Saturday Storytime: muo-ka's Child

Indrapramit Das is a writer, artist, and reviewer who is very comfortable with the horrid and the surreal, finding the story within. This story is no exception.

Ziara watched the shroud settle over muo-ka. Already the corpse had shrunk considerably as air and water left it. Its body whistled softly. A quiet song for coming evening. With a bone knife, she cut small slits into the shroud to let the gas escape more freely, even though the membrane was porous. The little rents fluttered. A breeze ruffled the flat waters of the eya-rith basin into undulations that lapped across muo-ka’s islet, washing Ziara’s bare feet and wetting the weedy edges of the stone deathbed. The water sloshed in the ruined shell of the pod at the edge of the islet, its sleek surfaces cracked and scabbed with mossy growth. Inside was a small surveying and recording kit. She had discovered the kit, sprung free of its wall compartment, shattered and drowned from the rough landing. Even if it had worked, it seemed a useless thing to her now.

When the pod had once threatened to float away, Ziara had clung to it, trying to pull it back with her tiny human arms, heaving with frantic effort. muo-ka had lunged, sealed the wreck to the islet with secretions. Now it stood in a grassy thatch of fungal filaments, a relic from another planet.

muo-ka had no spoken words. Yet, its islet felt quieter than it had ever been. Ziara had learned its name, and some of its words, by becoming its mouth, speaking aloud the language that hummed in a part of its body that she had to touch. It had been shockingly easy to do this. What secret part of her had muo-ka unlocked, or taught to wake? muo-ka’s skin had always felt febrile when she touched it, and when it spoke through her she felt hot as well.

The first thing it had said through her mouth was “muo-ka,” and she had known that was its name. “Ziara,” she had said, still touching it. “Jih-ara,” it had said in her mouth, exuding a humid heat, a taste of blood and berries in her head. Ziara had disengaged her palm with a smack, making it shiver violently. Clammy with panic, she had walked away. It had felt too strange, too much like becoming a part of muo-ka, becoming an organ of its own.

Ziara rarely spoke to muo-ka in the time that followed. When she got an urge to communicate, she’d often stifle it. And she did get the urge, again and again. In those moments she’d hide in the broken pod on the islet’s shore. She’d curl into its clammy, broken womb and think of the grassy earth of the hostel playground, of playing catch with her friends until the trees darkened, of being reprimanded by the wardens, and smoking cigarettes by the barred moonlight of the cavernous bathrooms, stifling coughs into silent giggles when patrols came by. Daydreams of their passing footsteps would become apocalyptic with the siren wail of muo-ka’s cries. It never could smell or detect her in the strange machinery of the wrecked pod. She assumed the screams were ones of alarm.

“You’ve fed me,” Ziara said to the corpse. “And clothed me. And taught me to leap across the sky.” Those stiffened limbs that its shroud now clung to had snatched her from the air if she leaped too high, almost twisting her shoulders out of their sockets once. She’d landed on the mud of the islet safe, alive. In the shadow of muo-ka she’d whispered “Fuck you. Just, fuck you. Fuck you, muo-ka.”

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Saturday Storytime: muo-ka's Child
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Saturday Storytime: Silver Linings

Tim Pratt commented ’round these parts this week, which reminded me that I hadn’t posted any of his stories for a Saturday selection. He’s a writer, under various names, of short stories (obviously) and novels, including the recent exploration of gender in Victorian England, The Constantine Affliction. He’s is also an editor, both of anthologies and of Locus Magazine. He also tweets prolifically. In short, he apparently writes all the things.

Back in the unregulated days, when the Gracious Trading Company mined in full force, whole small countries were turned into deserts by the strip-mining of the clouds overhead. These days there were only a few outlaw cloud miners, since existing cloudboats were damned hard to acquire and new ones nearly impossible to fuel—there were only a few places where mountains touched the sky, allowing cloudstuff to be gathered from solid ground. The small number of outlaw miners weren’t enough to do much harm in the aggregate, but in the specific . . . Well. It was dry days ahead for the good people of Crater Rim.

