Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 183

By Neil Clarke, Aimee Ogden, Meghan Feldman and 6 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 December 2021 issue (#183) contains:

• Original fiction by Aimee Ogden ("The Cold Calculations"), Meghan Feldman ("Beneath the Earth Where the Nymphs Sleep"), David Goodman ("Vegvísir"), Rich Larson ("You Are Born Exploding"),  Wang Yuan ("Other Stories"), E. N. Díaz ("Just One Step, and Then the Next"), and Amal Singh ("A Series of Endings").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Julie Novakova and interviews with Tarun K. Saint and Diana M. Pho, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642361032

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 183

Table of Contents

The Cold Calculations

by Aimee Ogden

Beneath the Earth Where the Nymphs Sleep

by Meghan Feldman

Vegvísir

by David Goodman

You Are Born Exploding

by Rich Larson

Other Stories

by Wang Yuan

Just One Step, and Then the Next

by E. N. Díaz

A Series of Endings

by Amal Singh

A Universe of Possibilities: Planets of Red Dwarfs

by Julie Nováková

Navigating the Seas of South Asian Diversity: A Conversation with Tarun K. Saint

by Arley Sorg

A Whole New Realm: A Conversation with Diana M. Pho

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: Worldcon Bound

by Neil Clarke

The Variable Man

Art by Douglas P. Lobo

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2021

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Cold Calculations

Aimee Ogden

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.

We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.

Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

Álvarez is standing beside the airlock as it cycles, pretending not to hear the girl cry.

If he acts like he can’t see her, can’t hear her, then at least he’s leaving her some dignity. Right?

As if there’s any dignity to be had in this godforsaken mess. As if it’s dignified to jump out of an airlock in nothing but a jumpsuit and your stockinged feet. As if anyone could have a reason to hold her head up high after she’s been told her dumbass little stowaway life is worth less than the razor-thin fuel margin that will safely decelerate this dropship when it reaches its destination.

The math is nauseatingly simple. There’s no other ship with a possible intercept course. There’s no other drop ship that can get the dying colonists at August Minor the nanotherapy antivirals they need. There’s no give in the physics of it all—only in the squishy human parts of the equation.

There’s still something wrong, here. Or, if not wrong, then at least not right. Álvarez just can’t put his finger on what, yet.

The airlock clanks; it’s fully dilated on this side, now. The kid blows her nose on her sleeve. Sharra. Her name is Sharra. She deserves the dignity of a name, at least. Thank you, she says. Her voice doesn’t break. God, how does her voice not break? For trying.

She’s walking to her death to save him, a man twice her age, and a bunch of colonists she’ll never meet, and she’s thanking him? This isn’t the big wrongness, the one that’s underlined every moment since he pulled her out of the nanotherapy storage capsule, but it’s a damned big one anyway. When she lets go of the loop and floats up toward the airlock, he grabs her by the sleeve—too hard—so that she bounces lightly against the inside hull of the drop ship. No, he says, into her too-close face. "No, fuck this. We’ll figure something out. We will."

That’s when she starts crying for real: not when she thinks she’s about to die, but when God sends something down the mountain and there’s still a chance it might be a ram. When the tears get too big, they float up from her face and pelt him, like rain in reverse. He grabs her and crushes her against him, and she cries like he thinks babies must cry before they get taught that pain is something to hide.

It’s not right, he says, into the top of her head. He never had kids—a drop ship pilot’s life is not exactly conducive to parenthood—but for a moment, this one, little dumbass stowaway that she is, is his kid, is every kid. We never should have had to make the—

—choice. Mollie Maggia’s sisters talk in whispers. In the back room of the little tenement apartment, Mollie is sleeping; Mollie is dying. "Money or health. Money or your life. The bastards. What else were we supposed to do?"

Their mother is at the stove, stirring the sauce for supper. Every now and then, she puts a hand in her pocket and fingers the pitted black tooth that lies at the bottom, the latest one collected from Mollie’s mouth. When she closes her eyes, she remembers the first time Mollie came home from the watch factory with a gleaming greenish smile. How they’d all exclaimed, how they’d laughed. My pretty girl, she’d said. So proud. Such a good living, such a good girl. My beauty.

She would take this pain away from her daughter and make it her own, if she could. She digs harder with her wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the pot, and doesn’t wipe away the sweat that rolls into her eyes. This is her daughter—and even if she wasn’t, even if she were someone else’s, good God, she’s only twenty-four, still a child. The spoon clatters to the floor and Mrs. Maggia leans against the kitchen wall. Who are they, the factory owners and foremen and faceless scientists in their white coats, to put this on her? Some man at a desk, totting up columns in his ledger: profit on this side, little girls’ lives on the other. Who gave them the right?

