Hub - Issue 13 Read online

  Hub

  Issue 13 - June 29th 2007

  Editors: Lee Harris and Alasdair Stuart.

  Published by The Right Hand.

  Sponsored by Orbit.

  Issue 13 Contents

  Fiction: More Than a Butterfly by January Mortimer

  Reviews: Broken, No Dominion, Doctor Who: Robot

  Feature: Not Just a Pretty Face

  Help Hub

  There are three things you can do to support us:

  1) Send this copy to someone else you know, and tell them to subscribe.

  2) Head over to www.hub-mag.co.uk and make a small donation

  (despite being a free ‘zine, we pay our writers, so all donations welcome - no matter what size)

  3) Head over to hubmag.wordpress.com and tell us what you think about the content of Hub. Your feedback will help us keep improving the magazine.

  NEWS

  See that little logo at the bottom of the page (or “later on” if you’re reading this on a hand-held reader)? We’ve just been awarded a grant from the Arts Council! Not only is this a validation of all the work we’ve put in to date, it will help us spread the word about Hub. The grant that we have been awarded is to be used purely for marketing purposes – letting people know that Hub is here, and it is free.

  Quite frankly we were surprised to have been awarded this funding, as we assumed that genre fiction (and emailed genre fiction) would not be viewed favourably by the Arts Council. We are obviously pleased to be proven wrong.

  That – along with the news that those lovely people at Orbit have renewed their sponsorship – means that Hub will be here for a while, yet.

  We still only just cover our costs, though, so don’t let the Arts Council award prevent you from considering a donation if you enjoy reading your weekly dose of genre fiction and features. We’re a free-to-read magazine, but we pay our writers. All donations are extremely welcome – regardless of size.

  More than a Butterfly

  by January Mortimer

  It begins the way it ends: with butterflies and dawn. On that beginning morning, it was late September and I was nine. I dozed on the sofa as pale sunrise slipped in through the window and washed my trailer home, making it new.

  The trailer door creaked; my mother came in. “Nita, get up! They’ve come,” she said.

  I scrubbed sleep from my eyes. In the tentative sunlight, Mama gleamed. Laughter hovered on her lips and hoop-earrings and pony tail bobbed and danced.

  “Where’re we going?” I took her offered hand, ready to follow her to Mars if that’s where she was headed. This smiling mama was a miraculous stranger.

  “Outside!” She flung the door open and pushed me out into the dew-damp yard.

  If he exists, God has a snap-shot of me on that morning, standing unshod on the trailer stoop. In that captured instant, my face is turned up to the sky, mouth an ‘o’ of wonder.

  I saw Him, you know, on that day in September.

  There were no trees in the vacant lot where we camped. No hint of green besides the broken beer bottles and a few sparse spikes of grass. But that morning there were leaves: swirling, rising, falling and filling the sky with autumn-touched orange.

  Butterflies. Millions of butterflies.

  “What are they?” I breathed.

  Mama’s hand squeezed mine; her fingers were all bone. “GATCGATA... They’re the Kings and Queens of the world, my darling.” The words were a teary murmur and the string of nonsense a prayer.

  Together, we stood in silence, rapt in the wonder of it all.

  “Look at them, darling, you can love them. You can love them and they’ll never hurt you,” said Mama. She wore Walmart clothes -- cheap and bright and ill-tailored, not quite the mystic size zero -- but she was radiant, just that once. No TV supermodel could have outshone her. “They’re all we need.”

  A breeze blew across the lot, lifting the butterflies and speeding them away.

  3.2 million lab-reared Danaus plexippus coaxed to life from entomologists’ corpse hoards, the newspaper said. Genetic biodiversity restored and given wings.

  Later that week, the town churches hung black banners across Main Street and the pastors made speeches on talk radio. I didn’t care: they didn’t want anything to do with my mother and me, either. Mama dieted down to size zero, for all the good it did her: my father didn’t come home, the miracle modeling job never came and Mama didn’t think she was beautiful enough.

  I was in love with the butterflies. Years past, and they were all I ever wanted.

