Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

 

Hotel Under the Sand , Kage Baker (Tachyon, July 2009)

Ice , Sarah Beth Durst (Simon & Schuster, October 2009)

Ash , Malinda Lo (Little, Brown and Company, September 2009)

Eyes Like Stars , Lisa Mantchev (Feiwel and Friends, July 2009)

Zoe’s Tale , John Scalzi (Tor Books, August 2008)

When You Reach Me , Rebecca Stead (Wendy Lamb Books, July, 2009)

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making , Catherynne M. Valente (Catherynne M. Valente, June 2009)

Leviathan , Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse, October 2009)

 

SHORT STORY

 

HOOVES AND THE HOVEL OF ABDEL JAMEELA

Saladin Ahmed

 

 

FROM THE AUTHOR: “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” is actually a prosification of a very short poem I wrote years ago. The poem consisted entirely of a single image — an old man somewhere in the medieval Islamic world defying the narrow-minded by declaring his love for a hooved woman. Translating this image into a story, of course, introduced deeper demands in terms of plot and character. These demands eventually led to the story that appears here. Most of the characters’ names, by the way, are vaguely allegorical or otherwise playful — “Abdel Jameela,” for instance, might be roughly translated as “servant (or slave) of beauty.”

 

 

A S SOON AS I arrive in the village of Beit Zujaaj I begin to hear the mutters about Abdel Jameela, a strange old man supposedly unconnected to any of the local families. Two days into my stay the villagers fall over one another to share with me the rumors that Abdel Jameela is in fact distantly related to the esteemed Assad clan. By my third day in Beit Zujaaj, several of the Assads, omniscient as “important” families always are in these piles of cottages, have accosted me to deny the malicious whispers. No doubt they are worried about the bad impression such an association might make on me, favorite physicker of the Caliph’s own son.

The latest denial comes from Hajjar al-Assad himself, the middle-aged head of the clan and the sort of half-literate lout that passes for a Shaykh in these parts. Desperate for the approval of the young courtier whom he no doubt privately condemns as an overschooled sodomite, bristlebearded Shaykh Hajjar has cornered me in the village’s only café — if the sitting room of a qat-chewing old woman can be called a café by anyone other than bumpkins.

I should not be so hard on Beit Zujaaj and its bumpkins. But when I look at the gray rock-heap houses, the withered gray vegetable-yards, and the stuporous gray lives that fill this village, I want to weep for the lost color of Baghdad.

Instead I sit and listen to the Shaykh.

“Abdel Jameela is not of Assad blood, O learned Professor. My grandfather took mercy, as God tells us we must, on the old man’s mother. Seventy-and-some years ago she showed up in Beit Zujaaj, half-dead from traveling and big with child, telling tales — God alone knows if they were true — of her Assad-clan husband, supposedly slain by highwaymen. Abdel Jameela was birthed and raised here, but he has never been of this village.” Shaykh Hajjar scowls. “For decades now — since I was a boy — he has lived up on the hilltop rather than among us. More of a hermit than a villager. And not of Assad blood,” he says again.

I stand up. I can take no more of the man’s unctuous voice and, praise God, I don’t have to.

“Of course, O Shaykh, of course. I understand. Now, if you will excuse me?”

Shaykh Hajjar blinks. He wishes to say more but doesn’t dare. For I have come from the Caliph’s court.

“Yes, Professor. Peace be upon you.” His voice is like a snuffed candle.

“And upon you, peace.” I head for the door as I speak.

The villagers would be less deferential if they knew of my current position at court — or rather, lack of one. The Caliph has sent me to Beit Zujaaj as an insult. I am here as a reminder that the well-read young physicker with the clever wit and impressive skill, whose company the Commander of the Faithful’s own bookish son enjoys, is worth less than the droppings of the Caliph’s favorite falcon. At least when gold and a Persian noble’s beautiful daughter are involved.

For God’s viceroy the Caliph has seen fit to promise my Shireen to another, despite her love for me. Her husband-to-be is older than her father — too ill, the last I heard, to even sign the marriage contract. But as soon as his palsied, liver-spotted hand is hale enough to raise a pen…

Things would have gone differently were I a wealthy man. Shireen’s father would have heard my proposal happily enough if I’d been able to provide the grand dowry he sought. The Caliph’s son, fond of his brilliant physicker, even asked that Shireen be wedded to me. But the boy’s fondness could only get me so far. The Commander of the Faithful saw no reason to impose a raggedy scholar of a son-in-law on the Persian when a rich old vulture would please the man more. I am, in the Caliph’s eyes, an amusing companion to his son, but one whom the boy will lose like a doll once he grows to love killing and gold-getting more than learning. Certainly I am nothing worth upsetting Shireen’s coin-crazed courtier father over.

For a man is not merely who he is, but what he has. Had I land or caravans I would be a different man — the sort who could compete for Shireen’s hand. But I have only books and instruments and a tiny inheritance, and thus that is all that I am. A man made of books and pittances would be a fool to protest when the Commander of the Faithful told him that his love would soon wed another.

I am a fool.

My outburst in court did not quite cost me my head, but I was sent to Beit Zujaaj “for a time, only, to minister to the villagers as a representative of Our beneficent concern for Our subjects.” And my fiery, tree-climbing Shireen was locked away to await her half-dead suitor’s recovery.

“O Professor! Looks like you might get a chance to see Abdel Jameela for yourself!” Just outside the café, the gravelly voice of Umm Hikma the café-keeper pierces the cool morning air and pulls me out of my reverie. I like old Umm Hikma, with her qat-chewer’s irascibility and her blacksmithish arms. Beside her is a broad-shouldered man I don’t know. He scuffs the dusty ground with his sandal and speaks to me in a worried stutter.

“P-peace be upon you, O learned Professor. We haven’t yet met. I’m Yousef, the porter.”

“And upon you, peace, O Yousef. A pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine, O Professor. But I am here on behalf of another. To bring you a message. From Abdel Jameela.”

For the first time since arriving in Beit Zujaaj, I am surprised. “A message? For me?”

“Yes, Professor. I am just returned from the old hermit’s hovel, a half-day’s walk from here, on the hilltop. Five, six times a year I bring things to Abdel Jameela, you see. In exchange he gives a few coins, praise God.”

“And where does he get these coins, up there on the hill?” Shaykh Hajjar’s voice spits out the words from the café doorway behind me. I glare and he falls silent.

I turn back to the porter. “What message do you bear, O Yousef? And how does this graybeard know of me?”

Broad-shouldered Yousef looks terrified. The power of the court. “Forgive me, O learned Professor! Abdel Jameela asked what news from the village and I… I told him that a court physicker was in Beit Zujaaj. He grew excited and told me beg upon his behalf for your aid. He said his wife was horribly ill. He fears she will lose her legs, and perhaps her life.”

“His wife?” I’ve never heard of a married hermit.

Umm Hikma raises her charcoaled eyebrows, chews her qat, and says nothing.

Shaykh Hajjar is more vocal. “No one save God knows where she came from, or how many years she’s been up there. The people have had glimpses only. She doesn’t wear the head scarf that our women wear. She is wrapped all in black cloth from head to toe and mesh-masked like a foreigner. She has spoken to no one. Do you know, O Professor, what the old rascal said to me years ago when I asked why his wife never comes down to the village? He said, ‘She is very religious’! The old dog! Where is it written that a woman can’t speak to other women? Other women who are good Muslims? The old son of a whore! What should his wife fear here? The truth of the matter is—”

“The truth, O Shaykh, is that in this village only your poor wife need live in fear!” Umm Hikma lets out a rockslide chuckle and gives me a conspiratorial wink. Before the Shaykh can sputter out his offended reply, I turn to Yousef again.

“On this visit, did you see Abdel Jameela’s wife?” If he can describe the sick woman, I may be able to make some guesses about her condition. But the porter frowns.

“He does not ask me into his home, O Professor. No one has been asked into his home for thirty years.”

Except for the gifted young physicker from the Caliph’s court. Well, it may prove more interesting than what I’ve seen of Beit Zujaaj thus far. I do have a fondness for hermits. Or, rather, for the idea of hermits. I can’t say that I have ever met one. But as a student I always fantasized that I would one day be a hermit, alone with God and my many books in the barren hills.

That was before I met Shireen.

“There is one thing more,” Yousef says, his broad face looking even more nervous. “He asked that you come alone.”

My heartbeat quickens, though there is no good reason for fear. Surely this is just an old hater-of-men’s surly whim. A physicker deals with such temperamental oddities as often as maladies of the liver or lungs. Still… “Why does he ask this?”

“He says that his wife is very modest and that in her state the frightening presence of men might worsen her illness.”

Shaykh Hajjar erupts at this. “Bah! Illness! More likely they’ve done something shameful they don’t want the village to know of. Almighty God forbid, maybe they—”

Whatever malicious thing the Shaykh is going to say, I silence it with another glare borrowed from the Commander of the Faithful. “If the woman is ill, it is my duty as a Muslim and a physicker to help her, whatever her husband’s oddities.”

Shaykh Hajjar’s scowl is soul-deep “Forgive me, O Professor, but this is not a matter of oddities. You could be in danger. We know why Abdel Jameela’s wife hides away, though some here fear to speak of such things.”

Umm Hikma spits her qat into the road, folds her powerful arms, and frowns. “In the name of God! Don’t you believe, Professor, that Abdel Jameela, who couldn’t kill an ant, means you any harm.” She jerks her chin at Shaykh Hajjar. “And you, O Shaykh, by God, please don’t start telling your old lady stories again!”

The Shaykh wags a finger at her. “Yes, I will tell him, woman! And may Almighty God forgive you for mocking your Shaykh!” Shaykh Hajjar turns to me with a grim look. “O learned Professor, I will say it plainly: Abdel Jameela’s wife is a witch.”

“A witch?” The last drops of my patience with Beit Zujaaj have dripped through the water clock. It is time to be away from these people. “Why would you say such a thing, O Shaykh?”

The Shaykh shrugs. “Only God knows for certain,” he says. His tone belies his words.

“May God protect us all from slanderous ill-wishers,” I say.

He scowls. But I have come from the Caliph’s court, so his tone is venomously polite. “It is no slander, O Professor. Abdel Jameela’s wife consorts with ghouls. Travelers have heard strange noises coming from the hilltop. And hoofprints have been seen on the hill-path. Cloven hoofprints, O Professor, where there are neither sheep nor goats.”

“No! Not cloven hoofprints!” I say.

But the Shaykh pretends not to notice my sarcasm. He just nods. “There is no strength and no safety but with God.”

“God is great,” I say in vague, obligatory acknowledgment. I have heard enough rumor and nonsense. And a sick woman needs my help. “I will leave as soon as I gather my things. This Abdel Jameela lives up the road, yes? On a hill? If I walk, how long will it take me?”

“If you do not stop to rest, you will see the hill in the distance by noontime prayer,” says Umm Hikma, who has a new bit of qat going in her cheek.

“I will bring you some food for your trip, Professor, and the stream runs alongside the road much of the way, so you’ll have no need of water.” Yousef seems relieved that I’m not angry with him, though I don’t quite know why I would be. I thank him then speak to the group.

“Peace be upon you all.”

“And upon you, peace,” they say in near-unison.

In my room, I gather scalpel, saw, and drugs into my pack — the kid-leather pack that my beloved gifted to me. I say more farewells to the villagers, firmly discourage their company, and set off alone on the road. As I walk, rumors of witches and wife-beaters are crowded out of my thoughts by the sweet remembered sweat-and-ambergris scent of my Shireen.

After an hour on the rock-strewn road, the late-morning air warms. The sound of the stream beside the road almost calms me.

Time passes and the sun climbs high in the sky. I take off my turban and caftan, make ablution by the stream, and say my noon prayers. Not long after I begin walking again, I can make out what must be Beit Zujaaj Hill off in the distance. In another hour or so I am at its foot.

It is not much of a hill, actually. There are buildings in Baghdad that are taller. A relief, as I am not much of a hill-climber. The rocky path is not too steep, and green sprays of grass and thyme dot it — a pleasant enough walk, really. The sun sinks a bit in the sky and I break halfway up the hill for afternoon prayers and a bit of bread and green apple. I try to keep my soul from sinking as I recall Shireen, her skirts tied up scandalously, knocking apples down to me from the high branches of the Caliph’s orchard trees.

The rest of the path proves steeper and I am sweating through my galabeya when I finally reach the hilltop. As I stand there huffing and puffing my eyes land on a small structure thirty yards away.

If Beit Zujaaj Hill is not much of a hill, at least the hermit’s hovel can be called nothing but a hovel. Stones piled on stones until they have taken the vague shape of a dwelling. Two sickly chickens scratching in the dirt. As soon as I have caught my breath a man comes walking out to meet me. Abdel Jameela.

He is shriveled with a long gray beard and a ragged kaffiyeh, and I can tell he will smell unpleasant even before he reaches me. How does he already know I’m here? I don’t have much time to wonder, as the old man moves quickly despite clearly gouty legs.

“You are the physicker, yes? From the Caliph’s court?”

No “peace be upon you,” no “how is your health,” no “pleased to meet you.” Life on a hilltop apparently wears away one’s manners. As if reading my thoughts, the old man bows his head in supplication.

“Ah. Forgive my abruptness, O learned Professor. I am Abdel Jameela. Thank you. Thank you a thousand times for coming.” I am right about his stink, and I thank God he does not try to embrace me. With no further ceremony I am led into the hovel.

There are a few stained and tattered carpets layered on the packed-dirt floor. A straw mat, an old cushion, and a battered tea tray are the only furnishings. Except for the screen. Directly opposite the door is a tall, incongruously fine cedar-and-pearl latticed folding screen, behind which I can make out only a vague shape. It is a more expensive piece of furniture than any of the villagers could afford, I’m sure. And behind it, no doubt, sits Abdel Jameela’s wife.

The old man makes tea hurriedly, clattering the cups but saying nothing the whole while. The scent of the seeping mint leaves drifts up, covering his sour smell. Abdel Jameela sets my tea before me, places a cup beside the screen, and sits down. A hand reaches out from behind the screen to take the tea. It is brown and graceful. Beautiful , if I am to speak truly. I realize I am staring and tear my gaze away.

The old man doesn’t seem to notice. “I don’t spend my time among men, Professor. I can’t talk like a courtier. All I can say is that we need your help.”

“Yousef the porter has told me that your wife is ill, O Uncle. Something to do with her legs, yes? I will do whatever I can to cure her, Almighty God willing.”

For some reason, Abdel Jameela grimaces at this. Then he rubs his hands together and gives me an even more pained expression. “O Professor, I must show you a sight that will shock you. My wife… Well, words are not the way.”

With a grunt the old man stands and walks halfway behind the screen. He gestures for me to follow then bids me stop a few feet away. I hear rustling behind the screen, and I can see a woman’s form moving, but still Abdel Jameela’s wife is silent.

“Prepare yourself, Professor. Please show him, O beautiful wife of mine.” The shape behind the screen shifts. There is a scraping noise. And a woman’s leg ending in a cloven hoof stretches out from behind the screen.

I take a deep breath. “God is Great,” I say aloud. This, then, is the source of Shaykh Hajjar’s fanciful grumbling. But such grotesqueries are not unheard of to an educated man. Only last year another physicker at court showed me a child — born to a healthy, pious man and his modest wife — all covered in fur. This same physicker told me of another child he’d seen born with scaly skin. I take another deep breath. If a hooved woman can be born and live, is it so strange that she might find a mad old man to care for her?

“O my sweetheart!” Abdel Jameela’s whisper is indecent as he holds his wife’s hoof.

And for a moment I see what mad Abdel Jameela sees. The hoofs glossy black beauty, as smoldering as a woman’s eye. It is entrancing….

“O, my wife,” the old man goes on, and runs his crooked old finger over the hoof-cleft slowly and lovingly. “O, my beautiful wife…” The leg flexes, but still no sound comes from behind the screen.

This is wrong. I take a step back from the screen without meaning to. “In the name of God! Have you no shame, old man?”

Abdel Jameela turns from the screen and faces me with an apologetic smile. “I am sorry to say that I have little shame left,” he says.

I’ve never heard words spoken with such weariness. I remind myself that charity and mercy are our duty to God, and I soften my tone. “Is this why you sent for me, Uncle? What would you have me do? Give her feet she was not born with? My heart bleeds for you, truly. But such a thing only God can do.”

Another wrinkled grimace. “O Professor, I am afraid that I must beg your forgiveness. For I have lied to you. And for that I am sorry. For it is not my wife that needs your help, but I.”

“But her — pardon me, Uncle — her hoof.”

“Yes! Its curve! Like a jet-black half-moon!” The old hermit’s voice quivers and he struggles to keep his gaze on me. Away from his wife’s hoof. “Her hoof is breathtaking, Professor. No, it is I that need your help, for I am not the creature I need to be.”

“I don’t understand, Uncle.” Exasperation burns away my sympathy. I’ve walked for hours and climbed a hill, small though it was. I am in no mood for a hermit’s games. Abdel Jameela winces at the anger in my eyes and says “My… my wife will explain.”

I will try, my husband .

The voice is like song and there is the strong scent of sweet flowers. Then she steps from behind the screen and I lose all my words. I scream. I call on God, and I scream.

Abdel Jameela’s wife is no creature of God. Her head is a goat’s and her mouth a wolfs muzzle. Fish-scales and jackal-hair cover her. A scorpion’s tail curls behind her. I look into a woman’s eyes set in a demon’s face and I stagger backward, calling on God and my dead mother.

