Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: Anthems to Craft and Compassion by Mike Allen

  Some Pebbles in the Palm

  Hear the Enemy, My Daughter

  Living in the Niche

  The Mannequin’s Itch

  Lineage

  Keepsakes

  The Last Bombardment

  Confinement

  Serkers and Sleep

  I Have Read the Terms of Use

  The Age of Three Stars

  Keeping Tabs

  Selected Program Notes From the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer

  The Plausibility of Dragons

  Calibration

  Levels of Observation

  Who Embodied What We Are

  Tenure Track

  The Sisters’ Line

  A Lack of Congenial Solutions

  Life of the Author Plus Seventy

  You in the United States!

  The Whole Truth Witness

  I Wrung It in a Weary Land

  Six Drabbles of Separation

  Dispersion

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Publication History

  ANTHEMS

  OUTSIDE

  TIME

  AND OTHER

  STRANGE VOICES

  KENNETH

  SCHNEYER

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  Praise for Kenneth Schneyer’s

  ANTHEMS OUTSIDE TIME

  “Schneyer dazzles with this striking collection of 27 wide-ranging speculative stories . . . Each world is distinct and fully realized, and the astonishing variety of genre and tone on offer showcases Schneyer’s versatility. Inventive and resonant, this collection is sure to impress.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “This fine collection of 26 stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, displays Schneyer’s characteristic combination of wit and deep feeling. The games he plays with the many forms that stories can take are as delightful as ever, and they never get in the way of him going right to the heart of things—in fact they are his way of seeing the world, and his gift to us. Enjoy!”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Curl up with a collection you won’t want to put down! By turns whimsical, moving and disturbing—always thought-provoking—Schneyer’s unique visions reveal myriad glimpses into the human heart.”

  —E. C. Ambrose, author of The King of Next Week

  “Ken Schneyer is a fearless explorer of the genres and his discoveries are treasures, one and all. He offers something for every fan of the fantastic in Anthems Outside Time. Equally adept at creating dragons and aliens, mages and movie stars, Ken brings them all to life with a sturdy intelligence and a heart as big as the sky. I’m a lifelong student of the short form and I’m here to report the arrival of another master.”

  —James Patrick Kelly, winner of the Hugo, Nebula & Locus Awards

  “Ken Schneyer’s collection is full of many gorgeous little stories (including one of my all time favorites, ‘Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer’). Each story is a carefully crafted puzzle box to be cracked open, revealing new insights into the world in all its complexity.”

  —Tina Connolly, author of On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories

  “Kenneth Schneyer’s new collection, Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices, is our latest evidence of a powerful, flexible, and relentlessly curious intellect at play in our genre. No story is like the next; each one shines with its own indomitable haecceity. Awkward sex, unreliable narrators, recorded memory as witness, contracts as characters, strange storms, grim revolutions, and—oh!—the awful melancholy of a weaponized toddler descending on her red balloon: Anthems is yet warm, human, and unafraid to despair. In the end, it is that very fearlessness, no matter how bleak or brutal, that brings the reader back to hope.”

  —C. S. E. Cooney, winner of the World Fantasy Award

  “I am in despairing awe of about a dozen stories from this book, including ‘Some Pebbles in the Palm,’ ‘The Mannequin’s Itch,’ ‘Life of the Author Plus Seventy,’ ‘Keeping Tabs,’ and an astonishingly dark fantasy that left my jaw agape, ‘The Last Bombardment.’ This is astonishing, brilliant stuff. Get your hands on this book.”

  —Adam-Troy Castro, author of Gustav Gloom

  “The short story is one of the few places where artistic experimentation is alive and well—at least in the hands of a master such a Kenneth Schneyer. Schneyer has the George Saunders-like gift of making new structures look easy and feel human. All too human, alas: Anthems removes our calluses and allow us to feel afresh the pain of injustice, the ache of love, the horror of what we’ve become. To call these stories science fiction or fantasy might leave some readers unprepared for the shock of the real Schneyer delivers: and through that shock, catharsis.”

  —Carlos Hernandez, author of the Sal and Gabi Series.

  “From ‘Some Pebbles in the Pond,’ the meta-meditation on stories and lives that opens Anthems Outside Time, to ‘Dispersion,’ the heartbreaking, all-too-real fantasy that closes it, the stories in Kenneth Schneyer’s new collection show a profound understanding of the craft of short stories, and an equal understanding of the people (and occasional dragon) who inhabit them. As at home in an art gallery as he is in a spaceship, Schneyer cares deeply about the world and seeks to understand it as best he can. Through these marvelous tales, he helps us do the same.

