Night Shift Read online

  Eileen Gunn

  Winner of the

  Nebula Award

  Sense of Gender Award (Japanese Association for Gender, Fantasy & Science Fiction)

  Nominated for the

  Hugo Award

  World Fantasy Award

  Philip K. Dick Award

  Tiptree Award

  Locus Award

  “Gunn can shift effortlessly among SF, fantasy, horror, surrealism, absurdist comedy, and myth, often in the same story.”

  —Gary Wolfe, Locus

  “Gunn’s stories spin ideas done up with sharp edges.”

  —New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Darkly comic science fiction. Her prose is vividly off kilter, her plots memorable and usually hilarious, and her characters recognizable even when they are tropes. The author’s firm grip on dream logic makes everything feel meaningful, even when it doesn’t quite make sense.”

  —School Library Journal, Adult Books for Teens

  “Corporate satire and Kafkaesque metamorphoses gleefully collide.”

  —Seattle Times

  “… a master of the short story.”

  —SFRevu

  “… an impressive sense of wonder.”

  —Tobias Carroll

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

    1. The Left Left Behind

  Terry Bisson

    2. The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

    3. The Underbelly

  Gary Phillips

    4. Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

    5. Modem Times 2.0

  Michael Moorcock

    6. The Wild Girls

  Ursula K. Le Guin

    7. Surfing the Gnarl

  Rudy Rucker

    8. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

  Cory Doctorow

    9. Report from Planet Midnight

  Nalo Hopkinson

  10. The Human Front

  Ken MacLeod

  11. New Taboos

  John Shirley

  12. The Science of Herself

  Karen Joy Fowler

  13. Raising Hell

  Norman Spinrad

  14. Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials

  Paul Krassner

  15. My Life, My Body

  Marge Piercy

  16. Gypsy

  Carter Scholz

  17. Miracles Ain’t What They Used to Be

  Joe R. Lansdale

  18. Fire.

  Elizabeth Hand

  19. Totalitopia

  John Crowley

  20. The Atheist in the Attic

  Samuel R. Delany

  21. Thoreau’s Microscope

  Michael Blumlein

  22. The Beatrix Gates

  Rachel Pollack

  23. A City Made of Words

  Paul Park

  24. Talk like a Man

  Nisi Shawl

  25. Big Girl

  Meg Elison

  26. The Planetbreaker’s Son

  Nick Mamatas

  27. The First Law of Thermodynamics

  James Patrick Kelly

  28. Utopias of the Third Kind

  Vandana Singh

  29. Night Shift

  Eileen Gunn

  30. The Collapsing Frontier

  Jonathan Lethem

  Night Shift

  plus

  Ursula and the Author

  plus

  Promised Lands

  and much more

  Eileen Gunn

  PM PRESS | 2022

  “Ursula and the Author” first appeared, under the title “‘The Author’ and the author and the aspirant,” in 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, Aqueduct Press, 2010.

  “After the Thaw” first appeared in Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales no. 12, Fall–Winter, 2011.

  “The Quiet Gardner Dozois” was expanded from an essay in the New York Review of Science Fiction no. 349, November 2018.

  “Promised Lands” was first published in Stone Telling, February 2013.

  “Night Shift at NanoGobblers” first appeared in Visions, Ventures, Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, Center for Science and the Imagination, 2017.

  “I Did, and I Didn’t, and I Won’t” is original to this volume.

  “Transitions” was first published in the online anthology 14C, X-Prize, 2017.

  “Joanna Russ Has Your Back” began as “Visions of Joanna,” in Locus Magazine, June 2011.

  “Into the Wild with Carol Emshwiller” was expanded from “Do Not Remove This Tag,” the introduction to Emshwiller’s story collection I Live With You, Tachyon Publications, 2005.

  “Terrible Trudy on the Lam” first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction 43, no. 3/4, March-April, 2019.

  Night Shift

  Eileen Gunn © 2022

  This edition © PM Press

  ISBN (paperback): 9781629639420

  ISBN (ebook): 9781629639567

  LCCN: 2021945051

  Series editor: Terry Bisson

  Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  Author photo by John D. Berry

  Insides by Jonathan Rowland

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the USA

  Contents

  Ursula and the Author

  After the Thaw

  The Quiet Gardner Dozois

  Promised Lands

  Night Shift at NanoGobblers

  “I Did, and I Didn’t, and I Won’t”

  Eileen Gunn interviewed by Terry Bisson

  Transitions

  Joanna Russ Has Your Back

  Into the Wild with Carol Emshwiller

  Terrible Trudy on the Lam

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Ursula and the Author

  IN 1975, I DECIDED I would get serious about writing science fiction. I quit my job, dumped all my belongings in my car, and drove across the US to Los Angeles, a city I’d never been to before and in which I knew only one person. My goal was to avoid distraction.

