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  Copyright ©2008 by Spilogale, Inc.

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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  October/November * 60th Year of Publication

  * * * *

  NOVELETS

  DAYS OF WONDER by Geoff Ryman

  THE VISIONARIES by Robert Reed

  PLANETESIMAL DAWN by Tim Sullivan

  SHORT STORIES

  INSIDE STORY by Albert E. Cowdrey

  SLEEPLESS YEARS by Steven Utley

  THE NEW YORK TIMES AT SPECIAL BARGAIN RATES by Stephen King

  DAZZLE JOINS THE SCREENWRITER'S GUILD by Scott Bradfield

  GOINGBACK [IN] TIME by Laurel Winter

  PRIVATE EYE by Terry Bisson

  WHOEVER by Carol Emshwiller

  EVIDENCE OF LOVE IN A CASE OF ABANDONMENT: ONE DAUGHTER'S PERSONAL ACCOUNT by M. Rickert

  THE SCARECROW'S BOY by Michael Swanwick

  POEMS

  DECEMBER 22, 2012 by Sophie M. White

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West

  PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: TILL HUMAN VOICES SHAKE US, AND WE FROWN by Paul Di Filippo

  FILMS: THINGS THAT GO by Lucius Shepard

  CLANK IN THE NIGHT

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  SCIENCE: ROCKS IN SPACE by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy

  COMPETITION #76

  CURIOSITIES by Fred Chappell

  COVER: “NEW BEGINNING” BY MAX BERTOLINI

  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 115, No. 4 & 5 Whole No. 677, October/November 2008. 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 © 2008 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.fandsf.com

  CONTENTS

  Short Story: Inside Story by Albert E. Cowdrey

  Department: Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Department: Musing on Books by Michelle West

  Short Story: Sleepless Years by Steven Utley

  Novelet: Days of Wonder by Geoff Ryman

  Department: Plumage From Pegasus: Till Human Voices Shake Us, and We Frown by Paul Di Filippo

  Short Story: ‘The New York Times’ at Special Bargain Rates by Stephen King

  Short Story: Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter's Guild by Scott Bradfield

  Novelet: The Visionaries by Robert Reed

  Department: Films: Things That Go Clank In The Night by Lucius Shepard

  Short Story: GoingBack [in] Time by Laurel Winter

  Short Story: Private Eye by Terry Bisson

  Poem: December 22, 2012 by Sophie M. White

  Short Story: Whoever by Carol Emshwiller

  Department: Science: Rocks In Space by Paul Doherty & Pat Murphy

  Short Story: Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter's Personal Account by M. Rickert

  Novelet: Planetesimal Dawn by Tim Sullivan

  Short Story: The Scarecrow's Boy by Michael Swanwick

  Department: F&SF COMPETITION #76: “Childish Things"

  Department: F&SF COMPETITION #77

  Department: FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Department: BOOKS-MAGAZINES

  Department: Curiosities: Rainbow on the Road, by Esther Forbes (1954)

  Department: Coming Attractions

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  Short Story: Inside Story by Albert E. Cowdrey

  Seven years ago, Albert Cowdrey showed us one of the weirder sides of New Orleans in “Queen for a Day.” That story, which first appeared in our Oct/Nov. 2001 issue and is currently posted on our Website, won the World Fantasy Award.

  Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans and changed everything ... including the lives of Detectives Fournet and Tobin. Read on and see if those changes are for the better.

  By the way, as of this writing, reports suggest that about 500 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are still living in FEMA trailers.

  Tough as he was, retired Detective Sergeant Alphonse Fournet admitted that he hadn't been able to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

  "Living in Alabama for a month,” he groused to Chief of Detectives D. J. Tobin. “Wunnerful folks, but how they live! Frying ham in lard. Alla time asking me what choich I belong to. They had a prayer vigil, for Chrissake, to apologize to God for pissing him off enough to hit us with Katrina. It's like that guy Cheney shot apologizing for getting in the way of the birdshot."

  It was noon at Ya Momma's Bar & Grill, and succulent aromas filled the air. Tobin, who was picking up the tab, listened patiently but sympathized only to a point.

  "You didn't lose your house or nothing, right, Alphonse?"

  "I live in Algiers,” said Fournet, as if that were sufficient explanation for his good fortune. “The west bank is the best bank. You oughta loin that, D. J., now you gotta wife and kids to proteck."

  "Maybe I'll think about it. We ain't moving back in the Ninth Ward, I can tell you that. Neighborhood ain't there no more. Traneesha and the kids're still in Houston. She's got ‘em in school, and—it's funny, you know? In Texas they expect kids to loin something, even in public school. I always figured public school was just a place where you put kids so's they wouldn't run the streets."

  He paused for a moment while they both meditated on the alien lands that surrounded them. Then Tobin said, “Okay, we're all caught up. Now let's get down to business."

  Fournet held up his right hand, palm flat, like a cop stopping traffic. “Lemme tell you sump'm foist, D. J. It's nice of you to invite me for lunch, but I ain't going back to woik, no matter what."

