Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  “What are they?”

  “They’re delicious,” I say. “But dangerous. It’s sort of like that French cheese you had back in San Francisco, the one that walked.”

  I didn’t eat that cheese. I was never a gourmand like Bert. You couldn’t have paid me enough. I preferred a nice processed cheese spread slathered on hot dog.

  Bert grumbles a little, but he opens the basket. Little exotic crullers inside it, with a creamy filling. He perks up.

  “Long as they aren’t raw,” says Bert. “I have allergies.”

  “Not raw,” says the chef. “These aren’t even special. They’re something the back kitchen whipped up. Grandma food, you ask me.”

  “Retro,” says Bert, clearly taking notes even as he bites in. “Home-cooked. Chef’s washed up, but the kitchen staff innovates with traditional flavors.”

  Harriet and I watch as he puts the pastry in his mouth, chews, and swallows. His head stretches. His ankles extend. His belly contracts and then rolls out to a long rubber-band of middle.

  “See you, Bert,” I say.

  “Damn it,” Bert says. “Damn it all. Wormhole?”

  “Wormhole,” Harriet confirms.

  Harriet and I watch as Bert Gold starts time-traveling from both ends.

  His belly stays. The rest of him flickers through time and space. His head is briefly in the 1820s, while his backside visits the dark side of the moon circa two thousand years from now. His feet step momentarily into Mesopotamia while his head dunks in a mucky sixth century bog.

  Harriet gives me another lick of her ice. She hoists up her swath of sky, scatters the crumbs in it, and rewraps it around her midriff.

  “Nice to see you, Rodney,” she says. She heads for the door.

  “Can I call you?” I ask.

  “You can take over as critic,” Harriet says. “Looks like that position’s open. I like to eat. I like hungry company. I’ll see you around.”

  She walks out into the nowhere, the sky shining in her wake. She’s striking, Harriet. Even more than usual.

  I look down at Bert. He’s divided between Mars and Pluto. I can see it, each place a flicker. His belly remains the same, stuck here in the middle.

  I look at the chef. He shrugs. “Kitchen works for the President,” he says.

  “What’ll you do with him?” I ask.

  “The President has provided for his care.”

  The chef wraps Bert Gold in a tablecloth and slings him over his shoulder. Bert’s head is in the Wild West. His legs are clamped around a shuttle from the early years of the colonies. I wonder if he’s eating well on his journey.

  When I get ready to leave the restaurant, I discover that the President of the Universe has paid the check. What can I say? The woman keeps a guy busy. She keeps everything busy. She teaches me things. I learn words from Harriet, which is more than I ever learned from Bert Gold. All he ever did was hit me with racquetballs and kick me out of fancy restaurants midway through the amuse-bouche.

  Things are different now. I’m free of Bert Gold. I’m already hungry again, and the universe is wide. I pick up Bert’s rating notebook. I walk out the door into the great darkness.

  There are things to eat out there.

  © 2014 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the Nebula-nominated author of the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, as well as the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream”), Subterranean, and more, and will shortly be anthologized in the 2013 editions of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven, a celestial bodies anthology, in which she is responsible for the story about Earth. Most recently, with Neil Gaiman, she co-edited the young-adult monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, to benefit 826DC. Find her on Twitter at @MARIADAHVANA, or on the web at www.mariadahvanaheadley.com.

  The Lonely Sea in the Sky

  Amal ElMohtar

  White as Diamonds

  My name is Leila Ghufran. I am fifty-six years old. I am encouraged to begin this journal in this way because, says the team’s psychiatrist, telling myself who I am will prove beneficial. This is, of course, ridiculous, because I am not my name—did not even choose it for myself—and a name is always a synecdoche at most, a label misapplied at the least. My name does not tell you that I am a planetary geologist, that I love my work enough to submit to this indignity, that despite the fact that I am a valuable member of my team I am expected to waste time on churning out this miserable performance for the sake of a stamp before I can get back to work.

  I suppose I see what she did there. Well done, Hala.

