Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  What’s amazing isn’t the existence of super-resistant, pathogenic strains of bacteria. What’s amazing is that we don’t have more of them.

  The Hindus consider the Yamuna River sacred and personify it as a goddess in their mythology. It was also, at one time, the most polluted river in the world. No matter what else I have said about the Water Commission, I could thank them at least for saving Yamuna. I needed her now.

  I followed the fence on the western side of the river to the nearest patrol house and drove by slowly; it was dark and silent, unused at this time of year. As far as I could tell, the dhaba owner had not misled me.

  The fence was still topped with razor wire and I had no bolt cutters to use on chainlink, but I probably wouldn’t get shot. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking for a way in, and finally found a spot where I hoped I could slip under. I yanked up on the chainlink to stretch it away from the ground, then kicked at the dirt until I made a lens of space just big enough for a person.

  With Priya’s jar wrapped carefully in a small satchel, I lay down on my stomach and shimmied under the fence. I didn’t bother dusting myself off when I stood up on the other side, I just shouldered the satchel and plowed forward into the straggly green vegetation of the river valley. Thorny shrubs clawed at my clothes and my exposed face. I couldn’t sense the water yet, but I pushed on blindly.

  I popped out of the brush like a cork from a bottle and landed on bone-dry earth. An old ox-bow, maybe. I turned left and walked, following a bend, the crusted riverbed crunching under the soles of my shoes. A net of fine cracks wove across the ground, mourning the loss of water.

  The sun began to set and the evening light cast a muted orange glow over everything. I walked until the winding bed straightened out and I could see a kilometer or so upstream. This wasn’t an ox-bow. I stood in the middle of the Yamuna.

  The Water Commission didn’t guard the river in summer because there was no river, and there wouldn’t be for weeks, until the monsoon came.

  As the sky dimmed to twilight, I knelt down in the cracked mud of the riverbed and finally let myself cry.

  The wind off the ocean smelled salty and fishy, and waves rustled against the rocky shore like a liquid lullaby. The raw scrapes on my foot still stung, so I held the rescued sandal in my lap. Priya sat next to me, the legs of her salwar hiked above her knees but soaked nonetheless. Despite the heavy yellow sunlight, the wind pricked goose bumps on her wet skin.

  “You’re cold,” I said guiltily.

  “It’s only water, it’ll dry.”

  I fingered the damp sandal. “I’m sorry you’re gonna get in trouble.”

  Priya put an arm around my shoulders. “We all come from the water. Did you know that? Every living thing. Water fills the cells in our bodies and flows in our veins. Life and water are one and the same, inseparable. You don’t need your eyes and your ears and your nose to feel the ocean.” She tapped my breastbone, a little to the left. “It’s always here, Riti, in your heart.”

  “So you don’t mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind getting wet.” She smiled. “You’ll understand someday.”

  I followed the eastern margin of the Thar Desert, skirting around the barren heart of Rajasthan. A chain of low, rough mountains broke the horizon on my left. When my money ran low, I began selling almonds and figs in the towns I passed through, but I never stayed long.

  By the time I’d crossed the state border into Gujarat, I stopped asking after the rivers. The Sabarmati dries up in the summer like the Yamuna. It didn’t matter. The ocean swelled as I drove, a tangible weight in the distance long before I could see or smell or hear it. Small objects fall toward larger ones, gravity proportional to mass. So it was with me and the ocean.

  I stopped in a bustling town south of the monstrous ultra-modern metropolis that was Ahmedabad and found an open-air market where I could sell the last of my produce. The vendor gave me a decent price with a minimum of haggling, and his casual generosity gave me a grain of hope for humankind.

  As we completed the exchange, I noticed another booth across the marketplace where a tight cluster of people deliberated in animated Gujarati. “What is that?” I asked in rusty English. Nobody spoke Punjabi this far south.

