Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Be still,” Doc commanded an eternity later, rousing me from a dream about chocolate birds. “I have to confirm these figures.” Her instrument tore flesh from my good shoulder.

  “Will my hair fall out before I die?”

  “You've lucked out, Citizen Newman.” She hooked her thumb toward the man I'd rescued. He was being zipped into a body bag.

  “Name's Newton.”

  “Yer chest dose reads three hundred and ninety eels. Considering the air standards on New Dee, yer lungs and blood chems are okay. You'll probably be sick for a few days, no more.”

  “What do you mean sick? Am I going to sneeze and have my brain come out?”

  “A bout of flu would be a good yardstick. Is yer dream date tonight?” A corner of her mouth curled upward. Was it mockery or a Martian smile?

  “Naw, I have until tomorrow at 20.00.”

  “Extraordinary,” she said, raining dandruff on me.

  “What happened to the reactors?”

  “Nothing major. Some squirrels gnawed through a wiring harness. Where were you when the heat exchanger exploded?”

  “Wrapping duct tape on my suit. I'm not getting sick! They have to pay me for the whole shift, don't they?”

  “Yer a basket case, Newman. Discuss yer salary with yer union rep.”

  “The name's Newton, not Newman. And unions are outlawed on Dearie, you Martian Bolshevik.”

  She snickered. “Did I mention radiation diarrhea? Drink plenty of fluids. Why don't you come by the office tomorrow? I can sew back anything that falls off.”

  “I won't be sick!”

  The Martian lacked the manners to turn before laughing at me.

  * * * *

  dream date

  Makson Nuclear Industry, Inc. paid me double in exchange for signing away my future litigation rights. I up-traded the two rat-cards for an .8 kilo tinned ham and four hundred grams of chocolate. Pea pods and mushrooms came via the black market. Kinal and corn meal were provided by the grey market on the docks. My regular rat-card qualified me to spend a month's salary on assorted goodies from the official market.

  Aspirin and Nelex eased my symptoms, although I had the energy level of a banana slug. To compensate, I began preparing dinner while waiting for breakfast to boil.

  Cleaning nearly killed me. Green mold in the bathroom thrived despite three steel wool assaults. Mopping caused a clean streak, so I had to mop and mop until the floor changed colors. I hauled my garbage a million kilometers to the trash room.

  I couldn't stop sweating. Twice, I changed my soggy date garb. The dawning of the magic hour found me draped over my living room hammock. I swayed. The clock ticked. At 20.10, I discovered a strip of the floor I hadn't mopped. At 20.30, I headed into the bedroom to change my clothes again. Hope died, a slow, ticking death. At 20.41 and eighteen seconds, I used the clock as a frisbee.

  The phone buzzed. I dived across the room.

  “How's your date going, old man?” asked Paul.

  “Does the term ‘expendable friendship’ mean anything to you?”

  “Are you this cranky with your char?”

  I severed the connection and swept up the remains of the clock. My last drop of hope drained down the cosmic toilet. At 21.00, I sat at the table, forcing myself to eat the pile of johnny cakes I'd prepared. They were greasy and cold, the perfect snack for the miserable.

  The door buzzed. It never occurred to me it might be a tardy Diane. I expected the Grim Reaper or a tax auditor. I snailed to the door by the fifth buzz, spinning the wheel to open the door manually. The Martian doc bee-lined for the feast. Down the line of covered dishes she traveled, sniffing each like a cocaine puppy.

  “You missed yer appointment this morn. How is willpower faring against radiation? I was visiting a friend down the hall and—No, that's a lie. Truth is, I was curious.”

  “Ya hungry?” After mocking her accent, I handed her a plate.

  Like most planet-born, her legs were prime. A polis’ sub-standard gravity could seldom produce calves like hers. She wore a rainbow rag-dress.

  “My God, this is real Martian ham!”

  Scooting pots aside, she sat atop the counter. She hoisted the bottle of wine for a long pull. Only a Martian could guzzle like a wino, yet make it appear dainty. Maybe it was the classy way she wiped her mouth on her sleeve after a fetching belch.

