Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 172: Clarkesworld Magazine

By Neil Clarke, Aimee Ogden, Elly Bangs and 4 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 2021 issue (#172) contains:

• Original fiction by Aimee Ogden ("Intentionalities"), Elly Bangs ("Deep Music"), R.S.A. Garcia ("Philia, Eros, Storge, Agape, Pragma"), R. P. Sand ("The Last Civilian"), Tovah Strong ("Aster's Partialities: Vitri's Best Store for Sundry Antiques"), and P H Lee ("Leaving Room for the Moon").
• Interviews with Connie Willis and E. Lily Yu, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642360721

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 172

Table of Contents

Intentionalities

by Aimee Ogden

Deep Music

by Elly Bangs

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma

by R.S.A. Garcia

The Last Civilian

by R. P. Sand

Aster’s Partialities: Vitri’s Best Store for Sundry Antiques

by Tovah Strong

Leaving Room for the Moon

by P H Lee

Science Fiction and Schmaltz: A Conversation with Connie Willis

by Arley Sorg

The Ten-Year Journey: A Conversation with E. Lily Yu

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: 2020 in Review

by Neil Clarke

Suspire

Art by Yuumei

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2021

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Intentionalities

Aimee Ogden

Sorrel never intended to confer a child to the Braxos Corporation. But Sorrel had never intended a lot of things that managed to happen with or without her say-so.

She had scarcely marched across the auditorium, diploma in hand, when Congress passed the Protecting America’s Children Act. Education was handed over to the private sector; mostly to prison corporations whose personnel already had certifications in Sublethal Youth Management. Sorrel didn’t have a SYM license, nor the heart to teach with a taser on her hip. Instead, she found work serving as a custodian at Mission Health’s main hospital campus. Mission belonged to the parent corp that owned her student loan debt and her father’s end-of-life bills too. Having them deduct the payments straight from her paycheck cut her interest rate by a full half-percent.

The hospital had Braxos ads everywhere, of course, along with those for several other parent corp holdings. One holovid played in the air over the middle of the cafeteria several times a day on a twenty-minute loop. Braxos: Our Future and Yours, Hand in Hand. A blurb about the Future Career Training and Advocacy Act. All the ads became white noise to Sorrel sooner or later. But she caught herself sometimes humming that little jingle, or the one for the new Hyperloop line.

So Sorrel made plans, the kind of plans that can only be made because believing they could come true was the only thing that got a body out of bed in the morning. She was making ends meet. She would find a cheaper apartment and save money there. She would skip breakfast a couple times a week: another couple bucks to sock away. She would stop going out to the matinee theater on her Tuesday mornings off, cancel her Vidja streaming service, skip the occasional beers with friends who still lived nearby. The Shell sparkled overhead, reflecting sunlight back into space, but Sorrel’s apartment sweltered in the hotter-than-ever summers with the air conditioning off. In her head, the numbers added up slowly but steadily, building sturdy mountains out of nickel-and-dime molehills.

But the balance in her checking account never fell in line the way its imaginary counterpart did. After two months of overdraft fees, her bank transferred her account to a High-Risk Financial Management Plan. When she sat down at the first required meeting with her assigned case manager, the man didn’t even look at her as he typed her entire biography into a two hundred-character field on his form. When he asked how she planned to develop her financial outlook to prevent reaching felony levels of debt, he called her Sara. Her hands refused to warm to the temperature of the office; she clasped them on her lap so he wouldn’t see them shake. Nothing she could say would be right. No secret money stashed away, no education and career development plan, no chance of an inheritance. Her head was an empty box and the only thing bouncing inside of it was the stupid Braxos jingle.

I’m going to confer a child to Braxos, she said, and he looked up from his tablet.

Sorrel meant to have a plan in place before the screening test arrived in the mail: another part-time job, underemployment relief funds, crowdfunding. But her BizPass résumé only ever racked up a dozen hits and no leads, her relief application bounced, and her HitchooUp ended up in the red after she paid the fee to close it out.

So, when the screening test came, Sorrel viciously swabbed the inside of her cheek and then dropped it back in the postal box, postage paid. By the time the response arrived, she’d convinced herself not to read it in detail. She would check to see if there was a contract, and if so, she could sign it and send it back. If not, no harm—she would simply be back where she’d started. Knowing what small genetic accidents kept her from being a viable candidate wouldn’t change things.

