Asimov's SF, July 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  What conditions are needed, after all?

  There are three basic requirements for the development of life on any planet: a building-block substance chemically able to join with other elements to form complex compounds, a solvent in which atoms and molecules can move about freely to take part in chemical reactions, and the chemical reactions themselves, resulting in the production of energy, so that the vital processes of life can occur. On Earth the building-block substance is carbon, the solvent is water, and the energy-producing chemical reactions are brought about by oxygen. Other combinations are possible, though: carbon and ammonia and nitrogen, for example.

  Temperature is also a factor: if a planet is too cold its water turns to ice, too hot and it turns to a gas. Therefore the planet must be at the proper distance from its sun, and the sun itself be neither too bright or too dim. If we discard from our reckoning the stars that are too small and the stars that are too big, we find that we have rejected seven stars out of eight as possible sites in our galaxy for life-bearing planets. But that still leaves a nifty twelve billion stars, just in this one galaxy. If half of them have solar systems, and half of those have planets that lie at the right distance to maintain water in its liquid state, and half of these are the right size to retain an atmosphere, a billion and a half planets remain. Rejecting half a billion of those because they are too big, because they don't rotate on their axes, because they have no water, or because they are otherwise unsuitable, we still have five hundred million Earth-type planets in our galaxy alone! And there are millions of galaxies.

  Leaving out of account the chances of the existence of really alien life-forms—based on silicon instead of carbon, or using ammonia rather than water as a solvent, say—the probability still seems overwhelming that the universe is teeming with life. Some worlds may be populated only by simple one-celled creatures, others may be swarming with fish and crustaceans, others may be worlds of insects, of amphibians, of reptiles, and some may hold intelligent civilized beings, possibly far beyond us in their achievements. All of that is probable. What isn't probable is that there's nobody else around at all.

  You may ask—especially if you are the sort of person who keeps the makers of flying-saucer movies busy—why they haven't been in touch with us, then. The simplest answer is that the universe is very big, traveling between stars would take so much time that it seems hardly worthwhile (or even feasible), and the chances that any of those distant interstellar civilizations would notice that we are here and worth visiting are very small. Until the development of faster-than-light space travel, itself a very low-probability concept, we ought not to expect any contact with the other intelligent races of the galaxy.

  But it still would be of some interest to know where they might live. The first step in finding out where our neighbors could be has now been taken. Perhaps by the time this column sees print, the Kepler telescope will have sent back the first snapshots of those other Earths far off in the heavens.

  Copyright © 2010 Robert Silverberg

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  Short Story: THE OTHER GRACES by Alice Sola Kim

  Alice Sola Kim lives in San Francisco. Her short fiction publications include stories in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2009 (Prime Books). Alice attended Clarion West and in 2005 she was the second-runner-up for the Dell Magazines Award for best science fiction or fantasy story by an undergraduate college student. Her first tale for us is a pitch-perfect portrayal of an insecure high-school senior's attempt to cope with the SATs, an unstable parent, mean girls, college applications, and especially . . .

  See: I don't even need to wake you up anymore. Maybe you're exhausted, your eyeballs feeling tender and painful and peeled of their membranes, but when the alarm goes off at 6:00 am, you jump out of bed and skitter across the chilly floor to the bathroom.

  Every morning is thrilling; every morning you make an effort because this might be the day. It is April and you are a high school senior. Very soon you will be getting the letter that tells you that you've gotten into an Ivy League college. Any Ivy! Who gives a shit which one?

  It wasn't easy to get in. You're all wrong for them. Your parents didn't put on identical polo shirts and take you on winding car tours through the Northeast to check out Princeton and Yale. No, you're part of the special category, species, family, genus, thing known as yellow trash. Yellow trash aren't supposed to go Ivy League—you've fooled them all, you cheater, you fake! Get ready for your new life.

  It's all so thrilling. Too bad you thought you couldn't write about that in your college application essays. All of the things that make you what you had decided should be called yellow trash—the shouting matches in motel courtyards, the dirty hair, the histories of mental illness, the language barriers, the shoes, the silver fillings.

  Grace, didn't you know? They eat that shit up. But you wanted a real do-over. You didn't want to be admitted only because they knew what you were. You like to think there's some honor in that.

  Even though you may or may not have cheated on the SAT.

  * * * *

  Breakfast is last night's dinner of chilly white rice and kimchi, which keeps your stomach full and your breath nasty, good things for a city girl on the go without a car. You like to think that this blast of prickly, fermented stink-breath might someday protect you from the next weirdo at the bus stop who sidles up to you to ask, “China or Japan?” So far, the most you've been able to do is flick up a middle finger in conjunction with a spat-out “America, asswipe!” And even that you've only been able to pull off once, but hey—good for you. If you were born unable to be pretty and quiet, then be loud and smelly. Own it.