  But they died. All of them. The Madgellion spill wiped them out. I was a nine year old in love, and on the stark screen of my TV I watched them die.

  #

  The season’s fashion Must Have was optics cloth. Gucci and Jlake had come out with wearable discos in vintage cuts and the department store brands had followed. From the window of the bistro, Sam and I watched the pedestrians move through the evening like neon ghosts. We were celebrating: a lab in Boston had offered me a post-doc place.

  “Nita, what are you feeling?” Sam rested his elbows on the table, leaning forward. Nothing remained of desert save scattered cake crumbs and a smear of icing. My Levardi scarf reflected blue and gold rivers across the table and the light caught upon his cufflinks.

  “Very full!” I said.

  “You always do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Avoid the question.” Sam shook his head, aggrieved.

  I shrugged. At twenty-six, I had long since learned that questions were optional.

  “Marry me, Juanita Diaz.”

  A wine glass stopped halfway to my lips. I stared at him, aghast. Sam and me met in Harvard Square, in the rain, at 3 am, as freshmen.

  I did not love him.

  Sam said, “That was a ‘No’, wasn’t it?”

  We sat in a silence fraught with unsaid things. The waiter arrived with the check.

  “You love your butterflies.”

  I nodded, relieved. “Yes,” I said. “I love the butterflies.”

  #

  When I left -- fled -- the night shift was seeping onto the streets. Billboards lit the way through the campus, flashing famous faces and famous brands: movie star/perfume, athlete/shoes, blog-lord/e-pad. Flash-Flash-Flash. Stray snowflakes fluttered from the dark, technicolored in the billboard glow.

  The lab welcomed me with a chilly breed of warmth and the hum of sequencers. Poster of pheromone structures and artsy DNA spirals hung on the walls, stuck up with yellowing tape and grungy blu-tack. Someone had left a news report on the proposed UN gene-rewriting restrictions on my desk; I crumpled it with great pleasure.

  Professor Terry Roberts, my supervisor, bustled by. “It’s cold. Isn’t it cold? More snow coming!” She was a motherly woman with graying hair, no interest in fashion and a face caught between age and youth.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s cold.”

  “Are you all right, Nita? You sound--”

  “I’m fine.”

  I compared the notes on my e-pad to gene-code on a main monitor, matching up the lines of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. G, A, T and C: the building blocks of life.

  An hour passed. Then another. I was fine.

  “You’ve had a fight with Sam, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  Terry and the lab technician stared out the window, their faces carefully blank. I pushed back my chair and joined them.

  There was Sam. Sam standing in the snow: coatless, scarf-less, in a cotton vest and blue jeans. And wings. Wings of amber and scarlet and indigo sprouted from his back, made of chopped up silk ties and wire coat hangers. Students paused to stare, then hurried on, thoughts of Christmas shopping and exams visi
ble in their hunched shoulders.

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  Sam saw me and waved. He blushed and the wind tore his hair into a wild tangle.

  “What an interesting young man,” said Terry. The technician giggled.

  I took the back stairs two and three steps at a time. The fire door wailed a protest as I stumbled out into the night; cold air slapped my face and stole speech from my tongue.

  In his snowdrift, Sam smiled. “Hey,” he said, casually.

  “Are you insane? What the fuck are you doing? Oh, no, don’t you dare--” Sam was kneeling, a ring box in hand.

  “For fucksake, Sam!”

  “Juanita Diaz, I’m a butterfly. Will you marry me?”

  Muffled cheers drifted down with the snow. At the lab window, the technician gave me a thumbs up and Terry beamed.

  “I’m a shallow, selfish bitch, Sam. You know that! I’d make you miserable.”

  He offered the ring: three rocks in platinum. De Beer’s best. “I love you,” he said.

  I warned him. What else could I do?

  #

  A lot could be said about my brother-in-law, not all of it complimentary and some of it of interest to the fraud squad. But damn, Albert knew what a party should be.

