Future Science Fiction Issue 2: Future Science Fiction Digest, #2

By Mike Resnick, Beth Cato, David Walton and 2 more

Second issue of FUTURE SF features nine stories by ten authors from six different countries totaling over 50,000 words of original fiction. From the time of the dinosaurs to the heat death of the universe, from thinking and feeling androids to human consciousness spanning multiple bodies, from cats on the Moon to alien salad dressing that makes plastic digestible and delicious, these tales have something for everyone.

Table of contents:

"Tideline Treasures, or Growing Up Along the Mile-High Dyke" by Tais Teng and Jaap Boekestein
"The Roost of Ash and Fire" by David Walton
"The Lord of Rivers" by Wanxiang Fengnian (translated by Nathan Faries)
"No Body Enough" by Dantzel Cherry
"An Actual Fish" by Natalia Theodoridou
"The Peculiar Gravity of Home" by Beth Cato
"The Zest for Life" by N. R. M. Roshak
"The Token" by Mike Resnick
"To Save a Human" by Svyatoslav Loginov (translated by Max Hrabrov)

• Language: English
• Publisher: UFO Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386138198

Mike Resnick

Mike Resnick was a prolific and highly regarded science fiction writer and editor. His popularity and writing skills are evidenced by his thirty-seven nominations for the highly coveted Hugo award. He won it five times, as well as a plethora of other awards from around the world, including from Japan, Poland, France and Spain for his stories translated into various languages. He was the guest of honor at Chicon 7, the executive editor of Jim Baen's Universe and the editor and co-creator of Galaxy's Edge magazine. The Mike Resnick Award for Short Fiction was established in 2021 in his honor by Galaxy’s Edge magazine in partnership with Dragon Con.

Book preview

Future Science Fiction Digest, issue 2

Future Science Fiction Digest, issue 2

Edited by Alex Shvartsman Mike Resnick David Walton Beth Cato Dantzel Cherry Tais Teng & Jaap Boekestein Wanxiang Fengnian N. R. M. Roshak Natalia Theodoridou Svyatoslav Loginov

UFO Publishing

Contents

Foreword

Tideline Treasures, or Growing up along the Mile-High Dyke

The Roost of Ash and Fire

The Lord of Rivers

No Body Enough

An Actual Fish

The Peculiar Gravity of Home

The Zest for Life

The Token

To Save a Human

Foreword

Alex Shvartsman

It has been an eventful few months since we launched the inaugural issue. Months filled with the good, the somewhat frustrating, and the tragic.

As the first issue launched, we learned that one of our contributors, Walter Dinjos, passed away mere days earlier. He was a young man, and an up-and-coming talented writer, and he will certainly be missed. I'm glad to have known him, even if briefly.

That's the tragic part. The somewhat frustrating part is how much work putting together the magazine is. I mean, I always knew this, but I assumed that I'd be able to delegate more of the responsibilities. Yet the work keeps piling on. And while my wonderful team has been very helpful, I definitely need to get more people on board, especially first readers so we can open to submissions from a wider range of authors, but also folks to help solicit advertisers and promote the magazine. If you feel you could help with any of those endeavors, please reach out.

And then, there's the good part. I've been flooded with emails and supportive comments as readers and writers alike are happy to see another venue. The first issue has received a number of very enthusiastic reviews and, saving the best for last, our lead story The Rule of Three by Lawrence M. Schoen is a finalist for the Nebula award in the novelette category. I couldn’t ask for a better start and now, of course, the challenge is to follow that up with another strong selection of stories. Which, I think, we've done.

Issue 2 features nine stories by ten authors from six different countries. From the time of the dinosaurs to the heat death of the universe, from thinking and feeling androids to human consciousness spanning multiple bodies, from cats on the Moon to alien salad dressing that makes plastic digestible and delicious, these tales have something for everyone.

Happy reading!

Tideline Treasures, or Growing up along the Mile-High Dyke

Tais Teng and Jaap Boekestein

Hanneke was deeply, madly in love, and she knew it wouldn't last. Only eight more months, twelve at most. She blinked her magnification on and zoomed in on her partner.

Sun-burned, sea-weathered, handsome Gerben, her Gerben was strolling down the tideline, crows taking to the air at every step, cawing their protest.

Every flood brought in treasure, all the precious stuff the sea had stolen from the drowned cities. Her lover knelt down to pick a tarred bottle from the kelp, then rose holding a string of glittering fishhooks. Ordinary diamonds. Worthless.

The harsh sunlight made his face into a marvelous woodcut: glowing skin and inky shadows, his nose a proud hook. Hanneke stood motionless like a sea heron at a tide pool, savoring the moment, burning it in her permanent memory.

Something gleamed at her feet. She pushed the strands of seaweed aside but it was only a herring. It looked quite fresh, the scales silver, but it might be decades old. The sea had become such a deadly brew of chemicals and polymers that the strangest things instantly fossilized, wrapped in strands of plastic. Take all those crow feathers blowing around. They would normally decompose in a year, but the moment the tide touched them they became imperishable.

