FSF December 2009 Read online

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  Copyright ©2009 by Spilogale, Inc.

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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  December * 61st Year of Publication

  * * * *

  NOVELETS

  DRAGON'S TEETH by Alex Irvine

  HELL OF A FIX by Matthew Hughes

  INSIDE TIME by Tim Sullivan

  I NEEDS MUST PART, THE POLICEMAN SAID by Richard Bowes

  SHORT STORIES

  BAD MATTER by Alexandra Duncan

  FAREWELL ATLANTIS by Terry Bisson

  ILLUSIONS OF TRANQUILITY by Brendan DuBois

  THE BLIGHT FAMILY SINGERS by Kit Reed

  THE ECONOMY OF VACUUM by Sarah Thomas

  IRIS by Nancy Springer

  THE MAN WHO DID SOMETHING ABOUT *IT* by Harvey Jacobs

  DEPARTMENTS

  EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  BOOKS by James Sallis

  FILMS: POST-MODERN HASIDISM ... WITH PUPPETS! by Kathi Maio

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  INDEX TO VOLUMES 116 &117

  CURIOSITIES by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  CARTOONS: Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris

  COVER BY KENT BASH FOR “HELL OF A FIX”

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor

  BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

  JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor

  CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 117, No. 5, Whole No. 686, December 2009. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $6.50 per copy. Annual subscription $39.00; $49.00 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2009 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646

  GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030

  www.fandsf.com

  Department: EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder

  As great as it is for contemplating the future, science fiction is also valuable for reminding us that we are living in someone else's future.

  This little truism came to mind when our last publisher, Ed Ferman, sent word that a winner from our 1980 contest has been decided a few months early. (If the contest doesn't sound familiar to you longtime readers, don't go searching through your back issues—the contest was conducted by mail as part of a subscription drive.)

  Report on F&SF's 1980 30th Anniversary Contest

  In 1980, F&SF sponsored a 30th Anniversary Contest called “Win $2,010 in the year 2010.” It asked readers to choose one science fiction concept which will have been realized by the year 2010 and which will have had the most significant impact (good or bad) on your life.

  As promised, the approximately 2,700 entries were held securely and recently opened in order to select a winner. I read through all of them over several days, and here are some comments:

  * Only a tiny minority chose something bad, typically, “thermonuclear war; I'll be dead."

  * The vast majority chose concepts that seemed—in hindsight at least—wildly optimistic. Most frequent entries of this sort included:

  World government, world peace

  Colonies or factories in space

  Robots in the home

  Tourist travel in space

  Most frequent of all: medical advances that would extend life span to 200 years or more.

  So many entries projected a sense of confidence and hope that it was somewhat distressing to see how badly we fell short in realizing these predictions.

  * More realistic predictions occurred in two areas: genetic research and alternative sources of energy. But even here, the only concept we came across that has come close to being realized is the electric car.

  * The winner was chosen from a fairly large group who saw that computer technology and communication would have the greatest impact. In 1980 personal computers had only been available for a few years (Apple was founded in 1976), and wide use of the Internet was more than a decade in the future.

  It was hard to select a winner from this group. What tipped Allen MacNeill's entry into the winner's circle was his prediction of hand-held computers, though he admits that he never thought they would be the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  —Ed Ferman

  On hearing the news, the contest winner, Allen MacNeill, sent a note that's worth reprinting in its entirety:

  Greetings, Ed:

  Please forgive my skepticism, but I receive about a hundred “phishing” invitations a day and so am very leery of the kind of notification contained in your email. However, it is indeed that case that I was a very loyal subscriber to F&SF from the 1970s through the late 1980s. As a professor of biology at Cornell, I eventually let my subscription lapse, mostly because I no longer had the luxury of spending time reading a lot of science fiction (more's the pity). I still glance through a copy now and then (usually in the library) and find it to still have the best short fiction in the genre.

  Anyway, yes I did indeed enter the contest, and remember the premise well. I believe that I entered several times, with several predictions. I came up with the one about “home computer terminals with interactive access to other home, business and academic terminals, and including hand-held terminals” mostly because I had been using the PLATO terminals in Uris Hall at Cornell and wished very, very much that I could have one of my own (and especially one that I could carry around with me). Of course, the fact that you are reading this email on precisely the kind of “home computer terminal” that I originally predicted would come about is evidence that this prediction was pretty accurate.

  However, I never would have predicted either spam or viruses/worms (although David Gerrold did in When HARLIE was One, which first appeared in Galaxy magazine, another sf mag I read with devotion in those days). I have owned at least one “home computer terminal” since 1982 (it was a Commodore 64), only two years after I made the prediction for your contest. My first real desktop (i.e. the fulfillment of the prediction) was an Epson QX-10, which I bought in 1983 when I landed a contract to write an introductory biology textbook for Prentice-Hall. When it died suddenly in 1987 I bought a Mac Plus, and have stuck with Macs ever since. Right now I have two 24” 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMacs, running simultaneously as WIntel machines using Parallels, one at home and one in my office at Cornell, plus a 15” MacBook G-4 that is now starting to show its age (it's almost four years old, and so a virtual antique).

