Tag: 3*

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark

Posted on by Paul Fraser

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny, September-October 2021)1 appears to be set in an alternate world where magic was discovered between the second and third Martian invasions of Earth and then used to defeat the aliens in that final encounter (the first invasion, in 1897, is presumably the one recounted in H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds; the third encounter takes place in 1903).
The story itself opens in Marrakesh some thirty years after the end of the war and sees a Mambo (voodoo priestess) called Minette, after initially negotiating the city traffic in a conventional way, make a deal with a loa (spirit intermediary) to loft her up to the Flying Citadel where The Council of Magical Equilibrium are assembled. Minette subsequently gatecrashes the meeting and pleads for the lives of three Martians.
During the exchanges that follow we learn that Minette has been studying (and joining with) a Martian triad (the Martians are only sentient when they join together in threes), and that the aliens may be on the verge of discovering a Martian form of magic (which would then alter their position under human law). Several of the council see any possible breakthrough as a threat, the most outspoken of whom is the war-mongering General Koorang. During the arguments between him and Minette we get an insight to this world’s complex background, which is full of throw away detail like this:

“Not every Martian was a soldier,” Minette reminded, speaking as much to the others gathered. “The One I joined with were worker drones. They never even saw fighting. That’s why it was so easy for the Central Intellect to abandon Them in the retreat.”
“And what did they work on?” the general asked, unmoved. “Was it their stalking dreadnoughts? Their infernal weapons what almost blew us to hell? Come visit the Archipelago sometime, Professor, and I’ll show you Martian gentleness.”
Minette bit her lip to keep from replying. That was unfair. The Archipelago was all that was left of what used to be Australia. The waters of the South Sea were mostly off-limits now: teeming with monsters that wandered in through torn rifts between worlds. That it was humans playing with Martian weapons who had brought on the disaster seemed to matter little to the general.

When the Council finally vote they decide that the prospect of Martian magic is too much of a threat to ignore but, rather than have Minette’s Martians euthanized, the Council decides to separate the creatures so they cannot form their sentient triad.
After the meeting Minette returns to the Martians and joins with them, after which they learn about what happened in the Council. Then the Martians give Minette a vision that suggests they are close to discovering their old magic.
The rest of the story sees the “mist-faced” woman from the Council meeting, who voted against Minette, secretly visit her and offer sanctuary to the Martians in exchange for some of their magic if they are successful. Then she and Minette plan how to smuggle the Martians out of the Academy.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees Minette and the Martians intercepted by General Koorang and another man called Aziz as they try to leave. Minette then combines with the three Martians and, in a moment of insight, realises what she has to do to help them summon their magic:

Papa Damballah appeared. But not like Minette had ever seen.
This Damballah was a being made up of tentacles of light, intertwined to form the body of a great white serpent. And she suddenly understood what she was seeing. The loa met the needs of their children. Papa Damballah had left Africa’s shores and changed in the bowels of slave ships. He changed under the harsh toil of sugar and coffee plantations. And when his children wielded machetes and fire to win freedom, he changed then too. Now to protect his newest children, born of two worlds, he changed once again.
Minette opened up to the loa and Martian magic coursed through her, erupting from her fingertips. The guards, General Koorang and Aziz drew back, as the great tentacles of Papa Damballah grew up from her, rising above the market tents as a towering white serpent: a leviathan that burned bright against the night. For a moment brief as a heartbeat—or as long as the burning heart of a star—it seemed to Minette she saw through the loa’s eyes. The cosmos danced about her. It trembled and heaved and moved.
And then Damballah was gone.

Aziz tells the general the Martians are now protected under the charter, and Minette and the Martians get on the mist-faced woman’s airship and quickly leave.
This has an inventive and entertaining setting—the mixture of War of the Worlds Martians, magical councils and voodoo shouldn’t really work as well as it does—but the ending is weaker (it is literally a deus ex machina).
*** (Good). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This is a Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award finalist, and placed third in the Locus Poll.

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, June 2020) is narrated by a haunted house, and sees it on its best behaviour when Mrs Weiss, a local realtor (estate agent), puts the house on the market:

The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time since vacant.
Today it is going to change that. It is on its best behaviour as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up. She puts out trays of store-bought cookies and hides scent dispensers, while 133 Poisonwood summons a gentle breeze and uses its aura to spook any groundhogs off the property. Both the realtor and the real estate need this open house to work.
Stragglers trickle in. They are bored people more interested in snacks than the restored plumbing. The house straightens its aching floorboards, like a human sucking in their belly. Stragglers track mud everywhere. The house would love nothing more than any of them to spend the rest of their lives tracking mud into it.

