Ghostweight

Yoon Ha Lee

For Charibdys

It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.

Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.

“There’s time for one more hand,” Lisse’s ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.

Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the war-kite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull’s eye socket.

Lisse didn’t need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse’s people had adopted a saying from the Imperium’s mercenaries: In raven arithmetic, no death is enough.

Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions.

For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void’s hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?

What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite’s shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.

The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost’s idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.

Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. Her hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.

“Look,” the ghost said.

Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General’s Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters. You must learn your enemy’s weapons, the ghost had told her, and so, even as a child in the reeducation facility, she had saved her chits for paper to practice folding into cranes, lilies, leaf-shaped boats.

Next to the Candle Column she had folded stormbird, greatfrog, lantern, drake. Where the ghost had interrupted her attempt to clear the pieces, they had landed amid the Sojourner and Mirror Columns, forming a skewed late-game configuration: a minor variant of the Needle Stratagem, missing only its pivot.

“Consider it an omen,” the ghost said. “Even the smallest sliver can kill, as they say.”

There were six ravens on the tapestries now. The latest one had outspread wings, as though it planned to blot out the shrouded sun. She wondered what it said about the mercenaries, that they couched their warnings in pictures rather than drums or gongs.

Lisse rose from her couch. “So they’re coming for us. Where are they?”

She had spoken in the Imperium’s administrative tongue, not one of the mercenaries’ own languages. Nevertheless, a raven flew from one tapestry to join its fellows in the next. The vacant tapestry grayed, then displayed a new scene: a squad of six tanks caparisoned in Imperial blue and bronze, paced by two personnel carriers sheathed in metal mined from withered stars. They advanced upslope, pebbles skittering in their wake.

In the old days, the ghost had told her, no one would have advanced through a sacred maze by straight lines. But the ancient walls, curved and interlocking, were gone now. The ghost had drawn the old designs on her palm with its insubstantial fingers, and she had learned not to shudder at the untouch, had learned to thread the maze in her mind’s eye: one more map to the things she must not forget.

“I’d rather avoid fighting them,” Lisse said. She was looking at the command spindle’s controls. Standard Imperial layout, all of them — it did not occur to her to wonder why the kite had configured itself thus — but she found nothing for the weapons.

“People don’t bring tanks when they want to negotiate,” the ghost said dryly. “And they’ll have alerted their flyers for intercept. You have something they want badly.”

“Then why didn’t they guard it better?” she demanded.

Despite the tanks’ approach, the ghost fell silent. After a while, it said, “Perhaps they didn’t think anyone but a mercenary could fly a kite.”

“They might be right,” Lisse said darkly. She strapped herself into the commander’s seat, then pressed three fingers against the controls and traced the commands she had been taught as a cadet. The kite shuddered, as though caught in a hell-wind from the sky’s fissures. But it did not unfurl itself to fly.

She tried the command gestures again, forcing herself to slow down. A cold keening vibrated through the walls. The kite remained stubbornly landfast.

The squad rounded the bend in the road. All the ravens had gathered in a single tapestry, decorating a half-leafed tree like dire jewels. The rest of the tapestries displayed the squad from different angles: two aerial views and four from the ground.

Lisse studied one of the aerial views and caught sight of two scuttling figures, lean angles and glittering eyes and a balancing tail in black metal. She stiffened. They had the shadows of hounds, all graceful hunting curves. Two jerengjen, true ones, unlike the lifeless shapes that she folded out of paper. The kite must have deployed them when it sensed the tanks’ approach.

Sweating now, despite the autumn temperature inside, she methodically tried every command she had ever learned. The kite remained obdurate. The tapestries’ green threads faded until the ravens and their tree were bleak black splashes against a background of wintry gray.

It was a message. Perhaps a demand. But she did not understand.

The first two tanks slowed into view. Roses, blue with bronze hearts, were engraved to either side of the main guns. The lead tank’s roses flared briefly.

The kite whispered to itself in a language that Lisse did not recognize. Then the largest tapestry cleared of trees and swirling leaves and rubble, and presented her with a commander’s emblem, a pale blue rose pierced by three claws. A man’s voice issued from the tapestry: “Cadet Fai Guen.” This was her registry name. They had not reckoned that she would keep her true name alive in her heart like an ember. “You are in violation of Imperial interdict. Surrender the kite at once.”

He did not offer mercy. The Imperium never did.

Lisse resisted the urge to pound her fists against the interface. She had not survived this long by being impatient. “That’s it, then,” she said to the ghost in defeat.

“Cadet Fai Guen,” the voice said again, after another burst of light, “you have one minute to surrender the kite before we open fire.”

“Lisse,” the ghost said, “the kite’s awake.”

She bit back a retort and looked down. Where the control panel had once been featureless gray, it was now crisp white interrupted by five glyphs, perfectly spaced for her outspread fingers. She resisted the urge to snatch her hand away. “Very well,” she said. “If we can’t fly, at least we can fight.”

She didn’t know the kite’s specific control codes. Triggering the wrong sequence might activate the kite’s internal defenses. But taking tank fire at point-blank range would get her killed, too. She couldn’t imagine that the kite’s armor had improved in the years of its neglect.

On the other hand, it had jerengjen scouts, and the jerengjen looked perfectly functional.

She pressed her thumb to the first glyph. A shadow unfurled briefly but was gone before she could identify it. The second attempt revealed a two-headed dragon’s twisting coils. Long-range missiles, then: thunder in the sky. Working quickly, she ran through the options. It would be ironic if she got the weapons systems to work only to incinerate herself.

“You have ten seconds, Cadet Fai Guen,” said the voice with no particular emotion.

“Lisse,” the ghost said, betraying impatience.

One of the glyphs had shown a wolf running. She remembered that at one point the wolf had been the mercenaries’ emblem. Nevertheless, she felt a dangerous affinity to it. As she hesitated over it, the kite said, in a parched voice, “Soul strike.”

She tapped the glyph, then pressed her palm flat to activate the weapon. The panel felt briefly hot, then cold.

For a second she thought that nothing had happened, that the kite had malfunctioned. The kite was eerily still.

The tanks and personnel carriers were still visible as gray outlines against darker gray, as were the nearby trees and their stifled fruits. She wasn’t sure whether that was an effect of the unnamed weapons or a problem with the tapestries. Had ten seconds passed yet? She couldn’t tell, and the clock of her pulse was unreliable.

Desperate to escape before the tanks spat forth the killing rounds, Lisse raked her hand sideways to dismiss the glyphs. They dispersed in unsettling fragmented shapes resembling half-chewed leaves and corroded handprints. She repeated the gesture for fly.

Lisse choked back a cry as the kite lofted. The tapestry views changed to sky on all sides except the ravens on their tree — birds no longer, but skeletons, price paid in coin of bone.

Only once they had gained some altitude did she instruct the kite to show her what had befallen her hunters. It responded by continuing to accelerate.

The problem was not the tapestries. Rather, the kite’s wolf-strike had ripped all the shadows free of their owners, killing them. Below, across a great swathe of the continent once called Ishuel’s Bridge, was a devastation of light, a hard, glittering splash against the surrounding snow-capped mountains and forests and winding rivers.

Lisse had been an excellent student, not out of academic conscientiousness but because it gave her an opportunity to study her enemy. One of her best subjects had been geography. She and the ghost had spent hours drawing maps in the air or shaping topographies in her blankets; paper would betray them, it had said. As she memorized the streets of the City of Fountains, it had sung her the ballads of its founding. It had told her about the feuding poets and philosophers that the thoroughfares of the City of Prisms had been named after. She knew which mines supplied which bases and how the roads spidered across Ishuel’s Bridge. While the population figures of the bases and settlement camps weren’t exactly announced to cadets, especially those recruited from the reeducation facilities, it didn’t take much to make an educated guess.

The Imperium had built 114 bases on Ishuel’s Bridge. Base complements averaged 20,000 people. Even allowing for the imprecision of her eye, the wolf-strike had taken out —

She shivered as she listed the affected bases, approximately sixty of them.

The settlement camps’ populations were more difficult. The Imperium did not like to release those figures. Imperfectly, she based her estimate on the zone around Base 87, remembering the rows of identical shelters. The only reason they did not outnumber the bases’ personnel was that the mercenaries had been coldly efficient on Jerengjen Day.

Needle Stratagem, Lisse thought blankly. The smallest sliver. She hadn’t expected its manifestation to be quite so literal.

The ghost was looking at her, its dark eyes unusually distinct. “There’s nothing to be done for it now,” it said at last. “Tell the kite where to go before it decides for itself.”

“Ashway 514,” Lisse said, as they had decided before she fled base: scenario after scenario whispered to each other like bedtime stories. She was shaking. The straps did nothing to steady her.

She had one last glimpse of the dead region before they curved into the void: her handprint upon her own birthworld. She had only meant to destroy her hunters.

In her dreams, later, the blast pattern took on the outline of a running wolf.

In the mercenaries’ dominant language, jerengjen originally referred to the art of folding paper. For her part, when Lisse first saw it, she thought of it as snow. She was four years old. It was a fair spring afternoon in the City of Tapestries, slightly humid. She was watching a bird try to catch a bright butterfly when improbable paper shapes began drifting from the sky, foxes and snakes and stormbirds.

Lisse called to her parents, laughing. Her parents knew better. Over her shrieks, they dragged her into the basement and switched off the lights. She tried to bite one of her fathers when he clamped his hand over her mouth. Jerengjen tracked primarily by shadows, not by sound, but you couldn’t be too careful where the mercenaries’ weapons were concerned.

In the streets, jerengjen unfolded prettily, expanding into artillery with dragon-shaped shadows and sleek four-legged assault robots with wolf-shaped shadows. In the skies, jerengjen unfolded into bombers with kestrel-shaped shadows.

This was not the only Rhaioni city where this happened. People crumpled like paper cutouts once their shadows were cut away by the onslaught. Approximately one-third of the world’s population perished in the weeks that followed.

Of the casualty figures, the Imperium said, It is regrettable. And later, The stalled negotiations made the consolidation necessary.

Lisse carried a map of the voidways with her at all times, half in her head and half in the Scorch deck. The ghost had once been a traveler. It had shown her mnemonics for the dark passages and the deep perils that lay between stars. Growing up, she had laid out endless tableaux between her lessons, memorizing travel times and vortices and twists.

Ashway 514 lay in the interstices between two unstable stars and their cacophonous necklace of planets, comets, and asteroids. Lisse felt the kite tilting this way and that as it balanced itself against the stormy voidcurrent. The tapestries shone from one side with ruddy light from the nearer star, 514 Tsi. On the other side, a pale violet-blue planet with a serenade of rings occluded the view.

514 was a useful hiding place. It was off the major tradeways, and since the Battle of Fallen Sun — named after the rebel general’s emblem, a white sun outlined in red, rather than the nearby stars — it had been designated an ashway, where permanent habitation was forbidden.

