Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 205: Clarkesworld Magazine, #205

By Neil Clarke, Suzanne Palmer, Lavie Tidhar 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 2023 issue (#205) contains:

• Original fiction by Suzanne Palmer ("Possibly Just About A Couch"), Lavie Tidhar ("The Blaumilch"), Lisa Papademetriou ("Down To The Root"), David Goodman ("Such Is My Idea Of Happiness"), Bella Han ("De Profundis, a Space Love Letter"), Grace Chan ("Post Hacking for the Uninitiated"), Amal Singh ("Rafi"), and Michael Swanwick ("Timothy: An Oral History").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Carrie Sessarego, interviews with Kij Johnson and Margret Helgadottir, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642361506

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 205

Table of Contents

Possibly Just About A Couch

by Suzanne Palmer

The Blaumilch

by Lavie Tidhar

Down To The Root

by Lisa Papademetriou

Such Is My Idea Of Happiness

by David Goodman

De Profundis, a Space Love Letter

by Bella Han

Post Hacking for the Uninitiated

by Grace Chan

Rafi

by Amal Singh

Timothy: An Oral History

by Michael Swanwick

Gardens in the Sky: Gardening in Science Fiction

by Carrie Sessarego

Hearbreak and Happy Endings: A Conversation with Kij Johnson

by Arley Sorg

Deep Oceans, Vast Skies: A Conversation with Margrét Helgadóttir

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: Seventeen

by Neil Clarke

Utopia #2

Art by Dofresh

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2023

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Possibly Just About A Couch

Suzanne Palmer

The universe begins.

It has barely begun to stretch out and wiggle its toes into the void, having just settled the primary matter of whether it will be one of positrons or electrons—electrons win out this time, though only by a hair—when the couch appears.

Probably, this couch is a metaphor, though those have not yet formally been invented, if by invented you mean named, though those are not the same thing at all.

Energy spins to matter, matter spins to dust. Dust spins, coalesces, and should probably cling to the nascent, bright red thing, but the couch is wholly ambivalent about gravity, so the dust ignores it as it always has, and very likely always will. Instead, the particles pull together with their neighbors, growing and solidifying and passing word—we are here, over here! only the best dust given membership here!—until, like a group chat gone rogue and running over its moderation, the very first to cross the point of no return collapses into itself and in the ensuing heat and drama becomes a star.

Ever chasing trends, more stars follow. Dust clouds whirl with light and competition, until some star says hey, I have a truly groovy fashion concept, and then planets are born to adorn them, and that is where the couch first sets its feet upon something solid.

There is no reason it had to be the only one, but it was; if anyone had thought to speculate if other couches existed, unseen deep within the hearts of stars, occluded inside some planet’s mantle, or far out in places of void where light had not yet and might never reach, it certainly could have been possible (or at least no more impossible) but, as it happens, there is just the one. If it is because the margin between electrons and positrons was too narrow, too fraught with that initial uncertainty to allow more, that sort of supposition in service to the subject of the mysterious couch population would be inescapably silly.

So: this couch. It’s red (has that been told already?), a brilliant scarlet that is almost an unseemly hue (if one can assign moral value to a wavelength of light, which seems specious at best.) Is the color hinting at some fundamental impropriety, hidden secrets, or the possibility of wild, dangerous adventure? Or is it as random as everything else, a great house of cards of happenstance upon chance upon that perpetual foundation of fortune and misfortune? It is soft, but not unfirm. It is comfortable, possibly even cozy, but not unnaturally so. It abides.

And the universe marches on.

Lava, lava, lava, more lava, then an errant planetlet crashes the party and vaporizes all the hard work already done, forcing the planet to scrap its plans and start over. Of course, that means more lava, a standard party favor as all the cataclysmic forces battle on a monumental, no-holds-barred scale. Still, the couch is untouched, left either to float atop the magma oceans or ride unbothered whatever surface forms there. Raindrops fall, may settle briefly upon its cushions, but it is not permeable, and the water soon runs off and away again into the cooling rock.

Elements come and go. Poor Hafnium, briefly a sensation, last seen slinking off in the night never to be seen again. Continents crash and split, and when the couch’s plate dives, grumbling, beneath another, the couch simply stays where it is and lets the new plate slide into place under its stout, stubby feet. If that means the couch sits atop ocean, briefly or for an extended epoch, it does not show any indication of minding whatsoever, possibly because it’s just a couch.

Sponges grow on its lower edges, then evolve and go elsewhere. Bugs arise and fly overhead on monstrous, glorious, shimmering wings, and ferns delight in the couch’s small shade until the ice comes, not returning until it finally retreats again. For a long time a boulder—a glacial erratic, even, not just some random rock off the streets but something entitled to a name of its own—is nestled against the left arm of the couch where it had been pushed by the ice and then found it could not be pushed any further.

