Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014

by Penny Publications

  Marian IX offered an eager defense of her Christian faith.

  But the visitor brushed that tedious horseshit aside. A shaman among his people, he explained that he was blessed with the gift of vision, able to peer into the next day. And when the magic was strong, he could see much farther than tomorrow, which was why he came all this way to visit the God-bearer.

  "Do you see something for me?" asked the little woman.

  Without hesitation, the visitor said, "Death."

  "That is everyone's fate," said the Theotokos. "But what do you see for the world?" The shaman did not hesitate.

  "In short order," he explained, "my people will unite and then claim China, followed by the rest of Asia."

  The woman felt like laughing, but she refused the urge.

  "The conquest of so much land will take more effort than simply riding from one end to the other, but our brother Believers are weak and divided. Like a herd of good beasts, the Maimuns will come to understand who leads, and then the Mongols and our allies will ride to this Greek city and breach these rock walls, catching the woman who sits where you sit today. A hundred soldiers will abuse her body, and she will die forsaking your Christ Lady, and we will enslave her priestesses, and we will make geldings of her soldiers and senators."

  In a rare failure of decorum, the God-bearer laughed at the visitor. "And what happens after that?" she inquired.

  The man squinted at the empty air.

  "I see nothing else. But after you, what can stop us? The Latins are past their glory. Rome's children are a few rough nations that quarrel over dark forests growing thick where laws used to reign. The rest of Europa is sure to perish, and by then the entire world will be ours to hold as we wish."

  Quentin fell silent.

  "Did this really happen?" his date asked skeptically.

  "A Frankish scholar might have fabricated the incident. Maybe ninety years after Marian IX died. The evidence isn't certain, but she had good reasons to scare her people, uniting them ready to fight the Mongols."

  "Well, I'm glad she did that," Emalee said.

  Quentin shrugged.

  "You're not hungry."

  He glanced at his half-eaten lamb. It was Monday and he wasn't where he should be, and the unexpected guilt was killing his appetite.

  His date offered a theatrical shiver.

  "Growing up Mongol," she said. "What a shitty, awful world that would be."

  Six days later, a low-pressure center emerged from the Navajo Nation, cold and angry as it marched across the prairie, and the sweat of the Carib Sea was chilled and thrown down on the flat world. By Sunday night, the hard winter turned brutal. North and west windows shook in their frames. The only story on the news was the blizzard. Schools and businesses would remain closed tomorrow. Except for essential services, the government was surrendering. By morning, the dry white terror would be knee-deep, but that was only if the wind and snow quit. They wouldn't quit. Drifts would turn into hills, exposed flesh would freeze in an instant, and society would bend before shattering where it was weakest. With luck, a dystopian world would emerge, human flesh being the main commodity, and a man like Quentin, armed with courage and charm, could take charge of a group of young women with lovely cannibalistic mouths. Rising from disaster, his new nation would steal heavy clothes and burn neighborhoods for heat, slaughtering the weak as they fled south, always two steps ahead of the spreading glacier.

  But alas, Monday brought nothing but the old world and one grand blizzard. Except for the howling majesty of the wind, silence reigned. The only visible traffic was a handful of heavy trucks shoving their way toward some critical destination. Quentin read and napped and then read again: He read about Mars and then the ecology of marshes, and he studied a long excruciating history of the Alamanni Wars—two hundred years of strife culminating in the extinction of an entire people. But the Alamanni deserved to die, claimed the author. They were religious maniacs and agents of chaos, and she applauded Rome for erasing that tribe of dangerous Germans in the beautiful green meadows of the Alps.

  Dinner was reheated potatoes and goat. Quentin watched the news while he ate, trying to understand the conundrum of Turkish politics, and it was easy to believe that this had been a miserably boring day. Then the phone sang.

  "I'm trapped inside my house," she began. "Are you trapped inside yours?"

  Quentin peered out the window, asking, "Are you alone?"

