Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I was getting more and more nervous. When Jason was finally in bed for his nap, I had to make myself stop going to the foyer to make sure the staircase was gone, that the men in suits were really gone. The car remained at the curb. At last Dad appeared. I almost knocked him down in my rush to get to him before he left again and I was nearly incoherent when I told him what happened.

  “Calm down,” he kept saying, as he patted my arm. “We'll figure out what to do.”

  Vernon came soon after that and I let Dad tell him. He turned pale. “Does Jason know? Did he see it happen?”

  “No! He ran out to play with Spotty. What difference—” I stopped myself. “Oh, my God! Your mother! Is that what happened to your mother?”

  Dad answered. “He didn't see it, either. He didn't know. And we don't know for sure, but it's the most likely thing.”

  Vernon rubbed his eyes and went to the sink where he stood with his back to us. Dad looked deeply troubled as he said, “I told her they were real, what you could do with them. I warned her not to go near, but...”

  The forbidden door in Bluebeard's castle came to mind, and I understood why Vernon had not told me until the issue was forced.

  No one spoke for a minute or two, until Vernon swung around from the sink and said, “Dad, you have to go to the mall and buy something, anything, and then come home on the bus, and get here before two-thirty. I'll go to the library, and get home by four, also by bus. April, it's going to be up to you to carry this off. Can you do it?”

  I nodded. Anything, I would do anything to get us out of this. How to explain two agents of some kind vanishing in our house?

  They both left soon after that, and after half an hour I called the police. “Please send someone,” I pleaded, all raw nerves again. “I'm alone with a small child, and I'm afraid. Please.”

  It took about ten minutes for two uniformed officers to get there. I met them at the door and was talking before they got all the way inside.

  “We were at the park, my little boy and I were. That car was there when we got home, and it's still there. Where is the driver? Why is it there? I keep thinking I hear someone at a window or something.”

  “Now, Mrs. Branleigh, take it easy. We'll have a look around. Why don't you have a cup of coffee or tea or something?” the older one said with a comforting smile. “I'm sure there's nothing to be alarmed about.”

  I didn't have to fake a thing. I was shaking and ready to fly apart. I sat at the kitchen table while they had their look around. They asked if they could have a look around inside and I nodded. “Don't wake up Jason.”

  When they came back the older one took out a notebook and asked a few questions. My husband, I said, was at the library in Roanoke doing some research. And my father-in-law had gone to the mall, and would be back any minute. Some people were supposed to meet with him between two and three.

  “I thought it was those men when I saw the car, but they were too early, and no one came to the door. Jason will be up any minute now and I'm afraid.”

  “Well, no one's around, so you can relax. No basement here?” he asked and I shook my head. And no upstairs, either, I nearly added.

  He turned to his companion, who had not said a word. “Call in the license number, see if we have anything on it.” The other one nodded and left, passing Dad at the door. Dad hurried into the kitchen. He was carrying a bag from Penney's.

  “What's going on? Why are you here?” he asked the officer.

  “Is there someplace where we can talk?” the officer asked. Dad took him to the living room.

  As soon as Jason was up and dressed we went outside. I sat on the patio with a cup of coffee and he played ball with Spotty. I did not want Jason to see the uniformed police officers and I most certainly did not want him to blurt out that the brain drain dudes had been there.

  The police left, but we knew it wasn't over yet. Others would come and ask questions. The best we could hope for was that the men in suits were from the private security company, and Dad would simply deny that he had been in California that year. His word against Styvesant's, he said. “And,” he added, “Styvesant is no better than a horse thief. He puts nags up for auction. Let them prove it.”

  A tow truck came and removed the car and two private detectives came. Vernon let them search the house and yard. They even looked on the roof. And they searched the park and the clubhouse, and no doubt talked to residents of the other section of the subdivision, including a couple who had seen Dad and Vernon on the bus that day. No government official came to ask questions, to our great relief.

