by Unknown
I explain to the journal editor that I’m no longer in a position to offer a balanced opinion on the worth of this work. Frankly, I’m not even sure it still qualifies as science.
I’m stuffing the paper back into the glove compartment when it meets some obstruction, some object lodged at the back. I push my fingers into the mess and meet a stiff, sharp-edged rectangle about the size of a credit card.
For a moment there’s a tingle of recognition.
I pull out the offending object, study it under the 4WD’s dome light. It’s a piece of grey foil printed with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company. The foil contains six blisters. All but one of the blisters have been popped and emptied of their contents.
The sixth still holds a small yellow pill.
I wonder what it does?
I sleep badly, but dare to hope that the murmuration will have gone by morning—broken up or drifted away elsewhere. But when I wake, I find it still present.
If anything, it has grown. I run a number count and find that it has been absorbing birds, sucking them into itself. More than half a million now. Enslaved to the murmuration, the individual birds will eventually exhaust themselves and drop out of the sky. But the whole does not care, any more than I concern myself with the loss of a few skin cells. As long as there are fresh starlings to be fed into the machine, it will persist.
I drive the 4WD out again, set up the laptop, try increasingly desperate and random measures to make the pattern terminate itself. Nothing works.
But the supply of new birds is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later, if they keep coming, it will churn its way through all the starlings in the country. Long before that happens, though, the wrongness of this thing will have become known to others beside myself. They will know that I had something to do with it. They will admire me at first, for my cleverness. After that, they will start blaming me.
I want it to end. Here. Now.
So.
Desperate measures. The wind is stiff today, the bushes and trees buckling over. Even the birds struggle to hold their formation, although the will of the murmuration forces itself through.
I make it move. I can still do that.
I steer the murmuration in the direction of the wind turbine. The blades swoop around at the limit of their speed: if it were any windier, the automatic brakes would lock the turbine into immobility. The edge of the flock begins to enter the meat slicer. I hear its helicopter whoosh, the cyclic chop of its great rotors. The blades knock the birds out of the sky in their hundreds, an instant bludgeoning execution. They tumble out of formation, dead before they hit the ground.
This is merciful, I tell myself. Better than being trapped in the murmuration.
But my control slackens. The domains are resisting, slipping out of my grip. The ensemble won’t allow itself to be destroyed by the wind turbine. It knows what I have tried to do. It knows that I am trying to murder it. On my laptop the Perl script says:
>>NO. NO. NO.
The pill leaves a bitter but familiar aftertaste. With a clarity of mind I haven’t known—or don’t remember knowing—in quite some time, I make my way once more to the top of the turbine tower. It’s odd that I feel this compulsion, since my fear of heights hasn’t abated, and for once there’s nothing wrong with the turbine, beyond some fresh dark smears on the still-turning blades.
In the housing, I ease around the humming core of the generator and its whirring shaft. The dials are all still registering power—enough for my needs, at any rate. We’re still down to those last few replacement fuses, but there’s no need to swap one of them at the moment.
I climb the little ladder and poke my head out through the roof hatch.
Steeling myself, pushing my fear aside, I put my elbows on the rim and lever my body up through the hatch. Finally I’m sitting on the rim, with my legs and feet still dangling back into the housing. The wind is hard and cold up here, a relentless solid force, but with the enclosing handrails there’s no real chance of me falling. All the same, it takes my last reserves of determination to rise from the hatch, pushing myself up until I am standing on the rubberised decking. The handrails seem too low now, and the gaps between the uprights too widely spaced. With each swoop of the blades, the housing moves under me. My knees wobble. My stomach flutters and sweat pools in the palms of my gloved hands.
But I will not fall. That’s not why I’ve come to the top of the turbine.
Once more I survey my little world from this lofty vantage. The hut, the instruments, the parked vehicle. The low sky. The boggy tracks of my daily routine.
The harder gleam of the causeway, arrowing away.
But it never gets anywhere. The causeway vanishes into bog and then the bog opens up into the silver mirror of a larger expanse of open water. I squint, trying to pick up the causeway’s continuation beyond the flooded area. There, maybe. A scratch of iron-grey, arrowing on toward the horizon. But dark shapes bordering that scratch. Cars, vans—all stopped. Some of them tipped over or emptied like skulls. Burnt out.
I might be imagining it.
Beyond the marsh, beyond the enclosing water, nothing that hints at civilisation. The telegraph poles run some distance, then sag into the water—their lines cut or submerged.
I realise now that I’ve been here a lot longer than weeks. I know also that I don’t need to worry about being a scientist any more. That’s the least of anyone’s concerns. Being a scientist is just something I used to do, a long time ago.