Please, learned one, be calm .

“What… what…” I can’t form the words. I look to the floor. I try to bury my sight in the dirty carpets and hard-packed earth. Her voice is more beautiful than any woman’s. And there is the powerful smell of jasmine and clove. A nightingale sings perfumed words at me while my mind’s eye burns with horrors that would make the Almighty turn away.

If fear did not hold your tongue, you would ask what I am. Men have called my people by many names — ghoul, demon. Does a word matter so very much? What I am, learned one, is Abdel Jameela’s wife .

For long moments I don’t speak. If I don’t speak this nightmare will end. I will wake in Baghdad, or Beit Zujaaj. But I don’t wake.

She speaks again, and I cover my ears, though the sound is beauty itself.

The words you hear come not from my mouth, and you do not hear them with your ears. I ask you to listen with your mind and your heart. We will die, my husband and I, if you will not lend us your skill. Have you, learned one, never needed to be something other that what you are?

Cinnamon scent and the sound of an oasis wind come to me. I cannot speak to this demon. My heart will stop if I do, I am certain. I want to run, but fear has fixed my feet. I turn to Abdel Jameela, who stands there wringing his hands.

“Why am I here, Uncle? God damn you, why did you call me here? There is no sick woman here! God protect me, I know nothing of… of ghouls, or—” A horrible thought comes to me. “You… you are not hoping to make her into a woman? Only God can…”

The old hermit casts his eyes downward. “Please… you must listen to my wife. I beg you.” He falls silent and his wife, behind the screen again, goes on.

My husband and I have been on this hilltop too long, learned one. My body cannot stand so much time away from my people . I smell yellow roses and hear bumblebees droning beneath her voice. If we stay in this place one more season, I will die. And without me to care for him and keep age’s scourge from him, my sweet Abdel Jameela will die, too. But across the desert there is a life for us. My father was a prince among our people. Long ago I left. For many reasons. But I never forsook my birthright. My father is dying now, I have word. He has left no sons and so his lands are mine. Mine, and my handsome husband’s .

In her voice is a chorus of wind chimes. Despite myself, I lift my eyes. She steps from behind the screen, clad now in a black abaya and a mask. Behind the mask’s mesh is the glint of wolf-teeth. I look again to the floor, focusing on a faded blue spiral in the carpet and the kindness in that voice.

But my people do not love men. I cannot claim my lands unless things change. Unless my husband shows my people that he can change .

Somehow I force myself to speak. “What… what do you mean, change?”

There is a cymbal-shimmer in her voice and sandalwood incense fills my nostrils. O learned one, you will help me to make these my Abdel Jameela’s .

She extends her slender brown hands, ablaze with henna. In each she holds a length of golden sculpture — goatlike legs ending in shining, cloven hooves. A thick braid of gold thread dances at the end of each statue-leg, alive.

Madness, and I must say so though this creature may kill me for it. “I have not the skill to do this! No man alive does!”

You will not do this through your skill alone. Just as I cannot do it through my sorcery alone. My art will guide yours as your hands work . She takes a step toward me and my shoulders clench at the sound of her hooves hitting the earth.

“No! No… I cannot do this thing.”

“Please!” I jump at Abdel Jameela’s voice, nearly having forgotten him. There are tears in the old man’s eyes as he pulls at my galabeya, and his stink gets in my nostrils. “Please listen! We need your help. And we know what has brought you to Beit Zujaaj.” The old man falls to his knees before me. “Please! Would not your Shireen aid us?”

With those words he knocks the wind from my lungs. How can he know that name? The Shaykh hadn’t lied — there is witchcraft at work here, and I should run from it.

But, Almighty God, help me, Abdel Jameela is right. Fierce as she is, Shireen still has her dreamy Persian notions — that love is more important than money or duty or religion. If I turn this old man away…

My throat is dry and cracked. “How do you know of Shireen?” Each word burns.

His eyes dart away. “She has… ways, my wife.”

“All protection comes from God.” I feel foul even as I steel myself with the old words. Is this forbidden? Am I walking the path of those who displease the Almighty? God forgive me, it is hard to know or to care when my beloved is gone. “If I were a good Muslim I would run down to the village now and… and…”

And what, learned one? Spread word of what you have seen? Bring men with spears and arrows? Why would you do this? Vanilla beans and the sound of rain give way to something else. Clanging steel and cleanburning fire. I will not let you harm my husband. What we ask is not disallowed to you. Can you tell me, learned one, that it is in your book of what is blessed and what is forbidden not to give a man golden legs?

It is not. Not in so many words. But this thing can’t be acceptable in God’s eyes. Can it? “Has this ever been done before?”

There are old stories. But it has been centuries . Each of her words spreads perfume and music and she asks, Please, learned one, will you help us? And then one scent rises above the others.

Almighty God protect me, it is the sweat-and-ambergris smell of my beloved. Shireen of the ribbing remark, who in quiet moments confessed her love of my learning. She would help them.

Have I any choice after that? This, then, the fruit of my study. And this my reward for wishing to be more than what I am. A twisted, unnatural path.

“Very well.” I reach for my small saw and try not to hear Abdel Jameela’s weird whimpers as I sharpen it.

I give him poppy and hemlock, but as I work Abdel Jameela still screams, nearly loud enough to make my heart cease beating. His old body is going through things it should not be surviving. And I am the one putting him through these things, with knives and fire and bone-breaking clamps. I wad cotton and stuff it in my ears to block out the hermit’s screams.

But I feel half-asleep as I do so, hardly aware of my own hands. Somehow the demon’s magic is keeping Abdel Jameela alive and guiding me through this grisly task. It is painful, like having two minds crammed inside my skull and shadow-puppet poles lashed to my arms. I am burning up, and I can barely trace my thoughts. Slowly I become aware of the she-ghoul’s voice in my head and the scent of apricots.

Cut there. Now the mercury powder. The cauterizing iron is hot. Put a rag in his mouth so he does not bite his tongue . I flay and cauterize and lose track of time. A fever cooks my mind away. I work through the evening prayer, then the night prayer. I feel withered inside.

In each step Abdel Jameela’s wife guides me. With her magic she rifles my mind for the knowledge she needs and steers my skilled fingers. For a long while there is only her voice in my head and the feeling of bloody instruments in my hands, which move with a life of their own.

Then I am holding a man’s loose tendons in my right hand and thick golden threads in my left. There are shameful smells in the air and Abdel Jameela shouts and begs me to stop even though he is half-asleep with the great pot of drugs I have forced down his throat.

Something is wrong! The she-ghoul screams in my skull and Abdel Jameela passes out. My hands no longer dance magically. The shining threads shrivel in my fist. We have failed, though I know not exactly how.

No! No! Our skill! Our sorcery! But his body refuses! There are funeral wails in the air and the smell of houses burning. My husband! Do something, physicker!

The golden legs turn to dust in my hands. With my ears I hear Abdel Jameela’s wife growl a wordless death-threat.

I deserve death! Almighty God, what have I done? An old man lies dying on my blanket. I have sawed off his legs at a she-ghoul’s bidding. There is no strength save in God! I bow my head.

Then I see them. Just above where I’ve amputated Abdel Jameela’s legs are the swollen bulges that I’d thought came from gout. But it is not gout that has made these. There is something buried beneath the skin of each leg. I take hold of my scalpel and flay each thin thigh. The old man moans with what little life he has left.

What are you doing? Abdel Jameela’s wife asks the walls of my skull. I ignore her, pulling at a flap of the old man’s thigh-flesh, revealing a corrupted sort of miracle.

Beneath Abdel Jameela’s skin, tucked between muscles, are tiny legs. Thin as spindles and hairless. Each folded little leg ends in a miniscule hoof.

Unbidden, a memory comes to me — Shireen and I in the Caliph’s orchards. A baby bird had fallen from its nest. I’d sighed and bit my lip and my Shireen — a dreamer, but not a soft one — had laughed and clapped at my tender-heartedness.

I slide each wet gray leg out from under the flayed skin and gently unbend them. As I flex the little joints, the she-ghoul’s voice returns.

What… what is this, learned one? Tell me!

For a long moment I am mute. Then I force words out, my throat still cracked. “I… I do not know. They are — they look like — the legs of a kid or a ewe still in the womb.”

It is as if she nods inside my mind. Or the legs of one of my people. I have long wondered how a mere man could captivate me so .

“All knowledge and understanding lies with God,” I say. “Perhaps your husband always had these within him. The villagers say he is of uncertain parentage. Or perhaps… Perhaps his love for you… The crippled beggars of Cairo are the most grotesque — and the best — in the world. It is said that they wish so fiercely to make money begging that their souls reshape their bodies from the inside out. Yesterday I saw such stories as nonsense. But yesterday I’d have named you a villager’s fantasy, too.” As I speak I continue to work the little legs carefully, to help their circulation. The she-ghoul’s sorcery no longer guides my hands, but a physicker’s nurturing routines are nearly as compelling. There is weakness here and I do what I can to help it find strength.

The tiny legs twitch and kick in my hands.

Abdel Jameela’s wife howls in my head. They are drawing on my magic. Something pulls at— The voice falls silent.

I let go of the legs and, before my eyes, they begin to grow. As they grow, they fill with color, as if blood flowed into them. Then fur starts to sprout upon them.

“There is no strength or safety but in God!” I try to close my eyes and focus on the words I speak but I can’t. My head swims and my body swoons.

The spell that I cast on my poor husband to preserve him — these hidden hooves of his nurse on it! O, my surprising, wonderful husband! I hear loud lute music and smell lemongrass and then everything around me goes black.

When I wake I am on my back, looking up at a purple sky. An early morning sky. I am lying on a blanket outside the hovel. I sit up and Abdel Jameela hunches over me with his sour smell. Farther away, near the hill-path, I see the black shape of his wife.

“Professor, you are awake! Good!” the hermit says. “We were about to leave.”

But we are glad to have the chance to thank you .

My heart skips and my stomach clenches as I hear that voice in my head again. Kitten purrs and a crushed cardamom scent linger beneath the demon’s words. I look at Abdel Jameela’s legs.

They are sleek and covered in fur the color of almonds. And each leg ends in a perfect cloven hoof. He walks on them with a surprising grace.

Yes, learned one, my beloved husband lives and stands on two hooves. It would not be so if we hadn’t had your help. You have our gratitude .

Dazedly clambering to my feet, I nod in the she-ghoul’s direction. Abdel Jameela claps me on the back wordlessly and takes a few goatstrides toward the hill-path. His wife makes a slight bow to me. With my people, learned one, gratitude is more than a word. Look toward the hovel .

I turn and look. And my breath catches.

A hoard right out of the stories. Gold and spices. Jewels and musks. Silver and silks. Porcelain and punks of aloe.

It is probably ten times the dowry Shireen’s father seeks.

We leave you this and wish you well. I have purged the signs of our work in the hovel. And in the language of the donkeys, I have called two wild asses to carry your goods. No troubles left to bother our brave friend!

I manage to smile gratefully with my head high for one long moment. Blood and bits of the old man’s bone still stain my hands. But as I look on Abdel Jameela and his wife in the light of the sunrise, all my thoughts are not grim or grisly.

As they set off on the hill-path the she-ghoul takes Abdel Jameela’s arm, and the hooves of husband and wife scrabble against the pebbles of Beit Zujaaj Hill. I stand stock-still, watching them walk toward the land of the ghouls.

They cross a bend in the path and disappear behind the hill. And a faint voice, full of mischievous laughter and smelling of early morning love in perfumed sheets, whispers in my head. No troubles at all, learned one. For last night your Shireen’s husband-to-be lost his battle with the destroyer of delights .

Can it really be so? The old vulture dead? And me a rich man? I should laugh and dance. Instead I am brought to my knees by the heavy memory of blood-spattered golden hooves. I wonder whether Shireen’s suitor died from his illness, or from malicious magic meant to reward me. I fear for my soul. For a long while I kneel there and cry.

But after a while I can cry no longer. Tears give way to hopes I’d thought dead. I stand and thank Beneficent God, hoping it is not wrong to do so. Then I begin to put together an acceptable story about a secretly wealthy hermit who has rewarded me for saving his wife’s life. And I wonder what Shireen and her father will think of the man I have become.

 

 

Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. He has been a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer and the Harper’s Pen Award for Best Sword and Sorcery / Heroic Fantasy Short Story. His fiction has appeared in magazines and podcasts including Strange Horizons, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine , and PodCastle , and has been translated into Portuguese, Czech, and Dutch. His fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon is forthcoming from DAW Books. His website is www.saladinahmed.com.

 

 

I REMEMBER THE FUTURE

Michael A. Burstein

 

 

FROM THE AUTHOR: When Apex Publications decided to publish a collection of my award-nominated short stories, I asked the readers of my LiveJournal if they could help me come up with an appropriate title. My high school friend Andrew Marc Greene suggested the title I Remember the Future as a fitting one for the type of stories I tend to write. I agreed, but that meant writing a new story with that title as well. I kept running the phrase “I Remember the Future” over and over in my head, but no story idea came to mind. And then on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 18, 2008, we heard the news that Arthur C. Clarke had died. (Oddly, because Clarke lived in a time zone farther east, he died on Wednesday, March 19, but those of us living in the West heard the news on Tuesday. It’s almost like time travel.)

Late that night, as I stared into a mirror and thought about how the last of the Big Three was gone, I suddenly realized what this story had to be about. I quickly shared the idea with my wife, Nomi, and then jotted down a bunch of notes so I wouldn’t forget it. I also called Janna Silverstein, since I needed to tell another science fiction and fantasy writer about the epiphany I just had, and it was too late to call anyone on the East Coast. “I Remember the Future” is about an elderly science-fiction writer named Abraham Beard (the name is a joke between my high school friend Charles Ardai and me, as we both have used it for writers or editors who are characters in our stories). Abraham has spent his life writing of various hopeful futures, and he is disappointed that none of them have come to pass. He reaches out to his adult daughter Emma, to connect with the future one last time, but Emma and her own family are moving away, and she rejects his overtures as being too little, too late. From Emma’s perspective, her father spent far too much of his life pursuing his writing career with his head lost in the clouds and too little time connecting with his family. Abraham acknowledges this in the story when he says, “I consider once again telling her what I’ve told her before: that times were tough, that money was tight, and that Sheila and I both had to work to support Emma properly. But then I recall the many times I shut the door of my home office on Emma to meet a deadline, and I realize that the chance for apologies and explanations has passed far into the mists of time.” As the story ends, Abraham connects with his other progeny, the characters he created in his infinite worlds.

The story is somber but hopeful. I had fun writing the selections from Abraham’s own novels that I worked throughout the narrative, as I had to capture the feel of science fiction from the various decades of the twentieth century. The story also tackles head-on the minor controversy that nowadays many science fiction and fantasy writers are looking to the past more than to the future; the story suggests that we should embrace that past rather than reject it. As Shakespeare said in The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue.”

“I Remember the Future” isn’t my first foray into recursive science fiction meant to honor those writers who came before us; my Hugo nominees “Cosmic Corkscrew” and “Paying It Forward” also show my interest in this theme.

“I Remember the Future” is dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke.

 

 

I REMEMBER THE FUTURE.

The future was glorious once. It was filled with sleek silver spaceships, lunar colonies, and galactic empires. The horizon seemed within reach; we could almost grasp the stars if we would but try.

I helped to create that future once. We created it out of our blood, sweat, and tears for a penny a word. We churned that future out onto reams of wood pulp paper, only to see the bitter acids of the decades eat it away. I can still smell the freshness of that world, amidst the stale odors left in the libraries, real ink on real paper.

But I despair that no one else does.

 

Smith turned to Angela, whose face was obscured by the glass plate of her helmet. Despite the higher gravity and the bulkiness of his environmental suit, he felt like jumping a hundred feet into the vacuum.

“Angela, look!”

“What is it?” she asked. She reached over with her gloved hands to take the object from him.

“Gently,” he said as he handed over the sheet. “It’s paper. Real paper.”

Angela took it and handled it almost reverently. Once again, she looked around the large cavern at the many inscribed marble columns, flashing her light into every dark corner.

“Paper? That dead wood stuff you told me about? Made from trees?”

Smith nodded. “It’s true. We’ve found the ancient lost library of New Earth. And maybe, just maybe, in these volumes we’ll find the final clue that will lead us to the location of the original human home world.”

—Abraham Beard,

The Searchers (1950)

 

The day after my diagnosis, Emma comes to visit me at home. When she rings the bell, I get up from my seat in the living room, where I’ve been watching Forbidden Planet on DVD for the past hour, and I shuffle over to the front door at the end of the hall.

A cold wind blasts me as I creak open the door. I shiver momentarily as Emma strides past me.

As I shut the door, she opens the hall closet and lets her hands dance upon the hangers. She ignores the empty wooden ones and selects a blue plastic one.

“It’s the middle of the day and you’re still in your bathrobe?” she asks me as she slips off her overcoat.

“I’m retired and it’s the weekend,” I say. “Why should I get dressed up?”

“Because your only daughter is coming to visit? Oh, never mind.” She hangs up her coat.

“Where’s Frank and the kids?” I ask her.

She sniffs. “They decided to stay at home.”

The kids decided to stay at home. My grandchildren, Zachary and Kenneth. Or Zach and Ken, as Emma told me they prefer to be called. I haven’t seen them in months. “They didn’t feel like schlepping out to Queens?”

“It’s too cold.”

“So why the visit?”

Emma purses her lips and glances at the floor. “I thought it would be nice to see you.”

