Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Read online

  An assortment of passports and identity cards, each with a photograph of younger versions of his mother, made out to different names and nationalities. A slim tight roll of old high-denomination banknotes, yuan, naira, and US dollars, more or less worthless thanks to inflation and revaluation. Blank credit cards and credit cards in various names, also worthless. Dozens of sleeved data needles. A pair of AR glasses.

  Lucas studied one of the ID cards. When he brushed the picture of his mother with his thumb, she turned to present her profile, turned to look at him when he brushed the picture again.

  He pocketed the ID card and the data needles and AR glasses, then walked along the ridge to the apple tree at the far end, and stared out across the flood that spread glistening like shot silk under the sun. Thoughts moved through his mind like a slow and stately parade of pictures that he could examine in every detail, and then there were no thoughts at all and for a little while no part of him was separate from the world all around, sun and water and the hot breeze that moved through the crooked branches of the tree.

  Lucas came to himself with a shiver. Windfall apples lay everywhere among the weeds and nettles that grew around the trees, and dead wasps and hornets were scattered among them like yellow and black bullets. Here was a dead bird, too, gone to a tatter of feathers of white bone. And here was another, and another. As if some passing cloud of poison had struck everything down.

  He picked an apple from the tree, mashed it against the trunk, and saw pale threads fine as hair running through the mash of pulp. He peeled bark from a branch, saw threads laced in the living wood.

  Dragon stuff, growing from the seed he’d planted. Becoming something else.

  In the wood of the tree and the apples scattered all around was a treasure men would kill for. Had killed for. He’d have more than enough to set him up for life, if he sold it to the right people. He could build a house right here, buy the shrimp farm or set up one of his own. He could buy a ticket on one of the shuttles that traveled through the wormhole anchored between the Earth and the Moon, travel to infinity and beyond . . .

  Lucas remembered the hopeful shine in Damian’s eyes when he’d talked about those new worlds. He thought of how the dragon-shard had killed or damaged everyone it had touched. He pictured his mother working at her tablet in her sick bed, advising and challenging people who were attempting to build something new right here on Earth. It wasn’t much of a contest. It wasn’t even close.

  He walked back to the caravan. Took a breath, unlocked the padlock, stepped inside. Everything had been overturned or smashed. Cupboards gaped open, the mattress of his mother’s bed was slashed and torn, a great ruin littered the floor. He rooted among the wreckage, found a box of matches and a plastic jug of lamp oil. He splashed half of the oil on the torn mattress, lit a twist of cardboard and lobbed it onto the bed, beat a retreat as flames sprang up.

  It didn’t take ten minutes to gather up dead wood and dry weeds and pile them around the apple tree, splash the rest of the oil over its trunk and set fire to the tinder. A thin pall of white smoke spread across the island, blowing out across the water as he raised the sail of his boat and turned it into the wind.

  Heading south.

  Copyright © 2010 Paul Mc Auley

  NOVELETTES

  NOVELETTES

  OUT OF THE DREAM CLOSET

  David Ira Cleary

  David Ira Cleary tells us he recently moved to Oakland, California, where “I live with my actress wife, two cats, and the sweetest cocker spaniel you could possibly imagine. The dog inspired the character of the Sphinx, while the themes were mostly generated by my favorite obsessions: free will,...

  Top of NOVELETTES

  NOVELLA SHORT STORIES

  NOVELETTES

  OUT OF THE DREAM CLOSET

  David Ira Cleary

  David Ira Cleary tells us he recently moved to Oakland, California, where “I live with my actress wife, two cats, and the sweetest cocker spaniel you could possibly imagine. The dog inspired the character of the Sphinx, while the themes were mostly generated by my favorite obsessions: free will, aging, mortality, and the philosophy of mind.” Dave recently completed an alternate world mystery novel called Waiting For Marshall Cheung. During the day, he documents software for a company that makes Android smartphones.

  The morning after the moodstorm, the Living Will came to her to bring grim news.

