Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32 Read online

  Lightspeed Magazine

  Issue 32, January 2013

  Table of Contents

  Editorial, January 2013

  The Fear Gun—Judith Berman (ebook-exclusive)

  Impulse—Steven Gould (novel excerpt)

  Interview: Cory Doctorow

  Interview: Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket)

  Artist Gallery: Alexandra Knickel

  Artist Spotlight: Alexandra Knickel

  The Cambist and Lord Iron—Daniel Abraham (fantasy)

  With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came—A.C. Wise (fantasy)

  Daltharee—Jeffrey Ford (fantasy)

  Purity Test—Kristine Kathryn Rusch (fantasy)

  The Sounds of Old Earth—Matthew Kressel (SF)

  Addison Howell and the Clockroach—Cherie Priest (SF)

  Lifeline—Jonathan Olfert (SF)

  Child Empress of Mars—Theodora Goss (SF)

  Author Spotlight: Judith Berman (ebook-exclusive)

  Author Spotlight: Daniel Abraham

  Author Spotlight: A.C. Wise

  Author Spotlight: Jeffrey Ford

  Author Spotlight: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Author Spotlight: Matthew Kressel

  Author Spotlight: Cherie Priest

  Author Spotlight: Jonathan Olfert

  Author Spotlight: Theodora Goss

  Coming Attractions

  © 2013, Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover Art and artist gallery images by Alexandra Knickel.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  Editorial, January 2013

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue thirty-two of Lightspeed!

  First of all, an apology for an error we made in our November issue. In that issue, we ran a story called “La Alma Perdida de Marguerite Espinoza” by Jeremiah Tolbert. The problem is, in proper Spanish, the title should have been “El Alma …” rather than “La Alma …” Despite our best efforts to proof everything—including checking the Spanish—that slipped through the cracks. So apologies to all of our Spanish-speaking readers who that no doubt bothered. (And thanks to the folks who pointed out the error.)

  On January 1, the nomination period for the Hugo Awards opens. The 2012 Hugo Awards will be presented in San Antonio, TX during Lone Star Con 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention (Aug. 29-Sep. 2). Nominations close on March 10, 2012. Anyone who has a supporting or full membership of Lone Star Con 3 as of January 31, 2013 and all members of Chicon 7 (last year’s Worldcon) may nominate works. If you didn’t attend Chicon 7, and you don’t plan to attend Lone Star Con 3, you can still nominate by purchasing a supporting membership. Nominations may be submitted through the online ballot at lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards.

  If you’d like to reference a list of all Lightspeed stories (and other material published by yours truly in 2012), visit my personal website at johnjosephadams.com/blog. There, I’ve sorted everything into their proper categories (short story vs. novelette, etc.), including material from my 2012 original anthologies, Armored and Under the Moons of Mars.

  Also, if you are planning and eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, you’re eligible for some free stuff! Just visit johnjosephadams.com/blog for details.

  With all that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

  We have original fantasy by A.C. Wise (“With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came”) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Purity Test”), along with fantasy reprints by Daniel Abraham (“The Cambist and Lord Iron”) and Jeffrey Ford (“Daltharee”).

  Plus, we have original science fiction by Matthew Kressel (“The Sounds of Old Earth”) and Jonathan Olfert (“Lifeline”), and SF reprints by Cherie Priest (“Addison Howell and the Clockroach”) and Theodora Goss (“Child Empress of Mars”).

  For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “The Fear Gun” by Judith Berman, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Cory Doctorow and Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket).

  Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for The Red Knight, the debut fantasy series from author Miles Cameron. 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

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  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, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, 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 four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade), and Robot Uprisings (2013, Doubleday). He is also the editor of Nightmare Magazine and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  The Fear Gun

  Judith Berman

  1

  The dawn found Harvey Gundersen on the deck of his house, as it had nearly every morning since the eetee ship had crashed on Cortez Mountain. There he stood a nightly watch for the fear storms. On this last watch, though, the eetees had worn him out—an incursion at the Carlson’s farm and the lone raider at his own well, where the black sky had rained pure terror—and fatigue had overcome him just as the sky began to lighten. When Susan shook him awake, he jerked upright in his lawn chair, heart a-gallop.

  She gripped red plastic in her hand. For an instant, Harvey was sure that his worst suspicions had proved true, and his wife had learned how to bring on the bad weather. But even as he swung up his shotgun, finger on the trigger, he saw that what Susan pointed at him was not a weather-maker, not even an eetee gun about to blast him to splat, but the receiver of their landline phone. The cord trailed behind her.

  Susan’s gaze riveted on the shotgun. Harvey took a deep breath and lowered the barrel. Only then did Susan say, flatly, “Your brother’s calling.”

  “What does he want?”

  She shrugged, two shades too casual. Harvey knew Susan and Ben plotted about him in secret. His pulse still racing, he carried the phone into the house and slid the glass door closed so Susan could not overhear. He stood where he could keep his eye on both Susan and the eetee-infested mountains.

