Asimov's SF, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Lollypop.” That's what she looked like.

  His saber-toothed grin widened. “Hello Lollypop. Do you need help?"

  “Doing fine."

  “Glad to hear that. How are things in the A-system?"

  “Hectic."

  He laughed aloud, clearly having heard the frantic calls for her to come about. “Good for you, girl. Want some advice?"

  “Sure."

  “You are boosting for Ashanti."

  “Maybe.” Her trajectory was easy to read.

  “Beware of Greenies,” the smiling predator warned. “They will rob you blind, then turn you in. You'll get the most for your cargo on Njovu V."

  Njovu meant elephant in an ancient tongue, the name for a gas giant on the edge of Niger B system—a notorious base for wreckers and slavers. “Tell ‘em Simba sent you."

  “Thanks."

  Simba signed off with a crisp, “Good hunting, girl."

  Good hunting to you. Shirlee easily recognized cyber-stalking. Simba pegged her for a scared young female on the run. Unable to snatch her up himself, Simba was sending her to friends who could. Probably for payment at a later date.

  Still, she dutifully adjusted her course for Njovu V, an icy outer moon of the gas giant. She could always return to an Ashanti trajectory, once safely out of warhead range.

  Not halfway to the B-system, and mutant predators were already licking their toothy chops over her. Was there a single safe spot in the cosmos? Apparently not.

  But going back to spend the rest of her life in JuVee had scant appeal.

  Instead she studied Lollypop's specs and manifest, trying to figure out how to defend her. By combining medical anesthetic with mining detonators, she could instantly flood any interior space with knock-out gas. Shirlee also attached high voltage surge generators to the cargo ladders and strategic deck areas.

  Knowing how easily Lollypop's controls could be overridden, Shirlee did her work with the cams off, avoiding ship's systems, using external power and code words keyed to her voice. No one else could trigger the traps. Or even tell they existed.

  Turnaround came. She flipped Lollypop over, braking to enter the B-system. Njovu control sent her a friendly 3V. Speed-of-light lag made conversation impossible, but a handsome, helpful officer in the “rescue service” asked if she needed assistance. His flying-dragon ship badge read Hiryu, and he assured her, “We have a deep space tug waiting."

  Again the eager offer to help, with no mention of her many crimes and misdemeanors. Clearly Njovu had no intention of sending her back to JuVee. How nice to be so wanted.

  Staring at this smiling, tousle-haired officer from the Hiryu, Shirlee could not shake the feeling that she was finally seeing the Boogie man face to face.

  She did not acknowledge the message, knowing that so long as she was shaping for Njovu, they would do nothing to stop her. Running orbits through the autopilot, she found the perfect point-instant to head for Ashanti.

  Despite Simba's warning, her best chance lay with the Greenies. Not a great comment on her own species.

  Niger B grew in size, becoming a small red sun, with a sprinkling of planets. When time came to switch trajectories, she did it from the command couch, not trusting the autopilot. Though Ashanti was the innermost planet, it was actually closer than Njovu, given her extreme angle to the ecliptic. Simple high-g braking would do.

  As soon as she was on an Ashanti trajectory, Ashanti control called her. Speed-of-light lag was not near as bad now, and she could carry on a conversation of sorts. The Greenie who greeted her had grass-colored skin, matching her eyes. Her hair was flame red, a fetching combination. “Why are you coming here?"

  Good question. She signaled back.

  * * * *

  Nowhere lz 2 go.

  * * * *

  While she awaited a reply, Shirlee studied the Photo sapien. Like SuperCats, Greenies had once been human. Now they were supposed to be better than human; non-violent vegetarians, immune to cancer, drugs, 3V, politics, religion, and all other forms of addictive behavior. Plus their bodies could turn air and sunlight into blood sugar.

  “Are you armed?” asked the Greenie girl.

  * * * *

  Not really.

  * * * *

  “We do not allow anti-personnel weapons onplanet.” And they call Greenies uncivilized.

  * * * *

  Great. My cargo is food, Rx, meds, ice-mining equipment.

  * * * *

  “That will be much appreciated.” The Greenie did not mention payment, since they had no money. Not that Njovu planned to pay her either.

