Aeon Thirteen Read online

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  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editor

  L. Blunt Jackson

  Editorial Associate

  Jak Koke

  Editorial Assistant

  Stacey Janssen

  Æon Thirteen is copyright © 2008, Quintamid LLC, 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.

  “Pearl,” by Jeffe Kennedy was briefly published, by mistake, on the Abyss & Apex website. Below is a statement from Abyss & Apex editor Wendy Delmater.

  “This story was submitted to Abyss & Apex. Due to errors in communication stemming from email problems, and a mistake on the submissions log, Abyss & Apex published the story without authorization. Upon being notified of the problem by the writer, the story was removed. Abyss & Apex offers its sincerest apologies to the writer, and has revised its tracking system to prevent such an error from happening again. Abyss & Apex declines any credit as the originating publisher of the work.”

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  Pearl . . . Jeffe Kennedy

  One Avatar, Hold the Anchovies . . . S. Hutson Blount

  The Dam . . . Daniel Marcus

  Hit . . . Bruce McAllister

  Little Moon, Too, Goes Round . . . David Dumitru

  Swimming Back From Hell by Moonlight . . . Marissa K. Lingen

  Misery Loves . . . Craig D.B. Patton

  poetry

  What Do We Pay the Moon? . . . Greg Beatty

  Holiday . . . Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

  Departments

  Signals . . . Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Æternum . . . The Æon Editors

  Parallax . . . Dr. Rob Furey

  Our Authors

  The Future

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  Thirteen

  My French science fiction publisher, Bragelonne, has just published a collection of short stories. Called Science-Fiction 2007, the collection is a loss leader designed to promote Bragelonne’s new science fiction book line.

  “The science fiction short story is dying in France,” my publisher told me over a very nice lunch last fall. “We are doing what we can to save it.”

  Including giving this quite lovely collection away for free. (French readers can order it at www.bragelonne.fr. In fact I’ll put ordering information throughout except for books which y’all know you can find at www.amazon.com)

  Things aren’t that bad in the U.S. Publishers don’t have to give short story anthologies away here to encourage interest in the SF short story. For all the doom and gloom I spout in this column about science fiction book publishing, I find that I cannot be gloomy about the science fiction short story—at least not in America.

  In the past year, at least three new science fiction anthology series have started. Lou Anders’ Fast Forward, George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse are all reviving a long-standing tradition in the SF field—the unthemed SF anthology series.

  The unthemed SF anthology series had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s with Damon Knight’s Orbit series and Terry Carr’s Universe series. Other anthology series, like New Dimensions, kept the tradition going into the early 1980s. My husband Dean Wesley Smith and I revived the tradition in the late 1980s with Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.

  What these anthologies did was catch the field’s attention, introduce new writers into the mix, and shake up existing science fiction—things that can’t be done effectively at the novel length.

  Themed SF anthologies have been around equally long, and are still going strong. From the Tekno Books anthologies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and company in Wisconsin and published through Daw, to the annual themed anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois and a partner (this year’s was with Jonathon Strahan, and called The New Space Opera), themed anthologies appeal to tastes ranging from hard science fiction to humorous SF.

  And we can’t forget the digest magazines whose demise has been predicted as long as I’ve been in the field. Asimov’s (www.asimovs.com) has just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Analog (www.analogsf.com) is still going strong, and the field’s longest running digest magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (www.sfsite.com/fsf), will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary in 2009.

  Add to these e-zines, like the one you’re currently reading, or webzines like Baen’s Universe (www.baensuniverse.com), and American science fiction short stories are in a kind of rennaissance.

  And I’m only counting original SF stories, not reprints. From the various short story collections published through specialty press houses like Golden Gryphon (www.goldengryphon.com) to the once-experimental, now long-standing download site Fictionwise (www.fictionwise.com) where the customer can purchase a single story, the short fiction market is thriving. And that doesn’t count the truly experimental, like author podcasts, or brand new sites for MP3 players, like Escape Pod (www.escapepod.org).

  While France might be struggling to keep the science fiction short story alive, other countries are doing as well as the United States. In Colombia, Hernan Ortiz and Viviana Trujillo just published a fantastic (and beautiful) multimedia SF collection called Agua/Cero: Una Antología de Proyecto Líquido. In addition to the anthology itself, Ortiz and Trujillo commissioned music to accompany the stories. Reading Agua/Cero is a complete sensory experience. (www.proyectoliquido.net).

  Spain conducts an annual novella contest, open to writers in four languages—Spanish, Catalàn, English and French—through the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. The winning stories, which come from all over the world, are published in an original anthology each year called Premio UPC. (www.edicionesb.com)

  Australia, which in addition to some of the best SF magazines such as Aurealis (www.aurealis.com.au), has a long tradition of original anthologies, many of which are now being published in the U.S. Canada’s long-running On Spec magazine (www.onspec.ca) has discovered some of the best Canadian writers of the past twenty years, and has helped the entire country develop a strong SF tradition of its own—independent of the U.S. (which is sometimes hard for Canada to do).

