Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (20 page)

Sandra sat up, staring at her hand while it pressed against his chest.

"Here's a confession. Think what you want about me. But if Sage told me that Theo would have to spend a few months in a jail and a few years working public service jobs, I would have turned him in. I was ready to abandon the people around him too.

Not because he would get a slap on his wrist, because he wouldn't have. They would throw him in prison for twenty years. But I would have turned him in just for the promise of that hard, easy slap.

"That was my mood," she said quietly, in astonishment. "And that's what scares me more than anything. I won't let that happen, Quentin. Which is why I've decided... this isn't how I wanted to tell you, believe me... but I'm going to run, starting in the morning."

"Run?"

"While you were showering," she said. "I made a call. Arrangements are being made."

He said nothing, and she continued to speak, talking to Quentin or to herself, or maybe that Federal in the adjacent room—the one with the smoker's hack. "I'm going to cry and doubt myself, I know. But there's never going to be another day where I will be brave enough to vanish."

Her birth name was Eleni, but for six years she had been Marian IX. She was plain and beautiful at the same time, and she had never felt healthier. Her favorite two boys were built like bulls, but with the temperaments of angels, and she loved them so much that she occasionally considered their futures. What would happen to them when she was dead, or worse, when she grew bored with their geometries?

The future was weighing heavily on the Theotokos tonight.

"What did you think of today's visitor?" she asked.

One of the boys was literate, even a little bit wise. "I think that pony-man was more than a little mad," he said with confidence. "Insanity is easy to spot. The insane believe what they want. They twist the world into shapes that can't abide, and nothing else is real. If it is as he says, if there is a tribe of pony-men savages, they will be slaughtered by our enemies long before they can assemble at our gates. And if for some reason they cannot be destroyed by our enemies, then you will ride out to meet their armies."

"As a very old woman," she said.

"A lovely old lady," he said, and with that he nudged the boy lying beside him in the giant bed.

That other boy was illiterate but never simple. Between the two he was the Theotokos' undisputed favorite.

"Everybody is insane," he said.

The first boy laughed in mocking fashion.

But the young woman cast an admiring eye at the sturdy young fellow, asking, "Why do you say that?"

"Because we bend what we see, and we see what we want. Everybody looks to the future, and we pick what seems best. But every future is just as impossible as any other. Ask yourself. When have we ever gotten the future that we want?"

A long uncomfortable silence claimed the bed.

Then to himself as much as anyone, the illiterate boy said, "I'll tell you what runs the world, in the Empire and everywhere else too."

"Our Lord," said the first boy.

"Fuck no," the second boy said.

"What then?" asked Eleni, her patience faltering.

"Need," said this hairy animal who could not read ten words. "Need is the principle that carries everything forward."

Sandra promised they could sleep, although she didn't know for how long, and she wasn't sure who or what would wake them up. But she insisted that good people were making plans on her behalf, adding, "We should dry your clothes, our clothes. As best we can."

Quentin's trousers and shirt were given the prime territory, stretched out in front of the room's heater. A battered piece of metal and angry electrons, the heater hummed ominously, throwing out a small, furious wind, and in no time, the air was filled with his stink as well as recycled rainwater. Sandra lay beside him in bed. With that endless, breathless voice, she talked about life on the run. But the word "run" was a misnomer. Most of your time was spent inside a safe house, often confined to a single basement room. What was coming for her was a contemplative existence, including a few books worth long study and the belated chance to write down old thoughts and new ones. Many fine works were composed inside secret closets, and she insisted on looking for the good in this turn of events.

"Good," Quentin echoed.

Then her voice changed. Sandra confessed that her only fear now was that she was going to be very lonely.

Quentin heard the words, and after a moment, he replayed everything else that she had just said, but with a new sensibility.

Of course. The woman was hoping that he would come with her.

But none of her words were explicit. She sat up in bed, naked with the heat and humidity and frank odors, and Quentin wished for any interruption.

The room phone broke into song.

