by Ken Liu
Fantasy Scroll Magazine
Speculative Fiction - Issue #1
Featuring works by Ken Liu, Seth Chambers, KJ Kabza, Alex Shvartsman, Hank Quense, and others
This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Editorial Team
Iulian Ionescu, Editor-in-Chief
Frederick Doot, Managing Editor
Alexandra Zamorski, Editor
First Readers: M.E. Garber, Katherine Price, Samantha King, Rachel Aronov
Cover Art: Jonathan Gragg
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #1
Iulian Ionescu
Copyright Iulian Ionescu 2014
Published by Fantasy Scroll Press LLC Publishing at Smashwords
ISBN #978-0-9916619-0-9
ISSN #2333-4932
www.FantasyScrollMag.com
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #1
March, 2014
Table of Contents
Introduction
Fiction
"Single-Bit Error" - Ken Liu
"Unforgiving Minute" - Seth Chambers
"Wind in the Reeds" - David Sklar
"In the Shadow of Dyrhólaey" - KJ Kabza
"Passenger Space" - Julia Watson
"Letters to the Editor of Tempestas Arcana" - Alexander Plummer
"Seven Conversations in Locked Rooms" - Alex Shvartsman
"Sponsored By..." - Hank Quense
"The Sculptor's Son" - Jason Gorbel
"Smew of Skray" - Rebecca Brown
"Your Lair or Mine?" - Cathy Bryant
"Shades of the Past" - Kurt Kirchmeier
Departments
Interview with Author Ken Liu
Interview with Author KJ Kabza
Interview with Author Sarah Hans
Interview with Editor Neil Clarke
Artist Spotlight: Jonathan Gragg
Book Review: The Dreamblood (N.K. Jemisin)
Movie Review: The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)
Editorial, April 2014
Iulian Ionescu
Welcome to Issue #1 of Fantasy Scroll Magazine.
Our first issue comes packed with twelve short stories-some original and some reprints-and several author interviews, plus book and movie reviews.
We are leading with Ken Liu's "Single-Bit Error," a story that, like many of Ken's stories, touches the reader on a deep emotional level. His stories have this ability to thrust an emotional wave inside of you, while at the same time forcing you think, question, and wonder.
Following Ken, we have Seth Chambers with "The Unforgiving Minute," a story that deals with a never-ending problem we all have: how can we have somebody else perform our necessary functions in life so we can be free to do whatever we truly enjoy?
David Sklar delights us in a micro-story called "Wind in the Reeds," presenting a cool perspective on world creation.
Next is KJ Kabza's "In The Shadow of Dyrhólaey," a story that builds up mystery from the start and gives you chills throughout. KJ transports us to strange and remote parts of Iceland where the fantastical almost seem possible.
Then we have Julia Watson with "Passenger Space," and Alexander Plummer with "Letters to the Editor of Tempestas Arcana," two shorter stories dealing with very different subjects.
Following are two cool reprints, one from Alex Shvartsman-"Seven Conversations in Locked Rooms," and one from Hank Quense-" Sponsored By..."
We are then closing the fiction part of the issue with four other original stories: "The Sculptor's Son," by Jason Gorbel, "Smew of Skray ," by Rebecca Brown, "Your Lair or Mine?," by Cathy Bryant, and "Shades of the Past," by Kurt Kirchmeier.
In our non-fiction section we have exclusive interviews with authors Ken Liu and KJ Kabza, writer and editor Sarah Hans, and Clarkesworld's editor Neil Clarke. We also have an artist spotlight featuring Jonathan Gragg, the creator of our first issue's cover art. Last, but not least, we feature a book review by Clare Deming, and a movie review by Mark Leeper.
That's it, folks! I hope you enjoy this first issue. We are waiting for your thoughts, comments, and suggestions. Your input is always valuable, as it helps us improve our magazine and be better.
Find us on the web:
Magazine site: http://www.fantasyscrollmag.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FantasyScroll
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FantasyScroll
Single-Bit Error
Ken Liu
Before he met Lydia, Tyler's life, like the lives of most people, involved the steady accretion of names.
Names were just shorthand for memories, and young Tyler did not yet understand that we define each name in life twice: the first time as a promise of the future, and again later, when it is a summary of the past.
—"What happened next?"
"Nothing," Grandmother said. "They just lived happily ever after."
"Forever?"
"Forever."
Until Grandmother read him "Sleeping Beauty," Tyler thought every story ended the way his parents ended them: "And they lived, sometimes even happily, until the day they died."
—Tyler and every other kid avoided the new boy because he was bigger than all of them and stared at everyone like he was looking for a fight. But the only empty seat in Mrs. Younge's Art class that day was next to Tyler, and that was how Owen Last and Tyler became best friends.
—Tyler looked at her until the music stopped. He was just about to ask her to dance when her date showed up. "So it is possible to fall in love in half an hour," he thought. He wrote "Amber Ria" on a slip of paper and sealed it in a beer bottle with aluminum foil and threw the bottle as far into Long Island Sound as he could.
