Never Never Stories

by Jason Sanford

  NEVER NEVER STORIES

  by

  Jason Sanford

  Never Never Stories

  Copyright 2011 by Jason Sanford

  ISBN: 978-0-9835217-1-6

  Cover artwork for Never Never Stories

  Copyright 2011 by Julie Dillon

  For complete publication information on each story, please see the additional materials section in the back of the book.

  * * *

  What others are saying about Jason Sanford’s short stories

  "Few SF/fantasy writers generate a buzz through short fiction alone, but Jason Sanford is an exception. Over the past few years, he's created a growing fan base through his brand of modern speculative fiction, something he called 'SF Strange.'"

  Jeff VanderMeer, Omnivoracious

  "Interzone is really spoiling me when it publishes Jason Sanford so regularly. As far as I'm concerned, they couldn't publish too much of this author if they named it Jason Sanford's Science Fiction Magazine."

  Sam Tomaino, SFRevu

  "A writer whose reputation grows with each story."

  Colin Harvey, Suite101

  "Sanford (and some other writers) are producing SF that truly has a different feel than much that has gone before."

  Rich Horton, Locus, February 2011

  "Sanford expertly blends world building and storytelling. In fact, he makes it look easy."

  John DeNardo, SF Signal

  Stories contained in Never Never Stories have won the Interzone Readers’ Poll, been nominated for the BSFA Award, longlisted for the British Fantasy Award, and printed in numerous magazines and book anthologies, including Interzone, Analog, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Year’s Best SF.

  Table of Contents

  The Science Fiction Stories

  An Introduction to Never Never Stories

  The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain

  When Thorns Are The Tips Of Trees

  Where Away You Fall

  Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows

  Rumspringa

  Freelanga

  Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Peep

  Memoria

  Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime

  The Fantasies

  An Essay on Archeology and Fantasy

  Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas

  A Twenty-First Century Fairy Love Story

  Maps of the Bible

  The Dragon of Tin Pan Alley

  The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola

  Additional Materials

  Story Credits

  About the Author

  About the Cover Artist

  The Science Fiction Stories

  An Introduction to Never Never Stories

  Humans love defining the world we live in – it's no coincidence the first thing Adam did after God slammed him into the Garden of Eden was name every living thing. Defining what we see and experience is both a core element of humanity and likely also created humanity in the first place. Naming our world is one of those wondrous feedback loops which both helps us understand who we are while also creating who we can be.

  So it is with the science fiction and fantasy. There are a thousand different definitions for these two literary genres. Depending on whom one asks, science fiction has been defined as everything from “realistic speculation about possible future events,” “the literature of ideas,” and so on. Fantasy is alternately described as the literature of dreams, the soul, or longing.

  But to me, perhaps the most useful definitions are given by longtime genre fan Nancy Lebovitz:

  “Science fiction: the unknown is to be understood and thereby changed. Fantasy: the unknown is to be loved for its strangeness.”

  I love Nancy's definitions of the two genres. I'll also take her definitions one step further: Science fiction should also flirt with the boundaries of what is scientifically – and therefore realistically – possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today. Fantasy should embrace the unknowns in both our world and our souls, even if these unknowns might never truly exist in our day-to-day reality.

  I named this collection Never Never Stories because the stories here are not an attempt to forecast the future or explain the present. Instead, these are stories which fail the harsh standards of our reality-obsessed world. But that said, these stories are also how I try to understand the world around me – and especially the future which continually swallows each and every one of us. Just as these Never Never Stories might never come true, they also have more truth than the everyday reality we worship.

  So while these stories are divided into separate sections for science fiction and fantasy, that's merely an interesting way to look at this collection. I hope people enjoy these stories. Don't take them too seriously. But never forget that the things we fail to take seriously often find ways to turn around and bite us in amazingly painful ways.

  Jason Sanford

  The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain

  Mares' tails blew in from the west, clear sign that a big storm was heading our way. As I watched the hundreds of small, wispy ships float silently by on the breeze, I was tempted to keep quiet. After all, I'd warned for years about our town becoming overbuilt, making us vulnerable to the flash floods created by big storms. But with memories of the last flood fading, people now ignored me. The mayor even called me a nervous old woman, afraid of my own shadow. It would be just deserts for everyone to be washed away when the big ship's rains hit.

  But wishing for revenge is one thing; actually hurting people over it, quite another. I grabbed my wooden mallet and rang the alarm bell long and hard, taking pride in a moment when my sworn duty actually mattered.

  By the time I climbed down the weather tower, the mayor was waiting impatiently for me. “What is it this time, Tem?” he asked. “Water or shit?”

  I smiled in irritation. Despite my continual corrections – the ships dropped a highly refined organic material, not excrement – too many townsfolk called it just that. While people knew how vital the ships were to our world, that didn't stop their agitation when salvation splattered across their houses and streets.

