Temporally Out of Order Read online

  Temporally

  Out of Order

  Other Anthologies Edited by

  Patricia Bray & Joshua Palmatier

  After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar

  The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity

  Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs Aliens

  Temporally

  Out of Order

  Edited by

  Joshua Palmatier

  &

  Patricia Bray

  Zombies Need Brains LLC

  www.zombiesneedbrains.com

  Copyright © 2014 Patricia Bray, Joshua Palmatier, and Zombies Need Brains LLC

  All Rights Reserved

  Interior Design (ebook): April Steenburgh

  Interior Design (print): C. Lennox

  Cover Design by C. Lennox

  Cover Art “Temporally Out of Order” by Justin Adams

  ZNB Book Collectors #2

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions of this book, and do not participate or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted material.

  Kickstarter Edition Printing, May 2015

  First Printing, July 2015

  Print ISBN-10: 1940709024

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1940709024

  Ebook ISBN-10: 1940709032

  Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1940709031

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Copyrights:

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Joshua Palmatier

  “Reading Lists” copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire

  “Salamander Bites” copyright © 2015 by Elektra Hammond

  “Black and White” copyright © 2015 by David B. Coe

  “Dinosaur Stew” copyright © 2015 by Chuck Rothman

  “Not All Is As It Seems” copyright © 2015 by Faith Hunter

  “Batting Out of Order” copyright © 2015 by Edmund R. Schubert

  “Grand Tour” copyright © 2015 by Steve Ruskin

  “‘A’ is for Alacrity, Astronauts, and Grief” copyright © 2015 by Sofie Bird

  “The Spiel of the Glocken” copyright © 2015 by Laura Resnick

  “The Passing Bell” copyright © 2015 by Amy Griswold

  “Destination Ahead” copyright © 2015 by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Where There’s Smoke” copyright © 2015 by Susan Jett

  “Alien Time Warp” copyright © 2015 by Jeanne Cook

  “Cell Service” copyright © 2015 by Christopher Barili

  “Temporally Full” copyright © 2015 by Stephen Leigh

  “Notes and Queries” copyright © 2015 by Juliet E. McKenna

  “Temporally Out of Odor: A Fragrant Fable” copyright © 2015 by Jeremy Sim

  Table of Contents:

  Introduction

  by Joshua Palmatier

  “Reading Lists”

  by Seanan McGuire

  “Salamander Bites”

  by Elektra Hammond

  “Black and White”

  by David B. Coe

  “Dinosaur Stew”

  by Chuck Rothman

  “Not All Is As It Seems”

  by Faith Hunter

  “Batting Out of Order”

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  “Grand Tour”

  by Steve Ruskin

  “‘A’ is for Alacrity, Astronauts, and Grief”

  by Sofie Bird

  “The Spiel of the Glocken”

  by Laura Resnick

  “The Passing Bell”

  by Amy Griswold

  “Destination Ahead”

  by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Where There’s Smoke”

  by Susan Jett

  “Alien Time Warp”

  by Gini Koch

  “Cell Service”

  by Christopher Barili

  “Temporally Full”

  by Stephen Leigh

  “Notes and Queries”

  by Juliet E. McKenna

  “Temporally Out of Odor: A Fragrant Fable”

  by Jeremy Sim

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  While traveling to a convention, waiting for a connecting flight at an airport, I sat across from a bank of pay telephones in the terminal. One of the telephones had a note attached to it: “Temporally Out of Order.” Obviously it was a typo, but as I sat there I began to wonder… If I picked up the receiver, who could I call? Could I dial my father, who’d died when I was eighteen, perhaps talk to him one last time? What about my grandfather? Or perhaps I could talk to my future self, find out what mistakes I’d made in the next few years, maybe attempt to avoid them.

  And then I began to think, what other everyday objects could somehow behave “temporally” out of order? What kind of stories could evolve out of such a situation? How would such an object change your life, either for good or bad, and what would the repercussions be?

  I decided to throw the idea out there, to see what kinds of stories would pop up. This anthology is the culmination. Seventeen authors used their imaginations and took gadgets—some every day and ordinary, others … not so much—and let them run temporally wild. We hope you enjoy them.

  And maybe next time, when that phone rings oddly or your computer acts weird, you should look at it askance and ask yourself whether it’s really out of order … or perhaps only temporally out of order.

