The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - July/August 2016

by Various

  Shortly thereafter, the bubbles really hit the fan.

  Driving to work, I noticed the sun looked dim. The air was hazy, like when an inversion traps pollution. But the haze was colored, as if a candy factory had burned down. Lemon-yellow here, blueberry there. Multi-hued clouds blew across the road like a dust storm made of Lifesaver particles. With a sinking feeling I continued on. At MatSciCo, white TV news trucks had surrounded the building like a pack of media hyenas. I huddled in my car, afraid to get out.

  How did we screw up?

  Since MatSciCo created extremely small structures, the air inside the building had to be kept extremely clean. In that environment, durable bubbles lasted only ten or fifteen minutes. In the wild, the same mechanism that kept bubbles from disintegrating made them incorporate dust and become too stable. Because of the drought, there was lots of dust. It wasn't obvious immediately because wind dispersed the bubbles from the planters, so they appeared to evaporate. Actually, the bubbles were spreading. In a few days, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco were enveloped in rainbow smog. Cars had to drive slowly with their headlights on. An astronaut in the International Space Station took what became an iconic photo: the Bay Area apparently buried in cotton candy.

  Turning off the planters stopped the supply of new bubbles but had no effect on the bubbles already loose in the area. Life in Northern California ground to a halt. People had to wear face masks when they went outside. Flash fires made the air smoky. We didn't know it yet, but the hit to the economy would lead to the "MatSciCo Recession." Reed blamed the techies who bought too many of our products. Nice try. We were living in the lab, gratefully breathing pure filtered air, desperately brainstorming, when the FBI stormed in and dragged us out in handcuffs.

  Which brings us to my predicament today.

  According to the lawyers, if I pin the blame on Vik and Reed, the government will go easy on me. Present myself as a minion, the lawyers say, and testify against them. It was my first job. I didn't know better. I vas juss follovink awders.

  Tempting. Reed and Vik used me; it would serve them right if I turned star witness. In my presence they said things that sounded awful, even in context. I could nail those two so bad.…

  But that would be dishonest. I had had many chances to slow or halt our mad rush to Bubble-geddon. Instead, I went along with their schemes. I was so proud of my skill with Beemer that I didn't think about what I was being used for. That was wrong. I must man up and take responsibility for my part in the disaster.

  When you decide my penalty, I have a suggestion, Your Honor. Instead of sending me to prison, sentence me to do a lecture tour.

  Silicon Valley is full of smart people working hard, fast, disruptively. I am the perfect person to say: Slow down! Think about what you're doing! I will speak to those smart nerds and warn them of the danger of being swept away by a cool idea. Yes, I will say, you want to parlay your cleverness into big buckaroos. Of course you want to IPO, get rich, buy a personal hovercraft. But think twice or you might end up like me: hobbling about with shame clamped around your ankle.

  Standing beside me as I speak will be the figure of the Karmic Avenger. An amusing prop at first, a visual reminder of Dr. Vikram Karmarkar's rise to fame and fall to pariah. But as I tell my tale, the audience will come to see it as evidence of the working of karma. So be careful! Or karma will flatten you like an Acme steamroller.

  Vik explained karma in different ways on different days, depending on his mood. The concept that stuck with me was that what happens to you today is the result of your actions in the past.

  And now, I throw myself on the mercy of the Court.

  * * *

  Spells Are Easy If You Have the Right Psychic Energy

  By Dominica Phetteplace | 3037 words

  Over the past five years, Dominica Phetteplace has built a reputation for writing sharply observed character-driven stories in magazines like Asimov's and Clarkesworld. We're happy to introduce her to readers of F&SF with this story about love and magic and finding your own way.

  1. THIRTY-ONE RESOLUTIONS

  SHAPE WHITE MODELING clay into a heart and while it is still wet, place thirty-one sewing needles in it. They should radiate from the center like spokes from a wheel, points in, eyes out.

  Once the clay is dry, thread a red string through each eye. This will be difficult; tweezers will help. The outline of the thread should approximate a jagged heart. Soak the thread in kerosene and light it on fire. The spell is cast.

  The Thirty-one Resolutions Spell is supposed to resolve thirty-one situations or open questions. The night I performed it, I dreamt I had purged myself of a tiny, scary slug. A good omen, I think?

  The next day, I found a missing earring. But that's not why I performed the spell. I performed the spell to help me dump James. To give me a deadline.

  But aside from the earring, nothing really resolved the whole month, and after thirty-one days, we were still together.

  2. LOVE SPELL

  In order to do your Love Spell, you have to know what your spirit tree is. Everybody has one, but it will change over the course of your life. Take a small branch or piece of bark from your spirit tree and boil it to capture its essence. This will be the base of your love potion. The other ingredients are cinnamon and rosewater. That's it. (Beware potions with too many ingredients—they never work. Remember that your main ingredient is your intent.) Wear the potion; feed your lover honey. Put your hand on his heart and seal him.

  The problem with sealing is that I didn't know how to unseal. I've tried different things. Nothing has worked; maybe I just didn't have the right intent.

