Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (19 page)

Ulno cleared his throat, apparently eager to change the subject. "Last day before we close up for good," he said. "Why don't we just get out of here and go somewhere fun instead?"

"But where?" asked Carol.

Ulno jabbed his thumb vaguely into the air behind him. "This whole place is mine, you know. Government issued on account of original ancestral claims. We can go anywhere as far as the eye can see."

"I never knew that," said Janice.

Ulno shrugged again. "I guess I don't talk much about that either."

Ulno's jeep rattled down the dirt track that ran behind the café, deep into the back country away from the highway. Great clouds of fine red dust billowed up from under the tires. Carol sat in the passenger seat next to Ulno with her hair tied up in a scarf. Janice was in the back, leaning against the side, trying to keep the dust out of her face. She could barely hear Ulno and Carol talking up front.

"So, you've seen a woolly mammoth?" Carol asked.

Ulno nodded agreeably. "Sure."

"And saber toothed tigers?"

"A couple." Ulno shifted gears as he took a turn. "They weren't that common around here."

"And you were frozen?" asked Carol. She said the last word like it was some kind of shameful event. "For how long?"

Ulno shrugged. "Ten thousand, twelve thousand years? Long enough anyway."

Janice suddenly leaned forward into the conversation. "That's how he lost his fingers," she said dryly.

Ulno laughed and looked down at his right hand as it clung to the steering wheel.

The tips of his index and middle fingers were gone, leaving stumps of skin. "Sure," he said. "Froze right off."

"Other things too," added Janice.

Ulno laughed again, louder. "Absolutely," he said. "Destroyed my pride and joy. Like a Hemingway hero."

Carol pursed her lips and sat back with a harrumph. "You guys are putting me on."

"We're not," laughed Janice. "I promise we're not."

Later, they were sitting under the shadow of Mt. Rebo, eating the ham sandwiches and drinking the Coca-Colas that Janice had packed for lunch. A little waterfall tumbled down into a pool of clear water nearby, cliff swallows swooping and diving for bugs over it, chasing their invisible prey in and out of the shade.

"So, wait," said Carol, halfway through her sandwich. "If you're really the ice man, thawed out and all that, then why are you running a diner in the middle of nowhere Montana? Why aren't you doing something important?"

Ulno was lounging against a damp mossy rock, his hands clasped over his stomach. "I didn't do anything important before. And getting frozen in a glacier doesn't exactly qualify you for a position of responsibility." He belched contentedly. "Besides, I like it here."

"No, but I mean, why aren't there scientists and archaeologists looking for you all the time? Don't they want to ask you questions?"

"They did. Sometimes they still do. But by the time I got back from Vietnam, they mostly seemed to have lost track of me."

Carol's eyes practically bugged. "They let you go to Vietnam? In the Army?"

"Sure," said Ulno, his voice a regretful whisper. "I wanted to. How could they stop me?"

For a moment, there was no sound but the trickle of water and the heavy drone of insects. And then Janice stood and started rolling up the sleeves of her blouse and folding down the collar. "Why don't you two go for a swim?" she asked as she moved to a rock in the sun. "I want to catch some sun."

It took a few minutes for Ulno to convince Carol to strip down for skinny-dipping, but it wasn't long before Janice could hear them both splashing and laughing in the pool. A little while later, the splashing stopped and the murmuring began. Janice knew what was going on—the same thing had happened back when she first met Ulno six years ago in Helena, after he was home from Vietnam.

Slowly, somehow, acceptance must be sinking into Carol's brain by now. Sun-baked drowsiness would help with that. But yes, it would start to seem real. Maybe he really was the ice man. Maybe he really had spent all those years trapped in the ice of that glacier—high up above them in the cool air on the summit of Mt. Rebo.

She'd ask, What were you doing up there?

He'd murmur, Just climbing—just seeing how high I could go.

What happened?

I fell into a crevasse in the glacier. They were a lot larger back then—the glaciers, I mean. I wasn't hurt, but I couldn't get out. So eventually I froze.

Were you aware that whole time?

