by Yoon Ha Lee
In the vestibule, commuters bustled, waiting for the bell that would sound the arrival of the next gondola. Just beyond the doors, the electromagnetic rails ran straight up the side of the tower, climbing up past the clouds. To one side of the room stood a young woman of Vinlander extraction, and a very old white ghost.
Johnston Lien and McAllister James were on the island of Fragrant Harbor, standing in the departure lounge at the base station of Gold Mountain. The old man was nervous, his gaze darting about the room furtively, his arms tucked in close to his narrow chest. Lien had not told him why they’d come, only that she had a surprise for him. In the end, she had to promise McAllister another stack of copper coins before he’d leave his rented rooms, and only with them safely in hand would he agree to bestir himself.
Lien had stayed in Guangdong longer than she’d expected. She could have left the week before, after finishing her interview with McAllister, but after hearing his story, she felt there was one more thing she had to do.
She was reminded of her grandfather, to look at McAllister now. Her own grandfather might have been such a man, had he not married her grandmother, and raised a family, and opened a successful Vinlander restaurant in Guangdong during the years of the Exclusion Decree, and later moved north to serve his cuisine in the capital city, and once even served a distant cousin of the emperor himself, and died in bed surrounded by friends and family. Except for an ungrateful granddaughter, of course, who never considered what sacrifices her parents and grandparents might have made so that she could grow up in a China where she could take imperial examinations, and hold administrative office. Women couldn’t yet own property, or remarry after the death of their husbands, but Lien was sure that was just a matter of time.
By the same token, had circumstances been other than they were, McAllister might have been her grandfather. He was of the right age, and background, and had it been he that met her grandmother, then things might have gone quite differently for him.
She had allowed her grandfather to slip from this life without taking the opportunity to say a final farewell, nor to thank him. Perhaps in doing some small favor for McAllister James, she could make amends to her grandfather’s spirit. She’d had to pull strings at the Ministry of Celestial Excursion, and there was a regional administrator whom she now owed a significant favor, but Lien was convinced it was worth it. For McAllister’s sake, for that of her grandfather, and for Lien herself. She felt calmer and more at peace at this moment than she had in years, anxious to see the look on the old man’s face.
“Why we here?” the old man finally asked, in his broken Cantonese.
“You’ll see,” Lien answered in English, laying a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder.
The departure bell chimed as the gondola approached, and the doors opened with a hissing outrush of air once the gondola was safely docked.
“Come along, Mister McAllister.” Lien took his withered hand in hers, and gently lead him toward the open doors.
The old man’s eyes darted from side to side, as he meekly followed behind.
“Where are we going?” he asked in English.
“You’ll see.”
The gondola doors slid closed behind them, and Lien guided the old man to an open acceleration couch. There were a few dozen engineers, naval officers and bureaucrats in the gondola with them, and a number of them cast sidelong glances at the old white man trembling in the corner, some with thinly disguised contempt.
The acceleration couch offered an unobstructed view of the observation ports on the opposite wall of the gondola. The old man looked to the window, confused, and it was not until the ground fell away, and he saw the rooftops of Fragrant Harbor spread out like a embroidered quilt at his feet, that he understood what was happened.
“No,” he said, his voice soft and far away. “Too high. Too long ago. No.”
Lien took his hand in hers, and tried to sooth him.
“It will be alright, Mister McAllister. The Bridge of Heaven is perfectly safe.”
The view out the gondola window was now of the bay, and of the Nine Dragons Peninsula. To the north stretched Guangdong and the Chinese mainland, to the east and south the sapphire blue of the south China sea.
“Oh, no,” the old man said, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “Too long.”
In moments, the gondola was ascending at speeds of one thousand kilometers per hour, then two thousand kph, then faster still. On either side of the passenger gondola, cargo loads traveling up and down the tether at speeds of over thirty-nine thousand kph rocketed by, exerting hundreds of thousands of gees on the cargoes they carried, enough to liquefy any passengers. At its leisurely top speed of three thousand kph, still putting several gees of pressure on its occupants, it would take the passenger gondola just over twelve hours to reach Diamond Summit, the station in geosynchronous Earth orbit above Fragrant Harbor.
“No,” the old man said, shaking his head.
Lien was beside herself.
“I’m so sorry!” she said, squeezing McAllister’s frail hand as hard as she dared. “I’d thought to do something nice for you. I’d no idea you’d be so frightened.”
“No,” the old man whispered urgently.
“It will be alright,” Lien insisted. “Once we get to the top, you’ll see what I wanted to show you, and then we can return. Alright? Please forgive me, I didn’t mean to cause you distress.”
