Aeon Fourteen Read online

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  Aeon Fourteen

  by AEon Authors

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  Science Fiction/Fantasy

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  Quintamid LLC

  www.aeonmagazine.com

  Copyright ©2008 by Quintamid Publishing

  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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  *Aeon Fourteen

  *Aeon Authors

  *Science Fiction/Fantasy

  © 2008, Quintamid Publishing

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  www.aeonmagazine.com

  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editors

  L. Blunt Jackson

  Stacey Janssen

  Editorial Associate

  Jak Koke

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  Æon Fourteen is copyright © 2008, Quintamid 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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  CONTENTS

  Signals Fourteen

  Aeternum Fourteen: Daydreams

  The March Wind by Davin Ireland

  The Diesel Mnemonic by Ryan Neil Myers

  Sweet Rocket by Jay Lake

  Wild Among Hares by Sarah L. Edwards

  Your Fairy Goth Mother by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff

  Parallax Fourteen: Archaea and Alien Real Estate

  Hard Rain at the Fortean Café by Lavie Tidhar

  The Diadem by Mikal Trimm

  Our Authors

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  Signals Fourteen

  Lately, critics, the blogosphere, and Those Whose Job It Is To Know have been complaining that SF feels retro. Sometimes I understand the comments—I wrote my own novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” with the science fiction of the past clearly in mind—but most often I don't understand those comments at all.

  But I had a surreal experience in January, one which made me think of the retro SF critics, and it made me wonder if they are aiming their criticism in the wrong direction.

  Let me explain.

  My husband and I were writer guests of the Space Coast Writers Conference and honestly, one of the main attractions of going to the conference (besides Florida's January weather) was the fact that it's held right near Kennedy Space Center.

  We flew in early and spent two full days at the center which, I have to tell you, was simply not enough time. For those of you who don't know, Kennedy Space Center is where our space shuttles launch from. Space scientists and NASA engineers share this lovely complex with alligators and manatees on one of the most beautiful parts of Florida's Coast.

  The center has a massive public area, which is a theme park for science fiction fans. You can ride a simulator of the space shuttle or walk through the mock-up of the space station that the astronauts actually practice in.

  The center's exhibits also feature the entire history of space travel using everything from a first-edition copy of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon to a decommissioned space shuttle that you can walk through.

  Hundreds of children go through the center every day. A Floridian told me that schools plan at least two field trips a year to the center—and the center works very hard at inspiring our future mathematicians, astronomers, and astronauts.

  But...

  I had this nagging sense as I walked through all the exhibits that the future looks dated. Everything that was so nifty and cool when I was a kid now seems as ancient as a Model T. The capsules that our astronauts risked their lives in are so tiny that I felt claustrophobic inside one when I was there all by myself—and that doesn't count the intruding buttons and knobs and flashing lights of my 1960s childhood, on display with the bolts and rivets that kept the ships together.

  Even the films of the astronauts bouncing on the surface of the Moon looked grainy and old, like Nickelodeon does when it replays the early black-and-white episodes of Bewitched.

  Space science, as presented by NASA, feels dated. The cutting edge has long since dulled and become history—and the kind of history that you have to explain carefully (you know, the old “when I was a kid, I had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to my one-room schoolhouse” kinda old).

  The excitement that anyone over forty felt about the space program has dissipated. The space program is so passé that only one of the major presidential candidates (who were there campaigning for the Florida primary while we were talking to aspiring writers) even had a platform about NASA. Three of the Republican hopefuls (Romney, Giuliani, and Huckabee) seemed surprised that Kennedy was still in existence—and said so while visiting the center. (Is it any wonder these guys had no hope of being elected?)

  How have we slipped so far? We've gone from dreaming of the stars to forgetting to look up.

  There are several reasons for this, many outlined in the last chapter of Too Far From Home, Chris Jones’ look at the 2003 crisis on the International Space Station (and if you say “what crisis?” I suggest you hike to Amazon.com right now and at least look at the book's blurb).

  But the relevant reason for my purposes is this: one of the many reasons Americans have forgotten to look up is that science fiction writers (and readers—I'm not letting you guys off the hook) no longer point to the heavens. When I came into SF in the mid-1980s, SF writers were actively discouraged from writing about outer space. Space stuff was “passé” or it had been done before, or there was nothing new. Space is as exciting, one editor once told me, as the Ford Motor Plant. Find something new to write about.

  Dutiful me, I did. Because I wanted to sell my fiction. Only recently have I returned to near future SF, set in this solar system, and I find that readers are hungry for it. Newer editors think I'm breaking new ground. Maybe I am.

