Diving After the Moon

Rachel Swirsky

When Norbu was a child, his mother Jamyang told him an old Tibetan story about an industrious but foolish troop of monkeys that lived in a forest near a well. One dusty night, a monkey elder woke thirsty. He crept away from his sleeping mate and went to the well for a drink. Inside, he saw a reflection of the moon.

“The moon has fallen into our well!” he hollered.

His ruckus woke the other monkeys. They all agreed that it would be a terrible thing to live in a moonless world. They joined hands and formed a chain to climb into the well and rescue the moon.

As the monkeys dove in, the moon’s reflection broke, leaving blank dark waters. The shamed monkeys climbed out again: shivering, wet, and empty-handed. The real moon chuckled above them, safe in the sky.

Norbu liked that story better than the others Jamyang told. He liked other stories about the moon even better: histories and text books and biographies of astronauts from the dead American empire. Even as a young child, Norbu was impatient with Jamyang’s fantastic tales of weather mages and magic scarves. Jamyang tried to get him to see the beauty of old stories for their own sake, but Norbu never listened. To him, the moon was the future.

Before Norbu left to become a taikonaut, Jamyang told him, “I am going to borrow a radio so I can listen every second you are on the moon.”

Norbu smiled and said, “You don’t have to do that, Ma,” but Jamyang thought he looked pleased as he grabbed his hat and went out the door.

The day before the launch, Jamyang hiked across the dry terrain of the plateau to her nearest neighbor’s. The woman’s son gave her a near-defunct radio that he’d found in a landfill and repaired. The boy was training himself to be a mechanic and he always asked after Norbu, who had promised to write him a letter when he applied to university. Usually, Jamyang enjoyed talking about her son, but that day she was impatient to get home.

Over and over, the boy repeated his instructions for how to use the machine. “Do you know what to do? Do you know what to press?”

Jamyang fended off his concerns, protesting, “I know, I know, I used to have one,” but the boy continued fretting and repeating. He’d never gotten over the impression most people had of Jamyang, that just because she preferred past ways to future, she must never have seen any technology, even as a young girl.

Jamyang returned home with the radio at dusk, the sun pouring out red and orange light across the horizon. She listened while shelling peas. The lady reporter’s voice was fluid and rhythmic; Jamyang found it easy to listen to her, even as she repeated the same few facts to fill the hour. “Thanks to backing from the Egyptian government, Qinghai’s first expedition into space lands on the moon today, led by Melbourne-trained astronomer Karma Sangemo… the expedition hopes to find asteroid debris from the near miss in 2029…”

Jamyang thrilled every time she heard her son’s name: “Geologist Sopa Norbu says it’s time for Qinghai to make a contribution to the world which has given it so much. He says the people of Qinghai must work tirelessly toward the future…”

On the third evening, Jamyang sat by the window with her embroidery. She missed a stitch as the reporter’s voice broke out of its mannered tones, registering panic. “We’re receiving an urgent report from our Beijing office. Hostilities have broken out between Egypt and Australia. The Australian government is threatening to detonate a spore-cluster bomb in Cairo… The Egyptians have issued a response. They say they won’t allow the bomb to kill millions of innocent citizens…”

Murmuring suggested a conversation off the microphones. Jamyang leaned closer to the radio.

“The Egyptians are threatening to block worldwide transmissions to prevent the detonation signal from going through. They’ve given the Australians ten minutes to respond. If the Australians don’t stand down, global communications could be blocked for weeks. Wait, I’m being told we may not be able to keep transmitting — ”

The reporter’s voice decayed into static. Jamyang smacked the radio.

“No!” she said. “You can’t cut out! Come back.”

She smacked it again.

“Come back on the air. This is not funny! I tell you, come back.”

Waves of white sound poured out of the old speakers, loud and relentless as a winter sandstorm.

Norbu walked from the moon’s surface into the pressurized cockpit which rumbled with the sound of static like a distant storm. The expedition’s leader, Sangemo, shouted into the microphone of the ship’s ancient transponder. After hours of trying to contact someone, her voice had become as hoarse and rough as the static.

