Aeon Eleven Read online

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  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editor

  L. Blunt Jackson

  Æon Eleven 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.

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  Novelettes

  The Sky Spider . . . Melissa Tyler

  The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie . . . Rob Hunter

  Short Stories

  A Very Old Man With No Wings at All . . . Jay Lake

  The Underthing . . . Ryan Neal Myers

  Brighton Bay . . . January Mortimer

  The Hanging of the Greens . . . John A. Pitts

  Poetry

  Two Cairns for Apollo . . . Greg Beatty

  The Gate . . . Marge Simon

  The Cathedral of the Never-Was . . . Mikal Trimm

  Passing Beneath Stars . . . Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

  Departments

  Signals . . . Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Æternum . . . The Æon Editors

  Parallax . . . Dr. Rob Furey

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  Eleven

  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Judy Jetson. Yes, that Judy Jetson, the teenager of the cartoon family with her perky blond ponytail and her impossibly thin waist.

  Mostly her impossibly thin waist.

  Because Judy Jetson is a visual example of how we science fiction writers missed a major societal change, one that was obviously coming, if any of us bothered to look.

  Here we are, nearly at the end of the first decade of the new century, and we are so blasé about outer space that we no longer watch the space walks with rapt fascination or care all that much when yet another rover lands on Mars. Our astronauts float around an international space station, for heavens’ sake, and we shrug it off like it’s an every day occurrence.

  Because it is.

  Granted, we don’t have the flying cars, but we carry computers in our pockets (what do you think your high-end cell phone is?). We argue about the viability of cloning, but we don’t consider ourselves part of a science fiction universe.

  Yet, to little ole me, the kid who watched Judy Jetson tease her little brother and ditch her parents like any normal teenager, we do live in a science fiction universe.

  Only no one except high end models have impossibly thin waists. Our waists are impossibly fat. The culture has shifted. In hindsight, the shift was obvious.

  How did SF miss it?

  I mean, it would be logical for good old Judy Jetson to have an impossibly fat waist. She never exercised. She hardly lifted a finger. Even if she ate the prescribed number of food pills every day, she probably would have gained weight—unless there was some magic weight loss potion in those pills as well as the necessary nutrients.

  I’ve been looking backwards because somehow in the past twenty years, I gained 60 pounds. That’s three pounds per year, less than the average American, who gains five every year. I’ve been fighting this weight gain since I turned thirty, mostly with exercise, but I didn’t realize I’d been losing the battle until my doctor complimented me.

  Yes, complimented me. She congratulated me on remaining the same weight for three years running. In other words, she complimented me for not gaining weight.

  Somehow that got through instead of her predecessor’s admonitions to lose the weight. In response, I stammered, “Is staying the same weight unusual?”

  “I never see it,” she said. “Everyone gains.”

  Well, I answered the wake up call and have so far lost thirty-six of those sixty pounds. And each half pound loss is a struggle. I added food portion control to my exercise routine and tried to figure out where I had gone wrong.

  And, it turns out, where I went wrong is simple:

  I consistently ate three-quarters of everything on my plate.

  In the 1970s, when I hit my teen years, three-quarters of everything on my plate was three-quarters of what the scientists consider a normal portion. That left me room for a small dessert. In the 1980s, that three-quarters was the equivalent of a full portion. In the 1990s, three-quarters equaled a portion and a half. And I still ate my desserts.

  Those plate sizes changed—not just in restaurants where portions grew astronomically, but at home as well. The plates I bought in 1995 are a third again as large as the plates I got in 1979.

  But that’s not the only problem. The American farm breakfast, which I was raised on—eggs and hash browns and toast and sausage—has an entire day’s worth of calories. So does a cheeseburger and fries.

  Our parents and grandparents ate these meals. How come they didn’t get fat?

  They did. They pudged by middle age. Even though they’d been working on the farm—actual physical labor—or walking to their day jobs. They also died early of heart attacks and strokes because of those infamous clogged arteries.

  Okay. So how come they didn’t get fatter when they were younger?

  Simple.

  They smoked.

  Nicotine cuts the appetite. Smokers who quit gain weight because food suddenly tastes good.

  I don’t know what the statistics were for smoking in 1970 because only the cigarette manufacturers had them, but what I recall is that it was more unusual to be a nonsmoker in those dark days than it was to be a smoker. And most nonsmokers lived with smokers.

  When you look backwards, the causes of the societal weight gain are obvious: cut smoking by more than two-thirds, increase calories, and decrease exercise, and what do you get? A nation of fat people.

  A disaster of untold proportions is coming. Twenty percent of all children are overweight. That’s more than double the percentage of ten years ago. These kids are starting life with a health problem that the rest of us crept into.

  As a result, preventable diabetes has grown into an epidemic. Life spans have shorted dramatically. Everyone, it seems, is taking pills for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. And even that isn’t staving off the strokes and heart attacks.

