Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82: Clarkesworld Magazine, #82
    Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82: Clarkesworld Magazine, #82
    Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82: Clarkesworld Magazine, #82
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82: Clarkesworld Magazine, #82

    By Neil Clarke, Vajra Chandrasekera, Sunny Moraine and

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Clarkesworld is a Hugo Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month they bring you a mix of fiction (new and classic works), articles, interviews and art.

    Our July 2013 issue contains:

    * Original Fiction by Vajra Chandrasekera ("Pockets Full of Stones"), Sunny Moraine ("I Tell Thee All, I Can No More") and David Tallerman ("Across the Terminator").

    * Classic stories by Daryl Gregory ("The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm") and Ian McDonald ("The Dust Assassin").

    * Non-fiction by Jason S. Ridler (Spock’s Pops: How Operational Research became Wartime Magic!), a interviews with J. M. McDermott and Richard Ellis Preston Jr., an Another Word column by Genevieve Valentine, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWyrm Publishing
    Release dateJan 16, 2014
    ISBN9781501473241
    Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82: Clarkesworld Magazine, #82
    Author

    Neil Clarke

    Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the multi-award-winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and over a dozen anthologies. A eleven-time finalist and the 2022/2023 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form, he is also the three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director. In 2019, Clarke received the SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons

    Read more from Neil Clarke

    Related to Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82

    Titles in the series (65)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Backup Drive

      Mar 23, 2022

      Backup Drive
      2 min read

    • Article

      Take A Chance With SF Noir

      Jul 1, 2021

      Tyche Books is a Canadian small-press specialising in science-fiction and fantasy anthologies, novels, and non-fiction, all available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. The editorial team ‘crave innovative stories that push the boundaries of imagination

      1 min read

    • Article

      Martian wants Drabbles

      Jul 7, 2022

      Martian is a zine for SF drabbles and the team publish new ones twice a week. Drabbles are very short stories of exactly 100 words (excluding title) and they are tricky to write. Read what’s published here to see how other writers do it. The editoria

      1 min read

    • Article

      Rocket Man

      Jan 26, 2022

      STAR TREK AND REAL SPACE flight have crossed paths before. A Space Shuttle test orbiter was christened Enterprise. Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space, appeared in The Next Generation. Two astronauts cameoed in Enterprise. But all of those we

      3 min read

    • Article

      Objects of Fear and Worship: The Evolution of Aliens in Literature

      Oct 20, 2017

      The sorns are slender and humanoid and are the scientists and thinkers; the hrossa resemble overstretched otters; they are poets and musicians; and the pfifltriggi are the builders, looking like insectile frogs. The post Objects of Fear and Worship:

      6 min read

    • Article

      Inhibitor Phase

      Aug 11, 2021

      Inhibitor Phase
      2 min read

    • Article

      'Provenance': A Cozy Mystery Set In Ann Leckie's 'Ancillary' Universe

      Sep 27, 2017

      In this standalone novel, Ann Leckie returns to the world of her award-winning Ancillary trilogy with a different mission — a cozy mystery about the theft of some politically sensitive antiques.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Children Of Ruin

      May 22, 2019

      Children Of Ruin
      1 min read

    • Article

      Wildlands of Utah

      May 7, 2022

      Whenever I’m traveling outside the U.S. and someone asks me where I’m from, and I say, “Utah,” their face often lights up as they launch into a story about how they recently took this “incredible, amazing” trip there where they ran whitewater rapids

      7 min read

    • Article

      Whom He May Devour: Saving her planet would ban her from paradise.

      Jan 7, 2016

      Lydia watched Ahad play the guitar. He leaned against a boulder, eyes shut, his face positioned to catch the last warm rays of the setting sun. His long, slender fingers caressed the strings, producing a slow, haunting melody. The music almost made h

      17 min read

    • Article

      The Bargain

      Dec 10, 2022

      “Which one of you owns G2V3889?” Cygnus glided through a luminescent star field suspended in the center of an otherwise dark, oblong studio, then turned in a slow circle to survey the twenty Agents surrounding him. “Come on, speak up.” Vega shuddered

      16 min read

    • Article

      These Bad Things

      Dec 23, 2019

      These Bad Things
      9 min read

    • Article

      ‘A Children’s Bible’: Featured Fiction from Lydia Millet

      May 12, 2020

      "My phone had ceased to interest me since the news started repeating, bringing a wash of grimness whenever I looked. I solved the problem by ignoring it." The post ‘A Children’s Bible’: Featured Fiction from Lydia Millet appeared first on The Million

      4 min read

    • Article

      Form Seven Alpha

      Oct 10, 2023

      So here I sit with it again, Form 7⍺. It is printed on cheap paper with low-quality ink that smudges under my fingers. The option they judge least bad for me has been scored through, unavailable, while the four other options remain. Since the last ti

      26 min read

    • Article

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson

      Jun 25, 2018

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson
      13 min read

    • Article

      Ready, Set, Let go!

