Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Read online

  Lightspeed Magazine

  Issue 37, June 2013

  Table of Contents

  Editorial, June 2013

  The Fool’s Tale—L. Timmel Duchamp (ebook-exclusive novella)

  Abaddon’s Gate—James S. A. Corey (novel excerpt)

  Interview: Robert J. Sawyer

  Interview: Nalo Hopkinson

  Artist Gallery: Pavel Elagin

  Artist Spotlight: Pavel Elagin

  The Ballad of Marisol Brook—Sarah Grey (SF)

  Mono no aware—Ken Liu (SF)

  Get a Grip—Paul Park (SF)

  Alive, Alive Oh—Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (SF)

  Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon—Theodora Goss (fantasy)

  The Huntsman—Megan Arkenberg (fantasy)

  Paranormal Romance—Christopher Barzak (fantasy)

  Game of Chance—Carrie Vaughn (fantasy)

  Author Spotlight: L. Timmel Duchamp (ebook-exclusive)

  Author Spotlight: James S. A. Corey (ebook-exclusive)

  Author Spotlight: Sarah Grey

  Author Spotlight: Ken Liu

  Author Spotlight: Paul Park

  Author Spotlight: Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

  Author Spotlight: Theodora Goss

  Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg

  Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak

  Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn

  Coming Attractions

  © 2013, Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover Art and artist gallery images by Pavel Elagin

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  Editorial, June 2013

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue thirty-seven of Lightspeed!

  This year’s Nebula Awards were presented at the Nebula Awards Weekend event, May 16-19, in San Jose, CA. Lightspeed had two finalists in the short story category: “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley and “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu. Alas, neither story took home the prize, but of course it was a huge honor to be nominated. Congratulations to Aliette de Bodard, who won in the short story category for her story “Immersion” (from Clarkesworld), and congrats to all of the other winners as well.

  In happier award news, the Locus Award finalists have been announced, and we’re pleased to report that your humble editor has been nominated in the best editor category. Finalists for this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Award have also been named, and our own Ken Liu is on that ballot as well—not once, but twice: for his Nebula-nominated Lightspeed story “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and his Hugo Award-nominated story “Mono no aware,” which we’re featuring in this issue as one of our reprints.

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

  We have original fantasy by Megan Arkenberg (“The Huntsman”) and Christopher Barzak (“Paranormal Romance”), along with fantasy reprints by Theodora Goss (“Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon”) and Gene Wolfe (“Suzanne Delage”).

  Plus, we have original SF by Sarah Grey (“The Ballad of Marisol Brook”) and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (“Alive, Alive Oh”), and SF reprints by Paul Park (“Get a Grip”) and Ken Liu’s current Hugo Award finalist (“Mono no aware”).

  And of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Nalo Hopkinson and Robert J. Sawyer.

  For our ebook readers, our ebook-featured novella is “The Fool’s Tale” by L. Timmel Duchamp, and the featured novel excerpt is from Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey.

  Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. This month, look for Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh. 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:

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  Before I go, just a reminder that our custom-built ebookstore I told you about recently is now up and running. So if you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format.

  And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe via Amazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

  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 The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, 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 six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and four-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. 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 Fool’s Tale

  L. Timmel Duchamp

  In September, 1589, a storm of “baffling winds” blew a Danish fleet carrying the sixteen-year-old Anne of Denmark off course, to the coast of Norway. Anne, the daughter of Frederick II, King of Denmark, had just been married by proxy to James VI of Scotland (who fourteen years later would accede to the throne of England). The fleet was within sight of Scotland, the story goes, when the storm struck. James and other persons of importance decided that witchcraft had caused the storm, and several Danish women were burned at the stake. Malice toward the fleet’s admiral, Peter Munch, not against James or Anne, was given as the motive. Munch, according to contemporary sources, had “boxed the ear” of a merchant and thereby enraged the merchant’s wife: “Quhilk storm of wind was alleged to have been raist by the witches of Denmark, by the confession of sundrie of them when they were burnt for the cause. What moved them was ane cuff, or blow, quhilk the admiral of Denmark gave to ane of the bailies of Copenhagen, whose wife being ane notable witch, consulted her cummers, and raised the said storm to be revengit upon the said admiral.”

  Though the women who paid for the storm with their lives were Danish, James himself had a great terror of witches and did his best to fan anti-witch hysteria in his own country. Claiming that judges who were “lenient” with witches were pawns of Satan, he participated in “examinations” of suspected witches personally and wrote Daemonologie (1597), a nasty piece of hate-literature framed as a learned treatise on the subject. Convinced that the Earl of Bothwell was employing a number of witches to murderous ends against him, he supervised the torture of the suspected witches and conducted their interrogations himself, resu
lting in the “discovery” that the “baffling winds” that blew his bride’s fleet off course had been caused by a group of women known as “the witches of Lothian.” The said witches had accomplished this feat by casting cats that had been bound to the severed joints of dead bodies into the sea.

