“Torquing Vacuum” by Jay Lake

Spanich had been up three shifts straight working on a drive alignment issue aboard ICV Mare Imbrium {13 pairs}. She was a charter — a rare thing, in a starship, which signified pockets deeper than planetary budgets — and the passengers reportedly wanted to lift out, but her pilot wasn’t lighting up without the alignment problem being solved. Spanich could get behind this. Faced with the choice of a well-monied tongue lashing or being smeared in rainbow quarks across a few dozen lightyears, he’d take the dressing down every time.

Besides, he was the only drive tech on Estacada Orbital certified to work the finicky and bizarre paired drives that post-Mistake starships relied upon. Supraluminal travel was so sporadic that if the system got half a dozen outside visitors a year, it was considered busy. And most of them flew with their own maintenance crews as a matter of course. Mare Imbrium {13 pairs} was practically a yacht, the smallest starship he’d ever seen or heard of.

The shipmind kept whispering specs and test results to him in a voice that made the hairs on his arms prickle and stiffen. Fair enough. A man shouldn’t get too comfortable with the machines that kept him alive. Mistrust was healthy.

Thank the saints he wasn’t signed onto this bucket for this run. Their quantum bloc cross-processors weren’t piping temporal data flow correctly. No one had liked his suggestion to pull the whole rig and reconfigure on a bench back at the station. A week’s work, at a minimum. But Spanich wouldn’t trust his life to the jigger he’d been ordered to attempt in the name of expediency.

He sighed and focused on the circuit joins. Nose-to-panel, flat on his back, falling asleep with the smartprobe in his hand, Spanich knew he was still better off working here than back in the engineering pool rotation.

“Domitian,” said the shipmind. “I think it’s time for you to stand down.”

“What!?” Spanich snapped.

“You’ve just probed the same shunt five times.”

He sighed, unclipped his instruments, and wriggled back into the engineering bay. That was only moderately less claustrophobic than the service accessway he’d just spent twenty hours in, minus breaks for pee and chow. “Home,” Spanich said to no one in particular, then began packing up.

Ribo thumped from the big speakers embedded in the floor of the Bar Gin. When the bass riffs hit, peanut shells danced across the table like cootch girls on payday. Most places used ambient nano to whisper music, but Bar Gin was so old school they probably hadn’t even invented reading, writing or differential equations back when the place had been founded.

Spanich huddled in a booth and wondered why he hadn’t gone home to sleep. ‘Home’ being a two-point-two meter-long tube, a meter in diameter. He paid extra for rack space for his hardsuit, and extra extra to make sure parts didn’t vanish from it during off shifts. Still, sleep would have made more sense for him than crouching here over some of Bitter Jane’s homebrew algae beer listening to music which had been crap when he was a kid, and not improved since.

Then Austen wandered into the joint, and Spanich’s world grew a little brighter. That boy just moved right. Cute enough kid, and buff in a way that kept the eye resting easy, and he smelled like heaven on a Friday night, but the way Austen walked sometimes kept Spanich up late, sweating.

He raised his hand, waved to Austen, but the kid’s gaze slid right over Spanich like he wasn’t there. Was it too dark back here in the booth? Maybe too much toke smoke in the air.

Who the hell was he kidding?

Austen No Last Name didn’t give a shit about Domitian Spanich. Sometimes the kid gave a shit about Domitian Spanich’s pay chitty, when the keycard was fat with local thalers, or more rarely, Imperial schillings. Except payday was seventeen shifts away right now, and Austen could scent ‘broke’ the way a sniffer could find a carbon dioxide breach in a scrubber tank.

Spanich sank deeper into his algae beer and wondered why the hell he couldn’t ever fall in love with anyone available. There was no lack of available talent. Half the guys torquing vacuum here on Estacada Orbital swung his way. For his own part, Spanich knew he was decent enough looking, and a good lover — it didn’t take raging egotism to sort out those kinds of truths, not once you’d left teen hormones behind. But somehow he always tumbled for the pretty boys, the working kids, who’d roll over and whisper sweet nothings while they let him play their bodies like harps, but always ran off with each other for the real laughs or the quiet times.

“Dommie,” said a voice for the second time.

Startled, he looked up from his beer, slopping some of it onto the tabletop. A warning blinked with pixel-rotted irritation from beneath the greenish puddles, but he ignored that.

Austen!

Spanich tried desperately to stay cool. “Hey.”

His sometime-lover sat down. “Mind if I join you?”

That crooked smile always melted Spanich. “Uh, yeah. Let, let me get you something.”

“I’m locked and stocked,” Austen said. Those violet eyes seemed to glitter in the bar’s lousy lighting. “Bitter Jane’s sending something over. Said she’d put it on your tab.”

“I don’t have a — ” Spanich managed to shut himself up before he looked any stupider. “Oh, right. Good. Happy to buy you one.” He tried to fight the goofy grin he could feel taking over his face. “Or more,” he blurted. Lots more.

Thank the pressure demons this place was so dark. Austen couldn’t see him blush, at least.

“Don’t mind if I don’t.” The kid’s crooked smile flashed into an answering grin that looked so free, so easy, that Spanich wondered why he even bothered to try.

He kept himself cautious. Don’t hope, don’t hope, don’t hope. “So, uh, what’s up?”

A drink arrived on a rollerbot, a cybernetic waiter converted from a level one security drone. For all Spanich had ever been able to tell, it might still be a kill platform. You couldn’t know, not with Bitter Jane in play.

Austen picked up the long, graceful ceramometallic stem, frost sparkling diamond bright as mist curled off its sides.

Great, thought Spanich. One of Jane’s thousand-thaler cryoliquid specials. Someone here was pushing their luck. Spanich had a sick fear that he was the chump. There was his next pay chitty gone, and a decent portion of his liquid savings. So to speak.

“Well…” The kid took a long, slow sip, batting his eyelashes.

Focus, focus.

“You’ve been working on the Mare Imbrium, right?”

Spanich winced. Austen even pronounced the old, old term wrong, as if he were speaking Classical English instead of Preclassical Spanish or Mayan or whatever language of lost Earth those words came from.

“Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs.” Spanich corrected the kid’s pronunciation and usage both. “And the shipminds are mighty picky about getting their numbers right.”

“Shipminds,” Austen said. “Yeah. Whatever.”

In that moment, Spanich suddenly wondered what it was he’d found so alluring about Austen. Sure, the kid was smoking hot, like fire in an oxygen plant, but had he never noticed how dumb Austen was. Maybe some dirtball farmer wouldn’t know the difference, but how could anyone survive in an orbital habitat and be so ignorant of the basic etiquette of ships and shipminds? The kind of ignorant that got people spaced out an airlock, or their breathing license erased from the station records.

“Look….” Spanich felt obscurely deflated and betrayed. “Don’t worry about Mare Imbrium thirteen. There’s a charter riding her this trip, and I hear the woman is deep-fried trouble on a fuckstick, if you catch my datastream. Let’s have a drink and, I don’t know, go dancing. Forget about starships, kid. They never mattered to you before, did they?”

Austen shrugged and smiled. The wattage seemed to have gone out of his expression, but maybe that was just Spanich. “I need something, Dommie. Something only you can help me with.”

“Only me, huh?” The words just slipped out of his triple-shift exhausted mouth. “And that’s why you’re sucking down a thousand-thaler drink on my tab? To get in good?”

The ceramometallic stem hit the table with a click that would have cracked ordinary plastic. “Dommie, please…”

Spanich stood up. “I’m tired, I need to sleep, I’m going home.”

Austen shot out of his chair, grabbing for Spanich’s rough, greasy hand with his own slim, manicured fingers. “At least let me come with you.”

Close, with that smell, though he knew them both for idiots, Spanich couldn’t say no to that. Even if he’d been awake enough to stop this disaster before it got any worse, with Austen standing so close his hormones were kicking ass and taking names.

Home they went, together.

The tube’s comm panel beeped him out of dreams into the reality of an itching belly — cum always dried that way on his skin — and a gently snoring Austen. Spanich nudged a crusty towel aside and punched the sleepshift override.

That didn’t stop the beeping.

He focused on the little display. Priority message, channel two. His blood chilled. Station ops.

“What the…?” He stabbed again, brought up voice-no-video mode. “Spanich.”

Austen groaned, tucked in tighter to his side. Spanich patted the kid, trying to soothe him enough not to make noise on this call.

The speaker crackled, shitty cheap tech like everything his type ever got, other than the tools of their trade. “Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

“Yeah. ’s what I said.” He blinked some sand from his eyes, and ignored hot memories of the most recent midshift here inside the comfortably tight confines of his sleeping tube.

“This is Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome, Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital operations.”

Whoa. Only flash brass used names that long. And most of the hypercrust didn’t bother to work for a living. “Alright. I’m impressed now.” Damn, he needed to be smarter.

Austen stirred. “Whu…?” Spanich jammed his fingers in the kid’s mouth. Reflexively, Austen began to suckle.

“Your presence is requested and required at berth eleven, docking boom gamma.”

Shit on an airfilter! That would be the current hookup of ICV Mare Imbrium {13 pairs}. “I’m not due back til thirteen hundred hours.”

“Requested and required, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. Would an escort facilitate your prompt presence?”

Shit! What was this about? “Ah, no. I’ll be there fast.”

“Adjutant-Intendant out.”

