Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 (6 page)

"What are you going to do about this woman?" Marla said. She was a small person, but a fuzzy one, her graying hair never containable, her clothing always textured by wrinkles and cat hair.

Petra shrugged. "I've asked her to lunch. I'm sure this mix-up with the gallery isn't her doing."

"They announced that they were pulling your show for hers pretty late in the game, didn't they?"

Petra leaned back in her chair, looking over the coffee shop. They were too near the speakers, which were playing folk music a couple of levels too loud. A woman near the front bent over a hand of Tarot cards while the woman across from her watched. Her expression jittered between anxious and hopeful.

"That's how it is with artsy types sometimes," Petra said. "Last minute and haphazard."

"You think it's just that? You said you'd had some trouble with her before."

"Maybe. I'm just not sure. But let's talk about something pleasant. How are your classes going this semester? Are you molding the next generation of women activists?"

"Just activists, thank you. No need to gender mark the word."

"You know what I mean."

"It's always the same. A handful who are interested, a large number who perpetually disavow feminism while saying all sorts of feminist things. A few young men there to score in one way or another." "You've always said you liked it."

Marla sipped her drink. Behind her shoulder, the espresso machine hissed and snarled in competition with the music.

"It just gets tiresome," she said after a while. "Making the same argument over and over. Hearing their tortured objections. They look hard at the system in a way they haven't before and they see stuff that pisses them off, but they don't know what to do with that. For some, it sets off a rage that's been smoldering for years. Others just get depressed or bitter."

"But there's some hope here and there. The same thing was true when you and I were taking Avallone's Intro to Women's Studies, almost two decades ago."

Marla's fingers strayed over her cup, stroking the heated ceramic smoothness. The skull disappeared and reappeared, looking at Petra. It was genderless, anythinged. The bell on the door jingled. A cold breeze entered with a customer.

"I feel bad about it." Marla slumped in her chair, eyes straying to the toes of her faded purple Vibrams. "I'm like the person who lets them know they've been living with a radioactive site next door. That it's seeped into their bones, colored the way they interact with the world and other beings. Changed the way they think and act. That it won't stop with them but will go on and affect their children and their children's children. That's how deep the patriarchal structures go, that's how much of our world they codify. It's a wonder we can even perceive them at all, we're so deeply entrenched."

So hyperbolic. But when Petra thought back to those days in Charlene Avallone's class, when they'd been awakened to a new way to step outside the world and see its structures, she knew her younger self would have nodded with every line.

"Leonid gave me a toy for Kerry."

Marla looked up. "What sort of toy?"

"Mermaids."

Marla made a face.

"Living ones, no less."

"Little Disney mermaids," Marla mused. "I wonder, how much anger would they have at their cores?"

When she got home, she put her groceries on the counter and went to the tanks, curious to see what progress had occurred. She'd put the coral seeds in them late last night. The seeds were globes now, made of a glossy gray material, almost two and a half inches in diameter.

Inside the globe, something was moving. Its sides flexed and bulged as the thing inside shifted. Even as she watched, it shuddered and wobbled. Whatever was inside—presumably a mermaid—was eager to escape.

Should she help it, perhaps poke a small hole in the side so it had something to work at? She consulted the pamphlet but it said nothing about the hatching process.

But by the time she came back to the tank, the question had resolved itself. A rent in the side was widening. Through it Petra glimpsed orange scales and pale flesh.

She checked the second tank. There the same thing was happening, although the scales were turquoise rather than reddish orange.

The globe convulsed and collapsed. In a flurry of scales the turquoise mermaid emerged.

Petra stared. She had expected Sea Monkeys.

This was very different.

The mermaid was perfect and colorful as one of the parrot-bright little fish that school in coral reefs. Its upper half was a tiny woman, complete with blue seashell bra cupping the faint swells of her torso.

She called Leonid. "What are these? Are they intelligent?"

"Of course not! I told you that," he crowed, pleased that his creation had deceived her sharp eye.

"But it's wearing clothing."

