excerpt

November 16, 2019

The complete previews of Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman’s acclaimed anthology THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized a series of steaks, alexander weinstein, alice sola kim, david erik nelson, excerpt, hannu rajaniemi, in the sharing place, jacob weisman, one hour every seven years, openness, our lady of the open road, preview, sarah pinsker, the new voices of science fiction, vina jie-min prasad

In celebration of the recently released THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, Tachyon and editors Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman present
glimpses into the future of science fiction from several of the volume’s
magnificent tales.

The previews included

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Matt Dixon
Cover design by Elizabeth Story

November 14, 2019

THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION preview: “OUR LADY OF THE OPEN ROAD” by Sarah Pinsker

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized elizabeth story, excerpt, hannu rajaniemi, jacob weisman, matt dixon, our lady of the open road, preview, sarah pinsker, the new voices of science fiction

OUR LADY OF THE OPEN ROAD

Sarah Pinsker

A
middle-aged cowboy wandered over to stare at our van. I pegged him
for a legit rancher from a distance, but as he came closer I noticed
a clerical collar beneath the embroidered shirt. His boots shone and
he had a paunch falling over an old rodeo belt; the incongruous image
of a bull-riding minister made me laugh. He startled when he realized
I was watching him.

He
made a motion for me to lower my window.

“Maryland
plates!” he said. “I used to live in Hagerstown.”

I
smiled, though I’d only ever passed through Hagerstown.

“Used
to drive a church van that looked kinda like yours, too, just out of
high school. Less duct tape, though. Whatcha doing out here?”

“Touring.
Band.”

“No
kidding! You look familiar. Have I heard of you?”

“Cassis
Fire,” I said, taking the question as a prompt for a name. “We
had it painted on the side for a while, but then we figured out
we got pulled over less when we were incognito.”

“Don’t
think I know the name. I used to have a band, back before …”
His voice trailed off, and neither of us needed him to finish his
sentence. There were several “back befores” he could be referring
to, but they all amounted to the same thing. Back before StageHolo
and SportsHolo made it easier to stay home. Back before most people
got scared out of congregating anywhere they didn’t know everybody.

“You’re
not playing around here, are you?”

I
shook my head. “Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow night.”

“I
figured. Couldn’t think of a place you’d play nearby.”

“Not
our kind of music, anyway,” I agreed. I didn’t know what music he
liked, but this was a safe bet.

“Not
any kind. Oh well. Nice chatting with you. I’ll look you up on
StageHolo.”

He
turned away.

“We’re
not on StageHolo,” I called to his back, though maybe not loud
enough for him to hear. He waved as his Chauffeur drove him off the
lot.

“Luce,
you’re a terrible salesperson,” Silva said to me.

“What?”
I hadn’t realized he’d been paying attention.

“You
know he recognized you. All you had to do was say your name instead
of the band’s. Or ‘Blood and Diamonds.’ He’d have paid for
dinner for all of us, then bought every T-shirt and download code we
have.”

“And
then he’d listen to them and realize the music we make now is
nothing like the music we made then. And even if he liked it, he’d
never go to a show. At best he’d send a message saying how much he
wished we were on StageHolo.”

“Which
we could be …”

“Which
we won’t be.” Silva knew better than to argue with me on that
one. It was our only real source of disagreement.

The
neon “open” sign in the restaurant’s window blinked out, and I
took the cue to put the key back in the ignition. The glowplug light
came on, and I started the van back up.

My
movement roused Jacky again. “Where are we now?”

I
didn’t bother answering.

As I
had guessed, the owner hadn’t quite understood what I was asking
for. I gave him the engine tour, showing him the custom oil filter
and the dual tanks. “We still need regular diesel to start, then
switch to the veggie oil tank. Not too much more to it than that.”

“It’s
legal?”

