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Because her sudden pregnancy doomed her—as she saw it—to diapers and daycares she couldn’t afford and the same drab job she already disliked, Abby asked for Marcia’s advice. At thirty months, Marcia was already the size of a glacier. She moved slowly and inexorably, lowering herself cranelike onto couches.
We all know, by now, how common time loops are. In less than a decade, they’ve moved from the realm of SF movies into the slightly less-realistic realm of self-help books—most famously, Moving On: How to Keep Going When Time Literally Stops.
Tyler Moore’s spells strive to exist in and of themselves. They make no excuse or justification for their existence: no promise to speak to the dead, predict next year’s grain or gold prices, or read the mind of lawyers during a hostile takeover. They are simply beautiful, challenging, and awe-inducing.
Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes.
The first thing you have to know is that I did not kill the gods. Now, I’m sure you must have heard differently from your parents when they tell you bedtime stories, your priests who tell you their selfish desires rather than the will of the gods, or from your teachers who pretend to know what they’re talking about.
Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive.
In Salemo, virtually the entire populace is kept in drudgery and toil. There are no public parks, nor libraries, nor song, nor wine, nor holidays. People slave away in seventy-two -hour workweeks, sustained by unnourishing meals of corn meal and grease, returning home to their miserable hovels at the end of each day to collapse on their stinking cots.
The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit.
Mom still has good days, some days. Those days, when I visit her at Alpine Rest, she knows who I am and asks how her grandson Jack is. On her not-so-good days, she tries to summon the Fire Cosmic and screams that I’m in league with Professor Incalculable.
It had been a long day of convention. All I wanted was a quiet drink in the hotel bar and quality time in my room with a romance novel. The utter cad from Planetary Industries was an unanticipated bubble in the fuel line.
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