  —F. Brett Cox, author of The End of All Our Exploring: Stories

  Also by Kenneth Schneyer

  The Law and the Heart

  ANTHEMS OUTSIDE TIME

  A Fairwood Press Book

  July 2020

  Copyright © 2020 Kenneth Schneyer

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First Edition

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover image © Getty Images

  Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson

  ISBN: 978-1-933846-92-7

  First Fairwood Press Edition: July 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my children,

  Phoebe Hannah Schneyer Okoomian

  and

  Arek Okoomian Schneyer

  INTRODUCTION:

  ANTHEMS TO CRAFT

  AND COMPASSION

  MIKE ALLEN

  Ken Schneyer is a talented fellow.

  He’s also a learned gent, as the stories in this book all amply demonstrate.

  With a background in theater and corporate law, Ken’s got a day job (most all of us writers do) in which he teaches college students about logic, constitutional law, criminal procedure, science fiction literature and Shakespeare—presumably not all in the same class! But if you’re skeptical that such topics can overlap, the evidence in favor is plainly laid out in the finely crafted tales that comprise this hefty collection.

  I’ve encountered Ken’s work before as an editor and publisher (more on that in a bit), and I’ve encountered Ken himself in both “virtual” and “in real life” spaces (more on that too!) Before I get into that, I want to chat just a tad about encountering Ken’s work in toto, as reading this book allowed me to make the acquaintance of stories of his that were new to me. (Some of them, I was already extremely familiar with, as I will explain.)

  As a teenager and twenty-something, I gobbled up lots of science fiction and fantasy short stories, and I had a particular fondness for the latest story collections by Isaac Asimov.

  (Two decades into the 21st century, I feel the need to footnote an evocation of Asimov by observing that problematic aspects of his persona, like those of many other seminal 20th century figures in science fiction and fantasy, are being properly interrogated and reevaluated by present day scholars and fans.)

  The personal connection I experienced in relation to Anthems Outside Time has to do with the subjective feel my impressionable young self had reading books like The Winds of Change and Robot Dreams. Rarely an action writer, Asimov wrote stories for the head, using the tools of genre-spanning fiction to present puzzles for the reader to pour over, with solutions that were sometimes amusing, sometimes profound, always entertaining.

  After I read the book that’s now in your hands, the comparison seemed wholly apt, but with need for expounding.

  Ken Schneyer mines a similar vein, and delivers engaging, entertaining yarns every time out; but his stories are equally written for the heart as for the head. His puzzles are as likely to be moral as logical. The solutions he concocts can be hilarious. The quandaries he poses can be heartbreaking. He works at a more sophisticated level than Asimov did, generating characters who live on the page and hinging outcomes on subtle and breathtaking nuances in the human condition, sometimes reveling in the indomitability of hope, sometimes arriving at disquieting conclusions.

  As examples of the indomitability of hope, I’ll hold up “Serkers and Sleep” and “The Age of Three Stars,” fantasies with tragic overtones—the former driven by magic, the latter by p
rophecy—that proceed with a kind of inexorable logic toward endings that offer rays of light amid the darkness. As examples of disquieting conclusions, I’ll point to the action-filled SF tale “Hear My Enemy, My Daughter” and the epic fantasy “Who Embodied What We Are,” which question core assumptions about heroic actions and their motives and consequences.

  There’s wry humor to be found here, too, and outright satire. Ken combines his legal expertise with classic science fiction problems in the Asimovian tradition in “Keepsakes” and “The Whole Truth Witness” (tellingly published in Analog, that bastion of hard SF), keeping his tongue in his cheek all the while. My personal favorite of these is “Life of the Author Plus Seventy,” which takes a bowl of incongruous ingredients—an urban legend about Walt Disney, the wicked spirit of Gordon R. Dickson’s “Computers Don’t Argue,” minutia of copyright law—and blends them into a marvelous comedy. Marvelous, by the way, both in the chuckles that come from the escalating bureaucratic inanities inflicted on its put-upon protagonist and in the applause-worthy high-wire balance act Ken performs, fitting those elements together so they function like clockwork.

  That penchant for satire isn’t limited to near-future legal extrapolations. Consider “The Plausibility of Dragons,” a high fantasy that works both as a ripping adventure yarn and as a pointed critique of historical misconceptions perpetuated in fan culture.

  Shifting to gears more Bradburian than Asimovian, there’s a dash of poignant surrealism here and there, as well. You’ll find it in “The Sisters’ Line,” a delightful romp co-written with Liz Argall, and in “Dispersion,” the moving original story that concludes this book. There’s also more horrific manifestations of that surrealist bent, in stories like “The Mannequin’s Itch” and “The Last Bombardment”—the latter adapted into a stage play!—that address the trauma of war with irrational, inexplicable, inescapably haunting imagery.

  Ken also has a knack for a rather deft bit of artistry, wherein he presents a narrative in fragments—often, as realistically craft documents, employing his familiarity with similar—and leaves it up to the reader to deduce what the story is. It’s a brave and brilliant thing to do.

