Thirteen
Page 33
Magus is kneeling before the painting, chanting in that same strange language. But now Belinda can understand him. She is granted a revelation and finally understands who the thirteenth goddess is.
Venera. Venera herself is the thirteenth goddess. Venera herself gifts Belinda with yet more divine visions. Venera is returning to reclaim her city. And she and Magus have been the instruments of her plan.
The Goddess is furious at the Church of Mother Earth for trying to eradicate her existence from history, for usurping her mysteries in the name of their Earth worship. It is her menses that flow through her city at every full moon, and not that of the Earth. The body parts that have been washing onto the core island are those of her sycophants, transmogrified and sacrificed in preparation of her return. Soon, they will live again.
Soon, Venera herself will live again.
Beneath the feet of her new worshippers, the Mother House crumbles to the ground, amid the screams of the blasphemous Sisters inside. The vermilion garden remains intact.
Around Belinda and the others, one of the myriad bygone iterations of the city of Venera rises from its subterranean tomb, reconfiguring the metropolis into a new agglomeration. The Goddess herself rises from deeper still, from deeper even than the bowels of the Earth, to whisper her divine song to those Venerans who survived the divine transmogrification of the city-state.
12. Love Song
The voice of Venera is a call to life and self-awareness for the Kourai Khryseai; they shed their mechanical bodies to reveal new flesh, blessed by the Goddess.
For Hemero Volkanus, the holy song is a source of power; he mines it to acquire the divine attributes of his patron god, Hephaestus.
The music of the Goddess inspires Belinda Gerda to new heights of creativity: as yet uncreated tableaux cascade through her mind’s eye, nurturing her lust for art.
The melodies of Venera are too exquisite for Magus Amore to bear; swimming in the holy music, his body dissolves—and his organic particles waft toward the Goddess. She inhales the essence of her most devout and loving worshipper.
To Pietro Dovelander, lost in the ever-changing maze of the city-state, Venera’s voice is a chaotic screech that further confuses whatever sanity remains within him.
Agnes, who has been unable to locate the foreign detective, is initially terrified at the scope of the unfurling bio-architectural transformations besetting the city of her birth; Venera’s song is welcome serenity.
13. The Blood of Venera
Come the gibbous moon, the waters of Venera start to flow red with the blood the Goddess. By the time of the full moon, the water coursing through the city’s waterways is of a burnt-red hue. At that time, the goddess Venera’s worshippers are invited to bathe in her menses.
Agnes takes off her shoes, her skirt, and her blouse. She walks down three steps on the stairs by the Via Olympia. The vermilion-red water caresses her toes, her feet, her freshly shaved calves. She delights in the briny smell of the salt water as it blends with the spicy tang of Venera’s blood.
Still trapped within an urban geography he cannot grasp, Pietro Dovelander watches Venera’s worshippers soak in her blood. He wants to call out to Agnes, whom he dimly recognizes, but the knowledge of language leaves him before he can utter even a word.
The Still Point of the Turning World
— Adrienne J. Odasso
1. Cather’s Run
I thought it was the stream
where the crayfish hid, where the wind
once knocked me clean in. So, I swam
for the bank by way of the deep
and dived instead. The trout teem
in this darkness divisible: my arms
cut a wide, white arc in the shallows
and then down like an arrow,
but bent, I touched rocks six feed under
where my feet slid on algae. Death came
to count the ticking of my fast-held breath.
Shivering, dragged to the surface, I went.
2. Harvard Square
It doesn’t work like that, she said.
One does not blink out and rekindle, one must
dare to return to haunt the living. Well, I dare,
I said, and the sterling spoon there, tyre-bent and slivered
agreed. Some ancient polarity, the universe’s heart
hangs on a thread. I bought my fare here, silver, too,
and hung it from a chain. I will not show it to the sun,
nor name it before the living. The prow of this ship
veers star-ward true as the traffic light turns green.
3. Rievaulx Abbey
My breath returned that day
in the rain, up on the rise
to where my eyes
fell on the walls. I cried
as if I’d found some fabled answer,
feral comfort
in the lichen’s loving scrape.
A chaser of pillars with stories
is what I became:
no hallowed ruin thereafter
was spared my embrace.
4. St James’s Park
Stay with me a while, he says.
And the water rises to the pavement, lifts
my coat, forms the wildest of wings. Sifts
the sand from my skull and gifts me
with snail-shells for teeth. I am
the duck-dive, the bird-cry, the breeze
through the bridges and leaves. I am silence
in the man’s startled eyes and I pass by the table
where he’s sat. Spark recognition. I’m your ghost,
I want to say, and you’re mine, but next time—
Next time won’t be so simple:
I’ll sink and not rise.
The eyes beneath which you shiver
will not be mine.
Contributors
Liz Argall often writes speculative fiction and interstitial work that explore spaces between genres. She is especially fond of gritty urban fantasy, thought provoking science fiction and fantastical literary fiction.
