Asimov's SF, August 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Mr. Fort didn't look up from the fire. “For the rest of his life, that other man would wonder about that night. Most of all,” he said, even more quietly and almost to himself, “he'd wonder why nobody ever beckoned to him.” He shook his head. “That is a horror story, lads."

  All the other boys groaned and swatted their hands at him, but Mr. Fort's story gave me a strange chill. For all our searching and listening and reading, I had yet to see something extraordinary myself. I wondered if I ever would, but I didn't have to wonder long.

  The next morning, after our breakfast of runny eggs and cold sausage, we prepared for our first excursion. We filled our canteens, unfolded Mr. Fort's maps, and marched into the woods with our dowsing rods.

  We fanned out amid the brush, Mr. Fort at our center yelling directions. “Come around the tree! No, this way! Stop!” he'd shout. “To the left!” I couldn't tell if he had some intended direction for us or if he was just improvising. I was too busy tumbling headlong over rotten logs and getting entangled in the vines to notice. Clarence broke his dowsing rod in a fall. Caleb kept stopping to drink.

  The day wore on, hot and muggy, and gnats buzzed around my eyes. By lunchtime, I was sweaty and tired of the whole exercise. I didn't know much about seeing magic, but I knew you didn't see it with a bunch of guys yelling in the woods. You didn't see it when you had to go to the bathroom or had mosquito bites all over your arms, either. Am I right?

  So when we gathered in a circle of elms to eat our cheese sandwiches, I took the opportunity to drift away from the group and eat mine alone.

  "Where are you going?” asked Petey.

  "I've got to pee,” I said, not quite telling the whole truth. What could I say to him? He'd kept me up half the night in our tent, talking about his vicious old man, and I'd talked to him as best I could. Now I was full of everyone, including him, at least for awhile.

  "Oh,” he said. “I'll just be here.” He sat on a boulder a few feet off from the other boys.

  If I'd been a better person, I might have stayed. I just couldn't, though. I turned and climbed over a ridge out of sight, and then I walked deep enough into the brush toward the protective drone of insects.

  I did my business behind an oak, and I stopped to sit upon a log to eat my sandwich before going back. It gave a little beneath my weight, obviously hollow. I'm not sure why, but I stooped at one end to look inside.

  The log was half-filled with a silt of rotten leaves and loam, and holes in the bark let in beams of yellowed sunshine. Among those beams, along a wide promenade of rich black soil, I saw the perfect place for a new city of Thuria, protected from my father, ready to rise again from destruction. Maybe I could never come back to see it, but at least I could always know that it was out here, growing on its own, living on no matter what happened to me. It would take no time at all, I figured, to set up some pine cone buildings and a leafy pavilion. So I reached inside and traced streets with my finger. I built a capitol out of bark. I tipped water from my canteen in the center of town, a fountain celebrating the fallen kings of ages past.

  And then I heard the crunching leaves of human footsteps behind me.

  Turning quickly expecting to see Petey or Mr. Fort, I saw instead a man in brown dungarees and a white shirt watching me from the edge of the hemlocks. He seemed to be silently flexing his mouth, his eyes wide. His hair had strands of grass in it, as though whippoorwills had nested there. He was tall and skinny, his legs most of all, and he swayed on his feet.

  "You find ‘em?” he said, finally.

  "Find who?” I asked.

  "The little people."

  I squinted into the log, and it seemed to stretch for miles. At the blurry edges of my vision, I could imagine the daily errands of a tiny civilization, but I knew that they were only imaginings. When I turned back, the man stood closer, though I hadn't heard him approach.

  "I don't see anybody,” I said.

  The man nodded. “You want to?"

  When I stood up, it seemed to take longer than usual and my head felt as airy as that log at the end. I swayed in the clearing like one of the saplings, barely strong enough to resist the breeze. I had a feeling something wasn't right, but I couldn't quite decide what it was.

  "I think I might have to go back,” I said, though my words felt as fuzzy as cotton.