  Would Greenies consider her hand laser a weapon? Maybe. She needed a back-up. Her medical shipment contained high-pressure hypos of instant anesthetic. Even a Greenie could not object to her having a couple of those up her sleeve. She'd say she had trouble sleeping.

  Checking her cams, Shirlee suited up just in case, then pressurized the inner lock to go and get the hypos. As she stepped out into the cargo module, with her helmet hanging open, the Boogie man grabbed her.

  His hand closed over her mouth, keeping Shirlee from triggering her traps, while a horribly powerful arm pinned her suited arms to her side, so she could not reach the laser. Strong, implacable fingers pinched her nose closed.

  Now she could not breathe. All her childhood fears came rushing back. He had her, and would not let go. She fought vainly to speak, plead, or just to breathe. None of that was allowed.

  Not even the King could save her. Slowly her struggles eased, and Shirlee slid into blackness.

  * * * *

  Candy Shop

  Shirlee never expected to awake, but she did. Still in her v-suit, she lay in one of Lollypop's cargo containers, seeing foam padding lit by light strips, and smelling like a JuVee toilet stall—a particular mix of sweat, urine, despair, and disinfectant.

  Carol stared down at her, wearing just a worried look.

  “Am I dead?” And gone to Graceland.

  Carol shook her red locks. “You wish."

  Too bad, because life seemed pretty horrible. Shirlee started to sob. Having Carol back was great, but not in some ghastly box. Her ship, her freedom, her hope for a future had all been snatched away. Incredibly unfair.

  Carol held her while she cried, pushing blond curls out of her eyes, waiting for her sobs to subside.

  When they did, Shirlee struggled to smile. “Good to see you, girlfriend."

  “Good to see you.” Too bad it had to be here.

  “Sorry I'm such a sissy."

  “Forget it,” Carol told her. “I cried like a cranky baby at first. He had to beat me into shutting up."

  “You were here this whole time? Since he grabbed you at Monrovia dock?"

  “Where else?"

  Totally logical. Carol and the Boogie man had been aboard all along. “How come he did not show on camera?"

  “Cams were programmed to edit out his ninja suit."

  “Sweet.” Shirlee wished she'd thought of that. “Why did he wait to take the ship?"

  “You were being too cautious."

  Up until the end.

  “So long as you were headed for Njovu, it hardly mattered,” Carol added. “He had me to play with."

  “Must have been awful."

  “Nauseating.” Carol pretended to puke. “But you get numb."

  “He beat you?"

  “Till I learned to please him."

  They both grimaced at that.

  “Wasn't hard.” From the way Carol said it, Shirlee knew the Boogie man was listening.

  “Take off the ninja PJs and he's no worse than the guys in JuVee.” Carol examined her bruised hip. “The marks have mostly faded."

  “So I see."

  Carol apologized for her nudity. “He thought clothes got in the way."

  “Tell me about it.” Good thing she had a v-suit on. The wrenching shock of being seized and smothered had filled her suit waste-evac unit.

  Just lying quietly was an effort,
showing they were on high-g trajectory for Njovu. She had to get out of this box. Soon. While she still had a chance to make Ashanti. Having Carol back leveled things. Together they could beat him, somehow.

  What would the King do? Naturally her hand laser was gone, leaving her with no cutting tools. Just her v-suit. Could a vacuum suit get her out of a sealed container? Lost in space, or even underwater, it would be great. But locked in a box?

  Might happen. She asked Carol, “Want some clothes?"

  Her friend shrugged. “He will just take them away."

  “Maybe that's a good thing."

  Carol caught her meaning. Both assumed the Boogie man was watching. What else would he be doing?

  Sitting up, Shirlee stripped off her v-suit, giving Carol the ship's coveralls underneath. Absurdly small on the taller girl, but better than nothing—unless you were a guy looking on. Shirlee swiftly suited back up.

  “Thanks.” Carol gave her a grateful kiss.

  As their lips parted, Shirlee mouthed, “Make-him-open-up."

  Carol nodded, kissing her again, then laying down beside her. Not very romantic in a vacuum suit, but Carol knew their audience best.

  Shirlee asked excitedly, “Did you know Didi is alive?"

