Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014

by Penny Publications

  Should she help it, perhaps poke a small hole in the side so it had something to work at? She consulted the pamphlet but it said nothing about the hatching process.

  But by the time she came back to the tank, the question had resolved itself. A rent in the side was widening. Through it Petra glimpsed orange scales and pale flesh.

  She checked the second tank. There the same thing was happening, although the scales were turquoise rather than reddish orange.

  The globe convulsed and collapsed. In a flurry of scales the turquoise mermaid emerged.

  Petra stared. She had expected Sea Monkeys.

  This was very different.

  The mermaid was perfect and colorful as one of the parrot-bright little fish that school in coral reefs. Its upper half was a tiny woman, complete with blue seashell bra cupping the faint swells of her torso.

  She called Leonid. "What are these? Are they intelligent?"

  "Of course not! I told you that," he crowed, pleased that his creation had deceived her sharp eye.

  "But it's wearing clothing."

  "Look closer," he said. "I told you. All natural coloration. Or engineered, to be more precise."

  Her fingers were tight on the cell phone as she leaned down to look into the tank. The mermaid coiled, long tail writhing in the water. It nosed among the plastic seaweed in the tank, perched atop an arch of rocks and groomed itself, combing fingers through blonde hair. Looking closely, Petra could see that what Leonid had said was true. The flesh shifted color and texture, became the bra's structure.

  "You're sure?"

  "They're not even animals, really," he said. "Think of them as little flesh machines."

  The flesh machines floated in their tanks. Petra pulled her eyes away from them.

  "Very well," she said.

  That night she set two more seeds into their starting buds, one white, the other purple. It amused her to think that these were Suffragist colors, the same colors banner wearers of the nineteenth century had sported.

  She wondered what a suffragist mermaid would look like.

  Daisy had opted for the new French bakery, the Rendezvous, over at Bella Bottega.

  She was already ensconced at a wrought-iron table.

  "Try the brioche with Nutella," she urged.

  Petra nibbled on a sample from the basket next to the cash register as she waited for her coffee, but opted for a croissant.

  The cashier was about fifteen, wearing a nose ring, and unsmiling. In a collage, Petra would depict her with a seagull's wing.

  An arc of discarded cigarette butts.

  A puff of glitter to show the way the light coming in through the front door shone on the ring.

  What signs expressed she reminds me, once I was young and now I regret so much?

  What signs spoke to that younger self that had been so wrenched awry by societal pressures and circumstance?

  She wrestled her mind away from the question. She shoved change in her jacket pocket, and turned back. Sitting down across from Daisy, she scattered croissant crumbs across the tiled table as she detached a flakey triangle.

  "I have to keep an eye on the time," Daisy said. "The kids are in archery camp, but they might get out early."

  Daisy's children were perpetually enrolled in lessons: gymnastics, ceramics, horseback riding, impromptu theater, all of which allowed Daisy to snatch time for her second love: poetry. Even now a Moleskine notebook protruded from the ample purse beside her.

  She looked at Petra. "You're too thin. And when are you going to tell that woman to back off?"

  "Thursday lunch. And I don't have anything overt," she added. "Or much, at any rate. But you know how sometimes you feel it in your core, that someone doesn't mean you well?"

  Daisy nodded. "Go with your gut," she said. "You learn that as a mother. You learn that silence sometimes has an ominous tinge that means someone's drawing with lipstick on the new flocked yellow wallpaper."

  "But enough of that," Petra said. "I don't want to think about it now, really."

  Daisy's gaze was intent behind wire-rimmed glasses. She always wore REI casual, lavender fleece or teal sweaters with matching socks. Her only piece of jewelry, other than her plain gold wedding ring, was a matching ring set with a topaz and a peridot, her daughters' birthstones.

  "How's Kerry dealing with the divorce?"

  "Hard to know. She seems to be enjoying this rock camp well enough. Says they named their band Harvey Hairbanger. Why? Who knows."

