Tag: short story

How Beautiful with Banners by James Blish

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How Beautiful with Banners by James Blish (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with Dr Ulla Hillstrøm on the surface of Titan wearing a molecule thick “virus space-bubble”. After some description of this space suit, her environment (which includes a view of the rings of Saturn), and of an alien “flying cloak,” the latter hits her in the small of the back and knocks her over.
The second chapter of the story sees her recover consciousness, and which point she starts thinking about a post-divorce affair that she had at a Madrid genetics conference. There is another page or so of background which, in part, focuses on her generally unhappy love life.
In the third chapter she realises that her suit isn’t working correctly but can’t remember what happened. Then she realises that the alien cloak creature has wrapped itself around her, and may have bonded with her suit, but this doesn’t stop further self-absorption:

And suppose that all these impressions were in fact not extraneous or irrelevant, but did have some import—not just as an abstract puzzle, but to that morsel of displaced life that was Ulla Hillstrøm? No matter how frozen her present world, she could not escape the fact that from the moment the cloak had captured her she had been simultaneously gripped by a Sabbat of specifically erotic memories, images, notions, analogies, myths, symbols and frank physical sensations, all the more obtrusive because they were both inappropriate and disconnected. It might well have to be faced that a season of love can fall due in the heaviest weather—and never mind what terrors flow in with it or what deep damnations. At the very least, it was possible that somewhere in all this was the clue that would help her to divorce herself at last even from this violent embrace.  p. 58

The final part of the story has her notice another of the flying creatures in the distance and, thinking that it might attract the one that surrounds her, she goes to the thermal beneath which it is soaring. She blocks up the vent, the creature descends, and then the cloak surrounding her departs, along with her spacesuit. She has time to think “You philanderer—” but not to realise that she has started a long evolution in the cloaks that will end sixty million years later.
This is a complete muddle of various parts, some of which are quite good (Ulla’s character is much more three-dimensional than usual for the time; there is some good descriptive writing; and there is a sense-of-wonder-ish ending) but some of it is awful (who wakes up from an attack on an alien and starts relationship navel gazing? What on Earth is the silly “philanderer” comment about?) None of this works as a coherent whole. God only knows what Blish was trying to achieve here.
** (Average). 3,800 words.

The Disinherited by Poul Anderson

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The Disinherited by Poul Anderson (Orbit #1, 1966) starts with two starship pilots in orbit around a planet called Mithras, where a human science expedition landed a century before. Their discussion provides various bits of background information, most pertinently that all interstellar travel is to be stopped.
After this setup the bulk of the story is from the viewpoint of Thrailkill, who is the son of one of the science team, and we join him as he returns from expedition upriver of Point Desire, the only city on the planet. With him are his wife, child, and an indigenous alien called Strongtail, a kangaroo-like creature with long arms and a head like a bird. When they arrive at an inn in Point Desire they are greeted with the news of the starship’s arrival, and that the arriving crew “say you can now go home”.
The remainder of the story focuses on the plan to remove the science mission, which leads Thrailkill and the other colonists to realise that they want to stay. In amongst all this, there is some good description of the planet and Thrailkill’s life there:

When he and Tom Jackson and Gleam-Of-Wings climbed the Snowtoothe, white starkness overhead and the wind awhistle below them, the thunder and plumes of an avalanche across a valley, the huge furry beast that came from a cave and must be slain before it slew them. Or shooting the rapids on a river that tumbled-down the Goldstream Hills, landing wet and cold at Volcano to boast over their liquor in the smoky-raftered taproom of Monstersbane Inn. Prowling the alleys and passing the lean temples of the Fivedom, and standing off a horde of the natives’ half-intelligent, insensately ferocious cousins, in the stockade at Tearwort. Following the caravans through the Desolations, down to Gate-of-the-South, while drums beat unseen from dry hills, or simply this last trip, along the Benison through fogs and waterstalks, to those lands where the dwellers gave their lives to nothing but rites that made no sense and one dared not laugh. Indeed Earth offered nothing like that, and the vision-screen people would pay well for a taste of it to spice their fantasies.  p. 73

Eventually Kahn, the starship captain, assembles all the humans and speaks to them while he waits for his men to arrive. He tells them that their colony isn’t a viable size, and they cannot be allowed to stay because, if they do, they will expand their numbers and overwhelm the planet and the aliens who live there. During his speech he refers to some of the indigenous populations of Earth’s past (Native Americans, etc.) who were overwhelmed by new arrivals. Then a shuttle from the starship arrives, armed men enter, and the story ends.
This is a picturesque story, but it poses a false dichotomy1 and the last scene resembles one of those didactic Analog story-lectures. It also ends far too abruptly, and feels like the beginning of a longer, better story.
** (Average). 5,500 words.

