Asimov's SF, September 2009 Read online

  Of course I can. It's a long time, but I'd think about them every day, keep them fresh in my mind. And what if they returned and I wasn't here? I feel panic at the thought; I stand up and start to pace nervously. How could I live without what my mother called glamour?

  Do they visit other places, hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions? Are there other people, all across the country, trapped in mean little towns like this one, just waiting for them to come back? Why do they do it, Ebenezer and the others? For no reason we can understand, probably. They're not like us, my mother said.

  I think of all those people, waiting years for just a few moments of magic. I think about my mother, how sad she looks, how pinched and harassed by all the problems at the hotel. How unhappy she must have been, to want to abandon her children without a second thought. Do I really want to become like her?

  I understand, slowly, the trap they've built for my mother, for me. Unable to get away, to get on with our lives. Not caring about anything except seeing them one more time.

  But how can I leave? I feel a sharp pain in my stomach at the very thought, and my breath comes short again. I barely even know what's out there, where the freeway goes. I could try to find Bert, maybe go to college—but could college possibly be as exciting as these last few days?

  I go to my window and look out at the flat desolate land outside, and at the freeway beyond that, the river that carries all those people away. I have to go, I know that.

  Can I leave now, though, at fifteen? But what would happen if I don't? I see myself waking each morning, tempted to stay just one more day, hoping that this will be the day they come. Running to the front door when the bell rings, convincing myself that this time, really, it'll be them sweeping through the reception room, laughing and juggling and playing music, making everything wonderful again.

  The pain returns. Can I hold firm to my resolution? Can I break away from here, is there enough glamour out in the world to hold me? I don't know. I hope so.

  Copyright © 2009 Lisa Goldstein

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: Asimov's Science Fiction Salutes the Winners of the 2009 Nebula Awards

  Best Novel

  Powers

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  * * * *

  Best Novella

  "The Spacetime Pool"

  Catherine Asaro

  (Analog, March 2008)

  * * * *

  Best Novelette

  "Pride and Prometheus"

  John Kessel

  * * * *

  Best Short Story

  "Trophy Wives"

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  * * * *

  Best Script

  WALL-E

  * * * *

  Grand Master

  Harry Harrison

  * * * *

  Author Emerita

  M.J. Engh

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: SPECULATIVE TAI CHI

  by Kendall Evans

  * * * *

  * * * *

  I have invented

  Ten new Tai Chi exercises

  In anticipation of strange possibilities:

  —

  1. Matador time-traveler

  Evading the charge

  Of a small, horned dinosaur

  —

  2. Colonist aboard an interstellar vessel

  Waking from Deep-Sleep stasis

  After centuries of unconsciousness

  —

  3. Baffled space-suited alien

  Experiencing its species’ first encounter

  With human beings

  —

  4. Low-G dance upon the asteroid Ida,

  With its captured asteroid Dactyl above

  Pretending to be a full moon

  —

  5. Cosmonaut stranded on Mars

  Engages in heated radio cell-phone conversation

  With officials back in Mother Russia

  (Long static pauses as radio signals

  Cross the solar system,

  Making even light speed seem slow)

  —

  6. Woman in a red dress

  Approaching the event horizon

  Mimicking the movements

  Of her quantum or virtual twin

  —

  7. Mobile artificial intelligence

  Walking upright for the very first time

  —

  8. Blue-skinned Princess

  Dancing beneath two moons

  —

  9. Lone man standing upright playing a keyboard instrument

  Determinedly ignoring Armageddon

  And striking exactly the right notes

  As the world comes to an end all around him

  —

  10. Eve welcomes

  Yet another new cycle

  Of the universe

  —

  —Kendall Evans

  Copyright © 2009 Kendall Evans

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Stories: CAMERA OBSCURED

  by Ferrett Steinmetz

  Ferrett Steinmetz lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, and blogs in sometimes excessive detail about his life at The Watchtower of Destruction [theferrett.livejournal.com]. The author is also the 77,491st best player of the video-game Rock Band. He credits the 2008 Clarion Writers’ Workshop for teaching him how to “get the numbers right"—a skill that is clearly exemplified in his first story for Asimov's.

  It had been a week since Victor “Yo-Yo” Pino had been stung by a hundred and seventy-four bees. And after a brief hospital stay at the 8,546th best emergency care center in the world, Victor's mother made him go back to his classes at Wilkinson High, the 4,378th best high school in America.

  Victor was no stranger to the hospital, since his quest to scale the Worldwork leaderboards had left him with a collection of fascinating injuries. His left pinky finger had nearly been sawn off by a glass-encrusted string in his attempt to become the world's best kite-fighter (highest ranking: 1,232,930,212nd place). Months of training to become the best firespinner in the entire world (highest ranking: 138,212th; his best placing to date) had left him with a combover hair style designed to mask the spots where his hair had permanently burned away. But at least lighting all those flaming poi balls had allowed him to dispose of last fall's matchbook collection (the 82,223,343rd least-impressive collection in the world).

