FSF, December 2007 Read online

  * * *

  Spilogale, Inc.

  www.fsfmag.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Spilogale, Inc.

  * * *

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  December * 59th Year of Publication

  * * * *

  NOVELETS

  THE BONE MAN by Frederic S. Durbin

  FINISTERRA by David Moles

  SHORT STORIES

  OSAMA PHONE HOME by David Marusek

  STRAY by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert

  DON'T ASK by M. Rickert

  WHO BROUGHT TULIPS TO THE MOON? by S. L. Gilbow

  POEMS

  SHE RIDES by Sophie M. White

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West

  PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: SURVIVAL OF THE FANNISH by Paul Di Filippo

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  FILMS: FLAVORLESS, ODORLESS, SOULLESS by Lucius Shepard

  INDEX TO VOLUMES 112 & 113

  CURIOSITIES by David Langford

  COVER BY CORY AND CATSKA ENCH FOR “FINISTERRA”

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor

  BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

  JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor

  CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  JOHN M. CAPPELLO, Newsstand Circulation

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 113, No. 6 Whole No. 667, December 2007. Published monthly except for a combined October/November issue by Spilogale, Inc. at $4.50 per copy. Annual subscription $50.99; $62.99 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2007 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646

  GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030

  www.fsfmag.com

  Click a Link for Easy Navigation

  * * * *

  CONTENTS

  Osama Phone Home by David Marusek

  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Musing on Books by Michelle West

  Stray by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert

  The Bone Man by Frederic S. Durbin

  Plumage From Pegasus: Survival of the Fannish by Paul Di Filippo

  Don't Ask by M. Rickert

  Who Brought Tulips to the Moon? by S. L. Gilbow

  Films by Lucius Shepard

  She Rides by Sophie M. White

  Finisterra by David Moles

  Index to Volumes 112 & 113, January-December 2007

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Curiosities: Parallel Botany by Leo Lionni (1977)

  Coming Attractions

  * * * *

  Osama Phone Home by David Marusek

  Our opening story this month is a somewhat grim look at the near future. It was first published in the March/April 2007 issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine and it's still available on their Website, but we thought that most F&SF readers would appreciate seeing it here.

  David Marusek has been publishing short fiction since 1993, mostly in Asimov's. His short fiction was recently collected in Getting to Know You, which is currently a finalist for the 2007 Quill Award. His first novel, Counting Heads, came out in 2005 to much acclaim. This information can all be found online at www.marusek.com, along with a bit of information about his days as a Homer “spit rat.” A longtime resident of Alaska, Mr. Marusek is currently back in Homer, finishing up his next novel, Mind Over Oship.

  We arrived by rental car and parked next to a delivery van in the lot closest to the freeway on-ramp. The van hid us from the security cam atop a nearby light pole. We were early, traffic being lighter than expected. As we waited, we touched up our disguises.

  At 09:55, we left the car singly and proceeded to our target site by separate mall entrances. I rode the escalators to the food court on the third level, while G, C, and B quickly reconned the lower floors, where shops were just opening their grates.

  I started at the burger stand and ordered a breakfast sandwich. The girl behind the counter was pretty, mid-twenties, talking on her cell. She snapped it shut and asked, without making eye contact, if I wanted something to drink with that. She looked as if she'd been crying. I said no thanks, and she rang up and assembled my order. As she did so, I ticked off the mental checklist we had memorized: slurring of speech—negative; loss of balance or coordination—negative. About two dozen data points in all.

  When my receipt printed out, she tore it off with a deft flick of her wrist and glanced up at me. Apparently that was all it took, because she said, “I'm only working here to kill my mother."

  I made no reply, as per instructions, and fresh tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, it's true!” she declared. “I'm a spiteful daughter who only lives to torment her mother. I admit it! I have a freakin’ master's degree in marketing from NYU, and I was a founding owner of Toodle-Do.biz. I practically ran Toodle-Do from my bedroom. Sixteen hours a day! But did she care? No! She was all, ‘Why don't you find a real job?’ She couldn't even comprehend what Toodle-Do was. I mean, I could tie her to a chair and put a fucking laptop in her fucking lap and use her own finger to point at the screen, and still she can't see it. I mean, what do I have to do?"

  Once she was rolling, the young woman's confession built up momentum and volume, and her coworkers glanced nervously at us. “I'll tell you what I did! I sold my shares in Toodle-Do and took the most demeaning, most mindless ‘real job’ I could find!” She gestured to take in the whole burger stand. “See that?” She pointed at the deep-fat fryers, where a pimply boy was racking baskets of fries. “I stand next to boiling grease all day. When I go home, I don't even have to open my mouth. No way! It's in my hair. It's in my clothes. It's in my skin.” She raised both wrists to her nose and inhaled. “I smell like a freakin’ exhaust fan, and it drives her mad! Oh, it pushes her right over the edge! My grandmother died of a stroke when she was only in her fifties, and every night I pray to God to give my mother one too!"

