The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  But you can see her thinking, the new film, which was to be her last, taking shape behind her eyes.

  This is what she came to see.

  Dead Adonis, laid out in state on the beach-head. Her single mourner. The great ocean provides a kind of score for her starlit landing, and in the old days a foley-boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theater to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Qadesh. We would all squint in the dark, and try to see scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon crinkles and billows lightly on the strand, clinging to the ruin of the landing capsule. The dwarf moon Anchises shines a kind of limping, diffident light on Bysshe as she walks into frame, her short hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed jodhpurs and famous black jacket. The boy turns and turns. His hands flicker and blur as if he is signing something, or writing on phantom paper. She holds out her hand as though approaching a horse, squats down beside the child in a friendly, schoolteacherly fashion. The boy does not raise his head to look at her. He stares at his feet. Bysshe looks uncertainly over her shoulder at the long snarl of sea behind them – the cinematographe operator, temporarily trusted with the care and feeding of George, says something to her offscreen, he must, because she cocks her head as though considering a riddle and says something back to him. Her mouth moves in the silent footage, mouthing words the audience cannot ever quite read.

  Once, a deaf scholar was brought to view this little scene in a private projector room. She was given coffee and a treacle tart. She reported the words as: Look at the whales. Are they getting closer?

  Bysshe stands up straight and strides without warning into the child’s path, blocking his little pilgrim’s progress around the sad patch of dune grass.

  The child does not stop. He collides with Bysshe, steps back, collides with her again. He beats his head against her soft belly. Back and forth, back and forth.

  The Documentarian looks helplessly into the camera.

  EXT. Former Site of the Village of Adonis, Afternoon.

  One of the crewmen shaves in a mirror nailed to furry black cacao-fern bark. He uses a straight razor whose handle is inlaid with fossilized kelp. He is shirtless and circus huge, his face angular and broad. He catches a glimpse of Bysshe in his mirror and whirls to catch her up, kissing her and smearing shaving cream on her face. She laughs and punches his arm – he recoils in mock agony. It is a pleasant scene. This is Erasmo St. John, the Documentarian’s lover and lighting-master, who would later claim to have fathered a child with her, despite being unable to produce a convincing moppet.

  Clouds drift down in long, indistinct spirals. Behind them, the boy turns and turns, still, celluloid transforming the brutal orange of the Venusian sun into a blinding white nova. Beyond him, pearlescent islands hump up out of the foamy Qadesh – callowhales, a whole pod, silent, pale.

  Adonis was established some twenty years prior to the Bysshe expedition, one of many villages eager to take advantage of the callowhale hibernations. What, precisely, callowhale is is still the subject of debate. There are diagrams, to be sure – one even accompanies the Radiant Car press kit – but these are guesses only. It cannot even be safely said whether they are animal or vegetable matter. The first aeronauts, their braggart flags flapping in that first, raw breeze, assumed them to be barren islands. The huge masses simply lay motionless in the water, their surfaces milky, motley, the occasional swirl of chemical blue or gold sizzling through their depths. But soon enough, divers and fishermen and treasure-seekers flocked to the watery promise of Venus, and they called the creatures true. Beneath the waterline were calm, even dead leviathans – taninim, said a neo-Hasidic bounty hunter, some sort of proto-pliosaur, said one of the myriad research corps. Their fins lay flush against their flanks, horned and barbed. Their eyes were then perpetually shut – hibernating, said the research cotillion. Dreaming, said the rest. From their flat, wide skulls extended long, fern-like antennae which curled in fractal infinitude, tangling with the others of their occasional pods, their fronds stroking one another lightly, imperceptibly, in the quick, clever Qadesh currents. Whether they have any sentience is popular tea-chatter – their hibernation cycle seems to be much longer than a human life.

  Some few divers claim to have heard them sing – the word they give to a series of unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, these quaking oscillations can be fatal to any living thing caught up in them – unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporized into constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though it is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve virtue. The vibrations are the color of morning, they whisper.