More important to Lisse, however, was the fact that 514 was the ashway nearest the last mercenary sighting, some five years ago. As a student, she had learned the names and silhouettes of the most prominent war-kites, and set verses of praise in their honor to Imperial anthems. She had written essays on their tactics and memorized the names of their most famous commanders, although there were no statues or portraits, only the occasional unsmiling photograph. The Imperium was fond of statues and portraits.

For a hundred years (administrative calendar), the mercenaries had served their masters unflinchingly and unfailingly. Lisse had assumed that she would have as much time as she needed to plot against them. Instead, they had broken their service, for reasons the Imperium had never released — perhaps they didn’t know, either — and none had been seen since.

“I’m not sure there’s anything to find here,” Lisse said. Surely the Imperium would have scoured the region for clues. The tapestries were empty of ravens. Instead, they diagrammed shifting voidcurrent flows. The approach of enemy starflyers would perturb the current and allow Lisse and the ghost to estimate their intent. Not trusting the kite’s systems — although there was only so far that she could take her distrust, given the circumstances — she had been watching the tapestries for the past several hours. She had, after a brief argument with the ghost, switched on haptics so that the air currents would, however imperfectly, reflect the status of the void around them. Sometimes it was easier to feel a problem through your skin.

“There’s no indication of derelict kites here,” she added. “Or even kites in use, other than this one.”

“It’s a starting place, that’s all,” the ghost said.

“We’re going to have to risk a station eventually. You might not need to eat, but I do.” She had only been able to sneak a few rations out of base. It was tempting to nibble at one now.

“Perhaps there are stores on the kite.”

“I can’t help but think this place is a trap.”

“You have to eat sooner or later,” the ghost said reasonably. “It’s worth a look, and I don’t want to see you go hungry.” At her hesitation, it added, “I’ll stand watch here. I’m only a breath away.”

This didn’t reassure her as much as it should have, but she was no longer a child in a bunk precisely aligned with the walls, clutching the covers while the ghost told her her people’s stories. She reminded herself of her favorite story, in which a single sentinel kept away the world’s last morning by burning out her eyes, and set out.

Lisse felt the ghostweight’s pull the farther away she walked, but that was old pain, and easily endured. Lights flicked on to accompany her, diffuse despite her unnaturally sharp shadow, then started illuminating passages ahead of her, guiding her footsteps. She wondered what the kite didn’t want her to see.

Rations were in an unmarked storage room. She wouldn’t have been certain about the rations, except that they were, if the packaging was to be believed, field category 72: better than what she had eaten on training exercises, but not by much. No surprise, now that she thought about it: from all accounts, the mercenaries had relied on their masters’ production capacity.

Feeling ridiculous, she grabbed two rations and retraced her steps. The fact that the kite lit her exact path only made her more nervous.

“Anything new?” she asked the ghost. She tapped the ration. “It’s a pity that you can’t taste poison.”

The ghost laughed dryly. “If the kite were going to kill you, it wouldn’t be that subtle. Food is food, Lisse.”

The food was as exactingly mediocre as she had come to expect from military food. At least it was not any worse. She found a receptacle for disposal afterward, then laid out a Scorch tableau, Candle column to Bone, right to left. Cards rather than jerengjen, because she remembered the scuttling hound-jerengjen with creeping distaste.

From the moment she left Base 87, one timer had started running down. The devastation of Ishuel’s Bridge had begun another, the important one. She wasn’t gambling her survival; she had already sold it. The question was, how many Imperial bases could she extinguish on her way out? And could she hunt down any of the mercenaries that had been the Imperium’s killing sword?

Lisse sorted rapidly through possible targets. For instance, Base 226 Mheng, the Petaled Fortress. She would certainly perish in the attempt, but the only way she could better that accomplishment would be to raze the Imperial firstworld, and she wasn’t that ambitious. There was Bridgepoint 663 Tsi-Kes, with its celebrated Pallid Sentinels, or Aerie 8 Yeneq, which built the Imperium’s greatest flyers, or —

She set the cards down, closed her eyes, and pressed her palms against her face. She was no tactician supreme. Would it make much difference if she picked a card at random?

But of course nothing was truly random in the ghost’s presence.

She laid out the Candle Column again. “Not 8 Yeneq,” she said. “Let’s start with a softer target. Aerie 586 Chiu.”

Lisse looked at the ghost: the habit of seeking its approval had not left her. It nodded. “The safest approach is via the Capillary Ashways. It will test your piloting skills.”

Privately, Lisse thought that the kite would be happy to guide itself. They didn’t dare allow it to, however.

The Capillaries were among the worst of the ashways. Even starlight moved in unnerving ways when faced with ancient networks of voidcurrent gates, unmaintained for generations, or vortices whose behavior changed day by day.

They were fortunate with the first several capillaries. Under other circumstances, Lisse would have gawked at the splendor of lensed galaxies and the jewel-fire of distant clusters. She was starting to manipulate the control interface without hesitating, or flinching as though a wolf’s shadow might cross hers.

At the ninth —

“Patrol,” the ghost said, leaning close.

She nodded jerkily, trying not to show that its proximity pained her. Its mouth crimped in apology.

“It would have been worse if we’d made it all the way to 586 Chiu without a run-in,” Lisse said. That kind of luck always had a price. If she was unready, best to find out now, while there was a chance of fleeing to prepare for a later strike.

The patrol consisted of sixteen flyers: eight Lance 82s and eight Scout 73s. She had flown similar Scouts in simulation.

The flyers did not hesitate. A spread of missiles streaked toward her. Lisse launched antimissile fire.

It was impossible to tell whether they had gone on the attack because the Imperium and the mercenaries had parted on bad terms, or because the authorities had already learned of what had befallen Rhaion. She was certain couriers had gone out within moments of the devastation of Ishuel’s Bridge.

As the missiles exploded, Lisse wrenched the kite toward the nearest vortex. The kite was a larger and sturdier craft. It would be better able to survive the voidcurrent stresses. The tapestries dimmed as they approached. She shut off haptics as wind eddied and swirled in the command spindle. It would only get worse.

One missile barely missed her. She would have to do better. And the vortex was a temporary terrain advantage; she could not lurk there forever.

The second barrage came. Lisse veered deeper into the current. The stars took on peculiar roseate shapes.

“They know the kite’s capabilities,” the ghost reminded her. “Use them. If they’re smart, they’ll already have sent a courier burst to local command.”

The kite suggested jerengjen flyers, harrier class. Lisse conceded its expertise.

The harriers unfolded as they launched, sleek and savage. They maneuvered remarkably well in the turbulence. But there were only ten of them.

“If I fire into that, I’ll hit them,” Lisse said. Her reflexes were good, but not that good, and the harriers apparently liked to soar near their targets.

“You won’t need to fire,” the ghost said.

She glanced at him, disbelieving. Her hand hovered over the controls, playing through possibilities and finding them wanting. For instance, she wasn’t certain that the firebird (explosives) didn’t entail self-immolation, and she was baffled by the stag.

The patrol’s pilots were not incapable. They scorched three of the harriers. They probably realized at the same time that Lisse did that the three had been sacrifices. The other seven flensed them silent.

Lisse edged the kite out of the vortex. She felt an uncomfortable sense of duty to the surviving harriers, but she knew they were one-use, crumpled paper, like all jerengjen. Indeed, they folded themselves flat as she passed them, reducing themselves to battledrift.

“I can’t see how this is an efficient use of resources,” Lisse told the ghost.

“It’s an artifact of the mercenaries’ methods,” it said. “It works. Perhaps that’s all that matters.”

Lisse wanted to ask for details, but her attention was diverted by a crescendo of turbulence. By the time they reached gentler currents, she was too tired to bring it up.

They altered their approach to 586 Chiu twice, favoring stealth over confrontation. If she wanted to char every patrol in the Imperium by herself, she could live a thousand sleepless years and never be done.

For six days they lurked near 586 Chiu, developing a sense for local traffic and likely defenses. Terrain would not be much difficulty. Aeries were built near calm, steady currents.

“It would be easiest if you were willing to take out the associated city,” the ghost said in a neutral voice. They had been discussing whether making a bombing pass on the aerie posed too much of a risk. Lisse had balked at the fact that 586 Chiu Second City was well within blast radius. The people who had furnished the kite’s armaments seemed to have believed in surfeit. “They’d only have a moment to know what was happening.”

“No.”

“Lisse — ”

She looked at it mutely, obdurate, although she hated to disappoint it. It hesitated, but did not press its case further.

“This, then,” it said in defeat. “Next best odds: aim the voidcurrent disrupter at the manufactory’s core while jerengjen occupy the defenses.” Aeries held the surrounding current constant to facilitate the calibration of newly built flyers. Under ordinary circumstances, the counterbalancing vortex was leashed at the core. If they could disrupt the core, the vortex would tear at its surroundings.

“That’s what we’ll do, then,” Lisse said. The disrupter had a short range. She did not like the idea of flying in close. But she had objected to the safer alternative.

Aerie 586 Chiu reminded Lisse not of a nest but of a pyre. Flyers and transports were always coming and going, like sparks. The kite swooped in sharp and fast. Falcon-jerengjen raced ahead of them, holding lattice formation for two seconds before scattering toward their chosen marks.

The aerie’s commanders responded commendably. They knew the kite was by far the greater threat. But Lisse met the first flight they threw at her with missiles keen and terrible. The void lit up in a clamor of brilliant colors.

The kite screamed when a flyer salvo hit one of its secondary wings. It bucked briefly while the other wings changed their geometry to compensate. Lisse could not help but think that the scream had not sounded like pain. It had sounded like exultation.

The real test was the gauntlet of Banner 142 artillery emplacements. They were silver-bright and terrible. It seemed wrong that they did not roar like tigers. Lisse bit the inside of her mouth and concentrated on narrowing the parameters for the voidcurrent disrupter. Her hand was a fist on the control panel.

One tapestry depicted the currents: striations within striations of pale blue against black. Despite its shielding, the core was visible as a knot tangled out of all proportion to its size.

“Now,” the ghost said, with inhuman timing.

She didn’t wait to be told twice. She unfisted her hand.

Unlike the wolf-strike, the disrupter made the kite scream again. It lurched and twisted. Lisse wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but there was more incoming fire, and she was occupied with evasive maneuvers. The kite folded in on itself, minimizing its profile. It dizzied her to view it on the secondary tapestry. For a panicked moment, she thought the kite would close itself around her, press her like petals in a book. Then she remembered to breathe.

The disrupter was not visible to human sight, but the kite could read its effect on the current. Like lightning, the disrupter’s blast forked and forked again, zigzagging inexorably toward the minute variations in flux that would lead it toward the core.

She was too busy whipping the kite around to an escape vector to see the moment of convergence between disrupter and core. But she felt the first lashing surge as the vortex spun free of its shielding, expanding into available space. Then she was too busy steadying the kite through the triggered subvortices to pay attention to anything but keeping them alive.

