FSF, March 2008 Read online

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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  March * 59th Year of Publication

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  NOVELLAS

  THE OVERSEER by Albert E. Cowdrey

  NOVELETS

  THE BOARDER by Alexander Jablokov

  SHORT STORIES

  RUMPLE WHAT? by Nancy Springer

  EXIT STRATEGY by K. D. Wentworth

  THE SECOND DESCENT by Richard Paul Russo

  A TEN-POUND SACK OF RICE by Richard Mueller

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West

  PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: TWO CC'S OF BESTSELLER, STAT by Paul Di Filippo

  FILMS: NO GAYDAR REQUIRED by Kathi Maio

  SCIENCE: TIME FOR SOME CHANGE by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  CURIOSITIES by Bud Webster

  COVER BY VINCENT DI FATE FOR “THE OVERSEER”

  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 114, No. 3 Whole No. 670, March 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.

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

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  CONTENTS

  The Boarder by Alexander Jablokov

  Rumple What? by Nancy Springer

  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Musing on Books by Michelle West

  The Overseer By Albert E. Cowdrey

  Plumage From Pegasus by Paul Di Filippo

  Exit Strategy By K. D. Wentworth

  Films: NO GAYDAR REQUIRED by Kathi Maio

  The Second Descent by Richard Paul Russo

  Science: Time For Some Change by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty

  A Ten-Pound Sack of Rice by Richard Mueller

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Curiosities: Father of the Amazons, by Pete Lewis (?) (1961)

  Coming Attractions

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  The Boarder by Alexander Jablokov

  We start off this issue with a story that isn't actually science fiction or fantasy. Nonetheless, we think you'll like “The Boarder.” This piece of historical fiction fits in with the growing body of works like Andy Duncan's “The Chief Designer” and Ellen Klages's “The Green Glass Sea” that view the scientific changes of the Twentieth Century through a lens of fiction. Mr. Jablokov, who is of Russian descent, assures us that the story is wholly fictional; in fact, he says that in researching the story, he had to find a vintage issue of Playboy, just so he could look at the ads.

  A couple of years after I was born, my parents bought the house where they still live. Before they even moved in, they had arranged for a boarder to rent the small room in the basement. They had decided, in a fairly formal way, that, as Russians with extra rooms, they should take in boarders. Neither had ever had an extra room.

  So they put lace curtains on the basement windows and installed a bathroom with a thundering exhaust fan and a tiled shower stall whose grout reliably turned black every summer. It was my job to scrub it out with a toothbrush. The room had a narrow bed with an embroidered cover, and dark icons of several nondescript saints, bought at a church sale from a glum anti-Semite who also tried to sell us copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from a box under his table.

  It was not an appealing room, but they seemed to have no trouble finding tenants. The first was a princess. An actual princess, some collateral of the Trubetskoys, born in Paris, her transliterated name ending in a scrolled double “f,” rather than the prosaic, anglo-phonetic “v” of ours. My parents, both products of the Soviet intelligentsia, were fascinated by aristocrats, even ones whose father had made ends meet by becoming a haberdasher. Princess Anna snored loudly and had the most impressive eyebrows I had ever seen. She always sighed over my mother's food, though she could never articulate, in her exaggerated Petersburg accent, what it was she was looking for. I don't think anyone really missed her when she left a few months later, to move in with a friend of hers, a duchess, in Brooklyn. She thought herself literary and was given to observations like: “Always read Turgenev in French. He makes much more sense that way. Some people prefer Shakespeare in French also, but I really do think that his cragginess shows off better in the original Russian."

  * * * *

  Some time later came the Little Green Man, a skinny, intense guy, an ex-Army Ranger or Green Beret or Navy Seal, I was never quite sure, who was studying Chinese at the University of Chicago.

  He believed it was possible to become invisible. He learned every board in the house and could slip through without making a sound. After he moved out, my mother found that he had kept a bag of cedar bark mulch in his bedroom, to cover up his steps in the flower beds.

  The night he earned his name, my parents had some friends over. I don't remember them, but I do remember their daughter, Maureen. She was a couple of years older than I, fourteen or fifteen, and wore a short skirt and a loose top. I was all over her, offering drinks, snacks, tours of the house. After some pestering from me she agreed to meet me out at the end of the block, past the shrubs, for ... I hadn't really thought it through, but already knew that thinking it through was what kept you from getting it done. She resumed her collapsed stare. For her, each second went by like a swallow of dry bread.

  Then she shrieked, “A little green man!” and pointed. We caught a glimpse of a startled face painted in shades of camouflage amid the rhododendrons. He dove through the basement window and was gone. Maureen had hysterics and insisted on leaving. She forgot all about her agreement with me. Thinking about it now, I realize that she had someone else to meet, and that the LGM's appearance in the shrubbery was a godsend that kept her from having to fake an epileptic fit or something. Still, my feelings were hurt. The LGM later married a nice Vietnamese girl and they now own a small tax accounting firm in Downers Grove, not far from my parents’ house.

