Author: Paul Fraser

Shoot your Shot by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Shoot your Shot by Rich Larson (Analog, September-October 2022) gets off to an entertaining start with its description of the story’s coke-head narrator in a club bathroom:

It’s been a while since I done coke—too expensive out East—but before Dante left the club he gave me his last two grams and the rolled-up fiver he was using, I think as an apology for bailing. I forgot just how fucking good it feels.
“Yo,” I say, pulling myself up to the sinks to make a new friend. “How’s your night going?”
My sink neighbor glances over, gives a bleary grin. “Yo,” he says. “Yo, not bad.”
“Heard you pissin’ while I was in the stall,” I say. “Terrific stream. Gotta say it. Real powerful-sounding.”
The guy looks confused for a second, then raises his soapy hand for a tentative fist bump. “Thanks, bro.”
I bump it, then start checking my nostril hairs for snowcaps. Clean.  p. 61

Subsequently, the sink neighbour talks about how he was just talking to “the most beautiful girl”, a “dark-haired chick with the silver jacket”. He says he is going to ask for her number, and the narrator assures him that he will succeed . . . before promptly going out and picking up the woman himself.
After some conversation in the club she suggests they go outside, and they eventually end up in an alleyway. They kiss, and then, when the narrator suggests they do some coke, he notices that (spoiler) her words aren’t matching her actions, that she is talking from a hole in her throat, and that her mouth is peeling back to show something like broken razors. The narrator can’t flee as the kiss has numbed his face and body.
This reads like a short character sketch lifted from the writer’s notes and given a random horror ending.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words.

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter1 (F&SF, August 1976) gets off to a lively start with a ship AI called Maelzel pranking one of the crew:

I could hear water splashing on the deck in Lloyd’s shower, then the slap of his feet on the wet tiles. I had planned to zap him right away, but he started singing in his wheezy tenor that song about the sailor who’s spent a year and a quarter in his ship’s crow’s-nest and he goes up the river to see Budapest… but you probably know it. “Yardarm Arnie?” Anyhow, it’s a particular favorite of mine, and it sounded kind of nice echoing around in Lloyd’s shower stall. So I let him finish first, and on the final “…mizzen mast, tooooo!” I cut off the hot water and ran up the pressure on the icy as high as it would go. Exit Lloyd, raging wet.
“Goddarnit, Mazey! This time…” he started in, mad as a kicked kitten.
I hit the decompression warning in his cabin, a basso profundo WHOOT! WHOOT! that totally drowned him out. I think he might have called my bluff, but for realism I dropped the air pressure a little, just enough to make his ears pop, and let the emergency airbag fall from its recess in the ceiling. It was as convincing as hell, if I do say so myself.  p. 78

When Lloyd makes it to the muster station he is only wearing a pair of soaking wet shorts under a transparent airbag, and is then subjected to the stares of the rest of the (unpranked) crew. They subsequently vote Maelzel into “Durance Vile” (limbo) for one day.
While Maelzel is disconnected from everything apart from the emergency systems, we get some backstory about the AI and learn that, because of a previous mission which ended in disaster, Maelzel has been, like the ship, hugely overspecified. This means Maelzel is underemployed, bored, and consequently needs to finds ways to entertain itself.
After Maelzel is released from limbo he gets up to his tricks again, this time slowly increasing the gravity and making the crew think about diets and exercise. When they find out about this some days later, they are just about to throw Maelzel back into Durance Vile when they are attacked by pirates. Of course, none of them believe Maelzel’s warnings until just before they are boarded, by which time it is too late:

