ASIM_issue_54

  Editorial

  …Simon Petrie

  A werewolf, a vampire, and a zombie walked into an issue of ASIM, and then they—

  No, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Which is unforgiveably non-Newtonian of me, and arguably spoilerish. But the fact of the matter is that I was struggling to see how to kickstart this editorial …

  Let’s try again. Different tack. What is it I look for in a story? What is it, perhaps, in the assembled sixteen stories that led me to select them, in particular, for this issue? What thread connects the helter-skelter rush of dialogue that is Anatoly Belilovsky’s deliciously unhinged ‘Durak’ with the closely-observed sense of unspoken desperation that marks Nike Sulway’s ‘The Fox’s Child’? Is it reasonable to juxtapose two such different spins on the trope of mass-media SF, circa the 1950s, as would seem to be presented within Robert P Switzer’s audaciously zany ‘The Day The Iguana Stood Still’ and Nicole M Taylor’s quietly ominous ‘The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter’? Is it possible to read Zen Cho’s charming ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favourite Anecdote’, or the Hunger exit interview from Kent Purvis’s multilayered satire ‘Going Fourth’ without hearing the words come to life in one’s inner ear?

  (I could answer the above questions, but I’m not going to. Instead, I’m just going to suggest you turn the page, and find out. But I’m not going to say it yet, because then you’d just skip past the rest of this editorial.)

  I’ve mentioned six stories above, but the other ten are just as good, and equally diverse. Which is not to say that there isn’t some common ground. Edwina Harvey’s tender ‘H G’, M Darusha Wehm’s sly ‘Modern Love’ and Alter S Reiss’s clinical ‘Server Issues’ all take a near-future SF stance, but to quite different ends; Sue Bursztynski’s measured ‘Midwinter Night’ and Belinda Crawford’s urgent ‘Lex Talionis’ both drape a tale of xenophobia and injustice in the cloth of fantasy, with which subject matter Tamlyn Dreaver’s assured ‘Petting The Tiger’ also deals in some measure. Dirk Flinthart’s ‘Head Shot’ has an unexpected quarry in its sights, in a telling that may seem familiar; exactly the same might, indeed, be said of Robert Porteous’s ‘Roasted’. (And please note that ‘Roasted’ and ‘Lex Taliornis’ merit special attention as the first publications by their respective authors. It’s always a priviledge to be able to give a new author his or her first flight, and I’m convinced we’ll be seeing much more from these two.) Sarah Frost’s ‘On Carbon Wings’ and C A L’s ‘The Iron Lighthouse’ are both (deep-)space-based SF: I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to judge whether they qualify as hard SF, or golden age SF, or space opera, or as some amalgam of all three. A conundrum of a different kind is presented in Jacob Edwards’ piece of speculative scholarship, ‘Nine Lines’ …

  What else? There are two beguiling poems, six brief book reviews, an interview with Brenda Cooper … and I clearly must acknowledge the wonderful contributions of Lewis Morley as this issue’s artist-in-residence. (When Lewis suggested he’d tackle the illustration for ‘Going Fourth’ with a Beatle-ish portrayal, my initial reaction was: ‘How will that work’? I should not have doubted, because, indeed, it works. As do all of the other marvellous pieces of art which Lewis has executed for this issue.)

  I must acknowledge also the usual gang of culprits and co-conspirators—Patty Jansen on proofreading, Lucy Zinkiewicz on slushwrangling, Edwina Harvey on advertising, David Kernot on web-fu, the collective consciousness of the ASIM co-operative on the myriad duties that go into making production of a quarterly magazine possible—and then I really must get out of your way, because you’ve got some reading ahead of you. Please strap yourself in and hang on, it looks like being a bumpy ride, even by our standards …

  Simon Petrie

  Editor, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine Issue 54

  May 2012

  ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS Inflight Magazine

  Issue 54 (Vol. 10, Issue 2)

  Fiction

  The Day the Iguana Stood Still (Robert P Switzer)

  The Earth Spirit’s Favourite Anecdote (Zen Cho)

  Petting the Tiger (Tamlyn Dreaver)

  HG (Edwina Harvey)

  Going Fourth (Kent Purvis)

  On Carbon Wings (Sarah Frost)

  Midwinter Night (Sue Bursztynski)

  The Fox’s Child (Nike Sulway)

  Modern Love (M Darusha Wehm)

  Server Issues (Alter S Reiss)

  Durak (Anatoly Belilovsky)

  The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter (Nicole M Taylor)

  Lex Talionis (Belinda Crawford)

  Head Shot (Dirk Flinthart)

  Roasted (Robert Porteous)

  The Iron Lighthouse (C A L)

  Poetry

  baby cosmos (s c virtes)

  Starry Night (David Luntz)

  Features

  Nine Lines: A Nail Clipping From The Hitchhiker’s Thumb? (Jacob Edwards)

  An Interview with Brenda Cooper (Edwina Harvey)

  Book Reviews (Edwina Harvey, Simon Petrie)

  Contributor Biographies

  Acknowledgements

  Art

  All artwork by Lewis Morley

  ‘The Day The Iguana Stood Still’ (cover art)

  ‘The Earth Spirit’s Favourite Anecdote’

  ‘Going Fourth’

  ‘The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter’

  ‘Head Shot’

  ‘Roasted’

  ‘The Iron Lighthouse’

  baby cosmos

  …s c virtes

  a chaos of nothing

  seething by degrees

  layers of potential

  spawning ripples

  growing to waves

  until

  finally

  beyond the secret radius

  seeds of order appear

  reaching for strings

  to pull it all together

  a baby universe

  clenches its quantum fists

  and begins to cry.

  The Day the Iguana Stood Still

  …Robert P Switzer

  I sit and watch the iguana for hours because he’s all I have left. There’s a deliberateness about him that I admire; he never does anything hastily. And he probably doesn’t have any regrets, which makes him the luckiest creature in this house.

  He’s walking across the carpet towards me now. He takes a step, pauses to reflect on the suitability of traveling in this particular direction, then takes another step. And then he completely freezes.

  One front leg is raised, hovering, in position to take that next step. But now he’s unsure. Or terrified. Or just plain frozen.

  “You okay, Iggy?” I ask.

  He doesn’t move; he doesn’t even blink. And I begin to worry.

  Suddenly we’re no longer alone. Like lightning, except faster, the room’s population has increased from two to three. An alien, to be specific, has just appeared in my living room.

  “I’m causing your iguana to stand perfectly still,” the alien tells me.

  “That would’ve been my first guess,” I reply.

  “Want to know why?” asks the alien.

  “I’m sure you have your reasons,” I say. Everyone has reasons for doing the things they do, in my experience. They may not always be logical reasons. And they may not even be comprehensible reasons, particularly in cases where aliens interact with humankind, such as right here. But there’s no reason to suppose that there aren’t any reasons. It would be utterly unreasonable to think so.

  “Stop,” says the alien. “Your internal rambling is giving me a headache.”

  “You can read my mind?” I ask.

  “Quite easily,” he says.

  That isn’t good news. Stupid, ugly alien. Stupid, ugly
alien. Stupid, ugly alien. That’s just an example of how my mind works.

  And what does he mean he can read my mind quite easily? That sounds like an insult to me, which forces me to carefully construct a devastating insult in return. Stupid, ugly alien.

  He blinks his big alien eyes like he can scarcely believe that I’m thinking what I’m thinking. Oh, but I be thinking it. I be thinking it real good.

  “Are you on crack?” the alien asks me.

  “What makes you ask?” I ask.

  “It just seems like a distinct possibility,” he explains.

  “Well, I’m not,” I answer.

  “Sorry,” says the alien. “My mistake.”

  “Think nothing of it,” I tell him. Everyone has reasons for making the mistakes they make, in my experience. They may not always be logical reasons. And—

  “Don’t start that again,” he says. He rubs his big alien head with his little alien hand, as if his headache is persisting. “Perhaps we should discuss the fate of your iguana.”

  “You mean, Mr. Frozen Fingers?”

  “Is that his name?” the alien asks.

  “Don’t be dense,” I tell him. “I just called him that in light of his current predicament.”

  “Don’t call me dense,” the alien warns.

  Dense alien. Dense alien. Dense, dense, dense, dense, dense alien, I quietly think to myself.

  “I warned you,” he says.

  “But I didn’t say anything,” I protest. “I can’t help it that foolish thoughts constantly flood my mind.”

  “I believe that,” says the alien.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  He chooses to ignore my unasked question, and instead says, “I’m returning to my ship now. I’m taking your iguana with me.”

  With sudden sadness, I glance down at Iggy. “You’re not going to eat him, are you?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” says the alien.

  “You’re not going to eat me, are you?” I ask next.

  “Don’t be insane,” says the alien.

  Both seemed like legitimate questions to me, and I’ve got one more. “What exactly do you want with my iguana?”

  The alien smiles, but the smile doesn’t make him any more attractive. He stops smiling at once. “You may find this difficult to believe,” he says, “but my people have determined that your iguana is extremely holy. What we would like to do is worship him.”

  But there’s nothing difficult to believe about that. “I should’ve known,” I say. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

  “I’m glad you understand,” says the alien.

  I get the dreadful feeling that Iggy is about to disappear from my life forever, and I panic. “Take me with you too!” I beg.

  “Whoa there, man,” says the alien. “Why would I ever want to do that?”

  “Well, you apparently think that my iguana is more than just an iguana.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe I’m more than just a man.”

  The alien weighs the logic of my argument for approximately half a second. “I don’t think so.”

  “Damn it, why can’t I ever be the object of someone’s worship?” I cry. “Why not me?”

  The alien looks uncomfortable. “I’m pretty sure you don’t really want me to answer that,” he says.

  Maybe I need a different type of alien to visit. Maybe as soon as some smarter aliens come along, I’ll be the one who’s worshiped. This one’s just way too stupid, and ugly.

  “Farewell,” says the alien.

  I reach out and grab the sleeve of his alien garment. “Take me too,” I say. “I promise you won’t even notice I’m there.”

  He focuses his big alien eyes on me, and for a second I’m certain he can see right through to my soul. But it isn’t a bad soul, is it? “Fine,” he eventually says.

  Suddenly we’re no longer in my living room. “Is this your starship?” I ask. “Huh. I thought there’d be more flashing lights.”

  “It’ll be about a week before we’re ready to leave this system,” he says. “You’re welcome to remain on board until then, if you are so inclined.”

  “Oh, I be so inclined,” I say.

  “Super,” says the alien, but something tells me he doesn’t really mean it.

  I look down and see that Iggy’s pose hasn’t changed. “Are you planning on unfreezing Mr. Frozen Fingers any time soon?”

  “No,” says the alien. “We’d like to worship him in all his frozen perfection.”

  It abruptly occurs to me that it might be the alien who’s on crack.

  “I heard that,” he says.

  “Stop reading my mind, you mind-reading extraterrestrial!” I shout.

  “It’s a bad habit,” he admits.

  “Like crack,” I suggest.

  “Perhaps,” says the alien.

  I bend down and touch the top of Iggy’s head. “Well, Mr. Frozen Fingers, are you ready to be the Lord of the Crack Aliens? I bet you are. Yes you are. Who’s gonna be the Lord of the Crack Aliens? That’s right! You are!”

  “Are you mocking me?” the alien asks.

  “Me?” I say. “Mock? Oh, that doesn’t sound like something I’d do. Or at least, I’d only do it in a really, really subtle way, if and when I did do it.”

  “I think you’re still mocking me,” says the alien.

  “Well I think you’re just being paranoid,” I reply.

  “Please keep in mind that it’s your iguana we’re interested in, not you,” he says. “It would be a simple matter to deposit you back on Earth, which we’ll be doing sooner or later anyway, before departing to show your iguana the galaxy.”

  “You hear that, Mr. Frozen Fingers? They’re going to show you the galaxy. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t it grand? Who’s gonna get to be the Lord of the Crack Aliens, and see the galaxy? You are! That’s right, Mr. Frozen Fingers, it’s you!”

  The alien picks up Iggy, opens a door, shoves me inside a dark room, and says, “Good night.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  With no explanation whatsoever, the alien closes the door and leaves me alone in this strange place.

  * * *

  I sit in an alien chair in an alien room on an alien starship, and my brain decides to think about my wife. I haven’t seen her in three years, but somehow our last conversation is still stuck in my head.

  “It’s impossible to have a conversation with you,” she told me. “All you ever do is make jokes.”

  Naturally my first instinct was to look for a way to nullify the seriousness of her complaint. “They say there’s truth in humor. Maybe when I’m half joking, I’m also being half serious. Or does it seem like I’m usually three-quarters joking? Even then, I suppose there’s still room for a kernel of truth.”

  From her expression I could tell that I hadn’t come close to saying the right thing. “Can’t you just talk to me like a normal person?”

  How the hell would I know how normal people talk? “You know what your problem is?” I said before I could stop myself. “You think everything’s the end of the world. Well, the end of the world actually would be the end of the world. But everything else just isn’t.”

  “I just take life seriously, that’s all,” she said. “I wish you would start to do that. I’ve been more patient with you than a lot of other women would’ve been.”

  I couldn’t recall any specific occasion during which she’d exhibited an abundance of patience, but I refrained from saying so. “What is it that you’re being patient about?” I asked.

  “You!” she said. “Building a life with me. Accomplishing something. Six years we’ve been married, and I’m still waiting for you to do something other than the odd little jobs you do.”

  “Are you calling me lazy?” I asked. “I’m not lazy. I just prefer to do as little work as possible.”

  She stood and looked down at me. “You’re an idiot,” she said.

  “I was joking, Isabel. Mostly.�
�

  “I know. You never stop.”

  So I tried to stop for a minute. “You’re worried about the future,” I said. “I understand that. But trust me when I say that everything is eventually going to work out. In the meantime, what you need to keep in mind is that politeness counts.”

  “What does politeness have to do with anything?” she asked.

  “It counts,” I repeated. “Before we were married, every little thing had a please and a thank you attached to it, but nothing does now. And you never used to call me an idiot.”

  “I didn’t know you as well back then,” she said.

  I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t hurt by the remark. “Do you really mean that?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer right away. Maybe she was searching for words that would smooth things over; maybe she wasn’t doing any such thing. I never found out, because while she was hesitating an alien appeared in our living room.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” the alien asked.

  This was our very first alien visitor, and I felt it was important to make him feel welcome. “Not at all,” I said. “I’m sure you have a good reason for being here.”

  “Indeed I do,” said the alien. But he wasn’t looking at me as he said it; he was looking at Isabel.

  “Something to do with my wife?” I guessed.

  The alien nodded his big alien head. “I’d like to take her with me,” he said. “But please don’t think of this as an ordinary alien abduction.”

  “What do you want with her?” I asked.

  “My people have determined that your wife is extremely holy,” said the alien. “What we would like to do is worship her.”

  I laughed. At the time, I’d never heard of such a thing. “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  Apparently Isabel had no trouble at all accepting that aliens would want to worship her, and evidently she found my reaction insulting. “You’re an idiot,” she said to me.

  It was the last thing I ever heard her say, for the alien chose that moment to freeze her. I had a few seconds to look into those angry eyes I knew so well. Then the alien and my wife disappeared.