Three short notes, and then the long note—the sound every telephone had made since the beginnings of this awful century.

A man's voice had given them a destination. They were returning to Eureka. The man told them to drive Sandra's car, but only partway, parking on a side street where it might not be noticed for a day or two. Nothing incriminating should be left behind, including fingerprints, he had warned. While Sandra drove, Quentin wiped, never in his life so consumed by a sense of neatness. They didn't speak during the journey, for fear someone was listening, and she acted stony calm, emotions kept under tight control. Warner College and Quentin's home were east of the original main street. They went west, finding a residential road that neither one of them knew, and she parked and lifted the hood again, detaching the battery, and then they walked in the darkness, holding hands until Sandra suddenly pulled hers free.

Finally she was talking, the tone of the voice almost light.

"I've walked leagues back and forth on the Acropolis," she said. "The first time as a student, a few years younger than you are, Quentin. Even for my age, I was very young. But I loved history, and Athens is the center of everything old and rich, and don't believe what old people tell you, that you don't appreciate the importance of things when you're innocent. You do. I did. My Marian spent time and effort protecting the Acropolis from those in the church who saw pagan threats in the ruins. All of the Theotokos took that as a mission of great significance, and most of the Deipara have done the same. Which was why it was in such marvelous order, the marble and the columns and the repaired statues... the Parthenon Frieze alone would have cemented my feelings for the past...."

She was crying, opening her mouth and closing it again, thinking before slowly saying, "There was a boy at the Acropolis. He was seventeen but with an older body, and he was charming and naturally sweet, and he approached us. There were six students, all female, and one of us was a beauty on her worst day, and this was not her worst day. She looked splendid, and we expected the Greek boy to move on her. But no, he ignored the deity among us, and the rest of them too. I was the one he walked beside. I was the girl who learned his name and watched as he bowed to me in that way our grandfathers used to do... but in Queensland, we never learned to do it well, and that's why we gave up the gesture. Not because it was old-fashioned, but because we were so painfully miserable at the gesture."

Her voice was rolling faster, but this wasn't a lecture. An emotional vein had been opened, tired purple finding light and fresh oxygen before turning into something vivid, bright and hot.

"Of course my suitor was a professional at this game," she said. "Find a group of tourists and cull the weak one out of the herd. Which was me. He knew exactly what he was doing when he told me that I was a beauty and he loved me at first sight and he could be my friend for as long as I wished and pay him nothing and he would be a good friend, even a great friend. Or I could send him away and he would kill himself before tomorrow. That's the kind of love song he had used on young women for several years already, and I knew that. I understood. And he appreciated my worldliness, at least to the point where he didn't press his love too far. So no, he allowed that maybe he wouldn't slice open his chest and rip his heart from its home. But he told me that I was still quite lovely and looked like a woman who appreciated a good man's charms. And I laughed at him, warning him that he was wrong even when he wasn't. I told him that I was saving myself for my husband. I even mention a fiancé back in Queensland—a man who might or might not have been real. But the boy... I always think of him as being years younger than me... the boy told me to stop and wait, let my silly girlfriends go ahead. Which they did, but not far. Then he winked and said, 'You have never seen a man give so much of himself at one time.' "

Quentin slowed his gait. But Sandra kept walking and talking, and he had to jog to catch her again.

"I read something once," she said. "Or maybe more than once, I don't know. This isn't my specialty, and my memory can be treacherous with the sciences. But from what I understand, the universe is far larger than we imagine, and every moment of existence stands by itself, and everything only seems connected."

"The Principles,"
he said.

She seemed not to notice.

"Suppose you were a god," she said. "Suppose gods could stand back and see the universe as infinite examples of what might be. Every moment leads on to a trillion, trillion possibilities, and there is no end to what will arise, and everything possible is inevitable."

"Katarina Tan," he said.

"The sex-crazed mathematician. I know about her."

"I told you about all of this," he insisted.