His comm panel died with a definitive pop that suggested further conversation would not only be pointless, but impossible. Spanich looked down at Austin, who was busy slurping the last of their midnight passion off his fingertips.

He was the chump, alright. Flash brass played for fatal stakes. Not their lives, of course, but the lives of people like him. And people like Austen.

“What the fuck did you want last night?” Spanich grabbed Austen’s hair, forced the kid’s head back until they were staring eye to eye. “What the fuck did you do?”

Austen didn’t have a hell of a lot to say at first. Spanich poured some bulb-coffee into him anyway, on principle, while slamming a couple for himself. He didn’t let go of the kid, either, dragging him into the shitter, then the scrubstall.

When the water hit them at 0.5 celsius, Austen sputtered into some fairly creative profanity. “You gruyere-scented douchenozzle, I’m going to kick your ass from the throat down, then yank your nuts — ”

Spanich slapped him. “Hush up, dearie,” he growled, dragging Austen’s face so close they might have been kissing again. Somehow, being naked and wet with the kid wasn’t doing much for him this morning. “You know how many times in my life flash brass has rung my bell?”

Austen found his voice. “Th-they put their jocks on one strap at a time like everybody else.”

“Maybe. And maybe they have platinum-plated jeweled nut sacks snapped on every morning by hermaphroditic dwarves. How the fuck would I know? Because never in my entire pressure-bleeding life have I had to take a call like that one.” He shook the kid hard, banging that pretty head against the scrubstall’s algaplastic lining. “And I’d bet my last gene scan you have something to do with it. You and your Mayor Eye-breye-um.”

“Mare Imbrium.” This time he pronounced the name right.

“That’s Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs, to you, my friend. Shipminds are damned proud, and have very long arms indeed when they’re riled up.” Even talking about it here in the scrubstall made him nervous.

Spanich dragged the shivering, naked Austen back to his tube, then forced the kid to dress by the simple expedient of bending his fingers back til he agreed. This one would run like a ball bearing if given the chance, and he figured on bringing Austen in as a kind of human shield for whatever it was the Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital had in mind for him.

All too soon for Spanich’s taste, they were off among the sweat-reeking passageways of the station’s guest-worker quarters. A person could get almost anywhere in this place without leaving oil footprints on the tourist walkways. Mostly he liked it that way, though if they’d dial the heat up even halfway to tourist standards, he’d have been a hell of a lot happier.

Austen had given up even muttering, and let himself be dragged along like a second toolbag. Whatever fate was coming, Spanich was pretty sure it wasn’t a surprise to the kid.

Just outside the lock array for docking boom gamma, Austen made his break. The kid stomped down hard on Spanich’s instep, or would have if Spanich hadn’t been wearing carbon-jacketed boots rated up to sixty gravities of pressure.

His second mistake was waiting until Orbital Security’s troopers had them in sight. Which was probably what panicked the kid, Spanich realized, as he knocked Austen down and went to one knee of top of the kid’s chest. “Don’t fuck around in front of the troopies,” he hissed.

The troopies were watching the scene with mild disinterest. Mild disinterest suited Spanich just fine. No hands on weapons, everybody stayed peaceful. He dragged an out-of-breath Austen back to both their feet, then manhandled the kid right up to the troopers.

Now their interest was neither mild nor dis. “You guys feeling brave?” asked the right-hand cop. Spanich vaguely recognized him from the Bar Gin, dude with space-black skin and eyes that shade of violent green that said that one of his ancestors had come from Falkesen sometime post-Mistake. Nobody from a human norm gene line had retinas that color.

The left hand cop, a fellow with nubbly skin and tight epicanthic folds, drew his stungun for emphasis. Bad cop, then.

“Got a call-in,” Spanich said to the good cop, keeping his chin down, his lips closed and his tone quiet. “Adjutant-Intendant wants us up on Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs.”

Austen squirmed at that, but Spanich knuckled his collar tighter. The kid seemed to get the message.

“You that Spinach guy?” green-eyes asked.

“Span-ick. It’s Span-ick.”

“Whatever.” The weapon was reholstered with the same bored air. Green-eyes gave Austen a long look, making no move to cycle the lock. “Who’s the cyclone ranger there?”

“My lovely and talented assistant,” Spanich informed his feet.

“Didn’t say nothing about no assistant.”

He looked up, caught the fellow’s green eyes. “Did anyone say I couldn’t?”

“Hey…” The cop spread his arms wide, letting go the responsibility. “You want to wave your dick around in front of flash brass, be my guest.” He glanced at his partner. “They tooled?”

Bad cop had the faraway gaze of someone reading a retinal implant. Finally he spoke, his voice like gravel in an airshaft. “Nothing out of profile.”

“Your lucky day,” said green eyes. “No cavity search. Hell, not even a pat down.” He leaned close. “We got orders to run light and easy for now.”

Spanich nodded vigorously. “Light and easy it is, sir.” Well, at least there hadn’t been a murder aboard the starship. Not of anyone important, at any rate. They’d be a lot more sealed up out here if so. He waited while bad cop punched in an access code — not one Spanich recognized — then waved them into the transition tube.

Waiting for the outer lock to cycle, he leaned very close to Austen. “What are you so afraid of?”

“You’re going to be sorry you asked,” the kid replied in a low whisper. His words sounded like a threat, but nothing in Austen’s voice, stance or stink of fear-sweat backed that up.

Not murder then, but something worse?

They found another troopie at berth eleven. This one didn’t bother to shake out their suits — he just cycled open the lock and let Spanich and Austen go in, not saying a word. Spanich did note that the tote board alongside the berth’s lock had been blacked out.  Which was both unsafe, and he was pretty sure, illegal. Not open-flame illegal, but still a safety violation waiting for a monitor to write a fine-and-dine.

The berth lock opened to the familiar accordion-walled transfer tube. Inside, Spanich’s breath damned near crystallized as he grabbed the lead lines. Air this stupid-cold meant someone had shut off the enviros, probably since he’d left Mare Imbrium thirteen’s deck a shift and a half ago. When there were no troopies guarding access, for one thing.

And they hadn’t had the stuff back up long.

“Dommie.” Austen’s voice was pleading as they approached Mare Imbrium thirteen’s hull lock.

No, Spanich realized, not pleading. Terrified. “Is this where you give it up?” He stopped them, floating in the tube’s microgravity. They had maybe a minute, tops, before whoever was expecting them onboard got unpleasant.

“We don’t have to d-do this.” The kid’s teeth were chattering.

“A little late now. You could have spoke up last night, instead of playing rolypoly with me for half a shift. Or anytime before now, even.”

“You h-have no idea.”

Close, so close that the kid’s smell began lighting up his backbrain once more, Spanich growled, “So give me a fucking idea, punk.”

“That w-woman on board. She’s not just some charter tourist.”

“Who is she, then?”

“My mom.” The abject terror in Austen’s voice was frightening.

The little bastard knew this ship all along then. He’d been faking, before. Faking everything, then? Spanich didn’t see much point in asking who the kid’s mother was. “Family reunion time.”

They kicked off together, heading the last few meters to the hull lock. Spanich was surprised how graceful Austen had suddenly become, for someone who had seemed to know so little about starships and life in space.

He was even more surprised when the lock cycled at the touch of Austen’s fingertip on the bioscanner. Though, really, Spanich was starting to realize, he shouldn’t have been.

Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome waited in the passageway beyond. There was no mistaking a flash brass — no one else dressed like them, or looked like them, or stood as if they owned the worlds of the Imperium Humana.

Which they as good as did, of course.

The Adjutant-Intendant stood about two meters, forty cents, but didn’t weigh above sixty kilos. It was all whipcord muscle, bred in through the better part of a thousand years of careful genetic planning, since the Mistake. Every schoolchild knew this, because every schoolchild was taught why the Familia Majora — flash brass — ruled over them all.

His skin was velvety black, similar to the guard outside. These were people who treated chromosomal radiation damage as a preventable disease on the par with influenza or head lice, after all. The Adjutant-Intendant’s eyes had the liquid silver look of someone whose optical nano bloom had been induced in utero, and carefully cultivated ever since.

If he’d had a few billion Imperial schillings, and some key Writs of Exemption, Spanich could have bought most of that package for himself. Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome wore it all like someone born to two dozen generations of that inheritance.

“Engineering Supervisor Spanich.” His voice had the tone of a man finding a slug under a salad leaf.

“Reporting, sir.”

“Were you ordered to bring an accompanist.”

“My assistant, Jim,” Spanich said, immediately regretting the stupid lie.

“Jim…?” The Adjutant-Intendant looked Austen over briefly. “Your wit is at least half misplaced, Engineering Supervisor.”

Spanich wondered if that had been the flash brass equivalent of a joke. “Your comm was urgent, sir. I figured this might take an extra pair of hands.”

“Hmm.” With a visible letting go — meant to be visible, Spanich was certain — the Adjutant-Intendant continued. “We are aboard because the Mare Imbrium shipmind has declared an emergency.”

“Thirteen pairs, you cocksucker,” muttered Austen. Spanich could have backjacked the little bastard for that — referring to shipminds that was a prerogative of the highest aristos among the flash brass, a rank thing — but he didn’t want to make this agonizing scene that much worse.

The look in the flash brass’ eyes could have frozen helium. “Indeed. Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs. I see why Engineering Supervisor Spanich values your services, Jim. As I was saying, the shipmind has declared an emergency, which it determined only you could resolve.”

