Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  She wailed: “Cut when I tell you!”

  “Stop ordering me about,” I said. “We don't even work together any more.”

  She burst into tears.

  * * *

  Incredibly, the cabriolet was still driveable, so when finally the ambulance got there, I followed Rachel to the hospital. The doctors could find nothing wrong with her but “we don't like to take chances with concussion,” so they kept her in overnight.

  I drove back to the cottage. I only had one headlight, and half way home I had to wrestle a buckled wheel arch free where it was rubbing against the tire. The wind dropped. The rain came on again. I didn't have a roof any more, so I drove faster than I should to make a pocket of dry air behind the windshield. It was a good tactic, until the track, and after that of course I was sliding about all over the place, doing ten, fifteen miles an hour if I was lucky. By the time I got to the house, the car's interior was like a footbath. I pulled to a stop and again the bloody car ignored me: I ended up in a ditch.

  Frank appeared as I got up to the door. I dropped his keys onto the kitchen table. “Ta,” I said.

  He made to hit me, but changed his mind. My bruises would only end up being his own, the moment we next swapped control.

  I went up to bed.

  * * *

  The next morning, Frank ordered a taxi to Audley End. He walked me to the gate to watch out for it, in case it had trouble negotiating the mud. The sunlight was bleary and hung-over, and already more dirty clouds were building to the south. The fields all around us were mashed to nothing.

  All Frank was interested in was the cabriolet. The side of the ditch I'd run it into had collapsed, and the near-side wheel had sunk in mud up to the axle.

  The phone rang inside. Frank went in to answer it. It turned out the taxi driver wasn't prepared to try the track, and I'd have to walk to the junction.

  I took up my burden and walked.

  About a minute before I got to the taxi, it started to rain. When I got up to him, the driver was laying sheets of newspaper along the foot well and telling me to mind the upholstery.

  I talked to him to take his mind off the sound of my shoes, scraping themselves deliberately and thoroughly across the back of his passenger seat. He was a gazetteer of disasters. Mud slides, hurricanoes, whirlpools, “dozens dead in France and Germany!”

  He turned his windshield wipers up to their maximum setting. Sudden gusts thrummed against the door panels.

  Clouds reared up into heads along the skyline, leaning in.

  “Bloody hell,” the taxi driver said.

  They were all there. Yasmine and her new boyfriend Billy. Colin and Jolene and the kids. Grahame from the garage. Stars of the hit 24-7 soap Green Lanes—their faces as familiar to you as the faces of your own parents, your lovers, your children—there they were, leaning in, smiling, their teeth white and sharp against the sun.

  Even canned characters had made the effort to turn out: Sarah the nurse and her husband Robert and their little girl. Kevin the Disgraced Pedophile Vicar (plenty of controversy over that plotline, I recall).

  Up there in the sky, all around the cab, hung the entire, vast, extended family of the Green Lanes imaginary.

  “Don't see that often, do you?” said the cabby, looking up at the clouds.

  Surely, he could not be seeing what I was seeing?

  The heads opened their mouths. The sky lit up.

  Time stopped.

  * * *

  Time stops: a frame of celluloid, jammed in the gate.

  Sheet lightning freezes and silences everything. The car engine cuts out. A scent tree, dangling from the rearview mirror, locks into position, twenty degrees off the vertical. The car is stationary and the driver's breath is frozen in his chest. Spray from the left front wheel hangs like a flange of broken glass over the verge; the long, rain-flattened grass is as still and stiff as wire.

  It looks for all the world as if the world has stopped—that the real world is, after all, only another soapland, only another manufactured place.

  But no.

  The world is real enough, seamless and inexorable.

  It's me that's the fabrication.

  From now on, all that you see and hear is down to me.

  As I shiver myself to pieces.

  Much as I've tried to resist it, Rachel was right: the real world had no place in it for me.

  My face didn't fit. (Of course it didn't. It was Frank's. Besides, it hurt!)

  In the rearview, Frank stares back at me, pale and wide-eyed. His cheeks and brow have a smooth, unlived-in quality, as though the constant back-and-forth between personalities—Frank's and mine—has left his face without a character of its own: a paretic blank.

