Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014

by Penny Publications

  "I thought you'd be pleased." She tried a grin. It bounced off him.

  "Honored, yes. Pleased, not at all. You think you can just issue commands and we jump? You have the right to ask, and I have the right to refuse. Even at the last minute."

  At fifty-three, Latif was still one of the handsomest men in the village. Daya had often wondered if that was one reason why everyone trusted him. She looked for some place to put the warming dish down.

  "No," he said, "don't you dare make yourself comfortable unless I tell you to. Why me?"

  She didn't have to think. "Because you have always been kind to me and my mother. Because you will tell the truth, even when it's hard to hear. And because, despite your years, you are still the most beautiful man I know." This time she tried a smile on him. It stuck. "All the children you've fathered are beautiful, and if my son gets nothing but looks from you, that will still be to his lifelong advantage." Daya knew that in the right circumstance, even men like Latif liked flattery.

  "You want me because I tell hard truths, but when I say you should move away, you ignore me. Does that make sense?"

  "Not everything needs to make sense." She extended her love feast to him. "Where should I put this?"

  He glided across the parlor, kissed her forehead and accepted the dish from her.

  "Do you know how many have asked me to be last father?"

  "No." She followed him into the great room.

  "Twenty-three," he said. "Every one spoke to me ahead of time. And of those, how many I agreed to?"

  "No idea."

  "Four." He set it on a round wooden table with a marble inset.

  "They should've tried my ambush strategy." She shrugged out of her pack. "I've got wine." She handed him the bottle of Xino she had picked for him.

  "Which you've been drinking all night, I'm sure. You know where the glasses are."

  He pulled the stopper. "And who have you been drinking with?"

  "Ganth, first."

  Latif tossed the stopper onto the table. "I'm one-fourth that boy's father..." He rapped on the tabletop. "... but I don't see any part of me in him."

  "He's handsome."

  "Oh, stop." He poured each of them just a splash of the Xino and offered her a glass. She raised an eyebrow at his stinginess.

  "It's late and you've had enough," he said. "It is affecting your judgment. Who else?"

  "Bakti."

  "You surprise me." They saluted each other with their glasses. "Does he really have Earth books?"

  "He says not."

  "He makes too many stories up. But he's sound—you should have started with him. Ganth is a middle father at best."

  Both of them ran out of things to say then. Latif was right. She had finished the first two bottles with the other fathers, and had shared a love feast with them and had made love. She was heavy with the weight of her decisions and her desires. She felt like she was falling toward Latif. She pulled the cover off the warming dish and cut a square of her love feast into bite-sized chunks.

  "Just because I'm making a baby doesn't mean I can't go away," she said.

  "And leave the fathers behind?"

  "That's what my mother did."

  "And did that make her happy? Do you think she had an easy life?" He shook his head. "No, you are tying yourself to this village. This little, insignificant place. Why? Maybe you're lazy. Or maybe you're afraid. Here, you are a star. What would you be in the blue city?"

  She wanted to tell him that he had it exactly wrong. That he was talking about himself, not her. But that would have been cruel. This beautiful, foolish man was going to be the last father of her baby. "You're right," Daya said. "It's late." She piled bits of the feast onto a plate and came around to where he was sitting. She perched on the edge of the table and gazed down at him.

  He tugged at one of the ribbons of her sleeve and she felt the robe slip off her shoulder.

  "What is this costume anyway?" he said. "You're wrapped up like some kind of present."

  She didn't reply. Instead she pushed a bit of the feast across her plate until it slid onto her fork. They watched each other as she brought it to her open mouth, placed it on her tongue. The room shrank. Clocks stopped.

  He shuddered, "Feed me, then."

  Latif 's pants were still around his ankles when she rolled off him. The ribbon robe dangled off the headboard of his bed. Daya gazed up at the ceiling, thinking about the tangling sperm inside her. She concentrated as her mother had taught her, and she thought she felt her cervix close and her uterus contract, concentrating the semen. At least, she hoped she did. The sperm of the three fathers would smash together furiously, breaching cell walls, exchanging plasmids. The strongest conjugate would find her eggs and then...

  "What if I leave the baby behind?" she said.

  "With who?" He propped himself up on an elbow. "Your mother is dead and no..."

  She laid a finger on his lips. "I know, Latif. But why not with a father? Ganth might do it, I think. Definitely not Bakti. Maybe even you."

  He went rigid. "This is an idea you get from the scientists? Is that the way they have sex in space?"

  "They don't live in space; they just travel through it." She followed a crack in the plaster of his ceiling with her eyes. "Nobody lives in space." A water stain in the corner looked like a face. A mouth. Sad eyes. "What should we do about them?"

  "Do? There is nothing to be done." He fell back onto his pillow. "They're the ones the founders were trying to get away from."

  "Two hundred years ago. They say things are different."

  "Maybe. Maybe these particular scientists are more tolerant, but they're still dangerous."

  "Why? Why are you so afraid of them?"

