Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 by Penny Publications Read Free Book Online Page A

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