Asimov's SF, August 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Why didn't you call for law enforcement?” Ozzie demanded, knowing he had been set up, not knowing why. “What did you expect me to do?"

  "I can't let him get away,” Ellie said evenly. “I can't risk it. I needed the roadblocks: that meant I had to have a Doo-Wer. So I wanted one who knew what it was like."

  "What what was like?"

  "What it's like to burn!” she snarled, her composure gone, ripped away like a fire shelter caught in tornado-force winds. “What it's like to feel your lungs sear, to know death is reaching for you!"

  Holding the acrid air in his lungs, knowing it held no oxygen, knowing the next breath would be worse, knowing he was going to die—

  "To feel your flesh burning, to know the pain, and know there's not a damned thing you can do but take it!"

  Beating at the flames inside the shelter with his gloved hands—but he couldn't reach the fire at his feet, couldn't do anything about it. Nowhere to go, and nothing to do but scream, burn and scream, and scream, and scream—

  Her voice dropped. “I've got a drip torch in my toolkit,” she said, nodding back toward the pickup. “We could start over there, to the north, and lay a line of fire to the road here, just like a backfire. Cut him off. The incline will carry the fire up to him."

  "Are you nuts?” Ozzie blurted, horrified.

  "It'll die out on the other side,” she went on. “It's all rock over there, too steep for much to grow—too steep for him to climb down."

  He stared at her, hoping she was joking, but she wasn't. “You are nuts!"

  "Did you see the others?” Her voice was hollow, the voice of someone else. “When you came out of your shelter, did you see the rest of your crew?"

  Little blankets of blackened aluminum peeled back, and here and there the glimpse of a hunched up figure—

  "No,” he lied. “I was in bad shape. They put me on morphine right away, carried me out on a litter."

  "I saw every one of them,” she breathed, her voice barely audible over the rustle of tree limbs, the whine of the wind. “Before the rescue team got there. I shouted at them first, begging one, just one of them, to be alive. I tore away the shelters with my burned hands. I found the ones who tried to run."

  Screams piercing the din, desperate voices shrieking for God's attention, and then the roar of the fire blotting it all out—

  "Let him know how it feels,” she hissed. “He likes fire so much, let him know how it feels to be trapped. To see the fire coming for you, and not be able to do anything about it."

  Cut off from their safety zone by fire that shouldn't have been there. Racing the dragon, knowing they must lose, knowing it was all going to end here—

  "No,” Ozzie croaked harshly. “I won't do that to anybody. Not even him."

  For a moment her face twisted in anguish; then she leaned in close to him, as though to keep her words from the trees that rattled their branches overhead. “Do you know who started your fire?"

  Ozzie's heart contracted in his chest. No. No, that was too much. They'd kept him in a drug-induced coma for months while his body tried to heal, while it fought infection, while they grew new skin and stimulated new muscle cells. But when he came out of it, when he came back to a world hazy from pain and medication, they had told him the Drover Fire was caused by a campfire that got out of control. A campfire—not a maniac with a drip torch.

  "You're sick,” he grated. “I'm calling for law enforcement.” Turning away from her, he tapped his sleeve interface to life with a shaking hand. “Doris, get law enforcement to this lat-long.” The chip in his sleeve would supply the latitude and longitude; Ozzie doubted he could read it from a map just now. “We may have the perp up on this ridge. I need you to run a license plate, too; we found a vehicle up here, and a flamethrower—"

  The slam of the pickup's tailgate jerked him around, and he saw Ellie striding toward the ridge with a rifle in one hand. “Hey!” he shouted, ambling painfully back toward the green rig. “Ellie!"

  "Stay out of my way, Dee-Dub!” she shouted back.

  "Are you crazy?” Ozzie forced his reluctant limbs to work harder, faster. “Come back here!"

  "I'm tired of him being at the point of origin. I'm going to make this his point of termination."

  Ozzie nearly tripped over a tree root, but caught himself and kept going. “Is that worth throwing your life away?” he demanded. “They'll send you up for murder."

