Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10
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23—SpecFic Colloquium, c/o Merril Collection, 239 College, Toronto ON M5T 1R5. friendsofmerril.org. Public Library.
28-31—World Fantasy Con, 3824 Patricia Dr., Upper Arlington OH 43220. worldfantasy2010.com. Hyatt, Columbus OH.
29-31—HalCon. hal-con.com. Lord Nelson Hotel, Halifax NS. Walter Koenig, D. Crosby, J. Bulloch, A. Douglas, M. Golden.
29-31—GayLaxiCon, 1206-44 Dunfield Ave., Toronto ON M4J 2H2. gaylaxicon2010.org. Montreal QC. For GLBT & friends.
29-31—HalloWhedon, Box 5773, Milton Keynes MK14 5BH, UK. massiveevents.co.uk. Heathrow UK. A. Tudyk, A. Head.
NOVEMBER 2010
5-7—Anime NebrasKon, Box 85173, Lincoln NE 68501. animenebraskon.com. Holiday Inn on S. 72nd, Omaha NE. E. Vale.
5-7—BasCon, Box 282197, San Francisco CA 94128. bascon.org. Embassy Suites. S. San Francisco CA. Adult fan fiction.
5-7—SoniCon, 2515 E. Rosemeade Pkwy. #115, Carrollton TC 75007. dfwhedgehogshow.com. Plano TX. Anime and gaming.
5-7—Warp 10, Box 5773, Milton Keynes MK14 5BH, UK. massiveevents.co.uk. Park Inn, Northampton UK. Star Trek.
12-14—WindyCon, Box 184, Palatine IL 60078. windycon.org. Westin, Lombard (Chicago) IL. Barnes. “The Land of Fae.”
12-14—FaerieCon. faeriecon.org. Marriott, Hunt Valley MD. J. Yolen, M. Hague, the Frouds. “Celebrating the Magical Life.”
12-14—Anime USA, Box 1073, Crofton MD 21114. animeusa.org. Arlington VA (near DC). Many guests. “Of, by, for otaku.”
12-14—KollisionCon. kollisioncon.com. Hyatt, Schaumburg (Chicago) IL. Staples, Axelrod, Mercer. Anime and cosplay.
12-14—NovaCon, 379 Myrtle Rd., Sheffield S2 3HQ, UK. novacon.org. Park Inn, Nottingham UK. Banks. Long-time con.
12-14—Dimensions, 643 Longbridge Rd., Dagenham RM8 2DD, UK. tenthplanet.co.uk. Newcastle-on-Tyne UK. Dr. Who.
12-14—Chevron, Box 5773, Milton Keynes MK14 5BH, UK. massiveevents.co.uk. Park Inn, Northampton UK. Stargate.
19-21—PhilCon, Box 8303, Philadelphia PA 19101. philcon.org. Crowne Plaza, Cherry Hill NJ (near Philadelphia). Beagle.
19-21—SFConTario, 151 Gamma, Toronto ON M8W 4G3. sfcontario.ca. Ramada Plaza. Swanwick, P. & T. Nielsen-Hayden.
20-21—Anime Festival, 2577 N. College Ave., Fayetteville AR 72703. aaf.calm-media.com. Clarion, Bentonville AR.
AUGUST 2011
17-21—RenoVation, Box 13278, Portland OR 97213. renovationsforg. Reno NV. Asher, Brown, Powers. WorldCon. $160.
AUGUST 2012
30-Sep. 3—Chicago WorldCon, Box 13, Skokie IL 60076. chicago2012.org. Chicago IL. Unopposed bid for WorldCon.
Previous Article Novelettes
Novelettes
PLUS OR MINUS
James Patrick Kelly
Jim Kelly checked in from Dingle, Ireland, where he was teaching at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, to say, “The Asteroid Belt is one of the stops most science fiction writers make on their literary tour of the solar system. Here is my version of a future in which everyday folks...
