Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Are you all right? Should I call 911?”

  “Oh, please don't. They always make such a fuss. Just the water will be fine.” Between sips, she said, “I was having a—a discussion with my daughter this morning, and I believe it tired me out more than I realized. Which is odd, you know, because we didn't argue. I'm finished with all that. Finally. For years I've tried to help her.” Sip. “All my life, it seems. And she always ends up as badly off as before, if not worse. At long last I've accepted that. All of it, including my own part in it. I felt quite kindly disposed toward her, when we spoke today. I told her I forgave her, and I do.” Sip. “What I didn't tell her—I don't know that it would have served any purpose—was that I also forgave myself. Looking back on it, I don't believe I could have done a single thing any differently. There's something very freeing about understanding that. Today I don't believe I'd change a single thing about my entire life. It's all been perfect, perfect, even the parts that at the time seemed quite horrid. I expect you don't understand. You will, one day.”

  She set the glass on a table at her elbow and looked around. “Is that a gramophone? My goodness, look at that! I haven't seen one since—oh, since the forties. And you have records! I must look at them.” She stood up, a little unsteadily—Joan was afraid for a moment she was going to have to catch her—and tottered over to the gramophone, an old hand-cranked model with a large bell. Three or four records were sitting beside it, and she picked up the top one. “Louis Armstrong—'King Porter Stomp.’ We used to dance to this, when I was a girl. It was so jazzy! It made you feel quite alive, dancing to it, sixteen and you knew you'd be young forever. Could I play it? Does the machine work? I'd love to hear it again.”

  Joan didn't actually know whether the gramophone worked. Nobody had ever asked. She fitted the disc onto the turntable and inspected the mechanism uncertainly. “Here, let me do it,” the woman said. She gave the crank a few deft twists and set the needle in the groove.

  The tinny, scratchy sound of old-time jazz rang out in the station. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Oh, yes.” She took a hesitant dance step, then another. She set her purse on the chair, swung her arms, snapped her fingers.

  The beat set Joan's toe tapping too. She marveled at the lively sound pouring out of the ancient gramophone. The clarinet and trumpet wailed, the bass and drums throbbed as if the band were right here in the room. The very floor was rumbling. The old woman danced down the aisle, skipping, nodding her head. Ninety-three and moving so nimbly?

  The rumble got louder. Quite distinctly Joan heard a railroad train pulling into the station—the whistle, the deep chuff of the engine, the hiss of the brakes. The broad double doors at the rear of the room, which had once opened onto the platform, when there was a platform, had been boarded up for years, the windows painted over, but when the old woman reached the doors and touched the latch they swung slowly, ponderously open.

  A dazzle of milky light poured in, flooding the room. The woman danced out into the light, the music rippling around her, and her figure was slim, her hair dark, her step light and eager, and she never turned to look back. A conductor cried, “All aboard!” His bell clanged.

  Joan moved hesitantly toward the doors, almost blinded by the radiance, trying to see. Something big was out there, and yes, it was a train, and the trumpet leaped and darted around the banjo while the trombone slid and the clarinet trilled, and the woman, young now, stepped up into the train as a spray of flower petals fluttered and swirled white and pink around her, and the conductor's bell clanged again and there were ghosts beside Joan now, walking with her as she drifted out onto the platform, the old man with the walker, who cast it aside and strode with a firm step, and the Gold Rush girl and the frontiersman, one by one they boarded the train in a gentle blizzard of flower petals, and Joan was in line behind the weeping woman, whose tears now flowed free around a radiant smile, and she reached out to put her hand on the side of the car so she could climb into the train feeling yes of course the joy of this flooding her now forever. But an arm in a dark sleeve reached across in front of her and barred the way, and she looked up, and the conductor's face was long and pale with bushy white eyebrows, a little like Uncle Frederick's but not really so very much, and the conductor said, “Not yet. Your time is not yet. Your task is to watch over the station.”

