Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 150

By Neil Clarke, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Rich Larson 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 (new and classic works), articles, interviews and art. Our March 2019 issue (#150) contains:

• Original fiction by D.A. Xiaolin Spires ("But, Still, I Smile"), Erin K. Wagner ("When Home, No Need to Cry"), Rich Larson ("Death of an Air Salesman"), Nin Harris ("Dreams Strung like Pearls Between War and Peace"), Kai Hudson ("Treasure Diving"), and Emily C. Skaftun ("The Thing With the Helmets").
• Reprints by Kij Johnson ("26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss") and Catherynne M. Valente ("The Future is Blue").
• Non-fiction by Paul Riddell, interviews with Sarah Pinsker and Jean-Michel Jarre, an Another Word column by Fran Wilde, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642360813

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 150

Table of Contents

But, Still, I Smile

by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

When Home, No Need to Cry

by Erin K. Wagner

Death of an Air Salesman

by Rich Larson

Dreams Strung like Pearls Between War and Peace

by Nin Harris

Treasure Diving

by Kai Hudson

The Thing with the Helmets

by Emily C. Skaftun

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss

by Kij Johnson

The Future is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

The Magician’s Garden

by Paul Riddell

High Seas, Multiple Selves, and Unspoken Songs: A Conversation with Sarah Pinsker

by Chris Urie

Electronic Music, Science Fiction, and AIs: A Conversation with Jean-Michel Jarre

by Neil Clarke

Another Word: A Flock of Crows in a Swan Suit

by Fran Wilde

Editor’s Desk: A Celebration of Many Things

by Neil Clarke

Alien Abstract VI

Art by Arthur Haas

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2019

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

But, Still, I Smile

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

When my baby flowed away from me, I thought of it as coursing away through a river, far and far away, and perhaps journeying through the great Silver River (the Milky Way) and towards some other exoplanet unseen and unknown. I thought it might be carried away by that great band of light, so faint but populated by so many stars, all doing its part to lift her, tiny little fingers bringing her towards a future that still held bright.

In reality, the system took the miscarriage remains and sucked it through tubes, yes, tubes unseen, but sterile tubes: no faint stars, no coursing through the galaxies, no distant land where she might be raised in the opposing angles of diffused rays of a dual star system. Despite the number of miscarriages, I was never sure where those tubes ended, maybe it went across the Earth, across the atmosphere. Maybe it jettisoned my baby into outer space itself, her body crystallized and preserved, in the half-born state it came into the world.

I vowed never to have a kid again. Or at least I pretended to, in my infinite duress. What was the point? She was the closest to term, and yet, still failure.

But, in my heart, I looked out into the vast unknown, thinking that somewhere my child was there, calling out for her mom.

Mapping out for SETI was a natural course of an occupation for me. Maybe it was destined, as my name was Dengwen 登文, where deng means climb but also means record like in a registry. And wen meant literature but also could mean civilization. So, here I was, reinventing my name in my own way, recording the possibility of new civilizations in my mundane everyday work. I would spend days sifting through data. Finding extraterrestrial life was ambitious, grandiose, and romantic in theory, but rather tedious in practice. I didn’t mind. Tedium suited me. I could spend days numbly parsing through radio and light signals, any ripple of a signature that would suggest something other than the natural movement of cosmic gears turning came under my meticulous gaze.

The Drake Equation always bothered me. Sure, it listed all the factors outright in diminishing fractions: birthrate of stars, stars with planets, life-sustaining planets, planets with life spawned, intelligence within those planets with life spawned, technological capability of the intelligence of the life spawned, and the span of years of a technological society. Sure, it made sense, ruling out candidates, like the piling discards dumped by sea trawlers of the past. But, when I stepped back and thought about it, the kernel that was left—it seemed improbable, almost impossible, despite my devotion to the project. Where were these places, these elusive hosts of life? It was like those old nursery rhymes where one thing compiled on the next compiled on the next and became a monstrous sentence with qualifiers abound. Given such a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, ad infinitum, the reduction of all the seemingly infinite stars out there, was there a space really for organic life to blossom and reach out to us and make contact?

In my office, I rubbed my abdomen as the data flickered on charts before me. The data might be impassive, but my body wasn’t. It hurt. I was too embarrassed to get postnatal care, if it could be called postnatal. No, it wasn’t embarrassment. It was a blip of numbness, or of delusion, of not wanting to face the truth. I had bled out, that rare instance of life fostered inside of me that lasted to such an advanced stage, in the face of the countless attempts at conception, and obliterated by some tacit violence in the universe.

