Asimov's SF, December 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She wiped her eyes. It had been night only a little while ago, and now there was sunlight outside her windows. She sat up and looked across the room. Cyril's bed was gone, and in its place stood a small bookcase and a painted chest of drawers.

  “Cyril,” she whispered, and then saw that the green bedroom walls were now yellow. This isn't my room, she thought, suddenly frightened; Maerleen had sent her somewhere else. She sank to the floor and put her hands over her eyes. She was dreaming; that had to be what was happening. All she had to do was wake up and everything would be the way it had been.

  “Addie?”

  She turned her head. Her father stood in the doorway, his tie loosened, his jacket draped over one arm. “I could have sworn—” He shook his head. “Came up to look for you a few minutes ago, and you weren't here. How'd you get past me?”

  She did not know what to say. For a moment, she had the feeling that someone else was in the room with her and her father. “I was here all the time,” she said, although that wasn't what she had meant to say. Maerleen took us both away, but she brought me back. That was what she wanted to say. She struggled to recall what the woman had said to her.

  He frowned. “What's the matter? Is something wrong?”

  She shook her head. The woman had a strange name, but she couldn't remember what it was.

  “Then come on downstairs. Dinner's almost ready.” He moved away from the door; she got up and followed him into the hall. The door to the room down the hallway was open; she glanced inside as they passed and saw blue curtains and a Brooklyn Dodgers pennant on the wall.

  She darted into the room. A baseball glove sat on top of a dresser, and a pair of sneakers on top of a blue rug. Through the half-open doorway of the small closet, she glimpsed a couple of pairs of pants draped over hangers. This wasn't the way this room should look, she thought, but could not remember what it had looked like before.

  “Your brother's downstairs,” her father said.

  She turned around. “Gary's downstairs,” her father continued, “and I hope you're not going to get into a fight with him at dinner. Your mother says you two were really going at it this morning.”

  She ran from the room, pushed past him, and headed for the stairs. Her hand gripped the railing as a boy appeared at the bottom of the stairwell; he pulled off a baseball cap to reveal white-blond hair.

  “Cyril,” she whispered. But this boy wasn't Cyril. A woman in shorts and a sleeveless white shirt appeared next to the boy; her smile was so open and her gaze so steady that it took Addie a few seconds to recognize her mother.

  “Addie,” her mother said, “what's the matter?”

  Addie stared down at the boy. “You're not Cyril.” She tried to remember who Cyril was.

  “What are you talking about?” the boy shouted. “I'm Gary, your brother. Or are you too dumb to know?”

  “But then what about . . .” Addie turned toward her father. “What about the twins?”

  “What twins?” Her father looked really worried now. Addie took a step toward him, then ran past him back to her room.

  She had lost something. She could not escape that thought. Maybe it was still here, somewhere in her room. She dropped to her knees and looked under the bed, but saw only a pair of sandals and a few dust balls. As she stood up, she noticed shadows on the wall. She had seen them so many times before, miniature silhouettes of cars, reflections of the traffic in the street outside her window.

  She sat down on her bed and watched the shadows flicker across the yellow wall.

  “Addie?” Her mother came into the room, trailed by her father and brother. “Is everything all right?”

  She had gone to her room earlier to read; that was coming back to her now. “I'm okay,” she replied.

  “Are you sure?” her mother continued. “You must have been up here all afternoon.”

  “I'm fine,” Addie insisted. “I was going to read for a while, but I must have fallen asleep.” She looked over at the bookcase. She had taken a storybook out of the town library a few days ago; that was the book she had planned to read that afternoon.

  Gary made a face at her, screwing up his eyes and sneering. Their father put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, slugger,” he said to the boy. “Might as well head downstairs and wash up before supper.” The two retreated down the hallway.

  The reflections on the wall had blurred. “Strawberry birdies,” Addie said.

  “What did you say?” her mother asked.

