Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (37 page)

It is magnificent.

About a dozen people in gray suits work in the hangar—jetting near the larger installations and hovering like dragonflies to tweak a propulsion unit or diagnose an adhesion rivet.

Roxy crosses her arms and tries to decide what to do next. They will find her; she is sure of that.

No—I see it in her eyes. She is trying to figure out
how
to do what she already plans to do.

This is the moment that should be flagged, sent higher up the food chain, when a predator is neither contained with other predators nor immediately threatened.

Roxy says something, but I can't understand it. She bangs on the window, and then takes the guard's interface out of her mouth. She presses a few buttons on it and casts it aside. Then she retrieves something else from her mouth, from underneath her long tongue. She slaps a small patch of yellow goo on the window and she takes a few steps back. I'm told that they've finally made a connection with her again. They are coming for her.

She covers her face. The door blows open. Metal shards nick her, but she manages to sidestep most of them. There's a yellowish fog in the corridor; the goo keeps emitting smoke. Behind her, guards call for her. She calls back, but again I can't understand what she's saying.

She darts into the hangar, choking but staggering forward. I can't see her because of the mist. The guards plunge through the broken doorway as well, but they are not prepared for the mist, and they halt and begin coughing.

I cannot see Roxy in the hangar at all, but in another minute, the hangar door heaves open, letting in the bright, unyielding Antarctic sunlight, and the dry, bitter air.

The art installations' cables have snapped; whether it's because of the mist, I cannot say. I am shaking. They slowly float out of the hangar: a hot air balloon attached to a large black heron, a hybrid of a dragon and a biplane.
The Leviathan
is the last to leave, as the whales' bodies rotate slowly. Roxy is still nowhere to be seen.

That's when my bees start to die. The view of the hangar gets fainter and scratchier, and then there is only the blank screen the color of black pearl.

I feel feverish. I stand up and check on my wife, who is resting in the study. I see—if for only an instant—Roxy's face in hers. That is why it is important to understand art before you buy it, to know how to see what is in front of you. But after my wife entered her coma, I became not only a connoisseur, but a patron. Commissioning Roxy with my wife's DNA was not theoretically legal, even in Antarctica. But I would not be deterred.

I stroke my wife's gray locks of hair. She doesn't stir. I feel the air from her breathing apparatus. When Roxy broke into the study—what did she know? How could she have known of my wife? She must have stared at my wife's face and seen something of herself there, some unblemished vision, without the animal splicings, without the flowers blossoming inside her arms.

That's when she tried to unplug my wife. I found her just in time. She shrieked at me in babble—of course it was incomprehensible—and darted past me. I called the local militia and explained the situation as I struggled to keep up with her roaming through the villa. I should have known that Roxy was veering toward my wife's old suites. She managed to break in and lock the main door behind her. When the militia finally entered the locked-off rooms by cutting a hole in the ceiling, Roxy was dressed in my wife's favorite peacock gown and had torn all her favorite paintings off the walls—Degas, Twombly, Hals—and stacked them in a pile. My wife had always been old-fashioned; she cared little for contemporary art.

Roxy was also wielding, with her tail, a broadsword from my wife's extensive medieval armor collection. The first fool who dropped through the ceiling was beheaded with surprising force. Blood gushed everywhere, but Roxy was careful to put herself in front of the paintings, so that they wouldn't get spoiled. It took a dozen militia soldiers to stun and subdue Roxy.

That was when I decided she needed to be loaned out. I immediately sold all of the paintings that she had torn off the wall. I could not bear to have them within my villa.

Roxy would have ruined everything with my wife. Yet I am upset that she is gone, and likely dead, because she didn't give me the chance to ruin her.

I exit the study and put on my suit and then go outside. There is a smog advisory around Ross Bay. Along the shore, the hills of bell heather and the crabgrass burn, only a few kilometers from the villa. No one is going to stop them from burning. There's no point. The weeds will grow again and burn again. The air has a pink tinge; I actually think it's beautiful.

