My high heels clack against the tiled floor. I hand Lena a bouquet of tulips, my favorite flower, which I’d purchased in the lobby, and smooth my black miniskirt self-consciously.
“Tony?” Lena asks hesitantly.
I stare at her blankly.
“No, this is Natalie. From work,” Drew says.
“I know who she is,” Lena says.
“You look great,” Drew says. He struggles to sit up further, wincing. His right leg is in traction, bound tightly at the knee. His shoulder is similarly bandaged.
“Drew, you’re supposed to rest,” Lena says.
He points at the flowers. “Would you mind putting these in a vase, Lena?”
Lena frowns. “I’ll be right back.”
I nearly call her back into the room, to say goodbye. But I let her go. There’s only one brother she cares about, only one she gets to keep.
Another shock. A blue-white flash. My vision clears and I find myself sitting on the bed next to Drew. I notice the effect my new body has on my old one.
“I c–can’t believe you’re here, Natalie,” Drew says to me.
I can barely stand the sight of myself. Had I always been so pathetic around her? I perch on the side of the bed, allowing my skirt to ride up my thigh, just to see the reaction, and place a hand on my original self’s arm.
“Do you remember anything?” I ask my body.
“Not much. That’s good, though. Lena’s lawyer friend thinks I’ll get off with a slap on the wrist since I only went to the swapmeat to help my sister with an article.”
Liar. No one knows his real reasons for being there better than me. I lean over and whisper, “Do you know where the next swapmeat will be?”
Confusion passes over my old face. “No. Why would I?”
“Do you think your sister might know?”
“You can’t, Natalie! The police are looking for you. You shouldn’t even be here.” He smiles. “But I’m glad you came to see me.”
“Never mind,” I say.
“My lawyer can probably help you too.”
Still playing the hero.
He smiles nervously. “Maybe one day, when all this is over, we could...?”
“Sorry,” I say automatically. “You’re not my type.”
Disappointment washes across his face. I think about everything this version of me never experienced, the memories he’ll never have.
I hesitate, then bend down and kiss him. It feels even stranger than I’d expected.
“Forget about me,” I murmur in his ear, even though I know he won’t listen.
I black out and find myself on the other side of the room, leaning against the bathroom door.
“Are you okay, Natalie?” Drew asks.
I wonder about Tony, what he felt in those final moments as the last vestiges of his personality faded away.
I open the bathroom door and shut myself inside. I peel off Natalie’s clothes and fold them neatly on the toilet tank. When I’m naked, I stare into the mirror over the sink. Natalie stares back at me with cold, azure eyes that draw me into them, like I’m falling into a frigid, blue ocean.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” she whispers.
I hear my own voice shouting in the room outside. “Lena? What’s going on? Who are these guys?”
“Where is she?” a man barks.
“She’s gone!” Drew says.
A moment later, a fist pounds on the bathroom door.
I pull my fingers through my blonde hair, down the nape of my neck and around to linger on my breasts. I shudder.
I look at my reflection. “I love you...” I struggle to remember the name, and then it bobs to the surface. “Tony?”
“Who’s Tony?” The woman in the mirror mouths the words with me.
A beat pounds against the door.
I’m lost, spiraling into the pupils of the blue eyes, searching, searching for someone I can’t find. I lean forward and the woman kisses me. Bliss. A perfect moment.
I slip into my reflection, like diving into the calm surface of a lake. A woman’s laugh follows me, clear and confident, as I leave Natalie’s body behind.
* * *
Mercurio D. Rivera has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and his fiction has appeared in venues such as Year’s Best SF 17, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Nature, Black Static and elsewhere. Tor.com has described his short story collection Across the Event Horizon (NewCon Press 2013) as “weird and wonderful,” with “dizzying switchbacks,” and “a revelation.”
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of the Andre Norton Award–winning young adult novel Fair Coin and its sequel, Quantum Coin, as well as numerous short stories in anthologies and magazines. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter: @ecmyers.
JODY LYNN NYE:
Pern, Xanth & Myth Adventures
by Stephen Euin Cobb
Author of forty novels and more than one hundred short stories of science fiction and fantasy, Jody Lynn Nye often enlivens her work with a generous dose of humor. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey in her Dragonriders of Pern series, and in the Myth Adventures series with Robert Asprin. She transcribed and corrected Gary Gygax’s prose for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; taught the Fantasy Writing Workshop at Columbia College Chicago; and teaches the annual Science Fiction Writing Workshop each year at DragonCon.
SEC: How did you get started in writing?
JLN: I have always written things, or told stories. Riding around in my old Volkswagen, my best friend, Diane, used to say, “I could always reach into the back seat and find something interesting to read.” The back seat was largely full of bits and pieces of manuscript I was writing.
