Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (20 page)

He turned onto a street cluttered with stores and eating places. This neighborhood changed fast. You drove down a "rich people's" block with trees and big front yards and twenty seconds later you were surrounded by rundown houses and stores that looked like they sold the kind of stuff the people in the rundown houses bought.

"You're the one that told them what I was doing," Arly said.

"I gave them some information. I didn't know what you were up to. I got your account numbers. They hired me to do it. The computer geek took the numbers and verified you were cheating them."

"You're a paranormal"

Gerdon glanced down a side street and saw a cluster of overhead lights two blocks away. Cars and trucks sped along a street that looked like a big boulevard—a road out of this part of the city.

"That's it, right? You get into people's minds? You did something funny and got inside my mind."

Gerdon had worked his way through a shelf of paranormal romance novels during a month when he had holed up in a room in Liverpool—back in the days when he had still thought he could learn something about himself from books. He had mostly learned that women were attracted to daydreams that were just as absurd as the fantasies that hypnotized men.

Did women who read Jane Austen novels read that kind of thing, too?

He had never understood how his thing worked or why he could do it. Or why he seemed to be the only person who could do it. There had been a time when he had thought quantum mechanics might explain it but he had given that up when he had decided all the writers who philosophized about uncertainty and entanglement didn't know what they were talking about. The people who really understood the subject communicated with mathematics he would never master.

The Universe was clearly a mysterious place, with wonders his fellow humans had barely noticed. Someday, someone might understand his peculiar aberration. When they did, the explanation would probably be just as incomprehensible as a quantum textbook.

"That's what you do?" Arly said. "You've got those kind of powers?"

"I have a trick I can do. It's very limited. I'm not looking into your head now, if that's what you're thinking."

"You did it to me twice."

"I did it the second time because I didn't know what they wanted—what would happen to you. I had your numbers. But I didn't know why they wanted them."

He had turned on to the boulevard. He didn't know how it fit into the street layout but he knew they were heading south, toward the downtown area.

"You did all this for me? You killed Freddy for me?"

"They would have sent you back on their terms. They would have kept you there until you got caught. You'd go to jail. And it wouldn't cost them anything."

"Are you in love with me? Is that it? You did all this because you're in love with me?"

"I didn't want you to get hurt."

"I'll have to watch for them every time I go out the door."

"We don't know what they'll do. Freddy's dead. They don't know what happened. And they don't have Freddy telling them what to do."

"You're in love with me. You're one of those men with a hard shell who doesn't want to admit he's in love. And now you're a murderer. You let yourself fall in love with me. You killed Freddy just for me."

"I'm taking you home. You'll be all right. They won't bother you after this."

"You should have killed Dan. He's the one that's dangerous."

Gerdon focused his attention on the road directly in front of the hood. He had felt her fear. She had seen the carnage in Freddy's off ice. Could she really recover this fast?

Maybe he should be asking her what
she
was.

"You don't have to worry about Dan. He's the smart one. He's not going to do anything that could invite more trouble."

"You could take over that whole operation. Freddy was just a midget under all that attitude. You could turn it into something big."

"You can't keep up what you're doing, Arly. You were just a temporary source to them. They use people like you until you get caught. You go to prison and they find somebody else."

"I could keep it up forever if I had you watching out for me. We could be living on top of the tallest building in the city."

"You're safe. You should be safe. They got a real shock."

"We could have everything we wanted. We could fill the biggest closets anybody could build for us."

He had placed the bag on a patch of broken concrete, in an area that picked up some of the light from the rumbling expressway over his head. He was standing in the darkness next to a pillar, out of effective pistol range, unless Dan was more of a marksman than most petty criminals.

It was two-f ifteen in the morning. He had told Dan he should arrive on foot, at two A.M., but he wasn't surprised when a car cruised down the street that ran beside the underpass and turned under the expressway, fifteen minutes late. He had assumed a smart person would create some confusion.

