Descended from Darkness: Vol II Read online

  Descended From Darkness:

  Apex Magazine Vol. II

  Edited by

  Jason Sizemore

  Visit us at:

  http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online

  This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. II

  Cover design by Justin Stewart

  "She Called Me Sweetie," © 2009, Glenn Lewis Gillette; "...That Has Such People in It," © 2009, Jennifer Pelland; "Pimp My Airship," © 2009, Maurice Broaddus; "Kenny 149," © 2009, Brad Becraft; "Advertising at the End of the World," © 2009, Keffy R.M. Kehli; "Fungal Gardens," © 2009, Ekaterina Sedia; "Ghost Technology from the Sun," © 2009, Paul Jessup; "A Poor Man's Roses," © 2009, Alethea Kontis; "To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer's Lament," © 2009, Peter M. Ball; "Benjamin Schneider's Little Greys," © 2009, Nir Yaniv; "After the Fire," © 2009, Aliette de Bodard; "Overclocking," © 2009, James L. Sutter; "59 Beads," © 2009, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz; "Wondrous Days," © 2010, Genevieve Valentine; "White Christmas," © 2010, James F. Reilly; "The Lady or the Tider," © 2010, J.M. McDermott; "p.a. chic," © 2010, Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf; "Beyond the Garden Close," © 2010, Mary Robinette Kowal; "The Bride Replete," © 2010, Mary Robinette Kowal; "Dying with Her Cheer Pants on," © 2010, Seanan McGuire; "Seafoam," © 2010, Mark Henry; "The Last Stand of the Ant Maker," © 2010, Paul Jessup; "City of Refuge," © 2010, Jerry Gordon; "Sol Asleep," © 2010, Naomi Libicki; "Laika's Dream," © 2010, Holly Hight; "Artifact," © 2010, Peter Atwood; "Shrödinger's Pussy," © 2010, Terra LeMay;

  All rights reserved

  Copyright 2011 Apex Publications and respective authors

  Published at Smashwords

  Apex Publications, LLC

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  For Glenn Lewis Gillette

  Table of Contents

  She Called Me Sweetie

  Glenn Lewis Gillette

  ...That Has Such People in It

  Jennifer Pelland

  Pimp My Airship

  Maurice Broaddus

  Kenny 149

  Brad Becraft

  Advertising at the End of the World

  Keffy R.M. Kehrli

  Fungal Gardens

  Ekaterina Sedia

  Ghost Technology from the Sun

  Paul Jessup

  A Poor Man's Roses

  Alethea Kontis

  To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer's Lament

  Peter M. Ball

  Benjamin Schneider's Little Greys

  Nir Yaniv

  After the Fire

  Aliette de Bodard

  Overclocking

  James L. Sutter

  59 Beads

  Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  Wondrous Days

  Genevieve Valentine

  White Christmas

  James F. Reilly

  The Lady or the Tiger

  J.M. McDermott

  p.a. chic

  Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf

  Beyond the Garden Close

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  The Bride Replete

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  Dying with Her Cheer Pants On

  Seanan McGuire

  Seafoam

  Mark Henry

  The Last Stand of the Ant Maker

  Paul Jessup

  City of Refuge

  Jerry L. Gordon

  Sol Asleep

  Naomi Libicki

  Laika's Dream

  Holly Hight

  Artifact

  Peter Atwood

  Shrödinger's Pussy

  Terra LeMay

  Bios

  Acknowledgments

  She Called Me Sweetie

  Glenn Lewis Gillette

  My throat clogging. My nose running. My eyes stinging with tears. I track down R in our game room. He's playing backgammon with O. He rolls his eyes, gaze panning up from the board to me. "What now?"

  I want to cry, It's not fair! But I stick to the facts, the ones affecting the other boys in the room---The Rest, I call them. A few peek over at my sniveling. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and stand straight to report: "Mrs. Ma'am says no more evenings with Mommy."

  That gets them. Heads snap up or around from all the game boards. The clock over the mantel chimes twice for 7:30 p.m.---I should be sitting with Mommy! Laughing with Mommy! Reading to her!

  R stands and towers over me. A couple sudden inches in the past months. Will that happen to me? Am I different enough to resist that?

  "Tell us," he says.

  The clock spits out more clicks, as I grab a breath.

  "On, on---" Even more air. "On my way to Mommy's sitting room." Out of our wing of Gilchrist Manor into the Central Hall. Along the walkway at the top of the Grand Staircase. "Right by the Crimson Knight." Dumpy old suit of armor with a red crest on its helmet. "She stopped me. Mrs. Ma'am." Our teacher, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day, when Mr. Sir took over in the gym. "She said..." I struggled to get the words right, though I can't do her voice like Y can. "Evening visits with Mommy have been cancelled for the time being. You will keep the afternoon schedule. Tell the others. Run along now." Run along now, like I was still five, like O2! I hated her for that, in that moment but, of course, that hadn't lasted as I returned to our part of the Manor. Mrs. Ma'am treats each of us too nicely to stay mad at her.

  "Just like that?" R says.

  I look up at him, and the words rocket up from my soul again. This time, I don't cut them off. I don't care what The Rest think, including R.

  "It's not fair! When you come out of Mommy's chute, there's supposed to be just one of you, now and ever. Nobody else like you. Nobody!"

  Only I hadn't come out of Mommy. None of us had. R knows that because I told him otherwise in the secrecy of the belfry, but none of The Rest realizes.

  I know lots The Rest don't because I explore. The Rest don't seem to like that...except maybe A---I'll find out for sure next year when he turns eight, the age I started sneaking around and crawling through the heating ductwork and watching. I know our home like the back of my hand. Or R's. Or A's. Or G's, for that matter.

  I've discovered that we get born in the clinic room over the tool room, next to the Manor's five-car garage. From hiding, I watched Y, C, and every one since, come down their chutes. Same day each year, August 6th. Only it's a different woman each time, and Mommy shows up when the baby's all clean and wrapped up. She smiles and cries and coos and gives the baby his name. From that start, she's treated us all the same---until G went to live with her this afternoon.

  R gazes at me and smiles his patient smile, though something skitters in his eyes, excited, scared. "Let's go talk about this." Get me out of the room if I'm going to talk like that, but he needs to spill something too. He sets a hand on my shoulder, then turns to The Rest. With G gone, R is the oldest in our wing: in charge.

  Eight other boys stare at him, identical faces, ages three to eleven. Three more, younger, sleep in the next room while we monitor with a radio.

  R spreads a smile around, then shrugs. "I'll find out what's going on. Don't worry." He narrows his look, picking out G2 and L, each wearing sport coat and slacks, dress shirt and striped tie, and loafers. Just like me. "You were scheduled with Mommy this evening?"

  They nod slowly.

  "You know," R says, gently.

  Tears bulge in their eyes. Just like me.

  R looks back at O waiting at their backgammon board. "Later?" O nods.

  R brushes past me, whispering, "Belfry," then marches out of the game room. I follow, avoiding all those gazes accusing me of ruining their li
ves.

  Mommy calls me E. I came to the Manor third, a year after R, two years after G.

  R heads toward the belfry above the Central Hall, expecting me to follow along, as if he'd found it and showed me, instead of the other way around. Overlapping planks, unpainted on this side, form the sides. No windows, though shutters on the outside pretend. It can be breezy up there, and at night, it's lit only by a battery-run light I snitched, but it's secret. Already sitting, R grins while I clamber to my perch, higher than his, under the slant of the roof's wooden underside.

  "Me first," he says. "I'm glad you're back early so I can tell you sooner." He spots my teary glare. "Not why you're back early, dummy. We'll handle that after."

  "Yeah," I grunt. My hour alone with Mommy, the focus of my week, every week, has been tossed away, rumpled and crushed, and he gets to go first as if a single year older makes him boss over me... which, of course, it does. Still, the poem I'd written for this evening---three stanzas with a refrain between, just like Mommy suggested---weeps in my pocket, unread.

  Twice a week, I go visit Mommy. Just me. Just her. None of the others. Tuesday at 3 p.m. instead of fencing and Friday at 7:30 p.m. for dessert. Oh, the others get their times with her, I know, but it's not like when I'm there.

  She calls me Sweetie. And she laughs with me and she listens to me. I recite. I read aloud from a fuzzy brown book she keeps in her sitting room.

  And I read poems I make up. The others don't do that, I'm sure, because the first one surprised her. She'd had me read a poem, something about counting ways. I'd never seen words laid out that way, but she sat beside me and ran her fingers along, reading so softly that sometimes I couldn't hear... just to show me how. I caught on fast---she said so, and called me My only sweetie. So I wrote a few lines, like those, but different, and read them to her at my next visit. She smiled so large and hugged me so hard, so I kept writing poems and she kept smiling and hugging---until today when G went to live with her.

  "---listening to me?" R declares.

  I jerk so bad I have to clutch at a wall to keep from falling. Nails from a fake shutter scratch my hand. Hurts no more than I'm used to while exploring. "What?"

  "The library,"R says patiently." I finally realized that there's nothing there newer than twenty years ago. I didn't really notice it at first..."

  Like he was boss of the library, when I was the one who'd shown it to him. Far end of Mommy's wing, back corner of the Manor, overlooking the formal garden, the overgrown experiment in micro-evolution, as R calls it. I came to it by heating plenum, long, dirty, dark, exciting---because I thought I'd crawled all the larger plenums and traced all the smaller ducts off the plenums by then, two years ago when I was ten---but Mrs. Ma'am had started me on geometry and drafting. Excited, I'd taken those tools and drawn the Manor from the inside-out as I knew it, hiding my drawings, not in my room, though it was supposed to be private, but in the belfry, because I knew it was private. And there, one early morning, I realized a gap in my exploring, a rectangle that no hall led to. But heating ducts go everywhere in a house---have to; it's a rule---and all I had to do was find where they'd thrown up a false wall. Whoever had hidden the library had been thorough, but I was more thorough. At the end of the hidden run, there it was, all those books. I could hardly wait to tell R.

  We can all read. Mrs. Ma'am starts in early, lays down the basics, then guides the tutoring, six years' difference. I tutor L, for instance. Got me to read all the better for helping him pick it up. Works the same for other subjects: arithmetic, history, science, grammar, composition. About the only thing L and I have in common, though, those daily lessons. Not like A.

  We do all study together for The Human Condition classes, reading Shakespeare's dramatizations of history as insights into people, alone and together. At least that's how Mrs. Ma'am puts it. On weekends, we act out his re-creations, playing all the parts, men and women, hags and children. Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice. Love and hate. Service, ambition, and power. People stuff. We're people, too, Mrs. Ma'am says.

  Only it's all the same books. Only those Mrs. Ma'am allows us. Lots of books actually, more than I ever got through. But there's stuff missing, R insists, ever since I showed him the belfry. The library had made us companions. The belfry made us friends. Still, I haven't shown him the hidden way to Mommy's bedroom... yet. I may never.

  Mommy. Next Tuesday? Should I tell her then about how I found the library? Show her another way that I'm special? Probably ruin it for R, though. Adults stick together against the kids, that I know, but I don't care so much for R anymore---or G, for that matter---not since this afternoon.

  "Listen to me!" R screams this time.

  "I am!" I yell back because I wasn't really.

  "What was I saying?"

  I sag in defeat, and he starts again. R doesn't mind talking, which is one reason he likes the belfry, even when I'm not in it.

  "I just didn't notice how old everything was," R says, "because with the fiction, it doesn't really matter---just having fiction, reading it, experiencing someone else's imagination! Well!" R stops, eyes glistening, breath coming fast. Then he glances with chagrin because he knows he's repeating himself. "Though I'm coming to see that Shakespeare might have used some fiction techniques in his re-creations." He watches for my reaction to that.

  Who cares? I stare back, glum on the inside, probably the same on the outside.

  R nods, shakes himself into sitting straighter, and announces, "Gregory Aloycious Penobscott."

  "Huh? Who?"

  "G," he says and holds up a finger. "R." A second finger, but pointed back at himself. "E." He jabs at me with that finger. Then he reels off the rest, spelling that name, counting off the letters. Then, grinning like a lopsided banana, he says, "Do you think Mommy intends to keep this up eleven more years?"

  Again, I'm not sure what he means, but I suspect---suspect it means a flood of sameness that will overwhelm my chances for being different. "Keep what up?"

  "Making more copies of him."

  "Him?"

  That slaps at his thinning patience, but he backtracks. "Someone---maybe Mommy---went through that library, removing every mention of its owner, its collector. Everything else but books gone, their front pages ripped out. No papers. No memos. Like someone wanted to erase him... or save every scrap of him in a special place somewhere else, I'm not sure which.

  "When I finally realized this, just a week or so ago, I went through it with a fine-toothed comb."

  "A what?"

  "A metaphor. Comes from reading fiction," he brags. "I finally found something." He digs inside his shirt, into that secret pouch he's taken to wearing all the time.

  He unfolds a letter and thrusts it at me. I look at the top, of course. "Dear Mr. Bryant." But R taps a finger toward the bottom. The printed signature reads "Gregory Aloycious Penobscott."

  "That's us," R spouts. "We are him, each and every one of us. Mommy must've loved him very much."

  "She loves us!"

  "Not the same way. Man-woman thing. You'll understand soon." He squints suddenly, changes it into a frown, then sighs, though it sounds like, Ahh.

  "What?" I'm dizzy from all his jumping to conclusions like they're stones in the stream behind the Manor, a stream that promises a way to the outside world through miles and miles of the forest that surrounds us.

  "I figured it out."

  "What?" My turn to declare.

  "What's going on with G and Mommy---puberty."

  Biology lessons had sneered at me while I struggled with them over the past year. We're engineers, all of us. Not doctors. Engineers! Doesn't Mrs. Ma'am realize that?

  "You'll start puberty in three months. You'll get pubic hair in five. You'll grow---"

  Burns me like an Indian rub on sunburn. "Will not!" I scream. "Just because we're clones does not mean---"

  "Mommy doesn't call us clones. I do. At least, all the evidence, my books, your spying---"

 
"Recce," I correct him. Short for reconnaissance. I read outlaw books too, just not all of them, like he has, several times. Well, maybe just that series by Adam Hardy, but I know them by heart.

  "I think Mrs. Ma'am is experimenting on us. Or maybe with us is more accurate. Using us as a means to deciding the old nature-versus-nurture question."

  He's lost me, so I sputter and glance around for someplace else to sit, but there isn't any.

  "Same genome. Same environment. So how could we be different from each other? 'Cause we are different, aren't we, E?"

  I answer with another glare because he knows how important that is to me.

  R sneers back, not happy about the G situation either, and nobody to take it out on but me. "You'll grow," he teases with the repetition, "three inches in the next year. Just like G did. Just like I did.

  "Your penis---" he gestures in that direction "---does it ever get big and stiff?"

  What a thing to ask! I shrug.

  R persists. "Does it?"

  I look away. "Sometimes."

  "Well, it's called an erection, and it's going to do it more, a lot more even. Only you'll control it." He sniggers. "Or it'll control you."

  My cheeks burn. I find the rafters of the belfry very interesting, anything till he quits talking about this.

  "It's connected with what's going on here."

  I snap back on that. "You knew this was going to happen?"

  He puts out a hand. "Not exactly. It just makes sense. Mommy's a woman."

  "She's Mommy!"

  "But not our mommy. Not biologically. So it's okay."