2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  Trees fell onto the property, knocked down by colossal creatures. The armed colonists retreated into Clarissa’s house and blasted from windows and doorways. Someone was pulled through a window by a bristly claw.

  By 3 a.m., it was over.

  Choppers were called in to spray microshredders on the insurgent horde, but when they shone their spotlights over the town and forest, there was only a trail of corpses to be seen.

  The woods were quiet once again.

  • • •

  The ensuing search party came to nothing. After eight months, it was called off and other explanations were sought.

  There was no denying the reality of the giant insectile corpses. Clarissa’s discovery had made her a celebrity, and she found herself touring the planet she had once hated as guest of every talk show and research hub and call-in newsfeed. The carcasses attracted the best minds in the solar system.

  Yet Clarissa’s insistence that the O2 zone had created the mutations was eventually dismissed. Genetic engineering was blamed. A child with a chemistry set could manipulate the DNA of lesser organisms, people said. The insect attack must have been a case of bioterrorism. Martian separatists declared it was a conspiracy by Brother Blue to dissuade political independence. Crackpots swore to a government cover-up.

  At the center of it all was Clarissa Lang.

  She found herself steadily dismissed by the scientific establishment and then ignored by the fickle media-at-large, prompting her to withdraw once more, a recluse again, and a year after the event she found herself once more seeking the comfort of her paintings (which Maureen eagerly let her hang all over the house, so desperate she was to make amends with her celebrity wife.)

  A year passed. No nests, no hives, no mounds. Search teams scoured the Martian surface, looking for evidence. Doppler teams dug pits and sounded charges.

  The bugs had vanished.

  “But we didn’t look within the planet,” Clarissa said into her recorder. “Mars is an entire world with deep passageways and tunnels and lava tubes far beneath our feet. The nests must be down there. They must have retreated to lick their wounds. They must have expanded their own colonies so far down that we can’t reach them. They must be there!”

  She shivered and gave a low keening sound. “I can envision the huge lairs they’ve built for the freakish behemoths and new generations of mutated eggs.”

  She sobbed once. The urge to look at the window was almost overpowering. She pressed her free hand into the scissors once more.

  Beyond the window, her neighbors marched out into the forest. No one was speaking.

  “I tried to warn them,” she said, relishing the pain that shot up from her wounded hand. “But tonight as we were all going to bed, a shining gold light manifested from the woods. Something about it is so… compelling that the colony is going to investigate. No one seems to care that it lies so far into the woods.”

  More footsteps, by the hundreds, passing below her window and stomping the nearby yards.

  Clarissa screwed her eyes shut.

  The gold light seemed to dance in her mind.

  When she opened her eyes the recorder was still in her hand but her body was moving with the rest of the colony. The light—

  —was so

  —beautiful.

  She wondered what they had been planning all this time. She had some ideas which even now were fading in the face of the beautiful, golden, painting-like light.

  The thought occurred that she should have left Mars while she had the chance, but by then they were already chewing on her.

  Sabrina Vourvoulias became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Collateral Memory” in Strange Horizons (Jun. 2013), edited by Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and An Owomoyela.

  Visit her website at www.followingthelede.blogspot.com.

  * * *

  Short Story: “Collateral Memory” ••••

  COLLATERAL MEMORY

  by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  First published in Strange Horizons (Jun. 2013), edited by Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and An Owomoyela

  • • • •

  CHILD’S PLAY. Tag. Hide and seek. Duck, duck, goose.

  A group of people thrown together for an afternoon, or an hour, or a lifetime. Someone chasing. Someone running. Someone hiding or praying to be overlooked. No one has to tell us it’s preparation for life, we just learn. Like we learn the multiplication tables and how to spell.

  Leila has climbed midway up the ladder leaned against the back wall of the shed. She sits there, legs spread for balance even though it means all of us can see her underwear. It has lavender kittens on it. She’s the youngest of us and hasn’t played before.

  I pat her foot even though I’m irritated at her. Leila is a big nine-year-old. She’s already pushing five-six and no matter what goes down she’s not going to get hurt. It’s Chela and me, much tinier even though we’re four years older, who stand to get the bruises.

  It’s not only size. There’s the fact we aren’t all golden innocence like Leila, or pretty in the way of the older American girls who play. The fact that we’ve been here all our lives and speak English with an accent we can’t hear but the Americans can’t hear around. The fact that we say yes to the game, even knowing we can’t win.

  It’s hot in the shed. And quiet.

  That’s the worst. Quiet is made to be broken.

  • • •

  I understand magic. I have from the first.

  The way the toffee-colored bark pulled in strips off a tree turns into exactly that confection the moment my lips close around it in craving.

  The way a stone I kick over in boredom as I walk down a familiar path turns into a face and opens its mouth, telling me its story.

  The way something from my student’s hoard of paper and ballpoint ink becomes both passport and the need for one.

  • • •

  I can’t properly remember who’s outside the shed. Ron, for sure, because it’s his shed, but the rest of the boys draw lots to see which ones are lucky enough to play outside.

