Escape Pod – “Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes”
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by Daniel Marcus read by Christiana Ellis Links for this episode:
- First published first in Asimov’s, July 1996, and reprinted in the author’s collection, Binding Energy (2008).
- Get stories from this author on Amazon.com
- Discuss on our forums.
- For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page
Author Daniel Marcus
about the author…
from the author’s website… Daniel Marcus has published stories in many literary and genre venues, including Witness,Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy,ZYZZYVA, and Fantasy and Science Fiction.Some of these have been collected in Binding Energy. He is the author of the novels: Burn Rate and A Crack In Everything. Daniel was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has taught in the creative writing program at U.C. Berkeley Extension and is currently a member of the online faculty at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. After a spectacularly unsuccessful career attempt as a saxophonist, Daniel earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, has worked as an applied mathematician at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and has authored numerous articles in the applied mathematics and computational physics literature. Daniel then turned his attention to the private sector, where for the last 15 years, he has built and managed systems and software in a variety of problem domains and organizational settings.
about the narrator…
Christiana Ellis is an award-winning writer and podcaster, currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her podcast novel, Nina Kimberly the Merciless was both an inaugural nominee for the 2006 Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction: Long Form, as well as a finalist for a 2006 Podcast Peer Award. Nina Kimberly the Merciless is available in print from Dragon Moon Press. Christiana is also the writer, producer and star of Space Casey, a 10-part audiodrama miniseries which won the Gold Mark Time Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Production by the American Society for Science Fiction Audio and the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Drama. In between major projects, Christiana is also the creator and talent of many other podcast productions including Talking About Survivor, Hey, Want to Watch a Movie? and Christiana’s Shallow Thoughts.
Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes by Daniel Marcus
The only window in Suki’s bedroom opened onto an airshaft that ran through the center of the building like the path of a bullet. She would lie in bed in the hot summer nights with the salt smell of the drying seabed coming in through the open window, a sheen of sweat filming her forehead and plastering the sheets to her body like tissue, listening to her downstairs neighbors. When they made love, their cries echoing up through the airshaft made her loins ache, and she brought release to herself silently, visualizing men with slender, oiled limbs and faces hidden in shadow. Sometimes the neighbors sang, odd, sinuous music redolent with quarter tones. The melodies wove counterpoint like a tapestry of smoke and for some reason Suki thought of mountains. Jagged, fractal peaks thrusting out of an evergreen carpet. Summits brushed with snow. Tongues of cloud laying across the low passes. Sometimes they argued, and the first time she heard the man’s deep voice raised in anger she was sure he was a Beast, possibly an Ursa. She was less certain of the woman, but there was a sibilant, lilting quality to her voice that suggested something of the feline. They’d moved in three weeks before but their sleep cycles seemed out of sync with hers and she still hadn’t met them. Suki tried to imagine herself going downstairs to borrow something — sugar, yarn, a databead. His broad muzzle would poke out from behind the half-closed door; his liquid brown eyes would be half-closed in suspicion. They would chat for a bit, though, and perhaps he would invite her in. They would teach her their songs and their voices would rise together into the thick, warm air. Some nights there was no singing, no arguing, no love, and Suki listened to the city, a white-noise melange of machinery and people in constant flux, like the sound of the ocean captured in a shell held to the ear. Beneath that, emanating from the spaceport on the edge of the city, a low, intermittent hum, nearly subsonic, so faint it seemed to come from somewhere inside her own body. On those nights, she had trouble sleeping, and she would climb the rickety stairs to the roof. She couldn’t see the Web, of course, but she imagined she could feel it arching overhead, lines of force criss-crossing the sky. Ships rode the Web up to where they could safely ignite their fusion drives for in-system voyages, or clung to the invisible threads all the way to their convergence at the Wyrm. Newmoon hung in the sky, its progress just below the threshold of conscious perception, like the minute hands of a clock. She had visited there as a child, a creche trip, and she remembered the feel of the factories humming under her feet, the metal skin pocked with micrometeorite impacts stretching to the too-close horizon, the tingling caress of her environment field.
– See more at: http://escapepod.org/#sthash.eNVZB7sE.dpuf
Pseudopod 316 – The Persistence of Memory
Original Post: http://pseudopod.org/2013/01/11/pseudopod-316-the-persistence-of-memory/
“The Persistence of Memory” by William Meikle.
“The Persistence of Memory” originally appeared in the collection DARK MELODIES (Dark Regions Press 2012). “Think of happy popular piano players/singers – Russ Conway, Liberace, Fats Waller, Fats Domino. And think of what’s behind the smiles.”.
William Meikle is a Scottish writer with fifteen novels published in the genre press and over 250 short story credits in thirteen countries. His work appears in many professional magazines and anthologies and he has recent short story sales to Nature Futures,Penumbra and Daily Science Fiction among others. He now lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out atWilliam Meikle.com. His Dark Regions Press collection DARK MELODIES (2012) is available now in hardcover and paperback – check it out here.
