Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Taney? Is that a town?"

  Jana said, Li wondering at her bravery, “Taney's a person. The world broke and before that the feeders didn't give us any food and we have to find Taney!"

  The person with the hair on his face looked away from Jana. His face above the hair looked very red. The other person came hurrying toward them with a white thing in her hand. “Here, drink first. Jack, go get some sheets or something from the trunk. Poor kids must have been asleep when the quake hit, you know these hippie tourists just let their kids sleep buck naked, it's a disgrace but even so—"

  Li stopped listening to her words, which after all didn't even make sense. The white thing was sort of like a food bowl closed at the top and sort of like the spring faucet in the real world, giving out water. Li passed it first to Kim, as always, who drank greedily, the water dribbling down her chest. Then Jana, then Sudie, and by the time it got to Li, he felt he couldn't wait another moment. Nothing had ever tasted as good as that water, nothing.

  The person called Sally handed a big thin blanket to Jana, who let it drop to the ground. “Put it on you, for God's sake,” Sally said, and the kindness in her voice was getting used up.

  Jack still not looking at them, said, “Sal, I think maybe they're in shock. Or maybe a little feeble-minded."

  “Oh!” Sally said, and she looked at Kim, still trying to lick Sudie's face. “Oh, of course, poor things. Here, honey, let me help you.” She picked up the blanket, tore it in half, and began to wrap Jana in it.

  Jana pushed away. “It's not time to sleep!"

  “Jana, let her,” Li said. He didn't know what these people were doing, but the kindness had come back into Sally's voice, and they were going to need kindness, Li realized, to find Taney. This place was much different from the real world. Brighter and harder and hungrier and bigger.

  From the corner of his eye he saw another of the not-birds watching him, stretched out on a flat gray rock. Its eyes were shiny and black as pebbles.

  Sally tied blanket pieces around all of them and said, very slowly, “Now get out of this sun and into the car before you all broil. Honey, you're burning already, and bleeding, too. You get hit by debris in the quake?"

  She was looking at Sudie, but Li answered. “She got scraped by the crack in the world."

  “I knew it. Get in, get in!"

  The “car” was just another covering, made of the same material as the place the sky met the ground in the real world. Inside the car, however, the air was more like the real world: cooler and not so bright. The four of them squeezed into a space in the back, and Sally and Jack climbed into the front space. Sally turned around.

  “Now what all are your names?” She still spoke very slowly, making each word with her lips all pushed out.

  Li said, “I'm Li. This is Jana and Sudie and Kim."

  “Good,” Sally said, smiling wide as a cartoon person. “Now tell Aunt Sally what happened. How you got all alone out on the desert."

  Li said, “The ground shook last night and then this morning the world broke. We squeezed out through a crack in the sky and walked. We have to find Taney."

  “Is Taney a town, son?” Jack said.

  Li didn't know what a town was. “Taney's a person. She takes care of us."

  “A foster mother?” Sally said.

  Jack said, “I don't think a foster mother could handle four retards, Sal. More likely some sort of institution. Might be in East Lancaster."

  “Doubt it,” Sally said. “East Lancaster got hit pretty hard by the depression, only been minimal facilities there for fifteen years, and now with the quake and all...."

  “Well, them kids didn't walk very far buck-naked in the desert,” Jack said. Li could hear that the kindness was getting used up in his voice. “Somebody must of took them camping or something. But I can't go racketing around looking for some institution when we need to see how badly our place got hit. Best bring them home with us tonight and check the Internet for this ‘Taney.’”

  “Right,” Sally said. “Kids, don't worry, everything'll be all right."

  Jack snorted.

  The covering round them leapt forward and Sudie screamed. Jana pinched her hard and Sudie stopped, although she didn't look any less terrified. Kim began licking Sudie's face. Sally watched a minute and then turned away, the tips of her mouth turning down. Li didn't want Sally's kindness to get used up again. He leaned forward.

  “Sally, thank you so much for the water. It was very good."

  “Oh, God, you're welcome,” Sally said.

