Asimov's SF, September 2009 Read online

  But, as I've said, working out the physical and biochemical characteristics of your invented world is just the starting point. Those characteristics will provide you with the setting for your story, but not the story itself, though in large measure they will govern the essential nature of that story. (The concerns of the thirsty desert-dwellers of Frank Herbert's parched Arrakis in Dune are quite different, for example, from those of the inhabitants of the completely aquatic Hydros in my own The Face of the Waters). Once you've determined your world's gravity, climate, geography, geology, natural history, etc., you need to work out the details of its culture, which will involve you in such matters as economics, politics, religion, and urban planning. Ideally all of this will grow out of the special physical characteristics of your invented world.

  I'll talk next time about how I went about this phase of the process in creating my own best-known imaginary world, the planet Majipoor of Lord Valentine's Castle and its various companion volumes.

  Copyright © 2009 Robert Silverberg

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  * * *

  Short Stories: AWAY FROM HERE

  by Lisa Goldstein

  Lisa Goldstein's novelette, “Dark Rooms” (Asimov's, October/November 2007) was a recent finalist for the 2008 Nebula awards. She returns to our pages with an enigmatic tale about a young woman who must face the unknown to discover if she has what it takes to get...

  I'm cleaning one of the vacant rooms when the bell over the front door rings. “Liz!” my mother yells from somewhere down the corridor. “Liz, could you get that?”

  I'm almost done here, though, and I don't want to stop. I fluff up the pillows on the bed and go out to the corridor to get the vacuum cleaner, and I'm pushing it into the room when I see my mother heading toward me.

  “Didn't I ask you to get the bell?” she says. “What's the matter with you? You know we can't afford to keep the guests waiting.”

  “I thought I'd finish—” I say.

  “Right, and have them go to some other hotel. Remember those people who left because you weren't quick enough?”

  “Oh, come on, that was a year ago,” I say, but my mother doesn't stay to hear the rest of it. I head down the hall to the reception room, wondering if she's ever going to forget that one mistake.

  Once I see the people waiting, though, everything she's said goes right out of my mind. They're like nothing I've ever seen at our hotel, and for a moment all I can do is goggle at them. The man in front is dressed in a top hat and a long shiny black jacket, and the woman next to him has on what looks like a costume from a marching band, with braids and epaulets and bars stretching across her coat; she looks sort of like she's wearing a xylophone. Another woman is dressed in a frilly pink dress and what I think is a feather boa around her neck, though I've never seen one in real life. They don't look silly, though—it's more like they're bringing some other part of the world inside with them, some larger part.

  I go behind the counter. The group of people all head up toward me at once. There are only five of them, I realize—the three I mentioned and two men standing at the back, both dressed in identical gray three-piece suits, one very fat and the other very thin.

  “Terrible weather we're having, isn't it?” I say. In fact I haven't been outside all day, but one of the guests told me it was about ninety degrees out there, and my father's big on making small talk.

  “Better than nothing,” the man in front says.

  I open my mouth to ask the usual questions—what kind of room do you want, how long will you be staying—but I finally register what he's said. What the hell does that mean? I decide to ignore it and continue on.

  “How many rooms would you like?” I ask.

  Something moves in the man's jacket pocket, and I step back, startled. A mouse peeks out, its pink nose sniffing the air. “There's no—we don't allow pets in here,” I say.

  The mouse wiggles back down into the pocket. “What do you mean?” the man says.

  “The mouse. In your pocket.”

  He pats his pocket. It's flat, nothing there. I have to laugh—I can't help it. My brother Bert used to practice magic tricks, though he was nowhere as good as this guy.

  The mouse pokes its head out again. “Elmer!” the man says, looking chagrinned. “I thought I told you to stay inside!”

  “It's stuffy in there, boss.” The mouse moves his top lip, showing his teeth—it really does look like he's talking.

  I laugh again. “Are you playing somewhere around here?”

  “Playing?” the man says. “We're playing right here.”

  “What?” I say, astonished.

  He grins at me. “Playing around. Playing with words. Playing a game.”

  “No, I mean—” I try again. “Are you doing some kind of show?”

  “Ah. No, just passing through. Passing through.” I'm disappointed; I realize I'd been looking forward to seeing them perform. “Two rooms, if you please. The very largest this establishment has.”

  “And your smallest bed,” the mouse says.

  “You can't—” I say. I stop and think of my brother again. Before he left he disobeyed my parents more and more, so often I think they might have been happy to see him go. One of the last things he did was to give a room to a woman with a tiny yapping dog, who ended up biting my father in the leg when he went to clean the room. The dog, I mean, not the woman.

  Usually I manage not to think of my brother at all, and now I've remembered him twice in the space of a few minutes. He went off to college a year ago, after a ginormous argument with my parents, who wanted him to keep working here. I expected him to write, to tell me what he was doing, but he never did.