  If pressed today, I would say that thirty years from now it is most likely that we will be using some version of a “cloudbook,” for which most of the processing and hard memory/data storage will be located somewhere else. This will, of course, depend on the Moore's Law enhanced capabilities of the descendants of today's cell phones, which I suspect will be incorporated into our clothing, with something like a virtually invisible BlueTooth earbud/jaw mike interface. I don't think we will have implants, however, as they would need to be surgically replaced too often as technology changes—fun as it was at the time, I certainly would not have wanted to have the equivalent of my old C-64 implanted in me!

  Anyway, my very brief bio is this: In 1980 when I entered the contest I had just recently finished graduate school and begun teaching introductory biology at Cornell. I have been doing so ever since, with a brief sabbatic as Chief Academic Officer for a Web 1.0 startup in 1999-2000. You can download my curriculum vitae at all four of my blogs (URLs listed in the sig at the end of this email). I am about to be taped for a series of online lectures on evolution for Cornell's CyberTower “study rooms” and am currently writing several books and maintaining four active blogs. I couldn't do any of this without my trusty home computer terminals with interactive access to other home, business and academic terminals, and including hand-held terminals, and indeed cannot imagine what life today would be without them. Very different, and much less interesting in many ways.

  By the way, I wish that back in 1980 you had bought $2,010 worth of Apple stock (or any kind of stock, for that matter) and held on to it for the winner of your contest. Now that I think of it, could I have my grand prize winnings in 1980 dollars? ;-)

  My sincerest thanks for a terrific magazine, a terrific contest, and for making my day! Please let me know where the announcement of the contest and the fact that I am the grand prize winner will appear, so I can blog it!

  Still in Ithaca/Utopia and still crazy after all these years, I remain...

  As always.

  —Allen MacNeill

  evolution.freehostia.com

  evolutionanddesign.blogsome.com

  evolutionlist.blogspot.com

  evolpsychology.blog
spot.com

  So, congratulations to Allen MacNeill, and for anyone who is reading this editorial in the year 2040, I hope you're making the most of our future.

  —Gordon Van Gelder

  Novelet: DRAGON'S TEETH by Alex Irvine

  Alex Irvine is best known for his novels A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, The Narrows, and Buyout. His story “Wizard's Six” in our June 2007 issue marked his first venture into High Fantasy genre. Now he returns to the same milieu with a story that is neither a sequel nor a prequel, or maybe it's both. It's a broader tale, and elements of “Wizard's Six” are encompassed in it, so if anything here seems familiar to you, that's just an old memory echoing in your head. (And if you want to check it, go to our Website, where “Wizard's Six” will be posted for a month.)

  I: The Tomb

  They brought the singer to the obsidian gate and waited. A sandstorm began to boil in the valley that split the mountains to their west. Across the miles of desert, they watched it rear and approach. Still the singer did not sing. She was blind, and had the way of blind singers. They were as much at the mercy of the song as anyone else.

  All of them were going to die in the sandstorm. At least the guard captain, Paulus, hoped so. If the sandstorm did not kill them, whatever was in the tomb would. Of the two deaths, he much preferred the storm. Two fingers of his right hand touched his throat and he hummed the creed of his god, learned from the Book at the feet of a mother he had not seen since his eighth year. The reflex was all that mattered. The first moon, still low over the mountains, vanished in the storm a moment after the mountains themselves.

  The singer began to sing. Paulus hated her for it, but with the song begun, even killing her would not stop it. In one of the libraries hung the severed head of a singer, in a cage made of her bones. No one living could remember who she was, or understand the language of the song. The scholars of the court believed that whoever deciphered the song would know immortality.

  They were at the mouth of a valley that snaked down from the mountains and spilled into a flat plain that once had been a marsh, a resting place for migrating birds. The tomb's architect, according to the scholars, had believed that the soul's migration was eased by placing the tomb in such a place. In the centuries since the death of the king, his world had also died. The river that fed the marshes shifted course to the south; the desert swept in. Paulus scanned the sky and saw no birds.

  At first he found the song pleasing. The melody was unfamiliar to him, in a mode that jarred against the songs he remembered from his boyhood. Then all the gates in his mind boomed shut again. He was not a boy taken into the king's service who remembered the songs his mother might have sung. He was the guard captain Paulus and he was here in the desert to have the singer sing her song, and then to die.

