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    Forever Magazine Issue 7: Forever Magazine, #7
    Forever Magazine Issue 7: Forever Magazine, #7
    Forever Magazine Issue 7: Forever Magazine, #7
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Forever Magazine Issue 7: Forever Magazine, #7

    By Neil Clarke, Nancy Kress, James Morrow and Kathleen Ann Goonan

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    About this ebook

    Forever is a new monthly science fiction magazine that features previously published stories you might have missed. Each issue will feature a novella, a brief interview with the novella's author, two short stories, and cover art by Ron Guyatt. Edited by the Hugo and World Fantasy Award winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Neil Clarke.

    Our seventh issue features a novella by Nancy Kress ("Savior"), a short story by James Morrow ("The War of the Worldviews"), and a short story by Kathleen Ann Goonan ("Dinosaur Songs"), and a short interview with Nancy Kress.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWyrm Publishing
    Release dateAug 9, 2015
    ISBN9781890464615
    Forever Magazine Issue 7: Forever Magazine, #7
    Author

    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

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      Book preview

      Forever Magazine Issue 7 - Neil Clarke

      Forever Magazine

      Issue 7

      © Wyrm Publishing, 2015

      wyrmpublishing.com

      forever-magazine.com

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      by Neil Clarke

      Savior

      a novella by Nancy Kress

      A Few Words with Nancy Kress

      The War of the Worldviews

      a short story by James Morrow

      Dinosaur Songs

      a short story by Kathleen Ann Goonan

      About the Artist and Authors

      Introduction

      Neil Clarke

      Welcome to the seventh issue of Forever Magazine!

      Worldcon is later this month in Spokane, Washinton and I hope to see some of you there. Ron Guyatt, has given me some really nice postcards for his Space Travel Poster series—what we’ve been featuring as our cover art—so you’ll have a chance to grab some there. I’m only on a few programs items, so I’ll also have a lot of time to sit around and chat. If you see me propped up in a chair somewhere, feel free to introduce yourself. Aways nice to meet some of our readers.

      As always, thanks for reading! If you enjoy the issue, please consider posting a review on Amazon, B&N, or any of the other places that sell Forever!

      Until next month . . .

      -Neil

      Savior

      Nancy Kress

      I: 2007

      The object’s arrival was no surprise; it came down preceded, accompanied, and followed by all the attention in the world.

      The craft—if it was a craft—had been picked up on an October Saturday morning by the Hubble, while it was still beyond the orbit of Mars. A few hours later Houston, Langley, and Arecibo knew its trajectory, and a few hours after that so did every major observatory in the world. The press got the story in time for the Sunday papers. The United States Army evacuated and surrounded twenty square miles around the projected Minnesota landing site, some of which lay over the Canadian border in Ontario.

      It’s still a shock, Dr. Ann Pettie said to her colleague Jim Cowell. I mean, you look and listen for decades, you scan the skies, you read all the arguments for and against other intelligent life out there, you despair over Fermi’s paradox—

      I never despaired over Fermi’s paradox, Cowell answered, pulling his coat closer around his skinny body. It was cold at 3:00 A.M. in a northern Minnesota cornfield, and he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. The cornfield was as close as he and Ann had been allowed to get. It wasn’t very close, despite a day on the phone pulling every string he could to get on the official Going-In Committee. That’s what they were calling it: the Going-In Committee. Not welcoming, not belligerent, not too alarmed. Not too anything, until we know what we have here. The words were the president’s, who was also not on the Going-In Committee, although in his case presumably by choice.

      Ann said, "You never despaired over Fermi’s Paradox? You thought all along that aliens would show up eventually, they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet?"

      Yes, Cowell said, and didn’t look at her directly. How to explain? It wasn’t belief so much as desire, nor desire so much as life-long need. Very adolescent, and he wouldn’t have admitted it except he was cold and exhausted and exhilarated and scared, and the best he could hope for, jammed in with other visiting scientists two miles away from the landing site, was a possible glimpse of the object as it streaked down over the treeline.