She opened the envelope. The cover letter fell out; behind it peeked another document, on heavy paper. At the bottom, a hungry signature line waited.

Her fingers brushed the letter, not hard enough to sweep it aside. Instead they crawled word by word over the ink, collecting the Scrabble-tile names of celebrated genes. A novel mutation in the POLB gene was her crowning glory, promising a vastly increased rate of replication fidelity that would help her offspring to withstand the withering radiation of space.

It would keep the baby’s genes hewing closely to the original versions that Sorrel would bestow upon it, in other words. A tie to bind them between worlds. Her hand seized, and she crushed the cover letter.

Her signature on the contract wavered more than usual, but still recognizable as her own. She put it into the envelope and dropped it into the mailbox downstairs before she changed her mind.

It was only five years. Sorrel could make it through five years unscathed, if it meant a light at the end of the interminable tunnel of debt she’d fallen into.

Sorrel got sucked into an argument with the crowd outside the clinic. She was supposed to keep her head down and follow the company liaison from the taxi to the door, but then some asshole hit her in the head with a sign declaring THE YOUTH OCCUPATIONAL SUCCESS ACT IS SLAVERY!!! It wasn’t slavery, it was just ten years of service after their training, and after that the kids would be set up for any career they wanted—she tried to say that, at least, but the protesters shouted her down, calling her corporate broodmare and mother of the year and, more succinctly, bitch. And then the liaison was pulling her away, through the bristling cardboard signs and grabbing hands, and into the cool, clean lobby.

While she waited for her appointment, Sorrel considered asking about the sperm donor. It was doubtful that Braxos could tell her much, but even if she couldn’t know who he was, she would have liked to hear what he was like, where he’d lived. Why they wanted to knit her DNA to his. But when the technician called her name, he didn’t look up from his tablet, only rattled off her identifying information.

Yes. She stood up and fumbled for her purse, her jacket, the outdated magazine where she’d been staring at a recipe she would never make. That’s me.

Follow me. He disappeared into the hallway behind the waiting room and Sorrel trotted to keep up. The waiting room had been full; he must have had a lot of clients that day. Knowing it was true didn’t make Sorrel feel better about it.

In the patient room, a sheet and a green cotton gown had been folded neatly and left on the edge of the exam table. The technician excused himself while Sorrel changed. Don’t forget to take your underwear off, he reminded her before the door whispered shut.

Sorrel slipped into the gown and lay back on the table. Her skin prickled with cold where the sheet touched her legs. She wriggled, trying to find a comfortable position. Exactly how many people had lain here expecting to get pregnant while still snugly encased in a pair of Hanes?

A knock on the door pulled her fingers taut on the sheet. Come in, she called, and another technician—a different sandy-haired white man—entered with a small cart. Sorrel McIntosh, he said, reading from a vial label on the cart, and compared it to the readout on his tablet. Thumbprint here.

She pressed the tablet where he indicated, and it chimed its approval: she was, in fact, who she said she was. No allergies he should be aware of, she averred, no new health conditions since the mandatory complete physical last week. At his instruction, she fumbled her feet into the stirrups and stared up into the clean white fluorescent light. Someone had hung a suncatcher from one intersection of the drop ceiling tiles. A crib mobile, for adults. Suspended, it twisted on its string in the draft from the HVAC vent, beaming faintly flower-shaped patches onto the white wall while the cold speculum stretched Sorrel open.

This is the lidocaine injection. The technician pulled up beside her on a rolling stool to show her a syringe. You might feel a little pinch.

That little pinch darkened the edges of Sorrel’s world. When she swam nauseously up from the depths of her dizziness, the technician had stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them into the used kit on his cart. You did great, he said, entering data on the tablet. Sorrel craned her neck, but couldn’t see what he wrote, nor guess what he’d need to. Please remain in this position for ten minutes before you get up. There are tissues to clean yourself up if you need. Thanks for coming in today.

Thank you, said Sorrel, foolishly, awkwardly. He pushed the cart out with one foot and shut the door. Sorrel stared at the ceiling, alone with the realization she’d forgotten to ask about the donor. Alone altogether, now.

Five years wasn’t forever. She could be alone for five years.

Sorrel wasn’t supposed to be the first one to hold the baby. The predelivery instructions had been clear that the Braxos technician would handle the infant before she did. First things first: turn the newborn into a number. Break her up from a person into a DNA word search puzzle.

