached a decision to stay with Black Box until they threw me out bodily, and went to church for the first time since Black Box began.

  * * * *

  Emma Strom pushed her way through the post-service crowd, coffee cup in hand.

  Em and I almost became lovers, years ago, before we came to our senses and she moved north to some hospital or other to head up a research and rehab department for patients with traumatic memory loss, and then moved back . . . but somehow, one way or another, our almost-relationship gave each of us something we needed. I'm still not sure what it was, but it was real. I hadn't seen her in years.

  She said, “Jack, I'd like you to meet Tara F
arallon."

  Only then did I realize that someone was with her—a thin, exotic-looking woman with long, flowing, midnight hair, wearing a short black dress and flat shoes. She was lugging a shoulder bag several times the size of my briefcase as if it didn't weigh a thing.

  Tara smiled, and I was lost.

  Em said, and I hardly heard her, “Tara's my prize patient. The Coast Guard found her near the Farallons, miles from land, stark naked, the only survivor of a party boat that blew up and sank. It's a miracle she didn't drown or die of hypothermia like the others. She had no memory, no language but animal grunts—nothing."

  I vaguely remembered hearing about the “Farallon woman,” back when I was a lot more concerned with whether we'd be able to fish Our Bird off the bottom of the Pacific without anyone figuring out what it was.

  "Yeah,” said Tara, with that smile, “I couldn't even dress myself. Would you believe a month to learn how to fasten a bra?"

  "But she learned fast! I think it was a block, not total loss of memory—that only happens in bad fiction. Some of the blocks are still there. We keep working on them."

  "Em's my saint and savior, like Helen Keller's Annie Potts."

  Em has the gift of saving people. Maybe she saved me. I'm not sure from what, but that's what it feels like when I think of her, like in our relationship she was the visiting savior who came, did what was needed, and left. I've often wondered whether I did something similar for her. I hope I did.

  She said, “It took Tara more than a year to relearn, or remember, language, but since then it's like she sees the title of a book and knows what's in it."

  "I read fast,” said Tara. “I expect to get my Ph.D. in history next June. I'm dealing with the final formalities. I've gotten really interested in math and physics, which drives my history profs nuts. They keep muttering about ‘perpetual student’ and stuff like that, but I think life should be about learning everything! I'm having trouble with technical terms and words. It's like there's a block, or I've gone off in some other direction, or maybe too much has changed while my memories were lost in left field."

  Em said, “I was going to call and invite you to lunch, Jack. I remember how well you explain arcane concepts. I think you could help Tara, if your research leaves you time and hasn't gotten so secret you can't talk about anything but the weather and politics."

  My talent for explaining the arcane is an unwritten part of my job at Black Box. I'm the guy who can help anybody talk to anyone else about anything, never mind whether it's in my field. I said, “Lunch is on me."

  The strange thing was, Tara understood at once that I couldn't mention where I worked, other than my visible position as a part-time lecturer and researcher at Cal Berkeley. Some of the “research” I do through Cal and the Lawrence Livermore Labs—which allows me to “invent” or “discover” what we learn from Our Bird—is classified, which makes good cover for my time at Black Box.

  We had lunch at a nice café in Kensington, not far from the church. Tara's huge shoulder bag contained a laptop and books and papers about molecular-scale miniaturization of chip circuits, like she was going after simultaneous Ph.D.s in particle physics, chemistry, optics, fractal geometry, chip design, and related fields, a strange but interesting mix of the theoretical and the practical. I didn't tell her—then—that nobody could do it all. I did ask why someone who presumably once had so much talent and knowledge didn't have fingerprints on file somewhere.

  Tara shrugged, sadly. “We looked. Best guess is that I used to be Doris Marie Black, who ran away from an abusive foster home and vanished. She learned like I do and wanted to know everything, which her foster parents didn't approve of. She apparently took their car and drove more than 150 miles—without driver's ed or a license!—before running it off the road and down an embankment. They found footprints in her size, but no sign of her. She had no fingerprints on file, or some idiot tossed the records after she vanished. I don't think I was Doris—but no one knows. That was when Em decided to legally adopt me, since I needed a real mother to replace the one I can't remember. I bless her every day of my life."

  It seemed natural to invite them to my home to continue the lunch discussion.

  Em had “other commitments."

  Tara accepted happily.

  When we walked in the door she said, in the manner anyone else might ask for a glass of water, “I really don't like clothes. Do you mind?"

