Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (12 page)

"But my car's parked back at the laundry," he said.

She had a fine laugh. Yet this time she didn't offer transportation.

In the snowy street, she said, "Good night, Quentin."

"Good night, Sandra," he said, the name still uncomfortable to say.

There was no touch of gloved hands. No last look. The lady was embarrassed, or maybe astonished by what she had done. Or maybe she did this kind of thing all the time, and she was disappointed or already bored with him. Unless Sandra was wracked by guilt or some weird despair. Quentin couldn't guess anything about her nature.

With a deep bark, the old Trailbreaker pulled away—an emblem of the miserable pay for professors—and Quentin began his cold walk.

A large, loud family lived across the street. But in late November, with fresh snow on the ground and wind slicing from the Polar Star, that big plain house was eerily peaceful. Quentin paused, staring at the decorative lights, reds and whites predominating. The traditional manger was built from cheap pine that was badly weathered. Over the years, dolls and toy animals had replaced critical players. The wrong sort of camel stood in the snow, and one of the Wise Men had enjoyed an earlier career as a toy soldier. But the baby looked original. A bright spotlight shone on the plastic straw, and the Child of God lay swaddled in plastic cloth, her face not just feminine but exceptionally pretty, smiling bravely at the incandescent, softly humming Christmas star.

Enormous rivers once flowed from the interior of the ancestral Africa. Two billion years ago, the earth was an alien world. Days were swift, the moon too close in the sky, and there were no trees or grass and precious little oxygen. Erosion scoured whatever it wanted, leaving vast deltas of sediment resting against the unnamed seas. In that younger earth, radioactive isotopes had different abundances. Chance and the sorting action of the runoff concentrated uranium into small areas, and the passing river water slowed the escaping neutrons, aiding interactions with neigh-boring fissionables, producing heat as well as a peculiar ash still visible today.

Eventually the river would boil, geysers towering over the stark wilderness.

According to
Science Queensland,
for hundreds of thousands of years those geysers would roar until the sediments dried out, and with nothing to slow the neutrons, the chain reactions collapsed, allowing the delta to cool and fresh water to flow back into the reaction zones, which soon triggered the nuclear blaze to begin all over again.

Quentin was smiling while he read the article.

And then a student emerged from the stacks, and his focus jumped.

She was carrying a book against her chest. He remembered that body and her name, and she remembered his name. Their conversation was polite, leading to the point where she asked why he was here. "Didn't you graduate?"

"But I can't leave," he said. "These journals have voices. They beg me to come read them."

The girl didn't quite smile, her body rocking slowly while she looked at the upside-down title. Then with a cluck of the tongue, she said, "That looks horribly boring."

Quentin remembered that he never liked the girl. Shrugging, he turned to the next article.

And she made her escape.

Page after page was filled with color images from the Vanguard probe. Leda was a cratered sphere, airless and cold; giant Europa was wrinkled in places by ancient tectonics. But the smooth white face of Io was tantalizingly young, a realm of thick pack ice and what might be a hidden ocean. And floating in front of glorious Jupiter was the angry, sulfurous orange face of Semele, bathed in radiation, an army of volcanoes trying to tear that moon apart.

Quentin found her sorting laundry.

It was the Monday after Christmas. Sandra smiled when she saw him. She smiled out of reflex and then in a warmer, more impressive fashion, pulling her basket out of the way so they could work together, washing and drying their belongings before two cars drove to his apartment.

As if they had done this a thousand times, they went upstairs and lights were turned off and the yellowed blinds were pulled, and then they stripped out of coats and clothes before duplicating the first coupling. Afterward she turned around on the mattress, her face beside his face, and together, they tried to defeat this persistent silence.

"I thought of calling you," she said.

"You could have," Quentin said.

"I did look up your number."

"I couldn't find yours," he admitted.

"Oh, it's unpublished," she said. Was she going to give it to him? Maybe, but there was another practical matter. "We need a system. We can't keep washing clothes, hoping to cross paths."