  "What if your city needs you?"

  "For what? To help catch some druggies been shooting other druggies? Gimme a break."

  "Nah,” shrugged D. J. “That's just the self-cleaning oven at woik. Can't say it in public, but the only useful thing those guys do is kill each other off. No, what I'm talking about is real human people disappearing. Like phht. We don't need no more of that. Besides twelve hundred and something drowned and otherwise dead, the city lost two hundred thousand live ones moved to elsewhere after the flood. We can't stand to lose no more."

  At this point an elderly man attired in a dirty apron and liver spots shuffled up and deposited on the table two frosty Turbodogs and an enormous bowl of crawfish étouffee. Fournet seized a dented spoon and set to wor
k with gusto.

  "Don'tcha know those mudbugs are solid cholesterol?” frowned D. J. He was brown-bagging, and sounded envious.

  "You wanna live forever, or you wanna live?"

  "Traneesha wants me to be there and still breathing when the kids graduate."

  "So, your wife's watching you by satellite, or what?"

  After brief meditation, D. J. pushed his brown bag away and called out, “Waiter, make it two crawfish."

  That afternoon, back home on Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler Drive, Algiers, Fournet discussed D. J.'s proposal with his wife, Alma. “He says people been disappearing out the FEMA trailer parks, and he wants me to check it out."

  Alma muted Oprah and thought the proposal over. “Well, normally I'd say trailer trash is trailer trash, and who cares? But today, anybody can be trailer trash. If the Pope lived in Noo Awlyunz, he might be trailer trash."

  Together they kicked the proposal around. What impressed Alma was D. J.'s comment on the state of the city.

  "We gotta get things back on their feet,” she decided. “Like it is, we ain't no city no more, we're a goddamn a-toll. Island One, everything's fine. Island Two, everybody's missing. Island Three, no island at all. This can't go on. We need our people back."

  "Well, maybe I'll do it. The department's so short-handed, they even got a use for old fat guys like me."

  "Right. They want you at Tulane and Broad, and I don't want you around the house supervising me like you been doing. One more piece of good advice outta you, Alphonse, I'ma put Drano in your gumbo. So get your wide butt to woik and do something useful for a change."

  This connubial advice settled the matter.

  * * * *

  On his first day as a Special Deputy, Fournet received a temporary ID, a badge, and an unmarked police car, and set out to visit a Seventh Ward trailer park housing people made homeless by the storm.

  The trailers were all small and white and as alike as ice cubes from the same tray. A rent-a-cop seated on a camp stool by the only gate in an encircling six-foot cyclone fence directed him to the dwelling of Mr. Alvin Joule Palumbo.

  The door was answered by an undershirted man of middle age who backed deeper into the trailer and invited the detective to follow him.

  "So this is what a FEMA trailer's like,” said Fournet, wedging his belly through the door. “It's uh, compact, I guess the woid is."

  "F'sure,” said Palumbo. “Where else can you sit on the terlet, fry an egg and watch TV, all at the same time?"

  "So, you contacted the po-leece about a missing neighbor?"

  "Yeah. That was a week ago. What you all been up to in the meantime?"

  "Fightin’ crime,” said Fournet, though without conviction. “Tell me about this neighbor of yours."

  "Her name's Miz Zeringue."

  "Zerang,” muttered Fournet, hauling out his notebook.

  "Spelled Z-E-R-I-N-G-U-E. Don't ask me why."

  Fournet wet the tip of a pencil stub on his tongue and inscribed the name. “So she's been missing a week?"

  "More like two. I mean, nobody knows each other in this damn place, and if she hadn't been a good neighbor and brought me a bowl of toitle zoop when I had the flu, I wouldn'ta noticed she was gone at all. I went to retoin her bowl (you know how ladies are about their kitchenware) and when she didn't answer the door I put it down on the step and left. But after it sat there for three days, I got worried about her and asked the guard to check out her trailer. When we seen it was empty and her milk was sour, I called the po-leece."

  He added darkly, “I think her disappearing had something to do with the thirteenth trailer."

  "The what?"

  "You happen to count how many trailers are in this row?"

  "No. The guard just said, ‘End a the row is Mr. Palumbo,’ so I never counted."

  "Well, there's twelve. Only the night she musta disappeared on, there was thirteen. And don't look at me like I'm nuts, neither. I'm a grown-up man, I don't use dope, I don't drink no more than I have to to get along with my wife and daughter in Jackson and me living in a sardine can trying to oin a living while I sue the goddamn Friendly Neighbor Insurance Company that wants us to take $3,034.59 in settlement of a hundred-thousand-dollar claim."

  He paused for breath.

  "Anyway, that night I woiked late at Home Depot, and come back about ten o'clock and just automatically stopped at number twelve. And yeah, I noticed there was another trailer beyond it at the end of the row, but I thought, well, today they musta brung in another one. Meanwhile I was trying to open the door , only my key wooden toin the lock. Then this voice inside says, ‘Whozat messing round with my door?'

