Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  CLARKESWORLD

  — YEAR FOUR —

  edited by

  Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace

  Copyright © 2013 by Clarkesworld Magazine.

  Cover art copyright © 2010 by Georgi Markov.

  Ebook Design by Neil Clarke.

  Wyrm Publishing

  wyrmpublishing.com

  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.

  ISBN: 978-1-890464-21-9 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-890464-22-6 (trade paperback)

  Visit Clarkesworld Magazine at:

  clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Contents

  Introduction by Neil Clarke

  Between Two Dragons by Yoon Ha Lee

  The Cull by Robert Reed

  The Mermaids Singing Each to Each by Cat Rambo

  Of Melei, of Ulthar by Gord Sellar

  Night, in Dark Perfection by Richard Parks

  The Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy by Marissa Lingen

  Brief Candle by Jason K. Chapman

  All the King's Monsters by Megan Arkenberg

  Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake

  The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar

  A Sweet Calling by Tony Pi

  Alone with Gandhari by Gord Sellar

  The History Within Us by Matthew Kressel

  January by Becca De La Rosa

  Messenger by J.M. Sidorova

  A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell

  Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  My Father's Singularity by Brenda Cooper

  Beach Blanket Spaceship by Sandra McDonald

  The Association of the Dead by Rahul Kanakia

  Spar by Kij Johnson

  Paper Cradle by Stephen Gaskell

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M. Valente

  The Things by Peter Watts

  Clarkesworld Citizens - Official Census

  About Clarkesworld

  Introduction

  Neil Clarke

  This anthology collects all of the original fiction from Clarkesworld Magazine’s fourth year of publication.

  When Clarkesworld Magazine first launched in October 2006, the odds were pretty good that we’d be out of business within two years. It wasn’t necessarily a reflection of our abilities; online magazines simply had notoriously short life expectancies back then. There were a lot of factors that led to that high turnover, one of which was that the climate was still a bit hostile, something we were lucky enough to see change over our first few years. Four years in, we had done more than merely survive. We had the honor of publishing our first Nebula Award-winning story, “Spar,” by Kij Johnson, and received the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

  Two years later, while attending the science fiction convention at which Clarkesworld was born, I experienced a near-fatal “widow-maker” heart attack. My doctors tell me that I was very lucky to have survived. It’s required some lifestyle changes and the implantation of a device in my chest (yes, I am now a cyborg editor), but I’m actually happier with my life than I’ve been in a long time.

  Survival is cool. I highly recommend it.

  I think you’ll like these stories too.

  Neil Clarke

  April 2013

  PS. “Spar” is a very intense story and should not be read by children. Proceed with caution. Once read, you will never forget it.

  Between Two Dragons

  Yoon Ha Lee

  One of the oldest tales we tell in Cho is of two dragons, twinborn and opposite in all desires. One dragon was as red as Earth, the other as blue as Heaven: day and night, fire and water, passion and calculation. They warred, as dragons do, and the universe was born of their battle.

  We have never forgotten that we partake of both dragons, Earth and Heaven. Yet we are separate creatures with separate laws. It is why the twin dragons appear upon our national seal, separated by Man’s sinuous road. We live among the stars, but we remember our heritage.

  One thing has not changed since the birth of the universe, however. There is still war.

  Yen, you have to come back so I can tell you the beginning of your story. Everything is classified: every soldier unaccounted for, every starsail deployed far from home, every gram of shrapnel . . .every whisper that might have passed between us. Word of the last battle will come tomorrow, say the official news services, but we have heard the same thing for the last several days.

  I promised I would tell no one, so instead I dream it over and over. I knew, when I began to work for the Ministry of Virtuous Thought, that people would fear me. I remind myself of this every time someone calls me a woman with no more heart than a stone, despite the saying that a stone’s weeping is the most terrible of all.

  You came to me after the invaders from Yamat had been driven off, despite the fall of Spinward Gate and the capital system’s long siege. I didn’t recognize you at first. Most of my clients use one of the government’s thousand false names, which exist for situations requiring discretion. Your appointment was like any other, made under one such.

  Your face, though—I could hardly have failed to recognize your face. Few clients contact me in person, although I can’t help wanting to hear, face-to-face, why my patients must undergo the changes imposed on them.

  Admiral Yen Shenar: You were an unassuming man, although your dark eyes suggested a certain taut energy, and you were no stranger to physical labor. I wished I were in such lean good health; morning exercise has never done much for me. But your drab civilian clothes and the absent white gun did nothing to disguise the fact that you were a soldier. An admiral. A hero, even, in my office with its white walls and bland paintings of bamboo.

  “Admiral,” I said, and stopped. How do you address the war hero of a war everyone knows will resume when the invaders catch their breath? I thought I knew what you wanted done. A former lover, a political rival, an inconvenience on the way up; the client has the clout to make someone disappear for a day and return as though nothing as changed, except it has. A habit of reverse-alphabetizing personal correspondence, a preference for Kir Jaengmi’s poetry over An Puna’s, a subversive fascination with foreign politics, excised or altered by my work. Sometimes only a favorite catchphrase or a preference for ginseng over green tea is changed, and the reprogramming serves as a warning once the patient encounters dissonance from family and acquaintances. Sometimes the person who returns is no longer recognizable. The setup can take months, depending on the compatibility of available data with preset models, but the reprogramming itself only takes hours.

