Asimov's SF, March 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Three days after the article in the paper, as the summer sky is just fading to dusk, Bobby's brother comes to see you. You pour iced tea and go out on the back porch and the two of you watch the sky turn red. One of the dogs, which has been lying dead asleep by your chair, leaps up and sprints off the porch after a rabbit.

  "What if he really sees something?” Bobby's brother finally asks you, the words bursting out of him like a dam break. “What if there really are angels?"

  "Or maybe trolls,” you say, mostly hoping to distract him.

  "Maybe,” he says. There is desperation in his voice and a thin edge of something else, like he knows something that he can't tell you because if he says it out loud then he has to actually admit that it's true. You don't want him to say it out loud, anyway. You don't want to admit to anything.

  You sit there together in silence a little longer, then Bobby's brother rises in a spring-loaded motion that echoes the dog. “Here, I—” he presses something into your hand and leaves and never looks back. You haven't seen him since.

  Later, you sit at the kitchen table and look at what he left you. It's a gold coin or maybe bronze—it changes in the light—bigger than the new dollar and heavy; it might be real gold. It has symbols on one side that almost look Chinese, but aren't, and a landscape on the other that looks a little like the Black Hills and a little like any rugged landscape anywhere. You wonder if Bobby had it made somewhere—it would be a lot of trouble—or maybe he picked it up once at a carnival or someplace. You stick it on the counter above the sink and forget about it, except once in a while when the light hits it in the late afternoon and it glows.

  You're home from the mall by 2:30 PM. The wind has sharpened and it's straight out of the north. You let the dogs out and change into long underwear and old jeans and a heavy sweatshirt that used to be Bobby's. The dogs are standing in the yard with as many of their feet off the ground as they can manage, looking as if they're freezing to death, though they run to the house quick enough at your whistle. You're tempted to take them with you to Bobby's so they can stand like a wall between you. But they'd just fight with the pit-bull cross Bobby picked up from somewhere you don't even want to know about, so you give them food and water, huddle up in a double-thick fleece vest and freshly laundered barn coat, and dive into the bitter cold one more time.

  The new sign on Bobby's lawn stands out stark against the bleak winter landscape. “Chainsaw on Hand.” What does that mean? Then you hate yourself for even wondering because you know you'll be sorry once you know the answer.

  You knock on Bobby's side door and walk in. It's never locked. The pit bull knows you and it comes into the kitchen as you enter, waiting to have its head scratched. The kitchen is warm and even humid as if there are pots of spaghetti cooking somewhere just out of sight. Bobby is in the dining room with all the lights on.

  "Hey, Chel,” he says when you walk in. He's bent over the big dining room table and doesn't look up from what he's doing. You shed your coat, stuffing your gloves in the pockets, but leave the vest on as if that means you won't be staying long.

  After a minute, Bobby straightens up and says, “Take a look.” He waves his hand at the dining room table. “It's almost done,” he says.

  For six and a half months, Bobby has been painstakingly building an exact replica of town and the surrounding countryside. The houses are made of balsa wood and matchsticks. He sculpts the people out of clay. He's recreating the town like it was the first time the angels came. You have avoided asking him why he's doing it, but because it's Bobby, you're pretty sure that he believes if he just lays it all out straight and simple, none of us can help but see what he sees.

  Instead of going to the table, you lean against the wall with your arms across your chest. “Is that why you wanted to see me?"

  Bobby is tall and lean, lanky like an oversized colt that never grew into its body. He's wearing blue jeans and work boots and nothing more than a faded red t-shirt in spite of the sub-zero air that weaves in around the windows. He has a worn baseball cap, as always, perched on the back of his head which he lifts by the brim, scratching his forehead absently as he looks down on his town. “This?” he says. “No, I—"

  The sound of another car pulling into Bobby's driveway cuts across the dry wind outside. “Hold on,” Bobby says, like you've been doing anything else for the last year or so. He grabs a jacket off a chair and heads to the back door. You hear him talking to someone in a low voice.

