Uncanny Magazine Issue 39

by Lynne M. Thomas

  I don’t know what Tris means, but Simon nods. “A passage through space, that’s what I heard.”

  “That is incorrect!”

  The three of us snap our heads around, startled to see the glassman so close. His eyes whirr with excitement. “The Designated Area Project is not what you refer to as a wormhole, which are in fact impractical as transportation devices.”

  Simon shivers and looks down at his feet. My lips feel swollen with regret—what if he thinks we’re corrupted? What if he notices Simon’s left hand? But Tris raises her chin, stubborn and defiant at the worst possible time—I guess the threat of that glassman hospital is making her too crazy to feel anything as reasonable as fear.

  “Then what is it?” she asks, so plainly that Simon’s mouth opens, just a little.

  Our glassman stutters forward on his delicate metallic legs. “I am not authorized to tell you,” he says, clipped.

  “Why not? It’s the whole goddamned reason all your glassman reapers and drones and robots are swarming all over the place, isn’t it? We don’t even get to know what the hell it’s all for?”

  “Societal redevelopment is one of our highest mission priorities,” he says, a little desperately.

  I lean forward and grab Tris’s hand as she takes a sharp, angry breath. “Honey,” I say, “Tris, please.”

  She pulls away from me, hard as a slap, but she stops talking. The glassman says nothing; just quietly urges us a few yards away from Simon. No more corruption on his watch.

  Night falls, revealing artificial lights gleaming on the horizon. Our glassman doesn’t sleep. Not even in his own place, I suppose, because whenever I check with a question his eyes stay the same and he answers without hesitation. Maybe they have drugs to keep themselves awake for a week at a time. Maybe he’s not human. I don’t ask—I’m still a little afraid he might shoot me for saying the wrong thing, and more afraid that he’ll start talking about Ideal Societal Redevelopment.

  At the first hint of dawn, Simon coughs and leans back against the railing, catching my eye. Tris is dozing on my shoulder, drool slowly soaking my shirt. Simon flexes his hands, now free. He can’t speak, but our glassman isn’t looking at him. He points to the floor of the truckbed, then lays himself out with his hands over his head. There’s something urgent in his face. Something knowledgeable. To the glassmen he’s a terrorist, but what does that make him to us? I shake Tris awake.

  “Libs?”

  “Glassman,” I say, “I have a question about societal redevelopment deliverables.”

  Tris sits straight up.

  “I would be pleased to hear it!” the glassman says.

  “I would like to know what you plan to do with my sister’s baby.”

  “Oh,” the glassman says. The movement of his pupils is hardly discernible in this low light, but I’ve been looking. I grab Tris by her shoulder and we scramble over to Simon.

  “Duck!” he says. Tris goes down before I do, so only I can see the explosion light up the front of the convoy. Sparks and embers fly through the air like a starfall. The pipeline glows pink and purple and orange. Even the strafe of bullets seems beautiful until it blows out the tires of our truck. We crash and tumble. Tris holds onto me, because I’ve forgotten how to hold onto myself.

  The glassmen are frozen. Some have tumbled from the over- turned trucks, their glass and metal arms halfway to their guns. Their eyes don’t move, not even when three men in muddy camouflage lob sticky black balls into the heart of the burning convoy.

  Tris hauls me to my feet. Simon shouts something at one of the other men, who turns out to be a woman.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask.

  “EMP,” Simon says. “Knocks them out for a minute or two. We have to haul ass.”

  The woman gives Simon a hard stare. “They’re clean?”

  “They were prisoners, too,” he says.

  The woman—light skinned, close-cropped hair—hoists an extra gun, unconvinced. Tris straightens up. “I’m pregnant,” she says. “And ain’t nothing going to convince me to stay here.”

  “Fair enough,” the woman says, and hands Tris a gun. “We have ninety seconds. Just enough time to detonate.”