  And Sandra said, "Not if you come see me."

  In his second year at Warner, Quentin took an informal writing course. The class shared an ancient table, discussing one another's pitiful work. Students were often girls, usually literature majors who could sound convincingly passionate about art forms they had no intentions of pursuing. The other male was a thirty-year-old ex-sailor who needed an audience for his drug-use-in-distant-ports scribblings. Quentin wrote exactly what he wanted to write. Some of his peers were hostile toward the futurist ramblings, or he pretended they were. "Otherness" was a blessing giving him an identity and a skeptical eye toward everything conventional.

  The professor was an old poet—a white-haired lady named Jurger who came with lofty credentials and a gigantic mug of coffee. Tolerant of all genres or worn down by too many years teaching small talents, she proved to be a quiet, thoughtful presence, offering opinions that sounded important and huge observations that Quentin didn't notice until days or years had passed:

  Producing a novel meant writing like hell and numbering the pages.

  Whatever the venue, fiction or autobiography, it was best to let the story have its own say.

  And imagination was a fine thing, as long as it was kept under control.

  One day, between longs sips of bitter black coffee, Madam Jurger mentioned that experience only went so far. Living an entire life in the northern taiga didn't mean that a person could write convincingly about snow. But the average genius from the tropics, walking once through a blizzard, should be able to fill volumes with tales of High Thule adventure.

  The address was buried in an unreachable pocket, along with a map cut from the telephone book. There were seven blocks to walk, mostly against the wind, but even when Quentin fell forward into a drift, he didn't worry about frostbite or death. His fear was focused on last Monday, his cheating waiting to be exposed.

  Sandra's Trailbreaker was buried on the driveway. The house beyond was long and plain, one story tall with the porch light burning yellow, ready to fend off moths and mosquitoes. Quentin waded up the porch stairs and stomped his boots in the shin-deep snow. He had an excuse ready to explain last Monday, but if the lie didn't work, he was prepared to tell some flavor of the truth: He went to dinner with a boring girl. Quentin had an awful time. He didn't have sex, except afterward and alone. And he was sorry, sorry, sorry.

  But neither lies nor excuses were necessary. Both front doors burst open with Sandra jumping back, shouting, "You made it."

  He brought the storm inside with him.

  Then the doors were shut, and she was a stranger spouting clichés about bravery and physical strength. "In this kind of weather, on this awful night." She took the hero's coat and face mask and the wet cold mittens, hanging them on an old wooden post beside her brown winter coat. She looked colder than Quentin felt, wearing nothing but a long plain shirt with huge brass buttons. Her hair was down and combed. Her breath smelled of mint. She was a different person, the voice louder, franker, and less polished, and she had never hugged him like this. Did he want something hot to drink? But Quentin didn't answer in the next breath, and the question had never been. By the arm, he was ushered into her bedroom. Candles were burning. A radio was playing old music, the volume far louder than seemed natural. The bed was suitable for a married couple who didn't want to touch. Quentin stood at a respectful distance, studying the gigantic mattress and then the rest of the room.

  Sandra came close, and her voice changed again. Whispering, she asked, "What's wrong?"

  Quentin laughed and wis
hed he hadn't. Then he made a confession that was more difficult than dinner with Emalee. "I keep thinking there's a husband somewhere."

  She nearly laughed, but her voice remained serious. "Never one of those, no," she said.

  Sure enough, nothing about the room felt masculine. No oversized socks lay forgotten in a corner, and only the near edge of the mattress had dipped, marking where a modest weight had been applied for years. The image of a lonely, middle-aged woman brought pity, and for no rational reason, Quentin grieved for the puffy man who never existed. And all that while, a pair of cool hands were running under his shirts and down the front of his trousers, the belt and snap and brass zipper handled with precision as this stranger prepared him for her pleasure.