At each of the four cardinal points of the lounge a tall skinny character appeared, back to the bulkhead, little round shield and big swashbuckling cutlass poised, ready to slay dragons or die trying. At the sight of my crew strewn all over the carpet they relaxed their defensive attitudes, and a couple of them started laughing. The one over by the aquarium, apparently the leader, swaggered over to where Sash was lying, half stunned, against the bar. He poked him with his cutlass.
“On your feet, reptile,” he said without rancor. Sash climbed slowly to his feet, then, with apparent effort, put his grin back in place. He looked his captor in the eye, then returned the careful eying the other was giving him.
Our uninvited guests were worth looking at. Two men and two women, each a shade under seven feet and several shades under two hundred pounds, they were as bald as a bar of soap and naked as a porno flick; nude, but not lewd, they were tattooed. All over. The one holding his cutlass at Sash’s throat had his musculature done in bright red and fine detail, from quadriceps and biceps down to the tiniest facial muscles. He looked like an anatomy chart, or like St. Bartholomew after the Armenians finished flaying him. The lady with her foot on the lens of my best holo projector was done up like a Gila monster, in black and orange pebble pattern, with each pebble carefully shaded to look raised. Black, whole-eye contacts made her eyes appropriately shiny and beady. I wondered how she felt about St. Bartholomew calling Sash “reptile.” The man down by where the fountain splashed into the pool was mostly in bare skin and tattooed zippers — some of which were partly unzipped to show right lung and liver, one temporal and both frontal lobes of his brain, and selected other bits of his internal workin’s, all in five colors and exquisite detail. The woman who had joined St. Bart in front of Sash was done over in spiders — big ones, little ones, hairy and smooth, they swarmed up her arms, legs, and torso (two enormous tarantulas cupped her breasts), all exact trompe l’oeil. If she’d been ticklish, she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Her head was done in furry black, with pairs of iridescent patches to match the contacts she wore, the locations of the false eyes being characteristic of the Latrodectus genus: the Widows, black and other colors.  pp. 84-5

That’s a passage that would grace a modern day issue of Planet Stories.
After an initially peaceable takeover, St. Bartholomew gropes Tilly, one of the crewmembers, and Sash gets slashed open when he tries to protect her.
The rest of the story sees the crew try to get Sash to sick bay, while avoiding mentioning Maelzel by name (to leave the AI with the element of surprise). Then (spoiler), when the pirates start wandering around the ship, Maelzel picks them off one by one (the first of the victims gets spaced through one of the ship’s toilets!)
If you are looking for a colourful and entertaining space opera with AIs and space pirates,2 then this will be right up your street.
*** (Good). 6,850 words. Story link.

1. According to ISFDB, Don Trotter only published three stories. On the basis of this one that is a pity.

2. This story reminded me of another recent AI/pirates tale, Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020).

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh (Tor.com, 22nd July 2020) opens with the narrator visiting her brain-damaged sister, Wanda:

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road. Wanda gets all that stuff: but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

The laboratory accident which caused her injury (and killed two others) may have been Wanda’s fault—we subsequently learn that she was a physicist doing research with a group that had developed a pair of “reality goggles”, a device designed to see the true quantum reality that lies beyond our own perceptions. Or at least I think that what they were designed to do, as the story only tangentially addresses the subject: the closest we get is a meeting between a physics researcher and the narrator towards the end of the story where the physicist attempts to quiz her about her sister’s work. The narrator does not reveal her suspicion that Wanda used the goggles herself.
What we get instead of a development of the core idea is a well written and characterised—but definitely mainstreamish—story that provides, variously: an account of the two sisters’ childhood; an interview with a detective who quizzes her about the two men who got killed in the accident; Wanda having a bad episode at the care home; and a visit to Claude the octopus, the team’s experimental subject who is now living in an aquarium.
This piece has an intriguing idea at its heart but, as with a couple other stories I’ve read by McHugh, it is a road to nowhere.1
**+ (Average to Good). 8,750 words. Story link.

1. Useless Things (Eclipse Three, 2009), for example.

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede (F&SF, August 1976) opens by establishing Horowitz as a hen-pecked husband who lives in an overheating apartment. On Saturdays he usually goes fishing and, during one particular trip out on the Many Happy Returns, something very odd happens:

[It] was at that moment that there was such a mighty tug on the dropline that Horowitz was in fear of losing his finger. Then, just as suddenly, there was no tension to the line at all. But as Horowitz looked over the side into the water, a large flounder about twice the size of any flounder Horowitz had ever seen before, surfaced next to the dropline. The fish had a hook and line in its mouth, and it seemed to gaze up at Horowitz and to judge him. After some little time the fish said, “Would you kindly remove your hook from my mouth?”  p. 70