  The man held out his hand but I didn't take it. He grunted and stumbled into the trees, weaving from trunk to trunk, ducking beneath the lower branches. I followed a few yards behind, listening for any sign of Mr. Fort and the other Scouts. I heard none.

  We came to an igloo of branches thickly woven together. The man pulled aside a sheet of old green canvas and pointed inside.

  "Go in if you want,” he said.

  The woods had gotten quiet, if that's the word for it. No, they'd gotten slow, as though the birds still opened their beaks to sing and the leaves still blew in the wind but they did it at a speed you couldn't quite perceive.

  I bent down to look inside. There, lying upon a bed of moss, was a girl in a white dress, not much older than me. She was asleep, one arm cast above her head and the other crossing her chest. Her feet were bare, and her fingers long and pale with strange purple-blue nails. Her blonde hair had been sprinkled with flowers.

  "She's my princess,” he said, close to my ear. His breath was cold. “Annabella. I rescued her."

  I blinked and turned to him. “Annabella? From Thuria?"

  He raised his finger to his lips and reached for me with his other hand, wide and fleshy, the fingernails packed deeply with grime.

  Time surged forward like a nickelodeon. I screamed and spun out of his reach. His mouth narrowed to speak and he lunged for me, but I was too fast. Jumping, crashing, shrieking through the bushes, I swam my way back to the others, not sure if he was following or not.

  I all but fell out of the forest, covered in scratches. “I know where they go!” I cried, scrambling on all fours. “I know where they go!” Everyone came over to help me stand but I was swinging my arms in all directions.

  Mr. Fort looked over my shoulder, back toward the way I'd come. Then he sprinted into the forest himself, and the rest of us followed. You wouldn't expect a middle-aged man to leave a group of thirteen-year-olds behind, but I think now that Mr. Fort wanted it more than we did, whatever he was chasing, whatever I'd seen. He could have scuttled atop those brambles if he had to.

  When he trotted to a stop in the middle of a clearing, we caught up to him. He was staring at the ground, eyes wide, and we followed his gaze to the object of his horror.

  It was an old green canvas tarp, bigger than the one that had formed the door of the hut. It was streaked with patches of brown blood, and the toe of a saddle shoe poked out from beneath.

  There was no log. There was no Thuria. There was no igloo. There was no man.

  We stood there, all ten of us, staring at the tarp a long time. Mr. Fort could probably have stayed there forever. We had to push our hands against him to get him to leave.

  The guys helped Mr. Fort and me back to camp, and neither of us was particularly useful for packing up the tents and knapsacks. Petey and Caleb had to slide Mr. Fort into the driver's seat of the bus. After he sat for a few minutes blinking through the windshield, he leaned forward slowly to start the engine. It took us six hours to get home after we called the New York State Police, and I looked so sick when my father saw me that he sent me straight to bed.

  That was the first night of many since that I've wondered just what I saw in those woods or how I saw it. The police found the other bodies, of course, though no one ever figured out who killed those girls or why they'd all been buried in white gowns. In all the questions I answered for detectives, I tried my best to describe the man who somehow entered or exited my Thuria, but I could never quite fit it all into words. I've found that the harder you work to explain something, the further it slips away. Maybe that's why Mr. Fort's books are all but unreadable.

  After that, our meetings w
ere never quite the same. Mr. Fort hadn't expected something so . . . expected out in those woods, and I think he was too spooked to take us on any other camping trips. Not that that stopped us, of course: most of us found other ways to get out again under the stars. Of course I did, sometimes alone, sometimes with Petey, sometimes with a few of the other guys—always to see just another glimpse of Thuria.

  Of course I wanted to see it again. Wouldn't you? I've been a Wonder Scout for my whole long life, even when it's cost me, and I always will be. There's no changing that for people like us, a little blessed and a little damned.

  I know some of you are waiting and hoping like I did for your moment of magic. I can't promise you'll have one, though looking at you here around the fire, I can see in your eyes that you've got a sporting chance. But you should know that there are no roads into Thuria, only out, and not all the people who take them are good.

