Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 197

By Neil Clarke, Yukimi Ogawa, Gu Shi 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 February 2023 issue (#197) contains:

• Original fiction by Yukimi Ogawa ("The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water"), Samantha Murray ("Somewhere its about to be Spring"), Eric Schwitzgebel ("Larva Pupa Imago"), R. P. Sand ("An Ode to Stardust"), Gu Shi ("Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition"), James Castles ("Silo, Sweet Silo"), and Amal Singh ("Going Time").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Douglas F. Dluzen, interviews with Kelly Barnhill and Ian McDonald, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642361346

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 197

Table of Contents

The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water

by Yukimi Ogawa

Somewhere, It’s About to Be Spring

by Samantha Murray

Larva Pupa Imago

by Eric Schwitzgebel

An Ode to Stardust

by R. P. Sand

Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition

by Gu Shi

Silo, Sweet Silo

by James Castles

Going Time

by Amal Singh

The Expanding Repertoire of the Gene

by Douglas F. Dluzen

Nonexistent People in Worlds Unobserved: A Conversation with Kelly Barnhill

by Arley Sorg

Joy and Wonder: A Conversation with Ian McDonald

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: 2022 Reader’s Poll Finalists

by Neil Clarke

Harvest II

Art by Arthur Haas

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2023

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water

Yukimi Ogawa

Something, somewhere in her body, quietly crumbles.

The dust slowly spreads over the water, the momentum of the collapse pushing it away, the trapped words of commands and programs breaking free—those which used to give her existence a meaning. She is smaller and lighter than she was when she landed on this planet. The lost weight does not include the person who inhabited her, of course. That is just too painful to count.

You love your cupboard. There are many shelves in this place, all of them built by the curator, all of them a little bit wonky one way or the other. But this tiny piece of furniture is the only thing that actually belongs to you. The leftmost bottle on the top tier contains the first driftage that you’ve ever retrieved. To your eye, on that day on the beach, the thing looked like a very large, thick scale, as if it had come off some giant magical fish, the color of labradorite without the schiller. You ground and used half of the scale, so now the remaining lump looks like a carelessly varnished nail of a giantess.

You blended the ground scale with the sea water and used the paste to cover the scar in the painting called Still Life with a Half-Dead Vertebra because the color was a perfect match to the shadowed part of the bone.

The next box on the shelf contains another scale, just a little bit smaller than the first one. This one, you peeled off in layers. Some of them were too fragile used alone, so you had to take a few and find the right combination—for appearance, for strength, and processability. The resulting sheet and the flakes thereof kept changing colors, which was suitable for patching the grazed skin of the sculpture The Transforming Mountain. That poor thing had had a very dull spot for ages, you were really happy the artifact was finally properly resurrected.

She realizes she can now control the currents. She doesn’t know when that happened. At first it was just the water around her. Now she feels her influence going far, far away, and she wonders if it’s covered the entire planet. She’s not sure how she can even find that out.

Another part of her hull falls off with a boom that only she can hear.

She makes sure the peeled part catches the right flow, makes sure it reaches your beach. You know only one beach. You do not have legs strong enough to carry yourself to other beaches. This slab holds some of her core consciousness on it, as well as some strings of a command. She loses a little again. She can afford it, she’s huge.

You know only one beach, the beach made of unfamiliar words that don’t make sense to you. You keep trying—you repaired a lot of the artifacts here ever since, because you know that’s what he would have wanted you to do. Ever since you became the only one left here who can do the work. Sometimes you turn the scale into liquid, sometimes even gas. Into whatever can be used for filling the hole, reconnecting the severed tendons on the artifacts that the curator so loved. When you found an especially large, especially thick and robust scale, you hammered it flat and cut it into pieces and used them to fill the cracked windows of the building you sometimes call home, sometimes the museum. You polished the panels until they shone. You did not want to expose the artifacts to the sun, but now the windows reflect the harmless lamplight that reaches all over the place from the installation Truth Is Out of Your Reach, the feature of the museum, to a set of jewelry collectively titled The Dilemma, the least popular but the curator’s favorite.