  The health researchers are screaming about obesity rate, as are the doctors and the dieticians. But Americans aren’t listening.

  Partly because we can’t imagine this predicted future.

  And why can’t we imagine it?

  Because of Judy Jetson’s impossibly small waist.

  Even now, science fiction writers do not look at the implications of fat on our culture. We missed the trend for the past forty years, and we’re still missing it. Our science fiction characters are all thin—even those who never get out of their chairs. The jacked-in characters in the cyberpunk universe were scrawny, just like the folks who spent all their time not exercising on starships. Or the people who have robots to do their every task.

  SF writers haven’t tackled the usual SF question: What if this goes on? We’re leaving it to the real scientists and the doctors and the child advocates. We’re dropping the ball.

  I’m guilty of it too. I’m sure I haven’t faced this part of SF because doing so would have meant acknowledging that I had gained a third again as much of my body weight in 20 years. It would have meant understanding what I was seeing around me (and in my mirror). And that would have taken more self-awareness than I possessed.

  At least until the doc broke through my wall of denial wit
h her strange compliment.

  So now I stare at Judy Jetson’s impossibly thin waist and I wonder if there’s some kind of girdle in that space-age dress that sucks the fat out of her system and uses that fat to power those skyways.

  Because it’s a lot easier to think about Judy Jetson than it is to think about what the world will look like in thirty years if this trend continues.

  But I can tell you this—as sure as I am that we’re not going to substitute pills for food in the future, I’m equally sure of one other thing:

  We won’t look like Judy Jetson either.

  Eleven

  Family Matters

  The family has been around as long as multicellular life; in fact you might say it was responsible for it. Individual cells joined up and took on specialized roles in larger communities, eventually creating new and more adaptable life forms. Bees and ants have ’em, mammals and birds have ’em, and us naked apes have more kinds than anyone else, and more ideas about what that means.

  Time was, everyone thought they knew what “family” was, though each member of the set “everyone” almost certainly had a different and very personal notion of what it was they knew. Family has been thought of as multigenerational, then nuclear, and recently in danger of collapse as an institution if every single example didn’t consist of a man, a woman, and some children. Maybe a dog, if it wasn’t a gay dog. Every now and again there’s a movement among some progressive types to do away with it altogether as hopelessly decadent. Nothing much ever comes of that.

  In the last few years a lot of people with political power have taken it upon themselves to define family in such a way as to exclude a large percentage of humanity. They have deemed some members of society as injurious to the whole idea of family for nothing more than the desire to start one. They’ve even made a stab at rewriting the constitution not as a framework to guarantee rights, but to deny them in the name of protecting something that has never been in any real danger.

  Wise people have always known that the idea of family is a powerful one. No-one is immune to its tidal forces no matter how loving or traumatic (or both) their experience of family may have been. We may be compelled or repelled (or both), but we are not—not one of us—unaffected. We fall at random into our first family and as it sets about creating us to some extent or another we also begin to form our later ones—our families of choice and commonality, our packs, our tribes—and we integrate all these into the richness of our lives.

  Whether or not of common blood, families have lots in common: memories, feuds, impenetrable in-jokes, and if we’re lucky, forgiveness of our foibles. The best ones love us even if they don’t always like us. Like other multicellular organisms, they experience and learn, flex and adapt. They nourish us, encourage us, accept us. When they operate at their highest level they are not only our blood but our life-blood.

  “Writers will happen in the best of families,” says Rita Mae Brown. And in the worst, no doubt. And then—liars that they all are—they invent families of every stripe and weave out of the whole cloth of their imaginations. Sometimes those families don’t have much in common with the Cleavers or the Brady Bunch.

  The Æon Eleven authors present a look at the heart and soul of human association—the kind of look that can only come from the heart and soul of the artist. Melissa Tyler, whose first story sale leads off our issue, follows a family’s flight into the sky and into freedom with the help of “The Sky Spider.” Jay Lake, who most recently appeared in Æon Seven with “Whyte Boyz,” tells us of the first person to be thrust from the bosom of a mythical first family: “A Very Old Man With No Wings At All.” Ryan Neal Myers shows how two beings grow together—and apart—in “The Underthing.” Loyal siblings stand together against the might and magic of the constabulary in January Mortimer’s “Brighton Bay.” Devotion and sacrifice run down the bloodlines of the families in John A. Pitts’s “The Hanging of the Greens.” And Rob Hunter rounds off this issue with “The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie,” the story of a conflict between two families, neither of whom know the other exists.

  And don’t miss the latest contributions from our regular columnists—Dr. Rob Furey and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. As usual they have much that is enlightening, entertaining, and valuable to say about the relationship of science and fiction to human experience. We value them and all our fabulous authors above rubies as members of our far-flung Æon family.