No one gave them the right. It’s something that they took. And it’s not something one woman can snatch back all on her own, not even when the little girl who had to die upon that time was her very own.

Armed only with the cheap-ass screwdrivers from the ship’s repair kit, Álvarez and the kid do their best to tear the drop ship apart. The ship wasn’t outfitted with the proper tools to be strip-mined from the inside out; hindsight is, as ever, a bitch. Together they chuck anything they can get out the airlock: cleaning supplies, every last scrap of food, Álvarez’s spare uniform and all of his bedding that can be torn loose from the wall. They even manage to rip up one of the metal panels lining the ship’s interior, one that hadn’t been screwed in squarely. The rest are flush and refuse to budge. The lone panel goes out the airlock anyway, one more piece of space junk. Hopefully it doesn’t become another drop ship’s urgent problem someday—but space is big, and the inside of the drop ship is small.

They do the math, with each piece of mass that goes flying off on a new career as interstellar jetsam. They crunch the numbers—and the numbers crunch back. It’s not enough. Not enough to add up to a single scrawny kid with her whole damn life ahead of her.

If he could flush the whole water system and run dry all the way into August Minor, that would be more than enough. But he can’t find a manual release, not on the hardware itself and not in the emergency handbook in his handheld, and there’s an emergency rationing shutoff if he tries to draw too much at once. Water water everywhere, and not a drop to sink.

I’ll do it, Sharra says, as he curses out the plumbing. Her tone is leaden; too bad he can’t throw that out the airlock. It’s my fault anyway. I wanted to see my mom and dad. They’ll die along with everyone else, if these supplies don’t get there in time. It’s fine.

"It’s not fine! He punches the water filtration unit, which does no harm other than sending him rebounding across the ship. Just let me think. There’s something I’m missing, I know it." There must be a way out. No one had to—

—die. Russayev mops his brow with a handkerchief as he and Yuri trudge together up the cement-block stairwell. They keep moving, their voices buried beneath the echo of their footfalls. It’s not safe to stop; every ear is always listening. It’s not safe to return to Russayev’s apartment; if the Party hasn’t bugged it yet, that’s due only to incompetence, not will.

"No one had to die. Yuri Gagarin is only thirty-four, and he moves heavily, like an old man. Guilt lays extra weight across his shoulders. When a man lays down his life for yours, that’s a weight you’ll carry the rest of your days. Vladimir Komarov knew what he was doing, who he was saving, when he stepped aboard the Soyuz-1. But he did anyway. We all knew the flight was doomed. They knew it too."

His lips barely move around the word they. Best not to say aloud who they are, to name a thing gives it power, and Yuri holds too little power already to surrender more. He keeps folders full of well-creased papers inscribed with pleas for his help: dear Comrade Gagarin, Esteemed Hero of the USSR; can he not pull the strings to secure an officer’s commission for this excellent young man, can he not see that this good daughter of the Fatherland be admitted to university despite her father’s Jewish heritage? Can he not snap his fingers and make medicine, food, housing rain down upon the comrades who esteem him so?

He cannot. He cannot, could not even when he had friends in the Politburo, and he has only enemies there now. Komarov died to save a hero of the Soviet Union who has never really existed.

He fumbles for a cigarette, but his pocket is empty. Russayev produces a pair, and they smoke in silence, finally still, as the air grays around them.

I should have done something else to keep him grounded, Yuri says, the words floating out of him on his smoky breath. Dangerous words, and the smoke does nothing to obscure the truth of them.

Russayev shakes his head, holding the smoke in. They had already made up their minds. The nebulous they again, an all-hearing hobgoblin invoked if his name is spoken thrice. No evidence could have changed that. There was nothing to be done. He claps Yuri’s shoulder firmly, briefly. Yuri has forgotten his jacket and Russayev’s hand is cold through his shirt. I should go.

He should. Yuri stays, sitting alone on the stairs, smoking until only ash remains. Ash, and doubt. Like guilt, doubt is a cruel master to bear for the rest of one’s life. But, Yuri knows, even then, he has not so much life left ahead of him that he cannot bear it, for a little while. His knuckles tap restlessly against the battered aluminum tread on the step.

Guilt is often all that’s left when what we should be feeling—anger—is an inconvenience to the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale.

The data refuse to make sense. Fucking rude, if you ask Álvarez.

He queries and re-queries his interface station, poring over the numbers, until his anxiously firing neurons finally strike a connection. The naughty data resolves into one vicious big picture. He knows what it is he’s been missing. Oh god, does he know what it is.