Legal
enough. There was a gray area wherein perhaps technically we were
skirting the fuel tax. By our reasoning, though, we were also
skirting the reasons for the fuel tax. We’d be the ones who got in
trouble, anyway. Not him.

“Of
course,” I said, then changed the subject. “And the best part is
that it makes the van smell like egg rolls.”

He
smiled. We got a whole tankful out of him, and a bag full of food
he’d have otherwise chucked out, as well.

The
guys were over the moon about the food. Dumpster diving behind a
restaurant or Superwally would have been our next order of business,
so anything that hadn’t made a stop in a garbage can on its way to
us was haute cuisine as far as we were concerned. Silva took the lo
mein—no complimentary bread—screwed together his travel
chopsticks, and handed mine to me from the glove compartment. I
grabbed some kind of moo shu without the pancakes, and Jacky woke
again to snag the third container.

“Can
we go someplace?” Silva asked, waving chopsticks at the window.

“Got
anything in mind on a Tuesday night in the boonies?”

Jacky
was up for something, too. “Laser tag? Laser bowling?”

Sometimes
the age gap was a chasm. I turned in my seat to side-eye the kid.
“One vote for lasers.”

“I
dunno,” said Silva. “Just a bar? If I have to spend another hour
in this van I’m going to scream.”

I
took a few bites while I considered. We wouldn’t be too welcome
anywhere around here, between our odor and our look, not to mention
the simple fact that we were strangers. On the other hand, the more
outlets I gave these guys for legit fun, the less likely they were to
come up with something that would get us in trouble. “If we see a
bar or a bowling joint before someplace to sleep, sure.”

“I
can look it up,” said Jacky.

“Nope,”
I said. “Leave it to fate.”

After
two-thirds of the moo shu, I gave up and closed the container. I
hated wasting food, but it was too big for me to finish. I wiped my
chopsticks on my jeans and put them back in their case.

Two
miles down the road from the restaurant, we came to Starker’s,
which I hoped from the apostrophe was only a bar, not a strip club.
Their expansive parking lot was empty except for eight Chauffeurs,
all lined up like pigs at a trough. At least that meant we didn’t
have to worry about some drunk crashing into our van on his way out.

I
backed into the closest spot to the door. It was the best lit, so I
could worry less about our gear getting lifted. Close was also good
if the locals decided they didn’t like our looks.

We
got the long stare as we walked in, the one from old Westerns, where
all the heads swivel our way and the piano player stops playing.
Except, of course, these days the piano player didn’t stop, because
the piano player had no idea we’d arrived. The part of the pianist
in this scenario was played by Roy Bittan, alongside the whole E
Street Band, loud as a stadium and projected in StageHolo 3D.

“Do
you want to leave?” Jacky whispered to me.

“No,
it’s okay. We’re here now. Might as well have a drink.”

“At
least it’s Bruce. I can get behind Bruce.” Silva edged past me
toward the bar.

A few at leasts: at least it was Bruce, not some cut-rate imitation.
Bruce breathed punk as far as I was concerned, insisting on recording
new music and legit live shows all the way into his eighties. At
least it was StageHolo and not StageHoloLive, in which case there’d
be a cover charge. I was willing to stand in the same room as the
technology that was trying to make me obsolete, but I’d be damned
if I paid them for the privilege. Of course, it wouldn’t be Bruce
on StageHoloLive, either; he’d been gone a couple of years now, and
this Bruce looked to be only in his sixties, anyway. A little flat,
too, which suggested this was a retrofitted older show, not one
recorded using StageHolo’s tech.

