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

with a grunt. Fool thing, where the heck did it think he was headed on this damned crowded train? And what did the idiots at Industrie Globalisierung, AG, think they were doing, sending him to oversee the so-called findings of this bunch of palpable crackpots?
    They sped under old Manhattan. The air-conditioning was on the fritz, hardly unusual. Imagine how life would be without the soletta, he thought. If this was actually the true greenhouse effect everyone was suffering, rather than an attenuated, sunlight-blocked ghost of—he caught his own thought again, snarled at himself. Those things, those mechanical interruptions on the screen, they were not ghosts, not the dead. It was a filthy political stunt, a sort of techno-brainwashing. No matter what foolish Tilly maintained, glued hour after hour in her darkened room, anxiously watching the dead, as she supposed them to be, marching behind her cathode ray tube, peering out, gesturing, their mouths moving silently.
    Jesus, wasn't it obvious? Whatever that dear little professional virgin Vogelsangerin believed. Most of them must be Chinese actors, you could tell at a glance. In those tasteless Mao suits, or old fashioned wrapping of one kind or another. Or Indians, not Native American, dark featured and gaunt from the Indian subcontinent, or Pakistan, or Bali, or whatever. A fashion show of faux-starved mummies from hell. He shuddered, rocking as the train thudded over tracks loosely fixed to sleepers unrepaired for years. Every spare cent was required for the big boosters shoving up the materiel to spin the soletta into being, there at the Lagrange libration point nine hundred thousand miles from Earth. That, or the planet would be roasted. Not immediately, true—but in another millennium. Was that why the dead were suddenly hanging about, shoving their damned stupid faces into people's primetime viewing—
    Jive caught himself with an audible obscenity.
    "No call for that language, sir,” a young blonde mother said, rebuking him with a scowl as she turned her child away.
    Apologize? Damn it, no. He was furious with himself, with the way he'd allowed the absurd obsessions of gullible people to draw his unconscious into betraying what he knew for a fact. The train was pulling into Brooklyn; he pushed his way to the door. One consolation: if he'd taken a cab he'd have been cooler, yes, and the ride smoother, but he'd still be trapped somewhere in traffic-lock, probably. With the meter ticking.
    The so-called thanatorium was within walking distance of High Street station. His headache was easing, and his dyspepsia.
    A long-jawed, raw-boned specimen in a stained lab coat introduced him, the head of engineering, Dr. Samuels. Bart Samuels asked him to say a few preparatory words on behalf of the oversight entity of their funding body.
    "Very well, gentlemen. And lady,” Jive told the assembled nerds and geeks in the traditional garb of their professions or trades. “Let me make one thing clear. I don't want to hear any claptrap—and I believe I speak for the Aktiengesellschaft in saying this—about discarnate souls, or cross-overs, or unnucleated thetans.” The nerds lounged as if they were taking an authorized anti-stress break, sucking their Prozac spansules, and stared at him without interest, dully. The one woman scientist or engineer actually rolled her eyes. Then, to his disbelief, she poked out her tongue, not at him but for her own entertainment, rolled it as well, and stared cross-eyed at its purplish tip. This was impudence beyond his capacity to cope. He took his seat abruptly, turning his back on most of them. Samuels signalled a bored audiovisual geek to activate the bank of some twenty antique television receivers arrayed like something out of the Apollo project command room three-quarters of a century earlier.
    The screens took an agonizingly long moment to come alive, as tubes warmed and electrons skittered about inside magnetic fields. One by one, then, the