Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 187

By Neil Clarke, Thoraiya Dyer, Leonard 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 2022 issue (#187) contains:

• Original fiction by Thoraiya Dyer ("Doc Luckless and the Stationmistress"), Leonard Richardson ("Two Spacesuits"), Greg Egan ("Dream Factory"), Pan Haitian ("Hanuman the Monkey King"), Beth Goder ("An Expression of Silence"), Martin Cahill ("An Urge To Create Honey"), and Parker Ragland ("The Carrion Droid, Zoe, and a Small Flame").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Julie Novakova, interviews with Rachel Cordasco and Djuna, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642361148

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 187

Table of Contents

Doc Luckless and the Stationmistress

by Thoraiya Dyer

Two Spacesuits

by Leonard Richardson

Dream Factory

by Greg Egan

Hanuman the Monkey King

by Pan Haitian

An Expression of Silence

by Beth Goder

An Urge To Create Honey

by Martin Cahill

The Carrion Droid, Zoe, and a Small Flame

by Parker Ragland

Finding Endor: The Quest for Habitable Exomoons

by Julie Nováková

A Whole World of SFF: A Conversation with Rachel Cordasco

by Arley Sorg

Unpredictable Changes and Surprises: A Conversation with Djuna

by Gord Sellar and Jihyun Park

Editor's Desk: Looking Ahead, 2022 Edition

by Neil Clarke

Ashes

Art by Yuumei

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2022

clarkesworldmagazine.com

Doc Luckless and the Stationmistress

Thoraiya Dyer

A plague flag flutters from the houseboat’s prow as it half-motors, half-drifts toward the dark side of the lake.

Harald hastily pokes the last of his jellyfish breakfast into his mouth, chopsticks trembling.

Always trepidation, first, followed by a deep sense of failure if things don’t go to plan. If he can actually help the patient, he feels relief.

Never happiness or satisfaction.

Only relief.

It wasn’t always like this.

Harald watches the gap close between the houseboat and his trawler. Glassy reflections of gray sky with slivers of deep green soon turn to a rippled chessboard. It’s as if the two metal hulls race to exchange secret information in advance of any human meeting. On a higher tech planet, they might.

They call him Doc Luckless, but they still come to him, because he’s the only registered doctor on Lake Endless. Artificial medics were banned from Gaviota when the Angries took over, and the sabotaged red rattler at the Station, that portal to other worlds, has been a one-way trip for the past seventeen years.

No way in.

One way out.

Two, if you count dying.

Things are worse than they were, but not so bad that Harald’s been tempted to pay the fare for the Stationmistress to dispatch him via the rattler. Escape Option A. Lake Endless is his home. He would prefer to eventually depart via Escape Option B, in a few decades time, may the whales relish his bones.

A bit of blue jelly sticks in Harald’s teeth.

The houseboat reduces speed. The plague flag droops. Four covered guns are bolted to the railings, with four extra-large life jackets fixed beside them. Yet, when Harald ties a pumice buoy to the second line extending under the lake surface to his southernmost mooring and tosses it toward the sluggish arrival, it’s a skinny, stumbling woman with one lock of white hair who emerges from the cabin to hook the buoy and secure the boat. She does this with her right hand. A staring, bowlegged seven year old dangles from her left hand.

Not trauma, then.

No more than all of them are traumatized by life, anyway.

You’re deficient, Doc Luckless tells Guro, the mother, in Vitamin D. You and Etty both. On Earth, fish are a suitable supplement, but here, neither Gaviotan whales, nor the lakeweed they graze on, can help with this.

The three sit around his scarred turpentine table, sharing a meal provided by Harald.

Etty turns out to be twelve, not seven. Easy mistake to make, on the Lake.

Guro holds up the glistening strings of shredded blue jellyfish and frowns at them.

But I thought—

Etty interrupts with the rhyme.

Jelly glows blue, good for you! Jelly glows green, petrol for machine!

Yes, Etty, Harald says, that’s still true. Blue jellies have all the nutrition a human body needs. But when we eat only jellies, we also need sunlight.

Two dirty blonde heads turn to peer through the porthole at the sunlit side, the northern side, of Lake Endless, and Harald can’t help but mimic them. Even as they rest at anchor, the lapping flow of the lake water tugs the houseboat and the trawler on their rusted chains further south, deeper into the shadow of the sheer, gray spikes of the seven-pointed crown.

Can I see your emergency flares? Etty asks. Her face turns dreamy. I won’t shoot them. They’re very colorful. Like angels come to life. Like if stars came to visit.

In the distant sunlight, the surface glitters.

Angries are over there, Guro mutters, lowering her chopsticks.

Angries in their solar-powered speedboats, smashing tech that isn’t theirs, stealing children for their scripture-based schools. Harald gets a pass on the sunny side because he’s the doc. Even Angries need surgery sometimes. Plus, he’s got no children for them to steal.

