Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (22 page)

Not to the marriage counselor. That much is damn sure.

She has stopped crying. She stumbles on, moving forward. There is no other way to go.

"Gran! Oh my God!"

"Is she
dead?"
a tech says, disbelief in his voice. "We never had... none of the beta tests...."

She doesn't hear them. She is flowing out, through and in and yet not of, space and time. Then nothing, but not before her sudden clutch of fear gives way to a moment of bizarre, utterly calm peace. An unexpected gift.

It will be all right,
someone says to her.

And it is.

Andromeda spirals toward
the milky way,
they may
collide and merge.

Then,tentei will change;
his face will have thick lines,
laugh wrinkles.

All will say he looks younger.

Orihime's river will swell,
drawing magpies to flutter round her
weaving rack.

Hikoboshi will be waiting
beside the water
to see if there is
a newly formed bridge.
While waiting he will
write a wish.

A poem that sounds like a hum
that massages his belly
to his throat.

When they blast off,
the great starships are like
heroic symphonies-

Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.

Free of Earth's gravity,
solar sails unfurled,their songs
turns to minimalism-

the gradual musical changes of
a Riley, Reich, or Glass.

Passing through our
solar system,each planet triggers
a symphonic movement-

that classical pomp of hoist.

At destination's end,
across our star studded galaxy,
a new world silence,

a blank score waiting for some
latter day Dvorak.

Lost in the jungle wars
Against encroachment
His leg an empty space
Defined only by memory

Like a wild-hearted bird
Trained with sweet seed
The mutant forest repays him
colonizes life back into limb

Reddish casting scarabs
Build bone from chitin
Their bug brethren form
sinews of elastic wax

Flesh made of wingless bees
A skin of interlocking mites
In this way he strides home
On the rebirth of his sole

It emerges out of time
and leaf,

mouth full of steam,

rip-roaring hot
and unsweetened

(no placid chamomile
or lavender here-
those are dried-out beasts
more fit for bedtime
than daybreak),

and not even milk can neutralize
its first bitter taste,

as shot through with tannin
and caffeine

(the more toothsome chemicals
in our rousing brew),

this apex predator of muddleheadedness,
this creature of morning
and herbal dregs,
takes a monster bite oout of sleep,
chasing away,

swallow by swallow,

the last remaning brontosauri of dreams.

"(s)outh of oz,and north of shangri-La."
-George R.R Martin

If there is a place south of Oz,
my compass will find it.
If it is the true north,
that lies past Shangri-La,
I have sought that way
since childhood,fairytale needle
always spining toward strangeness.

My father,whose Life was built
on careful lies-of where he was born,
of what he had done in the war,
of how many women he loved-
always wondered at the cardinal points
of my longings,declaring them
unreal,as if his make-believe
was more natural than my compass rose.

I am aligned to the magnetic field
of the human heart,his was always a gyro,
spinning rapidly to keep up with a world
rotating solely on his solipsistic lies.
There was never adventure for him,
no Shangri-La,no Oz, only a cold trail,
trackless plain,and a meal of salty regret.

A bat's swoop
blinks out some stars
ever so briefly
like an oracle revealing
where black holes will be.

BUMMED OUT AND UGLY ON THE OCCASSION OF PHILIP K. DICK'S BIRTHDAY

Last June, we ran a guest editorial commemorating the birth of Isaac Asimov. This year, we celebrate Philip K. Dick with an essay by Alice Sola Kim that has been reprinted from BuzzFeed Books. Alice's essay originally appeared on December 16, 2013, which would have been Phil Dick's eighty-fifth birthday.

The great thing about the library was that nothing too fucked up could happen there.

Untold multitudes of librarians and patrons would disagree with me, but I'm only speaking for myself. Even when I went to the library with my father, things were relatively chill between us, and would remain that way until we left. It was a building decorated in every shade of brown the seventies had on offer.

We walked to the back of the library, past the magazine racks, to the reference materials and the study tables. All sorts of people sat back here, but the ones I noticed the most were the crazy people, because I was with one. The library was wonderful because it was calm and full of books and this peace could be anyone's for no price at all. If you're crazy at a certain level, chances are, you don't have an office to be crazy in. The library is a decent replacement—an office of crazy, where you can work on projects no one cares about or understands, sitting at a heavy wooden table next to lamps and metal carts and encyclopedias. And my father worked very hard.

"Come back fast," he said. "You have to help me."

He sat, and I escaped like I was spring-loaded and shot at the science fiction section. I brought some books back and sat down with him. I hated to look at him writing his crazy-ass letters. He wrote with such care, his letters so pristinely serifed they looked Old German, and everything he wrote was straight garbage at best, something that would put him in jail at worst. I hated it so much, and it got sadder the more I thought about it until I thought I would start scream-crying at the office of crazy. So I went elsewhere. I read about anywhere but here. I read about space shit. No one wants to be that predictable and psychologically obvious, but sometimes things are exactly the way you expect them to be.

Once in a while, my dad would interrupt me. "How do you spell 'legislation'?" he'd say. "How do you spell 'inheritance'?" Questions like that, words like that. Sometimes he had me copyedit the whole thing, fixing spellings and sentence structures for letters in which he politely requested the return of three million dollars from the governor, or a helicopter to Seoul. And I would go from crazy-ass letter to book to letter, book, letter, book.

The world my dad lived in was the one in which dark forces thwarted him at every turn, keeping his fortune just out of reach and turning his family against him. He knew it was a false world, and none of the letters he wrote to the president or the rants he subjected us to were able to bring back the true world. At the library, he would write his letters and I would read Philip K. Dick and, each of us, in our own way, would hate this world.

Today is Philip K. Dick's birthday. Even if you don't care about science fiction, you know about him. There's the Philip K. Dick who belongs to everyone: American science fiction writer, known for drugs, paranoia, ontological fuckery, and the occasional really awful sentence. A heap of screen adaptations, most of which are glossily plastinated trash. At this point, dude is even recognizable as an adjective: You can throw Dickian on the heap with Dickensian, Orwellian, and, like, no women.

There's also the Philip K. Dick who is mine. The one I've been reading for half my life. The one who wormed his way into my life before I could be thoughtful and critical about the things I loved. The one who reigns in my personal pantheon.

Recently I hung out in a group with a guy who said innocently, "Being fat led me to
Star Trek.
" We all laughed, but he hadn't been joking. That would've been a bad joke, a ha-ha-ha-nerds-are-like-
this
joke of the variety I have absolutely no time for. We laughed because he wholly meant it. It's not the whole truth, but I will match that guy and say that being bummed out and ugly led me to Philip K. Dick.
Helped,
anyway.