  " Because they're unnatural. " The hand at her side clenched into a fist. "We're the true humans, maybe the last. But they've taken charge of evolution now, or what passes for it. We have no say in the future. All we know for sure is that they are large and still growing and we are very, very small. Maybe this lot won't force us to change. Maybe someday they'll just make us want to become like them."

  She knew this was true, even though she had spent the last few months trying not to know it. The effort had made her weary. She rolled toward Latif. When she snuggled against him, he relaxed into her embrace.

  It was almost dawn when she left his house. Instead of climbing back up Farview Hill, she turned toward the river. Moments later she stepped off Mogallo's Wharf into the skiff she had built when she was a teenager.

  She had been so busy pretending that this wasn't going to happen that she was surprised to find herself gliding across the river. She could never have had sex with the fathers if she had acknowledged to herself that she was going to go through with it. Certainly not with Ganth. And Latif would have guessed that something was wrong. She had the odd feeling that there were two of her in the skiff, each facing in opposite directions. The one looking back at the village was screaming at the one watching the starship grow ever larger. But there is no other Daya, she reminded herself. There is only me.

  Her lover, Roberts, was waiting on the spun-carbon dock that the scientists had fabbed for river traffic. Many of the magistrates from the blue city came by boat to negotiate with the offworlders. Roberts caught the rope that Daya threw her and took it expertly around one of the cleats. She extended a hand to hoist Daya up, caught her in an embrace and pressed her lips to Daya's cheek.

  "This kissing that you do," said Roberts. "I like it. Very direct." She wasn't very good at it, but she was learning. Like all the scientists, she could be stiff at first. They didn't seem all that comfortable in their replaceable bodies. Roberts was small as a child, but with a woman's face. Her blonde hair was cropped short, her eyes were clear and faceted. They reminded Daya of her mother's crystal.

  "It's done," said Daya.

  "Yes, but are you all right?"

  "I think so." She forced a grin. "We'll find out."

  "We will. Don't worry, love, I am go
ing to take good care of you. And your baby."

  "And I will take care of you."

  "Yes." She looked puzzled. "Of course."

  Roberts was a cultural anthropologist. She had explained to Daya that all she wanted was to preserve a record of an ancient way of life. A culture in which there was still sexual reproduction.

  "May I see that?"

  Daya opened her pack and produced the leftover bit of the love feast. She had sealed it in a baggie that Roberts had given her. It had somehow frozen solid.

  "Excellent. Now we should get you into the lab before it's too late. Put you under the scanner, take some samples." This time she kissed Daya on the mouth. Her lips parted briefly and Daya felt Roberts' tongue flick against her teeth. When Daya did not respond, she pulled back.

  "I know this is hard now. You're very brave to help us this way, Daya." The scientist took her hand and squeezed. "But someday they'll thank you for what you're doing."

  She nodded toward the sleepy village across the river. "Someday soon."

  * * *

  Camel Through the Eye of a Needle

  Robert Borski | 48 words

  1. Origami

  Both models,

  dromedary and Bactrian,

  incorporate space-time folds,

  allowing nano-level miniaturization,

  but given the large number

  of Escher recursions are

  not recommended for the beginner.

  (Although contrary to popular opinion,

  stairwell narcosis is almost certainly an urban legend.)

  2. Oasis

  Across a desert of stars,

  the Kamelos, trailing

  a plume of spent hydrogen,

  is unable to resist

  the quantum lure

  of an even thirstier black hole.

  * * *

  Late Nights Around the Fire Coral

  Brian Garrison | 42 words

  Do fish tell

  abduction stories,

  huddled around in conference rooms

  of run-down hotels

  or in the calm eddies of

  lesser-known riverbanks

  recounting the horrific tales

  of laying on dry rocks, being

  probed in the gills,

  and passing out?

  And having nothing more

  than their hazy dusk

  memories,

  do they wonder if maybe

  five-fingered mammals

  don't really exist?

  * * *

  In the Quiet Hour

  Bruce Boston | 143 words

  In the quiet hour

  we sit cross-legged

  on the hardwood floor

  in a soundproofed room

  of white-walled plaster.

  In the quiet hour

  our Monitors turn off

  the air conditioning

  and it grows warmer.

  In the quiet hour

  we are never allowed

  any distractions:

  no videos, no music,

  no games, no texts.

  In the quiet hour

  we are forbidden

  to communicate with

  others in any way.

  In the quiet hour

  we try to find marks

  the trowel has left

  on the plaster walls,

  only to discover there

  are no marks in their

  blinding whiteness.

  In the quiet hour

  we search for flaws

  in the polished floor,

  only to realize that

  each board has been

  perfectly aligned.

  In the quiet hour

  we can look inside

  the treacherous terrains

  of interior landscapes,

  knowing full well that

  our Monitors, alien

  telepaths one and all,

  follow every twist and

  turn of our thoughts.

  In the quiet hour

  those who violate rules

  we have yet to understand

  are taken from the room

  by force and never return

  for the next session.

