Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Ken Liu

  ECOTONES

  Ecological Stories from the Border

  Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Edited by

  Andrew Leon Hudson

  Copyright

  This ebook is Copyright © 2015 Andrew Leon Hudson

  Ebook and cover design by Andrew Leon Hudson

  Source images by Paul Critchley and Petras Gagilas

  Copyright of each story belongs to the respective authors, who assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of their works. Full copyright details appear here.

  This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, with the exception of for review or commentary purposes.

  for all those who struggle on behalf of the environment

  may their goals become facts, not fantasies

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword

  The Silva – Rebecca Schwarz

  Inundated – Jonathan Laidlow

  The Green – Lauren Beukes

  Seeds by a Hurricane Torn – Daniel Ausema

  Green Man – P. J. Richards

  Stochasti-city – Tobias S. Buckell

  Homo Panthera – Andrew Leon Hudson

  The First Feast – Victor Espinosa

  Compatibility – Ken Liu

  Not a Problem – Matthew Hughes

  The Pattern Box – Christina Klarenbeek

  A Theft of Flowers – Stephen Palmer

  The Grass is Greener on the Other Side – Igor Ljubuncic

  Paolo, Friend Paolo – Kurt Hunt

  Other Anthologies from SFFWorld.com

  An Expression of Thanks

  Acknowledgements

  Story Copyrights

  Foreword

  I have two brothers, but before that was true I once walked away from my parents in a supermarket, turned a corner in the aisles, and found myself in a strange new place where—for the first time that I recall—I didn't know any of the people around me.

  Several years later, when I had one brother, in the space of a year I travelled from a country where I could walk on the top of a six-foot snowdrift, ploughed up beside a rural lane, to one where snow doesn't fall, and my birthday was celebrated on the hottest day of the year instead of the coldest.

  By the time my second brother arrived on the scene, my family had lived in half-a-dozen homes, and since striking out on my own I've lived in rather more. Each of these relocations marked a border between stages of my life, as have new jobs, new friends, new relationships (in a few cherished cases, new books). As did the birth of my brothers, who altered the nature of my world they way we no doubt did those of our parents.

  Every life is map of such borderlands. The environment we knew stops and a new one begins, but that point of transition is fluid. Experiences on each side bleed through to the other, colouring our past, influencing our future. The lines fade, or shift, or—as in the natural world—sometimes unimagined change redefines the environment completely. There are no longer six-foot drifts every winter where I used to walk high on the snow.

  In nature, “ecotones” are the points of contact between differing ecosystems, the places where diverged rivals in the struggle to survive compete for the same resources. They provide some of the most dramatic settings for the perpetual drama of life. In this collection, we have stories that play out across ecotones that are both literal and figurative, the domain of the real world and of imaginary ones—but in all of them, the participants discover their inner environments changed, like ours are.

  When I stood on the snowdrift, surrounded by cold, clear views to the horizon, I wondered what it would be like if the crust broke and I fell into the close, white void beneath. It didn't happen, but I still wonder. Even a lack of change can change us.

  Andrew Leon Hudson

  December 2015

  ECOTONES

  Ecological Stories from the Borders

  Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

  The Silva

  Rebecca Schwarz

  Though now just a former librarian and cocktail waitress (and that does sound like a great place to read), Rebecca Schwarz continues to lead a double life. By day, a mild-mannered editorial assistant for a scientific journal. By night, she writes science fiction and fantasy, which has previously appeared in Interzone, Bourbon Pen and Daily Science Fiction. She also sleeps. She is currently writing her first novel, possibly during some sort of REM state.

  Since its very earliest incarnations, one of the central themes of science fiction has been that of first contact—and our own shared history has demonstrated time and again that initial encounters between different cultures are as often frightening and problematic as they are peaceful and rewarding. In the story to follow, the core issue of first contact comes into sharp focus: how to communicate with an utter stranger who lacks all your frames of reference. It also offers an answer: walk a mile in their shoes and explore the place they come from.

  More or less, anyway...

  I cut through the park on my way home. It wasn’t a shortcut I was looking for—I needed a border to cross, something to separate the hours of air-conditioned, backbiting gossip and petty politics of the Herald’s editorial office from the empty wreck of my apartment.

  I stomped along the paved trail, skirting a tree line too thin to hide the buildings on the other side. My heels were killing me. The squeal and roar of traffic bled through the branches as I turned onto the gravel path that led into the park and away from the noise.

  Tears filled my eyes as I approached the dense circle of forsythia shrubs that hid the koi pond. On the other side, a lone bench stood by the water. Our bench. I rubbed at my eyes. Just yesterday Hal sat there waiting for me. This had been our secret rendezvous. It was almost always deserted.

  He loved this place, brought me here on our first date. Yesterday, he brought me here to tell me about his fifteen-year marriage. His family. The son of a bitch.

