Uncanny Magazine Issue One

by Uncanny Magazine

  “Feel better?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You were a jerk to Gwynne.”

  “I was.”

  “We all have bad days. She’ll understand. She’s too good for us that way. But you need to apologize.”

  “Didn’t mean to insult her. Just everyone.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s part of everyone. And for some reason she cares what you think, unlike the rest of us.” I put a hand on his shoulder. Beneath the jacket’s padding, he was all bone. “God knows why.”

  “Losers,” he said.

  The door opened behind us. I didn’t recognize the big guy with the horned hat and tusks. Always someone new around. “Occupied.”

  “There’s—”

  “I said, occupied.”

  “I need to go.”

  “Use the ladies’ down the hall.”

  “There’s a line.”

  “Scoot.”

  I put something extra into my voice at the end there, and he did. When I turned back to Doc, he was laughing, and not the good kind of laughter.

  I shook him. “Stay with me.”

  He stopped, but the crazed look lingered in his eye—and I mean crazed like cracking.

  “Doc, we all have days like this. That’s the trouble with being player one. Spend months, years setting up the game, then player two stumbles in and wins. Sucks, but that’s the way. We all fall. If you take it out on the people who are there for you when you land, the fall’s just harder.”

  “You don’t get it, Stella. This time, I didn’t lose.”

  I did not like where this was going.

  “There we were, the heart of the Soul Engine. The redoubtable Ms. Claudia Zhang wired so any attempt to foil the Engine would kill her, the Engine wired so any attempt to rescue her would set it off. I knew Majestic could get them both—but I didn’t tell her about the second trap: a fate circuit drawing power from Majestic’s choice. There wasn’t enough juice to tear free the spirits of mankind, but it did the job for one.” He fished inside his jacket pocket, produced the Dagger of Leng and a collapsible pentacle woven from a dead god’s marrow and a half–dozen other implements of trade, until at last he found a little disc of ice–blue crystal. It hovered between us, perfect enough to grab a soul and flawed enough to keep it. Inside, turning and turning, all gyred up as a poet might say—

  If you’ve never seen a naked soul, it’s no more like a soul embodied than a flower you planted as a seed and watered and watched sprout, grow, bloom, and wither is like a badly–lit photo of the same. In that stone I saw birth, sex, heartbreak, pain, and that time Claudia Zhang got high with her friends and tried to synch Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz but no one could quite time the VCR right. Ms. Zhang, ace reporter, was inside that stone, timeless and trapped. She couldn’t see us, but her eyes had that same damn human expression. Unfair.

  I did not keep my voice level. Or down. Shadows clogged the room, which was my fault—I lose control when I’m angry. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I won.” His smile was way too wide to convince me. I know what fear looks like. “Player one always loses. Hell with that. So I set a trap and beat her.”

  “That’s not the way this works, Doc. You can’t call the game and win it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because then it stops being a game. And when our thing turns real, it turns ugly.” His eyes had no fire in them now. “You know that. You caught her and you came here, because you’re scared of what happens next.”

  “I wanted to win,” he said. “I wanted to show Gwynne I could. And now I’ve messed it all up. Like always.”

  “We can fix this,” I said. “Come with me.”

  “What?”

  “We need to get you back in the game. Majestic will come looking for you, and if she finds you here she’ll wreck this place, and I don’t want to spend the next few hundred years hunting another watering hole.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “Of Majestic? Hopped up alien shapeshifter with delusions of grandeur? Please. But I’m not the only one here. They don’t even have powers where Doctor J comes from. The Octagon might be immortal but his guitar isn’t. And neither’s Gwynne.”

  He’s a pale guy but he went paler.

  “I didn’t think.”

  “I know the feeling.” I stood, with a sigh. “You have two choices, way I see it. You want to walk this road, play for final stakes, then you go out the front door and never come back. Gwynne might be sad, and the rest of us might miss you, because you’re a fun guy when you’re not pulling shit like this. But we’ll live. Or.” Indicating, with open palm, the poor, trapped, corporeally–challenged Claudia Zhang. “You make two apologies tonight.”

