Betsy stared at the Perslop, shivering. Weakly, she said, “Was your story about the human true?”
Outside, a brilliant solar flare leaped from Maera and grew angrily out into space. The Daughter, shedding her last vestiges of life. Soon now.
The Perslop gestured to her screen. “Is your story true? Is not history filled with lies and obfuscations?”
On the screen, a beach, waves crashing silently. Umbrellas casting large shadows. A beautiful young woman smiling shyly at the camera. The future wife of the boy. A burning ball of light in the sky. Everyone watched the screen.
“So beautiful,” the Perslop said. “And gone forever . . . ”
Silence. Even the Twirlovers went still.
“Please!” she said. “Tell me! Was it true?”
“Why?” the Perslop said. “Why should I tell you? Why do you deserve an answer?”
She took a deep breath. “Because someone I love might still be alive,” she said. “To me, that’s everything.”
The alarm trilled, startling her. “Gravitational collapse imminent, beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”
“No!” she cried. “Not yet!”
The Perslop began to move away.
“Wait!” she screamed. “Please tell me!”
The Perslop paused but did not turn back. “I am the last of my kind,” the Perslop said. “I came over here to tell you that you are not.”
The Twirlovers shrieked and suddenly merged. They tumbled madly, yelping, barking, while the Perslop left for its transitional shell.
Ninety seconds to collapse.
Maera flickered and angry waves rippled across its surface, but Betsy could not summon the will to close her shell. On her viewscreen, the park, the blond-haired boy skipping, scaring away pigeons. Dappled sunlight. A breeze through trees.. A dead pigeon on the dirt. The boy, stopping, staring. Staring.
Suddenly, she understood why the boy stared at the bird for so long.
This is the first time you knew death! she thought. You knew the bird would never rise again. And you knew that one day you’d fall too, that everything falls! That’s why you gave these films to your son. You wanted him to remember you, forever!
Seventy-five seconds.
The Perslop had been right, she thought. I could be polluting the new universe with this history.
Sixty-five seconds.
But all those lives, erased? I can’t kill you, great-great grandfather. You are the first. Without you, we would be nothing. My ancestors, without all of you, I am nothing.
Sixty seconds.
The fourteen billion-year history of this universe had already unfolded. But for the World to Come, the story had yet to be written. Maybe the World to Come was a lie, but then again, maybe there was new life on the other side of the event horizon. Maybe they truly had been doing this forever and ever. A flower gone to seed.
She jumped out of her transitional shell, took off her grandmother’s computer from her wrist, and placed it inside the shell. Then she pressed the button to seal it inside.
She’d send the Biography, its mammoth history, with its eons of joys and sorrows, through Maera. She hoped that in the next universe, humanity would be different. Better. What every parent wishes for her children.
“Goodbye,” she said.
The Twirlovers still tumbled together in the air beside her, as wild as a radioactive atom. The alarm continued to wail. “Get in your shells!” she screamed. But they ignored her.
Twenty seconds.
She ran to the rear of the chamber and leaped into an escape pod. She pressed the emergency activator and in an instant she was hurtling away from the Eluder Ship at a large fraction of the speed of light. In the window behind her, Maera blinked twice, like two eyes closing, then began to fade. The star shrunk to half its size, and a moment later the sky filled with white light. The ship bleated a thousand warnings as Betsy closed her eyes.
“I’m coming, Julio. I’m coming for you.”
She had watched the ancient film so often that it still played in her mind, projecting on the back of her eyes like a movie screen. The boy in the park, running, laughing. Falling. Scuffing his knee. Father picking him up, kissing him, comforting him. Above them, a sun.
A young sun.
About the Contributors
Ann VanderMeer is the founder of the award-winning Buzzcity Press and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Weird Tales, for which she has received a Hugo award. Ann has partnered with her husband, author Jeff VanderMeer, on such editing projects as the World Fantasy Award-winning Leviathan series, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, The New Weird, Steampunk, and Fast Ships, Black Sails. Her latest book is The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. She is also known for teaching writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, and Shared Worlds as well conducting creativity seminars for such varied audiences as the state of Arizona and Blizzard Entertainment. http://www.weirdtalesmagazine.com
Rachel Pollack is the author of thirty-one books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her novel Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award, while Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her non-fiction work centers on Tarot, Kabbalah, and related subjects. Her book 78 Degrees of Wisdom has been in print continuously since 1980 and is often called “the Bible of Tarot readers.” Rachel’s work is published all over the world, in fourteen languages. Rachel is also a visual artist, creator of The Shining Tribe Tarot. Her most recent book of fiction is The Tarot of Perfection, a collection of short stories.
