Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Strange Attractors

originally published by Daily Science Fiction in June, 2014

The first time, we stayed together for fifty years. The divorce was my doing. I fell apart a few months after we received our permanent extensions, at a hotel on Nassau, the same one where we’d taken our honeymoon. We were sitting side by side on a balcony, basking in the sun and the moist, salt tinged air.

"We’re truly forever now," I said, fixing my gaze on the hazy blue horizon and not his face. "What if this isn’t right? What if there’s another woman out there who’d make you happier?"

"Not this again," he groaned. "After all these years, how can you be so insecure?"

"Wrong answer," I said. "If you’d told me that I’m the only one you’d ever want, I would have believed you."

I walked out of that room and refused to see him again, not even to serve the documents.

We were apart for nearly a decade before we both decided that we were better with each other than anyone else.

"Should we, maybe, have kids?" he said tentatively as we laid in bed on our second honeymoon. His pale skin glowed in the moonlight, and his copper hair sparkled and curled around my dark fingers.

I looked up into his clear hazel eyes. "I think I’d like that. How about we start tomorrow?"

He laughed, a deep, drum-like thrum which always made me warm inside. "Sure, why not?" He planted a kiss on my nose. "I love that you can still surprise me."

We raised three children and stayed together for sixty-two more years. That sounds like a lot of progeny to spawn in a few decades, but we really wanted to travel, and once we were off Earth, that avenue would be closed. We waited until the kids were grown and settled, or as settled as a person can be with a scant thirty years of experience, and then had nearly two blissful decades of tourism around the Solar System.

Our favorite spot was Ganymede station’s view lounge. We were curled up together on a sofa watching Jupiter’s psychedelic storms.

"It’s utterly mesmerizing," I said. "Have you seen the vids of L2-Vega?"

"That reminds me, while I was at the bar, I overheard someone say that they’ve opened a new portal to Vega."

"Fantastic," I exclaimed, sitting up straight. A second portal meant the system would open to tourists. "We could do it, you know. We have the funds now that kids aren’t drawing on them."

"We could afford it," he said, "but I don’t know about going away for that long. The round trip time penalty is, what, around forty years? We’d miss seeing so much of the kids' lives."

I waved my hand dismissively. "They’re adults. They should learn to be on their own. Besides, it’ll be a while yet before they have the credit for babies. This is the best time to go, and our funds aren’t going to be so high forever. We got lucky with the portal manufacturer we chose."

"It wasn’t luck," he protested.

"Fine, fine, it was your skill and timing, but you haven’t always struck the gold mine. Remember the ion engine flop?"

"How could I forget? You bring it up at least once every five years. Haven’t I more than made up for it since then?"

"Of course," I soothed, not mentioning the influx of credit I had brought in with my patents. "I am so proud of what you’ve done, and I love you, and I think we should take advantage of our situation and see the galaxy."

He shook his head and sent copper braids flying around his face in the low station gravity. "I won’t go," he said, "but I won’t ask you to stay, either."

Nothing I said would change his mind and so I blame him for our second split. I went. He stayed, the stubborn fool.

The third time was a couple of centuries later, and we had changed so much that we didn’t recognize each other. I saw her at a portal in the Gliese system, solar wings shimmering in the starlight, hair shorn, and limbs contracted into travel buds. I was still mostly human in appearance for I’d been traveling too much to keep up with technology, but I had gone neuter-male and had added a lot of radiation protection to my organs. That had been exhilarating in so many ways until I saw her. I felt a flash of envy, but the attraction overcame it, and I struck up a conversation once she was in station.

We talked incessantly for hours, flush with early romance, and then she said, "Let me show you my fourth level descendants back on Earth." She extended a biowire, but I didn’t have a port. It’s easy to blow your money once you leave the Milky Way.

"That’s alright," she said, smiling. She extruded a light cube and placed in my grateful hand. I pushed it into my wrist.

"What beautiful babies," I exclaimed as the images scrolled before my eyes. And they were indeed, all chubby and wide-eyed and adorably homo sapiens. Then I saw the family portrait, four generations arranged artfully in rows—all except for their great grandmother.

"That’s—you—" I stopped, lost for words.

Her brow creased with a delicate furrow of puzzlement. I copied over a few of my own memories and passed the cube back to her. The crease disappeared, and she closed her crystalline eyes for a few eternal minutes. When they opened, they were clear hazel and glistening with tears.

"I thought you’d gone forever," she whispered.

I smiled and leaned in for a kiss. "Forever is a long time."

The Egg

originally published by Nature in March, 2015

In the corner of the night darkened room, tucked next to the sofa, the Egg rested on its pedestal like a modern sculpture. Its quiet hum was the only sound in the apartment; its green indicator the only light. The screen on the front of the ovoid was dark, not revealing the partially formed creature incubating within.

That wasn’t right. The screen had never once been off, not while she had been here. She was gone now. She had slipped away quietly, without fuss, much as she’d lived.

"Promise," she had demanded, her voice raspy, as the smells of disinfectant and rot permeated his pores. "Promise that you’ll keep it going."

"I promise," he’d lied. "Don’t worry." He clutched the pills in his pocket with one hand.

In the end she had been reduced to skin and bones. Her hand, clutching his, was a papery claw. She had always been scrawny. He called her chicken legs when they first met, and she retorted with "stupid head." Insults had never been her strong point. They were six years old. Love came years later, and the cancer not long after that.

She was cured the first time. A designer molecule flooded her system, keeping the traitorous cells at bay.

"Let’s have a baby," she said when hope was allowed back into their house.

"Let’s have two," he responded, and they both grinned like fools and got started.

They found out not long afterward that the molecule which kept her alive was poison to any fetus. They spent the remainder of his inheritance on the Egg and the hormones and extractions and fertilizations.

"It will be every bit your baby," promised the specialists.

She let them record her heartbeat and intestinal sounds for playback. The two of them used the microphone daily to stimulate budding ear drums. She sang her favorite songs in her off key shower voice. He played his guitar and read cooking magazines aloud. They stared at the screen in fascination, watching it transform from a tadpole to an alien. The sofa seat nearest the Egg turned into a sinkhole.

The second cancer snuck in, quiet and efficient, while they were busy looking the other way. She needed another designer molecule, but she was too far down the queue. The money that would have bought her way higher was gone so the doctors tried the old fashioned poisons. She lost her strength, the contents of her stomach, and every hair on her body, but she didn’t miss a day singing to the Egg.

Watching her reclining against the cylindrical pedestal, forehead resting on the warm ovoid above, he loved her even more.

"You’re beautiful," he said.

She grinned, all teeth in a skeletal face. "You’ve never lied to me before."

"And I’m not lying now."

The second cancer took her swiftly. The apartment looked just as it had when they’d left for the hospital two days ago, but nothing was the same. The faint glow of city lights bled around the curtain edges, painting the room in a monochromatic palette. The Egg glinted, beckoning him. He shuffled toward it slowly like an old man, and tripped on the edge of the rug—the rug which they had chosen together to cushion tender baby feet and dimpled knees.

With a trembling hand he reached out and turned on the screen. It almost looked human now, though the head was too large and the body too skinny, sort of like she had looked in those last days of life. His hand moved of its own accord, navigating the menu screens, delving deep to find that buried option that came with every Egg. His fingers hovered over the number pad.

"I’m sorry, little one," he whispered. "This wasn’t how the road was supposed to go. I wish—if only -." He sighed. "I can’t do this alone, and there’s no one left for you but me, a poor excuse for a Father." He drew his hand back. "Wait. Let’s go together. I can do that much for you."

He stood and walked to the kitchen. His steps felt lighter now that the decision was made. He filled a glass with water, just enough to swallow a few pills. As he walked the scant distance back to the Egg, he reached into his pocket and retrieved the pills. Their small white forms gleamed like pearls in his palm.

He reclined against the Egg, as she had, and closed his eyes. You’ve never lied to me before. Her words rattled like marbles in his skull. An involuntary tear traced its way down the contours of his face. It was the pinhole in the dam, and he felt all his grief push against it and then break through.

The sobs crashed over him in great waves, and he wrapped his arms around the warm Egg, clinging to it like a buoy in a storm. The glass and pills fell from his hands, forgotten in the tempest. An eternity passed before he went limp from exhaustion and fell asleep, his body curled around the Egg’s pedestal. The menu system quietly and automatically exited to the start, and the screen went black.

Ships in the Night

originally published by Daily Science Fiction in May, 2015

The problem with seeing the future is that you can do nothing to change it. Kuni had figured this out long ago, when she was still a young child. People would ignore you, disbelieve you, or resent you. After enough failed attempts to change the course of events, she stopped trying.

This made it no easier to go about her life. She gained and lost friends, failed exams, fell in love, and had her heart broken. When she went to college and majored in physics, she felt the mathematical beauty of her foresight for the first time. Of course she couldn’t change the future. Time was an illusory concept. Everything that was going to happen had already happened, and she was simply another node in the fabric of the universe—along for the ride but with an extra-dimensional view.

The realization led Kuni to change her major to philosophy, and she went on to form her doctoral thesis around the subject. Naturally, this came as no surprise to her.

When Kuni was twenty-seven years old, in the midst of writing her dissertation, she met Isra. Isra was gorgeous: petite, curvaceous, dark hair, thick lashes, and deep brown eyes that were almost black. She was also like Kuni’s favorite rock.

Throughout Kuni’s life, she had found comfort from objects that changed little through time. The oak tree in her parents' backyard was one. The granite boulder in her grandparents' Kyoto garden was another. The boulder was particularly soothing since it was effectively unchanged on the timescale of Kuni’s life. It was a relief for her to cling to its rough surface and let that part of her mind rest.

Isra was like that rock.

Kuni had seen her many times at the Koffee Klatch, where Isra worked. She had foreseen their failed, short-lived relationship, but a silent movie of her own future told her little about the other woman’s life.

The first time they touched, hands brushing as Isra handed her a mug of hot chocolate, she saw Isra’s future: an unending sameness. Not literally, of course. Isra lived, breathed, moved, took coffee orders, and wiped tables. She went home, had lovers (there was Kuni herself), moved to other towns. But she never changed.

Kuni stood at the pick-up counter, steaming drink in hand, and hoped Isra couldn’t see the shock on her face.

"Hi, I’m Kuni," she blurted, trying to cover her confusion.

"What an interesting name," Isra said politely. "Where is it from?"

"It’s Japanese, short for Kuniko."

"You don’t look Japanese," Isra said. Her smile took the sting from the comment.

"My Dad’s from Japan. Mom’s Ethiopian. Everyone says I look more like her."

Isra shrugged. "Either way, I think you’re beautiful."

A few days later when the moment and the memory aligned, Kuni asked her out, and Isra accepted. They first kissed under a full moon. Isra’s lips tasted like cardamom and coffee. Kuni was intoxicated and utterly at peace as she held Isra in her arms.

For two weeks, Kuni enjoyed the romance and avoided the questions, but then it was time. She held Isra’s hand as they meandered through the arboretum. Sunlight speckled the ground around them, and the breeze carried the astringent scent of eucalyptus. Birds chittered, and leaves rustled, but they were otherwise alone. No human ears would be privy to this conversation.

"What are you?" Kuni asked.

"What do you mean?" Isra said, sounding puzzled.

Kuni stopped walking, not letting go of the warm fingers entwined with her own, and forced Isra to a halt.

"You never change. You never age, or grow fatter or thinner. You’ll never have a gray hair. You just go on and on and on." Kuni’s voice faded as she drifted into the bliss of timelessness. "It’s wonderful."

Surprise. Suspicion. Doubt. Fear.

Isra had an expressive face.

"How do you know?" she whispered, fingers tightening painfully.

Kuni took a deep breath and said the words aloud for the first time in her life. "I can see the future of anything—or anyone—I touch."

Isra stared at her for a moment and then demanded, "So tell me when mine will end!"

"I don’t know," Kuni said, taken aback. "I can’t see past my own death."

"You’re lying! You’re going to kill me!"

"What? No. Don’t be crazy. I could never-"

"Please!" Isra released Kuni’s hand and grabbed her by the shoulders. "Just do it!" she said, shaking Kuni with all her tiny might.

She pried Isra’s hands away as gently as she could. "I’m sorry."

Tears pooled in two sets of dark eyes.

"Go to hell!"

"Why?" Kuni said, her voice raw.

"You really have to ask? I’ve been alive so long, I can’t even remember how I got this way. I’m tired. So incredibly tired."

"I’m sorry," Kuni said again. "I wish there was another way I could help. Stay with me," she pleaded, ignoring the part of her brain that told her the truth, that she would never see Isra again. "Maybe I can make it better—somehow."

Isra sighed. The desperate anger in her face melted into desolation. "You’d be the worst of all. With anyone else, I can fake it. Have a fight, leave, start over. I can pretend to be someone new. I’m even good at lying to myself, but with you? I’d have to face the truth. Every time I looked at you, touched you—no. I can’t do it. Good-bye, Kuni."

Isra stood up on her toes and kissed Kuni with a slow, lingering touch of lips on cheek. Kuni’s heart ached. She had seen this moment, knew it would come, but it still hurt.

When Isra had gone, Kuni walked over to the pond and found her favorite stone. The great grey slab jutted over the murky water, and she laid down on its sun-warmed surface. For once, she didn’t care who saw her or what they thought. For once, life had surprised her, just a little bit, and she held tightly to that feeling. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and imagined the aroma of cardamom and coffee.