2015-07-01
Author: Asimov's Science Fiction
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

JULY 2015

®

Vol. 39 No. 7 (Whole Number 474)

Next Issue on Sale July 7, 2015

Cover Art by James Steidl/Shutterstock.com

NOVELLA

68

Pollen from a Future Harvest . . . . . . . . Derek Künsken

NOVELETTES

9

Like Native Things . . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Robinette Kowal

21

The Great Pan American Airship

Mystery, or, Why I Murdered

Robert Benchley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Gerrold

37

Acres of Perhaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Will Ludwigsen

SHORT STORY

58

Petroglyph Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rudy Rucker

POETRY

8

The Great Lacuna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cullen Groves

36

Schrödinger’s Cat Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thom Dunn

57

The Circulatory Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Valvis

DEPARTMENTS

3

Editorial: The 2015 Dell Magazines

Award . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Sheila Williams

5

Reflections: Leechdoms,

Wortcunning, Starcraft . . . . . . . . . Robert Silverberg

67

Next Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105

On Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul Di Filippo

110

The SF Conventional Calendar . . . . . . Erwin S. Strauss

Asimov’s Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 39, No. 7, Whole No. 474, July 2015. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $55.90
in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov’s Science Fiction, 44 Wall Street, Suite 904, New York, N.Y. 10005. Asimov’s Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2015 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. Please visit our website, www.asimovs.com, for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices.

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Printed by Quad/Graphics, Taunton, MA USA (5/4/15)

EDITORIAL

Sheila Williams

THE 2015 DELL MAGAZINES AWARD

015 was the year of the long journey

This year’s third runner-up, Courtney
for the winner of our annual Dell

Combs of the University of South Florida,

Magazines Award for Undergradu-
didn’t have too far to travel. Courtney

2ate Excellence in Science Fiction and studied Mass Communications with a fo-Fantasy Writing. Kayla Chronister trav-
cus on magazine writing. She charmed us
eled all the way from Cambodia to Or-
with a very modern look at Nellie Blye’s
lando, Florida, in March, to be honored
around the world journey, “#72 Days.”

at the International Conference on the

While Gwendolyn Karpierz of Col-

Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). The award,
orado State University couldn’t be on
which includes a five hundred dollar
hand to personally pick up her award for
first prize, is cosponsored by Dell Maga-

“Embryos,” we were able to meet with two
zines and the International Association
other honorable mentions. My co-judge,
for the Fantastic in the Arts and is sup-

Rick Wilber, and I were delighted that we
ported by the School of Mass Communi-
finally got acquainted with Taimur Ah-
cations, University of South Florida.

mad of Princeton University. Although he

The award is open to any student who
was a finalist last year, Taimur couldn’t
attended a semester at an accredited col-
get away from school. Luckily his spring
lege or university during the previous
break coincided with this year’s confer-
year. Finalists are ultimately chosen from
ence. He tells us he’s obsessed with rock
a blind read of the submissions. Kayla,
climbing, and his love of nature was ap-
who had also been one of our 2014 honor-
parent in his tale about why “Everything
able mentions, graduated from Seattle

Is Magic.” We were also very happy to

Pacific University last spring at the age of
meet Caighlan Smith, a third year stu-
eighteen. Now nineteen, she’s teaching
dent at Memorial University of New-
middle school students in Phnom Penh.

foundland studying English Literature.

At the conference, Kayla got to present

Caighlan wrote her first book at eight,
her eerie and subversive Eldritch horror
and has already sold several young adult
story, “How the Blood Spills,” in a session
novels. She received her award for the in-
along with readings by Alex Irvine and
ventive story “Greave.”

Daryl Gregory. The story will be posted

Kayla and Caighlan captured a confer-
at Asimovs. com next year.

ence first by inviting their lovely moms.

Rich Larson, a graduate of the Univer-

From time to time past finalists have
sity of Alberta, was our first runner-up
brought their dads. Never before, though,
with his story, “Bidding War.” Rich got
has a finalist been accompanied by a
honorable mentions for “Edited” and “The
mom. It was appropriate, then, that in

Delusive Cartographer” as well. Alas,
addition to being the year of the long

Rich couldn’t make it to this year’s con-
journey, it was also the year of the moms.

ference because he’s living in Spain.

I joined the party by escorting my own

Also missing was our second runner-
college senior to ICFA.

up, Jameyanne Fuller of Kenyon College.

The students dined with Kit Reed,

Jameyanne had been last year’s third

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Y. Lily Yu, Eugene
runner-up, and we all missed her. She

Fischer, Joe and Gay Haldeman, Allen M.

couldn’t receive her award for “Naming

Steele, and editor Neil Clarke. Plus, they

Angelo” in person because she’s now re-
had the chance to meet conference guests
siding in Italy!

of honor Joan Slonczewski and James

3

.

Locus Publications
rancesca Myman,F

Photo credit:

Left to right: Sheila Williams, Taimur Ahmad, Courtney Combs, Caighlan Smith, Kayla Chronister, and Rick Wilber

Morrow and to chat with Ted Chiang, Kij
long. Writers may submit an unlimited

Johnson, Stephen R. Donaldson, Andy
number of stories, but each manuscript

Duncan, John Kessel, Peter Straub,
must include a cover sheet with the

Patricia A. McKillip, Geoffrey A. Landis,
writer’s name, address, phone number,

Mary Turzillo, Will Ludwigsen, Fran
and the name of the university the

Wilde, David Lunde, Mary Anne Mohan-
writer attends. Manuscripts should be
raj, Sandra McDonald, Steven Erikson,
double-spaced, with adequate margins,

Ellen Klages, Sam J. Miller, Usman T.

and with pages numbered.

Malik, Cecelia Tan, Rachel Swirsky,

Before entering the contest, contact

Anne Leckie, and many others.

Rick Wilber for more information, rules,

You can visit with previous finalists
and manuscript guidelines. He can be
and current writers at our Facebook site.

reached care of:

Search for the Dell Magazines Award
or go directly to http://www.facebook.

Dell Magazines Award
com/pages/manage/#!/pages/Dell-

School of Mass Communications

Magazines-Award/177319923776

University of South Florida

We are actively looking for next year’s

Tampa, Florida 33620
winner. The deadline for submissions is

Tuesday, January 5, 2016. All full-time

Rwilber@usf.edu
undergraduate students at any accredit-
ed university or college are eligible. The

Next year, our award winner will be
award is not limited to unpublished au-
announced at the 2016 Conference on
thors, but all submissions must be previ-
the Fantastic, in the pages of Asimov’s
ously unpublished and unsold, and they

Science Fiction magazine, and on our
should be from 1,000 to 10,000 words
website. ❍

4

Sheila Williams

REFLECTIONS

Robert Silverberg

LEECHDOMS, WORTCUNNING, STARCRAFT
ong ago, in what is starting to seem

It’s an imposing three-volume set, and
like a galaxy far, far away, I wrote all
an old notation tells me that I bought it
sorts of things besides science fiction.

in 1968 for what was then the not incon-

LAmong those all sorts of things were siderable sum of $44.65.It was published books on a highly various assortment of
in 1864 by the house of Longman, Green,
scientific and historical subjects. I wrote
on behalf of the British government,
one on circumnavigating the globe, one
which was then issuing hundreds of vol-
on the quest for the mythical El Dorado,
umes of documents of British history go-
one on the quest for the equally mythical
ing back deep into Anglo-Saxon times,

Prester John, etc., etc. There were also
and my copy bears a bookplate declaring
several on the history of medicine—one
that it was presented by the Lords Com-
on the great doctors of medieval times,
missioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury to
one on the medical theories of the ancient
the Dominican Priory, Manchester. (“In
world, and others. (Some of these books
the event of the Library being broken up,
are still in print, forty and fifty years lat-
it is to be returned to the Controller of
er, or available in electronic format.)

Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, West-

Because I lived then in a gigantic
minster,” the bookplate says, but evident-
house with what felt like infinite stor-
ly that stern instruction was disobeyed,
age space for books, and books them-
for here is the book on my desk in Cali-
selves, even rare ones, were fairly cheap
fornia this very morning of the year
then, I built my own vast working refer-

2014.)

ence library so that I would not need to

A leech is a nasty bloodsucking worm,
expend time doing my research away
but leeches were used in olden days for
from home. I amassed thousands of
medicinal purposes, and in Middle Eng-
books on any subject that interested me
lish the word “leechdom” meant the art
or that was likely to interest me in the
of healing. So the “leechdom” section of
future: archaeology, geography, history,
the book is a collection of remedies for a
anthropology, medicine—you name the
vast number of maladies—at random, I
area of knowledge, and important texts
note one for poisonous spider bite, one
in it are likely to be somewhere on my
for gout, one for “the evil blotch,” and so
shelves.

forth. “Wort” was the Old English term

It’s a long time, now, since I have writ-
for any plant used for food or medicine,
ten books of the sort I once did, and over
and therefore the “wortcunning” section
the decades I’ve let some regions of my
of the book is a great botanical com-
library go unused, to the point where as
pendium, describing a myriad medicinal

I wander the shelves nowadays I am of-
plants and their uses. (“Sea Holly: This
ten surprised to rediscover some of the
wort is born in secret places, and in wet
things I own. A few weeks ago, for exam-
ones. Of this wort, it is said that its root
ple, while looking for something else en-
is compared to the head of the monster
tirely, I was pleasantly startled to stum-
which men name the Gorgon, and the
ble across a fascinating and exceedingly
twigs have, as is also said, both eyes and
obscure tome called Leechdoms, Wort-
nose, and color of serpents. . . . Carve it
cunning, and Starcraft in Early Eng-
off then with a crooked and very hard
land, which I would like to share with
iron, and he who will carve it, then let
you now.

him be averted, for it is not permitted

5

July 2015
that man may see this root unharmed. . .

one that demonstrates for us the intel-

.”) As for starcraft, the third section, that
lectual richness of the Anglo-Saxon cul-
refers to astronomy and its ancient
ture that the Norman conquerors virtu-
sister, astrology. (“If it thunders on a
ally wiped out, and the ingenuity of the

Monday, then that betokens much blood-
scientists of that pre-scientific age.

shed in some nation. If it thunders on a

Here is an overwhelming abundance

Tuesday, that betokens failure of crops. .

of charms and spells and instructions for

. .”) The source of all this medieval wis-
preparing useful medicinal potions:

dom is a manuscript written somewhere
many to heal wounds and defend
between A.D. 1000 and the Norman con-
against poison, to prevent sterility and
quest of England in 1066. The text is in
aid in childbirth, to ward off wild beasts,
the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, which I am
savage dogs, goblins, witches, and
unable to reproduce here because I don’t
demons, to increase the fertility of the
have an Anglo-Saxon font on my com-
soil, and ever so much else. We are told
puter. (Such a font is available, but I’m
how to transport a swarm of bees, how to
afraid to install it for fear that it will
calm a storm and fend off hail, how to
take over the computer and I will have
control the winds. One section that must
to compose my e-mails in Anglo-Saxon to
have been consulted often in that credu-
the end of my days.) The manuscript,
lous age provides a remedy for “elf-dis-
says its translator, the Rev. Oswald
ease”—“Take bishopwort, fennel, lupin,

Cockayne of Cambridge, “must have
the lower part of enchanter’s night-
been a regally magnificent book, execut-
shade, and moss or lichen from the hal-
ed at enormous expense. It suffered from
lowed sign of Christ. . . . bind all the
the fire at Ashburnham House, 1731,
worts in a cloth, dip it thrice in hallowed
and . . . was taken out of the ashes a
font water, have sung over it three mass-
shriveled blackened lump of leaves.” An
es. . . . Go on Thursday evening at sunset
elaborate restoration process followed,
to the place where you know the herb he-
by which Cockayne was able to recon-
lenium grows. Then sing Benedicite and
struct nearly all of the text.

Pater Noster and a litany; and stick your

It’s an extraordinary book. The basis
knife into the plant; let it stick therein.

for most medieval medical knowledge

Go away. Return when day and night are
was Greek and Roman, derived from
just dividing; in the same morning hour
the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen
go first to church and cross yourself and
and other doctors of the classical era,
commit yourself to God. Then go in si-
but the Anglo-Saxons, off by themselves
lence, and though anything soever of an
on their remote northwestern island,
awful sort should come to meet you, or a
developed their own set of surgical and
man, say no word to it or him until you
pharmaceutical skills as though Greece
come to the wort that you marked the
and Rome had never existed, and
evening before. Take up the wort, let the

Leechdoms is a wondrous conglomera-
knife stick in it, go again as quick as thou
tion of medical knowledge that seems to
art able to church, and lay it under the
come from some parallel universe. Most
altar with the knife. . . .”

of the Greco-Roman pharmacopeia was

And so on for several pages, with
nonsense, of course, based mostly on
much detail about holy water, singing of
magical thinking and wishful thinking,
hymns, three heads of cropleek and the
with a smattering of trial-and-error
netherward part of enchanter’s night-
pragmatism mixed in. Leechdoms does
shade, all for nine mornings and nine
draw on such Greek and Roman au-
nights, and at last all will be well with
thorities as Dioscorides and Sextus
the sufferer from elf-disease. I wish I

Placidus, but mainly it offers us an en-
could quote it all. You might find the
tirely different set of prescriptions, in-
salve “against the elfin race and noctur-
cantations, and technical suggestions,
nal goblin visitors, and for the women

6

Robert Silverberg

Asimov’s

®
with whom the devil hath carnal com-
merce” useful—it involves henbane,
harewort, garlic, bugloss, wormwood,
and much more—or the instructions for

SHEILA WILLIAMS
making an amulet to guard against

Editor
nightmares, using certain small stones

EMILY HOCKADAY
found in the bellies of young swallows

Assistant Editor
that also are good “for headache and eye-

DEANNA MCLAFFERTY
trouble and the assault of a fiend and a

Editorial Assistant
night-walker and tertian ague and eye-

JAYNE KEISER
trouble. . . .”

Typesetting Director

There are handy hints for the inter-

SUZANNE LEMKE
pretation of dreams, too: “To see oxen

Assistant Typesetting Manager
sleeping, betokens bad luck in trade. To

KEVIN DORIS
see himself bearded, betokens splendor.

Senior Typesetting Coordinator

To have a white overcoat, betokens bliss.

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To have a particolored overcoat, beto-

Senior Art Director
kens an unpleasant message. To see one-

CINDY TIBERI
self eating hot coals shows that one’s en-

Production Artist
emies will speak evil of one. To talk with

JENNIFER RUTH
dead men, betokens profit.” And on in

Production Manager
like manner for many a page.

ABIGAIL BROWNING

Manager Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

I never did write the book about An-
glo-Saxon medicine and astronomy that

SANDY MARLOWE

Circulation Services

I probably could have carved out of this
wondrous mass of splendid pseudo-sci-
entific fantasia. But I see from a note in-

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rated into my novel To the Land of the

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ISAAC ASIMOV
isted wander around together. Midway

Editorial Director (1977-1992)

through, Gilgamesh takes refuge from

Stories from Asimov’s have won 53 Hugos and 28
pursuers in a warehouse where three

Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 20

Anglo-Saxon wizards are peddling reme-

Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

dies and spells straight out of the Leech-

Please do not send us your manuscript until you’ve
doms collection: “I am Eadfrith. Here we
gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them
online at www.asimovs.com or send us a self-
have rue, hyssop, fennel, mustard, elel-
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broad without iron, ere the rising of the
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sun, bind the roots about the head, with
and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov’s
crosswort, by a red fillet. . . .” “The ash of

Science Fiction, 44 Wall Street, Suite 904, New York, NY 10005-2352. While we’re always looking for
dead bees, and linseed oil. Cammock and
new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving,
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find out what we’re looking for, and how to pre-
pare it, before submitting your story.

7

July 2015

So the book was professionally useful
other internet sites. Or, if you care to
after all, and I got my $44.65 worth out of
splurge, there’s a handsome Cambridge
it, and then some. Today, a first edition of

University Press paperback at $136 for

Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft
the three-volume set.

is sold for anywhere up to eleven hun-

Go thou, then, collect thy worts by the
dred dollars by rare-book dealers, but I’m
light of the crescent moon, cast thou thy
happy to say that the text is available for
spells— ❍

$0.00, courtesy of archive.org and several

8

Robert Silverberg

Mary Robinette Kowal < maryrobinettekowal.com> is the
author of The Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels from Tor. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo awards, and the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her stories appear in Asimov’s,

Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor, recording fiction for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob. In her latest tale, an animal mind-rider discovers that survival may depend on behaving . . .

LIKE NATIVE

THINGS

Mary Robinette Kowal

The iguana was probably some kid out for a joyride.A wetware patch covered nearly its full back in a web of gold and silicone. Tilda opened the window and leaned out to pluck the iguana off the branch. Thank heavens animals with amateur mind-riders tended to have slow instincts.

She dropped the iguana into a carry-crate and threw a cloth over it. “No trespassing signs apply to anything with an intelligence on board, but I’ll drop your critter near a street sign.”

“Most people would euthanize the thing.” Helmut pulled a fresh wetware patch out of the fridge and opened the sterile packet. “You’re a softie.”

“It’s not the iguana’s fault his person is an idiot.” Still, given the nature of her contract with the government, it was better to be on the safe side. Tilda carried the crate past the row of benches that dominated the saddle room and set it outside in the hall. “Go ahead and start calibrating and I’ll join you in a minute.”

Helmut shuddered as he laid the cold patch on the back of his neck. “Why doesn’t someone invent a room-temperature patch?”

“Working on it . . .” She pulled her own out of the refrigerator.

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“I know.” Back in her late twenties, Tilda had been on the team that had developed the wetware technology. Breaking away to contract for the government had been a bit unnerving but the resources . . . Working with dolphins was awfully nice.

She brushed her hair out of the way and placed the patch at the base of her neck.

The loose skin under her arm jiggled. No matter how much she went to the gym, she couldn’t get the firm arms she’d had in her twenties. Or even thirties for that matter.

“Saddle up and hush.”

9

July 2015

As Helmut inserted the cable from the computer in his patch, Tilda double-checked the placement. She’d rather not jeopardize her government contracts because an assistant screwed up, thank you very much.

The young man lay down on the bench closest to the window and closed his eyes to start accessing the computer. She watched the screen for a moment as it mirrored the information being piped through the patch. The software moved to a menu asking which animal he wanted to access. “Take Jurgen.”

“Yeah . . .” Helmut’s voice was slow, as though he were half-asleep. With his focus turned inward, she could take a moment to stare at him. All of twenty-seven, he had the hard muscles of a high-end clothing model.

Even if he weren’t her assistant, he was twenty years her junior and she’d have to be a total cougar to date him no matter how much he defined “distractingly handsome.” It would be easier if he didn’t occasionally seem to have a crush on her.

Maybe. Or maybe she was just lonely. Tilda sighed and turned her attention back to the screen.

This was her assistant and she needed to make sure he was following procedure.

The male dolphin’s name highlighted, then turned gray to indicate that it would be unavailable to anyone else.

“Good. Go for a soft login and let him do his thing. For the first ride, don’t try to control him at all. I’ll be right beside you.” Tilda lay back on the bench next to his and closed her eyes. The screen came into view. She selected Luise, the female of her dolphin pair, and ran the calibration. While the software measured her brain and prepared to map her nervous system to the dolphins, Tilda sent a message to Helmut using their house connection.

—SETTLED?

He sent back—THIS IS AMAZING.

She smiled and set her saddle for a soft fade. As the software activated the connection between them, Tilda’s awareness slowly shifted to the dolphin. It began as a lightness, as though gravity were less important. Warmth pressed against her skin from every direction, resisting her movement and supporting her. In the distance, a motor boat sliced through the water. The engine noise throbbed through her skull and made her teeth hurt. Under that came the constant surge of the surf and the heavy sway of waves hitting the power station’s oscillating wave surge converters.

Vision came to her last. Each eye gave her a different view through water dappled with sunlight. With a flick of her left flipper, she rolled to check Jurgen. The male dolphin floated near the surface of the water, tail moving gently to keep himself in place.

Jurgen was used to her consciousness invading his, but he wouldn’t know Helmut.

When introducing a new mind-rider it was as important for the animal to become used to the new saddle as it was for the rider to learn the animal. Any kid could get an iguana kit and go for joyrides. An iguana always wanted to find a warm spot to sit, so you could urge it with “that looks warmer,” but when you got into intelligent animals, they knew they were being manipulated. It took a delicate touch to ride them without driving them insane. It made animal rights groups a touch angry.

But intelligent species were her specialty and why the government had wanted her. She’d even trained a gorilla and no one else, no one, had managed to saddle one of those.

Jurgen rolled in the water and swam over to Luise. He nuzzled her with his snout and an answering wave of affection rolled out from the dolphin she was riding. To give Helmut an idea of what swimming felt like, Tilda sent an urge to dive to Luise.

The dolphin rose to the surface. Another rider might have thought the dolphin was f ighting her and would bear down too hard, but Tilda had felt Luise’s urge to 10

Mary Robinette Kowal

Asimov’s
breathe. The dolphin knew her body and limits better than Tilda did. The breath taken, Luise followed Tilda’s lead and dove to the bottom, water pressing tighter against her as she sank.

That, really, was the secret to riding animals; if you understood their urges, you could manipulate them. A carefully managed animal could often be given a task that they would complete on their own, and that allowed you to ride more than one animal.

Or rather, it allowed Tilda to ride more than one. For most people and most situa-tions, one animal took all the rider’s attention.

She wondered if Helmut was following her, and the question was enough to make Luise curious too. She twisted to look back.

Jurgen swam after them. He was also noticeably less . . . streamlined than he had been.

She sent a message to Helmut—JUDGING BY JURGEN’S ANATOMY, I THINK IT MIGHT BE

MATING SEASON.

A pause and then Helmut’s reply came.—I’M . . . I DON’T KNOW HOW TO STOP HIM.

—YOU COUNTER BY SENDING AN URGE THAT’S STRONGER. SOMETHING THAT IS MORE INTERESTING, OR A SENSE OF DISINTEREST.

—UM . . . I SHOULD—WELL, CRAP. SO . . . HI. APPARENTLY, I’M FIFTEEN YEARS OLD AND I DON’T HAVE A COUNTER URGE. JESUS.

—OH. A rush of heat flooded her body. Or maybe it was Luise’s. Before she could control her reaction, Luise stopped in the water so that Jurgen caught up with her.

—I DON’T WANT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION.

—THAT’S WHAT I WAS GOING TO SAY. Jurgen slid against Luise, making his interest clear.

Tilda could only feel the desire from the dolphin coupling with her own interest in Helmut. This was completely inappropriate. He was her assistant. Luise rolled to present herself more clearly.—I AM SO, SO SORRY . . . WE SHOULD LOG OUT.

—OR . . . OR WE COULD GO ALONG FOR THE RIDE.

Tilda slid under the covers and shifted her leg to rest on Helmut’s thigh. She was a terrible, terrible person to be sleeping with her assistant. Terrible.

Helmut stirred, drowsily, and caressed her leg without opening his eyes. “Morning.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you.” She kissed his cheek and moved along to his ear. Truly, she was an awful person. Next time, she was not hiring a cute boy as an assistant.

He smiled, twisting to pull her closer. “I was lounging. Not asleep.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Should I prove how awake I am?” He opened his startling blue eyes and gazed at her through his hair.

The temptation was strong. Tilda groaned and pressed against him. With a sigh, she rolled away. This was already crossing the line and she needed to maintain boundaries. “No. Gotta work.”

“Stay in bed. I’ll feed them. That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?”

“Can’t. Got a schedule to keep. Bastards.”

“Call in sick?”

“God . . . I wish I could.” She did lean back to join him in a kiss, which almost wound up pulling her under the covers again. “But I already told Woeller I’d be in.”

“Damn the German government and the way they thwart my desires.”

Tilda laughed and hid her face in the hollow of his neck. She had completely lost her mind. Sure, Helmut had met Commander Woeller when he was getting security clearance to be an assistant for her, but today’s job was classified. She shouldn’t even admit she was doing it. The fact that the government was exploring marine animals for military potential was extremely sensitive. She should kick Helmut out of the house.

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July 2015

“When will you get home?”

“Probably not until six or so.” Tilda crossed the room to grab her clothes, acutely aware of the cellulite on her upper thighs. “You get the day off.”

“I was . . . I was thinking that maybe I could have dinner waiting?”

Her breath caught. She’d never had a man offer to cook for her before.

His expression changed at her hesitation, becoming a little wary. “Or is that—I mean, if that’s presumptuous, just tell me. I don’t want to—I mean. Dolphins. And it’s just . . . this was really nice. I mean, you’re nice. Or—I’m making a mess of this, aren’t I?”

Lord. He was so young. “Why don’t I ping you if I can’t make it for dinner.”

He grinned. “Either way. Both. Text me with minute accounts of your activity. I pine. I pine . . .” He pressed his hand to his forehead and dropped melodramatically back to the cushions. Sobering a little, he lifted his head. “In all seriousness . . . Tell me who you’re riding so I know what to cook.”

“You’re actually going to cook.”

“Paid for undergraduate studies working as a sous chef. And . . . as my incredibly wise and insightful boss has said, a rider’s cravings tend to reflect the diet of the last animal ridden. With Tomas—you crave the fresh fruit and vegetables of a gorilla’s diet. Binga’s puma instincts make you want steaks. Very rare.”

“Fair enough.” Which animal she was riding said nothing about what the job was.

“I think it’ll be Jurgen.”

“Dolphin. Noted. Sushi and seaweed salad it is.”

“God bless assistants who pay attention.”

Helmut gave her a grin and looked down, blushing a little. “You have my full attention. I don’t suppose . . .”

“I’ll be late.”

“Oh. Right.” He shook his head. “Right. I’ll, um . . . I’ll tidy up.”

Why did he have to be so cute? “So . . . so I’ll just have to be late.”

She was a terrible, terrible person.

After she biked across town to the marina, Tilda dropped her portable case in the shed she rented on the dock. She could, truly, saddle up from home, but needed to put the manipulator harness on Jurgen.

And also, to be clear, she was going to get nothing done if she stayed in the house with Helmut. The ethical thing to do would be to ask him to quit so that she could actually date him. She could write a glowing letter of recommendation and get him into a program that would pay as well as she did. Although . . . they wouldn’t be able to teach him the same things she could. No one else had saddled a gorilla.

Informal instruction wouldn’t be crossing the line, would it?

Another of the darn iguanas was watching. She stuck her tongue out at the creature but otherwise left it alone. If some kid wanted to watch her feed her animals, fine.

And what if Helmut didn’t want to date her unless she was his boss?

Then it would be better to know that now. Tilda tossed a couple of fish to the octopus, then went to the shed and picked up the manipulator arms. The harness itself was similar to the ones that had been in use with dolphins since the Second World War. The link to the second war, to Nazis, was part of why everyone was being so very careful about the fact that the government was working on this project.

Tilda stripped down to her swimsuit, then headed to the pens. Her pair of dolphins occupied the nearer of the tanks, while the octopus was in the one closer to the sea.

Fred was a good cephalopod. He only escaped occasionally and was nice about coming back. Weirdly, she suspected that he found the whole “being ridden” thing 12

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fascinating. Or maybe it was the way octopodes were wired; having one extra brain wasn’t a big deal to him. Hard to say.

Luise rose to the surface of the dolphin tank and slapped the water with a fin to say hello. Tilda grinned, blushing as if the dolphin were actually teasing her about Helmut.

She rubbed the dolphin’s cool skin before hopping into the water next to her. The water’s chill grabbed her by the chest and yanked her breath away. And that’s why she used dolphins, instead of her own body.

Jurgen didn’t surface, probably because she didn’t have any more f ish with her.

“Tell your lazy husband that next time you get his share.”

The dolphin clicked at her and rolled over to disappear underwater. Tilda stuck her head under the water to watch. Jurgen was over by the gate, nosing at the controls. She clicked her tongue to get his attention.

After a moment, he turned and swam up. He floated by her and waited for her to put his gear on. No f lip of the tail or nudge to say hello. He must be pissed about something. Tilda slung the harness over his back, settling the manipulator arms on either side of his dorsal fin. “Hey, guy. Sorry I don’t have more fish. Not until after you work. You understand, right?”

He nodded.

She paused with the strap half-buckled. Had she really seen that? “Do you want fish later?”

He nodded again. The human motion sent an uncanny shiver down her spine. He was a smart dolphin, but he was still a dolphin and should not be nodding. Not with-standing dolphins in f ilms, it wasn’t a movement they made. Not unless someone was riding him.

The wetware software ran on a dedicated encrypted frequency, not attached to the net, specifically to make it harder to hack into. Only two systems were configured to work with Jurgen: her portable case and the equipment at home.

And only one other person had access to her home unit today.

Damnit. She should have kicked Helmut out of the house. Lord. The way the boy had been after her to stay in bed this morning, he probably thought he was being cute and expected her to chase him with Luise. Dolphin sex—it might be fun, but way out of line when she had a job to do. She sighed. He was so young.

Tilda cocked her head to the side, trying to spot the person within the dolphin.

“Helmut?”

The dolphin stiffened for a moment under her hand, so fast that she would not have seen it if she had only been touching him.

If he got caught messing with a military contract . . . “Helmut, you need to dis-mount. Right now. I told you I’d be home tonight.” She checked the last strap on Jurgen and swam to stare into the dolphin’s eye, making sure that Helmut could see her clearly. “Seriously. Out you go.”

The dolphin rolled, the way Tilda always did when she was in the saddle and wanted to see if the equipment was seated. Then he swam down to the gate. There was no way he could open it, not without her passcode—except this was not just a dolphin. This was her assistant using her gear.

Heavy and awkward, Tilda kicked underwater toward Jurgen. She needed to re-boot his patch if Helmut wasn’t going to listen to reason.

Luise circled her, clicking with worry. Tilda fumbled on Jurgen’s back for his implant. She was so not built for being underwater. He shrugged her off and rolled to the side.

Her lungs ached. Tilda kicked to the surface, gasping as she broke into air. Taking in another breath, she held it and ducked under water again.

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Jurgen turned and swam at her. Not just towards her, but like a torpedo aimed at her.

Tilda put her hands out, as if she could stop him. The dolphin slammed past them, hitting her square on the chest. The air bubbled out of her. She spun around, head and feet flopping. The dolphin slammed into her again, grabbed her shoulder with his teeth and pulled her down.

She beat at his head. The water slowed her movements. Every motion made her shoulder burn where he gripped it. She was going to drown. He couldn’t—

Something knocked them both sideways. She flew out of the dolphin’s mouth, tumbling in a whirl of light and dark. Tilda clawed the water, trying to find up again. Air.

She needed air.

Something shoved her from beneath. Luise. Pushing her toward the surface.

Tilda gasped as they surfaced, choking on the water that streamed down her face.

She pushed away as Luise surfaced next to her. Half supported by the dolphin, Tilda swam for the side of the tank.

She hauled herself out of the water and staggered to her shed on the dock. She fumbled with the lock, adrenaline shaking her hands like a badly calibrated saddle.

Finally, she got it open and shouldered the door aside. Slapping the switch on the wall, Tilda headed for her chair and stopped. The light had not come on.

She toggled the lightswitch back and forth. Only then did she recognize the silence. No hum from her computers. No telltale glow from power supplies. The only light came from outside. The bastard had gotten her power cut somehow.

Tilda pulled her handy out of her bag to make a call. It might have been a prank, if he hadn’t tried to kill her. Tilda stopped breathing for a moment. He had tried to kill her.

And right now, Helmut was in open water with a dolphin under military contract, with security clearance to approach the power station. It would not be hard to damage the wave station generator with the manipulator arms she had strapped onto his back.

Who would do that? Or rather, which group. Shit—had Helmut said anything about sympathies with . . . no. He’d just been saying things she wanted to hear.

She dialed her boss, but Woeller’s phone returned an error message. She tried again and got the same error. This time, she actually listened to it. Her service had been disconnected. Cursing, she tossed the handy back in her bag.

She would find a phone and call the base. Woeller could send someone after Jurgen. Hands still shaking, she yanked her clothes on over her swimsuit. She would need something that showed where Jurgen was. She grabbed the portable rig she’d brought with her to the marina. Just in case, she shoved wetware patches in her messenger bag.

Slinging the bag over her shoulder, she sprinted up the dock to her bicycle. She swung her leg over the saddle and tensed.

Why was her puma at the end of the street?

Binga saw her and the big cat’s legs gathered to spring. There was no way Tilda could get back to her shed. She shoved the bike away and ran towards the nearest boat. The puma growled as it hit the dock and dug its front legs in, shaking its head.

It stopped. Then took two jerking steps forward.

Was Binga f ighting her rider? Tilda didn’t wait. She scrambled up the boarding ramp of the nearest boat, and shoved the ramp free.

She ran to the passenger cabin and jerked on the door.

The hatch was battened down. There was no one aboard. She smashed the window and reached through the broken glass for the latch. The boat shuddered as the big cat jumped over the rail. It overshot and hit the wall of the passenger cabin. Tilda yanked the door open, staggering inside. She slammed the door and latched it.

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The big cat’s paw reached through the window for her, tearing on the broken glass.

Binga yowled and pulled back. Shaking, Tilda backed as far into the compartment as she could. All the bastard had to do was come here himself. The only thing saving her right now was that cats did not have opposable thumbs.

There was no way Helmut could manage two animals. Someone had to be with him. Unless he’d always known how and had been faking it. The way he’d faked everything else.

Tilda sat in the middle of the floor and pulled her jacket off. She turned it to the cleanest area and pressed it against the cuts on her forearm. The cursing in her brain had not stopped. What the hell was she going to do? Make a call. She needed to call Woeller.

She grabbed the cabin’s phone and dialed the commander. Wiping blood from her arm, she cradled the phone between her cheek and shoulder as it rang and rang.

Woeller or his assistant usually picked up on the first ring when she called—which was because she called from her own phone. He wouldn’t recognize the boat’s phone.

The phone dropped into voice mail.

“This is Tilda Fernheimer. Saboteurs are at the wave station generator using my dolphin, Jurgen.”

Binga lunged at the cabin door.

Tilda flinched back as the hatch rattled under her impact. Sweating, she backed farther into the cabin. “There’s someone in my office—I’m not there, I’m at the marina—

Doesn’t matter. Point is, one of them is—was—my assistant Helmut Kohlenberg.”

The big cat screamed with rage.

“Shit. I don’t have anything else useful.” Tilda crumpled the jacket in her hand.

“They know that I’m trying to reach you. Please hurry.”

She hung up. Hitting redial, she prayed that Woeller would pick up, but landed in voice mail again. Two more calls gave the same result. She bit the inside of her lip.

All she had were tins of food, narrow bunks and pillows, and a view through the tiny windows of the big cat as it clawed at the hatch. Somehow, she did not think that the bastard riding Binga would be tempted by a can of sardines.

Why was Helmut heading for the wave energy generator? The guards would let him through, too, because she was scheduled to work out there today and the dolphin had the right clearance. Crap. Anti-socialists had made attempts to damage the power station before.

And Helmut had tried to kill her.

Tilda had her portable case. It could not get her online, but she could ride another animal. She could stop Helmut.

With a shaking breath, Tilda slipped the portable out of the messenger bag. Thank God for batteries.

Tilda pulled the mattress off one of the bunks and settled on the floor as far from the windows as she could get. The puma paced around the cabin, tail swishing. No doubt she did not like being on board the ship.

Tilda pulled out a patch from the refrigerated bag and slapped it on the back of her neck. Tempting though it was to skip the calibration, the amount of adrenaline she had coursing through her system made that a terrible idea. There was no telling how far out of alignment she was.

Trying to calm herself, Tilda pulled up the list of available animals. Binga was greyed out, since she was pacing around the boat. Tilda pulled up Luise and hesitat-ed. Without a harness on, there was no way for Luise to disable Jurgen’s patch.

Cursing, Tilda saddled Fred.

Her brain split into multiples. She had to f ight nausea, as she did with almost every transition into the octopus. Too many limbs. Her sense of proprioception became Like Native Things

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July 2015
more intense but everything mapped wrong. Even more than with other animals, Fred demanded a really light touch. If she thought about what she was doing more than “Go there,” if she thought about having eight arms, then she lost all ability to ride him.

Riding Fred was more about having a dialogue than anything else. Right now, what she needed was for him to get after Jurgen.

Tilda launched the passcode sequence from the shed and used one of Fred’s tentacles to manipulate the lock. FAILURE ERROR. What the——? She did it again and got the same failure error. Her phone service was disconnected. Her power was shut off.

Her passcodes had been changed. How many things had Helmut hacked?

Frustrated, Tilda turned in a circle underwater. The orbit gave her a moment to think. The thing about Fred was that he escaped all the time. She had never caught him at it, so she didn’t even know how he did and couldn’t guess how to duplicate the feat. Lightening her touch, Tilda sent an urge toward the octopus. Out. He floated in front of the locking mechanism, tentacles stirring only to correct for drift.

Out, Tilda thought again with some urgency.

With a twist, Fred swam to one of the posts that supported the dock. He rose to the surface of the water and wrapped his tentacles around the post. So, he climbed out, eh?

But Fred stayed in the water and reached around the post, into a corner at the back. He f lattened an arm and pushed it through a gap between the pen and the post. The post masked a hole in his cage. Even seeing it, it didn’t seem possible for the octopus to fit through.

As he proceeded to shove his way through the hole, f lattening himself to an impossible degree, her sense of disorientation increased. Tilda had to fight panic to stay with him. There was no way she could go through that tiny space—the octopus continued to compress himself.

Her own body lay on a mattress, sweating like she was trying to create a miniature sea. She dug her fingers into the mattress and tried not to think about anything but out.

