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

Chamber.
    She didn't think about feminism that often. But something about the tanks of mermaids kept bringing it up over and over again.
    She'd minored in women's studies at a particularly oppressively religious Midwestern university. It had been the classes that got her through the years there. That and the other women. Not just the teachers, but the other students.
    And at the same time, she'd hated those classes because of what they showed her, the rage that rose in her every time she saw an injustice. She remembered seething then, full of hot anger. It lurked under every thought sometimes. Had informed every piece of art she'd made during those years.
    She rolled over and laid her cheek against a cooler section of the pillow. These days her temperature fluctuated in the night. She'd wake sauna-hot, throw off the covers and freeze. Lather, rinse, repeat till seven A.M.
    Her younger self would have hated the mermaids.
    Cartoons of traditional roles. Distorted mirrors held up to little girls to start them down the path of always looking at themselves, judging themselves against anorexic mermaids, wasp-waisted French maids, sex kittens, and iron-jawed Amazons.
    They were pretty, the mermaids. Mean girl prettiness. Female prettiness, the kind that masked their own inner rage.
    Was that anger still inside her, lurking under her placid surface like a coral reef? Unseen but shaping every thought current?
    Maybe she was going crazy again.
    Maybe Leonid was trying to drive her crazy.
    Maybe some facet of herself was trying to drag her down with it.
    Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
    Some combinations didn't work when you put them together to sing. Again the mermaids showed their displeasure not by fighting but by sulking, hanging limply in the water and refusing to move. She recorded the dislikes in her notebook but could make no sense of the pattern.
    More worrisome, the Song Chamber had produced a grey globe that refused to hatch. It bobbed loosely as she lowered her hand into the blood-warm water and tested it with her fingers. Through the rubbery substance of the globe's outer layer, she could feel something solid inside, but it didn't twitch at her touch.
    She did what she had promised herself she wouldn't do anymore. She called Leonid.
    He was over faster than she would have thought, there at her door within a quarter hour.
    He fished out the globe to examine it, "I thought we'd eliminated this problem.
    Sometimes they just don't spark. No one knows why."
    Holding the globe over the Chamber's water, he used a pocketknife to slice it open and let it drain. When he peeled away the gray shreds of the globe, the lump inside was not the perfect little body she'd feared. Rather it was a misshapen mass of colors, green and blue and yellow like a rotting Rubik's cube.
    "Do you have something I can put it in?" Leonid said. "I want to take it to the scientists. If you have another, just stick the whole thing in a container and put it in the fridge for me."
    As she crouched by the sink to find the box of baggies, she said, "Why mermaids?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "You could have picked some other form for your toy. You could have made all sorts of fish, for example."
    He laughed nervously. "Well, believe it or not, it's my tribute to you."
    She blinked as she handed him the baggie. Color mounted on his cheekbones. "They always seemed to me like women artists.
    Out there singing."
    "Singing to lure men to them."
    His headshake was immediate. "No. I can see where that's coming from. But I always imagine them out there on the rocks, singing into the wind."
    "Where no one can hear them."
    "I know it's difficult. Everything they say about women having to work harder, I've seen it. And having a daughter... well, I think about it more because of her. So I made mermaids for her."
    Something occurred to her. "Why don't they get along?"
    He laughed. "Well, come on. We had to complicate things a little. And you've seen it as well as I have. Sometimes women just