  So sit down, relax, and spend some time with the family in Æon Eleven.

  The Sky Spider

  Melissa Tyler

  “Why this story? Because people should talk about the future of Africa. Because zeppelins are cool. And because I have seen “the eye” in a goofy, harmless face, and it was pretty darn terrifying.”

  THE SHIP’S SPIDER was called Death-Eye. At any rate, that’s what the captain and I called him. The crewmen called him Deadeye, and my mother called him Mario.

  It wasn’t until much later, when as a grown woman I read about the horrors of Africa in the mid-21st century—horrors I had not only survived but been happily oblivious to through most of my childhood—that I learned more about Spiders. The history books don’t call them Spiders, they call them “linemen,” and by that fact alone I’m quite sure the historians have never seen one in action.

  I’d never heard of Spiders or linemen, or perhaps even airships, before the day we packed up and left our home. Before that trip I’d been the sort of self-centered child who paid no attention to what adults were doing. So when my family and Mr. Muenda walked into the steep, rocky hills behind the American compound, I never thought to ask the reason. I only wanted to know why we weren’t going in Papa’s truck.

  We carried heavy backpacks, with Papa carrying both his and Manu’s. Mama said we couldn’t drive, but it wouldn’t take long to get there on foot. I was startled to hear her say that: as a ten year old girl, I’d just decided that “outdoors” was something left to little children, like my six-year-old brother. To me, my mother was the height of feminine achievement. She spent hours every week having her hair braided at the California Salon to make it curtain halfway down her back in ebony shimmers. Papa would call her “Adanech, my Zulu princess,” and she would look haughty and beautiful until they both laughed. She walked differently in the hiking boots than she did in her high heels, and I didn’t like it.

  It was mid-afternoon, but sunless and humid. I cried, largely from anger and frustration, most of the way up. We climbed the trails until we passed between tall rocks with moss and webs in the dark cracks, and then stood at the edge of a big open place where the grass lay flat and brown on the ground. In the middle of the field stood a solitary man, small and old with wrinkled skin the color of dry leaves and eyes like little black beetles.

  Mama touched Papa’s arm and said his name. “Jawara.” She used the tone of voice that usually meant “don’t”—as in “don’t forget and make us late” or “don’t eat the cake I meant for guests.” It sounded strange on the mountain. Then it was she, not Papa, who went to talk to the stranger. I didn’t hear much of what she said, or at least I don’t remember it.

  When Mama told the man to give her a blindfold, however, I paid attention. She wasn’t rude, but neither was she asking. Her voice was firm, unafraid, and sounded nothing like the polite and sophisticated woman I knew as my mother.

  “I have nothing,” the man told her. “I have no blindfold. I am very sorry, but I only have a radio and my gun. Death-Eye, the lady-mother wants a blindfold. Do you have cloth? A handkerchief, perhaps?”

  I looked around, but couldn’t see who he was talking to. In the drab afternoon light I saw only Mama, Papa and my little brother Manu standing near the small man, and of course mean old Mr. Muenda was holding my hand. He held it too tight and wouldn’t let go, even when I tugged my hand. He just said, “Chiku, be still,” as rude as could be.

  Papa was behind me, and I didn’t understand why he wasn’t the one holding my hand, why he hadn’t carried me whe
n I said I was tired, or most of all why he hadn’t said we could stay home where it was bright and warm.

  Then I saw the gray basket silently descending from the low pewter-colored clouds. Pearly-colored, small enough to fit in the bed of my father’s truck, and made of some stiff plastic ribbing, it should have seemed mysterious and magical, but it wasn’t. It was terribly frightening.

  “Death-Eye says there is no blindfold,” said the little man, although I hadn’t heard anyone answer. “He says you must now hurry to board my airship, he sees people coming this way. Please stand back.” The basket settled on the ground and the cable that was attached to it began to go slack. The man opened a door in the basket and stepped inside. He used one hand to turn a crank and the other to carefully guide the cable so it wound neatly around a spool.

  Mama said only, “Then you must give me your shirt. Be quick. Do it now.”

  A strange smile flickered across the man’s face. For a second he tilted his head and looked at Mama, then began to unbutton his shirt. It was all too strange for me: my mother was too pretty to have done any of the strong, forceful things she did that day.

  She went to the basket and took the shirt from the man. The cloth was light green like spring grass but the cuffs were frayed white. “Thank you. What is your name?”

  “I am Captain Gabriel Bhengu, lady. Why is it you want a blindfold, that I must give you the shirt off my back?” he asked. “Am I so very ugly you must hide your eyes?”

  “Not at all.” Mama was calmly folding the shirt so that it was one long length from one sleeve to the other. “You are rescuing my family, so I think you are very handsome. You and your friend Death-Eye, whom I look forward to meeting, and my good neighbor Muenda.” Mama turned to Mr. Muenda. “Please come with us.”