Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  Every day her brother comes in attempting to buy beer. Every day he fails.

  “Why,” she asks T.

  “If I don’t, they’ll kick me out.”

  “Why,” she later asks the cashier.

  “Have you seen the crap floating around in one of those cans?”

  “But Captain?”

  “Little prick deserves whatever salmonella he catches.”

  In the winter months, Red returns to school and sits with the other Kirks in the back corner but she is ever so slightly out of step. While the others gaze longingly at the mauve pump dangling inches away from Jamie’s instep, Red is leaning back to examine the topographic maps on the walls. The Mississippi stretches from floor to ceiling, its many tributaries and old beds undulating in multi-colored bands. The teacher watches her and after class guides her hand up one stream and down the other.

  “This is where we lined it with concrete to save the port, this is where it jumped its banks. This is where we think it may go, and where we now try to guide it.”

  His hand on her wrist and the inside of her arm is insistent and imploring. “You can’t control a river forever. It goes where it wants. Or goes where it does not want, just to spite you.”

  Red pulls back, the backs of her legs tingling with flashes of hot then cold. In the bathroom she pulls up her pant leg and dabs at the cracked scabs. She considers telling the nurse, but there’s not much to be done. She will be dead by summer, like so many others before her.

  During her evening shift, Red tells the cashier she’ll make out with him if he agrees to sell T the beer.

  “Just once,” she adds.

  The cashier shrugs. “You’re not my type, but if it means that much to you.”

  T

  T’s mother says names have power. They are invasive, like a white fungus, a vine, a jumping carp. Names can take hold, changing the host and adapting it to become the perfect carrier. Why name your son and daughter after an ordinary person: Martha, George, John, Abigail when you can name your children something which will inspire them to a greatness which is not their own, but could be?

  T suspects his mother failed him by having twins. If names have power, then surely that power can be diluted. Not all the Kirks are equal. Jamie is the one with whom they are all in love. Captain is the one who can charm. James is particularly good with guns. Jimmy is the bully, but he is strong and fair when it comes to the other Kirks, most of the time. Tiberius and Tiberia are lithe as willow branches and quick as rabbits. Once they claimed to have seen a falcon swooping down upon the highway, and if anyone has eyes fast enough to catch an extinct bird, they do. Jimmy K and Kirkland don’t speak much, but when they do it is measured and wise. What weaknesses he has identified in himself, T sees converted into strengths in others. They are like wandering palms in some ancient forest, constantly moving into the light. He alone feels himself slowly falling down. What space he used to occupy shall be trod over by many soft, green leaved feet.

  One afternoon Captain hands T the cash and slaps him on the back. “This time, try not to fail.”

  When he walks in the cashier heads him off. “Compliments of your sister,” he says and hands T a bottle of whiskey.

  T is convinced that this is yet another ploy to humiliate him though he does not know how except for the suspicion that everything in his life is a mere contrivance to expose his weaknesses. When he reaches the group, Captain holds out his hand for the bottle but T ignores him. He opens it and hands it to Jimmy. It goes around and around, until finally someone hands it back to T, empty.

  T shrugs. “Hasn’t tasted right since Scotland went under anyway.”

  “How the fuck would you know?” someone says.

  T doesn’t answer, but looks up at the sky. The sun has gone down and they all shiver in the cooling air. It will be difficult riding back in the dark, with loose stones and jostling cyclists on the road. One of them could take him out, if they perceived him as a threat or a mere annoyance. Jimmy might take him out just ’cause. For once the thought doesn’t scare him and he realizes that knowing death is certain and not caring is his first Kirk-like thought. Maybe the clock at the hospital was wrong; maybe his mother was right.

  “Same way he knows everything,” Captain says. “He pretends. He thinks he’s better, different, special. But he’s not. He’s just the same as any one of us.”

  T smiles back. “Think what you want,” he says.