  "I'll plead insanity."

  "And spend the rest of your days in a mental institution?” His calves were shrieking, they felt like they were burning all over again.

  "Why should you care?” Ellie picked up her pace as he drew near.

  "Why should I care?” Ozzie didn't know. She was crazy, certifiable, and maybe she ought to be locked up; but she'd already done time in an eighty-six-inch by thirty-one-inch by fifteen-and-a-half-inch fire shelter. He felt drained, dizzy; but with one last burst of effort, he launched himself at her knees in a classic football tackle.

  Ellie went down with a cry of surprise. Then she began to struggle, but Ozzie kept his grasp on her legs until he could catch one flailing arm and wrench it around behind her. She was strong, but she was no match for him; the muscles in his arms and chest were well-seasoned, and he kept her pinned. Finally she surrendered and lay panting on the dirt. In the stillness of the forest's murmuring, he heard her begin to sob.

  * * * *

  Two sheriff's deputies arrived about forty minutes later. Ellie was calm and coherent by that time, and her unsanctioned rifle had disappeared back into the long toolbox in the bed of the green rig. The deputies inspected the ORV, which had been reported stolen in Pinetop three days earlier; they photographed the flamethrower, conferred with Ozzie, and then fanned out to approach the rock outcrop at the crest of the ridge.

  "He'll be gone,” Ellie said glumly, crouched in the shade of an Apache pine.

  "Yeah, I know.” Ozzie had ICCARUS set up on the hood of the pickup and was watching the fire's progress. He had been watching it off and on for the last thirty minutes. It was mesmerizing.

  "All they'll find is his nest: soda cans, chip bags, candy wrappers."

  "Yup.” The wind had pushed flames into the campground; as the screen refreshed, he watched the portable outhouses buckle and melt, watched the fee station blaze up.

  "And in a couple years, he'll be back to start another one."

  The screen refreshed again, and the fire had jumped to a cluster of picnic tables. “Not this time,” Ozzie said.

  Ellie lifted her drooping head to turn suspicious eyes on him.

  "I got him on the bird,” Ozzie told her. “Filed the request almost as soon as you stopped kicking. Scooter's been taking pictures of this ridge and the surrounding area once every two minutes for the past half hour. The perp took off when he saw the first sheriff's unit turn onto the control road, about twenty minutes ago. He's headed north—looks like there's a hiking trail up there that leads back down to FR 66. A Forest LEO and a half dozen deputies are closing in on it now. Here, you want to see?” He brought ICCARUS over to where she sat and eased himself onto the ground beside her, ignoring the protest from his rebuilt calves.

  Ellie stared at the screen as he toggled from the fire to the satellite photos showing the perp's ragged trek off the ridge. Finally she smiled. It was a wan and weary smile, a mere shadow of her former grin, but it warmed Ozzie's heart. “That's what I like about you Doo-Wer boys,” she said, watching the law enforcement officers move into place near the trail's end. “You've got the greatest toys."

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  Copyright © 2005 by Catherine Wells.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Summer of the Seven by Paul Melko

  A Novelette

  Paul lives in Ohio with his beautiful wife and two children. He tells us that, though he used to spend his spare time in the garden, now that the fuzzy bunnies have armed themselves with SIG 510 assault rifles, he can only watch from th
e back door. What they are using as fertilizer to grow their enormous carrots, he doesn't want to know. “Summer of the Seven” is the third in his series—that includes “Strength Alone” (Asimov's, December 2004)—concerning post-human teens coming to grips with their identity.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  In the summer of our fourteenth year, we weren't the only one to live with Mother Redd on the farm in Worthington. That was the year the Seven came to stay.

  "After lunch, you'll need to clean out the back bedroom,” Mother Redd said that morning at breakfast. One of her was busy frying eggs at the stove, while another was squeezing orange juice. Her third was setting the table. We had just come in from chores—picking diamond flowers, plucking sheep cloth, and, secretly, milking the beer bush for a few ounces of lager—and were lounging around the kitchen table.

