Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (7 page)

The princess took the wires of Diviya's sail in her steel fingers. They passed into the shadow of the asteroid, and out of sight, and Diviya released the second soul. The princess thrust, decelerating them. The soul hurtled onward, screaming. The tremendous deceleration bent Diviya's sail, and stabbed new pain into his underside. Diviya and the princess both groaned, sharing the pain of the unnatural maneuver.

Her thrust flagged.

She had almost no breath left and they would soon emerge from the shadow of the asteroid. But the soul was not far enough away.

"Don't stop!" he said.

"There is nothing more!"

"Then turn!" he said. "Into the asteroid!"

"We'll crash!"

They still traveled very fast. The regolith might be composed of deep powdered grains or it might hide nuggets and boulders of nickel-iron and hard ices that would shatter their carapaces.

"You are brave!" Diviya said. "It is the only way, Princess!" She did not turn. He waited. The thrust sputtered. "Please!"

The wires tightened and swung him as she aimed at the asteroid. They lurched as her breath expired. The regolith, even under microgravity, was frightening at their speed.

Diviya plunged deep in an explosion of dust, tumbling in the powder and pebbles, before being wrenched to the surface in a jarring, snapping stop.

He was on his back. His underside hurt. He could not feel his sail. Some of his fingers were bent. He wiggled them and began digging at the dust until he was right side up. A deep channel gouged the asteroid. Dust rose, swirling on its own static.

The princess had not let go of him. They had plowed the great furrow together before she herself had been driven by their speed into the regolith. She pulled herself free of the dirt. She had filled herself with dust, as had he. His insides. Her insides. Their souls were covered and, for once, silent. They spewed regolith, thickening the rising clouds. "You did it, Princess," he said.

"You stopped us. You are a hero."

She spat another gout of dirt from her gullet. Her anger and fear still crackled.

"Look!" Diviya said. The princess followed the line of his gaze.

Far in the distance, just a point now, the second soul sped onward, on a trajectory that would take it past the gravitational eddy and back toward the pulsar. From this distance, it looked like a tiny part of a distant migration.

On a course to intercept it, thrusting hot gas, was another sharp point of radiation: the shaghāl. By the time it realized what it was chasing, the shaghāl would be committed to a trajectory that would take it all the way around the black hole. It would be years before it returned. In that time, the new hive would have risen and matured and launched its own migration into the future.

Jason K. Chapman lives in New York City where, as the IT director for
Poets & Writers,
he gets to indulge his two main interests, computers and literature. Short fiction publications include sales to
Cosmos, Clarkesworld,
and
Bullspec.
His second appearance in
Asimov's
came about when two Simon & Garfunkel tunes collided with a song by Bread at a really bad intersection in the author's brain. He tells us, "The title, of course, is just because I love Philip K. Dick."

To Oxford Brown, dying was getting to be more annoying every day. He eased himself into the chair across the desk from the young blond woman. The off ice was cramped and shabby, as if someone had hastily thrown a few pieces of furniture into an unused mop closet. He shifted uncomfortably. The chair hadn't been designed to coddle his seventy-three-year old bones.

"Good morning, Mr. Brown." The woman's smile was smooth and flawless. She must have spent hours practicing it. "I've been assigned as your counselor here at AftrLyf."

"Like an attorney?" Oxford asked. He didn't care much for attorneys.

"No, no," she said. "I'm not an attorney."

A psychiatrist, then. Oxford cared for shrinks even less. "I'm not crazy," he said. "Can I go now?"

"It's the law, Mr. Brown." The woman seemed to turn up the smug factor on her smile. "As of last month, AftrLyf is required to provide you with a clear explanation of your options."

"What's to explain?" Oxford asked. "I die. You put my brain in a blender, plug it into the network, and I get to see me wife again. Right?"

The word "blender" seemed to unsettle her. Good. He was getting tired of her cool, synthetic calm. Oxford prided himself on being able to flap the unflappable.

"Mr. Brown," she said, "I'm here to make you aware of the alternatives."

"Alternatives? What alternatives?"

She folded her hands on the desk in front of her and steepled her fingers. "Are you a religious man, Mr. Brown?"

