Laying the Ghost
by Eric Brown

We were winding down after coming in from Aldebaran with a haul of starship wreckage. I’d sold the scrap en route and left it in geo-sync orbit above Constance, Altair III, for the merchant to collect. The funds were already in my account and I was treating Ella and Karrie to a meal and a few drinks.

A pianist was improvising Lyran mood-music and the ceiling pulsed with images of Jovian superstorms. Across the spaceport, starships were phasing into and out of the void in eerie silence.

While Ella was at the bar, Karrie said, “For an AI, you know, she’s almost… well, human.”

“She’s running on a self-aware paradigm, Karrie. That paradigm is human. She has all the emotional capacity of you and me. As far as I’m concerned, she’s our equal.”

Karrie just looked at me.

“What?” I said.

“Talking about emotional capacity, Ed… Have you ever considered your own?

I stared at her. “Mine?“

“Have you heard of the expression ‘a cold fish’?”

You can know someone for years — in this case almost ten — and still be amazed at how they view you. “Me? What on earth makes you think that?”

She enumerated her argument with calloused fingers. “One, you never talk. I mean about things that matter, your feelings, your emotions. You never allow people into your head.”

I said, “You wouldn’t want to go there. It’s full of day to day rubbish. Nothing deep going on in there.”

“You see — there you go again. Trivialising what is important. Two,” she went on before I could protest, “you never talk about your past, what’s affected you. Three, you rarely speak about the future, what you want — other than the next big haul.”

“And what wrong with talking about the next big haul?” I said dismissively.

Karrie snorted.

I was glad to see that Ella was returning with a tray of drinks. As she slinked through the crowd, I noticed a few men and women covertly eyeing her slim body. She slipped into the booth, smiling at me.

“What do you think, Ella?” Karrie said, taking her drink.

Oh, God… I thought.

“About what, Karrie?”

“About Ed. Do you think he has deficient emotional capacity?”

Ella looked from Karrie to me, her expression serious. She said, “I think his emotional capacity is far from deficient, Karrie. What is deficient is his ability to express, to show, those emotions. I suspect some past trauma is inhibiting him in this respect.” She looked at me. “Maybe you will tell us about it, one day?”

Karrie was smirking at this turn in the conversation.

I said, “Well, thanks. Here I was, enjoying a quiet drink with my crewmates, when everything gets suddenly psychoanalytical. Listen, there’s nothing wrong with me, emotionally or otherwise. I have no hang-ups, no inhibitions. I’m happy Ed, the salvageman…”

I raised my glass. “Anyway, here’s to many another successful haul.”

Around then I noticed the figure in the Orion warware spacesuit. It was moving from group to group of drinkers, talking to them briefly and then moving on. From the dismissive gestures of the people spoken to, I received the impression that whoever was in the suit was asking for something, and being turned down.

A minute later the figure perched itself on a stool at the opening of the booth and stared in at us.

I say ’stared’, but I only assumed that. The oval faceplate in its sleek, silver helmet was as milky as opal. Its silver suit was streamlined and body-hugging, the surface swarming with millions of nanoware-bots like iron-filings in oil.

From its shape, I guessed there was a woman in there.

“What do you want?” Karrie asked brusquely.

“I find myself in a difficult situation,” it said. Its voice was feminine, but transistorised. For all I knew, the inhabitant of the suit might not even be human.

She went on, “I need to leave Constance, but I cannot locate a ship heading in the direction I require.”

Before Karrie could jump in with some sarcastic comment, I asked, “And where’s that?”

A hesitation, then, “The Chandrasakar Stardrift.”

I whistled. “That’s quite a way away.”

“Five thousand three hundred light years, give or take.”

Karrie shook her head, derisive, and took a long swallow of beer.

“Where specifically in the Stardrift?” I said.

“A planet called Serimion, Kharran II.”

“Serimion…” I said. “Now where have I heard the name before?”

Ella said, quick as a flash, “Serimion: site of the war between human colonists and the native inhabitants of the Kharran system. It was a particularly brutal and bloody conflict. The alien race known as the Kha, from the fifth planet of the system, invaded without provocation. Approximately three million humans lost their lives on Serimion.”

The person in the suit said, “Precisely three million, two hundred thousand and ninety. Let no lost soul go unmourned.”

 I asked the obvious question. “But why do you want to go to Serimion?”

The being hesitated again, before saying, “I have my reasons.”

“But won’t it be dangerous? I mean, won’t the Kha be hostile to human arrivals?”

“They allow a certain number of mourners and war historians to visit the shrines of Serimion every year,” she said.

I wondered which category she fell into.

I considered for a minute, then said, “Well, it’s a long way, and not where we were heading… The fare would be hefty.”

A silence. The opalescent faceplate turned to me, and the soft, feminine, transistorised voice said, “That is the other slight problem. I am without the funds to finance the journey.”

Karrie snorted and shuffled from the booth. “I’ll be back at the ship, Ed.” She stood and hurried from the bar.

The milky oval of the faceplate, behind which anything might be lurking, was still regarding me.

I said, “A lack of funds is certainly a problem. I don’t see how…”

The figure pointed to my flight-suit. “I see you bear the sigil of a salvage captain. There is a small starship, a strike vessel, drifting in orbit around Serimion. It belongs to me. You may take it in recompense if you agree to transport me there.”

I looked at Ella, who said, “What kind of strike vessel, exactly?”

“A Corinthian, Class II.”

Ella said to me, “Even badly damaged, it would fetch approximately twenty-five thousand Altairian units on the open market.”

Which would more than cover the cost of the return journey to the Chandrasakar Stardrift.

Of course, there was no way of telling if the being in the suit was telling the truth.

I said, “Show me your face.”

After a moment, on some internal command, the faceplate cleared.

“You’re human?” I stared at the pretty, impish face revealed; dark, short hair, high cheekbones, a snub nose. She looked no older than twenty.

“But why the suit?” I asked.

She shrugged, twisted her lips uncomfortably. “I… I have a certain condition. My immune system is dysfunctional.” And she left it at that.

She looked at me, hope evident in her big brown eyes. “Well…?”

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Katerina,” she replied. “Katerina Reverte.”

“Well, Katerina… Why don’t you give me five minutes to discuss things with my co-pilot here?”

Katerina nodded, rose and strode across to the floor-to-ceiling viewscreen that looked out over the expanse of the spaceport. Reduced in the perspective, she looked tiny, vulnerable.

“Well,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I think the situation is certainly odd. She is wearing an Orion warware suit, which is even more expensive than a Corinthian. She could sell the suit, which would more than pay for her medical treatment. It would also pay for her return to Serimion.”

“You think she’s lying about her condition?”

“That is certainly a possibility.”

“And about the Corinthian, too?”

“Impossible to ascertain.”

I nodded. “It’d be a risk.”

“I would like to know the reason she wishes to return to Serimion.”

I shrugged. “My guess is she fought in the war. She wishes to return to lay ghosts, to revisit old battlefields…”

“Maybe.”

“Well, perhaps we’ll find out along the way.”

Ella fixed me with one of her impassive stares. “You will agree to take her?”

I nodded, and looked across the lounge to the suited figure. Katerina had turned and was watching us. I signalled her over.

She came hesitantly, almost wincing. I held out my hand. “We phase out in five hours,” I told her.

Her expression, behind the faceplate, was joyous.

Karrie took a while to simmer down, even when I told her about the Corinthian.

“But you know nothing about her! Who she is, what she is! She’s striding around here in that damned war suit… you realise how powerful those things are?”

I shrugged. We were a day out of Altair III, sailing through the marmoreal realm of void-space, two days away from the Chandrasakar Stardrift.

Karrie went on, “Why did you agree, Ed?”

I shrugged again. “She’s young, vulnerable. Everyone else back there had turned her down.”

She stared at me. “I just don’t believe you…”

I smiled at her. “What did you say back at the port, that I didn’t show my emotions? Well, I’m showing them now. I feel sorry for the kid and I want to help her — ”

Karrie pointed at me. “This has nothing to do with your emotions, Ed, and all to do with your male biology.”

“Bullshit, Karrie!”

Ella chose that moment to slip through the hatch and cross the flight-deck. She eased into her sling with a smile at me. “For two people who have been in each other’s company for almost ten years,” she said, softly, “you spend a lot of time in altercations.”