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Matt Dixon
Cover design by Elizabeth Story

November 13, 2019

THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION preview: “Openness” by Alexander Weinstein

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alexander weinstein, elizabeth story, excerpt, hannu rajaniemi, jacob weisman, matt dixon, openess, preview, the new voices of science fiction

Openness

Alexander Weinstein

Before
I decided to finally give up on New York, I subbed classes at a
junior high in Brooklyn. A sixth grade math teacher suffering from
downloading anxiety was out for the year, and jobs being what they
were, I took any opportunity I could. Subbing math was hardly my
dream job; I had a degree in visual art, for which I’d be in debt
for the rest of my life. All I had to show for it was my senior
collection, a series of paintings of abandoned playgrounds, stored in
a U-Pack shed in Ohio. There was a time when I’d imagined I’d
become famous, give guest lectures at colleges, and have
retrospectives at MoMA. Instead, I found myself standing in front of
a class of apathetic tweens, trying to teach them how to do long
division without accessing their browsers. I handed out pen and
paper, so that for once in their lives they’d have a tactile
experience, and watched as they texted, their eyes glazed from
blinking off message after message. They spent most of the class
killing vampires and orcs inside their heads and humoring me by
lazily filling out my photocopies.

The
city overwhelmed me. Every day I’d walk by hundreds of strangers,
compete for space in crowded coffee shops, and stand shoulder to
shoulder on packed subway cars. I’d scan profiles, learning that
the woman waiting for the N enjoyed thrash-hop, and the barista at my
local coffee shop loved salted caramel. I’d had a couple fleeting
relationships, but mostly I’d spend weekends going to bars and
sleeping with people who knew little more than my username. It all
made me want to turn off my layers, go back to the old days, and stay
disconnected. But you do that and you become another old guy buried
in an e-reader, complaining about how no one sends emails anymore.

So I
stayed open, shared the most superficial info of my outer layer with
the world, and filtered through everyone I passed, hoping to find
some connection. Here was citycat5, jersygirl13, m3love. And then,
one morning, there was Katie, sitting across from me on the N. She
was lakegirl03, and her hair fell from under her knit cap. The only
other info I could access was her hometown and that she was single.

Hi,
I winked, and when I realized she had her tunes on, I sent off an
invite. She raised her eyes.

Hi,
she winked back.

You’re
from Maine? I’m planning a trip there this summer. Any suggestions?

She
leaned forward and warmth spread across my chest from being allowed
into her second layer. I’m Katie, she winked. You should
visit Bar Harbor, I grew up there. She gave me access to an image
of a lake house with tall silvery pines rising high above the
shingled roof. Wish I could help more, but this is my stop. As
she stood waiting for the doors to open, I winked a last message. Can
I invite you for a drink? The train hissed, the
doors opened, and she looked back at me and smiled before
disappearing into the mass of early morning commuters. It was as the
train sped toward work that her contact info appeared in my mind,
along with a photo of her swimming in a lake at dusk.

It
turned out that Katie had been in the city for a couple of years
before she’d found a steady job. She taught senior citizens how to
successfully navigate their layers. She’d helped a retired doctor
upload images of his grandchildren so strangers could congratulate
him, and assisted a ninety-three-year-old widow in sharing her
mourning with the world. Her main challenge, she said, was getting
older folks to understand the value of their layers.

“Every
class they ask me why we can’t just talk instead,” she shared as
we lay in bed. Though Katie and I occasionally spoke, it was always
accompanied by layers. It was tiring to labor through the sentences
needed to explain how you ran into a friend; much easier to share the
memory, the friend’s name and photo appearing organically.

“At
least they still want to speak. My class won’t even say hello.”

“You
remember what it was like before?” she asked.

I
tried to think back to high school, but it was fuzzy. I was sure we
used to talk more, but it seemed like we doled out personal details
in hushed tones.

“Not
really,” I said. “Do you?”

“Sure.
My family’s cabin is completely out of range. Whenever I go back we
can only talk.”

“What’s
that
like?”

