Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (30 page)

"Not a good year for the millet," Dabir said, as if apologizing, looking out over the field. "Good rain at first, but then not enough. Next year be better, we think."

I walked in a mock-aimless direction, away from the house, taking deep breaths, waving my arms and flexing my wings slowly. I could feel energy from the sun soaking into my skin, coursing into the storage cells distributed through my body. But more than that I could feel that terrible little house, crouching behind me like a gargoyle. I was wishing desperately, frantically, that I could lift into the air and fly away now. That I could be back up in the cold sky where I belonged, where all of this would be far, far down, invisible below me.

Of course I'd known what I was flying over. I'd known people lived like this. Like this, and a hundred times worse than this, in some places. There was famine in Sudan, the epidemic in New Guinea, collapsing economies here and there around the world. I knew all that—had known it—since I was a child. But... but... but something.

Dabir was still at my side. "Are the splints holding okay?" I asked, half turning my back to him.

"Yes, they seem good," he said after looking.

"This race I'm in, the Kitaroharo, is a solo race," I said. "That means the racers have no support crew, no electronics, and we aren't allowed to make contact with the local people. At least not on purpose. It's okay if it happens by accident, if a racer makes a forced landing like I did. But normally we only land in remote areas, and we spend nights in the open, usually sleeping in trees. That's why the race is only over sparsely populated areas." I was saying all this with the plan of mumbling something about it being against the rules for me to spend the night in Dabir's house, should he invite me.

"I am glad you crashed here," he said, and then dipped his head in a gesture of embarrassment and apology. "I mean, I'm sorry you were hurt, but if you were going to crash somewhere..." He grinned, waving his long, graceful hand as a way of finishing the sentence. "I am... happy to be able to help you."

"You've been very generous, and I'm grateful," I said. "With any luck I'll be out of your hair tomorrow. Please let me know how I can send you some money, to pay for the barn, and to thank you for all your help."

Dabir was looking at an angle into the sky, where there was nothing to look at. "And tomorrow... tomorrow I see you fly, yes?"

"Yes, tomorrow I fly."

We walked around for a while in silence, ending up back at the barn as it was getting dark. Dabir went into his little house and came back out a few minutes later carrying a small, thin mattress and a blanket. "The roof in the house is low," he said, holding his free hand palm-down a few inches over his head. "You would hit your wings. So you okay to sleep in here?" He nodded at the barn.

"Yes, that's fine."

Dabir went into the barn and laid the little mattress out on the floor. It was really
just a blanket that had been folded in half and stitched up with something stuffed inside, probably dried millet leaves. "I'm sorry we have no better bed for you," Dabir said, flipping out the blanket over the mattress.

"Dabir... Is this your bed?"

He tugged at the corners of the blanket, pretending not to hear me.

"I don't need this, Dabir, really. I'm used to sleeping on the ground, and my body doesn't get cold." That last bit was pretty stupid of me, since the nighttime temperatures in this region are warm by anyone's standards. Still feigning deafness, Dabir was backing away from the bed and from me, moving toward the door. "Dammit, Dabir..." I said. I thought about picking the bed up and forcing it back into his arms, but I didn't.

"Good night," he said, smiling shyly and backing out the door.

As I lowered my face to his mattress there was the sweet smell of hay, and faintly beneath that, his sweat: a warm, living, human smell. I slept, jolting awake once through the night with my heart pounding from a dream I couldn't remember.

The next morning I was up early, pacing around outside and slowly flexing my wings while keeping them mostly furled. There was barely a hint of dew on the ground, and it was evaporating away with the smell of wet dust. I heard someone coughing in the house. It was wet, hacking, feeble, coming from old lungs. It seemed it was never going to stop, and finally I went back into the barn and sat on the dirt floor and put my hands over my ears.

Some time later, Dabir came in with a bowl of porridge for my breakfast. While I ate, sitting cross-legged on the ground, I asked him to unlace the splints on my wings. When he was done with that I felt him running his hand over the wing membrane, feeling the texture of it. And then his hand was on my shoulder, near my neck, grazing over a part of me that wasn't covered by my unitard.

"The wings, they look good," he said. "The places where they were broken, there is only a small bump now."

I went outside and made some experimental flaps with the wings half-unfurled, feeling for any twinges at the break sites. Nothing, or nothing too bad anyway. I flapped harder and harder, until Dabir was flinching and blinking his eyes at the rush of air and dust I was blowing up. The weight on my feet was becoming less and less, became nothing for a moment, and then another moment. I held my arms to the sides, tipped my body forward... and stopped, furling my wings in so quickly that I lost my balance, dropping to my knees and pitching forward to catch myself on my hands.

