Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 87 Read online

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 87

  Table of Contents

  Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel

  by E. Lily Yu

  Of Alternate Adventures and Memory

  by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade

  by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  1016 to 1

  by James Patrick Kelly

  The Pure Product

  by John Kessel

  Druids Reconstructed

  by Lee Beavington

  A Craftsman of No Small Skill: A Conversation with David Drake

  by Jeremy L. C. Jones

  Another Word: Two and a Half Writers

  by Daniel Abraham

  Editor’s Desk: Behind the Scenes Tour

  by Neil Clarke

  Elliptic

  Art by Julie Dillon

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel

  E. Lily Yu

  Sit down, sit. You’ll hurt yourself jumping around like that. No, don’t shout. Quiet studio on a quiet night—a rare thing. Why ruin it?

  Come from? Difficult question. I was there in the city of Sharh-e-Sukhteh when a potter glazed his bowl with a leaping goat. I was there when Ting Huan painted animals onto his paper zoetropes and set them slinking and lunging in the hot air from his lamp. I am in the twenty-fourth of a second between frames, where human perception fails. Right now, in fact, I’m shining on theater screens and on the glass of cathode-ray sets and in the liquid crystals of monitors across the world. And I’m here with you, because you called.

  You didn’t? Usually my votary burns his arms against the lightbox, or dies over and over in a spare room where he can film himself taking an imaginary bullet to the chest, applying what he observes—ah. That scrape, where your head hit the corner of your desk. That would have been enough.

  Naturally you’d fall asleep over your work. It’s one a.m. and you’ve been pulling eighty-hour weeks for as long as you can remember. Production deadlines, yes. No shame in that.

  Can’t help, sorry. That’s your job. But lean your head against my shoulder. I’m sympathetic. I’ll listen.

  What, the whiskers bother you? The beach-ball skull? The fangs? The tail? I thought you’d appreciate the potential for infinite stretch and squash. I’ll smooth them all out. How’s this?

  Frogfaced is an unkind way of putting it. You didn’t have those objections to Maryanne, and she approximates the classic pair of stacked spheres.

  Very simple. I can see right through you. You’re like a cel pegged under glass. Your four affairs. Your ten-year marriage, eroded by your devotion to me—I appreciate the compliment, by the way—and meanwhile Isabelle swelling, suspecting, expecting. Your lust for attention that leads you into other women’s arms. Your streak of mulishness. You’re a con man. A cheat. A shyster. A magician. I like you.

  Not Him, no, but I’m the closest you’ll get to the quickening of life. Triacetate and clay and cats using their tails for canes. I’m on the other side of reality, the better side, where physics is like lipstick, dabbed on if needed, and there’s no such thing as death. It’s all in the splitting of the seconds, see.

  Twenty-four frames every second, or the illusion stutters. Belief flickers and shatters. Even if they splice the ends together, the soundtrack will veer off. So I’m demanding, when it comes to sacrifices and offerings. At least 86,000 drawings for a feature film in two dimensions. In three, your weary flick, flick, flick through a dumbshow of polygons and nurbs, tweaking and torquing.

  Speaking of offerings. Open your mouth for me. Wider, or it’ll cut you. Stop squirming. It’s only 35mm. There.

  My left eye will do for lens and light. My right hand will be the takeup reel. Keep your chin up.

  Here’s your life projected on the wall. Your parents in crayon, and there’s you—watching Looney Tunes in your pajamas, drawing penguins in the margins of your homework. It runs in your family. Your father loved Felix, and your grandfather snuck into nickelodeons on Saturdays. I’ll crank faster through the litany of school, except those stretches where you were scribbling pterodactyls and fish. There’s—what’s her name?—gone. Alice. Beth. Chenelle. Danielle. She liked your cats, at least until you started drawing them with howitzers.

  Please stop moving, you’re making the picture shake. The faster I wind it out of you, the sooner this’ll be over.

  Art school. Elizabeth and Farah, tall and short, marvelous until they found out about each other. Your classes in anatomy, visual effects, life drawing, character rigging. What a crude and clumsy portfolio. But here’s the job offer, finally. Here’s your two dirty, grueling years as an assistant. Here’s the second offer, the promotion, the raise. Now the wedding suit and blown-over chairs on the seaside. The late nights modeling and posing doe-eyed animals. The fights with Isabelle. Plates crashing to the floor. Cracking. Team meetings, sweat darkening an inch of your collar, making long wings under your arms. Your manager telling you how much your work stinks, how much he’d like to take your ideas into a cornfield and shoot them, how close you are to the edge of the axe.

  That’s it, the reel’s run out. Feeling better? I thought so. Good to have it out, the fumes tend to build up explosively. Now—

  Ah. I thought you’d never ask.

  These are the standard packages:

  A. Your work will spring to life. It will dance, it will convince, it will enchant. Your transfer of mocap to wireframe will never seem dull or mechanical. Your hollow shells will breathe and blink and blush. It will look like voodoo.