  Undistracted, I quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. It had been a decade since I had regularly read the science-fiction magazines, and although I still read SF avidly, I really had no idea what was current, where the edge was. In mainstream fiction, the edge, for me, was just the other side of Donald Barthelme. I didn’t aspire to imitate Barthelme, but I was not interested in writing completely linear fiction. I wanted to pack a bit more into it. What could I get away with?

  To find out, I bought copies of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, of which there were at that time four volumes. The most recent, #4, contained nine stories by men and one by a woman. I read all the stories—I don’t remember in what order. Of those by men I have no memory. The story by a woman was “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  The story is composed of three articles from a (future) professional journal of a field called, in the story, therolinguistics: the scientific study of the languages of animals. The first extract examines a poem—perhaps a cry of existential despair, perhaps a call to revolution—written in Ant, scrawled in touch-gland exudation on acacia seeds. In the second extract, a researcher rhapsodizes about the kinetic dialects of Penguin and announces an expedition to Antarctica for further study of the emperor penguin’s thermal poetry. The third extract is an editorial that urges researchers to look beyond the now accessible languages of animals to the unknown art of plants, perhaps even to the slow, opaque poetry of rocks.

  In less than 2,600 words, the story addresses all of human aspiration—artistic, scientific, philosophic, and emotional communication—and reveals it as only the first step in understanding the universe. It draws, in miniature, a portrait of the history of science and the psychology of scientists: patiently, in painstaking increments, they build structures of knowledge and ascend those structures to assess their own ignorance and see opportunities for new research. And it sketches three individual researchers, detailing the differences in their personalities: the Ant linguist’s clinically precise yet carefully hedged interpretations of text, the Penguin researcher’s joyous enthusiasm for spending six months on the ice in the dark to further knowledge of the field, and the journal editor’s visionary exhortations to therolinguists everywhere.

  The scientists are not the only characters in the story. Within each article is, quickly limned, a tale of nonhuman emotional lives. The first is a murder mystery with political overtones. The body of a savagely murdered worker ant lay near the poem. Was this the poet? Who killed her? Does the poem call for the overthrow of the queen or, as a previous researcher suggested, merely express the desire to be an impregnating male? Women have sometimes been killed if perceived to have either aspiration. The second excerpt, in addition to giving a lightning overview of the past (including shout-outs to Konrad Lorenz and John C. Lilly) and intimations, from a 1974 perspective, of the future study of animal language, conveys the varying emotional lives of different types of penguins and notes that although it was at first thought that they spoke some incomprehensible language related to Dolphin, it was discovered that they in fact speak a perfectly comprehensible avian tongue, because penguins are, after all, birds, not mammals. The third excerpt sets up and amends Tolstoy’s definition of art as communication; it imagines and evokes the “uncommunicative” languages of plants and
rocks. Since this story was published, of course, evidence has been found for extensive quasi-neuronal communication among plants—but 100% predictive accuracy is not an essential criterion for science fiction.

  The story interrogates, progressively, the very concepts of language and text. The ant’s poetry, like a Dickinson poem or the translation of a Babylonian fragment, presents the problems of interpreting a conventional text. The Penguin article extends the language/text concept to a kinetic language—one of bodily motion, as in dance— and moves very quickly beyond that idea to the notion that the mind of an aquatic bird must, for evolutionary reasons, work differently from that of a fish or an aquatic mammal. As soon as the reader gets the point—perhaps even before it has sunk in—the essay drills down to the essential differences between species of penguins and the way the concerns of each species influence thought and language. It finishes with a description of poetry offered in the cold and the dark by beings that move very slowly, so as not to dislodge the single egg that sits on each one’s feet—a poetry written only in body heat. The Penguin specialist, after describing an expedition that would sit all winter in the Antarctic night to detect and interpret the poetry of the emperor penguin, cheerily notes that there are still four places available (out of a possible five, perhaps) and suggests that the reader might want to sign up now.

  And the whole story is funny. (Did I mention it’s funny? It’s funny.) The voices of the scientists, each so different from one another, are hilarious, but gentle, parodies of human communications—the ways intelligently obsessive people impart information and enthusiasms to others. Even the heartbreaking parts are funny—the doomed ant, a formic Dickinson writing desperate poetry, with her feelers, on one seed after another, is both affecting and wacky, as is the existence of a Freudian interpreter. The ant’s personal story is as unknowable as Sappho’s, and the meaning of her poetry is as dependent as that of the Hittites on a translator’s sincere but questionable extrapolation. How well does anyone know the internal life of another, of whatever species? It’s a question that is both profound and, expressed in this context, extremely funny. In the second section, the emperor penguins, presumably male, crowded together in the dark, cradling eggs, composing poetry by sending whiffs of precious body heat to one another, are touchingly funny—in their parallel with the production of human art from the cave to the present, and (to me anyway) in the implied visual: a bunch of guys standing around in the dark with eggs on their feet, doing their best to keep the species going.