Liz’s comics have been published in an array of publications, including Meanjin, The Girl’s Guide to Guy Stuff, Eat Comics, Something Wicked and her collection Songs, Dreams and Nightmares. Her anthology, Dreams of Tomorrow, won a Bronze Ledger Award for Small Press of the Year. In January 2009 her musical Comic Book Opera, written with composer Michael Sollis, was performed for the first time. Two of her short stories have been staged as plays.
Although currently known as a science fiction writer, editor, and anthologist, M. David Blake once utterly flunked a study of genre. In the third aforementioned role, he assembles the annual Campbellian Anthology; under guise of the second he edits STRAEON. The first garners infrequent publication royalties under an assortment of bylines.
Richard Bowes’ novel Dust Devil on a Quiet Street was nominated for the 2014 World Fantasy and Lambda Awards. He has published six novels, four story collections, over seventy stories and has won two World Fantasy, a Lambda, Million Writers, and International Horror Guild awards.
Recent and forthcoming appearances include: Tor.com, The Revelator, The Best of Electric Velocipede, Datlow’s The Doll Collection, Uncanny Magazine.
George Cotronis lives in the wilderness of Northern Sweden. He makes a living designing book covers. He sometimes writes. His stories have appeared in Big Pulp and Vignettes from the End of the World.
Amanda C. Davis has an engineering degree and a fondness for baking, gardening, and low-budget horror films. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Shock Totem and Cemetery Dance, among others. She tweets enthusiastically as @davisac1. You can find out more about her and read more of her work at http://www.amandacdavis.com.
Julie C. Day’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and A cappella Zoo’s best-of. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the USM’s Stonecoast program and a M.S. in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Some of
her favorite things include gummy candies, loose teas, standing desks, and a tiny primate known as the slow loris. You can find Julie on Twitter @thisjulieday or through her website: www.stillwingingit.com.
Jetse de Vries is a technical specialist for a propulsion company, and used to travel the world for this. Of late he’s trying to settle into a desk job, in order to have more time for editing and writing SF.
He writes SF since 1999, and had his first story published in November 2003. His stories have appeared in about two dozen publications on both sides of the Atlantic, and include Amityville House of Pancakes, vol. 1, JPPN 2, Nemonymous 4, Northwest Passages: A Cascadian Anthology, DeathGrip: Exit Laughing, HUB Magazine #2, and Clarkesworld Magazine (May 2007), SF Waxes Philisophical anthology, Postscripts Magazine #14 and Flurb #6.
They’re upcoming in the A Mosque Among the Stars anthology, and hopefully in some other future publications.
He’s been part of the Interzone editorial team from March 2004 until September 2008, and is now working on SHINE, an anthology of optimistic, near future SF for Solaris Boooks and other future editorial projects.
Jennifer Giesbrecht is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia where she earned a degree in History and Methodology. She currently volunteers her talent as a dramaturge at a local theater company and works as a freelance editor, writer and artist. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2013. Her work has previously appeared in Nightmare Magazine.
Daryl Gregory is the award-winning writer of genre-mixing short stories, novels, and comics. His most recent work includes the novels Afterparty and Harrison Squared (both from Tor Books), and the novella We Are All Completely Fine (Tachyon).
Rik Hoskin is a science fiction novelist and comic strip writer from London, England. He has been the primary writer on the Outlanders book series since 2008 and has contributed several volumes to its sister series, Deathlands, both under the pen-name of "James Axler". His recent comic strip work includes Star Wars and Doctor Who Adventures in the UK and Europe, and the Mercy Thompson comic book series in the USA. He is currently working on a science fiction novel for Resurrection House.
Rebecca Kuder’s novel, The Watery Girl, was chosen as one of ten finalists for the Many Voices Project at New Rivers Press in 2014. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published in West Wind Review, Mothering Magazine, The Knitter’s Gift, Midwifery Today, The Manifest Station, and Jaded Ibis Productions. Rebecca has an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing in the individualized masters program at Antioch University Midwest. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, the writer Robert Freeman Wexler, and their daughter, Merida. Rebecca blogs at www.rebeccakuder.com. She is working on a new novel.
Claude Lalumière (claudepages.info) is the author of the collections Objects of Worship and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes and of the mosaic novella The Door to Lost Pages. He’s the co-creator of the multimedia cryptomythology project Lost Myths (lostmyths.net), and he has edited more than a dozen anthologies, the most recent of which is The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir (with co-editor David Nickle); he’s currently working on his next anthology project, Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (with co-editor Mark Shainblum), forthcoming in 2016. Claude is a nomadic Montrealer now often sighted in Portland, OR, and Vancouver, BC.
Marc Levinthal is a writer and musician who has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for over thirty years. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, he moved to L.A. in the early eighties to become a rock star. That didn’t quite happen as planned, but a lot of other cool stuff did. He has been involved with both "The Music Business" (having co-written the hit single "Three Little Pigs" while in the band Green Jello) and "The Motion Picture Industry" (having co-written the score for the cult movie classic Valley Girl.)