  You’re interested, I can tell. Oh, easy. The accelerating pulse of color in your cheeks. Besides, I can guess. Thirty-six years old, overlooked, unknown, a failing marriage, a father-to-be. Success is survival.

  The price for all of this? Merely—long, sleepless nights with me. Nine thousand of them. And your wrists. You have such lovely, supple wrists. I shall mount them in mahogany, I think. What do you say?

  Of course, that’s only sensible. I’d want to know, too.

  B. is a rise. Not meteoric, but assured. Lead animator, then director of animation five years later. Doesn’t that sound nice? That’s not all. Shortly afterwards, you become head of the studio, or you split off to form your own profitable company. The less expensive option, this.

  Expensive? You’d make oodles off of it! You’d be famous! Admired! Fawned over! Only gradually would you notice, as you floated up like a birthday balloon, how far you always were from your pen and tablet. The animated films you produce, your name splashed everywhere, you’ll never touch with your own hands. All the work will be done by other people’s brushes and pencils and styluses. You’ll be so busy with decisions and budgets that you won’t have a thought to spare for art, for the boy you were at seven, doodling flip books at the kitchen table. So.

  No? Not satisfied? Neither of these appeal to you? A true artist! You have talent. I can see that. You want to press your fingerprints into history.

  Well then. I offer you hunger. A mastery of my arts and an inextinguishable desire to do things better and differently. Break the box. Upset the game.

  Others? Of course. Charles-Emile Reynaud. William Friese-Greene. Méliès. Yes, all of them. Yes.

  Why, nothing at all. Not a clipping from your fingernail. Not a red cent.

  I am quite serious.

  An intelligent question. Only if you
stand still. Only if you stop innovating. Take Reynaud, for example, smashing his praxinoscope as the more fashionable cinématographe swept Paris. Friese-Greene dying with the price of a cinema ticket in his pocket, which was all the money he had. One shilling and tenpence. The others—them too. You must not stand still. My hunger is a painted wolf that will chase you around the whirling rim of the world. Run, spin the wheel, and life will pour from your fingers. Geometry and time will be your dogs. Hesitate, let the bowl turn without you, and—snap! you are mine.

  That was a joke. You are one of mine and always were. The question is, do I like you better at your desk, or do I prefer your median nerve coiled delicately on a cracker with caviar to taste?

  Ha! That was also a joke! Why flinch? You used to appreciate the soft, surreal psychosis of cartoons. Mallets and violence! Bacchanals, decapitations, shotguns, dynamite! That’s my sense of humor.

  I don’t give, darling. I take. Sometimes I negotiate. It’s always unfair.

  Choose. Don’t make me wait, or you’ll wake up with stabbing pains in your arms and claws for hands. A slow dissolve on your career. No love, no money, no lasting memory.

  Begging doesn’t suit you. Your heart’s transparent to me. I don’t give a pixel more than you do for your family. Your Isabelle would be only too happy—but to the point. Our transaction.

  They can’t hear you from here.

  Certain privileges come with being a monarch of time and a master in the persistence of vision. I am nothing in the security cameras. Not a shiver. Not a blot.

  Are you sure? A kiss, then, to seal the bargain. I’ll peel this little yellow light out of you. You won’t be needing it.

  A gift I gave you, once. No matter. Tonight your department head will dream of you and what you could become. Expect a meeting next week.

  You might. But you’ll have the odor of vinegar to remember me by.

  From the decay of acetate film.

  No, I would never think of calling you a coward.

  About the Author

  E. Lily Yu was the recipient of the 2012 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Apex Magazine, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Eclipse Online, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

  Of Alternate Adventures and Memory

  Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  Adventure Boy was twelve when he met Mechanic for the first time. They had gone to an exhibit celebrating the removal of the barrier between Central City and Metal Town. He remembered feeling proud. His mom, after all, had played a key role in building bridges between the two worlds and if not for her efforts, the barrier would still be there.

  “There’s someone I want to introduce you to,” his mother said.

  He’d registered the peak in her voice that could mean excitement or trepidation, but before he could feel anything himself, they were being welcomed into a circle of metal men.

  “This must be your son,” someone said. “I’m very pleased to meet you. I hear you’re quite the Adventure Boy.”

  A hand was extended to him, and he looked up. Light glinted off Mechanic’s domed head and Adventure Boy picked up the static threaded through his voice. An unrelenting old-timer, he’d thought.

  “Well,” Mechanic said. “won’t you shake my hand? I assure you, shaking hands with me won’t turn you into a metal can.”

  It was the hidden taunt that prompted him to reach out and clasp Mechanic’s hand in his. He noted the temperature of metal against his skin, but where he’d expected cold, Mechanic’s hand was warm. “I may be old,” Mechanic said, “but I’m still upgradeable.”

  The other metal men laughed and Adventure Boy registered signals of relief from his mother.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” Adventure Boy said. He didn’t know what else to say because he’d never heard of Mechanic and he didn’t know why his mother felt it was important for this man to like him.

  After that introduction, his mother was summoned by Central City’s governor and Adventure Boy was left to wander the exhibit on his own.

