Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 201

By Neil Clarke, Dominica Phetteplace, Carrie Vaughn and 6 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 June 2023 issue (#201) contains:

• Original fiction by Dominica Phetteplace ("The Officiant"), Carrie Vaughn ("Vast and Trunkless Legs of Stone"), Isabel J. Kim ("Day Ten Thousand"), Angela Liu ("Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon"), David Ebenbach ("The Moon Rabbi"), Jana Bianchi (". . . Your Little Light"), Bella Han ("To Helen"), and Rajeev Prasad ("Mirror View").
• Non-fiction includes an article by Julie Novakova, interviews with Vajra Chandrasekera and Kemi Ashing-Giwa, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642361421

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 201

Table of Contents

The Officiant

by Dominica Phetteplace

Vast and Trunkless Legs of Stone

by Carrie Vaughn

Day Ten Thousand

by Isabel J. Kim

Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon

by Angela Liu

The Moon Rabbi

by David Ebenbach

. . . Your Little Light

by Jana Bianchi

To Helen

by Bella Han

Mirror View

by Rajeev Prasad

Life without Water, and Where to Find It

by Julie Nováková

Decades of Aspiration: A Conversation with Vajra Chandrasekera

by Arley Sorg

Stories about Unnamed People: A Conversation with Kemi Ashing-Giwa

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: Do I Have To?

by Neil Clarke

Raid

Art by Pascal Blanché

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2023

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Officiant

Dominica Phetteplace

I came to Tau to perform a wedding.

The Strangers met our ship at the dock, wearing hooded robes that obscured their appearance. The only clue to what they might look like occurred in the form of a single pair of forelimbs, which were sleeved and pale. Three-fingered hands protruded from those sleeves.

There were three of them, and they bowed deeply when they met me. They spoke their greetings in highly formal English, my native language.

I gave my greeting in Raxian, the predominant language of the planet where I resided, and then asked the hooded figure nearest me: What is the word for your people?

You call us Strangers. The term suffices.

The head diplomat shot me a look. I was not to press the point. I was hoping to find a more neutral word for them, in English or Raxian. The Strangers had their own language, but they didn’t want us to learn one word of it, not even the word they used for themselves.

We had our first meeting in the Central Hall. I saw less than a dozen other Strangers, all hooded, during the hour or so it took us to get to our destination. The diplomats and I were provided with simple stools in the main chamber. The Strangers remained standing.

Someone asked me something.

I’m sorry, I didn’t hear. Truthfully, I hadn’t been paying attention, but it seemed rude to admit as much. I was struck by the cavernous room we were in. Chairless, furnitureless, but elaborate in the contours of the ceiling and the walls. The Strangers had apparently never met an arch they weren’t fond of. Windows larger than swimming pools looked out upon a desert landscape and an atmosphere made yellow by an excess of sulfur dioxide.

I had never been on another planet before. I had been born on Raxia and spent my whole life there. Plain as everything was, it was still alien to me.

We’d like to see a vision, one of the Strangers said to me, presumably repeating themselves.

Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I was here to officiate a wedding. I went back to staring out the window. A plume of dust flew by, briefly resembling a murmuration of birds. An illusion, albeit a pretty one. I had pored over the scant information available about the planet on the journey over. Tau had once hosted abundant and diverse ecosystems, now only microbes were able to survive on its surface.

But perhaps we can start with a vision, the Stranger insisted.

I tore my sight away from the window. No, I replied, looking directly at the Diplomat now. He once more shot me one of his meaningful looks. I ignored this one. I no longer perform visions. I’m here for a wedding. When can I meet the betrothed?

The Strangers tilted their hooded heads at one another in a manner consistent with the silent transmission of information.

That is us.

I didn’t answer right away. I let my silence communicate my skepticism. It shouldn’t have taken them so long to answer me.

Can you tell me something about yourselves? How did you meet?

We’d prefer not to say.

I’ll need to know something about each of you to perform the ceremony. A cute story or something I can relate to the crowd. It’s part of my routine.

The hooded figures said nothing.

You have to understand, on my home planet, I’m a holy person. I take these ceremonies seriously.

More silence.

May I speak to you privately? the Diplomat finally asked me.

No, I replied. Once you got that first no out of your system, the rest flowed easily. I need to rest first. It’s been a long journey.

