Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  None of them were ever seen again.

  * * * *

  Chino Mendez

  People say at first what business has a poor fisherman to speak of Jesus? I have no education, no clever words. I have nothing but the high school and many years of chasing the tuna. But then I thought: what better thing for a preacher than to start as a fisherman? There is precedent, no?

  I will give my witness as I saw it, so you may believe with me.

  Understand that I was a sinner before. This is important. I drank and I gambled and I had women. Oh, yes. Perhaps you do not think so to look at me, but women find me attractive. I have cut men in fights. Perhaps I killed a man in Miami, but this I do not know for sure.

  I tell you this because you must understand what I was, so that you may understand what I am, and so understand what I say. If one as lost as me can be found, there is hope for all.

  I was christened Ipolito, but my friends have always called me Chino, because of my eyes. Oh, yes, there were many Chinese brought to Cooba years ago and their blood runs in me. I have been a fisherman all my life, even before I fled Cooba. I fished the Gulf, and then the Keys, and then I came here to these strange, cold waters. Capitan Norris give me a place on his Esmeralda and he teach me the waters of the Sound and there were many very hard years, but never did I complain. Well, perhaps a little.

  That morning we cast off and took our bearing on Duwamish Head. The dawn was behind us and the air shimmer like the rainbow. The horizon glowed red; the sky above me, blue; and all the colors ranged between. Oh, the salt tang of the sea! Oh, the cries of the gulls! They swoop in a great circle around the bay. Around and around. I look back now and I see how clear were all my senses that day.

  We hear the horn of the ferry as she left the pier and for a time our paths run side by side, the great ferry and the humble fishing boat, but the capitan saw a fog is risen in the bay, so he turn the wheel a little to avoid it. The ferry, yes, had the radar and the global positioning, and so she sailed into the fog, her horn booming. I hear the churn of her engines as she pass us, and I see the people who lined the railing. Some were reading of the newspapers. Some were watching the scenery. Some were talking to each other. There was one—a young girl near the quarter rail—who saw me watching. She was, I think, twelve. She smile and wave to me and I wave back and the capitan saw, and our boat's whistle shrieked and the little girl, she clapped in delight.

  But the capitan was fight the wheel. There was a strong current where there been no current before. I had the mad fancy that our boat sat ... somehow ... on the lip of a waterfall. We struggled like salmon against it as it pull us into the fog, toward the ferry.

  A collision with such a ship would destroy us, so Ngyuen and me—he is the other deckhand—we throw the bumpers over the side and stand by with the fending poles. When I look up again at the deck of the ferry, I see the little girl bathed in a golden-red light, such as one sees at dawn. The light came from out of the fog, you understand, and what sun has ever dawned in the west? It seem like all the ferry was aglow and I hear a great shout from on board. The foghorn was take on a sound like a train racing away. The little girl turn and face into the fog and her mouth drop open. Oh, it was a look of such delight! And she raise her hands to her face, and then the fog shrouded her, too, and everything—boat, foghorn, girl—vanished into silence.

  I did not understand then what I had seen, but I have thought over it much since. The strange fog. The strange current. The great light and the shout. Even the birds that wheeled over the spot. How could such a large vessel vanish so completely and so quickly? I found the answer in the smile of a little child.

  God had taken them all to Him, as a sign to the rest of us. That is why you will never find them or find the boat. That is why the girl smiled. All I was granted was the rainbow sign, but she had seen the pure light of heaven.

  I have heard others say I must be wrong because there was nothing especially holy about the people on that ferry that day. Only a thousand ordinary people.

  But don't you see?

  That is the Good News.

  * * * *

  Able Seaman Jimmy Lang

  The helicopter is already warming up when Jimmy and the crew scramble out to the pad. He doesn't know what the alert is all about, only that something happened to the Bremerton ferry. Liz Coburn doesn't know either. “But it's not good news,” she says. They check the rescue equipment on board.

  It's hard to talk over the steady whop-whop of the blades, which is just as well, because Jimmy doesn't have much to say. He can never find the words when he needs them. He'll rehearse them in his head, and run through them over and over until he is sure they are the right words; but by the time they're ready to come out, the moment for them has passed.