Only later did she remember how much debris there had been, flung in newly unpredictable ways: wings torn from flyers, struts, bulkheads, even an improbable crate with small reddish fruit tumbling from the hole in its side.

Later, too, it would trouble her that she had not been able to keep count of the people in the tumult. Most were dead already: sliced slantwise, bone and viscera exposed, trailing banners of blood; others twisted and torn, faces ripped off and cast aside like unwanted masks, fingers uselessly clutching the wrack of chairs, tables, door frames. A fracture in one wall revealed three people in dark green jackets. They turned their faces toward the widening crack, then clasped hands before a subvortex hurled them apart. The last Lisse saw of them was two hands, still clasped together and severed at the wrist.

Lisse found an escape. Took it.

She didn’t know until later that she had destroyed 40% of the aerie’s structure. Some people survived. They knew how to rebuild.

What she never found out was that the disrupter’s effect was sufficiently long-lasting that some of the survivors died of thirst before supplies could safely be brought in.

In the old days, Lisse’s people took on the ghostweight to comfort the dead and be comforted in return. After a year and a day, the dead unstitched themselves and accepted their rest.

After Jerengjen Day, Lisse’s people struggled to share the sudden increase in ghostweight, to alleviate the flickering terror of the massacred.

Lisse’s parents, unlike the others, stitched a ghost onto a child.

“They saw no choice,” the ghost told her again and again. “You mustn’t blame them.”

The ghost had listened uncomplainingly to her troubles and taught her how to cry quietly so the teachers wouldn’t hear her. It had soothed her to sleep with her people’s legends and histories, described the gardens and promenades so vividly she imagined she could remember them herself. Some nights were more difficult than others, trying to sleep with that strange, stabbing, heartpulse ache. But blame was not what she felt, not usually.

The second target was Base 454 Qo, whose elite flyers were painted with elaborate knotwork, green with bronze-tipped thorns. For reasons that Lisse did not try to understand, the jerengjen dismembered the defensive flight but left the painted panels completely intact.

The third, the fourth, the fifth — she started using Scorch card values to tabulate the reported deaths, however unreliable the figures were in any unencrypted sources. For all its talents, the kite could not pierce military-grade encryption. She spent two days fidgeting over this inconvenience so she wouldn’t have to think about the numbers.

When she did think about the numbers, she refused to round up. She refused to round down.

The nightmares started after the sixth, Bridgepoint 977 Ja-Esh. The station commander had kept silence, as she had come to expect. However, a merchant coalition had broken the interdict to plead for mercy in fourteen languages. She hadn’t destroyed the coalition’s outpost. The station had, in reprimand.

She reminded herself that the merchant would have perished anyway. She had learned to use the firebird to scathing effect. And she was under no illusions that she was only destroying Imperial soldiers and bureaucrats.

In her dreams she heard their pleas in her birth tongue, which the ghost had taught her. The ghost, for its part, started singing her to sleep, as it had when she was little.

The numbers marched higher. When they broke ten million, she plunged out of the command spindle and into the room she had claimed for her own. She pounded the wall until her fists bled. Triumph tasted like salt and venom. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy. In the worst dreams, a wolf roved the tapestries, eating shadows — eating souls. And the void with its tinsel of worlds was nothing but one vast shadow.

Stores began running low after the seventeenth. Lisse and the ghost argued over whether it was worth attempting to resupply through black market traders. Lisse said they didn’t have time to spare, and won. Besides, she had little appetite.

Intercepted communications suggested that someone was hunting them. Rumors and whispers. They kept Lisse awake when she was so tired she wanted to slam the world shut and hide. The Imperium certainly planned reprisal. Maybe others did, too.

If anyone else took advantage of the disruption to move against the Imperium for their own reasons, she didn’t hear about it.

The names of the war-kites, recorded in the Imperium’s administrative language, are varied: Fire Burns the Spider Black. The Siege of the City with Seventeen Faces. Sovereign Geometry. The Glove with Three Fingers.

The names are not, strictly speaking, Imperial. Rather, they are plundered from the greatest accomplishments of the cultures that the mercenaries have defeated on the Imperium’s behalf. Fire Burns the Spider Black was a silk tapestry housed in the dark hall of Meu Danh, ancient of years. The Siege of the City with Seventeen Faces was a saga chanted by the historians of Kwaire. Sovereign Geometry discussed the varying nature of parallel lines. And more: plays, statues, games.

The Imperium’s scholars and artists take great pleasure in reinterpreting these works. Such achievements are meant to be disseminated, they say.

They were three days’ flight from the next target, Base 894 Sao, when the shadow winged across all the tapestries. The void was dark, pricked by starfire and the occasional searing burst of particles. The shadow singed everything darker as it soared to intercept them, as single-minded in its purpose as a bullet. For a second she almost thought it was a collage of wrecked flyers and rusty shrapnel.

The ghost cursed. Lisse startled, but when she looked at it, its face was composed again.

As Lisse pulled back the displays’ focus to get a better sense of the scale, she thought of snowbirds and stormbirds, winter winds and cutting beaks. “I don’t know what that is,” she said, “but it can’t be natural.” None of the imperial defenses had manifested in such a fashion.

“It’s not,” the ghost said. “That’s another war-kite.”

Lisse cleared the control panel. She veered them into a chancy voidcurrent eddy.

The ghost said, “Wait. You won’t outrun it. As we see its shadow, it sees ours.”

“How does a kite have a shadow in the void in the first place?” she asked. “And why haven’t we ever seen our own shadow?”

“Who can see their own soul?” the ghost said. But it would not meet her eyes.

Lisse would have pressed for more, but the shadow overtook them. It folded itself back like a plumage of knives. She brought the kite about. The control panel suggested possibilities: a two-headed dragon, a falcon, a coiled snake. Next a wolf reared up, but she quickly pulled her hand back.

“Visual contact,” the kite said crisply.

The stranger-kite was the color of a tarnished star. It had tucked all its projections away to present a minimal surface for targeting, but Lisse had no doubt that it could unfold itself faster than she could draw breath. The kite flew a widening helix, beautifully precise.

“A mercenary salute, equal to equal,” the ghost said.

“Are we expected to return it?”

“Are you a mercenary?” the ghost countered.

“Communications incoming,” the kite said before Lisse could make a retort.

“I’ll hear it,” Lisse said over the ghost’s objection. It was the least courtesy she could offer, even to a mercenary.

To Lisse’s surprise, the tapestry’s raven vanished to reveal a woman’s visage, not an emblem. The woman had brown skin, a scar trailing from one temple down to her cheekbone, and dark hair cropped short. She wore gray on gray, in no uniform that Lisse recognized, sharply tailored. Lisse had expected a killer’s eyes, a hunter’s eyes. Instead, the woman merely looked tired.

“Commander Kiriet Dzan of — ” She had been speaking in administrative, but the last word was unfamiliar. “You would say Candle.”

“Lisse of Rhaion,” she said. There was no sense in hiding her name.

But the woman wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at the ghost. She said something sharply in that unfamiliar language.

The ghost pressed its hand against Lisse’s. She shuddered, not understanding. “Be strong,” it murmured.

“I see,” Kiriet said, once more speaking in administrative. Her mouth was unsmiling. “Lisse, do you know who you’re traveling with?”

“I don’t believe we’re acquainted,” the ghost said, coldly formal.

“Of course not,” Kiriet said. “But I was the logistical coordinator for the scouring of Rhaion.” She did not say consolidation. “I knew why we were there. Lisse, your ghost’s name is Vron Arien.”

Lisse said, after several seconds, “That’s a mercenary name.”

The ghost said, “So it is. Lisse — ” Its hand fell away.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Its mouth was taut. Then: “Lisse, I — ”

“Tell me.”

“He was a deserter, Lisse,” the woman said, carefully, as if she thought the information might fracture her. “For years he eluded Wolf Command. Then we discovered he had gone to ground on Rhaion. Wolf Command determined that, for sheltering him, Rhaion must be brought to heel. The Imperium assented.”

Throughout this Lisse looked at the ghost, silently begging it to deny any of it, all of it. But the ghost said nothing.

Lisse thought of long nights with the ghost leaning by her bedside, reminding her of the dancers, the tame birds, the tangle of frostfruit trees in the city square; things she did not remember herself because she had been too young when the jerengjen came. Even her parents only came to her in snatches: curling up in a mother’s lap, helping a father peel plantains. Had any of the ghost’s stories been real?

She thought, too, of the way the ghost had helped her plan her escape from Base 87, how it had led her cunningly through the maze and to the kite. At the time, it had not occurred to her to wonder at its confidence.

Lisse said, “Then the kite is yours.”

“After a fashion, yes.” The ghost’s eyes were precisely the color of ash after the last ember’s death.

“But my parents — ”

Enunciating the words as if they cut it, the ghost said, “We made a bargain, your parents and I.”

She could not help it; she made a stricken sound.

“I offered you my protection,” the ghost said. “After years serving the Imperium, I knew its workings. And I offered your parents vengeance. Don’t think that Rhaion wasn’t my home, too.”

Lisse was wrackingly aware of Kiriet’s regard. “Did my parents truly die in the consolidation?” The euphemism was easier to use.

She could have asked whether Lisse was her real name. She had to assume that it wasn’t.

“I don’t know,” it said. “After you were separated from them, I had no way of finding out. Lisse, I think you had better find out what Kiriet wants. She is not your friend.”

I was the logistical coordinator, Kiriet had said. And her surprise at seeing the ghost — It has a name, Lisse reminded herself — struck Lisse as genuine. Which meant Kiriet had not come here in pursuit of Vron Arien. “Why are you here?” Lisse asked.

“You’re not going to like it. I’m here to destroy your kite, whatever you’ve named it.”

“It doesn’t have a name.” She had been unable to face the act of naming, of claiming ownership.

Kiriet looked at her sideways. “I see.”

“Surely you could have accomplished your goal,” Lisse said, “without talking to me first. I am inexperienced in the ways of kites. You are not.” In truth, she should already have been running. But Kiriet’s revelation meant that Lisse’s purpose, once so clear, was no longer to be relied upon.

“I may not be your friend, but I am not your enemy, either,” Kiriet said. “I have no common purpose with the Imperium, not anymore. But you cannot continue to use the kite.”

Lisse’s eyes narrowed. “It is the weapon I have,” she said. “I would be a fool to relinquish it.”

“I don’t deny its efficacy,” Kiriet said, “but you are Rhaioni. Doesn’t the cost trouble you?”

Cost?

Kiriet said, “So no one told you.” Her anger focused on the ghost.

“A weapon is a weapon,” the ghost said. At Lisse’s indrawn breath, it said, “The kites take their sustenance from the deaths they deal. It was necessary to strengthen ours by letting it feast on smaller targets first. This is the particular craft of my people, as ghostweight was the craft of yours, Lisse.”

Sustenance. “So this is why you want to destroy the kite,” Lisse said to Kiriet.

