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    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #129
    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #129
    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #129
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    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #129

    By John Joseph Adams

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    About this ebook

    LIGHTSPEED is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF--and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.

     

    Welcome to LIGHTSPEED's 129th issue! Can you mix hard science and fairy tales? This month Phoebe Barton does just that in the very touching "The Mathematics of Fairyland." Writing duo Keith Brooke and Eric Brown return to our pages in a story of one life split between two different worlds: "Me Two." We also have SF reprints by Paul Crenshaw ("Bulletproof Tattoos") and Maureen F. McHugh ("Sidewalks"). Our first piece of original fantasy this month is A.T. Greenblatt's "The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit"-a story of an island filled with magic and wonder. Alexander Weinstein also gives us a magical new locale in the latest installment of his From the Lost Travelers' Tour Guide series. This one is called "Destinations of Beauty." Our fantasy reprints include work from Micah Dean Hicks ("Church of Birds") and Autumn Brown ("Small and Bright"). All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, plus our book reviewers have scoured the shelves for some exciting new reads. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Evarina Maxwell's new novel WINTER'S ORBIT.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAdamant Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2021
    ISBN9781393104230
    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #129
    Author

    John Joseph Adams

    John Joseph Adams is the series editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the editor of the Hugo Award–winning Lightspeed, and of more than forty anthologies, including Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, The Far Reaches, and Out There Screaming (coedited with Jordan Peele).

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      Book preview

      Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129 (February 2021) - John Joseph Adams

      sword_rocketLightspeed Magazine

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Issue 129, February 2021

      FROM THE EDITOR

      Editorial: February 2021

      SCIENCE FICTION

      The Mathematics of Fairyland

      Phoebe Barton

      Bulletproof Tattoos

      Paul Crenshaw

      Me Two

      Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

      Sidewalks

      Maureen F. McHugh

      FANTASY

      Church of Birds

      Micah Dean Hicks

      The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit

      A.T. Greenblatt

      Small and Bright

      Autumn Brown

      Destinations of Beauty

      Alexander Weinstein

      EXCERPTS

      Winter’s Orbit

      Everina Maxwell

      NONFICTION

      Book Review: On Fragile Waves, by E. Lily Yu

      LaShawn M. Wanak

      Book Review: The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by Katie Mack

      Chris Kluwe

      Book Review: Latinx Screams, edited by V. Castro and Cynthia Pelayo

      Arley Sorg

      AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

      Phoebe Barton

      A.T. Greenblatt

      Keith Brooke and Eric Brown

      Alexander Weinstein

      MISCELLANY

      Coming Attractions

      Stay Connected

      Subscriptions and Ebooks

      Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

      About the Lightspeed Team

      Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

      © 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

      Cover by Grandfailure (via Adobe Stock)

      https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

      From_the_Editor

      Editorial: February 2021

      John Joseph Adams | 192 words

      Welcome to Lightspeed’s 129th issue!

      Can you mix hard science and fairy tales? This month Phoebe Barton does just that in the very touching The Mathematics of Fairyland. Writing duo Keith Brooke and Eric Brown return to our pages in a story of one life split between two different worlds: Me Two. We also have SF reprints by Paul Crenshaw (Bulletproof Tattoos) and Maureen F. McHugh (Sidewalks).

      Our first piece of original fantasy this month is A.T. Greenblatt’s The Memory of a Memory Is a Spirit—a story of an island filled with magic and wonder. Alexander Weinstein also gives us a magical new locale in the latest installment of his From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide series. This one is called Destinations of Beauty. Our fantasy reprints include work from Micah Dean Hicks (Church of Birds) and Autumn Brown (Small and Bright).

      All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, plus our book reviewers have scoured the shelves for some exciting new reads. Our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Evarina Maxwell’s new novel Winter's Orbit.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Called the reigning king of the anthology world by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

      Science_Fiction

      The Mathematics of Fairyland

      Phoebe Barton | 2945 words

      If you had a warp drive, it would be easy. The mathematics are strange the way ley lines are strange, invisible yet divinable. You’ve pulled your way up sterner mountains, fingertip by fingertip. You’ve already compensated for stellar motion, spacetime curvature, hyperspatial congruences. You’ve scratched out hundreds of equations in cold blue hyacinth ink and piled them away in the knitted stocking under your bed, where only Berenice would think to look. Equations that would tell you exactly where to slice a hole between worlds, if only you had the right knife. You could bring Berenice back home.

