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    Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 27, July 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #27
    Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 27, July 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #27
    Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 27, July 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #27
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    Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 27, July 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #27

    By Jack McDevitt, Michael Swanwick and Jody Lynn Nye

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    About this ebook

    A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy

    ISSUE 27: July 2017

    Mike Resnick, Editor
    Taylor Morris, Copyeditor
    Shahid Mahmud, Publisher

    Stories by: Stephen Lawson, J.P. Sullivan, Jody Lynn Nye, Edward M. Lerner, Rachelle Harp, Lou J Berger, Michael Swanwick, Leena Likitalo, Paul Di Filippo, Kay Kenyon, Gregor Hartmann, Gordon Eklund, Jack McDevitt

    Serialization: Daughter of Elysium by Joan Slonczewski

    Columns by: Robert J. Sawyer, Gregory Benford

    Recommended Books: Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye

    Interview: Joy Ward interviews Kij Johnson

    Galaxy’s Edge is a Hugo-nominated bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book recommendations by Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhoenix Pick
    Release dateJun 28, 2017
    ISBN9781612423739
    Galaxy’s Edge Magazine: Issue 27, July 2017: Galaxy's Edge, #27

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      Book preview

      Galaxy’s Edge Magazine - Jack McDevitt

      ISSUE 27: JULY 2017

      Mike Resnick, Editor

      Taylor Morris, Copyeditor

      Shahid Mahmud, Publisher

      Published by Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick

      P.O. Box 10339

      Rockville, MD 20849-0339

      Galaxy’s Edge is published in January, March, May, July, September, and November.

      Galaxy’s Edge is an invitation-only magazine. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Unsolicited manuscripts will be disposed of or mailed back to the sender (unopened) at our discretion.

      All material is either copyright © 2017 by Arc Manor LLC, Rockville, MD, or copyright © by the respective authors as indicated within the magazine. All rights reserved.

      This magazine (or any portion of it) may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      ISBN: 978-1-61242-373-9

      SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION:

      To subscribe to the digital (EPub, MOBI or PDF) edition, visit www.weightlessbooks.com.

      To subscribe to the paper edition visit www.GalaxysEdge.com/sub.htm.

      ADVERTISING:

      Advertising is available in all editions of the magazine. Please contact advert@GalaxysEdge.com.

      FOREIGN LANGUAGE RIGHTS:

      Please refer all inquiries pertaining to foreign language rights to Shahid Mahmud, Arc Manor, P.O. Box 10339, Rockville, MD 20849-0339. Tel: 1-240-645-2214. Fax 1-310-388-8440. Email admin@ArcManor.com.

      www.GalaxysEdge.com

      Table of Contents for Issue #27

      The Editor’s Word by Mike Resnick

      The Death of Arthur Owsley by Stephen Lawson

      Tenure Track by J. P. Sullivan

      Rite of Passage by Jody Lynn Nye

      Too Deep Thought by Edward M. Lerner

      Termination Pending by Rachelle Harp

      Hired Gun by Lou J Berger

      Hello, Said the Stick by Michael Swanwick

      Disappearing Days by Leena Likitalo

      Karmic Chameleons by Paul Di Filippo

      The Spires of Greme June by Kay Kenyon

      This Knotted Dust by Gregor Hartmann

      Late Night at the Wonder Bar by Gordon Eklund

      Indomitable by Jack McDevitt

      Recommended Books by Bill Fawcett & Jody Lynn Nye

      A Scientist’s Notebook by Gregory Benford

      Decoherence—Defining Science Fiction by Robert J. Sawyer

      The Galaxy’s Edge Interview—Joy Ward Interviews Toni Weisskopf

      Daughter of Elysium (Part 1) by Joan Slonczewski

      The Editor's Word

      by Mike Resnick

      Greetings, and welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of Galaxy’s Edge.

      This issue features new stories by new and newer writers Lou J Berger, Leena Likitalo, J. P. Sullivan, Edward M. Lerner, Rachelle Harp, Stephen Lawson, Gregor Hartmann, and a couple of not-so-new ones, Paul Di Filippo and Gordon Eklund, plus some classic reprints from some classic and classy writers, Jody Lynn Nye, Michael Swanwick, Kay Kenyon, and Jack McDevitt. Also on hand are Bill Fawcett and Jody Lynn Nye to recommend some books, and Gregory Benford’s regular science column. And this month we introduce our new columnist on literary matters, Hugo/Nebula/Aurora/Seiun sho winner Robert J. Sawyer. The Joy Ward interview this issue is with Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf.

      Oh, and we start the serialization of Daughter of Elysium by two time John W. Campbell Award winner, Joan Slonczewski.

      * * *

      It’s difficult to imagine it today, but half a century ago Edgar Rice Burroughs was considered to be strictly a children’s writer. Only a handful of his books were in print, eight or nine Tarzan titles, and they were published as a matched, cheap ($1 apiece) set of hardcovers by Grosset & Dunlap. The only place you could find them was in the juvenile or young adult section of your local bookstore.

      Barsoom? Amtor? Pellucidar? If you were born after 1940, there was an excellent chance you didn’t know they existed. Yes, ERB, Inc. reprinted the Mars and Venus books, but their distribution was dreadful. For example, in Chicago, where I grew up—the second-biggest city in America—only one establishment, Carson Pirie Scott (a department store, not a bookstore) carried the ERB, Inc. reprints in the 1950s.

      All that was soon to change.

      I still remember the first of the Ace reprints—it was half of The Moon Maid (Ace specialized in splitting any ERB book that was, well, split-able) with a cover by Roy G. Krenkel.

      Science fiction by Mr. Tarzan? Science fiction that wasn’t set on Barsoom or Amtor?

      I bought a copy. So did thousands of others.

      And pretty soon we began to realize the full extent of ERB’s vast imagination—Africa, Mars, Venus, Pellucidar, the Moon, Poloda, Caspak, the Niocine, the Apache books, the cowboy books. And we discovered two brilliant artists who came to be associated with him in the 1960s as J. Allen St. John had been in the 1920s and 1930s—Frank Frazetta and Roy G. Krenkel.

      And just about the time Burroughs fans thought things couldn’t get any better, especially after that long drought when so much of his work was out of print, presumably forever, Dick Lupoff took over the editorship of Canaveral Press. Not only did Canaveral print hardcovers of known titles, but they began bringing out brand-new Burroughs titles as well, titles that had been locked away in ERB’s safe and unpublished during his lifetime.

      Then ERB, Inc. got into the act itself, bringing out I Am a Barbarian.

      With this plethora of Burroughs titles, of course fandom began getting organized. The Burroughs Bibliophiles were formed at the 1962 Worldcon in Chicago, and Vernell Coriell resurrected the Burroughs Bulletin. Peter Ogden was publishing ERBania, and then Camille Cazedessus brought out ERB-dom, and Paul Allen followed with The Barsoomian.

      New artists started getting noticed. Jeff Jones was probably the best of them, but there was Larry Ivie, and Neal Maconald, and Bob Barrett, and a host of others.

      In 1965, the Burroughs fans, declining to follow the Worldcon across the ocean to England, held their first independent Dum-Dum in Chicago. It was a smashing success.

      By 1966, the Burroughs Wave was riding high. ERB-dom became the first (and only) Burroughs fanzine to win the Best Fanzine Hugo. The Barsoom novels were nominated for Best All-Time Series (along with Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Heinlein’s Future History series, Doc Smith’s Lensman series, and the eventual winner, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which was definitely not shoddy company for old Edgar to find himself in), and Frank Frazetta picked up the Hugo as Best Pro Artist (an award Roy Krenkel had won three years earlier).

      New titles were appearing all the time. Tarzan and the Madman.The Wizard of Venus.Tarzan and the Castaways.Savage Pellucidar. A two-in-one hardcover of the Tarzan Twins books, which had been prohibitively expensive for a third of a century. Word came that they’d uncovered the rumored-but-never-seen Marcia of the Doorstep. Irwin Porges was working on his massive ERB biography. The Burroughs family hired Bob Hodes to run the corporation, and soon Hodes had Tarzan and John Carter back in the comic books, and plans were afoot for the movie that eventually became Greystoke.

      And then, not overnight, not so fast that anyone noticed it, the wave was gone. Oh, the Burroughs books remained in print for the most part, and before too long George McWhorter began a new and beautiful incarnation of the Burroughs Bulletin, and the Dum-Dums continued, and Disney made a mint on its animated Tarzan movie—but that first flush of excitement was gone.

      The Dum-Dums haven’t been held in conjunction with the Worldcon for thirty-five years now, and that’s probably fitting, since neither seems to have any great interest in the other. Burroughs, who once couldn’t get onto the shelves of some public libraries, is now so respected that a few years back I was asked to write an introduction to the University of Nebraska’s reprint of The Land That Time Forgot.

      ERB and his work are on dozens of web pages. Colleges now concede his importance to the field of science fiction. Major movie studios have renewed their interest in Tarzan, which also became a musical play on Broadway. Disney came out with a live-action John Carter film. ERB is here to stay this time.

      But there will never again be the excitement and the sense of discovery his work generated in the 1960s. He’s better known, better respected, more widely read now, his fandom’s better organized, his reputation has been rebuilt—but I wish you could have been around then, when the world was just finding him again.

      It was really something to behold.

      Stephen Lawson is a Writers of the Future finalist. His 2017 sales include Daily Science Fiction and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. This is his first appearance in Galaxy’s Edge.

      The Death of Arthur Owsley

      by Stephen Lawson

      Your eyes seem perfectly fine, Lawrence, Dr. Applegate says. I hear papers rustling under his fingertips. There’s no medical reason why you shouldn’t be able to see.

      I already know why I can’t see, though. I read. I know why Odin gave up one of his eyes.

      What else could do something like this? I ask. I can’t tell him what I know, of course. I just need him to find a solution.

      I’d like to refer you to a friend of mine, he says. I hear hesitance in his voice.

      What sort of friend? I ask.

      Thad Ingles is a psychiatrist—the best I know. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in his office myself.

      It’s hard for me to imagine why an optometrist would need to see a shrink, but I keep this thought to myself as well.

      Are you saying I’m blind because I want to be? I ask.

      Crime scene cleanup can be very traumatizing work, I suspect, Applegate says. Perhaps your last job was a bit too much to look at?

      Yeah, I say. Maybe that’s it.

      He gives me some papers to give to Natalie, so that she can take me to the shrink. Until a week ago, I was a voracious reader. Now I can’t even read my own appointment information. I guess I’ll have to learn Braille.

      * * *

      I need to go back, I say.

      Natalie closes the driver’s-side door and I hear the click of a seatbelt.

      Back where? she asks. Back to Owsley’s house?

      I want to look into it again, I say.

      Lawrence, you’re blind. Anyway, you finished the contract before you left. We couldn’t get in now if we wanted to.

      I could say I lost something inside and just realized it—a credit card maybe.

      So they’re going to let a blind man and his wife grope around unsupervised in their late uncle’s house for an hour? They’d be standing right over your shoulder even if you could see anything.

      I feel the car accelerate as we merge onto the Interstate.

      You’re right, I say. We’ll have to break in.

      People say that your other senses grow stronger when you lose one of them, and it’s true. I can feel her giving me the look even though I can’t see it.

      We could buy the house then. I offer.

      With what money? Natalie asks.

      I have a bit saved.

      We’re going to need it, since you can’t work anymore.

      I could get all the money in the world if I could look into it again.

      How?

      Call it insider trading.

      Natalie says nothing for several miles.

      They’re having an estate sale next Friday, she says finally. I saw a sign when I was coming to pick you up.

      * * *

      Arthur Owsley blew his brains out last Wednesday at three in the morning. Ginger and Randolph Owsley, his niece and nephew, discovered his body the next day when a concerned neighbor called them. Ginger Owsley called me after the coroner took the body away. The coroner had, thankfully, kept the business card I’d given him.

      An hour later, I pulled up at Arthur’s house in my van. I keep a simple sign on it that says Lippincott Cleaning, LLC with my phone number below it. I try not to draw attention to grieving families.

      Natalie had also given me the look when I told her I was going to call it Lippincott’s Horrendously Bloody Brain, Spleen, Toenail, and Pancreas Clean-Up Service, LLC.

      The signs will cost too much, she’d said. They charge by the letter.

      People would never forget me.

      That’s when she’d given me the look and I’d conceded.

      I finished scooping Arthur’s gray matter into a biohazard bag, thankful that he’d used a .45 instead of one of the shotguns in his gun cabinet. Of course, if I charged by the hour, the shotgun would’ve been more profitable.

      * * *

      I withdrew my drywall removal kit from the back of the van and briefly considered changing from my flat-rate pricing model.

      The police had pulled the bullet out of the wall, its hollow point having expanded and swallowed a shard of Arthur’s skull. I sighed and started cutting out drywall, carefully leaving a space large enough for the repair work that would come later.

      Behind the drywall, I found something.

      My box cutter stuck to the black box mounted to the stud, so I knew it had some sort of magnet inside. Two electrical cables were connected to the black box—one cable ran away from the box toward the light switch, and the other cable ran down toward the floor. I cut away more of the drywall to see where the first cable went, and found that it did indeed connect to the light switch, though for what purpose I could not discern.

      I sat in Arthur’s desk chair—the same one he’d used when he had pulled the trigger—and noticed a slight change in the paint hue around the gap in the drywall. The room’s overhead light hadn’t brought out this contrast, but my tripod-mounted work lights were meant to bring out tiny details that others missed.

      This drywall had been cut away and patched over before, but not by a professional. The black box, as far as I could tell, was also a switch of some kind. With the wire running out of it, but hidden behind the drywall all this time, it seemed that it must be activated by a second magnet—a key. Unfortunately, I didn’t carry a magnet with my tools.

      Curiosity piqued, I changed into a clean set of latex gloves and started picking through Arthur’s desk drawers with a set of steel forceps. If he was hiding something with this secret magnet-switch, I reasoned, a blind man would probably keep the second magnet nearby. At the back of the bottom-left drawer, the forceps stuck to another small black box, roughly the same size as the one mounted in the wall.

      I picked it up and held it against its twin. Nothing happened.

      I turned it on each of its six sides and held it against the other magnetic box. Still, nothing.

      I whispered several magic words, tapped three times on the box in the wall, and spun the second box on the first in case something inside needed to turn.

      Nothing.

      Sitting back in the chair, frustrated, I remembered the light switch, and put the second piece of the puzzle together.

      I turned out the light, held the boxes together once more, and heard a faint click from the corner of the room.

      A section of the floor had popped up just enough for me to pull it open with my fingertips, revealing a ladder and a soft glow coming from the room below. I descended.

      I thought it was a small light bulb at first, standing three feet off the floor. The rest of the room vanished into shadow at the edges, though I doubted there was anything else there. The pinpoint of light pulsed and swirled—white, blue, pink, and white again. I stepped closer, unable to take my eyes from it.

      From a foot away, I nearly realized what I was seeing, though my brain couldn’t fully register the sight. I knelt, and put my left eye to the light.

      Two minutes later, in a state of mild shock, I went upstairs to finish tearing out the drywall. I knew if I stayed in that room any longer I’d never finish the job. My eyes hurt, and it took about half an hour before I could focus them correctly again. The colors in the office had faded into a pale gray, and I felt as though I’d been staring at the sun.

      * * *

      I found something, I told Natalie the next morning. I’d been up until four, but I always got up to see her off to school. I wanted to make sure she felt my moral support before staring down a thousand middle-schoolers in all their hormonal, chaotic strangeness.

      What is it?

      I’m not sure, I said. I need to keep it a secret though. You know how we always figure rich folks get rich with secret sources of information that nobody else has?

      She cocked her head, and an eyebrow rose. Yeah?

      It’s kind of like that, I said. I don’t think Arthur’s family knew about it, but I do know that guy was loaded.

      Just be careful, Lawrence, she said. He was also blind and slightly psychotic. I don’t think he started out that way.

      * * *

      I finished the drywall repair that night, and took my waste containers in for disposal.

      Nobody tells you when you start a traumatic-death cleaning business how much medical waste disposal services charge, but it definitely eats into your bottom line. Factor in all the certification classes and license fees, not to mention the tiny market for demand, and you could definitely say I’m in a niche business.

      I always factor in an extra night on the estimate, in case the paint doesn’t look right or something else goes wrong. Reputation’s everything in this business, so you have to give yourself enough time to meet promised deadlines.

      Having completed the work, with paint drying in the office, I climbed back into the hidden chamber.

      I looked into it once again.

      By focusing my eye in different places, I could soar thousands of miles in any direction. Then, relaxing my eyes, I realized I could find anything in the universe simply by thinking about it.

      I saw pot-bellied children starving in an African village.

      I watched a polar bear stalk its prey.

      I unfocused my eye and leapt into space a million miles away. I watched a star collapse into darkness.

      I’d told Natalie a small white lie at breakfast. As I mentioned, I’ve always been a bibliophile. An occult historian named Borges wrote about one of these—an Aleph—a point in space from which all space is visible.

      I could be anywhere. I could see anything, and anyone. I could see the most marvelous or horrible things in the universe—things hidden from everyone but me.

      I wondered what had happened to the girl I had a crush on in seventh grade, Rebecca Taylor. At the thought of her, I found her, asleep in her bed, now married with three kids. Two of them were twins. One was Chinese, probably adopted.

      My ninth grade crush, Carmen Blake, was now a stripper with a C-section scar and a tattoo of a purple butterfly on her lower back.

      The first girl I’d ever actually dated, Gayle Ormsby, was lying on a hospital bed, taking a power nap between surgeries. I looked closer and saw needle marks on her arm under her scrubs.

      I pulled my eye away and looked at my watch. What I saw was a thin, blurry line where my arm should have been, and a black blob in place of my watch. I wiped at my eyes, but my vision remained fuzzy.

      I looked back into the Aleph, and my vision became clear again. I saw Natalie, golden curls falling on her pillow, asleep. Her hand rested where I would have been if I weren’t working late.

      A pang of guilt stung me. I’d discovered this—thing—and my first instinct was to look in on long-lost crushes. My mind leapt to the ones that got away rather than the one I had.

      I withdrew my eye once more, and found that the room had gone black, apart from the pinpoint of light. I couldn’t see the ladder anymore, or the office above.

      I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and held down the button until the voice prompt chimed.

      Call Natalie, I said.

      Calling Natalie, the phone responded, and started ringing a moment later. I looked into the Aleph and watched her phone light up on the bedside table. Natalie rolled over, but didn’t wake up.

      She could sleep through a tornado.

      I waited through three more rings before thinking of my brother Jacob. With the thought came his image through the Aleph.

      Jacob sat on a sofa in his living room, his right leg propped up on an ottoman. He’d removed the prosthetic from the stump of his left leg, and he seemed to be immersed in a video game.

      I pressed the button again, and told the phone to call Jacob. I watched his phone light up on the sofa next to him.

      He paused the game.

      Lawrence? he said. Working the late shift again?

      We can’t all be nocturnal writers, I said. I need a favor though. I can’t see anything. Any chance you could pick me up?

      Oh sure, he said. Call the one-legged insomniac with your big problems.

      You weren’t writing anyway.

      How do you know?

      Call it a hunch. I’m serious, though. I’m really blind right now.

      I watched him sit up, worried.

      I’ll come get you, he said, Where are you?

      I’d have to let him into the house, since I’d locked myself in. If Arthur Owsley had been climbing this ladder blind for so long, though, I could as well.

      * * *

      It’s like a point in space where you can see anything in the universe, I said as I climbed into the car. I’d made sure Jacob had secured the floor panel in place and pocketed the key-cube before we left. He’d only ventured a brief glimpse into the Aleph chamber before doing so.

      But it made you blind? he asked.

      I think it’s like staring into the sun or something, except it’s not that bright. Maybe it overloaded that part of my brain. Anyway, the work’s done. We’ll just have to get the van out of here tomorrow.

      What are you going to tell Natalie?

      I’ll tell her the truth. She accepts outlandish things pretty easily. I think her dad did that to her.

      Jacob snorted.

      It’s probably why she married you, he said. You’re as much of a crackpot as he was.

      The week passed and my vision didn’t return. That’s when I went to see Dr. Applegate, and got the referral.

      * * *

      I sit in an overstuffed chair in Dr. Ingles’ office. Dr. Ingles is soft-spoken, and pauses before responding to anything I say. I’d tell you what he looks like, but I don’t know. He smells faintly of Italian aftershave.

      You say you were able to see everything in the entire universe through this point of light? Ingles asks.

      That’s right, I say, and why not? He isn’t going to believe me anyway.

      What did you choose to look at?

      I tell him about my journey around the world and brief venture into space. I hear him scribbling on a notepad.

      He stops writing, reads. Starvation, an animal about to be eaten, a black hole, and a couple of girls you once had feelings for—one of whom is a stripper, and the other one an exhausted drug-user.

      It doesn’t sound so great when he says it.

      She’s a surgeon, I say, and it wasn’t all bad. Rebecca seemed to be doing fine.

      Still, in summary: you finished cleaning a room in which a suicide had occurred, and then spent an hour or so viewing images mostly of despair.

      Most of life is despair, doctor. It makes sense that if I could see everything, most of what I’d see would be despair.

      He makes some more notes.

      At the end, he says, when you realized you were losing your sight, who did you reach out to?

      Now I wonder if I was hallucinating. He’s trying to get me to see that I had some sort of nervous breakdown, and it makes a fair bit of sense. His is the more logical explanation for what I saw.

      My wife, then my brother, I say. Family.

      Ingles doesn’t say anything, but I imagine he’s nodding.

      Good, he says finally, but you’re still blind. Why do you think that is?

      I think for a minute or so. I hear a ceiling fan turning overhead. He’s got the Socrates act nailed down.

      Maybe I’m carrying around more negative memories than good ones?

      Your mind did go to those things first, Lawrence. You said yourself that it would show you anything you thought of.

      Wouldn’t you explore a bit, if you could see anything in the universe?

      Perhaps, he says, but we’re talking about what you want to see, Lawrence. Your time is valuable is it not?

      I guess.

      I’d like to give you a homework assignment, then. I think it will help.

      Alright.

      "Do a bit of digging, if you can, and find out if things in the real world are as bad as your Aleph showed you. Find out if

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