Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001
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CONTENTS
Reflections: Dead Souls
Letters to the Editor from Michael Swanwick
The Longest Way Home by Robert Silverberg
Troubadour by Charles Stross
The Boy by Robert Reed
When this World is All on Fire by William Sanders
Bad Asteroid Night by Steve Martinez
Lincoln in Frogmore by Andy Duncan
Liberty Journals by Allen M. Steele
Ménage by Simon Ings
Aotearoa by Cherry Wilder
Nitrogen Plus by Jack Williamson
The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
Verse
The SF Conventional Calendar
Upcoming Chats
In our next issue...
Asimov's
Science Fiction®
Oct/Nov 2001
Vol. 25 No. 10 & 11
Dell Magazines
New York
Edition Copyright © 2001 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications
Asimov's Science Fiction® is a registered trademark.
All rights reserved worldwide.
All stories in Asimov's are fiction. Any similarities are coincidental.
Asimov's Science Ficton ISSN 1065-2698 published monthly except for a combined October/November double issue.
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Reflections: Dead Souls
Robert Silverberg
One of the first great nineteenth-century Russian novels is the strange, almost surrealistic Dead Souls of Nikolai Gogol, a book that in some ways prefigures the robust, exuberant absurdities of such twentieth-century classics as Catch-22 and The Adventures of Augie March. Gogol's sly hero—antihero, really—is one Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a shrewd operator who goes around Russia offering to buy “dead souls,” that is, the identities of serfs who have died since the last census.
In Czarist Russia a century and a half ago, landowners were required to pay taxes on serfs who were linked to their estates until the next census date, even if they had died in the meantime. So far as the census register was concerned, in other words, the dead serfs were deemed still to be alive (and taxable) until officially tallied as deceased.
The first landowner Chichikov approaches is, of course, suspicious of his motives. Why would anyone want to pay for the ownership of dead serfs? But Chichikov assures him that the transaction is perfectly legal—that the Treasury would indeed profit by it—and the landowner, unwilling to take good money for something so worthless, grandly agrees to transfer the serfs to Chichikov without payment. Others, though, are quite eager to do business with him, and elaborately praise the qualities of their dead serfs in order to get Chichikov to raise his offer. ("Why are you being so stingy?” one landowner asks. “It's cheap at the price. There is Miheyev, the wheelwright, the carriages he made were always on springs. And Probka Stepan, the carpenter? I stake my head on it that you wouldn't find another peasant like him. The strength of him! He was over seven feet high! And Yeremei Sorokop-lekhin! Why, he's worth the whole bunch of them.... That's the kind of folk they are! It's not the quality you'd get from some Plyushkin or other.")
Precisely why Chichikov wants to acquire these souls is something that emerges gradually in the course of Gogol's long and brilliant novel, which he left unfinished at his death in 1852 but which even in its incomplete form is one of the masterpieces of Russian literature. What has called it to my mind today is a remarkable story out of India that is a kind of Dead Souls in reverse, a surrealistic black comedy which, like most black comedies, contains within it the stuff of tragedy.
My source for this story is a piece from the New York Times by Barry Bearak, whose admirable first paragraph would surely have brought applause from Gogol himself:
“Lal Bihari, founder of the Association of Dead People, first learned he was deceased when he applied for a bank loan in 1975.”
The Association of Dead People! How could I resist a hook like that? So I read on, and learned that Lal Bihari is a citizen of the state of Uttar Pradesh in northwestern India, near the border with Nepal. When the bank turned him down for the loan because he was listed in state records as having died, he headed off to Azamgarh, the district capital, to consult the official in charge of those records—a man who happened to be a friend of his. “Take a look for yourself,” the official told him. “It is all written here in the registry. You are certified as legally dead.”
Finding out what had happened involved returning to Khalilabad, his ancestral village, where Bihari had not lived since boyhood. There he discovered that an uncle of his had bribed the local officials to put him down in the books as dead—thus allowing the uncle to inherit Bihari's share of the family's jointly held farmland. Bribery of officials is apparently not an uncommon phenomenon in India—it seems to be the only way to get anything done, from the highest levels of government down to the local courthouse level. It turned out that the slippery uncle had paid the equivalent of twenty-five dollars to have Mr. Bihari declared dead, quite a considerable sum in modern India. (As the Times story noted, the uncle could have hired a hit man for half as much.)