  READING LISTS

  by Seanan McGuire

  Megan Halprin was forty-seven years old when she got her first library card. She didn’t particularly want it, all things being equal: she’d never been much of a reader, and she didn’t have the time to waste on books. But her employer had been very clear. Either she needed to bring her reading up to at least a ninth grade level, or she was going to be looking for another job. With the economy in the shitter—no pun intended—even janitorial jobs were thin on the ground. It wasn’t her fault the damn chemical cleaners were so complicated. How was she supposed to know that mixing them improperly would fill the halls with toxic smoke? It wasn’t on her. It was on the people who didn’t bother to make things simple.

  But that hadn’t held any water with management. “Remedial reading classes or the unemployment line,” was the order, and she was almost fifty years old, for God’s sake! She wasn’t going to go out and pound the pavement if there was any possible way for her to avoid it. Checking out a library book and doing a report on it was a requirement for graduation, and there wasn’t any way around it. So here she was, with a goddamn library card in her name. She didn’t even know why they bothered calling them “library cards” anymore. It was just an app on her phone, authorizing her to take books home. As if she’d ever want to do that again after she had passed her class.

  “Goddamn waste of time,” she muttered uncomfortably, and looked uneasily around the library’s cavernous main room.

  Megan Halprin was almost too scared to breathe.

  Bit by bit, she inched down the main hall, eyeing the brightly-lit rooms with their intimidating piles of books and periodicals. She’d been briefly hopeful when she heard that most libraries had lots of magazine subscriptions, but then her teacher had said “No reports on the latest issue of Us Weekly,” and all her hopes had been dashed. It was a book or nothing, and nothing wasn’t an option.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been so many people. They were everywhere, holding books, looking at shelves, looking at her. No matter what she tri
ed to pick for her report, there would be people there, judging her, knowing that she didn’t read as well as they did. They’d think she was stupid. They’d think she was old and useless and didn’t belong.

  She continued down the hall, looking for a room that didn’t have so damn many people in it. There had to be something. There had to be some little corner of this damn library that no one cared about.

  She nearly missed the door.

  It was closed, which was unusual: all the other doors she’d seen had been open. There was a piece of paper taped to it—“Temporally out of order.”

  “They work at a library and they can’t even spell,” muttered Megan. How could a room be out of order? It had to be some sort of library joke. She tried the knob and the door swung open, revealing a small, surprisingly well-lit room packed with books. Best yet, there were no people there. It was, at long last, an empty space.

  Megan slipped inside and closed the door behind herself, moving toward the nearest shelf. Fiction, non-fiction, how-to manuals, she didn’t care: all she cared about was getting a book and getting out of the library.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  The voice was female, pleasant, and probably didn’t deserve to be answered with a brief shriek of surprise. Megan whirled to find herself facing a smiling, hazel-eyed blonde with a name tag pinned to her breast. A librarian. Of course there would be a librarian. A librarian named “Holly,” because why not be as cutesy about things as possible?

  “This room closed?” Megan asked, once she had her breath back.

  “Not at all,” said the librarian. “We’ve just been having some mild causality issues. Can I help you find a book?”

  Megan didn’t know what “causality issues” were, and she wasn’t about to ask. “I need something to read. No big words. I’m just looking for something quick and easy.” Her cheeks stung a bit as they reddened. She hated admitting that she wasn’t the best reader. But this was a librarian. Librarians probably dealt with people who just wanted something relaxing all the time.

  “I have just the thing.” The librarian smiled, turned to a nearby shelf, and pulled off a book with a bright orange cover. She offered it to Megan, who took it cautiously.

  “Forty Things to Do Before You’re Forty,” she read, sounding the words out carefully and feeling a small ping of triumph when she didn’t have to hesitate at all to figure out what something said. Then she laughed roughly. “I probably should’ve read this eight years ago, when it could have done me some good.”

  “Do you want it anyway?” asked the librarian.

  “Since you can’t give it to me eight years ago, sure,” said Megan. “It’s a book, and that’s really all I need right now.”

  “Great,” said the librarian. “Let’s get you scanned and on your way.” She turned, heading for the circulation desk. It was a little odd that such a small room would have its own desk, but Megan didn’t question it much. Everything about the library was odd, or at least new, to her.

