Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “Ahhh,” Irnv strokes the screen appreciatively, stopping the montage on a close-up of a wisteria cluster.

  “And you?” Flur asks, trying to keep up her end of the socializing.

  Irnv looks up, her head tilted at an angle that is so clearly questioning that Flur begins to trust her body language interpretation again. “Your name,” she says. “What does it mean?”

  “Star,” Irnv replies, with a curious sort of bow.

  “Oh, I thought star was ‘trenu,’” Flur says.

  “Yes, trenu, star. Irnv is one trenu. A certain trenu.”

  Flur finds herself tilting her head exactly the way that Irnv did a few minutes ago, and Irnv obligingly explains.

  “Irnv is the name of your star. Your…planet? We tried to pronounce it like you, but this is our version.”

  Terre. Earth. Irnv. But “pronounce it like you?” They have only been in contact for a few years. How old is Irnv?

  “And your family?” Irnv asks, while Flur is still turning that over. “Where are you from?”

  “An island,” Flur says, one of the first words she learned in Cyclopan. She takes her palm screen back and brings up globes, maps, Ayiti. She hadn’t prepared anything about her family, though. “Many brothers and sisters,” she says. She thinks of the video that was made for the launch party, presenting a highly sanitized version of her backstory, and wonders why nobody thought to load that into her drive. Maybe it wouldn’t translate well; their research has not pinned down the alien version of the heartwarming, life-affirming family unit. “We used to raise chickens,” she says, unexpectedly, and quickly pulls up a picture of a chicken on the screen, and in her mind, the memory of chasing one with her brothers.

  Irnv blinks her single eye. “They are all well? Your brothers and sisters?”

  “Well?” It’s a hard concept to define. The pause feels like it’s stretching out too long. “They’re fine. We’re just fine.”

  A beat. “And how were you chosen for this?”

  “Oh,” Flur says. These are all questions they should have prepared for. She can’t imagine, now, why they thought the conversation would be all business all the time. “Well, I went to school, and there were…competitions.” She can’t remember the word for tests. “And then more school.”

  Irnv is nodding, but Flur reads it as more polite than comprehending, and she’s trying to remember the words, find the right phrase to explain it, how it’s not just written tests, but also character, leadership qualities, sacrifices, observations by instructors and mentors, toughness, drills…

  “…happy to have you here,” the alien is saying, with seeming earnestness.

  Flur rouses herself back to her job. “We are very happy to be here too,” she manages. “But we will have to go home soon, and we would really like to complete this agreement. For the future.”

  Irnv leans back in her hammock. “We hope so. But it is a very short time.”

  “It is,” Flur agrees, with as regretful a tone as she can summon. “The president…” she trails off, delicately.

  “The president is a great woman,” Irnv says, in a tone that sounds to Flur very close to reverence.

  “She is,” Flur agrees, disingenuously. Pause, effort at patience. “Perhaps it’s not the best time, though, with all she’s been through recently.”

  Irnv looks confused, then understands. “You mean the loss of her family? But that wasn’t recent, that was many years ago.”

  Years ago?

  It takes Flur a moment to recover from that, and when she does Irnv is looking at her curiously. She puts out her hand, and the supple, red-purple fingers curl around Flur’s arm. Flur is shocked to feel their warmth, faintly, through the protective space suit.

  “I think she will agree,” Irnv says. “It will take time. We can’t rush.”

  “Of course,” Flur answers, still feeling the pulse of warmth on her arm, though by then Irnv has removed her hand. “We go,” the Cyclops says, sliding the scarf back over the bottom of her face as she stands.

  They are not the first ones back into the meeting room, but it is still half-empty. Tsongwa and Slanks aren’t there yet, and Flur wonders what they might be talking about in the men’s room. She decides to put her time to good use.

  “Irnv,” she says gently, getting her attention from a conversation with another alien. “That—that face there?” Flur nods at the first one in the series, the two-tone blue and lavender portrait. “Is that like the fountain in the middle of the city?”