  No one attacks him on the way home, but T knows it is only a matter of time. None of them are safe; they are not a team and were never meant to be.

  Jamie

  The colony will select new immigrants any day now. Applications have been submitted: education, skills, physical exams. Jamie waits and waits while fending off the advances of the other Kirks.

  “We will fly to the moon, you and I,” Captain says. “They let you take a companion, and I will always choose you.”

  Weeks go by, months. Rumors spread that an illness has delayed the selection process and the most likely candidates will have advanced degrees in human physiology and evolutionary biology. Jamie doesn’t worry as she knows she is the perfect example of youth and health and they will want her for these attributes alone.

  When the spring floods begin most of the Kirks begin to pair off: Kirkland comforts T after his sister’s funeral and rather than calling her a slut, the other girls begin turning to her for advice. When Jamie shifts her legs in class, fewer and fewer Kirks turn their heads. Jamie’s skirts become shorter and shorter until eventually the teacher pulls her aside and gives her a sweatshirt to tie around her waist.

  “The noise your flesh makes when it sticks to the seat is distracting. This will help.”

  Jamie pouts and twirls her hair in her fingers. “Is that the only thing about it which is distracting?”

  “Yes. Now go sit down.”

  Jamie believes when the floods recede everything will go back to normal. But it doesn’t. Even her white skinned alien has abandoned her, and no longer walks along the road by her house. She begins to doubt she ever saw him/her at all.

  Only Captain favors Jamie openly and she pretends to favor him back to spite the others. She lets his hand wander up her leg and kisses him when the others are looking. She tells herself she is only salvaging her plan when she allows him to undress her in the dark. She is only recapturing her essence when he moves against her. But she feels nothing when he murmurs that their souls are mere whispers in the dark. She is robotic in her movements and she feels Captain, the other Kirks, the alien, her entire world slipping away from her. When they finish, Jamie goes back to the roof hoping that now she has sacrificed some small part of herself, perhaps the alien will come back. But instead there is only silence and the moon gleaming on the empty gravel.

  Fisher

  Everyone in the colony is slowly dying, save Fisher. He suspects his immunity is a sign of his guilt. He is the new typhoid Mary: asymptomatic and always suspiciously present. He eats only nutrition capsules and does not handle the food or animals. He walks while covered in latex gloves, hazmat suits and sanitizes constantly. If the others blame him, they do not let on and instead insist that he learn how to operate the colony in their inevitable absence.

  No new immigrants will come, not until the disease is quarantined and eradicated. The computers and robots and Fisher will need to carry on, long enough to stave off the extinction. When each colonist dies, the others strip the body and place it outside the clear walls of the compound. No one is buried or incinerated. Rather, a pile of dehydrated corpses piles up in view of the corn fields where the wild deer graze. No single human matters, only the responsibility to the birds, amphibians, lizards and mammals which were saved and transplanted.

  “We never intended to stay, you know,” Fisher’s mother tells him. “We just thought… a foothold. Something to get us started.”

  Fisher knows that one day all the colonists save him will be dead and he will be consigned to carrying on a
lone. Earth will send him one companion each year and he will fall in love with him or her each time but he or she will die and another one sent. He will have to be brave enough each time, hoping that this one is different.

  He reaches into the water and lets the fish glide by. If one looks long enough, one can see a pattern in any movement but it does not mean you can change it. Still, he believes one day someone will arrive who is strong enough to adapt to the path on which he or she finds herself. One day someone will open the shuttle bay door and be the person with whom Kirk can settle down and live a long, fruitful life.

  About the Author

  Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and is pursuing a Tax LLM in order to fulfill her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared in Brain Harvest, Daily Science Fiction, and Rattle.

  From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

  Matthew Johnson

  Food is one of our most basic desires. It’s the first thing we ask for after being born, the fuel for our work and our reward at the end of a long day. Because of this, it’s been an integral element of storytelling since Eve ate the apple, and science fiction and fantasy are no exception. It’s true that food has had a lower profile in the fantastic genres than in literature as a whole — but while it’s rarely the star of the show, food frequently plays an essential role.

