WEIRD SCIENCE

Authors explore traditional sciencefiction narratives

The whole Moon wondered: what would Khaz do for Fashion Week?

Last year he’d held the first zero-G fireworks show, raising plastic globes on tethers above the biodomes, with gorgeous gunpowder explosions inside.

Khaz’s little shop was the hit of the International Pavilion, the mile-long crystal mall between the Soviet and US spheres. Russians and Americans and all the millions caught in the middle clamoured for his designs.

Stars and stripes and hammers and sickles consorted freely in his jacket linings. The two empires were like old drunks with machine guns. Only their nukes kept them alive. Khaz’s work was a badge above the hearts of millions, a secret dream of peace.

Secrets were Khaz’s secondary trade. Tailors are like barbers – the presumption of privacy loosens lips.

And secrets swirled at the very core of who Khaz was. Ever since the collapse of uprisings in New York and the asteroid belt, non-heterosexuals had to remain in the shadows. But we were everywhere, and we were Khaz’s most loyal customers. Whatever he was planning for Fashion Week, many of us were in on it. For weeks beforehand, soldiers and diplomats made frequent visits.

At last it came. Twelve ateliers showed collections, but each only sharpened our hunger for Khaz’s climax.

The whole Pavilion became his runway. Stations along the way allowed for costume changes. Finally, 50 women walked out in blood-smeared white, and pointed skyward.

Bursts of fire bloomed. On Earth, on the Moon, from a thousand silos too far out for any of us to see. Every warhead igniting at once.

Screams echoed off the high ceilings. But the nukes streaked not at population centres, but into space – each one individually aimed at the Sun.

Only an army of operatives could have accomplished it, and both sides would certainly have ferreted out the traitors... if they weren’t suddenly under attack on all sides. Asteroids declared independence. States seceded. Borders were breached.

Weaponless, two empires crumbled in the space of months.

And Khaz? His atelier stood empty. Maybe he’d been assassinated. Maybe he’d ventured further out, searching for the new frontiers of fashion, and of freedom.

Sam J. Miller (1979, US) is the Nebula Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (2017) and Blackfish City (2019, published in Italy by Zona 42 with the title La città dell’orca). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Awards and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon and Locus awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He lives in New York City.