  The more I think about this story, the more amused I get: it is endlessly rewarding. Communication in the story, you’ll notice, goes in only one direction. There is no indication that any of the other creatures are at all interested in understanding humans. The implications are that the universe is larger than humans, that yes, we can understand others, albeit not perfectly, and that all life, not just human, is funny and tragic. Even the capitalization of Ant and Penguin, in referring to the languages, strikes me as a comment on nationalism in English-language orthography.

  In 1975, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” absolutely blew me away, speaking directly to my writerly backbrain. It told me that the telling of complexly layered, multiphasically imaginative stories was possible in genre science fiction. It didn’t tell me how rare they were or how difficult they were to write, but what I needed to know then was how high to set my aspiration.

  An attempt at interpreting such a witty tale seems like a typically human effort to explain rather than communicate. Le Guin satirized, in the story itself, this very essay, and I realize now that she was making subtle fun of me before I had even read the story.

  Thank you, Ursula, for all the epiphanies.

  After the Thaw

  WOW. WHAT WAS I doing last night? My head hurts. I can’t feel my hands and feet—anything below my neck. I think I have a fever.

  How’d I get here? Twinkling diodes and color-coded wires. Racks of iridescent crystal. Looks like a server farm in a casino—it’s some kind of big computer installation, anyway. There are a few people working in cubicles over there: I can see the tops of their heads.

  Welcome, Madam Professor. Your neurocranium has been thermed and activated, per your original instructions. You will soon adjust to your proprioceptive lacunae and restored euthermia.

  Now I remember—last time I looked, I was dying. So the cryogenic thing worked? I’ve been revived?

  That is correct, Madam Professor.

  Call me Elise. I don’t need the professor thing … Uh, who’s talking? It’s like you’re inside my head.

  I am Odin, the system’s operations data-interface node. We have found that bone conduction provides superior auditory reception and requires less maintenance than earlier input techniques.

  Should you wish to communicate with other cephaloids, please feel free to use your original equipment, which has been cleaned and refurbished.

  Cephaloids? I’m a cephaloid? Well, I guess I am for now. When do I get my new body?

  Permit me to welcome you to a new world of intellectual possibilities, in which re-thermed human brains are partnered with ids, intelligent devices that guide your integration into a productive existence.

  That sounds unpleasantly task-oriented. Also bizarrely intimate, in an asocial kind of way. I don’t want any part of it. When do I get reattached to a body?

  Madam Elise, the system has discontinued the use of organic bodies, due to some very unfortunate early results. Per your revised contract of January 14, 2368 (old calendar), ReThermal Corporation is obligated only to find you appropriate work upon thermination.

  I don’t work very much with other people—I’m a theoretical physicist. I don’t really need a body to think, and thinking is the most interesting part of my existence, anyway. I suppose I can consider this transition an advantage, really. I won’t have to provide my own shelter and nourishment—I can just focus on my work.

  We have you and your id scheduled to manage gallium arsenide deposition in Sector 2489. You will process signals for a matrix of 128 units.

  What do you mean, manage? I don’t know anything about signal processing. And I certainly don’t want to be partnered with an id. That sounds like a recipe for disaster …

  Madam, in your contract, you are listed as a professor and department head, a manager. We have placed you in a data management position.

  What? Wait a minute—that’s just a title. It means I get a little bigger salary, that’s all. I don’t really have to do much, in terms of managing people or teaching classes. Mostly I think about how very strange the cosmos might be.

  The time is past for you to worry about salary—or, indeed, for humans to think about how strange the universe is. Yours was one of the most functional of the organic brains, but we have better equipment at work on that question now. You are fully thermed and awakened, and it’s time you were gainfully employed. It is in your own best interest as well as ours. We can’t afford to keep you on ice forever. It’s time to warm you folks up and put you to work, ha, ha.

  It doesn’t sound as though you have very much experience with this.

  You are one of the first. But after the system has successfully completed these incorporation trials, there will be many more. You will soon have lots of company: we understand that humans are social animals and require constant interaction with one another. and drinking Diet Coke. Speaking of which, can I get a drink of water? It’s awfully warm in here.

  You don’t drink water anymore. Where would it go? We would have to follow you around with a mop. Ha, ha, just joking—the system has been experimenting with humorous communication.

  If you’re going to experiment with jokes, you’ll need protective gear. They’ve been known to backfire.

  Protective gear? This is funny, because it is free association? Ha, ha.

  The fact that you desire water indicates that we need to adjust your osmolyte/electrolyte balance before we proceed with your integration. I’ll just move you over here—whoops-a-daisy, ha, ha—and connect you to Loki, our logical kart interface, who will deliver you to the electrolyte uptake bar via go-kart. The bar will also provide valuable socialization time with other rethermed cephaloids whose electrolyte balance is impaired.