TACHYON || SAN FRANCISCO
Praise for Nalo Hopkinson
“One of our most important writers.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“A major talent.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption.”
—Globe & Mail
“One of the best fantasy authors working today.”
—io9
“An exciting new voice in our literature.”
—Edmonton Journal
“. . . like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future.”
—The News Magazine of Black America
“Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors . . . .”
—Caribbean Travel and Life
“Hopkinson’s prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details.”
—SCIFI.com
Brown Girl in the Ring
“Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, is simply triumphant.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
“Hopkinson lives up to her advance billing.”
—New York Times Book Review
“[Hopkinson] has created a vivid world of urban decay and startling, dangerous magic, where the human heart is both a physical and metaphorical key.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It is great.
—Octavia E. Butler, author of Parable of the Sower
“An impressive debut precisely because of Hopkinson’s fresh viewpoint.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A parable of black feminist self-reliance, couched in poetic language and the structural conventions of classic SF.”
—Village Voice
Skin Folk
“Everything is possible in her imagination.”
—Science Fiction Chronicle
“Nalo Hopkinson, award-winning author of Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber, has released an impressive collection of short stories entitled Skin Folk . . . well crafted and brilliantly written.”
—Barnes & Noble
The Salt Roads
“The Salt Roads succeeds impressively. . . .”
—Locus
“The Salt Roads is like nothing you’ve read before. . . . The characters’ stories are heartbreaking and beautiful, living beyond the novel’s pages. Hopkinson’s writing is like a favorite song.”
—Tananarive Due, American Book Award-winning author of The Living Blood
“With her conjurer’s art, with daring and delightful audacity, Nalo Hopkinson reaches into the well of history.”
—Sandra Jackson-Opoku, author of The River Where Blood Is Born
“Sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic. A tour de force from one of our most striking new voices in fiction.”
—Kirkus, starred review
Other books by Nalo Hopkinson
Novels
Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
Midnight Robber (2000)
The Salt Roads (2003)
The New Moon’s Arms (2007)
The Chaos (2012)
Sister Mine (2013)
Collections
Skin Folk (2001)
Report From Planet Midnight (2011)
Anthologies
Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root:
Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000)
Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003)
So Long Been Dreaming (2004)
Tesseracts Nine (2005, with Geoff Ryman)
Falling in Love with Hominids
Copyright © 2015 by Nalo Hopkinson
This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Nalo Hopkinson.
Cover art copyright © 2015 by Chuma Hill.
Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story
Tachyon Publications
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.285.5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
[email protected]
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Project Editor: Jill Roberts
Book ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-198-5 | Epub ISBN: 978-1-61696-199-2
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-61696-200-5 | PDF ISBN: 978-1-61696-201-2
Printed in the United States by Worzalla
First Edition: 2015
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The Easthound” copyright © 2012. First appeared in After: Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Hyperion: New York). | “Soul Case” copyright © 2008. First appeared in Foundation, 100. | “Message in a Bottle” copyright © 2005. First appeared in Futureways, edited by Rita McBride and Glen Rubsamen (Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver). | “The Smile on the Face” copyright © 2005. First appeared in Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, edited by Emily Pohl-Weary (Sumach Press: Toronto). | “Left Foot, Right” copyright © 2014. First appeared in Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant (Small Beer Press: Northampton). | “Old Habits” copyright © 2011. First appeared in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books: San Francisco). | “Emily Breakfast” copyright © 2010. First appeared in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5, edited by Helen Walsh (Zephyr Press: Toronto). | “Herbal” copyright © 2002. First appeared in The Bakkanthology, edited by John Rose (Bakka Books: Toronto). | “A Young Candy Daughter” copyright © 2004. First appeared on nalohopkinson.com. | “A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” copyright © 2006. First appeared in Lust for Life: Tales of Sex and Love, edited by Claude Lalumière and Elise Moser (Véhicule Press: Montreal). | “Shift” copyright © 2002. First appeared in Conjunctions, 39. | “Delicious Monster” copyright © 2002. First appeared in Queer Fear II, edited by Michael Rowe (Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver). | “Snow Day” copyright © 2005. First appeared on CBC Radio. | “Flying Lessons” copyright © 2015. First publication. | “Whose Upward Flight I Love” copyright © 2000. First appeared on Dark Planet. | “Blushing” copyright © 2009. First appeared in Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre, edited by Helen Walsh (Diaspora Dialogues: Toronto). | “Ours Is the Prettiest” copyright © 2011. First appeared in Welcome to Bordertown, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner (Random House: NY). | “Men Sell Not Such in Any Town” copyright © 2005. First appeared in Nature, September 2015.