A widower and his rumbustious four-year-old daughter later arrive at the open house and start viewing the property. As they do so the house makes a number of minor interventions (it blows the door shut, gives the father a vision of his daughter’s vertigo, etc.) before finally showing them a hidden room. Unfortunately, Ana runs into a spinning wheel she sees in the room and knocks it over, cutting her hand and losing a bracelet into a crack in the floor. The father grabs his daughter and leaves. The house resists the urge to trap the pair in the room, but realises in that moment why other houses sometimes go bad.
Later that day (spoiler), the father and Ana, having realised she has lost her bracelet (which was previously her dead mother’s), return to find it. The house helps them to do so, and during the process we learn more about the pair’s backstory and the death of Ana’s mother. The father finally decides to buy the house.
A charming (and feel-good) haunted house story.
*** (Good). 3,000 words. Story link.

1. This story won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. It was also the runner up in its Locus Poll category, fourth in the Hugo Award, and was also a World Fantasy Award finalist.

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L. Davitt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

The Castle by Raylyn Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Castle by Raylyn Moore (F&SF, August 1976) opens with Beryl the narrator being woken by her husband Miles, who has just had a nightmare where he was attacked by children. After Miles tells her about the experience he goes back to sleep, but she cannot. She thinks about various matters, during which we learn (a) that their house is a part-time toy museum which houses their huge collection and is open to occasional visitors, (b) Miles is Beryl’s second husband, and (c) he is building a huge play fort in the back garden overlooking the gully at the edge of their property. This latter venture does not proceed smoothly:

The first time the children had attacked the castle was before it was quite finished. Miles had left it late one afternoon with the mortar wet and returned in the morning to find the stones prized out of place. It looked as if a heavy pinch bar had been used. “I can scarcely believe it was children,” Beryl had said. “Think of the strength it must have taken.”
“Which is why I’m sure it was children,” Miles insisted. “They’re all just bubbling over with misdirected energy, aren’t they? And if they’re determined enough, they can do anything.”
[. . .]
The next time, the vandals had somehow sheared off the towers of the completed citadel, and once they had blasted a hole under the front wall with some explosive, presumably dynamite, though it didn’t make sense that children should have access to dynamite. (The Hullibargers had been out the evening it happened, and so had heard no sound.)  p. 101

Most of rest the story concerns their otherwise idyllic life (neither seems to work and they do as they wish), but one action after another subtly portrays Miles as a self-centred man-child (earlier in the story Beryl says, “There’s an old wives’ tale that all American men are really little boys in wolf’s clothing”). This is finally made explicit in the last scene (spoiler), where the couple come home to find two children/intruders in the castle and Miles agrees to fight them for it:

He plunged up the slope ready for battle, and the two emerged from behind the stone kremlin to meet him as agreed. For a long time she remained frozen near the bottom of the hill, watching what was happening simply because she couldn’t make herself stop watching. It went on for a long time. They fought desperately, as if for their lives, kicking, gouging, smashing.
And after a while she had to admit that of the three little boys, all of a size, struggling fiercely on the leaf-covered slope, she could no longer tell, through the lowering dusk, which was Miles.  p. 108

I think this is really a slightly surreal mainstream story rather than a fantasy (you would have to squint to see it as the latter), but I enjoyed its slow burn descriptive passages and quirkiness.
*** (Good). 6,050 words. Story link.

Sparrows by Susan Palwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sparrows by Susan Palwick (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) is set in an apocalyptic near future (storms and floods) and sees Lacey, a college student, finishing her paper on Shakespeare on a manual typewriter in her abandoned and damaged dormitory:

The paper was a comparison of Richard II and King Lear, contrasting close readings of Richard’s “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground” speech and Lear’s speech to Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.”
The sonorous language filled Lacey’s head, as if the characters were here, talking to her. Both of these beaten kings: Richard railing against mortality and Lear—unaware that he was about to lose his only loyal daughter—vowing to find every grace he could in her company, to “wear out in a wall’d prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.” Both of them were doomed. But Lear’s sufferings had brought him acceptance and humility, while Richard just felt sorry for himself.  p. 51