Then he was through and she could take the reins again. Tilda pushed the connection deeper and reoriented herself. According to his transponder, Jurgen was heading for the wave energy generators.

Tilda sent the octopus swimming after Jurgen. Fred was nowhere near as speedy as the dolphin, but he would get her there fast enough. She hoped.

She nudged Fred a little faster.

Tilda arrived at the guard station, which was patrolled by a pair of military sharks. The octopus responded by going into camouf lage mode. She let him. Lord.

She was out here without clearance for Fred. Worse, she had no way to talk to the guards. Normally communications were handled via existing lines, like handys or the net. They had decided to do that rather than risk compromising the system by asking it to do more than saddle the animals. But she needed to communicate with them, and her handy had been disconnected.

The military sharks she’d trained swam a pattern around the access point to the long channels that the wave energy generator rode in. While it looked possible to make other approaches, the way the current patterns went, it was too diff icult to make any headway. The military had also set up a system of buoys and nets to keep out riders on animals large enough to do damage. On the other side of those, she could see Jurgen, swimming casually, as if he were being ridden by her to do repairs.

She moved Fred closer to the barrier and stopped in front of a shark, moving in a geometric pattern to get his attention. She had to maintain tight control on Fred to get him to behave this close to a predator. She’d seen video of octopodes taking down full-grown sharks, but did not want to test that theory.

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The shark stared at her. It swam closer, baring its teeth. Tilda backed off a little, then pointed with a single tentacle at Jurgen. She spun to show the patch on the back of Fred’s head, then spun back to point again. Please, please understand. The riders had to recognize Fred.

The shark turned to look at Jurgen. Its rider must have spoken to the other rider out of body, because the second shark came over and Tilda repeated her dance. She also raised a tentacle and shook it, the way a person might wave a finger to say “no.”

Getting Fred to do such unnatural movements took all of her attention.

One of the sharks broke off and went over to the dolphin. Jurgen paused and turned back to look at her. Deliberately, unnaturally, the dolphin shook his head. A series of clicks and whistles vibrated through the water. The shark turned and barreled back as the other one circled her.

Tilda relaxed her hold on Fred and gave him only the urge to flee.

He inked them, shooting to the left. Then Fred dropped to the ocean f loor and grabbed a rock. He turned on his camouflage and undulated like seaweed at the bottom of the bay as the sharks shot out of the ink cloud overhead, racing in the direction Fred had appeared to head.

With apologies, she launched him after the dolphin. Tilda had to disable the saddle patch on Jurgen. She surged across the ocean floor to the base of the generator. Rising up the side of the wave energy generator, she came up under Jurgen. She reached out her tentacles and latched on to his face, wrapping around his beak and eyes.

Bucking, the dolphin twisted away. Tilda tightened her suction grip and used one of her free tentacles to reach for the patch behind his blowhole.

Jurgen slammed her against the wall of the generator. The impact stung, but Fred’s body f lattened and then rebounded. She scrabbled along the dolphin’s skin trying to find the patch by feel. Jurgen swam at the wall and smacked the octopus against the corner.

Something cracked. Pain flared through every nerve.

Tilda crashed back into her own body. The abruptness of the transition left her as limp as Fred would be on dry land. Her stomach turned. Tilda leaned to the side, grabbing for a wastepaper basket. She retched, sweating, and clung to the mattress as her stomach cramped. When she could, Tilda straightened and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

Damnit. She’d lost the connection. Maybe his patch had broken, but . . . Please let Fred be okay.

She stared out the window of the boat, where Binga paced relentlessly. An iguana had joined her. It turned a single eye toward Tilda.

It wasn’t a joyrider. It was surveillance. Rubbing her mouth, Tilda sank lower on the floor until she was out of its line of sight. Dragging the case closer, she checked the screen.

Fred’s name was still there. If he’d been killed, it would have gone to red. Thank God, it was only shock. In theory, the shark riders would report an intruder, which would hopefully make them clear the area. Not that they had enough marine animals deployed yet to necessarily find the dolphin if he hid.

She could log back in and re-saddle him or . . . or she could ride Tomas. If she got the gorilla out of his cage, she could use him to log into the net from home and send a message to Woeller. Let the military go to her house and deal with Helmut.

Tilda saddled Tomas, settling into his skin as gently as possible.

He was playing with his puzzle box and snorted as he felt her presence. Tilda let him set the puzzle box aside, then walked him over to the gate. In moments, she was in the hall and heading down the corridor to the stairs. Her body swung forward over her powerful arms. Everything about Tomas was weight and mass and strength.

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July 2015

Tilda eased open the door and, urging caution, climbed the stairs to her office.

Her office was in the front of the house so she could greet clients without having to take them through the whole building. She let Tomas pause at the top of the stairs to sample the air. He caught an old scent of her and a newer one of Helmut. And . . .

someone else.

She flared his nostrils again. Someone she didn’t know was in the house.

Rolling forward on his knuckles, she crept as silently as she could down the short hall to the saddle room. The door was open, and the light was dim. The tree standing outside the saddle room window shaded it to near darkness. She scowled. Tomas’s eyes were none too good in the dark. Still, they were good enough to tell that Helmut lay on the bench farthest from the door. God damn it. There went any hope she had that it wasn’t him. Tilda paused Tomas to scan the room, so she knew what to report to Woeller.

Two men were in the room with Helmut, also saddled. They were dressed in street clothes and had brought a small armory with them, as well as everything to set her home on fire when they were done.

Tilda stifled the impulse to rend, but not before Tomas growled, deep in his chest.

The man on the middle bench stirred. Light glinted off his eyes as they opened.

“Shit!”

Abandoning stealth, Tilda hurled Tomas forward. Something slammed into her back, knocking him off course.

Tilda pushed at the clawing mass and then heavy jaws locked around his neck.

Diedrich, her Eurasian gray wolf, growled and hung onto Tomas.

The man shouted, “Damnit, Kurt. I thought you had her pinned on the boat.”

Tilda clenched Tomas’s hand around the wolf’s throat. She did not want to hurt either animal. If she released control of Tomas, he would destroy the wolf on instinct.

Holding tight to cut off the wolf’s air, she rolled to the side. The jaws around Tomas’s throat were worrying, but his neck was too thick to be at immediate risk.

On the closest bench, Kurt groggily turned his head. “I did. I do. She’s still inside.”

He must be the one riding Binga.

“Well, she must have a portable case.” Diedrich’s rider turned and reached for a gun. The wolf’s jaw loosened as he lost focus. The rider’s eyes rolled back in his head.

“The wolf is hard to . . .” His hand dropped to his side and the wolf’s jaw tightened.

“Someone shoot it.”

“No! No guns. Not if we want it to look like they went rogue.”

“Yeah, well. That was the plan when Helmut was supposed to drown her. I think we’re past that.”

“The damn thing fought me. Hold her, Schaffer, and buy me some time. I’m nearly finished cutting the anchor cables but have to wait for the sharks to clear.” Helmut sat, weaving unsteadily as part of his senses remained mapped to the dolphin.

Tilda’s despair bled into Tomas and his hold loosened. The wolf took advantage of the slackening grip to bear down harder.

Schaffer twitched as he forced the wolf to attack. “I’ve got her.”

Tilda staggered to her feet, and then dropped with all Tomas’s weight on the wolf.

For a moment, the wolf’s jaws opened in shock and the gorilla pulled free, even before Tilda could urge him to do so. She grabbed the wolf and threw him out the open door of the lab. He landed badly against the stair railing and she winced for him—

—but did not wait. She turned back into the room, bellowing with Tomas in a shared rage. In a massive surge, she leaped across the space between them and yanked the cables from Binga’s rider. As he spasmed with the abrupt return to his body, Tomas leaned in, baring his teeth. She concentrated on the sparkles of light on the screens, trying to distract him from killing the man.

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The gorilla glanced up and they had a twin reaction of racing hearts.

Helmut stood on the edge of the bench. The cable stretched from the back of his neck over to the box. In his hand, he held a gun.

Light flashed from the muzzle.

She slammed back into her body. Rolling to the side, she vomited on the floor. Lying there, she shivered and sobbed for the gorilla.

And for herself. It was not some nameless terrorist attacking. Helmut had been playing her the entire time.

Outside, the big cat continued to pace around the cabin. Tilda clenched her teeth and took a hard breath through her nose. A litany of curses and denials ran through her mind. She tried to control it as if her own body was an animal she could harness.

She had to focus.

So. Helmut was still trying to sabotage the wave station generator. Unless she stopped him, no one would know what was happening until it was too late. Tomas’s name was in red. Tilda’s breath caught at that. She had hoped that it was shock. It had been a vain hope, but she didn’t even have that now. Fred’s name was still there, but other names were red. So either their wetware patches were malfunctioning or those men had killed them. Another name turned red.

Tilda cursed. Gnawing on her lower lip, she sat up and stared out at the big cat that was pacing around the cabin. Binga’s name on the screen was bold and available.

The iguana was crawling out of the shadow into the sunlight, so it was also probably not being ridden right now either. How long did she have before the big cat’s rider got a new patch and logged in again?

She rolled to her knees and turned her attention on the cat. “Binga? Sweetie?”

The puma cocked her head, ears pricked forward. Wetting her lips, Tilda dragged her case to the hatch where the broken window was. “Here kitty, kitty. Come here, Binga.”

Curious, the big cat came around. Her muzzle wrinkled at the smell of blood and a low rumble sounded in her throat. If only Tilda had a treat. A treat. She spun and dove back across the cabin, pulling out the tin of sardines. Peeling back the lid, she carried it back to the window. With her breath held, she stuck one out the window.

Binga sniffed it and with delicacy took the sardine with her tongue.

Tilda scritched the big cat behind the ear. “There’s my good girl. There’s my beauty.”

Binga’s rumble turned into a full purr of pleasure. She nosed at the window, sniffing for more fish. Moving slowly, Tilda opened the hatch and slid the tin of fish out.

As the big cat lowered her muzzle to the tin, Tilda plugged the jack into Binga’s wetware patch. With her other hand, Tilda toggled “Reboot.”

Binga slumped to the deck, head hitting the wood with a thud. Tilda winced. “Sorry, sweetness.”

Wiping the fish oil off on her trousers, she grabbed the iguana and did the same thing to it. Tilda turned back to the case. It would take longer than she wanted, but she set Binga and the iguana to reconfigure with new signals. Doing so lost her access to the other animals, but Binga would be out of reach to the men at her house.

Meanwhile, those bastards were in her house with her animals.

She picked up the phone and dialed emergency. “Hello. My house is on fire.”

Binga stalked through the shrubbery by Tilda’s house. It had been easy to urge her to head home. Convincing her to carry the iguana instead of having a snack? That had been harder. That had involved concentrating on bigger prey. Her tail lashed in the grass and Tilda had to work hard to control it. She pricked Binga’s ears forward, listening, before she settled in the bushes by the side of the house. Why were the fire trucks taking so long?

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July 2015

Shifting her awareness from the puma to the iguana, she thought This branch is warmer and the creature crawled farther out on the tree so she could see into the saddle room. Inside, Helmut lay on the saddle bench, plugged into the case, still riding Jurgen.

She focused on the iguana and sent it in search of a better vantage. Different views of the house swam through her brain. It only took a little effort at this point to focus on the most useful: the iguana’s right eye. Kurt was at the main console, trying to understand what had happened to Binga. A new cable stretched from his neck to the case, and his movements were slow and clumsy. Schaffer lay saddled on the table next to Helmut.

The puma raised her head, turning toward the road the moment before Tilda recognized the sound of engines. Oh, thank God. She dug her claws into the dirt and her haunches wiggled in anticipation, as the vehicles grew louder.

Inside, Kurt tilted his head and closed his eyes. “Are those—? Log out, guys. Iguana two shows incoming. We’re blown.”

“Shit.” Schaffer raised a hand to indicate he was complying. “I left the wolf in the front entry. We’ll have to go out the back.” He sat up, blinking slowly as he adjusted to his own body.

Tilda left her iguana in place, giving it only the lightest of attention, and suggested to Binga that the back door would have better hunting. With almost no urging, the big cat slunk through the bushes to the back yard, keeping her belly low to the ground.

Inside the room, Kurt picked up his gun. The other man peeled the patch off the back of his neck and shoved it in his pocket.

Kurt glanced over at Helmut. “Come on. Log out. Now.”

“Nearly finished . . .” Helmut’s voice slurred.

“We’ll have to go with what you’ve done. No time.” Kurt tapped a key on the console and forced a log-out.

Helmut groaned and rolled to the side, vomiting on the f loor. He heaved again, shaking with transition illness.

“Dammit.” Helmut pushed himself off the bench, visibly disoriented. He staggered as he followed them out of the room and past the iguana’s sight.

In the backyard, Binga flattened her ears. The back door cracked open, then flew wide, as first Kurt and then Schaffer emerged from inside. They took off at a run, heading toward the trees at the back of the property. Helmut followed, steadier than he had been as he settled back into his own skin, but still slower than the other two.

Perfect prey.

Letting Binga work with her natural urges, Tilda kept the lightest of touches, just enough to have her hunt the weakest member of the herd. She crept under the bushes, pacing him, allowing the others to draw farther ahead. Gathering her haunches under her, Binga launched across the grass.

She ran in silence, any sound she might have made buried under the crunch of gravel as fire trucks screeched to a stop in front of the house.

While Tilda was distracted by the trucks, Binga leapt, tackling Helmut. He tumbled to land face down in the grass. Screaming, he tried to claw away. Binga planted a paw in the middle of his back and bent down, her urges perfectly in line with Tilda’s.

Gently, as if she were eating a sardine, she wrapped her mouth around his neck.

She closed the jaws a little. Just until she could feel resistance. Breathing through her mouth, the big cat panted on Helmut’s neck.

The puma really wanted to kill him, and Tilda didn’t have a contrasting urge to stop the big cat with. Back in her own body, Tilda bared her teeth.

And logged out.

Sometimes, if you worked with an animal’s natural urges, it would finish a job on its own. ❍

20

Mary Robinette Kowal

David Gerrold is best known for his Hugo and Nebula winning novelette, “The Martian Child,” which was adapted into a 2007 movie starring John Cusack. He’s also known for the intensely popular (and still unfinished—c’mon, David!) War Against The Chtorr series of books. The author has been writing stories and novels, television scripts, and even columns in computer magazines for almost half a century. He wrote and directed his first play in 2013, Uncle Daddy Will Not

Be Invited. David will be one of the author Guests of Honor at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington. He also wrote a script for Star Trek, The Original Series once. His first tale for Asimov’s takes us aboard the sumptuous flagship Liberty for a droll story about . . .

THE GREAT

PAN AMERICAN

AIRSHIP

MYSTERY, OR,

WHY I MURDERED

ROBERT

BENCHLEY

David Gerrold

After all is said and done, I blame Nikola Tesla.

It’s his fault.

Because—if we’re going to talk about cause and effect, then we have to go all the way back to the original cause.

No, Nikola Tesla did not set out to invent an efficient method of low-cost helium 21

July 2015
extraction—it was a side-effect of his coal-fusion research—but if he hadn’t discovered it, no one else would have. At least not in our lifetimes.

Tesla gave away many of his discoveries, but not this one—he patented the helium extraction process. The technology that followed created so many new industries and opportunities for profit that it pushed Tesla’s own company into the Fortune 500
within eighteen months.

Knowing that Tesla was unlikely to invest in lawyers and lawsuits, patent violations started cropping up everywhere. The Third Reich, for instance, began extracting their own helium from the Ruhr, the large coal f ields located in the west of Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia—they used the helium to lift over a dozen huge vessels, all modeled after the luxurious Hindenburg.

Not to be outdone, the United States Congress created the National Aeronautics Studies Administration—NASA for short—to fund research and development in aerial transport.

Three years later, in June of 1937, the Great Pan American Airship Line began operations at their expansive new terminal on Welfare Island. Due to rising international tensions, as well as considerable domestic pressures against foreign competition, the trans-Atlantic German airships would be restricted to the airfield at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

To demonstrate America’s commitment to a new age of aerial transportation, Pan Am announced that the inaugural journey of their magnificent new flagship would be a coast-to-coast celebrity cruise. They held a nationwide contest to choose the name of the vessel they had nicknamed the Big Lady, and three lucky contestants would win berths on that first trip to prove that economical air travel for everyone was now a reality.

At 11:33 A.M. on Thursday, June 3, 1937, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt off icially christened the vessel in a grand ceremony and the Pan American flagship Liberty lifted majestically into the air while the United States Marine Band played “America the Beautiful.” The Chorus of St. Patrick’s Cathedral accompanied, and WNBC broadcast the event on nationwide radio. RCA also broadcast an experimental television signal originating from the top of the Empire State Building. Receivers at Grand Central Terminal showed a grainy image of the Liberty’s liftoff, although most people could have simply stepped outside onto Forty-second Street or Fifth Avenue for a better view.

Three times larger than the Hindenburg, she was a gleaming silver illusion. She circled Manhattan Island three times while tugboats below thumped their horns, fireboats howled their sirens and sprayed jets of water, and Mayor La Guardia read a poem of salute by Robert Frost on the WNBC radio station.

Most people assumed that circling Manhattan was a salute to the city. Actually, it was an opportunity for Captain Bradley to test all the systems of the airship, one after the other, and reassure himself that everything was operating up to spec. It was a second shakedown cruise, unofficial but necessary. Coming around Battery Park for the third time, finally satisfied that the ship was handling the way he wanted, he spun the wheel to the left and the Big Lady turned gracefully to port. She was now officially on her way. We passed over the Statue of Liberty and out across New Jersey.

Aboard the vessel, a host of Broadway and Hollywood celebrities waved to the crowds below. George Jessel, Al Jolson, George and Ira Gershwin, and George M. Cohan waved from the portside windows. Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, and several other members of the notorious Algonquin Round Table waved from the starboard side. Also aboard were Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and William “Billy” Mitchell. Sixty-five-year-old Orville Wright had been invited as well, but had politely declined. He still believed 22

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the foolish idea that heavier-than-air vessels would become the primary vehicle of modern air travel and felt it would be hypocritical to lend his name or support to this journey. Tesla had also declined the invitation, saying there was nothing in San Francisco to interest him right now.

Less notably, several high-ranking members of the army and navy were also among the complement of passengers, but were much less conspicuous. They seemed more concerned with the operational aspects of the Liberty than with the promo-tional aspects of the journey.

Pan Am’s official statements asserted that the average airspeed of the Big Lady would be 85 miles per hour, and that the non-stop voyage would take no more than 36 hours. The Big Lady would be going around the south end of the Rocky Mountains rather than over. But some of the engineers were betting that Captain Bradley would push the engines hard, hoping to average more than 100mph—as well as crossing over the peaks to give the passengers a spectacular view of the mountain-tops, ultimately arriving at San Francisco at 10:30 A.M. the next day, a journey of only 26 hours. If that did happen, then despite traveling more than 24 hours, we would still arrive an hour earlier than our departure time, an artifact of our west-ward passage through three time zones.

Heading west over New Jersey, many of the passengers still crowded the windows and speculated about the crowds below. Tiny people came running out of their houses and their businesses, shouting and pointing and staring skyward. They cheered and hollered and waved. When the shadow of the Liberty passed over, some of them pan-icked. We saw a few small children crying. They were carried inside by their reassuring mothers—where they promptly leaned out of the upstairs windows to stare again.

After a half-hour or so, once the second or third tray of drinks had been passed around, the Gershwins commandeered the piano in the salon and started playing.

Later, Oscar Levant took over the piano, providing accompaniment for Cohan, Jessel, and Jolson as they worked their inebriated way through an impromptu medley of popular songs.

When they finally tired out, Jack Benny and Fred Allen began trading quips—it started with Fred Allen asking Jack Benny why he hated the violin so much that he kept playing it. Benny responded with an observation that the bags under Fred Allen’s eyes were so big they required their own porters. Allen replied that Jack Benny couldn’t ad-lib a belch after a plate of Hungarian goulash. Benny promptly turned to him and grumped, “You wouldn’t say that if my writers were here.”

I wished his writers were aboard as well. I would have loved to have met them. I assumed they would be very funny men.

I was—at that time—a guest relations steward aboard the Liberty. My job was to keep the customers happy for the nearly two days it would take to travel the 2,600
miles from New York to San Francisco—actually a bit more, because our course would zig-zag to fly over several important cities and landmarks. That meant maintaining the well-being of everyone onboard who assumed they were entitled to special treatment—and that was everyone onboard. In the case of my specific charges, that mostly involved keeping them drunk enough to be cheerful, but not so drunk as to be uncontrollable. Passed-out was not an option.

But holding a tray of martinis was not my career goal. I intended to bootstrap my career by writing a memoir of this adventure. I planned to sell articles wherever I could to establish a name for myself.

I was already making notes for a profile of the celebrity doings for Life Magazine, a revealing slice of salacious gossip for The New Yorker, a report on the amenities of a flying hotel for Popular Science, a complementary article about the maintenance of the onboard necessities for Scientific American, a description of how well the six The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 23

July 2015
electric propellors performed for Popular Mechanics, and possibly even—I’d have to do it under a pen name—a futuristic story for Astounding about a giant passenger vessel journeying through outer space to Venus or Mars—I just needed a plot.

I had to trade a few favors, including a couple of sexual ones (that was fun), but I did get myself assigned to take care of the Algonquin Round Table crowd—that might have happened anyway. It turned out they were a boisterous group, hard to deal with, and none of the other stewards wanted to acommodate them and all of their shenanigans. A couple of the Algonquin group were putting away enough booze that their breath had become flammable. I expected—hoped—that after they settled in and became comfortable they would start discussing important literary issues.

Lunch was delayed because of the unscheduled performances. None of the staff were brave enough to interrupt the entertainers—the rest of the passengers would have dropped us out the nearest window—so we didn’t serve until we were well over eastern Pennsylvania and Oscar Levant remarked, “You can smell the cheese even from up here.”

We weren’t that high—he could have been right. The Liberty cruised below the clouds, usually only three or four hundred feet above the ground, mostly so passengers could have a great view of the landscape, but she was engineered to go much higher. Tanks of pressurized helium gas were stored along her keel to inflate additional lifting ballonets when more altitude was needed—such as flying over a mountain. To descend again, the extra helium would be released, or pumped back into the storage tanks. Large tanks of water were also used for ballast. This was the same water that passengers would use for washing. If the Liberty needed altitude quickly, it could be released in a massive shower. By the time it hit the ground, it would be little more than a mist. At worst, a momentary drizzle.

The Liberty carried two hundred passengers and eighty-f ive crewmembers. By comparison, a Hindenburg- class ship could carry only seventy-two passengers and required sixty-two crewmembers to manage the journey. The Liberty had been designed to carry four hundred souls, but Pan Am was using the inaugural journey to demonstrate the large cargo carrying capacity of the Liberty as well. A half-dozen new Fords were stored in her hold. None of the military officers would discuss it, but more than once I saw them scribbling numbers on yellow pads and arguing about balancing the weights of tanks, trucks, cannons, troops, and supplies.

Cross-country shipping by railroad could take anywhere from three days to two weeks, depending on how much you wanted to pay. For some industries, air transport would be both faster and cheaper—like fresh fruits and vegetables from the California fields to the New York markets. And then there were those lucrative mail contracts to consider.

After lunch, some of the passengers retired to their cabins to rest up for the rigors of dinner. The cabins were spacious and well-equipped, deliberately more luxurious than those found on any ocean-liner where space would be at a premium. The opposite was true aboard the Liberty. Here, weight was the limiting factor, not space.

Only the control gondola hung below the body of the craft. I’d delivered coffee and sandwiches to it on our training flight—it was a broad comfortable platform. All the other passenger and crew spaces were inside the Liberty’s envelope. Because a massive framework of aluminum girders and steel tension cables was needed to provide a stable structure for the huge array of giant lift bags, there was also considerable space beneath the ballonets for accomodations. There was almost too much space.

When Tallulah Bankhead boarded, she looked around the lobby and asked the nearest steward—me—“What time does this place reach San Francisco?” She had the most amazing voice, as deep and husky as a velvet martini. Then she stared into my eyes and asked, “Who do I have to fuck to get a drink?” You can bet that sent me scurrying.

24

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The interior of the airship and all of her trim and accessories were decorated in the latest Art Deco style—Streamline Moderne—very light and bright, all minimal-ist and futuristic, exactly the statement Pan Am wanted to make. Willliam F. Lamb, one of the principal designers of the Empire State Building, had supervised the design of the passenger spaces of the airship. He was also onboard, somewhere.

A broad salon stretched across the front of the aircraft, outlined by a terrifyingly open horseshoe of glass. This was the main gathering place for the passengers. It was almost too sprawling, too wide, too open; it felt cavernous. Huge windows stretched across the front of the deck and circled wide around both sides—that and the high ceiling gave the whole chamber a broad spacious feeling, much like Hollywood’s conception of a blissful afterlife.

A second level of walkways circled the high windows so every passenger could have a grand view without ever having to crowd. All the travelers could easily observe the ground through the large downward-angled panes. The sheer size of those glass walls made it feel as if we were not within a vessel, but simply drifting along on an airy platform, as removed from the mundane cares of the world as the gods of Olympus—well, we were—but the sense of a heavenly condition was deliberate. We f loated gracefully across the sky, trailing a massive shadow that traversed the ground below, a visible reminder of the Liberty’s astonishing size.

Across the main floor of the salon, there were step-up levels for service areas and step-down levels of various sizes for gatherings of passengers to discuss common interests. The chairs and couches were upholstered in muted shades of red, silver, and blue—all very Pan American. The floor was carpeted in a lighter blue, a reflection of the sky. The walls were eggshell-white with gold trim. Silvery murals portrayed Lady Liberty in a variety of heroic poses.

Just aft of the salon was a spacious dining hall. Behind that was a selection of smaller spaces: a cozier bar, a reading room, a smoking lounge for gentlemen, and a corresponding lounge reserved especially for the ladies. For overseas flights, the bil-liards room would be converted to a small casino. Further back, the airship contained a motion picture theater, a gymnasium, a quiet reading room stocked with many current magazines and a selection of popular books, even a bowling alley and a tennis court, and other lightweight amenities to alleviate the tedium of a long voyage. There was almost too much acreage on the main deck. The designers had run out of ideas before they had run out of space.

The original blueprints had included a swimming pool, with the water in it doubling as ballast. At the last moment, the airline had postponed the installation. It wasn’t the weight of the water that concerned the engineers, it was the weight of the support structure of the pool and all the additional plumbing and pumps and f ilters needed to maintain it. The pool hadn’t been completely ruled out, but the accountants at Pan Am had successfully argued that the loadweight could be more prof itably used for cargo, and the company was still weighing the pros and cons.

After Pennsylvania, we headed across Lake Erie. Captain Bradley diverted course slightly south so that people all along the northern shore of Ohio—Cleveland, Lo-rain, Sandusky, and finally Toledo—could see the Liberty and cheer and wave. Beneath us, more boats tooted their horns and people waved flags and banners to catch our attention. Many of the passengers went to the windows to wave back.

But not the Round Table group. They had gathered themselves near the bar again and were proceeding to work their way through pitchers of martinis, as well as a heated discussion of something they called, “writer’s block.” That sounded promising.

As a burgeoning author myself, I hoped to learn some of the wisdom of the sages, especially the hard part. How do you get the words onto the page?

The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 25

July 2015

Sometime after lunch, Dorothy Parker sent a radiogram to her editor: “I have not forgotten you. I have only forgotten to write the article.”

Two hours later, her editor wired back. I brought the radiogram to her myself. She plucked it from the tray, took a puff off her cigarette, and opened it nonchalantly. I had never seen anyone open a radiogram so nonchalantly before. She must have received so many of them in her career that she took them for granted. She looked around at the rest of the group. “He says,” she said, and read it aloud. “ ‘Put down the damn martini and f ind a typewriter. Benchley has one. He never goes anywhere without it, even if he has no intention of using it.’ ” She frowned across the table. “Is that true, Robert?”

Benchley had the good grace to look embarrassed. “Well, yes. It’s impossible to procrastinate properly without a typewriter.”

Mrs. Parker looked up at me, still waiting with the tray held out. “Are you waiting for a tip?”

Yes, ma’am. But I didn’t say it aloud. “Will there be a reply?”

“No. Yes. Send this back. ‘Benchley and typewriter defenestrated over—’ ” She frowned. “Where are we? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Defenestrate him over someplace interesting. No, make that boring. Oh, never mind. He’ll have to look up defenestrate and he hates looking things up. Begone now.”

I bewent.

I bewent all the way back to my station next to the bar. As much as I would have liked to eavesdrop on their conversation, it would have been rude—and against the rules. I was only allowed to approach if summoned by a gesture, or if I was emptying ashtrays.

Nevertheless, snatches of conversation still floated over to the bar, enough to suggest that the topic of writer’s block was still circling the conversation like a maiden aunt.

Because lunch had been delayed for more than an hour, dinner was also delayed, but only thirty minutes. We were over the northern part of Indiana when the sun touched the horizon ahead of us. Oscar Levant advised against looking out the windows at the broad plains of Indiana. “It’s only the people we fly over.”

The entire meal service was scheduled for ninety minutes. Soup, salad, fish, three kinds of carvery meat, dessert, coffee, and after-dinner drinks. The Algonquin crew managed to stretch it out to two and a half hours. By the time they finally heaved themselves laboriously from their chairs, it was nine o’clock and we were approach-ing the Chicago f lyover. The city was a bright sprawl of lights ahead, searchlights sweeping the sky.

As we approached, we could hear music coming from a band on the pier, but the distance kept it from being clear or identifiable. It sounded like a badly tuned radio.

According to Fred Allen it was “an excited crowd of bagpipers, accordion-players, and Jack Benny fans.” Beside him, Benny replied, “I’m having trouble seeing your fans, Fred. Are there any?”

Over the city, we were blinded by searchlights hitting us from the ground. They blazed up at us from everywhere, especially along the shoreline and the major boule-vards. “It looks like a dozen Hollywood premieres,” said Bankhead. “Louis B. Mayer should see this. He’d crap his pants.” She pronounced it “Louie.”

“I wonder what it looks like from down there,” said a tiny woman, one of the contest winners. The winners had been picked by their weight, a fact not made known to the general public.

I took the opportunity to answer. “Did you see the glow in the water as we passed over the lake? That was our lights. The entire airship is outlined with Nikola Tesla’s new illuminators—the ones that give off almost no heat. He calls them light-emitting-diodes. They print them on some thin panels of glass. From the ground 26

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the Liberty looks like a great silver spoon, blazing across the sky. The airship’s name is spelled out in lights like a Broadway star—only bigger than any marquee on broadway. Each letter is twenty-four feet high.”

Beside her, a nondescript little man—the publisher of a pulp science fiction magazine, Thrilling Wonder Stories—spoke up. “Imagine if we could put a news-marquee on the side of the airship, like the one in Times Square. We could display messages to the people below.” He thought a moment. “Or perhaps we could put projectors inside the skin of the dirigible and show motion pictures on her sides. Of course, the skin of the ship would have to be translucent enough for the movie to show through. Perhaps someday we’ll have airships anchored above cities, projecting television programs to thousands of people at once.”

He frowned, another thought crossing his mind. “That would use a lot of elecricity, wouldn’t it?” Still frowning, he added, “I wonder if Professor Tesla’s wonderful diodes could somehow be reversed to turn light into electricity? You could put rows of panels across the top of the airship and power its engines off sunlight all day long. Hmmm.” He pulled out a notebook and hurriedly scribbled his thoughts into it. “Perhaps I’ll write a sequel. Ralph 124C42+ . . . .” He wandered off, lost in thought.

The woman, the one who’d won her passage in a contest, said, “What a strange little man. Is he an inventor?”

“His name is Gernsback. He’s a science fiction writer.”

She frowned in confusion. “Science fiction? What’s that?”

“Pulp f iction. The silly kind. The kind you don’t want to let your little boy read.

Rocket ships to the moon. Giant mechanical brains. Robots. Silly things like that.”

She made a face. “Oh, that terrible stuff. No, we’d never let Jeffty read that trash.”

By ten, the Algonquins had reclaimed their place in the salon and another pitcher of martinis was meeting its olive-strewn fate.

“Do they ever stop?” the evening bartender whispered to me.

“I don’t know. I think Broun—or is that Woollcott?—got up to pee once. The rest of them must have iron kidneys.”

Between emptying ashtrays, retrieving empty pitchers and replacing them with full ones, occasionally delivering and sending telegrams, and always being as unob-trusive as possible, I managed to glean a sense of their evolving conversation. Tallulah Bankhead’s remark about Louis B. Mayer had sparked a conversation about writing for the movies, something that both Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald had dabbled with.

Before long, they were plotting a film of their own—or perhaps just plotting. The story involved, of course, a beautiful Broadway star traveling aboard a gleaming new airship when a terrible murder occurs. For the better part of an hour, the group argued about who to murder, perhaps someone in their own group? That ended abrupt-ly when Bankhead declared, “Dah-ling, you can’t murder a writer. Nobody will notice. It has to be someone important.”

Oh, good grief. Didn’t they realize? The writers are the most important people in Hollywood. If it isn’t on the page, it isn’t on the stage! You have to take the words seriously!

But instead, they wasted another hour of discussion about who might be worth murdering. The comedians were quickly dismissed, so were Jolson, Jessel, and Cohan. The Algonquins finally settled on George Gershwin as a suitable victim, then moved on to speculating about the identity of the murderer and what possible motive he (or she?) might have for killing America’s most gifted composer.

“Possibly his brother, Ira?”

“What motive?”

The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 27

July 2015

“Over a girl maybe . . . ?”

“How tawdry. How boring. Besides . . .”

“No, dear. George isn’t gay. He’s been bedding all those women—”

“—yes, trying to prove he’s a man.”

“What a wonderful way to prove it.” That was Oscar Levant, who’d been passing by, but stopped for the gossip.

I didn’t hear the end of that discussion—there were several other late-night gatherings that needed my attention, but none as interesting. The next time I passed by, they were arguing about writer’s block again. That was something I really wanted to hear about—how did the great ones get past it?

It was either Broun or Woollcott—I never could figure out which was which—who said, “Oh, there’s a very easy trick to break a block.”

Benchley was already glowing with inebriation, had been since liftoff, but he looked across the table with all the interest he could muster. “What?” he said.

“Quite simple. You put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and you type the word

‘The.’ The human mind abhors a vacuum. It is incapable of leaving the sentence un-f inished. You will f ind yourself typing something to complete the sentence almost immediately.”

“Yes, dear fellow,” said Benchley, “but what about the sentence that follows it? And the next after that? And the next and the next?”

The other one—Woollcott or Broun, or maybe it was George S. Kaufman—spoke up then. “Pablo Picasso says that all art is recovery from the first line. He was talking about drawing, of course, but I believe that’s true of writing as well. Once you have that first sentence on the page, the rest will follow.”

Benchley had already written quite a bit about his ability to procrastinate—that only the pressure of a deadline inspired true creativity—but in this group of trusted colleagues, he could admit that sometimes writing was difficult. Not the typing itself, but getting the right words in the right order. Others agreed. “There’s an elegance that we aspire to achieve, but the limitations of our own selves remains our greatest challenge.”

Benchley put his martini glass down. It was already empty anyway. “The . . .” he said. “The . . .” And then, “The the the the the.” He nodded. “Yes. The . . .” And then he leapt up from his chair. “It’s an admirable idea. I shall now proceed to test it.” And he staggered off in search of his cabin.

The others went back to discussing murder, now arguing whether Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer might be a better victim. There would be no shortage of suspects or motives. I did catch one line in passing. “No, not Walt Disney. If he doesn’t like an actor, he tears him up.”

By midnight, we were crossing Kansas—a dry state, it had the most restrictive alcohol laws in the nation. Legally, once we were in the state’s airspace we were for-bidden to serve liquor. When the company announced the f light itinerary of the Liberty, the Attorney General of the state had sent a letter of inquiry to Pan American’s lawyers asking if the state’s liquor laws would be observed while the Liberty was flying over Kansas. Pan Am’s lawyers had promptly sent back a note assuring the Attorney General that state off icials, including county sheriffs, were free to board, inspect, and serve any necessary warrants on any Pan Am aircraft flying over the state of Kansas. So far, none had done so.

Captain Bradley had altered the course a few degrees south to avoid a rumbling storm system spreading across the Dakotas and down toward Nebraska, where it would probably turn into tornado weather. The big chart in the salon was automatically updated every fifteen minutes. It showed our location and also demonstrated that we were averaging 93 miles per hour, so we were ahead of schedule, but 28

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nowhere near the 100 miles per hour that some had predicted. The figures were also available in knots for the aviators aboard. Of which I was not one.

Along about 1:30 in the morning, the Algonquins f inally started making noises that suggested they might be through for the evening. Two other stewards and I had to escort several of them to their cabins. When the last one had finally been tucked in, we looked at each other in exhaustion. “When do any of those people actually find time to do any of the things they’re supposed to be famous for?”

We secured all the windows, checking to make sure that none were left open to the night—we couldn’t risk a drunken passenger falling out—then adjourned to our separate bunks. Crew’s quarters were nowhere near as luxurious as the passengers’, but we each had a private space, a sink, and a shower—and a window! It was an uncommon luxury. Eventually, on a full flight with four hundred passengers, we’d be doubling up, two crewmembers to a cabin.

The cabins on the Liberty had what they called “picture windows.” The windows in the salon were even larger, as broad as those in front of Macy’s department store. By contrast, the windows on a passenger plane were little more than portholes—even on the newest aircraft under construction that Boeing was building in Washington state.

