Asimov's SF, July 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Alice stared at Marian, whose gaze remained bent on the photos pasted to the heavy black pages of the album. Her impulse was to say she did not feel she had “roots” at all. Her only sense of connection with blood relatives was and had always been with those individuals with whom she experienced close personal contact. She looked down at the picture in her hand, a yellowed color photo of her father holding herself at about eighteen months. What she saw in it, she realized, amounted to two individuals in close relation, not figures in relation to a world. Everything else looked like backdrop.

  “Do you remember what you said at dinner last night? When Gerald was talking about how extreme and visible the disappearance of habitats and species had already become now in the Arctic Circle?"

  Marian looked up from the album. “You mean about how the disappearance from public discourse of everything but individuals renders the elimination of species as well as entire human communities invisible and meaningless?"

  Marian had claimed that the National Geographic mentality had made even nonhuman species visible only as collections of individuals. But species couldn't survive as a collection of discrete individuals—whether as personalities living in zoos or radio-tagged numbered members of populations inhabiting wildlife preserves. “Isn't your question about the album related to the atomization you were talking about? That we mainly think of people as atomized individuals perhaps embedded in but essentially distinct from the world rather than as being part of the world and engaged in its processes?"

  Marian looked at her with what Alice uncomfortably recognized as surprise. Alice imagined her quickly revising a quarter-century's assumptions about her friend's intellectual capacity—and then told herself not to be an idiot. Marian had never treated her with anything but respect for her intelligence.

  “I think I see what you're getting at. As blood ancestors, distinct personalities whose genes you carry, they are first and foremost actors on a stage, bold-as-life characters surrounded by a simulation of ‘real life'—analogous to the individual personalities that are all anyone can relate to in public discourse, where the complex processes of the world are flattened to a simulation that can be faked, the way the backdrop for television reporters is faked to make it look as though they're on the scene rather than standing on a sound-stage in a studio. Whereas looking at your ancestors as part of the world that made you ... that's something else."

  Alice glanced at the album Marian's hands held open. Would the heft of the world it revealed appear less if she knew who the figures in the photos were in relation to herself ? Or even if she just had names to attach to the figures and stories to attach to the names?

  Alice thought the question interesting but felt wary of applying any of its possible answers to her own problem. At seventy-two she was a little late trying to do anything about it, anyway. She had been out of place in the world for so many years the idea of generating heft now could only be academic.

  13.

  The second thought preoccupying her came to the fore once she'd gotten all her affairs and papers in order. Daniel, noticing a pattern in her activity, had questioned her closely about her most recent doctor's appointment but had let the subject rest when her answers indicated that only the usual chronic complaints were plaguing her. She could think of nothing she needed to say to anyone, no particular task she felt it urgent to finish. She had a few near and dear relationships, but no deep connection with the world. The world did not need her; the world did not know her. Her passing out of it might mean something to a few individuals, but it would mean nothing to the world. And why, she asked herself, should it? The world she had been living in had never been hers.

  Though she ceased to think much about the likely approach of her death, the second matter on her mind fairly haunted her. What if she had been wrong to tell her younger self in encounter after encounter that they could only go back, go back to the world? What if she had been wrong to keep her selves separate? To not do what she could to explore, in league with her other selves, the place of chaos that lurked just outside the world? For years Alice had reasoned that every moment that they were face to face they were out of time, out of reality, out of any place at all. “It's no place, you're saying. It's nowhere.” “So we can only go back, Alice, go back to the world.” But what if she'd been wrong? What if the place she believed to be nowhere actually offered entry into another world—the one into which she should actually have been born?

  She judged this question, also, to be academic. But it felt so real and pressing that each iteration of it caused her pain. She thought of little Apple and how she had turned her away, the older Alice comforting while rebuffing the younger one. Maybe her selves had been meant to combine into one, instead of being allowed to fragment into so many. What if she had taken ten-year-old Alice home with her? Or if seventy-two-year-old Alice had merged at Hole-in-the-Wall with her fifty-three-year-old self? Maybe she would not have drowned like Narcissus. Maybe she had been thinking of the wrong story altogether.

  14.

  Two and a half years later, Alice met herself at age three. She and Daniel were visiting a friend in Buffalo and decided to play tourist at Niagara Falls. The two of them inadvertently got separated, and Alice found herself looking on a scene straight out of a photograph she'd sent to her niece Flora. Three-year-old Alice was holding her father's hand. Old Alice stood off to the side and watched her mother take their picture with a quaint Kodak camera. She trailed after the family grouping and followed them discreetly back to Uncle Bob and Aunt Alta's house. Alice had never before stayed so long in her younger self's world, nor strayed so far from her point of entry. She felt like an intruder likely to be discovered and expelled at any moment.

  Little Alice was playing in a sandbox in the backyard, happily alone and absorbed, when Alice approached and dropped to her knees in the grass nearby. “Hello, Apple,” she said to the child. “What's that you're building?"

  Little Alice flashed a smile at Old Alice and offered her a long and involved story. On and on it went, the story, about a host of imaginary persons and creatures and what the various mounds and trenches Alice had formed in the sandbox represented inside the world of the story. And so the child prattled and gestured and built the world she was describing. Alice could not remember herself ever having been so happy.

