Lightspeed: Year One Read online
LIGHTSPEED: YEAR ONE
Edited by John Joseph Adams
Copyright © 2011 by Prime Books.
Cover art by Vitaly S. Alexius.
Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission. An extension of this copyright page can be found here.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-333-4 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-304-4 (trade paperback)
PRIME BOOKS
www.prime-books.com
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
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For the Lightspeed Team,
without whom none of this would have been possible.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION, John Joseph Adams
I’M ALIVE, I LOVE YOU, I’LL SEE YOU IN RENO, Vylar Kaftan
THE CASSANDRA PROJECT, Jack McDevitt
CATS IN VICTORY, David Barr Kirtley
AMARYLLIS, Carrie Vaughn
NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT, Carol Emshwiller
MANUMISSION, Tobias S. Buckell
THE ZEPPELIN CONDUCTORS’ SOCIETY ANNUAL GENTLEMEN’S BALL, Genevieve Valentine
“ . . . FOR A SINGLE YESTERDAY,” George R.R. Martin
HOW TO BECOME A MARS OVERLORD, Catherynne M. Valente
PATIENT ZERO, Tananarive Due
ARVIES, Adam-Troy Castro
MORE THAN THE SUM OF HIS PARTS, Joe Haldeman
FLOWER, MERCY, NEEDLE, CHAIN, Yoon Ha Lee
THE LONG CHASE, Geoffrey A. Landis
AMID THE WORDS OF WAR, Cat Rambo
TRAVELERS, Robert Silverberg
HINDSIGHT, Sarah Langan
TIGHT LITTLE STITCHES IN A DEAD MAN’S BACK, Joe R. Lansdale
THE TASTE OF STARLIGHT, John R. Fultz
BEACHWORLD, Stephen King
STANDARD LONELINESS PACKAGE, Charles Yu
FACES IN REVOLVING SOULS, Caitlín R. Kiernan
HWANG’S BILLION BRILLIANT DAUGHTERS, Alice Sola Kim
EJ-ES, Nancy Kress
IN-FALL, Ted Kosmatka
THE OBSERVER, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
JENNY’S SICK, David Tallerman
THE SILENCE OF THE ASONU, Ursula K. Le Guin
POSTINGS FROM AN AMOROUS TOMORROW, Corey Mariani
CUCUMBER GRAVY, Susan Palwick
BLACK FIRE, Tanith Lee
THE ELEPHANTS OF POZNAN, Orson Scott Card
LONG ENOUGH AND JUST SO LONG, Cat Rambo
THE PASSENGER, Julie E. Czerneda
SIMULACRUM, Ken Liu
BREAKAWAY, BACKDOWN, James Patrick Kelly
SAYING THE NAMES, Maggie Clark
GOSSAMER, Stephen Baxter
SPIDER THE ARTIST, Nnedi Okorafor
WOMAN LEAVES ROOM, Robert Reed
ALL THAT TOUCHES THE AIR, An Owomoyela
MANEKI NEKO, Bruce Sterling
MAMA, WE ARE ZHENYA, YOUR SON, Tom Crosshill
VELVET FIELDS, Anne McCaffrey
THE HARROWERS, Eric Gregory
BIBI FROM JUPITER, Tessa Mellas
ELIOT WROTE, Nancy Kress
SCALES, Alastair Reynolds
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
INTRODUCTION
John Joseph Adams
Welcome to Lightspeed: Year One!
For those of you not already familiar with Lightspeed, some background may be in order: Lightspeed is an online magazine (www.lightspeedmagazine.com) that focuses exclusively on science fiction. Within its pages (or pixels, as it were), you will find all types of science fiction, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between.
Every month, we publish a mix of original fiction and reprints, and feature a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. So when you read Lightspeed, our hope is that you’ll see where science fiction comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.
Which brings us to the anthology that you’re reading right now. This is the first in a planned series of print anthologies that will annually collect all of the fiction originally published in the magazine. This first volume will collect all of the fiction originally published in Lightspeed, from June 2010 to May 2011.
We’ve had a great first year. Nine out of the sixteen original stories published in Lightspeed in 2010 have been selected for reprint in a best-of-the-year anthology. Additionally, two of our stories—“Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro and “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan—have been named finalists for the Nebula Award, and another story—“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn—was nominated for the Hugo Award. Lightspeed itself and yours truly were also nominated for the Hugo Award, and Lightspeed won the Million Writers Award for Best New Online Magazine. We’re hugely honored to have received all these accolades, but we’d like to think that these accolades are only a sign of more great things to come!
While fiction is Lightspeed’s focus (and only our fiction is included in this anthology), Lightspeed is also a nonfiction magazine. Alongside of our fiction selections, we run articles that riff off the ideas in the fiction. For instance, in our debut issue, we have a story about relativistic travel, so we asked sf author and expert astronomer Mike Brotherton to tell us about the science behind that familiar sf trope. We also regularly feature brief interviews with the authors we call “author spotlights,” in which the authors talk a bit about the stories behind their stories.