Pan Am had ordered six of those airplanes—the Boeing 314 Clipper long-range flying boat—for trans-oceanic flights. But with the success of the Liberty’s maiden voyage almost certainly assured, those planes might end up going to the army instead. Britain’s Royal Air Force had also expressed an interest in picking up those contracts if Pan Am canceled as expected.

Unlike an airplane, it’s easy to sleep aboard the Liberty. Her electrical propellors are so silent, and so distant from the passenger cabins, you can barely feel any vibration, just a gentle susurrus. Unlike the clattering internal combustion engines that keep airplanes aloft, the Liberty’s engines run on the same electricity that powers the lights and runs the radios. Everything aboard the airship runs off Professor Tesla’s marvelous new graphite and lithium batteries. The batteries were kept charged by three diesel generators.

Although technically I was on a 24-hour shift, in practice I would not be needed until at least 10 A.M., maybe later, if the Algonquins slept in—as expected—but I was already up and ready to go at 8:30 A.M.

We had made it to the northwest corner of New Mexico, and were on course to pass over the Grand Canyon, then Boulder Dam, only two years old and already providing electricity for much of the southwest, then past Las Vegas, a small desert resort town, up over the Sierras, and eventually north up the coast toward an early evening arrival in San Francisco. Passengers could expect a glorious California sunset as we landed.

The course of the airship was primarily determined by weather, but the airline wanted everyone in the country talking about the airship. That meant flying over as many cities as possible so the people on the ground could see the Liberty. It also meant flying over the most spectacular scenery below so that passengers could take photographs to show their friends and families.

Of course, Life Magazine had photographers aboard the aircraft as well, two of them, and more stationed on the ground all along the route as well. We’d lifted off on Thursday, June 3. The next issue of the magazine would appear on Monday, June 7.

We were guaranteed the cover, of course, and would likely have at least four pages of departure pictures, showing liftoff from the field as well as more photos of the airship over New York, then probably six pages of en route photos, especially aerial views of various landmarks, and another four pages for the arrival and landing.

According to the flight plan, we would head up the California coast, then sail in over the brand-new Golden Gate Bridge for even more spectacular photo opportunities. The bridge had opened on Thursday, May 27, exactly a week before our liftoff, so The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 29

July 2015
it was a grand occasion to demonstrate America’s growing industrial future, the strength and know-how that was bringing us back from the Great Depression.

After crossing over the bridge, the Liberty would circle the entire bay so people in Sausalito, Berkeley, and Oakland could also get a good look at the airship, then back across the bay to the Pan Am terminal at San Francisco Municipal Airport. We expected to see large crowds everywhere, but especially at the airfield, where a motor-cade awaited.

Governor Frank Merriam would be there to welcome us. He’d dedicated the bridge the week before, kissing every baby he could f ind. This week, he’d certainly make sure that the photographers would get pictures of him with George Gershwin and Al Jolson and Jack Benny—but not Tallulah Bankhead. She was developing an unsa-vory reputation among Republican voters, and Merriam needed all the good press he could get—he had a tough election coming up next year.

Not all of our celebrity passengers were placing themselves where photographers might find them. Some actually found the photographers a nuisance, but the photographers themselves were having no shortage of photo opportunities. Even if they couldn’t f ind Gershwin at the piano or Cohan and Jessel and Jolson mugging together, there were always the huge, downward-angled windows. They had already taken enough aerial photos for a dozen special issues and were now arguing which side of the salon would be best for photos when we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.

The two Life Magazine photographers had the best plan; they would station themselves one on each side.

Most of the Algonquins slept through breakfast. Not surprising. But they missed a great view of the Grand Canyon from the air. That Gernsback fellow, the one who published Thrilling Wonder Stories, speculated aloud, “I suppose that’s what the canals on Mars must look like, only larger, to be visible from Earth. What a grand civilization the Martians must have. We must make friends with them somehow.”

Amazing, what some people thought about. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking that science fiction stuff seriously.

The Algonquins did show up for lunch, one by one staggering bleary-eyed into the dining hall. Not the best argument for the life of a writer. These people were famous.

They were role models. Why weren’t they acting like it? I was beginning to hate them.

They had the best job in the world—they were the caretakers of culture, the shapers of opinion—and they were behaving like common drunks. But if writing is one of the best jobs in the world, it’s also one of the hardest—it’s all decision-making, all day long. This word or that one, over and over and over again, all the way to the end of the sentence. And even if you get to the end of a sentence, you still have to start again at the beginning of the next. It’s exhausting.

Maybe that’s why writers drink—to escape having to make any more decisions, except perhaps how many olives in the martini. Or maybe a twist or an onion instead.

And maybe what I was seeing was only an aberration. I couldn’t expect these people to be brilliant and noteworthy everywhere, all the time, could I? This was a vacation for them, a break from the stress. Maybe they just needed to recharge their creative batteries. Who was I to judge?

They took their coffee in the salon, along with a pile of fresh pastries that quickly disappeared. I circled regularly, alternating between brewing fresh pots of coffee and refilling their cups. They were now arguing about the best way to murder Louis B.

Mayer. Throwing him out the window of the airship was quickly discarded. If there’s no body to discover, you lose the scene where the French maid screams in horror.

That led to a discussion of why the maid had to be French. Woollcott—by now I was pretty sure it was Woollcott—noted that a young French maid was always going 30

David Gerrold

Asimov’s
to be more fun to look at than a dumpy English maid. Bankhead responded that the dumpy English maid was a great part for a good character actress, and good contrast. “What she means,” Dorothy Parker pointedly observed, “is that the star should be the prettiest one. Not upstaged by the ingenue.”

Woollcottt was undeterred. “Ah, but I have the perfect young actress—”

“Of course, you think she’s perfect. She’s sleeping with you and you’re vain.”

Bankhead leaned in. “Not perfect. Desperate.” Then she added, “On the other hand, if you actually believe her orgasm, we should cast her—that proves she’s a real actress.” Turning to the rest, she said, “What if the producer’s body is found inside one of the—what do you call them—the big balloons that hold all that nice helium?”

She turned to me and stroked my arm suggestively.

“Lift bags,” I said. “Or ballonets.”

“Oh, ballonets. I like that. How very French. There’s a bit of French sophistication for you, dear. Without all that messy business of having to buy a maid’s costume. We shall find Louis B. Mayer’s body in a ballonet. Suffocated because there’s no oxygen.

All blue in the face. Perhaps he has even been screaming. But no one could hear him.”

“Umm, if I may—” I politely lifted a hand.

The actress looked at me, her hand still on my arm. “Yes, dear boy?”

“If he were in the ballonet screaming, the helium would affect his voice, make it higher pitched. It’s the density of the gas.” She frowned in puzzlement. I demonstrated. “He’d sound like this. Help me! Help me!”

The entire group fell out laughing. “Oh my God, that’s priceless. Can you imagine Louis B. Mayer sounding like Mickey Mouse?”

“More like Betty Boop.”

“Makes me think—maybe we should do this as a comedy.”

“Somebody go find Jack Benny. He’s got the best writers—”

“We’d have to put him in the picture—”

“Oh, right. Never mind.”

“But if it’s a comedy—”

“Who says it has to be a comedy—?”

“If we’re murdering Louis B., it will be—”

“No, not a comedy, but certainly a feel-good movie. We could get Capra to direct—”

“No, we should get whatsisname, that little round English fellow, the one who does all those suspense movies—”

“I’ve met him.” Bankhead shuddered. “I have no intention of working for him.

He’s . . .” She searched for the word, f inally found it. “He’s creepy.”

She squeezed my arm, “Not you, dear boy,” and finally let go, but not before giving me the kind of delicious look that made me wish the dirigible was a lot slower so we’d have one more night in the air.

“I have a question . . . .” I was pretty sure that was Heywood Broun, maybe. “How do we get him into the lift bag? If we slice it open, doesn’t the gas escape? Wouldn’t that create a risk of explosion?”

“No, that’s hydrogen. Helium doesn’t explode. Isn’t that right, steward?” They all turned to me as if I was the expert.

“Yes, that’s correct, sir. Hydrogen is too dangerous. But helium is perfectly safe.”

“But the gas would still escape, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, yes. But the lift bags are very big. You could cut a slice near the bottom, shove a person in, then seal it again with duct tape. We use it to repair small rips.

They do happen sometimes, so there are rolls of tape everywhere—in all of the tool kits, and there are tool kits everywhere in the frame, for the convenience of the engineers. So that wouldn’t be a problem. Unless the victim struggled. You’d have to knock him out.”

The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 31

July 2015

“Or get him so drunk he passes out—” Parker pointed to Benchley, who was quietly snoring in his chair.

“No, we can’t murder Benchley. He still owes me money.”

“Well, we can’t murder Louis B. either then. He owes me a picture.”

“Yes, but now that we have a plan, we’ll have to murder the steward too, because he knows too much. We could practice on him. Would you like a martini, lad?”

“I don’t drink, sir,” I said, and excused myself to refill the coffee pot again. When I returned, they had decided that murdering a steward had no inherent drama. A murder mystery is only riveting if the victim is important. “So, you’re safe, dear boy,”

Bankhead reassured me. “You’re not important enough to kill. Don’t take it too hard.”

“Thank you,” I said, noncommittally.

“One of you wake up Benchley—”

“Why? He’ll just start talking—”

“He’s snoring!”

“You’d rather have him talking?”

And so it went. Somebody looked at me and asked why I was carrying a coffee pot instead of a martini pitcher, and they were off again. But they still weren’t talking about writing. Or anything relating to the literary world. I didn’t understand it.

Every other profession, the people in it talk shop. These people, they just drank. They did wake up Benchley in time to see the huge white slab of Boulder Dam. “Impressive! You could project movies on it!”

“It’s a long drive from Los Angeles. It’d better be one hell of a flick.”

Then they retired back to their chairs in the salon. “Las Vegas? Nothing there to see. Just a wide spot in the road. It’ll never amount to anything.”

Somebody remembered that Benchley had been procrastinating his way through a writer’s block—until he was told to go type the word “The” on a blank sheet of paper.

Dorothy Parker puffed on her cigarette and asked, “So how did that work, Robert?”

Benchley frowned. “How did what work?”

“The great ‘The’ experiment, remember?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Thank you.” He frowned again. “Well . . .” He cleared his throat, preparing himself for an extended explanation. “One has to be well-prepared for the task, you know. Procrastination is not for the faint-hearted. It takes genuine commitment. You cannot just sit and do nothing. You must make it appear as if you are preparing to do something. A pipe is very useful in that regard. It requires a great deal of attention. It’s an excellent way to look like you are preparing to get busy.

Lighting a pipe demands a specif ic ritual, an elaborate ritual, a very time-consum-ing ritual. There is the selection of tobacco, followed by the process of delicately f illing the bowl, pinch by pinch, then the tamping. One cannot tamp the tobacco too f irmly or it will be hard to light. Likewise, one cannot leave the leaves too loose or they will simply burn up. Then there is the application of the f ire. As soon as the match has been applied to the tobacco, the smoke is over. This necessitates ref illing, relighting, and oh, yes—reknocking. The knocking out of a pipe is as important as the smoking. You have to have the appropriate surface to knock the pipe on. Not just any table will do. No, knocking the pipe is a whole other ritual, you see, all part of the process, and if you leave any part of it out, you’re simply not serious about procrastinating.”

“Yes, you’ve bored us with this story before.” Kaufman yawned. “You really must write it and sell it someday so we won’t have to listen to it again. But we didn’t ask you how to procrastinate. Most of us already know how to do that, we’ve each developed our own specific set of skills. What we want to know is how well the experiment worked?”

32

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Asimov’s

“What experiment?”

“The one where you typed the word ‘The’ on a blank sheet of paper—remember?”

“Oh, that experiment. It worked very well. You were right. I typed the word ‘The’

and almost immediately, the rest of the words came flowing out as easily as if poured from a pitcher of martinis. Of which, I will have one, if you please, steward.” To the rest, he said, “It’s still sitting in my typewriter. Feel free to look.”

Unable to resist the invitation, the rest of the group scrambled to their feet and headed for the corridor, leaving Benchley behind with a martini glass held high in his hand. He saluted me with it, knocked it back, then held it up again for a re-f ill.

When the others returned from Benchley’s cabin, filing back in like children after recess, they were smiling and nodding to each other, but they were already talking about something else. Benchley waited expectantly for their reactions. Parker glowered at him as she seated herself. “Too clever by half.” A couple of the writers shook their heads as if Benchley had punned in public—a good pun, but still a pun, the literary equivalent of a fart. Bankhead gave him a scowl of approval. The one I’d identified as Kaufman parked himself, nodded and admitted, “Nice.”

I was curious too, but I couldn’t leave my station. By then we were coming out over the California coast and following U.S. Route 101 north. It ran all the way from Mexico to Canada, with portions of the route known as El Camino Real—“The Royal Road.”

The Spanish had built their twenty-one missions in California each one a single day’s travel from the next, so journeying missionaries would always have a safe place to rest each evening. Many of the state’s coastal towns and cities still retained the names of the original missions: San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Gabriel, Santa Catalina, Santa Ysabel, San Pedro, San Fernando, Santa Clarita, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Inez, Santa Cruz, San Jose, San Francisco, and a few more that always fell out of my head. How did I know all of this? Because it was part of Pan Am’s training for stewards. Passengers would always have questions about the scenery below. It was the stewards’ job to provide accurate answers. Any question we couldn’t answer was added to the training guide.

The rest of the journey was pretty much without incident. The Algonquins, exhausted from all their drinking, had given up their plans to murder Louis B. Mayer.

For some reason, they were now muttering imprecations against several New York critics—individuals who were not aboard. “Murdering a critic would only be poetic justice—” Bankhead said, “They’ve murdered so many shows.”

Benchley cleared his throat loudly. “I am a critic too, you know.”

“When you’re writing, yes. But most people know you as a humorist.”

“I resent that,” he replied, but without much emotion. He was giving more of his attention to his martini.

“Besides, you’re too nice to murder.”

“I resent that even more.”

“We can’t murder a critic. There would be too many suspects to make the plot workable.”

“There would be even more suspects if you killed Louis B. Mayer.”

“True, that. Maybe we should kill Benchley. Some people like him. That makes it even more of a mystery. Why would someone want to kill Robert Benchley?”

“I can think of—” Kaufman quickly counted off on his fingers. “—four reasons.”

“Besides that—”

“I think the question isn’t why, but who. ” Bankhead looked to me. “Oh, hello, dah-ling, bring those martinis over here. Tell me—would you like to murder Robert Benchley?”

The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 33

July 2015

Before I could answer, Dorothy Parker said, “Oh, no, no, no. He’s not important enough—”

“But he’s adorable enough. No one would ever suspect him. I know—” She waved her martini glass for effect, but to give her credit she didn’t spill a drop. The woman could hold her liquor. “I’ll tell you exactly why he wants to kill Robert Benchley. He’s a frustrated young writer and he’s jealous—that’s it! Jealous of all of us! Robert is just the f irst. Before the journey is over, he’ll kill every one of us. It’ll be just like Agatha Christie. Ten Little Indians. Only on an airship.” She turned to me. “Would you like that, dah-ling?”

As deadpan as I could manage, “It’s against airline policy to kill passengers. It might be bad for business.”

Bankhead guffawed like a choking foghorn. Quickly recovering herself, she turned to the rest, “You see, darlings. He’s perfect! Nobody would ever suspect him.”

Kaufman shook his head. “No, no, no. It won’t work. He’s scenery. The murderer has to be a lead, not a second banana. But I do like the idea of killing Benchley.

There’s a sadistic kind of elegance to it. Although once he’s dead, you lose some of your best opportunities for comic relief.”

Woollcott added, “Having the steward be the killer is too much like ‘the butler did it.’ ”

“Has the butler ever done it?” Parker asked. “I mean, how can it be a cliché if no-body’s ever written it? Maybe that’s how we make it work. If Benchley is the victim, then the other suspects have to be us. And here we are saying, ‘Oh, it couldn’t be the butler, that’s too obvious’—and it’s the butler all along. But we never considered it because we don’t like clichés.”

Silence, while they all considered it. I waited patiently to find out if I was going to be a murderer or not.

“Well . . .” said Kaufman, “We’d have to build up his part a bit. I do like the line about it being against airline policy to kill passengers. Notice he didn’t say he wouldn’t do it—only that it’s against airline policy. Nice bit of misdirection there.”

“That little lecture about the Spanish missions—and all those other bits of triva too. Electrical engines and lift bags and why helium makes your voice squeaky. We can use all of that—we’ll play him up as stiff and boring. He’ll be a dry comic presence for the f irst two acts. In act three, we reveal his seething core of resentment against those with real talent.”

Bankhead slid her hand up my arm. “What do you think, dah-ling?”

I couldn’t say what I was thinking. Fortunately, I was rescued by the chime announcing afternoon tea. Having missed breakfast, having drunk most of their lunch, the Algonquins agreed among themselves almost immediately that food was as good an excuse as any to relocate. They rose almost as one and headed for the dining hall, where trays of sandwiches and salads were being set out.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last to follow, still holding a glass of whiskey. He stopped and frowned at me, as if trying to f igure something out. “Why would you want to murder Benchley?” he asked, very seriously. “I think I’d be a much better victim, don’t you?”

“A very good point, sir. Shall I help you to your table?”

A southerly headwind slowed the Liberty, so we observed sunset while still passing over Santa Cruz. On the starboard side, we could see the Giant Dipper roller coaster, the highlight of the Beach Boardwalk amusement park. There were colored lights f lashing, people shouting and pointing, and carousel music. After that, the hills darkened quickly, a color somewhere between emerald and blackened indigo.

34

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On the port side, the sun went fireburst orange, then sullen crimson as it dipped into the horizon. For a few magic moments, the ocean glimmered with golden highlights across the surface of the waves. Several of the photographers got into a heated discussion about the limitations of monochrome and whether or not Kodak’s new color film—called Kodachrome, of course—would ever be able to capture the dynamic range of such a view.

The Algonquin group’s tea stretched on so long, they decided to remain in the dining hall and wait for dinner, now planned as a gracious evening affair over the San Francisco Bay, followed by a joyous welcome at San Francisco Municipal Airport—and apparently, I was no longer an accessory to their murder plot. This which might have been just as well, because I had already begun considering several better mechanisms of violence, including a way to frame Hugo Gernsback for the entire affair.

No, these people were not a good influence. Any last thoughts I had still been nur-turing about the glamor of writing had begun to evaporate somewhere after their second pitcher of martinis. What was left was a sodden residue, about as appetizing as the last forgotten olive in Dorothy Parker’s glass.

But while they were at dinner . . . when no one was around, I took advantage of the opportunity to let myself into Benchley’s cabin, ostensibly to make sure he had clean towels and a last full bottle of gin.

His typewriter sat on the desk, a tidy stack of paper next to it. In the machine, a single sheet. I had to look.

There, at the top of the page, a single sentence.

The hell with it.

Now I did have a reason to kill him.

It was too late for this voyage.

I got him on the return trip. ❍

The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or, Why I Murdered Robert Benchley 35

ACRES

OF

PERHAPS

Will Ludwigsen

Will Ludwigsen sometimes wonders if he might have been born a little too late, missing his chance to write for the great old anthology shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight

Zone. Instead, he teaches undergraduate creative writing at the University of North Florida, itself an experience of eerie terror. His recent collection In Search Of and Others was a nominee for last year’s Shirley Jackson Award.

If you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of schedule in the early sixties, you probably saw a show that some friends of mine and I worked on called Acres of Perhaps. By “certain kind of person,” I mean insomniac or alcoholic; by “certain kind of schedule,” I mean awake at 11:30 at night with only your f lickering gray-eyed television for company.

With any luck, it left you feeling that however weird your life was, it could always be weirder. Or at least more ironic. We would have settled for that in those earnest days.

They have conventions these days about our show where I bloviate on stage about what the aliens represented or how hard it was to work with Claude Akins or what we used to build the Martian spaceships. Graduate students write papers with titles like “Riding the Late Night Fantastic: Acres of Perhaps and the Post-War American Para-Consciousness.” I’m now an ambassador for the show and for my friends, and I’m the worst possible choice.

I wasn’t the one with the drive to create big things like our producer Hugh Kline, and I damned well wasn’t the one with the vision and the awe like David Findley. I was just Barry Weyrich, the guy who wrote about spacemen in glass bubble helmets, who put commas in everyone’s scripts, who never had writer’s block, who grimaced whenever they talked about “magic.”

And if there’s anyone to blame for the shriveling death of that show’s magic, it’s me.

Jesus, I don’t write anything for years and when Tony dies, bam, I’m sitting at his old computer typing about David Findley. David Fucking Findley, who wasn’t even really David Fucking Findley.

Not that we felt magical making Acres of Perhaps. The question for every episode wasn’t whether it was good but whether it was Monday: that’s when we had to have 37

July 2015
the cans shipped off to the network for broadcast. The money men at the studio had no idea whether what we did was good or not, but they gave Hugh a lot of freedom because they sure didn’t want to run anything valuable at 11:30 at night. As long as medicated powders and furniture polish kept flying off the shelves, we could have shown a half hour of fireflies knocking around in a jar for all they cared.

We came close.

You might remember “Woodsy,” an episode David not only wrote but shot himself.

That’s the one where the camera stays fixed on a dark patch of woods at night for the whole half hour, and after five minutes you see tiny faces watching you through the leaves grinning madly, first a couple and then many more. About ten minutes before the end, a half dozen of these little goblin people drag a man’s body across the camera’s field of vision, tugging it in bursts until the shoes disappear on the left side.

Then something pushes the camera over. Roll credits.

Hugh almost burst a blood vessel in his neck when David came back with that one, but he’d borrowed the camera all weekend and there wasn’t much else to do but send off the episode and see what happened. A whole big nothing, that’s what: people watched it, wondered what the fuck was going on, and then went to bed. We got letters about it, but no more than we did for the episode about the Hitler robot.

David pulled shit like that all the time. He was the tortured genius, treated with delicacy, and he pissed me off. I was young and insecure with a cottage in Venice to pay for, and here was this guy living like Poe in a boardinghouse, writing unfilmable stories about finding dead satyrs in a Manhattan street. David never seemed to understand there was a time when the words had to hit the page and go out to a real world of people who just wanted to be entertained.

Remember the one with two Jewish teenagers learning to fly as they plunged from the Stairs of Death holding hands at Mauthausen? That was David’s. There was one told from the point of view of an atomic bomb as it dropped, admiring landmarks and slowly revealing its target is Washington; that got us a visit from the FBI. We lost General Foods over the one where Abe Lincoln turns out to be the second coming of Jesus, but at least I talked them out of spreading his arms on the stage of Ford’s Theater at the end.

Hugh was the big picture guy—the big exploding “gee-whiz” picture guy. He liked to hold up his hands, framing the world with his fingers and imagining it better. To him, the three-act structure of our stories was, “What the fuck? Holy shit! Oh, my God.” Why anyone trusted him with money, I have no idea, but he was no help with David.

That made me the bad guy. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have an imagination, either: I’d written for the pulps since the forties and knew my way around a graveyard or a ray gun. But I sure as hell wasn’t writing scripts about two Scotsmen pulling in Nessie’s corpse with hooks so the tourists would never know she was dead. It fell to me to point out what was too expensive to film (walking skyscrapers in a city of the future) or too skull-cracked crazy (octopus women driving walking skyscrapers in a city of the future).

I had to make the characters sound like real people, too, not all breathlessly eloquent.

Hugh appreciated that, I guess—the balance between us. Maybe David did, too.

Thinking back on it, I was the only one with the problem.

David was so much younger than I was, very young, and he carried around an old-fashioned carpet bag with clothes and a portable typewriter, ready to sleep or write anywhere. I had no idea where he got the little money he had—God knows it wasn’t rolling in from Hugh—but he spent it cracking up a car at least once a year and buying girls drinks at the Brown Derby. Hugh and I once had to bail him out of jail because he woke up inside an empty water tower.

He was six years too early for the world, born for bell-bottoms and LSD. I was six years too late with my crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses. It’s taken me a half century 38

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s
to admit this, but yeah, he was everything I didn’t know I wanted to be. We were friends the way television writers are, smiling like sharks at each other across a dinner table.

I’m grateful to Hugh and David for at least one thing, sharks though they were: never seeming to care Tony and I were together. That meant a lot in the days when it was dangerous for two men to get a hotel room, when a neighbor peeved about too much noise could call the cops to report something worse.

Yes, they sometimes cracked jokes about where one applied to be a “conf irmed bachelor,” but they liked Tony. They liked the sandwiches he’d make on poker nights, not little triangles with the crusts cut off but giant heroes.

They didn’t like that he was almost unbeatable at cards.

“Please,” Hugh said once, “make an expression of any kind. Look down at your cards and then up at us.”

Tony shook his head and then drew his hand down in front of his face like a curtain.

“Buddy,”—that was what Tony said in public instead of “honey”—“with guys like us, it’s all poker face.”

We were midway through filming episodes for the second season when the Mullard family came looking for David at the studio. He didn’t often show up even when the story was his, but when it wasn’t, he was usually sleeping off a drunk or reading about ancient Egyptians in the library or doing some other goddamned thing.

We were working on the episode “The Dreams Come By Here Regular.” I’m sure you remember it; it starred that child actress, what’s-her-name, and she gets lost in the woods to be rescued by the ghosts of escaped slaves. It was all moralistic Hugh, right down to the fading strains of spirituals at the end—pretty gutsy for 1962, though, when people were getting their skulls split open for thinking those things in the South.

The stage was all set up as a forest at night where the action took place, and our guys were good at building forests. The trunks were huge and roughly coated, and the branches drooped with nets of fake Spanish moss. Hugh and I were looking over the script when a beam of glaring California light crawled our way across the stage.

“Close the goddamned door!” the cameraman shouted.

Figure after figure stepped in through the light, and they wove their way through our trees like pygmies coming for us in the jungle. If we’d turned the cameras on, we could have gotten an eerie scene, and I’m sure Hugh regretted it later.

A stern matron in a graying beehive came out f irst, clutching a patent-leather pocketbook with both hands. She examined our faces in the dim illumination behind the equipment, squinting at us each in turn.

“What can we do for you?” Hugh asked.

She didn’t answer, only squaring off with him as though ready for an honest-to-God fistfight. A fistfight, by the way, that you could see she had no plans to lose.

Before it came to that, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen came out from the fake woods behind her. She was a strawberry blonde, and she had all the grace and delicacy the old lady didn’t—that most ladies didn’t. Her calm eyes and strong brows, though, gave the impression that she’d learned the womenly art of making things happen with leverage from the sides of life.

But that’s David talk.

“Hello, gentlemen,” the woman said, surprisingly at us. “We’re looking for Leroy Dutton.”

Hugh glanced around. “Any of you call yourself Leroy?”

The grips, the cable jockeys, the flannel-shirted union men who seemed to be paid to drink our coffee all froze, perhaps contemplating if it would be worth pretending to be Leroy for that pretty girl . . . and that awful woman. Nobody spoke up.

Acres of Perhaps

39

July 2015

By then, the rest of the clan had come through—a father in a loose tie, a couple of strapping brothers in coveralls, and a kid sister with cat-eye glasses. They could have been the cast of a variety show a few stages over, something wholesome sponsored by a bread company with square dancing. All they needed were straw hats.

“No Leroy here, I’m afraid,” Hugh said.

The older lady snapped open her pocketbook and handed him a photograph. “He might not be calling himself Leroy anymore.”

I looked over Hugh’s shoulder. It was a wedding portrait, and the beauty on our stage was the bride, gazing up at her groom and holding a bouquet of wildflowers between them. The groom, of course, was David.

“This was taken three years ago,” she said. “Before Leroy up and left our Melody.

Not much before, let me tell you. Weeks. Right after he came back from the woods.”

“He’s a writer,” Melody explained, as though we wouldn’t know.

“He calls himself a writer,” the old lady corrected. “He’s a husband and a son-in-law and an employee of the J.W. Mullard Feed Company is what he is.”

A husband and a son and an employee—none were things I’d ever have linked to David Findley. I mean, everyone working on that show was unemployable. We’d been too blind or flatfooted or gay to go to Korea. Some of us had dabbled in college, but those days were cut short by a few bad creative writing classes and a lack of money.

We worked as clerks, as janitors, as too-old newspaper boys. And we worked on our writing, of course, holding the few checks that came in just long enough to clear before taking everyone else out for booze. We had mortgages; David had a trunk full of paperbacks. He could jump into a borrowed convertible with a cocktail waitress and go racing in the desert at three in the morning.

Though apparently he couldn’t after all.

Hugh was smooth. “Doesn’t look familiar to me, and I know almost every writer in this town. What about you, Barry?”

I swallowed hard and looked at the picture. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before.”

The old lady wasn’t buying it, and I’m not sure Melody was either.

“Oh,” Melody said, curling one side of her lips in thought. “Is there another show like this one? With little spacemen and ghosts and things?”

Hugh put his hands on his hips. “Is there another show like this one? Ma’am, this is the most inventive television program in the history of the medium. Is there—”

I cut him off before he dug himself any deeper. “What he means to say is that there are shows passingly similar to this one, and your husband could work for any of those. General Mills Playhouse, The Witching Hour, Dr. Hyde’s Nightly Ride . . .

maybe they’re worth a try.”

“They’re not as good as we are,” Hugh couldn’t resist saying.

Melody considered this. “Well, he’d only work for the best. If he hasn’t come here yet, he will. Can you tell him I’m looking for him?”

“Sure thing,” I said.

“And that I love him?”

“Of course.”

“And that I’ll always know who he really is?”

Hugh thought a second before saying, “Okay.”

The old lady pointed at Hugh. “You’d better be careful when you see him. He can take on any form.”

“Believe me, lady, I know the type,” Hugh said.

The family turned and headed back for the door one by one. The littlest Mullard sibling, the girl with the glasses, waited until last and handed us each something out of the pocket of her sweater: crosses fashioned from Popsicle sticks.

40

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

“In case he comes at night,” she said. Then she followed her family out through our woods and into the sunshine.

Hugh shook his head and tossed his Popsicle cross to a grip. “Can we get some footage shot today?” he barked.

Tony, by the way, was not particularly religious, which is one of about ten thousand things I liked about him. It would have been hard to be in those years, living like we were. The only place to feel and think differently than everyone else was on silly space-man shows like Acres of Perhaps . . . shows you watched with thousands of other people alone in the dark.

We found David where we usually did when he wasn’t at the studio: hunched in a booth at the Derby typing away on the portable with a glass of something clear and poisonous by his side. Hugh slid onto one seat and I slid onto the other right next to David.

“So, Leroy, tell us about Melody,” I said.

He paused with his fingers above the keys but then plunged them down again almost in a chord to finish the sentence. He batted the carriage lever and sent it clunk-ing to the far side.

“Melody,” he said, “is the most beautiful and brilliant woman in the world, and I don’t want to even think about your eyes on her.”

“Well, everybody at the studio had eyes on her today,” I said. “She came looking for you.”

“Brought her whole clan,” Hugh added.

“Probably spelled with a K,” I said.

David tapped a Chesterf ield from a pack and lit it. There was a shimmy in his hands. “That so?” he said.

“That’s so,” I said. I gave him time to take a drag and let out a whisper of smoke, maybe think of something to say next. When he said nothing, I did instead.

“So tell us how your marriage in a hick town crushed your artistic sensibilities until you had to break free, please. I’d like to hear it for the hundredth time, and I’ll bet your version is the best.”

“I didn’t want to leave her. I had to.”

I leaned back from the table. “Ohhhh. You had to.”

He waved his cigarette near his face. “Look, I didn’t want to end up here, for Christ’s sake. I’m from Jenkins Notch, North Carolina, and I spent my first twenty years thinking I’d be right happy working in a farmer’s store until I could afford a place of my own. I’m a hick, whatever you assholes think, and I’m not here because I want to be famous or rich. Shit, look at you guys.”

The waitress was sliding a gin and tonic over to Hugh, who came here so often he didn’t have to order it.

“Writing is your job. You talk about it, think about it, work out ways to do it better.

I want to get rid of it.”

I said, “Yes, it’s a bitch to be a genius. We get it.”

“No, you don’t. I’d go home with Melody right now if she was here. If I could.”

“Nothing’s stopping you,” I said. “Except maybe an aversion to decency.”

“It wasn’t like that,” David said. “I liked living there. I loved living with her. We were like limbs of the same tree growing back together after a fire. Even her sweat smelled good, you know? I’d come home and she’d be flushed from walking back from the schoolhouse where she taught and she’d have this scent of . . . the whole earth, really. Like a creek smells in the summer, or firewood in the winter.”

That was eerily and terrifyingly sweet for him to say. This was a man who’d written a script about how every Mercury rocket runs on mulched pixies for fuel, after all.

Acres of Perhaps

41

July 2015

“I didn’t used to drink when I lived back there.” His twang had come back and he sounded possessed by himself. “But there was this family—probably still is—called the McDantrys and they made moonshine out in the woods. They sold it in town from their truck, and some idiot got some for Melody and me for a wedding present.”

“Something borrowed, something blue, something toxic . . .” I started before trailing off.

“And one night she and I are in the new house and we’re rough-housing and laughing and she gets it into her head to try the stuff. ‘Nobody here but us chickens,’ she says, taking the Mason jar off the top shelf of the pantry and twisting off the cap. The fumes distorted her face right before she took a big pull from it, and then she handed it to me.”

“So what are you going to do? Let her unman you?” Hugh asked.

“Right. I woke up the next morning in a rocking chair with a fawn licking from the streak of vomit down the front of my shirt. All the windows of the house were broken. Inside, I hear this sobbing.”

He lit another cigarette and exhaled from his mouth.

“I go in, and sure enough, there’s Melody all beat up, her face puffy and bulging like a rotten plum. She’s crying and I try to console her, but she hides behind the kitchen table and won’t let me near her. I’m all looking down at my hands and I want to cut them off.

“But I’m still not thinking clearly enough, so I stagger off to the woods to find the McDantrys. They sold bad stuff, right? I could have fucking killed someone. And if I still had it in me, I might as well let them have a little.”

By then in David’s story, Hugh had gotten this look on his face that he wanted to write this down in case it got good. I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking much differently myself. Hell, we could use the forest set we’d already built.

But then the story got strange even by our standards.

“Out back of the Mullard property was a swamp of pines and cypress trees stretching for miles. The ground there is blackened mud and the canopy is all grown together. The McDantrys had put planks across the cypress knees so you’d walk on this tottering path zigging and zagging through the woods. Some were slick with mold so I had to be careful, but I followed them as far as they went—a long damned way.

“It got as dark as dusk back there, and it wouldn’t have been hard to lose your sense of time. So it might have been an hour or even three until I came upon a big rotten cypress stump the folks around there called the Old Knot. When I say ‘big,’ I mean easily the size of a bus, hollowed in the middle like a bottomless well.

“There was a still there all right, camouflaged with broken branches. I was tempted to kick it off into the pit but, frankly, I’d have preferred to do that to the McDantrys.

“Of course, none were there. So I set about to wait. I walked around on the planks a bit, holding out my arms to keep my balance. I fiddled with the still to see how it worked. And then I leaned over and looked down into the stump.”

“What did you see?” Hugh asked.

“I didn’t see anything,” David said. “It was dark. But I heard a hollow whistle, a little like the Knot was breathing—like it was the mouth of some wooden giant asleep under a blanket of mud. I reached my hand over the middle and the breeze was cool and rhythmic.”

The waitress set a beer in front of me and I flinched.

“The weirdest thing was that when I shifted my weight on the board and it let out a squeal, the breeze stopped. Like something was holding its breath for me. And I wanted badly for it to start again—like when a friend jumps into a quarry pond and doesn’t come up in what seems like forever?

“ ‘Hey,’ I shouted, but there was no answer.

42

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

“I got this idea I had to climb down there no matter how far it went, had to squeeze its heart with both my arms to start it again. That was crazy—for all I knew, it was a nest of rattlesnakes.

“But standing there thinking it over, I was okay with that. What else did anybody need me for? The least I could do was make Melody a happy widow instead of a miserable wife.

“So I leaned and leaned like a coward until gravity made the decision for me.”

“Jesus,” Hugh said.

“I fell for a long, long time—so long that I had dreams. The vibration of cold whispers on my ears. The tremble of f ingers up and down my arms. Something with claws combing over my scalp. I smelled oceans from other places, imagined music played with water and leaves.”

Bullshit, I thought . . . but didn’t say.

“And then I hit the ground. Or so I figured—I woke up flat on my face in my own front yard. Melody came running out and kissed me and said we’d never talk about it again and it wasn’t my fault and she’d still love me forever.”

Here he paused.

“Well, a funny thing occurred to me that night, naked with our sweat soaked into the sheets and our scents on each other’s lips. What if this was the bottom of the Old Knot, with a different Melody and a different house and a different town? What if up there somewhere was a woman still scared of me? And why wasn’t this one?”

Leave it to David Findley, or Leroy Whatever, to have the world’s most sublime and esoteric drinking blackout.

“After, I had weird dreams of what was going on here or up there, and I noticed things didn’t always connect. I’d think I’d said something here but really I’d said it in a dream up top of the Old Knot, or I’d lose a day in one place or the other. Folks got nervous around me because I’d stare off somewhere and then write down what I could in a notebook I got from the dime store. When that wasn’t fast enough, I got the typewriter.”

“So why’d you leave?” Hugh asked.

“Melody wasn’t worried at first when I clattered away in the kitchen with a board balanced on the arms of a chair. But then I stopped sleeping and going to work. I stopped leaving the house and shaving. I stopped talking, stopped focusing on anything in front of me. She called over my folks to talk sense to me. Reverend Pritchett stopped by. And when I heard them talking about ‘getting me out,’ I decided I’d better get myself out first. I packed up one night and lit out west. And the only thing I can make or sell is . . . whatever that fall gave me.”