Lal Bihari did not take his defunct state lightly. When his first attempts to be restored to life went nowhere in the Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy, he founded his Association of Dead People, had stationery printed, and with a nice sense of tongue-in-cheek absurdism added the Hindi word “mritak,” which means “dead,” to the name on his business cards. Then he set about trying to get his existence officially recognized by doing such things as running for office, suing people, and attempting to get arrested.
None of it worked. No one in the state government was willing to recognize the fact that Lal Bihari was very much alive. Evidently when an Indian bureaucrat is bought, he stays bought. Bihari was told that the state records plainly showed that he was dead, and a dead man could not run for office, and has no legal standing in a lawsuit.
He would not g
ive up. “In pursuing my battle, I had developed quite an identity,” he told the Times reporter. “I became the leader of a movement. I knew I had other dead people to save.”
During the course of his strange crusade Bihari even came up with the wonderfully ingenious idea of having his wife apply for widow's benefits, but—and here we have a touch reminiscent more of Kafka than of Gogol—the same officials who insisted he was dead found some pretext for refusing to approve any payout to his “widow.” Undeterred, Bihari bombarded the government with letters and pamphlets, staged a mock funeral for himself in the state capitol, and otherwise made such a nuisance of himself that in 1994—nineteen years after his discovery of his own demise—Lal Bihari was officially resurrected by the state of Uttar Pradesh and was able to return in triumph to his old village of Khalilabad.
No bitter confrontation with his scheming uncle took place, though, because by this time the uncle was dead himself, actually and literally. Nor did Bihari even try to reclaim his bit of land from the cousins who now were farming it. “We have done him a great injustice,” one of the cousins conceded, and that was good enough for Lal Bihari. He feels that the satisfaction of making them feel guilty is sufficient—and the land isn't worth very much, besides.
But the forty-five-year-old merchant continues his work on behalf of the living dead. Like an upside-down Chichikov he travels through the countryside, looking for others like himself, people who have been victims of the same sort of chicanery, dead souls.
Among those who have been turned up by the Association of Dead People is one Bhagwan Pra-shad Mishra, an eighty-year-old villager of Mubarakpur, who has spent the last twenty-one years in the limbo of official defunctitude after having been done out of a parcel of land by a pack of tricky nephews. There is a particularly nice twist in this case, because in fact Bhagwan Prashad Mishra still is registered as the legal owner of four other parcels of land; he is dead only so far as the one parcel “inherited” by his nephews is concerned.
Then there is the forty-eight-year-old farmer Ansar Ahmed of the ninety-family village of Madhnapar, who in 1982 was declared to be dead after some fast footwork on the part of his brother, Nabi Sarwar Khan. Having lost the family rice paddy to Nabi Sarwar Khan, Ansar Ahmed was reduced to complete poverty and had to take up residence with his widowed mother. The village was divided on the issue of Anser Ahmed's death, some supporting his claim to existence and others, says the Times article, “treating him as an invisible specter.” (And here I am reminded of an old story of mine, “To See the Invisible Man,” in which my protagonist, having been convicted of an antisocial crime, is condemned to a year of invisibility: no one is allowed to notice his presence, no matter what sort of outrageous things he may happen to be doing for the sake of getting attention.)
Last July, the High Court of Uttar Pradesh, having learned at last through the activities of the Association of Dead People that there might be hundreds of such cases in the state, ordered an investigation. “As the bureaucrats once feared the devil, they now fear the Association of the Dead,” says Lal Bihari.
Under the prodding of the High Court the state government was required to publish advertisements calling upon undead citizens to step forward and claim their rights, and allowing those who were able to demonstrate their existence to regain their places in the roster of the living. One of those thus resurrected was Ansar Ahmed, who has now brought criminal charges against his brother. But the brother is not admitting any guilt whatever. “These are only allegations,” he says grumpily.
So the task goes on. And though Mr. Bihari and his Association of Dead People remind me, in this way and that, of certain aspects of the works of Nikolai Gogol and Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow and even Robert Silverberg and Philip K. Dick, we need to remember that what happened to Ansar Ahmed and Bhagwan Pra-shad Mishra and Lal Bihari was only too painfully real, over there in the bizarre alien universe that is the subcontinent of India. They are not figures out of literature: they are real, suffering people, who had to fight terrible struggles against a corrupt bureaucracy. There's nothing funny about being stricken from the register of living beings because someone has paid a twenty-five-dollar bribe to turn you into an unperson.
Still—the writer in me wonders what the Association of Dead People will do once it has brought all the unjustly dead of Uttar Pradesh back to life. And the mischievous thought arises in me, by way of Gogol's Chi-chikov, that there must be plenty of profit to be found by locating people who are really dead and somehow getting them restored to the roster of the living over there. Let's hope the idea doesn't occur to Lal Bihari.
