Analog SFF, July-August 2009 Read online

  4. “Test Signals,” David Bartell (3.06)

  * * * *

  NOVELETTES (0.83)

  1. “The Man in the Mirror,” Geoffrey A. Landis (1.91)

  2. “The Night of the RFIDs,” Edward M. Lerner (1.63)

  3. “The Purloined Labradoodle,” Barry B. Longyear (1.56)

  4. “Moby Digital,” Joe Schembrie (1.42)

  5. “The Late Sam Boone,” Bud Sparhawk (1.35)

  * * * *

  SHORT STORIES (0.59)

  1. “Starship Down,” Tracy Canfield (2.01)

  2. “Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers,” David W. Goldman (1.60)

  3. “Let the Word Take Me,” Juliette Wade (1.25)

  4. “Forever Mommy,” David Grace 1.18)

  5. “A New Generation,” Jerry Oltion (1.11)

  * * * *

  FACT ARTICLES (2.00)

  1. “The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited,” Tom Ligon (2.68)

  2. “The 3D Trainwreck,” Thomas A. Easton (2.54)

  3 (tie). “The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe,” Carl Frederick (2.46)

  "Nuclear Autumn,” Richard A. Lovett (2.46)

  4. “Here There Be Dragons,” Richard A. Lovett (1.74)

  * * * *

  COVER (2.00)

  1. April, by Scott Grimando (3.55)

  2. July/August, by Bob Eggleton (2.25)

  3. December, by David A. Hardy (2.17)

  4. September, by David B. Mattingly (1.96)

  5 (tie). January/February, by David A. Hardy (1.88)

  March (for “The Spacetime Pool"), by George Krauter (1.88)

  * * * *

  All categories had clear winners, but competition near the top was generally tighter than it sometimes is. The most dramatic win was the cover by Scott Grimando, an artist new to us but from whom we'll hope to see more. Contrary to the popular mythology about the importance of “Big Names,” Analog readers have always been quick to welcome newcomers with conspicuous talent, and one of the best demonstrations is in this year's short story category, where the top three spots all went to authors whose first stories here (and possibly anywhere) appeared in the last year or two.

  Since Anlab votes are so important to encouraging authors and artists to do their best work, and to giving you the kind of magazine you most like to read, we hope to get even more next time. Use our online ballot, e-mail, or “snail mail,” whichever you prefer, but please vote! (Please be careful to vote in the right category, as listed in the annual Index. Sometimes a few votes are wasted by being cast in the wrong category, and those simply can't be counted.)

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novella: SEED OF REVOLUTION by Daniel Hatch

  * * * *

  Illustrated by John Allemand

  * * * *

  Epochal changes are usually scary and seldom go according to plan—especially when they involve a whole new kind of thinking.

  * * * *

  Professor Glenn: Your assertion that the chamalian race is driven to destruction by forces it cannot control and the xenophobic texts you cite-link in its defense smack of nothing more than rank Social Darwinism. You claim that biology is destiny and that history is written in our genes. Those ideas are the reified prejudices of the closeted academic—the mindless worship of idols, idols made of outdated rationalizations.

  The truth is that chamalians are self-conscious actors—as are human beings—and they will be the authors of their own history. They will do what all self-conscious beings do—struggle with the circumstances in which they find themselves, with what knowledge they have available, in order to chart their own course, wherever it may lie. They will make their own destinies.

  As will we all. (With the exception of some deterministic elitist academics who need to extract one of their extremities from another.)

  The text continued with a series of cite-links to relevant texts, a list that included Spinoza, Mill, Fromm, and Lukacs. It ended with the standard signature: David Wu, History Department, War College of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, Chamal.

  Pog reached out a long finger covered with fine white fur and ending in a rounded yellow nail and pressed the pad that sent the message on its way.

  Oh, if Dr. Wu knew what he was up to, he would be in big trouble. Double-big trouble, for certain fact.

  * * * *

  But Dr. Wu did not know.