  “Your father plans to die.” The Living Will was tall as a tree. It wore striped bell-bottoms and a vest with deep pockets. It had a mustache like tinsel. It crouched down, hunched over, resting its chin on fingers long as her forearm. It watched her with silver mirror-eyes. “I’m sorry to bring you this news, Sasha.”

  Sasha, blond hair in bangs, walnut-colored skin, eyes green as moss, said: “Call me Little Girl.” No fake-man, no automaton, deserved to call her by her true name.

  “Very well.” A tear rolled down its eye. Good Gödel—a weeper. Maybe it was susceptible to the traces of last night’s moodstorm. She hoped its eyeball tarnished. “I am sorry, Little Girl. I am here to prepare you for his death. I am here to tell you what you will inherit and how you will live with him gone.”

  “I’m busy,” she said.

  “Busy how?”

  “Collecting,” she said. She had a plastic pail beside her, sitting in the ankle-deep water.

  “Collecting what?”

  “You know,” she said. “Stuff.”

  The Living Will watched her a while, then got up and walked away.

  She was collecting souls in Rust Canyon, below the Mad Monk’s Dam.

  Rust Canyon. Cliff walls a mile high, made by moodstorms or by water, carved into metal-stone and polymer rock—the ruined cities of distant epochs, the landfills and boneyards of peoples dead ten thousand centuries. Where there’d been iron there were great ochre fans down cliffsides; where there’d been copper, verdigris. Little Girl liked to look for bones and platinum—bones for DNA and calcium, platinum for metal circuits. But what Rust Canyon was really good for was souls.

  Moodstorms, tantrums of the cloudmind, thought-poor but rich with passion, bursts of brain juice wind-driven down the canyon alleyways, scoured the cliff walls and raised clouds of dust and by the chemical affinity of brain juice for synapses like lock for key, lifted souls from riverbeds and pulled them loose from rock walls. Over years or lifetimes the souls had been carried downstream to the Mad Monk’s Dam, where they had collected. Now Little Girl, wearing rubber hip waders, carrying a bucket and a stick with a hand at the end, walked in the shallow waters beneath the dam. The water was chrome-colored and corrosive, swirling in places with ribbons of red and orange and blue, where the residues of thoughts gone soft, heavy metal acids, had leached to the surface. Little Girl used to grab souls with her bare hands. The corrosive water would burn her hands and forearm, and the red and blistered skin would upset the Papa. But she got bored with that. Now she used her stick-hand.

  The hand was tough brown demi-flesh. The stick carried a nerve bundle. When she gripped the stick from its end, she could feel what the hand felt and she could move its fingers. She lowered the stick. The water was warm and comfortable. She dragged the fingers along the lake floor, touching things. Gravel, sharp edges like glass, jawbones, scuttling tin millipedes and squishy grease worms, then at last souls, hard and round and clumped together or encrusted like barnacles to rocks or asbestos shells. She felt for souls that were just a little rough: ones that were polished smooth were too old, while pitted or smashed ones had usually lost character. Stuck to a rebar reef, she found four good ones, substantial, sandpaper-textured, giving her the faint buzz of dreams or simple cogitations. She grabbed each one carefully with the stick hand, twisted it loose, then brought it up.

  She was examining the fourth soul, gray but giving off a rainbow sheen as she turned it in the sunlight, when she heard Alistair Jones shouting at her: “Sasha! Sasha! Walnut Pasha!”

  He was climbing down the Mad Monk’s Dam,
using the bas-relief sculptures that decorated its face as handholds, clutching stone scrolls, grasping noses and beards, stepping on tonsured heads. At last he jumped into the water, and ran splashing to her. He was double-jointed and had hair colored shiny-black. The acidic water didn’t seem to hurt him.

  He was the cloudmind’s only son.

  “Sassy Sasha!”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Sullen Sasha!”

  “Call me Little Girl.”

  Alistair Jones furrowed his brow. “Well! Why?”

  “What does ‘Sasha’ mean? Nothing. But ‘Little Girl’ pretty much says it all.”

  “Okay,” Alistair said. “What are you doing with that hand?”

  Little Girl flared angry at Alistair. She’d wanted him to argue with her about the name. She said, “Are you dumb? What’s it look like I’m doing?”