Triangular windows on either side of the main control panel looked down on the cratered surface. Through them, he could see the expedition’s other members collecting samples from the meteor impact site. Norbu stretched with relief as he removed his spacesuit.

“Any luck?” asked Norbu.

Sangemo started as she turned to face him, as if she hadn’t noticed him before. “I’m trying Cairo and Xining. Maybe reception will come back in one before the other.”

Norbu’s eyes flickered toward the fuel gauge. “How long do we have…”

“Before our oxygen runs out? Another day. Maybe less.”

“My mother said she was going to listen to radio coverage of our trip. She must be very worried.” Norbu rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease his knotted muscles. “If we’re going to fly back blind, I’ll need to start calculating for re-entry right away. It’ll be chancey, but it’s possible I can get it right.”

Norbu expected Sangemo to chime in with her usual pragmatic analysis of statistics and time lines, but instead the woman opened her mouth slowly and hesitantly as if she didn’t want to let out the words forming in her throat. She closed her mouth again, and looked away into the shadows. Norbu’s tension tightened further in his chest.

“What is it?” he asked.

She looked down. “Do you remember your briefing on the legacy fail-safe?”

“The programming safeties the Americans put in to prevent sabotage?” asked Norbu. “Weren’t those taken out when they sold us the ship?”

Sangemo sighed. “They were supposed to be.”

She flipped open the lid that protected the delicate equipment that sensed the ship’s positioning in relation to earth. The instruments had frozen at impossible readings and showed no signs of change. She wouldn’t meet Norbu’s gaze.

“So what are you saying?” he demanded. “We’re stuck here?”

“The engines won’t reinitialize unless the ship has confirmation of radio contact,” said Sangemo. “Even if we could calculate re-entry… the ship won’t move.”

Norbu felt dizzy. He gripped one of the handles embedded into the side of the ship. “We’re going to die here? We can’t even try to fly back?”

“Unless radio contact comes back. Yes.”

Norbu surprised himself with the force of his anger. He punched the wall, his fist aching from contact with the metal. His head hurt, and he wanted to shout at Sangemo, take her by the shoulders and tell her that she was wrong, she was lying. The rational part of his mind that ticked beneath his spinning anger reminded him that this wasn’t Sangemo’s fault. It was the American’s. It was the Egyptian’s. It was the Australian’s. But they weren’t here.

Norbu stalked over to the windows and looked down at the surface. Norbu wondered if they’d feel as blindsided by this news as he did. They were always calling Norbu an innocent, an optimist. Probably Sangemo would say she’d always suspected the Americans couldn’t be trusted to fulfill their part of the contract. That was Norbu’s problem. He had too much faith.

Everyone in the expedition had wanted so badly to reach the moon. No one wanted its cold, dead surface as a burial ground.

“I should tell the others,” said Sangemo, softly.

Norbu didn’t turn toward her. “I’ll stay on the microphone,” he said.

“Thanks.” He heard the click and shuffle of Sangemo putting on her spacesuit. “Well,” she added even more quietly, “It’ll give us a chance to finish the chemical testing you wanted to do on the lava samples.”

Norbu realized she wanted him to smile to show he understood it wasn’t her fault, to take some of the burden off of her shoulders. He didn’t have the energy to comfort her. He remained silent as Sangemo’s helmet clicked into place and her footfalls fell hollow on the metal steps leading downward.

Norbu turned to the main control panel. The static roared and rattled, vibrating through his bones. He stared down at his crewmates through the triangular windows; they still pursued their various tasks, just now turning their heads toward Sangemo as she approached them. He imagined them stuck in their places like flies in amber, forever frozen. He shouted into the microphone’s deaf ear, and suddenly in his mind, it wasn’t the headquarters in Xining he was talking to.

“Mother! Mother, is that you? Can you hear me? Listen to me! Stay out of the storm! Don’t try to come for me. Are you listening? I’m stuck here. I don’t want you to be stuck here, too. Don’t try to come for me, mother! You have to move on.”

Norbu could hardly make out his voice in the onslaught of sound. Static swallowed him in a tumble of sand and dust.

Jamyang loved two things: her son and stories. Which was why she decided to catch a troop of monkeys to help rescue Norbu from the moon.