  Our glassman lies on his back, legs curled in the air. One of those sticky black balls has lodged a foot away from his blank glass face. It’s a retaliatory offense to harm a drone. I remember what they say about brain damage when the glassmen are connected. Is he connected? Will this hurt him? I don’t like the kid, but he’s so young. Not unredeemable. He saved my life. I don’t know why I do it, but while Tris and the others are distracted, I use a broken piece of the guard rail to knock off the black ball. I watch it roll under the truck, yards away. I don’t want to hurt him; I just want my sister and me safe and away.

  “Libs!” It’s Tris, looking too much like a terrorist with her big black gun. Dad taught us both to use them, but the difference between us is I wish that I didn’t know how, and Tris is glad.

  I run to catch up. A man idles a pickup ten yards down the road from the convoy.

  “They’re coming back on,” he says.

  “Detonating!” The woman’s voice is a birdcall, a swoop from high to low. She presses a sequence of buttons on a remote and suddenly the light ahead is fiercer than the sun and it smells like gasoline and woodsmoke and tar. I’ve seen plenty enough bomb wreckage in my life; I feel like when it’s ours it should look different. Better. It doesn’t.

  Tris pulls me into the back of the pickup and we’re bouncing away before we can even shut the back door. We turn off the highway and drive down a long dirt road through the woods. I watch the back of the woman’s head through the rear window. She has four triangular scars at the base of her neck, the same as Bill’s.

  Something breaks out of the underbrush on the side of the road. Something that moves unnaturally fast, even on the six legs he has left. Something that calls out, in that stupid, naive, inhuman voice:

  “Stop the vehicle! Pregnant one, do not worry, I will—”

  “Fuck!” Tris’s terror cuts off the last of the speech. The car swerves, tossing me against the door. I must not have latched it properly, because next thing I know I’m tumbling to the dirt with a thud that jars my teeth. The glassman scrambles on top of me without any regard for the pricking pain of his long, metallic limbs.

  “Kill that thing!” It’s a man, I’m not sure who. I can’t look, pinioned as I am.

  “Pregnant one, step down from the terrorist vehicle and I will lead you to safety. There is a Reaper Support Flyer on its way.”

  He grips me between two metallic arms and hauls me up with surprising strength. The woman and Simon have guns trained on the glassman, but they hesitate—if they shoot him, they have to shoot me. Tris has her gun up as well, but she’s shaking so hard she can’t even get her finger on the trigger.

  “Let go of me,” I say to him. He presses his legs more firmly into my side.

  “I will save the pregnant one,” he repeats, as though to reassure both of us. He’s young, but he’s still a glassman. He knows enough to use me as a human shield.

  Tris lowers the gun to her side. She slides from the truck bed and walks forward.

  “Don’t you dare, Tris!” I yell, but she just shakes her head. My sister, giving herself to a glassman? What would Dad say? I can’t even free a hand to wipe my eyes. I hate this boy behind the glass face. I hate him because he’s too young and ignorant to even understand what he’s doing wrong. Evil is good to a glassman. Wrong is right. The pregnant one has to be saved.

  I pray to God, then. I say, God, please let her not be a fool. Please let her escape.

  And I guess God heard, because when she’s just a couple of feet away she looks straight at me and smiles like she’s about to cry. “I’m sorry, Libs,” she whispers. “I love you. I just can’t let him take me again.”

  “Pregnant one! Please drop your weapon and we will—” And then she raises her gun and shoots.

  M
y arm hurts. Goddamn, it hurts, like there’s some small, toothy animal burrowing inside. I groan and feel my sister’s hands, cool on my forehead.

  “They know the doctor,” she says. “That Esther that Bill told us about, remember? She’s a regular doctor, too, not just abortions. You’ll be fine.”

  I squint up at her. The sun has moved since she shot me; I can hardly see her face for the light behind it. But even at the edges I can see her grief. Her tears drip on my hairline and down my forehead.

  “I don’t care,” I say, with some effort. “I wanted you to do it.”

  “I was so afraid, Libs.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll get home now, won’t we?”

  “Sure,” I say. If it’s there.