I know there must be more to it than that, but I don’t press it. Emma will tell me in her own sweet time. “Are you hungry?” I ask as we walk to the living room. “Do you want something to eat?”

She smiles. “What are you going to offer this time? A red pepper? A clementine?”

As it so happens, the refrigerator crisper holds many peppers and clementines, but I refuse to give Emma the satisfaction. “I thought you might want some ice cream.”

“Ice cream?” she asks with bemusement. “Sure, I’d love some ice cream. Where is it?”

“It’s in the freezer,” I tell her, although it should be obvious. Where else does one keep ice cream?

The first thing Larry noticed was the cold. It filled the core of his being, then slowly began to recede as tendrils of warmth entered his body.

Then he noticed a faint white light blinking in the distance. Either the light became larger or it moved closer, and it continued to pulsate in a regular rhythm.

And finally he heard a hiss, the sound of air leaking quickly across a barrier. He tried to breathe and felt as if his lungs were filled with liquid. He tried again—

—when suddenly a door swung open, and Larry realized that he was floating vertically in a round glass chamber. The gelatinous liquid surrounding him quickly drained, and Larry fell into the arms of two men in silver jumpsuits.

“Easy now,” the taller one said. “Your muscles need time to adjust.”

Larry shook off their support. “I’m fine,” he croaked. He coughed up some fluid and spoke again. “I don’t need any help.”

“If you say so,” the taller man said.

“I do, indeed,” Larry answered. He stretched out of his stoop, and although his legs felt like they would give way, he refused to give these strangers the satisfaction of seeing him fall.

“Where am I? What’s going on?” he asked.

“All in due time,” the shorter man said in a thin, reedy voice.

Larry turned to stare at him. “I am Larry Garner, the richest man on Earth, and I demand you tell me what’s going on, now!”

The two men looked at each other, and the shorter one shrugged. “Usually, we give people more time to adjust, but if you insist—”

“I do!”

“You’re in the future,” the man said. “It’s two thousand years since you died.”

Larry fainted.

—Abraham Beard,

The Unfrozen (1955)

 

“Earth to Dad? Hello? Are you there?”

Emma is waving a hand in front of my face.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking. My mind—”

“Was elsewhen. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

I realize that we are sitting in the dining room and that Emma has scooped two bowls of ice cream, one for each of us. I pick up my spoon and take a bite. It’s butter pecan.

I hate butter pecan, but I bought some for when Zach and Ken were last here.

The ice cream is very badly freezer-burned. It’s so cold against my tongue that it hurts. I put the spoon down into the bowl and watch Emma eat her ice cream.

“You can take the rest of it when you leave,” I say. “The kids might enjoy it.”

Emma gives me a half-smile. “Even with the cold outside, it’ll probably still melt before I get it home.”

“Oh,” I say.

We sit in silence for a few moments, the only sound the tick of the analog clock in the other room, the clock my wife, Sheila, bought when we got married, the clock that hangs above the flatscreen television set that Emma and Frank gave me for my last birthday.

“So, how are things?”

“Things are good.”

“The kids doing well at school?”

“Yeah.” Emma smiles. “Zach did a PowerPoint presentation on blogging for one of his teachers.”

I nod and try to keep my face neutral, but Emma sees right through me. “You disapprove?”

“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s just—”

“I know what it is. Rant number twenty-three.”

“I’m not that predictable.”

She crosses her arms. “Fine. Then what were you thinking?”

I pause for a moment, but she doesn’t sound sarcastic so I say, “When I was growing up, the future seemed so full of possibilities.”

“We have possibilities, Dad.”

I shake my head. “We’ve turned inward. All of us have. We used to dream of a world as big as the sky. Now we’re all hunched over our tiny screens.”

Emma rolls her eyes. “Like I said, rant number twenty-three. Within three sentences, you’re going from the Internet to the lack of a manned space program again.”

“You don’t think it’s a problem?”

“It’s just that I’ve heard it before.”

“The more true something is, the more it bears repeating.”

“Nothing bears repeating if you can’t do anything about it.” She sighs. “I mean, seriously, what did you ever expect me to do at the age of twelve when you first warned me about the eventual heat-death of the universe?”

The starship HaTikvah had finally made it to the edge of the universe. A hopeful mood filled the souls of the fifty thousand humans and aliens who occupied the ship, each the last of their kind.

On the bridge, Captain Sandra McAllister spoke into her intercom. “Fellow sentients,” she said, “this is the proverbial ‘it.’ The universe is ending, the embers of the stars are fading into nothing, and in a moment we’ll tap into the power of Black Hole Omega. If all goes according to plan, we’ll break out of our dying universe and into a new one, one that’s young and vibrant. Our own personal lives will continue, but more importantly, we will continue to exist in order to be able to remember all of those who came before us.”

McAllister turned to her first officer and said, “Any time you’re ready, Jacob. Push the button.”

Jacob nodded and reached out with his spindly fingers to the Doorway Device. But just as he was about to depress the red button, a blast rocked the ship.

“What was that?” he cried out.

Virilion, the ship’s robotic helmsman, replied in a croak, “It’s the Nichashim! They’ve come to stop us!”

McAllister narrowed her eyes. “Like hell they will,” she said. “Virilion, fire at will! Blast them out of our sky!”

—Abraham Beard,

Fire and Ice (1980)

 

“Dad? Dad?”

“You don’t need to shout.”

“You were gone again,” she says.

“Perhaps,” I say, “I’m turning inward because I’m getting old.”

For the first time since she came into the house today, Emma looks worried. “You’re not that old, Dad.”

I smile at Emma to keep her from noticing the wetness I feel in my eyes. “That’s nice of you to say, but it’s not true. I am old.”

“You’re only as old as you feel. You told me that once.”

I shake my head. “It’s hard to feel young when so many of my colleagues are gone.” First Robert, then Isaac, now Arthur , I think, although I don’t say it aloud. I know Emma too well; she might laugh at me for placing myself among such giants.

Instead, she doesn’t seem to know what to say in response. She fidgets for a few seconds, eats some more ice cream, and then changes the subject.

“Listen, Dad, I’m here because I have news.”

“Funny, so do I. You go first.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. What is it?” I ask.

She takes a deep breath and looks me in the eye. “We’re moving to California.”

Jackie looked at the gleaming silver spaceship with portholes running all up and down its sides. She felt more excited than she ever had before in her six years of life. Soon, her family would leave behind this polluted, depressing planet for a new world filled with cool green fields, rich with possibilities.

Jackie’s mother and father held tightly onto her hands as the three of them walked in the line out onto the launching pad. The hoverlift floated next to them, carrying their luggage, while Jackie’s robot dog kept running ahead and back toward Jackie, matching her excitement.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but Jackie knew was only minutes according to her chronometer, Jackie and her parents made it to the open hatch of the spaceship. A stewardess, her hair dyed platinum blonde, stood at the doorway greeting the immigrants with a big smile. She took their tickets and welcomed them aboard.

“Is this really it, Dad?” Jackie asked.

Her father removed the pipe from his mouth and smiled. “It is indeed,” he said. “Goodbye, Earth! Next stop, Mars!”

—Abraham Beard,

The Burns Family on Mars (1960)

 

“Dad? You’re gone again.”

“No, I’m not,” I say.

“So,” Emma says. “We’re moving to California.”

“Why?”

She takes a deep breath. “Frank’s got a new job. UCLA is offering him a tenured position. Full professor.”

“UCLA. Hmm . California.” I try to sound as noncommittal as possible, although Emma must know how much this news hurts me.

“Yes, California.”

“From what I hear, California is a nice place.”

She frowns and looks puzzled. “Aren’t you going to object?”

“Are you asking me to?”

“Don’t you even want to know why we’re moving?”

“You told me — Frank’s got a job offer.” I pause. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to keep working at the New-York Historical Society if you’re living in L.A. Have you found a job at a museum there?”

Now she pauses before speaking. “I’m not planning to get another job, at least not right away.”

“Oh?”

“I want to be there full time for the kids.”

I stare into her eyes, seeing the six-year-old girl who wanted nothing more than to be the first astronaut to walk on Jupiter. “Is that really what you want?”

She glares at me. “I think at least one parent should be devoted full time to raising the kids.”

I feel the sting of her words. I consider once again telling her what I’ve told her before: that times were tough, that money was tight, and that Sheila and I both had to work to support Emma properly. But then I recall the many times I shut the door of my home office on Emma to meet a deadline, and I realize that the chance for apologies and explanations has passed far into the mists of time.

Allen Davidoff walked around the floating cube of mist, careful not to let any of the tendrils touch him. There was nothing else on this planet for miles around.

The Keeper, still covered entirely in her white garment, walked three paces behind him until he finally came to a stop.

He turned to face her. “Impressive,” he said. “An atmospheric phenomenon?”

She laughed and her hazel eyes twinkled. “You are pretending to be the fool,” she said. “You know better than that.”

Allen nodded; she was right. He did know better, but he had previously allowed his hopes to be raised during his quixotic quest only to have them dashed time and time again.

“Then I’ve really found it?” he asked.

She nodded. “You have indeed.”

Allen looked back into the white mist. “It’s the Gateway of Time,” he said. “I can go anywhen into the time stream I want.”

“It’s the Gateway of Time,” the Keeper echoed. “You can go to any time period and any location in the universe you want. But there is one problem.”

Allen waited. The Keeper remained silent as Allen’s watch ticked off the seconds, and so finally he asked, “What’s the problem?”

The Keeper grinned evilly. “The only problem is, once you’ve made your choice and entered the past, you can never return. The trip is one way and final.”

“So—”

“So choose wisely.”

—Abraham Beard,

Amidst the Mists (1991)

 

“I hope it works out for you,” I say. “You know that I only want what’s best for you and the kids.”

If she notices that I don’t mention Frank, she doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, she nods and says, “You said before that you had news as well.”

I open my mouth to tell her about my diagnosis, as I had planned to do when she first called to tell me that she and the family wanted to see me, but then I hold back. I’m not dying yet, but I am old. My doctors say that my mind is not as sharp as it once was and my years are drawing to a close. If I tell her, maybe she and Frank will postpone the move, or at least stay closer to New York City, so I can keep seeing them in my dwindling, final days.

The last man on Earth said farewell to the spaceship carrying the rest of humanity to the stars. As the ship became a tiny dot in the sky, he took a deep breath of the fresh air and smiled. Someone had to watch over the planet as it was dying, and it was only right, he felt, that it should be he, and only he.

—Abraham Beard,

The Final Days of Planet Earth (1970)

 

I decide not to tell Emma about the diagnosis. It wouldn’t be fair to her or the kids to add that factor into the equation. But she’s waiting for me to tell her my news, and I only have one other piece of news to share. It’s extremely private, and possibly just the first symptom of my oncoming dementia, but I’ve felt the need to tell someone. And Emma is here, and Sheila is no longer here.

“Emma, may I confide in you?”

She tilts her head. “You never have before.”

I open my mouth to object, and then realize that she has a point.

“Well, I want to confide in you now. You know all those stories, all those novels that I wrote?”

“Yes,” she says flatly. “What about them?”

“My entire life, I never felt like I was coming up with anything on my own.” I stare over her shoulder. “Sometimes, when I was lying awake at two or three in the morning, I would get the feeling that the images in my mind weren’t just things I was making up myself. I felt as if I was a conduit, as if I had lifted an antenna into some sort of cosmic fog and that I was receiving messages, real messages, from the future in my dreams.”

Emma sits stoically as I tell her this. I don’t know what reaction I am hoping for, but Emma rolling her eyes is definitely not it. Still, it’s what she gives me.

“So what’s the news?”

“I’m not really sure,” I say. “You know how I haven’t written anything new for five years now? That’s because the messages stopped. Except…”

“Except what?”

“The dreams have started up again. I’ve been waking up again in the middle of most nights, feeling as if the future is trying to reach me one more time. But as soon as I wake up, the images the future is trying to send me recede into the distance.”

She sighs and stands up; I can’t tell if she’s angry or just frustrated. “You’re bouncing story ideas off of me again, aren’t you?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, I’m not. This is really happening to me.”

Emma’s expression is pitiful. “So that’s your excuse,” she says softly. “The future was really trying to contact you, and that’s why you always had your head lost in the clouds.”

I try to protest, but, ironically, I have no words. Emma picks up the bowls and used spoons and takes them into the kitchen. I hear her wash them quickly and leave them on the drainer while I sit at the table, unsure of what to say to her to make it all better.

She emerges from the kitchen and dashes through to the hall closet. I hear her put on her coat, and then she is back in the dining room, standing over me.

“Dad, you were always so busy living in the future that you never enjoyed your present. And now you don’t even live in the future anymore. You’re living in the past.”

With that, she walks out of the room and out of the house.

 

Over the next few days, Emma uses my spare set of keys to let herself into the house. She barely nods hello to me as she climbs to the attic and sifts through the boxes, packing away those few remnants that she wants from her childhood.

I want Emma to leave the photographs, but I’ve come to realize that she’s going to have to take them with her anyway if I want my grandsons to continue to remember what their grandfather and grandmother looked like. Emma tells me that she will scan the photos into her computer and send me back the originals, and I just nod.

The days pass far too quickly. Finally, the last morning arrives in which Emma will be coming over to take the last few boxes of possessions. What she doesn’t know as she is driving over is that this morning is also the morning of my final moments on this Earth. And in my final moments on this Earth, I am redeemed.

 

I am lying in my bed, wearing my favorite blue pajamas and peering through my glasses at the small print of a digest magazine. A half-eaten orange on a plate sits on my end table; I can still taste the juice on my tongue and feel a strand of pulp between two right molars.

And then it begins.

A slight breeze wafts toward me from the foot of my bed. I move my magazine aside and look, but I see nothing there but the wall and the closed bathroom door.

As I begin to read again, another breeze flutters my pages. Then the breeze builds, until a gust of wind flows past.

A tiny crack appears in midair, hovering about six and a half feet above the red-carpeted floor. The crack expands into a circular hole. White light emanates from the hole, which gets wider and wider, until it becomes a sphere about six feet in diameter, crackling softly with electricity. A human figure in a silver spacesuit, its face obscured by a helmet, emerges from the sphere with a loud popping sound.

I know this is no illusion, that whatever is happening in front of me is real. I manage to keep my composure and ask, “Who are you?”

The figure grabs hold of its helmet, breaks the seals, and pulls it off.

The astronaut is a woman. She shakes her long blonde hair out of her face and smiles. “You know who I am, Abe. Take a good look.”

I do, and I feel a chill. “It can’t be.”

She nods. “It is.”

“You’re Sandra McAllister. But you’re fictional. You don’t exist. I made you up.”

“Yes, you did make me up. But I do exist.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We figured you might not, but we don’t have a lot of time, so listen carefully. As far as our scientists have been able to determine, every time you wrote a story, you created a parallel universe, a place where the people you thought of really existed. Apparently, your brain has some connection on a quantum level with the zero-point energy field that exists in the multiverse. You’ve managed to bend reality, our reality, so that we ended up existing for real.”

“That’s not possible,” I say.

“You’re a rational man, Abe, I understand that. So explain my presence some other way.”

I know in my heart and soul that I am not hallucinating. And with the impossible eliminated, I am left with the improbable.

“So you’re real?”

“Not just me,” Sandra says.

I start thinking of all the characters I created throughout my career. “Jackson Smith and Angela Jones? Larry Garner? Jackie Burns? Allen Davidoff? They’re all real?”

Sandra nods after I recite each name. “They’re all real. We’re all real.”

“Even if so, how did you break through the barrier between universes? It’s not possible.”

“It is if you harness the energy of a black hole using the Doorway Device.”

I am puzzled for just a moment, and then light dawns. I recall the details of the story cycle from which Sandra comes. “The HaTikvah spaceship,” I say.

“And the Nichashim,” she adds.

I goggle. “You’re mortal enemies,” I say. “I wrote you that way. How can you be working together?”

“The Nichashim understand that you created them, too. We’ve got the two ships tethered together in orbit around New Black Hole Omega.”

I can’t help it; I flip the sheet off of my frail body and swing my legs around so I can stand up and face Sandra. “That’s far too dangerous, Sandra. You could lose both ships in a blink.”

“Which is why you must hurry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why do you think I came here?”

“Um, to say hello? To let me know that I didn’t live my life in vain?”

She rolls her eyes. “To rescue you. To cure you of your oncoming sickness, and to impart to you the same immortality you generously granted to all of us.”

“Rescue me? You’re using all that energy just to rescue me?”

She shrugged. “You’re our father. Why wouldn’t we?”

I feel tears starting in my eyes, and I move forward and hug Sandra as tightly as I can. She holds me as I cry.

“It’s all right, Father,” she says. “We’ve come for you. Welcome home.”

 

The last bit I can only guess at, as I was already gone by then. But the way I see it, as Emma was turning her keys in the lock, the house rumbled, and she heard a loud pop and whoosh coming from upstairs.

“Dad? Dad?” she called out, but I wasn’t there to answer her.

She dashed up the stairs and turned right, toward her father’s bedroom. She pushed the door open to discover her father already gone, amidst a trace of ozone.

I remembered the future.

And in turn, the future remembered me.

 

 

Michael A. Burstein was born in New York City, where he attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. He has physics degrees from Harvard College and Boston University, and he attended the Clarion Workshop in 1994. His short fiction has been nominated for ten Hugos and four Nebulas; in 1997 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. From 1998 to 2000 he served as secretary of SFWA. He and his wife, Nomi, live with their twin daughters in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Library Trustee and Town Meeting Member.

