Mattie Mom loosed a terrible cry, a shriek, a moan, a sound that held all the grief in the world, and when I could see again she was shrinking, falling, falling away, then she was gone, and I was sliding, turning in a dizzy circle, down, down, down. I opened my mouth to scream and a mailed fist quickly covered my face.
“Stop that. There is no need for you to cry out, girl.”
“God, you don't think so? Let me goddamn go, you hear? Let me go!"
I knew, somewhere inside my rattled brain, that wasn't a good idea, either. He held me tightly against his chest, but over his shoulder I could see the surface beneath us rushing by at a rapid pace. I thought I could see things, things down there below the cloudy glass, and I knew that couldn't be, that there was nothing down there, nothing at all to see.
“...It is written in the Book, child. The way things were, the way that things must be. Surely you can understand this is so.”
I almost laughed through my fear. “What, I'm supposed to ride down this thing and we just—die, right? Tell me where it says that!”
“...and lo, the beaten foes slept, and when they woke they crawled out of the horror the West had left behind. And, though they had no Newks of their own, God had given them a great sea of sand, and from that sand they forged a—”
“I already know that,” I shouted through the wind, “I'm slidin’ down goddamn Dallis, I can see what they did.” That was two hundred eighty-three years ago. I didn't do anything, what's that got to do with me?”
“It's all about you, child. All about you and the things that were and what has to be.”
“You keep saying that. I don't want to hear it anymore!”
“It's about done now. There isn't much more.”
“Don't. Don't you tell me that!”
I couldn't help myself. I tried to hold him close.
“I'll be there with you. That's what I'm supposed to do. And it does have to be, girl. You might breed, you know. And there can't be any more folks like they were before. There mustn't ever be.”
I could scarcely see the sky anymore. There was nothing but the great bowl of glass, rushing by, and nothing but the fast approaching dark down below, and I couldn't look at that.
“What do you think it's like?” I asked the rider. “What do you think it'll be?”
“I don't know,” he said. “Whatever there is, is. The way it has to be. Lo, the Book has said—”
“Goddamnit,” I told him. “I already knew that!”
Copyright (c) 2008 Neal Barrett, Jr.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Poetry: GARGOYLE PEOPLE
by Bruce Boston
If gargoyle people
were the world,
standards of beauty
would be far different
than they are today.
The eye of the beholder
would adore the grotesque,
worship the malformed,
rejoice in the appalling.
—
We would stand still
for hours at a time
without flinching,
never blinking,
glaring into one
another's countenances,
baring our static rage
and indomitable horror
with pride for all
the world to see.
When shadows of the sun
or moon moved across
the lines and planes
of our chiseled faces,
umbra and penumbra
like shifting scars,
we would celebrate the
hideous chiaroscuro
that light and its
absence invoked.
—
The rains would darken
our expressions further,
mottling our features
like a pox, sending
the dirt from Heaven
coursing through our
orifices in torrents,
spewing from our mouths
and staining our lips
in muddied streams.
—
And when the winds
teased our cracks and
crevices and whistled
and thrummed through
the stone hollows
of our wrathful selves,
the music we would
make would be fierce,
lovely, rich, and mad.
—
—Bruce Boston
Copyright (c) 2008 Bruce Boston
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: THE HOUSE LEFT EMPTY
by Robert Reed
While Robert Reed's short story “Eight Episodes” (Asimov's, June 2006) and novella “A Billion Eves” (Asimov's, October/November 2006) gave the author his seventh and eighth Hugo nominations, the latter tale also gave him his first Hugo Award. In his latest story for us, he investigates the significance of...
The House Left Empty
The truck was long and white, with a name I didn't recognize stenciled on the side. But that doesn't mean much, what with new delivery services springing up every other day. It was the details I noticed, and I've always been good with details: No serious business would call itself something as drab as Rapid Distribution. The truck's body had been grown from a topnotch Ford-Chevy schematic, tires woven from pricey diamond-studded glass. But the machine acted heavier than I expected, as if somebody had thrown extra steel and aluminum into the recipe—just to help a pair of comatose industries. Instead of a joystick, the driver was holding onto a heavily padded old-fashioned steering wheel, and he was locked in place with three fat seat belts, a cumbersome buckle stuck over his poor groin. Standard federal issue, fancy and inefficient; and, not for the first time, I wondered why we still pretend to pay taxes to the remnants of our once-national government.
It was mid-morning. I was sitting in my living room, considering my options for the rest of the day. My roof tiles were clean, house batteries already charged, the extra juice feeding into the SG's communal bank. The factory inside my garage had its marching orders—facsimile milk and bananas, a new garden hose and a dozen pairs of socks—and it certainly didn't want my help with those chores. I could have been out in my yard, but last night's downpour had left the ground too soggy to work. I could attack one of the six or seven books I'd been wrestling with lately, or go on-line on some errand sure to lead to a hundred distractions. But with the early warm weather, what I was thinking about was a bike ride. I have four fresh-grown bikes, each designed for a different kind of wandering, but even a decision that simple requires some careful, lazy consideration.
