Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  What the council didn’t count on was John’s parents.

  After Teeter-Totter died, John began flirting with space. He knew he would never find Zethon, because he didn’t believe imagining something made it so, and he wasn’t crazy. He was merely lonely. He hoped he might find someone like himself out there. But since he had never flown outside Earth’s atmosphere, he had no idea if he could survive away from Earth.

  “Trying not to die ain’t the same thing as living,” his mother used to say. So he launched himself straight up until he saw the planet bend in a sharper curve than he’d ever seen before, until blue sky faded to black, until he was no longer going up but out, away from Earth for the first time.

  It turned out he could do quite well in space.

  It was like being a small child again. Everything was vast and scary, and he exulted in it. He floated respectfully over the lunar surface, not wanting to add his footprints to those of the astronauts who’d come before. They’d been his childhood heroes. He climbed Olympus Mons. He showered in the sulfur geysers of Io. He let himself go limp and be battered about inside the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. It was an amazing ride.

  He spent years away from Earth and learned there wasn’t an environment he couldn’t survive. No amount of gravity or kind of radiation or absence of it could harm him. He learned to fly faster than the speed of light, and he explored. For a while, he named every new planet he discovered. He named one for each of the astronauts. He named them for school teachers he’d liked. He named one for a magazine writer he’d dated. He named a pair of moons for his parents, and he named a spectacular ringed gas giant for Teeter-Totter.

  In all the places he traveled to he found no one like himself. The closest he came to encountering intelligent life was on a small, rocky world where he came upon what someone had left behind. They—whoever they were—had worked out the mathematics to predict the position of every particle coming from Earth out to sixty-two light years. They had made a copy of each and every one of those particles and reassembled them into coherent signals, which they filtered out to leave only television broadcasts from 1956 to 1977. These broadcasts were played in a decades-long loop on a screen the size of Yosemite’s Half Dome.

  John watched the broadcast loop several times but never figured out what the point was. Eventually he went home.

  * * *

  Things had gotten bad and strange in his absence.

  Resources were scarce, fragmented nations fought for drops and crumbs, and it seemed to John after he’d spent years in the peaceful silence of space that every single person on Earth had gone crazy. He thought of leaving again, but he hadn’t forgotten the lessons his parents had taught him hundreds of years ago. He needed to stay, and he needed to help.

  For starters, he knew he had to do something about overpopulation. Culling was suggested as a possible solution, but he seldom considered the idea. The revelation that Protein-G, trademarked as GroTeen, was in fact made of dead human tissue—that caused some uproar. But it was cheap and plentiful, and after it ended a decades-long European famine, the conversation switched from “Protein-G is people” to “We need to ensure Protein-G manufacturers follow better quality-control standards.” It remained illegal to eat human brains, for example.

  When celebrities started earning huge advances by signing their post-mortem bodies over to exclusive Protein-G eateries, John had finally had enough. He took over the world. Five hundred years later, he gave it back. And five hundred years after that, nobody remembered he’d ever been the most powerful dictator ever known. People had short memories. At least his name, or variants of it, survived in the languages that came after the last speakers of English and Mandarin and other ancient tongues fell silent. It meant things like king, and father, and servitude, and slavery, and also freedom, and safety, and sacrifice, and generosity.

  John didn’t quite know what to make of it. He could only hope he’d made people’s lives better. At least they were no longer eating each other.

  * * *

  He met a woman named Aisha who ran a café in what used to be Ethiopia. She served him bread and lentils and beer, and if it wasn’t the best meal he’d ever had in his life (he was a picky eater and continued to compare everything to his mother’s cooking), it was certainly the most pleasant meal he’d had in a long time, due almost entirely to Aisha, who was beautiful and funny. She had many stories to tell and she was good at telling them. One thing led to another, and a month passed before they finally parted company.

