Asimov's Science Fiction (23 page)

The day after Mew-Mew was killed, while the ex-corporal shaved my father's face,

I snuck Joey into our beaten old minivan.

"Hey, Broseph! How would you like to live with Grandma for a while?"

"No." Snot ran down his face.

When I tried to drop him off at the end of her driveway, he clung to the sleeve of my sweater. I pulled his fingers away one by one and yanked him out of the car.

"You're hurting me!"

"I know."

Grandma answered the doorbell, eventually.

I told her that I would drop off Joe's stuff after school the next day. I told her that I would take care of her son. Her gaze skirted past the bruises the ex-corporal had left on my cheeks.

I couldn't blame her. She wasn't the only one in denial.

What had become of Dad in Etheropia? Had he bled out after all? Was he trudging through utterly foreign tropics, hoping for a seizure that might send him homeward?

I missed sitting beside him as he let out god-awful sounds or told fantastical stories. I missed all the other passengers that had overtaken him.

The ex-corporal must have known. One night he feigned a fit and broke into laughing hysterics when I rushed to his bedside.

"Poor girl. No homecoming." He picked at his teeth with swollen fingers. "I'm gonna try not to wake you at night, but lately I've been dreamin' of home. My dreams would send you runnin'."

"I'm not afraid of you."

"Sure you are. You still wonder whether I ain't your daddy."

I spat on his face, a great gob that rolled down his cheekbone.

He moved faster than Dad, who was always a bit of a bumbler. The ex-corporal was on his feet and grabbing my hair before I even had my hand on the doorknob. I waited for him to slam my face into the wall. Before I could scream he released me again with a cry of anguish.

I turned back for a moment—just long enough to see two of his fingertips bleeding, two fingernails torn from his hands and fallen to the carpet.

Sloughing tissue is a symptom of gangrene.

"Shit," he said. "Some things you just can't desert."

To say that the ex-corporal became a different person would be redundant. But those bouts of violence to which he had been prone diminished into vacant stares. A fetid odor emanated from underneath his clothes. Sometimes he scratched his feet with a pencil and the pencil came out blackened and soggy.

That was my father's body he was picking at. Those were my father's appendages melting.

The ex-corporal refused to be taken to the hospital. He limped after me and tried to smack me when I suggested it, then held a knife to my father's vein-ridden throat.

"Hospitals can induce seizures." Sweat stained Dad's shirt, his forehead. "They might send me back. I won't go, damnit."

"No one wants you here!"

The ex-corporal pressed the knife gently against his throat, so that Dad's blood dribbled onto the blade. "You think anyone wanted me back home?"

I did not sympathize with the ex-corporal, but I would not let him ruin my father. I kept him fed for two days. Just in case Dad was going to edge back in.

When he was sitting in the kitchen I brought him tea. He tipped the cup over with his remaining good hand, dumping the boiling water onto the decaying other. The skin bubbled and hissed.

"I wonder if your father feels that," he mused. "I bet he's dead already. Maybe this rot isn't my gangrene; it could be the rot of my old body, your father's new corpse bleeding through."

If the ex-corporal was right, there would be nothing left of Dad to return. No chortles, no
Battlestar Galactica
marathons to be had, no one to deadhead all those overgrown flowers outside. This body would be more than rotting, then; it would be a corpse.

"You'll seize eventually. And he'll be back."

"Where I come from, girlie," the ex-corporal said, "seizures aren't so spontaneous. Men seize up on the battlefield. They tremor like earthquakes when bits get amputated in explosions. The seizures that won your piss-ant father are nothing next to that. They can't compare to how I felt in that jungle. I couldn't even hold my gun. I couldn't even stop myself from pissing in my uniform. Your father's epilepsy is nothing to me. I could fight it forever."

"You dream about gunfire. Those whimpers—you laugh about it, but those are real. Every time I slam a door, you wince like I'm aiming a cannon at you."

He closed his eyes. Dad's face was emaciated.

"And that's because Dad's trying to get back."

"Could be. Could be your daddy has been prodding me from afar. Or could be that we're both corpses."

The rot spread. By the next day he was waxen. By the evening his eyes were unfocused. The ex-corporal did not curse or hit me. His eyes leaked water constantly. He began hallucinating. I could see bones beneath trench-foot decay.

While the ex-corporal writhed in delirium in bed, I unplugged the fluorescent starlighting bulbs from my bedroom; Joe's sheets felt cold and vacant while I kneeled on them. I plugged the lights into the sockets in Dad's bedroom. It was hard not to gag on the smell of the bed-bound ex-corporal.

I went outside in the summer heat and yanked all the prize daylilies from the earth. They wouldn't live long. I scattered them everywhere on his bedroom floor, letting the wet soil around their roots seep into the carpet.

I pulled a humidifier from the garage and set it up at the bedside. I set it to high, then sat beside it and waited.

The room was sweltering before long. It smelled like mildew and mud and dampness and when the ex-corporal opened his eyes in some semblance of coherence, I was ready for him. When at last he awoke in my makeshift jungle, I was drenched in sweat. I raised a dripping arm and pointed at him. With my other hand I scrabbled for the door handle behind me.

