Lightspeed Magazine Issue 101 (October 2018) Read online

  Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 101 (October 2018)

  John Joseph Adams et al.

  Published by John Joseph Adams, 2018.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Issue 101, October 2018

  FROM THE EDITOR

  Editorial: October 2018

  SCIENCE FICTION

  The Horror of Party Beach

  Dale Bailey

  Big Boss Bitch

  Adrienne Celt

  The Real You™

  Molly Tanzer

  Tribute

  Jack Skillingstead

  FANTASY

  Kaleidoscope

  Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Super-Luminous Spiral

  Cameron Van Sant

  The Dream Curator

  Alex Irvine

  Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake

  Mel Kassel

  NOVELLA

  Investments

  Walter Jon Williams

  EXCERPTS

  Dale Bailey | In the Night Wood

  Dale Bailey

  NONFICTION

  Book Reviews: October 2018

  Chris Kluwe

  Media Review: October 2018

  Carrie Vaughn

  Interview: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

  Christian A. Coleman

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

  Dale Bailey

  Cameron Van Sant

  Molly Tanzer

  Mel Kassel

  MISCELLANY

  Coming Attractions

  Stay Connected

  Subscriptions and Ebooks

  Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

  About the Lightspeed Team

  Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

  © 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover by Reiko Murakami

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  Editorial: October 2018

  John Joseph Adams | 152 words

  Welcome Lightspeed’s 101st issue!

  This month, our cover art is by Reiko Murakami, illustrating new science fiction from Dale Bailey (“The Horror of Party Beach”). We also have new SF from Molly Tanzer (“The Real You™”), along with SF reprints by Adrienne Celt (“Big Boss Bitch”) and Jack Skillingstead (“Tribute”).

  Our original fantasy shorts are by Cameron Van Sant (“Super-Luminous Spiral”) and Mel Kassel (“Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake”). We also have fantasy reprints by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“Kaleidoscope”) and Alex Irvine (“The Dream Curator”).

  All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns. We also have a feature interview with author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

  Our e-book exclusive novella reprint is “Investments” by Walter Jon Williams. Ebook readers can also enjoy an extract from Dale Bailey’s new novel In the Night Wood.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, the SF/Fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, as well as the USA Today bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and is a eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  The Horror of Party Beach

  Dale Bailey | 9450 words

  Times have changed here. We’re not a bunch of kids anymore.

  — Hank Green

  All this happened a long time ago, in the summer when Blackboard Jungle ruled the screen, “Rock Around the Clock” shot up the charts, and Hal March asked the first $64,000 Question. That was the year our friend the atom lit up the streetlights of Arco, Idaho, the world’s first atomic city. Reddy Kilowatt had slain Bert the Turtle, who’d been telling us to duck and cover for years, and for a moment we let ourselves forget that Uncle Sam had spent the better part of the last decade irradiating the Nevada desert. What did we care about the contradictions of America’s Atomic Age? We were seventeen, and we’d thrown off the shackles of the classroom for another year. We slept late, and breakfasted on ice cream sodas at the New Graham Pharmacy. We played lazy games of pick-up baseball on the grass-worn municipal fields off Shippan Street. Most days, we went down to Party Beach.

  That wasn’t its real name, of course. Maps had it down as Dane’s Cove, after the ill-fated captain of a nineteenth-century clipper that had gone down in the waters churning just off shore, and our parents, when they called it anything at all, mostly called it the sand beach, for it was the only stretch of anything remotely beach-like in a fifteen- or twenty-mile expanse of steep, rocky shoreline that left Maricove unspoiled long after the neighboring towns of Battleboro and Nash had bloomed into gaudy summer destinations. Even this unimaginative descriptor was not entirely accurate. The sand beach was really too small and rocky—not nearly sandy enough—to appeal to acolytes of surf and sun, and the currents there were too dangerous for swimming. But it was the perfect spot if you wanted to put “Maybelline” on the radio and dance beneath the stars; so in the summer before my senior year, the summer when rock ‘n’ roll was born and for one golden moment everything was possible, it came to be called Party Beach. And though the name would fall out of use after the horror that unfolded there, it has always remained Party Beach to me.

  I’m an old man now, and most of my memories have faded like old photographs left too long in the sun, but my recollections of that summer—my recollections of Party Beach—stand apart. They are crisp and well-preserved, and if they are not wholly free from nostalgia, that nostalgia is tempered with the hard lessons that came at the end. That was the first summer that I had a car—a battered ’49 Mercury that I’d purchased with a loan against my earnings from bagging groceries down at the A&P. That was the summer I lost my virginity. That was the summer of Elaine Gavin.

  I don’t want you to misunderstand me. Elaine wasn’t fast. There was nothing lurid or cheap, nothing shameful, about the moments we shared in the backseat of that old Merc, however fumbling and inexpert our amours might have been. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still smell the faint lavender scent of Elaine’s shampoo, and I can feel, for a fleeting heartbeat, the warmth of her embrace. But then the final horror sweeps over me once again, and I shudder and I jerk myself awake to stare out into the darkness, and listen. And though my house is almost a mile away from the sea, on those nights I can still hear the surf pounding upon the rocky shingle we called Party Beach.

  • • • •

  We met in Mr. Taylor’s chemistry class in the spring semester of our junior year, Elaine and I—really met, I mean. We’d known each other for years in the casual way you know kids that move in other circles—the ones you nod at as you pass in the hall, but never really pause to exchange a word with. And why would we talk? She was a loner, aloof and isolated—stuck up and wicked smart. Me? I was quiet, but well-liked. I knew the most popular kids, and even if I wasn’t quite one of them, I was always welcome in their company.


  Not that it mattered to Elaine.

  “I’ll take care of the thinking,” she told me when Mr. Taylor paired us up in lab. “You follow orders.”

  It turned out to be a good arrangement. When it came to chemistry, I was fumbling and dim at best. Elaine, on the other hand, was brilliant. She regarded Mr. Taylor’s labs as dumbed-down lessons for kids with the intellects of capuchin monkeys.

  She had, in short, inherited her father’s aptitude for science. Dr. Gavin—the Mad Scientist of Maricove—was widely regarded as a savant of the first order. A widower, he’d fled to Maricove from some southern university, for ill-defined but possibly scandalous reasons. He’d gone through two teaching jobs since then—first at Maricove College, then at the high school downtown—each departure attended by a fresh round of whispers: midnight power surges in the physics building, clandestine experiments in the chemistry lab. By the time Elaine matriculated as a Maricove Red Raider, he’d become a recluse in the sprawling Victorian house they shared out on Fingel’s Point. He hadn’t been seen in town for years, though passersby on Route 13 occasionally observed odd blue light flickering around the edges of his heavily curtained windows, and his mailman complained of the place’s persistent fishy miasma.

  But there was no fishy stench to Elaine. She smelled—indefinably—wonderful, and she looked wonderful, too. She was lean and dark-eyed and quick to smile, with a pixie haircut that flattered her at least as much as Audrey Hepburn’s had flattered her in Roman Holiday, and maybe more. I soon came to look forward to our twice-weekly labs more than anything else in school, or out of it. I was halfway in love with her by mid-February, and more than halfway by the beginning of April. She said things like “Don’t drop that beaker, Mike” (I was always dropping beakers) and “Be careful with the Bunsen burner” (this, after an unfortunate accident involving a lab report and the sleeve of my second-best shirt). I was always saying things like—

  Well, I was rarely saying things at all—and certainly not the things I wanted to say—though I didn’t do a very good job of hiding them, I guess, since I was always getting harassed about them in the locker room before gym. “When you gonna ask Brainiac from Planet X out, Mikey?” Scott Becker would ask, and John Moore would say, “Maybe she’s as mad as her mad scientist daddy,” and Floyd McKay would snap me with a towel and raise his eyebrows like Groucho Marx and add, “Mad in the sack, maybe,” and it would go on like that until finally Brad Clarke, quarterback of the Red Raiders, Big Man On Campus, and stand-up guy, would weigh in and put a stop to it, saying, “Lay off, fellas. Mikey here can ask out whoever he wants to.” But Mikey did nothing of the sort until one day—it was late in May, by then—Brad pulled me aside before English and batted me lightly on the back of the head. “You should go for it, Mike,” he said. “Can’t you see she’s wild about you?” In fact, I couldn’t see it, but I trusted Brad’s instincts. Wasn’t he dating Tina Laurel, the head cheerleader, homecoming queen, and all-around prettiest and most popular girl in school?

  He was.

  Which is how I wound up in chem lab the next day, stuttering, “Hey, Elaine, you think we should go see a movie this weekend or something?” And then, when she didn’t answer right away, “We don’t have to. It was just an—”

  “Shut up, Mike,” she said. “I think that would be grand.”

  She touched my hand, and I dropped my beaker in surprise. I stepped back and caught my sleeve on fire. “Gosh,” I said, as she shoved my arm under the spigot, twisted the handle, and doused the flames.

  She laughed and gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

  I felt like I’d caught fire all over again.

  • • • •

  I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been to Elaine’s house—had never heard of anyone even getting near the place aside from the aforementioned mailman. So it was with some apprehension that I turned my rusty beater of a Merc down Route 13 toward Fingel’s Point, and with greater apprehension still that I climbed the steps of the old house itself. The porch sagged, the wooden cladding had long since weathered gray, and if I detected a faint piscine tang in the air—nothing like the stench the mailman had described—I attributed it to the salty wind whipping up over the point.

  I had just lifted my hand to knock—tentatively—when the door swung open before me.

  Elaine stood on the other side, looking glamorous in a skirt and cardigan. She gave me another chaste peck on the cheek—more flames—and pulled me inside. “You have to meet Daddy,” she said, leading me through the dim foyer and into the room beyond, which swam with a strange, blue undersea light—a light reflected and refracted through dozens of huge aquariums, each schooling with fish. Some of them were the exotic beauties you saw in every hobbyist’s saltwater tank—clownfish and angelfish, dartfish and dottybacks. But some of them were exotic in other ways, in their sheer ugliness and unfamiliarity. I saw fish that seemed to be little more than mouths and curving, razor-edged teeth, bioluminescent fish and bewhiskered fish and heavy-lidded, drowsy-looking fish the size of my forearm. And in the largest tank a bizarre-looking fish that must have been four feet long.

  “What is that thing?” I asked Elaine.

  “That thing,” said a disembodied voice, “is a living fossil, young man.” And then the mysterious Dr. Gavin himself materialized out of the shadows, a tall man, well over six feet and gaunt to the point of emaciation, with a shock of dark hair that made him seem two or three inches taller still. His lab coat was filthy and he smelled of cigarette smoke and algae—though maybe that was only the odor of the room, which had through his long occupancy permeated his clothes and skin. Elaine would later tell me that he often fell asleep at his work. “He’s very devoted to his research,” she would say, though his devotion sounded more like obsession to me, a point that I remained silent on, as I would remain silent on other points as the summer went by. When I reached out to shake his hand, he didn’t seem to notice. He had the distracted air of a man who lived deep in his own thoughts. He had eyes only for the hideous fish.

  “That thing,” he said, gesturing, “is a coelacanth, thought extinct for sixty-six million years until some lucky fisherman pulled one out of the waters off South Africa not two decades ago. His kind—the fish, not the fisherman—swam the ocean waters in the last days of the dinosaurs, young man. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “I . . . guess so.”

  He nodded. “It’s a handsome creature,” he said. “Do you know the Cretaceous, then?”

  I sputtered.

  “My peers,” he went on, “such as they are, contend that climate change caused the demise of the dinosaurs. They are wrong. I believe that the impact of an enormous meteor wiped them out in the blink of an eye.” He drew his gaze back from the deeps of time and focused his considerable powers of concentration upon me. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “Um, I—a meteor? Sir?”

  He clapped me on the back. “Good. Elaine has told me of your aptitude for chemistry.”

  “My aptitude for—”

  “Ah. Well. You kids have fun tonight.”

  With that, he turned away. I knew a dismissal when I heard one.

  Outside, as we pulled out onto Route 13, I glanced at Elaine. “You told him I had an aptitude—”

  She leaned over to kiss me on the cheek once again. When I felt her hand fall upon my thigh, I thought I might spontaneously combust.

  “Didn’t you say something about a movie?” she asked.

  Which is how we wound up seeing Revenge of the Creature at the Granada Theater downtown. We shared popcorn and a Coke, we ate a box of Junior Mints—and just as the Gill-man made his escape from captivity, I yawned and stretched, draping my arm as if by chance across the back of Elaine’s seat. She leaned into me, resting her head against my shoulder. We watched the rest of the film that way. When the credits rolled and the lights came up—altogether too soon—she reached for my hand and we strolled out together into the night.

  In
the car, she said, “Do you know a place where we can talk awhile?”

  “Won’t your dad be worried?”

  She laughed quietly. Maybe there was a tinge of sorrow in the laugh. I couldn’t say for sure. “My dad doesn’t worry about things like that,” she said.

  So we went to Party Beach.

  • • • •

  It didn’t occur to me to ask what kinds of things her dad did worry about—not then, anyway. And by the time the question did come to mind, it was too late: Events had ground to their inexorable conclusion.

  But that night I could not imagine the horror yet to come. That night, the unpaved turnout overlooking Party Beach was empty. We had only a glittering multitude of stars for company. “Earth Angel” played softly on the radio as we gazed out across the black water. I wanted desperately to kiss Elaine, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I launched into some tedious observations about the movie instead.

  Elaine pressed a finger to my lips. “Hush, Mike,” she said, and I hushed—enthusiastically, if it’s possible to hush enthusiastically. I was certainly enthusiastic about what followed. Elaine’s next kiss was neither shy nor chaste. We must have made out for an hour or more, as only seventeen-year-old virgins can make out. We made out until our lips were bruised, we made out until I could barely breathe. And by the time Elaine put an end to the proceedings—just as my hand was about to close over her breast—I was, literally, aching with desire.

  “We’ll have another chance, Mike,” she said, and it was on that promise that I left her at her door.

  • • • •

  Elaine was true to her word. There were other chances—plenty of them, though never quite enough. Neither of us ever formalized the matter, but after that first session at Party Beach, we didn’t really need to: We both understood that we were going steady, in the parlance of the day, which translated to spending virtually every waking moment together—or every waking moment that I didn’t spend bagging groceries at the A&P, anyway. We shared chocolate shakes at Frankie’s Diner and movies at the Granada. We went parking out at Party Beach. My grades, never very good to start with, plunged. I might have failed my junior year altogether if I hadn’t managed to run out the clock on the semester.