Tag: novelette

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

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O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)1 opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O2 cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O2 masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O2 cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O2 generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O2 arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
** (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

1. This story was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)1 is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
*** (Good). 12,800 words.

A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L. Davitt

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A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L. Davitt (Analog, January-February 2021)1 has as its protagonist Dominic Vadas, a solo prospector who works on Titania (a moon of Uranus), humanity’s farthest away outpost. The only company this committed loner has is an AI called Enara, who interrupts his work to tell him that there is an incoming message from their bosses, the UN Space Control Agency—they ask Vadas to fuel up his ship and intercept an exo-solar object that has entered the solar system. There is then further disruption to Vadas’s routine as he prepares to depart, when he gets a message from a woman claiming to be his daughter. After the ship gets underway Vadas sends a reply that describes his short relationship with the woman’s mother and how it ended. Vadas later learns that he is not only a father, but a grandfather too.
The rest of the story sees Vadas receive further messages from both the woman and UNSCA as he approaches the exo-solar object. As Vadas gets closer to the object it soon becomes apparent that it is (spoiler) a spaceship of alien construction and, after some cautionary hand wringing from UNSCA, he goes EVA to explore. Then, after an external and internal examination of the object, Vadas takes samples back to the ship and comes to the conclusion about what the alien object is:

Back on the Resolution, he examined his finds in the airless vacuum of the cargo bay, using a microscope. UNSCA had yet to call in to scold him, for which he was grateful. They might not, once he sent them his current results. “Bacteria,” he finally assessed.
“Some of them might still be viable,” Enara noted. “Some have formed endospores. Control will likely assess this as a weapon of biological warfare between long-gone civilizations.”
Dominic thought about it as he stripped out of his EVA suit. Thought about his daughter, whom he’d never met. The grandson he hadn’t known he had. A shot through the dark of time, a chance connection of genetic material spanning worlds. Like all life, really. “Panspermia,” he said out loud, sitting down by the controls. “That’s what this is. Not a weapon. I’d be willing to bet that whoever they were, they sent these out by the thousands. Hoping that someday, they’d land on a planet with decent temperatures and at least the start of an atmosphere. And when they did, they’d eject their payload and start life on that planet. And that life would adapt to its surroundings, and adapt its surroundings to it. Slowly. Very slowly.”  p .51

After this intuition the object comes to life, deploys solar sails, and starts heading towards Uranus for a gravity assist that will slingshot it further into our solar system. UNSCA greets this news with alarm and wants him to boost the craft out of the system, but Vadas sends a broadcast stating that humanity should pause and give the object a chance before treating it as hostile—i.e. be open to possibility. Then he asks his daughter for photos of his grandson.
This is a solid piece that successfully combines an interesting character study, a relationship dilemma, and an interesting SF story.
*** (Good). 8,000 words. Story link.

1. Winner of the novelette category in the 2022 Analog Readers’ (Analytical Laboratory) Poll.

Sample Return by C. Stuart Hardwick

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Sample Return by C. Stuart Hardwick (Analog, July-August 2021)1 opens with the protagonist Katy and her fellow crewmember, Xavier, in the process of launching an impactor probe towards Jupiter. Although this part of the operation is successful, the Proteus, the craft designed to collect the samples the impactor probe will cause to be ejected from the Jovian atmosphere, has a launch malfunction. Katy (whose mother has just died) quickly suits up and goes EVA to free the craft, even though they are in a high radiation zone.
Initially Katy just tries to dislodge the explosive bolts holding the Proteus to their ship, Jovian Queen, but her actions soon become wilder:

She jerked her safety line, setting the brake on her take-up reel so her line went slack. He hauled on his tether to reel her in, but as she drifted within reach of the webbing, she swept the shears forward and cut it, then jiggled her line to reset the brake and feed her slack back down into the take-up reel still attached to Proteus.
“Katy, no!”
Xav grabbed for her, but the line popped taught, and she spun and sailed down toward the hub.
“Dammit, Katy! Get back up here before you get yourself killed!”
He was probably right. She was probably committing suicide, but if she had to die to save the mission, then she had to. That was a calculation she’d made long ago, before they’d ever left Earth, long before that . . .
And goddammit anyway! If the mission failed now she’d be written off as hysterical, but if Xavier were down here, they’d already be writing his heroism up for the feeds back home. After all, they’d say, what was one life—any life—compared to iron or steam or stone tools or fire? The world’s monuments were filled with the names of men who’d died for less. Who’d left families and fortunes and nations behind. Who every one shared the same dying wish: that it all hadn’t been in vain.
But Katy wasn’t dead just yet. It would be dicey now, but if she could free those pins quickly enough—before the Queen started her burn—she might still be able to make it. Maybe.  p. 130

Katy doesn’t make it back, of course, and departs with Proteus for a Jovian fly-by. The rest of the story (spoiler) sees her spend the next few days debugging faults on the probe while her suit AI fills her full of anti-radiation meds. Then the impactor probe hits and the capture pods start deploying from Proteus to capture the samples. Katy manages to jump into one of pods, and hopes that she will survive until the Jovian Queen returns to pick them up. However, Katy is ultimately rescued by a skiff the ship’s crew have built to rescue her, and it turns out, although she is ill, that she has been sufficiently shielded from radiation by the chunk of the metallic hydrogen blown out of the Jovian atmosphere. Katy has a final sentimental vision of her mother.
This is a fast paced adventure with plenty of rivets, reckless action, and miracle escapes—it may appeal to some, but I thought it rather far-fetched. I’d also hate to be on a spaceship with someone like Katy, who would likely not only kill herself, but take others with her.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.

1. This was the runner up in the novelette section of the Analog Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh

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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.

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

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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

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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.

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

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Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #175, April 2021)1 opens with the narrator, who has had a copy of his mind beamed into a “blank body” on a far-flung alien planet, recording in his log that he is the only one who has made it—all his colleagues’ downloads were scrambled and their blanks recycled. Worse still, he finds the planet is a polar wasteland that appears inimical to human life.
He subsequently decides to try and make it to a depot that is thirty clicks away, even though he is hampered by problems with his suit’s battery draining faster than he can recharge it (the surface of his suit doubles as a solar panel). During his journey he sees thermal vents (a sign of heat sources under the ice) and feels the vibrations of glaciers moving beneath him. Then he finds signs of alien life, the brittle chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals which he scans and photographs. During this process he realises he may be the first human to discover alien life, but that he has no-one to share it with.
Then, shortly afterwards, he makes an even more profound discovery:

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.
There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high.
Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.
That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?
Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning. It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.
Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.
And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.
Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees him working his way through the maze while he appears to be stalked by the alien—which, at one point, when he partially falls into a crevasse, he throws an axe at to scare away. Then, when he reaches the depot and finds an alien burial cairn nearby, he examines the body and sees that it appears to have the kind of impact damage caused by a crash.
The last pages see the narrator’s tent blown over in a storm, a concussion, and him waking to find that he is being dragged through the snow by the alien. He ends up in a warm cave with the creature observing him. Then, when he attempts to communicate with the creature, he discovers it is actually the sentient EVA suit of the buried alien—and it finally opens up so he can climb inside.
The strengths of this story are its cracking beginning and The Thing-like polar setting and suspense. Unfortunately it drags a little in the middle (the story is probably a little longer than it needs to be) and the ending verges on the far-fetched (i.e. the idea that the alien/suit would be able to provide life support to the narrator—although it must be said that the dead alien may have a similar biochemistry to humans or it probably wouldn’t have been sent to that planet). Overall, a good piece.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story Link.

1. This was joint seventh place in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories. Another of Nayler’s stories, Yesterday’s Wolf, was the winner.