Not really, he'd say. It was like being asleep a long, long time. Dreams upon dreams upon dreams, whole lifetimes of dreams.

Then she'd ask, Did you feel cold when it happened?

No, he'd murmur. When you freeze, you don't feel cold. It's strange to say, but you feel warm.

But your fingers... And everything else...

Yes, he'd say.

Oh, poor Ulno. You poor Hemingway hero!

And moments later, of course, she'd find out that he wasn't such a Hemingway hero after all, when he responded the usual way to her kisses. There'd be a playful slap, and Carol would roll away, suddenly shy but not as offended as she would pretend.

Even after all those years in the ice, Ulno still had sensation, nerves, reflexes. That was just a line that he had used on the girls back in Helena to win their pity and get their guard down. Somehow, Janice hadn't minded the deception when he'd used it on her.

She hadn't even minded later when she found out about his fingers—how he had really lost those. Self-inflicted wounds in Vietnam, a dishonorable discharge, but a ticket home at least, back to the tract of nothing the government had given him by a poorly traveled highway. But he'd been too transient, too unsettled, too unambitious—so they had lost touch. At least until he opened the café. Then Janice had come back to him for a while.

But then—it was hard to say. Who knows what happens? Things change, people grow older. Pretty soon they stopped spending nights together. It happened without a fight or a discussion or even a conscious decision. Just slowly, over time, they fell into different ruts, a little farther apart from each other.

Janice hadn't known it before, but she was glad the café was gone. Maybe now, Ulno would find something else—something better. Something that would last longer and mean more.

"All right, sleepy head," called Carol from the other side of the pool. Janice was suddenly aware that it was cooler now and windier. The sun had slipped behind Mt. Rebo. "If you want a ride back to the café, it's time to get up."

Nobody spoke much on the ride back. The next day, there'd be no café to go to—no rut to fall into, no reason to see each other. Janice hadn't even thought about what she would do next. She had a little money saved, but not much. But she would find something to pass the time, until...

Until she got another postcard from Ulno, like the one he had sent her in Helena after he'd opened the café. Short, unsentimental, promising nothing, but still able to make her heart jump. "Hi Janice—Long time, no see. Got a good gig going. Come visit sometime.—Ulno."

That was it—the postcard that had directed the next four years of her life, both good and bad. And now it was all ending. But she could wait for the next one. Things would be different then. Things would work out. All Ulno needed was another new beginning.

The jeep pulled into the café parking lot just as the sky started to turn indigo above them. Lonely stars poked out of that vast expanse, and Venus burned bright and yellow over the mountains on the horizon. Carol lingered over her goodbyes, but Ulno had gone quiet and cold. Finally, there was nothing left for her to do but leave.

"Why don't you go, too?" asked Ulno.

"I want to help you clean up."

"Don't bother," said Ulno, but Janice followed him inside anyway. They tidied up here and there, but the café was mostly clean enough already. The tables were wiped; the dishes were washed. Ulno had thrown out most of the leftover food earlier that day.

At last, for want of anything else to do, Janice wrote a phone number on the back of a paper placemat and passed it to Ulno.

"What's this?"

"You forgot to ask Carol for that tonight."

Ulno shook his head. "I don't want this. She's nice, she's pretty... but it won't work. It'll be a few dates, and then nothing. I don't think I can take any more endings right now."

Janice shrugged. "You should call her anyway."

Ulno balled up the placemat and threw it in the empty garbage can. "Thanks for everything, Janice. But just let me finish up here alone." With that, he disappeared into the back, and Janice sat down on the same stool she always did when she had nothing else to do.

When the clock on the wall clicked over to 10 P.M., Janice was aware that Ulno had been gone for a long time. Even spaced out like she had been, she would have heard him leave. And for the past half hour, she hadn't heard anything.

The back of the café was dark and silent, lights mostly turned out and everything put away. When Janice got to the walk-in freezer door, she paused. A frown creased her lips and her eyebrow arched. Opening the door, she was greeted by a puff of frigid air and the sight of Ulno standing still, arms crossed over his chest, little bits of frost already beginning to form in his hair.

