by Aeon Authors
“What is an ant, Lady?”
“Why, we are. And have been so since the moon filled the sky and the seasons did not change.”
“What may I do for my Lady?”
“Kill the woman and, failing that, bring home her corrosive powders to destroy the Icaros. The poison rains have made them mad. I can always make more.”
“What is a woman?”
“Do I have to tell you everything?”
“Yes, Lady.”
At the granite-topped center island of her renovated, better than new, kitchen, Ginny poked around in the drawers the previous owners had left chock full of utensils.
“Ahh…” She came up with a silver-handled mold for forming decorative cones from confectioner’s sugar. Dipping it in the can of poison she pressed out mounded ellipses in a half-circle.
Indil Thirty-seven, after navigating the grouted alleyways that separated the tiles of the kitchen floor, struggled with clicking articulations over the polished stone lip of Ginny Levitan’s countertop. Another obstacle, a range of white powder mountains, lay ahead. He made for a valley.
“Oh…” As Ginny shifted her weight on the high stool she set one mound of white, white powder into motion. Snow, snow, white and deadly, drifted a millimeter deep to bury a miniature alpine pass. She watched a lone ant struggle out from under the arsenic fall and skitter back to the edge of the polished granite slab.
“Hi there. Is that you?” Ginny felt ridiculous asking.
“Thus far, sister of the queen.” The words were close and foreign, a strange accent. Was that the Armenian music? And mixed with the tiny, tinny bagpipes, too.
“Who are you?” No answer. Ginny Levitan faced the windows, her eyes focused on nothing. A busy day, today, voices in my head.
“They are killing the captive queens, the Icaros are,” said the voice.
On the countertop the lone ant groomed its antennae as a miniature bagpipe band played from the poison buffet. “You are going to kill your husband. He is wearing out, then?” The ant was dusted white from its struggle through the arsenic.
“I am doing the wearing out. Would you kill my husband? If you were me?”
“Whatever advances the colony. My colony is killing its spare queens. This is usual in times of dwindling food or an overabundance of foragers. But Housekeeping’s behavior is not normal. They will kill the Mother of Us All.”
“Holy shit. You are the messenger.”
“Your sister, the Mother of Us All, said she had prepared you for my coming.” The ant was diffident.
“All this is for real, then?”
“What is real? Solid? Then that is what this must be.” The messenger was pleased, having figured things out by himself.
Ginny licked off her fingers, then self-consciously wiped them on her khaki shorts. “You are an ant. I am talking to an ant.” She had meant to kill them, the ants, and felt contrite.
“So that is indeed what you call us. I have learned this twice today. And are you perhaps the great presence shutting out the light? Thank you for sharing your air with me. Ant. Indeed. I am a Long Walker, messenger and scout.”
“You work like rice barge coolies: no future, no past, only the work and a scrap of food,” said Ginny. “You are an ant. I could kill you.”
“Should I consider this a warning or a call to combat?” Indil Thirty-seven crouched defensively on his second and third leg joints and tucked his abdomen under his thorax.
“Fight me? You are an ant.”
“So?”
“I am bigger than you. I would win.”
“So then I must die.” Indil Thirty-seven groomed an antenna. “Could we not work together?”
Almost flattery. Ginny crossed her legs. “Some men find me attractive.”
“You are a men? What is a men?”
Ginny explained.
“Then if I were a men I, too, would find you attractive,” said the ant. “But the joy of duty you find shallow. Duty is the greatest satisfaction imaginable. Soon there must be a swarming. I have no wings. Housekeeping will cut me up alive for it is not in me to resist them. I will be their last meal then they, too will die.”
“Then you all die and are eaten.”
“Self-death and the violent ending of another are expediencies. We are familiar with these,” said Indil. “Your husband. Will you eat him or may I take him home?”
Ginny uncrossed her legs.
“I could call 911,” said Ginny, remembering the arsenic. “For all of us.”
“You could. Who is 911?”
Ginny explained medical emergencies. “Are you real?” This was stupid, of course he wasn’t real.
“Ah, yes, 911. For your husband. The Lady Mother could call Housekeeping and they would come to cut him up for that is the way of things.”
Ginny washed her hands at the sink and thrust a spoon into the container of yogurt. “What do you do with the rice when you haul it home?”
“We eat it. You have eaten the white powder. You will die. Then again, perhaps not. But then, so will I for I have unwisely walked through it. Or not. Whatever is the will of the Mother of Us All.”
“My name is Ginny, by the way.”
