Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Maybe we'll have to do something about that,” I say ominously.

  “Please don't,” he says so earnestly that I stop and stare at him. “You have abused me, physically and verbally, since the day the Master brought you to the castle, and I have never complained. But if my services are terminated, where is an illiterate hunchback who left school at the age of eight to support his ailing mother to find employment? The townspeople laugh at me, and the children tease me and make up terrible songs about me. They even throw things at me.” He pauses, and I can see he is struggling to control his emotions. “No one in the town—in any town—will ever give me a job.”

  “You're still supporting your mother?” I ask.

  He nods his head. “And my widowed sister and her three little ones.”

  I just stare at him for a minute. Finally I say, “Get out of here, you ugly little wart.”

  “You won't speak to the Master about terminating me?” he persists.

  “I won't speak to Victor,” I tell him.

  “Thank you,” he says gratefully.

  “He probably wouldn't have listened anyway,” I say.

  “You are wrong,” says Igor.

  “About what?”

  “If it comes to a choice,” says Igor with conviction, “he will always side with the woman he loves.”

  “If he loves me so much, why is he always working in that damned laboratory?” I say.

  “Perhaps for the same reason the creature did not bring you the tray himself,” says Igor.

  I am still thinking about that long after he has gone and the eggs and coffee have both grown cold.

  * * * *

  June 9:

  Today is the first day that I willingly go down to the laboratory since the day after Victor created the creature. The clutter is awful and the stench of chemicals is worse.

  Victor looks startled and asks me what's wrong.

  “Nothing is wrong,” I say.

  “The townspeople aren't coming to burn the castle down?”

  “It's an eyesore,” I agree, “but no, no one's coming.”

  “Then what are you doing down here?” he asks.

  “I thought it was time you showed me what you've been doing day and night.”

  Suddenly his whole homely face lights up. “You mean it?”

  “I'm here, aren't I?” I say.

  There follows one of the most boring afternoons I have ever spent in my life, as Victor proudly shows me every experiment, failures as well as successes, plus all his notes and all his calculations, and then explains in terms no one could possibly understand exactly how he created the creature and brought it back to life.

  “That's fascinating,” I lie when he's finally done.

  “It is, isn't it?” he says as if it is some great revelation.

  I check my wristwatch. “I have to go upstairs now.”

  “Oh?” he says, clearly disappointed. “Why?”

  “To make you your favorite dinner.”

  He smiles like a child looking forward to opening his Christmas presents. I try to remember what he likes to eat.

  * * * *

  June 14:

  I encounter the creature in the library.

  “Igor thanks you.”

  “It was nothing,” I say.

  “By raising his salary, his mother can now remain where she is. That is something.”

  “I looked over the ledgers,” I answer. “He went fifteen years without a pay raise.”

  “He is very grateful,” says the creature.

  “If I fired him,” I say, “Victor would just go out and find an uglier, clumsier assistant. Handling money and running his life in an orderly fashion are not his strong points.”

  “He seems much happier this past week.”

  “He is obviously pleased with the results of his experiment,” I say.

  The creature stares at me, but doesn't respond.

  “Have you found any happy romances yet?” I ask.

  “No,” he admits.

  “Then since the tragic ones upset you, why keep reading?”

  “Because one must always have hope.”

  I am about to say that hope is a greatly overrated virtue. Instead, much against my will, I find myself admiring him for clinging to it.

  “For every Romeo, there must be a Juliet,” he continues. “For every Tristan, an Isolde.” He pauses. “There are those who say we are put on this Earth only to reproduce, but the Master has shown there are other ways to create life. Therefore, we must be here for a higher purpose—and what higher purpose can there be than love?”

  I stare at him for a moment, and then find myself pulling Pride and Prejudice off the shelf. I hand it to him, and do not even shudder when his fingers touch mine. “Read this,” I say. “Not every romance ends tragically.”

  I wonder what is happening to me.

  * * * *

  June 16:

  Victor looks upset as he sits down at the table for dinner.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask.

  He frowns. “Yes. Something is missing.”

  “From the table?” I ask, looking around. “What is it?”

  He shakes his head. “No, not from the table, from the laboratory's office.”

  “Has someone stolen your notes?” I asked.

  He looks confused. “Stranger than that,” he says. “My cot is missing.”

  “Your cot?” I repeat.

  “Yes,” he replies. “You know—where I sleep when I finish working late at night.”

  “How odd,” I say.

  “Who would steal a bed?” he asks.

  “It seems very strange,” I agree. “Fortunately there's another bed in the castle.”

  He looks confused again, and then he stares at me for a long moment, and then, suddenly, he smiles.

  * * * *

  July 2:

  “Are you sure?” asks Victor.

  “We can't turn him loose in the world,” I say. “What could he do to support himself ? I joked about it with him this afternoon and said he could always become a wrestler, that he looks the part of a villain.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he wants to be loved, not feared—and that he doesn't want to hurt anyone.”

  Victor shakes his head in amazement. “What kind of brain did Igor bring me, I wonder?”

