Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And in the afternoon, we put the heretic's cap and robes on our prisoner and shut him up in a cage, as one would a circus animal, and hitched the cage to an ox; and I wrapped my son up in many layers of blankets and loaded his pallet onto my cart for the drive back to Nantes.

  Alice and the innkeeper came to see us off; but I did not say a word to them. I tried to avoid Alice's eyes completely. I knew that she had given up her only treasure, and the only token she had ever possessed of the single night when I had forgotten my vows to God.

  There are not so many heretic burnings as there used to be; and so it was that by the time enough heretics had been delivered to the secular arm that a reasonable spectacle could be had on market day, the days had lengthened and there was no more snow to be seen. And each day, my son grew stronger, and we never spoke of the night of his delirium. But as for the burning itself, Guillaume would not leave the house, though he was hale enough to have started his singing lessons.

  Yet I had made a vow to God that I would personally try to urge Guillaume the Monster toward an eleventh hour repentance. And thus it was I found myself standing beside him at the stake, holding up a cross to him and urging him to turn to God.

  “Who is God?” he asked me.

  Around us, the other heretics were already on fire. The crowd was festive; they laughed, they sang, they jeered, they frolicked; music played, sausages were grilled, church bells rang. But it all seemed irrelevant. What transpired now was between the two of us alone.

  In my whole life, I have made love only once, and that was in shame. And yet I have heard, in the confessional, enough to know what it is like for laypersons. Lovemaking is not permitted to men who have given themselves wholly to Christ, and yet, to us inquisitors, there is an alternative. For the process of the Question is not unlike carnal knowledge of a woman.

  First, you see, there comes the foreplay, the teasing, the flirting; that is the first stage, where we try to extract the confession swiftly; yet if we succeed, it is somehow not entirely fulfilling. Then there is the physical part; the writhing, the flailing; that, you see, is the torture, and that can lead only to one thing: the final explosion of passion, the spurting of the seed; that is the confession, you see. And at last, with the violent emotions spent, comes the afterglow, the gentle conversation, the quiet descent into slumber.

  And this was the manner of conversation now, at the ultimate hour. It had a preternatural calm to it, even as the flames raged and the crowd roared about us like an ocean. There was no going back.

  He had asked me who God is, and I was bound to tell him: “God is the one who made us all, who loves us, who knows us inside out; and he dwells in Heaven. He who does not seek God is bound forever to the darkness.”

  “If that is true,” said Guillaume the Monster, his scaly face utterly serene, “then I already know God. And I am going to him now. For the being of which I am a part does dwell in the sky, and when I am cut off from him I am utterly desolate.”

  “You have rejected God,” I said. “What you call God is a Satanic lie.”

  “And what sane sentient being,” said the monster, “would not reject your God? You have made a mockery of compassion. You have twisted the truth in a thousand ways. You care only for your confessions, never for the truth itself.”

  “Repent,” I cried out, and I held the cross right up to his face. It cast a cruciform shadow on his alien features.

  “It is because you humans are all fortresses, impregnable and isolated, incapable of empathy; because you are not part of some greater consciousness, that you have invented these fanciful stories about gods and demons,” he said. “If you only knew how alone each one of you is, how incapable of the weakest psychic communion, you would despair. You would not care to live.”

  A soldier of the Secular Arm called up to me. “Come down, Father Lenclud! We need to get going, this is the last one.”

  “For the last time,” I cried out. “You can be saved if you only say a few words of repentance. You can be spared the earthly flames. You can dwell in Him, in the unity of the holy spirit—”

  “Then I am already God, for I already dwell in Him,” he said.

  And the fire began to blaze. I knew that I myself would be consumed if I did not leave. The piles of kindling crackled. The flames hissed. Already, the creature's extremities were beginning to char.

  Suddenly, at that moment, the sky abruptly darkened. A monstrous dark thing descended and blotted out the sun. A shaft of brilliant blue light shot out of the heavens and struck the heretic, and he immediately vaporized. And then it was over, and the sun shone as before.

  I looked wildly about. The revelers in the streets still danced and sang. Hawkers sold wine and food. Had no one seen what I had seen? And was the creature not gone? There were only the chains. Had my eyes played tricks on me?

  Or had this heretic really been snatched up into the sky in a chariot of darkness?

  I was troubled that night. I could not reconcile what I had seen with all that I knew and believed. Yet, as time passed, I came to believe it might have been an illusion. For the alternative made me far too uneasy. And I had to be steadfast in faith, for I had a child to raise.

  * * * *

  In the bedchamber of the new King Louis XI of France, my son Guillaume is singing. I am not permitted to enter; it is a performance for the most intimate circle of the King's friends.

  But as I wait for my son behind the arras, I realize that the song is another by that Burgundian, Dufay, whose song to the Blessed Virgin once moved Brother Paolo to demand the boy's emasculation. This is a secular song, Donnes l'Assault, in which the poet compares his lady to an impregnable castle to which he has lain siege. He speaks of battering down the gate to enjoy the treasure within. It is a bawdy song, turning images of war into double entendres. There is laughter in the bedroom; men's laughter, the high-pitched silvery laugh of a loose woman.

