Ted Kosmatka - The Art of Alchemy.pdf - Ted Kosmatka - widez2

The Art of Alchemy

by Ted Kosmatka

Since 2005, Ted Kosmatka has sold stories to numerous literary and science fiction

magazines. His story “The Prophet of Flores” will appear in two different

best-of-the-year anthologies this year and his fiction has been translated into

Hebrew and Russian. You can find a complete bibliography of his works at

tedkosmatka.com, but if you’re looking for pictures of his adorable baby daughter

Morgan, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

If you’re looking for adorable kiddies in your fiction right now, Mr. Kosmatka’s

F&SF debut is not for you. (There’s one elsewhere in this issue.) This story’s a

hardboiled science fiction thriller, and a good one at that.

* * * *

Sometimes when I came over, Veronica would already be naked. I’d find her

spread out on a lawn chair behind the fence of her townhome, several sinewy

yards of black skin visible to second-story windows across the park. She’d scissor

her long legs and raise a languid eyelid.

“You have too many clothes on,” she’d say.

And I’d sit. Run a hand along smooth, dark curves. Curl pale fingers into

hers.

The story of Veronica is the story of this place. These steel mills, and the

dying little city-states around them, have become a part of it

somehow—Northwest Indiana like some bizarre, composite landscape we’ve all

consented to believe in. A place of impossible contrasts. Cornfields and slums and

rich, gated communities. National parkland and industrial sprawl.

Let it stand for the rest of the country. Let it stand for everything.

On cold days, the blast furnaces assemble huge masses of white smoke

across the Lake Michigan shoreline. You can still see it mornings, driving I-90 on

the way to work—a broad cumulous mountain range rising from the northern

horizon, as if we were an alpine community, nestled beneath shifting peaks. It is a

terrible kind of beauty.

Veronica was twenty-five when we met—just a few years younger than I.

She was brilliant, and beautiful, and broken. Her townhome sat behind gates on

the expensive side of Ridge Road and cost more than I made in five years. Her

neighbors were doctors, and lawyers, and business owners. From the courtyard

where she lay naked, you could see a church steeple, the beautiful, dull green of

oxidized copper, rising over distant rooftops.

The story of Veronica is also the story of edges. And that’s what I think

about most when I think of her now. The exact line where one thing becomes

another. The exact point where an edge becomes sharp enough to cut you.

* * * *

We might have been talking about her work. Or maybe she was just making

conversation, trying to cover her nervousness; I don’t remember. But I remember

the rain and the hum of her BMW’s engine. And I remember her saying, as she

took the Randolph Street exit, “His name is Voicheck.”

“Is that his first name, or last?”

“It’s the only one he gave me.”

We took Randolph down to the Loop, and the Chicago skyline reared up at

us. Veronica knew the uptown streets. The restaurant on Dearborn had been her

choice of location—a nice sixty-dollar-a-plate Kazuto bar that stayed open till two

a.m. Trendy, clubby, dark. Big name suppliers sometimes brought her there for

business dinners, if they were also trying to sleep with her. It was the kind of place

wealthy people went when they wanted to get drunk with other wealthy people.

“He claims he’s from Poland,” she said. “But the accent isn’t quite right.

More Baltic than Slavic.”

I wondered at that. At how she knew the difference.

“Where’s he based out of?” I asked.

“Ukraine, formerly, but he sure as hell can’t go back now. Had a long list of

former this, former that. Different think tanks and research labs. Lots of burned

bridges.”

“Is he the guy, or just the contact?”

“He’s playing it like he’s the guy, but I don’t know.”

She hit her signal and made a left. The rain came down harder, Chicago

slick-bright with streetlights and traffic. Green lions on the right, and at some

point, we crossed the river.

“Is he bringing it with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But he said he was actually bringing it?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me. “He said.”

“Jesus.”

Her face wore a strange expression in the red glow of dashboard light. It

took me a moment to place it. Then it hit me: in the year and a half I’d known her,

this was the first time I’d ever seen her scared.

* * * *

I met her at the lab. I say “lab” and people imagine white walls and sterile

test tubes, but it’s not like that. It’s mostly math I do, and something close to

metallurgy. All of it behind glass security walls. I check my work with a scanning

electron microscope, noting crystalline lattices and surface structure

micro-abrasions.