  Sam did not want to go, did not think I should go, did not think it was appropriate to discuss babysitters yet. In the vestibule, while we waited to be announced, he stood in stony silence, holding The Baby. I could see the man’s universe shifting, the constellations realigning to center on one newborn boy: Benedict, apple of his father’s eye.

  It was all very nu-paternal. And nu-pat was all the rage: at the party Sam and Baby would blend right in, despite the storebrand dippers.

  I doodled Lycaena hypophlaeas and Strymon alea on my pad, coding variants with wings like abstract cityscapes and eyes like emeralds. At the top of the screen, the news ticker flashed an alert: a report plucked from the news bulletin sea, just for me.

  It was tagged MADGELLION.

  In the brief moment before I shut the pad, the vid showed a reporter standing before a backdrop of fetid grey goo ruin, haunted by shambling hazmat suits and dying trees. I imagined I could hear the earth screaming.

  Sam shifted the baby. “They have enzyme machines, sweetie, and more funding than they could shake a stick at,” he said. He watched as I buried the pad in the bottomless depths of my handbag. The baby gurgled; I eyed the kid.

  Motherhood and I had a distinctly ambivalent relationship.

  “Is he going to puke?”

  “Nita!”

  Albert’s major-domo straightened, the grand doors slid aside. “Mister Tyne and Doctor Diaz!” the man proclaimed.

  The light and laughter of Fashionable Society welcomed me in. The air smelled of expensive perfume and menthol cigarettes and slightly of sweat and stress. A digital runway snaked through the hall, the pencil-thin models draped in Albert’s latest line; from a distance, you might think they were really there, right up until the point when they dissolved in sparks and rainbows. Lace was coming back in, I noted. And shades of silver.

  God, Albert’s parties were like coming home!

  Baby Benedict opened his mouth, breathed deep... and wailed like an air raid siren.

  Sam elected to remain in the vestibule with our screaming offspring. He really was very nu-paternal. It was very cute and trendy.

  A waitress in traditional black and frilly apron minced up with canape trays balanced on each hand. I smiled at her. “Albert is expecting me. Here’s my card. Now get me a cappuccino.”

  #

  I found Sam’s older brother in a leather executive chair lording over his backroom domain. The real runway snaked before him: a darker version of its digital self, hung not with flowers, but leering cameras. On the green-screen floor, young women strutted and preened for an audience they could not see. To either side of the stage, half-naked models shimmied into creations of lace and air while armies of seamstresses and makeup artists battled to repair and touch up. Others girls stripped, dropping dresses and shivering in their undies as they waited for their next garment.

  Albert watched the nudity, pageantry and hysteria with a cool gaze. “Margaret, it needs more sleeve! Deal with it!” A manicured hand gestured to a young beauty about to mount the runway steps.

  A localized riot snatched the girl down and thrust another in her place. Margaret dealt with it.

  Mother wanted to be one of those girls. I was glad, in a way, she had never made it.

  “Albert, your party is lovely, as always,” I said.

  He stood to greet me and we kissed the air by the other’s cheeks. “Dearest Juanita, I hear I’m an uncle. Any other delightful news for me, on this finely feathered day?”

  Albert spoke with a precise baritone, a voice as smooth and slick as an oil spill.

  I tucked my arm through his. “Would I have come if I hadn’t?”

  He laughed.

  We moved away from the gaggle of peons. False windows -- high res-monitors set in frames -- looked over the party. The celebs and socialites drank, the girls strode, and media’s cameras twinkled. A soundless pantomime of a party. A stock ticker ran at the window tops.

  On the runway, the girl with the sleeves swirled a final time. On the screen, she dissolved into a swarm of red minnows and rose petals; behind us, I could hear her swearing as she descended the steps in too-high heels.

  The stock ticker dipped, the graph cutting jagged red lines across the gathering.

  Albert frowned. “Margaret!” he said into his headset. “Deal with it.”

  “Problem?”

  Albert watched his stocks dance. He said, “The pundits are predicting a Punk revival next year. Do you know how many times ‘nu-punk’ has been done? It’s just sickening. Bland, bland and dull, Juanita. Optics and e-integrates won’t spice things up forever.”

