Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014

by Penny Publications

  And then? More fungus-exposed wasps, more stings. Perhaps, with corporate's tools, a vaccine for those who hadn't been infected yet. Could she make a vaccine that didn't require a sting? Rios hoped so.

  "The next generations will be better able to process the fungus," Deece said.

  Lefevre stepped through the tent flap, catching the drift of the conversation. "Couple generations will change everyone, likely. If we survive it."

  Rios looked out the tent window at the red, pitted landscape. At the colonists digging foundations. She turned around and looked at her lab. The wasps hummed and knocked their heads against the clear vials Deece held: Click.

  "We'll survive," she said. "We'll adapt."

  Jersey's shout carried into the tent on the breeze. Another voice replied, filled with anger. Fighting over the components of a broken tablet.

  "I'll put a stop to that before they kill each other," Lefevre said. "We barely have enough people as it is." She started for the tent exit.

  Rios moved to catch up with her.

  "You know corporate will be back someday," Lefevre said.

  Rios didn't doubt it. They'd return to E-17, looking to sweep away the past, like she'd swept up the dead wasp that had stung Deece. But maybe it wouldn't be that easy.

  Rios remembered the crackle of the wasp nest she'd broken apart with a stick as a child. The angry hum of wings against her hands.

  "Tell you what." Rios smiled at her old adversary as she held the tent flap open. She looked past the people walking beyond the boundary of the former garrison, and at those gathering the first of the edible grass. "I'll make you a bet. When corporate returns to E-17, I wager we'll teach them one hell of a lesson."

  * * *

  SLOWLY UPWARD, THE COELACANTH

  M. Bennardo | 2650 words

  M. Bennardo is the writer of over forty published short stories. His newest is a tale about true determination. It marks his fourth appearance in Asimov's. The author lives in Cleveland, Ohio, but people everywhere can find him online at http://www.mbennardo.com.

  She knew little, but she knew she had been put here by some god as a safeguard. The god had no name, or no name that she knew. Perhaps it hadn't even been a god. She only understood it as a being of immense power who lived above, an unknowable being who entered the water only when it wished, who had put her here as a safeguard, and who had then left. But she stayed, even though the god had never returned. That she had been put here was one of the few things she knew, and so she stayed.

  The waters were dark and cold. She preferred it thus. At times she swam higher, into waters that were warmer and lighter, and she recalled the times when all the waters had been dark and cold. In those seasons she had swum high or low as she pleased, seeking scraps of food. Great storms had often lashed the sea, and angry rainfall turned the surface to a boiling blanket of lighter, fresher water. In places, close to the coastal shelves, great torrents of this fresh water poured off the land and brought much nourishment into the ocean, clouds of food particles blooming across the surface as far as anyone could swim. In the dark and cold times, she had ventured almost to the surface itself, feeding in great gulps and thriving amid this unexpected bounty.

  But the bounty had not lasted. It had given out before the dark, cold times ended. Season followed season, and soon she had descended into the depths of the ocean again—not because the surface was too warm or light yet, but because there was no more food there. In the ocean the top dies first, and it was not long before all the surface became like a desert. It was only in deeper, darker places where life still survived on the remnants of dead things drifting down like rotting snow from above.

  Though she swam in one direction, she found herself pulled in another. She was being dragged tail first through the water. Soon she bumped and collected against others—against other fish and other creatures. She was larger than most, a giantess of the deep now. Had she had any notion of time, she might have thought that she was older than most as well. But time was not important. There was simply the cycle of instinct and the same motions day after day, season after season. There was no progression, no end to look forward to, no beginning to recall.

  The dragging stopped and she felt herself lifted now, pulled slowly upward to the warmth and the light, as the pressure around her steadily decreased with each second of ascension. She was pulled up along with the other denizens of the ocean, gathered and netted indiscriminately—pulled up to regions she almost never chose to visit anymore. Some part of her protested. Had she not been put there as a safeguard? That was why she had never left, and she did not want to leave now.

  Then, at last—the cataclysm. The breaking of the surface and the strange stinging as streams of water poured off her scales and out of her gills, rushed in a thick rivulet from her wide open mouth. Her gills flared at the open air, gaping vainly for breath. She hung a moment and then fell heavily, along with all the others, into a shallow tank. She lay still, sullenly, heaped on top of others, water barely covering her gills and mouth.

  There was a noise, a voice, and almost immediately she felt herself lifted again— this time by five rough points inserted into each of her gills. She flopped rudely onto a dry, flat surface. Instinctively, she tried to wriggle off again, to fall from the high place to the lower—for water always collected lower. She had never been out of water before, but instinctively she knew where to seek it. But instead she was pressed out flat, and suddenly felt a thin, irritating blade pierce her belly. Before she knew what had happened, it had traveled the length of her body, and blood was flowing freely from her insides. There was no pain, just the irritation of penetration and then the surprise of evacuation.

  Just before she slipped into complete darkness, she felt two rough probes slip inside the newly made cavity and extract—yes, they extracted the little glowing pebble that she had carried as a safeguard so long, season after season, as the surface water changed from light to dark to light again.