  The vendor grinned as if I wasn’t the first person to ask about the booth. “He’s our seed merchant. Desert-adapted crops—natural, gen-mod, custom, you name it. Since the agave blight in Mexico, Gujarat is tequila central. Jojoba does well, too.” Then he shrugged, a slight retraction of his previous enthusiasm. “But with all the rain you get up north, who needs agave? Not like here.”

  I pressed my lips into a smile. “Right.” No matter where I went, people assumed that somewhere else was better.

  I made my goodbyes and hopped on my motorcycle, already feeling the ocean’s pull despite the brevity of the stop. It was temptingly close, but I wanted to take my time and find the right shore—our shore.

  Amazingly, I half-remembered the way there. Things had changed, of course, in the intervening years; maybe it wasn’t so much visual memory as instinctual, perhaps the salt in my blood knew the route. Either way, I found myself parking the motorcycle and lifting Priya’s jar in my hands, dreamlike, slow and attentive.

  The tide was high but falling. Ocean spray flecked the limestone, punctuated here and there with shattered white seashells left by the shorebirds. I slid my feet forward to the edge of a sharp drop-off, waves hushing and murmuring below, the weatherworn heads of rocks peering up from between them. Somewhere down there, under the water, lay a tide pool that had once known a sandal and a girl named Priya.

  I opened the jar and sent the ashes down to the frothing waves, to the salt and the water, the heart’s blood of the Earth. Back to the source. I had set my sister free.

  I crouched there for a while afterward, thinking. I could never replace Priya and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. She wasn’t a palimpsest that could be scrubbed and rewritten. It might be easy to take up her cause, her devotion to water, as my own, but mimicking her wouldn’t honor her. She would never have wanted me to spend my life chasing her ghost.

  I loved the ocean but I also loved the land. I understood its yearning, its passions. I understood the Earth’s struggle because it was the same as my struggle—for water, for growth, for life. And Father was right: Punjab wasn’t the land of five rivers anymore. If my people didn’t adapt to the shifting landscape, we’d soon share in the fishing towns’ destitution. As the ocean was Priya’s calling, so the desert would be mine.

  Not knowing if I would ever return, I bid the water a long farewell. A fitful breeze tugged strands of hair from my braid and whipped them around my face. Down the shore, a cluster of inky black cormorants rode the waves. I leaned down and washed my hands in the surf one last time before turning back, back to the sand and the nimm trees and the desperate earth. I hoped the crop merchant still had seeds for sale. Jojoba and agave could fill my empty jars.

  There’s work to be done. My family’s land is too wet for growing agave, but we can set up a rain catch when the monsoon comes and store the extra water for the almonds and the figs. We can even truck in new soil to spread over the old mango grove, building up for improved drainage. In another decade or two, the Thar will devour us, and the agaves will thrive.

  I’ll be ready for the desert when it comes.

  Copyright © 2010 Gwendolyn Clare

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  KILLER ADVICE

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s mystery novel, Hitler’s Angel, rereleased in mid-2010 in England (and available very soon in the U.S.) recently hit #1 on Amazon UK’s biographical fiction list. Kris isn’t abandoning SF, though. Her next novel set in the Diving universe, City of Ruins, will appear later this...

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  KILLER ADVICE

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

&n
bsp; Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s mystery novel, Hitler’s Angel, rereleased in mid-2010 in England (and available very soon in the U.S.) recently hit #1 on Amazon UK’s biographical fiction list. Kris isn’t abandoning SF, though. Her next novel set in the Diving universe, City of Ruins, will appear later this year. Her internationally bestselling fantasy series, The Fey, was released from Audible.com not long ago, and she has a new Kristine Grayson humorous paranormal romance, Wickedly Charming, forthcoming from Zebra. While Kris isn’t avoiding any genre, she does manage to combine a couple of them in her exciting new tale of murder, mayhem, and . . .

  Sixteen minutes. Sixteen minutes was simply not enough time to prepare for an onslaught. One would think with the recent breakthroughs in interstellar communication that a simple heads-up would be in order. Yet no one thought to contact Hunsaker.

