Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 203

By Neil Clarke, Andy Dudak, Congyun 'Mu Ming' Gu 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 August 2023 issue (#203) contains:

• Original fiction by Stephen Case ("Every Seed is a Prayer (And Your World is a Seed)"), Thomas Ha ("Window Boy"), Andy Dudak ("Light Speed Is Not a Speed"), Congyun "Muming" Gu ("Who Can Have the Moon"), M. J. Pettit ("Empathetic Ear"), Marisca Pichette ("Gel Pen Notes from Generation Ship Y"), and Koji A. Dae ("Resistant").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Priya Sridhar, interviews with Emma Mieko Candon and Joshua Glenn, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642361469

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 203

Table of Contents

Every Seed Is a Prayer (And Your World Is a Seed)

by Stephen Case

Window Boy

by Thomas Ha

Light Speed Is Not a Speed

by Andy Dudak

Who Can Have the Moon

by Congyun ‘Muming’ Gu

Empathetic Ear

by M. J. Pettit

Gel Pen Notes from Generation Ship Y

by Marisca Pichette

Resistant

by Koji A. Dae

There’s a New Octopus Sheriff in Town

by Priya Sridhar

Sense And Perception: A Conversation with Emma Mieko Candon

by Arley Sorg

Everything Goes In Cycles: An Interview with Joshua Glenn

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: One for the Team

by Neil Clarke

Old Ways

Art by J.R. Slattum

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2023

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Every Seed is a Prayer (And Your World is a Seed)

Stephen Case

i.

Everyone came to the Greenbelt Project for different reasons, they said. Some, like Ava, came from a sense of desperate hope. Here you could see trees, miles and miles of them. Here the forests were making their stand, were turning the tide. Here they would rally and return.

Ava remembered the last oak cut in the park when she was a child, the sense of desperation and the impotent anger she felt. It had been autumn, parched and dry. The storms had thrown the last of the older oaks down the spring before. Only this one remained, but her neighbors thought it was too dangerous. There were historic homes, several of which had been damaged in the storms. Yes, trees were important, yes carbon sinks were needed, everyone understood that—but not these trees.

She had stood on the stump and watched the river, staring across it to where a tiny strip of forest—brush more than anything—hung on the other side, and tried not to cry. It would be too obvious, too trite, to cry for a dead tree.

Here, now, at the Greenbelt, trees were being planted—tens of thousands of them, ultimately millions of them. Ava wanted to be here, to see the new hybrids that would tie up carbon in their tangled branches and root systems. The Greenbelt was a garden, was a dream of tipping the planet back toward balance, a system of managed forests spreading across western North America from Canada to Mexico, and Ava would be a part of it.

As soon as she finished high school, she registered for one of the forest stations.

ii.

Odem had grown up in the forests, or what was left of them. His parents were both loggers, and he had lived in the shadows of trees cut for the insatiable demand for paper, boxes, packaging to ship things back and forth across the planet. He remembered his parents talking about the need for better management, of being frustrated when things weren’t done correctly, when corners were cut, when over-logging in one place meant they had to pack up again and head somewhere else. He remembered them shaking their heads and telling him there were better ways, ways that would make it work. Trees were a resource that could grow again, a crop like anything else.

What drew him to the Greenbelt was the idea of managing, of doing things correctly. Companies in competition with each other, with themselves, would always grasp too much; it was their nature. And government was ineffective and often misinformed. The way to fix things was clear eyes and clear thought. Healthy forests meant healthy jobs meant there would never be another family that would suffer because someone up the food chain had screwed up or been too greedy.

When the Greenbelt Project came online and El began its work, Odem put his name in for a forest station immediately.

iii.

The Greenbelt, at least the portion of it visible from Odem’s station—which was now, Ava reminded herself, her station too—stretched like a green wall across the hillside. She knew it stretched hundreds of miles farther, to the foothills of the Rockies and then over toward the coast on the other side. Here though, on the eastern edge, she could see it like a green serpent, the edge of a wide river cutting across the continent, swallowing cities and farmland in a rising wave.

The line of trees stretched north and south as far as she could see. Those at the edge were the newest, fastest-growing hybrids: some like pines, some like broad-leaved maples, others bending like young birches. All of them were newly built species, constructed from native stock but with their genetic code put together in new ways to grow faster, denser, to pull more carbon from the atmosphere per cubic inch of wood or square meter of crown-spread.

It didn’t look like the world’s largest science experiment.

It looked like a forest. It looked like what Ava had been searching for.