Lacey later goes to drop off the completed paper in Professor Ablethwaite’s mailbox and, as she walks through the campus, sees bodies that have been crushed by trees or washed onto campus by the floods. When she gets to the English building (“one of the oldest on campus”) she is amazed to find it is still standing. Then, when she gets to Ablethwaite’s office, she sees the door is ajar and he is inside sitting at his desk.
After some initial introductions, Albethwaite asks Lacey why she bothered to finish her essay, and then, when she goes to leave, he asks her to stay. Albethwaite offers her something to eat and drink, and they (spoiler) start talking about her paper. This discussion references the earlier passage above, and the situation they are in:

A booming sounded in the distance, and they both looked out the window. The storm was much closer, the few remaining trees dancing and crashing. “This may be it,” Ablethwaite said.
“Yes. It may be.”
He turned back to face her. “All right. So what’s this paper about?”
She’d loved writing the paper, but now she felt tongue-tied. “It’s about Richard the Second and Lear. It’s a comparison of how they face their ends. Richard’s all bitter and everything, but Lear’s okay with being in a prison cell if he can be with Cordelia.”
“Which he’ll never get to be.”
“No. But he doesn’t know that.”
Ablethwaite scowled. “Mercy not to know sometimes, isn’t it? No currently relevant subtext, oh no. What is it Lear tells Cordelia? ‘So we’ll live’?”
“Yes. That’s what he says.”
Lear and Cordelia wouldn’t live. No one would. Lacey wouldn’t and her aunt wouldn’t and none of the departed students would. Even without the storms, even without social collapse and all the catastrophes besetting every corner of the globe Lacey had heard about, everyone would die, because everyone always did. The trick was to find what good you could while you were still alive. Lear had finally learned that, and all these hundreds of years after Shakespeare had written Lear’s speech, he had taught Lacey, too.
She swallowed and said, “For just a minute, you know, he’s happy. For just a little while. It’s the only time he’s happy in the whole play.”
“The sparrow flying through the mead hall, warm and dry, before it has to fly back outside, into rain and darkness.” Ablethwaite glanced through the window again.
Nothing was visible. The wind was a howling roar.
“Is that Shakespeare?”
“Bede.”  pp. 53-54 

The description of the unfolding apocalypse and the story arc outlined above work well together. Succinctly done, too.
*** (Good). 2,500 words.

The Rules of Unbinding by Geoffrey A. Landis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Rules of Unbinding by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) opens with Kharkov in the Negev desert looking for antiquities, preferably gold or silver ones. We learn that he hasn’t bothered to get a permit and has no intention of reporting anything he finds to the relevant authorities.
After wasting his time digging up a jeep axle from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, he finds a bottle just before he gives up for the day:

The bottle was ceramic, still intact, beautifully decorated with geometric patterns in yellow and blue glaze, but bound with an intricate cage of bronze, which must have been what had set off the metal detector. A clay jar would be exactly what a fleeing family might use to put their stashed coins in, so for an instant he’d been hopeful, but this was more of a bottle than ajar, with the neck opening too small for anyone to slip coins into. It was closed with a carved stopper (ivory, maybe?) that was held in place with twists of bronze wire—green with corrosion now—and then sealed with wax. Ottoman era, he thought; perhaps fifteenth century. When he picked it up, he realized it was too light to hold anything metallic, but still, a piece of Ottoman ceramic could fetch something in the antiquities market.
But he was curious what it had held—wine? Perfume? The rules of the antiquity market said that an untouched bottle would be worth more than one with the seal broken, but to hell with the rules. He could reseal the wax later and no one would know.  p. 80

Kharkov opens the bottle and smoke comes out, which eventually resolves into a genie clothed in modern attire. Kharkov quickly tells the genie that he wants his three wishes and then, when the genie begins to tell him the rules, says his first wish is that there should be no rules. The genie (spoiler) replies that without rules the universe would not exist in its current form (he gives several examples involving gravity, oxidation, etc. etc.) and asks Kharkov to reconsider. Kharkov complies and modifies his first wish to “no rules about wishes”—this means, of course (double spoiler), that the genie is not obliged to give him his three wishes.
Normally I don’t like short-shorts, but this one is well written and has a clever twist on an old theme.
*** (Good). 1,250 words.

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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