Forever Magazine Issue 2: Forever Magazine, #2

By Neil Clarke, Genevieve Valentine, Ann Leckie and 2 more

Forever is a new monthly science fiction magazine that features previously published stories you might have missed. Each issue will feature a novella, a brief interview with the novella’s author, two short stories, and cover art by Ron Guyatt. Edited by the Hugo and World Fantasy Award winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Neil Clarke.

Our second issue features a novella by Genevieve Valentine (“Dream Houses”), short stories by Ann Leckie (“The Endangered Camp”) and Tobias S. Buckell & Karl Schroeder (“Mitigation”), and a short interview with Genevieve Valentine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781890464561

Neil Clarke

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the multi-award-winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and over a dozen anthologies. A eleven-time finalist and the 2022/2023 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form, he is also the three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director. In 2019, Clarke received the SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons

Book preview

Forever Magazine

ISSUE 2

© Wyrm Publishing, 2015

wyrmpublishing.com

forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Dream Houses

a novella by Genevieve Valentine

A Few Words with Genevieve Valentine

The Endangered Camp

a short story by Ann Leckie

Mitigation

a novelette by Tobias S. Buckell and Karl Schroeder

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the second issue of Forever Magazine! Just a few words before I send you off to the stories.

This month’s novella is Dream Houses by Genevieve Valentine. It was originally published by WSFA Press as a guest of honor book for the 2014 Capclave convention in Maryland. (Great convention if you ever get the chance to attend.) I’ve long admired Genevieve’s work and I’m pleased to be able to bring this one to your attention.

Speaking of award nominations, last month’s novella, The Regular by Ken Liu, has just been nominated for a Nebula Award! Good luck Ken!

The Hugo Award nomination period closes up this month, so if you’re eligible to nominate, I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to do so. By the way, both of the novellas we’ve reprinted are eligible this year. Wouldn’t be shocked to see either snag more than a few votes.

Lastly, thanks for reading this fledgling magazine. I’d appreciate any early feedback you might have, so please feel free to email me at [e-mail] to let me know your thoughts.

-Neil

Dream Houses

Genevieve Valentine

1

You never see Gliese. It’s a dwarf star, red and faint and far away until you’re practically on top of it, and then a red bead blinks onto the viewscreen at the last second like a wound you forgot. You can look for it all you like, it should be in the center of the screen from the moment you clear the Moon, but stars multiply if you look at them too long. Your vision starts swimming with points of light in white and blue and gold. The small ones get swallowed.

If you wake up first from the Deep and stand at the comm to orient yourself, you have to find Beta Librae, and take the rest on faith.

I’ve moved most of my things to the comm room. There’s not much else to look at, by now, and it’s warmer here, and the projection of the starfield on the viewscreen is bright enough to read by. It’s easier just to be able to look at it whenever you need it, all to yourself.

Lai can stay in the canteen. She’s not missing much; her eyes are long gone.

The Golden Century Hall held a concert of songs composed for monarchs, once: Consecrated to Your Majestie, a dozen songs spread over a thousand years, sung by a visiting choir. I nearly missed it, but once I heard about it I pulled an overnight shift to make it to the city limits on time, and I parked the truck in a station off the highway and used my dinner money for a cab to get me there.

They didn’t actually have the concert in the Hall. I’ve never set foot in the Hall. It was in a building that had been a chapel, and then a gallery, and then a bank, and then a city building that opened whenever the financiers who owned it needed to look like they cared about culture. I got a ticket outside, for too much money, from someone who didn’t look like he had much of a vested interest in the arts.

For the first two hours it seemed like too large a choir. They sang hymns from countries I’d only heard of in school, and a few songs from coronation masses, and a Baroque piece that sounded like a beautiful math problem, and they took turns, but during any of the songs two full rows of singers were sitting like the carvings that crawled up the pillars.

Turned out they were waiting for the finale. Lux in tenebris used every voice they had; it was a song for a queen in splendor, and she must have wanted numbers to impress.

It started with one voice, then two, then four, and it doubled and doubled as the echoes built in the caves above us, until it sounded like two hundred notes alive and trembling at once. It was almost a round to begin with, but then it cracked open and became four songs that walked hand in hand, and then a single song in twenty staggered parts, a glorious knot my ear couldn’t untangle.

Intricate, the program called it, and congratulated the dead composer like he’d done a math problem. I threw the program out.

The anthem swelled and moved across itself, notes tangling and meeting and parting, and when the sopranos and tenors and altos and basses leapt from their melodies into a single chord held taut across four octaves, I looked behind me, because that was when the queen had sat taller to be worshiped. I just knew.

(Such a strange thing to do; I don’t know if I thought I’d see her. Probably not. I never did have much imagination.)

I got interested in it all, after. There were history books I listened to on a long drive through pine territory one summer. The royal politics in England got harder to follow the further back you went—the Tudors were all right, but whenever they hit the War of the Roses I had to turn it off before I veered onto the shoulder trying to keep track of it all.

But the queen was something else. I looked up the castle later just to see where she would have been sitting, when the music bid her rise. The place was meant to stun, and there were half a dozen audience halls and royal chambers and chapels that could have hosted the music. But in my mind she’s always sitting in the balcony of that bank-sponsored place of worship, right where I thought I saw her first.

He was famous, that composer; the queen granted him special right to write hymns for so many voices, to prevent anyone else from diluting what he’d done.

I haven’t listened to that song again. Some things you should only hear once.

When I wake up, I’m at the control bank, and four lights are blinking red amid the slivers of white.

