Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11
Page 7
They were standing in a market square strewn with diamonds and bits of plastic box, and all around them men, women, and children were jostling and shoving and screaming abuse at one another as they scrabbled on the worn paving slabs for the precious stones.
“Holy crap,” breathed Pennyworth, whose glistening face was now gray as a corpse’s.
Quite nearby, a tall woman with a baby on her back stood up, triumphantly clutching a single diamond in her fist, and glanced in their direction. The baby was screaming and screaming, but she was oblivious to it. Her hard, bloodshot eyes darkened as she saw the new arrivals with their piled boxes of jewels. There were four bloody scratches on her right cheek.
“Get them!” she shrieked.
The actual words were unfamiliar to the two thieves, who knew no languages other than their own, but the meaning was very plain. Immediately the woman started to run toward them. A few other people reluctantly lifted their heads, saw the two thieves, and took in the implications. And then there were more shrieks and more people looked up. In a matter of seconds half the crowd was heading straight for them.
“Throw it down, Pennyworth,” yelled Shoe. “Throw down the whole boxful and run!”
He hurled the contents of his box out into the crowd, followed by the box itself. Pennyworth gaped at him for a moment, then looked back at the faces rushing toward him, crazed and murderous with longing. He swallowed once, then flung out his own box just as the tall woman with the scratched face was almost upon him. Yet again there were diamonds everywhere. The crowd screeched as it took in this second helping of instant wealth, as plentiful as the first lot that had appeared out of nowhere only a few minutes previously. Everyone dived to the ground, snatching and snarling and clawing. The boxes were torn to shreds in moments. Dodging pedestrians and rickshaws, the two thieves ran.
They had run for the length of just one block when Pennyworth fell to his knees with a sob and threw up copiously, immediately afterward scrabbling in the vomit for stones.
“I’ve got to crap,” he whimpered to Shoe, “I can’t hold on any longer.”
His foolish octopus limbs dangled into his stinking sick. Passers-by turned to stare at them. Rickshaw drivers beeped horns to try and make them look round.
“Well, crap yourself then, Pennyworth. We need to move.”
Shoe looked back the way they had come. Any moment now, he knew, the diamonds on the market square would be exhausted and the first hungry outriders of the crowd would start to come after them.
He pulled his sick companion to his feet, and put an arm round his shoulders to hold him up, trying not to breathe in too much of Pennyworth’s spreading stench, but gagging all the same. He looked down the streets to the left, the right, and straight ahead, weighing his options with the speed and detachment of an experienced professional, and made a decision to turn to the left, where the road looked busier and more winding and easier to hide in.
But a second or two passed between taking the decision and acting on it. “There’s probably another well buried under that market square,” he found himself thinking during that brief lacuna in time. And he remembered what Officer Graves had said about the Old Empire and its playful mysteries strewn out across the stars, and it seemed, in that moment, to make sense to him, so that he could understand why Graves cared about such things. And then, with a sudden pang of loss so sharp as to bring tears up into his eyes, he recalled the room with the pool, and tried to bring back into his mind what he had experienced there.
But his thoughts were interrupted by harsh shrieks of recognition coming from the direction of the square. He tightened his grip round his foolish friend and gave himself back to the moment.
Copyright © 2010 Chris Beckett
Poetry
Poetry
FIVE POUNDS OF SUNLIGHT
Geoffrey A. Landis
The weight of sunlight striking the Earth every second is two kilograms. About five pounds. The weight of a kitten, six months old, still frisky still chasing his tail, and everything else, real and imaginary. Five pounds of sunlight races to Earth, crossing ninety-five million miles in eight...
Retired Spaceman
G. O. Clark
As a child he built plastic models of space ships and super-heroes, pieced together picture puzzles of celestial wonders and alien landscapes. As a young man he hit the textbooks and simulators hard, failing in the end to make the grade, to set a course for uncharted planets and distant stars. Now...
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Novelette Short Stories
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Poetry
FIVE POUNDS OF SUNLIGHT
Geoffrey A. Landis
The weight of sunlight striking the Earth every second is two kilograms.
About five pounds.
The weight of a kitten,
six months old, still frisky
still chasing his tail,
and everything else, real and imaginary.
Five pounds of sunlight
races to Earth,
crossing ninety-five million miles in eight minutes,
scattering off clouds,
absorbed by desert soils and rainforest jungles
reflecting from arctic ice
refracting into myriad rainbows.
The kitten
races across the house
scattering books and papers,
chasing myriad imaginary rainbows
crossing the width of
my office,
the living room
the kitchen,
in just under one second.
During which time another five pounds of sunlight collides into the Earth
Some of that five pounds of sunlight reflects back into space.
The kitten bounces off the kitchen cabinets, reflecting back into my office
scattering books and papers
But three or four pounds of sunlight stays, warming the Earth.
