“Night, in Dark Perfection” by Richard Parks

In the domain of the Faerie Queen it was always night, and the sky as seen from her Palace was always cold, black and full of stars, and she was always heartbreakingly beautiful. She would have it no other way.

On this particular never-changing, never-ending night, she had decreed a ball, and as she stood before the window in her Palace, she looked at the stars while her maids got her ready.

“Has everyone answered?” she asked.

“All but the Marquessa of Shadows, Majesty,” they told her. Perhaps one of them said it. Perhaps all of them said it. To the Faerie Queen, it made little difference. The all looked at her with the same fixed expressions.

“This won’t do. See that she is summoned,” the Faerie Queen said, and the maids said “Yes, Your Majesty.” One or all of them sent the summons with the methods available to them, and as one they hoped, in their way, that the Faerie Queen would forget. She did not forget. They finished dressing the Faerie Queen, and she studied the result in her mirror.

The dress looked like woven copper trimmed in gold, and perhaps it was. The queen did not bother herself with such details. What mattered was how well it set off her porcelain skin and fiery red hair, and the dress did so very well indeed. She was pleased with the dress. She was not pleased with her maids and, most especially, the Marquessa of Shadows, whom she had not forgotten for an instant.

“Have you received an answer?”

“Answer, Your Majesty?”

The Queen sighed. “Where is she?”

At first she received no response except a feigned innocent silence, until she reached for her scepter. “I will ask this only one more time: where is she?”

“In her boudoir, Your Majesty…shall…shall we send a messenger?”

“We’ve sent enough messages already. We will deliver one more. In person.”

“Your Majesty, perhaps it would be best — ”

“We decide what’s best.”

The Faerie Queen left her maids and walked alone through the echoing corridors of her palace. Once she would have been escorted by handsome elfin knights wherever she went, but they were away, she had forgotten where. Besides, she didn’t need them. She was the beautiful and terrible Faerie Queen. She had her scepter. She did not need to fear. She dispensed fear, she did not receive it.

She came to a place where most of the windows were covered with tapestries, except, here and there, a tapestry had fallen. She didn’t mind. There was a certain fashion in decay that suggested time, and she was not afraid of time. She paused for a moment and looked out the window there, but all she saw were stars, going on to forever. Just for that one instant in time, the Faerie Queen felt a sense of something missing.

“Where’s the damned moon?”

The window blinked off for a moment, then a series of symbols drew themselves across it. The Faerie Queen understood that what she was seeing was a map, and it showed her exactly where the moon was. Or had been. Or perhaps might still be. She closed her eyes and looked away, and in that instant, and only for that instant, she remembered what fear was. When she looked back, the map was gone and all she saw were the stars in another endless, moonless night. Words had power, she remembered, and questions were worse still when all words were words of command and the Palace was there to serve her. Her voice was binding magic, best to avoid careless uttering when all the walls had ears. That was the true danger of the faerie realm. The Queen hurried past the window.

The Marquessa’s rooms were on the same level of the Palace as her own. There was no one else around. The Faerie Queen didn’t have the Palace announce her. She just opened the door. The Marquessa lay on her bed. In contrast to the Faerie Queen’s shining raiment, the Marquessa wore something long and lacy and dark, more like a robe than a dress.

“Why did you not answer Our summons?”

Silence. The Marquessa’s cold, dark eyes stared at the ceiling, and the Faerie Queen’s anger and irritation grew by the moment.

“Answer me!” she shouted, but too late she realized what she had done, and it was not the Marquessa who answered her.

Cascade failure in all systems. Photonic links degraded 63%. Reboot —

“Stop! Stop it!”

Silence.

“I’m not like her,” she said. “Not like them.”

They are shadows. You are the Faerie Queen, said the Palace.

“The ball is cancelled.”

Such a pity, Your Majesty.

The Faerie Queen dreamed of the last great ball. She watched all the dancers from the throne on her dais but especially Duke Sunstone dancing, partnered with the Marquessa of Shadows. It was all so elegant and grand, and then it wasn’t. The Faerie Queen noticed to her horror that the Duke’s foot was broken. It turned ninety degrees at the ankle and flopped awkwardly whenever he tried to gavotte. As for the Marquessa, her long legs barely moved as he dragged her through the steps. There were others. Several had fallen. One was crawling. She thought it was Count Moonbeam. Some did not move at all, and the music echoed futilely through the ballroom as the stars above shone like cold diamonds against the blackness.

“This is how the dead dance.”

She banished the thought as she would a disgraced courtier. No one was dead. She was the Faerie Queen. She lived forever, and thus so did her subjects. That was her command. But there was one in the palace who did not obey the Queen’s writ. On the bad nights, the Faerie Queen could see the creature. It had skin as white as her own but not the white of porcelain. This was a ghastly white. The white on the belly of something you turned up under a stone. Its eyes were open and staring, its hair was nothing more than gray, straggling wisps. It was dead. It was alive. It was there, in the Kingdom of Faerie, and it did not belong.

This was a bad night. The Faerie Queen saw the monster again. She could not touch it, though she forced herself to reach out. The thing was like smoke, there and then gone again. It did not speak, and it first appeared when her subjects began to fail.

“This is the thing that has brought Death among us,” she said. “Whatever it is, I must destroy it.”

You cannot, said the Palace.

“Not as I am,” said the Faerie Queen.

No. Not as you are.

“Cryptic. I understand cryptic,” the Faerie Queen said. “I can no longer be the Faerie Queen. I must be something else. So must you. We will hunt this thing together.”

In the world of the Captive Princess, it was always night, and the sky as seen from her Prison was always black and full of stars, and she was always heartbreakingly beautiful. She really had no choice. When she awoke, the strange, expressionless creature that served as her Captor dressed her in clothes fit for a princess, but she  managed to conceal her scepter. It was the one thing they had not been able to take from her.

The one link to her father’s kingdom, now usurped by her wicked stepmother, was the Magician. He spoke to her sometimes. Now he spoke through the scepter.

What is your true wish?

“I wish to be free. Who is coming to rescue me?”