“Thank you, Ginny. I am the Master of Messengers. Today I am Thirty-seventh. This is my time, Ginny. Is that a sweet, sticky thing you have there? Don’t lick the spoon, lay it near me. Gently, gently now.” The Master of Messengers walked through the sticky blueberry essence, then the powder, covering his tarsal joints blue and white. “At present you are pondering the choices of suicide or killing your husband.”
“How did you know?”
“The Mother of Us All has informed me of this. I gather that either option will advance your colony’s sense of duty. However, both choices bring you unease.”
“Breathe well, Long Walker. Thank you for sharing your air.”
“May you sing like a queen, Mother of men. This is a dark and doubtful life we have around us.” With the easy clicking gaited grace of one born to duty, the Master of Messengers escaped beneath a baseboard molding to make his report. He had the gift of obedience.
Jim Levitan came home late again, moist and fresh from a recent shower. The reek of French milled soap did not cover the smell of sex, likewise moist and recent.
He found the house a symphony of aromas. His wife greeted him with powdered doughnuts, home-baked, lightly fried in sesame oil and covered with white, white powder. Confectioner’s sugar, he guessed.
Ginny Levitan wondered whom she would call; perhaps Linda Throckmorton with her belated atonements.
Hail to our mother, who caused the messenger, the soldier, the worker,
Who scattered the seeds of her body as she came forth from Paradise.
See how they love her, gathered near!
The Indil, master of messengers;
The Icaro, a soldier, a terror:
A stirrer of strife, A maker of war;
The worker, humble and wearied.
She is our mother, goddess of the earth, she offers food in the desert, and causes us to live.
Our lives are the wonder.
And I am the master of messengers.
Mother of Us All, be merciful.
Our Authors
Greg Beatty (“Two Cairns for Apollo”) and his wife live in Bellingham, Washington. Greg has a BA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Iowa, both in English, and attended Clarion West 2000. His work has appeared in 3SF, Absolute Magnitude, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov’s, Fortean Bureau, HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, Paradox, SciFiction, Shadowed Realms, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, among other venues. In 2005 Greg won the Rhysling Award in the short poem category, and, more recently, two of his poems won first and second place in the Bay Area Writers League Princess of Mars Poetry Contest.
Greg’s poem “Seeking the
Lovetrino,” appeared in Æon Six, “The Dolls of Mother Ceres” in Æon Seven, and “Unnatural Poetry Workshop in ”Æon Nine.
Visit Greg on the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~gbeatty/
Rob Hunter (“The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie”) is the sole support of a 1993 Geo Metro and the despair of his young wife. With the onset of late middle age he does dishes, mows the lawn and keeps their Maine cottage spotless by moving as little as possible. In a former life he was a newspaper copy boy, railroad telegraph operator, recording engineer, and film editor. He spent the 70s and 80s as a Top-40 disc jockey. Rob’s wife, Bonnie, is the secretary at a nearby rural elementary school. She is a gifted quilter who beguiled her new husband with the kaleidoscope of patchwork geometry. The nearest town to the Hunters that anybody is likely to have ever heard of—because of Stephen King’s The Langoliers—is Bangor, Maine where there are real parking meters and a traffic light. They drive down every six months or so to watch the light change and see the trains come in.
Visit his website at http://www.onetinleg.com.
Dr. Rob Furey (“Parallax”) worked on his PhD in Gabon, West Africa, on social spiders. He has returned to his study site several times for his own research, with students and once as a forest guide for a natural history film crew from the UK. He has faced down cobras, retreated from army ants, and slept on open wooden platforms in African swamps. Later he went to French Amazonia to work on another social spider species. Not only did he spend time with the spiders, but he watched a gunfight between gold prospectors and French army troops while he ate a meal of roasted tapir. Since then Rob has returned to the tropics several times, usually with students. He spent time as a student himself attending Clarion West. He has published a couple of stories in anthologies since then in addition to articles for dusty tomes on arcane spider behavior. He is currently part of the charter faculty at Harrisburg University, the first new private university in Pennsylvania in over 100 years.
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His recent novels include Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both books in 2008. Jay is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at http://jaylake.livejournal.com.
Jay's most recent appearance in Aeon was "Whyte Boyz" in Æon Seven.
January Mortimer (“Brighton Bay”) lives in London with her goldfish, Hedgehog, and a frightening number of house plants. She is currently employed as an ecologist, so wherever she is right now, it is probably muddy and full of frogs. When not standing in a field or ditch somewhere, she uses her spare time to collects old books, old photographs, and large quantities of utterly useless old junk. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, and Heliotrope.
Online, January can be found at http://Januaryhat.Livejournal.com.