  Martians!

  “Is there a law against chewing food?”

  She grinned, exposing a set of stainless steel teeth. “I got killed during the Wars, but I'm much better now. A lot of my original equipment was replaced. My new stomach doesn't require chewing.”

  “A once dead veteran and a Martian to boot. Sounds like the makings of a social plague. Why are you here?”

  “Can't you guess?”

  I sipped my glass of tepid tea, embarrassed and stubbornly refusing to snag her bait. “I mean, here on New Dearborn.”

  The char meant nothing, I kept telling myself. She had just been a hope hook to hang my dreams for the nonce. I turned to wipe a tear.

  “I'm paid by a grant from the Lytan Foundation to provide medical services, since yer doctors left for richer climes. As a reward for my humanitarian services, YER government has declared my paychecks are illegal currency transactions. Yer government is confiscating my hard currency salary and issuing me those damned worthless Neds at the official rate! My every dollar becomes a nickel. I'm sleeping at the clinic because I can't afford rent.”

  “Tell me about it.” A modicum of enthusiasm slipped into my voice, the inner bureaucrat rising to the occasion.

  “You ain't gonna ask, are you? One of my duties is certifying people for travel. Yer friend received a money order from a cousin and left on the Greyhound shuttle this morn. She asked me to say good-bye. She was extremely depressed about it.”

  “Really?”

  “I'm an awful liar, ain't I?”

  I shook my head slowly, mustering a brave facade. “Tell me about your 3-E prob.”

  “What?”

  “Foreign income falls under Clause 3E of the Revenue Code. I often solve problems in return for the occasional favor.”

  She spilled. I nodded.

  “I can do something about that. Now, for the quid pro quo, my dear doctor, I have a friend with an ego problem. How do you feel about pranks?”

  “On Mars, my fav is putting a grenade—”

  “We aren't in a Martian asylum.” I explained the gag before I dialed Paul.

  As usual my buddy picked up and made heavy panting noises. I turned on the vid pickup for a change. We exchanged some empty banter before I turned over the phone to the good doc.

  “Citizen Li, this is Doctor Jessica Stracher.” She flashed her ID to the camera. “Citizen Newton has explained yer problem to me. REALLY, Citizen, this is the twenty-second century. No matter how advanced, yer venereal disease can be treated. Be at my office at 16.00 tomorrow, or I'll have Public Health issue a warrant for yer arrest.”

  I leaned into the picture as Paul began yelling. I waved and unplugged the machine.

  She carried the pot of kinal to the table where she attacked the alien veggie with a large wooden spoon. I went into the living room and played at my terminal. Shelling through the polis’ data onion, I cracked the Revenuer's base. Shreds of kinal dropped on my shoulder.

  “There's a form of institutional judo you have to use on Dearie. You can't say your paycheck is in the wrong category unless you can show where the right category is.”

  “Sounds like you enjoy this paper chase.”

  “You have to take your pleasure where you find it, meka. More ham?”

  Copyright (c) 2008 R. Neube

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: VINEGAR PEACE, OR, THE WRONG-WAY USED-ADULT ORPHANAGE

  by Michael Bishop

  Michael Bishop has published seventeen novels in his career as a freelancer, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time (1982); Un
icorn Mountain, winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; and Brittle Innings (1994), an imaginative study of minor-league baseball in the Deep South during World War II and winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel. He has written and published two mystery novels in collaboration with Paul Di Filippo under the joint pseudonym Philip Lawson, Would It Kill You to Smile? (1998) and Muskrat Courage (2000); he recently published a collection of essays, A Reverie for Mister Ray (2005); and recently edited the Thunder's Mouth Press anthology A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ (2007). His latest book, Passing for Human (an anthology of stories about nonhuman creatures of various sorts, well, passing for human), which he and Steven Utley co-edited for Peter Crowther's PS Publishing will feature a haunting wraparound dust jacket by Michael's late son, Jamie Bishop.

  On Thursday evening, your doorbell rings. Two small men in off-white shirts and black trousers, like missionaries of a dubious religious sect, stand outside your threshold giving you scary pitying looks.