During the ensuing conversation the fish tells Horowitz that taking the hook out rather than cutting the line will reduce the risk of infection, that it is an enchanted businessman, and that it knew better than to take the bait but couldn’t resist, etc. Then, after Horowitz returns the fish to the water, it tells him that it owes him one.
When Horowitz later tells his wife about this fantastic event she is contemplative rather than dismissive and tells him to go back and ask the fish for a better apartment. Horowtiz does so and, after the fish expresses his surprise that he is back so soon, tells him, “It’s in the mail”.
This is the first of a number of demands that the wife makes as she quickly becomes dissatisfied with what she has been given (a country home, a bigger apartment in the city, and a seat as a US Senator soon follow). When Horowitz is eventually told to tell the fish that she wants to be President (spoiler), the fish gets fed up and tells Horowitz that they are both going back to their original apartment. Horowitz says he would be happy to return there but asks if his wife can stay where she is. The fish says it’ll arrange a divorce, that Horowitz can go back to the original apartment, and that his wife can live with her mother.
This entertainingly combines the fantastic elements involving the fish with the mundanity of married life (in this latter respect it somewhat resembles a humorous mainstream story). The ending is a bit of a dud, though.
** (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.

Nest Egg by John Morressy

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nest Egg by John Morressy (F&SF, October-November 1995) is one of his “Kedrigern the Wizard” series, and this one sees him receive a summons from a “friend and comrade” called Lord Tyasan to de-spell his household griffin, Cecil. After Kedrigern complains at some length to his wife, Princess, about how it isn’t a job for a wizard, and that he doesn’t like Tysan’s tone, etc., she eventually convinces him to take the job, and tells him she is coming too.
When they finally arrive at the castle, Kedrigern and Lord Tyasan catch up (in what is probably the best passage in a weak story):

“How old are [your children], Tyasan? They weren’t even born when I was here last.”
The king beamed upon them. “I remember the occasion well. I had only recently wed my fair queen Thrymm. She was sorely afflicted, but you came to her aid, old friend.”
“What was her problem?” Princess asked.
“Spiders.”
“Isn’t it customary to call an exterminator?”
“These spiders popped out of Thrymm’s mouth every time she spoke,” Kedrigem explained.
“It was especially unpleasant when she talked in her sleep,” Tyasan said with a slight shudder of distaste. “A single oversight in drawing up the guest list, and it caused us no end of inconvenience and distress. You can imagine how punctilious we were in sending out invitations to the royal christenings.”  p. 190

Seven pages in (about half way through the story), Kedrigern finally inspects the cantankerous griffin and finds it hasn’t been spelled but he still cannot work out what ails the creature. Then, when Princess starts stroking the griffin’s neck feathers, the creature starts to recover and asks for some broth. Kedrigern realises that (spoiler), while Princess was stroking the griffin, her gold necklace was touching its skin.
The story ends with Kedrigern giving Tyasan some blather about griffins needing gold for their nests before realising that Cecil must now be old enough to mate. Tyasan doubts he can find enough gold for the griffin (and doesn’t want to give what he has) but Kedrigern points out that his gold will still be there in the nest, and that griffins are good at finding the material for themselves—so Tyasan and his family will be rich.
This piece is typical of the other series stories in that it is pleasant enough light reading, but is also contrived and padded, and has a weak plot (which, when it finally gets going here, pivots on Kedrigern noticing something and then explaining the solution based on information only he could know).
* (Mediocre). 6,050 words.

Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly (Analog, May-June 2021)1 opens with what turns out to be a group of sentient asteroids (who call themselves “Stones”) seeing a flash of light in the rock field they inhabit. After discussing the matter between themselves (they think a younger member of their species may have mixed a hazardous “hotfire” that caused it to explode), one of their number, Five Rings, goes to investigate. During this, something wet hits it:

I sent harvesters out for the fluids and found that much of the internal material was organic. It was surprisingly warm, warmer than our own internal fluids. There was both water and organics, mixed together, much like our own minds and cells. Some of the outer covering was organic, too, but didn’t taste the same; it looked like it had been made, like some object we might excrete on our own stony surface. It was flexible. Had this Thing been alive? Regardless, the resources were too valuable to waste. As we spent water to propel ourselves on occasion, we needed to replenish it when we could, and the Thing was an excellent resource. I wondered if there were more Things available. It would save me from having to chase after every wayward comet that fell our way, putting a rock into its path and hoping some of the scattered ice shards would come my way, so that I might gather and store them for the future.
I broadcast my findings to the others, and the ones with close vectors propelled themselves in my direction, keeping a sharp eye out for more Things.  p. 28

After this the narrator changes to Heart of Stone, who tells the rest of them2 that he has detected another Thing, and is setting off to intercept it (although some of the others advise against this course of action). When he approaches the Thing (spoiler) it waves at him, and it becomes apparent (to those readers who didn’t suspect previously) that the Things are human astronauts. This second astronaut tries to communicate with Heart of Stone before trying to make it to a wrecked spaceship nearby:

I reabsorbed some of the warmgas, knowing that I wouldn’t need to escape an attack from the Thing, and ignited the rest, following the Thing to its rendezvous with the new bit of scrap.
Would this be another living thing?
No Sense Of Humor was nearby, and said to me, “That Thing is going to miss its target. If you wish to help it, you must get in front of it.”
“I have little fuel to spare,” I said. This was a common lie, since few Stones would allow themselves to get so low that they could not maneuver. That would mean a slow death, perhaps even consuming the core’s water to chase after more volatiles. It was a subtle request for help, whether actually needed or not.
“I can toss some ice to you when I am nearer. If you garner some benefit here, I expect some sharing,” said No Sense Of Humor.
It was a good response. I sparked some more warmgas and accelerated beyond the Thing’s position as it flew toward the scrap, and used simple steam to position myself in front of it. More volatiles than I would normally use in two cycles, but it seemed so important. I really was hurting for propellants. It was so rare that we ever needed to move anywhere quickly, and so expensive.
We flew past the debris together, the Thing coming down on my Stone, and then I accelerated slowly back toward the debris. The Thing seemed content to ride on my surface, though it kept pointing the shiny nob of its outer surface at me. I did not know what that might mean, but the Thing did not seem frightened.  p. 29

The astronaut eventually gets to the damaged ship—but only after fighting off alien scavengers that attack it and Heart of Stone (we learn that Stones are created by groups of scavengers occupying empty asteroids and becoming a single sentient creature). When the astronaut is finished examining the wrecked ship, he or she goes and lands on No Sense of Humour, who has just arrived at the scene. Subsequently, there are further attempts at communication during which the human gives No Sense of Humour a torch. Then the human dies—either from their injuries or damage to the suit (the scavengers caused a couple of leaks during the attack).
The penultimate chapter sees the Stones detect an even bigger ship (it appears the one that exploded was a scoutship) and, after another debate, they decide to contact it. Finally, the last chapter is related by Diamond Eye 16 cycles after this First Contact, and describes the events that have occurred subsequently (as well as giving us an insight into the novel formation of this solar system).
This is an original, inventive, and enjoyable piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,600 words. Story link.

1. This story was the winner of the Analytical Laboratory Poll for 2021 in the short story category. There is more information about the poll finalists here.

2. I was tempted to call this group of stones “the pile”.

The Trashpusher of Planet 4 by Brenda Kalt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Trashpusher of Planet 4 by Brenda Kalt (Analog, March-April 2021)1 has an opening that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the story that will follow:

In the center of the ship, near the AI, a dozen candidates for methane drainer scurried out of the examination room.
“Watch it, trash!” a young chemical engineer snapped as he bumped another student.
“I’m sorry.” Awi Trashpusher Nonumber had a blind spot behind him. Though an adult, only four of the six eyes on his pale, skinny, cylindrical body had developed. The engineer castes had twelve eyes in two rings around their upper tips.
Awi had taken the exam in his usual state of hunger, and his tip now curled forward. Wrapping one tentacle around a waterpipe, he enfolded the pipe greedily. By the time he was temporarily full of water and upright again, the corridor was almost empty.
“Awi! How’d it go?” Roob Mechanical Engineer 3886, barely old enough to be a candidate, had scandalized his classmates by befriending Awi. Roob’s body was the clear yellow of the engineer castes, with more intense color along his feeding strip.  pp. 32-33