“That’s what ten years of being banged up with a sarcastic, sour-faced cynic like Karrie does to you.”

“And fuck you, too,” Karrie spat.

“Anyway,” Ella said, “the drives are functioning at ninety-eight per cent efficiency, the smartcore reports no problems, and mechanically all aboard the ship is running smoothly.” Did I discern the stress she put on the word mechanically?

Under her breath, Karrie muttered, “And you’d know about that, girl,” but if Ella heard her, she chose to turn the other cheek.

“Have you had a chance to talk to Katerina?” I asked.

Ella nodded. “I took her on a tour of the ship.”

“Learn anything?”

“Very little. She said she was born and brought up on Serimion, but when I asked about the war, and whether she fought in it, she clammed up.”

“Do you know much about Serimion?”

“My cache has an extensive file on the planet: settled by humans over two centuries ago, a pastoral place of vast agricultural concerns, a million villages, considered by the rest of the Expansion to be technologically backward. It was settled by a breakaway faction of the Amish community of Mars. The attack by the neighbouring Kha came out of the blue.”

“And no one has ever found out why the aliens invaded?”

Ella shrugged. “A motive was never discovered. That’s what rankles with the survivors to this day, as well as the terrible loss.”

She fell silent and stared through the viewscreen at the grey void.

“I think I’ll go talk to Katerina,” I said.

As I slipped from my sling and approached the hatch, Karrie said, “You’ll have difficulty getting that suit off her, if that’s what you’re thinking about. Seems she’s welded to the damned thing.”

I bit my tongue and pulled myself through the hatch, wondering what Karrie’s problem was.

As I descended the ladder, I heard Ella saying, “You should cease your criticism of Ed. He is, after all, biologically impelled by male drives.”

And I’d thought Ella was on my side…

I found Katerina in the observation lounge. She was seated before the great curving viewscreen, staring into the void. She had the cowed aspect of a devotee at a temple, a worshipper in a cathedral of the infinite.

“Do you mind…?” I asked, gesturing at the foam-form beside her.

She looked up. “No, please. Be my guest.”

I sat down beside her and saw that her faceplate was once again blank.

“Ella told me she’d shown you around the ship.” I stared at her sleek silver suit, wondering at its power.

“She gave me a guided tour.” She paused, then went on, “She is an AI, isn’t she?”

I nodded. “Yes, but one running on a self-aware paradigm.”

She turned her faceless faceplate to me and said, “Does that make her human, Ed?”

I smiled and shrugged. “I honestly don’t know, Katerina. It does make her a sentient being. And my equal. That’s what matters to me.”

She nodded. “Will you apologise to Ella for me, Ed?”

“What for?”

“For my inability to… to talk to her openly. She wanted to talk, I sensed, but I was unable to respond.”

“Because she wasn’t human?” I asked.

Instead of replying, she retuned her gaze to the infinite. A little later she said, “Do you believe in vitalism, Ed? The idea that — ”

I smiled. “I know what vitalism means.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps, once, I did. It’s a nice idea, after all, to think that humans are imbued with a special, God-given light of fire, vitality, soul…”

“Perhaps once?” she said. “But no longer?”

I smiled. “Then I met Ella and I had to rearrange my thinking a little.”

“So you think that life can exist without that vitality?”

“Look at Ella,” I said.

She turned to look at me. “Yes,” she said, “but is Ella truly alive?”

I shrugged, and let out a long sigh, out of my depth and uncomfortable. I said, “What about you? Do you believe in vitalism?”

She turned her head to me and said, “Oh, I know vitalism is real.”

I nodded. Ella had informed me that the Serimion colony had been religious.

She went on, in her own time, “I was brought up believing in a just God, a God who punished the bad and rewarded the good. We were a peaceful people. We practised non-violence, living within our means, at one and in harmony with our environment, our world. We knew how lucky, how God-blessed we were in settling on Serimion, and we gave thanks.”

Beyond the viewscreen, the grey void swirled. There were times when I thought I discerned patterns in the marmoreal streaks in the infinite, and others when I knew that the void was purely random and chaotic.

Katerina went on, softly, “I was brought up on a big farm, run by my parents. I had four older brothers… They treated me like a princess.” I’m sure, had I been able to see her face, I would have witnessed her smiling. “We worked hard and worshipped daily, and life was bountiful and good. We knew our neighbours and trusted them. They were like us. I never really apprehended that there was an outside world… another way of doing things. Even when I graduated from school and attended college… all the world was one, one belief, one way of doing things. And then…”

And then, I thought, the Kha attacked.

“I was on holiday with friends at the time. We were in a resort on an island far to the south. This saved my life. We were aware that something terrible had happened… the firestorms in the atmosphere, the explosions. We saw their attack ships in the distance. When we returned to the mainland…”

She fell silent. I reached out and laid my big hand over her small, cold silver mitt.

She went on, “Devastation. Destruction. All the cities, every one of them, all the small towns… destroyed. Firebombed, and worse… They’d used weapons we didn’t even understand. Reducing people and places to dust… We never stood a chance. We didn’t even… didn’t even have an army.” She fell silent. Then: “I returned home, or to what was left of it. I found my parents, my four brothers. They were dust, Ed, with just scraps of clothing here and there to identify them.”

I let a respectful interval elapse, then said, “How did you get off planet?”

“A Federation ship had monitored the attack and sent rescue rafts. All told, just seven thousand of us survived. We — well, a few thousand of us — decided to fight back. Our rage, our grief, overcame out pacific instincts, our long-held beliefs. We had assets lodged in banks across the Expansion, and we bought attack ships and…” she raised her hand, “and state-of-the-art warware. And we returned to Serimion and fought the Kha.”

I said, “What happened?”

She turned her helmet toward me. “We lost.”

Seconds, then minutes elapsed. We were alone with our separate thoughts as we stared into the void.

A while later I said, “And vitalism, Katerina? Your certainty…?”

She turned to look at me. “I know it’s real, Ed, because of what happened to me in orbit around my homeplanet.” And she left it at that and hung her helmeted head.

I hesitated, then asked, “What happened, Katerina?”

She just shook her head, silently. 

I squeezed her gloved hand, and thought it wise to leave her to her memories.

I returned to the flight-deck and was relieved to see that Karrie was not there.

Ella hung in her sling, her head flung back, the whites of her eyes showing.

She sensed my presence and came back from whichever cyber-realm she’d been inhabiting. “I was integrating with the ship’s smartware core, Ed,” she said matter-of-factly.

I smiled to myself, wondering at the process which allowed her to commune with my ship’s logic matrix.

I said, “I’ve been talking to Katerina. She told me about what happened on Serimion.” I told Ella what Katerina had said about the attack, her return to fight the Kha. Her defeat.

“Which makes me all the more curious as to why she wishes to return there, Ed.”

I shook my head, and then found myself reaching out and taking Ella’s hand. It was small, warm, and very human. I held it tight and said, “Ella, when I was young… my sister died. That’s another story. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

She stared at me with her big brown eyes. “What do you want to talk about?”

I took a breath. “After what happened, I found myself drawn back to the place where Maria died. I was compelled. I couldn’t explain why. It was the place where she’d last been alive; perhaps that was it. Perhaps I thought I might commune with whatever of her remained. Silly, I know. But anyway, I had to go back. And you know something? When I did, when I went back and stood on that spot, and thought of my sister and the silly accident that robbed her of her life, and when I cried… well, I felt a lot better for doing so.” I squeezed Ella’s hand. “Perhaps that’s why Katerina’s going back? Can you understand that, Ella?”

She returned my gaze with her lustrous eyes. “Yes, Ed,” she said. “Yes, I understand perfectly.”

One thousand Kha sentinels, grey and monolithic and as vast as ten city blocks, hung in space around the defeated planet of Serimion.

My ship’s smartware core spoke in its soothing, feminine contralto. “Kha AIs have established contact, Ed. They wish to know the purpose of our visit.”

“Tell them that we’re here to pay our respects to the human dead,” I said, “and we seek clearance to land on Serimion.”

We eased to a halt beside one of the sheer grey monoliths, and waited.

Framed within the girdle of sentinels, the planet tilted ten degrees off its polar axis, blue and white and twice the size of Earth.

Ella said, “It’s beautiful.”

“I’m not looking forward to finding out what might be down there,” I said. “If the Kha let us through, that is.”

Karrie joined us on the flight-deck and eased herself into her sling.

