Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 178

By Neil Clarke, Karen Osborne, Grace Chan and 5 more

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our July 2021 issue (#178) contains:

• Original fiction by Karen Osborne ("Promises We Made Under A Brick-Dark Sky"), Grace Chan ("He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars"), Nick Wolven ("When the Sheaves Are Gathered"), Samantha Murray ("Preserved in Amber"), Leonid Kaganov ("I'm Feeling Lucky"), M V Melcer ("The Falling"), and Rich Larson ("Last Nice Day").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Andrew Liptak and interviews with Tommy Arnold and Sheree Renee Thomas, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Jul 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642360851

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

Book preview

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 178

Table of Contents

Promises We Made Under A Brick-Dark Sky

by Karen Osborne

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars

by Grace Chan

When the Sheaves Are Gathered

by Nick Wolven

Preserved in Amber

by Samantha Murray

I’m Feeling Lucky

by Leonid Kaganov

The Falling

by M V Melcer

Last Nice Day

by Rich Larson

Destination Mercury

by Andrew Liptak

Perpetual Training: An Interview with Tommy Arnold

by Arley Sorg

Connected to Culture: A Conversation with Sheree Renée Thomas

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: An In-House Holiday

by Neil Clarke

Garden

Art by Alejandro Burdisio

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2021

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Promises We Made Under A Brick-Dark Sky

Karen Osborne

I was standing on the dock when the angels fell.

Their blades stilled. Their lights dimmed. Their corpses shattered on streets and shingles and skulls, all the way from the cathedral at the crest of the world down to the blackwater at the end of it, where I waited on the dock with my baby. The noise was all crashing and squealing and screams—a bawling dirge for the world as it was, and a birthing-song for the world it would become.

From here, I could see into the windows of the bayside chapel, where the fisher-monks that had taken me in took their daily guidance from the god. All that remained was the scattered, swimming static of divine death, as cold and gray as a recycled human heart. The fisher-monks spilled out onto the street, screaming about the steel-prowed beast and the boundless obliteration and the end of all things. They’d fed us for eighteen months, taught me their prophecies, showed me how to fish and swim and survive. They’d taught me the divine language.

And I’d killed their god with it.

Our god.

Brothers and sisters, until that moment—sweating, shaking in ecstatic terror, my arms aching with the warm and wriggling weight of the most important person that ever lived—I did not believe the god could die. Certainly a god as powerful as ours, that dictated how we were to live and farm and marry, would not allow itself to be killed. But dead it was, and taking the world with it; far above, fires had caught where the angels had fallen, clogging the brick-dark sky with waves of black smoke. I could taste the broken air already, bright with stinking incandescence.

No, I thought, no, I killed the god to save us, not to burn us, and prayers sprung to my lips and died there in one breath. My daughter buried her face in the crook of my neck and cried, and in the blank space between her first long wail and the huffing, anger-caught sobs that followed, I doubted.

He’s coming, I whispered. He’s on his way. Your daddy is coming. The ship is coming.

It was the only prayer I had left.

Her smoke-drowned cry curled around my brain stem like a shot of adrenaline. Her little knuckles turned white on the edges of my robe, crying and crying and crying, screaming mamamama like she knew what I’d done. I knew my prayer would not help. In her circumscribed life so far, her father was as useless and dead as the god.

And with that, a new thought slipped in with the silt from the street: that the god had never existed in the first place.

That we were the god now, my daughter and I.

Steret arrived minutes later, out of breath from the run, a gun in each hand, looking for all the world like the burning wind delivered him there. Brothers and sisters, he was barely a silhouette of the boy I had known in the hills, a ragged black space drawn dark against the orange flames behind him. He was older now, but just as beautiful, fine silt and sand coloring his ash-bright hair.

I moved to greet him, my lips parting, joy in my throat, to say meet your daughter, finally, take her, look at her, when a woman in city silks, clattered heavy and unexpected onto the dock behind me. She was round-hipped and wife-beautiful where I was hunger-thin and monk-plain, and my elation choked in the smoke whirling in drunken circles around our feet.

We need to move, Ster, she said. Where’s the ship?

I moved my crying child to my other shoulder, fashioning a baby carrier out of a forgotten fishing net. We?

The prophecy says a ship will come. We need to be on it. The woman paused. Narrowed her eyes. You didn’t tell her.

Steret wavered. How was I supposed to tell her?

A letter?

And have it be tracked by the angels?

"You should have told her."

He hauled in a shuddering breath. Checked his gun. Elissa. This is Anaro, my wife. My second wife.