Litter crunched under the car's tires. Dan threw open the door and waddled toward the bag in an exaggerated combat-manual crouch, swerving his gun from side to side.

The crouch had put Dan's body in an awkward position. It fell backward before Gerdon could get control and he found himself sitting on the ground.

He had stepped out of the dark as he made the swap. He had a clear view of his own body. The man looking out of his eyes could see everything he did.

He sat up straight. He placed the gun next to his cheek and held it there—where the bullet would smash through his face and jaw, disf iguring and crippling without killing. Then he raised it and held it against the side of his nose.

He finished by holding it against his kneecaps. First the left. Then the right. Then he tossed the gun under the car.

He had thought about a little speech.
I can disfigure you. I can maim you. It will hurt me for a few seconds. You'll live with it the rest of your life.
But it wasn't necessary. Dan would understand.

He backed into the dark as soon as he had his own body under control. Dan grabbed the money and scrambled into the car with satisfactory haste. The gun was still lying on the ground when the car veered out of the underpass.

Gerdon wandered through the darkened neighborhood that abutted the underpass, looking for a main street that might attract a taxi. He had done his best. Arly might have to move to a cheaper apartment. She would def initely have to reduce her clothing budget. But she could go to work in the morning and read her romance novels in the evening without wondering if someone was going to attack her on the street or break down her door. He had returned every dollar he owed them. The brain in their newly remodeled organization knew what would happen if they violated their side of the bargain.

The neighborhood looked pleasant. The houses all looked neat and well maintained. It was a nice city. Could he stay awhile? He did have to make a living.

Jay O'Connell grew up in suburban central New York, but now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, kids, and cats. Although this is his first appearance in
Asimov's,
his fiction was published in a half dozen professional and semiprofessional genre magazines of the nineties, including
Aboriginal Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude,
and
Pirate Writings.
Jay's stories emerge from life-long dialogs with people far smarter and more interesting than he is; polymath geniuses, visionary tricksters, activists, scientists, artists, cranks, writers, work-shoppers, and family members, most of whom Jay is pretty sure aren't aliens. But he wouldn't bet on it. You can find out more about the author's imaginary friends at
www.jayoconnell.com.

My supervisor messaged me Thursday night that a visitation request had been made in my name, and so I had Friday off. Chances were I'd be back to work on Monday. Nine hundred and ninety times out of a thousand that's what happened. That one in a thousand? Off icially, the aliens weren't responsible. Some people took advantage of the visitation to take off. Just hit the road, abandon job, wife, family.

That made sense to me.

So Friday morning I logged into work, rescheduled my appointments and started a load of laundry; socks and underwear. For a while after Amy left, I'd just kept buying more. I had bushels of dirty underwear. Maybe I could convince my alien to stay in and I could get some house cleaning done too. The place was a mess. No way I could invite anyone back here. If I ever, you know, met anyone.

A conference window pinged. It was Gharlane. I didn't answer.

"Joel, want to do something after the visitation?"

He'd forced the voice message through with the emergency access code I'd given him. Every communication from Gharlane was an emergency.

I sighed, gesturing the conference window to center screen. I was looking at a darkhaired, middle-aged man with round, wire-rimmed glasses not making eye contact with the camera. But then, Gharlane was never big on eye contact. He was maybe my oldest friend, certainly my oddest. Decidedly non-neurotypical. He subsisted on the WPA Creative Stipend, wrote absurdist fiction, and created mildly popular video-montages.

"Maybe," I said. "Look, I'm getting ready over here." I hesitated. "What was your interview like?" I dimly recalled he'd been visited but was blanking on the details.

He looked me in the eye.

"It's bullshit. Like jury duty. But less interesting. There aren't any aliens, you know, it's a plot by the Feds—"

It came back to me. I interrupted the conspiracy theory, that the withered Federal government was behind Disclosure, and said I'd talk to him later. Like so many, Gharlane despised the Feds. He hadn't spoken to me for two weeks after I'd brought up the fact that half his stipend came from them. We'd stopped talking politics after that.

