by Nick Mamatas
REALMS:
The First Year of
Clarkesworld Magazine
Edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace
Copyright © 2008 by Clarkesworld Magazine.
Cover art copyright © 2008 by Rolando Cyril.
Ebook Design by Neil Clarke.
Wyrm Publishing
www.wyrmpublishing.com
Publisher’s Note:
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.
Visit Clarkesworld Magazine at:
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Table of Contents
Introduction: Turn the Page, Press Return
by Nick Mamatas
A Light in Troy
by Sarah Monette
304 Adolf Hitler Strasse
by Lavie Tidhar
The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved
by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia
Lydia’s Body
by Vylar Kaftan
Urchins, While Swimming
by Catherynne M. Valente
The Other Amazon
by Jenny Davidson
Orm the Beautiful
by Elizabeth Bear
Automatic
by Erica L. Satifka
Chewing Up the Innocent
by Jay Lake
Attar of Roses
by Sharon Mock
Clockmaker’s Requiem
by Barth Anderson
Something in the Mermaid Way
by Carrie Laben
The Third Bear
by Jeff VanderMeer
The First Female President
by Michael De Kler
There’s No Light Between Floors
by Paul G. Tremblay
Qubit Conflicts
by Jetse De Vries
The Oracle Spoke
by Holly Phillips
The Moon Over Yodok
by David Charlton
I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said
by Cat Rambo
Transtexting Pose
by Darren Speegle
The Taste of Wheat
by Ekaterina Sedia
The Beacon
by Darja Malcolm-Clarke
The Ape’s Wife
by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Lost Soul
by M P Ericson
TURN THE PAGE, PRESS RETURN
Nick Mamatas
There are two major theories when it comes to editing the online literary journal.
The first theory is the simplest: treat it just like a paper journal, even if it is nearly impossible to balance a laptop (much less an eighty-pound eMac like the one I have on my desk) on your lap while on the commode. Secret studies have shown that the washroom is where 90% of the world’s literary journals are read.
The second theory is in the decided minority: take full advantage of the new medium by presenting new types of fiction: hypertexts, microfiction to be sent to cell phones and other gadgets, memoirs in lengthy blog form, etc.
Well, if you want both an online magazine, such as the one I edit, and a book to be made of your stories, such as this book, neither theory works very well. Reading large amounts of text remains difficult on screen, and many people find the reading of long fiction on screen especially problematic. And of course, one cannot easily transport a hypertext onto the printed page.
For Clarkesworld Magazine, my editorial choices were guided by both the online medium and the ultimate goal of paper reprint. This means that my primary goal was to cultivate the audience of a popular magazine and not the audience of a literary journal. That latter audience is, of course, made up nearly exclusively of emerging writers who read just enough of a journal to know whether they should or should not submit their own fiction to it. An audience that small and ingrown would also obviate the need for this handy volume.
Hi there, reader-who-isn’t-also-a-writer, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Popular magazines are popular largely thanks to the fact that they are cheap enough to get rid of. Magazines determine their ad rates not based on the number of copies they sell, but on some multiple of that number. You may buy a magazine, and then your spouse may read it, or at least flip through it and thus catch some of the advertisements. Then after you’re both done with the latest issue, someone else may snag it off your coffee table or go sorting through your recycling. Even if you’re one of those people who read a magazine once and then rush off to seal it in Mylar and place it gently on a shelf with the rest of your periodical collection—you know, even if you’re a big ol’ kook!—your habits are counterbalanced by the number of magazines in medical waiting rooms.
Online magazines, however, have no “pass along.” So when reading for Clarkesworld, I made it a point to select only those stories that would send readers off to their email client or their blogs to send the story to all their friends, creating an active pass along. “Look at this weird story!” I wanted them to say. “You have to read it.” There was no room for the “good ol’ fashioned yarn” in Clarkesworld, or for one more comfortable variation on the stories we have all read before. Every month had to be a parade, the next Wrestlemania, an unexpected volley of bottle rockets, or some really interesting if nigh unidentifiable roadkill.
Also, because it gets tedious to read long stories online, all the stories had to be short. I set a 4000-word limit somewhat arbitrarily, but I think it worked. The end result is that Clarkesworld stories combine the shock of a bear trap on your ankle with the handy convenience of a sandwich. You may not want to read this book cover to cover all at once. It might spoil your supper.
To gain some attention in the overcrowded online milieu, I also took another unusual tack. Unlike virtually every other editor of short fiction, I never use form letters for rejections. I promised myself that I, or my twin brother Seth whom I keep hidden from the world so that he might better play me for half of our waking hours, would read at least the beginning of every short story and explain why the story, if rejected, failed to please. For this, some people have called me a sadist and an egomaniac. Others, generally those who have actually read some of the stuff that comes into magazines and journals on a daily basis, have called me a masochist.
