Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (24 page)

"You bet, kid."

In bed a month later, transported by passion, Larson said, “You look good enough to eat."

"I've been working out."

"Really."

"Going to the gym every day on my lunch break. What do you think?"

"I think you look great, but I always think you look great."

"You're sweet to say that."

"I mean it. But—"

"But what?"

"I don't know. You don't seem like the gym kind of girl."

"I'm not really. But I thought it was time to get in shape."

"Remember when we used to have sex on our lunch breaks?” Larson said.

"Of course I remember. Jeez.” She threw the sheet off, exposing her whole body. “So, what do you think of the new me?"

He traced his fingertips over the slight swell of her belly. “I think you could take me with one hand tied behind your back. But I liked the old—"

She sat up suddenly and pushed Larson over on the mattress, hands locked on his wrists, pinning his arms down, straddling him. “Maybe. But I think I'm going to use
both
hands."

Larson was alone in the apartment and it was raining hard. Vina was at the gym. She was always at the gym. Working out and “getting in shape” was stealing more and more of her time. Larson missed her. He didn't miss the idea of her, or certain aspects of her—he missed
her
.

Cory lay curled in his little basket bed. He spent a lot of time in the basket. The vet had diagnosed him, somewhat vaguely, as suffering from intestinal difficulties—something they needed to keep an eye on, since it might or might not be serious. Cory's meds made him even more listless than he'd already become.

The phone trilled. Larson touched it, and Beverman's avatar appeared courtesy of Projektrix. “You're going to
love
this, Travis. Love it."

"Love what?"

"I found a way to get Kristine on the Corky thing."

"I thought you said there was no language in the divorce settlement to—"

"There isn't. I'm not talking about the divorce settlement. I'm talking about intellectual property law. We can successfully argue that you made Cory the poodle he is, by diligent training and a daily regimen. Before you got hold of Cory he was just a generic dog. You said yourself that Kristine had nothing to do with the training, care, and feeding of the beast, right?"

"Right. But there's no such thing as a generic dog."

"Just listen to me. Think of Corky—"

"
Cory
."

"Whatever. Think of
Cory
as a piano you and Kristine bought. This piano sits in the living room, takes up space, and collects dust. Because nobody seriously plays the piano unless they've
always
played the piano. But you did play, my friend. You wrote songs on that piano. And then when the divorce came, Kristine appropriated a copy of the piano—which was a harmless deed. But she also appropriated
the songs you wrote on it
, which she then promptly infected all over the web."

Larson pressed his fingers to his temples, squinting at his attorney's avatar. “Cory isn't a piano."

"You're missing the point! What made the Corky download popular wasn't the fact that he was a cute poodle. What made him popular was what
you
trained the poodle to do. Around and around and around, for example.” Beverman's avatar made a silly whirling motion with his finger. “What made Corky popular were the songs you wrote on him. In other words, Kristine has stolen your intellectual property."

The attorney's avatar rubbed virtual hands together like Scrooge McDuck in a bank vault.

The real Cory struggled up on his feet, whimpering, and dragged himself to his water bowl. Larson kept the bowl close to the poodle's bed, but Cory still had to get up to drink. It was painful to watch.

"What does all that mean?” Larson asked Beverman. “What can we actually do about it?"

"Oh, nothing much."

"Then what's the point?"

"Travis. The poodle is already out of the bag, so to speak. There is no recapturing the information, or retrieving all the thousands of virtual Corkys. But a judgment against Kristine will wound her credibility in the legal profession. If you want to strike back, this is how we do it. Trust me. We could even exact damages, if you want to go that route. But the point is to strike back for your emotional suffering."

"Okay."

"Okay? That's it? After all the—"

"
Okay
."

Larson killed the avatar. Rain gusted in gritty waves against the wall-to-wall windows. Mid-afternoon and it was dark enough to require lamplight. Cory struggled back to his bed.

"Good dog,” Larson said.

Cory's little stub-tail wagged briefly.

Emotional suffering.

Every day, Larson returned to the apartment at lunch to check on Cory, give him his afternoon meds, and see if he needed to go out to the little green patch at the side of the building and relieve himself. The Tuesday after the call from Beverman, Larson found the poodle lying unnaturally still in his little bed. On the floor next to the bed there was a puddle of vomit threaded with blood.

Larson's mouth opened and the breath halted in his chest. He stared hard. Usually you could see the poodle's flank rising and falling when he slept. This time: nothing. Grief squeezed Larson's throat. And then Cory opened his eyes and blinked at him.

The vet wanted to keep Cory overnight, sedated. In the morning they would do an arthroscopic examination.

"What do you think it is?” Larson asked, holding the dog in his arms.

"We won't know until tomorrow. For now there's no sense in speculating."

Larson didn't have the heart to go back to work, so he returned home early to the apartment. Vina was already there. He surprised her in the spare bedroom, which was directly across from the entry. She was wearing his ex-wife's head, modeling herself naked, except for the Projectrix necklace, before the full-length mirror. She turned suddenly at the sound of the door opening, her full breasts swinging, so unlike Kristine's model-modest chest.

"Travis! I—"Her voice behind the blank, motionless, dead expression of Kristine's face.

"Jesus,” Larson said. “Could you turn that off, please?"

She touched something on the necklace and the Kristine head vanished. “That's so embarrassing,” Vina said. “I was just . . . I don't know."

"Look, don't do that anymore, okay?"

