“Between Two Dragons”
by Yoon Ha Lee

One of the oldest tales we tell in Cho is of two dragons, twinborn and opposite in all desires. One dragon was as red as Earth, the other as blue as Heaven: day and night, fire and water, passion and calculation. They warred, as dragons do, and the universe was born of their battle.

We have never forgotten that we partake of both dragons, Earth and Heaven. Yet we are separate creatures with separate laws. It is why the twin dragons appear upon our national seal, separated by Man’s sinuous road. We live among the stars, but we remember our heritage.

One thing has not changed since the birth of the universe, however. There is still war.

Yen, you have to come back so I can tell you the beginning of your story. Everything is classified: every soldier unaccounted for, every starsail deployed far from home, every gram of shrapnel…every whisper that might have passed between us. Word of the last battle will come tomorrow, say the official news services, but we have heard the same thing for the last several days.

I promised I would tell no one, so instead I dream it over and over. I knew, when I began to work for the Ministry of Virtuous Thought, that people would fear me. I remind myself of this every time someone calls me a woman with no more heart than a stone, despite the saying that a stone’s weeping is the most terrible of all.

You came to me after the invaders from Yamat had been driven off, despite the fall of Spinward Gate and the capital system’s long siege. I didn’t recognize you at first. Most of my clients use one of the government’s thousand false names, which exist for situations requiring discretion. Your appointment was like any other, made under one such.

Your face, though — I could hardly have failed to recognize your face. Few clients contact me in person, although I can’t help wanting to hear, face-to-face, why my patients must undergo the changes imposed on them.

Admiral Yen Shenar: You were an unassuming man, although your dark eyes suggested a certain taut energy, and you were no stranger to physical labor. I wished I were in such lean good health; morning exercise has never done much for me. But your drab civilian clothes and the absent white gun did nothing to disguise the fact that you were a soldier. An admiral. A hero, even, in my office with its white walls and bland paintings of bamboo.

“Admiral,” I said, and stopped. How do you address the war hero of a war everyone knows will resume when the invaders catch their breath? I thought I knew what you wanted done. A former lover, a political rival, an inconvenience on the way up; the client has the clout to make someone disappear for a day and return as though nothing as changed, except it has. A habit of reverse-alphabetizing personal correspondence, a preference for Kir Jaengmi’s poetry over An Puna’s, a subversive fascination with foreign politics, excised or altered by my work. Sometimes only a favorite catchphrase or a preference for ginseng over green tea is changed, and the reprogramming serves as a warning once the patient encounters dissonance from family and acquaintances. Sometimes the person who returns is no longer recognizable. The setup can take months, depending on the compatibility of available data with preset models, but the reprogramming itself only takes hours.

So here you were, Admiral Yen Shenar. Surely you were rising in influence, with the attendant infelicities. It disappointed me to see you, but only a little. I could guess some of your targets.

“There’s no need for formality, madam,” you said, correctly interpreting my silence as a loss for words. “You’ve dealt with more influential people in your time, I’m sure.” Your smile was wry, but suggested despair.

I thought I understood that, too. “Who is the target?”

The despair sharpened, and everything changed. “Myself. I want to be expunged, like a thrall. I’m told it’s easier with a willing subject.”

“Heaven and Earth, you can’t be serious.”

The walls were suddenly too spare, too white.

I wondered why you didn’t do the obvious thing and intrigue against Admiral Wan Kun, or indeed the others in court who considered your growing renown a threat. No surprise: the current dynasty had been founded by a usurper-general, and ever since, the court has regarded generals and admirals with suspicion. We may despise the Yamachin, but they are consummate warriors, and they would never have been so frightened by the specter of a coup as to sequester their generals at the capital, preventing them from training with the troops they commanded on paper. We revere scholars. They have their sages, but soldiers are the ones they truly respect.

“Madam,” you said, “I am only asking you to do what the ministry will ask of another programmer a few days from now. It doesn’t matter what battles one wins in the deeps of space if one can’t keep out of political trouble. Even if we all know the Yamachin will return once they’ve played out this farce of negotiations…”

You wanted me to destroy the man you were, but in a manner of your choosing and not your rivals’, all for the sake of saving Cho in times to come. This meant preserving your military acumen so you might be of use when Yamat returned to ravage Cho. Only a man so damned sure of himself would have chanced it. But you had routed the Yamachin navy at Red Sun and Hawks Crossing with a pittance of Chosar casualties, and no one could forget how, in the war’s early hours, you risked your command by crossing into Admiral Wan Kun’s jurisdiction to rally the shattered defense at Heaven’s Gate.

“Admiral,” I said, “are you sure? The half-death” — that’s the kindest euphemism — “might leave you with no more wit than a broken cup, and all for nothing. It has never been a safe procedure.” I didn’t believe you would be disgraced in a matter of days, although it came to pass as you predicted.

You smiled at that, blackly amused. “When calamity lands on your shoulder, madam, I assure you that you’ll find it difficult to mistake for anything else.” A corner of your mouth curled. “I imagine you’ve seen death in darker forms than I have. I have killed from vast distances, but never up close. You are braver by far than I have ever been.”

You were wrong about me, Admiral Yen, even if the procedure is easier with a willing patient. With anyone else, I would have congratulated myself on a task swiftly and elegantly completed.

You know the rest of the story. When you tell it to me, I will give you the beginning that I stole from you, even at your bidding. Although others know our nation Cho as the Realm Between Two Dragons, vast Feng-Huang and warlike Yamat, our national emblem is the tiger, and men like you are tigers among men.

Sometimes I think that each night I spin the story to myself, a moment of memory will return to you, as if we were bound together by the chains of a children’s fable. I know better. There are villains every direction I look. I am one of them. If you do not return, all that will be left for me is to remember, over and over, how I destroyed the man you should have been, the man you were.

By the time we took him seriously, he was an old man: Tsehan, the chancellor-general of Yamat, and its ruler in truth. Ministers came and ministers went, but Tsehan watched from his unmoving seat in Yamat’s parliament, the hawk who perched above them all.

He was not a man without refinement, despite the popular depiction of him as a wizened tyrant, too feeble to lead the invasion himself and too fierce to leave Cho in peace. Tsehan loved fine things, as the diplomats attested. His reception hall was bright with luxuries: sculptures of light and parabolic mirrors, paintings on silk and bamboo strips, mosaics made from shattered ancient celadon. He served tea in cups whose designs of seasonal flowers and fractals shifted in response to the liquid’s temperature or acidity. “For the people of Yamat,” he said, but everyone knew these treasures were for Tsehan’s pleasure, not the people’s.

War had nurtured him all his life. His father was a soldier of the lowest rank, one more body flung into Yamat’s bloody and tumultuous politics. It is no small thing, in Yamat — a nation at least as class-conscious as our own — to rise from a captain’s aide to heir-apparent of Chancellor-General Oshozhi. Oshozhi succeeded in bringing Yamat with its many would-be warlords under unified rule, and he passed that rule on to Tsehan.

It should not have surprised us that, with the end of Yamat’s bloody civil wars, Tsehan would thirst for more. But Cho was a pearl too small for his pleasure. The chancellor-general wanted Feng-Huang, vastest of nations, jewel of the stars. And to reach Feng-Huang, he needed safe passage through Cho’s primary nexus. Feng-Huang had been our ally and protector for centuries, the culture whose civilization we modeled ours after. Betraying Feng-Huang to the Yamachin would have been like betraying ourselves.