  “Water,” I said. “But it'll be a big blow, based on the number of mares' tails running from the ship. Maybe as big as that storm fifty years ago.” I winced at the memory. My little sister had been killed by those floods, sucked into a vortex which opened right in front of our house.

  The mayor glared angrily at the sky. “You sure this isn't another wrong prediction?”

  I restrained the urge to throttle this loathsome, worthless man. “I've done my duty and warned the town. It's now up to you.”

  The mayor cussed, not believing me, but also afraid of what the town folk would do if he ignored a valid warning. “People aren't going the like this. The harvest festival started this morning. All the vegetables and fruits are out in the open.”

  I glanced at the horizon. Already a dark shape – bigger than anything I'd ever seen – grew from the world's curve. “They don't have to like it,” I said. “Tell them we have an hour, at most.”

  The mayor nodded and ran toward the festival, yelling at people to save what they could. Other townsfolk ran to their homes, telling their kids to climb into the highest rooms. Everywhere I looked, people were wide-eyed and scared, rushing around as if the world was about to end.

  And perhaps it was. After all, a ship of heaven was about to unleash its floods upon our thrown-together land.

  * * *

  Imagine a mudball, packed tight by little kid hands. The hands continually pack mud onto the ball, but the ball never grows larger. Just endless mud, packing round and round, until you wonder where it goes.


  That's our world.

  From the weather histories, I know worlds aren't supposed to be like this. Worlds have solid crusts of metal and rock. Molten cores of fire and heat. Worlds also recycle. They create and destroy, grow and decay. The water you drink was excreted by a woman a thousand years before. Her body the dust from which your food grows. Her bones are the clay on which you build your home.

  Not our world.

  Like new mud pushing down the old, everything sinks to the middle of our world. There are no rivers, no oceans, nothing but land continually created from our rain of organics and other materials. Our skies are always hazy. Up high, one sees a dappled, silver sheen from the small mackerel ships passing at high altitude. Down low, the speckled dots and bulges of larger ships float by, bringing the biggest extremes of weather. All the ships contribute something to our world. Oxygen and carbon dioxide. Metal hail and organic particles. Water as rain, vapor, or ice. Every day our skies are filled with a thousand thousand ships, each one giving something before leaving again for the greater universe.

  The first thing we do upon waking is to sweep our houses of the dust which fell overnight. Eventually, though, as the land builds up around us, sweeping isn't enough. So we build our homes higher and higher. Walls ten meters above the walls your grandparents built. A floor which used to be the roof your ancestors slept under.

  Up and up, we're always moving up. But we never climb any higher.

  * * *

  By the time we'd salvaged what we could of the harvest festival's food, the ship – a cumulus, towering four kilometers high and stretching across the visible world – was upon us. I'd known a cumulus would be chasing the mares' tails I'd seen earlier, but I'd never seen one this big. It moved slowly through the atmosphere, the massive curve and sweep of its bow funneling the air into cloudy turbulence. Dark rains poured from the ship's belly, turning the horizon black except for the occasional burst of lightning.

  When I reached home my apprentice, Cres, was already at work, carrying books and weather logs to the top floors. I was glad she'd heard the bell. This morning Cres had headed to the ravines south of town to check the erosion gauges. Passing rains continually wore new gullies and ravines in our world's loose soil. Unfortunately, loose soil also made being caught in the open during a big storm extremely dangerous – flash floods would literally wash everything away.

  “Master Tem,” Cres said when she saw me. “I've discovered a new phenomenon. Come and see.”

  Cres sounded excited by the coming storm, as I guessed I'd have been when I was fourteen. I tossed the food I'd lugged home in our kitchen and followed her up the weather tower.

  The tower, the tallest structure in town, swayed ominously to the wind. I glanced around the town and saw that almost everyone had finished closing up their homes. The only person still out was Les the tailor, who hastily hammered a support beam against one wall of his house. For the last two years I'd been after Les to fix his house, telling him it would never survive a big storm. I shook my head and looked toward the oncoming ship.

  “What did you see?” I yelled at Cres over the building wind.

  “The cumulus dropped some kind of lighted sphere.”

  “Most likely lightning. You aren't old enough to remember, but big ships generate massive charge differentials between themselves and the ground.”

  Cres rolled her eyes. “I've read about lightning in the histories,” she shouted back. “This was different. Pay attention and see.”

  I resisted the urge to slap her for being cheeky with her master. She acted like I had at that age, totally absorbed in dreams of ships, distant planets, and dimensions beyond belief. Her parents had apprenticed Cres to me because they knew her imagination marked her as someone with the potential to be taken by a passing ship. But I wasn't sure that what saved me – the burden of weather forecasting I'd taken on after my sister's death – would also work for her.

  I looked back at the cumulus, wondering about both the ship and the people inside. Why did cumulus ships always pursue the much smaller mares' tails? Why did the people inside occasionally pound us with dangerous storms? My histories described the weather patterns on old Earth – the clouds and rains which recycled that world's water – and how early humans believed gods and demons created their planet's storms. Despite my years of study, it pained me to admit I was little better than those ancient humans. The ships might as well be gods or demons for all I knew about them.

