2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  The living room looks like you. I wouldn’t have put the couch where it is. You did. The arrangement of the furniture holds your memory. The color of the paint, the curtains, everything is a piece of you. I need to leave this place.

  Pg. 46

  Gardens near heavily trafficked roads receive a steady source of animal energies. State highways through the countryside provide exceptionally good harvests.

  I’ve rented an apartment in a subdivided house. It’s tucked in a clearing in the woods just off Route 17. There’s a cul-de-sac community across the road, but this place is isolated. It’s great for my neighbors to smoke pot. Three other people live here. One is rarely home. I told the couple I don’t mind if they play loud music. The fourth apartment is abandoned.

  The house is old and crumbling. The porch needs a new coat of paint. There are water stains on my ceiling, but they haven’t dripped since I’ve been here. Spiders, pill bugs, and crickets share the place with me. I let them be. You always killed such things on sight.

  There are stranger problems though. I keep finding salamanders in the sink and bathtub. I didn’t think they could climb walls.

  I started a garden in the back. A regular one, nothing like what’s in this book. Although this book was the inspiration for it. There’s a weed that isn’t in any guides or websites. Dark purple leaves and a flower shaped like an origami box poke out of the soil. I don’t remember planting this.

  Pg. 51

  In a sense, the entire Universe is alive. Patterns change over time, yet retain memories of past iterations. Forests, societies, water cycles on Mars, all are influenced by what came before and will affect that which comes after. Just as sound ripples through air and water, our actions ripple through the aethers of the noumena, the way light was once thought to ripple through an aether-filled cosmos. These echoes are what humanity describes as ghosts. Just as our personal appearance and living space are artifacts of our personality, these reverberations are artifacts of our lives.

  I hear shifting above me, like something rubbing on the upstairs floor. It could be rats, but the sound is slow and sporadic, not like scurrying. I looked through a window of the empty apartment. Paint peelings covered the floor, but nothing else was there. I tapped the glass. Maybe I thought something would respond.

  There are more origami flowers. My neighbors don’t know what to make of them. Their friends run a community garden, but their amateur horticultural knowledge doesn’t help. The buds are shaped like gems with waxy sides. When I cut a flower off and cracked the box open, I found a salamander inside.

  The shifting above my bedroom keeps me awake at night. Something big is lumbering about, dragging itself over the floor.

  I’m breaking into the abandoned apartment tonight.

  Pg. 68

  The word “supernatural” is a misnomer. To define something as “beyond nature”—when nature is the Universe and the Universe is the set of everything that exists—is to classify something as nonexistent. Yet are not paranormal phenomenon merely processes we have not modeled? Remember, just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s not super.

  Everything was rotten. There were holes in the kitchen tile leading to the space beneath the floor where rusty pipes and wires lay. The water stains on the ceiling looked like hieroglyphics, or old newsprint from a foreign country.

  Little orange salamanders crawled over each other in the kitchen sink. Blue ones with yellow spots plodded through the living room.

  Hellbenders lurked in the bathroom. I thought they were big—two feet long—until I checked bedroom. The thing in there was the size of a person and covered in old plaster. I thought it was dead until it shifted in response to my presence. As it dragged its bulk through the dust and paint shards on the floor, I heard the sound I came looking for.

  Leaving the place, I saw the origami flowers glowing. I don’t remember planting them.

  Pg. 85

  To obtain ghost plants, an initial live plant set up is vital. A real garden should be grown and then burnt to the ground (or poisoned) just before harvest. No food should be taken from it. This violent end will force the energy residue of the tomatoes, carrots, and squash to stay embedded in the framework of space-time instead of evaporating. Ghost rabbits from the highway will be attracted to the food as they are merely processes with no notion that they are dead. A sufficient ghost rabbit population will attract ghost foxes.

  I know this apartment is haunted. I’m going to burn it down when my neighbors aren’t home.

  Pg. 102

  Forest fires create extensive ghost ecosystems, but few have been modeled. The field is ripe for doctoral research.