“I was coming back in half a shift, anyway,” Spanich pointed out. “I’ve spent a lot of time in this engineering bay, these past few shift-cycles.”

The shipmind’s voice echoed through the corridor, a whisper like thunder — pervasive and overwhelming, but not loud. “This seems an opportune time to redirect.”

The hair on Spanich’s arms prickled. Far more astonishing, even Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome looked surprised. Austen just groaned.

“Please escort our new visitors to the wardroom, Markie,” the ambient voice continued.

Spanich nearly choked. No one called flash brass by a nickname, not like that. Not even other flash brass. From the look of him, much like a man swallowing a live eel, the Intendant-General was no less surprised.

“Of course,” he said, his voice in the perfect equilibrium that his facial expression had failed to retain.

Austen groaned again. Spanich was beginning to mightily regret bringing the kid, and was already thinking hard about ways to get out of this alive and free.

The wardroom hatch slid open. Where the passageway had been utilitarian — hookfabric carpet, grab bars, emergency stations every five meters; all the usual details of space travel — the wardroom was astonishing in its simple, almost terrible luxury.

A pond. A pond, on a starship. These people weren’t just wealthy, they were insane. The little pool of black water was walled around with rock, filled by a bamboo pipe serving as a fountain. The floor was pebbled like raked gravel, though Spanich’s engineering eye noted that was a texture, not half a ton of loose stone ready to break free in the event of a grav failure. The walls were of some woven reed matting, while the ceiling was draped with a rough, undyed fabric.

All highly illegal, according to any safety standards he’d ever been lectured about. Illegal, unsafe…

Next to the pond was a low black lacquer table aggressively simple in its lines. A woman knelt behind it, her robes a coarse, raw fabric that almost matched the ceiling. She had an air of extreme age about her — not like the Befores, those crazed, dangerous immortals everyone whispered about, that Spanich had even met one once — but more like an ordinary person who’d lived an extraordinarily long time with very good medical care.

And eyes like hull-cutting lasers. Eyes that happened to be the same pale violet as Austen’s.

“Hello,” she said.

Spanich knew where the Mare Imbrium thirteen shipmind had modeled its voice from. In those velvet tones, he could hear the armies march at a word, feel the bar emptying for a fight to the last man standing. He had to force himself not to kneel.

Austen did go down on one knee. So did Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome. The Adjutant-Intendant gave Spanich a glance which should have fried skin off his bones.

What the hells was he missing here?

“He can be forgiven because he does not know,” the woman said.

The voice again. And her scent, in this room as subtle as atomized lubricant moving through an air duct. She and Austen were of a —

He broke off the thought, staring at the kid in horror.

“Mother,” Austen finally said in a low voice so unlike his usual attitude that if the words had not come out of his mouth, Spanich wouldn’t have known.

“Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona,” she replied.

Somewhere in that welter of flash brass name, Spanich picked out the kid. He’d been fucking a runaway, and from the length of the name, one of the highest-placed runaways possible. How had the kid managed to seem so normal, instead of gene-modded to hell and gone like the Adjutant-Intendant?

Austen bowed so low his head almost touched the floor.

Clovis, thought Spanich. She’d said Clovis. He nearly shit himself. These people were Imperial family! There should have been a battalion outside the lock, not two bored station troopers.

No wonder the Adjutant-Intendant had been glaring him to death. Clumsy, shivering, clammy with sweat, Spanich dropped to one knee as well.

“Mare Imbrium tells me that you are working to set her drive to rights, Domitian Spanich.”

“Ma’am. I’m…” He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t qualified to work on a starship carrying members of the Imperial family.

The shipmind spoke. “There is nothing wrong with my drives, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. But I thank you for your work.”

“All a ruse, I am afraid.” Austen’s mother smiled at him. He was ready to lay himself at her feet if she’d just do it again. “Necessary to keep us in port without question while certain rumors were… traced.”

Spanich glanced over at Austen. The kid was pressed to the floor, his voice a whisper when he asked, “Why tell me now?”

“So you would understand what must happen to you next,” she replied, her voice now steel-hard. Austen took a sharp breath, then fell completely silent. The Adjutant-Intendant moved slightly, still on his right knee but shifting his weight in preparation for action.

In that moment, Spanich’s future became very narrow and very short. He stood, shaking off the spell of that voice, and reached slowly for his toolbag. Austen’s mother nodded slightly at the Adjutant-Intendant, who then spoke, his voice harsh. “What are you doing, Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

The words slipped out of him like bullets dropping from an open clip. “Preparing to die like a man.” Truly, he had no idea.

“Mother,” Austen said, his voice so low it was almost a squeak.

She gave Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome another significant look. Spanich took his cue and swung the toolbag hard, letting the strap pay out so fifteen kilos of metal and ballistic cloth took the bastard right in the temple. Two dozen generations of exquisite germline engineering dropped to the floor like a stunned drunk.

“Guess you’ll have to kill me yourself,” Spanich said, breathing hard. Austen was splayed flat on deck, hiccuping or laughing or crying or something. “Or is it Princess?”

“Is this how a man dies?” she asked, deceptively conversational.

“Yes.” Spanich tried to catch up to his adrenaline, slow himself down. “On his feet, fighting for his life.”

“Don’t,” moaned Austen.

“Do you care for this man?” his mother asked, curiosity filling her voice. Spanich let the bag swing on its strap, but she ignored the makeshift weapon utterly.

“No.” Austen whimpered, practically embracing the floor. Then, “Yes. No.”

Her gaze met Spanich’s again, and he wondered how he’d ever confused this woman for human.

“I’m very sorry, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, but my son does not seem to be speaking up for you.”

He expected to be shot in the back, but the hatch continued to fail to open, and hordes of guards bristling with armament did not leap into the room. “I can speak for myself, ma’am. I’m as much a citizen as you or he.”

“Then go.” Her voice was almost a whisper now.

“Just like that?” Spanich blurted.

“Who would believe your story?” A laugh was hidden in her words somewhere.

On impulse, he reached down and grabbed at Austen’s shoulder without taking his eye off the old woman. “You coming, kid?”

“I — ”

She interrupted. “My son is not free to go.”

Feckless impulse rose inside of Spanich on a red wave of anger. “He’s a citizen, too.”

The Adjutant-Intendant groaned, then stirred.

Austen’s mother glanced at the man, then turned her attention back. “Walk away, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, with your unbelievable story. You’ve won that much in standing up to authority. Take your life and go.”

“And what?” The anger poured out of him in a flood of words. “When Markie wakes up and gets onto comm, I’m a dead man. Station troopers will pinch me, and I’ll never be seen again. I’ve already committed two, maybe three capital crimes here! Talking directly to you is probably another one.”

“How you keep your prize is not my trouble.” Her face narrowed, the first real expression he’d seen on her. “Now depart.”

Spanich tugged at Austen’s shoulder, dragged the kid to his feet. “Come on.”

Austen stood shaking. His mother slipped a small flechette gun from beneath her robes.

Ah, thought Spanich, and wondered why he wasn’t surprised.

“Let’s go,” he hissed in Austen’s ear. “Nobody deserves to be pushed around like this.”

The flechette gun was unwavering. “Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona, you are coming home with me.”

“Mother…” The kid seemed so lost.

“You already said that.” Spanich let his voice grow gruff, in his talking-to-idiot-techs tone. “Get a new line.” Gambling, he turned the kid with a hard tug on the shoulder and began walking him out like a drunk.

“My son,” she said from behind them.

Spanich tapped the hatch panel. At least that control was normal in this freakish room. With a hiss, the wall slid open.

“Austen…”

He propelled the kid out, marching him with an arm twist. Austen wasn’t stumbling, though, which meant the heart hadn’t completely gone out of him. The hatch hissed shut behind them, without the characteristic whick-whine of flechettes that Spanich’s ears were straining for.

“Engineering Supervisor Spanich,” said the shipmind. Its voice was tentative, a tone he’d never heard from a starship.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growled. “You’re part of this, too.”

Mare Imbrium {13 pairs} didn’t say another word as they left the ship, left the transfer tube, left the berth lock, left the docking boom, and made their way back into the oily, cold passageways.

Well away from the locks-and-docks sector, he finally let go of Austen. Kid would be bruised for sure. “Alright then,” Spanich said. “You’re on your own.”

“Wh-what?” Austen seemed dazed.

“Snap out of it, kid. You’re free.” Spanich swatted him on the ass. “Now time to scoot.”

“But I don’t know where to go.”

“Sure you do. You’ve been living on Estacada Orbital for months.” Platinum-coated genetics or not, the kid had survived on his own. Hustling wasn’t the worst way to live.

Austen glanced back they way they’d come.

“Sure. Head back to Mare Imbrium thirteen if you want to.” Spanich leaned close. “But on your own terms.” Kid still smelled great. “And whatever you do, drop the stupid act. You got more education than anyone on this station who isn’t flash brass themselves. Damn well use it. At least be a smarter hustler.”

“I didn’t think they’d find me,” he said.

“Hah. You’re genetagged. Probably sniffed you out of the air recyclers, momma came running.” Spanich paused, then probed. “But the big dogs don’t know you’re gone, do they?”

“I th-thought I’d got away clean.”

“And that’s why she came with Mare Imbrium thirteen, instead of a battalion of special forces from the Household Guards.”

