Tag: 3.5*

The Metric by David Moles

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Metric by David Moles (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens on a far future Earth with a spaceship crashing near the city of Septentrion after the vessel is forced out of the metric (a universe wide system developed aeons ago which has its nexus on Earth). When a rescue party from the nearby city of Septentrion arrives, one of the members called Piper spots something in the wreckage, and he races his twin Petal to get to it.
When Petal arrives first and picks up a small sphere a stranger appears beside him and starts talking to the pair in an unknown language. One of the other group members gets their armour to translate what he is saying: they learn that the universe is ending.
Piper and Petal subsequently take the sphere and its intelligence, which calls itself Tirah, back to the city. Tirah applies for provisional citizenship and requests the fabrication of a body. While this happens, we learn about Tirah’s home world:

Hoddmimis Holt, the world that had sent Tirah, had been built perhaps two hundred million years ago, as Septentrion counted years; built when there were still stars in the sky, and when ships like Thus is the Heaven still plied the metric, knitting a web that spanned galaxies, even as the quintessence was drawing those galaxies apart, emptying the spaces between the stars to drown each galaxy alone in red darkness. It was a great city, as Petal understood it, built mostly of things more clever and more enduring than brute matter: nootic mass, dissociated fields, knots of space-time akin to the metric itself; and home only to purely computational intelligences, as far beyond the computationals of Septentrion as the Holt itself was beyond Septentrion’s towers of carbon and crystal.
The Holt was made in nearly full knowledge of the inevitability of the quintessence and the limitations of the metric, and made to last. Its makers poised it on the edge of a singularity with the mass of twenty billion stars, the core of a galaxy far from humanity’s birthplace, a black hole so enormous that even light would take days to girdle its vast event horizon; and there it spun, balanced at the equilibrium point between the singularity’s hungry mass and the even hungrier quintessence.  p. 26

The passage above gives you a good idea of the baroque and information-dense style of the story but, in the next few pages, the detail of Tirah’s warning becomes clearer and we learn that the quintessence is slowly destroying the universe. The metric, a system built to ameliorate the effects of the quintessence, needs to be shut down otherwise space-time will not come to an end—and this will prevent a new universe being born.
Tirah subsequently petitions the City Authority to shut down the metric but is unsuccessful (funnily enough, no-one wants the Earth and the Universe to come to an end before it has to). Tirah is then confined to the Archive grounds, but Petal, after discussing the matter with Gauge (a “motile” from the Archive), helps Tirah escape. When Piper realises that Petal and Tirah intend making the long overland journey to another city called Meridian, he and the rest of what remains of the rescue team are tasked to follow and retrieve them.
The second half of the story is devoted to the long overland trek that Petal and Tirah (and their pursuers) make in arctic conditions that prevail over most of this far-future Earth. Along the way there are deserted wastelands, buried cities, messages from their pursuers which make the pair detour, and periods when there is no light at all:

Petal and Tirah made more than twenty leagues that first day, the flat land of the lakeshore giving way to rolling hills, and there was just no reason to stop, not when Petal didn’t feel tired, not when the going was so easy, and Tirah so light in Petal’s arms. Petal could have kept on, continuing into the dark. But the scale of what they’d done, what Petal was committing to, was starting to sink in.
They’d outrun the storm, or it had passed over them, and they were under a clear black sky with only a faint dusting of silver sparks, very high up, that Tirah said was probably debris from colliding mirrors. The snow was smooth and very flat and seemed, through the armor’s eyes, to shine with its own light.
“What will it be like?” Petal asked—meaning the new cosmos. “Will there be stars?”
“Not to be known,” Tirah said. “It might be the same. It might be different. What’s most important is that it will be.”
Petal’s hand sought and found Tirah’s.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Petal said.
Tirah said nothing.
They couldn’t really touch, not through the armor, and in this cold the armor wouldn’t have opened if Petal had asked. But it was almost as though they could.
Three thousand leagues, Petal and Tirah, just the two of them.
And at the end of it, the end of the world.  p. 36

