Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (14 page)

"You have recently become a disappointment to me,” Sato continued. “I have not seen you in the evenings lately, nor on the weekends. Your work-ethic leaves much to be desired."

Tetsuo squirmed against the maniacal laugh that was struggling to escape from his intestines. He fought it by blinking his eyes hard.

"And then there is the matter of your suicide attempt."

Tetsuo didn't feel like arguing the point right then. He didn't feel like saying:
Actually, no, I just wanted to say hi to the baby whale that lives in the river, and while I am going to kill myself soon, very soon, that was not it.

He was given a warning and a mental-health leave from work. That gave him time to finish his at-home research or come as close to finishing as he could. He doubted his results, but he was meticulous in the execution of his plan, regardless.

His dead body would be a bio-hazard, and he needed to be responsible in containing it so as not to afflict the innocent. This would be a most ethical plague.

He wanted to dissolve in a streak of violence. He wanted a high-impact death, to be done in by momentum. But such things were messy, so instead he prepared a cyanide capsule.

Those hardworking mitochondria. How diligently they produced ATP by forcing protons across membranes. The cyanide would disrupt the membranes by poking holes in them, making ATP synthesis impossible. The body would starve without this fuel, but it would be a very quick starvation, about thirty seconds or so. Tetsuo pitied his organelles, but not his organs, strangely enough.

The suicide pill made him feel like a spy. He stared at it and hoped that death would feel like something. He picked a day in his calendar and circled it in red.

It had to be Aoi that would discover the corpse. The cult had only three members, soon to be two, and Kaito was the less qualified sibling for this particular job. Years of killing rats had hardened Aoi to gruesomeness.

Tetsuo had commissioned a local jeweler to make something special for Aoi. It was a pendant in the shape of a whale tail, in blackened silver with white sapphires. The stones were placed in such a way as to replicate the markings of a humpback whale. The markings of each humpback tail were unique, and so could be used to track the whales. Tetsuo carefully pored over the photos in the whale tail registry before deciding on Joie, female, age 32 (estimated), known mother of at least four other whales in the registry, last seen in the spring off the coast of Baja California. Joie's markings were the prettiest; they reminded Tetsuo of sheet music.

The pendant was hollow on the inside, to accommodate a vial of cat pheromones, synthetic because Tetsuo had killed enough cats already. He had already prepared several vials of pheromones and several more of
T. gondii
variant IV, along with instructions on how to make more. Aoi would be in charge of the lab work, while it would fall to Kaito to poison whale meat at various fish markets and restaurants. Both of them would leaflet restaurants together, in the hope that her scent would attract the afflicted.

"Join us,” she would say.

Yes, they would nod, not even fully sure of what they were agreeing to.

On the day marked in red, Tetsuo changed his plans. He would poison the meat himself. As long as he had a cyanide pill in his pocket, he might as well cause a little mischief.

At the market, the whale flesh was cut into rectangles and placed on ice. Pink and white and red, bloody, but not bleeding. Tetsuo did not gag as he stared at it. The small plastic sign named the price, 3000 yen a pound. He adjusted the sign and a thin stream of liquid microbes fell from a vial taped to his wrist onto meat for sale. The act went unnoticed. He would survive the day and return tomorrow. Today was not the day in red. The day in red would be the day he got caught.

He would pop that pill before being placed in handcuffs. So long, suckers! He wouldn't know if he had done more harm than good in this lifetime until he reached the next. He feared returning to earth as a lab rat, though there would be a certain justice to that. The goal was to reincarnate as a whale. Minke or fin or blue or killer. Happy and free and safe from the Institute of Cetacean “Research.” Worshipped by all, but especially Aoi.

Copyright © 2011 by Dominica Phetteplace

[Back to Table of Contents]

First you have to decide

If your broom

Is aerodynamic

Flying shaftlong up

With the bunch of twigs of broomstraw

Balancing the flight behind

—

Or if your broom

Is sprouting into animal sense

And needs its twigs

Facelike

Forward

To see your heading

—

Also you could do with stirrups

And a bit of saddle

Leastwise

If your destination's

More than a minute's

Distance

—Ruth Berman

[Back to Table of Contents]

Jason K. Chapman tells us, “I work as the IT Director for Poets & Writers (
pw.org
) which, all things considered, is the exact spot in the universe I should be in. I get to indulge my two greatest interests, computers and literature, and get paid for it.” Jason's love of SF began when he stumbled across a copy of
The Hugo
Winners,
Volumes I & II in his early teens. The author's short fiction appearances include stories in the
Grantville Gazette-Universe Annex
and
Clarkesworld
. Readers can find out more about him at
jasonkchapman.com.
Jason's riveting tale about a desperate attempt to outwit fate is his first story for
Asimov's.

Kyle Preston was already out of time when the stranger appeared in the middle of his coffee table. There was a flash and a pop and suddenly the image was there, stopping Kyle with one hand clutching his keys and the other reaching for the doorknob of his Upper West Side apartment. The image was clear, but thin, like a projection on a fog bank. The man looked frightened.

"Look, forget what I said before,” the image said. The voice, too, was thin, like a bad dub heard through cheap earphones. “The records are all jumbled. There are
two
of them."

"What the hell?” Kyle walked toward the image, moving around the side of his found-on-the-sidewalk sofa. From every angle, the image still faced him. The coffee table sliced through the stranger's legs just below the knees. His feet were lost in the stacks of reference books and scientific journals Kyle stored below the table.