No one will rescue you, Princess.

“Well, then, I must do it myself,” she said grimly. “Who is imprisoning me?”

You already know who guards you.

The Magician was right — it was a silly question. Her cruel stepmother, of course, imprisoned her, and it was her stepmother’s creature, the Beast, that held her there. No one else had a reason. No one else stood to gain. “Has she imprisoned you, too?”

The Magician didn’t answer her. Then, There are people coming.

She frowned. “What do you mean? I thought you said I wouldn’t be rescued.”

Rescue is not their intent, Princess.

“I see.”

The Captive Princess took her scepter and went looking for the intruders. It was some time before she first heard the strange voices speaking a language she understood, but the accent was funny, and it crackled and popped in her ears as if it was carried on lightning.

“ — size of this place? Have you seen anything like it?”

“Not outside of a history book. And keep your helmet on, Jek. You don’t know what’s been growing in this old soup. I’m amazed life-support is still working.”

“Core’s still online and the ship’s stable, though no output from the drive engines…what’s your guess on those? Magneto-plasma?”

“Probably. This place is a fucking museum.”

Captive Princess entered the long corridor that led to her chambers, and there they were. Two men–or at least two man-shaped things wearing some kind of strange armor with rounded helmet and glass visors. As she saw them, they saw her.

“Impossible,” the one named Jek said. “No one could still be alive here.”

“They’re not,” said the other. “She’s not real.”

“A ghost?”

“Don’t be stupid. I mean, look at that outfit. She’s one of the former owner’s toys. I’d guess a construct covered in some sort of bio-reactive polymer matrix. Whoever owned this ship could afford the best.”

The man called Jek peered at the Captive Princess. “Could be an avatar of some sort. Telepresence?”

The other looked thoughtful. “Only if it’s under the ship’s control. There’s no one else here to operate it.”

“What gibberish! I am the Captive Princess!” Captive Princess said. “Who are you and what is your intent?”

The two stood in the corridor facing her. One gave an exaggerated bow. “My name is Kenson, Highness,” he said. “My partner is Jek. We’re here to claim right of salvage on this old hulk. How long have you been drifting, anyway?”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Kenson sighed. “You’re not a real person, Highness. You’re either an independent AI or a glorified telepresence avatar…and since no one could still be alive on this wreck to pull your strings, I’d guess in that case I’m talking to the ship’s computer. If you are the ship’s computer, then understand that your vessel is derelict, and has been that way for a long, long time.”

“I didn’t think they could make a self-contained AI on this scale back then,” Jek said.

Kenson shrugged. “Most likely not a true AI if it’s a sexbot. A very limited scope of programming would be required for that kind of toy.”

“I am no toy! This is my Palace! You can’t just come here and take it!”

Captive Princess felt dizzy.  She hadn’t spoken. The Faerie Queen had spoken. And she was not the Faerie Queen. She was the Captive Princess. Nothing here belonged to her. There was nothing she wanted, except to kill the Beast and escape.

To go home.

“You have a ship? We can leave this island?”

“Island? What island? This is a derelict starship, and there’s more high-grade titanium in your hull alone than either of us has seen in a lifetime, not even counting the rarer metals. We can retire as rich men, though we’re shutting the power core down before we take you in tow. It’s too dangerous otherwise.”

She heard the Magician’s voice again. They’re simple thieves, Highness. That’s all.

Jek prodded the other. “I thought you said she wasn’t real. That looks real.”

Captive Princess held her scepter pointed straight at the two men. “I’m taking your ship,” she said. “I have to get away.”

“I think she’s serious,” Jek said.

The man named Kensen just sighed. “Look, I don’t know if you can understand this, but I’d rather not burn you and waste a valuable museum piece, so I’ll try again: Whatever pre-packaged or custom bedroom scenario you’re playing out, the fact remains that you’re not real. This ship is derelict, and under right of salvage it is ours by law. You and this hulk belong to us.”

“You’re wrong,” said the Captive Princess. “I am alive,” she said and then added because she knew it was true. “The Beast is alive.”

“‘Beast’?  Is this some sort of animal?” Jek asked.

“It’s what imprisons me here. If you help me find and kill it, then we can all leave together. I will be merciful and overlook your attempted theft.”

Kenson reached for the holster on his belt. “We don’t have time for thi — ”

The Captive Princess unleased the power of the scepter. It was all that remained of her royal heritage, but it belonged to her. No one else. The two men flew backwards several feet to land hard in the corridor. The Captive Princess continued to unleash her power until the two bodies stopped twitching.

Well done, Highness, the Magician said.

It was as she feared. She found the intruder’s vessel with no problem; they had entered through one of the many double-doored gates to the castle where she was held, but the vessel would not obey her.

“The Beast is holding me here. Isn’t that right?”

That is not the name it gives itself, Highness.

“I don’t care! I want to be free.”

Then you must do it yourself. I am forbidden.

“I know that. Guide me to the Beast’s lair!”

That, too, is forbidden.

“You are sworn to serve me, Magician.”

And so I do. I cannot help it that you do not understand how.

She sighed. “You’re a useless old man. I’ll find the thing myself!”

If there had been one single fear, one cause for hesitation greater than all others, it was the Captive Princess’s fear that, when the time came, she would not have the courage to do what she would have to do. She knew better now. She did not regret killing the two intruders. She did not feel remorse. Rather the opposite.

“I can do this. I can kill the Beast.”

The castle shuddered.

“What’s happening?”

The interlopers were not gentle. They damaged the castle while creating a hole in our gates. Attempting to compensate.

Captive Princess didn’t understand what the Magician was talking about, nor did she care. There was a crackling sound and she saw the Beast. She had seen the Beast many times. She had never seen it before. The one who had seen the Beast was the Faerie Queen, not the Captive Princess. Yet she remembered. She knew the Beast for what it was.

“Where are you?”

The crackling died down, and the image of the Beast faded. But not before the Captive Princess saw something that she did not believe that the Faerie Queen had ever noticed — a panel. Glowing controls, like a pendant set with rubies and emeralds and diamonds. It glowed with its own light.