The old man kept silent, his mouth drawn into a line, and turned his head away.
By the third hour, the old man would not speak to Lien, not even in response to direct questions. He just sat, his hands in white-knuckled grips on the straps of the couch, his gaze fixed on the curve of the horizon visible through the viewport. When the stewards came by to serve the mid-voyage meal, the old man waved them away, accepting only a bulb of water from their trays.
When the gondola slowed, and docked at Diamond Summit, the passengers found themselves weightless. The stewards helped them from their couches, and guided them to the nose of the gondola, to the airlock that led to the Diamond Summit entryway.
Once onboard Diamond Summit, Lien led the old man to the main body of the station, which rotated around the central hub, providing artificial gravity to the environs. At a large reinforced panoramic window the pair stopped.
In front of them, a few thousand kilometers off, they could see the last of the Treasure Fleet departing for the red planet Fire Star. Below them stretched the blue curve of the Earth, and the glow of the sun limning the far horizon with pale fire. They could see even as far as the edge of the western hemisphere, and the northern continent which McAllister had once called home. Nearest them was the Muslim colony of Khalifa on the coast, founded in centuries past by admirals of the Dragon Throne. Beyond that, off towards the blazing sun in the east, rose the lands of the Commonwealth of Vinland.
“There,” Lien said, supporting the old man with one arm, pointing towards the distant horizon with the other. “That is what I wanted to show you. First to let you see what your labor those many long years was for, and second to give you a final look at your lost home. There, on the horizon. That is your . . . that is our homeland. Vinland.”
The old man was trembling. He looked from the panorama to Lien, his eyes watering and his lip quivering.
“You . . . you don’t understand,” he managed to get out, with difficulty. His voice caught in his throat, sounding like an injured bullfrog. “It’s not terror that plagues me, but guilt.”
Lien looked at the old man, confused.
“But I assumed that you were still afflicted by the fear that gripped you up on Gold Mountain, all those years ago.”
The old man jerked his head from side to side, as though trying to shake her words from his ears.
“No!” he shouted, flecks of foam spotting the corners of his mouth. “It wasn’t fear, not even then. You don’t . . . ”
He left off for a moment, pulling away from Lien and averting his eyes.
&nb
sp; Lien reached out and laid a hand on his thin shoulder. She thought of her grandfather, and all that had gone unsaid between them.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me.”
“No,” he repeated, with less conviction.
“Please,” she urged. “What do you mean it wasn’t fear?”
The old man turned to her, his face a red grimace, his eyes flashing.
“It was envy!” he said. “It was lust! It was greed! But it was never fear. Anything but fear!”
He rocked back on his heels, eyes on the far ceiling, his body racked with sobs.
“I could have saved Michael,” he went on. “I only had to reach out my hand. But as he dangled there, I couldn’t help thinking that with him gone, Zhu Xan would be mine. I loved her, just as he did, and with my brother dead the way would be clear for me. But . . . ”
He broke off again, sobs interrupting his words. He slid to the floor, on his knees, his hands in his lap.
“But she was already dead,” Lien said.
Mucus ran down his face, and tears streamed across his dry cheeks.
“Yes!” he wailed.
Lien stood, looking down at the frail old man at her feet, rocked by paroxysm of grief and guilt.
“That’s why you never went home, isn’t it?” she asked, realization dawning. “Why you never returned to Vinland. You couldn’t face your family.”
The old man nodded, and beat his thin fists against the carpeted floor.
“Yes!” he shouted.
Without another word, she knelt down, and wrapped her arms around the old man’s slender frame. She drew him tight to her, and McAllister pressed his face into her shoulder, convulsing with sobs.
“Oh, Michael!” the old man said, his voice cracking. “I’m so, so sorry. It was my job to protect you, and I . . . Oh, God. Forgive me. Forgive me!”
Lien held him tighter, and stroked the back of his wrinkled skull with her hand.
“I forgive you,” she whispered, tears in her eyes.
They held each other, the old white ghost and the woman from the Northern Capital. Diamond Summit turned, and the curve of Vinland slipped out of view, and the mountains and plains of China swelled to fill the window.
“Now, grandfather,” Lien said, at the edge of hearing. “Forgive me, too.”
