by Kelly Link
In the place where I was a child the day was always turning into night and the night was always turning into day. This is because the planet spins in a circle around its own axis as it moves in a circle around its sun, so a different side of the planet is always facing or not facing the sun and touching or not touching light as it moves and time moves. Every ≈ 12 hours Tom and I passed through the place where the light touched the dark. We didn’t need to move our bodies to find the dark or the light. Time moved us through them all the time, into the dark and then into the light. It wasn’t ever a clean line. The light and the dark always moved into each other. It was always part-light and part-dark for hours.
On Valhalla, we think the air will be right for living, but the light touches the planet differently from the the way light touches the planet where I was a child. The same side of Valhalla is always facing its sun as it moves in a circle around it. Because the same side of Valhalla is always touching the sun’s light, 1 side is hot and dry, and 1 side is frozen and dark.
There is a circle around Valhalla’s edge that may be just the right amount of light. Around Valhalla’s edge is a circle of part-light where night and day press against each other.
I sit a lot touching the lamp’s light with my skin sharing in-breaths and out-breaths in space with Tom, feeling Tom’s toes press into my skin. Tom preens and says “Think we should go to the beach, today, Tom?” and I laugh and say “Good one, Tom,” and he says “Good one, Tom.”
For the last 3 times I’ve fed Tom fruit, he hasn’t hopped or squawked or flapped or talked. I know sometimes bodies change what they do as they move through space. Maybe Tom misses living in a place with night and day. This is what his body is used to. I love Tom anyway.
Plants’ bodies are used to night and day, too. Tom and I share the air with plants. The plants’ skins absorb the CO2 our blood seeps out from the O in the air and burn it up in their cells. Then the plants seep out O into the air that Tom and I absorb with the blood vessels in the membranes of our lungs. We turn on lights for ≈ 14 hours for the plants. Any plants in Valhalla will have to grow in the circle of part-light where it’s never night quite and never day quite. On Valhalla we won’t have fruit and meat in a freezer, so we’ll have to find a place where more plants can grow. We can then eat the bodies of the plants and the plants can eat our bodies when our bodies are no longer living.
On the planet where I was a child everything ate in circles. Animal bodies ate plant bodies and plant bodies ate animal bodies. These bodies became each others’ bodies and kept becoming each others’ bodies. These bodies drank water that became 60% of their bodies and then peed and sweated out the water that then became clouds and rain and rivers and bodies again. Bodies were only 40% body. Water was always passing through these bodies and becoming and unbecoming these bodies.
A long time before, there had been very little food in some places for people, and so people were always trying to keep as much as they could for people they loved. The people they loved were the people who lived and worked close to them in space and shared with them rooms and water and in-breaths and out-breaths. They made circles around the people they loved by making words and holidays and sports and songs that only the people inside the circles could understand. After a long time of this, some of the people in the circles found ways to make enough food for everyone on the whole planet, and they said there were no circles except only 1 very large circle that was the whole planet, water and in-breaths and out-breaths all moving through bodies all close in space, but most people were still very used to small circles. The very large circle scared most people, because their bodies were so small compared to the large circle. These people kept making their circles smaller and smaller with secrets and words. These people ate as many bodies as they could until they grew bigger and bigger. As these people grew bigger and bigger, all of their circles got smaller and smaller.
When the women in the dark suits asked me if I loved the world, I said yes, I thought I did love the world and I wanted the world to love me, too. When they asked if I would miss my mother, I said I thought I already did miss my mother, but I didn’t think I ever loved her the way she wanted to be loved by a child. I only knew how to love her with numbers and space. When they asked if I wanted to be the one to go to Valhalla first even if it meant I would never be around another human body I said yes because I only knew how to love with numbers and space and numbers and space would still be with me even when the nearest human body was > 4 lightyears away. If they had told me about Tom then I think I would have wanted to go even more than I did.
I haven’t seen Tom in > 52 hours. Before now, the longest piece of time I’d gone without seeing Tom was 2.58633701 hours. I’ve been to every cabin in the ship and stood and said “I love you, Tom,” and waited > 10 seconds, but I didn’t hear “I love you, Tom.” I’ve been to every cabin 14 times now and said “I love you, Tom,” and waited, like this. When I’ve waited like this and the ship is not humming, the only thing I can hear is my breathe and my blood both moving.
When there became humans > large plants on the planet where I was a child the air became not good for human breathing. But don’t worry, there’s another world out there where it’s always night and always day. It’s a straight line from here to there. I’m headed there right now to see if it’s all right for living. I’m headed there for all the world.
In ≈ 2100 hours the light will blink or won’t blink and there will or won’t be voices talking. Maybe the voice will be Bala, and she’ll have a good laugh and say “You are so brave and important.” Maybe if she says that I’ll say “You’re a good egg, Bala.”
The last thing Bala said was “Everyone down here loves you.”