 1. The ending of this piece made me realise that a lot of stories probably have simplistic either/or endings for dramatic reasons—in this case it means you can either finish the story as above (armed arrest), or you could have a “resistance and independence” ending (in what would be a longer story). A more pragmatic, fudged solution, where the humans covenant with the aliens to limit the size of their colony, for instance, probably wouldn’t be as satisfying.

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna

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The Secret Place by Richard McKenna (Orbit #1, 1966) has as its narrator a geologist called Duard Campbell, one of a team sent to a small town to search for a vein of uranium:

It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker.  p. 31

After the team finds nothing (the whole area is overlaid by Miocene lava flows) Campbell is left behind to maintain a skeleton operation to keep the army happy. He is angry and feels betrayed by his boss, and decides he will find the vein to spite him. Then, one night at dinner, Campbell speaks to Old Dave, one of the townsmen, who tells him about a local myth of a lost mine, and how the deceased boy’s sister, Helen, might know something about its whereabouts.
Campbell then hires Helen (who is described in part as “elfin”) as his secretary, and the main part of the story concerns itself with Campbell’s manipulation of her to obtain the information he wants. Initially this proves unsuccessful, but one day he makes a breakthrough:

I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole, expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me. “It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.

During this trip, and subsequent ones, Helen tells him of the “fairyland” that she and her brother used to play in, and talks about “big cats” that chase dogs, “shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures,” “the evil magic of a witch or giant,” “sleeping castles,” “gold or jewels,” and “magic eggs” amongst other things. Throughout this Campbell sketches the topology of Helen’s fantasy land (noting that she is remarkably consistent with her descriptions) and later convinces her to show him the “magic eggs,” which turn out to be quartz pebbles that could never have originated in the basalt desert around Barker.
Throughout all this Helen becomes increasingly unhappy and unstable, and there is a crisis point where she says that her brother Owen stole the “treasure” and later died because of her family’s poverty (when he was found he had lacerations of his back consistent with a cougar attack, although there were no such animals in the area). Old Dave eventually intervenes, tells Campbell about the townfolk’s displeasure about Helen’s condition, and states that she needs to go home.
Before he can arrange this Campbell receives a map of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape of the area, and is stunned when he realises it is a point for point copy of the map he has made of Helen’s fairyland. All of a sudden he realises, “The game was real [. . .] All the time the game had been playing me,” and he rushes out to find Helen, only to come across Dave who says she is missing.
Campbell drives out to the desert in the jeep ahead of the search party and, when he finds her, declares his love:

“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun.  p. 45

There is a minor confrontation with the townsfolk when they get back, but Helen says she is going away with Campbell to be his wife.
A short postscript takes place sixteen years later, where Campbell tells of his professorship and the son they have had. Campbell also says that they don’t have any books of fairy tales in the house, but goes on to quote a cryptic remark from the son:

“You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”  p. 47

When I first finished this story (I skimmed it again later) I found it a bit of a muddle to be honest, and wasn’t sure whether “The Secret Place” was located in a different time or in a different reality, or both.1 Part of this was down to expectation (I’d previously read a review—which I can’t now find—of McKenna’s Fiddler’s Green which states that the characters in the story generate their own reality to escape the current one), and part of it was McKenna’s execution of the story itself, which trowels in so much talk of fantasy and magic that it almost drowns out the evidence suggesting the children (and later Campbell and Helen) are actually playing make-believe games in another time: the gold, the uranium, the quartz pebbles, the topology map, and the comment by the son.
I also thought the sudden declaration of love by Campbell a bit unlikely, and have no idea what is happening in the earthquake scene above (is it really a timequake—“now and then all rushed together”—or is it just an emotional climax to the story?)
It’s a very mixed bag and by no means a worthy Nebula winner. Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days should have won that year, but was probably pipped by this as McKenna had recently died, and the film of his best-selling book, The Sand Pebbles, was in the cinemas.
** (Average). 6,150 words.

1. It took me a couple of days of scratching my head, Algis Budry’s October 1966 Galaxy review (“a minor story by a major writer,” “about time travel, love and maturation”), and reading the other comments on my Facebook group read thread before I could make sense of the story.

