Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “Can’t you at least write it on the board?”

  “Sure,” McClendon said. He picked up his marker, turned to the white board and wrote:

  2 + 2 = 4

  Sly thought McClendon was a hoot. His attendance was not faithful, but he was good on the tests. As he listened to Mrs. McClendon’s request, he realized it probably wasn’t any treat to be married to him.

  “They told me he would be an Alpha Package cleaning,” Sly said. “That he’d wake up in the hospital and be told he had been in a car accident and suffered a concussion. That you wanted everything related to the family removed from the premises.”

  “Whoever told you that was wrong,” she said. “He knows some things are missing, and he wants them back.”

  Sly was going to have trouble recovering everything. He was supposed to destroy it all, so it could not ever turn up again, but he had been supplementing his income by selling the more valuable items. “What things?”

  “He wants his books. His Draper Prize trophy. The stuff from his workroom: his tools, his radios. His teaching notes.”

  “He’s still teaching?” Reuben had told Sly that the guy was having more erased than anyone in his experience.

  A bitter irony crept into her voice. “He can’t remember my name, but he’s back teaching at the university.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Sly had to get onto retrieving the radios right away. Those vacuum tubes, some of them eighty years old, were irreplaceable. The only source for them nowadays was when someone occasionally discovered a cache in some decaying Soviet warehouse.

  A week later he showed up at the McClendon house with the back of his Jeep packed with junk. He’d gotten the tools and some of the old radios and the framed photos. He parked in the drive of the old craftsman bungalow and sat smoking a cigarette. Mrs. McClendon had told him to wait; she didn’t live there anymore.

  As he waited outside, the front door of the house opened and McClendon came out onto the porch. He looked a lot like the way he did back when Sly was in school, maybe a little heavier, less hair. He squinted at Sly, then waved him over. Sly got out of the jeep.

  “Got my stuff?”

  “Yes sir.”

  McClendon stared at him a little longer than was comfortable. “You’re Sylvestre Wesley. ECE 530, Physical Electronics. You missed too many classes.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And see—see what you ended up doing? Bring my things in.”

  While he was ferrying boxes, Mrs. McClendon drove up in her Beamer. She saw that he was already almost done. Her husband, sitting in a wicker chair on the porch, was fiddling with an ancient 8-track tape player. He looked up, noticed her, and went back to the tape player.

  Mrs. McClendon hesitated, standing by her car. There was a hurt expression on her face.

  Sly didn’t want to see them together. He interrupted McClendon. “Where do you want this one?”

  McClendon put down the tape player. “Follow me.” He took Sly into the house, down the steps to his workroom, and had him heft the unwieldy box full of coils and transformers onto the bench. McClendon sat on a stool and began unloading the items, slowly, examining each as he took it out. Sly went back upstairs.

  Mrs. McClendon was in the living room looking over the only box of personal items that Sly had retrieved. “You needn’t have bothered with these,” she said. “He doesn’t remember us at all. I don’t know if what they did to him has changed him, or only wiped the fog off the glass so we can see clearly what’s inside him. What’s inside him is nothing.”

  Sly didn’t need this. “He’s had his memory wiped. You can’t blame him.”

  “I can’t?” Mrs. McClendon picked up a framed photograph from the box. It showed her husband and her and a little red-haired girl standing on a beach, squinting into the sun. Her husband had one arm around her, his other hand resting on the little girl’s head.

  “In that picture you look happy,” Sly said awkwardly.

  She put it on the mantle over the fireplace. “Let him try to figure out what it means.” And she walked out.

  After she left, he finished moving the things in. He hesitated, then went down to tell McClendon he was done. The professor was still hunched over the tubes and wires, old resistors and condensers looking like foil-wrapped candies, wirewound pots, rheostats, worn schematics telling how it all fit together so it might work again, on fragile paper turned brown around the edges. “I’m finished,” Sly said.

  “That’s good,” McClendon said softly.

