Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (17 page)

"I know!" She whirled back, and he saw that her eyes were bright with unshed tears. "I know we did, Zach. Don't you see? That's why I did this. Because of you."

"Because of—"

"I
do
love you! The chip doesn't change that."

Do.
Not
did.
His heart suddenly felt lighter than it had in weeks. "Then what does it change?"

"It changes what I want my life to be. Or how badly I want it. Being Korean is important to me as a way of life, and I want to pass it along to my children
as a way of life.
Not as a colorful addition to being just like everyone else."

"But being just like everyone else could be a
good
thing. Especially if the reporter is right, if what I did catches on." He lifted a hand toward her face, and she didn't turn away. His fingers touched her cheek. "Don't you see? It's not about erasing differences. It's about erasing divisions. I identify with everyone, now."

"No." She slapped his hand away. Her eyes were bright, dark and shining. "You skipped the part where you learn how to do that. How can you identify with everyone when you can't even identify with your own people?"

His hand was shaking as he lowered it to his side. This wasn't how this was supposed to go. "That's exactly the sort of narrow-minded thinking I don't want to be forced into. Do you
want
to divide people from each other? To divide me from you? What if it doesn't have to be this way? You said I could never understand, but I do now. I
do."

"You don't! I'm trying to make you understand, and you won't. No matter how much I love you, Zach, I can't have the life I want if I'm with you."

"But I—"

"Grafted it on like it was an interesting extra-curricular? My culture, along with
everyone's
culture? No, Zach. That just proves how little you understand." She began to cry then—finally, after all this time—and it didn't make him feel better at all. He felt cold and empty. Tears dripped off her chin as she spoke. "You've done exactly what the chips were created to prevent. You want to erase all our differences. You want to make us all the same."

He wanted to brush away her tears. He wanted to hold her close. Instead, he held himself very still. "Yes. Because it will be a better world that way. I did this because
every
culture is important to me."

"No." She stuttered, but kept going. "What you're setting out to do is destroy my culture. Mine, and yours—"

"Don't pretend you care about mine!"

"I
do
care! I care about everyone's. I'm not afraid to be different, so I'm not afraid of other people being different. But you are."

"Maybe you should be," Zach said. "Differences between people aren't so simple. They can be dangerous. Read some history."

"Read some
more
history. People will find things to fight about no matter what. And fighting is better than persecution, Zach, which is what you get when you try to force everyone to be the same."

"I'm not trying to force anyone to do anything! That's what you and your precious chips are about. I'm just trying to help people move past worrying about persecution, past being stuck in history, past being obsessed with their own narrow ways of life—"

"So we should all be the same? Is that really what you want?"

"I want—" He stopped. He took a deep breath. "You know what, Amy? Yesterday, all I wanted was to understand
you.
But today I want more than that." He forced himself to look straight at her. "Now I'm part of something more important. Something bigger than I would have been a part of if I'd only implanted one chip."

"I don't think so," she said.

He managed a trembling smile. "I know."

She brushed away her own tears, and they stood in silence, facing each other. He was the first to step back. They stood looking at each other for a few moments more, and then they turned and went back to school, walking side by side but with a significant distance between them.

After a twenty-eight year absence, we are delighted to welcome Jim Sallis back to our pages. Jim's fifteenth novel,
Others of My Kind,
is just about to come out from Walker/Bloomsbury, and earlier this year his latest collection of poetry,
Rain's Eagerness,
was released by Aldrich Press. Jim received a lifetime achievement award for mystery fiction from Bouchercon in 2007 and he won the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime fiction in 2012. His novel
Drive
was the source of Nic Refn's film. Jim's band, Three-Legged Dog, plays regularly at music festivals. The author's new story for us is...

