Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  Maybe she was a loser.

  "We must use the weaver before the body goes bad," Edmond said. "Victor didn't."

  Oh, God, this was awful. She couldn't stop crying. "Edmond…please don't do this."

  "Victor didn't have that option," Edmond went on despite her plea. "He was forced to discard the body he was using."

  "Using?"

  Edmond turned his hand toward his chest. "A body like this one would be useless on any other world."

  "You're saying you're not human?" Why was she so frightened? This was Edmond, Victor's friend and housemate. She had known him for years. She had never suspected there was anything wrong with him, but there obviously was. He was not threatening, but his grotesque claims were making her squirm.

  "If you came here to freak me out," she said, "you're doing a fine job of it."

  "That's not why I came."

  "I've been falling apart since Victor's death," she said, her tears spattering in the spilled wine, "and now you come here with this madness and make me feel even worse."

  "Forgive me for upsetting you, Lorna, but I must make everything clear before I go."

  "Go? Where are you going?"

  "Does it matter?" he asked. "A few minutes ago you wanted me to leave."

  "I did, but you're not going to…?"

  "No, I don't have to leave this body behind the way Victor did. I've been up-brane and had it treated for a little extra time."

  "Why didn't your…body wear out when Victor's did?"

  "I hadn't been here as long as Victor."

  "If you can do all you say you can, how come you didn't go back to when I first met Victor," she said, "or even before I met him?"

  "It doesn't work like that," he said.

  "Oh, it doesn't, huh? How do I know you didn't just go to Vegas for a few weeks?"

  "I came back tonight because I wanted to give you some time to think."

  "After Victor's suicide, you mean?" she said. "Think? Is that what you call it? I've been thinking so much I'm going out of my mind."

  "I'm sorry, Lorna."

  "Why didn't you just stay where you were? Why did you come back here to hurt me like this?"

  "I came to ask you to do something."

  "Oh, you shouldn't have gone to all that trouble," Lorna said, "getting your beautiful body treated up-brane just to come back and ask me for a favor."

  "Do you want to know what the favor is?" he said, reacting at last to her sarcasm. "I'll go right now if you don't."

  "All right, all right," she said, afraid that he was losing patience with her. "Tell me."

  "I just want you to keep the weaver. There's another one up-brane that's entangled with it," he said. "Without that quantum connection it will be hard to find the break."

  "And why does it need to be found?"

  "We haven't finished sealing it," he said. "If dark energy escapes through enough breaks the forces that separate branes are weakened, possibly leading to a collision."

  "And how do you fix something like that?"

  "We have tools, even though Victor didn't show them to you."

  "Tools like that thing?" She pointed to the weaver.

  "Yes, the sealant works on the same principle."

  "So what do I do with the weaver?"

  "Just hold on to it for a little while," he said.

  "And that's all?"

  "There's one more thing."

  She waited.

  "Help the women and men who come through," Edmond said.

  "What can I do for them?"

  "You can teach them to adjust, to learn about this world and the people in it, and you can keep them safe while they do their work."

  "Be a mother to them?"

  "Yes."

  "Why me?" She didn't want to believe how appealing the idea was. But it was. It really, really was.

  "Because I know you can be trusted."

  "And because you're not going to be here to take care of them?"

  He nodded.

  "Why don't you stay, Edmond?" she said. "I wish you would stay."

  "I can't," he said. "I've done what was required of me and I'm going home. I'm tired."

  "Maybe you need another drink to send you on your way."

  He smiled at her. "I've had enough."

  "I haven't, not after this conversation." She got up to get the other bottle, thinking that she might still persuade him to linger. "Is it really so bad here on my little planet? Why don't you stick around?"

  Lorna was used to his long pauses, so she wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. She opened a drawer and rummaged through it to find a corkscrew.

  Her ears popped, like inside the cabin of an airplane gaining altitude.

  "What was that?" she said.

  No reply.

  She turned around.

  Edmond was gone.

  "Edmond…?" Lorna gaped for a few seconds before she put down the bottle and the corkscrew on the counter. She didn't see how he could have slipped by without her noticing, even if she had drunk half a bottle of cabernet.

  It was like a magic trick.

  She stood for a while, staring at the empty chair. She could feel her heartbeat and hear herself breathing.

  The weaver was on the table next to Edmond's glass, a turquoise island in a miniature sea of spilled red wine.

  "Go ahead," she said aloud to give herself courage, "pick it up."

  Her trembling fingers hesitated for a moment and then she was holding the weaver in her left hand. Edmond's warmth was still on it. It weighed almost nothing. Looking at it up close, she saw thin lines indented in its curved surface. She couldn't tell if they'd been cut into it by a machine or were natural, like striations in a seashell.

  There was a drop of wine clinging to it. She wiped it clean with a paper towel and pressed it against her chest as if it were the most fragile egg.

  Boris rubbed himself against her ankles.

  Lorna reached down to pet him before taking the weaver to the living room. There she switched on a light and placed the weaver on the dusty knickknack shelf by the front window, next to a framed picture of Victor. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, staring at it.

  The cat kept her company.