  Three frogs trot across the pad, already in their wet suits but carrying their flippers in their hands. Jimmy and Liz help them into the helicopter and Jimmy gives the high sign to the pilot.

  He slides the cabin door shut and the chopper tilts and rises. The frogs are checking the air tanks and Jimmy tells them he already done that, but they just look at him and continue checking. Jimmy turns to the window and watches the water race past below them. A container ship is working its way into the harbor and Jimmy cranes his neck to watch it. What he wants to do is ask Liz if she'd go to a movie with him tonight, but what he says is, “Look how big that thing is."

  “If that ferry's going down.... “Liz tells him. “Oh, God, Hyak can carry two thousand."

  One of the frogs tells them that ATN Puget Sound is putting out with the barge and they'll try to get people up on that. “That's a good idea,” Jimmy says, like they asked for his approval.

  The chopper cants suddenly and changes direction and everyone in the cargo bay dances to keep their balance. Liz falls against Jimmy and Jimmy puts his arm around her waist to steady her. They are friends, him and Liz. “My good bud,'” Liz calls him. He thinks she might mean more than that, but he has never gotten up the nerve to ask.

  The morning fog has mostly burned off by now. Only a large puff remains, floating in the waters like an iceberg. It is shot through with reflected colors—green from the waters, blue from the sky, brown from the earth, white from the clouds, tawny red from the dawn. Jimmy thinks the water looks funny, too. The waves are all a-jumble, some lapping toward the fog instead of toward the shore. “Looks purty,” he tells Liz.

  But Liz just shakes her head. “Where's the ferry? Ain't no sign of ‘er."

  Liz is, in Jimmy's estimation, the most perfect woman on Earth, after his maw. She's smart, but she doesn't laugh at him like other women and treats him nice, though not half so nice as he would like her to. He has not yet kissed her, although he imagines what that must be like.

  “Can a boat sink that fast?” Jimmy asks; but Liz just shakes her head, and it worries him that a smart gal like her doesn't know.

  The chopper swoops suddenly toward the fog and Jimmy hears the pilot say bad words.

  “Wind shear,” the co-pilot calls out, explaining the swerve. The frogs ask if there's a fix on the ferry, but the co-pilot shakes his head. “Something's wrong. VTS got three radar fixes, but they're three different positions, and too far away.” With the wind the way it is, he'll drop them as close as he can to the last visual position.

  Jimmy calls out “Aye” to show that he heard and he and Liz ready the hoist. They clip a sling to the end of the cable to lift people out of the water and onto the ATN's barge. They pile flotation devices by the sliding door. The frogs pull on their flippers and test their air.

  “Ready back here,” the chief tells the pilot.

  The chopper hovers and Jimmy heaves the door open. This is the part he likes best: standing in the open doorway above the waves, with the wind buffeting his face, with the tang of salt on his lips. The buzz of the rotors fills the cabin and the spray splashes onto the deck. A brisk breeze streams toward the fog, and Jimmy fancies the fog is somehow sucking air into it.

/>   Liz waves to the frogs and they step forward and drop the few feet into the bay, one-two-three. She looks out the door. “Ain't nobody in the water,” she says.

  “The frogs are there,” Jimmy points out what he thinks an obvious oversight on her part.

  “But who they gonna rescue?” Liz is angry, and Jimmy thinks it is at him for correcting her.

  The helicopter rises, banks, and, caught in another sudden wind shear, tilts to one side. The pilot cries out. Jimmy can hear the fear even over the noise of the rotors. Liz slips on a puddle and slides down the canted deck and out the open door. Jimmy, who has been holding on to the hoist cable, reaches toward her as she slides past, but their fingers only touch before she is gone, and the last thing Jimmy sees is her scowl of annoyance.

  He does not stop to think. “Man overboard!” he cries. The pilot brings the chopper around, and Jimmy readies the sling. Liz is a good swimmer, so he is not worried. He thinks they will laugh about it later, when the rescue is over.