  In the quiet hour

  we are not very safe

  and it is seldom quiet for long.

  * * *

  EDITORIAL

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  Sheila Williams | 919 words

  When Rick Wilber and I co-founded the Dell Magazines Award (then called the Asimov Award) in 1993 we hoped it would help us discover, encourage, and nurture new writers. The award, which is sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and Dell Magazines, recognizes the best science fiction or fantasy story by a fulltime undergraduate college student. This spring at the 35th International Conference for the Fantastic (ICFA) in Florida, Rick and I will celebrate with the winner and many of the finalists for the twentieth time.

  To commemorate so many years of fine storytelling, I thought I'd find out where some of our past finalists are today. The very first award winner was Eric Choi, aerospace engineer, writer, and editor, living in Toronto, Canada. He worked on the meteorology payload on the 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander. In the 2009, he was also one of the Canadian Space Agency's final forty candidates (out of 5,353 applicants) in their astronaut recruitment drive. This career path may come as no surprise to those who read "Dedication" ( Asimov's, November 1994), his award-winning story about astronauts on Mars. Eric co-edited the Aurora Award winning anthology The Dragon and the Stars (DAW), and he has a story forthcoming from Analog.

  Although Eric's is the only story, so far, to be published in Asimov's, we have been able to run the winning tale online since about 2000. Asimov's has also published subsequent stories by Marissa Lingen (winner 1999) and Lena DeTar (winner 2002). A few of the finalists have also appeared in our pages. Well known science fiction author, Creative Commons expert, and Internet blogger Cory Doctorow (honorable mention 1994) has been published in Asimov's numerous times. Alice Sola Kim's (second runnerup 2005) beautiful tale about "The Other Graces" appeared in our July 2010 issue, and only after our February 2014 issue with Maurice Broaddus's engaging story about "Steppin' Razor" was delivered to our printer did I realize that this successful author had received an honorable mention from us in 1996.

  Our finalists have collected some other impressive awards in the intervening years. E. Lily Yu was a finalist for the Dell Award in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Her 2011 story submission, "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" was published by Clarkesworld and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2012, Lily won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Matthew J. Kirby was the first runner-up in 2003. He is now the author of three middle grade novels. Among other honors, Matt has won the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery and the PEN Center USA award for Children's Literature. Cory Doctorow won his own Campbell Award for best new writer in 2000, and has since added to his trophy shelf several Locus and Sunburst Awards as well as the Prometheus and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

  In addition to her Asimov's tale, Marissa Lingen has sold over ninety short stories. Bryn Neuenschwader, who won the award in 2003, has since become well known under her nom de plume. The latest of her eight novels as "Marie Brennan" is A Natural History of Dragons. Bryn has more than forty short stories in print as well. Amelia Beamer, who was our second runner up in 2004 has since written the best selling zombie novel, The Loving Dead.

  Many other finalists, such as Lara Donnelly (winner 2013), Rich Larson (second-runner-up 2013), Seth Dickinson (winner 2011), Rahul Kanakia (first runner-up 2007), Catherine Krahe (second runner-up 2006), Karina Sumner-Smith (honorable mention 2003), Thomas Seay (first runner-up 2002), Beth Adele Long (winner 2000), and David Barr Kirtley (winner 1997), have also amassed a number of impressive publications.

  I hear from finalists all the time. Many hav
e followed interesting career trajectories outside writing SF—Mark Jacobsen (winner 2001) is a C-17 air force pilot while his ICFA roommate Elan Ruskin (second runner-up 2001) works in the game industry as a senior engine programmer. Monica Eiland (first runner-up 1995) is a medical writer and Emily Thornbury (winner 1998) is an assistant professor of English at UC Berkeley. In addition to a flourishing writing career, Brit Mandelo (third runner-up 2012) is a senior fiction editor at Strange Horizons.

  Alas, there isn't room to cover all the accomplishments or to even mention all of our gifted finalists. I apologize to everyone for the omissions.

  The penultimate word in this editorial belongs to my co-judge Rick Wilber.

  The award has always been a labor of love for me. There's a great deal of organizational work that goes on behind the scenes, and every year there's some worrisome problem or another that has to be dealt with. Then, once the stories are in, there's that intense few weeks of reading the submissions and struggling to narrow down the many good stories to the shorter list of truly excellent ones. That's never an easy job.

  But the payoff comes after Sheila and I discuss the finalists and pick the winner, runners-up, and honorable mentions. It's my happy task to email or call those talented writers and let them know they're invited to ICFA where they'll meet many of the finest professionals in the field. Hearing the excitement on the other end of the line, or seeing all the exclamation points in their emails makes all the work absolutely worth the labor. And, heck, following the careers of the finalists as they go on to find their own professional success is a wonderful capstone on the whole process.

  Rick and I set out to nurture a bunch of new writers and ended up enriching our own lives because of the wonderful people we've met along the way.

  * * *

  REFLECTIONS

  BORGES, LEINSTER, GOOGLE