Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 177 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction & Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2021-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Issue 3, 2018.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Jiang Bo’s first story, “The Last Game,” was published in 2003. To date he has published over fifty short stories and several novels, including The Gate of Machine and The Galaxy Heart trilogy. His work has been honored with multiple Galaxy and Xingyun Awards.

The Shroud for the Mourners

Yukimi Ogawa

Kiriko frowned as she peered into her magnifying glass. “This wasn’t here last time, Hama-san.”

“Oh, please don’t tell me I have a new symptom again,” Mr. Hama said, wincing.

Mr. Hama was a man in his fifties, with a vine-like pattern at the edges of his membranes, and carnelian-colored eyes. He had a long history of suffering from allergic reactions, ever since he was a child. When he’d reached this pattern atelier for the first time as a social insurance consultant, he’d long given up on his perpetually teary eyes. That day, he was looking for something to hang over the wall of his new office, but before he could start talking about his interior decorations, the founder of this atelier, Kiriko’s mentor, pointed at the client’s eyes and said, “Let me fix that first.”

“And who would have thought you’d walk out of a pattern atelier with medication?” Mr. Hama had laughed, when Kiriko had just joined the place.

Now Kiriko looked back into his ear, just to be sure. “This is weird,” she said. “As we discussed many times, most of your symptoms are caused by when your native pattern is distorted on your soft, flexible skin, like near your eardrums. But this distorted allergy pattern is always your native pattern gone wrong—the basic structures are the same, but they expand in different manners into different directions. This new thing here now, however, doesn’t seem to have any relevance to the pattern on your other parts. Even the color is completely different.”

“Hm. Can I have a look, too?”

“Sorry, you won’t be able to see it. Only a pattern craftsperson can.”

Mr. Hama smiled weakly, mocking disappointment. “Of course. Can you make a pattern which ‘offsets’ this allergy pattern? Like always?”

Kiriko was still frowning, her hand at her chin. As he suggested, that would be something she’d normally do: make a pattern whose lines could adjust the way the blood flow and water/air currents ran around the distorted pattern, to eventually smooth the ragged edges of the distortion. But . . .

“I don’t know,” she said. “The remedy patterns for you, they need to be something that have enough affinity with your native pattern. Otherwise the remedy pattern itself can cause a different type of malfunction in some other part of your body. But to offset this new thing, which is completely out of place itself, we would need to construct a pattern that would be too . . . foreign. You may as well go see a doctor, at the clinic.”

“Oh, but the clinic could do nothing for my situation!”

The door of the atelier’s lab opened, and Kiriko’s mentor walked in.

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