“Right. No scandal.”

“Yet,” said Spanich. “But you’ve been screwing the help, out here on big bad Estacada Orbital. Sullying yourself in the shallow waters of the gene pool.”

Austen nodded. “Some things get erased.”

Spanich thought about that, hard. “But not the entire labor force of a station. Too many of us know you, know you’ve been here a while.” He patted the kid’s arm. “I’m grabbing my kit and shipping out as an engineer’s mate in the next empty rack bound somewhere on the backside of this system. With a little luck I can get away before the Adjutant-Intendant puts out a warrant for my ass. You can stay here if you want, but you might consider the same.”

“No…” Austen stood firm. “I’m going back.”

“After all the trouble I took to get you out?”

The kid grinned, that old, easy smile flashing. “Back on my own two feet, walking in to set what terms I can. Like you said. Besides, on Mare Imbrium I can do something about those warrants. Or Mother can, if I ask her nicely enough.”

Now that Austen had outed himself, he didn’t seem to have any problem with the starship’s name. Spanich gave him a long, slow stare. “Then what, kid? You ran away from something? Sure you want to go back to it?”

“No.” He looked around. “But what’s here? They won’t let me be. And you’re right. I can be traced anywhere I’m likely to be able to get.”

For a brief moment, Spanich consider inviting Austen to berth out with him. It would be harder to sign on two, but not impossible. He shook off the idiocy, pulled the kid close for a rough kiss that mostly proved they both needed to shave, then took a step back. “I’m going, then. Good luck.”

“You’ll make it off Estacada Orbital,” Austen said behind him. “I’ll see to that.”

“Then you’d better fucking hurry,” muttered Spanich, but not loud enough for the kid to hear. He picked up his pace. There were maybe only a few minutes of freedom left. At the next junction, as he turned, Spanich glanced back. It would be just like the kid to be standing there, staring.

But no. A couple of off-shift sanitation techs, a trundlebot loaded down with something lumpy, and no sign of Austen, prince of the Imperium Humanum.

“What do you know?” he asked no one in particular. “Sometimes they grow up.”

He went for the rest of his tools and his gear. There was always room for a man who could torque vacuum, out here in the Deep Dark. All he had to do was live to not tell the tale.

About the Author

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are Pinion from Tor Books, The Baby Killers from PS Publishing, and The Sky That Wraps from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

“The Language of the Whirlwind” by Lavie Tidhar

The sky was the color of ash and the Whistler has been at it again: the shrill sound of his whistle rang like a curse down the abandoned street. Damn kid, the priest thought. Damn stupid kid. It was a miracle he was still alive.

It was a miracle. The boy was cursed, or blessed, or both. Perhaps he had been a normal child, once. But the year before he had lost his speech, and now nothing remained of it but the whistling.

The priest himself had been cursed, or blessed, or both. It was hard to tell, anymore. One year ago, he thought. How can everything change in one year?

He ran a hand through damp, thinning hair and looked warily up and down the street. All quiet — apart from the ceaseless whistling. But empty streets meant nothing any more, in this empty, ruined city. You never knew who or what may be hiding behind a fallen wall, or in the shadows of an abandoned shop… looters and slavers and hunters and snatchers — or the guards of a half-hundred banded-together groups, from the roof-dwellers to the children of the ruins to…

The boy kept whistling. Touched by God, the boy was. No one knew who his parents had been — or who had given him the whistle. The first the priest knew of him was when he saw him, in that first week after the Event — the catastrophe, the apocalypse, that thing that had happened, suddenly and inexplicably, to the city of Tel Aviv. He was not yet a priest, then. He had been a… well, did it matter? He had had a wife, and two children, still very small — some friends — a job — a television licence.

Gone. All gone, and in their stead he stood, a priest praying for salvation.

Praying to the Fireman.

He walked passed ruined shop fronts, around a Merkava tank half-buried in the broken asphalt of the road, watching the mountain, listening to the whistle of the boy.

The boy. He had first seen him, walking down this same street, two weeks after he had lost everything he had. The whirlwinds had come from the sea, tearing through Tel Aviv like biblical avengers, throwing up cars, tearing down houses and power-lines, making rag dolls of men, women, children… cats and dogs. There were so few left. Only cockroaches and rats there were in plenty, still. There was good eating on a rat. The priest had a friend who kept a farm in an abandoned pharmacy, hundreds and hundreds of pink, fat, juicy rats… people, survivors, came from all over the city to buy the meat. A whole industry had sprung around it, street stalls offering the visitors sheesh-kebabs of skewered rat in cumin and salt, rat stews with barley, and boneless meat in thin, flat pita bread made with year-old flour… and besides the food stalls a small market emerged, the alte-zachen souk, where scavengers came to sell and trade the refuse of a city that had once held two million people. It was said less than ten thousand now remained.

He was going there now, to the rat market and the rat men, to search amidst the stalls of the alte-zachen souk, for there were relics to be found, hints and secrets only he could decipher, and the might lead him to the Fireman. He watched the mountain rise in the distance as he had every day since the whirlwinds had come from the sea, and slaughtered the people of Tel Aviv, and took away his life… the day the mountain had risen, impossibly-high, emerging in the heart of Tel Aviv and rising, rising, felling houses and shopping malls and office towers as it rose. The heart of the city was a mystery. It was not possible to climb the mountain, no more than it was possible to leave the city. Only one had gone before, and would one day return… or so the priest believed. So his new religion affirmed. The Fireman had risen into the sky and up the mountain, where the great, cold beings lived. There were intelligences there, a whole other world, it was whispered: great beings as large as worlds, with cold clear eyes, who watched the city from their heights, and though slow, cold thoughts… Why had they come? Their mountain rose above the city and beyond the mountain there were other mountains, other skies… but outside of Tel Aviv there was nothing, a ring of darkness surrounding the city. None could climb, could ascend the mountain — and none could leave the city. We are prisoners here, he thought, for the untold time. I was born here and I will die here, as my sons have. The city is my tomb.

A whistle — he jumped, then realised it was the Whistler, who was following him. The boy, the cursed boy… he had seen him that first time, two weeks after the storm had lashed the city into bloodied submission and turned its few survivors into rats. The boy had been walking down the street, the whistle blowing — a small, brown-haired boy with large, serious eyes, in shorts and sandals and a once-white shirt splattered with old, dried blood. And as the priest (who was not then yet a priest) watched, a whirlwind had come, and then another, and another…

How to describe them? He was currently engaged in writing the Holy Book of Fire, the story of the city and the Fireman and of the Prophecy that he had seen, that he had known so fervently to be true. In the Holy Book he had attempted to describe the whirlwinds:

They came from the sea. Storms, sentient tornadoes. Invisible, aware, and hungry, they came from the sea. The whirlwinds. How many we could not tell. They threw cars into the air and brought them down like bombs, and when the army rose against them they broke our tanks and plucked the men from inside them, or roasted them in the metal, like crabs in their shells… they painted the city with our blood and re-drew it, filled with broken-down houses and streets that were no longer there, and graves, so many graves… they came from the sea but they are the children of the mountain, and they were sent from high above, to remind us we are mortals.

To remind us how easy it is for us to die.

The Holy Book currently filled half an A4 notepad that he had originally found in an abandoned stationary shop. His disciples were not many, but when they gathered, in the place that had once been a pharmacy and was now a slaughterhouse and a church, he read to them passages from the book, and they repeated the words, so they could spread them.

He alone had seen the Fireman, had seen him rise to heaven in a chariot of flame. He alone knew the tru —

The whistling returned, louder than before, and he saw the Whistler was gaining on him. The boy no longer wore his sandals, and the soles of his feet were black and hard, but he wore the same bloodied shirt, the same faded shorts as when he had first seen him. It was his eyes that the priest found most disturbing though… they were the grey and brown of the sea before a storm, the color of the sky the day the whirlwinds came… when he had first seen the boy he had seen the whirlwinds come to him, one and two at first and then three, four, ten, until their silent howling filled the world and ripped apart buildings still standing, tossed cars like game balls — but the boy himself was unharmed, and he stood there, surrounded by the storm, and whistled.

The boy was cursed, or blessed, or both. If he had any parents, brothers, sisters, he had none, now. Alone, he still stood. Like the priest.

He tried to ignore the boy. He was afraid of the whirlwinds, afraid of being taken, too soon. After they came he had prayed to die, prayed in the old religion, prayed to God and His angels, but no angels came, and there was no God. He had been there that day when the mountain rose and he saw the Fireman, driving his fire truck along the road, driving over everything in his path, driving like fire, like wind, charging at the mountain as those who dwell above reached down and took him, and the great municipal fire truck rose up in the air, higher and higher, until at last it disappeared beyond…

He knew then. Knew the Fireman had been chosen. A holy messiah, as it had been of old, in the old bible, chosen to lead his people out of darkness and into the light. Knew that he would return. That day he had shelled his old, dead identity and became the priest.

He walked through the silent city, and the Whistler followed him.