Dabir was at my side instantly, one hand on my arm and the other on my back. "Are you okay? Did you hurt something?" he asked.

"I'm all right." I stayed on my hands and knees for a few moments. The left break site had flexed dangerously, and now it was throbbing with an ache that kept time with my heartbeat. "I just overdid it a little. I need a few more hours to heal." I let Dabir help me to my feet, feeling his dry, callused hands holding me with gentleness and strength.

"Such power in your wings!" he said. "And they are huge when they open all the way! Amazing!" He was still holding me with one arm across my back, and with the word "huge" he swung his free arm over his head, sweeping it across the sky. "And your eyes!" he said.

"Eyes?"

"Your eyes, when you started to fly..." He didn't finish.

I went and sat on a bare patch of ground, spreading my wings out to the sun to gather energy and let the breaks finish healing. I fell asleep again.

When I woke I could see it was past noon already. I looked around for Dabir and found him in the millet field, deepening a dry irrigation ditch. "I'm ready to leave, Dabir," I said.

"Ah." He looked at me for a long time, and then smiled. "I get to see you fly. You finish this race and you qualify for the Asiatics, yes?"

"Yes," I said, wishing I had his certainty about what I was going to do. We walked up to a small hillside where the high ground would help with my takeoff. Dabir's grandmother was standing outside the doorway of the house, and when she saw me looking she lifted a hand and made one of her open-mouthed grins. "Dabir," I said. "If you just tell me your last name, and the name of the nearest village, then I'll be able to send you some money. It will pay for repairs to the barn, and enough so you could get some more goats, get medical care for your grandmother..." My voice trailed away. He was just looking at me with that blank, boyish smile. Or maybe it was an old man's smile. Maybe it was a smile of pity for the stupid, silly child who'd landed in his goat barn and who knew nothing, nothing, nothing about the world.

And then suddenly my arms are around him, my face pressed to his bony chest, my eyes wet. His hands touch my shoulders, my back, the side of my face, and then I turn away from him and I run down the hill, flapping frantically, tearing at the air, clawing my way up, and up, and up, then circling around to look down at him, both of his hands pressed to his mouth as he looks back up at me, his arm suddenly flailing out in a wave, piercingly childlike in the wild joy of it, and I climb up, straight up, pulling myself higher and higher to make him smaller, to make him smaller, to make him disappear.

Naomi Kritzer's short stories have appeared in publications that include
F&SF, Realms of Fantasy,
and
Strange Horizons.
Her novels (
Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom's Gate, Freedom's Apprentice,
and
Freedom's Sisters
) are available from Bantam. She also has two e-book short story collections out:
Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories,
and
Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.
Naomi lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters. In her first story for us, a strange woman claiming to be from the future pressures an eighties college student to investigate the enigma of...

It was February of 1989, and I was a freshman in college. I was sitting in the student center trying to do my Calculus homework and drink a cup of coffee, both of which were surprisingly hard, when someone pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. "Meghan," she said.

I looked up. She was
old
—not old like a senior, old like my mom. She actually looked kind of like my mom, and I bristled instinctively. "It's Maggie. Who are you?"

"I'd forgotten about the Maggie phase," she said, looking introspective. "I'm you. You, from the future."

I put down my pencil. "... Oh?" I said, wondering how this crazy person had found out my name. Maybe this was a non-traditional student doing a Psych class experiment. How do randomly chosen students respond to utterly implausible claims? "Uh. Why are you here?"

She leaned forward. "You should study abroad in the fall. In Germany. West Germany. In
Berlin."

I blinked at her. "I don't speak German."

"All the more reason to go! You could
learn
German."

"But I already have my language requirement," I said. "In French."

"That is the sort of thing that Europeans mock Americans for. 'I already know one foreign language! That's practically
two
more than the average American!' "

That stung. I scowled at her. "Look. My mom didn't let me go to France last year. Even though we'd paid the
deposit.
And that was just a two-week trip with chaperons. And you think she's going to cheerfully send me off on a study-abroad program?"

"You're eighteen now. How's she going to stop you?"

"She could
refuse to pay,"
I said, incredulously.

"Dad would take your side," she said. "He feels guilty about not standing up to her over France."

I folded my arms, thinking about the fight with my mother and how my father wouldn't even
stay in the house
while we were arguing. It was sure nice to
think
he had a few regrets about that. "Mmm-hmm. Why is it so important to you that I go to Berlin?"

"Because the Berlin Wall is going to fall this November. On the 9th."

