by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com; Mike Resnick; Lezli Robyn; Simon DeDeo; Catherynne M. Valente
This time statuette didn’t hold her against her will. She withdrew her hand, stood back, stared at it once again, and waited for her heart to stop pounding so hard against her chest.
If I’m not imagining this, what does it mean? And what have I stumbled into?
Evening and midnight came and went, and she still didn’t know. She barely slept, and made up her mind to finally confront Mr. Valapoli and get some answers. She knew he was always gone when she arrived at nine o’clock, so she showed up at six thirty, just as dawn was breaking.
Probably he’s asleep, she thought, staring at his door. I’ll just wait for some sound of movement.
She learned against the wall for five uneasy minutes, then stood erect. This was too important to wait. She had to get some answers now.
She knocked at the door. No response. She turned the knob and gingerly tried to open it. It was locked. She knew that using her master key was against regulations, probably against the law, but she didn’t hesitate. A moment later she was inside the room.
Mr. Valapoli wasn’t there. The bed hadn’t been slept in. She looked in the closet to see if he’d packed and left. It was filled with his clothes.
Was it all an hallucination? There was only one way to find out. She walked over to the statuette, summoning her courage to touch it again. It had changed again, no longer vaguely elephantine, no shape that she could identify…but she could identify an emotion, its every line seemed to project: fear.
It couldn’t be afraid of her. All she wanted were answers. What could be scaring it?
And suddenly, instinctively, she knew. It was the blue, shapeless things she had sensed yesterday. They were not part of her life, or even her world — and that meant that the fear was Mr. Valapoli’s.
She laid her hand on the statuette without hesitation now. Images, blue and garbled, flooded her mind, and she seemed to hear voices inside her head, not human voices, not speaking any language she had ever heard, but somehow she understood what they were saying.
A voice that sounded blue (how was that possible?) was saying, “You hid well. But now you must come back with us.”
And a gentle voice, a voice she instinctively knew was Mr. Valapoli’s, a very tired, very weary voice said, “It’s a big galaxy, and this is such a small world. How did you find me?”
“We have our methods,” said the blue voice. “Will you come peacefully or must we use force?”
“These are decent beings, these people. They are without malice. Do them no harm, and I’ll come back with you,” said the tired voice.
“I do not envy you when we get home,” said the blue voice.
Maria withdrew her hand. They were going to take him away, back to something awful! She raced to the window to see if they were in the yard. There was a hint of something large and blue beneath a tree, but she couldn’t make it out.
“No!” she yelled, turning and preparing to run to the door.
And the statuette, suddenly more human — or at least humanoid in shape — raised a hand as if to tell her to stop.
She froze, shocked, and the gentle voice spoke inside her head.
“It’s all right, Maria.”
She stared at the statuette, and its expression seemed to soften. Finally, after another minute, it lowered its hand.
“Thank you for caring.”
She walked to the window, and the blue shape was gone, and somehow she knew Mr. Valapoli was gone too. Forever.
Sunlight streamed in through the single window of the bedroom, bathing the statuette in warm golden light as it sat on the dresser, the focal point of the small, uncluttered room.
Still half asleep, Maria stretched languorously, thinking of all she had experienced over past few weeks. Ever since Mr. Valapoli left and she had brought the statuette home, it felt like it truly belonged with her, and she liked to imagine that the statuette itself felt comfortable on her dresser.
Its shape had continued to change. Each morning she would wake up to see the magic that had been wrought overnight, and each day it became somehow less alien in its form and more distinct in its features, softening into the image of a man, with eyes as kind as Mr. Valapoli’s voice had been gentle.
She no longer questioned how the statuette could change. She knew. Every time she touched it she could sense him. The connection was very faint, and growing fainter with each passing day, but she took comfort in the fact that it was there.
Until the morning she touched it and didn’t feel anything but the cold contours of the statuette itself. Not sure of what was happening, she reached out to make contact with it again, but before she could, her eyes widened in wonder as she realized she was witnessing its very last change, her unseen friend’s final parting gift to her, the one that let her know he also cherished their strange connection.