  Pato (Chela’s brother) and Memo end up inside every time they play. Maybe it’s not just terrible luck. They both have old-fashioned mothers who tell them girls aren’t to be touched with anything rougher than the petal of a rose.

  Or maybe it’s just that they’re both sixteen and the indignities of being on the losing side are worth it since they get to be near American girls from military families who wear shorts that show off their long, smooth legs. Neither Chela nor I wear shorts (our mothers won’t let us shave until our quinceañeras) and the missionary girls aren’t allowed to wear them anywhere but the beach.

  The exact ratio of American military kids to missionary kids to natives in the game varies from week to week, as does the ratio of boys to girls. But there are always more girls.

  Girls squeal better, is what Ron says.

  That and the way some of the boys cop a feel while the girls’ hearts are drumming with adrenaline are the incentives in stacking the deck, is what Pato says one day at school when I ask him about it.

  He always answers my questions, even though I’m just his kid sister’s friend.

  “Nobody feels up Chela or me,” I say to him.

  “Because they know I’d beat the crap out of them if they did,” he answers.

  “But it’s okay with you that they hit us?”

  I see his eyes light on each feature of my face in turn, finally settling on my mouth before he answers. “No,” he says, “but that’s the game. And you were silly enough to agree to play it.”

  “Are you saying you wouldn’t play if we didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” he answers. Then, “Mostly I wish nobody played it.”

  Then it dawns on me. “You’re worried about the American girls.”

  His nice face goes all scowly. I start to add something, but his patience with me is gone and he stalks off to the smokers’ corner wher
e no American—nor anyone my age—is allowed to go.

  I’m tempted to follow him. I take a step, two, then stop. Rules. We all hate the way they hold us in our place.

  But I might be wrong. It might only be me who hates it.

  • • •

  Magic waits for you to move from instinct to intention.

  I learn to comb my fingers through its strands and find the ones that lead past an instant. This strand is thirty years old and is still as much a conjuration as it was then.

  Martial law. Extrajudicial killings. Torture. Genocide. These words hang in the ether and I feel them brush my hand even as I go hunting for the less lethal ones of remembered play.

  These days my magic isn’t guerrilla, but something else. Magic turned in on itself. Like a sentence that doesn’t end.

  • • •

  They don’t bother to yell for us to open up. There’s just the first thud cutting into the silence as a body slams against the door.

  It budges the board we’ve wedged across it, but not by much.

  We know from experience the shed’s latch will give within the first five minutes unless we help it, and we spend most of our prep time finding ways to barricade the entry. This week I’m hopeful because, in addition to the two-by-four, Pato slips the new lawn mower into neutral and moves most of its weight against the door.

  Chela finds a hammer and pounds the board back in, until the splintering on the ends lets her know that she can’t ram our safeguard in any tighter. When she’s done she balances the hammer on the end of her index finger then flips it and catches it on her finger again.

  She wants to grow up to be an engineer, but we both know her parents won’t permit it. Pato will go to university—la San Carlos, since that one doesn’t cost—but Chela’s destined for marriage. I may envy other things about my best friend (the hammer trick prime among them), but I give thanks every night for my family’s bookish ways.

  The guys outside have heard the pounding of the hammer and figure if they’ve loosened the board once, they can do it again. The next body that slams into the door hits with a lot more force. Leila starts whimpering.

  After some five or ten minutes of pounding, the board shimmies again. Even with the lawn tractor to slow them down, we all understand it’s the beginning of the end. We turn to find hiding places. There aren’t many good ones, and Leila’s been given the best—the ladder’s new to the shed and rises so high its upper rungs are completely hidden in the shadowed rafters.

  Chela fits herself behind the low cabinet where Ron’s father stores tins stripped of their labels and old clothes to give to the ragpicker. Pato stations himself in such a way that his legs block the small opening she’s squeezed into. He prefers to stand than hide anyway. Plus, one of the older American girls isn’t too far off, hidden in the shadow cast by a tall, locked cabinet.

  I want to tell him it doesn’t matter how bravely he fights to protect—or to impress—the girl will never look at him the way she looks at Ron. It’s more than just the difference in skin tones, it has to do with how we don’t watch the same shows on TV, or listen to the same music. The food we eat is different, and the living that comes from it. They’re the children of God and counterinsurgency advisors; we’re the children of threat.

  Pato catches me watching him and gives me a wave, then turns it into the finger-slapping shake that we use to wordlessly indicate the need to hurry up. I hear the board groan and the sound of splintering wood. As I hurry to hide myself behind a box of pump parts near the ladder, I notice Leila is only midway up the rungs.

  “Get to the top,” I say.

  “I’m scared,” she answers.

  “Well then, get down and let Elena go up,” says Memo, a few feet away from us, mottled by the skinny, pierced shadow of the ladder. “The top of that thing is the only chance we have to outlast them, and if you waste it I swear I’m going to thump you myself.”