  And then, with that, she was a fish no more.

  She felt, for a moment, a strange affinity for all these things. There was some recollection of ships and people, some reassurance that she had been here before. She could not feel what it meant to be a human, but no more could she feel what it meant to be a coelacanth. She floated in between and unconnected, but there was some assurance somehow that she had done this before as well.

  Suddenly she could see everything at once, and somehow she was even aware that the gutted fish had lived for a hundred and fifty years. She had lived for a hundred and fifty years. Circling, swimming, answering the call of dumb instinct—but with that one variation, that one iota of knowledge that she had been put there—put there by a god—put there as a safeguard.

  Then at once the world collapsed and she was pinioned by straits of heavy flesh once more.

  There was something new this time. The flesh was different. It had a different configuration and different capabilities and somehow a different scope. This last was the most troubling. The limbs and the lungs were unusual, but she felt that over time she would grow used to them. After all, they seemed fitted to this new body, and she felt her old fins and gills would have been less appropriate.

  But there was a distinct shrinking of her horizons. Where once she had serenely let time wash through her, season by season, she now felt anxiety at every passing moment. There was only just enough time. Perhaps she would be vouchsafed more, but it could not be counted on. She needed to act now—needed to eat, to grow, to mate, to lay eggs. It was all imperative.

  Then she remembered she was meant to be a safeguard. She looked around herself. There was moist earth and a small pool. There was a clump of wriggling earthworms—food. She ate. Beyond, there was confusion. Brightness and movement. Tentatively, she ventured toward it, pushing against the earth with her delicate, translucent orange limbs. She struck something—something invisible—and could go no further. This was the scope of her domain. It was here, clearly, that she had been place
d as a safeguard.

  Again, she was liberated from the flesh. Another blade penetrated her—this one accompanied by real pain, flashes of sharp feeling coursing along her nerves. The large creatures outside her domain—she sometimes recognized them as humans— probed her insides and again that bright pebble was extracted. As the flesh melted away, she wondered that she had ever felt it to be part of her. Her sojourn there had been so brief, and now she looked in wonder down at the newt body, inert and flaccid on the table. She looked almost with repulsion—what a strange creature to have been, this newt. Surely she had never been meant to be such a thing.

  "I'm glad to be done with that," said one of the humans. "Those newts are too delicate—I always fear they'll die in the night."

  "But necessary, nonetheless," said another human. "She must go slowly upward. Like a diver returning from the depths, she must go slowly."

  But already, something else was waiting.

  Everything seemed to be clear. Movement was no longer merely an instinctive flailing, as it had been for so long. Instead, it could be a deliberate progression. She could examine obstacles and attempt to surmount them by lifting one leg or the other, or by moving her head from side to side. She could go around, to the left or the right. She could dig. And, most importantly, she could choose which. Somehow, now, she had the capability to decide.

  Now, she fed when she was hungry, and not merely when food was available. Leaves of uneaten lettuce lay in the dish where her food was placed. But she would eat it later. Again, her scope had expanded. She felt immense relief at knowing the years that lay before her—the time there was to do what she needed to do. It was because she was protected. If danger threatened, she simply had to retreat into her carapace and wait. She would be safe there, as she had once been safe in the depths of the ocean.

  But that—that was confusing. It seemed like a false life. It was better not to think about it.

  It was clear now as well that she was in a tank—an enclosure that limited her movement. There was no point in attempting to climb out of the tank. She had tried on each side, and could see that she would never succeed. Sometimes, however, the humans picked her up and placed her outside, on the floor of the room. But even here, she couldn't go far. And there was nothing to eat in the room, no water to swim in, no light to bask in, and no sand to lay eggs in. She preferred the tank in every way, except only that she wished it were larger.

  And what of being a safeguard? She dimly suspected these humans were the gods who had placed her where she was. She had those confusing half memories of other bodies and other lives before she had been this tortoise. In those memories, there were humans. It seemed that whatever purpose she served, it must have been ordained by them. And they were always there—or almost always. Every day, she saw one or another of the humans—usually all three of them. Whatever they would want of her, they could find her anytime. She did not need to worry about this either.

  Once more, the pebble was free. Suddenly, in her liberation, she knew she was a human too. It hit her suddenly, and it was both a surprise and so obvious in retrospect. She had not been born a coelacanth, nor a newt, nor a turtle. She had somehow, long ago—long, long ago—almost two hundred years ago—she had been born a human, just like these others.

  She had been placed in the fish, not as a safeguard, but to be safeguarded. The fish was to safeguard her spark, her essence, through some terrible catastrophe. The fish was to take her through the fire and heat, and then the long coldness that would follow. There had been no room for her elsewhere, with the rest of the surviving humans. But there had been this one last chance, and she had been lucky to have it.

  Someone had said the coelacanth had survived this before. If anything could survive again, it would be those sturdy fish. But they would come again later. The humans would return after winter had passed—the very lucky ones would come out of their caves or descend from the sky. They would trawl the oceans and they would pull up their lost cousins, the still-lucky but also not-so-lucky ones who had been given this last bare chance to survive in the depths.

