Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 156: Clarkesworld Magazine, #156

By Neil Clarke, Suzanne Palmer, Bella Han and 3 more

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction (new and classic works), articles, interviews and art. Our September 2019 issue (#156) contains:

• Original fiction by Suzanne Palmer ("Dave's Head"), Bella Han ("Amorville"), M. L. Clark ("To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things"), Sara Saab ("Lapis"), and Gabriela Santiago ("Malinche").
• Non-fiction by Eleanna Castroianni, interviews with Derek Kunsken and L.X. Beckett, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642360325

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

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 156

Table of Contents

Dave’s Head

by Suzanne Palmer

Amorville

by Bella Han

To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things

by M. L. Clark

Lapis

by Sara Saab

Malinche

by Gabriela Santiago

Staying with the End of the World: SF Futures of Hope during Ecological Devastation

by Eleanna Castroianni

Science Fiction Heist: A Conversation with Derek Künsken

by Arley Sorg

The Future of Shame and Hope: A Conversation with L.X. Beckett

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: A Journey Home

by Neil Clarke

Homage

Art by Beeple

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2019

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Dave’s Head

Suzanne Palmer

I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, Road trip?

I’m a senior porter now, I say. I can’t just skip work. This is true.

I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday, Dave says. This is also true. So, road trip?

You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long, I say.

Marty is at the party, Dave says. Throw him in the back seat and he’ll be fine. Back seat of course because Dave’s head is fucking huge—life-size, as advertised—and he wants to see out the front window and feel the wind as if he had real fucking skin, real nerves, rather than just a better imagination than most actual people I know. Someday if I ever meet his maker, I don’t know if I’d hug them or kick them in the nuts.

If Marty is at the party, I wasn’t gonna get much done here at the house, because he’d always be milling around and in the way and he’d notice me moving or taking stuff. It’s much better when he’s at the garage, and mostly just sits on the couch staring at nothing and mumbling to ghostly coworkers, and then I can sneak off the nasty stuff, old food wrappers and anything likely to go bad or attract bugs or mice, and maybe even sort out and ditch some papers if I take a little from one spot and a little from another so the stacks and piles don’t seem to change much all at once.

At least my uncle never collected actual live animals; I’ve seen too many pics of those horrors and we’re not nearly so bad. The closest he got was Dave and a couple of Dave’s friends, the rest of which were too broken to fix. I think it’s because most of the animatronics were indoors when the fire took out their park, but Dave was so big he’d been built to be outside and weatherproof, sturdier all around. One of his knee joints is locked up from an exhibit collapsing against him, but he can still walk around with a stiff limp if he has to, and with Marty nowadays mostly forgetting there was an outdoors I’ve managed to get most of the junk out of the backyard so he has some room to roam.

Still, as Dave likes to remind me, the backyard wasn’t all that big to start with, and there wasn’t all that much interesting to look at even when your head is normally as high up as Dave’s is. And he gets lonely when Marty is somewhere out of his own head, which is most of the time now.

Dave knows when I’m vulnerable. My job at the airport carrying bags for the few rich fuckers who can still afford to fly anywhere, furiously trying to buy time for the status quo, makes me resentful, and half this week was double shifts. Road trip? he says again.

Whatever it was I had been thinking I should get done this weekend I can’t remember anyway. And I get lonely too; not like I can invite people over, with my uncle’s stuff everywhere and imaginary people taking up whatever room is left. Fine, I say. But not too far.

Awesomesauce! Dave answers, which, really, is a weird thing to hear from a giant detached theme-park dinosaur head, but at some point you just let the weirdness own you and go with it.

My car is an old retired police cruiser, which means nothing much except that it has a reinforced frame and when I get up a little too close to someone on the highway and get myself into a predator mind-set there’s a vibe that surrounds us and they get paranoid and move the hell over to the slow lane. Mostly I don’t do this because it seems a dick thing to do, but I have a personal bias against anyone driving a Luxauto because of my shit of a father, especially if they’re the fucking beige armored ones. And nine times out of ten when you overtake them and they glare at you, you can tell just from that one look that they’re just the sort of douchebro who needed, at some point in their life, to get owned on the road by a green-haired skinny chick with a lip ring and a grease-converted V8 and a fucking dinosaur head in the passenger seat.