  Are you Ms. K——? they ask.

  When you assent, they say they've come to transport you to the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage thirty minutes north of your current residence in a life-help cottage of the Sour Thicket Sanatorium, where your father died seven years ago. But you don't wish to be transported anywhere.

  The smaller of the two small men, seizing your arm above the elbow, says that an order has come down and that they must establish you, before 8:30 pm, in a used-adult orphanage—upon penalty of demotion for them and unappealable eviction for you. If you don't cooperate, they will ransack your cottage and throw you out on the street with your musty belongings.

  Why now? you ask. Neither stooge manifests a glimmer of humanity. After all, you've been an orphan—as they insist on terming your condition—since you were a vigorous fifty-nine. They should show some respect.

  The man holding your bicep smirks. That's why they call it a Wrong-Way,Used-Adult Orphanage, he says. You get into one not because you've lost a parent. Your last living child has to die.

  Jesus, blurts the other man. That goes against all our training.

  You say nothing. You feel as if someone has opened a trap in your stomach and shoved in a package of wet cement. You sink to your knees, but not all the way because the smaller small man refuses to release your arm.

  You feel you've just climbed twelve sets of stairs. Someone has injected stale helium into your head, inflating it to beach-ball size.

  O God, you cry: O God, O God.

  Even to yourself you sound like a scared puppy, not a woman. Your only living offspring, one of only two who bore your genes, has just died in the interminable War on Worldwide Wickedness, probably in a snowy province of R——.

  Because Elise and her earlier-lost brother died childless years after Mick, your husband, passed away, you have passed from a state of natural, late-life orphanhood to the sad, wrong-way orphancy of the issue-shorn. Only someone similarly bereft can know your devastation.

  Put your stuff in two plastic duffels, the cruel stooge says: Only two.

  Please don't make me leave my home, you beg of him. Just give me a knock-me-out so I can die.

  Your lightheadedness persists: your dead daughter swims before your eyes like a lovely human swan, but the rock in your stomach keeps you from taking pleasure in her shock-generated image.

  Against your will, you must say goodbye to Elise forever, as you once did to Mick and later to your darling son Brice.

  Eventually, despite your protests, you cram clothing and toiletries into a duffel bag and some file discs and image cubes into another. Then the cruel stooge and his only slightly kinder partner escort you out to the van for transport to Vinegar Peace.

  * * * *

  Mr. Weevil, director of this Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage looks maybe twenty-six, with slicked-back hair you've seen before on leading men in old motion pictures, but he greets you personally in the rotunda-like foyer, points you to a chair, and triggers a video introduction to the place. His head, projected on a colossal screen at gallery level, spiels in a monotone:

  The death of your last surviving child (good riddance) in the War on Worldwide Wickedness makes you too valuable (unfit) to continue residing among the elder denizens (constipated old fools) of your life-help cottage (costly codger dump). So we've brought you here to shelter (warehouse) you until our Creator calls you to an even more glorious transcendent residency above (blah-blah, blah-blah).

  The talking head of Mr. Weevil—whose living self watches with you, his hands clasped above his coccyx—remarks that you can stroll inside the orphanage anywhere, but that you can never leave—on pain of solo confinement (for a first violation) or instant annihilation (for any later misstep).

  The building has many mansions (rooms), viz., 1) Cold Room, 2) Arboretum, 3) Mail Room, 4) Guest Suite, 5) Chantry, 6) Sleep Bay, 7) Refectory, 8) Furnace Room, and 9) Melancholarium. Orphans will, and should, visit all nine rooms at some point, for every room will disclose its significance to its visitors, and these elucidations will charge any resident's stay with meaning.

  Don't be alarmed, the director's talking head concludes, if I haven't mentioned a room you view as necessary. The existence of restrooms, closets, offices, kitchens, servant quarters, attics, basements, secret nooks, and so forth, goes without saying.

  A young woman dressed like the men who snatched you from your lodgings takes your elbow—gently—and escorts you from the rotunda. And as Mr. Weevil's body glides smoothly away, his face fades from the gallery-level screen.

  Where are we going? you ask the woman.