—San Francisco was just a dot on the map until he saw the seals sunbathing by Fisherman's Wharf.
—At the coffee house open mike, he read a poem called "Allure, Obsession, Desire and Devotion." Tyler could not understand why all the women were laughing until the woman sitting behind Owen showed him the perfume advertisements in the magazine in her hand. Lena Lyman and Tyler dated for exactly two months. Her favorite scent was Envy.
—Tyler didn't know what that bright star in the sky was called until he moved into his new apartment and found an abandoned star atlas in the kitchen, next to a bowl of fresh clementines. He tasted sweetness on his tongue whenever he thought about Sirius, the Dog Star.
The first time Tyler saw her was in a dumpster behind the Wholly Place two blocks from his apartment. He had gone around the back of the store to look for some empty boxes to carry his organic potatoes and free range chicken breasts home (the Wholly Place believed in neither paper nor plastic).
She was standing up in the dumpster, her hands lifting into the sun a giant jar of olives that had just passed their expiration date. A dark blue cotton tank top showed off the creases and dimples on her elbows. Her sun-bleached, ginger-red hair was pinned into lopsided coils on top of her head with a black barrette. A scattering of freckles gave color and vibrancy to her pale face.
She turned to him, putting the jar of olives down on top of the pile of other things she had fished out of the dumpster. She had chapped lips, the sort of lips that came from smoking cigarettes and laughing at statistics. Her eyes were the color of moth wings. She's going to smile, he knew, and he wanted to know if her teeth were white and crooked.
Tyler thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
"You know that most of the stuff they throw out here is still good for at least another week, right?" She beckoned h
im closer. "Come and give me a hand."
Yes, she was smiling.
We think we know a few things about the way memory works. We think that memories of things that actually happened, such as what you ate for dinner, thing that could have happened but didn't, such as the smart retort that came to mind too late, and things that simply could not have happened, such as the way sunlight might reflect from an angel's eyes, are encoded the same way at the level of neurons. To distinguish between them requires logic and reason, and a level of indirection. This is troublesome to some people in so far as they believe that our construction of reality is based on memories. If you cannot tell these kinds of memories apart, then it seems that you can be made to believe anything.
The consolation of philosophy and religion both was that they helped men classify the types of memories and keep their hold on the fragile authenticity of their waking lives.
When Tyler was very young, his grandmother was his favorite person in the world because, unlike his parents, who believed that children should always be told the truth as adults understood it, she would fill in the gaps in his knowledge —Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, God. And while his parents were always too busy and often a little too serious, his grandmother had a sense of peace about her, a lightness that lifted his spirit. A few times, when Tyler's parents were away, she took him with her to church. He remembered liking the singing and the colorful windows, and how safe he felt there, in that large, empty space, sitting on a hard bench next to her warmth.
When she died, grief overwhelmed Tyler. But like most adults, when he grew older he could only recall the intensity of that love in childhood in an abstract way. Making the common error of identifying maturity with worth, he assumed that the love he had for her as a young child must have been lacking in strength and depth.
For many years after her death, however, Tyler was tortured by the memory of a certain visit from her. He was five or so, and they were playing some board game at the kitchen table. As he swung his legs in his excitement, he kicked her repeatedly in the shins. She asked him to stop, and he refused, giggling. When she finally frowned at him and threatened to stop playing if he didn't stop he told her to go to Hell.
In Tyler's mind he could see her face grow taut, lose color, and then, for the only time he could remember, she began to cry. He also remembered his own utter confusion. "Go to Hell" was just something he had heard others say. His parents did not have much use for religion and so for him Hell was a word without much mystery or power. At that time he knew only vaguely that Hell was a place you did not want to go, like the dark basement and the even darker attic. He remembered feeling resentful that she was crying and he did not even understand why.
Tyler felt the guilt of this memory even in his teenage years. For him it summed up all his insecurities and fears about his own cruelty, ignorance, and the possibility that he was, in reality, not a good person. The fact that he had caused someone who loved him such pain with so little effort and understanding troubled him deeply.
One day Tyler looked through an old family photo album, and in it was a picture of the kitchen in the house they used to live in. He was surprised to discover that the small kitchen contained a central island, and had no space for the table in his memory at all.
With the discovery of that single error in his memory came a cascade of other revelations. Now he remembered that they always ate in the dining room, and when they did play board games, it was always on the coffee table in the living room. The memory that had caused him such pain over the years could not possibly have occurred. Somehow, he must have manufactured the whole scene in his imagination.
It was not very hard to explain what really happened, he thought. The death of his grandmother had probably caused in him feelings of abandonment and guilt. In his confusion he had taken elements from storybooks and imagined out of nothing this memory to punish himself. This was the sort of fantasy that could have occurred to any young child who lost an important relative. With that realization, the image of his grandmother crying faded in his memory and became less and less believable.
