Asimov's SF, August 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Last fall Diana took fLaar to the McDonald Observatory in west Texas to view his home star through one of the telescopes there. She explained to me that it is still visible, even though it was destroyed almost a thousand years ago, because it takes the light so long to travel to Earth. fLaar came back weeping, and did not leave his room for days.

  I checked my watch: 9:50. Almost time. I looked to the west, where Venus glowed like a silver concho nailed to the sky. I wondered what it would be like to be a thousand years old. What if I could have been present to see all the changes that had taken place over the last thousand years of human history? How amazing that would have been. But fLaar wasn't witness to a thousand years of vRel history—just a thousand years of boredom and frustration and despair.

  And now there were only three thousand vRel. Only a few more than all the cattle I run. And if I didn't breed out my bulls, and stock fresh cows from time to time, my herds would decline, become inbred and sickly. Eventually a parasite or a disease would sweep through and wipe them all out.

  In the sky, a handspan to the right of Venus, a new light suddenly flared gold. Swiftly it climbed across the sky like a falling star in reverse, then winked out at the zenith. The vRel spaceship, refitted for a human crew of six hundred forty men and women and renamed Discovery, had just departed Earth's neighborhood on its first journey of exploration.

  I threw the last of my cold coffee into the grass and stood up. “We have an early morning, gentlemen. Juan Bautista, mind your empties."

  "Si, señor.” He gathered up the bottles and turned to go, then turned back to fLaar. “Gracias, señor,” he said. “I am sorry for your loss. We have a beautiful planet, too. I hope you will be happy here."

  He left. I stood looking at fLaar in the dimness for a moment longer. I could just see the gleam of his huge eyes looking back at me. I went inside to bed. I don't know when fLaar turned in.

  * * * *

  A nurse sticks her head into the waiting room and says we can see Diana now. I'm down the hallway like a shot, fLaar and the nurse trotting just to stay in my wake. At the doorway to Diana's room, I stop so suddenly that fLaar plows into my back. He snorts and leaps away, the whites of his eyes showing, but I only have eyes for my daughter.

  Diana looks like she's been ridden hard. She's pale, except for the dark circles around her eyes, and the bright lights in the room gleam off a film of sweat on her skin. But she is triumphantly, glowingly happy. She looks up from the gurgling bundle in her arms and sends me a proud, fierce glare, and I nod in acknowledgment of this woman's work well done, this result of her daring vision and unbending will, the advances in genetics the vRel have brought us, and the doctors’ patient engineering.

  She hands the baby to the nurse, who puts it into my arms. The nurse is murmuring something about how they think it is a girl, but these matters are complicated among the vRel, so they are running some tests. I'm not listening; as soon as I look into the tiny face, I know I have a granddaughter.

  She stares up at me with her mother's fierce blue eyes and I remember the first time Maria put our new daughter into my arms—and I am lost. The eyes are too large, but they are set in the front of the face. The skin seems too pink, but that could be from the birthing. The ears are large, but perhaps not too large. The hands are very narrow, but they have only five fingers apiece, fingers that try to curl around my massive, dirt-seamed one.

  She is beautiful. She gives me a milky, toothless grin, and I know that someday her smile will break human and vRel hearts alike.

  fLaar is still standing in the doorway, shifting nervously from foot to foot. I turn to him, and this time I do not give him a predator's toothy smile, but something more genuine—a sincere, if ironic, smile of welcome: welcome to the fathers’ club, to dreams and midnight dreads, to toil and trouble, to pride and sorrow, to disasters survived and triumphs shared, and to the ultimate dismay of having your daughter marry a man you disapprove of. Yes, all this will be yours.

  He is wary of the promise he sees in my eyes, though it is not me he has to worry about. “What ... what is it?” he whispers.

  I put his daughter into his arms. “Something new,” I say.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Carrie Richerson.

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  Verse

  Velocity

  or

  An Imperfect Understanding

  There is a way to keep you nine forever.

  Give me a lever, a place to stand,

  a fast enough ship, and you will be ageless.

  If I launch you like a hawk from my hand

  into the delirious burning blue,

  I will gain all the time on Earth that I need

  to ready myself for your being ten.

  —Tracina Jackson-Adams

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  An Alternate Universe Alphabet

  contains letters with sounds you have never heard and will not. Each is the antimatter opposite of the sounds we read and hear.

  If “a” and “anti-a"

  were to come together each would be extinguished in a tiny yawn at the edge of consciousness.

  Whole sentences would swallow each other in a nearly inaudible whirr like that of the white noise generators people buy for their bedrooms.

  And if this poem were to meet its anti-poem in the interstice between universes, the silence of their embrace would be deafening.

  —Sandra Lindow

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  On Books: Peter Heck

  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

  Susanna Clarke, illustrations by Portia Rosenberg

  Bloomsbury, $27.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 1058234-416-7

  In the wake of the Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings on screen, it doesn't take much publishing smarts to figure that fantasy is hotter than ever. No surprise, then, that Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was given an enormous first printing and hyped in every available medium as a grownup's equivalent of Harry Potter. What is perhaps a surprise is that it actually lives up to the hype.