From above, the city:

The carcasses of cars and tanks lie rotting in the sun on Ibn Gvirol and Herzl streets, and along the Yarkon river human skeletons lie bleaching in the sand. Fires burn, here and there, and on the rooftops of the city one can see newly-formed habitats, green gardens and colonies of migrating humans whose children may never see the streets below. All along the shoreline small fires burn, where refugees gather to watch the wall of darkness on the horizon: you may go this far, but no farther. Along the Ayalon Highway the rider clans race and war. Above all towers the mountain, its peak rising beyond the cloud, and beyond it can just be seen the outlines of other mountains, other lands…

The rat market was near the old bus station. Here, amidst ruined shawarma stalls and the remains of massage parlours, the Rat Lord made his home, and with him his band of hangers-on, the traders in white meat, the male and female prostitutes, the singers, the dancers, the mad and the lost.

The cries came from everywhere, and with them the mouth-watering scent of char-grilled flesh. “White meat!” they said. “White meat on a stick!”

“Coins! Stamps! Tennis rackets! Footballs! Pens! — ” and all the other useless things the scavengers found amidst the abandoned shops.

“Onions! Fresh onions!”

“Oranges! Juicy oranges!”

“Lettuce! Tomatoes! Cucumbers! Garlic!” — from the roof dwellers and the small kibbutzim, those communal societies that had formed in the ruined city, and grew produce on the ground that peeked from underneath the broken-down concrete.

“Tinned pears! Tinned fish! Tinned peas! Tinned corn!” — In this the scavengers always did good trade, though prices were rising as stock had become increasingly harder to come by.

“Baby clothes… family photographs… ID books…” from a wizened old woman whose teeth were a bygone dream.

A wide board set up to one side. Photos pinned on to it, hand-written notices. Have you seen this child? Have you seen my wife? Have you seen my husband, have you seen my son, have you seen, have you seen, have you —

But no one has, and they are gone, gone, all gone into the clouds —

“White meat! Tender and sweet! Tasting like honey, the bestest white meat!”

The priest paid for a skewer (a pair of earrings, a handful of gold teeth), and on a whim he couldn’t quite explain paid for another, and gave it to the boy. To shut his whistling, he thought. The boy let the whistle drop onto his chest, where it hung by a string. He bit into the meat. There were three little rodents per skewer.

“Books! Get your books here! Good books, thick books, plenty of paper!”

The bookseller smiled up at him as he approached. The boy trailed behind. “Good paper, priest. Soft and strong, good for starting a fire and good for the bum — ”

“I have the only book I need,” the priest said, patting the place where his notebook was, and the bookseller nodded. “Are there news?”

“He has not yet descended to be amongst us,” the priest said. “But the time is approaching.”

“The Fireman…” the bookseller said. “I’ve heard the stories. A biker clan tried to challenge the mountain last week, did you know?”

The priest shook his head. The bookseller said, “Raced up old Dizengoff Street — what’s left of it — straight up the side of the mountain. Ahead they went, five of them, then four, then three. One made it almost to the place where Dizengoff Centre used to stand, before — ”

The priest nodded again. “It is folly to try,” he said. “What happened?”

“Combustions,” the bookseller said. “spontaneous combustions, as spectacular as — ”

“It is His mark,” the priest said, feeling excitement slide down his throat like a reviving medicine. “The time is nigh, I have told you.”

The bookseller only shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “Now, do you need a book?”

His stall was covered in paperbacks. Most were best-sellers, since those were the ones they printed most of. Now the survivors of Tel Aviv lit fires with them and always kept a book close by — you never knew when you might need to go, and a single book could last a long time…

“I have little enough to trade,” the priest said — looking longingly at a particularly thick thriller. He searched in his pocket. “I found these,” he said. Rings, of yellow gold and sapphires, a ruby chain of white gold, a diamond bracelet — there was still a market for jewellery in the city, with clan leaders cladding themselves in looted gold. The bookseller took the objects, examined them, made a motion with his head. The priest nodded thanks, and helped himself to the book.

Behind him the whistling continued. People stared, but did not move towards the child. Holy child, the priest thought. They can recognise that in him. Sometimes he thought the boy’s whistles were the language of the whirlwind.

He walked away, towards the Rat House.

“Priest!’

The Rat Lord was an old friend — and a believer. A large man, with hairy arms and thinner hair sprouting out of his ears, and reading glasses too small for his face. he had once been a general, and an aspiring politician, before the event put an end to both careers before the one had ended and the second began. Now he bred and butchered rats, and his fingers were covered in diamonds and topaz. “Lord of Rats,” the priest said, nodding.

“Have one,” the Rat Lord said generously, waving his hand, “on the house.”

“Thank you,” the priest said. “Is the gathering ready?”

“Ready and waiting,” the Rat Lord said.

“Then let us pray,” the priest said — and he followed the Rat Lord into the building, where the screams of rats could be heard, and their scrabbling feet, and into a back room of the old pharmacy, where a dozen people had gathered, waiting.

My flock, he thought. My lost little rats, anxiously awaiting the fire.

“Friends,” he said, looking at their faces. From all over the city they came, young and old, women and men, the lost, the mad — those touched by fire. Those who believed. “The hour draws near, and on top of the mountain the fire beckons. He is coming. Soon we shall be delivered.”

“Soon we shall be delivered,” they echoed him. The shrill sound of a whistle sounded outside. The priest knelt down on the hard floor and joined his hands before him. “Let us pray,” he said; and so they did.

He used to like Louis Armstrong music, pizza with olives, fresh cold water from the fridge, cartoons on Saturday morning TV. Now his thoughts were fire and his nights were waiting, always waiting for a sign from above, a sign that never seemed to come. Why has it happened? he thought. The storm had come and lashed the city of Tel Aviv into oblivion, but why? It occurred to him frequently that he might as well be asking — Why life? Why Death? The universe held no answers, and humanity went through cycles of life and death, birth and life and death, endlessly, no more comprehending than ants or dogs or rats. Did rats have a religion? Did rats pray to a rat-god? If so, what did they pray for?

Salvation, he thought. I pray for salvation.

Yet what sort of salvation could a Fireman bring?

The streets back were dark and cold and quiet. Too quiet. The silence was pierced only by the boy’s incessant whistling — and suddenly the priest was very afraid.

Shadows moved ahead… they skulked in the darkness of ruined hallways. He turned, began to walk back. Don’t run, he thought. When he came to the boy he said, “Come with me — ” wondering if the boy understood.

“Come with me — ” but even as he spoke he saw the shadows congeal ahead, and knew they were coming.

Stupid, stupid. He had not been paying attention. “There is nothing to take from me,” he said loudly, speaking to the approaching shadows. “Nothing that hasn’t already been taken.”

He did not even have the jewellery any more. All he carried was the book, and a wrapped package of three plump, salted skinned rats. And the Book, too, of course. The Holy Book of Fire. But they would not want that.

“I have nothing,” he said again, feeling the weight of the words tightening around his neck, pulling him down. “Nothing…”

“You have your life,” the shadows said. They came closer and closer, and one of them held a torch now, and in its light he could see them, young faces, hungry, without mercy — faces from which laughter and light had been bleached clean. “We shall take that, and the child.”

“Pretty boy!’ crowed another of the shadows. “We’ll put you to work in the mines, old man. There is much to be mined for, in this God-forsaken city.”

He knew about the mines. Deep they dug, into the cellars and the hidden warehouses, and as they dug they built, caves for the cave-dwellers, a hidden dark city under the city… some said the miners, too, had their own religion, and were seeking escape down there, in the darkness below the sands — seeking a way out of the city, tunnelling their way towards —

But there was nothing. He knew that. They all knew that. The city was no longer a part of the world, the other world. It had been annexed, and now belonged only to the mountain, and to what lay beyond.

“Take me,” he said. “But leave the boy.”

“The boy too can work,” the same voice said. They all looked the same to him, these boys who had once been soldiers or construction workers or delivery boys or telemarketers. They had been scourged by wind, he thought, scourged clean as bones. The dead had no mercy. “We have work for the boy.”

Ugly laughter. The priest, with shaking hands, brought out the holy book. “The Fireman comes,” he said, his voice weak in the cold night. “And the city shall be delivered at His approach. He has seen much that has been hidden, the bringer of fire, the bringer of ligh — ”

A back-handed slap felled him, the pain burning, burning, and he welcomed it. “Take him,” another voice said. All the while the boy was whistling, whistling, a forlorn cry in the night, the call of an extinct animal sensing its fate. Hands grabbed the priest, pulled him up. He saw knives, a rope. Their leader — if that’s what he was — approached the boy. “Shut up,” he said. But the boy’s only answer was his whistle.

The leader slapped him, casually, and the boy fell back a step, the whistle falling from his bloodied lips.

“There’s men would pay good food for a boy like this,” he said, “and wouldn’t mind a bit of blood on him, either.”

“He is innocent!’ the priest cried, and the leader turned to him, a snarl on his boyish face, and said, “No one is innocent.”

It was true, though the priest hated to think it. None of them were innocent, none of them who survived. And yet the boy, at least… surely the boy was innocent, if anyone was?

Fire and air, and high above the shadowy presence of cold, enormous beings in the mountain, and he thought, Let him call, let him —

And as he rose, as he charged at these shades, these cold men of the ruined city, he thought not of fire or prophets, messiahs or signs, but only of the boy — Let them come, he thought. He ran at the leader, bringing him down, and the others turned away from the boy and came for him, knives glinting in the light of the torch — and the darkness was pierced with the sound of a lone whistle, a whistle in the night, and they came — he felt them come even as the knife slashed down on his arm and the pain rose in him, and brought his old name with it.

