Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Cat's voice: “There's someone who wants to talk to you.”

  Had she already been asleep? She checked the time. “It isn't time for the appointment yet, not according to my clock.”

  “No, not that, it's someone from outside the ship.”

  “We are outside the ship.”

  “No, I mean someone from the GalCiv. There's a ship the size of a sunflower seed, it's matched trajectories with us. Someone's on board. I don't know, maybe it's an AI or a personality upload, or maybe the crew had a swig from a bottle labeled DRINK ME.”

  “So this is it? We meet the representative from the GalCiv? They're early, though, aren't they?” There'd be hell to pay for all the dismantled equipment. Maybe that was why they'd shown up early. “All right, put it on.”

  “They're here physically. I think.”

  “Physically? All right.” It must be really bad, then. She squared her shoulders. She'd done the best she knew how to do. Obviously she was a perfect little merdeuse, and now it was just a relief that it was all over.

  A bipedal hominid in a toga was sitting there in a human-style chair that hadn't been there before. His flattish nose reminded her of a pet guinea pig she'd had once. He handed her one of two snifters of brandy—those hadn't been there before either. “It's not easy, is it?” he said in an Eton accent.

  “Are you from the GalCiv? I hadn't thought it was time yet for ... whatever it is that happens. I guess now I need to hand things off to you. Sorry about the mess, that's all my responsibility. The others aren't to blame.”

  “You're correct that it wasn't really time yet, but sometimes a cohort is a little fast out the gate, eh?”

  “What?”

  “This is it, you graduated yourselves,” the Homo erectus said with a vague wave at their surroundings. “What you've done on your own is the ‘whatever it is that happens.’ No great trick to it really, just grab the spacetime tiger by the tail and don't let go. I'm afraid there's no handing things off, though. Bloody hard work, being a godlike master of matter and energy.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Means you're in charge.”

  “No!”

  “ ‘Fraid so. There'll be some formalities, of course, but your cohort has obviously chosen to treat you as their leader.”

  “I was only—you can't—I don't really know what I'm doing. They didn't vote for me or anything.”

  “Vote? Oh, pardon me, this cultural overlay isn't very good, but I think I know what you mean. We can't use voting as the criterion, much too species-specific. Generally we go by body count. Your cohort managed to harness relativistic technology to meet its common goals, and you did it without having anyone eat anyone else or blow them up or anything dreadfully unpleasant like that.”

  “You would have let that happen?”

  “Oh, everyone's already been taken apart and put back together once, and we still have all the data we would have needed for re-Frankensteining the victims.”

  “It's just that I'm not ... nobody else ... I was only taking care of things the best I knew how.” She was having trouble catching her breath.

  A wry grin. “Same here, old girl, same here.”

  Copyright © 2009 Benjamin Crowell

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: SHINER

  by G.O.Clark

  * * * *

  * * * *

  M64

  snapped by hubble

  is not an evil eye

  but rather

  a black eye

  as should be expected

  at the very least

  when two galaxies

  so violently collide

  —G.O.Clark

  Copyright © 2009 G.O. Clark

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

  by Mike Resnick

  Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction, most of which has appeared in Asimov's. His recent books include Starship: Flagship, Hazards, Stalking the Dragon, and Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks. His remarkable new story may forever shift your perception of a certain cultural icon.

  April 4:

  What am I doing here?

  We have no servants, we never go out, we never have company. The furniture is all decrepit and ugly, the place always smells musty, and although the rest of the village has electrical power, Victor refuses to run it up the hill to the castle. We read by candlelight and we heat with fireplaces.

  This is not the future I had envisioned for myself.

  Oh, I know, we made the usual bargain—he got my money and my body, and I got his title. I don't know what I thought being the Baroness von Frankenstein would be like, but this isn't it. I knew he owned a centuries-old castle with no improvements, but I didn't think we'd live in it full-time.

  Victor can be so annoying. He constantly whistles this tuneless song, and when I complain he apologizes and then starts humming it instead. He never stands up to that ill-mannered little hunchback that he's always sending out on errands. And he's a coward. He can never just come to me and say “I need money again.” Oh, no, not Victor. Instead he sends that ugly little toady who's rude to me and always smells like he hasn't washed.

  And when I ask what the money's for this time, he tells me to ask Victor, and Victor just mumbles and stammers and never gets around to answering.

  Yesterday he sent Igor off to buy a generator. I thought he'd finally realized the need to upgrade the castle. I should have known better. It's in the basement, where he's using it for one of his simple-minded experiments that never brings us fame or fortune. He can use the generator's power to make a dead frog's leg twitch (as if anyone cares), but he can't use it to heat this drafty, ugly, boring castle.

  I hate my life.

  * * * *

  May 13:

  “My creature lives!”

  That's a hell of a scream to wake up to in the middle of the night. Of course his damned creature lives. The little bastard nagged me for money again today.

  * * * *

  May 14:

  Well, finally I saw the results of all those months’ work today. Victor was so damned proud of this hideous monster he'd created. Let me tell you: it is ugly as sin, it can barely speak, you'd need a microscope to find its IQ, and it smells worse than Igor. This is what he's been spending my fortune on?