Yamat had been stable for almost a decade under Tsehan’s leadership, but we had broken off regular diplomatic relations during its years of instability and massacre. We had grown accustomed to hearing about dissidents who vanished during lunch, crèches destroyed by rival politicians and generals, bombs hidden in shipments of maiden-faced orchids, and soldiers who trampled corpses but wept over fire-scored sculptures. Some of it might even have happened.

When Tsehan sent the starsail Hanei to ask for the presence of a Chosar delegation and our government acquiesced, few of us took notice. Less than a year after that, our indifference would be replaced by outrage over Yamat’s demands for an open road to our ally Feng-Huang. Tsehan was not a falling blossom after all, as one of our poets said, but a rising dragon.

In the dream, he knew his purpose. His heartbeat was the drum of war. He walked between Earth and Heaven, and his path was his own.

And waking —

He brushed the hair out of his eyes. His palms were sweaty. And he had a name, if not much else.

Yen Shenar, no longer admiral despite his many victories, raised his hand, took aim at the mirror, and fired.

But the mirror was no mirror, only the wall’s watching eyes. He was always under surveillance. It was a fact of life in the Garden of Tranquility, where political prisoners lived amid parameterized hallucinations. The premise was that rebellion, let alone escape, was unlikely when you couldn’t be sure if the person at the corner was a guard or the hallucination of a childhood friend who had died last year. He supposed he should be grateful that he hadn’t been executed outright, like so many who had rioted or protested the government’s policies, even those like himself who had been instrumental in defending Cho from the Yamachin invasion.

He had no gun in his hand, only the unflinching trajectory of his own thoughts. One more thing to add to his litany of grievances, although he was sure the list changed from day to day, hour to hour, when the hallucinations intensified. Sourly, he wished he could hallucinate a stylus, or a chisel with which to gouge the walls, whether they were walls or just air. He had never before had such appreciation for the importance of recordkeeping.

Yen began to jog, trusting the parameters would keep him from smashing into a corner, although such abrupt pain would almost be welcome. Air around him, metal beneath him. He navigated through the labyrinth of overgrown bamboo groves, the wings of unending arches, the spiral blossoms of distant galaxies glimpsed through cracked lattices. At times he thought the groves might be real.

They had imprisoned him behind Yen Shenar’s face, handicapped him with Yen Shenar’s dreams of stars and shapes moving in the vast darkness. They had made the mistake of thinking that he shared Yen Shenar’s thrall-like regard for the government. He was going to escape the Garden if it required him to break each bone to test its verity, uproot the bamboo, break Cho’s government at its foundations.

The war began earlier, but what we remember as its inception is Sang Han’s death at Heaven’s Gate. Even the Yamachin captain who led the advance honored Sang’s passing.

Heaven’s Gate is the outermost system bordering Yamat, known for the number of people who perished settling its most temperate world, and the starsails lost exploring its minor but treacherous nexus. The system was held by Commandant Sang Han, while the province as a whole remains under the protection of Admiral Wan Kun’s fleet. Wan Kun’s, not Yen Shenar’s; perhaps Heaven’s Gate was doomed from the start.

Although Admiral Wan Kun was inclined to dismiss the reports of Yamachin warsails as alarmism, the commandant knew better. Against protocol, he alerted Admiral Yen Shenar in the neighboring system, which almost saved us. It is bitter to realize that we could have held Cho against the invaders if we had been prepared for them when they first appeared.

The outpost station’s surviving logs report that Sang had one last dinner with his soldiers, passing the communal cup down the long tables. He joked with them about the hundred non-culinary uses for rice. Then he warned the leading Yamachin warsail, Hanei, that passage through Cho to invade our ally Feng-Huang would not be forthcoming, whatever the delusion of Yamat’s chancellor-general.

Hanei and its escort responded by opening fire.

We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes. When photons march soldier-fashion at an admiral’s bidding, people die.

When the Yamachin boarded the battlestation serving Heaven’s Gate, Sang awaited them. By then, the station was all but shattered, a fruit for the pressing. Sang’s eyes were shadowed by sleepless nights, his hair rumpled, his hands unsteady.

The Hanei’s captain, Sezhi Tomo, was the first to board the station. Cho’s border stations knew his name. In the coming years, we would learn every nuance of anger or determination in that soft, suave voice. Sezhi spoke our language, and in times past he had been greeted as one of us. His chancellor-general had demanded his experience in dealing with Cho, however, and so he arrived as an invader, not a guest.

“Commandant,” he said to Sang, “I ask you and your soldiers to stand down. There’s time yet for war to be averted. Surrender the white gun.” Sezhi must have been aware of the irony of his words. He knew, as most Yamachin apparently did not, that a Chosar officer’s white gun represented not only his rank but his loyalty to the nation. Its single shot is intended for suicide in dire straits.

“Sezhi-kan,” the commandant replied, addressing the other man by his Yamachin title, “it was too late when your chancellor-general set his eye upon Feng-Huang.” And when our government, faction-torn, failed to heed the diplomats’ warning of Tsehan’s ambitions; but he would not say that to a Yamachin. “It was too late when you opened fire on the station. I will not stand down.”

“Commandant,” said Sezhi even as his guards trained their rifles on Sang, “please. Heaven’s Gate is lost.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “Sang, it’s over. At least save yourself and the people who are still alive.”

Small courtesies have power. In the records that made it out of Heaven’s Gate, we see the temptation that sweeps over the commandant’s face as he holds Sezhi’s gaze. We see the moment when he decides that he won’t break eye contact to look around at his haggard soldiers, and the moment when temptation breaks its grasp.

Oh, yes: the cameras were transmitting to all the relays, with no thought as to who might be eavesdropping.

“I will surrender the white gun,” Sang said, “when you take it from me. Dying is easier than letting you pass.”

Sezhi’s face held no more expression than night inside a nexus. “Then take it I shall. Gentlemen.”

The commandant drew the white gun from its holster, keeping it at all times aimed at the floor. He was right-handed.

The first shot took off Sang’s right arm.

His face was white as the blood spurted. He knelt — or collapsed — to pick up the white gun with his left hand, but had no strength left to stand.

The second shot, from one of the soldiers behind Sezhi, took off his left arm.

It’s hard to tell whether shock finally caused Sang to slump as the soldiers’ next twelve bullets slammed into him. A few patriots believe that Sang was going to pick up the white gun with his teeth before he died, but never had the opportunity. But the blood is indisputable.

Sezhi Tomo, pale but dry-eyed, bowed over the commandant’s fallen body, lifting his hand from heart to lips: a Chosar salute, never a Yamachin one. Sezhi paid for that among his own troops.

And Yen — Admiral, through no fault of your own, you received the news too late to save the commandant. Heaven’s Gate, to our shame, fell in days.

There is no need to recount our losses to Yamat’s soldiers. Once their warsails had entered Cho’s local space, they showed what a generation of civil war does for one’s martial abilities. Our world-bound populations fell before them like summer leaves before winter winds. One general wrote, in a memorandum to the government, that “death walks the only road left to us.” The only hope was to stop them before they made planetfall, and we failed at that.

We asked Feng-Huang for aid, but Feng-Huang was suspicious of our failure to inform them earlier of Yamat’s imperial designs. So their warsail fleets and soldiers arrived too late to prevent the worst of the damage.

It must pain you to look at the starsail battles lost, which you could have won so readily. It is easy to scorn Admiral Wan Kun for not being the tactician you are, less adept at using the nexuses’ spacetime terrain to advantage. But what truly diminishes the man is the fact that he allowed rivalry to cloud his judgment. Instead of using his connections at court to disparage your victories and accuse you of treason, he could have helped unify the fractious factions in coming up with a strategy to defeat Yamat. Alas, he held a grudge against you for invading his jurisdiction at Heaven’s Gate without securing prior permission.