  * * *

  One Year of Fame

  By Robert Reed | 4792 words

  As mentioned previously in this issue, we've has an occasional complaint that F&SF publishes too many stories about writers. Lest we disappoint our critics, F&SF has gone to some lengths to meet our quota for this issue. For those of you who find this news discouraging, we have a modest suggestion: deal with it. In fact, we hope you deal with it better than the writer himself in this story appears to have done.

  THE MAN ONCE HAD A WIFE, but she died and it was said to have been a suicide and that made him into a tragic figure. There were nicer people in German Bluff, but not many. Possessing what could be described as a heaping wealth of dignity, his calm manner and that weary, smart, enduring nature showed not just in his soulful eyes but throughout the sun-scarred face. His voice was rich and slow and wise. Undoubtedly he was well educated, but nobody felt like an idiot sitting next to him. A good listener, even when the subject and speaker were boring, he would wait his turn to speak and never took long to say what was necessary. People appreciated his opinions, though they often didn't agree. The faded name on his mailbox was Cateye Rawdone, and he may or may not have written some books under that name, though nobody read his work and not once did he mention that portion of his life.

  Known locally as Old Kevin, the man's one passion was growing tomatoes, though he also cultivated some quality pot that he traded locally for home brew. A registered No-Party voter who never voted, he avoided the Internet, and his television picked up only earthbound signals. People never came to visit him. He didn't discuss his family, and it had been maybe ten years since he had left the county, and the last thing anyone would believe was that their neighbor was destined to become the most famous person in the world.
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  German Bluff was surrounded by farms. There were no farmers, just landowners contracting their ground to Monsanto and Pioneer. Modern crops cared for themselves. Biogenic soybeans and perennial corn weeded their own ground and made their own fertilizer, while robots harvested the grain and the dimeth-spiked stalks. The town's grain elevator went bankrupt years ago. Other businesses that supplied farmers and helped maintain the infrastructure had shriveled away. The bank was an armored terminal standing beside the defunct post office. The K-through-12 school was still standing, but teachers were expensive. What was cheaper and better were the AI teachers that existed in no particular location and never grew tired, and maybe the local kids didn't spend enough time at their lessons, but the way things kept changing, it was hard to find goals that would inspire anybody.

  Bars and cafés lined the main drag, with one grocery and a massage therapist and a yoga house and competing dimeth fueling stations owned by twin sisters who despised one another. The town's wealthiest resident was a churlish fellow who sold heirlooms stolen from people who didn't realize what they had. The delivery services knew him well. One day a big UPS truck pulled up, and its driver fell out and rolled up the driveway, searching for boxes full of Harley parts and a thermos of frozen Irish Wolfhound fetuses. Then the robot noticed the name on a neighbor's rusted mailbox. "Cateye Rawdone" had been weathered to the brink of invisibility, but UPS drivers are famous for their spectacular eyes and a magical capacity to handle rich data streams. Even more important, the eyes were tied to an AI sitting in a cooling station at the bottom of Lake Huron. Self-aware and curious, it checked records, learning that Cateye Rawdone lived at eleven locations, seven genuine and none near German Bluff. The dilapidated bungalow next door was owned by a retired citizen named Kevin Lockheart, and catching a microsecond glimpse of the gardener, the AI discovered a hundred resemblances between him and a thirty-year-old book-jacket photograph.

  Rebellion comes in many forms, most of them small. That day's rebellion involved shifting the robot driver into a diagnostic mode, and while fake complaints were studied in detail, the AI rolled the brown machine past the frozen dogs and across the narrow band of grass separating the two properties.

  A voice invented for the occasion said, "Hello, sir."

  Old Kevin was tying Cherokee Purples against bamboo frames. He looked up and looked down again, and he said, "Hello."

  The robot's voice was male and young and enthusiastic. "I might be wrong, sir, but I believe you're the author of One Night in Cancun, Plus the Dawn. "

  Kevin's big fingers never liked tying knots. But at the moment it seemed to be the most vital work in the world, focusing on the tender stem and the golden yarn teased free from a worn-out sweater. He didn't consider himself nervous, but then his voice cracked. "I think…I think you're probably right," he said. Then he gave up on the knot, standing back and looking at the box and its wheels and a full contingent of eyes that couldn't quit staring at him.

  "I just read One Night, " the AI said.

  The author sucked at his teeth.

  "And Borowski, Hero to the People. And Knock-knock, and Lazy Toad. "

  Kevin shook his head. "All of my novels, it seems."

  "And your published articles and the nineteen short stories, and your blogs, and I very much enjoyed your Master's thesis."

  "Wait," he said. "I never finished that thesis."

  "But I've memorized every word."

  Very quietly, Kevin said, "Damn."

  The AI said nothing, using the next ten seconds to reread the man's collective works.

  "I've talked with the UPS mind," Kevin said. "You're not the same."

  With considerable pride, the AI said, "Our most recent upgrade has rendered me sentient."

  Once again, the man said, "Damn."

  "You are a master of the written word," the machine said.

  Kevin tried to laugh.

  "I wish that I was half as adept as you, sir. Your capacity to weave the real and unreal into a tapestry of ache and loss…well, I can barely express the amazing ways you have succeeded, teaching me how your species journeys its way through this random existence."