"Okay. Hey, what's wrong? Are you crying or something?"

"I just want you to be you."

"That's easy. I am me.” Vina pulled on a robe. She touched his cheek. “Hey, I love you."

He held her. “I love you, too. And you know I don't want you to be like Kristine."

"I know that. I was just playing around with the head. Really."

"And I don't want you to spend every second at the gym, not if you're doing it because of me."

"I'm not. Well, maybe a little bit because of you. It hurts when I see you looking at other girls. But mostly I work out for me."

"It's just looking. It's nothing. And you're perfect already, as far as I'm concerned. I don't care about other girls."

"Aw. You're perfect, too, Trav."

They kissed. “Hey,” Vina said, pulling back. “You
are
crying. Travis, where's the dog?"

Larson couldn't sleep. He stared at Vina's face on the pillow beside his. For all her dieting and exercise her features were still thick and plain; she was still
Vina
. Which is all he wanted. He remembered lying next to Kristine and how calm it felt to be with her sleeping body after all the stress and tension of their waking conflicts—Kristine's sleeping face presenting her absence. But Larson was tired of absence.

He slipped from the bed and into the hallway, pulling the bedroom door shut behind him. In the living room he called Beverman's office and left a message, keeping his voice down so he wouldn't wake Vina.

"I'm dropping it. We're not going to sue Kristine."

Larson fixed himself a drink and sat in the living room, listening to the rain. The bourbon helped Larson keep his fear at bay. That's what Kristine used to do for him. She used to keep the fear at bay by her presence. But presence wasn't always enough. Eventually you had to be there all the way, and you had to let somebody else be there all the way, too. Without that, little comforts counted all out of proportion. Even the comfort of a virtual dog you couldn't really touch. Some people needed that. It was a small thing and you were petty to begrudge it. The world only went around so many times in a person's life. If you made it harder than it already was, you were really just this gloomy person—this
shouter
.

Rain blew against the windows. Larson poured another bourbon and stood looking out at the city, at the world moving around through one dark night and already on the way toward the next one. Around and around and around.

Copyright © 2011 by Jack Skillingstead

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Galileo's Inkspots Fade into Twilight

Monks and madmen announce the end is near

and in the half-light auroras flare by day.

We look up at the mottled Sun in fear,

while from the north, the ice moves down to stay.

—

Solar variation, we are told.

Pressure oscillations in the core.

Stars sometimes do that as they get old.

A normal thing for a middle-aged star.

—

Just a short time, a million years or two

a magnitude dimmer, rarely much more,

not long to wait until it glows anew,

barely a blink in the life of a star

—

Inkspots now spatter the disk of the sun,

and brightness fades: our last days are begun.

—Geoffrey A. Landis

[Back to Table of Contents]

Eleanor Arnason has published six novels, thirty-plus short stories, and some poems. She has won the Tiptree, Mythopoeic, and Spectrum Awards, and has been a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo. Eleanor recently retired from making a living, but continues to write. After too long an absence from our pages, she returns with a perfect tale for our slightly spooky October/November issue. Set in a desolate corner of Iceland, it tells the modern consequences of an ancient monster's peculiar attempts to woo a twenty-first century woman.

I.

There was a woman named Signy, who was a journalist in Reykjavik. Her favorite work was writing about the environment, but she also did articles about art and fine dining. One does what one has to do in order to get by. In her spare time, she was working on a magical realist novel about Iceland in the twentieth century. She had read all the great Latin American writers, the Icelandic family sagas, and the novels of Haldor Laxness. But she hadn't found an approach to the novel that satisfied her.

She had a summer house in the East Fjords. This is a desolate area. The young people leave, because there is no longer any work. The fishing villages along the coast are empty or mostly empty, and there are abandoned farms in the mountains. Signy didn't mind this. She liked solitude and the landscape, and the house had been cheap, because most people wanted vacation homes closer to the capital.

Every chance she got, she drove to her house, taking Highway One into the East Fjords and then an unpaved road up to the house. It stood on a high slope. Behind it was a cliff of black stone; and in front was a long expanse of uncut grass that ended suddenly in a drop off. Beyond the drop off was a headland, an island, and the glimmering ocean. It seemed she ought to be able to see all the way to Norway.

Although it was isolated, the house had all the comforts Signy wanted: a generator, a well, an inside bathroom, a living room furnished with comfortable furniture and a tiny bedroom with a bed and a down coverlet. She spent most weekends there and often entire weeks.

She especially enjoyed getting up in the morning, making coffee, and going out her front door to look at the ocean, while she drank the piping hot coffee.

One morning when she did this, she found a wild swan on the ground in front of her door. It was dead, its neck broken. She looked at it for some time and then called the police.

"That's strange,” the voice on her cell phone said. “We have someone who lives not too far from you. We'll ask him to stop by."

She left the swan where it was and went inside. But she couldn't work on her novel. As the voice on the phone had said, the incident was strange and not in a way she liked.

Early in the afternoon a police car climbed the road to her summer house. It stopped. A big man got out and introduced himself. His name was Hrafn, which means Raven, but there was nothing raven-like about him. His hair was blond, and his eyes pale blue. He looked solid and not especially clever.

He examined the dead swan. “I can't find any tooth marks, which means it wasn't a fox or a dog. In any case, I don't think a fox could kill a bird this big. In my opinion, a human strangled it and left it for you. Can you think of any reason why?"