      You don’t have a warp drive. It would be easier to get a nuclear bomb, and you’ve checked—sub-kiloton models are always in demand among the asteroid miners. Warp drives are locked up tighter than princesses in towers, and for good reason. Warp drives are monsters chained inside niobium prisons, with claws that rip and tear spacetime. You were never afraid of them before, but they always commanded your respect.

      That was before, though. Before you stopped to think about what it must have been like for that monster to turn, to snarl, to carry your Berenice down a hole that disappeared in the darkness. If you had a warp drive you could follow her, carrying at least a guttering light. You’re each other’s princesses, after all.

      There’s an alternative beyond warp drives and nukes. The old tales are clear about what the fair folk charge for their help, but the cost of life alone is too much to bear. So you kneel in the station gardens and whisper your desperation into buttercups, at once hopeful and terrified that your words will find their way to Fairyland.

      • • • •

      It’s an in-between place, Psyche Harbour, a space station where gardens bloom within a polished hull. Below, the asteroid 16 Psyche glitters, a flying mountain of cold iron that no faerie could touch and live. Beyond, the vast and vaulting gap of emptiness between the asteroids and Earth.

      You know you’re the only one there who believes faeries are real, so you’ve buried your truth beneath expectations. You’re good at that, at least. Your official title is Hardware Operations Specialist, but you’d rather think of yourself as a blacksmith. Your tools are different, fabricator and versa instead of anvil and hammer, but the goal is the same.

      The gardener, Mariko, is a newcomer to the station. You see her in the corner of your eye when you crouch in the garden and whisper the faeries’ names, acid vowels and obsidian consonants. You see her kneeling reverently in front of the buttercups. After a while you begin to wonder: Maybe she knows the faeries’ names, too. Maybe she can never stop dancing between the flowers. Maybe she believes.

      At least it’s not difficult for you to broach the question. The gardener has the tall, spare, dark-skinned look of a Martian. Martians call their faeries gremlins now, but they never pretended faeries didn’t follow them.

      That’s the thing about Mars, the gardener says, her voice rich and loamy. Too much dust, not enough air. But that doesn’t stop us from building gremlin traps. If you want, I can show you.

      It takes a special kind of faerie to live on Mars, with no trods to follow and its soil half poison, half cold iron. They’re the faeries that learned how to shred airplane engines with their teeth, to burn control cables with a glare, and when the first Mars probes flew, the gremlins went with them. On Earth, they’re annoyances; on Mars, with its bubbled meadows on hostile plains, they’re cataclysms. Of course the Martians had honed their skills to trap them.

      Thank you, you say. There’s always the possibility a ship full of gremlins might put into Psyche Harbour, after all.

      A gremlin trap, she tells you, is simple: form over function. Gears that aren’t connected to anything, circuits that loop back on themselves, switches that turn themselves off. Make it complicated enough and the gremlins will flock to it, and while they’re figuring out how to tear it apart, they’re not tearing apart the life support systems. Once it stops working, that’s when you take it out and smash it to bits with a sledgehammer, and all the trapped gremlins with it.

      Of course, it’s best if you understand gremlins as a metaphor, Mariko says. But that doesn’t make them any less true, does it?

      The project gives you a distraction, at least. You never did this sort of thing with Berenice, and this far from the sun, you can arrange the gears to eclipse your grief. Still, you worry. You’re not Martian; your community never worried about gremlins. Do gremlins, so concerned with technology and machines, even talk to faeries?

      That’s when you realize there’s an alternative. There’s no point in whispering into buttercups—no faerie would want to dig their heels in so far from Earth’s green hills. The gremlin trap is a part, not a whole.

      You realize you need to build a radio, too.

      • • • •

      It’s hard work to make radio waves shatter spacetime the way starships do. In almost two hundred years of faster-than-light freedom, nobody has figured it out. Warp points let ships sail through intact, but there’s never been a broadcast that wasn’t received as a mixed-up crackle, indistinguishable from the echo of everything’s beginning. All you can do is hope that nobody’s tried this particular solution yet, and that’s why they still call it impossible.

      You know where you can find respite from your struggle, at least. In your dreams, you dance with Berenice among the saxifrage and snapdragon. If only you were an oneiromancer, you could apologize to her there. Tonight you sit with her next to a glassy pool and trace capacitors and antennas in the clear and changeless water.