The erratic has weathered down to a cracked, pitted thing by the time an Eoraptor decides that the couch is the perfect place for a nest and her eggs, and stays a while. It is gone by the time a Torvosaurus, chasing its next meal, trips over the couch and falls into the rock-strewn mud beyond, breaking its neck and turning, slowly, into one more tragic fossil.

Birds come, and flowers, and tiny mammals scurry underneath the couch for shelter. Eventually there are people (assuming birds and bugs and ferns and Eoraptors don’t count, which is highly debatable) but for some reason most do not find the bright red inviting—see above, re: hints of wild, dangerous adventure, which are not very attractive to species barely clinging to their own existence. Homo habilis, particularly, invariably runs at the sight of it, which is unfortunate, because they definitely could have benefitted from a brief respite to just relax and chill for a bit.

Homo erectus tries to stab it, then bite it, and then set it on fire, but still will not just sit.

Plates continue to move, continents continue to go sightseeing across the face of the planet. Eventually, a village grows up near the couch, then around it. For a while it is inside a castle, then inside a castle wall, then perched brightly among ruins. We will not mention, at all, its brief but undignified time in a midden.

When Ned rents the house that eventually contains it, he believes it was put there by the landlord, because the previous tenants were certainly not the types to keep any piece of furniture clean and in good repair. He and Shannon have sex on it, more than once; Ned also tries to have sex on it with Dean, who rents a room upstairs, but the couch freaks Dean out and he tries to invite Ned back to his place instead. Ned calls him a superstitious caveman—maybe he and Homo habilis were onto something, maybe not—and that’s the end of that.

The next renters burn the house down, and the couch sits there in the rubble for a while, waiting for insurance adjusters, who are not much faster in action than the various glaciers who have crept by, and will again in the future. If the couch has an opinion, which it does not, it would think the glaciers superior, because at least they arrived with interesting megafauna, instead of clipboards.

The house is rebuilt, remodeled, and no one seems to wonder why this couch is there, still looking not one day older than the beginning of the universe itself, though more than one person finds it frustratingly impossible to move, even a few inches, even as a team effort, even with the assistance of alcohol and cursing.

Mostly, though, no one thinks to move it, as if it is where it properly belongs.

Carla crochets a beautiful rainbow throw for it, and it suits it beautifully. She spends many years with it, reading books, knitting and crocheting, laughing or crying with friends who are never as stalwartly companionable as the couch, which she has come to think of as hers. When she sells the house, she regrets having to leave it behind, but her movers can’t budge it, and it feels like it’s proper for it to remain where it is.

She kisses it goodbye, and leaves it the now-worn throw, which the new homeowners immediately bag up and throw away.

Eventually, bombs happen, and there is no house again, nor any mud to make fossils of the people who tried desperately to hide behind it.

It is a long time before archaeologists come and find it, and are amazed by such a perfectly-preserved artifact. In the end, they build their museum around it, and showcase it next to other treasures—three frisbees, a braille copy of Moby Dick, a cappuccino machine that they theorize dispensed some sort of cure-all, and three-quarters of the very first android, reconstructed but not functional—with a Do not sit! sign (or, more accurately, a Fnah chi boogenim! sign) on the couch right where Carla used to rest her basket of yarn.

Most visitors to the museum respect the sign, not out of any lawful inclinations, but maybe because Homo pertinax received more from its ancestors than just a wackily hazardous climate, mottled pockets of radiation, and a fondness for cheese. The rare alien visitor, though, inevitably ignores the sign and sits/perches/slithers/alights/condenses/apparates/lies upon it, and has to be chased off by whatever docent spots the infractious guest.

By the time the sun senesces enough to reach out, an ice age made of fire that rolls over its planetary erratics one by one until it wraps itself around Earth, the museum and anyone left to visit are already long gone.

If the couch minds eventually being left to drift in the dying remains of the star’s system, who would know? Galaxies collide and pull each other apart, and a new galaxy claims the couch for a while, though it never does manage to settle a planet under it, or let it shade and shelter ferns again.

There are three visitors to the couch, which if you think about how mind-numbingly vast space is and how tiny a couch floating all alone in it is, is pretty damned good.

Not that any of them sit.

The universe continues to expand outward, thinning as it goes, matter being of finite supply. Eventually any aberration in the nothingness is well within statistical error, and all is dark and cold and forgotten for a very long time.

She—she is also probably a metaphor, although it’s also possible that she’s the only thing that’s not—comes along and finds the sofa, and sits for a bit, though she is mostly immaterial, and mostly far too ethereal and limitless for sitting to have much meaning. She can smell the long-ago scent of Eoraptor’s eggs, like chalk and faint juniper, and she can feel the ghost of Carla’s colorful throw warm on her neck, though she has no neck and no need or concept of one. She can feel the hot creep of lava, the warm touch of living earth, the gentle scratchings of coral and sponge and the tiny nibbles of fishes. She can sense the imprint of Ned’s ass where he sat alone and pouted about Dean for an over-indulgent number of days, though it let Shannon get free of him, which was all for the better. She can hear the pipes playing off the walls of the castle, hear the low thrum of dragonfly wings, feel the flutter of butterflies rewrite history around them in immeasurable ways. She can feel the swell of oceans, and hear the echoes of plesiosaurs and nautili and whales singing songs of love and friendship from below. Everything that is, or was, is perfectly remembered.

