Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (20 page)

I stared across at her. I was remembering our night together. It stood out from many other nights. For those hours it had seemed like the loneliness had retreated, just a bit, just enough.

But I had my task here. I drew a breath and asked stiffly, "What means did you use to simulate the amoker-like emotional state necessary to alert a Vigil?" The Agency had looked diligently into the matter. She had done this four times before over the past year, they had learned, at four different public locations where a Vigil was likely to be present. Four false readings had resulted, though none had ended in tragedy.

Outside the room they were probably holding their breath.

Inside, I braced myself. I looked away. The
fury
hit, nothing more than a flash, a violent bolt striking and vanishing. My heart sped. My hands shook.

Finally I lifted my gaze and looked at her again. She said, "I was working for my doctorate in biochemistry at that school. Maybe you geniuses should look into my research." She smiled, but it was a sneering smile this time.

It's something that got into our blood, into our national DNA. The incidents of mass crazed violence that characterized the Neuro-Chemical War have stayed with us, like childhood traumas. And so we act them out now, as adults, as amokers. We've always had rampagers and mass killers—Charles Whitman and Seung-Hui Cho and the rest of the rogues gallery—but now we have them by the score, by the week. Maybe it is what the terrorists intended all along.

The same operative in the suit waited for me. Here was one of the "geniuses," as Daphne had so scornfully said.

"Pheromone aggression," I said, stopping. I didn't follow when she turned to lead me down the dark green corridor.

She turned back but couldn't quite meet my eyes.

"Must be an interesting—an
unusual
—branch of biochemistry," I went on, enjoying myself. "Surprising no one picked up on that." The NCW had made bioweapons a field of permanent academic interest. Some students studied it the way others delved into abnormal psychology—to understand human darkness. Daphne had had a flair, and the killing of her father, accidental or otherwise, had galvanized her research and pushed her toward her breakthrough, which until now she had managed to keep secret.

I never had any higher education. The Agency had wanted only my one skill. It was difficult for me to even imagine how Daphne had devised the means to transmit that sense of imminent frenzy by way of aggressive pheromones. The Agency had missed an obvious clue; and I had uncovered it for them... for
us.
Maybe I wouldn't have to remind myself quite so often that I belonged here. Maybe it would be a bit less lonely for me.

The operative was still waiting to lead me away. I strode past her, not needing any escort. I already knew my next assignment.

I belong to that first traumatic event of the NCW, not to the systemic shock that followed. My memories of the mayhem are real, factual. I can still see my mother's eyes before the neurotoxin's release. Their depths were lovely.

Megan Arkenberg is a writer and poet from Wisconsin. In 2012, she won the Rhysling Award for best long form poem. Other work has recently appeared in
Lightspeed, Strange Horizons,
and
Shimmer.
Like many of her stories, Megan tells us, inspiration for "A Love Song Concerning His Vineyard" came about through "the convergence of several unrelated images: a line from the Book of Isaiah, a poster of Mars in a middle-school hallway, the red label on an empty wine bottle, and a name jotted down on a Post-It note and subsequently forgotten."

When I was twelve, my father, who was white, told me that Black women couldn't appreciate good wine.

"Just look, Isaya, at that grape juice your mother drinks," he said, pointing with his mustard-smeared knife at the bottle on my mother's kitchen counter. The cork was wrapped in gold foil, tied with a wisp of pink ribbon.
Sweet Moscato,
the label said in a soft, curling font like a lady's handwriting. My mother had always liked sweet things.

Even then, I knew it was not the wine's sweetness that my father objected to; it was its femininity. My mother had failed him in that regard. He had married her hoping for a Strong Black Woman, a spear-wielding warrior goddess, an ebony idol with a spine of steel. Instead, he got a princess.

My mother was astonishingly handsome, tall even in stocking feet, though she never went out without heels. Her cheekbones were prominent, sharp, and along with her soft, fleshy nose, a slightly paler bronze than the rest of her face; she looked like the metal statue of a queen that children had rubbed for luck. She wore pink and lace, layers and high necklines, and pearls. She had a particular strand of pearls that my father took as a personal affront. This was a time when genuine pearls had
to be off-white, gold, or ivory, sometimes pink. My mother's choker was pure snowfall white, glaring. They looked fake. I think Father thought they were fake, but they weren't; they were genuine, and worth more than the car he drove to and from the chain of liquor stores that he managed.

Remembering my mother, I can almost understand my father's confusion, his general impression that he had been cheated. My mother did not look like a princess. For one thing, she was skinny. Not trim or slender, but honest-to-God
Vogue-
model skinny, with thighs you could cup in one hand. (Maybe two hands—she had small hands. I have huge hands, eleven-piano-keys hands, and my thighs take four hands to circle.) Mother had no breasts to speak of. Father probably connected this vaguely to an idea about the Amazons, who cut off their breasts to improve martial prowess. Mother's breastlessness had no such roots; in fact, she padded her bra with soft perfumed tissue, which made her bosom rustle alarmingly when she moved her arms—a disadvantage in battle, no doubt. Also, it must have chafed.