Contents
Foreword
The Easthound
Soul Case
Message in a Bottle
The Smile on the Face
Left Foot, Right
Old Habits
Emily Breakfast
Herbal
A Young Candy Daughter
A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog
Shift
Delicious Monster
Snow Day
Flying Lessons
Whose Upward Flight I Love
Blushing
Ours Is the Prettiest
Men Sell Not Such in Any Town
About the Author
Foreword
Nalo Hopkinson
She got the which of what-she-did,
She hid the bell with a blot, she did,
But she fell in love with a hominid.
Where is the which of the what-she-did?
—“Ballad of the Lost C’Mell”
by Cordwainer Smith
I didn’t used to like people much. When I was sixteen and depressed, keenly reactive to every injustice I witnessed or experienced, very aware of having no control over my life, and (I thought) powerless to do anything about all the evil, unhappiness, violence, and pain in the world, I had no hope for us as a species. We humans have spread over the face of this planet like a fungus, altering and destroying whole ecosystems and species, abusing and waging war on each other. If teenaged me thought about it too much, I was engulfed with despair.
Not to say that it was all bad. I had friends, there was good music in the world, my parents were involved in the arts and made sure to expose me and my brother to them. And there were books.
The title of this collection comes from my love of Cordwainer Smith’s writing, especially his “Instrumentality of Mankind” stories. I loved his imagination, style, the poetry of his writing, his compassion. Loved his sensibility in writing about a racialized, manufactured underclass and telling some of the stories from their context. I’m black and female. I was born and for many years raised middle/creative class in the Caribbean, a region of the world which has had to be keenly aware of issues of race, class, gender, and privilege. You see the concerns reflected in much of our art and literature. I’d always loved reading science fiction and fantasy as well, and came to value the SF/F writers I found who could explicitly bring any of that into their writing in complicated ways. These are such human issues. I love and am fascinated by human beings. We are, all of us, capable simultaneously of such great good and such horrifying evil.
It’s a bit of a trick to treat a collection such as this as though the stories were all conceived of and written at the same time, with a single unifying principle. In fact, they were written over the course of perhaps eight to ten years, for different editors, on different themes, and published in different venues. The only unifying element is me, the author. Thinking about the stories as one volume forced me to consider what I’m about. What are my passions and obsessions of which these stories might be emblematic? Well, so many things, really. But one of the progressions I’ve made is from being a depressed teenager who saw how powerless she was to change all the ills around her to being a mostly cheerful fifty-something who realizes there are all kinds of ways of working towards positive change. I am not as active in doing so as my conscience would have me be, but I am not at all passive, or powerless. And that’s because I’m not alone. I’ve learned I can trust that humans in general will strive to make things better for themselves and their communities. Not all of us. Not always in principled, loving, or respectful ways. Often the direct opposite, in fact. But we’re all on the same spinning ball of dirt, trying to live as best we can.
Yes, that’s almost overweeningly Pollyana-ish, despite the fact that sometimes I just need to shake my fist at a mofo. I am not at all discounting all the pain, torture, and death we can and do inflict on others. As I hope will be clear from the stories that follow, I am not forgetting oppression, repression, abuse, genocide. I experience anger and outrage and despair. I see the ways in which science fiction is too often used to confirm people’s complacency, to reassure them that it’s okay for them not to act, because they are not the lone superhero who will fix the world’s ills. And yet, humanity as a whole is not satisfied with complacency. So part of the work of these past few decades of my life has been the process of falling in love with hominids.
The Easthound
Whenever the canned Star Trek-type computer voice of the Toronto subway system announces “Christie Station.” I always hear “Crispy Station.” I must have one day heard her announce the arrival of the easthound train; you know, the one that goes in the opposite direction of the westhound train?
Oh, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam,
Oh, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam.
“The easthound bays at night,” Jolly said.
Millie shivered. Bad luck to mention the easthound, and her twin bloody well knew it. God, she shouldn’t even be thinking, “bloody,” Millie put her hands to her mouth to stopper the words in so she wouldn’t say them out loud.
“Easthound?” said Max. He pulled the worn black coat closer around his body. The coat had been getting tighter around him these past few months. Everyone could see it. “Uck the fuh is that easthound shit?”
Not what; he knew damned well what it was. He was asking Jolly what the hell she was doing bringing the easthound into their game of Loup-de-lou. Millie wanted to yell at Jolly too.
Jolly barely glanced at Max. She knelt in front of the fire, staring into it, re-twisting her dreads and separating them at the scalp where they were threatening to grow together. “It’s my first line,” she said. “You can play or not, no skin off my teeth.”