I first knew something was amiss when the shouting started, though I just thought someone had just fallen. Then there was a sudden lurch as the mooring lines were cut free. I grabbed a handhold and kept my grip, but Salmon, fast asleep, rolled right off the gasbag, and I heard him curse and bounce on the side. I made my way along the curve of the gasbag so I could get a look around.

There was another cloudboat coming toward us from the west, its gasbags black, its deck polished and gleaming, utterly unlike the patched and ragged mien of the Corpulent Whale. Captain Ham was shouting about pirates, which wasn’t strictly accurate. There aren’t enough cloudboats plying the skies to support full-fledged pirates, but occasionally two outlaw ships will happen upon the same seam of silver, in which case the better-armed bunch generally gets all the spoils. And the losing boat gets its gasbags popped for a swift midair scuttle, if they’re lucky. Crueler foes will just poke slow leaks so the cloudboat drifts to the ground gradually, providing ample time for the people on the ground to set up a proper welcome, the kind with tar and torches and hanging ropes.

But this black ship was no mining vessel. It was a warship, the only one of its kind in all the world.

And it was coming for me.

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Saturday Storytime: Silver Linings

Saturday Storytime: Sexagesimal

Our memories are a large part of who we are. In this story, Katharine Duckett explores what happens when we have to choose between them. And what about the ones we want to forget we ever had?

Teskia’s grandfather chalked it up to nationality. “All Americans believe in immortality,” he’d told her. “Even the atheists. The Afterlife doesn’t surprise them in the least. They’ve had everything else handed to them–why not eternity?”

“And what about Russians? Or Greeks?”

He blew out a long plume of cigarette smoke. “We try not to show that we notice. Notice it, appreciate it–someone will take it away from you. I, for one, try to live like I’m dead.”

They’d met at his shop, one of the few shared spaces that remained between them. It saddened Teskia to see that her beloved grandfather had traded in the memories of her childhood for those of his own youth, but he had been a respected writer in his earlier years, and dementia had stolen his goldens just as it had taken hers. She had reverted to her younger self, too, of course; but then, she had no children.

That meeting had been their first and only: her grandfather had faded soon after. Teskia knew he was running out of time from the choppy way he morphalated, vibrating back and forth between only two or three states of being. His timeline–what Julio called “the snake”–was losing its tail, shriveling down to its essential segments.

“People’s timelines are like long, stringy creatures,” Julio had explained as they’d discussed the concept of morphalation.  “They contain every moment of that person’s life. We should be able to see every second of our lives, all at once, but we see each other like this because that’s what we’re used to. I don’t think the brain can handle much more than a flicker.”

“We’re dead,” Teskia had pointed out. “Who knows what our brains can handle?”

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Saturday Storytime: Sexagesimal

Saturday Storytime: Cotillion

Delia Sherman is a fantasy writer who embeds magic in unusual milieus. For her Mythopoeic Award-winning The Porcelain Dove, it was the French Revolution. In her recent novel, The Freedom Maze, it is a sugar plantation in antebellum Louisiana. Here it is the cultural friction of late 1960s New York.

Celia stepped out of the bright lobby into the cold night air. Her breath ghosted back to her as she cuddled her coat up to her chin.

Valentine folded her hand in his and drew her down the steps of the Plaza Hotel towards the fountain, heading across town.

“Let’s walk,” he said. “The fresh air will revive you.”

“There is no fresh air in New York,” Celia complained, but it was only reflex. She was feeling indecently cheerful, considering that she’d just broken up with Guy—if you could even break up with someone who was nearly too stoned to speak. When Valentine brought her back to the box after the waltz, Guy had let her know that he didn’t like her dancing with foreign fags, and she had let him know that she never wanted to see him again. He’d tried to kiss her. Stoned as he was, it was easy to push him away. Valentine had caught him, and a moment later, Guy was in a chair in the corner of the box with his head on the pink linen tablecloth, snoring peacefully.