I felt a wild dizziness. The angels gave him two wives while I was waiting for him to return? And he didn’t push back?

"This was for us, I said. You and I and the baby, you said there was a place we could be together. You said—what if we could live for fifty years and marry whom we pleased? You said—what if I could marry only you?"

Brothers and sisters, this promise had been a hot infection in my heart for the last two years, this memory of the two of us lying together on the hill above the cemetery farm, so close to heaven that we could see the rough outline of the sky above us, as brown and loamy as the ground below. We met as our mothers entered the recycler, as the monks tried to comfort us, saying that their death was blessed, that they would live underground forever, feeding the teeming thousands in the city below. We knew better about that—about our mothers, about ourselves, about all of it.

There was nothing blessed about how we were dying, about the illness that came up through the lungs in blood and black ichor. And the dead interred in the mushroom fields were getting younger every year. I had already begun to cough. Steret’s brothers were already dead and recycled—so, so young. And so we’d spent those long funereal days near the horizon, our hands and bodies and lips speaking a poetry I’d never thought possible.

And when Steret returned the city to enter his god-dictated marriage, I discovered there was a network for girls like me, for girls who are too poor and too sick with ichor to marry, who love someone hard enough to break the god’s restrictions on when a baby can be born.

And now—

Steret went silent and straight. In the bright firelight, I could see his cheeks flush, and he pointed at my daughter.

Is that—

I haven’t named her.

"Focus, Steret," Anaro snapped.

I swung my eyes back onto the other woman. "She isn’t coming."

Steret sighed. The plan didn’t work. The cathedral guards wouldn’t let me in. I had to improvise. Anaro had to bring the prayer to the cathedral in my stead. You don’t expect me to leave her to die?

I pointed up the hill. "Obviously, she messed it up."

Anaro exhaled. I didn’t write the prayer. If there is anyone who is responsible for this, it’s you.

I didn’t mean—

Of course you didn’t. Her eyes flickered down to my squirming baby. But that’s your thing, huh?

Brothers and sisters, these are my true confessions. I will be frank. I did not want her there. I wanted to rip the gun from Steret’s hand and end the question of this sudden and ant-waisted gulf between us.

But I was not going to be the kind of god I had just slaughtered.

I pointed instead at the bags and crates at the dock, at Steret’s shovels and torches and tunneling tools. Fine. When the ship comes, carry these aboard.

Anaro did not answer—just looked over my shoulder. I followed her glassy gaze toward the end of the pier. Beyond was the great, wide darkness where no human could go, with a heavy, dark humidity rolling in—

—no, not just a darkness, a slickening obliteration—

—and behind that, a ship coming.

It was just as the prophecy said—a behemoth of plain, ancient metal, curved and smooth, dark water dripping from the rails and balustrades. It cut the surface of the quiet water like blood welling up around the edge of a knife. No oars, no wheel—just a grinding, growling sound that split the fish in the bay into two frightened schools, their tiny, slippery, ghost-white bodies disappearing into the darkness. I looked, and looked, and looked, but could find no true reason why it would move.

Steret loaded one of the guns and shoved it in my hand. We were right, he said. Get ready. If there are demons aboard, we take the ship for ourselves.

I looked down at my daughter’s scrunched-up face, her tight fists, her shaking shoulders. I was willing to kill a god for her—so why was I so afraid?

Steret—

We already killed the god, he said. You can kill a demon.

You did nothing, I thought, and then there was no more time to dwell—we watched a rope fly out from the deck of the ship, flopping limp against the edge of the pier. Above, the demons appeared in their hellish orange carapaces, their mock-human faces trapped behind the same clear heavenly material the fisher-monks used in water purification ceremonies. They carried bags marked with the sign of hell: two blood-red lines, crossed in the center.

They breathe a different air, the monks had told me, and they are blind from living in a constant fire humanity could hardly imagine. When they come here, they bring the air of hell with them in baskets on their backs. If you take their helmets off, they choke.

One of the demons opened his mouth, and sound came from a grille in front of his carapace. It sounded like language, like speech, calm like the few memories I had of my father’s voice before the coughing sickness took him below the earth. He moved forward, indicating that he would come down to our level.

Come no further, Steret roared. The ship is ours.

Behind us, a crowd was forming, a sobbing, angry mass of people covered in soot and tears and utter confusion. Even if I had wanted something different than Steret, even if I thought I could negotiate with demons, it was too late.