      You could stay here, Berenice says, except it’s not Berenice at all. It’s the reflection of her that lives in your head, the costume you built out of tender moments and warm, lingering kisses and all the times you thought of moving to Venus so that a year would be as long as a day. We’d be together. Isn’t that what you want?

      I want you, you say. When you kiss her, her lips are fog and her breath is a distant whisper. The you who’s going to climb out of the darkness. Not your echo.

      You’re so certain there’s a ladder. Berenice dips two fingers in the pool, slices them through a circuit diagram, presses them to your lips. There’s no weight to them, no presence. What if there isn’t?

      There’s never an isn’t, you say, even though you have to force the assurances. The faeries will know.

      Faeries are legends. Myths. Unreality! Berenice stares deep in your eyes, and you stare back at the doubts you’ve kept bottled for so long. Her eyes are space-black, flecked with hints of stars. You’re grasping in the dark.

      Then I’ll hear my way though. It wouldn’t have to be much. Berenice’s heartbeat would be enough. If sound could fly though space, you’re sure you’d hear it across the solar system. Whatever it takes to open the way.

      The dream’s melancholy lingers after you wake, and it sharpens the sour sheen coating your tongue. It doesn’t matter, though. Here in space, there’s never a time when you’re not falling.

      • • • •

      Building the radio doesn’t take long; you didn’t last so long at Psyche Harbour, and places like it, by being a woman without skill. It’s a challenge, compared to the complex simplicity of the gremlin trap, and you’re eager to best it. You forge a cold iron case, to temper the faeries’ tempting voices. Around its circuits you weave patterns of spider silk, to strum impulses softly along the universe’s web. You whittle a second antenna from the branch of a rowan tree, to guide your words straight and true.

      You finish the work three hundred and forty-three days after the science vessel Tabetha Boyajian triggered its warp drive in ordinary space and vanished, taking Berenice and all her crewmates on a voyage they had never anticipated. No one knows where a ship that warps in ordinary space goes. Perhaps—you hope—it went to Fairyland.

      It’s a wonderful design, Mariko says when you show it to her. You had to tell someone, and of all the people aboard Psyche Harbour, you’re sure she’s the only one who could possibly understand. I know this is a hard time. If you need to talk, I’m here.

      I need to talk to Fairyland, you say. Someone there knows what happened. Someone will listen.

      There are a lot of frequencies to try, but that’s all right. Einstein caught a glimpse of Fairyland when he realized relativity. You force the sharp wedge of experimentation into your responsibilities, and hammer it with true blacksmith strength. Every night, once your work is done, you carry it to the garden and listen. Sometimes you hear voices, soft and sandy and crumbling, the codes of spaceship transponders, or rescue beacons shouting into the void.

      There isn’t so much as a whisper of Fairyland. Only distant murmurs and softly roaring echoes, as if you’re hearing the world from the far side of a dream.

      • • • •

      Once you finished the gremlin trap, Mariko set it in the middle of a little stone circle in the garden module. That’s where she finds you, crouching with a hammer, waiting for the last of its workings to stop. It still feels like a waste to break it apart, but what do you know? You weren’t born with red dust in your lungs.

      You did excellent work, Mariko says. Definitely Mars-quality. I hope it helped take your mind off things. Are you doing all right?

      Her tone is thick and sweet like jam, and leaves you feeling sticky. She acts like she understands, but unless her own love disappeared down a dark hole, there’s no understanding.

      I’ll be all right once this is all done, you say. Until then, I’ve got work. Faeries don’t reveal themselves to just anyone, you know.

      Faeries. Mariko sucks in a breath so deep it might last the rest of her life. I’m worried about you, you know. I really think you need help.

      Maybe, but not the kind you’re thinking of. You went through a full psychological evaluation before you joined Psyche Harbour and you check up with a virtual therapist every two weeks. It’s been enough to keep you grounded, here where the ground is spinning metal. I’m fine. Really.

      As fine as Mars dust in your lungs, maybe. Mariko kneels down and offers you her hand. If you really want to rescue her, you need to rescue yourself first.

      I’m not the one who’s lost! She can’t understand. Only a handful of people in the galaxy, the dozen or so who lost people aboard that ship, possibly could. You’re asking me to walk away from the pit when I’m holding a rope.

      You’re on the edge of falling in yourself. Mariko closes her eyes, and you catch yourself wondering if she’d catch you or let you pinwheel over the side. We’re all here to help each other. Let me help you. Please.

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