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If there’s one thing that makes Starship Captains cranky, it’s the stupid crisis that forces them to turn the ship around and head back to whatever planet they just left. It’s a function of the wormhole drive. You have to be a certain distance away from the nearest sun before you turn it on, or else you’ll blow up. So you must go sub-light while still within solar systems.
Fejértorony There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental. There is a mismatch. I realized after my friend Juli moved abroad and became a library; […]
I understand why you became a ladybug. The ladybug is one of Earth’s jewels. Shapeshifters from all across the universe enjoy the ladybug form as a gentle introduction to our planet’s native transformative experiences. I’ve heard many a shapeshifter rhapsodize about the pleasures of tearing yourself free from the carapace of a ladybug’s instar-self not once but three times, with pupa and imago forms still to come. One visitor I assisted spent seven years as a ladybug.
The next girl through the door was Robin’s prototypical customer. She trotted in with her chin up, her posture so rigid she definitely had back problems. Her dress jacket was the color of newly hatched cardinals, and it was doubtless self-tailored, the material wearing out at the seams. Likely she was one of those academy girls who was paying their own way—so she was definitely shopping for a blade.
What I observed was a giant anthropomorphized ribbon microphone, the type one might imagine standing in front of a radio announcer and his studio audience, selling soap in the dirty 1930s. It sauntered lazily over to an overstuffed red couch, walking on stick-figure legs that looked like they’d been hand-drawn by a young child. The large red couch sat next to a five-foot tall elephant ear plant.
The town was not called Byzantium. The Ministry named it during the first meeting. “It’s not a colony,” Thomas James would have said if he could, but the office was hot and bright, the sun in the windows, in his eyes. He felt like he was surrounded by faceless figures even though there were only two other people in the room. The town they were talking about was located between worlds. The entrance was in the remains of Ooldea, out on the edge of The Nullarbor Plain.
You knew from the beginning. You knew because the world knew about the intricate and fascinating life-cycle of the Svarrs, and it had been documented and discussed everywhere throughout the media endlessly. And you knew because Vo made sure you understood, before you married them. Four years is the bonding-period you get with a Svarr. Not quite four years, to be exact. Four years minus twelve days.
Almost everyone has, at some point in their lives, encountered a door that was not there before. A little girl sits up in bed, staring at the two identical closets in her bedroom. She feels certain there had been only one when she fell asleep. A salaryman on the subway blinks through his pre-coffee daze. The train is still in motion, but the doors have opened to an empty subway station he’s never seen before. The other passengers, eyes glued to their phones, don’t seem to notice.
Iris is deep in an empty ocean, gray-green twilight fading to black everywhere she looks—and she can breathe. She’s a thousand feet above the ground, climbing a fractal cliff suffused with flickering veins of electricity—and she cannot. Iris is flat on her back at home in bed, and her right hand is moving. She lies there, staring straight up, not looking. Dim lozenges of light reach in through the window and play across the ceiling.
On the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday, Francesca awakes to the sound of a blip in the apartment kitchen. It’s 9:30 on a Saturday; good thing she has no responsibilities to drag her out of bed any earlier. No kids, no pets; not even any creative writing essays to grade. She putters around finding her slippers and pulling her tangled hair into a ponytail so that Jason has time to make a pot of coffee. Not that he drinks—or eats—anymore. But he’ll pretend, for her sake.
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