Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 175: Clarkesworld Magazine, #175

By Neil Clarke, Ray Nayler, Endria Isa Richardson and 5 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 April 2021 issue (#175) contains:

• Original fiction by Ray Nayler ("Sarcophagus"), Endria Isa Richardson ("The Field Tiger"), Dean-Paul Stephens ("Ouroboros"), Richard Webb ("The Sheen of Her Carapace"), Chen Qian ("Catching the K Beast"), Andrea Kriz ("Communist Computer Rap God"), and L Chan ("A House Is Not A Home").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Andrew Liptak and interviews with Harry Turtledove and Bo-young Kim, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642360783

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

Sarcophagus

Ray Nayler

The causes of the disaster are these:

First: The estimations of this planet’s temperature were incorrect. The beacon should never have been placed. This planet is no more capable of supporting human life than our own polar wastelands.

Second: My companions are all dead. I do not know what happened for sure: Encoding errors in their uploads, possibly, or a malfunction that occurred during transmission, or a receiving fault here in the beacon. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: They never woke up. The beacon post-op will say more, but a preliminary diagnostic showed entire sections of their uploads missing, scrambled, or out of sequence. The material of their blanks was recycled back into the matter arranger.

Third: Many of the depots are lost, damaged, or unreachable. I found the first one thirteen kilometers from its original placement, three hundred meters down a crevasse. My scans indicated it was upside down, encased in ice. It had been trapped there for hundreds of years, already. It had become a part of the frozen mass of the glacier. There was no question of rappelling alone down into the crevasse and trying to free it: it was lost.

The next depot is thirty kilometers from here over the glacial surface. At an average daytime temperature of negative forty degrees Celsius, and an average nighttime temperature twenty degrees below that, I do not think I will survive the journey. But I have no choice except to attempt it.

This series of logs, this record of failure, should be accessed by my backup previous to its escape-transmission to the relay station and Earth. Do not put me in a new blank here. Do not kill me here again.

As a sidenote: When I next wake up, after the death of this stranded blank, I hope it is in a warm place, where a steaming bowl of noodles can be found nearby, and a cup of good coffee. Six centuries after my departure from Earth, I hope there are still such things as noodles and coffee.

A friend at the Institute once said, If you think things are bad now, just wait: they will get worse.

Gallows humor, of course. Things often get better. Seasons change, weather improves, time blunts the devastations of loss.

But not on this planet.

There is no liquid water on the surface here. But on the glacier, I can hear the flow of meltwater, down in the blue depths of the crevasses. And the glaciers are moving, shifting, the way our own glaciers move on Earth. What could be causing it?

What I saw yesterday might provide an answer.

I was resting on a nunatak, a mountain peak drowned in ice, when the glacier began to sing. The ice moaned in a bass that shuddered through the marrow of my bones. Half a kilometer away, a white plume appeared, surging up from the surface. Narrow at first, it thickened into a column. I could feel the shifting of the glacier’s mass around me, even through the stone. The column rose. A hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred. The lemon sky filled with a million stars of silver, winding down slow as snow. The suit analyzed them as they rained down on me. Water vapor, freezing and falling to the surface.

The glaciers’ motion is not from the melting of their ice from above: it is from below. Imagine an ice cube on a hot stove, sliding across its own substance as it dissolves. The glaciers are moving across thermal vents kilometers beneath the surface. The vents hollow out chimneys, galleries, unstable caves in the glacial interior. Once they breach the final crust of ice, a plume is the result—a geyser tunneled through ice instead of stone.

The plume rose into the sky for an hour. Then there was a rumble beneath the surface, a vibration fierce as any earthquake. The plume was cut off. The column began to dissipate—a chromatic cloud, a swarm of snow-stars. Though nothing changed on the glacier’s surface, I knew that underneath, the fan of passageways that had formed this temporary chimney had collapsed. An entire system of ice caverns—chambers the size of cathedrals, passages bored through blue-black strata of ice that may never have seen a sun, had ceased to exist. But the process would begin again. The heat from below would now carve new patterns through the glacial mass as the venting steam sought escape.

How many vents, out there? The nunatak now seemed not like a mountain peak, but a lifeboat. When I left it, I would swim out into a sea of holes. At any moment, a vent could open beneath me. Or the whole surface of the ice tear apart like paper. There would be no warning that would not come too late. And no companion roped to me to pull me back from the chasm.

The vent-cloud was a chromium trace in yellow air. Thirty kilometers to the nearest depot. If it was reachable. Across a surface rotten with crevasses. I was already dead.

That was the moment when I found life.

I was on one knee, watching that wisp of false stars die in the air. When I looked down, I saw them.

The wind must have blown them there, collected them over who knows how many rotations of this frozen world around its sun. They had drifted into the lee of a stone, where the windblown snow was carved into a bowl. Tiny, brittle, like the dry husks of dead autumn leaves in the spring.

I would have been happy to find just a leaf. But these were not leaves—they were the chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals. I scanned and photographed them, trying to keep my hands steady. Then I reached into that brittle pile, gathering a glove full. Coils and spirals, the cups of empty joints along the insectile carapaces, a litter of separated limbs like the smallest twigs. I could hold two dozen of them in my palm, no two alike. Little grains of existence.

Was I the first to discover life beyond Earth? Perhaps. I couldn’t know: the other explorers were strewn across space-time, scattered across a score of beacon planets. Perhaps they, too, at this moment or fifty years ago or a hundred years from now, were holding life in their hands, or had held it, or would hold it.

Life. Or its trace, at least. The proof of it.

And no one to share that moment with.

I stood up.

