Aeon Ten Read online

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  Scorpius Digital Publishing

  www.aeonmagazine.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Scorpius Digital Publishing

  First published in 2007, 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  www.aeonmagazine.com

  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editor

  L. Blunt Jackson

  AEon Ten is copyright © 2007, Scorpius Digital Publishing, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

  Cover photo: NASA/JPL/Cornell—Endurance Crater, Mars

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  CONTENTS

  Novelettes

  Ex Muro ... Dana William Paxson

  The Scarecrow's Bride ... Marina Fitch

  Short Stories

  Angels Over Israel ... Lavie Tidhar

  The Art of Memory ... Howard V. Hendrix

  The Case of the Detective's Smile ... Mark Bourne

  The City in Morning ... Carrie Richerson

  Dia Chjermen's Tale ... Kij Johnson

  The War Inside ... Mark Budz

  Another Saturday Night in Georgia ... Lorelei Shannon

  Departments

  Signals ... Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  AEternum ... The AEon Editors

  Parallax ... Dr. Rob Furey

  Our Authors

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  CONTENTS

  CONTENTS

  SIGNALS TEN by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  AETERNUM TEN

  Ex Muro by Dana William Paxson

  Angels Over Israel: Three Slides by Lavie Tidhar

  The Art of Memory by Howard V. Hendrix

  The Scarecrow's Bride by Marina Fitch

  The Case of the Detective's Smile by Mark Bourne

  The City in Morning by Carrie Richerson

  Dia Chjermen's Tale: the Delmoni Atrocity by Kij Johnson

  The War Inside by Mark Budz

  Another Saturday Night in Georgia by Lorelei Shannon

  Our Authors

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  SIGNALS TEN by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  It seems that every other column I write for Aeon is about death. The last few years have been hard on the SF genre. We've lost some of our best writers, and in November, we lost not only one of our best writers, but one of the best people I've ever known: Jack Williamson.

  Jack died in Portales, New Mexico, at the age of 98. He arrived in New Mexico ninety years ago in a covered wagon. He lived to see the space program. Heck, he lived to be invited to the launches of various spaceships.

  Jack wrote eight novels after he turned 90. He published his first short story in 1928, for Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. Jack wasn't just a pioneer in the Old West, he was a pioneer in science fiction—and he wrote some of the classics of the genre. (My favorite is his non-sf novel, Darker than you Think.)

  Jack was the kindest man I've ever met. Even in a critique session, he refused to say something negative. He made certain he said something kind and true about the work before him. I've been in critique sessions with Jack where the nicest thing he could say about a writer's manuscript was “beautiful typing.” But he would say that, at least, and the writer would leave happy.

  But I don't want to write sorrowfully about Jack. Jack told friends a few days before he died that he was ready to face the next adventure. He was looking forward—which Jack always did.

  In March of 2001, my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I were invited to be speakers at the Williamson Lectureship. Eastern New Mexico University in Portales put on the lectureship every year (including this past year) since Jack retired his teaching post there. The year we came, we were joined by SciFi.com's Scott Edelman and the marvelous SF writer, Connie Willis.

  The lecture hall at ENMU was full of young students and a few recognizable faces (SF writers, well-known scientists, sf scholars and some old friends). The discussion, on the future of science, was lively—one of the most interesting I've ever been involved in.

  And what struck me then—and still amazes me now—is that the most informed person in that room about the future of science was none other than Jack himself.

  Too often, I've been around elderly folk who talk about the old days or refuse to pay attention to new things because they're happy with their rut. My own beloved grandmother refused to use a new television the family had bought for her because she preferred her old tube television (although she did think Mr. Coffee was the best invention ever).

  When I met Jack more than twenty years ago, he was already elderly by anyone's definition. He still stood taller than me in those days, but his body had bent into a question mark. Over the years, the question mark remained, but by the end, I could look down on his wispy white hair. Jack's body grew older, but his mind never did.

  The questions in 2001 were all about the future—and many of them came from Jack. He studied, not just as a science fiction writer trying to keep up with an element of his craft, but with the enthusiasm of a man who loved life in all its incarnations—who had seen many of those incarnations—and knew that there were wonderful things to come.

  Even at the age of 93, he was still enthusiastic about what was ahead.

  When I read his most recent novel, Stonehenge Gate, in its Analog serialization, I realized that Jack saw life as a broad continuum. People left, but the continuum remained. Life, for him, was a stream, constantly changing, but always moving, always interesting.

  Jack was, and is, perhaps our purest SF writer. Stonehenge Gate is adventure fiction with a touch of the pulps where Jack got his start, but it is also a meditation on individual lives and love and the influence a person can have, not just on his own culture, but on one he couldn't even imagine when he was a child.

