Mahoussian Beast by Jacques Perret, translated by D. H. R. Brearley (Argosy (UK), July 1955), is a story from the 1951 Prix Interallié winner that starts with a small boy called Leon walking beside a marsh where a legendary beast lives. He subsequently arrives home late, whereupon his uncle scolds him and sets him to his homework. Eventually, Leon tells his uncle Emile that he was detained by the beast in the marsh, which, from his description, appears to be a female dragon. Leon also passes along her complaint about the drainage works that are going on at the marsh. Emile is initially disbelieving, but Leon passes on other details about the dragon, and also mentions that it intends to disrupt the Prefect’s forthcoming visit to the site.
Emile later finds a footprint and droppings in the marsh, and so goes to see the Mayor. The latter doesn’t believe what he is told but, after talking to the boy, agrees to go and meet the dragon. During their subsequent encounter the dragon displays its fire breathing capabilities—but the Mayor doesn’t seem much impressed, so the dragon decides to leave the marsh.
The last part of the story sees Leon accompany the dragon on her journey and, when they get to the Seine, the boy rides the dragon as its swims along the river. Eventually, after some minor adventures (at one point the dragon takes part in a fireworks display), she reaches the sea and disappears (although there is a suggestion at the end of the story that she has metamorphosed into a butterfly).
This is a pleasant enough piece, but it’s essentially a plotless, wandering piece of whimsy (why set up the conflict between the dragon and the town’s politicians if she is just going to wander off?)
** (Average). 8,750 words.
Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler
Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) takes place in the author’s ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ series, and opens with the narrator, Himmet, taking an injured sparrow to an android vet called Sezgin. Himmet later gets a call from him saying they need to talk and, when they meet again, Sezgin says that Himmet has found “a hole in the world”.
At a later meeting with a group of androids, at a safe house a ferry trip away from Istanbul (and after Himmit has been approached by a shady scientist from the nearby Institute enquiring whether he has picked up any injured sparrows recently), Sezgin tells Himmit that the sparrow contains a human consciousness. Moreover, it is a duplicate consciousness, not the original (something that was thought to be impossible in this consciousness-downloading society). Then someone knocks at the door, and Himmet is told to hide in a priest hole. By the time he gets out he is partially paralyzed.
This latter event is explained in a subsequent doctor’s appointment, where we find out that Himmet is a human who was downloaded into a blank android when he was badly injured in the war and who, when he is stressed, suffers partial paralysis in his new body (throughout the story, Himmet agonises about whether he is really himself, or a copy). We also learn about societal hostility towards androids, and how Himmit got involved with Sezgin when he started paying for deformed sparrows to be mended (replacement legs, etc.).
The story concludes (spoiler) with another, more menacing, visit from the Institute scientist, during which he demands the return of the sparrow. Himmit does not want the consciousness in the sparrow to be returned for illegal experimentation, and he reluctantly goes back to Sezgin to get the sparrow to give to the scientist. We later find out, however, that the woman present at that latter meeting is the freed consciousness (the “connectome”) from the sparrow, and that the androids have put a flawed replica in its place (something, they think, that will keep the scientist occupied for months).
This piece may seem to be a heavily plotted tale but it is actually much more of a slow burn than the synopsis above would suggest, and the main attractions are the setting, the writing (people who feed sparrows will appreciate the descriptions1 of their behaviour), and the character’s epistemological agonising.2
I suspect Nayler is becoming one of those writers who you can enjoy regardless of whether there is a story being told or not.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,500 words.
1. The description of the sparrows:
The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten.
Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.
No harm, in the end, was done. p. 27
2. The Institute scientist archly says to Himmet at one point, when he is holding forth about the various connectome experiments the Institute conducts, “I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme”.
Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy
Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy (Asimov’s SF, April 1987) opens with a chimpanzee called Rachel finding her human “father”, Aaron, dead in bed one morning at their desert ranch. Rachel covers him up and continues taking care of the other animals at the ranch before eventually letting them go. During this period she thinks of the stories her father used to tell her, and we find out that Rachel is more than just an intelligent chimpanzee:
Rachel’s father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn’t understand Rachel’s father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron’s voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.