Quentin's impression, based on very little, was that the professor didn't want the world to know about them.

"Yes, a system," he said. "Fine."

She pulled closer.

"Fine," was a good word. He repeated it.

"I'll call before I come here," she said.

"Here?"

"Would that be a problem?"

"No."

"Monday nights," she offered.

Quentin nodded, and then he asked, "Can I call you?"

She became guarded, just a little.

"No," she said. But that didn't set the right tone. "That wouldn't be any problem, normally. But there are complications."

Quentin imagined a husband, and that hypothesis was so reasonable that the imagined husband was accepted as fact—an older fellow, bald and bookish, carrying a soft, useless middle into his wife's bed. But Quentin didn't ask about husbands or forbidden phone calls. He didn't want to risk spoiling what this was: A healthy male doing what he was supposed to do, insuring that he was going to get laid.

The reading lamp was on again. Sandra's rump had vanished inside panties. Putting on glasses, she noticed a cardboard map covering the far corner of the bedroom floor. By all appearances, she was curious.

Quentin explained. College friends just had a baby daughter, and he was wandering through Treasure City, hunting for a gift. That's when he spotted the game box adorned with armored vehicles floundering in deep snow, handsome Western men shooting at vaguely human shapes marching along the edge of the world.
The Europa Campaign
was written in red. Blurbs promised a complex, historically accurate rendition of the World's War. But what sold him was a promise: Solitary play quality was deemed Very High.

He bought the game for himself, and for the baby, a wicker dreamcatcher.

The rigid cardboard map reached from the Rhine to the Tibetan Plateau, from Thule Sea to the Straits of Hormoz. Thirteen hundred years of war had been waged over this shifting boundary. Simple colors defined the very complicated terrain, rail lines and a hundred historic cities adding to the authenticity. Just punching out the brightly colored chits had taken an hour. Each chit represented some famous military unit. Blue Talons. Queen Anne's Faithful. The Fifth Tumen. The Big Red One. Entire evenings had been invested in a rulebook no less cumbersome than life. Then a few nights ago, Quentin finally rolled three dice to create a random number, launching a cardboard war that would take weeks to run its nonhistoric course.

"We could play," he suggested.

"Thank you, no," she said, setting down a Mongol tank army.

"Strip war games," he said, watching her breasts.

Her sternum deserved a thoughtful scratch. Then she slipped on her bra, asking, "Which side do you play?"

"Both."

"Emotionally, I mean."

"The West, probably."

She buttoned her blouse and touched his nose with just a fingertip, and he wondered what important thing she would say.

"Mondays," is what she decided on.

"Good," he said. And because that seemed inadequate, he added, "Great."

Quentin was nine when the young teacher steered her class through a civics lesson. What did everybody want to be when they grew up? A forest of eager arms rose high. Girls wanted to be doctors and business owners and maybe president, too. Boys were more focused on their military careers—those ten years of mandatory service, beginning on their eighteenth birthday. Some dreamed of being pilots, others to be stationed onboard famous warships. But a couple of boys in back were ready for the Marines. Marines, they knew, were elite soldiers who conquered islands and didn't back down from any fight.

Inside all that martial noise, one boy said nothing.

The teacher asked Quentin what kind of soldier he would be.

"None," he said.

That deserved a puzzled moment.

Then a classmate, knowing the story, called out, "Quentin's the Son-of-a-Hero. He never has to be a soldier."

The teacher was a Pawnee woman with big wonderful eyes, and her lovely mouth widened while the eyes grew even bigger.

"Your father is a Hero?" she asked, thoroughly impressed.

Quentin nodded, and the world around him noticeably warmed.

Intercourse wasn't permitted. That was Quentin's rule through college. He didn't want mistakes, and he didn't want to give girls the chance to cheat—a reason left unmentioned. Yet not only did Sandra agree to the prohibition, she seemed to relish everything else that was possible.

But even young men and needy women had limits.

Even if they wanted, it was impossible to do nothing but have sex and then part ways. So the lovers found comfortable subjects. Rituals were built, fine pleasures cultivated, and sometimes—more than sometimes—both of them took pleasure from what was being said.

