Lightspeed Magazine Issue 34 Read online

  Lightspeed Magazine

  Issue 34, March 2013

  Table of Contents

  Editorial, March 2013

  “Things Undone”—John Barnes (ebook-exclusive)

  Midnight Blue-Light Special—Seanan McGuire (novel excerpt)

  Interview: Angélica Gorodischer

  Interview: Philip Pullman

  Artist Gallery: Matt Tkocz

  Artist Spotlight: Matt Tkocz

  Lily Red—Karen Joy Fowler (fantasy)

  The Bolt Tightener—Sarena Ulibarri (fantasy)

  Ash Minette—Felicity Savage (fantasy)

  The Dream Detective—Lisa Tuttle (fantasy)

  Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince—Jake Kerr (SF)

  Three Days of Rain—Holly Phillips (SF)

  Let’s Take This Viral—Rich Larson (SF)

  The Sense of the Circle—Angélica Gorodischer (SF)

  Author Spotlight: John Barnes (ebook-exclusive)

  Author Spotlight: Karen Joy Fowler

  Author Spotlight: Sarena Ulibarri

  Author Spotlight: Felicity Savage

  Author Spotlight: Lisa Tuttle

  Author Spotlight: Jake Kerr

  Author Spotlight: Holly Phillips

  Author Spotlight: Rich Larson

  Author Spotlight: Angélica Gorodischer

  Coming Attractions

  If You Enjoyed This Issue of Lightspeed . . .

  © 2013, Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover Art and artist gallery images by Matt Tkocz.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  Editorial, March 2013

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue thirty-four of Lightspeed!

  First off, just a reminder: The nomination period for the 2012 Hugo Awards closes on March 10, 2013, so there’s still time for you to submit your nominations. The 2012 Hugo Awards will be presented in San Antonio, TX during LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention (Aug. 29-Sep. 2). Anyone who has a supporting or full membership of LoneStarCon 3 as of January 31, 2013 and all members of Chicon 7 (last year’s Worldcon) may nominate works. If you didn’t attend Chicon 7, and you don’t plan to attend LoneStarCon 3, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership. Nominations may be submitted through the online ballot at lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards.

  If you’d like to reference a list of all Lightspeed stories (and other material published by yours truly in 2012), visit my personal website at johnjosephadams.com/blog. There, I’ve sorted everything into their proper categories (short story vs. novelette, etc.), including material from my 2012 original anthologies, Armored and Under the Moons of Mars.

  Also, if you are planning and eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, you’re eligible for some free stuff! Just visit johnjosephadams.com/blog for details.

  Speaking of awards, the Nebula Award nominees for this year have been announced, and we here atLightspeed are thrilled to have two finalists in the short story category: “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley and “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu. So congrats to Ken and Maria, and to all of the other nominees!

  In other news, late last month, I had two new anthologies come out. The first, from Tor, is The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, featuring original stories by Diana Gabaldon, Seanan McGuire, Austin Grossman, Naomi Novik, and many others. For more information, visit johnjosephadams.com/mad-scientists-guide.

  Also just out is Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the Emerald City and Beyond, which I co-edited with former Realms of Fantasy editor Douglas Cohen. It features all new stories by Jane Yolen, Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams, Orson Scott Card, and many more. Plus, the cover and each individual story is illustrated by Lightspeed illustrator Galen Dara. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/oz-reimagined.

  With all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

  We have original science fiction by Jake Kerr (“Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince”) and Rich Larson (“Let’s Take This Viral”), along with SF reprints by Holly Phillips (“Three Days of Rain”) and Angélica Gorodischer (“The Sense of the Circle”).

  Plus, we have original fantasy by Sarena Ulibarri (“The Bolt Tightener”) and Lisa Tuttle (“The Dream Detective”), and fantasy reprints by Felicity Savage (“Ash Minette”) and Karen Joy Fowler (“Lily Red”).

  For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Things Undone” by John Barnes, and of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with acclaimed authors Philip Pullman and Angélica Gorodischer.

  Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

  It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

  Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

  RSS Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

  Podcast Feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

  Twitter: @lightspeedmag

  Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine

  Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624

  Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

  Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  Things Undone

  John Barnes

  With two contracts last spring, both successful, Year of Grace 2014 had already been lucrative by early December; better still, with just over three months left in the year, we had yet another contract. “We are looking for someone who will probably sound as if he has a Dutch accent,” Horejsi said. As always she was speaking from an index card, pulled from the envelope that had only just dropped out of the slot on the FBI-only blue phone about ten minutes ago.

  “Date of arrival, March 16, YoG 2013, so right before the new year. He can’t possibly have survived in Denver for nine months without having had extensive contact with other people, so there’s no hope of a true isolation.” She was getting that off the card where they set the rate, skipping all the numbers; they never meant much to her.

  I said, “Slow down slightly. What are the top and bottom rates they’re offering?”

