Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (14 page)

This was the kind of thing they talked about in Sunday school. Melissa hated Sunday school.

"I've decided on your punishment."

She followed her father into his study's bathroom, where he thumbed open the medicine cabinet and rummaged amidst the amber vials until he brought out a roll of foil wrapped candies.

"Give the hopeless girl one of these with her next meal."

"Her name is Lena,"" Melissa said.

He held out a silvery lozenge. "It will make
Lena
go to sleep. I'll call security, and they'll take her back where she belongs. Somewhere she can be of use. She won't be a stupid, dirty little girl growing into a stupid, dirty woman with nothing to offer."

He pressed the candy into her damp palm. She followed him back to his wallscreen.

"I understand this is hard, Melissa. You feel compassion for this person. That's forgivable. But you broke the rules, so you have to do this. You have to make this right."

He gestured at the screen, invoking stalled processes, resuming a conference. "If you take care of it, like a big girl, I'm prepared to let you design a puppy for your birthday. Any kind you want. If you can't act your age, then you'll get no birthday present or party this year. Am I making myself clear?"

Melissa recognized that tone of voice. The conversation was over. She held her anger carefully in check, eyes cast down. Her father's interface had swung back into place already. His lips moved as he subvocalized.

"Now run along."

Back in her room, Melissa sent Yani away, and then let herself cry. She lay on her bed, her face pressed into her pillow, hot tears flowing noiselessly, invisibly, into the fabric. Yani wasn't a bad governess. She picked out Melissa's clothes, dressed her, washed and braided her hair, but there was no love there. She spoke when spoken to, smiled coolly, and seemed always to be a half million miles away.

Melissa pored over the puppy builder on her slate. She would design the most expensive puppy ever built. She checked off everything, and where she couldn't check off two things at once, she went with the first choices, which were always the most expensive. Neural enhancement, security implants, remote control cortical implants, disease resistance and self-repair nano-bots designed for military and police service dogs.

The figure made no sense to her, the price, but it had quite a few zeros.

She found a Servant Bonding Agency, and clicked through the employment forms, rules, rates, and regulations. It made her head hurt, but she eventually arrived at a number for what conditioning Lena might cost.

About a quarter the cost of the maxed out puppy.

Smiling, Melissa went back to the terms and conditions clauses from the puppy mill. Her contract law classes in second grade came in handy, as she struggled with the language. Services that translated the legalese into plain English couldn't always be trusted, but they helped her home in on the problem passages, as she created her own custom contract proposal.

She worked on the problem long into the night.

Lena's father was clenching his teeth as he replayed the video, the muscles in his jaw bunching and unbunching. Melissa stood at his side and pretended not to notice.

On screen, Lena and Melissa were embracing.

"Why are you doing that?" her father asked.

"She likes to hug people. She says her parents used to hug her all the time."

"Did you like it?"

Melissa shrugged. "It's kind of nice. I mainly did it to be nice to her, though."

Her father grunted. "We don't hug the hopeless, Melissa. Ever. Do you understand?" Melissa nodded.

The camera view didn't include Melissa's face, which was pressed to the side of Lena's head. The video's audio track burbled with unresolvable static. The security software couldn't pick any voices out of the wall of noise created by a lawnmower running outside the shed.

"Did you warn her, Melissa?"

Melissa shook her head. "No."

"Because she didn't eat the candy. She left it on the tray. She's disappeared."

"I guess she didn't like candy. I gave it to her though, like you asked."

Her father looked at her for a long time. Looked back at the video window, of his daughter and the dirty little hopeless girl frozen in an embrace. He nodded his head curtly.

"You did what I asked," he said.

Melissa suppressed a smile. She was glad that her security transponder lacked an audio and video feed. That kind of thing wasn't done in families. Nor were lie detecting MRIs used. This technology was only employed with servants.

It also had to do with dignity, she remembered from Sunday school.

Melissa waited until half an hour before a cocktail party to ask her mother to approve her change order for the puppy.