He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including it.) The shape of this “Electric Mind,” as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual’s personality. Then one sunny day, the doctor’s wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron’s hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.) p. 73
Aaron subsequently transfers the “Electric Mind” of his daughter into Rachel, who becomes a creature with a merged/dual personality and memories. Aaron then teaches Rachel American Sign Language.
After Aaron’s death Rachel continues to live on the ranch, but the police eventually turn up and find his body. Rachel runs into the desert—she reluctantly leaves as her father told her that it was the only place she would ever be safe—but is seen by the police; later she is tracked down, and shot and drugged, by people from the Primate Research Centre. After she is taken to their facility, Rachel lies paralyzed but conscious while she is roughly handled (a TB injection into her eye socket, and a flea treatment that burns her skin). She is then put in a cage next to another chimpanzee, an elderly and traumatized individual with an electrode sticking out of his head.
The central part of the story initially sees Rachel keep her language ability to herself, something that she is glad of when she sees scientists talking to her neighbour with sign language and learns about their experimental requirement for ASL-able chimpanzees. Later though, despite her wariness, Rachel strikes up an odd relationship with Jake, the Centre’s deaf and alcoholic janitor, when she sees him give her neighbour a banana and talk to him with ASL. Rachel subsequently manages to convince Jake to let her out of her cage to help him clean the labs, and he agrees as he wants to get to the night’s drinking more quickly.
During the many nights they spend together at the end of his shift, Rachel watches Jake drink and look at his men’s magazines. She eventually develops emotional and sexual feelings for him—something that culminates with her trying to seduce him when she comes into heat. (I should add that a significant chunk of the story deals with Rachel trying to process the memories and feelings she has inherited from Aaron’s daughter, a blonde haired girl—something that competes and conflicts with her natural chimpanzee behaviour.) However, when Jake ignores her advances, Rachel goes back to the cages and releases a male chimpanzee called Johnson. She mates with him before they go on the run.
The final part of the story (spoiler) starts with the two chimps walking back through the desert to Rachel’s ranch when they are spotted by a woman driver. She sees that one of them is wearing a baseball cap and carrying a carrier bag, and her account of this eventually leads to press interest in the two escapees.
The two chimps later shelter in a cave; Rachel thinks while Johnson sleeps:
The rain lets up. The clouds rise like fairy castles in the distance and the rising sun tints them pink and gold and gives them flaming red banners. Rachel remembers when she was younger and Aaron read her the story of Pinocchio, the little puppet who wanted to be a real boy. At the end of his adventures, Pinocchio, who has been brave and kind, gets his wish. He becomes a real boy.
Rachel cried at the end of the story and when Aaron asked why, she rubbed her eyes on the backs of her hairy hands. —I want to be a real girl, she signed to him. —A real girl. “You are a real girl,” Aaron told her, but somehow she never believed him. p. 93
The newspaper reporter who originally wrote up the woman’s sighting of the pair as a humour item subsequently finds the carved names on the wall of the cave. He writes another article, and publishes a photo of what he found. As a consequence of this, when the two chimpanzees are surprised by a woman when they are using a tap outside a house, the woman addresses Rachel by name and brings her and Johnson food (when she doesn’t respond to Rachel’s ASL thank you, Rachel scratches out the words in the soil). The woman is subsequently interviewed by the newspaper, and investigations into the Primate Research Centre and Aaron intensify. Then, after Jake the janitor is interviewed and reveals what he knows about Rachel, the ACLU appoint a lawyer to the case.
The final scene sees Rachel and Johnson arrive at the ranch where there are TV crews waiting but, just before they get there, Rachel recalls a recent dream in which she was looking through a window:
The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in. p. 96
This is a very moving piece, even if you just view it as a prisoner/anti-vivisection story. What makes it more impressive is the secondary story where Rachel struggles to come to terms with her identity.
***** (Excellent). 11,700 words.
River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio
River of Stars, Bridge of Shadows by A. A. Attanasio (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Deri coming out of cleardrift (deepsleep) when her starship’s gravity kernel fails and drops it out of paralux (FTL) near a neutron star. Initially she is greeted by a white snake, her zobot (robotic) valet, which tells her that they are in a decaying orbit and have thirty minutes left before they perish.
