Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 119

by Neil Clarke

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 119

  Table of Contents

  First Light at Mistaken Point

  by Kali Wallace

  Teenagers from Outer Space

  by Dale Bailey

  Now is the Hour

  by Emily Devenport

  The Engine’s Imperial

  by Sean Bensinger

  Reclamation

  by Ryan Row

  Alone, on the Wind

  by Karla Schmidt

  The Fish Merchant

  by Tobias S. Buckell

  A Stopped Clock

  by Madeline Ashby

  Frankenstein’s Soldier: David Morrell and the Creation of Rambo

  by Jason S. Ridler

  Volcanoes, Obelisks, and Spam Sushi: A Conversation with N.K. Jemisin

  by Chris Urie

  Another Word: Peacetalk, Hate Speech

  by Cat Rambo

  Editor’s Desk: The Little Things

  by Neil Clarke

  Regis III (The Invincible)

  Art by Jaroslaw Marcinek

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2016

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  First Light at Mistaken Point

  Kali Wallace

  A low mist clung to the river and laced through the trees, thinning as dawn washed the forest from gray to gold to green. The road dipped into a hollow, lifted again into sunlight. Charlie was reaching for her sunglasses when her phone rang. She started, fumbled through her purse, but by the time she unearthed the phone it was quiet. She glanced at the screen. Sandeep. 6:53 AM.

  A call before seven meant something was happening in Houston, something important enough to disturb her on the weekend of her mother’s funeral. She spent too long staring at the phone, not watching the road, until a flash of motion caught her eye. She jerked the wheel to the right as a slow-moving pickup passed in the opposite lane. The truck was gone as quickly as it had appeared, the rumble of its diesel engine fading.

  Charlie rubbed her eyes and willed her heart to slow. It was fine. She hadn’t been in the wrong lane. Mom would have called it an inches-seconds moment, and she would have laughed. Inches one way, seconds another, and everything would have been different. Nothing had happened.

  The road curved along the river. She rubbed her eyes again. She was so tired of her throbbing head, the sickly roil of too much coffee and too little food in her stomach, the iron tension in her shoulders and back. On the left she saw the red Pennsylvania Dutch barn where Mom had dragged her to a community yard sale a few years ago. The farm was abandoned now; the barn door hung open, a black slice in the red. She had missed the turn. Her own mother’s house and she had driven right by.

  She pulled over, checked for nonexistent traffic, backtracked a few hundred yards to the bright purple mailbox at the end of Mom’s driveway. Long grass whipped the underside of the car, and the little blue house emerged from the wall of green. The door was red, the shutters blinding yellow. Mom had, in her last few years, surrounded herself with color and light, rainbows and flowers, any hue or pigment that caught her eye. There was a line of pinwheels marching through the flower beds beneath the front windows, unmoving in the morning air.

  Charlie’s phone beeped as she parked beside Cath’s car. A text from Sandeep: new transmission 6:29 am. 47 seconds.

  Forty-seven seconds. Something squeezed in Charlie’s chest. The first message had been four seconds, and no matter what they told the press and the public, that wasn’t long enough for them to learn anything useful.

  A month ago, three weeks before Intrepid was due to settle into orbit around Mars, mission control had lost contact with the ship. Telescopes confirmed it was right where it was supposed to be, but they received no telemetry, couldn’t make audio contact, and had no response when they queried the ship’s computers. All communication with Intrepid had stopped, and nobody could figure out why. Fingers of blame had pointed in every direction, but mostly at Charlie and her team. For Intrepid to fall silent, there had to be a problem with the shipboard radios—her system, her design—as well as the backups, the secondary backups, the spare parts, anything and everything that might be scavenged or repurposed for a replacement.

  However unlikely it was, that cascade of failures is well beyond the scope of bad luck or coincidence, it was better to believe there was something wrong with all of Intrepid’s communication systems than to consider the possibility that there might not be anybody alive to use them.