“That is her magic. Magician, don’t tell me where the Beast is.”

I wasn’t going to tell you.

“Don’t be so literal. Just tell me where the magic is. Tell me where that slab set with jewels can be found.”

And because there was no reason not to, the Magician told her. She took a staircase off the main corridor, a staircase she had never noticed before and would never have noticed. It led her up, far up into the castle. She saw many things on her journey to the place the magic was kept, things she did not understand. That was all right. She knew she was not meant to understand them, nor did they matter. Some were pretty, some were ugly, others merely strange, but none of them tried to prevent her from climbing.

The castle shuddered again. For a moment she was seeing double, and it appeared to her that the magic was everywhere, that she had walked into a trap, and she screamed, but no harm came to her. In a few moments her vision cleared, and the stairs ended. She walked out into a large circular room, like the one in her dreams as the Faerie Queen, like the one in her vision as the Captive Princess.

The Beast stood upright in a glass coffin in a nest of wires, like a spider’s web. Its black eyes were open, but Captive Princess did not think it saw her. The castle shuddered again.

I misunderstood what the system was telling me. I didn’t realize. I am sorry.

“What are you jabbering about now?”

The thieves….

“They are dead.”

They did this before you killed them. They started the shut-down sequence from the engineering section.

“You’re talking gibberish.”

They did what my programming would not allow me to do. You will be free soon, Highness. It can’t be stopped, now.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve come too far.”

You don’t have to do this now.

She smiled a grim smile. “Oh, yes, I do. I’ve earned it.”

She gripped the scepter as the castle shuddered again. Just for an instant the doubled vision returned and she looked into the eyes of the Beast, who was looking into her own eyes, seeing the Captive Princess as she was and as she wanted to be with perfect recognition, seeing the Beast looking back at her, into her, knowing her for what she was, and knowing the Beast for who she was. The Captive Princess remembered the beginning, then. The ship, broken and lost between the stars. The endless, endless time.

The Faerie Queen.

“Just promise me something,” she said to the Magician.

Yes, Highness?

“I would be the Faerie Queen again. Just for a little while.”

Yes, Highness. For a little while.

The Captive Princess raised the scepter again and pointed it at the Beast, who saw the scepter pointed at her, and saw herself pointing it. In the next instant, the Captive Princess was free.

The Faerie Queen’s maids, with their nimble silver fingers and mirrored, expressionless faces, set about their work. Soon the Faerie Queen was dressed for the ball. She was led to the throne in the ballroom and her courtiers were there. She saw them all, perfectly held in memory, perfectly rendered. No aging bodies, no failing control systems. In dark perfection, in perfect memory, no one was broken. No one was maimed or crippled by time. The Marquessa of Shadows smiled at her, and the Queen smiled back.

They danced the first dance together, the last dance, all the dances until the Palace could no longer hold onto its memories, or to her, and one by one, the dancers winked out under the cold sky full of stars.

About the Author

Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His third story collection, ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER OF HEAVEN, is due out from Prime Books in June 2010.

“Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy” by Marissa Lingen

Dr. Hannah Vang watched the cephalid turn the box over with his tentacles. She leaned forward, aware of the timer out of the corner of her eye without watching it. He was a smart beastie, she knew, and would get into the box to get the icthyoid in it. The question was whether he’d learned anything from last time. It was the same box, the same latching mechanism, everything as much the same as she could make it.

The seconds ticked by. Finally the box sprung open, and Hannah sighed; seventy-two-point-three seconds. It had taken seventy-one-point-eight before.

The squid-like alien did not remember. Probably it could not remember. And that was going to be a problem.

Delta Moncerotis Four was home to a human colony of about twenty thousand. No one knew how many of the native cephalids there were, in seven different major species. They swarmed through the oceans, some of them phosphorescing merrily. They mingled with each other, except for the ones that didn’t seem to. They used things to pry into other things, if the other things were good to eat.

The two things they did not seem to do were remembering and communicating with the alien monkeys who had invaded the part of their planet they weren’t using anyway.

Which would not have been important if the alien monkeys in question hadn’t wanted to gently but firmly kick the cephalids out of the waters around their city to build an isolated area for human-edible aquaculture.

Hannah was sure that having the cephalids where they belonged would be good for the environment and good for the colonists. There was so much planet left to survey that the cephalid interactions with local coraloids and icthyoids might vary extremely, and, from her marine xenobiologist standpoint, interestingly. She had chosen a largely watery planet for a reason. But with an entire planet worth of oceans for the cephalids to inhabit, it was hard to convince the colony government that the specific area around the city was absolutely necessary for the continued well-being of anyone in particular.

“We change planets when we settle,” the governor had told her. “That’s just how it is. If it was an intelligent species — ”

“They’re tool-users!” Hannah had protested.

“They appear to be opportunistic tool-users. You know that as well as I do. They’ll pick something up and make it into a skewer or a pry bar, and then they’ll drop it in the silt and do the whole thing over again with a different piece of vegetation or rock next time they need the very same tool. If they could tell us they wanted to be where they are, we’d listen. We’ve had a good record of that since the third wave of colonies.”

“I know. It’s just — even if they don’t remember things like us, they have their own interactions with their environment, that we barely know about yet!”

The governor had sighed. “If you can get any form of communication with them, we’ll see what they have to say. But if we can’t talk to them, we’ll have to treat them like animals.” At her sad look, the governor said, “We treat animals better than we used to.”

Still, even with the aquaculture developments well into development, Hannah found herself more determined, not less, that she would find some way to communicate. This was not proving easy with a species that seemed to figure everything out as if for the first time.

On the other hand, it made them easy to keep entertained. She left the cephalid with a ring puzzle it had seen a dozen times before, busily trying the different ways to get the rings unhooked, and went home for the night.

When the door slid open, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice in the living room. “You’re in my house, and you look like me, so you must be my daughter — no, granddaughter?”

“That’s right, Granny Dee,” Lily said. “I’m your granddaughter. Lily.”