  Addie pointed at the shadows. “Strawberry birdies,” she repeated, not knowing where those words came from, but feeling that they fit the shadows somehow. The sense of something lost came over her again and then faded.

  Copyright © 2011 by Pamela Sargent

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  * * *

  Short Story: THE LIST

  by Tim McDaniel

  One wonders what The News of the World, and other unscrupulous types, would make of . . .

  The front door—that's where they would come through. The house did have a back door, in the kitchen, but there were piles of bricks, scraps of wood, and collapsed cardboard boxes filling that entranceway, as if one of the former tenants had raided demolition sites and tornado leftovers and piled his takings there, God knew why. If anyone came that way, it'd cause a lot of racket, and the junk would slow them down, give Kurt time to blow them to hell.

  Kurt sucked the life out of his last cigarette and threw it to the ground. It had been a long night, and there was really only one way it could end. At the time—when he'd pried the list out of Hunter Martinez’ bloody grip—he'd thought he'd finally struck paydirt, silver and gold, the end of all his troubles. Instead, robbing the dead Mexican had bought him a ticket to nowhere good.

  Someone had boarded up the windows, so Kurt couldn't see the outside sky. But he knew the sun wouldn't be up yet. The house was cold; the fire he'd had going in the little fireplace had burned itself out. Kurt dragged his dainty wooden chair closer, to allow his back to benefit from the remnants of heat escaping from the ashes. Winter. If he survived the night, he'd go somewhere where winter never happened.

  His eyes grew heavy again. Too long with no sleep, but if he dropped off now he would miss whatever small chance he would have, when they finally came for him.

  He looked down at the list. Just a bunch of names, and not just kids either, with notes after each one. But enough material to blackmail anyone he cared to, for however much he would think to ask for—yet he knew it was unlikely he'd ever have the chance to use it. Everyone else—everyone, from Big Red to the corner pot dealer—wanted that list, and eventually they would figure out where he'd gone to ground, and come for it.

  Who originally had obtained the list, Kurt didn't know. Big Red ran a tight outfit, and things like this didn't normally slip through his fat fingers. Sure, it must have been an inside job—maybe The Dentist, maybe another of the Little Crew—but once let loose in the world the list had changed hands more times than he could count.

  Hunter, he knew, had got it off of Nucifora, and chances were good Nucifora had got it off of Rusty Ippolito and the Fake Belgian. And then after Kurt got it, he'd had to dodge Yuri, hanging for once with Lemon Lee. Talk about odd couples.

  He wouldn't have to worry about them anymore, but he figured Emiliano would be coming along, with Lowlife. Emiliano. Why would he hang with a guy whose name no one knew? Then again, Emiliano had no standards. He'd turned on Kurt after the chop shop bust fast enough.

  Or maybe Big Red himself would be coming for it. God knows he wasn't a stranger to getting his own gloves dirty, and he had some pretty serious home-cooked custom-made shit.

  Shit. His eyes jerked open. He must have fallen asleep; the fire's embers had died out completely, nothing but cooling ash in the fireplace.

  But he thought he saw a sliver of light under the door. Daylight? Was this long night finally ending? And if he had survived it—well, another day. Another chance to get out. If he k
ept his head, he could choose one, maybe two off the list, get them to fork over the cash and unload the list on them, let them take the coming truckload of crap. He wouldn't get greedy. That's what caught all those guys. They didn't know when to quit.

  Another hour. He'd wait another hour, and if was still all quiet, he'd slip a board off a window in the back, get to the parking lot at the train station, and steal a car. He'd drive until the gas ran out, then find a payphone in whatever town he ended up in, choose a name from the list, and make the call.

  Yeah. He could do this. If Emiliano had known where he'd gone, he'd have come already. And Big Red had connections all over, but even he couldn't see everything. An hour, when the parking lot was filled, then he could run. The train station was maybe ten minutes away, if he moved slow and careful. Once in the car, he'd stop for nothing.

  Kurt swallowed. Yeah.

  From behind him, a soft sound—just some bit of soot or something falling into the ashes in the fireplace.