I prefer to think of it as taking the long view. Despite the claims of those interminable how-to manuals on the subject, writing and submitting one’s work requires no special bravery. All one need be is a smidge tougher than a bowl of milquetoast, and you can hack it. As it happens though, in the Western world the idea of writing and publishing is considered somewhat effete, even feminized, which means that lots and lots of hothouse flowers waste their time and money on writer’s conferences and MFA programs and the aforementioned interminable manuals.
Well, there are two things you can do with a flower: fertilize it, or nip it in the bud. My comments did the fertilizing. Seth, he was the bud-nipper. Really. The end result was a great anthology, thanks to a year of making it clear to writers what we didn’t want. Anthology is an ancient Greek word referring to the gathering and artful arrangement of flowers. Hope you like our first bouquet.
Go on, take a whiff of this!
A LIGHT IN TROY
Sarah Monette
She went down to the beach in the early mornings, to walk among the cruel black rocks and stare out at the waves. Every m
orning she teased herself with wondering if this would be the day she left her grief behind her on the rocky beach and walked out into the sea to rejoin her husband, her sisters, her child. And every morning she turned away and climbed the steep and narrow stairs back to the fortress. She did not know if she was hero or coward, but she did not walk out into the cold gray waves to die.
She turned away, the tenth morning or the hundredth, and saw the child: a naked, filthy, spider-like creature, more animal than child. It recoiled from her, snarling like a dog. She took a step back in instinctive terror; it saw its chance and fled, a desperate headlong scrabble more on four legs than on two. As it lunged past her, she had a clear, fleeting glimpse of its genitals: a boy. He might have been the same age as her dead son would have been; it was hard to tell.
Shaken, she climbed the stairs slowly, pausing often to look back. But there was no sign of the child.
Since she was literate, she had been put to work in the fortress’s library. It was undemanding work, and she did not hate it; it gave her something to do to fill the weary hours of daylight. When she had been brought to the fortress, she had expected to be ill-treated—a prisoner, a slave—but in truth she was mostly ignored. The fortress’s masters had younger, prettier girls to take to bed; the women, cool and distant and beautiful as she had once been herself, were not interested in a ragged woman with haunted half-crazed eyes. The librarian, a middle-aged man already gone blind over his codices and scrolls, valued her for her voice. But he was the only person she had to talk to, and she blurted as she came into the library, “I saw a child.”
“Beg pardon?”
“On the beach this morning. I saw a child.”
“Oh,” said the librarian. “I thought we’d killed them all.”
“Them?” she said, rather faintly.
“You didn’t imagine your people were the first to be conquered, did you? Or that we could have built this fortress, which has been here for thousands of years?”
She hadn’t ever thought about it. “You really are like locusts,” she said and then winced. Merely because he did not treat her like a slave, did not mean she wasn’t one.
But the librarian just smiled, a slight, bitter quirk of the lips. “Your people named us well. We conquered this country, oh, six or seven years ago. I could still see. The defenders of this fortress resisted us long after the rest of the country had surrendered. They killed a great many soldiers, and angered the generals. You are lucky your people did not do the same.”
“Yes,” she said with bitterness of her own. “Lucky.” Lucky to have her husband butchered like a hog. Lucky to have her only child killed before her eyes. Lucky to be mocked, degraded, raped.
“Lucky to be alive,” the librarian said, as if he could hear her thoughts. “Except for this child you say you saw, not one inhabitant of this fortress survived. And they did not die quickly.” He turned away from her, as if he did not want her to be able to see his face.
She said with quick horror, “You won’t tell anyone? It’s only a child. A . . . more like a wild animal. Not a threat. Please.”
He said, still turned toward the window as if he could look out at the sea, “I am not the man I was then. And no one else will care. We are not a people who have much interest in the past, even our own.”
“And yet you are a librarian.”
“The world is different in darkness,” he said and then, harshly, briskly, asked her to get out the catalogue and start work.
Some days later, whether three or thirty, she asked shyly, “Does the library have any information on wild children?”
“We can look,” said the librarian. “There should at least be an entry or two in the encyclopedias.”
There were, and she read avidly—aloud, because the librarian asked her to—about children raised by wolves, children raised by bears. And when she was done, he said, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“No. Not really. I think he lives with the dog pack in the caves under the fortress, so it makes sense that he growls like a dog and runs like a dog. But it doesn’t tell me anything about . . . ”
“How to save him?”
“How to love him.”
She hadn’t meant to say it. The librarian listened too well.
