Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 by Penny Publications Page B

dangerous," she said. "And men are weak, impulsive animals. That's how women manipulate you, and sometimes in the most cruel ways. You don't want to fall for their traps. Do you understand me, Quentin?"
    Quentin wasn't sure what he understood. But feeling an obligation, he asked, "What about Madam Dob's grass?"
    "Her grass isn't your problem," his mother assured, answering his question as well as the one she heard.
    In 1839, the Reformed Church of the United purchased creekbottom ground from the local Otoe tribe. Warner College and the hamlet of Eureka were built on the prairie wilderness. But just two years later, the Otoe sold the adjacent country to what became the provincial capital, and a century later, Eureka was surrounded and legally incorporated.
    Yet the character of the old town refused to change. The campus would always be a collection of venerable brick buildings and Queensland elms. The local houses were built in the United-style, big and white with a fondness for square windows and oddly narrow doors. The original main street retained its scruffy charm as well as little shops, some of them generations old. Even in the 1970s, the only glass-and-steel buildings stood apart from the rest of Eureka. There was a Safeguard grocery and an abortion clinic, a modern laundry and a large discount warehouse courageously billing itself as Treasure City. In his first week at college, Quentin Maurus visited Treasure City looking for aspirin and for socks. What he found instead was a long aisle dedicated to cut-rate paperback books. Organization was deliciously minimal in those wire racks. Mysteries and women stories shared pockets with celebrity biographies and histories of popular wars. Invisible hands often hid the futurist fictions, but they were waiting to be discovered, and four years later, Quentin was shouldering both a degree in biology as well as a considerable library of acid-licked novels, each decorated with moons and stars and sleek rockets that most likely would never survive launch.
    He was a graduate, but Eureka still felt like home. The college had libraries and two girls for every male student. The neighborhood was full of houses converted to cheap apartments. Madam Lane was a dyke landlady who didn't trust men, but Quentin offered to double the normal deposit, and that's why she led him up a long staircase dressed with green carpeting and dirty white paint. An exceptionally narrow door led inside an empty apartment wearing more green carpet. What convinced him to stay—besides the big, oddly shaped rooms and the minimal rent, the iron radiators and peeling wallpaper, and those huge, ill-fitted windows—was the built-in bookshelves that covered every available wall.
    "My handyman put them up," Madam Lane explained, fiddling with the steel rings on her arthritic fingers.
    Not even Quentin had enough books to fill the available space.
    Here was a challenge worth taking.
    There weren't many local jobs for biologists, particularly if they happened to be males in their early twenties. Everybody asked Quentin why he wasn't serving the military or some other good public post, but honest answers didn't win over employers who had already made up their minds. Thankfully a nearby factory coveted young backs. Quentin was hired on the spot. Days were dusty and often hot but he was paid well enough, and every evening he stuffed filthy clothes inside an old white duffel—a family relic with great-uncle Clovis' name and army unit stenciled on the sides. Whenever the relic was ready to explode, Quentin would drive or walk to the neighborhood laundry, and those days were like any other: Nothing interesting happened, and the rest of his life looked to be just as relentlessly bland.
    One evening, a familiar face passed through the laundry door. Quentin and the newcomer exchanged polite smiles. That would be that, he assumed, tossing socks into the washer. He was reading a Johnsgal novel when the woman happened past, saying,