      May 15, 2019

      Ready, Set, Let go!
      11 min read

    • Article

      I Ran Away From Home At 60!

      Feb 20, 2024

      Three decades ago, I celebrated my 30th birthday in the time-honoured tradition of all young people who think they are an adult but have no real idea about life, duty or personal responsibility – I got smashed. In fairness, I had quite a lot to get s

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Physics Of Connection

      Sep 1, 2020

      IF I HELD A HAMMER CORRECTLY, the way my father taught me, and then swung it down on a rock, the rock would break. I would have caused that to happen. I would have transferred kinetic energy from my arm to the hammer’s handle and then to the hammer’s

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Lifelong Love Affair

      Jan 2, 2024

      Christmas morning, 1959. A skinny 12-year-old kid, one normally almost impossible to get jump-started in time to get him to school before the tardy bell, bounces out of bed at the crack of dawn and thunders down the hall, like a cutting horse after a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Famous People

      Mar 1, 2022

      Famous People
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Family Plot

      May 7, 2020

      The Family Plot
      10 min read

    • Article

      After “The End”

      Oct 10, 2022

      I walked down the road with a hunched back and a wet cigarette in my mouth—the fire had died a while back. My hands were tucked into the pockets of my jacket, and my hair fell over my face, limiting my sight. But I wasn’t really seeing where I was go

      10 min read

    • Article

      Anatomy Of A Search

      Mar 17, 2023

      Anatomy Of A Search
      13 min read

    • Article

      Birdie

      Jan 14, 2020

      Birdie
      24 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82 - Neil Clarke

      Clarkesworld Magazine

      Issue 82

      Table of Contents

      Pockets Full of Stones

      by Vajra Chandrasekera

      I Tell Thee All, I Can No More

      by Sunny Moraine

      Across the Terminator

      by David Tallerman

      The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm

      by Daryl Gregory

      The Dust Assassin

      by Ian McDonald

      Spock­s Pops: How Operational Research became Wartime Magic!

      by Jason S. Ridler

      Giving Birth to the Dark Monster: A Conversation with J. M. McDermott

      by Jeremy L. C. Jones

      Faulty Memories of a Time Long Past: A Conversation with Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.

      by Jeremy L. C. Jones

      Another Word: My Own Private B-Movie

      by Genevieve Valentine

      Editor's Desk: Taking Back July 12th

      by Neil Clarke

      The Land of Lost Dreams

      Art by Dan Osborne

      © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013

      www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

      Pockets Full of Stones

      Vajra Chandrasekera

      The ghost of my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.

      Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.

      Dike, Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. You notice the flicker?

      Probably lost some frames in the cooker, I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and travelling fast. Did he say first contact?

      He did, Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.

      I would have argued, except it was true.

      Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.

      Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up, Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.

      Do you mind if— I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.

      Go ahead, Hadil said, getting up. It’s your Grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your Grandma, anyway.

      I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through all the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.

      I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.

      As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.

      And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.

      It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.

      You want coffee? Hadil said.

      No, thanks.

      The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. Do we have any fresh fruit left? I asked, not turning around.

      The fridge door opened and closed behind me. Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.

      When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.

      But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.

      Given enough time, all problems are solvable.

      Oh, crap. Look at this, Hadil said. He pushed an array of screens across the room in my direction, displacing my own virtual workspace. Process listings and system status monitors, bars in the green flickering up to angry reds.

      I rubbed my hands over my close-shaven scalp. What did you do now?

      There was an executable binary in the Update, Hadil moaned. It was part of the signal they said they picked up.

      You opened an attachment . . . from space?

      No! I swear, Hadil said. He sounded guilty. Only in a sandbox. I was curious. I’m rebooting.

      I waved at the illegal ghost of my grandfather to continue. Color bled back into the imago’s skin, and light into his eyes.