I am to be, they tell me, in a new Western series, so I've tried on a shirt with snaps for buttons and a hat the size of a chamberpot and stood for hours before the mirror practicing the three S's: slouch, sidle, and squint. It's been a good life these past years inhabiting the science fiction novels of Iain Shore, but science fiction sales are falling, they tell me, plummeting in fact, so they've decided to get ahead of the curve and move me along. Back to mysteries? I ask, with fond memories of fedoras, smoke-f illed rooms, the bite of cheap whiskey. Sales there are even worse, they tell me, and hand across my new clothes. Howdy, my new editor says.

Next day I meet my author, who def initely ain't no Iain Shore. (At least I'm getting the lingo down.) Evidently, from the look of his unwashed hair, what's left of it, he doesn't believe in tampering with what nature's given him. His lips hang half off his face like huge water blisters there below rheumy red eyes. He's wearing a sport coat that puts me in mind of shrinkwrapping, trousers that look like the gray work-pants sold at Sears, and a purplish T-shirt doing valiant duty against his pudge.

By way of acknowledgment, he pushes his glasses up his nose. They're back down before his hand is.

"Woodrow," he says. My name, evidently.

His is Evan, which he pronounces (my editor tells me)
Even.

"I've the bulk of the thing worked out," Evan says. "All but the end, I should say. And the title—I don't have my title yet. First title, I mean. Not to worry."

I allow as how all that sounds good.

"Here's the thing," he says. "You get the girl."

"Beg pardon?"

"The schoolmarm. You get her. Playing a fresh twist off the classic trope, you see."

I make a spittin' motion toward the wastebasket. Kinda thinking things over. Never could abide authors that said things like trope.

So, three shakes of a calf 's tail and I'm riding into a half-assed frontier town in (as Evan told me the first day) "Arizona, Montana, some such godforsaken place," dragging a personal history that a hundred or so pages farther along will explain (1) what I'm doing here, (2) why I'm so slow to anger, (3) why I never carry a gun, (4) why I'm partial to sheep, (5) what led to my leaving Abilene, El Paso, Fort Worth or St. Louis, (6) and so on.

Glancing back, I see what looks suspiciously like a guitar wrapped in a flour sack slung across my horse's rump. The horse's name is Challenger, but I vow right then and there that, however long this thing lasts, he'll be George to me. And, yep, we hit a rut in the road and the sack bounces up and comes down with a hollow, thrumming sound. It's a guitar all right.

This could be bad.

Eyes watch from windows as I pass. An old man sitting out front of the general store lifts his hat momentarily to look, then lets it fall back over his face. Someone shoulders a heavy sack into a wagon, sending up dense plumes of white dust. Two kids with whittled wood guns chase each other up and down the street. I can see the knife marks from here. One of the kids has a limp, so he'll be the schoolmarm's, naturally.

Think about it. I've got a guitar on the back of this horse and I'm heading for... pulling up in front of... yeah, it's the saloon all right.

At least I'm not the sidekick again.

Inside, a piano player and a banjo man are grinding out something that could be "Arkansas Traveler" or "Turkey in the Straw" but probably isn't intended to be either. Seeing my guitar, the banjo man narrows his eyes. He also misses the beat, and his pick skitters out onto the floor, glistening, dark and hard, like a roach.

"Name it," the barkeep says, and for a moment I think this is some kind of self-referential game old Evan's playing, but then I realize the barkeep's just asking what I want. What I want is a nice café au lait, but I settle for

"Whiskey"

which tastes of equal parts wasp venom and pump-handle drippings. Not to mention that you could safely watch eclipses through the glass it was served in.

The town doc's in there, naturally. He comes up, trying hard to focus, so that his head bobs up and down and side to side like a bird's, to ask if I've brought his medical supplies. Have to wonder what he was expecting. Out here, a knife or two, some alcohol, and a saw's about all you need.

The banjo man is still eyeing me as one of the girls, who doesn't smell any better than the doc, pushes into me to say she hasn't seen me around before. A moment later, the musicians take a break, and I swear I can hear Evan clearing his throat, pushing back his chair. Then his footsteps heading off to the kitchen.