There upon the statuette’s face was a smile, and in her mind she clearly heard the echo of Mr. Valapoli’s voice for the last time.
“Thank you for caring, Maria.”
About the Author
Mike Resnick is the winner of 5 Hugos and numerous other major awards in the USA, France, Japan, Spain, Croatia, and Poland, and is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the author of more than 50 novels, 200 short stories, 14 collections, and two screenplays, and the editor of more than 50 anthologies. His work has been translated into 22 languages. He is currently the executive editor of Jim Baen’s Universe.
Lezli Robyn is a science fiction and fantasy writer who lives on southern-east coast of Australia. A fan of the field since she was old enough to read, she travelled to America for her first Worldcon in Denver and had the privilege of meeting authors she had grown up reading. Since going to Denver she’s made her first two solo sales as a professional writer. She’s also sold two stories in collaboration with Mike Resnick with an assignment for a third to be written together. As both a fan and a writer she looks forward to spending her future exploring the fictional worlds she creates with her words; she hopes her readers will enjoy them as well.
“batch 39 and the deadman’s switch”
by Simon DeDeo
You have Ted Kaczynski down the hall — the Earth Firster who quit tree-spiking to pipe-bomb a forestry convention — the abortion nut who gunned down three girls in Missouri — a half-dozen Arabs, half of whom again you have on phony evidence. I suppose I’m in good company. Or I would be if we could talk to each other.
You want to talk about the anima device. Devices. Of course. Everyone wants to know about Kazinsky’s time at Harvard, but MIT doesn’t rate. Yes, I understand the difference. Mail bombs don’t usually fit on a postcard.
This all started with my boyfriend. You figured he was behind it all, which just makes you sexist. He turned out to be tougher than expected, but then again, librarians always do. I understand that the American Library Association is filing a lawsuit on his behalf. It may even finish up before the courts collapse.
Mack worked for a library that handled rare manuscripts. Not exciting manuscripts, rare manuscripts. The Gutenberg Bible is not rare enough for them. Five copies in circulation is at least two too many. Like the Federal Government: lender of last resort. We think he got it from a Russian treatise from 1930 they uncovered after the Mafia blew a hole in the University of St. Petersburg because they wanted land for a new hotel. Where the Russian got it I don’t know. But we know the connection: Plotinus. The treatise was on the iconography of a Plotinus manuscript the Reds had looted from the palace. Before they shot the Romanovs.
Did you know the anima in Plotinus has been an open problem for historians of philosophy? Nobody could figure out what it meant. “Soul”, if you look in the lexicons, but that kind of Christian term doesn’t take you very far. Nor it is pnuema, the in-breathing of the gnostics, or any of a dozen other ways people talked about the sorts of things we run an MRI for today. The best clue we have is a passage that talks about illumination.
Which is, i
n the end, how I found it in batch thirty-nine. The thirty-nine steps. Two more than the most random number between one and a hundred. Terms two and three in a geometric series based on the Trinity. Not the bomb site. That came a little later.
Unlike the two Trinities, batch thirty-nine did not come out right. All the previous ones we had, through a combination of cross-breeding and radiation-bombardment, gradually taught to clip and reassemble proteins. We were solving the travelling salesman problem in a massively parallel form. As a test case. Biological computing. Batch thirty-nine, despite being the most advanced system yet, turned the vats to gel.
I was the graduate student and I was both curious and bored, so I reduced the gel, tipped it out on the bench like a birthday cake, clipped a corner, dropped it in universal solvent — water, to you — supersaturated the solution, and triggered a crystal. Which, unsurprisingly, did not look like the standard Frank Gehry bolt-on. I autoclaved the rest, and got time on the micrograph over in Systems.
