Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (13 page)

He winces. Looks almost afraid. But there's the same distant pity in his old eyes that Martha's seen a million times. Even here. Even from him. She tries to imagine herself dragging the syringe from her pocket. Running forward, screaming and stabbing. Instead, her vision blurs with tears.

"Oh, Martha,
Martha...
Here, look..." Now he's coming toward her in a frost of breath, and holding something out. "This used to be yours. It
is
yours. You should have it back...."

She sniffs and looks despite herself. Sees her long-lost seashell, of all things, nestling in his craggy hand. She grabs it greedily and hugs it to herself and away from him. "I suppose you've got that other thing here as well—another bloody souvenir?"

He almost looks puzzled. "What thing?"

"The gun, you bastard! The thing you killed my brother with—and did this to me!"

She slaps the slope of her skull so hard it rings.

But he just stands there. Then, slowly, he blinks. "I think I see."

"See what?" The entangled are useless at arguing—she's tried it often enough.

"You think, Martha, you
believe,
that I broke into your house and did that terrible thing? Is that what you're saying?"

"Of course I am." But why is the roaring getting louder in her head?

"I'm sorry, Martha," he says, looking at her more pityingly than ever. "I really am so very, very sorry."

"You can't just... leave...."

But he is. He's turning, shuffling away from her across this rainbow space with nothing but a slow backward glance. Dissolving into the frost and the shadows, climbing down and out from this lost place of memories toward his life and his commune and a sense of infinite belonging, before Martha Chauhan even knows what else to know or say or feel.

It's full day now, and Martha Chauhan's sitting high at the concrete edge of the waystation.

It's freezing up here, despite the snowmelt. But she doesn't seem to be shivering any longer, nor does she feel especially cold. She sniffs, swipes her dripping nose, then studies the back of an old woman's hand that seems to have come away coated in blood. That roaring in her ears that is far too loud and close to be any kind of sound. Although there's no pain, it isn't hard for her to imagine, with what brains she has left, the wet dissolution of the inside of her skull as the immune suppressants fade from her blood. If she doesn't turn up at Baldwin Towers soon, she supposes help will probably come. But the entangled can be astonishingly callous. After all, they let their old and frail die from curable diseases. They kill their treasured pets for clothing and food.

She inspects her old seashell. A small glow rises through the red smears when she touches its controls. Something here that isn't dead, and she hooks the buds around her ears and feels a faint, nostalgic fizz. But the stuff she liked back in the day would surely be awful, old, and lost as she now is. A different person, really. In fact, that's the whole point....

She feels past the syringe in her coat pocket, finds the data card she took from the house security system and sniffs back more blood as she numbly shoves it in. It's still a surprise, though, to find options and menus hanging against the clear morning sky. Files as well, when you'd have thought Dad would have deleted them. But then, he never liked destroying things—even stuff he never planned to use. And perhaps, the thought trickles down through her leaking brain, he left this for her. After all, and despite his many evasions and protestations, he always had a strong regard for the truth.

She waves a once-practiced hand through ancient images until she reaches the very last date.The end of everything. The very last night.

And there it is.

There it always was.

She's looking into the bright dark of their old kitchen through the nightsight eyes of that stupid not-dog. Fast-forward until a window shatters in a hard spray and the door opens and something moves in, and the not-dog stirs, wags its tail, recognizes... not Karl Yann, but a much more familiar shape and scent.

Martha rips the buds from her ears, but she still can't escape the past. She's back at this waystation, but she's young again, and the colors are brilliant, and she's here with Karl Yann, full of Politics and Philosophy and righteous anger at the state of the world. And he's got this handgun that he's merely using as a prop for all his agitprop posturings, when she has a much clearer, simpler, cleverer idea. The final performance act, right? The easiest, most obvious one of all.... Come on, Karl, don't say you haven't
thought
of it.... And fuck you if you're not interested. If you're not prepared, I'll just do the damn thing myself....

