Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 108 Read online

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 108

  Table of Contents

  Cremulator

  by Robert Reed

  Loving Grace

  by Erica L. Satifka

  Preserve Her Memory

  by Bao Shu

  The Algebra of Events

  by Elizabeth Bourne

  The Occidental Bride

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Canary Land

  by Tom Purdom

  Sea Change

  by Una McCormack

  The Next Generation of DNA Sequencing

  by Dan Kobolt

  Traitors and Tough Decisions: A Conversation with Seth Dickinson

  by Chris Urie

  Another Word: On Sunshine and Shadows

  by Jason Heller

  Editor's Desk: The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews

  by Neil Clarke

  New World Coming

  Art by J. Otto Szatmari

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Cremulator

  Robert Reed

  My hometown wasn’t much, but when I was fourteen I felt as if I lived in the busy center of all things interesting. Several thousand human mouths and who knows how many human urges, and there were no secrets. Three seniors were pregnant, two by the same boy. There was a snobby couple who drove Cadillacs but couldn’t get their checks cashed anywhere in the county. It was common knowledge that our local banker shotgunned cats for sport. And in a day when this kind of behavior mattered, my English teacher happened to have a girlfriend in the city.

  Of course the young lady never discussed sexual peculiarities. Paid to teach English, that’s exactly what she did, and what made her more intriguing, at least to one fourteen-year-old boy, was that she was pretty. I also liked her name, which was Gwen, and watching her move in front of class was a small, trusted pleasure. She had a pleasant strong, but very girly voice, and I particularly liked the big glasses that seemed too much for her little nose. I didn’t have a crush. Not really. But it’s fifty years later, and I’ll find myself thinking about the day a buddy of mine tried to do a wheelie with his desk. Got the front end up and then came the crash when the desk flipped, slamming the back of his head against the floor. Our teacher bent to help him or to punish him. I don’t remember her motives. But one of the buttons had come loose on her shirt, and her padded bra pulled away at the perfect moment. That was the second or third time in my life that I ever saw a woman’s breast. It’s my “girl in the white dress” moment. You know, that line from Citizen Kane. Half a century later, and I can’t count the times that image has gotten into my head, or how many times I’ve told the story to people who truly don’t care.

  But I’m telling a different story now.

  This was a different day. October in 1973, and I’m sure about that because of what was happening in the world beyond. And I know it had to be Monday because our English teacher had driven back from the city the night before. She told us that much. No, girlfriends weren’t mentioned, or what she might have been doing in the city. Maybe she didn’t realize what everybody knew. But my class was her first class of the day, and Miss Gwen was worked up enough to describe driving on the highway last night when the sky above suddenly got bright and beautiful.

  Those were her words. “Bright and beautiful.”

  There weren’t any storms last night, were they? She asked us that. A room of fourteen-year-old meteorologists. No, we couldn’t remember lightning. But war was running wild in the Middle East. I remember that detail. People on the news and adults around town were talking about us getting swept into the big fight. Which I’m guessing is why my teacher was so keyed up. Late at night, driving home in a time of war, and she saw something huge and totally unexpected.

  “It was the most beautiful blue light,” she told us.

  She did turn cagey when we fished for details. For instance, she wouldn’t admit the exact time. But I can imagine the circumstances. Abandoning the love of her life, she was returning to the inbred community where she had to feel trapped. And then a mysterious light poured across the world. Was this the big missile attack? Were the Soviets going to kill us all? But the light lasted only a couple seconds, bright enough to be seen over the countryside and maybe farther. Did anybody else notice it? None of us did, no. But I wished I had. And after the light faded, the young teacher, so impressed or so rattled, had pulled onto the shoulder to watch the otherwise empty autumn sky.

  And here comes the oddest part of her story.

  Standing on the highway’s shoulder, not a cloud in the world, and little bits of grit started falling. Started hitting her. It reminded her of sleet, except there wasn’t any ice. Using a couple index cards, she managed to sweep up a sampling of her mystery, and that’s what she brought out for us to observe. To interpret.

  “I don’t believe in flying saucers,” she told us.

  I once saw this woman’s breast and now she was telling me her disbeliefs. Kids didn’t usually get that familiar with teachers.

  “Pretend this is science class,” she said. “Your eyes are probably better than mine. Pass the sack and hand lens around, okay?”

  This seemed like a wondrous day. Everybody ahead of me saw bits of sand and busted glass—the kinds of crap on every road’s shoulder. But I was going to do better. It was my mission. So while she was trying to teach us something useful about MacBeth, I squinted harder than I ever had in my life, and I found something new, something nobody could doubt if they took a second look.

  “I see a tooth,” I said.

  That got people giggling.

  “A chip of a tooth, at least,” I said.

  More laughing, and then she said, “Yes,” and everyone went quiet. “That’s what I thought I was seeing too.”

