Read Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014 for Free Online Page B

search for something bigger and better that had driven him from one place to another, that had finally forced Petra from the marriage, taking Kerry with her, into stability.
    At least, she hoped she was taking Kerry with her. Custody hearings were still to come. They'd barely gotten to the point where they could sit together and talk like this. Leonid had felt so betrayed by Petra's departure that he hadn't spoken to her for three months.
    Still, he was cordial now. He said, "But I want to give you a set for Kerry. She'll be the envy of all her friends."
    "She won't be back from camp for almost a week. You can give them to her then, wouldn't you like that better?"
    He shook his head. "When you start setting things up, you'll understand. If you get it started for her, you can have a couple of generations of them ready to go." He pushed a pamphlet across the table toward her. "It's all in there, you'll see."
    "You breed them?" she asked, looking down at the mermaid on the cover. She thought it a cartoon at first glance, but closer examination showed three dimensionality. Like a toy, an exaggerated vision of femininity, pink fishtail with sparkly scales, long blonde hair floating in the water, tangled with scalloped white shells.
    She said, "Are they intelligent?"
    He looked shocked. "No, that would be illegal, of course. They're not even the same level of intelligence as goldfish or finches."
    She tapped a nail atop the pamphlet. The paper was stiff, heavy, high gloss. Expensive, to sell an expensive trinket. "They look humanoid?"
    He smiled. "It does look that way, doesn't it? But in reality, we've bred them into specific forms, designed very carefully. Nothing risqué, of course. Our mermaids are strictly G-rated. Very Disney."
    She didn't think that would be a point in favor of the mermaids for thirteen-yearold Kerry. Her daughter was interested in more emo, edgier things, skirting a line that Petra both sympathized with and feared. She understood the allure of knife-edged black. But she also knew how it drove you to test boundaries, to rebel against anything handy.
    Leonid's hopeful face shone across the table. All he wanted to do was connect with the daughter who he hadn't seen in a month. Petra should help in that, for Kerry's sake, if not for Leonid's.
    "How much fuss is this going to involve?" She pleated her napkin, looking at the texture. High thread count. Good for paper-making. A subtle nobby line was woven into it, a pattern of matte and shine.
    Typical of Leonid to assume she had plenty of time for finicky pet keeping. He'd never understood how she worked, that creating the vast collages that she'd become renowned for, that now sold for a hundred thousand minimum, took hundreds of hours of effort and planning. You would have thought a contemplative scientist would understand that one could be staring into space and actually working. But Leonid was a tinkerer, a mover, filling every minute of the day with constructions. Even now, the toothpicks and sugar cubes he'd been fiddling with lay scattered like a deconstructed puzzle.
    Leonid said, "Not too much." His blue eyes pleaded. "It's for Kerry, after all. Doesn't that make it worthwhile?"
    It did, of course.
    The set up equipment was more bulky than she expected, but Leonid helped load it into her trunk. She tipped the doorman to bring it up to her apartment. At least there was plenty of room in this new place. Only two months into occupancy, she was still furnishing it. She'd rented it primarily for the large room she'd designated as a work space, with its wall of windows overlooking Lake Union. And because it had a small bedroom for Kerry.
    More room if she didn't end up keeping Kerry with her.
    The kit was, in the manner of such things, more complicated to put together than the directions implied. Six tanks nested inside each other, the center occupied by a contraption called the "Song Chamber." More collapsible tanks in the bottom of the box. Tubs and spiraling