  Sly couldn’t just leave. “You know I wasn’t the best student, but I liked your class. I liked all those stories you would tell.’

  McClendon turned and looked at him. “Stories? I don’t—I don’t know any stories.”

  Three months in Cambridge had not helped Jinny to deal with the aftermath of her father’s erasure. She had avoided calling home, had refused any attempts her mother made to contact her, erased her e-mails unread, refused the phone calls, wiped out any voicemails without listening to them. Then, in a casual conversation with her cousin Brittany, she heard that her father was back teaching at the university.

  “What? How can that be?”

  “Apparently he was able to keep all his intellectual abilities.”

  Jinny called her mother. “No, he doesn’t remember,” her mother told her. “He’s as awkward as a grad student with Asperger’s, can hardly carry on a conversation.”

  “But he can still do his work?”

  “He made a bet that he could keep the electrical engineering and still beat the Alzheimer’s,” her mother said. “Looks like he won.” She sounded remarkably philosophical about the whole thing, not the bitter woman she had been when they lived together. “But everything else is gone. He peeled his memory back to before you were born, to before he ever met me. He reminds me of what he was like when we first met. He acts like a young, poorly socialized man.”

  “I’m coming to see him.”

  The line was silent for a moment. “If you have to. But honey, I don’t know if it’s going to make you feel any better.”

  “I have to.”

  Jinny talked to her mother for an hour. Elizabeth tried to alert her about what to expect. Then Jinny booked a flight for that weekend; the plane touched down at four in the afternoon on Friday, and she rented a car and drove straight to the house.

  She hesitated on the porch, considered knocking, and rang the doorbell. She heard sounds from inside, and through the glass in the door saw him come toward her. He opened the door wide and spoke to her through the screen door. “What do you want?”

  Physically, he looked good. He had lost some weight. He was clean shaven, his hair brushed back from his high forehead. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and a pair of needle-nosed pliers in his left hand.

  “May I come in?”

  “You’re my daughter, are you?”

  “Yes.” Her voice caught in her throat. “You remember me?”

  He opened the door and let her in. “They told me I had a wife and daughter. The woman comes around sometimes. I’m working. If you want to talk you have to come down with me.”

  They went downstairs. He had a big RCA cabinet radio half taken apart on the floor. The thing must date back to the 1940s; it was an elaborate set, with AM and shortwave reception and a built-in record player with a 78-rpm turntable. The cabinetry was beautiful, inlaid chevrons of dark and light wood. The turntable was dismounted, exposing the wiring.

  She sat on a stool next to him, held a light so he could see as he worked his narrow hands into the interior of the cabinet. She could not think of much to say, over-whelmed by his physical presence, the smell of the solder in the hot, musty basement. His sinewy arms and intent, old man’s face. He made no attempt to put her at ease.

  She asked him questions about the radio set. When he realized that she could tell a capacitor from a resistor, he let her help him. She took off her sweater and got down on her knees to be closer.
<
br />   “Why do you like these old radios?” she asked him. “It’s hard to get parts. They can’t even pick up FM, let alone satellite. Nothing but political rants and holy rollers.”

  He did not look at her, concentrating on the work. “They’re simple,” he said. “I can understand every piece of them. I can take them completely apart and put them completely back together again. A modern circuit, you can’t see without a micro-scope. I know how that works, too, but I can’t put my hands on it. If it breaks, you can’t fix it—you just throw it away. This light isn’t getting in there. We have to turn this cabinet around. Help me.”

  He started to get up. His legs failed him, and he had to make a second attempt before he got to his feet. “I’m old,” he said. “I keep forgetting.”

  Together they wrestled the bulky radio around so that the bench light was more useful. Her father exhaled sharply and drew his forearm across his forehead. “Do you want a Coke?”

  “Sure.”

  He got two old-fashioned glass bottles from the basement refrigerator and popped the caps, handed one to her. Jinny took a drink. She watched him lean down into the cabinet again, squinting.

