Mash Up
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Mash Up
Print edition ISBN: 9781785651038
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651045
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: June 2016
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
“Introduction” © 2016 by Steve Feldberg.
“Fireborn” © 2016 by Robert Charles Wilson.
“The Evening Line” © 2016 by Mike Resnick.
“No Decent Patrimony” © 2016 by Elizabeth Bear.
“The Big Whale” © 2016 by Allen M. Steele.
“Begone” © 2016 by Daryl Gregory.
“The Red Menace” © 2016 by Lavie Tidhar.
“Muse of Fire” © 2016 by John Scalzi.
“Writer’s Block” © 2016 by Nancy Kress.
“Highland Reel” © 2016 by John G. Hemry.
“Karen Coxswain, Or, Death As She Is Truly Lived” © 2016 by Paul Di Filippo.
“The Lady Astronaut Of Mars” © 2016 by Mary Robinette Kowal.
“Every Fuzzy Beast Of The Earth, Every Pink Fowl Of The Air” © 2016 by Tad Williams.
“Declaration” © 2016 by James Patrick Kelly.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
CONTENTS
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Steve Feldberg
FIREBORN
Robert Charles Wilson
THE EVENING LINE
Mike Resnick
NO DECENT PATRIMONY
Elizabeth Bear
THE BIG WHALE
Allen M. Steele
BEGONE
Daryl Gregory
THE RED MENACE
Lavie Tidhar
MUSE OF FIRE
John Scalzi
WRITER’S BLOCK
Nancy Kress
HIGHLAND REEL
Jack Campbell
KAREN COXSWAIN, OR, DEATH AS SHE IS TRULY LIVED
Paul Di Filippo
THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS
Mary Robinette Kowal
EVERY FUZZY BEAST OF THE EARTH, EVERY PINK FOWL OF THE AIR
Tad Williams
DECLARATION
James Patrick Kelly
About the Editor
Also Available from Titan Books
INTRODUCTION
If you are reading this page, you are about to enjoy an anthology that began as a glimmer of a notion way back in 2007. The conceit was simple: each author would take the first sentence of a favorite classic—fiction or nonfiction—and use it as the first sentence in an original short story. The stories could have everything to do with the original source—or nothing at all.
James Patrick Kelly was my first sounding board, and it was he who floated the idea of approaching the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) to partner with Audible. The idea germinated for several years until its next stop at John Scalzi, SFWA’s president at the time, who offered great insight into the nuts and bolts of turning the concept into reality. From there, literary agent Eleanor Wood worked her magic, and the project was born.
Ultimately, though, it took the amazing efforts of editor Gardner Dozois to draft a team of writers par excellence and to sculpt a collection of wonderful stories, each of which takes a single sentence to unexpected places. “Call me Ishmael” introduces a tough-as-nails private eye—who carries a harpoon; the opening of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz inspires the tale of an aging female astronaut who’s being treated by a doctor named Dorothy Gale; the first line of Huckleberry Finn leads to a wild ride with a foul-mouthed riverboat captain who plies the waters of Hell; and so much more.
The response to Audible’s original audio edition was beyond even our highest expectations. Mary Robinette Kowal’s story was honored with the Hugo Award for Best Novelette; several other stories were chosen for annual Best-of collections; the audio production was nominated for an Audie Award; and now, thanks to Titan Books, these stories are finding a whole new audience.
Most gratifying, though, was the opportunity to work with writers and an editor I’ve long admired. My fondest wish is if you encounter an author here for the first time, or rediscover an old favorite, your very next step will be to seek out more of their great work.
Steve Feldberg
Audible.com
January 2016
ROBERT CHARLES WILSON
FIREBORN
I’ve been writing science fiction since the publication of my first novel in 1986.
I took the opening line of the story that follows from one of the Rootabaga Stories, by the American poet and author Carl Sandburg. Sandburg won the Pulitzer Prize no fewer than three times, twice for his poetry and once for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, but generations of Americans remember him best for his children’s books, most famously the Rootabaga Stories. In these stories, populated with corn fairies and talking skyscrapers, melancholy adults and far-traveling children, Sandburg aimed to create a uniquely American response to the classic European fairy tales. They’re written in language that’s simple, evocative, vivid, and often wonderfully strange. Sandburg’s description of one of his own characters could equally describe himself: “He seems to love some of the precious things that are cheap, such as stars, the wind, pleasant words, time to be lazy, and fools having personality and distinction.”
I’m not a poet, and I haven’t attempted to duplicate what Carl Sandburg did so uniquely and so well, but it was Sandburg’s whimsicality, love of language, and deep sense of place that inspired this science fiction story, called “Fireborn.”
FIREBORN
BY ROBERT CHARLES WILSON
Sometimes in January the sky comes down close if we walk on a country road, and turn our faces up to look at the sky.
Onyx turned her face up to the sky as she walked with her friend Jasper beside a mule cart on the road that ran through Buttercup County to the turnpike. She had spent a day counting copper dollars at the changehouse and watching bad-tempered robots trudge east- and west-bound through the crust of yesterday’s snow. Sunny days with snow on the ground makes robots irritable, Jasper had claimed. Onyx didn’t know if this was true – it seemed so, but what seemed so wasn’t always truly so.
You think too much, Jasper had told her.
And you don’t think enough, Onyx had answered haughtily. She walked next to him now as he led the mule, keeping her head turned up because she liked to see the stars even when the January wind came cutting past the margins of her lambswool hood. Some of the stars were
hidden because the moon was up and shining white. But Onyx liked the moon, too, for the way it silvered the peaks and saddles of the mountains and cast spidery tree-shadows over the unpaved road.
That was how it happened that Onyx first saw the skydancer vaulting over a mountain pass northwest of Buttercup County.
Jasper didn’t see it because he was looking at the road ahead. Jasper was a tall boy, two breadloaves taller than Onyx, and he owned a big head with eyes made for inspecting the horizon. It’s what’s in front of you that counts, he often said. Jasper believed roads went to interesting places – that’s why they were roads. And it was good to be on a road because that meant you were going somewhere interesting. Who cared what was up in the sky?
You never know what might fall on you, Onyx often told him. And not every road goes to an interesting place. The road they were on, for instance. It went to Buttercup County, and what was interesting about Buttercup County? Onyx had lived there for all of her nineteen years. If there was anything interesting in Buttercup County, Onyx had seen it twice and ignored it a dozen times more.
Well, that’s why you need a road, Jasper said – to go somewhere else.
Maybe, Onyx thought. Maybe so. Maybe not. In the meantime, she would keep on looking at the sky.
At first, she didn’t know what she was seeing up over the high northwest col of the western mountains. She had heard about skydancers from travelers bound for or returning from Harvest out on the plains in autumn, where skydancers were said to dance for the fireborn when the wind brought great white clouds sailing over the brown and endless prairie. But those were travelers’ tales, and Onyx discounted such storytelling. Some part of those stories might be true, but she guessed not much: maybe fifty cents on the dollar, Onyx thought. What she thought tonight was, That’s a strange cloud.
It was a strange and brightly colored cloud, pink and purple even in the timid light of the moon. It did not move in a windblown fashion. It was shaped like a person. It looked like a person in a purple gown with a silver crown and eyes as wide as respectable townships. It was as tall as the square-shouldered mountain peak Onyx’s people called Tall Tower. Onyx gasped as her mind made reluctant sense of what her stubborn eyes insisted on showing her.
Jasper had been complaining about the cold, and what a hard thing it was to walk a mule cart all the way home from the turnpike on a chilly January night, but he turned his eyes away from the road at the sound of Onyx’s surprise. He looked where Onyx was looking and stopped walking. After a long pause, he said, “That’s a skydancer – I’ll bet you a copper dollar it is!”
“How do you know? Have you ever seen a skydancer?”
“Not to look at. Not until tonight. But what else could it be?”
Skydancers were as big as mountains and danced with clouds, and this apparition was as big as a mountain and appeared to be dancing, so Onyx guessed that Jasper might be right. And it was a strange and lonely thing to see on a country road on a January night. They stopped to watch the skydancer dance, though the wind blew cold around them and the mule complained with wheezing and groaning. The skydancer moved in ways Onyx would not have thought possible, turning like a whirlwind in the moonlight, rising over the peak of Tall Tower and seeming for a moment to balance there, then flying still higher, turning pirouettes of stately slowness in the territory of the stars. “It’s coming closer,” Jasper said.
Was it? Yes: Onyx thought so. It was hard to tell because the skydancer was so big. Skydancers were made by the fireborn, and the fireborn made miraculous things, but Onyx could not imagine how this creature had come to be. Was it alive or was it an illusion? If it came down to earth, could she touch it?
It began to seem as if she might have that opportunity. The skydancer appeared to lose its balance in the air. Its vast limbs suddenly stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to tumble it sidelong. Parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent colored clouds. “I think it’s broken,” said Jasper.
Broken and shrinking, it began to fall. It’ll fall near here, Onyx thought, if it continued on its wind-tumbled course. If there’s anything left of it, the way it’s coming apart.
It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind, something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It fell nearby – down a slope away from the road, on a hillside where in summer wild rhubarb put out scarlet stalks of flowers.
“Come on, let’s find it,” Jasper said.
“It might be dangerous.”
“It might,” said Jasper, who was not afraid of the possibility of danger, but all the more inclined to go get into it. They left the mule anchored to its cart and went hunting for what had fallen, while the moonlight was bright enough to show them the way.
* * *
They found a young woman standing on the winter hillside, and it was obvious to Onyx that she was fireborn – perhaps, therefore, not actually young. Onyx knew the woman was fireborn because she was naked on a January night and seemed not to mind it. Onyx found the woman’s nakedness perplexing. Jasper seemed fascinated.
Though the woman was naked, she had been wearing a harness of cloth and metal, which she had discarded; it lay on the ground at her feet, parts of it glowing sunset colors, parts of it twitching like the feelers of an unhappy ant.
They came and stood near enough to speak to the woman. The woman, who was about Onyx’s size but had paler skin and hair that gave back the moonlight in shades of amber, was looking at the sky, whispering to herself. When she noticed Onyx and Jasper, she spoke to them in words Onyx didn’t understand. Then she cocked her shoulder and said in sensible words, “You can’t hurt me. It would be a mistake to try.”
“We don’t want to hurt you,” Jasper said, before Onyx could compose a response. “We saw you fall, if you falling was what we saw. We thought you might need help.”
“I’m in no danger,” the woman said, and it seemed to Onyx her voice was silvery, like a tune played on a flute, but not just any old wooden flute: a silver one. “But thank you.”
“You must be a long way from home. Are you lost?”
“My devices misfunctioned. My people will come for me. We have a compound on the other side of the pass.”
“Do you need a ride, ma’am? Onyx and I can take you in our cart.”
“Wait, that’s a long way,” Onyx said. Anyway it was her cart, not Jasper’s, and he shouldn’t be offering it without consulting her.
“Yes,” Jasper agreed, “much too far for an undressed woman to walk on a night like this.”
Onyx considered kicking him.
The fireborn woman hesitated. Then she smiled. It was a charming smile, Onyx had to admit. The woman had shiny teeth, a complete set. “Would you really do that for me?”
“Ma’am, yes, of course, my privilege,” said Jasper.
“All right, then,” the woman said. “I might like that. Thank you. My name is Anna Tingri Five.”
Onyx, who knew what the “Five” meant, gaped in amazement.
“I’m Jasper,” said Jasper. “And this is Onyx.”
“You should put on some clothes,” Onyx said in a small voice. “Ma’am.”
Anna Tingri Five twitched her shoulder and blinked, and a shimmery robe suddenly covered her nakedness. “Is that better?”
“Much,” said Onyx.
* * *
On the road to the fireborn compound, as the mule cart bucked over rutted snow hard as ice, the three of them discussed their wants, as strangers often do.
Onyx was expected at home, but her mother and father and two brothers wouldn’t worry much if she was late. Probably they would think she had stayed the night in Buttercup Town, detained by business. Onyx worked at the changehouse there and was often kept late by unexpected traffic. Her parents might even hope she had stayed late for the purpose of keeping Jasper company: her parents liked Jasper and had hinted at the poss
ibility of a wedding. Onyx resented such talk – she liked Jasper well enough, but perhaps not well enough to contemplate marriage. Not that Jasper had hinted at any such ambition. Jasper wanted to sail to Africa and find the Fifth Door to the Moon and grow rich or immortal, which, Onyx imagined, would leave him little time for wedding foolishness.
Anna Tingri Five perched on a frozen bag of wheat flour in the mule cart, saying, “I am, as you must suppose, fireborn.”
No doubt about that. And how astonished Onyx’s parents and two brothers would be to discover she had been consorting with the fireborn! The fireborn came through Buttercup County only on rare occasions, and then only one or two of them, young ones, mostly male, riding robots on their incomprehensible quests, hardly deigning to speak to the townspeople. Now here Onyx was right next to a five-born female – a talkative one!
“Was that you in the sky, dancing?” Jasper asked.
“Yes. Until the bodymaker broke.”
“No offense, but you looked about five miles tall.”
“Only a mile,” said Anna Tingri Five, a smile once again dimpling her moonlit face.
“What’s a skydancer doing in Buttercup County, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Practicing for the Harvest, here where there are mountain winds to wrestle with and clouds that come high and fast from the west. We mean to camp here through the summer.”
Without so much as a by-your-leave, Onyx thought indignantly, though when had the fireborn ever asked permission of common mortals?
“You mean to dance at the Harvest?” asked Jasper.
“I mean to win the competition and be elevated to the Eye of the Moon,” said Anna Tingri Five.
* * *
The Eye of the Moon: best seen when the moon was in shadow. Tonight the moon was full and the Eye was invisible, but some nights, when only a sliver of the moon shone white, Onyx had seen the Eye in the darker hemisphere; a ring of red glow, aloof and unwinking. It was where the fireborn went when they were tired of living one life after another. It was what they did instead of dying.
Since Anna Tingri Five had divulged an ambition, Onyx felt obliged to confess one of her own. “I’m nineteen years old,” she said, “and one day I mean to go east and see the cities of the Atlantic Coast. I’m tired of Buttercup County. I’m a good counter. I can add and subtract and divide and multiply. I can double-entry bookkeep. I could get a city job and do city things. I could look at tall buildings every day and live in one of them.”