Space Magic Read online

  Space Magic

  Stories by David D. Levine

  Introduction by Bruce Holland Rogers

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  December 5, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-215-0

  Copyright © 2012 David D. Levine

  Table of Contents

  Some Guy Talking about Some Other Guy’s Stories

  Acknowledgments

  Additional Acknowledgments for the Electronic Edition

  Wind from a Dying Star

  Nucleon

  I Hold My Father’s Paws

  Zauberschrift

  Rewind

  Fear of Widths

  Brotherhood

  Circle of Compassion

  Tk’Tk’Tk

  Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely

  Falling Off the Unicorn

  The Ecology of Faerie

  At the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club

  Love in the Balance

  The Tale of the Golden Eagle

  About the Author

  About Book View Café

  Copyright & Credits

  Some Guy Talking about Some Other Guy’s Stories

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Short story collections are notoriously hard to sell, particularly for a writer whose name is not already well known, even if the stories that make up the book are really good and have won awards. Hence the need for an introduction. The publisher hopes that at least a few readers who don’t know David Levine’s name will have heard of Bruce Holland Rogers and will read the introduction to see what I have to say. My job is to snag those readers in the book store (Buy this book!) or the library (Borrow this book!) thanks to my name and my enthusiasm for Mr. Levine’s stories.

  However, like Levine, I am a short story writer. Novels build name recognition. Stories generally don’t. I’ve been in this game a bit longer than Mr. Levine, but to the average book browser, I’m unknown. To the average book browser, this introduction is Some Guy writing to introduce the stories of Some Other Guy. The average book browser should be thinking right about now, Why don’t I just skip the introduction and read a story?

  By all means, do!

  I suggest that you begin with the story with the least pronounceable title, “Tk’Tk’Tk.” Members of the World Science Fiction Convention for 2006, meeting in Anaheim, California, voted it the best English-language science-fiction short story of the year, adding Levine’s name to an impressive list of past winners such as Neil Gaiman, Mike Resnick, Michael Swanwick, and Connie Willis. “Tk’Tk’Tk” is the story of a salesman who is trying to work what must be the least promising sales territory in the galaxy, and his frustration at dealing with the complex customs and language of his prospective clients will remind some readers of classic alien encounters such as Jack Vance’s “The Moon Moth.” It’s not just the aliens and their wonderful money that make this story memorable, though. “Tk’Tk’Tk” comes to an apt yet surprising ending.

  So, average book browser, off you go! There’s nothing to see here. Go read that story!

  Now, for the compulsive who has to read every word of a book, and in order, let me see if I can tempt you into giving up that practice here and now. If I couldn’t get you to go read “Tk’Tk’Tk” immediately, maybe I can tempt you with “Love in the Balance,” a story set in a city floating in the sky, where the chief mode of transportation is zeppelins.

  Or how about a teen love story, a contemporary fantasy with a lovely twist or two? “Falling off the Unicorn” is where the Western Quarter Horse Association national horse show meets Faerie, complete with stage mothers and snippy pre-teen competitors. It is likely to be the only story you ever read where one character is described as “a barracuda in a double-A bra.”

  What, you’re still here?

  Instead of continuing with this introduction, wouldn’t you rather read a story about a man whose father has decided to become a dog? Or the story about a junk yard where things that never existed in this universe are scattered among the broken washing machines, rusting away? How about a fairy story written from an ecological perspective? Or a story demonstrating what it’s like to live inside a comic book as one of its characters? Go read the stories!

  Yet here you still are, in spite of my best efforts.

  I might as well tell you, then, that it is a particular pleasure for me to introduce this collection because I had the honor of buying Levine’s story “Wind From a Dying Star” years ago when I was editing an original anthology. It was his first sale. I’m sure that selling the story made him very happy, but finding his story made me very happy, too. Every writer should spend some time in the editor’s chair, learning how many hopeless manuscripts come in response to a call for submissions, discovering for himself what it feels like, while reading one mediocre first page after another, to read a first page that pulls him right in and transports him. I knew from the first lines of this story that I was in good hands, and I’m pleased to say that I still like “Wind From a Dying Star,” from first words to last, as much as I did years ago.

  One of the best things about writing short stories instead of novels is that no one cares if you cross or blend genres, writing heroic fantasy, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, or expressionism. Novelists are expected to specialize. Short story writers can work in a variety of different traditions, as Levine demonstrates.

  As much as Levine’s work is varied, it also demonstrates a consistency. This is science fiction and fantasy where they have come to be written in the post-industrial age. The borders between the genres have blurred, and the agenda has changed. At one time, science fiction was propelled by the dream of humanity’s leap into interstellar space. I grew up thinking that I might have a life among the stars. The goal of humanity was, I once thought, to spread ourselves beyond this ball of dirt circling this one sun.

