by Robert Reed
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 103
Table of Contents
The Empress in Her Glory
by Robert Reed
Let Baser Things Devise
by Berrien C. Henderson
The Petals Abide
by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Postcards From Monster Island
by Emily Devenport
Noble Mold
by Kage Baker
Weep For Day
by Indrapramit Das
Small Markets, Big Wonders
by Julie Novakova
Spanish Science Fiction: A Round Table Discussion with||Spain's Top Contemporary Voices
by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Another Word: The Precious Five-Star and the Reviewers of Mount Doom
by Alethea Kontis
Editor's Desk: Danger! Radioactive!
by Neil Clarke
Sleeping Giant
Art by Julie Dillon
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
The Empress in Her Glory
Robert Reed
Fruits ripen and worlds ripen.
If not taken at the right moment, any ripe prize falls from its tree and rots away, and nothing is gained.
That was how They looked at the situation.
Call them “alien.” The word isn’t ridiculous, yet by the same token, no label does justice to their origins or far-reaching powers. And after four and a half billion years of slow, often irregular growth, the Earth was deemed ripe. In the parlance of universal laws, that little orb had grown just soft enough and sweet enough. That’s why They came. That’s why an ordinary day in late June came and left again, and in those hours, by invasive and ephemeral means, every aspect of human existence was conquered.
The new rulers were few, less than a hundred, but they were an experienced, well-practiced partnership. Avoiding sloppiness and haste, they followed their occupation with months of careful study. This was a new colony, one realm among ten thousand thousand scattered about the galaxy, and their first job was to understand the world’s nature. Out of that collection of meat and history, failure and divine promise, they had to select one good leader—a human face and mind to be entrusted with the administration of what was theirs.
At fifty-eight, Adrianne Hammer ruled an empire of cubicles and computers as well as an impressive stockpile of Folgers Classic Roast. She was sharp-minded and quietly demanding of her seven-person staff. Weighing data from multiple sources, she was paid to make honest, unsentimental guesses about the future. Economic growth and downturns were predicted. The odds of storms and plagues and various medical breakthroughs had to be rendered as numbers. Hers was one minuscule department inside a major insurance conglomerate, but while other departments often duplicated their work, Adrianne and her team were unusually competent. Which is to say that the eight of them were correct a little more often than their competitors.
She was a widow. People who barely knew Adrianne knew that much. Her husband had struggled for a year against liver cancer. His prognosis was poor but never hopeless, and he might have survived. There were good reasons for optimism. But the man must have been too terrified to face his difficult future. One morning, Adrianne kissed him before driving to work, and the man subsequently drank half a bottle of quality wine and then jabbed a pistol under his fleshy chin.
As a rule, humans enjoy tragedies that involve others. They also believe suffering lends depth to the afflicted. Years after the event, co-workers still spoke about the police coming to deliver the awful news. It happened to be a rainy day. The poor lady was sitting alone in the cafeteria. The officers sat in front her and beside her, speaking slowly, and she seemed to hear them. But shock and pain must have left her numb. With a flat, unemotional voice, she asked, “Where did it happen?” Her husband shot himself at home. “But what room?” Inside the home office. “Who found him?” A delivery man looked through the window, called it in. She nodded, eyes narrowing. “Which gun?” she demanded. “And how bad is the mess?”
That’s when a bystander took hold of her hands, urging Adrianne to shut her eyes for a moment, to collect her wits.
She had one child, a grown boy already living in a distant state. Husband and son were the only people pictured on her work desk, and in keeping with a spirit of relentless honesty, neither photograph was flattering. The dead Mr. Hammer sported a beefy, rounded face dominated by an alcoholic’s bright nose. The son was an ugly fellow needing a comb and a smile. People on Adrianne’s staff knew about her life. She wasn’t particularly secretive, no. But there was a persistent story, popular in the other departments and divisions, that she was a cat lady. Didn’t she look the part? Except Adrianne didn’t keep any pets, and she didn’t suffer from mothering urges, and despite some very confident rumors, she also didn’t quilt or garden or ride cruise ships. She wasn’t unattractive, and so acquaintances imagined male friends. But except for a few dinner dates and a couple change of sheets, she never dated. Men and romance were difficulties best left behind. Alone inside the tidy, cat-free house, Mrs. Hammer filled her private hours with activities that mirrored her official job, She stood before a tall desk, in the same office where her husband killed himself. To her, the world was one giant and splendid puzzle, and like the best puzzles, it was built out of simple repeating pieces. Her passion was to searched the Internet for odd papers and unexplored pools of data, reading everything interesting as slowly and carefully as she could, and when she was ready—but only when ready—she would weave conclusions that were often a little more true than every other half-mad opinion on the Web.
Adrianne Hammer was a blogger.