  He sees her swimming hard against a strong current. The pilot is fighting the turbulent winds and cannot get close enough for the hoist, so Jimmy unclips the flotation ring and throws it to her so that she does not wear herself out swimming.

  He is a good thrower. He always wins when Group Seattle holds its Rescue Olympics. He puts the ring right beside her so that with two good strokes she grabs hold of it. She waves to him and Jimmy grins with pride as he waves back. He already thinks of the kind words she will say to him after she is pulled aboard. Maybe she will kiss him. Maybe ... He blushes at the anticipation of memories.

  Once she has grasped the ring, the strange riptide takes Liz into the rapidly diminishing fog. There is not much left of the mist now: a few corkscrew streamers. Seen through the haze, the water looks different, darker and redder. Jimmy searches for Liz through the mist but does not spot her.

  Even when at last the fog is entirely gone, there is no sign of her.

  The chopper circles and circles and when finally it must return to base, Jimmy is crying like a baby.

  Only one of the frogs comes back with them, and he does not say much of anything.

  * * * *

  Mitch Raftery

  So.

  If you're married to a bitch, a dockside bar can be a haven. When you order a bourbon and water, you call it “comfort food,” which earns a short grin from the bartender. He asks no questions. He doesn't care why you drink.

  “Get a job, get a job,” you tell your bourbon. “And what's it matter if it's all the way to hell and Bremerton to get it.” This is more than the bartender really wants to know, but he ventures that a good job is a good thing to have.

  “Never said it was a ‘good’ job,” you correct him. “Look at me. I got a degree, an MBA. So I should clerk at some two-bit operation?” You don't tell him about the truly skilled accounting work you've done, the kind that got you fired from your last job, or about your ever-loving's mountain of debt that drove you to it. He's got no Need To Know.

  Better than nothing, the bartender suggests. I'm a BS in chemistry.

  You hold up your now-empty glass. “Then how about some ‘better living through chemistry'?"

  Now you're talking his language. So, you drink a while and chat in a desultory manner. The bartender comments on the thick fog that has shrouded the harbor. You don't think fog at dawn on Elliott Bay is anything remarkable, but you remark anyway. Yes, that is the thickest and most unusual cloud of vapors ever known to mankind—excluding the cloud of vapors you gave your bitch-wife after the boss caught you with your hand in the till, although you don't share that particular tidbit, either. Sure, the firm didn't file charges, but only because the partners didn't want to invite an audit. So who's the bigger crook? “Everybody does it,” you mutter.

  Your wife would never have understood anyway. She would never have accepted the blame. Ask the boss for a raise. Tell the boss you need a raise. As if the boss cared what anyone needed. Was there a credit card anywhere on the face of the planet that was not maxed out? Was there an ATM anywhere in Seattle that did not hemorrhage cash as through a suppurating wound?

  “Never marry a rich girl,” you tell the bartender, and he tells you there's no danger of that, just as if you cared what sow he porked. Don't marry a pretty one, either, he adds, or other guys will always be sniffing around.

  Yeah, and a rich pretty girl is the worst of both worlds. Too used to spendthrift wealth; too used to flattering beaus. What matter if you have to work late because you need the OT because her skinflint parents didn't approve of Little Precious marrying “down” and won't shell out dime one to help? No reason why that should hamper the good times or the club-hopping. No reason why she can't always have the best.

  And her old man, he has to blah-blah-blah how he started with nothing, too, and how he envies you the same challenge. And what a sanctimonious, bullshit, self-righteous excuse for selfishness that is. Okay, maybe the old fart really had started poor, but then he hadn't married the National Debt, either. No, he had to beget that one, spoil it rotten, and pass it on to you.

  “I'd've paid it back,” you tell the empty glass in front of you. The way the markets were growing, the money should have multiplied like loaves and fishes long before the comptroller noticed the transaction. And it had. So you waited. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more, and the stock value went up and up and up until there was nothing left, and how could that much money evaporate like the morning fog?

