Asimov's SF, February 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Jive caught himself with an audible obscenity.

  "No call for that language, sir,” a young blonde mother said, rebuking him with a scowl as she turned her child away.

  Apologize? Damn it, no. He was furious with himself, with the way he'd allowed the absurd obsessions of gullible people to draw his unconscious into betraying what he knew for a fact. The train was pulling into Brooklyn; he pushed his way to the door. One consolation: if he'd taken a cab he'd have been cooler, yes, and the ride smoother, but he'd still be trapped somewhere in traffic-lock, probably. With the meter ticking.

  The so-called thanatorium was within walking distance of High Street station. His headache was easing, and his dyspepsia.

  A long-jawed, raw-boned specimen in a stained lab coat introduced him, the head of engineering, Dr. Samuels. Bart Samuels asked him to say a few preparatory words on behalf of the oversight entity of their funding body.

  "Very well, gentlemen. And lady,” Jive told the assembled nerds and geeks in the traditional garb of their professions or trades. “Let me make one thing clear. I don't want to hear any claptrap—and I believe I speak for the Aktiengesellschaft in saying this—about discarnate souls, or cross-overs, or unnucleated thetans.” The nerds lounged as if they were taking an authorized anti-stress break, sucking their Prozac spansules, and stared at him without interest, dully. The one woman scientist or engineer actually rolled her eyes. Then, to his disbelief, she poked out her tongue, not at him but for her own entertainment, rolled it as well, and stared cross-eyed at its purplish tip. This was impudence beyond his capacity to cope. He took his seat abruptly, turning his back on most of them. Samuels signalled a bored audiovisual geek to activate the bank of some twenty antique television receivers arrayed like something out of the Apollo project command room three-quarters of a century earlier.

  The screens took an agonizingly long moment to come alive, as tubes warmed and electrons skittered about inside magnetic fields. One by one, then, the grey screens lit up with images: two repeats of I Love Lucy and one of Gunsmoke, broadcast on the free-to-view channels, and a maddening diorama of meaningless, unscripted, silently parading men, women, and children. The Family of Man, Jive told himself, half-hysterically, recalling a book his grandma had loved and made him leaf through every time he and his sisters visited her in the nursing home. Gone these two score years, God bless her. And here were the same faces of every nation, peering out into the drab humming, shuffling, and rustling of the ad hoc, modified media lab.

  One of the nerds came forward to a podium. “We've had trained law enforcement lip readers examine the images, Mr. Bolen,” he said in a bored, impudent tone. “Most of them are speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and dialectal variants. There's an admixture of other major languages, of course, including German, Arabic, English, French, Spanish—"

  "Chinese, you say!” Jive cried.

  "They seem to be lost and looking for their families. The popular rumor that they are so-called ‘thays’ or thetans is not borne out by synoptic analysis of the recorded utterances to date. The more articulate among their number are asking for our aid, the assistance of living scientists. Hence this briefing. We are not authorized to—"

  "Aid? Aid? Crap! A scheme to divert our remaining resources to ideological lunatics who wish to see the planet's climate disrupted, to their own sectional advantage.” Although what benefit could accrue to anyone other than the Inuits he couldn't imagine. Least of all those closer to the tropics.

  "Sir, we do have a few ideas about what's causing this manifestation,” said Bart Samuels. “It seems likely that the soletta structure is intercepting or even enhancing insolation in the cerebral theta range. Despite racist rumors of a geopolitical flavor—"

  Jive cut him off. “Listen, don't give me any moralizing hocus-pocus and run-around,” he said angrily, remaining seated but raising his voice so nobody in the room would miss his import. “Three weeks ago, I saw a man throw himself from a tenth story window, driven to desperation by these preposterous ... things." He flung one hand at the screens. “First he'd torn his TV set off the wall, and thrown it into the street, where the goddamned thing nearly killed me. Then he jumped after it, and did kill himself. This is not a new furtive viral advertising campaign. It is not a political ploy by some misguided faction of the American Unterschicht or sotto classe."

