Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology) Read online

  REALMS 2:

  The Second Year of

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace

  Copyright © 2010 by Clarkesworld Magazine.

  Cover art copyright © 2008 by Aaron Jasinski.

  Ebook Design by Neil Clarke.

  Wyrm Publishing

  www.wyrmpublishing.com

  Publisher’s Note:

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.

  Visit Clarkesworld Magazine at:

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION: Tomorrow Can Wait

  by Sean Wallace

  Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky

  by Ken Scholes

  Tetris Dooms Itself

  by Meghan McCarron

  Blue Ink

  by Yoon Ha Lee

  Curse

  by Samantha Henderson

  Clockwork Chickadee

  by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Flight

  by Jeremiah Sturgill

  Captain’s Lament

  by Stephen Graham Jones

  Birdwatcher

  by Garth Upshaw

  The Buried Years

  by Loreen Heneghan

  The Glory of the World

  by Sergey Gerasimov

  Teeth

  by Stephen Dedman

  A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antartica

  by Catherynne M. Valente

  After Moreau

  by Jeffrey Ford

  Debris Ensuing from a Vortex

  by Brian Ames

  When the Gentlemen Go By

  by Margaret Ronald

  The Human Moments

  by Alexander Lumans

  The Secret in the House of Smiles

  by Paul Jessup

  A Dance Across Embers

  by Lisa Mantchev

  Threads of Red and White

  by Lisa Mantchev

  Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang

  by Kristin Mandigma

  The River Boy

  by Tim Pratt

  Acid and Stoned Reindeer

  by Rebecca Ore

  Worm Within

  by Cat Rambo

  Can You See Me Now?

  by Eric M. Witchey

  The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black

  by Jay Lake

  The Clarkesworld Census

  INTRODUCTION: TOMORROW CAN WAIT

  Sean Wallace

  Change is a constant in our lives, and it also plays an important role with the internet, which continues to grow and evolve at an awesome rate. (Surely the Singularity is right around the corner . . . ) Mind you, the accelerating and approaching future can be dizzying, confusing, scary yet exciting, and online magazines such as Clarkesworld Magazine are trying to move with the times, looking forward always, but with the occasional backwards glance.

  This introduction is your backwards glance, covering all the changes with our online incarnation, giving you a peek at what’s been going on, covering October 2007 all the way through September 2008. A lot can happen in twelve months, and it has.

  But where to begin?

  Well, starting with the October issue, a nonfiction department was introduced, covering a wide range of material, usually running two pieces, sometimes three times, a month. And when I say wide, I mean wide, with articles focused on the introduction of science fiction and fantasy literature to Hispanic audiences; discussions about mainstream/genre readerships, with recommended top ten lists for both; explorations of the fantasy world of professional wrestling; the impact of baby-rearing on one’s writing; diving into modern fantasists and the influence of role-playing games; and much more.

  And that wasn’t all, as Clarkesworld also ran interviews every month, either with an author, an artist, or editors, with Daniel Abraham, Kage Baker, Laird Barron, KJ Bishop, Steven Erickson, Margo Lanagan, Richard Morgan, John Picacio, Steph Swainston, Catherynne M. Valente, Sean Williams, Vernon Vinge, Gene Wolfe, and more.

  That’s a lot to take in, but in June Clarkesworld also started presenting audio fiction, beginning with “Clockwork Chickadee” by Mary Robinette Kowal, and narrated by Kowal. We try, whenever possible, to have the author do their own story, though this doesn’t always work out!

  This is a lot of change, of course, and a lot of firsts, at least for Clarkesworld Magazine, but it’s also been nice to be recognized, with stories appearing for the first time ever in several anthologies, including:

  The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed., with “The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue into the Black” by Jay Lake

  Unplugged: The Year’s Best Online Fiction, Rich Horton, ed., with “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” by Catherynne M. Valente

  Year’s Best Fantasy 9, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, ed., with “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica” by Catherynne M. Valente

  Best Horror of the Year, Volume 1, Ellen Datlow, ed., with “When the Gentlemen Go By” by Margaret Ronald

  Stories also appeared on the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List, along with tons of honorable mentions in various year’s best anthologies, but to top that all off, Clarkesworld Magazine was nominated for the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and then moninated for a World Fantasy Award.

  All of this points out simply that the future (and change) is always charging forward, and we are slaves to it, but surely you can take a moment out of your day, and read these stories, now, today, and kick back.

  Because tomorrow can wait.

  SUMMER IN PARIS, LIGHT FROM THE SKY

  Ken Scholes

  Life is marked by intersections and measured by the choices we make at each pause in our journey. I am fortunate to have made a good choice at the right time but more than that, many before me did the same and so the stones were set in the path long before the day of my birth. Will you not come after me and walk the stones so many before you have helped to put in place?

