* * * *
Ericka Hoagland is an assistant professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University where she teaches classes on world literature, travel writing, science fiction, and postcolonial literature and theory. She co-edited, with Reema Sarwal, the 2010 anthology of critical essays Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World published by McFarland, and has contributed pieces to Greenwood’s Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), and Gender and Sexuality in African Literature and Film (Africa World Press 2007).
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
(1969– )
I suppose it says something about the eclecticism of the SF field that Mary Robinette Kowal isn’t the only professional puppeteer I know who works in the field. (The other is editor Kathleen David, who is married to writer Peter David…as you may have gathered, SF publishing is a tightly woven community). A veteran of Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts and the children’s TV show LazyTown, Kowal has her own puppeteering company, Other Hand Productions, and remains just as active in puppetry as she is in publishing.
Kowal first broke into SF publishing with “Portrait of Ari” (2006), and won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. Since then she’s had a Nebula nomination (for her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey) and two Hugo nominations, including for the following short-short story.
EVIL ROBOT MONKEY, by Mary Robinette Kowal
First published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 2, February 2008
Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.
Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.
In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.
The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.
Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.
Damn.
He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.
In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.
Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”
Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.
“Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”
“You should have told them that I was not an animal.”
Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”
“And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.
“It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”
Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”
“I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”
Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived—too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”
Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey.’”
Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.
“But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”
Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern—rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel trying to push his anger into the clay.
The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived in his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.
His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.
Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”
Sly nodded.
“I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you.”
Sly nodded again staring at his vase. It was beautiful.
Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl feces.”
Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”
Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”
For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.
The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.
Clay.
“I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.
Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn.
* * * *
Copyright © 2008 by Mary Robinette Kowal.
NANCY KRESS
(1948- )
A former fourth grade teacher and advertising copywriter, Nancy Kress started writing genre fiction to pass the time while pregnant with her second son; she sold her first story, “The Earth Dwellers,” to Galaxy in 1976. Although primarily a fantasy writer at first, as in her 1981 debut novel The Prince of Morning Bells, by the late 1980s Kress was writing mostly science fiction. She won her first Nebula in 1986, for “Out of All Them Bright Stars.”
In 1990, the same year she began writing full-time, Kress published the novella “Beggars in Spain,” which established Kress as a major SF writer and which won both the Hugo and Nebula. Since then she’s won two more Nebulas and another Hugo, as well as a Campbell Memorial Award and a Sturgeon Award.
Kress lives in Seattle with her third husband, author Jack Skillingstead. (Her second husband, SF writer Charles Sheffield, died of a brain tumor in 2002.) In addition to writing SF, she is a columnist for Writer’s Digest, and teaches writing at the Bethesda Writing Center.
MY MOTHER, DANCING, by Nancy Kress
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2004
Fermi’s Paradox, California, 1950: Since planet formation appears to be common, and since the processes that lead to th
e development of life are a continuation of those that develop planets, and since the development of life leads to intelligence and intelligence to technology—then why hasn’t a single alien civilization contacted Earth?
Where is everybody?
*
They had agreed, laughing, on a form for the millennium contact, what Micah called “human standard,” although Kabil had insisted on keeping hirs konfol and Deb had not dissolved hirs crest, which waved three inches above hirs and hummed. But, then, Deb! Ling had designed floating baktor for the entire ship, red and yellow mostly, that combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic loveliness only Ling could have programmed. The viewport was set to magnify, the air mixture just slightly intoxicating, the tinglies carefully balanced by Cal, that master. Ling had wanted “natural” sleep cycles, but Cal’s argument had been more persuasive, and the tinglies massaged the limbic so pleasantly. Even the child had some. It was a party.
The ship slipped into orbit around the planet, a massive subJovian far from its sun, streaked with muted color.
“Lovely,” breathed Deb, who lived for beauty.
Cal, the biologist, was more practical: “I ran the equations; by now there should be around 200,000 of them in the rift, if the replication rate stayed constant.”
“Why wouldn’t it?” said Ling, the challenger, and the others laughed. The tinglies really were a good idea.
The child, Harrah, pressed hirs face to the window. “When can we land?”
The adults smiled at each other. They were so proud of Harrah, and so careful. Hirs was the first gene-donate for all of them except Micah, and probably the only one for the rest except Cal, who was a certified intellect donor. Kabil knelt beside Harrah, bringing hirs face to the child’s height.
“Little love, we can’t land. Not here. We must see the creations in holo.”
“Oh,” Harrah said, with the universal acceptance of childhood. It had not changed in five thousand years, Ling was fond of remarking, that child idea that whatever it lived was the norm. But, then…Ling.
“Access the data,” Cal said, and Harrah obeyed, reciting it aloud as hirs parents had all taught hirs. Ling smiled to see that Harrah still closed hirs eyes to access, but opened them to recite.
“The creations were dropped on this planet 273 E-years ago. They were the one-hundred-fortieth drop in the Great Holy Mission that gives us our life. The creations were left in a closed-system rift…what does that mean?”