  So here you were, Admiral Yen Shenar. Surely you were rising in influence, with the attendant infelicities. It disappointed me to see you, but only a little. I could guess some of your targets.

  “There’s no need for formality, madam,” you said, correctly interpreting my silence as a loss for words. “You’ve dealt with more influential people in your time, I’m sure.” Your smile was wry, but suggested despair.

  I thought I understood that, too. “Who is the target?”

  The despair sharpened, and everything changed. “Myself. I want to be expunged, like a thrall. I’m told it’s easier with a willing subject.”

  “Heaven and Eart
h, you can’t be serious.”

  The walls were suddenly too spare, too white.

  I wondered why you didn’t do the obvious thing and intrigue against Admiral Wan Kun, or indeed the others in court who considered your growing renown a threat. No surprise: the current dynasty had been founded by a usurper-general, and ever since, the court has regarded generals and admirals with suspicion. We may despise the Yamachin, but they are consummate warriors, and they would never have been so frightened by the specter of a coup as to sequester their generals at the capital, preventing them from training with the troops they commanded on paper. We revere scholars. They have their sages, but soldiers are the ones they truly respect.

  “Madam,” you said, “I am only asking you to do what the ministry will ask of another programmer a few days from now. It doesn’t matter what battles one wins in the deeps of space if one can’t keep out of political trouble. Even if we all know the Yamachin will return once they’ve played out this farce of negotiations . . . ”

  You wanted me to destroy the man you were, but in a manner of your choosing and not your rivals’, all for the sake of saving Cho in times to come. This meant preserving your military acumen so you might be of use when Yamat returned to ravage Cho. Only a man so damned sure of himself would have chanced it. But you had routed the Yamachin navy at Red Sun and Hawks Crossing with a pittance of Chosar casualties, and no one could forget how, in the war’s early hours, you risked your command by crossing into Admiral Wan Kun’s jurisdiction to rally the shattered defense at Heaven’s Gate.

  “Admiral,” I said, “are you sure? The half-death”—that’s the kindest euphemism—“might leave you with no more wit than a broken cup, and all for nothing. It has never been a safe procedure.” I didn’t believe you would be disgraced in a matter of days, although it came to pass as you predicted.

  You smiled at that, blackly amused. “When calamity lands on your shoulder, madam, I assure you that you’ll find it difficult to mistake for anything else.” A corner of your mouth curled. “I imagine you’ve seen death in darker forms than I have. I have killed from vast distances, but never up close. You are braver by far than I have ever been.”

  You were wrong about me, Admiral Yen, even if the procedure is easier with a willing patient. With anyone else, I would have congratulated myself on a task swiftly and elegantly completed.

  You know the rest of the story. When you tell it to me, I will give you the beginning that I stole from you, even at your bidding. Although others know our nation Cho as the Realm Between Two Dragons, vast Feng-Huang and warlike Yamat, our national emblem is the tiger, and men like you are tigers among men.

  Sometimes I think that each night I spin the story to myself, a moment of memory will return to you, as if we were bound together by the chains of a children’s fable. I know better. There are villains every direction I look. I am one of them. If you do not return, all that will be left for me is to remember, over and over, how I destroyed the man you should have been, the man you were.

  By the time we took him seriously, he was an old man: Tsehan, the chancellor-general of Yamat, and its ruler in truth. Ministers came and ministers went, but Tsehan watched from his unmoving seat in Yamat’s parliament, the hawk who perched above them all.

  He was not a man without refinement, despite the popular depiction of him as a wizened tyrant, too feeble to lead the invasion himself and too fierce to leave Cho in peace. Tsehan loved fine things, as the diplomats attested. His reception hall was bright with luxuries: sculptures of light and parabolic mirrors, paintings on silk and bamboo strips, mosaics made from shattered ancient celadon. He served tea in cups whose designs of seasonal flowers and fractals shifted in response to the liquid’s temperature or acidity. “For the people of Yamat,” he said, but everyone knew these treasures were for Tsehan’s pleasure, not the people’s.

  War had nurtured him all his life. His father was a soldier of the lowest rank, one more body flung into Yamat’s bloody and tumultuous politics. It is no small thing, in Yamat—a nation at least as class-conscious as our own—to rise from a captain’s aide to heir-apparent of Chancellor-General Oshozhi. Oshozhi succeeded in bringing Yamat with its many would-be warlords under unified rule, and he passed that rule on to Tsehan.

  It should not have surprised us that, with the end of Yamat’s bloody civil wars, Tsehan would thirst for more. But Cho was a pearl too small for his pleasure. The chancellor-general wanted Feng-Huang, vastest of nations, jewel of the stars. And to reach Feng-Huang, he needed safe passage through Cho’s primary nexus. Feng-Huang had been our ally and protector for centuries, the culture whose civilization we modeled ours after. Betraying Feng-Huang to the Yamachin would have been like betraying ourselves.