WARFRIENDS
Tom Purdom
“Warfriends” is the long-awaited sequel to The Tree Lord of Imeten, an Ace Double Tom wrote over forty years ago. He liked the planet and its people, and he always thought “a more energetic writer might have turned it into a series.” We are fortunate that recently he found...
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Novelettes
PLUS OR MINUS
James Patrick Kelly
Jim Kelly checked in from Dingle, Ireland, where he was teaching at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, to say, “The Asteroid Belt is one of the stops most science fiction writers make on their literary tour of the solar system. Here is my version of a future in which everyday folks working in space face the ultimate challenge.”
Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova. Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner. She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it. He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.
Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.
For example, there was crud duty. With a twisting push Mariska sailed into the command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall. The racks of instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; Command was one of the loudest mods on the ship. She stuck her landing in front of navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship’s .0006 gravity. Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall. This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it. He kept the humidity jacked up in Command, said that dry air gave him nosebleeds. Richard FiveFord claimed they came from all the drugs Beep sniffed, but Mariska didn’t want to believe that. Also, Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead of sucking it out of a bag, even though he slopped all the time. Fungi loved the sugary spatters. She sniffed one particularly vile-looking smear of mold. It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the Moon. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge. As she scrubbed, the bitter vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod. Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.
She felt the tingle of Richard FiveFord offering a mindfeed and opened her head. =What?=
His feed made a pleasant fizz behind her eyes, distracting her. =You done any time soon?= Distraction was Richard’s specialty.
=No.=
=Didit is making a dream for us.=
She slapped her sponge at the wall in frustration. =This sucks.= Mariska couldn’t remember the last time Didit or Richard FiveFord had pulled crud duty.
=Should we wait for you?=
=If you want.= But she knew they wouldn’t. =Might be another hour.=
“You’re working, Volochkova.” Beep’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. One of his quirks was snooping their private feeds and then yelling at them over the ship’s com.
“Yes, sir,” she said. Beep liked to be called sir. It made him feel like the captain of the Shining Legend instead of senior monkey of its maintenance crew.
“She’s working, FiveFord. Leave our sweet young thing alone.”
She felt Richard’s feed pop like a bubble. He was more afraid of Beep than she was even though the old crank hardly ever bullied Richard. Mariska hated being called sweet young thing. She wasn’t sweet and she wasn’t all that young. She was already fifteen in conscious years, eighteen if you counted the time she had hibernated.
When Mariska finished wiping the wall down, she paused at the navigation rack. She let her gaze blur until all she saw was a meaningless shimmer of green and blue light. Not that she understood the rack much better once she focused again. She had been job-shadowing Beep for 410 million kilometers and eleven months now. They had traveled all the way to SinoStar’s Rising Dragon station and were passing Mars orbit on the way back to the Moon, and she had mastered less than two-thirds of the nav rack’s screens. If she had used a feed to learn the read-outs, she would have been nav qualified by now, but Beep wouldn’t allow feed learning. He insisted that she shadow him. Another quirk. He was such a fossil.
She said, “Close astrometry, she ordered.” The shipbrain cleared the readouts of the astrometry cluster from the screen. “Time?” A new cluster appeared. It was 14:03:34 on 5 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and ninth standard day. Enough water ice aboard for two hundred and eleven days of o
xygen renewal. Mid-course switchover from acceleration to deceleration would take place in three days, two hours, and fifty-nine minutes. The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for one hundred and seventy-three days. More than they needed. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in just one hundred and fifteen days, three hours, forty-seven minutes.
Mariska bit her lip. Even if by some miracle she could get home the day after tomorrow, it wouldn’t be soon enough for her. She glanced up at the tangle of cables that Beep had strung from nav’s access port to its backup rack. They swayed weightlessly in the currents of the air recycling system. Were those blue-black splotches on that cable sheath? They were. With a groan, Mariska peeled her slippers from the deck and launched herself toward the ceiling, sponge at the ready.
It took almost two hours to finish—although crud duty was never-ending. In another week it would be back; crud had been climbing the walls of spaceships for two hundred years now. The stuff offended Mariska’s lunar sensibilities. There had been none of it on the Moon, or if there had been, she had never seen any. But Haworth, the crater city where she had grown up, was a huge environment. Compared to it, the Shining Legend was a drop in the Muoi swimming pool.