  Now that Flur has seen Irnv’s mouth she finds she can better interpret the movement of the muscles around it, even with the mask covering it. She is pretty sure Irnv is smiling. “Yes, yes,” she says, “you are right, that is another example. She is the founder of our city. After starting this city she was visited by very great tragedy. In her sorrow she wept, and her tears, different colors from each side of her eye, became the canals that we use to navigate and defend our city.”

  Flur is trying to figure out how to phrase her follow-up questions—does she probe whether Irnv understands it as a myth and exaggeration, or take it politely at face value?—when she notices Tsongwa has come back in with Slanks, and nods to them.

  “It is in her honor,” Irnv continues, “that we now make the tear tracks on our faces, to represent her learning, sacrifice, and wisdom.” She runs her fingers along the deep grooves in her face.

  “You…do that? How?” Flur asks, trying to sound interested and non-judgmental.

  “There is a plant we use,” Irnv says. “But when one has really suffered, you can see the difference. As with her,” she adds in reverential tones as the president enters the room, and Flur can see that it is true, the wrinkles in her cheeks are softer and have a subtle shine to them.

  “That’s…impressive,” she says, feeling that admiration is the correct thing to express, but then the president begins to speak.

  “Very regretfully,” she begins, her eye not nearly as moist as Flur had expected, “the time our visitors have with us is limited by their technology, and unfortunately we will not be able to settle this question on this visit.”

  Flur’s hammock shudders with her urgency to speak, even as she catches Tsongwa’s warning look.

  “However, we look upon it favorably,” the president goes on. “We will take the time to discuss it here among ourselves, and converse again with our good friends soon.”

  Flur is about to say something, to ask at least for a definition of ‘soon,’ a deadline for the next communication, some token of goodwill. It is the Mission Director’s voice in her ear that stops her. “Stand down. Stand down, team, let this one go. We were working with a tight time frame, we knew that. And it’s not over. Great job, you two.”

  The positive reinforcement makes Flur feel ill. Irnv’s face, as she turns to her, seems to hold some wrinkles of sympathy around the mouth-covering mask and her cosmetic tear tracks, but all she says is, “We should get you back to your ship as soon as possible.”

  The return trip, indeed, seems to pass much more quickly than the journey into the city. Less constrained by the idea of making a good impression, Flur takes as many hyperphotos as she can, possibly crossing the borders of discretion. Noticing that they are taking a different canal back (unless they change color over time?) she scoops up another sample. She even pretends to trip in the forest to grab some twigs, or twig analogs. Irnv says little during the walk, although Tsongwa and Slanks appear to be deep in discussion. Probably solving the whole diplomatic problem by themselves, Flur thinks miserably. When they find their ship—it is a relief to see it again, just as they left it, under guard by a pair of Cyclopes—Flur half-expects Irnv to touch her arm again in farewell, but all she does is make the double-hand gesture of welcome, apparently also used in parting.

  “Irnv,” Flur asks quickly. “How old are you?”

  “Eighty-five cycles,” Irnv says, then looks up, calculating. “About thirty-two of your years,” she adds, and Flur
catches the corners of a smile again. Meanwhile, Tsongwa and Slanks are exchanging some sort of ritualized embrace, both arms touching.

  The return beam is less difficult than the landing, and once they are out of the planet’s atmosphere and waiting for the Mission Crawler to pick them up, Tsongwa takes off his breathing apparatus and helmet, removing the comms link to Mission Control.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Fine,” Flur says, trying for a why-wouldn’t-I-be tone. “You?”

  Tsongwa nods without saying anything.

  “I just wish we could have gotten the stupid thing signed,” Flur says finally.

  Tsongwa raises both palms. “It’ll happen. I think.”

  “The president seemed so…” Flur shakes her head. “It’s a shame that we caught a weak leader.”

  “You think she’s weak?”

  “Well, grief-stricken, maybe. But it comes to the same thing. For us, anyway.”

