Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I waited a couple of minutes,” Gadwin said, “but nothing's changed. Maybe I missed you. Or maybe nothing will change. They talk about alternate time lines and multiple universes. I don't know. Maybe nothing changes. Anna died. Anna lived. The records make no sense. That must mean something.”

  Kyle leaned against the kitchen counter, feeling sick.

  Unaware of the agony he caused, Gadwin went on. “The Loyalty Bureau doesn't trust me. I don't have much time. Listen. I don't know how, but you have to do something. There are things going on, things that started even then—now. People are dying by the millions. He's got weapons in orbit—Skelbak weapons. The aliens don't care what he does as long as they get what they want. You have to change things. Stop him before he starts. My brother can't be allowed—” Gadwin broke off, looking over his shoulder, then vanished.

  On some level, Kyle had known it all along. Isn't that why he'd begun his own line of research? Messages from the future. Gadwin had found him here because he was supposed to be here, was already here, in some sense. He'd moved in and left a record of the address in some database somewhere that survived for Gadwin to find.

  But the multiverse—the quantiverse? Yes, he liked that better—the quantiverse left room for error. If one theory held, every possibility happened in every way possible, no matter what one individual did. In that case, poor Gadwin was doomed to live through his brother's reign of terror and nothing Kyle did would change that. The important thing was that Kyle was right where he was supposed to be.

  “Couldn't sleep?” Cathy drifted into the kitchen wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. She gave him a sleepy smile and pressed herself against his side.

  “Just thinking,” Kyle said, putting his arms around her.

  She mumbled against his chest. “Three in the morning is a horrible time for theoretical physics,” she said. “Don't quarks need sleep?”

  “No, something else.”

  “Hmmm?”

  He pulled her close, relishing the feel of her. “I think I should move in.”

  “Can't,” she said.

  “But I thought . . .”

  “Movers are closed.” She looked up at him, smiling. “You'll have to wait till morning.”

  * * * *

  It was five years before Gadwin reappeared. Kyle was hurrying to get to the hospital, where Cathy was already in labor with their first child, when the image popped into the space between Kyle and the loft's front door. Kyle dropped the tote bag he'd been loading up with last minute necessities. Reds and yellows spilled onto the floor. They'd forgone the traditional pink and blue, preferring not to know the baby's sex until it was born. He gathered up the loose items while Gadwin launched into a replay of the message from five years before.

  “I don't care!” Kyle yelled. “I can't help you. I have my own life to worry about.”

  “I tried your father,” Gadwin said, “but your background isn't very clear. I don't think you two were close.”

  Kyle checked his watch. It read 3:27. Minus five minutes. Time enough for the darkness to pile deeper, for the uncertainties to coil around his throat, for regrets to flow, leaving damp trails on his blood-drained cheeks. Not quite time enough, though, to forgive the past for not doing more.

  “If I have time, I'll try your son,” Gadwin said. “After that, things get muddled by the war. The lineage is there, but no places or times.”

  My son. It's a boy. For chrissake just tell me everything, why don't you?

  Someone banged on the door, but it was Gadwin who looked around. Someone, sometime in the dim, dark future, was going to bang on Gadwin's door. Kyle wished they'd just arrest him already, get him out of Kyle's life, out of his son's life. Sorry, Gadwin, but fuck off and leave me alone. It wasn't his time. It wasn't his life. It just wasn't his problem.

  * * * *

  Kyle fingered the tiny pistol's barrel as he sat alone on the bed. Bright Long Island sun streamed in through the windows, glinting off the weapon's sleek side where it rested on his lap. The metal was smooth and polished and so unlike the wrinkled flesh that touched it. He was sixty years old. Sixty! Time had gotten away from him. It always seemed to do that. It was slippery that way. Had it really been twenty-five years since he and Cathy had moved out of the city?

  Gadwin hadn't been back, but he didn't need to this time, did he? Gadwin, you bastard. There was so much he hadn't mentioned. He'd never mentioned the Nobel Prize, never mentioned the book deals, never mentioned the money. At the very least, he could have warned Kyle about the short-lived disaster that was Kyle's television show. As if you really could popularize theoretical physics in mass media. On second thought, maybe Kyle should have seen that one coming on his own.

  But that was all done now. Kyle had had his fling with fame, leaving him with enough of the fortune to keep them comfortable for the rest of their lives. His son was grown and married and his daughter-in-law was just three months away from Kyle's grandson. Oh, yes, they'd chosen to know the sex right away. No surprises for his boy. Get the future over with. Bring it on.

  It made sense in a way, didn't it? Out there in the living room, Cathy kept company with their son and his wife and the foreshadowing bulge in a dark, dangerous womb. That's why Kyle had to kill her. What else could he do? If only she'd kept her mouth shut. If only she'd broken with tradition, stepped away from the past, chosen a future of her own.

  But she hadn't, had she? No, she just had to blurt it out about their son and the grand tradition her family had carried on for umpty-ump generations spanning two hundred years of mindless, spineless cowards who just did what their long-dead ancestors had told them to do. Damn her! He could still hear her sweet little bell-like voice tinkling along, explaining how in every generation, unbroken, her family's male children had been saddled with the weight of their ancestors. It didn't matter if it was the first, the middle, or stuck in a string of five, but every male child had one thing in common: the name Gadwin.