  “No!” Carol's eyes widened.

  “Swear, I saw her. In a real sicko ad.” Shirlee had always wanted to be a 3V child star, but not that badly.

  “Think he took her too?"

  “Would not put it past him."

  “I've been sold online,” Carol boasted. “To the Candy Shop on Njovu III."

  Shirlee winced. “I saw the ads.” It made Didi's brothel seem like a preschool.

  “So did I.” Carol took one of Shirlee's blonde curls, idly twisting it around her finger. “It turned him on to show me where I am going."

  Shirlee smirked. “Got to beat being here."

  That was the message she meant to send. This box was so boring, compared to what they might be doing. She prayed to Elviz that the Boogie man would open it up, to peel her out of her silly v-suit.

  This same annoying suit kept him from just flooding the container with anesthetic. Her suit's alarms and oxy-tanks easily dealt with bad air. So he would have to unseal the box with Shirlee alert and awake.

  Which he finally did, breaking the container seal from the outside. He could not resist having his latest acquisition just the way he wanted her.

  Carol rolled her eyes to say, “Get ready."

  Popping the lid, the Boogie man stood over them, hanging onto a cargo ladder, wearing his hooded black night suit. Goggle eyes glared at Shirlee out of a filter mask. Plainly this was meant to scare her, freezing her into submission.

  Instead she shouted out, “Spark!"

  Seventy-five thousand volts flashed through the cargo ladder from a hidden surge generator. His night suit protected him some, but not nearly enough.

  Losing his grip on the ladder, her captor tumbled down and landed on the metal deck, which Shirlee had also electrified.

  Ten seconds later, the shock ended, but the Boogie man still jerked about.

  Hauling Carol out of the box, Shirlee made for the command deck, hopping over the convulsing slaver.

  As soon as she had Carol safe on the command deck, Shirlee evacuated the inner lock, then flooded the cargo hold with anesthetic gas.

  * * * *

  Matching orbits with Ashanti required more high-g braking, but Shirlee hardly cared, so long as it kept them out of the Candy Shop.

  Twenty hours later, they docked at a Greenie habitat circum Ashanti, a great rotating torus full of light and chaos. Instead of flat fields and dark tunnels, Shirlee saw a low-g riot of green vines and giant trees reaching up to an artificial sun. Semi-nude Greenies flitted on gossamer wings between tree houses, and floating platforms borne aloft by helium reservoirs.

  Shirlee stayed at the dock entrance, to be close to the ship, while Carol met with the 3V-shy Greenies.

  Naked green-skinned kids crowded around her, laughing, joking, and stroking her bare skin. Photo sapiens did not watch 3V porno, so a young human woman was as rare as a female SuperCat, and infinitely more interesting. Even if she was merely waiting by an airlock in the de-spin system.

  Carol returned, wading through giggling kids, who tugged at her ill-fitting coveralls. She told Shirlee, “All they ask is that we swear off weapons and violence."

  Two human traits that horrified the locals. “They do not care that we stole this ship?"

  Carol shrugged. “Not particularly."

  That came from being illegal themselves. Like SuperCats, Greenies had been created secretly centuries earlier, in a gross violation of bioethics and the Universal Human Rights Act. To be totally within the law, all such “bio-engineered beings” would have to kill themselves. “They just want any human troubles kept off-world."

  “Outstanding!"

  “If we want to make ourselves useful,” Carol added. “We can transport goods for a share of the cargo."

  Fifteen and free, hard to believe. “Sounds fine by me."

  Carol shook her head. “Greenies see us as totally good."

  “Weird, when they hardly know you."

  “Maybe.” Carol smirked at the kids crowding around them.

  “What do you mean?"

  Carol said that grown-up Greenies had wanted to stroke her skin as well. “I got propositioned on the way here. A lot."

  “That so?"

  “Twice by women."

  Shirlee grinned. “So, you gonna look for a Greenie guy?"

  “Or gal,” Carol reminded her. “You gonna look for Ivan?"

  “Hard as I can.” Lollypop had a cargo lander for loading in atmosphere. Shirlee had named it the Liza-Marie, and meant to take it down to Ashanti. Humans were rare there, so one as cute as Ivan should stand out.