  Adolf Hitler

  Commencement Address,

  Yale University School of Human Rights and Social Justice, 1969

  Adolf Hitler came to Paris in June 1941 feeling the weight of his years in his legs and the taste of a dying dream in his mouth. He spent most of that first day walking up and down the Champs Elysées, working the stiffness out of his bones and muscles while he looked at the shops and the people. Some of the dull ache was from the wooden benches on the train from Hamburg; most of it was age. And beneath the discomfort of his body, his soul ached too.

  He’d never been here before, he thought as the Parisians slipped past in the noon-time sun. He snorted at the revelation. A fine painter you are, he told himself.

  Of course, it was only for the summer. Then Paris . . . and painting, he imagined, would slip quietly to the back row of his memory. He would return to Berlin and take a job for the government buying supplies he would never see for people that he would never know. In the end, he realized, he would become his father’s son and live out the rest of his days as a quiet civil servant.

  Alois Hitler had been a hard man, even a cruel man, before the accident. But death up close can change the hardest heart and after nearly a month in the hospital, he returned to his family with a deep faith and a sense of compassion for all hum
ankind . . . especially his children. He listened. He prayed. He studied St. Francis, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhard and even Buddha. He became gentle and warm toward his wife and their five children. Until the very end, he encouraged Adolf’s dreams. And when he died, still working as a customs official for Napoleon IV’s puppet chancellor, he left behind a small but sufficient inheritance to finance his son’s art.

  By living frugally and occasionally taking odd jobs, Adolf stretched it as far as he could. He’d even set aside a bit for his old age. But come September, he’d decided, it was time to put away the canvas and brush. Time, at fifty-two, to put away childish things.

  Adolf sighed.

  And then something happened. He stood in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, dwarfed by that first Napoleon’s grandiose gesture of complete victory, dwarfed by the size of his own dreams in the shadow of over thirty years of failure. He stood, feeling his breath catch in the back of his throat and his eyes turning to water. And suddenly, he was no longer alone.

  A girl—a pretty girl, a dark girl dressed in ragged clothing—separated from a crowd of passing students. She walked up to him without a word and kissed him hard on the mouth, pressing her body against him while she fastened a flower into the button-hole of his Prussian great coat. After the kiss, she vanished back into the crowd.

  Adolf licked his lips, tasting the apples from her mouth. He took in a great breath, smelling the rose water from her skin and the sunshine from her hair. He listened to the sound of his racing heart and the drum-beat it played. He felt the warmth of her where it had touched him.

  It was his first impression of Paris.

  His second impression was the perpetually drunk American, Ernie Hemingway.

  After a day of wandering aimlessly, as the sun dropped behind the horizon and the sky grew deep purple, Adolf found de Gaulle’s and went inside because he heard American music.

  Americans had always fascinated him. He’d met a few—not many because they tended to have little use for Europe. America was an entire continent without kings or emperors or royalty of any kind. A place where they selected their own President every four years and where any one of the ninety states from Brazil to Newfoundland was a thriving nation in and of itself united by democracy, progress and freedom.

  A middle aged man stood on the bar leading the room in a bawdy tune. He worked the song like a conductor, waving a pistol instead of a baton, and scattered drinkers around the room joined in the song. A man in a ratty suit crouched over the piano, mashing the keys with his fingers with a rag-time flair. Adolf watched and smiled. The man sang too fast and slurred too much for the lyrics to make much sense but the gestures and pelvic thrusts conveyed the gist of it.

  When the song was done, the man dropped lightly to the floor amid cheers and brushed past Adolf on his way to a table at the back of the room. Adolf found an empty table near the American and sat down. The pianist launched into another song, this time in French—a language Adolf grasped better—and he blushed. Looking around, he was the only one who did.

  “Are you a priest, then?” the American shouted across at him in English.

  Adolf looked up. “I beg pardon?”

  The American grinned. “You’re blushing. I thought you might be a priest.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not a priest.”

  “Well then, are you a homosexual?”

  The word escaped him at first, then registered. He blushed even more, looking around for a different table to sit at. He had heard that Americans were quite forward but until now had never experienced it. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I’m not liking men, though I am very flattered by your . . . ” He struggled to find the right word, couldn’t find it, then said the closest one he did find. “By your . . . love.”

  For a moment, he thought the American might hit him. But suddenly, the American started to laugh. The laugh started low and built fast, spilling over like an over-filled bathtub. Adolf wasn’t sure what to do so he offered a weak, tight smile. The American leaped up with his beer in his hand, staggered a few steps and sat heavily in the empty chair at Adolf’s table.

  He leaned in and Adolf could smell days of alcohol rising from his skin. “Deutsche?”

  Adolf nodded. “Ja.”

  The American stuck out his hand. “Ernie Hemingway.”

  He took the hand, squeezed it firmly and pumped it once. “Adolf Hitler.”