  It is the milk the divers are after – nearly everything produced on Venus contains callowhale milk, the consistency of honey, the color of cream, the taste something like sucking on a dandelion stem caked in green peppercorn. It is protein-rich, fat-clotted, thick with vitamins – equally sought after as an industrial lubricant, foodstuff, fuel, as an ingredient in medicines, anesthesia, illicit hallucinogens, poured into molds and dried as an exotic building material. Certain artists have created entire murals from it, which looked upon straight seem like blank canvases, but seen slant-wise reveal impossibly complex patterns of shades of white. Little by little, Venusian-born children began to be reared on the stuff, to no apparent ill effect – and the practice became fashionable among the sorts of people whose fashions become the morality of the crowds. Erasmo St. John pioneered a kind of longlit camera lantern by scalding the milk at low temperatures, producing an eerie phosphorescence. The later Unck films use this to great effect as spectral light. Cultivation has always been dangerous – the tubules that secrete milk are part and parcel of the ferny antennae, extending from the throat-sac of the callowhale. In order to harvest it, the diver must avoid the tendrils of fern and hope upon hope that the whale is not seized with a sudden desire to sing. For this danger, and for the callowhales’ rude insistence upon evolving on Venus and not some more convenient locale, the milk was so precious that dozens of coastal towns could be sustained by encouraging a relatively small population of municipal divers. Stock footage sent back to earth shows family after beaming family, clad in glittering counterpressure mesh, dark copper diving bells tucked neatly under their arms, hoisting healthy, robust goblets of milk, toasting the empire back home.

  But where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Bysshe comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure-domes recede. Everyone knew where she was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. To Venus, and Adonis, to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed.

  EXT. Village Green, Twilight.

  Bysshe is grabbing the child’s hand urgently while he screams, soundlessly, held brutally still in his steps by the gaffer and the key grip, whose muscles bulge with what appears to be a colossal effort – keeping this single, tiny, bird-boned child from his circuit. The Documentarian’s jagged hair and occasionally her chin swing in and out of frame as she struggles with him. She turns over the boy’s hand, roughly, to show the camera what she has found there: tiny fronds growing from his skin, tendrils like ferns, seeking, wavering, wet with milk. The film jumps and shudders; the child’s hand vibrates, faster, faster.

  It is a difficult thing, to have an aftermath without an event.

  The tabloids, ever beloved of Bysshe and her exploits, heralded the return of the expedition long before the orbits were favorable. They salivated for the new work, which would
surely set records for attendance. The nickelodeons began taking ticket orders a year in advance, installing the revolutionary new sound equipment which might allow us all to hear the sound of the surf on a Venusian shore. The balloon was sighted in orbit and spontaneous, Romanesque gin-triumphs were held in three national capitals. Finally, on a grassy field outside Vancouver, the black silk confection of Bysshe’s studio balloon wrinkled and sighed to rest on the spring ground. The grips and gaffers came out first, their eyes downcast, refusing to speak. Then the producer, clutching his hat to his chest. Lastly came Erasmo St. John, clutching the hand of the greatest star of the coming century: a little boy with ferns in his fists.

  Bysshe did not return. Her crew would not speak of where she had gone, only that she was to be left to it, called dead if not actually deceased – and possibly deceased. They mumbled; they evaded. Their damaged film, waterlogged and half-missing, was hurried into theaters and pored over by hundreds of actors, scholars, gossip columnists. It is said that Percival Unck only once viewed the reels. He looked into his lap when the last shot had faded to black and smiled, a secret smile, of regret, perhaps, or of victory.

  The boy was sent to school, paid for by the studio. He was given a new name, though later in life he, too, would eschew any surname, having no family connections to speak of save to a dead documentarian. He wore gloves, always, and shared his memories as generously as he could with the waves of popular interest in Venus, in Adonis, in the lost film. No, I don’t remember what happened to my parents. I’m sorry, I wish I did. One day they were gone. Yes, I remember Bysshe. She gave me a lemon candy.

  And I do remember her. The jacket only looks black on film. I remember – it was red.

  I once saw a group of performance artists – rich students with little better to do, I thought – mount a showing of the shredded, abrupt footage of The Radiant Car, intercut with highlights of the great Unck gothics. The effect was strange and sad: Bysshe seemed to step out of her lover’s arms and into a ballroom, becoming suddenly an unhappy little girl, only to leap out again, shimmering into the shape of another child, with a serious expression, turning in endless circles on a green lawn. One of the students, whose hair was plaited and piled upon her head, soaked and crusted in callowhale milk until it glowed with a faint phosphor, stood before the screen with a brass bullhorn. She wore a bustle frame but no bustle, shoelaces lashed in criss-crossings around her calves but no shoes. The jingly player-piano kept time with the film, and behind her Bysshe stared intently into the phantasm of a distant audience, unknowable as God.