Marc’s short stories have appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and several anthologies, including Mondo Zombie and Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. A novel co-written with John Skipp, The Emerald Burrito of Oz, was published by Eraserhead Press in 2010. (Several sequels are in the works!)
Marc currently lives in Pasadena with his two lovely nerd children, somewhere between JPL and Mount Wilson.
Grá Linnaea is a hippie punk nerd in the northwest United States. Check out his serial novel, "The Curious Investigations of Miranda McGee" and more at http://www.gralinnaea.com/.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld, Interfictions Online, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies Phantasm Japan, Solaris Rising 3 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014). For Tor.com, she runs the Post-Binary Gender in SF column. Find her on Twitter: @foxvertebrae.
Juli Mallett writes lies that strain at the bounds of the perceptible, twisting in and out of those things for which there are no words. Her publications include urban wildlife non-fiction, ecoinformatics research, open source software, poetry and strange epistles. She is currently a seminarian and lives with several ridiculous beasts, at least one of which could be mistaken for a human.
Lyn McConchie began writing in 1990 since which time she has seen 32 of her books published, and some 275 short stories, her work appearing in 9 countries and in 4 languages. Her most recent book was Sherlock Holmes: Repeat Business, which is currently shortlisted for the Silver Falchion Award. Lyn lives on a small farm in New Zealand where she raises colored sheep and has free-range geese and hens, she shares her 19th century farmhouse with Thunder her Ocicat, and 7469 books.
Fiona Moore is a business anthropologist at the University of London, studying identity and migration. Her SF has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Dark Horizons, and On Spec, and she has co-written four books of TV criticism for Telos Publishing. She lives in a very crowded house in Southeast England. Read about her adventures at http://www.fiona-moore.com.
A week after buying his house in New Hampshire’s North Country, Gregory L. Norris glanced at the cobalt blue glass lamp in the bay window, picked up his pen, and wrote the first draft for "Occupy Maple Street." Norris has written for television and, recently, the scripts for two feature films. His fiction, short and long, appears regularly in print. Look for his latest book, Tales From the Robot Graveyard, and follow his literary adventures at www.gregorylnorris.blogspot.com.
Adrienne J. Odasso’s poetry has appeared in a number of strange and wonderful publications, including Sybil’s Garage, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Cabinet des Fées, Midnight Echo, Not One of Us, Dreams & Nightmares, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Farrago’s Wainscot, Through the Gate, Liminality, inkscrawl, and Battersea Review. Her début collection, Lost Books (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2010), was nominated for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and for the 2011 Forward Prize, and was also a finalist for the 2011 People’s Book Prize. Her second collection with Flipped Eye, The Dishonesty of Dreams, was released in August of 2014. Her two chapbooks, Devil’s Road Down and Wanderlust, are available from Maverick Duck Press. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of York (UK). She currently lives in Boston with her partner and a tank full of inquisitive freshwater fish. You can find her online at ajodasso.livejournal.com (and on also on Twitter under the same name).
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 150+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story, "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain," from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see http://www.kittywumpus.net
Andrew Penn Romine lives in Los Angeles whe
re he works in the visual effects and animation industry. When he’s not wrangling words, robots, cavemen, or dragons, he dabbles in craft cocktails and sequential art.
A graduate of the 2010 Clarion West workshop, his fiction appears online at Lightspeed Magazine, Paizo, and Crossed Genres as well as in the anthologies Fungi, What Fates Impose, By Faerie Light, Coins of Chaos, and Help Fund My Robot Army. You can find his full list of publications at andrewpennromine.com.
He’s also contributed articles to Lightspeed/Fantasy Magazine and blogs at Inkpunks. He occasionally blogs about cocktails as The Booze Nerd. You can also follow his day-to-day adventures on Twitter: @inkgorilla.
David Tallerman is the author of the comic Fantasy novels Giant Thief, Crown Thief, and Prince Thief, as well as the absurdist Steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science.
David’s short Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror has appeared in over sixty markets, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He can be found online at http://davidtallerman.co.uk and http://davidtallerman.blogspot.com.
Tais Teng is a pseudonym for a Dutch fantasy and science fiction writer, illustrator and sculptor. His real name is Thijs van Ebbenhorst Tengbergen and he was born in 1952 in The Hague.
Tais Teng has written more than a hundred books for both adults and children. He has won the Paul Harland Prize four times. His books have been translated in German, Finnish, French and English. One of his books, The Emerald Boy, has been published in the USA. He recently sold the story Embrace the Night to the Night Land site.
Richard Thomas is the author of six books—the novels Disintegration and The Breaker (Random House Alibi), The Soul Standard (Dzanc Books) and Transubstantiate, as well as the collections Herniated Roots and Staring Into the Abyss. His over 100 stories in print include Cemetery Dance, PANK, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Midwestern Gothic, Chiral Mad 2, Qualia Nous, and Shivers VI. For more information visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com.