Regularity. Reliability. Those were qualities she demanded of herself, and her tiny audience had always appreciated the results. She posted every Sunday, and the only postings missed were because of one bout of swine flu, and before that, her husband’s messy suicide. Thousands of people had her tools and intellect, or they had better. But brilliance likes to be focused. The average genius wants to fall in love with some narrow cause, a topic that generates passion and that she can master better than anyone else. And the most powerful minds often ended up being driven by the rawest, most predictable emotions.
But this human didn’t suffer from a narrow focus.
In fifteen years, that lifelong Republican had successfully predicted elections and civil wars as well as giving shrewd warnings about which stable nations would fail to rule effectively. She warned her readers about stock bubbles and the diminishing stocks of easy petroleum. China was on the precipice of ten environmental disasters. Russia was a rotted husk. She studied SARS and MERS and then successfully predicted the onset of GORS. Climate change was a growing maelstrom worth visiting every couple months, and with a perpetually reasoned tone, she warned her careless species to watch out for even more serious hazards. Comet impacts. Solar flares. Nuclear war between small players and firestorms born from mistakes made in North Dakota.
In one popular posting, she wrote about the Singularity. “I can only guess when the day comes, but self-aware computers are inevitable. In fact, synthetic intelligence is more likely today than it was yesterday. And it’s a little more plausible this afternoon than it was just this morning.”
At the heart of every posting was the inescapable truth: The future was chaos smothered inside more chaos. Even at her best, Adrianne cautioned that no marriage of learning and ins
ight can envision what comes in another ten years, or in some cases, in another ten seconds.
Yet even the most difficult, disorganized race had to have its winner.
And Adrianne Hammer was among of the quickest of the best.
The invisible lords made her one candidate among twenty-three. Each human was secretly examined, every life measured against an assortment of ideals. Adrianne was fifth on the list, and she wouldn’t have climbed any higher. But her son called her at home one evening. Intoxicated, plainly furious, the young man began by telling his mother that she was a bloodless bitch, unloving and ugly.
Adrianne reacted with a soft sigh, shaking her head.
The son’s rapid prattle continued, insults scattered through recollections from childhood. Old slights and embarrassments were recounted. One cold, wicked parent had destroyed the young man’s future. Didn’t she see the crimes? Didn’t she understand what a miserable mess she had made of his little life?
Once and then again, she said her son’s name. Quietly, but not softly.
The tirade finally broke. Then he muttered, “Dad.”
She nodded, apparently unsurprised by the conversation’s turn.
“Yes,” she said.
“You should have known,” the young man said. “Of all people, you should have seen it coming. Why didn’t you sense what he was planning?”
“Because he didn’t give clues.”
“Dad didn’t have to kill himself,” her son said. “He wasn’t that sick.”
She said, “Honey, he was very ill. And that doesn’t matter now.”
“It does matter.”
“Not after the gunshot,” she said. “That’s why people kill themselves. One action, and everything else is inconsequential.”
Both stopped talking.
Forty seconds passed.
“I wasn’t there,” her son complained.
“Nobody was.”
“Poor Dad was alone.”
“We’re all alone, honey.”
By a thousand means, the Earth’s new owners studied the woman’s pain. They watched the candidate open her mouth and close it again. They measured her breathing, her heart. The electricity running along her wet neurons. They even tried to read her thoughts, which was difficult with most humans and quite impossible with this specimen.
To their minds, opacity was a noble quality.
“After he shot himself,” her son began.
“I know.”
“At the funeral—”
“I remember.”
“You were angry at him. Because he used the .357. Because he aimed up and made a mess in the ceiling, and you’d have to find someone to come pull out the bones and make patches and then paint. That’s why you were angry with him.”
“I wasn’t angry,” she said.
“Yes you were.”
“No, I was reasonable frustrated,” she said. “You’re always the furious one.”
“Don’t fucking say that.”
Eyes narrowed. Adrianne fell silent.
Her pulse was slow, regular.
“You see everything, Mom. You should have predicted this.”
Just then, Adrianne’s heart rate elevated. Slightly.
“You could have taken precautions,” he said.
“It was my mistake,” she agreed. “I underestimated your father’s fears, and overestimated his aversion to violence.”
Her son sobbed.
Honesty was easy for the woman. “I always assumed your father would drink himself to death,” she said. “Which perhaps was how he made himself sick in the first place.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“I always do.”
“You don’t care. You make an awful mistake like that, and it’s nothing to you.”
“One error among thousands,” she pointed out.
The young man said nothing.
Adrianne’s pulse had returned to normal.
“Do you miss him, Mom?”
She said nothing, apparently giving the problem some thought. “I miss you,” she said at last.
Her son broke the connection.
Adrianne set the phone down on the desk, and after a sigh and seven seconds of introspection, she glanced up at the patched, repainted ceiling. Then she returned to work, crafting a long, tightly reasoned blog about thorium reactors, their blessings and why they were coming too late to the discussion.
Those watching came to one enduring conclusion: This was an exceptionally tough-minded, determined beast.
Which was why a month later, without warnings or the barest explanations, an obscure blogger was given complete control over the secretly conquered world.