  I wait for the song to end. It is a tawdry song, but haunting, too. And the wounded innocence of my son's voice transforms it from a jest to a thing of vaunting beauty. Oh, the song moves me.

  For did not the other Guillaume declare that we humans were all fortresses, impregnable, doomed to be forever isolated from one another? That it was this that drove us to torture and maim and burn others to death? Oh, that is true. But it is also what gives us this yearning. Guillaume's song is filled with the unfullfillable; he sings of what he is doomed never to possess; and that is the source of its searing beauty.

  Was it for this beauty that my Guillaume gave up becoming fully a man?

  Or was it for material gain? He will be wealthy, I know; he will be a courtier. He will become far more famous than I. But he did not do it to become rich, or to know the honeyed compliments of court ladies. He did it as a proof of his love for me. He did it because I demanded it of him.

  Yet who was I to play God?

  I too have become powerful. I too have become rich. But something in me has died. Or perhaps was plucked from my soul and has ascended into the sky along with the body of my heretical monster.

  I too was transformed by the fire.

  I have sent many more to the flames since that day. I have signed many death warrants. I have consented to innumerable sessions of savage torture, and always with the knowledge that my scruples have ineluctably eroded until the act of condemning a man to an agonizing death has become but a figment of bureaucracy, a flourish of a signature.

  Am I evil? I have come to believe that I am. I care not. I accept it, because my becoming evil is the price of being allowed to love my son.

  Though the heretic from another world has proved incontrovertibly to me that Satan exists, I am, alas, no longer certain of the existence of God.

  Copyright (c) 2008 S.P. Somtow

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  * * *

  Poetry: THE LUNARCHEOLOGIST REQUESTS

  by Greg Beatty

  Don't keep diaries

  Don't take pictures.
r />   Don't be heroes.

  Don't wear sensors,

  so we don't know where you went.

  Don't mark graves, don't date them,

  so we don't know your loves

  Don't paint murals in your tunnels

  showing great battles and pure values.

  Leave the moon a mess

  so future lunarcheologists will

  know challenges, spin theories

  and land our precious tenure.

  And thank you for making

  epics, mysteries, and myths

  from that gray and dusty moon

  instead of mere industrial history.

  Unless, of course,

  you can do both.

  —

  —Greg Beatty

  Copyright (c) 2008 Greg Beatty

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: GHOST TOWN

  by Catherine Wells

  Catherine Wells is the author of Mother Grimm and several SF books and short stories. Her latest novel, Stones of Destiny (Four O'Clock Press), retells the Macbeth tale in its historical context. Readers can find out more about her works at www.sff.net/people/catherine-wells. Catherine and her husband live in Tucson, Arizona, where she runs a science and technology library. The author's first story for us, “Point of Origin,” appeared in our August 2005 issue. She returns to our pages with a haunting look at why you can't go home again, especially when home has become a...

  Ghost Town

  A shiver slid over Kaye when she saw the bright yellow house on the edge of town. It looked the same. What right did it have to look the same? The trees had grown taller, of course, and the hedge had filled in, but the toolshed still squatted by the garden patch, and the second-floor deck clung like a scaffold to the eastern side. A person would never know her parents no longer lived there, and hadn't for nearly ten years. How could it be that her home was no longer her home?

  Her rental car glided silently over the pockmarked pavement, ignoring the defects caused by freezing winters and melting snow. Cars had not been this quiet, nor this smooth, when she had left to join the first crewed expedition to leave the solar system. Lowering her window, she listened for the sounds she remembered: the call of a meadowlark, the creaking of crickets, the crunch of tires on the gravel that spilled from dirt shoulders onto the street. But the birds and insects were silent, and her rental car rode on a plasma stream, not wheels. That had been new technology when she left, fourteen years ago. Fourteen years for everyone she'd left behind.

  Only two years for her.

  The yellow house passed out of view, and she slowed to make the turn into town. With less wind noise, she finally heard other sounds: a bird call at last, a katydid's dry trill, the rustle of carrigana leaves as she passed a large hedge. Yet it all seemed off somehow, as though the orchestra were missing its woodwinds or its first violins. Where was the ambient noise of a small community? The buzz of a lawn tractor? The slam of a screen door? The voices of children at play?

  Rounding the corner, she glanced at the quiet house there, a house where she used to play with her friend Jocelyn. The willow tree wept as profusely as ever, but the tree swing was long gone, the sandbox vanished. Maybe there were no children here anymore. The local school had closed while Kaye was still a child, and it was either home schooling or—as her parents had chosen—a two-hour bus ride to a larger town. This wasn't the place to raise children now. Not enough socialization. Not enough kids for a softball game. Who still lived in this tiny village called Jubilee? Even her family had gone, though the Halstads had settled here before it had a name. I shouldn't have come, she thought for the hundredth time. There's nothing here for me.