  Tsongwa leaves a beat of silence. “What did you talk about in the eating room?”

  “Personal stuff, mostly…names, families. Oh, that’s something,” Flur sits up in her chair. So different from those hammocks. “Irnv told me she’s named after our planet, but after our word for it. Earth, I mean.”

  Tsongwa is stunned for a moment, then laughs. “Well, that’s very hospitable of them.”

  “Tsongwa, she’s thirty-two. Thirty-two in our years!”

  Another pause. “Maybe her name was changed in honor of the visit?”

  “Or maybe…” Neither of them says it: Maybe the Cyclopes have been listening to us longer than we have been listening to the Cyclopes.

  “What did you talk about?” Flur asks finally.

  “Family, to start with.” Tsongwa says. “Personal history. It’s very important to them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He arranges his thoughts. It occurs to Flur, looking at the lines in his face shadowed by the reflected light from the control panel, that she has no idea what he might have told them about his family, because she doesn’t know anything about him outside of his work.

  “They wanted to know if I’d suffered.”

  “Suffered?” Flur repeats, in the tone she might use to say, Crucified?

  Tsongwa sighs; the English word is wrong, so dramatic. “They wanted to know if I’d…eaten bitter, if I’d…gone through hard times. If I’d experienced grief. You know.” An alert goes off; he starts to prepare for docking as he speaks. “They think it’s important for decision makers, for leaders. It stems from the myth of the founder—you heard about that? They believe that people who have suffered greatly have earned wisdom.” He twitches a control. “Now that we know this, we can adjust the way we approach the whole relationship. It’s a huge breakthrough.”

  “But…but…” Flur wonders, with a pang, whether this means she won’t be included in the next mission. Can she somehow reveal all the hardship and self-doubt she has so painstakingly camouflaged with professionalism, dedication, and feigned poise? “But come on! The president has suffered, okay, but she didn’t seem any the wiser for it!”

  Tsongwa shrugs. “They believe it, I said. That doesn’t mean it’s true. They aren’t perfect, any more than we are.”

  And Flur thinks of the Mission Director, his careful multidisciplinarity and his pep talks, or the president of her country, a tall, distinguished-looking, well-spoken man who has failed by almost every measure yet retains a healthy margin of popularity. By that time they are docked, and scanned for contaminants, and the airlock doors open, and then they are swarmed by the ops team, shouting and congratulating them, slapping their shoulders and practically carrying them into the main ship where the Mission Director, his emotion apparent but held in perfect check, shakes hands with each of them and whispers a word or two of praise in their ears. Flur tries to smile and nod at everyone until finally, though it can’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, she’s alone, or almost, stripped to a sterile shift and lying in a clinic bed for the post-visit checkup.

  “What’s the matter?” The medical officer says, coming in with a clipboard and a couple of different scanners. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Fine,” Flur manages through her sobs.

  “You did great,” he says, as he runs the scanners over her quickly, almost unnoticeably. “The geeks are already raving about those samples you brought back. There, there,” he says, when she doesn’t stop crying. He pats her arm awkwardly. “It’s just the tension and excitement. You’ll be fine.”

  But it isn’t the tension or the excitement. Flur is thinking about the things she could have said to Irnv: about her four brothers, dead, drunk, imprisoned, and poor; her three sisters, poor, unhappy, and desperate. About her own childhood, hungry and hardscrabble. If she had unburied these old sufferings, would Irnv have trusted her more? Would she have been able to get the agreement signed?

  But mostly, and it is this that makes her want to cry until she makes her own, shimmering tear tracks, she is thinking about her mother. Twice abandoned (three times if you count Flur’s reluctance to visit). Beaten occasionally, exploited often, underpaid always. An infant lost, a dear sister lost, an adult child lost. Flur has always avoided imagining that grief. When her brother was killed, she clung to her own complicated pain and did not look her mother in the eye so she would not probe those depths. Now she weighs all her mother has suffered.

  In another world, it would be enough to make her president.