  She opened her mouth to wail a protest, it was impossible not to board the train, how could she not? But somehow she stumbled, as if her foot had come down on a step that wasn't there, and for a moment more she thought the train was starting to move, sliding sideways in front of her, she submerged in the engine's bone-deep rumble, and then suddenly she wasn't on the platform at all, she was engulfed in ordinary sunlight, lurch-staggering onto the freeway on-ramp where it cut close behind the store. She was hollow. She had been turned inside out. Head spinning, she nearly sat down on the pavement, but a rusty old pickup truck was bearing down on her at forty miles an hour. It honked, and she leaped sideways to dodge it and fell in the grimy bed of iceplant where it sloped gently up to the back of the station. She sprawled among the wadded candy wrappers, the crushed and mutilated soft-drink cups, and started to cry.

  All right, she said, get hold of yourself. What just happened? Feeling unbearably heavy, as if she were wearing the train across her shoulders like a stole, she picked herself up, winced in pain when she put her weight on a twisted ankle, and stared up in blurred confusion at the rear of the station. Thirty feet away, the rear double doors were shut as tight as ever.

  Cars whizzed past her, their chrome lancing daggers in the sunlight. It seemed to take all day to walk around the building, limping, staring fixedly at the curb in front of her feet as if she might lose her way. A line from an old song, a spiritual, coiled into her mind like sweet smoke: “Don't need no ticket, you just get on board.” Was that it?

  Inside, the station was blessedly dark and cool. She noticed she was trembling, and shut her eyes and willed the trembling to cease. That didn't work, so she went and got a drink of water. The gramophone needle was going whicka-whicka-whicka at the center of the disc, so she took it out of the groove. The double doors were still shut, but strewn around them on the floor was a careless scatter of white and pink flower petals, which certainly hadn't been there before. She went to the doors and touched them, running her hands up and down the rough surface like a blind person. And started to cry again. Out there, just beyond the doors, was an ocean of joy so deep she had never imagined such joy could exist, and she had tasted it, it had filled her, and now it was gone and the doors were sealed shut again. She slid down to the floor and sobbed.

  The tears dried up. Sitting on the floor, she saw the store at a new angle. It felt empty, though it was still as packed with antiques as before. There were no ghosts now, that was it. The ghosts had gotten on the train.

  She might have sat there all afternoon, but the phone rang. She got up, sniffled a little, and answered. It was the Behrenses’ real estate agent. “I have an offer here for your retail property,” he said, sounding just the right note of suppressed excitement. “I'd like to present it to you and your agent this afternoon. What time would be convenient?”

  Her agent. The one she hadn't spoken to in months. “Well, I'll have to—” No, wait. She took a breath, and swallowed. “I'm sorry,” she said. “The property is—it's no longer on the market. There's been a—I've changed my mind. About selling it.”

  “If you've received a better offer, I can talk to my clients and see if they might be—”

  “No, you don't understand. I'm really not going to sell. I'm going to keep it.”

  He took a little convincing. He told her how disappointed Ludwig and Anna would be. He vented a gentle rasp of annoyance, testing whether she could be intimidated into feeling guilty. In the end, he signed off with a breezy assurance that he'd call again in a day or two in case she had reconsidered.

  She hung up, sat on her stool by the cash register, and thought about that. He'd call ag
ain. She could still change her mind and sell. But if she stayed here, before long more ghosts would be bound to show up, and sooner or later the doors would open again and she could go out on the platform for just a minute and maybe wave to them as the train slid away, and touch the tip of her tongue to a drop of glory. If she sold the store and moved to LA, would she ever find this kind of station again? And where would the ghosts go, when it was shut down?

  The old woman had left her purse sitting on the chair near the gramophone. And that was very bad. She might already have been a ghost when she came in, but she hadn't acted like one. If she had been alive, she was now a missing person, and the police would make inquiries, and when they found the purse they would ask Joan what had happened, and Joan would have to lie, and her lies had never fooled anyone for very long, apart from her mother.