“The air in the creations’ valley doesn’t get out to the rest of the planet, because the valley is so deep and the gravity so great. They have their own air.”
“Oh. The creations are cyborged replicators, programmed for self-awareness. They are also programmed to expect human contact at the millennium. They…”
“Enough,” said Kabil, still kneeling beside Harrah. He stroked hirs hair, black today. “The important thing, Harrah, is that you remember that these creations are beings, different from us but with the same life force, the only life force. They must be respected, just as people are, even if they look odd to you.”
“Or if they don’t know as much as you,” said Cal. “They won’t, you know.”
“I know,” Harrah said. They had made hirs an accommodater, with strong genes for bonding. They already had Ling for challenge. Harrah added, “Praise Fermi and Kwang and Arlbeni for the emptiness of the universe.”
Ling frowned. Hirs had opposed teaching Harrah the simpler, older folklore of the Great Mission. Ling would have preferred that the child receive only truth, not religion. But Deb had insisted. Feed the imagination first, hirs had said, and later Harrah can separate science from prophecy. But the tinglies felt sweet, and the air mixture was set for a party, and hirs own baktors floated in such graceful pattern that Ling, not even Ling, could not quarrel.
“I wonder,” Deb said dreamily, “what they have learned in 273 years.”
“When will they holo?” Harrah said. “Are we there yet?”
* * * *
Our mother is coming.
Two hours more and they will come, from beyond the top of the world. When they come, there will be much dancing. Much rejoicing. All of us will dance, even those who have detached and let the air carry them away. Those ones will receive our transmissions and dance with us.
Or maybe our mother will also transmit to where those of us now sit. Maybe they will transmit to all, even those colonies out of our own transmission range. Why not? Our mother, who made us, can do whatever is necessary.
First, the dancing. Then, the most necessary thing of all. Our mother will solve the program flaw. Completely, so that no more of us will die. Our mother doesn’t die. We are not supposed to die, either. Our mother will transmit the program to correct this.
Then the dancing there will be!
* * * *
Kwang’s Resolution, Bohr Station, 2552: Since the development of the Quantum Transport, humanity has visited nearly a thousand planets in our galaxy and surveyed many more. Not one of them has developed any life of any kind, no matter how simple. Not one.
No aliens have contacted Earth because there is nobody else out there.
* * * *
Harrah laughed in delight. Hirs long black hair swung through a drift of yellow baktors. “The creations look like oysters!”
The holocube showed uneven rocky ground through thick, murky air. A short distance away rose the abrupt, steep walls of the rift, thousands of feet high. Attached to the ground by thin, flexible, mineral-conducting tubes were hundreds of uniform, metal-alloy double shells. The shells held self-replicating nanomachinery, including the rudimentary AI, and living eukaryotes sealed into selectively permeable membranes. The machinery ran on the feeble sunlight and on energy produced by anaerobic bacteria, carefully engineered for the thick atmospheric stew of methane, hydrogen, helium, ammonia, and carbon dioxide.
The child knew none of this. Hirs saw the “oysters” jumping up in time on their filaments, jumping and falling, flapping their shells open and closed, twisting and flapping and bobbing. Dancing.
Kabil laughed, too. “Nowhere in the original programming! They learned it!”
“But what could the stimulus have been?” Ling said. “How lovely to find out!”
“Sssshhh, we’re going to transmit,” Micah said. Hirs eyes glowed. Micah was the oldest of them all; hirs had been on the original drop. “Seeding 140, are you there?”
“We are here! We are Seeding 140! Welcome, our mother!”
Harrah jabbed hirs finger at the holocube. “We’re not your mother!”
Instantly Deb closed the transmission. Micah said harshly, “Harrah! Your manners!”
The child looked scared. Deb said, “Harrah, we talked about this. The creations are not like us, but their ideas are as true as ours, on their own world. Don’t laugh at them.”
From Kabil, “Don’t you remember, Harrah? Access the learning session!”
“I…remember,” Harrah faltered.
“Then show some respect!” Micah said. “This is the Great Mission!”
Harrah’s eyes teared. Kabil, the tender-hearted, put hirs hand on Harrah’s shoulder. “Small heart, the Great Mission gives meaning to our lives.”
“I…know…”
Micah said, “You don’t want to be like those people who just use up all their centuries in mere pleasure, with no structure to their wanderings across the galaxy, no purpose beyond seeing what the nanos can produce that they haven’t produced before, no difference between today and tomorrow, no—”
“That’s sufficient,” Ling says. “Harrah understands, and regrets. Don’t give an Arlbeni Day speech, Micah.”
Micah said stiffly, “It matters, Ling.”
“Of course it matters. But so do the creations, and they’re waiting. Deb, open the transmission again.…Seeding 140, thank you for your welcome! We return!”
* * * *
Arlbeni’s Vision, Planet Cadrys, 2678: We have been fools.
Huma
nity is in despair. Nano has given us everything, and nothing. Endless pleasures empty of effort, endless tomorrows empty of purpose, endless experiences empty of meaning. From evolution to sentience, sentience to nano, nano to the decay of sentience.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 534