Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (28 page)

She squatted, tucked up, with her eyes closed while she re-acquainted herself with the sound and touch of the world. It was daytime, but not warm. The wind raised goosebumps on her skin. The light came pink through her eyelids, but it wasn't blinding bright. Small things scuttled about on the ground nearby. Gamman felt the prickle of thunder.

She opened her eyes.

She was facing the sea, the great dry pan of salt that went to the horizon. It was dull white under a roof of grey clouds that blotted the sun. The clouds were heavy with the sky's grief, accumulated over the long years of the dry. The sea would fill up, when the rain fell.

It had rained some already, she could feel it in the dampness of the earth. But not enough, yet, to bring forth the green leaves and bright flowers that would carpet the ground once the true downpour began. Red dirt extended away from the saltpan, broken by outcrops of eroded rock the same color. Red dunes encroached to the south, closer than Gamman remembered. The olive and grey foliage of brittle-dry shrubs interrupted the monotony. When the rain came, they would flower in yellow and blue, pink and white.

Gamman's stomach grumbled. She duck-walked over to the nearest shrub and dug around its roots for the fat white grubs that slumbered there. She gobbled them greedily.

"Gamman."

She turned. A man approached. His brown skin was covered in red dust, as was hers. The same stuff matted his hair and beard. His chest and shoulders were wide above the slits of his gills across his middle torso. His long-legged gait was easy.

"Ulin," she said, her voice rusted from lack of use. "I be seein you."

Ulin grinned, showing good teeth apart from one chipped corner at the front.

He squatted to join her digging under the shrub, quickly turning up a pair of grubs. He offered one to Gamman and popped the other into his mouth.

"You be early wakin," he said.

"Early wakin like Suka, my mother," she agreed.

Ulin swallowed the grub and smacked his lips. "Them late wakin peop'e don' know what them missin," he declared.

Gamman grimaced. The muscles of her face moved awkwardly, only dimly remembering the expression. "Fishes tas'e better, I think."

Ulin chuckled. His gaze ran over her. "You bein all grown," he said.

She felt a slight stirring between her legs. Ulin was a handsome man. "Am now," she agreed.

He grinned again, then looked over his shoulder. He raised an arm to point to a low, flat-topped butte near the dry shore. "Some other early wakin peop'e be at the cave already."

Gamman stood cautiously, bracing fingertips on Ulin's shoulder while her head spun a moment. He rose beside her and they began walking towards the butte. She thought perhaps that Suka, her mother, would be among those already awake.

People gathered at the cave over the following days as scattered showers fell. The occasional rumble of thunder could be heard from deep within the clouds.

Of every newcomer, Gamman asked, "You been seein Suka, my mother?" But none had.

Her sister came in—Tennip, born of Suka as well and older than Gamman. Tennip answered the same as the rest, "No," then watched Gamman a while as she asked the next ones after her.

Eventually Tennip came and sat beside Gamman at the mouth of the cave. Both of them gazed out over the saltpan.

Tennip said, "Suka, who give birth to you an me, she seen the rain come many time. I think she not be wakin this time."

Gamman hung her head. "I think you right."

Later, Gamman sat close beside Ulin. The light touch of his knee against her thigh had a burning intensity. Daylight had faded behind the clouds and the cave was lit only by the campfire. The people around it were still, at rest.

In the stories that were sometimes told, of the dawn time when there was always rain, people were always moving, never resting, never still, and all the creatures and fishes were the same. People didn't dig in those days, but built their places by piling sticks and rocks on top of the ground, and hid inside from the rain. And they couldn't breathe the water, just the air, so they had to do their fishing from the edge of the sea.

Gamman saw Tennip start to fidget, and knew that a song had come into her even before she lifted her head and released the first mournful cry. "

Ai-yah. Ai-yah oh!"

Gamman shared a sigh with all the rest.

Tennip cried out again, "Ai Suka! Ai-yah oh!"

She stood to begin a shuffling dance around the flames. Some rose to join her, others who were tired or who tended small children retreated to give the dancers room.

Ulin turned to Gamman. He laid a hand on her breast, then on her belly. She shivered.

"You bein ol' enough, now," he said.

They retreated to the back of the cave and mated, simply and quickly, kneeling on the dusty stone. Afterward, Gamman lay on her side, afraid that his juice might run straight out of her if she stood, while Ulin joined the dance around the fire.