  Increasingly, the dreams of science fiction have bumped against the realities of the physical world. Gravity wells are deep. The biosphere is a web that supports us but also, like a spider web, holds us. We are this little ball of dirt. It’s likely that the only planet humans will ever know is this one. Although science fiction is the literature of what is possible, much of what is possible is also highly unlikely.

  For many readers and writers, science fiction has changed from being a brochure for the future to being, like fairy tales, another way of telling stories that engage our imaginations with a purely invented reality, an exclusively literary reality. Some readers who first encountered science fiction when I did look at our current realities and despair. Where are our moon colonies? Our flying cars? Our terraformed Mars? We thought SF was more than just art.

  But writers like David Levine remind us that we can still go to flying cities, the far reaches of deep space, and planets inhabited by exceedingly polite chitinous aliens. Better yet, our destinations don’t have to be limited by what’s actually possible or can be made by science-fictional sleight of hand to seem possible. We can go to a present time that’s only a little different from the time we know, one populated with creatures of myth or with 1950s model-year nuclear cars. Outer space or faerie, an alternate medieval China or a haunted 1930s America, we can visit right now.

  Just turn the page.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  London, England

  February, 2008

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully acknowledges everyone who has helped to make these stories possible, including but not limited to: the staff and students of Clarion West class of 2000 (especially Patrick Weekes, Pat Murphy, and Candas Jane Dorsey), the members of the Lucky Lab Rats critique group (especially Sara Muelle
r, M.K. Hobson, and John C. Bunnell), the editors who bought them (especially Gordon Van Gelder, Gardner Dozois, Deborah Layne, and Bruce Holland Rogers—who not only bought my very first story, he also wrote the Introduction), and all the fans and writers who have offered their support and encouragement over the years (especially Jay Lake, Karen Berry, Paul Wrigley, and Debbie Cross). But first and fundamentally, this my first published book is dedicated to Kate Yule—my love, my flying partner, and my best friend forever.

  Additional Acknowledements for the Electronic Edition

  Many thanks are extended to the members of Book View Café for assistance and impetus in transforming this book into an ebook, especially Chaz Brenchley for proofreading and Chinese transliteration, Dave Smeds for work on the cover, and Vonda N. McIntyre for much help and advice on the ebook transformation. Also to Darin Bradley and Bruce Holland Rogers for selflessly donating the e-rights to their work on the print book, and of course to Deborah Layne for publishing it in the first place.

  Wind from a Dying Star

  Gunai seethed with sorrow and rage as she helped to prepare Kula’s corpse for its final journey.

  Kula had always delighted in her body, its warm and golden glow, the way it flowed into a thousand useful and expressive shapes. She had explored the universe with its senses and reached out with its fields. Now it was nothing but a senseless lump of flesh and brain and polymer, a cold mockery of what she had been. Kula the person was gone. Taken by a wolf.

  The torn and ravaged corpse floated between Gunai and Old John, barely visible in the dim starlight. The other members of the tribe were gathered in a sphere around them, their glowing forms held in angular shapes of grief as Old John spoke the words of Kula’s eulogy.

  More than Kula’s life had been lost in the attack. Kula had carried a child, conceived at their recent meeting with the tribe of Yeoshi. Gone now, along with whatever fraction of the father’s memories it had carried. Even Kula’s intuition, one of the best in the tribe, was gone. A compound tragedy.

  “We mourn and remember Kula,” Old John concluded. “For as long as we remember her, in a very real way she still lives.”

  “We mourn and remember Kula,” they all said, and paused for silent reflection.

  Unwillingly, Gunai’s mind returned to the moment when Kula’s screams had been their first notice. She blamed herself. Kula should not have strayed so far from the tribe, she knew; Enaji and Huss should have kept a better lookout; Yaeri should have called a warning. But Gunai, as tribe leader, was ultimately responsible. She should have recognized the danger, should have prevented it somehow. That knowledge pained her, burned from the inside like the hunger that chewed at her belly.

  Old John caught Gunai’s attention. His form did not show emotion like a normal person’s; it was fixed in an archaic five-lobed shape. But through long acquaintance Gunai had learned to read his attitudes and intentions. Without a word, Gunai and Old John grasped Kula’s body with their fields and accelerated it toward the nearest star.

  The cold and lifeless thing quickly faded from view—just another bit of dark matter in a cooling universe. The tribe stared after it long after it had vanished, then gathered together in a group embrace of sorrow and reassurance. They held each other for a long time, but eventually, one by one, they drifted away to forage for food. Not even grief was stronger than hunger.

  Gunai made sure all four lookouts were at their stations before she allowed herself to begin foraging.

  After a time she found a small patch of zeren. She spread across it, taking a little solace from its sparkling sweetness. “Zero-point energy” was what Old John called it, but to Gunai and the rest of her tribe it was zeren, delicious and rare. Gunai recalled a time when zeren was something you could almost ignore—a constant crackling thrum beneath the surface of perception—but now there were just a few thin patches here and there. These days the tribe subsisted mostly on a thin diet of starlight, and even that was growing cold. Soon they would be forced to move on again. Yeoshi had told her the foraging was better in the direction of the galactic core, but it was so far...

