Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Read Free Page A

Weston waved away his words and moved toward the door.
    "Unless you've been sent to rescue him, I'll just leave you to do your thing."
    Jimmy hefted his duffel from the floor. "I did want to ask: The birth year... that can't be right. Not with the fight he put up."
    "Over a hundred?" He waited for her to shrug, but instead she said, "With no birth certificate, it's obviously an estimate. He's definitely
old".
She opened the door for Jimmy. "We've been calling him Methusaleh."
4. The Cunning Man
    Jimmy pushed his sunglasses closer to his eyes and frowned at the palm-tree print on his trunks—pickings had been slim at Target the day before the trip—while Bekka and her friends, Max and Megan, graduate mathematics students at Cornell, continued to reminisce about Wesleyan. When Jimmy picked up his book, Bekka noticed.
    We might work a little harder to include Jimmy in our conversation," she said.
    "I'm fine," he said. "I'll go back in the water in a bit." Three small children rushed past, heels flinging up sand; Bekka sat forward to brush off the towel.
    "Ithaca seems like a nice little city," she said. "Was it founded by Greeks?"
    "Actually, a lot of towns around here have classical names, the ones without Iroquois names, that is," Max said, and Jimmy watched him tuck in his lips and shut his eyes, preparing to elaborate. He had left his T-shirt off after swimming, and Jimmy figured that he would, in a few hours, be red and in pain. "Roman and Greek cities and personalities. Here's an interesting thing: Seneca was both a Roman senator and an Iroquois nation. There's even a Homer. And an Ovid."
    Megan said, "Who's Ovid again?" The meager breeze from off the water swirled across the beach and kept tossing her corn silk hair into her face. "Blah," she said, pulling hair from her mouth.
    "Latin poet. He wrote the
Metamorphoses,
a collection of stories about changes, changes of form, people changing into trees or changing into other creatures. Did I tell you? Lipkiss, my classics prof, e-mailed me a poem called 'Ithaka' the other day."
    "She was in love with you," Megan said.
    "That poem. You mean 'Ulysses'?" Bekka asked.
    "No, not the 'To strive, to find...' Not that. What's that, Tennyson?"
    "Tennyson," agreed Bekka. "I had to memorize that for a recitation in high school." She made a fist and brought her arm across her chest, regal and sonorous. "'To strive, to seek, to find, and
not
to
yield!'"
    "Not that. No, the poem is called 'Ithaka.' There's something with 'Hope the voyage is long...' The poet's Cavafy."
    "Our voyage to Ithaca wasn't terribly long," Bekka said. "Not of
epic
length, right?" She put her fist against Jimmy's shoulder and shoved, and he turned that into a face-first topple into the blanket. She giggled, tickling him till he sat and grabbed her lively hands.
    Max got up on one knee as if to rise, then reseated himself and cleared his throat. "Bekka says you were in the military."
    Jimmy grinned. "She speaks the truth," he said, echoing Bekka's stentorian tone, winking at her.
    "Did you... were you..."
    Megan's face suggested caution. "Max..."
    "I'm just... I'm not..."
    "You want to know if I was stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq." Jimmy swung his sunglasses up to rest atop his head. Both men squinted against the brilliance. "I was in Iraq."
    "Well." Max gave something like a short nod that might just have been him gauging his tone before he spoke. "Thank you for your service."
    Jimmy gave the only adequate answer. "You're welcome." That he had spent time in Iraq was all he had told Bekka, all he could tell her. The other man's face expressed understanding of this stranger on the beach, but Jimmy knew Max didn't know a thing. Looking at the stretch of sand beyond Max, pitted where people had stepped, he thought of the desert floor surrounding the Texas prison, though the texture wasn't the same and the color wasn't the same. Sand came in infinite varieties.
    Max asked Jimmy, "Have
you
read
The Odyssey?
Or
The