And now for the bad news. I had been loitering on that glacial island, which perhaps one day will be marked as the first place in the universe humankind encountered evidence of life off our world, for a reason: my suit.

The causes of the disaster are these . . .

The suit was built to be the most efficient collector of energy possible. It was powered by a passive system of batteries recharged by light, motion, wind across its surface, friction—anything that could transfer energy into it. When charged, it would keep me warm, collect water from the atmosphere and store it for me, collect organic compounds and process them into some minimal supply of sustenance beyond what I could carry. All of those wonderful things. Its technology was centuries old, but still the best we had.

But its batteries weren’t charging fast enough. They were not able to stand up against the constant chill of this planet. They were failing faster than they could be charged.

I had begun to notice the cold more and more over the past few days, seeping into the suit. So, I had stopped on that oasis of stone to lay in the sun. Splayed out on the rock to get maximum exposure, I was also making rock angels, rubbing the surface of the suit against the stone to further power the batteries.

If there had been anyone to see me, it would have been quite a sight: Earth’s first explorer, lying on its back waggling its limbs on a rock. One more dying thing, about to leave its exoskeleton behind as a trace of its existence.

Fifty-one percent battery. It was forty-five percent when I started this a few hours ago. Okay, that was progress. And maybe I felt a little warmer. Maybe.

But yesterday the suit had started out at eighty-four percent, and by nightfall, even though I had been walking all day, and almost always in the sun, it had been eighty percent. In the morning it had been fifty-seven percent.

Thirty kilometers to the depot. If it was there. Or twenty kilometers back to the beacon, where there were other spare suits—spare because my companions were dead. And I would be dead soon enough. The other suits would have the same battery problem.

To the depot, then. In the depot there would be heat packs, ample food supplies, electrolytes, tools, and a shelter set: Unpowered, body-heat retaining sleep sacks, external wear. Low-tech lifesavers. Enough to keep me going for a while.

I stepped off my island.

I am being hunted. I am putting this record down in fragments, where I can. Important to get it on the record—but I also have to keep moving. One foot in front of the other is all that is left to me.

As I stepped off that little island of stone, I felt the glacier shift again. Another spout appeared, a kilometer away. It was larger than the first: a volcano of steam, thundering up into the atmosphere. Vibrations passed through my boots: the treachery of the glacier, rearranging itself under my feet. It was hard not to think of mystical things: Trolls, ice giants waking from their sleep. The glacier alive, malevolent, irritated by my presence on its skin.

For the first few kilometers or so, though, it was good going. The surface, covered with just a slight layer of snow, was relatively even, the sastrugi no more than calf-high, the ice beneath solid. At one point I was almost running. The pace helped keep me warm.

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.

There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high. Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.

That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?

Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning.

It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.

Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.

And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.

Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

Perhaps, I thought, as I clambered down into the maze, it had not seen me after all. Five kilometers is a long way. I had been looking through a high-powered machine to make it out. Perhaps it had just looked in my direction and not seen me.

But the ancient brain and body, sharpened on the savannah, knew better. I knew it in my flesh, with primal certainty: I had been seen.

The maze was like a city of broken ice cathedrals, of shattered crystal spires fallen into roads that twisted back upon themselves and tangled in cul-de-sacs. The ice, refracting light countless times from one crystal to another, trapped everything red in the spectrum in another maze—the deeper maze of microscopic structure. Only blue escaped.

But so many blues! Sapphires dusted by fresh-fallen snow, cerulean tiger stripes etched against white, ancient inks of slabs forced up from the deep-time abyss of the glacial mass. Wind darted into the frozen city of ice every few moments. The spires sang and hissed. Wonder was mixed in me with fear—a strange alchemy.

Such a beautiful world—if only I had the time to explore it, rather than just dying on it.

The suit compass pointed my way to the depot, but I had to turn away from it again and again. Five kilometers in the maze would be ten, fifteen. I glance at the suit battery. Forty-eight percent. Forty-seven percent. And I would be in the shade, much of the time.

And it was in there with me.

Nothing to be done, I said out loud. Concentrate on what you can control.

One foot in front of the other. That’s what I could control. That’s all I could control, now.

I skirted a section where the ice had fallen away, a crevasse deeper than I could see, on an ice and snow bridge no wider than my boots. From an unimaginable depth came the thunder of water.

It was dark when I emerged from the maze. I unfolded the shovel from my pack and dug a hole. I could not travel at night across this landscape of crevasses. Monster or no monster, I would have to sleep.

Under the snow, it was warmer. I wriggled into my cocoon, pulled the pack in after me like a beetle blocking the entrance to its tunnel with a tiny stone. As if that would help.

Thirty-six percent. How long did I have? And did that number even matter, with that thing out there?

Fear or no fear, I was tired enough to sleep. And too tired to dream.

The three of us assigned to this planet knew it would be cold where we were going. The data indicated a planet not much warmer, at its best, than an Icelandic summer. A planet with long, brutal winters even near the equator. So, we passed around books about polar exploration. It was somewhere between serious research and an inside joke.

We traded stories over amber glasses of tea. The darkest moments from the books stood out most: Cherry-Gerrard’s teeth shattering from the cold of the Antarctic winter. Shackleton abandoning the icebound Endurance in desperation, forced to lead his crew over pack ice. Robert Falcon Scott penning his final missive to the public as he lay dying in his sleeping bag, just kilometers from a depot of food that could have saved him.

Why put these things in our heads? Maybe we thought only the ancients suffered, with their heavy equipment freezing to their skin, their unwieldy sleds dragging them down. Or maybe reading them was a sort of talisman: we dispelled their power by absorption.

A decent surface again, in the morning. Snow thicker, here—but dry, at least. Post-holing up to my knees the first half of the day, not looking at the