  “Seventy percent of the standard for a fully discreet termination, one hundred forty-three percent if it turns out we can do a true isolation, but we won’t be able to—”

  “One hundred forty-three percent is the exact inverse of seventy percent,” I commented. “Rounded to the nearest percent.”

  Horejsi looked at me, multiple apertures in her
Riemann eyes opening and polyfocusing so that she could catch every nuance of the pulse in my neck and the infrared flush of my skin. “There will be a reason why that thing about exact inverses is useful, and that reason is eluding me.”

  Numbers elude Horejsi like faces and names elude me. But time travelers never elude us for very long, I thought. I enjoyed thinking it.

  I said, “The penalty for having to resort to killing him is exactly the same as the reward for getting him all the way into the WPP. Normally the reward is much lower than the penalty—when they pay seventy for a complete screw-up where we have to shoot him and grind him, they only pay maybe one hundred ten for true isolation. So for some reason they are incenting us very, very hard to achieve true isolation, even though it’s obvious that true isolation is impossible. That is interesting.”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “Furthermore,” I said, (Horejsi is a good partner, the best actually, the only one I’ll ever want, but she always stops talking about numbers just before it gets really good), “this means that they are incenting us to improve, if only by the slightest margin, across the whole spectrum from barely acceptable failure to triumphant success.”

  Horejsi nodded. “I think I get it, Rastigevat. The pay scale is telling you that the case is much more important than the usual ballast-tracking job, they want all the results we can squeeze out no matter what it takes, and there’s no such thing as ‘good enough, we can coast.’ Has there ever been a case with a pay scale like this before?”

  “Thirty-nine cases since I started working with you, after six cases with Gomez, and in every case the bonus was less than eighty percent of the inverse of the penalty. So no. Never. Not only is this the most urgent case ever, it’s the most urgent by a wide margin.”

  Horejsi nodded. “We’re not supposed to notice that.”

  “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be smart enough to catch time jumpers.”

  “Right.” She gave me her weird grimace that meant smile. (She didn’t get Riemann eyes till she was in her twenties—she was born blind and Com’n—so she hadn’t had the right feedback to develop proper facial expressions when she was young.)

  I grinned back. It was nice to work with someone who got jokes.

  I estimated that I knew at least two thousand percent more than I was supposed to know about Horejsi. For example, her first name was Ruth, but since I could never call her that, I called her Horejsi, same as she called me Rastigevat, even though she knew my first name was Simon. I estimated that we covertly shared between 820 and 860 simple declarative statements about each other that we were not supposed to know.

  We also were the only two people in the world who knew each other at all. I looked a little more normal, but I didn’t get to know people much. Except for Horejsi they were boring. And if anyone found out that Horejsi didn’t bore me, she’d be gone, literally before I ever knew her. When a Com’n becomes important to a Liejt, there’s a waiver on the temporal rules.

  Her grimace/grin got more intense and she focused her vision apertures directly at my face. The Lord of Grace alone knows why—knowing Horejsi better than anyone else in the world is like knowing just one fact about a star no astronomer has seen. It was good that I knew how to be fascinated without showing it.

  At last she said, “All right, shall I resume reading cards?”

  “Please.” I took a sip of coffee, careful to set the cup down without making a bump or disturbance that might draw either of our attention from what she was doing, because if we missed anything, it was gone for good—regulations required that as she finished each card she dropped it into the combustor; she had to pull them from their package one at a time, then put them down the combuster.

  Basics: Ballast tracking job. Date of ballast’s origin, 28 May 1388. Location, Southwark, London, England. She dropped the card into the slot. The combustor made a soft brak! as the swirling white-hot oxygen turned the card to gas and a wisp of glassy ash.

  Mass, twenty gallonweights, almost exactly. Cylinder of enclosure, 70 x 11 decifeet, so he was about average height and girth. Into the slot, brak!, more gas and ash.

  Our mystery man was the ballast load for the backward journey of Alvarez Peron, which was the alias for a man named CONFIDENTIAL who had worked for the Federal government as a AVAILABLE ON A NEED TO KNOW BASIS while leading a double life. It noted that in his real life he was Liejt and had family, and therefore we should avoid any inquiries in that direction unless specifically authorized.

  Peron had departed from an apartment near 30th and Downing, apartment destroyed in fire of suspicious origin. That was unsurprising. It takes time to build an illegal time machine and prepare to use it, so he’d taken a place in the bad side of town under another name, and then probably firebombed it just after the ballast came through. That was a pretty common trick, not least because it forced the ballast to run instead of doing the natural thing and holing up in the place where the time machine had been. Horejsi and me had caught eight ballasts who had barely had a second to realize they were naked or in rags, bleeding and hurt, in a strange place, before the room had gone up in flames and they’d fled for their lives into the street.