  “You’re digging up souls. What for? Are you going to eat them?”

  Ingested souls might give you a buzz but more likely would leave you constipated. “Not likely.”

  “Then why?” He arched his eyebrow. “Oh, are you going to try and catch a sphinx? Are you going to seat a soul in one?” He stepped toward her, excited. “Can I help, Sa—Can I help you catch a sphinx, Little Girl?”

  She was disappointed that her plan had been so obvious. It made her mad. She said, “No, that’s not it, and you can’t help, anyway.”

  “Then what are you going to do? “

  “Nothing you’d find interesting.”

  “Oh.”

  She dropped the soul into her bucket. He stood there glumly as she stepped around him and put the stick-hand back in the water. She had just found another soul, slightly perforated so she wasn’t sure whether it was good enough, when he said, “Hey, Little Girl, want to see my tits?”

  Never glum for long. “Hardly.”

  “Look.”

  Despite herself, she glanced at Alistair. She expected him to be lifting his shirt. Instead he was holding out his hand. In his palm, there grew two little breasts, milky-white and pendulous, with carmine nipples and blue veins she could see connecting to the big vein at the base of his thumb. “I found some bio-code inside the Mad Monk’s tomb.”

  “Who cares?” she said. “That’s stupid.”

  She turned and went back to work.

  Little Girl sorted souls.

  By size as you go right to left, by buzz as you go top to bottom. They lay upon her dissection table. She’d soaked them in buffering solution to neutralize the acid, and now as she handled them, they sent emotional pulses through her hands and arms. Shivers of pity, currents of fear, waves of melancholy. And itches of sentiment, goose bumps of lust, fluxions of hope. All of it subtle, none of it strong enough to move her one way or another. Well, of course. These were old souls. The thing to do was cut one up and see if she could absorb some thought juice directly.

  She chose a small soul with the largest buzz: it had a sweet sadness like hot chocolate on a rainy day.

  It had a knobby brown carapace to protect it from the acid waters. She took her number three scalpel and placed its edge between two knobs.

  “What are you up to, Little Girl?” Startled, she set the soul rolling as the scalpel screeched on the steel table. “Drat!” She caught the soul. “Why are you bothering me, you big metal monster?”

  It was the Living Will. His shiny eyes blinked sadly. He was too big to come in her room so he was looking at her from outside her window. Her room was in the Tower. She figured he had climbed onto the roof of the main building, the Elderhaus, so that he could see her. “I need to talk to you. I need to prepare you for your father’s death.”

  “I’m busy,” she said.

  “I can see that. Cutting up souls, a fine hobby. To wet your fingers with the thoughts of a dead person; an excellent pasttime.”

  It rankled her that he knew so much about her. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Really?” His mirror eyes widened. She saw herself reflected: convex, brown, and double. “What are you doing, then?”

  “Nothing. Nothing I’d want the Papa to know about.”

  “Is that so?” The Living Will tapped thoughtfully on the window pane. His long pink fingernails had dark lines across them, regular as the marks on a meter stick. “I hope you’re not messing with souls beyond slicing open their shells. Your father finds out you’re perverting them or resurrecting them in a body, the terms of his will might be affected.”

  “Don’t worry,” Little Girl said. Her palm was wet as she squeezed the soul; apparently she had cut the soul a little, and some juices were leaking out. She felt sadder, less interested in provoking the Papa or the Living Will. “Souls are stupid anyway.”

  “Well, that’s true.” The Living Will seemed relieved. “I know you don’t care to talk much about your father, but I think you need to know some facts.”

  She put down the soul. “Whatever.”

  “Your father’s getting old.”

  “Nine-hundred sixty-nine,” she said.

  “Yes. He handled souls, when he was a boy, did you know that?”

  “So?”

  “Souls aren’t just moods. They’re not just thoughts. They are biocodes, too. Physical instructions, streams of messages.”

  “Messenger RNA,” she said. “Protein Turing tapes.”

  “Good. So you know all the hard names. And you know how the codes can affect not just your brain, but your body as a whole.”

