Periphery
Origins By Marianne de Pierres
The Voyage Out By Gwyneth Jones
They Came from Next Door By Kristyn Dunnion
The Rocky Side of the Sky By Melissa Scott
Angels Alone By Carolyn Ives Gilman
Devulban Dreams By Jean Stewart
Diplomacy By Catherine Lundoff
Periphery
Edited by Lynne Jamneck
“Origins” copyright © 2008 Marianne de Pierres
“The Voyage Out” copyright © 2008 by Gwyneth Jones
“They Came from Next Door” copyright © 2008 by Kristyn Dunnion
“Ishtartu” copyright © 2008 by Lyda Morehouse
“Mind Games” copyright © 2008 by Tracey Shellito
“The Rocky Side of the Sky” copyright © 2008 by Melissa Scott
“Angels Alone” copyright © 2008 by Carolyn Ives Gilman
“Devulban Dreams” copyright © 2008 by Jean Stewart
“Diplomacy” copyright © 2008 by Catherine Lundoff
“Silver Skin” copyright © 2008 by Elspeth Potter, portions of the story originally published as “Camera” (2001) and “Wire” (2003)
“The Spark” copyright © 2008 by Cecilia Tan
“Sideways” copyright © 2008 by Sharon Wachsler
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Lynne Jamneck
Introduction
What is science fiction?
The answer—or answers—depends on who you ask. For some, science fiction, or sf, is a component of speculative fiction. Others reject this umbrella term, suggesting it detracts from the
what
,
who
and
why
of the genre.
Can science fiction be defined at all?
Perhaps it was easier during the infant stages of the genre, seventy odd years ago when sf first began to receive major attention as a particular mode of writing. At its core, good sf has always been about everything
but
little green men. To the uninitiated, aliens and space ships are unfortunately still two of the most synonymous elements related to sf writing.
In many so-called “literary” circles, sf remains a genre that is frowned upon, even seen as substandard. Clearly though, anyone who thinks of sf in terms of
Star Trek
and
Star Wars
as the beginning and end-all of the field has probably never read much sf to begin with. It's hard to think that such narrow perceptions still flourish, when real-world science is frequently anticipated in the fictive contexts of sf long before they materialise as tidbits on the evening news.
The best fiction in any genre is most often about people, and how they react to the changes constantly taking place in the world around them. How do they react to cause and effect? What about the solutions that can be extrapolated from these transformations?
Sf stories are sociological studies of potential futures, and that is what makes them so exciting. In a world that keeps so many secrets from us, they give us an exciting glimpse into a future that could be—or a terrifying glimpse of something we could potentially avoid.
As many descriptions as there are to explain “science fiction,” so few are there when it comes to the topic of eroticism. Perhaps it is easiest explained as an aesthetic focused on sexual desire; the emotions and feelings that build upon the anticipation of sexual activity. Importantly though, it is not only arousal and anticipation, but also the attempt through whatever means of representation to incite those feelings.
This is what makes eroticism such a multifaceted concept. It is different for almost everyone. Similar erotic traits may follow through, but there is invariably always something that differs from one individual to another—a colour, a gesture, a texture, memories. The taste of a particular tang on the tongue, a threat, a specific word or sound—the possibilities as endless as the make-up of the human mind.
The stories in this anthology cross several boundaries. Some are sublime, others overt. What binds them together is that they are unique in their diversity. In terms of voice, style and story content, the thirteen stories in this collection run the gamut of not only the sf and erotic genres, but also showcase that which yields great stories—human emotion. Our fears and desires, the memories that haunt us, inspire us or ultimately drag us down.
Here’s wishing you a marvelous journey through the following exciting, tragic, sexy and inspiring pages. The girlies are suited up, they’re tough and they’re mean and they know how to wear a uniform, shake a stick and pilot an engine. They’re coming in from the boundary rims, and they’re ready to play.
Lynne Jamneck
New Zealand
2012
By Marianne de Pierres
When Nicholein’s ladylove un-suctioned her fifteenth toe and dropped it into the Air Vice-Marshall’s martini, I thought it was time to leave the party.
Outside the air felt warmer, a hint of frangipani mingled with wafts of essences from the kitchens. I imagined the golden-eyed servants bearing their trays of sweet delicacies to the guests—steeped figs, halva and caramelized tomi fruits. My mouth moistened and I nearly turned back.
The evening’s shadows danced though; dark, erotic performers, teasing and swaying.
Come…play!
I forgot the party and abandoned my dress jacket, leaving it snug and pale over Nicholein’s original bronze of St George and the Dragon.
Reaching a line of goliath eucalypts I rubbed my hands across their thighs. Patches of rough bark tore my soft-fin’s membrane where I had neglected to secure my cellsuit. I cursed the custom that considered it ill-mannered on any world to celebrate a toast wearing pseudo flesh.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Too many years inside secondary skins,” I replied, supposing that the tree had spoken.