Your reader this week – Christiana Ellis – was last heard here reading PSEUDOPOD 268: Let There Be Darkness.
Escape Pod #352 – Food for Thought
Originally posted at EscapePod.org!
By Laura Lee McArdle
Read by Christiana Ellis
Discuss on our forums.
An Escape Pod Original!
All stories by Laura Lee McArdle
All stories read by Christiana Ellis
Rated 15 and up for explicit language
Food for Thought
By Laura Lee McArdle
Pseudopod Narration – Let There Be Darkness by Mike Allen
(Original Post at Pseudopod.org)
by Mike Allen
Click his name to visit his website, DESCENT INTO LIGHT. Mike is also editor of the critically acclaimed CLOCKWORK PHOENIX anthology series and the long-running poetry journal MYTHIC DELERIUM. This story first appeared in Penny Dreadful, and was reprinted in the anthology THE BIBLE OF HELL and Mike’s poetry collection STRANGE WISDOMS OF THE DEAD. He is planning a collection of his horror stories, including this tale and previous Pseudopod submissions “The Button Bin” and “The Blessed Days”.
Read by Christiana Ellis, who recently read “Plus Or Minus” for ESCAPE POD.
“A day will come when the sun’s pale yellow stare starts to fill with the taint of blood.
Among the confused and tremulous hordes of mankind, amidst the endless processions of grand towers forged from metal stolen from the moon, I will walk. One knowing face, one unique being traversing the rivers of humanity that flood this world.”
Escape Pod 299 – Plus or Minus
By James Patrick Kelly
Read by: Christiana Ellis
Originally appearing in Asimov’s
Discuss on our forums.
All stories by James Patrick Kelly
All stories read by Christiana Ellis
Nominated for the Hugo Award for Novelette, 2011
Rated appropriate for older teens and up for sexual situations and violence.
Plus Or Minus
By James Patrick Kelly
Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova. Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner. She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it. He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.
Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.
For example, there was crud duty. With a twisting push Mariska sailed into the command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall. The racks of instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; command was one of the loudest mods on the ship. She stuck her landing in front of navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship’s .0006 gravity. Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall. This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it. He kept the humidity jacked up in Command, said that dry air gave him nosebleeds. Richard FiveFord claimed they came from all the drugs Beep sniffed but Mariska didn’t want to believe that. Also Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead sucking it out of a bag, even though he slopped all the time. Fungi loved the sugary spatters. She sniffed one particularly vile looking smear of mold. It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the Moon. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge. As she scrubbed, the bitter vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod. Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.
She felt the tingle of Richard FiveFord offering a mindfeed and opened her head. =What?=
His feed made a pleasant fizz behind her eyes, distracting her. =You done any time soon?= Distraction was Richard’s specialty
=No.=
=Didit is making a dream for us.=
Death Traps – A short story by Christiana Ellis
In the Summer of 2010, my good friend Jared Axelrod asked me if I was interested in writing a story featuring Dr. Mercury, a marvelous super-villian created (or perhaps just discovered?) by his lovely wife J.R. Blackwell. The story would be part of a collection, offered as a birthday gift to her. I seized the opportunity, but what kind of story to write? After considering and rejecting several ideas, I eventually decided to try merging Dr. Mercury with a preexisting story idea I had about a super-villain engineer. The result turned out far different, (and far better!), than I’d ever imagined.
Dr. Mercury - A Spirit of Chaos
So here is the result: “Death Traps” written and read by Christiana Ellis, character of Dr. Mercury created by JR Blackwell.
Requiem of the Outcast 0813: Dis-tropian Society
UPDATED LINK!
Dystopian Society. Utopian Society. Information Society (it’s a band, look them up). No one really knows what kind of society they’re in while they’re in it. Just because you had a crappy day or the economy is bad, you may think you’re in a dystopian society when in fact you are in a Utopian Society like the Jetsons. Except with people other than JUST WHITE PEOPLE.
Seriously. Go back and watch the Jetsons. Only whities as far as the eye can see.
mmmm, I’d say that the Jetsons where actually very Dystopian. Way to white-wash the future both Hanna and Barbera! Jerks.
RotO 0812: A Very RotO Christmas ‘10
It’s Christmas! We at RotO hope you have a great one.
We have 12 Angry Elves, The Noir Before Christmas, plus Brian Blessed as a Christmas Tree! What more could you want?
Besides the pony.
PodCastle 133: And the Blood of Dead Gods Shall Mark the Score
by Gary Kloster.
Read by Christiana Ellis.
Originally published in Fantasy Magazine.
Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead. Before Nikolai’s betrayal, Huck’s face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning. That tat’s magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch. Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless.
“Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink. Do yourself a favor and piss off.”
Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt. “Follow him out, Huck,” I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I’d laid out for the job. “We’re done, remember?”
Rated R for: violence, language and adult themes.
This week’s episode is sponsored by METAtropolis: Cascadia