  Of course, the communications problem wasn’t with the Presidio, who barely got off a single we need help; we’re docking soon communiqué before their entire communications array went down. No, the problem was with Repair and Maintenance. Some idiot there forgot to inform Hunsaker that his resort would soon be full.

  Not that the Vaadum Resort and Casino was much of a resort. It was more of a Hail Mary pass. If you were passing through the Commons System (which was what most people did in the Commons System—pass through) and for some reason you needed to exit your luxurious spaceship for some downtime and you couldn’t wait the extra day to go to Commons Starship Resorts—which were real resorts, by the way, on full-size space stations—then you ended up at Vaadum Resort and Casino.

  Hunsaker liked to think of Vaadum as a bit of a surprise. Vaadum was on the Vaadum Outpost, which predated the Commons Space Station by nearly two hundred years and looked it. Small, cramped quarters, a docking ring that couldn’t accommodate most modern ships, a repair shop that was catch as catch can, a resupply warehouse that sometimes needed resupplying itself, and of course, the resort.

  Which, when Hunsaker bought it, was a seedy little rundown motel, operated by the repair crew, who learned (accidentally or so the histories said) that ships in distress often couldn’t house their passengers. Better to place those passengers in a paying room than have them bunk on top of tables in the cafeteria.

  Hunsaker was manning the front desk because sixteen minutes didn’t make up for the six months during which he had neglected to upgrade the automatic check-in system. He hadn’t cleaned the rooms in six months either—or at least, not all of them, nor had he checked the environmental systems.

  He sent his entire staff—all two of them—off to dust, change linens, and ensure that each room had both oxygen and some sort of livable temperature while he scoured the entry, trying to make it look presentable.

  The Repair and Maintenance crew told him that the Presidio had twelve passengers and four crew members, so he would need a minimum of eight rooms, but it would be better to have sixteen.

  It would be better to have all thirty rooms cleaned and livable, but really, where was the percentage in that? He had three functioning rooms at all times, and two of those were rarely full. The regulars that came through—and there were regulars, although not always the best of regulars—came for the casino, which had the only living breathing human dealer in the Commons System.

  She was 50 percent fake. He didn’t test the 50 percent theory or which part about her parts was rumor—although he did know that her breasts literally sparkled because she often dealt topless (hence the repeat audience).

  She was a bit too vulgar for him. Vaadum Resort and Casinos was a bit vulgar for him, and quite low scale, and if someone asked him, he would have admitted that the entire enterprise had irritated him when he arrived, but it didn’t bother him so much now.

  His standards had lowered, not because of the place, but because he didn’t really deserve better. He was just coming to terms with that.

  The entry was the largest room in the resort, not counting the restaurant or the casino. The entry had bench seats, no-die, regrow plants that he’d bought early in his tenure here and regretted ever since, and a large faux marble floor that, when he bothered to faux polish it, shined like a million bright stars.

  He managed to clean the dust off the benches, prune the regrow plants so that their branches no longer took up most of the stairwell, and set up a makeshift computer system to handle the new guests, all in fifteen of his sixteen minutes. But he hadn’t tried to clean the floor, and he was grateful for that as the passengers of the Presidio pushed and shoved their way through the double doors.

  All human (thank God for small blessings) and all sizes, the twelve passengers from the Presidio smelled—not so faintly—of burnt plastic. A few had smoke lines across their faces, and another few wore tattered clothing. They also stank of sweat and fear and had that wild-eyed look of people Who Had Been Through It All and Weren’t Yet Sure They Had Lived To Tell About It.

  He had seen so many people like that over the years, and they were always distraught, always needy, and always demanding. He loathed demanding customers, even though his high-end education had prepared him for them. Once upon a time, he was the best at dealing with the most difficult of guests, back when he actually worked in a real resort that catered to the very wealthy, who, at least, were predictable in their very disagreeability.

