Posts Tagged ‘Christina Lebonville’

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Escape Pod 496: Falling Through Creation

This story originally appeared in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:25 — 20.3MB)

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Falling Through Creation

by Mark Robert Philps

HD 168443 b — Extra-Solar Terrestrial Planet, Silicate Core, Active Plate Tectonics

We drift in warm lighted liquid and dream of a home that we have never known. Below us the dead world hangs in space, its mantle loose and wrinkled like dusty grey skin. We fire probes, watch as they arc towards the planet in long loops of light.

We wonder if this planet is our planet. Will we find some trace of our people here?

The probes have laser cutters and diamond drills and they burrow deep into the planet core. We collect samples from the surface and test them. This had once been a lush world, a garden in a droplet of water, trembling in the void. Now it is dead, the atmosphere a noxious soup, and we can feel only its past in the rocks that remain.

This world is not our home.

We play cards while the probes do their work. You always win. Remember how Father would drift above us–a short man, even for a human, pudgy, bald and smiling, some kind of Buddha in a wetsuit–teaching us how to play? How he would laugh as we pincered the oversized polymer cards between jet-black mandibles. Now the cards are slick with the residue of our feeling for him.

We play for a long time. Days, weeks, months–it is easy to forget that time moves differently for us, faster than it does for Father and the other humans.

They are liars. They use us. You share this once, many times.

They let us leave, I reply. They could have killed us.

I don’t remind you that it was because of your anger, your frustration, your rejection of ignorance, that we are out on the edge of the void, alone and separated from Father and the Star-City where he raised us. I don’t care about these things. Besides, you are the mercurial one. The stronger one.

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Escape Pod 458: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love

This story has been previously published in Apex Magazine.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:20 — 10.6MB)

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If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love

by Rachel Swirsky

If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.

If you were a T-Rex, then I would become a zookeeper so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats. I’d watch the gore shining on your teeth. I’d make my bed on the floor of your cage, in the moist dirt, cushioned by leaves. When you couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

If I sang you lullabies, I’d soon notice how quickly you picked up music. You’d harmonize with me, your rough, vibrating voice a strange counterpoint to mine. When you thought I was asleep, you’d cry unrequited love songs into the night.

If you sang unrequited love songs, I’d take you on tour. We’d go to Broadway. You’d stand onstage, talons digging into the floorboards. Audiences would weep at the melancholic beauty of your singing.

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Escape Pod 399: My Heart is a Quadratic Equation

Originally published in Redstone Science Fiction, September 2012.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:25 — 17.9MB)

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My Heart is a Quadratic Equation

by Shane Halbach

I.      Brian

“So, uh, Chrysanthemum, what do you do?”

“Science. You know…science stuff. I’m a scientist.”

“That’s…not very specific.”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain,” said Chrysanthemum. In words you’d understand she added to herself.

She used the lull in the conversation to take a pen out of her pocket. Idly she doodled the inside of a hydrogen-powered rocket on a spare cocktail napkin. It was a nice restaurant, she’d give him that. He’d even ordered wine. Big spender. She added an extra fin to her schematic, for stability.

He broke the silence. “Chrysanthemum is an unusual name.”

“The Chrysanthemum is in the Asteraceae family and has been cultivated in Japan for over 2,000 years.”

Brian coughed and looked down at the table, quiet once more.

Turn off the mouth, she thought, this is not how normal people talk.

She stole quick glances at him, her eyes flicking back and forth between his face and the pen in her hand. He was clean cut, with short brown hair. By the way it was carefully styled, she guessed he didn’t keep it short for the convenience, the way she kept her own black hair short. He was taller than she was, but then she was petite. His nose was a bit on the large side, but at least he seemed nice. It would probably be an adequate genetic pairing, if she didn’t mind inane small talk.

He took a breath and waded in again.

“Have you always lived in the city?”

“Yes,” she replied glumly. This is intolerable. How do people do this?

This time the silence stretched on and on, like time in a black hole as it approached singularity. Her mind groped for something to say.

“I’ve created a nuclear-based energy weapon,” she blurted out.

Brian raised his hand.

“Check please!”

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