  “Ask yourself,” she cried brazenly, clutching her small, naked breasts. “As Bysshe had the courage to ask! What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly nurse. What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? I will tell you. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and that morning star, Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam – like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk how many bubbles may form and break, how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? I suggest this awe-ful idea:Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is milled, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world – perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers, blinking through worlds like holes burned in film – leaving behind only the last child born, who had not yet enough of the milk to change, circling, circling the place where the bubble between worlds burst!” The girl let her milk-barnacled hair fall with a violent gesture, dripping the peppery-sharp smelling cream onto the stage.

  “Bysshe asked the great question: where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know. Adonis returned to his mother, the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld.” Behind her, on a forty-foot screen, the boy’s fern-bound palm – my palm, my vanished hand – shivered and vibrated and faded into the thoughtful, narrow face of Bysshe as she hears for the first time the name of Adonis. The girl screams: “Even here on Earth we have supped all our lives on this alien milk. We are the calves of the callowhales, and no human mothers. We will ride upon the milky foam, and one day, one distant, distant day, our heads will break the surf of a red sea, and the eyes of the whales will open, and weep, and dote upon us!”

  The girl held up her hand, palm outward, to the meager audience. I squinted. There, on her skin, where her heart line and fate line ought to have been, was a tiny fern, almost imperceptible, but wavering nonetheless, uncertain, ethereal, new.

  A rush of blood beat at my brow. As if compelled by strings and pulleys, I raised up my own palm in return. Between the two fronds, some silent shiver passed, the color of morning.

  INT. The depths of the sea of Qadesh.

  Bysshe swims through the murky water, holding one of Erasmo’s milk-lanterns out before her. St. John follows behind with George, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counterpressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. Bysshe strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.

  The audience will always and forever see it before Bysshe does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the Documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular – the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the center of the shot – the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. Her short fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Weird Fiction Review. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. Visit her in California, or at www.sofiasamatar.com.

  Kristin Mandigma lives in Manila, Philippines.

  Vandana Singh is a science-fiction writer from India, living in the Boston area. When not teaching physics to undergraduates in wildly creative ways, she writes non-Euclidean tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, most recently Clarkesworld Magazine, The End of the Road, Solaris Rising 2, and The Other Half of the Sky. Several have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and her novella Distances (Aqueduct Press) won the 2008 Carl Brandon Parallax award. For more information please see her website at http://users.rcn.com/singhvan/and her blog at http://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/.

  Lucy Sussex is a New Zealand-born writer living in Australia. Her award-winning work covers many genres, from true-crime writing to horror. It includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider (1996 – to be reissued in 2014). She has published five short-story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a best of), and Thief of Lives. Matilda received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. She has been a weekly review columnist for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Her literary archaeology (unearthing forgotten writers) work includes Women Writers and Detectives i
n Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (Palgrave). She has also edited pioneer crime-writer Mary Fortune’s work and an anthology of Victorian travel writing, Saltwater in the Ink (ASP). Her current project is a book about Fergus Hume and his 1886 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, the biggest-selling detective novel of the 1800s.

  Tori Truslow lives and writes in England, in a house on a hill overlooking the Thames Estuary. Her short fiction has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix 3, Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other publications. She co-edits the multimedia journal Verse Kraken, and runs the LGBTQ Fandom track at Nine Worlds GeekFest. Find her on the web at toritruslow.com or on twitter @toritruslow.

  Nnedi Okorafor is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled “Weapons of Mass Creation”, the New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning”. Nnedi’s adult works are Who Fears Death (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), her short-story collection Kabu Kabu and her recently released science-fiction novel Lagoon. Her young adult novels are Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature) and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award). Her children’s book Long Juju Man is the winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. The sequel to Akata Witch (Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola) is scheduled for release in 2015. Nnedi holds a PhD in literature and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Buffalo. Find her on facebook, twitter @Nnedi and at nnedi.com