Martha flouncing out from the waystation. Into the darkness. Hunching alone through the glass and rubble streets. The gun a weight of potentiality in her pocket and the whole world asleep. She feels like she's in the mainstream of the long history of resistance. She's Ulrike Meinhof. She's Gavrilo Princip. She's Harry Potter fighting Voldemort. A pure, simple, righteous deed to show everyone—and her dad especially—that there are no barriers that will keep the truth of what's really happening away from these prim, grim estates. Not this shockwire. Nor these gates. Not anything. Least of all the glass of their kitchen door that breaks in a satisfying clatter as she feels in for the old-fashioned handle and turns. Not that this isn't a prank as well. Not that there isn't still fun to be had. After all, that fucking thing of a dog isn't really living anyway, it's nothing but dumb
property,
so what harm is being done if she shoots it properly dead? Nothing at all, right? She's doing nothing but good. She's shoving it to the system. She's giving it to the man. The darkness seethes as she enters, and she feels as she always feels, standing right here in her own kitchen, which is like an intruder in her own life.

That roaring again. Now stronger than ever, even though the seashell's buds are off and its batteries have gone. After all, how is she to tell one shape from another in this sudden dark? How could she know when she can barely see anything that the thing that comes stumbling threateningly out at her is Damien and not that zombie dog? It's all happened already, and too quickly, and the moment is long gone. A squeezed trigger and the world shudders and she's screaming and the dog's howling and all the backup lights have flared and Damien's sprawled in a lake of blood and the gun's a deathly weight in her hand—although Martha Chauhan doubts if she could ever understand how she felt as she turned it around so that its black snout was pointing at her own head and squeezed the trigger again.

Her father's with her now. Even without looking, and just as when she lay in her bedroom surrounded by pain and humming equipment, she knows he's here. After all, and despite her many attempts to reject him, he never really went away. And, as always, he's telling her tales—filling the roaring air with endless ideas, suppositions, stories... Talking at least as much about once-upon-a-times and should-have-beens as about how things really are. Using what life and energy he has left to bring back his daughter. And if he could have found a way of sheltering her from what really happened that terrible night, if he could have invented a story that gave her a reason to carry on living, Martha knows he would have done so.

She sniffs, tastes bitter salt, and feels a deep roaring. It's getting impossibly late. Already the sun seems to be setting, and the beach is growing cold, and the cricket match has finished, and that last gritty samosa she's just eaten was foul, and all the dogs and the kite flyers have gone home. But there's Dad, walking trousers-rolled and hand-in-hand with Damien as the tide floods in. Martha waves cheerily, and they wave back. She thinks she might just join them, down there at the edge of everything where all islands meet.

Jay O'Connell's tells us his second story for
Asimov's
started as "flash fiction with an ax to grind, which we know is a Bad Thing, so I let it alone for a long time. Rewritten for my new workshop to allow the protagonist to actually protag, (what we in fiction call, a Good Thing) the ending surprised me—and made the story true." Jay now writes at Toscaninnis on Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge every day. His previously published work is available in
Asimov's
as well as the anthology
Not So Distant
—see his website
www.jayoconnell.com
for more information.

Melissa looked up into her father's unobscured eye.

"Can I keep her?"

Her father sighed, turning back to his wallscreen to pause a conference window. "There are laws, Melissa Elsbeth, against harboring the hopeless. What were you thinking of? How long has this been going on?"

"A few days," Melissa lied. She'd been bringing Lena food for over a week. Yani, Melissa's servant, had finally penetrated her lie, that Lena was the gardener's daughter, and told Melissa's father.

"Days?" She had his full attention now. Never a good thing.

"Melissa? Did you bring this girl into our house?"

"No." Melissa couldn't get Lena into the house proper without a biometric scan. "I brought food down to the garden shed. That's all!"

"Where has she been going to the bathroom?"

"There's a drain, in the middle of the floor."