  When you leave the house for the day, your mother is gone and your brother is still at work. When you return, your brother will already be perched on the couch, watching TV. You pause at the door and rest your head on the jamb. The house is so quiet, all yours for now, and you will miss it.

  Catch the bus, Grace! The bus!

  It takes two city buses to get to your high school. You had started there right before your parents got divorced. You could walk seven blocks to go to a nearby, similarly shitty high school, but faced with the choice of shitty-familiar and shitty-new, you chose shitty-familiar.

  Running across the street, you jam the hood of your sweatshirt over your damp head, creating tropical conditions under which your hair will steam and saran-wrap itself to your skull before giving up and drying itself. Why do people even use hair-dryers? They make you go deaf. You're just happy to have shampoo. It was not that long ago when your family could not afford shampoo and so used soap. People—as in, other ten-year-old girls—noticed. Perhaps being poor either turns one into an animal or a classy ascetic with eye-popping cheekbones; it made you into an animal, the fur on your head as oily and felted as a grizzly's.

  The bus comes; you lunge inside, stepping tall; the doors slide shut like folding arms. On the sweating brown seat, you pull out a book to read—a charming little volume titled Science Fiction Terror Tales—but instead you wedge it under your thigh and close your eyes.

  Last night you dreamed a familiar dream, so familiar that all you have to do is drift off in order to call it back. It's a Grace convention up in there, populated with girls and women who look exactly like you. GraceCon always meets in a different location—in hammocks that don't connect to anything you can see, a rainforest, the bottom of a swimming pool. Last night was the swimming pool. Graces were turning somersaults, sitting cross-legged on the bottom of the pool, knifing through the water. You just hung there, inhaling as if the heavy blue water was both fresh air and a nice cold drink.

  Always, in the dreams, the Graces look at you and they go, “[]. [] [] [].” You ask them, “[]?” Your accent is perfect. You sound like an ingénue on one of those K-dramas that your mother's addicted to. “[],” they answer. In the dreams, you understand every word.

  On the bus
, when you jerk awake, your face feels tired. It's the same way your face always felt after elementary school slumber parties—your eyebrows were unused to being hoisted so high, and your mouth-corners felt as though they had been pushed wide and pinned. Back then, your face didn't move much; when anyone in your family smiled, your pops got paranoid. He thought the joke was on him; now it is; it is.

  * * * *

  Origin story. You first figured out that you were yellow trash when you were thirteen and attended a summer music day camp two hours away, in a nice neighborhood with a good school district. We both know that you're not that good at the violin. But already you were thinking about college applications, and searching for cheap and easy ways to make yourself appealing to admissions officials.

  Anyway, you were getting off the bus in that nice neighborhood when the handle of the violin case slipped out of your hand. You stopped to wipe your sweaty hand on your T-shirt. Someone pushed up behind you and said, “Out of my way, chink."

  Who does that? Surely the dickhead utterer of such words must have been green-skinned, a thousand feet tall, dragging a spiked club behind it as it picked and ate its own boogers. But, no, it was just some pretty white girl, a little older than you, high-ponytailed and tall. She didn't even look at you as she walked past. It was all so very racist that you felt as though you were watching a movie of yourself. A movie about racism! Oh, but for you it was playing in Extreme Feel-O-Vision, in that you felt everything, all the hurt and shock, and that despite your best efforts to blend in, to embody a Whiter Shade of Asian, this thing just happened to you, it had happened before, and it would happen again.

  It was unfair how everyone could look at her and not see a—let's be blunt, Grace, a racist asshole—but just about anyone could look at you and see a chink.

  You walked to the middle school where the music camp met, and spent a few minutes in quiet shock as everyone around you chattered and warmed up. Ann Li, who played the cello, asked you what was wrong.

  "Someone called me a chink on the way over here,” you said.

  Ann opened her mouth, so you felt encouraged to spill. You said, “I didn't even do anything to her. I hate people."

  "Wow,” she said. She gave you a look of pity. “No one's ever called me a chink before."

  At this, you crumpled like a soda can. Never? Bitch, please! You thought: if you believe that then I have a very lovely, like, pagoda to sell you. Admit it, you wondered how it could be that you got chinked about once a month but Ann never had in her entire life. Wasn't there enough racism to go around?

  It was then you realized that there are many different kinds of Asian girls. one kind is yellow trash; that is what you are. No matter how you brush your hair and wear Neutrogena lip shimmer and speak perfect English with nary a trace of fobbiness and play a string instrument like, say, Ann Li, you are not like her and you will never be like her, because you are yellow trash and people can tell. Even if it takes them a while.