  Daisy's smile quirked. They'd met several years ago at a gallery fundraiser and found they lived two blocks from each other. Even so, coffee dates were rare. Daisy prized her free time fiercely, used it to hole up and write the taut little half-sonnets about overthrowing the establishment that had made her an unlikely Occupy hero.

  The phone laid beside Daisy's cup buzzed.

  "What now?" She picked it up and glared at it. "Jesus. Kaitlin has what they think is a broken arm. How do you break your arm shooting an arrow?" She gathered her things in a scramble. "I'll see you next week?"

  "Sure."

  "You'll have to tell me how it went." The crumbs on the table lifted and fell as the door closed behind Daisy. She vanished out into the parking lot's sun. Petra remained in the shadowy cafe, studying the chalkboard and black and white photographs of French landmarks. Was the cashier watching her? She was the only customer other than the inevitable laptop user hunched at a back table, a young hipster man wearing gawky horn-rimmed glasses.

  He raised his head as she looked at him, returning the look. They both blushed and looked aside. The cashier made an uninterpretable sound.

  Petra felt unsatisfied. These daily interactions, the lunches and coffee dates, were how she managed equilibrium, how she kept herself from spiraling into obsessive thought, kept herself from being consumed. Her best collages came out of such passages, but they were hard on her: days spent working, no sleep, no showers, no food other than a succession of sugar-heavy Cokes and old-style cigarettes until she finally forced herself to let the creation go, shipped it off to her gallery.

  Her former gallery now. She'd have to look for a new one. That would be a pain in the ass, a search more painstaking than for any lover, because a gallery steered you, represented you, built your brand, was the enabler for your statement to the world.

  Why had they decided to remove her from their client list? Blake, the owner, had refused explanation. Simply said it would be best for her to move to another establishment. Then stopped returning her calls.

  When she saw Saffron this Friday, maybe the other artist would give her insight into what had happened, why Saffron's show now appeared on the schedule where Petra's had been.

  Petra found it hard to believe there was any malice. These things were always the result of a misunderstanding, something that could be sorted out.

  The pamphlet said the Sound Chamber was used to breed the mermaids, although it coyly called it "collaborating." Apparently that was the toy's main point, to see what combinations you could create, collect the different and increasingly complicated configurations like trading cards or stickers. She noted that the expansion kit came with plenty of additional tanks. With hundreds of possible mermaids, this would be an expensive hobby if Leonid was using the pricing strategy he'd indicated.

  The turquoise mermaid didn't flee the net as Petra dipped it into the tank. Instead it floated there docilely. The lack of reaction reinforced what Leonid had called them: flesh machines. She put it and the white mermaid—Snowlanthia, the pamphlet named it—in the Song Chamber and watched.

  The mermaids hung still in the Song Chamber's tepid water, staring at each other. A circle at the circular tank's bottom lit up, a phosphorescent glow illuminating each mermaid from beneath. It gave the turquoise mermaid a peculiar intensity reminiscent of a black light poster and tinted the opal one with a hint of green, as though mold were growing in the ridges of her scales.

  The mermaids circled each other in slow, undulatin
g spirals. They flicked their fins and collided, bouncing off each other.

  Petra's breath stopped. Had she done something wrong? Were they attacking each other?

  No. The mermaids were rippling against each other.

  From the chamber's silver rim came a whisper, the note of a drowning flute calling to a submerged piccolo.

  Flesh machines. But the contortions seemed so intimate. She took a yogurt from the coolbox and went to watch a news flickie.

  When she returned, the mermaids were no longer in contact. In the circle of light at the chamber's bottom lay a thumb-sized globe, its surface patterned with silvery lines, like a cracked glass marble.

  She set up another tank to put the seed in. Over the course of the evening she managed to start another four mermaid seeds: kelpy, mottled green; peacock purple; a frosty yellow as soft as an Easter chick; and a deep, inky black shot through with parallel needles of golden light.

  She was going to need more tanks.

