Asimov's SF, February 2010 (6 page)

it's only plants and animals, too dumb

to know to kill themselves.

—Peter Swanson

Copyright © 2010 Peter Swanson

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Damien Broderick's latest critical book is
Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature,
from Borgo Press. His next one,
Chained to the Alien,
will be an anthology of essays from
Australian Science Fiction Review
(Second Series). Other recent publications include two collaborative SF novels:
The Book of Revelation,
written with Rory Barnes, and
Post Mortal Syndrome,
written with his wife Barbara Lamar. The author's recent tales for
Asimov's
have taken some inspiration from classic SF writers like A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny. Damien now appears in our pages with a decidedly Dickian meditation on...

Jive Bolen exited his cramped office inside the two hundred story zeugma complex in the heart of nouveau Manhattan. Summer's noon sun was a blurry disk high overhead, easily visible even through the crowding skyscrapers. The size of a ten dollar coin at arm's length. Or so he'd read in the pape during morning coffee break, hoping to ferret out some lively snippet to throw into his next abortive conversation with Jolene, the building's peripatetic Vogelsangerin, with whom he had been desperately smitten for at least the last four thwarted months. Jive fished a coin from his pouch pocket and held it up. Not quite; the frayed edges of the immense nanotech-spun soletta, stationed out at Earth-Sun L1, extended like a reddish ghost corona beyond the rim of the plastic currency unit. The literal meaning of his ghost analogy stung Jive somewhere in his cerebellum a moment too late to repress it. Shuddering, he folded the coin back into his pouch.

Something rushed directly above him. The sort of uncanny buffeting rush of air, it seemed to him in a vivid recollection from childhood, that a falling ten-ton safe creates in a toon as it tumbles from a high window to flatten a furious two-dimensional and villainous puddycat. In disbelief, Jive glanced up past the rim of his Brooks Brothers tropical pith helmet. By the living lord Harry, it
was
a safe plunging toward him, or a plausible simulation. No, light winked from the front of the thing. Leaping back, terrified, Jive tripped on the curb, fell full length. With a splintering detonation, the thing flew apart into shards of broken glass, trailing wires, microcircuitry from the previous century, plywood, and tasteless veneer. Another damned TV set, hurled from an upper window by a cit driven to despair.

Jive scrambled to his feet, retreated, lifted his eyes again. A moment later something long and large with flapping limbs flailed down to slam atop the fractured television receiver. The soggy crump of flesh striking concrete, the spatter of blood, twisted Jive Bolen's mouth in disgust. He felt a sort of remote sympathy. Another day, another ‘ratische Augen, as the Kraut socialists dubbed them. Square eyes. Mort victims of the visible dead, supposedly. Kind of ironic.

A siren was already sounding as a mortuary truckee, alerted by gossipgrrl watch, raced to claim the corpse. Jive shrugged, settled his hat about his ears. Mortuarian was a job, distasteful or not. It was a living—and there was another soupcon of irony. A more socially useful job, he reproved himself, than his own dead-end post with Industrie Globalisierung, AG. Day after oppressive day, representing the shareholders on the board of management oversight, his nominal post with the Aktiengesellschaft, seemed ever more meaningless. A political contrivance. Even if it paid the bills for himself and Aunt Tilly, god bless her, and his damned wife and the kids off on the far side of the continent in Orange County. Camouflage is what it is, though, he thought, for the great owners whose blocks of stock overwhelmed the protest votes of all the small stakeholders. In effect, he was a mere stalking horse for corporate greed.

Stepping around the corner, with some difficulty putting the corpse from his mind, he bought a liverwurst brat snacker from a sidewalk multimat. Jive consoled himself with the reflection that without such immense and unthinkable concentrations of wealth and power, the sun-blocker could never have been emplaced in orbit between Earth and Sun, mitigating the greenhouse threat that would have wiped 92 percent of all surface life from the globe within a mere thousand years. According to petacomp spreadsheet calculations, at any rate. Even though they had been known, historically, to be wrong.

