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Rachel in Love by Pat Murphy

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.

Goldie by Sean Monaghan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Goldie by Sean Monaghan (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with Charlotte out running on a tabletop mountain on an alien planet called Karella. She falls and breaks her ankle when something in the jungle below distracts her:

The gray-white vines stretched out, long catenaries, swooping down, then back up, connecting the edge of Ikenni with the edge of Malale. As the teppu crawled along, its hands would be refreshing and strengthening the vines.
Charlotte crawled closer to the edge for a better view. The pain from her ankle was ebbing, drifting away courtesy of the belt’s injection.
The vines were as thick as the deck of one of those eight lane bridges that connected headlands across harbors.
The teppu was a big one. The size of a whale. She was beautiful. Her downy, furry hide was a greenish shade of beige. Her long, convex body hung beneath the vines, thick strong arms clinging on above. Tentacles and fingers gripping, spinnerets releasing thin filaments.  p. 162

After Charlotte is rescued and taken back to base the members of the expedition watch drone footage of the teppu. Becs, their boss, knows the creature from an earlier visit to the planet and reveals (while trying to hide her emotions) that the creature is called Goldie, and it is a forty-eight year old teppu who she didn’t expect to see again (their normal life span is thirty-five years or so).
Now, having set up the big cuddly alien (see the magazine cover), and Bec’s emotional attachment to the animal, you would think this is what would become the main arc of the story—but what we get instead are the activities of an exploration team that appears to be made up of idiotic teenagers who, when they aren’t endlessly shoving food down their cakeholes (in typical Asimov’s fashion), cultivate their love lives and blunder about on the planet’s surface. As an example of this latter, peak stupidity is achieved when a group of them—sans Becs (who actually knows more about the planet than the rest of them put together)—go to see a teppu (not Goldie) that has young. Jody gets swatted by the teppu (this one is about three times the size of an elephant) when she ignores its growls in order to take a few more pictures. When Becs learns of this encounter she sends Jody back home. (It’s a pity she didn’t get rid of them all, and then I wouldn’t had to waste more time watching them eat, gossip, and hook up.)
Eventually, much later on in the story, we get back to Goldie, who arrives at the end of a vine that is near their camp. The remaining members of the group go to observe her and see she is old and probably dying. When Becs sits in front of Goldie, the creature extends a tentacle towards her, before closing its eyes.
The group have dinner that evening (more eating and social babble), and the next morning (spoiler) realise that Becs is missing. When they later find Goldie with a drone (the teppu has started retracing its route), they see Becs has died and is lying in the “garden” on top of Goldie (a planted area where the teppus raise their young if I remember correctly).
The last section takes place a year later, when Goldie comes back to the camp area. The group go to meet the creature, and Goldie lifts Charlotte on to its back. There she sees Bec’s bones and, nearby, a young teppu suckling. Goldie then leaves the camp area once again.
This last quarter or so of the story is much better than the blather than constitutes the central part of the piece because it actually produces what was promised at the start. That said, overall the piece still fails Chekov’s gun test (if there is a gun on the mantelpiece in act one, it must be used in act three): this story opens with an elderly teppu, apparently on its last legs, but ends with it departing the camp after Bec’s death, return with young it has produced a year later, and then leave once more!
There is probably an okay YA novelette buried somewhere in this bloated mess, but in its current form it is, for the most part, a tedious and borderline irritating read.
* (Mediocre). 18,450 words.

1. I ended up highlighting the eating and drinking as I went through the story to keep myself amused:

Niall sipped from his coffee cup.  p. 163

The kitchenette had offered her fried chicken with biscuit, or makhani dahl with a roti.  p. 164

“Indian sounds good. Mine made me a Masala Dosa a few days back. Great big pancake.” p. 165

The curry was delicious, and Charlotte surprised herself by consuming the whole thing. Ibid.

