“A Jar of Goodwill”
by Tobias S. Buckell

Points On A Package

You keep a low profile when you’re in oxygen debt. Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway. So I was nervous when a stationeer appeared at my cubby and knocked on the door.

I slid out and stood in front of the polished, skeletal robot.

“Alex Mosette?” it asked.

There was no sense in lying. The stationeer had already scanned my face. It was just looking for voice print verification. “Yes, I’m Alex,” I said.

“The harbormaster wants to see you.”

I swallowed. “He could have sent me a message.”

“I am here to escort you.” The robot held out a tinker-toy arm, digits pointed along the hallway.

Space in orbit came at a premium. Bottom-rung types like me slept in cubbies stacked ten high along the hallway. On my back in the cubby, watching entertainment shuffled in from the planets, they made living on a space station sound exotic and exciting.

It was if you were further up the rung. I’d been in those rooms: places with wasted space. Furniture. Room to stroll around in.

That was exotic.

Getting space in outer space was far down my list of needs.

First was air. Then food.

Anything else was pure luxury.

The harbormaster stared out into space, and I silently waited at the door to Operations, hoping that if I remained quiet he wouldn’t notice.

Ops hung from near the center of the megastructure of the station. A blister stuck on the end of a long tunnel. You could see the station behind us: the miles-long wheel of exotic metals rotating slowly.

No gravity in Ops, or anywhere in the center. Spokes ran down from the wheel to the center, and the center was where ships docked and were serviced and so on.

So I hung silently in the air, long after the stationeer flitted off to do the harbormaster’s bidding, wondering what happened next.

“You’re overdrawn,” the harbormaster said after a needle-like ship with long feathery vanes slipped underneath us into the docking bays.

He turned to face me, even though his eyes had been hollowed out long ago. Force of habit. His real eyes were now every camera, or anything mechanical that could see.

The harbormaster moved closer. The gantry around him was motorized, a long arm moving him anywhere he wanted in the room.

Hundreds of cables, plugged into his scalp like hair, bundled and ran back along the arm of the gantry. Hoses moved effluvia out. More hoses ran purified blood, and other fluids, back in.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Traffic is light. And requests have dropped off. I’ve taken classes. Even language lessons…” I stopped when I saw the wizened hand raise, palm up.

“I know what you’ve been doing.” The harbormaster’s sightless sockets turned back to the depths of space outside. The hardened skin of his face showed few emotions, his artificial voice was toneless. “You would not have been allowed to overdraw if you hadn’t made good faith efforts.”

“For which,” I said, “I am enormously appreciative.”

“That ship that just arrived brings with it a choice for you,” the harbormaster continued without acknowledging what I’d just said. “I cannot let you overdraw any more if you stay on station, so I will have to put you into hibernation. To pay for hibernation and your air debt I would buy your contract. You’d be woken for guaranteed work. I’d take a percentage. You could buy your contract back out, once you had enough liquidity.”

That was exactly what I’d been dreading. But he’d indicated an alternate. “My other option?”

He waved a hand, and a holographic image of the ship I’d just seen coming in to dock hung in the air. “They’re asking for a professional Friend.”

“For their ship?” Surprise tinged my question. I wasn’t crew material. I’d been shipped frozen to the station, just another corpsicle. People like me didn’t stay awake for travel. Not enough room.

The harbormaster shrugged pallid shoulders. “They will not tell me why. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to get them to tell me what they wanted.”

I looked at the long ship. “I’m not a fuckbot. They know that, right?”

“They know that. They reiterated that they do not want sexual services.”

“I’ll be outside the station. Outside your protection. It could still be what they want.”

“That is a risk. How much so, I cannot model for you.” The harbormaster snapped his fingers, and the ship faded away. “But the contractors have extremely high reputational scores on past business dealings. They are freelance scientists: biology, botany, and one linguist.”

So they probably didn’t want me as a pass-around toy.

Probably.

“Rape amendments to the contract?” I asked. I was going to be on a ship, unthawed, by myself, with crew I’d never met. I had to think about the worst.

“Prohibitive. Although, accidental loss of life is not quite as high, which means I’d advise lowering the former so that there is no temptation to murder you after a theoretical rape to evade the higher contract payout.”

“Fuck,” I sighed.

“Would you like to peruse their reputation notes?” the harbormaster asked. And for a moment, I thought maybe the harbormaster sounded concerned.

No. He was just being fair. He’d spent two hundred years of bargaining with ships for goods, fuel, repair, services. Fair was built-in, the half-computer half-human creature in front of me was all about fair. Fair got you repeat business. Fair got you a wide reputation.

“What’s the offer?”

“Half a point on the package,” the harbormaster said.

“And we don’t know what the package is, or how long it will take… or anything.” I bit my lip.

“They assured me that half a point would pay off your debt and then some. It shouldn’t take more than a year.”

A year. For half a percent. Half a percent of what? It could be cargo they were delivering. Or, seeing as it was a crew of scientists, it could be some project they were working on.

All of which just raised more questions.

Questions I wouldn’t have answers to unless I signed up. I sighed. “That’s it, then? No loans? No extensions?”

The harbormaster sighed. “I answer to the Gheda shareholders who built and own this complex. I have already stretched my authority to give you a month’s extension. The debt has to be called. I’m sorry.”

I looked out at the darkness of space out beyond Ops. “Shit choices either way.”

The harbormaster said nothing.

I folded my arms. “Do it.”

Journey by Gheda

The docking arms had transferred the starship from the center structure’s incoming docks down a spoke to a dock on one of the wheels. The entire ship, thanks to being spun along with the wheel of the station, had gravity.

The starship was a quarter of a mile long. Outside: sleek and burnished smooth by impacts with the scattered dust of space at the stunning speeds it achieved. Inside, I realized I’d boarded a creaky, old, outdated vehicle.

Fiberwire spilled out from conduits, evidence of crude repair jobs. Dirt and grime clung to nooks and crannies. The air smelled of sweat and worst.

A purple-haired man with all-black eyes met me at the airlock. “You are the Friend?” he asked. He carried a large walking stick with him.

“Yes.” I let go of the rolling luggage behind me and bowed. “I’m Alex.”

He bowed back. More extravagantly than I did. Maybe even slightly mockingly. “I’m Oslo.” Every time he shifted his walking stick, tiny grains of sand inside rattled and shifted about. He brimmed with impatience, and some regret in the crinkled lines of his eyes. “Is this everything?”

I looked back at the single case behind me. “That is everything.”

“Then welcome aboard,” Oslo said, as the door to the station clanged shut. He raised the stick, and a flash of light blinded me.

“You should have taken a scan of me before you shut the door,” I said. The stick was more than it seemed. Those tiny rustling grains were generators, harnessing power for whatever tools were inside the device via kinetic motion. He turned around and started to walk away. I hurried to catch up.

Oslo smiled, and I noticed tiny little fangs under his lips. “You are who you say you are, so everything ended up okay. Oh, and for protocol, the others aren’t much into it either, by the way. Now, for my own edification, you are a hermaphrodite, correct?”

I flushed. “I am what we Friends prefer to call bi-gendered, yes.” Where the hell was Oslo from? I was having trouble placing his cultural conditionings and how I might adapt to interface with them. He was very direct, that was for sure.

This gig might be more complicated than I thought.

“Your Friend training: did it encompass Compact cross-cultural training?”

I slowed down. “In theory,” I said slowly, worried about losing the contract if they insisted on having someone with Compact experience.

Oslo’s regret dripped from his voice and movements. Was it regret that I didn’t have the experience? Would I lose the contract, minutes into getting it? Or just regret that he couldn’t get someone better? “But you’ve never Friended an actual Compact drone?”

I decided to tell the truth. A gamble. “No.”

“Too bad.” The regret sloughed off, to be replaced with resignation. “But we can’t poke around asking for Friends with that specific experience, or one of our competitors might put two and two together. I recommend you brush up on your training during the trip out.”

He stopped in front of a large, metal door. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Here is your room for the next three days.” Oslo opened the large door to a five-by-seven foot room with a foldout bunk bed.

My heart skipped a beat, and I put aside the fact that Oslo had avoided the question. “That’s mine?”

“Yes. And the air’s billed with our shipping contract, so you can rip your sensors off. There’ll be no accounting until we’re done.”

I got the sense Oslo knew what it was like to be in debt. I stepped into the room and turned all the way around. I raised my hands, placing them on each wall, and smiled.

Oslo turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. “The harbormaster said you were freelance scientists. What do you do?”

“I’m the botanist,” Oslo said. “Meals are in the common passenger’s galley. The crew of this ship is Gheda, of course, don’t talk to or interact with them if you can help it. You know why?”

“Yes.” The last thing you wanted to do was make a Gheda think you were wandering around, trying to figure out secrets about their ships, or technology. I would stay in the approved corridors and not interact with them.

The door closed in my suite, and I sat down with my small travel case, no closer to understanding what was going on than I had been on the station.

I faced the small mirror by an even smaller basin and reached for the strip of black material stuck to my throat. Inside it, circuitry monitored my metabolic rate, number of breaths taken, volume of air taken in, and carbon dioxide expelled. All of it reported back to the station’s monitors, constantly calculating my mean daily cost.

It made a satisfying sound as I ripped it off.

“Gheda are Gheda,” I said later in the ship’s artificial, alien day over reheated turkey strips in the passenger’s galley. We’d undocked. The old ship had shivered itself up to speed. “But Gheda flying around in a beat-up old starship, willing to take freelance scientists out to some secret destination: these are dangerous Gheda.”

Oslo had a rueful smile as he leaned back and folded his arms. “Cruzie says that our kind used to think our corporations were rapacious and evil before first contact. No one expected aliens to demand royalty payments for technology usage that had been independently discovered by us because the Gheda had previously patented that technology.”

“I know. They hit non-compliant areas with asteroids from orbit.” Unable to pay royalties, entire nations had collapsed into debtorship. “Who’s Cruzie?”

Oslo grimaced. “You’ll meet her in two days. Our linguist. Bit of a historian, too. Loves old Earth shit.”

I frowned at his reaction. Conflicted, but with somewhat warm pleasure when he thought about her. A happy grimace. “She’s an old friend of yours?”

“Our parents were friends. They loved history. The magnificence of Earth. The legend that was. Before it got sold around. Before the Diaspora.” That grimace again. But no warmth there.

“You don’t agree with their ideals?” I guessed.

I guessed well. Oslo sipped at a mug of tea, and eyed me. “I’m not your project, Friend. Don’t dig too deep, because you just work for me. Save your empathy and psychiatry for the real subject. Understand?”

Too far, I thought. “I’m sorry. And just what is my project? We’re away from the station now; do you think you can risk being open with me?”

Oslo set his tea down. “Clever. Very clever, Friend. Yes, I was worried about bugs. We’ve found a planet, with a unique ecosystem. There may be patentable innovations.”

I sat, stunned. Patents? I had points on the package. If I got points on a patent on some aspect of an alien biological system, a Gheda-approved patent, I’d be rich.

Not just rich, but like, nation-rich.

Oslo sipped at his tea. “There’s only one problem,” he said. “There may be intelligent life on the planet. If it’s intelligent, it’s a contact situation, and we have to turn it over to the Gheda. We get a fee, but no taste of the real game. We fail to report a contact situation and the Gheda find out, it’s going to be a nasty scene. They’ll kill our families, or even people you know, just to make the point that their interstellar law is inviolate. We have to file a claim the moment of discovery.”

I’d heard hesitation in his voice. “You haven’t filed yet, have you?”

“I bet all the Gheda business creatures love having you watch humans they’re settling a contract with, making sure they’re telling the truth, you there to brief them on what their facial expressions are really showing.”

That stung. “I’d do the same for any human. And it isn’t just contracts. Many hire me to pay attention to them, to figure them out, anticipate their needs.”

Oslo leered. “I’ll bet.”

I wasn’t a fuckbot. I deflected the leering. “So tell me, Oslo, why I’m risking my life, then?”

“We haven’t filed yet because we honestly can’t fucking figure out if the aliens are just dumb creatures, or intelligences like us,” Oslo said.