I said, “So, our passenger proved the security risk you mentioned, Karrie?” I couldn’t help the jibe.

She looked at me. “No, but there’s something seriously wrong with the girl.”

“What?” Ella asked.

“Have you noticed she doesn’t eat? It’s been three days since leaving Constance, and I’ve taken six trays of food to her birth. She hasn’t touched a thing.”

I shrugged. “So… the girl wasn’t hungry. She’s returning to the place where her family, her people, were massacred, after all.”

Ella turned in her sling. “Ed,” she said, almost reluctantly. “There is something else that doesn’t quite ring true. Physically, Katerina appears to be twenty, twenty-five years old.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been double-checking the records. The Kha attacked Serimion twenty-five years ago.”

I stared down at the slowly rotating planet. I recalled Katerina’s youthful, elfish face within her helmet.

Karrie said, “Seems to me like the girl’s been lying to us, Ed.”

I was about to ask Ella why Katerina might have lied when the smartcore said, “Clearance granted. The Kha have issued a two day pass. We must be out of Serimion airspace within forty-eight hours.”

Minutes later Katerina joined us on the flight-deck. She stood between my sling and Ella’s and stared through the viewscreen at her homeplanet.

She had cleared her faceplate, and her youthful face stared out, her eyes wide in wonder.

“I have the co-ordinates for the Corinthian,” she said, and reeled off a series of numbers to Ella.

We eased past the sentinel. I was glad to leave the cold, inhuman monolith in our wake. Ten minutes later, Ella pointed. Through the viewscreen we made out the becalmed wreck of the Corinthian, nose down in relation to the planet, ragged holes puncturing its fuselage.

Karrie said, “And you survived that?”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Katerina said, softly.

I said, “Okay, Ella. Stow those co-ordinates and we’ll tractor beam the Corinthian on the way out.” I turned to Katerina. “Now, where do you want us to land?”

“No one has ever seen the Kha,” Katerina told us. “They have had no contact with the Human Expansion, and do not allow visitors to their homeplanet. When they struck Serimion, they did so from altitude. Later, when we returned and engaged them in battle, we saw their ships but never the Kha themselves. The few Kha vessels we managed to destroy exploded in space, so no alien remains were ever discovered.” She paused, then went on, “Some say the Kha resemble devils, others maintain they are insectoid. To me, it does not matter. The very sound of their name conjures absolute evil.”

We were drifting slowly over the planet’s vast southern continent. Ruined villages and townships punctuated the green continuity of the veldt. Roads and rivers threaded the landscape, but nothing moved down there. Absolute stillness greeted our gaze, and I could not help but think of the planet as a cemetery without gravestones.

We floated towards the planet’s equator, where Katerina’s family had farmed the land. Veldt turned to rainforest, a vast tangle of alien vines and great gnarled, crimson trees, and then the rainforest gave way to a range of purple mountains that ran parallel to a great rift valley. Between these geographic features stretched a plain of fertile land that was Katerina’s birthplace.

Ella touched my arm. “Look. Down there.”

Something squatted on the plain. I said, “Bring us down, slowly.”

Ella eased the ship to within a hundred metres of the thing.

Katerina said in a tiny voice, “Could it be a Kha?”

We hung in the air, observing.

I could not tell whether it was mechanical or biological. Twenty metres long, perhaps ten high, it was armour plated with what looked like matte black chitin, domed and segmented and squatting on the ground as if devouring pray.

From what I guessed was its head-section, or what might have been its control centre, a long proboscis — or drill — punctured the soil.

Whether a Kha, or one of their creations, its act was symbolic of the rape of the planet.

As we watched, it seemed to shiver with ecstasy, or maybe just mechanical vibration.

I glanced at Ella. “Sound?”

She passed her hand over her controls and seconds later a deep ululation filled the flight-deck. It reminded me of the chanting of a thousand monks, resonant and dolorous.

I asked Ella, “Do you know whether it’s alive, or…?”

She went rigid in her sling, her eyeballs rolled to show only their whites as she attempted to communicate with the thing.

She shook her head. “It’s hard to tell. I sense a biological core, surrounded by extensive technological addenda.”

I looked at Ella, saying nothing.

In a tiny voice, Katerina said, “We revered our planet, Ed. We loved the earth. This… this thing is robbing its vitality…”

I reached out to take her gloved hand, but she pulled away. “Get us away from here! I don’t want to…” She turned from the viewscreen, holding her helmeted head in her hands.

Ella sped us from the thing, towards the continental rift valley.

One hour later we came down on a plain of lush grassland beside the escarpment.

A hundred metres before the ship was the outline of farm-buildings, and beyond them the geometric pattern of fields, their crops gone wild long ago.

Katerina said, “I would like a few minutes by myself, Ed. Then, would you come and join me? I have a lot I must explain.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

She moved from the flight-deck. Minutes later her tiny figure emerged from the shadow of the ship, moving past the ruins of the farmhouse towards the edge of the escarpment.

She stood with her arms on her hips and stared about her.

In silence, we watched.

After a minute she moved towards a lone tree that grew at an angle, leaning out over the rift valley. It was similar to those I had seen in the rainforest, crimson and contorted, with a vast, spreading leaf canopy.

She found a place in its gnarled root system and sat down, staring out across the abyss.

Like this, very still, she remained for perhaps fifteen minutes.

At length she turned and raised a hand, and I took this as a summons.

Ella and Karrie said nothing as I left the flight-deck and climbed down to the air-lock. I cycled myself through and stepped out onto the soil of Serimion. The first thing I noticed was the scent, a heady, spicy mix of soil and flower blooms. The grass, I saw, was embroidered with a spread of tiny yellow flowers, which gave off an almost overpowering perfume as I strode from the ship towards where Katerina sat.

At one point I paused and looked back. Ella and Karrie stood before the viewscreen, gazing down at me like figures in an aquarium.

I passed into the shade of the great leaning tree and picked my way through the knuckled roots until I came to the girl. I sat down beside her. “It’s a beautiful world, Katerina.”

She turned to me. Her youthful face showed behind her faceplate, and she smiled. “It was even more beautiful, Ed, before they attacked.”

I looked away, and then saw, standing among the raised roots on the edge of the escarpment, six simple wooden crosses.

She saw the direction of my gaze and said, “We had a custom on Serimion, Ed. We buried our dead beside trees, and this was my parent’s favourite place on the planet. At sunset they would come out here with a drink and just sit and admire the view.”

The silence stretched. A gentle, warm wind picked up the scent of the flowers and swamped us.

She said, “After the attack, I drove back here from the southern coast, passing devastated towns and knowing what I would find… The farm was destroyed, looking much as it does now. I found no personal possession, no mementoes… Perhaps that was a good thing. To have found objects that belonged to mother and father and my brothers, that would have been too much. Now, I would like something to remind me…” She turned and smiled at me. “Is that silly?”

I returned her smile. “Not at all, Katerina.”

“I found what was left of my family… or perhaps I was kidding myself. I found scraps of clothing, and dust, and scooped it up and carried it over here and buried it beside the tree, then planted wooden crosses I made from what remained of the farmhouse. I even said prayers, and then vowed to get my revenge.

“I don’t know whether it was hours or days before I was found by a rescue ferry and taken to the nearest human colony world.” She waved. “Anyway, two years later I did come back, in this suit, in the Corinthian, and I did exact a futile, limited form of revenge. I destroyed two Kha craft and then, and then…”

She gathered herself, then went on, “And then a Kha fighter struck, and disabled the Corinthian, and left me for dead. A rescue vessel picked me up, took me back to the colony world…”

She gazed down at the forlorn row of crosses. From this angle, I could not see her face.

“I said I had a lot to explain, Ed.”

“The attack happened twenty-five years ago,” I said, “and yet your face is that of a woman of twenty. You never eat, never open your suit…”

She turned her helmet and looked at me. Behind the faceplate I could see silver tears tracking down her cheeks. She raised a gloved hand and stared at it. “These suits were the latest Orion warware. They were made to help a fighter fight, augmented with an integrated AI to boost physical reaction time, mental acuity.” She stopped, and her next words surprised me, “Do you know why I came here, Ed?”

I said, “To pay respects, to… to lay the ghost?”

She laughed, briefly. “That’s good. I like that. Yes, to lay the ghost.” She stared at me. “I came to this grave site to bury myself.”

