Tag: 2*

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor.com, 12th August 2020) opens with Rue Savenga, a museum curator at on the planet Sarona, receiving an unexpected visitor just before closing time. The man tells Rue that his name is Traversed Bridge, and that he has been sent by the Whispering Kindom of the Manhu to find their ancestors.
It materialises that Bridge’s people are descended from a Saronan tribe called the Atoka (long thought extinct) who, after being persecuted on both Sarona and another planet called Radovani, ended up on Exile. When Bridge says he wants to see his ancestors, Rue takes him instead to see a painting of a woman called Aldry:

People called it a painting, but it was actually an elaborate mosaic, made from pieces so small it took a magnifying glass to see them. Rue had commissioned a scientific analysis that had shown that the colors were not, strictly speaking, pigments; they were bits of bird feather, beetle carapace, butterfly wing-anything iridescent, arranged so as to form a picture. And what a picture it was: a young girl in an embroidered jacket and silver headdress, looking slightly to one side, lips parted as if about to speak. Operas had been written about her. Volumes of poetry had speculated on what she was about to say. Speeches invoked her, treatises analyzed her, children learned her story almost as soon as they learned to speak. She was the most loved woman on Sarona.
“We call her Aldry,” Rue said.
Traversed Bridge looked transfixed, as if he were falling in love. He whispered, “That is not her name.”
“What do you call her?” Rue asked.
“She is Even Glancing.”

After some more small talk, Bridge collapses. While they are waiting for help to come, he tells Rue that the painting spoke to him, and that the woman in the picture said she was lonely and wanted to return home—and see an Immolation. Rue explains, after Bridge recovers, the rules and regulations governing the return of artefacts are complicated.
The second part of the story sees Rue learn that the painting was “rescued” from an Atoka Immolation—apparently the tribe’s customs dictated they should periodically burn all their possessions and start again from scratch. Then Bridge tells her that the Manhu are going to court to reclaim the painting because “there is a ghost imprisoned in it”, and that they intend to release it by holding an Immolation.
The matter eventually ends up in court and Rue tells Bridge, just before the verdict:

“This is not an ordinary object. At some point, great art ceases to be bound to the culture that produced it. It transcends ethnicity and identity and becomes part of the patrimony of the human race. It belongs to all of us because of its universal message, the way it makes us better.”

The verdict is decided (spoiler) on a narrow point of property law, and the object is put on a slower than light ship that will take almost sixty years to get to Exile (it and the other reclaimed pieces cannot go by the faster wayport “because what would arrive at the other end would be mere replicas of the originals”).
Fifty years later, the ninety-five-year-old Rue decides to go to Exile to be there for the arrival of the painting and the other artefacts (ten years will elapse while she travels, although it will appear instantaneous to Rue). When she arrives she meets Bridge, who is now a grandfather and has built a huge dam in the hills to improve life for the Manhu.
Rue spends the night in his house, and the next day they go to unpack the painting. There is then a procession to the village where the painting is put on a pyre and all the members of the Manhu add possessions of particular value. Then (after a token back and forth about what is about to happen between Rue and Bridge), they light the fire. After the blaze starts to die down, the Manhu leave the village and Rue follows them. Once they have reached a spot on the mountain overlooking the village, Rue sees and then hears the dam being blown up.
The story ends with some suitable humbug about the past not feeding anyone, “only the future does that”.
This is quite well done for the most part, an interesting examination of the issues affecting archaeological artefacts that were created by one culture but are now in the contested possession of another. However, the final actions of the Manhu are so mind-numbingly and nihilistically stupid that I suspect many readers will be hugely irritated not only by those but by what is a dramatically unsatisfying conclusion. Apart from this the story’s other shortcomings are the unconvincing “ghost” idea, and reader realisation that the survival chances of a civilization that periodically destroys everything are probably non-existent (and what a legacy to leave your children).
A good story about stupid people, so a mixed bag.
** (Average). 13,400 words. Story link.