  He nodded.

  I held out my hand and dragged him to his feet.

  Back in the bar, Castaway threw a card that would have gone straight into Javier’s hat if the Dealer hadn’t winked the hat out of existence first. This prompted some argument about the rules of their game. Gwynne waited at the table, mostly recovered. Kyberios sat with her, not talking, just being there. She looked up to me first, and then to Doc.

  “I’m sorry,” Doc said, and would have said more before I tugged him past.

  “Hold that thought, Gwynne. Need to take care of some trouble first. Our friend’s been dumb.”

  Her brow furrowed like she could read minds. “I’m coming with you.”

  “That is not a good idea.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “I could,” but why argue?

  She followed Doc and me to the door, which I dialed for Doc’s home realm and opened onto an almost–empty parking lot flanked by scrub pines. Stars overhead, pretty patterns, the galaxy washed out by streetlights but still there. Far away and past the trees a city’s lights burned. Here, the Cape and Cane was the corner of a strip mall occupied by a karate club and a Wash–n–Fold. There are lots of realms; can’t afford downtown real estate in every one.

  We stepped out, me and the Doc and Gwynne. It takes a second to get your bearings in a new world. Thank momentum and reference frames for that.

  “Hey,” I said. No need to speak louder than a whisper, at least on this seaboard. “Majestic. Doc has something to say.”

  There were crickets among the pines around us, and wind in the branches, and cars on the road in the distance.

  Sound travels three hundred forty meters a second in air, give or take. The city was forty clicks away. My voice reached it in a little under two minutes. Majestic made the return trip faster.

  She wasn’t there, and then she was, hovering with arms crossed above the blacktop. Her hair was long and black and unbound, blown straight by the wind of her flight. The world bent with her anger. She wore striped pajamas. She could break the sound barrier without a sweat and had been in too much of a hurry to put on clothes.

  We were probably screwed.

  Majestic’s eyes were red. She had not been sleeping. She turned her gaze on Doc, with a mixture of scorn and anger I knew too well: The righteous angel’s expression. “Doctor. What you’ve done—”

  Doc stepped forward. For a guy drunk as he was, he made an admirable show of sobriety. “It was an accident,” he said.

  “Bullshit.”

  I’ll say this for Doc, not everyone controls their bladder when a woman who can punch holes in the moon calls bullshit.

  “You’re right. I made a mistake. I wanted.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter what I wanted, does it?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s no excuse for what I did. Here.” He offered her the crystal. “Place it over her heart. She’ll wake, unharmed.”

  “You’re a mad dog, Doctor. I should put you down.”

  Gwynne stepped between them. “I’ll stop you if you try.”

  I kept a straight face. What could Gwynne do against her? But Majestic didn’t know Gwynne and wasn’t psychic any more.

&n
bsp; “He wants back in the game, Mags,” I said. “It’s a good deal.”

  She turned to me. “Stella. You think you’re above all this. I should get the League, burst through that door, scatter you and your sick friends to the ends of time.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if you came after us, you’d be player one. And you know how things end for player one.” I smiled, and showed sharp teeth and the faintest trace of my ruined wings. “The folks in there have a lot of practice losing. And me, I have more practice than anyone. How’d you like to find out how it feels?”

  Majestic, to her credit, considered the option.

  But she looked at the stone then, and saw Claudia staring back at her.

  She took the stone, and her love, and left.

  None of us spoke for a while. Doc worked up the nerve first. “Gwynne. You couldn’t have beat her.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well. Who cares about winning anyway? I’d rather lose with style.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was scared.”

  “And a jerk.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with a self–deprecating laugh out of character for a master of the mystic arts.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  I held the door open for them. Above, the stars and galaxies whirled, and seemed to smile.

