Liyeusse contacted the command ship in the Fortress’s imposed lingua.
The connection hissed open. The voice that came back to them over the line sounded harried, and spoke accented lingua. “Who the hell are—” Rhehan distinctly heard Kavarion snapping something profane in the Kel language. The voice spoke back, referring to Liyeusse with the particular suffix that meant coward, as if that applied to a ji-Kel ship to begin with. Still, Rhehan was glad they didn’t have to translate that detail for Liyeusse, although they summarized the exchange for her.
“Go,” the voice said ungraciously. “I’ll keep the gunners off you. I hope you don’t crash into anything, foreigner.”
“Thank you,” Liyeusse said in a voice that suggested that she was thinking about blowing something up on her way out.
“Don’t,” Rhehan said.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“They need this ship to fight with. Which will let us get away from any pursuit.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re all the enemy.”
They couldn’t blame her, considering what she’d been through.
The scan suite reported on the battle. Rhehan, who had webbed themselves into the copilot’s seat, tracked the action with concern. The hostile Kel hadn’t bothered to transmit their general’s banner, a sign of utter contempt for those they fought. Even ji-Kel received banners, although they weren’t expected to appreciate the nuances of Kel heraldry.
A fighter launched from the hangar below them. “Our turn,” Liyeusse said.
The Flarecat rocketed away from the command ship and veered abruptly away from the fighters’ flight corridor. Liyeusse rechecked stealth. The engine made the familiar dreadful coughing noise in response to the increased power draw, but it held—for now.
A missile streaked through their path, missing them by a margin that Rhehan wished were larger. To their irritation, Liyeusse was whistling as she maneuvered the Flarecat through all the grapeshot and missiles and gyring fighters and toward the edge of the battlefield. Liyeusse had never had a healthy sense of fear.
They’d almost made it when the engine coughed again, louder. Rhehan swore in several different languages. “I’d better see to that,” they said.
“No,” Liyeusse said immediately, “you route the pilot functions to your seat, and I’ll see if I can coax it along a little longer.”
Rhehan wasn’t as good a pilot, but Liyeusse was indisputably better at engineering. They gave way without argument. Liyeusse used the ship’s handholds to make her way toward the engine room.
Whatever Liyeusse was doing, it didn’t work. The engine hiccoughed, and stealth went down.
A flight of Kel fighters at the periphery noted the Flarecat’s attempt to escape and, dismayingly, found it suspicious enough to decide to pursue them. Rhehan wished their training had included faking being an ace pilot. Or actually being an ace pilot, for that matter.
The Incendiary Heart continued to glow malevolently. Rhehan shook their head. It’s not personal, they told themselves. “Liyeusse,” they said through the link, “forget stealth. If they decide to come after us, that’s fine. It looks like we’re not the only small-timers getting out of the line of fire. Can you configure for boosters?”
She understood them. “If they blow us up, a lot of people are dead anyway. Including us. We might as well take the chance.”
Part of the Flarecat’s problem was that its engine had not been designed for sprinting. Liyeusse’s skill at modifications made it possible to run. In return, the Flarecat made its displeasure known at inconvenient times.
The gap between the Flarecat and the fighters narrowed hair-raisingly as Rhehan waited for Liyeusse to inform them that they could light the hell out of there. The Incendiary Heart’s glow distracted them horribly. The fighters continued their pursuit, and while so far none of their fire had connected, Rhehan didn’t believe in relying on luck.
“I wish you could use that thing on them,” Liyeusse said suddenly.
Yes, and that would leave nothing but the thinnest imaginable haze of particles in a vast expanse of nothing, Rhehan thought. “Are we ready yet?”
“Yes,” she said after an aggravating pause.
The Flarecat surged forward in response to Rhehan’s hands at the controls. They said, “Next thing: prepare a launch capsule for this so we can shoot it ahead of us. Anyone stupid enough to go after it and into its cone of effect—well, we tried.”
For the next interval, Rhehan lost themselves in the controls and readouts, the hot immediate need for survival. They stirred when Liyeusse returned.
“I need the Heart,” Liyeusse said. “I’ve rigged a launch capsule for it. It won’t have any shielding, but it’ll fly as fast and far as I can send it.”
Rhehan nodded at where they’d secured it. “Don’t drop it.”
“You’re so funny.” She snatched it and vanished again.
Rhehan was starting to wish they’d settled for a nice, quiet, boring life as a Kel special operative when Liyeusse finally returned and slipped into the seat next to theirs. “It’s loaded and ready to go. Do you think we’re far enough away?”
“Yes,” Rhehan hissed through their teeth, achingly aware of the fighters and the latest salvo of missiles.
“Away we go!” Liyeusse said with gruesome cheer.
The capsule launched. Rhehan passed over the controls to Liyeusse so she could get them away before the capsule’s contents blew.
The fighters, given a choice between the capsule and the Flarecat, split up. Better than nothing. Liyeusse was juggling the power draw of the shields, the stardrive, life-support, and probably other things that Rhehan was happier not knowing about. The Flarecat accelerated as hard in the opposite direction as it could without overstressing the people in it.