The Central Hall was a compound bigger than most Raxian cities. I had been assigned a large room on a high floor. The walls were painted a pretty shade of lavender and the room itself was filled with soft textiles and had a view of the barren ochre plain. In the distance I could see dark mountains.

Are those volcanoes? I asked the drone that had acted as my escort. It was a tetrapod that had long front limbs and short back limbs. It walked in a mostly upright posture that vaguely reminded me of old zoo footage I had seen. Like an Earth monkey knuckle walking, only this monkey was spindly and hairless.

Lightning may be visible after sundown. Do not be alarmed, as it is of no consequence, it replied. Its voice reminded me of the famous Raxian actress Gurngun, whom I greatly admired. I didn’t know if that was because the Strangers programmed it that way for my benefit or if the drone itself was a fan of Raxian holodramas.

Wait! I need to connect my device. Thousands of microsatellites orbited Tau, but we were only permitted to connect to a specific one to send and receive messages. I handed the drone my tablet and a moment later it handed it back. It didn’t look like it had done anything at all, but when I opened my inbox, I saw that new messages had come in. The most recent one had come from the Diplomat. It had been sent just moments ago.

It was a dense paragraph of text, so I skimmed it and replied with a message of my own: I need lunch.

I took my meal at a stone table in a vast dining hall. The first course was a clear, brown broth studded with Earth vegetables. I tasted potatoes, carrots, and celery. These were rare on Raxia. They must have grown them in anticipation of my arrival. It was incredibly delicious. I drank it quickly and pinged the drone for seconds.

My second bowl was brought out by a Stranger.

At my insistence, the three Strangers in the diplomatic delegation had adopted names: Moses, Luke, and Sarah. They had picked them from the Bible in deference to the religion of my parents. I would have to explain to them that this was not my faith. For our part, we were told to infer neither gender identity nor personality traits from the choice of names. Pretend they are random selections, the Diplomat wrote in his message, as if I could somehow forget all the stories I had grown up with.

You like the soup? There was a newly embroidered M on the sleeve of this Stranger’s robe. Moses.

I love it. An old family recipe? I laughed at my own joke. The Stranger was silent. To answer me yes or no would imply they had a family.

We cannot supply any information about our kin groups.

That’s too bad. I need that kind of information if I’m to perform a wedding ceremony. I was told you would teach me about your society when I arrived.

We promised no such thing.

The Diplomat had lied to get me here, so eager was he to see the closed planet. The solar system that contained Tau was surrounded by a network of drones that blocked passage and blunted Raxian telescopes under ordinary circumstances.

Why did you invite me here? I asked. Why lower your force field at all?

For a vision.

I understand that, but why do you need to see my visions? There are others who can do what I do.

We cannot say.

The truth is important to me, I said. I feel like I have been lied to. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding on your part. Or perhaps the Diplomat deceived me. But regardless, I want to feel like I’m working in the service of the truth. It’s not possible to feel that way in the absence of so much information. You have to tell me something about yourself.

The Stranger was silent for a long time. During the silence, another hooded figure approached us. The second Stranger said nothing at all but stood next to Moses. They raised their sleeve to rest on Moses’ shoulder for a moment, long enough for me to see the embroidered L they wore. Luke lowered their hand and left as silently as they entered.

You need information to perform visions? Moses continued as if Luke had not interrupted us.

No, I need information to feel like I didn’t waste the two years it took to come here. Two years was a quick trip considering Tau was over five hundred lightyears from Raxia. The Strangers had built us a special wormhole to ease our passage.

Moses tilted their head side to side. Their movements reminded me of an antenna locating a signal. I assumed they were wirelessly communicating with the others. After a minute, they removed one hand with the other and laid it on the table. The three fingered hand had been a prosthesis. It had been sheathed in a pale, reptilian skin that made it look organic. Just another ruse.

I heard a clicking sound and saw a robotic hand emerge from the sleeve that had once held the prosthesis. This hand also had three fingers, like the old hand, like the Diplomat’s hand.

With a whir, the palm of the robotic hand turned up and emitted one image after another. It was a slideshow. The images were snapshots of visions I had projected.

These are very important to us. We have been watching them.

Can you tell me why?

I cannot.

Lunch was an additional twelve courses. I ate while Moses flipped through the projections. It was nice to revisit past work. Here was a scene of a lake. Here was a lunar eclipse, seen from the top of a mountain. There were pictures of nebula I had dreamed of, and one of the nearby white hole. Moses refused to answer any more of my questions, so I returned the favor, spending the rest of the meal in near silence.