He never forgave you for eclipsing him. Even as he died in defeat, commanding the Chosar fleet that you had led so effectively, he must have been bitter. But they say this last battle at Yellow Splendor will decide everything. Forget his pettiness, Yen. He is gone, and it is no longer important.

“I have your file,” the man said to Yen Shenar. His dark blue uniform did not show any rank insignia, but there was a white gun in his holster. “I would appeal to your loyalty, but the programmer assigned to you noted that this was unlikely to succeed.”

“Then why are you here?” Yen said. They were in a room with high windows and paintings of carp. The guards had given him plain clothing, also in dark blue, a small improvement on the gray that all prisoners wore.

The man smiled. “Necessity,” he said. “Your military acumen is needed.”

“Perhaps the government should have considered that before they put me here,” Yen said.

“You speak as though the government were a unified entity.”

As if he could forget. The court’s inability to face in the same direction at the same time was legendary.

“You were not without allies, even then,” the man said.

Yen tipped his head up: he was not a short man, but the other was taller. “The government has a flawed understanding of ‘military acumen,’ you know.”

The man raised an eyebrow.

“It’s not just winning at baduk or other strategy games, or the ability to put starsails in pretty arrangements,” Yen said. “It is leadership; it is inspiring people, and knowing who is worth inspiring; it is honoring your ancestors with your service. And,” he added dryly, “it is knowing enough about court politics to avoid being put in the Garden, where your abilities do you no good.”

“People are the sum of their loyalties,” the man said. “You told me that once.”

“I’m expected to recognize you?”

“No,” the man said frankly. “I told them so. We all know how reprogramming works. There’s no hope of restoring what you were.” There was no particular emotion in his voice. “But they insisted that I try.”

“Tell me who you are.”

“You have no way of verifying the information,” the man said.

Yen laughed shortly. “I’m curious anyway.”

“I’m your nephew,” the man said. “My name wouldn’t mean anything to you.” At Yen’s scrutiny, he said, “You used to remark on how I take after my mother.”

“I’m surprised the government didn’t send me back to the Ministry of Virtuous Thought to ensure my cooperation anyway,” Yen said.

“They were afraid it would damage you beyond repair,” he said.

“Did the programmer tell them so?”

“I’ve only spoken to her once,” the man said.

This was the important part, and this supposed nephew of his didn’t even realize it. “Did she have anything else to say?”

The man studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”

“I did not choose to be here,” Yen said, because it would be expected of him, although it was not true. Presumably, given that he had known what the king’s decree was to be, he could have committed suicide or defected. He was a strategist now and had been a strategist then. This course of action had to have been chosen for a reason.

He realized now that the Yen Shenar of yesteryear might not have been a man willing to intrigue against his enemies, even where it would have saved him his command. But he had been ready to become one who would, even for the sake of a government that had been willing to discard his service.

The man was frowning. “Will you accept your reinstatement into the military?”

“Yes,” Yen said. “Yes.” He was the weapon that he had made of himself, in a life he remembered only through shadows and fissures. It was time to test his forging, to ensure that the government would never be in a position to trap him in the Garden again.

This is the story the way they are telling it now. I do not know how much of it to believe. Surely it is impossible that you outmatched the Yamachin fleet when it was five times the size of your own; surely it is impossible that over half the Yamachin starsails were destroyed or captured. But the royal historians say it is so.

There has been rejoicing in the temporary capital: red banners in every street, fragrant blossoms scattered at every doorway. Children play with starsails of folded paper, pretending to vanquish the Yamachin foe, and even the thralls have memorized the famous poem commemorating your victory at Yellow Splendor.

They say you will come home soon. I hope that is true.

But all I can think of is how, the one time I met you, you did not wear the white gun. I wonder if you wear it now.

for my parents, with additional thanks to Prof. Barry S. Strauss

Yoon Ha Lee's fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Sybil's Garage. She was one of the section editors at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Currently she lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and daughter.

“January”
by Becca De La Rosa

Fionn took the dogs out to the water, and there, in the river’s reflection, he realised that January had left. He plunged his hands into the water, but she was not there; he sent the dogs barking over the hills, but they did not come back with her or a trail to her hiding place. No scent lay over the land. Exhausted and uneasy, Fionn and the dogs trudged back to the house. January was not there, either, though he hunted in every room, under tables and inside wardrobes. He only found his wife, curled up in the oven. The dogs lost interest and went to their beds. Fionn sat down on the kitchen linoleum.

Mara lay tucked neatly between the grill and the oven floor. She should have had to snap her neck to fit, and her throat should have been a mess of small bulging bones, but these days she bent at impossible angles, and her feet seemed to have disappeared entirely into the fan in the oven wall. She wore no clothes. It was a businesslike nudity rather than erotic. Charcoal dusted her skin.

“She’s disappeared,” Fionn said, to the linoleum, the oven, the snake-like curve of his wife’s neck.

Mara blinked her wide eyes. “Who?”

“January. She’s gone.”

“Not too long ago,” said Mara, “you were saying the same about me.”

“Don’t pretend you’re jealous.”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “Who is she? A lost lover?”

Fionn stared at her. “It’s January,” he said.

Mara laughed. Her hair tumbled out of the oven and onto the floor, so close that Fionn might have reached out and touched it. He knew better. “January was your friend too,” he told her. “Don’t you remember?”

“No. Tell me a story about her.”

Fionn thought, and found none. Mara had had few friends, but the ones she’d had were close; and Fionn could think of a hundred stories about each, events he had witnessed and ones he had only heard about, so well-worn with age and retellings that they felt whole and solid as fruit in his mouth.

“She isn’t real,” Mara said. “I could tell as soon as you said her name.”

“What do you mean, she isn’t real?”

“We know these things,” his wife said. She disentangled one hand to tap her forehead with a thin and pearly finger, and then coiled it back into a spring-tight fist, and slipped it away into the depths of the oven. Her we unnerved Fionn, because it was a growing we, one she mentioned more and more, a crowd steadily approaching from behind, ready to throw envious arms around her neck and pull her backwards, away from him.

“Some people just aren’t real,” Mara said, as if she had sensed a faux pas and wanted to remedy it. “You can tell by the sound of their names. She is not a real person, or not the kind of person it’s easy to find in reality, at any rate. How long has she been missing?”

“Since I went out to the water, maybe.”

“How long has that been?”

“An hour or so.”

Mara nodded thoughtfully, her chin and the crown of her head knocking against the grill, the oven wall. “What do you remember?” she asked.

Fionn thought about January. He could picture her easily, standing at the edge of the river with a yellow scarf in her hair, but he did not know if it was his river, and her smile was distant and unfocused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know her face, I feel as though I know her, but I can’t tell you why.”

“We can talk about it later,” Mara said. “You look tired. You were out in the cold. Cook your dinner, Fionn.”

In the past year and a half Mara had grown more watchful over him. She ordered him to wear scarves and boots in bad weather, reminded him of meals he would otherwise have forgotten, sent him off to bed at a reasonable hour. She made sure he kept all his appointments and ordered him to visit the doctor for small but persistent illnesses. Why, he had asked her once, laughing, did she care so much? Didn’t she want him to die comfortably of starvation one day, so they could live together forever, pressed to each other’s hearts like baking bread inside an oven? “Don’t even joke about that,” Mara had hissed. “Don’t you dare.”

Fionn sat beside the oven to eat his dinner, while Mara sang to him, an unrecognisable and tuneless song, but comforting in its own way. The dogs gathered at his feet.