      Dear Dikeledi, Rais said. Granddaughter. He kept looking down at the photo in his hands. I’d walked over and looked at it once, but it cycled through so many pictures of my grandmother and Mom as a baby that it came across blurry and indistinct in the imago. Please let me know about the petition. Has Da Nang given answer? His voice was warm, a little too loud. Little puffs of air from the tiny speakers in my glasses, as if my too-young grandfather had his lips pressed to the soft skin behind my ear.

      If things had been different, I would have been one of the twenty thousand colonists. No, that wasn’t right—I wouldn’t even be born yet. If Rais had been allowed to take his wife, Abena, and their infant daughter along with him, my grandmother would be a young woman, my mother still a baby. I wouldn’t be born for another four hundred years.

      But he hadn’t been allowed to take them with him. Something happened, eighty years ago, while the family was preparing for departure. My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it except elliptically, to say that Rais made an enemy of someone powerful, someone in the junta, someone with control over the colonization project’s approvals board. I didn’t know exactly what it was that Rais had done to deserve this—Grandma Abena wouldn’t speak of it, and Mom didn’t know. It had been serious enough that after Rais left, Grandma Abena had changed her name and gone into hiding for a while. But by the time Mom was grown up, the urgency and the terror had faded. By the time I was born, it was only history.

      I could even appreciate the clever cruelty of it: to give him the choice of being part of the colony, but only if he went alone.

      A forced decision, made in haste. I distrusted haste. Decisions needed planning, strategy, not a wild leap into a dilemma constructed by somebody else. And it was still so recent for him, just a year and a half at relativistic speeds. A year and a half of recent memories and regrets, against eighty years of half-forgotten family history for me.

      There had been no contact for all of that time, until he got that first message from me. An older woman who called him grandfather and told him that his wife and daughter had grown old and died, that I was his only family.

      I look forward very much. Your next message, Rais said. Your last before you leave Makemake. Perhaps petition will move faster when you are back in Da Nang.

      Rais kept pausing, as if expecting an answer. He wasn’t used to one-way messages yet, having only been doing them for a few weeks. His messages were full of awkward pauses and non sequiturs. Or perhaps the error correction at this range was poorer than I’d accounted for and parts were being lost. There was no way to tell.

      Family, under time dilation: he’d append a personal message to the Cây Cúc’s daily update; I’d get it every two months. I’d add a small personal message to the annual update from Makemake; he’d get one of those every week.

      When it ended, he would have spent a month talking to me. I would have spent five years, the full term of my contract on Makemake Station. It was almost done.

      I nudged Hadil. Your spikes are on the host network now, I’d just noticed the angry red spikes indicating increased activity on Makemake Station’s computers both physical and virtual.

      Everything’s showing spikes, Hadil said. Except ops and life support.

      Those are physically separate networks, I said, absently. The CPU temperature graph was climbing steadily. I’d missed something Rais said. I’d have to rewind him later.

      Will you please switch off your Grandpa and check the logs? I could hear the glare in Hadil’s voice. He was right, but I was reluctant to stop listening.

      I’d been ten years younger than Rais was now, when the plan occurred to me. I was still at Nha Trang University, working through the qualifying courses to apply for extraplanetary duty. Plan—more of an intention, then, an understanding that I wanted to do this, that maybe I could, that maybe I should. I’d grown up hearing about Rais from Grandma and dreaming of space, which may have had something to do with my choice of career. But that was the year I put the plan together. The time dilation, Makemake Station, my career, the time and training I’d need to get there. I could talk to Rais himself; I could close the loop, answer the nagging little questions.

      Now at forty-two I was as old as Mom when she had me. Ten years older than Rais, who had aged less than a year in my two decades of putting all the pieces together. I’d thought I knew him from Grandma Abena’s stories, from the things Mom didn’t say. Rais had grown bigger in the tellings, his absence having density and mass.

      In person, he was too small, too young.

      My grandfather’s ghost was flickering again, almost strobing.

      Hadil and I both looked at it.

      Did your Grandpa break the imago? Hadil said.

      Shut up, I said. I’m pretty sure this is all your fault. I grinned at him to take the sting out of it a little, while swiping rapidly through the last hour of logs. Makemake generated a lot of logs even when not doing anything in particular. Anything of note should have been flagged. There was nothing.

      I really miss Abena, Rais said. He said this every time. He had never known her as a grandmother, with the wrinkles and the white hair that I kept expecting him to have. He wouldn’t talk about Mom at all.

      I’d told him in my second message that Mom had lived into her eighties and taught art history. She specialized in Lý dynasty ceramics. But he didn’t acknowledge what I said—or he did and it

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1