  “My name is Li. Not God."

  Jack laughed. “He's not so dumb after all!"

  * * * *

  The “car” walked a long way, and everywhere on the long way looked the same. Li watched everything, inside and outside the car, until despite himself, he fell asleep. He woke up when the car stopped at a big square thing which, Li realized when they went inside it, was another world, with its own ground and sky. How many worlds were there?

  “Still standing, by the grace of God,” Sally said. “We're damn lucky. Jack, you get on that computer and start searching. Li, what did you say your last name was?"

  “My name is Li."

  “No, honey, your other name."

  Li just stared. He had no other name. Jack sighed and went around a part of this world's sky. The place the children stood in was cool and dim, with large, funny-shaped rocks covered in blankets to sit on, and a feeder. The children crowded near it, waiting.

  “Y'all are hungry, right?” Sally said. “Can't say as I blame you. Well, go ahead sit at the table and I'll rustle up something. A lot of smashed crockery in the kitchen, but that can wait."

  This feeder was broken, too; no bowls rose from it. But apparently Sally had saved food from before it broke because she brought out big bowls. The food looked strange but tasted wonderful, and Li ate until his belly felt full and round. Afterward sleepiness took him again, and he stretched out on the floor beside Jana, who was making strange sounds in her throat.

  “You got allergies, hon?” Sally said. “Never mind, I don't expect you to know. Jack, you making any progress in there?"

  “Just over a million hits on ‘Taney,’ is all,” Jack said, which made no sense. Nobody was hitting anybody. “This ain't going to be easy."

  Li's throat felt strange, and not in a good way. Jana kept making strange noises in her throat. Li must have slept, because when he woke it was night again, and very dark. Something glowed in a far corner of the room, and at first that scared Li. He lay on the ground, watching to see if the glowing thing moved. It didn't. Slowly he crawled toward it, until he could see that it was a tiny ball of morning, like the big one in the sky of the big world, but not so bright. Li touched it, and snatched back his finger. The tiny morning was hot.

  Carefully he studied it. It was a made thing, like the pretty folded things Jana made from Taney's paper bags. Li's breath came faster. All these things were made: the feeder and the bowls and the blanket-covered rocks—"chairs” Sally had called them—to sit on, and maybe even the sky of this world.

  Of any world.

  Li's mind raced. He never got back to sleep. All the rest of the night he either crawled around, touching things and trying to figure out how they'd been made, or else lay still, thinking. His throat still hurt but he ignored it. Made things. Other people. Worlds within worlds.

  When morning—the big morning—returned, the girls still lay sleeping on the ground. All of them breathed too heavily. Li stood, stretched, and went to look around the parts of sky that touched the ground for Jack and Sally.

  Jack sat slumped over a small screen, which still glowed. Sally lay on the floor. Both of them were dead.

  * * * *

  Not here.

  Katherine made another, equally futile tour of the biosphere, stumping heavily, leaning on her cane. She'd fallen two days ago, twisting her knee, which had led her to put off her visit to the children. Then had come the first quake, which had
made her fall again as she hobbled across her living room. No one had predicted the second, massive quake.

  She called again, knowing it was pointless. She'd seen the blood on the crack in the supposedly shatter-proof dome. The children had squeezed themselves through and set off, probably looking for her. They wouldn't get far, naked in the desert, without water. There was, by design, nothing within fifty miles of the biosphere. Scavengers, of air or ground, would get the bodies.

  Tears welled in her eyes, behind the faceplate. Stupid. This was one solution, maybe the only solution, to a problem that could only grow as years passed. Katherine was nearly seventy—what would have happened after she could no longer carry on this long, painful fight? Some days she felt ninety. Some days she felt already dead, even as the world slowly revived itself from the bad years of the war.

  Li, with his dark expressive eyes and quick mind ... delicate Jana, who in another world would have been a startling beauty ... funny emotional Sudie ... even Kim, afflicted with both Down's and autism ... even Kim she would miss. Her children. She'd had no other.