  I remember everything. I was watching those big glasses and the breath going in and out of her cute nose, and better than seeing any breast, those few seconds stuck in my head. Which made everything worse later.

  In 1975, my English teacher was riding inside her girlfriend’s car. They were driving fast on a different highway, and they had been drinking, according to those who knew. The car was alone when it left the road and rolled, and one door came open and a body was thrown free and then crushed.

  Nothing else mattered in the world. Make all the noise you want about gossips and narrow-minded farmers, but everybody liked Miss Gwen. School was let out so that her students could attend the service in the city. And to see the famous girlfriend. Several people claimed that she was a graduate student in math or something like math, and I know I had ideas about what she would look like. But no, Gwen’s lady proved to be big and plain and a little fat. Bruises and guilt didn’t help her appearance either, and it was impossible to miss her, sitting to one side and alone, openly drinking from a bottle now and again. Our teacher came from a gigantic family, I learned, and none of them wanted the girlfriend close. But they made a show of weeping and holding each other, and Miss Gwen’s students filled in the back rows, crying a little or more than than a little. I gave my tears to the show. Except I couldn’t figure out one part, and I couldn’t let it go.

  “Where’s the casket?” I asked.

  “Oh, they cremated her,” a classmate whispered.

  Cremation happened on the banks of Ganges. Not in our part of the world, at least not in 1975.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because, Walt,” he said, grimly happy to know things that I didn’t know. “She got torn to pieces under the car.”

  That hard news was absorbed with a sob and a handful of unasked questions. Including me wondering whatever happened to t
hat white chip of a tooth that rained down on her. That chip was suddenly important to me, and I don’t know why.

  This is what life has taught me:

  People are peculiar.

  A person can spend every day of his life finding examples of our spectacular oddness, and if that’s what he likes to do, then his life is destined to be full and rich.

  Reagan.

  I mean, really.

  Where did we fail so spectacularly that we deserve to have Ronald Reagan on the news every night?

  No, I’m not talking politics. This isn’t about Republicans, or even white male assholes. And despite what people think, I’ll never waste my breath talking about the man’s intolerance to people like us. Ask Melanie. We have friends who were hoping Reagan’s son would reveal a hunger for other men. Except that is a fool’s game. If you think Ronald Reagan would change his attitudes because of one dancing child, then you live in a simple and dangerously sentimental world—a world where every opinion and policy is ready for radical revision with every first shove.

  Honestly, I would hate that kind of world.

  Melanie says I’m cold, and she likes that about me.

  She warns me that I’m fooling people, meaning everybody except her. But that’s how I survived four years in the boondocks, teaching future farmers how to read the works of dead men and a few women.

  I love Melanie, as best I can. But I know she gets tired of me.

  I get tired of me.

  But Reagan, yeah. What makes me angriest about our President? He comes into office, and overnight our government’s official policy is to act brazen in the face of every trivial threat. Like the Soviets, who don’t look to me as if they’ve got more than a few years of life remaining. In Reagan’s world, we have to be geared up to fight a foe that could barely feed its own people. And meanwhile, our real troubles have to be mocked. Global warming. Nuclear proliferation. Corrupt governments supported by my tax dollars and everyone’s complacency. This is the mess that one arrogant man has stirred with his cock, and we’re into the second term of this bullshit, and I’m just hoping there’s still time to save the world before we have nothing but hope remaining.

  Melanie wants me to be calmer.

  Except the storms are inside me. Most of the time, at least in public, I’m sporting the calmest face in the room.

  She says she mostly agrees with me. In fact, with her mind and her skills, Melanie is in an even better place to comprehend the enormous risks standing before this world.

  People do ask about the two of us.

  And I’m talking about people who hold our ideals. Gay friends have questioned things, and my family never stops asking.

  I do prefer women.

  It’s my wiring, my constitution. Some fundamental talent of DNA coupled with a superior aesthetic.

  I don’t know what it is.

  “But why her?” my sister can’t stop wondering aloud.

  “Because,” is never an adequate answer. Except that is the answer, of course. “Because.”

  “Oh, it’s not that I don’t like your friend,” my sister constantly tells me. Which underscores how little regard she has for Melanie. And that’s before she delivers all of the usual reasons.

  “The drinking,” says my sister.

  My “friend” has a habit, yes. I see it and I can’t really approve, and sometimes, yes, the alcohol is in control.

  “Her appearance,” my sister mentions.

  “Appearance” can mean quite a lot. But my sister isn’t talking just about the disheveled clothing and her weight. That doesn’t cut to the heart of what’s wrong. Melanie isn’t pretty enough. That’s what she and probably the rest of my family believes. My brothers, for instance. All three of them would accept a starlet, high tits and a narrow waist. Or at least they could come to terms with my nature a little easier, seeing that at the family gatherings.

  “And besides,” my sister always says. “I don’t like . . . none of us enjoy . . . how your Melanie treats you.”

  “It’s none of your business how she treats me,” I have told her.