  As he slurped last night’s mormon tea from his thermos, liquid spilled onto the arm of his coat. Strange that his hands never shook while he held a gun.

  “Hello, Ben,” he said into the receiver.

  “Nice work last night, Harve,” said Ben. “Good spotting. You saved some lives there, buddy.”r />
  Although Harvey knew better than to trust his brother’s sincerity, he could not repress a surge of pride. “I watch the weather, Ben. I can see it coming five miles off. And I look for the coyotes. They track the eetees. They keep a watch on them. The coyotes—”

  “Sure, Harve,” Ben said. “Sure. I’ve never doubted it. You’re the best spotter we have.”

  “Well, thanks, Ben.” Harvey seized the moment to describe how, two days ago, the coyotes had used telepathy to trick a van-load of eetees over the edge of the road to their deaths. As long as Ben was de facto dictator of Lewis County, for everyone’s good Harvey had to try to warn him what was happening out there in the parched mountains.

  But Ben cut him off before he’d even reached the part about the eetee heads. “Harvey, Harvey, you sound pretty stressed. What about you come in and let Dr. King give you something for your jitters? You tell me all the time how jittery you get, keeping watch day and night. I’ll tell you honestly I’m worried, Harve. Come in before you mistake Susan for an eetee, or do something else we’ll all regret.”

  What a lying fuck Ben was. Ben just wanted Dr. King to trank him stupid with Ativan. If Ben were truly worried, he wouldn’t force Harvey and Susan to stay out here in this horribly vulnerable spot, where Harvey was exposed to bad weather two or three times a week. That was what made him so jittery. But it was always, “Sorry, Harve, you can’t expect anyone in town to just give you food or gasoline or Clorox, or repair your phone line when the eetees cut it, not when supplies are dwindling by the day. We all have to contribute to the defense of Lewisville. Manning your observation post—the closest we have now to the ship—is the contribution we need from you.”

  What Ben really wanted was for the eetees to rid him of his troublemaker brother. And on the day the weather finally killed Harvey, Ben would send a whole platoon of deputies out to De Soto Hill to take over Harvey’s house and deck. Ben would equip them with the eetee weapons and tools he kept confiscating from Harvey. Can’t hoard these, Harve, my men need them. Lewisville needs ’em.

  Ben’s invitation to visit Dr. King, though: Harvey couldn’t afford to pass that up. Although the timing of the offer was a little too perfect …

  “Ben, I’d rather have a couple of deputies to spell me than a pass for a doctor visit. What about it?”

  “You know how short I am of manpower.” Ben sighed. “I’ll work on it, but in the meantime why don’t you come on in?”

  “Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay, Ben, I’ll stop by Dr. King’s. If I can get Susan to stand watch for me. You know how she is these days. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave the observation post that long, do you? How can you be sure eetees won’t come in daytime?”

  There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Ben said goodbye and hung up.

  Harvey swallowed a few more gulps of mormon tea, feeling the ephedrine buzz now, and returned outside for recon. First he checked the weather. No fear-clouds on the horizon that he could detect. But lingering jumpiness from last night’s raid, and the scare Susan had given him on waking, might obscure an approaching front.

  His video monitors showed him the view toward Lewisville, from the north and front side of the house. At this distance the town was a tiny life raft of houses, trees and grain elevators adrift on the rolling sea of golden wheat. The deck itself gave him a 270-degree view west, south and east: over the highway and the sweep of fields below De Soto Hill, and of course toward the pine-forested mountains and that immense wreck.

  Harvey cast around for the Nikons, only to discover that Susan had usurped his most powerful binoculars and was gazing through them toward the mountains. Anger stirring in him, he picked up the little Minoltas. Through them, the world looked quiet enough. The only movement was a hawk floating across the immaculate blue sky. But Harvey never trusted the quiet. The eetees might avoid the desiccating heat of daytime, but they were always stirring around up there. Plotting the next raid. And the coyotes—

  If only he could spy into those mountains as easily as the eetees’ fear-storms roared into his own head.

  The nape of Harvey’s neck began to twitch. “Do you see something?” he demanded. “Are the coyotes—”

  “I’m looking for Fred,” Susan said coldly, without lowering the binoculars.

  “Fred is gone.” Now the anger boiled in Harvey’s gut. “You should be watching for eetees, not pining after your lost dog.”

  “Fuck your eetees! Fred is out there somewhere. He wouldn’t leave us and never come back!”

  Her voice had turned flat and uncompromising, and Harvey knew one of her rages was coming on. But he could not rein in his own fury.

  “If you care so much,” he said, “why did you let him loose?”

  Susan finally turned to stare at Harvey. She was breathing hard. “I didn’t let Fred out.”

  “Oh, so the coyotes unbuckled his collar?”