  Yamat had been stable for almost a decade under Tsehan’s leadership, but we had broken off regular diplomatic relations during its years of instability and massacre. We had grown accustomed to hearing about dissidents who vanished during lunch, crèches destroyed by rival politicians and generals, bombs hidden in shipments of maiden-faced orchids, and soldiers who trampled corpses but wept over fire-scored sculptures. Some of it might even have happened.

  When Tsehan sent the starsail Hanei to ask for the presence of a Chosar delegation and our government acquiesced, few of us took notice. Less than a year after that, our indifference would be replaced by outrage over Yamat’s demands for an open road to our ally Feng-Huang. Tsehan was not a falling blossom after all, as one of our poets said, but a rising dragon.

  In the dream, he knew his purpose. His heartbeat was the drum of war. He walked between Earth and Heaven, and his path was his own.

  And waking—

  He brushed the hair out of his eyes. His palms were sweaty. And he had a name, if not much else.

  Yen Shenar, no longer admiral despite his many victories, raised his hand, took aim at the mirror, and fired.

  But the mirror was no mirror, only the wall’s watching eyes. He was always under surveillance. It was a fact of life in the Garden of Tranquility, where political prisoners lived amid parameterized hallucinations. The premise was that rebellion, let alone escape, was unlikely when you couldn’t be sure if the person at the corner was a guard or the hallucination of a childhood friend who had died last year. He supposed he should be grateful that he hadn’t been executed outright, like so many who had rioted or protested the government’s policies, even those like himself who had been instrumental in defending Cho from the Yamachin invasion.

  He had no gun in his hand, only the unflinching trajectory of his own thoughts. One more thing to add to his litany of grievances, although he was sure the list changed from day to day, hour to hour, when the hallucinations intensified. Sourly, he wished he could hallucinate a stylus, or a chisel with which to gouge the walls, whether they were walls or just air. He had never before had such appreciation for the importance of recordkeeping.

  Yen began to jog, trusting the parameters would keep him from smashing into a corner, although such abrupt pain would almost be welcome. Air around him, metal beneath him. He navigated through the labyrinth of overgrown bamboo groves, the wings of unending arches, the spiral blossoms of distant galaxies glimpsed through cracked lattices. At times he thought the groves might be real.

  They had imprisoned him behind Yen Shenar’s face, handicapped him with Yen Shenar’s dreams of stars and shapes moving in the vast darkness. They had made the mistake of thinking that he shared Yen Shenar’s thrall-like regard for the government. He was going to escape the Garden if it required him to break each bone to test its verity, uproot the bamboo, break Cho’s government at its foundations.

  The war began earlier, but what we remember as its inception is Sang Han’s death at Heaven’s Gate. Even the Yamachin captain who led the advance honored Sang’s passing.

  Heaven’s Gate is the outermost system bordering Yamat, known for the number of people who perished settling its most temperate world, and the starsails lost exploring its minor but treacherou
s nexus. The system was held by Commandant Sang Han, while the province as a whole remains under the protection of Admiral Wan Kun’s fleet. Wan Kun’s, not Yen Shenar’s; perhaps Heaven’s Gate was doomed from the start.

  Although Admiral Wan Kun was inclined to dismiss the reports of Yamachin warsails as alarmism, the commandant knew better. Against protocol, he alerted Admiral Yen Shenar in the neighboring system, which almost saved us. It is bitter to realize that we could have held Cho against the invaders if we had been prepared for them when they first appeared.

  The outpost station’s surviving logs report that Sang had one last dinner with his soldiers, passing the communal cup down the long tables. He joked with them about the hundred non-culinary uses for rice. Then he warned the leading Yamachin warsail, Hanei, that passage through Cho to invade our ally Feng-Huang would not be forthcoming, whatever the delusion of Yamat’s chancellor-general.

  Hanei and its escort responded by opening fire.

  We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes. When photons march soldier-fashion at an admiral’s bidding, people die.

  When the Yamachin boarded the battlestation serving Heaven’s Gate, Sang awaited them. By then, the station was all but shattered, a fruit for the pressing. Sang’s eyes were shadowed by sleepless nights, his hair rumpled, his hands unsteady.

  The Hanei’s captain, Sezhi Tomo, was the first to board the station. Cho’s border stations knew his name. In the coming years, we would learn every nuance of anger or determination in that soft, suave voice. Sezhi spoke our language, and in times past he had been greeted as one of us. His chancellor-general had demanded his experience in dealing with Cho, however, and so he arrived as an invader, not a guest.

  “Commandant,” he said to Sang, “I ask you and your soldiers to stand down. There’s time yet for war to be averted. Surrender the white gun.” Sezhi must have been aware of the irony of his words. He knew, as most Yamachin apparently did not, that a Chosar officer’s white gun represented not only his rank but his loyalty to the nation. Its single shot is intended for suicide in dire straits.