  You see, only a handful of writers stuck to space stories—and most of them made the transition to the novel in the 1990s (Stephen Baxter comes to mind as one of the most popular of outer space guys). The cutting edge in SF has always been the short story, and the short story has forgotten that we have yet to colonize the Moon or send a manned (peopled?) expedition to Mars.

  So yeah, critics, bloggers, and you folks supposedly in the know, space SF has become retro—because American space science is retro. Even though NASA displayed the prototypes of their Constellation project (and you don't know what that is? I barely did—no one is covering it; it's the project that's going to take a new generation of astronauts to the Moon [check it out at www.nasa.gov]), the bulk of Kennedy Space Center's tourist wing is devoted to the past and to old technologies still in use, like the space shuttle. Nothing except a single room that showed the future of unmanned exploration had anything remotely modern inside it.

  I know it's not popular to be a space geek any more. The days when every single child dreamed of being an astronaut are long gone. And yes, I know that we haven't solved the issue of
poverty and we're spending too much on an unpopular war and the U.S. has record deficits.

  But...

  We need space. Once again, I point you to NASA's website. Look at all the things that are now commonplace from Velcro to microchips that developed because the space program pushed us in brand-new directions. This modern culture would not exist if we hadn't flung ourselves wholeheartedly into what President Eisenhower called “the space race.”

  President Kennedy said that we were going to the Moon not because it was easy but because it was hard.

  No one talks like that any more. No one, at least in America, even seems to think like that.

  And it's time we think like that again.

  So that our children dream of exploration and adventure, and turn those dreams into usable science that improves the world for the rest of us.

  And those of us who are paid to dream? We need to point at space again, so that everyone around us remembers to look up.

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  Aeternum Fourteen: Daydreams

  What a marvel is an imagination, is it not? Thank everything that's holy we all have one. I've heard people described as having “absolutely no imagination,” but I've never met one of those strange beings myself. We all, I think, think. And as our thoughts are no more real in terms of the universe of things and experiences than other, more fanciful fantasies in which we indulge, they seem to me to be as imaginary as hallucinations of faeryland. As editors of a science fiction and fantasy magazine, we have more acquaintance than most with hallucinations, and we sort of like it that way. Figments of other people's imaginations are our life blood here in the Æon office, which overlooks the fifth floor of a parking garage in Seattle's historic Pioneer Square. The view in our heads is ever so much more entertaining than the view out the window, though in a sense it's no less a phantasm.

  There's undoubtedly a “real” universe out there somewhere, but I don't fool myself that I've ever seen it, heard it, felt it, smelled it, or tasted it. Or if I have, the experience—once translated by my senses into familiar and comprehensible sensations—is not the one I had. Or didn't have. Whichever. I have a model of the universe in my head which works okay most of the time for most purposes, but this brings up the matter of whether my head is then bigger than the universe which it contains, and whether that model contains me and my head, which in turn contains the model? Or do I have an infinite number of heads? Bertrand Russell dreamed up that particular head-game, along with classes which don't contain themselves, except they must in order not to. He had a great imagination.

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  Our Æon Fourteen contributors, all nine of them, could give Lord Russell a run for his money in the imagination department. From their infinite heads and hearts they've dreamed up worlds and people and places and ideas and opinions to keep your head spinning for some time to come. And like T.E. Lawrence's “dreamers of the day,” who “act their dreams with open eyes,” they are dangerous. Let's hear it for dangerous dreams.

  All but one of our Æon Fourteen offerings are written by returning dreamers: Ryan Neal Myers ("The Diesel Mnemonic") appeared previously in Æon Eleven with “The Underthing.” Jay Lake ("Sweet Rocket") has made five previous fiction appearances, from “A Mythic Fear of the Sea,” in Æon One, to “A Very Old Man With No Wings At All” in Æon Eleven. Sarah L. Edwards’ ("Wild Among Hares") gave us that story's prequel—"The Butterfly Man"—in Æon Twelve.

  Lavie Tidhar ("Hard Rain at the Fortean Café") appeared in Æon Six with “Midnight Folk,” and Æon Ten with “Angels Over Israel.” Mikal Trimm ("The Diadem") was shortlisted for the Rhysling award for his poem “Lost on the Shores of Avalon,” which appeared in Æon Six. He also contributed poetry to Æon Eleven. Aurora Award winner Marcie Lynn Tentchoff ("Your Fairy Goth Mother") also had poems in Æon Six, Eight, Eleven, and Thirteen.

  Our columnists, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dr. Rob Furey, have been nothing if not dependable about returning—Kris since Æon One in November of 2004, and Rob since his first science article for us in Aeon Three, six months later.