Most people stick to the publics—around here in dead-end post-suburbia that means pretty much electric buses—so those out on the road in private cars are either loaded with money, or looking to take some. Or they’re taking their damned dinosaur head for an outing in a car their uncle pulled out of the junkyard and fixed you for your sixteenth birthday and you’re gonna drive it ’til the bitter end.

Sometimes Uncle Marty will start having conversations with people in other cars, even if we’re only actually beside them for a few seconds and the windows are up and of course they can’t actually hear him and aren’t even looking at him. Once we’re past he’ll tell us about it, but when it’s a beige Luxauto he doesn’t, or he’ll just tsk and look sad or upset, so I think that makes it clear my bias isn’t unreasonable. Family baggage distilled down to car brand hate.

Anyhow, the sun is still up, the roads aren’t crowded, Marty is happily chatting with four or five imaginary people in the back seat, still at his party, so we’re good. Last time we did this we went west, so this time we go east, and other than that we got no plan. Or at least, I don’t.

I was thinking, Dave says, all casual conversation, and I think right, here it is, I’d still really like to see the redwoods.

Yeah, so do I, but I don’t have the heart to tell Dave that some jackhole burned the entire damned forest down nine years ago. Scientists are working on new groves, in better places now that the climate has shifted so much, but they don’t want anyone to know where those are and besides they can’t be more than a few feet tall yet, right? They’re off-limits, I say.

We could sneak.

I snort, which doesn’t sound at all girl-like, but who the hell is gonna care? You’re a sixty-pound robotic head, Dave. Sneaking is kinda beyond our means.

I just think it would be nice for me, he says, and what he means is he likes things that are very old and very big, because—as he put it once—they resonate with him. He forgets he’s not real. Sometimes I think the fact that I’m the only one of the three of us with any kind of decent grip means I’m the one losing out. Meanwhile I’m dodging potholes and watching the yes/no machine stuckied to the dash get brighter, and it’s worrying me, so I’m not feeling too charitable about any of it.

Yeah? I ask. Why’s that?

Because it’s hard when you’re two hundred million years old and everything around you is teeny tiny and fleeting, he says.

When I cracked Dave open to see if I could fix him, after I moved in to take care of Marty and was exploring the junk in the yard, I’d found his serial number plate. Dave was made when I was two years old. But if I say that the rest of this trip will be sullen silence and now that we’re out and moving I’m kind of getting into the idea of the trip after all.

With reservations, though. We’ve had the redwoods convo a bunch of times and I always say no, and Dave knows this even if he doesn’t know why, which means it’s a dodge.

We’ll see if we can find something else, I say, and if that’s not the answer Dave wanted, at least he seems to be okay with it.

I tap the hexagon face of the yes/no machine, hoping it can give us the all-clear by the time we have to make a pit stop. It was an expensive thing, but I like to think it’s saved our asses a couple of times. It’s got a built-in GPS and it collates data about your location on the fly, economic data and crime data, education, air and water toxicity, and key words in social media posts from or about wherever you’re driving through, and it does whatever magic math it does with that and produces a six-metric rating that is displayed as colors. Right now we’re on the highway, but whatever shit place we’re passing through on the other side of the vine-strangled trees is hot red and yellow. The other colors are there too, but fainter. It’s funny that they called it the yes/no machine because it’s about as far as it could be from giving you a clear yes or no answer to whether you should stop somewhere or floor it ’til you’re out. I mean, I suppose if the hexagon stayed clear that would be a yes, but that never, ever happens. And if it did I’d assume the thing was busted.

Maybe if we head more south, it’ll get better, Dave says from the passenger seat.

Yeah? I ask. What’s south of here?

Dave fixes one big fake eye on me. "It was just a random suggestion," he says, and by his insulted tone I can tell it wasn’t any such thing. But if he has more to say, he’s still not saying it. I fumble one of the new plastic dollar coins out of the collection of candy bar wrappers in my ashtray and, one hand still on the wheel, flip it. Heads I let Dave get his way and head south, tails I be the Girl In Charge and we go due north instead.

Head wins, damn him.