  Here were replicas of a life he’d never known. Photographs and reliquaries that meant nothing at all to him. They were part of his mother’s long ago life, not his. He had come to awareness in Central City, and he only knew this place with its smooth asphalt, ordered subdivisions and neatly manicured front lawns.

  The photographs made him wonder though. He stared at captured images of piles of rusted metal, disembodied machines, and deserted buildings and he couldn’t help but wonder what it had been like when his mother still lived there.

  “You should visit it someday,” a voice said behind him.

  It was Mechanic. His hands neatly folded behind his back, his eyes directed at the replica of a building called the Remembrance Monument.

  “Of course, the streets are silent now,” Mechanic said. “We’re being integrated into Central City’s workforce and there’s no need to maintain the workshops and the shelters. It’s a foolish fancy that none of us are allowed, but if you stand directly under the Remembrance Monument, you can still hear the whisper of voices from those who’ve gone before.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Adventure Boy asked. “I don’t belong there at all.”

  Mechanic inclined his head. His face was blank, in the way metal men’s faces were blank. But Adventure Boy couldn’t help feeling as if he’d hurt the metal man somehow.

  “I mean, I was born here,” Adventure Boy said. “I’m a citizen of this place. Also, Metal Town is no more, so . . . ”

  His voice trailed off as Mechanic stepped away.

  “You’re right,” Mechanic said. “This is your city. I hope you enjoy the exhibit. It was good to meet you, Adventure Boy.”

  As he watched Mechanic walk away, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’d done a great wrong.

  An alternate child will be a good addition to your home. Memomach industries works to create the perfect child to suit your needs.

  —Memomach Industry ad—

  He remembered the time he was refused a place on the school softball team. He listened to the soft-voiced principal as she tried to explain it to him.

  Alternates were different. They could run faster. They had more stamina. It wouldn’t be fair to the children of the makers.

  In time, he learned not to want. He tried to blend in. He was, after all, his mother’s child. In his second year at school, another alternate child transferred in. He tried not to speak to the other, and the other did not speak to him. They sat side by side on a bench watching the others play, not speaking a word.

  It would have gone on that way if not for another transfer. Unlike them, Jill Slowbloom was noisy. She laughed loud and she made jokes. She was clumsy as well.

  “My parents said they wanted the perfect child,” she said. “But they meant the perfect child for them.”

  Her laughter drew them out of their shells. They were no longer two, but three, and when the term ended and another alternate transferred in, they became four.

  “We could start our own club,” Jill said.

  “I’ll be point. Eileen will notate. And you and Jeff can follow my lead.”

  For a while, he felt like he belonged somewhere. Then the new term ended. Jill transferred out. Eileen moved away. He and Jeff were left staring at each other, not knowing how to fill the silence that was left behind.

  Perhaps, he thinks. Perhaps if I go to Metal Town, I will find the words to fill the silence. Perhaps I will understand more.

  Father wears the face of a numbered man. He wears the suit, he carries the briefcase, he drives the car.

  At home, he morphs into someone who Mother argues with over their dinner.

  “I don’t see why you feel the need to indulge him,” Mother says.

  “Mechanic thinks it will be good for him, and I agree,” Father replies.

  They are discussing Adventure Boy’
s desire to visit Metal Town.

  Mother doesn’t wish them to go, but Father sees no harm in it.

  “I don’t understand why you want to see that place again,” Mother says. “I shudder when I remember how I almost lost you there.”

  “But you didn’t lose me,” Father says. “And we can’t deny him this. If he wants to know it for himself, then he should know it for himself.”

  “I won’t go,” Mother says.

  “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go,” Father replies.

  Adventure Boy lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling. He had bought a picture of the Remembrance Monument and Father had hung it up. At night, the lines of the monument glowed in the dark.

  Mechanic’s words rang in his ear.

  “You can still hear the voices of those who have gone before.”

  Come reminisce of days gone by . . .

  Metal Town Tours, your official tourist operator. We provide detailed excursions, maps, and access to some of Metal Town’s most spectacular monuments.

  —Metal Town Tours ad—

  Smooth asphalt morphed into rough tarmac and the neatly ordered lawns of suburbia were replaced with fields full of high grass and wild sunflowers with faces turned towards the sky.

  Father had rented a tour car; it was decorated with yellow sunflowers and bold black lettering announcing the name of the official tour agency.

  They were the only visitors so far. It was a Saturday and most tourists came in after twelve.

  Adventure Boy rolled down the window. A light morning breeze caused goosebumps to rise on the surface of his skin. But after that initial contact, his skin warmed and they vanished.

  “It’s a much smoother ride than I remember,” Father said.

  Adventure Boy turned to look at him.

  Without his suit, Father looked like one of the makers. His face was not as rigid, his shoulders were relaxed and he wore a plain t-shirt and jeans just like all the other fathers Adventure Boy saw at school.

  “We’ve never talked about it,” Father said. “But Metal Town is a painful memory for your mother. She came to consciousness here. She loved it and yet she wanted nothing more than to escape it.”