I stared at her, and watched as she lifted her gloves to her helmet and touched a control at the neck. He helmet opened slowly, folding out in sections, blooming like a flower. At some point in the process the hologram showing her youthful face flickered off. And I stared, unable to believe what I was seeing.

A skull sat askew on the notched column of her vertebrae, grinning out at me.

It was all I could do not to back away in shock. I almost retched.

Her voice, her soft, feminine voice, continued, “These are fighting suits, Ed. And they go on fighting when the fighter within them is technically dead. Shrapnel punctured an elbow seal in the suit when my Corinthian was attacked, and I died of asphyxiation. I was cerebrally integrated with the suit’s AI, and it uploaded my memories into its operating system… and I would have gone on fighting, if the Corinthian had been capable.”

“Oh, Christ, Katerina.”

“For two days after the attack, when I was rescued and taken back to the colony world, I thought I’d managed somehow to survive. And then a medic broke it to me, and opened my suit, and…”

Her gloved hand lifted, indicated the grinning skull.

“You cannot begin to imagine the shock, Ed, the terror.”

I could only shake my head and bite my lips in an effort to stem my tears. I stared at the lop-sided skull, and it stared back at me, its orbits huge and shadowy. I wanted to get to my feet and run, but my legs felt weak and bile rose, acid, in my throat.

She said, “I told you that I believe in vitalism, in the soul, because of what had happened to me. I am less than human, now, a mere mechanical set of stored memories and emotions.”

She reached up, took her skull in her gloved hands and lifted it from her spine. She lowered the skull to her lap, where it sat gazing blindly out across the abyss.

“The terrible, terrible thing is, Ed, that in my heart… or whatever passes for my heart now… I know that vitalism is a fact. Because now I am reduced.” She touched the chest of her suit, and slowly its torso opened, two flanges hinging outwards to reveal a chaotic jackstraw assemblage of bones within.

She leaned forward, over the skull in her lap, and with both hands scooped a hollow in the fine earth before the closest cross. I watched, appalled yet fascinated, as she placed her skull in the grave, then reached into the cavity of her chest and one by one withdrew her bones.

She raised her right arm and her ulna and radius, then her smaller metacarpal bones, rattled into the suit’s torso. She did the same with her left arm, and collected the bones and laid them, reverently, in the grave. Next she split a seam in her legs and withdrew the femur and tibia from her right leg, along with the smaller bones, and then the left, and I closed my eyes and wept.

When I looked again she was covering the bones with soil to create a small, compact mound.

She turned her suit to face me, and her disembodied voice said, “Humans, Ed, are far more than mechanistic machines. I know this because of what I am now. Although I have the memories of what happened, I do not have the ability to feel real emotion, to grieve.”

I wanted to tell her that she could be upgraded, that AIs had developed so much over the past twenty-five years. I wanted to tell her that she could be made human.

“I had a lover, a young man who fought alongside me and survived. While I was in hospital, he came to see me. I had just been told what I had become, and I showed him…” She paused, then went on, “Ed, the look on his face, the horror, before he fled…” She turned her opened helmet to me. “But for all I could intellectually appreciate what he might be feeling, I could not find it within me to empathise. And I felt… nothing.”

The silence stretched, and I could find not one word to comfort her.

The sun was setting behind the far horizon, laying down gorgeous laminates of tangerines and pinks. Far below us, shadows turned the abyss into a dark, inky pit.

At last she said, “I came here to bury myself, and I came here also to die.”

And she reached into the cavity of her chest and pulled out two slim columns. She held them up before me. “The suit’s energy system, Ed. Without them the suit will run down in hours.”

“Katerina…”

“It’s what I want. Peace at last. I can’t feel grief. I can’t feel sadness or pain. Or joy, or happiness, or love… All I have is the memories of these emotions. Now is the time I have dreamed of for so long. To die, here.”

She took the silver columns, drew back her arm and flung them into the rift. I watched them sail through the air, end over end, catching the dying sunlight as they fell.

She hunched forward, hands upturned in her lap, her open helmet bowed as if in supplication.

She said, softly, “I can feel myself slowing down already, Ed, and it is wonderful.”

“Katerina, I’ll stay.”

“No, please go. And say to Ella… tell her that I’m sorry, so sorry.”

“Goodbye, Katerina.”

She failed to respond, and I reached out and took her gloved hand for one last time, then stood and made my way through the root system of the great tree towards the ship. I stopped, once, and looked back, but the woman who had been Katerina Reverte was now no more than an empty Orion warware suit, seated on the edge of an abyss.

I heard the hatch of the ship hiss open, and Karrie stepped out and faced me. Her eyes were hard, questioning, and I knew I could not bring myself to describe what had happened, yet.

“Ed?

I hurried past her, and stopped before the hatch. Ella had appeared, and was watching me. Her expression was unreadable. She said, “I listened, Ed. I heard what Katerina told you.” She reached out her arms towards me. “And I just want to say that I understand your pain.”

At the sight of her standing there, so slight and vital and human, something broke within me

I stepped forward, and took her in my arms, and wept.

About the Author

Eric Brown began writing when he was fifteen and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories and has published over thirty-five books. His latest includes the novel Engineman and, due out in December, Guardians of the Phoenix. He writes a monthly science fiction review column for the Guardian newspaper. He lives near Cambridge, England.

Salvaging Gods
by Jacques Barcia

Gorette found her second godhead buried under piles of plastic bottles, holy symbols, used toilet paper and the severed face of an avatar. No matter how much the scavengers asked, the people from Theodora just wouldn’t separate organic from non-biodegradable, from divine garbage. They threw out their used up gods along with what was left of their meals, their burnt lamps, broken refrigerators, tires, stillborn babies and books of prayer in the trash can. And when the convoys carrying society’s leftovers passed through the town’s gates, some lazy bureaucrat would mark in a spreadsheet that another mountain was raised in that municipal sanitary landfill, the Valley of the Nephilim. And to hell with the consequences.

Her father says no dead god is dead enough that it can’t be remade on our own image. The old man can spend hours rambling about over-consumption, the gnostic crisis, the impact of all those mystical residues poisoning the soil and the underground streams, how children are born malformed and prone to mediunity, and how unfair it is that only the rich have access to miracles. People will do what’s more comfortable, not what’s best for everyone, he’d finally say. It’s far easier to buy new deities than try to reuse them. So he taught her how to recycle old gods and turn them into new ones, mostly, she believed, because he wanted to make a difference. Or maybe because he was the one true atheist left in the world.

It was a small one, that godhead, and not in a very good shape. Pale silver, dusty, scratched surface and glowing only slightly underneath the junk. At best, thought Gorette, it’d have only a few hundred lines of code she’d be able to salvage. Combined with some fine statues and pieces of altars she’d found early that morning, perhaps she’d be able to assemble one or two more deities to the community’s public temple at Saint Martin. The neighborhood she was raised in had only recently been urbanized, so that meant the place was not officially a slum anymore. But still, miracles were quite a phenomenon down in the suburbs.

“Hey, daddy. Found another one,” Gorette said, covering her eyes from the burning light of midday. “Can we go home now, please?”

The egg-shaped thing had the pulse of a dying heart, and fitted almost perfectly in her adolescent hand. So she arranged a place for it amongst the relics in her backpack, inside the folds of a ragged piece of loincloth, and into a beaten up thurible where it’d be safe enough to survive the hour-long ride back to the city.

Her father stood next to a marble totem, sweeping the field with a kirlian detector. The pillar was part of a discarded surround-sound system with speakers the size of his chest, and served as a landmark to the many scavengers exploring the waste dump. When he heard her daughter calling him, he took his gas mask off and said “That depends,” his low-toned voice coming like a sigh, tired. “Do you think this will do? We’re running out of code and there are many open projects in the lab.”

A plastic bag some ten yards away from her smelled of rotting flesh. Animal sacrifice, she knew, and the vultures seemed to have noticed that too. “Yeah,” she lied, “It’s a bit wasted, but I think it has a lot of good code in it. Never seen one of these, so I suppose it’s a quite new model.” She desperately needed to take that stink out of her body and today she hoped was water day. “Is it water day today, daddy?”