The Drone

“Welcome to the Screaming Kettle,” said the woman who grabbed my bag without asking. She had dark brown skin and eyes, and black hair. Tattoos covered every inch of skin free of her clothing. Words in scripts and languages that I didn’t recognize. “The Compact Drone is about to dock as well, we need you ready for it. Let’s get your stuff stowed.”

We walked below skylights embedded in the top of the research station. A planet hung there: green and yellow and patchy. It looked like it was diseased with mold. “Is that Ve?” I asked.

“Oslo get you up to speed?” the woman asked.

“Somewhat. You’re Cruzie, right?”

“Maricruz. I’m the linguist. I guess… you’re stuck here with us. You can call me Cruzie too.” We stopped in front of a room larger than the one on the ship. With two beds.

I looked at the beds. “I’m comfortable with a cubby, if it means getting my own space,” I said.

There was far more space here, vastly so. And yet, I was going to have to share it? It rankled. Even at the station, I hadn’t had to share my space. This shoved me up against my own cultural normative values. Even in the most packed places in space, you needed a cubby of one’s own.

“You’re here to Friend the Compact Drone,” Cruzie said. “It’ll need companionship at all times. Their contract requires it for the Drone’s mental stability.”

“Oslo didn’t tell me this.” I pursed my lips. A fairly universal display of annoyance.

And Cruzie read that well enough. “I’m sorry,” she said. But it was a lie as well. She was getting annoyed and impatient. But screw it, as Oslo pointed out: I wasn’t there for their needs. “Oslo wants us to succeed more than anything. Unlike his parents, he’s not much into the glory that was humankind. He knows the only way we’ll ever not be freelancers, scrabbling around for intellectual scraps found in the side alleys of technology for something we can use without paying the Gheda for the privilege, is to hit something big.”

“So he lied to me.” My voice remained flat.

“He left out truths that would have made you less willing to come.”

“He lied.”

Cruzie shut the door to my room. “He gave you points on the package, Friend. We win big, you do your job, you’ll never have to check the balance on your air for the rest of your damned life. I heard you were in air debt, right?”

She’d put me well in place. We both knew it. Cruzie smiled, a gracious winner’s smile.

“Incoming!” Someone yelled from around the bend in the corridor.

“I’m not going to fuck the Drone,” I told her levelly.

Cruzie shrugged. “I don’t care what you do or don’t do, as long as the Drone stays mentally stable and does its job for us. Points on the package, Alex. Points.”

Airlock alarms flashed and warbled, and the hiss of compressed air filled the antechamber

“The incoming pod’s not much larger than a cubby sleeper,” Oslo said, his purple hair waving about as another burst of compressed air filled the antechamber. He smiled, fangs out beyond his lips. “It’s smaller than the lander we have for exploring Ve ourselves, if we ever need to get down there. Can you imagine the ride? The only non-Gheda way of traveling!”

The last member of the team joined us. She looked over at me and nodded. Silvered electronic eyes glinted in the flash of the airlock warning lights. She flexed the jet black fingers of her artificial right hand absentmindedly as she waited for the doors to open. She ran the fingers of a real hand over her shaved head, then put them back in her utility jacket, covered with what seemed like hundreds of pockets and zippers.

“That’s Kepler,” Cruzie said.

The airlock doors opened. A thin, naked man stumbled out, dripping goopy blue acceleration gel with each step.

For a moment his eyes flicked around, blinking.

Then he started screaming.

Oslo, Kepler, and Cruzie jumped back half a step from the naked man’s arms. I stepped forward. “It’s not fear, it’s relief.”

The man grabbed me in a desperate hug, clinging to me, his hands patting my face, shoulders, as if reassuring himself someone was really standing in front of him. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “You’ve been in there by yourself for days, with no contact of any sort. I understand.”

He was shivering in my grip, but I kept patting his back. I urged him to feel the press of contact between us. And reassurance. Calm.

Eventually he calmed down, and then slowly let go of me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Beck.”

“Welcome aboard, Beck,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the scientists who looked visibly relieved.

First things first.

Beck got to the communications room. Back and forth verification on an uplink, and he leaned back against the chair in relief.

“There’s an uplink to the Hive,” he said. “An hour of lag time to get as far back as the home system, but I’m patched in.”

He tapped metal inserts on the back of his neck. His mind plugged in to the communications network, talking all the way back to the asteroid belt in the mother system, where the Compact’s Hive thrived. Back there, Beck would always be in contact with it without a delay. In instant symbiosis with a universe of information that the Compact offered.

A hive-mind of people, your core self subjugated to the greater whole.

I shivered.

Beck never moved more than half a foot away from me. Always close enough to touch. He kept reaching out to make sure I was there, even though he could see me.

After walking around the research station for half an hour, we returned to our shared room.

He sat on his bed, suddenly apprehensive. “You’re the Friend, correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’m lonely over here. Can you sleep by me?”

I walked over and sat next to him. “I won’t have sex with you. That’s not why I’m here.”

“I’m chemically neutered,” Beck said as we curled up on the bed. “I’m a drone.”

As we lay there, I imagined thousands of Becks sleeping in rows in Hive dorms, body heat keeping the rooms warm.

Half an hour later he suddenly sighed, like a drug addict getting a hit. “They hear me,” he whispered. “I’m not alone.”

The Compact had replied to him.

He relaxed.

The room filled with a pleasant lavender scent. Was it something he’d splashed on earlier? Or something a Compact drone released to indicate comfort?

What’s Human?

“That,” Kepler said, leaning back in a couch before a series of displays, “is one of our remote-operated vehicles. We call them urchins.”

In the upper right hand screen before her, a small sphere with hundreds of wriggling legs rotated around. Then it scrabbled off down what looked like a dirt path.

Cruzie swung into a similar couch. “We sterilize them in orbit, then drop them down encased in a heatshield. It burns away, then they drop down out of the sky with a little burst of a rocket to slow down enough.”

I frowned at one of the screens. Everything was shades of green and gray and black. “Is that night vision?”

Oslo laughed. “It’s Ve. The atmosphere is chlorinated. Green mists. Grey shadows. And black plants.”

The trees had giant, black leaves hanging low to the ground. Tubular trunks sprouted globes that spouted mist randomly as the urchin brushed past.

“Ve’s a small planet,” Kepler said. “Low gravity, but with air similar to what you would have seen on the mother world.”

“Earth,” Oslo corrected.

“But unlike the mother world,” Kepler continued, “Ve has high levels of chlorine. Somewhere in its history, a battle launched among the plants. Instead of specializing in oxygen to kill off the competition, and adapting to it over time, plant life here turned to chlorine as a weapon. It created plastics out of the organic compounds available to it, which is doable in a chlorine-heavy base atmosphere, though remarkable. And the organic plastics also handle photosynthesis. A handy trick. If we can patent it.”

On the screen the urchin rolled to a slow stop. Cruzie leaned forward. “Now if we can just figure out if those bastards are really building a civilization, or just random dirt mounds…”

Paused at the top of a ridge, the urchin looked at a clearing in the black-leafed forest. Five pyramids thrust above the foliage around the clearing.

“Can you get closer?” Beck asked, and I jumped slightly. He’d been so silent, watching all this by my side.

“Not from here,” Kepler said. “There’s a big dip in altitude between here and the clearing.”

“And?” Beck stared at the pyramids on the screen.

“Our first couple weeks here we kept driving the urchins into low lying areas, valleys, that sort of thing. They kept dying on us. We figure the chlorine and acids sink low into the valleys. Our equipment can’t handle it.”

Beck sat down on the nearest couch to Kepler, and looked over the interface. “Take the long way around then, I’ll look at your archives while you do so. Wait!”

I saw it too. A movement through the black, spiky bushes. I saw my first alien creature scuttle around, antennae twisting as it moved along what looked like a path.

“They look like ants,” I blurted out.

“We call them Vesians. But yes, ants the size of a small dog,” Oslo said. “And not really ants at all. Just exoskeletons, black plastic, in a similar structure. The handiwork of parallel evolution.”

More Vesians appeared carrying leaves and sticks on their backs.

And gourds.

“Now that’s interesting,” Beck said.

“It doesn’t mean they’re intelligent,” Beck said later, lying in the bunk with me next to him. We both stared up at the ceiling. He rolled over and looked at me. “The gourds grow on trees. They use them to store liquids. Inside those pyramids.”

We were face to face, breathing each other’s air. Beck had no personal space, and I had to fight my impulse to pull back away from him.

My job was now to facilitate. Make Beck feel at home.

Insect hives had drones that could exist away from the hive. A hive needed foragers, and defenders. But the human Compact only existed in the asteroid belt of the mother system.

Beck was a long way from home.

With the lag, he would be feeling cut off and distant. And for a mind that had always been in the embrace of the hive, this had to be hard for him.

But Beck offered the freelance scientists a link into the massive computational capacity of the entire Compact. They’d contracted it to handle the issue they couldn’t figure out quickly: were the aliens intelligent or not?

Beck was pumping information back all the way back to the mother system, so that the Compact could devote some fraction of a fraction of its massed computing ability to the issue. The minds of all its connected citizenry. Its supercomputers. Maybe even, it was rumored, artificial intelligences.

“But if they are intelligent?” I asked. “How do you prove it?”

Beck cocked his head. “The Compact is working on it. Has been ever since the individuals here signed the contract.”

“Then why are you out here?”

“Yes…” He was suddenly curious in me now, remembering I was a distinct individual, lying next to him. I wasn’t of the Compact. I wasn’t another drone.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It was good you asked.” He flopped over to stare at the ceiling again. “You’re right, I’m not entirely needed. But the Compact felt it was necessary.”

I wanted to know why. But I could feel Beck hesitate. I held my breath.

“You are a Friend. You’ve never broken contract. The Compact ranks you very highly.” Beck turned back to face me. “We understand that what I tell you will never leave this room, and since I debugged it, it’s a safe room. What do you think it takes to become a freelance scientist in this hostile universe?”

I’d been around enough negotiating tables. A good Friend, with the neural modifications and adaptive circuitry laced into me from birth, I could read body posture, micro-expressions, skin flush, heart rate, in a blink of the eye. I made a hell of a negotiating tool. Which was usually exactly what Gheda wanted: a read on their human counterparts.

And I had learned the ins and outs of my clients businesses quick as well. I knew what the wider universe was like while doing my job.

“Oslo has pent-up rage,” I whispered. “His family is obsessed with the Earth as it used to be. Before the Gheda land purchases. He wants wealth, but that’s not all, I think. Cruzie holds herself like she has military bearing, though she hides it. Kepler, I don’t know. I’m guessing you will tell me they have all worked as weapons manufacturers or researchers of some sort?”

Beck nodded. “Oslo and his sister London are linked to a weaponized virus that was released on a Gheda station. Cruzie fought with separatists in Columbia. Kepler is a false identity. We haven’t cracked her yet.”

I looked at the drone. There was no deceit in him. He stated these things as facts. He was a drone. He didn’t need to question the information given to him.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

He gestured at the bunk. “You’re a professional Friend. You’re safe. You’re here. And I’m just a drone. We’re just a piece of all this.”

And then he moved to spoon against the inside of my stomach. Two meaningless, tiny lives inside a cold station, far away from where they belonged.

“And because,” he added in a soft voice, “I think that these scientists are desperate enough to fix a problem if it occurs.”

“Fix a problem?” I asked, wrapping my arms around him.

“I think the Vesians are intelligent, and I think Kepler and Oslo plan to do something to them if, or when, it’s confirmed, so that they can keep patent rights.”

I could suddenly hear every creak, whisper, and whistle in the station as I tensed up.

“I will protect you if I can. Right now we’re just delaying as long as we can. Mainly I’m trying to stop Cruzie from figuring out the obvious, because if she confirms they’re really intelligent, then Oslo and Kepler will make their move and do something to the Vesians. We’re not sure what.”

“You said delaying. Delaying until what?” I asked, a slight quaver in my voice that I found I couldn’t control.

“Until the Gheda get here,” Beck said with a last yawn. “That’s when it all gets really complicated.” His voice trailed off as he said that, and he fell asleep.

I lay there, awake and wide-eyed.

I finally reached up to my neck and scratched at the band of skin where the air monitor patch had once been stuck.

Points on nothing was still just… nothing.

But could I rat out my contract? My role as a Friend? Could I help Oslo and Kepler kill an alien race?