  At the moment, Dr. Wu was sprawled across the divan in the bungalow's front room. His body had assumed an almost spherical shape, matched by his head, which was smooth and hairless except for a long, drooping mustache and a patch of dark hair at the crown. His snoring had stopped, but earlier in the evening it had rattled the timbers above. Dr. Wu never had gotten used to Chamal's eighteen-hour day and tended to come loose from its diurnal tyranny.

  In addition, he was prone to experimenting with the various alkaloid concoctions that chamalians found stimulating, intoxicating, or hallucinogenic—experiments that often left him in this posture. Often for many hours.

  Nevertheless, Pog quickly cleared the screen of Dr. Wu's mindpad and returned to his regular duties. He rushed around the room, gathering up the doctor's scattered clothes, which he threw into the hamper. He collected the pots and cups and glasses that had accumulated beside the divan and across the nearby table, holding some of them at arm's length as he dumped their contents down the drain in the kitchen.

  Dr. Wu was not on the faculty of the War College, but worked for the University, a much newer institution created by the angels and chamalians who worked with them.

  From time to time, Dr. Wu would refer to Pog as his “native house boy,” but they both knew that their relationship was something entirely different. Dr. Wu was an angel, not of this world. He had come from the stars to study Chamal and report to the other angels on their world. His studies were much too important for him to waste time trying to manage the details of ordinary life on an alien world—especially one as alien as Chamal. Pog's mother before him, and now Pog himself, had the unique honor of managing Dr. Wu's household and acting as go-between with the world outside its gates.

  It was not employment. This was no wage work. Pog and his mother were agents of the War College and honored for their service.

  Though there were times when Pog would rather forgo the honor.

  Dr. Wu was not an easy creature to live with—and Pog had lived his entire life in this household, so he should know—for certain fact. He could be stubborn, demanding, unreasonable, unyielding, and inflexible. He was no angel.

  But he was quick to transform himself into exactly the opposite. He could be solicitous, gracious, nimble in thought and deed, and generous. He was a man.

  Few on Chamal knew what that meant. But Pog had learned.

  Dr. Wu lived a rich life of the mind—always questioning, always searching, always investigating. His questions probed deep into all that Pog knew about his own world and how he knew it and why he thought it was so and what if it wasn't. And he was always talking, lecturing, deliberating, pontificating—even if no one was listening.

  Though most often someone was listening. Pog listened. And he learned. Learned well. Learned much. Perhaps too much.

  Certainly too much for the few duties that kept him busy around the house.

  He hurried out to the kitchen and found the broom, then began sweeping the dust and dried leaves out the door. He cleaned up the counters and wiped down the food processor—a special piece of angeltech with ceramic containers that produced the odd substances and liquids that Dr. Wu cooked up on smooth stone surfaces that turned hot on command. He washed out the cookware, keeping the more toxic-smelling compounds at arm's length and dousing them with a blast of steaming hot water from the hose in the sink.

  In the office, he gathered up a scattering of chamalian books and reports and letters, sorted them roughly, and piled them on the desk. He looked wistfully at the mindpad, but resisted the impulse to check for a reply from Professor Glenn. It was much too soon.
/>   He wanted to provoke a response. The Earthman was arrogant and narrow minded, but he argued well. It was far too easy in a textwar to draw intractable lines of dispute that ended all discussion. Glenn kept the conversation going despite his opposition, always responding to actual comments instead of imagined “straw men.” (Pog always laughed at that term, for which there was no precise equivalent in his own language.)

  But lately, this thread had prompted purely emotional outbursts from the man. Outbursts that revealed much about the weaknesses of his argument. Another poster in the discussion had been goading him on, deliberately antagonizing him.

  Pog wanted to see if he could do the same—but by pointing to texts that attacked the weakness of Glenn's worldview, undermining the very context from which he argued.

  He knew he shouldn't expect a reply until tomorrow, given the time it took to relay messages through the wormhole link to Earth, but he couldn't help the anticipation.