Did they kill Etty’s father? Harald asks.

Worse, Guro says. He’s one of them.

When they’ve gone, Harald pulls on a buoyancy wet suit and floats beside his ship on Lake Endless, as passive as the trawler and its wind-powered mechanical catcher and sorter.

It strains the jellies from the lake, spinning the heavier green jellies directly into the fuel tank of the engine. The blue jellies go to the larder.

Through the water and the suit material, the sorter sounds like whales swallowing and excreting.

Calm and slow.

Not like gasping scorpion people dying of acidemia. Not like the howling of wind through bone-dry clay houses.

Harald sighs deeply, rising with the inflation of his lungs and then sinking like a melting iceberg with the exhalation.

To be a jelly would be to have no thought for past or future.

But also, to be helpless in the face of wind and flowing water.

After sunset, Harald falls asleep to the recorded sounds of Earth whale song. Unlike Gaviotan whales, who learned to sing human songs back to the new arrivals, Earth whales never gave a shit what songs their humans sang. They sang to one another, until the genetically engineered jellies that were supposed to save the planet from plastic pollution took over the oceans instead.

Earth whales are all dead.

But Harald’s lived on Lake Endless for long enough that the local whales have started to mimic the recordings. Three years ago, when the twin supernovas were visible in the night sky like a pair of pink eyes, was when he first heard the Gaviotan beasts joining in.

They serenade his sound player as if Harald was singing to them, himself, even as his eyelids slide closed.

Harald’s eyelids slide open.

Everything’s white and cloudy, until his third eyelid slides across, and a chitinous face with burnished bronze cheekplates and double-articulated mandibles flickers into clarity.

Grandmother, whispers the face.

Harald feels his own confusion, but also, somehow, disappointment cut by a quiet thrill, because he’s Palma, grandmother of Gupalma—which means descendent-of-Palma in Akranian—and although she seems to be awake again, which means she hasn’t died, Palma is going to die soon, and depart Akranes for heaven, which is exciting.

In heaven, water droplets float around in the air.

There’s nothing to lift, in heaven. No need for augmented scorpion claws designed for off-world hard labor.

Even Palma’s body will be weightless.

Hello, Gupalma, Palma says, her mandibles stiffened with dust, like the jamb of a sandstorm-scoured, centuries-old front door, so that every spoken word is painful. Help me up. There’s work to do.

For thirty years, Palma has maintained the town’s underground water supply. There, blue jellies are used to clean the water of organic pollutants, but not eaten, as they are incompatible with scorpion biology.

The artificial doctor ordered you to rest, Grandmother, Gupalma answers earnestly.

That brain-in-a-box! What does it know?

Heat and hurt, like lightning, lance through Palma’s spine and claws—internal and external skeleton—as she curls up to sitting, but she welcomes it. Every crack of pain is a drumbeat welcoming her to the next life.

You’ll work yourself to death, Grandmother! Gupalma cries.

Yes, dear, Harald/Palma thinks. That’s the whole idea.

Underground, the blue jellies fluoresce majestically in the stone cisterns. Palma stirs them with great paddles, churning oxygen into the subterranean sea.

When it’s time to go back up the black steps to the city, Palma’s legs seize. She stumbles into the stairwell, instead, her bent back against stone, wheezing the welcome, damp air.

I will just rest here for a moment.

Her third eyelid clouds the caverns, an eclipse that precedes the proper closing of her eyes.

Harald’s eyes shoot wide open.

He rolls out of his low bunk and curses thickly when his face hits the floor.

That great sail of a nose! his now-dead, small-nosed father who taught him how to sail the sulfuric acid sea on Haey had laughed.

Harald tends his bloody nose on autopilot as his mind tries to make sense of the dream.

I was on Akranes.

A planet he’s never actually visited, but easily able to recognize from the films.

His waking nightmares are bad enough. He doesn’t need to walk among scorpions in his sleep as well. But this was so oddly specific.

Did I ever treat a patient called Palma? With a granddaughter called Gupalma?

Shaking it off, he moves the trawler to a ripple of water against a horseshoe-shaped rock, on the sinuous line between light and dark, where message bottles thrown in on the sunny side of Lake Endless accumulate.

Haey is the place. Not Akranes. Haey is the planet where I failed them. Why not have nightmares about Haey?

A green bottle rests wetly against the rock. Precious glass. The Stationmistress doesn’t even need to write a message on a torn corner of a book page to summon Doc Luckless.

Only the Angries still have unbound paper, anyway.

Harald lifts the bottle by its slender neck out of his scoop net, letting the slightly salty water drip.

Letting it slide away, like the lubrication of tears against lids.

Got something in my eye, the Stationmistress says.

When?

Few days ago, now. That really windy afternoon.

Harald holds her eye open with a hairy-knuckled hand. His sun-ravaged skin is the color of corned beef from his decades on Haey. Meanwhile, the Stationmistress, Deen, delicate, her skin blue-black, wears a long white glove on her left arm that covers her from fingertips to heart. Her eye is inflamed, with conjunctivitis and aqueous flare.