  Emma Osborne

  http://emmakosborne.com

  The Box Wife(Short story)

  by Emma Osborne

  Originally published by Shock Totem: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

  If you run your hands over me you’ll be pulling splinters from your palms for days.

  I am in a room bare and dark.

  “Melissa, oh oh,” it says, thrusting. “Kelly, my dear, my love, Kelly.” Sometimes I am one or both. Three nights ago, it called me little one, though I am bigger than it by half. I have many names. Each of them, I remember. Each of them is an identity that drapes over me like a mask.

  It made me one night from boxes and springs. My joints were screwed in and locked into place with bolts. My boxes were nailed together; each hammer blow like a gunshot. I will always remember the thrill of the drill as it punched through my rough planks to make gaps for the hoses. I have painted toenails, red on the left side and black on the right. My front is covered with a woolly sheepskin. The rest of me is skinned with rubber gloves. I worry that I may crack in the cold.

  My room has a window dressed with lace that restrains any errant snowflake that may fly to me. The walls are the pink of new flesh. There is something bundled up in the corner that has the colour and smell of burned hair.

  “Madison,” it says, choking. “Belle, my sweet, my heart.”

  It is heavy and stinks of lust. When it rolls on me I flex and shift. I turn my head but it always moves me into its preferred position. I am slick in patches and moist in others. A hank ofhair birthed from a hairdresser’s garbage bag has been slapped atop my pate and fastened with tape. The lock is of many colors and red.

  It built me from flat pillows and rusted clockwork. It painted on eyes so that I may stare at it and glued in teeth so that I may smile. I contain wires that squeal when it lifts my arms. I am voiceless, but for the creak of my parts.

  I am obliging.

  It slows its movement and begins to oil me. I lay exposed as it pushes warmed liquid into my hollows and cranks with insistent fingertips.

  “Holly,” it says, as it maintains me. “You can’t go. You are here for me, here to stay.”

  There is someone below us, rattling against bricks and coughing up the water and the bread that it leaves when the pumping is steady. The pumping has to be steady for me to breathe.

  I am connected by clouded tubes to something below me, far down where I can’t see. My circulatory system is squeezed by anonymous hands and this thing that mig
ht be blood flows up through the dangling tubes. My cheeks bloom, sometimes, and other times my whole cavity heaves.

  The pumper grants me breath, minute by minute. I thank the pumper, silently, every time the sun rises to shine in through my window.

  “Geraldine.” It names me anew as it finishes its greasing and begins to thrust once more.

  It drags its fingers through the wool and grips hard with each push. “My sweet, my heart,” it calls me, quietly, then louder. “Geraldine!”

  I wonder who she is; who they all are. Former lovers? Enemies? Sisters? I try to give them all faces, when I am named for them but I do not and will never know them. All I know is that I am them, for a time, until it changes the name and my identity hastens to the next.

  “Jessica, I have always known that it would be you. I have waited for you forever and ever. Jessica, lovely one, Jessica!” It scrapes its cheek against my cheek and I can smell its muggy breath.

  I am allowed to rock along with it, when I am being used. Sometimes I make the smallest of unnecessary movements when I think that it is too caught up to notice. It feels like a minuscule act of rebellion. I dare not even tremble when I am in my room, alone. It tells me that if I move when it isn’t around, it will come to me in the smallest hours and set me on fire—just burn me up into a crisp. It could be lying. But I don’t know anything.

  I am just a box.

  I could tell you a story. I could tell you about the way that it whispered me to this place, telling me how beautiful I was, oh, how perfect; all the while gouging its fingernails into the parts of me that once had feeling. I could spin you a tale of my life before it, before this room. I could tell you of the time I ran after a dragonfly and skidded through mud until I was wet up to my knees in a creek. I could recount for you the months it took me to learn how to play my favourite song, could show you the guitar-string callouses that emerged. I could count for you the number of rooms that I slept in, from the time I was small until the day that I was installed in this place.