Then the delivery truck drove past my house. I heard the bang when it hit the pothole up the street, and then the long white body swung into view. I immediately spotted the uniformed driver clinging to his steering wheel, trying to read the number that I'd painted beside my front door. He was young and definitely nervous. Which was only natural, since he obviously didn't know our SG. But he saw something worthwhile, pulling up alongside the far curb and parking. The uniform was tan and unmemorable. A clipboard rested on his lap. With a finger leading the way, he reread the address that he was searching for. Then he glanced back up the street. His sliding door was pulled open, but the crash harness wouldn't let him get a good look. So he killed the engine and punched the buckle and climbed down, carrying the clipboard in one hand and noticing me as he strode past my window.
I considered waving, but decided otherwise.
The deliveryman disappeared for a couple of minutes. I wanted to watch him trying to do his job. But my instincts are usually wiser in these matters, and they told me to do nothing. Just sit and wait, guessing that he'd come looking for me eventually.
Which he did.
If anything, the poor guy was more nervous than before, and, deep inside, a little angry. He didn't want to be here. He was having real troubles with our streets and numbers. My gues
s then, and still, is that he was using a badly compromised database—not an unlikely explanation, what with the EMP blasts over Washington and New York, followed by the Grand Meltdown of the original Internet.
Of course he could have been hunting for me.
But that seemed unlikely, and maybe I didn't want to be found. Climbing back into his truck, he turned on the engine with his thumbprint and a keypad. I couldn't hear the AI's warning voice, but judging by the guy's body language, he didn't want to bother with any damned harness.
Real quick, he looked in through my window, into my house, straight at me sitting on my black facsimile-leather sofa.
Then he drove up to the next corner and turned and came back again, ending up parked two doors west of me.
This time, I got up off the sofa and watched.
His best guess was that the smallest house on my street was the one he wanted. Several minutes were invested in ringing the bell while knocking harder and harder at the old front door. Then after giving the window blinds a long study, he kneeled to look down into the window well, trying to decide if someone was lurking in the cool, damp basement.
Nobody was.
With no other choice, he finally stood and walked my way, sucking at his teeth, one of his hands beating at the clipboard.
I went into the bedroom and waited.
When the bell rang, I waited some more. Just to make him wonder if he had seen me in the first place. Then I opened the door and said, “Yeah?” without unlatching the storm. “What's up?”
The guy was older than I'd first guessed. And up close, he looked like the sort who's usually sharp and together. Organization mattered to this man. He didn't approve of mix-ups. But he'd been in this delivery game long enough to recognize trouble when it had its jaws around him.
“Sorry to bother you, sir.”
“No problem.”
“But can I ask ... do you know your neighbors...?”
“A few of them.”
He glanced down at the clipboard's display, just to be sure before saying, “Penderlick?”
“No.”
“Ivan Penderlick?”
“What's that first name?”
“Ivan?” he said hopefully.
“No.” I shook my head. “Doesn't ring any bell.”
This wasn't the news he was hoping for.
“But maybe I've seen him,” I mentioned. “What's this Ivan guy look like?”
That could be a perfectly natural question. But the deliveryman had to shake his head, admitting, “They didn't give me any photo.”
The Meltdown's first targets were the federal servers.
That's when I opened the storm door, proving that I trusted the man. “Okay. What address are you chasing?”
“Four-seven-four-four Mayapple Lane,” he read out loud. “Are you forty-seven fifty-four Mayapple?”
“That's the old system.”
“I realize that, sir.”
“We pulled out of the city six years ago,” I reported. “New names for our streets, and new numbers.”
He flinched, as if his belly ached.
Then I had to ask, “You from around here?”
“Yes, sir.”
As liars go, he was awful.
I asked, “Which SG do you belong to?”
He offered a random name.
I nodded. “How's life up there?”
“Fine.” Lying made him squirm. Looking at the clipboard, he asked, “Were you once 4754 Mayapple?”
“I was,” I said.
“The house two doors down—?”
“That ranch house?”
“Was it 4744?”
“No, I don't think so.”
“You don't think so?”
“I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Sorry.”
Minor-league mix-ups happened all too often. I could tell from the deliveryman's stooped shoulders and the hard-chewed lower lip.
“Call out for help,” I suggested. “Our cell tower can get you anywhere in the world, if you're patient.”
But he didn't want that. Unless his hair caught fire, he wouldn't involve his bosses.
“Mayapple was a short street,” I mentioned. “Go west, on the other side of the park, and you'd pick it up again. Of course that's a different SG now. The street's got a new name, I don't remember what. But I'd bet anything there's a house waiting, someplace that used to be 3744 Mayapple. Could that be your answer? Your first four is actually a three instead?”