  The dining room is cold; you can feel a breeze from the windows and you wish you'd left your jacket on. You wish you'd never come. You could be holed up inside your house, barricaded against the cold—it's not so much where you wish you were, as the only place you have left to be.

  You look at the town model Bobby has spread across his dining table. He's painstakingly lettered the signs on old storefronts—Beth's Rings & Things, Shiner Diner, Waterman's Insurance. He's even—you have to squint to look at it—put the “Independent Insurance Agent” logo on the bottom half of Waterman's door. There's a car in the middle of the street, one half-pulled out of a parking space, several women walking out of the diner, and Bobby himself at the intersection of Main and North. At least you think it's Bobby, like you would recognize him anywhere, even as a stick figure in a make-believe town. He is completely surrounded by six gold coins.

  You reach out and pick up one of the coins. It's heavy, like the one Bobby's brother gave you, and warm against your palm. You close your fingers over it and the warmth of the coin seems to spread all the way up your arm.

  You close your eyes.

  The back door closes with a loose rattle and, startled, you drop the coin back on the table. It lands with a ringing sound, like metal against crystal, and rolls across the table until it settles with a tiny shudder almost exactly where it was when you picked it up.

  "Eggs,” Bobby says as he reenters the room and sheds his coat, without looking, laying it in the exact spot it was before.

  You put your hands in your pockets and look away from the table and the gold coins and miniature Bobby.

  "Don't the chickens get cold, Bobby?” you ask despite yourself. He can't make a living from a sign posted in his yard.

  "I've got a good place fixed up for them,” Bobby says. “You'd be surprised."

  You decide that if you're going to be surprised today it's not going to be over chickens. “That new sign, Bobby? ‘Chainsaw on Hand?’ What's that supposed to mean?"

  He cocks his head to one side and looks at you with the ghost of a slow, sweet smile. “What does it mean to you?"

  "Nothing,” you tell him, irritated with yourself all over again for asking. “It means nothing to me, Bobby. It's just stupid."

  Bobby shakes his head sadly. “Then I guess it means nothing,” he says.

  Exasperation wars with weariness because the truth is you're just plain tired of Bobby and fairies—or maybe trolls—and of being in South Dakota in the bleak depths of endless winter. “No one puts a sign in their yard that says ‘Chainsaw on Hand.’”

  "I do,” Bobby says. “I like to be prepared."

  "Bobby, did you want to see me for a reason?"

  Bobby looks at you as if he's waiting for something you can't give him. He ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck. “I have something to show you,” he says.

  "What?” You have a thousand better things to do—stoke the wood stove, feed the dogs, stuff rags around the rattling kitchen window.

  "It's outside."

  Your shoulders hunch as if you're outside already. “It's goddamned cold outside, Bobby."

  "It'll be okay.” Like he controls the weather.

  You sigh and bite your lip on all the things you want to say, but never do. It's not Bobby you're mad at anyway. You could be living in Boston or Chicago or St. Paul. No one is making you live out in the open. No one is making you do anything.

  It takes five minutes to put on your coat and hat and gloves and zip and button everything up
to your nose. You can feel the burn of the wind across your cheekbones and you haven't even stepped out the door. The sun is low when you walk outside, flat against the horizon. There are no shadows, just fading half-light slanting blue across the snow.

  Your boots and Bobby's squeak on the snow as you walk past the two barns and the tool shed toward the lean-to that houses Bobby's old tractor. Just past that is open pasture, an old cemetery in a grove of dying trees, and the creek that divides Bobby's land from his neighbors. The last time you came out this way it was late spring and muddy. Bobby insisted on showing you what he called “definitive proof of fairy/troll presence."

  Bobby's proof turned out to be three boxes made from some material that looked and felt exotic, but tore exactly like cardboard. All three of them were empty inside except for three cards in the bottom of the largest one that had been printed on both sides with unrecognizable and indecipherable symbols.

