Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (33 page)

"They're dead already," Mr. B said irritably.

Antonio leaned down to Patty. "All things perish in the end. Flowers and birds, even men. There are no exceptions."

"Not my family," Patty whispered. "I won't let it!"

He gazed at her for a moment. "And how shall you prevent it?"

"I'll find a way."

"You have the power to do that?" She heard amusement in his voice.

"Do
you?"
she countered.

"What do you think?"

She thought about the question. He'd been through the same hardships they all had, but he seemed untouched. She never saw him eat, yet he hadn't shrunk to skin stretched over bone like Tommy or the others. His dark eyes were clear and bright, not deep in their sockets and clouded like Mama's. An Indian, she'd thought him when she'd first seen him, or a Spaniard from New Mexico territory. But he seemed more than that.

"I think you have some kind of magic."

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. "No magic. Just one very small dispensation, if I care to use it."

"I don't understand your words. If you have a way to save us, why wouldn't you care to use it?"

"What difference does it make, to live a little longer now and die later? Even the one born this season died in the end."

"I think you must be a very bad man!" Her bones ached with the cold and the hunger, but something drove her not to accept the bleak future he described. "Gran said God wants us to live and do good works."

"Wise woman, your grandmother!" he observed.

If he was still strong, perhaps he could get through the snow and across the mountains. "Why don't you go to fetch help? If my Papa knew how hard it is here, he'd come back for us."

"Always an argument," he said, shaking his head as if in wonderment.

"Oh—if I were older I'd go myself!"

He was silent for so long she thought he'd gone to sleep. Then he said, "Perhaps my 'magic,' as you name it, could spare you a little while. Would you like to live?"

"Of course! Who wouldn't? You can do that?"

"If I so choose."

How annoying he was! "And my family?"

His eyes opened and he stared at her. She felt as if she were a book he was searching for an answer. Then he nodded. "And your family."

"And the others here. "

"They're all mine at the last."

"But you can't just leave them—"

He stood suddenly. "Enough!"

"You disappeared after that," Pat said, remembering. "And then the dying in that camp began in earnest."

She snatched up the needles and began knitting furiously again. It had been many more weeks of starvation and death before her father had managed to get a rescue crew up to the lake to save them. Weeks of nightmare hunger and even worse, unspeakable remedies. Her mother had stayed firm; their little family never descended into the horror that engulfed the rest of the party though they stood at the edge of their own death. Somehow, they had survived. She'd had a long life since the camp on the frozen lake.

"You lived," Antonio said. "Why should the rest of it trouble you?"

"You are despicable!"

But he was what he was, and all things had to come to their end. Remembering and reliving the horrors of the past had exhausted her. She thought of the bed with its warming pan that waited upstairs, the soft mattress and the thick quilt to ward off the cold. She shook off the desire to sleep; she had to stay awake till Robby arrived.

"I knew you would come eventually," she said. "Well, you'll have to wait while I finish this sock."

Antonio laughed as if he heard echoes of her childhood attempts at arguing with him. "If I came personally for everyone who thought they had a special relationship with me, I would've exhausted time long ago!"

His voice was so very cold, like the ice that surrounded that long-ago cabin. She said nothing, bending to her knitting, but her hands were shaking. The sock had reached the last row, needing only to be cast off before it joined the other on her lap.

After a while, he said, "Do you really understand so little?"

"And whose fault is that? When I was a child you spoke to me in riddles." Nervousness brought her to her feet to pace the room. He, by contrast, never seemed to need to fidget. He sat unmoving in the chair under the window, his face halflit by the yel low lamp, half in shadow. His stillness made her want to slap him. "The least you could do is speak plainly at the very end."

"I have no power to change the final judgment," he said. "Only a small ability to grant a delay, a stay of execution, you might call it. I go wherever there is a greater chance of relieving my boredom, one player who can engage me enough to earn a brief reprieve from the sentence no one evades in the end."

"No caring in the decision?" She felt the old urge to argue with him. "No greater matter than picking one chicken out of the flock to put in the pot, another to spare? Because you're bored?"

She continued knitting right where she was standing by the lamp, ignoring the stiffness in her fingers and the pain in knuckles and wrists. Then she became aware of how ridiculous this was and sat down again, allowing the knitting to slide onto her lap.

"Ah, Patty," he said. "I thought perhaps you—of all people—might understand."

His sigh opened up a great lonely vista, years, centuries, millennia, of a solitary game of massacres and bloodbaths. A game he only won by granting a brief reprieve here and there for whatever reason amused or intrigued him. No power to do anything else. What kind of being endured such torment? Not one that had a heart to be broken.

Far away as if at the end of a tunnel, she heard the sound of the front door slamming, feet on the stairway, a familiar voice calling. She was too tired to answer. She leaned back in the chair, eyelids drooping.

"Your grandson has come to say goodbye," Antonio said.

When she managed to open her eyes, there were two soldiers in the room. Robbie was dressed in the same uniform that Antonio wore.

"Corporal!" Robbie exclaimed. "I didn't expect to find you here."

"Your grandmother and I are old friends," Antonio said.

"Granny, give me your blessing." Robbie said. "I decided to enlist. I'm going to Europe to fight the Hun."

What about your studies at University?
she wanted to say, but her voice wouldn't come.

"It's going to be a grand battle!" Robby said.

Her hand weighed too much to lift to touch him. Robbie bent over and kissed her on the brow. He was such a good boy, so idealistic and polite, with a promising life ahead of him.

Perhaps too polite?

"Time to march!" Antonio said. "Oh—you'll need the socks your grandmother knitted for you." He held out the finished socks to Robbie.

"Thanks, Granny. I'll think of you whenever I wear them," her grandson said.