Tyler thought he was very lucky to have discovered the single error in his false memory, which enabled him to reason his way into distinguishing between reality and fantasy. He felt that it was a coming-of-age moment.
Nonetheless, he admitted to himself that he was a little sad also at the discovery. For however imaginary that memory was, it was also a part of his love for his grandmother. When that memory lost its compelling aura of truth, it was like another part of her died with it. He had no name for the emptiness that remained.
The best pistachio ice cream in the world was served in Dora's Ice Cream Parlor in the town of Los Aldamas. Tyler knew this because it was while they were there, with the air conditioner cooling the back of his neck and the sunlight streaming in through the cracks in the dusty windowpanes, while they shared a small cup of pistachio ice cream, that Lydia said to him, "Yes, of course I will. Let's."
A month earlier he had helped her carry the olives and bread and grape juice she had salvaged from the Wholly Place dumpster to her apartment, which turned out to be in the same building as his, only on the floor below. What little furniture there was in the apartment was made from cardboard boxes with sheets draped over them. It was like being on the set of a minimalist play.
Lydia spread a blanket on the floor and they had a picnic in the middle of the afternoon in her twelve-by-ten studio. She broke the bread into pieces and handed the pieces to him, and they drank the grape juice from the bottle.
"The Eucharist," Lydia said, "à la Lydia." She said it with the same tone one would say, "Pollo Calabrese, my grandmother's recipe." It didn't sound like a joke. She offered him an olive from the jar.
It had been many years since Tyler had last gone to a church with his grandmother, and he didn't know what to say. But he wanted to stay with her and look at her face, which, though it broke into smiles only occasionally, was suffused with a happiness that Tyler felt as a wave of heat.
He told her about his job as a database programmer at a bank, and about his nights scribbling in his notebook and reading in smoke-filled coffee houses to other young men and women with dreams like his own. He told her a selection of the most important names of his life and the stories behind them. While he spoke, he marveled at her face, and how he was already crazy about her.
Tyler asked her questions. He wanted to know the life of the woman he was falling in love with, to understand her collection of names.
Lydia had grown up in New Camden, one of thousands of other towns just like it, exurbs cast adrift along the highways between Boston and New York. She was named in honor of a grandmother who died before she was born. When she was little her mother called her "Peapod" because she was chubby and loved the sun. Her father called her "Princess" because that was what he thought all fathers called their daughters.
For much of junior high she did not know who she was. Her parents fought and when they finally stopped fighting her father wanted her to continue to be called Lydia Getty, and her mother wanted her to be called Lydia O'Scannlain. She spent her summers at her father's new home in Arizona, where he took her to meet his friends at night. They called her "Baby Shark" because she beat them at poker. At school the girls called her Lydia O'Hara because her favorite color was red. The boys did not have a name for her because, as far as they knew, she had not yet kissed anyone.
In high school she was Lydia the Pothead, and she was popular with the boys for all the wrong reasons. Her mother called her names that she would rather not remember. Once a boy drove her to a building in Boston, where angry men and women waving signs and placards lined the driveway as she walked up, alone, and called her names that made her shiver. Later, as she lay in a small white room, recovering, a nurse told her to ignore the noises outside and to try to imagine herself as A Very Brave Young Woman.
She fell asleep, and was startled awake when she felt the room shake. Her life was transfor
med at that moment because she was visited by the angel Ambriel, the angel with eyes the color of moth wings.
Contrary to most accounts of angelic visitations —Lydia told Tyler, who did not yet quite understand what he was hearing —angels do not engage in conversation with the visited. The power of the visitation comes entirely from the presence of the angel itself, which is a fragment of the being of God.
Like that of millions of other people, Lydia's life, though not filled with extraordinary suffering, had had enough disappointments and betrayals by that point that she had lost what little faith the church had been able to instill in her. God had the same status in reality as neutrinos.
Now, Lydia looked upon the angel, and felt Ambriel's light punch through her eyes and fill her mind, and the pain was so glorious that she could not even conceive of closing her eyes. Everything she had ever learned about anything was simply wrong, irrelevant. Ambriel's light illuminated the deafening silences between her parents, the old and fresh scars from that zero-sum game known as social life in a high school, the humble, confusing and desperate inconsistencies of an ordinary life. In that light, all of it was coherent, sensible, and above all, beautiful.
In that moment Lydia was made anew. She was filled with such love for God that she finally understood why Hell is really the absence of God, and has nothing to do with fire or brimstone.
Tyler learned then what it was he saw in Lydia's face that so pulled at his heart. He saw in that face the signs of that species of happiness we used to call blessed. To be blessed is to be without fear, which is just another name for desire left unfulfilled. But the very presence of God, even through the intermediary of an angel, made unfulfilled desires meaningless for her. The only fear left after a visitation was the fear that one might be denied the presence of God. But since the only requirement to reach God is to love Him, and it is not possible to not love Him after having experienced the joy of His presence, Lydia's salvation was guaranteed.
