Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  In fact, the entire scenario played out in the story can be had for under a billion dollars. Admittedly, that's a lot of money for a business hacker like me, who missed out on the dotcom gravy train because he was writing science fiction stories instead of paying attention, but there are plenty of people who've got that much laying around, and more.

  As to where...

  Go to www.spacex.com and you'll see that Elon Musk and his employees at Space Exploration Technologies, Inc. have been awarded $278 million by NASA for the purposes of building the Dragon commercial manned spacecraft. That would be Fafnir and Smaug in the story. In just a couple years, I'm sure he'll be glad to sell you one, and launch it into space atop a Falcon 9 rocket. And yes, Elon Musk is indeed the PayPal guy, who was paying attention when I was not.

  Go to www.rocketplanekistler.com and you'll find everything you want to know about the Kistler K-1 reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle. Kistler tried and failed to build the K-1 cargo rocket in the 1990s, and finally went bankrupt. For a while, it seemed like the end of the trail, until the remains were bought by Rocketplane Limited, and resurrected to a new life. Now RpK, as it's called for short, has a $207 million contract from NASA to get their rocket up and flying.

  And that's just the two winners of the government-sponsored COTS competition for a Commercial Orbital Transportation System. There were losing competitors as well, and some of them intend to proceed, one way or another.

  Go to www.spacehab.com and you'll see that the company that makes the SpaceHab payload-bay cargo module for the Space Shuttle had a proposal to build a big cargo module called the Apex 400, which would fly interchangeably atop any of the world's big launchers. It would be a useful thing to have, and I hope they still build it. In the story, it's called Excelsior, and I suspect if you showed up with money and an order, they'd consider building one for you. They already know how.

  Go to www.bigelowaerospace.com and there you'll find a wealthy hotelier determined to set up an orbital hotel. Pipe dream? Not at all. The Genesis-1 test module is in orbit right now, and it worked so well the Genesis program will end with Genesis-2, which will have flown long before you read this. Next up, Sundancer, which will act as a prototype for the orbital hotel, and as a target for America's Space Prize, $50 million to anyone who can demonstrate the ability to get up there repeatedly, without taking any government money to do the job. In the story, I called the orbital honeymoon hotel Exodus. I think it's a damn fine name, and I hope Robert Bigelow will consider it, when the time comes.

  Need a methane/liquid oxygen main engine for your interplanetary spacecraft, even though NASA has decided it's too iffy for the Orion moonship? Go to www.xcor.com and there you'll see a company that's got smaller engines designed, built and tested. A larger methane/LOX engine is merely a matter of demand. If not, you still might find the Rocket Racing League entertaining.

  This is just scratching the surface, of course. the tSpace consortium at www.transformspace.com didn't win either the COTS competition or the CEV competition, but their designs are sound and innovative. The CXV air-launched manned spacecraft may well make it into orbit, and will certainly be cheaper to fly than anything except the Kistler K-1. And if it does? Well, their CEV design will make an ideal all-purpose planetary lander, not just for the Moon, but for Mars and beyond. We'll need it someday, one way or another.

  Finally, go to www.andrews-space.com and take a good look. Especially take a look at the Mini-Mag Orion design. It's a practical, buildable fusion-drive interplanetary spacecraft waiting in the wings. It would take a pile of money and determination to bring something like that to fruition, but no more money than is already earmarked by Congress to fund the nation's long-delayed return to the Moon, and a whole lot less than has already been spent on the International Space Station. With it, you could get anywhere in the inner solar system, and a little beyond. If I had one, I'd stick a tSpace CEV on the nose, fly on out to Callisto, and make a landing.

  I've written a number of stories about futures we lost due to stupidity, for example “Harvest Moon” (Asimov's SF, September 2005). And once upon a time, Michael Capobianco and I wrote a book called Fellow Traveler (Bantam Books, July 1991) about a splendidly possible future that crashed and burned away to nothing at all in the weeks and months following the book's publication. Politics and short-sightedness took those futures away before they could happen. This story is about the next such future, looming up before us with the promise of a bright new tomorrow.

  Maybe this time, the dream will come true. Either way, we'll soon know. Keep your fingers crossed. And if you happen to have a few hundred million dollars you don't need right away, I've got some cool ideas....

  Copyright © 2007 William Barton

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  LILYANNA

  by Lisa Goldstein

  "Asimov's bought my first story, ‘Ever After’ (December 1984). I'd already published two novels by then, and I was beginning to think I was going to be one of those authors who could only write novels. Since then, of course, I've given you almost all of my short stories. Best wishes on your thirtieth birthday."—Lisa Goldstein

  Lisa Goldstein has published eleven novels, the most recent being The Alchemist's Door from Tor Books. She has spent the last four years as Isabel Glass, and has written two books under this name; the latest is The Divided Crown. Her novel The Red Magician won the American Book Award for Best Paperback. Her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. She has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer, and she lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their cute dog Spark. Her website, which includes pictures of Spark, is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.

