Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 160: Clarkesworld Magazine

By Neil Clarke, Naomi Kritzer, Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko 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, articles, interviews and art. Our January 2020 issue (#160) contains:

• Original fiction by Naomi Kritzer ("Monster"), Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko ("The AI That Looked at the Sun"), Rita Chang-Eppig ("The Last to Die"), I-Hyeong Yun ("The Perfect Sail"), and Chen Qiufan ("The Ancestral Temple in a Box").
• Non-fiction by Douglas F. Dluzen, interviews with Walter Jon Williams and Victo Ngai, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642360516

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 160

Table of Contents

Monster

by Naomi Kritzer

The AI That Looked at the Sun

by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

The Last to Die

by Rita Chang-Eppig

The Perfect Sail

by I-Hyeong Yun

The Ancestral Temple in a Box

by Chen Qiufan

Reshuffling Evolution

by Douglas F. Dluzen

Charging A Brick Wall: A Conversation with Walter Jon Williams

by Arley Sorg

The Color of Nature: A Conversation with Victo Ngai

by Arley Sorg

Editor's Desk: A Bucket of Things

by Neil Clarke

Zarrio

Art by Eduardo García

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2020

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Monster

Naomi Kritzer

No one at the Guiyang airport speaks English. I have the UTranslator app on my phone, and before I left my colleague Jeanine said that it had worked fine for her. But she’d also said she’d never had trouble finding an English speaker in China. And her trips were to Shanghai and Beijing.

I’m going to the Guizhou province, I’d said.

Where? she said, pulling out her phone to look up a map.

Like the Oklahoma of China, I said. Southern-ish, rural, inland, poor. Not where the foreign tourists usually go.

At the baggage claim, there’s a yellow lab sniffing bags, trotting happily back and forth along the conveyer belt as it snakes into the airport. The dog looks deeply pleased with his work, and I am startled to see him sit down on the belt next to a suitcase, which is the standard signal dogs give when they’re flagging something. I look around, wondering if I’m about to see an arrest. No one seems perturbed. Also, no one claims the bag; a short time later it winds past me and I see that its wheels are wrapped and it has no handle. The suitcase is a decoy, riding the belt endlessly to give the dog something to react to on days with no would-be smugglers. I wonder what they put inside it.

My suitcase elicits no response from the dog. I’m irrationally relieved.

In Guiyang, the responses from the UTranslator app get me a lot of very confused looks unless I keep it to single-word requests. Bathroom? gets me pointed in the right direction. Newspaper? gets me to a newsstand. Of course, all the papers for sale are in Chinese and I can’t tell which are going to be filled with news from Beijing and Shanghai and which might have local stories. I buy two papers anyway.

Where can I hire a car to take me to Danzhai? is not a successful sort of query but taxi? eventually gets me to the right spot. It takes time to make it clear that I really do want to go all the way to Danzhai (it’s two-and-a-half hours away), but we finally set off.

I didn’t sleep well on the plane, and I very much want to sleep in the car, but I’m too keyed up. I stare out at the wide smooth highway that tunnels straight through the hills and bridges the valleys, trying to catch glimpses of China beyond the guardrails, barely absorbing anything.

All I want from the newspapers is the answer to one question: have there been any more bodies? I hover my phone over the characters, slowly parsing out headlines about trade agreements, a train accident, a pair of extremely old identical twins who are celebrating their birthday.

Why are you going to Guizhou? Jeanine had asked.

Because no one I know has ever been there, I said. This was a lie. I’m here to find Andrew.

I met Andrew my sophomore year of high school.

I was a nerd, which back in the 1980s was the actual opposite of cool (as opposed to now, when it’s simply another variety of it). I spent middle school being bullied for my preference for books over people and sweatpants over jeans. Any time I stopped for a drink from the water fountain, my classmates would yank my pants down; the school administrators all insisted that if I just ignored them instead of crying, this would stop. When I started high school, I caved and started wearing blue jeans, even though I hated the way the waistband dug into my sides when I sat.

Freshman year of high school, I spent my lunch periods eating with a few girls I called my friends, who’d more-or-less tolerated me in middle school. Sometimes we hung out on weekends at the mall, where the other girls would coo over adorable clothing and I’d self-consciously stroke the scratchy fabric and pretend I wished my mother would give me a clothing allowance instead of just buying me the same L.L.Bean turtlenecks again and again because she knew they had soft tags and I’d wear them.

Andrew was in both my chemistry class and my precalculus class, and he noticed that I spent a big part of the day reading books under my desk. He started asking me each morning what I’d brought to read. Initially I wasn’t sure whether his curious tone was the fake-curious voice other kids sometimes used right before they turned into complete assholes. After multiple classes passed and he didn’t snatch my books away to wipe a booger on them or anything like that, I started feeling a bit less wary. My books were all science fiction, and all came from my neighborhood library, which mostly meant Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, and all the older Anne McCaffrey.

You should read this, Andrew said one day, and handed me a paperback. It’s mine. Don’t crack the spine. You’ll like it.

It was a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson. The next day, I sat with him at lunch.

Danzhai Wanda Tourist Village is possibly the strangest place I’ve ever been.

Everything around me looks quaint and old, but in fact it was built from scratch just a few years ago to showcase local ethnic cultures and attract tourists to the area. Local people are employed to wear traditional costumes, walk the street playing traditional instruments, make and sell traditional crafts. It reminds me of a Renaissance festival.

Many of the women in traditional clothing are wearing silver hats with delicately formed butterflies on the top and a jingly fringe right above their eyes. Other women wear their long hair scraped up high into something almost like a bouffant, but with silver ornaments and oversized flowers pinned in. They wear beautifully embroidered jackets and skirts, and silver belts, and large silver necklaces that look like someone cut a circle and hammered the silver out into a crescent. Everything jingles as they move. I wonder if the metal jewelry is heavy, if the clothing is uncomfortable, how much is prescribed, and how much is left up to them.