Five days and nights, Jamyang cooked. She labored over the fire without sleeping. Sweat dripped from her brow, salting the broth. Her deep sobs woke the stinging flavors of the spices. Her burned fingertips rolled a dazzling hint of flame into the dough.

When the vast buffet was complete, Jamyang tottered away from the stove on weary legs and laid the feast on the threshold. The scents of thenthuk noodle soup, momo dumplings, and butter tea traveled swiftly through the cold, clean air of the plateau.

The sun glared down. A small breeze ruffled a whirl of dust before dying down. The plateau remained still.

Jamyang drooped. Her tired eyes stung as if they were full of sand. An inquisitive bird swooped down on black wings to investigate the meal. Jamyang shooed him away.

Sudden, bright chittering drew her attention to the horizon. A band of gold-furred monkeys approached across the wide terrain. They held each other’s paws one after the other in a chain. Their noses tilted upward, sniffing the air. Jamyang’s exhaustion vanished.

She clapped her hands and gathered a handful of dumplings. “Come eat!” she called, holding them out. “Come, quickly! I’ve made it all for you!”

The monkeys snatched the food out of Jamyang’s hands, eating with feral quickness as if afraid such good fortune would melt if they ate too slowly. Jamyang beamed down at them, offering new tidbits when their paws emptied. She was as attentive and elegant as the palace servants from the old stories.

When there was no more food, the monkeys lolled about. Partners idly groomed each other’s sleek fur. Others lay belly up, enjoying the faint warmth of the distant winter sun. Jamyang passed through the troop, patting the monkeys’ flossy white beards. She counted them: chig, nyi, sum. Four hundred and seventy monkeys had gathered on her land.

“My friends, thank you for coming,” said Jamyang. “I need your help.”

The monkeys’ collective, satiated gaze settled on Jamyang as if to ask: What can we do?

Jamyang knelt. She drew a shawl over her shoulders. Cheap North American fabric was little good against the chill.

“I have a son, Norbu,” she said. “He is a taikonaut, a person who goes into space. People here in Qinghai have wanted to go into space for a long time. They want to show the world that Qinghai is worth something as an independent state, that our worth didn’t die when the American Empire and the old Republic of China fought themselves to pieces.

“Egypt loaned us money to buy an old American era ship. It arrived by train in the capitol at Xining. Twenty thousand people gathered to see it. It was such an honor for my son to be part of something so big!

“Egypt and Australia started arguing again, over whatever the rich fight about. Qinghai wasn’t involved. But when have superpowers worried about who they hurt? Their fight stranded my son on the moon.

“Finally, after two weeks, Egypt reached a truce with Australia and cut off their jamming signal. I thought, at last, we can save my son! But then the prime minister came on the radio. He said we cannot afford to send a rescue ship. He said we should honor my son’s crew for their sacrifice. He said they have asphyxiated on the moon. Huh! I know they are not dead. The prime minister only wants to save money. He thinks about gold more than people.

“I went to the monastery to ask them for help. The monks told me not to worry. They said that when Norbu died, he would be reincarnated on earth and that was all the homecoming he needed. What comfort is that for a grieving mother?

“I took the train to the television station in Xining, thinking they could help me talk sense into the prime minister. They sent out a young woman half my age wearing a short skirt. She took my hands and said, ‘We’re so glad you came. We’re ten minutes short for the evening news.’ They filmed me for half an hour and sent me home with a handful of piastres.

“No one cared about my son.

“I thought I would die of grief. I sat in the dark, doing nothing. I looked at the radio and remembered the static that killed my son, so angry and loud. I looked out the window and saw the moon. And then I realized how silly I’d been! No one wants to hear the stories anymore. Even as a child, Norbu never wanted to hear them. But I remembered you.”

A satisfied smile stretched across Jamyang’s lips.

“We’re going to build another chain to the moon. But this time, it will be the real moon! Will you help me?”

A large female with a puff of auburn fur over her eyes approached Jamyang, taking her hand. The monkeys chattered. The female led Jamyang into the crowd. The other monkeys gathered around to groom her, their short black fingers tugging at Jamyang’s clothes, traversing her skin, winding through her hair.