Beachcombing was a rather romantic and most dangerous profession, a job for Youngsters: no steady and prudent Parent would touch it with a six-foot pole. For now, Hanneke and Gerben meshed like two perfect cogs, two fearless daredevils. All too soon they would start to bicker. The Change would turn them into fiercely protective Parents, nest makers. As Truthsayer Joachim had told them: You’re dream partners now and will become the worst of Parents if you don’t break up in time. As a Youngster, Hanneke considered a baby about as attractive as a naked mole rat. Next year she would probably be pregnant with her first and ecstatic about it.

Gerben waved, came running.

What is it? Hanneke asked. Another preserved gull feather?

No such luck. This is almost as good. He opened his hand. On the palm lay a barnacle-encrusted smartphone. The rare earths in the circuits alone would keep them in water and food for a month. But what makes it a real find… . He placed his thumb on the screen and it lit up.

Hello, a tiny voice piped up, I am Siri mark three-eight-seven. How can I help you?

The talking antique made them almost overstay their welcome. The flood came suddenly rushing in, turning from a distant silvery line into a foam topped wall. It moved way too fast: another part of the English coast must have slid into the waves, raising a tsunami.

Hanneke saw the last apartment building go down and now only the three church towers of Old Amersfoort were left standing.

They ran across the mudflats, the Dyke a distant wall.

Hurry up! Gerben’s boots instantly grew into ten foot stilts. Those wouldn’t save him from the violence of the tidal wave, but they might just outrun the racing water.

Extend! Hanneke ordered her boots, but a warning flashed across her retina. Some arcane technobabble, pulsating and alarmingly red.

Let’s go, love, Gerben urged her on.

They aren’t working! In the distance she could hear the wave, like the muted roar of a colony of sea lions.

Gerben didn’t even curse. He just bowed down, grabbed her arm, and hoisted her on his shoulders. Hold on.

Drop me, you crow-brain! We will both drown!

I'd rather drown with you than leave you behind.

Hanneke didn’t object. She embraced him, feeling his strong body move against hers. Behind them the tsunami rushed in: a wall of thundering water.

You won’t survive, Siri suddenly said in her head. Probability 97 percent. Now, I don’t fancy spending another fifty years on the bottom of the sea …

So? Hanneke felt a darkening of her spirit, a fatal drop in her life force. The last Siris had been infallible AIs, in the decade before the programs had learned to lie.

You may order me to save your life. Even if you two aren’t my true owners.

Do it! She didn’t ask for the price. Beggars can’t be choosers.

A pause, then: The truthsayers state that they can lift you out before the wave hits.

A gray drone dropped from the sky, dangled a rope. It was made of braided gecko-string, a hundred times as sticky as a spiderweb. It curled around them, adhering to their beachcomber’s suits, their bare arms. A sickening lurch and then they rose.

Not a heartbeat too soon: the waters thundered past, with the tips of Gerben’s stilts trailing through the foam.

The Dyke expanded, rose, until it seemed to touch the sky. According to the ever unreliable Allnet, the Dyke had been built long ago to stop the rising water and the onslaught of hurricanes, but Hanneke suspected it had more to do with keeping the outer-dykers on the seaside, away from the inland paradise of Earth’s true rulers.

One mile high, the Dyke was encrusted with an immense shantytown: bubbles of metallic glass or foamed titanium, windmills and gardens with melons and spiky cactus trees.

The lowest part belonged to the Youngsters: beachcombers, tinkerers, artists, performers, … The people who lived. All right, there was also plenty of dying, but that just added spice to life. Only the boring survive to become Parents, ran the Youngsters’ credo.

So, low down the portholes sported a foot thickness of diamond glass. On the walls, cultivated banks of bread clams competed with constructs of tide treasure. Human-shaped robot remains hung crucified on bleached tree trunks. Ancient car wrecks, parts of ships, and buildings rose up in rusty totem poles. The smaller totem poles had been constructed by the muskrats that dug their warrens in the Dyke. To dismantle them would earn you a sea-snake in your boots or a poison arrow in your eye. After the dendritic plague, the humans were no longer the only intelligent species on Earth.

Higher up the Dyke was the domain of the Parents. Those streets were much cleaner and organized, with blooming sea-thistles in earthenware pots. Behind the windows colorful paper lanterns shone, indicating how many children that particular family was blessed with. Blue for trying, green for the first daughter or son, yellow for the next five, red for up to fifteen, and the much envied purple for even more.

In highest levels of city, the Elders lived in their stained-glass pavilions until the genetically programmed cut-off age of a hundred and twenty. They had done their duty and most of them were hooked up to VR-Heavens where they experienced a million years in just an hour. Others collected obscure relics, or were busy with outlandish projects spanning decades.