  “You know he's gonna have a Greenie girlfriend,” Carol warned.

  “Or three."

  “But they're pacifists."

  Both of them laughed at that. All humans, even teenage females, had an aura of violence that no Greenie could match. Stealing spaceships, resisting arrest, electrocuting Boogie men—no wonder they got a wary welcome.

  “I want to find my dad too,” Shirlee added. Her last fatherly contact had been a birthday call two years ago.

  “Homesick?” Carol asked.

  Shirlee shook her head.

  “Me neither."

  Shirlee grinned at the admiring young Greenies. “At home I'd be in JuVee."

  “And the Boogie man would be out on bail."

  “Claiming we kidnapped him,” Shirlee added.

  “Prove we didn't."

  “What will happen to him?” Shirlee had not seen their comatose captor since Greenies had taken him off the Lollypop. Slavers preyed on Greenies as well, and being vegi-pacifists did not make them pushovers—not totally.

  “Hard to say,” Carol admitted. “They don't believe in punishment, or the death penalty, but they don't believe in trials either. All they said is that he is a very, very bad human. So we won't be seeing him again."

  Life without the Boogie man. What a concept.

  Copyright (c) 2007 R. Garcia y Robertson

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  Secret America

  Is it heretical or the sign of a promiscuous liberality of judgment to compare any graphic novel to the prose masterpieces of Thomas Pynchon? This question conceals an underlying core debate: is the medium of comics inherently less sophisticated and impactful and artistically deep than that of novels?

  Recently, when Gene Yang's graphic novel AmericanBornChinese was nominated for a National Book Award in the broad category of YA Literature, a critic or two objected to the inclusion of a funnybook among works of prose fiction. On the other hand, Time magazine boldly added Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic novel Fun Home to its general year's-best book list without apology.

  I'm
inclined as a critic and reviewer and reader to place fiction-with-pictures on pretty much the same plane as fiction-without-pictures, while acknowledging that each mode has different strengths and weaknesses. Thus I have no problem in comparing Kim Deitch's wonderful new book of both words and illustrations, Shadowland (Fantagraphics, trade paper, $18.95, 180 pages, ISBN 978-1-56097-771-1) to the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon, especially something like Pynchon's latest, Against the Day (2006).

  Both authors revel in the oft-times wacky (racist, sexist, ageist, and whatever-ist) detritus of forgotten pop culture, seeing in these decades-old effusions of the mass mind hidden cosmic significances. Both authors employ a kind of erratic, non-linear plotting by synchronicity and chance associations of characters. Both men endorse conspiracies as reality. Both gleefully and irreverently deploy an array of consensus SF tropes in wayward fashion.

  Deitch's novel is basically the life story of two generations of the Ledic-ker family, father and son showmen of the most dissolute, greedy, shifty, scamming sort. The lives of the Ledicker père et fils, their relatives and lovers and hangers-on, would be fit material for a mimetic Westlake novel—were it not for the fact that one exhibit in the sleazy Ledicker sideshow is a crashed alien spaceship with inhabitants still alive, and that the family is also under observation by—and interference from—a secret subterranean race of dwarves. These touches of the uncanny transfigure all into pure fabulation, while still allowing Deitch an ashcan naturalism.

  We open in the year 1897, with the elder Ledicker exhibiting a diving pig that helps sell his snake-oil. This first chapter is rather anomalous, seemingly a kind of simple American frontier tall tale. Nonetheless, all the seeds of what will follow are present in embryo.

  (The serial printing of these stories in various magazines over a long span of years contributes, I think, to their occasional misalignment of continuity and tone. But overall, this essentially haphazard publication history works to actual advantage, conjuring up fruitful enigmas and non-linear jumps and juxtapositions that a more compact and straightforward composition would not have allowed.)

  From these humble beginnings, we will encounter killer geeks, orbiting cargo-trailer trucks, debauched orphanages, Hollywood silent-movie glamour, Polynesian castaways, heroic elephants, and a walk-on role by the author-artist himself. (Sounds pretty Pynchonesque, huh?) It all coheres into a hypnotic secret history of America, or at least one particular corner of this gonzo nation.