They converged on the street from all corners, it seemed. Hovering in the air, these cold, unknowable whirlwinds, and starlight was bent and transformed as it passed through them. Silent, they came closer, and the men left him, and tried to run, and someone cursed, and the priest lay on the ground, waiting for his death still, hoping for it, and all the while the boy’s whistle cut through the air like a surgical blade —

Holding his arm, blood trickling through his fingers, he watched the whirlwinds come. Where they passed the ground was torn up, buildings collapsed, their sound drowning the boy’s whistle. When the men tried to flee some were snatched up by the wind, rising up in the air slowly before exploding, their blood raining down like fallen poppies. But some escaped, moving between the columns of air, vanishing in the distance, to live another day in the city, to die another night.

“They came,” he said, speaking to the boy — but the boy was no longer there.

When he raised his eyes he saw the boy hovering in the air above him, caught inside a whirlwind. Round and round and round he went, his face placid, his eyes the color of a grey storm, his shirt a mix of blood old and new. The whistle sounded, shriller than ever, communicating in a language the priest could not, would not understand.

Higher and higher the boy went, and the priest began to shout, screaming at the storm, but it was no good — the boy rose and then the whistling stopped, and a faint “pop’ sounded, like a bottle being uncorked —

Red rain fell down on the priest, softly, like a whisper in the night, like a mother’s goodnight kiss. Red rain fell and the whirlwinds turned away, and from the sky an object fell down to the ground, and the priest grasped for it with bloodied fingers, barely seeing:

It was a cheap, plastic whistle, the mouthpiece still moist where it had been blown, and teeth marks that were the only thing to remain of the boy.

He stared at the object in his hand, and raised his head, and watched the mountain rise, mute and inexplicable as life, as death, impossibly-high in the distance.

Why? he said, or thought he had, though no sound came. When he cried it was without sound and the tears mingled with the blood of the boy. Why? he said, or tried to, but the whirlwinds were gone and the street was deserted again, and very quiet, and very dark, and after a while he put the whistle in his pocket and resumed the long walk home, alone.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is the author of The Bookman and forthcoming sequel Camera Obscura. Other books include linked-story collection HebrewPunk, novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv), novella An Occupation of Angels and a host of to-be-released novels and novellas including Cloud Permutations, Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God and Martian Sands. He also edited The Apex Book of World SF and runs the World SF News Blog.

“Chameleon of the Fantastic: An Interview with Jeffrey Ford” by Jason S. Ridler

Over the past twenty-five years, Jeffrey Ford has earned a reputation for being one of the best writers working today. His short stories and novels collect tales from a wild and unique imagination steered by a craftsmen’s eye for narrative and prose. His fiction could stand as comfortable next to Jonathan Carroll, Lucius Shepard, or Michael Swanwick, as with Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka or Hunter S. Thompson. No mean feat. His diverse interests and influence allow him to write across the map of literature with equal aplomb. Realism, the fantastic, horror and humor can be found in different measures throughout his body of work, which is substantial, varied, and acclaimed.

He’s been awarded the World Fantasy Award, The Nebula, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, The Fountain Award, and Le Grand Prix de l’imaginaire. While a bold experimenter, Ford is perhaps the most effortless and readable practitioners of fantasy fiction working today, able to groove the surreal, weird, and gritty into stories with an almost zen clarity that never loses its intensity.

A long time professor of literature at Brookdale Community College in southern New Jersey, Ford’s latest works, the collection The Drowned Life and the novel The Shadow Year, both received the World Fantasy Award. His story “After Moreau” appeared in Clarkesworld in April 2008.

The first Jeffrey Ford story I read was “A Night at the Tropics,” in an Ellen Datlow anthology. I was struck at how well you blended a clear narrative style with rather wild story of cursed chess sets, surreal paintings, and neighborhood thugs. What was the genesis of this story, and do you remember the first works you read that attempted blending this style of fantasy and realism?

“A Night In the Tropics” was originally published by Lou Anders in the first issue of Argosy. There was a bar in the town where I grew up that had a mural of “the south seas” like the one described in the bar in the story. My dad would take me in there once in a while on Sunday when he wanted to watch a Giant’s game and have a beer. That mural fascinated me. When I grew up, I’d go there occasionally, but it was really an old man’s bar. The place just closed down a few years ago. My cousin told me he heard from a reliable source that before the owner sold it, he had a false wall installed over the painting so that it would always be there.

The scene in the story where those guys rob the blind man and he comes after them with a sword is based on a true incident. For the story of the chess set, I did some historical research about a certain time period and about the goldsmith Cellini, but mostly it’s just made up. Author Rick Bowes gave me some really good advice on this one, so to commemorate his efforts he appears briefly in the story.

You were a student of the late writer and writing teacher John Gardner, who also wrote realistic, mythic and fantasy fiction and enjoyed genre fiction. What work of yours did he read or help you with and has it seen print? Is there any advice Gardner gave that has stayed with you?

He published a couple of my stories in his magazine, MSS, and there were just a couple of other stories he’d helped me with that saw publication after he passed away, but for the most part, the majority of stuff I went over with him when he was my teacher wasn’t anything to write home about. It was basically useful fodder for learning and that’s the best you can say of it.

Gardner talked quite a bit about the author’s experience of watching the story unfold in the imagination, seeing the characters, etc. That was something that stayed with me.

Gardner once noted the need for fiction to create a “vivid and continuous dream” in the mind of the reader. Do you agree, and was such advice hand-in-glove for your own storytelling instincts, or something you had to work on? How do you cultivate this skill?

To get the full import of that “vivid and continuous dream” business, you have to remember, and this is something Gardner pointed out, that when you’re engaged in a dream, no matter what strange stuff happens, you believe it to be reality. You experience terror, joy, arousal as a result of the dream experience. How do you create a fictional world that convinces with the same authority as dream? Thinking about fiction in this way suited me well. How do you actually do this? Who the fuck knows? What you do is write some stories and the ones that come out good, you think, “I did it in that one.” Every writer will give you a different recipe for creating a “vivid and continuous dream.”

One of the things I enjoy most about your fiction is that no matter where it leads in terms of content or theme or genre, I know I’m reading a Jeffrey Ford story. Your voice contains multitudes, from fables (”The Annals of Eelin-Ok”) to eclectic science fiction (”Exo Skeleton Town”), to strange hybrids of realism and the fantastic (”The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant,”, “Scribble Mind”, “Golden Dragon”), and more. As such, what is “voice” to you and do you remember a moment (a story, novel, etc.) where you noticed that your own voice was singing above your influences, able to reach into each one of these kinds of stories?

Voice comes part and parcel with the story. For me the instant when I have achieved the requisite confidence to write a story is the same instant I hear the voice it will be told in. They are the same thing in a way. The medium is the message and the massage. The period where I think I discovered my own “voice” was right around the time I started selling fiction. I remember rethinking and committing more fully to revision had a lot to do with it.

Much of your work, especially your novels (such as The Physiognomy, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass) is infused with your enjoyment for research and interest in a wide range of literature and history. What’s the appeal of research versus invention for you, and what’s scratching your research and literary interests itch these days?

Research is invention for me. The two are so intertwined. I might find a little tidbit about some historical time period I’m working in and that will take my imagination in some new direction or add something to the story and characters I’m envisioning in my mind. Research is part of pretty much everything I write to a greater or lesser degree. Research can get out of hand when I’m working on a novel — then sometimes I feel like there is always still one more little bit of information out there that I don’t know about yet but that I’m sure will make all the difference. When I get to that point, I know it’s time to put the books away and start writing. So a little research goes such a long way, especially when doing an historical piece. The stuff I dig up and never actually use all becomes part of the background knowledge in a way. As for what am I looking at now — I was doing a lot of reading about the dust bowl after watching a show on TV about Black Blizzards. That wasn’t for a story so far, but just something that caught my interest. As for recent reads, I’ve recently read Vertigo by W. G. Sebald. There’s a part in it that has to do with Kafka’s story “The Hunter Gracchus,” which is one of my favorites. Also recently read a book about mirror neurons, Mirroring People by Marco Iacoboni. A few short story collections — Waking the Dead by Yvette Tan, Everland and Other Stories by Paul Witcover, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet by Vandana Singh. All of these collections are worth a reader’s time.

You’ve produced three acclaimed short story collections (The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life, for which you received the World Fantasy Award) and are largely considered one of the best short story writers working today. For shit and giggles, could you discuss your first published short story and compare it to your most recent one? What are the common and divergent threads between those two poles of your career?

Shit and giggles might be all this is worth, but… I think my earliest story was “The Casket,” which appeared in MSS, about an old guy who builds a coffin for himself, decorates it the way Queequeg did in Moby Dick, and then sleeps in it every night in preparation for death. It was pretty heavy handed on the symbolism. I was injecting the big ideas here and there like I was filling cream doughnuts on the graveyard shift. The piece was way overwritten and rather plodding, still it had its charms. What they were, I can’t now recall. A recent story that has not yet seen publication but will sometime soon is “Daddy Long Legs of the Evening,” which is a horror story. In this respect it’s different, but the main difference is in the writing. I’ve eventually learned how to be able to convey more with less words and to make the whole thing, sentences and images, flow better. I’m not throttling the necks of stories anymore like they owe me money. I ditched the idea of conscious symbolism about 20 years ago. Now I just follow the characters and record what they do. One thing that remains the same is my enjoyment in seeing the stories unfold behind my eyes and the work of capturing them in words. That experience remains profound for me. 