  “A better one, I think, than you had any right to expect,” I say.

  “Almost certainly,” says Victor. “But that will have no effect on the way people will react to his appearance.”

  “It could destroy him,” I say.

  “Literally,” agrees Victor.

  “If we want him to stay,” I tell him, “then you know what we have to do.”

  Victor looks at me. “You are quite right, my dear,” he says.

  * * * *

  July 3:

  I find him in the library, where he spends most of his time these days. He is sitting on the oversized chair that Victor and Igor constructed for him, but the second he sees me he gets to his feet.

  “Have you spoken to the Master?” he asks nervously.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And?”

  “And he has agreed.”

  His entire massive body seems to relax.

  “Thank you,” he says. “No man, no person,” he amends with a smile toward me, “should live his life alone, even one such as myself.”

  “She won't be pleasing to the eye,” I warn him. Or the ear, or the nose, I want to add.

  “She will be pleasing to my eye,” he answers, “for I will look past her face to the beauty that lies within.”

  “I'm surprised you want this,” I say. “I'd have thought all those tragic romances would discourage you.”

  “It may end unhappily,” he acknowledges. “But that is better than it never beginning. Would you not agree?”

  I think of Victor, and I nod my head. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I would agree.”

  Then there
is nothing left but to send Igor out to start visiting the graveyards again.

  I hope Victor finishes work on the new project by Christmas. I can hardly wait for the five of us to sit around the tree, a happy family unit. Maybe it won't end well, but as my new friend says, that is no reason for it not to begin.

  Copyright © 2009 Mike Resnick

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  JANUARY ISSUE

  Hugo and Nebula winner (not to mention NASA scientist) Geoffrey A. Landis returns, after too long an absence, with his latest hard SF story, “Marya and the Pirate.” In it, we find a resourceful space-hijacker tangled up (for better and worse) with an innocent—though no less resourceful—crewwoman on the very ship he's trying to boost. Popular Coyote-series scribe Allen M. Steele recounts “The Jekyll Island Horror,” a tale of an eldritch, well, horror from shores unknown menacing the coddled landed gentry of the titular isle; Hugo winner Robert Reed raises “The Good Hand,” a taut story of former allies become enemies, and an imaginary film we're sure many cineastes would kill to see; new talent Felicity Shoulders, in her second story for us, “Conditional Love,” in which a doctor at a rather unorthodox children's clinic sanctions an even more unorthodox adoption; Carol Emshwiller takes us deep into the “Wilds” where a desperate woman on the lam with her ill-gotten gains must escape the intentions of a rather unusual mountain man—our money's on the mountain man; Chris Roberson reimagines the adventure pulps through his Celestial Empire universe, not to mention the origins of a very familiar hero, in “Wonder House"; and Steve Rasnic Tem travels the interstellar spaceways to deliver “A Letter from the Emperor” with unexpected consequences for the recipients.

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  Robert Silverberg plumbs the silt-strewn depths off the coast of ancient Greece in search of “The Antikythera Computer” in Reflections; James Patrick Kelly, in On the Net, plaintively cries out, “Dude, Where's My Hovercar?"; Paul Di Filippo brings us “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our December issue on sale at your newsstand on November 10, 2009. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in classy and elegant paper format or those new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!

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  * * *

  Novelette: SOME LIKE IT HOT

  by Brian Stableford

  Brian Stableford's recent novels include Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity (Black Coat Press) and The Moment of Truth (Borgo Press). Recent non-fiction includes The Devil's Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse (Borgo Press). He is making good progress with his project translating the major works of early French scientific romance; five volumes featuring all the relevant work of Maurice Renard will appear in the early months of 2010 and a further five collecting work by J.H. Rosny later in the year. In his newest story for us, Brian turns away from the past to imagine the future. We know that a warming Earth may present us with a world of difficulties, but then again...

  "Gaia likes it cold."—James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia

  Gerda Rosenhane fell in love with Kelemen Kiss—who did not like his forename and insisted on being called Kay—at the age of six, and somehow avoided ever falling out, in spite of all the customary childish quarrels and jealousies, adolescent metamorphoses and adult shifts in perspective. She was able to fall in love with him in the first place, and to sustain their relationship for many years thereafter, because they spent their childhood living on the same street in Strasbourg, within walking distance of the European Parliament.

  The resilience of their relationship was greatly aided by the fact that Gerda and Kay had the same birthday, March twelfth; they always celebrated it together as children, thus founding a tradition that extended far into adulthood.

  Under other circumstances, the cultural differences between Gerda, who was Swedish, and Kay, who was Hungarian, might have been immense, but they not only lived on the same street, they attended the same school: the so-called New International School, whose pupils came from the assorted nations of the EC, but where all the classes were taught in English. Everything in their world tended to be prefaced with the label “New,” even though the practice was getting rather old. As beneficiaries or victims of New Internationalism, however, they were certainly united in their cultural affiliations in a way that even their immediate families did not entirely understand.