  The man’s take on his world was definitely paranoid (a condition not atypical in powerful men of the day). But to give credit where credit is due, we must acknowledge that such ideas about witchcraft, women, and the supernatural originated with the perverse ideas two women-hating German Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Institor Krämer and Jakob Sprenger, had conjured up more than a century earlier in their infamous Malleus Maleficarum, or “Witches’ Hammer.” With the authorization of the complementary papal bull by Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, this fabulous duo took their inquisition on the road through most of Western Europe, far beyond the Rhineland, their original sphere of operations. As is well known, the paranoia they whipped up had a devastating impact on European society, particularly on women.

  The Malleus was indeed a blunt instrument, or “hammer.” Besides inspiring authority-sponsored terrorism, it had the additional effect of preventing men like James I from ever imagining creative forms of magic not cast in the ugly, constipated, Malleus mold, much less perceiving its practice right under their very noses. But though the ferocity and indiscriminate wildness with which the hammer was wielded did not crush the practice of enchantment by adepts, it did, eventually, drive such adepts underground—and, finally, to extinction.

  Since the spectacle of hammer-wielding maniacs in positions of authority provokes a certain streak of perversity woven through the fabric of my personality, I take the greatest pleasure in disseminating a tale of magic told (if not enacted) right under that very king’s nose. The tale has been pieced together from five manuscript fragments written on quarto-sized pages that were found in a sheaf of folio-sized sheets of music that had been wrapped in silk and kept in a thick leather pouch recently discovered in the false bottom of a Jacobean chest stored in the attic of the house of a distant descendant of a cousin of two Jacobean courtiers, Lord Harington and his daughter, Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Lord Harington was the tutor of Princess Elizabeth, James’s daughter, who eventually became the “Winter” Queen of Bohemia (so-called because her husband’s election to that throne, contested by the Hapsburgs, set off the Thirty Years War).1The Countess of Bedford was one of the most influential courtiers of her day, holding the Number-One spot among Anne of Denmark’s Ladies of the Bedchamber; she collected art as well as patronized several artists and poets, including John Donne and Ben Jonson. Julia Guthke, the music historian, believes that the music manuscripts present a rare English example of musica secreta. She describes the music as being “for the most part elaborate motets and madrigals in that highly wrought, bizarre-to-the-modern-ear style which is most (in)famously associated nowadays with Gesdualdo.” Composed for Renaissance princes and kept private, musica secreta was never performed in open court. “Such music,” Guthke says, “went abruptly out of fashion in the first decade of the 17th century, with the arrival of (a) the stile nuova (the most famous early practitioner of which was Monteverdi) and (b) ever more visibly absolutist courts that used music and dance less to give an exclusive and intimate pleasure to princes and more for the ostentatious display of their power.”

  The identity of the tale’s author has stimulated a degree of scholarly speculation. The initials XCM appear in the lower right-hand corner of every sheet of music; suggestively, the author of the tale identifies herself as Xaviera Cristiana Morley. (The PRO State Papers Domestic do not mention anyone of that name, but a James Morley, musician, was employed by Elizabeth I, as well as by both James I and Anne of Denmark.) The author claims to be Anne of Denmark’s “fool.”2My good friend, the historian Louise Ducange, informs me that although paleographers and literary experts find the manuscript a convincing example of early 17th-century English prose (and chemical analysis confirms that the ink and paper are appropriate to the era), she doubts that such a person ever existed, and believes that whoever wrote the music and the tale simply called herself that, in order to protect her privacy (and reputation) in case either the music or the manuscript ever became public. I, L. Timmel Duchamp, am not a historian and therefore don’t qualify to debate the matter. But I would urge readers to consider the author’s self-description:

  “I may call myself a fool, but though the King in his very person grants me a rich source of foolery, he doth not love fools, and I am not his, but his wife’s, and know better than to play the fool with such as he. In a man so ordinarily superstitious and frighted of women, the very look of my person, stitched to the needling wit of my tongue, is like to make me appear to his rolling eyes a witch for hanging. My laugh I know he detests, ‘an ugly clangor of mismatched bells’ he once called it; wisely, I keep it muted whenever he is by. And what would he think to learn that when he is absent the ladies take that very clangor up among themselves, in unconscious mimicry, a contagion they do not in the slightest seek to resist? I listen to them falling about laughing at the mildest of witticisms, in mere mimicry of the laughter that is the true source of their mirth. ’Tis the Queen who laughs the loudest and the longest, holding a hand to her side, indelicately doubled up, nearly spilling her breasts from her gown in abandon. ‘Cristiana!’ she shrieks (like everyone in the court, unwilling to call me “Xaviera”). ‘Have mercy,’ she begs, ‘for already my sides ache from thy earlier excesses.’ And ’tis not my joking she means, but my laugh. My witch’s laugh, the King could well have it. A laugh with power to corrupt.