“I’ve thought about it,” Mara announced, when he had finished. “I think you ought to look for her. If you know her but don’t know her, if her disappearance is so troubling to you, there must be a reason. There is a purpose behind it.”

“Is this one of the things you just know?” he asked.

She blinked at him, her eyes too big in her thin, flattened face, a strange facsimile of herself. “Don’t ask me that, Fionn.”

So he asked, instead, “Will you help me?”

Mara smiled her same sweet smile. “Of course I will. But you won’t be able to look for her here. You know that, don’t you? You’ll have to leave.”

“I know,” he said.

Fionn washed the dinner dishes slowly, listening to Mara hum below the rush of water. Soap grew fluttering bubbles and each bubble spelled out January’s name. January, the colour of a sun rising, her voice in his ear, January waiting. “Where would you look for her, if you were me?” he asked his wife.

Mara manoeuvred her head around to look up at him, a thoughtful owl. “I would examine the clues,” she said. “I would start at the beginning.”

“Elliptical,” he said dryly.

“But accurate.”

Fionn bent, kissed the air beside her cheek, and shut the oven door.

When Mara had first returned, when Fionn recovered from the shock and the strange new logic of his wife as a ghost, he found himself prone  to odd hungers. Down in the village, putting sliced pan into a basket, the desire for physical sensation would suddenly snatch at him and he would spend the next hour wandering through the shop aisles, touching knobbed avocados, rough soda bread, the silky synthetic feathers on a feather duster, paper napkins, basil leaves, broom handles; leaving a trail of opened packaging behind himself. Day by day, in slow increments, Mara grew stranger. In the beginning, although he could never touch her with his own hands, she had reconciled her shape to the things around her, the oven walls, the floor. Now she was forgetting how to exist in a concrete world. Her hands sank through iron. Her hair floated around her face like breathing seaweed, immune to gravity or the illusion of gravity. Her bones dwindled, she grew tightly coiled like curled ribbon. Fionn wondered what it would be like to touch her spiralling fingers, how her drifting hair would feel; but he did not know and never would, and this knowledge was a recurring illness that left and returned to attack him and left again. Having a ghost wife was like being married to a concept, an abstract noun, something beloved but elusive.

That night he dreamed of January, while a storm vaulted the roof to scream against the angles and planes of the house. Dressed in a yellow macintosh and wellingtons, January stood against the backdrop of foreign hills and valleys. Her hair whipped in the wind; small dragons snapped among the tangled ends. She smiled, and didn’t smile. Fionn, who did not seem to exist in this dream at all, saw that a chain around her neck held three small charms: a frowning sun, a sliver of moon, a lidded eye. January held a book in one hand. Her fingers were blackened with soil or ash. Fionn asked a question, and January answered, her answer was in the affirmative, she reached for him. Downstairs, Mara sang wistfully into the echo of the oven.

The next morning Fionn left the house and followed the last few traces January had left behind on his land and in the water: a yellow flower, yellow paint splashed on a broken fence, a bird with yellow plumage on its chest. January left her messages in odd places, borrowing from landscape and flora and fauna as she pleased. Fionn followed her trail down to the barren orchard. Rainwater dripped from the apple trees, although the storm had blown over hours ago. The ground was wet and mulchy.

A small girl in a yellow smock sat in the crook of a tree-branch, looking down at Fionn. Light pressed against her back, hiding her face from him; her feet, dangling down, were bare, and yellow ribbons flapped and tangled from the hem of her dress. One of the dogs barked at her, half-heartedly, and then gave up and trotted away towards the river.

“I’m looking for January,” said Fionn.

The girl said, “I know.”

“My name is Fionn.”

“Fionn Cogann. It says so on your van.”

“Do you know where she is?”

She shifted, and Fionn saw that a black sun had been painted over her mouth, with triangular rays like the points on a compass, making her look odd and dangerous, poisonous, many-toothed. He stared, fascinated and appalled. “Come up here and talk to me,” she suggested, so he pulled himself up to settle on the upper branches of the apple tree. Closer, the girl looked to be about ten or eleven, and above her fierce black mouth, black freckles had been dotted across her cheekbones. “I’m Swan,” she said.

“Do you know where January went?”

“No.” Swan brushed moss and rainwater from her hands. On one palm, Fionn noticed, someone had painted an open eye; on the other, an eye-shaped moon. “She’s gone altogether, or hidden very well. How do you know her?”

Fionn thought of January, solid and unplaceable. “I don’t know.”

The little girl shrugged. “January can be like that.”

“How do you know her?”

“She is my sister.” When Swan smiled, it stretched the sun out into a mouthful of fangs. “Though she didn’t live with me, not for years. She lived where she pleased.”

“How did you know she was missing?”

“The same way you did.”

At one end of the world, the villagers worked and conversed, brought children to school, studied, cooked; at the other end, Mara lay in Fionn’s oven like a snail curled up in its own shell; but this was somewhere in between the two, a dim twilight place, utterly inexplicable. “Has she done this before?” Fionn asked, half hopelessly. “Disappeared without warning?”

“Hundreds of times,” said Swan. “But never like this. This time is different, and I know it, and you know it.”

They stared at one another. Swan’s pockets, Fionn saw, were full of cut flowers, daisies, buttercups, children’s flowers, but none of them was wilting; they stood up tall and elegant, as though sipping water from some hidden source. Fionn sighed. “Have you been sitting here waiting for me?” he asked Swan.

“I have been waiting for someone. I assumed it was you.”

“How long?”

“Two hours,” she said, “three. I don’t know.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked her.

“I am,” said Swan.

Fionn led her back to the house. Swan paused to examine the shoes lined up in the hallway, the umbrellas toppled over beside the coat-rack, the photographs on the wall - Fionn and Mara’s wedding, Fionn and Mara in black and white, reduced to only the light and the darknesses of themselves - and the big gilt mirror, in which Swan’s face floated small and pale as a ghostly fish. Fionn left her studying her own reflection and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. He did not open the oven, not wanting Swan to know about his dead wife, not wanting to share Mara with her, but it was the first thing Swan did when she wandered in from the hall; she sat cross-legged on the linoleum and tugged at the oven door. Mara blinked at Swan.

“Who are you?” Swan asked.

“I might ask you the same question,” Mara said. “This is my house.”

Swan hooked one arm around her grass-stained knees. “You’re dead.”

“I am.”

“My sister might be dead,” she offered, a conciliatory gesture.

“I’m sorry,” said Mara.

Fionn made tea and bacon sandwiches, and he and Swan ate on the floor while Mara nibbled delicately at a piece of burnt onion. Swan ate two sandwiches, and then finished Fionn’s, and hunted through his refrigerator for lunch meats and cold leftover potatoes. “Where did you live, if not with January?” Fionn asked her, when she had exhausted his food supply and sat arranging frozen raspberries into indecipherable, bleeding designs on the linoleum.

“Irrelevant, Fionn,” said Swan, and she sounded calm and self-assured as any adult.

“Do you have any other brothers or sisters?”

Swan stood without answering, wiped raspberry juice onto her yellow dress, and left the kitchen. Mara shooed Fionn away with both hands, and after a moment he followed the little girl into the living room. Swan held up a picture of Fionn as a child. It was a bad photograph, but one he loved, because it was the only picture he had left of his mother: she stood behind him, pale and indistinct, her long hair blown across her face; and Fionn sat in a patch of dusky grass, playing with finger paints. Three black fingerprint dots crossed his cheek. His mouth was a dark and painty smudge.

“Fionn,” Swan said, her voice low, urgent. “There is somewhere we have to go.”