  And Great Britain, which has always had a thriving SF community, is the home of Interzone (www.ttapress.com), one of the best SF magazines, as well as a host of others—an entire rackfull of short fiction magazines, as I noted on my trip there last fall.

  While the state of the science fiction novel is in flux, the SF short story is healthy and growing. Part of this is, I think, due to SF’s short fiction roots. SF works extremely well in the short length. In many genres (romance comes to mind), the short story feels like a truncated novel. Even mystery short stories (one of my favorite forms) can go horribly wrong in the hands of an author who doesn’t understand that the short form is different from the long form. (For someone who understands both short and long mystery fiction, pick up the work of Jeffrey Deaver (www.jeffreydeaver.com)

  But SF short stories don’t have to do just one thing such as present a crime and solve it like a mystery does, or show the development of an entire romantic relationship like a romance does. The SF short story can explore a strange new world or it can introduce an alien culture. The SF short story can be a character study or it can be plot-heavy. It can incorporate a mystery or a romance, or both. It can be any length, be set in any time period (present, past, or future), and be located anywhe
re from Earth to the Moon and beyond.

  In France, the science fiction magazines lost their state funding and the anthologies didn’t sell as well as anticipated. Bragelonne says its anthology is doing quite well—but it’s not being sold. It’s a giveaway, designed to introduce readers to the unfamiliar SF form.

  If Bragelonne’s experiment works, it won’t just help their own publishing line. It’ll revive the SF short story market in one of the few developed countries where it’s not thriving.

  But here in the United States, we’re lucky to have such a strong SF short story market. Once I believed, like so many other people still do, that the short story was threatened. But I’ve heard about the demise of the science fiction short story for decades now, and yet there are more SF short stories being published in more venues and formats than ever before.

  SF readers appreciate the freedom the short story brings to their favorite genre. I think the SF short story will survive—in one format or another—for decades to come.

  Thirteen

  All You Need is…

  One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

  —Sophocles

  Sophocles lived to be ninety. Although we missed crossing paths with that worthy by a few years, and can’t recount his history with any degree of accuracy, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably long enough to have encountered love a time or two and to have taken its measure. Many authors of apt aphorisms take a more jaded view, but that’s not our view, and as we’re not constrained to give them equal time, we won’t.

  What does a brand-new human being need more than love? Nothing, and that’s a fact in our very personal book of facts. Thankfully most of them get a big heaping, pure, unconditional dose of it, at least in those early days before they learn to defy us. If we didn’t love them the moment they made their appearance we might well abandon them to wolves the first time they wake up screeching at 3 a.m. But we do. So we don’t. Of course things are simple at that point: love is made visible by feeding and cuddling and dry diapers. Later it gets complicated, and I think anyone who grows up into a reasonably okay human being should thank their clueless caretakers for giving it a go. That’s about all we can do as parents, and we get it wrong at least as often as we get it right, but it’s love that keeps us working at it.

  And it’s love that keeps us together, and love that finds a way, and all you need is love. And songwriters. And we grow up to find even more ways to love, and many, many more complications. Which valentine do you give the girl you really like? The least-sentimental one in the box, right? And if all that’s left are the stupid goopy ones, and the only name left on your list is Brenda Sakmyster, who’s six inches taller than you and broke your little toe when you did mixed dancing in gym class, and is the only girl in 6th grade with breasts, how can you go on? And how can you go on when you love and it’s not returned? And how about when it is? Then we’re really in trouble, ’cause then we actually have to give it a go, and…see above. I never said it would be easy. Just inescapable. Stop trying to escape. Stop it. Now.

  So love is a major thing then, not just in February where we find ourselves at the moment, but in all times and places to all people. It’s a huge, looming presence in life if you’ve got it, and perhaps even more so if you don’t got it. Its presence or absence makes and breaks us. Its forms mold us from swaddling-clothes to winding-sheets, and if there has to be one influence that stands out in our lives above and beyond (and over and under and in-between) all others, we vote for Love.

  Our Æon Thirteen authors have also voted for it, and we say well done to them. We love it when people agree with us.

  Jeffe Kennedy – whose first fiction sale this is – leads off this lovely Æon issue with a story of love all too human in “Pearl.”

  S. Hutson Blount delivers love and pepperoni in “One Avatar, Hold the Anchovies.”

  Daniel Marcus (“Echo Beach,” Æon Eight) shines a dark lantern on the abyss that is the absence of love and human charity in the town behind “The Dam.”

  Bruce McAllister (“The Passion: A Western,” Æon Seven) reveals a professional view of love human, divine, and otherwise in “Hit.”

  David Dumitru illuminates realities of post-human love in “Little Moon, Too, Goes Round.”

  Marissa K. Lingen (“Things We Sell to Tourists,” Æon Six, “Michael Banks, Home From the War,” Æon Nine), spins a tale of true love and true sacrifice in “Swimming Back From Hell by Moonlight.”

