August 2011

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Lady of the Floods

August 26, 2011 in Fantasy, Horror, SF, Uncategorized | No comments

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Lady of the Floods

by DeAnna Knippling

Praise Be to Those Who Steal Not

The picture on the cover was made by Cathy Miller Burgoyne, who records the weird and wonderful at her Arctic Fire website.  Check it out.  I was just enthralled.

 

The gods can build in a single night a tower that would require the toil of many men over many seasons.  Balathu, chief of scribes, brings the King’s offerings.  Balathu is a virtuous man, but the tools of the gods are lovely in his sight, and in the sight of the King.

Truly, weak men are always seized by fate.

I am not the man who has seen everything, and I know even less. I am Balathu, scribe of Ubaratutu of Shuruppak. Ubaratutu is a king over merchants and scribes, of which I am his chief. Our wisdom is the wisdom of planting fields and avoiding gossip. I preserve the sayings of our people in the name of the King and inspect the tallies of our grain stores.

When the Ilumesh built their tower near the city in a single night of fire, the king sent me to present his gifts and see what they wished of the children of men. The black tower rose higher than the city walls, higher than the palace, higher than the bluffs, and seemed made of obsidian tears from faraway lands.

The land at the top of the bluff bears no fruit and is fit only for goats, but the wind cooled my hair and took me from the stench of the city. The hooves of my horse broke through the crust of ash before the tower, stirring dust into all our eyes.

When we reached the tower, I prostrated myself on the ash and begged for the Ilumesh to show their will.

Truly the Ilumesh are not like men. They accepted our gifts of olives and spice but refused the gold. Also slaves and horses they took. They spoke not directly with me, but sent forth demons to accept our gifts, with backward-turned claws, many limbs, and faces which writhed with long, white eyes. The horns of a powerful bull graced each of their heads. Their skin was gray, and their chests shone black.

Each of the demons bore a measuring stick with which they measured each gift. They measured me by laying the stick on the inner part of my thigh, which stung like bees at the hive. After I was measured, they anointed me with fire, after which they deemed me worthy to hear some small part of their councils.

They wished for us to bring sacrifice, one of each kind of animal, or plant, or men, even of the races of slaves, to them, so that they might be measured in the sight of heaven, and from this I knew them to be messengers of Enlil.

Upon hearing the wish of the Ilumesh, Ubaratutu commanded it to be fulfilled.

I tallied all gifts that were brought. Types of flax, six. Types of fish, forty-seven. Types of water birds, sixty, although more would have been brought as they passed in their season. Types of beetles, one hundred and three. Types of winged insects, seventy-two. Types of ants, six. Types of worms, fifteen, although Warassuni claims to have found more in other seasons. Types of spiders, fourteen. Types of other creeping things, thirty-five. Types of goat, four, although others could be traded for, from the herders. Types of sheep, eight. Types of horses, eight. Types of ass, nine. Types of date palm, four. Types of leeks, three. Types of onion, seventeen, although two of them may be considered the same type, in spring and then mature. Types of lentil, twelve. Types of wheat, two. Types of barley, seven. Types of spices, in the names of the Gods, two hundred and twelve. Types of healing herbs, in the names of the Gods, two hundred and sixty-seven. Types of grapes, fifteen. Types of olives, eight. Types of plants bearing flowers, in season and out, over three hundred. And so on.

The list of men was as long and varied as the list of animals and plants.

The demons kept a few choice sacrifices but measured all. Truly they loved honey more than gold, and we brought almost every hive in the city to them, which they accepted with great leaps into the air.

I am not a man who knows everything. After accepting the bees in the names of the Ilumesh, one of the demons left its measuring stick behind, and I stole it, I, who has recorded so much in the name of the King, decrying thieves.

 

 

Which Is Bigger, the Moon or an Elephant? and Other Stupid Questions

August 19, 2011 in Kids' Pulp, Uncategorized, Women's Snark and Romance | No comments

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Which Is Bigger, the Moon or an Elephant? and Other Stupid Questions

by De Kenyon

Antonia does not need a babysitter.  She has her CPR certification and a list of emergency contact numbers.  But the babysitter isn’t a normal high school girl who just wants to watch TV and call her boyfriend…but a mean, sarcastic teen who wants to terrify them all.

Some of the other kids may have needed a babysitter, but I was old enough not to need one. I had my parents’ emergency contact information in my backpack along with my pajamas, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, cotton swabs, and mini emergency kit. I had taken a CPR class. The instructor had told me I wasn’t strong enough to be able to do everything and get my certification, but the electronic test dummy’s heart had started beating again after I spent five straight minutes pumping its chest, so he had to certify me anyway.

I was eleven, and I didn’t need a stupid high school babysitter.

But it wasn’t my house. I mentioned my CPR training to my father, who had sighed and said, “Antonia, while we have no doubts about your competence in not burning the house down, we have discussed this and none of us are too sure about the other girls’ ability not to be complete idiots. I’m not paying for the babysitter, so it’s out of my hands. I know it’s frustrating, but please make an effort to behave well in front of the other girls.”

I tapped my fingers on the kitchen counter, where we were having our little talk. “All right, father. I suppose it can’t be helped.”

He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Thank you.”

The doorbell rang, and the daughter of the house, my cousin Lavvie (nine), yelled, “Emily’s here!” She galloped down the stairs and flew past the kitchen door, her hair streaming out behind her. The door slammed open. “Emily!”

I followed my father out of the kitchen. My first glimpse of the babysitter wasn’t pleasant. Emily was six feet tall and must have weighed three hundred pounds. She had an ugly face with lots of zits and squinted, even though she wore glasses.

“Hello, Lavvie,” she said as Lavvie tried to squeeze her around the middle. “Ugh. Not so hard, kid.”

Lavvie, disgustingly, rubbed her face across Emily’s arm. “I missed you.”

She would. She was a complete and utter twerp who could not sit still for five minutes if you offered her a dollar to do it. Daring Lavvie to a staring contest was an easy win.

I am just loving on the cover image for this story–it reminds me of my sister Betsy when she was that age.  And thanks to Jen LaPointe, who supplied the stupid question in the title.

This one comes partially from memory…we had a house full of cousins at one point, and one of the older ones got paid to watch the rest of us, even though my brother and I were old enough to stay on our own, when the rest of the cousins weren’t there.  But it ended up being pretty cool.  I read a book about The Dark Crystal thatshe had brought with her.  I can’t remember whether the haunted house in the basement episode was the same day or not, but it was the same gang of kids.  We used to sit on the edge of the cellar steps and tell ghost stories; the only one I can remember was the one about the guts in the bucket.

As kids, we thought teenagers were dumb and mean and kind of creepy-looking, and we treated her like crap.  She didn’t seem to mind; she was just that evil.  Years later, we finally got to hang out as adults.  She’s pretty awesome.

 


 

Blind Spot

August 12, 2011 in SF, Uncategorized | No comments

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Blind Spot

DeAnna Knippling

She sees art.  He sees technology worth killing for.

An artist who sees what nobody else sees:  the visual code generated by the eye’s own blind spot.  A VR developer who sees the possiblities–including the threat to her life.

“I can’t see myself,” Thomas said, raising his hand to touch the Mirror. The reflected room behind him was pale gray and filled with a line of guests, each craning their necks to see around him. It was a terrible sight, and he smiled in delight even as his eyes filled with tears. His body grieved for the lack of himself, the knowledge of how little he mattered, even as he felt like crowing with joy.

“Sir.” The guard shook his head. “Don’t touch.” He’d been saying it through the whole opening, no doubt, to incredulous guests trying to touch the work of art or science or whatever it was. Keeping people far back enough from the frame so they didn’t spill wine on it when it clicked.

“How?” Thomas asked, knowing that the guard couldn’t answer the question, but unable to stop himself.

“Read the sign, sir,” the guard said.

Thomas laughed under his breath. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to know, but he bent toward the sign anyway; he would have seemed out of place otherwise.

Why can’t you see yourself in “The Mirror of the World without You”?

The sign explained, in language a ten-year-old could understand, that it wasn’t a mirror but a television. Cameras in the television screen itself—which had originally been part of a console gaming system—recorded the images that surrounded the screen and projected them.

The real trick was in the way the cameras removed the viewer’s image from the screen. The cameras didn’t just edit out the image of the viewer—which would have removed all people from the image—but placed a subtle pattern layer over all moving objects. The pattern was cued to align with the orientation of the eyes of each object, if it had any, and simulated the sensory data the eyes sent to the brain from the area directly over the optic nerve, or blind spot.

The brain saw the pattern, interpreted it as the eye’s blind spot, and filled it in with what it calculated to be the correct images. The brain, trained to compensate for its own shortcomings, erased anything coded with what seemed to be the same pattern, rendering it invisible.

It was essentially an optical illusion, if a very sophisticated one. It worked wonderfully. As Thomas finished reading the sign, he peeked at the Mirror out of the corner of his eye, trying to get a glimpse of himself. The cameras tracked his gaze quickly, but he was able to catch a white wisp that faded like a breath on glass. It was creepy.

The woman behind him was having a completely different reaction. She was standing with her hands on her hips and grinning, making faces at herself. “Nobody can see me! I can do whatever I want! Nyaaa!” She stuck her tongue out.

But of course Thomas and the other guests could still see her, both in real life and in the mirror; each person only failed to see themselves.

Devil Mountain

August 5, 2011 in Fantasy, Horror, SF, Uncategorized, Weird West | No comments

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Devil Mountain

by DeAnna Knippling

An Eye for an Eye.  A Seed for a Seed.

The alien called him her beloved devil for tempting her away from her brood and tried to make him promise not to take revenge if the other humans turned on him. Now he’s on top of Devil Mountain, looking down at the town that murdered his wife, and he has no promises to keep.

Hank dragged me out of the mining sled on my back. I bunched myself up in a ball and got ready to kick, either him or the door of the sled as I went past, just to try to throw off his balance, but he didn’t put the ramp down, and the rock knocked the wind out of me. I was lucky I didn’t crack my spine.

By the time I could really get a breath again, he was back, holding the processers—five of them—in his hand. “You watching, Farrod?” he asked.

I gritted my teeth around the gag, which was about all I could do.

For a fat guy, he’s quick. Three strides forward, and he threw the processors off the side, into the rocks like a javelin thrower, his whole body like a whip. All I needed was to find one of them to fix the sled to get back down the mountain, but it would take some doing.

He pulled his rifle out of the holster on his back. Didn’t aim it at me. “You going to be all right if I cut those ties?”

I gritted at him again.

“I better cut your gag anyway,” he said. “Don’t want you to choke on your own bile.” He put the rifle down, far out of reach, and loosened the snap of his sheath. He took a step toward me and waited. Another step, to where I might be able to roll quick and try to thrash out at his legs.

Oh, it was tempting. I knew, deep down in my heart, that he’d done it. He was the rotten son of a bitch who had killed my wife. Nevermind that he’d been with me the whole time. He was with them. He was the one who had kept me in the mines an extra week, extracting iron ore for the damned spacers that came through for parts.

Another step, and my eye started to twitch. He walked back to the gun, sheathing his knife. Damn it. He knew me too well.

“I guess you’ll just have to be okay,” he said. “Try not to vomit, Farrod. I’ll keep an eye on you, but we’re done until morning. And try not to piss yourself.”