Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Look at you.” That was LaChapelle. “Look at your face all squinty and bloodshot. You know cTHC is addictive, right?"

  “Just testing the product."

  Shorty's voice was slower and deeper than she would've guessed, maybe because smoke had made his throat raw. Marijuana. THC was the drug in marijuana. Her brother had sucked it down the same way Mom soaked herself in rum and Coke.

  Shorty said, “You wanna do business or what, man?"

  “Do you? You almost got all of us shafted tonight playing Canuck Cowboy."

  This just got better and better. Shorty was Canadian. Were they smuggling across the border? How much pot could you stuff into a sports car? It would make more sense just to grow it here, all these greenhouses, horticulture experts....

  Julie performed quick surgery on the doe's wiring while she pinned the base of the swan's neck between the trailer wall and the back of her head. Then every muscle in her neck seized up and she leaned away, clumsily grabbing the swan before it hit the ground. If LaChapelle looked out now he'd think she was putting on a puppet show.

  The doe had nightvision camera-eyes, of course, which she'd spliced into a WatchMan recorder. Staring at the tiny screen in her lap, Julie lifted both animals again and zeroed in on the faint outlines behind the drapes.

  “—even carrying a gun like that?"

  “Wanna try it? Let's have a toke and go blow the tits off some stuff, buddy, you should see—"

  “We're not buddies,” LaChapelle said quietly. “We're business partners. And I think our other partners would be very, very unhappy to hear you're taking chances. And testing the product, you idiot, cTHC is addictive."

  See THC. Canadian? Camouflaged. Cocaine. Cockamamie. Julie was too revved up to play Wheel of Fortune.

  A bad ache knotted her shoulders again and she twisted her butt around in the dirt, trying to find a comfortable pose. It couldn't be done.

  Shorty had what must be a briefcase and laid out several small items on the table, the first hot enough to show on infrared. A nifty little incubator. But LaChapelle gave him no money as far as she could tell, only paperwork, and Shorty muttered his way through a few lines: “The select crossbreeding resulting in concentrated THC has proved independent of the plus nitrogen fertilizer.” He laughed. “You guys really think you're rocket scientists or something."

  “Just bring it back to the lab, all right?"

  Concentrated THC. They were retooling the plant to sink its teeth into people like tobacco or heroin.

  Could Mr. Shaug know about this? He didn't need more money, that was for sure, and it didn't fit with his protectiveness of his family.... LaChapelle and some cronies were probably looking to cash in on the side. Julie wondered why they were using a lab across the border, but it must be tough to find people with the right training, especially out in the middle of nowhere.

  Busting an international biotech drug ring! She was going to be absolutely buried in venture capital money, and she couldn't wait to see the look on Sheriff Tom's face when the grumpy old boob realized she was his best friend in the world.

  She was going to have to let him in on the glory.

  * * * *

  Despite its fabulous name, the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy was merely a three-room cabin set beside a warehouse in a dirt lot graced with two trees and a sagging fence. By rights the place should have been named something more along the lines of Beauchain Security, but Julie hadn't thought it prudent yet to draw that sort of attention. In any case it was Highsong who'd christened her shop, with mischief in his often unreadable dark eyes, and Julie had blown a hundred and forty bucks getting a sign made in the hope that he might feel a possessive twinge each time he picked her up.

  She did not sell pet supplies. Highsong was a tease. He found it amusing that she had six bird feeders and threw snacks to every mutt in town, yet packed her warehouse with armies of dead beasts. Most of it was FW&P work, of course, although she did perform some regular taxidermy. The work paid decent money and also generated good will among the townies she'd busted.

  Tonight her cabin seemed stuffy, too small. It had been one wild ride of a day—a new day now; it was twenty minutes after midnight—but things had ended well. Sheriff Tom had goggled at her recordings and actually stammered thanks. He said he'd go straight to the nursery as soon as the state police arrived. He also warned her that she stood some chance of trouble herself, having no authority, no warrant, but Julie pulled her tapes out of his hands and told him to say he received an anonymous tip. Big deal. The man really was dense sometimes.

  Heading home, she'd considered a drive out to Highsong's place with a six-pack to celebrate. But what if he wasn't alone?

  She was putting water on for tea when twin lights flashed across her window, then again. She leaned over the hot stove to peek out. Speeding into her lot was a sports car, the sports car, followed by the sheriff's hard-top jeep.

  “God, no,” Julie said.