  And that leaves Davin Ireland, our one and only Æon first-timer, who kicks off this issue with a story of love, time, and redemption in an English beachfront town. Start there if you like, or pick a title at random, and dream on.

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  The March Wind

  by Davin Ireland

  "At heart, this is a story about lost love and the redemptive power of Time. 1987 wasn't a good year for me. I started it off as an unruly teenager getting himself thrown off a kibbutz in Israel for theft, and ended it in a psychosis back in the UK after consuming absurd quantities of hallucinogenic drugs. The events described in the story happened somewhere in between, and are mostly real. The coastal resort wasn't in the south of England, I hasten to add, but the shores of Tel-Aviv, and the Mash House—while once a notorious hangout for travellers and beach bums—is long gone. I did, however, step onto the balcony one morning to the sight of armed soldiers creeping through the fog at high tide. What they were doing on that foggy beach remains a mystery to me, but I do know that, almost twenty years to the day after it happened, the story I once wrote in my head finally made it onto paper. I just wish the real Penny were here to read it."

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  I

  VIC FENTON clutched his Puffa jacket tighter to his chest and leaned into the icy gale blowing down Troubadour Street. Up ahead, taxis whizzed along the empty boulevard in search of fares that had long since dribbled from the cafes and ailing bingo halls, their absence mourned only by the wheeling gulls. Vic put his head down and watched flagstones disappear beneath his peeling shoes.

  The Mash House was a squat, four storey pile of seafront masonry the local council should have condemned years ago, but hadn't on account of the facilitative role it played in modern beachfront society. Masquerading as a back-packer hotel, the building's middle two floors were actually a brothel that made easy money exploiting the town's surplus of economic migrants during the off-season. Vic had only secured a room there because he had promised to clean the stairs and reception area every Tuesday and Friday for nothing. Apparently, even the whores had better things to do in winter.

  He slipped into the lobby, exchanged a curt nod with a little boy who sat in the corner flipping languidly through a magazine he had probably read a dozen times before. His father was a regular here. Vic mounted the stairs two at a time, didn't stop till he reached the nominal sanctuary of the third floor.

  Penny hadn't moved in the time he'd been gone. She lay curled beneath the sheet like a human comma, a brief pause in the story of a relationship that was fast running out of options. You can't stay with somebody just because you pity them. That was the last thing Eamonn, the self-proclaimed playwright from across the hall, had said to him before catching the train back to Derby. Wise words from an ignorant prick. But he had loved Penny once, and wasn't going to abandon her now, just because her health was failing. Vic thought about this as he brewed tea beneath the big picture window in the kitchen.

  Out beyond the rain-swept boulevard, the grey Atlantic continued to swell and surge, hurling great rhythmic plumes of surf onto the beach. Deranged joggers and harried dog-walkers appeared from time to time, picking their way through the kelp that decorated the blurred scar of the high tide line, but that was about it. Nobody sane was out in weather like this. That was fine with Vic. He often spent hours sitting alone on the balcony staring out to sea, lost in thoughts he had trouble recalling even minutes later. People were just an intrusion.

  Back in the bedroom, he set the tea tray o
n the night-table next to the little three-bar heater he'd bought at a flea market the previous weekend, and thumbed the power switch. Penny's breathing had been getting worse since the arrival of the cold snap, and he'd felt the need to do something, to make a bold gesture, even one he couldn't afford. The heater had constituted his one concession to gallantry. Ironically, the atmosphere in the flat had soured ever since. We don't have that kind of money, Penny had repeatedly complained, and besides, it gives me a dry throat.

  Give it a few more days, he had told her, the benefits will justify the expense.

  They hadn't so far. Penny still looked like shit, slept like death, bitched incessantly about the weather. But that was because she was scared. They all were. Vic glanced at the mute TV screen in the corner and shivered. Best not to think about that right now.

  “Pen, are you awake?”

  When she failed to respond, he poured himself a cuppa and migrated to the window. He didn't bother drawing the flimsy drape he'd tacked to the wall above the curtain rail. The material was so thin it was practically translucent. Besides, it served to mute the red-and-white scream of the gigantic Coca-Cola billboard straddling the brown-field site next door. And the brighter light might wake her up, chimed a mischievous voice from the back of his mind. Vic banished the thought, sipped tea, waited for something to happen.

  It took him a moment to realise that it already was.

  From this distance the man appeared the wrong side of fifty, a tad overweight, looked as if he'd had a real job squeezing into his trunks that morning. He mounted the rotting breakwater with some difficulty, and paced awkwardly to the end, arms outstretched for balance as he went. Vic sipped more of his tea, a worm of discomfort wriggling in his guts. He knew what was coming, yet felt no real compunction to act.