  More than two hundred years later, John found himself walking through that part of the world again. And there was Aisha’s café, still standing, still serving lentils and bread and beer. There was no mistaking the woman in the kitchen. He could have analyzed her on a cellular level to make sure she wasn’t Aisha’s descendent, but there was no need. She remembered him, and now she knew what he was. Two centuries after their first meeting, they discovered one another.

  It wasn’t a perfect marriage. They were both practiced at relationships but still fell prey to misunderstandings, impatience, bouts of selfishness and resentment. But they figured it out, and together they traveled the earth and made homes and left homes and traveled some more.

  There were no children. John surmised it was because they were of different species, compatible but not compatible enough. John had powers, Aisha did not. And, as they slowly discovered, unlike him, she wasn’t immortal. She was aging, just slowly. When you live forever and everyone you’ve ever known has died, even eight hundred years of being with the woman you love isn’t enough.

  John stayed with her until the end, when her hair was white and her skin like paper.

  He told her he loved her.

  She told him not to give up.

  * * *

  At the end, there was no reconciliation with a lost loved one, no forgiveness granted by the dead, no revelation, no epiphany that gave his life a particular meaning, no overriding message his life could be said to impart, no tidy, circular shape to it. There was just a lot of living, day to day, each hour spent trying to find grace or happiness or satisfaction or decency. And in that his life was no different than anyone else’s. Just longer.

  After four score and billions of years, he’d had enough, and he sat down to die. For a man who could survive in the core of a sun, this proved itself a challenge. But he could do so many other amazing things, surely he could make himself die. He concentrated on learning his body, not just the cells, but the molecules, the atoms, the protons, and all the little bizarre bits that the protons were made of.

  It was complicated stuff, and it took a long time. And while he was trying to figure out how it all worked and think himself dead, the universe, which, except for John, was barely a ghost of its former self, reached its outmost expansion. It paused for a time neither long nor short, but immeasurable either way, and then began drawing in on itself, much in the same way John had turned inward. Perhaps he was the thing causing the contraction.

  By now John had a pretty decent handle on the stuff he was made of, and he even began to understand not just the what of it, but the when of it. As the universe continued to reverse its course, John rode with it. Backwards. Backwards. All the way, backwards.

  Maybe, he thought, he didn’t really want to die. After all, if the matter he was made of had already been eroded and replaced uncounted times, then he’d been dying and being reborn for eons. His particles had shot out on their trajectories, and then his new particles had done the same, and so on, until they’d all gone so far out that they had no other choice but to return to their origins.

  John chose to go with them, as far back as he could go.

  GREG VAN EEKHOUT writes novels for adults and young readers, typically characterized by mayhem, banter, weirdness, and action. His first novel, Norse Code, was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. His middle-grade novel, The Boy at the End of the World, was a nominee for the Andre Norton Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Award. His most recent work is the Daniel Blackland trilogy from Tor Books, consisting of California Bones, Pacific Fire, and Dragon Coast. He lives in Southern California, where two seismic plates crash into each other and give rise to disaster and mayhem.

  Ponies

  Kij Johnson

  If you want to be friends with TheOtherGirls, you’re going to have to give something up; this is the way it’s always been, as long as there have been Ponies. Nebula Award winner, Hugo Award nominee, World Fantasy Award nominee. Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

  The invitation card has a Western theme. Along its margins, cartoon girls in cowboy hats chase a herd of wild Ponies. The Ponies are no taller than the girls, bright as butterflies, fat, with short round-tipped unicorn horns and small fluffy wings. At the bottom of the card, newly caught Ponies mill about in a corral. The girls have lassoed a pink-and-white Pony. Its eyes and mouth are surprised round Os. There is an exclamation mark over its head.

  The little girls are cutting off its horn with curved knives. Its wings are already removed, part of a pile beside the corral.

  You and your Pony ___[and Sunny’s name is handwritten here, in puffy letters]___ are invited to a cutting-out party with TheOtherGirls! If we like you, and if your Pony does okay, we’ll let you hang out with us.