"The Bureau knows I'm here,” the image went on, “so my time is almost up.” He laughed, then, in a manic, edge-of-panic sort of way. “I think I was wrong. Whatever you do, don't go to Paris!” The image vanished.

Kyle stared at the empty space above the coffee table for a moment, but it stayed empty. He looked at the battered old wind-up watch that clung to his wrist by its cracked leather band. He had a cell phone. He had a cable box. He owned a laptop. At any given time, Kyle was never far away from a network-synchronized, mutually accepted, atomically sound time keeper, but still he hung on to the crappy watch that crept ahead five minutes every three days simply because of the scratches on the back of its case. “Sorry I couldn't do more,” it read. It was a fitting epitaph for the old man. Pity he'd misspelled the word
didn't
.

The absurdities were piled thick upon deep, not the least of which being the idea that a Columbia grad student working his way toward a career in theoretical physics could afford to go to Paris. The stranger had acted as if this had happened before. If so, Kyle must have missed it. Just how in the hell do you project an image onto nothing, anyway? Especially with no projector. Kyle waved his hand above the coffee table, assuring himself of the thinness of the air. Sure, there was that paper by Krakowski about squeezing photons into one of the micro dimensions, but there was no way to determine where they'd reappear. Was there?

He was already reaching for his sub-table archive when he remembered his lunch date with Anna.
Crap!
Time had gotten away from him again. And she'd been so insistent. They
had
to have lunch today. No, it
couldn't
wait till tonight. She
really
needed to see him. Her emphasis had buzzed through the cheap speaker of his free-when-you-sign-your-soul-away cell phone. Fine. He'd blow the budget and take a cab down to Union Square. A week of ramen noodles would balance things out.

When the cab dropped him on 15th Street, Kyle waded into the crowd. The place was a madhouse, as always, but it was Kyle's kind of madhouse. Thousands of people bounced around in a Brownian chaos that made the city hum. Cell phone in hand, he played a quick game of microwave Marco Polo with Anna. He finally spotted her at the southeast corner of the square. She wore that maroon sweater dress that made Kyle's knees go loose every single time. Again, he swore to himself never to ask what she saw in him. She might realize she didn't have an answer.

"I can't believe you took a cab,” Anna said.

He put an arm around her and aimed for the crosswalk. Across the streets that bounded it, Union Square was surrounded by stores and restaurants. “If I hadn't,” he said, “I'd still be twenty minutes away."

The light changed and they moved with the mass of pedestrians waiting at the corner. “Cool,” she said. “It's like time travel."

He coughed deliberately. “I thought we'd agreed that
I'd
do the physics around here."

She shrugged, laughing. “It's like Schroedinger's Subway Rider. He's both here and twenty minutes away at the same time and you don't know which until he meets his girlfriend."

"That's it, young lady. No more quantum mechanics before bedtime."

"Meanie."

"And furthermore—"

"Stop."

"Why?"

"We're here."

Kyle found himself standing outside a tiny eatery. Three tables, all full, poked out of the restaurant's open front onto the sidewalk. At a glance, there wasn't much to distinguish it from a thousand other places in the city. Kyle glanced up at the awning. It read “Paris Café."

"Kyle, what's wrong?"

Don't go to Paris.
He was being silly. Wasn't he? He'd almost convinced himself that he'd imagined the whole episode, but now wasn't so sure. “I don't know,” he said. “It just . . ."

"Barbara recommended it. Sort of a Parisian-Masala blend with locally-grown organics. She says it's great. Well, you know Barb. She actually said it's ‘
soo
per awesome.’”

"It's full,” Kyle said.

"Look. There's an open two-top in the back."

"I just don't like it."

"You've been here?"

"No,” Kyle said. “Just call it a feeling."

She sighed. “Way to go, Mr. Analytical."

They ended up at the restaurant next door. It was equally nondescript, but it had an outdoor table open which made it, as Barb would say,
soo
per awesome. Kyle never did get to find out if the food was any good. The gas line inside the Paris Café exploded before they'd even placed their order.

Kyle didn't believe in hell, but he did believe in force and mass and acceleration. He believed in the deformation of physical structures upon the application of force vectors. He also believed he could have saved Anna's life. If he'd insisted on moving just one more restaurant down the row, just a few yards farther away, the brick that blew out of the café's facade would have flown out into the street, instead of intersecting with Anna's skull.

And wouldn't that have been just
soo
per awesome.

Except for the funeral, Kyle barely left his apartment for three weeks. There'd been two wreaths at the service, two weights around Kyle's neck, two holes in his universe. Anna's mother told him why Anna had been so excited that day, why she'd insisted on the lunch date. She'd planned to tell him about the pregnancy.

He thought about following his father down that bloody, barefoot path of broken booze bottles, where every cut slashed at those around you, draining their lives away as fast as your own, while you staggered on, blissfully unaware of the damage you did. It was the “blissfully unaware” part that he found so appealing. As to the rest, who would care?
Sorry I couldn't do more.
And that was the rub, wasn't it? The anger that had fueled Kyle's life, the certainty that his father had been wrong, would evaporate, leaving Kyle momentumless, massless, inert. It would, in a way, justify the old man. And Kyle just couldn't let that happen.

When the stranger appeared again, Kyle barely reacted. Nothing seemed to matter that much, not even the question of “how?” Maybe, if he was really, really lucky, he was losing his mind, and some kindly gorillas in shiny white coats would be along any minute with a welcome dose of mind-numbing drugs to take it all away. Forget the fuel. Forget the engine. Let the tide push him where it would.