  I am allegedly exhibiting signs of succumbing to the middle stages of Meisner Syndrome, colloquially known as adamancy, which sounds more like a method of divination than anything else—as is appropriate, frankly, to the hazy mysticism that passes for the disease’s pathology. “A preoccupation with the nature and properties of diamonds, and/or the study of the same, especially extraterrestrial”; “obsessive behaviour related to the study of diamonds, especially extraterrestrial”; “unusual levels of alertness and attention to detail”—I am a planetary geologist, Hala! These are features, not flaws! How could several years’ friendship not—

  I am pausing to remind myself that as someone who’s known me for several years is insisting on this exercise, perhaps something is a little off, and perhaps I am not the person best qualified to judge. But the symptoms of adamancy are ridiculously vague and diffuse and at the present moment are hampering my actual work. I am meant to be studying Lucyite at our Triton base. Instead I’ve been banished—is hyperbole a symptom of adamancy?—to the Kola Borehole in order to assist with extra-galactic neutrino detection. Not content to exile me to Siberia, my friend, you literally found the deepest hole on the planet to shove me into under the guise of studying the sky.

  I can actually hear you saying this is for my own good. It’s a little hilarious, actually.

  • • •

  Meisner’s Syndrome, aka Adamantine Dissociation Syndrome, aka Adamancy

  Etiology

  Theorized to be a consequence of cumulative exposure to Lucyite-powered technologies or the Corona fields of extraterrestrial minerals. Affects an estimated one percent of the global population.

  Symptoms

  Hyperfocus, especially on light refraction; sudden, temporary sensation of cold (“cold flash”); urgent need to submerge oneself in hot water. A preoccupation with the nature and properties of diamonds, and/or the study of the same, especially extraterrestrial; unusual levels of alertness and attention to detail alternating with periods of trance-like calm.

  Risks and Complications

  As with other obsessive disorders, sufferers are at risk of self-neglect relating to hygiene, nutrition, and personal relationships, resulting in a poor quality of life. Certain kinds of work are also at risk: driving, operating heavy machinery, and performing delicate tasks are all to be avoided.

  Progression

  At more advanced stages of the disease, sufferers are prone to sometimes violent emotional outbursts, often accompanied by memory loss. Consequently, it may become difficult to convince a sufferer of their diagnosis.

  Treatment

  Symptoms can be managed with varying degrees of success with anti-anxiety medications. Cognitive behavioural therapy and other forms of talk therapy have not been found to be effective. Some studies suggest isolation from crystalline structures and Paragon technologies is helpful, and others have demonstrated an easing of symptoms when the sufferer is underground—possibly as this isolates them from most instances of ambient light refraction and the trances these can provoke.

  Prognosis

  Even with treatment and lifestyle change, chances of full recovery remain slim.

  • • •

  Lucy in the Sky with Diamond
s

  I could say I have always loved diamonds, but this isn’t quite true. I have, for as long as I can remember, loved the idea of diamonds; loved diamonds in stories; loved the things compared to diamonds in metaphor. Stars; the spark of light on water; that sort of thing.

  It comes down, I suppose, to loving light—but no, more than that—it must be about the breaking of light, its containment. A bit sinister when put that way, isn’t it? Sunlight on its own holds little appeal, but angle it against the ocean, make it dance—poetry.

  Diamond oceans on Neptune! I suppose that’s what started everything off—those early accounts of diamond oceans in the twenty-teens. Determine that diamonds behave like water—that you can have diamond in liquid form that isn’t graphite, and chunks of diamond floating on it—and you have the realisation of metaphor, you have every fairy tale made flesh. Only a hop and a skip in the mind from that to holidaying on extraterrestrial getaways by shores of literally crystalline water.

  All well and good until you think about the heat and the pressure required to maintain diamonds in liquid state, and realize you’d be liquid yourself long before you could dip a careful toe in.

  Still. It still sounds beautiful to me, somehow, in spite of everything, in spite of having worked with solid chunks of it on Triton. A diamond ocean in the sky. Like that John Masefield poem you recited for me once—you remember how I misheard it? I must go down to the sea again / the lonely sea in the sky.

  Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. Isn’t it incredible that we take something born out of the bowels of the earth and stud the sky with it in our songs and stories? Isn’t it desperately strange?

  Isn’t it even stranger that we should find them where we’d imagined them to be for so long?

  I hope you’re feeling guilty, Hala.

  • • •

  Teleportation Possible Within Ten Years, Scientists Say

  Recent studies coming out of Triton Base 1 provide a veritable cavalcade of information about the mineral composition of Neptune’s mantle and the unusual properties of the liquid carbon contained there.

  “Though the only carbon samples we succeeded in extracting from the planet were solid, and almost indistinguishable in their crystal lattice structures from Earth diamonds, we discovered that super-heating them until they turned liquid caused them to vanish, completely, without a trace,” said an excited Dr. Jay Winzell. “Eventually we realized that the spikes of thermal activity we’d been observing on Neptune corresponded exactly to the moments we liquefied the crystals. It was a leap, but—that’s what they were doing! Our samples, made liquid, were jumping back to Neptune and mixing with the diamond ocean there.”

  Dr. Winzell believes it could be possible, with further study, to understand how this teleportive quality works. “We’re a long way off, still theorizing how this behaviour is even possible within our current understanding of quantum mechanics—but it’s conceivable that once we’ve understood it, we could harness this property somehow, contain and channel it such that we could effectively ride the liquid substance across vast distances instantaneously within a closed system. The journey to Neptune would be shortened from years to seconds. But imagine using it on Earth! This could do for travel what the internet once did for communication. It’s a massive paradigm shift—our very notions of distance, of space and time, will have to be re-examined.”

  Dr. Winzell, as discoverer of the diamond-like mineral, has elected to name it Lucyite, in honour of the iconic Beatles song.

  • • •

  Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

  I’m not allowed mirrors. Too much chance of light reflections causing relapse. I’m astonished they let me work at all, but I suppose you knew it would be worse for me without something to keep my mind and hands busy.

  I hate it here.

  • • •

  From “Untangling the Melee: Towards Practical Applications of Quantum Entanglement,” by Dr. Elaine Gallagher

  In conclusion, while there is as yet no definitive theory explaining why Lucyite behaves as it does, the properties are clear: Operating on the principles of quantum entanglement outlined above, we can consistently manage the energy state of each individual unit. When liquid, the unit’s entangled property teleports it to the location of the unit with the next highest energy level, allowing for distance—bearing in mind that, as previously stated, “teleport,” though a less than ideal description of linear movement theorized as taking place in higher dimensions, is nevertheless the nearest term one can accurately use without succumbing to the more colloquial “blink,” “jump,” or, even more ludicrously, Paragon Industries’ preferred term of “shine.”

  • • •

  Diamonds are Forever

  I am encouraged to write about my family, but all I want is to write to you, Hala. It helps me to think of saying these things to you and I would rather not pretend that there is privacy here, between my mind and the screen. I would rather address you and the things you request of me.

  When I was small my mother would read me bedtime stories out of holy texts. She later told me this was so I wouldn’t ever mistake fictions for fact, but I had little sense of her project then; I just loved the fantastical tales about things transforming into other things, people doing bad things and being punished or forgiven or vindicated.

  She read me this bit out of the Talmud, once, that I loved desperately for how strange and otherworldly it seemed to me:

  Rab Judah, the Indian, related: Once we were travelling on board a ship when we saw a precious stone that was surrounded by a snake. A diver descended to bring it up. [Thereupon] the snake approached with the purpose of swallowing the ship, [when] a raven came and bit off its head and the waters were turned into blood. A second snake came, took [the head of the decapitated snake] and attached it [to the body], and it revived. Again [the snake] approached, intent on swallowing the ship. Again a bird came and severed its head. [Thereupon the diver] seized the precious stone and threw it into the ship. We had with us salted birds. [As soon as] we put [the stone] upon them, they took it up and flew away with it.