“Yes.” The other woman’s smile was bitter. “As you might imagine, the Imperium did not approve. It wanted to negotiate another hundred-year contract. I dissented.”

“Were you in a position to dissent?” the ghost asked, in a way that made Lisse think that it was translating some idiom from its native language.

“I challenged my way up the chain of command and unseated the head of Wolf Command,” Kiriet said. “It was not a popular move. I have been destroying kites ever since. If the Imperium is so keen on further conquest, let it dirty its own hands.”

“Yet you wield a kite yourself,” Lisse said.

“Candle is my home. But on the day that every kite is accounted for in words of ash and cinders, I will turn my own hand against it.”

It appealed to Lisse’s sense of irony. All the same, she did not trust Kiriet.

She heard a new voice. Kiriet’s head turned. “Someone’s followed you.” She said a curt phrase in her own language, then: “You’ll want my assistance — ”

Lisse shook her head.

“It’s a small flight, as these things go, but it represents a threat to you. Let me — ”

“No,” Lisse said, more abruptly than she had meant to. “I’ll handle it myself.”

“If you insist,” Kiriet said, looking even more tired. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Then her face was replaced, for a flicker, with her emblem: a black candle crossed slantwise by an empty sheath.

“The Candle is headed for a vortex, probably for cover,” the ghost said, very softly. “But it can return at any moment.”

Lisse thought that she was all right, and then the reaction set in. She spent several irrecoverable breaths shaking, arms wrapped around herself, before she was able to concentrate on the tapestry data.

At one time, every war-kite displayed a calligraphy scroll in its command spindle. The words are, approximately:

I have only
one candle

Even by the mercenaries’ standards, it is not much of a poem. But the woman who wrote it was a soldier, not a poet.

The mercenaries no longer have a homeland. Even so, they keep certain traditions, and one of them is the Night of Vigils. Each mercenary honors the year’s dead by lighting a candle. They used to do this on the winter solstice of an ancient calendar. Now the Night of Vigils is on the anniversary of the day the first war-kites were launched; the day the mercenaries slaughtered their own people to feed the kites.

The kites fly, the mercenaries’ commandant said. But they do not know how to hunt.

When he was done, they knew how to hunt. Few of the mercenaries forgave him, but it was too late by then.

The poem says: So many people have died, yet I have only one candle for them all.

It is worth noting that “have” is expressed by a particular construction for alienable possession: not only is the having subject to change, it is additionally under threat of being taken away.

Kiriet’s warning had been correct. An Imperial flight in perfect formation had advanced toward them, inhibiting their avenues of escape. They outnumbered her forty-eight to one. The numbers did not concern her, but the Imperium’s resources meant that if she dealt with this flight, there would be twenty more waiting for her, and the numbers would only grow worse. That they had not opened fire already meant they had some trickery in mind.

One of the flyers peeled away, describing an elegant curve and exposing its most vulnerable surface, painted with a rose.

“That one’s not armed,” Lisse said, puzzled.

The ghost’s expression was unreadable. “How very wise of them,” it said.

The forward tapestry flickered. “Accept the communication,” Lisse said.

The emblem that appeared was a trefoil flanked by two roses, one stem-up, one stem-down. Not for the first time, Lisse wondered why people from a culture that lavished attention on miniatures and sculptures were so intent on masking themselves in emblems.

“Commander Fai Guen, this is Envoy Nhai Bara.” A woman’s voice, deep and resonant, with an accent Lisse didn’t recognize.

So I’ve been promoted? Lisse thought sardonically, feeling herself tense up. The Imperium never gave you anything, even a meaningless rank, without expecting something in return.

Softly, she said to the ghost, “They were bound to catch up to us sooner or later.” Then, to the kite: “Communications to Envoy Nhai: I am Lisse of Rhaion. What words between us could possibly be worth exchanging? Your people are not known for mercy.”

“If you will not listen to me,” Nhai said, “perhaps you will listen to the envoy after me, or the one after that. We are patient and we are many. But I am not interested in discussing mercy: that’s something we have in common.”

“I’m listening,” Lisse said, despite the ghost’s chilly stiffness. All her life she had honed herself against the Imperium. It was unbearable to consider that she might have been mistaken. But she had to know what Nhai’s purpose was.

“Commander Lisse,” the envoy said, and it hurt like a stab to hear her name spoken by a voice other than the ghost’s, a voice that was not Rhaioni. Even if she knew, now, that the ghost was not Rhaioni, either. “I have a proposal for you. You have proven your military effectiveness — ”

Military effectiveness. She had tallied all the deaths, she had marked each massacre on the walls of her heart, and this faceless envoy collapsed them into two words empty of number.

“ — quite thoroughly. We are in need of a strong sword. What is your price for hire, Commander Lisse?”

“What is my — ” She stared at the trefoil emblem, and then her face went ashen.

It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

But the same can be said of the living.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Tying Knots

Ken Liu

(In ancient times, there was no writing. When people needed to make a contract or pact, they tied a big knot on a string for a big matter, a small knot for a small matter. The number of knots depended on the quantity under contract. That was sufficient to provide a record.)

— (Jiujiayi, a Chinese philosophy text on the study of the I Ching, probably composed during the Eastern Han Dynasty, 25-220 AD)

Sky Village:

The spirits like to play jokes on us. I have seen more in my lifetime than any Nan in recorded history, and yet I am also the most shortsighted, practically blind.

Five years ago, when two Burmese traders climbed up the mountain for their annual trading trip, their hair dripping with water from the hard hike up through the clouds, they brought a stranger with them.

The stranger was unlike anyone I had ever met, and there was no record of anyone like him in our archive of ropes. He was tall, taller than my nephew Kai by two feet, and Kai was the tallest man in the village. His face was pale, florid and ruddy, like a statue of an arhat with a painted face. He also had blue eyes and golden hair, and a nose so sharp and stuck so far out of his face that it was like a bird’s beak.

Pha, one of the traders, told us that the stranger’s name was To-mu. “He’s from far away.”

“As far away as Rangoon?” I asked.

“Much, much farther. He is from America. Headman Soe-bo, that is so far away that you cannot imagine. Not even a hawk flying nonstop for twenty days can reach it.”

That was probably an exaggeration, as Pha liked to tell tall tales. But To-mu spoke to Pha in a harsh, staccato language that held a kind of music I had never heard, so he was certainly from no place I knew of.

“What is he doing here?”

“Who knows? I don’t understand anything he does. Westerners are all strange, and I have met many. But he is even odder than most. He walked into Man-sam two days ago, carrying that pack on his back, which seems to hold everything he owns. He asked me and Aung to bring him to places no Westerner had been to. He offered us a lot of money. So we said we’d take him to Sky Village. Maybe he’s running and hiding from an opium lord.”

Pha would do anything for money, even incurring the wrath of a general with opium fields. Sometimes we sell the rice for money too, to save up for a lean year when we might not have enough rice to trade. But we don’t pine after it the way Pha does.

If To-mu was trying to hide from an opium lord, then we wanted nothing to do with him. I had to watch him carefully, and make sure he left with the traders.

But To-mu did not act like a man on the run. He was loud and rude, and smiled at everyone and everything. He was always asking one villager or another to stand still while he held up a small metal box to his eyes and made clicking noises with it. He walked around and examined our huts, the narrow terrace fields, the wildflowers and weeds, and even the children shitting in the bushes. Pha translated for him as he asked the stupidest questions: What did we call this animal? What was the name of that flower? What foods did we eat? What crops and vegetables did we grow? To-mu was like a child, and did not know the most basic facts. He acted like he had never seen people.

He sought out Luk, the medicine man, and waved a stack of money at him.

“He wants you to tell him about sicknesses and how you treat them,” Pha said.

The traders sometimes asked Luk for tips like this too, so this was not such a strange request as To-mu’s other questions. Luk shrugged away the money, and patiently walked around with To-mu, pointing at herbs and insects and explaining their uses. To-mu held up his metal box and clicked at everything, and wrote in a notebook, as he collected the herbs and insects and stored them away in small clear bags he took out of his backpack.

We Nan have lived on this mountain for thousands of years. The oldest books passed down in the village — copied and reknotted with fresh hemp rope every few generations — tell the origin of our people. Long ago, our ancestors lived many days to the north, in a small Chinese kingdom. A war came, and invaders on horses tore through the rice fields, burning down our houses. The brave Elder San-pu led the survivors on a desperate run until we could no longer hear the horses’ hoofbeats, and we kept on walking for another moon. We climbed onto this mountain, and made our home above the clouds. We do not bother the world, and the world, for the most part, leaves us alone.

I say “for the most part” because every year, a few traders make their way up the mountain and bring us medicine, iron tools, silk and cotton cloth, and spices from far away. In exchange, they want one thing: our rice. The large, smooth grains, unlike anything the Burmese villages at the foot of the mountain grow, are hawked by the traders as “sky rice” in the markets.

They tell their customers that sky rice is fed with the pure essence of clouds and grows in air. When I heard this, I explained to the traders that the rice comes from the terrace fields on the mountainside, and we water it by irrigation ditches, no different from how our ancestors used to do and no different from the villages below. But the traders laugh. The buyers like our story better. They are willing to pay more because of our idea. You can never trust traders to tell the truth.

The rice harvest had not been good for a few years. It did not rain as much as it used to, and the springs that flowed down from the peak of the mountain slowed down to a trickle in the summer. Young men with keen eyes said that they thought the snowy peaks far to the west were losing their white hair, like old men going bald. Families were now eating a lot more wild vegetables and the children helped by hunting birds and treeshrews. But even these sources of food seemed to be in decline.

I had consulted the records of rainfall and harvest for past centuries, and a drought such as this had never been recorded. Could something in the world below the mountain be causing all of this?

I asked the traders for their thoughts.

They shrugged. “We hear the weather has turned strange everywhere, drought up north in China and cyclones down south in the Irrawaddy. Who knows why? It is just the way it is.”

I offered to have To-mu and the traders stay with me for the night, before their long climb down the mountain the next day. Pha and Aung always had good stories to share of the world below, and To-mu seemed a man full of interesting tales too.

I served them the last of my rice with sweet bamboo shoots and pickled ginger. To-mu smacked his lips and praised my cooking. I laughed, embarrassed. After the meal, we sat around the fire drinking rice wine and chatting.

I asked To-mu what he did. He sat quietly for a bit, scratched his head, laughed, and then said a long string of words to Pha. Pha seemed puzzled. He shrugged, and said to me, “He says he studies sicknesses and invents proteins — I guess that’s a kind of medicine — to treat them. It’s very confusing though. He says he doesn’t see any sick people or make medicine. He just comes up with ideas.”

So he was a healer, of sorts. That was certainly an honorable calling, and I had respect for anyone who wanted to heal others, no matter how strange he was.

I asked To-mu if he wanted to hear some of the old medicine books of the Nan. Even Luk, skilled as he was, couldn’t hold all knowledge in his head. He often consulted the old medicine books when he encountered a disease he hadn’t seen. There is much wisdom passed onto us from our ancestors, some of it bought with the lives of brave men who ventured past the line between medicine and poison.