In the early 1980s, my dear friend Barbara and I took over one of the very small press magazines for the Society for Creative Anachronism for a couple of years—a kingdom newsletter which was called Dragonrunes. We edited and wrote articles. I took over a humorous saga from the previous editor who surrendered it to me. I changed the characters just a little, and had a lot of fun with it because it was goofy and full of dreadful puns. So I was ready for Xanth.
My first paid work in publishing was typing—for a dollar a page—the Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual for TSR; which included correcting Gary Gygax’s grammar.
My first publications in the professional press were technical articles for a magazine called Video Action, as well as RoleAids modules for Mayfair Games which were used to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
SEC: You wrote eight books with the late Robert Asprin. How did that collaboration come about?
JLN: My husband, Bill, was one of Bob’s best friends and also acted as his agent. He kept the creative Bob on a more business level. He was a good friend to him, but also able to tell him, “Bob, that’s not going to work.”
Bill introduced me to Bob early in our relationship. We went up to Ann Arbor to stay with Bob and his second wife, Lynn, for what I thought was going to be a nerve wracking experience. It turned out they were incredibly nice, generous people who went to a great deal of trouble to make me feel at ease.
Bob and I got along like a house on fire. We hit it off immediately. We discovered how ridiculously much we had in common, despite being born eleven years apart. We liked much of the same music, movies and writers. We both wrote humor, and the same things made us laugh.
A few years later, Bob was having trouble writing. He was frozen. Having achieved a little too much success with one of his novels, he feared he could not match it. So to get him through this frozen period, Bill proposed we do a project together. Something completely unrelated to anything Bob ha
d written before. And so we wrote the novel License Invoked. A story of magic, spies and Rock & Roll!
SEC: What were the mechanics of that collaboration?
JLN: Bob and I sat together in the living room at my and Bill’s house and talked at length about what we would like to do with this project. We put together an outline (which I still have somewhere) then went through the outline and decided which of us was likely to know the most about each section, and scribbled in the margin who would write that section. Then he took his half of the outline down to New Orleans, I kept my half up in the Chicago area, and we started writing. We wrote the sections while apart, then we put them together and I went over it, then Bob went over it—because his name is first on the cover—and then it went to the publisher.
SEC: You also collaborated on many books with Anne McCaffrey. How did that collaboration differ?
JLN: First, it was much earlier in my career. I began writing with Anne in 1987; Bob and I didn’t write together until the late ’90’s. And second, Anne was much more the senior writer; I was really more an apprentice.
The first thing I wrote with Anne was Dragonharper which was one of the Crossroads Adventure series. In the 1980s “branching-path” gamebooks, also called choose-your-own-adventure books, were very popular. They weren’t linear stories. At the end of each chapter it said, “If you choose to take this action go to page 35, but if you choose to take that action go to 87.” I wrote two of them in Anne’s universe.
But Anne also had a number of books that she had always meant to go on with. She wanted to explore their world more but just didn’t have the time. One of them was Dinosaur Planet, so she agreed to work with junior authors. Elizabeth Moon and I were both selected to write novels in that universe. It’s now called the Planet Pirate series.
Anne was always generous, but strict about wanting a good story well told. As an apprenticeship I could not have wished for better. It boosted me years beyond where I would have been at that time. She made me better than I knew I could be.
Bill arranged many apprenticeship-style book projects with junior authors. Many of whom have gone on to notable solo careers: among them Mercedes Lackey, Nancy Asire, Leslie Fish, and Elizabeth Moon. It also made me some close friends of Anne’s collaborators even though we never actually collaborated with each other.
SEC: Your collaboration with Piers Anthony, was it different too?
JLN: Yes, though the first things I worked on for him were also a pair of Crossroads Adventures. Bill, my husband, came up with the idea of creating a gazetteer set within the imaginary universes of popular novels. He started with Roger Zelazney’s Visual Guide to Castle Amber which was copiously illustrated by the wonderful Todd Cameron Hamilton. I didn’t write that first gazetteer, I wrote the next: The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern. For that Todd Cameron Hamilton and I spent ten days with Anne in Ireland, interviewing her and getting the ideas of what she wanted. Anne was already familiar with me. And Todd had a background in pre-med and so was able to sketch skeletons and muscle groups so that Anne was able to get on paper the dragons she always wanted.
Then Todd and I did a Visual Guide to Xanth for Piers Anthony. Piers wrote some of the internal material, but it was mostly me working from my research of the existing Xanth books—of which there were many.
SEC: Your husband, Bill Fawcett, has been a college professor and dean, teacher, corporate executive, writer, editor, anthologist, and game designer. How did you two first get together?
JLN: We met at a science fiction convention in the middle of the night, introduced by my friend Barbara. She told him, “Oh, there’s Jody. I need to get something for her. Tell her to stay where she is.”