This may be a chicken or egg question regarding the relationship between reading and writing. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about the broad arc of your career is the freedom of your imagination, especially in short stories, and yet a real clarity to your use of the fantastic. I wonder if that’s in part because of your own diverse reading habits. Can you think of specific influences on you regarding this tying of clarity and fantasy/surrealism?

Well, one reading influence on my fiction, and there are a lot, is definitely Isaac Bashevis Singer. His stories, especially the supernatural ones that take place after he has emigrated to New York, so beautifully mix the autobiographical and the fantastic. Singer’s first person narrator in these pieces is always or very nearly always the same guy — which the reader can’t help but take to be a fictional version of Singer, himself. He grounds the story in detail out of his real life, I’m sure, and then slowly filters in the strangeness. Great effect. I go for it every time. There are certain short story writers whose work I go back to over and over again — the same stories. I’ve read Singer’s “The Cafeteria” about a hundred times and it’s never stale. Kipling’s “The Return of Imray” is another one of those stories. I don’t know what it has, but it keeps me coming back. I never tire of reading it. Kelly Link’s story, “Lull,” is another. Tanizaki’s “Bridge of Dreams,” Akutagawa’s “The Hell Screen.” Anything by Alice Munro or Angela Carter. The story “Elaine Coleman” by Stephen Millhauser. Shepard’s “Hands Up Who Wants to Die?” Hawthorne, Poe, …. You get the picture. These are great artists writing at the top of their abilities and you can fall into one of these stories and come up with a different satisfying experience every time. Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp,” Bunin’s “The Gentleman From San Francisco.” “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” Somebody stop me.

You noted in an earlier interview about the value of teaching. One episode I found intriguing was when you were teaching students with learning disabilities how to write stories without giving them a map on how to do it, thus circumventing their fears and experience with failing to follow structured writing. Did their experiments inspire you and if so how?

When I teach fiction writing, whether it be for students with learning disabilities or not, I teach it the same way. My first assignment is always — Hey, write me a story. If you don’t make a big deal out of it, make a mystery out of it, everyone pretty much knows how to tell a story. I don’t like to start giving them a lot of instruction and examples before I see what they think a story is and what they come up with. I want to see what they’re thinking and what they want to write. Then we take whatever they do and work on it — expand it, add detail, mess around with it until they have it where they want it. The interesting thing about the students who have had a lot of difficulty with writing in high school English classes is that a lot of times they’ve come up with interesting strategies in order to circumvent some of their limitations — sometimes neurological (dyslexia) or physical — and this results in innovative ways of approaching fiction and telling a story. Yeah, I’ve learned a lot from these pieces. I’ve also borrowed from their structures and styles for my own fiction. Not too many semesters ago, a student of mine from another country wrote a story about an exorcism he’d witnessed in his village when he was a kid. The story was dynamite, blew me away, but the grammatical problems were legion. It seemed to me that there were ESL problems overlaid with a kind of severe dyslexia. It sucks that it’s the 21st century and there isn’t some way certain students who have some of these problems can’t express their ideas in a different medium than text. For a lot of them, writing is at best a struggle and at worst nearly impossible. They have difficulties that will not be “cured” by taking a thousand English classes. The problem is that so many of these disabilities are unseen — too many people in education and elsewhere are unaware of them or don’t believe the student is anything other than stupid or lazy, and so the student is made to continue to work in text. It’s pretty fucked up. It doesn’t make any sense with the technology available.

During a recent online discussion on the current quality of short fiction in genre fields, you challenged the assumptions that there wasn’t loads of good work out there and postulated that the only reasonable thing any writer with such concerns should do is write the next story. Is there any other advice you’d hand out to writers who are also tired of GENRE WARS: PART ZILLION?

You want to write fiction, write fiction. Write the stories you want to write when you want to write them. Sell them for as much as you can. Write more. Try always to be a better writer.

The emphasis now in writing has shifted from writing stories to selling stories. The blogs are full of it. Everybody has advice on how to make it. It’s hysterical. The problem is you might be able to come up with six ways to Sunday to sell a story, but if it’s a shitty story no one is going to want to read it or buy it. If you spend the time trying to write good stories, editors might very well eventually ask you for them. That said, there are interesting strategies and strategists out there dealing with the marketing of fiction and the business of writing. Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife is, I feel, very reasonable and well thought out in its advice. Well written too. Also, I’d be interested to read a book or sit in on a seminar about small press publishing and marketing by Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press. I think Nick Mamatas has a book like this coming as well, which will probably be quite good. I’m sure there are others. But, come on, write the freakin stories first.

You’ve noted how much teaching literature and writing, both the content of the course and the work with students, has impacted your own writing life, and certainly led to some stellar stories (the riveting and dark “The Honeyed Knot” comes to mind). Do you foresee a time when you might, as John Gardner did, write a book on the craft and profession of writing? Any interest on that front?

No, no interest. It’s just that I’d rather spend my time writing fiction. 

What can fans expect to see from you in the near abroad?

Well, I ditched my livejournal 14theditch just the other day. I’d been at it for five years and I’d reached the bottom of that hole. It was a lot of fun in the digging. I had great assistance at times from Rick Bowes and my uncle, Walt, and Lynn’s cousin, Dan, and my cousin Dylan, and KJ Bishop, and eroslane and Bart Calendar, and a bunch of other people who sent me stuff and wrote in with comments. You gotta know when to end the story, though. I’ll probably be starting another blog of some kind later in the year.

The original stories that are sold and due out this year or close to it are  —

“86 Deathdick Road” in The Book of Dreams, an anthology edited by Nick Gevers for Subterranean

“Ganesha” in The Beastly Bride, an anthology edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow for Viking Juvenile

“Down Atsion Road” in Haunted Legends, an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas for Tor

“Polka-Dots and Moonbeams” in Stories, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio and Neil Gaiman for Harper Collins

“The Hag’s Peak Affair” in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio

“Daddy Long Legs of the Evening” in Naked City, an anthology edited by Ellen Datlow for St. Martins.

As for reprints —

“The Empire of Ice Cream” in The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter Beagle for Tachyon

“The Beautiful Gelreesh” in Running With the Pack, edited by Ekaterina Sedia for Prime

“On the Road to New Egypt” in Sympathy For the Devil, edited by Tim Pratt for Night Shade Books

“Pansolapia” in Digital Domains, edited by Ellen Datlow for Prime

And if I’m not mistaken, I believe that Rajan Khanna is producing an audio version of my story “Creation” for Tony Smith at Starship Sofa (I’m very much looking forward to this).

There are a bunch of new projects I’m working on presently, and if I can get them all done and done well this list will be longer. Wish me luck.

About the Author

Jason S. Ridler’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as Nossa Morte, Big Pulp, Crossed Genres, New Myths, Necrotic Tissue, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. “Billy and the Mountain” appeared in Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

“Earth Science Gets No Respect” by Russ Colson

Science fiction writers routinely get loads of cool physics right; and biology too. It’s expected of them. Maybe they stretch believability with that faster-than-light nonsense and all the strange creatures, but at least they know they need to imagine a means to circumvent the constraints of light speed, and that the creatures have to be tied loosely to some ecological environment where their strangeness is a reasonable adaptation. In earth science, however, there seem to be no constraints. Tides, earthquakes, deep stresses, giant caverns, and terrible storms are all too often magic forces invoked to provide drama and atmosphere without reference to reasonable science. What would earth science in the movies be without volcanoes in impossible places, giant caverns to the Earth’s core, and nearly-instantaneous changes in temperature masquerading as catastrophic climate change?

I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, but that’s just in the movies, they’re always bad.” Sorry, it’s not only the movies. Misconceptions of earth science so pervade our collective understanding that magic happenings are sometimes preferred in written stories; not only for their drama but for their believability!

Don’t think so? Consider this advice to new science fiction writers from Kathy Wentworth, judge of a well-known writers’ contest.

“If you’re writing hard sf, do your research and get your facts right….the science has to be dead on….You can’t have diamond ships that shatter when iron runs into them…without explanation.” (Dec 21, 2007 Writers and Illustrators of the Future Newsletter)

Oh? Why not? Isn’t that exactly what would happen? Here’s a quick thought puzzle for you: Let me smash your diamond engagement ring with an iron hammer and see which one breaks.

Oops.

Equating strength with hardness is a common misconception we address in introductory geology classes. Hardness relates to how a material resists scratching, not to how likely it is to survive a sudden blow. Iron is malleable, allowing it to deform without breaking when subjected to a force that would shatter the much harder diamond.

Yet this misconception is so strong that the science fiction writer must spend tons of words making what’s really true believable. Why bother? Just go with the misconception. Thus, Earth Science gets no respect, and writers know and accept this.

Moved by the Tides

Consider this sentence from The Ruby Dice by Catherine Asaro (Baen).

“Even this high above the coast, in the crystalline silence of the mountains, he could hear the tides ripped from the ocean by the moons and hurtled against the shore far below.”

Lovely atmosphere, but tides hurtling against the shore?

Waves, driven by wind, hurtle against a shore. Tides, on the other hand, move gradually with the rotating world and the orbiting moons, a bulge in the ocean that creeps or sweeps upon a shoreline. They don’t hurtle with the sound of crashing waves.