“Damn,” Celia said, disgusted. “Now there’s going to be the most incredible scene.” Her cigarettes and silver lighter were lying by Guy’s hand. She picked up the pack and pulled one out. Valentine took it from her hand and tucked back it into her purse.

“Let’s not make a big deal out of this,” he said. “Someone might notice that I don’t actually have an invitation to this affair. Perhaps one of his friends would be willing to perform a discreet rescue? I’ll see you home, if you like.”

Celia was momentarily side-tracked from the problem of what to do with Guy. “You crashed the ball? Why?”

Valentine’s smile broadened just a little. “To find you,” he said.

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Saturday Storytime: Cotillion

Saturday Storytime: Honey Bear

It is always dangerous to bargain with the Fair Folk, but sometimes what they offer is exactly what you’re looking for. Sofia Samatar studies African languages and literature, as well as a writing speculative fiction. Her first book, A Stranger in Olondria, comes out next spring.

On my first visit to the clinic, I went through all the usual drills, the same stuff I go in for every two weeks. Step here, pee here, spit here, breathe in, breathe out, give me your arm. The only difference the first time was the questions.

Are you aware of the gravity of the commitment? I said yes. Have you been informed of the risks, both physical and psychological? Yes. The side effects of the medication? Blood transfusions? Yes. Yes. The decrease in life expectancy? Everything: yes.

That’s what you say to life. Yes.

“They chose us,” I told Dave. Rain lashed the darkened windows. I cradled tiny Honey in my lap. I’d dried her off and wrapped her in a towel, and she was quiet now, exhausted. I’d already named her in my head.

“We can’t go back,” Dave whispered. “If we say yes, we can’t go back.”

“I know.”

His eyes were wet. “We could run out and put her on somebody else’s porch.”

He looked ashamed after he’d said it, the way he’d looked when I’d asked him not to introduce me as “my wife, Karen, the children’s literature major.” When we first moved into the neighborhood he’d introduce me that way and then laugh, as if there was nothing more ridiculous in the world. Children, when almost nobody could have them anymore; literature when all the schools were closed. I told him it bothered me, and he was sorry, but only for hurting me. He wasn’t sorry for what he really meant. What he meant was: No.

That’s wrong. It’s like the Simkos, hateful and worn out with saying No to Mandy, saying No to life.

So many people say no from the beginning. They make it a virtue: “I can’t be bought.” As if it were all a matter of protection and fancy goods. Of course, most of those who say yes pretend to be heroes: saving the world, if only for a season. That’s always struck me as equally wrong, in its own way. Cheap.

I can’t help thinking the absence of children has something to do with this withering of the spirit—this pale new way of seeing the world. Children knew better. You always say yes. If you don’t, there’s no adventure, and you grow old in your ignorance, bitter, bereft of magic. You say yes to what comes, because you belong to the future, whatever it is, and you’re sure as hell not going to be left behind in the past. Do you hear the fairies sing? You always get up and open the door. You always answer. You always let them in.

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Saturday Storytime: Honey Bear

Saturday Storytime: Zero Bar

“If only,” we say. If only this one thing were different, then everything would be changed. All our problems would be solved. But that assumes that all our problems are simple things with simple causes. As this story by Tom Greene demonstrates, that isn’t always the case. Even if we avoid them, the problems don’t simply go away.

It’s because of the new school that I find out what’s been done to me. Because of sophomore biology class where we actually do things, instead of reading silently at our desks and answering the questions at the end of the chapter.

We’re studying genetic inheritance, drawing Punnett Squares of our hair and eye color for two generations back. My father’s grandparents both had brown eyes and hair. My mother’s grandparents both had brown eyes and hair. So that means that I should have. . .

I raise my hand. “Mr. Kreiger? Am I doing this right?”

He comes over and looks at my datafly. “Hmm, that’s all correct. Human eye and hair color is actually more complicated than Mendel’s peas—” He stops suddenly. I get the feeling he’s realizing something. Connecting the dots.