Violins had woken Swan that morning, shrilling against the chime of a grandfather clock. She knew her sister was missing. Scented air blew across the tops of green bottles, blue bottles, clear bottles scattered across the room, and the breathy notes sang in harmony, and they sang Swan, Swan, Swan.

She crawled out of her bed when the strings woke her. Swan lived, and had lived for the past three years, in an old brewery: a place still summery with the smell of hops, where nameless machines rusted and broken glass caught every angle of light on the floor and in the windows. She walked barefoot across the factory.

The first owners of the brewery lived there still. They were old, a few hundred years old, so long dead that they had forgotten even how to be ghosts, and only remembered their roots in the roots clinging to the earth. Once, Swan expected, they had carried shapes and voices; these remnants drifted away piece by piece, and now they were nothing  but air and misplaced colours in light. They cared for her like loving parents. They had little to say, but listened sympathetically to her stories, and made her tea full of tin buttons and dust. They had met January only once.

Swan climbed up into an empty window-frame and looked out over the canal and boardwalk. January was nowhere to be seen, not in the waterfront businesses, the tall apartments, the crumbling lacework of bridge. Swan was used to disappearances. Her family was a family of strangers. But not January, not in this dreadful manner, an absence like a body carved in two. Something terrible had happened.

January had been young once, too. She had lived with Swan in a city apartment. They had slept side-by-side in a king-sized bed, and their walls were decorated with strings of seashells, sugary sea glass, dried flowers. January baked mussels for their supper in smoky sacrificial fires. Her younger face was different from the one she wore later, as an adult: swirled with black designs, her lips plum-red, vicious red, golden hoops swinging in her ears. Her older face was more sedate, more cosmopolitan, but Swan remembered the days when January climbed trees for the choicest apples and screamed to the wind. January had been Swan’s protector, and neither men nor monsters ever troubled them. But when Swan turned eight January packed away her lacy dresses, her willow spears, her golden earrings, put on a face more suitable for the outside world, and walked away. Swan had not cried. Without January to be the strong one, Swan was no longer the weak one, which meant she had grown strong, which meant she would never be afraid again. She left her own home and wandered up and down the city until she found the abandoned brewery.

Now, sensing her worry, the brewery owners surrounded Swan with their sweet breath. One made her a cup of tea. One brought a mouldy biscuit. Swan swallowed a piece of broken glass, an apple seed, a dead moth. “January is missing,” she said. “What do you think I should do? Do you think I should look for her?”

Automatically, the shapeless shapes of the brewery owners shook their gusty heads. No, no, no, they breathed.

January had visited Swan in the brewery once, almost a year before. She appeared in the factory front, wearing a belted yellow raincoat and fingerless lace gloves, bearing gifts like a conquering hero. She gave Swan expensive dresses, suede boots, sun hats with hanging veils of silk, wheels of cheese and salted meats, strings of glossy beads, elderflower cordial in frosted bottles, a silver tea service, pearl-drop earrings, a new yellow jacket. Swan accepted these gifts wordlessly. Rain dripped from January’s coat, though outside the sun shone.  Her hair clung damply around her neck. Troubled, the brewery owners stood at Swan’s back, swirling themselves into a mistrustful light show. January had not noticed. Her adult face, clear of black paint, was swept with blush, her eyes dark and fluttering lashes long as spider legs. She spoke in a strange new dialect. January stayed for one night; in the morning she kissed Swan’s cheek, and left.

Swan ignored the advice of the brewery owners. They begged her to stay, to lie in the sunny factory and doze and dream and let them blow music from the many warped bright bottles. Instead, she dressed and she tied up her long hair. She pressed her mouth to the glassy ground. January’s scent hung there, faintly. Swan left the brewery owners to their own dreams.

Every step Fionn took away from Mara was a tangible one, a chain around his feet. He sat in a silver taxi and watched mile after mile of distance separate them. This world, the world into which he shot like a reluctant bullet, seemed to be the ghostly one, barely readable outside the car window; while his house and his dead wife were solid, a known territory. If Mara had taken up residence in his skull instead of his oven none of this would matter. There would be no room for imaginary January then, only the two of them, husband and wife, husband and ghost, the most intimate marriage.

They left the taxi at a hill lined with tall Georgian houses. Up on a black cliff, a castle made of golden rock balanced like a bird perching over the city. A tourist attraction, an historical remnant. Fionn wondered about the castle’s ovens. Where were they? Did someone keep them working? Did other ghosts live in them, royal ghosts, passing their time with songs and counting games, waiting until the castle crumbled around them? If the world’s ovens were populated with ghosts, how did anyone ever get any cooking done? A mystery, Fionn thought, one not even Mara would answer.

He and Swan counted houses until they came to seventy-six, a number that pleased them both, and they stopped simultaneously, and nodded at one another. Fionn opened the door. Inside the house smelled of cooking rice, limes, and another sweet, unnameable fruit. Along the seashell-grey walls, someone had hung old black-and-white photographs, minimalist things: a table full of light, a hat stand with one black hat, an empty bridge; stenographer’s shorthand for a life history. Swan smashed one frame against the wall and picked the photo out from the shards of glass. On the back was written Où es-tu? The picture showed a path of white stones, leading from nowhere to nowhere. Fionn and Swan made their way slowly down the length of the corridor, smashing every glass frame, examining every smooth, age-worn photograph. Each one had a note for them to read. Put together, they made up a strange news story, one without statistics or irrefutable evidence, and too arcane to be useful. Fionn and Swan collected the photographs in their pockets and stepped into the first room they found.

It was a bedroom, January’s. Dusty teacups arranged like standing stones waited on the floor to trip them up. The bedclothes on the iron-barred bed were rumpled; Swan found a single piece of orange peel beneath the pillow, a clue that left them with more questions than answers. On the ceiling above them, black mould blossomed in the shape of a woman’s frowning, indistinct face, a reproachful guardian angel. Fionn stared across the room at the bathroom door. He knew it was the bathroom door; and he knew that he should not cross the room to see it, knew that if he tried the floor would buck and tilt like a rough ocean, the armchair would snap ferocious teeth at him and the wardrobe would yawn to swallow him whole. He moved towards it. “Don’t,” Swan whispered.

In the bathroom, mirrors glinted everywhere. They were sulky creatures and refused to show Fionn his own pale face. Coloured water had fallen on the floor, and he side-stepped it carefully. January’s bathtub was a wide one, knobbed jets and painted tiles, surrounded by vials of bath salts, perfumed soap, tiny bottles of essential oils. In the bathtub lay January. Her hair was tangled and matted. Blood had dried into a dull glint. January wore veined, blue-tinted skin, and her eyes were open, cloudy like lake-water in a glass.

“You knew, didn’t you,” Fionn said.

He crept closer. January’s chest lay open like a tree, and inside it was a white staircase crowded with ivy, leading down, and warm air, the sounds of birds calling somewhere in the distance. Swan, hovering beside Fionn, rested her face on his arm.

“What are the rules,” he asked, “in a situation like this? Are we here to sew her up? To bury her and forget her?”

“No,” said Swan.

If January was dead, they were all dead, Fionn and Swan as well as Mara coiling in her oven, January neat and ajar. It seemed an impossible situation. Fionn gazed, pensive, at his lack of a reflection. In the end, he offered his hand to Swan, and she took it, the half-moon on her palm smiling into his skin; together, they stepped into the bathtub. He lifted Swan onto the first white step, and then swung himself down onto the open path in January’s chest. Fionn and his sister started down the stairs.