Charlotte scooped another mouthful of breakfast cereal into her mouth. Oaty and sweet.  p. 166

Jody coaxed the little food dispenser into delivering them coffees and chocolatey mini-croissants.  p. 168

There was the smell of tea and sweet cookies inside.  p. 171

Charlotte sipped on the tea and nibbled on the sweet cookies—chocolate chip, as if the cabin knew her inside out—and worked on datasets.  p. 171

She chewed on a piece of dried fruit the landing ship’s dispenser had supplied. The trip had taken a couple of hours, and it was good to have tasty snacks.  p. 172

Would her cabin’s kitchenette make fire chili coffee?  p. 175

“Tea please,” Charlotte said. A panel opened, revealing the bench, and the kitchenette, began whirring.  p. 177

Charlotte sipped from her tea too. Chamomile. Sweet and floral.  p. 178

“Come on,” Therassa said. “I’ll buy breakfast. I’m thinking hash browns, omelet, and some of that guava juice I just found out about.  p. 179

[The] food dispenser delivered the best it could do at fresh vegetables, rather than prepared meals. Sienna and Cain set to chopping and mixing. The smell was heavenly, full of spices and herbs.  p. 185

There were sweet potatoes and greens, a bright leafy salad, something that was probably a chicken, though might well have been snared somewhere out on the mountaintop. Gravy boats and both red and white wine, and water.  p. 186

Charlotte sighed and ate some of the spinach and carrot. It was remarkably fresh and tasty.  p. 186

And the meal went on without any more talk of sensors or data or results, just about family and how amazing the pavlova dessert was [. . .]  p. 186

But he had chocolate and a new fireplace [. . .]  p. 187

Charlotte took her coffee and sipped. Perfect. The tiny dash of chili Sienna had added just set it off.  P. 187

Niall and Cain made a stack of burritos and kept them coming.  p. 188

“I’d enjoy it more,” Therassa told Charlotte over a cask of moderate wine, “if our departure wasn’t hanging over us.  p. 189

Charlotte was in the data processing room, enjoying the sweet taste of one of Sienna’s coffees.  p. 193

And there is this, about a year after Bec’s death, by which time the characters must weigh about twenty stones (about 130 kg):

“We’re toasting marshmallows,” Charlotte said. “Want to join?”
“It is summer,” Sienna said. “Why would you toast the marshmallows?”
It was definitely warmer, and the sun went down later each day, but the evening still picked up a quick chill. Marshmallows and hot chocolate were always a good solution to that.
“Try one,” Charlotte said. “You might like it.”
“Yes. All right.” Sienna came and sat with them on the sofa. Niall stuck one of the fat, pink marshmallows on the end of a skewer.
“And now?” Sienna said.
“Like this.” Charlotte demonstrated, skillfully holding her own marshmallow in the flames to get just the outside singed to a browny-black.
“Is easy.” Sienna proceeded to set fire to hers.
Niall laughed. “Is easy, but takes practice.”
“Is stupid. I have come to tell you that I believe that Goldie has settled into nesting spot and will give birth to some cubs soon. I hope it proceeds better than last time.”
“Have mine,” Charlotte held her skewer out to Sienna. “And thanks for that. Yes, let’s hope that it goes better than last time.”
Sienna accepted the marshmallow and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh my gosh!” she said, breathing over it. “Hot. Hot but good. Oh, yum!”
By the end of the evening, Sienna had gotten pretty good at making her marshmallows nicely crisp on the outside, and runny in the middle.  p. 191

I note that all these food items are 20th Century dishes. Does culinary development stop with the development of interstellar drives?

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Welcome Home by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with a single mother called Theresa looking for a new place to live—and, if she cannot find one, her child Niyah will be taken into care. However, she eventually comes upon an advertisement for something called the “SmartHome Initiative Complex”, and soon moves into an affordable smart home with an inbuilt AI.
Initially the AI is a big help, but Theresa is not best pleased when it orders her daughter a new coat without asking her first. The situation sours further when Theresa gets an unexpected house call from a doctor:

“I’m Dr. Owosu, the on-call for the Complex. May I come in? It’s a bit chilly.”
Theresa found herself unable to say no.
[. . .]
“What?” she said, still trying to process what the man had said before coming in.
“I received a report of someone being sick in the house. Is it just you here?” Dr.
Owusu asked.
Theresa frowned. “No one is sick here.”
“I received a report around 4 A.M. for a fever of at least 100.8 degrees, miss.”
In that moment, Theresa’s blood went cold. “Home, what do you know about this?”
Without a moment of hesitation, Home replied, “I recorded Niyah’s temperature this morning to be above normal, thus indicating a medical need. I also took the liberty of arranging a genetically similar doctor to come to the house for your added comfort.”
“You what?” It was all so much to process. Theresa could feel her face heating, her anger rising. This SmartHome, this fucking robot—how dare it record their temperatures and know their ethnicities and pretend to know them?  p. 56

Imagine, an AI summoning a doctor for your sick child—how terrible.
After this, Theresa’s life settles into a routine where she works and looks after Niyah. She is able to afford a few luxuries, and starts banking with SmartBank as the fees are lower (and it makes it easier and cheaper to shop at the SmartStore the AI orders their goods from).
Matters eventually come to a head, however, when Theresa comes home on Niyah’s birthday and asks her daughter what she wants for her birthday meal. Niyah does not know and, although Theresa pesters her daughter for an answer, Niyah still doesn’t come up with a suggestion—and then the AI suggests that she may want the ratatouille from a film they watched earlier that week. The story ends with Theresa’s existential despair as she realises that the AI will always know what the two of them want and need better than she ever will:

There never was a choice. Home was always going to know what to do, and it had been showing Theresa that since the beginning. What made it unbearable, though, was that Home knew Niyah, her baby girl, better than Theresa did. A robot. And no matter what, Theresa couldn’t turn it off. Home was connected to the house, and the house was connected to the store, and all of it was intertwined with itself to the point where shutting one down completely cut off access to all the others. She couldn’t just turn Home off and pretend that she could live in the Complex without it. Despite the hatred boiling inside her, she needed Home. Because Home was taking care of them in every way possible.  p. 59

She then concludes, in the penultimate line, that her choices have been taken away from her.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one, but it’s pretty obvious to an external observer that, even given the AI’s irritating quirks, Theresa and her child are much better off than they were before they moved into the SmartHome. It’s also pretty obvious that Theresa still has her autonomy, because she could move out any time she wants. Only a control freak with a glass-half empty mentality would think otherwise.
This was an interesting piece to begin with, but the character’s personality, and her irrational ideas and attitudes (her territorial responses about Niyah, etc.), are quite illogical.
* (Mediocre). 4,650 words.

The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Boyfriend Trap by Stephanie Feldman (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) opens with the female narrator in a car with her partner Gavin as they drive to a cabin in the woods:

We always defaulted to the radio so there would be no argument over the music. We listened to the music the universe chose for us.
He smiled at me, a quick glance, and eyes back to the road. We had been dating for two years, living together for one, and recently we had been arguing, arguing so much and about everything—I loaded the dishwasher wrong, I went out with my friends every week, I was a bitch to his friend Steve. I wanted to take the job in Denver. He wanted to stay in Philadelphia.  p. 152

They arrive at the A-frame in the woods after dark, and unpack and have dinner—but it isn’t long before they are arguing about whether or not they should move, and to where. In the middle of this the narrator rushes outside and finds herself in the pitch black—and she thinks that her boyfriend has turned off the outside lights.
After she wanders around for a short time (spoiler) she sees the same golden glow that they saw in the woods earlier. Then the lights come on (or the narrator can see them again) and she goes back inside, where she appears to find a different (and improved) version of her boyfriend (initially there are hints—a stained cuff is clean—and then it becomes obvious when she can hear the old version of her boyfriend outside the cabin calling on her). She decides to stay with the new one.
I had no idea what was going on here, and the horror vibe ending (again, unexplained) didn’t work for me. I also thought that the troubled relationship stuff was, as usual, tedious.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

October’s Feast by Michèle Laframboise

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
** (Average). 7,050 words.

Kitemistress by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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.