Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  Any parting words of advice, wisdom, or mischief?

  I just want to thank the amazing Orbit Books team for bringing Seven Princes and The Books of the Shaper to fantasy fans all across the globe. Orbit is truly a class act and it’s humbling to be a part of their terrific lineup.

  About the Author

  Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

  And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor

  Neil Clarke

  It wouldn’t be appropriate to end this issue without sending congratulations to E. Lily Yu and Catherynne M. Valente for their respective Nebula Award nominations for Best Short Story and Best Novella. We’re quite pleased to see “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” and “Silently and Very Fast” on the ballot. Good luck! We’ll be rooting for both of you!

  A word of advice to our book collector friends: the signed limited edition of “Silently and Very Fast” that was published by WSFA Press is nearly out of print. You might want to grab one while you can.

  In other good news, thanks to the continued growth of our Kindle and Weightless Books e-subscriptions, we will be rolling out some more non-fiction features over the next few months. The first of these is scheduled to debut in our April issue. If you’d like to see Clarkesworld continue to grow, please help us spread the word about our subscription options. Details can be found at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/.

  Thanks, as always, for your continued support!

  About the Author

  Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 67

  Table of Contents

  Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

  by Tom Crosshill

  Draftyhouse

  by Erik Amundsen

  The Womb Factory

  by Peter M. Ferenczi

  The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

  by Brian Francis Slattery

  Passing Through Each Other: A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

  by Jeremy L. C. Jones

  Suitably Strange: A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

  by Jeremy L. C. Jones

  Another Word: Reading as Performance

  by Daniel Abraham

  Place to Ponder

  Art by Steve Goad

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

  Tom Crosshill

  Every day, Mom says goodbye to me for the last time.

  I need to go to the office or meet Lisa at the airport or pop out for some milk. I’m lacing my shoes in the hallway when I hear the tap-tap-tap of her heels. I freeze for a moment, then rise to meet her.

  Mom stands in the door, elegant in a simple dress. No matter the silvery hair. No matter how her skin, once a smooth dark brown, wrinkles over her bones. You’d never guess she has lived a century. She has no titanium knees, no vat-grown veins, no concession to modernity inside her.

  If only her mind were as strong.

  “Mom.” I smile at her.

  “Rico.” She smiles too, uncertainly. “Must you go?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  Her breath catches. She reaches for me with one trembling hand. Halts when I wince. Her fingers linger mid-air, gnarled and stained with ink.

  She’s been drawing in her upstairs studio. She’s been drawing with the door locked, her work a secret to the world and her agent and me.

  I haven’t pried. What might I find, if I opened her sketchbook — scribbles, blotches, scrawls? Proof that her time is up?

  Ashamed of the thought, I take Mom’s hand — bony and warm and strong. “I’ll be right back.”

  She steps close and presses her face into my chest. Her shoulders tremble. I feel her tears soaking through my shirt.

  “Lo siento, Rico,” she whispers.

  Every time Mom says goodbye to someone, it’s for the last time. She thinks — no, she knows — that she’ll never see them again. Not the mailman. Not her best friend Abby. Not me.

  It’s no tumor, no disease — we’ve run all the tests. Her reasoning is strong as ever. She can tell you how the milkshakes tasted in Miramar, before Fidel came down from the mountains and she left on the Peter Pan airlift. But deep within her mind, something has begun to fail.

  And I can’t fix it.

  So I pat her back and murmur reassurances in her ear, and try not to think what she’s feeling. Try not to imagine how I would feel, if I knew that I’d never see her again in my life.

  This happens every day.

  Still I delay what I must do.

  “Just build the habitat. You’ll feel better.”

  Lisa packs shirt after lopsided shirt into her green Samsonite. After three decades of marriage, the sight is comforting. Lisa’s only happy when in motion. Even her business suit has a space age streamlined look, the collar chic-asymmetric.

  “It seems too. . . permanent,” I say. “Like I’m giving up on her.”

  “It’s hard, I know. But what if she strokes tomorrow?”

  Lisa’s right, of course. The habitat’s a contingency. I won’t have to use it until it’s that or the crematorium.

  But can I watch Mom suffer day after day, once there’s an alternative?

  “You’re giving her a gift,” Lisa says. “You of all people should know that.”

  Me of all people.

  I walk to the viewport in the north wall. It sits mounted in a steel band like a ship’s porthole. Below it, a brass plate reads “George Dieter — Captain, Husband, Father. 1960-2049.”

  Dust covers the screen. Has it been that long? I reach up to wipe it clean.

  Blackness flickers into life.

  A turquoise sea laps against a stretch of sand. The beach glares blinding white, studded with regal palms. Beautiful.

  I could grab my immersion headset, feel the heat of the sun, hear the breeze coming off the water. But then I’d have to face the man on the sand.