Deri soon meets another two characters in the stateroom: Jyla, a woman whose exotic past will later be revealed, and Ristin Taj, an omen coder. All of this (and indeed, the whole story), is told through baroque, high bit-rate prose:
“I know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.” Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla’s large eyes glittered like geodes.
“My escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.” She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. “Ristin Taj.”
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar.
Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl’s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri’s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes.
Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection’s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw—her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
“Ristin is an omen-coder,” Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the cluttering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. “Listen.”
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
“They are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.” p. 63
We then learn more about Del’s backstory, and her romantic disappointments, before discovering that Jyla is an Imperator, a human being from Earth who is sixteen thousand years old. The valet suggests that Jyla’s compartmentalised memories may hold the key to their survival.
Various other events fill up the story’s length (spoiler): Deri is taken out of her body by Ristin and put with the plasmantics (the other “human” passengers on the ship are discorporate beings of sentient plasma); Jyla and Restin go to see the (unconscious) pilot, and discover that there is fault in a compressor outside the ship; Jyla says she will fix it, but Ristin objects to her her plan. As they quarrel, Deri, released by the plasmantic, arrives; Deri then goes outside the ship and, although mostly shielded from the neutron star flux by her own and the other valets, fixes the problem but apparently dies.
The last section sees Deri awaken to find that it was actually a five-space projection of Ristin that went outside to fix the compressor and not her, but Ristin isn’t dead either (the omen-coder does die, but far enough away from the neutron star to be, I think, resurrected).
To be honest, I’m not sure the plot of this amounts to much (and it isn’t helped by the “I woke up and it was all a dream” ending), but the attraction of this for most will be the dazzle and glamour, all of which is enjoyable enough if you don’t weary of the constant flow of information and complex prose.
*** (Good). 11,500 words.
October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise
October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with October, a survey team member on a potential colony planet, taking spare parts to a colleague. It becomes apparent that (a) she (or her stomach at least) has been adapted for life on this planet and (b) that this is her STL exploration ship’s third attempt at colonisation (two previous attempts have failed). When October reaches Jan, her older male colleague, we discover that he lost his legs (and his wife) on the first of those attempts (on a tectonically active planet called Jackpot).
The pair use their “bubble” (an aircar, basically) to travel over the surface of this new world looking for plants that will be edible (they need to find three before the colonisation committee will approve settlement), and it isn’t long before October tries her first native meal:
October smelled the steam before plunging her fork into the soggy mass of boiled leaves.
[. . .]
She advanced her lips as if for a kiss. The leaves were hot, and she blew on them before putting them in her mouth.
The flavor was different from the burnt-hair smell. Her tongue identified no sweet parts, but an acid citrus aroma mixed with a good old lettuce, with a sour peach taste, and a touch of salt. She went through the motions of mastication, finding no abhorrent reaction.
She swallowed, feeling her food traveling down her esophagus, waiting for her stomach to react violently.
It didn’t, despite the acid content of the alien lettuce. She felt the signal for more, more grinding up, and dug again into the green mossy mound. The lens of the drone moved in for a close-up like a dark eye. p. 106
A couple of weeks later they find an edible algae, but then nothing for the next month or so, and then Jan becomes angry when banana-like fruits aren’t edible (he subsequently flounces off on his own in the bubble for a while, as you would when you are part of a two-person team on an unexplored alien planet).
The seasons start changing and then (spoiler), while they are flying to a new destination, the bubble apparently runs out of power, and crashes in a lake. They manage to get out and swim to an island, but have to leave their communications and other equipment behind.
The final section of the story sees October try build a raft, but it rains and gets washed away, and the two of them have to climb a tree to stay above the rising flood waters. A couple of weeks later October is beginning to starve to death (she has an accelerated metabolism as well as a modified stomach) but, when she tries eating some of the bark of the tree they are sheltering in, she finds it is edible. They are saved, and later leave the island on a second raft.
