{"id":317,"date":"2021-01-17T12:51:28","date_gmt":"2021-01-17T12:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=317"},"modified":"2021-01-17T12:51:28","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T12:51:28","slug":"weep-for-day-by-indrapramit-das","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Weep for Day<\/em><\/strong> by Indrapramit Das (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, August 2012) opens with a family who live on a tidally locked planet (one side of the planet always faces the sun, the other is always in the dark) on a train from the City of Long Shadows, which is near the boundary of the two halves, to Weep-for-Day, which is on the dark side of the planet. The story is related by the daughter, Valyzia, who states that they are going to stay with one her father\u2019s clients, who has a \u201cNightmare\u201d in captivity. These savage animals live in the dark areas near the terminator, and Valyzia\u2019s race has long been in conflict with them\u2014more so now that her people are penetrating further and further into the dark zone.
The first part of the story tells of the trip to Weep-for-Day, the advances in steam and electric technology that make feasible the trip into the cold, dark night, and Valyzia and her brother\u2019s terror at the thought of seeing a living Nightmare. When they arrive at the outpost they settle in and then, on the second night of their stay, the family are taken to see the captive creature (spoiler):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in the deepest recesses of the manse, which was more an oversized, glorified bunker on the hill of Weep-for-Day than anything else. We went down into a dank, dim corridor in the chilly heart of that mound of crustal rock to see the prisoner.
\u201cI call it Shadow. A little nickname,\u201d Sir Tylvur said with a toothy smile, his huge moustache hanging from his nostrils like the dead wings of some poor misbegotten bird trapped in his head. He proved himself right then to have not only a startling lack of imagination for a man of his intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also a grotesquely inappropriate sense of levity.
It would be dramatic and untruthful to say that my fear of darkness receded the moment I set eyes on the creature. But something changed in me. There, looking at this hunched and shivering thing under the smoky blaze of the flares its armored gaolers held to reveal it to its captor\u2019s guests, I saw that a phantom flayed was just another animal.
Sir Tylvur had made sure that its light-absorbent skin would not hinder our viewing of the captured enemy. There is no doubt that I feared it, even though its skin was stripped from its back to reveal its glistening red muscles, even though it was clearly broken and defeated. But my mutable young mind understood then, looking into its shining black eyes\u2014the only visible feature in the empty dark of its face\u2014that it knew terror just as I or any human did. The Nightmare was scared. It was a heavy epiphany for a child to bear, and I vomited on the glass observation wall of its cramped holding cell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After a short scene which describes a brief altercation between her and her brother (he violently objects to the suggestion that he was scared of the creature), the story then telescopes forward in time to his graduation from the military. Six months later he is killed in combat, and Valyzia later attends his funeral, where she has doubts about her religious beliefs and wonders what truly comes after death.
The final scene sees Valyzia deep in the dark side, working as an archaeologist after the war against the Nightmares has been won:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dear Velag, how would you have reacted to see these beautiful caves I sit in now, to see the secret culture of your enemy? I am surrounded by what can only be called their art, the lantern-light making pale tapestries of the rock walls on which Nightmares through the millennia scratched to life the dawn of their time, the history that followed, and its end, heralded by our arrival into their world.
In this history we are the enemy, bringing the terror of blinding fire into Evening, bringing the advanced weapons that caused their genocide. On these walls we are drawn in pale white dyes, bioluminescent in the dark, a swarm of smeared light advancing on the Nightmares\u2019 striking, jagged-angled representations of themselves, drawn in black dyes mixed from blood and minerals.
In this history Nightmares were alive when the last of the sunwyrms flew into Evening to scourge the land for prey. Whether this is truth or myth we don\u2019t know, but it might mean that Nightmares were around long before us. It might explain their adaptation to the darkness of outer Evening\u2014their light-absorbent skin ancient camouflage to hide from sunwyrms under cover of the forests of Evening. We came into Evening with our fire (which they show sunwyrms breathing) and pale skins, our banners showing Dragon and the sun, and we were like a vengeful race of ghosts come to kill on behalf of those disappeared angels of Day, whom they worshipped to the end\u2014perhaps praying for our retreat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The story ends with Valyzia embarking on an expedition deeper into the darkness, but it is one motivated by curiosity, not fear.
This is a very good, if sad and elegiac, piece. The one minor criticism I have is that the final paragraphs could be briefer and more pointed about the change in attitude that has occurred after the genocide of the Nightmares (and there are also one or two other bits that could do with some polishing, to be honest1<\/sup>).
**** (Very good). 7,900 words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The second last sentence in the section above could do with a \u201cwas\u201d where the \u201cancient\u201d is, and a \u201cto hide from sunwyrms in the ancient forests of Evening\u201d at the end. Or is it just my eyes that trip over \u201cancient camouflage\u201d and \u201cunder cover of the forests\u201d? And in the last sentence why have the sunwyrms suddenly gone from being predators to worshipped angels of Day?
My specific criticisms may be off, but my gut feeling is that there is the odd wonky sentence or paragraph in this tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das (Asimov\u2019s SF, August 2012) opens with a family who live on a tidally locked planet (one side of the planet always faces the sun, the other is always in the dark) on a train from the City of Long Shadows, which is near the boundary of the two halves, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[100,101,4,99,7],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indrapramit-das","tag-100","tag-101","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-indrapramit-das","tag-novelette"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}