  My thoughts were interrupted as a single ball of light fell from the ship. It hurled through the dark skies and exploded into the ground two kilometers from us, sending up a mushroom explosion of dirt.

  I grabbed the telescope and tried to make out what the light was, but rain already splattered around us and the tower swayed too much to focus on the impact site.

  “We have to get below,” I yelled. “The tower isn't safe in a storm this big.”

  Cres ignored me as she plotted the impact through the rangefinder. She wrote something down on the rain-splattered weather log and shoved the paper under my nose. “That's the third impact I've seen,” she said. “They're all in a straight line.”

  Before I could ask where the line was leading, another ball of light shot from the ship and hit just outside town. The impacts were walking themselves straight toward us. Not needing to see more, I rang the warning bell again – for all the good it would do – then grabbed Cres and pulled her down the ladder. We bolted into the house's safe room, but when I tried to shut the door the wind blew so hard the locking bar wouldn't catch. I yelled for Cres to get under a desk as I tried to force the door shut.

  The last thing I remembered was a loud whining, followed by an explosion of dirt and rain which threw me into blackness.

  * * *

  I woke to dried blood caking my face and dried mud stiff on my clothes. I lay on my cot in my bedroom, the sun shining through shattered windows. As I sat up, I saw that my room was a shambles. Even though this was the second story, the flood waters had reached this high. Water and muck coated the floor. As I stood up, I plucked several of my sketches from the mud. One, a detailed exploration of the high altitude mackerel ships which were hard to see even with the best telescopes, had been a particular favorite of mine. I dropped it back in the mud and walked outside.

  In my sixty years of life, I'd never seen the town so hard hit. Of the five hundred homes and buildings in town, at least a hundred were damaged. In addition, there were gaps along the streets where houses had once stood. I wasn't surprised to see that Les the tailor's house was gone. His house had needed repairs for so long that everyone knew it wouldn't stand up to a strong blow. I muttered a silent prayer that he'd died quickly, and wasn't lying entombed in some runoff tunnel dozens of meters beneath my feet.

  What shocked me most, though, was the number of strong homes that had also disappeared. During big storms, flood waters usually raced straight through our town before washing into the drainage tunnels which continually opened and closed in the loose soil. This time the ripples left in the mud suggested the waters had swirled about in unusual circular patterns.

  I discovered why when I walked two blocks south of my house. A number of buildings there were gone, replaced by a large sink hole fifty meters across. Cres and the mayor stood next to the hole with a group of townsfolk. I walked over and joined them.

  “Glad to see you up and about,” the mayor said as he hugged me, an embrace I grimaced through. “I was worried our hero wouldn't get to tell me what the hell happened here.”

  I nodded, embarrassed at the mayor calling me a hero. Several other townsfolk also thanked me, grateful for the warning I'd given.

  Once Cres had a moment, she filled me in. The explosion that knocked me unconscious came from one of the balls of light, which crashed into town and created the hole before us. Cres assumed the explosion had breached some cavern or tunnel under the town because the flood waters had swirled down the hole as if into a drain. The waters had also carried abo
ut forty houses away, along with over a hundred people. But as the mayor kept telling me, it would have been far worse without my warning.

  “What do you think's down there?” Cres asked, trying to get close to the crumbling edge without falling in. Already the hole was collapsing. Within a few days, nothing would be left in the loose soil but a large depression.

  “We'll never know because it's forbidden,” I said, eying the mayor, who nodded in agreement as I reminded Cres of the only absolute law on our world. “Anytime people try to dig underground or explore sinkholes like this, ships arrive and kill them. Come, we need to salvage what we can from our house.”

  Cres didn't seem convinced by my words, but she followed me back home without argument as she stared with longing at the ships passing in the sky.

  * * *

  The next two months were tough, but the town pulled through. Most of the crops stored at the harvest festival had been destroyed, along with many of the chickens and pigs, and none of us had much food to fill our bellies. But crops grew fast here. They had to – anything which grew too slowly would be buried by the continual rain of organics and other materials. Soon the wheat and rice were ready to harvest, the vegetables were ripe, and the fruit only a week from being picked.

  As I'd predicted, the sinkhole quickly collapsed under the weight of the loose soil. Several townsfolk petitioned the mayor to allow new houses to the built near there, or at least a memorial park. However, I advised against both options. The ground could still collapse if another storm blew through. Because of my hero status, the mayor actually agreed with me.

  In more mundane matters, Cres couldn't keep her head out of the sky. While this was usually a good trait in a weatherman, she blew off all her studies, only doing enough work to keep me from yelling at her.

  So it was that one fine, hazy day, I found her daydreaming in the weather tower instead of recording the passing ships in the log. When Cres saw me, she jumped off her stool, knocking the log from the railing. I barely caught the book before it fell six stories to the ground below.