Jamyang let them pull her into their center. She raised her hands toward the moon. “I knew you would help. Thank you. Together, we’ll get my son back, won’t we?”

Jamyang and the monkeys practiced from dawn until dusk, forming ever-longer chains into the sky. They went out every morning, even in the bitterest winter winds. Once, a ferocious gust picked up the tiniest monkey and blew him halfway across the plateau. His mother had to run all night to fetch him back.

After sunset, Jamyang brought the monkeys into her house for large meals and warming butter tea. After they ate, the monkeys groomed Jamyang. In exchange, she told them old Tibetan stories about the Weathermaker and the wise scholar Padmasambhava’s magic scarves. The monkeys fell asleep to the sound of Jamyang’s soothing voice. She joined them on the floor, huddled body to fur.

One bitterly cold morning, Jamyang woke with a sense of purpose. “We should do it today,” she said. She urged the monkeys outside into the frigid air.

The largest monkey planted himself solidly in the field. His mate, the second-largest, climbed onto his shoulders. She held out her arms to one of her sons, the third-largest monkey. So it went, smaller and smaller monkeys scrambling up their elders.

When the chain had grown so tall that the top monkey could touch the belly of a passing airplane, a roaring sounded in the distance. Jamyang turned. A sandstorm whirled toward them, dust and sand rumbling across the horizon in great dun-colored clouds.

“Hurry! Hurry!” Jamyang told the monkeys. The next pair rushed past her, holding their paws over their eyes to keep out the sand. Luckily, they had practiced so often that even blind they knew what to do.

Jamyang spat out a mouthful of sand. Grains caught in her eyes. She could no longer see the monkeys, only hear their chatter. The tiniest monkey clung to her breast until it was his turn. He jumped to the ground, tugging on Jamyang’s hand to pull her behind him. She heard his toes brush through the elders’ fur as he climbed up and up and up.

Now it was Jamyang’s turn. She planted her foot on the eldest monkey’s shoulders and began to climb. The monkeys shifted under her, groaning as they accepted her weight. Currents of sand drove against her back, scouring her skin. Gusts roared in her ears like static.

On the shoulders of a strong young male, she paused to wrap her shawl over her mouth so she could breathe. Sand worked its way in anyway, coarse underneath her tongue.

The climb seemed to last forever. At first, she kept track of how many monkeys she’d passed. Soon she lost count. Her hands and feet became numb, assaulted by millions of hard, minuscule grains. She could no longer hear the monkeys, only the storm’s relentless white crash.

At last, Jamyang mounted a pair of teeny tiny shoulders. No more paws reached for her. The sandstorm retreated to a distant rumble. Jamyang opened her eyes, scraping sand out of her lashes. The sky around her was absolute matte black, darker than ink on midnight silk. Above hung the moon, great and white and pitted with craters.

Jamyang looked down. The chain of monkeys trailed away at a steep angle, appearing to grow smaller and smaller like railroad tracks moving to the horizon. The line disappeared into the swirling sand.

Jamyang smiled into the face of the tiniest monkey. “We made it!” she said. The tiny monkey chattered back happily. She ruffled its fur.

Stretching out her arms as if she was going to pick up a huge barrel, Jamyang hugged the moon’s surface. Her legs swung above her head like she was doing a handstand. The world went topsy-turvy. She flipped onto her feet. She felt a blush as the blood pooled in her head, then stiffness in her ankles as if it were all rushing into her legs. Suddenly, she was looking up at the monkeys instead of down at them.

“Thank you so much!” she said, waving.

The tiniest monkey lowered his little black paw to wave back.

“Wait for me!” Jamyang said. “I will return with my son.”

The monkey regarded Jamyang with sober, comprehending eyes. Above him, the chain swayed like a tall stem of grass in the wind.

Jamyang turned her attention to the vast vista of the moon. She leapt between craters. “Norbu!” she shouted. “I’ve come for you! Where are you?”

Jamyang passed scraps of ancient American technology, marked with faint symbols of red, white, and blue. Beyond them, stood an old but intact South African war machine, faceted lenses gazing down at an ancient enemy on earth. Deactivated scuttlebots lay scattered across the landscape, legs curled up like dead spiders.