  The bee stings had accumulated after this spring's disastrous attempt to become the world's finest beekeeper (final ranking: 309,423rd place), which led to his mother's creating her “no pets” rule. Victor felt terrible about that, because it wasn't the bees’ fault; he hadn't smoked the hive properly when introducing a new swarm, and the poor things had panicked.

  He felt bad for the bees, so bad that he couldn't even swat them when they started stinging him. He felt even worse when, while he was doped up in the emergency room, his mom had called in the exterminators (who were cut-rate 73rd percentile exterminators, but apparently even an 8,786th place business was enough to kill a defenseless bunch of bees).

  But the worst thing of all was that in the rush to the hospital, he'd forgotten to mark the bee footage off of his vlog—and without the “no-show” forbiddance markers around the continual feed of his daily footage, Worldwork had rightfully chosen that incident as the most notable thing that had happened to him that day. It then broadcast it to his subscribers on the fifteen-minute auto-edited video log of Victor's day, and his subscribers had laughed so hard at Victor's flailing shrieks that merely watching Victor had registered as interesting enough to show up on their daily vlogs, resulting in a mild viral outbreak. In two days, 24.6 percent of his high school, a full 538 students, had witnessed his incompetence and laughed themselves silly.

  The laughing he was used to. But the real damage was the fact that his beekeeping was revealed. The yo-yo incident in seventh grade had left a
nickname as sticky and painful as napalm, and since then Victor had vowed never to show his classmates what he was up to.

  Now they knew. They'd use that to make his life a living hell.

  The hospital stay had been as gloomy as they usually were. A childhood's worth of experience had taught Victor that injuries were the sign of yet another misplaced career path. The stings weren't nearly as painful as the loss of the idea of being the best beekeeper, and so he'd spent three days watching whatever flashed across the inside of his vlog-glasses, with that slow sinking feeling that he was nobody, nobody, nobody.

  His injuries hadn't been that severe, but his parents could afford an extra day's stay at the hospital (just as they'd afforded the beekeeping equipment and the kites and the poi balls), and so Victor had wheedled the day out of sympathetic nurses; the nurses must have really liked him, because his conversations with them were flagged in their vlogs.

  The doctors were more skeptical. “Nobody ever built viewer loyalty from inside a hospital room,” they joked, punching him lightly on the arm in the sort of heartwarming gesture that looked good on camera.

  It didn't matter. On the third afternoon, as Victor lay dejectedly in his bed, kismet struck in the form of a television show—specifically, a documentary on the the ex-girlfriends of Angata Mahamoud, the World's Best Lover (Hetero Male).

  Victor watched with dejected interest; having failed so miserably in all his own attempts, the last thing he wanted was to watch someone else's triumph. But he was too depressed to switch to another datastream.

  And Angata was remarkable; he still clung to his position as the World's Best Lover after an amazing four-week streak, and no one—not even Angata—knew how he'd done it. Angata, a pleasant, bland-looking Hindu, seemed surprised by the attention. He'd never wanted to be the World's Best Lover; he hadn't had a choice. Every night, the Worldwork servers analyzed all the footage that streamed in from everyone's vloggles, then re-ranked the skillsets of everyone caught on-camera anywhere.

  Most skill rankings stayed relatively consistent, but the World's Best Lover rankings fluctuated violently. Yet Angata had stayed on top for almost a month now, without even trying. That interested Victor.

  Angata had had only four lovers, so they'd sent a reporter out to interview each of them. They were all virgins before they had met him, and still virgins today, but for him. Ugly and stammering in the glare of the cameras, they each gushed about how sweet and considerate Angata had been. That was no surprise to Victor. Angata was the World's Best Lover, after all.

  But he felt bad for the girls, wincing as the interviewer implied that Angata had wasted his skill on these ungainly females. Nobody but Angata would ever want women this homely, they said.

  Victor was furious—"That's not true!” he yelled at the screen, feeling his cheeks flush with sympathetic humiliation—but, in a flash of revelation, he realized that it was true.

  That was why Angata was the best.

  Truth was, Victor realized, Angata wasn't that great a lover. He was simply a nice man who'd had the good fortune to sleep with four women who had no other experiences to compare with. Angata had stumbled into an isolated bubble of four people, none of whom had even kissed anyone else in the world—so the Worldwork algorithms couldn't contrast and compare their results with those of previous lovers to fine-tune the thousands of other factors that made people over-and under-estimate someone's skills in bed.

  The Worldwork system was taking Angata's ex-lovers at face value. And since he was a kind man, they thought the world of him.

  Victor had discovered loopholes in the Worldwork algorithms before, but this was a doozy. Eventually, some guy would sleep with five women who'd never kissed another man, and that man would be...

  ...the best lover in the whole world.

  He could feel the hair prickling at the back of the neck as Destiny seized him. This was the key. This was how he, Victor Pino, would become the greatest. For he—and he realized that this was part of his master plan now—had never kissed a girl, making him the perfect candidate to steal Angata Mahamoud's ranking.

  His depression vanished, replaced at once by a fevered energy.