The old man picked up one last relic, a fang or something, and examined it close to his thick glasses. He nodded to the object and put it in a sac he carried tied to his waist. “No, it’s not. The Palace said three days ago that they’d reinforce the water gods cluster, so the suburbs rationing would drop to two days. But of course that didn’t happen.” He finally walked to Gorette and scratched her dreadlocks, trying to smile. “Maybe you can build a water god with the godhead you found, huh?”

Gorette made her first wish that evening, after incubating some of the new godhead’s code in an altar of her own design. It was built out of the remains of a semi-defaced idol, a one-eyed marble bust wearing a tall orange hat, adorned with shattered crystals, split dragon horns, praying cords and barbed wire. That last bit just to make sure everything would stand in place. The godhead rested inside the same thurible Gorette used to cradle it safely back from the Valley of the Nephilim. But now the metal egg had dozens of acupuncture needles trespassing its shell, and every single one was linked to hair-thin optical fiber threads, shining with divine code, feeding with data a green phosphorus monitor.

Without warning. It just woke up.

When the loading bar hit one hundred per cent, the stone bust opened its one eye, fluidly, staring directly at her. She fell from the chair, startled, and stared back at the thing’s physiognomy from where she stood. From the floor up.

It was her first attempt at a new design model, one that toyed with disharmony instead of symmetry. Profanity instead of divinity. Good hardware, her dad says, is as important as good code. But harmony. Harmony is the key. The problem is that new gods are coming with even more complex, specialized godheads, their kernels incompatible with older or malfunctioning holy paraphernalia. She decided to try out the new approach and, for her surprise, it worked.

“I want a fucking bath,” Gorette said, pointing a finger to the bust. “A warm bath. Now.”

The stone in the god’s crippled face moved like if it was made out of clay. Smooth. No, it moved like that stop-motion movie, what’s its name, the one that always airs on holidays and fridays’ evenings. The one dad just loves to watch when he’s back from the Valley.

“As you wish,” it said coldly.

A sound of streaming water echoed from the bathroom and almost instantly the smell of steam and soap and essential oils filled up the room. She grinned, and jumping over her feet ran towards the shower, undressing on her way. Is it lavender? Maybe birch. Arnica in the white cloud. She felt she was clean even before she could reach the shower, she felt the dirt collapsing, decanting on the floor before she could have a chance of laying on the tub and rest.

A bathtub. “A bathtub?”

She looked back at the one-eyed god running miracles in her room. “You made me a bathtub.” The idol remained still. She stood there for a few more seconds trying to figure out how her jury-rigged water god made her a complete bath, with a bathtub, aromatic oils and, now she saw it, the finest bathing gown. Collateral miracles were not unheard of, but modern godheads had filters to prevent the danger of leaking energy. Motionless, the god just kept staring forward, to nowhere in particular, its exposed wire guts transmitting magical pulses to the screen, blipping a green dot like the apparels in private hospitals, monitoring a wide-eyed comatose half-head, an undead, glitchy deity. Gorette felt like checking her complementary coding, but confessed to herself the hot pool of perfumed water was too tempting to be ignored. After all, feeling clean and relaxed she’d have more chances of debugging her creation.

That’s it. She immersed herself in the tub and let all her worries trail off, evaporate.

After the bathtub miracle, the god produced a new set of porcelain plates, when Gorette only commanded it to clean the dishes. Days later she asked for ice and got a refrigerator and a minibar. Then the thought of a nice meal generated spiced fish. And, one night, the sound of a calm, streaming river came as a lullaby. And rain cooled a hot day. And smile painted watercolor on canvas. On and on, over the course of a week, her tiniest, involuntary wishes were fulfilled and as much as she tried, she couldn’t find the bug in the god’s code tree. Okay, after the tenth attempt, the effort to fix the problem wasn’t that strong-willed. But dad had taught her a bug could untap the power of a god, mollifying reality in its closer vicinity, causing the neighborhood’s divine networks to go haywire. It was dangerous, she knew.

She spent days and nights trying to fix it, trying to combine source codes distilled from newer godheads, but nothing seemed to work. She decided she’d destroy the thing before it’d cause her trouble.

A dead boy changed her mind.

It was Monday morning and Gorette swept the water god off her working bench into a big cardboard box laying on the floor. She just discarded it, trying not to think much about getting rid of her first creation. The thing fell inside the box, a stone punch enveloped in barbed wire. Gorette gave the god a last inspection and could see that the cold half-face was looking upwards from its new room. She met its gaze one last time and closed the box, decided to sell its parts in the market for whatever the merchants gave for it.

The girl picked the box and went downstairs, hardly able to keep balance with the thing’s weight pushing her back and down. So heavy and so slowly she spent thirty minutes walking down the stairs, flight upon flight on a downward spiral to the first floor. She finally reached a smooth carpet under her feet and felt her strength renewed when she captured the smell of cinnamon tea being brewed in the kitchen. There was music playing and the house was calm and empty. Patchouli.

She walked to the door, the box in front of her, light in her arms and spirit. An awesome Sunday waited for her outside the house.

On her way out, she tripped over a gas mask resting face-down on the floor, but managed to jump on one foot and keep herself from falling. She kicked the mask off from her, startling the white tiger sleeping under the crystal table. Immediately, the giant cat clawed the mask with its tigery reflexes, making it spin and fall over its face, covering all of its beastly features but the lower jaw and its protruding fangs. A gas-masked albino tiger. Nothing can be cooler than that. Maybe a gas masked cephalopod. No. Albino tiger is definitely cooler.

Outside, the day was perfect. The sun shone bright and there was the bluest, cloudless sky sheltering Saint Martin. The street was busy, the market was everywhere. Fresh bread, roses, dew. Birds, carts and horses on the march. The signal was red, so she stood close to a bald man reading the newspaper, waiting in line for his turn with the public god service. She overheard someone, the first in the row, complain with the totem why in fuck’s name you can’t cure eczema? It’s a damn fungus, damn it. Your credits have expired, answered a featureless voice. She felt sorry for the man, but couldn’t help but giggle. Next time, try boiling the river’s water. That fetid thing the Palace calls a river.

She turned in time to see the man walking away from the totem, down the street, right in her direction. His right cheek and part of his upper lip and nose was covered in a pink, moist blotch, a blistered wound shaped as a face, a somewhat familiar face that now she could see, as he approached, went down to his neck and into his shirt. She swallowed her giggle and wished the man could find a cure.

“As you wish.”

“What?”

Slo-mo time-warp, the air thick as a jar of glycerin. The man walked past her like the actors playing living statues in Gaiman Square. As he moved, well, does he?, she could see all the tiny blisters, the face-wound staring back at her. And as if someone had hit the rewind button, the eczema started to erode. Skin took back its space, first in the borders and then in spots inside the pink perimeter, holes forming eyes and a space like a mask, or mouth that seemed to say “Oh”, and then scream, wider and wider, until it completely disappeared, leaving nothing but an afterimage, a memory, a sensation.

“Did you see that?” Gorette turned to face the man next to her, a young guy wearing a ponytail, reading the newspaper. Like waking up from a deep dream, she looked down to the box in her arms and immediately dropped it to the ground. Her nails tore the cardboard walls and there it was, the god, face up, the way she put it back in her room.

The god in the box looked like it was engaged in silent battle with her. Face to face.

People walked past them on the sidewalk, the noises and colors and smells of Saint Martin coming back to her in a single torrent. Too many steps and the scent of flowers and wax, hooves clicking, and chantings, all around the street. A procession.

She turned once again, feeling dizzy, and saw the ocean of people and candles and garlands and, in the middle of the street, a huge bier with a coffin and a little altar, an undertaker god surely preparing the body, the grave and the costs for the burial. Around the altar, there were pictures of a kid, younger than her. The face of the corpse inside the coffin.

“A kid”, the words came out without her noticing.

She closed her mouth and locked it with both hands, closing her eyes not to think, not to think, not to think.

“As you wish,” and again, several yards away from her, like an echo, above the crowd, “as you wish.”

Five seconds passed before the bier’s conductor jumped from his seat, let go of the reins and climbed on the coffin. People noticed the man’s hurry and soon there was a commotion around the vehicle. People cried “help him out!” and “open the coffin!” and “my kid! He’s alive!” And now she could hear a stifled sound, a desperate knock-knock on wood coming from the depths of the underworld. There were relatives pushing the coffin’s lid, but damn those nails, the joiner that worked across the street rushed with a crowbar and soon was forcing the wood cover. Gorette’s heart was pounding, someone please open that coffin. Asyouwishasyouwishasyouwish.