  Another circumstance that helped Gerda and Kay find common cause in their early days was that they only had one parent each, and that the parents in question, busy about the ever-problematic business of running Europe, were almost entirely absent from their quotidian lives. Gerda's father, an EC bureaucrat, had died on a fact-finding trip to the vanishing Arctic ice cap before her second birthday, a victim of the treacherously melting ice; Kay's mother—a much-married woman—had resumed her briefly interrupted career as a celebrity model as soon as she had recovered her figure after the relevant divorce, which was finalized not long after her pregnancy came to term.

  At six, Gerda believed, with an innocently boundless conviction of which only six-year-olds are normally capable, that Kay was her other half—or, because she had a precocious love of language, her “inevitable counterpart.” They did, in fact, look uncannily alike, apart from the fact that Gerda was very pale of complexion, blonde and blue-eyed, while Kay was dark, black-haired and brown-eyed. “Like opposing pawns on a chessboard,” Gerda's mother once observed, rather unkindly—quickly adding, for the sake of kindness, even though it wrecked the analogy: “But one day, when you're grown up, you'll be a queen.”

  Even at the age of six, Gerda had been able to reply, “I can't, Mommy. We live in a democracy.”

  When Gerda and Kay started at the NIS, the fact that all its classes were taught in English was only mildly controversial, but by the time they reached their final year it had become a running sore of angry contention. This was not because anything had happened in the meantime to the ever-dubious reputation of the United Kingdom, which was still the Crazy Man of Europe, but because it was universally recognized that the NIS practice of offering classes in English had nothing to do with far-from-merry England and everything to do with an “American cultural hegemony” that was supposed to have died in the first half of the twenty-first century, and whose inertial persistence within the World Wide Web generated a good deal of World Wide Resentment. Pragmatism insisted, however, that if any language were ever to get the children of Europe's elite talking like a true community, English was the only possible candidate, so English survived while “American cultural hegemony” became effectively synonymous, on European lips, with “the poisonous ideas that got us into this unholy mess.”

  The unholy mess in question was, of course, the CC. Hardly anyone called it the Carbon Crisis any more, as if merely spelling out its name might somehow make the catastrophe worse. Indeed, such were the mysterious ways in which euphemism operated, that it was often re-expanded, with calculated absurdity, as “the Cubic Centimeter"—except in England, where the cultural significance of the letters CC was as farcically out of step with the rest of Europe as everything else. There, the unholy mess was routinely referred to, in a similar spirit of perverse flippancy, as the Cricket Club, even though—as the smart kids at the NIS were fond of pointing out, in order to demonstrate that the Second Great Depression hadn't entirely robbed the world of its sense of humor—the only things England had that remotely resembled crickets were itsy-bitsy grasshoppers, which no one ever hunted with clubs, or even packs of hounds.

  Long before she came to the end of her schooldays, Gerda had grown used to thinking of her relationship with Kay as an unholy mess, but it wasn't the same kind of unholy mess as the CC, even though the CC had already become tangled up in it. The CC was all about unwelcome overheating, but Gerda's love for Kay had never had a chance to overheat, because Kay had never given it a chance to
do so. When Gerda first confessed to Kay that he was her other half, her inevitable counterpart, he agreed, but his casual manner made it obvious that he didn't really understand. It soon became painfully clear to Gerda that he understood the analogy in a very different way. He thought that they were like non-identical twins: that his idea of “inevitability” was that they were and would always remain pseudo-siblings, as close as close could be but in an inviolably non-erotic sense. As time passed, although his sexual indifference never became a hostile jet of ice-cold water chilling the force of her emotion, it definitely functioned as a frustrating gust of carbon dioxide, warm enough in its fashion but fatal to wholehearted flamboyance.

  Because she continued stubbornly to yearn for him, in a pathetically desperate fashion, Gerda grudgingly accepted and adapted to Kay's insistence on thinking of her as a sister. By slow degrees, as she passed through puberty and matured into an adult, she even managed to half-convince herself that perhaps it was for the best; romance was, after all, an obsolete twentieth century delusion born of a world careless of the deadly Cubic Centimeter, blithely unconscious of the holocaust to come. She, as an apostle of New Internationalism, owed her first and greatest dedication to whatever part she might be able to play in the Great Crusade for the Salvation of Civilization.

  There were, of course, many parts available in that great drama, which was an end that lent itself to many means, but Gerda and Kay were MEP kids in an era when European politics was proudly recovering the old dynastic dimensions that it had briefly forsaken in the twentieth century. There was a tacit expectation in the NIS that the best of its students would become the MEPs and EC bureaucrats of the future, and that all other vocations were second-rate. Kay was never in any doubt that he would follow in his father's footsteps, but Gerda was not at all sure that she wanted to follow in her mother's. This was not because of any difference in the quality of the role models that Miklos Kiss and Selma Rosenhane provided, but did have something to do with the fact that they were routinely opposed in key debates, Miklos being an orthodox Gaian utterly dedicated to the war against global warming, while Selma represented a constituency that had seen significant local benefits from the shift in climate and was not at all averse to keeping them, in spite of the nasty problems that were being caused elsewhere.