Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  “Hi, there,” she said. “Sorry about missing the seder, but I’ve only got a third-tier priority in the airline’s lists, and got bumped at the last minute.”

  “Of course,” Susan said. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Should we begin?” asked Rachel. “Susan, you start.”

  Susan shook her head. “It’s your house,” she said. “You or Annie head the seder.”

  Rachel was going to protest but Edward put a hand on her arm. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Rachel took a breath. “This meeting of Soul 2065 is hereby called to order,” she said, a little huskily. “We greet Abram, my mother Eileen and Uncle Mark, and ask them to remember us.” She glanced over at Susan, but the woman was dry-eyed. “Yolanda?”

  On the display, Yolanda nodded. “I’m doing well, although I still have moments where I become very sad at the loss of our friends, and of all those who died, even ten years later. As you know, I’ve been part of an organization that represents many of those who were forgotten in the compensation agreements. I’m also concerned at reports that the environmental damage may be worse than we were led to believe.” She stopped, and shook her head. “Sorry. I’m so involved in this stuff that I can get boringly didactic. Forgive me.”

  Edward drew on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger. “On a more selfish level,” he said, “I haven’t been able to produce a lot that was worth anything for the last year or so. It could be just a temporary setback, but I’m a little nervous about it. I’m hoping that certain people will help,” and here he paused, and directed a long look at Susan, “and that next year I’ll be able to report several well-paid sales.”

  Annie sat back in her chair. “I don’t have much to say about myself,” she said. “I’ve been helping Yolanda with fundraising. And I want to add that we’re doing well enough that certain members of this household should shut up about money and just remember how devastated we’d be if they left.” She took a deep breath.

  Rachel reached out and smoothed Annie’s hair. “What Annie said. Especially the last.”

  Susan looked down for a moment, and then said, “Thank you. I’m not going to talk about how much I miss Mark, and your mother,” looking at Rachel, “and everyone else who is gone now. I’m trying not to feel guilty that I happened to be visiting here when … when it happened. I’m trying not to feel that I should have been with Mark.”

  She paused. The rest waited. “I remember my mother talking about how hard it was to outlive all the people she grew up with, and now I know what she meant.” Susan looked around. “But still, I’m luckier than many—I have you all now, and perhaps the rest of Soul 2065 to take care of me later. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.”

  * * *

  Fifty years later.

  Although the seder had to be cancelled when Susan had a sudden crisis, after three days she had recovered enough that Annie and Rachel decided to hold what Annie dubbed a Late Seder. They called Yolanda and Edward, and two evenings later they all sat together in the bedroom and nibbled on matzoh.

  “We greet Abram, my mother Eileen and Uncle Mark, and ask them to remember us,” said Rachel a bit too brightly; despite the help of the mechanized bed and the nursing aid who came once a day, she insisted on tending to Susan herself, and hadn’t been sleeping well at night.

  She looked at the others and said, “I called my agent and told him that I was taking a vacation. I just don’t have the personal bandwidth to handle any jobs right now.”

  “I disagree. I think Rachel needs to go back to work,” Annie said. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after things here, and the knitting shop practically looks after itself.”

  “No,” said Rachel. “Just … no.”

  “If somebody is offering you a part,” said Susan, “I don’t see why…” She started to cough.

  “It’s not up for discussion,” Rachel said. She put a hand behind Susan’s back and supported her until the coughing fit subsided, and then settled her again.

  “Actually, it is,” said Edward, and put up a finger when Rachel started to speak. “It’s my turn. I’m tired of the rat race. I’ve decided that I’m going to hang out here instead and visit one of the few people around who still remembers when I was young and good-looking.”

  He smiled gently at Susan, who smiled back. “Thank you,” she mouthed.

  Rachel stared at him. “Edward!” she said. “I can’t ask you to…”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a purely selfish act. I’m expecting you to mention my name to your public at least twice a week until somebody re-options one of my series.”

  He grinned, and Rachel threw a pillow at him. “Ouch!” he protested.

  Yolanda smiled slightly and simply said, “Susan’s asleep.”

  They quietly stood and left the room.

  * * *

  Sixty years later.

  Yolanda called Rachel and said that one of the members of her congregation—a former child survivor from New York—was giving a seder and would be delighted if she and Annie came. Rachel said she’d think about it. Annie glared at Rachel, then said that of course, they’d be happy to come.

  “I can’t do that to your friend,” Rachel said impatiently. “Ever since I mentioned I attend an annual seder in that interview a couple of years ago, our systems are deluged every year by cards and gifts from fans. It’s a pain in the ass. We have to farm out part of our feed to avoid bringing the whole thing crashing down.”

  “His wife works in communications,” said Yolanda calmly. “We’ve got it covered. Reserve your flight.”

  Yolanda and her congregants lived a few miles outside of Minneapolis in a suburban community that was protected from airborne toxins by a large bubble of forced air and chemicals that surrounded a couple of miles of territory. By the time Rachel and Annie had arrived, preparations were well under way. While the adults bustled around in the kitchen and dining room, the family’s children put on a play for their guests, who laughed and applauded.