  Kyle felt himself crashing against a stony shore, dragged by tides from the future and tossed by waves from the past. All along he'd been pushed this way and that, shoved along a course without any turns. He'd had no choices. There were no changes he could have made. It had all been predetermined. Well, that ended today.

  He shoved the pistol into the pocket of the silly button-up sweater he wore because Cathy had given it to him. She'd seen Einstein wearing one like it in an old photograph and decided there was something “all dignified and emeritus-like” about it. It made her happy when he wore it. And the pistol fit nicely in the pocket.

  Killing his daughter-in-law wouldn't make Cathy happy. Or his son. Or himself.

  “Kyle?” Cathy called from the living room.

  “In a minute,” he called back.

  What else could he do? How else could he break the chain from Gadwin to Gadwin that led to that final Gadwin's brother and his evil alien weapons? Kyle checked his watch—that watch. He'd replaced the band a couple of times, and his mental adjustment was eight minutes, now, but the thing was still with him. Sorry I couldn't do more.

  Sorry wasn't enough. You couldn't just regret things. You had to fix them. You had to do more. If you wanted to send a message, send a good one.

  Yes, that was it. Kyle pulled the pistol out of his pocket and stuck it back into the nightstand. He didn't have to hurt anyone, didn't have to kill. He just had to send a message. His life's work had been about sending messages back in time. He'd been looking the wrong way. He needed to send a message to the future. He took the watch off his wrist for the last time and went to join his family in the living room.

  In the following months, a great many people had cause to think that Kyle was losing his mind. As far as he was concerned, they may have been right, but he had enough notoriety—and enough money—that no one really cared. He chose the three most stable and prestigious law firms he could find and paid them staggering sums of money to contractually obligate them for at lea
st two hundred years. As long as there were laws and courts and a country to keep them all enforced, those firms would keep his packages safe. They would watch over his descendents, tracking each generation of offspring. They would follow the trail of Gadwins no matter where it led, until one day Gadwin Smith would arrive.

  The packages themselves weren't cheap, either. Paper alone wouldn't do. He etched his story into thin sheets of stainless steel. He had it encoded into every form he could think of and stored on every medium available. One of them had to make it through.

  If you were going to send a message, make it a good one.

  * * * *

  Kyle Preston checked his watch, subtracting the usual five minutes. He had plenty of time. It was still two hours before he had to meet Anna for lunch in Union Square. He was just about to sit down with a newly-arrived journal when the stranger appeared in the middle of his coffee table. There was a flash and a pop and there he was.

  “My name is Gadwin Smith,” the stranger began. “I don't understand how you knew about all this—this machine, my brother, the war.” His eyes closed as his lips pressed themselves into a thin, pale line. He looked tortured. “Your message says that I told you about it—will tell you.”

  “What the hell?” Kyle walked toward the image, moving around the side of his found-on-the-sidewalk sofa. From every angle, the image still faced him. The coffee table sliced through the stranger's legs just below the knees.

  “All these years I thought it was a joke,” Gadwin Smith went on, “but I believe you now. And you have to believe me.” The image held up two objects that appeared out of nowhere. One looked like a sheet of stiff, shiny paper. The other was a watch. “I can't stop him. No one can. Not now.”

  Kyle looked at his wrist and back at the image. It definitely looked like his watch.

  “Give me some time,” Gadwin said. “I need to tell you a story.”

  * * * *

  “You want to tell me something,” Kyle said. He took Anna's hand across the tiny café table, nearly knocking over the salt shaker.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.” He barely flinched when he heard the explosion. They were at a place on 13th Street, nearly a block away from Union Square. He clutched Anna's hand as he felt his own begin to shake. It was New York. Loud noises were part of the scenery.

  She looked past his shoulder. “What was that?”

  “Not important,” Kyle said. He smiled, shifting sideways to put himself in her line of sight. “You're what's important.”

  She smiled back at him. “Good,” she said. She reached over with her other hand and touched his bare wrist. “Your father's watch?”

  Kyle stared at the spot where Anna's fingers touched skin that had been kept too long away from the light and air. “His watch,” he said. “Not mine. I can do better.”

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “And you will.” Then she told him her news.

  By the time they heard the sirens in the distance they were too deeply wrapped in their life together to notice. Kyle smiled, took a deep breath, and cast himself into the unknown, uncertain future.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason K. Chapman

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: EXTENDED FAMILY

  by Bruce Boston

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The bones of your mother

  ride the unending dust storms

  on Triad Sixteen.

  —

  Your father's skull

  bleaches in the stark light

  of an airless moon.

  —

  Your wife leaves you

  for an alien lover

  from the Haasedar Quadrant.

  —

  You daughter joins

  a gravfree artist colony

  in an artificial satellite.

  —

  Your teenage son

  has never returned

  from the Pleasure Domes.

  —

  You travel aimlessly

  from red giant to white dwarf,

  always on the look out for home.