  Manners were important in the world, and he was the willing guest. Sandra was a surprisingly quiet lover inside her own home, even more so than at his apartment, and like always, she was precise about what she wanted. Her climax was quick and intense, and he wasn't close. He was too busy watching the show. Sandra was still wearing the shirt—to keep warm, he understood at last. But she had opened the top buttons in order to show him the small drooping breasts, and then he grunted and said, "There."

  She put her face close to his, asking, "Better?"

  "What?"

  "Are you feeling better?"

  He was ferociously warm, which was a huge improvement. But he also felt drained and useless. For the next five minutes and maybe for hours, he would be a sexless, pitiful creature.

  "You thought I had a husband," she said, and now she laughed.

  "Have you been married?"

  She said, "No. Have you?"

  Secrets were lurking.

  "I risked my life walking here," Quentin said.

  "You did."

  "You have secrets," he said.

  She didn't dispute him.

  "So tell me something I don't know."

  Sandra took a breath and held it deep. Then very quietly, she said, "Euphemia II was an effeminate man who dressed and acted like a woman."

  "That was a Theotokes?"

  "From 965 through 968. According to reliable texts, the truth was known to loyal sponsors who intended to keep their secret for decades, should the young man live long enough."

  "But he died."

  "A suicide. Or murder."

  "Okay," he said, letting his dissatisfaction grow. "But you're not telling me something."

  That earned a long, careful stare.

  "What don't I know?"

  Sandra sat up, one finger scratching her sternum. Then she refastened each of the big buttons and slid to the floor, putting on slippers long past their prime. Two steps, and she turned back to him, the same finger curling, inviting Quentin to follow.

  A closed door waited at the end of the hallway, and beyond, a second bedroom. Its bed was long and narrow, the elderly mattress stripped of sheets and depressed in the center. The dresser was walnut, worn and looking handed down. Two dusty lacrosse sticks waited in a corner, and there were other embellishments that smacked of the male world. On the far wall was a photograph of the Acropolis, framed and in color but not recent and definitely not professional. Beside the door was a calendar from three years ago, from May, two dates wearing circles and words written inside each:

  "Theodore's 18th B-day," he read silently.

  "I have a son," Sandra whispered.

  And two days before Theodore became a man, a mother's hand wrote in big letters, "T. defects."

  Quentin was awake and maybe he never slept. He wasn't certain. Sandra had turned down the volume, but the radio was still fixed to the same strong station, and maybe that's why he was awake. Advertisements for funeral services and hemorrhoid creams led to a late-night voice hoping that everybody was warm, and then another old song tried to heat the world. The melody was familiar. A standard from the World's War, he couldn't remember ever listening to the lyrics, but every word seemed important tonight, if only because the smoky-voiced singer was long dead, and her noise about eternal love and devotion was ridiculous beyond measure.

  The song ended with stringed instruments and the word, "Forever."

  Quentin realized how stupid he was.

  Sandra lay at the edge of the mattress. She slept until he tried to crawl past, and then her sleepy voice asked where he was going.

  "To pee," he lied.

  Clothes had to be gathered, keys kept quiet, and then because he was thinking about peeing, he had to go.

  Sandra found him standing beside the toilet. She wore glasses and socks and nothing else. Staring at the ceiling, she waited, and then Quentin finished, pulling up his underwear before grabbing at the trousers, and she stepped forward and flushed, water rushing hard when she asked, "What's wrong?"

  "Theodore," he said.

  "Theo," she said, talking quickly. "I told you. He left before he was drafted."

  But she had told him very little, as it happened. And after another round of sex, she fell asleep, or at least shut her eyes and laid still.

  The flush was finishing.

  Quentin said, "They're looking for him."

  "Yes." "He's running—" "Yes." She put a finger on his mouth, and her naked body slipped past, dropping the seat before settling.

  She peed, and he turned away, putting on the still damp trousers.

  "Don't go," she said.

  The wind had weakened, but not by much.

  She wiped and stood and said, "Stay until morning," and then she flushed again.

  Quentin turned to the small woman.