  Except this morning's fog is not evaporating. A deep, extended blast pierces the dawn and you start on your barstool because you know it's the ferry casting loose and you are supposed to be on that ferry heading for a job interview in God-forsake-us Bremerton. Oh, Honey-bun will ream you fair if you screw this one up.

  You slap a president down on the bar top without even looking to see who it is and stagger out onto the sidewalk. Alaskan Way is nearly empty, as if everyone has stood aside to make room for your hopeless sprint to the pier.

  By the time you reach Pier 52, winded and disheveled, the ferry is gone. You curse and shake a fist. Why is it that you never have any luck?

  A score of people mill about dockside now, sharing their mutual ignorance of events. You hear something about the ferry vanishing and you turn and gawp at him. “You mean it sank?” He nods. Hundreds dead for sure; maybe more than a thousand. The crowd is buzzing now, approaching that critical mass where uninformed speculation implodes into a hard knot of impermeable belief. Stunned sorrow clashes with ghoulish wonder. The networks are coming! Oh, the networks are coming!

  You shade your eyes against the dazzle of the waves and you see nothing. No boats. No one in the water. A lone frogman being hoisted into the ‘copter. Words tumble from the lips around you: Tragedy. Catastrophe. Terrorists. Aliens. Sea Monster. But the one word that occurs to you, you do not voice, and that is Opportunity. And your rage evaporates with the last of the fog.

  Poor Mitch Raftery! He has drowned with all the others. Your wife will think so; her parents will; your employers past and prospective will. Why, you have become as one already dead. You can hear the drumming of the dirt on your coffin lid, the lying words of sorrow spoken over you by people who never gave a shit when you were alive. But your death is your salvation, for you can rise again—and not wait any three damn days to do it. You can be born again through the waters of this most peculiar baptism, cleansed of all past sins. You can start fresh, with a new name, a clean slate, hobbled no longer by a spendthrift wife, or skinflint in-laws, or hypocritical bosses. Without those shackles, how high might you soar?

  It is a shining vision, and you stand there dockside stunned by the beauty of it. “By God,” you mutter, “I'll have the life I deserve."

  So.

  You slip anonymously from the docks, plans already whirling through your mind. There are ways to acquire driver's licenses and ID cards. You know a few people. You can make a new start in a new city; you can live a new life.

  You
can become a new Mitch Raftery.

  * * * *

  Dolly Mannerheim

  If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, so at times does mere existence. Howard Mannerheim was a man so ordinary that he vanished into the wallpaper of the world long before he vanished from it.

  Dolly Mannerheim, his wife, was a tall woman who managed somehow to appear stocky. It was something in her posture. She was embarrassed to be seen in public with her husband, who was shorter by a head, and so in consequence they did not go out much. Howard never noticed, which was part of the problem.

  Her parents had named her “Medallion” for no better reason than a couple of tokes from an especially potent stash the night following the delivery. Dolly-the-child had thought her name Seriously Cool, but she was past forty now and it seemed now less cool than affected. “Dolly” was not much better—resonance of child, resonance of plaything—but she did not know what else she might call herself.

  She saw Howard off that morning as she usually did. He was a consulting engineer working at a construction site outside Bremerton. Dolly thought it was an office complex or perhaps a dam—something which at any rate required a lot of wire and concrete and steel. It was also, mirabile dictu, a local assignment—which meant that Howard could actually come home each day, a circumstance not without its complications.

  It was his habit to catch the six-thirty ferry, so Dolly would get up with sandpaper eyes and ensure a breakfast and a cab to take him down Queen Anne Hill to the ferry dock. “You take such good care of me,” he told her, sitting down to a bowl of soggy flakes drowned in milk. Perhaps he meant it—he was not a demanding man—but he always said the same thing, so perhaps he didn't mean much. Howard was a creature of habits and she had learned (or had convinced herself) over the years that there was behind that compendium of tics and routines no genuine person. Were it not for clichés, he would sit dumb.

  At the door, the cab already waiting, Dolly offered him her cheek and he gave it the usual perfunctory benediction before walking down the steps, where the cabbie, had he been listening, might have heard him mutter something about “dry sticks."