But there’s more to Lightspeed than that, too. Lightspeed is also a podcast, which features two stories each month in audio format, produced by Grammy- and Audie Award-winning narrator/producer Stefan Rudnicki.
And, finally, Lightspeed is not just a weekly online magazine, it’s also a monthly ebook magazine, so if you’d rather read it every month on your Kindle or Nook or Sony Reader or iPad (or even your PC!), that option is available, and you can also subscribe to the ebook edition via Weightless Books (www.weightlessbooks.com).
I hope you enjoy the anthology. If you do, I hope you’ll go to our website at www.lightspeedmagazine.com to let us know what you think. And also—tell a friend!
I’M ALIVE, I LOVE YOU, I’LL SEE YOU IN RENO
Vylar Kaftan
We have a history of missed connections, you and I. Years ago, when you called goodbye from the shuttle launch, my flight was landing in Zurich. I’d changed planes, been re-routed from Frankfurt. That’s why you got my voicemail. I’d have answered if I could, and would’ve wished you luck, even if you wanted a life without me. I never managed to see Europa, like you did—just Europe, where I met my first husband. The one I wished was you.
When I heard your message, I was glad you were happy—yes, I’ve always wanted you happy, even during our divorce. I thought of you traveling to Alpha Centauri, time dilating between us like a portal. I envisioned it like a slow-motion movie. You’d be back in forty years. I’d be sixty-four, and you’d only be half my age.
I saved your message for weeks, until I accidentally deleted it. It felt symbolic. We’d be happier apart, I thought to myself. But “apart” was always the way we connected. The word defines us relative to each other: one cannot be apart without th
e other.
Einstein spent ten years thinking about a mirror that troubled him. If he traveled at the speed of light and looked into a hand-held mirror, would he see his reflection, or not? Setting aside vampirism, or poorly-made glass that cracks at high speeds, the answer is that he must. Relativity means that you can’t tell how fast you’re going unless you have a point of reference.
We’ve been together for as long as I can remember. Just kids, running around the Sacramento suburbs. I liked you because you’d play with a girl. I ran faster, fought harder, and hit harder than any boy—and I knew it. Remember that time we played Capture the Flag and you couldn’t find mine? I shoved it in a drainpipe. You could still see its corner. That counts.
I was the girl next door—safe, reliable, undesirable. When I was thirteen, and you were sixteen—I was crazy-in-love with you. But you were blind. “Best friends forever,” you told me.
I thought that you’d never see me as a woman your own age. I had to hear about all those girls you dated. Remember that awful redhead who stole cigarettes from her grandmother? I bet she got lung cancer.
“Best friends,” I told you too. We were together, yet completely apart.
I used to wonder how to make you see me. Should I tell you what I felt? Stay silent and hope you’d see?
But you made the choice for me: you left for the military. So I joined the Peace Corps—the polar opposite of what you did. This drew us together again like magnets. It’s why we ended up living together in San Francisco. Roommates and lovers.
I didn’t know this then, of course—all of this I figured out during the journey to Alpha Centauri.
Two magnets, apart, continue to exert force on each other. Their power lies in the space between.
Einstein says that nothing moves at the speed of light, because the faster things get the heavier they become.
It’s true that as I accelerated, everything had more weight: two decades of child-rearing, juggling flute practice with my photography career, balancing a marriage’s weight against single independence. But weight is relative, and what’s heavy on Earth is light on the Moon and monstrous on Jupiter. Yet the mass remains the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When I think about the changes in my parents’ lives—and how much more I’ve already seen, in fewer years—I think of Moore’s Law.
My world is doubling every year. Somewhere in old Italy, Galileo is searching the skies with his telescope, wondering why his life doesn’t feel as full as it should. It’s because I have it all, four centuries later—his life, and millions of others.
The doubling sequence surprises people who’ve never thought it through.
Reno, you told me once. Reno, Nevada. When we lived in San Francisco, in that tiny apartment above a Mission District taqueria. Do you remember that conversation? We were sitting on that awful brown loveseat you’d rescued from a dumpster. You were heating dinner in the microwave, and the room smelled like curry. The fog rolled through the city and we both wore old sweaters. I didn’t yet know the relevance of Reno.
“If we’re separated,” you said.
“Why Reno?”
“It’s inland. When the big quake hits the Bay, Reno’s safe. Or if there’s a missile strike or something. No one strikes Reno.”
“You’re paranoid,” I said.
You shrugged. “I’m aware.”
We’d been living together for six months. We made good roommates—both of us loud, and neither of us tidy. You took out the trash, and I sorted the mail; we both did dishes when needed, and not more often. I didn’t mind your waterskis propped against the fridge, or your physics books scattered on the pizza-stained carpet. You didn’t mind the way I always slammed doors and drawers, no matter how quiet I tried to be. It was a good arrangement. But not what I wanted.
I knew you loved me, of course. It was written in your eyes when you looked at me, a physics problem with no clear answer. If an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens then?