  Too late it all made sense. Idiot. How else could LaChapelle have known that Shorty machine-gunned her decoys?

  Now she had maybe twelve seconds before they got inside, and used three grabbing her phone and punching 911. Then she wasted two more realizing that calling the cops might not be the best idea. What if all six members of the Sugarloaf sheriff's unit were in on the deal?

  The slam of car doors felt like malfunctions in her heart and Julie forgot to think again as gunfire blew through her front door, right over her head.

  Originally she'd drawn up the killer lawn gnomes as a gag. In Florida, however, people crammed their yards with shiny plastic flamingos and miniature windmills and such. She'd realized there could be a paying market—and a trio of elves stood on her coffee table because she thought she might lure Highsong inside for a little show-and-tell.

  Julie dove back behind her kitchen counter as Shorty kicked through the door. He looked down at the weird greeting party he discovered inside, then snorted and started to kick at them.

  The first elf misfired, its jaunty green cap rocketing off to the left. The second either aimed or launched poorly. Its taser-leads bit into the sofa with a flash of white electricity, at least twenty inches off-target.

  The third elf rammed its juice home directly over Shorty's heart. His chest seemed to explode into ashes.

  Julie screamed, expecting buckets of blood. An instant later, though, her cabin was saturated in tasty blue smoke. He must have been carrying a personal stash in his pocket.

  He toppled like Goliath onto the ceramic elves.

  Coughing and wheezing, Julie rose from her hiding place and ran for the back door. Her feet felt huge, weightless, like soft balloons pushing her skyward. She was looking down at them when her face encountered the door and then her butt met the linoleum.

  Oh jeez I'm totally schnockered! she realized, and sat there owlishly counting her own thoughts.

  The sound of two gunshots slapped her like her mother's palm. She pushed herself upright. But the small, neat holes in the door stopped her again. Just missed. When she looked around her vision seemed dim—they were shadows thrashing toward her in great swimming motions and everyone was yelling.

  Suddenly she was outside, wrapped in fogbanks of smoke. Then she could see again. The stars glittered and the chill air felt exquisite on her neck. She made sense of the fact that she was wearing only floppy socks and knew she couldn't run all the way back to Florida. She sprinted toward her warehouse instead.

  “Goddamn goddamn goddamn!” Sheriff Tom chanted behind her.

  She slammed the door on his anger and dropped to her hands and knees, sensing bullets like she had radar. Her consciousness felt huge and sensitive and vulnerable, as if every hair on her head had been squeezed full of brains like toothpaste.

  She rolled right, then popped up beside a work table as the door crashed open with a resounding metal gong. The vibration felt so intense that her fingers wouldn't close on the master remote she wanted. Groping for it through the jumble o
f tools and wiring, she cut herself on a bandsaw and that raw hurt was the promise of death.

  But LaChapelle wasn't handling the smoke well either. He went completely bug-nuts, and started shooting away from her.

  Shooting her pets.

  The black bear's only moving parts were its neck and one foreleg, yet, even positioned on all fours, it was nearly as tall as a man, a hulk of claws and teeth. Shotgun blasts echoed through the warehouse. Then she activated the rest of her toys and Sheriff Tom also opened fire, shrieking in fear.

  Julie had not invented the robo-decoys. That honor went to a Wisconsin taxidermist. She had, however, made improvements as word got round and poachers grew wary.

  The migratory elk were capable of walking stiffly and waddled forward in a slow-motion stampede, bumping and bonking each other. Julie realized with surprising passion that she had to take them to Hollywood—here's the pitch, live-action Bambi crossed with Night of the Living Dead. They formed a shaggy wall of muscle from which Sheriff Tom and LaChapelle could only blast meaningless, fist-sized hunks.

  High in the rafters, a mass of shadows flopped and twitched.

  She'd run out of working space in autumn, when gun lovers were permitted to kill beautiful fuzzy things and her decoys had to be put away. And in winter, Fish, Wildlife & Parks focused more on maintaining habitats than on trapping the few hunters enthusiastic enough to brave the elements.

  Her birds nested on sheets of plywood laid across the open rafters—and her turkeys and sage grouse could all walk. The lone bald eagle and platoon of ring-necked pheasants could all open both wings. They carried the immobile owls, cranes, and swans to the edge.

  It was Biblical, a rain of fowl.

  Most of the palsied horde crashed down upon the elk or her work tables, but enough hit their targets that Sheriff Tom vanished from sight and LaChapelle was driven to his knees, hacking on old dry feathers.

