Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page B

crazy deal for you guys. Who wants a revolution? C'mon, hands, hands?"
    He really seemed like he wasn't going to go anywhere until he got some audience participation, so I raised my hand.
    "Yes!" he clapped and jumped to his feet. "You're a superstar..."
    He left a conspicuous space for my name.
    "Suze," I admitted, crossing my arms and tamping down a smile.
    "Superstar Suze. Rad," He turned back to the others, "Who else? Who else wants to change the world?"
    And he kept at it, kept cajoling until all five of us had our hands up, even Buffie Bill. Then he dropped his bomb.
    "Supercool, 'cause me and my partner Deke have this time machine, and we're looking for a few good men."
    Everyone was quiet then.
    "He's not kidding," Rob-o said, struggling to suppress his glee. "He's legit."
    "Extraordinary claims," militantly skeptical Matilda intoned mechanically, staring him down from beneath her black, blunt-cut bangs, "require extraordinary evidence."
    "No sweat!" Taylor answered. He turned to Rob-o. "Should I show them the orange?"
    "Yeah. The orange is pretty convincing."
    Taylor the narc clapped briskly. "Right-on. Cool. Who's got an orange?"
    No one had an orange.
    "Or anything, any fruit or veg?" Taylor expanded. "A snack or something?"
    Matilda's boyfriend, hulking John-john, raised his hand tentatively. John-john wasn't really into the anarchist thing, let alone the vegan thing, but he was pretty into Matilda's thing. I had trouble believing
anyone
could be that into Matilda for long, but I clearly was underestimating the joys of Matilda's thing, because Johnjohn was a good-looking guy, and had been helping us for a year, even though it was pretty obvious that most of the meeting stuff bored him blind.
    Taylor called on John-john, as though this was a crowded lecture hall instead of a half-dozen people sitting in a circle in a bookstore.
    "I've, ah, got a grapefruit," John-john offered. "That's citrus."
    "It is indeed," Taylor agreed. Nothing happened, and so Taylor gently suggested that John-john could go and get the grapefruit whenever he felt comfortable doing so. John-john jumped up and jogged to his backpack, which hung on a hook next to the owner's little back office. Taylor graciously accepted the fruit. "Anyone got a sharpie?"
    I knew there was one in the jar of pens next to the register, and said so.
    "Rad!" Taylor said as he jogged over and plucked it from the jar. "So, we all agree that this is a grapefruit and I've had no opportunity to screw with it." He handed it to me, along with the marker. "Check it out, sign your name on the fruit, and pass it along." I made a big show of analyzing the grapefruit's skin minutely, smelling it, thumping it with my knuckle. Rob-o and John-john laughed, and Matilda snorted despite herself. I scrawled my autograph on it.
    "Excellent!" Taylor enthused. "Have you done this before, ma'am? Have we ever met in the past? Are you, in fact, my lovely assistant placed as a confederate in this audience."
    "Not a bit, good sir," I said stiffly, like a girl giving a testimonial in a low-budget local TV ad. I passed the fruit counter-clockwise, to Matilda, and when Taylor's sharp gaze shifted to her, Buffalo Bill leaned in and muttered, "When it comes to me, distract him."
    I frowned, because I'm not especially keen on being bossed around by Bill, but I also knew how his mind worked, and if this Taylor craziness might turn out to really be something, I knew Bill was seeing how to get the edge now. I nodded once, curtly, and Bill leaned back, nonchalantly hooking the box of straight pins off the ledge running beneath the
Community Action
bulletin board.
    When the grapefruit came around, I hopped up, button-hooked around Taylor, then tapped his shoulder so that he put his back to Bill.
    "So," I said, realizing that I hadn't really planned beyond getting the guy to turn around. "What's it like, being a tool of state repression?"
    He smiled. "Pretty okay. When we aren't suckling at the teat of