Bill, who is a very eager person and loves to do things for people, came running over to me and said, “Barbara says you have to stay right here.” So while we waited for Barbara we attempted to make small talk. It was an awkward situation for both of us, but one of the things he came up with was asking me out. He is an incredibly wonderful, warm, considerate person so we got along very well. And still do.
* * *
Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist and award-winning producer of the podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he’s also been a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine. His nonfiction books include A Brief History of Predicting the Future and Indistinguishable From Magic: Predictions of Revolutionary Future Science. His SF novels include Bones Burnt Black and Skinbrain (Cerebrodermus Fantastica). He is also an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation.
THE HAUNTED GOLDMINE
by Derek Muk
artwork by Alan Beck
Dan looked at his watch: 10:00PM. He sighed in relief. He did one final sweep of the park, making sure all the buildings, entrances, and rides were locked. It was a muggy summer night and he mopped his sweaty face with his handkerchief. When he reached the Funhouse he noticed the dungeon-style doors the cars went through was ajar. He pointed his flashlight to the ground and saw the padlock had been cut. Damn kids! They probably went on a joyride inside. Got stoned and Lord knows what else. It happened before.
Next to the Funhouse was a ride called the Haunted Goldmine. Kids had broken in there before, too. Dan checked it out. He wasn’t surprised when he saw this padlock had been snapped off as well. Dan returned to the Funhouse and entered, walking along the track used by the cars to transport patrons. An eerie silence surrounded him. He shone his flashlight around, not seeing anything except cheesy-looking figures meant to scare. He passed by a coffin. Claws hung out of it.
Suddenly, something or someone flashed by him. Super fast. He spun around, scanning the darkness. It whizzed by him again.
“Who’s there?” Dan asked. At moments like this he wished he had a gun. “This is park security. Who’s there?”
The eerie silence continued. Things just didn’t feel right. Something was definitely wrong here. He felt a cold draft, and the hairs on the back of his neck went up. His face was sweaty and he heard himself panting out of fear. Dan didn’t scare easily so he knew something was up! Something foreign was in the atmosphere…unexplainable.
Again, whatever it was flashed quickly by, knocking into him. “Hey!” he said. “Stop! This is security. Stop!”
Silence.
* * *
“Welcome. Thank you for attending The Occult Files Magazine’s fifth annual ghost and paranormal convention,” Albert Taylor said into the podium’s microphone. He was a tall, lanky fiftysomething man with brown hair and long dark sideburns. “As our handy little brochure indicates, we have a full schedule of cool spooky lectures and workshops lined up for you, folks. This introductory lecture, Ghost Hunting 101, will cover the basics of forming your own ghost hunting/paranormal group, what each members’ ghost hunting kit should contain, legal issues and forms to use, the definition of a ghost, and so forth.” He looked ahead at his assistant, Jan, who was seated behind a laptop in the audience. She was a slender young woman with shoulder length red hair. “Jan, could you dim the lights and start the slide show? Thanks.”
The hotel ballroom darkened and there was some mumbling and whispers here and there as a picture appeared on the large white screen near Taylor. “Now, this first photo is a little grainy, but if you look carefully you can see the outline of a figure standing on the stairs. Notice the two orbs above the figure, too.”
Dan, sitting in the second row of the audience, studied the photo. Then he looked at a business card in his beefy hand: Professor Albert Taylor.
* * *
After the lecture there was a lengthy question and answer period. When it was finished, Taylor drank some water and put his papers in his briefcase. Dan approached the stage hesitantly, the b
usiness card still in his hand.
Taylor smiled at him. “Did you enjoy the presentation?”
“Very much,” Dan replied. “I…I wanted to talk to you about…something.”
Taylor closed his briefcase, walking down the stairs of the stage. “Sure. Let’s sit down.”
They sat in chairs before the stage. The ballroom was empty except for them and Jan, who was packing up the equipment.
Dan cleared his throat. “Well, I’m a security guard at Bizarro and I…I think I had a ghostly encounter the other night.”
“That used to be Funland, right?”
Dan nodded. “Another victim of the bad economy. A corporation bought it, gave it a new name, but essentially it’s the same attractions with some tweaking here and there.”
“Gotcha.”
“Anyway, someone or something broke into the Funhouse and the Haunted Goldmine so I checked it out…and boy, I never had an experience quite like that!” He chuckled. Dan was a heavyset, bearded man in his twenties with dark hair. “I truly believe it was a ghost…things just didn’t feel right. I felt this cold chill that I’ve never felt before. And I read about how other people also felt this draft when encountering ghosts. Something foreign was in the air…I had to get out of there. It didn’t feel right, you know?”
Taylor nodded. “What else happened when you were in there?”
“Well, it bumped into me, almost knocking me over. I didn’t feel flesh, but it felt like a person, you know? And it was fast! Zipped by me.”
Space and Time Issue 121 Page 5