I would have probably stopped reading there if I was an editor as, at that point, I would know that (a) the story has an amateurish and juvenile tone, (b) it sounds clichéd and (c) that the tale would show Awi overcoming the disadvantages of his caste after some difficulties.
I wasn’t far wrong. After this encounter Awi goes home and broods about his lot until the ship AI (it materialises that he is on board an alien generation ship) gives him a job cleaning the scout ship Beautiful Light. The AI then tells Awi to take Beautiful Light on a reconnaissance mission. Awi takes the ship out—experiencing zero gee for the first time and learning how to use centripetal force to feed himself from the pipe—before orbiting a nearby planet that looks habitable. Then, when Awi returns, he meets Roob disembarking from another ship and they go to see the AI together. The AI subsequently instructs Awi to lead Roob’s ship, Firm Resolve, to the planet so they can dump nitrogen there to prove that the planet is terraformable.
After their experiment proves successful, the terraforming begins—although not without some pushback from the higher castes—and, during this episode, a new worldformer caste is created. Roob is given a place in it, but Awi is refused.
The story finishes (spoiler) with the AI more or less forcing the aliens to settle on the partially terraformed planet (it wants to go off and explore), and Awi taking his scoutship to investigate the “moonlets” that keep coming from planet 3 (Earth, obviously, so the planet they are terraforming is Mars).
I suppose that this is a competently enough told YA story where, ultimately, Awi doesn’t change the system but does escape it. I have to wonder what it is doing in Analog, though—I wouldn’t say that about all kinds of YA stories, but this type of story seems far too unsophisticated for a modern audience.
** (Average). 5,700 words. Story link.

1. This story was the runner-up in the short story category of the Analytical Laboratory poll for 2021. If this is really the second best short story from Analog that year no wonder so few of its works feature in the Hugo or Nebula Award final ballots (not that they are currently anything to write home about).

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove

Posted on by Paul Fraser

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 opens with Dave Markarian, CEO of Interstellar Master Traders, arriving at work to anxiously prepare for a visit by a representative of the alien Brot. During the three page wodge of exposition that follows, we learn that the Brot have the economic (and military) whip hand over humanity, and use us as an economic subject race (I guess you could view this as an extreme version of China’s relationship with many developing countries).
The middle act of the story sees Old Salty (the name given to the Brot representative by Dave) arrive in a gossamer bubble that is beyond human science or comprehension. When Dave welcomes Old Salty, the alien almost immediately tells him that this will be his last visit as he is returning to his home planet. Then they set off on a tour of the premises so Old Salty can inspect the devices that are being built there (the devices have “Made on Earth” on the base, and the workers manufacturing them have no idea of what they are, or how they work). During the visit Dave walks on eggshells—even though he is friendly with the alien, or as friendly as you can be with aliens who have, in the past, levelled a city for unfathomable reasons.
Before Old Salty leaves Dave invites the alien to have a farewell drink with him (“the Brot could handle methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol”) and, during this get together, Dave presents Old Salty with a going-away present, a set of plastic “California Raisins” toys that were originally given away with fast food meals in the 1980s:

“I see,” Old Salty said, which gave not the slightest clue about what he/she/it thought.
He/she/it picked up one of the Raisins: Beebop, the drummer. His/her/its eyestalks swung toward Beebop for a close inspection, and tentacles felt of the small plastic figure. “On the bottom of one foot I the inscription ‘Made in China’ find.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Dave nodded. “I know that, these days, China’s right up with the United States or maybe even ahead of us. That wasn’t true then, though. China was just starting to turn into a big industrial power. Peasants would come off the farms and move to the big cities to work in factories.”
“We this phenomenon on other worlds also have observed,” the Brot said.
Dave Markarian nodded again. “Yeah, I figured you would have. Some of those peasants would have made their livings painting eyes or gloves or shoes or whatever on the California Raisins, over and over again. Same with the detailwork on all of these other little plastic toys. They wouldn’t have known why the figures were supposed to look the way they did. They wouldn’t have seen the advertising campaigns or games or films the toys were based on—they lived in a faraway country that used a different language. I sometimes wonder what they thought while they painted every toy the same way while they went through their shifts day after day.”  p. 38