  "The radio," he said.

  She began to nod.

  "Someone's listening to us," he said.

  With every possible reaction before her, Sandra decided to laugh wearily, bare shoulders shrugging as she told her fearful lover, "Maybe they are. Really, I don't know what the Federals do."

  "One draft dodger," he said.

  A mother's pride showed. "An important dissident."

  Quentin finished dressing.

  "You can't leave. Not in this weather," she said.

  Time was an illusion, and every life was a line drawn between adjacent, eternal images, and that's what Quentin was thinking, trying to decide what line to walk.

  The toilet had stopped flowing.

  One small hand grabbed him by an elbow.

  Then Quentin began to talk, to shout, telling the ceiling and the entire house, "I'm leaving, I'm gone. Good-bye."

  The map was paper, detailed and thoroughly researched yet cheaper to print than the stiff cardboard used in the Eastern Campaign. Its central fold was a stubborn ridge dividing Europa and North Africa from the vastness of Asia. But what if geology like this were possible—a mountain range running straight for thousands of miles, soaring above clouds and climate? Hard vacuum and the tilted terrain would have prevented armies and cultures from crossing sides. If there was an Alexander, he would have no choice but to march west. The Man Prophet, son of an Arab mother and Jewish father, would have been born on the wrong side of the divide, separated from Persia and that old empire that was waiting for rebirth. Two worlds would stand beneath the impossible mountain, and thousands of years would pass before either civilization would have so much as an inkling of its neighbor.

  Quentin folded the map back on itself, removing the ridge.

  This was the world thirteen centuries ago. But instead of pushing cardboard chits into battle, there would be thousands of filthy, furious men and a few famous women, plus slaves and girl whores and their male counterparts, swift horses to carry the best fighters and solid horses and mules toting inadequate supplies. Dust would matter, and the relentless, amoral weather. Personalities would play against one another, with tragic and humorous and often trivial consequences. The mastery of a single general might carry the day, or a bout of dysentery would negate his genius. Or fear, weightless and contagious, would ripple through a small infantry unit, triggering panic, and an army would lose its battle, and the other side would find a decisive, inexp
licable victory.

  The greatest story in history was about to repeat itself.

  The dice were thrown, and the Prophet led his chits into Egypt and Anatolia. But the wellbeing of millions was at stake, as well as the shape of civilization for the next thirteen hundred years, and in this version of history, Europa endured the onslaught. Their armies not only won the war, but they annihilated the Maimuns. Then the surviving chits, heroes every one, returned home to fuck the grateful landowners and shopkeepers and scholars, making fine babies that grew up hearing tales of distant lands that they would never need to see for themselves.

  The phone sang.

  Short-short-short-long.

  "Hello."

  A woman was breathing, and then she stopped breathing.

  Quentin knew who it was, but he asked anyway.

  "It's me," she said.

  He sighed.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  He said, "I can't tonight."

  That earned a moment of silence. "I didn't ask," she reprimanded. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry, I should have explained all of that before."

  "Yes," Quentin agreed.

  Sandra said nothing.

  But if she had confessed, what would have been different?

  "Of course you don't have to think about these matters," she said, her voice gaining velocity, heat. "You are blessed. You have a deferment. In your life, you've never had to contemplate hard choices."

  "Do you think my phone's bugged?" he asked.

  And he instantly imagined Federals listening to headphones.

  "We're at war," she said. "We've been in this battle for thirteen hundred years, and of course everybody is being watched."

  He felt exhausted, sick in his stomach.

  "Quentin," she said. "What goddamn dream world do you live on?"

  The laundry was transformed. The spring sun and melting snow flooded the windows with light. As a consequence, the little building felt tiny. Grime and dents begged to be noticed. Every mote of dust was fixed inside the dry hot air, and every client was a stranger, and everybody wore the worst kinds of clothes, some people looking drunk and everybody working slowly, nobody in any hurry to be anywhere else on a boring Sunday morning.