Lightspeed Magazine Issue 22, March 2012
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 22, March 2012 Table of Contents Editorial, March 2012 by John Joseph Adams “Cleopatra Brimstone”—Elizabeth Hand (ebook- exclusive novella) The Games—Ted Kosmatka (novel excerpt) Interview: R. A. Salvatore Interview: Ian McDonald Artist Gallery: Ed Basa Artist Spotlight: Ed Basa “The Day They Came”—Kali Wallace (SF) “My She”—Mary Rosenblum (SF) “Electric Rains”—Kathleen Ann Goonan (SF) “Test”—Steven Utley (SF) “Alarms”—S. L. Gilbow (fantasy) “The Legend of XI Cygnus”—Gene Wolfe (fantasy) “Beauty”—David Barr Kirtley (fantasy) “Halfway People”—Karen Joy Fowler (fantasy) Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Hand (ebook-exclusive) Author Spotlight: Kali Wallace Author Spotlight: Mary Rosenblum Author Spotlight: Kathleen Ann Goonan Author Spotlight: Steven Utley Author Spotlight: S. L. Gilbow Author Spotlight: David Barr Kirtley Author Spotlight: Karen Joy Fowler Coming Attractions © 2012, Lightspeed Magazine Cover Art and artist gallery images by Ed Basa. Ebook design by Neil Clarke. www.lightspeedmagazine.com Editorial, March 2012 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue twenty-two of Lightspeed! This month, our ebook-exclusive novella is “Cleopatra Brimstone” by Elizabeth Hand. Then we have original science fiction by new writer Kali Wallace (“The Day They Came”) and Steven Utley (“Test”), and SF reprints by award-winning authors Mary Rosenblum (“My She”) and Kathleen Ann Goonan (“Electric Rains”). We also have original fantasy by S. L. Gilbow (“Alarms”) and David Barr Kirtley (“Beauty”), and fantasy reprints by bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler (“Halfway People”) and the legendary Gene Wolfe (“The Legend of XI Cygnus”). All that plus our artist showcase, our usual assortment of author spotlights, and feature interviews with R. A. Salvatore and Ian McDonald. You’ll also notice a new addition this month: We’re featuring an excerpt in this issue from a forthcoming novel: The Games by Ted Kosmatka. Long-time readers of Lightspeed will remember Ted from his story “In-Fall” (December 2010). Here at Lightspeed we’re excited about his debut novel, so we wanted to bring you this early look at the first fifty pages. Whether or not these novel excerpts become a regular feature remains to be seen, but meanwhile we hope you enjoy this one. We’ve also got some good news to report: Lightspeed has three stories on this year’s Nebula Awards ballot! “The Old Equations” by Jake Kerr is up for best novelette, and “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro and “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son” by Tom Crosshill are both up for best short story. Additionally, “Her Husband’s Hands” is also up for the Bram Stoker Award for best short story. So we’d like to send a big congratulations out to Adam-Troy, Jake, and Tom, and to all of the other nominees. Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Timeless, the latest installment in steampunk-wunderkind Gail Carriger’s bestselling Parasol Protectorate series. You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content: Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter RSS feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2 Twitter: @lightspeedmag Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624 Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe Speaking of our content, if you’d like to help other connoisseurs of quality literature like yourself discover Lightspeed, posting reader reviews on sites like Amazon.com and BN.com can help a lot, as positive reviews and/or a high star-rating is a significant contributing factor to readers trying out something new. Reviews of individual issues are, of course, much appreciated, and if you’re a subscriber, please also consider posting a review on the magazine’s subscription page (at Amazon or Weightless Books). Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed Magazine, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and three- time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include: Armored (Baen, April 2012), Epic (Tachyon, Fall 2012), and The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination (Tor, 2013). John is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. Cleopatra Brimstone Elizabeth Hand Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: They were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air. Could they ever have been real? For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten, she went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner beneath a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny fuzzy jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memory of whatsoever. And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted out of shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and their wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representations of monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated hairskipper and Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that any child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long since broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal. The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to the window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, blood- red, ivy-green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her entire being was burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butterflies and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her eyes scored by wings. As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when she was thirteen: She started bumping into things, and found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pains, her mother thought; but after two months, Jane’s clumsiness and concomitant headaches became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious, and took her to the family physician. “Jane’s fine,” Dr. Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. “She needs to see the ophthalmologist, that’s all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty.” He gave her mother the name of an eye doctor nearby. Her mother was relieved, and so was Jane—she had overhead her parents talking the night before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumor figured in their hushed conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd physical manifestation, one which no one but herself seemed to have noticed. She had started menstruating several months earlier: nothing unusual in that. Everything she had read about it mentioned the usual things—mood swings, growth spurts, acne, pubic hair. But nothing was said about eyebrows. Jane first noticed something strange about hers when she got her period for the second time. She had retreated to the bathtub, where she spent a good half-hour reading an article in Nature about Oriental Ladybug swarms. When she finished the article, she got out of the tub, dressed and brushed her teeth, then spent a minute frowning at the mirror. Something was different about her face. She turned sideways, squinting. Had her chin broken out? No; but something had changed. Her hair color? Her teeth? She leaned over the sink until she was almost nose-to-nose with her reflection. That was when she saw that her eyebrows had undergone a growth spurt of their own. At the inner edge of each eyebrow, above the bridge of her nose, three hairs had grown remarkably long. They furled back towards her temple, entwined in a sort of loose braid. She had not noticed them sooner because she seldom looked in a mirror, and also because the odd hairs did not arch above the eyebrows, but instead blended in with them, the way a bittersweet vine twines around a branch. Still, they seemed bizarre enough that she wanted no one, not even her parents, to notice. She found her mother’s eyebrow tweezers, neatly plucked the six hairs and flushed them down the toilet. They did not grow back. At the optometrist’s, Jane opted for heavy tortoiseshell frames rather than contacts. The optometrist, and her mother, thought she was crazy, but it was a very deliberate choice. Jane was not one of those homely B movie adolescent girls, driven to Science as a last resort. She had always been a tomboy, skinny as a rail, with long slanted violet-blue eyes; a small rosy mouth; long, straight black hair that ran like oil between her fingers; skin so pale it had the periwinkle shimmer of skim milk.