“Do you think he wishes for your love?”
“No. But he keeps coming back. And . . . and I must love someone.”
“Must you?”
“What else do I have?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and they did not speak again that day.
She did not attempt to touch the child. He never came within ten feet of her anyway, the distance between them as impassible as the cold gray sea.
But he was always there, when she came down the stairs in the morning, and when she started coming down in the evenings as well, he came pattering out from wherever he spent his time to crouch on a rock and watch her, head cocked to one side, pale eyes bright, interested. Sometimes, one or two of the dogs he lived with would come as well: long-legged, heavy-chested dogs that she imagined had been hunting dogs before the fortress fell to the locusts. Her husband had had dogs like that.
The encyclopedias had told her that he would not know how to speak, and in any event she did not know what language the people of this country had spoken before their world ended, as hers had, in fire and death. The child was an apt mimic, though, and much quicker-minded than she had expected. They worked out a crude sign-language before many weeks had passed, simple things like food, for she brought him what she could, and no, which he used when he thought she might venture too close, and I have to go now—and it was ridiculous of her to imagine that he seemed saddened when she made that sign, and even more ridiculous of her to be pleased.
She worried that her visits might draw the fortress’s attention to him—for whatever the librarian said, she was not convinced the locusts would not kill the child simply because they could—but she asked him regularly if other people came down to the beach, and he always answered, no. She wasn’t sure if he understood what she was asking, and the question was really more of an apotropaic ritual; it gave her comfort, even though she suspected it was meaningless.
Until the day when he answered, yes.
The shock made her head swim, and she sat down, hard and not gracefully, on a lump of protruding rock. She had no way of asking him who had come, or what they had done, and in a hard, clear flash of bitterness, she thought how stupid of her it was to pretend this child could in any way replace her dead son.
But he was all she had, and he was watching her closely. His face never showed any emotion, except when he snarled with fear or anger, so she did not know what he felt—if anything at all. She asked, All right?
Yes, the child signed, but he was still watching her as if he wanted her to show him what he ought to do.
She signed, All right, more emphatically than she felt it, but he seemed to be satisfied, for he turned away and began playing a game of catch-me with the two dogs who had accompanied him that morning.
She sat and watched, trying to convince herself that this was not an auspice of doom, that other people in the fortress could come down to the beach without any purpose more sinister than taking a walk.
Except that they didn’t. The locusts were not a sea-faring people except in the necessity of finding new countries to conquer. They were not interested in the water and the wind and the harsh smell of salt. In all the time she had been in the fortress, she had never found any evidence that anyone except herself used the stairs to the beach. She was trying hard not to remember the day her husband had said, casually, A messenger came from the lighthouse today. Says there’s strangers landing on the long beach. Little things. Little things led up to disaster. She was afraid, and she climbed the stairs back to the fortress like a woman moving through a nightmare.
Her louring anxiety distracted her so much that she asked the librarian, forgetting that he was the last person in the fortress likely to know,
“Who else goes down to the beach?”
The silence was just long enough for her to curse herself as an idiot before he said, “That was . . . I.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What on earth possessed you?”
His head was turned toward the window again. He said, “You spend so much time there.”
At first she did not even understand what he was saying, could make no sense of it. She said, hastily, to fill the gap, “You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.”
“I won’t do it again, if you don’t want.”
She couldn’t help laughing. “You forget which of us is the slave and which the master.”
“What makes you think I can forget that? Any more than I can forget that I will never see your face?”
“I . . . I don’t . . . ”
“I am sorry,” he said, his voice weary although his posture was as poker-straight as ever. “I won’t bother you about it again. I didn’t mean to tell you.”
She said, astonished, “I don’t mind,” and then they both, in unspoken, embarrassed agreement, plunged hastily into the minutiae of their work.
But that evening, as she sat on her rock beside the sea, she heard slow, careful footsteps descending the stairs behind her.
Come! said the child from his rock eight feet away.
Friend, she said, a word they’d had some trouble with, but she thought he understood, even if she suspected that what he meant by it was pack-member. And called out, “There’s room on my rock for two.”
Friend, the child repeated, his hands moving slowly.
No hurt, she said, and wondered if she meant that the librarian would not hurt the child, or that the child should not hurt the librarian.
Yes, he said, and then eagerly, Rock!
“What are you doing, this evening?” the librarian’s voice said behind her.
“Teaching him to skip stones.” She flung another one, strong snap of the wrist. Five skips and it sank. The child bounced in a way she thought meant happiness; he threw a stone, but he hadn’t gotten the wrist movement right, and it simply dropped into the water. Again! he said, imperious as the child of kings.