I was a disappointment on a whole new front. I was not a princess; I was a crybaby. Worse, I was overweight. My limbs quivered like chocolate ice cream. I was an indignity, like my mother's poor taste in wine, that had to be endured until it could be changed—or cast off.

In both cases, my father picked the latter course. And then, when he was alone, he drank himself to death. That's all my mother ever said about it; but you can be sure as hell he didn't drink himself to death with Moscato. He never liked sweet things.

My mother, on the other hand, died because of Mars.

To be fair, Mars was an indirect cause. The direct cause was botulism, which she contracted from a particularly foul crop of Martian-grown romaine lettuce. I'm not saying that's how she would have wanted to go—vomiting was not her style—but salad constituted the vast majority of her sustenance in those later years, so I assume it was on some level psychologically satisfying. For her, I mean. It took me years to process it, to recast her death, to pin the blame on something big enough to support it. On Mars.

The second greatest tragedy of my life—the greatest, before my mother's death—can also be blamed on Mars. His name was Rondell. Like my father, he sold wine.

My mother never liked for me to call her "Mother."

"What would you prefer?" I asked, cool and polite and disinterested as a middling concierge.

"What's wrong with mama? You too old for that now?"

I was, but I didn't want to admit it, as that would open the door to conversation about this intolerable thing called "growing up."

"Father doesn't want me to call him daddy anymore," I said.

She looked at me like I was a frog and told me, delicately and with precise pronunciation, just what I could call him instead.

Anyway. Rondell.

Rondell had a white mama. That's what he called her, his white mama, to differentiate her from the Black woman his father had later married. When we were in middle school, Rondell liked to say he spent as much time as possible in the sun because he wanted to stay dark. I questioned the biological feasibility of this, but he took it as a matter of faith. He always sat in the back of class, right by the windows; he'd change desks to follow the progress of the sun. I later learned that his white mama was in fact of Middle Eastern descent—Pakistani. Her name was Noor. Rondell liked to pronounce it "Noir" and pretend she came from France.

"Wine country," he said.
"Vin de Pays."
He had the most flawless French pronunciation of anyone I'd known before or since. Even my delicate, Coco-Chanel and Yves-Saint-Laurent mother couldn't match his consonants. "Pinot Noir," he'd say, describing a grape as dark as his skin. "Makes red Burgundy. And in November, there's Beaujolais Nouveau. Everyone rushes to get a bottle, but no one knows for sure what it's going to taste like until they buy it. It's like fucking a girl none of your friends have been with, you know?"

He said this to shock me. We were both sixteen; he was still a virgin, although I was not. How do I know this? Because I'm the one he gave his virginity to, about twenty months later, on a wool blanket we spread on the floor of his baby sister's playroom while his stepmother was out grocery shopping. This was the same day he told me he was getting a job.

"Do you think it's safe?" I asked. "Liquor stores get held up a lot, you know."

"Not this liquor store," he said. "This one's on the other end of town. It just sells wine, none of that crap like Steel Reserve or Skol or Black Velvet." ("Crap" was, for Rondell, a more all-encompassing term than it is in conventional usage.)

That job didn't last long. People on the other end of town—I'd say
white
people on the other end of town, but it's not like there's another kind over there—they didn't think an eighteen-year-old Black man knew anything about wine. The last straw, Rondell said, was this asshole who picked up a bottle of Pinot Noir and asked if it was Burgundy.

"No, sir," Rondell said. "It's not French."

"So what's different about it?"

"The grapes are grown in California, not France."

"But it's the same kind of grape, right?"

"Of course, sir. But they aren't grown in France, so it's not a Burgundy wine."

The customer complained that Rondell had an attitude, and he was let go the next day.

There's a few things about growing wine on Mars.

Not as many as there are with growing wine on Earth, I guess, since the Non-Necessary Agricultural Agreement. It's at least
legal
to grow wine on Mars. No one's going to hunt you down for wasting fertile ground-space. And the dryness isn't a problem for grapes, not like it would be for cranberries or oranges or chrysanthemums. But still, take the soil, for example—acid as all hell, at least in the parts we could get our hands on. And then there's the growing season.

None of this stopped Rondell. Or me, for that matter: I hesitate to blow my own horn, to preach from the Book of Isaya, as my father used to say, disliking all pride, but especially the pride of a moon-faced half-white crybaby. But I played my own role with the Martian vineyards. I wrote to the right people and filled out the right forms and made sure that, when it mattered, the sturdy little vine clippings were in their Styrofoam coolers at the shuttle launch, ready to hurtle through space. I'm not saying Rondell was no good at logistics, he was fine, but his brain was on other things. Advertising on pages opposite Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Audi. Wine-tastings with white-gloved waiters and counters of black Italian marble.