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila1 (Dominion, 2020) opens in a spaceship hold (although that is not immediately obvious, see below) with Red_Bati (originally a robot dog built as a kid’s toy) running out of power and realising that, if it does not get a recharge, it will die. As Red starts hacking the nearby bot and ship systems in an effort to get what it wants, we learn that it was upgraded to look after an old woman called Granny. After her death Red then hid its high level of sentience as it was converted into a mining robot. The loss of one of Red’s mining arms while he was working in that role is how it has come to be in the spaceship’s hold.
Eventually, and I am compressing a lot of the story here (spoiler), Red takes control of the ship and heads out to the asteroid belt to build more of its own kind.
This is a slickly enough told story, with the exception of the confusing (and irrelevant in terms of story setup) first page. The opening paragraph:

Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.

Who is “He” at the beginning of the second sentence? I thought this was referring to a third person, not Red_Bati, and the reason I thought this was because a “he” doesn’t normally have batteries. More generally, the point of view/subject matter bounces around like a ping-pong ball in the first few sentences: Red_Balti, Granny, She, He, She, She, He, Akili’s mother (!).
Furthermore, the whole first page is little more than backstory waffle like the above, and our intitial introduction (apart from the security cameras) to Red_Bati’s environment is a reference to ice floating about like a “predator shark”, something that further confused me.
The story would have benefited from a revised beginning that started with this paragraph:

The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped [Red-Bati] in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.

From this we would quickly have got Where, Who, What, Why, and realised that there was a sense of peril. You get none of that from the original. Then, after this opening, Red_Bati could have projected Granny for company, and you could then have fed in exchanges with her that outlined his predicament and gave snippets of his backstory.
Ultimately, this is a bit dull for the same reason that a lot of cyberpunk stories are, i.e. they are a series of hacking events that are rarely emotionally engaging or entertaining. It is also uncomplicated, and there is little sense of risk or peril.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. Dilman Dila has an interesting biography.

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz (Astounding, February 1955) opens with a fifteen-year-old called Cord anesthetising and examining bugs on an alien planet called Sutang. He is then interrupted by Grayan, an older female friend who warns him that, if he doesn’t start behaving in accordance with the colony’s rules and expectations, he is likely to be sent off-planet.
After this YA setup to the story, the next part sees Cord, Grayan, Nirmond (the regent of the planet), and a young woman called Dane (head of the visiting Colonial Team) set off on a tour of the Bay Farms. To travel there they use one of the planetary life-forms:

Three rafts lay moored just offshore in the marshy cove, at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugarloaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, gray green pineapple growing from the center of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the team’s interest in them went at present.

They then go looking for “Grandpa”, a bigger raft they’d rather use but, when they eventually find it, Cord sees that it has moved from where he last left it. They also find that Grandpa’s head (a cone shaped protuberance in the middle of the raft) now has red buds on the top, and has also sprouted vines. Cord attempts to warn the others about using the raft as they have never seen this phenomenon before, but he is fobbed off.
The rest of the story sees an uneventful passage until they pass a group of yellowheads (“vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better”) clinging to tall reeds when, uncharacteristically, one of them slips down into the water and swims underneath Grandpa. Shortly after this event they lose control of the raft (it won’t respond to the heat from their guns) and then there is a convulsion that sees all of them except Cord trapped by the vines. Cord is subsequently forced, after a brief conversation with Dane, to relieve their pain by using his gun’s anaesthetic darts.
The rest of the story sees Grandpa travel far out to sea while Cord observes the creature’s behaviour. Eventually (spoiler) Cord manages to distract Grandpa (it has been swiping at various forms of life that pass before feeding on the smaller ones), and he jumps into the sea ahead. Cord then swims underneath the creature and manages to access a hollow space inside the central cone: there he finds the yellowhead symbiotically attached to Grandpa.
After fighting and killing the yellowhead, Cord slips back into the water and emerges to the rear of a now stationary raft. When he gets on board again it responds to his heat gun and the raft heads towards the shore.
For most of its length this reads like a rather dull YA biology puzzle, but it improves with an exciting climax. I’d note, however, that there is little indication of what Cord is about to do before he goes into the water (I can’t remember any description of him thinking about the yellowhead, or what he plans to do). This is rather too straightforward a piece, I think (especially for its length).
** (Average). 9,050 words. Story link.