I wish I could hold onto this. I wish I could remember that the paper doesn’t matter, that the journal doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. That the only thing left to worry about is holding on, keeping things at bay. But unless I’m mistaken that was the last of my medication.
Finally the wind and the swaying overcome my will. I start down the tower, back to the ground.
At the 4WD I stand and watch the birds. That clarity hasn’t completely left me, that knowledge of what I am and what has become of me. I can feel it leaking out of my head as if there are drainage holes in the base of my skull. For the moment, though, there’s still enough of it there. I know what happened.
But the murmuration still contains troubling structure—sharp edges, block knots of density, shifting domains and restless connections. Symmetries and geometries. Did I cause all of that to come into being, or is this now the way of things? Is it a kind of equivalence, order emerging in the natural world, while order is eclipsed in ours? Have I been trying to communicate with the murmuration, or is it the other way around? Which of us is the observer, which the phenomenon?
If I tried to kill it, will it find it in itself to forgive me?
I try to hold onto these questions. They seem hugely important to me now. But one pill was never going to hold the dusk at bay.
In the morning I feel much better about things now. Finally, I think I can see a way through—a fresh approach, a new chance of publication. It will mean going back to the start of the process, but sometimes you have no choice— you just have to cut your losses.
I draft a letter to the editor. Although it pains me to do it, I feel that we have no option but to request a new referee. Things have gone on long enough with this old one. Frankly the whole exchange was in danger of getting too personal. We all know that the anonymous part counts for very little these days, and in all honesty professional feelings were starting to get in the way. I had a suspicion about their identity, and of course mine was all too visible to them. We had history. Too much bad blood, too much accumulated recrimination and mistrust. At least this way we will be off to a clean start again.
I read it over, make a few alterations, then send the letter. It might be misplaced optimism, but this time I am quietly confident of success.
I look forward to hearing from the editor.
RECOMMENDED READING
“Ruins” by Eleanor Arnason, Old Venus
“A Stopped Clock” by Madeline Ashby, War Stories from the Future
/> “City of Ash” by Paolo Bacigalupi, Matter (July 2015)
“My Last Bringback” by John Barnes, Meeting Infinity
“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” by Elizabeth Bear, Old Venus
“The Machine Starts” by Greg Bear, Future Visions
“It Takes More Muscles to Frown” by Ned Beauman, Twelve Tomorrows 2016
“Twelve and Tag” by Gregory Norman Bossert, Asimov’s (March 2015)
“Ratcatcher” by Tobias S. Buckell, Xenowealth
“Evangelist” by Adam-Troy Castro, Analog (November 2015)
“The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang, e-flux Journal (56th Venice Biennale)
“勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace)” by John Chu, Lightspeed (June 2015)
“The Vital Abyss” by James S.A. Corey, Orbit Books
“The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” by Aliette de Bodard, Asimov’s (October/November 2015)
“Taste the Whip” by Andy Dudak, Diabolical Plots (March 2015)
“The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred” by Greg Egan, Asimov’s (December 2015)
“The New Mother” by E. J. Fischer, Asimov’s (April/May 2015)
“Liminal Grid” by Jaymee Goh, Strange Horizons (November 9, 2015)
“The Light Brigade” by Kameron Hurley, Patreon
“The 1st Annual Lunar Biathlon” by Rachael Jones, Crossed Genres (October 2015)
“The Last Hunt” by Vylar Kaftan, Asimov’s (September 2015)
“Consolation” by John Kessel, Twelve Tomorrows 2016
“Machine Learning” by Nancy Kress, Future Visions
“Gamer’s End” by Yoon Ha Lee, Press Start to Play
“My Father’s Crab” by Bruce McAllister, Analog (October 2015)
“The Falls: A Luna Story” by Ian McDonald, Meeting Infinity
“Little Sisters” by Vonda McIntyre, Book View Cafe
“When Your Child Strays from God” by Sam J. Miller, Clarkesworld (July 2015)
“Plural” by Lia Swope Mitchell, Cosmos (February/March 2015)
“The Molenstraat Music Festival” by Sean Monaghan, Asimov’s (September 2015)
“Binti” by Nnedi Okorafor, Tor.com (August 17, 2015)
“Our Lady of the Open Road” by Sarah Pinsker, Asimov’s (June 2015)
“Today’s Smarthouse in Love” by Sarah Pinsker, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (May/June 2015)
“The City of Your Soul” by Robert Reed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (November/December 2015)
“Slow Bullets” by Alastair Reynolds, Tachyon Publications
“The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson, Clarkesworld (February 2015)
“Inhuman Garbage” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Asimov’s (March 2015)
“The Museum of Modern Warfare” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Analog (December 2015)
“I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way up in the Air” by Clifford D. Simak, I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak
“The Reluctant Jew” by Rachel Swirsky, Jews vs Aliens
“Planet Lion” by Catherynne M. Valente, Uncanny (May/June 2015)
“The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You” by Jo Lindsay Walton, Twelve Tomorrows 2016
“On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers” by Nick Wolven, Asimov’s (February 2015)
“Ether” by Zhang Ran, Clarkesworld (January 2015)
PERMISSIONS