She watched the dancers, shuffling and stamping, and imagined them as people from the dawn time, always moving, and wondered at the strangeness of those days.

The storm finally broke, and the rain fell in sheets that hid the horizon. The people hunted small creatures that struggled from their burrows. They watched the flood creep across the saltpan. Then they swam, diving under for long hours with the brine flowing in their throats and gills. They chased the fishes—scaled, shelled, or many-legged—and ate most of them raw. Only rarely did they come back to shore.

Gamman mated several more times with Ulin. The next rain, she would wake with a baby grown inside her. She would birth it in the flooding sea and suckle it and teach it to swim.

One night, near the end of the rain, the clouds broke apart for a while, as some of the people sat beside the shore. They gazed up at the stars.

A story came to Gamman that Suka, her mother, had told when Gamman was young. Gamman let it pass through her and out, beginning as stories always began: "In the dawn time, when the worl' was new, there was always rain, for the sky still wep' at bein apart from the earth."

She waited for the sigh that said people were listening, then went on. "In time, the sky an the earth grew ol', an them got slow, an them learn to be still. An all them creatures an fishes learn the same. An the sky learn to be conten' with bein apart from the earth, an didn' weep no more, hard'y at all. An there was no more rain. An all them creatures and them fishes learn to dig, an sleep still in the earth through the dry time, til the sky do weep again, an the rain come.

"An peop'e learn the same. 'Cept for them who wouldn'. Them peop'e, them didn' want to stay still, them want to keep movin. An them peop'e learn the way up to the sky, an them become the stars. Them a'ways movin, still."

She slumped when the story was done with her, used up by the torrent of words.

Ulin rested his hand on her back.

"Ai-yah oh," sang Tennip, softly.

The stars wheeled overhead. No one else spoke. They sat still, and watched.

ADVENTURES IN COGNITIVE HOMOGAMY: A LOVE STORY

Paul Di Filippo
| 7277 words

The majority of Paul Di Filippo's backlist, some fourteen books, is available in digital editions at e-Reads. His second collection of humor columns,
More Plumage from Pegasus,
was recently published by PS Books, and his newest story collection,
Wikiworld,
is just out from Chizine. Paul's latest story for us is the result of a trip to Colombia in 2012 to attend the futurist-oriented Fractal Conference put on annually by Hernan Ortiz and Vivi Trujillo. The author tells us, "Hernan and Vivi were kind enough to vet my story for any cultural misapprehensions, pronouncing themselves very pleased with the adventure I chose to stage in their gracious land."

Handsome Kioga Matson, waking from a fitful programmed microsleep imperfectly contoured by the experimental orexin-modulating drug Ailurexant he had self-prescribed, and landing once again in yet another of those Science Parks that constituted his insular and discontiguous adopted homeland, a quasi-state composed of homogenous R&D and prototyping sites in a globe-girdling network of exclusive brainpower, had to pause a moment on consciousness's hazier edges, an interzone fuzzed also by an ongoing bad episode of Kyoto Duck Flu against which he had been administering a powdered antiviral inhalant from NexBio, DAS939, in order to recall exactly what antiquated nation-state now hosted him.

Looking blurrily out the window as the SonicStar plane taxied, he saw a line of modest mountains ringing, at some distance, the small corporate landing field. So this could not be Kalundborg in Denmark nor Seletar in Singapore nor Granta in the United Kingdom. But it could very well have been Sunlight in Montana, USA, or Acheson in Canada or Baikampady in India. Very disorienting.

A glimpse of some lush emerald tropical vegetation caused the knowledge of his current destination to click into place in his memory. He had come down in Parque Arví, Medellín, Colombia. Along with other boffins Kioga was to participate in a presentation for MercoSur trade reps, his field of expertise being industrial metabolics. And he was also to spend a full glorious twenty-four hours in the presence of his fiancée, Mallory Sloper, whom he had not seen in six whole weeks. In theory, what bliss!

And yet, Kioga found himself strangely unexcited at the prospect of reconnecting with his bride-to-be. He imagined with some degree of accuracy that much of their private time here would be spent firming up the endless details of their elaborate wedding next year—details that had already consumed a myriad of online hours when apart—and that rather too little time would be spent with any kind of preferable bedroom athletics. This skewed ratio of work to fun irked Kioga, and he had to strive hard to convince himself that everything would be different after they were married.