  * * * *

  Vassily moved in not long after that. He was, in his way, much stealthier than the LGM. He just appeared one morning at breakfast, smearing jam on a chunk of bread and peering at an already coffee-stained issue of Iron Age, a steel-industry trade magazine. Too-large bites at his bread revealed teeth made of various alloys, which revealed his profession, though I did
not know it then. He did not acknowledge me. My parents, somehow following his lead, also pretended I was not there. I only learned his name a day or so later, by which time various of his possessions had made their way into the living room, and even into my closet. I complained about the gigantic leather bag that took up residence amid my sneakers, but no one listened to me.

  My parents wanted me to learn Russian, so they had me read Russian children's books. There were no non-Soviet Russian children's books, so I found myself imbibing gentle political indoctrination along with my stories of impudent Pioneers improvising solutions to their dilemmas, and became a sentimental Soviet, longing for tram cars, red neck kerchiefs, and Lenin portraits at the fronts of schoolrooms.

  I cringe now to think of how pompously insistent I was on the wonders of the people's paradise: the free health care, the fine education, the rights of women, the spotless and prompt public transportation. No wonder it was months before Vassily could even acknowledge my presence.

  * * * *

  Vassily had an urban Russian's facility for gardening in a small space. He dug up a stretch of weedy grass along the side picket fence. Most of both summers he lived with us were spent out there, growing odd, dark varieties of tomato, lumpy rustic cucumbers, beans you could buy by the pound for almost nothing at the store.

  His gardening outfit consisted of a beat-up pair of dress loafers my father had thrown out, black socks pulled up to the knee, long shorts that looked like they had been cut from a pair of work pants by someone who hadn't quite gotten the hang of scissors, and a hat folded out of that morning's Chicago Sun-Times. He had a sagging belly, and the beginning breasts that older men get, but he seldom wore a shirt. He was often burned red by the sun, and scratched his peeling skin, but never tired of the ability to walk around bare-chested. He always grabbed that day's paper off the kitchen table to fold his hat, and because he got up so much earlier than everyone else in the house he sometimes ended up wearing a section my mother had not yet managed to read. She would gulp her tea and glower out of the dining room window at him, as if she could pick out the headlines as he bent over his hoe.

  On the other side of the picket fence was Mrs. Melmar's yard. Luscious Mrs. Melmar favored flowers. She had her own gardening ensemble: straw hat, large sunglasses, lime green shorts—a bit too tight, as my mother observed—a discarded pink oxford shirt of her husband's knotted up under her breasts, and sandals with daisies on them. She had fair skin, despite the amount of time she spent in the sun, and you could see the veins in her legs. She protected the red nails on her hands with huge yellow gloves. The skin of her belly was loose, from giving birth to her two kids, one college age, with a red MG I admired, and one just finishing up at St. Joseph's prep, but that made no difference to how wonderful I thought she was. Mr. Melmar worked long hours at a law firm downtown, and all I ever saw of him was the back of his head as he drove off in his Cadillac.

  Vassily and his stupid newspaper hat seemed like an aesthetic affront, and I wanted to defend the innocent Mrs. Melmar from it, so, the first and only Christmas he was with us, I bought him a straw hat. It was not a great straw hat, I'll admit that, not a snappy Panama that you could roll up and stick into a cigar tube, but at least the damn thing wouldn't make him look like an idiot. He showed metallurgical teeth when he saw it. “I'll look a regular Tom Sawyer with this! Thank you, Andrewsha.” Like all literate Russians, he had grown up with “Mark Tven.” I'd seen the movie, thought the girl playing Becky Thatcher was kind of cute, but didn't really know much about him as an author, which distressed and irritated Vassily, as if, in turning my back on my great national literature, I had committed some kind of crime. He assumed that a boy my age would have read the complete works of Victor Hugo, Turgenev, and Conan Doyle as well. Such discoveries of my ignorance always sent him off on a tirade against the painfully inadequate American educational system. “You will lose!” he would say, though how a knowledge of world literature was supposed to save us, he never said. “But you will not end up having to learn Russian. Oh, no. Our day is done. Prepare to speak Chinese!” Needling from me once revealed his complete ignorance of Chinese literature, and he sulkily retreated to his room.

  I thought he had thrown the hat away, but once the ground thawed, he was out there, with it on his head. He looked like Jed Clampett painted by Camille Pissarro, but, still, I counted that as a small victory.

  We ate a lot of cucumbers while Vassily lived with us. I tried to develop a taste for them, since they were a quintessential Russian vegetable, but never managed to do more than tolerate them. By the end of the summer, they rumbled into our kitchen like an avalanche. As it happened, though, the last ones were allowed to rot on the vines.

  * * * *

  I sprawled in the dark living room, reading. Someone creaked past and I waited for Papa to tell me to go outside, it was such a nice day.

