Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (11 page)

Or a knock would come. He would open the door. The Old Man would say, "We have to go. Follow me." Jimmy would step out into the fraught and waiting and damaged world. At last he would be free.

Bob Reed remarks, "For a lot of years, I've been working on a giant alternate-history novel. This is a part-time project, mostly. The story is wrapped around the spectacle of ordinary life, and while some details have been pulled from my past, the interesting stuff is mostly invented. My protagonist, Quentin Maurus, endures quite a lot. 'The Principles' is one of those adventures, teased free from the story's body and the action compressed, building what might be confused for a traditional story." The author's first novel in years comes out this spring.
The Memory of Sky
is a Great Ship story published by Prime Books. He is also flirting with self-publishing a collection called
The Greatship,
which strings together most of his tales in the Marrow universe.

A word of warning: This story contains scenes that may be disturbing to some readers.

Honest labor made for honorable men. Every woman understood that principle, and that's why when Quentin turned thirteen, a lawn-cutting business was born. His mother rounded up local war widows and elderly dykes, and his father showed him how to mix gasoline with the oil and how to curse at the old mower's quirks. Then with pleas for safety and a manly slap to the back, one generation sent the next into the honorable world of commerce.

Madam Lorton walked her yard afterward, making certain her warhorns and roses were still standing.

Madam Codmarm insisted on giving orange-and-fizz treats before inventing new ways to shortchange the child.

Because Christian mothers often stole from their sons, Madam Bernstein made certain that Quentin had an extra blue bill to hide outside his wallet.

Across the street from Madam Bernstein lived a young widow named Madam Dobs. Her husband died in Vietnam, making her an object of pity in the neighborhood. She wasn't one of the boy's clients, but one afternoon she stepped out on her porch, smiling when she promised to double his wages if her yard was cut today.

Quentin readily agreed. But the Sussex-gold in her yard looked like hay, and the windfall soon became a torment of endless pushing and bag dumping. Drenched in sweat, Quentin paused to gasp, and looking up, found the lady watching him from behind her storm door, wearing nothing but a small shirt with no bra, and no pants, white legs ending inside slender panties that couldn't have been more red.

He stopped in the middle of the half-cut yard.

She asked, "What's wrong, Quentin?"

The mower wasn't powerful enough, he explained. He was tired and it was dinnertime and maybe he could finish tomorrow.

"Would you like something to drink, Quentin?"

Very much. But that wasn't the subject of the moment.

"Come here," she advised.

He climbed one porch step and another, reaching a vantage point where he could see twisted black hairs pushing out from under the panties' elastic.

He stayed where he was, and eventually she said, "Come back tomorrow then."

And he rolled the exhausted mower home.

Dad didn't show for dinner, which was happening more and more. The kitchen television was turned to the news. Some little battle had been fought on the Armistice Line, twenty Queensland soldiers dead but plenty of Mongols too. Then the phone sang out. "Hello, Madam Bernstein, how are you?" Mom began. The Jewish lady said she was well, thank you, and then she mentioned something about Madam Dobs. Mom pulled the phone cord as far as it would reach, leaving the kitchen, and after a couple of minutes she returned and hung up, thinking carefully before giving her son the most important sex lesson of his life.

"Women are dangerous," she said. "And men are weak, impulsive animals. That's how women manipulate you, and sometimes in the most cruel ways. You don't want to fall for their traps. Do you understand me, Quentin?"

Quentin wasn't sure what he understood. But feeling an obligation, he asked, "What about Madam Dob's grass?"

"Her grass isn't your problem," his mother assured, answering his question as well as the one she heard.

In 1839, the Reformed Church of the United purchased creekbottom ground from the local Otoe tribe. Warner College and the hamlet of Eureka were built on the prairie wilderness. But just two years later, the Otoe sold the adjacent country to what became the provincial capital, and a century later, Eureka was surrounded and legally incorporated.