  It was a chance only. No one was sure if it would work. It was so far down into the coelacanth and then so far back up again. So many things could go wrong, but it was a chance and it was offered only to a few. To skip the chance was to die alongside billions. So she had taken it, had gone down into the coelacanth, and had lived through the catastrophe and the winter that followed. And here again were her cousins, passing the bright pebble of her soul from body to body to body, as high as they could pass it up, in the hopes they could find her again.

  Something was the matter. Something was wrong. In her mind—there was something wrong.

  She knew the names of the humans now. Donna, Harold, and George. When one of them pointed at the objects in front of her, she understood what they were asking. She could even hear the words they spoke. She could hear them and remember and repeat them. But it wasn't until one of them spoke the name for the objects that she could speak them back.

  If they pointed at the round object first, she could only shift from foot to foot, her head weaving sideways in anxiety. She could only whistle and repeat the question in a nervous parrot's croak. "What is it? What is it?" But once they spoke the word— ball—then she could say it.

  "What is it?" asked Harold.

  "What is it? What is it?"

  "Ball," said Harold, pointing and enunciating.

  "Ball," she croaked back, the shame of failure rising inside her.

  Why couldn't she say more? She could think now—could reason. She understood so much. When later they pointed to the ball and said "red," she understood that too. It wasn't another name for the object—it was a name for an attribute. It was a category. Things could be classified and categorized. Balls, nuts, humans, pretty birds. She understood it all.

  But somewhere, something was wrong. The wiring in her mind wouldn't let her put thoughts into words. There was much she wanted to say—every day, more memories came back. In her sleep, she regressed further and further into her personal history. The turtle and the newt flashed by—the coelacanth persisted seemingly for eons—but there, before it all, was a woman. She remembered what she had remembered. She knew what she had known. Or most of it—much of it. As much as her parrot's mind could comprehend, which was a great deal more than she could express.

  And they asked her. They asked: "What is your name?" They asked: "Who are you?"

  She saw—she remembered. Not in words, but in images and feelings. And could only shift from foot to foot on her perch. She could only whistle sadly.

  Finally, they said: "It isn't working." Not to her—to one another. She wanted to tell them that it was. It was working.

  She shifted from foot to foot. She whistled. "Working," she croaked.

  "It isn't working," said Harold, absent-mindedly feeding her a nut. "And there is no place else to put her."

  "We need this parrot for another one," said Donna. "There are three more tortoises ready to bring up."

  "Perhaps it hasn't been long enough," said George.

  Everyone looked at him. She looked at him. "Perhaps," she croaked.

  She hardly understood what had been missing, but as soon as the salty water touched her gills, she knew. She shivered—not in pleasure, not exactly. She shivered in comfort. In the return of familiar and preferred circumstances. All was now as it should be.

  With a twist of her body, she kicked away from the cradle, out in the water. It was too warm and too light here at the surface. She couldn't recall how she had gotten here, but that gave her no anxiety. Even if she had remembered, the string of events would have meant nothing. Why should one thing come before the other? Why should effect follow cause? It was all merely a simultaneous jumble of sensations— strange sensations—sensations best forgotten.

  She dove, seeking colder and darker waters, slipping into the depths. She was a safeguard. She must return to her home, for she had been placed there and she was a
safeguard. Of the little she knew, that was all she was certain of.

  * * *

  THE TALKING CURE

  K. J. Zimring | 3996 words

  Kim Zimring recently moved from Georgia to Seattle. Her poignant story about an old man's memories of a perilous childhood, however, was written in New Mexico, at Walter Jon Williams's "indisputably fine Rio Hondo workshop." Kim is a graduate of Clarion 2005 and her previous stories have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, and the Writers of the Future anthology.

  My first memory is of my dead mother. I'm crouched by her face, mouth close enough to kiss, waiting for a breath that never comes. An open jar of mushrooms sits beside her, spoon embedded in its boggy heart. Botulism is the cause of death, I presume, though why I selected that for the image I couldn't say. Some warning about home-canned goods wrapped together in my childish brain with the classic Oedipal love/fear complex: Mother, bringing food and death.

  It isn't true, of course. That's always my next thought. Mother died at a hundred-something, better preserved than anything canned in Nazi-owned Vienna. She was never warm to me, certainly, but to translate that to the literal coldness of the grave? It's an image only a Freudian could love.

  My wife Lillie scooted a little closer to me on the sofa. She'd been the one who'd spotted the ad in the back of the AARP rag. Art authentication—who'd have thought there'd be money in it for a guy like me?

  Given who I'd known when I was a kid, apparently there was a bundle. She'd found that out when she called. Sotheby's got the details and sent a representative right over, to drink tea and perch on our armchair, and offer up a stack of signable forms.

  "So this memory projection thing," I say to the rep, after I signed an attestation this, an informed consent that, and settled on the day after tomorrow to come down to their office. "You can tell the difference between real memories and fake ones, right?"