David drank the rest of his liquor in one long swallow. You’d think he’d have learned not to do that from his own story.

And that’s what it was: a story. A good one, like all of his, but a tall tale myth meant to make him seem like the Paul Bunyan of weird fiction or something.

“So you drank bad moonshine, beat up your wife while barely conscious, stumbled into the woods, and got a concussion after falling into an old tree stump?” I said.

David eyed me calmly. “Yeah, if you think so.”

“One of those McDantry people dragged you back home where you came to, and ever since, you’ve suffered the lingering effects of your concussion, plus some uncharacteristic guilt. Mystery solved.”

“If you say so,” he said.

Hugh, not helping, asked, “So there are different versions of us back where you came from?”

“Yeah,” David said. “Barry here is writing for the Saturday Evening Post.”

Hugh and I stared and he let us dangle a moment before laughing.

Acres of Perhaps

43

July 2015

“Barry, I have no idea if you even exist, here or there. I’m not sure I’m creative enough to invent you or Hugh. Or, shit, all of Hollywood. Who would imagine the studio system? Jesus, I hope not me.”

Then, being writers, we spent the night getting drunk and bitching about the money men.

You know, Tony and I never got to speed around the desert in a Karmann Ghia convertible like David did with his girlfriends. We could never fight in public with me chasing him out of a restaurant to apologize, either, or walk close on the pier. We lived in a closet built for two for fifty years, and when I finally found the guts to step out, he was too sick to step out with me.

The saying goes that to be great is to be misunderstood, and most people assume this also means that to be misunderstood is to be great. But there are lots of misunderstood people who are a long way from greatness.

When I crawled into my bed beside Tony that night, I wondered which one David

“Leroy” Findley was: a visionary or some delusional hick good at sounding like one.

Or maybe there wasn’t a difference.

What did “Woodsy” even mean when you thought about it? Anybody can film random movements and rely on the viewers’ perceptions to make it art, but unless it says something, what’s the damned point? Acres of Perhaps wasn’t in the “giving-voice-to-David’s-demons” business; it was in the “entertaining-and-enlightening”

one. We made people think about race, nostalgia, paranoia . . . not the stitching of the Universe. Someone could create the Clorox Kafka Hour for that.

Tony rolled over under his sheets to face me. We’d just moved to this Craftsman bungalow in Venice then, and air conditioning was a science fictional concept to us.

Even a fan was something that cost money, and so he slept without much on at all. I remember this now only because, well, I thought right then that Tony was as good as Melody any day of the week.

I told him what had happened, about the Mullard family and David’s secret identity, about how the whole genius act had a clichéd story behind it—except for the falling into the netherworld part which was pure delusion. He listened with his head propped up in his hand under the moonlight, asking questions and nodding at the answers.

At the end, he asked, “So what is he going to do?”

David had ducked the question at the Derby so I could only offer my guess. “He’ll probably keep avoiding her until she gives up and goes home.”

He considered a moment. “You sound angry about it.”

“I don’t think angry is the right word. Annoyed. I’m annoyed things are easier for him because he has people like Hugh and Melody and me carrying his load of the ordinary.”

“You know what I think?” That was one of my favorite phrases of his; it was like a motor revving. “Men like David make women into muses so they have someone to blame when they don’t deliver the goods. And they make women into anti-muses, too.”

“Anti-muses.”

“Yeah. Like this poor Melody. She’s the boat anchor mooring him to reality, right?

So he builds it all up until she seems to be after his soul, and then he’s justified in leaving her.”

Tony was a part-time illustrator for magazines in L.A. and San Francisco, and he had a way of drawing exactly what you needed to see but no more. He sometimes did it with words, too.

“Do you think I’m that way?”

He smiled and reached for my hands. “You don’t have a muse, love. In the same way astronauts and carpenters don’t. You just do things.”

44

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

Tony never misunderstood me, and sometimes that was consolation enough for not being great.

I’d leaned in closer when there came a thunder of fists against the front door.

Tony sighed and gathered up the blankets around him. Then he reached for his cigarettes and said, “Better go see what David wants.”

“What makes you think it’s David?”

He tapped the end of the pack. “It’s the way his life works.”

I pulled on an undershirt over my pajama pants and headed for the door. A shadowed head bobbed in the window, and I could tell from the wild spray of hair that it really was David.

“What do you want?” I asked through the door.

“Barry! You’ve got to let me in. They’re after me.”

“Who?”

“Melody and her folks!”

I imagined them walking down the street with torches and pitchforks, and I’ll admit I liked the image.

“Where are they?”

“They’re here,” he cried, twisting the doorknob and thumping himself against it.

I opened the door and he stumbled inside. He tried his best to slam it again but I was holding it.

“This is silly,” I said. “They’re people. Be with her, don’t be with her—just tell her the truth.”

Out in the darkened street, I saw the Mullard family walking abreast in a single line, patrolling with flashlights like you would if searching for a lost dog. They pivoted as one group at the end of my driveway and marched toward us.

“Okay,” I said, closing the door.

David did me the courtesy of bolting it shut. He reached for a chair to prop under it but I stopped him.

I watched through the window as the Mullards formed an arc around the entrance to my house like Christmas carolers. Melody left the group and knocked gently.

“Mr. Weyrich? I think Leroy is inside your house. Can he come out so we can talk to him?”

“Hold on a moment,” I yelled. Then, turning to David, I whispered, “What do you expect me to do?”

“Tell them to go away. Tell them you’re calling the cops.”

“Mr. Weyrich?” This time it was the mother. “That’s my daughter’s lawful husband in there.”

David shook his head but I leaned closer to the window. “Look, I don’t want to be involved in this at all. Maybe everybody should call it a night, get some sleep, and then get together somewhere tomorrow to talk it all over.”

The Mullards closed in.

“Hey, Tony,” David said.

Tony was leaning in the hallway in his navy blue pajamas. He lowered his cigarette from his lips and said, “Hello, David.”

“You’ve got to talk some sense into her, Tony.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Why me?”

“Because you have feelings and things,” David said quickly, still peering through the window.

I watched as the two brothers broke off from the group and out of my vision. I wondered if I’d remembered to lock the back door. Then I wondered if it wouldn’t be just as well for these guys to carry David out of my house and my life. Maybe I could hurry and unlock it—

Acres of Perhaps

45

July 2015

Tony came closer. “Melody, honey?”

“Yes,” was the quiet response.

“My name is Tony. I’m Barry’s roommate.”

Isn’t that funny how quickly it ran off his tongue? He didn’t even have to pause anymore.

“David—Leroy—isn’t in a condition to talk to you right now.”

“Has he changed form?”

Tony turned to David; he’d sat down in one of our living room chairs and was squeezing his temples with his palms.

“No, he’s still Leroy,” Tony said.

On the other side of the house, the back doorknob rattled. Then a giant rhomboid head with speckled stubble craned in through the open kitchen window. He peered around, looking down at the sink and up at the ceiling, maybe judging if there was room to climb through.

“Hey,” I said, stepping over to the sink. I picked up the fancy new water sprayer gizmo and gave him a quick spritz in the face. He retreated sputtering and I slammed the window closed.

By now, David was holding his head in his hands, covering his eyes.

“Who the hell are these people?” I said.

“They think I’m possessed by the devil,” he said quietly.

“So do I, but you don’t see me climbing into people’s houses to get you.”

“They found me at the boardinghouse, I have no idea how. Melody’s always been able to find me wherever I was like she can feel me, a phantom limb.”

I wondered if Tony could sense me that way. Probably, knowing him.

“Do you have anything to drink?” David asked.

“For you, no,” Tony said. “You smell like a gas tank.”

“It’s how I listen,” he said.

Outside, the Mullards began to sing. They weren’t bad a capella, but when the little one started in on the banjo, it was actually beautiful. Beautiful and scary because, Jesus, who carries around a goddamned banjo?

I glowered at David with my arms folded. “Your whole life is one long episode of Acres of Perhaps, isn’t it?”

So began a strange siege, me sitting on the couch keeping an eye on the Mullards through the blinds, and Tony sitting in the other recliner watching David. The Mullards sang hymns in low voices while David muttered to himself with his hands clawed into the arms of my chair like an astronaut going up.

“This is ridiculous,” I whispered to Tony. I probably didn’t have to.

“Maybe everybody will get tired and go home,” he said.

“We are home,” I said.

Not long after, a rancid odor overtook the room. It took me a moment to realize what it was: David, head lolled back and his mouth wide open, had pissed himself in my favorite chair.

Tony figured it out at the same time. “It’s not like that chair was cheap,” he said.

I grabbed David by his shirt and yanked him up. A dark spot had bloomed on his pants.

“David, wake up!”

He rolled his head to one side and then the other, mumbling. The words were faint and garbled at f irst but then they resolved like a radio bearing in on the right station.

“What if people make cities itch?” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “ ‘Antelope umbrellas crying in the wind.’ There. I’m a genius, too.”

46

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

“You’re the one who thinks it’s magic.”

“People who piss themselves in my house don’t get to ever use that word around me again.”

He tilted his head back way farther than I thought possible, opened his mouth like the tall front doors of a church, and let out a long, low wail. Then he pivoted his head forward again and said, “Where’s my typewriter?”

I glanced around in case he’d brought it inside. When I didn’t see it, I opened the blinds and squinted on the porch. There was his black case sitting amongst the Mullards.

“You really want it?”

“Barry,” Tony said in his admonishing voice.

“Yes,” David said. “I’ve got to get this down.”

“Excellent,” I said. I turned the deadbolt on the door.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Tony asked.

“Never surer,” I said, opening it.

The Mullards all stood from where they were sitting on the low adobe wall, looks of surprise on their faces.

“He’s all yours,” I said, shoving him into their arms.

The two beefy brothers caught him while the mother looked down with disgust.

She’d probably have let him hit the cement face first.

“It’s okay,” Melody said, her hands on the sides of his face.

“No, it isn’t,” David groaned.

“Peace be with you, praise the Lord, whatever the fuck,” I said, holding up my hand jauntily and then slamming the door.

“Hugh’s going to kill you,” Tony said.

“No, he’s not,” I said absently, watching through the blinds as the Mullard brothers hoisted David on their shoulders like a trophy deer. “Jesus is cheaper than detox.”

They’d left David’s typewriter behind and, well, you can’t leave something like that lying around. I reached out and grabbed it.

David was a drunk, an eloquent drunk, and it was hard to blame him because hey, you’ve got to do whatever makes you brave. For some people that’s booze, for others it’s drugs, for others still it’s narcissism or vengeance or desperation. I don’t know what made it possible for me to face the page, but keeping stupid words like “magic”

out of my head probably helped—telling myself it was like making a chair or a sandwich instead of something alive.

It’s not what you think, that I jumped on a chance to take out a rival. After that night, my frustrations with David turned to pity. He happened to be sick in a way that helped him write stories for our television show, but it wasn’t comfortable for him. It hurt him to do. It might even have killed him one day.

But first, as Tony predicted, Hugh wanted to kill me.

“ ‘Jesus is cheaper than detox’? That’s what you have to say?” he told me at the studio the next day. “People come back from detox, Barry.”

“He’ll come back. They might not even get him all the way to Jenkins Notch. We’re going to get a collect call from a Howard Johnson’s in Kansas after he escapes, and we’ll go pick him up. But you know what? He’ll damned well be sober.”

“You understand he’s the engine of this whole show, don’t you?”

“Well, I like to think I’m useful, too.”

Hugh brandished his clipboard over his head. “You’re the brakes! You’re the rearview mirror!”

Acres of Perhaps

47

July 2015

“Okay, well, fuck you. But listen. David drunk would last what, another season? At the most.”

“You don’t know that!”

“At the most. Then he’d wrap himself around a tree or hang himself by his belt in a closet. You know how many scripts he’d write then? Zero.”

“They’re going to make him into a revivalist preacher.”

Okay, I smiled a little to imagine old Leroy Dutton swinging a Bible over his head on a plywood stage somewhere, sweat staining the armpits of his short-sleeved but-toned shirt. He’d be good at it, I thought. Quick on his feet, anyway.

“Look,” I said. “he’s a married man. He has a wife and responsibilities and we shouldn’t interfere with that just because you think he’s the only way to make a television show.”

“Married man?” Hugh said. “What the hell do you know about being married?”

I used to think Hugh only meant about 30 percent of what he said, less when he was angry, but it was funny how even irrational, he still remembered where to hit me.

I was considering where to hit him back when the stage door opened again and for the second time in as many days, Melody Mullard Dutton was walking through our woods. She was by herself this time, thankfully.

“There’s something wrong with David,” she said.

“Of course there is,” I said.

You know what Tony did every morning for fifty years? He’d open the office curtains facing out to the street, tying them neatly to the side. He’d straighten papers on the desk. He’d set down a cup of coffee he’d brewed on the stove, the way he knew I liked it best. He’d turn on the typewriter.

And because he did, I sat down every day. Sometimes I’d peck something out, but mostly I didn’t.

David had escaped, though he was hardly on the lam: he jumped out of the Mullard’s 1940 DeSoto at the intersection of Wilshire and LaBrea on the way out of town, and now they were pretty sure he was holed up at the Derby. It says all you need to know about Hugh that he was relieved a beautiful woman and her good Christian family had failed to lure his writer to a wholesome life in Jenkins Notch.

“He knows where his home is,” Hugh said later. “Not shuff ling barefoot with a bunch of Snuffy Smith castoffs.”

The only thing keeping the Mullard boys from storming into the Derby and carrying David out on their shoulders like a sack of grain was that Melody had a plan. In Hugh’s office with her hands folding and unfolding in her lap, she explained it to us.

“Leroy thinks he’s fallen through that old stump and he’s now living on the other side, right?”

I had doubts he thought so literally, but I nodded with Hugh.

“When she taught me how to sew, Mawmaw,”—I think that’s what she called her, and it made me think of a giant double mouth lined with sharp teeth—“told me that sometimes the only way to undo a knot is to push the needle back through it.”

“Okay,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I think we might be getting a bit too literal here—”

“So you want to push him back through the Knot again?” Hugh asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of getting him back to North Carolina in the first place, does it?” I asked.

“We wouldn’t have to if there was a forest here.”

48

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

Of course, there happened to be the perfect forest not forty feet from us. A week earlier and the stage would have been New York City. A week later and it would be acting as Moon Base Theta. The Mullards had shown up right in the middle of our very own North Carolina backwoods, almost as though it was destiny.

“All it needs is a Knot,” she added. “Or something he thinks is one.”

I watched Hugh’s eyebrows lift in excitement as they did before any new production, when the budget shortfalls and actor disagreements and special effects problems hadn’t started yet. If there was ever a man born to build a fake portal between worlds to convince a half-mad, half-drunk genius he was sane again . . . it was Hugh Kline.

The question, though, was why he’d want to do it, aside from the artistic challenge.

As he leaned across his desk with a pencil and paper so Melody could sketch the stump, I wondered what his angle could be. When he glanced at me and grinned, I knew it for sure.

The Mullards wanted an exorcism. They assumed a sober, demon-free Leroy Dutton would climb out of that stump all blinking in the light of Jesus to return to Jenkins Notch. Hugh, on the other hand, assumed David Findley would climb out, look around at his crazy hick relatives and then never leave Los Angeles again. He wasn’t exorcising the Devil. He was exorcizing the Mullards.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about working with writers, it’s to meet them on their own level,” he told me after Melody was gone.

“What’s my level?” I asked.

“You don’t have a level, Barry. That’s why I like you.”

And hearing that—knowing it—solidified which fate I wanted for David Findley.

It’s not like I never wrote again after the show went under. I moved on to comedies and little dramas to keep food on the table, not because I was gifted at it, but because I showed up and produced words when they needed them. In Hollywood, that beats genius every time.

I never knew why guys like David Findley got all the credit for creativity. Anyone can wave his hands and yell, “Magic dust!” or “interdimensional tree stump” to explain everything away.

We left the set decorator to build the stump while we went to fetch David. He’d slipped away from the Derby by the time we got there, and we checked two bars before finding him again. I don’t remember the place, but I do remember him sitting under the only bright light in the room, writing in a goddamned steno pad with an arc of empty glasses around it.

“Do we grab him or what?” I asked Hugh.

“No, let’s try this,” Hugh said, hunching a little toward the back as though he was trying to go unnoticed.

When David looked up, I could see his eyes weren’t quite focusing on us, and the writing on his pad couldn’t be decipherable even to him.

“We got rid of them,” Hugh whispered.

We sat down on the other side of the table.

“How?” David asked, his voice hoarse.

“Told them you’d gone to the desert to think things through,” Hugh said. “They’ll be there for another four hours, easy.”

David glanced down at the steno pad. “Thanks. I appreciate it. I need some room—”

“What you need,” I said, holding up a hand for a waitress or a bartender or whatever worked in that hole of a bar, “is a celebratory drink.”

“We all do,” Hugh said.

“Yeah, we do,” David said, dreamily.

Acres of Perhaps

49

July 2015

So that was the plan. We let David drink as much as he wanted, “slaking the demon” as the Mullards would have called it, matching him with one drink of ours for three of his. We figured he’d get drunk enough to drag back to the studio for his exorcism in about two hours.

It took more like four and the cost of at least one episode to get him to the blub-bering mess we required. He descended to that state in layers: f irst he was senti-mental, then he was funny, and finally he was full of strange advice.

“You know how you can be as good a writer as I am, Barry?” he asked.

“Please tell me,” I said. By then, I was barely keeping my own liquor down in my stomach where it belonged.

“By not imagining I’m a better writer than you are,” he said.

“That’s deep. You’re like some alcoholic Confucius.”

When David started to drizzle down his seat toward the floor, we figured it was time to get him home. I caught him before his head hit the carpet.

“Jesus,” Hugh said. “Maybe we ought to take him to the hospital instead.”

“We’re taking him to a spiritual one.” I ducked beneath one of David’s arms. “Come on, lift the other side.”

We got David into the car. We got the car across town. We got the car through the studio gate. We got David up, out, and onto his spongey feet. We got him out of the California sun and into the North Carolina backwoods in the time it took to write this paragraph.

The set was the best we’d ever built. I felt the warmth in those woods, the South-ern stickiness of them. I smelled the moss. I heard the cicadas. I saw, yes, the winding path of planks leading off into the swamp.

Standing at the end closest to us was Melody.

“We’re here to take you home, baby,” she said, reaching for David. “We came through the Knot.”

He turned into my chest and made a few sloppy skids on the stage to get away.

“Get out of here! This place isn’t for you!”

“It isn’t for you, either,” she said calmly.

“Come on, buddy,” I said.

Hugh followed us on the creaking path deep into the soundstage. I hadn’t realized it was that big. Helping David along those planks, I felt the danger of falling into the muck, of stirring up snakes. I felt the trees watching me.

We came to the stump—the Knot—in only a few minutes, but it seemed much longer. They’d outdone themselves with lumber and plaster: it was giant and creepy and it cost as much as three episodes we’d now have to film on canned sets in the back lot. But you could park a Volkswagen inside if you wanted to. The set decorator must have gotten it right because David recoiled when we got there.

“We’re going home,” Melody said like a beckoning spirit, a dryad or a nymph, her hand dipping gracefully from her pale wrist.

We propped David up near the edge. I peered down into the stump and saw the stagehands had lined the bottom with black cloth—a kind of hammock. It would catch him when he fell.

If he fell. He clutched the stump and wouldn’t even look inside. “I can’t go,” he said.

Melody steered herself into his vision. “Baby, listen to me. We’re going home now.

You’re going to remember this all like a dream because that’s what it is.”

“I can’t take it back with me,” he said.

It was growing clear that we’d soon have to toss him into the stump by force unless someone thought of the right thing to say. Everybody turned to me.

It wasn’t a rational decision, what I said next. It came as some awful belch of the id.

“There is no ‘it,’ Leroy,” I said.

50

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

He closed his eyes as though that would close his ears.

“Nothing’s talking to you or through you. You write weird stuff and what does it change? Nothing. Somebody sits up late at night watching our fucking show in an undershirt with a bottle of beer in his hand. His eyes get opened to the dark truths of the Universe. But then he crawls off to bed and gets up the next morning for work.

He farts in the elevator, he looks down a lady’s dress . . . it’s all gone.”

David didn’t say anything, but he did slump further against the Knot.

“Even if you had something, people would just f lush it down the toilet. It’s good they flush it down the toilet because how else are they supposed to sell insurance or sweep f loors or wipe baby asses after knowing all of that? It’s a defense mechanism.”

Hugh’s smile faded. “Hey,” he said.

“It’s self ish when you think about it,” I pressed. “Shoving people’s faces in lives they’ll never have, things they’ll never feel that you made up out of nowhere.”

“Selfish?”

“Yeah. That’s what it seems to me. You’re not supposed to see that stuff and you sure as hell aren’t supposed to make us see it, either.”

“I don’t—”

It takes a writer to know how to demolish another writer. And with Melody looking on and her family all praying, I did it.

“Go home, Leroy. Go the fuck home. This world is lost. The one on your side of the Knot, though? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe you’ll give your magic to your kids. Maybe you’ll just live.”

David’s voice cracked when he said, “What if I don’t see anymore? What if I can only see here?”

“Then it wasn’t yours to see in the first place,” I said.

The little Mullard girl began to sing. Melody’s brothers joined in as the harmony and soon the whole family had clasped hands in a circle around Hugh’s fake stump.

David turned his back to me on his hands and knees and I wondered what he was doing. Then he put one wobbling hand on the edge of the stump followed by the other, and he pushed himself slowly to his feet.

“Hey,” Hugh said again, pushing me away. “You do see things, and you need to share them with people who don’t.”

David closed his eyes and swayed a moment.

“No, I don’t,” he said quietly. “I’m not one of the good guys.”

Melody came up smiling with one hand held out for him.

“Walk with me again until you are?” she said.

He took her hand with the wide eyes and open mouth of a man being saved at the last second from drowning in the sea. Together they stepped onto the edge. They paused and gazed at each other like the wedding picture. This was another one, a re-newal of the vows.

“Do you want to say goodbye?” she asked him.

He glanced over at Hugh and me. Hugh was reaching for him with a look of feral desperation on his face. Me, I nodded to David and he nodded back.

“No,” he said. “Never again.”

Then she took him into her arms in a dancing embrace and they plunged into the Knot. I half expected them to disappear in a flash. Or maybe I hoped.

All I heard was the pop and creak of them hitting canvas. When we approached, she was cradling him close like an infant and he was unconscious.

The Mullards came forward with a blanket and they bundled David inside. The brothers hoisted him between them and started for the studio door.

Acres of Perhaps

51

July 2015

“Thank you all,” Melody said, clasping mine and Hugh’s hands. “You saved a life today.”

Hugh tugged his away. “No, we murdered a great show that made people happy.”

He turned to me. “You murdered it.”

I didn’t think so then, not yet, so I didn’t even watch as he stormed off through the forest, punching tree after tree.

“I’m glad we could help,” I said.

Melody kissed me on the cheek and hurried off after the limp form of her husband, the late David Findley.

Tony wasn’t well enough to travel in person at the end thanks to the cancer growing in his body like something on one of our old shows. I tried last October to rent a Winnebago and take him up the coast; he always loved the trees like David. We got maybe thirty miles out before he was too sick to keep going, but it wasn’t him who said it. He’d have gone the whole way in that little plastic bathroom to make me feel better.

Make me feel better.

What he did instead with the last year he had was walk the world through Google Maps, steering down back country roads with the arrow keys. He went twice or three times across the country that way.

I told myself Acres of Perhaps died for many reasons, not just because of losing our resident “genius.” People gave a lot less of a shit about fantasy and a lot more about the bullet-flying, hose-spraying, billy-clubbing reality of the time. If you were square, you wanted to be told about better times on television in Westerns and variety shows. If you were cool, a show like ours couldn’t keep up with the farm-league David Findleys on every college campus with speed, weed, and acid. If you wanted weird, if you wanted surreal, there was always the news.

We tried, though, and I wrote my best scripts in that last half season. Remember the one where the disgraced comic book artist has to draw pictograms for our first contact with an alien race? That was mine. I also did the one where the white-bread people of a wholesome Midwestern town chase the stranded motorcycle gang into a warehouse and burn it down.

But come on. It was over. And as the stories and scripts came slower to me, I began to realize I might be over, too. I knew it on the last day of filming when Hugh handed me my check.

“You know not to come back here, don’t you?” he said.

“I sure do,” I said, folding the check for my pocket.

Hugh and I made up a little before he died. We were in the elevator at a convention years later, standing in opposite corners with grinning teenagers glancing back and forth between us, when out of nowhere he said, “The fucking Love Boat? Really?”

I calmly looked at him and said, “Flood Zone Manhattan? Really?”

Deadpan, he said, “We’re both writing disaster pictures.”

“At least Ethel Merman dies in yours,” I said.

We laughed together for as long as it took to get to the lobby, and Hugh patted my shoulder with one shaking hand on his way out. That was it. That was as close as we got.

The next year I was writing for Charles in Charge.

This is Tony’s computer, and I barely know how they work. I follow the paths he made for me, click the things he showed me how to click, let him do the looking I’ve always been afraid to do, and I’ve been exploring his mind when I’m not typing this.

52

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

Yesterday, I found the orange teardrop marking a spot in the North Carolina foothills in Google Maps. It had a label, and the label was, “Go here when I die.”

So I am.

Jenkins Notch is in its own valley between two ridges of the Appalachian foothills, and first you have to go up a road of hairpin turns and switchbacks before coming down again. Not that Tony went there in person, of course. But for him to find the town and find the farm, even when he was in too much pain to sit for twenty minutes at a time . . . it probably almost felt that way.

The place looks like one of our old sets, Fantasia Americana. There’s a real general store where old men sit around a giant wooden spool playing checkers. There’s a post office operating from an old mobile home surrounded on three sides by a hand-icapped ramp. They’ve got a Main Street, too, but the little hardware store and clothing shop have long been boarded up, and the only busy place in town is the Circle K
convenience store.

I followed the line Tony drew for me off the main road and through town and into the forest and finally down a bumping dirt track with a ridge of weeds growing out from the middle. The closer I got, the more I worried about whom I would find at the end. I hadn’t called ahead, and Leroy Dutton could stagger from his shack with one overall strap hanging loose from a beefy shoulder and a cocked shotgun on his arm, thinking I’m the tax man. I could end this journey bleeding out in the dust with my chest turned to hamburger.

That’s not the reason I didn’t go to see Leroy first, though.

I’m no commando or wilderness scout, so it took me some wandering and thrash-ing through the brush to find my way to the low-sloping hammock of loamy soil that David described for us all those years ago. I glanced between the sycamores for the little goblin things of “Woodsy,” but I didn’t see any.

When I came to a path of planks, I knew I was close. I followed them deeper into what now were oaks and cypress, big trees with heavy drooping limbs. Hanging from some were unlit oil lanterns, maybe placed by Leroy himself, and there was evidence people had been walking through recently: trimmed branches, flattened leaves.

It never occurred to me that the Knot could have rotted into the ground over the f ifty years since Leroy fell inside. It didn’t seem possible. And when I reached a domed clearing with a single heavy beam of sunlight aimed at the center, I was not surprised to see the Knot waiting for me.

Our replica on the stage was almost perfect, but this one was even larger than I imagined. Even now, rotted down low to an irregular circle, it still felt mighty. Someone had assembled a half-circle of log benches around it.

I’d come a long way, right? I wasn’t drunk or imaginative or knighted by the gods with any magical perception, but yes, I leaned over and looked down into the Knot.

It was dark, just as David had described. There was a slight intimation of a breeze, a breathing, also like he’d said. My eyes couldn’t focus on the bottom, black and speckled with something like stars. It might have been night on the other side, where David Findley was still writing in an attic somewhere with a bottle of gin beside him.

Where Tony was speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway with me.

I closed my eyes and tipped myself inside.

We had a hard time agreeing on the opening credits for Acres of Perhaps. A time-lapse of day fading to night in the desert? Turning pages of a book? The sparks of a campf ire winding upward to the stars? A f lying saucer hovering in observation above a tranquil Earth?

Acres of Perhaps

53

July 2015

Hugh wanted something I called the Flying Antique Store, old porcelain dolls and Victorian chairs and grandfather clocks tumbling at the camera from some distant point in space, probably because the props were free. David, who couldn’t care less about the credits, half-heartedly suggested the ticker-tapper of a news broadcast from the “far edges of imagination,” something to lure in the suburban zombies he hoped to awaken.

My idea—and I’ve marveled since that it came to me—was to show a family sitting down to watch television on the other side of the glass, Mom in her housecoat and Pop in his loosened tie and the kids settling in, all of them staring expectantly at the viewers as though they were about to be the show. That’s what we went with.

I saw none of those things falling through the Knot like I expected. I would have settled for scenes from my life because at least Tony would be there, but all I got was the stretch effect from Vertigo, zooming the edges of that stump into infinity, lined with swimming lights.

It felt like settling into bed after being awake for years.

Tony was not the one who woke me, but I wasn’t surprised. What were the chances he’d be waiting by the Knot on the other side when I came through?

The man who did was heavyset with horn-rimmed glasses and a head of white un-ruly hair. He wasn’t in overalls and he didn’t have a shotgun, just an undershirt and blue jeans.

“Barry?” he was saying.

“What year is it?” I croaked. “Who’s the President? Did 9/11 still happen?”

The man who once was David Findley sat on the edge of the stump. “Tony’s still gone,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you still Leroy Dutton?”

He clasped my arm and tugged me from the soft black soil. “Always was,” he said.

With his help I got to my feet, knee-deep in leaves. I found my way back over onto solid land in three wobbling steps.

“Are you still . . .”

“A hillbilly? If you’re asking if I can play a banjo, I have to say the answer is yes, but I can only pick out the first few bars of the Acres of Perhaps theme.”

I peered down into the Knot and all feeling of inf inite depth and darkness was gone. “So it is just a stump.”

David glanced in. “I’ve gone back and forth on that. I’ve never believed like I did back then, but then, maybe I don’t have to.”

I felt very strange and light, and it took me a moment to ask, “How did you know?

About Tony?”

“He sent a letter and told us you’d be coming.”

Tony, still planning my travel from beyond the grave. “When?” I asked.

“I’d have to look at the letter,” he said. “A couple of months ago. You want to come back to the house to see it, maybe get some water?”

“No moonshine?” I said.

“I quit that stuff years ago, believe me, and the McDantrys up and left in 1970
anyway. I bought their property from the bank.”

“You own the Knot?”

“I own the Knot.” He grinned. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“Yes,” I said. It all was.

“The kids and grandkids used it for a stage,” Leroy said. “They did puppet shows and magic shows and little plays and Franny used to have her revival sermons here for us. She’s a Unitarian minister now.”

54

Will Ludwigsen

Asimov’s

“Children played in the Knot?”

“They still do sometimes when they come to visit,” Leroy said. “We built a little platform for it and set up the benches like our own Globe Theater.”

“They don’t . . . fall through?”

“Not literally, no.”

By then I was feeling warm, and my head felt heavy and barely attached to my neck.

“Hey,” I said, taking his arm before I fell back in. “That whole thing back then in LA . . . I wasn’t your friend.”

“I know,” Leroy said.

“I killed you,” I said.

“A little bit,” he conceded.

“Stories came to you easily and love came to you easily and you could be whatever you wanted in the open and you didn’t want what I couldn’t have.”

“I knew that fifty years ago, Barry. Did you come to hear how everything turned out okay? That’s fine, but first you have to know that it didn’t for a long time. For a long time, I was the world’s angriest feed and seed delivery man.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“You have to understand that, okay? You did something shitty to someone who saw you as a friend.”

Keep going, I thought. Go all the way through with the needle, me or the Knot, I didn’t care.

“But I did something you didn’t. I healed and scarred over. Maybe it was easier here in the woods with Melody, but you could have done it, too, if you’d let yourself.

You didn’t have to write for Diff’rent Strokes or The Facts of Life or whatever you did, and you didn’t have to blame me or yourself for it.”

“I should have been the one who left the show,” I said.

“Why? You were always as good as me. You’re the one who didn’t think so, only because you did it differently.”

I squeezed my eyes shut with my fingers. I killed him for nothing.

“All those stories that could have been,” I said.

“You still wrote some,” Leroy said.

“No, I mean you. I mean your stories.”

Leroy squinted at me. “Do you think I stopped writing?”

“I thought—”

“—that I’d be too busy shooting Indians and skinning raccoons? Who do you think wrote those plays and puppet shows?”

“It’s not the same,” I said.

“The same as what?”

“The same as Acres of Perhaps.”

“Barry,” he said. “I don’t want to let you off the hook without giving you some more shit first, but what do you think I’ve been writing?”

“Puppet shows,” I mumbled. “Plays for kids.”

“It was just a different network,” Leroy said. “And my grandson Tucker? He can do one hell of an impression of a dropping atomic bomb.”

Wait, I wanted to say. I wanted the world to wait, let me hear it clearly. “You wrote scripts?”

Leroy shrugged. “Sure. Here and there, maybe a couple hundred.”

A couple hundred. Scripts. Of Acres of Perhaps.

“Are you sure I’m not on the other side of the Knot?”

“If you can’t tell the difference, Barry, then maybe there isn’t one.”

* * *

Acres of Perhaps

55

July 2015

On our way back, we walked in silence until Leroy said, “You know, I could have written for The Love Boat, too.”

“Could you?”

“Sure. They pull into Acapulco and at midnight, the ghosts of murdered Aztecs steal everyone’s gold.”

“You’d have to write in Billy Barty or Paul Lynde,” I said.

“Okay. One is a famous diamond thief and the passengers hang him from a yard arm when he doesn’t confess.”

“That’s not bad,” I said.

We followed the planks back toward a farm, not a gray shanty with the siding peeling at the corners but something with two stories and a gleaming metal roof. A woman with gorgeous long gray hair hanging almost to her waist was climbing out of a giant Toyota pick-up truck. She was wearing a suit.

Leroy pointed to me. “Look what I found in the Knot.”

She didn’t close the door. She hurried over, her heels kicked free, but then she stopped with her hands on her hips.

“Are you taking him back to sin?”

“What?” I glanced at Leroy and then back to her. I never imagined she might be the one to greet me with a shotgun, probably not far out of reach in that truck. “No.

No. Not at all. I wanted to—”

She pulled me in for a hug. I didn’t raise my arms to return it right away, only slowly.

“It’s okay, Barry. That’s what my family thought. I just wanted my husband back.”

She leaned back, looking me over. “How long were you out there?”

“I think he might have been lurking there since the sixties,” Leroy said.

She frowned but said, “Well, that would explain a lot. I’m sorry I just got home.

Had to go to the school board in town.”

“She used to be superintendent,” Leroy said. “Still is, if you count all the ‘consult-ing’ she does.”

I wondered if her district taught evolution. I had a feeling it did if Leroy was anything to go by.

“Are you going to stay awhile?” she asked me.

“Do you want me to?”

“We both do,” she said. “Tony did, too.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, not sure I’d heard.

“Come on,” Leroy said.

We walked to the edge of the grass beneath a copse of trees toward a small shed or cabin with three lightly molded windows. He opened the door for me and inside were two desks, one a computer and one with Leroy’s old typewriter.

“Tony sent it a few months ago,” Melody said. “He told us you kept it for years.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Leroy pointed. “What I figure is you can use that and I can use the computer, or maybe the other way around, and I can write stories about walking skyscrapers and you can write stories about Mars.”

“Who would want them?” I asked.

“Well, Tony would, for one,” he said. “But I’m guessing we can find some asshole in Hollywood to sell them for us.”

So I’m sitting now in a creaking swivel chair. I’m looking out through the windows.

There’s a glass beside me of something called “unsweet tea” which is what we drink around here now instead of booze. I’m resting my fingers on the keys—I don’t plan to type, don’t plan to even try—but the cool plastic waits.

Waits for when I’m ready again. ❍

56

Will Ludwigsen

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, and an Emperor Norton award for his autobiography Nested Scrolls. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and he paints in his spare time. His recent titles include a novel, The Big Aha, an omnibus, Transreal

Trilogy, and his mammoth Journals: 1990-2014. In Rudy’s new story for us, a young couple on a Hawaiian holiday attempt to rekindle their romance while coping with the . . .

PETROGLYPH

MAN

Rudy Rucker

One August, Julio and Beatriz went for a vacation in Hawaii.

Beatriz was a grade-school teacher. Julio was doing product support for a new photo app called Benthos. Lately things had been rough. Beatriz’s mother died, their landlord raised the rent, one of their cars got stolen, and they’d flirted with infidelity. The young couple had been quarreling all the time. There was talk of divorce. And now they’d gone for a second-honeymoon-type trip. To save money, they went with a package deal that Beatriz found online, booking them into the Royal Kwak, a generic resort hotel on the west coast of the big island.

The drive from the airport to the Kwak ran through miles and miles of volcanic cinders. Like the Moon. Julio had been hoping for a flowery jungle. Along the road-side, local kids had spelled out their initials with patterns of white stones upon the dark ones.

“The black rocks are called a’a,” said Beatriz, who’d been studying up. She got Julio to stop the car so they could examine the faintly iridescent stones. Foamy, spiky, surprisingly light.

Julio used his phone to take a picture of Beatriz holding a piece of the a’a in her hand. He had the Benthos photo app on his device and the Benthos f ilters made Beatriz look like a goddess. Or maybe a TV actress.

“Check it out,” he said, showing the image to her. “See how I idolize you? Benthos picks up on a situation’s vibes. Kind of amazing. The app designer is a quantum physicist. Jules Swearer? He says he has a quantum thing happening on the image chip. It feels your brainwaves.”

