Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 193

By Neil Clarke, Lavie Tidhar, M. L. Clark 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 October 2022 issue (#193) contains:

Original fiction by Lavie Tidhar ("Junk Hounds"), Elaine Gao ("Coding Van Gogh"), Thomas Ha ("Fly Free"), M. L. Clark ("Lost and Found"), Alan Kubatiev ("Fly Free"), Chu Shifan ("Giant Fish"), Gregory Feeley ("The Secret Strength of Things (A Nikkei Legend)"), and Jared Oliver Adams ("Rondo for Strings and Lasergun").

Non-fiction includes an article by Julie Novakova, interviews with Marie Vibbert, Aleksandra (Ola) Hill, Kanika Agrawal, and Rowan Morrison, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Dec 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642361261

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 193

Table of Contents

Junk Hounds

by Lavie Tidhar

Coding Van Gogh

by Elaine Gao

Sweetbaby

by Thomas Ha

Lost and Found

by M. L. Clark

Fly Free

by Alan Kubatiev

Giant Fish

by Chu Shifan

The Secret Strength of Things

by Gregory Feeley

Rondo for Strings and Lasergun

by Jared Oliver Adams

Between Chaos and Order: The (Un)predictability of Evolution

by Julie Nováková

Switching Perspectives: A Conversation with Marie Vibbert

by Arley Sorg

Art and Kindness: A Conversation with Aleksandra (Ola) Hill, Kanika Agrawal, and Rowan Morrison

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: Sweet Sixteen

by Neil Clarke

Art Block

Art by Daniel Conway

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2022

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Junk Hounds

Lavie Tidhar

The walls were beige and you could see where the rust took hold. A tiny dead robot floated past Amir, feelers drooping. It was the same color as the walls and shaped like a grasshopper. Amir made a grab for it but a hidden maintenance duct sucked it up and it vanished with a soft, almost hungry pop. Other tiny robots crawled along the wall, attempting to repair a recent fracture.

The Heavenly Palace, a hundred years on from its grand opening. Once it was glorious. Now it was just another piece of floating junk.

Amir loved it. He loved the worn grooves in the floor and the faded carpets in the Stargazer’s Lounge. The whistle of the ivory balls in the old centrifugal roulette wheels and the way the bartender still mixed a martini like he was serving it to Neil and Buzz at the Oasis Hotel in Maspalomas after Apollo 11 came back from the Moon. The Heavenly Palace was a junk hound’s Mecca, and if one day the owners decided to stop boosting it and doom it at last to the inevitability of orbital decay, you could bet Amir and every other junk hound in Low Earth Orbit would be swarming over the spoils like locusts.

He wondered uneasily if Aya would be there. He hadn’t seen her since before the start of his bad-luck streak.

What do you want to do? Woof said. Woof was a dog. She trotted next to Amir in her little magnetic boots: head too big for her body, thin pipes trailing from her skull to her second brain, buried under muscle, skin, and fur. She stopped and scratched herself halfheartedly.

We still have time before they finish setting up, Woof said.

"I want to see what everyone else’s got," Amir said.

We don’t even have a table, Amir, Woof said.

They had a meager haul, it was true. Amir hated to admit it. Low Earth Orbit was too crowded, there were too many amateurs getting into haulage and salvage, there were more junk storms recently, there was . . .

Bad luck, that’s all it was. You got a run of it and it could wipe you out clean. He and Woof were down on their luck and dangerously low on funds. The Domestic Entropy was docked against the Heavenly Palace and it was badly in need of maintenance. They needed money but didn’t even have anything to sell at the Rummage—if they didn’t get lucky soon then one or both of them would have to get an honest job.

Amir shuddered. He’d done odd jobs before to pay the bills. He was a croupier at the Floating Dragon Casino once for over a year. A year stuck without the freedom to move at will through space. A year with the monotony of the same landmarks passing under you at the same time, sixteen sunrises and sunsets a day, the same bland buffet food day in and day out, rude gamblers and mean shift supervisors, the same canned music playing everywhere you went. He never wanted to hear a Muzak version of Space Odyssey or Life on Mars ever again.

After a year he’d saved enough to get the Entropy out of hock and pay for the repairs. But he swore he’d never go back after that.

I need a pee, Woof announced.

You want me to take you out for a walk? Amir said.

You’re a funny guy, Woof said. She tottered to the bathroom (canines), a modesty screen hiding the suction cups. Amir headed to the Rummage. The Grand Ballroom of the Heavenly Palace hosted free-fall dances and (so rumor had it) more than one zero-G orgy in its time. Now it had the same faded feel as the rest of the giant habitat. Tables had been bolted down to the floor and lethargic staff were setting up for the exhibitors. Magnetized holders provided purchase for the currently empty displays.

Amir scanned the room, searching for familiar faces. His heart sank when he spotted a group of scruffily dressed scavengers at one end. Too late—their boss spotted him, grimaced, and gestured him over. Amir went reluctantly.

Helmut, he said.

Amir. Didn’t think you’d show up.