Eliot Fintushel makes his living as a writer and as an itinerant solo performer. He won the National Endowment for the Arts’ Solo Performer Award twice. Fintushel has performed solo shows at The National Theater and thousands of venues, including once, for a party of diplomats, under the anti-aircraft gun of a German ship in New York Harbor. He has published about fifty short stories, mostly in Asimov’s, and the novel Breakfast With the Ones You Love (Random House.) He was a contributing editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, until he lost his oneness. He performs with the Imaginists Theatre Collective.
Rose Lemberg was born on the outskirts of the former Hapsburg Empire. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, and now works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal Studies somewhere in the Midwest. Her office is a cavern without windows. When nobody’s watching, the walls glint with diamonds or perhaps tears, and fiddlers dance inside the books. Rose’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine, and her poetry in Abyss and Apex and Goblin Fruit, as well as other venues. She edits Stone Telling, a new magazine of boundary-crossing poetry.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; and Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems. Her short stories and poems have won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.
Poems and short stories by Sonya Taaffe have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3; a selection can be found in Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books). She holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and named a Kuiper belt object last year. “The Dybbuk in Love” is dedicated to Bernice Madinek Glixman (1923–1997). Thanks to Michael Zoosman for Menachem.
Michael Blumlein is the author of three
novels, The Movement of Mountains; X, Y; and The Healer, as well as the award-winning story collection, The Brains of Rats. He wrote the screenplay for the widely acclaimed independent film, Decodings, and has also written for the stage. His novel, X,Y, was made into a feature-length movie. He has recently completed a new novel, The Domino Master, the first book in the multi-volume Bonebreaker Chronicles.
Jonathon Sullivan, MD, PhD sees patients, teaches, and conducts research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Detroit Receiving Hospital-Wayne State University, a Level I Trauma center. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies and has often been featured on Escape Pod. Currently he devotes most of his time to research on brain resuscitation after cardiac arrest and trauma—a field not entirely dissimilar to the animation of golems—but he hopes to return to writing more SF soon. He lives in an old house with his wife, Marilyn, and a demented cat, Smeagol.
Jane Yolen, often called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America,” is the author of over 300 books that range from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, nonfiction, and up to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. Her books and stories have won an assortment of awards—two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic awards, two Christopher Medals, a nomination for the National Book Award, the World Fantasy Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Jewish Book Award, among others. Five colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. Visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com.
Dr. Elana Gomel is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, which she chaired for two years. She is the author of four books: Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject, We and You: Being a Russian in Israel, The Pilgrim Soul, and Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. She has published numerous articles in academic journals in the U.S. and UK on subjects ranging from Charles Dickens to science fiction and narrative theory. Her fantasy story “In the Moment” won the second place in the 2009 Short Story Competition of the British Fantasy Society.
Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor at the University of Ulsan in Korea, and a low-residency Creative Writing student at the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He went to Clarion West in 2006, and his stories have appeared in Flytrap, Podcastle, and Diet Soap. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Miami, which is a different way of saying that he spent his late twenties living by the beach, sipping mojitos and thinking about semantic paradoxes, thus earning the right to obnoxiously correct people who call him “Mr. Burgis.” He blogs at benburgis.livejournal.com.
Benjamin Rosenbaum lives near Basel, Switzerland, with his wife Esther and their eeriely clever children, Aviva and Noah. Benjamin’s stories have appeared in Nature, Harper’s, F&SF, Asimov’s, McSweeney’s, Strange Horizons, and a collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, from Small Beer Press, and have been translated into fourteen languages. He has been a party clown, a synagogue president, a computer game designer, and can cook a mean risotto. More at http://benjaminrosenbaum.com
Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and has lived variously in South Africa, the UK, Asia and the remote island-nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Lavie’s first novel, The Bookman, was published in January 2010 in a UK edition, and will be published in the U.S. in October 2010. Lavie’s other works include novellas An Occupation of Angels, Cloud Permutations, and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, linked-story collection Hebrew Punk, and a collaborative novel The Tel Aviv Dossier with Nir Yaniv.
Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. Some of his notable works include The Sandman comic book series, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. Gaiman’s writing has won numerous awards, including World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, IHG, and Bram Stoker, as well as the 2009 Newbery Medal. Gaiman’s official Web site, www.neilgaiman.com, now has more than one million unique visitors each month, and his online journal is syndicated to thousands of blog readers every day.
Peter S. Beagle originally proclaimed he would be a writer at age ten. Subsequent events have proven him either prescient or even more stubborn than hitherto suspected. Today, thanks to classic works such as The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper’s Song, he is acknowledged as one of America’s greatest fantasy authors. In addition to stories and novels he has written numerous teleplays and screenplays, including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn, plus the “Sarek” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is also a poet, lyricist, and singer/songwriter. In 2007, Beagle won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his original novelette, “Two Hearts.” For more details on Peter’s career and upcoming titles, see either www.peterbeagle.com or http://www.conlanpress.com/.
Max Sparber began blogging in 2000, at first editing an online poetry magazine, Doggerel Weekly, that specialized in bawdy themes and black humor. This later turned into Bawd, a personal blog exploring the same themes. Since then, Max has started a number of blogs detailing a variety of projects, including horror makeup, his work as a playwright, the culture of the cocktail, and supernaturally themed music. Lately, Max has been redacting all these projects into a single blog: sparberfans.blogspot.com. Max has written more than a dozen plays, many of them appearing at Omaha’s Blue Barn Theatre, where Max had his first play produced.
Tamar Yellin is the author of The Genizah at the House of Shepher (St Martin’s Press), Kafka in Brontëland (Toby Press), and Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes (St Martin’s Press). She received the Sami Rohr Prize for emerging Jewish writers in 2007. She has a website at www.tamaryellin.com.
Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Book of Bunk: A Fairy Tale of the Federal Writers’ Project (Earthling, 2010), and The Snowman’s Children (Carroll & Graf, 2002). Both of his story collections, American Morons (Earthling, 2006) and The Two Sams (Carroll & Graf, 2003) received the International Horror Guild Award and were selected by Locus as a best book of the year. He won the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for his novella, The Janus Tree. With Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, he cofounded the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe. He teaches writing and the teaching of writing at Cal State San Bernardino.
Alex Irvine’s most recent novels are Buyout, The Narrows, and Transformers: Exodus. He also is the author of nonfiction books including The Vertigo Encyclopedia and John Winchester’s Journal, as well as comic series Daredevil Noir and Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox. His short fiction is collected in Unintended Consequences and Pictures from an Expedition.
Michael Chabon has been called “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation” and is winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his third novel, The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). His most recent novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) won the Hugo, Sidewise, and Nebula Awards. After earning a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine, Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) made him a literary celebrity. His second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), was made into a popular film. He has also published collections of short stories, written for the screen, and penned a novel for young readers (Summerland, 2006). Chabon is married to writer Ayelet Waldman.
Matthew Kressel’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, and the anthologies Naked City and Hatter Bones. In 2003, he started the speculative fiction and poetry magazine Sybil’s Garage. He is also the publisher of Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, which won the 2009 World Fantasy Award for best anthology of
the year. He has been a member of Altered Fluid, a Manhattan-based writers group, since 2003. His website is www.matthewkressel.net.
Publication History
Peter S. Beagle, “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel” © 2008. Strange Roads, chapbook (DreamHaven Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Michael Blumlein, “Fidelity: A Primer” © 2000. Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Ben Burgis, “Dark Coffee, Bright Light, and the Paradox of Omnipotence” © 2009. AtomJack Magazine, October 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Michael Chabon, “Golems I Have Known” © 2008. Maps and Legends, collection (McSweeney’s). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Eliot Fintushel, “How the Little Rabbi Grew” © 2007. Strange Horizons, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Neil Gaiman, “The Problem of Susan” © 2004. Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, ed. Al Sarrantonio (Roc). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Elana Gomel, “Going East” © 2010. Original to this volume.
Theodora Goss, “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” © 2004. Polyphony 4, ed. Deborah Layne & Jay Lake (Wheatland Press). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Glen Hirshberg, “The Muldoon” © 2006. American Morons, collection (Earthling Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Alex Irvine, “Semaphore” © 2007. Logorrhea, edited by John Klima (Spectra). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Matthew Kressel, “The History Within Us” © 2010. Clarkesworld Magazine, March 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Rose Lemberg, “Geddarien” © 2008. Fantasy Magazine, December 2008. Reprinted by permission of the author.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 43