  He peered at the sea of humanity before him—well, all twelve of them anyway, which felt like a veritable sea to him, considering he probably hadn’t seen twelve people all in one place since the last ship disaster nearly a year before. These people, with their untended hair and their air of complete panic, stared back at him as if he were their only savior.

  He smiled unctuously—and he hadn’t managed that expression in nearly a decade—and nodded his head to the first person in line.

  She was a stout elderly woman, wearing a black business suit (now decorated with several rips to the right side) and matching sensible shoes. She even had a little hat perched on top of her graying curls. That hat looked like it was an afterthought—one of those things she had grabbed automatically as she fled the ship just to make herself presentable.

  “Agatha Kantswinkle,” she said with one of those operatic voices (complete with vibrato) that certain older persons cultivated. “I should like a single room.”

  She did not say please, nor did he expect her to. In fact, she raised her chin after she spoke to him.

  She, at least, was a type he could handle. “We only have a few rooms, madam,” he said in his best toady voice. “You’d be more comfortable if you shared a double.”

  “I would not,” she said. “I shall not ever room with any of these despicable people.”

  She leaned forward and whispered—as best an operatic voice could whisper, which was to say not at all. “There are murderers among them.”

  A middle-aged man in the center, face covered with soot, rolled his eyes. A younger woman toward the back raised her gaze heavenward—if there were a heaven in space, which there was not. Still, Hunsaker didn’t miss the gesture. Or the grimaces of dislike on the faces of the other passengers.

  “Surely, it wasn’t as bad as all that, madam,” he said as he opened the file on the old-fashioned built-in screen on his desk. The comment was somewhat reflexive. He hated histrionics. But it was also geared toward the other passengers upon whom, he was becoming certain, he would have to rely to keep Agatha Kantswinkle under some kind of control.

  “Not as bad as all that?” she repeated, slapping a palm on the desk, making his computer screen hiccup and nearly blip out. “Are you mad, man? When we left the Dyo System, we had fifteen passengers. Do you think they stepped off the ship mid-flight? I think not.”

  Hunsaker raised his eyebrows and looked over her shoulder at the rest of the group. The man with the soot-covered face shook his head slightly. The young woman had closed her eyes. A few others were looking away as if Agatha Kantswinkle’s behavior embarrassed them.

  He decided to ignore the woman, which meant getting her away f
rom his desk as quickly as possible. “We have a single room, madam,” he said, “but it’s tiny. The entertainment system needs upgrading and the bed—”

  “I’ll take it,” she said, handing him a card with her information coded into it, a method as old-fashioned as she was.

  He charged her twice the room’s usual rate and felt not a qualm about it. First (he reasoned to himself), the Presidio’s parent company would probably pay for the extra stop. Secondly, the woman had already shown herself to be an annoyance, and he’d been a hotelier long enough (even at a disreputable place like this one) to know that customers often showed their true colors from the moment they walked in the door.

  He was simply adding a surcharge for the difficulties ahead.

  He finished adding her information to his file, resisted the urge to wipe his hands on the constantly sanitized towel he kept beneath the desk, and gave her his best fake smile.

  “Your room, madam,” he said with a nod, “is up those stairs to the left. It is the only room off the first landing.” Because it used to be a maid’s room, back when the resort had actual dreams of grandeur, in the days just after its first construction, long before he was born.

  She did not thank him and mercifully did not ask him how she would unlock the door. He handed her the door’s code, but it was a mere formality. The lock had broken long ago.

  As she made her way toward the stairs, he processed four other passengers—real, sane, sensible people. They had all of their information coded into their fingertips like proper human beings, and they were solvent, which was good, since he debited their accounts immediately, although he didn’t overcharge them (too badly) as he had Agatha Kantswinkle. People who were in a hurry to get to their rooms, relax, and try to forget whatever it was that brought them to this godforsaken place.