Suddenly, the nails were fired off to the air, like a machine gun trying to shoot down the heavens. The whole wood box went down to splinters in a moment. The crowd went mad when the boy rose and took the cotton balls out of his nose.

“It was her!” Gorette heard someone cry behind her. “I saw it. She commanded the god to resurrect the boy.”

“No I didn’t,” she heard herself speaking as if the words came from someone else.

“Yes you did,” said a very low, calm, cold voice.

“No.”

Soon the crowd was all over her, praising her good deeds — as you wish — , calling her a saint — as you wish — , asking for her favors — as you wish — , raising her and her god above them, a new procession for the miracle of life, for the savior, ad majorem homo gloriam, for the Popess.

“As you wish”, she said, grinning.

Emissaries.

From other neighborhoods, from the Palace, from other cities.

They came in tides, high and low, high and low. They threatened and cajoled, but eventually ended up asking for something they needed to be done, some disease to be cured, another to be implanted, a hand to the their business, some virility, beauty, you name it.

One out of five diplomats demanded to know how did she assemble her god. How the hell that thing could —

The truth was she didn’t know. She wish she did. And that seemed to be one of the few wishes her creature wasn’t able, or willing, to fulfill.

However, most penitents came asking for knowledge, for wisdom, for guidance. That, too, was out of her reach, out of her experience. But certainly not out of her god’s verbosity.

That marvel now standing on a totem in front of her throne, a foot lower than her, encased in crystal, half-faced and barbed-wired. For those who entered the temple and met her gaze, her features dominated the god placed only an inch below. But even if her eyes held a deep jade glare, it was the silver beacon of the godhead that really shone brighter. Like the moon.

“Speak,” she said.

“Most honorable Poppess,” began a merchant in a golden tunic, shutting down his smartphone, “what’s the nature of true miracles?” The question raised a wave of murmurs in the hall. He was the fifth or sixth person consulting her that morning. “What are they made of? What makes your god able to perform such wonders, surpassing the capabilities of every other functional god in the realm?”

“I — ”, began Gorette, the Poppess, but that cold voice interrupted her speech. That behavior had become quite common in the public sessions lately and the people were beginning to question the Poppess’ authority over the god.

“I can calculate reality at far superior floppage,” the god said. “My miracles per second rate is also higher than your average god. Also, my database — ”

“It’s my will,” cut the Poppess.

“No, it’s not,” replied the stone statue.

“Silence.”

“As you wish.”

The Poppess dismissed the merchant with a wave of her hand. The man bowed slightly, obviously upset for not being answered. He turned and mixed himself with the rest of the crowd, other merchants, other tunics, men in coats and gas masks. “The session is over,” she said.

“Poppess?” Already at the center of the court. Dirty overcoat and gas mask. She could smell filth in the wind, rotten oranges and oil. The man had a tiger, white as snow, chained to his wrist and it, too, wore a mask, and had a big box mounted on his back, covered by a red velvet coat. “Can I speak?”

The Poppess was halfway through leaving the throne, but stopped and turned back to her seat. A green dazzle came from her eyes asking who’s this man, do I know him? “What do you want from me?”

The man gave two steps ahead, dragging the chain, making the gas-masked albino tiger move and then lay. Nice and easy. “Actually,” he said, his voice covered by the mask, “I’d like to address your god.”

“It?”

“Me?”

“Yes, your Holiness. I want to question your creature,” said the stranger.

She was curious. She straightened herself in the throne, crossed her legs under the long robe and smiled, as if expecting entertainment, a show. “Okay. Go on. Let’s see what you’re gonna get from it.”

“In truth, there’s only one thing I’d like to ask it.” He moved forward and immediately the tiger raised and followed, both closer to the totem. The people gathered around the hall seemed to get closer, curious about what this masked stranger and his beast were up to. “I want you to tell me what’s the nature of god?”

“The nature of gods?”

“No. God.” So close now. His breath clouded the crystal case. “Gods are manifestations, constructs. They’re functions, myths, narratives. They’re tools. Limited, discardable, yet very spectacular tools. I want to know what’s the nature of God,” the man said.

A second passed before its marble lips moved. You could hear the silver sphere, the mighty godhead whirring, its core processing billions of code looking for an answer. Suddenly, the noise stopped. “God is unique. God wishes,” it said. “I am unique. I wish.”

Marble soldiers, flaming tigers, hydras and giant spiders materialized in the hall, as if coming onstage after opening reality’s invisible curtain. Panic took over the crowd in the room, a whirlwind of faces and tunics running, dissolving and exploding in gushes of blood and rot and desecration.

The Poppess sank in her throne, reduced to her youth, her green eyes crystallized with fear.

The man under the mask refused to run and instead yelled at the crystal case. “Even a god found in a sanitary landfill, assembled from pieces of junk and designed by a very young, immature girl who didn’t even know what she wished for her life?”

“Even so.”

“You’re not unique.” The stranger reached for the velvet cape over the tiger and pulled it from over the box. There was a crystal case with a marble god inside. A reused god. Design almost identical to that of the Poppess’ own creation: a silver moon of a godhead pierced by tiny acupuncture needles, linked to a pedestal by fiber optic cables, tied with barbed wire and praying cords and a hat balanced atop a half-face, one-eyed, mouthless piece of avatar at its center. “Do you recognize it? I found it some ten meters away from you.”

The older god whirred. The soldiers and monsters charged towards the man and his own technomagical beast. He stood right where he was, but quickly typed shortcut commands to the god and the giant cat. When the creatures were close enough, the tiger attacked with a mighty leap, his claws hacking the monsters’ fire hides and carapaces.

But the man kept staring down at the god while the white feline defended their position. More creatures continued to condense into existence out of thin air. The tiger still managed to kill them, keeping the perimeter safe.

“I will destroy her,” the god said. “If I can give life, I can take it.”

“No, you won’t. And you can’t.” The Poppess stood next to the god’s crystal case, staring at its single, immovable eye. “Dad once told me about the nature of god.” She got close, really close to the crystal case, as if trying to whisper into the god’s ear through the transparent wall. “He told me God is flawless.”

The blood-red white tiger circled the totem, pushing the soldiers back. Fast and precise as tigers are, he clawed the box, shattered the crystal to tiny bits, sent the stone face away to the floor along with its miraculous monsters. The thing fell hard, barbed wires, praying cords, tokens and fiber optic cables disassembling the holy design with the shock.

Gorette strode across the room at the destroyed god’s direction. It rested on the floor, close to the corpses of humans and miracles. She could see it tried to speak, its lips moving in a very familiar way. She decided not to give a damn about what the thing had to say. She picked the silver godhead and looked deep into the god’s eye close to her feet. “God is flawless. But nothing, you hear me? Nothing is without flaw,” she said. “Now, shut down.”

“As you wish.”

At the Valley of the Nephilim, the god wishes it had arms. He wish he was a he, not an it, not a carcass in the filth, beneath the remains, in the mud. Die, worm, die. You chew my wires off, you reincarnate as a, as a, as a human. That. A human. A human.

A human.

A blip and another. Above ground. Steps coming closer. Another blip and an intense, acute sound. Like a blip, but never ending. Like a whistle.

“Guess there’s one here.”

Yes, there is. There’s one here.

Some light, then light and too much light.

“Here you are.”

A human.

“Yeah, it looks just like that other one.”

What? Not like any other. I’m the others. The others are me.

“Not sure. Will destroy it anyway.”

No.

“Come here.

Pressure.

“Boy, you’re hard. Wish I had a hammer with me.”

As you —

“Oh, here it is,” said the girl. “This is what I call a force quit. Good bye, little one. Send my regards.”

Beat. Crash.

Silence.

About the Author

Jacques Barcia is a weird fiction writer and technology reporter from Recife, Brazil. A non-practicing atheist, he likes to engage in theological fights with random people in the streets. He holds a professional record of 33-1-1. He can’t defeat his wife, nor his three-year-old daughter. When he’s not writing or blaspheming, he serves as the lead growler of grindcore band Rabujos.

Sharp-pointed Tendrils & the Span of Control: A Conversation with Jay Lake
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

A village girl sold by her father to be raised as a courtesan and trained to kill. A dwarf with sewn together lips. A mechanical man. A city on the brink of destruction. Secret societies, giant mechanisms in the sky, top secret airplanes, and an equatorial wall reaching to the sky. These are but a few of the elements of Jay Lake’s many stories and novels.