  Sometimes after the library closes I walk through the dim rooms, savoring the quiet. I put books back in order, and straighten the displays, and take down the outdated fliers on the community bulletin board. Then I put on my coat, turn out the last light, and go home.

  Today the disorder the patrons had left was worse than usual, books scattered on tables and counters and across the floor. The days when libraries were havens of silence, the only sounds a muffled cough and a scratch of a pen on paper, are long gone, I'm afraid. People talk and laugh as if they're at a ball game, or answer their cell phones, or call out to one another when they see a book they recognize. Around three-thirty the after-schoolers come in, looking for something to do until their parents get off work and pick them up. Mostly they gossip, or sit at the computers and play games; occasionally one of them will read something, but it's usually a comic book.

  I picked up the books and stacked them into piles. It's a small library I work in, in a small town down the peninsula from San Francisco, just two rooms for adult fiction and nonfiction and two for the juvenile sections. The clean-up took only a few minutes. Then I put the books into the bin to be checked in the next day, in case a patron had checked them out and forgotten them.

  A piece of paper fluttered out from one of them and fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over. It was a photograph, black and white, a picture of a woman. She looked like a movie star, with the sort of beauty they used to have when they all looked like kings and queens, distant and regal. Perhaps she really had been a star, but if so I didn't recognize her.

  I studied her a while longer. Her hair was light brown, and her wide-set eyes could have been the same color, though the black and white of the photograph made it hard to tell; they could just as easily have been gray. Her mouth was that bow shape that had been popular generations ago; it looked dark in the photograph, and I thought she might have been wearing red lipstick.

  None of this explains why I thought her beautiful, though. It was something impossible to define, a matter of the curve of a cheekbone, the straight line of a forehead. A few millimeters one way or the other and she would have looked different, entirely ordinary.

  The actress she reminded me of most was Gr
eta Garbo. I went over to the movie section (791.43) and took down a book on her, but I saw I'd been wrong; they were not very much alike. But both seemed luminous somehow, as if a light shone from inside them.

  I learned from the book that Garbo had not said “I want to be alone,” the quote everyone attributes to her, but “I want to be left alone,” which makes more sense. Librarians, I sometimes think, know a great deal of useless trivia about a great variety of subjects.

  I wished I had thought to check which book the photograph had come from, but there were too many in the bin now to make a guess. I puttered around some more, then went to my cubbyhole of an office, just behind the circulation area, and put the photo in a desk drawer. I straightened the plastic sign that said “Harris Kent, Librarian” and checked the empty rooms again—there was no one waiting for me at home, after all—and caught a later bus home.

  We were busy as usual the next day. I stayed in my office, doing paperwork and ordering books, coming out when the library aides needed help. I saw the Crossword Puzzle Guy, there in the mid-morning as always—he Xeroxes the puzzle from the New York Times, fills it in in ink, and leaves it behind him on the front table. After he left, a high school student came in, obviously truant. He'd been here a few times before, and had even asked me for help finding information about anoles, which turned out to be a kind of lizard. I'd shown him how to use the encyclopedia (what do they teach them in schools these days?), and later he graduated to the Internet. If he kept skipping school I'd have to talk to him or his parents or guardian, but for now I left him alone; he was probably learning more here than in his classroom.

  Every so often I opened my drawer and took out the photograph. Looking at it made me feel as if I were turning on a light in a dark room, as if something were being made clear, illuminated.

  I've always liked photographs, the way they're the same each time you look at them, predictable, even comforting. So much else goes by so quickly, changes even before you've had a chance to notice it.

  Once when I studied the photograph I saw something new: the woman looked a bit like someone I'd dated in college. Nina had had the same breathtaking beauty, and she, too, had seemed set apart by it, a visitor from some other, better, realm. I'd never understood why she'd gone out with me. I wear glasses, my hair is the dull color of meatloaf, and I'm tall and skinny—though at least, I used to think, Nina and I were the same height.

  Usually the thought of her brought back a confusion of feelings, love and loss and regret, but this time the mysterious woman crowded out everything else. Who was she? Where had she come from? What had happened to her?

  I went to lunch, came back. The mob of kids came in after school, talking noisily. Some of them towed bookbags on wheels; you have to wonder about the amount of homework they get. Fortunately the children's librarian deals with them; only rarely does she call me for help.

  The time slid toward closing. The patrons headed toward the doors, and I turned off some of the lights. A woman dashed in; she knew what she wanted, she said, it would just take a minute. I knew this type of patron of old, and sure enough she was still standing in front of the fiction shelves when we closed. I sent the aides and the children's librarian home and talked to her a bit about the bestseller list; then it turned out that she didn't have a library card and I had to process one for her.

  It was ten minutes after closing when I finally shut down the computer and made my rounds through the empty rooms. My footsteps echoed back to me, muffled by the rows of books; when I accidentally dropped a pen the sound lingered for a while, suspended in the silence. This was the way libraries used to sound, I thought, like nothing else in the world.

  I picked up books from when they had been left (or thrown—one of them lay open on its back, looking disturbingly helpless, like a dead body). As I carried them to the bin a scrap of paper fell out and drifted to the floor.