  Kurt looked again at the door. No one there, and it was almost time to go. He opened the gun, checked to make sure it was ready. He checked it twice.

  A presence behind him. Kurt started to swing the gun around, but a meaty, gloved hand closed on it, inexorable. But how—

  Damn. The fireplace. He'd forgotten about Big Red's thing with chimneys.

  “Ho, ho, ho, asshole,” was the last thing Kurt heard.

  Copyright © 2011 byTim McDaniel

  * * * *

  "His insights will of course be sorely missed—but this does imply that we're on the right track."

  * * * *

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  * * *

  Novelette: EPHEMERA

  by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Steve Rasnic Tem's new novel, Deadfall Hotel, will be published as a limited hardcover by Centipede Press this fall, followed by Solaris Books mass market and ebook editions in May. His collection of noir fiction, Ugly Behavior, appears from New Pulp Press in 2012, and Crossroad Press just released an audio edition of his novel The Book of Days. In his latest story for Asimov's, Steve takes us into the future to pensively examine many different aspects of . . .

  It was disturbing, the things you forgot. If it was an appointment there were technologies to remind you with floating images and messages across your walls and ceilings, or even an urgent voice delivering an emphatic reminder directly into your ear, repeated every thirty seconds if desired. And for birthdays, holidays, Daniel had the recorders running, so he always had at least a half dozen angles of his son opening presents. But for the random moments that changed an attitude or defined a new perspective, recording devices were seldom on hand, leaving only unreliable memory.

  They'd taken their son to the beach. He'd been only a few months past two, and it had been a fake beach fronting a fake ocean—the real ones being too nasty or too difficult to reach within the prevailing travel cautions. Lex had come into the world during the middle of the last of three major Asian pandemics, a nightmarish period for parents around the world. The airlines never quite recovered, and neither Daniel nor Trish imagined they'd ever travel again. But the sand seemed real enough, and whatever the water might be it was still wet, and apparently mostly water, and crept up the shore the way water will.

  Lex giggled at the way the sand mushed around his fingers, but became increasingly alarmed at how it gathered stubbornly under his nails and into every crevice. The more his little hands slapped at it, the more tightly it clung. But he gotused to it, then loved it.

  What he loved more was making his marks: loops and curlicues and more-or-less parallel tracks that seemed purposeful—given the serious faces he tried on while making them—like some intuited alphabet or hand-crafted math. When the tide came in, triggered by some anonymous stranger in a hidden booth, Lex grew distraught as his marks washed away, and they'd left.

  In the years of accumulating, studied detail since then, Daniel had forgotten the incident. Then a few days ago, triggered by a report on consumer behavior and a news item on the rapid decline of America's beaches, he pieced together a recollection. The details of a life faded all too quickly into the tide if someone didn't pay attention.

  Daniel knew the world as a repository of overwhelming detail. In an earlier age you could be local, you could filter, you could ignore. Now the data came in floods, and some very large companies and even a few governments trusted and paid for his attention.

  The desk underneath his fingers went from a cool and depthless pool to a hallucinogenic array of computational, communications, and entertainment displays rearrangeable with finger gestures and voice commands. Most of the words and images related to preprogrammed queries whose results he could read quickly for the clients who paid him an analysis fee.

  Although this ocean of information was still frequently referred to as the “web,” that had ceased to be an adequate metaphor some time ago. The world of electronic information was now much more fabric-like. Information came to him in fields and flows and transformational currents that he had to ride skillfully or drown in the surrounding irrelevancies.

  Daniel knew better than most what a volatile and dangerous place the world had become. Perhaps it had always been this way, but now the dangers could be minutely and obsessively dissected. Sometimes he could feel himself succumbing to all the implications—and with a child to raise.

  Too often he felt that contemporary life had become like an escape from a burning building. The reasonable thing was to grab only what was essential as you made your desperate race for the door. But it's hard to act reasonably when you're living inside a fire.