  "I said, ‘Your door! I live here.’ With that the door opens, and it's the black guy lives next door and he's got him a butcher knife in his hand and he says, ‘Mr. Palumbo! Whatchoo want this time a night? I thought you was a boiglar.’ I apologized and went to the last trailer, and that toined out to be mine. So I figured the new trailer must be someplace in the middle of the row, though how they squeezed it in without disconnecting and moving all the others I coulden figure. And next morning when I counted again, there was only twelve trailers just like always. I guess,” he added resentfully, “you don't believe me."

  But Fournet—recollecting a case he and D. J. had worked, involving a necklace that behaved like a boa constrictor—was better than Palumbo thought at believing the unbelievable. He said slowly, “This Miz Whatsit. She woiks late too?"

  Palumbo nodded vigorously. “At Rite-Aid. They lost so many employees she double-shifts lotsa days to make money to pay a lawyer so she can sue her insurance company."

  "Then if the new trailer was right next to hers, she might of walked into it by mistake?"

  "You quick on the uptake,” said Palumbo gratefully. “She mighta found the door on the new trailer unlocked and thought, ‘Whoa! Did I forget to push the button?’ So she stepped inside, and that was when they grabbed her."

  "They who?"

  "They whoever. You wanna beer?"

  "Why not?"

  "Well, if you back out the door just a second and gimme some space, I'll get one for you."

  In the hours that followed, Fournet visited three more trailer parks where residents had disappeared. The missing included a construction worker named Harry J. Symms, a beignet cook named Mary Margaret Trudeau, and an aspiring rap artist whose real name was Bill Snyder but who called himself Bluddy Slawta.

  Harry's roommates were deeply concerned about him, and Mary Margaret's co-workers wanted to offer a $500 reward for her safe return. Bluddy Slawta's neighbors begged Fournet not to return him if he were found, and after listening on an iPod to the artist's latest, “Ho's and Bitches Need to Die,” Fournet heartily agreed.

  Sunset had arrived with a saffron sky and hysterical traffic was clogging all the main arteries of the city when Fournet, heading home to Algiers, heard the opening chords of “Blueberry Hill” erupting from his cell phone. (The cop car's radio had perished during Katrina and had never been replaced.)

  Fournet popped the gadget open and glued it to one ear, meantime steering onto an Expressway onramp. “Yeah? Watch out, Butthead!"

  "What?” The voice was D. J.'s.

  "People don't know how to drive no more. I'd like to run that character in. Talking on a goddamn phone while he's driving the freeway."

  "So are you."

  "Yeah, but I'm doing my duty. What's up?"

  "That foist lady on your list. What her name was again?"

  "Zerang. Z-E-R-I-N-G-U-E, Zerang."

  "Well, she been found. She was wandering around in the flooded area out by Paris Road. I don't mean it's flooded now, but it was flooded bad, and it's still empty except for the wreckage. Some National Guard guys on a routine patrol looking for looters spotted her and brung her in."

  "She okay?"

  "Yes and no. She's alive, and she wasn't mugged or raped. But she had her clothes on backwards."

  "What?"

  "Shoit
and pants next to her skin, bra and panties on the outside. Her clothes were inside out, too—also her shoes. And she's talking in reverse."

  "Whatchoo mean, in reverse?"

  "You got a bad connection? By in reverse I mean in reverse. At Judah Touro when they asked her how she was feeling, she said, ‘Won doog leef I, doog lear.’ Took ‘em a while to figure out she was saying, ‘I feel good now, real good.’ I mean, she wasn't babbling or nothing, she seemed like a nice sensible lady, just politely talking to them, only in reverse."

  Fournet sighed. Another screwball case. “She's still at Touro?"

  "Yeah. Let her rest tonight, check her out tomorra morning. Okay, Alphonse?"

  When Fournet reached home, Alma was tasting a bubbling caldron of red beans and Cajun sausage. Frowning critically, she added a hefty dash of Tabasco and asked, “So where you was at today?"

  "On some of the other islands,” he said, and popped his first Turbodog of the evening. After one swallow, he added, “It's wild out there."

  * * * *

  The interview took place in a comfortable solarium of Touro Hospital.

  Mabel Zeringue turned out to be a plump widow of forty-six with a cap of neat brown hair just starting to gray, and missing contacts that caused her to lean and peer at Fournet as he questioned her. She was wearing clean pajamas and a blue wrapper that Mr. Palumbo had brought her from the trailer park, so that she wouldn't have to be interrogated wearing the paper doily provided by the hospital.

  To Fournet's relief, overnight she'd recovered the ability to speak in the usual manner.

  "They tell me I was kind of incoherent yesterday,” she admitted. “I just don't remember. I do remember those nice Guardsmen picking me up. One of them looked a lot like my Alvin, who's in Eye-rack."

  "You gotta boy in the service?"

  "No, he's with Boots and Coots. They fix oil wells and pipelines after the insurgents blow them up. They all pretty busy, them."

  Fournet forbore to ask whether she meant the insurgents or the repairmen, assuming that—since they made work for each other—both must be active. Instead, he zeroed in on the subject of the interview.