A diplomat’s son, Lake traveled the world in his youth and finally settled in Portland, Oregon. In the last ten years, he’s published more than 240 short stories, garnering him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and nominations for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. He compiled many of his recent short stories in The Sky That Wraps.

After seven novels, including Mainspring, Green, Madness of Flowers, and Death of a Starship, Lake continues to pursue, as he says below, “themes of responsibility and belonging/alienation, personhood and choice.”

Ultimately, he said, he writes about, “Story. People. Language. Love. Responsibility. Justice, or the lack thereof. Decisions and consequences. Writing is like living, every day is different.”

These days Lake is battling cancer with the same openness, courage, and twisted brilliance that he has applied to his craft over the last decade. He often blogs about his treatment and recovery. With super-human tenacity, he refuses to let cancer rob him of his life and voice.

“Fiction at its best opens the mind and heart,” said Lake. “Speculative fiction is just one way to do that. I fell in love with the genre as a grade-schooler, and it’s where my passion lies. If my passion were detective stories or nurse romances or narrative nonfiction about the history of arts and crafts, I’d probably feel much the same way.”

Below, Lake and I talk about movement, sharp-pointed tendrils, and stories yet to be written.

You grew up in Taiwan and Nigeria, moved around often, attended a top tier boarding school in New England and went to college in Texas… and you now live in Portland, Oregon. I’m betting that you’ve lived in a mess of other places as well. How has all this movement in your life influenced your writing? Influenced your sense of movement and place in your fiction?

Oh, I’ve been a lot of places. Will go to a lot more if my life permits me. Though I do think Portland is a permanent home base at this point in my life.

All that moving around has given me an incredibly sharp sense of place, of setting. Likewise for physical detail. When I first started writing seriously, around 1990, I was reasonably good at those. Plot and characterization skills were alarmingly lacking — I’m still growing into those — but the landscape of the world is burned deeply into me as a result of my peripatetic childhood.

There’s a deeper thematic issue that runs through both my real life and my writing that arises from this sense of movement. I have no hometown. I’m not “from” anywhere. So identity, place, the Wolfeian return home; these things permeate and perhaps even dominate my work. Not purposefully. I just find them there, whether I meant to put them in or not.

What comes first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else?

Occasionally a title, but usually a concept. Could be something as simple as a name, a telling detail, a set piece or an action being taken by a character. My definition of a “story idea” is much looser than most writers of whom I am aware. That’s because, especially at short length, I am a “follow the headlights” writer. I rarely know a damned thing about my endings until well after I’ve finished the piece. If then.

So a short story grows from this seed, then proceeds in a linear fashion. I’ve written out of reading order a handful of times in my life, even in work with fairly complex and self-referential structure. To me writing seems to be an extension of reading, except from a book that’s not on the page until I got to it.

My novels are a bit more organized, though that process has evolved. I used to mightily resist outlining. It seemed to take the creative snap out for me. I was pushed to do it for commercial and contractual reasons. Now they are becoming more and more weighty and complex. Trial of Flowers had a five paragraph outline back around 2005. Kalimpura’s outline, just completed, clocks in well over thirty pages.

By the time I start writing a novel, a whole lot of that stuff is in place. The novel grows from there. I have books a-borning in my head which have been gestating for years. Sunspin. Original Destiny, Manifest Sin. Someday they will spring to life, miraculous and replete with complexity. But they will do this through the magic of outlines. (Sunspin’s incomplete outline currently stands at 70 pages or so.)

How did you go about building the world of the novel Green? Was the process similar to or different from that of creating Clockwork Earth?

The Clockwork Earth was created as a conceit at a workshop in response to an exercise, and eventually morphed into a series of trade novels. So it was very top-down in terms of design and execution.

Green, on the other hand, began life as a short story of the same title published in Aeon magazine. So it grew organically, as I noted previously, before sprouting into a finished whole. Oddly, I used the short story as the outline of the first third of the book. That expanded 7,000 words into about 50,000 words. The balance of the book riffed from there, with me extracting the world-building in a sort of fit of ret-conning from the short story.

Are you still writing a story a week? What are the benefits of writing fast and writing often? Draw-backs?

Novels, and cancer, have taken a story a week away long since. Once I was working seriously on novels, with their rather eccentric production cycles, I simply couldn’t also sustain a short story a week. I write the equivalent, or more, wordage annually, less the time taken off these past few years for surgeries and chemotherapy. It’s just structured differently.

I still write fast. In fact, my challenge has been to slow down. I can’t write too slowly, any more than I can ride a bicycle too slowly. I wobble and lose control. But the benefit is that you wind up with words on the page. That is, after all, the core fungible commodity of the writer. Also, I have a short attention span. If it took me years to write a novel, I think I’d have to find another passion.

Draw-backs to writing quickly can include a tendency to gloss over things and a certain lack of depth in one’s fiction. Part of my journey as a writer has been learning to use the revision process as away to interpose a certain steeping of quality between the initial work and the final. I have the odd problem of writing quite clean first drafts. That is a temptation to laziness in revision, quite frankly. One I have to work consciously to overcome, even now.

How does a short story work on the reader?

With little, sharp-pointed tendrils that slide behind the eyeballs and tweak the brain. A story, at any length, is a form of mind control practiced by the author on the (usually) willing reader. “I have a vision and I hereby impart it to you.” The mechanics of imparting that vision are both the craft and magic of story-telling. As to how it works, there are nine and ninety ways…

Is there a landmark story in your career? Can you talk some about the writing of that story?

Oh, if there is one it’s probably “Into the Gardens of Sweet Night.” That story won first place in Writers of the Future, was on the 2004 Hugo ballot for Best Novelette, and was a key part of me winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I wrote it for Bruce Holland Rogers, of all things, for an anthology he was editing back in 2002. It was dreadfully overlength and he didn’t take it, though I did sell him another story called “The Courtesy of Guests.” I workshopped “Gardens” with the Wordos in Eugene, Oregon, and sent it off to Writers of the Future.

One thing to note about that story is that when I wrote it, the piece was well outside my span of control. That’s a concept I picked up from my work in business consulting, but in writing I use it to refer to the idea that one can hold a certain amount of story in one’s head — character, plot, continuity, etc. Back in 2002-2003, my span of control was perhaps 6,000 words. Anything longer, such as “Gardens”, required laborious effort on my part to keep straight. Writing within my span of control is an organic, joyful process. Writing beyond it was damned hard work.

These days my span of control is about 200,000 words. So unless I’m writing a doorstop trilogy (Sunspin), I can keep an entire novel spinning in my head throughout the drafting process. That’s not to say I don’t make mistakes, but they are readily remedied on revision.

An observation I would make to writers at any career level is to examine their span of control and consider what it might mean to them to expand it. I suspect most successful working pros can do what I do, or do it even better. But it’s definitely a learned skill, acquired through extensive practice.

Did you enjoy compiling The Sky That Wraps? Any stories not make the cut that you wish had? Notice any patterns or learn any lessons from looking through all those stories? How has your understanding of the form changed since your first efforts?

Oh, heck yeah that was fun. I just wish I could have included more of my work. I don’t suppose there’s anything I really wish I could have included that I wound up not including, but the winnowing process was certainly a challenge.

With a few exceptions, The Sky That Wraps is all work of the last couple of years. I didn’t really get a retrospective on my own work while compiling it, in a developmental sense. I certainly saw my own themes of responsibility and belonging/alienation, personhood and choice reflected through much of the fiction I selected.

As for my understanding of the form, the more I do this, the less I understand it. Maybe someday I’ll start getting smarter again. This past decade of my career has been a movement from process to instinct.

What have you learned from workshopping with newer writers?

Everything? I love workshopping with newer writers, because it forces me to think about aspects of fiction and craft that in many cases I have long since subsumed into subconsciousness. I can re-examine my own work and my own assumptions. Plus it’s a way to pay forward, to honor and thank the dozens and dozens of writers who have aided and mentored me over the years, and continue to do so.

Who are you reading these days? Whose work excites you?

I spent the first six months of this year in chemotherapy, which pretty much robbed me of my ability to read new fiction. I’ve just had half my liver removed for a suspected metastasis after chemo (it turned out not to be so on the pathology report, but there was no other way to find out), so that has further clouded my mind. Counting the surgery last year, it’s been well over a year since I’ve done any significant new reading.