After more small talk, Yoda—sorry, Old Salty—leaves in his gossamer bubble.
The final act of the story (spoiler) sees Old Salty back on his home planet, and we see him visit his sister and her children. Old Salty gives each of the children one of the devices made by Dave’s company, and we learn that they are cheap junk toys for kids. Old Salty reflects that the master/peasant relationship between the Brot and humanity is similar to the one between American consumers and Chinese workers in the 1980s. The alien hopes that humanity will develop spaceflight and find races that can work for them, but doubts that will be the case.
This is a plodding, expository, and clunky story with a very old-fashioned feel and a dispiriting vision of interstellar commerce. I also note that the repeated “he/she/its” pronouns used for the alien are irritating—what is wrong with “they” and “its”?
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This story was fourth in the Analytical Laboratory Poll for 2021 stories. There is more information about the poll finalists here.

The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with Chester Drummond, an ex-politician, taking a train to a “refusenik” farm for those that have not had the Carcopino-Koster treatments (these are never really explained in any detail, but have given the vast majority of the near-future human race an emotional stability and intellectual uplift that has radically changed society).
When Drummond arrives at his station he is picked by Roberta, a woman from the farm who has had the C-K treatment, and travels to their destination along with another new inmate, the charismatic Brother Emil Sangar.
After they arrive, Sangar, who wants society back the way it was, goes to see Drummond, who has similar plans. Sangar tells Drummond that there is a woman called Elizabeth Wiley at the farm who, after an accident, reverted to pre C-K state and did not want to undergo the process again. Sangar wants to recruit her as he thinks her perspective will prove useful (he describes her as “the Holy Grail”). Later, the pair meet Elizabeth, who says she is in communication with the Virgin Mary (she says she gets messages in the veins of leaves), as well the farm’s other inmates (one is an SF writer “who predicted this” but “my books never sold”).
Further on in the story Drummond learns from Roberta, to his surprise, that he isn’t a prisoner at the camp and can leave any time he wants (she adds that there are only two C-K people at the camp and that they are there as helpers, not as guards). Roberta also tells him about a therapy class, and Drummond’s subsequent visit there (most of chapter 5) is the highlight of the story, as it consists of some entertainingly demented one-liners and exchanges:

Roberta opened the session by focussing immediately on the new arrivals. “Let’s start with you, Brother Emil,” she said. “You were saying this morning that you wanted to be cured.”
“Cured, yes,” said Brother Emil. “Of the coercion of the state. Of the tyranny of reason.”
Roberta raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Allan Fence, the writer, quickly rose to the occasion. “What coercion?” he said. “You checked yourself in here voluntarily, Brother Emil. Of your own free will.”
“When we were neanderthals,” replied Brother Emil, “we developed a taste for mastodon. You know how we hunted them, my friend? We’d form a hunting line and drive the herd toward the edge of a cliff. Within the bounds of that line each mastodon exercised free will, yet today”—he waved at the window, which looked out over the fields—“one very rarely sees a mastodon.”
“No, no, that’s terribly wrong.” Linda Bartly was upset. “We’re not all mastodons, we’re not all the same. They’re like a hunting line, but what they’ve crowded together is a flock of creatures: sloths, butterflies, leopards, loons, platypusses—”
Loons indeed, thought Chester.
“they want us all to be the same, but we’re not—”
“Linda,” said Roberta, “would you like to tell the group what you see in Brother Emil and Chester’s auras?” She turned and explained to Chester: “Linda sees auras. But not around those of us who’ve undergone Carcopino. We’ve lost ours.”
Brother Emil held up his hand. “It will avail us nothing to become mastodons, certainly. But if we all grew wings together, the onrushing cliff would become an opportunity.”
“Or arm the mastodons with machine guns,” said Allan Fence thoughtfully. “Suitably adapted for physiological differences, of course. Trunk triggered, air-cooled fifty calibers with cermet stocks.”
“Mr. Drummond’s aura is huge,” Linda Bartly stage-whispered. “Big enough for all of us. But it’s gray—”
“I’m interested in what the group thinks of Brother Emil’s image of the wings,” said Roberta. “Implicitly, he’s proposing to lead you, to turn you into his followers. He’s not a man who gives up easily—only last year he was preaching the end of the world to his cult on Mt. Shasta.”
“It was postponed,” said Sanger.  p. 155-156

