Shoggoths in Bloom
and other stories
Elizabeth Bear
Praise for Elizabeth Bear
“Elizabeth Bear is awesome.” —John Scalzi
“Bear is an amazingly impressive and prolific writer, who seems to write great work that wins awards—and deserves them—at an astonishing rate, over a huge variety of speculative fiction subgenres.” —The Agony Column
“Elizabeth Bear is one of the best writers in genre today. Period.” —SF Signal
“Bear’s tales are not only ingeniously mysterious but also richly textured with details.” —Publishers Weekly
“Elizabeth Bear is talented.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Bear’s . . . elegant storytelling should appeal to fans of Charles de Lint, Jim Butcher, and other cross-world and urban fantasy authors.” —Library Journal
“Bear makes the rest of us look like amateurs.” —Peter Watts
“Bear holds nothing back, and everything that she pulls into her story just gleams with that special wonder of discovery.” —The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
“[Bear] does it like a juggler who’s also a magician.” —Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus
“Bear’s ability to create breathtaking variations on ancient themes and make them new and brilliant is, perhaps, unparalleled in the genre.” —Library Journal, starred review, on All the Windwracked Stars
For Scott.
This is the first one.
In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns
The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe
The Death of Terrestrial Radio
So, a hard science fiction writer, a fantasist, a consulting futurist, a sociological essayist, and a speculative fiction critic walk into a bar . . . Which is less hectic than it sounds. It turns out they’re all the same person.
Let’s try another. An archer, a rock climber, a kayaker, an anthropologist, a gamer, a gardener, and a very talented amateur chef/mixologist—
Ah, you’re ahead of me this time. Yep. All the same person.
A pair of Hugo Awards, a Drabblecast Annual Story Award, a John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award, a Locus Award, and a posse of nomination trinkets and ribbons arrange themselves on a shelf . . .
Okay, those are clearly inanimate objects, so they can’t be a person. But they’ve all got her name on them.
Elizabeth Bear is the sort of writer who keeps the trophy and ribbon manufacturers of the world gainfully employed.
I could never be accused of neutrality on the subject of Bear. Before we were friends, I appreciated her work. Once we became friends, we found that it didn’t suit us, so we became close friends. Once we became close friends, we eventually realized that it wasn’t working out, so we were forced to start dating. As I type this, somewhere on the irresponsible side of a sweltering summer midnight in central Massachusetts, she’s asleep on a couch about a dozen paces away, breathing gently, surrounded by shelves of books. She wrote a daunting number of them herself.
I could gush. That is to say, I could keep gushing. I could go on an Ellisonian bender and spit adjectives and superlatives until the sun comes up and my face hits the keyboard. When Paula Guran asked me to write this introduction, she handed me a double boon: the chance to laud a woman I love, and the chance to associate my name with the most powerful collection of her short fiction yet assembled. The former is a privilege of personal circumstance, but when you read the collection you’ll see why the latter is something other writers might well begrudge me . . . with knives and brass knuckles and sugar in my gas tank.
Elizabeth Bear is the sort of writer who might get me murdered by my peers. I would die happy.
I’ll tell you a little bit about what you’ll find here, but I’m not handing out keys. Oh, no. No keys, no Cliffs Notes, no maps or flashlights for Elizabeth Bear stories. Talk about the fastest possible way to ruin the whole damn point. You need to make your own keys, sometimes slowly, and find your own doors, sometimes painfully. Throw yourself on these things, and mind the spikes and brambles, and be aware that you might need to make a few attempts. You might rebound entirely from some of them. There’s no baby food prose here, no pat punchlines at the ends, no Obvious Spokesbeings who walk out into the spotlight and Tell You What It All Means in the worst tradition of the middle-school book report, or the platonic ideal of the half-assed science fiction story.
This is never to say that Bear doesn’t have a point. All of these works have points. Huge points, important points, melancholy and rueful points. But her Relevant Portions of the Text are never conveniently circled and underlined. She doesn’t light up her Themes and Messages so that they’re visible from any distance. Skim these stories and you’re lost. The only way in or out of this particular fictional country is to pay attention.