I’m Scared by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I’m Scared by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 15th September 1951) opens with the narrator listening to the radio and hearing a snatch of an old program before the normal one resumes. Soon he learns of other temporal anomalies from his friends and colleagues:

A man on Long Island received a telephone call from his sister in New York one Friday evening. She insists that she did not make this call until the following Monday, three days later. At the Forty-fifth Street branch of the Chase National Bank, I was shown a check deposited the day before it was written. A letter was delivered on East Sixty-Eighth Street in New York City, just seventeen minutes after it was dropped into a mailbox on the main street of Green River, Wyoming.

There are several cases that are described in some detail: a woman is continually pestered by a stray dog—but, when she later gets a puppy, it grows up to be the same animal (and then one day disappears); a man takes several time delay photographs of himself and his family—in the last exposure a woman other than his wife is standing beside him; a revolver is found by the police the night before a gun with the same ballistics is used in a murder; a contemporary car accident victim is found to be a missing person from 1876.
After a little too much of this kind of thing, the narrator floats the idea that, because people are rebelling against the present and have an increasing longing for the past, “man is disturbing the clock of time” and causing it to become tangled. The narrator finally addresses this discontent with a homily about the fact that we have the ability to provide a decent life for everyone—so why don’t we?
This story is never really more than a notion (albeit an interestingly described one), and the ending doesn’t really follow the logic of the narrator’s theory—if people were longing for the past, you would think they would be going back there, not getting knocked down and killed in their future.
** (Average). 5,300 words. Story link.

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Shadow of Space by Philip José Farmer (Worlds of If, November 1967)1 opens with a woman rescued from a wrecked spaceship barricading herself into the engine-room of the experimental FTL craft Sleipnir. She then accelerates the Sleipnir beyond light speed.
When Grettir, the captain of the ship, learns that the woman will only talk to him, he goes down to speak to her. He gives instructions to MacCool, his engineering officer, to blast his way in if he is incapacitated or killed. Grettir then talks to the woman, during which she confuses Grettir with her dead husband Robert (she has been delusional since she has been rescued) before shooting at him. When Grettir recovers consciousness he discovers that MacCool has blasted his way in, and that the woman stripped off all her clothes and went out the airlock. Grettir also learns that they are now in a strange, unknown zone of space.
After this fast-paced and Van Vogtian start to the story, it becomes something much more weird and trippy. Grettir sees that they are in a grey space filled with grey spheres and, after much speculation, he concludes that they have entered a “super universe”, and that the sphere behind them is their universe (there is some 1930s-ish atom-and-electron-worlds hand-wavium at this point). As they manoeuvre back to where they think they entered the super-universe, they fly past the woman’s now huge dead body.
The next part of the story sees the various attempts made by the Sleipnir’s crew to re-enter their own universe, during which, on one failed attempt, they have burning coal-like objects shoot through the bridge:

Grettir picked up his cigar, which he had dropped on the deck when he had first seen the objects racing toward him. The cigar was still burning. Near it lay a coal, swiftly blackening. He picked it up gingerly. It felt warm but could be held without too much discomfort.
Grettir extended his hand, palm up, so that the doctor could see the speck of black matter in it. It was even smaller than when it had floated into the bridge through the momentarily “opened” interstices of the molecules composing the hull and bulkheads.
“This is a galaxy,” he whispered.
Doc Wills did not understand. “A galaxy of our universe,” Grettir added.
Doc Wills paled, and he gulped loudly.
“You mean . . . ?”
Grettir nodded.
Wills said, “I hope . . . not our . . . Earth’s . . . galaxy!”

The story becomes even more bizarre when they later fly into the woman’s body, start overheating, and only just make it out again (you get the impression that in a more permissive age they would have been birthed out of her womb/vagina, but, if I recall correctly, they come out of her mouth). After this they prepare for a final attempt to get back into their own universe.
This has a fast-paced start, but the bulk of the story, although sometimes entertaining, is arbitrarily bizarre and goes on too long. The ending also fizzles out.
** (Average). 10,200 words. Story link.

1. From the Philip José Farmer website:

Farmer tried to sell this as a possible Star Trek episode (before the show ever aired I think). He later decided that it would not have worked. Just what is waiting for us at the edge of the universe?