"Look closer," he said. "I told you. All natural coloration. Or engineered, to be more precise."

Her fingers were tight on the cell phone as she leaned down to look into the tank. The mermaid coiled, long tail writhing in the water. It nosed among the plastic seaweed in the tank, perched atop an arch of rocks and groomed itself, combing fingers through blonde hair. Looking closely, Petra could see that what Leonid had said was true. The flesh shifted color and texture, became the bra's structure.

"You're sure?"

"They're not even animals, really," he said. "Think of them as little flesh machines."

The flesh machines floated in their tanks. Petra pulled her eyes away from them.

"Very well," she said.

That night she set two more seeds into their starting buds, one white, the other purple. It amused her to think that these were Suffragist colors, the same colors banner wearers of the nineteenth century had sported.

She wondered what a suffragist mermaid would look like.

Daisy had opted for the new French bakery, the Rendezvous, over at Bella Bottega.

She was already ensconced at a wrought-iron table.

"Try the brioche with Nutella," she urged.

Petra nibbled on a sample from the basket next to the cash register as she waited for her coffee, but opted for a croissant.

The cashier was about fifteen, wearing a nose ring, and unsmiling. In a collage, Petra would depict her with a seagull's wing.

An arc of discarded cigarette butts.

A puff of glitter to show the way the light coming in through the front door shone on the ring.

What signs expressed
she reminds me, once I was young and now I regret so much?

What signs spoke to that younger self that had been so wrenched awry by societal pressures and circumstance?

She wrestled her mind away from the question. She shoved change in her jacket pocket, and turned back. Sitting down across from Daisy, she scattered croissant crumbs across the tiled table as she detached a flakey triangle.

"I have to keep an eye on the time," Daisy said. "The kids are in archery camp, but they might get out early."

Daisy's children were perpetually enrolled in lessons: gymnastics, ceramics, horseback riding, impromptu theater, all of which allowed Daisy to snatch time for her second love: poetry. Even now a Moleskine notebook protruded from the ample purse beside her.

She looked at Petra. "You're too thin. And when are you going to tell that woman to back off?"

"Thursday lunch. And I don't have anything overt," she added. "Or much, at any rate. But you know how sometimes you feel it in your core, that someone doesn't mean you well?"

Daisy nodded. "Go with your gut," she said. "You learn that as a mother. You learn that silence sometimes has an ominous tinge that means someone's drawing with lipstick on the new flocked yellow wallpaper."

"But enough of that," Petra said. "I don't want to think about it now, really."

Daisy's gaze was intent behind wire-rimmed glasses. She always wore REI casual, lavender fleece or teal sweaters with matching socks. Her only piece of jewelry, other than her plain gold wedding ring, was a matching ring set with a topaz and a peridot, her daughters' birthstones.

"How's Kerry dealing with the divorce?"

"Hard to know. She seems to be enjoying this rock camp well enough. Says they named their band Harvey Hairbanger. Why? Who knows."

Daisy's smile quirked. They'd met several years ago at a gallery fundraiser and found they lived two blocks from each other. Even so, coffee dates were rare. Daisy prized her free time fiercely, used it to hole up and write the taut little half-sonnets about overthrowing the establishment that had made her an unlikely Occupy hero.

The phone laid beside Daisy's cup buzzed.

"What now?" She picked it up and glared at it. "Jesus. Kaitlin has what they think is a broken arm. How do you break your arm shooting an arrow?" She gathered her things in a scramble. "I'll see you next week?"

"Sure."

"You'll have to tell me how it went." The crumbs on the table lifted and fell as the door closed behind Daisy. She vanished out into the parking lot's sun. Petra remained in the shadowy cafe, studying the chalkboard and black and white photographs of French landmarks. Was the cashier watching her? She was the only customer other than the inevitable laptop user hunched at a back table, a young hipster man wearing gawky horn-rimmed glasses.

He raised his head as she looked at him, returning the look. They both blushed and looked aside. The cashier made an uninterpretable sound.