Fine, I say, south it is. When the next big interchange comes up I slow down and take the exit, bump over the vehicle scanner and scale, and then we’re merging onto another pothole-riddled highway heading south.

The yes/no machine fades to a lighter pink, paler yellow, and that’s at least something.

We drive for about two hours then stop at a roadside service stop so I can usher Marty into the men’s room; he can’t always tell me when he needs to go, but I noticed him being antsy in the back seat. Anyway I want to load up on some cheap packaged snacks. The old lady behind the counter seems nice enough, but with most food regs now entirely voluntary, I don’t trust anything not wrapped, stamped, and safety-sealed while I’m on the road, which is too bad because the pot of chili she has simmering near the counter smells really fucking good.

Another hour later and we’re nearing a gate city named Middleton, hidden from view behind the highway walls, and even though the yes/no machine is pretty optimistic about it, I know better than to stop. When everything went to shit and most of the middle class got stripped broke, those who were left circled their wagons into tight little protective clusters, though what they were protecting other than their schmancy boring-ass lawns and their inbred kids I dunno. Nonresidents routinely get targeted for all kinds of fees and harassment, and I’ve heard stories where if you couldn’t cough up ridiculous money you’d find yourself working for the city ’til you paid it off, which with compounding interest and fees on fees you never ever would. Middleton doesn’t have that rep, but I’m not keen on risking my own freedom on it; I’ve got things to do.

How about here? Dave peeps up, the first word he’s said in over half an hour, as we approach the first Middleton exit.

Gate city, I say. Nope.

Dave can’t purse his lips, because he’s fucking animatronic and no one thought he’d need that, even though they apparently thought they should make him smart enough to read and be argumentative as hell. For educating children, sure. So instead he does this thing where he just lightly clacks his jaws open and closed, tap tap tap tap, except he’s a giant head so it shakes the whole damned car. We’re not stopping here, I say again, just to be sure he gets that this is nonnegotiable.

Marty in the back seat has gotten quiet, and I glance at him in the mirror and he’s frowning and looking around as if he understands where we are. My uncle might be on another planet most of the time, but not long ago he was one of the sharpest people I knew, the only one who could go toe to toe with my mother in the brains department—macrotech versus nanotech—and he knew everybody and everything.

We’re not going to stop here, Uncle Marty, I tell him, and the anxious look eases. Just passing through.

Dave is silent for a bit, then starts clacking again, and this time I do glare at him. You have a problem? I ask.

And then, like a goddamned omen, up ahead, half-leaning on the guardrail, I see the falling-down highway billboard for Middleton Prehistoric Playland. I had totally forgotten about it, but I have doubts it’s coincidence that we’re here.

I keep driving, paying no notice to the billboard as if very busy instead of keeping a safe eye on the faded yellow lines on my side of the road. There is a small metallic chuffing sound I have come to identify as a cough, and then Dave says brightly, Well, hey!

Hey what? I say.

I just saw a sign for another dinosaur park, right here. What amazing luck! We should stop.

Yes, Dave sucks at poker, too. Gate city, I say again. We’re not stopping. Besides, it’s been closed for decades, so it’s not like we could go inside.

We could look around, though, Dave says. Maybe we could sneak in.

Sneak in?! I laugh. You? You must be shitting me. No.

I heard they might have another Euhelopus there, Dave says.

You heard? So you knew this was here all along? Of course I already know the answer, but it has to be asked.

I saw a brochure, Dave says.

You saw a brochure? Where?

Somewhere in the house, in one of the paper piles, Dave says.

And you couldn’t just ask me if we could come here?

I knew you’d say no, Dave says. You don’t know what it’s like being extinct. It gets lonely.

I’ve already gone down the argument hole with Dave about the Euhelopus thing, a name he picked up off some TV kid doco and decided was him (rather than the Generic Sauropod Model C (XXXL) his maker-plate reads) and I made the mistake once of telling him his kind wouldn’t be extinct until our toaster and microwave died, and that got ugly. Ugly enough that Uncle Marty got upset, which is where I draw the line.

Look, I say, we can’t just go right into a gate city. I can try to find out who owns it and if we can visit, and then try to find us a resident to sponsor us—

"I think it’s outside the gates, on the far