She
shared a photo of walking in the woods with her father, the earth
covered in snow, and I felt the sharp edge of jealousy. Back where I
grew up, there hadn’t been any pristine forests to walk through,
just abandoned mini-marts, a highway, and trucks heading past our
town, which was more a pit stop than a community. The only woods were
behind the high school, a small dangerous place where older kids
might drag you if you didn’t run fast enough. And my parents sure
didn’t talk. My mother was a clinical depressive who’d spent my
childhood either behind the closed door of her bedroom or at the
kitchen table, doing crossword puzzles and telling me to be quiet
whenever I asked her something. My father had hit me so hard that
twice I’d blacked out. My history wasn’t the kind of thing I
wanted to unlock for anyone, and since leaving Ohio I’d done my
best to bury those memories within my layers.

So I
spent our first months sharing little of myself. Katie showed me the
memories of her best friends and family while I showed her the
mundane details of substitute teaching and my favorite bands. I knew
Katie could feel the contours of my hidden memories, like stones
beneath a bedsheet, but for a while she let me keep the private pain
of my unlocked layers.

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Matt Dixon
Cover design by Elizabeth Story

November 12, 2019

THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION preview: “One Hour, Every Seven Years” by Alice Sola Kim

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alice sola kim, excerpt, hannu rajaniemi, jacob weisman, one hour every seven years, preview, the new voices of science fiction

One Hour, Every Seven Years

Alice Sola Kim

When Margot is nine, she and her parents live on Venus. The surface
of Venus, at that time, is one enormous sea with a single continent
on its northern pole, perched there like a tiny, ridiculous top hat.
There is sea below, and sea above, rain continually plummeting from
the sky, endlessly self-renewing.

When
I am thirty, I won’t have turned out so hot. No one will know; from
a few feet away, I’ll seem fine. They won’t notice the dandruff,
the opalescent flaking of my chin. They won’t know that I walk hard
and deliberate, like a ’40s starlet in trousers, in order to
compensate for the wobbly heels of my crummy shoes. They won’t see
past my really great job. And it will be a great job, really. I will
be working with time machines.

When
Margot is nine, it has been five years since she has seen the sun. On
Venus, the sun comes out but once every seven years. Margot’s
family moved to Venus from Earth when she was four. This is the main
thing that makes her different from her classmates, who are just a
bunch of trashy Venus kids. Draftees and immigrants. Their parents
work at the desalination plants, the dormitory facilities; they plumb
and bail, they traverse Venus’s vast seas in ships and
submersibles, and sometimes they do not come back.

To
her classmates, Margot will never be Venusian, even though she’s
her palest clammiest self like a Venusian, and walks and talks like a
Venusian—with that lazy, slithering drawl. Why? First finger: she’s
a freak, quiet and standoffish, but given to horrible bursts of loud
friendliness that are so awkward, they make everyone hate her more
for trying. Second finger: her dad is rich and powerful, but she
still isn’t cool. The Venus kids don’t know it, but it isn’t
her wealth they hate. It is the waste of it. The way her boring hair
hangs against her fresh sweatshirts. The way she shuffles along in
her blinding new sneakers. Third finger, fourth, fifth, sixth,
seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth fingers, and all the toes too: in her
lifetime, Margot has seen the sun and they haven’t. Venus kids are
strong and mean and easily offended. They know there’s a thing they
should be getting that they’re not getting. And
that the next best thing to getting something is no one in the whole
world getting it.

When
I am thirty, I will have gotten my first boyfriend. He’ll be a
co-worker at the lab and I won’t have noticed him for the longest
time. Big laugh, right? You would think that, as some nobody who
nobody ever notices, I’d at least be the observant one by default,
the one who notices everyone else and forms complex opinions about
them, but, no, I will be a creature spiraled in upon myself, a shrimp
with a tail curled into its mouth.