  “‘Child,’ oftimes saith my father to me, ‘how dost thy make such a sound, being thyself so tiny, and thy speaking voice like the piping of a small bird? Thy mother never sounded thus, nor I either, as thou knowest. How can such a sound come from such little lungs?’

  “That a musician would even ask such a question! ‘How can’st such a sharp throb come from your smallest tabor?’ I always reply. ‘Or such a far-carrying hoot from the smallest length of wood pipe, or such a penetrating sweetness from even the smallest of your viols?’ My mother was a singer, and do I not remember how her voice had the power to soar above all the drums and viols and pipes playing at once?

  “Oh my mother, my mother, that luminous Spanish beauty—nothing at all to the likeness of my person! Only my father asketh whence comes my laugh. All else ask whence came my very person, that is nothing like to her, nothing like to him, a creature some call a sport. My person, as grown to its full height as ’twill ever be, stands as high as the Queen’s waist; my breasts like a boy’s, my chest as large and arched and flatly smooth as a bird’s; my hair sprouts from my scalp every shade of the rainbow, as though Nature could not decide Her will; great brown and strawberry patches paint my olive skin with Mysteries physicians and magicians are pleased to read; my hands, mismatching my body, are as strong and as great as those of the largest men. These features alone—besides those talents I keep close, safe from all discovery—mark me as one of those strange creatures so dear to the physicians and moralists who instruct men and women on how to get children. All who see me wonder first whether I am the devil’s spawn, or the issue of the most improper sodomy practiced by my parents, or mayhap of some strange thoughts or sights my mother looked upon during pregnancy. Oh how they tasked my mother, to learn her sin, after bringing forth such as I! Oh how my mother was grieved, worrying to remember what fault had been hers. And yet, giving me her milk, as fine ladies seldom do their noble infants, and teaching me to sing and dance, and even setting me to perform for the old Queen herself, she did bear to me all the love any mother hath to give.”3

  If such a narrative self has been cut out of whole cloth, it is in the form of a morally equivocal being, the misconceived freak from “unnatural” sexual intercourse, a being in contrast to whom the normal categories of human being were strictly defined. Such an invention, as my friend Louise Ducange agrees, w
ould be an extraordinary-for-those-times conceit of authorship. While it often amused early modern people to write about freaks, what person in his or her right mind would have consented to speak from the position and in the voice of a freak? Trained closely to Occam’s Razor, I prefer, over the conceptually extraordinary, a simple fact: viz., that Xaviera Cristiana Morley did exist and did produce the tale. So. As is always the case with any text, whether the tale is truth or fiction, readers will have to decide for themselves.

  In a society in which service was the most important avenue to advancement at all levels, one of the most essential skills was the ability to make oneself acceptable to superiors … Marks of respect to be shown in conversation with superiors included baring the head, dropping the right knee, keeping silence till spoken to, listening carefully and answering sensibly and shortly. Compliance with commands was to be immediate, response to praise heartily grateful.

  —Ralph Houlbrouke, The English Family

  On a February evening in 1609, the Countess of Bedford arranged a special performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for the Queen’s court. The Countess intended this performance to be a simple affair, a light amusement meant to whisk away the queen’s inevitable letdown following her grand triumph of February 2. On that day Anne had appeared, in a masque, as the queen of the twelve greatest queens in history, Amazon warriors all.4She and the Countess had devoted months to cooking it up with Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. According to the Venetian ambassador, Marc Antonio Correr, the Queen had personally supervised “daily rehearsals and trials of the machinery.” By all accounts, James’s court far exceeded contemporary notions of extravagance with the Masque of Queens.

  The King, it had been thought, would be at Theobalds, an estate he kept for hunting.5The masque had kept him from hunting, and the three courts combined (James’s, Anne’s, and Prince Henry’s) had already staged a total of twenty-three plays that winter. And a Shakespearean comedy was not, after all, the sort of play James was likely to attend for fun. And yet that evening, just as the company was about to enter the Performance Hall, the King and a large party of his cronies showed up—“loud, and loutish, and lousy lords,” as the tale has it—staggering drunk. At their unexpected appearance, the Queen’s Fool thought, “’Tis clear intrigue or mischief is afoot, or I be no fool!”