  It will come, Scouts. You can't be ready, but you can be brave.

  Copyright © 2011 Will Ludwigsen

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Poetry: THE MUSIC OF NESSIE by Bruce Boston

  is indistinct and

  somewhere in

  the far distance,

  with long moments

  of silence between

  every string of notes.

  —

  As each brief interlude

  of elusive sound expires,

  you are astounded

  by the liquid

  and serpentine grace

  of its movement.

  —

  Yet it remains vague

  and far in the distance,

  like the memory

  of a dream

  on awakening.

  —

  Like the times

  the telephone

  rings and you hear

  it ring a moment

  before it rings.

  —

  —Bruce Boston

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: PAIRS by Zachary Jernigan

  Zachary Jernigan lives in Portland, Maine with his girlfriend, her daughter, and a cat with an eating disorder. “The sale of ‘Pairs,’ my first to Asimov's, made me jump higher than I've ever jumped in my life. The inspiration for the character Louca was a lyric from the Frank Black song, ‘In The Time of My Ruin.’ The rest of the story just came from somewhere else."

  I had been practicing turning myself into a knife. Between star systems I gathered and focused my particles into a triangle, a sharp shape. Hurling myself against the diamond-hard walls of my small ship, the point of the weapon hardened. I honed myself.

  You see, I had decided to murder my employer. I had studied his weaknesses and come to believe myself capable of the act. I did not know when and where, nor did I know what would trigger it. I simply knew it had to happen. On that day I would either die or buy myself a measure of freedom.

  Originally, this was the extent of my plan: To serve myself.

  My name is Arihant. I am one of two humans still inhabiting a physical form, diminished though it is. Outside the walls of my ship, I am in form a faintly translucent white specter, strong and powerfully built—an artist's anatomical model. Over the years it has become difficult to remember what my face looked like, and thus my features are only approximately human, my head bare. My eyes glow the color of Earth's sun.

  I am quite beautiful, Louca tells me. On more than one occasion she has run her hands over the ghostly contours of my body. “I wish you were solid,” she once said. “Oh, Ari. The things I would do to you."

  Louca is the one I am forced to follow and observe. Her name means “crazy"—an appropriate name. She is the second human possessing a body. Technically, her body is a black, whale-shaped ship one hundred meters long, but her avatars take the forms of anything she imagines. Very rarely, she is human, and never the same person twice. More often, she wears the bodies of flying animals.

  She dreams of flying, which is appropriate.

  Our profession is transport. For three centuries we have hauled the disembodied souls of Earth—each stored in a projection cube—from star to star to be sold. They are quite expensive, I am told, but I have no understanding of the means of exchange. Nearly everything is hidden from me, and Louca sees nothing.

  The reason souls are bought varies. Often they are kept as curios. Sometimes they are used to attract customers to the buyer's business. My employer used to goad me on these points: “Is it not wonderful to know your people are put to such good use? Imagine how happy it must make them!"

  But I know the truth. Even without physical bodies, men become lonely. They despair and I feel it. Surely Louca feels it; she goes crazier and crazier in such close proximity to ghosts. Before the events of this recording, only the luckiest souls were bought in pairs or groups, a rare occurrence. Now, because of Louca and I, it is the rule that souls must be sold in pairs.

  It is my one accomplishment, making men marginally less alone.

  Still, I arrange nothing—I have no power over the situation. I follow Louca from a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers, never any closer, and report anything unusual. I need not watch very closely. Louca's duty is to dream violent dreams, to defend and deliver her payload. Hopefully, her capacity for violence will never be tested. She is categorically insane—a fact that, my employer insists, makes her uniquely suited to the job of protector.

  Employer. Job. The terms are ridiculous, for Louca and I are not paid. Our terms of service are not negotiable. I am no one's employee, but I prefer not to use the word slave. Or master.