  Toss it in a dumpster. Drive down to Gilroy and toss it in a dumpster. And don't leave fingerprints. But on a whim, she snapped it open. There wasn't much inside—some Kleenex, keys, a billfold with a few dollars, an opened packet of hearing aid batteries, and a postcard.

  It was an old-fashioned picture postcard. On one side was what looked like an Alpine ski lodge, but cupped in summer, perched on the side of a mountain amid a gorgeous spill of trees and flowers. On the other side was a three-cent stamp and a brief message written in blue fountain pen in a flowing hand: “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here!”

  When had postcards cost three cents to mail? The stamp was obviously old. It took Joan ten minutes to find the stamp catalog in the book room. When she saw what the stamp was worth, her mouth got dry. She'd be able to pay last year's taxes and then replace her sputtering, asthmatic Geo with a new Civic.

  She's still there. You can drop by Station House Antiques and say hello if you'd like, though you probably won't see any ghosts. They never seem to come out when customers are around. The antiques business is lousy, but once in a while Joan picks up a valuable item that keeps her going for a few months.

  She had a repair shop look at the gramophone to make sure it's in good shape. It's always kept dusted and polished, and there's a box of old-time jazz records sitting next to it, in case anybody who drops in wants to play one. Once in a while, somebody does.

  And sometimes, when Joan is alone in the store, she puts on “King Porter Stomp.” While it plays, she goes over and presses her ear against the double doors and listens for the train.

  Copyright © 2009 Jim Aikin

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  * * *

  Novelette: A LARGE BUCKET, AND ACCIDENTAL GODLIKE MASTERY OF SPACETIME

  by Benjamin Crowell

  When Ben Crowell was growing up, his only reliable source of science fiction reading matter was his elementary school's collection of Heinlein juveniles. These days we know that meeting an alien won't be as easy as grabbing a quick flight to Mars in a cigar-shaped rocket ship—but, in this story, Ben tries to have his hard-SF cake and eat it too.

  Sidibe Traore ended up as Earth's diplomatic representative because she was an astronaut who loved to pop the blisters on a sheet of bubble wrap. Sidi volunteered without any expectation of being chosen. What she did expect was that her training was about to become obsolete, so she decided to visit what little family she had left in Bamako before deciding what to do next with her life. On the way out the door of her apartment in Houston she was intercepted by her neighbor.

  Mrs. Forrest leaned over her walker and squinted through her bifocals. “Cindy, darling, are you getting sick?”

  “Afraid so, ma'am,” Sidi said. “Thanks for watering my fern while I'm gone.”

  “Of course, dear. Hold on, I have something for you.” She produced a little box of See's candy with a well-worn red bow on it.

  “Oh, that's sweet of you.” The thought of food nauseated her.

  “Nuts and chews. If you don't need the bow I can use it again. The Mexican girl on the news says the aliens are practically in our lap already, because they sent us the radio signals from the spaceship, but the ship is coming in almost as fast as sound.”

  “Light.” Her sinuses hadn't hurt this much since decompression training.

  “She said sound. I don't see why they have to whiz on past like our whole world is just a whistle stop. Plenty of people like me would like to meet them. You know I get along fine with colored people, so why should it be any different for ones with tentacles?”

  “I'm sure they'd like to stop and visit, but the Bus is the size of a city, and when you're going that fast you can't stop and start again. That's why it just sort of loops around the galaxy and picks up representatives of species that are ready to graduate into the GalCiv.” She told Mrs. Forrest she had to get to the airport.

  Sidi didn't waste much time worrying about the gruesome things that the aliens had to do to a human body to boost it to near light speed in a matter of days. (The press used words like “iron maiden,” “julienne,” and “Frankensteining.") Nor did she agonize over the prospect of only having bug-eyed monsters to socialize with for the rest of her life, while relativistically compressed centuries rolled by back on earth. She wouldn't be picked. She'd only volunteered because—well, the U.S. astronaut corps was almost the only family she had left, and not to step forward—she knew the word the Americans would use: “chickenshit.”