  "How did they get here?” Bobby asked you.

  "I don't know, Bobby, there's a hundred ways they could have gotten here."

  "Name one."

  "You could have put them here."

  "But I didn't."

  And then he offered you one of the cards, which you, of course, refused.

  You know it's going to be like that again, some lame thing Bobby's made up to convince you of something that only Bobby believes is true. You can feel the cold right through your coat and your fleece vest and your two pairs of long underwear. You can feel it in your bones.

  In South Dakota in winter the temperature can linger below zero for weeks. Clear skies and weak sun and bone dry wind that grinds your face like sandpaper go on day after day until you don't remember that it's ever been warm, that grass has ever been green. If it were suddenly summer in South Dakota after a week of minus two, you would hate it—it would be too hot and too humid and frightening, like the world was ending in fire instead of ice. In South Dakota in winter, you don't think about seventy degrees or eighty degrees. As far as you're concerned the tropics don't exist; palm trees, blue waters—they're just a television fantasy. Twenty degrees would be enough. If the temperature got up to twenty degrees, you'd unbutton your jacket and shed an entire layer of long underwear. At twenty degrees you'd walk outside without your head covered, with your face turned toward the sun, like you were living in Bermuda. Twenty degrees in South Dakota in winter would give you enough hope to go on.

  Right now you can't imagine that it will ever be twenty degrees again.

  You stumble on a patch of ice and jerk away from Bobby's offered hand. You realize that you're crying and you don't know when it started. The tears don't freeze on your cheeks, not in cold like this—moisture can't survive. You duck your head so Bobby won't see, but he knows anyway. He puts his hand under your arm and guides you over by the lean-to.

  You're out of the wind up against the lean-to wall and just that, just stepping out of the wind, makes it feel half as cold as it was.

  "Don't,” Bobby says, leaning toward you as if he can block the cold. “I'm sorry."

  "I wasn't crying,” you say. You rub your hand across your cheek, rubbing away tears that aren't there anyway. “It's not like I care."

  Bobby looks away, toward the cemetery and the creek and things you can't see.

  "I thought—” he says.

  He turns and looks straight at you—you'd forgotten that his eyes are a blue that looks like midnight mixed with summer.

  "Bobby—” you begin, because somehow you know that whatever he's going to say, you want to stop him.

  He ducks his head as if he wants to say and not-say something at the same time and when he does speak the words come out all in a rush, his voice pitched a half-octave higher than normal. “Maybe I won't see them anymore,” he says.

  "The fairies?” you ask, your voice half-choked; whatever you expected this isn't it.

  "Or whatever."

  You forget the cold completely. You look at him as if the world, and not just you, has stopped breathing. You want to ask him—would it be like it was before, would he come back to the farm, would he charm the birds off trees, would he smile—like summer when it's ninety-five and you can't remember that it's ever been cold, like we'd never been here at all, on this shabby run-down farm with the chickens and the signs and the chainsaw on hand.

  Bobby has stepped away from you; he's slouched against the metal wall of the lean-to, his arms across his chest. He isn't looking at you. There is something tight and tense about him, even slouched like that, not the way he's been, as if he doesn't give a damn, almost as if he cares what you will say.

  You've thought all along that this was easy for Bobby. He's left you and the farm and his family and his life. He has fairies or angels or trolls who freeze time for him, who make it all right to scrape a living from chickens and rabbits. It can't be cold when the fairies come—that's what you've always figured—there is no need for chainsaws. Bobby gets off easy; everyone else pays the price.

  "Why?” you finally ask.

  Bobby shrugs. “I'm just saying,” he tells you, though he doesn't look your way when he says it.

  A blast of pure winter fire flashes through your veins. You were always right and Bobby was always wrong.