  Peg said, "You've always been too nice for your own good. You let Leonid drag you from town to town with all his crazy schemes. You kept building up networks and then he'd move the family to Atlanta or Austin or somewhere in Michigan."

  Peg was Petra's cousin, and one of the few women Petra didn't mind a scolding from. They had too much history between them, too many sleepovers and shared escapades and confided crushes, for Peg's words ever to sting too hard.

  This time Petra had picked the place, the Regent Bakery-Cafe, so she could get one of their elaborately frosted cake slices, compartmentalized from its kindred with barricades of printed cellophane. It was busy. Chinese food sizzled in the back, while the pastry counter serviced an ongoing stream of customers.

  "It's hard to be assertive sometimes," Petra said as she uncurled the wrapper from her green tea cake.

  "But life gets a lot harder if you're not." Peg had a ham bun. She'd dyed one lock of her auburn hair pine green, a dryad look that went well with her unobtrusively shaded sweater and jeans. She was well-fleshed and perpetually on the verge of starting a diet, always postponed to a better tomorrow. "After all, you want to set a good example for Kerry."

  "True."

  Petra didn't want her daughter to put up with half the bullshit she'd had to. But she suspected it was inevitable.

  She hurt so much sometimes on her daughter's behalf. Leonid had never understood that, had always discounted her experience. He had a way of finding articles on feminism and quoting them to her, leading up to an argument over its relevance. It was one reason she'd been so relieved to leave, that endless rehearsal, pressing on sore points that he'd learned, relying on sophistry and doubletalk to discount everything she believed in, everything she'd learned over decades of trying to exist as a female artist.

  She said, "Sometimes I worry I'm too weak to be a good example."

  "Don't be ridiculous. Eleanor Roosevelt said women are like teabags. It's not till we're in hot water that we learn how strong we can become."

  "Did you pick that up on Pinterest?"

  "Yup, with an infographic showing the rising number of women in the Senate." Peg's eyes danced.

  But Petra didn't have the energy for banter. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I have enough laid aside for six months, but after that I need to be selling work. Ideally, I need to give a new gallery some time to plan a first show. But it's all such a pain in the ass. Nothing makes me feel more like a fraud than going into a gallery with my portfolio and trying to convince them they should give me wall space."

  "ArtForum called you one of the West Coast's most important new artists."

  "After twenty years of work, I'm a new artist."

  "The 'important' is what you should concentrate on. Get a new gallery and start building on that. I can't believe they'd let you go when your work brings in so much."

  "I know. But I haven't delivered one in a year. Things were so up in the air. I only started working a few months ago. I've been trying to finish up the main piece. I guess I can relax on that deadline."

  "What's it called?"

  Petra licked jade frosting from a fingernail. "Welcome to My Life."

  The mermaids had all hatched. Their differences fascinated her. Seaweed fronds grew along the green one's length, tangled in its black hair. The peacock purple one had scales shaded similarly but crimson hair and a delicate gold tiara floating in that hair. Petra had to squint to ascertain that it wasn't actually a separate artifact but rather the trick of a horny protrusion with deceptive coloration.

  The marigold yellow mermaid had peach colored lips to match the flowers in the illusion of a lei around its neck. The black one was unexpectedly zebra striped, minute pearls around its neck glimmering coldly.

  She watched them. Leonid had said flesh machines, but had all the patterns of be havior been programmed into them, then? She watched the green and marigold blowing kisses at each other.

  Leonid picked up on the second ring. "You've called me more this week than you did all last year," he said without preamble.

  She said, "They're blowing kisses and playing patty cake with each other, for god's sake. You can't tell me they're machines."

  "But they are," he said. "Do you really think I'd make little thinking humanoids as toys? I know you think I'm an asshole, but really, Petra? Really?"

  She said, "I guess you did a better job that you thought. They're fucked up."

  His voice was a cold knife. "You're always ready to condemn. Particularly things that are meaningless. Jokes."

  "Jokes are a form of hostility, Freud said."

  "No one takes Freud seriously anymore."

  "You deny there's hostility behind them sometimes?"