Systems was a joint university-Air Force project. It was headed — de facto, not de jure — by Rachel, who was always in the pressed uniform of her branch. Rachel was a grump, but she was efficient in the comforting way civilians imagine all military types to be, and she booted up the micrograph, plated the crystal surface, parked me at the screen, and left. That’s when I saw the anima.
They were a few microns on a side. On the surface a few brute-force levers, but clearly doing something more than Archimedes: the whole surface was electrically active, strong enough to make the images shiver in the electron beam. Wherever they sat in the crystal, the surrounding proteins twisted into new patterns. I tweezed one up with a ion probe, put it down. The ion probe is pretty brute force; a bunch of them fell onto the bench.
Then I put the crystal in the fridge, and went out for a late dinner. I was starved. Or, at least, I thought I was. It was then I caught a glimpse of what is, at this point, planet-wide. Little things, but strange. Crossing Mass Ave, the traffic lights went red and green together. The ATM in the student center dumped three grand into the tray, irritating enough because I had checks I needed to clear.
I headed back to Systems and pulled the batch again. I looked at the levers on the surface, and used the ion probe to nudge the largest. The contraption fit together like a Victorian toy and in an instant the cube had crumbled away. I looked on the plate for the machines I had dislodged, and destroyed a few more before I felt guilty.
Outside the door, I heard weeping, and I stepped into the corridor; it was Rachel. Her uniform was in shreds all along the hallway; she herself was naked. I held her head while she choked on mucus and told me what Systems was for. It’s above your paygrade, I’m sure, but it can’t hurt to tell you that the august institution that funded the travelling-salesmen problem was keen for a dual-use.
It turns out, out in Iraq, that the U.S. military used to leave booby-trapped bomb components in volatile areas. They guesstimated that about ninety percent of the casualties were bona-fide insurgents trying to scrounge up enough wire, cord and shell casings for the next IED. It was the biggest success of the occupation, and Systems was going for the next stage. The biological analogy.
It didn’t make much scientific sense — this is the same military that tried to leverage paranormal Uri Geller types to spy on the Kremlin, after all — but Rachel had an inkling of how the various products of Systems were tested: back out in Afghanistan and Iraq, on people we disappeared off the streets. Rachel’s arms and face were bloodied by self-inflicted scratchings, but this was apparently nothing compared to what went down in a retrofitted Abu Gharib.
The court martial, six weeks later, was not exactly advertised on the Internet. But I knew why Rachel had disappeared from the lab, and I knew where to find her. I gave her a shard of the crystal, and she duly dropped it on the prosecution’s table. In his coffee, actually; Rachel was a very angry woman. The next morning, I turned on NPR for the commute in time to hear Lakshmi Singh interviewing both sides of the court martial after a joint statement. What then became known as the Systems Trial — formally, Afshordi et alia v. Department of Defense — ran for three months. It took time, because the alia were twelve rows deep in the visitor’s gallery.
I’m a reasonably good scientist — for a girl, as my freshman advisor told me — so it took a few more test runs before I understood the anima devices. A police brutality case in Chicago and two resignations in Congress made the news. It was about this time that I took Mack in to the lab and we eventually traced it to Zukankov’s Plotinus book. That gave our cubes the name.
We soon figured out the lever combinations that produced more — I thought about the backstory quite a bit. The anima devices were bizarrely complicated, practically sentient. We soon discovered that we didn’t need an ion probe; various chemical combinations — like the supersaturations I started with — would trigger them. Mack pointed out that simply distilling a healthy alchemist’s urine would be sufficient to get them running at full steam.
The anima, you see, is a fail-safe. Systems would never have found them. You need to be a little more curious than Industry, a little cleverer than a dilletante, and have a little more spare time than someone doing work-for-hire. And, of course, you have to like old books. As Mack says, you need to be an intellectual: a Plotinus, a John Dee. Or at least John Dee’s graduate student.
I don’t know who made them. Not any of us. And obviously not the people who came before us. But they work, and even pre-Enlightenment science would be enough to figure out what they did.