Things had gotten very muddy in just a few minutes. I felt trapped between the hell of an old life and the hell of a horrible new one.

“What’s a human being?” I asked Beck over lunch.

“Definitions vary,” he replied.

“You’re a drone: bred to act, react, and move within a shared neural environment. You serve the Compact. There’s no queen, like a classic anthill or with bees. Your shared mental overmind makes the calls. So you have a say. A tiny say. You are human…-ish. Our ancestors would have questioned whether you were human.”

Beck cocked his head and smiled. “And you?”

“Modified from birth to read human faces. Under contract for most of my life to Gheda, working to tell the aliens or other humans what humans are really thinking… they wouldn’t have thought highly of me either.”

“The Compact knows you reread your contract last night, after I fell asleep, and you used some rather complicated algorithms to game some scenarios.”

I frowned. “So you’re spying on us now.”

“Of course. You’re struggling with a gray moral situation.”

“Which is?”

“The nature of your contract says you need to work with me and support my needs. But you’re hired by the freelancers that I’m now in opposition to. As a Friend, a role and purpose burned into you just like being a drone is burned into me, do you warn them? Or do you stick by me? The contract allows for interpretations either way. And if you stick with me, it’s doing so while knowing that I’m just a drone. A pawn that the Compact will use as it sees fit, for its own game.”

“You left something out,” I said.

“Neither you, nor I, are bred to care about Vesians,” Beck said.

I got up and walked over to the large porthole. “I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for them?”

“What would?”

“Whatever Kepler and Oslo want to do to them. Better to die now than to meet the Gheda. I can’t imagine they’d ever want to become us.”

Beck stood up. There was caution in his stance, as if he’d thought I had been figured out, but now wasn’t sure. “I’ve got work to do. Stay here and finish your meal, Friend.”

I looked down at the green world beneath, and jumped when a hand grabbed my shoulder. I could see gray words tattooed in the skin. “Cruzie?”

Her large brown eyes were filled with anger. “That son of a bitch has been lying to us,” she said, pointing in the direction Beck had gone. “Come with me.”

“The gourds,” Cruzie said, pointing at a screen, and then looking at Beck. “Tell us about the gourds.”

And Oslo grabbed my shoulder. “Watch the drone, sharp now. I want you to tell us what you see when he replies to us.”

My contract would be clear there. I couldn’t lie. The scientists owned the contract, and now that they’d asked directly for my services, I couldn’t evade.

Points on the package, I thought in the far back of my mind.

I wasn’t really human, was I? Not if I found the lure of eternal riches to be so great as to consider helping the freelancers.

“The Vesians have farms,” Cruzie said. “But so do ants: they grow fungus. The Vesians have roads, but so do animals in a forest. They just keep walking over the same spots. Old Earth roads used to follow old animal paths. The Vesians have buildings, but birds build nests, ants build colonies, bees build hives. But language, that’s so much rarer in the animal kingdom, isn’t it, Beck?”

“Not really,” the drone said calmly. “Primitive communication exists in animals. Including bees, which dance information. Dolphins squeak and whales sing.”

“But none of them write it down,” Cruzie grinned.

Oslo’s squeezed my shoulder, hard. “The drone is mildly annoyed,” I said. “And more than a little surprised.”

Cruzie tapped on a screen. The inside of one of the pyramids appeared. It was a storehouse of some sort, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of the gourds I’d seen earlier that the Vesian had been transporting.

“Nonverbal creatures use scent. Just like ants on the mother planet. The Vesians use scents to mark territories their queens manage. And one of the things I started to wonder about, were these storage areas. What were they for? So I broke in, and I started breaking the gourds.”

Beck stiffened. “He’s not happy with this line of thought,” I murmured.

“Thought so,” Oslo said back, and nodded at Cruzie, who kept going.

“And whenever I broke a gourd, I found them empty. Not full of liquid, as Beck told us was likely. We originally thought they were for storage. An adaptive behavior. Or a sign of intelligence. Hard to say. Until I broke them all.”

“They could have been empty, waiting to be sealed,” Beck said tonelessly.

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Beck. I have to do this. He’s telling the truth, Oslo. But misdirecting.”

“I know he is,” Cruzie said. “Because the Vesians swarmed the location with fresh gourds. There were chemical scents, traces laid down in the gourds before they were sealed. The Vesians examined the broken gourds, then filled the new ones with scents. I started examining the chemical traces, and found that each gourd replaced had the same chemical sequences sprayed on and stored as the ones I broke.”

Beck’s muscles tensed. Any human could see the stress now. I didn’t need to say anything.

“They were like monks, copying manuscripts. Right, Beck?” Cruzie asked.

“Yes,” Beck said.

“And the chemical markers, it’s a language, right?” Kepler asked. I could feel the tension in her voice. It wasn’t just disappointment building, but rage.

“It is.” Beck stood up slowly.

“It took me days to realize it,” Cruzie said. “And that, after the weeks I’ve been out here. The Compact spotted it right away, didn’t it?”

Beck looked over at me, then back at Cruzie. “Yes. The Compact knows.”

“Then what the hell is it planning to do?” Kepler moved in front of Beck, lips drawn back in a snarl.

“I’m just a drone,” Beck said. “I don’t know. But I can give you an answer in an hour.”

For a second, everyone stood frozen. Oslo, brimming with hurt rage, staring at Beck. Kepler, moving from anger toward some sort of decision. Cruzie looked… triumphant. Oblivious to the real breaking developments in the air.

And I observed.

Like any good Friend.

Then a loud ‘whooop whooop’ startled us all out of our poses.

“What’s that?” Cruzie asked, looking around.

“The Gheda are here,” Oslo, Kepler, and Beck said at the same time.

The Path Less Traveled

“Call the vote,” Oslo snapped.

Cruzie swallowed. I saw micro beads of sweat on the side of her neck. “Right now?”

“Gheda are inbound,” Kepler said, her artificial eyes dark. I imagined she had them patched into the computers, looking at information from the station’s sensors. “They’ll be decelerating and matching orbit in hours. There’s no time for debate, Cruzie.”

“What we’re about to do is something that requires debate. They’re intelligent. We’re proposing ripping that away over the next day with Kepler’s tailored virus. They’ll end up with a viral lobotomy, just smart enough we can claim their artifacts come from natural hive mind behavior. But we’ll have stolen their culture. Their minds. Their history.” Cruzie shook her head. “I know we said they’re going to lose most of that when the Gheda arrive. But if we do this, we’re worse than Gheda.”

“Fucking hell, Cruzie!” Oslo snapped. “You’re changing your mind now?”

“Oslo!” Cruzie held up her hands as if trying to ward off the angry words.

“You saw our mother planet,” Oslo said. “The slums. The starvation. Gheda combat patrols. They owned everyone. If you didn’t provide value, you were nothing. You fought the Sahara campaign, you attacked Abbuj station. How the fuck can you turn your back to all that?”

“I didn’t turn my back, I wanted a different path,” Cruzie said. “That’s why we’re here. With the money on the patents, we could change things… but what are we changing here if we’re not all that better than the Gheda?”

“It’s us or the fucking ants,” Kepler said, voice suddenly level. “It’s really that simple. Where are your allegiances?”

I bit my lip when I heard that.

“Cruzie…” I started to say.

She held a hand up and walked over to the console, her thumb held out. “It takes a unanimous vote to unleash the virus. This was why I insisted.”

“You’re right,” Kepler said. I flinched. I could hear the hatred in her voice. She nodded at Oslo.

He raised his walking stick. The tiny grains inside rattled around, and then a jagged finger of energy leapt out and struck Cruzie in the small of her back.

Cruzie jerked around, arms flopping as she danced, then dropped to the ground. Oslo pressed the stick to her head and fired it again. Blood gushed from Cruzie’s eye sockets as something inside her skull went ‘pop.’

A wisp of smoke curled from her open mouth.

Oslo and Kepler put thumbs to the screens. “We have a unanimous vote now.”

But a red warning sign flashed back at them. Beck relaxed slightly, a tiny curl of a smile briefly appearing.

Oslo raised his walking stick and pointed it at Beck. “Our communications are blocked.”

“Yes,” Beck said. “The Compact is voting against preemptive genocide.”

For a split second, I saw the decision to kill Beck flit across Kepler’s face. “If you kill him,” I spoke up, “the Compact will spend resources hunting you two down. You can’t enjoy your riches if you’re dead.”

Kepler nodded. “You’re right.” But she looked at me, a question on her face.

I shrugged. “If you’re all dead, I don’t have points on the package.”

“Trigger them manually,” Oslo said. “We’ll bring the drone. We won’t leave him up here to cause more trouble. Bring him, or her, or whatever the Friend calls itself as well. Your contract, Alex, is now to watch Beck.”

We burned our way through the green atmosphere of Ve, the lander bucking and groaning, skin cracking as it weathered the heat of our reentry fireball.

From the tiny cramped cockpit I watched us part the clouds and spiral slowly down out of the sky as the wings unfurled from slots in the tear-drop sized vehicle’s side. They started beating a complicated figure-eight motion.

Oslo aimed his walking stick at us when the lander touched down. “Put on your helmet, get out. Both of you.”

We did so.

Heavy chlorine-rich mists swirled around, disturbed by our landing. Large puffball flowers spurted acid whenever touched by a piece of stray stirred-up debris, and the black, plastic leaves all around us bobbed gently in a low breeze.

Oslo and Kepler pulled a large pack out of the lander’s cargo area. Long pieces of tubing. They set to building a freestanding antenna, piece by piece. I watched Beck. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his posture.

He was about to run. Which made no sense. Run where? On this world?

Within a few minutes Oslo and Kepler had snapped together a thirty-foot tall tower. I swallowed, and remained silent. It was a choice, a deliberate path. I broke my contract.

Oslo snapped a clip to the top of the tower, then unrolled a length of cable. He and Kepler used it to pull the super light structure up.

That was the moment Beck ran, as it hung halfway up to standing.

“Shit,” Oslo cursed over the tiny speakers in our helmets, but he didn’t drop the structure. “You’ve only got a couple hours of air you moron!”

The only response was Beck’s heavy breathing.

When the antenna stood upright, Oslo approached me, the walking stick out. “You didn’t warn us.”

“He was wearing a spacesuit,” I said calmly.

But I could see Oslo didn’t believe me. His eyes creased and his fingers tightened. A bright explosion of pain ripped into me.

My vision cleared.

I was on my hands and feet, shaking with pain from the electrical discharge. A whirlwind of debris whipped around me. I looked up to see the lander lifting into the sky.

So that was it. I’d made my choice: to try and not be a monster.

And it had been in vain. The Vesians would be lobotomized by Kepler’s virus. Beck would die. I would die.

I watched the lander beginning a wide spiral upward away from me. In a few seconds it would fire its rockets and climb for orbit.

In a couple hours, I would run out of air.

Four large gourds arced high over the black forest and slapped into the side of the lander. I frowned. At first, it looked like they had no effect. The lander kept spiraling up.

But then, it faltered.

The lander shook, and smoke spilled out of a crack in the side somewhere.

It exploded, the fireball hanging in the sky.

“Get away from the antenna,” Beck suddenly said. “It’s next.”

I ran without a second thought, and even as I got free of the clearing, gourds of acid hit the structure. The metal sizzled, foamed, and then began to melt.

A few seconds later, I broke out onto a dirt path where the catapults firing the gourds of acid had been towed into place.

Beck waited for me, surrounded by a crowd of Vesians. He wore only his helmet, he’d ripped his suit off. His skin bubbled from bad chemical burn blisters.

“The Vesians destroyed all the remote-operating vehicles with the virus in it,” he said. “The queens have quarantined any Vesians near any area that had an ROV. The species will survive.”

“You’ve been talking to them,” I said. And then I thought back to the comforting smell in my room the first night Beck spent with me. “You’re communicating with them. You warned them.”

Beck held up his suit. “Yes. The Compact altered me to be an ambassador to them.”

“Beck, how long can you survive in this environment?” I stared at his blistered skin.

“A year. Maybe. There will be another ready by then. Maybe a structure to live in. The Gheda will be here soon to bring air. The Compact has reached an agreement with them. The Vesian queens are agreeing to join the Compact. The Compact gets to extend out of the mother system, but only to Ve. In exchange, the Gheda get rights to all patentable discoveries made in the new ecosystem. They’re particularly interested in plastic-based organic photosynthesis.”