Okay. This was clearly a joke. "The Berlin Wall is going to fall. This year. You even know the
day.
That's awesome. I can't wait. Now in the meantime, I should probably work on my Calculus homework."

She stood up to go, then turned back, her eyes narrowed in an expression that almost looked like something I'd seen in my own mirror. "You should just drop Calculus now," she said. "You're going to get a D."

She turned up again in May.

As weird as that first encounter was, I couldn't just put her out of my mind. Yes, she was probably a lunatic, but I did at least
think
about going to the study abroad office to ask for information on studying in Berlin. The problem was when I imagined telling my parents I wanted to go abroad—it was the whole scene I found myself unspooling, complete with a migraine headache for my mother and a guilt trip from my father. It was usually my younger brother who defied Mom: I was the good girl. And I was
still
getting guilt trips for leaving Iowa for college, even though they'd gone along with it.

I finally stopped into the study-abroad office in April. It was too late to apply for a program in the
fall,
but I leafed through the brochures, filled with pictures of smiling students frolicking by the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, giant golden Buddha statues, the Taj Mahal. I traced the Golden Buddha. Now,
that
would be something to see, if my mother ever chilled out.

I was more proactive with Calculus. When I couldn't get through the homework the crazy lady had interrupted, I concluded that
maybe
she was a Message from Somewhere that I ought to sign up for the free tutoring at the Math Skills Center. I headed there straight from the student center that afternoon.

The second time she came, she found me in the library. "Maggie?" she said, more hesitantly this time.

I looked up. "You again? How'd you find me in here?"

"I remember my favorite library spots." She sat down next to me on the ugly orange couch.

I normally liked the spot because hardly anyone came to this section. Being pursued by a lunatic made me rethink the advantages of this strategy, but it seemed a bit premature to scream for Campus Security. "What do you want?"

"I want you to go to Germany. You didn't apply for a study-abroad program, did you?" I shook my head. "Well, that's okay. You can take a leave of absence in the fall, and just go."

"And tell Mom and Dad
what,
exactly?"

"Tell them you want to travel. Lots of students travel. You don't need their permission. There's actually a work visa program for American college students—you can get a work visa for six months in West Germany, so you wouldn't need their money."

"I'd go to West Germany and apply for a
job?"

"Yeah, exactly."

"I don't speak German.
What kind of job would I get?"

"You could teach English. Or—I don't know. You'd find something."

I gave her a look of disbelief. "Mom would have a nervous breakdown."

"At some point, you have to realize that her anxiety disorder is not
your
responsibility."

This was almost a word-for-word echo of something my high school best friend had said. I shot the woman a narrow-eyed look of my own. "Who are you, anyway? For real."

"I go by Meg. And I told you the truth. I'm you." She pulled something out of her pocket; it looked a little like a calculator. "Here, I brought something to show you. This is my pocket computer."

I took it. It had a smooth, black surface. "It doesn't look very useful," I said.

"Put your thumb on the screen for a second. It's keyed to my fingerprints, which incidentally are the same as yours."

I did, and the black surface suddenly sprang to life, presenting me with rows of little pictures. "Does it have a mouse?"

"Your finger's the mouse. Tap on the icon you want."

I tapped on one randomly. It spit out a stream of music, and the orderly rows disappeared. The screen showed a cascade of images: a close-up of a snowy owl in flight, a wood landscape, and then the interior of a room with stone walls. Meg leaned over to take a look. "That's a game," she said. "It does useful stuff, too. When I'm in the future I can use it to get my e-mail—which everyone in the future has. I can use it to get on the Internet—almost all information is online in the future. It stores all my music, photos, and books. It's also a camera, a video camera, a credit card, a GPS—that's sort of like a talking atlas—and a phone."

I stared at it. The graphics were
amazing.
"When you took it out, I thought it was a calculator."

"It's a calculator, too."

"This is
really cool,"
I said. "Can I keep this?"

"No. You have no way to recharge the battery, for one thing." She took it back.
"Now
can we have a serious conversation about getting you to Germany?"

"So does everyone in the future have a time machine, too?" I asked.

"No," she said, her gaze wavering a little. "No, mine is special."

I stared at the pocket computer and tried to imagine telling my parents that a woman from the future had told me to go to West Germany, and I
knew
she was from the future because she had
amazing futuristic technology
and even if I'd had the gadget with me I was pretty sure my mother would not be convinced.

"Okay," I said. "Here's the thing. I have to admit that you really might be from the future. If I'm going crazy, this is an awfully
detailed
hallucination. But."

"But?"

"I got a B+ in Calculus last term. You thought I was going to get a D!"

"You got a B?" she said incredulously. "A B
plus?
How?"