Before you picked up Mack outside his office and hit him with something even harder than waterboarding, he pointed out that fail-safe was not quite the right word. Neither of us wanted to release them on a global scale. We figured we’d keep them safe, use them sparingly. Neither of us had finished the Brothers Karamasov, but we had read the Grand Inquisitor section, and both of us were keen on Free Will. We voted for Howard Dean, not the Sparticus League.
The anima devices are not weapons. Only a particular kind of person can find them, and it’s the kind that doesn’t go in for world-scale domination. But now Mack is gone, and I’m in a supermax in flyover country.
It took a long time for the Roman empire to collapse under the weight of a confused and strangely altruistic religious ideology. Plotinus was long gone. Things happen faster these days, but there’s no way you’re going to let me out of here to turn it off, and it’s rather too late. Our apartment is a crime scene and seven liters of the stuff has been divided up and sent to every branch of the government, known and hidden, for analysis. Rachel tells me that it will hit the Israelis, the Russians, and the Chinese, in that order, within the next few months.
The anima device; we know what it is.
A deadman’s switch for nerds.
About the Author
Simon DeDeo is a scientist, writer and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. His essays and criticism on poetics, epistemology and anarchism have appeared in The Continential Review, absent, and on his blog rhubarb is susan, and are forthcoming in Mantis and The Chicago Review. batch 39 was completed during a stay at the Santa Fe Institute.
“Writing with One Hand Tied to the Death Star: Award-Winning Authors and Media Tie-In Fiction”
by Jason S. Ridler
Peruse the genre section of any bookstore and you will see a large chunk of shelf-space bending under the weight of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Lucrative and popular, media tie-in fiction is a sub-genre all to itself. It even has its own professional organization, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. At the same time, tie-in fiction has a reputation for being hackwork, a mercenary-gig writers do for money for a pre-set audience, creating fiction that doesn’t require much more skill than those of the pulp forefathers who gave it birth.
So it may be surprising that many award-winning genre writers have also tried their hand at tie-in fiction. Some have done it for money, som
e for love, most for both. Jeanne Cavelos (World Fantasy award, editor) wrote four Babylon Five novels. Bruce Holland Rogers (Pushcart Prize, Nebula, Stoker and World Fantasy award winner) wrote a novel based on the card game Magic: the Gathering. Jeff VanderMeer (World Fantasy, Rhysling award) just completed a novel based on the Predator film franchise, and the experience led him to produce the writing book How to Write a Novel in Two Months. And Elizabeth Hand (Tiptree, Nebula, World Fantasy) has published more tie-in fiction then the above combined, from the popular Star Wars franchise to the universally panned Catwoman flick. Bruce Bethke’s (Philip K. Dick award) is unfortunately best known for the novelization of the box office disaster Wild Wild West.
This is not a screed for or against tie-in fiction (if you love or hate reading the continuing adventures of anybody-who-is-not-real, great!), but instead a sample of experiences of award-winning authors writing for worlds not their own. Some experiences were good, some were bad, and some were downright fugly.
THE TIES THAT BIND
You don’t have to be a fan of tie-in fiction to write it, but it helps. Jeanne Cavelos adored the well-regarded tie-in fiction James Blish had done for Star Trek (eleven volumes from 1967-1975). While a senior editor at Dell Publishing in the 1990s, she also became a fan of the SF series Babylon Five (B5), in part because it seemed smarter than your average TV series in its attempt to use a novel structure for the series. After securing the rights to have Dell publish B5 novelizations, she left editing to pursue her own fiction, only to have Dell ask her to write a B5 novels. She did both a stand alone (The Shadow Within) and trilogy (The Technomage Trilogy). She pitched her novel idea to B5 creator and chief writer/director J. Michael Straczynski, which he loved. For the trilogy, she worked from an outline Straczynski provided. “Joe’s outline had as its centerpiece a great revelation about the techno-mages,” Cavelos said. ”My heart jumped when I read it. That was a thrill, to be handed material like that.” She was thrilled to be adding to the story of a show she respected.