  Katherine put herself through detox, leaving her biohazard suit behind, even as she doubted that detox was any longer necessary. She hobbled toward her car. The AC felt blessedly cool. Fifty miles to the village of Las Verdes, where a group of Native American descendents eked out a subsistence existence, survivors of past injustices just as the children had been of a future one. A mile outside Las Verdes, Katherine had built a house, which was now a pile of debris. The Indians would rebuild it for her; they were good at starting over. Although now there was no reason for her to stay.

  Li. Jana. Sudie. Kim.

  She drove home through a desert wavery with heat and tears.

  * * * *

  “Why don't the buttons have cartoon pictures on them?” Jana said.

  “It isn't for cartoons,” Li said slowly. They stood around the little screen where Jack had died. Li and Sudie had pulled him off the chair and laid him on the floor beside Sally, and Jana had covered the people with a blanket. Li didn't know why she'd done that, but it seemed a good thing to do.

  The children had examined this world. It had four places, two with faucet springs. In those two places a lot of things were broken, and sharp pieces of clear sky had fallen down. Jana cut her foot on one piece, but it only bled a little. One of the places had more of the strange food, but not very much of it. They'd eaten it all.

  “If the screen isn't for cartoons, what is it for?” Sudie said. She stood behind Li, breathing heavily into his neck, and her voice sounded ... thick, somehow. Like food was stuck in her throat, although she said it wasn't.

  “I don't know what it's for,” Li said. “But we can't take it with us because it's tied to where this sky touches the ground."

  “Take it with us? Where are we going?” Sudie sounded frightened and Kim began to lick her face.

  Jana said, “We can't just walk like yesterday, Li."

  “We're not going to walk. I watched Jack make the car go. I think I can do that."

  “But where?"

  “We'll go along the big path. There's no more food here, Jana. Maybe the path will take us to Taney."

  Jana considered. “Okay. You're right, we can't stay here. We have to find Taney. But first fill those white bowls with water from the faucet spring."

  They went out the leaving door and climbed into the car, lugging blankets and water. Sudie had untied the blanket from her body, but Li made her put it back on. “People here are different,” he said. “They use up their kindness faster if you don't have blankets around you. Oh—wait!"

  He went back inside and brought out a big armful of the blankets behind another leaving door in the biggest place. They were like the blankets around Jack and Sally, all shaped like bodies and fastened together with tiny little strings or hard bumps that Li had examined in great detail. “Put these coverings on you,” he told the girls.

  “Like Taney has,” Sudie said happily, even though none of Jack's and Sally's coverings were slippery like Taney's. But some were white, and Sudie picked one of those.

  Li turned the thing that Jack had turned to make the car go, and it started making noises. But it wouldn't go forward until he pushed down with his feet on the flat things on the car's ground. Then the car stopped.

  “It's dead,” Sudie said.

  Li made it start again, and pushed the flat things. The car stopped. “Maybe I should just push one."

  The car raced away so fast that Sudie screamed, even Jana gasped, and Kim started licking everyone frantically. Li pushed on the other flat thing and the car stopped.

  Eventually he figured out how to make it go-stop-go-stop-go-stop, and they started down the wide dusty path, under the hot ball of morning high in the sky, to look for Taney.

  * * * *

  “—eight point one on the Richter scale, slightly higher than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The president has declared southern California a federal disaster area, and the Department of Domestic Rescue is mobilizing to—” Katherine turned off the car radio.

  She drove past the village. Las Verdes—a bitter joke of a name, if there ever was one—had gotten off fairly lightly because when all buildings were one-story adobe brick, collapse was quick and clean. No fires, no burst gas mains, no floods. The underground spring, the only reason this village existed at all, was still there, although the well-house had crumbled. The windmills and lone cell tower lay on their sides; TV satellite dishes littered the rubble; somewhere a woman wailed, a high keening borne on the thin wind.