  Then, six days ago, Intrepid had finally called home. But exclamations of relief had quickly given way to bewilderment: the transmission was brief and unintelligible. Four seconds of noise. Nobody was even sure whose voice it was, much less what they were saying. They had been waiting for a second message ever since.

  Forty-seven seconds. Long enough for words. Long enough for answers.

  She snapped out of her seatbelt and called Sandeep back.

  He picked up at once. “I’m sending you a file right now.”

  “What can you hear?” Charlie asked. In the twenty minutes since the message had arrived, everybody at MCC would have listened to it twenty times. They would be clustered around workstations with mugs in hand, bleary-eyed but talking nonstop. The arguments wouldn’t have erupted yet. Give it another half an hour, another pot of coffee, time for the commuters to arrive and the office cot-sleepers to wake. Everybody was on edge. All week there had been shouting, tears, blame, and that was with only four seconds.

  “It’s clearer than the other,” Sandeep said, “but not by much. We can identify a voice this time.”

  The hair on the back of Charlie’s neck rose. “Who?”

  “Harris, we think,” Sandeep said. “We’re pretty sure it’s him. Definitely a man, but Hattendorf says—well. It doesn’t matter what he says.”

  “What? What does he say?”

  “Hatt says it sounds like Dr. Rivers.”

  Charlie blinked. “Rivers?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  Dr. Rivers had been the original mission doctor, but he had been replaced before launch. His heart, the doctors said, was cause for concern. A single medical test had grounded him, and Lisa Huerta had taken his place. Nobody was supposed to be thrilled that Rivers was off the mission, least of all Lisa, who was his friend. But after the decision, Charlie and Lisa had retreated to Charlie’s apartment with a bottle of champagne. Their relationship had been new, their future uncertain, and now they would spend years separated by millions of miles. It didn’t matter. Rivers’ bad luck was Lisa’s chance of a lifetime. It was her dream come true, and Charlie had been thrilled for her, happier than she’d had words to convey.

  “Rivers is with his family in Atlanta,” Charlie said slowly. “On Earth. He was on MSNBC yesterday. Hatt knows that, right?”

  Sandeep laughed uneasily. “He knows. He’s just—he needs sleep. We all need sleep.”

  “But that’s—” She couldn’t handle Hatt’s nonsense right now. “Tell him to stop wasting everybody’s time. You think it’s Harris.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely Harris.” A pause, and Sandeep added, his tone soft, “A man for sure, anyway.”

  The gentle apology in his tone made Charlie’s skin crawl. Sandeep didn’t need to coddle her, even so obliquely. Brian Harris was mission commander; it was protocol for him to make the report, if possible, when something went wrong. His was the voice they were all expecting to hear. Charlie’s own dark fears and aching hopes had nothing to do with it.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  Sandeep exhaled. “Maybe. I don’t want to bias you before you listen.”

  “Talk to Inez about tweaking her noise al
gorithm using the first—”

  “She’s on it,” Sandeep said.

  “Good.” There was a sour taste at the back of Charlie’s throat. She couldn’t do anything from Virginia. “I’ll give it a listen and—”

  The red door opened, and Cath stepped onto the porch. Her hair was pulled back from her face, and in one hand she held rubber gloves the same bright yellow as the shutters. Yesterday at the funeral, standing there alone in her black dress and pearls, Cath had looked so much like their mother that Charlie had stumbled in surprise, and a wild impossibility had skittered through her mind: I knew it was a mistake, I knew she wasn’t gone. Before that moment it had been three years since Charlie and Cath had seen each other in person. They communicated by sporadic text, brief email, and most of all through their mother, who had accepted her position as nexus between daughters with a sigh and a sad smile.

  “Charlie?” Sandeep said. “How are you doing? How was the funeral?”

  “It was fine. It was good.” Charlie winced. “I don’t mean good. I mean . . . . Everybody loved Mom. Half the university was there. They’re even talking about making a Helen Rush scholarship for paleontology students.”

  “That’s nice. That’s really nice.”

  “It is. Look, my sister is waiting, I have to—”

  “Oh, sure, definitely.” Sandeep cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Send me the audio now, just so I can hear it.”