  He did, however, take the time to return to the mindpad and quickly compose a love note to his sweetheart, Mally.

  This night, as she had for many nights, Mally made her bed in a tent at an archaeological dig hundreds of leagues to the west of the Meshkar Sea—down in the lowlands, where the rainforest met the grasslands that led north to the world-girdling desert. It was there that the University was digging through the fossil record of chamalian evolution, seeking the source of all wisdom. She was part of a team led by Deldred, the chamalian field director, excavating the fossil remains of earlier chamalians.

  They had found promising evidence of the earliest children of wisdom—hands that grasped and mouths that spoke. They were hoping to find skulls that had once contained minds that thought and reasoned and desired and sang.

  Mally had grown up in the villa next to Dr. Wu's. She and Pog had grown up on opposite sides of a stone wall, speaking to each other through a crack at the far end of the yard, meeting only after years of separation, soul mates bound in a way that few chamalians could know.

  The love note was long on poetry, lifted nearly intact from Shakespeare ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") and Browning ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"), and written in English, which he had taught her, to keep it from the prying eyes of Deldred. And to be certain that she would know it was from him, he signed it with his secret nickname—Pogo.

  He pushed the SEND button and the message went off on its way, coursing through the world-straddling information network built by the wizards in the high vastness of Kwikorak in the years since the angels had arrived.

  He returned to his chores. He swept the floor in the office and moved on to the bedroom, where he piled Dr. Wu's dirty clothes onto the bed and wrapped them in the bedsheets. He carried the bundle through the kitchen and out the back door, crossing the dark courtyard to the laundry. A cool night wind blew through the trees in the corner of the yard and set the cardboard paddles on the luck-spinner flapping. The tall cylinder of colored panels squeaked on its axle as it turned, generating good fortune for all who believed in it. Few chamalians actually did believe in it, but they were all willing to pretend they did in front of their neighbors.

  He dumped the clothes into a basket and was crossing the yard, his neck craned up to appreciate the handful of sharply twinkling stars overhead, when the world exploded with noise and fire.

  * * * *

  First came a barrage, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! from the street in front of Dr. Wu's villa.

  That was followed by the whoosh-smack of a dart-cannon's payload, cutting through the air and anything else in its path, ending against a solid wall or on the ground.

  Then an assortment of ordinance flew into the house with a CRACK-CRACK-CRACK or flashed into eye-popping bright blue light.

  He realized suddenly that if he'd been inside, he would have been dazzled by the lights and disoriented by the sounds and would never have been prepared for the assault that followed.

  As it was, he had the presence of mind to start climbing the nearest tree, scrambling to find a purchase at first, then almost flying up the branches—as at that very same moment the team of assailants burst through the doors and windows of Dr. Wu's home.

  A volley of loud shots—Pog recognized them as handguns—rang out, echoing off the neighboring houses and the cliffs that rose from the far side of the street. Pog's heart sank. Dr. Wu was still inside.

  The squad spilled out into the courtyard below Pog's feet. There were five of them—mist-apes, with big pistols in their big hands.

  From his perch, he could look over the top of the house, and what he saw made his hearts squeeze in fear.

  A black steamwagon.

  He realized with a halt that he'd heard its hissing and clanking engine in the moments before the attack. If he'd known what he was listening to, he would have flown into action. He didn't know what action, but it would have been something.

  No one stood still when a black steamwagon full of assassins came your way. He could scarcely believe it himself. They were the stuff of fable and fiction—some of it his own. But they were real, and every time they struck, the stories raced from one end of the city to the other before lunchtime.

  The mist-apes spilled across the yard, into the laundry and out again, just in time to meet their leader—a short fox with high pointy ears and long snout full of sharp teeth.

  "He's not here,” one of the mist-apes said.

  "He was here,” said another. “I can smell him. He's not long gone."

  "That's bad,” said the leader. “We don't get paid if he's not here."

  "Should we wait?” asked a mist-ape.

  "For what?” the leader asked. “The Public Vendetta?"