Sandra stopped walking, grabbing up one of his hands and then the other. They were a block short of their destination—the alleyway running behind the grocery and Treasure City. In the darkness, staring at him, she was smiling and not smiling—an odd expression rendered when weaving emotions tried to gain control over the face.

"They are still there, these past times," she said. "Except they're not the past and they're never endangered. Athens. The Acropolis. That magnificent young man lurking in the marble columns, trying to impress homely girls with his fine Greek body."

"What are you telling me?" asked Quentin.

"You don't know," she said.

He knew that he was exhausted and worried for good reasons, and then he spotted a familiar white car waiting in the alley with its lights out, and for some reason that worried him even more.

"You don't understand?" she asked.

And when Quentin didn't respond in the next moment, she said, "Stay here. You don't need to come any farther."

"Oh," he thought. "She's telling me about Theo's father."

But Quentin didn't say it, and Sandra was talking again. Quickly, softly. "Of course you won't want to go with me, an old woman destined for closets. I don't know why I would ever think you would."

"But I don't want to leave you," he began.

"Besides," she said, "there is a chance, a small but not thin chance, that they won't believe my story, my innocence. And if they don't believe me, they'll take what precautions need to be taken."

"What does that mean?"

Sandra sighed, and she made a point of smiling at Quentin until he smiled back at her, in reflex, and then she put her hands on the sides of his face and pulled his mouth down, kissing him intensely and then less so, and at some imprecise point, she was no longer there.

The opossum waddled across the road, over to Quentin's side of the street, indifferent to him until it discovered that they were on converging paths. Then the creature stopped, hunkering down, growing perfectly still. The scaly tail froze, and the dark eyes gazed straight ahead, and Quentin stopped, arms crossed. They were ten feet apart. "Hello," Quentin said. "You're a beautiful opossum." Another step closed the gap between them. "Roll over. Stick out your tongue. Convince me you're dead."

But his new friend insisted on watchful stillness.

Quentin relented, claiming the middle of the street. The early morning air was cool and damp. His arms were happiest crossed, clinging to the body heat. The plain houses slept, and the people inside them slept, and a car was roaring somewhere, but it was moving away and soon gone, allowing the quiet to come back out of its hiding places, reclaiming the world.

Walking in the street had become habit.

Quentin's house stood on the next corner.

He stopped short, wondering if he could turn and run fast enough to catch the white car.

"Don't," he whispered.

Easter decorations had been set up on the neighbor's yard. Quentin crossed the curb and sidewalk and then the closely mowed grass, standing before the crucifix. The savior's right breast was exposed, sliced from below and bleeding, her hands and feet were pierced with iron spikes, and blood ran down both of her bare legs, proving the carnage wrought by multiple rapes. Yet that face, that unnaturally pretty face, was at peace. This woman was bearing the evil and sin of this world, and to believe anything else was heresy beyond forgiveness.

Quentin stepped close enough to touch that beautiful face, and he kicked over the cross and the savior.

Then he walked the rest of the way home, hunting for bed.

Michael Swanwick tells us that he has just finished his "new, incredibly entertaining novel,
Chasing the Phoenix,
in which confidence tricksters Darger and Surplus accidentally conquer China." As readers may recall from stories like "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" (October/November 2001) and "Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play" (July 2005), this sort of thing is always happening to them. A conquering of a different sort takes place in Michael's engaging new fantasy about a determined young woman who enters the uncharted territory of power dressing in Hell.

Of finest scarlet was her gown; It rustled when it touched the ground. Even the Devil, with all her wealth, Had no such silks to clothe herself.

Su-yin was fifteen when her father was taken away. She awoke from uneasy sleep that night to the sound of tires on the gravel drive and a wash of headlights through her room. From the window she saw a stretch limousine glide to a halt in front of the house. Two broad-shouldered men wearing sunglasses got out to either side. One opened the passenger door. A woman emerged. She wore a dress that covered everything from her neck to her ankles except for a long slit on the side that went all the way up one leg.