  It’s probably fair to say I wanted to go offworld because of these stories. You grow up on giant snakes and life-rendering gems and the prospect of a manned mission to Neptune’s not reaching very far at all.

  You know the Talmud is structured like a diamond of popular imagination, too? Seders at the crown, footnotes at the culet. You’ll have to ask Ben about it for me sometime.

  I was reminded of that passage when my mother read me stories of Sindbad later on—in his second voyage he comes to a valley of diamonds beset by giant serpents that will eat anyone who approaches. So Sindbad figures out a way around them: He throws down slabs of raw meat into the valley that they might become studded with gems before attracting great birds to swoop down and carry the diamond-laden meat into their nests.

  Is this not the Melee? Or perhaps the reverse of it—diamonds carrying slabs of meat through space at astonishing speed, in spite of serpents, in spite of all—and is our understanding of the Melee not roughly this sophisticated?

  Was ours not a ship navigating towards a serpent wrapped around a precious gem?

  And have we not cut—have we not stolen—

  It’s funny, isn’t it—my mother wanted me to think of scriptures as fairy tales so that I would not be their dupe. But as a consequence, all my frames of reference, my earliest acquisitions of knowledge, are fantasy. Fairy tales have, in a sense, become my scripture.

  I am very cold. I need a bath.

  • • •

  The Gasp Heard Round the World

  Thousands gathered today to observe the first human use of the network of gates known as the Melee. Established by international conglomerate Paragon Industries in collaboration with governments around the world, the Melee revolutionized international commerce with its Lucyite-powered technology, allowing instantaneous transport of goods across the world. Today Paragon pres
ident Alastair Moor prepared to be the first to blink from Glasgow to Damascus and back.

  Cameras in Glasgow recorded Mr. Moor stepping into the Glasgow Gate and waiting for its in-built Z-mechanism to activate and liquefy the Lucyite. No sooner had Mr. Moor vanished from the Glasgow monitors than he appeared, not a hair out of place, on the Damascene cameras, having successfully effected a journey of over 3,000 miles in less than a single second.

  “One small step for man,” said Moor, and the crowd erupted in cheers.

  • • •

  She dwelt among the untrodden ways

  I never feel clean enough. Is this because of what I can’t remember doing? I never feel clean enough. I walk the halls and I sit to write and all I want is to wash, wash, wash until my skin pinks and peels into petals floating on the surface of the bath. If all of me could slough off into remnants, into something beautiful—if all of me could dissolve—if I could just get clean—

  Why do you suppose we have so many stories about diamonds? Diamonds are curse-stones in some places, markers of great fortune in others. Diamonds are so hard and so brittle, so strong and so delicate at once. Do you suppose, ultimately, those stories are all about us? Carbon to carbon to carbon?

  Do you think it possible that, once upon a time, all our diamonds were an ocean? It used to be that all land was one land, no? Perhaps we had a diamond ocean here. Perhaps we loved it, and it died. Perhaps it loved us and it died. Perhaps because it loved us it died.

  No motion has she now, no force;

  She neither hears nor sees;

  Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  Wordsworth. Maybe I am going mancy after all.

  • • •

  From Philip Kidman’s A Melee for You and Me

  There is a very real sense in which we can comprehend quantum entanglement as applied to Lucyite in terms of living memory. Without wishing to lend a crumb of credibility to the Friends of Lucy’s extremist ravings, it could be said that the Melee operates on a carefully curated forgetfulness: After all, the entirety of the Melee’s infrastructure is powered by the dispersal of one large chunk of Lucyite brought to Earth from Triton. By breaking it into precise halves and carefully calibrating each half’s liquid state, Nobel-winning Dr. Jay Winzell succeeded in causing the halves to blink towards each other in a closed system, instead of back to Neptune—which is, as the physicists have it, the place of highest entanglement. Dr. Winzell effectively pioneered the method for entangling Lucyite crystals with each other, the further perfection and sophistication of which enables the complexity of the Melee. Possessing only “memory” of each other, the fractions of Lucyite liquefied at each gate will always blink towards each other within the Melee’s careful curation of space.