  I look on the computer and find two double rooms a couple doors down from me. “Okay,” I say.

  “Fantastic,” the man says.

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Oh, let's say ... one night.”

  “Just a night?” I say, surprising myself. I hadn't meant to say that.

  “For now. We'll see how it goes.”

  “Okay, then—I need you to fill out this form, please. And can I have a credit card?”

  “Don't believe in them. How much are the rooms?”

  I tell him. He fishes out a handful of money from another pocket and fills out the form. I give him the keys and the group starts for the door. As the woman in the pink dress turns I see her boa move, sidling along her neck like a snake. I look again and it's standing still, and obviously made of feathers; it couldn't possibly have done what I thought it did.

  After they leave I stop and look around the reception room for a minute. It's so shabby and familiar that usually I barely notice it, but now it's as if I'm seeing it through their eyes. The rug's worn through in a trail that leads to the desk, and some of the bulbs in the overhead lamp are out. The walls are paneled in this bogus wood, some kind of weird material that doesn't even try to pretend it comes from trees. It actually has this brown fuzz on it, some of which is always flaking off and getting all over the furniture.

  I glance down and see I'm still holding all the cash they gave me. I open the safe and put it inside. Then I realize I don't even know the man's name, and I look at the card he filled out.

  “Ebenezer Monologue,” it says. Yeah, right. And he didn't put down his home address, which annoys me. There's some law that says we need this information, and my mom gets mad when it's not filled in—not at the guest, of course, but at me. For a wild moment I think about filling it in myself, making something up that would go with the name, but with my luck one of my parents would get to talking with them and find out that all the information was wrong.

  I go back to the room I was cleaning. I can't stop thinking about them, though, and I keep smiling to myself. Who are they? Where are they from? What are they doing here, in this town where nothing ever happens?

  * * * *

  I wake up feeling excited the next day. I lie in bed for a while, wondering why, an
d then I remember the people who checked in yesterday. There's a weird tune running through my head, and I think I've dreamt about them, performing in time to the music.

  I dress and go to the small kitchen behind the reception room where we have all our meals. My parents are already there, having breakfast, and my dad's ready with a list of the rooms I have to clean, where the people have checked out early.

  We break for the day, but instead of going to the first room on my list I hang around reception and polish the front desk instead. I'm rewarded when the woman in the pink dress and feather boa comes into the room. Sweeps into the room is more like it—she seems to leave a pink blur in the air behind her.

  I'm watching her boa so closely I miss what she says and have to ask her to repeat it. “We've decided to stay a few more nights,” she says.

  “Great,” I say.

  She opens the clasp on this purse made out of tiny silver links, like chain mail. I unlock the safe—and I can't find the money from last night.

  I look up. The woman's gone, disappeared. “Hey!” I yell. “Hey, come back!”

  I run out of the room. I don't see the woman anywhere, just my mother coming down the hall, carrying a package of light bulbs. “What is it, Liz?”

  I don't know how to explain what's happened, so I take her back into the reception room. Once I'm there I realize I left the safe open, something I've never done before. Worse than that, my mother's noticed, and this is the kind of mistake she never lets me forget.

  “The money,” I say. “The money they gave me last night. It's not here.”

  My mother looks inside the safe. “Who?” she asks.

  I hand her the card the man—Ebenezer—filled out. Too late, I remember he never wrote down his address. Another mistake.

  To my surprise, though, she smiles. “So they're back,” she says.

  “Who? Who's back? Who are those people?”

  “Oh, they stay here sometimes,” my mom says, still smiling.

  It's so unusual to see her even this happy—over the years she's developed this sort of tight-lipped expression, worried about everything—that I almost don't want to ask any more questions. I'm too curious to stop now, though. “That isn't his real name, is it?”

  “Oh, I don't know.”

  “Come on. Who are they? When were they here before? I don't remember them. What do they do? Are they actors, or what?”

  “They came about ten years ago, when you were five or six. And they were here another time, too, a few years before you were born. They showed you some magic tricks, don't you remember?”

  I shake my head. But I'm starting to remember something, a man with a cigarette puffing smoke out of his ears, a woman throwing a napkin that turned into a bird and flew around the room. “So they're magicians? Where do they perform?”

  “Magicians. That's right.” She looks away from me, back to the safe. “They paid cash again, didn't they?”

  “Yeah. And I put it in the safe, and now it's gone.”

  “Well,” my mom says. She's serious now, like when she talked to me about sex. “They don't—we don't actually charge them to stay here.”

  “We don't? Why not?”

  “It's a—a tradition.”

  “Then why the hell did they give me money? And where the hell did it go?”

  “Language, Liz.”

