Asimov's SF, February 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors Read Free Book Online Page A

management oversight, his nominal post with the Aktiengesellschaft, seemed ever more meaningless. A political contrivance. Even if it paid the bills for himself and Aunt Tilly, god bless her, and his damned wife and the kids off on the far side of the continent in Orange County. Camouflage is what it is, though, he thought, for the great owners whose blocks of stock overwhelmed the protest votes of all the small stakeholders. In effect, he was a mere stalking horse for corporate greed.
    Stepping around the corner, with some difficulty putting the corpse from his mind, he bought a liverwurst brat snacker from a sidewalk multimat. Jive consoled himself with the reflection that without such immense and unthinkable concentrations of wealth and power, the sun-blocker could never have been emplaced in orbit between Earth and Sun, mitigating the greenhouse threat that would have wiped 92 percent of all surface life from the globe within a mere thousand years. According to petacomp spreadsheet calculations, at any rate. Even though they had been known, historically, to be wrong.
    He hurried along Eighth Avenue, munching his sliver, and had disposed of the degradable wrapping before he recalled that he was meant to be meeting Delphine for luncheon at the Quick Brown Pig, given five full stars by Eric in the Times Eats Guide. These days, since the divorce, his wife worked for the Consumer Advocacy and spent a day each month at the New York offices of Rand Nader. Probably she gets to eat free at the Pig, he thought morosely, but Del will insist on my paying for us both anyway, as if I'm not already squandering danegelt on alimony and school fees. His homeowatch peeped from his wrist, reminding him belatedly and uselessly of the lunch date. Fool of a thing, its programming bollixed by the same virus that had munged all the music records in the world except for those CDs carefully wrapped and hoarded by a few thrifty collectors like himself. Could that, he thought, abruptly wildly excited, be the doorway to Jolene's singing heart? Did he dare risk humiliation, and the possible emetic degradation of his slender CD hoard?
    A lovely young Chinese woman in clinging neck to heel sharkskin cheongsam bowed as he entered the dim luncheon palace. He checked his pith helmet, took a slip. With a hush of tiny slippered steps, she led him directly to an alcove where Delphine sat forward pertly, sipping an alcohol-free Manhattan and reading her own homeowatch. It projected a display directly onto her retinas, which danced like running lights in the lowered illumination of the booth. Jive slid in on the other side of the classic sparkly Formica eating bench, hearing the genuine red leather creak under his buttocks.
    "Sorry I'm late."
    "Oh, hi. That's all right, Jive. I had some research to catch up on before the plenary this afternoon.” Del switched off her data feed and looked at him, perfectly relaxed. She wore a pillbox hat spun from Martian crabgrass, which flourished only under the light of the twin hurtling moons of the red planet. He had given her that hat as a Kwanzaa gift two years ago, as their marriage took its final dive into the dumpster. Was this her notion of conciliation, or a final turn of the knife in his spine? “And how's dear Auntie Tilly?"
    "Matilda's about as well as can be expected,” he said. “Morbid, actually. She's got her nose stuck in that damned old TV set my Poppa gave her for her twenty-first birthday, the one he found on the curb and fixed up with valves he scrounged heaven knows where."
    "They're the best for picking up the thays, those old ones, I hear,” Delphine said absently. “I have to say, the children are still obsessed by it as well, although I notice you don't ask after them. I have to—"
    "The children!” Jive said, voice roughening. “What the hell's wrong with those kids? They won't answer emails, their IM messages are totally incomprehensible, they refuse to pick up when I phone them."
    "For