Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 (15 page)

I stumble my way home through the corridors past confused, angry voices, feeling trapped. We've come to Shepard Station to spend our golden years, only to find that the Universe's warped sense of humor hasn't improved since Ranginui.

"Where have you been?" Cheryl asks as I open the door and stagger in.

"We have to pick out things to throw away by morning," I tell her.

"Yes, I heard," she says. "It was broadcast everywhere."

I look around at the apartment. Everything here has a memory, something I want to remember, something to hold the memories I don't want at bay: there's the holograph Cheryl and I took diving in the Great Barrier Reef; there's the award Cherylwon for forty years of excellence in teaching; there's the ticket to the first play we saw after... we finally paid off our debt.

How can I choose to throw any of it away?

Cheryl yawns. "Can you watch Shep for a bit while I catch some shut-eye? He refuses to sleep. I think he misses you."

Before she goes through the door to the bedroom, she turns around and says, "I'll get up in a few hours and help you figure out what to throw away." She flashes me a smile. "I've always said we have too many things."

And she leaves me alone with Shep. With Shep and all my memories.

I go over to the plantimal. It's bobbing up and down, making a mewling noise.
"Ta-

Ta." There's no evidence of any nervous system.
The planter is huge. I try to calculate the mass. What if I add in all the toys and other baby things Cheryl has bought for it?

It doesn't feel anything.

I picture myself carrying it down to the disposal airlock, before Cheryl wakes up. Shep turns to me, and waves its arms at me.
It's just an adaptive, automatic, imitative reaction.
I reach out and caress it. And somehow I know, I
know
that its shiver is a sign of pleasure. I hold up the nutrient bulb, and it leans over to be closer to my hand. There's no doubt in my mind that it's excited about its pending snack.

Is it possible that I'm seeing what I want to see?

The Station Commander has laid down the rules. Rules that must be followed. "I'm sorry," I say. I put down the nutrient bulb. I bend down to lift the planter. I have to get rid of it now, before Cheryl wakes up, before I have to lose all that we've fought so hard to remember: our life together.

"Si aaaa oooo,"
Shep says, its leafy lips rasping against each other. The rhythm is familiar, bringing to mind something Cheryl used to say a lot, but now, rarely.

Cheryl's voice comes from bpehind me. "That's how he says 'I love you.' "

Cheryl took the news better than I expected. When the nurse disconnected the life support system and left us alone, she just sat and held Joey.

"You should eat something," I said.

"Soon," she said.

I sat next to her, not wanting to touch my son. I hated myself. I hated how relieved I felt. Almost euphoric. I was a monster.

This is what should have been done in the first place,
I told myself.
We were being selfish. And now we're doing the right thing. The rational thing.

Joey twitched violently in her arms, a seizure. He had those often. Usually we'd call the nurse, but not this time. Not anymore.

"Can you hold him?" she asked. "He usually calms down if you hold him."

I thought if we really checked it scientifically, there would be no evidence that my holding him made any difference. But I said nothing and opened my arms.

The twitching body fluttered against my chest, my arms, my shoulders. Then the movements subsided, and Joey was still. His breath, wheezy, caught in his throat.

I looked down and kissed the baby. Did I do it for myself or for Cheryl? Even now, after all this time, I'm not sure.

Joey's left arm moved up, the fist tightened, and then moved back down. I'd never seen him do that before.

"That's how he says 'I love you,' " Cheryl said.

I gently put the planter down.

I'm crying the way I haven't cried in years. It feels like something inside me wants to force its way out. The sobs wrack my body and it's hard to breathe.

It's not rational to love something that can't feel, that does not have consciousness or will, that can't love you back. But love has never been rational.

It's the effort you put into someone, to care for them, to sustain them when they need you, that gives love life.

Cheryl's arms wrap around me. And I cry even harder. She kisses me and I turn my face away. "I have a confession," I begin.

"I know," she says. "I've always known. I wasn't really asleep."

I look at her, not understanding.

