Asimov's Science Fiction - September 2016 by Penny Publications

Author:Penny Publications [Publications, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penny Publications
Published: 2016-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

4.

It seems to me now that some of the best hours of my life were spent not in reading books, but in sitting with Rob Holm in my cramped room in that house we shared back in Leeds, and talking about them.

What to read and admire, but also—and this was just as important—what not to. The Catcher in the Rye being overrated, and James Joyce a literary show-off, and Moby Dick really wasn’t about much more than whales. Alarmingly, Rob was often ahead of me. He discovered a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges in a garage sale, which he gave to me as a gift and then kept borrowing back. But he was Rob Holm. He could solve the riddles of the cosmos and meanwhile explore literature as nothing but a hobby, and also help me out with my mek so that I was finally able to produce the kind of arguments, links, and algorithms for my piece on Madame Bovary that the AIs at An Eng actually wanted.

Meanwhile, I also found out about the kind of life Rob had come from. Both his parents were engineers, and he’d spent his early years in Aberdeen, but they’d moved to the Isle of Harris after his mother was diagnosed with a brain-damaging prion infection, probably caused by her liking for fresh salmon. Most of the fish were then factory-farmed in crowded pens in the Scottish lochs, where the creatures were dosed with antibiotics and fed on pellets of processed meat, often recycled from the remains of their own breed. Just as with cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease a century earlier, this process had resulted in a small but significant species leap of crossinfection. Rob’s parents wanted to make the best of the years Alice Holm had left, and set up an ethical marine farm—although they preferred to call it a ranch—harvesting scallops on the Isle of Harris.

Rob’s father was still there at Creagach, and the business, which not only produced some of the best scallops in the Hebrides but also benefited other marine life along the costal shelf, was still going. Rob portrayed his childhood there as a happy time, with his mother still doing well, despite the warnings of the scans, and regaling him with bedtime tales of Celtic myths, that were probably his only experience before meeting me of linear fictional narrative.

There were the kelpies, who lived in lochs and were like fine horses, and then there were the Blue Men of the Minch who dwelt between Harris and the mainland and sung up storms and summoned the waves with their voices. Then, one night when Rob was eleven, his mother waited until he and his father were asleep, walked out across the shore and into the sea, and swam, and kept on swimming. No one could last long out there, the sea being so cold, and the strong currents, or perhaps the Blue Men of the Minch, bore her body back to a stretch of shore around the headland from Creagach, where she was found next morning.

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