Jamyang caught sight of her son’s ship. It stuck up from the horizon like a great white needle, faded red paint etching a stripe around its tip. “Norbu?” Jamyang shouted. No reply came.

A crater the size of a lake sprawled in front of the ship. Three figures in spacesuits stood around it, frozen. A woman bent over a rock, squinting at an instrument. Beside her, a man sat on another rock, holding his head in his hands. Another leapt toward the ship, caught in mid-jump.

“Hello, good people?” Jamyang called. “I am Norbu’s mother. It’s all right. I am here to bring you home.”

They remained frozen, like dancers caught by a photographer’s flash. Jamyang passed them. She mounted the steel mesh steps leading into the ship.

Jamyang crawled through tiny passages until she entered a room where she could stand. Norbu stood in front of a huge machine the width of three large men standing shoulder to shoulder. His mouth stretched open into a shout. Sweat beaded his flushed cheeks.

Jamyang threw her arms around the waist of his spacesuit. “Norbu! I knew you weren’t dead!”

Norbu’s body wrenched into motion, like a stuck cart pulling free from the mud. He jumped back, startled. “Ma? What are you doing here?” He tapped a gauge on the panel. “I can’t have much O2 left.” He twisted a microphone toward his mouth. “Cairo, can you hear me? Xining, do you read?”

“Don’t talk to them,” said Jamyang. “I’m the one who came to rescue you.”

“Where’s Sangemo? Where’s Dorje?”

“Hush. They’re outside. We’ll wake them when we head home. See?” She pointed out the triangular windows overlooking Norbu’s frozen crewmates. “You won’t believe what I had to go through to find you. The prime minister refused to send anyone for you!”

Norbu shook his head like a person waking from a long dream. “I don’t… remember. What happened? Our radios went dead.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“A signal came through before it happened… I’m having trouble remembering… my head hurts, I’m all fuzzy… I remember thinking about you, hoping you’d find a way to move on…”

“But I did move on, don’t you see? I came for you. The monks and the television people, they wouldn’t help me, so I summoned monkeys and climbed my way to you, just like in the old stories. I can bring you all home.”

Norbu shook his head. “No.”

Jamyang went to the window. “I hope the monkeys can hold us all. That girl’s a sturdy one, isn’t she?” She clucked her tongue against her teeth.

“Ma, this is important. I’m trying to remember. The transmission…”

“The Australians declared war,” said Jamyang. “They threatened to detonate a spore-cluster bomb.”

“-a spore-cluster bomb,” Norbu finished with his mother. “The Australians would never have done it. It was an empty threat. The Australians would never have done it. Not with the Egyptian military presence in New Zealand, ready to retaliate with short-range missiles. It was an empty threat. The Egyptians knew that. Sangemo contacted the ambassador to beg them to delay their response until we could get home. The Egyptian ambassador said they couldn’t. He said it would make them look weak. They loaned us the money to help us get to space, they said it was important for Qinghai to join the modern world, but they forgot us as soon as it became inconvenient…”

“Do we need to straighten this out now?” said Jamyang.

“Sangemo gave the headset to Dorje. He pleaded, ‘I have sons at home. They need a father.’ When that didn’t work, Sangemo took the headset again. She said, ‘We’ll cut our mission short and leave now. We’ll be in orbit in a few hours. You can send out your signal then.’ She said, ‘You have no idea how much this means to Qinghai. We’ve been waiting to show the world that we, too, are a great people. We, too, can touch the moon.’”

“Enough of this now,” said Jamyang. “You never wanted to listen to stories, but they’ve saved you now, haven’t they?” Jamyang grabbed Norbu’s hand to pull him toward the door. He shook himself loose.

“No, ma, you don’t understand. I’m running out of oxygen. You’re a hallucination.”

“You say this to the woman who comes to rescue you? Children! I cooked kitchens full of noodles and dumplings to lure the monkeys. When the new world fails you, the old stories are always there.”

“I need to get to the others,” said Norbu.