  Daniel's desk rippled gently with blue light. “Ascher appointment in fifteen minutes,” it murmured.

  He tapped the desk and a library of old books displayed over the walls of his office, except for a strip above the door where framed LP covers from the 1960s and ‘70s—Aqualung, RubberSoul, LetItBleed—were showcased, and a vertical rectangle on the right where a physical bookcase of wood-grained plastics stood, half-filled with his tangible book collection, each volume wrapped in a protective zelloprene sleeve. New volumes in his virtual collection had golden stars floating over the spines.

  His eyes strayed to the right corner of his desk where Lex had placed several new drawings, executed with aggressive strokes of compressed pigment on expensive sheets of handmade paper. On the top sheet was a monkey swinging through a jungle, its arms and legs loose and rubbery and stretching all the way across the page. Several additional arms and legs had been added. Daniel thought, “spider monkey.” The rest of the page was filled with complementing coiled trunks and giant leaves and tropical birds distorted curvaceously. The drawing had a cartoony style but the use of color was bold and exciting.

  He had hundreds of such drawings in files, although these days kids were given electronic slates whose images could be stored theoretically forever. Trish wanted Lex's drawings scanned and archived and the originals disposed of—but he'd been unable to get rid of a single one. To get rid of even one piece seemed a betrayal of Lex's evolving self. One by one he laid the drawings face down on a red dot shimmering near the middle of his desktop, scanned them into memory and backups, then placed them carefully into a sealed box under his desk for later archiving.

  “Daniel?” His wife's voice fluttered moth-like over the desk. “Daniel, there's a man here. Should I tell him you're busy?”

  Daniel used both hands to spread open a virtual window in the desktop. Ascher's greasy gray collapse of hair was unmistakable as the old guy bent to peer into their front door's eye. He suddenly realized just how much Antonio Ascher resembled that figure on one of his album covers: Jethro Tull's “Aqualung.”

  Daniel had bought his first edition Life on the Mississippi from Antonio Ascher as well as several other ancient Twains. Trish avoided even physical contact with the old books, but as far as Daniel was concerned there was still room for a few more. “That's Mr. Ascher. Ask him in, Trish.”

 
; A static buzz hovered over the desk. Trish had opened the channel, but wasn't speaking. Finally she said, “I thought you always met him in public places, like out at that People's Mall?”

  “I don't always have time to get out there. I invited him over.” Then he added, “Trish, he's harmless.”

  She didn't reply, but Daniel could see their front door opening, Aqualung shambling inside. Trish kept her back against the wall, gesturing him forward. Daniel went to his office door and let him in.

  He did smell a bit, but no worse than some of Daniel's friends who lathered on exotic fruit and vegetable washes. Ascher's face appeared clean and perhaps too vigorously scrubbed for their meeting. He wore one of those formerly popular wear-once-and-throw-away smocks, a common concert giveaway. A faded figure with decaying mouth and eyes dominated the back, but the rest had evaporated into a cloud. Here and there the supporting fibers were exposed, reinforced with tape. A soft bag with a stained pavement pattern hung from his shoulder.

  Daniel imagined Ascher had never seen anything like his virtual library and prepared to be complimented.

  “Your office is a bit empty,” Ascher said. “I hadn't expected that, since I know you're a book lover.” Daniel was at a loss. “It's just that you don't have much in here. The desk, that little bookcase—some nice books, by the way—I recognize a few you bought from me. A few great old album covers, and this lovely library pictorial on your walls. It doesn't feel much like a working space to me. I brought a couple of books for you to look at.” Ascher plopped into Daniel's chair without permission and began rummaging through his bag.

  Daniel held his annoyance in check, remembering how little sense of manners Ascher had shown when he'd seen him at the People's Mall. He had been generally gruff and appeared to enjoy insulting the tastes of potential customers. But for some reason Daniel very much wanted to please this man. “Keeping tight control over the number of objects around me helps me focus. I deal with massive amounts of electronic data—I don't want my environment to distract.”