  I stepped into the grove. I didn’t see anyone, but didn’t exactly feel alone, either. I’d told Hal not to come here anymore, I couldn’t think of anything better to demand in return for his belated honesty. I should have smelled it. Thinking back, there were plenty of clues. Just the other night after taking me to dinner, he’d picked up a gallon of milk before going home. He claimed he had a big case to argue the next morning and had to turn in early, which was probably true. But what single guy buys a gallon of milk? He was just so damn charming. It had blinded my instincts. Still, I looked over my shoulder, hoping to see him walk down the path. Pathetic.

  I sat on the bench, tears spilling down my cheeks and bent double, heaving out the sobs I’d been strangling for hours. I’d barely made it through today. I didn’t know how I would make it through tomorrow. I didn’t want to go home. Even though he never came over on Thursdays, my place would be desolate. The carp watched me from under the surface of the water, orange and gold and white and piebald.

  Then I saw the dog. It stood in the ragged shadows of the underbrush. Big like a husky. Its fur as gray as the ash left behind when something has been burnt to the ground. In pictures you can’t tell them from normal dogs, but in person it
’s different. I’d seen them before. This wasn’t a dog, it was a Silva.

  Silvas were named after the first identified victim: nine-year-old Timmy Silva. He had begged his parents for a dog, and one day a stray followed him home. His mother let him play with it in the yard. They would discuss adopting it at dinner. But when his father arrived home from work, he found his son sitting alone in the grass, staring vacantly, his skin cold to the touch. His parents put him to bed. When the dog appeared in the yard the next day, the mother chased it off.

  The city desk editor sent me out to the burbs to follow up. At the hospital, the doctors could do nothing to prevent the boy’s descent into a coma, and nobody was talking. The editor spiked the story.

  Similar stories began to surface. People rendered speechless and immobile after contact with a strange dog, though most recovered after twelve to twenty-four hours. Others claimed to have been affected after waking up, usually in the open somewhere, chilled to the bone with sticks in their hair. All sorts of crackpot theories began to float around the Internet. My editor had written the story off, but it nagged at me and I lurked on conspiracy and natural healing sites for more information.

  When his parents brought Timmy home from the hospital for palliative care, the dog returned, running straight across the yard toward the house. The father shot it with the pistol he kept in his nightstand. A local vet performed a necropsy with the boy’s doctors attending, but when they opened the carcass up they found no clue as to the origins of Timmy’s illness. That made print when the tabloids splashed pictures of Timmy Silva curled in his bed on their covers.

  The headline read FROZEN SOLID!

  I stood and edged my way along the path past the dog. It made no move, only followed me with its blue eyes. I couldn’t look away. Blue as the sky at 35,000 feet—the one I’d only ever glimpsed through scarred Plexiglas and the bitter bite of stale peanuts, the blue out there beyond the jet engines’ whine and the crushing exhaustion.

  I stared back at the sky behind his eyes. I thought the Silvas would be terrifying, but I was not afraid. I knew one thing for sure, I didn’t want to go back to my empty apartment tonight, or my shitty job tomorrow. I stretched my hand out toward the dog.

  Its fur was as cold as ice. Colder. As cold and empty as I imagine space to be. I don’t know a thing about space, but feeling its fur made me think that Silva's do. It shook itself out, head and shoulders, tail and rump, as if my touch had soaked it. It sidled closer like a love-starved stray. Despite the cold, something inside me melted too.

  I worked my fingers through the thick fur at its neck, down to its flesh. My hand went numb. Pain shot up through my arm and wrapped around my chest. I staggered back and fell to the ground, helpless to do anything more than feel the sunlight on my face.

  The Silva followed me down, its face close to mine but growing vague at the same time. The world shrank away; as if the wrinkled water of the pond, the trees, the dull roar of the city were all now contained behind the curving glass of a fishbowl.

  I smelled the faint odor of tuna salad, my lunch, overlaid by the eau de cologne I’d sprayed on my neck in the morning. The floral scent now only smelled like the inside of a high-end department store, with an abrasive metallic undertone I’d never noticed before.

  Hal had given it to me, very expensive. I wondered now if it was the same kind he bought for his wife.

  I sneezed, and four legs splayed under me.

  The dog.

  I was inside the Silva.

  I looked at my body where it lay on the ground. My vacant eyes stared at the pond. The Silva shook again, the delicious wave of mammalian heat revving its body up like an engine. Heat I had somehow provided with my touch.

  The Silva got to work tugging at my shirt collar and pushing my legs with its snout until it had tucked my body into the shadows under the bushes behind the bench. I watched my chest rising and falling in long, slow breaths and a wave of panic swept over me, but I could also feel the Silva’s urgency. I didn’t know where it intended to take me, but when the Silva turned and trotted up the path, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  The sun had disappeared behind the buildings that bordered the park. I peered out through the Silva’s eyes. No one noticed us. A jogger trotted past a young couple pushing a stroller along the main path. I could smell sour milk on the baby, and the sweet humidity of the woman’s lactating breasts. Everything had a distinct smell, the grainy pebbles under its paws, the leaves that bobbed just at the edge of sight. After the couple passed, the Silva slunk along the shadows toward its destination: and I glimpsed a memory of shadowed pillars, the noise and blackness of big water.