His jolt of hysterical laughter brings the kid’s head up. What? she demands. She bobs over his shoulder, almost hitting her head on the bulkhead, to peer at the interface. As if she can make heads or tails of the techno-jumble on the screen. What is it?

The launch, he says. "Christ. The launch. He highlights one particular figure in red. It’s not just the deceleration. There was extra mass on board when we were accelerating, too. Her blank, frightened face wakes an obscure anger in him. He swipes one arm hard, wiping away the calculation display. Even if I did push you out the airlock—fuck, I’m not going to do that, I said ‘even if I did’—there’s still not enough fuel left for me all on my own. The margin was razor-thin; the kind of margin you could cut yourself open on. He rides another wave of hysterical laughter into dissociation, into the euphoria of perfect understanding. We’ve been fucked since the get-go."

She stares at him. Her eyes are huge and dark in the big gray moon of her stupid sixteen-year-old face. I killed you, she says. I killed you. I killed you I killed you I—

She’s beating her own head and chest and shoulders with her fists, and Christ, Álvarez has never done zero-g wrestling before, let alone with somebody half his size whose dumbass head he would just as soon not split on the bulkhead, because if they’re both going to die out here, and they are, why the fuck should they have to do it alone?

When she’s calmer (which is certainly not to say calm), he produces a small plastic pouch from inside his flight suit. Her lips curls at the sight of it. That’s extra mass. It sounds like a curse word, the way she says it.

I know. I was planning to piss it out the airlock pretty soon here. He opens the outside lid and squeezes some of the liquid inside into his mouth, then offers it to her. She takes a tiny sip and gags, sending tiny spheres of whiskey into orbit around Álvarez. She shoves the flask back at him; he takes it with a shrug. Plastic-flavored liquor is better than none. It’s not really enough to take the edge off. It was meant to be a victory toast upon a successful touchdown, not an opportunity for self-medication. But it seems a damn shame to waste it.

I hate physics, she says as he takes another pull.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Gone already. The caramel flavor lingers on the back of his tongue. No, you don’t.

I’m allowed to hate the thing that’s killing me.

It’s not physics that’s killing us. He throws the empty pouch at the inside of the airlock door. It bounces off and spins lazily across the inside of the drop ship. It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash. Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—

—us? Ha Wan shouts into the railroad foreman’s face, so that his spittle flecks the man’s brown beard. Perhaps he would take a swing at the foreman, too; but with what? One of his arms terminates just below the elbow, the other at the narrow point of a wrist. Sweat crowns his forehead, and the sour stench of sickness clings to him, to the stained bandages on the stumps of his arms. There is a list, on the foreman’s table, of employees to be paid for their time. Ha Wan’s name is not on it. My family depends on me!

The foreman doesn’t speak Cantonese, and the fever has curtained off whatever part of Ha Wan the English words occupy. Would it matter, if the foreman understood him? What would that change? His countrymen pull him away from the table, before the foreman’s bully boys can intervene. They try to lead him back to his cot, but he pulls away before they can stuff him back inside the hot, half-dark tent. They do not follow as he stumbles out into the scrubby highlands. Each of them is exhausted, too, spirits hammered flat with every blow of their iron mallets, every blast of dynamite. And how far can he go, they ask themselves, alone, on foot?

Not far. Dizziness catches him first, then exhaustion, and he crashes knees-first into the side of a boxcar laden with lumber for the new line. Bright new lines of pain crawl up through the dull, enveloping ache, and the morphine haze; he has scraped his back on the rough metal. Two drops of blood strike the sandy soil. In the dust-scratched sunlight, they already look faded and brown. Ha Wan is only surprised that he has blood left to lose.

Alone, what difference can one human being make? More than you think. Change comes incrementally. This is a symphony—not a solo.

Álvarez is supposed to be sleeping. Instead, he and the girl drift in silence, separately. Less than sixteen hours out from August Minor now.

He thinks the kid’s asleep, her breathing uninterrupted by hitches and starts. A polyp of snot hangs by a thread from her upper lip, and her face looks sunken, dehydrated.

Grief is exhausting. But Álvarez isn’t tired. There’s an artery beating a staccato fringecore rhythm in his neck and an acid burn at the back of his throat. Periodically, he reminds himself that he absolutely cannot throw up right now.

He and the kid have fallen into opposing patterns, her spinning in place roughly clockwise, him counterclockwise. They’ve only known each other a little while, but there’s a strange sense of belonging here, this person inextricably tied to him over the course of