First published in Postscripts, Autumn 2005
About the Author
Chris Roberson is probably best known for his Alternate History “Celestrial Empire” series, which, in addition to a large number of short pieces (including “Gold Mountain”), consists of the novels The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, The Voyage of Night Shining White, and Three Unbroken. His other novels include, Here, There & Everywhere, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, Set the Seas on Fire, Voices of Thunder, Cybermany, Incorporated, Any Time At All, End of the Century, Book of Secrets, and Further: Beyond the Threshhold, and he has also contributed to the “Warhammer,” “X-Men,” and “Shark Boy and Lava Girl” series, and written “Elric” graphic novels in collaboration with Michael Moorcock. In addition to his writing, Robertson is one of the publishers of the lively small press MonkeyBrain Books, and edited the “retro-pulp” anthology Adventure, Volume 1. He won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History in 2004 with his story “O One.” Roberson lives with his family in Austin, Texas.
The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction:
Publications from Slush
Susan E. Connolly
The issue of representation of men and women in science fiction is one that has caused much discussion. There’s “The Count,” from Strange Horizons which looks at professional reviews of science fiction novels by gender, and a similar initiative by Lady Business for blog reviews. A common query when it comes to this issue of representation is the makeup of submissions. Are the differences we see simply reflections of the proportion of submissions received?
There has been some investigation of this question before, and by widening the data-gathering net, I hope to allow a more nuanced and informed discussion of the issue. I have also attempted to perform separate analyses of submissions as a whole, as well as science fiction submissions specifically.
In the previous article I looked at the gender ratios of published stories of all genres and published science fiction stories in seventeen SFWA short fiction markets. While looking at published fiction alone does give us some important information about the gender representation of authors both overall and between different markets, it’s not the end of things. In addition to gathering data on published stories, I asked editors for details of the source of those published stories.
With some editors receiving hundreds of submissions every week, the effort and time to categorize even a sample of those submissions for this study was substantial, and I am extremely grateful for that assistance.
Publications from Slush
Some markets draw all of their published stories from open submissions, while others draw from a combination of slush submissions, reprints, and stories solicited from authors. For the second group, it is useful to compare the published stories with those that came from slush, to see if this results in significantly different gender ratios. After all, it could be the case that reprints or solicited stories show a different kind of gender ratio than the stories that just come from slush.
Those markets which drew published stories from outside the slush pile during the period studied were: Apex, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, F&SF, F&SF Special Issue, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com.
Table 1: Reprints and Solicited Stories Status of Markets
Market
Solicit Stories
Publish Reprints
Notes
AE
Yes
No
All stories came from slush in 2013.
Analog
No
No
Apex
Yes
Yes
On investigation, the numbers for Apex in the previous article were slightly off. (17 Men, 28 Women, 1 Non-Binary, 1 Unknown.) This has been corrected for this piece to 18 Men, 27 Women, and 2 Non-Binary.)
Apex editors also did not assign genres to speculative fiction, so the division was based on my own assessment.
Reprints data for SF stories was available, but data for solicited stories was not.
Asimov’s
No
No
Bull Spec
Yes
Yes
All stories came from slush in 2013.
Buzzy Mag
No
No
Clarkesworld
No
Yes
Daily Science Fiction
Yes
No
Escape Pod
Yes
Yes
F&SF
Yes
Yes
F&SF Special Issue
Yes
No
Flash Fiction Online
No
No
IGMS
No
No
Lightspeed
No
Yes
Nature
No
No
Strange Horizons
No
Yes
Tor.com
Yes
No
Taking this subset of markets and graphing Publications from Slush vs Total Publications, we can see that reprints and solicited stories make up a large proportion of published fiction in some markets. When looking at the percentage share of each gender, there are some slight differences when comparing Publications from Slush with Total Publications for both all stories and science fiction stories.
However, overall, the differences in ratios between All Published Stories and Stories from Slush are not significant.
Submissions: Samples and Variation
As mentioned in the previous article, please note that this is a study of apparent gender.
Some editors used Google to obtain public bios of the authors for a more accurate categorization of author gender, and some were already aware of the gender identity of some authors, but in most cases the categorization by gender was based on first name. This inherently makes the gender split less accurate than it was in the previous article.
Additionally, when dealing with overall publications and comparing them to publications drawn from slush, I could look at the full data-set for the time period. However, with some publications receiving thousands of submissions per year, many markets were understandably unable to provide full breakdowns for a year’s worth of submissions. As such, I am dealing with samples from varying time periods. This means that the analysis will not be quite as comprehensive or accurate as would be ideal.
Drawing conclusions about the yearly submissions from a smaller sample may lead to error. For example, Escape Pod provided data for the months of February 2014, April 2014, and May 2014. We can see a variation of 4.01% between the highest and lowest months in terms of gender ratios.
Table 2: Escape Pod Submissions by Month
Total Submissions
Submissions from Men
Submissions from Women
February
85
65
20
76.47%
23.53%
April
69
50
19
72.46%
27.54%