FSF, September-October 2010 Read online

  * * *

  Spilogale, Inc.

  www.fsfmag.com

  Copyright ©2010 by Spilogale, Inc.

  * * *

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  * * *

  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  September/October * 61st Year of Publication

  * * * *

  NOVELLA

  ORFY by Richard Chwedyk

  NOVELETS

  EATING AT THE END-OF-THE-WORLD CAFé by Dale Bailey

  THE DOOR IN THE EARTH by Alexandra Duncan

  THE LITEROMANCER by Ken Liu

  UNCLE MOON IN RAINTREE HILLS by Fred Chappell

  SHORT STORIES

  THE WINDOW OF TIME by Richard Matheson

  HOW SEOSIRIS LOST THE FAVOR OF THE KING by James L. Cambias

  BLIND SPOT by Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario

  STEADFAST CASTLE by Michael Swanwick

  F&SF MAILBAG by David Gerrold

  ABOUT IT by Terry Bisson

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  BOOKS by Chris Moriarty

  FILMS: NEITHER FISH NOR FOWL—NOR FULLY HUMAN? by Kathi Maio

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  CURIOSITIES by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  Cartoons: Arthur Masear, Joseph Farris, Mark Heath

  COVER BY BRYN BARNARD FOR “ORFY”

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  STEPHEN L. MAZUR, Assistant Editor LISA ROGERS, Assistant Editor

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 119, No. 2 & 3, Whole No. 691, September/October 2010. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $6.50 per copy. Annual subscription $39.00; $49.00 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2010 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ 07646

  GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030

  www.fandsf.com

  CONTENTS

  Novelet: EATING AT THE END-OF-THE-WORLD CAFé by Dale Bailey

  Short Story: THE WINDOW OF TIME by Richard Matheson

  Department: BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  Department: BOOKS by Chris Moriarty

  Short Story: HOW SEOSIRIS LOST THE FAVOR OF THE KING by James L. Cambias

  Novellla: ORFY by Richard Chwedyk

  Short Story: BLIND SPOT by Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario

  Short Story: STEADFAST CASTLE by Michael Swanwick

  Novelet: THE DOOR IN THE EARTH by Alexandra Duncan

  Short Story: F&SF MAILBAG by David Gerrold

  Novelet: THE LITEROMANCER by Ken Liu

  Department: FILMS: NEITHER FISH NOR FOWL—NOR FULLY HUMAN? by Kathi Maio

  Short Story: ABOUT IT by Terry Bisson

  Novelet: UNCLE MOON IN RAINTREE HILLS by Fred Chappell

  Department: FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Department: CURIOSITIES: TRUE HISTORY, BY LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA (CA. 160 A.D.) by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  Department: COMING ATTRACTIONS

  * * * *

  Novelet: EATING AT THE END-OF-THE-WORLD CAFé by Dale Bailey

  Dale Bailey contributed “Silence” to our May/June issue this year. His story “The Crevasse,” written with Nathan Ballingrud, has garnered several reprints and award nominations since it appeared in Lovecraft Unbound last year. Now he kicks off our anniversary issue with a science fiction noir story.

  She'd seen them once, the dead and damned, hooded blind, their hands bound at their backs. She'd seen blue lightning leap sizzling from electric prods as gray men in blue uniforms harried them stumbling down from enormous canvas-covered army trucks. She'd heard their cries, their moans, the shouts and the mocking laughter of the men in blue. She'd smelled the stench of their roasting flesh.

  That had been her first night at the café. Afterward, in the ashen rain, Eleanor had gotten turned around somehow, missed the train station. When the fence loomed up before her—fourteen feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, and bound at the distant corner by the skeletal shadow of a sniper tower, the smoking red haze of the pit beyond—a fist closed around her heart. Recoiling in horror, she'd turned away and fled for miles through night-plunged streets, tears streaking her face. When a taxi hove up out of the dark, she'd flagged it down, blind to the expense; she just wanted to get away from that place, it didn't matter how much it cost. But the heat inside the car couldn't warm her and the aimless chatter of the cabbie provided no comfort. She resolved to give up the job, even if it meant that she and Anna both starved, but even then she knew that she would not. She could not. There were no other jobs, not for the likes of her, anyway, and so she resolved instead to forget what she had seen, to put it out of her mind forever.