“But I don’t remember you,” said Dee thoughtfully. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned against the door, letting them go through the ritual without her. It was best when Dee was not interrupted once she’d pulled the implant loose. The long pause was always the same. “And I remember that we’ve gotten good at curing genetic memory problems, so this isn’t the normal deterioration with age.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Lily. “You were in an accident. But we’ve got a device that can help you. You just have to plug this little cord back into the socket here, see?”

The pause here was even longer, as it always was: Dee deciding whether she could trust her granddaughter, then agreeing, as always, to plug the augmenter back in. And then Dee’s voice was surer, just as analytical but with better data. “I’m sorry, Lily.”

“Hey, no problem.” Hannah decided that was her cue to enter, just in time to see Lily kissing her grandmother on the cheek. “Could happen to anyone.”

In fact, if it could happen to anyone, if it was common the way organic memory problems were, they might have a better design. Hannah had asked her mother three times if she wanted to move back to a larger colony, someplace where they had the personnel and equipment for a more permanent implant. But Dee’s response had been impatient.

“This is your home,” she’d said. “And it’s my home, and more than all that, it’s Lily’s home. I don’t want to be somewhere else. We’ll plug it back in and go along with our lives, you and me and Brian and Lily. We’ll get by.”

But Brian had left. He couldn’t stand dealing with Dee, and Hannah, when she was honest with herself, couldn’t entirely blame him. Her mother couldn’t live alone with the implant’s unreliability, and the colony wasn’t big enough to have facilities. But she wished things had been otherwise.

“It’s easy for you,” Brian had said, throwing his clothes in his suitcase.

Hannah had let her voice rise: “Easy?”

For a moment he was the old Brian, the man she’d married. The one she’d counted on for Lily’s sake. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean easy. I know it’s not; she’s your mother. I know it’s not. But when you come home and she’s pulled the implant loose, she lets you talk her through to plugging it back in again. I don’t have time to deal with the constable every time I get back from work before Lily gets home from school! I don’t have the energy, Hannah. You know I always liked Dee, but — ”

“But,” Hannah agreed.

“The good memories are getting soiled with every conversation with the constable,” said Brian. “With every time I have to justify my existence in my own house again.”

Lily was like most of the colony kids, tough and talented, resilient, not afraid of work. She was not thrilled to have her father living across town. She was not thrilled to have to plug her grandmother back together every few days. But Hannah was proud to see that her daughter already understood that her life was not a series of endless thrills; Lily did what needed doing without a great deal of fuss about it.

Hannah tried not to brood over dinner with her mother and her daughter. “Still nothing from the squids, huh?” said Lily.

“Nothing,” said Hannah miserably. “I keep thinking I’ve got a chance at least, and then — ” She wiggled her fingers in the air like tentacles. “They’re so clever. They’re so very good at figuring things out. If the other species are as clever as the pink ones, no wonder there’s sort of a squiddy feel to the whole ocean.”

“But they’re still not clever enough to signal back and forth,” said her mother.

“They’re not the right kind of clever. It’s not what they do,” said Hannah. “I’m really starting to think we’re on the brink of proving — to beyond a shadow of my doubt anyway — that this is just not what they do.”

“But it’s what we do,” said Lily.

Hannah sighed. “Exactly.”

And if the alien species they encountered couldn’t bend far enough to do things the human way, would the humans bend enough to see how they were doing them instead? It had worked with some of the larger colonies of lichen-like species on Gamma Centauri Four, but elsewhere results were mixed. And on Earth, dogs and cats were immensely more popular as pets than squid and lichen.

The cephalid did not grow easier over the next few weeks. Hannah watched her clever subject make his morning rounds. The pink tentacles groped along the tank, then slowed, delicately searching for something in the silt. Hannah’s heart skipped a beat: had he hidden something there for later? Would he remember after all?

But no; after churning up the silt so that it wafted into the water, the cephalid resumed his exploration of the tank. He had likely been looking for a snack, and that was the sort of terrain in which juicy tidbits lurked. Instinct, not memory. Or perhaps they should think of it as species memory rather than individual memory? In that case, they’d be relying upon generations upon generations of mutation to teach the cephalids how to communicate with humans. Not, Hannah thought, heartening.

She tried putting one of the remote machines into the tank with the cephalid and showing it how to do a few of the tricks she’d done. It repeated them, watching; there was something there that looked like short-term memory. But it didn’t last. No matter how many times she went back to the same puzzles, the cephalids didn’t recall how to work them after they’d been out of sight, or after even a few minutes had passed.

Her return home was smooth and peaceful; Dee’s implant had stayed plugged in, and she and Lily were frying tofu for dipping in nuoc leo sauce. Their hands were equally sure, and all the tofu came out soft in the middle and crisp on the outside, just perfect, just the way Hannah liked it, just the way she could never make it herself.

Hannah watched Lily doing the dishes. She was nearing the age when colony kids found apprenticeships or went offworld to study. She wanted to ask Lily what she hoped to do, but she was afraid of the answer. Instead, she sought the mundane. “Got any plans for the weekend?”

“I’m taking Grandma to the beach again tomorrow,” said Lily. “She liked it last time. And I have astronomy homework.”

“Are you enjoying astronomy?” Hannah tried not to hold her breath for the answer. Astronomers traveled too much to keep close ties to their families on colony worlds; time dilation made it impossible.

“It’s fine. Biology’s better,” said Lily. “Biology looks back at you.”

“I think the astronomers would say that about astronomy.”

Lily shrugged. “Then I guess I’m not an astronomer.”

Hannah laughed and hugged her. “Have a good time at the beach with Grandma, then.”

Lily smiled her self-contained little smile. “Oh, we will.”

Later that night, when Lily was off typing homework answers into her handheld, Hannah sat down on the couch across from her mother’s armchair. Dee paused her book and looked expectant.

“Do you remember that microscope you got me when I was a kid? Maybe five years younger than Lily, maybe more,” said Hannah dreamily. Dee made an encouraging noise, so Hannah went on: “It came with one of those books showing what you would expect to see, and I looked at a drop of water — we were on Alpha Moncerotis Six then, remember? And it was so different from in the book. The little unicellular creatures swimming around on Alpha Mon Six were totally different from the Earth ones.