The fighters took this as a trap and soared away. Rhehan expected they’d come around for another try when they realized it wasn’t.
Then between the space of one blink and the next, the capsule simply vanished. The fighters overtook what should have been its position, and vanished as well. That could have been stealth, if Rhehan hadn’t known better. They thought to check the sensor readings against their maps of the region: stars upon stars had gone missing, nothing left of them.
Or, they amended to themselves, there had to be some remnant smear of matter, but the Flarecat’s instruments wouldn’t have the sensitivity to pick them up. They regretted the loss of the people on those fighters; still, better a few deaths than the many that the Incendiary Heart had threatened.
“All right,” Liyeusse said, and retriggered stealth. There was no longer any need to hurry, so the system was less likely to choke. They were far enough from the raging battle that they could relax a little space. She sagged in her chair. “We’re alive.”
Rhehan wondered what would become of Kavarion, but that was no longer their concern. “We’re still broke,” they said, because eventually Liyeusse would remember.
“You didn’t wrangle any payment out of those damn Kel before we left?” she demanded. “Especially since after they finish frying Kavarion, they’ll come toast us?”
Rhehan pulled off Kavarion’s gloves and set them aside. “Nothing worth anything to either of us,” they said. Once they would have given everything to win their way back into the trust of the Kel. Over the past years, however, they had discovered that other things mattered more to them. “We’ll find something else. And anyway, it’s not the first time we’ve been hunted. We’ll just have to stay one step ahead of them, the way we always have.”
Liyeusse smiled at Rhehan, and they knew they’d made the right choice.
© 2017 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Cosmic Powers. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards; its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were also Hugo finalists. His middle grade novel Dra
gon Pearl won the Mythopoeic Award and was a New York Times bestseller. He has a collection of fairy tales forthcoming in October from Andrews McMeel, The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales. Yoon lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy catten, and has not yet been eaten by gators. You can follow him on Twitter as @deuceofgears.
Through a Thousand Eyes
by Nisi Shawl
None of us lives in the same world. I told my niece that as she drove me home from Alki Beach last week. We could be walking down the same sidewalk, I said, and still be seeing and smelling and feeling completely different things. I pointed out the giant, 35-foot-tall flowered shovel sculpture across the street from us as an example of one of those things. “What? A shovel? Where?” she replied.
We had just passed an earlier site of this particular epiphany of mine: a billboard visible off of the West Seattle Bridge advertising a bank’s services. “Use our ATMs anywhere, anytime, anyplace!” it urged proudly. Other writers I share this wording with get bothered by the same thing that makes me shake my head in disgust. What, we ask, is the distinction between “anywhere” and “anyplace”? Why mention both? It’s redundant.
Not everyone sees that error, or cares about it. The typographer viewing the billboard with me that first time was more concerned with the message’s kerning—the regularization of spacing between words, letters, and lines. He notices these sorts of things—fonts, relative sizes, serifs or the absence of serifs. He knows his Garamond from his Georgia from his Goudy Old Style. Not me. That’s not my world.
China Miéville does a brilliant job of literalizing this concept in his novel The City and the City. Inhabitants of Besźel and Ul Quoma occupy the same physical space while living in separate communities and experiencing irrecoverably separate realities. From birth, Besźelers are trained to “unsee” and “unhear” Ul Quomans, and vice versa. There’s a critique of nationalism at work here, of course. But mainly I love this novel because it’s doing what speculative fiction does best: using metaphor and analogy to show the unacknowledged strangeness inherent in the status quo.
Decades earlier, genius fabulist R.A. Lafferty took a different approach to this same idea of worldviews as distinct and exclusive worlds. You can read “Through Other Eyes,” the relevant short story he wrote, here, if you like, although I warn you that it’s served with a heapin helpin of gender essentialism. Lafferty’s hero, Cogsworth, invents a “Cerebral Scanner,” a technology which allows him to perceive what others perceive—not just in terms of the input their senses register but in terms of how they interpret that input. Cogsworth is horrified and repelled by the noisome mindscape roiling with decay he discovers when trying the device out on his crush, a woman named Valery Mok. Mok, in turn, is horrified by the lifelessness of Cogsworth’s perceptual cosmos and calls him “a pig made out of sticks.”
We who don’t match up with the template for “normal” espoused by the dominant paradigm—we who are too old or fat or crippled or Black or queer or Asian or femme or butch or slutty or prudish or religious or atheist or possessed of whatever condition the dominant paradigm considers as defining us as sub-ordinary—we live in other worlds than these soi-disant normal people. But as Lafferty’s character Gregory Smirnov says, “There is no normal. There are only differences.”
Comprehending how these differences change not only those in possession of them but their entire universe is a gift. And it’s a gift you’re free to claim.