  "The true history of that time will never be written.” This was the first time Vassily had ever addressed me directly.

  "It's not about the past,” I said. “It's about the future."

  He ran his thick finger on the cover. “But what is that?"

  Against stereotype, no one in the house ever gave me a hard time for reading science fiction, or even remarked on it, although the ridiculous covers, with their screaming girls and junkyard robots, did sometimes made me feel self-conscious. But this one just showed a spacecraft on an airless planet, with a couple of guys in spacesuits climbing a slope toward the reader. It wasn't on the Moon, or at least not on ours, because you could see an alien planet with too many continents just at the horizon.

  "It's a spaceship."

  "Is an A-4,” he said. “What Goebbels decided to call a V-2: the German vengeance rocket. I took one apart twenty-five years ago after we overran their testing field at Blizna, in Poland. We have better technology now."

  No science fiction writer had ever imagined the complicated and hideously expensive way we finally made it into space. Even as Apollo missions were climbing to the Moon, the spaceships in my books stayed sleek and unitary, things you powered up and flew off in.

  To Vassily, science fiction was a way of reasonably thinking about the future and its possibilities, so he did not end up liking most of what I lent him to read, with its mental supermen, exotic planets, and entertaining aliens. It made no sense to him that their very impossibility was their pleasure. He puzzled over the spacecraft and their handwavium drives. “The thousand and one nights of Scheherazade, told by an engineering student who failed his graduation exams,” was his literary judgment.

  * * * *

  Two things Vassily liked about American life:

  Saturday morning cartoons. Yogi Bear (I did actually hear him mutter “smarter than the average bear” to himself after fixing Mrs. Melmar's lawn mower), any superhero, though I think he favored Spiderman. He did not care for Jay Ward productions, the ones I loved, like Rocky & Bullwinkle or George of the Jungle, I suspect because he did not get most of the jokes. I was old enough to be embarrassed by some of the things he laughed uproariously at.

  Breakfast cereal, the sweeter the better. Trix, Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, Alpha Bits (which he claimed was “educational"). And he never finished a box, but left a tiny bit at the bottom, making me throw tantrums when only a crumbled handful of Cap'n Crunch tumbled out into my bowl in the morning. And he picked the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms. I'm sure he did. More devious than you would expect of an adult, he would reach into the box and mine a vein deeper in the cereal, arranging it so that I was the one who would get a bowl of marshmallow-free cereal, then stare at me expressionlessly, daring me to complain.

  * * * *

  Vassily was an excellent draftsman. While looking for work as a metallurgist, he earned money with technical illustration. He came into our house with two plant engineering textbzúks, written by his friend Kolya Mishkin, for which he'd done the machine layout illustrations. One of them continued to be used as a textbook in Soviet engine
ering schools into the early 1960s, in an edition revised by others. Kolya Mishkin sometimes wrote Vassily long letters, which he stuffed into envelopes until they were close to exploding.

  So I was used to seeing diagrams of milling machines lying out on his bureau. But once, on stiffer paper, there was a portrait of a woman. Vassily had used a piece of reddish chalk, so that it looked quite old. The woman had a Louise Brooks-style bob, and a direct, sad gaze. She looked intelligent, and a bit severe, like someone you would be uncomfortable with when you knew her, but whom you would think about later. A candle burned in front of it for a day, leaving a lot of wax that enraged my mother, and that I had to try to get off the oak top of the bureau. I looked at the picture while I did it. Vassily did not say who it was, and I did not ask.

  * * * *

  One thing Vassily hated about American life:

  Wernher von Braun.

  There are plenty of other things on the list, but none of them really says much about him. Von Braun though ... I remember Vassily sitting in the living room, huddled like a sulking child, staring at a NASA press conference after Apollo 8 successfully orbited the Moon.

  "Sturmbannführer von Braun,” he muttered, using von Braun's SS rank: major. He affected to be flabbergasted by the fact that our space program was run by someone who had been both an aristocrat and a Nazi, but I don't think he was really surprised at all. He was just jealous. Years later, my mother revealed how many times Vassily had tried to get work at Huntsville. He blamed his failure on security problems, but it was really the less-than-cutting-edge nature of his metallurgy. A lifetime working with Soviet technology had left him permanently behind.

  TV, newspapers, and magazines were dominated by the launching and orbiting of space vehicles in a way that makes no sense now. Those Mercurys, Geminis, and Apollos were celebrities, in a way their spacesuited occupants never quite became, despite the ticker tape parades and interviews in the magazines. It had been barely a decade since Sputnik had been launched, and now we were getting ready to land on another planet. Who knew where we would go beyond that? Vassily was always on the lookout for something that indicated laxness or poor metallurgy on the part of “Herr Sturmbannführer von Braun” and his team. He examined magazine photographs with a magnifying glass, but he never found a crooked weld or a bad alloy choice that he could be satisfactorily irritated by.