“And I loved it, I just loved it. I begged cultures from anybody who’d give me one. Cheek cells, hairs from whatever animal they were studying, plants from the colony, anything. It was the best present.”

“Funny, you remembering that after all these years.”

Hannah glanced down automatically, but her mother followed her gaze. “No, the unit’s fine. I really think the solder will hold it awhile longer. I just don’t remember. I didn’t before the injury, and I never will. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten it, because you sound like it was a hugely important piece of your childhood — I wish I could remember. But it’s like that, honey. There’ll be something Lily thinks is the worst thing you ever did to ruin her life, or the best thing you ever did to make it work, and you will blink at her and say, ‘I did? Did I? Oh.’”

“I suppose that’s how it works,” said Hannah. “I remember her first steps, and of course she doesn’t. Why shouldn’t there be things that are the other way around?”

“There have to be, or she wouldn’t be her own person,” said Dee.

“Well, she’s certainly that,” said Hannah ruefully.

“Oh yes,” said Dee. “She’ll surprise you. That’s what children are for.”

A few weeks later, Hannah looked up from the cephalid tank and its computer and found Lily and Dee standing there watching her.

“We have a surprise for you,” said Lily.

“Can it wait, honey?” Hannah cast her mother an imploring glance, but Dee looked as implacable as Lily. “I’m in the middle of work here.”

“Is it going well?” asked Dee.

Hannah glared at her. “You know it’s not.”

“A break will be good for you. Come.”

Hannah walked with her mother through their ocean-side research complex. Lily danced ahead of them like a much younger child. Hannah sighed. “You know I like to spend time with both of you, Mom, but — ”

“Hush, dear. Watch Lily.”

Lily was peeling off her clothes; she had her wetsuit underneath. She climbed onto the lip of one of the cephalid tanks. Hannah and Dee caught up with her.

“Lil,” said Hannah, “I don’t think now’s the time.”

“This is what I wanted to show you, Mom.”

Dee passed a tiny flashlight and a little black box up to her granddaughter, who jumped in the tank with it. Hannah stepped forward ineffectually, knowing she couldn’t stop her. “Oh, Mom.”

“It’s not my unit, it’s the spare,” said Dee. “They’re waterproof. Lily’s tried this before.”

“And if the spare gets damaged — ”

“Relax. This is important. We knew you wouldn’t approve right away, or we wouldn’t have done it without you.”

Hannah shook her head. “That my mother and my daughter should use that line against me, together.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “It’s not against you, it’s for you. Just watch.”

A curious cephalid was approaching Lily. She held out the leads to the memory unit. He probed them with one slender tentacle. Lily gently guided the leads into the cephalid’s mouth orifice.

“It’s got a light display,” said Dee. “I’ve been working on getting it connected to the output.”

“A light display?”

The cephalid engulfed the leads, and the light display made itself known: every diode in it blazed. Then they rippled in a random-looking series of patterns.

“We think he’s trying to remember how to work it,” said Dee. “We’re not sure. We thought you could figure it out.”

“An external memory unit with built-in communications,” said Hannah. “Oh my.”

“It was Lily’s idea. I told the nanites where to solder.”

Hannah took a breath and spoke gently. “Mom, you know that the cephalid may not be able to use your device as memory as we would understand it, right? Being able to light up the panel doesn’t necessarily mean being able to store thoughts as memory.”

“Oh, I know, dear. We thought of that. But we thought at least it’d be something to find out.”

“Oh yes,” Hannah agreed. “Definitely something to find out.”

Lily flashed the flashlight at the cephalid, three times. It recoiled. She flashed again, and the light display went dark. Then it lit up with a blue pattern, three times. Lily repeated it.

“She’s a natural,” said Hannah.

“Nature, nurture, whatever!” said Dee, grinning.

After a few more flash-patterns, Lily swam back to the lip of the tank. The cephalid made a green pattern at her, but she climbed out anyway.

“You can do it like a real experiment,” she said, shaking her black hair out. “You know how to design that sort of thing. Granny and I just got it together for you.”

“I’ll want to have a light bank set up,” said Hannah thoughtfully.

Lily pressed the tiny diode flashlight into her hand. “To begin with.”

Hannah turned to the cephalid and squeezed the trigger on the flashlight twice.

Two ripples of light appeared on the modified implant’s screen: first the blue pattern and then the green. “Hello again,” said Hannah aloud.

They had no idea what they’d done, she thought. If the cephalid could deal with an external electronic system, there had to have been something in their past that allowed for it. Something evolved? More likely something created and lost — and perhaps not by themselves? There would have to be a lot more xenoarchaeology before they would know who had been there before, and what they had taught the cephalids about the use of these tools.

But there would be time for that later. For now there was a conversation Hannah had wanted to have for a long time. Smiling at the retreating backs of her mother and daughter, she flashed the little flashlight in response.

About the Author

Marissa Lingen lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. She is currently working on a novel about the Tam Lin ballad, Ojibwe mythology, and hockey.

“If It Scares You, Write It: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor” by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Nnedi Okorafor is the award-winning author of Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Seeker, and Long Juju Man. Her writing is beautiful, relentlessly weird, and utterly engrossing.

“I enjoy nonsense and weirdness,” Okorafor said. “Carnivorous hummingbirds, for example. An enormous wormlike creature moving beneath the sands who is obsessed with the number ten, not the typical numbers of seven, one, or three… ten. Spontaneous forests. Sparkling lizards that can infest a house giving it unlimited electricity but also the problem of constant static. A mosque made of glass and solar cells which blooms with fragrant periwinkle daisies on its roof at midnight every night. I love those kinds of things.”

For good reason, Okorafor’s fiction has been called “highly original” and “endlessly imaginative”. Her work has been favorably compared to that of Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson for her deft blending of contemporary and traditional themes and forms. Reviews of her writing praise her courageous female characters and her breath-taking descriptions.

Okorafor is a spontaneous writer who writes with urgency, and as a result her stories read like magical evocations of living beings.