The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice

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The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice (Orbit #1, 1966) isn’t so much a story as an account of a mother of four’s various domestic problems and accidents. In a mainstream story these would mostly be the fault of the children, but here they are ascribed to the “loolies”:

Anyhow, to the inevitable queries—Why are they called loolies? Where do they come from, et cetera?—I can only reply through a mouthful of clothespins, I haven’t time to hat this over the head with a rolled-up research paper. I guess they’re called loolies for the same reason that brownies are called brownies. It is their name. Maybe they come from the same place. Et cetera. Wherever that is. However and whereas a brownie is a good-natured goblin who performs helpful services at night (that’s what I need, begod, a reliable brownie, with an eyeshade and some counterfeiting equipment) a loolie will leave you lop-legged. And probably already he has. I’m not sure a loolie is a goblin either.  p. 85-86

Deliver all this in Rice’s high-energy, madcap style1 for half a dozen pages, until which time the loolies turn their attention to the wife’s less than helpful husband, and you are done.
Not bad, just froth that would have been better off in Good Housekeeping.
* (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

1. For better examples of Rice’s solo humorous style, I recommend The Elixir (Unknown Worlds, December 1942), or The Magician’s Dinner (Unknown Worlds, October 1942).

Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm

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Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm (Orbit #1, 1966) opens with two humans and a long-lived alien called Staeen closing in on a wrecked and tumbling spaceship that appears to be abandoned. Throughout their craft’s approach to the wreck, which they intend to investigate, we learn various things about Staeen, including the fact that he is tulip-shaped, is very long lived, can survive unsuited in space, and is able to sense the men’s emotions. Staeen also, in common with the rest of his race, feels a paternalistic concern for the men (who they call Flonderans):

When the Flonderans had come to Chlaesan, they had been greeted with friendliness and amusement. So eager, so impulsive, so childlike. The name Earthmen was rarely used for them; they remained the Flonderans, the children. It amused Staeen to think that when they had still been huddling in caves, more animal than man, his people already had mapped the galaxy; when they had been floundering with sails on rough seas, engrossed in mapping their small world, his people already had populated hundreds of planets, light-years away from one another.  p. 14

When the three of them go aboard the wreck they come to realise that the missing crew used all the lifeboats to abandon the ship, a course of action that would only have kept them alive for a few hours longer because of the limited oxygen carried. Mystified, they leave. However, when they return on a further search, Staeen picks up various vibes that make him realise that the crew left the ship “in the madness of fear,” but he does not tell the humans as he thinks they will not accept his discovery.
The final act of the story involves the three of them subsequently encountering a Thosar spaceship, a race who only pass through the galaxy every twelve thousand years, and who mankind have never come into contact with. Staeen explains to the men that the Thosars are huge creatures, and that they will send representatives to the ship but stay outside. When they get close enough to be seen (spoiler) the humans go into a blind panic and accelerate their ship away at a pace that almost kills the three of them. Staeen eventually manages to turn off the drive but, when the men come around, they get into their suits and flee through the airlock, dragging Staeen with them.
Staeen then floats in space contemplating his demise, and concludes that the human’s panic response must be down to a previous visit to Earth by the Thosars in prehistoric times, where they inadvertently terrified the primitive humans and some sort of genetic or race memory was laid down.
There is much to like in the first part of this story—it is a readable example of a traditional SF tale, the kind of thing you could easily imagine finding in Analog—but the ending is just ridiculous. Apart from the fact that the reason for the human’s terror is never specified (the Thosars have one eye and there is a brief mention of “Bi—”), you would hide in the ship if something terrified you, not jump out the airlock to a place you are even more exposed. And the generational chicken-fleeing-from-chickenhawk response that Staeen uses to explain the human’s behaviour could not have been imprinted on mankind in one visit. It all just falls apart.
PS According to Staeen, Staras eku Flonderans means “poor, short-lived Earthmen.”
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (San Francisco Examiner, July 13, 1890) is a story that is presumably familiar to American readers (British ones less so, perhaps), and the only reason I read it was because of a mention in relation to Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat (there is more on this below1).
Bierce’s tale takes place during the American Civil War and is set on a bridge across a river. There, a southerner called Peyton Fahrquhar is about to be hanged by Union troops.
After the preparations are complete he is left standing on a plank held in place by the weight of the sergeant on the other end; when the latter steps away, Fahrquhar will fall between the cross ties of the bridge to his death:

His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance.
Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