  Why, they had not been told. The tomb was to be opened. Paulus was a soldier. He would open the tomb. In doing so, he would die, but Paulus did not fear death. He had faced it in forms seen by few other men, had survived its proximity often enough that it had grown familiar. Fatalism was an old friend. The song made his teeth hurt; no, not the song, but some effect of the song. In this place, it was awakening something that had slumbered since The Fells was a scattering of huts on the riverbank. This king had died so long ago that his name was lost. At his death the desert had been green. The world changed, aged with the rest of them. In the desert, you breathed the air of a world where everything had happened already, and it made you feel that you could never have existed.

  The obsidian gate shifted with a groan and the wind rose. Sand cascaded down the walls, revealing worked stone, as the singer's song began the work of undoing a burial that had taken the desert centuries to complete. The dozen soldiers with Paulus shifted on their feet, casting glances back and forth between the gate and the approaching storm. They rested hands on sword hilts, gauged the distance to their horses; Paulus could see each of them running through a delicate personal calculation, with the storm on one side and a deserter's crucifixion on the other.

  At the mouth of the tomb, at the end of his life, Paulus had only gossip to steer by. Someone important, a merchant named Jan who had the king's ear, wanted to free the spirit that inhabited the tomb. The king had agreed. Paulus wondered what favor he owed that made him willing to cast away the lives of a dozen men. Perhaps they would not die. Still, they had ridden nine days across the desert, to a tomb so old and feared that it existed on maps only through inference; the desert road bent sharply away from it, cutting upward to run along the spine of a line of hills to the north before coming back down into the valley and following the ancient riverbed up to the Salt Pass, from which a traveler could see the ocean on a clear day. Paulus wondered what in the tomb had convinced the road builders to believe that three days’ extra ride was worth it.

  The singer wept, whether in ecstasy or sorrow Paulus could not tell. Swirls of sand reared in the figures of snakes all around them, striking away in the rising wind. The obsidian gate was open an inch. The wind scoured sand away from the front of the tomb, revealing a path of flat stones. Another inch of darkness opened up. The singer's vibrato shook slivers from the gate that swept away over their heads like slashes of ink inscribed on the sky. Slowly the gate shivered open, grinding across the stones as the singer began to scream. The soldiers broke and ran; Paulus let them go, to die in whatever way they found best. A sound came from the tomb, answering the singer, and the harmony of voices living and dead burst Paulus's eardrums. Deaf, he felt the wind beat his face. Darkness fell as the storm swallowed the sky. The air grew thick as saliva. The sand undulated like a tongue. From the open gate of the tomb, Paulus smelled the exhalation of an undead spirit. He drew his sword, and then the sandstorm overtook them.

  * * * *

  When it had passed, Paulus fumbled for the canteen at his belt. He rinsed his eyes, swished water around in his mouth and spat thick black gunk ... onto a floor of even stones. He was in the tomb, without memory of having entered. Water dripped from his beard and he felt the scrape and grind of sand all over his body. He was still deaf. His eardrums throbbed. Where was the rest of the guard? He turned in a slow circle, orienting himself, and stopped when he was facing the open doorway. A featureless sandscape, brushed smooth by the storm and suffused with violet moonlight, stretched to an invisible horizon. The skin on the back of Paulus's neck crawled. He turned around to face into the tomb, growing curious. He had enough oil for a torch. Its light seemed a protective circle to him as he ventured into the tomb to see what might have been left behind when the spirit emerged into the world. What it might do was no concern of his. He had been sent to free it; it was free. The merchant in The Fells had what he had paid for.

  Torch held off to his left, sword in his right hand, Paulus walked along the narrow entry hall. He went down a stairway and at the bottom found the open sepulcher. The ancient king's bones lay as they had been left. His hair wisped over a mail coat that caught the torchlight.

  Am I to be a graverobber? Paulus thought. The spirit was fled. Why not?

  He took a cutting of the king's hair, binding it with a bit of leather from the laces of his jerkin. Arrayed about the king's body were ceremonial articles: a sword pitted and brittle with age, jars that had once held spices and perfumes, the skeletons of a dog and a child. Paulus went through it all, keeping what he knew he could sell and ignoring anything that looked as if it might be infected with magic. He worked methodically, feeling distanced from himself by his deafness. After an hour's search through the main room of the tomb and an antechamber knee-deep in sand from the storm, he had a double handful of gold coins. Everything else he saw—a sandstone figurine with obsidian eyes, a jeweled torc obscured by the king's beard, a filigreed scroll case laid diagonally into a wall alcove just inside the door—made him leery of enchantment. The gold would do.

  Leaving the tomb, he stumbled over the body of the singer, buried in a drift of sand just inside the shattered gate. There was no sign of the rest of his men. It disturbed Paulus that he had no memory of entering the tomb as the storm broke over them, but memory was a blade with no handle. When it failed, best to live with the failure and live to accumulate new memories. He took another drink, scanned the desert for sign of the horses, and gave up. Either he would walk back, or he could cross the mountains and sail around the Cape of Thirst from the city of Averon. The boat would be quicker and the coastal waters less treacherous than the desert sands. Paulus turned west.