  The first person I ever sealed was my high school boyfriend Ben. He was a skinny boy with brown eyes that could warm me from the inside. He did graffiti in sketchbooks and on bare walls. Once I sealed him, he began to write my name, Hruta, in giant letters. Or he would draw me, but in his version, my brown skin was lavender and my black hair brown, and my too-far-apart eyes were balanced by a tiny button nose. In his version, my lips were puckered and off to the side, as if I was up to no good.

  I never should have sealed him or anyone else. I was fifteen and not beautiful. I thought it was the only way to get a boy to like me. But then I kept doing it, because it was easy, and fun.

  3. BEAUTY

  There is no spell to make you beautiful to the larger world. It is too hard to change everyone's minds. A Love Spell can make you beautiful to one person. And one person is enough. Or it ought to be.

  I never should have performed one Love Spell, let alone seven. Being not-beautiful is no excuse. Plenty of people are not-beautiful; they manage to find someone. Inner beauty is what's key. A woman who performs seven Love Spells is not beautiful on the inside.

  4. THIRTY-ONE RESOLUTIONS, PART TWO

  If at first you don't succeed, thread the needle again. Light it on fire again.

  So I did it again, but James still comes around. Still brings me flowers and red wine on Friday nights, even though I am tired of his face. And yesterday, Ben sent me a picture of his latest creation, a graffiti mural depicting the solar system. I have asked him to stop writing my name on walls, and he mostly has. It's a distinct name, so it's implicating. The police have visited me on more than occasion.

  "Are you Hruta?" I am, unfortunately.

  Today I got an email from this guy I used to know, Eric. We had a couple of sexual encounters senior year of high school that were highly meaningful for him but embarrassing for me.

  The message started out by asking how I was, but thereafter turned into an expression of regret. He was sorry for the way things went between us. (Me too.) He hoped he hadn't hurt me. (No, not in any sense of the word.)

  Then.

  Then he worried that he had taken advantage of me. He apologized. Said he missed me but understood if I never wanted to see him again.

  How to tell him that it was me who coerced him? I had him lick honey from my fingertips. I didn't ask for his consent. And
how to make amends now, I don't know.

  I wrote Eric back to tell him that he was better than he remembered. That I thought of him fondly. That I was happily involved in a polyamorous marriage, two partners and seven kids. None of it was true, but I hoped it would scare him away.

  5. MONEY SPELL

  An essence of orange peel and bergamot, prepared with the right intent, can make others more generous toward you.

  My mother created a trust fund for me, so I never needed to work. But I wanted to anyway. I got a job at a Starbucks, and soon after I was hired, tips shot way up. I had to fine-tune my essence. If I made it too powerful, customers would empty their pockets and sign over their savings on their credit card slips.

  We split all the tips evenly, so my coworkers saw their wages rise to a middle-class income for the first time. It made the awful scheduling practices tolerable. This was my version of communism.

  I worked in one of the many Financial District locations up until a few weeks ago. The FiDi branch was fun; men and woman in suits left hundred-dollar tips on corporate credit cards. The best kind of thief is one who steals from other thieves.

  But once I decided to give up the kind of magic that manipulates other people's emotions, there was no point in working there. I hope my former coworkers are getting along all right.

  6. FORGIVENESS SPELL

  Not a spell to get someone else to forgive you. This is a spell to help you forgive someone else. Under a full moon, lie down naked in wet grass; place one spirit crystal on each chakra point. As you chant om, send your chakra energy to the moon. Receive healing energy back.

  Healing magic can be pretty silly and it mostly doesn't work, otherwise there'd be no cancer or eczema. It is somehow easier to manipulate a person's mind than it is their body. My mother has some bullshit explanation for this. She's a Professor of Witchcraft, which means she has a bullshit explanation for most of life's mysteries. In addition to being tenured faculty at a non-accredited institution, my mother has a "Prosperity Witchcraft" practice. Her practice is why I have my trust fund.

  That I asked to meet with her is a sign of how much I want to be a good person, whatever that is.

  Meetings between us are always tense, but I thought the spell might help me forgive her. I don't think it worked.

  I reclined in my first-class seat on my flight to Oslo, wearing designer pajamas and bunny slippers, with the vague sense that I would have to give all of this up if I truly wanted to become a better person.

  Sometimes I wonder if magic is even real. Maybe it's not, and all my transgressions are imagined and all our money is just due to random good luck. Then I wouldn't have to change anything about my life except my belief system. Wouldn't that be nice?

  But in my heart, I know it is real. I can feel it.

  Some of the spells I cast don't work because they are fraudulent and some of them don't work because my energy is not in tune with the energy of the Universe. But the Universe definitely has a special energy, and that special energy is what we call magic.

  My mother looks much younger than she is, but this is not due to magic; rather to an expensive skin-care regimen. She hugged me tightly when she saw me.

  "Hruta, Hruta, Hruta." She said it like a chant. Maybe it was a chant. Maybe she was performing a spell right there, in the airport.

  The driver delivered us to the school, and we had tea and smørrebord in the faculty lounge.