Finding life out there seemed futile; the universe was as sterile as my womb. Cold, detached, anesthetized. It made one attempt at life and, well, we had royally messed it up. Destroyed ourselves and pretty much wrecked our home, Earth, along with it, thanks to petty disputes, constant competition over scarce resources getting scarcer. To think that another being might be out there and signal at us was like catching my fetus through the tubes and breathing life back into it. We were too far gone and we were hoping for a miracle.

It was while thinking this—experiencing a flash of pain glide through my lower back and swallowing grief I might never dispel—that the strange anomaly caught my breath.

An anomalous pattern of radio signals. It wasn’t like anything I’ve seen before.

I pressed my face against the screen, feeling its cold glass. I looked closely, wondering if the pixels were shifting on me.

They weren’t.

I sat up, despite all the groans of my body.

Dengwen, you’re lucky you found the blip of possible life. The nurse pressed the gauge against my cheek, taking my temperature and vitals. She didn’t seem too moved by the idea of imminent communication with extraterrestrials.

Yes, there’s hope for humanity yet, I said.

She dabbed a bit of anesthetic fumes behind my ear. My nose wrinkled at the smell, as I winced. I hated hospitals.

No, you’re lucky, for your own sake, she said, wiping my arms down with the cleaning cloth. She gave me a stare I couldn’t decipher and shook her head at me, black hair whipping her chin. Then she tied the blue massage fabric to my arms and back. Otherwise, you might not have ever come to me. How long has it been since the miscarriage?

A week . . .  My words tapered off as I tilted my head back so she checked my tonsils. I stared into the bright lights of the white ceiling. I still wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for.

And you’re passing enough blood clots to make this an event worth flagging. She tapped on my chart on the thin screen beside her. It didn’t say anything in that vein. I wondered how she knew.

Blood clots.

They freaked me out. I would flush them down the tubes, but they would return, day after day, ejected from my body, haunting me, detritus in lieu of life.

Yet, they were comforting in their own way; evidence that she did exist, even if it was just a semblance of life, almost-life that short-circuited. Yearning for motherhood possessed me, no matter how much I tried to push it away. I closed my eyes, let my head swim as the massage fabric worked its way, stimulating my muscles, relieving my incessant pain. It couldn’t soothe the ache in my loins.

Maybe they’ll deliver us some well-needed tech. Something to turn the tides, lower the CO2, bring down the rising sea levels. I wonder what they would look like, corporeal beings or evanescent bands of light? Would they speak with tongues and spit saliva? Or would they hover and float? There was so much we didn’t know. So much that couldn’t be inferred from the little data we had.

The nurse must have turned the knob up higher, since I felt a pulse travel through my arms. The massage fabric sent me a buzz right under my chest. I put my hand there, thinking of how my breasts had gotten smaller, receded in the wake of the miscarriage, as if it, too, like all my nurturing prowess, decided to go into hibernation. Not yet, I had whispered. I had stopped cooking hearty broths for myself, stopped caring about my health, and instead zapped hydrobar dinners every day. I was numb, but deep within, I still hoped I could.

I was woken up by the feeling of the nurse pressing a few thin pads to my hands. At first, I thought they were for the bleeding, but she said in a hushed voice, Hemoglobin adhesives. It’ll pump some iron back into you. It’s cutting-edge tech that I swiped from the gift bag of a higher-up at a conference for military medical innovations.

It felt light in my hands, almost weightless.

She pressed one against her skin, not opening it, but simply demonstrating. Once you put it on, some of your blood will flow into its lattice fabric and align itself to avoid a hemolytic reaction. Then, once calibrated, the patch will shift iron out of its fabric, pitch the ferrous nutrients so it traverses air and skin and into your body. She passed the one she was using as demonstration to me as well.

It’s not on the market yet and I don’t have many. I don’t give them out to my patients. But, you look like you could use some. Besides, it’s not every day I have a patient rocketing into space.

I thanked her, pocketed the stickers fast like they were contraband and we were about to be busted. The door opened just then and the nurse plastered a benign smile on her face as she finished up my checkup. She let the bots work around her, picking up extra supplies, checking the inventory, as she indicated to me with a finger that my time here was up. As we left, she handed me some more contraband: a whole box of hemoglobin adhesives and a dozen reviving sticks.

In case you run into the ETs, she said in a whisper. No one wants to say they might be violent. But, who knows. You might need them to save yourself. She gestured slapping one on herself. She turned around, spinning on her heels, and left, curt with no goodbye, as if our appointment never happened.