—Robert Silverberg
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Letters to the Editor from Michael Swanwick
Dear Contributor,
We are pleased to be publishing your work in Asimov's. To do so, however, we will need updated information for the author's blurb that will accompany it. Please send whatever biographical and bibliographical information that we can use along with the signed contracts in the enclosed envelope as soon as possible. Thank you.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Executive Editor
December 19, 1988
Ms. Sheila Williams
Asimov's Science Fiction
475 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016
Dear Sheila:
I am pleased that you are publishing “The Dragon Line” in Asimov's. My updated bio follows:
Along with H.G. Wells, Michael Swanwick is generally thought of as one of the two founding fathers of science fiction. Where Wells brought a high literary sensibility and seriousness of purpose to the field, however, Swanwick is better known for his wild extrapolative ingenuity and slapdash plots. Many inventions we now take for granted—the land submarine, the steam tricycle, and the nasal decongestant, to name but a few—appeared first within the pages of his “nouvelles romances electrique.”
Swanwick's works have been acclaimed by many of our finest drinkers. They include Around the World in a Bassoon, Voyage to the Bottom of the Ground, The Electric Chaise (part of the “Unspeakable Voyages” series), Dirigible Mania! and The Interurban Dreadnaught. He has also written a penetrating series of monographs exploring the fiction of Lionel Fanthorpe. In his spare time he likes to dress up as a bat and pummel wrongdoers.
There you go. Have a very merry Christmas, okay? Love to all.
Best,
Michael
February 5, 1992
Dear Sheila,
As requested, here is my updated bio:
Larger than a breadbox and wittier than all of Wilmington, Delaware, put together, Michael Swanwick is most widely famed and esteemed for the same baffling line of gaudy persiflage that once briefly resulted in his being incorrectly listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica as the twenty-second President of the United States, less (but still significantly) widely famed and esteemed for a scrupulously painstaking research style in consequence of which warrants are still outstanding in the several states featured in his justly acclaimed novelette, “The Plagues of August,” and without question least widely famed and esteemed for a purported and all-but-obsessive tendency to fall into the sort of run-on sentence that might, though so far it has not, be compared to a single snowflake carved with astonishing but pointless skill into an endlessly recursive filigree. He denies everything.
That's all. Take good care, hear? I'll be writing you soon.
All best,
Michael
October 21, 1992
Dear Sheila,
As per your recent request, here is my updated bio:
Germany's most beloved cartoon mouse, Michael Swanwick, was created by Jewish slave animators in the notorious Peenemunde Kartoonwerks in 1934. Fleeing the consequences of history, he surfaced in postwar Argentina, where a combination of plastic surgery and intensive genetic reprogramming allowed him to move to California and cut a complex series of
deals with right-wing arms manufacturers. The original acetates were all bought up and overdubbed in English and a false history back-created that quickly convinced over 98 percent of the American public he was an indigenous product. He has since branched out into amusement parks, live cinema, and the establishment and dictation of moral standards. He is currently at work on a national program of neighborhood ethical hygiene squads.
No, no, don't say that!...Contracts enclosed. Take good care, yes?
All best,
Michael
July 28, 1993
Dear Sheila,
Here, as requested-by-Xeroxed-form-letter, is updated bio material (I even saved you the trouble of writing it up in intro form) for “The Mask":
Ascended master Michael Swanwick, having transcended the gross material sphere, now exists in a bodiless state of spiritual perfection and perpetual bliss. He is currently a being of pure awareness who sheds the Buddha-light on the grateful denizens of literally thousands of worlds. However, he still expects to be paid promptly. You wouldn't want to stiff an ascended master. He's got the power to make you sorry you ever thought of it. You want to wake up one morning and find yourself in the body of a migrant laborer in the heart of Pennsylvania's mushroom country? Or maybe an arthritic goat? He could do it. Don't kid yourself. These Bodhisattvas-manqué are mean mothers. That's why we wrote the check for this story and sent it out STAT!
Not that I would do that to you, Sheila... !
All best,
Michael
January 13, 1998
Dear Editor:
Your corrected galleys/proofs for my Asimov's story/poem are enclosed. While I regret having to use a Xeroxed form letter—I don't like them myself !—the press of constant publication has forced me to this pass. However, in my experience galleys/proofs for stories/poems inevitably include one or more of the following items.