I collapsed to the ground, realizing that I would live. Beck sat next to me. A small Vesian, approached, a gourd in its mandibles. It set the organic, plastic bottle at my legs. “What’s that?”

“A jar of goodwill,” Beck said. “The Vesian queen of this area is thanking you.”

I was still just staring at it two hours later as my air faded out, my vision blurred, and the Gheda lander finally reached us.

The harbormaster cocked his head. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” I said. Someone was unpacking my two bags. one of them carefully holding the Vesian ‘gift.’

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the harbormaster said. “Not with a contract like that.”

“It didn’t work out.” I looked out into the vacuum of space beyond us. “Certainly not for the people who hired me. Or me.”

“You have a peripheral contract with the Compact. An all-you-can-breath line of credit on the station. You’re not a citizen, but on perpetual retainer as the Compact’s primary professional Friend for all dealings in this system. You did well enough.”

I grinned. “Points on a package like what they offered me was a fairy tale. A fairy tale you’d have to be soulless to want to have come true.”

“I’m surprised that you did not choose to join the Compact,” the harbormaster said, looking closely at me. “It is a safe place for humans in this universe. Even as a peripheral for them, you could still be in danger during patent negotiations with Gheda.”

“I know. But this is home. My home. I’m not a drone, I don’t want to be one.”

The harbormaster sighed. “You understand the station is my only love. I don’t have a social circle. There is only the ebb and flow of this structure’s health for me.”

I smiled. “That’s why I like you, harbormaster. You have few emotions. You are a fair dealer. You’re the closest thing I have to family. You may even be the closest thing I have to a friend, friend with a lowercase ‘f.’”

“You follow your contracts to the letter. I like that about you,” the harbormaster said. “I’m glad you will continue on here.”

Together we watched the needle-like ship that had brought me back home silently fall away from the station.

“The Compact purchased me a ten-by-ten room with a porthole,” I said. “I don’t have to come up here to sneak a look at the stars anymore.”

The harbormaster sighed happily. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? I think, we’ve always loved them, haven’t we? Even before we were forced to leave the mother world.”

“That’s what the history books say,” I said quietly over the sound of ducts and creaking station. “We dreamed of getting out here, to live among them. Dreamed of the wonders we’d see.”

“The Gheda don’t see the stars,” the harbormaster said. “They have few portholes. Before I let the Gheda turn me into a harbormaster, I demanded the contract include this room.”

“They don’t see them the way we do,” I agreed.

“They’re not human,” the harbormaster said.

“No, they’re not.” I looked out at the distant stars. “But then, few things are anymore.”

The Gheda ship disappeared in a blinding flash of light, whipping through space toward its next destination

About the Author

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel, Sly Moongoose, a Caribbean Space Opera, is currently out from Tor and his first short story collection, Tides from the New Worlds, was published by Wyrm Publishing in 2009.

“A Sweet Calling”
by Tony Pi

Red paper lanterns, strung high like persimmon moons, welcomed customers to the market street. I announced my next performance of the sugar opera to passers-by, hoping to draw the curious to my stall. But if the row of candy zodiac animals in front of me couldn’t lure them in, perhaps my show would.

Taking a dollop of warm caramel, I fashioned a straw-thin spout and blew into it to inflate a bubble of sugar. An elderly couple stopped to watch, while two boys gaped in amazement as I pulled limbs and long ears from the hollow, golden shell to make a rabbit. Satisfied with my handiwork, I stuck the candy-hare onto a bamboo stick and dabbed on molasses eyes.

The elderly pair complimented me on the show and bought two caramel monkeys I had on display. I thanked them. I had arrived in Chengdu with very little money, but hoped to make a small profit by the end of the night. For each creation I sold at the festival, I earned a coin. Such was the simple life of a candyman.

Few customers, however, lingered as long at my stall as Lun the wheelwright. It wasn’t my sugar-figurines that caught the lad’s eye, but the winsome lass ladling out yuanzi dumplings across the street.

“You want to win her heart, Lun?” I held the caramel rabbit forth. “Give her this. I guarantee she’ll adore it.”

Lun wavered. “I’m grateful, Tangren Ao, but suppose I say the wrong thing?”

“Courtship, like any craft, needs practice. Compare her to the moon; they love that. Quickly, before nightfall brings more admirers to her stall.” I’d seen her turn away two suitors already, a willowy scholar and a brocade merchant with a fat purse.

The lad took the gift and trudged across the stone road, yielding to peasants, horse carts, and even a stiltwalker who passed before him.

I tried not to smile. I would surprise them both with a little magic when he showed her the rabbit: wrinkle its nose, waggle its tail. They’d dismiss it as a trick of the crimson light. But in sharing that moment of delight, perchance they’d fall in love.

Spring’s a delicious time to meddle!

“Make a lóng next!” demanded the pesky boy, who had yet to buy anything.

“Dragons are hard, kid.”

“Bet you don’t know how,” said his snotty friend.

“I said hard, not impossible. After my break, I’ll show you.”

I sat, shut my eyes, and hurled my senses into the sugar-rabbit across the way.

I spied through dotted eyes at the world grown vast. Lun’s stammer thundered in my pulled-candy ears. The yuanzi girl’s lips curled in a grand smile. But there came an odd cracking sound from near her soup-pot. The girl glanced down and shrieked.

Lun backed away but stumbled, and I — rabbit-I — fell from his hand. My vision spun, but I caught a glimpse of flames before the impact against the cobblestones shook me from the candy-shell and back into my body.

I blinked open true eyes.

A monkey shaped from fire hunched on top of Lun, setting his shirt alight. Lun grabbed for it but winced as he clutched only flame.

The crowd fled in panic.

“Roll, Lun!” I cried as I bolted into the street. “Smother the flames!”

Lun obeyed, but the fire monkey pressed its attack.

I grabbed the ladle from the yuanzi girl (with muttered apologies) and scooped soup from the pot, slinging the hot broth at the fire-beast. The splash doused only its tail, but before I could dip the ladle for more sweet soup, the monkey darted away with all-too-human strides.

“Lun! Are you all right? What happened?”

The lad winced and blew on the burns to his hands. They’d blister, but he was lucky his wounds hadn’t been worse. “The fire under her pot just came alive! Is it because it’s the Year of the Monkey?”

“Doubt it.” It moved too like a man to be a wild spirit. Could it be an elemental conjuration under a puppeteer’s sway?

The monkey clambered up the stiltwalker’s wooden legs, its flaming paws raking the startled performer’s flesh. Climbing onto the man’s shoulders, the beast leapt onto a riddle lantern before the man toppled over.

People cried for the city guard.

I called to the frightened yuanzi girl. “Please, look after Lun!”

The girl remembered to breathe and hastened to Lun’s side, concern clouding her face.

I dashed to the fallen stiltwalker and untied the stilts from his legs. Motes of burning paper rained down on us as the fire monkey leapt from one lantern to another, then another and another, until it landed on the thatched roof of the yuanzi girl’s family teahouse. With mad glee, it set the thatch ablaze, and the flames regenerated its tail.

I cursed. Our troubles had just begun.

Lun raised the cry of “Fire!” while the girl screamed for everyone to get out. Patrons poured out of the teahouse, but those in nearby establishments heeded the call as well, knowing the blaze would eat through the row of wood and thatch buildings like a child through a skewer of candied haws.

Proprietors filled buckets with water from the bronze vats outside, but how could they tame the rooftop fire?

I left the stiltwalker and flitted between terrified citizens towards my stall. I saw the boys Pest and Snot run off with fists full of sugar zodiac animals, leaving only a pair of Oxen-on-a-stick and a half-gnawed Rooster in the dust. Greedy brats!

With the teahouse roof vigorously ablaze, the monkey hopped across a string of lanterns to my side of the boulevard and ignited a new fire. Wide streets normally prevented flames from leaping the gap, but tonight, a web of lanterns crisscrossed all of Chengdu. The monkey conjuration could travel the high paths and set fires wherever it pleased, and no man could hope to intercept it.

Even the animal seemed deliberate, as the abundance of the Monkey sign would cast suspicion on an angry spirit, or worse, someone who played with that shape.

Like a Tangren making candied monkeys in plain view of the teahouse.

Had the arsonist planned it all, choosing the Lantern Festival to wreak the most havoc without getting caught? But who’d harbor such calculated hatred, and how would I catch him?

The mystery taunted me like a devious lantern riddle, but I hadn’t the time to mull over clues. I couldn’t stand idly by while Chengdu burned.

My father had taught me the secret of sweet possession. Each generation of Tangren in my family would push the bounds of our magic the way we’d inflate a candy-bubble. Spying was our earliest power, then animation, and last year I discovered water-shaping. To fight the fires, I’d need that new skill now, and also water and golden caramel to conjure with.

With mandated fire stations every three-hundred steps, the fire-fighting force soon swarmed the street with buckets, but the number of blazes daunted them. Lun, with cloth-bandaged hands, pointed out the monkey to incredulous men.

At my stall, I pulled a glob of hot caramel from my pan. Years of practice making the scalding heat bearable as I palmed, twirled, and blew on the gooey lump to cool it.

To battle such hungry blazes spreading by rooftop, I’d need a storm’s worth of water, maybe from the Jinjiang River nearby. The sun had set and the River Bridge Gate was shut, but I had no choice. I tucked a bamboo stick behind my ear and ran southward, rolling the sugar ball between my palms to keep it soft. In my haste I nearly collided with a dour-faced official who glowered and barreled past me, roaring orders to the fire-fighters.

The walls of Lesser City loomed ahead, too high to climb. But if I chose the right animal, it might be no obstacle at all.

Only twelve primal shapes could contain an elemental conjuration: the animals of the shengxiao zodiac, the foundation of every Tangren master’s repertoire. Goat, Rabbit, Pig; Tiger, Horse, Dog; Snake, Rooster, Ox; Monkey, Dragon, and Rat.

I had to call the Dragon, rider-of-mists and bringer-of-rains, the most dangerous of all.

I shaped a hollow in the caramel with my fourth finger and stretched it funnel-long. Snipping away excess candy with a bite, I blew into the thin sugar-pipe, making the bulbous end expand, but this time I laced the breath with half of my soul like Iron-Crutch Li of the Eight Immortals.

My hands recalled the Three Joints and Nine Resemblances of the dragon-shape, drawing the soft shell long and plucking limbs, antlers and frills of golden sugar. On the dragon’s head I molded a chimu lump, without which it could not fly.

I twisted off the airpipe. Almost done save the final touch. Breaking the bamboo stick in two with my teeth, I jabbed a sharp point into the back of my hand and drew blood.

Dragons only come alive when you dot their eyes.

I settled on the dirt in the shadow of the wall, hoping my body would be safely hidden here, and called to the spirit of Dragon.

O Sacred Dragon, hear me! I, the insignificant Ao Tienwei, humbly ask your aid.

A voice like thunder echoed through my head. You are not one of mine, Water Rat, though I know you from your tributes of art, it said, calling me by the sign of my birth year. What will you ask, and what will you give in return?

Lord Dragon, Chengdu burns and I must quench the flames. Water I have in plenty, but not strength enough to fly. Legends tell of your dominion over water and sky. If you would lend me your power, I’d soar and save the city, bringing you new worship and reverence.

It considered it. Your proposal pleases me, Water Rat. Fly with my blessings.

A thousand thanks, Sacred One.

I lobbed the blood-eyed Dragon underhand into the air and cast my consciousness inside, becoming the small caramel creature. Starlight on my chimu lump pulled me towards the new moon sky, and I floated over the wall and down into the river.

I bobbed thrice before sinking into the frigid depths. I felt my sugar-body begin to dissolve, and welcomed the simultaneous sensations of drowning and fading. That was the trick to elemental possession; my first tries failed because I fought those fears when I should have embraced them. As my senses seeped from hardened candy into sweetened water, I asked the river to accept my offering in trade for a moat’s worth of water. The river savored the candy and gave me what I asked, but left to me the shaping of the river-water.