  “Kids,” came the cry, “Come set the table!” The children dashed away, leaving a sudden silence, broken only occasionally by the voices at the other end of the house.

  “They’re great kids,” said Rachel. “But isn’t it strange for them, growing up in such an artificial environment? I mean, they never get outside. Really outside.”

  “It’s healthier for them,” Yolanda said. “Better that than having to reach for an airsock every time the particle levels get too high. And we take them on trips in the cooler weather, when things are safer.”

  They sat quietly for a moment. Suddenly, without speaking, Yolanda reached out to Ann and Rachel, and took their hands. Rachel took Ann’s other hand, completing the small circle.

  “Go ahead,” Yolanda said to Rachel.

  “We greet Abram and Edward and…” Rachel started, and then pressed her lips together. “I can’t,” she whispered. They just sat, heads bowed, remembering, while an errant breeze stirred the window curtains.

  * * *

  Seventy years later.

  Rachel sat and stared at the ocean. These days, she liked to come to the shore as often as possible to watch the birds dip and soar, scuttle along the shore hunting for small shellfish and insects, or dig through the sand for leftover food from human visitors.

  It was getting harder, though. Oh, Rachel could get herself to the boardwalk easily enough; her chair moved her around with only the twitch of a finger. But the discomfort—hell with that, the pain—was getting worse. At some point, even these days, medications could only do so much.

  So a few days ago, she had filled out all the necessary forms and had all the required interviews. They then fitted the small ampoule in a special section of the chair.

  Now, Rachel sat for a few more minutes, watching the birds and listening to their distant calls. After about half an hour, she lifted her head and said, as clearly and loudly as she could, “Annie.”

  The small holographic portra
it appeared on the tray that extended from the left arm of her chair. Annie, gray-haired but still mischievous, blew a kiss and grinned at her.

  “I’ll just be a few more minutes,” Rachel told her lover, dead these three years now. She tried to smile at the holo, failed, and shut it down.

  It was a nice sunset. A few passersby walked along the boardwalk, and from a small building just behind her, there was a sudden spurt of sound: The raucous but pleasant noise of people singing badly but enthusiastically. Rachel had chosen this day and this spot purposefully—the small building was a shared religious center, and tonight was the second night of Passover.

  She listened for a moment. Had it really been that long since … ? A sharp twinge bit at her stomach like a small arrow.

  “Okay,” Rachel said out loud. “Enough of this shit.”

  She reached down into the bag that hung from one arm of the chair and pulled out a glass of wine. She peeled off the top and then tapped the glass lightly with the ring that she still wore on her left ring finger. It rang faintly but satisfactorily.

  “This meeting of Soul 2065 is hereby called to order,” she told the seagulls. “I greet Abram, Yolanda, Edward, my mother Eileen, Uncle Mark and Aunt Susan, and my loving Annie, and ask them to remember me.” She paused. “No. I am the last living member, and so I ask them not simply to remember me, but to allow me to join them.”

  Rachel placed her hand flat on her chair’s arm, and carefully recited the series of numbers and letters she had memorized. She felt an almost imperceptible vibration against her palm. Then she smiled, and raised her face to the ocean. A breeze caressed her cheek.

  “You were right, Aunt Susan,” she said. “If you just pretend you got it right, nobody will notice the mistakes.”

  She sighed.

  And part of the universe was made whole.

  PINIONS

  The Authors

  Yves Meynard was born in 1964 in Québec City. Active in Québec SF circles since 1986, he served as literary editor for the magazine Solaris from 1994 to 2001. In addition to over forty short stories, he has published eighteen books, alone or in collaboration. Sixteen of them are in French, his native language, and two in English, the most recent being Chrysanthe (Tor Books, 2012). Yves holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université de Montréal and earns a living as a software developer.

  “There’s no set routine for me to get story ideas,” he writes. “I usually note them down in a text file, which is more convenient than my old spiral-bound notebook but even less romantic. Since I put down the date and the source of the idea, I can see that I’ve been inspired by watching Roman Holiday, by visiting the Titanic exhibition, and very often by listening to a panel at Readercon. In all cases, the idea tends to go at right angles to the source material. I also note down some of my most vivid dreams, but those I mostly fear would be stillborn if I tried to shape them into stories. Still, many of the ideas have only a date attached, which presumably means they came to me while I was taking a shower or walking to work. ‘Our Lady of the Thylacines’ did not come from any particular source. I recall I found myself imagining a child mistaking a Tasmanian tiger for a real tiger. My Apollonian self wondered how this mistake could ever be made, given that thylacines are extinct. Then my Dionysiac self supplied an answer—a cruel, cruel answer—and the seed of the story was born. It lay dormant for four years until I finally got around to planting it.”