Were the aliens real? I was agnostic on the subject. They certainly could be, but then, who knew. Who killed Kennedy? Some things are hard to know for sure, even when extensively documented.

Of course the joke was that by the time Disclosure occurred more than half the planet already believed in aliens. It was the educated elites who had the most trouble absorbing the news.

It had been five years, maybe thirty million interviews, and nothing much seemed to have changed. Disclosure had occurred two days after the discovery of the vent worms under the ice of Europa, which was three days after my Hyperacusis diagnosis. Somehow they were all mixed up for me.

I was too busy mourning my diagnosis, the end of my musical life, to care. I'd been a fan of space as a kid, caught up in the resurgence of interest following the discovery of the Martian microbes, but music had been my life's focus. After that, after the diagnosis, well. I'd had to grow up.

The door chimed softly.

I opened it, blinking at the moist blast of mid-summer, head-advisory air. My alien was an oddly cute youngish Caucasian woman, slender and blonde, with a pixie haircut. Aliens all looked perfectly human, of course. Hence the conspiracy theories.

She wore a clean white tank-top, faded jeans, and those barefoot shoe things with the individual toes, which I hadn't seen in a decade.

"Hi," she said. Her eyes were a friendly shade of blue. "Can I come in?"

I stood aside, still in my pajamas. My underwear was in the dryer, and I hadn't wanted to go commando with the alien. It was summer, and I had a tendency to chafe. My heart was beating too fast. I took a deep breath.

"What do I call you?" My voice sounded wavery and weird. I cleared my throat. "What do you want to call me?" The alien-girl-person-thing asked.

I sighed. It was going to be a long day.

I decided to call her Zena, which had a nice alien ring to it. She asked me questions while I folded laundry. It started out almost like a census, dull stuff, demographics. Then we talked about my childhood, my failed marriage, my subsequent love life, or lack thereof. I answered honestly. I'm not sure why.

It was a weird conversation, like talking to a therapist. Questions like, "What do you want to do with your life?"

How the hell do you answer that one?

"I want to be a pop star," I said. Joking. Not.

"Are you in a band?" Zena asked.

"Not for a few years." I saw no reason to bring up the hyperacusis, the excruciating pain that certain sounds, including my music, now caused me. My band, Tikkun Olam, was on hiatus, probably dead, barring a miracle cure. I didn't talk about that stuff with anyone.

Zena nodded, her expression neutral.

"My job takes a lot out of me," I said. "I work for LiveWork, a big NGO, a non-prof it. We feed people. Well, we teach people to feed themselves. Fund community gardens and self-suff iciency projects. Subsidize and police barter networks, work exchanges. We're trying to do what the Feds used to do, with corporate sponsorships and social media donations. The private private partnership, I call it, when nobody is listening. Which is most of the time."

"Do you enjoy your work?" Zena asked.

"Not for years." My own answer startled me. But it was true.

Zena nodded. "It's important work, though." Zena nodded again. "People won't feed themselves?"

"They can't, really," I said, irritated. "You know. Tech Shock. Half the population has nothing to do. Not that anyone wants to pay them for."

"If you don't do your job, it won't get done?"

I snorted. "Plenty of people want work. They could replace me in a heartbeat, with a kid they'd pay half my salary."

"I see," said Zena.

She blinked at me. Silence fell. I felt the beginning of a headache throbbing in my temples.

"I don't think you do," I said. I sat heavily next to the stacks of underwear and socks on the sofa. My face was hot. I was angry. Something about the questions, and my answers, had made me feel terrible. She implied things.

"People can't just do any damn thing they feel like. Grown-ups, I mean. People with kids, families..."

"Do you have children?" Zena asked. "Family? Pets? Anyone?"