  Deep red suffused Susan’s face. “Fuck you,” she screamed, “and fuck your coyotes!” She slammed the binoculars onto the deck, she reached toward the rifle—

  Harvey grabbed his shotgun and aimed. How stupid to leave his rifle propped against the railing, out of reach—

  Susan threw the rifle onto the deck, and then the tray holding the remains of his midnight snack; she kicked over his lawn chair and the tripod for his rifle, and upended the box of shotgun cartridges he’d been packing with rock salt. “Shoot me, Harvey!” she screamed. “Shoot me! I know you want to!”

  Harvey snatched up his rifle but did not shoot. At last Susan stopped her rampage. She stared with fierce hatred through her tangled, greasy hair, panting. “I didn’t let Fred out, you moron. You did.” Then she flung herself in her own lawn chair and picked up a tattered and yellowing issue of last summer’s Lewisville Tribune.

  The shakes took Harvey. While he waited for the waves of fever cold to recede, he gritted his teeth and said to her, “I’m going to do my rounds now. Just keep an eye out, okay, Susan? That’s all I ask? Watch for eetees, who want to kill us and steal our water, and not for your dead dog?”

  When she did not answer, he heaved open the glass door again and stalked into the house. Susan might as well be using a weather-maker, the way she kept terrifying him. Harvey was jumpy enough today. He just had been lucky that last night’s raider had probably stolen its weather-maker from a higher-ranking eetee and wasn’t skilled in its use. And by now Harvey had learned to keep his distance and rely on his rifle and sniper’s night-scope. So the lightning strike of blind terror had fallen short. Harvey had caught only the peripheral shockwave—although that that had been horrible enough.

  Weather-maker was what Harvey called the weapon. Other people called it a fear gun. Dr. King and Joe Hansen, putting their heads together, had suggested that the gun produced (as quoted in a bulletin distributed by the sheriff’s office) “wireless stimulation of the amygdala, mimicking the neurochemical signature of paralytic terror.” But no one had yet been able to figure out the insides of those whorled red pendants, and no one could do with them what the eetees did, not even Harvey, who was so hypersensitive from repeated exposure that the weapon affected him even when he wasn’t its target. Even when they weren’t being used. (When Dr. King told him that human researchers had for years been able to produce a similar if weaker effect with a simple electrode, Harvey had, next time he was alone, checked his scalp for unfamiliar scar tissue. But if Susan or Ben had had such an electrode implanted, they had also concealed the traces well.)

  Harvey unbolted the connecting door that led from the kitchen into the garage. As angry as Susan’s abdication of responsibility made him, this was the opportunity he needed. She would read and re-read her Tribune for hours, trying to pretend that the entire last year hadn’t happened.

  In the garage he quickly donned his rubber gloves and plastic raincoat. He raised the lid of the big chest freezer, long emptied of anything edible, and heaved out the large tarpaulin-wrapped bundle, humping it into the pickup b
ed. The raider’s corpse hadn’t frozen yet; Harvey just hoped it had chilled sufficiently to last until he reached Dr. King.

  Then he stripped off his protective gear and gave it a swift rinse with Clorox in the utility sink. On the cement floor beside the sink, still at the end of its chain, lay Fred’s unbuckled collar of blue nylon webbing—a testament to Susan’s lies.

  Harvey fetched last night’s newly scavenged eetee gun from the wheel well of his pickup, where he hoped this time to keep it hidden from Susan and Ben. Next, after checking the yard through the front door peephole, he bore the ladder outside to begin his daily inspection of the video cameras, the locks and chains, the plywood boarding up their windows, the eetee cell that powered the house (one of the few perks Ben allowed them).

  It hurt Harvey to think about Fred, happy Fred, the only one of them unchanged since the days before the eetees had come to Earth. When he and Susan had been happy, too, in their dream house with the panoramic view atop De Soto Hill. Fred was just one dumb, happy golden retriever with no notion of the dangers out there in the mountains. More likely the coyotes had gotten Fred than the eetees—not that it made any difference.

  Sweating, his scalp twitching, Harvey made his way downhill through dry grass and buzzing grasshoppers. He righted the black power cell (how he’d had to argue with Ben to keep two), slipped on a spare adapter to reconnect the cell to his well pump, and refilled the salt-loaded booby traps the raider had sprung. All the while he searched the trampled ground for the raider’s missing weather-maker, but still without success. Had the coyotes taken it? There couldn’t have been bad weather without a weather-maker …

  Finally he was climbing the hill again, eager to return to his deck. On his deck he was king—at least, on the deck he had a chance of seeing death before it peered at him with its yellow, slime-covered eyeball.

  He had nearly reached the house when a new sound stopped him in his tracks. A shape thrashed through the tall thistles along the driveway. Adrenaline and ephedrine together surged in Harvey’s veins, making his hands tremble like grass in the breeze.

  But even as he pulled the eetee gun from his waistband and clutched at his rifle with his other hand, he saw that what rustled onto the driveway was not an eetee. It was not even a demented coyote come to grin mockingly at him and then zigzag wildly away into the fields, tongue flapping, while Harvey tried in vain to ventilate its diseased hide.