An unlikely explanation, yet he had to nod and hope.
But then as he turned away, he thought to ask, “The name Penderlick doesn't mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
“Sorry, no.”
Unlike that deliveryman, I am a superb liar.
* * * *
Our Self-Governing District is one of the best in the area. At least we like to think so. About five hundred homes stand on this side of the park, along with two bars and a public hall, an automated health clinic and a human dentist, plus a cell tower on talking terms to twenty others, and one big shop that can grow almost anything you can't, and one tiny but very useful service station that not only has liquor to sell on the average day but can keep almost any machine functioning. One of the station mechanics lives one street over from me. We're friends, maybe good friends. But that wasn't the reason I half-ran to his front door.
His name is Jack, but everybody knows him as Gus.
“What do you think he was doing here?” Gus asked me.
“Bringing something special,” I allowed. “I mean, if you're the Feds and you're going to send out an entire truck, just for Ivan ... well, it's going to be an important shipment, whatever it is.”
Gus was a tough old gentleman who liked his hair short and his tattoos prominently displayed. Nodding, he asked, “Have you seen our neighbor lately?”
Ivan was never my neighbor. I took over my present house a couple of years after he moved out of his.
“But has he been around lately?” Gus asked.
“Not since he cut his grass last year,” I allowed. “Early November, maybe.”
It was March now.
“A delivery, huh?”
“From Rapid Distribution.”
“Yeah, that's going to be a government name.” Gus was grinning. “Didn't I tell you? Ivan was important, back when.”
“You said so.”
“You do like I told you? Search out his name?”
When I was a kid, the Internet was simple and quick. But that was before the EMP blasts and the Meltdown. Databases aren't just corrupted nowadays; AI parasites are still running wild, producing lies and their own security barriers. What I could be sure of was a string of unreadable papers and a few tiny news items—not much information maybe, but enough to make me accept the idea that my almost-neighbor had once been a heavyweight in the world of science.
Governmental science, to be precise.
“How'd Ivan look, last time you saw him?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“How was his weight?”
“He looked skinny,” I admitted.
“Cancer-skinny, or fit-skinny?”
I couldn't remember.
Gus used to be friendly with the old Ph.D. “Of course you mentioned that Ivan lives with his daughter now.”
“The daughter, is it?”
Gus knew me well enough to laugh. “You didn't tell him, did you?”
“It slipped my mind.”
He threw me a suspicious stare. “And is there some compelling reason why you came racing over here two minutes before I'm supposed to go to work?”
“That deliveryman will come back again,” I promised.
“If the daughter isn't in their files, sure. Somebody's going to make a couple more stabs to deliver the package. Whatever it is.”
“I didn't tell him that the house was empty. What if he shows and finds an old guy sitting on the porch of that house, enjoying the spring sun?”
“I'm supposed to be Ivan?�
�
“Sure.”
“What if it's valuable, this delivery is?”
“Well then,” I said. “I guess that depends on how valuable valuable is. If you know what I mean.”
* * * *
I'm not old, but I'm old enough to remember when the world felt enormous, and everybody was busy buying crap and selling crap, using their profits to move fast across the globe. In those times, life was fat and sweet and perfectly reasonable. Why shouldn't seven billion souls fight for their slice of the endless wealth? But still, not everybody agreed with the plan. Environmentalists had valid points; apocalyptic religions had a strong urge toward mayhem. Some governments tried cracking down on all kinds of enemies, real and otherwise, and that spawned some tough-minded groups that wanted to remake the world along any of a hundred different lines.
Our past leaders made some spectacularly lousy decisions, and those decisions led to some brutal years. But it wasn't all just chaos and famine and economic collapse. Good things happened while I was a young man. Like the cheap black tiles that every roof wears today, supplying enough electricity to keep people lit-up and comfortable. Like the engineered bugs that swim inside everybody's biotank, cleaning our water better than any of the defunct sewage systems ever could. And the nanological factories that an average guy can assemble inside his garage, using them to grow and harvest most of the possessions that he could possibly need, including respectable food and fashionable clothes, carbon-hulled bicycles and computers that haven't required improvement for the last ten years.
The old nation-states are mangled. But without any burning need, nobody seems eager to resurrect what used to be.
The old communications and spy satellites have been lost, destroyed by the space debris and radioactive residues stuck in orbit. There are days when I think that it would make sense to reconstitute that old network, but there just aren't enough hands or money, at least for the time being.
A few physical commodities still demand physical transportation: fancy products protected by the best patents or their own innate complexities; one-of-a-kind items with deep sentimental attachments; and certain rare raw materials. But I don't usually hunger for vials of iridium or a kidney grown in some distant vat. My needs are more than being met by my patch of dirt and my black rooftop.
Asimov's SF, April-May 2008 Page 7