He hurried along Eighth Avenue, munching his sliver, and had disposed of the degradable wrapping before he recalled that he was meant to be meeting Delphine for luncheon at the Quick Brown Pig, given five full stars by Eric in the
Times
Eats Guide. These days, since the divorce, his wife worked for the Consumer Advocacy and spent a day each month at the New York offices of Rand Nader. Probably she gets to eat free at the Pig, he thought morosely, but Del will insist on my paying for us both anyway, as if I'm not already squandering danegelt on alimony and school fees. His homeowatch peeped from his wrist, reminding him belatedly and uselessly of the lunch date. Fool of a thing, its programming bollixed by the same virus that had munged all the music records in the world except for those CDs carefully wrapped and hoarded by a few thrifty collectors like himself. Could that, he thought, abruptly wildly excited, be the doorway to Jolene's singing heart? Did he dare risk humiliation, and the possible emetic degradation of his slender CD hoard?

A lovely young Chinese woman in clinging neck to heel sharkskin cheongsam bowed as he entered the dim luncheon palace. He checked his pith helmet, took a slip. With a hush of tiny slippered steps, she led him directly to an alcove where Delphine sat forward pertly, sipping an alcohol-free Manhattan and reading her own homeowatch. It projected a display directly onto her retinas, which danced like running lights in the lowered illumination of the booth. Jive slid in on the other side of the classic sparkly Formica eating bench, hearing the genuine red leather creak under his buttocks.

"Sorry I'm late."

"Oh, hi. That's all right, Jive. I had some research to catch up on before the plenary this afternoon.” Del switched off her data feed and looked at him, perfectly relaxed. She wore a pillbox hat spun from Martian crabgrass, which flourished only under the light of the twin hurtling moons of the red planet. He had given her that hat as a Kwanzaa gift two years ago, as their marriage took its final dive into the dumpster. Was this her notion of conciliation, or a final turn of the knife in his spine? “And how's dear Auntie Tilly?"

"Matilda's about as well as can be expected,” he said. “Morbid, actually. She's got her nose stuck in that damned old TV set my Poppa gave her for her twenty-first birthday, the one he found on the curb and fixed up with valves he scrounged heaven knows where."

"They're the best for picking up the thays, those old ones, I hear,” Delphine said absently. “I have to say, the children are still obsessed by it as well, although I notice you don't ask after them. I have to—"

"The children!” Jive said, voice roughening. “What the hell's wrong with those kids? They won't answer emails, their IM messages are totally incomprehensible, they
refuse
to pick up when I phone them."

"For heaven's sake, don't exaggerate. At their age—"

"Ex
agg
erate! Watch and learn!” He keyed the virtual board of his homeowatch, fastclicking his children's phones. The holographic privacy display showed an instant red, with the words: NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE, OR TRY AGAIN LATER. He turned his wrist so his former wife could witness his humiliation.

"Jevon, you're losing your bearings. It's three hours earlier on the left coast. The kids are both at morning class. You know full well they're not allowed to use the access during scholastic hours."

Deflated, Jive shook his head and reached for the menu. He wasn't hungry; the brat sat in his guts like lead. I will be conciliatory, he decided. Isn't that alleged to be one of my prime work-related skills? Isn't conciliation the doctrine of Sister Grace of Magdalene, pastor of his house of worship, the Wee Baptist Kirk i’ the Glen (Scottish Rite)? To the lovely waitron, he said, “Get me a real Manhattan. And whatever my wife ... the lady is drinking, get her another. What would you like to eat, Delphine?"

"I ordered en route. You really should eat something if you're going to drink—"

"Why do you let them watch that crap?” he asked vituperatively. “They should have their heads down to their books."

"Jive, Angelina is eight and Barack is only five, let them enjoy a bit of childhood before you start cramming—"

He slammed his fist on the table, making the cut-glass soy dispenser jump. “Watching alleged dead people is enjoying childhood? Christ, you're an intelligent, educated woman, Delphine, you must know it's just a barrage of vicious propaganda beamed down on the cit sats from those goddamned
Chinese
—"

Showing her perfect white teeth, Delphine hissed, “Lower your damned voice, you oaf. In case you hadn't noticed—"

Faces had turned their way, hiding shock behind bland contempt. The waitron stood with their drinks.