Catherine Asaro is a physicist. She should know this. I can only surmise that since this is earth science (which gets no respect) authors presume readers don’t know any better. Tides, waves, whatever. Aren’t they interchangeable? And crashing tides are more dramatic than creeping ones.

All Done by Magic

I point out to my college students that real science writing happens in making connections between cause and effect, not in spouting factoids. I suggest that if you can substitute the word “magic” for some cause in a sentence, without changing the character of the sentence, then you haven’t made the connection between cause and effect. Here’s an example.

Ophiolites are rock bodies formed deep in the crust of ocean basins, yet we sometimes find them at the surface of continents. Students write, “ophiolites are exposed at the Earth’s surface by Plate Tectonics”, thinking this tells the reader how ophiolites are exposed. It doesn’t. Think about it. Can you tell me, based on this sentence, how ophiolites reach the surface of continents? You may as well say ophiolites are exposed by magic.

For science fiction writers, trying out the word “magic” can help identify passages that don’t make sense. “…he could hear the tides ripped from the ocean by magic…” Investigation reveals little connection between crashing waves and the hours-long rotation of a world or the orbit of its moons. It’s Clarke’s Law in action: without any understanding of how the science works, it might as well be magic.

What’s really distressing is that I delighted in the sound of the crashing “tides”, and loved the story! No wonder earth science gets no respect!

Scraped Flat

Most authors don’t include earth science in their stories at all, or include it only as an atmospheric backdrop. But there are a few who incorporate earth science in substantial ways. These are some of my favorite writers and stories. So naturally, with apologies, I’m going to pick on them.

The Engines of God (Ace) is a great novel by Jack McDevitt, but consider the following passage:

“The plateaus were probably carved by methane glaciers, Angela said.”

OK, methane glaciers, that’s cool, and the story is set on a world with hydrocarbon rain, so that makes sense. But consider rephrasing this as “plateaus were carved by magic”. Is there any non-magical connection between glaciers and plateaus?

Not much. What’s more, the idea of plateaus carved by glaciers brings up another common misconception of earth science. When I ask my college students why the Red River Valley of the North at the border between North Dakota and Minnesota is so flat, they always say, “Because the glaciers scraped it off.”

Nope. Flat topography, such as a plateau, usually requires erosion or deposition to a base level. Think about rivers flowing into an ocean. As the landscape erodes down to sea level, the slope will decrease, causing the water velocity to slow and lose its capacity to erode. Thus, land will erode flat at the level of the sea, the base level, and no further.

Glaciers don’t behave in the same way as rivers. They erode here or deposit there on the basis of variations in temperature, speed of movement, and thickness of the ice. What’s more, when the ice melts, rock and sediment caught up in the ice are draped irregularly over the preexisting topography leaving a rolling, hummocky terrain, not a flat plateau.

So, glaciers, methane or otherwise, aren’t going to carve a plateau, although they might drape glacial deposits on top of a preexisting plateau formed by another process.

Volcanoes of Ice

Ice worlds are cool and fun to read about, but they provide plenty of opportunities for writers to get things wrong. Consider another ice world story by a new writer, “The Frozen Sky” by Jeff Carlson (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future XXIII). This little gem, in which explorers discover alien life in the catacombs of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has all kinds of geological details, such as the formation of an oxygen atmosphere by dissociation of water molecules on the icy surface. Frozen silicate lava from past volcanism cuts across the icy catacombs, an important element of the story because the lava rock, much harder than the ice, blocks the characters’ way in places.

However, real volcanoes on Europa don’t involve the melting of silicate rock. On frigid Europa, the crustal “rock” is ice, and lava is made of hot, molten liquid ice (that is, water) rather than liquid silicate. Thus story elements that involve silicate magma in contact with water ice, and the separate uses of the words “ice” and “rock”, don’t make sense. Silicate rock melts a thousand degrees Celsius higher than water ice, so intrusion of silicate lava into water ice would vaporize it, pulverizing both water rock and silicate rock.

A Lot of Hot Air

New writers seem to be particularly bold in putting earth science in their stories (a very hopeful sign!). “The Flue” by John Schoffstall (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future XXI) is a story in which giant towers in the desert capture heat energy by allowing rapidly rising air to turn power turbines in towers that are kilometers high. There’s all kinds of physics details in the story (proving that physics gets respect), such as the terminal velocity of a falling body and how this relates to the velocity of upward moving air required to suspend or raise a body. Way cool.

But the earth science doesn’t quite work. What, exactly, is causing the air to rise up these giant towers?

The implication of the story is that well, duh, hot air rises. And the desert is hot. But why isn’t it already rising out there in the desert before we build the towers, thus creating a great vacuum at the surface?

Ok, so maybe a tower somehow (read “magically”) creates a pocket of convection centered on the tower, with air rising at the tower and sinking somewhere nearby in compensation. But there is a more serious problem. The temperature of the air where it comes out the top of the tower is sixty-five degrees Celsius (medium rare on a meat thermometer, according to the story). This high temperature is a key challenge which the protagonist must overcome in climbing a kilometer down the tower to find out why Flue number seven is 5% off its rated output.

Here’s the problem. How did the air get so hot? Down at the surface of the desert the air might be, say, forty-six degrees Celsius on a really hot day. As air rises, its temperature will fall due to adiabatic decompressional cooling (that is, cooling caused by the expansion of the air as pressure decreases upward). You can experience this yourself by blowing up a balloon and then holding it against your cheek as you let the air out quickly. The balloon will grow cool. Try it!

A rise of a couple of kilometers will result in a temperature drop of about twenty degrees Celsius if air is dry, reducing air temperature to twenty-five degrees. But the temperature at the top of the tower is reported as forty degrees higher than this! The only way for that to occur is if energy is added to the air. But, if energy is added to the air in the tower, then the tower won’t be an energy generator, it will be an energy consumer!

Convection towers have been proposed and tested in the non-fiction world as a means to capture solar energy. However, real towers require the air at the surface to be heated above ambient temperature for the process to work. One way to accomplish this is to build a green-house-like solar collector in an apron around the tower. Even so, the temperature of the air will decrease as the air rises up the tower.

Hail and Ice

Thus we have a thrilling story, with cool physics, but the earth science doesn’t quite work out. No respect again.

OK, so volcanoes can’t really just pop up anywhere, and caverns deeper than a few thousand feet in Earth’s crust would collapse under the weight of overlying rock. At least we can do anything we want with weather, right? It’s so erratic, so unpredictable, so powerful and mysterious, that anything is possible. Right?

Let me pick on my favorite author. I hope she’ll forgive me. In Riders of the Storm (DAW), Julie Czerneda writes an exciting scene where the protagonist struggles against a fierce winter storm involving “ice stones as big as a fist” and rain that “wasn’t rain, it was liquid ice.”

Exciting, but is it likely? Actually we don’t observe freezing rain and fist sized hail from a single storm cloud on Earth, though we do see both separately. Why not?

Let’s think about it. To get such large hail stones, vertical winds have to be strong enough to suspend the stones in the air until they grow to the size of a fist, whereupon the ice will overcome the updraft and fall. This process will hold true on any non-magical planet.

To get air moving upward at such a high velocity, the air needs to be highly unstable, such as when cold air aloft overlies warm air at the surface. The warm air will spontaneously rise due to its lower density, sometimes reaching hurricane force.

In contrast, to get freezing rain, the air at the ground has to be colder than air aloft. Rain starts out warmer and gets colder as it falls, eventually freezing when it hits the ground.

But, if cold, dense air is near the ground, and warm low-density air aloft, the air will be stable and you can’t get strong vertical winds. Thus, large hail and freezing rain occur from very different types of storm clouds, regardless of whether you’re on Earth or elsewhere (that is, unless you’re in a universe with different physical laws).

Of course, writers can always come up with ways to make unexpected things happen in a way that is believable within the context of the story. That’s what makes science fiction stories fun. We should also not forget that real science is all about poking holes in old ideas so as to gain better new ones. Yet many science fiction writers apparently don’t feel obliged to provide explanations for their deviations from standard earth science principles. Or maybe they don’t realize when they’re going wrong. Would they get away with treating physics or biology so carelessly?

I tell you, earth science don’t get no respect.

About the Author

Russ Colson lives with his wife Mary on a farmstead in northern Minnesota, far enough from city lights to see the Milky Way and the aurora borealis. He’s a professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead where he teaches planetary science, meteorology, and geology. Before coming to Minnesota, he worked at the Johnson Space Center in Texas for five years, followed by six years of research at Washington University in St. Louis where, among other things, he studied how a lunar colony might mine oxygen from the local rock. In addition to writing non-fiction, he writes a variety of speculative fiction stories.

“2009 Reader’s Poll Results” by Neil Clarke

Last month, we asked you to vote for your favorite artwork and short fiction publishing in Clarkesworld in 2009. The results are in and it is my pleasure to present the 2009 Clarkesworld Magazine Reader’s Poll winners:

Short Fiction

1st Place (tie) - “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” by Catherynne M. Valente and “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7″ by Nnedi Okorafor

2nd Place - “Spar” by Kij Johnson

3rd Place - “Placa del Fuego” by Tobias S. Buckell

Artwork

1st Place - “Brain Tower” by Kazuhiko Nakamura 38

2nd Place - “Signs of Life” by Geoff Trebs 29

3rd Place - “Evil Snowman” by Serj Iulian 28

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone that voted.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.