By the time she flew back to Wardroom C, Glint, Didit, and Richard were already lost in the dream. Each had tethered themselves to the wall and drifted aimlessly, occasionally nudging into one another. They weren’t asleep exactly. It was just that linking feeds to create a communal dream took concentration. Reality just got in the way. But Richard noticed when Mariska came through the hatchway and roused himself.
“Mariska.” His voice drowsed. “Hey monkeys, it’s Mariska.”
Glint blinked as if she were a mirage. “Mariska.” To Glint she probably was. “’S not too late.”
She knew it was, but she opened her head a crack to take in their common feed. Didit had created a circus framework; she was good at dream narratives. She had raised a striped tent and a rusting iron pyramid from a grassy field. A parade of outsized animals trudged down a dirt road: cows and polar bears and elephants and a whale with squat legs. Glint’s contribution was sensory. She was an amateur artist and had painted the feed with moist summer heat, the smell of popcorn and barns and sweat, the tootling of a pipe organ, and the delicate taste of dust from the road. But what Mariska liked most was her sky. It was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space and had a kind of delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Richard supplied the details. He was the only one of them who had actually lived on Earth and had seen an elephant or had walked on living grass.
If Mariska had spotted any of her bunkmates in the dream, she might have tried to catch up to them, even though they had created the feed without her and were already deep into its mysteries. She gave up looking when she heard laughter and applause coming from the tent. She was alone again. So what was new? She closed her head and left them to their fun.
Mariska was the youngest of the five-person crew assigned to the Shining Legend. There were three other maintenance monkeys job-shadowing Beep. This was her first—and last—asteroid run. Being the rookie shadow meant getting stuck with the worst chores, having no say about anything, and getting left out half the time. She stripped off her coverall and underwear, wadded the lot into a ball, and crammed it into the clothes processor. She didn’t know which she hated more, the mindless work or the smothering boredom when there was no work to do. She heaved herself into the cleanser, zipped the seal shut, and slipped the spray wand from its slot. On the Moon, she could have let the cleanser fill with steam. Warm mist would bead on her skin and trickle deliciously down her body. But in space, there was no down. The wand’s vacuum nozzle sucked the water off her before she had a chance to savor it. She came out of the cleanser free of mold spores but chilled. She snatched a fresh coverall from the processor’s drawer.
As she dressed she tried to convince herself that getting left out didn’t matter, that she didn’t even like the other monkeys. Of course, this wasn’t true. She would have done almost anything to get them to accept her as an equal. She jammed her arm into a sleeve. She was irked that Richard hadn’t made the others wait for her. She knew he wanted to have sex with her and recently she had been surprised to find herself warming to him, despite his nightmarish body. Even though he had lived in space for four of his nineteen years, Richard had been warped by Earth’s freakish gravity. He was tall and his head was way too big and all those grotesque muscles scared her. If she was a monkey, then he was a gorilla.
Mariska had made out a couple of times with Glint, but it wasn’t very good for either of them. Glint and Didit were sister clones of a woman named Xu Jingchu, a big name at SinoStar Ltd. Glint was eighteen and Didit was fifteen. Genetically tweaked for weightlessness, they were as dainty as Richard was gross. They had slender limbs and beautifully defined ribcages and were so tiny that they might have been mistaken for elves or fourth graders. Their delicate bones were continually reinforced by some kind of super powered osteoblasts or something. They had thick pubic hair and small breasts but no wasteful reproductive systems. People living on the Moon or Mars or in space didn’t make babies by having sex. Their kids would have two heads or no lungs because of the cosmic radiation. At the start of the run Mariska had hoped that she and the Jingchu sisters might be friends. But it never really happened, despite all her efforts to reach out. Didit and Glint treated her like the rookie she was.