  I cling to life. I value it, though what value it has is measured in a mere handful of molecules. I possess no unique or useful knowledge, only memories. My ship, small though it is, has several lifetimes’ worth of entertainment files. I immerse myself in virtual environments so flawlessly rendered I forget they are fiction. I have lived many lives, largely uninterrupted by my duties.

  An observer might call these lives empty, but between systems, often decades at a time, they are all I have.

  By my count, the year is 2432—though I may well be wrong, as we travel faster than the speed of light. Not that it matters; Earth is dead, ground up for fuel, all her souls absconded with. In the time it has taken me to lose track of my own lives—a hundred, a thousand years—the fate of mankind has not changed.

  I record these words for a posterity that will not exist.

  * * * *

  I was interrupted in the middle of making love to a four armed, furred woman. My life of four years dissolved around me, and I woke in my single room to find a message written on the surface of my desk: We have arrived in the Sfari system. A quick check in my journal confirmed that we had visited it once before, nearly two centuries previously. A second visit is rare.

  Before/Under me spun Sfari, a blue-green marble. To my right, in the process of docking with a triple tori-shaped station, was Louca. She opened a bay door for me and I guided my ship inside. Several robota, eight-limbed and silvered, ignored me as they passed by in the maintenance corridor. Their carapaces nearly brushed the ceiling. An inspection team from the satellite, I recalled from last time.

  I found Louca in the debarking lounge. She had taken on the form of a five foot-tall flying squirrel, cartoonishly feminine—one of her favorites. A paw tapped the handle of the cart loaded with souls, eyes staring out the lounge's one window. There was nothing to see but the pitted wall of the station.

  "How are you, Louca?” I asked.

  She turned and smiled, revealing large incisors. “Arihant! You wouldn't imagine where I've been!"

  "I bet I can.” We have this conversation every time we meet.

  "No, no. I was a hawk.” She curled one claw, beckoning me closer as if to share a secret, and whispered, “I just flew in. I'm a hawk right now, actually, but you can't really tell. A vicious hawk."

  "You are?"

  "Yes. I am.” She rocked back, looked me up and down. “Yo
u look wonderful. Where have you been?"

  I considered my life, just erased. I had been an author of erotica on Luna, a famous man. I had had twelve children from seven women, a penthouse apartment in Saffron Towers, and an endless supply of drugs. It had been wonderful—wonderful but already fading, disappearing faster and faster the more I tried to cling to it.

  "Nowhere special,” I told her.

  Her rodent face managed to look sad. “That's sad,” she said.

  The door irised open, admitting us into the station.

  * * * *

  The cart guides us to the buyer. A cube intended for him/her/it glows and Louca hands it over. That is all, generally. Sometimes I am asked to demonstrate how to activate the soul projection, and I pantomime pushing the cube's single button. I have been instructed that Louca is not to perform this action—perhaps because, unlike me, she could physically depress the button. I have been warned several times not to allow this to happen.

  Apparently, the customers too are warned to never activate the projection before us. This used to disappoint me. I used to long to see the person trapped within the device, but now I know it is for the best. If I see another human, I have to explain what I am and what I do.

  The schedule is the same every time. We deliver the souls and store the cart. If sales are negotiated in the interim, we return to the ship to retrieve more cubes. Thus, during the night—or whatever constitutes the end of the business day—Louca and I are allowed to wander. I do not follow her; I do not witness what trouble she causes. For me, carnal pleasures are had only in simulated life.

  Our first day in orbit above Sfari we delivered seventeen souls to representatives of—to my untrained eye—nine species. The final three transactions occurred at the central market, a raucous, jumbled warren of stalls displaying items recognizable and foreign. The various species eyed us with expressions I read as menacing, hungry, disinterested—never friendly.

  One smiled, or possibly grimaced, exposing blue and yellow gums. He gestured to me and tried to hand Louca a sheaf of gold leaf bills in exchange. “Fuck you,” she said. “I'm a hawk and you'd better back off. I wouldn't sell Ari for all the gum in a candy store."