  Her connection to Paris was going to be delayed because of weather. While they were taxiing in at JFK she got a call from Matti Karjalainen, who'd been on two long orbital missions with her. She didn't want to talk, so she let her avatar take a message and then played it back. Bon soir, Sidi. Ah ... I know you volunteered. I did too, but, well ... I don't know about you, but a lot of us are having second thoughts. Slice you like French fries, ow, right? Cologne says now we have these infos about the procedure, they don't blame anyone that takes his name out of the hat. Anyway, I'm talking to a headhunter from SpaceX, and he says they like to hire ex-astronauts as managers. I told him Traore is the Terminator, she never stops. Her avatar had taken the headhunter's number.

  On the monitor at the gate they were listing her flight as canceled, and the agent said the next one that might actually go was at five in the morning. Sidi sat down and checked her phone, and from the subject lines in her in-box it looked like there were a lot of messages similar to Matti's zipping around the tight-knit social network of the world's various astronaut corps. Her head was throbbing. It seemed like everyone was ducking out. Should she do the same?

  It wasn't the kind of decision she wanted to make right there, feverish and sleepy in a deserted airport terminal. She fished the box of chocolates out of her carry-on and ate one, absentmindedly popping one of the bubbles on the packaging. She calculated that if she popped one bubble every three minutes, tuning out the rest of the world, it would get her through to five o'clock. She pushed her phone down into the bottom of her bag and didn't allow herself to look at it again until the last bubble was gone.

  When she pulled it back out again at five, there were nineteen new messages, of which the AI had judged one from Zhang-Yu Wen to be the highest priority. Hi, Sidi. I am sorry to bother you late at night in America. It's only that ... I got a phone call from big party boss, and he says many candidates were scared away. He has seen the list, and now your name is number two and I'm number one. I'm just wondering, because my girlfriend is pregnant, and we're thinking to get married.

  * * * *

  The Galactic Civilization's automated diplomatic ship continued on its broad, preprogrammed circuit through the Milky Way, passing out of the Orion Arm and back into the Perseus Arm. Some seven hundred-odd representatives were now aboard. In one of its compartments, two of them were trying to set up diplomatic relations, with their artificial intelligences acting as translators and go-betweens.

  “I can't negotiate on behalf of my entire genus,” Sidi warned the alien. Its body was like a spider and an octopus in flagrante delicto.

  Their AIs worked out a round of translation. “Your planet is a
lso the homeworld of...” The Snow White woodcut Sidi had chosen as an avatar for the alien's AI raised its eyebrows and batted its delicate black lashes.

  “Yes, the other hominids graduated into the GalCiv in earlier cohorts,” she told her own AI's visual representation, which was the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

  “But there is continuity between your cultures?”

  “No,” she admitted, knowing it would cost her in prestige to be unable to claim a closer relationship with species that had already graduated into the GalCiv. “They migrated off-world at some point, and they did a pretty good job of cleaning up after themselves. We do have a few artifacts from the Neanderthals that are very interesting. Chipped flint, bone flutes.” Maybe that would count for something, like a high school yearbook picture that showed a future movie star playing tuba next to you in marching band.

  “You smell good,” Snow White said, then gazed raptly at a monochrome butterfly on her finger while the giant hairball she spoke for swayed closer to Sidi. Sidi forced herself not to flinch in her chair, the only furniture in the compartment. She remembered her first semester at MIT, fresh off the plane from Bamako, when she'd made the American students uncomfortable by standing too close to them. It was one of those cultural things that her American father had never thought to tell her while he was teaching her to read English from Dr. Seuss books.

  She batted a tentacle away from her eye. “Cat, I need some clarification on that.”

  There was an invisible electronic powwow while the Caterpillar took a drag on its hookah and Snow stared off into the distance as lifelessly as if she'd returned to the printed page. “It's a ritual phrase,” the Caterpillar said finally. It spoke in the slow-talking provincial Finnish accent she'd grafted onto it, a verbal plug-in module that Matti Karjalainen had given her as a going-away gag joke.