If he'd been thirty years younger, he'd have shot to his feet. He settled for leaning forward and frowning. "Heaven?
That's
your alternative?"

"AftrLyf is unnatural, Mr. Brown. You should know that it could keep you from reaching the
real
afterlife."

"You don't work for the company, do you?"

"Certainly
not,
" she said. "I'm with the Interfaith Council on—" "And this isn't mandatory."

"I told you, the law requires AftrLyf to—"

"Forget it!" Oxford finally made it to his feet. "My wife is in AftrLyf's system. She has been for three years now, and she'll be there when I arrive. Can you guarantee the same for your—
alternative?
"

"As you say, Mr. Brown, your wife is in AftrLyf's system."

"And God hates competition. I get it." Oxford leaned on the desk, staring down at her. "He sounds like a vindictive bastard."

She began to tremble and her knuckles turned white. For a moment, Oxford thought she was going to hit him, but instead she snatched a clipboard from the edge of the desk and slapped it down between his hands.

"Sign this," she said. "It states that you've refused counseling."

Oh, yes. He'd definitely flapped her.

The night Oxford died, he was sitting quietly in his living room, letting the gloom and the past envelope him. So many evenings he and Emily had spent there, he in his chair, she in hers. They'd read, sipping tea, marking the hours with bookmarks and teaspoons, wrapped in the silence that only two people truly comfortable with each other could share. Theirs had never been a passionate relationship, but it hadn't been unhappy, either. He'd devoted himself to making her happy more than fifty years earlier, ever since that one time in college, when he'd violated her trust completely.

She'd wanted him to do it, though. He'd always been certain of that. Why else would she have left him alone in her dorm room, with her private journal just sitting there in the half-open nightstand drawer?

"Had that dream again last night," he'd read. "Sexy! Hands on me. Lips on mine." Embarrassed, he'd almost stopped reading there, but couldn't. "I hate this! It hurts knowing O thinks of me as just another pal in the Pizza and Beer Club. Hurts when we're together. Hurts when we're apart. I'm such a coward! Why can't I just say something? Maybe I just don't deserve to be loved."

That's when he'd put it back in the drawer, careful to slide the Dickinson collection back on top of it at just the right angle. When she came back, he began watching her more carefully. He studied her the rest of that night as they joined the gang at their favorite off-campus haunt. How could he have missed how sweet her quick, little smile was, or how smoothly she navigated any conversation? By the end of the night, he'd silently vowed to devote his life to making her happy.

Now, sitting alone in the living room they used to share, he congratulated himself on keeping that vow. He took his nightly pills that AftrLyf had given him and relaxed into the short burst of memory they always caused. The doctors had said something about electrochemical stimulation of myelin production, but Oxford just thought of them as a way to make sure your life flashed before your eyes well before your death. He watched the parade of reminiscences as if it were a slideshow: Emily at graduation, Emily in the backyard garden of the house they really couldn't afford at the time, Emily at the beach house he'd given up grad school for, Emily by the fireplace reading a book of poetry and glowing in the flickering light as if it came from inside her.

He never noticed his own death. He missed the tiny beep beep beep of his alert bracelet signaling AftrLyf 's collection team. He missed the team's dramatic entry, their clockwork efficiency as they wrapped his head in cooling blankets and inserted the needles into his neck. He never heard the swishing whir of the pump that circulated foul-smelling fluids through his body or the hurried rush of the ambulance as it whisked him to the processing center.

From Oxford's point of view, he fell asleep in his living room and awoke in a bus station.

The blue plastic seat was hard, but the finger poking Oxford's shoulder was harder still.

"Hey. Buddy. Wake up," the man poking Oxford said. "Don't want to sleep your death away, do you?"

Oxford grabbed the man's offending finger, trying to blink away the fog in his head. "Stop that," he said.

"So," the man went on, "you're from Raleigh, huh? How'd the Tar Heels do this year? They get a bowl game? Man, you're old. You should fix that."

"Of course I'm old, you idiot." Oxford had already had quite enough of the man. "And how do you know I'm from Raleigh?"

