Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (16 page)

Sorry wasn't enough. You couldn't just regret things. You had to fix them. You
had
to do more. If you wanted to send a message, send a good one.

Yes, that was it. Kyle pulled the pistol out of his pocket and stuck it back into the nightstand. He didn't have to hurt anyone, didn't have to kill. He just had to send a message. His life's work had been about sending messages back in time. He'd been looking the wrong way. He needed to send a message to the future. He took the watch off his wrist for the last time and went to join his family in the living room.

In the following months, a great many people had cause to think that Kyle was losing his mind. As far as he was concerned, they may have been right, but he had enough notoriety—and enough money—that no one really cared. He chose the three most stable and prestigious law firms he could find and paid them staggering sums of money to contractually obligate them for at least two hundred years. As long as there were laws and courts and a country to keep them all enforced, those firms would keep his packages safe. They would watch over his descendents, tracking each generation of offspring. They would follow the trail of Gadwins no matter where it led, until one day Gadwin Smith would arrive.

The packages themselves weren't cheap, either. Paper alone wouldn't do. He etched his story into thin sheets of stainless steel. He had it encoded into every form he could think of and stored on every medium available. One of them had to make it through.

If you were going to send a message, make it a good one.

Kyle Preston checked his watch, subtracting the usual five minutes. He had plenty of time. It was still two hours before he had to meet Anna for lunch in Union Square. He was just about to sit down with a newly-arrived journal when the stranger appeared in the middle of his coffee table. There was a flash and a pop and there he was.

"My name is Gadwin Smith,” the stranger began. “I don't understand how you knew about all this—this machine, my brother, the war.” His eyes closed as his lips pressed themselves into a thin, pale line. He looked tortured. “Your message says that I told you about it—
will
tell you."

"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.

"All these years I thought it was a joke,” Gadwin Smith went on, “but I believe you now. And you have to believe me.” The image held up two objects that appeared out of nowhere. One looked like a sheet of stiff, shiny paper. The other was a watch. “I can't stop him. No one can. Not now."

Kyle looked at his wrist and back at the image. It definitely looked like his watch.

"Give me some time,” Gadwin said. “I need to tell you a story."

"You want to tell me something,” Kyle said. He took Anna's hand across the tiny café table, nearly knocking over the salt shaker.

"How do you know?"

"I just do.” He barely flinched when he heard the explosion. They were at a place on 13th Street, nearly a block away from Union Square. He clutched Anna's hand as he felt his own begin to shake. It was New York. Loud noises were part of the scenery.

She looked past his shoulder. “What was that?"

"Not important,” Kyle said. He smiled, shifting sideways to put himself in her line of sight. “You're what's important."

She smiled back at him. “Good,” she said. She reached over with her other hand and touched his bare wrist. “Your father's watch?"

Kyle stared at the spot where Anna's fingers touched skin that had been kept too long away from the light and air. “His watch,” he said. “Not mine. I can do better."

"Yes, you can,” she said. “And you will.” Then she told him her news.

By the time they heard the sirens in the distance they were too deeply wrapped in their life together to notice. Kyle smiled, took a deep breath, and cast himself into the unknown, uncertain future.

Copyright © 2011 by Jason K. Chapman

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The bones of your mother

ride the unending dust storms

on Triad Sixteen.

—

Your father's skull

bleaches in the stark light

of an airless moon.

—

Your wife leaves you

for an alien lover

from the Haasedar Quadrant.

—

You daughter joins

a gravfree artist colony

in an artificial satellite.

—

Your teenage son

has never returned

from the Pleasure Domes.

—

You travel aimlessly

from red giant to white dwarf,

always on the look out for home.

—Bruce Boston

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Financial Times Weekend
review of Kit Reed's new collection,
What Wolves Know,
calls the work a “confirmation of an extraordinary talent.” The review sums Kit up neatly: “She calls herself ‘transgenred,’ acknowledging that her fiction is too fantastical for most literati and too literary for most fans of the fantastic.” Her recent novels include
Enclave, The Baby Merchant
and
Thinner Than Thou,
and her short fiction appears in
Asimov's
as well as dozens of anthologies and periodicals that include
The Kenyon Review
and
The Yale Review.
She's been nominated for several awards in the SF field but in the realm of prizes, she's often been a bridesmaid, but, so far, not the bride. In a tale that is both literary and fantastic, Kit returns to our pages to reveal the terrors that lurk behind the icy smiles of authors vying for attention in a competition at a writers retreat and the horror that awaits the losers and those who can't cope with . . .

I'm supposed to come down and sit in your, like, confession box and spill my . . . what? Wait! I have to do makeup. So, is this judged more on looks, or is it a performance thing?

All right, all right, this is
not
a contest, but. Really. Gazillion writing samples, audition demos, personal interviews and you only picked twenty of us, how is not competitive? I am very close to someone who didn't make it, and believe me, there are feelings . . . Davy, I love you, think of me as doing it for you!

Hello out there, audience? Judges? Whatever you are. This is Cynthia LaMott, speaking to you from The Confessional in the re-purposed Gothic chapel on my very first day at Strickfield. What a rush! First I want to thank Dame Hilda for founding the colony in memory of Ralph Strickler, her son, who died. Nobody will say how, but it was awful. Greetings from the great stone castle where many are called but few are, oh, you know.