“I think your Benthos pictures make me look dumb,” said Beatriz. “Generic. I forget what you said that name means. Ocean?”

“Well, in biology, the benthos is the crap that lives on the ocean floor. The name is a metaphor, see. Benthos unveils the deeper levels of reality. Supposedly the app reads my mind, a little bit, and it does a search for similar images on the web, and it 58

Asimov’s
ends up showing what I’m thinking. Like I’m photographing my emotions. And maybe yours too. We’ve had some really strange customer problems around this.”

“You’re saying your personal emotions are things that crawl on the sea floor?” said Beatriz, fixating on that. “Albino crabs and miniature octopuses and slimy fish with needle-teeth?”

Julio put his hands next to his mouth and wriggled his fingers. “Mating season!”

“You’re a complete idiot,” said Beatriz, not unkindly. “Meanwhile I have to teach you a little more about lava. As well as a’a, there’s a kind called pahoehoe. It’s smooth like taffy, like dough. And that’s what the old-time Hawaiians carved their petroglyphs on. Little people and turtles and suns.”

“I definitely want to see the petroglyphs,” said Julio.

“Soon,” said Beatriz. “I can’t believe we’re finally here. Hawaii! We’ll be happy now, right?”

A little further on, they came to a golf course, then a bunch of parking lots, then some shops, and then the Hotel Kwak, hunkered like a convention center amid asphalt.

Beatriz kept on acting excited, not letting up, wanting to make the vacation good.

The lobby was full of fountains and plants, the staffers were nice, and the room was ocean-front as promised. The balcony overlooked trees, a café, the beach, and the rolling sea. The sun was going down, with tiny clouds like an endless patch of pink and lavender cabbages, dwindling out across the Pacific Ocean. Julio took a Benthos picture of them.

The image looked a little like a page of a calendar, boxes with dates, and—Julio automatically knew this because the image’s message was specifically tailored for him—
the dates stood for all the time he’d been living with Beatriz. A sky of days. Clouds of words. He liked the Benthos view, with everything a symbol, everything alive.

Rather than going downstairs, Julio and Beatriz stayed on the balcony, enjoying their complimentary pre-mixed Mai Tai cocktails from the room’s fridge, also some room-service barbequed pork with rice, plus a sliced-up half pineapple, startlingly delicious. Beatriz began singing a silly, happy Hawaiian song that she’d heard in the elevator, pretty much making up the lyrics as she went along. Something like,

“Numi-numi-nou ah pooku-pooku-pu oh lomi-lami-kaukau-koo. ” She waved her arms, miming a hula.

“Beat that tail, big fish,” said Julio. He didn’t bother taking a Benthos picture of her. He was seeing just what he wanted to see. He got to his feet and they danced. It was good with Beatriz tonight, everything in synch, the two of them slipping into happy traveler roles. Graceful dancers instead of slimy fish.

The next morning, the groundskeepers were running a small bulldozer up and down the beach, systematically shifting the sand. The beach wasn’t very big. Maybe it sucked. Julio took a Benthos photo from the balcony, and in the image the beach looked like a garbage dump. He and Beatriz went downstairs to the breakfast buffet and—even without Benthos—it seemed like a factory assembly line.

When they made their way onto the beach, a staffer told them they weren’t allowed to swim this morning. The man pointed to a jellyf ish-warning placard he’d posted. The sign had a wavy horizontal line for the water, with a floundering stick f igure who’d raised an arm in despair. All around the stick f igure were jellyf ish glyphs, like brains with dangling spines. Pain bursts were radiating from the swimmer’s legs wherever a tendril touched. Harsh semiotics, brutally clear. When Julio shot a picture of the sign, the Benthos app put his own face onto the stick figure in the water.

He and Beatriz lay on the beach and stared at the sea, longing to recapture last night’s mood. Near them were a silent white-haired woman and a mustached, slack-bodied man. Old-marrieds. Ghosts of their future selves. The sun amped to a Petroglyph Man

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stunning intensity. The mustached man began lecturing his wife, uninterruptible as an automaton. Talking about digestion and nutrition.

“Maybe let’s check the shops,” said Beatriz.

“I thought Hawaii would be paradise,” complained Julio. “Orchids and wild pigs.

Surfers and wahines.”

“I hate when you sulk,” said Beatriz. “I have to get souvenirs for my friends and it’s not too soon. Tell you what. We shop a little, get lunch in the hotel café, and then you lead us on a walk. Find some petroglyphs.”

“Okay, yeah,” said Julio, pulling his shit together. He didn’t want to be f ighting with Beatriz. Not on their special vacation.

Poking around in the gift shop, he found a pamphlet on petroglyphs. And, yes, there was indeed a petroglyph spot near the Royal Kwak, with an easy trail leading there.

Maybe Beatriz had known this all along. The teacher encouraging her pet pupil.

He bought the pamphlet and wandered on among the shops, shooting Benthos snaps that made the stores look like prison cells and torture chambers, working the visual angles and the app settings. Taking pictures was like having a friend to talk to. Like, “Look at this,” and “Do you see that?” And with the Benthos app, the smart phone’s camera was talking back, riffing off thoughts that he hadn’t managed to put into words.

Eventually he noticed that the hotel developers had used some petroglyph-bearing stones to decorate the f lowerbeds. Sad frags with labels. The Benthos app showed the petroglyphs as looking like cartoony keyholes. Locks to magic doors.

Some kind of message was beaming out from the quantum vibrations of the petroglyphs, through Julio’s smart phone, and into his eyes.

Uneasily he recalled a group of their users who’d started using Benthos in a full augmented-reality mode—f iltering everything around them in real time and displaying the tweaked world on pairs of display glasses that they wore. None of them had suffered injuries yet, but legal had quickly pushed out a Benthos upgrade, layering a fresh liability disclaimer onto the revised license agreement.

According to what Jules Swearer had told the Benthos employees in a private meeting, what with quantum mechanics being so odd, you couldn’t be sure who or what was controlling the images that the Benthos app was showing you. And maybe not everything in the world was wholly on your side. But Swearer was determined to keep his app on the market. He had the programmer’s typical fantasy about his product changing people’s lives.

Beatriz reappeared, bouncy and chirpy, toting a bag of souvenir-gift schwag. She and Julio ordered mahi-mahi burgers in the snack bar by the beach. A tourist woman there was already eating, holding her sandwich burger in her left hand, and continually waving her right hand against the swarming gnats. Her husband was grinning at her. Newlyweds. In the man’s eyes, everything his new mate did was wonderful. Julio felt a pang. Sometimes an hour would go by without him actually looking at Beatriz’s face. Often when she’d talk, he wouldn’t really hear her. Busy on the gerbil-wheel of his fears and regrets. Lost in the depths of his own private benthos.

“What’s wrong, Julio?”

“I—” He couldn’t verbalize it. But yes, Beatriz’s kindly smile touched his heart. He took her hand in his and stroked it. “I want to be nicer to you,” he said.

“We’re both trying,” said Beatriz. “It’s not our fault that things have been hard.”

And now their sandwiches arrived, and things were fine.

“Love the breeze,” said Beatriz. “That gentle beat.”

“Caressing us,” agreed Julio. “Dig this.” He took a Benthos selfie of them beneath the rustling palms. The beach furniture and all the other guests were filtered out.

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ker

Rudy Ruc

Copyright ©

Beatriz was wearing bridal white. Julio had the trim look of a model. “You and me, babe.”

And then they went upstairs for a nap—well, more than a nap. They made love, with not one thought in Julio’s head. After that they sat on the balcony, waiting out the sun’s midday glare, Beatriz tan and happy, reading a fashion magazine.

“Melt, oh melt, my stony heart,” intoned Julio.

“You don’t like it here,” said Beatriz, maybe a little too quick on the uptake. “You’re mad at me for picking this place.”

“It’s fine,” said Julio. “I’m seeing everything as good. Pushing down any false expectations. Seizing each moment.”

“I wish you meant that,” said Beatriz. She gestured across the balcony railing. “See the low tree that’s domed like an umbrella? I’m noticing some spots where a branch forks in two, and then a few feet later the two branches merge back together. How’s that for a deep symbol, Mr. Benthos Head? Didn’t we have fun in bed just now?

Merge, baby, merge.”

“Our bodies always like each other,” said Julio. “I love your curves and your smell.

And we’ll go on the petroglyph trail in a minute.”

“And maybe later I’ll do a scuba dive,” said Beatriz. “I’ve always wanted to try that.”

“You’re not certified.”

“You don’t need cert at a resort,” said Beatriz. “I saw in the guidebook.”

“Don’t go killing yourself !” said Julio.

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind,” said Beatriz, fishing for an avowal of love.

“I’m the one who should die,” said Julio, redoubling the game. In some bad way, he believed the words as he said them, feeling as if he were sinking into the deepest trench of the sea.

Petroglyph Man

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Beatriz gave a theatrical groan. “Why are we even talking this way? It’s like turning tamales into turds. The petroglyphs! Are they far?”

“I don’t think so. We’ll wear shoes and socks. I’ll bring along some water. And hats.

And sun cream.”

“Atta-boy! And a walking-stick and a tent and a portable stove!” Beatriz’s laugh was a burst of bubbles leading Julio into the light. There was his petroglyph pamphlet on the table, gleaming like a holy writ.

The petroglyph site was a rolling patch of smooth pahoehoe lava, patterned with cracks like the plates of a turtle shell. The clearing had a spooky vibe, with thorny kiawe trees squeezed around weathered stone. The petroglyphs were bunched in one particular spot, hundreds of them—men, circles, animals, and a few women, indent-ed at the waist.

“The men have giant penises,” observed Beatriz. “And the women’s little wool triangles are upside-down.”

“I’m sensing that the petroglyphs are our friends,” said Julio. He captured a quick pair of Benthos images that made the petroglyphs look like naked sunbathers on a beach. Old-school Hawaiians at their ease.

“That photo app of yours,” said Beatriz uneasily. “Can it work the other way?”

“How do you mean?”

“What if Benthos changes the actual things that you’re taking pictures of ? I almost feel like those petroglyphs are moving now. Really slow. Like the minute hand on a watch? Maybe you woke them up, Julio. Don’t use the app anymore, okay?”

“I’m not really done shooting,” said Julio.

“It’s so deserted here,” said Beatriz, looking around. “The sun, the rocks, the trees, and us. And look at that sign.” She read it aloud. “Those who defile or mistreat the petroglyphs must bear the emotional, physical, and spiritual consequences for themselves and those around them—we can take no responsibility for these effects.”

Julio was still focused on his phone’s Benthos display. He walked around the edges of the petroglyph patch, watching the figures morph themselves on his little screen.

The best ones were near the middle. Before Beatriz could stop him, he took off his shoes and walked out there in his socks.

“Didn’t you hear what I read, Julio?”

“I won’t step on anyone,” he said. On his screen the petroglyphs were winking at him, waving their little arms. Yes, he did have a sense that he was trespassing—but one petroglyph in particular was calling to him. This guy had a narrow, downward-pointing triangle for his chest, with thick lines for his limbs, and a pocked pit for his head.

“Just one more,” he told Beatriz and snapped the Lord of the Petroglyphs. Error. A ripple pulsed up from the little figure, warping the look of the stone. A tingle surged through Julio’s smart phone. He dropped it; the screen cracked and went dark.

A numbness percolated up Julio’s arm and into his head. It was like the Benthos app had ported itself into his brain. Installing itself as a low-level quantum computation. And now Julio was seeing through the Benthos app all the time. The petroglyphs were jiggling. Laughing at him.

“Did you ruin your phone?” called Beatriz.

Julio waved to her, not trusting his voice. He took out his handkerchief and used it to pick up the phone, loath to touch its metal. He made his way back to the outer edge of the petroglyph patch. The pahoehoe stone felt permeable and unsteady—as if he were a waterstrider on a pond. Was he going to be stuck in this nightmare headtrip for the rest of his life? At least the guys who’d made Benthos glasses for themselves had been able to take them off.

Beatriz stepped forward, running her cool hand across his forehead. “Did the petroglyphs scare you? Maybe your phone’s still under warranty. Calm down, Julio. Put 62

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on your shoes and we’ll go back to the beach. Do some wading, and maybe we’ll snorkel.”

“Okay.” Seen through Julio’s Benthos eyes, Beatriz looked fully Polynesian, with bare breasts and a lei. The app was affecting his ears as well. He was hearing a soft drumbeat and a chant. He didn’t tell Beatriz. Instead he drew out his petroglyph pamphlet and made a show of looking at the map. The letters were random pictograms, and the markings wriggled like snakes.

“We’ll take a different trail back to the hotel,” he said manfully. “Instead of retrac-ing our steps.”

“That sounds fine.”

They headed into the shade. Julio had some vague hope that the shadows might somehow dim the intensity of his Benthos hallucinations. He glanced back at the undulating pahoehoe, wanting one last look at his special petroglyph—but he couldn’t see it. And then they were blundering around in a trackless thicket of the thorny kiawe trees.

“We’re not really lost,” Julio assured Beatriz. “You can see the ocean over there, and as long as we follow the shoreline, we end up at the Kwak.”

“The real path is by the water,” said Beatriz. “I’m going down there.”

“I think I’ll rest here for a minute,” said Julio.

“I don’t want this to be an all-day expedition,” said Beatriz. “I’ll see you at the beach. And let’s not have a nervous breakdown, okay?”

Alone now, Julio kicked aside some spiky twigs and sat on the sandy ground, will-ing his pulse to slow. Too much wack bullshit in his head. Quietly he sipped at his water bottle.

The breeze had picked up. The criss-cross shadows of the kiawe branches were dancing on the ground, making calligraphic shapes. Nice to watch them. But naturally they were morphing into petroglyph men. Wriggling on the ground, encircling Julio.

One shadow was closer than the others. It had a long triangular torso and a dark, blank head. The big one from the rock. Of course. The petroglyph man slid back and forth, coming a little closer each time. His legs fluttered, as if he were swimming.

“Command-Option-Shift-Esc,” Julio muttered, longing to abort the quantum Benthos program in his head. “Alt-F4. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Power down. Unplug. ”

He rose to his feet. Stay with the calm breathing, man. As he found his way on-ward, something jabbed him in the calf. He whirled around, and oh god, the petroglyph man was standing upright, a swizzle-stick f igurine, his body dark and glinting. He was carrying a long thorn for poking Julio. He waved the thorn like a baton and began piping a Hawaiian chant, that same cheerful song that Beatriz had been singing—but transformed into something archaic and uncanny.

Julio broke into a run, with the petroglyph man mincing along behind him very fast. Eventually Julio f loundered through a stand of f lowering ginger plants and emerged onto the utterly non-mysterious concrete patio of the Hotel Kwak’s beach-side café. The same place where he and Beatriz had eaten lunch. And there was Beatriz herself, trim and sexy in her black bikini, her skin a golden brown, wearing white shell earrings. His kind, beautiful wife, waving to him. Julio burst into tears.

“Oh, what is wrong with you?” demanded Beatriz. Not much sympathy in her face.

“I’m—I need to go up to the room for a minute.”

“Your leg’s bleeding. Godammit, Julio, does everything have to be a freak-fest?”

“I’ll take a shower. I’ll fix the scratch. It’s nothing. I’m not sad. I’m happy. I mean happy to see you.”

Beatriz sighed, shook her head. “Get your suit. I changed into mine just now. The jellyfish warning signs are down. They say the equipment-rental guy will be here in a few minutes. We can see what’s underwater.”

Petroglyph Man

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Alone in the hotel room, Julio had a shot of rum from the fridge-bar, then an as-pirin and a glass of water. For the moment his Benthos visions had died down, but he had a distinct feeling they’d soon come back. He showered off, patched his calf with a bandage from his travel kit, and went to sit on the balcony in his T-shirt and bathing suit. Catching his breath.

The Benthos-in-your-head routine was bad news. He needed to warn the others.

Rather than trying to revive his own phone, he got Beatriz’s from the room’s safe. He started by trying to phone Jules Swearer—no dice. Left a voicemail. Then messaged the support team, asking if anyone else had seen a problem with the Benthos program getting inside someone’s head. Emailed one of those guys who’d been walking around with Benthos glasses. Waited a few minutes—and got no useful answers. All the time thinking about the petroglyphs.

Was that a knock? Someone at the door? Instantly the Benthos freakout kicked in again. The room’s walls were woven palm fronds, the bed was a heap of ferns, the floor was dirt, the bamboo door was shaking. Maybe just Beatriz out there? No, he could see her from the balcony, down by the ocean splashing in the surf, a Gauguin girl. She waved to him, gesturing that he should hurry. More noise at the door.

Julio went and peered through a peephole. That same petroglyph man was in the hallway—five or six feet tall, with his triangle chest and his blobby head. His limbs were dark, tubular, flexible. He knew Julio was watching. He gestured, he swayed from side to side, he put his face forward. He had dimly glowing dots for eyes, and a jagged line for a mouth. Simple and iconic—like the visage of a primeval god.

Julio remained utterly still. The petroglyph was crooning the same tune as before, that eldritch hula music, the sound ever higher and more refined. Fluidly writhing in the patterns of a dance, the creature knocked once again on the room’s door. His mood seemed more impatient than hostile. Like he was a tutor come to give a lesson.

No way was Julio opening the door.

A long pause. And then, with a faint sizzle, the petroglyph man sank through the hallway floor. Heading elsewhere. Maybe to the beach? Suddenly Julio recalled the warning that Beatriz had read aloud. Consequences for themselves and for those around them. Finding his courage, he made his way down the mossy stone ledges of the stairs. To Beatriz. His hula maiden.

And there she was, with the expected dark figure beside her, the guy looking like a skinny Hawaiian in a baggy, oversized bathing suit. A large cloth sack rested on the sand at his feet.

“Come on!” Beatriz called to Julio. “It’s Kimo the dive master!”

Kimo was wearing dark shades and he smiled a lot, showing small, even teeth.

Lean and twitchy, with ebony skin. Bobbing his head to some inner rhythm. A type of guy that Beatriz liked. Not that Julio could be sure if Beatriz was seeing what he was seeing.

“You’re the petroglyph, right?” he asked the man.

“Oh, quit it,” interrupted Beatriz. “Don’t listen to my husband, Kimo. He’s acting crazy. Sunstroke. And I smell rum.”

“Wack attack,” said Kimo. “I got masks, fins, snorkels, and fizz bottles if you want

’em.” He talked pidgin-style, but with a Latino accent that made Julio feel at home.

“Fizz bottles?” said Beatriz.

“Like for scuba,” said Kimo. “Special for guests.” He produced a little air tank the size of a water bottle. It had a mouthpiece. “Chomp onto this and breathe. Dip down twenty, thirty feet, it’s chill.”

Beatriz asked more questions, maybe flirting with Kimo a little bit. Julio was only processing about a third of what they said. Beatriz was renting snorkeling outfits for them. Including fizz bottles. You wore them on a band around your neck.

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“Ulu turtles out there,” said Kimo, gesturing toward a jutting f inger of rock.

“Grinding that ono turtle grass. Fizz under and look up. See them turtles f ly! The brahs dive here at night. The fish sleeping. Like a supermarket. Parrot fish, grouper, eel.”

“I’m going out there!” said Beatriz. “Ready, Julio?”

“In a minute,” he said. “I want more tips from Kimo.”

“Kimo knows,” said the skinny man. “We chat, yah. Your wife be fine.”

“Don’t take too long,” said Beatriz, and then she was in the water—a post-Impres-sionist figure formed from blocky shapes of copper and tan, an exquisite collage of monumental forms, filled with the juice of life.

Kimo smiled at Julio, flashing a thousand-watt grin as if they were sharing a complex joke.

“So, okay,” began Julio. “Beatriz and I were in the petroglyph field this morning.”

“Yah, mon.”

“I walked on the rock with all the figures, and then I’m having a weird head trip, and a petroglyph man is . . . is following me.”

“Know that. Me him.”

“Do you mean to hurt me? Or hurt Beatriz? I’m sorry I stirred things up.”

“Could be I your teacher,” said Kimo. “Come to help.”

“Help?”

“I dance and then I go pau. And wait to dance some more. One year, ten, a hundred.” Kimo made a rap gesture and stared at Julio, his face a dark, cryptic oval. His hand had morphed to a claw—a thumb and one f inger. “Somebody gotta pay the dancer.”

“All I did was walk on your frikkin’ rock!” cried Julio. “And if you really want to help me, yes, I do want to change. I get stuck in my downer thought loops. I can’t get loose.”

“My auntie say she’s mostly water,” said Kimo. “And that why she fat. I say we’re mostly mana. That why we dance.” He swept his pincer hands toward the sky, with the sun bright overhead. A petroglyph sun. A dot in a circle.

A minute of silence passed. “I’m going in with Beatriz,” said Julio.

“Me come too,” said Kimo.

“And don’t you be bugging her, okay?” said Julio. “We love each other.”

“Yah, mon.” Kimo stepped into the water, like a heron with long, careful legs. Julio hurried after him.

They found Beatriz beneath a column of bubbles. Brave, reckless and perhaps a little desperate, she was lying on the bottom, twenty feet down, holding onto a rock, reveling in the sight of a dozen turtles above her. Kimo and Julio joined her, one of them on either side.

Julio kept himself in place by wedging his swim-fins under the coral. He had his own fizz bottle, and Kimo—he wasn’t using an air tank at all. He was looking more glyphic all the time.

But Beatriz was fully real. She was Julio’s dear, supple mermaid, right next to him, here and now. For a happy minute he forgot himself and his worries. He pressed against his wife, watching the turtles circle like birds—ungainly and graceful, wag-ging their fat flippers.

And then Beatriz pointed at one of the turtles and made an “oh my god” gesture.

This particular turtle was made of lines. Another goddamn petroglyph, and Beatriz was seeing it too. Kimo burst into song—you could hear him underwater—gargly and bubbly. Chanting that same tune as before. Working his way up to something.

Julio reached across Beatriz to shove stick-man Kimo away. The petroglyph man’s dark body was smooth, tingly to the touch, slippery as a kelp tube. Resisting Julio’s Petroglyph Man

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efforts, Kimo held himself solidly in place and now—here it came—he made a harsh darting movement and clamped one of his pincer-hands around Beatriz’s wrist. She let out an underwater scream.

Julio clawed at Kimo’s hand—quite immovable. And now, oh oh, Beatriz had used up the last of her air. Julio grabbed the middle of Kimo’s arm, frantically bending it back and forth. And then—yes!—the arm snapped. Cut off from its source of reality, the claw-hand holding Beatriz disappeared.

With three kicks of her strong legs, Beatriz reached the surface, brushing past the petroglyph turtle. Julio would have joined her, but now Kimo had clamped his remaining hand onto Julio’s wrist. For being a vision or a ghost or a hallucination, the petroglyph man had a very strong grip.

Julio held back from panic. This experience was tempering him, like a sword in a fire. Kimo had said he was a teacher, right? Things were bad, but Julio still had a little air in his fizz bottle, and maybe he had some hope of severing Kimo’s other arm—
but no, that wasn’t likely, not with one of Julio’s wrists clamped.

The sketchy, iconic turtle swam down to join them. It had an oval line to indicate the shell’s edge, plus a line down its middle, and stubs for head, tail, and flippers.

Kimo caught hold of the petroglyph’s tail and it began towing them along the sea floor, deeper into the benthos.

High above them, Beatriz was following along, splashing and yelling, now and then pausing to peer down. The water was darker at this depth, greener. The pressure crackled in Julio’s ears. He was struggling against Kimo—but to no avail.

Maybe he was going to die down here.

At least he’d saved Beatriz. At least he’d done that.

The petroglyph turtle set Kimo and Julio onto a patch of clean white sand. Kimo had made himself as heavy as an anchor—an anchor bound to Julio’s wrist. Shapes glimmered against the sand, slender tendrils wobbling this way and that, with curved flat knobs on top.

High above them the water’s surface was a wrinkled mirror, with Beatriz a frightened starfish silhouette. Why had Julio ever wanted to die? Life had been sweet—
when he’d remembered to notice. His air was nearly out.

A huge, dim form was watching them from the abyss. A leviathan. It gave off a deep low rumble, slow and profound. That same Hawaiian song, one final time. Julio felt a sense of the mystery of life, of the world’s incalculable vastness.

“Help me,” he murmured, his last bubbles f loating from his lips, praying to who knows what. The leviathan? The petroglyph man? The Benthos app? The world at large?

The snaky tendrils above the sand began briskly jiggling, with work to do. The images of their shapes clicked into place for Julio: these were the jellyfish glyphs from the warning sign. Sketchy brains with dangling spines, menacing abstractions come to the rescue.

The glyphs converged on Kimo, stinging the petroglyph man with visible zaps, shattering the stick-man into—a school of tiny, gem-blue f ish. The f ish swam at Julio, harmlessly swirling around him. One final jellyfish glyph stung the wound on Julio’s calf, jolting him from his waking dream, terminating his internal Benthos app for good.

He shot toward the surface. And found his dear Beatriz, quite alone.

“Oh, Julio,” she said. “What happened? I can’t figure it.”

“I got well?”

They kissed. ❍

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NEXT ISSUE

AUGUST

The excitement never lets up in Will McIntosh’s August 2015

ISSUE
novella. You’ll get whiplash traveling from Mars to the Earth avoiding asteroids and aliens. Death and destruction reign, but there’s hope for humanity, too. That is, as long as we can survive “A Thousand Nights Till Morning”!

ALSO

A marauding gang discovers the true sting of “Wild Honey” in Paul McAuley’s thrilling new tale; Nick Wolven’s inventive IN
novelette explains exactly why there’s “No Placeholder for You, AUGUST

My Love”; the inventor of time travel learns the importance of

“The First Step” in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s touching short story; while Karl Bunker’s historical tale about erecting the Brooklyn Bridge reveals the obstacles that had to be overcome by the laborers in the “Caisson”; and new writer, Kelly Robson, makes her Asimov’s debut with a short story about the formidable challenges that face “The Two-Year Man.”

Robert Silverberg’s Reflections cheekily demands that we OUR

“Reunite Gondwanaland!”; Peter Heck’s On Books takes a look EXCITING
at works by Brandon Sanderson, Catherine Asaro, early Jack FEATURES

Vance, and others; James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net extends a warm “Welcome to Asimov’s”; plus we’ll have an array of poetry and other features you’re sure to enjoy; Look for our August issue on sale at newsstands on July 7, 2015. Or subscribe to Asimov’s—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We’re also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com’s Kindle and Kindle Fire, and BarnesandNoble.com’s Nook, as well as from
magzter.com/magazines, Google Play, and Kobo’s digital newsstand!

new stories by Greg Egan, Jim Grimsley, Sandra McDonald, COMING

Rick Wilber, Aliette de Bodard, Robert Reed, Alan Smale, SOON

Daryl Gregory, Sam J. Miller, Brenda Cooper, Vylar Kaftan, Timons Esaias, M. Bennardo, Garrett Ashley, Brooks Peck, Peter Wood, Ian Creasey, Jason Sanford, Amanda Forrest, R. Neube, Ian McDowall, Sean Monaghan, and many others!

POLLEN FROM

A FUTURE

HARVEST

Derek Künsken

Derek Künsken writes science fiction and fantasy in Gatineau,

Québec, and blogs and tweets from BlackGate.com and

@derekkunsken. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Beneath

Ceaseless Skies, The Best Horror of the Year, and multiple times in Asimov’s. “Pollen From a Future Harvest” is the second of three stories he’s writing about how alien life cycles might evolve to incorporate time travel. The first, “Schools of Clay,” appeared in our February 2014 issue.

Major Okonkwo had never attended a meeting of the General Staff.The military police checked her ID, scanned her retinae and shut off her recording augments. In a reception room, facing the steel coat-of-arms of the Sixth Expeditionary Force of the Sub-Saharan Union, she fought the urge to fidget.

She could guess what this was about. Her senior husband was dead. In the last weeks, Okonkwo had sent message after message to Military Security asking for them to investigate his death as a murder. Perhaps they hadn’t been ignoring her.

Perhaps they’d been preparing a disciplinary meeting instead. She had little understanding of the politics of the General Staff or how they would react to her requests.

She missed her senior husband and she wanted justice.

The wide doors opened and Colonel Bantya signaled her in. Okonkwo’s heart thumped. She stepped into a high chamber, walked to a seat at the foot of a long table, and saluted. Major-General Nandoro, the Commanding Off icer of the Sixth Expeditionary Force, sat across from her. Two lower-ranking brigadiers and some colonels were arrayed to his left and right. Okonkwo sat stiffly.

“This is Major Chenesai Okonkwo, Acting Head of Auditing,” Colonel Bantya said, emphasizing the “acting” in Okonkwo’s title. Her French departed from the visceral Montréal dialect affected by the ambitious, leaning instead to the lilting French spoken by the Congolese. It was all artificial. Neither Bantya’s nor Okonkwo’s ancestors had ever spoken French; they had adopted the tongue from their patrons a century ago as a condition of clienthood.

Nandoro nodded to his aide and Colonel Bantya spoke. “Major, the General Staff requires you to audit the security and accountability protocols around the Expeditionary Force’s research base.”

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Okonkwo made no sound, and perhaps had no expression. The security and accountability protocols for the base. That was close to asking her to audit the entire base, and by extension, the entire Expeditionary Force.

“You, your teams, and your AIs will be granted white access,” Bantya continued on behalf of the General Staff. “AI recordings of the investigation are to be sequestered during the audit and destroyed thereafter.”

White access. Nearly the highest level clearance possible.

“What is driving this, ma’am?” Okonkwo asked. “Has there been a breach?”

The two brigadiers appeared uncomfortable. Major-General Nandoro spoke with a voice both raspy and wet. “The pollen streaming through the time gate has stopped.”

Okonkwo retreated to the suite she had shared with her two husbands. Its plastic walls were f lat and undecorated, smelling vaguely of chlorine, but it was several steps better than the barracks. The suite had three workstations, a small shower and toilet stall, and three tiny bedrooms. Tinashe Zivai, her younger husband, waited for her. She closed the door and slumped at her desk. She wanted a cigarette, but held her beret tight to keep her hands from shaking in front of him. She might as well not have bothered. His brown eyes were wide and he paced on long legs, stopping every so often, only until nervousness set him moving again, fine fingers making tight fists. She’d never seen him frightened. She loosened her grip on her beret.

He shouldn’t see her scared.

“Does this mean the Congregate has found us, eleven years in the future?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Three months earlier, the Expeditionary Force had been sent by the Congregate to raid deep into the star systems of the Middle Kingdom, well beyond contact with their patrons, although each warship had carried its complement of political and language commissars. On their way, the Force had discovered the time gates, a pair of artif icial wormholes connected across eleven years of time. All the ancient wormholes were incalculably valuable; their possession was the defining feature of the patron nations. Finding a wormhole was the Union’s chance to slip from beneath the yoke of the Congregate. They had abandoned their mission, imprisoned all the commissars, and gone into hiding.

“It’s a big audit,” Tinashe said.

Auditors thought in terms of falsif ied records, skimmed rations, pay reconcilia-tions, and lost materiel. This assignment was not their area of expertise. Okonkwo rose and put her arms around him. She pressed her lips against the warmth of his ear. “We will get this done,” she whispered.

He deflated, taking for a moment what she offered, but then stiffened and pulled away. “I’ve never done a really big audit,” he said. “You’ve never led a big one.”

“I know,” she said. “We’ll have to hit the MP detachment, detention, the coordinating office, one or more of the research modules, and probably some of the battle ships.”

Tin turned away, rubbing his forehead, as if to knead the implications to the surface. “It’s big,” he repeated.

She understood what he was not saying. Garai, their late husband, had led many big audits. That was why he had been a colonel, and been given two subordinate spouses and command of an audit team. Neither Okonkwo nor Tinashe trusted that she could pull this off, and neither was saying so.

“This is our chance, though, Tin,” she said.

He frowned. “What? To prove ourselves?”

“No,” she said. “White clearance gives us access to almost everything. We can open the records we need to investigate Garai’s death.”

Pollen from a Future Harvest

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“That’s not what this is for. We can’t get distracted.”

“Did you love him?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“If he had thought you’d been murdered, he would not have rested until he found justice for you.”

Colonel Garai Munyaradzi, her late senior husband, had trained a small political-security-military unit for his audit team. Okonkwo suited up with them and they entered a skip shuttle, a pilotless shell that freighted kit from one part of the base to another. PolSecMil was meant to be the most experienced side of their little profession. Before Garai’s death, Okonkwo had been training to join them. Now with Okonkwo in charge instead of their colonel, an odor of awkwardness hung about them.

Captain Tendekai was a man of Okonkwo’s age, thirty-eight, flat-faced, with wide-set eyes, experienced at building and dissecting the security measures that protected information. Clever and effective, he was neither inspirational nor strategic, but functioned best when pointed at a target with questions of deep detail.

Cold air jets lifted them in the planet’s low gravity.

Second Lieutenant Rudo was a woman barely out of the Union Academy at Harare, attached to Garai’s command only days before the Sixth Expeditionary Force had shipped out. Among the shortest of military personnel she had ever seen, Rudo was also narrow-boned and slim. The vacuum suit, designed for larger crew, looked like it was melting over her in wrinkles.

Her tremendous ability and relentlessness had scored her above seven hundred other cadets in her class. She might have gone anywhere: field command, research, strategic intelligence. Garai had convinced her to choose internal affairs as a junior auditor, on his PolSecMil team. Rudo was eager to operate on her own, but was cursed with youth’s lack of subtlety.

Rudo and Tendekai had followed Garai because he knew more than they did.

Okonkwo ignored the gnawing nervousness in her stomach and tried to make out detail beyond the window. The red dwarf brooded at noon in the dark sky. Its orange light reflected off a hard point high above the shuttle: the Expeditionary Force’s flagship, the Mutapa. It was a good name. A growing power deserved a storied name, despite some irony.

Mutapa had been founded in the f ifteenth century, during the expansion of Greater Zimbabwe. Mutapa had gone on to supplant Greater Zimbabwe, becoming a kingdom and taking on client princes of its own, until internecine fighting weakened it enough for conquest by larger powers.

“Ma’am?” Rudo had edged close behind Okonkwo’s seat. “Ma’am, I’ve heard some talk that you’d been called to the General Staff and that the auditing unit might be dismantled. Is that what’s happening?”

“Why would you say that, Lieutenant?”

“It’s just what I hear.”

Tendekai looked over at the conversation. His expression was not one of someone holding back from laughing at a second lieutenant.

“Rudo,” Okonkwo said, “never gossip about your superiors or what meetings they attend. The auditing unit is not going anywhere.”

Rudo pressed her lips tight. “But we’re so far from headquarters and we have no colonel. I don’t see how they could get us another one. And no offense, ma’am, but you’re a new major. They can’t skip you two grades to colonel.”

Okonkwo’s face heated. Tendekai would not meet her eyes. The girl had proven brilliance in books and in the f ish bowl-clear rules of the academy. She still wore 70

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dark curls tight against her scalp in a cadet cut. But the rules that needed navigating were written and rewritten by the tides, and all that went on below the surface of the real world.

“Keep your nose out of politics, Rudo. Everything you do in politics comes back to bite you.”

Rudo failed to hide her disappointment and retreated.

Rudo had also missed what was uppermost in Okonkwo’s mind. The triple marriages of senior spouse, middle spouse, and junior spouse were Venusian in origin, a method for the colonists of Venus to ensure genetic diversity and formalize their clan alliances in the competitive, hellish depths of their new home. The Sub-Saharan Union had adopted the practice to arrange many key military and political portfolios beneath triptych marriages. The welding of management teams who came with different views and loyalties meant that treason and fraud were harder to hide. And MilSec made no secret that some spouses in some marriages were intelligence operatives. But despite the political and security character of the arranged marriages, many worked quite well. Okonkwo had loved Garai. She loved Tin. If the General Staff disassembled the auditing team, she would lose not one husband, but two.

The shuttle descended enough that the dim reflection of the surface revealed the thicket of vegetation on the ice. The Union base was in the middle of a deep valley hundreds of kilometers across. The gravitationally locked world sublimated slowly under the cool noon star and the vapor moved up and away to snow down onto rings of far-off glaciers. The surface was organic black.

They landed at the MP detachment overlooking the gates. It was a tower of ice and plastic. They cycled through the airlock, and while Tendekai and Rudo went right away to inspect the hard systems, Okonkwo climbed the stairs to the sixth floor and met Lieutenant-Colonel Tapiwa, Detachment Commander. His off ice was starkly functional, with hard plastic chairs. Okonkwo surveyed the f loor of the valley through the thick window beside their shoulders. Dark shapes moved so slowly as to make the movement doubtful glimmers at the corner of the eye.

“Before we start,” Okonkwo said, “I was reviewing all the personnel files. I noticed that you were a colonel in the bioweapons division, and yet you’ve taken an assignment at a lower grade as the detachment commander. Why did you do that?”

“All the other likely officers were already tasked with other things,” Tapiwa said.

“The General Staff had the choice of putting me here or leaving me at bioweapons.

This detachment is more important.”

“So this wasn’t your choice?” Okonkwo asked.

“We’re all soldiers, Major. We go where the mission needs us. You may be one of the only officers who has the same assignment she had on the way out.”

“I may get changed yet,” Okonkwo said, in a voice she hoped was light. “When exactly did the pollen stop?” she asked.

“At 14:20 on July 13, 2475,” Tapiwa said crisply. He had a brisk, efficient manner of speaking, undecorated features, and dark calloused hands.

“Can you swear, under examination, that you can account for all the records under your mandate?” Okonkwo asked formally.

“I can.” Tapiwa looked at Okonkwo directly, without the nervousness that accompanied an auditor’s visit.