I began molding the water into likeness of the candy-dragon. I’d never attempted so prodigious a conjuration before, a horse being the largest water-shaping I’d succeeded at. It took all my strength to merely break the surface with my water-dragon head, but as my manifestation took shape, Dragon power welled inside me and lifted me heavenward.  As my sinuous body escaped the Jinjiang River, my undulations freed startled fish from my frame and threw them back into safe currents. I gave thanks to Dragon and flew, grander than any conjuration I ever dared.

Below, the gardens and pagodas grew small like tray landscapes, while the folk on the streets might as well be tiny dough figurines. I spiraled in the air to get my bearings. More the impression of a dragon than a detailed rendition, this grand manifestation was slow to respond to my thoughts, but it would have to do.

Points of red lantern lights dotted the city below, though the fires in Lesser City shone fierce through billowing smoke. I dove for the scene of the fiery devastation.

All along the street, blazes raged out of control. The yuanzi girl and her parents huddled by the overturned stall in front of the doomed teahouse, cradling a sign that boasted ‘fragrant tea from river water’. A bandaged Lun fought alongside the others to put out what fires they could, while the magistrate in charge grabbed a snake-halberd and cut down a string of lanterns, hollering for other soldiers to do the same.

A handful of men saw my coming and cried out in astonishment. All turned to look, with some men thinking it best to flee, while others gaped in bewilderment and forgot their tasks.

I ignored the stares and twisted through the air, spewing river-water at the flames licking the sky. The blasts of water worked wonders at extinguishing blazes, but each spray diminished me by a like sum and rippled the veneer of my dragon-shape. I did my best to hold the dwindling manifestation together and surveyed the rooftops with liquid eyes.

There! The fire monkey hid in the high flames and blinding smoke of the brocade shop to my left, its flicking tail betraying its place. I angled my flight towards the demon, our eyes meeting at last. For good or for ill, the sorcerer now knew I pitted my magic against him.

I spat a cauldron-sized pearl of water at the monkey, but the agile beast vaulted out of the way onto an adjacent roof and raced across black tiles. I rushed through rising steam after it, but the monkey was too small and nimble to target with bursts of water.

In spite of my laggard reflexes, I could still fly faster than the beast could run. I overflew the beast and walled off its progress forward with watery coils, but the monkey grabbed the roof’s edge and swung through the back window of a wineshop. I gave chase and spewed a great measure of water through the opening, but the monkey leapt out of a front-facing window as the flood struck. In single-minded pursuit, I threaded my body forcibly through the narrow frames, stripping more water from my manifestation. I emerged slimmer, overshadowing the market street where the fire monkey had landed between the magistrate and Lun.

The magistrate lowered his halberd and sliced at the fire monkey, while Lun hoisted his bucket and readied to throw.

Trapped between the fearless official and a wheelwright with a bucket of water, the fire monkey hesitated.

That moment of indecision was just enough time for me to gamble it all.

High above the trio, I purposefully shaped away my chimu lump and my ability to fly ended abruptly. I fell bodily on top of them, river-water overflowing the bounds of my dragon-shape as the conjuration collapsed. The impact sent my awareness tumbling out of the elemental conjuration.

For the first time, I lost all of my senses.

In the past, ending a conjuration meant my soul would fly back to my body. I had never been stripped of every sensation: no sight, no sound, no pulse racing or hackles rising on the back of my neck.

Nothing but naked fear and solitude.

I tried picturing my body, from my dry eyes to the growl of hunger in my belly, from the itch between my toes to the sting of the wound on my hand.

But still I could not return.

Did I overreach myself, conjuring with too much water? What if I were trapped like this forever?

What I’d give to feel my heart pound in terror!

No, stop obsessing over why and think about what-now. I shouldn’t let this predicament cool and harden into permanence while I fretted; I ought to shape the situation while it was malleable. I might be bodiless but I still had memory and thought, purpose and principle. If an escape didn’t exist, I’d make one.

I remembered asking my father to teach me sweet possession when I was sixteen. Father was a difficult master to please, finding fault in my interpretations of the Dragon. “You must pay tribute to the animal with your artistry.”

“But why?” I asked. “Paintings, sculptures, and calligraphy last. Candy figurines don’t.”

Father swatted the back of my head with his folding fan. “The sugar opera may be fleeting art, but it’s no excuse to slacken! Show respect for the animals before you ask to wear their shapes, in particular the spirits of the twelve signs. Revere them, my son, lest they find cause to meddle in your affairs.”

I took Father’s lesson to heart. It took months of practice to render a Dragon to his liking, thereby completing a Tangren’s zodiac repertoire. At last, he consented to teach me the spying skill. “Always begin with taste,” he said, handing me a golden Tiger impaled on bamboo. “Lick and burn the sweet flavor into your memory.”

Taste, of course!

I meditated on the flavor of my family’s secret sugar blend: brown layered on cane, dusted subtly with musk-flavored sugar. As the memory of that taste crystallized in my mind, I caught a tinge of it coming from beyond remembrance. I latched onto the taste and willed myself towards it.

My senses returned, though not to my body as I hoped, but back inside the rabbit-on-a-stick beside the toppled yuanzi stall. I wore a drenched and sticky hollow candy-skin, a small comfort compared to my own skin, but a skin nonetheless.

From this low angle, I could only see the hulking remnants of the stall on the paved road, but my rabbit ears revealed my surroundings in full. In the distance, fire-fighters chattered about the Water Dragon and the Fire Monkey battle as they threw water onto flames. I heard no urgency in the men’s voices, which likely meant the fires were under control.

There would be legends told of this night, which ought to please Dragon.

Behind me, the magistrate questioned Lun and the yuanzi girl about the mysterious monkey. “And it attacked you without provocation?” he asked in a calm, scratchy voice.

“Yes, Magistrate Gongsun,” Lun replied. “All I did was, um, offer candy to Miss Deng when the fire monkey crawled out. I stared, it stared, and then it jumped me!”

I animated the belly of the rabbit-shell and eased myself off the bamboo stick. The wall where I hid my body wasn’t far by human scale, but at caramel-rabbit size it might as well be a li away. Perhaps if I invoked the Rabbit’s speed….

“Candy, hm? Tell me about this candyman,” Gongsun urged.

“Tangren Ao?” Lun spoke my name with cheer. “He’s a pleasant man, nosy but generous. He’s from Ji’nan, I think.”

“Did Ao make any monkey figurines?” Gongsun pressed.

“What? Surely you don’t think he’s behind the fires!”

I cursed my luck. The judge was right to suspect a human behind the arson, but did he have to suspect me?

“Answer the question, son,” Gongsun said. “Monkeys or not?”

“Well, why wouldn’t he in the Year of the Monkey? Magistrate, he saved me from burning alive. I’d rather believe he brought the dragon.”

I was heartened to hear Lun defend me so.

“Perhaps, or perhaps not,” Gongsun said. “Regardless, I have questions for him. Guards! Find this candyman.”

If they brought my body back, I’d be spared the trek. On the other hand, I’d have to lie my way out of another charge of sorcery or flee the city.

“Magistrate, wasn’t it just a duel between spirits?” Miss Deng asked.

“It might be, Miss Deng, but magic isn’t the sole providence of gods and demons. I must consider all possibilities, including a magician with a vendetta against you or your family.”

“A vendetta?” She sounded surprised.

“It burned your teahouse first. I do not doubt that it was personal. Any trouble with the gangs? Unpaid gambling debts?”

Miss Deng paused. “My father may love Constellation Dominoes, but he knows his limits.”

“We shall see,” Gongsun said. “What of this candyman? Did you know him?”

“No, he never crossed the street.”

Gongsun sighed. “Try to remember everyone who came to your stall. If this arson is an act of planned revenge, the instigator is likely as meticulous and ruthless in covering up his crime. We must find him before he has that chance.”

As Miss Deng recounted further details for Gongsun, I wondered if I might have seen my foe. But countless people had passed my stall since I set up shop this afternoon. It could be any of them.

Instead, I considered how the sorcerer might have enchanted the yuanzi-pot fire. An elemental conjuring required an offering in the shape of a primal animal. If his power were akin to mine, then he must have offered something in the shape of a monkey to that fire. But how?

I softened the rabbit-candy and hopped to the soup-pot apparatus, knocked over during the chaos. Among the bits of burnt wood lay the charred halves of a walnut-shell. They must have made that cracking sound I heard.

If an offering had been sealed inside, the flames would have to burn through the shell or melt whatever held the halves together. The sorcerer would have had time to flee the scene.

The small walnut couldn’t fit a Tangren’s sugar animal. But perhaps a different kind of food offering, like a dough-figure, would suffice. A master of dough-sculpting could easily hide a tiny painted monkey in the hollow.

But one detail still puzzled me. The soup-pot apparatus sat on the ground, too low for anyone to easily feed a walnut to the fire without attracting attention. Surely Miss Deng would comment if someone tampered with the fire?

Unless the scoundrel responsible had been short.

I’d have noticed a dwarfish man among the street performers, but those kids — had Pest and Snot gone for yuanzi? I couldn’t remember, but Miss Deng could have easily dismissed the antics of boys at her stall.

Of course, neither boy could be the arsonist. By the looks of them they were anywhere between nine and twelve years old, too young to plan arson. Besides, the monkey was setting fires at the same time they were running away with candy loot. The sorcerer must have bribed them to plant the walnut in the fire. And if the magistrate was right about the mindset of the arsonist, then the boys were in grave danger. A promise of more spoils would surely lure them into a trap!

Squishy footfalls grew loud behind me. I froze.

Giant fingers hoisted me by the ears in front of great, scrutinizing eyes. Magistrate Gongsun.

The Sichuanese man in his early fifties suffered his wet official’s robes without complaint; the wing-tips of his black hat, once extending stiffly to either side, now sagged from the wet of river-water. “So this is the candyman’s handiwork,” he boomed.

Had he seen me move?

A guardsman raised a call. “Magistrate! We found the candyman unconscious by the town wall. What should we do with him?”

Gongsun glanced in that direction. “Lay him down by his stall and watch him.”

My body! I reached for it with my mind but still couldn’t grab hold. How close did I need to be?

If I squirmed out of Gongsun’s hand, I could hop to my body and try to awaken, and if I did I’d tell the magistrate my fear for the children’s safety. But would he believe my story? I had nothing but guesswork.

But maybe I could find solid proof. Those kids took so many sugar figurines that they couldn’t possibly have eaten them all. If I could find one of those shells….

What had they taken? A fistful of Monkeys, a pair of Pigs, a Horse, and a Snake. I’d made only one Snake in recent days, as that sign never sold well outside its Year. Unless the boys ate it already, that was my best chance to find them.

I opened my awareness and sought caramel in the vicinity, reaching as far as the walls of Chengdu. My mind probed each instance like a tongue discerning a shape, hoping to find the serpentine candy. We’d hunt for secrets this way, my father and I. He never shied from using the dirt we uncovered to blackmail rich men.

When I located the Snake, my mind darted through the connection into its coils, but I left a thread of sugary taste so I could find my way back to Rabbit. Half-wound about a bamboo stick, I saw through dotted molasses that the older boy held me in his right hand and Horse in his left. The younger kid trailed behind him with a bundle of Monkey candy. I caught only dizzying glimpses of our surroundings awash in red light, like the shadowy foliage of a park or garden.

Snot tugged on Pest’s sleeve. “Let’s go home.”

Pest stopped. “Not yet, brother.”

“You go then,” Snot said, his voice wavering. “I’m going home.”

“Fine! I’ll keep everything for myself,” Pest said.

Snot ran off while Pest continued onward alone. A familiar pagoda loomed before us, and I realized where we were: the Flower-Strewing Tower. The sorcerer must have intended to watch the streets burn from the tower once he ended his conjuration.

I had to get Pest out of here now, but how? I hadn’t blooded the Snake’s eyes so I couldn’t shape water, leaving me only this candy-body to defend him. But I could petition the spirit of Snake. O Snake of Ten-Thousand Years! I, Ao Tienwei who did not give you proper notice, ask your help to save a life.

I taste you, Tangren Rat, Snake answered. What succor do you seek, and what losses will you suffer?

A beardless man in the garb of a scholar emerged from the pagoda. His eyebrows were so sparse that I’d almost say he had none. He was one of the suitors that Miss Deng had rebuffed!

“Where’s your brother?” the willowy scholar asked.

“The crybaby went home,” Pest said. “I did what you asked. Where’s my money?”