  I didn’t smile back. I went inside to see how Doctor J’s hat would fare. Us losers have to stick together, after all.

  © 2014 Max Gladstone

  Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated (twice!) for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. Tor Books published his third novel, Full Fathom Five, in July 2014. The first two books in his Craft Sequence, Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, came out in October 2012 and 2013. Last First Snow, the next novel in the Craft Sequence, will hit shelves in July 2015.

  Celia and the Conservation of Entropy

  by Amelia Beamer

  I’m shocked that my time machine has worked. At least, I think it’s worked. But I can’t see anything and I’m feeling carsick.

  The room smells like I imagined, dust and cool metal, and underneath that, a hint of aftershave. I blink a few times and then touch my eyelids to check that my eyes are open.

  It’s not my room anymore. No way. A single uncovered bulb hangs overhead. I haven’t seen one of those outside of a museum! Plus he’s got these long wooden tables covered with real copper wire, wrenches, switches, circuitry. I listen, but no one seems to be home. I try to breathe. I’m so excited. I never expected my time machine to work!

  Taped to the wall is a photo of a girl–child with goofy ’80s glasses and hair. My mother, I suppose. I peel it off the wall, careful to keep the tape intact. Then I fold the tape over and pocket the photo, as a test.

  I look out the window. It’s dark outside. Like, really dark, only a few streetlights and no overglow. We talked about light pollution in science class, but I never understood it until now. The dark is sort of pretty, but unnerving.

  I don’t have time to waste. I sit at the computer, which says it’s an Apple II. Good, I studied these. I saw pictures: the CRT monitor and dual 5 ¼ inch floppy drives.

  I go to search for the doco, hoping I can figure out what it’s called. My Novel seems unlikely. I’ve brought the page with me, the page I found deep in my closet when I was sentenced to clean my room over summer vacation. It was rolled up inside the left half of a pair of galoshes. The only other person who had my room was Grandpa, so it must have belonged to him. Those galoshes were his. Even now I’m holding the piece of paper as if it’s a talisman, creased like a love note from me folding and unfolding it.

  Nobody would believe me, but the page I found is part of a novel. The novel is about me, Celia, going back in time to save my Grandpa’s novel. I can tell it’s his because it has my real name, Celia, and a bunch of math. I seem to only have part of the equation. But I get chills when I read it. I want to know how the story ends. Also, the science fair is less than two weeks away.

  So today after school, I got some of Grandpa’s old circuitry and switches from the garage and made my time machine. That part was easy. The hard part was the relativity recalculation to correct for the Earth’s rotation and revolution through space. I got stuck trying to do the math there, but then I looked at the page from Grandpa’s novel and it gave me what I needed to make my relativity coordinator from an analog potentiometer. I got it for Christmas. My parents like to support my hobbies.

  I go to turn on Grandpa’s computer. But there’s a program running already. On the left of the screen is a pixilated picture of a guy in an apron, and the txt says: Hello, I’m Matt.

  So you’re going to Oregon! I can fix you up with what you need:

  –a team of oxen to pull your wagon

  –clothing for both summer and winter

  Press SPACE BAR to continue

  Is this a sim? I wonder. Some kind of preparation course? Well, okay. And I am glad for seventh grade computer history class when Mrs. Goober insisted we learn the QWERTY keyboard.

  I press the spacebar. It takes so long I think I’ve broken the machine.

  But it’s just another prompt in the sim.

  Matt has listed more supplies:

  –plenty of food for the trip

  –ammunition for your rifles

  –spare parts for your wagon

  I hit the spacebar again, which brings up a menu. I’m starting to worry. Matt’s General Store. Independence, Missouri. July 1, 1848. I have $800 to spend on oxen, food, clothing, ammunition, and spare parts.

  Wait. 1848? That’s not possible. I don’t want to do anything that will hurt Grandpa, if he’s in this weird old sim. I have to get the novel that’s on this computer. I fight the urge to start randomly hitting buttons.