“Do you assert that all the procedures within your mandate conform to Expeditionary Force Standing Orders, as well as the General Regulations and Orders and the Code of Service Discipline?”

“I so assert, with one exception,” Tapiwa said.

“Go on.”

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“My security cordon does not conform to the GR&Os,” he said, “due to an exception made by the General Staff. The passage of the vegetable intelligences through the cordon creates a series of leaks that cannot be accounted for or predicted.”

“Go on,” Okonkwo said.

“A security cordon must prevent the passage of enemy personnel and equipment, as well as anyone or anything that might be able to act on the enemy’s behalf,” Tapiwa said. “The vegetable intelligences roam across the entirety of the sunward hemi-sphere, as do our scientists, geologists, security patrols, and so on. We do not know how many more sleeper agents are still free. When the vegetable intelligences return to the gate, my systems scan them, but their different life cycle stages make their X-ray shadows different. A device of some kind could be hidden on one of them.”

“You’ve reported this to the General Staff ?”

“Of course,” Tapiwa said.

“Their response?”

“None,” Tapiwa said.

“Do you have a recommendation?” Okonkwo asked.

“The vegetable intelligences do not need to be here,” he said. “They could be completely excluded from the site and left to reproduce naturally. They don’t need to send their pollen back in time.”

“You are primarily securing the site against Congregate sleeper agents?”

“We’ve imprisoned all of the Congregate political commissars, but those were certainly the least of their spies. We can’t know how many of our crew and even officers might be in direct Congregate service.”

“And your answer to this is to exclude the vegetable intelligences from the gate?”

Tapiwa crossed his arms. “This is the largest action ever taken against the Congregate by a client nation, bigger than the Crow protests,” he said. “They will have been preparing against it for decades. Even if I was given complete control of security measures, and I was able to make it leak-proof, at some point the Congregate would still find out what we are doing here. Security measures only delay discovery by the enemy. It is the law of security that no secret is secret forever.”

Okonkwo, Tendekai, and Rudo stepped onto a crunchy surface of hard water and methane ice, painted with a riot of black, cold-living plants. Her suit detected a magnetic f ield of about half a Gauss, reaching over the habitats and labs like a great droplet of water, trembling at the assault of cosmic radiation. Periodically, the field was dropped; many life cycles depended on the scouring of parasites by hard radiation.

The display for a laser communication blinked inside her helmet. Rudo was transmitting to her by laser, so the conversation could not be overheard.

“Ma’am, I found something strange in the MP tower,” Rudo said.

Okonkwo double-checked the security of the line. “Go on.”

“I found traces of organics that shouldn’t have been there,” Rudo said. “Strange DNA and proteins.”

“Native?” Okonkwo asked.

“No, ma’am. Our kind of life, from Earth. But I think it’s viral. Probably a bioweapon.”

“Someone detonated a bioweapon in there?” Okonkwo asked.

“No, ma’am. Containment is always challenging. It could be just contact residue, but either something in there came close enough to a bioweapon that a bit stuck to their suit, or a bioweapon moved through the tower.”

“What do the logs say?” Okonkwo asked.

“My AI found nothing,” Rudo said.

“Movement of undocumented bioweapons through the MP tower?” Okonkwo said.

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“Looks like it, ma’am.”

“How sure are you? This stuff breaks down, no?”

“Under normal circumstances, yes, but the intense cold and weak insolation mean that DNA and proteins like ours can persist for a long time.”

“Where did you learn this? It isn’t in my SOPs.”

“The Academy, ma’am. I majored in MilSec. We had to take courses in experimental forensics.”

“Give me a report and analysis as soon as you can,” Okonkwo said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Okonkwo stepped over oily mats of photosynthesizers slicking the ground. These plants absorbed the red dwarf’s infrared radiation, slowly building high-energy com-pounds and antifreeze proteins. The skins of the plants, hardened against the near-vacuum, deposited water to make fragile skeletons and lived on the surfaces of those icy bones.

Scientists and the military police had cleared a path, but stiff rods of ice and pitch-colored leaf edged back into it. Beyond the opening the humans had made was the wide migratory path of the vegetable intelligences.

They were barrel-shaped, but mostly hollow, with hard skin stretched slick and black over fine ribs of ice. High, whip-like stamens and pistils sprouted from wide fronds on the tops of their bodies. They shambled, one ponderous, four-legged step every hour or two, trampling new growth, so that across the wide plain, the thin dark air carried the faint, relentless sounds of breaking crystal. They circled the double gates, a slow whirlpool around an oracle offering cryptic clues. Somewhere in the deep past, evolution had incorporated a time travel device into their life cycle.

“It’s creepy out here,” Tendekai said.

“I know,” Okonkwo said.

The lower edges of the time gates rested just beneath the flat plain. They scintil-lated; rings of warped space, held in imperceptibly trembling tension by what some guessed might be inflaton fields. And inside the gates, space bent in directions that could not be long observed. No one knew who had created the artificial wormholes, but they were ancient. They dotted space like flowers in a meadow, mostly around neutron stars, bridging the gulfs between the stars for human ships.

They appeared in nodes of three to f ive. Four had been found in Earth’s Solar System, creating the great interstellar patron nations: the Venusian Congregate, the Middle Kingdom, the Ummah, and the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy. Artif icial wormholes had become the new gold of human civilization, and these powers held the known gates like fortif ied oases. Humanity had found about two dozen gates, but their placement suggested a much larger decayed web of space-time tunnels. In the shadows of these ancient artifacts, humans were mice in an abandoned cathe-dral.

But this pair was unlike any other. Most gates were big enough to accommodate interstellar ships. These double gates were small ovals, only a dozen meters wide and half that high, partially embedded in the ice of the planet. They were not only locked together, but unevenly so, like two picture frames hanging on the same hook.

And they did not reach back and forth across space, but led from one to another in one direction only, backward in time by eleven years.

The Expeditionary Force’s physicists guessed that this was not intentional, that at some point the gates had collided and interfered with each other. All known gates evaporated in the same way as black holes, but this pair, locked together, seemed to be catalyzing each other’s evaporation. This unnatural dual gate would only live for a few million years more, but that would allow Union scientists to actually observe the decay, and perhaps, unlike the other patron nations, find out how to construct Pollen from a Future Harvest

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new stable wormholes. New technology developed by the Union would stake out a place for them on the stage of human affairs.

As the vegetable intelligences passed before the upwind side of the gate, the thin breeze carried pollen from rows of high stamens, and through the gates, delivering it eleven years into the past. Under normal circumstances, the creatures of today stood on the other side of the gate and received the pollen from eleven years in the future, but now the wind emerging from the future carried no pollen at all.

Here was the mystery the generals had issued her. Did that mean that eleven years in the future, none of the vegetable intelligences stood on the other side of the gate, pollinating the past, or that they were there, but were unable? The fact that the wind persisted meant that no one had moved the gate. Nor could the end of the pollen be explained by an order from the General Staff to remove the vegetable intelligences. The generals knew that they had given no such order. Any order that they gave in the future that involved the time gates would only be implemented after eleven years, so that there was no danger of paradoxes.

It might be that some environmental catastrophe had ended the pollen. Ice cores revealed plant material and pollen only as far back as a few hundred thousand years, suggesting that the dwarf planet had been colonized. The environment revealed in the ice cores was erratic, melting hundreds of meters in some spots due to scouring flares from the restive star. It did not even need to be a flare. The planet was already experiencing global warming.

The temperature of the planet hovered around seventy kelvins, but was minutely rising each year. The vacuum photosynthesizers absorbed infrared radiation that would otherwise have been reflected back into space. The trapped energy inexorably sublimated molecular-thin layers of the planet’s surface, gradually thickening the atmosphere. The pressure difference between the present and past drove the slow wind through the gates. It was starkly elegant, but not geologically sustainable.

“Remarkable,” Okonkwo said into her helmet’s radio.

“What?” Tendekai asked.

“That something alive, much less intelligent, managed to survive here.”

“Won’t be in eleven years,” Rudo said.

Okonkwo did not think of a proper retort before Tendekai spoke again.

“Good riddance,” he said. “Creepy buggers.”

Okonkwo eyed the intelligences under the light of the tepid star. Old leaves hung from them, on wisps of black, oily skin that had not yet torn through. In places, the skin had rubbed away, exposing the white bones of ice beneath. The dangling growth of yesterday tinkled like chandelier crystals, sounding faint and distant in the thin-ness of the atmosphere. Tendekai saw ugliness. Rudo calculated probabilities, bereft of beauty and ugliness. Okonkwo saw the repellent, but also an audacious vitality.

Four of the shambling vegetable intelligences, pistils and carpels gnarled with age, stooped near the gate, neither on the future side, nor on the past side. Reports identif ied these intelligences as something of elders, keepers of wisdom, and the most likely to understand direct conversation from the humans. Okonkwo had read all the reports of communicating with the vegetable intelligences and thought she understood it.

Previous conversations with the vegetable intelligences had been frustrating for physicists, botanists, and military intelligence analysts. An absence of common cultural referents yawned between them.

Okonkwo wore a chest plate filled with different chemicals and a multiplicity of small irises by which to release them for speech. Her chest plate would also smell the conversation. The intelligences themselves had a series of stomata on their chests that opened and closed, releasing chemical signals that traveled in nearly straight 74

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lines through the rarefied atmosphere, to smell receptors on their companions. Some thousand scents made up their vocabulary.

She joined their circle. They were silent.

“I am elder,” she said as the device hanging from the front of her suit released the chemical signal translation. Her words appeared on the screen in her helmet and they would not fade for a long time. Neural tests on discarded skins had revealed that the vegetable intelligences’ nervous cells did not relax quickly after firing. This made their sensations long things, not moments at all, but sober still lives lasting minutes, overlapping with other sensations in a fiction of simultaneity and a blur-ring of causality.

“New elder,” she added self-consciously. Not really an elder at all, just the middle wife in a triptych without a senior.

ALONE appeared on her screen, written over her words.

Rudo and Tendekai stood behind her, but perhaps to the vegetable intelligences, these creatures who made no smells were not part of the group.

“I have others,” she said. The smells hissed out of the tiny stomata in the machine she carried and crowded the cluttered screen with new words. Depending on the direction she followed on the screen, the conversation could be read in the order it had been spoken, or it could be read all in a jumble, or it could even be read backward. I have others, alone, new elder, I am elder.

NOT ELSEWHEN, appeared on her screen.

What did that mean? She was not elsewhen? She did not touch the past and the future the way they did.

The officers who had first contacted the vegetable intelligences reported their alien concept of time. Their gently rolling cyclic time was far from the moment-based human conception of the present, almost incomprehensively so. To the vegetable intelligences, the human present, the moment of now, was a single vote, and not even the most important one, in constructing cause and effect. They spoke with the past by sending pollen to their ancestors and sometimes even to past selves through the time gate, preparing the past for now without conceptually separating past from present.

Eleven years ago was the trailing edge of their present, the edge of what could contribute to their cross-temporal, tribal consensus. The past voted, through the off-spring begotten by the present and past. The future contributed the third leg of this consensus, sending its pollen back to the present. Eleven years in the future was the leading edge of now to the vegetable intelligences. Their broad present, and their basis of causality, were fuzzy conversations on events scattered across a window twenty-two years wide.

Except that their present had now narrowed. The future third of the relationship was estranged.

DO YOU COME TO BROADEN YOUR PRESENT? appeared on her screen, as the rest of the conversation faded.

“I do not think so,” she said. “The gate sends no pollen and we do not know how to send our wisdom through it to our own trailing edge. I come to see what you may understand of the end of the pollen.”

A staccato of chemicals shot at her chest translator and her screen changed. Her previous words “we do not know how to send our wisdom” faded. The other words were still there. The intelligences sent out smells to turn off previous parts of the conversation, to end stimulus, to change and correct what had been said, except that they were not limiting themselves to rewriting what they had said. Perhaps they believed that overwriting her meant that she hadn’t said it.

MUCH PITY. NO ONE SHOULD SUFFER A NARROW VIEW, appeared on the screen, as if they had been the ones to bring up the point. It bothered her sensibility as an Pollen from a Future Harvest

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auditor that they would rewrite what had been said. If humans did the same, there would be nothing upon which to base history and causality.

“Sometimes one must live, as you do now, with a shadowed leading edge,” she responded, using their description of the absence of future pollen streaming through the time gates.

NO ONE CHOOSES TO BE SHADOWED, they said.

She blinked at a sudden watering of her eyes in her helmet. No one did choose. She did not choose for Garai to have died. His role in the triptych had been to advise her, to guide her, as she guided and protected Tinashe. Garai had been a voice from a future she had yet to reach, at a stage of experience where he lit his own way through the world.

No one chooses to live shadowed, but sometimes one must.

“Sometimes the leading edge offers not wisdom, but bondage,” she said. The Venusian Congregate shared yesterday’s science with its client nations, directed their laws, and imposed the French language. They controlled military and political policy, throwing client nations into the wars against the other nations. The Congregate offered no wisdom, only a wing under which to shelter from larger predators.

LEADING EDGE, TRAILING EDGE, AND THE CORE ARE ALL ONE, the vegetable intelligences said, ONE LIVING BEING, SEEKING TO SURVIVE THE HOSTILITY OF THE WORLD.

The red dwarf above glared its hostility. At times cold, shuttering its dim light under silicate clouds, and at other times spewing hot flares with which to sand the surface of this world. The Venusian Congregate possessed its own fickleness, at times throwing scraps, at other times dictating, and at other times punishing.

“And what of the pollen?” she asked. “Do you know why it stopped streaming through the gates?”

NO, they said.

“Do you think the leading edge became lost? Broken?” she asked. They had no word for dead. “Was it a flare?”

WE DO NOT KNOW.

“Could one of you, or some of you working together, have caused this?” she asked.

CIRCLES TURN UPON THEMSELVES, RISING AND MELTING, THREADS OF RIGHT-PARENTAGE

MEETING WHERE THEY MUST, they said.

Okonkwo checked the translation, trying to make sense of the last answer. Their common vocabulary was so small and crude that it might be that they were saying something important.

“What will happen to you with no pollen coming from the future?”

The word pollen appeared this time on her screen as a constellation containing pollen-wisdom-insight. The inscrutable things shifted. Not much; each movement involved the injection of anti-freeze chemicals into their joints to soften them enough for muscular flexing to create motion. One began to turn away, to the sound of wine glass stems breaking.

THE TRIBE WILL STEP INTO SHADOW, came the answer eventually on her screen, AND

WILL EMERGE AFTER IT HAS COME TO KNOW WHAT HAS BECOME KNOWN TO THE LEADING

EDGE. WE WILL BECOME THE SHUTTERED VOICE, WITHOUT A WAY TO SPEAK TO THOSE WHO

FOLLOW. SOME TRIBES NEVER EMERGE FROM THE SHADOW.

What they said was true. Some tribes never did emerge from the shadow.

Late that night, after Tinashe was asleep, Okonkwo sat in the common area of their suite. Her encounter with the vegetable intelligences had disturbed her, although she did not know why. So utterly alien.

And every day, their strangeness walked over the spot where her husband had died.

The hardness of the ground, the grinding crunchiness of it was as cold and inhospitable as the intelligences themselves. He had fallen softly on that unforgiving surface.

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The softness of his body. The warmth of his skin. The wrinkles around eyes and lips. His home was now a grave scraped into the ice. Softness now hard. Warmth gone cold.

Okonkwo, Tendekai, and Rudo were in the sublevels dug deeply into the granite-hard ice beneath the surface. Their breath swirled in thin white clouds. The slick blackness of the walls hid the depths of the ice. She might touch a hand to the cold and know that the same ice somewhere touched her husband. She might press a light against the surface and watch it penetrate voids of perfect transparency, and lacy fields of bubbles hardened from ice. She did not touch the ice. Today she was the hunter.

“Ma’am,” Rudo said, almost skipping to keep up with Okonkwo’s impatient strides.

“What do we expect to find by auditing detention again?”

Okonkwo did not answer.

Rudo looked at Tendekai for support, then back to Okonkwo. “We have so much to audit, in such a short period of time, that we should decide where to put our energies, ma’am. PolSecMil audited detention only a couple of months ago. We have the report.”

Rudo held out a pad, no doubt with a copy of the report helpfully displayed.

Garai himself had initiated and led the audit because he had worried that sleeper agents might try to pass messages or materiel to the imprisoned political commissars, or vice versa. Rudo’s implication was accusatory. If Colonel Munyaradzi, with twenty years more experience, hadn’t found anything, what would Okonkwo’s team f ind? From the way Tendekai avoided her eyes, he sympathized with Rudo. He’d been part of Garai’s audit.

Okonkwo neared the pair of them.

“You’ve been briefed,” she said in a low voice. “The Congregate may be coming for us. If they are, who do you think told them we’re here?” She hung the question in the chill until even Rudo looked away. “Will you sign your name to an assurance that no one in detention got a message to an ally on the surface?”

Rudo lowered the pad.

“This time, we’re going to tear this place apart,” Okonkwo said. “And if you’re worried about getting bored, Tendekai, you cover the colonel’s part this time. I’ll take yours.”

And then, both Rudo and Tendekai had difficulty in keeping up with her.

Despite her bravado, Okonkwo was out of her element within hours. She was not nearly as experienced as Garai had been. In the zones Tendekai had covered last time, she found no irregularities that were not in his report, and missed a few that were.

Two months ago, Garai’s worries of sleeper agents had been founded. Twice since the Expeditionary Force had established the base on the surface, detainees had attempted escapes. Both detainees were killed before leaving the facility, but the breach pointed at weaknesses yet unknown. And even after the audit, a schematic of the detention center, sketched from the inside, had been found in a dead drop on the surface. Someone had carried that message there, and had left it for some other sleeper agent they had not yet caught.

Okonkwo moved to the main control area, accompanied by the detention commander, an old lieutenant. She reviewed the detainee files, cross-checking them against older records and live closed-circuit footage. MilSec housed fifty-nine detainees.

There were the ship engineers, those Union off icers trained by the Congregate naval engineering schools and loyal to the Congregate. There were the political commissars, those who had worked with the naval commanders, counter-signing Pollen from a Future Harvest

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important decisions and watching for sedition. These were mostly Venusian colonists, mixed with some citizens of the greater Congregate, like the Québécois or the French. There were the undercover commissars and sleeper agents. They’d been detected, one by one, through counter-revolutionary operations and stings.

And finally, there were the language commissars, generally junior officers of the Union, monitoring adherence to the French language laws, looking to make names for themselves to jockey for higher-level duties for the Congregate. These lick-boots were among the most despised of the detainees, and Okonkwo did not smother her satisfaction when the guards on closed circuit video insisted that the language commissars speak Shona.

But it was a bittersweet satisfaction.

French, however much its adoption was a humiliating condition of becoming a client nation of the Venusians, was a powerful language. During its long history, French had been the language of philosophy, science, war, and diplomacy. It drew on centuries of literature and political dialogue, and even during its eclipsing by other cultures, it had borrowed and coined new words. The Shona spoken by the guards, leavened with French terms every tenth word, felt smaller. It made her feel smaller.

“I found something,” Tendekai reported to her on the third day, sidling close with a display. “A computer virus,” he whispered, “a micro-AI really, adaptive to defensive software. I found it in the security system, patched to the closed-circuit feed. I think it’s programmed to send encrypted screenshots of the detainees somewhere.”

“Do you know where?”

He shook his head.

“So the detainees could have used prearranged signals and body language to send messages outside the detention center?” she asked.

Tendekai nodded, removing his beret to wipe at a sheen of nervous sweat that managed to form even in this cold.

“How long has it been there?” she asked.

“Months?”

“Why didn’t Colonel Munyaradzi see this?” she asked.

“This is really advanced, Major. Experimental. I don’t know how many people in the whole Expeditionary Force could have found it. Me. Probably Captain Zivai.

MilSec sure didn’t find it, and they scan their systems daily.”

“How advanced?”

“A computer virus needs processing power,” he said. “We sometimes find viruses by subtracting out all the other things a computer is doing and then seeing what’s still eating up the processing power. But MilSec runs on quantum computers. Their algorithms process in parallel, running all possible variables simultaneously, in a su-perposition of states. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter if you’re running two or twenty operations at a time on a quantum processor. And this is a quantum computer virus. It runs unnoticed, taking its processing power by superimposing itself on the variables we aren’t keeping. It can only be found by testing for certain kinds of interferences.”

“Why wouldn’t MilSec look for those interferences? Why did you?”

“I’ve never seen a quantum computer virus, ma’am. There’s no reason to check. I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t redo the colonel’s work like you said. I trusted the colonel to have covered all the bases, so I took a few long shots. This one paid out.”

A hollow opened in her gut, nervous and f illing with fear. Someone loyal to the Congregate had hacked the MilSec computers and had been sending messages out for who knew how long. What other unknown resources did the sleeper agents have?

Could they have already contacted the Congregate?

* * *

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Comme il faut

Parle comme il faut, dit le commissaire

Speak properly, says the commissar.

Il faut. One must.

My words cut, mes mots coupent, must cut, faut couper, cut out, cut away, until nothing remains

But the words of les immortels.

They traded me a gun for my words,

Then threw them down a well

Dissolved them into the acid of their world.

Grandfathers have words. Mothers have words. Les miens sont français.

Two boys whisper nothings in a corner. No more.

“En français, les garcons!”

My gun is powerful. The language aches

With beauty, beauté, coiled meanings and hidden metaphors As cunning as a cuckoo, tossing eggs from a nest.

Parle comme il faut, dit le commissaire.

I have a gun. I will make those boys speak as they should.

I have left my mother behind.

Okonkwo sat in the dark, her hands lit by the hovering holographic displays of her desk. Tendrils of cigarette smoke writhed through medical reports, the times and locations changing color and brightness. The room brightened as Tinashe emerged from the shower. She did not turn and his hands came to rest on her shoulders, warm. Being with Tinashe only, living in a shrunken family, felt strange.

“I miss Garai too,” he said, “but I don’t torture myself over and over with his last moments.”

“This isn’t torture,” she said slowly. Her exhaled gray smoke coiled, soaking itself in holographic yellow. “Something doesn’t add up.”

Tinashe pulled a chair closer, wrapped himself in his towel and sat. He tapped her pack and pulled a cigarette free with his lips. His finger penetrated the hologram, expanding the coroner’s report.

“This conversation is getting old, Chenesai,” he said softly. “No toxins. No injuries.

No sign of foul play.”

“He was outside, in a suit. The magnetic field was dropped for eighty-nine seconds.

He died forty minutes later.”

“Neither Garai, nor his assistant, took more than two hundred millisieverts of radiation,” Tinashe said. “Hot, but not lethal.”

Okonkwo inhaled and shook her head. The smoke stung her eyes.

“We have no reason to believe it was murder,” Tinashe said. “There’s no motive.

Killing him doesn’t get audit results erased and we haven’t even found an audit that would have justified murder.”

“Garai said that an auditor must also be part philosopher, interrogating not just the facts, but the depths of human nature,” she said. “We’re not done interrogating.”

“I loved Garai,” Tinashe said, “but he looked at auditing more as an artist than as an engineer. He missed the quantum computer virus.”

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“So did MilSec.”

“Chenesai, I don’t think Garai’s memory is taking you to the right place so that you can lead us through whatever shit the Expeditionary Force has gotten itself into.”

Okonkwo stood, cigarette butt trembling in her fingers.

“Keep this in sight, Tin. You and I are not engineers. We are hunters. Keep your nose to the ground.”

Administrative protocols, counter-signatures and distributed authorities were the f irst immune response of any bureaucracy. Restricting access to key systems and information was like stretching skin across a body to keep pathogens out. Counter-signatures emulated self- and non-self-recognition; what should be there, and what should not be. Distributed authorities, the requirement for two or three concurrent signatures, was like the monitoring of DNA health, the comparing and contrasting of information and conf irming matches, with mismatches triggering a repair response.

The guards scanned Okonkwo and Tinashe and checked and rechecked their AI.

Okonkwo, with her blue access, and even Garai, with his green, had never been close to the research modules or the coordinating center. They’d had no need to know.

With white access, no door was closed to her.

It was heady and dangerous power. Dangerous because she could make a mistake.

Dangerous because the systems and partitioning of knowledge had been built to avoid breaking the laws of causality.

Colonel Chipunza, a slender old physicist commanding the coordinating center, met them. Okonkwo saluted, and then accepted coffee and a cigarette in his office.

He examined their accesses and ran the authorizations from the General Staff against their DNA before getting to business.

“This research facility is unique,” Chipunza said, displaying a f lowchart in the holographic projector on his desk. “We have six research modules. My mandate is to keep them separate so that no grandfather paradoxes can occur. Each module, after doing eleven years of research, will send back everything they learn through the gate. I will receive it and then give it to the next research module, which is entirely separate and without any communication with the first. The second one does another eleven years of research and so passes what it learns back into the past so that the third module begins, and soon, in this way, sixty-six years of research can be compressed into weeks or months. In theory, we are limited only by how many research modules we can sustain.”

“If you don’t mind, sir, I think I need to back up,” Okonkwo said. “I’m no physicist.

I know what grandfather paradoxes are, but what would really happen? Why these measures? Was there some successful transmission of information to the past that went badly?”

Chipunza smiled. “No one has blown up a research facility by creating a grandfather paradox,” he said. “A grandfather paradox creates a causal loop, where one event overwrites another, which in turn overwrites the original event, and which overwrites its cause and so on. No theory knows how to break out of a causal loop, but theories do suggest that the process will need a lot of energy.”

“What does that mean?”

Chipunza struggled for words. “Everything in the Universe can be considered in computational terms,” he f inally said. “Atoms and photons move around and carry bits or qubits of information. Their interactions process the information they carry, like computer logic gates. And as they compute, they give off heat. Rewriting information expends energy. In the case of the causal loop of a grandfather paradox, it is like looping one NOT gate to another, and then running it forever. Heat will 80

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be given off, in theory, inf inite heat, but the energy for running the rewriting process, the calculations, comes from somewhere. We don’t know where, but we are certain not to want to be nearby if that were to occur.”

“But your modules can’t send information back through the gate yet, can they?”

she asked.

“Not yet, but soon,” he said. “The first attempts have only just been made. Subse-quent attempts will be fast. We program a series of experiments, lock up the instructions, and give them to the research modules to open in eight or nine years, so as to prepare the experiments and implement them by the eleven-year mark. It won’t be long.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“It’s more than interesting. This time travel device enables us to process in parallel, looking down all avenues at once. It’s almost like a real-world quantum processor. A transformation.”

Okonkwo mused. Transforming the process of research, the nature of research, by using communication with the past, was the strategic key to Union military su-premacy. The Venusians had studied their wormhole for decades, peeling back extreme physics and technology, before any of the other powers had found theirs. Now, the Sub-Saharan Union could not only catch up, but surpass them. Generations of research, done overnight, in parallel. As long as the Venusians did not find them and as long as the Union itself did not create a paradox.

“How do you measure the tightness of the isolation between modules?” she asked.

“The modules are physically and electronically isolated from each other and from the rest of the Expeditionary Force, so there is no possibility of a causality violation.

Food and supplies are delivered by the coordinating center,” he said. “Moreover, few in the Expeditionary Force know what we are doing or how. Except for those working on communicating with the past, those in the modules are rarely aware that their work is being sent back in time. They only receive information from their superiors, who receive it from me, and they do their jobs without asking any questions.”

“Don’t you worry that some will chafe at being isolated, find it a bit strange that they never see any of the rest of the force?”

“We’re on a frozen planet orbiting a red dwarf,” he said. “Where would they go?

They live in small villages with families.”

“What about sleeper agents?”

“That’s the beauty of this structure. Even if there were sleeper agents in one of the modules, what could they do? The isolation necessary to avoid grandfather paradoxes also neutralizes sleeper agents.”

“You yourself aren’t a possible cause of a grandfather paradox?” she asked.

“I won’t read the complete reports,” he said. “I’ll ensure that the information survived transmission into the past and then pass it on. A record will be kept, but to be frank, the research and experiments are so advanced that I wouldn’t be able to puzzle together anything dangerous. I’m like you: an effective project manager. We make processes work.”

Something inside her cringed at his words. She’d never considered herself in such limited, heroically bureaucratic terms. What was she? A second spouse, adrift, cling-ing to processes, to questions that were, in their own ways as limited as the ones she assigned to Tendekai. No one chooses to be shadowed.

“What do you make of the end of the pollen streaming through the gate?” she asked. “What do you think is possible, and what do you think is probable?”

The old colonel huffed.

“I’ve been asked this already,” he said.

“And what did you tell them?” she asked.

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“That I am not concerned about the interruption of the pollen. A hard flare could kill most of the vegetable intelligences, and those that survive might become trapped as the ground refroze. It could take years for the population to rebound.”

“We found no ash, water vapor, or snow coming through the gate. The wind carries no clues at all.”

He licked his lips.

“What are the chances that one of the research modules in the future moves the vegetable intelligences away from the gate?” she asked.

“Zero,” he said, sitting straighter.

“Why?”

“They wouldn’t do that. They only do what they are instructed by this office.”

“How are you sure?” she asked.

Chipunza pursed his lips and tsked, offended. “I’ll show you our system is auditor-tight,” he said, leaning over the desk toward her. Then he stalked from the office. He returned with a data wafer, colored red for secure. He slapped it on the desk and slid it toward her.

“Your white access ought to open this. Look at it.”

She slid the wafer into her data pad and thumbed her passcode. A security process diagram bloomed, detailing hard and soft security measures, counter-signed by the commander of the military police and Colonel Munyaradzi.

She suppressed a reaction. Of course Garai would have designed a set of administrative protocols tight enough to prevent even causal violations. He cast a long shadow.

His Ghost Upon the Ice

And so he walks,

Bewildered, on the ice,

Scraping at rime on ghostly feet.

He looks for his house,

But no trees or grasses mark the way.

Frost bites fingers and toes.

He holds high hands to warm them,

In bloodied starshine,

But the sun is cool, curtained by clouds of sand,

Its corona glassing grains into a star’s pollen,

Sterile seed to trace veins in the blooms of convection, Fated never to know another star.

What is pollen but reaching, like the hands of a ghost,

Wrinkled still, and bitten by cold?

Clouds of glass reach without consummation,

The ghost calls my name with words lonely and tender and cutting, But the sound: snow upon the ice.

Okonkwo and Tinashe spent the day in the coordinating center inspecting the hard systems, and then worked well into the night preparing algorithms to look at the files. But about midnight, when Chipunza understood how deeply they intended to dig, he refused her requests to open the records of the instructions that had been given to the modules. His protests shot straight to the General Staff, so that Chipunza and Okonkwo spoke with a tired Colonel Bantya.

“I cannot answer the questions put to me if I cannot see what instructions were given to the future,” Okonkwo said simply. It was late and her energy was flagging.

Bantya ordered the records to be opened to her.

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“Enough rope to hang yourself, and all of us too,” Chipunza said.

Chipunza was not being professionally proprietary about the instructions for the future. No one knew how causality worked, how flexible it might be or what counter-measures the Universe might possess to avoid causal breakdowns. Not even Chipunza knew the contents of the instructions, so that even inadvertently, he could not test the Universe.

But he enabled her white access in his system, opening all the instructions having been given to the future so far. Hundreds, thousands of experiments, small and large.

It would take days for them, even with AI assistance, to analyze them. She set the AI hunting patterns and anomalies.

She and Tinashe set up an office and were given cots and rations. The next day, while their AI worked, they resumed the inspection of the hard systems and then questioned the staff and reviewed documentation and signatures and authorizations.

At the end of the day, Tinashe settled down with the AI and activated the privacy screen. A low sheen of white noise hissed out. Something similar would be projecting at low levels in much of the EM spectrum. It cloaked against listening and watching devices. Few people could access this kind of privacy without drawing the attention of counter-intelligence operatives hunting undercover Congregate sympa-thizers. But auditors, by the nature of their work, enjoyed an exceptionality, as if to make up for the hushes that bloomed when they entered a room.

“I don’t think we’re finding anything,” Tinashe said quietly.

Okonkwo had her data pad plugged into the AI; she scanned pages and pages of orders. So many experiments, ingeniously timed and distributed among the modules so that no information ever apparently traveled faster than the speed of light. No causal violations. Graphically, the flow of communications was artful, a fountain of experimentation traveling forward in time with droplets of results falling back.

As of yet, the Expeditionary Force had not succeeded in transmitting any positive signal back in time. The first experiments to send information by laser and maser through the time gates eleven years from now were simple attempts. The gates randomized the beams, so much so that even the time of arrival could not be used to send information back in something as rudimentary as Morse code.

Several dozen experiments eleven years in the future had tried sending information back on steel plates. Information was encoded in hard, macroscopic etching, resistant to quantum uncertainty, and then written redundantly into smaller structures, all the way down to holes in the crystalline lattice of the metals, to mimic the redundancies of the eight chromosomes of the vegetable intelligences.

These experiments delivered only disrupted metallic plates. The metals were ablated inside and out, in every direction. The plates had not passed through an abra-sive medium that had sanded the outside, while leaving the inside intact. Every cubic millimeter showed ablation, from many directions, as if the plates had passed through a higher-dimensional space that cared nothing for topological niceties like the difference between surface and interior.

They were dealing with powers they did not understand.

Okonkwo shivered.

Experiments scrolled on and on, one after another. She stopped. One caught her eye.

“Tin, why would researchers need a tachyon burst?”

He lifted an eyebrow. The Sub-Saharan Union knew slightly more about tachyons than they did about the time gates, which was to say, almost nothing. Perhaps the Congregate knew more. Warship engines, under punishing circumstances, could emit tachyons, and the engines of another ship might detect the disturbance. No one knew how to modulate the wavelengths of the tachyons, nor their energy and speed.

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At best, the Union knew how to create a crude omnidirectional tachyon spray, traveling faster than light, and backward in time.

“Maybe the tachyons wouldn’t get randomized going through the time gate?” he mused.

“How far do you suppose they would go?”

“Through the time gate?” he asked.

“No, everywhere else.”

Tinashe raised an eyebrow. “Far.”

“Far back,” she corrected. “Months. Maybe years. Far enough back that the Congregate could mount retribution.”

“What?”

“Think of it this way. The Congregate trains our engineers on the ships they give us. The engineers become loyal to the Congregate, but trust is a weak security feature. To guard against disobedience, they have political commissars too. But that’s still a leaky system with which to control nations, isn’t it? Suppose they had other ways of discovering disloyalty? What if a Congregate operative could signal our patrons with tachyons if any client unit ever went rogue? Wouldn’t that be a good security feature for keeping tabs on client nations?”

“No one knows how to encode anything in tachyons,” Tinashe said.

“They might not need to,” Okonkwo said. “If the only circumstances under which tachyons are emitted is a rogue action, the Congregate would only have to listen for those. It’s binary, an on-off alarm.”

“We arrested the engineers with the political commissars,” Tinashe said. “They have no access to the engines.”

She showed the display. “Well, if you’re a well-placed sleeper agent, you could just make it one of the experiments. Our own people will do it for you. The order is right here.”

“Your theory seems a little far-fetched.”

She leaned closer. “Think like an auditor, Tin. Nothing is a coincidence until we prove they’re unrelated.”

The more she thought of it, the more sense it made.

“We’re dozens of light years into Middle Kingdom space, far from anything that ought to see traffic,” she said. “We know the pollen stopped, and we don’t know why.

We do know that we’ve betrayed our patron and that some of their sleeper agents are still active. It would take decades for a slower than light signal to tell the Congregate where we are. Tachyons can get back to them not only now, but before we even left.”

Okonkwo and Tinashe approached the darkened habitat in the shadow of the planet, sitting among food, volatiles, and industrial goods on a cramped, automated shuttle. Even with white access, Okonkwo could not bring more than one person with her. The security had to be tight. The habitat was gun metal dull, windowless, without any external lights, difficult to see.

They maneuvered, bumped, and sealed. A young captain called Deng met them at the airlock, accompanied by the smell of growing things. He was very tall, taller than Okonkwo and Tinashe; he was likely Dinka, part of the Sudanese contribution to the Union forces. There were many off icers in the Expeditionary Force, but command posts tended to fall to the Bantu. Deng must have been very competent, or very well connected.

The module was eighty meters in diameter and some three hundred meters long, spinning slowly to give a feel of gravity not much different than the planet’s. It housed dozens of scientists who labored for the bioweapons division. Greenhouses and crop areas took up most of the space in the habitat, interspersed with dark and empty bays.

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“Why isn’t this space being used?” Tinashe asked.

“We’ve not yet been told to f ill those areas with experiments,” Deng answered.

Of course some of the bays would be empty. When they f igured out how to send messages to the past and the work of other modules was passed to them, Module One would need to set up new experiments. They couldn’t do that if every cubic meter of space was already claimed. The coordinating center had to plan in block time.

The inside of the habitat did not seem to extend the whole three hundred meters.

They walked to the northern ceiling, where banks of labs and telepresence equipment were set up around a pair of airlocks.

“What’s in here?” Okonkwo asked.

“Half of the habitat is given over to a near-vacuum, bathed in infrared and cosmic rays at a temperature of about seventy kelvins. We’ve reproduced the environment of the planet so that we can culture the tissues of the vegetable intelligences.”

“What for?” Tinashe asked.

“We’re designing synthetic viruses to carry coded information that can be infected into the vegetable intelligences,” Deng said, “based on the pathogens that already infect them.”

“What is the chance that something you’re doing could damage the intelligences in the future?” Okonkwo asked.

She’d posed the question factually, as an auditor, and she’d expected some reaction.

Pride. Offense. Deng held up his hands helplessly.