Somewhere, bread was baking. Mara smelled it and rose, uncoiling the way a snake rises, charmed, from its basket. She had not been a baker. She did not know pound cakes from fairy cakes; but these days the smell of bread welcomed her. She extended her pointed toes delicately. Each step was another oven, a shoe for her feet, until she found the bread in a stranger’s kitchen, and wrapped herself around it like a nesting doll. Behind her, darkness stretched out, never-ending; in front of her, Fionn wandered through the world; they were choices, ones she could not deny, only delay; and ovens seemed to speak her language. This one was vast, sweet-scented. A chef’s home. A bakery. Mara nibbled experimentally at a piece of char on the oven floor.

A small wind blew a puff of flour in Mara’s eyes, with the scent of seaweed and roses. January had tossed her yellow hair. “Greetings,” she said. Mara could not place the accent, but it did not matter. It was unmistakably January, impossibly January. Who else would it be?

“Does this mean you’re dead?” Mara asked. “My husband is off looking for you. He is a wonderful man, a lovely man. If he dies in your pursuit I will be furious with you.”

January shook her head. “I don’t know what I am.”

“I’m dead.”

“I know you are,” January said, and laughed her beautiful laugh. “But for people like me, like my sister, like your husband, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. There are not only two states of being, alive and dead. There are others.”

Mara ground burnt bread between her teeth. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know what it means.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Mara thought of Fionn, the way she always thought of Fionn. If he died, who would hunt for him? Who would cross the country in search of his body, whether alive, or dead, or some mysterious third option? She asked, “What part of you is here, if you don’t know where you are?”

“The smallest part,” said January.

I will hunt for him, Mara thought; and it was a realisation, and a choice.

January drew herself closer, as though seeking heat in the heat of the oven. “Don’t you want to know what happened to me?”

“No.”

“Do you believe in ghost stories?”

“No,” Mara said, judiciously. “Do you believe that they can help you?”

The baking bread glowed like a fire signal.

Becca De La Rosa lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she is studying Ancient Greek at university. Her stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Sybil's Garage, and the recent anthology Phantom, edited by Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay, among other places.

“Peculiar Notes of Contradiction: A Conversation with N.K. Jemisin”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

A simple walk, rich with impending doom. A chance encounter, taut with peculiar familiarity. A main character whose back-story drips into the surface action with maddeningly beautiful precision and poignancy.

Last month, N. K. Jemisin’s short story “Non-Zero Probabilities,” was nominated as a finalist for the 2009 Nebula Award. A well-deserved honor.

“N. K. Jemison is coming on strong in speculative fiction,” said Lettie Prell novelist and editor of Broadsheet. “The first story of hers I came upon was “The You Train” published in Strange Horizons in 2007. That story went on to receive an honorable mention in the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 21st collection. Another story, “Playing Nice with God’s Bowling Ball,” won an honorable mention in the Year’s Best Science Fiction (2008). Then in 2009 comes “Non-Zero Probabilities” (Clarkesworld #36), and after reading it I’m excited to read more from her, for her voice has matured and also her insights, and a more poetic prose that nevertheless maintains the unique voice I first noticed and admired.”

Jemisin lives in Brooklyn, NY where she works as a counseling psychologist. Her stories have appeared here in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizon’s, Baen’s Universe and others. Her first novel, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was published in March by Orbit Books.

Her novel, like her stories, has been praised for its originality, complex-yet-clear plotting, and stunning world-building. In addition to all that, Jemisin’s fiction burns with an anger fueled by an undeniable gentleness of spirit.

“Nora Jemisin’s imagination is refreshing and illuminating,” said Ann VanderMeer, the editor-in-chief of Weird Tales. “I always know I’m about to get a special treat when I see a new work of fiction from her. I can’t wait to see what she does next!”

Not long before the voting deadline for the Nebula, Jemisin and I talked about writing, rejectomancy, and peculiar notes of contradiction.

In an interview in the back of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, you cite John Coltrane as an influence. What is it about Coltrane and/or his music that influenced you?

I like the music itself — serious earworm stuff — but I also just love the way he plays it. There are times when you can tell he’s stopped caring about what his audience thinks, or whether they’re even there. He’s totally caught up in it, playing for himself; the rest of us are just along for the ride. I admire that kind of submission to the art. Wish I’d been able to meet him.

What do you enjoy most about writing fiction?

Getting the voices out of my head? I’m not sure there’s an “enjoy most” component to it — I’ve been writing for nearly as long as I can remember, and making up stories in my head for longer than that. Writing them down is almost a relief, because otherwise I find myself daydreaming and spacing out. (Sometimes I do that anyway.)

Lately, though, I’ve discovered another pleasure, which is seeing people get lost in enjoyment of something I’ve written. For example, I’ve seen a few comments on “Non-Zero Probabilities” from people who’d like to see more of the story — even a novel. I’m not sure I’ll ever do that, but it’s a real delight to see people say that they went on imagining what happened even after the story ended.

Do you prefer novel or short story writing? Feel more at home in one or the other?

I have a long-standing preference for novels, but I’ve learned to love short stories. I’ve always written novels; even as a child, my first story was intended to be a novel. (I didn’t understand word count in those days; I just figured that if I put a cover and binding on it – cardboard and yarn in this case — it was a novel.) I only started writing short stories late in my professional career — less than ten years ago. I’ve discovered that they’re just as exciting as writing novels — but they don’t last as long. And I hate it when something fun ends too soon.

Are there any similarities between your day job and writing fiction?

Hmm, maybe a few. I’m a counseling psychologist in day job life, specializing in career counseling, so much of my work consists of helping people stay focused on their goals and reminding them of reality when the rejectomancy (e.g., “I sent out 50 resumes and got no callbacks. I’m unemployable!”) takes over. As a writer, I’m constantly fighting rejectomancy, albeit of a different nature (e.g., “I sent out this story 50 times and nobody wants it. I’m a terrible writer!”), so I end up using the same pep-talks on myself. Beyond that, there’s not much similarity.

Your day-to-day profession leads me to wonder and make some assumptions… how do you go about creating characters, developing, making them feel so real?

Honestly, I don’t really try to do that. The characters spring into my brain fully-formed, or form themselves as the story progresses. Sometimes I choose to show everything I know about them, and sometimes I show very little. But it’s plot, not characterization, that’s difficult for me.

The world of the Inheritance trilogy, you’ve mentioned elsewhere, began with images. What were those images and how did you develop them into a world?

Well, I smoked a lot of crack — Wait, did I say that? Let me start over.

Actually, I dreamt them, or maybe day-dreamed them. That’s how many of my story ideas crop up. In the case of “Non-Zero Probabilities”, I imagined a woman searching frantically for a four-leafed clover in the funky empty lot on the corner of my block. In the case of the Inheritance Trilogy, the first image that hit me was of a child playing with floating spheres, a la the glass balls used by Jared in the movie Labyrinth. (Wait, did I say that too? Well, now you know what kind of stuff I was exposed to in my formative years.) In this case, the floating spheres were actually tiny planets, and the child — who was incredibly cute — had old, somehow disturbing eyes. Naturally I needed to immediately figure out the backstory of this image. As I did, other images came to me: of Sky, the “floating” palace; of a god on a leash; more. All of the images had the same peculiar note of contradiction in common — ancient eyes in a young face, an entity of cosmic power and significance reduced to slavery, and so on. The only thing I could find to reconcile these images was some sort of mythology, since mythology routinely syncretizes contradictions. Everything else fell out from that.

Power struggles, colonialism, social justice, what is it about these themes that sparks your imagination and compels you to write stories?