  And finally Craig D. B. Patton dishes up Love and Misery and their neighbors in “Misery Loves.”

  In addition you won’t want to miss our regular columnists: Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dr. Rob Furey, who as always give us something wonderful to wonder about, and also a couple of lovely poems by a couple of award-winning poets making return visits to our pages: Greg Beatty and Marcie Lynn Tentchoff.

  And while we’re examining the wisdom of great philosophers, we can’t resist passing along these words about the experience of love from Matt Groening:

  “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”

  Love,

  Your Friendly Æon Editors

  Pearl

  Jeffe Kennedy

  “‘Pearl’ came to me literally in a dream. I’ve long been interested in what other people experience in different kinds of bodies than what I was born with. It was thrilling to dream of being an extraordinarily beautiful woman, the kind that wields power over people through her beauty, even if only for a little while. The dream primarily revolved around the final scene. Writing the story was finding what events led her there.”

  THE DISCOVERY OF SCHNELL, the natural man, rang through our small world like an ancient gunpowder shot. The kind the books said made the ears ring and heart pound. So, yes, my heart thumped, pumping hot blood to my ears; my fingers trembled, weak and burning; and I definitely heard some kind of high whine when Casidy and Tomas first pulled Schnell out of the cubby, deep in the machine bowels.

  We were on the routine maintenance checks assigned to the younger people, those of us no longer children, but who aren’t full Techs. That day, we had descended to Level 137, which is the lowest that remains accessible. I understood even then, before Schnell taught me my own history, that there were levels built beneath that, but as far as any of us were concerned, our dungeon—Tomas and I favored the books with castles and prisoners in need of rescue—was the bottom of the world and anything below that might as well be mantle and magma. Actually, all of Obidion should be called the dungeon, since that’s the ancient word for an underground holding facility for criminals, but that’s a fine point.

  Tomas and I always volunteered for lower level duty, ever since the day when we were ten and found the secret compartment off an old chamber. Tomas had been showing off for me, kicking the old metal walls to make bigger and bigger dents. With a soft whoomp, one dent became a hole and old air sifted out. Inside we found stories, more and better than any we had made up.

  Walkways in Obidion wound on narrow footing between the arching walls of machinery. The maintenance consoles doubled as handholds, so we stalked along, hands outstretched on either side gliding along the gleaming metal rails, our feet narrowly planted one in front of another. If I looked up, I could see the intermittent walkways of other levels, lights ascending to an infinite perspective. There was something of a drop-off beneath us, but if I shone my wristlight down, it was clear that the metal banks curved together, seams that knit irrevocably. The bottom of the world. Or so we thought, until we heard a voice inexplicably below us.

  “Faustus!” Tomas yelped. “Calling from the pit of hell…”

  “Whoever that is,” Casidy said, not a volunteer for this level and not a fan of our games. She pushed past him, “Just some Tech who came down here to fix something and got stuck.”

  “But who?” I asked. “Anyone away from Co
re without assignment longer than two hours would set off the Recover Alarms up top—we’ve been down here longer than that.”

  “Well, no one has passed us, and no one lives down here,” Casidy said.

  “Nobody but us chickens,” Tomas inserted, to be met with Casidy’s blank glare.

  “You should have read some of those old documents we found, Casidy,” I said. “Maybe you would’ve learned something.”

  “Those were interdicted texts in a sealed-off area,” Casidy began, her voice pitching higher, until another, louder shout interrupted her.

  I lagged behind, my precognitive heart already beginning its symbolic pounding, while Tomas and Casidy scanned the walls and floor with their wristlights. They located the old hatch, and blood whistled in my ears. Tomas wanted to try kicking it in. Casidy overruled him and searched the Core database for the computer command to open it. And blue eyes blinked up from below.

  They each grabbed an arm, helping him lever up and out of the narrow mouth. His gangling legs doubled up to his chest as his feet thunked up to the walkway. Once his purchase was secure, he flashed eggshell teeth and turned his hands over, changing the grip so that he clasped their hands, and with one pull stood beside them, raising locked fists up in triumph. There they stand in my mind still: pale, hygienic Casidy and rippling dark Tomas, flanking the red-haired giant, hands raised above their heads like children clinging to their father.

  They were as stunned as I, though they had done more than stand and wonder. None of us had ever seen a new adult person before. And unencoded people existed only in stories.

  The red man flared his chest, then exhaled.

  “Pwah!” He dropped the captive’s hands to run his own over their heads. “Thrilled to meet you, my friends—thought I’d be crawling through the ducts of this beast forever!” Placing his hands on his hips, he arched backwards, the crackling of his vertebrae rattling against the metal walls. “The name is Schnell,” he boomed, reclaiming Tomas’ hand in a pumping shake, then turning to clasp Casidy’s translucent fingers, “And who is the shadow supervisor?”