  He put one last shot into the ceiling as Julie charged in for the coup de grace, high-stepping through the flapping mess. She brained LaChapelle with a duck and kicked him four times for good measure, then drove her bruised knee into Sheriff Tom's belly when she was bumped from behind by an elk still diligently marching its way forward.

  * * * *

  The paramedic kept pressing his thumb down on the skin beneath Julie's eyes, checking her pupil response to see if she was concussed. She had repeatedly lost track of what she was saying, fascinated by the blizzard of red and blue lights. The confusion of emergency vehicles and personnel seemed roughly equal to the congestion inside her stoned brain.

  “Look up,” the paramedic kept saying. “Can you look up?"

  “Let's go over it again,” the state trooper said. “They followed you into the warehouse...."

  “Right.” Julie tried to point and nearly fell over. She'd squeezed three industrial-size tubes of epoxy over the pile of robo-fowl, binding LaChapelle and Sheriff Tom into a surreal cake of beaks and bodies that would have to be taken apart with a power sander, no doubt painfully. As for Shorty, she had simply hit him with the taser again because she was unable to tie him up, having unfortunately glued her right hand to her own hip.

  She gestured with her chin instead and saw Highsong among the milling uniforms. His head was also turning, searching, and Julie's first impulse was to hide. She was very aware of her own sour adrenaline breath and lumpy hair—but with the sudden clarity of the smoke, Julie understood that this might be her best and only chance.

  He spotted her as soon as she started toward him, shuffling. Then his eyebrows went up. Did she look even worse than she thought?

  Julie was confrontational. “So what was so important you couldn't even come in for a cup of coffee earlier?"

  He hesitated, then grinned and shrugged, an expansive motion that was unlike him. “Left-over tacos and a two volume biography of Eisenhower,” he said.

  “What?"

  “I just didn't think we should rush things."

  Julie stepped closer and Highsong brought his open arms in, enfolding her. When she kissed him, he kissed back.

  Copyright © 2006 Jeff Carlson

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  * * *

  TRUNK AND DISORDERLY

  by Charles Stross

  Charles Stross has been in rehab since 2004, recovering from the bad attack of singularitis that led to the Accelerando outbreak. His doctors report that he is much improved since the excision of his dot-com gland, and may eventually be capable of writing normal SF again, under suitably controlled circumstances, although he is unlikely ever to return to his previous proto-Ballardian normality. The following story was discovered cunningly encoded in a scarf he was crocheting at the clinic; we believe it may cast some light on his illness.

  * * * *

  1. In Which Laura Departs and Fiona Makes a Request

  “I want you to know, darling, that I'm leaving you for another sex robot—and she's twice the man you'll ever be,” Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind her.

  Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I'd missed this time. “Laura—"

  She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. “I'm leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can't stop me. You're not paying my maintenance. I'm a free woman, and I don't have to put up with your moods!"

  The hell of it is, she was right. I'd been neglecting her lately, being overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I'm terribly sorry,” I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don't have to walk out right this instant—"

  “There's nothing to talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching for the door handle. “You've been ignoring me for months, darling: I'm sick of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you'd try not to be so distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and froze the pose for a moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. “You didn't mean it. I'm sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me you'd face up to the fact that you're an obsessive-compulsive, and get your wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then, I'm out of here!"

  The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel, and swept out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.

  “Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like an absolute bounder at the time; it's a low blow to strike a cove right before he tries to drill a hole in the desert at mach twenty-five, what? But you can't take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her accusation wasn't, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.

  I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless tension. I couldn't decide whether I should go back to the simulator and practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there's something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.

  You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand, Laura's walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I'm never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath and a bottle of sake would
get me over it so I could practice later; but tonight was the pre-drop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it's fried snacks all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.

  “Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?"

  I didn't need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.

  “You don't sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.

  “Laura just walked out on me again and I've got a drop coming up tomorrow,” I moaned.

  “Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She'll be back in a week when she's run the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I've been invited to a party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping you'd be able to look after Jeremy for me while I'm gone, just for a couple of days or maybe a week or two—"

  Jeremy was Fiona's pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high bundle of hairy malevolence. Last time I'd looked after Jeremy he puked in my bed—under the duvet—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the fleshpits of Venus. Then there's the time Jeremy got at the port, then went on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn's favorite skirt when we took him to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we'd locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can't take him anywhere—he's a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.