She walked through the door behind Hal, the lab’s senior supervisor.

“This is the memory metals lab,” Hal told her, gesturing as he entered.

She nodded. She was young and slender, smooth dark skin, a face that

seemed, at first glance, to be more mouth than it should. That was my initial

impression of her—some pretty new-hire the bosses were showing around.

That’s it. And then she was past me, following the supervisor deeper into the lab.

At the time, I had no idea.

I heard the supervisor’s voice drone on as he showed her the temper ovens

and the gas chromatograph in the next room. When they returned, the super was

following her.

I looked up from the lab bench and she was staring at me. “So you’re the

genius,” she said.

That was when she pointed it at me. The look. The way she could look at

you with those big dark eyes, and you could almost see the gears moving—her full

mouth pulled into a sensuous smile that wanted to be more than it was. She

smiled like she knew something you didn’t.

There were a dozen things I could have said, but the nuclear wind behind

those eyes blasted my words away until all that was left was a sad kind of truth. I

knew what she meant. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s me.”

She turned to the supervisor. “Thank you for your time.”

Hal nodded and left. It took me a moment to realize what had just

happened. The laboratory supervisor—my direct boss—had been dismissed.

“Tell me,” she said. “What do you do here?”

I paused for three seconds before I spoke, letting myself process the

seismic shift. Then I explained it.

She smiled while I talked. I’d done it for an audience a dozen times, these

little performances. It was practically a part of my job description since the last

corporate merger made Uspar-Nagoi the largest steel company in the world. I’d

worked for three different corporations in the last two years and hadn’t changed

offices once. The mill guys called them white-hats, these management teams that

flew in to tour the facilities, shaking hands, smiling under their spotless white

hardhats, attempting to fit their immediate surroundings into the flowchart of the

company’s latest international acquisitions. Research was a prime target for the

tours, but here in the lab, they were harder to spot since so many suits came

walking through. It was hard to know who you were talking to, really. But two

things were certain. The management types were usually older than the girl

standing in front of me. And they’d always, up till now, been male.

But I explained it like I always did. Or maybe I put a little extra spin on it;

maybe I showed off. I don’t know. “Nickle-titanium alloys,” I said. I opened the

desiccator and pulled out a small strip of steel. It was long and narrow, cut into

almost the exact dimensions of a ruler.

“First you take the steel,” I told her, holding out the dull strip of metal. “And

you heat it.” I lit the Bunsen burner and held the steel over the open flame.

Nothing happened for ten, twenty seconds. She watched me. I imagined what I

must look like to her at that moment—blue eyes fixed on the warming steel, short

hair jutting at wild angles around the safety goggles I wore on my forehead. Just

another technofetishist lost in his obsession. It was a type. Flame licked the edges

of the dull metal.

I smiled and, all at once, the metal moved.

The metal contracted muscularly, like a living thing, twisting itself into a

ribbon, a curl, a spring.

“It’s caused by micro- and nano-scale surface restructuring,” I told her.

“The change in shape results from phase transformations. Martensite when cool;

Austenite when heated. The steel remembers its earlier configurations. The

different phases want to be in different shapes.”

“Memory metal,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see this. What

applications does it have?”

The steel continued to flex, winding itself tighter. “Medical, structural,

automotive. You name it.”

“Medical?”

“For broken bones. The shape memory alloy has a transfer temp close to

body temp. You attach a plate to the break site, and body heat makes the alloy

want to contract, thereby exerting compressive force on the bone at both ends of

the fracture.”

“Interesting.”

“They’re also investigating the alloy’s use in heart stents. A cool-crushed

alloy tube can be inserted into narrow arteries where it’ll expand and open once

it’s heated to blood temperature.”

“You mentioned automotive.”

I nodded. Automotive. The big money. “Imagine that you’ve put a small

dent in your fender,” I said. “Instead of taking it to the shop, you pull out your

hairdryer. The steel pops right back in shape.”

She stayed at the lab for another hour, asking intelligent questions,

watching the steel cool and straighten itself. Before she left, she shook my hand

politely and thanked me for my time. She never once told me her name. I watched

the door close behind her as she left.

Ted Kosmatka - The Art of Alchemy.pdf

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