  Yet she dreamed of it still.

  She dreamed of it now—the stench and the mocking laughter, the blue flicker of the prods in the dark. Then she was awake. A train thundered by down below, rattling the apartment. Eleanor stood and shrugged on a robe. She glanced at the alarm clock—four twenty-seven in the morning—as she stepped into the tiny bathroom, the light glary and over-bright as she lowered herself to the icy rim of the toilet seat. She showered and dressed, shivering in the cold, and then she let herself into the living room.

  Anna dozed amid damp twisted sheets, bone thin, fever sweat beading her forehead. Eleven, she looked infinitely older—sixty, seventy even, a wizened old woman curled fetal around a hoard of pain. As Eleanor caressed the child's head, she thought of the curls that had grown there not a year ago, thick and lustrous and dark. Anna: sick unto death, unable to die. Degrees of punishment, Eleanor thought, degrees of pain. And she wondered whose punishment this was, hers or Anna's, and whose pain?

  The kitchen—spotless—stank of rancid grease and an older, deeper corruption that no amount of scrubbing could eliminate, the ghosts of a thousand meals cooked into the cracked plaster, the peeling yellow-gray linoleum, and the rot-sodden wooden floor underneath. A round schoolroom clock hung above the stove: five oh-one now, Mrs. Koh due any minute. Eleanor cleared a spot among the avalanche of bills on the rickety table, set down her cup and poured boiling water over a basket of two-day-old coffee grounds. Setting it aside to steep, she brushed back the curtains to peer out.

  Acheron dozed, dreaming its unquiet dreams. On and on it went, street and tenement, tenement and street, shot through with commercial avenues, decaying storefronts, and dusty offices where men in suits labored at inconceivable tasks. Craving the warmth of sunlight against her skin, Eleanor had tried once to beat the city—everyone did, sooner or later—jumping from line to line, yellow line, blue line, red line and more, until the primary colors failed and still the network of trains went on, each fresh stop spilling her up into the same squalid warren.

  Eleanor lifted the coffee basket, dumped the grounds, and screwed the cap down atop her cup. She stole another glance at the clock, five-seventeen now—where was Mrs. Koh?—t
ilted the weak, bitter coffee to her lips, and twitched back the curtains. Beyond the age-rippled glass, Acheron stirred. To the east the sun glowed, a polluted cinder, wreathed in fog; to the west, the dawn burned. Night and day, it burned: the pit, sleepless and terrible, casting its sickly red pall over the successive rings of the city that surrounded it. And night and day now, Eleanor felt its pull. As it did with each successive generation, the city had drawn her slowly in, ever closer to its bleak and desperate heart. Even now she could feel it, its dark allure, as irresistible as the drag of a dying star.

  In the living room, Anna cried out. Eleanor tensed, knuckles white around her coffee cup. And then Anna was sobbing. Eleanor let the curtain fall, turned from the window, and slipped through the beaded curtain between the rooms. Anna half-sat against the headboard, rocking, her interlaced hands clenched over her belly in agony.

  Eleanor put her coffee down. She sat on the edge of the bed and rested her hand against the child's forehead: hot, so hot, a fire burning deep inside her; just feeling it, Eleanor had to choke back the tears. “It's okay. It's okay, baby. Let me get your pills"—she stretched for the orange bottle on the nightstand—"Here. They'll help."

  "They don't help,” Anna gasped between sobs, but Eleanor had already loosened the cap. She was spilling the silvery caplets into her palm—one, two, and two more for luck; the prescribed dosage had ceased to help a long time ago—and reaching for the cup of tepid water Mrs. Koh had left the night before, when Anna screamed—

  — “They don't help” —

  —and lashed out with one hand. Pills and water went flying like glistening rain. The prescription bottle and the water cup fetched up spinning against the rump-sprung sofa.

  "Dammit, Anna!"

  "I don't want the pills!” Anna hissed. “I want Mrs. Koh!"

  Confused emotion erupted at the base of Eleanor's ribcage: fury and dull resentment and something else—

  —face it, why don't you?—

  —something darker and more loathsome, something she didn't want to name. It was all she could do not to slap the child.

  Then the buzzer. Mrs. Koh. Eleanor rang her up. The diminutive Asian woman, her face as shrunken and wrinkled as a dry apple, bustled into the apartment, spilling umbrella and purse, a canvas sack stuffed with her knitting and her romance novel, and a spate of apologies even as Eleanor snapped, “You're late."

  "I said I'm sorry,” Mrs. Koh told her, shrugging off her coat. “Sorry, sorry sorry.” She flapped her hand. “The trains, you know. What can I do about the trains? Hire somebody else, you don't like it."

  "The trains!” Eleanor said, snatching up her cup of bitter coffee. “I'm late, and it's you she wants anyway."

  * * * *

  Outside, Eleanor ran for the subway, clutching her coffee at arm's length so it wouldn't slosh on her uniform. The doors snatched at her skirt, and the train lurched into motion as she was edging through the crush of grudging rush-hour flesh inside. She snagged a spot on the overhead rail and steadied herself, already framing the morning's excuse—

  —Anna it was always Anna—

  —in her mind.

  An in-bound train hurtled past the windows, light and shadow, scattering her thoughts. The car leaned into a curve. Eleanor shut her eyes, breathing air thick with the funk of coffee, cologne, stale sweat. It was okay.

  Everything was going to be okay.

  "Avernus Street Station,” the PA system said, and the train braked, gravity swinging through her like a pendulum.

  The doors hissed back. In the rush on the platform someone jostled her, splashing coffee across her breast. “Hey—” she said, swiping at her blouse. “Why don't you watch where y—"

  A low menacing growl drove her back a step.

  A man lean and sharp as a straight razor gashed the air before her, uniformed in a short double-breasted black tunic buttoned to the neck, with a pair of tiny red eyes affixed to the tips of his stiffened collars. His own eyes were glittering chips of mica, set deep over cheekbones like upturned blades. His mouth was a slit, unsmiling. She could see the coffee stain, darker on the dark breast of his uniform. And a dog, vicious and lean as its master, straining against its leash, teeth bared and slavering.

  "I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry."

  Clutching the coffee against her breast, Eleanor fished in her purse with one hand for a wad of napkins to blot the stain. “Here, let me—"

  "Don't touch me,” the man said. And then: “Sit, Cuth."

  The dog dropped to its haunches, gazing up at her out of mean, narrow eyes.

  "I'm sorry,” Eleanor said. “I'm—"

  "Move along,” he said.

  And she did, swallowing the word like a stone. She let the crowd carry her along, feeling those eyes take her measure as momentum swept her past. She glanced back from the turnstiles, but he was gone, lost amid the welter of blank morning faces. Vendors clashed back their storefront cages, and someone screamed into a cell phone—

  —"it was at six, doesn't anyone listen"—

  —and the train shrieked as it pulled away, dragging up a rooster tail of candy wrappers and newsprint.

  Just gone, like he'd never been there at all.

  And she was late.

  Yet he wasn't gone, not really. His twin gazed down at her from enormous banners over the escalators, right arm crossed over his breast, hand curled into a fist over his heart, the words Ever Watchful inscribed in red above his close-cut hair. And then she veered away, into one of the labyrinthine corridors to the street. Her shoes unleashed a chorus of crêpe-soled accusations on the tile, late again, Eleanor, you'll be late for your own funeral—

  Charlie's voice. Screw Charlie, she thought, and stepped out into the rain.

  The sky clamped down like the lid of a pressure cooker. Even now, even in the rain, the air reeked of the pit, a sulfurous miasma of cinder and ash, charred flesh rendered down to bone, air so tainted not all the rain in the world could ever wash it clean. Clear days you could see it, an oily black haze that masked the sun, filming everything—sidewalks and windows, skin too—in clinging grime; worse, you could hear it, a sub-aural throb in your bones.

  A tangle of secondary enterprises had sprung up to feed it, tributary veins wound tight into the fibrous heart of the tumor, newsstands and snack shops mostly, cigarettes and lunch, for people who worked in the pit would just as soon wash their hands of the place afterward, she supposed. Shed their uniforms and the knowledge of the things they did in them and do their real shopping elsewhere.

  And there was the diner, too, of course.

  The End-of-the-World Café, Tank's idea of a joke.

  It glimmered across from the station in the murk, crimson neon bloodying the rain-slick pavement. Eleanor dumped her coffee—rancid with the memory of her collision on the train—in an overflowing trash bin, and dashed across the street. Pausing, she glanced back at the dark mouth of the subway.

  For a moment—a heartbeat—she thought she saw a figure standing there. Thin and black, that hateful cur at his side, straining at its leash. Both of them watching her. She brushed the water from her eyes, blinking: gone now, if they had ever been there at all.

  Eleanor ducked inside, the dining room jumping with the first-shift crowd, damp heat and the rattle of crockery, the tang of frying bacon in the air. Philippe, bussing table six, winked as she rolled through. Noreen smiled from behind the counter.

  "Today's the day,” she said.

  "What are you talking about, Noreen?"

  "Loverboy, that's what. Ten bucks says he makes his move during the lunch rush."

  "Right."

  Shedding her coat, Eleanor swung into the kitchen, already awhirl with the sizzle of grease and the tinny thump of the radio propped over the prep table, a wire clothes hanger jammed into the hole where the antenna used to be. Tank grinned at her from the grill, his clean-shaven skull shining, the roll of dark flesh at his collar stippled with sweat. “Darla laid down on me this morning
,” he told her as she punched in, half an hour late, half an hour without tips, the clock grinding down her hours. “Said she was puke sick, if you believe that. You wanna pull a double?"

  "I'll have to make a call, see if Mrs. Koh can stay with Anna."

  "You know you gonna do it. You late, and both us know you need the hours.” He shook his head as she buzzed by in the other direction, tying on her apron. “You be late for your own funeral someday,” he said, and then the kitchen door swung closed at her back and the roar of the dining room engulfed her.

  * * * *

  Loverboy rolled in just after one—

  "Ten bucks,” Noreen hissed, sweeping past with a tray of iced tea. “Betcha."

  —and took the last booth in Eleanor's section, same as he always did; the dining room teemed by then, blue uniforms most of them—pitmen, the ones who did the really dirty work—their oily, sulfurous smell strong in the place, them and a handful of their supervisors, gray men clad in gray, their uniform collars emblazoned with a stylized flame, and a handful of locals, shop girls and countermen, hunched in nervous silence over their meals. Nobody talked much when the pitmen were around. They sucked the air out of a room, leaving other folks gasping for breath, stricken with the certainty that it wouldn't do to cross them.

  Loverboy, though—Loverboy was an exception.

  Eleanor had noticed that much even before Noreen had saddled him with that ridiculous name. Yet she couldn't quite figure out what it was: the way he carried himself maybe, confident but empty of swagger or maybe just that he always ate alone or maybe—though Eleanor didn't like to admit it—that he reminded her of Charlie, rangy and raw-boned, with a beak of a nose that looked like it had wound up once or twice on the business end of someone's fist. He had the same dark hair, unkempt and shot through with strands of gray; the same hands, thick knuckled, knowing. Occasionally—and she didn't much care to acknowledge this either—Eleanor found herself alone in bed after Anna had drifted off to sleep, her mind fixing on those hands and how it might feel to have them touch her. Aside from the simple exchanges he needed to order, though, he'd never spoken to her—so when Noreen's bet came in it took Eleanor by surprise.