Heiresses of Russ 2012

by Connie Wilkins

  “No!” I jumped at the sound of my own voice. “Man probably did this at the first eclipse, too. They looked up and saw something eating the sun and they thought it was the end of the world. But it wasn’t. We don’t understand everything. So what! We’ll learn. And the world will keep changing and we’ll learn to deal with that, but everyone is acting like it’s the end of the world!”

  My grandfather looked at me. Then he looked down into his coffee. I was reminded of Josey; of her asking, What happens to us then?

  I wanted to know what was happening to us now.

  “Katri,” he said, after a moment. “These things everyone is doing. They’re important.”

  I started to object, but he didn’t let me.

  “So what do you want everyone to do, when the world changes up around them. Hm? Dig their heels in like you’re doing?”

  “I’m not—” I said. And then, “I’m just not panicking.”

  “You’re dealing with the light very well,” he conceded, and drank from his mug.

  The light.

  But the light, for all that it had sent Dad to Liberia and Josey to Tennessee, hadn’t sent me seventy minutes down the interstate to drink coffee in my grandfather’s kitchen. That had been Josey, it had been Dad, it had been the people buying gas and generators like they’d need to dig in tomorrow for a white night sky—maybe—in twenty years.

  “You think I’m acting fourteen, don’t you?”

  My grandfather set his coffee down. “No! No, I just think you’re in over your head.” He gestured, trying to paint an entire world with his hands. “If God gives you a reason to remember what’s important in life, take it. That’s all. And if everyone else takes it, that’s wonderful. No one has to act like the world’s on fire.”

  I studied his face for any hint of rapture. “Do you think it’s God, then?”

  No rapture. Just a smile, expanding across his face. “I meet a lot of articulate agnostics out here on the ranch, Katri,” he jibed. “So no; I think a very un-Islamic thing. I think God is what we make of Him.”

  •

  We went out back to the patio. My grandfather carried the telescope despite my attempts to help, and he set it up in the corner with the best view. He let me take the first look, straight at the unexplained God in the sky.

  “Has it changed at all?” my grandfather asked.

  I squinted through the lens. The light was as inscrutable as ever.

  “I wonder what we look like from that far away,” I said, pulling away. “If they could even see the light from our galaxy. Or maybe you could see the light from our universe. From the big bang.” I shook my head to keep myself from shaking, but the shiver was gone in a moment anyway. “I wonder if the big bang looked like that.”

  My grandfather put his hand on my back, rubbing slow circles and meaningless patterns. “Think we’ll find out what it is?”

  “Give it twenty years,” I answered. Two decades, and it would have filled the night sky or faded away. Or just sat there, letting the world learn how to deal with it.

  “Hmm,” my grandfather agreed.

  We watched for a few more minutes in silence before he turned to go back inside. After a while, I followed him. The light stayed behind, waiting in the cold night sky.

  •

  Contributors

  Laird Barron is an award-winning author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, and dark fantasy genres. He raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s and worked as fisherman on the Bering Sea. His debut novel, The Croning, released in 2012 from Night Shade Books.

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  Steve Berman’s young adult novel Vintage: A Ghost Story was a finalist for the Andre Norton Award and made the GLBT-Round Table of the American Library Association’s Rainbow List of recommended queer-positive books for children and teens. He’s worked as editor of the genre anthologies Magic in the Mirrorstone, So Fey, and the Wilde Stories series, which has twice been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In fall of 2011, he edited his latest book, Speaking Out, a young adult anthology featuring inspirational short fiction aimed at LGBT teens, released from Bold Strokes Books. His short fiction has been featured in such anthologies as The Beastly Bride and Teeth, all edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Berman is the founder of Lethe Press, which, for over a decade, has released quality books of queer and weird fiction from such writers as Tanith Lee, Livia Llewellyn, Catherin Lundoff, and a host of other authors whose names do not start with ‘L.’ He resides in southern New Jersey with a very demanding feline.

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  Desirina Boskovich graduated from Emory University in 2005, with a degree in creative writing. In 2007, she attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been published in Realms of Fantasy, Last Drink Bird Head and The Leonardo Variations, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Currently, she lives in Atlanta, in the light-filled attic of an old brick building. She works as a freelance copywriter and drinks too much tea.

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  Lindy Cameron lives on the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne, Australia and is the author of the acclaimed Kit O’Malley mystery series. We hope she will have more forays into science-fiction noir.

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  A Canadian-born child of the Mediterranean, Amal El-Mohtar is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the Cornwall campus of the University of Exeter, sharpening her quills for the hunt. In her hours of rest, she lives in a house on a Hill’s Head, where she drinks tea, plays harp, tastes honey, and writes stories about the Arabic alphabet, book-women, singing fish, and Damascene dream-crafters.

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  Katherine Fabian was born and raised in the UK. She currently divides her time between reading, writing and trying to save the world through the power of statistics. So far, she’s had the most success with reading. Her blog can be found at kfabian.dreamwidth.org.

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  One of the preeminent voices in feminist speculative fiction, Nalo Hopkinson is of Jamaican birth and lives in Canada. Her novels (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms) and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling. She has won such awards as the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and the Aurora Award.