Ryan Neal Myers (“The Underthing”) lives with his wife in a small town in Northern Idaho—a magical place where gray-haired hippies shake hands with well-educated farmers. Ryan is neither. He graduated from Clarion in 2001, has a degree in creative writing, makes short films in his living room, and writes everything from cyberpunk to children’s fantasy. He almost sold a big-budget screenplay to Hollywood, almost lived in Australia, almost flew a UH-60 Blackhawk, and almost looks cool in his leather jacket. His sunglasses are clip-ons.
John A. Pitts (“The Hanging of the Greens”) is a transplanted Kentucky boy who makes his home in the Pacific Northwest. By day he’s a computer consultant. He writes at night, after his family has settled into their nightly routine. His other stories have appeared in Fortean Bureau and the anthology From the Trenches from Carnifex Press.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Signals”)’s novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 13 different languages. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won Hugo awards for both editing and fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has also been the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award, the Science Fiction Age Reader’s Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award, and been nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award.
From 1991-1996 Kris was the editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.
Visit Kris’s website at http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/.
Marge Simon (“The Gate”) freelances as a writer-poet-illustrator for genre and mainstream publications such as Nebula Awards 32, Strange Horizons, Flashquake, Flash Me Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares, The Pedestal Magazine, and Story House. She is former president of the Small Press Writers/Artists Organization and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has received the Rhysling Award for speculative poetry and the James Award for art. Her poetry collections, Night Smoke with Bruce Boston (2003) and Artist of Antithesis (2004), were Bram Stoker Award finalists.
Marge’s short SF/fantasy fiction collection, “Like Birds in the Rain” (Sam’s Dot Publications) is self illustrated and will be out in 2007. Her collaborative dark SF poetry collection with Charlee Jacob, VECTORS: A Week in the Death of a Planet (Dark Regions) and Night Smoke with Bruce Boston (Kelp Queen Press) will also be available this year.
Marge's poem "Yours or Mine?" appeared in Æeon Two.
http://hometown.aol.com/margsimon//
Marcie Lynn Tentchoff (“Passing Beneath Stars”) is an Aurora Award winning poet/author who lives with her family and other odd creatures in a small town on Canada’s west coast. Her stories and poetry have appeared in On Spec, Weird Tales, Aoife’s Kiss, Dreams and Nightmares, and Talebones, as well as in various anthologies and online publications.
Marcie’s poem “But You Don't Remember” appeared in Æon Six, and “This Girl on a Train” in Æon Eight.
Mikal Trimm (“The Cathedral of the Never-Was”)’s short stories and poems have appeared in numerous venues over the last few years. Recent or forthcoming works may be found in Helix, Postscripts, Weird Tales, Black Gate, and Interfictions, among others.
His novel, The Greatest Freaking Book Anyone Has Written EVER! is not forthcoming from any publisher at any time in the future.
Mikal’s poem “Lost on the Shores of Avalon”, which was shortlisted for a Rhysling Award, appeared in Æon Six.
Visit Mikal’s blog at http://catchingflies.blogspot.com.
Melissa Tyler (“The Sky Spider”) is a cheerful cynic who was raised by Yankees in the swamps of East Texas. She lived for twenty years in Austin, Texas, but has recently moved to the Pacific Northwest to delight in the novel experiences of changing seasons, regional foods that won’t try to kill you first, flora that’s not armed, and drizzle. She’ll fill her time with the three R’s: reading, writing, and researching, as well as the obligatory remuneration. Æon has obliged her by being the first magazine to buy one of her stories, and thus will be her favorite magazine forevermore.
In Æon Twelve your editors will welcome the return of three Æon authors of the past:
Dev Agarwal (“Angels of War,” Æon Three) returns with another story of humankind’s creations gone wrong, the Salusa. We may once have been their masters, but now we’re only “Toys.”
Lisa Mantchev (“Mirror Bound,” Æon Nine) explores a universe of dreams, decisions, and choices that form us in “Her Box of Secrets.”
Lawrence M. Schoen (“The Game of Leaf and Smile,” Æon Four and “Thinking,” Æon Eight), shows us a metaphoric vision strangely achieved in “Fitzwell’s Oracle.”
We’ll also be offering fou
r stories by authors making their first Æon appearances. Sarah L. Edwards depicts a world of quietly magical folk and their animal companions in “Wild Among Hares.”
John Kratman pays a speculative visit to a great Crow Nation of the not-too-distant future in “Harry the Crow.”
Hugo Award-winner David D. Levine casts some “Moonlight on the Carpet” in a gently-terrifying tale of the same name.
And finally, come along to a wacky, wonderful world at the end of the human story as Katherine Sparrow bids you “Welcome to Oceanopia.”
We hope to see you in the future!
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