Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  BariStar - 6:27

  Good thing I have villain activity insurance. And my dad said not to bother—LOL.

  Havespatulawillomelet - 6:35

  @BariStar: You disappeared again.

  BariStar - 6:36

  Had to put my phone away while the magnetic field was screwed up, but it’s good now! The capes are off the train!

  Sidekickenvy - 6:37

  @BariStar: Awesome!

  Superinformed - 6:37

  @BariStar: So what’s happening now?

  BariStar - 6:39

  Redshift just tied up Polarity in a field between two residential areas. No metal. Plastic cuffs. #YEAHLADYSUPERHEROES #fightover

  BariStar - 6:42

  OK, made it to my stop. Thx for the company guys.

  Sidekickenvy - 6:43

  @BariStar: Sure thing. Good to hear it worked out.

  LunaSam - 6:44

  @BariStar: This wasn’t as exciting as I wanted it to be.

  Private message from: @lotsalattes - 6:45

  glad ur safe amy, hate to be short staffed

  Havespatulawillomelet - 6:45

  @BariStar: F’ing supervillains! Hope your next commute goes better.

  BariStar - 6:49

  OMG there’s a guy actually complaining to a station employee. No, really.

  BariStar - 6:49

  Tourists.

  BariStar - 6:51

  #tuesdaytrainfight #thankyouredshift #baristastories

  Private message to: @SonicSass - 8:04

  Okay, Elisa, I’ve had enough time to think it over. Maybe it was the Polarity thing tonight or watching that guy complain about you—your beam fried his tablet so screw you, apparently, even though you saved his life—but I’m done watching lunatics abuse this city just because they can. I don’t want to be one of those people who swear they’re going to move, then find themselves still here 30 years later, broken because one of Doctor Stain’s cyborgs destroyed their house or Omnigalaxis sent a bus full of kids to another dimension.

  But I don’t want to run away either. If you’re still looking for someone to team up with you, I’m in. You bring the serum or radioactive bracelet or whatever it is. I’ll bring the costume.

  I can be good at this. I know I can.

  Amy

  P.S. Why the hell did you never tell me you changed your codename to Redshift? I felt like an idiot on Patter today.

  © 2014 by Vanessa Torline.

  Vanessa Torline is fascinated by many storytelling mediums, but her first love is a book—the kind with pictures and without. As a journalist, she has written about comic books, theatre, animation, and film in addition to news articles. She is currently working on other short stories and a young adult fantasy novel.

  The Hymn of Ordeal, No. 23

  Rhiannon Rasmussen

  Your brother’s bones, suspended in mineral fluids, turn as smoothly and shine as brightly as the oil-coated joints of the mechanism they guide. When you touch the heavy plastic that separates you from his body, it is cold. The iron plate that serves to cover what is left of his face turns towards the tapping, and nausea wells deep in your throat. You catch a glimpse of yellow fat, the hole of a socket, nerves that once bundled into the base of an eye now strung behind the iron half-mask.

  Flesh did not make the transit to deep space whole, only guts packed in gel and nerves strung into wires, the delicate threads that extend to outer sensors, thrusters, and lenses. That is what they are now. Not people, not soldiers, but shrikes: the folded warbirds sent through void to cleanse it of the invaders, to impale them on their own stardust ruins, to leave broken chassis and frozen corpses scattered as warning to others who might threaten us. If the invaders left corpses—you have never seen them, only the scars of their passage left across the skin of Earth.

  Only the shrikes see them, and the shrikes are silent.

  The motion makes you queasy, to see your brother laid bare in this way, deconstructed into scaffolding, but he knew what he had volunteered for long before the first flensing cut had been made. Most people are advised not to see the volunteers after induction. Now you understand why.

  You’re told he does not acknowledge you. The movement is involuntary, a roll in his sleep while he dreams the dreams of kites. He does not see inside the ship any more than you can peer inside your own ribcage.