  When we hear her start to climb, he turns back to me. “You’d think she’d know what to do.”

  “The soldiers don’t go to the American houses.” Then, because it’s Memo, I add what I’ve heard my father say to my mother when too much rum has untied his tongue. “You don’t dare piss off the people giving you guns and training.”

  Memo shoots a quick look around the shed. No one is close enough to have heard, except Leila, and she’s got panic plugging her ears.

  “When was the last time they came through your door for real?” he whispers.

  “Last month. They trashed a bunch of my father’s books and one of them twisted my mother’s arm pretty bad. He’s her cousin’s godson and he still did it. She came this close to going to her knees. You?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Anything happen?”

  “Nah. We’re all good about not mouthing off,” he says. I swear his chest puffs a little with the words.

  “We’re good about it, too,” I say.

  I think he knows that he’s insulted me, because his shamed smile-that-isn’t-a-smile duplicates mine. “You going to say that prayer?” he says after a moment.

  “Sure.”

  It’s not a prayer, but a rhyme a bit like the one my mother intones when she rubs salve on a wound. But Memo hears it as a prayer because his family—half Filipino, half Guatemalan—is seriously church-going. We were once at the same novena and he actually knew the correct responses.

  Me, well my bit of doggerel is what my grandmother would call a charm and my mother a poem because, even though she’s got both church and bruja blood running through her veins, she’d rather invoke art.

  I call for the deep of a grave, the shade under the wing of a crow, the dark of midnight on a moonless night.

  It’s only the second time I’ve used the spell during the game, and most of the others think it’s just unexpected luck that so deepens the dark in the shed. Except Memo. I know he can’t decide whether I’m cursed or blessed by what I do, but he’s tired of the relentless losing too.

  The dark magnifies the noise. The broken board bouncing off the lawn tractor, the constant thunder of bodies against wood as they try to budge the machine, my heartbeat irregular in the soundbox of my chest. A quick defeat would be easier than this waiting, and still, I ask for time.

  Time, and the magic to cover me when it runs out.

  • • •

  The more years pass, the more I need details.

  “You don’t remember?” I ask them.

  Most of the girls don’t.

  One seems genuinely happy to hear from me, but signs off to attend to bellowing children before answering.

  “The military moved us from country to country every four years,” Leila says. “I can hardly distinguish one set of memories from another.”

  The boys are no better.

  The first deflects by revealing he’s lost his religion, and is estranged from the rest of his family still on mission in a third world country perceived to be in need of first world grace.

  Another hangs up as soon as he hears my name.

  “You got away,” Memo says.

  “Not completely,” I answer, “or I wouldn’t be asking.”

  Then, after a long silence, he says, “It was only you who played with magic. You can’t blame the rest of us for closing our eyes.”

  • • •

  When they break in, the light follows. It falls on their movements with love, caressing them. It isn’t such a friend to those of us on the inside; the light picks us out, exposes our hiding for what it is.

  It doesn’t take long for someone to grab the splintered butt ends of the board and start swinging. And connecting.

  Friends or not, there is one guiding rule in the game: it’s got to be genuine. Like life. Real. Anything else would be a cheat. And despite all of our other differences, no one in the shed is that.

  Except me.

  Ron is almost to the girl by the locked cabinet when Pato steps between them. I don’t believe he even thinks about it
, it’s just reflex. Like the look he casts at me before turning to face the bigger American boy. Neither says anything, they just stand with the muscles bunching up under their shirts and fierce mutual understanding in their eyes.

  But the move leaves Chela’s hiding place exposed and within seconds someone is there and dragging her out by her hair. She squirms to get free. Clear across the shed, I can hear the crack of a kick against her ribs.

  I sense Memo near me, strand after strand of indignation palpably unwinding from his body. I can use it. I fling one hand out in his direction without looking and gather the etheric fuel around him. My other hand points toward the two I’ve been watching.

  It’s nothing I’ve practiced, just instinct, and a stanza written by adrenaline.

  The hand wrapped around Chela’s hair starts shaking as if caught in the mouth of a dog. Chela tears away and scrambles to her feet. She meets my eyes across the shed, then takes off at a run.

  Straight into the entrapping arms of another boy.

  “Elena, let me go,” Memo’s strangled voice makes me turn to him. He’s somewhere in a confining bubble of dark I’ve pushed his way without thinking.

  I quickly take the measure of the effect, then I spit out a word to make it twice as sticky. “They won’t see you and won’t feel you in the shed, even if they stumble into you,” I say. I hope it’s true.

  “But, Chela… ,” he says.

  “Chela’s done for anyway,” I interrupt. “The guy’s got her half to the door already. So keep quiet now, okay?”

  I hear an odd little sound that might be a groan or a sob as I turn back to the pandemonium. I put my hands out but, before I can pull together the elements for another spell, they’re caught. The boy who holds them is the son of missionaries and doesn’t play as often as the rest of us.

  “I don’t want to hit you,” he says as soon as I meet his eyes. “Come willingly with me outside so I don’t have to.”