But the C-section had run long, and the technician had left the operating room for a bathroom break, and so this pink, wrinkled, cotton-smelling thing had been pressed directly into Sorrel’s arms. Her whole body trembled, convinced she was ice-cold in the wake of the epidural. I’ll drop her, she cried, as the little mouth pushed and puckered against her neck.

You can do this, Mama. The nurse tutted and draped a warm felt blanket over her head and around her shoulders, anchoring it under the baby’s tiny weight. Sorrel didn’t have the energy to explain it to her. If anything happened to the child, if she wasn’t contractually perfect, then these nine months of worry and wellness checks had been for nothing. Then she was still in the same tunnel, digging ever downward, too turned around to hope to surface again. "No one’s ever dropped a baby on my watch. But if you do fumble her, the nurse went on, appending a wink, I’ll catch her before she hits the ground." She collapsed the wave function of Sorrel’s violently oscillating knee by squeezing it through the sheets.

Then the Braxos technician stumbled back into the OR, scrubbing in and making his apologies concurrently. Sorrel hadn’t stopped shaking by the time he lifted the infant from her arms, nor during the trip from the operating floor to the recovery ward. She was shaking still when her predelivery clothes, folded on the room’s empty chair, buzzed. The nurse brought her the phone, wrapped in Sorrel’s wadded-up jeans, and Sorrel fumbled her passcode twice before it unlocked.

There was a new message from her bank: the initial Braxos payment had been received. Every zero in the number looped her around and around inside it, dizzying her with relief. She shut the phone off and tossed it by her feet before the nausea overwhelmed her.

Here we are, now! The nurse appeared in the doorway with a swaddled infant in her arms. When Sorrel didn’t hold her arms out, she nestled the baby in the bed alongside her. She’s been fed according to your wishes. You two should get acquainted and get some rest. Not necessarily in that order. Her smile had ossified since earlier. Maybe she was at the end of a long shift; maybe she’d remembered that Sorrel was a Braxos parent. If you’re going to name her yourself, you can start thinking on that; otherwise, we’ll use the random generator tomorrow for the official certificate. In the meantime, you just buzz the nursing station if you need anything. All right, dear?

Okay. The nurse dimmed the lights. Sorrel frowned down at the infant beside her, scrying for her own reflection in the opaque blue-black eyes and petulant face.

In the morning, she had the nurse enter the name Abigail onto the birth certificate. Abigail had been Sorrel’s mother’s name. You can use the generator for a middle name, she said, aiming the little plastic bottle at Abigail’s incompetently pursed mouth.

The nurse’s reading lenses jumped as she wrinkled her nose at the tablet. Abigail April! Doesn’t make much sense for a little girl born in July.

It’s fine. Sorrel nudged Abigail’s lips with the bottle nipple, the way the nutritional consultant had showed her. This time, she latched on. Tiny bubbles rolled up to the top of the chalky liquid with each of her sluggish pulls. Just put in Abigail April.

The nurse turned her back to tap on her tablet. Abigail’s feeble gulps competed with the room’s silence, then were absorbed into it. Sorrel rearranged to hold the baby and the bottle with the same arm and fumbled her phone out to watch the day’s news. The top story detailed the construction project that would house the new Braxos crèche. She scrolled past it to a bit about a Hyperloop derailment outside Rio, then glazed over the coverage of the Water Riots—nothing new to see there.

A loud slurping noise roused her from behind drooping eyelids. The baby had made it to the end of the bottle and failed to distinguish dry air from milk. Sorrel flicked the bottle onto the bedside table and hefted the baby toward her shoulder. The baby burped before she ever made it there, dribbling a mouthful of sour milk slobber down the front of Abigail’s gown. Goddamn it, Abigail April, she said, and the words rolled too naturally out of her mouth. She snatched a tissue to wipe off her shirt and the baby’s pointed chin. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

She knew from the outset the name was a mistake. Pretending it was the first such she’d made, that was only a concession to what was left of her pride.

Sorrel didn’t mean for Abigail’s second birthday party to be her first and only one. She made a cake, yellow with chocolate frosting, and invited the other three children around Abigail’s age from the Mission housing complex where they lived now. One of the kids’ older siblings who’d tagged along sang Happy Birthday with the adults, but the other little ones only shrieked in confused anticipation. When Sorrel stopped Abigail from grabbing for the cake and its still-lit candles—No no! Hot!—Abigail burst into frustrated tears.

Sorrel cried too, but only later, when they were alone, while Abigail played with the presents that Braxos had