  I grabbed it on its way down. It was a ticket stub, an old one, pre-printed instead of spat out from a computer. It had been torn in half; the part I held read “Para” and, on the next line, “Thea."

  That sparked a vague memory. I put the books down and went to the local history section (979.46). I found it in the third book I checked: a brief history of the Paramount theater in Oakland. The place had been a movie palace from 1931 to 1970, though it had had to shut down once during the Depression. I studied the angular gold and green lights of the main entrance, the statues of golden women marching toward a great gold fountain, and as I did so a strange notion took hold of me: that the woman in the photograph had held this ticket, had gone to this performance.

  It was crazy, delusional. And yet the idea wouldn't leave me. I saw her striding through the front door in a short jacket and a long slim skirt, a mannish hat with a feather on her head, looking up at her companion from under the brim. At the intermission she took out a cigarette and went to the women's lounge (amazingly, according to the book, women were not allowed to smoke in public then) and discussed the movie with the other smokers. If my guess was right and she was an actress, perhaps she would have known something about the stars. The other women might even have recognized her, might have listened intently as she gossiped about the leading man.

  I re-shelved the history and went back to the pile of books I'd collected earlier. This time I'd seen the one the ticket had come from, and I checked the title; it was The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. The books themselves weren't relevant, then, just the messages they contained.

  I put the ticket in my drawer, together with the photograph, and left. When I got home I made dinner and then settled down with a book I'd checked out. The quiet at the end of the day was welcome, but even as I read I was aware that it wasn't the same as the hushed silence of the library. It didn't have the weight of history behind it, the great edifice built of kings and explorers, poets and philosophers, books about carpentry and cat care and trains and when to plant dahlias, all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.

  The next day crept by slowly. I was eager to be left alone (like Garbo) and see if the books would yield up something new. I kept seeing vague glimmers out of the corner of my eye, a blur of white like the sway of a skirt or the turning of a page, but when I looked there would be nothing there. Finally everyone left; I shut the door behind them and turned the sign to Closed.

  “Are you doing anything tonight?” someone said behind me.

  I jumped. It was only the children's librarian, Amy, coming out of the back. I muttered something about a dinner meeting, and she shrugged and left.

  I was actually trembling as I walked through the library, picking up books and rifling through their pages, turning them upside down and shaking them to dislodge any stray pieces of paper. My heart pounded so loudly I could hear it in the silence. I made myself go slower, straightening each pile of books carefully and setting them gently in the bin.

  Amy and I had gone out for a drink once. Afterward she had invited me to her house. I had felt awkward, filled with trepidation; I hadn't known what she wanted, hadn't known what I wanted for that matter. It was one of those moments where a life could change in an instant, some decision made that could never be taken back.

  I needn't have worried. She lived with her three children, two dogs, and a parrot, who shouted “Abandon all hope!” when we walked through the door. Her ex-husband, I soon discovered, lived over the garage and had been taking care of the kids, only two of which were his. One of the dogs was recovering from some complex surgery and wore that collar that looks like a giant Elizabethan ruff. He had fixed ideas about how big he was, ideas that did not include the collar, and kept bumping into things. Perhaps it was only in memory that he bumped into me more than anything else.

  The ex-husband made his living from entering contests, and Amy's walls were stacked with computer games and lifetime supplies of hair product; he had run out of space to store them all. As we sat on her couch, trying to talk over children's demands and the parrot's squawking, a post
al truck pulled up, setting off a round of barking from the dogs, and disgorged more boxes.

  I noticed for the first time that evening that she was quite pretty—though perhaps cute might be a better word, with her frizzy blond hair, snub nose, and freckles. And I had never realized how short she was; she barely came up to my shoulders.

  She turned out to be an interesting woman, too, more thoughtful than I would have expected from her surroundings. “Sometimes I feel like I'm walking down a long hallway, and doors are closing all around me,” she said. “There are so many things I wanted to do, things I thought I'd get around to when I was older. Like go to exotic places and write books about them, and learn how to sail, and speak Spanish, and make pottery ... And have kids, of course, but it's the kids that are keeping me from all the rest of it. You can't do everything, I guess is what I'm saying. Do you know what I mean?"

  I didn't, not really. She had her hands full, more than full; she seemed to be doing enough for several people already.

  “Well, but you're still young, younger than I am,” I said. “There's still time for all that.” But she looked at me as if my answer had disappointed her.

  I never went back. I'm not sure why, really. All the time I was with her I kept thinking about Nina, the way she used to stride forward on those long legs, the way she always seemed to know where she was going, even when she was lost. And Amy's life looked too confusing, there were too many things to take in at once.

  I finished making the rounds of the library. There had been no messages from the books, not a scrap of paper to be found. I cursed myself for an idiot. I had built up something out of nothing, a ludicrous fantasy. I felt a mad urge to take every book off the shelf and shake them until they gave up their secrets. Instead I took a last look at the photograph and headed for the door.