  It jumped the low stone fence at the south end of the park—and now we were noticed. Someone screamed and a man pulled a child away as the Silva ran for the intersection. It didn’t understand about traffic lights and the colors were wrong, but when the bottom light flicked on, I felt a surge of panic, and the Silva reacted, skidding to a stop at the curb just as the first cars hurtled by. Its terrified confusion at this strange world washed over me—but it had understood my fear. I struggled to keep calm, and wished for it to turn back. Take me back, I thought picturing my sleeping body.

  People shouted behind us. The fuzz and crackle of a police radio sounded. The Silva had no collar. Thanks to Timmy and the other cases of the mysterious sickness, untagged dogs were now picked up by animal control and euthanized. Some had been shot on sight. Heart racing, I looked back at the cop running toward us drawing his gun.

  We had to get across the road. The lights cycled, slowing traffic. The Silva dove between two taxis, weaving through the lanes. Its tail whacked an SUV that screeched to a stop almost too late. I glanced back at the rime of frost spreading across the bumper. Then we were running through the shadows between buildings, legs pumping, pushing the warm cement under our pads as we tore down block after block.

  Finally, at the river, we slowed, trotting around broken Styrofoam cups and the plastic bags that rolled under the elevated highway. The smell of oil, salt and rotting fish mixed with exhaust fumes and the chalky tang of bird shit. My muscles ached. I knew they weren’t my muscles, but when I wanted to look back at the cop, and the SUV’s bumper, we had turned as one.

  I thought again of Timmy Silva, and the dog responded with a memory of Timmy’s dog. A small straw-colored mutt with floppy ears, just the type you’d imagine walking down a country lane with a kid. They had joined together enthusiastically, but the dog had been unable to return Timmy to himself.

  Oh my God—Timmy had been inside the dog when his father had shot it.

  The Silva stopped and sat heavily as comprehension dawned; both host and symbiont were lost. I thought of the little boy’s body curled in his bed, forever an empty shell.

  Behind us a siren blipped. I thought of the officer at the park. A cruiser roared by. I saw a shotgun mounted on the dash, and the Silva understood gun. The cop would try to cut us off or corner us by the water. We darted across the street through more blaring horns and screaming tires, toward the labyrinth of buildings. We ran over shredded paper and broken glass, past blank, barred windows.

  In an alley, a dog charged through a gap in a chain link fence. It was all muscle under scarred, dirty white fur. It clamped its jaws around our neck. Its mouth burned, molten, saliva soaking into our fur. It whined as its mouth froze but didn’t let go. We rolled onto our back, kicking at the dog’s belly, gasping, trying to twist out of its grip.

  Someone yanked back on the dog’s collar, careful not to touch us, pulling us off the pavement as well. “Ammo, get off him!” a man yelled. “He’s one of them diseased dogs.”

  He thrust a wide, flat stick into his dog’s mouth and twisted it, prying its jaws open. We wrenched our neck away and ran into the darkness, skirting the streetlights’ glare, the dog’s howls of pain echoing behind us.

  We limped back to where the river slapped against the concrete side of the island. The Silva needed to drink,
to eat, but nothing looked safe to consume. In the darkness under the highway we shook out our fur, pieces of the white dog’s frozen, shattered teeth skittered across the greasy dirt. The scent of urine filled the air, the ghostly amalgamated evidence of every creature that had passed this way.

  As we continued, the chipped pillars holding up this section of the highway looked familiar, though I’d never been here before. At last a Dogloo came into view, filthy beige plastic worn to a velvet fuzz, its domed shape inconspicuous in the shadows. Where I grew up, upstate, everyone had one of these cheap doghouses in their yard. This was the first one I’d seen in the city.

  We trotted to it. A cool breeze drifted out from the small, arched opening. We lifted our leg, left our mark, then ducked through the opening—and fell into a black, sucking rush. All the air disappeared and then all heat—and then the darkness resolved into a frozen landscape the same cloudless blue of the Silva’s eyes.

  Home.

  Our limbs, still four, had become fins ending in numerous webbed digits. We stroked the slick ground to move across it. Clouds of vapor rose whenever they made contact with the surface—we were hot here. Light radiated up through the blue ice. Above, stars crowded every corner of a black sky. If this planet had a sun, it was very distant.

  This body felt so strange, so utterly different. Why dogs? I thought. The Silva’s mind bloomed with a cascade of images. Many had gone into the portal to search for a new world and never returned. Once they found Earth, the Silvas needed to adopt a native form in order to survive. The new world was difficult to comprehend, so bright and hot and abundant with life. In the end, it came down to chance. The first Silva to arrive encountered a stray dog dying inside the abandoned Dogloo. The Silva gave comfort in exchange for genetic material.