The men and women minding the shops are mostly wearing more ordinary clothes, although a few have the hairstyle with a smaller ornament pinned in. I can’t tell whether the tourists shopping in the stores are from other parts of China, or just other parts of Guizhou.

UTranslate doesn’t work any better here than at the airport. Fortunately, the hotel has a sign in English over the door telling me it’s a hotel, and Room? is easy enough to understand.

I know I’m not going to find Andrew today. It’s going to take time. Today my job is to check into the hotel, not nap, and adjust to the time change. This would all be easier if I’d arrived in early evening rather than midmorning. I resolutely leave my suitcase on the bed instead of lying down myself and go back outside.

At the end of the street there’s a public square, and three young women have set up a table with carved drinking horns and little bowls of what I’m pretty sure is a potent alcoholic beverage. Two have the silver hats; the third has the hair ornaments. They are beckoning visitors over and feeding people the drink out of the horns. I am quickly jostled up to the front, where one of the women smiles and sings a song as she pours the drink into my mouth.

You could poison a lot of people this way I think as I swallow obediently and then wonder what sort of person I am to even think such a thing. The alcohol is strong, and I hope it’s not rude if I stop drinking. The ladies don’t stop smiling when I pull my head back, so if I’m being rude, they’re too polite to mention it.

I like meeting new people, one of the affirmations they made me repeat back when I went to therapy years ago, pops into my head. Xie xie, I say, the one word of Chinese I know: thank you.

Thank you, I said to Andrew when I gave him back the book. It was great. I’d brought along one of my own paperbacks to lend him, one I’d bought on my own rather than checking it out from the library—Startide Rising.

If you used a bookmark instead of putting your books facedown they’d last longer, he told me when he finished it.

Sometimes I dog-ear the pages, I said.

"You do realize that makes you an actual monster."

It’s my book! I can fold down corners if I want! Sometimes I’d fold down corners just so I could easily get back to a particular page to reread it. I didn’t tell Andrew that I occasionally even did that with library books. Just the older library books I checked out again and again, though—especially the story collections from the bottom shelf. Not the new books.

Andrew had a girlfriend, a goth girl named Nadine who went to the other school, and she had a whole cluster of nerdy friends. Suddenly on the weekends I had something to do, and when Star Trek IV came out I had people to see it with. Since none of us had much money, we spent most of our weekend afternoons haunting local parks or the family rooms of the kids with more absent parents. Having an entire group of friends was a shocking novelty to me. The friends I’d had before were willing to put up with how weird I was. Never before had I had friends who were weird with me.

Andrew was my closest friend in the group: he loaned me books and comics, made movie recommendations. I rented Alien on video because he’d recommended it so highly. Also Blade Runner. He was brilliant but lazy, sliding by with adequate grades because he didn’t want to do the work. High school is pointless, he said. I already know everything they’re telling us. There will actually be things for me to learn once I get to college.

There were a lot of on-again off-again romances in the group—two kids would get together, spend a couple of weekends holding hands (or making out while the rest of us yelled get a room!), amicably break up.

When Andrew and Nadine broke up, Nadine disappeared from the group.

Months later, I ran into Nadine waiting tables at a diner near the U. I was by myself, with a stack of books and homework and $10 for bottomless coffee and a big plate of fries. Nadine! I said, delighted, when she came to my table. I haven’t seen you in forever!

Oh, hi, she said, giving me a faint smile. Yeah, guess it’s been a while.

How are you? I’ve missed you.

You have? Huh, okay. She took out her pad. I’m actually working, so . . . do you know what you want?

I gave her my order and let her take my menu and tried to shake off my hurt feelings. She was busy; I was a customer; I didn’t want to be a pest. I spread out my Spanish vocabulary cards and worked on them as I dipped fries into ketchup one by one and ate them, flipping them around so I didn’t double-dip even though I was the only one at the table. She came around twice to refill my coffee and water, not making eye contact, and finally stopped, my mug still in her hand, and said, Are you still hanging out with Andrew?

Yeah, I said, a little hesitant. He had a new girlfriend. Was she jealous? Was that what this was about? I wasn’t the one dating him. I wasn’t into him that way.

You know he has a dead rabbit in his freezer? Or did. He was going to dissect it.

Nadine clearly expected a response, but my main question was, was she saying he killed the rabbit or did he just find a dead one, because . . . I mean, we cut up animals in advanced biology. They were from a supply house, of course, not picked up off the street, but . . . I didn’t know how disturbed to be about the whole idea.

"He wanted me to watch," Nadine added.

Ugh, I said, sympathetically.

"He talked about wanting to know what everything looks like on the inside. Everything. Just . . . I don’t know, Cecily. Be careful, I guess."

Is that why you disappeared? I asked.

She gave me a look that I couldn’t identify. Pity? Exasperation? Yeah, Cecily, she said, flatly. That’s why I disappeared. Do you need anything else or should I bring you the check?

I had been planning to get a slice of pie, but there was something about Nadine’s glare that made me antsy. I decided to just go. Check, I said. Thanks.

She took my money up to the register and brought me the change. Keep it, I said.

Thanks, she said, and put the change in her apron. And then stood there, chewing on her lip and staring at me. Don’t be alone with him, she blurted out, finally, as I started to gather up my books.

Why? I asked.

You just don’t want to be alone with him. Trust me.

I’d been alone with him dozens of times, and nothing bad had ever happened to me. Okay, I said, not arguing. Thanks.

I didn’t tell Andrew I’d run into Nadine. The next time I wanted to get French fries