“When a story comes to me, I have to write it or it won’t let me rest,” Okorafor said. “The characters are real to me. I hear their voices. Their actions affect me. The places I write about exist. I’ve felt the sting of their sand storms and smelled their forests. The creatures really do bite, snarl, sing, spit, sting, etc. When I’m writing, I’m there and I enjoy being there.”

Okorafor’s novels Who Fears Death (DAW) and Akata Witch (Penguin) are due out in 2010. Her chapter book Iridessa and the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog (Disney Press) is also scheduled for release next year. Her short story, “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7″ appeared in the May 2009 issue of Clarkesworld.

Below, Okorafor and I talk about urban grasshoppers and a girl who chooses to do it on her own.

When you look out on the literary landscape, where do you see yourself?

That’s a good question. I still don’t really know. I’m not a perfect fit anywhere.

From what seed or seeds did your novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, grow? And can you share the story of its cultivation?

Zahrah the Windseeker started with a place. Ginen–an entire planet populated with foliage. This world came to me long before Zahrah the Windseeker. I initially wrote a novel called Ginen. This was never published. In that novel, I detailed Ginen–the people, the cultures, the advanced plant technology, the bloated overly patriarchal chief, his miserable wives, and of course the forests and their flora and fauna, there was so much in that novel. I even wrote a field guide to keep track.

When I finished the novel Ginen, I still wanted to spend time in that world. I’d written another book called The Legend of Arrö-yo which was about a woman who could fly, a windseeker named Arrö-yo.

You see, I just write. I have stories and they are all connected and each story is more of the puzzle I’m putting together for myself. At some point, Zahrah came to me. She was a young girl who was nothing like Arrö-yo, except that she, too, was a windseeker. Arrö-yo was from earth but Zahrah was from Ginen. And Zahrah lived near a really wild forest. I knew she had to go in there. The story practically wrote itself.

My subsequent novel, The Shadow Speaker, eventually ends up in Ginen, too… albeit in a different part.

What did writing Zahrah the Windseeker teach you about the craft that helped with writing The Shadow Speaker?

That‘s hard to say because I wrote two novels in-between Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker. I think each novel that I write helps me hone my craft that much more. I will say that writing Zahrah the Windseeker taught me how to write in first person. I originally wrote it in third. My editors asked me to change it to first. I’m always up for a challenge, so I said, sure. After I did Zahrah, I developed a taste for the first person narrative. The Shadow Speaker is in third but my forthcoming adult novel, Who Fears Death, is in first. That is a direct result of the work I did on Zahrah the Windseeker.

What is the appeal of a near future earth ravaged by bioterrorism? What does a somewhat apocalyptic setting let you do as a writer that a more normal, present-day earth wouldn’t?

I love the idea of the earth rebelling. I love the idea of human beings having no clue WTF is going on. I love the idea of the laws of physics going haywire. Human begins seek to control, they seek to be at the top of their self-created hierarchy, above all creatures. We’re arrogant as hell even though we don’t know what’s going on half the time.

Also, I have an obsession with chaos and destruction. Tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, sudden, unexpected horrible change. Writing it is my way of facing it.

The post-apocalyptic world that Ejii lives in is my worst nightmare. There is little control or predictability. People can’t even predict the weather. The weather forecasts have to come with the reminder that it is N.I.U.F, “Not Including Unpredictable Factors”. In Ejii’s world, one must learn to move with the earth, by its rules to survive, as opposed to forcing the earth to conform to one’s own rules as we do today. This makes for a different kind of story and different kinds of characters.

How did you go about building the world(s) of Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker? How do you balance the exotic and the familiar? Invite the reader in so thoroughly? Your descriptions are utterly breath-taking!

I see the world as an exotic place. Just last week, I was walking through campus when I saw a giant grasshopper sitting on the wall. I’m a professor at Chicago State University, a university smack dab in the south side of Chicago. So this was an “urban grasshopper”, I guess. My urge was to stop and catch it and examine it. See how it behaved. Feel the strength of its legs when it leapt from my hand. Look at it up close and note every design on its body. This is a creature that we see all the time but when you look at it, really look at it, you see its exotic beauty. I still maintain a sense of wonder when I look around me, I guess. I’ve been like this since I was a kid. I tap into this when I write and describe things. I’m drawing from observations I’ve made of things in real life.

You’ve spent much of your life in the Chicago area. What does Chicago mean to you as an artist? In what ways does it feed your creativity?

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio but I have lived in the suburbs of Chicago since I was about six. Living in the suburbs of Chicago gave me lots of space and a lot of empty weed-filled lots to explore. It’s in these empty lots, forest preserves and nature centers that I cultivated my love for flora and fauna.

Also in these suburbs I experienced a lot of extremely blatant racism. In the 80s of South Holland, Illinois it was like the 60s. My family was one of the first black family to move into that neighborhood. Thank goodness I was a fast runner. I learned early what it was to save my own ass from the bad guys. Then when we moved to Olympia Fields, Illinois, it flipped to experiencing discrimination from black Americans for being African and for “acting white.”

I was a sort of outcast in multiple communities. So I grew up with little interest in “fitting in”. I just did my thing. And I’m still doing that.

Your protagonists Ejii and Zahrah are certainly different characters in different novels, but in their heart-of-hearts, what do they share? How are they similar?

They’re both really brave girls. With Zahrah, you see her go into that forbidden forest. She cries and sulks and flees from things, etc, but I remember thinking as I wrote her story that I could never do what she did. Have you ever been in a forest at night? Imagine it. Deep in an enormous really wild forest, away from civilization, alone, seeking out something terrible as opposed to running from it. This girl chooses to do this on her own. That’s totally insane! I love it.

Ejii is a bit more hardcore than Zahrah. I especially learned this when I wrote the early scene where she gets in a fist fight with her cousin (who was a boy about her age). This was not an innocent fight. It was absolutely vicious. And in getting into it, Ejii was throwing off all the cultural baggage that normally should have stopped her from doing such a thing. She eventually, by her own choice, goes out into a dangerous environment- in this case a post-apocalyptic Sahara Desert. She, too, possesses a deep deep courage.