"BANG!" I shouted, and slammed the bedroom door with all my might.

His eyes rolled back.

The gran mal that followed was as monstrous as he was. There were no coherent sounds emanating from his garbled throat. Horrendous screeching tore through the muggy air as the ex-corporal shook in earnest from head to toe.

I told myself Dad was fighting tooth and nail to get back to us. That this fit was his consciousness returning, and not a human being in the throes of painful death.

These were the rumblings of an earthquake. This was something clawing away at my father's insides.

The thing clawing had to be Dad. It had to be.

"Ma!" the ex-corporal screamed, smacking his head against the pillow.

The ex-corporal's face was unrecognizable, inhuman in its distortions. His hands clenched and unclenched while trails of skin slipped from them.

"Ma. Life insurance. Please."

I stepped forward. I held that rancid body, held its stinking head still in my arms.

I didn't know who was begging now or whether the body was unoccupied and the gaping Universe was passing through it. It hardly seemed to matter.

"The gunfire!" it screamed, and then the body was limp. I pressed my ear to its chest, but if there was a heartbeat I couldn't hear it over my own.

After an hour, the body's eyelids fluttered open. Its eyes fixed on me. I met them.

I trembled.

"... Dad?"

When he spoke, his voice was a garbled mess. But it sounded no worse than it had on days when he had bitten through his tongue, and it sounded nothing like the not-quite Kentucky twang of the ex-corporal. "Traversing the Universe is... tiring, Gwyn."

"Let's just try to stick to reading paperbacks, Dad," I said. I tightened my arms around him.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

—Alan Turing

Tell yourself that computers don't know
love, indigestion, irony, Shakespeare, prejudice,
the soul in its proud motion.
These are the secret handshakes
we learn to protect the clubhouse.
Display them like bottle-caps,
like we are at war with
the injuns down the street.

My spellchecker learned
I was Canadian
before my neighbor did.

Carbon knows the periodic table is all
snakes and ladders. It could slide
down its column to silicon
any time it wanted
and become something
less obsessed with
distinction.

Dijkstra said that
asking if machines could think
was like asking if submarines could swim,
but it was his computer
that wrote down the idea.

Today my word processor offered to help me
with a love letter I was writing—
a favour I have yet to reciprocate.
Did Turing ever wonder
why they'd want to be like us?

The soul is a stick
we rattle on the bars of these arguments,
anxious to know
what side of the cell
we've been living on.

"Harp and carp, Thomas..."

Fairy queen to Thomas the Rhymer

If you put your lips to my lips, she says,
your hand on your heart, on your harp,
I will give you eyes of silver to see,
I will give you tongue of silver to tell.
I will set you on my left hand, by my right foot,
set you ahead of me, beside me, behind me,
riding pillion, arms entwined, upon mine own horse
whose bridle rings with a thousand bells.
And all of those bells every one of them,
sings out, tolling, telling the true.

She lies, of course, that old seducer who,
with her brother Death, tells you what you wish,
what you desire, what you need to hear.
Look away, Thomas, look ahead.
Do not look behind. You will find
nothing in her eyes, nothing on her tongue,
nothing but the coarse, cruel, easy lies
a poet must never speak. The truth is
Truth sits uneasy on any horse,
and does not ride pillion or otherwise
but hobbles down the road, breathing in the dust,
and like God, breathing out life.

Although it was raining when I landed in Orlando, Florida, for the 2013 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the weather soon brightened. This was a relief for the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing finalists who had chosen to spend their spring breaks at the conference. As usual, my co-judge, Rick Wilber, and I had picked our finalists from a huge pool of talented authors. The winner receives an expense-paid trip to Florida and a five hundred dollar first prize that is cosponsored by Dell Magazines and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and is supported by the School of Mass Communications, University of South Florida. The award is given out each year at the conference.

The finalists are determined by a blind read, but we were thrilled to discover that this year's first prize went to a very familiar face. While Lara Donnelly received the 2013 a ward for her powerful tale about settlers going "To the Dogs" this was her fifth year to "medal" in the contest. Lara was an honorable mention in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and she was last year's third runner-up. Lara graduated from Wright State University in June 2012, and promptly attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. She was eligible for our award because her entry was written during the spring of her senior year. Lara is now working on an urban fantasy novel and has recently moved to Louisville, Kentucky.

Our first runner-up, Alexandra Gürel of Princeton University, was unable to collect her certificate for "Fantasmas Maravilhosas" in person. Fortunately, Rich Larson, our second runner-up, was able to make the trip all the way from the University of Alberta. Rich was born in Galmi, Niger, and raised in Maradi until his family moved to Canada when he was ten. A student of French and Spanish, Rich has already sold fiction to several professional markets. We were pleased to encourage his nascent career with our award for "Atrophy."

Our third runner-up, Caitlin Higgins, is a senior studying physics at Cornell University. Although she may eventually study finance or law, Caitlin would like to be an author like her favorite writers, Robin Hobb and Fydor Dostoyevsky. She received her award for "The Changling."