  "Sure. Sure, sometimes. Not as many times as you think, though, Petra."

  Her shoulders ached with tension, pain that spread its tendrils down her arms and caged her wrists. "All I want," Leonid said, "is for Kerry to be happy. I think she's happier if I'm part of her life. So I give her a present and here you are on the phone telling me it's fucked up. I'm just trying to reach out."

  Guilt surged through her. Why was it so many people could evoke this helpless shame in her?

  But Kerry deserved a father.

  Kerry deserved so much.

  Kerry deserved a happy life.

  Kerry deserved to be more than a mermaid.

  "Petra?"

  She snapped out of the spiral fugue. "Sorry. I find them... I find them unsettling. Maybe that's good for you to know. Market research and all that. I can't think I'll be alone in the reaction."

  "Sure," he said. "That's great, I appreciate it. Thank you for getting it set up for Kerry. You must be breeding them, if you're seeing the kiss behavior. That's a second level mermaid feature."

  "Making them collaborate, you mean."

  He laughed. "Yeah, marketing wanted to steer away from the idea of sex. We're thinking about a racier version, though. Who knows? They're convincing, you've got to admit that."

  In the tank, zebra stripes and a peacock blur circled, lemniscate.

  "They are that," she said and hung up without saying goodbye, a petty blow she regretted immediately.

  She spent the rest of the evening studying the mermaids. She got out a notebook and put a color atop each page, recording the combinations she'd tried so far. She assembled the rest of the tanks in the bottom of the box and cleared the nook's bookcase in order to stack them in it. She ordered it with what Leonid had called the second level mermaids on the top shelf, and what were presumably the first level, the ones hatched from the kit's seeds, on the middle shelf. She set the rest of the seeds to hatch, another half dozen colors.

  She made notes of the behaviors and characteristics of each, transcribing the few lines the pamphlet provided for each onto the appropriate page.

  Once or twice, she thought, "I should go work." But the mermaids riveted her. She tried to analyze their actions.

  Put more than four in a tank and you had trouble. They'd all just hang there li
mply, floating in the water as though dead.

  Some interactions were mermaid specific. If you had two with the lei growths, they'd swap them from time to time. How had Leonid managed to make those detachable?

  When she finally lay down, sleep wouldn't come, no matter how hard she tried to relax. The mermaids flitted behind her eyelids, spasmed in the water as they fucked. Because no matter how you tried to disguise it with prettier words, that was what they did. Leonid had said things about the song releasing the collaboration protocol in the mermaids.

  How many times could one sing, she wondered. How many mermaids could one end up with, a marine version of a crazy old cat lady, a madwoman in the attic, tending mermaids and breeding them into increasingly crazy combinations? What had led Leonid to think of mermaids? They were certainly unthreatening to a girl child, the half where sex occurred removed, a neuter fishtail substituted. Wasn't that what was at the heart of the Little Mermaid, the mermaid taking on legs and the ability to fuck, and look what disasters came of all that.

  But he'd reinserted sex with the Song Chamber.

  She didn't think about feminism that often. But something about the tanks of mermaids kept bringing it up over and over again.

  She'd minored in women's studies at a particularly oppressively religious Midwestern university. It had been the classes that got her through the years there. That and the other women. Not just the teachers, but the other students.

  And at the same time, she'd hated those classes because of what they showed her, the rage that rose in her every time she saw an injustice. She remembered seething then, full of hot anger. It lurked under every thought sometimes. Had informed every piece of art she'd made during those years.

  She rolled over and laid her cheek against a cooler section of the pillow. These days her temperature fluctuated in the night. She'd wake sauna-hot, throw off the covers and freeze. Lather, rinse, repeat till seven A.M.

  Her younger self would have hated the mermaids.

  Cartoons of traditional roles. Distorted mirrors held up to little girls to start them down the path of always looking at themselves, judging themselves against anorexic mermaids, wasp-waisted French maids, sex kittens, and iron-jawed Amazons.