  She went on like this, and the fries boy came over to add masturbatory sins of his own, but I'd heard enough and took my egg sandwich to the seating area. I spied a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit talking on a cell phone. He had a cup of coffee, so I went over to sit near him. He was so engrossed in his conversation that he didn't notice me eavesdropping.

  "Uh-huh ... uh-huh,” he said while pushing doughnut crumbs around the tabletop with his finger. “The reason I called ... uh-huh ... the reason I called ... uh-huh.” He took a final sip of coffee and said, “Listen, Ted, shut up for a minute, will you? I have something important to say. Yeah ... that's right. You're my brother, and I love you, but I've been holding this back for too long. Uh-huh ... You know Billy? Yeah, your kid, Billy, only he's"—the man wiped his brow with a paper napkin—"he's not your son. He's your nephew."

  There was a long pause, and then the man continued, “What the hell do I mean? I'll tell you what the hell I me
an.” And he did so, in excruciating detail. I half listened as I checked off my list: muscle twitching—negative; bizarre behavior—negative. Out of the corner of my eye I watched G, C, and B working the other tables, approaching anyone drinking coffee from one of our vendors.

  * * * *

  We compared notes on the drive back to the motel. Beyond a doubt, True Confessions was a keeper. The early reports on its harmlessness seemed justified. Nevertheless, C's idea of delivering test doses via adulterated coffee was a brilliant precaution, because no children became involved. We're patriots, not monsters.

  * * * *

  M's part in the operation had concluded that morning, and when we arrived at the motel room, she was in the bathroom removing tattoos. We quickly changed our clothes and cleaned the room for final departure, meanwhile logging our test results. M came out of the bathroom a new brunette with scrubbed pink arms, and B and G went in to remove their disguises. M walked around the room gathering up her things and asking how it all went. C looked up from his handset long enough to say, “It's true! No offense is too large or too small for a detailed accounting."

  M nodded thoughtfully, then turned to me and said, “And this is a good thing, why?"

  I just grinned, and she let it drop, said she had to go get her kid, and left.

  G, meanwhile, was in the bathroom brewing up a celebratory pot of coffee. His idea of a joke.

  * * * *

  Six years ago, in March 2002, I happened to attend a barbecue in the backyard of some good friends. As the flesh sizzled on the grill, we attempted small talk to pass the time, as we usually did. But in those early months, feelings were still too raw for small talk.

  Fortunately, there was beer.

  Someone had read an article—"The Battle of the Organizational Charts"—comparing the relative efficacies of a classical top-down hierarchy like General Motors and a distributed network like al-Qaeda. Apparently, the term “al-Qaeda” means “the database” in Arabic and was coined in the 1980s, when we were fielding freedom fighters in our Afghan proxy war against the Soviets. Not an operational organization itself, al-Qaeda is a sort of “Ford Foundation for jihadist startups,” as a pundit put it, that provides support in the form of financing, expertise, and coordination. In an “ah-ha moment,” one of us, with a mouth full of pulled pork, bragged that our old college crowd could form such an organization. Even better—because we weren't limited to box-cutter technology, we could out-qaeda al-Qaeda.

  * * * *

  It was a beer-soaked boast, soon forgotten. But not a week later, the president of the United States held a news conference at the White House. When reporters asked him about Osama bin Laden, who had recently escaped capture by our troops in Afghanistan, he said, “I truly am not that concerned about him."

  * * * *

  In all honesty, this presidential statement floored me. Not concerned about bin Laden? How could our president not be concerned about him? Was there anything our government could have found to say to the American people that day more knuckleheaded than this?

  A few of my friends gathered again, this time stone sober. We played one of bin Laden's videotaped sermons to the West. This lunatic with a Kalashnikov, wagging his finger at our whole culture, had somehow slipped through our military's grasp at Tora Bora. We should have had him—but we didn't. And then—according to the president—he and his whole murderous crew dropped off our radar altogether?

  That didn't sit well with my friends and me, but we weren't sure what to make of it. The news-conference dismissal might have been nothing more than our president's sometimes difficult way with words. Or his inability to admit to failure. But we didn't think so. Most likely it was the president's way of admitting that the hunt for bin Laden had gotten lost in the shuffle on the road to war in Iraq. It made us wonder if there wasn't a place for private citizens in the war on terror. Perhaps we could lend a hand.

  * * * *

  An affinity group can form around any mutual interest: tasting Beaujolais wines, singing in a choir, attending a communal sauna. We called our group the American Curling Club. We are a small group of men and women who roomed and/or socialized together in college back in the day. We came from middle-class families and attended a prestigious, but not Ivy League, school. There wasn't a legacy among us. We pretty much put ourselves through school with student loans, scholarships and grants, parental handouts, and part-time jobs.