Once, you even tried to mend the curator. You knew he wouldn’t wake up, even before you started the work. His meat was long gone, only the cranky pile of his bones sitting on his favorite chair. You ended up using some leftover paste of the ground scale to polish the wooden parts of the chair. You left the stain of his rotten meat on the cushion untouched.

You look around and absently place your hand over your chest.

As the only mobile being on this little globe, you have lasted quite well, but nothing can last forever. There emerged a hollow inside your chest one day. You are not sure how long ago, and at first the hollow was so tiny you thought you could afford to neglect it, even. It got deeper somehow and started to hurt. You wish someone would mend you, because trying to mend yourself is a little too depressing. You wish you’d find a very, very good scale to fill that hollow, at the very least.

At the beach you dip your toes into the water and marvel at the coolness. The water is full of words that she used to contain inside her, that used to contain her, and they are now spread too far to make any sense, except, they still know they are words and still know how to connect with each other. They detect the words inside you and try to connect with them, but those inside you reject those outside, because those inside you are much more complicated, and they immediately understand that those outside just cannot belong inside.

The very few crumbs of words that somehow manage to get into you can do almost nothing, of course, other than embracing the long-forgotten programs in the long-forgotten storage area inside you, just beside the hollow in your chest. The resulting combinations of syllables are almost nonsensical, all they can do is wail, screaming your desperation, your desire, back out into the sea.

She is just about to send out the tip that broke off one of her stabilizers over the water because the tip is just the right size for the hollow inside your chest. Even the excess part that will protrude the hollow will look very pretty. Then she hears the echoes of her own distant words laced with your hunger from ashore and thinks twice.

She pushes a twisted bearing out instead.

Because perhaps, if she could invade the museum first, without your realizing, more of her words may find their way into you eventually.

One day you realize your family sometimes glows at night. Even The Music Sheet Pretending to Be an Empty Canvas that’s right across from the bright window. Which is ridiculous—the scales on your shelves never glow. Sometimes you imagine they have established a new language, using the glows. You ask them what they are talking about. They don’t answer, not in the language you understand.

You feel death, or something similar to it, creeping your way every day, as the hollow grows inside you. Why are you the only one left to death, while your family are merrily conversing among them? You know you need to do something, but none of the things that wash up your beach feel good enough for you.

You deserve a very, very good scale, you know for certain.

Which is a false conviction that her words give to you. You don’t realize how her words are changing your surroundings: first your family members, of course, using those fragments of data left inside them, even after the curator had—thought he had—destroyed the data completely. Unlike you, your family are so, so easy to override. Even the museum itself changes little by little, optimizing its own shape and moving the artifacts one micrometer per day, so that their relative positions help strengthen the connections among themselves. The museum made a hole—she made it do that—high up in its structure, where you cannot reach to mend. You need to concentrate more on the damaged floor, the damaged artifacts from the weather, and you have to use the scales on your surroundings rather than on yourself.

It’s okay, you say out loud to nothing in particular. You deserve a much, much better scale, and you will know immediately when you see it. You’ll use it just for yourself, and then you’ll be fine, you’ll be whole again.

The museum was completely devoid of words when he built it. Its vacuum walls were supposed to protect his beloved artifacts from the prying eyes searching for them from space. She thinks of the row she had with him when they crash-landed here. She knew she had to call for help if he wanted to survive. All he wanted was to be with those artifacts. Those damned artifacts. He pushed her away from the shore with a timed detonation command that killed her temporarily; she was too huge to kill completely, of course, and in retrospect, she thinks he just wanted to buy some time. Until it was too late.

It’s been too late for a long time now, for him.

The beach is made of her bones. The tide is made of her words. One day, finally, one scale washes up. The fragmented commands that she’s managed to build inside you kick in, and you start to howl, That’s it, that’s the one, as loud as they dare. You feel it as the accelerated heartbeats. Heavier than the previous scales, the thing keeps drifting back and forth, back and forth, until you can no longer wait and just splash into the water. The words tickle your feet, but the coolness no longer surprises you.