The man smiled. “I left the sycees in a pouch under that bench there. The gold’s all yours.”

No time to answer Snake. I softened and sprang off the bamboo, landing on the path between the scholar and the boy. They startled and backed away. I reared up, shaped and hardened caramel fangs, and mock-attacked Pest.

Frightened, the boy turned to run, but saw the stone bench and couldn’t resist. With candy-horse still in one hand, he scrambled to the seat and fumbled under it.

There’s nothing there, kid, run!

“So you were the water dragon, Tangren?” the scholar-sorcerer said in a low voice. “Stop interfering with my revenge.”

He raised his foot and stomped down. I slithered away in the nick of time. Grant me venom, Snake!

My price —

The scholar started towards the kid.

Anything, Snake! I coiled and sprang for the man’s ankle, sinking fangs deep into his flesh. The scholar cried out and stumbled.

So be it, Snake said.

Something flowed through my fangs into the scholar’s blood.

I heard the rattle of rocks, then small footfalls receding. The kid saw through the sorcerer’s lie at last.

I had no time to celebrate. Pillar-like fingers pulled and ripped me in two.

The shock again sent my consciousness reeling, but I caught the thread of sweetness and followed it back to Rabbit. My rabbit-self lay on the table at my stall. A towering Magistrate Gongsun stirred through the pot of cooling caramel beside me.

With Pest still in danger, I abandoned caution and leapt off the table, catching the magistrate by surprise. He grabbed for me but clawed only air as I landed on top of my body’s chest.

But despite the closeness of my flesh, I could not return to it.

Gongsun knelt and reached for rabbit-me.

Always begin with taste, I decided, and scurried towards my human mouth. I burrowed between the lips and kissed the tip of my own tongue.

My awareness flooded back inside my body.

I pulled the candy out of my mouth and gasped for breath. The Dragon conjuration had taken too much out of me, and I struggled to sit up.

Gongsun raised a bushy eyebrow and extended his hand. “You and I have much to discuss, candyman.”

I took his hand. “Magistrate, you must send men to the Flower-Strewing Tower, without delay.” I said, nearly breathless. “The arsonist’s a scholar with almost no eyebrows. Please hurry, before he catches the boy!”

“What boy? Explain.”

Lun and Miss Deng saw me stir and came towards us, hand in bandaged hand. “So good to see you awake, Tangren Ao!” Lun said.

I smiled weakly. “Miss Deng, did a willowy scholar give you any gifts? Dough-figures, perhaps?”

“Master Shuai? Yes, he tried to give me several of the miniatures, but I refused them all,” she answered. “I didn’t want to encourage him. He’s chased me since my hair-pinning ceremony two years ago.”

“Shuai had a kid slip a magical figurine into your fire, but now the boy’s a liability.” I turned to Gongsun. “You must believe me, Magistrate. Find Shuai.”

Gongsun stood and called to a group of halberdiers. “Go. Detain anyone at the Flower-Strewing Tower.” The soldiers hastened away without question. “Stay here, Tangren Ao.”

“I’m coming with you.” My legs weak, I could only stand with Lun’s help. “Thank you, Lun.”

We left Miss Deng with her family on the market street and headed for the pagoda.

The halberdiers found the scholar Shuai trying to limp with a swollen foot away from the Flower-Strewing Tower. They held the cursing suspect at blades’ point and called out to Pest.

The boy poked his head out from behind a clump of bamboo, still clutching Horse-on-a-stick in an iron grip. “Did you kill the snake?”

I grinned. “Don’t worry. It won’t be back.” However, my smile faded when I realized I had no idea what Snake would demand of me.

With Shuai in custody and the boy safe under the soldiers’ protection, Gongsun demanded answers. “Start from the beginning.”

“I’ll gladly answer all your questions, Magistrate, but only in confidence.”

“Agreed.”

Lun helped me to the tower on Gongsun’s instructions. “Thank you, Tangren Ao,” he whispered in my ear.

“No need, Lun. She likes you. All you needed was a little push.” I was glad the candy-rabbit brought them together, even though things had turned out much differently than I expected.

“I meant the water dragon.”

I pretended not to know what he was talking about. “You have a vivid imagination, lad.”

Lun left with a crooked smile.

I couldn’t lie to Magistrate Gongsun. I couldn’t prove the scholar’s guilt unless he understood how Shuai’s magic and mine worked. I sat on the steps of the pagoda and recounted the night’s events, and for the first time, spoke frankly about my power. As I revealed my secret, the burden of years fell away. Despite myself, my eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

At the end of it, Gongsun stroked his beard. “I believe you, though few others will.”

“No one else must know.”

“I agree. However, I still intend to bring Shuai up on charges of sorcery and arson. The boy’s testimony will seal his fate, and I will crush him with the full force of the law.”

Not what I wanted to hear, being a sorcerer myself, but nonetheless I bowed. “I, your insignificant servant, thank you.”

“You have a strange and useful talent that ought not go to waste, Tangren Ao,” Gongsun said. “Will you work for me? I will pay you well for it.”

“And give up this sweet calling? The life of a Tangren is all I know.”

“I am not asking you to abandon your trade. Stay in Chengdu. Learn the city. Help us rebuild. I only ask that when I have need of you, you answer my summons. What say you?”

He surely knew how my magic could advance his career. For good or for ill, my fate was now entwined with his, so long as he demanded it. But what choice did I have? You should never anger a man who could sentence you to death. I felt as helpless as a rat caught in the coils of a —

“Your animal sign wouldn’t happen to be Snake, would it?” I asked.

“Indeed,” Gongsun replied. “How did you know?”

About the Author

Tony Pi was born in Taiwan but grew up in Canada. A Ph.D. in Linguistics, he currently works as an administrator at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. A finalist in 2009 for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his work also appears or will appear in Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and On Spec, as well as numerous anthologies, including Writers of the Future XXIII, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Dragon and the Stars, and Alembical 2.

“Revealing How the Elements Cohere: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bear”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Elizabeth Bear’s first novel, Hammered, launched the Jenny Casey series and Bear’s career as an award-winning novelist. With each new novel and each new series, Bear’s writing continues becomes impossibly richer, brasher and more stunning. Her worlds are breath-taking and her characters as real as bone and steal.

These are but a few of the reasons she’s won the Locus Award, the John J. Campbell Award, and multiple Hugo Awards.

“Elizabeth Bear comes across as brassy and bold — I once saw her doing the pogo to the Ramones at a karaoke event — and her fiction follows suit,” said Lettie Prell, a novelist and the former editor of Broadsheet. “Her character Jenny Casey of Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired is addicted to a chemical enhancer that increases reaction time, leading to tension-filled SF adventure. Yet the Jenny Casey trilogy is about character and relationships as well.”

In addition to the Jenny Casey novels, Bear is the author of the Promethean Age, Jacob’s Ladder, and the Edda Burdens series. She is the co-author of the Iskyrne series with Sarah Monette. Her most recent books include the Chill, Bone and Jewel Creatures, and the forthcoming The Sea Thy Mistress.

“I write about things that irritate me,’” said Bear. “Or, in the words of some guy named Cicero, ‘I criticize by creation — not by finding fault. I tend to write arguments — arguments with myself, arguments with the world. I’m very bad at choosing sides, so I tend to thematic arguments rather than thematic statements.”

Below, Bear and I talk about characters, settings, and fiction that both angers and comforts.

What is the central argument of All the Windwracked Stars and By the Mountain Bound?

This is where I say “If I could have said it in less than a hundred thousand words, I would have.”

They both have to do with responsibility, though.

The two books are thematically linked, but not identical. And By the Mountain Bound wasn’t the second book; it was the third. The Sea Thy Mistress was written second, although it will be published third.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction?

That’s kind of a peculiar question, for me. I don’t think of it as something I enjoy, but rather something I do, something I am. I tell stories: I always have.

I do find it very satisfying when something I’ve written reaches someone, connects with them, and gives them hope or comfort or a place to hang an epiphany — that makes me feel like I’ve justified my existence.

How has your understanding of the craft changed over the years?

I’ve come to understand a lot of things that are hard to articulate — that there’s no single way to write a story; that the best tool for any given task is the simplest available that will do the work, but some tasks are damned complex; that there’s no single way to read a story; that a story that doesn’t piss anybody off is also incapable of giving anyone else comfort; that you cannot control what other people read when they read your words.

I’ve also, I hope, built up a pretty good toolbox for trying to prove that last wrong.

Remember: just because people tell you something about writing, doesn’t mean it’s useful or true.

Any particular time that a story or novel that has pissed off one and comforted another reader? Is there one that has seemed to be particularly volatile in terms of the response it elicits from readers?

Not really. Any given story contains both potentials. The only way to avoid it is not to write.

I’ve gotten hate mail about the swearing in Hammered — somebody who was offended that he couldn’t give it a twelve year old. (My response to that one was something to the effect of, the book has the word shit on the first page. Your twelve year old probably already knows every word in the book. And I’d be more worried about the graphic violence, if it were my kid.) I’ve also received commentary that the book was comforting to people in times of need.

What’s hard is when somebody walks away from a story with hurt feelings because of something the writer never intended.

The world of All the Windwracked Stars and By the Mountain Bound is staggeringly beautiful. Where did you start and how did you build it?

Oh, you know? I’m not really sure. I’ve had Eiledon in my head for a long time. The name is taken from a Big Country song off their third album, which describes an imaginary destroyed-and-reborn city. I’ve always thought the name was a play on “eidolon,” which seemed appropriate to my use.

The entire setting, to be sure, is strongly influenced by me being a child of the 80s, so it’s doubly appropriate. There’s a lot of Mad Max and Thundarr the Barbarian and Krull in there, a lot of the post-apocalyptic steampunk-before-steampunk-was-cool of my nuclear-shrouded adolescence in there. I am of the generation that took it for granted that the world was going to end, but that what came after might involve Tina Turner in chain mail. And oh boy, does that seep out of the world of the Edda of Burdens.

From there, it developed over the course of years. Decades, really, as I think I first came up with Eiledon in the late 80s, Muire in 1993 or 1994, and I didn’t sell All the Windwracked Stars until 2007 or so. So as you can see, it’s been a long time growing. I’m fascinated by the intersection of myth and technology, and being a second-generation Swede, it was natural to explore Norse myth.

Since September 11th, 2001, maybe, we live with a sense that disaster is likely, but not necessarily cataclysmic. Do you see any ways in which the events of the last decade have shaped the world of Eiledon?

Well, the books probably wouldn’t have gotten written if 9/11 hadn’t happened, because I was laid off from job afterwards and spent my period of unemployment writing them. And Hammered and Scardown. But no, I don’t think they’re all that effected by the Bush years. Blood and Iron was more focused on the problems of a post-colonial world.

The characters of the Eiledon books are so complex, so human, so alive… how do you do develop your characters?

Oh man. Jay Lake has a theory that every writer gets one or two cards free, and has to collect the rest (with regards to building a complete set of writer skills). Characterization was one of mine. The other was structure.

Basically, for me, characters happen in one of two ways. Either they step up from Central Casting, introduce themselves, and we’re ready to go — my problem becomes mining them out to find out what secrets they’re keeping from me. Or I have to build them from a kit, assemble motivation and desire and wants and needs and fears.

I have a thing I tell students — one of the most important things you can learn about a character is what they want on their tombstone.

Characterization, for me, is a matter of revealing how the elements of a person cohere — contradictions, harmonies, main themes and relationships. Everybody is trying to see themselves as a hero, and everybody is fragile as old glass if you hit them right. It’s all about the tensions between those things.

Does the character- and world-building process change much when you are collaborating? Can you tell a little bit about the writing of A Companion to Wolves with Sarah Monette and your work on Shadow Unit?

My processes don’t change, in particular. Collaboration is hard, but it does have the benefit that when you get bored with what you are writing, you can send the manuscript to the other guy.

You have to be willing to relax your control issues a lot to collaborate.

The descriptions in your novels — of setting, of character’s actions, of creatures — are lush and rich… and so immersive (if that’s the right word.) How do you go about describing something? Are there strategies you use? Do you have advice for beginning writers?

Funny you should ask. I’m not a very visual person, and I tend to rely more heavily on other senses, particularly tactile ones. Visual description has always been extremely hard for me: I have to concentrate to remember to put it in at all, and to make it interesting.