I told Steret I would follow him. I had to follow him. He was the one I loved. I yanked the gun from his hand. Held my baby light and kind with one, and the gun tight and hot in the other. I would kill for her, I’d said. Over and over and over.

Do it! he screamed.

I aimed. Closed my eyes.

Pulled the trigger.

Brothers and sisters, I know you have many questions about our journey, just as I know you have suffered since the death of the god.

Put simply: the god had to die. The ship had to come. The algorithmic prayers were wrong. The divine mathematics that linked men and women to one another had gone sour and unnoticed by the angels. Why would a god create children just to slip the smoke and ichor into their lungs, so mothers and fathers could watch their children writhe and gasp, their mouths open and breathless to the stone-caught sky? My daughter needed to live. I needed to live. Isn’t that enough of an answer?

We piled on the ship, using ropes and nets and pulleys. The fisher-monks worked in a neighborhood full of mushroom farmers and body recyclers and factory workers, and we took as many of them as we could, until Anaro realized that the ship was moving of its own volition—that even though the demons had died, they’d left behind some still-active prayer. When the ship turned away from the dock and picked up speed, I watched people on the shore throw themselves into the bay, falling under the water because they could not swim, choosing that death over the fire. And then—the city was gone, the world was gone, and from a place no human had ever ventured, we watched orange light hit the russet sky, making torches of the roots of heaven.

I vomited over the side of the ship.

Get over it, Anaro said.

Have some humanity.

Anaro narrowed her eyes. You wrote the prayer. I didn’t think you’d be concerned.

The baby grabbed at my matted hair, and I loosened the carrier, placing her on the deck. My shoulders ached. I needed a break. The baby looked around, her eyes wide, shoving her fingers in her mouth, excited by her new surroundings. I didn’t know the angels could start fires. There’s only so much air in the world. Nothing we do will matter if we come back to a city full of corpses.

You should have thought of that.

You shouldn’t have married—

Both of you. Stop. Steret squatted over the demon bodies. He’d dragged them to the center of the top deck and was using his day-knife to cut through their orange carapaces, revealing feet and fingers and faces that looked entirely too human. If I hadn’t already known that we were in the right, I would have started to question myself.

I’d imagined our reunion in shades of red and brown, passionate, and close, and skintight. This felt cold. Gray. Wrong. Steret, I need you to meet your daughter.

In a second, he said.

You don’t have to recycle them. There are no machines here, and it’s not like you can bury them in a field.

Steret didn’t look up from his task. His knife had moved to the demon-skins, slicing into the fatty, bloody layer beneath. I don’t know what happens if I don’t.

Nothing happens. The god is dead. There’s nobody left to stop us living how we choose.

Then who sent the ship?

The ship is in the prophecy, I said. "If the colony core machinery can no longer function, an automatic fail-safe beacon will be dispatched, and a rescue ship will arrive within—"

His hand tightened on the knife, which came back red. "I know. But we didn’t think. If the god is dead, who dispatched the ship?"

I felt a stab of bright annoyance. The baby started crawling toward the dead bodies, her fingers raking at the silent bootlaces. "Now you’re troubleshooting?"

I don’t know, he said. I didn’t actually think the ship would arrive.

"You what?"

He looked down.

Behind us, Anaro found something useful to do, organizing the monks and factory workers milling around on the deck. A smart thing to do, replacing the god’s rules and algorithms with a structure that frightened people could follow for now. I was absurdly grateful to her; since I was an illegal mother of an extra mouth, I could not step forward to lead, and if Steret tried, I’d punch him in the jaw.

He must have seen it written on my face, that he’d gone too far, and he dropped the knife. I got your letters. All of them. And I wasn’t just going to let you die in the basement of some fisher-abbey. I thought I’d humor you.

And then what?

He flushed as red as my anger. I thought you’d finally realize that the baby wasn’t a good idea, that you’d have it recycled like all the other extras.

And die on the street? You told me I’d be the only one! We were in love!

He stared at the demon’s cracked skull. We can’t fight reality, Liss.

But we did. And we won.

I heard a squeal. I had not seen the baby crawl forward and close her tiny fingers around the bloodied hilt of the knife. I swore, dropping to the deck like a stone, wrestling the thing out of her deadlocked hands. I cast the knife aside, and it skittered toward the sloshing water; my baby cried. Furious that I’d saved her, just like her father.

You don’t leave knives out around babies! She doesn’t even have a name, if something happened to her now—

He blinked. You never named her?

I was waiting on you.

I was thinking—

I swept her up in my arms. And now you won’t get to.

With her weight against me, I felt ungainly. My legs burned.