  The plan is for all of us to use the stairs to go to the farm, and to leave as soon as Jason is sound asleep. Dad will carry Jason, who is not likely to wake up. Vernon will have a big suitcase, enough to do us until the movers bring the rest of our things, and I'll have a smaller suitcase. The last thing I put in the suitcase was Jason's new favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are. I wonder if that's where the two men in suits ended up, with the wild things.

  Dad will come back with Vernon, and he will drive to the farm overnight with Spotty. We will say he drove Jason and me, but it's too long a trip for Jason, who would need a bathroom break. Also, there's the possibility that we could be stopped somewhere. We want whoever hired those agents to believe that Dad is at the farm, and if they keep tabs on him, that's where they will locate the tracking device for the next ten years or longer. Vernon will wait for the movers, and then drive our car to the farm.

  And I have a plan of my own that I haven't mentioned yet. But I will. If Vernon thinks he can flit off now and then to exotic places and take pictures while I sit at home, he's in for a surprise. From now on he will have a companion and Dad will be our babysitter.

  “Ready?” Vernon asks, taking my hand.

  I nod. The staircase is only four or five steps this time, and it's for my benefit since I can't teleport, but although anyone can climb the stairs, only the conjuror can decide where they end up. Vernon will keep a good grip on my hand so we'll all end up at the same place. We start up the staircase.

  Copyright © 2009 Kate Wilhelm

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  * * *

  Poetry: SMALL CONQUERORS

  by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Who saw the menace? mice were just so cute

  riding with sharpened lance to challenge cats

  when first they forged a mouse-made armor suit

  and rode with painted banners on armored rats.

  —

  When mice discovered guns we worried more

  soon rodent Einsteins found the atom bomb

  and rodent armies learned the arts of war

  to start upon their human-race pogrom.

  —

  Mouse armies swarm, an angry furry tide

  we thought ourselves, once, nature's best and last

  from hordes of mice, there's just no place to hide

  now we flee creatures small and smart and fast.

  —

  So here's the lesson: we may be on top

  but evolution doesn't stop.

  —

  —Geoffrey A. Landis

  Copyright © 2009 Geoffrey A. Landis

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: ATOMIC TRUTH

  by Chris Beckett

  Chris Beckett lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife Maggie, his youngest daughter Nancy, and sundry furry animals. His first short story was published in the UK in 1990 in Interzone, which has since published twenty more. The author's US appearances have included: four previous tales in Asimov's, six stories in “year's best” collections, his first novel The Holy Machine (Wildside, 2004)—described here as “a triumph” by Paul Di Filippo—and, most recently, his second novel, Marcher (Cosmos Books). Chris's short story collection The Turing Test, which includes three tales first seen in Asimov's, was published last summer by Elastic Press. His latest Asimov's story takes a look at a social condition that is
n't necessarily all that far away.

  Jenny Philips emerged from the revolving doors of Rigby, Rigby, & Stile into the dirty drizzle and the glistening lights of a London November night. It was a Friday and she'd been working late, clearing her desk in preparation for a week's leave. This time tomorrow she and Ben would be in Jamaica, dining under palm trees and stars.

  She badly wanted to call him now, to make some kind of contact. But she knew he was busy wrapping things up at his work and he'd quite specifically told her he didn't want to be disturbed until he was done. Ben could get quite cross about things like that. He'd promised to call her as soon as he was through and she'd have to be content with that.

  Jenny looked up and down the busy street, judging the severity of the rain, turning up her collar, opening her pink umbrella and then, of course, putting on a pair of large hemispherical goggles. She was pretty, smartly dressed, twenty-eight years old, the p.a. to the senior partner in a City law firm. The goggles made her look like a fruit fly but she didn't mind because so did everyone else on the street. Ocular implants were on their way, but there were still unresolved safety issues—a small but unacceptable percentage of laboratory animals were still going blind—and for the moment everyone wore bug eyes.