The kitten, temporarily stationary, naps in the sunlight.
I cup the kitten in one hand
and imagine that I am holding all the sunlight striking the Earth.
Next Article
Previous Article
Poetry
Retired Spaceman
G. O. Clark
As a child he
built plastic models
of space ships and
super-heroes,
pieced together
picture puzzles of
celestial wonders and
alien landscapes.
As a young man
he hit the textbooks
and simulators hard,
failing in the end
to make the
grade, to set a course
for uncharted planets
and distant stars.
Now an old man,
the lost years finally
catching up to him,
he rehashes the past
and completes
paint-by-number pictures
of the future he longed
so much to join.
Copyright © 2010 G. O. Clark
Previous Article Short Stories
Short Stories
DOLLY
Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear lives in Connecticut with a giant ridiculous dog and a presumptuous cat. Her hobbies include cooking, rock climbing, and playing some of the worst guitar ever heard. Her fiction has been the recipient of several major awards, including two Hugos and a Sturgeon. Both Hugo Award-winning...
VISITORS
Steve Rasnic Tem
Steve Rasnic Tem has had recent appearances in the John Skipp anthology Werewolves and Shape Shifters, and in Stephen Jones’ Visitants: Stories of Fallen Angels & Heavenly Hosts. His most recent book is In Concert, a collection of all his short fiction collaborations with wife Melanie Tem. In his...
INTERLOPER
Ian McHugh
Ian McHugh is a graduate of Clarion We
st. His fiction has received the Writers of the Future Award and Australia’s Aurealis Award. Readers can find more of his work at ianmchugh.wordpress.com. The idea for his outré new tale of the Australian outback was “concocted over the course of a very tedious...
ASHES ON THE WATER
Gwendolyn Clare
Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is in the process of adding another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in the Warrior Wisewoman 3,...
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Poetry Novella
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Short Stories
DOLLY
Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear lives in Connecticut with a giant ridiculous dog and a presumptuous cat. Her hobbies include cooking, rock climbing, and playing some of the worst guitar ever heard. Her fiction has been the recipient of several major awards, including two Hugos and a Sturgeon. Both Hugo Award-winning stories, “Tideline” and “Shuggoths in Bloom,” originally appeared in Asimov’s. The author’s latest books are Chill (Spectra, 2010) and The Sea Thy Mistress (forthcoming from Tor). Her latest story for us is a futuristic murder tale. Readers will not be mistaken if they detect a few nods to a past SF master hidden among the clues to the mystery.
On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.
In her black French maid’s outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.
Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele—and try to say that without sounding like a comic book—which lay at Dolly’s feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.
That was how she looked when Rosamund Kirkbride found her, standing in a red stain in a white room like a thorn in a rose.
Dolly had locked in position where her program ran out. As Roz dropped to one knee outside the border of the blood-saturated carpet, Dolly did not move.
The room smelled like meat and bowels. Flies clustered thickly on the windows, but none had yet managed to get inside. No matter how hermetically sealed the house, it was only a matter of time. Like love, the flies found a way.
Grunting with effort, Roz planted both green-gloved hands on winter-white wool-and-silk fibers and leaned over, getting her head between the dead guy and the doll. Blood spattered Dolly’s silk stockings and her kitten-heeled boots: both the spray-can dots of impact projection and the soaking arcs of a breached artery.
More than one, given that Steele’s heart lay, trailing connective tissue, beside his left hip. The crusted blood on Dolly’s hands had twisted in ribbons down the underside of her forearms to her elbows and from there dripped into the puddle on the floor.
The android was not wearing undergarments.
“You staring up that girl’s skirt, Detective?”
Roz was a big, plain woman, and out of shape in her forties. It took her a minute to heave herself back to her feet, careful not to touch the victim or the murder weapon yet. She’d tied her straight light brown hair back before entering the scene, the ends tucked up in a net. The severity of the style made her square jaw into a lantern. Her eyes were almost as blue as the doll’s.
“Is it a girl, Peter?” Putting her hands on her knees, she pushed fully upright. She shoved a fist into her back and turned to the door.
Peter King paused just inside, taking in the scene with a few critical sweeps of eyes so dark they didn’t catch any light from the sunlight or the chandelier. His irises seemed to bleed pigment into the whites, warming them with swirls of ivory. In his black suit, his skin tanned almost to match, he might have been a heroically-sized construction-paper cutout against the white walls, white carpet, the white and gold marble-topped table that looked both antique and French.
His blue paper booties rustled as he crossed the floor. “Suicide, you think?”
“Maybe if it was strangulation.” Roz stepped aside so Peter could get a look at the body.
He whistled, which was pretty much what she had done.