They wanted me out there with the scientists, exploring space. I mentioned I was only one of the data analysts. Why me? Shouldn’t they choose a xenoanthropologist, someone who had spent years dedicated to the role?

We’re not just sending you, Dengwen. Of course we’ll have a xenoanthropologist on board, plus a linguist, plus an army of data crunching AI. Botanists, geologists, everything we’ve got. But, who knows what kind of tech they might have? What if their connection fries our AIs? We can’t rely on AI to data analyze, we’ll need a human touch. Someone who might see a blip out of some inexplicable instinct where an AI might rationalize it away.

My supervisor sent me a pack of rations and told me to practice getting used to them. My stomach might first object, so better to deal with the ramifications while still on Earth. I tore off one of the packets and chewed. It tasted like dirt mixed with honey.

The nurse must have watching over me, rooting for me. She didn’t mention to anyone else about the miscarriage, which might have disqualified me for the trip. She had simply logged in the necessary checkups, which flashed across my supervisor’s eyes during our meeting. I still had her medical supplies stashed away for the trip, pushing away the idea of violence that she had suggested, and instead banking on hope.

I looked out of the giant window of my supervisor’s 22nd floor; she had the whole floor to herself and her data-crunching machines. For a moment, together we marveled at the skies that now held so much promise.

If only FTL drives were invented, I said. Then we course through to the outskirts of the universe and seek out more lives. If there is one, other than us that is, there must be more.

Just be lucky we have even enough power to get to Proxima Centauri. So much of our energy put into keeping the seas at bay and the skies barely breathable enough to live. We’re really hanging on a thread. Your discovery came just in time.

I said what I thought she wanted to hear:

We need to unwind a new thread. A thread that’ll guide us to another species. Or guide them back to us. We’ll . . .  My voice of optimism croaked to a halt as I shifted my feet. A cramp subsided. They should diminish and eventually go away, the nurse had said. It felt sad, being wistful for pain. It was the remnant of what was, life that hadn’t come to be. If only I could conceive . . .

We never uttered those words that ran around in gossip circles and circulated the digital filigree. The ones that the nurse had whispered so directly into my ear. The possibility that hope was a trap. That they were malevolent. That there was no winning. That they would conquer us.

It didn’t matter, for those of us who did the calculations. What if they were malevolent? Either way we die. The Earth was perishing before our eyes, given the rate of our global bickering. We didn’t have quite the mutual coordination to seed a big enough space station for a future generation. Mismanagement and bare sustenance were draining us of all our resources, leaving other recourses dead ends. Despite the hollers of the everyday citizens, deafening calls in our ears to stop and stay away from the aliens, in our raised towers high above their shouts, we knew that we only had one way: forward. And hope.

We turned our faces against the protests.

I spent a decade on board, waiting to get there. What if we got the calculations wrong? What if we missed our mark?

This would be the ultimate mission, one of daring pleas and of desperation. We had torn apart our space programs, poured all our funding into saving the Earth, but our beloved planet had been careening into a vicious cycle, irregularities that became more magnified. We were lucky there was even enough push to get this spaceship out there, just enough of coming together and pinching and saving to bring us the fuel and resources needed, though mostly it was weighed down by constant fighting.

Hope was the drug that temporarily anesthetized humanity from the stark matter of its imminent unfortunate end. Scientists put their all into it; the diminished SETI team overclocked their bodies, their machinery, put their lives on hold, to get us off the ground. People scrounged, collected, connected to get their hands on remote equipment.

And then—the takeoff. The most beautiful sight on Earth and the Heavens so they called it. Our tiny ship. Millions of eyes following us, whispering, praying. The oceans receding, the blackness engulfing us, until we were one with the infinite stars.

And then the wait.

While I sat on board growing hair, growing wrinkles, my nails getting longer and clipped, longer and clipped, humanity struggled again, relentless quarreling as they faced the collapse of its own empire as the seas threatened to engulf residences and land and the skies loomed with noxious gas. We thought of the fragments of catastrophe while trying to pass time calmly—hurricanes, vacillating temperatures, underwater cities. We were restless. It wasn’t just me, but the whole of the crew. It was going to be a long marriage; a sense of domesticity in the midst of the ever-present faint hum of anticipation, as well as constraining doom, that made all of us a little stir crazy.

My womb went from bleeding to productive again to obsolescence. While we flirted, made love, maintained our distances, fought, cohabited and uncohabited, interacted with one another in various ways in ten years, enough drama of seven people to last a lifetime, all the while I kept trying to conceive, my reproductive system made its way to its decline, until menopause