  * * * *

  Or almost everyone. In the burger bar next to Jenny's office, Richard Pegg slid off his stool, pushed a dog-eared notebook into his pocket, zipped up his very large anorak that stretched down almost to his knees and pulled his woolly hat even lower down over his head. He was one of the few people in London under seventy who didn't even own a set of bugs. Even the people who slept in shop doorways had bugs, but Richard still went out into the rainy street with a bare face and naked eyes. The truth was he didn't need bugs to provide him with phantoms and visions and voices. In fact he had to take pills to keep that stuff at bay.

  Richard was twenty-eight, like Jenny, but he'd never had a job. He'd come up to town from his little one-bedroom flat in Surrey for one of his trips round the museums with his notebook and pencils. “Doing research” was what he called it to himself, looking for the hidden meaning of the world among the fossils and the hieroglyphs, the crystals and the cuneiform tablets. He'd filled up another notebook with his dense scrawlings in three different colors about clues and mysteries and conspiracies, full of capitals and underlinings and exclamation marks.

  Emerging from the burger bar, Richard too confronted the drizzle and the electric lights: orange, white, green, red, blue. But while Jenny had taken the everyday scene for granted, for him, as ever, it posed an endless regress of troubling questions. What was rain? What were cars? What was electricity? What was this strange thing called space that existed in between one object and the next? What was air? What did those lights mean, what did they really mean as they shifted from green to amber to red and back again, over and over again?

  Unlike Jenny, he also saw Electric Man. Four meters tall and outlined in white fire, Electric Man towered over the passing people and cars and stared straight at Richard with its light bulb eyes because it knew that he could see it, even if no one else could. Pursing his lips and hunching down into his anorak, Richard avoided its gaze as he headed off towards the station.

  “Atomic truth,” he muttered to himself, drawing together the fruits of his day's work. “Atomic truth. Hidden by the world's leaders. Hidden from the world's leaders because none of them has atomic eyes. They can't see it, not truth in its correct atomic form. Or not as far as I know.”

  He laughed loudly, opening his gap-toothed mouth. People turned to look at him. He ignored their bug-eyed stares.

  “Hi, Sue, it's Jenny!” The slender woman waiting in front of him for the pedestrian crossing sign to change from red to green had taken the opportunity to put through a bug call to one of her friends, an older woman who she used to work with in a previous job. “Ben is too busy to talk and I had to phone someone. I'm so excited! But nervous too. Our first holiday together. Do you think it's all going to be all right?”

  Thanks to her bug eyes, Jenny could see and hear her friend right in front of her. Richard couldn't see or hear the friend at all, of course, but he gathered up whatever fragments of the conversation that he could and stored them in his mind with the same reverence with which he copied down hieroglyphs in the British Museum. The way people talked to each other, were at ease with one another, the way they shared things and held one another's attention, these were as much a mystery to him as the inscriptions on the mummy cases of pharaohs: a mystery, but like the hieroglyphs, pregnant with mysterious meaning.

  * * * *

  “ ‘Hi, Sue, it's Jenny!'” he muttered.

  He laughed. It struck him as funny. And then he tried just repeating the name, “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

  It had such a sweet sound, that name, such a sweet, sweet sound.

  “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.”

  * * * *

  Jenny had her bug eyes set at low opacity. She could still see the world that Richard saw—the traffic lights, the taxis, the cars throwing up their fans of brown water, the shops like glowing caves of yellow light—but for her, soothingly, all this was enclosed in a kind of frame. Wearing bug eyes was cozy, like being inside a car. It reduced the city streets to a movie on a screen, a view seen through a window.

  Near the bottom of her field of vision—and seemingly in front of her in space—was a toolbar with a row of icons that allowed her to navigate the bug eye system. Near the top of the field there was an “accessories bar” with a clock and a variety of pieces of information of the kind that people find comforting, like the many blades of a Swiss penknife, even if they never use them: things like the air temperature, the Dow-Jones Index, a five-year calendar, the TV highlights of the evening ahead, the local time in Sydney and Hong Kong...