  Frank must be a very weak man, to have agreed to this invasion. Weak—or very much in love—to take me in the way he did.

  And now I realize, it has always been in my power to release myself. It has always been up to me, whether or not to participate in this ménage.

  It's just that, like Dorothy in Oz, I needed some time to realize what was staring me in the face.

  I do not belong here. I do not belong anywhere. The writers on Green Lanes did their job well, and my story is over. Long concluded. Entirely resolved.

  Knowing this at last, accepting it, I am not afraid to bring the curtain down on myself. In the film of condensation covering the cab window, I trace the Green Lanes credits with my finger. So it is that we will be released—producer, actor—each after his fashion. One to flesh, the other to imagination.

  Sound...

  Grip...

  Set design...

  Continuity...

  Credits.

  Words that, spinning clear of the screen, leave behind a perfect blank.

  Copyright © 2001 by Simon Ings.

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  Aotearoa by Cherry Wilder

  Cherry Wilder was born and educated in New Zealand and moved to New South Wales, Australia, in 1954. She relocated to West Germany in 1976 with her husband Horst Grimm (1928-92), and their daughters Catherine and Louisa. She tells us, “The idea of the Hellenic world based on Benin and Africa was the inspiration for Aotearoa.”

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  Our maternal uncle, Kritias Ngumbe, was not at home for his birthday: he had flown off to the Hawaiian Islands. Although she did not approve of globe-flitting, the idle sport of rich young people, Mother suggested that we fly after the old man and bring him his presents. Dion, my twin, could not get leave from the hospital, so we were only four in Phoebe's elegant, golden Lepido: Daiban, Phoebe, Luma, and our visitor, Hilda, a student from northern Europe. She was a girl of wildly exotic appearance: she put me in mind of a swan. Her skin was whiter than marble, her hair absolutely straight and yellow-gold in color, her eyes a pale blue, like the afternoon sky into which we had risen.

  “Brother-heart,” Phoebe said to me, teasing, “do you know why the uncle took off ?”

  “Why should Luma know?” demanded Daiban, our youngest. “He takes no interest in the family!”

  “I think I do know,” I replied.

  I had made the discovery in the course of my work. I brought up a ten-day-old News Theater program on the nearest screen and we watched the short item from Honolulu. The Oceanographic Survey from Tokyo was beginning work in the Hauraki trench, southeast of the island continent of Nihonshu, home of the fascinating pouched fauna.

  “In this area of the Taroan Ocean,” said the chronist, “poets and dreamers have placed the fabled islands of Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.”

  “Oh dear,” said Phoebe softly. “Poor Uncle Kritias!”

  “The old fool!” burst out Daiban. “Still taken with his mystical sunken islands!”

  “Well, islands come and go,” I said. “They do sink.”

  “And not only islands,” said Phoebe. “Remember your geography, little brother. The Aegean was once a blind alley with no Straits of Daphne, no inviting
seaway to the east. Imagine that! No Arabian Ocean but the plains of Lost Arabia.”

  “That's quite different,” said Daiban.

  “The Land of the Long White Cloud,” said Hilda. “It sounds so beautiful. What is this island Aotearoa? Is it a magic place like Tir-nan-og, the island of the blessed?”

  “Yes, a little,” I replied. “There are many theories of where these islands lay and what kind of civilization they had. Look ... here is an entry from a school encyclopedia.”

  Hilda sat before the screen and brushed back her shining hair with a gesture that stole my heart.

  “Oh, it is nonsense...” insisted Daiban.