Mariska was a clone too, but Natalya Volochkova had had her daughter tweaked to go to the stars. Mariska hadn’t asked for the genes that made it possible for her to hibernate and she didn’t want to crew on a starship. But her mother had made those decisions for her—or thought she had until Mariska had run away to crew on an asteroid bucket. She had hoped to keep her past a secret from the little crew of the Shining Legend. But Beep had found her out and told everyone and now she was sure they resented her for throwing away a chance they all would have jumped at.
When Didit’s arm brushed her sister’s face, she murmured something that Mariska didn’t catch. She studied the two sisters and wondered if maybe her body unnerved them as much as Richard’s unnerved her.
“Moo,” said Glint. “Moooo.”
Mariska had an impulse to yank on her tether, pull the little monkey down and tell her to start the dream over. Include her this time. “Moo yourself,” said Mariska. She flipped out of the wardroom and angrily pulled herself upspine toward Galley.
Mariska shook a sippy cup of borscht until it was hot. She bungeed herself to a dining stand and woke up the screen beside it. Lately she had been looking at the news. Even though it was boring, it made her feel grown-up. Today was all about Mars. Construction of the last phase of the Martinez space elevator had finally been funded. Maybe a job there for her? Vids of genetically tweaked Martians picketing the domes of Earth-standard Martians. Never mind—she was never going to Mars. They were taking applications again for emigration to the colony on Delta Pavonis 4, the terrestrial planet that the Gorshkov had just discovered. Natalya Volochkova had been chief medical officer on that mission. Mariska didn’t get why the Gorshkov crew hadn’t given it a real name. Who would want to move to a planet called 4?
She sipped some of the borscht and sighed. Another thing that she hated about space was everything tasted bland, like oatmeal or crackers.
She checked her inbox and as usual there was a message from her mother. Golubushka, nothing, nothing, nothing, can’t wait to see you again, love, Mama. She deleted it, as usual. Once again, nothing from Jak. Back on the Moon they had been all but engaged to be married and become deep spacers and go to the stars together. But she was over him now. Still, it would be nice to hear something, seeing as how she would have gladly had sex with him if only he had waited for her. Maybe he was applying to emigrate to Planet 4. Maybe he was already there. Good riddance.
She missed him.
“Mind if I join
you?”
She hadn’t heard Beep slip into the stand beside her. With its clatter of fans, pumps, and compressors, Galley was almost as noisy as Command. The creak of the hull expanding and contracting was particularly bad here. “No sir,” she said, and wiped the screen.
Beep was maybe forty, maybe eighty. She couldn’t tell. Living in space faded different people at different rates. The stubble on his head and chin had gone gray and there was a dimpled scar on his cheek where the cancer had been carved out. He had the slouch that all bucket monkeys got from spending too much time weightless. There was nothing special about his coveralls, but one of the Shining Legend’s two override cards hung from his neck on a green lanyard.
“I had a message today from your mother.” He scanned the galley menu. “I was given instruction.” His eyes were watery and vague.
“Really?” She felt her cheeks flush. “What did she say?”
“To take good care of you.” He pointed at the menu. “Ha-ha-ha.” Seconds passed and then the oven stuck its tongue out at him. On it was a steaming tart. He swiped it into the air, caught it before it could fly across the room, then juggled it from hand to hand until it floated, cooling, in front of him. “We go way back, Natalya and I,” he said at last. “A thick stick now, isn’t she?”
There was nothing safe she could say about that.
“Your mother doesn’t understand you, young Volochkova. She wants you to be a deep spacer, not a bucket monkey.”
“She’s never bothered to understand me.”
“You had the tweak. You can hibernate, sleep your way to the stars. So why are you dancing on one foot?”
She snorted in derision. “Only losers hibernate. You wake up and nothing is the same. You lose everything.”
He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her. “You know, I was supposed to be a spacer. Zoom through the wormhole to the stars.” He sailed a flat hand back and forth imitating a spaceship. “Your mother Natalya pronounced me unfit.” He caught his tart and bit into it. “Thinner than water, I was back then.” Mariska watched crumbs fly out of his mouth. More crud duty.