"What do you want to change?" Her mother frowned, glancing at the form. Her dresser was weaving faintly luminous green jewels into her towering hairdo, which made it hard for her to move her head. Her mother hated reading, and when she thought her daughter wasn't watching, mostly used her slate in text to speech mode.

"Just getting rid of things I didn't really need. I didn't want to be wasteful." Her mother nodded and thumb-printed the change order. Melissa's puppy—she'd decided to name him Paris—lost his remote control and his neural and life extension genemods.

She waited until her father was standing in the entry hall with his footman. He was dressed in elegant black evening wear, dinner jacket and tie.

"Dad!" Melissa thrust the pad at her father. "My reward?"

Her father looked annoyed. "Not now."

"Please? I did what you asked."

Her father's face looked naked without the interface. He'd complained about his eyesight, but had put off the corrective surgery. Mother joked about Father's old man eyes. When he wasn't around.

Her father squinted at the dense, tiny type on the pocket slate.

Avoiding surgeries, her father had told Melissa, when she'd cried before getting her security implants, was a sign of weakness.

He thumbprinted the form.

Melissa watched the copter lift off, the wind blowing back her hair. She laughed.

The refund from the puppy order change would pay for Lena's conditioning. Her father had approved the second transaction. Her mother the first.

She didn't care what her punishment would be. She didn't care about her dolls.

She didn't care about her toys. She didn't like parties.

Lena was better than any dog. So much better.

And she would be all Melissa's. For life.

Timons Esaias is an Asimov's Readers Award winning poet and a satirist who lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania—chiefly on the faculty of their MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. The author's poetry, both literary and speculative, has appeared in markets ranging from
Asimov's
to
5 AM
and
Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Literary Journal of Baseball.
His poetry chapbook,
The Influence of Pigeons on Architecture,
is available at Amazon and his short fiction publications include stories in
Interzone, Asimov's,
and
Future Games.
Timons' current project is
Warfare for Writers,
a manual for authors who forgot to major in military science or history. He admits to us that a French essay on semiotics was one of the seeds that grew into his latest short story.

"I don't really approve of people from other planets."

Miss Douglas believed quite strongly in being clear from the very outset of a job interview. The employment agency had proven quite lax, of late, in screening the applicants. The proof of this laxity squatted before her right now in all its alienness.

The applicant most resembled a seven-foot-tall sea anemone wearing bits and pieces of rococo knight's armor from the late Middle Ages, all greaves and layered breastplates and doodads sticking out everywhere. Swiss army knife armor, like they wore at court, long after the wheel-lock had made armor obsolescent in the field.

But not a full suit of it. Squishy parts peeked out in several inexplicable places.

Miss Douglas focused her attention on the resume. "I see that you have, in fact, no work experience whatsoever."

The alien began an utterance. This entailed several seconds of distant-sounding gurgling, ending in a sigh that one might describe as reluctantly sensuous... if one were so inclined. The last part of the sigh turned into the word "Yes."

"And what makes you think that you would fit in here at, hem, Randi's Bustique Boutique?"

Perhaps the creature from Thalia Majoris IV–B scanned the store to determine what might fit in well there. The prominent display of sensible housecoats and thick flannel bathrobes did not fulfill the promise of the shop's name. The more uplifting foundational garments could only be observed here and there, in distant dark corners and from behind far more conservative selections. Patterned black lace hosiery fought a losing battle for space with opaque taupe types beloved of senior citizen churchgoers.

Randi's was a lingerie shop in the process of de-emphasizing its main product.

"Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, sigh... The employment agent assured me that working here would be well within my range of capabilities, Miss Randi Douglas."

"The person named Randi is no longer associated with this establishment," Miss Loreena Douglas snapped, for the thousandth time in the last ten months. She'd have wiped her no-good niece's name off the store and business license already if it wouldn't have cost four hundred honest dollars to do it. "You will kindly address me as 'Miss Douglas' for the duration of this interview."