  Sunny says, “I can’t wait to have friends!” She reads over Barbara’s shoulder, rose-scented breath woofling through Barbara’s hair. They are in the backyard next to Sunny’s pink stable.

  Barbara says, “Do you know what you want to keep?”

  Sunny’s tiny wings are a blur as she hops into the air, loops, and then hovers, legs curled under her. “Oh, being able to talk, absolutely! Flying is great, but talking is way better!” She drops to the grass. “I don’t know why any Pony would keep her horn! It’s not like it does anything!”

  This is the way it’s always been, as long as there have been Ponies. All Ponies have wings. All Ponies have horns. All Ponies can talk. Then all Ponies go to a cutting-out party, and they give up two of the three, because that’s what has to happen if a girl is going to fit in with TheOtherGirls. Barbara’s never seen a Pony that still had her horn or wings after her cutting-out party.

  Barbara sees TheOtherGirls’ Ponies peeking in the classroom windows just before recess or clustered at the bus stop after school. They’re baby pink and lavender and daffodil yellow, with flossy manes in ringlets, and tails that curl to the ground. When not at school and cello lessons and ballet class and soccer practice and play group and the orthodontist’s, TheOtherGirls spend their days with their Ponies.

  * * *

  The party is at TopGirl’s house. She has a mother who’s a pediatrician and a father who’s a cardiologist and a small barn and giant trees shading the grass where the Ponies are playing games. Sunny walks out to them nervously. They silently touch her horn and wings with their velvet noses, and then the Ponies all trot out to the lilac barn at the bottom of the pasture, where a bale of hay has been broken open.

  TopGirl meets Barbara at the fence. “That’s your Pony?” she says without greeting. “She’s not as pretty as Starblossom.”

  Barbara is defensive. “She’s beautiful!” This is a misstep so she adds, “Yours is so pretty!” And TopGirl’s Pony is pretty: her tail is every shade of purple and glitters with stars. But Sunny’s tail is creamy white and shines with honey-colored light, and Barbara knows that Sunny’s the most beautiful Pony ever.

  * * *

  TopGirl walks away, saying over her shoulder, “There’s Rock Band in the family room and a bunch of TheOtherGirls are hanging out on the deck and Mom bought some cookies and there’s Coke Zero and diet Red Bull and diet lemonade.”

  “Where are you?” Barbara asks.

  “I’m outside,” TopGirl says, so Barbara gets a Crystal Light and three frosted raisin-oatmeal cookies and follows her. TheOtherGirls outside are listening to an iPod plugged into speakers and playing Wii tennis and watching the Ponies play HideAndSeek and Who’sPrettiest and ThisIsTheBestGame. They are all there, SecondGirl and SuckUpGirl and EveryoneLikesHerGirl and the rest. Barbara only speaks when she thinks she’ll get it right.

  * * *

  And then it’s time. TheOtherGirls and their silent Ponies collect in a ring around Barbara and Sunny. Barbara feels sick.

  TopGirl says to Barbara, “What did she pick?”

  Sunny looks scared but answers her directly. “I would rather talk than fly or stab things with my horn.”

  TopGirl says to Barbara, “That’s what Ponies always say.” She gives Barbara a curved knife with a blade as long as a woman’s hand.

  “Me?” Barbara says. “I thought someone else did it. A grown-up.”

  * * *

  TopGirl says, “Everyone does it for their own Pony. I did it for Starblossom.”

  In silence Sunny stretches out a wing.

  It’s not the way it would be, cutting a real pony. The wing comes off easily, smooth as plastic, and the blood smells like cotton candy at the fair. There’s a shiny trembling oval where the wing was, as if Barbara is cutting rose-flavored Turkish delight in half and sees the pink under the powdered sugar. She thinks, It’s sort of pretty, and throws up.

  Sunny shivers, her eyes shut tight. Barbara cuts off the second wing and lays it beside the first.