At work and at home, Adrianne wielded tools that she didn’t understand. The web crawlers and other bots gathered data and then filtered it for her eyes. But even the most competent expert wouldn’t have noticed the unique bots added to her account. That small event happened early on a Saturday morning. Waking at ten after five, as usual, she discovered e-mails and classified reports from mainland China. Asking for origin reports, the new software told reasonable lies about failures to encrypt and a nameless hacker who must have left her cleverness sit exposed for too long.
This week’s blog was supposed to focus on a renewed US space program.
Not anymore.
Adrianne read and reread the translations, slept five hours, and finished her research on Sunday morning. The blog was written in two hours, which was quick for her. Instead of railguns, she described the secret fissures inside the Three Gorges Dam and how the Chinese government was doing nothing of significance, nervously hoping that their wildest worries would prove without merit.
At the moment of publication, the empress had 709 scattered followers.
Sunday evening was unremarkable, and the next two days were pleasant enough. Wednesday seemed to offer more of the same. A courtyard was adjacent to the cafeteria. Adrianne sat in the shadows, eating a peanut butter sandwich and small apple and then two Girl Scout cookies bought from a colleague’s daughter. Thin Mints. Arguably the finest cookie in the history of humankind.
“How bad?” a bypasser asked.
“They still don’t know,” his companion said.
“How many people live downstream?”
“Millions.”
The men were past, gone. The final cookie was half eaten. That very calm woman took a moment to examine her tooth marks in the bright black chocolate. Then she finished the cookie and the last of her low fat milk, and she disposed of the trash and used the restroom, returning to her station two minutes before one o’clock.
Every monitor in the office showed the Chinese flood. The giant dam didn’t just split open. It had failed catastrophically, dissolving into rubble and a wall of filthy black water that was slashing through the nightbound countryside, and it wouldn’t stop flowing until wreckage was washing up on American shores.
That portion of the future was easy to predict.
Other parts were less certain.
Most humans would have been traumatized, and many would have mentioned their brilliance or dumb luck. But no, Adrianne had a project to shepherd along. Her department was trying to calculate the likely changes in life spans in the Western world. Insurance companies never stopped making these assessments. Until now, she had been enjoying a productive week, discovering speculative works in places that normally didn’t share ideas, including several interesting reports about a small start-up in France working with anti-aging drugs.
Adrianne was the only person in the office who had found the anti-aging references. Which was bothersome. Her staff was badly distracted, but she sent one of her boys chasing the French story, expecting and even hoping that he would follow the crumbs to the same destination.
But he didn’t, no.
“I’m not finding anything, ma’am. Where am I supposed to look?”
Adrianne drove home as usual. The evening news was filled with videos of cities being gutted, churning w
aters filled with animal corpses and human corpses. She stayed awake past midnight, just after a light-water reactor and various storage facilities were inundated. The disaster had reached a new level of appalling. By five o’clock the next morning, her time, martial law had been imposed across China, and there were rumors of a major shake-up in Beijing.
The Chinese civil war remained weeks in the future.
Arriving late to work, Adrianne found one of her boys standing beside her desk. He smiled nervously. The young man looked happy yet uncertain, rocking from foot to foot. His voice cracked when he said, “Hello,” and then he laughed at his obvious terror.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Her voice broke. Just a little, in places only she could hear.
The man tried laughing again. But he couldn’t make himself. “I don’t read it a lot,” he confessed.
“Read what?” she asked.
“Your blog.” He sighed. “But I did see something . . . I don’t know . . . it’s been a couple years. And you were right.”
“Was I?”
“China. It was ripe for environmental disaster.”
At that moment, Adrianne would have been hard-pressed to write any coherent opinions about Chinese futures. The flood was enormous, but good things might come from this. Sometimes chaos supplied the fuel to make meaningful changes, destroying corruption, ensuring stability for hundreds of millions of survivors.
“You were right,” he repeated.
Finally, she saw what was obvious. “You didn’t read my last article. Did you?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. Like I said, I don’t get to it much.”
Adrianne felt sick.
“Why? Should I become a follower?” He was nearly a boy, years younger than her son. “I’ll read it right now. How’s that?”
“No,” she said.
Loudly, almost shouting.
He blinked. “Okay. You’re right. Work first.”
Adrianne’s hope was to cross the day, to finish these hours and escape back home and then make some accommodations to this very unlikely coincidence. But the peace only lasted until ten in the morning. People from other departments began to stop outside the office. Familiar, nameless faces came to look at the slender woman with the neat gray hair and out-of-fashion glasses. With caution and nervous wonder, they stared, and then she would glance up and they would retreat. Then one bold lawyer asked how she could be so right about this goddamn mess. And suddenly her own people were demanding explanations. Adrianne had no choice but some species of honesty, and then nobody was working. Everyone inside her office and throughout the complex began to read and reread a few thousand words predicting the century’s largest disaster.