  Perhaps the most common use of food in SF and fantasy is to ground a work. Taste is our most intimate sense, the only one that we experience by taking things into our bodies. For this reason, food imagery can make the most outlandish setting more real and immediate by tying it to familiar sensations. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, had his characters eat essentially the same foods he enjoyed, and there is a strong connection drawn in his The Fellowship of the Rings between food and home: the last scene set in the Shire is a dinner with Farmer Maggot, whose famous mushrooms Frodo was beaten for stealing many years before. The basket of those mushrooms that the hobbits are gifted with serves as a reminder of what they are leaving behind. It is the homeliness of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — in which Bilbo’s first challenge is to cook breakfast for thirteen hungry, fussy dwarves — that helped set those books apart from Tolkien’s earlier work and contributed to their accessibility and timelessness.

  The association of food and home is a natural one. Our notions of home are made up largely of the flavors and smells of what we cook and eat. This applies on the level of a family — most of us have experienced the mild culture shock of visiting a house that uses margarine when we are used to butter, or white bread instead of brown — but it is even more powerful in defining a whole culture. It’s the smells of different foods — say, of certain spices or kinds of meat — that can sometimes cause friction when peoples from different cultures are forced to share space.

  SF and fantasy writers take advantage of this phenomenon when they use food to establish distance rather than familiarity, as George R. R. Martin does in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. While the largely authentic medieval cooking he describes is not strange enough to make his setting feel entirely alien, it communicates a powerful sense that the novels’ world is different from ours — partly by featuring foods that have fallen out of favor, such as lamprey pie (see the excellent Inn at the Crossroads blog for recipes and more information on the use of pies in Martin’s series), but also by highlighting the regional and seasonal differences in food. As Waldo Jaquith points out in his essay “On the Impracticality of a Cheeseburger,” the biggest gap between the present and the past is not what we eat but when we eat it. Until the development of railroads, canning, and refrigeration, along with the complex financial infrastructure that makes it profitable to ship and store food around the world, only a tiny number of foods could be eaten out of season. As a result, our ancestors’ meals were deeply rooted to the time of year in a way that we can hardly imagine.

  Using food in this way, to highlight cultural differences rather than similarities, is a common SF trope. Works of SF nearly always include some token examples of foods that are exotic on a surface level — an obvious one being the blue milk in Star Wars — but this technique may also be used in a more thorough way to make aliens seem more alien. In particular, aliens’ eating habits are often shown as being disgusting to humans. For example, Klingon food in Star Trek is generally used as a challenge or an obstacle to the humans who must eat it: Our first introduction to Klingon cuisine on Star Trek: The Next Generation comes when Commander Riker eats a Klingon meal, to the open disgust of his colleagues, in order to accustom himself to it before serving as an exchange officer on a Klingon ship. The archetypal Klingon food — a living (and still moving) worm called gagh — is an example of a classic cultural slander: To accuse others of eating their food raw is to claim that they either have not developed or worse have rejected the use of fire for cooking — making them so savage as to be barely above the level of animals.

  Historically, the only food-related slander worse than saying that people didn’t cook their food was to accuse them of eating the wrong things entirely — like other people. An example in fantasy is Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose eating habits — implied by his name, which is a near-anagram of “cannibal” — justify Prospero’s conquest of the island and Caliban’s enslavement. The ingestion of human tissue is, of course, a frequent activity of certain monsters, most notably vampires and zombies. In both cases the bite may transform the victim as well, a common feature of cannibalistic monsters. The Wendigo, according to the Algonquian peoples, was most often a malevolent spirit, but it could also be a person transformed by eating human flesh. In SF, humans are more likely to be victims of human-eating aliens — as in (spoiler alert) the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” — than to be cannibals themselves.