Petra felt unsatisfied. These daily interactions, the lunches and coffee dates, were how she managed equilibrium, how she kept herself from spiraling into obsessive thought, kept herself from being consumed. Her best collages came out of such passages, but they were hard on her: days spent working, no sleep, no showers, no food other than a succession of sugar-heavy Cokes and old-style cigarettes until she finally forced herself to let the creation go, shipped it off to her gallery.

Her former gallery now. She'd have to look for a new one. That would be a pain in the ass, a search more painstaking than for any lover, because a gallery steered you, represented you, built your brand, was the enabler for your statement to the world.

Why had they decided to remove her from their client list? Blake, the owner, had refused explanation. Simply said it would be best for her to move to another establishment. Then stopped returning her calls.

When she saw Saffron this Friday, maybe the other artist would give her insight into what had happened, why Saffron's show now appeared on the schedule where Petra's had been.

Petra found it hard to believe there was any malice. These things were always the result of a misunderstanding, something that could be sorted out.

The pamphlet said the Sound Chamber was used to breed the mermaids, although it coyly called it "collaborating." Apparently that was the toy's main point, to see what combinations you could create, collect the different and increasingly complicated configurations like trading cards or stickers. She noted that the expansion kit came with plenty of additional tanks. With hundreds of possible mermaids, this would be an expensive hobby if Leonid was using the pricing strategy he'd indicated.

The turquoise mermaid didn't flee the net as Petra dipped it into the tank. Instead it floated there docilely. The lack of reaction reinforced what Leonid had called them: flesh machines. She put it and the white mermaid—Snowlanthia, the pamphlet named it—in the Song Chamber and watched.

The mermaids hung still in the Song Chamber's tepid water, staring at each other. A circle at the circular tank's bottom lit up, a phosphorescent glow illuminating each mermaid from beneath. It gave the turquoise mermaid a peculiar intensity reminiscent of a black light poster and tinted the opal one with a hint of green, as though mold were growing in the ridges of her scales.

The mermaids circled each other in slow, undulating spirals. They flicked their fins and collided, bouncing off each other.

Petra's breath stopped. Had she done something wrong? Were they attacking each other?

No. The mermaids were rippling against each other.

From the chamber's silver rim came a whisper, the note of a drowning flute calling to a submerged piccolo.

Flesh machines. But the contortions seemed so intimate. She took a yogurt from the coolbox and went to watch a news flickie.

When she returned, the mermaids were no longer in contact. In the circle of light at the chamber's bottom lay a thumb-sized globe, its surface patterned with silvery lines, like a cracked glass marble.

She set up another tank to put the seed in. Over the course of the evening she managed to start another four mermaid seeds: kelpy, mottled green; peacock purple; a frosty yellow as soft as an Easter chick; and a deep, inky black shot through with parallel needles of golden light.

She was going to need more tanks.

Peg said, "You've always been too nice for your own good. You let Leonid drag you from town to town with all his crazy schemes. You kept building up networks and then he'd move the family to Atlanta or Austin or somewhere in Michigan."

Peg was Petra's cousin, and one of the few women Petra didn't mind a scolding from. They had too much history between them, too many sleepovers and shared escapades and confided crushes, for Peg's words ever to sting too hard.

This time Petra had picked the place, the Regent Bakery-Cafe, so she could get one of their elaborately frosted cake slices, compartmentalized from its kindred with barricades of printed cellophane. It was busy. Chinese food sizzled in the back, while the pastry counter serviced an ongoing stream of customers.

"It's hard to be assertive sometimes," Petra said as she uncurled the wrapper from her green tea cake.

"But life gets a lot harder if you're not." Peg had a ham bun. She'd dyed one lock of her auburn hair pine green, a dryad look that went well with her unobtrusively shaded sweater and jeans. She was well-fleshed and perpetually on the verge of starting a diet, always postponed to a better tomorrow. "After all, you want to set a good example for Kerry."

"True."

Petra didn't want her daughter to put up with half the bullshit she'd had to. But she suspected it was inevitable.