  It smelled like February. The ash even replicated the snow. I tried to mimic your confidence as I called 9-1-1, but it wasn’t the same.

  Since then I’ve been driving a lot, stopping anywhere that looks interesting. I find myself in the woods sometimes, staring at the understory. The leaves high up cast shadows down below. These trees are old. Their forest is open like a cathedral and just as quiet. There are salamanders here. Finally, someplace they belong.

  Pg. 115

  In mythology, psychopomps ferry souls between this life and the underworld. In the theory of spectral impressionism, psychopomps are elementary particles that transfer information from phenomena to noumena.

  A science magazine in a grocery store had salamanders on the cover. Apparently they move nutrients between land and water as adults lay their eggs in ponds where the young feed on bugs before returning to the forest. I guess all those little things really are important.

  Pg. 138

  Once started, a garden lasts at least 100 years, although it becomes less noticeable with time. Due to the merely symbolic nature of the organisms involved, the rabbits will never deplete the vegetables and the foxes will never deplete the rabbits. The garden becomes a loop in which semantic energies are trapped and repeat behaviors learned in life until the entire system fades as a whole.

  In complicated ways, you left effects on the Universe—chaotic butterfly disturbances. You inspired people, broke hearts, and delayed traffic at your end. Somehow, in some way, all those events you planted influenced people, changed their lives, and changed the lives of others. Your ghost exists on the world through those cascades.

  Before I get in trouble for the things I’ve done, I’m donating this book to a different store in a different town so maybe the echoes of your existence will find it someday. You won’t be able to read these notes, but someone will, and they will influence her life, and influence her ripples on the world. Maybe your ripples will collide with hers, and I’ll touch you one last time.

  AFTER THE KAIJU ATTACK

  by John Zaharick

  First published in Stupefying Stories Showcase (Jul. 2013), edited by Bruce Bethke

  • • • •

  ICE. He hated when they filled his glass with ice. It wasn’t there to keep the cream soda cold. The soda was already cold. They put it in to serve him less.

  Barney read the song lists on the mini jukebox in the booth as he waited for Will. He resented having to huddle at a table, but a gang of raygun goths crowded the counter. The boys wore dark toned imitation pressure suits—one had managed to slip a milkshake straw into a respirator mask—and greased their hair. The girls had on all black or white contrasted sharply by hair the color of electrified noble gases from which sprouted antennae. They all wore make up and looked like dead astronauts. Barney frowned. He would belt his kid for trying to leave the house like that.

  Bright toy guns hung from their hips that could spew sparks and were probably good for lighting cigarettes. Barney felt the solenoid at his side and quietly laughed at the children.

  The cards in the jukebox rewrote themselves with each turn of a dial. Barney had to go through five pages before finding songs he recognized. The device’s blue glowing rim reflected off the polished table. The diner was a factory fabricated silver stamp of Googie architecture complet
e with curved edges and primary colored decorations. Most of the new buildings in the Swath were streamlined fac-fabs. Automated trucks glided down the construction roads, dropping them into position where workers linked them to water and electricity. Mayor Flatwoods had promised to rebuild the city quickly. The sky tubes were still down though, and Barney saw bulldozers clearing rubble on his way here. He had to wipe dust from his receding hair when he got to the diner and found his white jumpsuit was now gray.

  The door opened, letting in the sound of pneumatic hammers. Barney looked for Will only to see a tall man in a black suit and fedora with a newspaper under his arm. He sat at the end of the counter, three seats from the raygos.

  Barney gave up on the music and eyed the waitress who had brought his drink. She looked familiar and after a few minutes he realized she was Judy Parsons, last year’s Miss Flying Saucer. She looked different in a white uniform, balancing plates on her left arm, instead of in a swimsuit, spread out on a giant serving saucer, offered up like coffee with a glass helmet over pink hair. Either way, she was stacked.