  The terrorists take us to a town fifty miles from Annapolis. Even though it’s close to the city, the glassmen mostly leave it alone. It’s far enough out from the pipeline, and there’s not much here, otherwise: just a postage stamp of a barley field, thirty or so houses and one of those large, old, whitewashed barn-door churches. At night, the town is ghost empty.

  Tris helps me down from the truck. Even that’s an effort. My head feels half-filled with syrup. Simon and the others say their goodbyes and head out quickly. It’s too dangerous for fighters to stay this close to the city. Depending on how much the glassmen know about Tris and me, it isn’t safe for us either. But between a baby and a bullet, we don’t have much choice.

  Alone, now, we read the church’s name above the door:

  Esther Zion Congregation Church, Methodist.

  Tris and I look at each other. “Oh, Christ,” she says. “Did Bill lie, Libby? Is he really so hung up on that sin bullshit that he sent me all the way out here, to a church …”

  I lean against her and wonder how he ever survived to come back to us. It feels like a gift, now, with my life half bled out along the road behind. “Bill wouldn’t lie, Tris. Maybe he got it wrong. But he wouldn’t lie.”

  The pews are old but well-kept. The prayer books look like someone’s been using them. The only person inside is a white lady, sweeping the altar.

  “Simon and Sybil sent you,” she says, not a question. Sybil—we never even asked the woman’s name.

  “My sister,” we both say, and then, improbably, laugh.

  A month later, Tris and I round Bishop’s Head and face north. At the mouth of our estuary, we aren’t close enough to see Toddville, let alone our home, but we can’t see any drones either. The weather is chillier this time around, the water harder to navigate with the small boat. Tris looks healthy and happy; older and younger. No one will mistake her for twenty-five again, but there’s nothing wrong with wisdom.

  The doctor fixed up my arm and found us an old, leaky rowboat when it was clear we were determined to go back. Tris has had to do most of the work; her arms are starting to look like they belong to someone who doesn’t spend all her time reading. I think about the harvest and hope the bombs didn’t reap the grain before we could. If anyone could manage those fields without me, Bill can. We won’t starve this winter, assuming reapers didn’t destroy everything. Libby ships the oars and lets us float, staring at the deep gray sky and its reflection on the water that seems to stretch endlessly before us.

  “Bill will have brought the harvest in just fine,” I say.

  “You love him, don’t you?”

  I think about his short, patchy hair. That giant green monster he brought back like a dowry. “He’s good with the old engines. Better than me.”

  “I think he loves you. Maybe one of you could get around to doing something about it?”

  “Maybe so.”

  Tris and I sit like that for a long time. The boat drifts toward shore, and neither of us stop it. A fish jumps in the water to my left; a heron circles overhead.

  “Dad’s probably out fishing,” she says, maneuvering us around. “We might catch him on the way in.”

  “That’ll be a surprise! Though he won’t be happy about his boat.”

  “He might let it slide. Libby?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You aren’t sorry if you’d do it again,” I say. “And I’m not sorry if I’d let you.”

  She holds my gaze. “Do you know how much I love you?” We have the same smile, my sister and I. It’s a nice smile, even when it’s scared and a little sad.

  © 2013 by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2013. Also published in Reconstruction (Small Beer Press). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Alaya Dawn Johnson is a Nebula award-winning short story writer and author of seven novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent novel for adults, Trouble the Saints, was released in July 2020 from Tor books. A short story collection, Reconstruction, was released in January 2021 from Small Beer Press. Her young adult novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, while her novel Love Is the Drug won the Andre Norton/Nebula Award for Middle Grade/Young Adult fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, A Phoenix First Must Burn, Feral Youth, and Zombies vs. Unicorns. She lives in Mexico where she received a master’s degree with honors in Mesoamerican Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for her thesis on pre-Columbian fermented food and its role in the religious-agricultural calendar.