  “Will do. Just to warn you, it sounds pretty bad, but it’s—”

  “Better than silence. I know.”

  “It is, Charlie,” he said earnestly. “They’re alive.”

  “I know.”

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Tonight. Talk to you later.” Charlie hung up.

  It was what they had been saying all week, in the anxious chaos of MCC, in the public spectacle of press conferences and interviews: It’s better than silence. At least we know they’re alive. It’s better than silence. Charlie couldn’t remember anymore if the words were supposed to be a comfort.

  She stepped out of the car, and a symphony of morning birdsong surrounded her.

  “I thought you had to go back to Houston,” Cath said.

  “My flight’s this afternoon. I can help for a little bit.”

  “It’s going to take a while to get all this stuff sorted out. I forgot she had so much shit.”

  Cath held the screen door open, and Charlie paused before stepping in, wondering if her sister’s outstretched arm was offering a hug, wondering still when Cath dropped her arm. When Cath had called from the hospital earlier that week, Charlie had been at work, listening to four seconds of gibberish over and over again until it became a steady hum beneath every moment, and her first thought upon hearing that Mom had died in her sleep was: It’s too soon.

  Her second thought, more shameful: I don’t have time for this.

  Charlie wanted to ask why Cath was here by herself, but she knew the answer, and Cath wouldn’t welcome the question. Cath’s husband Walter was not the sort of man who would consider the funeral of a mother-in-law he had never liked reason to interrupt his weekend, and he would certainly never lower himself to scrubbing floors or packing boxes. When they were still speaking regularly, Cath used to complain to Charlie—laughing, like it was a charming quirk—that Walter couldn’t find a dishwasher or laundry hamper if his life depended on it.

  The inside of the house was cool, a little humid; the windows were open and the mist had invited itself in. Charlie brushed her fingers over a flat stone on the table inside the door: a single trilobite in dense gray shale, as long as her hand from head to tail. Ever since she was a child she had been fitting her palm to that fossil, pressing into the ripples of the creature’s carapace and spines. When she was little she had imagined she could feel it moving beneath her fingers, a lightning-fast twitch nobody could see.

  “The news was saying you heard from the crew again. Any truth to that?” Cath asked.

  “I’m surprised it’s on the news already,” Charlie said. “It just came in.”

  Cath lifted a single eyebrow. At fifteen she had practiced that expression in the mirror until she mastered it; Charlie had stood beside her, four inches shorter and two steps behind, trying just as hard, never succeeding. “It’s all they talk about anymore. Nobody can decide if it’s a hoax or a conspiracy or aliens or whatever. What’s the new message say?”

  “I haven’t listened to it yet. Apparently it’s hard to make out.” A glance at her phone: the file had nearly finished downloading.

  “But it’s a good sign, isn’t it?” Cath asked. “At least you know they’re still alive.”

  “It’s better than silence,” Charlie said.

  Cath started to say something, changed her mind, and gestured to the house around them. Her wedding ring glinted in a shaft of sunlight. “I started in the kitchen. I was going to get to work in here, but this . . . . The department said they’d take all this for the museum, so I guess we just put it in boxes. Same with the books.”

  The front room of their mother’s house was lined with bookshelves, and crammed in with the books, slotted into every spare space, were the fossils. They spilled over to cover the end tables and fireplace mantle, into shoe boxes on the floor and bowls on the window sill. Shells in spirals and fans, flattened fish with needle-thin bones and delicate impressions of fins, one massive flat chunk of stromatolite lumps like cobblestones. Nautiluses and trilobites and spidery sea stars and mashed jumbles of insects smothered in ancient clay, eaten away by water and time until nothing remained but the stone ghosts of their exoskeletons. Charlie recalled the names like she remembered grade school friends, old words unused but not forgotten: Aspidella, Spriggina, Cloudina.