 

 

NON-ZERO PROBABILITIES

N. K. Jemisin

 

 

FROM THE AUTHOR: It should be pretty obvious that the bulk of the story is a pastiche of my perfectly ordinary daily life in Brooklyn — riding the shuttle to work, traipsing to the farmers’ market, thinking scornful thoughts about tourists as if I didn’t just move here a few years ago myself, and so on. But there’s an understated sort of magic in Brooklyn which I can feel throughout these perfectly ordinary walks and encounters. It rides my skin like humidity, thrums underneath every conversation. The awareness of this is what marks a true New Yorker, I think. You move here, feel out of place for awhile, and then suddenly snap! There’s this moment where you feel it. You can look at another person who belongs here, who feels that same magic, and you know . It’s like a secret handshake, except New Yorkers would never be so gauche. They’d just glance at each other. That would be enough.

So with “Non-Zero Probabilities,” all I did was make that undercurrent of perpetual strangeness explicit. I’m thrilled with the response this story has gotten, but I completely didn’t expect it, because as the story itself notes — what does it matter whether a city reacts to one improbable disaster (say, 9/11) or another (probability gone haywire)? The city remains, and reacts, the same. That’s where the real magic lies.

 

 

I N THE MORNINGS, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that, too. Today’s word is suerte .) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the pan ties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry; they’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woolite, and lays them flat to dry.)

Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ’hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed, too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

 

Her neighbor — the other one, across the hall — helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

“Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Baileys. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

Adele picked. The Joker.

“Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again. “Pick another.”

She did, and got the other Joker.

“Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his pocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

“These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

“Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

“Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Baileys had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double six.

“That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

“Yeah. But it works.”

He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.

 

It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.

The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.

And it’s not like the signs are all bad. The state had to suspend its lottery program; too many winners in one week bankrupted it. The Knicks made it to the Finals and the Mets won the Series. A lot of people with cancer went into spontaneous remission, and some folks with full-blown AIDS stopped showing any viral load at all. (There are new tours now. Double-decker buses full of the sick and disabled. Adele tries to tell herself they’re just more tourists.)

The missionaries from out of town are the worst. On any given day they step in front of her, shoving tracts under her nose and wanting to know if she’s saved yet. She’s getting better at spotting them from a distance, yappy islands interrupting the sidewalk river’s flow, their faces alight with an inner glow that no self-respecting local would display without three beers and a fat payday check. There’s one now, standing practically underneath a scaffolding ladder. Idiot; two steps back and he’ll double his chances for getting hit by a bus. (And then the bus will catch fire.)

In the same instant that she spots him, he spots her, and a grin stretches wide across his freckled face. She is reminded of blind newts that have light-sensitive spots on their skin. This one is unsaved -sensitive. She veers right, intending to go around the scaffold, and he takes a wide step into her path again. She veers left; he breaks that way.

She stops, sighing. “What.”

“Have you accepted—”

“I’m Catholic. They do us at birth, remember?”

His smile is forgiving. “That doesn’t mean we can’t talk, does it?”

“I’m busy.” She attempts a feint, hoping to catch him off-guard. He moves with her, nimble as a linebacker.

“Then I’ll just give you this,” he says, tucking something into her hand. Not a tract, bigger. A flyer. “The day to remember is August 8th.”

This, finally, catches Adele’s attention. August 8th: 8/8 — a lucky day according to the Chinese. She has it marked on her calendar as a good day to do things like rent a Zipcar and go to Ikea.

“Yankee Stadium,” he says. “Come join us. We’re going to pray the city back into shape.”

“Sure, whatever,” she says, and finally manages to slip around him. (He lets her go, really. He knows she’s hooked.)

She waits until she’s out of downtown before she reads the flyer, because downtown streets are narrow and close and she has to keep an eye out. It’s a hot day; everybody’s using their air conditioners. Most people don’t bolt the things in the way they’re supposed to.

“A PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY,” the flyer proclaims, and in spite of herself, Adele is intrigued. The flyer says that over 500,000 New Yorkers have committed to gathering on that day and concentrating their prayers. That kind of thing has power now , she thinks. There’s some lab at Princeton — dusted off and given new funding lately — that’s been able to prove it. Whether that means Someone’s listening or just that human thoughtwaves are affecting events as the scientists say, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

She thinks, I could ride the train again .

She could laugh at the next Friday the 13th.

She could — and here her thoughts pause, because there’s something she’s been trying not to think about, but it’s been awhile and she’s never been a very good Catholic girl anyway. But she could, maybe, just maybe, try dating again.

As she thinks this, she is walking through the park. She passes the vast lawn, which is covered in fast-darting black children and lazily sunning white adults and a few roving brown elders with Italian ice carts. Though she is usually on watch for things like this, the flyer has distracted her, so she does not notice the nearby cart-man stopping, cursing in Spanish because one of his wheels has gotten mired in the soft turf.

This puts him directly in the path of a child who is running, his eyes trained on a descending Frisbee; with the innate arrogance of a city child he has assumed that the cart will have moved out of the way by the time he gets there. Instead the child hits the cart at full speed, which catches Adele’s attention at last, so that too late she realizes she is at the epicenter of one of those devastating chains of events that only ever happen in comedy films and the transformed city. In a Rube Goldberg string of utter improbabilities, the cart tips over, spilling tubs of brightly colored ices onto the grass. The boy flips over it with acrobatic precision, completely by accident, and lands with both feet on the tub of ices. The sheer force of this blow causes the tub to eject its contents with projectile force. A blast of blueberry-coconut-red hurtles toward Adele’s face, so fast that she has no time to scream. It will taste delicious. It will also likely knock her into oncoming bicycle traffic.

At the last instant the Frisbee hits the flying mass, altering its trajectory. Freezing fruit flavors splatter the naked backs of a row of sunbathers nearby, much to their dismay.

Adele’s knees buckle at the close call. She sits down hard on the grass, her heart pounding, while the sunbathers scream and the cart-man checks to see if the boy is okay and the pigeons converge.

She happens to glance down. A four-leafed clover is growing there, at her fingertips.

Eventually she resumes the journey home. At the corner of her block, she sees a black cat lying atop a garbage can. Its head has been crushed, and someone has attempted to burn it. She hopes it was dead first, and hurries on.

 

Adele has a garden on the fire escape. In one pot, eggplant and herbs; she has planted the clover in this. In another pot are peppers and flowers. In the big one, tomatoes and a scraggly collard that she’s going to kill if she keeps harvesting leaves so quickly. (But she likes greens.) It’s luck — good luck — that she’d chosen to grow a garden this year, because since things changed it’s been harder for wholesalers to bring food into the city, and prices have shot up. The farmers’ market that she attends on Saturdays has become a barterers’ market, too, so she plucks a couple of slim, deep-purple eggplants and a handful of angry little peppers. She wants fresh fruit. Berries, maybe.

On her way out, she knocks on the neighbor’s door. He looks surprised as he opens it, but pleased to see her. It occurs to her that maybe he’s been hoping for a little luck of his own. She gives it a think-over, and hands him an eggplant. He looks at it in consternation. (He’s not the kind of guy to eat eggplant.)

“I’ll come by later and show you how to cook it,” she says. He grins.

At the farmers’ market she trades the angry little peppers for sassy little raspberries, and the eggplant for two stalks of late rhubarb. She also wants information, so she hangs out awhile gossipping with whoever sits nearby. Everyone talks more than they used to. It’s nice.

And everyone, everyone she speaks to, is planning to attend the prayer.

“I’m on dialysis,” says an old lady who sits under a flowering tree. “Every time they hook me up to that thing I’m scared. Dialysis can kill you, you know.”

It always could , Adele doesn’t say.

“I work on Wall Street,” says another woman, who speaks briskly and clutches a bag of fresh fish as if it’s gold. Might as well be; fish is expensive now. A tiny Egyptian scarab pendant dangles from a necklace the woman wears. “Quantitative analysis. All the models are fucked now. We were the only ones they didn’t fire when the housing market went south, and now this.” So she’s going to pray, too. “Even though I’m kind of an atheist. Whatever, if it works, right?”

Adele finds others, all tired of performing their own daily rituals, all worried about their likelihood of being outliered to death.

She goes back to her apartment building, picks some sweet basil, and takes it next door. Her neighbor seems a little nervous. His apartment is cleaner than she’s ever seen it, with the scent of Pine-Sol still strong in the bathroom. She tries not to laugh, and demonstrates how to peel and slice eggplant, salt it to draw out the toxins (“it’s related tonightshade, you know”), and sauté it with basil in olive oil. He tries to look impressed, but she can tell he’s not the kind of guy to enjoy eating his vegetables.

Afterward they sit, and she tells him about the prayer thing. He shrugs. “Are you going?” she presses.

“Nope.”

“Why not? It could fix things.”

“Maybe. Maybe I like the way things are now.”

This stuns her. “Man, the train fell off its track last week.” Twenty people dead. She has woken up in a cold sweat on the nights since, screams ringing in her ears.

“Could’ve happened anytime,” he says, and she blinks in surprise because it’s true. The official investigation says someone — track worker, maybe — left a wrench sitting on the track near a power coupling. The chance that the wrench would hit the coupling, causing a short and explosion, was one in a million. But never zero.

“But… but…” She wants to point out the other horrible things that have occurred. Gas leaks. Floods. A building fell down, in Harlem. A fatal duck attack. Several of the apartments in their building are empty because a lot of people can’t cope. Her neighbor — the other one, with the broken arm — is moving out at the end of the month. Seattle. Better bike paths.

“Shit happens,” he says. “It happened then, it happens now. A little more shit, a little less shit…” He shrugs. “Still shit, right?”

She considers this. She considers it for a long time.

They play cards, and have a little wine, and Adele teases him about the overdone chicken. She likes that he’s trying so hard. She likes even more that she’s not thinking about how lonely she’s been.

So they retire to his bedroom and there’s awkwardness and she’s shy because it’s been awhile and you do lose some skills without practice, and he’s clumsy because he’s probably been developing bad habits from porn, but eventually they manage. They use a condom. She crosses her fingers while he puts it on. There’s a rabbit’s foot keychain attached to the bed railing, which he strokes before returning his attention to her. He swears he’s clean, and she’s on the pill, but… well. Shit happens.

She closes her eyes and lets herself forget for awhile.

 

The prayer thing is all over the news. The following week is the runup. Talking heads on the morning shows speculate that it should have some effect, if enough people go and exert “positive energy.” They are careful not to use the language of any particular faith; this is still New York. Alternative events are being planned all over the city for those who don’t want to come under the evangelical tent. The sukkah mobiles are rolling — though it’s the wrong time of year — just getting the word out about something happening at one of the synagogues. In Flatbush, Adele can’t walk a block without being hit up by Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’s a “constructive visualization” somewhere for the ethical humanists. Not everybody believes God, or gods, will save them. It’s just that this is the way the world works now, and everybody gets that. If crossed fingers can temporarily alter a dice throw, then why not something bigger? There’s nothing inherently special about crossed fingers. It’s only a “lucky” gesture because people believe in it. Get them to believe in something else, and that should work, too.

Except…

Adele walks past the Botanical Gardens, where preparations are under way for a big Shinto ritual. She stops to watch workers putting up a graceful red gate.

She’s still afraid of the subway. She knows better than to get her hopes up about her neighbor, but still… he’s kind of nice. She still plans her mornings around her ritual ablutions, and her walks to work around danger-spots — but how is that different, really, from what she did before? Back then it was makeup and hair, and fear of muggers. Now she walks more than she used to; she’s lost ten pounds. Now she knows her neighbors’ names.

Looking around, she notices other people standing nearby, also watching the gate go up. They glance at her, some nodding, some smiling, some ignoring her and looking away. She doesn’t have to ask if they will be attending one of the services; she can see that they won’t be. Some people react to fear by seeking security, change, control. The rest accept the change and just go on about their lives.

“Miss?” She glances back, startled, to find a young man there, holding forth a familiar flyer. He’s not as pushy as the guy downtown; once she takes it, he moves on. The prayer for the soul of the city is tomorrow. Shuttle buses (“Specially blessed!”) will be picking up people at sites throughout the city.

WE NEED YOU TO BELIEVE, reads the bottom of the flyer.

Adele smiles. She folds the flyer carefully, her fingers remembering the skills of childhood, and presently it is perfect. They’ve printed the flyer on good, heavy paper.

She takes out her St. Christopher, kisses it, and tucks it into the rear folds to weight the thing properly.

Then she launches the paper airplane, and it flies and flies and flies, dwindling as it travels an impossible distance, until it finally disappears into the bright blue sky.

 

 

N. K. Jemisin is a New York City author. Although she has written novels since childhood (to varying degrees of success), she began writing short stories in 2002 after attending the Viable Paradise writing workshop. Thereafter she joined the BostonArea SF Writers Group (now BRAWLers), until 2007 when she moved to New York. She is currently a member of the Altered Fluid writing group.

Jemisin’s short fiction has been published in a variety of print, online, and audio markets, including Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Postscripts , and Jim Baen’s Universe . She was the first recipient of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Travel Research Grant, which was awarded for her short story sample “L’Alchimista.” This story and “Cloud Dragon Skies” received Honorable Mentions in two editions of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror , and her short story “Playing Nice With God’s Bowling Ball” received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Science Fiction . Her short story “Cloud Dragon Skies” was also on the Carl Brandon Society’s “Recommended” shortlist for the Parallax Award. This story, “Non-Zero Probabilities,” also appeared on the 2010 Hugo Awards Ballot. Her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , was published by Orbit Books. It is the first of a trilogy, and has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal . A full bibliography of her work can be found at nkjemisin.com.

 

 

GOING DEEP

James Patrick Kelly

 

 

FROM THE AUTHOR: “Going Deep” marked my twenty-fifth appearance in the June issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine . Although this streak started entirely by chance, in time it became a centerpiece of my career: most of my Nebula nominees were children of June. I am eternally grateful to the three editors who published these stories, Shawna McCarthy, Gardner Dozois, and Sheila Williams. However, all things must pass, and “Going Deep” is my last June story — for now, at least. Thanks much to my friends and colleagues for the honor of ending my run with a nomination.

 

 

M ARISKA SHIVERED WHEN she realized that her room had been tapping at the dreamfeed for several minutes. “The Earth is up,” it murmured in its gentle singing accent. “Daddy Al is up and I am always up. Now Mariska gets up.”

Mariska groaned, determined not to allow her room in. Recently she had been dreaming her own dreams of Jak and his long fingers and the fuzz on his chin and the way her throat tightened when she brushed up against him. But this was one of her room’s feeds, one of the best ones, one she had been having as long as she could remember. In it, she was in space, but she wasn’t on the moon and she wasn’t wearing her hardsuit. There were stars every way she turned. Of course, she’d seen stars through the visor of her helmet but these were always different. Not a scatter of light but a swarm. And they all were singing their names, calling to her to come to them. She could just make out the closest ones: Alpha Centauri. Barnard’s. Wolf. Lalande. Luyten. Sirius .

“The Earth is up, Daddy Al is up, and I am always up,” her room insisted. “Now Mariska gets up.” If she didn’t wake soon, it would have to sound the gong.

“Slag it.” She rolled over, awake and grumpy. Her room had been getting on her last nerve recently When she had been a little girl, she had roused at its whisper, but in the last few weeks it had begun nagging her to wake up. She knew it loved her and was only worried about her going deep, but she was breathing regularly and her heartbeat was probably in the high sixties. It monitored her, so it had to know she was just sleeping.

She thought this was all about Al. He was getting nervous; so her room was nervous.

“Dobroye utro,” said Feodor Bear. “Good morn-ing Mar-i-ska.” The ancient toy robot stood up on its shelf, wobbled, and then sat down abruptly. It was over a century old and, in Mariska’s opinion, needed to be put out of its misery.

“Good morning, dear Mariska,” said her room. “Today is Friday, June 15, 2159. You are expected today in Hydroponics and at the Muoi swimming pool. This Sunday is Father’s Day.”

“I know, I know.” She stuck her foot out from underneath the covers and wiggled her toes in the cool air. Her room began to bring the temperature up from sleeping to waking levels.

“I could help you find something for Daddy Al, if you’d like.” Her room painted Buycenter icons on the wall. “We haven’t shopped together in a while.”

“Maybe later.” Sometimes she felt guilty that she wasn’t spending enough time with her room, but its persona kept treating her like a baby. Still calling him Daddy Al , for example; it was embarrassing. And she would get to all her expectations eventually. What choice did she have?

The door slid aside a hand’s width and Al peered through the opening.

“Rise and shine, Mariska.” His smile was a crack on a worried face. “Pancakes for breakfast,” he said. “But only if you get up now.” He blew a kiss that she ducked away from.

“I’m shining already,” she grumbled. “Your own little star.”

As she stepped through the cleanser, she wondered what to do about him. She knew exactly what was going on. The Gorshkov had just returned from exploring the Delta Pavonis system, which meant they’d probably be hearing soon from Natalya Volochkova. And Mariska had just turned thirteen; in another year she’d be able to vote, sign contracts, get married. This was the way the world worked: now that she was almost an adult, it was time for Al to go crazy. All her friends’ parents had. The symptoms were hard to ignore: embarrassing questions like where was she going? and who was she going with? and who else would be there? He said he trusted her but she knew he’d slap a trace on her if he thought he could get away with it. But what was the point? This was the moon. There were security cams over every safety hatch. How much trouble could she get into? Walk out an airlock without a suit? She wasn’t suicidal — or dumb. Have sex and get pregnant? She was patched —  when she finally jumped a boy, pregnancy wouldn’t be an issue. Crash from some toxic feed? She was young — she’d get over it.