Her father made a face, as if Lena had been going to the bathroom on the baby grand piano in the corner of his office. He squatted so his eyes were level with hers. His interface pivoted away. His coding eye was bloodshot, like a GPS roadmap choked with traffic.

"We can't keep a hopeless girl in the shed. Yani should have called security immediately. She will be docked a week's pay for her mistake. What do you think your punishment should be?"

Melissa held her expression neutral. This was a trap. If she chose too lenient a punishment, her father would exact something far worse, to teach her an extra lesson. Crying seemed to make the punishments worse. Crying was a sign of weakness.

Stalling, she examined the study's wallscreen, which glowed with an intricate tangle of code rendered to look like ore carts and factories and conveyor belts. Melissa could follow some of the logic already, the input streams and processing stations. There were icons that represented people, others that represented resources, drones and bots. The goal, Dad said, was replacing the people with drones and bots with the fastest payoff. When Melissa had asked what happened to the people he replaced, her father laughed. Someone smart always figured out how to make a profit with the leftover people, he said. Eventually.

"You should decide," she said finally.

Her father nodded, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He turned back to the wallscreen, sweeping away his work, invoking the estate security suite. A dozen window views bloomed, mostly inside the main house, but there were also shots of the grounds, the formal garden, the tennis court, the stables. In another pane, live feeds from the cams implanted in the household staff lit up another dozen windows. Servants washing, weeding, doing laundry.

"How did she get past the perimeter?"

Melissa shrugged. She hadn't asked. At first, she had thought the other girl really might be the daughter of another servant. Lena had been so eager to play with her, so eager to please. It had been fun, being with someone her own age. They'd actually played with the dolls and tea sets that her father had let her collect.

Melissa's father prowled the perimeter via a security drone, examining the 10-foothigh, electrified fence, checking it for weaknesses. There was a tree, an ancient thing, too close to the fence on the western edge of the estate. It had been pruned back before, so it didn't hang over into the estate, but had regrown... yes, a child could have climbed that tree, and jumped into the hedges that mostly hid the fence, which would have broken her fall.

He made a note for the gardener, to remove the tree immediately. And for security to sweep the surrounding forest for vagrants.

He flew the drone back to the garden shed, and growled on discovering that the shed's door wasn't powered. He couldn't open it. Circling the shed, he found a missing windowpane and flew inside to inspect the interior. And the girl.

A skinny child, with coffee-colored skin, dark eyes, and close cropped hair, in a blue everclean jumper, sat cross legged at a tea set, surrounded by Melissa's dolls. An antique porcelain Victorian, retrofitted with a cybernetic chasis, was pouring imaginary tea for a Native American and a fairy with rainbow hued holographic wings.

The girl whirled at the tinny buzz of the drone, her eyes going wide. The drone locked onto the girl's right hand holding the tea cup, reading the tattooed barcode.

Her father invoked a search of public records. Within seconds, Lena's profile filled a window.

"She's an orphan. Parents dead in one of the urban plagues. No holdings... disappeared from a medical research compound six weeks ago." He puffed out his cheeks.

"... And she's unenhanced, of course. Junk genome. Public domain."

"She could serve," Melissa said quietly. "She could be my servant. I could take care of her with my allowance. She doesn't eat much."

Her father frowned.

"Yani was conditioned to serve. All of our servants are conditioned. Not a trivial expense. That's how we know they're safe." He shook his head. "We were talking about your punishment. Not about adopting a hopeless girl."

"I could pay for her conditioning."

Her father was scrolling through Lena's profile too fast for Melissa to follow. "She's not worth training."

Melissa fought back tears. This was the problem with her allowance, and if her older sister Christine was any indication, with her share of the family estate. It wasn't really hers. Any purchase larger than a piece of candy had to be thumbprinted by her mother or father, who had opinions as to what was a reasonable way to spend her money. She sniffed. She wouldn't cry. Crying meant the argument was over. It meant she'd lost.

"When you give someone something they haven't earned, you take away their dignity. The more you give them, the worse they get. You know that."