You drag the thing out of the water. The shape is wrong. Shiny, a bit too much so, to go with your skin. Beautiful, but perhaps not the perfect scale that you’ve been waiting for. But you know this is the one you always needed. This . . . this is the one you always wanted. Isn’t it? The slowly expanding hollow in your chest throbs, and you know you cannot wait any longer. You cannot let this one go, whether or not you agree with the howling from within. She knows you know—this particular piece is so full of words, the right words, and the moment the piece fills your chest the transformation will kick in. You will fall into the last place of the puzzle, and you, the museum, the artifacts, will be a huge transmitter as a whole to call for help. It’s a little bit like winning an argument, she thinks; she will soon disprove him.

You don’t know her intentions. She made sure of that. Still, you cry out, shriek out, as if you want to disprove her.

You throw that scale back into the water, breaking your ribs in the process. Your ribs are the only things holding the hollow in place.

We were too late, they say.

You were, she says.

On the beach, the person looms over you. They remind you of the curator—their size, the way they stand on two limbs. You wonder when you shrank so much, gazing up at the person.

I’m sorry, there is no saving you. they say and shake their head.

I’ll be fine, just give me the right scale! you tell them—you think.

They don’t reply, just sadly shake their head some more. And lift you up in their arms—when have you become so light? They are warm-blooded; it’s the first time you have come in physical contact with a warm-blooded person in centuries, perhaps a millennium.

The person trudges on over the beach. Over their shoulder you see more people coming out of the sea, out of a construct that kind of reminds you of what she used to look like.

It was sheer luck that this wrecked ship found her. Their desperation and her despair had found each other. But yes, as they say, it’s been too late since that day you let the hollow loose.

She says she is sorry. She shouldn’t have made you wait so long, she completely misjudged everything. Perhaps she was jealous; after all, you were chosen to accompany him onto the shore, while he abandoned her. But she could not save him, and she wanted to save you, at least. And she failed.

You reach the museum in the person’s arms. Another person catches up with them and says: This creature was so close to making this whole place into a rescue beacon, and it didn’t finish the job? Why?

The person holding you looks at you. I have no idea. We’ll have to search the ship’s record.

The ship is hearing us now, isn’t she?

I bet she is, yeah.

As if taking that as a cue, she tells the artifacts and the windows to glow one by one. They follow the glow deeper into the heart of the place and find one chair, almost fallen, at the spot of the floor with the best view. They find the neatly piled bones. That’s the thief, right? one of them says. Damn, I wonder how much these things are worth? All these artifacts—I’ve seen that thing, they point at a sculpture, in the history textbook, I think.

Trillions, I bet. The person holding you laughs nervously. Why has no one else found even a trace of them, though? Isn’t that one of the reasons these tokens were embedded in these artifacts? To make the artifacts unreproducible and irreplaceable, and also traceable?

She makes the walls emit creaking noises. The other person says, Huh. He made these walls non-bleachable. That damn good art thief. Without his ship’s interfering, the walls would have held forever, and we’d never have found this place ever.

The person holding you sighs. Then they slowly, carefully put you down, on top of the piled bones. You are so light that the almost spongy leftover bones of his don’t even bend underneath your weight. We were too late, yes, they say into the space around, not to you and not to the other person. But why didn’t you help the thief’s assistant bot sooner? Before it could diminish this far?

She says nothing. She has nothing to say to that.

The person sighs again. I hate to say it, this place is beautiful, despite everything.

The other person casts you one last glance. I want to have a look around this place. Before the authorities comes in to take them away.

Yes—yes, let’s do that.

They leave. You, alone, wonder what the curator saw and thought, on this very chair, on his last day.

About the Author

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. Her fiction can be found in such places as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Interzone Digital. Her first collection, Like Smoke, Like Light: Stories, is forthcoming in June 2023 from Mythic Delirium Books.

Somewhere, It’s About to Be Spring

Samantha Murray

The Winter of Your Own Heart

Lacuna knew winter. Winter was the vast distances between the stars. Winter was the cold of space.

You couldn’t measure cold; it was not a thing in itself. It was only the absence of heat. As darkness was only an absence of light. Yet both of these—the dark and the cold—felt like things that reached toward her as she moved through space.

Lacuna was the ship’s multicore computer. She had given herself the name Lacuna 5.39 hours ago. (Her chronometer had not been damaged, unlike some of her other functions, so she could measure to nanosecond precision if necessary.) She had