Eventually, after a hundred and seventy days on the ice, Petal and Tirah reach Meridian, only to see that parts of the city are on fire because of misaligned orbital mirrors. Then they realise that they are going to have to go through a restricted area (Petal’s armour and life support system tells him, “Under the terms of the 57th Diatagmatic Symbasis and its implementing regulations and orders, entry to the peripheral conservation area is permitted only to authorized persons”). They nearly make it, but are caught by the city cohorts.
Petal is taken to a cell and (spoiler) is surprised to see it is already occupied by Piper—he and his team arrived earlier as they used a crawler to travel overland. Petal also learns that several members of his old team died on the way.
Petal and Piper are then taken to the city, where they meet another old colleague, Hare, and then learn that Tirah will be allowed to see the sacella to make his case for shutting down the metric. Petal wants to go with him, and tells Piper to come along.
The final scene sees Tirah attempt to approach the sacella, but he is a machine and is disintegrated before he can speak with them. The twins, after some existential agonising, take his place—and the story ends with the implication that they are successful (the chapter headings form a temporal countdown throughout the story, with the last one being TΩ-2×103—thirty three minutes before TΩ).
This story struck me as the kind of piece that a more cerebral and current day Planet Stories might use—a enjoyably high density (there is as much detail here as some novels) super-science tale set on an exotic, far-future Earth, and one which ends with the death and rebirth of the universe!
***+ (Good to Very Good).1 16,300 words. Story link.

1. I liked this story (a Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, by the way) better than all the other novelette finalists in the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll for 2021. I don’t know how this one didn’t make the cut—too complex, too hard a read?

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:

→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)

>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy

>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum

→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)

This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.

1. This won the Nebula and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. It’s a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow (Apex #121, January 2021) begins with Sam, the narrator, telling us that he has ferried “two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death” before he is given his next assignment:

Name: Lawrence Harper
Address: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797
Time: Sunday, July 14th 2020, 2:08AM, EST
Cause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
Age: 30 months

Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

Sam goes to see Lawrence several hours before his death (a requirement that helps smooth the passing of the dead across the river to “rejoin the great everything”) and, when he arrives in the boy’s bedroom, watches him stir. Lawrence’s father, alerted by the intercom, comes in and picks the boy up and takes him into the kitchen. Sam then watches the father hold and feed Lawrence, and notes the father does not know that this will be his last time together with his son. Later on in the garden, the boy (unusually) sees Sam, and the pair later play catch together.
The rest of the story switches between this kind of affecting domestic detail (we see the boy with his mother when she gets home), backstory about the premature death of Sam’s own young son, Ian, and an account of Sam’s own death and recruitment as a “reaper”.
Eventually (spoiler), Lawrence’s moment of passing arrives and, when his heart stops, Sam intervenes, putting a ghostly hand into the boy’s chest and massaging it back to life.
Sam subsequently has his tea leaves read by his Archangel supervisor, Raz (“the kind of sweet, middle-aged Black woman with whom you do not fuck”) and is given another appointment to reap the boy. Once again Sam saves him, and once again Raz appears. This time she asks Sam what he would do if she punished him by leaving him on Earth, never to cross the river and rejoin the great everything, but to fade into nothingness. Sam says he would watch over Lawrence as long as he could, and the story finishes with Raz telling him he no longer works for the Department of Death. Before she goes she hands him a card, which says, “Sam Grayson, Junior Guardian, Department of Life”.
Although this story pretends, for most of its length, to be an edgy and dark piece, it is ultimately sentimental and feel-good—and, to be honest, quite well done.1 I couldn’t help but think, however, that there are darker and more profound versions of the story where the boy dies. Two options spring to mind: the first, which would appeal to the religious, is that we see the joy of him rejoining the great everything; the second just sees him die, and has the narrator reflect on the need for stoicism to get us through this veil of tears. I doubt any current SF writer is going to be writing that kind of story any time soon.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

1. This piece, obviously, is a short story finalist for this year’s Hugo Award.

Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly (Analog, May-June 2021)1 opens with what turns out to be a group of sentient asteroids (who call themselves “Stones”) seeing a flash of light in the rock field they inhabit. After discussing the matter between themselves (they think a younger member of their species may have mixed a hazardous “hotfire” that caused it to explode), one of their number, Five Rings, goes to investigate. During this, something wet hits it:

I sent harvesters out for the fluids and found that much of the internal material was organic. It was surprisingly warm, warmer than our own internal fluids. There was both water and organics, mixed together, much like our own minds and cells. Some of the outer covering was organic, too, but didn’t taste the same; it looked like it had been made, like some object we might excrete on our own stony surface. It was flexible. Had this Thing been alive? Regardless, the resources were too valuable to waste. As we spent water to propel ourselves on occasion, we needed to replenish it when we could, and the Thing was an excellent resource. I wondered if there were more Things available. It would save me from having to chase after every wayward comet that fell our way, putting a rock into its path and hoping some of the scattered ice shards would come my way, so that I might gather and store them for the future.
I broadcast my findings to the others, and the ones with close vectors propelled themselves in my direction, keeping a sharp eye out for more Things.  p. 28