If
The Leviathan
were to come to me, I would not see it descend, until it was almost too late. What would my wife have thought of those Jackson Pollocks? Surely she would have been riveted by the sight?

I go back inside. I try to put the incident behind me. Cashing the insurance settle ment helps. Many of the works from the museum are recovered—albeit damaged—but not Roxy. I decide that I want to go shopping in earnest this time, for a work of art that, by active contemplation of it, will help ease my unease. I put out feelers for a few weeks to the best galleries.

I cross John Priestly off my list, naturally.

After a week, when I am ready to visit my favorite galleries in person to bargain for a sale, I receive a package, about half my height. It doesn't list a sender. I am often the recipient of enticements from galleries. After the courier leaves, I take it to my study—it is not heavy at all—and press my hands against the black box. The sides flop open.

Inside the package is a sculpture of me. Though only a meter tall, it is like me in every aspect. Its skin gleams white as mine gleams. Its eyes are opalesque like mine. Its hands are at its sides. I am filled with both flattery and fear; flattery at the daring attempt at hyperrealism, and fear from the blank, unnerving stare from my miniature twin.

It is staring at me. Its head has moved imperceptibly, but it now looks in my eyes. I am transfixed, despite my best efforts. I immediately desire to know who the artist is, and what the genetic provenance is. As I take a step toward it, the sculpture turns its head to one side. It's like a glitch, or as if the sculpture is thinking or listening to an inner voice.

Then the
objet d'art
puts both hands against its ears, squeezes tightly, and rips its own head off.

The sculpture holds its head over its body. Yellow mist spews from its neck. I manage to look at my wife, before the mist overtakes us.

WITHIN THESE WELL-SCRUBBED WALLS

Ian Creasey
| 3074 words

Ian Creasey tells us, "this story is the shortest I've published in
Asimov's,
and it's also the one that took the longest to write. I had the initial notion way back in 2002; ten years later, I realized how to execute it. Even today I'm reminded of the story whenever I use my notebook, which still bears the stains from where I dropped it in the mud during an excursion to check what the protagonist would see in the final scene. Readers may rest assured that my depictions of rain and mud are fully authentic!"

When David arrived at his mother's house in Harrogate, he hesitated before getting out of the van. After a moment, he picked up the plastic box containing his mother's ashes. It felt disrespectful to simply leave the box in the van—and besides, what if someone stole the vehicle?

Yet it didn't feel entirely right to take the ashes inside. The whole point of today's visit was to clear out the flat, so it seemed odd to start by bringing something in.

Well, no help for it. David strode up the path, past the paved front yard where no flowers grew. His mother lived—had lived—in the ground floor flat. He fumbled the keys into the lock. As soon as he opened the door and smelled the familiar scent of bleach and air-freshener, a rush of emotion welled up within him.

Not nostalgia, a word that implied pleasant or at least bittersweet memories. This was a more painful emotion, a tangled knot of grief and childhood resentments. He'd lived here until he was seventeen, and had hardly been back since.

He entered the living room and put the ashes on the mantelpiece. Then he walked to the window to open the curtains.

"David, take your shoes off! You'll tread dirt everywhere."

It was only a remembered voice, of course. His mother had always forbidden anyone to wear shoes or coats inside the flat. David wanted to reply, to say that it no longer mattered. But arguing would be as fruitless now as it had ever been.

Instead he went back to the van to fetch the moving boxes. Swiftly, he began filling them with his mother's belongings. He labeled each box according to whether the items needed to be kept, donated to charity, or thrown away.

It shouldn't take long, because his mother owned few possessions. Her voice resounded in his mind: "It's just one more thing to keep clean!" When he was young, he'd given her some silly trinket for a birthday present. He no longer recalled what the trinket had been, but he remembered her waspish response on receiving it. She'd tried to make amends by saying she appreciated the thought; yet that wasn't the same as actually appreciating the gift.

He sighed as he contemplated the detritus of existence: a half-empty bottle of vitamin pills; three fluffy cushions in bright colors; a framed print of a David Hockney still life....