  I said, “Hey, this is California.” I didn't think she meant it until she shed her dress the way you'd expect a visitor to take off an overcoat. But when she did . . . well, I couldn't very well change my mind. The strange thing was that her body language told me she meant it exactly as she said it; that she wasn't coming on to me and didn't expect me to come on to her. She didn't give me time to think that I'd never met anyone who was more naturally dressed nude than clothed.

  I shed my tie and unbuttoned my collar.

  She said, “When it gets warmer, we can go to nude beaches and talk there. You've been to them, haven't you?"

  "Uh, no."

  "There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like lying on the sand by the sea, letting the sun and wind kiss your skin.” She opened her computer and a couple of books on my dining room table. “What I don't understand is..."

  We talked about odd bits and pieces of esoterica of fractal geometry, chip design and manufacturing techniques, molecular chemistry—stuff that's my passion—and kept going and going.

  About two am, she put on her clothes and went home. Only then did I stop to think about the strangeness of spending almost twelve hours with a nude woman—a very erotic nude woman!—without considering it a sexual experience. It wasn't that she wasn't sexy, or that I didn't respond to her, just that we didn't do anything about it, no more than we would have had she been fully dressed. The really strange thing was that it seemed so natural, as if we'd known each other all our lives.

  And, when I could take time to stop and think about it, that sense of something exotic when I first saw her was very real. She mentioned casually that one of the reasons they thought she might have been Doris Marie Black was that to all appearances she had parts of many races in her genetics, and Doris was of very mixed ancestry. Tara looked like she had a little of just about all the peoples of Earth in her. Her skin was an interesting shade of copper, which I'd assumed—until I had time to think about it—was a product of time spent under the sun. Some of it might be . . . but . . . I wondered, and decided to ask no questions she couldn't answer.

  Three months later, we visited the Red and White Beach.

  She was right.

  After that, when she came to my house, I took off my clothes, too.

  On the night she got her Ph.D., we made love.

  She didn't put her history Ph.D. to professional use, but started using the math and physics we discussed long before she got her second Ph.D.

  She never asked about my classified work, not once. I didn't ask about hers. I learned of it through questions she asked in our long discussions of the mysteries of the universe we'd dedicated our lives to exploring—questions that could only come from such a source.

  Her work was so brilliant, her recognition so instant, that I wondered whether she'd once been part of some project as black as Black Box.

  I mentioned her to Roy.

  Roy had heard of her and checked. He said he couldn't find anything. That might mean there was a project, somewhere, even more secret than ours. If there was, I couldn't imagine why they hadn't come to get her long ago . . . unless maybe they had, but of course she could no more talk about it than I could talk about Black Box.

  * * * *

  I stared at Tara's shadowed, seductive back, all the questions I couldn't make myself ask stampeding through my mind:

  Is there someone else?

  What about us, now?

  Why?

  And so on.

  She broke the long silence, facing the window, arms crossed under her breasts. “Jack, I
think this isn't the right thing to say, but I don't know what else . . . how else . . . Jack, I wish you hadn't asked. I'm honored; touched; I love you more than I can believe, more than you could believe if I had words to tell you. I want us to go on just like we have, but I don't know whether—well, I think I can, but I don't know whether you can."

  I got up and went to stand beside her, feeling like I walked in a dream, or in numb, unfeeling weightlessness. “Tara, I wish I was half as good at understanding the mysteries of relationships as I am at solving the mysteries of the universe."

  She leaned against me, inviting the hug I desperately needed to give.

  "I don't want to lose what we have, Tara."

  "Nor do I,” she said, long minutes later, and more long minutes before we let go.

  I poured the rest of the wine, and we sat and stared at each other until the candles guttered into darkness.

  Somebody must have once said something like, “When you can't think of anything to say, make love."

  We did.

  Long, slow, intense, and then a second time before we could come down from the peak of the first.

  As I drifted off to sleep, our bodies entwined, she whispered in my ear, or maybe I dreamed it, “Jack, maybe you should quit that thing you're doing."

  And I replied, or dreamed, “Yeah, maybe . . . it's been slow..."

  Which I didn't remember when the Monday morning alarm drove me out of bed.

  "Jack, can you take the day off?"

  "No, love."

  "I'll fix breakfast."

  * * * *

  I remembered the dream (or had it been real?) while inching along with rush-hour traffic on 880, on the way to Black Box.

  And wondered how I could have been so blind for so long.

  All the times we've gone over the radar scraps of the descent trajectory of our starship, never once had I or anyone I knew found a suggestion of an escape capsule launch or bailout. We found no evidence one had existed, so we assumed the pilot must have escaped in space and been rescued, ignoring the possibility that they had something we wouldn't recognize as escape gear—or that they had something radar couldn't track.