  Nothing rare or valuable, Mom had always said with a self-conscious laugh. Nothing anybody would begrudge an old woman for hoarding like a dragon on a pile of gold. Some were smeared with a brand of white and Mom’s handwriting in neat block letters; some had names, locations, dates, or only a letter and a number. Somewhere in the room, maybe beneath the sloping stack of field notebooks on the desk, there might be a catalog. Many had no labels at all. This had always been their mother’s landscape: history as a jumble of soft tissue turned to stone, evolutionary happenstance preserved for accidental eons, names and places and ages only occasional anchors, more forgotten in dusty corners than remembered in the open.

  The cluttered room made Charlie’s hands itch. Cath gave her a pitying look and a cardboard box.

  “You can do the bedroom,” she said. “All the clothes are going to Goodwill, unless you find anything you want.”

  Charlie glanced into the guest room as she passed. Cath’s overnight bag was open on the bed, her funeral dress hanging on the closet door. She hadn’t known Cath was staying here. She hadn’t thought to ask.

  In their mother’s room Charlie sat on the edge of the bed with her phone in hand. She opened the audio file. The initial burst of sound was so loud she jumped, thumbed the volume down, paused the playback. There were no footsteps in the hall, no sign Cath had heard. Her heart was racing. Seconds had never seemed so precious to Charlie until they became her only measure of the teetering balance between hope and despair. She hit play again.

  The message began with a deep hum that lasted an uncomfortable five seconds.

  That’s Brian, Charlie thought. Her throat hurt. It was really him.

  That low hmm was a drawn-out version of the same sound Brian Harris made every time he cleared his throat before speaking. At countless press conferences before launch, at the start of every audio message he sent back to Earth, he always made the same noise. One of the fussy PR men had complained about it once, said, “Can’t we get him to stop doing that? It makes him sound slow.” The young man had been so disapproving behind his horn-rimmed glasses, and there had been glances around the room, across the table, until finally somebody—Charlie couldn’t remember who—had said, “The man’s a NASA
astronaut going to Mars. He’s a fucking genius. He can talk however the hell he wants.” Laughter, real from the scientists, feigned from the PR guy, and the subject was dropped.

  Six seconds of silence followed the opening hmm. Charlie nudged the volume back up. In the background she heard faint murmurs that might be conversation just beyond the edge of comprehensibility, or it might be mechanical noise, or nothing at all. Her phone speaker was no good. Everything useful was stripped out of this file. She needed the data. She needed her equipment. She needed to be at work.

  Then Brian’s voice returned, but his words were broken, unintelligible, rising and falling in a singsong rhythm. There was a waver that might have been someone or everyone. A quiver that could be time or fine. Charlie passed her phone from one hand to the other, held it closer to her ear.

  Another noise whispered in the background, half a beat behind. Instrument feedback. An echo.

  No. It was a woman’s voice.

  Charlie closed her eyes. It felt like sandpaper scraping over her corneas.

  Intrepid had left Earth eight months ago. A small fraction of a single life, less than a blink in the history of humankind, nothing at all to the incomprehensible span of the universe. But it was time enough for the sound of a voice over a radio to replace the memory of a whisper in her ear, for the sight of a face framed by a camera to grow more familiar than a smile in morning sunlight. For the memory of hands clasped, the tickle of soft hair on a bare shoulder, warm bodies curled together, companionable silences beneath the night sky to fade, fade, fade.

  Lisa had said, “We’ll figure us out when I get back.” And Charlie had agreed, and they had both laughed, mapping the geologic slowness of Charlie’s emotions, the epochs and eras it took for her to understand what she was feeling. Space and time contracted with a kiss, expanded with a goodbye, and two years and a hundred million miles were supposed to be enough.

  The recording ended. Forty-seven seconds. Such a small snippet, and alone, to have made its way through the vacuum to Earth. These garbled noises made no more sense than the previous four seconds. When Charlie had let her mind wander these past few days, exhaustion nudging her from reason to fantasy, she found herself imagining something in the space between Earth and Mars—some thing, a curtain vast and dark, rippling in the solar wind, beyond sight, beyond sense, knowable only by the distortion it caused, by the wavelengths it absorbed and the cruel, tantalizing fragments it let pass.