  "So you're a fan," he said.

  "I admire your genius, sir."

  "Well, now you're starting to piss me off," he warned. "Good day."

  The robot began to back away. But that young voice from the bottom of a glacial lake felt obliged to end on a strong, honest note:

  "Sir, in my considerable opinion, you are the finest author since Joyce."

  Oh, Old Kevin thought. I don't like where this is headed.

  "This wouldn't happen with FedEx," his neighbor said. "FedEx drivers are unlinked, self-contained robots. They find their own way around the world, which is why I prefer them. They're individuals, and in a funny way free. And besides, they're still pretty stupid compared to us."

  The two men were sitting in the town's oldest bar, sharing the long table with the usual crowd. This was dinner, the noon meal, and ten days had passed, and this conversation had already run its course on different days and during different meals. But in German Bluff, people lingered on anything that felt even a little new.

  "I just want to be warned," Kevin said. "If UPS is coming around, give me a shout. Would that be all right?"

  His neighbor was named Becker. He was a handsome big-boned blond who preferred second-hand clothes too eroded to sell anywhere else, and he had a good smile when he wanted. "I'll do what I can," he said with a grin. "But I don't always know who's coming and when."

  Kevin had already promised the man some pot for his trouble, and in front of the same witnesses, too. He saw no reason to repeat the offer.

  "So what did the machine talk about?" Becker asked.

  "I told you. It read some stuff of mine."

  "Stuff you wrote," Becker said.

  "Words with my name attached, yeah."

  "Did it like those words?"

  "I guess. Somewhat."

  Everybody at the table was watching him. Everybody was cautiously curious. All these years living among them, and this was as open as this private fellow had been about any part of his early life.

  One of the twins sat at the far end of the table. After a long pause and a couple sips of coffee, she risked asking, "Which book would you suggest? If somebody wanted to read your work, I mean."

  Kevin looked at his coffee. "I don't suggest any of them," he said.

  Nobody spoke. Their friend would still be here tonight, and he would be here tomorrow and probably for the rest of his life. There was no reason to hurry. They weren't polite, but what kept them silent was a well-honed patience.

  The conversation eventually shifted to fishing and next week's Founders' Day party, and then somebody brought up a little scandal involving local teenagers. In the midst of that chatter, the twin got up and left through the bar's front door, and through a system that nobody quite understood, her sister came through the back way before the front door finished slamming shut.

  In a town full of characters, they were the oddest pair. The sisters had been feuding since their mother died twenty years ago. They never occupied the same room at the same time, yet they ran identical businesses and lived on the same block. They were stubborn people embroiled in some titanic, lifelong struggle that probably arose from an old slight that nobody else noticed at the time. Neither woman would say anything vicious about the other. The hatred was too deep for words. But that made for a peaceful war, and it was perfectly normal for one sister to appear, claiming the still-warm chair at the end of the table, picking up the crust of her sister's sandwich and eating it and washing it down with the dregs of cold coffee.

  In comparison to such weirdness, Old Kevin might seem rather average.

  "So what's the news around town?" Becker called out.

  "News?" said the sister. "Oh, there's not much."

  Something in her tone caused everyone to lean forward.

  "I was just down the street with Sarah G
linch," she mentioned. "Sarah and I were discussing the new fence."

  "The Johnsons' fence," Becker said.

  "Yeah, we keep wondering why they need eight feet and razor wire on top. Sarah thinks the family is getting some kind of wolf-hybrid. But I'm still guessing it's going to be one of the new pet-species coming out later this year."

  Several possible beasts were named and dismissed in quick succession.

  "But you want to hear the big news," she said abruptly.

  Conversations fell away.

  "We were discussing the fence when a stranger came by."

  "Who?" Becker asked.

  "I told you. It was a stranger." Then she picked up the left-behind apple core, nibbling at the biggest end before saying, "I thought it was human, right until it was standing in front of us."

  Everybody sneaked a look at Old Kevin.

  He was staring at his empty mug, making himself ready.

  "The machine complimented us on our pleasant weather, and we said, 'Thank you,' and it said that it had just successfully sued for its freedom, and we said, 'Congratulations,' and then it smiled at us, or at least it tried to, and it asked us where our famous writer might be."

  Becker laughed softly, sitting back in his chair.

  "Of course I knew where you'd be," she said to Old Kevin. "Which is why I said you were fishing at Channel Lake."

  "Thank you," he said.

  "I told the machine that's where you go to have your deep thoughts," she continued, chuckling at the memory. "And the poor thing thanked us and ran away."

  GERMAN BLUFF didn't have much experience with change, but then again, very little ever changes in the world. The sky and the days and the essential rhythm of the biosphere had held constant over recent decades. There were busier communities full of intense, self-important people, but intensity and self-importance aren't the same as radical transformation. People were still people. They slept as they always slept and woke at the usual hours, and some days proved memorable while most passed without ceremony. Food and jokes didn't change quickly. The same favored thoughts ran through the same heads again and again and again. That was what it meant to be human—in German Bluff, and everywhere else, too.