  Meda, my true sister and our pod's interface, asked the question we were thinking. “Who's coming to stay?” It wasn't a visit. For a visit, we wouldn't bother to clean out the bedroom; we'd just pull out the beds from the couch in the downstairs den and let the visitor sprawl around the first floor. Or, if it was more than one person, we'd lay quilts and pillows in the great room.

  One of Mother Redd gave us a look that said we asked too many questions. “A guest,” she said.

  We all shrugged.

  We spent the morning on calculus and physics. We were doing word problems: if you fired a cannonball from a train car and it lands on another train car, how fast are the train cars traveling apart after five seconds. Stuff like that.

  Why would anyone mount a cannonball on a train car? I sent.

  Strom laughed. Bola, who understood force and motion intuitively, flashed us the image of the cannonball and its graceful trajectory. Then he added air currents, and gravity perturbations and other second-order forces. As he added in tidal effects and the pull of Jupiter, Quant sent, Seven and a half centimeters per second.

  "At least let me write something down before you give me the answer,” Meda said. She had the pencil, but Quant was solving the problems in her head.

  "Why?"

  "For the practice!"

  "Why?"

  Meda groaned. My sister is always so expressive; there's never any doubt what she's—or we're—feeling. That's why she was our interface.

  "We have to show our work on the tests! We can't just write down the answer."

  Quant shrugged.

  Sometimes Quant won't be with us, I sent.

  Moira!

  I felt Quant's surprise and a moment's fear; we'd been together for almost fourteen years. Being cut off from the rest of us was what we most often had nightmares about. And if one of us had a nightmare, we all had it.

  "Okay.” I sent a smile and reassurance to Quant, and she relaxed and returned focus to the problem set. We worked through the rest of them on paper, Quant guiding us through the equations to the answer she already knew.

  After lunch, we trudged up to the back bedroom and started moving boxes. We couldn't just throw the junk out the window and then haul it to the trash heap; Manuel had found a pipette set, and there were frames and pictures in some of the boxes. We had to be careful.

  "What's this?” Meda asked, holding up a photo in an old plastic frame.

  We saw the image through her eyes, well enough for me to recognize Mother Redd, a younger woman than she was now, and a quartet. Her hair was brown and bobbed, not gray and long as she wore it now. And she was slender in the picture, not anything like the plump, huggable women we knew.

  "That was before—” Meda said.

  Yes.

  Mother Redd was a trio now, but once, a long time ago, she had been a quartet. She had been a medical doctor, a famous one; we'd read a few of her papers and barely understood them, even though we were the highest order—a sextet—and specialized in math and science. Then one of her had died, leaving her three-quarters of what she had been.

  Again, the fear of separation rippled through us, emotions that we would have to learn to check. Strom shivered, and I touched his hand. To lose one of ourselves, to become a quintet....

  Meda looked closely at the picture. I knew what she was wondering, though I could only taste the curiosity. Which one of Mother Redd had died? I didn't think we could tell; she had been identical quadruplets. Meda put the picture away.

  "Look at this,” Quant said. She held up a tattered and old biology book. The date inside was 2020.

  "That is so old!” Meda said. “Older than pods. What could that have that's any use?"

  Quant thumbed through the pages and it fell open at a colored plate, a bisection of the female body.

  "Now that's sexy,” Manuel said. Arousal mingled with embarrassment. The stupidest things triggered desire in our male components. I sometimes wished that we were an all-female pod like Mother Redd, instead of an equally mixed sextet.

  He turned the page, and there was a dissected frog, with overlays, so that you could flip from the skin, into the musculature, and then the internal organs.

  "The spleen's in the wrong place,” Bola said.

  We had built frogs in biology class last year. Ours had been the best jumper.

  As we were stowing the last of the boxes in the barn loft, we heard the whine of a jet car.

  "Folsom 5X,” Bola said. “Six-prop hydrogen burner."

  It was actually a Folsom 3M, a converted older skybus, but we didn't have time to razz him for his mistake. The skybus landed on the airpad behind the farmhouse, and we ran to meet it.