Helmut Blobel of Helmut’s Haulage was tall, stooped, and smelled faintly of disinfectant.

We have two tables, he said.

Yeah? Amir said.

You find anything recently, Amir?

The other scavengers smirked.

I have a few things, Amir said.

Yeah? Like what? An original Long March satellite? Laika’s collar?

The other scavengers laughed.

Very funny, yes, Amir said.

Speaking of Laika, where’s your partner? Helmut said.

She’s around somewhere, Amir said. So what have you got, Helmut?

Not like he needed to ask. Everyone’d heard of Helmut’s latest haul. How he got to know about it or how he even made it there nobody really knew. Somewhere in Mid Earth Orbit and smack in the middle of the Van Allen Belt with all the radiation that entailed—only a desperate salvager or a crazy one went in there for too long without proper shielding.

It was worth it, though. A nearly intact, centuries old LOE pleasure cruiser—the sort they carried the early tourists around in to take in the views. How it survived, or how it drifted that high up, was a mystery. The story Amir heard was that it got an indirect boost from some old explosion, but that was just a theory. Now Helmut had it—intact internal fixings and all.

This and that, Helmut said, falsely modest.

Nice score, Amir said, hating to hand over the compliment.

Got a buyer already, Helmut said, bragging now. Wants to re-equip it and put it back into use, you know, take sightseers on a vintage cruise like in the olden days and all that. Sit in the exact same seat some historical figure sat in. That sort of thing.

All they’re gonna see is junk, Amir said.

Just then he spotted Woof coming in and so he left Helmut and his haulers with some relief. They had a right to brag, he thought. They made a score and it was good. But when would be his time again? He felt restless suddenly. Why did he even come to the Rummage this time? It was not like he had anything good to sell. He should be out there, in orbit, where more and more junk accumulated every day and fortunes could be made.

They give you a hard time? Woof said.

A little, Amir admitted.

Don’t let them get to you. Woof wagged her stump of a tail. Our next score is just around the corner, I can feel it.

You’ve been saying that for months, Amir said, feeling defeated. This wasn’t like him, he thought. A junk hound was naturally optimistic. You had to be, in this line of work. It wasn’t a job, it was a calling. He still remembered the first time he saw a piece of real space junk. Still a kid, still on Earth, with its impossible rain that just fell from the skies, its profusion of flowers and streetside hawkers selling every manner of food, its myriad of smells—cumin-spiced lamb turning on a grill, frangipani, rose water, and clove cigarettes. Busy crammed streets, bicycle bells ringing, hawkers shouting, a thousand pieces of colorful cloth and batiks moving in the wind, monks chanting, mosques calling, church bells ringing, the buzz of low-flying drones, and the whisper of cleaner robots scuttling underfoot.

He didn’t miss Earth, only sometimes he dreamed of it still. He hadn’t been back down the gravity well in twenty years.

Back then, running through the market, he came across a hidden shop buried in the shadows of an indoor mall and stopped, astounded. Cheap trinkets adorned the walls, flags for vanished empires: USSR, CCP, USA—stars and stripes, sickles and hammers, yellows and reds, blues and whites. The shop was dim and a cheap plastic globe on the floor projected moving images of planets on the walls. Behind glass shelves lay mysterious objects whose purpose Amir could not even begin to guess.

An elderly figure behind the counter sorted metal tokens into plastic boxes.

What are these? Amir said.

Coins, the owner said. He looked up irritably. His thin wispy hair was white, his colorful shirt decorated in Dragon modules and NASA mission patches. A name badge said he was called Mr. Ng. Old coins. People used to buy stuff with them.

How? Amir said. He knew nothing back then.

You just handed them over, Mr. Ng said. See this one? It’s Roman.

He handed it to Amir. The coin felt heavy. It was little more than a metal slug, with just the hint of a human profile still visible on one side.

Trajan, maybe, Mr. Ng said, answering an unspoken question. It’s hard to tell for sure. He put his hand out for Amir to give him back the coin. He was one of the Five Good Emperors.

Is it expensive? Amir said. He was reluctant to give back the coin. Tried to imagine an old woman rummaging in a purse to pay for a loaf of bread in some age so long ago that they still used physical money.

This one is, Mr. Ng said, and he firmly took back the coin and put it away. But not because it’s old. The Romans minted a lot of coins for a very long time, you know.

Amir didn’t know, of course.

So why is it expensive? he said.

Mr. Ng said, Because it was flown.

There was something reverent in the way he said the last word. Amir didn’t understand it, but the magic of it was there. The dim light and the moving planets on the wall, the smell of rust, the cough of an ineffectual fan struggling to move the still air around, all combined in some way to make him forget where he was . . .

Flown where? Amir said.

It means it was in space, Mr. Ng said. Someone took it up in the old days on a rocket, and then brought it back down with them again. Flown objects are expensive. Well, they were once, anyway. Now everyone can go up to space.

I’ve never been to space, Amir said.