The rest of the story (such as it is) concerns the manoeuvrings of Sangar and Drummond in their attempt to recruit the enigmatic Sister Wiley to their cause. During this, Drummond walks to Roberta’s nearby house and ends up sleeping with her when she arrives to find him inside. At the end of this encounter she tells him that he can’t change the world (and Drummond also later discovers that the explosive he has hidden in a bust in his room has been taken away).
Finally (spoiler), Elizabeth converts Drummond and Sangar to the C-K treatment (Sangar is told that he must take the treatment so he can save C-K souls), and we find that she intends taking the treatment herself, but only once she has convinced the last of the unconverted to do so.
This piece doesn’t have the strongest story arc—the ending, where the unreasonable are converted into the reasonable, seems rather unlikely—but it works on an ironic level, I suppose. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining read, sometimes very much so.
I’d add that it seems a remarkably uniform work given that it has three writers involved.
*** (Good). 10,900 words.

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with Stern, the narrator, thinking about different types of assassin before he himself is recruited by a wheelchair-bound man called Thrale to kill a Senator Philip Hanson.
We later learn that the reason for the proposed killing is that Hanson intends to vote for legislation enabling a biowar facility, an action that links to Stern’s own past as he was a spider drone operator in the Brazilian conflict and was exposed to a cocktail of tailored viruses and pathogens, but never fell ill. His family, however, were not so lucky:

After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt in our five-year-old daughter’s flesh.
I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died—a noxious odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room. My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over our noses and mouths.  p. 115

In the next part of the story we see (the now widowed) Stern learn how to operate a marionette-like bodysuit that will enable him to control Hanson’s daughter after she has been injected with nanotechnology. The nanotech will give Stern twenty minutes of control and will than decompose, leaving no trace of external involvement—so the daughter will take the blame for the murder which, apart from the obvious benefits to Thrale, Stern & co., will also prevent her, a politician in her own right, from continuing with her father’s legislative agenda. To be honest, the suit/nanotech gimmick is probably the weakest part of the story, but little time is spent on the tech stuff and the bulk of the piece is mostly a series of scenes where we get a character study of Stern, or learn more about Thrale and his two employees: Pangborn is a female assistant, and Truman is the scientist who developed the system that Stern will be using to control the daughter.
At one point Stern is given a video disc from Pangborn that shows Hanson’s daughter and her female lover in a hotel room, and he later has a disturbing dream:

I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side. Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of contused undergrowth.
How I loved the hunt.
I had always loved it.
Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.
I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the area.
The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but one another.
“It’s time,” said the voice of Napoleon Thrale.
I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of orgasm.
She wore my daughter’s face.
I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a stiffened rod against my belly.  p. 126

After this Stern (a) talks to Truman about scientists like Oppenheimer and the guilt they bear for the inventions they create and (b) sleeps with Pangborn, learning that her fiancé died in Brazil.
Eventually (spoiler), the day of the assassination arrives and Stern, Pangborn and Truman set off to complete the mission. The daughter, Amanda, is shot with a long range hypodermic dart while out on a regular run and the nanotechnology enters her body. Stern takes control of Amanda and takes her back to the house, quickly finding Hanson in his office. Then, when the nanotech starts to break down, Amanda manages to reassert enough control to say “Dad?” just before Stern breaks a mug on the desk and kills Hanson by repeatedly slashing his throat.
There is a final postscript which sees Stern in the Caymans, where he still dreaming of his wife and daughter. Stern says that he has written a letter to Amanda’s attorneys explaining what happened and why she is not guilty of the murder (“the daughters have suffered enough” he adds to himself). After he sends the letter Stern says he will swim off towards the horizon to join his wife and daughter.
If you are looking for the assassination adventure suggested by the beginning of the piece you are probably going to be disappointed—however, if you are looking for a complex and involving psychodrama, then this will be well worth your time.
***+ (Good To Very Good). 11,100 words.