To-mu nodded after Pha translated my offer. I got up, and retrieved the knotted clumps of the medical books. Stretching out the rope, I ran my finger down the line, and read out the symptoms and cure recipes.

But instead of listening to Pha’s translation, To-mu was staring at the knotted books, his eyes wider than teacups. He interrupted Pha and jabbered at him. I could tell he was extremely excited.

“He’s never seen knot-writing before,” Pha said. “He wants to understand how you do what you do.”

The traders have seen the Nan knotting for years, and grown used to it. I have also seen them record their purchases and inventory with markings on paper — Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese, Naga — different traders use different scripts. As different as they look though, the ink markings always seem to me dead, flat, ugly. The Nan do not write. We knot.

Knots have allowed us to keep alive the wisdom and voices of our ancestors. A long hemp rope, supple and elastic, is stretched and twisted to give it the right amount of tension and coil. Thirty-one different kinds of knots can be made on the rope, corresponding to the shapes of the lips and the tongue in making different syllables. Strung together like Buddhist prayer beads, the knots form words, sentences, stories. Speech is given substance and form. Run the hand down the string, and you can feel the knotters’ thoughts in your fingers and hear their voices through your bones.

The knotted string does not stay straight. The knots put tension on the rope. It coils in on itself, twisting, bending, yearning towards a shape. A book of knots is not a straight line, but more like a compact statue. Different knots give you different shapes in the coiled-up rope, and at a glance you can see the flow and contour of the argument, the tangible rise and fall of rhythm and rhyme.

I was born with bad eyesight. I can only see clearly a few feet away, and my head aches if I strain my eyes for too long. But my fingers have always been nimble, and even as a child my father said I was a quick learner of the properties of different ropes and knots. I had a talent for seeing in my mind the way the knots would change the tension on the rope, the way the little forces pulled and pushed it into its final form. Every Nan can knot, but only I have the eye for seeing the final shape of the rope before even a single knot has been made.

I began as a copyist, taking the oldest knotted books that were fraying and falling apart, feeling and memorizing the sequence of knots, and then recreating them with fresh hemp rope so that every knot, every twist would be faithfully reproduced, until the rope coiled in on itself, an exact replica of the original, so that the village’s children and their children would also be able to feel and learn from the voices of the past.

And later, after I became Headman and the record keeper after my father’s death, I knotted my own ropes. I knotted practical things, like the prices charged by the traders from year to year so that we wouldn’t be cheated, the new uses for old herbs discovered by the medicine men, the weather patterns and planting times. I also knotted other things, just because I liked the way the knotted ropes looked after I was done. I knotted the songs of the young men singing to the girls they liked, the feel of fresh spring sunlight on my face after the dark winter, the flickering shadows of the Nan dancing by the bonfire at the Spring Festival.

Route 128, Greater Boston:

It took a year of begging, expensive lawyers, bribes — excuse me, extraordinary processing fees — and even getting back in touch with acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to since college who now work at the State Department to get Soe-bo the right travel documents.

He doesn’t have a birth certificate? No last name? Does he grow opium for the warlords up there? Do you know anything about this guy? I gotta tell you, Tom, I’m pulling in a lot of favors for your native witch doctor. This better be worth it.

It is amazing how a few pieces of paper can generate so many headaches. Made me wish that it was still Victorian times, and I could just bring a “native” from the jungle back home without dealing with a thousand bureaucrats in two governments who didn’t much like each other.

“That is a very long journey,” Soe-bo had said, when I tried to convince him to come back with me on my second trip to Sky Village. “Too far for me.”

The Nan had no interest in money. I knew that it would be useless to promise him rich rewards.

“If you come with me, you can help heal many people.”

“I’m no healer.”

“I know that. But that knot-writing thing you do … You can help a lot of people. I can’t explain it. You have to trust me.”

He was moved, but still uncertain. Then I played my trump card, something I knew was on his mind, the only thing he might want.

“Your rice crops are dying because of the drought,” I said. “I can help you get new rice that will thrive with less water. But you have to come with me, and then I’ll give you new seeds.”

Soe-bo was not as terrified of the airplane as I had expected. He was such a small man to begin with, but huddled in his seat, his movements cautious and slow, he seemed even more like a child. He was calm though. I think the bus to Yangon shocked him a lot more. After sitting in one metal box that moved on its own to get you from one place to another, I guess a box that flew wasn’t much stranger.

As soon as I settled him into the studio suite at the hotel next to the GACT Labs campus, he fell asleep. He didn’t use the bed; instead, he curled up on the tile floor in the kitchen. Closer to the hearth, I suppose, an instinctual urge that I had read about in old anthropology books.

“Can you knot the rope so that it ends up in this shape?” I pointed to a small model sculpted out of clay. It looked vaguely like the head of a dragon. The Burmese college kid we were using as a translator shook his head — this whole set up must have seemed crazy to him; heck, it seemed crazy to me — but he translated my question.

Soe-bo picked up the model, turning it this way and that. “It doesn’t say anything. The knots will be nonsense.”

“It doesn’t matter. I just want you to make it so that the rope folds up naturally into this shape.”

He nodded, and began to twist and knot the rope. As the rope coiled in on itself, he compared the result to the model, pulled the rope straight and let it coil back again. He shook his head, and untied some knots and retied new ones.

In the lab, five different cameras were recording his progress, and on the other side of the one-way mirror, a dozen scientists leaned in to watch the tiny man and the zoomed-in image of his nimble fingers.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“My father taught me, as his father had taught him. Knot-writing is passed down to us from our ancestors. I’ve pulled apart and retied a thousand books. I feel in my bones how the rope wants to tie itself.”

Proteins are long chains of amino acids strung together, their sequence dictated by genes in living cells. The amino acids, knotty with their hydrophobic and hydrophilic side chains and differing charges, pull and push at each other, forming local secondary structures like alpha helices and beta sheets through hydrogen bonds. The long chain of the protein is an unstable, writhing, jiggling mass agitated by millions of minuscule force vectors until it “folds,” coils in on itself to minimize the total energy in the entire chain, and thus settles into its tertiary structure. That final, stable, native state gives a protein its characteristic shape, a tiny three-dimensional clump, a modernist sculpture.

A protein’s shape is what gives it its function. The “proper folding” of a protein depends on many things: temperature, solvent, chaperone molecules to help things along. When proteins fail to fold into their characteristic shapes, you get diseases like mad-cow prions, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis. But with the right-shaped proteins, you get drugs that can stop the uncontrollable division of cancer cells, block the cellular pathways needed for HIV to replicate, and cure all kinds of difficult diseases.

But predicting the native state of a sequence of amino acids (or, the converse, designing a sequence of amino acids that will fold into the desired protein shape) is harder than particle physics. A brute-force simulation of all the forces acting on the atoms in even a short chain of amino acids and a search through the free energy landscape will bring the most powerful computer to its knees. And proteins are composed of hundreds of amino acids, sometimes thousands.

If we can find an accurate, fast algorithm to predict and fold a sequence of amino acids into its native state, medicine will have taken the largest stride since the discovery of antibiotics. It will save countless lives — and be very profitable.

Once in a while, when Soe-bo seemed tired from the work, I would take him on an excursion into Boston. I looked forward to these excursions myself. My globe-trotting had made me into something of an amateur anthropologist, and I liked to observe the reactions of those outside of our world to the things we took for granted. It was fascinating to see the world through Soe-bo’s eyes, and to discover what shocked him or didn’t.

He accepted the skyscrapers as attributes of the landscape, but he was frightened by escalators. He took the cars and highways and crowds of people of all colors towering over him in stride, but he could not get over his amazement with ice cream. He was lactose intolerant, but he would endure the stomach aches for the pleasure of two scoops. He avoided dogs, even when they were on leashes, but he enjoyed feeding the ducks and pigeons in the Common.

Next, we moved to simulations on computers. Soe-bo could not learn to use a mouse effectively, and the screen tired his eyes. So we had to rig up a 3-D simulation system, complete with gloves, goggles, and adequate tactile feedback.

Now he was no longer working with his familiar knots. We had to see if his ability to predict the final shape of the chain was just the result of rote memorization of rigid folk traditions, or if the techniques could be generalized and mapped into a new domain.

Through a video feed from his goggles, we observed him manipulating the models of amino acids floating in air, learning their properties when placed next to each other. He jiggled the chains, pulled some strands apart, pushed some strands together, tucked in the side chains. To him, it was just playing a strange game.

But he did not have much success. The amino acids were too different from his knots, and he could not solve even the simplest puzzles.

The Board grew impatient and skeptical. “You really think this illiterate Asian peasant is going to provide a breakthrough? If this fails and it gets out in the papers, investors wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole.”

I had to bring up, yet again, my track record of mining pre-industrial peoples for medical knowledge. Within the mess of old wives’ tales and superstitions, there often lay hidden kernels of real expertise that could be discovered and exploited for real gains. Hadn’t our bestselling drug been first extracted from those orchids used by the Taeoc Indians in Brazil? They ought to have a little faith in my instincts.

But I was worried.

For our next excursion, I took him to the Sackler Museum at Harvard, where they had a collection of ancient Asian art. I understood vaguely that the Nan had migrated to where they were from somewhere up north in China during the Bronze Age. I thought he might be interested in seeing the old earthenware and bronze ritual vessels from people connected to his ancestors.

The museum had few visitors, and we wandered through it quietly. A large, three-legged, roundish bronze pot in a glass case caught Soe-bo’s attention, and he shuffled closer. I followed.

The vessel, called a ding, was etched with Chinese characters and decorative patterns composed of animal motifs, but there was something else, an even finer pattern of thin lines that covered the smoother parts. I read the little placard at the bottom of the case:

“The Chinese wrapped bronze vessels in silk and other fine cloth for storage. Over the centuries, the pattern of warp and weft in the wrapping would be left in the patina, long after the cloth has rotted away. Our knowledge of ancient Chinese weaving comes almost entirely from such traces.”

I asked the translator to read this to Soe-bo. Soe-bo nodded and pressed his face up against the glass to get a closer look. A museum guard walked towards us, but I waved him away. “It’s all right. He has bad eyes.”

“Thank you,” Soe-bo said afterwards. “They did not write with their threads, so the patterns were not intelligible. But I followed them closely, and I could hear their voices, though but faintly. A chance to hear such ancient wisdom, even if I could not understand it, is a great gift.”

During our next session, Soe-bo managed to fold a reasonably complex chain. It was as if he had gained some extra insight, and suddenly things clicked for him. We repeated the experiment with a few more complex chains, and he solved them even faster.

I think he was even happier than I was.