  “There's something I want to show you,” Alice said to the child. Trusting and curious, the child sat in her lap and looked straight into her eyes. Without breaking her lock on the child's gaze, Alice sensed they'd stepped into nowhere. She could feel the fissures rending the world around her. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a crack in the sky and the presence of chaos. But she kept her attention fixed on the child and held the child's attention fixed to herself even as she rose to her feet, for the child weighed not much more than an average bag of groceries.

  Alice stepped back into the world she had come from, the world seventy-two years into the child's own future. “Mommy?” the child said. “Daddy?” The high, piping voice sounded thinner than it had when the child had been explaining the world she had been making in the sandbox—thinner, almost threadbare. Old Alice noticed that in her world, the child weighed nothing at all, less even than the weight of a light cotton dress, less than the weight of the barrettes holding the unruly russet hair out of the child's eyes. Less, certainly, than the weight of the child when Alice had taken her from her world.

  Although the child weighed nothing, and her voice could be heard only inside Old Alice's head, Old Alice herself felt strangely heavier than her bones could now seem to bear. The weight pulled at her legs, forcing her to her knees on the walkway of a condo complex she had no memory of having entered. The weight pulled at her heart, clutching it with claws of cold iron. And the weight pulled at her head, compressing her brain with a force that filled her eyes with a red haze and her ears with gray thunder. The weight was altogether more than she could ever manage to live with.

  The man who found Alice jus
t yards from his front door briefly glimpsed the shadow of a child on the sidewalk beside her. Voiceless, with only enough body to cast the slightest and thinnest of shadows, that one small fragment of young Alice's being wandered the future like a shade cast into Hades for the few minutes her specter had the energy to sustain.

  And then it was gone.

  Copyright 2006 L. Timmel Duchamp

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  BITTERSEED

  by Ted Kosmatka

  Ted Kosmatka hails from the cornfields and steel mills of Indiana. He's been a field hand, a college tutor, a zoo-keeper, a chemical analyst, an eco-researcher, and a laborer in the red-black guts of a blast furnace. He now works for a research laboratory. Ted's knowledge of those cornfields comes in handy in his second story for Asimov's.

  The world was rivets.

  Marc groaned as he lifted his face from the cold, steel deck and tried to focus his eyes. Pain thundered in his skull, driving away articulate thought. He knew he had to hurry but couldn't remember why. So much blood, red on grayæa wet smear across the smooth metallic surface.

  He rolled onto his back and brought a hand to the side of his face where he found the familiar topography transformed into something loose and lumpyæsomething with two sharp angles where none had been before. He tried to move his mouth and the bones grated; his jaw was broken.

  The field-skim thrummed beneath him, waking new pain along his left leg as the ship adjusted its flight course. He tried to sit but his ribs flared white-hot, and he collapsed, breathing hard up at the blue sky.

  Movement caught his eye and he concentrated the blurry figure into focus. Eli's sun-creased face glared down over the railing of the sight deck twenty feet above. There was no mistaking his expression. Marc blinked and the face was gone.

  He remembered then why he had to hurry. And he remembered why he'd jumped.

  Ignoring the pain, he hauled himself to his knees and then to his feet. The deck heaved beneath him as the skim banked hard to port on its preprogrammed flight pattern across the crop glade. He clutched weakly at the railing for balance, trying not to faint while sparks played across his vision. The field-skim was one of the corporation's smaller ships—just under thirty meters—and was designed to fly close to the crop surface. Beyond the railing, the spindly green tops of maiza whisked by a few meters below.

  On this planet, maiza was the equatorial crop, and from Marc's perspective, it spread in a swaying carpet from the eastern horizon to the low mountains sixty kilometers to the west. It wasn't just a sea of green; it was a vast, sweeping ocean. The individual plants were tall and thin, and the backwash of air from the skim made the stalks dance as they flashed by below.

  Marc glanced around for a weapon, but the nose deck was empty. There was only the hard steel floor, the railing, wind, and a sea of green all around. Oh, and the ladder. Mustn't forget the ladder.

  Eli descended toward him a rung at a time.

  Marc felt the vibration when the man's boots slapped heavily to the ship's lowest deck. Though Eli stood three inches shorter than Marc, he outweighed him by fifty hard-won pounds of muscle. There were no guns on Tristan-3, but Man's indomitable spirit never lacked for improvisation: Eli still carried the iron tamping rod that had broken Marc's jaw.

  Marc backed against the rail. Eli followed with his dark eyes but did not move. The wind lifted his short, black hair off his forehead in buffeting spikes.

  “There's still time to take it back,” Marc said.

  “I don't want to take it back,” Eli said.

  “Are you sure?” That was as close to begging as Marc would go.

  “Very."

  Marc ducked the first swing and rolled across the deck. His head swam with the sudden movement, and colors blotted his vision again as he reached up for the railing. The swing had been just high enough to let him slip beneath. Eli was toying with him. Marc pulled himself to his feet, backing toward the far front of the skim.