Stories can operate somewhat like Lafferty’s Cerebral Scanner. Authors create empathy by immersing willing readers in the viewpoints of imaginary people created just to show how something that never happened would feel. We base these characters on what we know, who we’ve met, where and when we’ve studied them, how real we want them to seem, and why we think they belong where we’re putting them. Cindy Ward and Tempest Bradford and I use our book, essays, classes, and workshops to help our students calibrate their Scanners so that they capture the intimate details of the worlds of Others-with-a-capital-O. In editing New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, I did my best to make a huge variety of viewpoints available for readers interested in exercising their empathy. Writing Everfair’s Martha Livia Hunter Albin challenged me to plausibly adopt the vantage of a Christian missionary; more recently, writing Nia, the narrator of my forthcoming story “I Being Young and Foolish,” was likewise a stretch: an albino Ugandan sorceress traveling through 11th century Europe? That’s several degrees of separation from my own demographic traits.
Reading widely can increase your ability to empathize, according to a study published in 2006 by University of Toronto professor Keith Oatley et al. In my opinion, writing further develops and fine tunes it; deliberately seeking ways to connect readers to new viewpoints deepens our experience of these viewpoints. We must immerse ourselves in them in order to share them.
Last year I visited author Karen Joy Fowler and she took me shopping. A clerk in what she’d told me was her favorite store was very, very attentive. As we were walking back to Karen’s house, I asked Karen if she’d ever had the feeling that this kind of helpfulness was also a way of keeping tabs on a possible thief. She hadn’t. But she showed me she understood what I was talking about even though it was outside of her experience. Nalo Hopkinson, Karen said, had once asked her how often she got strip searched when crossing the US/Canada border.
Not, you should note, whether Karen got strip searched. Nalo just assumed she did, because that was par for Nalo’s course. Her suspicious inquiry into the possibility of racial bias in their treatment (Karen is white and Nalo is Black) was, “How often?”
The store Karen and I were in at the same time was at the same location for each of us. The borders Nalo and Karen crossed were physically and geographically identical. Yet in both cases they were worlds apart. And Karen got that.
Of course she got it. Sarah Canary, her debut novel, published way, way back in 1991, shows us the mysterious, eponymous heroine from numerous characters’ perspectives. To Chin Ah Kin she’s ugly and obviously, therefore, a prostitute. To suffragist Adelaide Dixon she’s a heroic husband-killer. So on, so forth. Karen Joy Fowler knew what she was doing then, so long ago, and she still knows now.
Karen’s 70. I’m 65. At our ages we’ve witnessed the deaths of many worlds. My mother’s days and nights are gone. My mother’s dreams. Her friendships, those mutually built bowers of love and support and daring and rest are faded, melted, tumbled aside. Collapsed from without and within.
I hear that’s going to happen with me, too. Only before then I plan on making these models of my multitudinous mindscapes and getting you to come inside them. (You’re soaking in it.)
Twenty years ago, when I was applying for lots of grants, I wrote a Statement of Artistic Intent. That’s one text almost everyone asks for. My original SAI is lost to me in the mists of Wordperfect, but I can quote three relevant excerpts here:
“I want to make worlds out of words.”
“If I present my visions vividly enough, I can convince my readers that they’re wading through rivers of pearls, or flying through the air in a sentient dirigible.”
“The way into the worlds I make is easy and interesting. The adventures my readers have during their visits are the sort that stay with them when they have left. I write for the enlightened enjoyment of my audience, to draw them into a strange, familiar landscape, and show them secrets that no one has ever told them, yet which they know quite well are true.”
This is what I’ve been trying to do my whole life. Stories are worlds we leave behind us when we die.
I want you in my worlds. I want you in many others, too. The more you find, the more there are. Can you see them? Look through a thousand eyes.
© 2021 Nisi Shawl
Nisi Shawl edited New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, winner of the World Fantasy Award, the FIYAH Magazine IGNYTE award, and others. Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist Everfair and the 2008 Tiptree/Otherwise winning collec
tion Filter House. They are a co-founder of the inclusivity-in-SF nonprofit the Carl Brandon Society. In 2005 they co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusivity. They live in Seattle, near a large lake full of dangerous currents.
The Necessity of Slavery Stories
by Troy L. Wiggins
I think I first heard a Black person say “I’m tired of stories about slavery” in high school. Our school’s football coach, who doubled as our history teacher, had decided to show us Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa. A classmate whose name I can’t recall but whose voice I still hear to this day huffed at our teacher’s film selection and declared with his full chest that he was sick and tired of “motherfucking slavery movies.” Since then, I’ve heard this same sentiment from Black people at a fairly consistent rate in college and graduate school, around the water cooler, at cookouts, and at conventions.
I get it. Most Black Americans have a complex emotional connection to the idea of slavery, to say nothing of the historical facts. The products of slavery’s horrifying and efficient brutality are ever-present, and our country is only just beginning to give the barest acknowledgement of its lingering systemic impact. And many of the films concerned with slavery are preoccupied with the white filmmakers’ perspectives, seeking to titillate viewers with the horrors of slavery and call it “education” while ignoring the everyday violence that the Black descendants of slaves have to endure. Currently, radical conservative groups in America are attempting to meme their way into revising this country’s history of slavery. These groups are doing ridiculous things: declaring war against concepts like Critical Race Theory, an ideological framework used to examine the relationship between race, law, and power in order to uncover and challenge white supremacy. But they are also passing legislation that will penalize educators, many who support children in former slaveholding states, for teaching the accurate history of this country’s legacy and how that legacy shapes the United States that their students live in today.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 Page 12