  There’s a thump in the next room, like from something the size of a cat. I panic, quickly setting my relativity coordinator. It only takes a second, and then I press the Return button on my time machine. Too late. A man comes into the room, looking as startled as I feel. He holds a sandwich on a plate which he drops. He looks so young. In the family photos, he’s gray haired, but now it’s brown. I feel a pang in my heart. My grandfather died when I was two.

  I have an urge to tell him about the heart attack he’ll have, but I don’t dare because it would be tactless.

  “Wait!” he says. “Celia, wait. Please!” He’s scattering the equipment and papers on his table, looking for something.

  I wonder what he means, and how he knows it’s me. Have I been here before, me or some alternate timestream version of me? I’m working out the Feynman diagram in my head as the room grows faint. I’m feeling faint.

  And then I’m lying on damp grass. It’s dark. I’m afraid that I’ve landed in someone else’s future, that there’s another version of me already here, or I was never born, or that people never existed. My jeans are wet. I might catch a cold.

  But I can hear the freeway. So people must exist. Then I remember the photo and check my pocket. It’s there, proof that I didn’t just dream this. I turn it over, marveling in the light of the overglow. On the back is written my mother’s name, Celeste, and the year. 1983.

  I am so proud of myself. This is going to be the best science project ever.

  It turns out my relativity coordinator still needs some work. I’ve landed not far from I–70, so I get a lift with a grizzly–looking trucker named Stanley. Maybe in this time period, hitchhiking is OK, but it’s not like I planned for this. I’m afraid to ask what year it is in case I’m right. I kinda want to have landed somewhere random.

  Stanley is nice and just wants to know that I am being safe. I give him a lie about how I’m going to live with my grandfather. He buys us cherry pie just before Pittsburgh (he had his with a big slice of cheddar on top, ew). Then he drops me off with a buddy of his named Bug who’s going through Harrisburg. Bug talks all night about axles and weighing stations and cops who lie in wait. I piece together what year it is by
the iPhone 12 on the dashboard. By sunrise I’m home in the ’burbs. He takes me right there.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say as I’m getting out of the truck.

  “Right arm,” he says, or maybe he says, “Right on.” I’m not sure, so I salute.

  I go in the back door, trying to be quiet. At least I’d had the sense to tell my parents I was staying over at my best friend Kelly’s house. I hope my cover story hasn’t been blown. Kelly would know to call me on my mobile, anyway. I check it, and the display shows a bunch of gobbledygook. I get scared, thinking this is evidence that I’ve landed in some other alternate reality, but when I restart it and it links up with the satellites, it tells me I’ve missed no calls.

  My parents’ bedroom door is shut, and I can hear my mom snoring. Awesome. All of this, the nice truckers, the unsuspecting parents, should be proof that I’m in someone else’s future, but I decide it’s just beginner’s luck. I go to sleep with the picture of my mom under my pillow, and dream about penguins.

  I don’t even mind when my mother wakes me up with her singing.

  “Been spending most our lives/Living in a gangsta’s paradise,” she sings over the bangs and clangs she’s making in the kitchen. She likes oldies.

  My bedside clock reads ten AM. That means I’ve slept for maybe three hours. I am so excited I don’t care. I change into pajamas and go downstairs. I can smell the pancakes.

  Dad has gone golfing already. Everything is normal. Mom has burned the first batch. I can smell it, so I know it’s really her, not some weird demon reptile alternate version of her. She’s taking the second batch off the griddle when I enter the kitchen, and they’re a perfect golden brown.

  I pour orange juice for both of us and we sit at the kitchen table. The window is open, letting in the soft morning sun.

  “Did you come home early from Kelly’s?” Mom asks. She’s pulled her hair into a pony and I can see the gray streaks over her temples. I think my mom is the most beautiful woman in the world.