“I would guess zero. They beat us at every step. Sometimes the pollen is triploid, but most of the time, it’s hexaploid or octoploid. Imagine six to eight copies of every chromosome. The pollen chromosomes undergo randomization as they go through the time gate, just like our information, but somehow their repair mechanisms correct the changes or adapt to them. With eight copies of every gene, no matter what happens at each bit of the chromosome, they compare and contrast and adapt, deciding by molecular consensus. We can’t break in.”

“But these viruses can do it,” she said.

“We don’t know how.”

“So your retroviruses integrate into the vegetable intelligence chromosomes, and then get repaired out?” she asked.

“Yes, but we’ve done more than that,” he said miserably. “We developed the vegetable intelligence equivalent of DNA synthesizers to hard-write whole chromosomes from scratch to transfect back into pollen cells. It took us months to realize that the vegetable intelligence repair mechanisms are adapted for such high levels of mutation and randomization that they compare chromosomal sequences to the proteins they code for, and where there are differences, back-transcribe the chromosomes through the equivalent of their ribosomes, based on the molecular voting of their repair systems.”

“So at a molecular level, the future is checking on the correctness of the past?” she asked.

“I’ve never thought of it that way, but I suppose so.”

“When will you try to actually put these retroviral experiments through the gate?”

she asked.

“We already have, or, that is to say, we will have already done so,” he said, twisting his French tenses and modes into the grammar of time travel logic. “We locked away several components already. They would have been sent through the gate about ten and a half years from now. We received the resulting pollen back through the gate six months ago.”

“So it’s hopeless?” she asked.

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“No. Whatever laws of causal conservation we are discovering here, we have not yet gotten to the bottom of them. The vegetable intelligences have evolved a system to send information back in time, so we know it’s not impossible. We’ll get it soon.”

Deng led Okonkwo and Tinashe through the hard systems for a first sweep. The security measures were straightforward. Okonkwo’s AI examined the electromag-netic emissions of the habitat and the power flows using magnetometers, to ensure that no spy could have set up an antenna or laser outside the hull to communicate out. They had nearly no contact with headquarters: an inspection once a month by the coordinating center, and a weekly cargo drop and return of any materials to headquarters. All in-coming and out-going materials had to be inspected and authorized by Deng and counter-signed by a lieutenant.

Then Okonkwo and Tinashe, with Deng, inspected the research records themselves.

“This feels strange,” Deng said. “Standing orders say no one looks at this, not even me.”

“The standing orders are signed by the General Staff,” Tinashe said wryly. “They’re the ones asking if everything is in order.”

Deng opened administrator access for them.

“Is all the research in here?” Tinashe asked, as he hooked up their AI. “Nothing more classified stored elsewhere?”

“It’s all here.”

“Mostly botany?” Okonkwo asked.

“The research of other units too. They’re less active, except for the bioweapons team.”

“What are they building?” she asked.

“The bioweapons team is trying to increase the virulence of human viruses and bac-teria, as well as plant pathogens. The problem is that when you make pathogens more virulent, they kill the hosts too quickly to allow widespread infection of the enemy.”

A moment of black humor rose in her. Insensitive, but they were all soldiers. They had weapons. Did it matter if the enemy soldiers died from nukes, lasers, or viruses?

The Expeditionary Force had slipped the leash. They had betrayed their patrons; they had to take this seriously. The Congregate took betrayal very seriously.

An office was prepared for them in Module One and they spent that day and the next directing their queries and systems checks through their AI, sleeping on cots for only a few hours when the habitat was already long silent. The hours passed in a wash of reports on molecular biology and alien metabolic systems.

Somehow the vegetable intelligences managed to send information into the past.

They therefore held the secret to unlocking the Union military development without creating grandfather paradoxes. Yet what the Expeditionary Force did not know so vastly dwarfed what they did that it was disheartening.

The vegetable intelligence metabolism, their multicopy chromosomes, and their genetic repair mechanisms were fascinating, as weird as their two-dimensional communication and their distended concept of the present. Human DNA repair was crude by comparison, quiescent for the most part, activating only when DNA suffered damage by toxins or radiation.

Mutation and genetic repair were the keys to the incredible resilience of the vegetable intelligences. They needed to be able to adapt quickly in response to drastic environmental swings. Gene shuffling and swapping and recombination were only the beginnings of the creation of new forms. The time gates were a potent mutagen to them, producing genetic variation.

The genomes, with some surviving wildtype genes, as well as all the copies carrying errors, constituted a great, disagreeing council sitting to hammer out an agreement.

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The repair mechanisms were the mediators, translating the views of old and young, past and future, into an acceptable consensus in the present. It was astonishing and humbling, like looking at a work of art possessed of dizzying complexity.

Long after Tinashe had slumped onto his cot, Okonkwo stayed scratchy-eyed at work, running more personal queries through the AI in bioweapons databases. The researchers were testing different flu viruses for their ability to spread to large populations, as well as retroviruses that integrated their DNA into human genomes to extend the period between infection and sickness. Sleeper viruses, like sleeper agents.

Since Garai’s death, she’d been obsessed with death and plots and conspiracies.

Like a madwoman. Except her problem was the opposite; she did not see conspiracies everywhere. She looked and looked and could find none.

Shipping manifests caught her attention. They were more numerous than she would have expected. Small cargo scows shuttled week after week between the main base and Module One. That shouldn’t happen. Any shipping ought to have been routed through the coordinating office. The manifests were counter-signed by officers at the MP tower.

Tapiwa had taken a demotion, from commanding the bioweapons division, to lead the MP detachment. And Rudo had found residue of bioweapons at the tower. Were these secrets stolen by sleeper agents, or was someone in the base stockpiling weapons?

She opened the files and found that the shuttles were transporting tissue samples.

The security and causality-preserving protocols should not have permitted this. Bio-logical materials were the easiest thing to hide coded information in, whether in proteins, DNA, or RNA.

The f iles also contained medical records, a whole sequenced genome, with ap-pended genetic and pathological analyses. Someone had been diagnosed with an advanced melanoma that had already inf iltrated multiple tissues. Appended f iles contained the sequences of viruses engineered to target the transformed cells, carrying immune and suicide genes to kill the cancer.

She was no doctor, but she could read diagnoses and prognoses in plain French.

The therapies could prolong life, but they would not save the patient. Who was worth breaking the hermetic, causality-preserving protocols around Module One?

She went cold.

Nandoro. Major-General Nandoro. Commander of the Expeditionary Force.

In a few months, a power vacuum would bloom over his grave.

Okonkwo had been interviewing Deng, but then lingered at the crops, trying to dismiss a dark mood and the false promises of coincidence. Auditors reacted to coincidences exactly opposite to the way scientists did. To a scientist, a coincidence meant nothing unless proven otherwise. To an auditor, a coincidence meant everything until proven otherwise. And she was swimming in coincidences.

The bioweapons residue at the MP tower, the odd transfer of Tapiwa and the illic-it shipping between the MP tower and Module One were all too coincidental for comfort, but the shuttles had contained only tissue samples, biopsies, and treatments for Major-General Nandoro.

Sitting in the light gravity near the crops, she dug deep into Nandoro’s medical records. He was diagnosed soon after the launch of the mission. Most cancers were treatable, but sometimes people still got unlucky. Nandoro had spent a long career in space. Initial treatment. Then aggressive treatment. Then major surgery. She stopped.

Major surgery, general anaesthetic, on the twentieth of June, six weeks ago, the exact date Garai had died on the surface. There couldn’t be a connection. Could there?

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She worried at the pieces for a long time, before finally stowing her pad and heading back to their temporary office. Tinashe was still awake. He’d been querying the data from the coordinating center with an AI. His face wore a mood. She sat and rubbed his shoulder. “What’s wrong, Tin?”

“You were off thinking about Garai,” he said. “Obsessing.”

“He was your husband too,” she said.

“You’re not letting yourself mourn,” he said. “It’s supposed to hurt, Chen. Let it run its course. There are no shortcuts to feeling better.”

She found her fingers pressed into fists, and as she opened them by an act of will, her vision watered. Tinashe knelt before her, taking her stiff fingers.

“One day we’ll f ind out it doesn’t hurt so much,” he said. “And we’ll even love again. Somewhere out there is a senior auditor who’s ready to take on a small team and a husband and a wife.”

She shook her head.

“We’re widows, Tin,” she said. “We’re out here for the duration. The gate is too secret. Even a normal gate would mean war. These time gates might be unique in the Universe. If a breath of them gets out, the patron nations will go to war themselves, not just through proxies. There will be no resupply or reinforcement. We’re widows.”

“Maybe for a time,” he said. “In a few years, you might be old enough to be a senior wife and we’ll take a junior wife.”

“Ah, Tin, you’re so innocent.” She stroked his face. “This is all politics. I don’t have the connections. The colonels and general staff need us, but they’re probably already thinking about absorbing our family into their little empires.”

Tinashe grimaced and retreated to his cot. “Not if we f ind what stopped the pollen,” he said. “We’ll find out. You think the tachyon instruction did it?”

She cupped her fingers around a flame to light a cigarette, hiding tiny tremors of fear. She inhaled a deep rush of false calm.

“Not directly,” she said. “I think the tachyons were used to signal the Congregate.

I don’t think we would do experiments with things we don’t understand.”

“This audit is showing that we don’t understand anything about the gates or the vegetable intelligences,” he said. “Maybe the General Staff is desperate enough to try anything. The research has to get off the ground, or the rebellion against the Congregate is wasted.”

She rose and moved away from him. There was no place to go in such a tiny cabin.

She faced the wall, creating a wall with her back in a movement as old as space travel. Without room to move, humans could either kill each other or create artificial privacies. Their words stung. She had said widow. He had said rebellion.

It had slid off his tongue, just like any word. But calling it rebellion was like breaking off the tip of a branch and ignoring the tree beneath, the context and cause. It was true that the Union bled in the Congregate’s wars, but that had always been the bargain.

And yet history was more than just the bargain. It stood on old roots. Was the bargain itself fair? In what sense could the Zimbabwean state, Earth-bound by a relative lack of wealth and allies, make a deal with anyone but the devil? The mineral, metals, and volatiles of the asteroids produced wealth, not Earth-bound manufacturing.

Strategic military advantages lay beyond the Earth’s gravity well. The Earth-locked nations like Zimbabwe had been destined to disappear, or persist as backwaters.

The acid-marked ambassadors of Venus, desperate for allies and resources after their separation from Québec, came to the African hegemon with offers of power, interstellar ships, warships. Could they have declined? Only this hand opened to the struggling, history-mauled Zimbabwe. The Venusians demanded only their people and their language as the price.

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Yet, for all that Union patriots argued over the poor hand dealt to them, it was a profitable bargain. The Sub-Saharan Union had been founded by imposing Zimbabwean hegemony over their neighbors, offering the same deal as they had been given, but with poorer terms. History was layers and layers of open hands and bargains.

Now, the Union intended to bite the Venusian hand and Okonkwo had followed them.

So they all waited in stillness on judgment, to see if they were rebels or traitors.

Tinashe touched her shoulder and she turned.

“I did my own obsessing today,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I dug into the instructions for the tachyons,” he said, “and I found out who authorized the tachyon burst.”

“Who?”

“Brigadier Takatafare,” he said quietly.

Takatafare. General Staff. Head of security.

Big fish.

Okonkwo and Tinashe, with a small PolSecMil team, boarded the Mutapa, the f lagship of the Sixth Expeditionary Force. For seven hours, a crewman led them wherever they wanted to crawl in the hulking fortress.

No one knew the age of the Mutapa. Fifty years? A hundred? Decades ago, it had been on the cutting edge of Congregate technology, before presumably being replaced with something better. The Union had received the weapon from their patrons the way Viking retainers would have received an old shirt of mail, with grace and greed and resentment.

Okonkwo reached the great engine at the back of the ship. The twin fusion reac-tors in the aft of the Mutapa were crewed by young, green off icers, hopeful and learning the functioning of the engines. The new engine chief was a smooth-faced captain.

“How do you like being an engine chief ?” Okonkwo asked.

“I love it, ma’am. Ready to take on the Congregate and the Middle Kingdom,” he beamed.

“What did you study?” she asked.

“Power engineering at the academy, ma’am.”

“And what did they have you doing on the way out?”

“I was the gunnery chief aboard the Limpopo, ma’am.”

Okonkwo looked up at the big engines. “Can you create a tachyon burst?”

Okonkwo asked.

A puzzled expression greeted her at first. “Yes, ma’am, I suppose. I don’t think it would be good for the engines.”

They showed her the whole engine room, from top to bottom, down to the sealed metal boxes over the scuttle switches.

“Open this, please,” Okonkwo said.

“Ma’am, we’re never to unlock these.”

She gave him a dry look and he eyed her clearance again. He was sweating, as if facing down a superstition. Maybe he was. It didn’t matter. They all feared the Congregate, but they had to believe that they could emerge from under that shadow.

“Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled.

It took some time to find the keys. When they were finally opened, five in all, she was underwhelmed. The scuttle switches were just small hatches with dusty key-pads behind them. She had expected something more dramatic and sinister.

The scuttle switches were a precaution, something the political commissars or sleeper agents would use in case any element of the Union evaded control of the Pollen from a Future Harvest

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Congregate, as if people were all just the cells of a great organism. The first tasks of any cancer were to evade the immune response and to disable the suicide switch.

The Union thought they had done both.

Okonkwo left Tinashe and her PolSecMil team with the engines, and floated hand over hand to the command center. It was a narrow place, mostly dark, with six acceleration couches where pilots, weaponeers, and the general would be plugged into the ship’s command systems. A skeleton crew composed of the officer of the watch and a single pilot nested in the gel cocoons of two couches. Okonkwo swiped her white access and plugged her AI into the ship’s servers.

The Mutapa controlled the defenses for the research base, including the magnetic shield. Her AI scooped up the maintenance schedules for the magnetic shield and she ran them through the algorithm in her pad. In the middle of lists of orders, she found what she’d expected.

On June 20, the day Garai had been irradiated, the magnetic shield had not been scheduled to go down. A special maintenance procedure had been ordered. The authorization was low, just a watch off icer. That was odd. A watch off icer did not do something that would affect the whole base without orders, even if it only involved a magnetic shield.

Had she found a sleeper agent? It couldn’t be that simple.

She sent her AI snuffling about in the Mutapa’s files. After only ten minutes, the AI brought her a backed-up temporary file, an order from the base to the Mutapa to drop the magnetic field, signed by Major-General Nandoro.

She didn’t understand.

Signed by the major-general. Either Nandoro had something to do with Garai’s death, or the dropping of the magnetic f ield really was only a coincidence. She rubbed at her throat, which had tightened uncomfortably.

Her AI presented two other messages from a system drive that briefly backed up f iles. Such items were normally deleted automatically when the originals were archived. That they had still been stored in the system drive meant that someone had deleted the original received messages before archiving, but wasn’t particularly good at being sneaky.

The two messages were from Major-General Nandoro, requisitioning heavy weapons and ammunition for the General Staff headquarters from the Mutapa.

Okonkwo was no expert at weaponry, but some of them were quite powerful, field-level infantry kit. What would he want with such powerful weapons on the ground?

Was there really a plan afoot to eliminate the vegetable intelligences? Or was this to f ight against a cell of sleeper agents? Or worse, that these were requisitioned by sleepers with false authentication codes?

The date caused her to pause. The messages were received on the 20th of June, the day Garai had died, the day the magnetic field had come down, and the day Nandoro himself had been in surgery. Too much coincidence.

She thought of Tapiwa again, and his assignment to the MP tower, and the residue of bioweapons. She used her white clearance to call up Tapiwa’s personnel f ile again.

He had been the executive officer on the Zvongombe, under Brigadier Iekanjika.

Iekanjika had fleet duties, being responsible for the tactical maneuvers of two other warships, so Tapiwa would have had a big ship to run for the Brigadier. Why take the demotion? Fraud? Collusion between Tapiwa and Iekanjika to circumvent the security precautions around Module One? Why?

Politics. Think politics. Place your trusted people into command and control positions. Command of the MP detachment on the surface was certainly a command and control position.

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And Nandoro was ordering weapons for the headquarters. For fighting the sleepers, the vegetable intelligences, or Iekanjika? Nandoro was dying. People would be positioning themselves to succeed him, and a fait accompli was as good a way as any to take over.

Or Okonkwo was letting her imagination run away with her. The Sixth Expeditionary Force was an armed reconnaissance and raiding mission against the out-posts of the Middle Kingdom. Abandoning that mission and setting up a research mission without resupply or restaffing meant that many jobs were filled with new people. And they’d lost a lot of technical talent when they’d detained the Congregate-trained engineers and the sleeper agents. They might have been disloyal, but they’d been technically competent. Maybe Tapiwa truly was an innocent transfer, the case of a soldier going to where he’s most needed.

The engine chief, the young captain, was new. Impressionable. What unit did he come from? Who controlled the Mutapa? She conjured the new engine chief ’s personnel file on her screen. Gunnery Chief on the Limpopo, one of the major-general’s warships. No doubt loyal to Nandoro and probably Colonel Bantya.

That gave her some comfort, but in a few months, Nandoro would be as cold as Garai. What other positions and reactions were happening right now? Was the Sixth Expeditionary Force to destroy itself from the inside?

Late that night, when most of the audit of the Mutapa’s bridge was done, Okonkwo went back to the cabin she had been assigned with Tinashe. He was still working, strapped in at a workstation. The white light of the AI display showed his red, puffy eyes. Okinawa shut the door and moved hand over hand to him.

“What is it, Tin?”

He would not meet her eyes. Tears trembled and spread over damp cheeks in the micro-gravity. He swallowed.

“Some of the routing suff ixes on the authorization smelled f ishy to me,” he said slowly. “Some of the dating tags matched, but more than they ought to have.”

“What are you talking about, Tin?”

“I told you that Takatafare had authorized the tachyon experiment.”

“It’s falsified?” she asked.

“Last year, I wrote an algorithm to check for certain kinds of forgeries. My program was used here, but in reverse, to create a really good forgery of Takatafare’s authorization.”

“Who used your program?”

“Only me and Garai knew about it.” His voice cracked.

“You think Garai did this?” she whispered, waiting to laugh at the absurdity.

“It was a brilliant fake,” he said, “and no one would ever have found it out if not for the audit. No one but me would have known what to look for, and without the audit, I would never have had access to the instructions.”

“Somebody must have faked Garai’s code,” she said. “Garai was an incompetent at coding and programming and encryption.”

“Only he and I knew this algorithm. I could have done this too, but I’ve never been anywhere near the coordinating center. Garai must have been playing dumb to everyone. Faking the whole time.”

Okonkwo numbly released the chair. She floated away from Tinashe. She pressed her hands to her eyes. For a long time they were quiet.

“An instruction for a tachyon burst was given,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And I think it’s a way to signal the Congregate.”

“That seems more likely now,” Tinashe said in monotone.

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“We think Garai inserted that instruction, and left tracks leading away from himself.”

“Yes.”

Numb. Head to foot. Glowing ache in chest.

“Garai was a sleeper agent,” she said, “for the Congregate.”

Tinashe sniffled.

“He would have . . . he will have brought the wrath of the Congregate down on us,”

she said. “He knew what he was planning would mean that everyone on this base would have been killed, including his husband and wife.”

“Garai was too smart to set up a situation where he would be killed,” Tinashe said.

The quiver in his tone plucked at a chord in her heart and she wanted to reach for him, hold him, but she would break if she moved. “Getting killed would not have been part of his plan.” Tinashe said. “He would have had some safe hole to run to during the assault. When the time came, he would have brought us with him. We’re admin. Not real combatants.”

“No,” she whispered. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes hard, squeezing back tears and blacking out the world. Who had been betrayed? Garai or Okonkwo? Garai, obviously, in his mind. He had judged her and Tinashe with the same hard purity he reserved for the architect of a kickback scheme or a falsifier of pay orders.

He had judged her as a traitor.

Her insides shriveled. She still loved him. And now she knew he couldn’t have loved her back, at least not in the months since the Expeditionary Force had found the time gates.

She breathed deeply, gasping, a sob seeking to erupt, but all remained locked within her. Garai had made himself her enemy, by not joining the grand rebellion. The grand betrayal. She wanted to huddle tight and never move again. But she could not.

She released the tension of her hands over wet eyes. She uncurled, slowly, very slowly. Inhale. Exhale.

Think like an auditor.

“Garai paid the price for his betrayal.”

“Execution,” Tinashe said.

“Yes,” she said, “but something still doesn’t fit. He can’t have been executed because of the tachyon order. We’re the only ones who know about it, otherwise the General Staff would not have assigned us the audit. Garai must have been up to something else, smaller betrayals, leaving enough clues to be found out, and so they killed him.”

“Who is they?”

“We have to find that out,” she said.

“Do we?”

“Yes. The tachyon signal will be bringing the Venusian forces in less than eleven years, but I think the destruction of the Expeditionary Force is closer than that.”

Tinashe grimaced. He looked lonely and young and afraid.

“The Union would fight back, even against insurmountable odds,” she said. “That kind of battle leaves signs of radiation, burning, and melting in the wind from the future. But we don’t see any of that. Something internal will have happened before the Venusians get here. The Expeditionary Force is going to destroy itself unless we stop it.”

Like the internecine fighting in the Kingdom of Mutapa.

“When we know how Garai died,” she said, “we’ll know who’s in which faction on the General Staff. Tomorrow, go back to Module One. Dig back into all the research.

Look for a murder weapon.”

“How long do you want me to look? Somebody’s not going to be happy.”

“You have white access. Use it.”

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“It’s still a big field,” he said.

“We’ll know them by how they killed him,” she said. “We’ll also know them by what they killed him for. What can you find out about what he might have been caught doing?”

“Garai?” he said. “The man was a master. The only reason we found out about the tachyon order is because of the audit.”

“There’s a difference between murder by Congregate sleepers and execution by a military tribunal. If they had proof, it would have been over something Garai could hold or some information he would have received or transmitted to some known sleeper. We have the MilSec records. Look for gaps or deletions.”

Tinashe nodded slowly. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’m going to report our progress to the General Staff.”

“You don’t know anything for sure yet.”

“I have to suggest that I have leads,” she said, “to flush out those who may have had a hand in this. The dropping of the magnetic field while Garai was out on the surface can’t be a coincidence either.”

“You’re not Garai,” he said. “You don’t know the political landscape.”

“Garai was not Garai. He tried something and it didn’t work. He was not as clever as he thought. We’ve got to stop taking lessons from him.”

She realized then that she was still taking lessons, like the vegetable intelligences did. The weird aliens experimented with wild genetic permutations every genera-tion. Eleven years later, anything that did not survive to send its pollen back was shown to have been the wrong permutation. The fact that those failed tries sent nothing into the past was an important data point. Garai had not survived. That taught her something.

“Our husband didn’t love us,” she said softly.

Tinashe reached for her, but she was too far away. He unstrapped himself and joined her in the middle of the cabin. She clung to Tin with a intensity born of being alive and dead, rebel and traitor, loved and rejected all at once. Her fingers trembled with the openings to her clothing.

“Tell me you love me, Tin.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

“Garai didn’t,” she whispered back. Then she sobbed once, a lonely sort of plaintive thing, that echoed around the hardness of their cabin, overwriting the first sound.

“I do,” Tin said.

She gripped him harder. He had her clothes off, and his, and they floated near the doorway.

“Chen,” he said, kissing down her neck.

She held him there, preventing his slide lower. She pulled his face close and touched her forehead to his.

“I’m sorry, Tin.” She shook her head. “I’m . . . I can’t.”

“I know,” he said.

“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t make love to you.”

“All of that will come,” he said, “when we’re done.”

She shook her head. “Garai broke my heart. Tonight.”

“Mine too.”

She pressed herself against him, head to foot, hooking ankles behind his so that they would not drift apart. Tin kept her warm.

“Go to bed, Tin. One of us needs to be ready for tomorrow.”

“Come with me.”

“I’m going to have a cigarette and think.”

“Come to my bag when you’re done.”

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July 2015

She nodded, believing that she meant it. They kissed, disconsolately, she thought, and then Tin unhooked himself and floated over to his sleeping bag on the wall.

Okonkwo put on her clothes again and strapped herself into the chair he’d been using before. She retrieved her pad and toggled to the last poem she’d written. It was too good for Garai, to have a widow gushing over his ghost, to feel his pain. He didn’t deserve it. But she did not delete it. That would have been the way of the vegetable intelligences. Erasing pain and love. What did they have left when they took out the bits of history they didn’t want? She lit a cigarette and began a new piece.

Pollen from a Future Harvest, Part I

Bones of ice, creaking new,

Bask in shuttered ruby starlight,

Melting, moving, waiting, smelling,

Stiff pistils thrust high, fronds wide in lusting,

Licking at winds of tomorrow’s pollen

Aching for consummation.

Then a bone of hard ice emerges from

Within the wisdom of that future harvest, a

Violence of tomorrow imposed upon today, shattering

Frond and high pistils, making of beauty and

Youth a necklace of shards.

Tomorrow wins nothing in hurting the past. Betrayed

By tomorrow’s tribe, for no crime at all, he creeps away, seedless, Hopeless. A heart severed admits no kindness to its void.

Scents of sorrow mark him as one who sullens, one

Who remembers the violence of tomorrow,

But not the pollen.

The lesser-fronded youth

Grows, faster, stronger, to meet the future,

Prepared to undo and unmake.

Okonkwo met Brigadier Takatafare in MilSec deep under the main base. Takatafare was tall and slim, with hair cut close to her scalp. She received Okonkwo’s salute and waved her in. The bodyguard left them. Two heaters ran in Takatafare’s office, blowing tepid air into cold.

Okonkwo sat rigidly. Takatafare leaned forward, her eyes glinting very faintly.

Okonkwo looked away. The general had eye displays patched to implanted processors and could be reading every bit of Okonkwo’s career and even recent movements.

“How is your investigation going, Major?”

“You will have seen the progress report I filed last night, ma’am?”

“Yes. I was horrified that my systems contained a quantum virus. The report was disappointingly light on other details.”

“Such is the nature of an audit in mid-process, ma’am.”

“What else have you found?”

“I can’t say more than what’s in the progress report, ma’am. Some might question my impartiality.”

“Some rules become more flexible when those talking have more responsibility,”

Takatafare said. “The General Staff, for example.”

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“I don’t know much of the General Staff, ma’am.”

“Colonel Munyaradzi was a member. He is no longer with us. There may be no reason why you might not become a member in his place.”

“I assumed I was too young,” Okonkwo said carefully.

“The right supporters mean everything. It is not inconceivable to think of Colonel Okonkwo, is it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Were I to feel that a major was someone I could work with,” Takatafare said, “it is easy to imagine possibilities. I wished Colonel Munyaradzi nothing ill, but he was difficult to work with. You are an energetic officer not yet forty. Perhaps you understand flexibility more than he did?”

“I believe I do, ma’am,” Okonkwo said. She looked hard at this woman three ranks higher than her, one of only two possible successors to Nandoro, and decided to make her gamble. “I need access to the headquarters files.”

“Nandoro’s?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The major-general gave you the authority he felt you needed for this audit. Is the audit not large enough for you?” Takatafare asked. She did not seem offended. She was waiting, perhaps for Okonkwo to make a mistake in the political terrain she had entered.

“I’m not looking to make the audit bigger,” Okonkwo said, “but I have to follow leads when I find them.”

“And why would you be wanting to go there?”

“I want to see all the orders signed by the major-general since our arrival,”

Okonkwo said.

“There are reasons those orders are not commonly accessible, Major. Many are related to security. Knowing those orders would make you a target of sleeper agents.”

“No one needs to know but you and I.”

“Why not just ask Nandoro yourself, Major?”

“Bantya.”

Takatafare laughed. “The lick-boot. And what’s in this for me, Major? Why should I let you look over my shoulder when you haven’t the clearance?”

“Bioweapons residue,” Okonkwo said.

“I beg your pardon?” Takatafare’s expression hardened, muscles clenching in her jaws.

“I found bioweapons residue at the MP tower. Something like that shouldn’t have been found outside of the research modules.”

“Who put it there?”

“I can find out, ma’am.”

Takatafare measured her for a long time before laying her hand upon her desk, unlocking it. She summoned a holographic display and manipulated it, deleting some entries so quickly that Okonkwo did not have time to read them.

“It needn’t even be all of the files, ma’am. In fact, I only need to check the orders issued for the week of June 19, 2330.”

“The week your husband died,” Takatafare said.

“That’s not what I’m looking for.”

The display rotated, facing her. Okonkwo felt a bit giddy, looking at secrets without authorization, movement orders, squadron tactical stances, daily passwords, one after another. And then she arrived at the time of Garai’s death, and Nandoro’s surgery, and the two orders requisitioning heavy weapons from the Mutapa.

There were no orders to match the ones received at the Mutapa.

“That’s all I need, ma’am.”

Pollen from a Future Harvest

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July 2015

Takatafare frowned at her.

“And what did you find?”

“I need to compare these results against the ones I am collecting, ma’am.”

“I’m not accustomed to waiting, Major.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I will do you a favor, however,” Takatafare said. “You were at Module One. You may wish to return.”

“Why, ma’am?”

Takatafare withdrew a data sliver from her breast pocket, put it on the desk, and slid it toward Okonkwo. “Munyaradzi, despite my personal dislike of the man, was an important person. If he is dead, it is my business to make sure that his death was natural.”

The air stilled in Okonkwo’s chest. The data sliver, a silicon flake, lay on the desk, as if it radiated heat only she could see.

“I had his DNA sequences on file,” Takatafare continued. “I had my medical officer sequence his DNA and look for any strange antigens or nucleic acids. He had no new antigens, but some viral DNA had made its way into his genome.”

Okonkwo breathed cold air into chilled lungs. Her fingers snaked out, taking the sliver. Then it was in her pocket.

“You believe he was murdered by a viral weapon?” Okonkwo asked.

“You react very little, Major.”

“I had already suspected that my husband had been murdered.”

“Good instincts. Perhaps the bioweapons facility has more to teach you.”

“You are the head of military security,” Okonkwo said with unshuttered heat. “You suspect that the senior auditor died under suspicious circumstances. Why not pursue it?”

“There are powerful factions on the General Staff, Major. The reality is that there will never be open justice on this. If the biologists had a hand in his death, then powerful politics are at play. But your audit may be a form of justice.”

Brigadier Iekanjika’s summons was less overt than Takatafare’s, but equally expected. An off-duty sergeant brushed against Okonkwo outside the mess and whispered, “It would be wise for you to have a quiet talk with Iekanjika, Major.” Then he was gone. She did not look after him or ask any questions. That would not be how things were done. No doubt Takatafare had a few of her people watching Okonkwo as well. There was no secrecy, only layers of misdirection.

Okonkwo ate briskly with Tinashe and the admin audit team. In the afternoon, she started the team working on the Quartermaster receipts. A military expedition had an odd economy, partly need-based communism, partly superior-based patron-age, overlaid with a shadowy black market that could only thrive when Quartermaster staff were skimming some of the shipments. This was not only her area of expertise, but the movement of materiel could hint at the placement of security risks, like sleeper agents.

In the evening, before supper, Okonkwo left the team and made her way to Brigadier Iekanjika’s office. Iekanjika was a young general, perhaps not even forty-five, with only black in her hair. She had an expansive body language, smiling at Okonkwo’s entrance and rising from her desk with open arms. She took Okonkwo’s salute by clap-ping the major on the shoulder and draping her arm there to lead her to a chair.

The office was not chill, like Takatafare’s, and displays of biochemical pathways hung on the walls, like pieces of art. And perhaps they were. These had strange gene and protein names, all prefixed with “vi” for “vegetable intelligence.” Metabolic pathways went from gene to protein and back again, a dizzying, artful way for nature to 96

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decide to work. These were not just pathways. The biochemical maps were algorithms, ways that life processed information. Iekanjika noted the long look Okonkwo gave the displays.

“Do you appreciate biochemistry, Major?”

“I hadn’t always had the opportunity, ma’am,” she said, sitting.

“I am not a biologist myself,” Iekanjika admitted, pulling a chair to sit in front of Okonkwo. “I came up the ranks in the naval command trades. After the discovery of the time gates, it was clear that the base needed a solid general in charge of the biology. I’ve been learning it quickly. It’s very subtle.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have a bit of subtlety, don’t you, Major?”

“I haven’t thought about myself that way before, ma’am.”

“You ask penetrating questions, some of which may make the bioweapons division look bad. Justif iably so,” Iekanjika hastened to add. “My researchers have been pulled from every part of the fleet, with backgrounds in physics, chemistry, and biology, but not necessarily so much in command and quality control.”

“I have not found anything damaging, ma’am, but part of every good audit includes making recommendations to improve existing practices.”

“I have an oversight problem, then?” Iekanjika asked.

“In part.”

“You would see how to fix it?”

“In part, the answer is straightforward, ma’am. I note that bioweapons originally had an experienced colonel. I’ve seen Tapiwa’s work. He runs a tight operation. I don’t believe that this oversight problem would have happened if he was still here.”

“The Expeditionary Force was staffed a certain way, Major. We were given people who know how to kill the enemy and then come home. We weren’t given all the management competencies for a larger, extended mission. Almost everyone is learning a new job, because the jobs need to be done. Look at me. I’m beginning to love biology.”

“All quite understandable, ma’am.”

“I haven’t seen your work before now. I’d only known the work of your late husband. My deepest sympathies for his untimely loss.”

Okonkwo nodded with the graveness she assumed the brigadier was expecting, but made note of Iekanjika’s capacity to feign sincerity. Something produced under her command had killed Garai.

“What I have seen of your work has impressed me, Major. You certainly strike me as someone suitable for command.”

“Thank you for saying so, ma’am.”

“We have suffered a lot of change,” Iekanjika said. “We will suffer more of it before long. I tell secrets now, Major, but Major-General Nandoro is sick. Very sick. It may be that the Congregate will come for us. We will need to be nimble in our structures and in our thinking. I do not believe that Brigadier Takatafare brings that nimble-ness and flexibility to her thinking and leadership. She thinks of cannons and ships and not about how military, political, and industrial strategies change when communications to the past are mastered. I intend to succeed Nandoro, but I need someone like you on my team.”

“An auditor, ma’am?”

“You’re cut out for bigger things, Major. You f ind oversight and command problems. As a colonel commanding the bioweapons division, you could get our mission done. Someone must organize the bioresearch and the botanists. I will have my hands full assuming command of the Expeditionary Force, assuming I have the right supports.”

* * *

Pollen from a Future Harvest

97

July 2015

Second Lieutenant Rudo, looking uncharacteristically meek, stood in the open doorway. “Don’t let in the cold, Lieutenant.”

Okonkwo was reviewing a report Rudo had produced overnight for her: all the assignments, promotions, demotions, and unit reorganizations made since the Expeditionary Force had found the gates. The patterns were illuminating. But that wasn’t why they were speaking. Rudo had analyzed the DNA sequence given to Okonkwo by Takatafare.

Rudo stepped into the suite shared by Okonkwo, Tinashe, and formerly Garai.

Rudo had never been here. She closed the door and stood in the awkwardness between attention and at ease. Okonkwo signaled her closer, into the radius of the multi-spectrum white noise generator.

“What did you find out?” Okonkwo asked.

“It’s a proviral DNA sequence, ma’am,” Rudo said, “the kind that might be left by somatic cell gene therapy.”

“Meaning it infects many cell types in the body?”

“Partly, ma’am,” Rudo said. “The sequence is incomplete. It lacks the genes that encode the attachment proteins, the ones that determine exactly which cell type it will infect.”

“So how would this have gotten into someone’s genome?” Okonkwo asked.

“The actual DNA sequence was probably complete. This is just a sequence in a computer file, ma’am,” Rudo said. “Are you able to tell me where it comes from?”

“No.”

Rudo deflated. “Then I cannot conclude much, ma’am. If you know that this came from someone’s genome, then the provirus may have integrated incompletely, but it is more likely that after it was sequenced, someone deleted the part that tells us what cell it got into.”

Someone deleted a part, to give Okonkwo only part of the story. But no doubt the story she had in hand was enough to cast suspicion on bioweapons. Major-General Nandoro was dying. Brigadier Iekanjika, commander of the bioweapons division, was the only true obstacle to Brigadier Takatafare taking possession of the Expeditionary Force and the time gates. Takatafare was aiming Okonkwo like a political missile.

“Why?” Okonkwo asked.

Auditors were encouraged to be suspicious. Where something looked out of place, an auditor with instincts saw fraud. It made them difficult friends, but excellent investigators. Garai had seen the right instincts in Rudo.

“Cover-up?” Rudo asked. “Maybe someone used this to carry a message?”

Okonkwo shook her head. “That wouldn’t be it. Why else put this DNA into someone?”

“There was nothing special in the gene cassettes,” Rudo said. “They coded for potassium channel proteins.”

“What do they do?”

“The potassium channel proteins release cellular potassium to the intracellular fluids.”

“Can it be a weapon?”

Rudo frowned.

“Enough of them could upset the potassium gradients in the nerves,” Rudo said.

“But you would need a lot of them, all turned on at once.”

“Could this provirus have done it?” Okonkwo asked.

“I don’t know,” Rudo said. “The sequence you gave me doesn’t indicate what kind of promoter drove it, so we know neither the parts that tell the gene when to turn on, nor any of the upstream DNA factors that amplify the gene’s expression. Is this part of the audit, ma’am?”

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“Everything is part of the audit, Rudo. What could turn on many of these genes at once? Overexpress them?”

“I’ll find out, ma’am,” Rudo said.

And she probably would. That would build Rudo as an investigator. But Okonkwo had already figured out how they’d executed Garai.

Okonkwo crunched out onto the surface again, this time alone. She followed the paths cut by foot falls through the black photosynthetic mats, between sunning vegetable intelligences, toward the elders, who stood on a low hill overlooking the time gates.