  After you leave the shrike and the remains of your brother behind, you lift your phone as you have many times before, to listen again to the last message your brother left you, on the day he decided to join. The words are as hollow as you felt when you first heard them. You thought a suicide note might be less painful, but you did not know what you could do, you never raised your voice against him, and now you walk away.

  “How else do you see the stars, but to join the war?” he asks, distant and thin through the speakers. “I don’t know if you’ll understand,” a pause for breath, and you stop the message. You know how it ends.

  • • •

  On launch day you stay at home while astronomers gather on hills and look up for the tiny stars, winking out one by one as the shrikes break orbit and fling themselves far past the shadows the sun casts. It is all the news discusses for weeks, how we are taking the fight to them, how brave the volunteers are, how we are turning the tides of history this day, this year, this century. Reconstruction will last generations. Who knows what civilization will follow in the contrails of conquerors?

  You sit at home and you do not listen, but the shadows flit through your thoughts as you wonder how we will know they have succeeded, how many thousands of years will pass before the night sky shows the scars of war, if your children’s children’s children will be able to look up and trace battle lines by the absence of light.

  News feeds and reports of the war arrive in fragments, sentences at a time, signaled in light packed tight and sent back the way they came, the way the invaders came. All years too late. If there is humanity among the stuttered laser missives, songs or stories or riddles the shrikes call back and forth through flickering verses over void to pass the time, it is not shared. Only life confirmed and life lost, coordinates and absences.

  Light casts long shadows in vacuum.

  There are more launches. We are winning, the missives say. Victory is a mathematical equation.

  The equation is repeated daily. Sometimes, as the announcer’s voice drones on, name after name, you wonder why they list the casualties at all. They volunteered to be killed long before they were sent to the front lines. But those thoughts are treason, and you push them aside even while listening, always afraid, for your brother’s name to be spoken among the dead.

  It never is, and you are never sure if you are grateful for the sparing or sorry that you have no chance to grieve. You wonder if the machines will fail first, or the organics inside them, or if age no longer applies to a kite of angles and shards.You transfer your brother’s last message from phone to phone to phone as you move from place to place, buried deeper under your new life with every adjustment made for your work, your career, your friends. That is how it should be. Life moves on. Sometimes you think you hear your brother’s voice, your brother’s words–humanity is worth fighting for–and you wonder whose wounds will leave the most visible scars; those dismantled to wheel like hunting hawks out into the void, or the handlers left behind to fit each twisted spar back into place, one by one?

  • • •

  Time passes. The shrikes’ infrequent transmissions shift in measured steps from war to the equations of extermination, and the ones who do not wish to mask truth’s sharp words with poetry call it genocide. No plea for surrender comes, and the news turns its attention to closer matters, to expansion, to colonization, to business and the small strifes that spring up after the need for unification has passed.

  We no longer tell the shrikes what to do; they are bladed kites loosed upon æther, ours in name only. On Earth, cities are built over and around the ruins. If not for words carved into glas
s, speeches that remind citizens never to forget wounds past, and crystal walkways over exposed bedrock, there would be no physical memories of the damage wrought at all.

  Did you have children, did you marry, did you retire well or not at all? It doesn’t matter on the day that the sky opens wide again and the shrikes pour down through the tears. No signal heralded their arrival, no sound and no light. They never left unheeded any command, but they broadcast no warning of their return. And with them come unfamiliar ships with geometry more grown than manufactured, bone-bright and entwined with the shrikes in the sky, as equals. Only decades-old footage will identify them as the ships of the invaders, the lances that carved irreparable gouges into the Earth.

  The shrikes flare out, the lancing lights among the stars that flew to cleanse the void of a threat returned and dragging their catch with them. The world falls quiet under their long shadows. The shrikes lie silent, waiting, listening, wings spread in formation, shining knives to cut the sun.

  Of course you walk outside with the others and you crane your neck, wondering which is your brother, aware of how vulnerable you are in this moment, how they could rain fire down upon you all.

