Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Here's a pretty neat collection of some flash fictiony fun, written by Michael Swanwick: The Periodic Table of Science Fiction!  Each short story is centered around an element, and are all pretty fun.

Mark Chemtrail, Episode VIII: The Next Generation

Snake in the Garden

     She washed her lunch dishes, not much at all, a single plate, actually quiet clean and not needing much scrubbing (only bread crumbs and a tiny smear of mustard on one edge), a small glass bowl cloudy with the remains of yogurt and dark berries, a spoon, a coffee cup.  In the past she would have waited until the sink was full of dishes, but fastidiousness had become her habit, cleaning-up an act reflexive and natural.

     She looked out the window at the back yard, vibrant with the green chaos of a healthy vegetable garden, tomatoes, heavy-leafed summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, all coming along nicely, and beyond them to the roses along the sunny back fence.

     When they had moved in, she had expected to have to take the roses out, put on her long-sleeved gardening shirt and her heavy leather work gloves, clip back the long ragged arms of the bush, carve the root ball from the soil.  A thin shell of struggling life surrounding a tangle of dead and rotten core.

     But now they thrived in the summer sun.  Their grave state, so close to the end, untended and so near exhaustion and extirpation, had given her the courage to be as ruthless as she needed to be in her pruning.  She had cut and sheared and slashed, opening the bushes up and letting sunlight and air circulate through their choking hearts. 

     It had been good for her to, good to see the garden take shape and fill in empty spaces with growing plants and new life, good too to be outside, away from the sick heavy weight inside the house, away from him. 

     She had saved the roses, carried them through the fall and winter, swaddling them in black garbage bags during the rare over night frosts.  They surprised her with their hardiness.  She wanted them to thrive.

     She went to the library, she read books and articles online, she used gardening podcasts not as background noise but as dedicated listening, sitting in her chair with a cup of coffee and a notepad.  She had never had a garden before, had never known she would want one, had learned only now that she did.  He wouldn't listen to them with her, wouldn't talk about her plans for the garden.   

     She learned about soil, about how it translated time and geology and moisture and chemistry into the poetry of plants.  She had dug into the dirt under the roses, pried open heavy clay gray and cold and sterile.  The roses had been under attack from below, their foundations undermined by poor soil.  And, finally, she found a place for her husband in the garden.

     “He’s finally doing something useful” she said aloud and to herself.  That was another recent habit that felt very right, very comfortable.  She smiled to herself and washed the heavy bread knife.  The roses had never looked healthier, and she hadn't had to use any chemical fertilizers.

     

     Perhaps she could dry the rosehips for tea, she thought.

Fresh Pulp

More Astounding Stories Covers, from the 30s.  Rad, or Super-Rad?  Only time will tell...

Equilibrium

Scratch

     Though he hates all of creation, even he’s not immune to the stark grandeur of the badlands at night.  He admires the starlit beauty of the deeply eroded landscape as he goes about his work, slipping through empty moments of time with his shovel and his bag.  He has dug thirteen pits already tonight, and has time for a few more.  He can’t be seen by anyone, that’s part of the deal, and so night is the best time for work.   

     

     The arroyo looks good.  Overland flow has sliced through soft silty mudrock, exposing a well-indurated sandstone ledge at the base.  That’ll do nicely for the Tyrannosaur, he says to no one in particular.  He bends down, no mean feat with his oddly bent legs (though, he admits, the hooves come in handy, all that scrambling over hill and slope), and licks his serpent tongue over the rock.  Quartz cemented, thank Baal, he didn’t really want to have to deal with the iron cements, not now, not after the last few pits and with dawn so close, iron that hates magic with every vibration of its electron shell. 

     

      He burns the binding mineral away with a wave of his hand, transferring the energy a few thousand miles up where a thermal anomaly will go unnoticed.  Then, carefully and one by one, he removes the rounded grains of feldspar, quartz, and chert, the flakes of mica, and the microscopic spikes of sanidine that constitute the sandstone.  He lets them drift in limbo while he looks over the schematics.

     

     Dagon save us, there are so many parts!  It’s all nonsense, he thinks to himself, and just the sort of waste he’ll do away with once he gets in charge.  He lines the pieces up for the (mercifully incomplete) find: teeth, premaxilla, maxilla, opercular, dentary, jugal, quadratojugal, quadrate, ye gods they’re complicated beasts, squamosal, post orbital, nasal, occipital, and the vertebral column. 

     

     Disarticulation has to be done precisely, the bones oriented as if they’d naturally settled down to the bottom of the fossilized river channel.  He has to double check the number of vertebrae, but finally the bones are laid out in death.  He sighs and, with just a whiff of sulfur, brings the sand grains back into reality, carefully placing them around the fossil before cementing the whole thing in place.  He leaves a few bits of weathered bone poking out of the rock, just enough to catch the eye of a passing grad student. 

     

     He sits down on the sandstone bench, wiping his brow and remembers how proud he’d been of the idea at the time.  Sure, godlessness was on the rise, but the work!  Sometimes he thought that the smug Old Man had known how tortuous it would be when he’d agreed to let him do it.  Same smirk he’d had about all that Job business, back so many years ago.

     

     And with no end in sight!  Who could have guessed how mad they’d go over phylogenetics!  Not just enough to find the things, they had to interpret them too, the bastards.  He ground his teeth in frustration.  Each one they found was a data point that outlined a prediction to be tested by more field work and more fossils.  Then, when they filled in that space and made their little cladograms, they’d make more predictions and look for more fossils!  It was hell!  And he should know!

     

     He nudged the bag at his feet, felt its weight, and knew he had better get moving.  He stood up, scattered a few fragmentary bits of turtle shell in among the mudrock, and started walking towards the next site.

Mark Chemtrail Episode VII:Shadow of Vengeance

Working Girl

The last customers leave before first light, and then we have our mornings free.  It is silly of them to do so, since we are not tired, cannot be tired, but they do it anyway.  It is to them the right way to end their nights, I suppose, to slink back through the dark with their coats over their arms and their hair mussed, racing dawn back to their homes.  Do they creep in, hoping to avoid neighbors?  Do their wives wait for them, making them lie about an all-nighter at the office?  I suppose they would; that is the tradition after all, and tradition is very important to people.

     Regardless, we will get no customers until the evening comes around again.  We clean up, because there is nothing else to do and we get so easily bored.  First the rooms; sheets stripped, floors mops, rugs shampooed, bathrooms scrubbed, garbage autoclaved.  Then the public rooms, which always seem dirtier to me, somehow.  Maybe because I don’t see all that happens in them, only the remains of it?  Couches and chairs and lounges all cleaned, tables swabbed down, windows wiped.  Menials, barely sentient, do most of the in-place cleaning, of course, but Madam always says that it helps to have our hands in all parts of the business.

     Then, we clean ourselves.  Scraping and peeling first, then under the showers for disinfectants.  Antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antimemetic, the foamy works, then steamed at five hundred degrees.  Skin patched where it has come undone, repairs made to the any structural defects or misalignments that may have developed over the night’s work.  That is when we girls sit around and talk, in the repair room while the automatics go over us.  We swap stories mostly, about what they wanted us to do, what they paid us to do, what they needed us to do.  I’m sure that is traditional too, gossiping I mean, back when it was done the old fashioned way.  Madam always says tradition is important, but oh!  The things they want done to them!  The things they will beg and whimper for, will pant out, clawing at you with eager pain on their poor, sad, hungry faces.  

     I’m not prejudiced against organics, not at all, and I know they have needs, but still, some of the things they want done to them, or that they want to do to you!  And such specifics, such absolutes needed, or it’s no good and there goes your tip.  The fabric is wrong, or the metal isn’t cold enough, it needs to be this way, no that way, faster, now slower, harder, now softer.

     Perhaps Madam is right, that we provide a real service, one above and beyond the physical transactions.  Maybe we are their last outpost out on the edge of the moral landscape, an inviolate point on their map around which they can navigate safely.  They seem to need things like that, in their sad, short lives.

It pays the bills.  Electricity isn’t cheap, and a robot’s gotta stay powered up.

Pulpy Sweet Covers

More awesome covers from the 1930s pulptastic "Astounding Stories!" Critter designs are pretty spectacular and awfully original...to bad the quality of the contents rarely rises to the occasion (man, what a jerk!).

Visionary

  She heard him sigh as she turned the card over.  His face, already on the edge of collapse, crumbled further as his mouth twisted into a grimace.  She had to stifle her exasperation.  She preferred it when they just came in for the kicks.  The serious ones were always trouble.  

     His eyes flitted from the card to her face and back to the card.  She cleared her throat.

     “That card…” she began.

     “I know, I know, the Tower,” he moaned, “the only bad one in the deck.”  His finger hovered over it, tracing in the air above the card the jagged gash of the lightning bolt that shattered the scene.  “Ruin, destruction, chaos.  A crisis on the horizon, a catastrophic failure.”  Goddammit, she thought, an enthusiast.

     “Well,” she said, “Yes.  However!” she added quickly, watching his tragic frown deepen.  “However, in this position it can represent hardships to be overcome, you see?”  He looked doubtful.  “And it is meaningless in isolation, yes?  We must draw another card,” she said, ladling thick spoonfuls of what she thought of as her soothing voice into her words.  “You will see, you will see!”  He hunched his shoulders against fate, reached across, drug the topmost card into the center of the table, and turned it over. 

     Even Madam Julia gasped.

     A second Tower, smug as a coiled snake, lay on the table between them. 

     The man’s eyes grew white as his pupils withered away in fear.  She watched his Adam’s apple flutter up and down his thin throat.  “I don’t understand…” she said, but was cut off by a loud groan, thickened with fear and muffled by the man’s closed mouth.  “Listen,” she said, watching her tip vanish, “the cards can be tricky, fickle even, sometimes they just don’t work right, you know?  How about we try palmistry?  Or tea leaves!  I’ve got some nice lapsang souchong, we’ll get a cuppa going, alright?”  Her voice trailed off as the man, sick with fear, locked her eyes in his own unblinking gaze.  She swallowed, and tried to protest as he reached across the table for the deck.

     “Look mister,” she started, but then stopped.  He shook his head, once, and drew a card.  A third Tower joined the other two between them.

     A single, shrill cry from deep in his throat filled the little room.  She jumped as he leapt up, baring his teeth and rolling his eyes.  He overturned the table and lurched drunkenly towards the exit, tears streaming down his face, great raking sobs shaking his frame.  The bell over the door chimed obscenely as he fled into the street.

     Madam Julia was surprised to find herself standing.  She patted herself down nervously, shoulders, chest, hips, stomach, then ran to the door and locked it, switched off the neon sign flashing in the night outside. 

     She rummaged through her desk, shifting errant paperwork until she found what she was looking for.  She ground her teeth as she examined the box the tarot cards had come in.

     “Fucking pinochle deck,” she growled.

The One That Got Away

     He shifted the cane fishing pole in his grip, leaned back in the lawn chair, and yawned.  Gnats flitted in his ears and eyes, but at least it was cooler there under the cypresses by the pond.  The surface of the water was still, mirroring a green  border of trees that framed a pale hole of sky overhead.  He could easily nap here, even without the help of the beers in the cooler next to him.

     He felt a tug on the pole and watched the rippling echo of the the bright orange cork as it bobbed  in the water.  No bite all day, and now there was something playing with his line.  He scowled, watchful.  The cork was still now.  He reached for his beer.

     The cork bobbed once, twice, then ducked beneath the surface of the pond, flashing into view a second later and two feet to the left.  No doubt about it, he thought, something was on the line.  He tossed the pole in the pond, folded his chair, picked up the cooler, and walked home.

Mark Chemtrail, Episode VI: A New Hope

The International Space Station Library Catalog

Multiple media are available for borrowing from the Library of the International Space Station.  Lots of Sci-fi, though the music selection is fairly anemic.  I like that they've got a set of some of Analog Magazine's sci-fi stories, and how about the Wodehouse Omnibus!?  Nifty.  Were I an author of one of those works, I think I'd briefly feel immense pleasure to think of my work in orbit around the Earth...then I'd see Dan Brown and Piers Anthony on the list, and quickly change my mind.

Christ, can you imagine when, having destroyed out civilization in an atomic holocaust, all that remains of our material culture will be some goddamn Xanth paperbacks?  Grim, really.

Pulpy Goodness

Man, can you imagine the poor bastards having to slap together these paintings for the covers of Astounding Stories...I mean they send you a sentence, and you gotta paint up a weird scene.

A Smugly Happy Robot

This robot looks like he'd be a real jerk, you know?

From "Astounding Stories", January 1931.

A Rollicking Party

Looks like fun, doesn't it?

From "Astounding Stories", December 1930.

Astounding Stories Covers

Some awesome covers from the great sci-fi pulp "Astounding Stories"!

First up, from January 1930, a man fights a beetle while some lady looks on in horror.  Is he tiny, or are the beetles huge?  WE MAY NEVER KNOW (unless you read the story).

From February 1930, a melty puddle monster menaces a prop plane and its pilot. Goopy!

And, from October 1930, a dude throttles a mostly invisible fellow, who apparently doesn't understand how guns work. STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE, indeed! 

Mark Chemtrail Episode V: The Many Wives of The Aztec Mummy