Late
night at work, a group of people will be playing Jenga in the lounge.
The researchers love Jenga because it has the destructive meathead
glamour of sports but only a fraction of the physical peril. Anders
will ask me if I want to play and I’ll shake my head, hoping it
looks like I’m too cool for Jenga but also bemused and tolerant,
all of this hiding the truth, which is that I am terrified of Jenga.
I’m afraid of being the player who causes all of the blocks to
fall. Because that player is both appreciated and despised: on the
one hand they absorb the burden of causing the Fall, thus relieving
everyone else of said burden, but on the other hand, they are
responsible for ending the game prematurely, killing all the fun and
potential, not to mention the Jenga tower itself—the spindly
edifice that everyone worked so hard together to create and protect.

The
guy who will be my first boyfriend will push a block out without any
hesitation. He won’t poke at it first, he will go straight for the
block, and I will watch as the tower wobbles. It won’t fall. As he
takes the dislodged block and stacks it on his pile, he will make eye
contact with me, a carefully constructed look of surprise on his
face—mouth the shape of an O, eyebrows pushing his forehead
into pleats.

When
Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus. Her classmates lock her
inside a closet and run away. They are gone for precisely one hour.
When her classmates finally come back to let Margot out, it will be
too late.

When
I am thirty, I will have been at my great job, the job of working
with time machines, long enough to learn their codes and security
measures (I’ve even come up with a few myself), so I will do the
thing that I didn’t even know I was planning to do all along. I
will enter the time machine, emerging behind a desk in the school I
attended when I was nine. Water droplets will condense on the walls.
There is no way to keep out the damp on Venus. The air in the
classroom will taste like the air in a bedroom where someone has just
had a sweaty nightmare. I will hide during all of the ruckus, but
don’t worry: I will work up the courage. I will stand and open the
closet door and do what needs to be done. And I will return!

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Matt Dixon
Cover design by Elizabeth Story

November 7, 2019

THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION preview: “IN THE SHARING PLACE” by David Erik Nelson

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized david erik nelson, elizabeth story, excerpt, hannu rajaniemi, in the sharing place, jacob weisman, matt dixon, preview, the new voices of science fiction

IN THE SHARING PLACE

David Erik Nelson

Children
are brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died.

You
must always use the present perfect tense and passive voice: “A
loved one has died.” Not “A loved one is dead,” and never “this
killed a loved one” or “a loved one was killed by
that”
or even “a loved one died because of the other
thing.”

The
actual circumstances of the death are inconsequential. They have
nothing to do with why children are brought (note the passive voice)
to the Sharing Place, nor when they will leave the Sharing Place.

Children
are brought to the Sharing Place because a loved one has died and,
despite being young, they may very well still suffer Rejection if
they fail to process this grief.

And
just about the only thing we can do for our children now is help them
avoid Rejection.

I. DENIAL

There
are three rules at the Children’s Sharing Place. The first is that
a child may leave at any time, provided they attest that they are
ready to leave on two separate occasions.

The
boy with the long hair that hangs over his eyes does not speak for
his first two sessions in group. On the third session the first thing
he says is that he is ready to leave.

He
shouldn’t even be here, he explains. His father isn’t dead, he
insists.

“Augie,”
you say, “your father has died.”

Augie
does not speak again for the remainder of the session.

The
next day, he repeats that he is ready to leave.

You
say nothing, because that is the therapeutic protocol. This protocol
demands impartiality and discipline: A child who has self-selected to
leave will not progress further if forced to stay in the Sharing
Place. Worse yet, a non-progressing child could derail the others’
progress.

You
remain silent, but the other children attempt to talk sense into him.
They Bargain. This is appropriate.

They
tell Augie he can’t go, because he just got there, because he
hasn’t resolved any of his issues, because he hasn’t Said It
yet, hasn’t even started to Say It. They say that if
he goes into the Waiting Room now, he’s definitely going to get
Rejected. They say that he can go but doesn’t have to: he
can still just go back to the dorms and then have dinner and then go
to bed and then get up and then go to class and then return to their
next session. He doesn’t have to leave, even if he said he
wants to leave. Fifty-seven minutes pass this way.

“Our
time is almost up for today,” you say.