The fact that she loved Al’s strawberry pancakes did nothing to improve her mood at breakfast. He was unusually quiet, which meant he was working his courage up for some stupid fathering talk. Something in the news? She brought her gossip feed up on the tabletop to see what was going on. The scrape of his knife on the plate as she scanned headlines made her want to shriek. Why did he have to use her favorite food as a bribe so that he could pester her?

“You heard about that boy from Penrose High?” he said at last. “The one in that band you used to like… No Exit? Final Exit?”

“You’re talking about Last Exit to Nowhere?” That gossip was so old it had curled around the edges and blown away. “Deltron Cleen?”

“That’s him.” He stabbed one last pancake scrap and pushed it into a pool of syrup. “They say he was at a party a couple of weeks ago and opened his head to everyone there; I forget how many mindfeeds he accepted.”

“So?” She couldn’t believe he was pushing Deltron Cleen at her.

“You knew him?”

“I’ve met him, sure.”

“You weren’t there, were you?” He actually squirmed, like he had ants crawling up his leg. “When it happened?”

“Oh sure. And when he keeled over, I was the one who gave him CPR.” Mariska pinched her nose closed and puffed air at him. “Saved his life — the board of supers is giving me a medal next Thursday.”

“This is serious, Mariska. Taking feeds from people you don’t know is dangerous.”

“Unless they’re schoolfeeds. Or newsfeeds. Or dreamfeeds.”

“Those are datafeeds. And they’re screened.”

“God feeds, then.”

He sank back against his chair. “You’re not joining a church, are you?”

“No.” She laughed and patted his hand. “I’m okay, Al. Trust me. I love you and everything is okay.”

“I know that.” He was so flustered he slipped his fork in his pants pocket. “I know,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself.

“Poor Del is pretty stupid, even for a singer in a shoutcast band,” she said. “What I heard was he accepted maybe a dozen feeds, but I guess there wasn’t room in his head for more than him and a couple of really shallow friends. But he just crashed is all; they’ll reboot him. Might even be an improvement.” She reached across the table, picked up Al’s empty plate, and slid it onto hers. “You never did anything like that, did you?” She carried them to the kitchen counter and pushed them through the processor door. “Accept mindfeeds from perfect strangers?”

“Not strangers, no.”

“But you were young once, right? I mean, you weren’t born a parent?”

“I’m a father, Mariska.” He swiped his napkin across his lips and then folded it up absently. “You’re a minor and still my responsibility. This is just me, trying to stay in touch.”

“Extra credit to you, then.” She check-marked the air. “But being a father is complicated. Maybe we should work on your technique?”

The door announced, “Jak is here.”

“Got to go.” Mariska grabbed her kit, kissed Al, and spun toward the door in relief. She felt bad for him sometimes. It wasn’t his fault he took all the slag in the Talking to Your Teen feed so seriously.

 

Of course, the other reason why Al was acting up was because Mariska’s genetic mother was about to swoop down on them. The Gorshkov had finally returned after a fifteen-year mission and was now docked at Sweetspot Station. Rumor was that humankind had a terrestrial world to colonize that was only three years away from the new Delta Pavonis wormhole. Natalya Volochkova was on the starship’s roster as chief medical officer.

Mariska didn’t hate her mother, exactly. How could she? They had never met. She knew very little about Volochkova and had no interest in finding out more. Ever, never. All she had from her were a couple of fossil toys: Feodor Bear and that stupid Little Mermaid aquarium. Collector’s items from the twenty-first century, which was why Mariska had never been allowed to play with them.

What she did hate was the idea that decisions this stranger had made a decade and a half ago now ruled her life. She was Volochkova’s clone and had been carried to term in a plastic womb, then placed in the care of one Alfred DeFord, a licensed father, under a term adoption contract. Her genetic mother had hired Al the way that some people hired secretaries; three fifths of Volochkova’s salary paid for their comfortable, if unspectacular, lifestyle. Mariska knew that Al had come to love her over the years, but growing up with an intelligent room and a hired father for parents wouldn’t have been her choice, had she been given one.

As if parking her with a hired father wasn’t bad enough, Volochkova had cursed Mariska with spacer genes. Which was why she had to suffer though all those boring pre-space feeds from the Ed supers and why everyone was so worried that she might go deep into hibernation before her time and why she’d been matched with her one true love when she had been in diapers.

Actually, having Jak as a boyfriend wasn’t all that much of a problem. She just wished that it didn’t have to be so damn inevitable. She wanted to be the one to decide that a curly black mop was sexier than a blonde crewcut or that thin lips were more kissable than thick or that loyal was more attractive than smart. He was fifteen, already an adult, but still lived with his parents. Even though he was two years older than she was, they were in the same semester in the spacer program.

Jak listened as Mariska whined, first about Volochkova and then about Al’s breakfast interrogation, as they skated to the hydroponics lab. He knew when to squeeze her hand, when to emit understanding moans and concerned grunts. This was what he called taking the weight, and she was gratified by his capacity to bear her up when she needed it. They were good together, in the 57th percentile on the Hammergeld Scale, according to their Soc super. Although she wondered if there might be some other boy for her somewhere, Mariska was resigned to the idea that, unless she was struck by a meteor or kidnapped by aliens, she would drag him into bed one of these days and marry him when she turned fourteen and then they would hibernate happily ever after on their way to Lalande 21185 or Barnard’s Star or wherever.

“But we were there, ’Ska,” Jak said, as the safety hatch to the lab slid aside. “Del asked you to open your head.” He bent over to crank the rollers into the soles of his shoes.

“Which is why we left.” She pulled a disposable green clingy from the dispenser next to the safety door and shrugged into it. “Which is why we were already in Chim Zone when the EMTs went by, which means we weren’t really there. How many times do I have to go over this?” She gave him a friendly push toward his bench and headed toward her own, which was on the opposite side of the lab.

 

Mariska checked the chemistry of her nutrient solution. Phosphorus was down 50ppm so she added a pinch of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate. She was raising tomatoes in rockwool spun from lunar regolith. Sixteen new blossoms had opened since Tuesday and needed to be pollinated; she used one of the battery operated toothbrushes that Mr. Holmgren, the Ag super, favored. Mariska needed an average yield of 4.2 kilograms per plant in order to complete this unit; her tomatoes wouldn’t be ripe for another eight weeks. Jak was on tomatoes, too; his spring crop had had an outbreak of mosaic virus and so he was repeating the unit.

Other kids straggled into the lab as she worked. Grieg, who had the bench next to hers, offered one of his lima beans, which she turned down, and a hit from his sniffer, which she took. Megawatt waved hello and Fung stopped by to tell her that their Corshkov tour had been rescheduled for Tuesday, which she already knew.

After a while, Random ambled in, using a vacpac to clean up the nutrient spills and leaf litter. He had just washed out of the spacer program but his mother was a Med super so he was hanging around as a janitor until she decided what to do with him. Everyone knew why he had failed. He was a feed demon; his head was like a digital traffic jam. However, unlike Del Cleen, Random had never once crashed. They said that if you ever opened yourself wide to him, even just for an instant, you would be so filled with other people’s thoughts that you would never think your own again.

He noticed her staring and saluted her with the wand of his vacuum cleaner. It was funny, he didn’t look all that destroyed to Mariska. Sleepy maybe, or bored, or a little high, but not as if he had had his individuality crushed. Besides, even though he was too skinny, she thought he was kind of cute. Not for the first time, she wondered what their Hammergeld compatibility score might be.

Mariska felt the tingle of Jak offering a mindfeed. She opened her head a crack and accepted.

=giving up for today= She was relieved that Jak just wanted to chat. =you?=

=ten minutes= Mariska was still getting used to chatting in public. She and Jak had been more intimate, of course, had even opened wide for full mental convergence a couple of times, but that had been when they were by themselves, sitting next to each other in a dark room. Swapping thoughts was all the mindfeed she could handle without losing track of where she was. After all, she was still a kid.

=how’s your fruit set?= Jak’s feed always felt like a fizzing behind her eyes.

=fifty, maybe sixty= She noticed Random drifting toward her side of the lab. =this sucks=

=tomatoes?=

=hydroponics=

=spacers got to eat=

=spacers suck=

Jak’s pleasant fizz gave way to a bubble of annoyance. =you’re a spacer=

Mariska had begun to have her doubts about that, but this didn’t seem like the right time to bring them up, because Random had shut his vacuum off and slouched beside her bench in silence. His presence was a kind of absence. He seemed to have parked his body in front of her and then forgotten where he had left it.

“What?” She poked his shoulder. “Say something.”

Jak bumped her feed. =problem?=

=just random=

All kids of spacer stock were thin but, with his spindly limbs and teacup waist and translucent skin, Random seemed more a rumor than a boy. His eyelids fluttered and he touched his tongue to his bottom lip, as if he were trying to remember something. “Your mother,” he said.

Mariska could feel a ribbon of dread weave into her feed with Jak. She wasn’t sure her feet were still on the floor.

=’Ska what?=

=nothing= Mariska clamped her head closed, then gave Jak a feeble wave to show everything was all right. He didn’t look reassured.

“What about my mother?” She hissed at Random. “You don’t even know her.”

He opened his hand and showed her a small, brown disk. At first she thought it was a button but then she recognized the profile of Abraham Lincoln and realized that it was some old coin from Earth. What was it called? A penalty? No, a penny .

“I know this,” said Random. “Check the date.”

She shrank from him. “No.”

Then Jak came to her rescue. He rested a hand on Random’s shoulder. “Be smooth now.” It didn’t take much effort to turn the skinny kid away from her. “What’s happening?”

Random tried to shrug from Jak’s grip, but he was caught. “Isn’t about you.”

“Fair enough.” Jak always acted polite when he was getting angry. “But here I am. You’re not telling me to go away, are you?”

“He says it’s about Natalya Volochkova,” said Mariska.

Random placed the penny on Mariska’s bench. “Check the date.”

Jak picked the penny up and held it to the light. “2018,” he read. “They used to use this stuff for money.”

“I know that,” Mariska snapped. She snatched the penny out of his hand and shoved it into the front pouch of her tugshirt.

Random seemed to have lost interest in her now that Jak had arrived. He switched on the vacpac, bent over, and touched the wand to a tomato leaf on the deck. It caught crossways for a moment, singing in the suction, and was gone. Then he sauntered off.

“What’s this got to do with your mother?” asked Jak.

Mariska had been mad at Random, but since he no longer presented a target, she decided to be mad at Jak instead. “Don’t be stupid. She’s not my mother.” She saw that Grieg was hunched over his beans, pretending to check the leaves for white flies. From the way his shoulders were shaking, she was certain that he was laughing at her. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jak looked doubtfully at the chemical dispensers and gardening tools scattered across her bench. “You want to clean up first?”

“No.” She peeled off her clingy and threw it at the bench.

 

Jak tried to cheer her up by doing a flip-scrape in the corridor immediately in front of the hydroponics safety hatch. He leapt upwards in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, flipped in midair and scraped the rollers on the bottom of his shoes across the white ceiling, skritch, skritch , leaving skid marks. He didn’t quite stick the landing and had to catch himself on the bulkhead. “Let Random clean that.” His face flushed with the effort. “That slaghead.”

“You’re so busted,” said Mariska, nodding at the security cam. “They’re probably calling your parents even as we speak.”

“Not,” said Jak. “Megawatt and I smeared the cams with agar last night.” He smiled and swiped a lock of curly hair from his forehead. “From Holmgren’s own petri dishes. All they’ve got is blur and closeups of bacteria.”

He looked so proud of himself that she couldn’t help but grin back at him. “Smooth.” Her Jak was the master of the grand and useless gesture.

He reached for her hand. “So where are we going?”

“Away.”

They skated in silence through the long corridors of Hai Zone; Jak let her lead. He was much better on rollers than she was — a two-time sugarfoot finalist — and matched her stroke-for-stroke without loosening or tightening his feathery grip.

“You were mad back there,” said Jak.

“Yes.”

“Have you heard from your mother yet?”

“I told you, she’s not my mother.”

“Sure. Your clone, then.”

Technically, Mariska was Natalya Volochkova’s clone, but she didn’t bother to correct him. “Not yet. Probably soon.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “Unless I get lucky and she lets me alone.”

“I don’t see why you care. If she comes to visit, just freeze her out. She’ll leave eventually.”

“I don’t want to see them together. Her and Al.” She could just picture Volochkova in their flat. The heroic explorer would sneer at the way her hired father had spent the money she had given them. Then she would order Al around and turn off her room’s persona and tell Mariska to grow up. As if she wasn’t trying.

“Move out for a while. Stay with Geetha.”

Mariska made a vinegar face. “Her little brother is a brat.”

“Come stay with us then. You could sleep in Memaw’s room.” Jak’s grandmother had been a fossil spacer, one of the first generation to go to the stars; she had died back in February.

“Sure, let’s try that one on Al. It’ll be fun watching the top of his head blow off.”

“But my parents would be there.”

Being Jak’s girlfriend meant having to tolerate his parents. The mom wasn’t so bad. A little boring, but then what grownup wasn’t? But the dad was a mess. He had washed out of the spacer program when he was Jak’s age and his mother — Memaw — had never let him forget it. The dad put his nose in a sniffer more than was good for anyone and when he was high, he had a tongue on him that could cut steel.

“Weren’t your parents there when you and Megawatt set off that smoke bomb in your room?”

Jak blushed. “It was a science experiment.”

“That cleared all of Tam Zone.” She pulled him to a stop and gave him a brush kiss on the cheek. “Besides, your parents aren’t going to be patrolling the hall at all hours. What if I get an overpowering urge in the middle of the night? Who’ll protect you?”

“Urge?” He dashed ahead, launched a jump 180, and landed it, skating backwards, wiggling his cute ass. “Overpowering?” His stare was at once playful and hungry.

“Show off.” Mariska looked away, embarrassed for both of them. Jak was so pathetically eager; it wasn’t right to tease him about sex. It had seemed like a grownup thing to say, but just now she wasn’t feeling much like an adult. She needed to get away from Jak. Everybody. Be by herself.

She decided to cue a fake call. When her fingernail flashed, she studied it briefly then brought it to her ear. “It’s Al,” she said. “Sorry, Jak, I’ve got to go.”

The swimming pool in Muoi Zone was one of the biggest in the Moon’s reservoir system, but Mariska liked it because it didn’t have a sky projected on its ceiling. Somehow images of stars and clouds made the water seem colder, even though all the Moon’s pools were kept at a uniform 27° Celsius. And she felt less exposed looking up at raw rock. The diving platforms at the deep end were always crowded with acrobats; in the shallows little kids stood on their hands and wiggled their toes and heaved huge, quivering balls of water high into the air. Their shouts of glee echoed off the low ceiling and drowned in the blue expanse of the pool.

The twenty-five lanes were busy as usual with lap swimmers meeting their daily exercise expectation. Mariska owed the Med supers an hour in the pool four times a week. She sat at the edge in lane twelve and waited for an opening. She was wearing the aquablade bodysuit that Al had bought for her birthday. Jak had wanted her to get a tank suit or a two-piece, but she had chosen the neck-to-knee style because her chest was still flat as the lunar plains. That was why she didn’t like to swim with Jak — when they stood next to each other in swimsuits, she looked like his baby sister.

She eased into the cool water just behind an old guy in a blue Speedo and cued up the datafeed she was supposed to review on ground squirrels.

=The hibernating Spermophilus tridecemlineatus can spend six months without food. During this period its temperature drops to as low as 0° Celsius. With a heart rate at one percent of its active state and oxygen consumption at two percent, the squirrel can survive solely on the combustion of its lipid reserves, especially unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.=

As Mariska’s heart rate climbed to its target of 179 beats per minute, her deep and regular breathing and the quiet slap of water against her body brought on her usual swimming trance. For a brief, blue moment doing the right thing was easy: just bounce off the two walls connected by the black lane line.

Then her thoughts began to tumble over one another. Everything was stuck together, just like in the Love Gravy song. Al and Jak and Volochkova and her life on the moon and her future in space and sex and going deep and the way her room wouldn’t let her grow up and Feodor Bear and pancakes and tomatoes and what did Random want with her anyway?

=The gene regulating the enzyme PDK4 (pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase isoenzyme 4) switches the squirrel’s metabolism from the active to the hibernating state by inhibiting carbohydrate oxidation.=

She tried to remember exactly when she had decided to block out everything about Natalya Volochkova, but she couldn’t. She had a vague memory that it had been her room’s idea. She had asked it why her mother had abandoned her and her room had said that maybe grownups didn’t always have choices but that had only made her upset. So her room had told Mariska that she was a special girl who didn’t need a mother and that she should never ask about her again. Ever. Never . Or had that been in a dreamfeed?

=…mitochondrial functions are drastically reduced… =

Mariska felt as if she were swimming through the data in the feed. She was certain that she would never remember any of it. And Mr. Holmgren was going to have a meltdown when he saw how she had left her bench in the lab and she’d probably flunk tomatoes just like Jak had.

=In 2014 the first recombinant ground squirrel and human genes resulted in activity of PTL — pancreatic triacylglycerol lipase — in both heart and white adipose tissue under supercooling conditions.=

What had happened in 2018? She had never much cared for history. The Oil Crash must have started around that time. And Google 3.0. The founding of Moonbase Zhong? A bunch of extinctions. Datafeeds, sure, but mindfeeds didn’t come until the eighties. When did the fossil spacers launch the first starship?