  After the University of Chicago, you took a job in Boston at a consulting firm running statistics on focus groups and research surveys. In Boston, it gets wet instead of cold. In Boston, no one ever puts a sign in their front yard that says “Chainsaw on Hand.” In Boston, life never notices you, until one day Bobby shows up out of nowhere and asks you to go whale watching with him.

  "Why?” you ask.

  "How long have you been here?” he says.

  "Four years,” you tell him.

  "Have you ever seen whales?"

  "Well, no."

  You should have asked him right then about fairies and angels and trolls. You should have realized what you were getting into. Instead you go whale watching and hiking in New Hampshire and out to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in Boston, which neither of you can afford.

  Right now in the shelter of a thin metal wall, with the temperature dropping and every breath burning dry in your throat, you suddenly remember something you forgot, or maybe never even knew—the reason you came back to South Dakota was not because you had nowhere else to go.

  "Bobby."

  You wipe a hand across your cheek. “Bobby,” you say again just so he knows you're really talking to him. And even then, you don't know the words you're going to say until they're already out of your mouth.

  "That's not what I want at all."

  Five things have surprised you in your life: the first time you saw a calf born in the middle of a green pasture in spring, winning a full scholarship to the University of Chicago just because you were smart enough, when Bobby came to Boston to take you whale watching, finally figuring out how to mix paint the exact color blue of the South Dakota sky on the longest day of summer.

  And now this.

  "What do you want, Chelley?” Bobby asks. His voice is tired, hopeful, desperate and resigned all in one.

  You know, finally, that you have the power to pierce his soul. You know that he has the power to do the same to you.

  "I want to see fairies,” you tell him, “Or maybe trolls."

  Bobby laughs, a sound you haven't heard in longer than you can say. He reaches out his hand and you reach out and take it. You realize, though you should have always known, that warmth doesn't always come from winds out of the south or woodstoves stoked with birch logs or cattle standing huddled in the barn.

  You don't know what will happen next. You don't know how to make things work or what it will be like the next time Bobby says the fairies have frozen time. You don't know if Bobby will charm birds again or come back to the farm or smile just because you need him to.

  What you know is that even in South Dakota in winter, even with a chainsaw, you can never really be prepared for everything.

  Copyright (c)
2007 Deborah Coates

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  DOCTOR MUFFET'S ISLAND by Brian Stableford

  Brian Stableford's recent works include the novel The New Faust at the Tragicomique and the anthology News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances, both from Black Coat Press. Routledge published his mammoth reference book Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia in 2006. One does not have to be familiar with the remarkable events that occurred in Brian's tale about “The Plurality of Worlds” (August 2006), to follow the further exploits of Francis Drake and his adventures on...

  1

  The island's only hill was so shallow that it would have posed no challenge at all had it been a Devon moor, nor was its vegetation unduly thorny, but the thin-boled trees were parasitized by so many sticky vines that it was difficult for Francis Drake and Martin Lyle to climb it, even with the aid of a machete.

  The island seemed to have little in the way of animal life except for birds, of which there were many brightly colored kinds, which seemed quite unintimidated by their visitors. Whenever Drake was not fully occupied in clearing a path he attempted to watch the birds more attentively, but the only result of his cursory study was a conviction that a few of the larger parrots were studying him with equal intensity. It was easy to imagine that the endless avian chattering was conversation.

  When Drake and his young cousin finally got to the top of the rise it was necessary for the boy to climb a coconut palm with the captain's best telescope clutched beneath his arm. Drake watched him anxiously, afraid for the instrument. It was one of John Dee's finest, designed with the aid of the theory of optics Dee and Tom Digges had worked out in happier days and constructed by a lens-grinder from Strasbourg, who had fled to Protestant England to escape the gathering storm of the continental wars of religion. In theory, it was a capital offense for anyone outside the Queen's Navy to possess a telescope, but Drake had long been an exception to that rule. The ethership fiasco had reduced his reputation as Queen Jane's favorite privateer, but he ought to be able to recover his prestige if his present expedition went well.