His eyes shift away from me. “Recessive genes can sometimes lie dormant for generations.”

My father picks me up after school and I tell him what happened. He doesn’t look at me until I get to the end and say, “So I should have brown hair and brown eyes, right?”

“Yes,” he says, “And brown skin. You have the genes for those. And from your mother’s Spanish ancestors you also have genes for green eyes, fair hair and white skin, which are actually expressed.”

“Huh?”

“We were wondering when to tell you. It had just been approved by the FDA when you were—you know, before you were born.”

“What had been approved?”

“A way to swap—or not actually to swap out genes—they can’t do that yet. But a way to control which genes are expressed by inserting an extra piece of DNA. A ‘plasmid’.” He glances at me. “So you would have brown hair and eyes, and darker skin. But those genes were switched off.” He looks back at the road. I take a moment to figure out what to say.

“You messed with my genes? To make me look white?”

“You gotta understand, Zoe. As a parent, you want your child to have every possible advantage.”

“What advantage?”

“Demographics don’t lie. Race and poverty are still correlated for Latinos almost as strongly as for African Americans. So we do everything we can. Good nutrition. A safe neighborhood. Strong schools. So when we had the chance to do this—you understand, right?”

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Saturday Storytime: Zero Bar

Saturday Storytime: Armless Maidens of the American West

Genevieve Valentine is currently widely known as the victim of harassment at the center of the Readercon storm (which I will hopefully get to writing about this weekend). As much as that all needed talking about, it is Valentine’s writing for which she should be known. Her novel, Mechanique, haunted my Twitter feed as friends found it emotionally demanding but were unable to put it down until they’d finished it. Her new short story is very much like that.

The armless maiden has never spoken, that anyone has ever said, and someone would have said. There’s no need to tell strangers from Indianapolis about her, but she belongs to the town, sort of, and it’s nothing strange to talk about your own.

Suzanne from the hairdresser’s talked sometimes about how she couldn’t imagine how that poor girl was looking after herself, and how she’d go out to the woods asking if the maiden needed anything, except that it would be butting in. Usually she said this when she was cutting your hair; she said, “I hear she’s a blonde,” and then there was no sound in the whole place but her scissors, and you watched your hair falling and held your breath.

At least once every year, someone from the PTA stood up in a meeting and asked if she was still of the age where she needed to be in school, even though she’d been in the woods so long that even if she’d started out that young, she wasn’t now.

Tommy from the motel told everyone about the time the bird watchers came down to look for some warbler that was hard to find except in the forested region where they were, and ran into her, and got so frightened they left town without paying their bill. But they left most of their things in the room, too, so he sold the binoculars and the cameras and it came out all right.

He told the story like it was funny, how scared they had gotten, like any of them had ever really seen her and there was something to compare.

You start to think that you’re the only one who has ever seen her.

It’s a terrible thing to think, and you hope for a long time that it isn’t true, but in all the stories people tell about her, no one says a word about seeing her themselves. Maybe she’s just the kind of person whose privacy people respect, you think.

(But you know already, long before you admit it, that you’re the only one who’s ever seen her, and that she must be so lonely it makes your stomach hurt.

When she said hello, you’ve never heard anyone so surprised.)

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Saturday Storytime: Armless Maidens of the American West

Saturday Storytime: Ironheart

There are probably two ways to be a nuclear reactor operator. The first would be to avoid thinking, on a visceral level, about what disaster would mean. The second would be to become comfortable with dark places and consequences. Alec Austin seems to have done the latter.

“Dead men shouldn’t scream,” Marya muttered at Kade from the next cot over, her eyes glittering like funeral jade in the bunker’s dimness. “Or have panic dreams, or sweat. You reek, did you know that?”

“They were cutting me open,” Kade said, drawing a shuddering breath.

When Marya spoke again, her voice was gentler. “You were dead at the time, Kade. Really dead, until they replaced your heart with a necropotence engine. Let the dream go. You have enough nightmares without inventing new ones.”