"I didn't mean ... Oh, please, just put them down.” He gestured to the great acrylic patriotic flag above them, pinned to the four corners of the room, fifty white stars on deep skyblue, three more blue stars clinging at the inner edge of the top white stripes: New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan. “I know
these
Chinese are our loyal allies, our fellow
citizens,
but it's obvious to anyone with his damned ear to the ground that these ... these fake
dead
people are a plot to undermine the confidence of our nation. I'm
insulted
, Delphine. It's
our
people they are targeting especially, you know that, the Chinese think we're still a damned superstitious bunch of primitive jungle—"

"Shut
up,
you fool.” His wife was on her feet, seething yet containing her fury. Holding her handbag against her breast, she said, “You can get the check. I should have known better. And give the kids a call at a time when it suits them, not you."

His head had started throbbing. He threw back the Manhattan, coughed. To the impassive waitron, he said, “Get me another. And a soluble ginseng antacid."

His head echoed like a jug kicked by a steel-tipped boot. Ensconced again in the refitted storage room that was his office, Jive Bolen groaned. He was drinking too much. Two Manhattans on a stomach with nothing in it but a brat sliver, it was self-destructive. His tongue rolled again and again against his lips, trying to dispel the over-sweet taste of cherry and burned orange peel. He noticed what he was doing, and recoiled in disgust. This was the tic that had disfigured poor Gran Bolen as she subsided inch by inch toward the grave. Tardive dyskinesia, the medically induced disorder of the nervous system inflicted by early-generation antipsychotic drugs, those barbarously crude neuroleptics such as metoclopramide. Induced supersensitivity to dopamine in the nigrostrial pathway, damaging the D2 dopamine receptor. Or so he'd been told by the apologetic physician who finally had changed the old lady's regimen, but too late, far too late. She had thought to see the dead, Jive recalled, with a shudder. Her erratic thought disorders, that late turn to Buddhism, to the belief in the Bardo Thodol and afterlife demons. As if the word of the Lord Savior were not enough.

He fumbled off a cap of cuffee, heard the hiss as it self-heated, drank it down with a trembling hand. What's wrong with me? he wondered. It's this damned cramped work space, he thought, staring peevishly at the wall to his right, the racks of classic Barbie dolls still in their virginal packaging.

Without knocking, his Uzbek secretary, Hammerlock Ganji, poked his head around the door jamb. “Christ, you look terrible, Chief. You're drinking too much."

"Shut up,” Jive said. He took another swig, but the cap was empty. The foul taste of the synthetic lingered on his lips, and he felt his tongue once again begin its bovine rotation. “It's these quarters, Ganj. Undignified for a man of my station."

Neither said anything further; it was simply a fact of life that in these straitened times the great multinational corps had to impose the most severe restrictions on their senior factors, and to be seen to do so. Ganji entered the office, squeezed past Jive's desk, stood examining, as he often did, with a perfervid fascination, the fantastically expensive collectible Barbara Millicent Roberts manikins in their plastic and cardboard cages. There was not a single Ken mounted on the wall.

"You need cheering up,” Hammerlock said at length. His eyes traveling back again to the dolls in their pristine boxes. If one of them ever went missing, which was unlikely given the covert security features in situ, Jive would know where to turn.

"I hear Jolene is in the building. I'll have her drop by. A professional call,” he said hastily. “It's part of the building code, as you know, Chief."

"If you wish,” Jive said, foraging ostentatiously in a pile of hard-copy documents. “Go away now, I'm busy."

It could only have been ten minutes later when he heard her cheerful birdsong soprano carol his name at the open door.

"I told my secretary I'm too busy for therapeutic melody today,” he said gruffly.

"Never too hectic for a heart-filling tune, I hope,” she said, and perched herself on the edge of his desk. “What's it to be? Cole Porter? Wit
and
a jaunty air. Something from the Beatles collection? I love ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ although people have gone off it, and I suppose we mustn't blame them."

"'Come again,'” said Jive, decisively. Jolene had the power and sweetness of a young Linda Ronstadt—it was possible that she could meet the demands of Dowland. If she knew his work.

"Come again?” she said, grinning.

"It needs a lutenist to accompany the lyrics,” Jive told her. “John Dowland? Turn of the seventeenth century?"