Elizabeth Bear is the sort of writer whose works are like found objects. They don’t come with instructions.
Her personal eclecticism projects into her work like a beam of light passing through mist and foliage, casting peculiar shadows and spiraling off into alternately disquieting and entrancing patterns. Here are stories of murder and criminal investigation, stories of broken hearts, stories of communication and miscommunication, stories about drinking and exile and sacrifice, both voluntary and involuntary. Here are stories of lost dreams and broken lives and people moving forward, always forward, however slowly and painfully, however twisted their paths.
Bear is a proven survivor, and she writes about survivors. But it’s a curious thing, how many of her survivors are also casualties, and how many of her casualties are also survivors.
Elizabeth Bear is the sort of writer who doesn’t play zero-sum games with the important stuff.
Here you’ll find myth and mythic resonance, fantasies both subtle and epic in tone. Here you’ll find the hardest sort of hard science fiction, speculations about the loneliness and unbridgeability of the space between the stars, knowingly hard-edged projections of possible futures. Yet you won’t hear the tinny hum of any comforting old-time propaganda behind it all. No unstoppable over-people, no Competent Men with buzz cuts and slide rules, no pat on the back with a jolly reassurance that the universe is waiting patiently for us to pave it and mark out subdivisions.
Bear’s universe is an altar, and the mere act of living is the sacrifice. We lay ourselves out, hot metal on a cosmic anvil, and the fateful hammer comes down. Sometimes we come out harder, sharper, stronger. Sometimes we simply get smashed and discarded. Yet once smashed, we still move forward, always forward, however slowly and painfully, and eventually, inevitably, we put ourselves beneath the hammer again. That’s Elizabeth Bear right there . . . and this is as close as I’m going to swing to giving you a possible outline of one of those keys I mentioned.
Bear’s universe isn’t a simple inheritance, waiting tamely for our pleasure. But gods and powers and entropy be damned, that’s no excuse for not flinging ourselves at it anyway. To be smashed, and disappointed, and discarded, and then to stand up and do it all over again.
Elizabeth Bear stories can be uncomfortable in the same way life itself can be uncomfortable.
You’re getting older. You’re losing things. The strength you have now can never last, no matter how hard you work to sustain it. It seems like there’s less room for air in your lungs all the damn time. You might as well breathe deep even if it hurts. You might as well run, even if it makes your feet sore. You might as well throw parties. You might as well make mistakes. You might as well heave yourself gamely onto the altar of the universe and see what happens, even if you’re bound to get smashed. The alternative is to be dead. So you might as well.
You really might as well, so long as you’re here.
Bear’s stories won’t conceal sweet lies like soporific venom. They won’t ever, ever try to pretend you can have something for nothing. They won’t tell you there’s a grand design and anyone or anything to watch over you as you stumble through it. But somehow they’re like anti-matter for cynicism. They’re what nihilism has nightmares about. Just because there’s no grand and assured meaning behind the pain doesn’t mean there’s no personal reason to take it anyway, to fight through it, to go down burning in it if we must.
Elizabeth Bear is the sort of writer who always reminds you that you get a fighting chance.
No more, and no less, and sometimes it’s not enough. Invariably it’s not what you hoped it would be.
But she’ll tell you to fight anyway, all the way to the end.
These, her stories, are full of sympathy for the unsympathetic. Of quiet and personal justice for the downtrodden. Of tiny victories of kindness and comprehension over anger and prejudice. Of the living choosing to carry hard and bitter burdens for the sake of a future they’ll never see. These are tales of reinvention after disaster. Tales of the lost and wounded and forgotten making new missions for themselves in the worlds they have to live with. The worlds they do live with.
The worlds they keep on fighting in, and fighting for, all the way to the end.
Chalcedony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.
Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.
They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.
The beach was where she met Belvedere.
Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony’s trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.
As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn’t raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors which locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.
He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn’t deem him a threat.
Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.
The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.
“Whatcha picken up?”
“Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he’d been creeping closer, until he’d begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag.
Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prize it open with. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.
Deft enough—he flicked, sucked, and tossed the shell away in under three seconds—but that couldn’t be much more than a morsel of meat. A lot of work for very small return.