Some of their people still wandered downwind of the gates, pistils crowning their fronds in a wind from the future, bereft of pollen. On the upwind side, many still passed before the gates, sending their pollen into the past. Okonkwo wondered what value their advice might still have.

She had a dozen threads in her fingers and not all were safe, for her, or for the Expeditionary Force, to pull at. The movement of weapons, information, and personnel revealed three prime movers: Takatafare, Iekanjika, and Bantya. Takatafare and Iekanjika were positioning themselves against each other to succeed Nandoro, while Bantya appeared to be making her own play against the pair of brigadiers. Tapiwa, Chipunza, and Deng were chess pieces, moving on a board inhabited by the vegetable intelligences and their cross-temporal ecological niche. All the actors had been looking for sleeper agents moving supplies and compromising files, which they certainly still were, but these might have been distractions while Garai completed their big gambit: the signaling of the Congregate itself. A knife-edged sense of waiting had her twitchy.

Okonkwo held a kind of justice in her hands. For a brief time, she would have the stage before Nandoro, and what she said would move events. Nandoro was dying, and whether she chose Takatafare’s bribe or Iekanjika’s, or even Bantya’s, she had no real way to make them work together. The bright and dangerous Union rebellion might die young, like the Kingdom of Mutapa.

Okonkwo was alone with this power, without advice. Tinashe was too young to provide counsel. His cunning lay in the future. Nor could she approach the heads of other families. The politics of the Expeditionary Force were too treacherous and uncertain to reveal weakness.

She joined the four elders. They were inscrutable still, and likely had no concepts for many of Okonkwo’s troubles. She struggled with how to begin.

“Does the leading edge ever send you wrong advice?” Okonkwo asked. On her display, the words wrong advice were expressed in the smells from her suit as mis-parentage. Bad advice and bad parentage. Like Garai.

A series of smells triggered small alerts in her suit as the translator worked.

THE LEADING EDGE MAY ONLY SPEAK WITH THE WORDS IT HAS, the intelligences answered. The lexicon grouped words and genes. SOMETIMES WORDS DO NOT EXIST TO

SPEAK OF WHAT WILL COME, SO NOT EVERY WISDOM CAN BE EXPRESSED.

The pollen that the vegetable intelligences sent into the past now might be wrong advice. Okonkwo knew that. The vegetable intelligences possessed only the vocabulary of the gene variants they had in their population now. Yet even at their most precise, they sent back only statistical information. They could not direct or advise the past about the absence of pollen. Even now, they did not know what it meant. It could mean anything. The vegetable intelligences could only imagine the possibilities that might have produced it.

Was her problem like theirs? Her investigations dug up the past and merged it with the present. A perfectly fine auditor might never need to look to the future. She might set up checks and balances for the future, but that did not resemble a true consensus like the vegetable intelligences made. Their consensus created the future.

Pollen from a Future Harvest

99

July 2015

Mis-parentage. Wrong advice. Right-parentage. Good advice.

The vegetable intelligences were not referring to truth. Advice was wisdom, whether it was true or not. That was why they could rewrite even their conversations. Parentage among the vegetable intelligences was a series of tiny causal loops, and often, what came before did not matter so much as what was now and what would come. Genes shuffled across time. Genetic descent was created of the future and the present and the past, and only survival judged their creations. This was their truth.

Think like an auditor. This was Garai’s art and his first and last gift of wisdom.

She’d lived it, and taught it, but perhaps she’d also outgrown it.

Audits searched for truth, but politics created truth. The Venusian Congregate had little to do with the Republic of Québec, and had even less claim on the trappings of Imperial France. The modern nation of Zimbabwe had little to do with the Kingdom of Greater Zimbabwe.

Politicians created truths.

Sometimes, so too must auditors.

Pollen from a Future Harvest, Part II

What has been done, will be done.

The lesser-fronded adult found tomorrow,

Having grown big and calloused on a resentment,

Weeping to unmake the past.

Sister-brothers plod around him through the wind,

Stamens snowing pollen, telling to those who follow.

He waits for the one who created violence.

Upon the fragrant mats lay a pair of bones, fresh,

Not yet welded to the surface, nor slicked with new growth.

He recognizes the pristine weapon that had robbed him of his fronds.

What is clean ice but fallow ground? What is youth but a pistil Upon which to write lust in slow pollen? He weeps

Perfume for might have beens.

The anger seeded and sprouted in his heart surges,

Heaving, sputtering, directionless, until he throws the shining Bone into the past, because he rages, because he must.

He weeps frustration, for parenthood denied

And wisdom undone. He weeps until

No scents remain to tell of him.

Then he takes the second fallow bone and sets it atop his stump.

He will carry it for wearying years, to regrow frond and stamen And pistil, to be able to tell his wisdom to the past,

To no longer be the lesser-fronded,

But the self-caused.

Okonkwo sat under the white light before the General Staff. Major-General Nandoro sat in the center, facing her, flanked by Colonel Bantya and Brigadiers Takatafare and Iekanjika.

“You have results, Major?” the colonel asked.

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“I was tasked to audit the major systems of the Expeditionary Force, to find out why the pollen stopped flowing through the time gates,” she said. “I believe I have found the answer.”

“What is it?”

“It is complicated to explain, because of the involvement of time travel, ma’am. I believe that I caused the end of the pollen.”

“What?” Major-General Nandoro demanded, cutting off his puppet colonel.

“That is to say, I am about to convince you to cause it, sir.”

The colonel did not speak while Nandoro’s eyes bulged at Okonkwo. The two brigadiers were tight-lipped.

“When I began my audit, I saw three possibilities to explain the end of the pollen,”

Okonkwo said. “The first was that a flare, eleven years in the future, had greatly reduced the vegetable intelligence population or exterminated them. However, the wind continued to blow from the future with no change in speed and no evidence of widespread burning. That left two possibilities: that the Congregate had found us, or that we ourselves had denied access to the time gates to the vegetable intelligences, by physically blocking or killing them. I could not know if the Congregate had found us, so I sought to verify or falsify the last possibility.”

“The more I saw of bioweapons, the more possible it seemed that we might have killed the vegetable intelligences by accident,” she said. Iekanjika looked uncomfortable. “While trying to find a reliable way to send information into the past, our research modules will construct completely synthetic vegetable intelligence pollen. Of necessity, they will live-test these constructs around the intelligences. We will not know if this will harm them.”

Takatafare frowned. “If synthetic pollen has killed off our only example of successful communication backward in time, this will jeopardize the rebellion,” she said.

“The intelligences could also have been affected by other actions of ours,” Okonkwo said. “In the process of reviewing the instructions given to the research modules in the future, I found an instruction for the Mutapa to emit a tachyon burst in approximately ten years.”

Muttering and quiet expletives erupted. Despite her internal certainty, she’d left some room to be proven wrong. But she’d guessed right. The General Staff already knew or suspected that a tachyon burst would draw the Congregate, but they had not known that one had been ordered.

“We have to rescind that order,” Nandoro said.

“We cannot rescind the order, sir,” Okonkwo said. “It has already been given.”

“But it has not yet been implemented,” Nandoro said.

“But it has, sir. Ten years in the future, the order will have already been received, and the tachyon burst will have been emitted. The tachyons have already traveled backward in time. I do not know the resolution of the Congregate’s tachyonic telescopes, but—”

“What do you know of tachyonic telescopes?” demanded Nandoro.

“Nothing, sir, except that they must exist, and that they must tell the Congregate where and when we are, otherwise no such tachyon order would have been hidden this way. The Congregate will arrive in approximately ten or eleven years.”

“They will come now,” Iekanjika said.

“No, ma’am,” Okonkwo said. “Our warships must be free to emit the tachyon burst in ten years. The Congregate cannot jeopardize causality any more than we can. The tachyon burst is related to the end of the pollen, a fact that we have already observed. If we rescind the tachyon order, we will stop this chain of events, but we will have no idea how the past we are living right now will be rewritten. We must leave it be or risk a grandfather paradox.”

Pollen from a Future Harvest

101

July 2015

The murmuring grew. They spoke at each other and across each other. They cursed. The Sub-Saharan Union’s great gamble had failed.

“Who did this?” demanded Nandoro.

“When I found the tachyon order, Brigadier Takatafare was listed as the authoriz-ing officer,” she said.

Dead silence.

The General Staff turned to Takatafare as she half-rose from her chair.

“But the authorization seemed too perfect,” Okonkwo said. “It was forged. Further analysis uncovered evidence leading back to Colonel Munyaradzi.”

Swearing. They had not known this. They had killed Garai for other betrayals.

“No one was able to establish that Colonel Munyaradzi was truly murdered,”

Okonkwo said, “but given this new information that he was a Congregate sleeper, I have discovered the killer’s method and motive.”

They silenced.

“It is unlikely that Colonel Munyaradzi was the leader of the commissars, only that he was the highest-ranking in the Expeditionary Force. The other commissars likely suspected that the colonel would eventually draw the attention of military security.

And the colonel knew too much that could be revealed by interrogation, most especially the tachyon order. The remaining free commissars decided to kill him, discreetly.”

She was creating the consensus now, writing past and present and future all at once, overwriting as the vegetable intelligences did. Her husband had been a traitor, but she had loved him.

“The sleeper agents acquired samples of a DNA-integrating virus and modified it to carry genes that would overexpress potassium channels in the infected cells when the DNA-repair response was triggered. Colonel Munyaradzi had been infected, probably weeks earlier, and the viral DNA had integrated into his genome. They fab-ricated some excuse for the colonel to be outside and arranged for the magnetic field to briefly come down. The colonel received a nonlethal dose of radiation, activating his DNA-repair response, which then overexpressed the potassium channels, which massively disrupted his potassium gradients, and he died.”

Her voice lacked emotion to her ears. She was a professional, reporting on her investigation. Farewell, Garai.

“This assassination left no evidence of the murder weapon,” she said. “The potassium would quickly have diffused through his fluids and many people are already seropositive for the virus itself. The sleeper agents lost an important asset that day, but by then, Colonel Munyaradzi had already succeeded in summoning the Congregate.”

They stared at her. She had surprised them, decoding their elaborate execution and blaming it on sleeper agents. Now she was ready to make her real play.

“Major-General Nandoro, while we likely have the Congregate arriving in a little less than eleven years, I have other concerns that are more immediate,” Okonkwo said.

Most of the table before her frowned.

“What could be more pressing than the arrival of the Congregate?” Takatafare demanded.

“The research modules are designed to be organizationally isolated,” Okonkwo said. “A great deal of effort is being put into preventing a grandfather paradox while we try to accelerate research. I found bioweapons residue at the MP tower that had no reason to be there and could only have come from Module One.”

Nandoro’s teeth ground as he looked at Brigadier Iekanjika.

“I understand that the MP tower required senior supervision,” Okonkwo said, “but the decision to pull an experienced colonel from bioweapons division greatly reduced 102

Derek Künsken

Asimov’s
the security there. I recommend that the General Staff revisit this decision and find out which bioweapons reached the base and for what purpose.”

Nandoro’s anger seemed to be rising. Iekanjika was grim-faced. Takatafare and Bantya appeared elated.

“Of slightly greater concern,” Okonkwo said, “I found several irregular orders from the General Staff.”

“What kind of irregular orders?” Nandoro said.

“On the Mutapa, I found several deleted orders in a system backup,” she said, holding out a silicon wafer to them. “I brought copies. Under the SOPs, no orders ought ever to be deleted, much less ones bearing the major-general’s authentication.

What concerns me is that the orders appear to have been sent at a time that other records showed the major-general to have been under the care of the chief medical officer. It may be that some systems glitch delayed the transmission of an authentic order by the major-general. If so, then it ought to be simple to cross-check the message to the HQ records for this requisition of heavy weapons and ammunition for HQ.”

Iekanjika had lost her stony grimness, and now betrayed the same wide-eyed astonishment as Takatafare. Bantya looked sick.

Nandoro slapped his palm onto the table. “What heavy weapons?” he demanded, looking at Bantya. “What heavy weapons were requisitioned with my authentication?”

The tension in the room tightened. A stillness settled.

“I . . . A sleeper agent must have infiltrated the staff,” Bantya said uncertainly. “We should . . . I’ll look at the evidence for you, sir.”

“MPs,” Nandoro said, “arrest the colonel.”

Two corporals, one with a drawn sidearm, emerged from the shadows. Bantya’s sidearm was removed and she was taken from the meeting. The boom of the closing door left a long silence.

So, Takatafare and Iekanjika had not known that the colonel was moving behind the scenes to topple the both of them and take command of the Expeditionary Force.

Although Okonkwo had stymied Iekanjika’s positioning, she had also saved the brigadier’s life from whatever coup Bantya had been planning. Iekanjika regarded Okonkwo with a curious eye.

“Major,” Nandoro said in a quiet voice, “I will want to examine those orders.”

Uncertainly, with no secretary or chief of staff to carry things between her and the general, Okonkwo rose and walked to put the silicon wafer in his hand. She returned gingerly to her hard chair. An odd quiet fell on the room as everyone watched Nandoro turn the wafer over and over in his hands.

“You said you caused the end of the pollen?” Nandoro said more kindly. “Is this a trick, Major?”

“We have already observed that the pollen has stopped,” she said. “We cannot change that observation, nor the future emission of the tachyon burst, but there is nothing to stop us from creating a future that is consistent with our observations. We may leave, and take the time gates with us.”

“We cannot take a wormhole through another,” Nandoro said. “We have no idea what would happen.”

“I mean that we should take the gates away on thrust alone,” Okonkwo said, “for several years, within the hold of a warship, along with some or all of the vegetable intelligences. We would need to ensure that the vegetable intelligences of the present continue to pass their pollen to the past for another eleven years, so that the observations we have already made about the pollen coming through will have a cause.”

“But the wind continues to pass through the gate from the future for at least ten years,” Takatafare said. “We cannot leave before then.”

Pollen from a Future Harvest

103

July 2015

“Module One has created a simulated environment,” she said. “We could either carry the gates in there with the vegetable intelligences, or create a new simulated environment on one of the warships. We need only set the pressure in the future at exactly the level needed to produce the wind we have observed. When we will have accounted for all the observations, we will be free.”

Tinashe moved more of his things into the room in their suite reserved for the middle spouse. Okonkwo smoked, watching his muscles bunch under dark skin, feeling a building need to touch those arms, to stroke their strength. She had already moved her few possessions into the room reserved for the senior wife. Tinashe came back and held out his hand for her cigarette. He inhaled and then shook his head in dis-belief.

“Colonel Okonkwo,” he marveled.

“Major Zivai,” she smiled.

He laughed. “And Captain Rudo!” Rudo was joining them tomorrow. The marriage had been arranged and approved by the General Staff. “She’s so young.”

“Her academy test scores are extraordinary,” Okonkwo said. “She has no experience now, but when she does, she’ll be formidable.”

She took back her cigarette.

“You’re formidable,” he said. “You must be the only investigator in history to have uncovered herself as the culprit.”

Tinashe checked again that the multi-spectrum white noise generator was really on. His suspicious streak was growing nicely. It had to. They were becoming an important family.

“You said you weren’t good at politics,” he said, “but you were better than Garai.”

She narrowed her eyes against the smoke raking her lashes. Damp eyes. No tears.

“Garai was good at politics,” she said. “He had the right face for each person. Even us. He just picked the wrong side.”

“But we were out here. We had already slipped the Congregate noose.”

“Maybe he thought of those who were still at home, in Congregate cross-hairs. Or maybe he just thought what we were doing was wrong.”

“It isn’t, is it?” Tinashe asked.

She took long seconds to butt out her cigarette before taking his hand.

“We create right and wrong, Tin. The Congregate makes imbalanced alliances and punishes disobedience. We break oaths. The Congregate plants commissars among its clients. We spin counter-intelligence webs to sweep them out. We all make past and future and truth with unclean hands.” ❍

104

Derek Künsken

ON BOOKS

Paul Di Filippo

New Weird Meets Old Tall Tales

“Metal More Attractive” brings back two
aving rounded out her winning and
of Wilce’s favorite characters: Duke Hard-
whimsical Califa trilogy in 2012
hands and Little Tiny Doom. The former is
with Flora’s Fury, Ysabeau Wilce
a fifteen-year-old mage and musician, the

Hnow presents us with a pendant vol- latter his three-year-old betrothed.Togeth-ume of short stories set in that wonder-
er they have to combat dynastic machina-
ful counterfactual place, Prophecies, Li-
tions that seek to undermine the legiti-
bels & Dreams (Small Beer Press, trade
mate rule of the Republic. There’s a
paper, $16.00, 272 pages, ISBN 978-

Sturgeonesque feel to Wilce’s depiction of

1618730893). Triggered by a similarity

Tiny Doom, and a gleeful ambiance
of nomenclature, I often speculate on
throughout. Few other authors would have
any possible paths linking Wilce’s myth-
invented a rough side of town that features
ical, mystical quasi-California with Cal-

“hard-drinking” ice cream parlors.

isota, the coeval venue created by comics

Part of the allure of these stories is the
artist Carl Barks. There’s a similar air of
thick background information that Wilce
mad-hatter whimsicality about both
lavishes on Califa, as well as the many
places. But Wilce’s kingdom is of course
fine touches of culture and politics, fash-
far stranger than mere Duckburg. It’s a
ion and recreation seen in the realtime

New Weird kind of land with the admix-
action. “The Lineaments of Gratified De-
ture of the all-American tall tale tradi-
sire” has the perfect plot for introducing
tion and some mannerpunk, the result-
this type of richness in a plausible man-
ing hybrid being sunnier and more fun
ner. Hardhands, now aged sixteen, man-
than most straight-up New Weird.

ages to lose Tiny Doom in a public place.

Leading us into the volume—which in-

His quest for the missing girl takes him
cludes clever new Afterwords written as
through a large number of venues that
if by a Califian historian—comes “The

Wilce describes lovingly. And then, on

Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!”, a
the edge of death, Hardhands faces his
little gem which exhibits Wilce’s “drunk
ultimate challenge.

on words” style worthy of Edward Lear.

“Lovelocks” is one of the two stories

Conflating the famous fairytale of the
original to this collection. We jump ahead
magic red shoes with the Victorian ur-
in the biography of Tiny Doom to her
ban folklore of Springheeled Jack, Wilce
young adulthood, when she is a novice
give us the birth of a rogue in touching
soldier put to a certain ritual of initiation
detail. The second piece bears out my de-
by her regiment. That brings her directly
scription in the previous paragraph to a
up against her husband/mentor, and she

T. “Quartermaster Returns” finds our
relishes the conflict.

protagonist, Lt. Pow Rucker, literally

“Hand in Glove” is a police procedural
back from the dead and looking to slake
that introduces Frankenstein and anoth-
his immortal thirst. He comes up
er classic horror story to the precincts of
against a fitting supernatural opponent

Califa. Wilce’s talent for great, memorable
in an epic drinking match, but his living
characters is evident here, as she pits a
comrades still have to lend a hand in his
pretty-boy superstar cop against an
favor. The whole affair, with its desert
unglamorous but smart female newbie.

setting, evokes Pecos Bill by way of R. A.

“Scaring the Shavetail,” the other

Lafferty.

brand-new item, jumps out of Califa and

105

July 2015
into our consensual history, telling an
responsibilities she longs to escape, but
anecdote of the western Indian Wars
how? Finally, we encounter Maia, Diana’s
that delivers the supernatural into a
predecessor, now resident on the planet
rich mix that includes Geronimo and

Nereus. “The Last Days of the Good Ship

U.S. expansionism.

Mercury” finds Maia serving as go-be-

Sharing the fey, exuberant world-
tween in the fratricidal competition be-
building wonkiness of Jack Vance, Ys-
tween two brothers, and the story is full of
abeau Wilce guarantees a wild ride with
slambang action. These three tales show
every wonderful story.

Anthony Ha to be fully conversant with

SF tropes, yet determined to subtly un-

“My God—it’s full of stories!”

dermine them for novel narrative effects.

A flood of fine short fiction in book

Laird Barron’s manifest talents and
form continues to inundate lucky read-
stature and amiable enthusiasm in the
ers, thanks to the combined prowess and
field of horror fiction and weird tales
perseverance of the independent press-
has made him something of a Pope of
es. Here is some all-too-brief coverage of

Perversity. He leads the pack of contem-
five recent examples.

porary Poe-esque authors, first among

The title and cover image of Mark
equals, and so we find him honoring his

Tiedemann’s Gravity Box and Other Sto-
role by anointing two recent volumes in
ries (Walrus Publishing, trade paper,
a manner befitting the worthiness of

$14.99, 354 pages, ISBN 978-1-940442-
their contents. His introductions always

02-0) might lead you to believe that its
zero in precisely on the virtues of the fic-
table of contents holds nothing but hard
tion, and almost make my job superflu-

SF. But instead we find a panoply of genres.

ous.

The book opens strongly with a Stephen

First up is Mike Allen’s Unseaming

King-style contemporary bit of weirdness

(Antimatter Press, trade paper, $15.95,
titled “Miller’s Wife.” A futuristic story in-

222 pages, ISBN 978-0-9889124-1-0).

volving robot nursemaids/surrogates of a

Representing sixteen years of prose out-
sort, “Redaction” evokes feelings similar
put from a fellow better known for his
to viewing Spielberg’s A.I. “The Disin-
poetry and editing skills, these stories
terred” is a strong blend of steampunk,
nonetheless show a writer with a natur-
specters, and religion, as a man goes
al facility for offbeat, gruesome conceits
searching for his lost wife and runs into a
and expert delivery. Take a story like
scientific expedition instead. And the title

“The Blessed Days,” which shows a fu-
piece tracks the fortunes of a teenage girl
ture Earth where everyone exhibits copi-
who must rebel against the ignorance of
ous bloody stigmata while they sleep.

her family and the laws of society to at-

Such a notion is hard to reify plausibly,
tain a future in space. Tiedemann’s range
much less explain, but Allen does both.

is large, his heart big, and his skills and

Then there’s “The Music of Bremen Farm,”

insights deserving of your attentions.

which takes a familiar folk tale and puts

Love Songs for Monsters (Youth In De-
a creepy modern spin on it. Finally, “The
cline, trade paper, $10.00, 92 pages, ISBN

Quiltmaker” picks up where Allen’s Neb-
unavailable) by Anthony Ha, is a beauti-
ula-nominated “The Button Bin” left off,
fully designed and illustrated collection
giving us familial horrors encapsulated
of three heterogenous tales. “Destroy All
in unforgettable visuals.

Monsters” is a fusion of Mike Mignola

Contrary to Allen’s relative sparseness
with Cormac McCarthy, as we follow a
of output, Simon Strantzas steps up
man and his unnatural be-gilled com-
with his fourth collection in six years.

panion across a blasted techno land-

Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press,
scape. Next, on the starship Orion, we
trade paper, $20.00, 310 pages, ISBN
meet Diana, the heroine of “Unplugged.”

978-1614980834) shows us an author

As the cyborg eyes of the ship, Diana has
who takes classic themes and frissons

106

Paul Di Filippo

Asimov’s
reminiscent of Lovecraft and Aickman
very magazine, and in that sense author
and brings them squalling and kicking

Jack McDevitt can be seen as one of the
into the twenty-first century. I’ll cite just
leading heirs of Asimov working today.

the title story, with its cultish doings in a

Our hero, Alex Benedict, is a dealer in
creepy Mexican town, and “One Last
antiquities, a kind of Sherlock of the Space-

Bloom,” which portrays a demented
ways—or perhaps a Nero Wolfe type, with-
realm of jealous academia and incorpo-
out quite so many picky fetishes. His assis-
rates the mangled text of found journals
tant/partner—the Watson or Archie Goodwin
in the classic “Call of Cthulhu” way.

role—is Chase Kolpath, a female starship

Strantzas never rushes his horrific cli-
pilot and jack-of-all-trades, whose pleasant
maxes, employing leisurely and subtle
narrative voice couches the adventures.

constructions to make them impact all

This time around, McDevitt deftly
the more fiercely.

walks two parallel tracks of deduction.

S.T. Joshi does the introductory honors

First comes the McGuffin that slots
for Clint Smith’s Ghouljaw (Hippocam-
naturally into Alex’s vocation: into his
pus Press, trade paper, $20.00, 254
hands falls a unique and valuable eight-
pages, ISBN 978-1614980650), and he is
thousand-year-old piece of technology.

justly proud of having published one of

It’s from a long-lost trove of artifacts

Smith’s first stories. Smith is indeed a
from the twenty-first-century dawn of
find, with a good career ahead of him, I
the space age, and Alex figures where’s
think. His fiction focuses on Everyman
there’s one piece, there may be more. Off
types with a kind of Midwestern, demot-
he and Chase go to Earth, Neptune, and
ic vibe to the cultural backdrops, even
points beyond.

when a story is not placed precisely in

Meanwhile, a starship trapped in a hy-
that region. He conjures up a world of
perspace fluke for eleven years is about
louche drug-hazed parties that result in
to resurface temporarily into normal
monstrous transformations (“Benthos”).

space. New developments in science are

Of father-son descents into ghost-ridden
going to allow the craft—and its living
terrors (“Dirt on Vicky”). Of restaurant

Rip van Winkle passengers—to be res-
kitchens that feature the ludicrous but
cued, at some risk. Alex’s involvement
horrible organs of “The Tell-Tale Offal.”

lies in the fact that his uncle and mentor

And a Halloween-centric story like “The

Gabe is one of the passengers.

Hatchet” is Bradbury reimagined. Clint

McDevitt brings both subplots to satis-

Smith’s settings and characters are folks
fying and surprising conclusions. Dra-
you’d stand next to at the DMV, but their
matic moments do arise a couple of times,
plights are otherworldly.

such as when Chase and Alex are at-
tacked while on Earth, and during the

Vault of the Ages
race to save the lost starship before it

I think the proper term for this sev-

“sinks” back into an alternate dimension.

enth installment of the “Alex Benedict”

But generally speaking, the pleasures of
series, Coming Home (Ace, hardcover,
the story come from the meticulous clue-

$25.95, 368 pages, ISBN 978-0425260876),
sniffing and deductive brainpower of our
would be “a novel of ratiocination.” It’s
heroes.

not that the book does not also feature a

Set some eleven thousand years into
modicum of action, good speculative
our future, this story qualifies as space
riffs, and a whole boatload of sense of
opera of a quiet sort. One of the charges
wonder. But the overwhelming affect
leveled against space opera is that we
and source of delight derives from the
never see how humanity surmounted our
calm and deliberate employment of the
contemporary problems and managed to
intellect to unriddle an enigma (dual
reach such an expansive high-tech em-
enigmas, actually). It’s the kind of SF pi-
pire. McDevitt revels in supplying the
oneered by the sainted namesake of this
answers. He conjures up an elaborate

On Books

107

July 2015
future history, full of Dark Ages and re-

Padre Rios—who overcame his early ca-
vivals (again, a nod to Asimov), and this
reer as a bandit—has done his fair share
backstory supplies much of the sense of
of ghostbusting prior to this. But even
cosmic magnitude and melancholy. I par-
his occult skills might not suffice against
ticularly enjoyed McDevitt’s speculation
this blood thirsty entity. Toss in a hurri-
that a collapse of the “Fourth Millennium
cane (in tribute to the famous historical
internet” would wipe out most prior hu-

Galveston Flood of 1900), and the scene
man culture, all neatly digitized with no
is set for mayhem and struggle.

paper books left as backup. “Mark Twain

Any story about a haunted hotel imme-
is just a name,” Chase laments.

diately bumps up against King’s The

Readers looking for a hardcore SF

Shining, and I think Priest knows this
novel of the old school that finds its
and makes due literary obeisance while
brightest moments in the contest of the
still charting out her own fresh path. Her
human mind versus the conundrums of
supernatural villain is distinct and more
history and the cosmos can’t do better
vivid than King’s nebulous evil, and her
than McDevitt.

characters are more varied and numer-
ous than the compact Torrance family at

The Tree That Would Not Die
the Overlook. In fact, the three main

For many years, word-lovers have
characters assume wonderful archetypi-
amused themselves trying to pin down
cal dimensions while still remaining be-
the most euphonious or mellifluous or
lievably mortal. This symbolical status is

“beautiful” words in the English lan-
hinted at by the generic section titles:

guage, with such famous contenders in

“The Nun,” “The Padre,” “The Ranger,”

the list as “selladore” (cellar door). I’ve al-
and, most scarily, “The Hotel.”

ways harbored a fondness for “jacaranda”

Priest’s prose here is restrained and
myself. Cherie Priest must feel the same
blunt, achieving a kind of harsh poetry.

way, since she’s assigned that gorgeous

Her short chapters pack tons of action
word counterintuitively to her strikingly
into small spaces. And her plotting is
spooky new book: Jacaranda (Subter-
twisty yet inevitable, providing lots of
ranean Press, hardcover, $25.00, 184
creepy and heroic moments
pages, ISBN 978-1596066847). And the

With this book, Cherie Priest has cre-
volume is also graced with an equally
ated the perfect property for a film by
brooding and handsome painting by my

Robert Rodriguez, he of the Mariachi tril-
pal and fellow Rhode Islander Jon Foster.

ogy: vivid visuals, sophisticated gore, ro-

Priest’s tale centers on the haunted
bust ethical dilemmas, colorful person-

Hotel Jacaranda in Galveston, Texas,
ages, in an unforgettable venue, the haunted
during the year 1895. The structure was

Hotel Jacaranda.

built after the heartless owner chopped
down a beloved legendary tree. The own-

When Worlds Collide
er’s imminent unnatural demise, and his

If you mashed up two classics of the
wife’s, inside the possessed structure
genre—Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud
soon followed. The spirit of the tree was
and the film Five Million Years to Earth—
having its revenge. Left vacant for many
then delivered the rich gooey story batter
years, the hotel was reopened by heed-
to Nancy Kress’s expert fabulist kitchen
less investors. But the quiescent curse
for her culinary wisdom—well, you might
reared its formless head again, bringing
get something like her new novel, Yester-
on several further deaths.

day’s Kin (Tachyon, trade paper, $14.95,

Now, a concerned nun named Sister

192 pages, ISBN 978-1616961756). Ap-

Eileen Callahan has enlisted the help of
plying her signature core insights into bi-
two men to exorcise the place: an elderly
ology, history, and culture, Kress has fash-
but virile Texas Ranger named Horatio
ioned an apocalyptic vision that probes at

Korman and Padre Juan Miguel Rios.

the sore spots of humanity’s nature.

108

Paul Di Filippo

Asimov’s

In a day-after-tomorrow setting, aliens

Most critical to the story is youngest son
arrive on Earth. In just a single ship, the

Noah, addicted to a strange new drug

Denebs establish themselves as a float-
dubbed “sugarcane.” The personality-al-
ing Embassy in New York Harbor. For
tering drug means that when he encoun-
months their purpose remains shrouded.

ters the Denebs, his reaction and percep-

Then they reveal all, in multiple shocks.

tions are unlike anyone else’s.

First, they are humanity’s kin, their

Kress fosters a tense and suspenseful
genomes identical to ours, indicating a

Manhattan-Project-style hothouse at-
splitting of the species by ET abduction
mosphere as we ride Marianne’s shoul-
some hundred thousand or so years ago.

ders, while at the same time giving us

Second, and more vitally, Earth is swim-
just enough incidental pictures of the
ming into the path of a deadly “spore
global disintegration outside the Em-
cloud” composed of unkillable virus parti-
bassy to convey the chaos. And of course
cles that will wipe out human life on the
the family dynamics are explored in-
planet. The Denebs offer this program:

tensely. All the main characters, aliens
together the two branches of humanity
and humans, are depicted as creatures of
will work toward discovering a cure and
mixed virtues and vices: no pure saints
saving the race. All in ten months’ time.

or sinners among them. As for the ulti-

Our viewpoint on this end days sce-
mate crisis and denouement, I think you
nario is one woman and her children.

will have a few suspicions, but never see

Marianne Jenner is a smart biologist
the full ramifications of it till Kress un-
who has made a recent discovery that
veils her surprises.

dovetails with the desires of the Denebs,

This fine, intelligent novel possesses all
and so they insist on her being part of
the virtues and ambiance of old-school SF,
the R&D program. This puts her plausi-
while still exhibiting an utterly contempo-
bly at the center of the action. Her three
rary eye. Those two qualities always spell
adult children, all in the NYC region, get
out “classic” in my book, and Kress might
swept up in the events thanks to her.

very well have hit that mark here. ❍

On Books

109

SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

‘m taking some down time in June. But consider ConCarolians, the Nebula and Locus awards, AnthoCon, ApolloCon, LepreCon, LibertyCon, SooonerCon, Fourth Street Fantasy, InConJunction, WesterCon and ConVergence. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an Iexplanation of our con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week’s cons), leave a message and I’ll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss

MAY 2015

27–29—Book Expo America. For info, write: 10 Hill St., Newark NJ 07102. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) www.bookexpoamerica.com. (E-mail) info@bookexpoamerica.com. Con will be held in: New York NY (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Guests will include: none announced.

29–31—ConCarolinas. www.concarolinas.org. Embassy Suites, Concord NC. John Scalzi, C. Asaro, Michael Hogan, Matt Busch, Lin Zy.

JUNE 2015

3–7—Origins. http://originsgamefair.com/. Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus OH. Theme: “Space.” A huge gaming meet.

4–7—Nebula Weekend. www.sfwa.org. Chicago IL. SF and Fantasy Writers of America’s big annual meet. Nebula Awards presented.

5–7—AnthoCon. www.anthocon.com. Portsmouth NH. “The Anthology Conference.” Billed as a celebration of speculative fiction and art.

5–8—ConTinuum. www.continuum.org.au. Ether Conference Center, Melbourne Australia. SF, fantasy and horror.

9–12—SpaceFest. (800) 727-6682. www.spacefest.info. Tucson AZ. The annual space development conference.

12–14—Sci Fi Summer Con, c/o Box 957203, Duluth GA 30095. http://sfscon.tripod.com. Atlanta GA. SF, fantasy and horror.

12–14—AngliCon, c/o Box 75536, Seattle WA 98175. www.anglicon.com. SeaTac Doubletree, Seattle WA. Doctor Who and British media.

13–14—Maryland Faerie Festival. www.marylandfaeriefestival.org. Darlington MD. Outdoor event, celebrating the faerie folk.

19–21—ApolloCon. www.apollocon.org. Westin Houston Memorial Center, Houston TX. Jim C. Hines, Scott Cupp, Bradley Denton.

19–21—HyperiCon. http://hp.forshado.ws. Holiday Inn Express at the Airport, Nashville TN. SF, fantasy and horror.

19–21—ConCertino, 18 Cottage Ave., Arlington MA 02074. www.massfilc.org. Boxboro (Boston) MA. SF, fantasy, horror folksinging.

20—JediCon. www.jediconwv.net. Matthew Barker Memorial Complex, Paden City WV. One-day Star Wars event.

25–27—SF Research Association. www.sfra.org/sfra2015. State University of New York, Stony Brook NY. Annual academic conference.

25–28—LepreCon, Box 26665, Tempe AZ 85285. www.leprecon.org. Embassy Suites Phoenix North, Phoenix AZ. Emphasizing SF art.

25–28—MidWestCon, 5627 Antoninus Dr., Cincinnati OH 45238. www.cfg.org/midwestcon. Sharonville OH. The original relax-a-con.

25–28—PortCon, 492 Main, Westbrook ME 04092. www.portconmaine.com. Doubletree, Portland ME. Eric Anderson. Anime and gaming.

25–28—ArchipelaCon. www.archipelacon.org. Mariehamn Finland. Johanna Sinisalo, Karin Tidbeck. Combined Nordic national cons.

26–28—LibertyCon, Box 695, Hixson TN 37343. www.libertycon.org. Choo Choo Hotel, Chattanooga TN. David Weber, Steve Jackson.

26–28—SoonerCon, 1848 Hemingway Dr., Edmond OK 75013. www.soonercon.com. Midwest City OK. E. Moon, R. Picardo, R. Caine.

26–28—Fourth Street Fantasy Con, c/o 323 Autumn Woods Dr., Covington LA 70433. www.4thstreetfantasy.com/2015/. Minneapolis MN.

26–28—Locus Awards Weekend, c/o Box 68547, Seattle WA 98168. www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2015LocusAwardsAd.html.

26–28—New York Faerie Festival. www.nyfaeriefest.com. Windsor (central) NY. Outdoor event, celebrating the faerie folk.

26–28—Days of the Dead. www.daysofthedead.net. Indianapolis IN. Tobin Bell, Lisa and Louise Burns (Grady twins in “The Shining”).

27–28—CabbageCon. www.dutchdwcon.nl. Golden Tulip Van Monte, Berg en Dal Netherlands. The Dutch Discworld con.

JULY 2015

2–5—WesterCon, c/o SanSFiS, Box 927388, San Diego CA 92192. www.westercon68.org. Town & Country Resort. Annual Western con.

2–5—ConVergence. www.convergence-con.org. Doubletree, Bloomington (Minneapolis) MN. Editor Toni Weisskopf, Wesley Chu, Chad Frey.

3–5—InConJunction, c/o Box 68514, Indianapolis IN 46268. www.inconjunction.org. Arlan K, Andrews, Timothy Zahn, Eddie Del Rio.

AUGUST 2015

19–23—Sasquan, PMB 208, 15127 Main St. E., Suite 104, Sumner WA 98390. http://sasquan.org. Spokane WA. Gerrold. WorldCon. $190.

AUGUST 2016

17–21—MidAmeriCon II. www.midamericon2.org. Convention Center and Bartle Hall, Kansas City MO. Kinuko Y. Craft. WorldCon. $150.

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