Some items were freighted with memories. David winced when he saw the Holo-Max projector. That had been his own birthday present, when he was nine years old. He'd been hankering after a puppy and nagging Mum about it, even though he knew she'd never agree.

"This is much better," she'd said. "It's a hologram! It can do lots of tricks, and you can customize it as well—it can be a dog or a cat or anything you like."

She'd meant well, she really had. The HoloMax was no match for a real pet, but it was better than nothing. David had fired it up, flipped through the defaults, and chosen a bulldog called Spike. The hologram roamed around the flat, performing wacky cartoon-style antics. David's mother had even paid extra for the battery-powered remote unit, to let Spike accompany him outside. If you threw a stick, Spike eagerly chased after it—but he could only pretend to bring it back; you had to find another one yourself. Still, it was a game. Spike could also spray phantom pee on the legs of passers by, a joke that amused David's nine-year-old self rather more than it did the victims.

Meanwhile, his mother would stand gingerly at the edge of whichever park they'd visited, even though the Stray and West Park both had tarmac paths across the grass. David knew how the parks felt from Mum's perspective. They were full of other people's boisterous dogs, who might jump up and put their dirty paws on you. They were full of inconsiderate cyclists who would zoom past, forcing you to step off the path into the muddy grass, dodging the dogshit. In autumn, the avenues were full of dead leaves, which grew stickier and slimier the more it rained.

As a child, David would pick up great armfuls of dead leaves and bury his face in them to inhale their smell, just for the thrill of being naughty, while Mum yelled frantically at him to put the nasty things down....

Now, David flinched at the memory, feeling both guilty at his own behavior and resentful of his mother's strictures. What did she expect? He was a child! He wanted to run around and play. He wanted to have friends. But he could never invite anyone over, because Mum hated having visitors. "You don't know where they've
been,"
she would say.

So David spent all his free time at his schoolmates' houses, where the adults didn't make such a big deal of a speck of mud on his clothes, or a few crumbs on the carpet. His mother's sterile sanctum became a place to escape from. He only ever came home when he had to. And when he grew up, he didn't have to come home at all.

He'd felt guilty about this, but not guilty enough to actually make the effort to visit more often. He was busy having fun: festival weekends, backpacking excursions, adventures with women.... Besides, there was always phone and email. Through such occasional contact he knew that his mother was retreating further into herself, hardly ever leaving the flat. She shopped online and had everything delivered. She managed her investments online, took distance-learning courses online, and joined online forums discussing contemporary politics and Victorian fiction. Or was it Victorian politics and contemporary fiction?

When David suggested that she seek treatment for her problem, she took this as a criticism rather than an attempt at helping her. So he left her alone. Just after turning fifty, she suffered a stroke and died.

"All that bleach didn't save you, did it?" David said, gazing at the ashes on the mantelpiece. "You only ever worried about germs, as if they were the only things that could kill you."

He shook his head, wincing at how harsh his words sounded. He was angry at the waste of it all: not just his own blighted childhood, but his mother's confined existence here within these well-scrubbed walls. Had she been happy, inside her pristine cocoon? Or had she felt trapped? With a pang of shame, David realized that he didn't know. "Too late now," he told himself.

He turned his attention back to the HoloMax. He hadn't bothered taking it when he left—he'd resolved to get a real pet as soon as he found his own place. But he was surprised that his mother had kept the gadget. Had she been using it? Did it even work, twenty years on?

David powered it up, and a green light appeared on the front of the unit. He glanced around, looking for the hologram, already smiling as he anticipated seeing Spike bound toward him.

Instead, the hologram showed something else entirely: a young boy, about seven years old. The boy had untidy brown hair, and wore a white Leeds United shirt that was too big for him. He sprawled on the sofa, reading a comic, biting his thumb in concentration as he peered at the pages.

It might have taken David a few seconds to recognize himself, if he hadn't immediately remembered the shirt.
That's me,
he thought, astounded to see his younger self in hologram form.
My mother turned me into a hologram.