  Smiling at the thought, he heard the door swing open again. The beeping of a truck echoed in, followed by Will Taylor, still blonde from when he blasted off in a home-made hydrogen peroxide powered rocket in his back yard. Port Authority slapped him with a traffic fine, but the phase shift of his formerly coarse, black hair was a more blatant punishment. He joked that at least he didn’t have any internal injuries. The doctors would have filled him with car parts to keep him going.

  “Some heat we got out there,” Will said, taking a seat. An orange vest with a lightning bolt on it hung over his green jumpsuit. “I fried me some eggs and ham on a busted stop sign this morning.”

  “That’s city property,” Barney said with feigned seriousness. “You got a permit for that?”

  Will chuckled. “I’m the one rebuilding this city.” He took a cigarette from the case in his pocket and lit it.

  A low rumble overtook the diner, glasses and silverware rattling. Barney glanced out the window at the Ohio Class riding a ribbon of smoke into the sky. The swath of destruction ran straight for the launch pad, but arced away at half a mile, sparing the port. The business district and several low income neighborhoods had suffered instead.

  At the counter the raygos focused their attention on the suited gentleman. “You having some trouble there, big daddy?” an imitation Martian girl asked. The man held his fork and knife by the sharp ends and stared at an omelet.

  To his left was a Tarantulus, the Crawling Horror! movie poster. It was grimly out of place in the Swath, where several thousand had died, but that was a side effect of fac-fab design.

  “How much longer before everything is back to normal?” Barney asked.

  “We’ve got businesses running at the northern edge, as you can see,” Will said. “Lots of mod-buildings snapped into place. They just need to be prettied with sidewalks and flowerbeds. We’re still cleaning up footprints though, and there’s the crater where it died.”

  Barney felt his heart beat faster as he watched the man in the black suit struggle to comprehend a salt shaker. “They never should have dropped the tungsten on it.” He remembered how the air cracked around the thin black lines flashing from the clouds. The Rods from God were intended for Leningrad or New Swabia, but that night sliced out of American skies to cut through the giant sea star. Silver fire consumed the city, burning in the porcelain rings its tube feet left on the ground. He had seen two dump trucks filled with the white crust this morning. The crowds came back to him, screaming, shoving, stepping on the dead already trampled underfoot as those gargantuan cries, half loon, half whale, shuddered through the air.

  “What are you talking about? The artillery shells were bouncing right off it,” Will said, “and an H-bomb would have leveled the whole city.”

  “Do you know what happens when you cut a starfish in half, Will? You get two of ’em!”

  “The pieces seemed pretty dead to me when they hauled them off.” He took a drag on his cigarette.

  “There were cells, tissues that could have gotten into the water works to infect people. There’s a rumor going ’round about a drifter causing trouble at a tube station. He pulled a broken bottle on the cops, and when they zapped him, his skin split open and brittle stars poured out.”

  “You mean Christmas decorations?”

  “No, they’re like starfish, but with long, wavy cable arms.”

  Judy appeared at the booth and Will ordered a tuna sandwich and coffee. At the counter, the man in the black suit had his hat on top of his plate. He picked it up and put it back on. Barney looked from him to the television on the back wall, its convex screen contained in an oval frame. A titan-o-fungus was blossoming in Japan. Workers repairing a cracked bridge in Sapporo found their cement pushed out of fissures by something invisible. Soon white and purple mold appeared and encased the entire structure.

  “Those growths are getting more common.” Barney shook his head.

  “The missile shields should keep their spores off the coasts,” Will said. “They send out shiny golden flakes. Ain’t that something?”

  “It’s unnatural, is what it is.” Barney rattled the ice about in his soda before taking a sip.

  “Well, San Francisco is suing Cardinal Electric over the armored salamander that ate Brannan Street.”

  “You buy that scam?” Barney slammed his soda on the table, splattering drops. “The Reds and Antarcticans want everyone to believe we’re spawning all these monsters so they can ruin our economy. They grow ’em out in their frozen wastelands and then send ’em here.” The media was quick to blame an undersea mining firm for its atomic robot that malfunctioned two years earlier. Several beaches were closed at the time as radioactivity washed ashore. Barney knew better.