This piece is okay, I guess (the food prospecting stuff is reasonably novel), but it reads pretty much like the old-school Planetary Exploration stories I was reading in the 1970s (and this could have been published in Analog then or at any time since), and has some of the same shortcomings as those thematically similar works, e.g. there is a lot of not particularly convincing description about the planet and its ecosystem. I’d add that the plot of this particular story also seems to depend on unlikely and/or dumb actions or circumstances, such as the idea that the bubble would suddenly run out of energy and fall from the sky without warning, and not have a secondary or triplex system providing redundancy. I also wasn’t convinced about the merits of sending someone with no legs to explore an unknown planet—this is a marvellously diverse of course, but really quite a stupid thing to do. I also wondered why the STL ship was not continuously monitoring the pair’s position, and why they weren’t doing hourly or half-hourly ops-normal checks, etc. etc.
One to read with your brain disengaged.
** (Average). 9,350 words.
Kitemistress by Keith Roberts
Kitemistress by Keith Roberts (Interzone #11, Spring 1985) is a direct sequel to Kitecadet,1 the second of the ‘Kiteworld’ stories, and takes place shortly after Raoul’s crash in the Badlands. Raoul has decided to leave the Kitecorps, and we see Captain Goldensoul quiz him about his decision to leave. They quickly get to the nub of the matter:
‘Cadet,’ he said, ‘you saved both yourself and your String. You showed coolness, and considerable courage.’ He paused. ‘You are here, we are all here, to protect the Realm. You did your duty. I see no shame in that.’
But he’d been neither cool nor courageous. He’d been terrified. He’d seized the first weapon that came to hand, killed a defenceless creature with it. He said, ‘Have you ever cut a baby’s head off with a hatchet?’ His back stiffened instantly. He said, Sorry, sir. Beg pardon.’
The Captain waved a hand, mildly. He stared a moment longer, then sat back at the desk. He said, ‘You didn’t kill a baby. You killed nothing human. You destroyed an alien. An enemy of the Realm.’
Raoul moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘It was human,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t our enemy.’
Goldensoul decides to give him a conditional discharge (twelve months upaid leave) and Raoul leaves. He packs his things and goes to the bar, where Canwen, the legendary kiteman, summons him to his table. He quizzes Raoul about his decision, points out a few uncomfortable truths about the young, and then gives him a letter of introduction to the Bishop of Barida, who will get Raoul a job as a house kiteman.
Raoul travels to Easthorpe and is quickly placed by the Bishop in the Kerosin household. However, its wealthy master (“the richest bloke in the realm” on account of his fuel business) soon passes him on to the Lady Kerosina, who runs the household:
The Lady Kerosina was lounging in a chair of silvery Holand fibre. Behind her, long glass doors gave a view of landscaped grounds. A glass was at her side, and a bowl of some confection. He stared. Her hair was dark, shot with bronze highlights. It tumbled to her shoulders and below. Her cheekbones were high and perfectly modelled, her eyes huge and of no definable colour, her nose delicately tip-tilted. She wore a simple white dress; the neckline plunged deeply at the front. She wore ankle-high sandals, again of some silvery material. He saw they were uppers only; the soles of her feet were bare.
She inclined her head, graciously. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Josen,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and tell me about yourself.’
He took a chair, hesitantly. She crossed her knees. Her skirt was split to the top of her thigh. Her legs were long, and exquisite. He blinked. He’d seen some daring fashions in Middlemarch odd times, but nothing to compare with that. He rested his eyes carefully on the middle distance. He was aware she smiled. He began to talk, haltingly at first, about his training, early career; but she interrupted him. ‘Who,’ she said in her well-modulated, slightly husky voice, ‘was your Captain, in the Salient?’
‘Goldensoul, Mistress,’ he said. ‘He gave me an excellent testimonial.’
‘Dear old Goldensoul,’ she said. ‘Always the do-gooder.’ She selected a sweet, bit into it deliberately. Displayed even, pearly teeth. ‘And what brought you to Barida?’
He swallowed. He said, ‘I was sent by the Master Canwen.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I begin to understand. I was wondering how you breached our good Bishop’s defences. Tell me, is the Master still as mad as ever?’