But he’s distracted by the dream. He’s remembering his life on Haey, where computers were the best doctors, and every diagnosis he made was wrong or incomplete. But the scorpion people who labored at the Station preferred him, because he was kind.

Fake Doc can’t tell me to get well soon and mean it!

Then one day a traveler brought a virus, and when Harald recognized the symptoms, he felt that comforting glow of certainty. He could fix this.

He could fix it with an IV infusion that had as a side effect a temporary metabolic acidosis. In humans, compensatory respiratory alkalosis could have kept the patient’s blood pH in a range compatible with survival. Unfortunately, gas exchange in scorpion people was less efficient and the laborers all died of acidemia. He should have known.

An artificial computer would have known.

First, do no harm.

To escape the shame, Doc Luckless fled to Gaviota.

His birth body had been consumed by the heat of observation in the red rattler at Haey Ninth Colony Station. Roughly three years later, his particles, right down to his thought processes, had been reconstructed in the rattler kept by Gardenia Breeze in the heat-shielded heart of her floating Station on Lake Endless.

So long ago.

Harald arrived a full ten years before Deen sent her daughter, Nunuz, through to Eye Station, on Kvivik, the water world, to train as a Stationmistress herself.

Thirteen years before Angries sabotaged the Gaviotan rattler from the other side, so that Nunuz could never—can never—come back.

Doc Luckless can’t even be sure the rattler’s element tanks have enough in them to print a whole person anymore. Angries stopped short of pillaging the tanks and setting fire to the floating Station. Something in their scriptures about portals to heaven. About the Stationmistress being an intermediary, some sort of ethereal guide.

Ow, rebukes the ethereal guide as Harald tests her intraocular pressure.

Something outside the Station makes a faint tick-tick-tick sound.

Can’t see a foreign body, Doc Luckless says quietly. But there’s trauma to the eye. Bathe it in lake water, Deen. Six times a day. Stay inside. Protect it from light.

They’d slept together, once. Seventeen years ago. She’d done it to stop him from crying. Faced with a bawling, fully grown man, instead of fetching water and asking about feelings, as Harald had been trained to do, Deen had peeled off all her clothes except for the glove and gripped him like an ultrasound probe with her other, bare hand, wielding his intimate organ with compassionate but clumsy determination.

He hadn’t stopped crying, not for good, but he’d been grateful to her.

Would always be grateful.

He’d gifted her the only book he’d brought with him, a copy of Sindre’s Exile, and she’d added it to her tiny library on the silky oak shelf with such a glow around the eyes that, although he sneaks the yellowed poems out to read sometimes, when she’s too busy maintaining the rattler to notice, he won’t allow her to give the pages back to him.

The poisoned air/ I cannot sing/ the mouth a still/ vestigial thing. I mocked a Lord of blood and waste/ He fed me to his sharks/ My body wasted by this throw/ through myriad of darks.

It was never payment. It was just doing what he could, in darkness, to show another person something bright.

The Stationmistress pays him now, for the medical consultation, with a coil of strong lakeweed rope and a single teaspoon of sugar-filtering lake sponge. They live in a world of brine. Sweetness is a gift. He’ll keep the sponge safe until the solstice.

Tick-tick-tick.

The hell is that sound? Deen demands.

They spill out onto the deck of the Station, at the closest point to where Doc Luckless tethered his trawler. Something has floated south. Something facedown and skinny, with one lock of white hair among streams of dirty blonde.

The ticking sound is Guro’s dead body, trying to get stuck in the inlet of his boat’s jelly scoop.

Her throat is cut.

Angries are over there, Guro had said, staring at the sunlit side.

And Doc Luckless had insisted that she go there.

Nobody should ever listen to me, he tells Deen.

No crying, Deen warns, her fierce grip on his arm. Or you’ll have to endure my inept banging. She hesitates. Help me put her into the separator. I finally pissed enough nitrates to fuel it. The Stationmistress’ grip falters. Her voice shakes. One day, Guro’s elements may be reassembled, and help somebody else to live.

Somebody. She means Nunuz.

She thinks Nunuz will one day repair the rattler from the Kvivikian side, and return to Gaviota from heaven, shining like an angel.

Like if stars came to visit, the child, Etty, had said.

I’ll help you, Doc Luckless says.

Can I see your emergency flares?

After Guro’s body is secure in the separator, Harald searches Lake Endless ’til nightfall. He burns every last drop of liquefied green jelly.

But there’s no sign of the houseboat or of Etty.

Harald/Palma’s eyes slide closed/open.

Mammalian lashes and scorpion third eyelid.

This continuing, uneventful scorpion-woman dream is irritatingly chronological/ This human man lurks inside my head now whenever I’m awake and lucid, they think briefly, before