  Will shrugged and knocked ash into the face of a cartoon Venusian painted in the tray. “All I know is we didn’t have giant mushrooms taking over cities when I was growing up. Something’s changed.”

  Barney watched the counter as he took another sip of cream soda. “Look behind you. That guy’s been acting weird ever since he came in.”

  The gentleman in black lifted his newspaper off the counter, food sticking to the back of it, and held it in front of himself as if to read, but looked at the raygos instead.

  A boy in a dark orange spacesuit turned to his friends as he jerked a thumb towards the man and grinned. “Tune in this rich elder.” The kid wore blue-red 3-D glasses.

  A girl in a dirty white dress with wavy lavender hair leaned across the counter. “Are you like one of those cubes who tells people they didn’t eyeball any lights in the sky or insists the abnormals on their farm were only owls?” She blinked and her oversized eyelashes waved like coastal fan worms. “Whitley here had a smoking cylinder crash behind his house once. What do you correlate of that?”

  “I come from Greece and I have seen the wooden airships propelled by song,” the gentleman responded. The kid in the glasses cracked up laughing.

  “Hey, leave that old man alone, you punks,” Will yelled. The gentleman stood, put his egg covered newspaper under his arm, and began to leave the diner, his legs and arms jerking randomly. Barney’s jaw dropped and a tremble rolled through his body.

  “Seriously, you’re not ichor, are you, mister?” asked a blue haired girl in a black skirt and vest.

  “G-good Lord, he’s been infected by Asteroidea spawn!” Barney leapt out of the booth, spilling soda and ice on the floor. Miss Flying Saucer screamed and dropped a cup of coffee when he pulled the gun mounted solenoid from his hip and aimed it at the old man.

  “Barney, what are you—” Will shouted, cut off by the flash of light and crack of static from the pistol.

  Charred pieces of fabric and rubber fell away from the gentleman’s chest to reveal a pair of half-gallon jars containing glass spirals and branches. Pistons pumped out of either side of a metal plate on which a grid of tiny lights grew and retreated like time lapse video of
bread mold.

  “He’s a robot?” Barney said. “A Russian autospy!”

  The raygo with blue hair grabbed the automaton by the shoulders and lowered him to the ground, her antennae bobbing on springs. Drawn on her cheek in eyeliner was a heart with the word CRAFT next to it.

  “Get away from him, little girl. He could be a walking neutron bomb!”

  She looked at Barney with disgust. “I’m a registered nurse. This man has an artificial chest.” She spoke to the rest of the diner. “Somebody clue the hospital. Now!” She read the lights in his chest while his eyes rolled back into his head and he hyperventilated. “Oxygen to his brain has been down 17 percent for the last 3 hours.”

  The kid in the 3-D glasses asked a radio on his forearm for a medi-copter. Judy spoke to the police on a screen by the cash register. Barney stepped back, simultaneously shocked and embarrassed. Ice cracked under his feet. Everyone was staring at him. He looked at the TV. In Japan, it was snowing phosphorescent goldfish scales.

  DESPITE ALL ATTEMPTS to extend an invitation to every eligible writer, and desire to include work from as many potential Campbell nominees as possible, several individuals either elected not to participate, were unable to supply reprint rights prior to the publication deadline, or were simply unaware of their own eligibility and/or the existance of this anthology. The intent of this volume is still to supply a clear and comprehensive overview of the field, and with that in mind the following supplemental list represents the remainder of those believed, at the time of this writing, to have met the eligibility criteria. Readers are encouraged to visit the accompanying websites, since those writers may still elect to supply stories for consideration.

  Since it is possible (and even probable) that some names were inadvertently missed, readers are also encouraged to visit the John W. Campbell Award Eligibility Page at Writertopia.com for periodic eligibility updates.