  The horn is harder, like paring a real pony’s hooves. Barbara’s hand slips and she cuts Sunny, and there’s more cotton-candy blood. And then the horn lies in the grass beside the wings.

  Sunny drops to her knees. Barbara throws the knife down and falls beside her, sobbing and hiccuping. She scrubs her face with the back of her hand and looks up at the circle.

  Starblossom touches the knife with her nose, pushes it toward Barbara with one lilac hoof. TopGirl says, “Now the voice. You have to take away her voice.”

  “But I already cut off her wings and her horn!” Barbara throws her arms around Sunny’s neck, protecting it. “Two of the three, you said!”

  “That’s the cutting-out, yeah,” TopGirl says. “That’s what you do to be OneOfUs. But the Ponies pick their own friends. And that costs, too.” Starblossom tosses her violet mane. For the first time, Barbara sees that there is a scar shaped like a smile on her throat. All the Ponies have one.

  * * *

  “I won’t!” Barbara tells them all, but even as she cries until her face is caked with snot and tears, she knows she will, and when she’s done crying, she picks up the knife and pulls herself upright.

  Sunny stands up beside her on trembling legs. She looks very small without her horn, her wings. Barbara’s hands are slippery, but she tightens her grip.

  “No,” Sunny says suddenly. “Not even for this.”

  Sunny spins and runs, runs for the fence in a gallop as fast and beautiful as a real pony’s; but there are more of the others, and they are bigger, and Sunny doesn’t have her wings to fly or her horn to fight. They pull her down before she can jump the fence into the woods beyond. Sunny cries out and then there is nothing, only the sound of pounding hooves from the tight circle of Ponies.

  TheOtherGirls stand, frozen. Their blind faces are turned toward the Ponies.

  The Ponies break their circle, trot away. There is no sign of Sunny, beyond a spray of cotton-candy blood and a coil of her glowing mane torn free and fading as it falls to the grass.

  Into the silence TopGirl says, “Cookies?” She sounds fragile and false. TheOtherGirls crowd into the house, chattering in equally artificial voices. They start up a game, drink more Diet Coke.

  Barbara stumbles after them into the family room. “What are you playing?” she says, uncertainly.

  “Why are you here?” FirstGirl says, as if noticing her for the first time. “You’re not OneOfUs.”

  TheOtherGirls nod. “You don’t have a Pony.”

  KIJ JOHNSON is an American fantasy writer noted for her adaptations of Japanese myths and folklore. “Ponies” won the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Her story “Fox Magic
” won the 1994 Theodore Sturgeon Award, her novel The Fox Woman won the Crawford Award for best debut fantasy novel, and her subsequent novel Fudoki was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best fantasy novels of its year. She is also the author of the Huge-nominated The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. She is an associate director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.

  La beauté sans vertu

  Genevieve Valentine

  In a future where disturbing trends have only been amplified, a famous fashion house prepares for an important show. Edited by Ellen Datlow.

  These days they use arms from corpses—age fourteen, oldest, at time of death. The couture houses pay for them, of course (the days of grave-robbing are over, this is a business), but anything over fourteen isn’t worth having. At fourteen, the bones have most of the length you need for a model, with a child’s slender ulna, the knob of the wrist still standing out enough to cast a shadow.

  The graft scars are just at the shoulder, like a doll’s arm. The surgeons are artists, and the seams are no wider than a silk thread. The procedure’s nearly perfect by now, and the commitment of the doctors is respected. Models’ fingertips always go a little black, tending to the purple; no one points it out.

  * * *

  Maria’s already nineteen when the House of Centifolia picks her up. You don’t want them any younger than that if you’re going to keep them whole and working for the length of their contract. You want someone with a little stamina.

  The publicity team decides to make England her official home country, because that sounds just exotic enough to intrigue without actually being from a country that worries people, so Maria spends six months secluded, letting her arms heal, living on a juice fast, and learning how to fire her English with a cut-glass accent.