  "So what do you need help with?" she asked.

  "I don't need help," I said.

  "Then why are you here?"

  Crystals, chakras, full moon, om, I told myself. Forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

  "I do need help," I said. "I need to undo a Love Spell."

  "I told you not to mess around with Love Magic."

  "You never told me that!" I was mostly raised by her apprentices. "You always expected me to figure things out for myself."

  "Well, I don't know anything about Love Magic," she said.

  Obviously. I would have said that out loud if I didn't need her help. My mother has never taken a lover or spouse, as far as I know. No man or woman, husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend.

  I have asked about my father. She says I don't have one, that I was conceived through parthenogenesis. When I ask her where we are from, she says we are from Eden, descended from Eve. That Genesis story of expulsion was an exaggeration. Only Adam had to leave. Eve stayed and birthed our distaff. She is still there, but the location must be kept secret. I don't get to know because I have not bound myself by oath to the coven.

  My mother is wealthy and white; I am brown and know nothing about my origins. This leads me to believe I was actually adopted from some Third World orphanage. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

  7. FORGIVENESS SPELL, ALTERNATE VERSION

  Baptize yourself in a volcanic spring. Make sure you are wearing your Aura crystal when you do this.

  All the men I have loved were handsome artists. They were beautiful; they created beautiful things. I have no beauty; I create nothing. Ben writes me love letters on highway overpasses. Eric writes fiction about disappointed, dark-haired girls. James, current boyfriend, future former love, does data visualization. He munges his data until the plots approximate the contours of my face. His spreadsheets seem to know everything about me except the contents of my heart.

  There are others; I forget their names even as they stalk me on Twitter. I will write their names down. I will make a list. I will free them one by one.

  My Aura crystal is a twenty-three-carat emerald. Something about the Norwegian mineral water weakened the chain I wore around my neck, and during my moonlight self-baptism/swim, I lost it.

  But I wasn't even mad and I didn't go looking for it. Let it be my offering to the Universe. Let the spell work. Let me forgive myself.

  8. LOVE SPELL, PART 2

  "My advice is to stop with the Love Magic."

  "I'm trying to stop. That's why I need a Love Reversal Spell."

  "Love Reversal is still Love Magic. Stop. Give it up."

  "But there are all these guys!"

  "I thought you said it was just one guy."

  "I lied. I am a bad person and I lie. And I need help," I said.

  My mother looked thoughtful. Almost like she might forgive me for being such a disappointment to her.

  "You could always try the original spell in reverse," she said.

  "That makes no sense."

  "You could perform the steps in reverse," she said.

  I thought about this. "No, that still doesn't make any sense."

  She shrugged. "My advice is to leave that situation alone. You should take the oath, come to Eden. The boys will never find you there. Then you can start practicing real magic."

  9. GLACIER SPELL

  Stand facing north and place a charged rock between your feet. Salute each compass direction and then pat down the ice or snow beneath your feet. Trace a hexagon in the ground and fill it with cold energy.

  I went to Greenland. I tried to save a glacier with magic. I tried to cool the land with magic. I moved into a tent in order to do this.

  The Earth is too hot because people are selfish. If people could be more giving, the planet would be the right temperature and the glaciers would not all be melting away. If I could be more giving, maybe I could be better. Maybe I could be free.

  10. LOVE SPELL, REVERSAL

  The only reversal that makes sense is to have him perform the spell. Except that men are forbidden to do magic.

  I started from the top of my list. I invited Ben to join me in Greenland.

  That he said yes was further proof of the insanity I had induced in him twenty years ago.

  He was still handsome, taller now. Roman nose, lines on his forehead that were new to me, same cheekbones. And those eyes. I was not wrong to want him.

  I had to look away when he greeted me, in shame and in shyness. It was bad, what I had done to him, for so many reasons. If
I had left Love Magic alone, it's possible he could have liked me for me. I might have developed some inner beauty or learned some art or figured out some way to impress him. And if he had come to me willingly, then I could have felt worthy in this moment. Now I would never know.

  When I was fifteen and stupid, I thought romantic rejection was the worst thing that could happen to a person.

  Ben hugged me; he kissed my cheek. He would follow me anywhere, do anything I wanted. I explained to him the ritual. Told him how to perform the forbidden. Passing him the knowledge would stain my Aura, I was sure. I could never take the oath. I would never know for sure if Eden was real or not.

  He would make a potion, he would feed me honey. And that would free him. Or it would imprison me. He would place his hand on my chest, force his energy through me. And then we would see.

  11. SNOW SPELL

  Smooth a patch of snow with charged hands (gloves are okay). Say the snow prayer. Cup your hands over the snow and blow, imagining a ray of blue light emerging from your mouth.

  I couldn't really tell if the glacier spell was doing anything. And I knew my reversed Love Spell did nothing because both Ben and I felt the same after. We went to my tent and had sex, and even though the sex was good, we were unchanged by it. I was always taught that sex without love was a sin. I disagree with this teaching but have somehow managed to internalize it anyway.