  Strange/Norrell combines the flavor of an early Victorian novel with an alternate history in which magic not only works, but plays a major role in history. The combination not only succeeds, but the result is a genuine page-turner, At 782 pages, that's a lot of turning, but worth the effort.

  The premise is that England was once ruled by magicians, but by the early 1800s the art had degenerated to an eccentric hobby. In fact, the few who do call themselves magicians are really more interested in talking about the history of magic and collecting old books than in attempting to cast spells. A group of these dilettantes meeting in York (once the center of English magic) learns that a magician, Mr. Norrell, who claims to cast spells as well as to study them, has set up in the neighborhood. To their astonishment, he not only turns out to have real powers, but enforces an oath upon them to give up magic entirely. He then goes to London, where he intends to offer his services to the government in order to spur a revival of English magic.

  Complications ensue; he falls into a wrong crowd, who nonetheless manage to introduce him to people of genuine power and influence. And he ends up doing one of them a magical favor—reviving a recently deceased loved one—that has far more serious consequences than he expected. In particular, it brings a powerful and amoral Fairy king into the lives of several other characters. But Norrell, now the toast of fashionable London and an important government contractor, seems unaware of the chaos that is brewing.

  Around the same time, Norrell learns of a young man who has also begun to practice magic, and despite some misgivings and jealousy, takes him as an apprentice. Jonathan Strange is far more personable than the reclusive Norrell, and far more adventurous in his approach to the magical arts. As a result, Strange is sent to assist the British forces in the war against Napoleon, where his success brings him power and influence of his own. This has the inevit
able result of bringing about an estrangement between him and his mentor. Much of the last half of the novel revolves around Strange's discovery of the consequences of Norrell's magical bargain, and the inevitable confrontation between them.

  Clarke's plot is complex and unclichéd, original enough to make the book a success on that level alone. There is no quest for some magical object, no magical battle between good and evil (although moral issues are always near the center of the book), and the conclusion is as emotionally complex as the buildup.

  Clarke also has a wonderful cast of characters, including a few historical figures—Wellington, Lord Byron, Byron's publisher John Murray—none of whom intrude excessively. And while many of the minor characters are variants of stock figures from Victorian fiction, Clarke portrays them with enough warmth to keep them from feeling like caricatures—much the way that some of Dickens's minor characters transcend their two-dimensional portrayal.

  The point that raises Jonathan Strange to another level is Clarke's affectionate but gently teasing imitation of the style and manner of a Victorian historical novel. Her language has just the right veneer of archaism—much of it in a few old-fashioned spellings (chuse, shew, headach)—to convey the feeling of an earlier period. Footnotes fill in the history of this alternate England and its magic. And she adopts the trick—which we associate with Dickens, but which has a long history both before and after him—of giving many of the characters names just peculiar enough to suggest some quality without quite becoming allegorical. So in addition to Strange, an important secondary character is Mr. Drawlight, a pair of walk-ons are Mr. and Mrs. Honeyfoot, and so on—just enough to intrigue and amuse, without becoming an annoyance.

  A delight; possibly the best fantasy of the year.

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  The Family Trade

  Charles Stross

  Tor, $24.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 0-765-30929-7

  Having already made a mark with post-singularity space opera and neo-Lovecraft, Stross takes a fling at alternate-worlds fantasy, and comes up with another winner.

  The setup finds Miriam Beckstein, a tech journalist working for a Boston firm, finding out too much about a powerful company's illegal dealings, and getting fired almost before she can figure out what's gone wrong. It's made very clear to her that pursuing the story could get her in real, i.e., fatal, trouble. Her only ally, at this point, is Paulette, a co-worker who lost her job at the same time. The two of them decide to stay in touch and help each other if things get too tough.

  Then Miriam's foster mother, who raised her after she and her fatally wounded mother were found in the woods near their home, gives her a box of her belongings. Among them is a locket with an intricate design. Staring at it, Miriam finds herself transported from her living room to a wooded area, where she sees armored men on horseback pass by in the night. One of them fires a gun at her, and she flees into the woods. Hiding, she realizes that the locket was somehow responsible for her transportation; she stares into it again and finds herself back home, shaken but unhurt.

  At this point, Miriam's reporter's instincts take over; she has to know just what she's found. She equips herself for a stay in the woods, gets Paulette to drive her to a secluded area, and returns to the other world, where she learns enough to recognize it as a structured feudal society. Taking pains to avoid exposing herself to the rulers, she returns home—only to learn that she's underestimated the rulers’ resources when they come and abduct her to the alternate world. And then the real fun begins....

  Miriam is, of course, a missing heir to one of the ruling families of this alternate reality, where the ability to travel between worlds gives them trade advantages both in their world and in ours. The Americas are sparsely settled, and Europe remains in a quasi-medieval stage of development. Miriam's appearance reopens a complex dynastic squabble that was settled a few years back when she and her mother disappeared—victims of hostile action. The family elders see the best solution as marrying Miriam off to one of the scions of a rival family, a solution Miriam herself does not embrace. But the alternatives are no more attractive, since most of them appear to require her permanent “removal” from the scene. Returning to our world—which she would welcome—is not one of the options.