  She smiles as she might at an infant mouthing a milk bubble.

  Where are the other residents? Will I have my own room?

  That the director included a dormitory in his list of mansions suggests otherwise, but you have to ask. Still, you have begun to think you're in a reeducation camp of some sort. Your stomach tightens even as you tighten your hold on the duffels, which now feel as heavy as old lead sash weights.

  Miss, you plead. Why am I here? Where are we going?

  She stops, stares you in the eye, and says: Oldsters who've lost children in the war often make trouble. Hush. It isn't personal. We're sheltering all orphaned adults in places like this, for everybody's benefit. You'll meet other orphans soon, but now Mr. Weevil'd like you to visit the refrigitorium.

  What?

  The Cold Room. Relax, Ms. K——. It's nice. It's a surprise, sort of.

  * * * *

  It's a surprise, all right, and no sortof about it. Your escort has abandoned you inside the Cold Room, which drones like a refrigerator but sparkles all about you as if you were its moving hub. Ice coats the walls in ripples and scales, each its own faintly glowing color.

  Effigies of frozen liquid occupy shallow niches about the walls, and you soon find that three of these, interleaved with simulacra of unfamiliar persons, commemorate your dead: Mick, Brice, and Elise.

  As if over a skin of crushed Ping-Pong balls, you totter gingerly to each beloved ice figure in turn.

  Tears spontaneously flow, only to harden on the planes of your face. You clutch your gut and bend in agony before each image of loss. You sob into the chamber's dull hum, stupidly hopeful that no one's wired it for video or sound, and that your pain has no commiserating spies.

  You've done this before. Must you indulge again? Have you no shame?

  Over time your tears re-liquefy, and the ice effigies glisten more wetly. The Cold Room has grown imperceptibly warmer. The ice on its walls stays solid, but the statues—by design or accident, but more likely the former—begin to shimmer and melt. Do they stand on hotplates or coil about intricate helices of invisible heating wires? Whatever the case, they dissolve. They go. And there's no reversing the process.

  So much water collects—from your tear ducts and the de-solidifying statues—that puddles gather in the floor. Even the ceiling drips.

  If you stay here out of a misbegott
en desire to honor your treasured dead, you'll wind up drenched, ill, and soul-sick.

  Freezing, sweating, weeping, you back away. You must.

  * * * *

  You have a slick card in hand: a floor diagram of the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage. YOU ARE HERE, it asserts in a box next to the blueprint image of the Cold Room, BUT YOU COULD BE HERE.

  An arrow points to Room 2, the Arboretum. Well, you could use a sylvan glade about now—an orchard or a grove—and because you walk purposefully, the room pops up just where the arrow indicates.

  Like the Cold Room, the Arboretum is unlocked. Unlike the Cold Room, it soars skyward four or more floors, although its dome has an ebony opaqueness that hides the stars. You gape. Willows stretch up next to sycamores, oaks shelter infant firs and pines, disease-free elms wave in the interior breeze like sea anemones in a gnarl of current, and maples drop whirling seeds, in windfalls lit like coins by the high fluorescents.

  Twilight grips the Arboretum.

  Out of this twilight, from among the pillars of the trees, figures in cloaks of pale lemon, lime, lavender, ivory, blue, pink, orange, and other soft hues emerge at intervals. They amble forward only a little way, find a not-too-nearby tree, and halt: they decline to impose themselves.

  None of these persons qualifies as a wrong-way orphan because all are too young: between thirty and forty. All stand on the neat margins of this wood like passengers with tickets to bleak destinations. Although none seems fierce or hostile—just the opposite, in fact—you prepare yourself to flee, if your nerve fails you. Your heart bangs like an old jalopy engine.

  Pick one of us, a woman in a lavender cape tells you. She speaks conversationally from under a willow in the middle distance, but you hear her just fine. The acoustics here are excellent: maybe she's been miked.

  Pick one of you for what?

  Condolence and consolation: as a sounding board for whatever feeds your angst. The woman advances one tree nearer.

  You snort. You've had more sounding boards than a cork-lined recording room. Why take on another?