  He rose, faced the useless pointy-headed drones, then looked back up in rage at the drifting images of despair. If what the screen displayed was truly hell, or some other version of the afterlife, as Tilly and Jolene claimed, it undercut everything a man could believe, could work toward in his career. How could you bring children into a world if this abomination was their destiny? “No," he roared, with the deep-throated power of a Baptist choir baritone. “A fraud! These are computer-generated engrams projected into our living rooms on stolen citizen satellite channels by the Chinese national zaibatsus. Or, if not them, revanchists in the Saudi peninsula. They can't be...” His voice drained away, suddenly, as an image caught his eye. Bile rose in his throat. “Oh my dear god. Granny Bolen? Can that be you?"

  An old woman's face peered down at him from the closest orthicon tube display, and in a series of snapping jumps copied itself across all of the banked monitors. The muted mutter of Desi Arnaz and James Arness was wiped away. Jive Bolen stared up at his dead grandmother, who looked back in terror at him from twenty grey windows. Her wrinkled hands pressed the inner edges of the screens, and her mouth moved, again and again, in a sort of voiceless screaming supplication. Jive felt his own lips mimic the movements of her mute mouth. Help me, he mouthed back, mirroring her cry. Get me out of here, little Jevon. Aloud, Jive said, softly, “Help me.” Tears ran down his cheeks.

  * * * *

  Hammerlock Ganji reached Jive on his phone as he waited impatiently in the research thanatorium lobby for his cab back to the city.

  "You're better off waiting there until things calm down, chief,” the secretary told him, licking lips nervously.

  "Tarry in Brooklyn? Don't be absurd, Ganji.” A small red gypsy cab pulled up outside the plate glass lobby. God, is that what we've sunk to now, in our effort to attain a low fiscal profile? Through the dirty vehicle window he saw a villainous wild-haired import from Turkestan or points farther east apparently shouting into an old-fashioned mic with a helical cable. A moment later the cool receptionist crossed the carpet and murmured that his ride awaited. Jive gave her a reflex smile and nod, and went out into the soletta-muted sunlight. A disturbing tang hung in the air. Wood smoke? He coughed, suddenly. Something more toxic than that.

  "Get in, mister, you want a ride,” the driver told him, pushing the passenger door open from the inside. “We gotta move fast, before anyone catches on we're coming from this science place."

  "What?” Jive had no chance to buckle up before the cabbie took off with a screech. They tore through a small crowd of scowling citizens who loitered at the gates of the lab. What the hell? There was a thud, and another. “For the love of sweet Harry,” he cried, “those fools are throwing rocks at you."

  "Not me, professor—you.” He gunned the little car's electric hybrid engine, flung it onto the feeder to the bridge. Jive ducked his tall head, wound down the filthy window. Streamers and pillars of smoke were slowly drifting upward from the Manhattan skyline, billowing into the damaged sunlight. “Blogs are saying kill all scientists."

  "I'm not a scientist, I'm a ... a high-status administrator.” For some reason, saying so made Jive Bolen feel profoundly ashamed. “It's part of my duties to oversee the efforts of bona-fide researchers in the domain of—” He broke off. “Christ, why am I explaining myself to a gypsy hack? Just get me to the zeugma, and step on it."

  His homeowatch and phone were both peeping; he shifted his mind into high, concentrated gear. A thudding racket ahead pulled up his head. A laden moving van had ploughed into two or three cars illegally stopped at the edge of the feeder. The ‘stanner cursed or prayed vehemently, perhaps in th
e name of Allah, and jerked them to one side, skidding past the pile-up. God almighty, men stood by the side of the road with rifles and shotguns. The windshield starred, shattered, fell into fragments of safety glass. Ganji said, faintly, like a voice of conscience, “Bolen, the thays want all the scientists dead. The streets are clogged with crazies who agree with them. Just get the hell off the road and lay low for a—"