After this the narrator changes to Heart of Stone, who tells the rest of them2 that he has detected another Thing, and is setting off to intercept it (although some of the others advise against this course of action). When he approaches the Thing (spoiler) it waves at him, and it becomes apparent (to those readers who didn’t suspect previously) that the Things are human astronauts. This second astronaut tries to communicate with Heart of Stone before trying to make it to a wrecked spaceship nearby:

I reabsorbed some of the warmgas, knowing that I wouldn’t need to escape an attack from the Thing, and ignited the rest, following the Thing to its rendezvous with the new bit of scrap.
Would this be another living thing?
No Sense Of Humor was nearby, and said to me, “That Thing is going to miss its target. If you wish to help it, you must get in front of it.”
“I have little fuel to spare,” I said. This was a common lie, since few Stones would allow themselves to get so low that they could not maneuver. That would mean a slow death, perhaps even consuming the core’s water to chase after more volatiles. It was a subtle request for help, whether actually needed or not.
“I can toss some ice to you when I am nearer. If you garner some benefit here, I expect some sharing,” said No Sense Of Humor.
It was a good response. I sparked some more warmgas and accelerated beyond the Thing’s position as it flew toward the scrap, and used simple steam to position myself in front of it. More volatiles than I would normally use in two cycles, but it seemed so important. I really was hurting for propellants. It was so rare that we ever needed to move anywhere quickly, and so expensive.
We flew past the debris together, the Thing coming down on my Stone, and then I accelerated slowly back toward the debris. The Thing seemed content to ride on my surface, though it kept pointing the shiny nob of its outer surface at me. I did not know what that might mean, but the Thing did not seem frightened.  p. 29

The astronaut eventually gets to the damaged ship—but only after fighting off alien scavengers that attack it and Heart of Stone (we learn that Stones are created by groups of scavengers occupying empty asteroids and becoming a single sentient creature). When the astronaut is finished examining the wrecked ship, he or she goes and lands on No Sense of Humour, who has just arrived at the scene. Subsequently, there are further attempts at communication during which the human gives No Sense of Humour a torch. Then the human dies—either from their injuries or damage to the suit (the scavengers caused a couple of leaks during the attack).
The penultimate chapter sees the Stones detect an even bigger ship (it appears the one that exploded was a scoutship) and, after another debate, they decide to contact it. Finally, the last chapter is related by Diamond Eye 16 cycles after this First Contact, and describes the events that have occurred subsequently (as well as giving us an insight into the novel formation of this solar system).
This is an original, inventive, and enjoyable piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,600 words. Story link.

1. This story was the winner of the Analytical Laboratory Poll for 2021 in the short story category. There is more information about the poll finalists here.

2. I was tempted to call this group of stones “the pile”.

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey (F&SF, October-November 1995) opens with Stern, the narrator, thinking about different types of assassin before he himself is recruited by a wheelchair-bound man called Thrale to kill a Senator Philip Hanson.
We later learn that the reason for the proposed killing is that Hanson intends to vote for legislation enabling a biowar facility, an action that links to Stern’s own past as he was a spider drone operator in the Brazilian conflict and was exposed to a cocktail of tailored viruses and pathogens, but never fell ill. His family, however, were not so lucky:

After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt in our five-year-old daughter’s flesh.
I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died—a noxious odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room. My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over our noses and mouths.  p. 115

In the next part of the story we see (the now widowed) Stern learn how to operate a marionette-like bodysuit that will enable him to control Hanson’s daughter after she has been injected with nanotechnology. The nanotech will give Stern twenty minutes of control and will than decompose, leaving no trace of external involvement—so the daughter will take the blame for the murder which, apart from the obvious benefits to Thrale, Stern & co., will also prevent her, a politician in her own right, from continuing with her father’s legislative agenda. To be honest, the suit/nanotech gimmick is probably the weakest part of the story, but little time is spent on the tech stuff and the bulk of the piece is mostly a series of scenes where we get a character study of Stern, or learn more about Thrale and his two employees: Pangborn is a female assistant, and Truman is the scientist who developed the system that Stern will be using to control the daughter.
At one point Stern is given a video disc from Pangborn that shows Hanson’s daughter and her female lover in a hotel room, and he later has a disturbing dream:

I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side. Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of contused undergrowth.
How I loved the hunt.
I had always loved it.
Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.
I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the area.
The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but one another.
“It’s time,” said the voice of Napoleon Thrale.
I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of orgasm.
She wore my daughter’s face.
I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a stiffened rod against my belly.  p. 126

After this Stern (a) talks to Truman about scientists like Oppenheimer and the guilt they bear for the inventions they create and (b) sleeps with Pangborn, learning that her fiancé died in Brazil.
Eventually (spoiler), the day of the assassination arrives and Stern, Pangborn and Truman set off to complete the mission. The daughter, Amanda, is shot with a long range hypodermic dart while out on a regular run and the nanotechnology enters her body. Stern takes control of Amanda and takes her back to the house, quickly finding Hanson in his office. Then, when the nanotech starts to break down, Amanda manages to reassert enough control to say “Dad?” just before Stern breaks a mug on the desk and kills Hanson by repeatedly slashing his throat.
There is a final postscript which sees Stern in the Caymans, where he still dreaming of his wife and daughter. Stern says that he has written a letter to Amanda’s attorneys explaining what happened and why she is not guilty of the murder (“the daughters have suffered enough” he adds to himself). After he sends the letter Stern says he will swim off towards the horizon to join his wife and daughter.
If you are looking for the assassination adventure suggested by the beginning of the piece you are probably going to be disappointed—however, if you are looking for a complex and involving psychodrama, then this will be well worth your time.
***+ (Good To Very Good). 11,100 words.

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

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

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

Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand by Vonda N. McIntyre

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand by Vonda N. McIntyre (Analog, October 1973) takes place at a tribal settlement in the desert where Snake, a female healer, is treating a sick young boy. It soon becomes apparent that she does not use conventional treatments:

She had to annoy Mist to make her come out. Snake rapped on the bag and finally poked her twice. Snake felt the vibration of sliding scales, and suddenly the albino cobra flung herself into the tent. She moved quickly, yet there seemed to be no end to her. She reared back and up. Her breath rushed out in a hiss. Her head rose well over a meter above the floor. She flared her wide hood. Behind her, the adults gasped, as if physically assaulted by the gaze of the tan spectacle design on the back of Mist’s hood. Snake ignored the people and spoke to the great cobra, focusing her attention by her words. “Ah, thou. Furious creature. Lie down; ’tis time for thee to earn thy dinner. Speak to this child, and touch him. He is called Stavin.” Slowly, Mist relaxed her hood and allowed Snake to touch her. Snake grasped her firmly behind the head and held her so she looked at Stavin. The cobra’s silver eyes picked up the yellow of the lamplight. “Stavin,” Snake said, “Mist will only meet you now. I promise that this time she will touch you gently.”

Mist is the one of three snakes that Snake has (Sand is a rattlesnake, and Grass is a smaller “dreamsnake” she uses for pain relief and euthanasia).
After Snake lets the cobra “taste” the boy with his tongue, she meets with the tribe’s female leader and asks for food for her pony, and for someone to help her with Mist through the night. Snake then feeds Mist a small animal that she has treated with drops from a vial.
She is joined by Arvin, one of the male tribesmen, and they spend several hours restraining the cobra, which repeatedly convulses as it manufactures a treatment for the boy’s tumour. Eventually, day comes, and Mist is ready for the boy but, when Snake goes back to the tent, she discovers (spoiler) that Grass, who she left to comfort the child, has been have killed by the frightened parents. Even though she is distraught Snake treats the boy by letting Mist bite him and inject the venom treatment.
Snake later comes close to suffering the same fate as Grass even thought the boy’s tumour starts shrinking (the tribal members are a superstitious and fearful lot), but the tribal leader intervenes to let her leave safely. Arvin wants to go with her, but Snake tells Arvin that she must return to the city where she was trained and see if she can get a replacement dreamsnake (there is the briefest hint in the story that this is a post-nuclear holocaust world). Snake promises him that if she can appease her superiors, she will return.
This is an original piece and a pretty good one too—what also marked it out at the time, apart from its original idea, was the more subdued writing style, and the story’s matriarchal society (unusual for most mid-70s SF). However, some of the novelty wears off on the second or third reading, and it also feels a little fragmentary (it is part of the Hugo and Nebula winning novel, Dreamsnake,1 which I’ve also read).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

1. Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand was the first chapter of the novel Dreamsnake (1978); The Serpent’s Death (Analog, February 1978) was chapter two of the novel; and The Broken Dome (Analog, March 1978) is a condensation of the last half of chapter 9 through to chapter 12 (the last hundred pages of the book).

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.1
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.
 
