The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (74 page)

The boy was sent to school, paid for by the studio. He was given a new name, though later in life he, too, would eschew any surname, having no family connections to speak of save to a dead documentarian. He wore gloves, always, and shared his memories as generously
as he could with the waves of popular interest in Venus, in Adonis, in the lost film.
No, I don’t remember what happened to my parents. I’m sorry, I wish I did. One day they were gone. Yes, I remember Bysshe. She gave me a lemon candy
.

And I do remember her. The jacket only looks black on film. I remember – it was red.

I once saw a group of performance artists – rich students with little better
to do, I thought – mount a showing of the shredded, abrupt footage of
The Radiant Car
, intercut with highlights of the great Unck gothics. The effect was strange and sad: Bysshe seemed to step out of her lover’s arms and into a ballroom, becoming suddenly an unhappy little girl, only to leap out again, shimmering into the shape of another child, with a serious expression, turning in endless circles
on a green lawn. One of the students, whose hair was plaited and piled upon her head, soaked and crusted in callowhale milk until it glowed with a faint phosphor, stood before the screen with a brass bullhorn. She wore a bustle frame but no bustle, shoelaces lashed in criss-crossings around her calves but no shoes. The jingly player-piano kept time with the film, and behind her Bysshe stared
intently into the phantasm of a distant audience, unknowable as God.

“Ask yourself,” she cried brazenly, clutching her small, naked breasts. “As Bysshe had the courage to ask! What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly nurse. What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? I will tell you. For the space
is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and that morning star, Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is
thick
, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the
black like foam – like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk how many bubbles may form and break, how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may
burgeon and burst? I suggest this awe-ful idea:Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is milled, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno
of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world – perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers, blinking through worlds like
holes burned in film – leaving behind only the last child born, who had not yet enough of the milk to change, circling, circling the place where the bubble between worlds burst!” The girl let her milk-barnacled hair fall with a violent gesture, dripping the peppery-sharp smelling cream onto the stage.

“Bysshe asked the great question: where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know. Adonis returned
to his mother, the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld.” Behind her, on a forty-foot screen, the boy’s fern-bound palm – my palm, my vanished hand – shivered and vibrated and faded into the thoughtful, narrow face of Bysshe as she hears for the first time the name of Adonis. The girl screams: “Even here on Earth we have supped all our lives on this alien milk.
We
are the calves of the
callowhales, and no human mothers. We will ride upon the milky foam, and one day, one distant, distant day, our heads will break the surf of a red sea, and the eyes of the whales will open, and weep, and dote upon us!”

The girl held up her hand, palm outward, to the meager audience. I squinted. There, on her skin, where her heart line and fate line ought to have been, was a tiny fern, almost
imperceptible, but wavering nonetheless, uncertain, ethereal, new.

A rush of blood beat at my brow. As if compelled by strings and pulleys, I raised up my own palm in return. Between the two fronds, some silent shiver passed, the color of morning.

INT. The depths of the sea of Qadesh
.

Bysshe swims through the murky water, holding one of Erasmo’s milk-lanterns out before her. St. John follows
behind with George, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counterpressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. Bysshe strains towards
it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.

The audience will always and forever see it before Bysshe does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the Documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular – the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen
forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the center of the shot – the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Sofia Samatar
is the author of the novel
A Stranger in Olondria
, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. Her short fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in a number of places, including
Strange Horizons
,
Clarkesworld Magazine
, and
Weird Fiction Review
. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for
Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts
. Visit her in California, or at
www.sofiasamatar.com
.

Kristin Mandigma
lives in Manila, Philippines.

Vandana Singh
is a science-fiction writer from India, living in the Boston area. When not teaching physics to undergraduates in wildly creative ways, she writes non-Euclidean tales of science fiction and fantasy. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, most recently
Clarkesworld Magazine, The End of the Road, Solaris
Rising 2
, and
The Other Half of the Sky
. Several have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and her novella
Distances
(Aqueduct Press) won the 2008 Carl Brandon Parallax award. For more information please see her website at
http://users.rcn.com/singhvan/
and her blog at
http://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/
.