Yet the character of the old town refused to change. The campus would always be a collection of venerable brick buildings and Queensland elms. The local houses were built in the United-style, big and white with a fondness for square windows and oddly narrow doors. The original main street retained its scruffy charm as well as little shops, some of them generations old. Even in the 1970s, the only glass-and-steel buildings stood apart from the rest of Eureka. There was a Safeguard grocery and an abortion clinic, a modern laundry and a large discount warehouse courageously billing itself as Treasure City. In his first week at college, Quentin Maurus visited Treasure City looking for aspirin and for socks. What he found instead was a long aisle dedicated to cut-rate paperback books. Organization was deliciously minimal in those wire racks. Mysteries and women stories shared pockets with celebrity biographies and histories of popular wars. Invisible hands often hid the futurist fictions, but they were waiting to be discovered, and four years later, Quentin was shouldering both a degree in biology as well as a considerable library of acid-licked novels, each decorated with moons and stars and sleek rockets that most likely would never survive launch.

He was a graduate, but Eureka still felt like home. The college had libraries and two girls for every male student. The neighborhood was full of houses converted to cheap apartments. Madam Lane was a dyke landlady who didn't trust men, but Quentin offered to double the normal deposit, and that's why she led him up a long staircase dressed with green carpeting and dirty white paint. An exceptionally narrow door led inside an empty apartment wearing more green carpet. What convinced him to stay—besides the big, oddly shaped rooms and the minimal rent, the iron radiators and peeling wallpaper, and those huge, ill-fitted windows—was the built-in bookshelves that covered every available wall.

"My handyman put them up," Madam Lane explained, fiddling with the steel rings on her arthritic fingers.

Not even Quentin had enough books to fill the available space.

Here was a challenge worth taking.

There weren't many local jobs for biologists, particularly if they happened to be males in their early twenties. Everybody asked Quentin why he wasn't serving the military or some other good public post, but honest answers didn't win over employers who had already made up their minds. Thankfully a nearby factory coveted young backs. Quentin was hired on the spot. Days were dusty and often hot but he was paid well enough, and every evening he stuffed filthy clothes inside an old white duffel—a family relic with great-uncle Clovis' name and army unit stenciled on the sides. Whenever the relic was ready to explode, Quentin would drive or walk to the neighborhood laundry, and those days were like any other: Nothing interesting happened, and the rest of his life looked to be just as relentlessly bland.

One evening, a familiar face passed through the laundry door. Quentin and the newcomer exchanged polite smiles. That would be that, he assumed, tossing socks into the washer. He was reading a Johnsgal novel when the woman happened past, saying, "Good evening, Mr. Maurus."

He rose and bowed. "Good evening, Dr. West."

The professor had given him a P-minus in Ancient Governments, and now she was dropping bras into an adjacent washer. That was worth a secret laugh. Reclaiming his plastic chair, Quentin read another two pages of battling starships. Then he looked up to find Dr. West standing closer than he'd expected, that small smart face showing something completely unexpected: A distinct, endearing nervousness.

The woman was supposedly brilliant and undoubtedly she was demanding, as inflexible as an old Roman wall or the Mongolian bureaucracy. The history of the world lived inside her head, and while lecturing, Dr. West needed neither notes nor punctuation, nor any air. Drop your pen, her students joked, and a full century would slip away.

Quentin was nervous enough to laugh.

The woman found some reason to laugh with him.

She was shorter than he recalled—the difference between being a tenured professor and a forty-year-old lady. There were no rings on any finger, steel or gold, and the watery brown hair was tied up in a chignon, and her oyster-shaped glasses hadn't been in style for several years. And like quite a few effective speakers, the woman knew what it felt like to be shy.

She glanced at Quentin's book, at the obligatory rocket ship.

He took a long walk to the dryers.

When he returned, she said, "I suppose you're following the Mars mission."

"Always."