      Jim, that sounds so . . . so . . . 

      A man has to believe in something, he said in a gruff voice, quoting a recent bad movie, swaggering a little to point up the joke. It fell flat. Ann went on staring at him in the harsh glare of the floodlights until someone said, Bitte? Ein Kaffee, Ann?

      Hans! Ann said, and she and Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt rattled merrily away in German. Cowell knew no German. He knew Kleinschmidt only slightly, from those inevitable scientific conferences featuring one important paper, ten badly attended minor ones, and three nights of drinking to bridge over the language difficulties.

      What language would the aliens speak? Would they have learned English from our secondhand radio and TV broadcasts, as pundits had been predicting for the last thirty-six hours and writers for the last seventy years? Well, it was true they had chosen to land on the American-Canadian border, so maybe they would.

      So far, of course, they hadn’t said anything at all. No signal had come from the oval-shaped object hurtling toward Earth.

      Coffee, Ann said, thrusting it at Cowell. Kleinschmidt had apparently brought a tray of Styrofoam cups from the emergency station at the edge of the field. Cowell uncapped his and drank it gratefully, not caring that it was lukewarm or that he didn’t take sugar. It was caffeine.

      Twenty minutes more, someone said behind him.

      It was a well-behaved crowd, mostly scientists and second-tier politicians. Nobody tried to cross the rope that soldiers had strung between hastily driven stakes a few hours earlier. Cowell guessed that the unruly types, the press and first-rank space fans and maverick businessmen with large campaign contributions, had all been herded together elsewhere, under the watchful eyes of many more soldiers than were assigned to this cornfield. Still more were probably assigned unobtrusively—Cowell hoped it was unobtrusively—to the Going-In Committee, waiting somewhere in a sheltered bunker to greet the aliens. Very sheltered. Nobody knew what kind of drive the craft might have, or not have. For all they knew, it was set to take out both Minnesota and Ontario.

      Cowell didn’t think so.

      Hans Kleinschmidt had moved away. Abruptly Cowell said to Ann, "Didn’t you ever stare at the night sky and just will them to be there? When you were a kid, or even a grad student in astronomy?"

      She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Well, sure. Then. But I never thought . . . I just never thought. Since. She shrugged, but something in her tone made Cowell turn full face and peer into her eyes.

      Yes, you did.

      She answered him only indirectly. Jim . . . there could be nobody aboard.

      Probably there isn’t, he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years old, goddamn it!

      Look! someone yelled, and every head swiveled up, desperately searching a clear, star-jeweled sky.

      Cowell couldn’t see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere. He caught his breath.

      Oh my God, it’s swerving off course! somebody shouted from his left, where unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group effort. Impossible! someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was that the object hadn’t swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind: Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.

      A tenth of a degree northwest . . . no, wait . . . .

      Cowell’s mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sense of inevitability grew on him, and he wasn’t surprised when Ann cried, "It’s landing here! Run!" Cowell didn’t move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.

      The object slowed, silvery in the starlight. It continued to slow until it was moving at perhaps three miles per hour, no more, at a roughly forty-five degree angle. The landing was smooth and even. There was no hovering, no jet blasts, no scorched ground. Only a faint whump as the object touched the earth, and a rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind.

      It seemed completely natural to walk over to the spacecraft. Cowell was the first one to reach it.

      Made of some smooth, dull-silver metal, he noted calmly, and unblackened by re-entry. An irregular oval, although his mind couldn’t pin down in precisely what the irregularity lay. Not humming or moving, or, in fact, doing anything at all.

      He put out his hand to touch it, and the hand stopped nearly a foot away.

      Jim! Ann called, and somebody else—must be Kleinschmidt—said, Herr Dr. Cowell! Cowell moved his hand along whatever he was touching. An invisible wall, or maybe some sort of hard field, encased the craft.

      Hello, ship, he said softly, and afterward wasn’t ever sure if he’d said it aloud.

      Don’t touch it! Wait! Ann called,

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