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  A Miami native, S.L. Knapp grew up with ready access to the ocean and to the absurd. Inevitably, she developed an affinity for both. She has an anthropology degree that gets more use during dinner conversations than professionally, which in her opinion is the best reason to study anthropology. She is currently pursuing a law degree and hopes to go into maritime law. “Amphitrite” is her first publication.

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  David D. Levine has sold over forty science fiction and fantasy stories to all the major markets, including Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy. He’s won a Hugo Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and won or been shortlisted for many other awards as well as appearing in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and the revised version of Wild Cards, Volume I. His web page is at bentopress.com/sf/.

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  Anna Meadows is a part-time executive assistant, part-time housewife. She writes from her heritage in the Mexican-American Southwest and her passion for stories about women in love. Her work appears in thirteen anthologies and on the Lambda Literary website. She lives with her Sapphic husband in California.

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  Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height. They’re also a PhD student in sociology and a writer who has published short stories in Strange Horizons, Jabberwocky, and Shimmer, among lots of other places. Their days are spent in balancing teaching, research, writing, and healthy doses of nothing whatsoever. Their life is a trick of light, so don’t blink.

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  Emily Moreton published her first short story in 2007, for a charity anthology in aid of victims of Hurric
ane Katrina. Since then, she has continued to publish erotic short fiction regularly with a number of American publishers, including Torquere Press and Circlet Press. She lives in Bristol, UK, with her cat, where she works a number of jobs and studies towards her PhD.

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  Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton currently lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction appears in the anthology Hellebore & Rue and is forthcoming from Daily Science Fiction, and her poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons. Although she is blogless, her daily shenanigans can be tracked by following @lnmorton on Twitter.

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  An Owomoyela is a web application developer by profession and a writer by vocation. She is a classic INTP, which means she loves systems and details; she didn’t go into Lingusitics because of the job prospects, she went because playing in grammar and word formation were hella exciting fields. Her work has seen print in the pages of Fantasy and Lightspeed Magazine.

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  And

  Connie Wilkins’s first love was writing fantasy and science fiction, where she published work in such diverse venues as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Prom Night, and two of Bruce Coville’s anthologies for children. Then her alter-ego Sacchi Green was seduced by the erotic side of the force, where she published scores of stories in books including seven volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica, four volumes of Best Women’s Erotica, and four volumes of Best Lesbian Romance. She has also edited or co-edited eight anthologies of lesbian erotica, including Girl Crazy, Lesbian Cowboys (a Lambda Literary Award winner), Lesbian Lust (GCLS Award winner), Lesbian Cops, and Girl Fever, all for Cleis Press, along with A Ride to Remember, a collection of her own work from Lethe Press. Lately she’s returned to her speculative fiction roots as a contributor to Haunted Hearths and Hellebore & Rue, both from Lethe Press, and several publications from Circlet Press. She is also the editor of Time Well Bent: Queer Alternative Histories from Lethe Press.

  Connie’s Sacchi persona can be found online at http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com, Facebook (Sacchi Green), Live Journal (http://sacchig.livejournal.com/), and the Lesbian Fiction Forum (http://www.lesbianfiction.org/viewforum.php?f=53) Her corporeal form resides in western Massachusetts, with frequent retreats to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

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  Publication Credits

  “In Orbit” copyright © 2011 Katherine Fabian, first appeared in Expanded Horizons (April 4th, 2011) • “La Caída” copyright © 2011 Anna Meadows, first appeared in Girls Who Bite: Lesbian Vampire Erotica (ed. by Delilah Devlin, Cleis Press) • “The Thick Night” copyright © 2011 Sunny Moraine, first appeared in Strange Horizons (May 2, 2011) • “And Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness” copyright © 2011 Lisa Nohealani Morton, first appeared in Hellebore & Rue (ed. by Catherine Lundoff & JoSelle Vanderhooft, Lethe Press) • “Daniel” copyright © 2011 Emily Moreton, first appeared in Like a Treasure Found: Erotic Tales of Pirates (ed. by Joy Crelin, Circlet Press) • “Amphitrite” copyright © 2011 S.L. Knapp, first appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories 2 (ed. by JoSelle Vanderhooft, Torquere Press) • “The Tides of the Heart” copyright © 2011 David D. Levine, first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, June 2011 • “Feedback” copyright © 2011 Lindy Cameron, first appeared in Women of the Mean Streets (ed. by J.M. Redmann & Greg Herren, Bold Strokes Books) • “To Follow the Waves” copyright © 2011 Amal El-Mohtar, first appeared in Steam Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories (ed. by JoSelle Vanderhooft, Torquere Press) • “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven” copyright © 2011 Laird Barron, first appeared in Supernatural Noir (ed. by Ellen Datlow, Dark Horse) • “Thirteen Incantations” copyright © 2011 Desirina Boskovich, first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, February 2011 • “D is for Delicious” copyright © 2011 Steve Berman, first appeared in Hellebore & Rue (ed. by Catherine Lundoff & JoSelle Vanderhooft, Lethe Press) • “Ours is the Prettiest” copyright © 2011 Nalo Hopkinson, first appeared in Welcome to Bordertown (ed. by Holly Black & Ellen Kushner, Random House Books for Young Readers) • “God in the Sky” copyright © 2011 An Owomoyela, first appeared in Asimov’s, March 2011