So at least I ain't gonna have to play this damn guitar for a while.

We hang out waiting for him to come back, smiling at each other and fidgeting. After a while we hear his footsteps again. (Bastard's got café au lait, wouldn't you know? I can smell it.) Just as those stop, an Indian steps up to the bar. He's wearing an Eastern-cut suit and two gleaming Colts.

"Whiskey," he says, throwing down a gold piece that rings as it spins and spins and finally settles.

"Yes,
sir."

Nodding to the barkeep, he holds up his glass, dips it in a toast, and throws it back. I notice he's got hisself a
clean
glass. That's when his eyes slide over to me.

"Took you long enough getting here," he says.

Damn.

I'm the sidekick again after all.

Tom Purdom tells us he "continues to cope with the travails of old age: concerts, plays, video games, and Friday evenings at America's oldest journalism club, Philadelphia's Pen and Pencil Club, hobnobbing with literary lights like Michael Swanwick and Gardner Dozois." We are pleased that he manages to interrupt these enthralling pursuits to pen exciting stories for us. Of his newest tale he says, "I don't normally write paranormal stories, but I got the idea for this one while I was coping with chemotherapy and it looked like it might be worth a try."

The people in this city had developed a taste for formality in their after-hours garb. Most of the men were wearing black coats. The women had opted for more color but black coats had won the vote in their bloc, too. The women added the color with accents like scarves and hatbands. Nobody gave Gerdon a second glance as he slipped through the crowds hurrying between dinner and curtain time. He didn't try to keep up with fashion in the places he visited. He had learned he could fade into the crowd if he merely looked like what he was—a stranger from a foreign ship.

The target was a slender young woman, six feet in low heels, brisk walk, light coat, long face that matched her build. Gerdon picked her up, as planned, a block and a half from the concert hall, twenty minutes before show time. She lived in an apartment building five blocks from the pickup point. She subscribed to a six-concert Thursday night series. This was one of her Thursdays.

The client had given him some very precise details. He had wondered, in fact, why the client had needed him.

He had only been hanging around the corner for three or four minutes when he saw her crossing the street with the other people who had been waiting for the light. He was standing near the bus stop, looking down the street as if he was watching for the bus. He fell in behind her, a middle-aged couple between them, and rested his shoulder against a patch of wall just before he made the swap.

The disorientation always hit him harder when the target was a woman. The body felt off balance. Strange hormones played with your emotions.

He couldn't have taken this job when he first started. They wanted her bank account and credit card numbers. Most people didn't memorize information like that.

He had to search for visualizations—for the last time she had looked at a card or a statement and her brain had laid down a memory.

It took him longer than he liked. Behind him, through her ears, he could hear people stirring. The man leaning against the wall was attracting attention. The woman locked inside the man's head was reacting to the jolt of the shift—to the shock of suddenly finding herself riding in another body, staring out of someone else's eyes.

Most of them never understood what had happened. How could they? You were walking down the street or sitting in a theater and
blam, flick,
you found yourself connected to strange muscles and strange glands, inches taller or shorter, looking at the world from a different place. You might even glimpse your own body, seen from the outside.

He had never been a target himself, but he could remember all the times it had happened spontaneously when he had been young, before he had learned to control it. Most of his targets probably assumed it was an odd glitch in their brains—a hallucination created by a deficit in blood sugar or understandable fatigue from all those extra hours they were virtuously logging at work.

You couldn't search through a brain the way you searched a computer, with key words and logical connections. The links were foggier and less rational. Odors. Emotions. Childhood associations. Arline Morse had an exceptionally well organized brain, but the images he needed forked from a trail that started with the label on the wallet tucked in the suit she was wearing under her coat.

He severed contact and discovered his body had started sliding down the wall while she had been inside it. He waved off the people around him and straightened up. He ran his hand over his face. He threw out reassuring gestures.