As for advice, well, I would repeat John Gardner, and suggest that any beginning writer pick up a copy of On Becoming A Novelist. Which is not a book on writing technique so much as it is a book on learning to observe as a writer, to find the telling detail, and create what he refers to as a vivid and continuous fictional dream.

In a more concrete fashion, I suggest the writer concentrate on the telling detail. The thing that makes a chair not a chair, a generic object, but this exact chair right here. Which means the writer has to stop seeing the world in terms of symbols, and start seeing it in terms of real objects.

What are you working on now?

I’m about to start my second draft of Grail, the last book in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. As soon as the edit letter gets here. I’m also working on Shadow Unit, as you mentioned, some short stories and novellas including another New Amsterdam story, and I have two other novels due this year — the sequel to A Companion to Wolves and the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy, The Steles of the Sky.

I’m more or less up to my neck in work, in other words. The scheduling alone is a huge challenge, and trying to keep quality up, and thinking up new and interesting ways to tell stories. One of the shorts will be in third person objective, which is a new point of view for me, and there’s also the issue of keeping the balls in the air on Shadow Unit, which is a positively epic undertaking.

About the Author

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

“The Border between Writing and Life: A Conversation with Marly Youmans”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Reviewers call Marly Youmans’ work angelic, beautiful, magnetic, wonderful and immersive. And it is all those things. She is praised for her boundless creativity and her uncanny ability to surprise even her most dedicated fans over and over again. She has often been referred to as a best kept secret of American poetry, of fantastic literature, of literary fiction.

“I’m afraid that I’m known for never writing about the same thing twice (although The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove take place in the same world, one that fuses together the traditional Scots and Irish culture ways of western North Carolina with Cherokee culture),” said Youmans. “This tendency is not one that mainstream publishing encourages, and I make the situation more complicated by writing in a number of forms — lyric and narrative poetry, short story, novella, and novel.”

While publishers may have trouble placing Youmans, readers know that her stories and poems, like incantations, are powerful, meaningful, and often enchanting.

“As a young girl, I was obsessed with reading and thought of myself as somebody who would become a writer,” said Youmans. “As a result, I have never quite understood how people who don’t have a ruling passion make it through the days. I love the way poetry can pour out — that’s a delicious sensation. I like the way that following the thread of a story can obliterate one’s usual sense of time and space, and the way the past can become an accessible place rather than lost time. I like being surprised by something new that feels like me and not-me, as though it had flowed to me from a distant source. Chasing the muse can become, at times, the pursuit of joy. The way words sound when you push them around in new combinations feels satisfying to me.”

A native of South Carolina, Youmans now lives in Cooperstown, NY, along with her family and an array of local ghosts. She is the author, most recently, of Val/Orson and of the forthcoming collection of poems, The Throne of Psyche. As she was preparing for a summer of teaching at places like Hollins College and Shared Worlds, we had a chance to discuss the borders between writing and life.

You move back and forth between poetry and prose. How do the two genres/modes inform each other? What has each taught you about the other?

I started out as a poet and was a poet for many years until a former colleague of mine said to me, “What does the world need with another poem?” This silly little joke of a question stopped me. I had thought of myself as a poet for a long time, but now I wasn’t one. Days passed, and I could feel that something was dead inside me. Since I couldn’t manage without writing, I started making stories on the weekends. A year later I had a plump manuscript. When I became a poet again, I found that everything had changed. I wanted poems that were bigger in every way possible, and I wanted to tell stories in poems, and I wanted to bind myself in the alluring corset of form. All of this came as a great surprise to me.

Back then, I was a once-and-future poet who wrote fiction, and no doubt I had the faults and the virtues that come from such a mix. The good things poetry gave to my fiction were a love of tautness, a lack of understanding about how to pad a novel, and a grasp of sound. But I didn’t know anything about plot, propulsion, or causality and didn’t see why they should matter. I hope that I’ve learned a few things since then.

But even last year’s book from P. S. Publishing, Val/Orson, may have some elements that are related to poetry. A story of tree sitters set in the California redwoods and inspired by the legend of Valentine and his feral twin brother, its chapters are short, tight, and titled: a little like a collection of poems.

What does writing fantastic literature allow you to do that you couldn’t do in a book like The Wolf Pit, which is set during the Civil War?

I’m going to answer this one by walking around it, thinking…

All fiction and poetry is made. Realism and irrealism are simply categories so that people can sort books, often for the purpose of sales and marketing.

Now consider, say, neurological status among people who can function in the world. There’s a spectrum populated by interesting but varied people, some of whom appear unusual — fantastic, even — and some of whom appear ordinary. At one point, out in left field, there’s Asperger’s Syndrome or mild autism, say, and at another point, somebody who appears “a regular Joe.” Now consider books and this matter of realism and irrealism. What we see as fantastic is at one point on a spectrum of books, realism at another. But the books are all made. They’re made up, one hopes for the joy of making things. Realism is the raw material that stretches out on all sides of us. So I have a hard time putting much faith in labels.

My first book, Little Jordan, was reviewed as literary fiction. Yet a number of people reported that it and the nine stories that I wrote at about the same time were strange — some said that they had a sort of fairy-tale relation to time and place. The next book I wrote, Catherwood, was set in 1676 and took a young woman from the Old World to the New World. Everything about the New World was fabulous to Catherwood, and she expected to see a unicorn or “a red Indian” at any instant. In fundamental ways, that’s not any different from what happens to a girl who falls down a rabbit hole or one who stows away on a starship to another planet. When I look forward to The Wolf Pit, I see a book that begins under the shadow of that most Southern and Gothic of stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The bloody plantation-reflecting puddles in the first scene could be reflecting that cracked house. Robin, the Confederate soldier who walks across that bloody ground, is obsessed with the 12th-century account of green children found in a wolf pit in Suffolk. All the passages related to those children are uncanny, as are the ones where Robin and his sister blur into that mysterious history. But what could be weirder than parts of that novel that relate directly to historical events? To yank red corpses from the red clay of the Crater is a surreal act.

So I don’t particularly see a line between those books and fantasies like The Curse of the Raven Mocker or Ingledove or even Glimmerglass.

Now, for just a moment, I’ll think about whether I might be fibbing. Considering Glimmerglass, I see that a surreal landscape is a kind of cauldron for cooking up transformation. At the start of the story, Cynthia might as well be the invisible woman in Randall Jarrell’s poem, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” who shrieks inwardly against what she is and longs to be radically changed. A failed painter, Cynthia runs after a physical Muse who appears repeatedly on the other side of a stream by her house. Flood, labyrinth, and the dead speak to her deepest self and demand her transformation far more forcefully than they could in a novel that found itself more to the right on the spectrum of books. The fantastic allows ideas and intangible forces to be embodied and made visible without reducing a story to allegory. Perhaps I was fibbing.

I’ll just walk around this question for a few years more…

Cooperstown, where you’ve lived for the last decade or so, is a village rich in history — some might even say that it is stuck in time. What about Cooperstown captured your imagination?

Cooperstown is a border town settled somewhere between ordinary life and fiction. People regard places brought into novels and named by James Fenimore Cooper as major landmarks. They borrow his place names for shops, clubs, and nonprofit organizations. Though this is not Europe, we have two castles, a big Norman one hidden in the woods and Kingfisher Tower in the edge of Otsego Lake (Cooper’s Lake Glimmerglass.) The Farmer’s Museum is a faux nineteenth-century village with pretend graves but real buildings, each moved to a new location. Cooperstown is America’s mythic site of the birth of baseball. It also has a kind of class structure that smacks of Henry James and Europe.

Ghosts are rampant. Writer and philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper was seen floating down the aisle of Christ Church and vanishing into the altar on the day of her death. The house across the street from me has an old lady ghost who gives directions to lost travelers and a haunted mirror. The wall outside has a buried chief who occasionally stirs and kicks it to pieces. Next door is a Carl Brandt painting, bolted through an outer wall to discourage poltergeist activity — the subject of the portrait refuses to have it removed. Carl Brandt was a painter and the first director of the Telfair Academy in Savannah, where one of my aunts used to take me when I was little, so I feel quite friendly toward his haunted painting of the teenage bride, Jenny Cooper Worthington.

Did it take a while for you to feel at home enough there to use it as a setting?

Evidently not. I lived in Cooperstown from July ‘92 through June ‘93. That winter, being sure I would never return to the spot, I wrote Catherwood as a kind of souvenir of and homage to the area.

Some years later when my husband asked me where I would be willing to live, I said this: “Well, I would never live north of Cooperstown.” These words are of the genre known as Famous Last Words. This time around, I have lived near the lake for eleven chilly years, and I have written a good many stories — plus the forthcoming Glimmerglass — about the place.

I am definitely a Southerner, and so I can never be completely at home here. But that feeling is also useful to a writer.

How have you altered it for Glimmerglass?

I have stolen pieces of the village and fitted them together in a new way. I have pilfered a cunning little gatehouse and the stream beside it, and I have invented a new historic mansion to go with the gatehouse. My mansion emerges from a hill; inside the hill is a labyrinth. I borrow Kingfisher Tower, the frozen surface of the lake in winter, and the bottom of the lake for my own odd purposes. (Cooper used the lake for water burial in the Leatherstocking Tales. I use it for a different kind of immersion. Like him, I let my characters visit the slightly submerged island where his Muskrat Castle stood in The Deerslayer.) I have also borrowed the spring floods that sometimes flood Lakefront Park so that only the bronze “Indian Hunter and His Dog” and the tops of the benches show.

In some anthologized stories and in the original version of Glimmerglass, I have called the village Templeton, as Cooper did, but I am dropping that because of Lauren Groff’s book, Monsters of Templeton — it’s her home village, after all.

Your life is, as you say, like a bug on a hot griddle. How do you balance so much — motherhood, multiple genres, day-to-day life — and still keep your creativity so vital, so seemingly boundless?

If you’re a mother, you can’t be fussy about writing time or writing conditions. I have three children and need to be present for them. Forgotten books, homework, appointments, music lessons, sports, long talks: many things lap up the day. I wrote The Wolf Pit during the night, sometimes going to bed at four in the morning and rising with my children at seven. It’s not a way to write that I recommend, but it worked. I am able to plunge into a novel or story without any trouble with readiness, and I can write in the midst of noise. Revision — tweaking poems, cutting and tightening fiction, and so on — is especially doable while children come in and out. Another useful thing is that my husband likes to cook. I highly endorse marriage to a man who cooks!

What prompted you to retire from teaching so soon after earning tenure? How did that change your writing life?

A Tweedledum and Tweedledee contrariness?

I’m glad for my tenure and promotion because it’s a kind of landmark in life, and I have great respect for the work of teachers. Leaving the profession meant more time to write, as well as more time for family. My feeling is that I can do two large things well, but that three major activities are not in my scope. Being a mother, being a teacher, and being a writer are all demanding activities, especially for somebody who is a bit obsessive. I prefer concentrating on the two that are most important to me and occasionally dabbling in the third. I admire women who manage all three.

Are there any similarities between teaching and writing?

They both demand boatloads of time, energy, and creativity.

Lastly, what are you working on now and what’s next?

Right now I’m working on some revision of poems and doing some semi-final polishing on a 3-in-1 trilogy written for my youngest child. I’ll probably submit it in a few months after a final read and scrub.

This summer I’m going to be writer-in-residence for the graduate program in children’s literature at Hollins for a few weeks, and afterward I’ll be at Shared Worlds. I’m also scheduled to write an essay for a book honoring my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins on the occasion of his 60th birthday retrospective in Wales. After that, no doubt there will be something else…

Next year will see publication of The Throne of Psyche, a collection of poems from Mercer University Press, as well as Glimmerglass from P. S. Publishing. After that comes another collection of poems, The Foliate Head from Stanza Press, guaranteed to green your mind. That book already has three scrumptious division pages by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. He did the marvelous cover of Val/Orson and will be doing three more covers for my work in the near future. Last is a book inspired by the peculiar life of Robert E. Howard, Maze of Blood, also from P. S. Publishing. I find fascinating his neurological strangeness and his Southern entrapment. And I had a wonderful time creating faux-Howard characters.