I remember the first vintage—2029. Turned out it was a bitch to make decent wine on Mars. I took one good sip and gagged. "Don't rush it," Rondell said, kissing my bare shoulder. But even he turned faintly green. Once, my father made me so angry that I drank a glass of vinegar.

We'd been having the usual argument. I was shameless; I was ungrateful; I didn't know what to do with nice things. I suspect he enjoyed making me cry. (He was good
at it, but that's hardly high praise—a sudden shift in the weather, a dead spider trapped in its web, reports of a fatal car accident on the television could open the floodgates just as well.) I knew that in his eyes I was despicable. Instead of Hippolyta, he'd accidentally married Aphrodite; and his child, instead of an Athena, was some sort of bear-clumsy, swollen Callisto. Stupid and tedious as a sponge.

But here's the thing about sponges: we're porous. We absorb everything.

"You're ignorant," he was saying, or words to that effect. You may have noticed that I remember little of his exact wording; the fact is, he was not very memorable. His voice was like sour milk, quickly wiped up, bleached out, and forgotten. "You couldn't tell good vine from vinegar."

I said nothing. I knew he was speaking metaphorically, but I didn't really give a fuck. I took a wine glass from the cupboard. I got the gallon of vinegar from the pantry. I poured some of the latter into the former.

Looking into his little, watery blue eyes, I started to drink. I didn't stop until he flinched away.

"Tastes fine to me," I said, wiping the back of my mouth with my sleeve.

He flinched again.

I went into the bathroom and vomited.

I said Rondell was no good at logistics. He was also no good at hate mail.

This was three or four years into the business, when what we were bottling and distributing was finally good. Blends had suddenly shot up in popularity and we were prepared for it, with a heady, velvety mix called Morningstar—Pinot Noir and Merlot from the Martian vineyards, plus a trace of Cabernet from a pre-NNAA vintage we'd discovered near Bordeaux. A burst of red berries and stone fruits, a faint mocha finish, surprisingly drinkable. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive. We even made an awards ballot or two, nothing too high-brow.

Well, I guess it must have been too high-brow for
some
people.

Rondell wanted me to answer all the messages. Thank the polite ones, tuck in a coupon for a free bottle or two, and tell the rest in no uncertain terms to fuck off. He couldn't understand why even clicking through those misspelled messes, those hateful, poisonous pages of tripe where words like "paws" and "gutter" and "filthy" cropped out like foul alien weeds, would make me burst into tears and flee the room.

"But they're wrong," he said, bewildered. "We've got a good thing."

He couldn't understand how them being wrong made it worse.

I've still got a few bottles of Rondell's vintages on a plywood rack in my basement. I carried them from apartment to apartment and house to house, dusted them and smoothed the labels where the glue is starting to wear thin. They might be worth something. I couldn't bring myself to sell them, though.

And drinking them is out of the question. It'd be like drinking my own tears. Sure, they're sweet, and the action is fittingly cyclical; but really, it's just taking back your own salt, reclaiming what your body has rejected and expelled. You've got to trust that your body knows best. Some things you just have to let go.

So far as I can recall, my mother brought up Rondell as a subject of conversation precisely once.

"Is his mama really white?"

"No," I said. We were sitting on the porch swing, sipping sweet white wine from plastic cups. "Maybe. She's Pakistani. Does that count?"

"Nah." A pause. My mother gave the floorboards a kick, sending the swing back
sharply. But she didn't lose her grip on her wine glass. "He was okay, that boy. It's a shame."

This conversation took place two weeks after he died.

Rondell also died of Mars, indirectly. Somebody shot him.

We were giving a demo at the Pan-Am Agricultural Congress. It wasn't very pan-American; everyone was white and balding and spoke with a Midwestern accent. This was in Chicago. The heartland took a particularly hard hit with the NNAA—not the act, as such, which profited corn farmers and some of the wind turbines, but the anti-NNAA reactions, which consisted of pretty much everyone else. Everyone who could afford to was talking about buying off-Earth, not merely from necessity, but as a big old fuck-you to the NNAA. Buying, that is, from us.

I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the shooting.

The gunman was short, pudgy, and white, with sparse, greasy blond hair. I don't know much more than that, because after he walked up to our booth and fired a full round, hitting Rondell four times in the chest, he turned the gun on himself and blew his face off. They searched his computer afterward; I think he hated Pakistanis. All I could think at the time was good riddance, and then I was on my knees, cradling Rondell in my arms and pleading with him not to go.

He went, though. He squeezed my hand, but he couldn't say much. His lungs were in tatters. And I held him and kissed his bloody lips and couldn't cry, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't cry. My body was in shock. I'd been shot too, in the fat upper thigh, mere fractions of an inch from the femoral artery. The blood ran down my leg in sheets, black as Pinot Noir.

My father said I'd never find a man who could love me. Did he mean I was unlovable because I was fat, or half-white, or a crybaby? Because I was ungrateful? Because I couldn't appreciate good wine? But in that, as in everything else, my father was wrong.