They meet. That’s all we know. Relative to each other, they are in contact. From within the object or the force, there is no way to tell if you’re in motion.
For a while, I was Charon to your Pluto, keeping the same faces to each other as we circled around endlessly.
And through all of this you still thought of me as a moon, and yourself as a planet. But it’s not so easy as that. Our orbit is erratic, an ellipse among circles, an offbeat pattern in a regular solar system. Do you see the sun, far in the distance? Even when our orbit sweeps close to the sun, it takes four hours for its light to reach us. It’s a centerpoint that keeps us captured. We circle it so we don’t fly off into space. It’s a point of reference, and it proves to us that we’re always in motion.
We keep moving, along with everything else. Even if we can’t see where or how.
By the time we got together, it was more for convenience than anything else.
It was what we did: have sex, fight, break up, meet someone else. And when the new relationship burned out, like a magnesium ribbon flared and gone, we’d find each other again.
The best thing between us was the sex. We fought—oh, yes, we fought—and then had make-up sex. Hard, hot, and heavy. You’d drive into me just before I was ready—making me ready—then finish just after me, both of us collapsed together, trapped in each other’s gravity wells.
When you slept, I’d stroke your rough, calloused fingers and the Superglued cuts in your feet from waterskiing. I’d think about our next fight, and my body tingled with wanting you.
“I’ll marry you,” you said once, “if you can’t find anyone else.”
I laughed because I thought you were kidding. You couldn’t even propose right.
It was the last push on a decaying orbit. I was not your fallback option. From the time you said that, our path downwards was guaranteed, calculable. We fought about the phone bill, Chinese leftovers, a broken plate that didn’t get swept up. When you told me about your new job repairing relativity shuttles, I was secretly glad. Your work would take you to Reno. Out of my path.
I was completely over you, over us—or at least I was then, when you left. I was on the rebound, ready for someone new.
Gunther, the German engineer, was everything you weren’t. So I married him. Once you knew his first few digits, they repeated in a predictable pattern. He was a wonderful father for our two sons. I thought of you sometimes as I raised my boys, perfect squares in their rational world. I never forgot you.
Thanks to genetics, we expected Gunther’s heart problems before they happened. He lasted twenty-five years with me, then slipped away. My kids were on their own by then, and I had time and money. I was free to choose irrationally, and so I took up waterskiing.
When you came back, I was surprised you came to my door—and even more surprised that you wanted me. I didn’t think you’d stay with me—a hot young thirty-something, with this dried-out old lady. You kept saying you liked my maturity, you found me sexy. But it was different for me. I saw you like my kids. More like a son than a mate.
If I can’t find anyone else.
That’s a terrible proposal. It makes a woman feel like you’re just putting up with her. I did find someone else. I had twenty-five happy years with him, while you were living through just a few months. I accumulated the weight of years—of a woman building decades with her partner, of a mother renewing herself by raising her children. All of this weight I gained—not to mention my new-found belly.
But I married you anyway. You wanted to be with me, you said. All your recent thoughts told you so. My age didn’t matter—you still wanted me, the woman you’d loved all this time, you said.
As for me, now I had what I’d always wanted—but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.
One night after we made love on the beach, I watched the stars. They shone with light from billions of years ago. The stars offered us time apart. That’s why I sold everything I had—to see what you�
�d seen.
The new relativity shuttles were even faster than yours had been, and now they were open to tourists. It had been forty years here, after all. I’m sorry I didn’t leave a note.
I figured it was all relative.
Gunther was always patient with me. Slow. He’d wait for me to orgasm, like he was holding a car door open for me, and then he’d finish quickly and silently. Sometimes I pretended he was you to make things more exciting. Once I pretended he was Albert Einstein. It was the accent, I swear.
With you, the electromagnetic pull bonded us together. We could ionize briefly, visiting other molecules and forming weak bonds—but we always came back together, circling each other endlessly.
An electron and a proton. You and me.
For a long time I thought I was the electron, spinning wild patterns around you. Then I realized the electron was you, because I always knew either where you were or how fast you were going, but never both.
So I left you and went to the stars, like you’d done. Alpha Centauri! The brilliant star burned into my mind. It was a vacation for me, a short time away from Earth. For the first time, I saw the lights up close. The luxury ship went 99% the speed of light. Much faster than you had gone, faster than before.
I figured you’d be dead once I got back. It simplified things. Stopped the fighting. You’d be ashes, like you’d always wanted. I wouldn’t even have to see your body. I thought about it, as I looked through the viewport, and realized that I was still thinking of you. That was when I understood that no matter how far I went or how fast, I still responded to you in every way.
Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. Our bond pulls me back, and I love you.
Reasons why I have loved you:
1. Yes.
2. Yes, again.
3. Because you’re you.
None of these are love, perhaps, but they’re forces of physics. And if love isn’t subject to physics, then it has no grounding in our universe. I can’t believe that’s true.
Just when I got back, you left again, like one metal ball clacking another —the opposite side of our kinetic motion toy. You were off for the Andromeda Galaxy, moving at 99.38% the speed of light.