  “What is it?” I ask, and Victor explains that it isn't an it, it's a he. He is sitting on the edge of a table, just staring stupidly at a wall. Victor takes me by the arm (he always has chemicals on his hands; I hate it when he touches me) and pulls me over toward the creature. “What do you think?” he asks. “Do you really want to know?” I answer, and he says yes he really does, so I spend the next five minutes telling him exactly what I think. He doesn't say a word; he just stands there with his lower lip trembling and the same expression on his face that my brother had when his puppy drowned all those years ago.

  The creature makes a soothing noise and reaches out to Victor, as if to comfort him. I slap his hand and tell him never to touch a human. He whimpers and puts his hands in front of his face, as if he expects me to beat him. I wouldn't even if I could; this blouse is hard enough to clean without having to wash any disgusting monster yuck off it.

  “Don't frighten him!” snaps Victor.

  Which is a perfect example of how out of touch with reality he is. The creature is about six football players and a weightlifter all rolled into one, and I'm just a helpless woman who spends an inordinate amount of time wondering why she didn't marry Bruno Schmidt. All right, he's bald and fat and his teeth are rotting and he's got a glass eye, but he's a banker, and his house doesn't have a monster in the basement.

  * * * *

  May 25:

  I went fishing in the stream today, since Victor is too busy making notes to notice that we're almost out of food. (Of course, we wouldn't run out so
often if we had a refrigerator, but then we have no place to plug it in anyway.)

  So I'm standing there in my rubber boots, fishing rod in hand, and I hear a noise behind me, and I turn to look because a woman alone can't ever be too careful, and what has happened is that Victor has let the creature out for some exercise, or air, or whatever hideous eternally damned creatures get let out for.

  When I turn to face him he stops and stares at me, and I say, “You lay a finger on me and I'll scratch your eyes out!”

  He kind of shudders and walks around me in a huge semi-circle, and winds up about thirty yards downstream, where he stares at the fish. Somehow they seem to know he's not trying to catch them, and they all cluster around his ankles when he wades into the water, and he smiles like an idiot and points to the fish.

  “Fine,” I say. “You catch four for dinner and maybe I'll even cook you one.”

  Up to that minute I would have sworn that he didn't understand a word, that he only reacted to tones of voice, but he leans over, scoops up four fish, and tosses them onto the grass where they start flopping around.

  “Not bad,” I admit. “Now kill them and we'll take them back to the castle.”

  “I don't kill things,” he says in a horrible croaking voice, which is when I discover he can speak.

  “Okay, eat yours while it's alive,” I say. “What do I care?”

  He stares at me for a minute, and finally he says, “I am not hungry after all,” and he begins wandering back to the castle.

  “Fine!” I shout after him. “There will be more for us!”

  If there's one thing I can't stand, it's an uppity creature.

  * * * *

  May 27:

  “Don't you realize, my dear,” says Victor, his narrow chest puffing out with pride, “that no one has ever accomplished this before?”

  “I believe it,” I say, looking at the creature, who seems to get uglier every day. “But that doesn't mean it's anything to brag about.”

  “You just don't understand,” says Victor, and he's pouting now, like he does whenever I point out the obvious to him. “I have created life out of the disparate pieces of the dead!”

  “I understand perfectly,” I say. “Who do you think's been paying the bills for all this?” I point at the creature, who is busy staring off into space. “That left arm should have been my new stove. That right arm is my carpet. The left leg is my automobile. The right leg is a central heating system. The torso is my new furniture. And the head is indoor plumbing that works.”

  “You are being too materialistic, my dear,” says Victor. “I wish I could make you see that this creature is of inestimable value to science.”

  I look at the mess my husband has made of his laboratory. “If you're going to keep him,” I say, “at least give him a mop and teach him how to use it.”

  * * * *

  June 1:

  I am sitting on a chair I have dragged out to the garden because I can't stand the smell of Victor's chemicals, and today I am reduced to reading Life and Look, because the Bavarian edition of The Wall Street Journal is late again. I had to sell all my stocks to pay for Victor's endless experiments, but I still follow them and compute how much I'd be worth if I had just married Bruno Schmidt, or maybe some doctor who, if a patient died, let him stay dead.

  Anyway, I have dragged a small table out to hold the magazines and my iced tea. I could have asked Igor to do it, but I'd sooner die than ask him for a favor. So I am sitting there reading, and I hear an earth-shaking clomp-clomp-clomp, and sure enough it is the creature, out for his daily airing.

  “Good afternoon, Baroness,” he croaks.

  I just glare at him.

  He notices my magazines. “Are you reading?” he asks.

  “No,” I say coldly. “I am speaking to an animated nightmare from the deepest pits of hell.”

  “I don't mean to distress you,” he says.

  “Good,” I said. “Go halfway around the castle and try not distressing me there.”

  He sighs and walks away, and I go back to reading. After a few minutes my magazine is covered by a huge shadow, and I look up and the creature is standing next to me.