  30th and Downing was a logical place—in the scummy boho end of town, where many Liejt had apartments for mistresses or for drug parties, and near a levrail station where gravitic power was easy to steal with just an Edison tube of mercury for an antenna.

  We could have had the case the day after he left. The Royal Temporal Division had measured the power draw, mass, and cyl-enc but hadn’t seen fit to tell us till we asked, and of course we hadn’t asked till we detected it by our methods, which meant not until after anomalies began to accumulate and casopropagate forward around the disappearance of Peron’s ballast. That was typical; RTD cops gave no cooperation to anyone, least of all us feebs.

  “So,” I said, “just rechecking your memory with mine; we have it that Peron had no prior record of experimenting with time machines, but given that you can make one out of three old radios and any pre-1985 ultrasonic clothes-cleaner—”

  She nodded. “And he could have gotten the physics from the tweenweb—plenty of articles there. Or with his confidential background, and being from a Liejt family, good odds he’s a high-level physicist or mathematician.”

  She turned another card. “This is the longest kinegraph of him they can find, and it’s only about forty seconds. He liked tango, so he made it to most of the Argentú clubs here in town.”

  I watched; faces are all alike, but I remember gaits.

  Peron sent his partner through a quick, neat boleo and led her out in a nice cruzada; he took good care of her axis without fussing about it, and I could tell his lead was firm and clear (letting her look good), but not very imaginative (he didn’t particularly make her look good). “He’s good,” I said. “But not great.”

  “You . . . dance?” She sounded equally astonished on each word. Add one more declarative statement to things she knew.

  “Yeah. I met Peron; we danced in some of the same places. He was around for a while—till a few months ago, in fact.” I looked at the kinegraph more closely. “You sure can tell he’s been gone for nine months, can’t you? His face is blurring badly. I don’t really remember it well, either, but I don’t think that’s an effect of the time travel; I think I just never paid much attention to him.”

  “You’d know him if you saw him again?”

  “Yeah, no question. If they drop me back for an exchange, I can do it. Mention it in your daily to the FBI, but they aren’t going to want to try. My fuzzy memory is bound to be better than that kinegraph, so combust it.”

  Brak. Horejsi pulled out the next card. “Peron had a lot of friends.”

  “How many?”

  “Forty-one identified.”

  “That’s a lot for you or me, not so much for a regular social dancer.”

  “Sounded like a lot.”

  “Always give me the number.”

&nbs
p; “Sorry, Rastigevat. You’re right.” She was checking me, opening apertures to see if I was upset with her, so I smiled and nodded to let her know it was okay. That was Horejsi, always worrying whether I liked her.

  Better get her off that worry. I asked, “So, forty-one friends, in what kind of relationships?”

  “Very casual, all of them. Hanging out, bars and movies together, that kind of thing. Nine from dancing, thirty-two from Specthink, which is a philosophy e-kiosk on tweenweb. Now his old cronies on Specthink are arguing about who he was, where he went, and so on.”

  “May I look at the card?”

  She handed it over. I could listen to Horejsi try to explain a table of numbers all month and not learn anything; she just didn’t see numbers. If she let me look and then explain to her, we both knew a lot more.

  Frequency of contact, frequency of mention, and trust in mention all showed the usual pattern after someone jumps back: His friends were talking about him less and less, being troubled by not quite remembering Old Whatsisname. In the last three months, four of them had decided he was a hoax invented by the rest of the group, and five more were sympathetic to that view. He had been the most frequently quoted member of his personal web; eighty-five percent of quotes originating with him had already been reattributed. “Popular guy,” I said. “But one of the things I like about the dance communities, you don’t have to talk more than you want to, and most people prefer it if you don’t get too involved with each other. And it’s nice precise exercise. I love all that. So since I didn’t dance with him and wasn’t much of a talker, I just didn’t interact with him much. The only thing I remember is that there were always people around him. I think I’d recognize him from his gait, though. If he came back.”

  “You don’t think we’ll retrieve him.”

  “No way. He has almost already gotten away with it. It’s a miracle the random searches found him when they did; whatever Peron has done, it’s already melding with reality. There’s going to be uproar, I’m afraid.”

  Her apertures opaqued and she rubbed the back of her head. “Shit.”

  Horejsi hates uproar. Me, I barely notice it.

  Six hundred years ago, in the One Great Lecture of 1403, Francis Tyrwhitt articulated the theory of indexical derivability, and after his death, his eleven students carried the work on. In 1421, a six-page calculation overthrew all of Aristotelian mechanics and Ptomelaic astronomy, and told them how to build the telescopes and chronometers with which to confirm it. In 1429, Marlow discovered the periodic table of the elements, valence, and carbon chains in his calculations in a single thick codex; Tyrwhitt’s last living student, Christopher Berkeley Maxwell, laid out the basic equations of electromagnetism in the notes found in his rooms after his death.