Jamyang watched him pull on his spacesuit. “You don’t need that.”

“I don’t care if I am hallucinating, I’m not going out onto the moon without my suit,” said Norbu. He pulled the bubble of his helmet over his head and bounded out of the room.

Jamyang followed. Norbu’s crewmates remained frozen in the crater. Norbu went to each of them, waving his gloved hands in front of their still faces. Finally, he turned to his mother, hands groping in front of him as if searching for something concrete to grasp.

“I always thought I’d relive the most exciting moments of my life before I died. Winning the bicycle race from Xining to Qinghai Lake. The clean empty feeling of running ten kilometers, three thousand feet above sea level. Being chosen for the expedition. The launch! But when Sangemo told us about the message from Cairo, I kept thinking about you, Ma, and the old stories you used to tell. Monkeys forming a chain and jumping into a well after the moon.”

Norbu paused. Behind his helmet, his expression was inscrutable.

“I must love you very much.”

“As I love you,” said Jamyang.

Around them, the world began to unfreeze. Norbu’s crewmates inched forward as if in a slow motion video. From Norbu’s space suit there came the noise of his radio, sputtering the empty static of Australia’s jamming signal. Jamyang flinched.

“You can hear that?” said Norbu.

“Never mind!” shouted Jamyang. “Come on! We should get back to the monkeys before they fall!”

Jamyang turned to flee back the way she’d come, but her feet only ran in place. Dead scuttlebots lay where she hoped to find the monkeys. Panic cinched her throat. She couldn’t breathe. She clawed at her neck. “Where did the earth go?” she choked.

“You don’t get it, do you, ma? There isn’t any air here. The old legends aren’t true.”

“We have to get home!”

Norbu shook his head slowly. “We can’t, ma. You and I, we’re both fools. Nothing we believed was true. There’s nothing for us in the past or the future. I remember when I was a kid thinking if Qinghai could just get to the moon we’d be like all those other countries, rich and glamorous. No more poverty. No more children starving in the streets. No more taxes to pay for other people’s wars. No more generations of boy soldiers coming home crippled. We’d leap across the gap and when we landed - we’d be with everyone else in the future.”

Norbu stomped his foot. Moon dust billowed around him in slow motion. “Everything I grew up thinking — it was all wrong. I was trying to grab the future out of the well water. But it was only a reflection. It’s hovering above us, chuckling in the sky. And here we are, wet.”

Static roared in their ears, like the sandstorm.

“No,” said Jamyang.

Norbu placed his hand on her face. His thick Kevlar spacesuit felt rough against her cheek.

“You don’t get it, do you, Ma? We’ve fallen in the well. There’s nothing left to breathe.”

About the Author

Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Sturgeon, the Million Writers Award, and the Locus Award. Her first collection, Through the Drowsy Dark, a slim volume of fiction and poetry, came out from Aqueduct Press in 2010. A second collection is forthcoming from Subterranean Press. She lives in Bakersfield, California, with her husband, a geologist who has never been to the moon.

Three Oranges

D. Elizabeth Wasden

Orange stained the entire room. Orange juice. Zest. Peels. I scratched at the moist peel over a flowerpot and covered the shavings with soil. The flowerpot had cracked this time. I should buy another. I told myself this on numerous occasions.

I dipped my hands in the washbasin, then toweled my hands dry. Soil, mixed with orange zest, clung beneath my fingernails. It pushed right up against the soft skin of my finger and worked against my skin, like a rat gnawing against a belly. Had I not had an appointment, I would have excavated the mixture. Scrubbed my hands clean. Perhaps removed a bit of skin with it.

But neither I nor Hermes wore clean hands, and I suspected he might appreciate the irony of wearing my guilt in the open — if he noticed at all.

“Give Prokofiev more commissions,” I told Hermes when he suggested I convince the composer to return to Russia. “The capitalists are fucking him over. He’s getting frustrated. He even told one of the ballet directors that he was tiring of life in Paris. That Russia seemed to ‘beckon to him.’”

Hermes was a field operative from Ukraine, glad to have a full stomach and to not be a Russian, whereas I was from Russia and glad to not be from Ukraine. I often wondered which of us had fared better. Me, with my postings in Berlin then Paris, or he, flitting about the Continent.

