Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (22 page)

SHOTS 71–83, VIDEO #3: The tribespeople sing. The song goes on long after the stars have come out, long after their voices have gone hoarse, long after the fire has dwindled.

SHOT 84: This picture was taken with a cellphone camera, by someone other than the photographer whose work is on display in this gallery. Yona Haifetz-Perec is the subject of the photograph. She is singing with the tribespeople, her face tilted toward the stars.

Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the Minneapolis suburbs with two large men and one small dog. She's sold over ninety short stories to
Tor.com, Analog, Lightspeed,
and more. Her first tale for
Asimov's
takes on the complex world of the future. If we are to resolve difficult issues with diplomacy, it may be wise to seek advice from an expert.

Dear Citizen Etiquette:

My cousin insists on bringing her robot to all family gatherings. Am I obliged to hold events in robot-friendly surroundings to please her? If I do not, must I pay her robot's cleaning and retooling bills?

Signed,

Longing for the Beach

Gentle Reader:

Sand in the gears will ruin any 'bot's day, but that doesn't mean you have to keep your summers buttoned up for your cousin's robot's sake. Don't have every event somewhere that's unfriendly to machine people. That would be pointed. But just as you're allowed to get up an outing to an art museum without making sure your blind auntie is pleased with it, you may with no lapse in manners go to the beach. And if your cousin wants to bring her robot, let
her
clean the poor thing out herself. She's the one who insisted on bringing it.

Dear Citizen Etiquette:

My workmate will not stop talking about her pregnancy. I know she and her partner scrimped and saved for years to buy the best embryo possible, but do I have to listen to every single chromosomal choice they made? We are only ten chromosomes and four months into this discussion, and already I'm beginning to hate this child. What will I do when he's in nappies?

Desperately,

Love Your Baby But Not His Genechart

Gentle Reader:

Of course this is one of the most important decisions a person will ever make— but so was choosing her partner, and she didn't chronicle every particle of flirtation in the break room, did she? I hope not! But by the same token, no new mother wants to hear that her embryo is a bore. It's time for you to learn some of etiquette's oldest tools, the polite lies. "Oh, Gertrude," you will say, "I so wish I had the time to hear more about your decision to go with hazel eyes instead of true green. But alas, our employer will be so put out with us if we do not finish the presentation by Thursday. I would hate to see Little Gertlet in a subpar preschool because we lost our situations." Perhaps it would be for the best if you left that last part as implication only, but you get the picture.

Dear Citizen Etiquette:

My neighbor keeps tuning his implant to a frequency close to mine. I fear he is overhearing the chats of an—ahem—personal nature shared between my spouse and me. Worse, I fear he means to! How can I make it clear that our facilitated telepathic exchanges are for our two minds alone?

Hopefully,

Alone In Our Own Little Corner of the RF Spectrum

Gentle Reader:

This is where modern technology's approximation of telepathy is, alas, only an approximation. Wouldn't it be charming to feel that you and your sweetheart are in a world of your own? But it is not so, and no amount of chiding, no application of manners, can make it so. You can gently hint, you can cajole, you can grab him by his fashionably wide lapels and declaim, "Now, look here, buddy!" But the airwaves are and ever more shall be the airwaves. Either invest in better encryption or resign yourselves to the idea that your private times will not be so private. Or may I suggest the old-fashioned idea of whispering your inmost thoughts in your beloved's ear? Crazy notion, I know, but it thwarts all but the most dedicated snooping neighbor—and if he plants a bug to hear you whispering, you'll have recourse to call in the authorities.

Dear Citizen Etiquette:

How do I explain to my friends and relations that I am the same person I was before I uploaded? My interests remain the same—I was never much of a golfer, and I can still play virtual holotennis with them, but I have always preferred a quiet chat and a good book to a walk on the beach. So what if I don't have legs now? Is that any reason to cut me out of their social plans?

Uploaded and Lonely

Gentle Reader:

Shall I get you in touch with the robot companion of the first writer's relative? Perhaps the two of you can have your quiet chat and a game of chess while your respective relations obsess about beaches. More practically, while it would be lovely if everyone's friends and family were open-minded about their decisions to become up-loaded citizens, the simple fact is that not everyone will. "But the environmental impact—" I know. "But the health concerns of—" I know. "The political lobby of—" I know, I know, I know. The simple fact is that you cannot force your friends to want to invite you to do things socially. They will or they won't. What you can do is invite
them
to do things. Show them the best of the uploaded world, or those aspects of it that you can share with someone who is still flesh and blood. If they still never contact you, it's their loss.

Feeling overwhelmed by the social demands of the modern world? Write, text, or telepathic chat to Citizen Etiquette on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Problems solved and persons respected regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexuality, chemical basis, or upload status. You pay communications charges please.

We
Find
Harsh
Cold crisp
Meteoric light
Our necks craned back
Seated in the nascent morning
We open ourselves to the full cosmos
The possibilities of change in our constellations
Like a cork popped then easily ignored
One streaks out from the belt
A mark of transience
An exclamation
Too short
Then
Lost
...

—Robert Frazier

Looking online
at Cassini's amazing picture
of Saturn's North Polar Vortex,
that giant, swirling madness
of clouds,

brings back
the memory of lying
upon my grass-cushioned back,
gazing at summer storm clouds
as they rumbled across the
New England sky,

the simple shapes
of calmer days turning darkly
monstrous, like those now riding
the vortex, and the weather
of my nightmares.

—G. O. Clark

Schrödinger's cat asks
why don't you ever pet me?
Wait, don't open the...

—Greg Beatty

She goes back in time
And tweaks
This or that event
So that
I am standing alone
Wondering
At the déjà vu.
Wasn't someone
Just here?
Don't I still
Smell perfume?
But then,
Standing alone again,
The feeling is gone.

—Roger Dutcher

Found a gold ring in our backyard
Bright on new grassblades
One spring muddy morning
It didn't take a fire to find
An inscription — initials inside
That matched our neighbor's

It was her wedding ring
Lost scrambling in from a blizzard
And buried in new snow

Then blown
Over the fence
When the blower cleared the driveway

It wasn't much of a quest
To return it
And it didn't turn any of us invisible

But when you find a gold ring in the backyard
It makes a fairytale
Out of an April day

—Ruth Berman

Daily visits to
SFsignal.com
keep me up on our field's latest news. Checking in on my phone on the last day of LoneStarCon 3—this year's Worldcon—I discovered that Frederik Pohl had died. Although I knew he was ninety-three and had been in failing health, I was shocked and saddened by the news.

Fred Pohl, author, editor, even agent, blogger, and SF ambassador to almost every corner of the world, helped fashion the field as we know it. Rather than try to capture his whole life, I thought I would reflect on this talented grandmaster from my own point of view as an editor.

Long before there was a Hugo Award, Fred edited the 1940 and most of the 1941 issues of two pulp magazines—
Astonishing Stories
and
Super Science Stories.
Authors whose first stories appeared in these issues included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Wilson Tucker. Although Fred was operating with an excruciatingly low budget, he was also able to procure work from L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, and other well-known writers. Fred worked on some later issues as assistant editor before enlisting in the army in 1943.

He returned to editing magazines at the helm of
If
and
Galaxy
in 1959. During his tenure,
If
won three Hugos for Best Professional Magazine. Works published under Fred's tutelage included Larry Niven's "Neutron Star," Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," Cordwainer Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," and Roger Zelazny's "Damnation Alley." He published numerous pieces by Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg as well as Gardner Dozois and Bruce McAllister's first stories and Gene Wolfe's second published tale.