  The librarian took the book away and ran it under the computer while Megan pulled up the library app on her phone. The computer beeped. Megan’s phone beeped. She looked at the display, and her eyes went wide.

  “What the hell does this thing mean, I have a book that’s more than five years overdue?” she demanded. “I just got this card today!”

  “Five years is when the system stops tracking how overdue something is. It looks like a glitch,” said the librarian, her mouth drawing down into a moue of displeasure. “I’m so sorry about this. Look, why don’t you go and grab something to eat, and then come back here? I’ll fix it. Trust me.”

  Megan frowned, but couldn’t think of a good reason not to take the librarian’s advice. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and started for the door.

  “I’ll be here,” said the librarian.

  Megan stepped out into the hall, and disappeared.

  oOo

  Megan Halprin was thirty-eight years old when she got her first library card. She’d been putting it off for years—she didn’t like admitting that she’d dropped out of high school; it felt too much like saying she hadn’t been able to hack it, when really she’d just been bored and unequipped for all that damn homework—but the new management of her building had promised her a promotion if she could just bring her reading up to snuff. Janitorial work was nothing to be ashamed of. At the same time, the idea of getting to a desk job someday, where she could tell other people to go and mop up spills while she sat on her butt and let her feet recover from the last ten years? Damn, that was a nice idea.

  So now here she was, standing in the library, fresh from her first Adult Literacy class, and she had no idea where to go. There seemed to be people everywhere, and while she didn’t mind other people so much, she really didn’t feel like sharing her first careful exploration of the library with folks who wouldn’t understand why she looked so confused, or why she was clutching her phone—loaded with one of the new library card apps that were all the rage these days—quite so tightly. She thought she might have preferred to get one of the physical cards after all, even though that was a five dollar materials charge. It would have been nice to have something a little smaller to hold onto.

  Slowly, she began moving through the library, trying to look like she was going somewhere in specific, when really she was just going wherever she wound up. When she saw the closed door with the sign taped to it, she paused only long enough to be sure that the sign didn’t say “private” or “no admittance”—it didn’t—before opening the door and stepping through into the small, book-lined room on the other side.

  “Hello!”

  Megan turned. There was a smiling woman standing behind a circulation desk. It looked a little out of place here; weren’t the circulation desks supposed to be out in the more general-use parts of the library? But the woman’s smile was very bright, and she was wearing a name tag. She must be a librarian.

  “Hello,” said Megan. “Is this room open to the public?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said the librarian—“Holly,” according to her name tag. “We’re just experiencing some causality issues. You’re Megan Halprin, right?”

  Megan stared. “How do you know my name?”

  “The system alerted me when it scanned your card into the library,” said the librarian. “It’s a new feature. I have your book.” She reached under the counter and produced a book with a bright orange cover. Forty Things to Do Before You’re Forty, proclaimed the title.

  “Oh,” said Megan. “Um, yes, that does look like something I’d … but is there some sort of recommendations system?” She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of the library profiling her likely reading tastes. She wasn’t even sure she had reading tastes as such.

  “No, my system says you put a hold on it last week.” The librarian looked from the book to Megan before offering, “Maybe we have someone else with the same name coming to this branch. Well, since the computer thinks it’s yours, would you like to check it out anyway?”

  “Sure,” said Megan. “Can I … can I get more than one?”

  “Of course,” said the librarian. “What can I help you find?”

  Forty Things to Do Before You’re Forty checked out just fine, but Megan’s second book—a travel guide to Alaska, which she had always intended to visit—came up as five years overdue.

  “Go grab a cup of coffee and then come back,” suggested the librarian. “I’m sure it’s a simple fix.”

  “All right,” said Megan, and left, Forty Things to Do Before You’re Forty tucked safely under her arm.

  oOo

  Megan Halprin was thirty-three years old when she got her first library card. She had never been a recreational reader—strictly instruction manuals and self-help books—but if she was going to make it past supervisor with the cleaning company she worked for, she needed to learn how to relax. Reading seemed like an easy, effective, and best of all, economical way to let her hair down a littl
e bit.

  Most of the rooms at the library were full of people, which didn’t really suit her much: she wouldn’t have gone into janitorial services if she liked dealing with people day in and day out. So she wandered the halls and browsed the reading rooms until she found a little door with a sign claiming it was somehow out of order. Unable to resist, she tried the knob. The door swung open.