I brought dessert back to my quarters. I could eat my brownie sandwich while catching up on my inbox.

There were dozens of messages from my family. All my parents and most of my siblings and cousins were getting ready to board the next Generation Ship. They would leave Raxia before I got back from Tau. I would not see them again.

There was a light rapping at my door, done in a series of quick triplets. This was Orsol’s signature knock. It used all three of her knuckles.

Come in, I said.

Ah, I didn’t mean to intrude, she said when she saw the photos in the projection of my inbox. You could ask the Diplomat to delay their departure. He knows how to pull strings.

I don’t want to go with them.

I know that. But you might want to say goodbye.

I don’t want to do that either. I think I came here to avoid seeing them leave. They’re so stupid for leaving.

Orsol was silent. She squinted and tilted her head toward the ceiling. Then she looked right at me, almost through me. Her third eye had been damaged in an accident when she was first starting out as a mechanic. The socket had been stitched over, all that remained was a very faint scar. What made so many Raxians reject her made her more attractive to me. I liked that she only had two eyes. It made her look alien and human at the same time.

I’m so stupid for coming here, I said, giving voice to what I thought she was thinking.

Orsol embraced me. Then we made love. After we were done, we lay next to each other in the darkness. I felt myself fall asleep. In the liminal space between waking and dreaming, I had a vision.

The image that projected from me was a jungle teeming with animals. It lasted only a few seconds.

Neat, said Orsol. My vision was a light that surrounded us. Many observers told me it was like being in virtual reality.

You don’t, uh, feel differently about anything, do you?

You’re worried I’m going to convert.

It’s happened before.

You convert all the girls, do you?

Her teasing provoked a blush. She knew that wasn’t what I meant. She knew I was romantically inexperienced, despite my choice of profession as a wedding officiant.

It was a strong one. Did you see the monkeys? I asked her. I didn’t want to talk about love or sex or religion. I wanted to talk about what I saw. The visions came from me, so I could see all of them at once. It was what I imagined having four-dimensional sight might be like. The panorama of it meant that I missed or forgot details. That’s why I treasured snapshots, like the ones Moses showed me.

Yes, lots of monkeys, she replied.

Did the monkeys have four limbs or six?

She laughed and replied: Six, of course.

The next morning, I wanted to swim. I invited Orsol to join me, but as the chief mechanic, she had to supervise ship maintenance. We were scheduled to leave in two weeks, a tight turnaround for such a long journey, but the Strangers didn’t want us to stay one sol longer than we had to.

The Strangers had built me a vast saltwater pool. Lifeguard drones followed me around at a respectful distance as I swam.

The Diplomat was drinking tea and chatting with Moses poolside when I arrived.

There are other humans that can do what she can do. He was not talking to me, but I was meant to hear. Supposedly, talking about someone in the third person like that is not rude in Raxian. Too bad he was speaking English.

Our scientists have performed experiments. It isn’t magic. There is something unique about human biology that reacts to the nearby white hole. It’s a special cocktail of neutrinos that hits their brain in just the right way. Some of their brains, anyway. Not many of them can do it, and none seem to be as powerful as her.

Moses replied with something that was inaudible to me as I splashed around.

Well, she won’t do it. Not on purpose, at least, the Diplomat replied. I’m sorry. She’s made her wishes clear. Sometimes her visions happen spontaneously. You might catch one of those. Those seem to require a sort of relaxed contentment on her part. Your best chance of finding a cooperative partner is to invite someone else. We have someone willing to come, they could leave in a few weeks.

I wondered if he was referring to Joseph, my third cousin. He was the only other human I could think of that had visions and wasn’t leaving on the Generation Ship to spread the Gospel. I lay on my back and marveled at the cleverness of the Diplomat. He wasn’t trying to trick me, he was trying to trick them.

He knew I wouldn’t give them a vision. He was trying to get the Strangers, the most private people in the galaxy, to host a second diplomatic envoy from Raxia. The next human the Diplomat brought here might not even be able to perform visions. That would create the opening for yet another visit. He hoped to open up trade, some of their superior technology for some of Raxia’s cultural exports.

I laughed to myself and did an underwater somersault. I had expected to spend the week bickering with the Diplomat. Instead I would