Common Time by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Common Time by James Blish (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953) sees Garrard wake up in a FTL spaceship with the thought “Don’t move!” He struggles to open his eyelids, senses that something is very wrong, and does not attempt to move his body. Eventually, after further description of his physical condition and of his observations, Garrard realises that the infrequent “pock” sound he hears is the hugely slowed down ticking of the ship’s clock. He then counts seconds in his head and discovers that ship time is moving much more slowly than his subjective time—and that it will take him six thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri.
After Garrard gets over the intial shock, he thinks further about the physical ramifications (his body is subject to ship-time, and much slower than the speed his mind is working, so there will be a problem with co-ordination) and the possible mental problems (how will he occupy his time and stave off madness?) Then, as he deliberates, he notices that the clock is speeding up, and that the ship-time is accelerating. Soon, the clock is a blur, and he enters a state of “pseudo-death”.
The next stage of the story sees Garrard awake at Alpha Centauri, where he is greeted by aliens who speak to him in a incomprehensible language (although Garrard can make sense of it):

“How do you hear?” the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual.
“I . . .” he said. “Or we—we hear with our ears. Here.”
His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language. “We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,” the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the deck beside the hammock. “We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.”
“With all of love,” Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.

After another page or so of Blish channelling (I presume) his inner James Joyce, Garrard sets off for Earth, and once more he experiences pseudo-death.
The final part of the story sees Garrard awake near Uranus, and he soon makes radio contact with Earth. The story then ends with a conversation between Garrard and Haertel, the inventor of the FTL drive, about various scientific and philosophical matters (how personality depends on environment, time flow, etc.). When Garrard volunteers to go out again on a new ship, Haertel refuses, saying that they need to work out why the beademung wanted him to come back to Earth.
This story has an intriguing gimmick at the beginning of the piece, and an interesting (if somewhat unintelligible) first contact situation after that. However, all this, and the dull talking heads section at the end, doesn’t really add up to anything, and you very much get the impression that the author was merely playing with a number of pet ideas as he went along.1
There are also a number of matters that don’t make much sense: (a) the interior temperature in the ship is noted as being 37° C, far too hot to be comfortable; (b) the reason he enters “pseudo death” isn’t explained (if time kept on speeding up in the last part of the journey it would appear as if he suddenly arrives at Alpha Centauri; (c) if ship time speeds up so rapidly your normal speed mind won’t be able to feed your body sufficiently, and you will starve to death during the ten month trip.
Those who like literary, or more ideational or philosophical stories, may get something out of this, but I suspect many will be perplexed.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.

1. The story was commissioned by Robert A. Lowndes to accompany a previously painted cover:



The details of this commission are discussed in Robert Silverberg’s anthology, Science Fiction 101, where the he recounts what the cover suggested to Blish:

Blish, early in 1953, was handed a photostat of a painting that showed a draftsman’s compasses with their points extended to pierce two planets, one of them the Earth and the other a cratered globe that might have been the Moon. A line of yellow string also connected the two worlds. In the background were two star-charts and the swirling arms of a spiral nebula. Blish later recalled that the pair of planets and their connecting yellow string reminded him on some unconscious level of a pair of testicles and the vas deferens, which is the long tube through which sperm passes during the act of ejaculation. And out of that—by the tortuous and always mysterious process of manipulation of initial material that is the way stories come into being—he somehow conjured up the strange and unforgettable voyage of “Common Time,” which duly appeared as the cover story on the August, 1953, issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.  p. 282

If Blish were older at the time he would presumably have identified the exploding sun in the background as the prostate.
Silverberg adds:

I failed to notice, I ought to admit, anything in the story suggesting that it was about the passage of sperm through the vas deferens and onward to the uterus. To me in my innocence it was nothing more than an ingenious tale of the perils of faster-than-light travel between stars. Damon Knight, in a famous essay published in 1957, demonstrated that the voyage of the sperm was what the story was “really” about, extracting from it a long series of puns and other figures of speech that exemplified the underlying sexual symbolism of everything that happens: the repeated phrase “Don’t move” indicates the moment of orgasm, and so forth. Blish himself was fascinated by that interpretation of his story and added a host of embellishments to Knight’s theory in a subsequent letter to him. All of which called forth some hostility from other well-known science fiction writers, and for months a lively controversy ran through the s-f community. Lester del Rey, for example, had no use for any symbolist interpretations of fiction. “A story, after all, is not a guessing game,” del Rey said. “We write for entertainment, which means primarily for casual reading. Now even Knight has to pore through a story carefully and deliberately to get all the symbols, so we can’t really communicate readily and reliably by them. To the casual reader, the conscious material on the surface must be enough. Hence we have to construct a story to be a complete and satisfying thing, even without the symbols. . . . If we get off on a binge of writing symbols for our own satisfaction, there’s entirely too much temptation to feel that we don’t have to make our points explicitly, but to feel a smug glow of satisfaction in burying them so they only appear to those who look for symbols.”  pp. 282-283

Knight’s analysis of the sexual symbols in the story can be found—if, like him, you appear to have too much time on your hands—in Chapter 26 of In Search of Wonder.

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, April 1958) sees a time-travelling Claude Ford hunting a brontosaurus in the past:

You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

This intensely described and emotionally heightened narrative continues, with descriptions of the scene alternating with Claude’s inner thoughts, until (spoiler) he eventually shoots and kills the creature. Then, as he examines the dinosaur’s body up close, one of the beast’s parasites attacks and kills him.
This seems to be more of a dramatic prose poem than a story, but maybe that, and the ironic ending, will do it for some readers. It’s certainly got more depth and vibrancy than the other time travel pieces of the period.
** (Average). 2,400 words. Story link.

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson (Galaxy May 1958) opens with a Mr Whatney visiting a bicycle shop run by Oscar. Mr Whatney asks where Ferd (the other owner) is, and Oscar tells Whatney he is now on his own. The story of why begins with a habit of Oscar’s that irritated Ferd:

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”
“Why . . . I guess so.”
Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily.
He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”
“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

The rest of the story sees various other elements introduced, beginning with a couple with a baby visiting the shop in need of a replacement safety pin for the child’s nappy. Neither Oscar nor Ferd can find one in the shop, but later on Ferd finds a drawer full. Ferd wonders why this kind of thing happens, along with other phenomena like wardrobes suddenly filling up with coat hangers.
Running in parallel with these events is Ferd’s restoration of a red French racing bike, which he angrily smashes up after Oscar takes it to chase a female cyclist. When the bike later regenerates itself (and draws blood when Ferd tries to ride it) it leads him to speculate that there may be mimetic life on Earth:

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are— these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not . . .”

The story closes (spoiler) with Oscar telling Whatney he is now in a relationship with Norma (the female cyclist), breeding American and French racing bikes, and that Ferd “had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.”
This is an enjoyable and amusing read but the ending didn’t work for me, probably because I thought that the safety pin/coat hanger lifecycle would extend to the bikes (maybe it did and I just missed it) and (b) I didn’t really get why the coat hangers would kill Ferd (unless, again, they are the previous life stage of the bikes).
I assume this story mostly got a Hugo Award for its quirk (the observational humour about safety pins and coat hangers) and its (for the time) perhaps risqué suggestion that Oscar is having sex with a succession of young women in the woods.
** (Average). 3,650 words. Story link.

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin (Orbit #5, 1969)1 gets off to an unclear and confusing start with the androgynous “King” Argaven of Karhide (referred to as “she” rather than “they” for some mysterious reason2) apparently having a breakdown or delusional episode. Argaven repeatedly says to the surrounding figures, “I must abdicate.”
It is only much later in the story (for those that are lucky; myself, I had to go back a reread it after finishing the piece) that it becomes apparent that Argaven has been kidnapped and is being mindwashed.3
The story then cuts to the point where it should probably have started, with a harbour guard challenging a drunk figure and, after administering half second of stun gun, inspecting the body:

Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the finger joint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone.