  Impact jarred his teeth. The door beside him sprang open, and Jive tumbled bruisingly to the road surface. Pain tore up his right arm as his hand broke at the wrist. He lost consciousness. The pain was gone. He lay in the silent, empty street for minutes or hours, passing in and out of clarity. People were moving past him. Nobody stopped to help. The damn world's gone mad, he told himself. It's been a powder keg ready to go bang ever since the hothouse shock really struck home, when we realized we needed to spend every penny the world makes putting up that shield in space. And Christ knows what that's done, in addition. He seemed for a moment to be back in the Wee Kirk i’ the Glen, hearing obese, powerful Sister Mary Magdalene belt out the verses of “God of Earth and Outer Space,” that sprightly Baptist hymnal entry by the Welshman Joseph Parry. He smiled in the grey twilight. A lot they knew about outer space back then, in the nineteenth century. Sister Mary powered away as he piped along in the choir, with his sisters singing lustily. Where are they, he asked himself. Where are my sisters? At length Jive stumbled to his feet, holding his brutalized right arm tenderly with his left hand against his breast. Now that he was home again, he could get it looked at by competent medical practitioners. After that terrible near-accident, escaping from it shakily, stumbling inside his apt, he found Aunt Tilly absent. Of course, she was staying for several days upstairs with those pleasant dykes. A nice couple, for all their gene-reproductive dysfunction. He walked through the house, and with increasing alarm found that his wife and children were also gone. Plaintively, he called their names. “Angelina, where are you, honeypie? Barack, you scamp? Come out, come out.” Silence, and the rustle of strangers inside his home. “Delphine, you bitch!” He found himself on the ground floor and wandered in the smoke-filled streets. Others were drifting along as if dazed, staring into windows, some in the middle of the streets. Why was the traffic stalled? Someone caught his sleeve, spoke urgently, but he couldn't seem to hear the man's voice. The man raised a crudely wrought sign, rendered in thick black marker pen ink on the back, evidently, of an advertising poster: SEND THE SEINTISTS OVER, THEY HAV 2 HELP US. A flicker of motion caught his eye, reflected in the side window of a motionless Hyundai sedan. Behind the curved window, half-seen, the driver sat, listening to his phone. Reflected in the glass, faces passed, jumbled and unfamiliar. Terrified, Jive shook his head in denial. He sat edgily in his favorite armchair, activated the HDTV to distract himself and settle his nerves. The machine wasn't working right. A new emetic virus attack? His daughter's monochrome face contorted in the wide frame of the image. He lumbered to his feet, went to the out-of-order plasma image. The child rushed away behind the screen and returned with his wife and son, who peered in apparent horror at the camera. When was this home movie shot? He couldn't recall. Where is Tilly? In the monochrome, silent background, he watched Delphine turn her head, walk with her head clasped in her hands like a mime doing an impression of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Gentle love, he thought absurdly, recalling Dowland, Draw forth thy wounding dart. She opened the front door. Upheaval in the background, black and white gouts of flame and smoke. People were running, striking each other. Two cops stood, hats in hand, unhappy, bearing bad news Jive Bolen could not bear to hear.

  —to Phil's memory, of course

  Copyright © 2010 Damien Broderick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: THE WOMAN WHO WAITED FOREVER by Bruce McAllister

  Bruce McAllister has just finished his first novel in twenty years. The book is tentatively titled The Village That Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic and includes the haunting tale of “The Woman Who Waited Forever” as one of its episodes. The author gleefully tells us that he is almost done with a second novel as well, and that he has stories forthcoming in F&SF, Cemetery Dance, and Albedo One.

  * * * *

  Love is never finished.

  —Thomas Mann

  * * * *

  The military, like every other world, has its social classes, with an impossible chasm between officer and enlisted—something that even a foxhole or military hospital has a hard time breaking down, and something that will always be haunted by the dead whispering of injustice. When you're the son of a Naval Academy graduate, you know that those crewcut, knockdown, book-avoiding kids on the school bus with you in the sunny port of San Diego are going to play rough touch football with their dads while you play a dignified game of tennis with yours, that their families will ride loud power boats on the bay while yours prefers the grace of sailboats, and that yours will belong to a sedate yacht club while theirs will throw rowdy barbecues on public beaches. Those kids wouldn't be caught dead doing what you're asked to do at the parties your father and mother have for the other officer families, namely, helping serve hors d'oeuvres in little mahogany bowls. In fact, they'd probably pants you if they caught you doing it. All because they're the sons of the enlisted, while you're the son of a three-striper.