  He lies in the shade of a thatched beach umbrella. Perhaps thirty, his body lean and muscular, tanned bronze. Arms stretched out at his sides, eyes closed, face relaxed.

  George Dieter. First habitat upload in the world.

  “Hi, Dad,” I whisper.

  It’s been long since I said those words. Long since I descended into the world Lisa and I built two decades ago. I miss Dad — it’s not that. But every time I went to see him, I didn’t find the man I was looking for.

  “Mom’s drawing again,” I tell Lisa. “She won’t, after.”

  I offered to give Dad a ship, after he uploaded. I offered to give him virtual seas to sail, cargo to carry, battles to fight. He only told me, “I’m tired, son.”

  I learned that lesson well, those early years before our IPO. Maybe it’s the lack of biochemical stimuli, maybe it’s a shortcoming in the iterative neural matrices — uploads just don’t care.

  Lisa zips her suitcase and comes to me. She slides between me and the viewport, wraps her arms around me. “Come with me to LA. Emily and I, we’ve got miracles to show you. There are breakthroughs coming down the pipe that—”

  “Breakthroughs?” I pull back without meaning to. “Every month, heck, every week we get some breakthrough. We all rush to try it and blog it and show it off. Aren’t you scared we’re losing our humanity?”

  “Oh, but we’re not human anymore! We’ve fragmented into a thousand different sp
ecies. With every new technology we choose to adopt — or not — there are more of us.”

  “You’re spouting Emily again.”

  Lisa turns away, goes back to her suitcase. “She’s a brilliant woman.”

  “She’s our competitor.”

  “Should we miss out on a chance to change the world again, just because Emily works for the wrong corporation?”

  On the screen, Dad gets up on his elbows and watches someone approach. A lithe figure and beautiful, strikingly dark against the white sand. A simulacrum of Mom as she once was. The thing can’t even hold a conversation, but Dad doesn’t seem to mind. He reaches out a lazy hand and grasps her, and draws her down atop him.

  The screen blurs.

  I turn away. “I never wanted to change the world. I wanted to preserve it.”

  Lisa seems not to have heard. “I’ll call you from LA.” She wheels her suitcase to the door.

  Before she can open it, a knock comes. We jump, both of us. “Come in,” I call.

  Mom enters. “Rico, I—” She sees Lisa. “I. . . I thought you left already, dear.”

  “Hello, Alina.” Lisa keeps her gaze on the floor. “I’m running late.”

  As Lisa walks past, Mom parts her lips in a silent cry. She reaches for Lisa’s shoulder. Pulls back as if scalded.

  Just like that, Mom lets Lisa go.

  I watch the tear that rolls down her cheek. I watch it, my eyes dry as they have ever been. I envy her.

  I’m a coward that night. But the next day I call Mom from work.

  “Mom.”

  A faint draw of breath in my cochlear. “Rico.” Pause. “I’m glad you called.”

  I wait for more, but nothing comes.

  “Mom, I’ve been thinking. Your house in Miramar. The one with the grand patio and those big old doors. What color were those doors?”

  Silence. “What’s this about?”

  “You showed me those photos a thousand times. I close my eyes, and I see that house. But I got to thinking I never knew the colors.” When Mom says nothing, I add, “That’s the place you were happiest, isn’t it?”

  “You’re building me one of your things.”

  Your things. That’s all she calls the habitats, ever since she saw what Lisa and I created for Dad.

  “Must you do that?” she asks me.

  I press my face against the window, look across Northwest Portland to home. The tiles of our roof shine red amidst the trees of Nob Hill. I imagine Mom on the veranda, the question in her eyes.

  “We need to prepare,” I tell her. “Before you. . . Before it’s too late.”

  “. . . okay.”

  “Okay? Really, you’re fine with this?”

  “This has nothing to do with me,” she says.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Mom.” The words come out hard and fast. “Does that make me a bad person?”

  “The doors were green,” she says, after a while. “Green like bananas not yet ripe. We had the greenest doors in all of Miramar. They stood out from blocks away. On the last day, when my father drove me to the airport. . . I looked back at the end of the street and saw only a glimpse of green. I knew that I’d never see those doors again.”

  “You’ll see them again.”

  I stand there by the window, listening to Mom breathe. Waiting for some answer, question, request. Anything to let me believe this is an actual dialogue, a real conversation between two human beings.

  “Rico?” she asks at last.

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “Don’t hang up.” Her voice catches. “Stay on the line for a while, will you?”

  I do. For a while.

  I go home late — late enough to be sure Mom’s asleep. Lisa calls as I close the door behind me.

  “Rico!” she chirps in my cochlear. “Check the mail.”

  I scan the shelf by the door. A cardboard box. I recognize Lisa’s cursive on the label. “What’s this?”

  “Something Emily and I cooked up.”

  Emily again? I tear open the box and extract an immersion headset — a thin gray headband, with the initials LE etched on the outside. “Tonight’s a bad time for toys, Lisa.”