  “I thought I told you to—”

  His hand juts forward with a delicate golden flower in it. “For you,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say, taking it from him and tossing it onto the ground. “Now go away.”

  Maybe it is the way the sun hits him at just that moment, but I could swear a tear trickles down his cheek as he turns and walks away.

  * * * *

  June 3:

  Today I caught him in the wood-paneled library that should have been my pride and joy but is now just my daily escape from the boring reality of my life.

  “What are you doing here?” I demand as I enter.

  “I was bored, just sitting around,” he answers. “I asked permission to go into town, but the Master"—that's Victor—"doesn't want anyone to see me yet. He told me to read some of his books instead.”

  “Can you read?” I ask.

  “Of course I can,” he replies. “Is it so surprising?”

  “Fine,” I say with a shrug. “Go read. You'll find Victor's scientific books on the other wall.”

  “I have no interest in them,” he says.

  “That's not my problem,” I say. “I can't help but notice that you're standing right next to a row of romances by Jane Austen and the Brontes. They'll be wasted on you.”

  “I think I would like romantic stories,” he says.

  “That's disgusting!”

  “Do you really think so?” he asks curiously.

  “I said so, didn't I?” I reply.

  “Perhaps that is why the Master spends his nights in the laboratory,” he says.

  I pull a thick book off the shelf. I feel like pummeling him with it, but I don't think he feels pain, so finally I just thrust it in his hands and tell him to get out of my sight.

  * * * *

  June 4:

  He lumbers up to me while I am outside reading the Journal, which has finally arrived.

  “What is it now?” I demand irritably.

  “I have come to thank you,” he says.

  “For what?” I ask.

  “For this.” He lays the book on the table. “I read A Christmas Carol last night. It was very uplifting.” He pauses for a second, staring into my eyes with his cold dead orbs. “It is comforting to know that even Scrooge could change.”

  “Are you comparing me to Scrooge?” I ask angrily.

  “Certainly not,” he answers. Another tiny pause. “Scrooge was a man.”

  I stand up and lean forward, bracing my hands on the table and glaring at him. I am about to give him a piece of my mind, to explain that I'm going to speak to Victor and insist that we donate him to some university, when a big hairy spider appears from nowhere and races across my hand and starts crawling up my arm. I scream and shake my arm, and the spider falls to the ground.

  “Kill it!” I yell.

  He kneels down and picks the spider up in his hand. “I told you the other day,” he says. “I don't kill things.”

  “I don't care what you told me!” I snap. “Stomp on it, or crush it in your hand—but just kill the damned thing!”

  “I have been dead, Baroness,” he replies somberly. “It is not an experience I would wish upon anyone or anything else.”

  And so saying, he carries the spider about fifty feet away and places it on the branch of a young sapling.

  I don't even notice when he comes back to pick up the book. I am too busy thinking about what he said.

  * * * *

  June 7:

  The next day it is Wuthering Heights and then it's Anna Karenina and finally he reads Gone With the Wind, which is making so much money in the bookstores that even Victor couldn't run through the royalty checks.

  “You're developing quite a taste for romance,” I say as I find him in the library again. It is the first time I've initiated
a conversation with him. I don't know why. I suppose if you spend enough nights alone you'll talk to anyone.

  “They are heartbreaking,” he says with a look of infinite sorrow. “I thought romances had happy endings, like A Christmas Carol, but they don't. Heathcliff and Catherine die. Anna and Vronsky die. Scarlett loses Ashley, and then she loses Rhett.”

  “Not all romances end unhappily,” I say. I think I am arguing with him, but I wonder if I am not trying to comfort him.

  “I remember, as though through a mist, the story of Arthur and Guenevere.” A body-wrenching sigh. “It ended poorly. And so did Romeo and Juliet.” He shakes his massive head sadly. “But it does explain a lot.”

  “What do a bunch of tragic romances explain?” I ask.

  “Why you are so bitter and unhappy,” replies the creature. “The Master is a wonderful man—brilliant, generous, thoughtful, and he is constantly saying that he is very much in love with you. Clearly you must feel the same emotions toward him or you would not have married him, and because all such romances end in tragedy, you behave as you do from resentment at what must be.”

  “That will be quite enough!” I say. “Take whatever book you want, and then keep out of my sight for the rest of the day.”

  He picks up a book and walks to the door.

  Just before he leaves, I ask: “Did Victor really say he loved me?”

  * * * *

  June 8:

  The toady brings me my breakfast on a wooden tray while I am still in bed. I stare at his misshapen body and ugly face for a moment, then have him set the tray down on my nightstand.

  “What is this all about?” I demand.

  “The creature is afraid that he may have hurt your feelings,” answers Igor. “I tried to explain that it is impossible, but he insisted on preparing your breakfast. Then at the last minute he was too frightened of you to bring it here himself.”

  “What do you mean, it's impossible to hurt my feelings?” I say.

  “I have never known it to happen, Baroness,” he answers, “and I have been with the Master longer than you have.”