As the ground crew wheeled a set of steps up to the opening hatch of the jet, Matson sneezed suddenly with contaminatory gale force. He fumbled out a packet of tissues and evacuated his nostrils, preparatory to blasting another hit of DAS939 into his sinuses. That task done, he woke his nap-silenced phone and, feeling somewhat guilty at his ingratitude toward Mallory's majestic and unyielding love, rang her up. She'd be happy if he checked in immediately upon landing and disgruntled if he didn't—though she would never admit her displeasure, instead merely affecting a certain sharpness of voice that cloaked ostensibly jovial phrases in sonic barbed wire.

The superfine patrician bone structure of his beloved's face, wrapped in seemingly poreless peachy flesh finer than spidersilk, filled his phone's retina+ display. Since last telephonically encountered, Mallory had changed her hairstyle to a platinum pixie cut layered with living crimson pinfeathers that tapped her scalp's blood supply to stay perpetually vibrant.

"Darling! You beat me to Colombia. And I so wanted to be there to meet you! But the Osaka conference ran long."

"It's just as well. I'm a bit under the weather.
La grippe canard.
I can use a little downtime first."

"Well, I'm somewhere over the Pacific at the moment. ETA about two hours from now."

"Fine. You can wake your Prince Charming with a kiss."

"But of course! And then—"

Kioga brightened. "And then?"

"We simply have to discuss the guest list!"

Kioga suppressed a wince. The dreaded guest list discussion had already occupied one-hundred-and-fifty-two-point-five hours of his life. He knew the stat precisely from totaling all the automatically tagged hours in his lifelog. Sometimes it seemed that this endless parsing of the relative affinity bonds of friends, relatives, and business associates would extend into infinity, finding an angel-winged Kioga still indecisively parceling out seats in the heavenly cloudbanks.

"Of course. I can't wait. See you soon."

"Mwah!
Bye for now, lover."

Lodgings for braintrust gypsies at Parque Arví were, of course, more or less identical with the facilities at a hundred other Science Parks, an organically efficient architecture and interior design that bespoke a kind of stern technocratic accommodation with the needs of the flesh and spirit, acknowledging that a measured slight amount of earned pampering was conducive to productivity and creativity, while any hints of hedonism would amount to a venal betrayal of a sacred, semi-public trust, not to mention stockholder bottomline expectations.

Kioga's phone checked him in as he walked through the lobby, instantly making his location known to everyone in his social and business networks. Greetings and memos filled his message queue, but the phone flagged nothing for his immediate atten tion. A message from Jimmy Velvet, declaring boisterously that Jimmy himself would imminently be "hot-cradling in Parque Arví," lifted Kioga's spirits. Any time spent with Mr. James Swinburne Velvet would involve exotic inebriants, Planck-level conversation, and possible rousing altercations with offended pecksniffs and grundies of all stripes. But right now, Kioga felt relieved to have a couple of hours to himself.

Up in his room Kioga unpacked his small bag, his essential invariant kit. He propped a dented, military-hardened, brushed aluminum digital picture frame on his dresser top. A memento of his recently deceased mother, Brenda, the frame cycled through photos of the Matson family: a sprawling, well-fed, bright-eyed Anglo clan, jolly as a whitebread Christmas pudding with one dark little raisin embedded.

Kioga regarded that selfsame grownup raisin in the smart mirror over the dresser. (The mirror flashed a mild warning that his body temperature was one-point-seven degrees above normal, courtesy of
la grippe canard.)
Six-two, burnt sienna skin, hair buzzed almost to nullity—at age twenty-eight he resembled, some said, Uganda's still vibrant elder statesman, President Frank Mugisha.

Not exactly a phenotype in conformity with his adopted kin.

Twenty-five years ago, in 2015, Brenda Matson had been a KBR mercenary attached to the U.S.'s AFRICOM forces based in Entebbe, Uganda, where they waged a cat-and-mouse contest with the fighters of al-Shabaab. Captured after a fierce fire-fight in the bush, Brenda Matson had been removed to a tiny remote village on the shores of Lake Kioga that hosted the terrorist cell. There she had been securely bound and dumped into a big multifamily hut, all gnarly poles, mud-walls and palm-thatched roof. Hot, smelly, claustrophobia-inducing, with manic house geckos skittering every which way.