  I extracted my pad from my handbag and passed it to Albert. Deeper in the bag a sandwich box and a perfume vial waited. “I took the liberty of filling out the paperwork,” I said. “It’s ready to send.”

  To the Patent Office... and the press.

  Albert read.

  Then he had Margaret fetch a model. The girl was whippet thin with large, bruised-looking eyes.

  “Juanita, allow me to introduce Lizzie. Lizzie, meet Dr. Juanita Diaz, a woman about to become so rich that she could buy your soul from God. She has some perfume for you.”

  The girl took the offered vial; sweet floral spray hissed out.

  I removed the sandwich box’s lid.

  “Oh!” Lizzie said. “They’re so pretty!”

  Golden green as peacock feathers, the butterflies tested the air and took wing. They circled Lizzie like courtiers around a queen; now sliding close, now backing away, now darting in to kiss her with their wings. Lizzie stilled, big eyes grown bigger. Against the cinnamon of her skin, the insects gleamed like living jewellery. All thanks to pheromone magic and some judicious biological reprogramming.

  “Many insects have complex chemical signals. I fiddled with receptors... ” I shrugged. It felt like explaining 2+2 and the colour blue to someone who could neither count nor see. And Alfred didn’t care.

  “The rewrites are legal?” He played with my pad. The gears in his head turned, calculating profit with mechanical efficiency.

  “They’re all sterile.”

  The UN mandates doomed my creations to die: forever barren, their artistry ending with their brief lives.

  Alfred thumbed the pad screen. Contract signed. Patent application sent. Press releases released. He said, “Get on the run, Lizzie.”

  Lizzie ran; butterflies soared in her wake, following their goddess: the ultimate accessories.

  Through the false-window, I could see Sam returning with quietened baby. He was smiling. They both were. Beautiful Sam and baby. Benedict looked like a gremlin-creature or one of those chubby swallowtail caterpillars: endearing and as ugly as sin. I can try to love them, I thought.

&nb
sp; My brother-in-law stood beside me, his hand on the small of my back. He bent to murmur in my ear. “What do you want, Juanita?”

  Lizzie stepped onto the runway. The media's cameras went nova.

  “Butterflies,” I said.

  Albert kissed my cheek. His next kiss was less than chaste. “Money then,” he said. “Money I can give you.”

  #

  In parlors, nightclubs and film premiers, butterflies floated on the blue updrafts of cigarette smoke. On the high street, Fairyflys(tm) drifted from earth to heaven and back, like folded paper messages from god. We’d launched and fashion was following.

  “You’re getting death threats.” Sam paced our living room. Benny, a year old and discovering hands can grasp, thumped plastic dinosaurs together and giggled.

  Sam’s tie -- orange, so last season -- hung askew; I straightened it. “Lunatics and fundamentalists,” I said. “They’re just words, Sam. Words won’t hurt me. Besides, what are bodyguards for?”

  Newspaper headlines glowed under the glass of the coffee table; Alfred’s picture smirked from the business section. My name was there too, hidden somewhere in smaller font.

  “Are you sorry about this?” I said.

  Sam exhaled, shaking his head.

  Benny tugged my tights, jabbering. I patted his head. “Good boy.” He grinned with pink gums and handed me a dinosaur.

  “You’re happy,” Sam said. “And I’m glad. . . .”

  “But?”

  “But I’m afraid. It’ll all get bigger. And there are the still the mandates.”

  I said nothing. Churches were already hanging black flags in my butterflies’ honor. The ban on viable and long-lived rewritten organisms would not be lifted in my lifetime.

  “I know you, Nita,” my husband said. “One day, the mandates are going to look tempting.”

  An autumn breeze blew through the curtains. It smelled like leaves, like a morning in September years gone. I imagined I could hear my mother’s laughter. “I could stop the Magellion Spill,” I said to the wind. “A self-perpetuating population. Enzymes to digest the nano-compounds. Tell me that’s wrong.”