  Stross knows the previous models of this kind of fantasy, particularly Roger Zelazny's “Amber” series, and he makes effective use of the opportunity to spin a web of Byzantine political intrigue. Miriam is a smart, tough heroine, just feisty enough to take on the powers that be, and just vulnerable enough to keep the reader's sympathies on her side. The world-building is first-class, the characters are convincingly complex, and the plot full of surprises. Could well be a break-out series for Stross.

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  The Meq

  Steve Cash

  Del Rey, $13.95 (tp)

  ISBN: 0-345-47092-3

  A first novel (and the first of a series) that effectively sets a “hidden race” story against American history of just about a century ago.

  The story's narrator is Zianno Zezen ("Z” to his friends), whom we meet as he celebrates his twelfth birthday in 1881, just before his parents are killed in a train wreck on their way west from St. Louis. Rescued from the wreckage by an eccentric peddler named Solomon, and brought back to St. Louis, Z begins by living his life much the same as any other boy, becoming a baseball fan (the Cardinals are new in town) and having boyish adventures, unaware that he is not just another normal human.

  He begins to understand his true character as he meets Ray, another of his kind. Ray tells him something about what it means to be Meq. The Meq are apparently a subgroup of the Basques, distinguished by freezing in their growth at the age of twelve and then living almost indefinitely. In addition, Z has the “power of the stones,” an amulet given to him by his mother that lets him command others, as when he stops a group of robbers from attacking Solomon. He and Ray become friends, and begin to share their adventures.

  The next big change in his life comes when a Cardinals player dies after an all-night drinking bout, and leaves his twin daughters in the care of Mrs. Bennings, the woman who looks after Z (and who is Solomon's lover when he returns from his travels). Z learns to love the twins, even as he remains to all outer appearances a twelve-year-old boy. He meets others of his race: a girl who has the physical skills of a world-class tumbler, and then an assassin named Fleur de Mal. In the aftermath of a devastating tornado, the Fleur kills Mrs. Bennings and one of the twins, and diverts Z's life into a burning quest for revenge. Much of the rest of the book is driven by that quest.

  At the same time, it is a romp through the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Z's travels take him to New Orleans, then to sea, where he becomes an accomplished sailor; then to the western US, where he meets the family his parents were going to visit when they were killed; then to Canada. He arrives in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, and wanders parts of the country far beyond European influence in search of a mysterious Meq who knows the deepest secrets of their race. And he travels to the African desert, where he eventually confronts his enemy in the days of World War I.

  Author Cash, a long-time member of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils rock group, makes interesting use of history and local color, and his original approach to fantasy makes up for the occasional first-novel lapses (mostly of the “if only I had known” variety). Worth checking out if you like magic but are getting tired of the usual trappings of epic fantasy.

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  The Mysteries

  Lisa Tuttle

  Bantam Spectra, $21.00 (hc)

  ISBN: 0-553-38296-9

  Lisa Tuttle's latest, set in present-day England and Scotland, begins as a mystery and rapidly mutates into a fantasy.

  Ian Kennedy is an American detective living in London, specializing in tracing missing persons. His interest in detective work began when he was a small boy, and his own father abandoned
his family. Teenaged Ian managed to trace him to a nearby city—with anticlimactic results. That might have been the end of it. But after he broke up with a girlfriend, a family friend sent him to England to trace a missing daughter. Ian solved the case and ended up staying in London far longer than he'd planned on.

  But, of late, business has gone badly, and as the story begins he's come to depend on regular handouts from his American mother to get through. Now Laura Lansky, an attractive American woman working in London, hires him to find her college-age daughter Peri, who vanished two and a half years ago after a date with her English boyfriend. Ian looks through the various clues she gives him, including statements of four people who saw Peri—bedraggled and apparently pregnant—a few months after her disappearance, when she called Laura from a rural pay phone in Scotland. He also interviews Hugh, her boyfriend, who tells of taking her to a strange nightclub where the owner played chess with him, claiming to have won Peri. The next day, after Peri's disappearance, the club was no longer to be found.

  Ian recognizes a pattern: both Hugh's story and a fantasy Peri wrote in one of her notebooks parallel the Celtic legend of Etain and Mither, where a king of the Sidhe falls in love with a mortal woman and takes her away to his kingdom. At this point, it is revealed that Ian has dealt before with abductions of mortals by the Sidhe, and that is the appeal of Peri's case to him. Neither Laura nor Hugh are initially ready to accept his interpretation of the facts, but eventually he convinces them. The three of them travel to Scotland to attempt the rescue.

  Tuttle alternates Ian's story with snippets of tales of fairy abductions, mostly British, mingled with other mysterious disappearances, many apparently historical. And Ian jumps back and forth between the present and his own past, giving the story depth and resonance that yield pay dirt when the trio finally does attempt the rescue. Very effective mingling of folklore elements with a modern British setting to bring new impact to a theme that goes back centuries.