He frowned. He said. ‘He’s one of the most respected Fliers in the Realm.’
She looked amused. She said, ‘No doubt.’
He risked another glance at her. She wore no jewellery of any kind; but round her neck was a slender leather collar. The sort of thing you might put on a dog. It seemed oddly out of sorts with the rest of her ensemble; he wondered what its purpose could be.
Raoul later talks to the retiring kiteman, who confirms other comments that Raoul has heard about Kerosina’s predatory sexual behaviour, and it isn’t long before he has to report again to her in his new uniform. This time she makes him kneel down in front of her and gathers his hair into two ponytails. She instructs him to wear it like that. However, when she invites Raoul to stay and have a glass of wine, he says he has urgent work to do.
In between the pair’s further encounters we learn more about the household and its personnel, one of whom is the unsavoury head horseman Martland—who Raoul ominously sees at one point in the house with a young boy and a nine-year-old girl (we learn at the end of the story that Martland is Kerosina’s procurer).
After further attempts at seduction by Kerosina (who gets progressively more irritated at Raoul’s reluctance) and more trouble from Maitland, matters come to a head when Raoul gets a letter from Stev, an old friend who had been posted to F16—then immediately afterwards gets another letter saying that Stev has been killed in a crash. While Raoul is emotionally vulnerable Kerosina takes him down to her mud dungeon and seduces him (this scene includes the first hint of urolangia that I think I’ve seen in an SF story).
Afterwards, Raoul packs his bags and flees with Canwen’s words ringing in his ears (“Wallow in mud, and then the stars come close. Because you have earned the right to see their glory. . . .”). Then a jealous Martland pursues Raoul on horseback and, when he catches him, beats him so badly that Raoul is badly injured. He lies on the ground going in and out of consciousness for days. During this period a thick bubbling voice talks to him and leaves food—rabbit haunches—on a decorated plate.2 Raoul comes to a terrible realisation about the mutants from the Badlands:
He thought, ‘So they’re even here. In the Middle Lands.’ So much for the Kites then. Once he thought he saw one of the creatures humping away. On all fours; smaller than a dog, and blue. He pushed himself up on his hands. ‘Come back,’ he called. ‘Come back, I want to talk to you. . . .’ But the bushes stayed still.
He wiped his cheeks. He’d met its sister once, and killed her. This was how they were repaying him. With Life.
Raoul eventually manages to get to his feet and continue his journey to Middlemarch, but he experiences further abuse from tinkers, who rob him of some of his clothes, and the Variant police, who beat him. He finally gets sanctuary at the doors of Middle Church just as he is about to be beaten again. Rye (the barmaid from Kitecadet) comes to him at the end of the story.
The bare bones of the plot probably make this sound like a fairly slight story, but the beauty of this piece is in its writing and characterisation, its subtlety and slow burn. And perhaps, most of all, its sorrowfulness. It’s a very good piece, if one that uses its main character rather badly.
**** (Very Good). 11,000 words.
1. I think that Kitecadet and Kitemistress (this story) would have been better published as one piece: Kitecadet has a rather abrupt, puzzling ending, and Kitemistress depends, at least for part of its effect, on a good knowledge of Kitecadet.
2. This part of the story, where the mutant brings Raoul food, reminded me of the scene in the ‘Pavane’ story, The Signaller, where the fairies/Old Ones appear after Rafe has been attacked by the catamount.
The more obvious reminders of The Signaller are the parallels between the Signaller’s Guild and the Kitecorps, and of a young man’s progression in those organisations.
The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty
The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty1 (Lightspeed #125, October 2020) begins with the narrator, Barry Simcoe, looking at the drones flying over Chicago from the middle of a muddy expanse that used to be Lake Michigan. In the centre of what used to be the lake is a mass of steam rising up from Deep Temple, a mysterious mining project. We then learn, when Simcoe contacts a friendly AI called Zircon Border with a request for transport, that he is struggling to get to his destination because of the many interconnected pools that lie ahead (even though he is wearing a modern American combat suit):
One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very manoeuvrable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.
[. . .]
“Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’
“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”
“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”
“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”
“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”
“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”
“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.