  But he turned to another of the screens and read the entry too:

  AOTEAROA, in the tradition of antiquity, a large island in the Taroan Ocean, situated near the island continent of Nihonshu. The first recorded account of Aotearoa, which is said to have been engulfed by the ocean as the result of an earthquake, appears in Voyages, a work by the explorer poet Orpheon. According to this account, the island was described to the Athenian statesman Solon during his travels in the east by a Brahman priest who maintained that it was more than twice as large as the island of Lankha. The priest further revealed that a flourishing civilization centered on Aotearoa, reputedly about the tenth millennium Before Benin, and that the nation had influenced all the peoples of the southern ocean and spread its wisdom abroad to the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico and to the Confederacies of Manitou. In a later work, Dialogues, Orpheon records the history of Aotearoa and depicts the nation as an ideal commonwealth. Though Orpheon's descriptive material and history are probably fictional, the possibility exists that he had access to records no longer extant. The Aotearoa tradition has persisted through the centuries, and as recently as the twenty-ninth century, prominent writers, including the Bantu satirist Aphrodite Mgave, have given credence to it. In attempts to explain the tradition scholars have variously identified the island with Hawaii, Tahiti, Okinawa, and Lankha.

  “The encyclopedia is rather dry,” I said. “The poets and dreamers prefer something like this!”

  I touched the console again, and there was Zozoe, the popular lutenist, in a robe of gold fringes. He intoned sweetly:

  "Aotearoa is the most beautiful of all lands!

  From the mountains to the sea,

  From the plains to the rushing rivers

  There was never a land more beautiful.

  Who remains to sing of your untrodden shore,

  The silence of forest and lake,

  The wonder of your bell-voiced birds?

  "Aotearoa is the land of wisdom and of light.

  The Tohungas, priests and philosophers,

  Looked out upon their fair green land

  From the fabled pink and white palaces,

  They numbered the stars from Mount Tarawera,

  They harnessed the might of the fire-mountains,

  They explored the mysteries of the sea.

  "Aotearoa is the lost land of our dreams,

  It has descended, burning, into the sea,

  It has been shaken to pieces by the angry Gods!

  Yet it returns in the voices of young men,

  In the grace of young women, dancing.

  It can be glimpsed from afar,

  Like mist upon the surface of the sea."

  “Angry Gods, indeed,” said Daiban. “Seriously, Luma, you don't believe a word of this rubbish, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted sadly.

  “Recliners,” said Phoebe, “we are coming in to land.”

  Kritias was the guest of his friend Prince Kalani. Hawaiian hospitality is well-known, and we were taken at once to a small banquet in an inner courtyard of the palace. There sat our uncle, wearing a feather cloak over his tunic. He was pleased to see us but tried not to show it. Daiban had brought him a compass in a crystal box; Phoebe had woven a belt; I gave him a miniature phonotron. When he tried it out, the voice of Zozoe sounded with his incantation to the lute: “Aotearoa is the most beautiful of all lands!” Kritias switched off the phonotron with a rueful smile.

  * * *

  The prince's daughter, a tall and stately woman, garlanded each guest with a lei of fragrant white flowers. She paused before Hilda, our northern girl, who had bent her head to receive the garland, and then passed on. No one could save the situation: the princess had taken Hilda for a servant or even a slave. Phoebe at once stripped off her own lei and placed it around the neck of her friend. I wondered if there had been slaves in Aotearoa. It was an evil too slowly eradicated in Benin and the Hellenic world.

  After the feast, we were left alone with Kritias in a lofty room that looked out upon the ocean.

  “Well, Uncle,” said Daiban, “what news of the oceanographic survey?”

  Kritias shook his head. He stood looking out into the mild southern night; the constellation of the Cross blazed overhead. I was reminded that as a young man my uncle had been initiated into one of the mathematical cults.

  “Daiban, my dear boy,” said Kritias, “surely you realize the necessity for these islands....”

  “Tell us,” said Phoebe gently. “Tell us of Aotearoa.”

  “What is there to tell?” he said, still gazing out at the starry heavens. “Why should there not be a tradition of wisdom, of life-giving science? What is more beautiful than an island, a lost island, receding before us, unattainable as the days of our youth? They will find nothing in the Hauraki trench, yet Aotearoa slumbers deep down ... its mountains, its palaces.... Have you read Philemon's Theory of Archetypes?”

  “I have, Master Ngumbe,” said Hilda. “I have searched my dreams for a reliable soul-companion. Perhaps I should seek elsewhere.”