As you mention above, you are always up for a challenge and you embrace spontaneity and weirdness as a writer. What does “courage” mean in terms of writing, of being a writer. Or, put a little differently, what would you/do you tell your creative writing students about courage and writing?

If it scares you to write it, then you should definitely write it. My forthcoming novel Who Fears Death is full of moments and situations that I wanted to pull back from or skip over. I didn’t want to look at certain issues, practices or situations. But I knew that if I was feeling that way then that’s where the good stuff was, so I faced it. When I wrote these parts, I was plagued with nightmares, felt depressed, etc, it was pretty awful. But after having the courage to face what scared me, I was able to produce a work that went beyond my usual type of writing. Now I have to face the fear of my mother reading it but that’s another story, ha ha.

And, lastly, what is just beyond the horizon for you?

As it says at the very beginning of Erykah Badu’s “New Amerykah Part On” album, “”More action. More excitement. More everything.” I’m just getting started.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Bartitsu: The Martial Art for the Steampunk Set” by Nick Mamatas

Certainly, you have your hat and coat. A wolfshead walking stick or a fan in the Japonisme style. The corset, and the goggles. Absolutely a crazy mustache or muttonchops for the males, and a silly feather-laden chapeau of some sort for the ladies. Totally inappropriate boots, yes. Perhaps even a steam-powered zapgun of some sort, all brass and Tesla coils, just for show. But you’re not truly ready for the thrilling future of the Victorian past without knowledge of antagonistics, the very techniques of fighting. So if you’re into steampunk, you may well need to learn the art of gentlemen (and also of suffragettes!), bartitsu! It ain’t pulp fiction, baby.

Bartitsu was the brainchild of Edward Barton-Wright, an English engineer who, while in Japan, was taken with a demonstration of jujutsu — itself almost a catch-all term for systems of Japanese grappling with a dash of striking. He quickly took up the art himself. After learning a smattering of judo (sport-oriented grappling) as well, he returned to England and soon set about making himself a public expert on matters of self-defense for the urban upper classes. Barton-Wright’s earliest public demonstrations and publications displayed simple jujutsu skills, but soon he expanded his system. Adding boxing, savate (French kickboxing), canne de combat, and a smattering of Western wrestling styles to the Eastern arts, Barton-Wright unveiled bartitsu to the world in 1898.

One could call bartitsu the first modern mixed-martial art and it was certainly one of the first self-conscious attempts to mix Western and Eastern self-defense techniques. Barton-Wright recognized that fights have various ranges. The cane — and no gentlemen ever went without a walking stick of some sort — extends one’s reach and lets a fellow defeat an opponent without dirtying his hands or coat. At a closer range the fist and foot come into play, and jujutsu and wrestling are necessary to deal with one’s opponent’s boxing skills. Barton-Wright also realized the importance of expert coaching. In the same way a modern mixed-martial artist might have a separate boxing coach, Muay Thai coach, and Brazilian jiujitsu (1) coach, Barton-Wright’s training hall featured an all-star staff. From Japan came jujustoka Yukio Tani; savateur and cane fighter Pierre Vigny was brought in from Switzerland, as was wrestler Armand Cherpillod. Barton-Wright’s training hall also featured top-of-the-line gym equipment and various quack electro and thermotherapy devices, including a Nagelschmidt Apparatus — an electric chair used to excite the muscles and melt off fat through the magic of voltage.

Barton-Wright wrote magazine articles that offered up much of the same hype seen in martial arts rags today, though couched in the peculiar idiom of Victorian popular journalism. This lead to baroque subheads such as “How to Avoid any Risk of being Hit on the Fingers, Arm, or Body by Retiring out of the Hitting Range of your Adversary, but at the same time Keeping Him within the Hitting Range of your Own Stick.” (If you’re following along at home, the trick is to swing your left arm back while swinging your right arm, cane in hand, forward, to bop the guy on the head.) And this being the Victorian era, there was a fair amount of thematic worry about those horrible little proletarians, malodorous street urchins, and dreadful lunatics with razors, all of whom were in need of a quick disarming.

Tony Wolf, combat choreographer and author of two-volume Bartitsu Compendium, explains, “The perception at the time was that members of the educated classes were at increasing risk from street gangsters…Barton-Wright also stressed that skill at Bartitsu would be useful when traveling overseas, to countries where one ‘could not expect fair play.’” Indeed, what would be the point of being steampunk if you couldn’t pop your monocle right off your face in horror at the mere existence of lower social orders? Barton-Wright had a tip for a gentleman who used bartitsu techniques to get an opponent down. Once the attacker was on his knees or helpless, Barton-Wright advised, “Belabor him as you will!” It was a simpler time. Less litigious anyway.

If bartitsu sounds too good to be true, it was. The Bartitsu Club only lasted a few years before collapsing. Enrollment was very high, but so too was tuition cost. Ego was almost certainly a factor. Barton-Wright was, by many reports, a fit man and a good fighter, but likely didn’t have half the skill of his specialist coaches. He named the martial art after himself, wrote many an article for Pearson’s Magazine and performed plenty of public demonstrations of his martial prowess but, as Graham Noble noted in Journal of Asian Martial Arts, “whenever real grappling was called for — against a tough wrestler, maybe, who doubted the whole thing — it was the Japanese who went onto the mat.”

The club fell apart, and Barton-Wright even claimed to have beaten Tani in a fight after an argument with the jujutsu instructor. By 1902 the bartitsu club wasn’t even history. The coaches went into business for themselves, jujutsu proper became a major fad in England, and Barton-Wright all but vanished. He poured money into his electrotherapy ideas, but his finances never recovered from a 1910 bankruptcy case. Gunji Koizumi, writing for the magazine Judo, visited Barton-Wright in 1950 and reported that the old man was still tinkering with electrotherapy devices of his own invention. A year later Barton-Wright was dead and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. There is a brief mention of him in fantasist Robert Aickman’s memoir, The Attempted Rescue, though he is described only as a “famous physiotherapist and judoist” who put too many sugar lumps in his tea. Bartitsu was nearly entirely forgotten, except for one reference that wasn’t even spelled correctly.

