Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  “We sat here,” she went on, aware of Thea’s gaze on her face. “We thought... I don’t know. Maybe it would be different at night. Maybe there would be—something. But it was still just a thing. A dead thing.”

  Lacie sniffled, glanced up. Snowflakes were whirling down through the trees. High branches creaked and swayed in the wind. She stood, and Thea did the same. They looked at the bones one more time. They didn’t speak as they walked back to the road. The snow swallowed their footsteps into the forest floor.

  After they climbed the fence again, Thea said, “You around for a few days?”

  “Until Saturday.”

  Thea made a noise at the back of her throat, but the space where an invitation for lunch or coffee might fall stretched, and passed. When they reached the Macdonald house, Cait invited Lacie in for a cup of tea, but she declined, smiling, her face hurting in the warmth. She said, “Mom’s probably worrying about me,” and she walked home on empty streets.

  When she let herself in she found her mother sitting up on one end of the couch, television on, blanket over her knees.

  “There you are,” Marla said. Her mouth was pinched at the edges. She held up her phone. “Cait told me you were on your way over. She said you and Thea went for a walk.”

  “Just for a little while, yeah,” Lacie said. The room was so warm tears stung her eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t realize we were gone so long. It’s really cold out there.”

  “The news says it’s going to snow another four inches,” Marla said.

  “I believe it. It’s already started.” Lacie dropped into the armchair and stared at the television without seeing it.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?”

  She considered her answer before speaking. “I don’t know. It’s weird that he’s gone.” She had always hated the way people said gone rather than dead, but on her own tongue, in the safety of her mother’s living room, it was all she could say.

  “I remember you used to be good friends,” Marla said. “You were always getting him into trouble.”

  Lacie smiled. “We were always getting each other into trouble.”

  Marla huffed a quiet laugh, and Lacie looked at her mother, properly looked. Marla’s hair was more gray than brown, peppery and thin. She was as small as a child in her pilled fleece bathrobe, as though she was shrinking away, her insides collapsing while her skin wrinkled.

  Lacie knew if she asked—if she had anybody to ask—the advice would be that now was the time to start thinking about the unwelcome future, the difficult decisions. It paralyzed her with fear, sometimes, that she didn’t know who would be here if something happened to her mother. If Marla fell on the stairs or slipped on the ice, Lacie didn’t even know how long it would be until somebody found her, or who it would be. With the fear came the rush of resolutions: make the phone calls, ask the questions, this time for sure. Meet the neighbors, the doctors. Move back. She couldn’t move back. Marla didn’t have anybody else. She never asked for help. She panted when she climbed the stairs. She could have dropped the spaghetti pot.

  Lacie said, “I might come back here for a week or two this time. For Christmas, I mean.”

  Marla looked at her, eyebrows raised. “That would be nice.”

  “I’ll have to see.” Offering, immediately retreating. She couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. She needed time. She would do the research during December and talk to Marla at Christmas. After, so the holiday wasn’t ruined by the pall of the future. “But I think I can make it work. I’d like to get away from the city for a little while anyway.”

  “I always like having you around, but I know you’re busy,” Marla said.

  In the forest the bones would be disappearing beneath a shroud of snow. By morning they would be buried. Somebody might find them next week, if the island warmed in an early winter reprieve, or in the spring if it didn’t. A girl out for a walk, no particular destination in mind. Shoes sinking into muddy ground. Admiring new green leaves and shy white flowers and thinking about light, about color, about the spaces between. Looking up at the sky, down at the ground, feeling too big for the island and too small for the world. There: a shape out of place.

  She will look away, look again, this girl alone in the woods. In the shadows of a cool dank hollow the eye sockets will be wide and black and watchful.

  A log settled in the wood stove. Lacie startled, relaxed. The house groaned in the wind and branches tapped expectantly on the windows. She leaned into the chair and pulled a blanket over her legs.

  “I like being around,” she said to her mother.

  Marla hummed softly, eyes closed, already half asleep.

  * * *

  Million-Year Elegies: Archaeopteryx

  Ada Hoffmann | 100 words

  Settled and nested in what, to you,

  was the present, you never imagined

  the quick-flit jewel bodies of hummingbirds,

  the falcon's deadly plunge, the ostrich,

  the quizzical flamingo. To you,

  you were the pinnacle of all

  small-bodied quick-snapping things:

  the air your palace. A song your home.

  Or did you dream, at your perch,

  of the thunderous terror birds of the Andes?

  Did you preen at your own little black-bristled tail,

  remembering the brilliant eyes

  of yet-to-be-born peacocks, and despair?

  Perhaps you felt, all your life,

  like only half a thing, and strained

  in a direction only half-real,

  ashamed that you could not mold yourself,

  by force of will, into all

  that could ever be made of you.