  A statement both true and useless.

  I have mention that my sister’s husband is a beery brute, and maybe she should take care of her own life before charging into mine.

  That tactic never works, but it does spice up Thanksgiving.

  On other occasions, I’ll say nothing. The cool, unreadable Gwen can nod in a way that’s both noncommittal and only a little bit angry. Because frankly, how often can I disagree with an opinion that I myself share?

  Melanie can be difficult.

  I admit that, yes.

  If I dialed my life back to my twentieth birthday, then maybe I would avoid her and the nearly two decades that followed. I would fall in love with somebody else. Shit, maybe I’d surrender to convention, ending up with a heavy and often drunk man and three kids, and I’d be teaching my soul out in some boondock bend in the goddamn road.

  But then I would have missed the rest of it.

  I’m smart and always have been. And my interests are broader than most people’s interests. For example, I happen to be one of the great scientists among Literature majors, and if it comes down to it, I can do a better job describing quantum mechanics and high-energy physics than a lot of the geniuses who work with nothing else.

  Melanie taught me.

  Talk about your gifts.

  She drinks too much. No question about it. And her hygiene could be improved. And we’ve settled into that old-dyke mentality where sex is relegated to special occasions. But sex isn’t anyone’s business, and what I get seems to be enough for me, and I don’t hear her complaining much at all. And during all these years together, the woman has never stopped giving me the most amazing tales about space and time and that truer wonder called spacetime.

  I feel fortunate.

  And all my lady gets from me are angry words about an old man who might kill the world but hasn’t yet and has only two years left in his second term.

  Anyway, here’s my point in this roundabout story.

  This winter, in Chicago. Melanie and I were attending one of her conferences, some of the big people in her business talking about neutrinos and Senators with pull and that huge underground ring they were building in Texas. Physicists wanted the ring finished, but there were a lot of complaints about the billions being spent. And I might have said a few carelessly skeptical words about the venture. But no, I really wanted the ring to happen, if only because my Melanie has assured me that we would learn a lot.

  Except that’s not quite it.

  “I’ll learn a lot, and that’s what matters.”

  She’s an arrogant broad. In every sense of the word, and she’d be happy to hear me say it.

  Chicago.

  Yeah, we were at the conference. A six-inch snow made the city prettier than it deserves to be. Fermi people and their wives, and by chance, I was standing outside waiting for the bus that was supposed to shuttle us to another event. And that’s when the blue light came. Brilliant and silent at first, but then we heard the crack of what wasn’t thunder and was definitely far from normal.

  I knew that instantly.

  And nobody debated my ignorant assessment.

  Maybe a dozen geniuses were gawking at a sky that made no sense, listening to that long odd roar. And then every light in the city went out. Power was down across all of northern Illinois, although we didn’t know it then. Maybe half of the scientists proposed that a suborbital nuke had generated some kind of blistering pulse. Except the glow didn’t come from one point but seemed to be generated everywhere, and this was strange as hell, and what impressed me most was how excited they became, these brilliant men and that one woman who happened to be standing beside me, giggling with nervous joy at the idea of something that they couldn’t quite explain.

  Which would have been enough, obviously.

  I couldn’t have imagined anything stranger than that.

  But then the little
bits of teeth and bone began falling on us and on millions of other people, and later came the soft ash that was never thick but easy enough to see on the fresh snow. And the scientists collected up samples along with snowballs, and a day later someone came out with the news that the ash and those tiny bits of teeth were human.

  And again, foolish as can be, I told myself that the story couldn’t find a stranger gear.

  Grandparents wanted to see the kids. That’s why we came back.

  My hometown lured us in because we were tired of dealing with renters from a thousand miles away. But selling Gwen’s old house meant cleaning it up first and probably seeing a new roof put on, and I would have preferred it if my folks could have volunteered to part of that work for us. That was my secret thought. But Gwen actually said it. She isn’t normally that mouthy, but the town and her still remembered each other, and I suppose it’s always going to be that way.

  And there’s another reason to return: My firm was sending me overseas, probably for the next several years, and what with time distance and the vagaries of health, there was a respectable chance that one of my parents would never see our kids again.

  Vagaries. Gwen dwells on little else, some days.

  “I loved this place,” she confided to me.

  We were standing in front of her former home. The last of the renters had vanished, evicted and possibly now being pursued by various authorities. And they had left behind exactly the kind of mess you’d expect.

  “You loved this place when?” I asked.

  Knowing the possible answers.

  “When I sat on this porch. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  I was home from college and she was sitting in the shade. The English teacher with a tragic past. She was looking at me as I strolled past. I have no recollection about where I was going. Probably down to the Sinclair for a Pepsi, and it was definitely summer, just like today. It was bright and hotter than normal for morning. Not unlike now. Which I suppose is why my wife brought up that critical moment in both of our lives.

  “You said my name,” I said.

  She laughed and said, “No.”

  “Yes.”