If you had a car you could just point it up at the sky and be in orbit in half an hour driving, Mr. Ng said. It’s only just up there. So close you can almost touch it . . . The place where the world ends and the universe begins. He sounded wistful.

I’ve never been, either, he said.

All this stuff? Amir said. It’s from space?

Almost all, yes, Mr. Ng said. I have some replicas, of course. Mission patches and so on. Plus meteorites. Just rocks from space. Oh, and gold. Did you know all our gold came from space? Every ring, every bracelet, the gold in the circuit boards of old machines . . . All of extraterrestrial origin. Are you going to buy anything, kid?

I don’t have any money, Amir said.

Well, come back when you do, Mr. Ng said.

Amir shook off the memory. Woof was growling at some unseen insectoid repair robot. Woof was ex-military. She’d been a sniffer dog in another life. There weren’t that many augmented dogs around and even fewer in space.

Stop barking, Amir said.

I can’t help it, Woof said. I’m a dog.

She looked up innocently at Amir.

What were you thinking about? she said.

My first real score, Amir said.

He’d gone back to Mr. Ng’s shop after that first visit. Finally he bought something—a golf ball from the Shepard Golf Course (eighteen holes) in the lunar highlands. It was named after Alan Shepard, the first person who played golf on the Moon. Now the golf course regularly sold branded balls to Earth collectors. Amir had put everything he had into buying that single item.

Then he turned it around and sold it to a collector in Djibouti at almost double the price. After that he never looked back.

Shepard, right, Woof said. You told me that story a thousand times already.

It’s a good story, Amir said.

I don’t care much for golf, Woof said. Come on, let’s get a drink.

Amir followed Woof to the Stargazer’s Lounge. The bartender mixed drinks. Amir ordered a martini and a beer for Woof. Woof liked beer. They could hardly afford the prices round here but it was worth it for the view. Windows opened on all sides of the room. Earth passed below, blue and white, enormous, like an eye that stared right into your soul. Beyond it was space itself—an endless ocean of dark silence speckled with an infinity of stars.

Then there was the moon, hanging in the sky in monochrome like in an old photograph, and the bright flashes of rocket stages as they climbed up the gravity well. It all looked so beautiful, and there were no junk storms just then. They had their own beauty, Amir thought. But other people didn’t see it that way.

Woof barked.

What? Amir said. He sucked on the martini he couldn’t afford. It was served in a suction bulb. You could brew alcohol anywhere, even in space. And the olives came from the garden belt satellites that circled the Earth replete with solar-powered hydroponics.

Woof barked again.

Aya at three o’clock, she said.

"Aya? What’s Aya doing here?" Amir said.

Hello, Amir.

She perched with her elbows on the bar next to him. Short-cropped hair the color of rust, eyes that looked at him like at a chart of moving objects in orbit.

Aya, Amir said. You’re here for the Rummage?

I figured I’d find you here, Aya said.

You were looking for me?

She smiled—just a tiny bit.

Heard you had a bad run, she said.

Well, you know how it is, Amir said.

I do.

He saw something in her eyes. The smile—Aya didn’t smile often. He felt excitement stir inside him.

You have something, he said.

I could smell it! Woof said. She fastened her jaws on her beer bowl’s spout and drank. This is good, she said.

I might have something, Aya said. "How is the Domestic Entropy?"

Flight-ready, Amir said. "You do have something!"

Maybe, Aya said. Talk after the Rummage? I still have to buy a few things for the Institute.

Amir nodded. Aya touched his shoulder briefly.

It’s good to see you, she said. Then she was gone.

She still likes you, Woof said. It’s a shame you . . .  She didn’t finish the thought.

Junk hounds don’t mix with junk hounds, Amir said.

She’s not a junk hound, Woof said.

Oh, on that one you’re wrong, Woof, Amir said.

And they left it at that.

Junk hounds come from anywhere. Attracted by history and its financial remuneration, they scavenge and pilfer with no care for the strata and context of their finds.

That was what Aya always used to tell him. Aya was an archaeologist. A pretty good one, too, he had to admit. She worked for the North Australian Alice Gorman Institute of Advanced Space Archaeology. He first met her at a Rummage when she was just a newbie fresh off-Earth.

Most archaeologists saw junk hounds as a necessary evil at best. Low Earth Orbit was too crowded. Frequent collisions, abandoned orbitals, and decaying satellites created a field of debris only a junk hound would be stupid enough to willingly go into.

Aya was different. Amir saw it the first time they met. Not the way she looked at the displays, which was professional, detached, evaluating items with a quiet expertise. But the way she looked at the junks.

He’d taken her to the port side of the Heavenly Palace. Observation windows set into the walls showed the docked ships—the junks, so called less for the historical connection with sailing ships than for their overall appearance. Junk-hound ships were a lot like junk hounds themselves: rusted, beat up, and constantly patched together with whatever was to hand.

Amir saw the way Aya looked at them. That dreamy gaze that meant a junk hound could look at another and recognize them instantly.

She wanted to be out there, he knew.

She wanted