  Eli followed, changing his grip on the long iron cylinder and widening his stance. The second swing was calculated to be more damaging, and Marc sacrificed an arm to save his skull. The bar careened off his forearm with a crunch of bone, missing the top of his head by an inch.

  Marc staggered back against the railing, clutching his arm. He turned and Eli was two steps away, poised, a smile on his face. Marc saw it in his eyes then. He saw it in the smile. This wouldn't be a beating. Eli was going to kill him.

  Marc considered rushing him, but then what? He wouldn't have a chance. Instead Marc looked him in the eye. “Don't get caught for this,” he said. “It would kill Mom to lose both of us."

  “I've already thought of that."

  Eli raised the iron rod. Marc slid backward over the handrail just ahead of his brother's final blow. His feet followed him into the spinning sky, and then the wind tore at his clothes and the stalks were crunching like bones breaking. Silence.

  * * * *

  Marc opened his eyes to darkness. Pain and the sweet smell of growing things told him he was not dead. For a long time he just breathed, and that was miracle enoughæto ask for more seemed presumptuous. The fall should have killed him and he knew it.

  Wind blew high up through the stalks, making rasping whispers of the shadows that moved there. It was a sound he'd grown familiar with in his four years on Tristan-3, and it brought him a strange species of comfort.

  When he tried to sit, pain quaked through him, too diffuse and all encompassing to isolate in any single body part. Everywhere hurt. Slowly, by degrees, he managed to roll out of the crater he'd made in the soft black dirt. The fall had embedded him well into the moist soil, and he left a perfect imprint of himself behind. He rolled against the row of maiza and let himself feel the hard vertical shafts against his back and legs. He raised himself up on an elbow.

  One of the moons was rising, and Marc caught glimpses of it through the swaying leaves. It looked like Bromb, the larger moon, but he couldn't be sure. He thought of his brother and knew he couldn't be sure of anything anymore.

  His good arm climbed the stalk, and he pulled himself to his feet. He leaned against the plant, feeling the slow sway. Even with all that had happened, he couldn't help but feel a sense of pride at the touch. This year's maiza crop was the healthiest yet. As a geneticist for Pioneer Seed Co. he'd worked long and hard toward that goal. It was likely now to be his only legacy.

  Down the row to his left, he saw the leaning, shattered shafts that had slowed his descent and saved his life. The plants lay skewed across the narrow gap between the rows, their leaves crumpled beneath the weight of the stalks. To the right, the row disappeared into the distance. What direction had the skim been going when he jumped? East? North? He couldn't remember.

  He put his shoulder against one of the plants and pushed with all his weight, but it was already too late in the season. He wasn't strong enough to bring one down. He counted the broken stalks: four. Would that be enough for them to find himæfour broken stalks among a continent of maiza? Perhaps, but Eli would direct the search parties away from any evidence. He would say that Marc fell near the river thirty kilometers to the East, or at the edge of the mountains. The satellites might be able to pick out four broken stalks in the vast sea of green, but Eli wouldn't have them looking for that.

  Marc felt the energy drain out of his legs as he considered his situation. There would be no rescue. His knees folded, and he collapsed to the dirt, sending a fresh jolt of pain through his jaw. Mother would take this hard. By now Eli would have told her. A fresh rush of anger welled up in him. She was too old to deal with this; she'd lost so much already.

  When he laid his face on the warm ground, the soil was as soft as any pillow. He breathed in the smells of life and slipped into the darkness.

  * * * *

  He woke to roaring sunshine. An early morning wind drove the leaves into a kind of applause as he sat and wiped the crusted dirt from the side of his face. Something in his
broken jaw shifted, and he screamed. His mouth was cotton dry, his tongue coated in grit.

  As he sat, he considered his options. He could sit here and die, or he could walk and probably still die. He looked down at the little crater he'd made and decided it looked too much like a grave.

  Marc stood. Looking up at the sun through the long, narrow leaves, he decided which way was north and set off down the row to the right, pushing aside the leaves as he walked.

  Maiza was an amazing plant. The roots of its cultivation could be traced back a thousand years on Earth to aboriginal Central American populations. Later, in the twentieth century, it became a staple throughout the world for both animal feed and human consumption. But the leafy green field he walked through now hardly resembled what twentieth century farmers would call corn. Agricultural geneticists had stopped using that term more than a hundred years ago.

  Maiza now clung to the equatorial continent of Tristan-3 in an ecological monoculture, dominating the landscape to the complete exclusion of endemic flora. The local plants simply couldn't compete with a thousand years of selective breeding. It was midseason now, and the plants were already fifteen feet tall. Upon harvesting, each would produce a variety of usable products for export to fringe colonies. The stalks were mulched into a biodegradable lubricating oil; the cobs provided food for people and livestock; and the leathery leaf fiber was used to make heavy, durable rope.

  The enormous continental basin was divided into a corrugated pattern of male and female plants: two female rows for every male. The sexes were of different strains, designed to be of slightly differing heights so that the male reproductive tassels were close to the female cobs. This helped diminish the instances of self-fertilization, and subsequent inbreeding depression in seed product.