Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  But when he got to the refugee camp he found it had all been for nothing. The truck was gone and so was Eva May's family; an elderly couple in a Buick were already setting up camp in the spot. No, they said, they didn't know anything; the place had been empty when they got here, just a little while ago.

  Davis made a few cautious inquiries, without finding out much more. The woman in the school bus across the lane said she'd heard them leaving a little before daylight. She had no idea where they'd gone and doubted if anyone else did.

  “People come and go,” she said. “There's no keeping track. And they weren't what you'd call friendly neighbors.”

  Well, Davis thought as he drove back to the reservation, so much for that. He felt sad and empty inside, and disgusted with himself for feeling that way. Good thing the bars and liquor stores weren't open on Sunday; he could easily go on a serious drunk right now.

  He was coming over the mountains east of Cherokee when he saw the smoke.

  * * *

  It was the worst fire of the decade. And could have been much worse; if the wind had shifted just right, it might have taken out the whole reservation. As it was, it was three days before the fire front crossed the reservation border and became somebody else's problem.

  For Davis Blackbear it was a very long three days. Afterward, he estimated that he might have gotten three or four hours of sleep the whole time. None of the tribal police got any real time off, the whole time; it was one job after another, evacuating people from the fire's path, setting up roadblocks, keeping traffic unsnarled, and, in the rare times there was nothing else to do, joining the brutally overworked firefighting crews. By now almost every able-bodied man in the tribe was helping fight the blaze; or else already out of action, being treated for burns or smoke inhalation or heat stroke.

  At last the fire ate its way over the reservation boundary and into the national parkland beyond; and a few hours later, as Wednesday's sun slid down over the mountains, Davis Blackbear returned to his trailer and fell across the bed, without bothering to remove his sweaty uniform or even to kick off his ruined shoes. And lay like a dead man through the rest of the day and all through the night, until the next morning's light came in the trailer's windows; and then he got up and undressed and went back to bed and slept some more.

  A little before noon he woke again, and knew before he opened his eyes what he was going to do.

  * * *

  Captain Ridge had told him to take the day off and rest up; but Ridge wasn't around when Davis came by the station, and nobody paid any attention when Davis left his car and drove off in one of the jeeps. Or stopped him when he drove past the roadblocks that were still in place around the fire zone; everybody was too exhausted to ask unnecessary questions.

  It was a little disorienting, driving across the still-smoking land; the destruction had been so complete that nothing was recognizable. He almost missed a couple of turns before he found the place he was looking for.

  A big green pickup truck was parked beside the road, bearing the insignia of the U.S. Forest Service. A big stocky white man in a green uniform stood beside it, watching as Davis drove up and parked the jeep and got out. “Afternoon,” he said.

  He stuck out a hand as Davis walked across the road. “Bob Lindblad,” he said as Davis shook his hand. “Fire inspector. They sent me down to have a look, seeing as it's on federal land now.”

  He looked around and shook his head. “Hell of a thing,” he said, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  It certainly was a strange-looking scene. On the northeast side of the road, there was nothing but ruin, an ash-covered desolation studded with charred tree stumps, stretching up the hillside and over the ridge and out of sight. The other side of the road, however, appeared untouched; except for a thin coating of powdery ash on the bushes and the kudzu vines, it looked exactly as it had when Davis had come this way a couple of weeks ago.

  The Forest Service man said, “Anybody live around here?”

  “Not close, no. Used to be a family named Birdshooter, lived up that way, but they moved out a long time ago.”

  Lindblad nodded. “I saw some house foundations.”

  Davis said, “This was where it started?”

  “Where it was started,” Lindblad said. “Yes.”

  “Somebody set it?”

  “No question about it.” Lindblad waved a big hand. “Signs all over the place. They set it at half a dozen points along this road. The wind was at their backs, out of the southwest—that's why the other side of the road didn't take—so they weren't in any danger. Bastards,” he added.

  Davis said, “Find anything to show who did it?”

  Lindblad shook his head. “Been too much traffic up and down this road, last few days, to make any sense of the tracks. I'm still looking, though.”

  “All right if I look around too?” Davis asked.

  “Sure. Just holler,” Lindblad said, “if you find anything. I'll be somewhere close by.”

  He walked off up the hill, his shoes kicking up little white puffs of ash. Davis watched him a minute and then started to walk along the road, looking at the chewed-up surface. The Forest Service guy was right, he thought, no way in hell could anybody sort out all these tracks and ruts. Over on the unburned downhill side, somebody had almost gone into the ditch—

  Davis almost missed it. A single step left or right, or the sun at a different angle, and he'd never have seen the tiny shininess at the bottom of the brush-choked ditch. He bent down and groped, pushing aside a clod of roadway dirt, and felt something tangle around his fingers. He tugged gently and it came free. He straightened up and held up his hand in front of his face.

  The sun glinted off the little silver dog as it swung from side to side at the end of the broken chain.

  Up on the hillside, Lindblad called, “Find anything?”

  Davis turned and looked. Lindblad was poking around near the ruins of the old house, nearly hidden by a couple of black tree stubs. His back was to the road.