"What did you study?"

"Study?"

"For your thesis."

The smile was sly, girlish. "Greek men."

Quentin laughed, hiding the squirm.

His lover sat up in bed. A hard north wind was trying to destroy the adjacent window. Both of them listened to the panes shaking, and then she offered a few senseless words.

"Greek," he guessed.

"Byzantine Greek," she said.

"Okay."

"Marian IX," she said.

"One of the Deiparas?"

"They were called the Theotokos. In the Orthodox East."

"Should I know her?"

"You should but you don't."

Quentin lifted his hand, pretending to hold a pen at the ready.

She laughed, just a little. "Marian IX led the Orthodox Church for six years and six months before she died. Of cholera, we believe."

"She was your thesis?"

"Her foreign policies were. Particularly her balancing act between the Latins in the West and the Maimun kingdoms in Asia. But even that narrow topic held too much ore for me."

The pen joke was stale. His hand dropped.

"Scholars will swear: Marian IX achieved nothing. No bulls of note. No recorded incident where she tested the power of her male ministers. She might have been the Christ's representative, at least over the Byzantine world, but she rarely traveled and wrote little and left behind the absolute minimum of history."

"Well. That lady does sound fascinating."

"Except," said Sandra. "Doing nothing is incredibly difficult."

A doubtful noise leaked out of him.

"Quentin," she said. "Hold your life exactly where it is now. Nothing about you and yours can change. You'll always have the same friends, the same routines. You'll never move to another apartment or alter your beliefs, find a new job or new lovers. How easy would that be? Not very. And now imagine that same trick applied to Constantinople and its enormous wealth. Retain all of your far-flung holdings. Your enemies remain your enemies, yet you never enter into open war. And meanwhile your fragile alliance with Rome and the Latin Deipara can be burnished but never altered. Six and a half years, and nothing becomes new in your very complex world. For any leader, wouldn't that be a wonderful accomplishment?"

Quentin narrowed his gaze, saying, "Six and a half years."

Sandra heard implications that he never intended.

After a moment's consideration, she kissed his cheek and then warned him, "Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?"

Quentin was reading about dirt. Specif ically, a peculiar and very old layer of shocked quartz and ash that was scattered across the world. Mongolian researchers found the anomaly years ago, but it wasn't until an Iberian paleontologist made the same discovery that the Asians revealed their secret data. A single catastrophic firestorm had engulfed the earth, and the dirt's elemental makeup wasn't only peculiar, it was meaningfully peculiar: An abundance of rare-earths, including iridium, revealing the presence of a large asteroid or comet that attacked the helpless world.

Below the iridium, thunderbirds ruled.

And above lay nothing but furry lactating queens.

"When I was a girl," she began.

And she hesitated, smiling at some cherished memory.

A single hard click sounded, hot water flowing through pipes and the iron radiator.

"Venus was alive," Sandra said. "Smart well-read people were certain that it was a warmer, wetter earth. I never read the fantastic fictions, but the ideas were floating free, and I spent quite a lot of time dreaming about life on that sister world."

"What did the dreams show you?"

"Nothing interesting," she stated, with conviction. "I wasn't an imaginative nineyear-old. But the World's War had just finished, and I pictured a tropical realm full of dark naked people who were happier and quite a lot nicer than we are."

"That was 1948," Quentin thought.

"The War killed my father," she said.

She hadn't mentioned that before.

"On my Venus," she said, "little girls don't lose fathers to bombs."

"So you were thirteen when the Mongolian probe flew past Venus," he said, proving that he was paying attention. "No jungles found. Just one enormous oven and clouds of sulfuric acid."

She moved over him, saying, "Mars could be alive, I hear. Even if it's just bacteria."

Quentin queued up a few smart words about the manly Mongolians riding in their rocket ship.

But she spoke first, saying, "I don't want another world contaminated."

"I doubt our bacteria would survive there," he said.

She eased away.