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

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Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser Leave a Comment on Dankden by Marc Laidlaw

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw (F&SF, October-November 1995) is the first of a series about Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with a difference:

His musical deficiency owed much to the fact that his right hand was made entirely out of polished black stone, carved in perfect replication of a human hand, so detailed that one could see the slight reliefwork of veins and moles, the knolls of knuckles, even peeling cuticles captured in the hard glossy rock. Most of the fine hairs had snapped from the delicately rendered diamond-shaped pores, but you could feel where they had been, like adamantine stubble. His left hand was more dexterous than most, and his calloused fingers hammered the strings as best they could to make up for the other hand’s disability; but his rock-solid right hand was good for nothing more than brutal strumming and whacking. He couldn’t pinch a plectrum. The soundbox was scarred and showed the signs of much abuse, the thin wood having been patched many times over.
“It’s a gargoyle affliction,” he said to most who asked. “Comes and goes. I’m looking for the treacherous slab who did it to me and disappeared before he could undo it.”  p. 202-3

If you read on through the series you will discover that Gorlen and a gargoyle called Spar, who is introduced later, were cursed by a wizard who swapped their hands for reasons connected to a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. None of this backstory is particularly germane to this particular story, however, which has Gorlen arrive at the town of Dankden, a place located in a swamp and whose streets are (literally, as it turns out later) rivers of mud. We subsequently discover that the town is populated by human inhabitants and by creatures that are half-human, half-phib (the phibs are amphibious creatures that live in the swamps).
Gorlen falls into the company of a woman and her brother, and soon encounters their phib hunting father. Then, shortly after this meeting, there is a commotion in the street when a number of half-phibs gather to complain about the killing of one of their young and, during an altercation, the hunter’s son is taken hostage. The rest of the story concerns his rescue, and Gorlen’s dawning realisation that the hunting community has been killing half-breed phibs rather than taking the wild (and non-intelligent) ones.
This story doesn’t entirely work, partly because of the odd and unlikely interbreeding, and partly because of the depressing genocide subplot. There are also a couple of loose ends, and one of these (spoiler) is why one of the phibs would give Gorlen an underwater kiss of life to save him from drowning when he is in the process of trying to escape from them:

The water, black until now, began to fill with streaming lights. A distant liquid music swelled in his ears as though an operatic riverboat were passing overhead. This developed into a rich, throaty vibration, a catfish purr. According to those who had been revived from the edge of watery death, drowning was almost peaceful once you gave in and inhaled the waters, once the body surrendered and let the soul drift free. Gorlen clung to this last hope as he opened his mouth and inhaled—
Warm, fishy air.
He nearly choked. Cold lips out of nowhere pressed tight to his own. Opening his eyes in disbelieving terror, he saw nothing. Nor could he move, something powerful bound his arms to his sides, albeit without hurting him. Reflexively he breathed in deep, then deeper still, unable to believe that there was air enough to fill him. There was a rich taste in his lungs, an undercurrent to the clammy essence, some perfume that flooded his brain and seeped down his nerves like a whisper, nudging him with secret knowledge, eking out revelation on such a fine level that he felt his atoms1 were conversing with a stranger’s atoms. The mouth sealed to his own began a slight suction, encouraging his exhalation, he gave up the stale air gladly. On the second inhalation—shallower, less desperate—his blinded eyes lit up with a vision of the swamp, all its tangled waterways cast through him like a glowing net whose intricacies were as homey and familiar as the sound of his own pulse. He knew his location: near the sea, not far from Dankden. Dankden! Human town! At the thought of the place, he felt a violent urge to flee at any cost, to swim and keep swimming until he had put that loathsome blot far behind him. An evil paradox posed itself in the same instant: there was literally nowhere left to run. The swamps, once vast enough to remain uncharted even by their most ancient inhabitants, had dwindled alarmingly within the span of several generations; encroached on by human dwellings, drained and poisoned and tamed by air-breathers, the swamps had been reduced to a few last drops.  p. 228-9

Notwithstanding my reservations above, the atmosphere and setting in this story are pretty good, and it’s also an entertaining piece.
*** (Good). 14,300 words.2

1. “Atoms” is not a good word for a fantasy story.

2. This is listed in the magazine as a novella, but it isn’t even close.