"I loved our son," she says. "But I also love his father. I was selfish, and let you make the decision by yourself because I didn't want the responsibility. Sometimes there are no good choices in life."

We
were
selfish, but sometimes love and life both depend on being selfish, a selfishness that requires no return.

We cry together. More than half a century of guilt, of things unsaid and topics avoided, cannot be erased in one night. But it's a start. It's the start of relief and hope.

"Do you want me to help you pick out what to throw away?" she asks.

I look around at the binders, the souvenirs, the awards and photos and knickknacks. I had thought I hoarded them to help me, help us, remember, but I had really kept them to forget.

They have lost their glow now, their magic. They don't have a hold on me.

"I don't care," I say. "We can throw all of it away."

"Si aaaa oooo. Sa-Sa. Ta-Ta."

We look over at Shep. He's so lovely, so beautiful. He looks a bit like Cheryl and a bit like me. With a little help from the Old Man, he'll be saying "Mama" and "Daddy" in a month. Hell, in a week.

I can hardly wait.

Pete is a criminal defense attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his loving wife and demanding cat. His stories have been published in many markets, including
Daily Science Fiction, Bull Spec,
and
Stupefying Stories.
Of his first tale for
Asimov's,
he says, "Twenty years ago I worked as a law clerk in a sleepy Georgia town where a bar near the courthouse served cold beer and the best hamburgers in the world."

Wallace picked a hell of a place to watch the first Mars expedition land. The small Georgia town probably hadn't changed in a hundred years.

He parked in front of Scooter's Tavern, the place the interstate gas station attendant had suggested. He wondered how dives like Scooter's survived. Except for the bar he saw nothing but boarded-up buildings. The dark street had only one other car.

He thought twice about leaving the interstellar drive's blueprints in the trunk. But he didn't feel like lugging them around. After the frustrating week trying to get money to manufacture the drive, he half hoped somebody would steal the damned plans.

Inside, the wheezing window air conditioner fought August's heat and humidity. A teetering stack of water-stained boxes leaned against a dented video poker machine. Wallace hoped he hadn't made a mistake coming in here. "Do y'all serve food?" he asked the bartender, a greasy-haired man in a NASCAR T-shirt.

The bartender's eyes opened wide. He grabbed a half-filled beer off the counter and gulped it down. "Evening, sir. I'm Ray. We got burgers and chips. Want a drink?"

Wallace sat down on a duct-taped stool. He needed a drink. After trudging through South Carolina and Georgia, he still hadn't found a single investor. The real world was even less interested in his ideas about string theory and exceeding light speed than the Ph.D. physics program. Days like this he almost wished he hadn't dropped out. "Burger and chips. And whatever you have on draft."

Ray slapped a patty on the grill and poured Wallace a tall Stroh's. He turned on the flat screen TV with a remote. "Those boys are about to land."

"I wouldn't want to be the first man out of the lander. Too much pressure. Hard to top Neil Armstrong." "One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind," Ray said. "You know your history," Wallace said. Ray smiled. "It's my specialty." Wallace sipped his beer. He hadn't realized how thirsty he was. "How old's this place?"

Ray shrugged. "Who knows? Ninety years? I was here when the Supreme Court ended segregation. The Vietnam War. The Moon landing." His voice was slurred.

"You were here?"

"Of course not." Ray coughed. "I meant the bar's been here that long."

"This must be a slow night with the landing and all," Wallace said.

"Nope. Normal crowd." Grease spattered as Ray flipped the burger. The rich smell of sautéing onions filled the air. "It's our last night." He poured himself another beer.

"So, I'm celebrating."

Wallace studied the unswept concrete floor, and the cracked plastic chairs and Formica tables. He wondered if the dusty pinball machine worked. "Hard to make money downtown with the interstate, I guess. Everybody goes to Red Lobster or Applebee's."

Ray leaned against the counter. "Our work's done is all. I'll miss it. A good spot to watch the world. Nobody bothers you."

Wallace doubted anyone could see much of the world from a street that probably had less traffic than a suburban cul-de-sac. The countdown clock on TV said thirty minutes to landing.