  “Would you like to hear a poem?” she asked.

  “A—a poem?” Her father lifted his head and looked at her, eyebrows arched.

  “It starts like this: ‘There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold—’ ”

  “Moil? What does that mean?” he asked. He looked so trusting, like a child of eight.

  Jinny moved in closer so she could see into the cabinet. “It means to work hard. Like we’re doing now.”

  Copyright © 2011 John Kessel

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  NOVELETTES

  “I WAS NEARLY YOUR MOTHER”

  Ian Creasey

  “I WAS NEARLY YOUR MOTHER”

  Ian Creasey

  Ian Creasey tells us that with the following story he has reached a milestone in two respects. “Firstly, it’s my tenth sale to Asimov’s; it’s very pleasing to reach double figures. Secondly, it’s my first appearance with a story that’s longer than ten thousand words. (You can tell I have a mathematics background from the fact that I notice these numerical quirks.) But although this is my longest story here to date, it’s actually much shorter than the tale I originally planned. Some time ago, I was working on a very ambitious novella, and getting utterly bogged down in its complications, so I decided to start again with a different approach. The following story is the result.” While his disconcerting new story is shorter, it doesn’t seem to have lost the complexity of the original novella.

  On Friday afternoon, coming home from school, Marian saw a woman leaning on the garden gate, smoking a cigarette and tapping her foot to the beat of the tiny earphones she wore. It was a fast song, by the look of it; or maybe she was just impatient. The woman looked familiar—far too reminiscent of Marian’s mother, triggering a painful wrench in the gut of the kind Marian thought she’d outgrown. Her mother had died four years ago, just after Marian’s eleventh birthday. For months afterward, Marian had been pummeled by echoes everywhere: she would see a purple-tinged hairstyle across the street, or hear the ring tone of her mother’s old cell phone, and for a heart-stopping moment she’d think Mom was alive, and then have to remember all over again that she was gone, gone, gone.

  Resentfully, Marian glared at the stranger. She assumed the woman was a tourist—Hebden Bridge was crawling with them—but she didn’t have the rucksack or Ordnance Survey map or smug “I exercise outdoors and eat healthily” expression that most of the summer visitors had. Instead she had a tan that looked like it came out of a bottle labeled Burnt Umber, and she wore a loose blouse that was five years too young for her. If not a hiker, she was probably one of the New Age crowd looking for a house to rent, with plans to give lessons in tarotmancy and join whichever of the pagan circles had concocted the most impressive-sounding heritage.

  Marian strode to the gate, expecting the woman to move out of the way. Instead the stranger tore off her earphones and said, “Oh, you’re early! I was going to have it all worked out what to say, and now—well, here you are. I’m so pleased to see you! You look great. I like what you’ve done with your hair. It’s not easy when you have curls, is it? I remember—” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m rambling! I’m so sorry. I took a little something to stop me being nervous, and now I can’t shut up.”

  She fell silent, and stared with an intense proprietorial gaze that made Marian wonder whether she’d washed behind her ears properly.

  “If you’re here to see my grandparents, they’ve gone away for the weekend,” Marian said firmly. She wanted to get rid of the unexpected visitor so that she could call her friends. It was practically the first time she’d had the run of the house for a couple of days. She’d promised not to hold a party, but all the way home she’d been counting how many people she could invite round, without crossing the line between “friends hanging out” and “having a really wild time with lots of hot-looking boys.” Yet it wasn’t about the numbers—it was about whether you had booze. Without alcohol, it wasn’t technically a party, no matter how many people you crammed in.

  “I’m here to see you. Don’t you recognize me?” The woman spoke in a hurt tone, as if her identity should have been obvious.

  Marian had somehow failed an exam that she hadn’t even known was happening. It made her feel stupid. She hated feeling stupid. “No, I don’t recognize you.” And because she was feeling resentful and stupid—the weekend had only just started and already it was spoiled—she added something that her grandmother often said at outbreaks of self-importance. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, remember.”