  “Put it on. Trust me, honey.” I can hear her smile. “Just get yourself comfortable first.”

  Perplexed, I move into the living room and sink into my reading chair. A heavy leather recliner, it’s the only piece of furniture in the whole house older than a decade. I had to fight Lisa to keep it when we moved up to Portland.

  I put on the headset. “Okay.”

  “Meet you there!”

  One by one my senses disconnect. The world quiets. I can’t feel the leather under my fingers. I notice the faint scent of Stumptown Organic — Mom’s favorite coffee — just as it evaporates. Black falls across my vision.

  Then, immersion.

  Warmth envelops me.

  My toes curl on cool glass.

  Nighttime. I look out over a golden city. Ten thousand towers lit up bright, far below. New York revolves stately around me.

  No, it’s not New York that revolves, but I. A glass box of a room surrounds me, suspended at the end of a lever from the top of the Chrysler Building. The lever turns, and the streets of Manhattan float past below.

  My breath comes fast. Dizzy, I brace myself against the glass wall.

  “It’s a Bocelli design.”

  Lisa stands behind me, at the side of a gigantic mahogany bed covered in white satin. She too wears white — sheer silk pajamas that cling to her skin. Her perfume caresses me delicately.

  I struggle to resist, but I feel myself stiffening inside my own pajamas. This place. . . I note the clear glass shower booth in the corner. The mirror centered in the ceiling.

  “Really, Lisa? You know I don’t go for this stuff.” We tried immersion sex, early in our marriage. It never felt any better than dream sex — than mental masturbation.

  “This is different,” Lisa says. “We’ve hit on something.”

  She gestures, a flick of her wrist. Her clothes melt away, as do mine. She stands before me naked and beautiful — and real, so very real. No glorified avatar, this. I see the stretch marks on her thighs, the slight flab of fat on her midriff, the wine-stain birthmark on her left breast.

  She smiles, a slight upturn of her lips.

  Blood pounds in my ears. I’m hard as I’ve ever been, the brush of cool air tantalizing against my skin.

  “So you got modeled for textures,” I manage to force out. “That doesn’t mean—”

  “It’s more than that.” Lisa steps forward, reaches for my cheek. “This is me, Rico. Genetically. Chemically. Truly.”

  Her fingers make contact.

  There’s no faking her touch. No faking the bolt of electricity down my spine.

  I embrace her. Pull her close, shivering at the wonder of her skin against mine.

  We fall onto the bed and cling tight to each other. My body recognizes the whole of her pressed against me — her heat, her scent, her strength, and so much more.

  With a hunger I’d forgotten I possessed, I slide into her. She arches against me. We gasp as one and slip into an urgent beat. I kiss her lips, kiss her nose, kiss her sweat-slick brow as we climb the slope to climax. She smiles at me and cries out my name.

  When the end comes, some wonderful minutes later, I convulse against her and think — this is better, this is better, this is better than the real thing. . .

  After, I lie on my back, her hand in mine, and listen to my heart calm its beat. “We’ve got to put this in our habitats.” What if Dad could feel this real? What if Mom could? Might it make a difference?

  “I’ve already started negotiations. Emily’s offering us a joint venture.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” I pause, uncertain. “Lisa? I’ve missed you.”

  She smiles. “Me too, Rico. I want to be there for you. With this new tech, we can see a lot more of each other.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You
should hear what Emily’s got in mind,” she says. “Once you’re capturing genetic makeup, it’s a single step to information transfer. Immersion induced pregnancy.”

  “. . .pregnancy?”

  “Procreation is the only limit to our fragmentation as a species,” Lisa says. “But procreation is just information exchange. Theoretically, I could mate with a piece of software.”

  I gape at her.

  Lisa pats my cheek. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Not with a stud like you around. Now I’ve got to go. Say hi to your mother from me, will you?”

  Before I can answer, she disappears.

  The living room snaps into reality around me as my teeth click together.

  Lisa’s voice reverberates inside my skull. Can you imagine. . .?

  I sit there alone, covered in sweat. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticks the seconds away. Cold sperm dries on my leg.

  “. . . it’s like she sees another person in me.” I pick at my omelet. “Like we disagree on who I am.”

  Mom sips coffee and draws in a sketch pad with her free hand. She glances up at me once in a while. Hers is an artist’s gaze, all-encompassing.

  She used to draw me every morning, while I ate before school. The price of my breakfast, she called it. I pretended to mind, but I kept all the drawings. A thousand penciled sketches of a teenager slurping down rice and beans.

  That was long ago. Today, it feels right that Mom should draw me. I need her to look at me. I need her to see me as I am and reassure me.

  She only says, “Your father gave me black soles.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw the home you built for him. The beach. The palms.”

  “That’s what he asked for.”

  “I saw the girl,” Mom says. “He asked for her too?”