Well, really, none of that stuff sparks my imagination. It sparks my anger, and compels me to do something to solve the problem in the real world. But because that’s part of my reality, it does tend to appear in my fantasy as well. Honestly, I’m surprised that I don’t see these themes in fantasy more often. So much of fantasy focuses on worlds that are full of deep, deadly inequities — medieval Europe, for example. Feudalism wasn’t exactly happy fun time for most of the population, the nobility included. Yet most fantasy seems to prefer an idealized, Vaseline-lensed version of this kind of society, rather than the reality. Granted, we’re writing fantasy; it doesn’t have to be realistic. But I do wonder why so many fantasy writers choose those particular elements to gloss over, again and again. I suppose because they don’t want to deal with those things – but racism, sexism, classism, and the aftershocks of colonialism are part of my daily life. I don’t have a choice about ignoring them, even in fictional form.

What role does the reading and creating of speculative fiction play in your life?

It’s my cheapest and most reliable means of entertainment. I get frustrated with TV because the stories so often disappoint me, and because the images are never as good as what I can conjure up in my head. Video games do a better job, but they’re expensive. I’m fond of visual and performative arts — been really getting into Shakespeare since I moved to New York; Shakespeare in the Park is the best. And I love having easy access to so many great artists who do mindblowing work: most recently I’ve been fascinated by Takashi Murakami and Yinka Shonibare, featured-exhibit artists at the Brooklyn Museum. But books are still the #1 mind-sink for me.

And what role does speculative fiction play in society?

A mirror? Prophecy? Reflective prophecy? I don’t really know how to answer that. I think all stories, regardless of medium or genre, serve the same purpose for humankind: to help us define meaning in our environment or experience. I don’t think speculative fiction is any more or less useful for that purpose than, say, romance, or high literary stuff. It’s just the method/medium I enjoy most.

What’s in store for the Inheritance Trilogy? Did The Broken Kingdoms present you with any notable challenges? How is work on Book Three coming?

The Broken Kingdoms was challenging at first because I kept trying to write the same kind of story that I’d done in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. But then I realized it can’t be that kind of story. It’s going to take place in a more open-air environment than the hothouse that was Sky: Shadow, the city beneath the palace. And it takes place ten years later, showing how the world has begun to adapt to the changes that took place in the first book. It will focus on Oree, a young artist who’s just trying to make ends meet — “living just enough for the city”, so to speak. (I’m a Stevie Wonder fan too.) So there won’t be a lot of high-fantastic political intrigue, because the story isn’t about the rulers this time. At the same time there will be a focus on things the first book couldn’t really examine, like organized crime in a world of mortals and meddling gods, and what it means to be a victim of the Arameri’s harsh rule, and what happens when a religion — and a god — suddenly lets faithful followers down.

Book 3 is moving in a still newer direction. That one will focus on Sieh, the trickster/child-god introduced in the first book. It’s a kind of perverse bildungsroman, which starts when Sieh suddenly starts growing up against his will. Since his godly power and immortality are dependent on him being childish, what this means is that he’s changing from an incredibly powerful god into a helpless mortal — a death sentence, basically, from which he’s got only seventy years or so to escape. (Not much time, from the perspective of a several-billion-years-old being.) So he’s working against the clock to figure out what happened to him and why — and in the meantime, since he now has to eat and sleep and avoid moving vehicles, he’s forced to rely on some old enemies: the Arameri. Who are dealing with their own very serious problems by this point in the series. This one is turning out to be both funnier (because Sieh has the best sense of humor out of all the gods) and more bittersweet than I expected. We’ll see what the final result looks like.

Coltrane’s music grew more and more… expansive, mind-bending and limit-pushing. Do you see yourself heading in a similar direction?

It’s too early to say! I’ll go wherever my muse takes me, as long as someone’s willing to pay me rent money in the process. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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.

“We Come in Pieces: The Alien as Metaphor”
by Daniel M. Kimmel

When, in a movie or TV show, the aliens arrive on Earth, or we meet them somewhere out in space, one thing is certain: whatever they’re supposed to represent, it’s not life on other worlds. Each genre has certain stock characters and situations which, in the hands of a master storyteller, can be used to turn a story into a work of art, or at least great entertainment. They can also be used to discuss things in a kind of code where facing it head on might be too heavy or controversial. For example the western High Noon is often seen as a parable about the Hollywood blacklist, with the Gary Cooper character systematically abandoned by all his friends and neighbors. In 1952 the blacklist was a topic filmmakers were unable to tackle directly.

Inevitably stories where humans encounter beings from other worlds are really about us, not them. Often it’s about the ways we deal with people we view as “other.” If, at times, viewers become caught up in the lives of the alien characters, it’s because they, too, are being used to tell us something about the human condition. Once we know what kind of human in alien guise we’re dealing with, the point of the story becomes clear. Let’s take a look at five different metaphoric aliens.

The Alien as Healer

He comes to Earth with a message of peace, assumes the guise of a Carpenter, is persecuted, killed by the authorities, and is then brought back to life with a warning that we must change our ways. That’s the narrative of the Christian Bible, of course, but it’s also the plot of the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Here the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie) looks and speaks like us and wants to help us avoid destruction by getting us to give up our warlike ways. Although the film is obviously a product of the Cold War, the antagonists here are not the merely the Russians but any political and military authority. Klaatu’s message turns out to be best appreciated by scientists and other intellectuals, along with a widowed mom and her young son. In addition to the overt and deliberate borrowings from Christian theology, Klaatu is delivering an equally subversive message encouraging us to question authority. Humanity will advance when it places its trust in wise people instead of powerful ones. Just as importantly, we must trust ourselves.

The aliens in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E. T. don’t have that kind of agenda (E.T., of course, just wanted to go home) but they also bring a message of healing. The characters most open to the message of the aliens in Close Encounters are those who haven’t lost their childlike sense of wonder, while it is actual children who befriend and rescue E.T. In the latter film it is the authorities, including the scientific ones, who risk the alien’s life. Since we in the audience are asked to cheer for the aliens and the humans who befriend them, the message of peace and love and being open to new and wondrous things is key. It’s the grown-ups who have forgotten how to see the world with a child’s eyes who need help.

Even in the marvelous spoof Galaxy Quest, the silly but lovable aliens who put all their hopes in the cast of a canceled TV show end up helping the jaded actors realize their true potential. The pompous star (Tim Allen) who played at heroism must now truly act heroically, while the bit player (Sam Rockwell) gets the opportunity to become a lead. Even the actor embittered by his career as a TV alien (Alan Rickman) learns to embrace what was great about his character.

In all these films the kind-hearted, benevolent aliens serve as the means for both the viewer and the on-screen characters to realize what is best about humanity.

The Alien as Evil Empire

There’s no question that many aliens in Cold War era movies and TV shows were stand-ins for the Soviet Union. It’s not surprising that those who attacked us in the 1950s films War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars came from the Red Planet. If The Blob wasn’t Red, it was certainly pink, and its goal was to overtake and consume everyone around it, almost like a Communist front group. These aliens were all after land and power, as even Marvin the Martian demonstrates in the classic Warner Bros. cartoon, Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. Dodgers has already claimed Planet X for the Earth when the “Martian Maggot” spaceship makes a belated landing. Marvin tries to steal the planet, the only known source of the “shaving cream atom,” for Mars.

The 1950s and 1960s gave us many examples of aliens as metaphorical Cold War rivals. In the original The Thing, the alien may have been a carrot monster from space, but here the military authority was shown to be correct in engaging in a shoot first, ask questions later policy. The brilliant scientist who wants to try to communicate with it endangers everyone. Even in carrot form, the movie makes clear, Communists can’t be reasoned with. They must be defeated with brute force. When, at film’s end, we’re told to “Keep watching the skies,” audiences knew it wasn’t only for UFOs. It was also for those Soviet weapons which would signify the start of World War III. Similarly, the sneaky aliens of Invaders from Mars set up a base where they can plant devices that transform humans into willing slaves. Those parents, teachers, police officers and military officials under Martian control become stand-ins for Communist fifth columnists.