  “Now there’s a nice way to talk to your mother!” said the stranger, indignantly.

  “My mother’s dead,” Marian said, hating the woman for making her say it, for stirring up the coagulation of memories and grief that had clotted deep inside her.

  “Yes, I know. But I was nearly your mother.”

  Marian dropped her schoolbag and stared at the stranger. “What are you talking about?”

  “You must have heard about parallel universes, alternate selves and all that.”

  “Sure,” said Marian. “Celebrity gossip!” The magazines were full of it—stars whose alternates were having different careers and different lovers, with different scandals and rehab stints. Marian and her friends pored over the gossip rags every week, and sent each other links to the latest sleazy stories on the web. Why, only the other day Lester Todd and his girlfriend supposedly had a foursome with their alternate selves, with the two Lesters competing to . . . well, it made her blush to read about it.

  The woman laughed. “Everyone has alternates, you know. Not just celebrities. They were the first people who could afford to hop, but everything gets cheaper if you wait. I waited—and now here I am.”

  “So you’re my mother’s parallel self? No wonder you looked familiar!” Marian’s voice cracked as she spoke. She didn’t know how to feel about this, or how to deal with it. This wasn’t Mom, and yet it was. Marian wanted to hug her, and at the same time she found it too creepy. She’d known intellectually that everyone had alternate selves, but it was a big leap from reading about celebrities on websites to having your own dead mother turn up at the garden gate.

  “I diverged from her a long time ago—before you were born. I never had a child of my own.” A depth of sadness suddenly opened up, a chill in the summer air.

  Marian knew that a lot must lie behind those words. It was too much all at once. She wasn’t ready for it. “I’m sorry,” she said, for once blessing the reflex politeness that her grandparents tried to drill into her. Why had she never appreciated how useful those empty formulas could be? They gave you something to say, when you had nothing to say.

  “So . . .” said the woman. She gestured indecisively. “I didn’t want to barge in on anothe
r version of me. But accidents happen. I knew there must be a world where I had died.”

  A neighbor walked down the street, his greyhound snuffling among the dandelions. Marian didn’t want anyone to overhear this conversation. She barely wanted to hear it herself. She swallowed hard. “Do you want to come in for a cuppa?”

  “Sure!” The visitor’s stiff posture relaxed a little. “Thanks, I’d like that.”

  The woman—Marian couldn’t think of her as Mom, not yet, maybe not ever—followed Marian up the short path to the front door, between tubs of lavender that scented the air as they brushed past.

  “Nice garden,” her pseudo-mother said. “Is any of this your stuff?”

  “No!” said Marian, laughing. “That’s the old folks. They love it—they have an allotment as well, outside town. Some of it’s for the shop. Mystic herbs, all that crap. I swear, any old weed takes root in here, they’ll put it on sale as Sylvan Essence of the Arcane Realm. The sillier the label, the higher the price.”

  On Saturday afternoons, Marian sometimes helped fill orders and stack shelves in the shop, “The Cauldron by the Bridge.” She despised the gullible fools who bought sacred herbs and plastic crystals and reproduction Tarot decks printed in China on recycled paper. None of it worked. It was all bogus solutions for bogus problems. In the clientele’s earnest queries, she’d heard everything under the moon—disturbed auras, unbalanced destinies, reincarnation diagnostics for cats and pigs.

  But if your dad was in prison and your mom was dead, then no stupid little fake potion would bring them back.

  Marian put the kettle on. Grateful for an easy subject to start the conversation, she made fun of the customers with their oh-so-fascinating angelic encounters and spiritual conundrums. However, Marian refrained from mentioning something she might have told her real mother: that she occasionally switched the labels on similar-looking charms and crystals, just to see if anyone would ever complain of unexpected effects. Instead she concluded, “The herbs sell pretty well. And when people buy alternative medicine, we don’t let them pay with alternative money!”