"Well, I went to the Math Skills Center for extra help, and—"

"The
Math Skills Center,"
she said.
"Why
didn't I do that? I can't remember why I didn't even think to try that."

"Anyway," I said. "You've sort of undermined your credibility, you see. I think maybe you're from the future but we're actually from different time streams. Because I really can't believe the Berlin Wall is going to fall in less than six months. I mean, Gorbechev seems pretty cool and he's made some really amazing changes but Honecker—"

"Honecker's going to resign in October."

I stared at her skeptically. I'd started paying attention to the news after her first visit, and although there had been a lot of good news from the Soviet bloc, Honecker was really an asshole. And assholes with power rarely seemed to say "Oh, hey, I've just realized something:
I'm an asshole.
Maybe I should resign!"

"He'll get sick," Meg said. "And Gorbechev can't stand him. He'll resign.
The Wall is going to fall and you can be there to see it."

"Here's the other thing: I have no money. 'Go to Germany,' you say, like I could just hitchhike there. I'd have to buy a plane ticket—"

"That's what credit cards are for."

"And I'd pay it off with
what,
exactly?"

"Your work-study earnings. It would be worth living with debt for a while if you could be there."

"I want to graduate in
four
years, not four and a quarter. Especially since I'm planning to do my student teaching the fall after I graduate. That's how it's set up. If I throw the schedule off I'll have to wait until the
following
fall."

"Oh, God," she said.
"Teaching.
Of course, you're planning around the
student teaching
calendar. Listen, you should just forget about it. You're going to
hate
teaching. I mean, you'll realize it during your student teaching year and then spend three or four years doing it anyway before you wise up and change careers. Really, if you pulled a B+ in Calc, just switch right now to an Econ major. It's going to be
so
much more useful to you later."

"Useful for what?" I said. "Am I destined to become an
investment banker
or something?"

"No, you're going to manage a non-profit focusing on public health. Econ would still be way more useful. At least take Statistics
.
You can drop the Educational Studies stuff and take a bunch of Econ and Stats while you major in English."

"The only reason Mom isn't freaking out about the English major is that I'm doing the teaching concentration!"

"Maggie,
forget about what Mom wants.
You're nineteen. You get to make your own choices!"

"Yeah? She's paying my tuition. What if she cuts me off?"

"She won't. She didn't cut my—she didn't cut
our
brother off for majoring in Theater."

"Robbie's going to major in
what?"

"Yeah, and Mom threw a fit about it but she adjusted in the end. To everything." She sighed heavily and said, "At least
think
about it."

"Berlin, or my major?"

"Berlin," she said. "Your major, too. But mostly Berlin."

"Okay," I said, because it was clear this was the only way I would get rid of her. "I'll think about it."

She was crazy.

Or maybe I was crazy.

I didn't arrange for a leave of absence and I didn't buy any plane tickets. And I certainly didn't tell my parents about any of this. But when I packed to go back to college in August of 1989, I crept downstairs late one night and rooted through the filing cabinet that held our important papers until I found my passport.

Meg knocked on my dorm room door in September. My roommate was out, which was actually a little disappointing, since it would have been nice to have some sort of external validation about the whole "I'm you from the future! Look at my futuristic technology!" routine.

I didn't invite her in, but she came in anyway and I sighed and closed the door behind her.

"Just go," she said. "Buy a ticket and go. Even if you fail your classes, it'll be worth it."

"I'm actually
taking Statistics right now,"
I said stonily. "So on one hand I should take Statistics! It'll be so useful! When I'm a grownup! But never mind
that,
I should just fail all my classes and—"

"—
go to Berlin,
yes." She chewed her lip. "You could have taken the term off. I did
suggest
that."

"Yeah, well, I was actually looking forward to coming back in the fall, as it turned out."

She looked at me blankly and then recognition dawned in her eyes. "Peter. It's Peter, isn't it?"

"You know, for someone who claims to be me from the future, you don't seem to remember your own life very well."

She started pacing. "That's because I did my best to
forget
that I ever dated Peter. Oh my
God,
Maggie, he was the biggest mistake
ever."

"Well,
you
might view him as a mistake, but
I
happen to like him!"

"He cheated on us. He gave us an
STD,
Maggie—oh, not that one," she said, when she saw me blanch. "Christ, if he'd given us AIDS I wouldn't be here because we'd probably have been dead before the better treatments started becoming available. No, it was one of the curable-with-antibiotics kind. Thank God we didn't
marry
the son of a bitch. He's currently working part-time for cash to avoid paying his wife child support. In the future, I mean. He seems nice, sure, but he is an
ass."