Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 180

By Neil Clarke, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Gregory Feeley 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 September 2021 issue (#180) contains:

• Original fiction by Ray Nayler ("Yesterday''s Wolf"), Ziggy Schutz ("It is a Pleasure to Receive You"), D.A. Xiaolin Spires ("Xiaolongbao: Soup Dumplings"), Robert Jeschonek ("Dog and Pony Show"), Regina Kanyu Wang ("The Winter Garden"), Gregory Feeley ("In a Net I Seek to Hold the Wind"), and Timons Esaias ("Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for Our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Julie Novakova and interviews with Nina Allan and Cat Rambo, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642360936

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 180

Table of Contents

Yesterday’s Wolf

by Ray Nayler

It is a Pleasure to Receive You

by Ziggy Schutz

Xiaolongbao: Soup Dumplings

by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Dog and Pony Show

by Robert Jeschonek

The Winter Garden

by Regina Kanyu Wang

In a Net I Seek to Hold the Wind

by Gregory Feeley

Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for Our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril

by Timons Esaias

Under Pressure: Life’s Last Dance?

by Julie Nováková

The Practice of Writing: A Conversation with Nina Allan

by Arley Sorg

5,000 Words a Day: A Conversation with Cat Rambo

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: Ten+ Years of Translation

by Neil Clarke

Vimana

Art by Daniele Gay

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2021

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Yesterday’s Wolf

Ray Nayler

They found the torn lamb in the gold spring grass, beside the gravel road. The flies had found it first. But the flies were still lazy and slow. Later in the season, when they found a feast like this, you would be able to hear them buzzing from a distance.

Elmira watched her brother Taalay and her father Nurlan from several meters off. She did not want to see the lamb. She had carried it to the summer pasture in a bag dangling from the side of her own horse. She did not feel like crying—this was not the first lamb she had seen destroyed by wolves—but she did not need to look at it, either. She looked instead at the small white coins of her family’s two yurts, higher up in the valley. Then at the herd, three hundred meters away, a pool of tan balls shifting from one grazing spot to another.

She could hear the bell on the neck of the goat they called Nursultan clanking. He was old, long a leader of sheep, slowly going blind in one eye.

She won’t be the last one we find this season, Elmira’s father said.

Arystan, the fat stupid shepherd dog, stood off on the other side of the road, wagging his tail slowly back and forth. His barking had, maybe, driven the wolves off so they did not finish their meal—but it hadn’t stopped them from killing the lamb.

What good are you? Taalay yelled at the dog. Why even feed you? He pretended to pick up a rock. Arystan danced off a few meters, then came back and stared at them hopefully, knowing eventually his incompetence would be forgiven.

Elmira’s father climbed into the battered old jeep and drove off to the village, the wooden slats of the trailer clacking behind.

Too bad you can’t reprogram that idiot dog. Taalay said to Elmira. He spat in the grass and walked off toward his horse.

You’re drunk.

I’m not.

I can smell you. Do you think I can’t smell you?

I only drank enough to be polite. I even poured some out on the ground. Do you think I want to drive these roads drunk?

Elmira lay underneath her sheepskin, listening to her father and mother outside the yurt. They always fought like this—in angry whispers just as audible as their regular voices.

Come and see it. Come over here, her father said.

What did you pay for that thing?

Nothing. They found it on their summer pasture. I used the winch to drag it out of a stream bed. Amir said I could take it away with me.

He was drunk.

"Yes. He was drunk."

He’ll want it back in the morning.

What for? He wouldn’t know what to do with it.

What to do with it? Sell it for scrap metal. What else would you do with it?

Elmira will know. Is she up?

She’s asleep. Leave her alone.

I’m up! Elmira shouted from inside the yurt. She was already out from under the sheepskin, pulling on her heavy quilted coat.

Her mother, Bermet, was standing near the trailer looking down at the thing. Elmira ran over.

What it looked like most was the skeleton of an enormous dog. Its body was still coated with dried mud, but its head must have been sticking out in the last rains, because that was almost completely clean. Its protruding visual arrays stared off at the mountains. Elmira examined it closely. Its limbs were all intact.

It’s just junk, her mother said. She looked at her daughter almost hopefully. It must be wrecked, otherwise they wouldn’t have just left it there.

A friend of mine found one of their armored vehicles last summer, just lying in a ditch, Elmira’s father said. It started right up, and he drove it home.