  Ernie waved to the bar. “Hey, de Gaulle!”

  A slim man looked up. “Oui, Monsieur Hemingway?”

  “A beer for my new friend Adolf Hitler.”

  The bartender nodded. “Un moment, s’il vous plaît.”

  Then Hemingway leaned in again, his voice low. “You got any money?”

  Adolf nodded. The man’s fast speech and unpredictable movements made him nervous. He found himself blinking involuntarily.

  “That’ll save us both a bit of embarrassment.”

  He nodded again, not quite understanding. The bartender arrived with two pints of light, foamy beer and Hemingway raised the glass. “To life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said.

  “To your health,” Adolf said.

  “I’m afraid it’s far too late for that,” another voice said. The pianist—finished with his tune—pulled up a chair, flipping it around backwards and straddling it. He was a short man, wiry with curly hair gone gray, blue eyes and a brief but contagious smile. “We just have to hold out hope that somehow he’ll manage to pickle himself before he begins to decompose.”

  Adolf didn’t understand but said nothing.

  “Adolf Hitler,” Hemingway said, “Old Mother England’s wittiest bastard child, Chuck Chaplin.”

  They shook hands.

  “Fresh from the train?” Chuck asked in perfect German.

  Adolf nodded. “Yes. This morning.”

  “Looking for work here? It’ll be hard. You’re not Jewish are you?”

  “No, not Jewish. I’m a painter.”

  Chuck nodded. “Are you any good?”

  Hitler smiled. “My English is better than my painting.”

  The pianist returned the smile. “And your English is atrocious.”

  “Your German is quite good.”

  Chuck grinned. “Benefit of an English education.”

  Ernie looked perplexed, trying to follow the rush of German in his drunken state. “What are you two going on about?”

  Chuck turned to Ernie. “Drink your beer, you silly sod.” Then, back to Adolf in German: “Do you have a place to stay yet?”

  Adolf shook his head. “I was going to ask after a boarding house or hotel.”

  “Nonsense,” Chuck said, switching to English. “You can stay with us. At least until you find something more suitable.”

  Adolf looked around again, suddenly unsure what to do. He lowered his voice. “I’m not a homosexual,” he said in a quiet voice, nodding towards Ernie. “Tell him for me? In English?”

  “What’s he saying?” Ernie asked.

  “That he admires your mustache and the light in your eyes,” Chuck answered. “Particularly the way you dimple when you smile.”

  “Bloody British fairy,” Hemingway muttered into his beer.

  “That’s not,” Chuck said slowly and deadpan, “what your mother said to me last night.”

  Perhaps, Adolf thought, Paris was a mistake after all.

  Very little is known of his life before the Revolution. The records and recollections of those who might have known were lost in the heavy fire-bombings during the final days of the War for Democratic Change. And the man himself rarely offered up a personal detail, despite having given over five thousand documented speeches over the span of his life. In an early American lecture, he casually mentioned coming to Paris to be a painter. In a spontaneous speech at his son’s wedding, he fondly recalled a kiss in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. We may never know more than these scattered references. But would knowing matter? Or would it merely add to the legend
of this great but humble man?

  Nicholas Freeman, Editor

  Preface, A Kiss in the Shadow: Essays on The Pre-1942 Life of Adolf Hitler,

  Harbor Light Press, Seattle, 1986

  By day Hitler wandered the city with his easel and stool and pallet and canvas. At night, he sang and drank with his new friends down at de Gaulle’s. He never did move out. He slept on a cot in the corner of their large loft and tapped into what little remained of his inheritance to help with expenses. Ernie and Chuck took him under their wing, showing him around the city and helping him with his English.

  The economy was struggling as a massive influx of Jewish refugees fled the Russian Civil War. The Empire was already stretched thin with footholds in Africa and Indonesia. There were quiet rumors that Napoleon IV was gradually losing his grip on sanity as he entered his eighties and even quieter rumors that his military advisors and generals had plans of their own.

  Still, the summer was hot and bright and one afternoon in July, Adolf looked up from painting the Arc de Triomphe and locked eyes with the girl who had kissed him there over a month earlier. She was staring at him, a slight smile pulling at her mouth.

  He licked his brush and tried to resume work, suddenly uncomfortable with her wide, dark eyes. She took a step closer.

  “You’re no good at it,” she said to him in heavily accented French. “You’ve gotten the colors all wrong.”

  He shrugged, feeling a stab of annoyance though her voice was playful. “It’s how I see it.”

  “Perhaps you need spectacles,” she said, taking another step closer.

  Adolf chuckled. “And this from a girl who kisses men old enough to be her grandfather?”

  “You don’t look so old,” she said.

  “Perhaps you are the one who needs spectacles?” He looked at her. She was tall, slender, with long arms and legs. Her breasts were small but high on her chest.