“The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss” by David Brin. © 2015 by David Brin. Originally published in Old Venus, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Hold-Time Violations” by John Chu. © 2015 by John Chu. Originally published in Tor.com, 10/17/2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Iron Pegasus” by Brenda Cooper. © 2015 by Brenda Cooper. Originally published in Mission Tomorrow, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt (Baen Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“In Blue Lily’s Wake” by Aliette de Bodard. © 2015 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan (Solaris Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Three Bodies at Mitanni” by Seth Dickinson. © 2015 by Seth Dickinson. Originally published in Analog, June 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang. Translated by Ken Liu. © 2015 by Hao Jingfang. Originally published in Uncanny, January/February 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Cocoons” by Nancy Kress. © 2015 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan (Solaris Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer. © 2015 by Naomi Kritzer. Originally published in Clarkesworld, January 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“So Much Cooking” by Naomi Kritzer. © 2015 by Naomi Kritzer. Originally published in Clarkesworld, November 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Meshed” by Rich Larson. © 2015 by Rich Larson. Originally published in Clarkesworld, February 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Another Word for World” by Ann Leckie. © 2015 by Ann Leckie. First published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, November 2015. Reprinted by permission of Microsoft and the author.
“The Cold Inequalities” by Yoon Ha Lee. © 2015 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan (Solaris Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Damage” by David D. Levine. © 2015 by David D. Levine. Originally published in Tor.com, 1/21/2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” by Ken Liu. © 2015 by Ken Liu. Originally published in The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey (Broad Reach). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Wild Honey” by Paul McAuley. © 2015 by Paul McAuley. Originally published in Asimov’s, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan” by Ian McDonald. © 2015 by Ian McDonald. Originally published in Old Venus, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Bantam). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Hello, Hello” by Seanan McGuire. © 2015 by Seanan McGuire. First published in Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, November 2015. Reprinted by permission of Microsoft and the author.
“The Audience” by Sean McMullen. © 2015 by Sean McMullen. Originally published in Analog, June 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Calved” by Sam J. Miller. © 2015 by Sam J. Miller. Originally published in Asimov’s, September 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Outsider” by An Owomoyela. © 2015 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan (Solaris Books). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan. Translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan. © 2015 by Chen Qiufan. Originally published in Lightspeed, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Empty” by Robert Reed. © 2015 by Robert Reed. Originally published in Asimov’s, December 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Murmuration” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2015 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published in Interzone, March/April 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Two-Year Man” by Kelly Robson. © 2015 by Kelly Robson. Originally published in Asimov’s, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Capitalism in the 22nd Century” by Geoff Ryman. © 2015 by Geoff Ryman. Originally published in Stories for Chip, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell (Rosarium). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Gypsy” by Carter Scholz. © 2015 by Carter Scholz. Originally published in Gypsy Plus (PM Press). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker. © 2015 by Martin L. Shoemaker. Originally published in Clarkesworld, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” by Taiyo Fujii. Translated by Jim Hubbert. © 2013 by Taiyo Fujii. Originally published in SF Magazine in Japan. English translation © 2015 VIZ Media.
“Bannerless” by Carrie Vaughn. © 2015 by Carrie Vaughn LLC. Originally published in The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey (Broad Reach). Reprinted by permission of the author.
“No Placeholder for You, My Love” by Nick Wolven. © 2015 by Nick Wolven. Originally published in Asimov’s, August 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” by Caroline M. Yoachim. © 2015 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in Lightspeed, September 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld and Forever Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing, and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children. You can find him online at neil-clarke.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of content
Introduction
Today I Am Paul
Calved
Three Bodies at Mitanni
The Smog Society
In Blue Lily's Wake
Hello, Hello
Folding Beijing
Capitalism in the 22nd Century
Hold-Time Violations
Wild Honey
So Much Cooking
Bannerless
Another Word for World
The Cold Inequalities
Iron Pegasus
The Audience
Empty
Gypsy
Violation of the TrueNet Security Act
Damage
The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss
No Placeholder for You, My Love
Outsider
The Gods Have Not Dies in Vain