The Klingons in the original Star Trek TV series served much the same purpose. Where the peaceful Federation (read: the West) wants only to explore the galaxy, the Klingons are out there stirring up trouble for their own nefarious ends. Such was the power of the metaphor that when the real Russians complained about the absence of a Russian crew member on the Enterprise — given the successes of the Soviet space program — the character of Chekhov (Walter Koenig) was added. Yes, he was part of the Federation, but he would also brag about various Russian accomplishments, often rewriting history in the process. If the “real” Russian was now one of the good guys, the alien Klingons represented what we really feared about them.

The Alien as Corrupter

Sometime aliens represent our own worst excesses, not an external threat. One of the most famous alien invasions on television occurred in the Twilight Zone episode entitled “To Serve Man.” The benevolent visitors cure our diseases, end famine and war, and even offer to take Earthlings to the paradise of their home world. The humans become complacent, happy to take all these gifts as their due without asking the price. The memorable price is that the alien book that gives the episode its title turns out to be a cookbook.

More recently the revival of the series V has brought similarly benevolent aliens with ulterior motives. When the aliens offer their free advanced medical treatments to humans, it is this a swipe at President Barack Obama’s health care proposals, or is it a critique of how we weren’t taking care of our own? Whichever side of the issue you come down on, V has the answer: be suspicious.

The original Alien would seem to have a simple message: if you encounter an alien designed by H. R. Giger, go screaming in the opposite direction. However in watching the film it is clear that it is personal and corporate greed that sets the story in motion. The crew of the Nostromo see the opportunity for bonuses in retrieving the alien egg while their corporate masters see their employees as expendable if they manage to bring back alien technology or lifeforms. The profit motive proves to be a death sentence for nearly all concerned.

Two of the sequel Star Trek series — Next Generation and Deep Space 9 — offer many alien races and metaphors, but in this context the arrival of the Ferengi offered not only comic relief but a chance to show capitalism run amok. Their “Rules of Acquisition” spell out a philosophy that would not have been out of place on Wall Street in the last few decades, with adages like, “Once you have their money, you never give it back” and “Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.” In the guise of aliens, these characters suggested that we are our own worst enemy.

The Alien as Victim

Sometimes the alien stands in, not for our exploiters, but for our victims. The “Prawns” of the South African District 9 were an obvious substitute for the native black Africans who had been subjected to apartheid. Often in a story set in the future we’ll see that humanity has moved beyond racism and now projects their xenophobia and prejudice onto alien species. This was the driving force of the plot of Avatar, with the Na’vi substituting for American Indians, Australian aborigines, or whatever native population subjugated by western colonialism you prefer. Where mainstream critics compared it to Dances with Wolves and the animated Pocahontas, science fiction fans might have noticed the similarities to Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story “The Word for World is Forest,” which pitted militaristic humans against the native population on another planet. Instead of asking us to be open to other ways of thinking and living, as in the “alien as messiah” films, these are harsh warnings about the damage powerful civilizations do to the powerless.

Sometimes the victimized aliens are closer to home. Both the movie and TV series “Alien Nation used the Newcomers as a marker for prejudice in our everyday lives. Although it was set up as a buddy cop story, Alien Nation was really about integrating the Newcomers into the American way of life. The human cop in both versions had to overcome negative attitudes towards the aliens and, in the series, eventually started dating one of them. This led to a hilarious scene where he’s introducing her to one of his favorite aspects of Earth culture – the Three Stooges – and she looks at him admonishingly and says, “If you only knew what ‘Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk’ meant in our language.” It was a low key example of the theme of Alien Nation: each subculture in our society has things to offer as well as providing a unique perspective on the mainstream world.

The Alien as Unknowable

Why do the unseen aliens in Independence Day attack Earth? Why do the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers want to replace humanity? What is the agenda of the superior beings who created the monoliths of 2001? Why couldn’t the super-intelligent Krell realize what unleashing the power of the mind could mean in Forbidden Planet?

In each case the answer is, “We don’t know.” We like to have things explained and to see that things make sense. When confronted with the unknown there’s usually someone who wants to make it known, whether it means conquering a disease or climbing Mount Everest or heading into space. Yet there is much we don’t know and can’t know and these aliens stand in for our fears and frustrations in such situations.

In movies like the original War of the Worlds and Independence Day there are people who want to welcome the space visitors to Earth. They must have so much to teach us. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Instead, the humans get blasted. One of the hardest things for people to understand is that not everyone sees the world as we do. It’s why westerners who prize freedom of the press and Muslims outraged by editorial cartoons mocking their Prophet can’t communicate with each other. The views are so divergent they might as well be from different planets. Aliens who don’t appreciate  humanity’s diplomatic overtures are truly alien to us.

On the personal level the truth is that we can never really know another person fully. Think of friends and family members who turn out to have interests — legitimate or clandestine — that are surprising when they come to light. Nowhere is this clearer than in a marriage where two people make continuing discoveries about the other, or evolve and change in unexpected ways. This often plays out in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where characters are taken over by aliens, making their loved ones feel their family members or neighbors are not the “real” ones but not being able to explain why. In I Married a Monster from Outer Space, the aliens take over the bodies of men in a town, and one newlywed bride can’t understand why her husband is acting so differently. Has there ever been a clearer metaphor for marriage? “You’re not the person I married” is a claim that only needs the explanation of alien mind control in the movies.

Yet another level of the unknowable is for those whose lives are informed by religion. To a western monotheist, the mind of God is beyond human understanding. Even when there’s direct evidence of God’s intentions as in a Biblical text, mere mortals can’t agree on what it really means. A film like 2001 approaches this ambiguity by keeping its aliens off-camera, instead letting them intervene through the mysterious monoliths. One monolith has a hand in evolution when it turns primitive apes into tool users. Another is buried on the moon ready to send a signal when humanity sufficiently advanced to have bases there. Yet another one is some sort of interstellar gate off of Jupiter, taking Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) to be transformed into — possibly — the next evolutionary step. Whomever or whatever is behind the monoliths seems benign and even helpful, but we can’t be sure. The rival ape killed by a crack to his skull certainly wouldn’t have felt that way.

Finally, there is much we still don’t know. Scientists and others keep pushing back the borders of human knowledge, but there are always others who will argue that we go too far. There are some things man is not meant to know or is not yet prepared to handle. If the arguments against stem cell research and cloning seem familiar it’s because they are the same arguments used by Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) in Forbidden Planet. Those long dead and unseen Krell are a warning to us to turn back from the path of forbidden knowledge before it’s too late. If they couldn’t control the power of the mind, what chance do we puny humans have?

What’s clear is that whether friend, foe, or beyond our ability to understand, the aliens in our popular movies and TV shows tell us little about whether life exists on other planets, but they speaks volumes as to the nature of life back home on the planet Earth.

Daniel M. Kimmel is past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He reviewed in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette for 25 years, and can now be found at NorthShoreMovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety and teaches film at Suffolk University. He regularly appeared in The Internet Review of Science Fiction and contributed to the SmartPop book, Batman Unauthorized (2008). He is the author of an award-winning history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004) and of the history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006). His most recent book is I'll Have What She’s Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies. Upcoming projects includes an essay in the SmartPop book on "True Blood" and a forthcoming collection of his essays on SF film.