The Dyke stretched farther than the eye could see, north- and southwards, all the way from Stavanger to Gibraltar.

The drone set Hanneke and Gerben down on a ledge of varnished kelp-wood. Brother Joachim, the truthsayer who was their usual buyer, sent it away with a wave of his hand. He was a tall man, his body as spare as a hunting dog, dressed in bright white robes. The breeze played with the folds, but no shadows appeared on the smart-cloth. The truth should always be clear, without a taint of doubt.

Youngsters Hanneke and Gerben, I wish you a clean future.

Hanneke gave the traditional response. And the truth is the only path to there.

The brother extended his hand, raised an eyebrow.

So sorry, Siri said. But I was the price for your rescue.

I might have known. Still, what use was a smartphone to a drowned girl? Nonetheless, Hanneke felt a pang. We never get to keep anything nice.

Did you find some more treasure? Like that gull feather last month? You only sold us the tip and the cut looked new.

Seagulls had been extinct for generations, driven out by the more versatile crows, Hanneke knew.

We cut it in two, she confessed. Lying to a truthsayer was bad form and the order was their best client. Truthsayers never lied. With the Allnet sprouting fantasies and fake news by the microsecond, truth had become a precious commodity. The word of a truthsayer was as immovable as a clump of neutronium, any fact rock solid.

Well, I seek a true answer now: what did you do with the rest of the feather?

Gerben looked at Hanneke, who shrugged. He can know. It doesn't matter. We aren’t telling where we found it.

We sold it to Svendsen Artifacts, she said. One of our regular buyers. Why?

Brother Joachim just smiled: It is impractical for this humble person to enumerate the myriad of reasons that would be required to answer that question.

It was the standard truthsayer's answer for: I'm not going to tell you. Debating a truthsayer was like arguing with a tame crow: you would end up with a dry throat and nothing to show for it but a load of guano.

Brother Joachim raised his hand. We would be interested in procuring all partly preserved or whole feathers, if you have them, now or in the future.

We will keep that in mind, Gerben said. I wish you a clean future, Brother.

And truth is the only path to there.

They took the moving staircase all the way down to Scrounge, the district of the beachcombers, almost at the foot of the Dyke.

What was that all about? Gerben said, when they walked along Jutterstraat with the hundreds of stalls hawking anything from fossil shark teeth to still glowing everlamps from stranded oil tankers. Rats peered from their holes, clutching tiny crossbows. Some had their own tiny tables where they bartered their dug-up Dyke treasure with the humans.

It means that feather was worth a lot more than we thought. We should have asked Svendsen twice as much. Or cut it up in more pieces.

Next time we will, love. Cheer up, life is too short to sulk!

Aye, aye, captain. But it's still a shame …

Next time, sweet. The tide will provide. It always does. He pursed his lips so she kissed him. He tasted of silt and the smell of kelp still lingered in his beard.

I can’t help wondering what Svendsen did with his half of the feather, Hanneke mused.

No doubt sold it to some collector higher up the Dyke.

Hanneke automatically looked up. The Dyke dominated the sky, the city a sea of jeweled lights in the setting sun. This was their home. She loved it, but this time it couldn’t console her.

What is so fascinating up there? Gerben asked, following her gaze.

Hanneke balled her fists. It all seems so pointless, suddenly. Soon we’ll be slaves of our kids and then we’ll become Elders. What kind of life is that? Collecting stuff from the drowned past? Not seeking treasure and having adventures, just hoarding it. Like pack rats or magpies!

And the worst is that there won’t be any we. Truthsayers are never wrong. According to Joachim, I will have children with Achmed, and Gerben will marry that stupid Wendy girl. Like she will make him happy!

The thought stung like sea water in an open wound, and Gerben seemed to sense her mood. He threw his arm around Hanneke’s knobby shoulders. We’ll ascend all the way to the land of the Elders, my love. Together. They can’t force us apart.

They can, and they will, unless we stay Youngsters forever. But everyone says we will change. Survival-programming to produce as many offspring as possible in this monstrous empty world. Suddenly Achmed will smell irresistible, the very pheromonic aroma of lust and devotion. My body and brain will tell me he is my true love.

The woman waiting in front of their door was clearly an Elder. Her skin seemed as smooth as soapstone, her face so symmetric she looked like another species altogether.

In a way she was. Elders didn't have the bravura and reckless energy of the Youngsters, nor the maniac urge of the Parents to make and raise children. She had moved beyond human.

Business, whispered Hanneke. I'm sure of it.

Everything with you is business, Gerben said, from the corner of his mouth.

"Not everything." She squeezed his hand, then stroked his cheek, just to let him know he was wrong.

Maybe the Elder woman didn't approve of such blatant Youngster behavior, but it was impossible to tell. Her face stayed an unreadable mask, deep in the uncanny valley.

I am Full Academician Krupina, she introduced herself. Professor of Historical Cryptozoology of the Lysenko Institute.

"Pina? How many children is that in