The last thing Tom said was “Good one, Tom.”
When we get to Valhalla I’ll step out into the circle that’s not night quite and not day quite and breathe in and breathe out, and Tom will fly over my head and breathe in and breathe out, and I will breathe in his out breaths and he will breathe in my out breaths, and I’ll send a message back with all the numbers they will need to follow me, saying “Come on, then. Bring the kids. There’s plenty of space here to love each other.” My body may not be living still though when they hear this good news.
About these Authors
A. B. Robinson lives in Western Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in TINGE as well as Industrial Lunch, which she currently co-edits. Her first chapbook, Dario Argento Is Not My Boyfriend, was selected as a jubilat contest winner.
Gillian Daniels writes, works, and walks in the streets and parks of Boston, MA. Since attending the 2011 Clarion Writing Workshop, her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, and PodCastle among others. She reviews short stories for Fantastic Stories of the Imagination and writes about plays for the New England Theatre Geek. She tweets on a fairly consistent basis as @gilldaniels.
Debbie Eylon is an Israeli translator and illustrator. Among other things, she’s translated into Hebrew essays by David Foster Wallace and Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners.
Alyc Helms fled her doctoral program in anthropology and folklore when she realized she preferred fiction to academic writing. She dabbles in corsetry and costuming, dances Scottish Highland and Irish Ceili at Renaissance and Dickens fairs, gets her dander up about social justice issues, and games in all forms of media. She sometimes refers to her work as “critical theory fanfic,” which is a fancy way to say that she is obsessed with liminality, gender identity, and foxes. She’s a freelance RPG writer for Green Ronin, a graduate of Clarion West, and her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Crossed Genres. Her first novel, The Dragons of Heaven, will be published by Angry Robot Books in June 2015. She can be found on Twitter @alychelms or at www.alychelms.com.
Dylan Horrocks lives with his wife and sons in Maraetai, New Zealand, and online at hicksvil
lecomics.com. His published comics include Pickle, Atlas, Hunter: the Age of Magic and the graphic novels Hicksville, Incomplete Works, and Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. When he’s not making comics, Dylan also writes prose fiction, walks the dog, and sleeps.
Kodiak Julian is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found in the Writers of the Future anthology, Volume 29, and in the anthology, Witches, Stitches, and Bitches. She lives in Yakima, WA, with her husband and son.
Over the past 30 years, Nicole Kimberling has become an expert at disassembling plants of all kinds only to turn around and reassemble them into a item called “dinner.” She lives and works and in Bellingham, Washington.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet loves to receive change of address cards at 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027.
Henry Lien (henrylien.com) attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and has sold stories to publications including Asimov’s, F&SF, Interfictions, and Analog. He is the Art Director of Lightspeed and the Arts Editor of Interfictions. He is currently working on a series of YA fantasy novels about kung fu figure skating.
Joe M. McDermott is the author of six novels and two short story collections including Last Dragon, Maze, and We Leave Together. He lives in San Antonio.
Joanna Ruocco is the author of several books including Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith from Fiction Collective Two & most recently Dan from Dorothy, a Publishing Project. She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal with Brian Conn.
Jade Sylvan, called a “risque queer icon” by the Boston Globe, is an award-winning author, poet, screenwriter, producer, and performing artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jade’s most recent book, Kissing Oscar Wilde, a novelized memoir about the author’s experience as a touring poet in Paris was a finalist for the New England Book Award and the Bisexual Book Award. Jade has toured extensively, performing their work to audiences across the United States, Canada, and Europe. They are heavily rooted in the literary and performance community of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. Jade has had pieces published in the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, The Toast, PANK, and many other places. The author has received the Bayou Poetry Prize, the Write Bloody Renaissance award, and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Henry Wessells is a writer and antiquarian bookseller in New York City. He is author of Another Green World and The Private Life of Books, and editor of several volumes by American fantasist Avram Davidson, including El Vilvoy de las Islas, The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead, and, with Grania Davis, The Other Nineteenth Century and Limekiller. His imprint, Temporary Culture, has published works by Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, Don Webb, Gregory Feeley, and Judith Clute. He likes to walk around in the woods and in the dictionary.
The following are excerpts from a few recent books from Small Beer Press:
An excerpt from The Liminal War
Ayize Jama-Everett
Act 1: London, fourteen minutes from now
Chapter One
“They say you can cure my cancer.”
“Who is ‘they’?” It’s a genuine question. Lots of people talk about me.
“People that I trust.”
She’s old, white, manicured, and comes from a titled family. I shouldn’t be in the same room with her, even with this false East Indian face and body on. She’s nothing but attention. But the location is anonymous enough—a two-room lightly furnished office paid for in cash, in the heart of Metro London—that I risk her continued, dignified begging.
“That does me no good. Give me a name or I walk.”
“I will not betray the people that have gotten me this far with you.” A little backbone. I like it. Not like I’ll let her know.