The man pointed up to an enormous electronic sign on the wall. "Now arriving: Raleigh, NC Ctr #201."

"Oh." Oxford rubbed his eyes. "This isn't at all what I expected. I thought my wife would be here."

"Yeah, well," the stranger said, shrugging, "you can't expect her to just hang out at the terminal waiting for you. She's got a death to live, too, you know."

Oxford looked pointedly at the crowd milling at the edge of the waiting area. "I suppose," he said.

"Them?" The man squinted and blew through his lips like a horse. "Losers, hanging around waiting for news from the living world. Just can't let it go and get on with their deaths, you know?"

"Pot," Oxford said, turning his pointed look toward the stranger, "meet kettle."

The man's eyebrows shot up. "Me? No way. I'm not like them at all. I'm just here to..." His voice trailed off into a long sigh and his gaze drifted to the floor. He seemed to deflate, aging as Oxford watched. Wrinkles began to crease the corners of his eyes and his cheeks sagged. His thick, dark hair faded, thinned, became a wispy gray fringe above his ears.

"Man, you look old," Oxford said.

"Eighty-two," he said, glancing up. "I'd be eighty-seven now."

"Neat trick, looking young."

The man planted his elbows on his knees and rested his face in his hands. "I hate being dead."

Oxford left the man to stew in his own self-pity. He had his own death to live, and his first order of business was to find Emily. Outside, he found a bright, sunny day with just the right amount of breeze and a perfect temperature. That made sense, of course. It was all virtual, right? Why program it to be anything but heavenly?

A ten-foot wall, painted pale blue, surrounded the bus station. There were no buses, though, and no streets, just a little bit of well-ordered grass and a few generic-looking trees. A sidewalk led to an archway in the outer wall. "Exit," read a sign above the arch, "to the Yellow Zone."

Uncertain what to do next, Oxford shoved his hands in his pockets. Surprised, he pulled out the rectangular object he found in the right one. It looked a little like a cell phone. "What the hell is this," he said aloud.

A rectangle appeared in the air above the device. Words resolved themselves. It was some kind of projection display. "Welcome to your new AftrLyf Network Guide to Eternal Life."

Oxford groaned. IT people and their stupid acronyms. Did they really think that was cute? What about their customers whose religions didn't have angels? He suddenly realized he had no idea which religions those might be, but he wasn't in the mood to be agreeable. "What about the atheists?" he said.

The display changed. It now read, "Welcome to your new Personal AftrLyf Librarian."

Oxford sighed. "Thanks, pal," he said, shoving the device back into his pocket, "but no thanks." He wrapped his irritation around himself like a comfortable old sweater and strode out through the archway.

The yellow zone was surprisingly urban. Except for the fact that the cars were silent, and the sidewalks were spotless, and the passersby were courteous, and the stores weren't gaudy, and the air smelled like freshly mown grass, it might have been any city. The buildings ranged from one to forty stories, in a mix of styles that somehow managed to blend together smoothly. Whenever he reached an intersection, the lights changed and the cars stopped. Traveling by car must be annoyingly slow. Overall, the place was a little too cheerful for Oxford's tastes.

It didn't take him long to completely lose his bearings, not that he had any idea where he was going. After an hour or so, his feet hurt and his knees ached and his mood took on the sharp, jagged edge of frustration. He stepped into a small coffee shop, despite its unbearably silly name of Cy Klopp's Grill.

The place was like something out of history, with leatherette booths along one wall, a scattering of tiny Formica-topped tables, and a long counter fronted by a row of red-seated stools. Oxford chose one of the empty booths. Lily was there before he'd finished squeaking himself into something like a comfortable position.

"Hi, I'm Lily," she said, tapping her name tag with the end of her pen. "What can I get for you?" She couldn't have been older than twenty-three. Her green-and-white uniform and pale yellow apron looked like something from her great grandmother's era. She was so young. Maybe she'd never had the time to become more than just a waitress.

"I don't—I just needed to get off my feet for a while," Oxford said. Then he realized a bigger problem. He reached for his back pocket. "I don't think I have any money." Lily giggled. " 'Course you do," she said. "Ask your ANGEL."