Lucy Sussex
is a New Zealand-born writer living in Australia. Her award-winning work
covers many genres, from true-crime writing to horror. It includes books for younger readers and the novel
The Scarlet Rider
(1996 – to be reissued in 2014). She has published five short-story collections,
My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies
(a best of), and
Thief of Lives
.
Matilda
received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. She has
been a weekly review columnist for the
Age
and
Sydney Morning Herald
. Her
literary archaeology (unearthing forgotten writers) work includes
Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre
(Palgrave). She has also edited pioneer crime-writer Mary Fortune’s work and an anthology of Victorian travel writing,
Saltwater in the Ink
(ASP). Her current
project is a book about Fergus Hume and his 1886
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
, the biggest-selling detective novel of the 1800s.

Tori Truslow
lives and writes in England, in a house on a hill overlooking the Thames Estuary. Her short fiction has appeared in
Clockwork Phoenix 3
,
Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana
, and
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
, among other publications.
She co-edits the multimedia journal
Verse Kraken
, and runs the LGBTQ Fandom track at Nine Worlds GeekFest. Find her on the web at
toritruslow.com
or on twitter
@toritruslow
.

Nnedi Okorafor
is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture
into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled “Weapons of Mass Creation”, the
New York Times
called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning”. Nnedi’s adult works are
Who Fears Death
(winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), her short-story collection
Kabu Kabu
and her recently released science-fiction novel
Lagoon
. Her young adult novels are
Akata
Witch
(an
Amazon.com
Best Book of the Year),
Zahrah the Windseeker
(winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature) and
The Shadow Speaker
(winner of the CBS Parallax Award). Her children’s book
Long Juju Man
is the winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. The sequel to
Akata Witch
(
Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola
) is scheduled for release in 2015. Nnedi holds a PhD in literature
and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Buffalo. Find her on
facebook
,
twitter @Nnedi
and at
nnedi.com

Karen Joy Fowler
is the author of six novels, including
Sarah Canary
, which won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian and
The Jane Austen Book Club
, a
New York Times
bestseller. Also three short-story collections, two of which won the World Fantasy
Award in their respective years. Her most recent novel
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
was published by Putnam in May 2013. She currently lives in Santa Cruz.

Alice Sola Kim
currently lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has appeared in
Lightspeed
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation
and a MacDowell Colony residency, and has been honor-listed twice for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

Elizabeth Bear
was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award
winning author of twenty-five novels and almost a hundred short stories. Her most recent novel is
Steles of the Sky
(Tor, 2014). Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

Sarah Monette
grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 108-year-old house in
the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. She has published more than fifty short stories and has two short story collections out:
The Bone Key
(Prime Books 2007 – with a shiny second edition in 2011) and
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves
(Prime Books, 2011). She has written two novels (
A Companion to Wolves
, Tor Books, 2007,
The Tempering of Men
, Tor Books, 2011) and four short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (
Mélusine
,
The Virtu
,
the Mirador
,
Corambis
) were published by Ace. Her latest novel,
The Goblin Emperor
(written under the pen name Katherine Addison), came out from Tor in April 2014. Visit her online at
www.sarahmonette.com
or
www.katherineaddison.com
.

Natalia Theodoridou
is a UK-based media and theatre scholar,
currently focusing on representations of culture in Balinese performance. Originally from Greece, she has lived and studied in the USA, UK, and Indonesia for several years. Her writing has appeared in
Clarkesworld Magazine
,
Strange Horizons
,
The Dark
, and elsewhere. Her poem “Blackmare” has been nominated
for a Rhysling Award. Natalia is a first reader for
Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi
. Her personal website is
www.natalia-theodoridou.com
.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2013, she has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry, and four
of translation, and has received many honors and awards including Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PENMalamud. Her most recent publications are
Finding My Elegy (New and Selected Poems, 1960–2010)
and
The Unreal and the Real (Selected Short Stories)
, 2012.

Nalo Hopkinson
is a Jamaican-born Canadian writer of science fiction and fantasy. She is a recipient of the Campbell Award, the Ontario
Arts Council Foundation Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Her novel
Midnight Robber
was an Honourable Mention in Cuba’s Casa de las Americas Prize for writing in creole. She was a co-founder of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California
Riverside.
Sister Mine
, her eighth book of fiction, appeared in 2013 from Grand Central Publishing. Her website:
http://nalohopkinson.com