  —Bruce Boston

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: THE OUTSIDE EVENT

  by Kit Reed

  The Financial Times Weekend review of Kit Reed's new collection, What Wolves Know, calls the work a “confirmation of an extraordinary talent.” The review sums Kit up neatly: “She calls herself ‘transgenred,’ acknowledging that her fiction is too fantastical for most literati and too literary for most fans of the fantastic.” Her recent novels include Enclave, The Baby Merchant and Thinner Than Thou, and her short fiction appears in Asimov's as well as dozens of anthologies and periodicals that include The Kenyon Review and The Yale Review. She's been nominated for several awards in the SF field but in the realm of prizes, she's often been a bridesmaid, but, so far, not the bride. In a tale that is both literary and fantastic, Kit returns to our pages to reveal the terrors that lurk behind the icy smiles of authors vying for attention in a competition at a writers retreat and the horror that awaits the losers and those who can't cope with . . .

  I'm supposed to come down and sit in your, like, confession box and spill my . . . what? Wait! I have to do makeup. So, is this judged more on looks, or is it a performance thing?

  All right, all right, this is not a contest, but. Really. Gazillion writing samples, audition demos, personal interviews and you only picked twenty of us, how is not competitive? I am very close to someone who didn't make it, and believe me, there are feelings . . . Davy, I love you, think of me as doing it for you!

  Hello out there, audience? Judges? Whatever you are. This is Cynthia LaMott, speaking to you from The Confessional in the re-purposed Gothic chapel on my very first day at Strickfield. What a rush! First I want to thank Dame Hilda for founding the colony in memory of Ralph Strickler, her son, who died. Nobody will say how, but it was awful. Greetings from the great stone castle where many are called but few are, oh, you know.

  Mom, they chose me, bad Cynnie, and not Leon, family crown prince and bum playwright, for this expense-paid summer in the castle; if you have to ask you can't afford it, and fuck you.

  Davy was very sweet about it when I got the callback because until last week, he thought we were equals. He's a poet so it shouldn't be a problem, but it is. A guy in a white suit hand-carried the invitation up four flights to our front door. By the time Davy and I opened it he was down in the street, getting into a cab. Davy made me jump for the envelope like this was a game, which it definitely is not.

  I think.

  Mom, it was for me! Time, place, and dates engraved, with a note added in that farty, rich-girl handwriting you see in raised silver foil on every Aline Armantout bestseller:

  Welcome, writer-in-waiting. At Strickfield, you'll do great things, and this year we're starting something new! Do come. Your future depends on it.

  xxxx A.A.

  That's all.

  Aline herself followed up with a phone call, which is how Davy and I knew it wasn't a joke. I wanted to ask about the something new but she said, “Congratulations, you are chosen.” Period. Davy gave me Swarovski crystals to prove he isn't mad. Real writers don't have day jobs, so Davy maxed out his plastic to cover the rental car plus gas and snacks along the way to keep me sharp so I can sparkle at the Opening Night Banquet. Everybody, it's black tie!

  We drove forever to get here. Strickfield is in the middle of, like, the Black Forest. Who knew it was also shopping hell? No malls anywhere; you can't even order online. In woods like these, delivery kids get hunted down and eaten by bears, and all the pretty things in their packages ripped to shreds. Riding up here, I could swear I saw wolves running along behind the car. They didn't peel off until the castle gates opened up and then clanged shut behind Davy's Zipcar like a giant bear trap.

  In spite of which this place is beautiful, although there are rumors about The Thing i
n The Lake and weird noises coming from the attic. Three months, all expenses paid, what could go wrong?

  Well, one thing. Nobody warned me every single dinner is black tie. If I do this right I'll be famous. My whole life is at stake and I'm sitting here thinking, what to wear, what to wear?

  See, for dress-up, I brought exactly one sexy dress and my Jimmy Choos that I got off a stall—I saw the guy glue in the label himself. Oh, and my present Davy bought to prove he's okay with this—which was big of him, as, whatever the game is, we both know he just lost.

  Entre nous, it's just as well Strickfield's just for the chosen, so he's not allowed to stay. When you're in love with a guy, the last thing you want is you and him both fighting over the same prize.

  I hope Davy gets home all right.

  I hope he won't dump me if I lose.

  Unless I'm scared he'll dump me if I win.

  * * * *

  Do I love being a writer more than I love my boyfriend? Are we lovers or rivals or what? Not clear. I'm not a poet like he is, so we thought it was okay but it isn't, and that's just bad.

  Which is more important, really? My one-and-only or this thing that I don't even know what it is, that I have to do? Does wanting something bigger than I am make me a writer or is there more? It's not like I can make out the size and shape of my ambition, all I know is that I want this, and I want it bad.

  Writers work alone but here I am, batched with people who fought, bled and died to make it here, so what's that all about? Probably we'd rather hang out than work, so we're putting off the hard part, where we have to sit down and bash our heads against a wall of words with nobody around to cheer us on. See, at rock bottom what goes on between you and your work is strictly private, in spite of which we cluster in these places, and it scares the crap out of me. Like we're all in a footrace or a beauty contest, with only one prize.