At last, she digs down among the cushions, rummaging between them, until she finds that one infinitely small, infinitely dense grain of existence, no more than a glimmer, a fleck of glitter, waiting.

She holds it in her palm-that-is-not-a-palm, feels the heat and potential and impatience of it, and then blows on it gently as if it were an ember to ignite. The memories of fear, the crush of destruction and desolation, the emptiness and entropy are stripped away with that breath, but hope and wonder and joy remain, for information is never, ever, truly lost, and those last are the most fundamental of all. New decisions will need to be made, will always be made again and again, but so it is meant to be.

She lets the spark go, sees it touch the void around it and desire to make it full again, to wiggle its toes in the future, always a future. Let there be life, she says, and with those words, the universe begins.

About the Author

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and occasional artist who lives in western Massachusetts with too many two- and four-legged creatures, and a new (gray) couch, because her Irish Wolfhound, Tolkien, acting in his capacity of an agent of chaos and entropy, ate the last one.

The Blaumilch

Lavie Tidhar

Outside Yaniv Town, beyond the dome, on the dirt track that led on to Enid, there was a small camp of Martian Re-Born. A clump of beat-up caravans, a couple of old oxygen generators, a spliced water main pirated off of the main line. A small chapel for the Emperor of Time sat forlorn in what was once a metal drum, the size of a small house, salvaged from an abandoned biofuel facility near Port Jessup. Inside it was a much patched-together Kawamata Chiaki deck that offered the Re-Born access to the Mars-That-Never-Was.

For power, the dwellers of that encampment in the desert harvested solar and seeded wind turbines; for money, they brewed Water of Life and cheap vodka to sell to the izakayas and shebeens of the nearby towns, and hired out as day laborers in the bug farms, i-deity factories and underground fish tanks that provided the towns of the outback with nutrition and faith. But most of the time the Re-Born—inevitably young, male, and purposeless—just hung about. Visits to the Mars-That-Never-Was—where the would-be warriors were reincarnated fully—were short and expensive, and attempts to steal additional power from town were met with polite but firm objections by the local constabulary.

The Re-Born raced each other in their sand buggies across the desert. They hopped the short-haul trains between Yaniv Town and Port Jessup and jumped off without paying. They went detecting for old junk in the desert to sell for scrap, and sometimes they met up with other Re-Born in great conclaves out where not even the trains went, and there they drank too much Water of Life and held tournaments where they battled each other in feats of strength.

Daud, in truth, had begun to find the whole thing uninspiring. The problem was, there was nowhere else to go. He sat on the caravan’s porch, behind the thin stretched acrylic glass, and watched the horizon. Even the sunsets weren’t all that. He’d heard sunsets on Earth were spectacular affairs, but Earth was closer to the sun. Here the sunsets just sort of went gray on the horizon. At night he loved watching the lights in the sky, of which Earth was just another dot. But up there, visible as light in the sky, moved spacecraft, habitats, satellites—life, more glamorous and exciting than anything the outback had to offer.

Up there sophisticated people sat right now in a floating bar, drinking fancy cocktails in bulb-like containers, watching the world spin below as they chased the day. Looking down on him, not even knowing there was a place called Yaniv Town, not caring either.

He’d grown up in town, had fallen for a visiting troupe of Re-Born warriors from Tong Yun who travelled from town to town with a Kawamata deck, offering anyone the chance to see Mars-That-Never-Was for themselves for a small price. He’d paid the admission, was astonished to find himself in Mars as it never was but could have been, a wild, ancient, beautiful world, with its water-filled canals, where four-armed warriors built a great civilization under the direction of the Emperor of Time.

For most people, a glimpse was just that. A moment’s entertainment, followed perhaps by a shrug. There were many gamesworlds in the Conversation, after all. One could immerse one’s self in the Guilds of Ashkelon universe and pilot spaceships at warp speed and trade with aliens. People did. People lived and worked in the virtuality every day of their lives.

But Mars-That-Never-Was was different. It was real, not a simulation. It was not run inside the Conversation, was not hosted off some deep buried core. It really was Mars, the way it was, or could have been, or could still be. At least, that’s what they said.

Daud followed the troupe to the next town, and the next. He slept rough, went hungry, did odd jobs, or begged until he got the money to pay for another glimpse. After a while, the Re-Born accepted him as an apprentice. By the time he got back to Yaniv Town he had begun the surgery that turned him into a warrior, two new arms grafted on his body to join the existing ones, his skin tinted red, his muscles bulging and his height greater. He was now called T’P’aii.

Eventually he and the others moved out of town into their little camp. They had their own Chiaki deck. He still loved going into the real Mars, even if it never