“And how do I know those who mean to do me harm haven’t sent you?”
“I get the sense you don’t suffer your enemies to live for very long.”
“So long as that’s clear.”
I read bodies the way master musicians read music. The closer I get, the more I can see and the more I can influence, change, heal . . . or hurt. I spent years hurting—others, and myself—for a shadow of a pestilence named Nordeen. Head of a team of murder-oriented smugglers called the Razor Neck crew, Nordeen was part father, part slavemaster, all boss. Three years ago I paid for my freedom and family with the life of the only woman I’d ever truly loved: Yasmine. Since then I’ve been keeping a low profile with our daughter, Tamara, and another liminal teenager in need named Prentis.
It was Samantha’s idea to get into healing. No fixed location, no flat fee, no credit cards. Just put a whisper into the no-hope cancer streams, in terminal AIDS wards, among the undiagnosed critical patients, and see who comes.
“But why?” I asked Samantha after she brought it up for the fifth time.
“You have years of practice as a dealer of destruction. Why not aim toward health?” Sam has that way of making me feel like an idiot with simple statements.
The Dame with a backbone has a pernicious brain cancer. Last night I read her from a distance. Rather, I read the chromosomal signature of the cancer. I haven’t seen it before, but I’ve met its cousins and uncles in my other patients. The woman is not nearly as interesting as her disease.
“Breathe easy and try not to move,” I tell the Dame, and go deep. Starving out the tendrils drifting into her spine and lungs is easy. I run an experimental serotonin/dopamine blend through her as I block all neural pain pathways. She relaxes instantly. All that’s left is the golf-ball-sized toxic cluster of spastic nerve spindles and fibrous tissue in her cerebellum. I deaden its noxious abilities instantly; reducing it will take more time and focus so that the surrounding tissue doesn’t overcompensate or remain regressed as a result of the pressure the tumor has put on it. I could beat the tumor back, get the Dame’s body to send a sustained electric pulse into the heart of that dead tumor star. But I want to comprehend the beast, figure out why it grew there as opposed to in her hippocampus, or liver for that matter. Sam was right. This has turned into fun for me.
But the Dame starts panicking. Not an indigenous panic either. Someone else, another person like me, a Liminal, is pushing the Dame’s fight or flight buttons like she was a stuck elevator. I know because the same thing is happening to me.
A heroin-sized high is enough to knock the Dame unconscious. I turn my ability inward and reduce my doubling hippocampus as it reacts to the fear. I’m calm just in time to hear cars crash right in front of the Tate Modern. At the window I confirm what I’ve feared. Half of London is in a full-blown panic. Whatever did this—it’s not targeted.
Liminals—folks like myself, born with a variety of abilities and skills—tend to be . . . difficult. With no template of appropriate behavior, a Liminal with the ability to enter dreams can be a fairy godmother or a psychic rapist. My brother, with hard telekinetic abilities, chose the latter route. But this is different. There is no maliciousness in this psychic hijack. In fact, this is no attack: this is terror shared.
I hit Holland Street, heading away from the Thames in default healing mode. If I can’t reset the panic centers in any of the growing crowds in under two seconds, I just knock them out. I’ve seen something like this before: 2007, Kuala Lumpur, Mont Kiara. I want to handle this the way I handled that: track the Liminal based off of the victims’ symptoms. The closest to the Liminal will be the most severely affected. If I were still with Nordeen, I’d find the Liminal and either me or one of the Razor Neck crew—his pack of murder oriented smugglers—would deal the death. But there’s something familiar about this Liminal.
“Prentis,” I call out. Usually an animal of some sort—a dog or a mouse—will donate its attention to me if she can hear through them. Prentis is a liminal animal totem; a conduit for animals, but the link works both ways. She knows every move every animal in London makes. But as I dodge a Mini Cooper hopping up the curb, all I get is a flock of pigeons. I follow the progressively more severe fear symptoms over to Trafalgar Square before I rea
ch out with my mind to Tamara.
“Kid, you getting this?” I can’t call Tamara my daughter to her face, and given that she’s one of the strongest telepaths I’ve ever met, I’ve got to be careful not to think it too much either. When her mom Yasmine, realized she was pregnant, she kicked me out without letting me know about our girl. Tamara grew up calling a progressive politician in the Reform Labor Party daddy. When the car Tamara’s parents and I were in blew up, she blamed me for their deaths and threw me out a plate-glass window. For a while I thought I deserved it.
Then it hits me. This type of panic has Tamara written all over it. She’s usually a sarcastic, semi-streetwise, crafty git. But when she gets truly scared, all that bravado and control disappears. For whatever reason, she’s infected every man, woman, and child near her with a mind-crushing panic. The streets are flooded with people crying, breaking down, and hiding. Traffic is worse than usual, with every other driver paranoid about turning the wheel. This ends soon or a lot of people die.