  And that's Jack. As a human being, he had a tremendous impact on me. As a teacher, he gently molded generations of young minds. But as a writer, he influenced people the world over—for nearly eighty years.

  What a legacy.

  We would be remiss, in discussing the life of this very important man, if we do not discuss the future. For the future was the source of his inspiration and the place he boldly walked toward.

  Even as he faced his last great adventure.

  So look toward the future. Help preserve it for those who'll come after us.

  Do it to honor one of the great pioneers of the future: Jack Williamson.

  Whom I will miss more than I can say.

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  AETERNUM TEN

  Buried Treasures

  The greatest talents often lie buried out of sight.

  -Titus Maccius Plautus

  Plautus (254-184 BCE) was the most famous Roman playwright of his century. The mob loved him and his broad, ribald
comedies that made heroes of dirty old men, clever slaves, and entertaining low-lifes of various stripes. The patricians were not amused, at least not publicly. A millennium later his works were to be a major influence on Shakespeare, Molière, and Fielding. More recently he inspired Stephen Sondheim, author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was based on several of Plautus's comedies, 21 of which still exist in some form. The other 100 or so are, like Plautus, buried out of sight. By the time he was a century in the ground he was nearly forgotten in his own country, and only regained popularity among theater scholars much, much later.

  As Plautus could attest, being lost is easier than being found, and more of us (and our creative works) are obscure than famous. More literature is buried than unearthed, and more literati too, we suspect. But what lies buried is not always bones; sometimes it's gold.

  So loving a challenge as we do on our more ambitious days (on the others we love lying about on the sofa watching CSI reruns), we recently decided to take our treasure map, go digging in the SF/F field, and see what we could turn up. The result is this collection of nine wonderful stories you may not have seen. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed finding them.

  We open our curtain on Dana William Paxson's dark and edgy novelette “Ex Muro,” about a future serial killer set free on an unsuspecting city. Next onstage is “Angels Over Israel: Three Slides,” where Lavie Tidhar shows us the unsuspected lives (and deaths) of heavenly messengers. Howard V. Hendrix portrays a frighteningly-believable fundamentalist future and a valuable lesson from the past in “The Art of Memory."

  Act Two brings on “The Scarecrow's Bride,” a novelette by Marina Fitch, in which love and devotion are found in unexpected ground, Mark Bourne's “The Case of the Detective's Smile,” in which a melancholy investigator receives an agreeable gift, and Carrie Richerson's “The City in Morning,” in which a quantum event does what quantum events do: create something new and wonderful.

  In Act Three Kij Johnson relates a tale of worlds lost and rebuilt: “Dia Chjermen's Tale: the Delmoni Atrocity,” Mark Budz rips loose the flimsy curtain between reality and nightmare in “The War Inside,” and Lorelei Shannon brings down the house lights and flips on the headlights with “Another Saturday Night in Georgia."

  So ground has been disturbed, treasure uncovered, and gold obtained. Our job here is done. Enjoy Aeon Ten.

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  Ex Muro by Dana William Paxson

  "Ex Muro” originally appeared in Dana William Paxson's short fiction collection Neuron Tango from Scorpius Digital Publishing.

  Author's Note: “What happens to the mind of a serial killer after that mind has been in prison for ten thousand years? Jono is one possible answer, but at first he repelled me. The first few pages of this story sat untouched for several years, and then I learned to hear the rest of Jono's dreadful thoughts and moves. His tale is removed from our world by light-years and millennia, but its street children are near-kin to the technosavages of war-torn countries we know all too well. As I wrote down Jono's words, I began to wonder: Is he lying to me? Just how far from us is he, really?"

  ELECTRIC DAWN APPROACHES. I stretch my arm out before me into the corridor dark, luxuriating. The skin of my upper arm tightens and thins out where it becomes one with the wall in which I am embedded. It tightens and thins, but it refuses to break. Damn its strength!

  Every so often in the slow-walking years I tried to rip it, tear myself free with these long heavy fingernails, and walk out into this darkness like those people who pass by me once in a long time. Jono is my name, the name I forgot for too long. Jono, who took so many men and women and hollowed out their skins and stuffed them lifelike and put them back in their places in life to be found making little endless movements and shedding endless tears.

  Twelve thousand years imprisoned here, and no one remembers me, except to descend two or three hundred levels in this ageless underground City, to laugh and point and wonder at the man locked in the stone wall.

  I will make them all remember me again.

  I thrust my neck and jaw forward, straining against the bond between my toughened skin and the stone wall around me. This time I will stay uncaught, and I will take many human insides and make of them a single flesh creature, tubes and bags and vessels and cords and muscles and bones and nerves, a great heaving sentient thing to be left in the fountain at Aswal Narr. A living, sobbing memorial to my long power and skill as a maker. My ancient vats are waiting.