The station was surrounded by a grassy meadow on all sides. Odem said that when the station was first constructed, the forest had barely been in sight. Now it had crept within a few hundred meters, and the line of trees curved around to the north and south so that soon the station would be within a wide ring of trees. Drones worked ceaselessly, planting trees that sprouted in days, that were knee-high in weeks. They rose and fell from the soil like metallic beetles, kissing the earth, dropping their seeds, smoothing the soil.

Ava had hoped they would do the planting by hand. She had envisioned walking through prairies digging and planting, touching the soil, but of course that had already been tried: corporations had employed people to replant cut forests, most often just replacing the virgin forest with nothing more than a monoculture. It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t diverse enough or fast enough.

The drones didn’t plant in geometric grids; they planted their mix of hybrids according to a complex pattern that only El fully understood, based on soil mixture, topography, and even microclimate—the perfect planned forest.

Every seed is a prayer, Ava muttered under her breath. Odem glanced over with a question, and she repeated it, more loudly. Something my dad used to say, she added. Usually standing at the counter with potting soil and a jar of acorns. He also used to say the only harvest he ever wanted was a forest.

He would be proud of this.

She nodded absently.

They stood at the station’s edge, looking at a prairie filled with a new grass. The stalks wore flowers like jagged red crowns. Pollinators were already at work among them. This particular type, which had sprung up almost overnight, was supposed to sequester carbon and fix nitrogen at higher rates than what had previously filled the wide lawn between station and forest wall, but the botanists couldn’t explain exactly how. They just knew it worked.

Like everything El did.

The whine of malfunctioning drone signaled an incoming job. Odem watched it arch from the forest toward the station’s landing pad.

I’ve got this one.

He touched her arm as he passed.

Ava had not yet been at the station a full month. Some of the other stations scattered along the length of the Greenbelt held botanists, biologists, and other scientists, but this one was purely mechanical support, mainly drone repair, and Odem and Ava were the only two personnel.

She watched him go and turned back to the grass, which seemed markedly thicker than it had been the day before. Of course the field wasn’t a monoculture; El was too smart for that. Looking closer, she decided there were probably five or six species in this mix alone. Carpets of new grasses came in waves now, one mix of ground cover giving rise to the next as though evolution had been accelerated by a factor of millions.

It wasn’t just the forests and grasses that were evolving. El was evolving too.

Eventually, Odem had told her soon after her arrival, as they both stood working beside the open shell of a drone, their arms greased to elbows with oil, El won’t even talk to us anymore. We’ll be like . . .  He paused, wiping at his nose and leaving a streak of black. We’ll be like whale songs to it. Too slow to pay attention to.

The drones had come to the station almost ceaselessly then, and the two of them always had a queue for repairs.

Take this, he said, tapping a narrow module that hung along the drone’s side. It’s a new kind of cutter. I’ve seen some of the drones using it on deadwood. El designed it. I asked some of the engineers how it worked, and they didn’t know. They’re still trying to reverse engineer it. Said it was the most efficient plasma blade they’d ever seen.

Drones trimmed the trees. When the Greenbelt Project began, no one had been sure how El would tackle the problem of reducing atmospheric carbon within its given parameters. It quickly became apparent that whatever the solution was, it was fractal in scale, extending from the growth patterns of entire forests to the shape of individual trees. El’s remote drones planted, mapped, and tended the forests on a large scale, but they also carved, trimmed, and pruned on a plant-by-plant basis. The fast-growing hybrids in the forest around the station had bizarre-yet-ordered shapes for maximum efficiency that reminded Ava of something from a Dali painting or the Dr. Seuss books her grandparents had read to her from.

Sometimes El’s decisions didn’t make sense. Odem had told her about a time, only a few weeks after the station had come online and he had arrived to run it, that El had completely clear-cut a hillside within sight of the next ridge.

There was some old growth there, Odem told her, shaking his head. He had looked half-wild when Ava was first stationed here, long hair and a wiry beard that covered half his face. That was gone now. I couldn’t understand why that would happen. I thought it was something we were trying to protect. But it was part of the larger pattern. His shrug seemed glacial, his face resigned. It’s working though. Can’t deny that. El sees patterns we can’t.

The grasses were another new pattern, a woven carpet of species.

She wondered if they would look the same tomorrow.

iv.

Ava saved seeds from her walks. The drones came to the station less frequently than they had when she first arrived, though they still passed silently through the trees. There were new models now, printed somewhere farther south, on the scale of birds rather than vehicles. The older models hummed, but she couldn’t hear the new models at all, only the sounds they made snapping twigs or slicing leaves that fluttered down behind them, shaping trees and even the underbrush to grow as efficiently as possible within the parameters of programming and time.