Mom, they chose me, bad Cynnie, and not Leon, family crown prince and bum playwright, for this expense-paid summer in the castle; if you have to ask you can't afford it, and fuck you.

Davy was very sweet about it when I got the callback because until last week, he thought we were equals. He's a poet so it shouldn't be a problem, but it is. A guy in a white suit hand-carried the invitation up four flights to our front door. By the time Davy and I opened it he was down in the street, getting into a cab. Davy made me jump for the envelope like this was a game, which it definitely is not.

I think.

Mom, it was for me! Time, place, and dates engraved, with a note added in that farty, rich-girl handwriting you see in raised silver foil on every Aline Armantout bestseller:

Welcome, writer-in-waiting. At Strickfield, you'll do great things, and this year we're starting something new! Do come. Your future depends on it.

xxxx A.A.

That's all.

Aline herself followed up with a phone call, which is how Davy and I knew it wasn't a joke. I wanted to ask about the
something new
but she said, “Congratulations, you are chosen.” Period. Davy gave me Swarovski crystals to prove he isn't mad. Real writers don't have day jobs, so Davy maxed out his plastic to cover the rental car plus gas and snacks along the way to keep me sharp so I can sparkle at the Opening Night Banquet. Everybody, it's black tie!

We drove forever to get here. Strickfield is in the middle of, like, the Black Forest. Who knew it was also shopping hell? No malls anywhere; you can't even order online. In woods like these, delivery kids get hunted down and eaten by bears, and all the pretty things in their packages ripped to shreds. Riding up here, I could swear I saw wolves running along behind the car. They didn't peel off until the castle gates opened up and then clanged shut behind Davy's Zipcar like a giant bear trap.

In spite of which this place is beautiful, although there are rumors about The Thing in The Lake and weird noises coming from the attic. Three months, all expenses paid, what could go wrong?

Well, one thing. Nobody warned me
every single dinner is black tie.
If I do this right I'll be famous. My whole life is at stake and I'm sitting here thinking,
what to wear, what to wear?

See, for dress-up, I brought exactly one sexy dress and my Jimmy Choos that I got off a stall—I saw the guy glue in the label himself. Oh, and my present Davy bought to prove he's okay with this—which was big of him, as, whatever the game is, we both know he just lost.

Entre nous
, it's just as well Strickfield's just for the chosen, so he's not allowed to stay. When you're in love with a guy, the last thing you want is you and him both fighting over the same prize.

I hope Davy gets home all right.

I hope he won't dump me if I lose.

Unless I'm scared he'll dump me if I win.

Do I love being a writer more than I love my boyfriend? Are we lovers or rivals or what? Not clear. I'm not a poet like he is, so we thought it was okay but it isn't, and that's just bad.

Which is more important, really? My one-and-only or this thing that I don't even know what it is, that I have to do? Does wanting something bigger than I am make me a writer or is there more? It's not like I can make out the size and shape of my ambition, all I know is that I want this, and I want it bad.

Writers work alone but here I am, batched with people who fought, bled and died to make it here, so what's that all about? Probably we'd rather hang out than work, so we're putting off the hard part, where we have to sit down and bash our heads against a wall of words with nobody around to cheer us on. See, at rock bottom what goes on between you and your work is strictly private, in spite of which we cluster in these places, and it scares the crap out of me. Like we're all in a footrace or a beauty contest, with only one prize.

“
We expect great things from you.” They do. It was on the invitation, but what, exactly, is not written, here or anywhere?

So, are colonies like Strickfield really part of the process? You hear about one person every year when a Strickfield summer ends, and that person starts winning prizes, fame and fortune implied, but what happens to the rest?

I guess you stop hearing about them because the world only wants to hear about winners, right?

Which is why I have to win this thing! No prob. All I have to do is figure out the object of the game—and play the game, but, wait. What if the object of the game is finding out the object of the game?

Oooh, camera, I think I know how my novel starts!

Emerging from the dressing room, Stephanie was sweating thumb tacks that penetrated every soft spot in her body. The regulation satin thong gave her a humiliating wedgie. Her heart constricted under the mandated mini-bra. Her perfume stank and her head wobbled under the weight of her towering hair but she had agreed to enter the Miss Universe pageant and now, next-to-naked, she was heading into the blinding light, exposed like this, on the cavernous stage.

Oh, sorry. I was just—never mind.

It was scary, coming up the walk, like the electrified razor wire on top of the wall was the only thing holding back those monstrous trees. Gnarly bushes loomed like predators crouched to spring. Then Miss Nedobity opened the great front door and everything got worse. Strickfield's successes publish smarmy thank-you notes to this woman; they dedicate books to her, but she's famous for being mean and nobody can figure out why sweet Dame Hilda left her in charge.

This pair of heavily armored boobs came out first, closely followed by the lady herself, with her fierce diamond dog collar and her fuck-you smile. She was all, “Welcome, welcome."

Then she wasn't.
Wham,
she slammed her clipboard into Davy's chest. “Not you,” she said, and ticked my name off. “LaMott. You're the last. Now, keep this sheet with you at all times."

It was pink. It was headed: HOUSE RULES, which Miss Nedobity recited in case I couldn't read. “No cell phones at Strickfield. We have a signal blocker, so don't even try. In case of emergency, there's a pay phone in the office; computers, but no Internet; no wandering in the halls after Lights Out; and
no outsiders
."