  Mother Redd waved us back, and we saw why. The bus had already discharged its passenger and was whining back into the sky. Another pod stood there next to Mother Redd, its interface shaking hands.

  "Hi, I'm Apollo Papadopulos,” Meda said. “Welcome to—"

  The newcomer turned to us, and we counted: a seven-person pod, a septet. Our greeting hung in Meda's mouth. We gaped in wonder, stunned by the sight. We were a sextet; our order was only six.

  * * * *

  "Everyone knows that the higher the order, the stronger the pod,” Quant said.

  "That's not true,” Meda said.

  We'd gotten over our voicelessness and had managed a polite greeting to Candace Thurgood. Meda had shaken hands with the leader of the septet, one of six identical females, skinny, blonde-haired, green-eyed girls. The seventh member was a male, taller, just as skinny and pale in skin and hair. We're three females and three males; Meda and I were identical female twins, while our other pod mates were of different genetic stock.

  Then Strom came up with the idea that we still had chores in the barn, and we made a quick exit, watching as the seven of Candace and the three of Mother Redd walked to the house.

  Yes, it is!

  No, it isn't!

  I shushed them with a whiff of baby pheromone, a poke at their childish behavior.

  We all knew the history. The first pods had been duos, created almost fifty years ago, the first to use the chemical memory and pheromones to share feelings between two separate humans. Since then, the order of the pods and complexity of the chemical signaling had grown. We were a sextet, the largest order we'd ever seen. All our classmates were sextets. Everyone in the space program was a sextet.

  "Because sextets are the largest order. They're the best,” Strom said.

  Not anymore! Candace is a seven, a septet!

  It made sense. Genetic engineers were always trying to add to the power of an individual. Why wouldn't they try to build a seven? Or an eight?

  "They succeeded in building one, finally."

  "How old is she?"

  "Younger than us. Maybe twelve."

  I hope she's not staying all summer.

  But we knew she was. We wouldn't have turned out the guest room if she wasn't.

  Maybe we can make her leave.

  I said, “We have to be nice. We have to be friends."

  We have to be nice, but we don't have to be friends.

  Why be nice?

 
I looked at Meda, and she said, “Oh, all right. Let's go be nice. At least there isn't eight of her."

  Though how far away would that be?

  * * * *

  We tried to be nice.

  I was the one who'd advised it, and even I chafed at the manners of that arrogant septet.

  "Fifteen point seven five three,” Candace said, while we were still scribbling the problem. One of her was looking over Quant's shoulder as we sat at the great room table.

  I knew that, Quant sent.

  Still, Meda wrote the problem down and we worked through to the answer, while Candace tapped seven of her feet.

  "Fifteen point seven five three three,” Meda said.

  "I rounded down,” she said. “One of us—” She nodded at the identical girl to her left—"is specialized in mathematics. When you have seven, you know, you can do that. Specialize."

  We were specialized too, we wanted to say, but I sent, Humble.

  She's specialized at being a git.

  "You're very smart,” Meda said diplomatically. I hadn't even had to remind her.

  "Yes, I am.” She was standing so close that the pungent smell of her chemical thoughts tickled our noses and distracted us. It was almost rude to stand so close that our memories mingled. We couldn't understand her thoughts, of course, just a bit of self-satisfaction from the pheromones. The chemical memories that we passed from hand to hand, and, to some extent, by air, were pod-specific, most easily passed by physical touch at the wrists, where our pads were. Pheromones were more general, and indicated nuance and emotion. These were often common across all pods, especially those from the same creche. So even though our thoughts didn't mix together, it felt weird for her to be so close.

  She doesn't know any better, I sent, touching the pad on Manuel's left wrist. She's young.

  We knew better at that age.

  We should try to be friendly, I sent.

  "Do you want to go swimming this afternoon?” Meda asked.

  Candace shook her head quickly, then she paused for a consensus. We smelled the chemical thoughts, pungent and slick in the air, and wondered why she had to consense on going swimming.