So they discussed the ambitious Mongolian space program, and then they talked about their government's moon base. Dr. West sat beside the graduate, only one empty chair between them. Not a gesture or word was improper, yet Quentin had to wonder what the woman was thinking. He tried to guess what was inside his own busy head. Meanwhile his clothes continued baking inside the dryers, and he finally saved them just before they scorched.

Folding nothing, he stuffed hot shirts and socks inside the duffelbag.

The professor studied the Clovis' name, the unit markings.

"My uncle helped build the Aleut Road in the twenties," he explained. "When he wasn't fishing for grayling, that is."

Dr. West smiled. She was smiling at her own clean clothes. Her basket had fewer items, and she hadn't cooked them. In a world built on coincidences, the two of them finished their laundry at the same moment.

"Back into the cold," Quentin announced, throwing the hot bag over his shoulder.

It was only November, but snow was falling again. Looking into the darkness, the lady asked, "Would you like a ride home, Mr. Maurus?"

What surprised Quentin was his lack of surprise.

"That would be nice," he said.

An old yellow Trailbreaker was waiting at the door. Two minutes later, they pulled up in front of the plain white house. Quentin turned to her, saying, "Thank you very much, Dr. West."

Garish Christmas decorations were burning in the neighbor's yard, making the woman's face red. With a nervous little grin, she said, "It's been my good pleasure, Mr. Maurus."

She leaned toward him, and he leaned toward her.

And because they were smart people, they hesitated, doing nothing for a moment while each considered a universe full of immeasurable ramifications.

Katerini Tan was the most famous, most scandalous scientist in the Western world. In her autobiography,
The Principles,
she wrote about growing up as the genius child of a Han woman and an Egyptian man. Vivid tales of her affairs with famous men and their beautiful wives led to the making of a bestseller. Dr. Tan often claimed that her extraordinary talents with mathematics and with sex came from a profoundly masculinized brain. Who else could write such amazing ideas? Quentin read the book twice in college, and he reread it a third time afterward, but what was the strangest and best about
The Principles
was Tan's cosmology:

The universe was built on its own desperate infinity.

Matter and energy occupied every possible position, every mandated state, and in its fundamental heart, existence was nothing but a series of intense, perfectly rendered photographs.

Dr. Tan claimed that human opinion was built entirely on human ignorance.

Even the greatest people were nothing but alignments of soulless atomic particles, and similar particles could line up in nearly identical ways, pretending to be joined by something called Time.

According to the mathematics, time did not exist.

Every life and every potential history were nothing but the lines that could be drawn between unvanquishable, eternally frozen faces.

The warm bag rode Quentin's right shoulder.

Ten quadrillion slices of reality portrayed two people on the staircase.

Dr. West watched her companion fish keys from his pocket and unlock the door, and saying nothing, she followed him inside.

Quentin dropped his laundry on a slumping old chair. She looked at the chair and his hands and the air beside his face—everywhere but directly at his eyes—and then she quietly told somebody, "I should leave."

"No," Quentin said. "Stay."

Her hands grabbed one another.

One reading lamp had been left burning. Quentin turned off the light and kissed her mouth while reaching inside her heavy brown coat, and she pushed him away until he reached again.

"Wait," she said.

Leaning forward, she wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed—not a hug so much as a wrestler's confining pose. Quentin felt her breathing, felt her heart working. A lot of professors generated scandalous rumors. Not this professor, at least nothing he could remember. And after nothing changed for what seemed like too long, Quentin began to believe that yes, maybe she should leave.

Then the woman took one deep breath, her right hand running down the front of his pants.

She didn't f ling him onto the mattress, but Quentin felt f lung, and she deftly climbed on top of the naked man, assuming the Feast of the Sabbath position. Her climax was quick and loud, and she returned the favor with desperate, self-absorbed intensity. Then she allowed him ten seconds of calm before demanding another round.

Then they pulled apart, and they dressed.

Quentin mentioned not knowing her first name.

"Sandra."

He repeated the name carefully.

She put on her brown coat and Quentin put on his jacket, and with an edge to her voice, Sandra said, "You don't have to walk me out."