  She looked directly at me. I was confused, then joyful.

  “Come,” I said, “we must fly back and leave our Uncle Kritias to contemplate his lost islands.”

  * * *

  On the return flight, we were all very quiet: I sat beside Hilda. We did not even touch hands. Neither of my siblings were aware that we had fallen in love. I wondered if Dion, my other brother, my identical twin, would know when he set eyes upon me. I had always been considered very cynical, yet now it seemed that I was about to discover a new world.

  “Of course,” said Phoebe, “we should never forget that, technically speaking, we live on an island too.”

  We laughed, relieving tension, and looked down at the grey waters of the Tritonic Ocean. Our golden craft soared over the vast metropolitan coast of Benin, and we saw, outlined in light, the ancient towers of Atlantis.

  Copyright © 2001 by Cherry Wilder.

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  Nitrogen Plus by Jack Williamson

  We are delighted to have a new story by Jack Williamson. In his ninety-third year, Mr. Williamson continues to produce remarkable work. A recent novella, “The Ultimate Earth” (Analog, December 2000), is currently a Hugo finalist, and his latest novel, Terraforming Earth, has just been released by Tor Books.

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  Some optimist in the Star Survey christened the planet New Earth. It was warmed by a Sun-like star. The mass and gravity were only slightly less than Earth's, the day very slightly longer. The oceans were water, and water ice capped the poles. The surface air pressure was near Earth normal.

  “A perfect world!” my uncle boasted. “Except for one odd feature. The atmosphere is nearly pure nitrogen, with a whiff of carbon dioxide but hardly a trace of oxygen. A survey lander discovered that, and never returned. Tough luck for the crew, but good news for me. I got the planet for a song.”

  He wanted me to terraform it.

  “A slice of apple pie,” he scoffed when I shrank from the problems. “Just sow the seas with engineered algae spores. Wait for photosynthesis to release oxygen out of the water.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “What's time?” His pudgy fingers snapped the years away. “Fly home for a holiday and back there again. Ninety-seven ligh
t-years each way. Two centuries for the spores to work. Only a weekend for you, what with the relativistic time contraction. You'll have a paradise planet ready to welcome our colonists and get home again with your own ticket to immortality.”

  Immortality? I wanted to strangle him.

  He is immortal, with his own imperial sense of time, but the members of his tight little fellowship are jealous of their secrets and slow to admit outsiders. Not that I'd longed to become his eternal handyman or abandon my own place and time for a life of interstellar adventure.

  Yet he is my uncle. He's a legendary interstellar tycoon, enormously wealthy. His enemies like to paint him as a devouring octopus with a thousand arms writhing though the galaxy. As a child I had dreaded his sudden fits of rage when some unlucky flunky failed to please him. Yet I had learned to tolerate him.

  Hard enough to love, he's a short, shrewd, dynamic man with a round baby face. His fat cheeks are pink and hairless from the precious micro-machines in his blood, which sharpen his wits and preserve him from illness or age. He can seem genial and generous enough, so long as you please him.

  My father, two years younger, had been the unlucky brother. A disappointed idealist, a failed artist, an ill-starred lover. When my uncle offered him a chance at immortality, he refused it because he thought people should be equal. His avant-garde art found no buyers. My mother left him for another eternal. He vanished from Earth the year I was five. My uncle adopted me, sent me though expensive schools, promised me a fine future in his companies. When he named me his personal agent on New Earth, I knew I had to go.

  * * *

  I found a crew at the Skipper's Club. That's an ancient building inhabited by ancient starmen who run a sort of hiring hall and retirement home for skipship crews. Long halls in the basement crypt are lined with cold lockers labeled with the fading names of men and women who had planned to be back after decades or centuries to open them again.

  The pilot I hired was Buzz Bates, a lanky, bald, and ageless veteran of half a hundred flights. His copilot was an anxious young apprentice who had never been beyond the solar system. I spent an evening with them in the bar, listening to his tales of desperate adventure on far-off worlds, and even here on Earth.