  * * *

  Ian McHugh’s first success as a fiction writer was winning a short story contest at the 2004 Australian national SF convention. Since then, he has graduated from the Clarion West writers’ workshop (in 2006) and sold stories to professional and semi-pro magazines, webzines and anthologies in Australia and internationally. His stories have won grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest and been shortlisted four times at Australia’s Aurealis Awards, winning Best Fantasy Short Story in 2010. His first short story collection will be published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2014.

  He lives in Canberra, Australia and is a member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild.

  Of “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine Daughter,” he says, “This story started with the title, which elves slipped into my brain one night. Or something. One day it was just there, and there’s no way a title like that could go storyless. If it had come to me to write its story, well, I had to oblige. My dad’s a geek for transport history, so I borrowed a couple of his books on canals, and man, Industrial Revolution Britain really was totally steampunk. Only a little bit of that incredible infrastructure made it into the finished story (like the barge lift), but it gave me the the first flavour of the world and, from there, the rest just kind of fell together.”

  * * *

  Nicole Kornher-Stace was born in Philadelphia in 1983, moved from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again by the time she was five, and currently lives in New Paltz, NY, with one husband, two ferrets, one Changeling, and many many books. She is the author of Desideria, Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties, and The Winter Triptych. Her newest novel, Archivist Wasp, is forthcoming from Big Mouth House, Small Beer Press’s YA imprint, in Spring 2014. She can be found online at www.nicolekornherstace.com or wirewalking.livejournal.com.

  She says that “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse” was “an initial swipe at some of the worldbuilding and characters that went on to be featured in my latest novel, Archivist Wasp. Wasp and her ghost pal end their story-to-novel journey virtually unrecognizable, but the constellations remain.”

  * * *

  Richard Parks has been writing and publishing fantasy and science fiction longer than he cares to remember … or probably can remember. His work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several “Year’s Best” anthologies and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3,” also known as www.richard-parks.com.

  He writes, “The genesis of ‘Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl’ is the easy part to explain. Not too long ago I was in a writer’s group. We met once a week, partly for social reasons but every now and then we’d try to get something done. The ‘something’ this time was an assignment to write a story around the theme of a modern myth. So what’s a modern myth? Odds are it’s an urban legend. Only urban legends have been done to death, so I decided to make up my own. Something plausible, but one I’d never actually heard of. And there, waiting, was The Drowned Girl. So where did she come from? I wish I knew. Or maybe I don’t. It’s probably better that way.”

  * * *

  Born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, Gemma Files has been a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter and is currently a wife and mother. She won the 1999 International Horror Guild Award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Her fiction has been published in two collections: Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, and five of her stories were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry. In 2010, her first novel—A Book of Tongues, Part One of the Hexslinger Series—was published, followed in 2011 by A Rope of Thorns, the second novel in the series. The third and final installment, A Tree of Bones, was published in May 2012, just in time for the Mayan Apocalypse. She is currently at work on a novel with no gay outlaws or Aztec gods in it whatsoever.

  She says, “I think it will probably surprise no one at all to be told that my mind is a mulch-heap, dark, deep and foetid, fed by many different obsessional streams. In the case of ‘Trap-Weed,’ I had a few introductory paragraphs told from the point of view of a selkie, a mythical creature I have a genetic predisposition to find interesting yet have very seldom come across in fantasy (almost never male ones, in particular), and some vague notes about how later he might find himself trapped aboard a pirate ship with a shark-were (not
a were-shark, because that would just be boring).

  “This percolated at the back of my mind for maybe five years, not catching fire, until mid-2012, when I suddenly rediscovered my love for British actor Peter Cushing through revisiting his work with Hammer Horror: The Curse of Frankenstein, The Horror of Dracula, then down into a bunch of lesser-known titles, including a loose adaptation of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh called Night Creatures, in which Cushing’s character is a former pirate turned small-town Cornish parson with a sideline in smuggling. A few tweaks, some juggling and a little alchemy later, Captain Jerusalem Parry emerged, glancing haughtily around; he was soon joined by the little-seen former Captain Solomon Rusk, whose relationship with my Five-Family Coven stories provided a couple of neat plot twists. Fun fact: This story was so much fun to write that it now has both a prequel and a sequel. The first, ‘Two Captains,’ will appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies; the second is massive, so I may have trouble finding a venue. But my Hammer Pirates trilogy is complete, and I’m happy.”

  * * *

  Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction has appeared in Expanded Horizons, Jabberwocky, and Strange Horizons.

  About “Icicle,” she explains, “There is no English word which conveys the meaning of ‘Yohkai’ correctly, so I’m going to call them spirit-monsters, just here.

  “Our folk tale about the spirit-monster snow-woman—who kills a man who loses his way traveling back home in a snowstorm—never scared me much. It’s probably because I grew up in a relatively dry area, and somehow as a child I knew the snow-woman would never come down out of the snowy mountain to harm me. I very recently learned that this was really the case: spirit-monsters rarely move away from their usual habitat.