  A sudden motion caught Gunai’s nervous eye, but it was just her daughter Teda. She had bumped Old John with her fields, sending his blocky form tumbling for a moment. “Teda!” Gunai scolded privately.

  “But Mother, he’s so slow!”

  “He’s doing the best he can. You should apologize.”

  Teda turned to Old John, forming herself into a flattened oval of contrition, and said, “I’m sorry I bumped you.” Gunai was pleased that it seemed sincere, but he replied only with a curt gesture of acknowledgment.

  Old John’s silence troubled Gunai. Apart from necessities, he had barely said anything since their meeting with the tribe of Yeoshi. This was unlike him. Usually he loved to share stories from his many years—though some derided them as mere legends—and Gunai was surprised he hadn’t picked up anything new at the gathering. Until now she had left him alone, thinking he might spring back by himself, but after Teda moved away she asked him privately what was bothering him.

  “You know there was another of my... cohort, in the other tribe. One nearly as old as I. Shala was her name.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw you with her.” It had been strange to see another with Old John’s stiff and blocky shape. She had thought he was unique. “Did she have any new stories for you?”

  “She had new information. But not stories I would like to tell.”

  “Go on.”

  “She told me... she told me Earth’s sun is dying.” There was a sadness in his voice Gunai had never heard before. “Ballooning into a red giant. Much sooner than anyone had expected.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words seemed so tiny.

  “Given the velocities we use, I suppose I should have expected to outlive my birth planet. But still, the news hurt.”

  “I thought Earth was gone already?”

  “No. Dead, yes. Emptied, wasted, ruined, picked over. But still there. Massive with history. No other planet holds the stones where Shakespeare and Caesar walked. No other planet has that year, that gravity, that... that place in the sky.” His awkward form curled into a ball. “Soon even the headstone of Humanity will be gone.”

  “It is a shame,” Gunai said, though many of his words meant nothing to her.

  “My own bones are there,” the old man sobbed.

  “What are bones?”

  “Parts of me I threw away to become what I am today. Parts you never even had. They are buried with my parents.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “No,” he sighed, relaxing. “No, you wouldn’t. And you aren’t going to understand this either, but I want... no, I need to visit Earth again. To see it one more time before we both are gone.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Gunai’s intuition told her where Earth was—over a thousand light-years away, in the very center of the deadest, most used-up area of the galaxy. “There’s nothing there.”

  “I am serious. I will go by myself if I have to.”

  Part of Gunai sneered that the tribe would be better off without the old man slowing them down. She beat that part down. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that. We need your wisdom.”

  Old John’s body never showed emotion, but his voice now held a mixture of pleasure and regret. “Thank you. But... I feel I’ve taught you all I know already. Let an old man go to visit his dying homeworld. Please.”

  “It would be different if you could have children to carry on your memories.” Old John looked away at that, and Gunai chided herself for raising the awkward issue. “I will consult with Enaji.”

  Enaji was one of Gunai’s most trusted advisers. He was old—nearly half as old as Old John—but he had been born in space in the usual way, and upgraded his body and intuition regularly.

  “Let him go,” he said. “Drain on the tribe.”

  Gunai felt herself contracting in denial at his words. “How can you say that? Remember how he
saved Rael and Kanna from the wolves? How he found a way out of the poison nebula? How his stories kept Jori alive?”

  “Long time ago.” He furled his edges at her. “These are new times. Perilous. Universe is changing, and he is too old to change with it. Remember, I offered to share my intuition with him. He refused.”

  “I can’t believe you could be so ungrateful.”

  “Gunai... Don’t you see?” He stroked her with his fields, his tone softening. “His time is past. He knows it. Let him go. Let him keep his dignity.”

  She turned away, presenting Enaji with a blind surface. “If I let him attempt that journey alone he would die. I could never live with myself.”

  “Hard times call for hard decisions.”

  The stars were tiny shards of light, scattered thinly on a dark background. Cold and heartless. They stared in at Gunai as she thought. How could she jeopardize her tribe for one old man’s insane whim? But how could she abandon the tribe’s eldest, wisest member—possibly the oldest human of all?

  Gunai’s intuition told her there were trillions of humans, but space was so vast that even in her long life she’d encountered other tribes less than a hundred times. To leave a person alone, to cast them into the depths of time and space where they might never meet another human being again, was the greatest sin. Would a person who could convince herself to commit that sin be worthy of leadership? Would a tribe that could condone such a sin be worth leading?

  No. She had lost Kula; she would not lose Old John.

  “I will not abandon him,” she said to Enaji, “and I will not deny his request. We will all go to Earth.”

  He pulled into a tight little ball. “We will regret this.”