  “Yeah. So he’s tumored up and destabilized.”

  “Worse than that. He’s spawning organs, homunculi, strange creatures—maybe alien.”

  “Really?” That sounded cool. “Maybe I should go see him?”

  “Maybe. My point here, is his cells are compromised, his body’s breaking down.”

  “So? Why not get a deep body-flush?”

  “He’d replace so many cells, it would be a kind of death.”

  “He’s scared of the Continuity Threshold?” Little Girl said. “That’s lame.”

  The Living Will tapped his nails nervously against the window. “Not being self-aware, I’m unsuited to judging your father’s fears one way or another.”

  “They’re dumb fears,” she said. “The Continuity Threshold is malarkey. Our minds lose continuity every time we sleep.”

  “You would know,” the Living Will said. “But I’m not the one to argue with.”

  She touched the soul and got a shimmy of sadness. “You’re saying I should go argue with him?”

  “I’m not saying that at all.” His eyes blinked, mirrors sheeny with yellow lubricant. “I’m to tell you that your father is turning himself off three days from now.”

  She had met the Living Will once before, after her mother fell to her death. Her mother had been a scholarly woman obsessed with the biomechanics of spirituality—whether a soul could be divided, and if so, how many times before awareness itself disappeared; whether if a soul were replicated then placed into identical cloned bodies the resurrected awarenesses would diverge or remain in lockstep, spirits resilient despite the vagaries of experience; finally whether a soul planted in a semi-autonomous machine, say a sphinx or smarthouse, would be a moral being. It was said that she, while pondering these questions, tripped and fell into the Gash Peculiar, that fissure so deep it touched the Earth’s hot core and where her body was presumably incinerated.

  Her mother—the Living Will told her—had left her a toolset for examining souls. And a cache of dreams, like the dreams the Papa sent the cloudmind, only smaller.

  Sasha (still Sasha; this was long ago) was too sad to experiment with souls then.

  But she used the dreams to smooth the sharp edges of her grief when otherwise to sleep meant only nightmares.

  Little Girl had not seen her father since her sixty-fourth birthday.

  She could wait one more day.

  She wanted to have something to show him, anyway. And the Living Will had given her an idea. Perverting souls,
resurrecting souls: that would be interesting. She didn’t know much about any of this, though. So she took the stairs down to the cellar and went to the library. The library was a scary place. Thirty rows of stacks, each stack honeycombed with memories, scattered between the stacks of bioluminescent limestone growths, rising from the floor or descending from the ceiling, providing a wan blue light that did not so much illuminate the library as distort it, making stalactites look like hanged men, memories like the compound eyes of insects. And there was a sense of confusion or panic; there was no diagram, no index, no attendant to help you find what you wanted. She stood with her hand on a cold wet stalagmite, sense of unease rising as she considered how complex and unfathomable the library really was.

  “Oh,” she said. She remembered now, there were catalogs. Special memories set in the center stacks, dark red like drying blood despite the blue light. She walked carefully to the catalog area, touching limestone or running her fingers along the honeycombs as if her eyes could not be trusted. She still felt unease or even dread. It was only as she reached the catalogs, and pulled out the two-inch vial, that she realized why she was afraid. The Papa must have cycled some sort of fear juice into the library since she had been there last.

  To keep her out.

  She chewed off the end of the vial and drank down the catalog.

  It tasted of eel.

  A twist in her stomach, a motion in her head; she was dizzy. She hugged the stalagmite so she wouldn’t fall. Maybe she didn’t have the enzyme to digest the catalog. And now she was cold, too, shivering. By Gödel; she didn’t want to be sick. She would have no interest in perverting souls if she wanted to throw up.

  But then the dizziness was gone and her stomach felt fine.

  She was still cold. That was all right. Cold was how the catalog must work. Or rather, hot; she walked a few steps forward and felt warmer, then a few steps farther and felt cold again. The catalog was one of those that let your skin temperature indicate the proximity of the memory you wanted. How to pervert souls. Experimentally, she thought of something else, How to sew on a patch, and she felt suddenly so cold she wondered if the library contained no sewing memories.