The terrifying experience of her childhood had not been the first time—or the last—for Antonio. What did that say about his accompanying Robbie to war?

Challenge him, Robbie, fight for your life!
But the words stayed unvoiced in her head.

Death touched her eyelids, closing them, his touch soft as a feather. She heard them going out of the room together, talking and laughing like good friends playing a game.

WAITING FOR MEDUSA

Jack Dann
| 5749 words

Jack Dann (
jackdann.com
) is a multiple award winning author who has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the groundbreaking novels
Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral
—which was an international bestseller, the Civil War novel
The Silent,
and
Bad Medicine.
His short stories have appeared in
Playboy, Omni, Penthouse, Asimov's,
numerous best of the year collections, and other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthologies
Wandering Stars
and
More Wandering Stars,
and the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology
Dreaming Down-Under.
Jack's recent anthologies are
Dreaming Again, The Dragon Book
(with Gardner Dozois),
Australian Legends
(with Jonathan Strahan), and
Ghosts by Gaslight
(with Nick Gevers). His entire Magic Tales series of anthologies, co-edited with Gardner Dozois, is being made available online by Baen Books. His new story for us is a terrifying glimpse at what it's like to be...

Homage à Harlan...

The most reliable way to make the immortal jellyfish age in reverse... is to mutilate it.

—Nathaniel Rich

One: A Few Tips from the
Flash-Fire Manual of Good Manners

I have a routine I always follow before I die.

I take a good long piss, evacuate my bowels, check and recheck food supplies; then check and recheck every inch of my earth bunker to make sure that no hungry home-boy mutation will be able to smash his way in or burn me out; and
then,
when I'm satisfied that all is as it should be, I just lie down and wait for it. I don't eat. I don't drink. I just starve myself and wait for the medusa. Suffice it to say that I get so goddamn bored and hungry-aching that I finally just fall into a coma and drop dead.

It takes about a week for me to become an ugly-smelling gelatinous blob.

My stem cells just keep degenerating—for the record, I should tell you that I'm
all
stem cells—until my microRNAs kick in and start my regeneration from blob to pup. Yeah, I regenerate just like a Turritopsis medusa. In case some uneducated asshole home-boy carnivore is reading this, that's a jellyfish. And in case some
educated
ass-hole home-boy carnivore is reading this... aside from having two genome duplications,
you
look like a jellyfish, too!

And, yes, for the record, I'm a dog and proud of it.

Okay, let's get this out of the way right now: My name is Teviot Flash Fire 8703898, and my complete pedigree name is as long as your arm (providing you have arms). I'm a classic blackback: brown and white with a jet black saddle; and if the wind is right, I can smell man-stink ten miles away. I'm three feet tall, weigh forty pounds (all muscle!), and have opposable thumbs on my front paws—you can blame the Sprague Dawley Company, the Scientific Procedures Act of 2051, AUSDA, DARPA, and the U.S. Australia Homeland Security Amendment for that! But that's all old news, four hundred-year-old old news. Christ,
I'm
two hundred and eighty-eight years old, which isn't bad considering that the natural life of my breed is sixteen years.

Yeah, I've died eighteen times, and I'm not due to kick the bucket again for another ten years. I'm talking here about natural death, of course, which is something one can plan and make provisions for. I've had only two unnatural deaths, both in the killing fields; and both times I was lucky: I wasn't eaten or left to fertilize God's good soil with an arrow in my heart. So here's a free bit of gastronomical enlightenment for all you starving, snaggle-toothed, rot-brained, dog-eating killers out there: eat me and we
both
turn into unregenerationable blobs of flesh-fester.

Two: Homeboys and Bimbos

An arrow grazed my dewlap.

A hail of shot almost tore off my right ear.

I felt hot stings across my withers and back; and as I leapt for cover, it felt like a swarm of bees was stinging the hell out of me.

A laser sliced through the air where I had been. I moved, again and again; and

I moved quickly, resting only when I found a temporary vantage point behind (and partly inside) a rotting, vine-strangled tree trunk.

And, yes, it was my own stupid, fucking fault that a bunch of starving, snaggletoothed, rot-brained, dog-eating killers had managed to catch me unawares.

I was foraging in South Gippsland hill country, which, aside from the odd mutant and florid green flat-leaf flora, should have been safe as houses. It had been radioed, which turned humans and most of the wildlife into radioactive compost for hungry plants. The place was still hot as Melbourne, Sydney, New York, London, or Bangalore. There shouldn't have been
anybody
here.

I guess it just goes to show that experience, a heightened olfactory sensorium, and augmented intelligence ain't what they're cracked up to be, because a rover pack of dangle-armed, hump-backed, anthropophagous mutes had been tracking me for hours. Well, they weren't tracking me, exactly.

They were tracking the crazy bimbo that was—

I'll get to that by the by.

Anyway, by the time I got my first whiff of the mutes' gland-stink presence, it was too late. The wind had blown their smell north, and the acid odor of pelting rain had muddled my olfactory discrimination. I'm not meaty enough to be more than a snack for two or three, but there you are: I suppose the homeboy mutes will just have to fight over who gets what parts of me... and, of course, the bimbo.

I shouldn't call her that, but I'm a dog for Crissakes; and one could reasonably argue that, augmented or not, I'm by definition sexist right down to my brisket and gonads. That I use the term "bimbo" as an expression of affection is, of course, no excuse. Her name is Crash—at least that's what she calls herself: she doesn't give away much information—and she was tracking
me.
Now that's a trick-and-a-half, because I should have smelled her.

I should have smelled her when I finally smelled the nose-clogging pong of the mutants... except she's got no signature spoor; at least none that
I
could detect. Nothing.

As far as I could tell, she was just... green. Green as the air. Green as the refreshing, actinic smell of radiation: that's what fresh air smells like to me.