  There are exceptions to this rule, though, one of the most famous being the film Soylent Green. Although Harry Harrison complained about the changes made to the source material for Soylent Green — his novel Make Room! Make Room!, which did not contain any references to cannibalism or even the phrase “soylent green” — those changes give the movie a deeper currency than the novel. By juxtaposing heavily processed food with cannibalism, Soylent Green’s very title has become a shorthand for the way in which our industrial food system, thanks to which we may go our entire lives eating food that has been picked, processed, cooked, and packaged out of our sight, distances us from our moral responsibility toward what we eat — leaving open the possibility that what we eat could be soylent green without our knowing it.

  Like the Wendigo’s cannibalism, the invention of soylent green is caused by famine. This illustrates another way in which SF uses food: to speculate about scarcity and abundance. One of the building blocks of SF is the question, “What happens if this goes on?” — and many writers have explored the idea that developments in technology, society, or demographics might lead us to either critical shortages of food or to a future where those shortages are a thing of the past. Both visions exist side by side in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Musing on the increasing economic disparity of his day, Wells describes a life of ultimate leisure for the indolent, upper-class Eloi. While all their physical needs are tended to, however, the Eloi themselves end life as food for the subhuman Morlocks — a situation Wells likely imagined as both an echo and a reversal of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which satirically suggested that Ireland’s potato famine could be solved if the Irish were only willing to eat their own children.

  Genuinely endless food supplies are not often found in SF, and when they do they are rarely the central idea of the story. Rather they are devices that keep the writer from having to deal with food as an issue, such as the food dispensers in Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld and the replica
tors in Star Trek. Nevertheless, food pills and machines have become fixed in the general public’s mind as one of the key elements of SF. Rather than being created by SF writers, though, the idea of the food pill more likely arose from nutritionists of the 19th century, who attempted to solve hunger by boiling down food (in some cases literally) to its supposedly essential elements. The fact that those who embarked on these diets often became worse off eventually led to the discovery of vitamins. Ironically, the isolation of vitamins in pill form encouraged a widespread belief that a complete food pill was on its way, whereas the truth was that people needed vitamins to supplement the heavily processed and barely nutritious “food pills” they were already eating.

  For most contemporary readers, especially those in more developed areas of the world such as North America, the notion of a food shortage is so distant that fantasies of abundance have little power. What has taken their place is the imagining of food that is not just free but guilt-free — such as meat that can be eaten without killing animals. This, too, may be played straight or satirically, but it is the satirical examples that have endured. For instance: the vat-grown meat found in Ferderik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants and William Gibson’s Neuromancer; the Chickie Nobs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, genetically engineered to have no heads and therefore feel no pain; and of course the sentient Meat served in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which introduces itself to diners and, in an effort to soothe their consciences, tries to reassure them by insisting, “I’ll be very humane.”

  One place the fantasy of an endless food supply is still alive is children’s fiction. Food is a major part of the power dynamic between adults and children, who learn early that the pleasures of dessert only come after the sacrifice of eating vegetables. This dynamic is reproduced in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, where the impoverished Districts make do with fish and greens stew (and, no doubt, broccoli and Brussels sprouts) while the rulers in the Capitol enjoy such exotic treats as a purple-fleshed melon. With a few exceptions (such as foie gras, surely chosen for its associations with gluttony and cruelty), nearly all of the foods associated with the Capitol are sweets: melon, pancakes, marmalade, and orange juice — as close to candy as is possible in the world of the series. Because it is controlled, withheld, and only occasionally doled out by adults, candy is a natural focus for children’s fantasies. When British author Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964, many readers had vivid memories of wartime shortages (the rationing of candy had only ended in England in 1953), making the image of endless chocolate extra appealing. But the novel’s fantasy goes beyond mere abundance: It also imagines that all the restrictions adults place on eating candy may be removed by such magical treats as caramels that fill the dental cavities they create.