Augie
stands without a word and opens the Waiting Room Door. Beyond the
Waiting Room Door is a small waiting room—just a pair of
upholstered yellow chairs and a side table with a fan of three
magazines. The top magazine is Ranger Rick. You have never
been in the waiting room, and so do not know what the other two
magazines may be. There is also a potted plant. There must be a
draft, because the potted plant nods rhythmically, like the quiet old
lady knitting in the rocking chair in Goodnight Moon.

And,
of course, there is the other door, the EXIT. The word “EXIT”
glows above it in red. It probably isn’t even three long strides
from the Waiting Room Door to the EXIT.

Augie
steps through the Waiting Room Door and gingerly shuts it behind him.
The door latch clicks, then there is the faint sigh of the EXIT
door, followed by a big and sudden sound, like an alligator
roaring and rolling in a swamp. And then silence.

“Our
time is up for today,” you begin to say, but just after you say
“time,” Augie’s scream interrupts you. It is a truly agonized
scream, loud and long and ragged. It doesn’t end, so much as fade.
There is whimpering and crying for a long time after. But this
whimpering is quiet, and the other children in the Sharing Place
understand your words this time. They file out the main door, back to
the dorms and mess hall and everything else down here in their
sheltered world.

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF SCIENCE FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Matt Dixon
Cover design by Elizabeth Story

August 28, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: ”Enyo-Enyo”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elizabeth story, enyo-enyo, excerpt, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from a “brilliant story collection.” (Grimdark Magazine)

Enyo-Enyo

by Kameron Hurley

Enyo
meditated at mealtimes within the internode, huffing liquor vapors
from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the
satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckered skein of the
peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

She recited her own name first.

Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor,
slowing losing shape as the satellite she commanded spun back to the
beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of
knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

She had named the ship after herself—Enyo-Enyo—without any
hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous
laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second,
Reeb, amused himself often at her shattering attempt at humor.

After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green
quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had
come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that
season in her childhood.

“Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We
can manage the internode ourselves. Besides, they don’t make
engineers the way they did eight turns ago.”

“There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes,
there’s the prisoner.”

It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the
tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internode to the holding
pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

Each time, she greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous
green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in
propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the
body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who
knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had
seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million
dead. A system destroyed.

The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face
a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most
sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled
a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black
fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body
absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of
fulfillment.

Enyo usually went straight back to the internode to recite her lists
of dead, after. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat,
gurgling drive that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had
been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become when they
reached its destination. She lost track of time in these intimate
reveries, often. After half a rotation of contemplation, Reeb would
do a sweep of the satellite. He would find her alive and intact, and
perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the
engineers or concocting a vile hallucinogen the gelatinous
consistency of aloe. They were a pair of two, a crew of three,
picking up rim trash and mutilated memories in the seams between the
stars during the long night of their orbit around the galactic core.

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 27, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: “The Plague Givers”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elizabeth story, excerpt, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview, the plague hunters

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “the literary sci-fi equivalent of a progressive rock album for punks.” (Starburst)

The Plague Givers

by Kameron Hurley

Inside
the tree, well insulated from the view of the two figures in the
boat, a thick, grubby woman raised her head from her work. In one
broad hand she held the stuffed skin of an eyeless toy hydra; in the
other, a piece of wire strung with a long white matte of hair. An
empty brown bottle sat at her elbow, though it took more than a
bottle of plague-laced liquor to mute her sense for plague days. She
thumbed her spectacles from her nose and onto her head. She placed
the half-finished hydra on the table and took her machete from the
shelf. The night air wasn’t any cooler than the daytime shade, so
she went shirtless. Sweat dripped from her generous body and
splattered across the floor as she got up.

Her
forty-pound swamp rodent, Mhev, snorted from his place at her feet
and rolled onto his doughy legs. She snapped her fingers and pointed
to his basket under the stairs. He ignored her, of course, and
started grunting happily at the idea of company.