Kade nodded once, in acquiescence. As Marya rolled over, the impact of a shell landing nearby rattled the bunker, but neither of them deigned to notice it. Welcome to the Front, Kade thought as their lantern oscillated on its hook, making his shadow sway from wall to wall. The Front, where shells fell like rain, and men and Sidhe died like mayflies. The Front, where replacing his heart with an engine of spelled steel that could revive him when he died almost seemed sane and reasonable.

I hate this place, Kade thought, but the thought was worn and tired. Of course he hated it here, amidst the mud and the corpses. Anyone would hate it.

Anyone but your sister, a traitorous part of him whispered, and Kade shuddered and closed his eyes.

Like Marya said, he had enough nightmares already.

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Saturday Storytime: Ironheart

Saturday Storytime: Peas, Plots, and Peril

Sometimes, you think you know exactly where a story is going. Then it turns left.

Melissa Mead is the author of several short stories and one novel.

The hardest part was spreading that silly rumor in the first place. I didn’t use magic. A dairymaid’s pay doesn’t cover hiring sorcerers. No, I spent months discretely complimenting the ladies who came to the dairy on the delicacy of their complexions, working my way up to the nonsense about, “A true princess can feel a dried pea through a dozen mattresses.” Soon the dressmakers doubled their orders for fine silk and satin, because any lady with pretensions to quality claimed that ordinary calico chafed her delicate skin.

People are foolish and vain, and our former Royal Family doubly so. Word spread to the Palace. The Prince broke off his engagement, claiming that his planned bride was “too coarse,” and commandeered enough geese to make a dozen feather mattresses.

He was an idiot. But a good-looking idiot, with wealth and power enough to make up for his lack of wits. Besides, this only proved that he’d make a biddable husband.

I laughed when I heard the news. The dairy mistress beat me for my impertinence and sent me packing, which suited my plans just fine.

The dress I stole from the lady of the manor both looked elegant and hid the bruises. It was raining, too. Perfect. I arrived at the palace bedraggled and dripping. Their Majesties exclaimed over my state, and over my smooth, ladylike dairymaid’s hands.

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Saturday Storytime: Peas, Plots, and Peril

Saturday Storytime: Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

Sunny Moraine writes a fair amount of erotica for Circlet Press’s themed anthologies, as well as the occasional queer paranormal romance. This story, however, owes more to the “Golden Age” of science fiction. It does so, however, in a way that tells you what so many of those stories were missing.

All at once I learn a number of things, data nestled at the point where I and CERA intersect, waiting for me to retrieve it. I flip through it like a printed report; it helps to imagine these things in physical terms. This is how I was trained and in moments of partial consciousness it’s best to fall back on what you know at the most basic level. And here are the new things I know: as far as CERA can determine, re-emergence into normal space has occurred. There are a number of equipment malfunctions. Most of the sensor array appears to be offline. The primary Q-drives are offline. The differential sail is online and can be deployed if needed. Life support is online.

I am alive. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Chronometrics are offline.

Shit.

Extensive systems failure was a distinct possibility; we knew this as well, and I was told it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the launch, as if it might make a difference. It makes no difference now in the most complete possible sense, but I punch a weak fist into the padding of the cocoon.

CERA’s plucked string voice in the center of my head—she’s waiting on my command. She’s a smart AI but even so she operates at about the intelligence of the average Labrador. She can think. But in situations featuring high degrees of uncertainty she needs instructions.

Do we have visual?

She shivers an affirmative into me. I feel something approaching relief; I’m flying blind in every meaningful way but one, then. My craft can’t tell me exactly where or when I am, the composition of the space around me, the relative location of any neighboring bodies, or whether I’ve gone anywhere else at all. But I can see.

At my command CERA engages my optical feed. But my body jerks in protest, though the cocoon swallows the movement. This isn’t right. I can feel myself blinking, lifting my hands to my eyes again—the frantic movements of the abruptly blind. Because all of my vision is blackness.

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Saturday Storytime: Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers