Comanche Zariphe in “Form and Void” is as faithful to her difficult friend Kathy Cutter as Robbin “Hobnoblin” Just is to Loki in “Hobnoblin Blues.” Kathy is beautiful, pampered, and rich, but something compels her to hoard the memory of every slight and hurt. Comanche is the only friend she will permit and being Kathy’s friend is a trial of one’s patience and loyalty. When Kathy wants to travel to Io abruptly after graduation, she sets to transforming herself into one of the dragons that float high above Io, isolated, protected, and alone. Comanche follows, always faithful, until they have to part ways forever.
“Your Collar” is a story of two prisoners—the minotaur, exported from the labyrinth and made to wear a collar and chains as a prize of a vast empire, and that empire’s queen, unheard by her advisors and disregarded as a mere female. They form a friendship over a chess board and make an alliance that will free them both.
“Terroir” is a story about an inventor who perceives the souls of the dead connected to the land where the food he eats is produced. After years of eating heavily processed baloney sandwiches and factory-made white bread, he travels to Normandy—a place with a blood-soaked history and strong regional pride in their local foods—to attempt a kind of exposure therapy. It’s a delicate work of fabulism, sensual and horror-tinged and thought-provoking.
“Dolly” is another SF mystery that hinges on the place where people and tech collide. A wealthy man is found dead in his home—and his lifelike android companion’s hands are soaked in blood. The police on the scene need to solve the mystery, and wind up setting a world-altering legal precedent.
“Love Among the Talus” is the story of a brotherless princess raised to rule her land instead of making a political marriage told with gorgeous prose and the voice of legend. When confronted with the choice of who to marry, Nilufer sets upon her own plan to navigate between the choices of the weak son of a powerful ruler and a well-armed bandit prince and claim her own destiny.
“The Deeps of the Sky” imagines life in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter where a young sky-miner uses all his ancestor’s knowledge to rescue an alien craft from tumbling into the dangerous depths of the sky. A gorgeous, otherworldly story that gently observes the weight of memory and grief.
“Two Dreams on Trains” imagines a floating New Orleans where a woman’s dreams for her son and the dreams of the son himself pass each other.
“Faster Gun” explores the weird west with John Henry Holliday and a party of intrepid time-traveling explorers investigating a spacecraft.
“The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” is about jealousy—not the fear of losing someone to infidelity, but the terrible result of comparing oneself unfairly to the people around them. Dharti has measured herself against her beloved and needs to prove that she has her own value. She sets on a quest to explore the damp, hot forests of Venus, looking for the ruins of an ancient city.
“Perfect Gun” is the story of John Steele and his beautiful, versatile, deadly war machine. He knows every inch of his darling rig. He removed the morality circuits with his own two hands. John’s the perfect mercenary. He cares about getting out unharmed with a paycheck in hand, with his beloved rig intact. His girl has an AI system—can’t operate without it. And John likes them a little intelligent anyway. She’s perfect. They’re a team. Business is good. But somewhere, it started to go wrong.
“Sonny Liston Takes the Fall” is a story about sacrificial kings. The narrator, One-eyed Jack, tells the story of talking to Sonny Liston in 1970. He claims to have taken a dive in 1965 against Muhammad Ali, but Jack knows better. He knows that kings are a potent sacrifice. But sometimes, someone can sacrifice themselves to save the king, so they can be safe, and that there’s powerful magic either way.
“Orm the Beautiful” is the last of his kind, and very old. When plunderers come to rob the mountain of the fabulous jeweled dragons, who sing on even in death, Orm must find a way to save his chord from being destroyed by greed. This is another story about sacrifice and preservation that ends leaving the reader with a glad ache in the chest.
“Erase, Erase, Erase” features a person who, in trying to forget the parts of her she doesn’t want, finds herself falling apart—she left a hand in the refrigerator once, and an ear came off with the earbud—and certain that she’s forgotten something. Something important. Something that will hurt a lot of people if she doesn’t remember. And so she tries to re-piece her life together, to face what she doesn’t want to face so she can recover an important memory. And as she remembers, anchoring herself with the right pens put to paper, what comes out are clear-eyed reflections on how trauma, recovery, and insight are a wheel that just keeps turning, that epiphanies don’t come as singletons that fix everything. That you don’t have to be perfect. That your story isn’t done.
It’s the perfect place to leave a collection of the bejeweled, heartbreaking, comforting, unflinching stories of Elizabeth Bear, whose stories are not yet finished.
Covenant
This cold could kill me, but it’s no worse than the memories. Endurable as long as I keep moving.
My feet drum the snow-scraped roadbed as I swing past the police station at the top of the hill. Each exhale plumes through my mask, but insulating synthetics warm my inhalations enough so they do not sting and seize my lungs. I’m running too hard to breathe through my nose—running as hard and fast as I can, sprinting for the next hydrant-marking reflector protruding above a dirty bank of ice. The wind pushes into my back, cutting through the wet merino of my base layer and the wet MaxReg over it, but even with its icy assistance I can’t come close to running the way I used to run. Once I turn the corner into the graveyard, I’ll be taking that wind in the face.
I miss my old body’s speed. I ran faster before. My muscles were stronger then. Memories weigh something. They drag you down. Every step I take, I’m carrying thirteen dead. My other self runs a step or two behind me. I feel the drag of his invisible, immaterial presence.
As long as you keep moving, it’s not so bad. But sometimes everything in the world conspires to keep you from moving fast enough.
I thump through the old stone arch into the graveyard, under the trees glittering with ice, past the iron gate pinned open by drifts. The wind’s as sharp as I expected—sharper—and I kick my jacket over to warming mode. That’ll run the battery down, but I’ve only got another five kilometers to go and I need heat. It’s getting colder as the sun rises, and clouds slide up the western horizon: cold front moving in. I flip the sleeve light off with my next gesture, though that won’t make much difference. The sky’s given light enough to run by for a good half-hour, and the sleeve light is on its own battery. A single LED doesn’t use much.
I imagine the flexible circuits embedded inside my brain falling into quiescence at the same time. Even smaller LEDs with even more advanced power cells go dark. The optogenetic adds shut themselves off when my brain is functioning healthily. Normally, microprocessors keep me sane and safe, monitor my brain activity, stimulate portions of the neocortex devoted to ethics, empathy, compassion. When I run, though, my brain—my dysfunctional, murderous, cured brain—does it for itself as neural pathways are stimulated by my own native neurochemicals.