I like that comparison between the ticking of a watch and the tolling of a death knell.
Fahrquhar then thinks about how, if his hands were free, he could remove the noose and dive into the river, and escape back through the front line to his family. But then the sergeant steps off the plank, and Fahrquhar starts the long drop.
The second chapter is a brief passage which shows how Fahrquhar came to be in this situation, which was by making the mistake of suggesting sabotage to a passing horseman (who turns out to be a Union scout).
The third chapter sees Fahrquhar fall to what should be his death but ends up with him partially strangled in the water below. The rope has apparently broken, and the exciting narrative that follows tells of how he manages to release his hands and swim away from the Union troops (and the resultant rifle and cannon fire). Eventually, he manages to get far enough downstream that he is out of immediate danger, and pulls himself onshore and begins to make his way through the forest to his home.
Then (spoiler), when he arrives at his house the next morning, he sees his wife standing at the bottom of the steps waiting to greet him; he reaches for her but then feels a “stunning blow upon the back of his neck.” The rope did not break, and his escape was a momentary fantasy.
I liked the evocative description in this piece and, even if the twist-ending of the story is a variant of the “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream” sub-genre, I thought it pretty good. At a stretch you could probably call this a fantasy story.
***+ (Good to very good). 3,750 words.

1. The reason I read this is because it was mentioned in an essay by Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat. Aramini states, “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact (as Ambrose Bierce does when detailing his main character’s dying fantasy in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant and, having now read the story, I’d say that Bierce’s use of this narrative device is transparent; Wolfe’s, not so much, if at all.

The Best We Can by Carrie Vaughn

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The Best We Can by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, July 2013) starts with the narrator discussing the discovery of UO1, an unidentified alien craft that is discovered in our solar system, and the bureaucracy that delays the an announcement to the world:

In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.

Eventually, the narrator releases the news, and the rest of the story is about her further struggles to get a mission to go to the object and drag the (apparently dead) ship into a more manageable orbit so humanity can investigate. She is (spoiler) completely unsuccessful in her various efforts, to the extent she doesn’t even manage to get a JPL probe retasked to take better photographs. By the end of the piece she is reduced to writing a proposal for a Voyager-type probe to be sent to the origin of the object.
This well enough done examination of the inertia and bureaucracy of big organisations, but it is fatally flawed in at least three ways: first, it beggars belief that the militaries of both the USA and China, and perhaps others, wouldn’t be all over the craft; second, it is ultimately a story where nothing happens; third, the back end of the piece seems to be as much about her finding meaning in her life as much as it is about the UO1, and so splits the story’s focus.
** (Average). 4,500 words.

The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar

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The Memcordist by Lavi Tidhar (Eclipse Online, December 2012) is one of his ‘Solar System’ series, and it gets off to an evocative start:

Beyond the dome the ice-storms of Titan rage; inside it is warm, damp, with the smell of sewage seeping through and creepers growing through the walls of the above-ground dwellings. He tries to find her scent in the streets of Polyport and fails.
Hers was the scent of basil, and the night. When cooking, he would sometimes crush basil leaves between his fingers. It would bring her back, for just a moment, bring her back just as she was the first time they’d met.
Polyphemus Port is full of old memories. Whenever he wants, he can recall them, but he never does. Instead he tries to find them in old buildings, in half-familiar signs. There, the old Baha’i temple where they’d sheltered one rainy afternoon, and watched a weather hacker dance in the storm, wreathed in raindrops. There, what had once been a smokes-bar, now a shop selling surface crawlers. There, a doll house, for the sailors off the ships. It had been called Madame Sing’s, now it’s called Florian’s. Dolls peek out of the windows, small naked figures in the semblance of teenage boys and girls, soft and warm and disposable, with their serial numbers etched delicately into the curve of a neck or thigh. His feet know the old way and he walks past the shops, away from the docks and into a row of box-like apartments, the co-op building where they’d first met, creepers overgrowing the walls and peeking into windows—where they’d met, a party in the Year Seventeen of the Narrative of Pym.
He looks up, and as he does he automatically checks the figures that rise up, always, in the air before him. The number of followers hovers around twenty-three million, having risen slightly on this, his second voyage to Titan in so many years. A compilation feed of Year Seventeen is running concurrently, and there are messages from his followers, flashing in the lower right corner, which he ignores.