  Here’s where I feel justified in sharing personal anecdotes.

  Ken and I and first met in the late 2000s during the lost era of LiveJournal, a social network that was a major gathering point for creative types, especially those of a speculative genre persuasion. (I believe George R. R. Martin was the last major celebrity to leave.)

  Not long after that as the temporal crow flies, I accepted his story “Lineage” for my anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3, the middle installment in what’s to date a quintology of books showcasing unusual and beautiful stories with science fiction, fantasy and horror trappings. “Lineage” is a story that leaps backward and forward and sideways in time and space, highlighting acts of courage and self-sacrificing, ending with a perfect last sentence. I loved it, and even thought it might go far come awards season. That last part, alas, did not come to pass, as can happen—but there’s more to this history.

  First, I met Ken in person. He’s a mensch, energetically cheerful, a guy who works hard to lift others up.

  I’m a regular attendee at Readercon in Boston, and so is he. Ken took part, of course, in the promotional readings for Clockwork Phoenix 3, and we hung out a bit more besides. I have a fond memory of taking part in a group reading he organized for one of his pieces in which more than half a dozen authors read designated parts. It was like a spontaneous stage play.

  The same year “Lineage” came out, Ken became an early pioneer of the sci-fi literary scene’s embrace of the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, successfully raising more than $2,000 that sponsored the writing of new short stories. He also provided invaluable guidance and support during my own baby steps onto the platform, as I launched the campaign that led to the publication of Clockwork Phoenix 4.

  As it turned out, Ken wrote what is (so far!) his most celebrated story, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” for that Kickstarter campaign of his, and my own successful Kickstarter venture enabled me to have the honor of being that tale’s editor and publisher.

  This time my awards hunch was on the money. “Selected Program Notes” was nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, adapted for audio, translated into Chinese and reprinted in a couple of Best of the Year volumes. Gorgeous, powerful and mysterious, it shares the life story of an artist, the details unfolding as a series of entries in a gallery guide, with an ambiguity I find delectable and an extra layer of tension in how the reader’s interpretation of the paintings might differ from the descriptions and analyses provided by the unnamed authors of the guide.

  I don’t want to belabor “Selected Program Notes” at the expense of the other stories in the collection—many stories in this book are worthy of equal praise—but obviously I’ve got bias for good reason.

  Ken continued to have my back with my subsequent crowdfunding ventures, the Mythic Delirium digital magazine and the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 5. Furthermore, sensing that I’m drawn to this style of his involving documents and fragments, he sold me “Levels of Observation,” a blood-chilling tale in which the protagonist never makes a direct appearance.

  For these reasons and more, I’m incredibly flattered that I get to be the one telling you why you need this book in your life.

  One final observation: In every one of these stories, regardless of mood or approach, you’ll find impeccable craft and heartfelt, contagious compassion.

  Go now and experience it for yourself.

  —Mike Allen, March 2020

  SOME PEBBLES

  IN THE PALM

  Once upon a time, there was a man who was born, who lived, and who died. We could leave the whole story at that, except that it would be misleading to write the sentence only once. He was born, he lived, and he died, was born, lived, died, bornliveddied.

  The first few words of a story are a promise. We will have this kind of experience, not that one. Here is a genre, here is a setting, here is a conflict, here is a character. We don’t know what is coming next, but we do know what is coming next; we wonder what is coming next. He was born, he lived, and he died.

  To say that this man did nothing would be false. As a child he made up a little game where he moved smooth pebbles between the shade of a tree and earth warmed by the sun, and for a few moments the warmth or coolness of the pebble would stand bravely against the heat or cold of its surroundings, making a little zone that thought it could resist entropy. No one else ever played it, but it occupied him for dozens of happy hours. When he grew older he forgot all about this game, except that every few years the sight of certain tiny white stones made him want to pick them up, and in his hand they felt heavier than they should. As a man of forty, he regularly walked near a patch of gravel that filled him with inexplicable melancholy.

  The stones are not a symbol. The melancholy was nothing more than the distorted lens through which anyone sees his childhood. Lucky people see lost contentment, safety, and endless wonder. Others see the hand raised in anger, feel the ache in the belly, smell the shit or rotten food or sour sweat.

  He was lucky. He was educated in the manner befitting a person of his time and station—let’s say it was an English public school of 1840 or so, which would mean that he experienced a certain amount of brutality, a fist raised not in anger but because fists are supposed to be raised. We can pity him for that, if we like. He pitied himself for it.

  He fell in love with a young woman whose dark eyes narrowed in concentration when she used two fingers to extract a single seed from a pomegranate. She would hold it between the nail of her first finger and the pad of her second, turning it like a gemstone for perhaps a quarter-hour before she put it in her mouth. By that time its skin had dried, and it must have popped like a tiny balloon when she bit into it.