  After graduation, we went our separate ways but kept in touch. We attended each other's weddings, and we are watching each other's kids grow up. We have built comfortable lives. We have climbed to upper-management positions in our chosen fields. We firmly believe in freedom and free markets. We are Christians, or at least most of us are. We're your average janes and joes with no particular axe to grind, except this one—Osama bin Laden must pay in full measure for what he has done.

  * * * *

  The American Curling Club formed in order to play a key role in bringing bin Laden to justice: namely, to locate him. It seemed to us to be an important and doable project. If our government couldn't or wouldn't find him, we would. And when we found him, if only his grave, we would forward his coordinates to the relevant agencies. We would do this as a public service, not for the twenty-five-million-dollar State Department bounty on him.

  Though our mission was lawful, we realized that pursuing it might require us to bend a few rules and make a few enemies. So we pledged our own lives and liberty to each other and swore an oath of secrecy. We established appropriate security protocols to shield the ACC core group.

  Collectively, we had expertise in a number of fields, including telecommunications, biochemistry, the military, civil government, and finance, but our contacts extended far into other areas. Each of us was charged with organizing further assets—networked cells and task groups—behind strong firewalls. Initially we chipped in our own savings to bootstrap our enterprise, but eventually our swifty cells became adept at targeting bank transfers in large offshore money-laundering operations. Soon we were able to finance ourselves by imposing “sin taxes” on drug cartels and playboy dictators. To name a few.

  * * * *

  In the summer and fall of 2002, while we were recruiting our go-to, wizard, swifty, lineman, and expat cells, we met frequently to bat around ideas for achieving mission success. Because truly brilliant ideas can sound crazy at first, and because committees smother ideas, we declared that during our freewheeling brainstorming sessions no idea was too outrageous to say out loud.

  What if we invented a surrender dust, keyed to bin Laden's DNA?

  Or what about informer dust storms?

  Our powers of imagination were running a bit hot in those days. What with all the news of war and rumors of war. What with the anthrax, Saddam, and the shoe bomber who ruined air travel forever.

  What if we embedded artificial memories in people throughout the Middle East so that they were certain they remembered Osama mocking the Prophet in public?

  What if we afflicted all adult males taller than six foot three in the tribal regions of Pakistan with the mother of all tooth abscesses, requiring immediate dental surgery in Peshawar, and then watched the dentists?

  With righteous fervor, in sessions that lasted through the night, we loosed the dogs of ingenuity upon the Sheikh of Saudi Arabia.

  What if we made the mountains of eastern Afghanistan begin to hum? An unrelenting low-frequency thrumming that seemed to rise from the very rocks and that drove people out into open spaces screaming and tearing their hair?

  * * * *

  My own résumé nominated me to form and coordinate our go-to cells, including an elite cell that I headed myself. Among my first recruits were several Desert Storm vets whose toughness and loyalty were known to me. They, in turn, helped me do background checks and interviews to fill out their own cells.

  People claim that this nation of ours is too polarized, that we hardly recognize the other half that doesn't think as we do. But I'm here to say
there's one issue that all Americans can agree on, no matter where they stand on most everything else: our nation won't rest until Osama bin Laden faces justice. This truth alone was our most effective recruitment tool. We characterized the ACC as an off-the-books government black op with one simple mission. The fact that we paid well, and in cash, helped, too.

  * * * *

  Eventually it was time to tether our brainstorming to reality. Our wizard cells were up and running, and we passed them our favorite ideas for critical feedback. They, in turn, fed us weekly “News-to-Use” summaries of developments across a broad range of fields. Our brilliant ideas became somewhat tempered by scientific reality.

  For instance, geneticists are cultivating plants that grow medicines in their leaves and fruit. They already have a potato rabies vaccine and a tomato HIV drug. Transgenic tobacco plants alone produce dozens of “farmaceuticals,” everything from human growth hormone to cancer drugs.

  What if we engineered a hybrid tomato or lettuce crop that contained a therapeutic dose of Xanax or Prozac and introduced it to the Middle East? Could that help reduce the bloodshed? Seriously, treat a whole region like a patient.

  Or: Does Osama use sunscreen? For decades, sunscreen was whitish and opaque because of the properties of one of its chief ingredients, zinc oxide. In the 1990s, researchers found that if they made the zinc oxide particles really tiny, they could produce a much more pleasing clear sunscreen. It was one of the first commercial successes of nanotechnology, and the source of the first nanotech-related product liability lawsuits.

  The problem was that nanoparticles are so small they pass through the skin and enter the bloodstream. They even cross the blood-brain barrier and come to rest, like shells on a beach, in the sun worshiper's brain.

  Researchers wondered if nanoparticles could be designed to collect in other kinds of tissue—feathers, for instance. That's what one radar ornithology group is attempting to find out in an avian-flu-related study for the DoI. They are sizing and shaping nanoparticles of various materials to pass through the birds’ skin and collect in developing feathers. Their ultimate goal is to nanobrand entire flocks of birds on the wing for precise tracking across the globe by radar.