  “No,” Davis yelled back, walking across the road. “Not a thing.”

  He drew back his arm and hurled the pendant high out over the black-and-gray waste. It flashed for an instant against the sky before vanishing, falling somewhere on the burned earth.

  Copyright © 2001 by William Sanders.

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  Bad Asteroid Night by Steve Martinez

  The author works as a clerk at a public library. He's single, fifty years old, and lives with his brother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mr. Martinez has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from George Mason University in Virginia, and an undergraduate degree in math from the University of New Mexico. He tells us, “I'm happy to be living in such interesting times in the worlds of science fiction and scientific discovery.” This is his second published story. The first, “One Hand Clapping,” appeared in our May 1995 issue.

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  Sometimes, Trina envied the robots. There was never anything they'd rather be doing. Give them a new assignment and it became their whole reason for being. For four years, they had been trusted to work asteroid T-Berg 020, mining and replicating with no human presence. But somewhere in that span of time, someone had given them a new purpose, and managed to make off with nearly three billion dollars worth of processed ore and equipment, including a breeding stock of the very latest in self-replicating robots. And not one robot had sounded an alarm. In fact, the remaining robots continued to file a whole history of false reports to cover the theft. By the time a resupply ship with its crew of six arrived, the robots had conveniently forgotten everything that could incriminate them and were hard at work as if nothing had happened, a good two years behind schedule.

  At least the hole was still there, properly dug and sealed off. Some of the precious volatiles were back in production. But there was no clue to what had happened. At least nothing Trina could see. Whoever had pulled this off had been thorough. She
had almost given up looking for traces of memory, and had been trying to hack the security system to see how it might have been done. She was the official robot jockey of the crew, so everybody was counting on her, especially the captain, so she pushed herself to exhaustion.

  It was getting so bad that now Trina's dreams were blending into reality. She had fallen asleep at her desk with her cheek on one of her flat panel displays. In her dream, she pushed the color-coded program modules all over the screen like layer upon layer of jigsaw tiles, pushing them right off the screen onto the table as she went after something hiding beneath them, if only it would hold still, she was so tired, but she had to go on even when she began turning up pieces of teeth with long crusty roots and tiles covered with mucous, and bones that she cracked open, using one jagged piece to dig little white worms out of the marrow of the other.

  She was awakened by the beeping of the com link, and scowled, confused to find her messy desk so similar to her dream. “Yes,” she replied, looking sleepily over the array of data screens for the one that had beeped. It was the task scheduler, one of the robot overseers, asking for some kind of confirmation. It took a minute for Trina to look over the data and get a sense of what project she was being asked about. Apparently one of the robots, Willie 1-9, had gotten himself stuck down a fissure, and the vapors he'd kicked up before he broke his torch had frozen him solidly in place. “Current status?”

  “Attempting to extricate Willie 1-9,” replied a synthetic voice.

  She grimaced and shook her head at the diversion of resources the scheduler was proposing. This was ridiculous. It would be cheaper to make a new Willie. “Interrupt task. Download Willie 1-9, memfile, all.”

  “Task interrupt. Download in progress.” A string of corrupt file messages filled her screen, then, “Download complete.”

  “End task. Abandon Willie 1-9. Reassign task, task manager, um, Oversee 2-0.”

  “Confirm end task. Query. Task ‘extricate Willie 1-9’ does not exceed current budget parameters. Do you wish to reset current budget parameters for task ‘extricate Willie class worker'? Estimate hours. Estimate resources. Estimate task priority. Please choose reset parameter.”

  Funny, the budget parameters were set way high. So then, why was it even asking for confirmation? Oh well, check into it later. “No. Retain current parameters. End task. Abandon Willie 1-9 through exception handler.”

  “ID confirmed. Authority confirmed. Resource protocol exception. Abandon Willie 1-9. Reassign task. Task manager Oversee 2-0.”

  Now she was wide awake. It could be nothing. Perhaps some strangeness of the dream had carried over—perhaps that and nothing more. Still, she was about to do a little digging when the light from the doorway was blocked by Captain Anders, suited up for an excursion except for his helmet and gloves. He held another spacesuit beside him, dangling like some poor crewman's fresh-peeled hide.

  “Here we go off to the salt mines,” he said, as if talking to the empty spacesuit, “while little miss princess gets to stay behind so she doesn't get her face dirty. What do we think of that?” Then he changed his voice and spoke out the side of his mouth while dangling his puppet beside him. “We think it sucks.”

  “Hey, this was your idea,” said Trina, turning to face him. She expected him to sit across from her in her mini couch, but instead he came beside her and sat against the desk, his ankles crossed.

  Up close, Trina recognized the spacesuit he was holding as her own and said, “Oh, did you change your mind?”

  “No, I just didn't want to leave this by the airlock. We don't want you-know-who to see you're still here.”

  Trina didn't say anything. She just pulled her lips in and made a slight chewing motion, as she did sometimes when lost in thought, unaware of how monkeylike she looked. She came out of it blinking and puzzled by the amusement on the captain's face.