“What changed?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “In my knot-writing, knots very far from each other do not influence each other, but that is not true in your game. Hearing the voices left on the Chinese bronze helped me. The weaving pattern is made by one thread knotting back on itself over and over. But once woven into a net, a knot’s tension can be felt in all directions, even by far away knots. That made me see how I had to think about this game, and change what I knew about knot-writing to make the patterns fit. The ancient voices did have much to teach me, but I had to know how to listen.”

I was fine with mystical mumbo-jumbo, as long as it worked.

We played back his sessions on the computer, abstracting out his movements, inferring his decisions, systemizing his trials, compiling it all into an algorithm. This was not trivial, and it required a great deal of creativity and hard work to refine Soe-bo’s instincts into explicit instructions. But having Soe-bo’s movements as guide lights through the dark sea of infinite possibilities made the effort possible.

I resisted the urge to say to the Board “I told you so.”

Soe-bo reminded me that I had yet to fulfill my promise. We had been working together for months, and I was so absorbed in the progress we were making that I had forgotten. I was embarrassed.

I called up Chris, who had been at grad school with me, working in the same lab. He was now at Enadyne Agro, which had a reputation for good varieties of genetically modified rice.

I explained what I wanted: drought- and altitude-tolerant, does well in acidic soils, high yield, and preferably resistant to common Southeast Asian pests.

“I have a few varieties that might work,” Chris said. “But they are expensive. And we don’t usually like to sell seeds to a place like Myanmar. Besides the political risk, there’s no respect for intellectual property in much of Asia. I don’t want to see the whole country growing our rice without paying. You know the police and courts are useless, and hiring thugs to enforce patents against peasants doesn’t play well on the evening news.”

I asked Chris for this favor, and promised to help with the lessons on intellectual property.

“We might have to implement a technical solution for the problem of unauthorized seeds,” he added.

The Nan need the rice, I thought. The world is changing around them, and they need help.

I accompanied Soe-bo on his trip home and helped him carry the bags of rice seeds up the mountain. It must have been an amusing sight: the little Asian explorer coming home ahead on the trail, and me lumbering after under my load, a strange sort of Sherpa.

Sky Village:

It took me a long time to knot down the records of my trip to America, and the amazing sights I saw there. They now fill a whole shelf, and children come to me every night for more stories.

A trip like that makes you see how much a man does not understand. I thought I knew much before I left, because I had read more of the rope-books in this room than anyone in the village, but now I know better.

The rice seeds given to us by To-mu in exchange for my going to America grew like magic. The first year’s harvest was bigger than anyone remembered. The rice didn’t taste as good as the old rice, but we had so much more of it. We celebrated with a great festival, and everyone, even the children, got drunk. It felt good to have done this, to have brought in new seeds, new hope from outside that would fill everyone’s bellies again.

Before the next planting season, To-mu came again with Pha and Aung, carrying his heavy backpack as always. Even though we had not known each other that long, I thought of him as an old friend, familiar since childhood, because I had learned so much since I first met him.

But he seemed uncomfortable, agitated. “I came,” he said, “to sell you more seeds.”

“Oh, we do not need more seeds.” I’d learned to accept that To-mu could be very knowledgeable about some things, but had little common sense. “We saved plenty of seeds from last year’s harvest.”

To-mu looked away from me. “The seeds you saved will not work. They are sterile.”

Pha did not know how to translate this word, and To-mu had to try again. “The seeds will not grow. They are dead. You have to buy new ones.”

I had never heard of such a thing. How could seeds grow into rice stalks that will not yield more seeds?

To-mu explained that there are small bits of twisted-up string in every living thing, including the seeds and including us, called genes, which determine how that thing grows and how it will look. The genes are strung together from little clumps that form a language that can be read.

“Like the Nan knots,” I said. He nodded.

When someone invents a new gene, a string of new words, and puts it in a seed, that seed may have qualities that people like. The words make the seeds valuable. But the words are owned by the inventor, and other people have to pay him if they want to grow the seed. To make sure that people pay, To-mu explained, the inventor sometimes has to put in more words in that will prevent the seed from growing new seeds. So people have to pay every year.

“If you tried to grow seeds with that gene without the inventor’s permission, you would be stealing from him,” To-mu said. “It’s just like if you walked into the inventor’s house and took a bowl of rice away from him. The sterile genes are added to help people stay honest.”

This made no sense. If I take someone’s bowl of rice, that’s stealing because that person doesn’t have the bowl of rice any more. But if someone teaches me a new word with power, I haven’t taken that word away from him. He still has it.

I tried to understand this better. “We have to pay to use these words that you say are knotted up inside the rice seeds.” He nodded.

To-mu had told me that watching me tying knots in his game helped him. “So if you learn the words from our books, the wisdom from our knot-writing, do you have to pay us every year too?”

To-mu laughed and scratched his head. I thought he seemed nervous. “No, I don’t think so. The things I learn from you are … old. Not protected, not by copyright or patent.” More words that Pha could not translate, and I didn’t want him to bother asking To-mu to explain. If I learned more words from To-mu, I might have to pay for them too. I understood enough to know that To-mu thought what the Nan could teach him was of no value.

I had been a fool. I thought I was doing something to help the village, but To-mu’s part of the bargain came with strings tied to it. All I did was to put us into debt with a remote lord, a lord to whom we must pay an annual tribute. I had brought Sky Village as low as the peasants bonded to the opium lords.

There was nothing to be done. So we sold more rice to the traders to get money, which we used to buy the seeds from To-mu.

“The price will go up a bit next year, and the next,” he said. “I had to beg my friend to give you a discount for the first few years. You might want think about how to expand the village’s economy so you’ll be able to afford the seeds and buy better things. Like medicine and ice cream.”

Pha said that some of To-mu’s words made sense. The world was changing, and the Nan should change too. Some of the young men could go down the mountain to work, and Pha knew of opportunities for pretty young girls in the cities, especially if they were willing to go as far as Thailand.

I knotted a book about my conversation with To-mu. Maybe it will serve as a warning for the future, so that others will not be as shortsighted and stupid as I was.

We tried to grow some of our old rice alongside the new rice the next few years, but the old rice withered since it needed lots of water, and we had to save most of the little water we had for the new rice. People gave up. I think about the little genes twisted up inside those old seeds, the words passed down to us from our ancestors, now forgotten and gathering dust in storage sacks. Will those seeds even grow in the future, if the rain ever comes back?

To-mu has not been back since that second year. A different man now comes before each planting season to sell us seeds.

Route 128, Greater Boston:

The algorithm based on Soe-bo’s techniques performed well, far better than anything in the published literature. The paper describing my research is out for peer review, now that the lawyers are done with the patent applications.

If things work out right, this may be every bit the breakthrough I was hoping for. My algorithm will speed up drug discovery by orders of magnitude and save many lives.

I haven’t had time to focus on the revenue impact this will have on us, but the CFO’s presentation to the Board was very well received. The ten-year profit projections from direct discovery and licensing looked like an exponential curve.

Maybe it’s time for another discovery trip. I’m thinking Bhutan.

Author’s Note: the idea of tapping human pattern-recognition and spatial reasoning skills to aid the search for effective algorithms for protein-folding is described by Seth Cooper et al. in “Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game,” Nature 466, 756-760 (5 August 2010).

Some features of the knot-writing system of the Nan are modeled on the Hangul script as well as Incan quipus and Chinese folk art knotting.

About the Author

Ken was a programmer before he became a lawyer, and he still drafts legal documents like he writes code. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, and Science Fiction World, among other places. He lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and they welcomed their daughter into the world in 2010. He and Lisa are collaborating on a novel.

Fly Me to the Moon: Romance and SF Movies

Daniel M. Kimmel

Coming off a polarizing political season, we’ve come to think of ourselves as “red states” and “blue states.” You’re on one side of the divide or the other, and there’s no middle ground. That sort of binary thinking gets transferred to all sorts of subjects, and in the field of movies that means there are “guy movies” and “chick flicks.” A compromise is something like Knocked Up, which crossed fratboy humor with a romance. See? Something for everyone.

In the realm of science fiction films marketing considerations usually result in something with lots of action and special effects, and the “love interest” relegated to a minor subplot. After all, were the viewers who made Inception a hit talking about the twisted relationship between Cobb and his dead wife, or about the intricacies of the “dreams within dreams” action set pieces? However, just because that’s the way the suits who have to market the films think, it doesn’t mean that that’s how the filmmakers see it, and there’s no reason we in the audience have to buy into it either. In fact, romance — successful or not — is at the core of a number of science fiction films, sometimes in a way that no one can miss, and sometimes more subtly.

One can go all the way back to Metropolis (1927) and see that a bitter romantic triangle is driving the plot. It’s not simply that Freder, the son of wealthy industrialist Joh Frederson, has fallen for Maria, the young woman trying to better the lives of the workers living down below; nor that the scientist Rotwang has transformed his robot into an evil version of Maria. The key romantic triangle actually occurred a generation earlier, as has become apparent now the film has been systematically restored to its original version over the last twenty-five years. Frederson and Rotwang were once rivals for the same woman and Rotwang has never forgiven the industrialist for besting him. She married Frederson and bore him his son, dying in childbirth. Frederson has sublimated his love for his late wife into his work and into raising his son, now grown to adulthood. Rotwang, on the other hand, seems to have become loonier. He has put himself into Frederson’s employ and has been biding his time ever since. When Frederson asks him to find some way to prevent Maria from riling up the workers, Rotwang sees his chance. His robot Maria will not simply discredit the do-gooder; it will bring down Metropolis in the process. This is the vengeance he has been seeking for having lost the love of his life to Frederson. Generations who saw the severely truncated versions that eliminated this storyline had to accept Rotwang as a generic mad scientist who acted crazily simply because that’s what mad scientists do.

Similarly it is a doomed love story that is at the heart of Bride of Frankenstein (1933). The traditional romance is between Dr. Frankenstein and his new bride, Elizabeth. When evil Dr. Pretorious has the monster kidnap Frankensein’s wife it is in order to coerce his cooperation in new experiments to create life. Elizabeth’s job is the traditional one of standing around and screaming whenever the monster appears. However, it is the experiment that creates the romantic tragedy of the film. When the female monster is awakened, the intention is that she will be a mate for the original monster. Instead she is repulsed. It is a heartbreaking moment. The monster has become humanized, especially after his sojourn with an old blind man who teaches him to speak. Due to his blindness the man doesn’t know he is supposed to be afraid of the monster, instead treating him with warmth rather than fear, with the monster responding to this. Now the monster reaches out longingly to his newly created “bride,” eager for similar companionship. Her recoiling in horror may be understandable, but it leaves the monster bereft. As Frankenstein’s laboratory is destroyed, the monster sends the human couple away to rescue themselves while he, the inhuman bride and the monstrous Dr. Pretorious are buried in the rubble. If he can’t know love at least the monster can protect it in the form of Frankenstein and his wife.