About the Author

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

“Stranger Than Science Fiction: Into the Alternate Dimension of Mainstream Literature”
by Ryan Britt

Sometimes I imagine a world where stories are experienced not by reading, listening or seeing, but are instead comprehended through telepathic signals sent directly from the stories themselves. Here stories are living, corporeal things, floating around in the air like butterflies, or humming birds, or bats. In one scenario, I am an unscrupulous story-poacher, sent to this world from ours, tasked with netting a few good yarns. Soon I’ve captured three of them, and shoved the stories into my backpack without remorse. Back in our world, they’ll be transcribed, and stuck in a genre-appropriate book or magazine. Prior to snatching the stories, I listened to their whispers and quickly noted each story’s “elevator pitch.”

The first one is about a group of sentient buses who are all suddenly and mysteriously murdered one evening. The second story tells of a finishing school for female werewolves and their attempts to become permanently human. The third is a personal narrative of a man’s family history, stretching all the way back to civil war era America. Returning home, I prepare to convert the stories to good-old ink on paper (or photons on a computer screen), and I’m pretty damn sure I know how to classify these suckers. Using my extensive training, I identify the sentient bus and werewolf stories as works of speculative fiction, and the family tree story as a memoir. I’ll send the first two off to Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, or Clarkesworld. The other one will end up with Tin House, or Conjunctions, or Granta. But there’s just one problem. In the real world, I’d be wrong.

“The Night the Buses Died” is a short story written by Etgar Keret, a wildly popular Israeli writer whose work frequently features elements of speculative fiction, despite being published in Zoetrope All Story, The LA Times, and Tin House. “St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves” is the title story of short story collection by the American writer Karen Russell who, in addition to being recently awarded the prestigious 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation, was also named one of Granta’s best new novelists in 2006. The memoir about the man’s family tree, “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance”, was written by Paul Park and appears in the January/February 2010 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

To be fair, the publication of a pseudo-memoir in F&SF is not without conventional reasoning; Park’s tale does stretch into the future, 2024 to be exact. “I’ll be in my late sixties when this all eventually happens,” he tells me, playfully affirming the notion that he views his own personal science fiction as an inevitable reality. Still, upon first inspection “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance”reads like something you might find in The New Yorker. It has the trappings of a deeply personal confessional piece of emotional angst. It explores the struggle of the American male to find meaning in his family history while grappling with his failings in an increasingly emotionally brutal and detached world. It feels like serious literature. It also has aliens. Is this uncommon in SF? Not to those of us who know the score. For fans of Alfred Bester, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and, more recently, Paulo Bacigalupi, the answer to the question “Does SF have literary merit?” is a resounding “yes, of course.”

Paul Park enjoys some cross-over success. In addition to being published in Interzone, F&SF, and other genre magazines, his stories have materialized in more mainstream journals like Conjunctions and Fence. “That was back when Jonathan Lethem was the editor,” Park says of the latter publication, an allusion to another well-known writer who, along with Michael Chabon, Stephen Millhauser and a few others, is claimed by both the literary and SF camps. Kurt Vonnegut famously joked in his essay “Science Fiction” that he had no idea he was a science fiction writer, and that he was simply someone who “noticed technology.” But what about non-SF writers who consciously had SF-leanings at the start of their careers? It appears some of today’s rising literary stars became writers because of an interest in, and love of, the fantastic.

When I ask Etgar Keret about the kinds of books he read as a teenager, he lists Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Robert Zelany and other SF giants as major influences. “I didn’t differentiate SF writers from ‘other’ writers,” he says, “There was interesting stuff and boring stuff.” Keret, a household name in Israel, has a speculative element in almost every single one of his crisp short fictions. Shapeshifters, ghosts, super-powers, magic, alternate dimensions, the after-life, you name it.

He’s “sure” we’ll see an Etgar Keret story set in the future at some point, and says it would be a “great honor” if one of his stories or books were nominated for a Hugo. “They [the Hugos] were the first literary prize I had ever heard of, and some of the best short fiction I’ve read in my life is associated with this prize.” Keret finds hyper-realistic writing “over-rated” and tells me, “The ‘objective’ sense of reality is in no way closer to your inner truth than metaphorical or fantastical storytelling.” When he espoused a similar sentiment to NPR’s Ira Glass in front of a large audience at the New York Public Library last October, I heard not only thunderous applause, but some hoots and hollers of approval too.

“I am soooo glad you mentioned that,” Karen Russell tells me over the phone, “I remember loving that comment.” Russell was in the same NYPL crowd as I was, and speaks fondly about her love for speculative fiction. In addition to the werewolf story, Russell’s other premises include: a minotaur with a human family, children with prophetic nightmares of past disasters, and a world where crab carcasses are large enough to be made into small boats. Of the giant crab-shell boats Russell has this to say: “My favorite thing about that story is how many people have asked me if there really are crabs that big. Like they really believe in these huge mutant crabs! Who knows, I guess they might be real. I have no idea. I made them up.”

She is quick to point out that her mutant crabs and werewolves aren’t merely symbols in her stories or tricks of magical realism. “I don’t like stories that use the alphabet of the fantastic to seem weird or whatever. You’ve got to believe in the monsters.” Her story about the finishing school for female werewolves possesses wonderful self-searching themes of identity and self-control. At the end of “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” if the reader has any experience with social anxiety they’ll relate to being a werewolf. But Russell insists the story didn’t begin from a sense of metaphoric self-importance. “I didn’t sit down to write this story about my childhood of feeling awkward and left-out and then slapped on the werewolf thing as some over-the-top metaphor. I sat down and wrote a story about werewolves because werewolves are cool and I thought it would be a fun story to write.”

Another celebrated young writer whose career began with a focus on genre, rather than mainstream fiction, is Victor LaValle. He is the author of three books, most recently the highly acclaimed novel Big Machine which, in addition to being one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 best books of 2009, was also named among the best science fiction of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times. The novel is perhaps more accurately described as horror than SF (it has recently been nominated in the Best Novel category of the Shirley Jackson Awards). LaValle tells me he set out to write a story that was “scary”, “exciting” and “had monsters in it.” The book describes a sort of low-tech secret society whose members are attempting to piece together supernatural consistencies through the study of various newspaper clippings. The tone of the book could easily make it the literary cousin of Fringe or, as one character describes it, “the spiritual X-Men.”

LaValle tells me he is very pleased with the response Big Machine has received, since it was the first of his three books that he decided to “have fun with.” In between bites of burgers in the Upper West Side of Manhattan I tell him I sensed a sort of Harlan Ellison meets H.P. Lovecraft quality in the prose and style of Big Machine. “You know,” he says, “I had direct references to ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ in early drafts of the book. But my editor wasn’t sure who Harlan Ellison was, and I figured the material should stand on its own. But yes, that is totally an influence.” When he was a teenager living in Queens, LaValle sent one of his early short stories to a horror ‘zine based in the Lower East Side. They didn’t take the story, but what LaValle did receive in the mail was a detailed checklist indicating which aspects of his story were strong and which aspects were weak. “They had this flow chart,” he says, “telling me the characterization was weak, or the plot was strong, or whatever. This was a huge moment for me. I realized even if I was writing about Goblins or Demons or whatever, that there were people out there that took writing seriously.”

So it’s safe to say many young writers getting attention in mainstream circles love genre fiction, and in many cases actually write genre fiction. But what about the editors on the front lines of new fiction? Are mainstream literary journals looking for SF-style stories? Todd Zuniga of Opium Magazine certainly seems to think so.

“We did an interview with William Gibson back in our fifth issue, which was great because he is phenomenal.” Headquartered in Brooklyn, Opium (available both online and in print formats) in many ways represents the post-McSweeney’s 21st Century direction of chic mainstream literature. With contributors like Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Ben Greenman (an editor at The New Yorker) and Etgar Keret, Opium celebrates a diversity of voices and shows no signs of shying away from something because of its genre. Their 8th Issue, called “The Mania Issue,” featured almost exclusively fanfic, including a story which combined elements of the film Alien with John Paul Satre’s No Exit.

“The fanfic thing was fun,” Zuniga tells me. “But I really want to go further. I’m not sure I know what to call it anymore. I like ‘Fabulolist Fiction’. But yeah, I love all that stuff.” As we talk I get the impression that Opium is the kind of mainstream publication that is perfect for a humanist science fiction writer. Zuniga likes stories “with plots” that are “actually about something”, rather than dry character studies in which “not much happens.” “The thing about good science fiction,” he says, “is that it’s always about something happening now. And I’m really interested in stories about now.” When I ask him if Opium would ever publish a story which takes place in the future his response is confident, “Oh yeah. For sure.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all kinds of SF would find its way into the pages of Opium. I ask Zuniga if, as an editor, he has any kind of nerdy science fiction threshold; a point at which certain speculative elements will turn him off. “When something takes itself a little too seriously,” he says, “I read because reading is fun. If I’m dealing with science fiction and it’s absolutely no fun to read because of too much earnestness, I’m out.”

Jessica Loudis, an associate editor at Conjunctions, firmly believes, “it just comes down to the quality of the prose and the writer’s ability to effectively create their world. If an author can make use of speculative elements in an innovative way, then I certainly won’t object to genre tricks.” In the late 1980s, George Plimpton (of The Paris Review) said Conjunctions was “the most interesting and superbly edited literary journal founded in the past decade.” The journal has published such literary super-stars as Joyce Carol Oates, Ricky Moody, Sandra Cisneros, Tom Robbins, David Shields, Mary Gaitskill and many others. Yet the ratio of genre writers to literary writers is practically one to one. In addition to Paul Park, Conjunctions has published stories by China Mievelle, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Jeff Vandermeer and others. They’ve also published Karen Russell. Though seemingly a redundant question, I asked Loudis if Conjunctions is actively still looking for SF stories. “Definitely,” she says, “Conjunctions publishes across those genres regularly. Our upcoming issue is about facsimiles and doppelgangers, so expect to see lots of fantasy/speculative fiction in that [issue].”

For the ultimate proof that many of those who run in literary circles actually long to travel through time and space, I find myself visiting the home of Lawerence Raab. At 64, Raab has been a finalist for the Nation Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, published in The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and is currently a distinguished professor at Williams College. Raab has the gravitas of being an old solider of literature; he refers to Raymond Carver as “Ray” and possesses a book collection that includes numerous first editions. In addition to the stuffy important stuff, there are various toy robots, rocketships and wonderful vintage statues of Nosferatu and Gamera peeking out from the shelves, letting you know the real inspiration behind the great poems. And of all his various awards and plaques, there is only one thing he wants to show me.

“Look at these!” Raab exclaims has he shows me two different issues of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy for the 1970s. Both feature cover stories from SF giants like Ellison and Zelany and Asimov. But the contributing SF poem in each issue was written by Lawrence Raab. “Pretty cool, huh?’ he says, beaming like a child. Raab is a little older than my father and yet, as he shows me these old issues of F&SF, he’s looking for approval from me, not the other way around. Yes Larry, it’s still cool to like SF, and it’s still literary too.

The next time I head back into that alternate dimension of corporeal stories, and hunt for the best new stuff, I might not be as sure where to put a story from Karen Russell, or a novel from Victor Lavelle. Hell, even Lawrence Raab has a poem called “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” And if I’m very lucky, I may not always know. When my memory fails me decades from now, I might recall having read that Paul Park story in The New Yorker and Karen Russell’s werewolf story in Weird Tales. I may not remember which authors won all the Pulitzers or Hugos, but hopefully, I’ll always find the good stories. In his essay “On Writing”, Raymond Carver lists some of his favorite writers (including Ursula K. LeGuin) and then says that, “Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.” I wonder if this made all good writers of fiction in actuality, writers of fantasy.

“I hope so,” Karen Russell tells me, “because I do this so I can escape to another planet. My planet.”

About the Author

Ryan Britt’s writing has been published with Nerve, Soon Quarterly, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and is forthcoming in Opium Magazine. He has performed stories on stage in New York City with The Moth, The Liar Show, Stripped Stories, and Heeb Magazine. Ryan’s plays have enjoyed readings and productions in NYC with The Longest Lunch Theatre Company and Collective Unconscious, with a new play slated for summer 2010 at The Tank. Recently, he wrote weekly short stories for the blog Brooklyn The Borough. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.