Ray placed a steaming hamburger before Wallace. He unclipped a bag of barbecue chips from the wall. "Sorry, we're out of plain and sour cream. Not much point in restocking."

Wallace slathered the burger with mustard and Texas Pete hot sauce. He took a bite and remembered why he had left the generic chains near the highway. "This is great."

"You're a long way from home, ain't you?" Ray asked.

"I'm from Florida." Ray took another sip of beer. "Good day's drive to Miami."

"How'd you know I was from Miami?"

"You must have told me, sir." Ray pointed to the TV. "There's going to be a delay."

Wallace glanced at the ticking countdown clock. "Everything looks on schedule." Ray grinned. "Wait a second."

A commentator replaced the picture of the rapidly approaching surface of Mars. "The computers are out of sync, but Mission Control promises they'll fix the problem in ten or fifteen minutes. We—"

Ray picked up the remote and muted the sound. "The landing will be fine."

"How do you know?"

"The same way I know your fund raising trip went well." Had he told Ray about that? God, he was tired. "Nobody's interested in my company."

Ray finished the beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "That venture capitalist in Macon wants to invest. He'll call tonight."

"Are you watching me?"

"We're watching this time in history. Tomorrow we return to our time." The Georgia accent was gone. He poured another Stroh's and pushed it to Wallace. "On the house."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm saying too much, but I don't drink usually. And there's something I have to tell you in a minute." He smiled. "What do you think of the Mars landing?"

Wallace squinted. Was the man crazy? Maybe he was just drunk. "You don't want to know."

"Sure I do."

Wallace rolled his eyes. "It came in billions over budget. We should have a base on Mars by now. We should have friggin' FTL drive. And why is space travel still a national project? We need to work with India, Japan, China, Brazil. Don't get me started."

"Don't worry," Ray said. "Your little startup will fix that faster than light problem, but I got to tell you something. Helium 3 is a dead end. It's inefficient and too expensive to mine."

Wallace sighed. "Then what do you suggest?"

"Water. And fission. There's plenty of water." He scrawled something on a napkin and handed it to Wallace.

Wallace stared at figures and symbols. "That'll really work?"

"Yes, sir. You'll be exploring places you never imagined."

"Where?"

"The planet hasn't been found yet." Ray poured another beer... "And you'll discover something else when you're tinkering with that drive."

Wallace's mobile phone rang. He recognized the number of the Macon investor.

"What?" he asked Ray.

Ray raised his drink in a toast. "Time travel."

Jay O'Connell tells us that "Solomon's Little Sister" began with an attempt by the middle-aged author to compete with his tweenage sons on the Xbox 360, culminating in several completed Halo campaigns and a disturbing quantity of on-line multiplayer. "Could the video game be a metaphor for the post-singularity world? Assuming any humans stay human, Solomonic wisdom will remain a precious commodity... though it is available, as always, at
www.jayoconnell.com.
"

"Your sister is at the door," House said.

"How does she look?"

"Upset."

Of course. "Let her in."

Jean was in character, wearing the Sixties—the late Sixties; tie-dyed T-shirt, a faded denim miniskirt, beat-up moccasins, the works. Her pale green eyes skewered me through round, wire-rimmed lenses. She flipped a yard of dirty blonde hair back over one shoulder, hands on her hips.

"I left Peter," she said.

Peter had been a good friend of mine before he'd married my sister, back in the Before. We'd become brothers-in-law and somehow stopped being friends. Still, he'd called me, looking for his wife.

"He was two-timing me. Did you know?" She narrowed her eyes.

"Of course not," I lied.

I carried her backpack into the family room. It was an absurdly large thing topped with a paisley sleeping roll. It didn't weigh nearly enough. Null-grav in the aluminum tube frame?

Jean flung herself into the leather couch across from the fireplace. She frowned at my video-wall.

"What the hell are you watching?" The show had frozen when I answered the door; on screen, a cute woman in a nun's habit was superimposed, badly, on a clear blue sky.