  Because at first they only see an Asian girl carrying a violin case, and if they think about you at all, it's to wonder at what a dweeby little princess you must be. But then they realize that the violin is borrowed from the scanty school music equipment room, deep scratches next to the f-holes as if Wolverine himself had given classical music a brief try before roaring in frustration, that you can only ever understand about half of what your parents are saying (if that), that your father is a nutcase, that your mother—who, let it be known, is amazing at her job—periodically has clients who want to speak to her manager because does her manager know that this woman totally cannot speak English?, that your brother likes to spit on the floor inside the house, that you are trashy and weird and something is deeply wrong with you and it will never be right unless you do something drastic, like go away to an Ivy League college and return transmuted, if at all.

  You like to think that the Ivy League is mystical, miraculous—that, in a biography, it erases everything that comes before it, or else imbues an ignoble childhood with a magical sense of purpose. And it goes without saying that it charms the life that comes after it.

  * * * *

  Grace, you moron.

  But I understand. Things were rough; you got single-minded.

  * * * *

  Your high school is named after a Native American chief and is said to be one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the state, which unfortunately gives ethnic diversity a terrible name because the high school is truly rubbish. They don't offer AP classes, which is a big part of what drove you to cheat on the SAT, because the SAT is then the only objective measure by which admissions officials will be able to determine if your waving and withered cold hand is the one they want to catch and yank out of the sea.

  (You've thought this through. You chew your nails, a lot, and spit out keratin explosively like so many bitten-off ends of cigars. You like to think you fret in style.)

  The school day is a long gray expanse. At lunch, you sit in the hallway with some friends. Tama is your best friend here. Tama's half-black half-white, her skin paler than yours. She's stupid-pretty. Not as in ridiculously pretty, but as in pretty in a way that initially makes people think she's not smart, with her jutting upper lip and her lashes so thick they pass for eyeliner. You and Tama have an unequal friendship of the type where she is your best friend and you are probably not hers.

  You break Fritos in your mouth and listen to Tama talk about her mother's new painting. It is something sexually explicit involving satyrs and plums. Tama's parents are both artists.

  You pull out Science Fiction Terror Tales, an act that might be rude if you were there, but you are not there. They, your friends, like you when you're there, but they don't miss you when you're not there. I don't read science fiction anymore, but I like to watch you do it. You get so lost, Grace. You're split in two: you're immersed in a story about a man who is confused about if he's really a man or a robot (truth: he's a bomb), but you're also dreamy for the better days to come.

  Right now, you're a weirdo in a hooded sweatshirt, a skinny girl shapeless but for a gigantic ass. Think of a boa constrictor that's just eaten a goat. Stand the boa constrictor on its pointy end. The goat, sliding deeper into its body in one thick lump, is your ass. The rest of you, in this example, is the boa constrictor, which was chosen because obviously boa constrictors do not have tits.

  But someday, far into the future, you will look fine. You will have money to spend on your clothes instead of going to the thrift store and pretending that the stuff there is cool but really everything's been picked over by tattooed twenty-somethings and all that's left are racks of sad tank tops with droopy armpits and flared stretch denim. Your hair will be washed with shampoo like the snot of unicorns and cruel hairstylists who are rude to everyone else but kind and complimentary to you will shear you into acceptability. Someday you'll learn on your own the things that no one bothered to teach you. You'll be a lovely young woman.

  Yes you will.

  * * * *

  Riding the bus home after school, you think about those letters that might be in the mailbox right now. Why not? You've got a perfect 4.0 (albeit the easiest 4.0 ever), crazy extracurriculars, a brilliant essay all about, like, realizing stuff at important moments, and an SAT score of 2400. A perfect score.

  Around this time last year, you received a strange invitation to join a group on a social networking website. The group was called The Other Graces, and when you saw its members, you looked around the library in a panic and scooted your chair closer to the computer. Because the other members of The Other Graces looked just like you, but older, all different ages and hairstyles and clothing.

  Well, you joined. The next day, you received a message from Grace Prime, as she called herself. Grace Prime got right to it:

  you have been chosen for a mentorship by the other graces

  the other graces are grace chos from alternate timelines of a high fidelity to yours

  we have decided to help you with your
dream of acing the sat

  in order to do so i will have to open a subspace corridor into your brain

  please respond with your answer within two business days

  all best

  grace prime

  * * * *

  You wrote back and asked her what a subspace corridor was and what it would do inside your brain. You told her that you needed more information before proceeding, duh. Grace Prime called you at home later that night. How she got your number you still don't know.

  "It's a way of traveling between universes,” said Grace Prime. “You won't feel anything. Well, you may experience a side effect of odd dreams, just here and there, but that's the nature of the beast. It's an invasion, dear. A kindly invasion. You don't need to be afraid."

  The cordless handset rested on your face. You tapped your feet on the wall. “You'll all be inside my brain? For how long?"

  Grace Prime's voice was old. Quavering-old, creaky screen door-old, gargling with Listerine for a thousand years-old. But strong and scary. “Once created, the subspace corridor remains open for a time before fading away. It has to close on its own. It'll take time, but eventually your mind will be all yours again."