They didn’t talk about skin coming off, either. Jolly should be picking someone to come up with the next line of the game. But Jolly broke the rules when she damned well pleased. Loup-de-lou was her game, after all. She’d invented it. Someone had to come up with a first line. Then they picked the next person. That person had to continue the story by beginning with the last word or two of the line the last person said. And so on until someone closed the loup by ending the story with the first word or two of the very first line. Jolly was so thin. Millie had saved some of the chocolate bar she’d found to share with Jolly, but she knew that Jolly wouldn’t take it. If you ate too much, you grew too quickly. Millie’d already eaten most of the chocolate, though. Couldn’t help it. She was so hungry all the time!
Max hadn’t answered Jolly. He took the bottle of vodka that Sai was holding and chugged down about a third of it. Nobody complained. That was his payment for finding the bottle in the first place. But could booze make you grow, too? Or did it keep you shrinky? Millie couldn’t remember which. She fretfully watched Max’s Adam’s apple bob as he drank.
“The game?” Citron chirped up, reminding them. A twin of the flames of their fire danced in his green eyes. “We gonna play?”
Right. The game. Jolly bobbed her head yes. Sai, too. Millie said, “I’m in.” Max sighed and shrugged his yes.
Max took up where Jolly had left off. “At night the easthound howls,” he growled, “but only when there’s no moon.” He pointed at Citron.
A little clumsy, Millie thought, but a good second line.
Quickly, Citron picked it up with, “No moon is so bright as the easthound’s eyes when it spies a plump rat on a garbage heap.” He pointed at Millie.
Garbage heap? What kind of end bit was that? Didn’t give her much with which to begin the new loup. Trust Citron to throw her a tough one. And that “eyes, spies” thing, too. A rhyme in the middle, instead of at the end. Clever bastard. Thinking furiously, Millie louped, “Garbage heaps high in the . . . cities of noonless night.”
Jolly said, “You’re cheating. It was ‘garbage heap,’ not ‘garbage heaps.’” She gnawed a strip from the edge of her thumbnail, blew the crescented clipping from her lips into the fire.
“Chuh.” Millie made a dismissive motion with her good hand. “You just don’t want to have to continue on with ‘noonless night.’” Smirking, she pointed at her twin.
Jolly started in on the nail of her index finger. “And you’re just not very good at this game, are you, Millie?”
“Twins, stop it,” Max told them.
“I didn’t start it,” Jolly countered, through chewed nail bits. Millie hated to see her bite her nails, and Jolly knew it.
Jolly stood and flounced closer to the fire. Over her back she spat the phrase, “Noonless night, a rat’s bright fright, and blood in the
bite all delight the easthound.” The final two words were the two with which they’d begun. Game over. Jolly spat out a triumphant, “Loup!” First round to Jolly.
Sai slapped the palm of her hand down on the ground between the players. “Aw, jeez, Jolly! You didn’t have to end it so soon, just cause you’re mad at your sister! I was working on a great loup.”
“Jolly’s only showing off!” Millie said. Truth was, Jolly was right. Millie really wasn’t much good at Loup-de-lou. It was only a stupid game, a distraction to take their minds off hunger, off being cold and scared, off watching everybody else and yourself every waking second for signs of sprouting. But Millie didn’t want to be distracted. Taking your mind off things could kill you. She was only going along with the game to show the others that she wasn’t getting cranky; getting loupy.
She rubbed the end of her handless wrist. Damp was making it achy. She reached for the bottle of vodka where Max had stood it upright in the crook of his crossed legs. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he chided, pulling it out of her reach and passing it to Citron, who took two pulls at the bottle and coughed.
Max said to Millie, “You don’t get any treats until you start a new game.”
Jolly turned back from the fire, her grinning teeth the only thing that shone in her black silhouette.
“Wasn’t me who spoiled that last one,” Millie grumbled. But she leaned back on the packed earth, her good forearm and the one with the missing hand both lying flush against the soil. She considered how to begin. The ground was a little warmer tonight than it had been last night. Spring was coming. Soon, there’d be pungent wild leeks to pull up and eat from the river bank. She’d been craving their taste all through this frozen winter. Had been yearning for the sight and taste of green, growing things. Only she wouldn’t eat too many of them. You couldn’t ever eat your fill of anything, or that might bring out the Hound. Soon it’d be warm enough to sleep outside again. She thought of rats and garbage heaps, and slammed her mind’s door shut on the picture. Millie liked sleeping with the air on her skin, even though it was dangerous out of doors. It felt more dangerous indoors, what with everybody growing up.
Falling in Love With Hominids Page 1