  You may envy them their confidence and scars, but even at your age you know that family is destiny. The privileged, though cursed by their own ghosts, are still privileged, wouldn't have it any other way, and haven't since the beginning of time, whether in war or peace.

  So it was a shock, especially to the adults, to encounter—when my father was stationed with NATO in Europe during the Cold War—an officer's family that didn't behave like one at all, that acted “enlisted,” and that, because it did, threatened the cosmological order of things in the tiny community of officer families at that NATO center in northern Italy. The two sons, Keith and Bobby, could certainly have held their own with those enlisted Army, Navy, and Marine kids on that school bus in San Diego. And the daughter—well, the daughter could have held her own, too, but in other ways.

  Their father was a commander, too, like mine—Commander John Speer—and there were strange things about the family beyond the fact that his two sons, Keith, at fifteen, and Bobby, at eighteen, were tough as nails, boasting, in fact, as one of their favorite pastimes, shooting lit cigarettes out of each other's mouths with a .22. Their sister—whose name, Chastity, said it all—was a model United Nations, that is, she had the hots for any boy of any nationality she could find; and find them she did at Lungamara, the swimming cove where the families of officers from Italy, America, Germany, and France—those who worked at the NATO Center thirty minutes north in the industrial port of La Creccia—could sun themselves on the weekends and swim in the crystal-clear waters of the Ligurian Sea. Chastity was, we all knew, “sexually active,” though the term we all used was the much less clinical “slut.” To the adults, Chastity's mother was one too, but for the strangest reason: She was pregnant at forty-five. Her husband was the father of the baby, of course; but in those days, you just didn't have a kid at forty-five with a fifteen-year difference between your youngest kids. It was a scandal, and the part that family would play in a story of love's denial of death couldn't change that.

  I'd learned enough Italian with a tutor our first summer there that I was attending middle school in the little fishing village where we lived. The Speer boys, however, were being educated at a monastery near Rome, so they weren't around much; and when they were, I was supposed to play with them because they were officer's kids, too, but also because my parents didn't know what troublemakers they were. I wondered if the monks beat them. I couldn't imagine them obeying fat little men in brown robes. I couldn't imagine them obeying their father either, but for all I knew he was, behind closed doors, even tougher than the monks were.

  Why I played with them, scary as they were, I don't know; but they had that weird charisma all bad boys have for bo
ys who are a little too “good.” They're the stuff of our secret fantasies: “If I had the courage—and wouldn't get in trouble—that's what I'd do too—shoot cigarettes out of someone's mouth with a gun!"

  "Speer? What nationality is that?” I asked Keith one day as we headed down from my family's villetta, our little house, to the next cove, his brother somewhere else for a change.

  "What do you mean—nationality? We're Americans, asshole."

  He'd call you every name in the book, but he'd still hang out with you. Whether he really liked you, you never knew; but he'd appear and want to hang out because you were the only thing available.

  "I know that, Keith. I mean, your people—your ancestors—what country did they come from?"

  He was staring at me as if I was accusing him of something.

  "My people are from Scotland,” I said stupidly, trying to make the sparks leave the air. “But that was a couple hundred years ago."

  "Well, la-di-da, Brad."

  We walked on for a while. Why was he so upset?

  "It's a German name,” he said at last, “but that doesn't mean we're Nazis."

  "I wasn't saying you were a Nazi.” I wanted to laugh, but this was a serious matter for him. I wanted to say, “Nobody's a Nazi now, Keith—World War II was a long time ago,” but didn't.

  "Gee, thanks."

  "Why ... why would anyone think you're a Nazi?"

  "Because of the name."

  "I didn't even know it was German."

  We kept walking and, just as I'd given up on an answer, Keith said: