Periphery Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Periphery

  Introduction

  Origins By Marianne de Pierres

  The Voyage Out By Gwyneth Jones

  They Came from Next Door By Kristyn Dunnion

  Ishtartu By Lyda Morehouse

  Mind Games By Tracey Shellito

  The Rocky Side of the Sky By Melissa Scott

  Angels Alone By Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Devulban Dreams By Jean Stewart

  Diplomacy By Catherine Lundoff

  Silver Skin By Elspeth Potter

  The Spark By Cecilia Tan

  Sideways By Sharon Wachsler

  The Authors

  About the Editor

  Periphery

  Edited by Lynne Jamneck

  “Origins” copyright © 2008 Marianne de Pierres

  “The Voyage Out” copyright © 2008 by Gwyneth Jones

  “They Came from Next Door” copyright © 2008 by Kristyn Dunnion

  “Ishtartu” copyright © 2008 by Lyda Morehouse

  “Mind Games” copyright © 2008 by Tracey Shellito

  “The Rocky Side of the Sky” copyright © 2008 by Melissa Scott

  “Angels Alone” copyright © 2008 by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  “Devulban Dreams” copyright © 2008 by Jean Stewart

  “Diplomacy” copyright © 2008 by Catherine Lundoff

  “Silver Skin” copyright © 2008 by Elspeth Potter, portions of the story originally published as “Camera” (2001) and “Wire” (2003)

  “The Spark” copyright © 2008 by Cecilia Tan

  “Sideways” copyright © 2008 by Sharon Wachsler

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  PERIPHERY

  Edited by Lynne Jamneck

  Introduction

  What is science fiction?

  The answer—or answers—depends on who you ask. For some, science fiction, or sf, is a component of speculative fiction. Others reject this umbrella term, suggesting it detracts from the what, who and why of the genre.

  Can science fiction be defined at all?

  Perhaps it was easier during the infant stages of the genre, seventy odd years ago when sf first began to receive major attention as a particular mode of writing. At its core, good sf has always been about everything but little green men. To the uninitiated, aliens and space ships are unfortunately still two of the most synonymous elements related to sf writing.

  In many so-called “literary” circles, sf remains a genre that is frowned upon, even seen as substandard. Clearly though, anyone who thinks of sf in terms of Star Trek and Star Wars as the beginning and end-all of the field has probably never read much sf to begin with. It’s hard to think that such narrow perceptions still flourish, when real-world science is frequently anticipated in the fictive contexts of sf long before they materialise as tidbits on the evening news.

  The best fiction in any genre is most often about people, and how they react to the changes constantly taking place in the world around them. How do they react to cause and effect? What about the solutions that can be extrapolated from these transformations?

  Sf stories are sociological studies of potential futures, and that is what makes them so exciting. In a world that keeps so many secrets from us, they give us an exciting glimpse into a future that could be—or a terrifying glimpse of something we could potentially avoid.

  As many descriptions as there are to explain “science fiction,” so few are there when it comes to the topic of eroticism. Perhaps it is easiest explained as an aesthetic focused on sexual desire; the emotions and feelings that build upon the anticipation of sexual activity. Importantly though, it is not only arousal and anticipation, but also the attempt through whatever means of representation to incite those feelings.

  This is what makes eroticism such a multifaceted concept. It is different for almost everyone. Similar erotic traits may follow through, but there is invariably always something that differs from one individual to another—a colour, a gesture, a texture, memories. The taste of a particular tang on the tongue, a threat, a specific word or sound—the possibilities as endless as the make-up of the human mind.

  The stories in this anthology cross several boundaries. Some are sublime, others overt. What binds them together is that they are unique in their diversity. In terms of voice, style and story content, the thirteen stories in this collection run the gamut of not only the sf and erotic genres, but also showcase that which yields great stories—human emotion. Our fears and desires, the memories that haunt us, inspire us or ultimately drag us down.

  Here’s wishing you a marvelous journey through the following exciting, tragic, sexy and inspiring pages. The girlies are suited up, they’re tough and they’re mean and they know how to wear a uniform, shake a stick and pilot an engine. They’re coming in from the boundary rims, and they’re ready to play.

  Lynne Jamneck

  New Zealand

  2012

  Origins

  By Marianne de Pierres

  When Nicholein’s ladylove un-suctioned her fifteenth toe and dropped it into the Air Vice-Marshall’s martini, I thought it was time to leave the party.

  Outside the air felt warmer, a hint of frangipani mingled with wafts of essences from the kitchens. I imagined the golden-eyed servants bearing their trays of sweet delicacies to the guests—steeped figs, halva and caramelized tomi fruits. My mouth moistened and I nearly turned back.

  The evening’s shadows danced though; dark, erotic performers, teasing and swaying.

  Come…play!

  I forgot the party and abandoned my dress jacket, leaving it snug and pale over Nicholein’s original bronze of St George and the Dragon.

  Reaching a line of goliath eucalypts I rubbed my hands across their thighs. Patches of rough bark tore my soft-fin’s membrane where I had neglected to secure my cellsuit. I cursed the custom that considered it ill-mannered on any world to celebrate a toast wearing pseudo flesh.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  “Too many years inside secondary skins,” I replied, supposing that the tree had spoken.

  “I thought you must be one of them. Only they don’t often walk in the gardens—not during dream-dark.”

  Her face appeared then, amongst the silver shrubs that flanked their majestic parents.

  I felt breathless and excited by her perfection.

  Then, solemnly, she extended her hand and placed it in mine. Strangely small, the nails were sharp on my tender flesh.

  Leathery, bony, tiny hands.

  Marsupial hands.

  Disappointment sobered my mood. I knew enough about Arids to realize that the creature before me was a native. And yet for a few seconds my soul had soared, giddy and aflame, so desperate was my need for love.

  She asked me to walk a while, and loathe to defy another—even an arid—with my melancholy, I agreed.

/>   Into the dream-dark, rubicund swamped night.

  Direction-less, save for the glitter of Nicholein’s party lights, we drifted amongst the rocks and spiny bushes to the powdered cushion of a dry riverbed. With her hand balanced delicately in mine she uttered a discordant rasping sound. Her tail brushed my legs.

  From unseen places a crowd gathered, first, one shadow, and as I turned to catch it, another and another. Pensive, entrancing faces wavering as hers had done, above fur and claw.

  “She comes as the geste bespoke.”

  “’Tis her.”

  “’Tis truly her.”

  “…must be her. Praise!”

  Tuneless clamor filled the night and I shivered with premonition. Heavy muscular tails pounded in accompaniment and choked the air with dust.

  She silenced them and waited, until I was fit to shout or weep with fright, or wishfully close my eyes and wake sick from Nicholein’s cocktails.

  “On dust warmed night,

  by primordial right,

  the enduring race be born.”

  She chanted in words I understood, yet pretended not to.

  One part dream, one part disgrace—as all her breed—she blew sweet-musty breath in my face. “You will take us there. Home.”

  She pointed to the gauzy dust of stars.

  I moved away, fear coiling to squeeze inside me like a tentacle.

  What part could I play in your customs? I am traveler to this world. Alien. Transient. And lonely. “Nothing I have could be of value to you.”

  Tails beat in denial of my words. Disapprovingly jagged. Rough.

  Again she silenced them, a slow smile to her perfect lips.

  “It is time for our kind to leave this place and command the future. Yet we are trapped here. Grounded by another race’s laws. Forbidden to travel. But our genome cannot be held prisoner. Your child will be our children.”

  She touched me again.

  I recoiled from the warmth of it. Underneath the cellsuit, my real skin ached from too much time spent on dry land, longing for the spray, and the cool of ocean depths.

  “But we are not compatible.” My protest was submissive at best.

  She knew it, and drew me toward her, laying me gently to the ground, piercing through the cellsuit and into my membranes with gentle insistence.

  I began to leak precious fluid. Slow. Salty.

  She licked it with her sharp tongue then spread its scent across her fur.

  I could hardly bear the pleasure of either deed or notion.

  My body rippled as if I swam in the metallic hydrogen layers of my home world.

  She plunged her tongue into me and curled it around my womanly erectile.

  My mind overflowed with images of pulsing, multiplying cells. Tiny holes began to appear in them. Each one sent me shivering to a higher bliss. My mind inverted in ecstasy.

  Around us, their collective sigh cocooned my conception.

  She stroked me down, careful not to rupture more skin.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  Her face glowed with the rapture of certainty. “Transfection. A mating of fluid and dust, scale and fur,” she replied. “But more so than that…woman and woman.”

  *

  MdP: I lived for several years in a far-north mining town in Western Australia. The Mining Manager often had parties at his house on the hill. It stood alone on the edge of town, its garden merging with thousands of kilometres of red rock and Spinifex. I used to think how easy it would be to wander drunk from a party there, and lose yourself forever in the harsh, dreamtime landscape.

  The Voyage Out

  By Gwyneth Jones

  i

  “Do you want to dream?”

  “No.”

  The woman in uniform behind the desk looked at her screen and then looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t know if she was real and far away, or fake and here.

  “Straight to orientation then.”

  ii

  I walked. The Kuiper Belt Station—commonly known as the Panhandle—could afford the energy fake gravity requires. It wasn’t going anywhere; it was spinning on the moving spot of a minimum-collision orbit, close to six billion kilometres from the sun: a prison isle without a native population. From here I would be transported to my final exile from the United States of Earth, as an algorithm, a string of 0s and 1s. It’s illegal to create a code-version of a human being anywhere in the USE, including near-space habitats and planetary colonies. Protected against identity theft, the whole shipload of us, more than a hundred condemned criminals, had been brought to the edge: where we must now be coded individually before we could leave. The number-crunching would take a while, even with the most staggering computation power.

  A reprieve, then. A stay of execution

  In my narrow cabin, or cell, I lay down on the bunk. Walls, floor, fittings: everything was made of the same, grey-green, dingy ceramic fibre. The “mattress” felt like metal to the touch, but it yielded to the shape and weight of my body. The raised rim made me think of autopsies, crushed viscera. A panel by my head held the room controls: just like a hotel. I could check the status of my vacuum toilet, my dry shower, my air, my pressure, my own emissions, detailed in bright white.

  Questions bubbled behind my lips, never to be answered. I was disoriented by weeks of being handled only by automation (sometimes with a human face); never allowed any contact with my fellow prisoners. When did I last speak to a human being? That must have been the orientation on earth, my baggage allowance session. You’re given a “weight limit”—actually a code limit—and advised when you’ve “duplicated.” Gray’s Anatomy, for old sake’s sake. A really good set of knives, a really good pair of boots, a field first aid kit, vegetable and flower seeds. The Beethoven piano sonatas, played by Alfred Brendel; Mozart piano sonatas, likewise. The prison officer told me I couldn’t have the first aid. He advised me I must choose the data storage device for my minimalist choice of entertainments, and specify the lifetime power source. He made me handle the knives, the boots, the miniaturised hardware, even the seeds. What a palaver.

  But the locker underneath the bunk was empty.

  Do you want to dream?

  The transit would happen, effectively, in no time at all. I had no idea how long the coding would take. An hour, a week, a month? I thought of the others, dreaming in fantasy boltholes. Some gorging their appetites, delicate or gross. Some exacting hideous revenge on the forces that brought them here: fathers, mothers, lovers; authority figures, SOCIETY. Some even trying to expiate their crimes in virtual torment; you get all sorts in the prison population. None of that for me. If you want to die, have the courage to kill yourself, before you reach a finale like this one. If you don’t, then live to the last breath. Face the firing squad without a blindfold.

  Scenes from my last trial went through my head. Me, bloody but unbowed of course, still trying to make speeches, thoroughly alienating the courtroom witnesses. My ex-husband making unconscious gestures in a small blank room, as he finally abandoned this faulty domestic appliance to her fate. He was horrified by that Death Row interview: I was not. I had given up on Dirk long ago. Did he ever believe in me? Or was he just humouring my unbalanced despair—as he says now—in the years when we were lovers and best friends? Did he really twist his hands around like that, and raise them high, palm outwards, as if he faced a terrorist with a gun?

  I thought of the girl who had caught my eye, glimpsed as we sometimes glimpsed each other; waiting to be processed into the Panhandle system. Springy cinnamon braids, sticking out on either side of her head, that made her look like a little girl. Her eyes lobotomised. Who had brushed her hair for her? Why would they waste money sending a lobotomy subject out here? Because it’s a numbers game they’re playing. The weaklings, casualties of the transit, may ensure in some occult way, the survival of a few, who may live long enough to form the foundation stones of a colony, on an earth-like planet of a distant star. Our fate: to be pole-axed and buri
ed in the mud where the bridge of dreams will be built.

  *

  I wondered when “orientation” would begin. The cold of deep space penetrated my thin quilt. The steady shift of the clock numerals was oddly comforting, like a heartbeat. I watched them until at some point I fell asleep.

  iii

  The Kuiper Belt station had been planned as the hub of an international deep space city. Later, after that project had been abandoned and before the Buonarotti Device became practicable for mass exits like this one, it’d been an R&R resort for asteroid miners. They’d dock their little rocket ships and party, escaping from utter solitude to get crazy drunk and murder each other, according to the legends. I thought of those old no-hopers as I followed the guidance lights to my first orientation session; but there was no sign of them, no scars, no graffiti on the drab walls of endless curving corridors. There was only the pervasive hum of the Buonarotti torus, like the engines of a vast majestic passenger liner forging through the abyss. The sound—gentle on the edge of hearing—made me shudder. It was warming up, of course.

  In a large bare saloon, prisoners in tan overalls were shuffling past a booth where a figure in medical-looking uniform questioned them and let them by. A circle of chairs, smoothly fixed to the floor or maybe extruded from it, completed the impression of a dayroom in a mental hospital. I joined the line. I didn’t speak to anyone and nobody spoke to me, but the girl with the cinnamon braids was there. I noticed her. My turn came. The woman behind the desk, whom I immediately christened Big Nurse, checked off my name and asked me to take the armband that lay on the counter. “It’s good to know we have a doctor on the team,” she said.

  I had qualified as a surgeon but it was years since I’d practiced, other than as a volunteer “barefoot” GP in Community Clinics for the underclass. I looked at the armband that said “captain” and wondered how it had got there, untouched by human hand. Waldoes, robot servitors… It was disorienting to be reminded of the clunky, mechanical devices around here; the ones I was not allowed to see.

  “Where are you in the real world?” I asked, trying to reclaim my dignity. I knew they had ways of dealing with the time-lapse, they could fake almost natural dialogue. “Where is the Panhandle run from these days? Xichang? Or Houston? I’d just like to know what kind of treatment to expect, bad or worse.”