Mother Goddess of the World

Mother Goddess of the World

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Kathmandu is a funny city. When you first arrive there from the West, it seems like the most ramshackle and unsanitary place imaginable the buildings are poorly constructed of old brick, and there are weed patches growing out of the roofs; the hotel rooms are bare pits; all the food you can find tastes like cardboard, and often makes you sick; and there are sewage heaps here and there in the mud streets, where dogs and cows are scavenging. It really seems primitive.

Then you go out for a month or two in the mountains, or a trek or a climb. And when you return to Kathmandu, the place is utterly transformed. The only likely explanation is that while you were gone they took the city away and replaced it with one that looks the same on the outside, but is completely different in substance. The accommodations are luxurious beyond belief; the food is superb; the people look prosperous, and their city seems a marvel of architectural sophistication. Kathmandu! What a metropolis.

So it seemed to Fred and me, as we checked into my home away from home, the Hotel Star. As I set on the floor under the waist-high tap of steaming hot water that emerged from my shower, I found myself giggling in mindless rapture, and from the next room I could hear Freds bellowing the old 50s rocker, “Going to Katmandu.”

Mother Goddess of the World. Photo : Elena

An hour later, hair wet, faces chopped up. Skin all prune-shriveled, we met Arnold out in the street and walked through the Thamel evening. “We look like coatracks!” Freds observed. Out city clothes were hanging on us. Freds and I had each lost about twenty pounds, Arnold about thirty. And it wasn`t just fat, either. Everything wastes away at altitude. « We`d better get to the Old Vienna and put some of it back on. »

A started salivating at the very thought of it.

So we went to the Old Vienna Inn, and relaxed in the warm steamy atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After big servings of goulash, schnitzel Parisienne, and apple strudel with whipped cream, we sat back sated. Sensory overload. Even Arnold was looking up a little. He had been quite through the meal, but then again we all had, being busy.

We ordered a bottle of rakshi, which is a potent local beverage of indeterminate origin. When it came we began drinking.

The Temporary King

The Temporary King

By Paul J. McAuley

Here and there mud had been daubed in crude symbols: the traces of bears. I pointed them out.

“They live in the rooms underneath. No one knows how far it all extends. They say it underlies all of the mountain.” It was cold in there, and I hugged my shoulders as I peered into the flickering shadows of the spiral ramp. “The bears can be dangerous. They speak a kind of American, but it isn`t much like ours.”

“Our ancestors, Christ. Why did they trouble to alter bears? They were crazy, Clary, you know? They did so much damage to the world at one time that they spent most of their energies afterward putting it back together, changing animals to make them more intelligent, raising extinct species from dust. What do you think he bears are guarding down there?”

“It was all looted age ago. Come on, Gil, please.” I thought that I could hear something moving far below, in the darkness. After a moment he shrugged and turned to follow me out into the sunlight.

I sat in the shade of a little aspen that canted out from the remains of a wall, and watched Florey prowl the ruins. The sunlight sank to my bones, and I closed my eyes. After a while Florey sat beside me. His white chest, the single crease in his flat belly. His black hair tangled about his white face.

The Temporary King. Photo : Elena

“It is true,” I asked, “about the people in the old days growing animals? »

“Surely. Plants, too. Greater Brazil may have invented the phase graffle, but it’s way behind the old biology. That was all lost in the war, like a lot of things. On Elysium we lost Earth, you know.”

« What’s a phase graffle? »

« It keeps a ship together in phase space. A sort of keel into reality, you understand? Otherwise the entropic gradient would spatter it all over the universe.”

I sighed. “I wish I knew more.”

“It’s a big universe outside this forest. You’re better off here, really you are.” His silver eyes flashed in the sunlight. His knees leaned negligently against my thigh.

Perpetuity Blues

Perpetuity Blues

Neal Barrett, Jr

The first thing she noticed was things had changed in the year she’d been away. Instead of the ’72 Ford, there was a late mode Buick with a boat hitch on the back. Poking out of the garage was a Ranger fishing boat, an 18-footer with a big Merc outboard on the stern.

“You better be dead or dying,” said Maggie.

The living room looked like Sears and Western Auto had explodes. There was a brand new Sony and a VCR, and hit tapes like Gymnasts in Chains. The kitchen was a wildlife preserve. Maggie stood at the door but wouldn’t go in. Things moved around under plates. There were cartons of Hershey bars and chips. Canned Danish hams and foreign mustards, All over the house there were things still in boxes. Uncle Ned had dug tunnels through empty bottles and dirty books. There were new Hawaiian shirts. Hush Puppies in several different styles. A man appeared in one of the tunnels.

“I’m Dr. Kraft, I guess you’re Maggie.”

“Is he really dying? What’s wrong with him?”

“Take your pick. The man’s got everything. A person can’t live like that and expect their organs to behave. »

Perpetuity Blues. Photo : Elena

Maggie went upstairs. Uncle Ned looked dead already. There were green oxygen tanks and plastic tubes.

“I’m real glad you came. This is nice.”

“Uncle Ned, where’d you get all this stuff?”

“That all you got to say? You don’t want to hear how I am?”

“I can see how you are.”

“You’re entitled to bad feelings. I deserve whatever you want to dish out. I want to settle things up before I go to damnation and meet your aunt. Your father had an employee stock plan at Montgomery Wards. Left your mother well off and that woman was too cheap to spend it. We got the money when she died and you came to us. We sort of took these little vacations. Nothing big.”

Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight

Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight

By Ursula K. Le Guin

“You fell out of the sky,” coyote said.

Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt.

“There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it,” the coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. “Are you hurt?”

She was all right. She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn’t understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her feel sick, bit it was all right. They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.

She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear line back from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat’s.

She sat up slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.

Buffalo Gals. Photo by Elena

“Did you lose an eye? » the coyote asked, interested.

“I don’t know,” the child said. She caught her breath and shivered, « I’m cold ».

“I’ll help you look for it,” the coyote said. « Come on! If you move around, you won’t have to shiver. The sun’s up.”

Cold, lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbitbrush and cheatgrass, pawing at a rock. “Aren’t you going to look?” it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. “I knew a trick once where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and the whistle, and they’d come back into my head. But the goddamn bluejay stole them, and when I whistled, nothing came. I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that. But you’ve got one eye that’s O.K.; what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?”

The child crouched, shivering.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)

The Pardoner’s Tale

The Pardoner’s Tale

By Robert Silverberg

The wall that encircles L.A. is 100, 150 feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin, from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least 60 feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it – muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did 5000 years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build us, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall 60 feet high and 150 feet thick. Houston doesn’t Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A, is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles Wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

Pardoner's Tale. Photo by Elena

The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it, too. They just want to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied, as usual, with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a 15-foot high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m, in no hurry to have it happen again.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)