  “Oh, and your transponder,” he said, carefully removing it from the chest of her suit. “We'll take this with us so your blip will show up with ours in case he checks the roster.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble.”

  “It's not so much trouble.” He let the spacesuit hang folded over his hands like a dead animal, casual, or suggestive, Trina wasn't sure. “We'll only be gone a few hours. I'd take him along just to get him out of your hair, but then he'd be in my hair.”

  “I still don't see what's the big deal. We work together just fine.”

  “Yes, I know you do. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have any problem. But this isn't normal.”

  “What you mean is, he's not normal.”

  “Oh, that's what it is. You think this is personal? Trina, I don't know if I'm going to be able to trust you if you think I'm just going on some personal grudge against him.”

  “I didn't say that.”

  “Look, if he was a regular crewman, I wouldn't care how many arms he had, as long as he can do the work. But he's not a regular crewman. He's a protocol officer. What the hell is that? Have you seen his job description? Some kind of glorified safety inspector, is all I can make of it. With special authorities he can invoke. Hell, I don't even know if I outrank him. Let me ask you this—how come we never knew we needed one before? We sure as hell didn't need a protocol officer when we set up this place, so why now?”

  “It's not his fault.”

  “I know. When you come right down to it, nothing is his fault. He didn't ask to be born, or made, or uncorked—whatever you call it. He didn't buy out our contracts. I hate to mess up your dreams, Trina, but I hope you weren't planning on working up to your own time-share condo on this berg or any other. You're working for Gnomonics, now.”

  “Doesn't matter. They've still got to honor our contracts.”

  “Your contract was with Novinco, back when people thought human beings would be settling out here. That's history. Novinco is just a subsidiary now. It's cheaper to breed ganglies to live in space. They're designed for it.”

  “But we've still got a contract.”

  “And what I'm saying is, we used to have a contract. Now we've got a contract plus a pair of beady little eyes to go along with it, watching over us. For our own safety. Right.”

  “Okay, so we just don't give them any grounds....”

  “That's going to be a little tricky right now, don't you think? I mean, we are missing a few billion dollars’ worth of company property. Do you realize how they'd love to pin it on us?”

  “But we're innocent!”

  Captain Anders opened his mouth and slapped his head, then held up the spacesuit in front of him and spoke to it. “So what are you worried about, old timer?” When he released the suit, its beginning-to-fall was so slow it almost seemed to stand. Then he pushed it and it caved in like an octopus, descending into a gentle collapse on the couch. Trina copied the motion and sank back into her chair, feeling stupid.

  “It's a perfect set-up,” Anders continued. “The timing couldn't be better. That lawsuit with the Consortium has a lot of weight behind it. They could pull the plug on Gnomonics. In effect, Earth's ban on monkeying with human genes would be extended to the whole solar system. And all they have to prove is what's true, that the ganglies have been unlawfully deranged.”

  “I wouldn't call Rakshasa deranged.”

  “Whatever you call it. He's a piece of the company mind. There are certain thoughts he can't think because he has an unnatural loyalty to the company that made him.”

  “You can be a company man without being a gangly.”

  “Yeah, but at least a company man is still a man. Or a woman. We're all company men on this boat, but at least what we do is out of greed or lust or pity, whatever. I'm telling you, these guys have it inbred into them not to be able to think outside the company box. That's why he's here, because they want something here that's not one of us, someone who will file reports on us without the inconvenience of friendship or affection getting in the way.” He frowned.

  “They don't even have to find us guilty of a
nything, just drag us into a courtroom and raise a cloud of suspicion. Because we're human, so, to their minds, that means we could be bribed, we could have been greedy, whatever. So some shareholders get to thinking maybe a special breed of demented workers doesn't look so bad after all. And Rakshasa is going to see everything the way the company wants him to see it. He'll stack all the facts against us in the worst light. The only way to really get off the hook is to come up with the big clue ourselves. Now do you see why I don't want him working on this with you?”

  She nodded, and the captain continued. “Besides, I'd feel kind of guilty about leaving you alone with him if he knew you were here, you know what I mean?” She gave him a blank look. “It's just that, um, I don't think an artificial species can leave everything behind all at once, in one step. Because if I was him, I don't think a ganglyoid female would look all that—”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “Are you sure? I know you feel sorry for him.”

  “No. I see what you mean.”

  “You know why else I want you on this case? Because you're better than he is.”

  “Don't be so sure. He wasn't always a protocol officer, you know. He used to—”

  “Academic stuff. You're the one with practical experience. Don't be so humble and innocent you can't grab the opportunity I'm giving you. If you come up with something good, you might be able to write your own ticket. I want you to get the credit. This is your puppy. Don't let any ganglyoid try to take it away from you. Look at me. You know I'm straight with my crew. You make up your own mind if I'm a good judge of who can do what. Just don't sell yourself short, okay? You can do this!”

  She winced slightly, as if he'd just tousled her hair, and shrugged him off, but after he was gone and the door was closed, she couldn't help thinking that maybe he saw something in her she didn't see in herself. After all, he did have a way of being painfully honest in his dealings with the crew. It would mean so much to him if she could pull this off !