It’s shameful that I’ve fallen asleep at my post (I was dreaming, grass like the sea). I hope Lai isn’t around to see it—she’s ruthless about crew who can’t hack the circadian fuckups of Deep. But I still can’t see anything but smears of color, and my throat is sandpaper, and I’m on my knees in front of the console—that’s why the buttons are slivers, my angle is wrong—and the alarm is shrieking.

The alarm is the same pitch as Lai screaming (she proved it once), and I’m four more breaths along before I can be sure it isn’t her. My elbows ache. My right forearm aches. My knees.

Capella, I say, but nothing comes out.

There are red angles along the edge of the console, wherever I hold on. I turn my hands over. I’ve cut my palms, my knuckles. There are two bloody handprints under my knees. I must have been scrabbling on all fours to reach the controls, to see what the matter is. The alarm screams.

I’m dragging a long tail where the nutrient tube didn’t pull out of my right arm. There’s a smear of blood under the bandage. I must have been in a hurry.

But I couldn’t have gone far. The nursery’s down the corridor, the center of the honeycomb of the living quarters on the top deck. They design it with a straight shot to the comm up front, so anyone who needs to take watch can still keep an ear out for the strange chorus of life-support beeps in the one-two-three waltz—nutrients, oxygen, neuro.

But there’s not supposed to be anyone on watch; we’re all supposed to be sleeping.

Capella, I croak, report.

Amadis, Capella says. We’re skipping the Good Afternoons, I guess.

Capella’s voice is the bland, asexual synth that Kite-class ships get as their default, where it sounds like every person who ever mildly offended you sent through an equalizer. Most Captains pay for the upgrade to something more particular, but Martiner in Earth Ops laughed Lai out of town for wanting it done free; Lai says Capella’s natural voice is a good reminder of how much the GAU values our work.

I reach up and hit at buttons blindly with the heel of my hand. The white ones glow pink from the blood, but the alarm stops.

I blink sleep from my eyes, yawn. My ears are always popping up here; that and taking showers out of plastic bags are the biggest hassle of transit.

Capella says, Amadis, again, so quiet I can barely hear it. But I can hear it. There’s no chorus of blips from the nursery.

There’s no chorus.

I can’t remember if there was a chorus before I hit the buttons. The alarm was so loud and I was so tired and it’s hard to remember anything because my heart has stopped.

When I breathe out it’s utterly silent, and for a second I wonder if I’m dead.

Capella. What happened?

Please clarify. Capella doesn’t know what would be the matter; you have to tell it what to worry about. Fuck. Useless.

Capella, I say, have to close my mouth around something sour in my throat, carefully breathe in. Casualty report.

Captain Pamela Lai. Capella says. Crew Samuel Franklin. Crew Juan Morales. Crew Sajita Jaisi.

I’m waiting for a little while before I realize that’s the death toll: everybody.

Health report. Me. My health report.

Sustained minor trauma waking from Deep during emergency circumstances.

I close my eyes a second, just because when I look at the floor, bloody handprints are reaching up to me.

As I stand up, I loop the tube in my hand once or twice. I’m liable to trip on it; I’m always clumsy for a while after I wake up. Morales made fun of me on my first run, for how long it took me to get my sea legs. Thought you were a traveler, he’d said, with a look like he’d crossed me off a list.

The comm is white, now, except for the red button near the pilot’s station. There’s been a malfunction in the manual piloting system. Autopilot engaged until we’re within Gliese sensor range. I can’t fix the manual; I’m a passenger for the duration.

I start thinking about calories.

The nursery’s a different room when it’s silent. The pods are closed, and inside the medical-glassine observation windows Lai and Franklin and Jaisi and Morales have their eyes closed, the monitors perfectly still, like the demo decals they come when with you buy them new.

It’s all as calm and clean as a ship that’s never been used, except the broken glassine and blood from where I broke out of mine.

Captain, Capella says, and that’s when I retch.

I’m trembling (the Menkalinan gets cold during Deep, what would it be heating you for?), so it takes me a while to stand up, and I have to prop myself up on Jaisi’s pod with both arms.

Somewhere, I’m still and quiet and mourning four people. It’s a far-off place. There’s no way home from there.

The part of me that’s gasping for air, the part of me that broke the pod trying to get out, is calculating how much food there is on the ship to get me through the six years I’ll have to be out of the Deep and awake.

The Menkalinan’s Gliese run takes six years and change, depending on energy currents, and we stay awake for six months on each side. There are five of us. (Were five.) The numbers aren’t good.

Capella, I start to say.

But I’m looking at Lai’s face, stern even dead, and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

The dead don’t come back. I’m not one of those.

It’s just that something’s wrong, and Lai would know, but she’ll never get the chance to tell me.

Capella.

Yes, Captain.

I press my lips tight until the bile is gone. Just Amadis, please.

Yes, Amadis.

What message has been sent to ground about what happened?

A casualty report is waiting for your approval.

Of course it is. I’m the Captain.

If everyone had died, the report would have been automatically generated by Capella, and the Gliese Associates United port on the far side would send a tugboat as our ship pulled into the system, to shift our cargo and move it to the planet near the little red star. The tug might reclaim the bodies if there was a news story in it, but Gliese is struggling for news stories these days, and they like them to be good. Most likely they’d sell the ship for scrap to an outer-ring salvage crew. Menkalinan would be stripped to her bones and the pods would drift out toward the other points of Libra, and that would be it.

But I hadn’t died; I had sliced three fingers to the bone breaking out, and it was up to me to decide what we told them planetside.

(How had I woken up? Why me?)

If I said I was awake, would I get a message back? Was someone Earthside still waiting up for us?

I glance over my shoulder, out at the comm room, where we keep