As she touched the wall a foot tapped her on the shoulder. She twisted out of her flip turn and broke the surface of the water, sputtering. Random was standing at the edge of the pool, staring at her. His bathing suit had slid down his bony hips. “My penny,” he said. “Can I have it back now?” His pale skin had just a tinge of blue and he was shivering.

Random spilled his bundle of clothes onto the floor in front of her locker; he had the handle of a lunch box clamped between his teeth. Mariska slithered into her tube top as he set the lunch box on the bench between them. It had a picture of an apple on it; the apple was wearing a space helmet.

“This isn’t funny, Random.” Mariska slipped an arm into the sleeve of her tugshirt. “Are you stalking me?”

“No.” He punched the print button on the processor and an oversized pool towel rolled from the output slot above the lockers. “Not funny at all.”

She sealed the front placket of the tug and plunged both hands into its pouch. There it was. She must have taken the penny without realizing it. She extended the coin to him on her palm.

“First we talk, then you get the penny.” She closed her fist around it. “What’s this about?”

“I said already.” Random stripped off his wet bathing suit. “Your mother.” He crammed it into the input slot and began to dry himself with the towel.

Mariska set her jaw but didn’t correct him. “What about her?”

“She’s a fossil. The penny could have been hers.”

“Okay.” She wasn’t sure she believed this, but she didn’t want him to think that she didn’t know if it were true. The heroic fossils had been the first humans to go to the stars. They had volunteered to be genetically altered so that they could hibernate through the three-year voyage to the wormhole at the far edge of Oort Cloud and then hibernate again as their ships cruised at sublight speeds through distant solar systems. Most of the fossils were dead, many from side effects of the crude genetic surgery of the twenty-first century. “So?”

“She probably has stuff. Or maybe you have her stuff?”

“Stuff?”

“To trade.” He wrapped the towel around his waist and opened his lunch box. It was crammed with what looked to Mariska like junk wrapped in clear guardgoo. “Like my goods.” Random pulled each item out as if it were a treasure.

“Vanilla Girl.” He showed her the head of a doll with a patch over one eye. “Pencil,” he said. “Never sharpened.” He arranged an empty Coke bubble, a paper book with the cover ripped off, a key, a purple eyelight, a pepper shaker in the shape of a robot, and a thumb teaser on the bench. At the bottom of the lunch box was a tiny red plastic purse. He snapped it open and shook it so that she could hear coins clinking. “Please?”

Mariska dropped the penny into the purse. “How did you find out she’s a fossil?”

“It’s complicated.” He tapped his forehead and she felt a tingle as he offered her a feed. “Want to open up?”

“No.” Mariska folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t think I do.” She was chilled at the thought of losing herself in the chaos of feeds everyone claimed were churning inside Random’s head. “You’ll just have to say it.”

Random dropped the towel on the floor and pulled on his janitor’s greens. She was disgusted to see that he didn’t bother with underwear. “When the Corshkov came back,” he said, “everyone was happy.” He furrowed his brow, trying to remember how to string consecutive sentences together. “Happy people talk and make feeds and party all over. That’s how I know.” He nodded as if that explained everything.

Mariska tried not to sound impatient. “Know what?”

“It’s a beautiful planet.” Random made a circle with his hands, as if to present the new world to her. “Check the feeds, you’ll see. It’s the best ever. Even better than Earth, at least the way it is now, all crispy and crowded.”

“Okay, so it’s the Garden of slagging Eden. So what does that have to do with all this crap?”

“Crap?” He drew himself up, and then waved the pepper shaker at her. “My goods aren’t crap.” He set it carefully back in the lunch box and began to gather up the rest of his odd collection.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Mariska didn’t want to chase him away — at least not yet. “So it’s a beautiful planet. And your goods are great. Tell me what’s going on?”

He stacked the Coke bubble and the eyelight on top of the book but then paused, considering her apology. “Most of the crew of the Gorshkov are going back.” He packed the pile away. “It’s their reward, to live on a planet with all that water and all that sky and friendly weather. Going back…” he tapped the bench next to her leg “… with their families.”

Mariska’s throat was so tight that she could barely croak. “I’m not her family.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “But anything you want to trade before you go — either of you…”

Mariska flung herself at the security door.

“Just asking,” Random called after her.

 

When she burst into the kitchen, Al was arranging a layer of lasagna noodles in a casserole. Yet another of her favorite dishes; Mariska should have known something was wrong. She gasped when he looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes were shiny and his cheeks were wet.

“You knew.” She could actually hear herself panicking. “She wants to drag me off to some stinking rock twenty light years away and you knew.”

“I didn’t. But I guessed.” The weight of his sadness knocked her back onto one of the dining room chairs. “She stopped by right after you left. She’s looking for you.”

“I’m not here.”

“Okay.” He picked up a cup of shredded mozzarella and sprinkled it listlessly over the noodles.

“You can’t let her do this, Al. You’re my daddy. You’re supposed to protect me.”

“It’s a term contract, Mariska. I’m already in the option year.”

“Slag the contract. And slag you for signing it. I don’t want to go.”

“Then don’t. I don’t think she’ll make you. But you need to think about it.” He kept his head down and spooned sauce onto the lasagna. “It’s space, Mariska. You’re a spacer.”

“Not yet. I haven’t even passed tomatoes. I could wash out. I will wash out.”

He sniffed and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you taking her side?”

“Because you’re a child and she’s your legal parent. Because you can’t live here forever.” His voice climbed unsteadily to a shout. Al had never shouted at her before. “Because all of this is over.” He shook the spoon at their kitchen.

“What do you mean, over?” She thought that it wasn’t very professional of him to be showing his feelings like this. “Answer me! And what about Jak?”

“I don’t know, Mariska.” He jiggled another lasagna noodle out of the colander. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She stared at his back. The kitchen seemed to warp and twist; all the ties that bound her to Al were coming undone. She scraped her chair from the table and spun down the hall to her room, bouncing off the walls.

“Hello Mariska,” said her room as the door slid shut. “You seem upset. Is there anything I can… ?

“Shut up, shut up, shut up .”

She didn’t care if she hurt her room’s feelings; it was just a stupid persona anyway. She needed quiet to think, sort through all the lies that had been her life. It must have been some other girl who had drawn funny aliens on the walls or listened to the room tell stories — lies! — about a space captain named Mariska or who had built planets inhabited by unicorns and fairies and princesses in her room’s simspace. She didn’t belong here. Not in this goddamn room, not on the moon, not anywhere.

Then it came to her. She knew what she had to do. Only she wasn’t sure exactly how to do it. But how hard could going deep be? It was in her genes — her mother’s genes. Slag her. Everyone so worried that she would go deep without really meaning to. So that must mean that she could. That’s how the fossils had done it, before there were hibernation pods and proper euthermic arousal protocols.

She didn’t know what good going deep would do her. It was probably stupid. Something a kid would do. But that was the point, wasn’t it? She was just a kid. What other choice did she have?

She lay back on her bed and thought about space, about stepping out of the airlock without anything on. Naked and alone, just like she had always been. The air would freeze in her lungs and they would burst. Her eyes would freeze and it would be dark. She would be as cold as she had ever been. As cold as Natalya Volochkova, that bitch.

 

The Earth is up,” the room murmured. “And I am always up. Is Mariska ready to get up yet?”

Mariska shivered from the cold. That wasn’t right. Her room was supposed to monitor both its temperature and hers.

“The Earth is up, and I am always up,” cooed her room. It wasn’t usually so patient.

Mariska stretched. She felt stiff, as if she had overdone a swim. She opened her eyes and then shut them immediately. Her room had already brought the lights up to full intensity. It was acting strangely this morning. Usually it would interrupt one of her dreams, but all that she had in her head was a vast and frigid darkness. Space without the stars.

Mariska yawned and slitted her eyes against the light. She was facing the shelf where Feodor Bear sat. “Dobroye utro ,” it said. The antique robot bumped against the shelf twice in a vain attempt to stand. “Good morn-ing Mar-i-ska.” There was something wrong with its speech chip; it sounded as if it were talking through a bowl of soup.

“Good morning, dear Mariska,” said her room. “Today is Wednesday, November 23, 2163. You have no bookings scheduled for today.”

That couldn’t be right. The date was way off. Then she remembered.

The door slid open. She blinked several times before she could focus on the woman standing there.

“Mariska?”

Mariska knew that voice. Even though it had a crack to it that her room had never had, she recognized its singing accent.

“Where’s Al?” When she sat up the room seemed to spin.

“He doesn’t live here anymore.” The woman sat beside her on the bed. She had silver hair and a spacer’s sallow complexion. Her skin was wrinkled around the eyes and the mouth. “I can send for him, if you like. He’s just in Muoi Zone.” She seemed to be trying on a smile, to see if it would fit. “It’s been three years, Mariska. We couldn’t rouse you. It was too dangerous.”

She considered this. “Jak?”

“Three years is a long time.”

She turned her face to the wall. “The room’s voice — that’s you. And the persona?”

“I didn’t want to go to Delta Pavonis , but I didn’t have a choice. I’m a spacer, dear, dear Mariska. Just like you. When they need us, we go.” She sighed. “I knew you would hate me — I would have hated me. So I found another way to be with you; I spent the two months before we left uploading feeds. I put as much of myself into this room as I could.” She gestured at Mariska’s room.

“You treated me like a kid. Or the room did.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d be gone this long.”

“I’m not going to that place with you.”

“All right,” she said. “But I’d like to go with you, if you’ll let me.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Mariska shook her head; she still felt groggy. “Where would I go?”

“To the stars,” said Natalya Volochkova. “They’ve been calling you. Alpha Centauri . Barnard’s. Wolf. Lalande. Luyten. Sirius .”

Mariska propped herself on a elbow and stared at her. “How do you know that?”

She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from Mariska’s forehead. “Because,” she said, “I’m your mother.”

 

 

James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His most recent book, a collection of stories, was The Wreck of the Godspeed . His novella Burn was awarded the Nebula in 2007, his only win in twelve nominations — but who’s counting? He has won the Hugo Award twice and his fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is coeditor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology , and the The Secret History of Science Fiction . He writes a column on the Internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. Hear him read “Going Deep” and many other stories on his podcasts: James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible.com and the Free Reads Podcast . His website is www.jimkelly.net.

 

 

BRIDESICLE

Will McIntosh

 

 

FROM THE AUTHOR: One of my writing friends once described my writing process as thinking up a bunch of hopefully cool ideas, throwing them up against the wall, and seeing what stuck. I hope that’s not completely accurate, but I do tend to be driven by overt ideas and interesting characters, and underlying themes or resonance tends to develop outside my awareness. In other words, as a writer I’m not terribly self-aware, so writing about my writing can be a struggle.

This same writing friend pointed out that almost all of my fiction to date explores romantic love. It astonished me that I had never noticed. I write love stories — who’d have thought?

“Bridesicle” is a love story. It didn’t start out that way, though. I originally wrote “Bridesicle” from the perspective of Lycan, a man visiting a cryogenic dating center who, unbeknownst to his potential mates, can’t afford to save any of them. In the original story Mira, who is the protagonist in the final version, was one of a number of women Lycan “dated” at the center. I posted the original story for my online writing group to critique, and they politely panned it. Mary Robinette Kowal suggested the story would work better from the perspective of one of the women trapped at the center and, after a few weeks of acclimating to the idea that I should toss the original story in its entirety and start over, I tossed the original story in its entirety and started over. So I have Mary to thank for guiding me toward the story as it was published in Asimov’s .

While I’m not exactly suffering from imposter syndrome, to say I was stunned to learn that “Bridesicle” had been nominated for a Nebula Award would be an understatement. When I began writing at age thirty-nine it never occurred to me that I might turn out to be any good at it. I wrote because I discovered I loved it more than anything I had ever done, and eighty-eight straight rejections to begin my career didn’t deter me, because I just flat-out love to write. I fully expect the day of the Nebula Awards to be the second-best day of my life. The best was my wedding day. Originally I ranked the birth of my twins, Miles and Hannah, second, and the Nebulas third, but my wife Alison reminded me that the day of their birth actually sucked pretty badly.

 

 

T HE WORDS WERE gentle strokes, drawing her awake.

“Hello. Hello there.”

She felt the light on her eyelids, and knew that if she opened her eyes they would sting, and she would have to shade them with her palm and let the light bleed through a crack.

“Feel like talking?” A man’s soft voice.

And then her mind cleared enough to wonder: where was her mom? She called into the corners of her mind, but there was no answer, and that could not be. Once she’d let mom in, there was no tossing her out. It was not like letting Mom move into her apartment; there was no going back once mom was in her mind, because there was no body for mom to return to.

So where was she?

“Aw, I know you’re awake by now . Come on, sleeping beauty. Talk to me.” The last was a whisper, a lover’s words, and Mira felt that she had to come awake and open her eyes. She tried to sigh, but no breath came. Her eyes flew open in alarm.

An old man was leaning over her, smiling, but Mira barely saw him, because when she opened her mouth to inhale, her jaw squealed like a sea bird’s cry, and no breath came, and she wanted to press her hands to the sides of her face, but her hands wouldn’t come either. Nothing would move except her face.

“Hello, hello. And how are you?” The old man was smiling gently, as if Mira might break if he set his whole smile loose. He was not that old, she saw now. Maybe sixty. The furrows in his forehead and the ones framing his nose only seemed deep because his face was so close to hers, almost close enough for a kiss. “Are you having trouble?” He reached out and stroked her hair. “You have to press down with your back teeth to control the air flow. Didn’t they show you?”

There was an air flow — a gentle breeze, whooshing up her throat and out her mouth and nose. It tickled the tiny hairs in her nostrils. She bit down, and the breeze became a hiss — an exhale strong enough that her chest should drop, but it didn’t, or maybe it did and she just couldn’t tell, because she couldn’t lift her head to look.

“Where—” Mira said, and then she howled in terror, because her voice sounded horrible — deep and hoarse and hollow, the voice of something that had pulled itself from a swamp.

“It takes some getting used to. Am I your first? No one has revived you before? Not even for an orientation?” The notion seemed to please him, that he was her first, whatever that meant. Mira studied him, wondering if she should recognize him. He preened at her attention, as if expecting Mira to be glad to see him. He was not an attractive man — his nose was thick and bumpy, and not in an aristocratic way. His nostrils were like a bull’s; his brow Neanderthal, but his mouth dainty. She didn’t recognize him.

“I can’t move. Why can’t I move?” Mira finally managed. She looked around as best she could.

“It’s okay. Try to relax. Only your face is working.”

“What happened?” Mira finally managed.

“You were in a car accident,” he said, his brow now flexed with concern. He consulted a readout on his palm. “Fairly major damage. Ruptured aorta. Right leg gone.”

Right leg gone ? Her right leg? She couldn’t see anything except the man hanging over her and a gold-colored ceiling, high, high above. “This is a hospital?” she asked.

“No, no. A dating center.”

“What?” For the first time she noticed that there were other voices in the room, speaking in low, earnest, confidential tones. She caught snippets close by:

“…neutral colors. How could anyone choose violet ?”

“…last time I was at a Day-Glows concert I was seventeen… ”

“I shouldn’t be the one doing this.” The man turned, looked over his shoulder. “There’s usually an orientation.” He raised his voice. “Hello?” He turned back around to face her, shrugged, looking bemused. “I guess we’re on our own.” He clasped his hands, leaned in toward Mira. “The truth is, you see, you died in the accident…”

Mira didn’t hear the next few things he said. She felt as if she were floating. It was an absurd idea, that she might be dead yet hear someone tell her she was dead. But somehow it rang true. She didn’t remember dying, but she sensed some hard, fast line — some demarcation between now and before. The idea made her want to flee, escape her body, which was a dead body. Her teeth were corpse’s teeth.

“…your insurance covered the deep-freeze preservation, but full revival, especially when it involves extensive injury, is terribly costly. That’s where the dating service comes in—”

“Where is my mother?” Mira interrupted.

The man consulted his palm again. He nodded. “You had a hitcher. Your mother.” He glanced around again, raised his hand as if to wave at someone, then dropped it.

A hitcher. What an apropos term. “Is she gone?” Mira wanted to say, “Is she dead?” but that had become an ambiguous concept.

“Yes. You need consistent brain activity to maintain a hitcher. Once you die, the hitcher is gone.”

Like a phone number you’re trying to remember, Mira thought. You have to hold it with thought, and if you lose it, you never get it back. Mira felt hugely relieved. From the moment she waked, she kept expecting to hear her mother’s voice. Now she knew it wouldn’t come, and she could relax. She felt guilty for feeling relieved that her mother was dead, but who would blame her? Certainly not anyone who’d known her mother. Certainly not Lynn.

“I have a sister,” she said. “Lynn.” Her jaw moved so stiffly.

“Yes, a twin sister. Now that would be interesting.” The man grinned, his eyebrows raised.

“Is she still alive?”

“No,” he said in a tone that suggested she was a silly girl. “You’ve been gone for over eighty years, sleeping beauty.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if all of that was trivial. “But let’s focus on the present. The way this works is, we get acquainted. We have dates. If we find we’re compatible,” he raised his shoulders toward his ears, smiled his dainty smile, “then I might be enticed to pay for you to be revived, so that we can be together.”

Dates.

“So. My name is Red, and I know from your readout that your name is Mira. Nice to meet you, Mira.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mira murmured. He’d said she died in a car accident. She tried to remember, but nothing came. Nothing about the accident, anyway. The memories that raced up at her were arguments — arguments with her mother. An argument at a shopping mall. Mom hating everything Mira liked, trying to get Mira to go to the Seniors section and buy cheap, drab housedresses. Mom had had no control of Mira’s body (she was only a hitcher, after all), but there are lots of ways to control.

“So. Mira.” Red clapped his hands together. “Do you want to bullshit, or do you want to get intimate?”

The raised eyebrows again, the same as when he made the twins comment. “I don’t understand,” Mira said.

“Weeeell. For example, here’s a question.” He leaned in close, his breath puffing in her ear. “If I revived you, what sorts of things would you do to me?”

Mira was sure that this man’s name was not Red, and she doubted he was here to revive anyone. “I don’t know. That’s an awfully intimate question. Why don’t we get to know each other first?” She needed time to think. Even just a few minutes of quiet, to make sense of this.

Red frowned theatrically. “Come on. Tease me a little.”

Should she tell Red she was gay? Surely not. He would lose interest, and maybe report it to whoever owned the facility. But why hadn’t whoever owned the facility known she was gay? Maybe that was to be part of the orientation she’d missed. Whatever the reason, did she want to risk being taken out of circulation, or unplugged and buried?

Would that be the worst thing?

The thought jangled something long-forgotten. Or more like deeply forgotten; everything in her life was long-forgotten. She’d thought something along those lines once, and there had been so much pain that the pain still echoed, even without the memory. She reached for the memory, but it was sunk deep in a turgid goo that she encountered whenever she tried to remember something. Had she really been able to effortlessly pull up memories when she was alive, or was that just how she remembered it?

“I’m just—” she wanted to say “not in the mood,” but that was not only a cliché, but a vast understatement. She was dead. She couldn’t move anything but her face, and that made her feel untethered, as if she were floating, drifting. Hands and feet grounded you. Mira had never realized. “I’m just not very good at this sort of thing.”

“Well.” Red put his hands on his thighs, made a production of standing. “This costs quite a bit, and they charge by the minute. So I’ll say goodbye now, and you can go back to being dead.”

Go back? “Wait!” Mira said. They could bring her back, and then let her die again? She imagined her body, sealed up somewhere, maybe for years, maybe forever. The idea terrified her. Red paused, waiting. “Okay. I would…” She tried to think of something, but there were so many things running through her mind, so many trains of thought she wanted to follow, none of them involving the pervert leaning over her.

Were there other ways to get permanently “revived”? Did she have any living relatives she might contact, or maybe a savings account that had been accruing interest for the past eighty years? Had she had any savings when she died? She’d had a house — she remembered that. Lynn would have inherited it.

“Fine, if you’re not going to talk, I’ll just say goodbye,” Red snapped. “But don’t think anyone else is coming. Your injuries would make you a costly revival, and there are tens of thousands of women here. Plus men don’t want the women who’d been frozen sixty years before the facility opened, because they have nothing in common with those women.”

“Please,” Mira said.

He reached for something over her head, out of sight.

 

Mira dreamed that she was running on a trail in the woods. The trail sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper until she was running up big steps. Then the steps entered a flimsy plywood tower and wound up, up. It was dark, and she could barely see, but it felt so good to run; it had been such a long time that she didn’t care how steep it was. She climbed higher, considered turning back, but she wanted to make it to the top after having gone so far. Finally she reached the top, and there was a window where she could see a vast river, and a lovely college campus set along it. She hurried over to the window for a better view, and as she did, the tower leaned under her shifting weight, and began to fall forward. The tower built speed, hurtled toward the buildings. This is it , she thought, her stomach flip-flopping. This is the moment of my death .

Mira jolted awake before she hit the ground.

An old man — likely in his seventies — squinted down at her. “You’re not my type,” he grumbled, reaching over her head.

 

“Hi.” It came out phlegmy; the man cleared his throat. “I’ve never done this before.” He was a fat man, maybe forty.

“What’s the date?” Mira asked, still groggy.

“January third, twenty-three fifty-two,” the man said. Nearly thirty years had passed. The man wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I feel a little sick for being here, like I’m a child molester or something.” He frowned. “But there are so many stories out there of people finding true love in the drawers. My cousin Ansel met his second wife Floren at a revival center. Lovely woman.”

The man gave her a big, sloppy smile. “I’m Lycan, by the way.”

“I’m Mira. Nice to meet you.”

“Your smile is a little wavery, in a cute way. I can tell you’re honest. You wouldn’t use me to get revived and then divorce me. You have to watch out for that.” Lycan sat at an angle, perhaps trying to appear thinner.

“I can see how that would be a concern,” Mira said.

Lycan heaved a big sigh. “Maybe meeting women at a bridesicle place is pathetic, but it’s not as pathetic as showing up at every company party alone, with your hands in your pockets instead of holding someone else’s, or else coming with a woman who not only has a loud laugh and a lousy sense of humor, but is ten years older than you and not very attractive. That’s pathetic. Let people suspect my beautiful young wife was revived. They’ll still be jealous, and I’ll still be walking tall, holding her hand as everybody checked her out.”

Lycan fell silent for a moment. “My grandmother says I’m talking too much. Sorry.”

So Lycan had a hitcher. At least one. It was so difficult to tell — you got so good at carrying on two conversations at once when you had a hitcher.

“No, I like it,” Mira said. It allowed her precious time to think. When she was alive, there had been times in Mira’s life when she had little free time, but she had always had time to think. She could think while commuting to work, while standing in lines, and during all of the other in-between times. Suddenly it was the most precious thing.

Lycan wiped his palms. “First dates are not my best moments.”

“You’re doing great.” Mira smiled as best she could, although she knew the smile did not reach her eyes. She had to get out of here, had to convince one of these guys to revive her. One of these guys? This was only the third person to revive her in the fifty years that the place had been open, and if the first guy, the pervert, was to be believed, she’d become less desirable the longer she was here.

Mira wished she could see where she was. Was she in a coffin? On a bed? She wished she could move her neck. “What’s it like in here?” she asked. “Are we in a room?”

“You want to see? Here.” Lycan held his palm a foot or so over her face; a screen embedded there flashing words and images in three dimensions transformed into a mirror.

Mira recoiled. Her own dead face looked down at her, her skin grey, her lips bordering on blue. Her face was flaccid — she looked slightly unbalanced, or mentally retarded, rather than peaceful. A glittering silver mesh concealed her to the neck.

Lycan angled the mirror, giving her a view of the room. It was a vast, open space, like the atrium of an enormous hotel. A lift was descending through the center of the atrium. People hurried across beautifully designed bridges as crystal blue water traced twisting paths through huge transparent tubes suspended in the open space, giving the impression of flying streams. Nearby, Mira saw a man sitting beside an open drawer, his mouth moving, head nodding, hands set a little self-consciously in his lap.

Lycan took the mirror away. His eyes had grown big and round.

“What is it?” Mira asked.

He opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind, shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Please, tell me.”

There was a long pause. Mira guessed it was an internal dispute. Finally, Lycan answered. “It’s just that it’s finally hitting me at a gut level: I’m talking to a dead person. If I could hold your hand, your fingers would be cold and stiff.”

Mira looked away, toward the ceiling. She felt ashamed. Ashamed of the dead body that housed her.

“What’s it like?” he whispered, as if he were asking something obscene.

Mira didn’t want to answer, but she also didn’t want to go back to being dead. “It’s hard. It’s hard to have no control over anything, not when I can be awake, or who I talk to. And to be honest, it’s scary. When you end this date I’m going to be gone — no thoughts, no dreaming, just nothingness. It terrifies me. I dread those few minutes before the date ends.”

Lycan looked sorry he’d asked, so Mira changed the subject, asking about Lycan’s hitchers. He had two: his father and his grandmother.

“I don’t get it,” Mira said. “Why are there still hitchers if they’ve figured out how to revive people?” In her day, medical science had progressed enough that there was hope of a breakthrough, and preservation was common, but the dead stayed dead.

“Bodies wear out,” Lycan said, matter-of-factly. “If you revive a lady who’s ninety-nine, she’ll just keep dying. So, tell me about yourself. I see you had a hitcher?”

Mira told Lycan about her mother, and Lycan uttered the requisite condolences, and she pretended they were appropriate. She held no illusions about why she had agreed to host her mother. It was, in a sense, a purely selfish motive: she knew she couldn’t live with the guilt if she said no. It was emotional blackmail, what her mother did, but it was flawlessly executed.

But I’m dying. Mira, I’m scared. Please . Even across eighty years and death, Mira could still hear her mother’s voice, its perpetually aggrieved tone.

An awful darkness filled her when she thought of her mother. She felt guilty and ashamed. But what did she have to feel ashamed of? What do you owe your mother if the only kindness she had ever offered was giving birth to you? Do you owe her a room in your mind? What if you loved a woman instead of a “nice man,” and your mother barely spoke to you? How about if your soulmate died, painfully, and your mother’s attempt to console you was to say, “Maybe next time you should try a man.” As if Jeanette’s death justified her mother’s disapproval.

“What if I actually find someone here, and she agrees to marry me in exchange for being revived?” Lycan was saying. “Would people sense she was too good-looking to be with me, and guess that I’d met her at a bridesicle place? We’d have to come up with a convincing story about how and where we met — something that doesn’t sound made-up.”

“Bridesicle?”

Lycan shrugged. “That’s what some people call this sort of place.”

Then even if someone revived her, she would be a pariah. People would want nothing to do with her. Her mother’s voice rang in her mind, almost harmonizing the line.

I want nothing to do with you. You and your girlfriend .

“I’m afraid it’s time for me to say goodbye. I should circulate. But maybe we can talk again?” Lycan said.

She didn’t want to die again, didn’t want to be thrown into that abyss. She had so much to think about, to remember. “I’d like that,” was all she said, resisting the urge to scream, to beg this man not to kill her. If Mira did that, he’d never come back. As he reached over to turn her off, Mira used her last few seconds to try to reach for the memory of her accident. It sat like a splinter under her skin.

 

Lycan came back. He told her it had been a week since his first visit. Mira had no sense of how much time had passed, the way you do when you’ve been asleep. A week felt the same as thirty years.

“I’ve talked to eleven women, and none of them were half as interesting as you. Especially the women who died recently. Modern women can be so shallow, so unwilling to seek a common ground. I don’t want a relationship that’s a struggle — I want to care about my wife’s needs, to be able to say, ‘no, honey, let’s go see the movie you want to see,’ and count on her saying, ‘no, that’s okay, I know how much you want to see that other one.’ And sometimes we would see her movie, and sometimes mine.”

“I know just what you mean,” Mira said, in what she hoped was an intimate tone. As intimate as her graveyard voice could manage.

“That’s why I came to the bottom floor, to the women who died one hundred, one hundred and twenty-five years ago. I thought, why not a woman from a more innocent time? She would probably be more appreciative. The woman at the orientation told me that choosing a bridesicle instead of a live woman was a generous thing to do — you were giving a life to someone who’d been cheated out of hers. I don’t kid myself, though — I’m not doing this out of some nobility, but it’s nice to think I’m doing something good for someone, and the girls at the bottom need it more than the girls at the top. You’ve been in line longer.”

Mira had been in line a long time. It didn’t seem that way, though. It had only been, what, about an hour of life since she died? It was difficult to gauge, because she didn’t remember dying. Mira tried to think back. Had her car accident been in the city, or on a highway? Had she been at fault? Nothing came, except memories of what must have been the weeks leading up to it, of her mother driving her crazy.

Once she took in her mother, she could never love again. How could she make love to someone with her mother watching? Even a man would have been out of the question, although a man was out of the question in any case.

“It’s awkward, though,” Lycan was saying. “There aren’t any nice ways to tell someone that you aren’t interested. I’m not in practice rejecting women. I’m much more familiar with the other end of the equation. If you weren’t in that drawer, you probably wouldn’t give me a second glance.”

Mira could see that he was fishing, that he wanted her to tell him he was wrong, that she would give him a second glance. It was difficult — it wasn’t in her nature to pretend that she felt something she didn’t. But she didn’t have the luxury of honoring her nature.

“Of course I would. You’re a wonderful man, and good looking.”

Lycan beamed. What is it about us, Mira wondered, that we will believe any lie, no matter how outrageous, if it’s flattering?

“Some people just spark something in you, make you breathe fast, you know?” Lycan said. “Others don’t. It’s hard to say why, but in those first seconds of seeing someone,” he snapped his fingers, “you can always tell.” He held her gaze for a moment, something that was clearly uncomfortable for him, then looked at his lap, blushing.

“I know what you mean,” Mira said. She tried to smile warmly, knowingly. It made her feel like shit.

There was constant murmur of background chatter this time.

…through life and revival, to have and to hold…

“What is that I’m hearing? Is that a marriage ceremony?” Mira asked.

Lycan glanced over his shoulder, nodded. “They happen all the time here. It’s kind of risky to revive someone otherwise.”

“Of course,” Mira said. She’d been here for decades, yet she knew nothing about this place.

 

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Lycan said. It was their sixth or seventh date. Mira had grown fond of Lycan, which was a good thing, because the only thing she ever saw was Lycan’s doughy jowls, the little bump of chin poking out of them. He was her life, such as it was.

“What is it?” Mira asked.

He looked off into the room, sighed heavily. “I’ve never enjoyed a woman’s company as much as yours. I have to be honest with you, but I’m afraid if I am I’ll lose you.”

Mira tried to imagine what this man could possibly say that would lead her to choose being dead over his company. “I’m sure that won’t happen, whatever it is. You can trust me.”

Lycan put his hand over his eyes. His chest hitched. Mira made gentle shushing sounds, the sort of sounds her mother had never made, not even when Jeanette died.

“It’s okay,” she cooed. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

Lycan finally looked at her, his eyes red. “I really like you, Mira. I think I even love you. But I’m not a rich man. I can’t afford to revive you, and I never will. Not even if I sold everything I owned.”

She hadn’t even realized how much hope she was harboring until it was dashed. “Well, that’s not your fault, I guess.” She tried to sound chipper, though inside she felt black despair.

Lycan nodded. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

Mira didn’t have to ask why he came here pretending to be looking for a wife if he couldn’t afford to revive anyone. The women here must all be kind to him, must hang on his every word in the hope that he’d choose them and free them from their long sleep. Where else would a man like Lycan get that sort of attention?

“Can you forgive me?” Lycan asked, looking like a scolded bulldog. “Can I still visit you?”

“Of course. I’d miss you terribly if you didn’t.” The truth was, if Lycan didn’t visit Mira would be incapable of missing anyone. No one else was visiting, or likely to stumble upon her among the army of bridesicles lined shoulder-to-shoulder in boxes in this endless mausoleum.

That was the end of it. Lycan changed the subject, struck up a conversation about his collection of vintage gaming code, and Mira listened, and made “mm-hm” sounds in the pauses, and thought her private thoughts.

She found herself thinking about her mom more than Jeanette. Perhaps it was because she’d already learned to accept that Jeanette was gone, and mom’s death was still fresh, despite being not nearly as heartbreaking. After Jeanette died, Mira had worked through her death until there were no new thoughts she could possibly think. And then she had finally been able to let Jeanette rest….

She had the most astonishing thought. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now. Mira had worked for Capital Lifekey, just like Jeanette. Preservation had been part of Jeanette’s benefits package, just like Mira’s.

“Lycan, would you do something for me?” It felt as if an eternity rode on the question she was about to ask.

“Sure. Anything.”

“Would you run a search on a friend of mine who died?”

“What’s her name?”

“Jeanette Zierk. Born twenty-two twenty-four.”

Mira was not as anxious as she thought she should be as Lycan checked, probably because her heart could not race, and her palms could not sweat. It was surprising how much emotion was housed in the body instead of the mind.

Lycan checked. “Yes. She’s here.”

“She’s here? In this place?”

“Yes.” He consulted the readout, pulling his palm close to his nose, then he pointed across the massive atrium, lower down than they were. “Over there. I don’t know why you’re surprised, if she was stored she’d be here — it’s a felony to renege on a storage contract.”

Mira wished she could lift her head and look where he was pointing. She had spent the last few years of her life accepting that Jeanette was really gone, and would never come back. “Can you wake her, and give her a message from me? Please?”

Lycan was rendered momentarily speechless.

“Please?” Mira said. “It would mean so much to me.”

“Okay. I guess. Sure. Hold on.” Lycan stood tenuously, looked confused for a moment, and then headed off.

He returned a moment later. “What message should I give her?”

Mira wanted to ask Lycan to tell Jeanette she loved her, but that might be a bad idea. “Just tell her I’m here. Thank you so much.”

Maybe it was someone else, or Mira’s imagination, but she felt sure she heard a distant caw of surprise. Jeanette, reacting to the news.

Soon Lycan’s smiling face poked into view above her. “She was very excited by the news. I mean, out of her head excited. I thought she’d leap out of her crèche and hug me.”

“What did she say?” Mira tried to sound calm. Jeanette was here. Suddenly, everything had changed. Mira had a reason to live. She had to figure out how to get out of there.

“She said to tell you she loved you.”

Mira sobbed. He had really talked to Jeanette. What a strange and wonderful and utterly incomprehensible thing.

“She also said she hoped you didn’t suffer much in the accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Mira said.

It just came out. She said it without having thought it first, which was a strange experience, as if someone had taken control of her dead mouth and formed the words, rode them out of her on the hiss of air coursing through her throat.

There was a long, awkward silence.

“What do you mean?” Lycan said, frowning.

Mira remembered now. Not the moment itself, but planning it, intending it. She had put on her best tan suit. Mother kept asking what the occasion was. She wanted to know why Mira was making such a fuss when they were only going to Pan Pietro for dinner. She said that Mira wasn’t as beautiful as she thought she was and should get off her high horse. Mira had barely heard her. For once, she had not been bothered by her mother’s words.

“I mean it wasn’t an accident,” she repeated. “You were honest with me, I want to be honest with you.” She did not want to be honest with him, actually, but it had come out, and now that it was out she didn’t have the strength to draw it back in.

“Oh. Well, thank you.” Lycan scratched his scalp with one finger, pondering. Mira wasn’t sure if he got what she was saying. After all their conversation, she still had little sense of whether Lycan was intelligent or not. “You know, if I figure out a way to revive you, you could come with me to my company’s annual picnic. Last year I announced to my whole table that I was going to win the door prize, and then I did!”

Lycan went on about his company picnic while Mira thought about Jeanette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.

Far too soon, Lycan said goodbye. He told Mira he would see her on Tuesday, and killed her.

 

The man hovering over her was wearing a suit and tie, only the suit was sleeveless and the tie rounded, and the man’s skin was bright orange.

“What year is it, please?” Mira said.

“Twenty-four seventy-seven,” he said, not unkindly.

Mira couldn’t remember the date Lycan had last come. Twenty-four? It had been twenty-three something, hadn’t it? It was a hundred years later. Lycan had never come back. He was gone — dead, or hitching with some relative.

The orange man’s name was Neas. Mira didn’t think it would be polite to ask why he was orange, so instead she asked what he did for a living. He was an attorney. It suggested to Mira that the world had not changed all that much since she’d been alive, that there were still attorneys, even if they had orange skin.

“My grandfather Lycan says to tell you hello,” Neas said.

Mira grinned. It was hard to hold the grin with her stiff lips, but it felt good. Lycan had come back after all. “Tell him he’s late, but that’s okay.”

“He insisted we talk to you.”

Neas chatted amiably about Lycan. Lycan had met a woman at a Weight Watchers meeting, and his wife didn’t think it was appropriate that he visit Mira anymore. They had divorced twenty years later. He died of a heart attack at sixty-six, was revived, then hitched with his son when he reached his nineties. Lycan’s son had hitched with Neas a few years ago, taking Lycan with him.

“I’m glad Lycan’s all right,” Mira said when Neas had finished. “I’d grown very fond of him.”

“And he of you.” Neas crossed his legs, cleared his throat. “So tell me Mira, did you want to have children when you were alive?” His tone had shifted to that of a supervisor interviewing a potential employee.

The question caught Mira off guard. She’d assumed this was a social call, especially after Neas said that Lycan had insisted they visit her.

“Yes, actually. I had hoped to. Things don’t always work out the way you plan.” Mira pictured Jeanette, a stone’s throw away, dead in a box. Neas’s question raised a flicker of hope. “Is this a date, then?” she asked.

“No.” He nodded, perhaps to some suggestion from one of his hitchers. “Actually we’re looking for someone to bear a child and help raise her. You see, my wife was dying of Dietz Syndrome, which is an unrevivable illness, so she hitched with me. We want to have a child. We need a host, and a caregiver, for the child.”

“I see.” Mira’s head was spinning. Should she blurt out that she’d love the opportunity to raise their child, or would that signal that she was taking the issue too lightly? She settled on a thoughtful expression that hopefully conveyed her understanding of the seriousness of the situation.

“We would marry for legal reasons, of course, but the arrangement would be completely platonic.”

“Yes, of course.”

Neas sighed, looking suddenly annoyed. “I’m sorry Mira, my wife says you’re not right.” Neas was very upset. He stood, reached over Mira’s head. “We’ve interviewed forty or fifty women, but none are good enough,” he added testily.

“No, wait!” Mira said.

Neas paused.

Mira thought fast. What had she done to make the wife suddenly rule her out? The wife must feel terribly threatened at the idea of having a woman in the house, raising her child. Tempting her husband. If Mira could allay the wife’s fears…

“I’m gay,” she said.

Neas looked beyond surprised. Evidently Lycan hadn’t realized who Jeanette was, even after carrying the verbal love note. Friends could say they loved each other. Neas said nothing, and Mira knew they were having a powwow. She prayed she’d read the situation correctly.

“So, you couldn’t fall in love with me?” Neas finally asked. It was such a bizarre question. Neas was not only a man, he was an orange man, and not particularly attractive.

“No. I’m in love with a woman named Jeanette. Lycan met her.”

There was another long silence.

“There’s also this business about your auto accident not being an accident.”

Mira had forgotten. How could she so easily forget that she killed herself and her own mother? Maybe because it had been so long ago. Everything from before her death seemed so long ago now. Like another lifetime.

“It was so long ago,” Mira murmured. “But yes, it’s true.”

“You took your mother’s life?”

“No, that’s not what I intended.” It wasn’t. Mira hadn’t wanted her mother dead, she just wanted to escape her. “I fled from her. Just because someone is your mother doesn’t mean she can’t be impossible to live with.”

Neas nodded slowly. “It’s difficult for us to imagine that. Hitching has been a very powerful experience for us. Oona and I never dreamed we could be this close, and we’re happy to have dad and grandfather and great-grandmother as companions. I know I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“I can see how it could be beautiful,” Mira said. “It’s like a marriage, I think, but more so. It magnifies the relationship — good ones get closer and deeper; bad ones become intolerable.”

Neas’s eyes teared up. “Lycan said we can trust you. We need someone we can trust.” He kept on nodding for a moment, lost in thought. Then he waved his hand; a long line of written text materialized in the air. “Do you believe in spanking children?” he asked, reading the first line.

“Absolutely not,” Mira answered, knowing her very existence depended on her answers.

 

Mira’s heart was racing so fast it felt as if there were wings flapping in her chest. Lucia was sleeping, her soft little head pressed to Mira’s racing heart. The lift swept them up; the vast atrium opened below as people on the ground shrank to dots.

She wanted to run, but kept her pace even, her transparent shoes thwocking on the marble floor.

She cried when Jeanette opened her eyes, swept her fingers behind Jeanette’s bluish-white ear, lightly brushed her blue lips.

Jeanette sobbed. To her, it would have been only a moment since Lycan had spoken to her.

“You made it,” Jeanette croaked in that awful dead voice. She noticed the baby, smiled. “Good for you.” So like Jeanette, to ask for nothing, not even life. If Jeanette had come to Mira’s crèche alive and whole, the first words out of Mira’s stiff mouth would have been “Get me out of here.”

Vows from a wedding ceremony drifted from a few levels above, the husband’s voice strong and sure, the wife’s toneless and froggy.

“I can’t afford to revive you, love,” Mira said, “but I’ve saved enough to absorb you. Is that good enough? Will you stay with me, for the rest of our lives?”

You can’t cry when you’re dead, but Jeanette tried, and only the tears were missing. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thousand times better than good enough.”

Mira nodded, grinning. “It will take a few days to arrange.” She touched Jeanette’s cold cheek. “I’ll be back in an eyeblink. This is the last time you have to die.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Mira reached up, and Jeanette died, for the last time.

 

 

Will McIntosh’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction: Best of the Year , the acclaimed anthology The Living Dead, Strange Horizons, Interzone , and many other venues. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural South, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. Last December he became the father of twins.

 

 

^{NEBULA AWARD WINNER »»}

SPAR

Kij Johnson

 

 

From the author: Science fiction and fantasy are the literature of the edge. We have resources that other genres don’t because we are not restricted by naturalistic (or realistic) conventions. We can create outrageous thought experiments and explore human nature through situations that just can’t exist in the real world. Sometimes our medium for exploring human nature isn’t even human.

A lot of SF and fantasy explores concepts and worlds that are out there on the edge, but there are limits to how close to the edge we like to go when we’re discussing human experience. There’s a reason: they’re not very pleasant to read, for me anyway. Stories like Richard Matheson’s “Born of Man and Woman” leave me a little soul-sick. They are horrific, and they are also asking disturbing questions about what makes us loving, or keeps us alive. Or human. They’re not very pleasant, but they are saying and doing something fiction that is pulled back from the edge does not. Hearing it — saying it — is worth it. When I wrote “Spar,” I was trying to see how close to the edge I could bear to get, as both reader and writer. As it happened, it was far enough out that I didn’t know whether I could get it published, even in SF and fantasy markets. I am so glad that Clarkesworld did so, and to know that people are reading past the horror to the heart of it.

 

 

I N THE TINY lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.

 

They each have Ins and Outs. Her Ins are the usual: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, cunt, ass. Her Outs are also the common ones: fingers and hands and feet and tongue. Arms. Legs. Things that can be thrust into other things.

The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. Its skin is the color of dusk and covered with a clear thin slime that tastes of snot. It makes no sounds. She thinks it smells like wet leaves in winter, but after a time she cannot remember that smell, or leaves, or winter.

Its Ins and Outs change. There are dark slashes and permanent knobs that sometimes distend, but it is always growing new Outs, hollowing new Ins. It cleaves easily in both senses.

It penetrates her a thousand ways. She penetrates it, as well.

 

The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no warning labels, no voices, no bed or chair or table or control board or toilet or telltale lights or clocks. The ship’s hum is steady. Nothing changes.

There is no room. They cannot help but touch. They breathe each other’s breath — if it breathes; she cannot tell. There is always an Out in an In, something wrapped around another thing, flesh coiling and uncoiling inside, outside. Making spaces. Making space.

She is always wet. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin, the oil and sweat from hers, her exhaled breath, the lifeboat’s air. Or come.

Her body seeps. When she can, she pulls her mind away. But there is nothing else, and when her mind is disengaged she thinks too much. Which is: at all. Fucking the alien is less horrible.

 

She does not remember the first time. It is safest to think it forced her.

The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. Her magnetic boots clung to part of the wreck. His did not. The two of them fell apart.

A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit to the bone, through the bone. She screamed. He did not. Blood and fat and muscle swelled from his suit into vacuum. An Out.

The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.

Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would try to establish communications. It is quite possible that she is not a rescued castaway. She is salvage, or flotsam.

 

She sucks her nourishment from one of the two hard intrusions into the featureless lifeboat, a rigid tube. She uses the other, a second tube, for whatever comes from her, her shit and piss and vomit. Not her come, which slicks her thighs to her knees.

She gags a lot. It has no sense of the depth of her throat. Ins and Outs.

There is a time when she screams so hard that her throat bleeds.

 

She tries to teach it words. “Breast,” she says. “Finger. Cunt.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.

“Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Does it even have ears?

 

The fucking never gets better or worse. It learns no lessons about pleasing her. She does not learn anything about pleasing it either; would not if she could. And why? How do you please grass and why should you? She suddenly remembers grass, the bright smell of it and its perfect green, its cool clean soft feel beneath her bare hands.

She finds herself aroused by the thought of grass against her hands, because it is the only thing that she has thought of for a long time that is not the alien or Gary or the Ins and Outs. But perhaps its soft blades against her fingers would feel like the alien’s cilia. Her ability to compare anything with anything else is slipping from her, because there is nothing to compare.

 

She feels it inside everywhere, tendrils moving in her nostrils, thrusting against her ear drums, coiled beside the corners of her eyes. And she sheathes herself in it.

When an Out crawls inside her and touches her in certain places, she tips her head back and moans and pretends it is more than accident. It is Gary, he loves me, it loves me, it is a He. It is not.

Communication is key, she thinks.

 

She cannot communicate, but she tries to make sense of its actions.

What is she to it? Is she a sex toy, a houseplant? A shipwrecked Norwegian sharing a spar with a monolingual Portuguese? A companion? A habit, like nailbiting or compulsive masturbation? Perhaps the sex is communication, and she just doesn’t understand the language yet.

Or perhaps there is no It. It is not that they cannot communicate, that she is incapable; it is that the alien has no consciousness to communicate with. It is a sex toy, a houseplant, a habit.

 

On the starship with the name she cannot recall, Gary would read aloud to her. Science fiction, Melville, poetry. Her mind cannot access the plots, the words. All she can remember is a few lines from a sonnet, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” — something something something — “an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark….”

She recites the words, an anodyne that numbs her for a time until they lose their meaning. She has worn them treadless, and they no longer gain any traction in her mind. Eventually she cannot even remember the sounds of them.

If she ever remembers another line, she promises herself she will not wear it out. She will hoard it. She may have promised this before, and forgotten.

She cannot remember Gary’s voice. Fuck Gary, anyway. He is dead and she is here with an alien pressed against her cervix.

 

It is covered with slime. She thinks that, as with toads, the slime may be a mild psychotropic drug. How would she know if she were hallucinating? In this world, what would that look like? Like sunflowers on a desk, like Gary leaning across a picnic basket to place fresh bread in her mouth. The bread is the first thing she has tasted that feels clean in her mouth, and it’s not even real.

Gary feeding her bread and laughing. After a time, the taste of bread becomes “the taste of bread” and then the words become mere sounds and stop meaning anything.

On the off-chance that this will change things, she drives her tongue through its cilia, pulls them into her mouth, and sucks them clean. She has no idea whether it makes a difference. She has lived forever in the endless reeking fucking now.

 

Was there someone else on the alien’s ship? Was there a Gary, lost now to space? Is it grieving? Does it fuck her to forget, or because it has forgotten? Or to punish itself for surviving? Or the other, for not?

Or is this her?

 

When she does not have enough Ins for its Outs, it makes new ones. She bleeds for a time and then heals. She pretends that this is a rape. Rape at least she could understand. Rape is an interaction. It requires intention. It would imply that it hates or fears or wants. Rape would mean she is more than a wine glass it fills.

This goes both ways. She forces it sometimes. Her hands are blades that tear new Ins. Her anger pounds at it until she feels its depths grow soft under her fist, as though bones or muscle or cartilage have disassembled and turned to something else.

And when she forces her hands into the alien? If intent counts, then what she does, at least, is a rape — or would be if the alien felt anything, responded in any fashion. Mostly it’s like punching a wall.

 

She puts her fingers in herself, because she at least knows what her intentions are.

 

Sometimes she watches it fuck her, the strange coiling of its Outs like a shockwave thrusting into her body, and this excites her and horrifies her; but at least it is not Gary. Gary, who left her here with this, who left her here, who left.

 

One time she feels something break loose inside the alien, but it is immediately drawn out of reach. When she reaches farther in to grasp the broken piece, a sphincter snaps shut on her wrist. Her arm is forced out. There is a bruise like a bracelet around her wrist for what might be a week or two.

She cannot stop touching the bruise. The alien has had the ability to stop her fist inside it, at any time. Which means it has made a choice not to stop her, even when she batters things inside it until they grow soft.

This is the only time she has ever gotten a reaction she understands. Stimulus: response. She tries many times to get another. She rams her hands into it, kicks it, tries to tears its cilia free with her teeth, claws its skin with her ragged, filthy fingernails. But there is never again the broken thing inside, and never the bracelet.

 

For a while, she measures time by bruises she gives herself. She slams her shin against the feeding tube, and when the bruise is gone she does it again. She estimates it takes twelve days for a bruise to heal. She stops after a time because she cannot remember how many bruises there have been.

She dreams of rescue, but doesn’t know what that looks like. Gary, miraculously alive pulling her free, eyes bright with tears, I love you he says, his lips on her eyelids and his kiss his tongue in her mouth inside her hands inside him. But that’s the alien. Gary is dead. He got Out.

Sometimes she thinks that rescue looks like her opening the lifeboat to the deep vacuum, but she cannot figure out the airlock.

 

Her anger is endless, relentless.

Gary brought her here, and then he went away and left her with this thing that will not speak, or cannot, or does not care enough to, or does not see her as something to talk to.

On their third date, she and Gary went to an empty park: wine, cheese, fresh bread in a basket. Bright sun and cool air, grass and a cloth to lie on. He brought Shakespeare. “You’ll love this,” he said, and read to her.

She stopped him with a kiss. “Let’s talk,” she said, “about anything.”

“But we are talking,” he said.

“No, you’re reading,” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t really like poetry.”

“That’s because you’ve never had it read to you,” he said.

She stopped him at last by taking the book from his hands and pushing him back, her palms in the grass; and he entered her. Later, he read to her anyway.

If it had just been that.

They were not even his words, and now they mean nothing, are not even sounds in her mind. And now there is this thing that cannot hear her or does not choose to listen, until she gives up trying to reach it and only reaches into it, and bludgeons it and herself, seeking a reaction, any reaction.

“I fucking hate you,” she says. “I hate fucking you.”

 

The lifeboat decelerates. Metal clashes on metal. Gaskets seal.

The airlock opens overhead. There is light. Her eyes water helplessly and everything becomes glare and indistinct dark shapes. The air is dry and cold. She recoils.

The alien does not react to the light, the hard air. It remains inside her and around her. They are wrapped. They penetrate one another a thousand ways. She is warm here, or at any rate not cold: half-lost in its flesh, wet from her Ins, its Outs. In here it is not too bright.

A dark something stands outlined in the portal. It is bipedal. It makes sounds that are words. Is it human? Is she? Does she still have bones, a voice? She has not used them for so long.

The alien is hers; she is its. Nothing changes.

No. She pulls herself free of its tendrils and climbs. Out.

 

 

Kij Johnson is the author of several novels and more than thirty fantasy, science fiction, and slipstream stories; winner of the 2009 World Fantasy Award; and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She is also the winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short story of the year, and the IAFA’s Crawford Award, for best new fantasist of the year. She is the vice chairman for the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and an associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, where she teaches an annual summer workshop on the novel. She lives in Seattle.

 

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