  Katherine's house was a pile of dirt, but the shed in the back yard still stood. Under its deceptive façade of cheap plastic was a reinforced steel frame, thief-proof and, unlike the biosphere dome, far too small to crack. She let herself inside with the key around her neck. A generator-powered computer running encrypted, military-grade software sat on a table that nearly filled the small space. It had a direct uplink to a military satellite.

  TOP SECRET

  CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

  NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

  CASE NO. 254987-A

  CODE NAME: ACHILLES

  DATE: 6/12/28

  AGENT IN CHARGE: SIGMA INVESTIGATOR K.M. TANEY

  SUBJECT: DEATH OF GM JUVENILE AGENTS

  * * * *

  She typed swiftly, sent the report, and turned off the computer. With a second key, Katherine turned a small lock set into the machine's side. She closed the door, hobbled back to the car, and drove several hundred feet away. Five minutes later, the shed exploded.

  Now there was nothing to keep her here at all.

  Nonetheless, she drove toward Las Verdes. The village had regarded Katherine with neither kindness nor suspicion. Mostly it had let her be: one more crazy white inexplicably in love with the inhospitable desert, wasting her time making bad paintings of rocks and sunsets, supported by means beyond their world. Still, the trunk of her car held medical supplies, among other things; perhaps she could help.

  * * * *

  The car stopped going and Li couldn't make it start again no matter what he did. “Is it broken?” Sudie said. “Like the feeder and the world?"

  “Yes,” Li said. He opened the door; it was getting very hot inside. It was hot outside, too. The four children got out and sat in the brief shade on one side of the dead car, trying to not touch its burning side.

  Jana started to say something, stopped, took Li's hand.

  He gazed out across the big world, glanced briefly at the hot ball of morning in the big sky, and anger grew in him. All this—all this had been out here all the time, and Taney had never let them have it. All this, and now that they had found it, they were going to die here. Li knew it, and he guessed that Jana knew it, too. Sudie and Kim did not. But Kim might have known something, deep in her different head, because she crawled over Sudie and began to lick Li's face.

  He pushed her away and dropped Jana's hand. His kindness, he knew, was all used up. He didn't want to die. />
  “I'm so thirsty,” Sudie said. No one answered.

  A long time later Sudie said, “Look at those big birds up there. Flying around and around in circles. Why are they doing that, Li?"

  “I don't know,” Li said.

  Jana said, “Something is coming on the big path. There.” She pointed.

  Li strained his eyes. Finally he saw a sort of wiggle in the air—how could Jana see so far?—with a black dot in it. The dot got bigger and bigger and then it turned into another “car” but big, enormous, so that Sudie whimpered and tried to hide behind Li. The car stopped and a person got out.

  “What the ... what happened here, son?"

  “This car stopped,” Li said. He stood. The man didn't have hair on his face like Jack, and his voice sounded more like Taney's.

  “You were driving? Where's your folks?"

  Li didn't know what “folks” might be; everything in this world was so strange. He said, “We have to find Taney."

  “But your parents ... hell, get out of the sun, first. We can help you, son. We're Department of Domestic Rescue. Climb in."

  Inside the big car was another little world, with chairs and blankets and a feeder. A woman gave them water and said, “Baker, where did they come from?"

  Baker sat at another of the little screens and did something to it. “They said ‘Taney,’ but GPS isn't giving me anything like that."

  “Well, we're due in Las Verdes like, now. Shall I drive? And while you're on-line, is there any more email on why we're being diverted to an ass-end hole like Las Verdes when real population centers are screaming for help?"

  “No. Presumably Las Verdes has an emergency situation."

  “Two states have an emergency situation, Baker. Why the priority-one diversion to Las Verdes?"

  “'Ann, ours is not to reason why—’”

  “Oh, roast it. I'll drive."

  Baker gave them all food, and Li fell asleep on the moving ground of the car. When he woke, Baker and Ann were leaving the big car. “You stay here, Li,” Baker said. “Safest and coolest inside, and we've got work to do. We'll get you sorted out tonight, I promise. Okay, buddy?"

  There was kindness in Baker's voice, so Li said, “Yes."