  Revitalized, Victor spent the rest of the day searching the Worldwork profiles to find his ideal first mate. Very few of his female Wilkinson High classmates were lonely, one-node potentials like Angata's ex-girlfriends, but eventually he narrowed it down to a blurry photo of a girl he was pretty sure he'd seen around the school before: Rosalie Atkinson.

  Her profile was scant, but he memorized every iota of it, then researched her hobbies. He took copious notes, making sure to get things right.

  As the first woman in the chain that would make him the Best Lover (Hetero Male), Victor owed it to Rosalie Atkinson to make this act of love good and beautiful and kind.

  This wouldn't be like the bees.

  * * * *

  Victor returned to school with enthusiasm, slinking past the pickets of striking cafeteria workers ("56th Percentile Work Shouldn't Get 62nd Percentile Pay!"), and sucked in a deep breath for confidence before he stepped into the hallways.

  The students, their vlog-cameras gleaming, surrounded him like a pack of paparazzi.

  The jocks buzzed him with stuffed bee dolls, the underclassmen spattered him with honey, the cheerleaders ground against him in a mockery of affection and begged him in faux-dramatic voices to “BEE MINE, YO-YO, BEE MINE!"—the usual host of over-the-top stunts, filmed in attempts to go viral.

  Victor would have reported them to the principal, but everyone knew the principal benefited most from all of this; he had ten thousand subscribers, and every student sent to the principal's office gave him a “greatest hits” summary of the craziest stunts at Wilkinson High. He sold advertising as a lucrative side business.

  Someone shoved a bowl of Honeycomb cereal in Victor's face, braying laughter, and he felt his skin prickle as he tuned out; he wasn't really here. He was years in the future, the number-one lover, and reporters were all interviewing these morons right now, asking them, “When did you realize Victor was so talented?” And he was watching their befuddled expressions as they realized that they should have paid him a different kind of attention.

  All this would fade once he found Rosalie Atkinson.

  He scoured the hallways, looking for signs of Rosalie—which was tough, because she darted from class to class like a fish trying to avoid a predator.

  There was something about the way she walked that made Victor afraid to interrupt her, lest she plow right through him. She clutched her laptop to her chest and walked with her lean torso tilted forward, head down like a bull charging. She looked straight through the crowds in front of her, her gaze aimed at the end of the hallway as though she planned to burst through the wall there like the Kool-Aid Man. Then she'd pivot precisely on one heel to walk through whatever door she needed to enter, not a step wasted.

  By lunch period, though, she had retreated to the far corner of the cafeteria, crouched over as she dipped her fries in mayonnaise. She was all bones and spiked hair, like an angry parrot, but Victor thought the hollows of her bone structure were as beautiful as the vaults of a cathedral. She wore a tight striped sweater that outlined her boobs, which were hard to see because she always had something clasped in front of them.

  They were pretty good boobs. He'd read that large ones were less sensitive, and made a note to try not to overstimulate her.

  Being the World's Best Lover (Hetero Male) shouldn't be too different from beekeeping, he reassured himself, moistening a paper towel to dab the last of the honey off the front of his sweater vest. He'd never had time to date girls the way his other classmates did, but Victor presumed it was like any other hobby; you put your mind to it, discovered what worked, and honed your craft.

  He'd make this act of love good for her, because even now he could tell she was lonely; he flicked his browser on in his v-glasses just to verify, and Rosalie still had no one watching her daily broadcasts. He
wasn't even trying to gain marketshare on his vlog, and even without the bee incident, he had sixty-eight subscribers.

  What a sad, pathetic life she must lead, not to have anyone viewing her.

  As he crept up to her table to ask her for a date, Victor noticed the blob of dried mustard on the diamond-sized lens of Rosalie's vlog-glasses, which were old-fashioned black horn-rims five years out of date, and he realized she was writing in a book. She wasn't an artist—he'd scoured her rankings extensively, and there were no archived drawings in her profile aside from what she'd done for art classes. So what was she doing with paper?

  Plus, it was paper—the kind of cheap stuff you found in dollar stores. Smart paper was instantly networked to archive everything you scrawled on it; why would she use something so fragile? What if she spilled Pepsi on it?

  The facts didn't fit, and that made his chest tighten; maybe he'd looked up the wrong Rosalie Atkinson. He thought about turning away, but his shadow fell over the table, and she looked up.

  She snapped her book shut, palm over the cover, which had old magazine images cut out and taped to the front. Her nails were chewed bloody.

  Her eyes were cobalt blue, like laser beams. Her gaze was so scarily irritated that Victor felt he couldn't move until she gave him permission.

  “Turn off your vlog,” she snapped. “I don't talk to cameras.”

  He took a step back at her vehemence, then pointed to the dimmed red light on his glasses. “It's already off,” he explained, not mentioning that the reason he'd shut it down was because, though this interaction would clearly boost traffic to his vlog, any hint of his plan to become the World's Best Lover would bring competition. “See?”

  She looked at him closely. Her eyes paused on the fresh cuts on his face where he had shaved with a razor this morning.

  “I don't like vlogs,” she said sullenly. The note of explanation somehow felt like an apology.

  “That's okay,” Victor said.

  “I didn't ask for your permission. I just said that I don't like them.”