Many of the SF classics of the 1950s turn on romantic relationships, even if that’s not often acknowledged. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) features a war widow who turns on her obnoxious boyfriend when he tries to call the authorities on the benign visiting alien, Klaatu. While Klaatu has to return to the stars at the end, she’s clearly taken by him and the way he seems to have bonded with her young son. Likewise in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the growing relationship between Miles and Becky — both newly divorced — provides a startling contrast to the emotionless beings they will become if taken over by the pods. Indeed, when they object to a world with no love, one of the pod people points out that both of them are living examples of how love can fail. Life will be simpler without this troublesome emotion.

However, the most interesting film of the period in this regard may be Forbidden Planet (1956), in which a United Planets cruiser discovers the fate of a lost Earth colony, now reduced to two people, Dr. Morbius and his daughter Altaira. How the men react to Altaira, and she to them, is as important to understanding the film as is figuring out the secret of the “Monster from the Id” and, in fact, is directly related to it. Dr. Morbius’s interest in his daughter is, at best, an unhealthy one, as we see when he creates an image of her using an alien device which has her in a sexy, skimpy outfit. Several of the officers try wooing her and her lack of reaction, due as much to her inexperience as anything else, provides some moments of humor. The one who finally connects with her is Commander Adams, and the implications are subtle enough that some may miss it. Earlier we see her dealing with a variety of animals around Morbius’s house without any fear. After she has experienced adult love — which in a 1956 science fiction movie is limited to a heated kiss — a tiger tries to maul her and has to be zapped by the commander’s ray gun. She expresses surprise. The animals have never reacted that way before and she can’t figure out what’s different. What’s different, of course, is that she is no longer the innocent girl her father has tried to preserve and has now experienced the romantic feelings of an adult woman.

Romance is at the heart of movies from more recent decades, such as the 1986 remake of The Fly. The film is a romantic chamber piece in which Seth Brundle can’t believe his good fortune when sexy, brainy journalist Veronica Quaife takes an interest in his matter transporter experiments. Seth is a nerd’s nerd, having a closet full of identical clothing so he never has to make any fashion decisions, but with an infectious enthusiasm about his project that Veronica finds very attractive. Unfortunately she has a troubled relationship with her ex-lover and editor, Stathis Borens, a man clearly unhappy that she has left him and has begun thinking for herself. Once this triangle is in motion, the science fiction tragedy plays out as an unreasonably jealous Seth risks running himself through the matter transmitter, not realizing there’s a fly in the chamber with him, with horrific results.

Noting that the film is about jealousy and romance is not, as some would have it, a way to say it’s not “really” science fiction. Of course it is science fiction. It’s a science fiction story about how a bad romance can become worse when the people in the triangle are involved in a strange experiment that will change life as we know it. By the film’s end, things have spiraled out of control for all three characters, and it is in the intersection of romance and science fiction that the horrors of the story play out.

Another 1980’s film is fondly remembered as a romance, but a recent viewing suggests that time has not been kind to it. Starman (1984) is the movie that caused Columbia Pictures to pass on E.T. since they already had a visiting alien movie in development. The Starman has landed in Wisconsin and needs to get to Arizona to meet up with his spaceship. He transforms himself into the genetic double of the late husband of Jenny Hayden. We first meet Jenny drinking by herself and watching home movies of herself and her husband, clearly still broken up over her loss. At the time this seemed like a touching story as she not only gets a chance to say goodbye — since, like E.T. and Klaatu, Starman has to return home — but also gets the opportunity to have the baby she and her husband always wanted. She had some medical problem that prevented her from getting pregnant, but Starman has miraculously fixed this so that when they make love he can ensure that she will have a baby. Since he is, in effect, her husband’s clone, this is the baby she was meant to have.

Well, that’s how it seemed in 1984, with everyone remarking over Jeff Bridges and his Oscar-nominated performance. Seen today, however, it seems downright creepy. Starman literally kidnaps her and, like a victim of Stockholm syndrome, she comes to identify with his mission. Whatever his temporary genetic makeup, he is not her dead husband, and his having sex with her seems closer to rape than love, however gentle he may be. That he then abandons her with child provides one of the saddest “happy endings” of any science fiction film. Whether seen as a touching love story or interstellar molestation, it is the romance between the two — and the debate over whether it really is a romance or not — that provides the engine for this movie.

Many science fiction love stories seem to turn out badly, however all is not bleak. The terrific social satire The Truman Show (1998) posits a situation where Truman has been encased in an artificial world from birth, for the entertainment of a worldwide television audience. While everyone in his life is an actor and everything that happens to him has been carefully scripted, accidents do happen. He falls in love with Lauren instead of Meryl, the woman the script says he is supposed to marry. The actress playing Lauren is quickly whisked away and Truman is led back on the scripted path to marriage with Meryl. However, late at night we see him cutting up pictures of women trying to create a composite face that will resemble Lauren. He’s been told that she now lives far away and is beyond his reach, but even though he’s oblivious to his real situation he’s not giving up. In the outside world the actress has become part of a group of people protesting the show, although she’s powerless to help him. Their bond is real but until he gets away there’s nothing she can do. Truman’s ultimately successful escape is motivated by the desire for truth and freedom, and that includes his being able to pursue the woman he really loves, not living a lie with the character created for that role on the show.

More recent films have continued to play with romance as a motivator. In Moon, Sam Bell is going slowly mad running a moon-based mining operation with no company except a robot. His one link to a normal life back on Earth is his wife, although as the film progresses we begin to wonder whether his understanding of their situation is realistic. In Avatar, Jake, a paraplegic soldier, comes into his own when his mind is transferred into the constructed body of one of the planet’s native population, allowing him to interact with them. For all the “big picture” issues ranging from ecological concerns to corporate greed, it is Jake’s falling for Neytiri, one of the native females, that opens him up to the perspective of her people, the Na’vi. Ultimately his goal is not only to protect and defend her people, but to find a way to cross the species boundary so that he can be with her permanently. It’s not a surprising development as the emotional bonds of his characters have served filmmaker James Cameron throughout his career, including in the Terminator movies, Aliens and The Abyss.

However, to end on a happy note, it is the little known science fiction film Happy Accidents that gives us a traditional romantic comedy in its purest form. Ruby Weaver has dated a bunch of losers and doesn’t see her life going anywhere. Enter Sam Deed, who is energetic, smart, funny and absolutely crazy for her. Crazy may be the operative word, however, when he announces he’s a visitor from the far future and has come back to the present after seeing a picture of her. Time traveling romances are not all that unusual, as with Somewhere in Time and Time After Time, but this one is more a romantic comedy than a drama or adventure. Ruby has to decide if Sam’s for real, or just another loser, and the clues go back and forth as to his real story. Once again the romance here is not subplot or subtext, but the driving force of the plot. It follows the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl outline for such stories, but the science fiction elements aren’t an afterthought or mashup, the way dirty jokes are included in Knocked Up so that guys would accept the love story. Happy Accidents has a lot of fun dealing with time travel and its paradoxes, and it satisfies as both romantic comedy and SF story.

It’s not surprising that love and romance should figure in so many science fiction stories, since it is part of the human condition. When people trying to defend a science fiction movie say it’s not really science fiction because it’s “about people,” they’re missing the point. All science fiction — all good science fiction — explores some aspect of humanity. The question isn’t why some SF films have offered up love stories, but why haven’t we seen more of them?

About the Author

Daniel M. Kimmel is past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He reviewed in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette for 25 years, and can now be found at NorthShoreMovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety and teaches film at Suffolk University. He is the author of an award-winning history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004), a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006) and I'll Have What She’s Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies. A collection of his essays, Jar Jar Binks Must Die... and Other Observations on Science Fiction Movies, will be published by Fantastic Books in March.

Practice for Something Else: Walter Jon Williams

Jeremy L. C. Jones

“I don’t have an agenda for science fiction,” said Walter Jon Williams. “It’s the thing that turns me on, both as a reader and a writer, and that’s enough for me.”

A sense of playfulness and wonder pervades Williams’ stories, a sense that he is exploring the whole sandbox, every dimension, every tool, and not just some corner sectioned off for one genre or another.

In the introduction to Green Leopard Plague & Other Stories, novelist Charles Stross praises Williams as a “versatile and elegant writer.” Nowhere is Williams’ flexibility (and elegance) shown more vividly than in Green Leopard Plague. Williams gives us Wyatt Earp through the eyes of Friedrich Nietzsche, shipwrecks through a diver’s mask, imaginary friends, dream-inspired water ballet, and working-class buddies who hit the road against a space opera back-drop.

Over the years, Williams has been compared to Roger Zelazny for his relentless exploration of the genre’s possibilities. Williams shies away from the comparison.

“Roger was a nationally recognized poet before he became a science fiction writer, and that shows,” said Williams. “His singularly elegant, poetic style was a constant delight. Though I’ve been flattered by the comparison, I have to admit that I don’t think I write at all like Roger. What Roger demonstrated was that you could be unique, you could tackle themes that no one else was doing and write like no one else. That’s inspiration for any writer.”

A martial artist, scuba diver, and traveler, Williams began his career writing nautical novels in the mode of Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester. He switched from historical fiction to science fiction for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the SF genre’s versatility.

“When I began writing SF,” Williams writes in the afterword to “Lethe” in Green Leopard Plague, “I realized that I could tell practically any story that appealed to me, as long as I set it in a science fiction context, and so I made a list of the sorts of stories I longed to write. The list was as follow:

A future in which everything went right. (This became my novel Knight Moves.)

A future in which everything went wrong. (This became Hardwired.)

A mystery/thriller. (Voices of the Whirlwind)

A first-contact story. (Angel Station)

A Restoration-style comedy of manners. (The Crown Jewels and its sequels)

A hard-boiled mystery. (Days of Atonement)

Williams spent a little more than six months outlining these novels and subsequent years writing them. Each book crackles with complexly crafted worlds, compelling characters, and startlingly effective slipstreaming.

After completing Days of Atonement, Williams worried that he had run out of “creative spark.” Fortunately, he hadn’t. That was more than a dozen books and nearly two decades ago, and Williams’ creative reserves show no signs of being tapped out.

Williams and I spoke recently with the paperback edition of This Is Not a Game just out and the sequel Deep State due in February of 2011. Our conversation was delayed once or twice by deadlines and by his rather adventurous itinerary; therefore, we started off with one of his favorite topics — travel.

Are traveling and scuba diving similar to writing?

Writing is a sedentary profession, and too many writers do little with their lives other than stare at a monitor.

I prefer more of a boots-on-the-ground approach. I travel as much as I can.

When I was writing stories set on sailing ships in the Indies, I got myself on a sailing ship in the Indies — plus other sailing craft in other corners of the world. The details I picked up by being there myself added infinitely to the fictional world I was trying to create.

Insofar as it’s chronologically and financially possible, I try to visit the places that I intend to write about. My next book is set largely in Turkey, and over the last few years I’ve spent as much time there as I could.

Naturally I can’t visit the extraterrestrial sites I write about, but I’ve seen as much of the world and its cultures as I can, and that helps when it comes to building plausible societies that don’t look entirely like late 20th Century America.