  * * *

  Relativistic Dickinson

  John Richard Trtek | 96 words

  Out there—beyond the window pane—

  The listless spirals hang—

  A curtain for eternal fear

  Of Vacuum's hollow pang—

  I pierced the Black to seek reprieve—

  I sped to conjure hope—

  I manipulated spacetime

  And braved the Einstein trope—

  There were centuries and then some—

  Their passage lost to me—

  My soul a naïve victim of

  The fickleness of cee—

  Dilation's enigma mocked me—

  Dismissed anxiety—

  My gospel hopes made empty claims

  Bereft of piety—

  The stars compress and shift their hues—

  The nebulae run thin—

  Despite my frantic delta vees

  I've failed to outrun Sin—

  An untouched pulse still marks my time—

  No varying of breath—

  A life now lost in flight because

  I could not slow for Death—

  * * *

  GUEST EDITORIAL

  Sarah Pinsker | 984 words

  THAT’S FAR OUT, SO YOU READ IT TOO?

  Sheila asked me to write an editorial about science fiction and music, the two subjects that are always on my mind. It’s good timing, too. I’ve just returned from Worldcon, where I was on a panel on SF’s influence on David Bowie and David Bowie’s influence on SF. We actually didn’t get to the second half of the question at all; we didn’t get much past 1974. Now I’m sitting in my living room in Baltimore, listening to the dog day cicadas contract and relax their tymbrals, vibrating their abdomens to create a sound that is at once song and biology.

  Music is science fiction, science fiction is music. I can say this at a base level. I don’t only mean that there is rhythm in sentences, that there is melody in word choice and paragraph and phrase, though I do believe that applies to any genre. I don’t only mean that David Bowie synthesized the pulps and novels he read as a kid into songs that were at times almost verbatim retellings (“Karma Man,” “We Are Hungry Men”), but eventually found his own science fictional story to tell, and then moved from there int
o writing songs that were as science fictional in their composition and arrangement as any of his lyrics ever were. I don’t only mean that we as consumers of these works feel a kinship with those who created them, or that sometimes we make the mistake of elevating those creators. I don’t only mean that the works exist in concrete form, but the creators are part of a community of creators, a community that overlaps with a community of fans, which itself gives birth to new fans and new creators.

  Here are the ways music is science fiction:

  Music is math. It has a basis in fact. The 1-3-5 notes that make up a major chord have the same relationship to each other no matter the root, the octave, the key, the instrument. The relationship between any two notes can be expressed in numbers. They are law, unchanging. It’s those laws that tell us where we have room to explore.

  Music is experimentation. The laws have been established, but there’s room between them. Can I play that note over that chord? Where can I go within the structures? How can I create something new? What if new is too new? What if what I think is new has been said before? Does it matter that it is being revisited in my voice and my hands? How do I move from this note to the next, and which is the next anyway, and how can I turn a mistake, a sour note or flubbed chord, into something that works with the piece rather than fighting against it?

  Music is math, but you don’t need to know the math to make music. A good melody exists on its own, independent of the notes composing it or the emotions those notes stir in combination. Tell me a good story and underpin it with science. Tell me a good story and make me think it is underpinned with science. Make me forget science exists. Gravity is overrated; stories, like songs, can be weight or wings.

  Here are the ways science fiction is music:

  Science fiction is variation on a theme. It takes an idea and twists it, turns it, holds it to the light. The idea can be new or old; what counts is how you explore it. You can change the key, the instrument, the mode from major to minor to Phrygian. You can invert it, divert it, revert it, subvert it. Sharpen its claws or render it toothless. Send it to space. We all know the tropes by now, know where we expect a piece to go; it’s the unexpected variations that render us breathless. “How did she do that?” we still wonder. We live to be amazed.

  Science fiction is in conversation with itself. Like every musician in every genre of music, SF writers study what came before. We don’t necessarily call it study; we read, we listen, we absorb. We are drawn to our genres because we are fans of our genres, because at some point we read something that resonates like a bell, like a cicada’s tymbal, calling to us from tree to tree. Sometimes we are drawn for the opposite reason, because a piece begs to be repudiated. We accept the established works or reject them, we build upon them and modulate them and respond to them. We dig into the unexplored corners, and once again hold them up to the light.

  Science fiction constantly reinvents itself. It endures because we challenge it. It needs new voices alongside the established ones. It changes and changes again, then welcomes back its pioneers.

  Science fiction as a genre is still composed of individual stories, individual novels, individual authors. The term is an umbrella. When we say we love a certain genre, part of what we mean is there are specific voices that speak to us over and over again. Their works become part of us.

  Science fiction is built upon short works. The short works make up longer wholes. They play roles as lead-off or connective tissue or a closing statement. Good editors and savvy producers knit them into a cohesive whole. They can be recombined, put into new compilations or greatest hits collections, but most stories appeared first in the context of a magazine like this one.

  Science fiction is music is science fiction. The kid who narrates Bowie’s “Starman” is listening to the radio when a voice reaches out to him in a literal interpretation of the way music and storytelling have rescued us throughout human history. Every time we come to something new—an album, a live set, a magazine like this one—we renew our hope that the works contained will inspire and transport us, or just teach us something new about being human.

