Spring 2007 Read Online Free Page A

creations, Lucifer went
onto the back burner and stayed there for ten long years.
    Then in 2004, Lou Anders began editing the reborn Argosy and agreed to run a Lucifer story every other issue. So though it took him a
decade to cross the Atlantic, Lucifer Jones finally set foot on the South
American continent. Then, like Pulphouse before it, Argosy folded.
    But another Lucifer fan, Chris Roberson, offered to run
the second story I had sold to Argosy , “The Island of Annoyed Souls”, in
his anthology Adventure. Finally Bill Schafer got in touch with me and
offered to start running Lucifer regularly in Subterranean. He published
“Chartreuse Mansions” a couple of issues back, and now Lucifer’s appearing in
the same venue twice in a row for the first time in 13 years.
    With a little luck, he’ll
stick around long enough to get thrown off still another continent.

Fiction: A Plain Tale from Our Hills by Bruce Sterling
    Little Flora ate straw as other children eat bread.
    No matter how poor our harvests, we never lacked for
straw. So Flora feasted every day, and outgrew every boy and girl her age. In
summer, when the dust-storms off the plains scourge our hills, the children
sicken. Flora thrived. Always munching, the tot was as round as a barrel and
scarcely seemed to sweat.
    It was Captain Kusak and his young wife Baratiya who had
volunteered to breed her. Baratiya was as proud of her little prodigy as if she
had given birth to the moon. Bold strokes of this kind are frequently discussed
in Government, yet rarely crowned with success. No one should have resented
Baratiya’s excellent luck in the venture. Still, certain women in our Hill
Station took her attitude badly.
    Kusak should have done something useful and tactful
about the matter, because he had also hoped and planned for a new kind of
child, one fit to live more lightly on our stricken Earth. Captain Kusak tried
to speak some common-sense to his wife, I think; but he was clumsy, so this
made her stubborn. Baratiya lost friends and her social prospects darkened. She
obsessed so single-mindedly about the child that even her husband grew
estranged from her.
    Baratiya is more sensible now that other such children
have been born to us. At the time, though, this woman was the talk of our
Station.
    You see, though motherhood is the golden key to
humanity’s future, it can be a leaden burden in the present day. And as for the
past–well! Many of us scarcely understand that a mere half-century ago,
this world was crowded.
    Certain grand people existed in those greater, louder,
richer days. These moguls knew that a general ruin was coming to the
Earth–for they were clever people. They feared our planet’s great
calamity, and they schemed to avert it, or at least to adapt to the changes.
They failed at both efforts, of course. The heat rose so suddenly that the
rains dwindled and the mass of mankind starved in a space of years.
    Rich or poor, the ancients perished quickly, but some
few of that elite had a fierce appetite for living. Among them was a certain
grand lady, a pioneer founder of our own Hill Station. Privately, we call this
persistent woman “Stormcrow.”
    I myself have nothing to say against her
ladyship–if not for her, I would have no post within Government. However:
if a little girl who eats straw differs from the rest of womankind, then a
woman who never seems to age is even more remarkable.
    Our Stormcrow is black-eyed, black-haired, slender,
brown, clever, learned and elegant, and, taken all in all, a dazzling creature.
Stormcrow sleeps a great deal. She pecks at her food like a bird. She lives
with her servants in a large and silent compound with shuttered blinds. Yet
Stormcrow takes a knowing hand in all we do here.
    That old woman has no more morality than a rabbit. You
had only to mention her name over the tea-and-oatmeal for every younger woman
in the room to pull a sari over her head straightaway. Yet Stormcrow was witty
and bright, and