The
woman rolled her brown, meaty shoulders and moved up to the left of
the door like a woman expecting a fight. She hadn’t had a fight in
fifteen years, but her body remembered the drill. She called, “You’re
trespassing. Move on.”

The
voice replied—young and stupidly confident, maybe two years out of
training in the city, based on the accent, “The whole of this
territory was claimed by the Imperial Community of the Forked Ash
over a decade ago. As representatives of the Community, and scholars
of the Contagion College, we are within our rights in this waterway,
as we have come to seek your assistance in a matter which you are
bound by oath to serve.”

The
woman did not like city children, as she knew they were the most
dangerous children of all. Yet here they were again, shouting at her
door like rude imbeciles.

She
pushed open the door, casting light onto the little boat and its
slender occupants. They wore the long black robes and neat purple
collars of the Order of the Plague Hunters. When she had worn those
robes, long ago, they did not seem as ridiculous as they now looked
on these skinny young people.

“Elzabet
Addisalam?” the tall one said. That one was clearly a shoman, hair
twisted into braided rings, ears pierced, brows plucked. The other
one could have been anything—man, woman, shoman, pan. In her day,
everyone dressed as their correct gender, with the hairstyles and
clothing cuts to match, but fashions were changing, and she was out
of date. It had become increasingly difficult to tell shoman from
pan, man from woman, the longer she stayed up here. Fashion changed
quickly. Pans dressed like men these days. Shomans like pans. And on
and on. It made her head hurt.

She
kept her machete up. “I’m called Bet, out here,” she said. “And
what are you? If you’re dressing up as Plague Hunters, I’ll have
some identification before you go pontificating all over my porch.”

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 24, 2019

A week’s worth of previews from MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elephant and corpses, elizabeth story, excerpt, garda, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview, the corpse archives

In celebration for the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “one of the best short story collections you will read this year.” (B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog)

This week’s previews included

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 22, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: ”Garda”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elizabeth story, excerpt, garda, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview

In celebration of the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic.” (Publishers Weekly)

Garda

by Kameron Hurley

Abijah
finished her first can of rum as the world began to grow more
bearable at the edges. A persistent message tap-tapped at the edge of
her vision, a little red arrow indicating a conferenced call from
Maurille and Savida. She brooded on it a long moment, then popped
open the other can and accepted the call. The safety notification
asked her to confirm she was not currently mobile or operating any
type of machinery. She checked “no” and her wives’ faces filled
her vision.

Maurille
and Savida projected an image of themselves that was certainly far
removed from wherever they were currently holidaying on the
continent. They both looked severe and buttoned up, as if expecting a
business negotiation to break out at any moment. Maurille, tall and
lean, like an exceptionally well-bred tree, was older, her face
softer now around the edges. Maurille and Abijah had married first,
and Savida had come later, a slim woman a decade their junior whose
fisher-family had supported her schooling in bio-environmentalism on
the continent and then welcomed her back as a local government
resource steward. Somehow the two of Abijah’s spouses grew more
serious, brought together, no doubt, when Abijah had gone away to the
war. When Abijah came back, maybe, there had been time to repair what
the three of them had, but she hadn’t been ready back then. Wasn’t
ready now.

“Are
you drinking?” Maurille asked, softly concerned.

“Nah,”
Abijah said, sipping her rum.

Savida
made a face, because though Abijah had chosen a fine upstanding image
of herself to project to them, they could certainly hear everything.

“We’re
calling about the dog,” Maurille said.

“What
dog?” Abijah said.

“There
was a dog in the apartment,” Savida said, “when we came to get
our overnight bags for the trip up. Did you get a dog?”

Abijah
turned to look around the room; the motion of her head flipped the
full-screen of the faces to the bottom left corner of one eye,
letting her get a view of her actual surroundings instead of the
projected ones. “No dog here,” Abijah said, but she got up
anyway, sipping the rum as she did, and checked the two bedrooms, the
closet, and the little balcony, just in case.