A friend of yours. Bermet stared at her husband.

A friend of a friend.

Well, at least you made it to town before getting into this nonsense. Elmira, get the rest of this unloaded while there’s still a little light left. I don’t know how we’re even going to get that thing off of there.

Elmira’s father looked at her. Is it broken? You’re the expert.

He was looking at her the way he always did when they were talking robotics, computers, anything technical. As if he were the child, and she were the parent.

Elmira’s father was confident in everything he did—but to him, tech was an incomprehensible, secret world. Elmira’s prowess with tech was magical, a power he bragged about constantly to his friends, and indulged in any way the family could afford.

This was just the latest of the treasures he had brought home for her. Over the years he had gathered old terminals with their screens cracked, wet and moldy programming guides from before the war, any dongle or wire or circuit board he came across. And in winter, in town, he was the one that loaded her up with credits so she could spend hours in the basement web café, practicing coding and designing new programs, viewing all the latest techvlogs while the neighborhood boys blew muscle-bound, armored avatars of one another to pieces in VR.

She can figure that thing out later, her mother snapped. Right now I need her help with real chores.

Elmira sat on Alatoo, watching the herd. There was a thin rain coming down, one of those mountain rains that kept turning to sleet and then back to rain, and she tightened the strings on the waxed hood of her poncho.

Alatoo shifted from one hoof to another, and Elmira patted her with a reddened hand.

I know you don’t like him. But he’s going to help us.

Arystan growled. He had been walking in circles around the horse, staying as far away from the herd and their new guardian as he could.

The sheep hadn’t liked their new guardian either, at first. But then Taalay put Arystan’s old collar on him, and that seemed to be enough. Now they treated it as if it were any other shepherd dog.

The goat Nursultan remained suspicious. He would occasionally stop and stare at the gaunt, black thing with one eye and then the other, as if trying to fit it in to at least one half of his goat brain.

Taalay had doubted her, and so had her mother, but her father had watched the process as if viewing a film, in which his daughter was the star. He’d circled around her for days with a small smile on his face, stopping in his work constantly to watch hers, waving her mother and brother off when they tried to distract her or enlist her for some other chore.

Recharging the battery was the trick: she needed to charge it just enough to bring the processor online so she could dump its old routines, and then load in the new ones. If she charged it too much—if it started moving before she got the old war routines out, who knew what would happen? So she took the whole thing inside one of the yurts, turning it into her workshop. She isolated its processor, disconnected it from the chassis, and worked on the new code while the diesel generator ran for three days, returning power to its core.

Once fully charged, she knew, it would run on its own for years, picking up power from the sun via the solar nanocrystals in its hardened, black coating, and from a dozen other systems. It even regained power from the impact of its feet on the earth.

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the kara itter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb. The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.

She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.

Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.

No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.

And he had. There was much howling and snarling for a few minutes, then nothing at all. In the morning, they found a jumble of tracks in the mud, and a few droplets of blood. Batyr was pacing the perimeter of the sheepfold, turning his sharp, pseudo-canine head side to side. Elmira thought he looked proud.

The sheep are all here, Bermet said.

But he didn’t kill any wolves, Taalay added.

I didn’t program him to kill wolves, Elmira said. Wolves are good. They balance the mountains. Without them even the rivers would not run as steady. Don’t you read anything?

Wolves are expensive, Taalay said.

Maybe so, their father said, But these are their mountains. And we are their guests.

I would like to give him a piece of meat, Bermet said. He has been such a good boy. Aren’t you a good boy, Batyr?

At his name, Batyr stopped and walked over to Bermet and sat in front of her. She took a step backward.

It’s okay, Elmira said, I programmed him to do that. Now say, ‘shake.’

Shake, Bermet said, after a moment of hesitation.

Batyr put a paw in the air, but she would not take it.

Maybe I’m just not ready yet, she said, and walked away. I better get breakfast started.

But her father came over and took Batyr’s paw in his hand. Arystan never learned that one.

At the sound of his name Arystan whined and turned a circle in the mud.

Elmira clapped, and Batyr went back to his patrol.

That had been in the morning. Now, in the sleet-rain of a cold day, Elmira sat on Alatoo, watching Batyr pace his line along the sheep herd.

She heard the sound of the car behind her, the smooth electric hum, its immaculate honeycomb tires on the road. She knew who it was, of course. But she did not turn.