  They do not rain fire. Instead, over the growing hum of fear and conjecture, the enemy ships sing. All at once, they sing, and the noise brings you to your knees.

  Weave, they sing.

  teach us to refasten our kin

  in your image

  in the image of the kites

  kestrels, swifts, merlins, shrikes

  we too wish to cut the stars to thread.

  You shield your eyes to study the blinding angles because there is no point to shielding your ears from the song. If you can recognize him, if he would know you, if he survived, if it can be called survival and if he still could be called your brother. But they all look the same and you see him in every one, and in every one yourself.

  © 2014 by Rhiannon Rasmussen.

  Rhiannon Rasmussen has worked in comics scripting, illustration, graphic design, and printmaking, but no matter what else she pursues it is always alongside prose. Her interests lie in juxtaposition and layering, contrasting humanity with elements of monstrosity, phantasm, the macabre, geology, and spaceships. Her sensibilities are influenced by kimokawaii culture, her hometown in Hawaii and the time she spent in Mexico and Denmark as a child. Follow Rhiannon on Twitter: @charibdys or visit her at rhiannonrs.tumblr.com.

  Emoticon

  Anaid Perez

  Once the hostages abandoned the building safely, the screen composing the robot’s face displayed: ^_^

  Its policeman partner spit on the floor to complain.

  “Don’t be a fake! You know you don’t have emotions.”

  “Neither you do, but at least I can pretend.”

  © 2014 by Anaid Perez.

  Anaid Perez is a freelance Spanish and English writer; her tale “Años y Felices Días” won second place in the sci-fi contest “Las Cuatro Esquinas del Universo,” her essays have been published in local newspapers in her home city of Morelia, and she hasn’t missed a NaNoWriMo since 2010. She’s an active member in ficticia.com and fanfiction.net, where she writes under the pseudonym of Panakeia.

  The Mouths

  Ellen Denham

  I once traveled to a world where the blob-like inhabitants had only one sense organ—the mouth. Everything went through that single orifice to be perceived. Even their atrophied hands were dull and had little feeling, only enough to grasp whatever they came across and lift it to their mouths.

  They could neither hear nor speak, but if you were to bake your words into a cracker, they would devour this with relish, then cock their nearly featureless heads, as if considering.

  Their customary greeting for each other was a long, open-mouthed kiss—embarrassing to watch. But it wasn’t sexual—just the way they recognized each other and shared information. In fact, they did not even reproduce sexually. I wasn’t sure why a particularly large individual would suddenly vomit up a small but nearly identical creature. Then I learned that once they had eaten a certain amount, they must give birth. This was quite a large quantity over the course of the creature’s lifetime, as they were not prolific breeders. They did not eliminate, so giving birth to another creature was the only way they could lose some of their mass.

  Conversation was unknown to them. Some crackers contained the equivalent of sounds, poetry or music; other crackers delivered pictures, smells, and even moving images, directly to their minds. They spent most of their time baking and eating these crackers, seasoned with their own saliva, for this, apparently, was what carried the information they wanted to convey. Then they would sit for hours, rapt, experiencing the information contained in the cracker. Later, they would waddle inside their huts to bake another batch in response. I tried some of the crackers, but my brain could not translate them into the information that the creatures were absorbing. My interpreter, a wrinkled individual—a throwback of sorts who alone of the group had ears and could speak—had to describe them to me.

  After a while listening to its explanations, I noticed several recurring themes. It always portrayed the contents of the crackers as the ancestors dancing, or the ancestors singing, or an artwork of the ancestors. I didn’t understand what it meant, and my grasp of our one common tongue was not sufficient to grasp its elaborations. But according to my research, the creatures had evolved (devolved, some said) from a long-limbed people who had many senses. These must be the ancestors that were the creatures’ source of inspiration.

  Why, I asked my interpreter, did their crackers not contain stories of their own people doing things? Why always the ancestors?

  It made a gurgling sound deep in its throat and uttered a word so rude I won’t translate it. Our interview was over for the day.