  * * *

  REFLECTIONS

  Robert Silverberg | 1817 words

  DEAD AS A DODO

  Dead as a dodo! It’s a proverbial phrase that everybody knows. It means defunct, deceased, vanished, demised... extinct. But is the dodo destined to stay forever dead? Are there plans afoot to bring it back from extinction in all its ungainly splendor? Most of us have our first encounter with the dodo when reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Not long after Alice falls down the rabbit hole, briefly turns into a giantess, and weeps herself into a deep pool of tears, she finds herself swimming about with a little group of bedraggled creatures who have also fallen into the pool—a Mouse, a Duck, an Eaglet, a Lory (the capital letters are Lewis Carroll’s) and, yes, a Dodo. I had to go to the dictionary just now to find out what a lory is—a parrot-like Asian bird with brilliant plumage—but I have known since childhood about the dodo, because Sir John Tenniel, who did the classic illustrations for the Alice books, shows us one in an unforgettable drawing for Chapter Three: a huge, ungainly, splay-toed bird, round as a sack, with a bulging chest, short, stubby legs, and an immense head that had a black bill ending in a great snubbed hook.

  Lewis Carroll’s dodo was solemn, rather dignified, and faintly absurd. It carried a walking stick, spoke in words of many syllables, and when asked a question “stood for a long time with one finger pressed against its forehead... while the rest waited in silence.” But Lewis Carroll had never observed the ways of the dodo, because he wrote his book in 1863 and the last time anyone saw a living dodo was in 1681, when an Englishman named Benjamin Harry, visiting the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius where dodos lived, encountered one. Lewis Carroll might have had a chance to see a stuffed one, since one had been brought back to England some decades before Benjamin Harry’s visit, ending up in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and Alice’s creator lived in Oxford. But by 1755 the Ashmolean specimen was so moth-eaten that the curator threw it away, and just the head and one foot of the specimen were salvaged. Thus the only dodo in any museum was lost.

  Extinction was plainly the dodo’s destiny from the beginning. It was unable to fly and ran in a slow, clumsy waddle with its plump belly scraping the ground. Since it made its nests on the ground, both it and its eggs were vulnerable to any predator that came along. Luckily for the dodo, its habitat—its sole habitat— was the island of Mauritius, six hundred miles east of Madagascar, and Mauritius had no native predators to threaten the dodos.

  But no island is an island, as the poet did not quite say, and the grand isolation of Mauritius and its defenseless dodos ended in 1507, when Portuguese mariners looking for a convenient base along the route from India to Africa discovered it. They surely must have noticed dodos, but their official reports say nothing about them, and so their formal discovery had to wait until the end of the sixteenth century, when a Dutch expedition under Admiral Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck arrived, named the island “Mauritius” in honor of Count Maurice of Nassau, the ruler of the Netherlands, and took note of huge flocks of an unusual bird. Van Neck tells us that one of his officers examined one closely and was “pecked mighty hard” for his curiosity.

  When Van Neck’s ship returned to Europe in 1599, he had a captive dodo on board, and one of his other ships brought back a second one. In his journal he described the bird as “larger than our swans, with huge heads only half covered with skin, as if clothed with a hood.... We call these birds walghvogels (‘disgusting birds’) for the reason that the more and the longer they were cooked, the less soft and more unpalatable their flesh became.”

  Unfortunately for the dodo, the men of a second Dutch expedition found the dodo much tastier, and captured dozens of the slow-moving birds for food. Later the Dutch planted a settlement there, bringing with them dogs—there had been none on the island—and rats arrived aboard the ships, and between the appetite of the sett
lers for walghvogel meat and of their dogs and the rats for its eggs, the dodo swiftly began to disappear.

  Meanwhile the bird was attracting attention in Europe. A Dutch painter named Roelandt Savery made a career out of depicting the one in Holland in sketches and paintings, and the other one, a gift to the Austrian Emperor Rudolf II, had its portrait done by the court painter. The dodo had also acquired a new name by then. An English sailor who had visited Mauritius, writing in 1628, told of “very strange fowles called by ye portingals Do Do.” In Portuguese doudo means “simpleton,” a good name for this lumbering, dim-witted creature.

  About a dozen dodos were brought to Europe in the early seventeenth century, including the one whose partial remains Lewis Carroll probably saw a couple of centuries later. In 1638 a certain Sir Hamon Lestrange wrote of seeing one on exhibit in London, swallowing pebbles the size of nutmegs. But under the onslaught of the dogs and rats and hungry Dutch settlers, the dodo population of Mauritius was dwindling rapidly, and by 1693, when another visitor to the island went to look for them, there were none to be found. Within another sixty years the inhabitants of Mauritius did not even remember that there had been such a bird.

  And so the dodo vanished from the Earth. Only some travelers’ tales, the seventeenth-century court paintings, and the fragmentary Oxford specimen remained to testify that it had ever existed. By 1800, many doubted that it ever had. No stuffed specimens existed. The reports of the early explorers might have been in error; plenty of imaginary beasts like unicorns and dragons had been reported by gullible travelers over the years, and so perhaps the dodo, too, was a figment of someone’s imagination. The paintings Savery had made of them showed a creature so weird that it was hard to believe that such a ridiculous being could be authentic.