  Above the accessories bar, advertisements rolled by:

  “Even Detectives Cry, the powerful new novel from Elgar Winterton, now in bug-book format at Finlay and Barnes for just (British pounds) 2.99.... Froozli, the great new snack idea from Nezco. Because being healthy needn't mean doing without...”

  Of course Jenny wasn't paying any attention to the ads.

  “Ben's spent so much money on this,” she said to Sue. “You wouldn't believe it! Jet-skiing, and diving, and rafting, and ... well, loads of things he's booked up for us. I keep worrying that he's done too much and that it's going to be hard to ... I mean, I keep saying he doesn't have to...”

  A young couple passed by in the other direction, arm in arm. Although physically together, thanks to their bugs they were at that moment in entirely different worlds. He was blink-surfing the net. She was chatting animatedly into the air.

  Sue regarded her friend Jenny. Bug eyes did not transmit a visual image requiring a camera, but a virtual image in which movement and expression were reconstructed from facial muscle movements. Now Sue's virtual face regarded her gentle friend Jenny with narrowed, worried eyes.

  “Just try and enjoy it, Jenny!” she said. “Grab it while you can and enjoy it!”

  She hesitated, wanting to say more, but unable to find quite the right words. She was nine years older than Jenny, and rather tougher.

  “Enjoy it, Jenny dear,” she ended up repeating. “It's not every day you get a trip to Jamaica with everything paid for by someone else.”

  * * * *

  Communicating through bug eyes, paradoxically, allowed you to see other people bug eye free. But since he never used bugs himself and since he never entered other people's homes where folk removed their bugs to watch TV, Richard saw people with bug eyes on most of the time. He inhabited a world of human fruit flies. They saw his naked face and looked away.

  “Jenny,” he whispered, “Jenny.”

  And he laughed, not mockingly but with delight.

  * * * *

  Jenny finished her call with Sue. She crossed a busy road, then glanced at the mail icon on her toolbar and blinked twice. Her e-mail window opened and she skipped through the unread message
s. One came from a bug-book club she subscribed to and needed a quick answer or she'd have to pay for a book she didn't want.

  She blinked her message on its way. A relay station half a mile away picked it up, extracted its cargo of digital code and translated this into tiny flashes of light which traveled underground, at three hundred thousand kilometers per second, along filaments of glass, to a satellite station down on the Cornish coast which turned the light flashes back into a radio signal, a single phrase in a never-ending stream, and beamed it into space. Five hundred kilometers out, a satellite received Jenny's signal, along with hundreds of thousands of others, amplified it and sent it back down again to Earth.

  “101011101001010010100010111010111010100101010010101000...” called down the satellite, high up there on its lonely vigil at the edge of the void. “...10001010100011101...” it called down to the busy surface of the Earth:

  “No thank you,” it was saying on Jenny's behalf. “Please do not rush me my discounted bug-book edition of Even Detectives Cry.”

  A satellite dish in Cape Cod picked up the signal, and sent it on its way.

  * * * *

  Richard looked down a little side alley and saw two foxes. They'd knocked down a pile of wooden pallets at the back of a restaurant, and were now rummaging for scraps of meat and fish. In the electric light of the city, they were pale and colorless and not at all like those foxes in storybooks with their merry faces and their cunning eyes. No one but Richard had even noticed these foxes were here.

  “Hey, look! Foxes!” he said out loud, stopping, and hoping that Jenny might turn and look.

  He'd picked up that she was worried and he thought the foxes might cheer her up. Women liked animals, didn't they? He was pretty sure they liked things like that.

  “Look at that!” called Richard again, “Two foxes! Right in the middle of a city!”

  Behind and above the foxes he also saw Jackal Head, the presiding spirit of dogs and foxes and other doggy creatures. Jackal Head regarded him with its shining eyes, but Richard looked away and said nothing. He knew from long experience that no one else could see the likes of Jackal Head, bug eyes on or not, so he concentrated on the foxes.