  He turned and walked back into the house. The mist-apes looked at one another, then abruptly lurched into action, filing out behind him. Pog heard the steamwagon puff itself up, then whistle away down the street. From his vantage point, he watched it rumble and spit as it rolled down the road to where it curved away out of sight.

  Then he waited another ten minutes to be sure they were really gone before climbing down the tree and venturing into the house.

  There were splinters and shredded upholstery everywhere, all over the floors and walls and across the furniture. Pog treaded carefully across the room to the divan, dreading what he knew must await him.

  In the yellow light of the angel-tech lamps, Pog could clearly see the bullet hole in Dr. Wu's chest. A drop of blood had trickled down across his pale skin, leaving a narrow trail.

  His eyes were already closed, his body already in repose, his soul already fled. There was nothing more Pog could do to serve the only master he had ever known.

  But there was much that he had to do and do quickly.

  He rushed over to the mindpad, swept it up, and stuffed it into a rucksack he pulled from his own closet. He tossed in the few personal items he would need for the next few days. In the kitchen, he gathered some fruit and frogpies, wrapped them in marketpaper, and stuffed them in with the mindpad.

  Then he returned to the courtyard and began climbing a tree. This one was closer to the wall, and midway up its branches grew entangled in those of a mate on the other side of the street. On the far side, the tree gave access to the cliff face itself.

  Pog climbed the rocky wall, stepping from one rough block of basalt to another, higher and higher, until he reached a street above Dr. Wu's. He peered up and down the roadway, then hoisted himself up onto the pavement.

  Then he began walking. Quickly. There was so much to do now, and so little time.

  * * * *

  Jonas Winston, visiting professor of genetics at the university of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, was sleeping when the message came in. His AI evaluated it and sounded the gentle chime that woke him.

  "Dr. Wu is dead,” the AI said. “Violence was involved. They need your help."

  Winston rubbed his eyes until he could open them enough to see and exercised his ankles until they were limber enough to walk on. He went first to the la
vatory, squinting into the bright light that helped rouse him from lingering slumber, ignoring the old man's face that peered back at him from the mirror. It wasn't really his face. Not the one he'd been used to for a great many years. He had a hard time thinking of himself as any older, and wearing that disguise of age felt odd and unsettling.

  He ordered a cup of coffee from the autochef, and when it was ready he made the call.

  "What happened?” he asked when the duty officer on the Cousteau, Lieutenant Janet Cloud, responded.

  Lieutenant Cloud was young and pretty but kept her hair pulled back tightly and kept her face stern and military. She reminded him of his granddaughter, who was about the same age. And like his granddaughter, she made him feel his years, something he vowed not to hold against her favor. “No one knows,” she said. “His AI called it in. But there's something wrong with the unit, so it couldn't give a report."

  "Who knows about it?"

  "Just us, right now,” she said. “There's been no activity to suggest that the chamalians are aware of it."

  "We should let them know,” Winston said.

  "That's why we called you. The survey team would like you to handle it, since you're already in the city."

  Winston felt his shoulders slump with the sudden weight of responsibility. He was senior scientist in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh and he would be the natural one to take on this duty.

  "We need to know right away what happened,” she said.

  "Do you think the chamalians did it?"

  "Did you do it?"

  "No!” Winston said, his mouth hanging open in surprise. “Of course not."

  "Then most of the remaining suspects are chamalians, aren't they?"

  "I suppose so."

  "So that means we have to tread very carefully,” Lieutenant Cloud said.

  "None are so aware of that as those of us who live down here on the ground,” Winston said.

  His back began to itch as his imagination rose to the occasion, offering up images of catastrophe. No, the crew up on the survey ship had no appreciation of just what kind of place Chamal was.

  A race of creatures who could all interbreed. As a geneticist, Winston was enthralled by the whimsical way in which the chamalian genetic code proved its versatility and universality. Every warm-blooded furry creature on the planet shared the gene pool—from the mice in the woodwork to the great beasts in the forest.