She attempted to glare at the Thaliamajoran, but was distracted by the wreath of small tentacles, slowly waving like tendrils of ivy in a summer breeze. And that distraction led to another. Women were gawking. Actually gawking through the front window. Some were inside, pretending to examine merchandise, while actively avoiding the attention of the two salesgirls. It was quite bad enough that she had had to bring them both in, but interviews did require her full attention.

Even if there was only the one applicant. Miss Douglas's reputation had spread far and wide in the job-seeking community.

New salesgirls didn't stay long at Randi's Bustique Boutique.

"Let me put it another way, uh, Mr., uh," her eyes scanned the printout held disdainfully in her unadorned, and unpampered fingers, "Throgmorton. What attracted you to lingerie, or was this the employment agency's suggestion?"

The Thaliamajoran did not explain, as it could have, that it had failed to find work of any other kind. Thaliamajorans had not brought brave new technologies with them from the stars. Their spacecraft, which resembled freshly pulled beets, were completely inadaptable to human use, and required frequent repair. Neither their diseases nor their medicine were terrestrial in nature or relevance. And they revealed no special talents other than, well, being alien.

Hollywood employed numbers of them, as did Madison Avenue. Thaliamajorans took direction well and did not inquire into a character's motivation or history. Those with less talent naturally gravitated to Vegas. As more arrived they found work on Broadway, and subsequently in regional theater.

Throgmorton came to Earth after the cusp of Thaliamajoran media interest. Audiences were going back to the fourteenth year of Britney Spears treason trial coverage. Science reporters, tired of discovering surprisingly uninteresting facts about the first extraterrestrials, had moved on to old standbys like global warming and the coming Ice Age.

"Gurgle, g–, g–, sigh... In considering the realms of possible employment I became aware that lingerie and the female form is a pervasive icon of your society. Lingerie appears repeatedly in motion pictures, television, most magazines, and almost all newspapers. It is a vital feature on the covers of your most popular paperback novels. Lingerie is clearly, along with automobiles and firearms, a cornerstone of your civilization. Yet when looking in the Yellow Pages one finds far fewer outlets for this product. This suggested to me that the lingerie industry was in the nature of a cartel, and therefore a desirable industry in which to seek a position."

Miss Douglas pursed her lips. This sounded to her as though the creature had some business judgment, but she had lost the thread while wondering exactly where the thing's voice came from, and how.

The pinging of the credit register reached her ear. And in the corner of her eye there appeared a customer, a customer trying to get her attention. The kind of customer Miss Douglas most disliked to serve, being unconscionably fleshy.
Whatever had
happened
to discipline and self-control?
Miss Douglas frequently asked of an unrepentant world.
How can such women bear to present themselves to the public view?

"Excuse me," said the impudent customer. "How would this look on me, do you think?"

Miss Douglas feigned unawareness of this interruption. Her interviewee, while also not turning toward the speaker, emitted, "G, g, g, s... Which of your many fine features do you wish to emphasize?"

The article dangling from the hanger in the woman's hand seemed designed to let any and all features speak for themselves, but she did have the ability to blush. Dimples suddenly punctured her face near the corners of her mouth. "Ooo–uh," she replied. Her eyes shone. Her feet subtly shifted into the first ballet position.

"G–s... It really could not be better suited, don't you agree, Miss Douglas?"

Before Miss Douglas could reply, the woman announced happily, "I'll take it." She fled toward the checkout counter.

"What is your address, Mr. Throgmorton?" Miss Douglas asked firmly. "G–s... It's [email protected]."

Though Miss Douglas did not hold with idle curiosity, she did not mind profiting from those who did. Aliens on the screen may have paled in popularity, but Thaliamajorans in person were apparently quite another thing for mall denizens. Miss Douglas let Minine ("It's like Maxine, only it's not.") and Alsatia deal with the customers, and against all precedent undertook the training of Throgmorton herself.