Travel does broaden the mind, but only if you travel with a certain degree of humility. If you go with the idea that you already know everything worth knowing, you won’t learn anything, and you’ll probably have a terrible time. Travel wanting to learn, and you’ll always find people willing to teach you.

And as for scuba — once you’ve cruised along a coral reef, you’ll never lack for models of alien creatures.

Why did you make the switch from nautical fiction to science fiction?

Though I enjoyed writing sea-adventure novels, I never intended to spend my entire career in that particular niche.

Though the reason I shifted my career had nothing to do with my wishes one way or another. American publishers just stopped buying historical fiction. A once-thriving genre no longer really exists. Writers who once would have written historical fiction are now writing historical romance, alternate-worlds science fiction, and historical mysteries.

The skills I learned writing nautical novels were eerily similar to that required for science fiction: I had to show to the modern reader a world displaced in time, a world whose assumptions are not the same as our own; and I also had to demonstrate an intricate technology, equally displaced in time, in a comprehensible manner.

The disadvantages I found with sea-adventure fiction was that I was constrained by actual history — I couldn’t have Washington fight for the British, say — and that my cast was constrained to a couple hundred men on a small boat.

I was deeply grateful to discover the breadth of science fiction that has allowed me to tap so many literary veins, and to let my imagination fly.

For a full time writer, short fiction is a luxury more so than a living. Why do you write short stories? What do you enjoy about them?

My output of short fiction has been slow but consistent. I think my best work is in the shorter forms, which is why I continue to write at shorter lengths despite the probability that every short story costs me money. It would be much more profitable to write nothing but novels.

I agree with others that the novella is probably the ideal length for science fiction. At this length you can engage fully with your ideas, develop your characters, and bring it all to a neat conclusion, all without trying the reader’s patience.

Another advantage of a short story is that it can be perfected. Novels are too sprawling to be perfectly crafted, too diffuse in their effects, but a short story can be honed until not a comma is out of place. This appeals to the craftsman in me.

In the Afterward to “Incarnation Day” in Green Leopard Plague & Other Stories you write, “Every story I write is practice for some other story.” Can you expand on this some?

If I don’t learn something new with every work, the result may be fine with readers but it’s a disappointment to me. I’m always trying to stretch and grow in different directions, because the alternative is stagnation.

It’s like playing a musical instrument. If you’re not practicing, you’re not getting better.

When I develop a skill, it’s like a shiny new tool in my toolbox, one I can use to help construct future projects. And sometimes I deliberately choose a project because it will allow me to stretch in some desired direction. The novel Hardwired began as a novelette called “Sarah Runs the Weasel,” which I wrote as a deliberate experiment to see if I could handle writing the novel.

Did you enjoy compiling The Green Leopard Plague & Other Stories? Where there any stories that didn’t make the cut that you wish had? Beyond what you mention in the individual author’s notes, did you notice any overall patterns or learn any lessons from looking through all those stories?

Actually I didn’t compile Green Leopard. The book was edited by Jonathan Strahan, whose name was unaccountably left off the title page, probably so that it would be alphabetized under my name instead of his. I’m pleased to help restore proper credit.

I only wish that the length of the work had permitted me to include some more novellas, including the Hugo-nominated “Argonautica.”

Looking at the collection, I realize how much of my recent writing is based on what I’ve called the Good News Future — the future in which such perennial misfortunes as death, war, and poverty are more or less eliminated.

What do you have left to write about when there’s no bad stuff happening? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

When writing a story or novel, what comes first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else?

Most of my books started with a character I desperately wanted to write about. (Cowboy and Sarah in Hardwired, Steward in Voice of the Whirlwind, Loren in Days of Atonement.) I created other characters to contrast with that first character, and did the world-building in order to put that character under pressure and show what he or she is made of.

Some of my books start with the world (Metropolitan, Aristoi)and I create the character and story to show the reader as much of that world as possible.

On three occasions I’ve gotten novels from dreams — twice a striking image that I ended up building an entire plot around — but the first 100 pages of Implied Spaces came directly from a dream.

I wish I had more dreams like that, but so far it’s just the one.

Your novels seem to get faster and faster as they go along.

One of my translators once remarked that the first 100 pages of one of my novels are very different from the rest. This is very often true.

During the first part of the book I am very carefully setting up the dominos in order, so that when the time comes, the plot can cascade to its conclusion with just a flick of my fingernail.

In the first part of the book I’m showing the bits of the world-building necessary to understand the action, explaining the characters to the reader and to each other, and very possibly creating a vast and threatening menace that hangs over the characters like a dark, ominous cloud.

Once I’m reasonably confident that the reader can navigate in my world, the plot springs into action and races to the finish.

Dagmar Shaw from This Is Not a Game will be returning in the forthcoming Deep State. In terms of character creation, where did Dagmar Shaw come from? Has she surprised you along the way? Been stubborn? Easy to work with?

This Is Not a Game was a delight to write, and Dagmar was a character whose point of view was a pleasure to write from.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Dagmar is that she’s not an action heroine. She’s intelligent and capable and sometimes devious, but her reaction to violence is to run into the bathroom and lock the door. She makes mistakes. She loves the wrong people. But she’s smart and persistent, and she fights her way through.

You’ve been at this now for thirty years. What changes in the publishing industry have caught you off guard?

I think the most surprising discovery was how little regard publishers have for their own interests. And it’s an ongoing discovery, because I keep encountering new ways in which publishers fail, not simply their authors, but their reading public.

For instance:

Paying lots of money for a big, important book and then doing nothing to earn any of the money back. No ads, no review copies, nothing. What is this business model, exactly? Who does it benefit?

Buying a series, publishing the first book to acclaim and success — after which the editor doesn’t even bother to read the second book in the series for a couple years, let alone edit and publish it.

Turning editors, whose job is to make books better, into publishing company executives, whose job is to go to meetings.

Never promoting from within the company, which forces editors to find new jobs in order to earn promotion and higher salaries — and forces them to abandon the authors they’ve nurtured at their old jobs.

I could go on, but the examples would grow increasingly arcane and require more and more knowledge of publishing. Suffice it to say that I’ve been in this business for thirty years and I’ve yet to understand why publishing works the way it does

What’s next for you?

My next novel, Deep State, will be out in February. It continues the adventures of Dagmar Shaw a few years after the events of This Is Not a Game. In This Is Not a Game, Dagmar accidentally used online gaming and social networking to solve a real-world problem.

In Deep State, it’s no accident, she does it deliberately.

After Deep State comes the third Dagmar Shaw thriller, Mister Baby Head.

Lastly, I’ve got to ask you about the martial arts. You studied Judo as a teenager and Kenpo Karate as an adult. What has the study and practice of martial arts taught you about writing in general and fiction writing in particular?

“A student practices until he gets it right, but a master practices until he can’t get it wrong.” The slow accumulation of knowledge and skill, developed with incessant practice, results in an unconscious competence that brings mastery to any practice. This isn’t to say that a master can’t make a mistake, but that he will make it in a masterly way, and that observers may not know that a mistake has been made.

Everything that I write is practice for something else. I am always learning and honing my writing skills, and my accumulated knowledge is applied to the next project. It’s not that I can’t err, but by now even my errors look awfully damn polished, and sometimes they turn out to be exactly the right thing after all — my unconscious mastery was guiding my conscious awareness in the direction that the project needed to go.

And what has writing taught you about the martial arts?

That practice and diligence will bear fruit. I worked at writing for years before I made a professional sale. This taught me that working toward long-term goals is possible, and in the martial arts necessary.

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.

2010 Reader’s Poll

Neil Clarke

Every year, we give you the opportunity to pick your Clarkesworld favorites from the prior year. This time around, you’ll have the opportunity to select your favorite story, cover art, interview and article from 2010. Feel free to use the comments on this post to help promote your favorites. (No attacking other people’s choices.)

You can take the survey at http://clarkesworld2010.questionpro.com.

We will close this survey on January 30th and we will publish the results in our February issue.

2010 Fiction

The Things by Peter Watts

All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg

Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake

The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar

Alone With Gandhari by Gord Sellar

The History Within Us by Matthew Kressel

Between Two Dragons by Yoon Ha Lee

January by Becca De La Rosa

A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell

A Sweet Calling by Tony Pi

Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My Father’s Singularity by Brenda Cooper

Beach Blanket Spaceship by Sandra McDonald

The Association of the Dead by Rahul Kanakia

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M. Valente

Messenger by Julia M Sidorova

The Cull by Robert Reed

Paper Cradle by Stephen Gaskell

Laying the Ghost by Eric Brown

Salvaging Gods by Jacques Barcia

On the Banks of the River Lex by N. K. Jemisin

Seeing by Genevieve Valentine

The Taxidermist’s Other Wife by Kelly Barnhill

The Children of Main Street by A.C. Wise

Articles

Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age by Brian Trent

Earth Science Gets No Respect by Russ Colson

Future Brains: Neuroscience Fiction versus Neuroscience Fantasy by Luc Reid

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

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

Moonage Daydream: The Rock Album as Science Fiction by Jason Heller

Packing for a Very Long Trip by Sarah Goslee

Steel is not Enough: The Lives and Times of Magnus, Robot Fighter by Bill Spangler

Sherlock Holmes & the Science Fiction of Deduction by Ryan Britt

Nothing This Fun Could be Good For You: A History of Evil Entertainment by Nancy Fulda

Interviews

Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales

Chameleon of the Fantastic: An Interview with Jeffrey Ford

A Terrifying Mix of Honesty and Rigor: A Conversation with Kij Johnson

Peculiar Notes of Contradiction: A Conversation with N. K. Jemisin

Revealing How the Elements Cohere: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bear

The Border between Writing and Life: A Conversation with Marly Youmans

Finding the Language I Need: A Conversation with Caitln R. Kiernan

No End to the Madness: A Conversation with Artist Scott Eagle

Even the Best Stories Have Flaws: Inside Altered Fluid

To See Beyond the Points of View: A Conversation with Karin Lowachee

Each Facet Intensely: A Conversation with Angela Slatter

Sharp-pointed Tendrils & the Span of Control: A Conversation with Jay Lake

A Novel Possibility: A Conversation with Mary Robinette Kowal

Testing What They’re Made of: A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold

Struggling to Define Themselves: A Conversation with Cherie Priest

Crossing Borders & Exploring Possibilities: A Conversation with Theodora Goss

Cover Art

 Warm by Sergio Rebolledo

 Transfiguration of Sergeant 05 by Bryan Sola

 Retro Robots by Georgi Markov

 Bagadurn by Aim Jalon

 The Biomarket by Rodrigo Ramos

 perseus faces the kraken by John Barry Ballaran

 My Secret Friend by Murat Turan

 Watcher of Merlin by David Melvin

 Honeycomb by Julie Dillon

 For the Colony by Erta Alt?nz

 Soulhunter by Andrey Lazarev

 Solitude by Rafael Sarmento

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.