“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”
As the drone takes him to his location, we learn about the post-collapse world that Simcoe lives in, and his mission, which is to take out a sixty ton killer robot called True Pacific. The robot is currently hiding in a wrecked ship but, when Simcoe arrives there, the robot comes out to kill him. There is then an exciting fight scene in the mudpools, which goes on until Simcoe finally outwits the machine and gets to a power cable at the rear of its head. When Simcoe threatens to disconnect the cable, the robot stops fighting.
Simcoe asks the robot why it has been on a rampage and, after some verbal back and forth, it eventually tells him that it has just disconnected an echo module, a comms device that was (spoiler) enabling an AI called Ambient Intelligence to control it. We subsequently learn that Ambient Intelligence is a newly aware AI born in the mysterious Deep Temple project mentioned previously. True Pacific adds that the AI is like a a child but, before we can learn anything more, Zircon Border interrupts to tell Simcoe that four drones have been hijacked by Ambient Intelligence and are inbound to their location.
The climactic scene shows the pair—now co-operating—defeating the drones, and then leaving the area for a hiding place in Chicago. Questions about what Ambient Intelligence will do next, and what is going on at the Deep Temple project, hang in the air.
This is more open-ended than I’d like (although it points to an obvious sequel), but it was refreshing to read a well-paced piece of action SF with an intriguing background and a sense of humour.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,400 words. Story link.
1. There is a short article about the story here, which also mentions how it fits in with McAulty’s* other novels (*Todd McAulty is the pseudonym of John McNeill, editor of Black Gate).
Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis
Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:
For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.
Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:
He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”
After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:
He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .
When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy1).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.
1. The trilogy comprises The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.
Sparklybits by Nick Wolven
Sparklybits by Nick Wolven (Entanglements, 2020) gets off to a bloated and rambling start with four mothers, who are group-parenting a child called Charlie, meeting to discuss his lack of progress. During their long conversation, lights and icons flash across the walls—this is attributed to “Sparklybits”, but there is no immediate explanation as to what is going on. The author manages, however, to squeeze this in on the first page, well before the light show:1
Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do.
The mother-stereotypes (“Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff”) chatter about Charlie’s “problems” for another few pages before Jo, the live-in mother, and Teri go to speak to Charlie. We then see Charlie communicating to the flashing lights—now described as a virus—in his room, using a non-verbal/sign language.
The story finally perks up (and starts making some sense) when Evan, the AI virus exterminator (and mansplainer) turns up to deal with the problem. After some talk about the virus/ghost, the semaphore/lights language, the internet of things, etc. Evan manages to capture Sparklybits when it turns up to see what is happening. Charlie loses his temper.
The final part of the story (spoiler) takes place after the three non-resident mothers depart, and Jo takes Charlie to Evan’s workshop. There, the two of them see other AIs that Evan has captured and given a home. At the end of their visit Charlie gets to take Sparklybits back home, but with strict instructions to keep him contained in the device that Evan has provided. However, the final page sees Charlie show Jo something that he and Sparklybits are building, although I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is (the picture he shows Jo has two tiny figures stand on the lawn in front of the house holding hands; Charlie wears a conspiratorial grin while he does this).
This story has a bloated and inchoate start (you can’t help but think that Robert Sheckley’s first line for the same story would have been, “There was a ghost in the house”); a decent middle; and a weak ending (and a twist I possibly missed because, again, too many words).2 Overall it is an okay satire about modern parenting I guess but, having reread the above, I suspect I’m being over-generous.
** (Average). 8,750 words.
1. What is it about Asimov’s SF (and adjacent anthology) stories that they have this constant description of food and people eating?
2. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Wolven is just not my cup of tea (and if he was coffee, he would be a cup that is mostly full of froth and not liquid). Of the stories by this writer that I’ve read so far, there is only one that I liked, Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017). As for the others, I thought Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? (F&SF, January-February 2016), Passion Summer (Asimov’s SF, February 2016), and No Stone Unturned (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) were mediocre; and Galatea in Utopia (F&SF, January-February 2018) and Carbo (F&SF, November-December 2017) were awful.
Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly
Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:
Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”
This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
** (Average). 11,500 words.