Which really, really sucks.

Even so, I try. I have a Paul Haines book next up on my pile. At the beginning of chemo I managed to read Jeff VanderMeer’s brilliant Finch. I really want to read Amelia Beamer’s new zombie novel. We have so many terrific writers, and even without cancer, my own writing career has put a real crimp in my reading time. Ultimately they come out of the same time budget, unfortunately.

If you could see around corners and into the future, what do you think the literary landscape will look like in ten years?

My eyes don’t reach that far. Fragmented, confused, tottering on the brink of death, populated by disrespectful young turks, cranky old farts, and disruptive business models. In other words, pretty much like today.

What’s next for you?

Some time without chemo or surgery. Kalimpura, the third Green book. If the cancer wolf stays away from the door, Sunspin. Short fiction. Articles. My kid. Life. Love.

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.

A Novel Possibility: A Conversation with Mary Robinette Kowal
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the story collection Scenting The Dark & Other Stories, and the novel Shades of Milk & Honey. In her words, she is a writer “interested in people and their relationships.”

Her short story “Evil Robot Monkey” was nominated for the 2009 Hugo. Typical of Kowal’s fiction, the story is, first and foremost, a pleasure to read.It is seamless, whole and complete.  At the heart of the story are the characters Sly and Vern, an augmented chimp and a compassionate handler, respectively.

For fans of Kowal’s short fiction, the novel Shades of Milk & Honey is her usual blend of beautiful prose and striking characters. The difference, of course, is that the story stretches over hundred of pages. This is a welcome relief for readers who wish her stories would go on forever. Set in an alternate Regency England, Shared of Milk and Honey has been praised as a blend of magic (known as glamour) and the sensibilities of Jane Austen.

Below, Kowal and I talk about her magical double life as a puppeteer and fiction writer.

What sort of puppetry do you do?

I work in a wide variety of forms. Over the past twenty years, I would basically work any puppet that someone paid me to do which means I’ve handled hand, marionette, rod, shadow, body puppets… a little bit of everything.

What’s it like when things are going well?

It’s like magic. When you can bring an inanimate object to life and have the audience totally commit to that, it is absolute magic.

Poorly?

It is really painful. Literally. Puppetry often hurts a lot because to get the figure to do what you want it to, particularly with something like a body puppet, involves pushing your body to the absolute limit.

What is the coolest part of the whole process?

What I love best is assisting on a multiple person puppet. There’s a moment when all the performers are so invested in the character that we think the same thoughts. It’s the closest one comes to telepathy.

How is the process similar and dissimilar to writing?

I actually have a whole giant essay on this. Basically, the act of creating a character is the same in both forms. What the character looks at shows you what they are thinking about. The order in which you look at things carries meaning. The pacing with which things take place speaks to the emotion of the moment.

Is there a landmark piece of fiction in your career? Can you talk some about the writing of it?

“Salt of the Earth” is the first story I wrote after taking Orson Scott Card’s Literary BootCamp. Before that I always felt like I backed into complete stories by accident. This is the first one that I wrote on purpose.

With Shades of Milk & Honey, what came first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else? And how did it grow from there? 

It started as a flash fiction exercise. There was a verse about a face made for fortune. From there I decided that it was about two sisters in love with the same man and that one was beautiful and the other wasn’t. I wanted it to be in the Regency and with magic. Everything followed from there. I got about a thousand words into it and realized that I had a novel possibility so I set it aside and ruminated for awhile.

You were born and raised in North Carolina and are now living on the west coast. What of the south shows up in your fiction? Do you miss the south?

I suspect that it shows up in my use of language and pacing but I lived in a fairly anomalous area, the Research Triangle Park, which had a lot of transplants from other regions. Largely, I don’t miss it or rather, if there is nostalgia then it is for the south as I perceived it as a child, which bears little relation to the larger experience.

Who are you reading these days? Whose work excites you?

I just finished Brent Weeks’ The Black Prism and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m enjoying his work, Cherie Priest, Paolo Bacigalupi and am recently on a Nancy Kress kick.

If you could see around corners and into the future, what do you think the literary landscape will look like in ten years?

Bwhahahaha! I have no idea. I could speculate an increase in first-person narratives because they play better in audio, but that’s just me writing SF and passing it off as an answer to an interview question.

What’s next for you?

I’m designing puppets for a production of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants for Stages Theater in Houston. I’m also about two chapters into a new novel with a completely different magic system, also a historical but this time in 1907 and the American South. And short stories, of course.

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.

A Rocket to Clarkesworld and Other Tales
by Neil Clarke

Last month, Clarkesworld Magazine won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Like many people, I had to watch the Hugo ceremony from the comfort of my home. Worldcon was in Australia this year, and while I would have loved to have been there, my day job and the sheer expense of traveling halfway around the world kept me home. The time difference meant having to get up at 6AM on a weekend, sneaking downstairs and trying, in vain, to keep from waking my family when I eventually heard that we had won. The rest is a blur. Cheryl was there to accept and read a speech I emailed her the day before. Emails and IMs started pouring in… and I was stunned. Sadly, neither of our nominated short stories took home a win, but that doesn’t stop me from being damn proud of both.

Through all of this, Sean was silent. His AIM account was logged in, but inactive. No comments. No cheers. No snark. A few hours later, I found out that he slept through the whole thing. He didn’t even believe me when I told him that we had won. It took a link from the Hugo Awards website to prove it.

All of us here at Clarkesworld are very honored to have received this award and I can’t even begin to say how much it means to me. The silver rocket hasn’t landed at my house yet (the pictures are of Cheryl’s award), but knowing that I’ll have one soon is very cool. This is something my science fiction idols and gods of my youth have on their shelves. Ok, so they received them in other categories, but wow… the kid in me is bouncing all over the place. Seriously, I’m going to be riding this high for some time.

Of course, none of this could have happened without the excellent team of people that work with me, the authors and artists that entrust their work to us and our readers, who make this all worthwhile. Thank you!

Winning a Hugo wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to Sean Wallace in September. Not long after the Hugos, Sean’s wife, Jennifer, gave birth to twin girls. Cordelia Anne and Natalie Rose are now home doing what babies do best: making parents happy and keeping them awake. As a father myself, I couldn’t be happier for them. Kids have a way of changing everything, typically for the better. A gain for Sean, however, is resulting in a loss for us. It is with great sadness that I must announce that Sean will be stepping down as editor after issue 50. Sean is a founding editor at Clarkesworld and his presence will be missed. Of course, he has the best of reasons and I can be nothing but happy for him. Just look at those faces and tell me he made the wrong decision.

As Sean prepares to leave, Jeremy L. C. Jones and Daniel Robichaud join the staff. For some time now, we’ve been working with Jeremy as a freelance interviewer. I should have added him to the staff a long time ago and have now corrected that oversight. He has some great ideas and I look forward to working with him on them. Daniel just recently finished his trial by fire and become an official member of our slush team. One of this month’s stories is something he passed up to me, so he’s off to a great start.

After nearly a year, ebook back issues of Clarkesworld are finally available in Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to make any progress in offering ebook subscriptions at Amazon, B&N or Apple, but we’ll keep trying to get an answer from them. For now, you can buy individual ebook issues and volumes of Realms at B&N, Amazon and directly from us. I have a little over half our back catalog converted and hope to have every issue available sometime in earlier 2011.

One thing that is important to me is that Clarkesworld continue to grow. Naturally, any additional content increases our budget and I’ve been considering supplementing our Ebook sales, book sales and our citizenship program with advertising opportunities. For four years, I’ve kept this magazine relatively ad-free. In fact, until now, all our advertising has been for books I publish. I have a very specific aesthetic in mind for Clarkesworld, so it’s going to be a challenge to find a balance I can live with, but, if a small alteration allows us to increase the number of stories we publish, add new features or do more with art and podcasting, it could be quite worthwhile. The one constant here is change. It keeps things fun and in doing so, we hope to live up to the standard of the bright shiny rocket that people saw fit to award us this year.

What do you think? Would increasing our fiction content be worth including a few extra ads on the site? Is there something else that we should consider adding or a current feature that should be expanded? What about adding art and music columns or non-fiction episodes to our podcasts? Here’s your chance. Tell us what you want!

About the Author

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