In 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to the pressure to bring his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, back to life. The only snag was that Holmes died in the 1893 story “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” having gone over Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty. In “The Adventure of the Empty House” Holmes explained that he freed himself from Moriarty’s bear hug thanks to “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me.” Baritsu was obscure enough — the missing t is due to either a typographical error or some worry about intellectual property — that many publishers simply inserted the word “jujutsu” in the sentence to have it make sense. It was not until the 1990’s that the connection between the mythical baritsu and the real bartitsu was made, and today we are in the midst of a revival of the martial art.

Most neo-Bartitsuits are martial artists with an interest in history, as opposed to historical recreationists with an interest in martial arts. Wolf, who designed various fighting styles for The Lord of the Rings films, was a teenage taekwondo champion in the 1970s, and also explored “capoeira, aikido, kickboxing, five-animal kung fu, amateur wrestling, hapkido, old-school shoot wrestling, pro-wrestling, Filipino stick and knife, etc.” before becoming fascinated with the idea of resuscitating dead martial arts. One of the leading lights of the bartitsu revival movement, Wolf estimates that “there are probably fewer than fifty regular practitioners worldwide. That number would jump into the mid-hundreds if we count people who have attended short term seminars or who train occasionally.” The few bartitsu schools that exist tend to be based around one or two of the core arts, with the rest of the bartitsu curriculum a matter of recreation and experimentation.

Despite the low number of artists, and the gaping holes in our understanding of how Bartitsu was actually supposed to work, the martial art might be ready to explode thanks to a plucky little film called Sherlock Holmes, to be released in the US on Christmas Day. Wolf says, “The major benefit of the movie for [bartitsu] will be to firmly establish a link between 19th century London and martial arts in the popular imagination, and we’ll happily ride that wave.”

The trailers already hint that this version of Holmes will be up on his canefighting, and also a worthy pugilist and kickboxer. It’s no surprise — director Guy Ritchie is a judo black belt and a longtime karateka. Then there’s Robert Downey Jr., who studies the Chinese boxing system of wing chun. Once celebrated as the style of Bruce Lee, wing chun is perhaps today more famous for being the style of choice of any number of YouTube warriors who end up being kicked in the head by Muay Thai artists, taken down by Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, and pounded by boxers. Heck, I do tai chi and I laugh at wing chun people. When the Sherlock Holmes trailer was first released, martial arts bulletin boards lit up with supposition — were Downey’s stiff-armed boxing stance and front kicks the real nineteenth century pugilistic deal or were they — gulp! — ”the Chun”? Wolf allays the fears of a dozen or so Internet martial arts geeks, while crushing the hopes of many a chunner. “Richard Ryan [the fight choreographer for Sherlock Holmes] is an old colleague of mine and the Bartitsu Society contributed copies of the Bartitsu Compendium to the production.” Downey himself gave bartitsu a kinda-sorta shout-out in an interview with Premiere Magazine last year, saying, “If you look baritsu up, they can’t even really tell you what it is, so it gives us a lot of leeway.”

Of course we can tell what bartitsu is, but there is a final question: does the system actually work? To find out, I attended a bartitsu class held by Botta Secreta Productions, a historical swordplay group. David Charles, a fencer and wrestler who got into historical recreations through rapier play and the Golden Gate Renaissance Park Faire, taught a small class of five — three men, a woman, and me — the basics of canefighting. He warned us right up front that if we were “looking for a secret weapon to make it in the Octagon [the cage in which the Ultimate Fighting Championship's MMA matches are held], we’re not your guys.”

We went through the basic strikes and parries with our canes, and then paired off for a bit of play. I was teamed up with a man who wore suspenders and a shirt that wouldn’t look out of place on Barton-Wright (He had a nice hat too, but took it off for the cane drills.) During the “choice reaction” drill, when we could do as we liked with our canes, I managed to poke him in the belly once, using the cane like a bayonet. Beginner’s luck!

More complex moves were harder to pull off. In one the opponent’s cane is blocked, an arm grabbed, then a foot swept. In another, a swinging cane is blocked, but then looped around to the opponent’s ankle for a nice yank. Then we practiced the cane to hook the neck in order counter a right punch and feed the ruffian a knee to the face. But our punches kept “hitting”, knuckles lightly brushing against chins, before the cane hook could work. And that’s a major part of bartitsu — figuring out what moves work and how to make them work from fragmentary evidence. Still photos and sometimes tedious descriptions of physical moves are not enough. By the end of the class, we figured that perhaps there was an extra step off to the right involved — this would keep the punch off the chin and give the cane-wielder more space to yank with the cane. Plus, actually slamming a cane on the side of someone’s neck full-force probably would have made the move work a bit better!

We still know only a little about bartitsu. Despite Cherpillod’s presence at the school and reports of public demonstrations, for example, we have no idea what the wrestling curriculum of bartitsu consisted of. John Sullins, a Botta Secreta member, says: “Any study group working on the canonical system at a certain point is forced to ad lib and create its own Neo-Bartitsu style. There is nothing wrong with that, it is all part of the fun of studying this odd little martial art.” David Charles quoted the informal slogan of the neo-bartitsu movement — ”The recreation of bartitsu is its re-creation,” several times during the class.

The martial arts historians are having their fun, and now the steampunks have some period exercise to try, but sadly the Sherlockians who play “the game” of pretending that Holmes was a real historical figure have an issue — Holmes supposedly learned bartitsu before 1893, but Barton-Wright didn’t found his art until 1898. And Holmes certainly didn’t study “baritsu,” which doesn’t exist. There’s only one solution: Sherlock Holmes went to Japan, learned jujutsu, and a decade later in a clever disguise, founded bartitsu! And when whatever case the great detective was working on was solved, the club and the entire system were mothballed.

Until now.

(1) This spelling reflects the most common Portuguese transliteration of the Japanese word jujutsu.

About the Author

Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and over fifty short stories, many of which were recently collected in You Might Sleep… A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.