Ulno's breathing had slowed, but Janice could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest if she watched close enough. She could still wake him up and—what? Give him a pep talk, send him on his way, and wait to hear from him again in a few years when he had his next gig figured out?

Janice suddenly felt ashamed of what she had tried to do with Carol. She had pretended to herself that she was doing Ulno a favor, trying to make him feel better by setting him up with somebody young and pretty and new. But she knew that she had only done it because he was down. She had been trying to bum him off on somebody else while things were bad, so she could pick him up again when things got good. Some friend she was. No wonder they always drifted apart.

Still, going to sleep in the freezer wasn't exactly a long-term solution either. It would be one thing if Ulno could just wake up again after another ten thousand years—wipe everything clean and start new for a third time. But once he stopped paying the electric bill, they'd shut his power off in two or three months. At best, this plan would get him through to November.

Janice reached out to wake Ulno, but then stopped short. She thought instead about where she'd be in November. Probably living in half of a cheap apartment, working some crummy job, eating canned soup and dried pasta off a hot plate. It wasn't much. It wasn't anything at all, really. If she had more time, maybe she could do something better. Or maybe she just wasn't that kind of person. But she didn't think it was fair to expect Ulno to always come up with the plans and make them happen. And neither was it fair to her to always have to shoehorn herself into a life already in progress.

Shutting the door to the freezer again, Janice went back to the front of the café. She didn't have a postcard, so she used the back of another placemat. "Hi Ulno," she wrote. "Three months isn't long enough to get anything going. But if you want, we can figure it out together. Love, Janice."

Then she taped the placemat to the freezer door, shut out the last few lights in the café, and went back out to the parking lot. Overhead, the Milky Way was starting to show high up above; a ribbon of faint luminescence that went around and around and around the Earth without stopping.

Maybe he'd come, and maybe he wouldn't. But all Janice could do was put the invitation out there. He'd often told her, half joking and half serious, that he'd been a pretty good caveman once upon a time. But Janice knew he couldn't have done that by himself. Hunters always needed gatherers. That was part of what made humans the way they were.

But for now, Ulno could have three months of dreams. And in that time, Janice would start what she could for herself, no matter how little that might be.

Just one minute later, she was already headed down the road.

Sarah Pinsker is a singer-songwriter with three albums and a fourth in production. Her fiction publications include stories in
Strange Horizons
and
Daily Science Fiction.
Sarah lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her website is
http://www.sarahpinsker.com
and you can follow her at
http://www.twitter.com/sarahpinsker
.
The author's first tale for
Asimov's
focuses a camera lens on love, loss, and...

IMAGE 1: The photograph depicts an unmade bed covered in gear and clothing. A military-style duffel, half filled, dominates the shot. A camera bag sits next to it, cameras and lenses and lens cleaners laid out neatly alongside.

IMAGE 2: Shot from the center of the bed. A shirtless man reaches for something high in the closet. He has the too-thin build of an endurance runner, his bare back lanky and muscled. There is a permanent notch in his left shoulder, from where his camera bag rests. A furrow across his back tells of a bullet graze in Afghanistan. The contrast of his skin and his faded jeans plays well in black and white. A mirror on the dresser catches Yona Haifetz-Perec in the act of snapping the picture, her face obscured but her inclusion clearly deliberate. Multiple subjects, multiple stories.

IMAGE 3: This photograph does not actually exist. A third person in the room might have taken an intimate portrait of the two alone in their Tel Aviv apartment, photographers once again becoming subjects. A third person might have depicted the way her freckled arms wrapped around his torso, tender but not possessive. It might have shown the serious looks on both of their faces, the way each tried to mask anxiety, showing concern to the room, but not each other. They have the same career. They accept the inherent risks. They don't look into each other's faces, but merely press closer. It would have been the last photograph of the two together. Eleven days later, he is beaten to death in Uganda. His press credentials, his passport, his cameras, his memory cards, and cash are all found with his body; it isn't a robbery. Since the third option doesn't exist, the last picture of Yona and Oliver is the one that she took from the bed: his strong back, her camera's eye.