  Most of the globulous creatures moved awkwardly, when they moved at all, but I noticed one whose stout body constantly undulated, so I thought of it as “Twitchy.”

  On my fourth day studying the colony, Twitchy jiggled from side to side, waved its tiny hands, made a little turn, and repeated facing the new direction. It did this so many times, while its fellows sat absorbing the information of their crackers, that I wondered what might be wrong with it. I asked my interpreter, who replied that I should not waste its time describing impossible things.

  Later that day, Twitchy galumphed from its hut with a batch of crackers and distributed them to any person it bumped into. The creatures consumed their crackers, sat still for a moment, and then, one by one, began to heave themselves around the area more quickly than usual, bumping into each other and kissing each one they bumped, until one of them kissed Twitchy. The creature pushed Twitchy into the center of the group and they surrounded it, all kissing it, as I first thought, until I stood for a better look and realized they were devouring the baker of the most recent crackers. I couldn’t do much for poor Twitchy. When the crowd parted, nothing remained of it but a greasy stain.

  Why? I asked my interpreter. At first, it didn’t believe me when I explained what had happened. Then, curious, it sought out one of the remaining crackers Twitchy had shared. It sat in a lump and chewed for a while, then flew into a rage.

  “Ugly!” it said. The creature I called Twitchy had shown them something that was not art at all, didn’t even show the ancestors, but a malformed, squat creature flailing about. It spat out the remnants of the cracker and mashed it into the ground with its flat lower appendages. I asked for clarification. What my interpreter described sounded like one of the creatures themselves, moving in just the way Twitchy had the day before. I could only guess that what Twitchy had shown the others that put them in a murderous rage was itself, doing something besides sitting and contemplating the contents of crackers. I didn’t understand what was taboo about this, but later, compiling my notes, I theorized that the creatures themselves did not create. All of the crackers, as described to me, contained familiar themes, which matched well-documented works, such as certain ritual dances
of the more elegant-bodied ancestors.

  I wondered if Twitchy understood the peril of showing them something new, of having the audacity not only to create, but to show the creatures a vision of themselves. I can only conclude that some creatures are too alien for me to understand, and I dared not read too much into what I saw.

  © 2014 by Ellen Denham.

  Ellen Denham is a multidisciplinary performing artist and writer currently teaching voice and completing a doctorate in music at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a 2006 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. Her previous publications include stories in Daily Science Fiction, NewMyths.com, and the Sky Warrior Books anthology Gears and Levers 3. Her written works for the stage have been performed by the Butler Ballet and the Indy Convergence. Not content to keep her writing and performing life in separate boxes, Ellen likes to hang out in the dark alleys where artistic genres and disciplines intersect. Her performing career has encompassed everything from opera and oratorio to barking Mozart as a dog, turning internet memes into a comic soundscape, and tap dancing in a Santa suit. You may find her online at denham.virtualave.net.

  M1A

  Kim Winternheimer

  Mother says Mia can stay in my room a little longer. I jump up and down a bit squealing with delight and Mia claps her hands but says nothing because she cannot speak. Mother smiles at us, and tells me not to overexert myself. I’ve been so sick, she reminds me.

  Five minutes, girls.

  I hand Mia the laser we’ve been painting with and she points it at the wall. The figures M1A appear in an array of colors—her name, bright and vivid—and then a horse jumps out from a cloud of glitter behind it. It would gallop over us if it were real.

  Mia is very good at art and most subjects, especially the ones that don’t require speaking. She uses these skills to entertain me when I’m sick, and though it’s true I’ve been sick for some time, I don’t feel sick now, not like I did before my last surgery. I feel like I’m riding that big sparkling horse that’s bounding across the walls and have all the energy of a healthy girl. Mia never bolts around noisily or cries or doesn’t eat her vegetables. She hides her energy inside her like a secret. She is, as Mother puts it, quite nearly a model child. If she could speak, I’ve heard Father say. If she could speak.