“Somebody hated him a lot. Hey, that’s one of the new Dollies, isn’t it? Man, nice.” He shook his head. “Bet it cost more than my house.”
“Imagine spending half a mil on a sex toy,” Roz said, “only to have it rip your liver out.” She stepped back, arms folded.
“He probably didn’t spend that much on her. His company makes accessory programs for them.”
“Industry courtesy?” Roz asked.
“Tax write-off. Test model.” Peter was the department expert on Home companions. He circled the room, taking it in from all angles. Soon the scene techs would be here with their cameras and their tweezers and their 3D scanner, turning the crime scene into a permanent virtual reality. In his capacity of soft forensics, Peter would go over Dolly’s program, and the medical examiner would most likely confirm that Steele’s cause of death was exactly what it looked like: something had punched through his abdominal wall and clawed his innards out.
“Doors were locked?”
Roz pursed her lips. “Nobody heard the screaming.”
“How long you think you’d scream without any lungs?” He sighed. “You know, it never fails. The poor folks, nobody ever heard no screaming. And the rich folks, they’ve got no neighbors to hear ’em scream. Everybody in this modern world lives alone.”
It was a beautiful Birmingham day behind the long silk draperies, the kind of mild and bright that spring mornings in Alabama excelled at. Peter craned his head back and looked up at the chandelier glistening in the dustless light. Its ornate curls had been spotlessly clean before aerosolized blood on Steele’s last breath misted them.
“Steele lived alone,” she said. “Except for the robot. His cook found the body this morning. Last person to see him before that was his P.A., as he left the office last night.”
“Lights on seems to confirm that he was killed after dark.”
“After dinner,” Roz said.
“After the cook went home for the night.” Peter kept prowling the room, peering behind draperies and furniture, looking in corners and crouching to lift up the dust ruffle on the couch. “Well, I guess there won’t be any question about the stomach contents.”
Roz went through the pockets of the dead man’s suit jacket, which was draped over the arm of a chair. Pocket computer and a folding knife, wallet with an RFID chip. His house was on palmprint, his car on voice rec. He carried no keys. “Assuming the M.E. can find the stomach.”
“Touché. He’s got a cook, but no housekeeper?”
“I guess he trusts the android to clean but not cook?”
“No taste buds.” Peter straightened up, shaking his head. “They can follow a recipe, but—”
“You won’t get high art,” Roz agreed, licking her lips. Outside, a car door slammed. “Scene team?”
“M.E.,” Peter said, leaning over to peer out. “Come on, let’s get back to the house and pull the codes for this model.”
“All right,” Roz said. “But I’m interrogating it. I know better than to leave you alone with a pretty girl.”
Peter rolled his eyes as he followed her towards the door. “I like ’em with a little more spunk than all that.”
“So the new dolls,” Roz said in Peter’s car, carefully casual. “What’s so special about ’em?”
“Man,” Peter answered, brow furrowing. “Gimme a sec.”
Roz’s car followed as they pulled away from the house on Balmoral Road, maintaining a careful distance from the bumper. Peter drove until they reached the parkway.
Once they’d joined a caravan downtown, nose-to-bumper on the car ahead, he folded his hands in his lap and let the lead car’s autopilot take over.
He said, “What isn’t? Real-time online editing—personality and physical appearance, ethnicity, hair, all kinds of behavior protocols—you name the kink, they’ve got a hack for it.”
“So if you knew somebody’s kink,” she said thoughtfully. “Knew it in particular. You could write an app for that—”
“One that would appeal to your guy in specific.” Peter’s hands dropped to his lap, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically. “With a—pardon the expression—backdoor.”
“Trojan horse. Don’t jilt a programmer for a sex machine.”
“There’s an app for that,” he said, and she snorted. “Two cases last year, worldwide. Not common, but—”
Roz looked down at her hands. “Some of these guys,” she said. “They program the dolls to scream.”
Peter had sensuous lips. When something upset him, those lips thinned and writhed like salted worms. “I guess maybe it’s a good thing they have a robot to take that out on.”
“Unless the fantasy stops being enough.” Roz’s voice was flat, without judgment. Sunlight fell warm through the windshield. “What do you know about the larval stage of serial rapists, serial killers?”
“You mean, what if pretend pain stops doing it for them? What if the appearance of pain is no longer enough?”
She nodded, worrying a hangnail on her thumb. The nitrile gloves dried out your hands.
“They used to cut up paper porn magazines.” His broad shoulders rose and fell, his suit catching wrinkles against the car seat when they came back down. “They’ll get their fantasies somewhere.”
“I guess so.” She put her thumb in her mouth to stop the bleeding, a thick red bead that welled up where she’d torn the cuticle.
Her own saliva stung.
Sitting in the cheap office chair Roz had docked along the short edge of her desk, Dolly slowly lifted her chin. She blinked. She smiled.