  Deadly Frocks and Other Tales of Murder Clothes

  by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Recently, while working on a murder mystery novel involving green dye, I fell down a rabbit-hole of historical research about arsenic green, and the deadly ballgowns of the 19th century.

  I’ve always loved bright green clothing, so I was fascinated to read about the Victorian passion for that particular colour, how delighted they were with the bold pigment that defied the more muted shades of green previously available…so delighted that they kept wearing ‘emerald green’ garments despite the known danger to themselves and (more crucially) to the workers who made those clothes.

  In 1861, Matilda Scheurer, a 19-year-old maker of artificial flowers, died tragically of arsenic poisoning. Her job had involved blowing arsenic powder onto headdresses to colour the petals, which meant she inhaled a great deal of the poison over a long period of time. In February 1862, a year after Matilda’s gruesome demise, renowned chemist Dr. A.W. Hoffman published an article in the Times called “The Dance of Death.” His work drew public attention to the huge weight of poison carried in garments like headdresses, ballgowns, and so on, in order to achieve that perfect shade of vivid green. Cartoons of skeletons dancing or displaying their fancy clothes appeared in publications like Punch, and even the British Medical Journal weighed in on the topic, also finding it humorous:

  “Well may the fascinating wearer of it be called a killing creature. She actually carries in her skirts poison enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may meet with in half a dozen ball-rooms.” British Medical Journal, February 1862

  At this point, arsenic green had been fashionable for decades. Queen Victoria herself was sketched in a famous green ballgown six years earlier. Factory workers had likewise been reporting symptoms such as open sores, stained hands, vomiting, and so on, sometimes leading to death.

  The dangers of poison in everyday items of Victorian England was a controversial, highly-discussed issue at the time, with various items such as wallpaper, cosmetics, and soap also featuring arsenic—given how often newspapers called attention to this shocking fact, the results from Hoffman’s study of the fabric industry were neither controversial nor surprising. His investigation was funded by the Ladies’ Sanitary Association…the same upper-class women who were now being blamed and shamed in the media for their vanity, responding to long-held beliefs that there was something sinister in the dye-vats.

  If it involves ladies and fashion, of course, it counts as frivolous even (or especially!) if it’s al
so deadly. Hence the reporting in the media so often making a joke of it, even as they accused the women of cruelty and murder.

  Knowing that these poisons were not only present in the fabrics, but actively causing harm—far more to the people (mostly women) working with the pigments than to the men and women wearing them—did not slow down the industry. In fact, a new fashion—one for dresses decorated with artificial fruits and vegetables—began in Britain a year after Dr. Hoffman’s findings were discovered… and yes, the combination of toxic green pigments with dresses that looked edible did actually lead to some horrific accidents involving children, thanks for asking.

  Arsenic dye was not the only 19th century clothes-related hazard, from crinolines catching fire (at the rate of three deaths on average per week according to the New York Times in 1858) to the mercury poisoning that was common to the hatter trade, another sinister fashion joke famously captured for posterity with the Mad Hatter character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Deaths and illnesses caused by the fashion industry, however, were talked about far more as a female issue than one affecting everyone. The narrative around the risks of women’s clothing was quite different to that of men’s clothing…and that gender divide became far more dramatic as the 19th century progressed. The female victims of fashion-related illness or death in Victorian England were usually considered to be at fault—such as Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, who died in a tragic crinoline conflagration—for caring about frivolous things in the first place.

  There’s something weirdly mythic about the idea of wearing a garment that could kill you. From Ancient Greek legends (Heracles met his death by a shirt soaked in the blood of a poisoned centaur; Medea murdered her rival with a toxic gown that burned like acid) to fairy tales (Snow White suffering through a deadly too-tight corset, the Red Shoes that dance their wearer to death…), the idea of a beautiful garment that kills its owner is both memorable and dramatic.

  Especially when that death is intentional. And we’re back to gender stereotyping, of course, because historically poison has always been framed as a woman’s weapon. Over the centuries, women who are publicly disliked have often had accusations of poisoning used to damage their reputations, along with accusations of adultery and witchcraft.