  She swears more than I do, but she thinks if I get into the habit I'll start doing it around the guests. I'm so frustrated now I don't care. She seems to understand that, because she says, “It's a game to them, I think. They like to have fun, to play around.”

  “But why don't we charge them?” I know the hotel isn't doing well, that every year we earn less and less. That's why I have to work so hard, and why my parents got so angry when Bert left; we can't afford to hire anyone else.

  “Because—well, they're just a lot of fun to have around.”

  This is so unlike my mother that I just stare at her. I can't remember the last time she had fun doing anything. And she never lets people get away with not paying—she even charged a friend of hers from high school when she stayed here.

  She looks down at the package of light bulbs, still in her hand. “We need to change some bulbs in here, I think. Could you go find your father?”

  This is her way of telling me not to ask any more questions. I head out, swearing under my breath, but this time, luckily, she doesn't hear me.

  * * * *

  Megan calls the next day and asks me if I want to take a bus with her into the nearest town and go shopping. “No, I have to work today,” I say.

  “It's Saturday, Liz,” she says.

  I actually hadn't realized that—over the summer pretty much every day seems the same here. “Yeah, well, the weekend is our busiest time.”

  She sighs; I hear it come gusting through the phone lines. “What are your parents, slavedrivers? You're fifteen years old—I think there are laws about this. Don't you get any time off ?”

  Suddenly I'm angry. Who the hell does she think she is, criticizing my family? “Yeah, in the middle of the week,” I say, trying to stay polite. “I'll call you then—how about that?”

  She sighs again. “Okay,” she says, and hangs up.

  I wonder if I'm really going to call her. I never managed to keep in touch with friends from school last summer—they asked me to come over to their houses or out for dinner, but after I turned them down a few times they stopped. I could have called them on my days off, but I was usually tired and it seemed like too much trouble. Mostly I just stayed at the hotel and helped my father with some project or other.

  And it's not like there's a lot of places to go around here. We're barely a town, just a collection of restaurants and gas stations off the freeway about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The land is hot, baked flat, surrounded by miles of farms and orchards in every direction.

  I start on my cleaning. Maybe my parents do work me too hard, I think, but they can't help it. And it's even harder during the school year—with all my chores I barely have enough time to finish my homework or study for tests. Still, it's none of Megan's business.

  I make an effort to think about something else. Ebenezer and the others: the graceful way they move, the way they seem to know things no one else does. The mouse, sticking out of Ebenezer's pocket. I laugh to myself and take my mop into a dirty bathroom.

  * * * *

  I wake up that night from a complicated dream, something about a crowd of people going somewhere to watch a show. There was music in the dream, a weird compelling run of notes, and I realize that I'm still hearing it, that it's coming from a few rooms away. I put on my slippers and go down the hallway.

  Ebenezer's door is open, and I look inside. There's a woman on a unicycle in the middle of the room, holding out a horizontal pole for balance. It's the woman in the pink dress, and I'm so caught up in watching her that for a moment I don't even notice all the furniture's gone, that it's just her, cycling backwards and forwards in a circle of spotlight.

  The music, mostly trumpets, is louder, and I have a sense that the others are here too, watching from beyond the spotlight. The woman looks up. I follow her gaze—and the ceiling's gone, there's nothing there but the moon and the stars. The woman upends her pole and raises it up, higher and higher, until she hooks the moon. She draws the pole down, hand over hand, the moon still hooked on the end, the pole somehow collapsing as she brings it down. The music is full of trumpets and drums.

  Then, suddenly, she wobbles on the unicycle. The trumpets screech one long note. The spotlight widens, and clowns run out into the circle, looking terrified. They tumble and bumble around her, holding their hands out for the moon or hiding their heads in their arms.

  The woman grabs the moon and lifts it high up over her head. The music sounds triumphant now, and the clowns bow and turn somersaults. The woman tosses the moon out of the light and it floats lazily, very white in the dark room. One of the clowns reaches for it, jumps, th
en jumps again, flapping his hands and feet to keep himself afloat before he comes crashing back to the stage. The moon skips upward, like a balloon when a child lets go of the string.

  The clown tries again, and this time he catches hold of it. Then the moon lifts him up, pulls him into the air. He fights with it, wrestling it down, and then thumps back to the stage, cradling the moon in his arms.

  A big grin spreads across his face. He turns the moon over and over in his hands; he polishes it with his sleeve. He bites it and makes a horrible face, fanning his hand in front of his mouth to get rid of the taste. Then he sits down—though there's no chair, he's sitting on nothing. He turns the moon face up, pulls out a pair of drumsticks from somewhere, and plays it like a drum.

  For a while he manages to play along with the music. Then the trumpets speed up, and he beats faster and faster, trying frantically to keep up. Crash! and the clown falls to the floor, and when he stands up again he's holding the broken halves of the moon, looking from one to the other with an expression of terrible sorrow.