  Her sister Rita had insisted they meet here. “I've got a surprise for you! Meet me in front of the old post office,” she had instructed. Though Kaye had suspected it was a bad idea, she didn't know how to tell Rita that. Rita had been twenty-one when Kaye shipped out, just finishing her bachelor's degree and crying because Kaye wouldn't be there for her graduation. But it was only supposed to be two years. She wasn't supposed to miss Rita's wedding, too, and the birth of her twins, and her divorce, and her promotion to VP of Human Resources. The Razavi stabilizer was supposed to negate the Doppler effect on the revolutionary faster-than-light spacecraft. It had been tested time and again before they sent humans outside the solar system.

  The house at the end of the block looked odd to her eye. The Moores’ place had always been white and unkempt, a working man's house. Now the lawn had been trimmed up, the rambling foliage neatly pruned, and the house painted a fashionable shade of cinnamon. She wondered if the Moores had moved away, and who lived there now. Someone must—the place looked so tidy. Too tidy. She tried not to shudder as she turned another corner.

  Around a bend and up a short hill sat the yellow house. An ache filled her as she approached; she wanted to walk through it once more, to see the familiar furniture in the living room, to have one final look at all the dishes and curios in the hutch. She wanted to help her mother with the packing, to load the linens into cartons, to box up the files from Dad's office, to sort through the cartons of games and toys, the detritus of her childhood. She wanted to put it all to rest. But a strange vehicle was parked in the driveway and she glided past, knowing it was too late. Her parents had closed the family store ten years ago and moved to Jamestown, where they could still make a living. Someone else lived in the yellow house now. Someone she had never met.

  Taking a deep breath, she left the house behind and drove slowly up the three blocks to the old post office. The absence of cars on the streets felt spooky. True, there had never been many even when she was growing up here, but shouldn't there be some parked somewhere, at least? She craved the scenes of her youth: A stakebed truck at the lone gas pump. A pickup parked outside Mort's Bar. Two cars stopped in the middle of the street, their windows rolled down as the drivers talked to each other and spit the shells of sunflower seeds out onto the road. This was eerie, as if aliens had abducted the inhabitants, or the Rapture had taken them all away to Glory.

  But it's not the town, it's me, she realized. I'm the alien. I'm the ghost, a shade from the past. Maybe I'm not really here, just a restless spirit wandering back to haunt the places where I grew up—

  Then she spotted Rita's cheery little Upstart coupe just up the street, parked in front of the tiny building that had once been Jubilee's post office. The car gleamed in the afternoon sun, not a speck of dust on it. Why was there no dust on it? This was farmland, and the wind whistling over the fields should have put a fine layer of Dakota dirt on everything that passed through. But some new technology gave cars the ability to shed dust the way a duck shed water. As Kaye climbed out of her rental car, she realized it, too, was clean and sparkling.

  I'm the one with the dust, she thought, and had an image of herself emerging from some overgrown tomb. She felt as if cobwebs clung to her, slowing her movements, slowing her wits.

  The old post office building had been a subdued cream color when Kaye was growing up, worthy of a government office. Now it was a vibrant chartreuse and sported a holographic sign that read “Lacey's Gifts.” As she stared at it, the door flew open, setting off a tinkling of shop bells, and out bounced Rita. Blond like Kaye, she sported a short haircut and artful makeup. Fashionable clothes hugged a body that was fit-looking without losing its softness, designed for the boardroom and not a spacecraft's grav-deck. Kaye's own muscles were toughened by physical labor and rigorous conditioning, granting her an economy of movement that was more efficient than graceful. Even now, with no reason to stay in shape, she kept at it. Her career was as stunted as her emotions: who would put her on another spacecraft, with her outmoded skills and archaic knowledge? But using her muscles kept her grounded, made her feel she was connected to something. To her own body, at least.

  “Lovesy!” Rita squealed, rushing to give Kaye a hug. It was a term that had come into fashion recently, and it m
ade Kaye want to vomit. But she smiled wanly and returned her sister's embrace, if with less enthusiasm. This was supposed to be her younger sister, the one she had tutored in math and warned against the dangers of letting a boy put his hand on your knee. The one she had yelled at for losing her favorite hairbrush and sworn to secrecy when she slipped out to meet Dusty Watson. Rita was now thirty-five years old with two kids and an MBA; Kaye was just twenty-six.

  “Isn't this cute, what Lacey has done with the old Post Office?” Rita gushed.

  Kaye glanced at the building again and her stomach did a slow roll. “Yeah, cute. What's this surprise you have for me?” And why couldn't you have given it to me at Mom and Dad's condo in Jamestown, where I didn't have to see all of this?

  “It's this way. Come on!” Rita took her hand and led Kaye up the street a dozen yards to a small stuccoed building that fronted directly on the sidewalk.

  Kaye blinked as she tried to recall it. “Grandma Olsen's house, right?” She remembered the stack of old board games her friend's grandmother had kept in a closet, and how they had played those old games for hours on lazy summer afternoons. “I don't suppose she still lives here.”

  “No,” Rita said smugly. “I do.”

  Kaye blinked again and tried to make sense of the information. “You live here? In Jubilee?”

  “No, silly! This is my vacation house, my private retreat. When the twins go to visit their dad, or when I get loaded down at work, I pop out here to relax.” Her smile turned a bit wistful. “I sleep better out here.”

  Kaye was trying to imagine relaxing in a town that felt so empty.