They counted three hundred sheep, her father said.

They were all cross-legged around the cloth. Dinner was finished, and they were drinking green tea. The electric lantern light made Elmira’s father and mother look old.

But there aren’t three hundred, Bermet said. There are two hundred and ninety two.

They round up, Taalay said. That’s new this year. They round up to the next ten.

So they can take another sheep from us. On top of the ten percent they take.

Yes, Nurlan said. They’ll come for them in the fall. Thirty. And any lost from the flock between now and then is our own loss, of course.

It should be twenty-nine. Elmira protested. And counted at the end of the season. That’s how it was last year.

Yes, her father replied. But the year before that, it was only one out of every twenty.

And next year, they will count the sheepskin we sleep under as sheep. They will count our jackets, and our bowls, Taalay said, looking off into the dark as if he could still see their electric six-wheeler, somewhere out there.

They are the government, their father said. They take what they need.

"They take what they want, Bermet said. And they are not a government. Governments give you something for what they take. They give us nothing. They are a gang. They are the ones with guns and power, that is all."

They keep the others away, at least.

Others who are exactly like themselves.

No, Nurlan said.

Old. The lantern makes him look old. And Elmira was reminded that he had fought in the war. He never spoke about it—he was not like some of the others, who wore old parts of a uniform or a cap, so you knew they were veterans. He had put all that away, as if it never had been.

But it had been. Somehow the light of the lantern, which made everyone look a little aged, a little weaker, brought it out.

No, Nurlan repeated. There are others that are much, much worse. They will take everything, and not only the sheep.

After a while, Bermet said, Whoever is in power becomes just like the others. They are not like wolves: they do not eat only what they need. It takes time for the hunger in them to grow, but it always grows. Next year they will come for more than just sheep. Or perhaps even this year.

Are you all right?

Elmira didn’t know any other question to ask. She sat on top of the kurgan with her friend Jyrgal. Two years older than her, Jyrgal had been kidnapped the year before while walking home from her high school graduation ceremony. She had been forced into a car by a second cousin of hers and a boy who attended her school a year ahead of her.

That boy’s name was Eldar, and he was now her husband. Elmira watched him down below, standing in a circle of men talking with her father.

Elmira had come along with her father to talk about buying a yurt from this family, who lived a few summer pastures over from her. She had been surprised to see Jyrgal here.

Talking to her now, she felt like she was speaking with the ghost of someone she had once known. Jyrgal was not who she had been a year ago. She was pale, her face more oval now than the happy moon it had been when they went to school together. The bony tip of her chin was visible against the flesh. She kept her head angled away when speaking.

They are a family like any other family, Jyrgal said.

I don’t understand what you mean.

The mother-in-law is a mother-in-law. The father-in-law is a father-in-law. Eldar is a husband. The cousins are all as stupid and boring as cousins are. They are exactly like my own family.

Then—it isn’t so bad?

Now Jyrgal turned to face her. It was the first time she had made eye contact. Elmira had forgotten the color of Jyrgal’s eyes. They were amber with a ring of brown at the center. How could she have forgotten?

"They held me for three days, trying to force me to say yes. But I wouldn’t. They threatened to spread rumors about me. That they had . . . used me. But I wouldn’t give in. I knew my father and brother were looking for me. I knew they would find me. But Eldar’s family had taken me off to the mountains, and it would take time for them to come. All I had to do was hold out. Wait for them. I had hope."

But they didn’t come.

They did come. On the sixth day. With guns, and two cousins of mine. But by then, Eldar had forced himself on me. I was afraid to go back to my family. I had already agreed to a wedding.

You said they were just like any family. But how could a family do such a thing?

Ask my father, Jyrgal said. My mother was kidnapped when she was younger than me. She didn’t even finish school. Ask my brother—I hear he and two of his friends dragged a girl off last week. A freshman at the polytechnical university. I hear she has already agreed to a wedding. Most of us do.

I’m so sorry.

No, Jyrgal said. But you will be, if you don’t get out of here.

Driving home in the bouncing, creaking old jeep, Elmira was silent, staring out the window at the mountains, the new green of spring grass, the hoops of yurts going up. Here and there, a man on horseback, a lonely kurgan in the middle of a plain (and deep in that barrow, a skeleton that had once been a man on horseback).

There were scars from the war: a bomb-hole that had become a pond, a