Parsing the pattern finer and finer.

She printed containers from downloaded templates and potted the seeds she gathered on the station’s narrow windowsills, knowing they would not grow as orderly or efficiently without El’s guiding hands.

Odem thought the drones were coming to the station less because they had become more efficient at navigating. It used to be they would get caught in the trees and need to be fetched down for repairs, as though El was a child learning to keep a million kites in the air at once. But Ava’s own suspicion was that there were fewer because they had begun repairing themselves. A week ago, she had come across one sitting in a clearing in the forest, its solar fins spread like petals. It was working with manipulators at the innards of another, half-disassembled before it.

Broken drones still floated to them on occasion though, and she unscrewed their silvered carapaces and followed El’s instructions to repair components she no longer understood. She recorded each new variation she saw, just as she recorded the grasses in the surrounding prairie and new hybrids in the forest, sending her reports back to the Project scientists or sitting in virtual meetings where experts wore continually bemused expressions.

It’s the space program all over again, one of them told her during a debriefing. Those spin-offs NASA was always touting. Who knew saving the planet would have so many technological payoffs?

For Ava the payoff was watching the Greenbelt expand—watching El slowly but inexorably tip the planet back toward life.

v.

One morning the two of them woke to the sound of drone-hum, heavier than they had heard before. Four drones the size of busses settled at the corners of the field around the station. Each carried a printer in its belly, and as the sound of repulsors faded, Ava heard the high-pitched whine of printers kicking into gear.

Her phone blinked with a message from headquarters.

We’re installing new turbines, one of their managers said with a slightly harried look. El’s begun disassembling the Rain River Windfarm. But there’s a new, more efficient design with less footprint—

They’re already here, Odem told them, peering over Ava’s shoulder.

Within half an hour the construction drones lifted off, leaving four phallic-like towers about twice Ava’s height.

Blade-less turbines, she said as the two of them ate breakfast from the station’s small organic printer. Odem fished the stream El had rerouted near the station, but a good portion of their food was still printed from materials delivered by drone. I’ve read about the design. Supposed to simply vibrate in the wind to generate energy.

Later that morning, he shifted against her as they napped in his bunk. Do you ever wonder how El interprets its programming?

Only all the time.

I saw drones the size of my thumb yesterday taking soil samples. The forests are healthier than they’ve ever been.

It’s working. Ava leaned into his arm. Reverse climate change for human flourishing.

Right. But I’m a human, right?

Yeah?

So. Odem paused. El’s shaping the forest on a leaf-by-leaf basis at this point.

Yeah.

He was quiet for a few moments. How long was it after you arrived before we started sleeping together?

The sudden shift confused her. What?

Like, two days? Three?

She pushed up on an elbow and stared him down. What are you talking about?

The station needed another technician. It got one. But I also got the person I’d been waiting for my entire life.

She rolled her eyes and lay back down. Human flourishing?

It was his turn for monosyllables. Yeah.

There were hundreds of qualified applicants in for this posting, she mused. Does it change anything if El weeded those profiles for compatibility with the mechanic already posted here? Does it change anything about us?

It does, he said, running a hand through her hair.

What? She glared at him. What does it change?

I need to know who to thank.

vi.

The turbine-less generators lasted a little more than a month. Something like trumpet vines started growing up around them, then there was a hard rain, and the structures began dissolving into a kind of gray sludge.

Biodegradable, Ava said, wrinkling her nose at the smell.

Makes sense. I doubt El’s making anything out of plastic anymore.

But where’s our power coming from now?

Odem was going to spend the day in the forest, and there were no drones in for repairs, so Ava set about answering her own question. The lines that had connected the station to the electric grid were long gone, but everything that drew power, from their printers to their screens, was still active. She spent the morning tracing the station’s electrical systems—updated several times since the latest schematic was sent from headquarters—with no luck. No new or unfamiliar devices had been added that might be generating energy. No solar panels had been installed on the roof by industrious drones when they weren’t paying attention.

Ava printed a small shovel and followed the cable running from the station’s main electrical panel to where it disappeared down the wall and into the soil of the surrounding prairie. Scraping away the dirt from its surface, she found it covered in a network of filaments grafted on like roots and disappearing into the soil in all directions.

vii.

Odem wanted to climb. There was no need for it, but once he was out among the trees and their haunting geometry, he found he wanted to be in the canopy. When he had first arrived, he and Lily—his first partner, and had El arranged that transfer as well when it became clear they weren’t compatible?—often had to venture into the canopy to fetch down snared drones. They would let