This last part sets out the story’s stall, which is that the protagonist has, since birth, had his life continually televised to a mass audience of “followers” as the “Narrative of Pym”. Think The Truman Show with an aware central character set in an exotic solar system.
This audience, when he is seventeen, watch him meet his true love and then, when she later leaves him, his continual search for her across various planets and moons until the day he dies. The story jumps about chronologically, so it may very well be a lifetime compilation feed, similar to the one mentioned above.
It is a wonderfully descriptive piece, and it packs a lot into its four thousand-odd words:

But Pym likes Tong Yun. He loves going down in the giant elevators into the lower levels of the city, and he particularly loves the Arcade, with its battle droid arenas and games-worlds shops and particularly the enormous Multifaith Bazaar. Whenever he can he sneaks out of the house—they are living on the surface, under the dome of Tong Yun, in a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Mother’s—and goes down to Arcade, and to the Bazaar.
The Church of Robot is down there, and an enormous Elronite temple, and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist and Baha’i temples and even a Gorean place and he watches the almost-naked slave girls with strange fascination, and they smile at him and reach out and tousle his hair. There are Re-Born Martian warriors with reddish skin and four arms—they believe Mars was once habituated by an ancient empire and that they are its descendants, and they serve the Emperor of Time. He thinks he wants to become a Re-Born warrior when he grows up, and have four arms and tint his skin red, but when he mentions it to Mother once she throws a fit and says Mars never had an atmosphere and there is no emperor and that the Re-Born are—and she uses a very rude word, and there are the usual complaints from some of the followers of the Narrative of Pym.

If I have one minor criticism (spoiler) it is that the slightly abrupt death scene could have been foreshadowed a little before it happens (although I was expecting it from early on in the story).
**** (Very good). 4, 650 words.

I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia

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I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) starts with an android called Reznikov being abused by his female owner until a friend of hers calls the police and she is arrested. After this Reznikov rips out his transponder and lives wild until he meets another woman and starts living with her. The rest of the story details their relationship (and the woman’s reservations about him) until they eventually have children—at which point the “story” grinds to a halt.
This story is similar to the kind of work you find on Tor.com (I suspect Reznikov is a metaphor for a certain type of emotionally shutdown man) and it has MFA/writer’s workshop stamped all over it. Apart from the fact there is little in the way of structure or an arc, I could have done without the omniscient author comments, e.g. “This is a story about a creature that was incapable of telling stories about itself.”
* (Mediocre). 2,850 words.

Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick

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Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick1 (Asimov’s SF, January/February 2021) opens with Mitchell and a robot called Simone (“Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir”) in a boat, with Mitchell diving down to a drowned Atlantic City Municipal Court to retrieve various documents. When he surfaces, Simone gives him news of an apartment fire. The pair are soon back on land and at the site of the blaze, where they manage to finagle matters so they are the only ones permitted to enter the “unsafe” building. This is followed by a meeting where they shake down the residents to get the salvage contract for their possessions.
The main part of the story (spoiler) sees the pair at work in the building, in which, the guard warns them, there may be an “anthroform” lurking. They soon find out that it is a robot when it physically attacks Mitchell and then Simone. During this episode they realise that it is made from standard parts, speaks Chinese, and its power levels are low (the only thing the creature says during the scuffle is that it has 6% power remaining). This encounter leads to more robots in the attic, where Mitchell gives them batteries and then rigs a solar panel to give them a permanent power supply. Then he and Simone leave.
The plot is by far the weakest part of this piece: not only is it relatively uncomplicated, but the idea of giving experimental robots of an unknown origin (one of whom has previously attacked you) a power supply and leaving them to it seems rather foolhardy. However, the story is fluently told, and there is a lively relationship between Mitchell and Simone that results in some sparky and/or quirky conversation. This isn’t limited to the exchanges between the pair however, as the apartment owners discover:

“No, wait, hold on,” said one of the interchangeable three. “So, we’re paying, what, you? And, er, your—” they paused, confused. “F. . . friend? Employee? The robot?” Simone turned a featureless head toward the speaker and said nothing. “And they’re going to help you retrieve things?”
“She is going to help.”
“Excuse me?”
“She is going to help.” Simone’s tone had grown clipped. “Not they. There is only me.”
The marks practically fell over one another in a confused torrent of explanation. “I thought robots were theys instead of its—” “You’re definitely displaying a gender neutral—” “Wait, is robot wrong? I’ve heard people saying Mobile Anthroform—”
Simone played an audio file of a sharp handclap as two sets of metal fingers came together, silencing the table. “No offense is taken,” Simone said. “If you find yourself struggling with the nomenclature, please feel free to ignore me completely.”
Mitch cursed inwardly—Simone had been getting worse and worse at handling the clients. In Pittsburgh, a recent argument about the nature of identity had ended with the clients never calling again.  p. 117

It is a mixed bag of a story, but a very promising debut: I look forward to further stories from this writer.
** (Average). 5,300 words.

1. The introduction to the story mentions Gardner Dozois (whose office manager Swanwick was) shaking a baby toy at the author when he was an infant, so I presume he is the son of Michael Swanwick.