“No
dog,” Abijah said. “No paw prints. Not even a shit.”

Maurille
said, “It was quite clearly in the apartment.”

A
knock came at the door. Distracted, Abijah wondered if Pats had come
back to try and lick the inside of the pastry box. She opened the
door, hoping for a distraction from her wives—and got a fist in her
face.

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

August 21, 2019

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE by Kameron Hurley preview: “Elephants and Corpses”

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized carl sutton, elephant and corpses, elizabeth story, excerpt, kameron hurley, meet me in the future, preview

In celebration of the release of Kameron Hurley’s MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, Tachyon presents glimpses from “one of the best short story collections you will read this year.” (B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog)

Elephants and Corpses

by Kameron Hurley

Bodies
are only beautiful when they aren’t yours. It’s why Nev had
fallen in love with bodies in the first place. When you spent time
with the dead you could be anyone you wanted to be. They didn’t
know any better. They didn’t want to have long conversations about
it. They were vehicles. Transport. Tools. They were yours in a way
that no living thing ever could be.

Nev
stood at the end of the lower city’s smallest pier with Tera, his
body manager, while she snuffled and snorted with some airborne
contagion meant to make her smarter. She was learning to talk to the
dead, she said, and you only picked up a skill like that if you went
to some viral wizard who soaked your head in sputum and said a prayer
to the great glowing wheel of God’s eye that rode the eastern
horizon. Even now, the boiling mass of stars that made up the God’s
eye nebula was so bright Nev could see it in broad daylight. It was
getting closer, the priests all said. Going to gobble them up like
some cancer.

Why
Tera needed to talk to the dead when Nev did just fine with them as
they were was a mystery. But it was her own body, her slice of the
final take to spend, and he wasn’t going to argue about what she
did with it.

“You
buying these bodies or not?” said the old woman in the pirogue.
She’d hooked the little boat to the snarling amber head of a
long-mummified sea serpent fixed to the pier. In Nev’s fascination
with the dead body, he’d forgotten about the live one trying to
sell it to him.

“Too
rotten,” Tera said.

“Not
if we prepare it by day’s end,” Nev said. “Just the big one,
though. The kid, I can’t do anything with.”

He
pulled out a hexagonal coin stamped with the head of some long-dead
upstart; a senator, maybe, or a juris priest. The old folks in charge
called themselves all sorts of things over the years, but their money
spent the same. He wondered for a minute if the bodies were related;
kid and her secondary father, or kid and prime uncle. They were both
beginning to turn, now, the bodies slightly bloated, overfull, but he
could see the humanity, still; paintings in need of restoration.

“Some
body merc you are!” the old woman said. “Underpaying for prime
flesh. This is good flesh, here.” She rubbed her hands suggestively
over the body’s nearly hairless pate.

Nev
jabbed a finger at the empty pier behind him; she arrived with her
bodies too late—the fish mongers had long since run out of stock,
and the early risers had gone home. “Isn’t exactly a crowd, is
there?” He pushed his coat out of the way, revealing the curved
hilt of his scimitar.

She
snarled at him. It was such a funny expression, Nev almost laughed.
He flipped her the coin and told Tera to bring up the cart. Tera
grumbled and snuffled about it, but within a few minutes the body was
loaded. Tera took hold of the lead on their trumpeting miniature
elephant, Falid, and they followed the slippery boardwalk of the
humid lower city into the tiers of the workhouses and machinery shops
of the first circle. While they walked, Falid gripped Nev’s hand
with his trunk. Nev rubbed Falid’s head with his other hand. Falid
had been with him longer than Tera; he’d found the little elephant
partly skinned and left to rot in an irrigation ditch ten years
before. He’d nursed him back to health on cabbage and mango slices,
back when he could afford mangos.

For info on MEET ME IN THE FUTURE, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Carl Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Story

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