Argaven wakes up in the palace (the real one this time), and starts a period of recovery. During this it becomes apparent that, due to the limitations of Karhidian technology, no-one local can determine what changes the mindwashers have wrought, or what they have programmed Argaven to do. Argaven abdicates, and arranges with Mr Mobile Axt, the Ekumen ambassador on Gethen, passage off-planet in one of the their near-lightspeed spaceships. Argaven later visits their firstborn, and leaves the royal chain in the baby’s crib before departing.
The second act of the story sees Argaven travel to Ollul (Earth), a trip that only seems to last a day but, because of the relativistic effect of travelling at near-lightspeed, has her land on Earth twenty-four years later. On arrival Argaven is given a summary of events in Karhide (the regency of Lord Gerer was “uneventful and benign”) before commencing treatment for the mindwashing episode. The doctors discover that Argaven’s mind was changed to make them become, over time, a paranoid tyrant. After the treatment is completed, Argaven subsequently decides to attend Ekumenical School on Earth (“She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert”).
As the years pass, the Ekumen train the ex-King to be of use to them in the future, and this time comes (spoiler) when the current King of Karhide (Argaven’s child) terrorizes and fragments the country. This eventually sees Argaven return to Karhide sixty years after their original departure—but only a twelve years older—and, on arrival, meet children who are now older than them.
After learning of the country’s further deterioration over the last twenty four years, and the revolt of some Karhiders, Aragaven leads a rebellion, and the story finishes with the ex-King standing over the body of their child, who has committed suicide.
This story has a poor start, good middle, and perfunctory ending (the idea of a parent standing over a child who is chronologically older than them is a good one—but there is no development or confrontation, just the image). I’m not sure that this piece is much more than an intermittently well-written gimmick story.
** (Average). 8,000 words.
 
1. I read a revised version of this—apparently there are differences between the original Orbit version and those in subsequent publications (or perhaps just post the author’s collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters). Rich Horton has written an article about the differences at Black Gate.
 
2. This piece is a “Hainish” story, and one set on Gethen, the same planet that featured in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In that work the Gethians were referred to as “he”. There is more about the pronoun switch at Wikipedia.

3. Apart from the cloudiness of the first two pages, I couldn’t work out if the palace scene that follows (after the guard discovers Argaven’s body) was a continuation, or not (not, as I concluded later).
I would also suggest this is a terrible first paragraph:

When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sublightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.

I’m not sure starting with whirlpools and moving smartly on to snapshots is a winning opening sentence. Then we get a data dump about radios and spaceships. And who is Plenipotentary Axt? (He turns up pages later, by which time I had long forgotten his name.)
Winner of the 1969 Random Musing Award.

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn1 (Tor.com, 26th February 2020) opens with a scout-ship pilot called Graff who is nearly cut in half:

My biologics are mostly shut down with shock, though I’m dutifully trying to monitor the pain. It’s all-enveloping, a fist squeezing my brain. My mechanics are in full self-repair mode, overheating because there’s so much to knit back together. Because of them, I have survived long enough that I will probably not die. This is going to be awkward.
From my own internal processor I send out an emergency signal to piggyback on ship comms, so that maybe someone can come and explain.

Graff manages to get back to the ship after the accident and, before he passes out, he realises that the medical crew see that he is a cyborg.
When Graff next recovers consciousness he is in drug-induced and physical restraint, and is questioned by the ship’s doctor, Ell (who is also his lover), and Captain Ransom. After they leave him, Graff recalls various memories he has sent back to a group of other AIs who have secretly sent cyborgs like Graff out into the universe to accumulate memories of what it is like to travel, and be human, etc.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees further sessions where the three meet, during which Graff attempts to explain who and what he is, and how he is not a threat to them or the ship. Eventually he succeeds, and the final scene has Ell remove the nerve block that incapacitates him. A woman called Tek also appears, a cyborg summoned by the message Graff sent immediately after the accident (which was initially detected and blocked by Captain Ransom but later allowed through). Graff downloads his memories to Tek, and Ransom and Ell agree to keep Graff’s secret.
This is a slickly told piece but the ending, especially the captain’s actions, stretches credulity (even if Graff had been a loyal crewmember for some time previously).
** (Average). 4,400 words. Story link.

1. I see this story has a prequel: An Easy Job.