  I count the days in this underground world by the brightening and dimming of the corridor ceiling lights, synthetic memories of the sun seven hundred levels above this empty street. The last passer-by here, maybe ten years ago, an andro woman laughing and drunk with hallucins, left a shard of cryssteel on the floor. Since then, four thousand synthetic dawns have passed in this dusty stone hallway, and each day I reached for that tiny shard and came just short. Until today.

  The wall section that holds me is a miracle of elastic steel: a membrane of such flexibility that I can actually step outward into the street and dance little steps, bending down to touch the stone streetfloor, straining against the wall's pull. It is also a prison so secure that in twelve thousand years I have been unable to tear free. Even my diamond-alloy nails, harder than anything but cryssteel itself, are blunted and flawed from ripping at the membrane.

  Now, thanks to the leaping kick of a tiny streetmouse, the cryssteel shard bounced into my reach. I have withheld from myself an exquisite pleasure: to cradle this ultrasharp sliver of transparent metal in my fingers, plunge it into my membrane in just the right places, feel the pain of escape when I slice through and rip myself free.

  The woman had worn the shard at her wrist, maybe to use as a defense, maybe just because she liked the sparkle and gleam of its irregular facets, maybe to scar her lover. Now it lies in the darkness just within my span. I exult for a while, thanking her and the little rodent for their assistance.

  She is probably dead now, gone into the recycling vats with her short-lived andro genes, to be reborn out of elements into a new street woman for the wealthy to toy with. And the rodent, caught maybe by some predator itself now dead and recycled in the City's hungry engines, lives on in its elements, a part of the new woman.

  The thought amuses me. I laugh. Andro servants have their own little heaven in their heads, a kind of biological cyberspace; they don't care what humans do to them. Andros can fantasize themselves out of the city to any planet or setting they can imagine.

  I would have indeed enjoyed something like that to help me pass a few thousand years. The lights begin to glow a little. Dawn. I crouch and reach forward one more time. My fingers close on the shard. Yes—it is as sharp as I had thought. I prick the metal-strong skin at my left shoulder, and my bronze blood wells and trickles down my chest. No more will I be this living relief-sculpture, gray and trapped like the wall of stone around me. My limbs throb.

  I want to change my point of view, turn my gaze left and right along the street. I make the first exquisite cut around my head, where the skin leaves the vicinity of my skull to become part of the wall. The cryssteel sings pain to me as I outline my neck and head, sawing through my dermal prison.

  Air rushes in, burning into the uncovered flesh behind the wall's barrier. Screaming, I flay myself. Any of my own original skin is now long gone, absorbed by the preservation drugs they gave me, the gene drugs that made me able to feed only and forever on the photons of the hallway light. For a time, I will bathe in pure pain: an incentive to find a skin to replace the gift prison-hide that has so long armored me in here.

  My screams continue; no one is near enough at this hour to hear me. I saw quickly th
rough the last confining sheets of the flexible metal at my feet; I step free, and fall on my face. My legs barely work. To learn to use them again will take some time.

  The dawn lights become an underground sunrise. No one will come this way for hours. I twist in crawling pain to see my calf and buttock muscles, no skin covering them now. Slowly, carefully, I pull the prison-skin from my front. My exposed flesh—chest, face, neck, thighs, sex—burns now as if I have been set aflame. On the dusty stone floor fall dribbles of golden fluid: my eternal blood, another gift of the City's minions. No hemoglobin needed for a wall-prisoner.

  The pain lashes me to full attention, to fight my way to my feet, stagger back and forth, and school my muscles. Now, needing real blood again, I am thirsty. I know the old ways, the spiral stairs of the City's filthy airshafts; I stumble off to the left, toward a steel door in the wall of this corridor. It should be Shaft Arbonel. That shaft will take me to my walled-off home, ages after I closed the last crevices, knowing then that they would find me.

  Yes, say the door's faint dead runes, Arbonel. The door, rusted shut, gives way when I slam it with a hand, flies back, and bounces from the wall; its squeal mocks my hand's explosion of nerve lightning. The stink of the shaft boils out to me. I open my arms to the stench and stagger forward. Here in the shaft, darkness rules again, except for a pinpoint of light thousands of feet above me. That point is the sun of planetary morning. Sharp-toothed rats, interested in my scent, follow me now; I ascend the stair winding around the shaft, stopping to rest and breathe. No energy here. If I slip from the steps, and fail to splatter on the flights below me, I will die in the quickening slime ten thousand feet down.

  Even Jono the Corer can die.