Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:
It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand. p. 78
Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):
“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.” p. 87-88
I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
*** (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.