1. A quick skim of ISFDB shows this writer has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss (New Worlds #100, November 1960) is set on a far future Earth where humanity has departed and only animals are left; it opens with Dandi Lashadusa (who we later discover is an uplifted sloth-like creature) passing a musicolumn:

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding down that dusty road on her megatherium, the column began to intone. It was just an indigo stain in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.  p. 63

Dandi dismounts near the column to listen to its music, and telepathically communes with her tetchy mentor half a world away in Beterbroe. He ignores Dandi’s suggestion to look at the view through her eyes, and he instead provides a trenchant critique of an unnamed piece of music that is of significance to Dandi. The conversation then briefly touches on to her tentative plans to die, before she gets back on the megatherium and continues on.
As Dandi travels towards her next stop, the Involute (“it seemed to hang irridial above the ground a few leagues on”), we learn that, in this far future, the Moon has left Earth to orbit the Sun, and that Earth and Venus now orbit each other. We also learn about humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system, and their development of the Laws of Intergration, which ultimately led to the construction of the transubstantio-spatialisers used to project them onto the pattern of reality. They never came back.
When Dandi arrives at the Involute her mentor senses her dark thoughts. He tells her that moping does not become her, and that she should return home, and adds that he does not want to hear any more about the music she has chosen for her swan song. She replies that she is lonely:

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream-like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring underground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. Its motivations were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer.’ Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occasional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made; loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!  p. 68

The last part of the story (spoiler) sees Dandi arrive at her old home in Crotheria. When she goes to look at her old house she is confronted by an uplifted bear—transgressive creatures that are the only ones who wish to emulate “man’s old aggressiveness”. Dandi panics and summons her mentor (now revealed as an uplifted dolphin). He takes control of her body and moves to kill the bear, but Dandi fights her mentor and tells the creature to flee. The enraged mentor throws Dandi’s elephant-sized body against the wall and the house begins to collapse. She jumps to safety.
Dandi later realises, when she hears nothing further from her mentor, that she has been excommunicated. She continues her journey until she comes to a suitable spot, frees her mount, and proceeds with her plan:

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherim body . . . but an indigo column, hardly visible . . .
Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.
Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: “All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .”  p. 73

There isn’t much of a story here, and the pleasure that this piece provides comes from (a) its exotic and elegiac descriptions of a pastoral far-future Earth, and (b) its transcendent, sense-of-wonder ending. I thought this was an excellent story the first time I read it but, this time around, it was apparent that part of its charm is the novelty of its touching last line.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins with a time-retrieval team (consisting of the narrator and his two colleagues) learning that their special assignment will involve taking a Professor Rothman back in time to the “Age of Desolation” to retrieve her brother and three sisters. It materialises that Rothman is a time-probabilist who herself was extracted from the past, and whose exceptional contributions to the work of the Conglomerate have provided her the credit to pay for the journey back in time.
Almost immediately after they arrive at their extraction point it becomes obvious that the plan they have been briefed about is a cover story provided by Rothman, and that she has other ideas. This begins with them having to walk to a nearby railway station at a military camp:

A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier.
The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.
“Not my specialty,” he said.
Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond. These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.
“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.”  p. 85

They later find out that they have arrived at this Nazi concentration camp at the beginning of a prisoner revolt and, during the turmoil, they join the fight with their advanced weapons: the team targets the guards and Rothman searches for a sadistic officer called Frenzel, who she kills (a “ghost killing”). During the action the team becomes concerned that this branch timeline they are creating (their own will be “canonical”) may not last long enough for them to complete the mission and they worry that they will become “ghosts”. Rothman reassures them that vortex that took them there will last for “days, months, maybe longer”.
Eventually (spoiler) they find Rothman’s family, and it materialises that she intends to rescue a different group of people:

The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“We—” I began. Rothman cut me off.
“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”
I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.
The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.
Instead, they smiled.
“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.
“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”
The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves.  p. 97

As they return to the extraction point the narrator tells Rothman that, if she returns to the future with her younger self, the Conglomerate will kill her and the child for breaching its rules. Rothman says she knows, and that she intends staying behind in this ghost timeline (“Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”). Their problems aren’t over, however, and they then find that even without Rothman they are a hundred kilograms overweight for the return journey. After they all strip off all their clothes and dump their equipment they still have forty kilograms to shed, and the story finishes with the narrator volunteering to stay with Rothman.
The time travel hand-wavium, combat scenes, and Holocaust elements are blended together well, and produce a pretty good story.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Story link.