“I thought you must be one of them. Only they don’t often walk in the gardens—not during
dream-dark
.”
Her face appeared then, amongst the silver shrubs that flanked their majestic parents.
I felt breathless and excited by her perfection.
Then, solemnly, she extended her hand and placed it in mine. Strangely small, the nails were sharp on my tender flesh.
Leathery, bony, tiny hands.
Marsupial hands.
Disappointment sobered my mood. I knew enough about Arids to realize that the creature before me was a native. And yet for a few seconds my soul had soared, giddy and aflame, so desperate was my need for love.
She asked me to walk a while, and loathe to defy another—even an arid—with my melancholy, I agreed.
Into the dream-dark, rubicund swamped night.
Direction-less, save for the glitter of Nicholein’s party lights, we drifted amongst the rocks and spiny bushes to the powdered cushion of a dry riverbed. With her hand balanced delicately in mine she uttered a discordant rasping sound. Her tail brushed my legs.
From unseen places a crowd gathered, first, one shadow, and as I turned to catch it, another and another. Pensive, entrancing faces wavering as hers had done, above fur and claw.
“She comes as the geste bespoke.”
“’Tis her.”
“’Tis truly her.”
“…must be her. Praise!”
Tuneless clamor filled the night and I shivered with premonition. Heavy muscular tails pounded in accompaniment and choked the air with dust.
She silenced them and waited, until I was fit to shout or weep with fright, or wishfully close my eyes and wake sick from Nicholein’s cocktails.
“On dust warmed night,
by primordial right,
the enduring race be born.”
She chanted in words I understood, yet pretended not to.
One part dream, one part disgrace—as all her breed—she blew sweet-musty breath in my face. “You will take us there. Home.”
She pointed to the gauzy dust of stars.
I moved away, fear coiling to squeeze inside me like a tentacle.
What part could I play in your customs? I am traveler to this world. Alien. Transient. And lonely. “Nothing I have could be of value to you.”
Tails beat in denial of my words. Disapprovingly jagged. Rough.
Again she silenced them, a slow smile to her perfect lips.
“It is time for our kind to leave this place and command the future. Yet we are trapped here. Grounded by another race’s laws. Forbidden to travel. But our genome cannot be held prisoner. Your child will be our children.”
She touched me again.
I recoiled from the warmth of it. Underneath the cell-suit, my real skin ached from too much time spent on dry land, longing for the spray, and the cool of ocean depths.
“But we are not compatible.” My protest was submissive at best.
She knew it, and drew me toward her, laying me gently to the ground, piercing through the cell-suit and into my membranes with gentle insistence.
I began to leak precious fluid. Slow. Salty.
She licked it with her sharp tongue then spread its scent across her fur.
I could hardly bear the pleasure of either deed or notion.
My body rippled as if I swam in the metallic hydrogen layers of my home world.
She plunged her tongue into me and curled it around my womanly erectile.
My mind overflowed with images of pulsing, multiplying cells. Tiny holes began to appear in them. Each one sent me shivering to a higher bliss. My mind inverted in ecstasy.
Around us, their collective sigh cocooned my conception.
She stroked me down, careful not to rupture more skin.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Her face glowed with the rapture of certainty. “Transfection. A mating of fluid and dust, scale and fur,” she replied. “But more so than that…woman and woman.”
*
MdP:
I lived for several years in a far-north mining town in Western Australia. The Mining Manager often had parties at his house on the hill. It stood alone on the edge of town, its garden merging with thousands of kilometres of red rock and Spinifex. I used to think how easy it would be to wander drunk from a party there, and lose yourself forever in the harsh, dreamtime landscape.
By Gwyneth Jones
i
“Do you want to dream?”
“No.”
The woman in uniform behind the desk looked at her screen and then looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t know if she was real and far away, or fake and here.
“Straight to orientation then.”
I walked. The Kuiper Belt Station—commonly known as the Panhandle—could afford the energy fake gravity requires. It wasn’t going anywhere; it was spinning on the moving spot of a minimum-collision orbit, close to six billion kilometres from the sun: a prison isle without a native population. From here I would be transported to my final exile from the United States of Earth, as an algorithm, a string of 0s and 1s. It’s illegal to create a code-version of a human being anywhere in the USE, including near-space habitats and planetary colonies. Protected against identity theft, the whole shipload of us, more than a hundred condemned criminals, had been brought to the edge: where we must now be coded individually before we could leave. The number-crunching would take a while, even with the most staggering computation power.
A reprieve, then. A stay of execution
In my narrow cabin, or cell, I lay down on the bunk. Walls, floor, fittings: everything was made of the same, grey-green, dingy ceramic fibre. The “mattress” felt like metal to the touch, but it yielded to the shape and weight of my body. The raised rim made me think of autopsies, crushed viscera. A panel by my head held the room controls: just like a hotel. I could check the status of my vacuum toilet, my dry shower, my air, my pressure, my own emissions, detailed in bright white.