“To trade the City of Light for the dark of Moscow.” Hermes shook his head.

“Ah, but it’s easier to see light when one is in shadow.”

“It’s also easier to draw insects to the light and to — ” He slapped the table. The thin, spindly legs shook with the sharp smack. I glanced over at the window. The cracked flowerpot held steady. A small, spindly orange tree had already burst through the soil. It shook with his movement. He dusted off his hands. “The Cockroach wants him back now.”

Hermes had shared Osip Mandelstam’s almost deadly poem about our Great Leader, and we often referred to Stalin as Cockroach or Cockroach with Whiskers or any variety of phrasing that would have gotten us shot. Should have gotten us shot.

“What’s the rush?” I asked.

“You can’t keep them forever. They’re not yours to keep.” His voice sounded different. Quieter. More predatory. “Where are they, hmm? You never share them anymore.”

I held up my hands and smiled. He was correct: I did not share them with anyone. Perhaps he had informed Cockroach. Bastard.

He said, “Orion, there are plenty of other stars in the sky.” He laughed. I did not. “You won’t like this at all. It gets worse.” Hermes blew out smoke from his nose like a dragon and gazed down. He thumped the cracked surface with his thumb. “You are to use the Oranges to convince him.”

I shrugged and tapped a cigarette on the table. Loose tobacco jumped from the cigarette, and I swept it away with my hand. The apartment was fairly sparse. We sat, suspenders hanging from broad shoulders, at a small, square table. There were two other chairs besides the ones we occupied, and one of them was fairly comfortable. Thick, purple curtains hung in front of the apartment’s single window. It was a horrible color, like soft, bruised flesh.

“Fine. I can do that.” I sniffed. Moor had brought me the Oranges when I was in Berlin. Moor was a Caucasian, not an African. Armenian, I think. It was one of the few things I clearly remembered about those days. That and the street fights.

Hermes cleared his throat. There was more. “Cockroach wants the Oranges returned to Moscow with the composer.”

Fuck. “Why?” I lit my cigarette. My hands did not shake.

He shrugged. “Who can say?”

Fuck. “You must have heard something.”

He crushed his cigarette on the table next to the ashtray. “I think you can guess why he might want Three Oranges returned. You’ve certainly spent enough time with them.” He laughed.

I would kill the Cockroach with my bare hands. Wrap my suspenders around his throat and pull and squeeze. I would watch his tongue roll and dip in and out, out and in. The tongue that would find all of the crevices and secrets of my Oranges because no one could refuse the Cockroach.

“Relax,” Hermes said. He had already unscrewed a flask and offered it to me as if he were reading my thoughts. It was a disconcerting proposition. What the Center did not need were omniscient handlers and field agents. “Get this done quickly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a promotion.”

“Here or in Moscow?”

“Is something wrong with Moscow?” He planted his elbows on the table and leaned forward.

I did not move. “I’d rather not return to Moscow. In fact, I’d adamantly decline.”

He laughed again. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You don’t decline the Cockroach, and you don’t tell him you’re more comfortable in Paris and would rather stay, thank you very much. I’d advise you to express some measure of homesickness. Like the composer.”

“Why don’t you keep the promotion? I’ll keep Paris.”

“Get him to return to Moscow within the week. You’ll stay in Paris, and I won’t say anything about the Normandie. What do you say?”

My stomached tightened, and my legs became dead weight. I gave him a crooked smile; I could appreciate his position. Hermes had shared the news about Kirov’s death in 1934, and since then, I had purchased passage on the Normandie. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew or that he would use it as leverage. He was protecting his own ass.

Hermes was a colonel. Perhaps he could convince the chief and the chief could convince the Cockroach to keep me in Paris. Perhaps not.

“If not, I do hope you’ll let me know.” I took a drink and returned his flask. Cognac.

The door creaked shut behind him. I followed him a few minutes later, the flowerpot tucked inside my coat, pressed against my side. It bulged outward like a large tumor.

Night had fallen. The city vibrated with conversation and jazz and whispered promises over cocktails.

The Oranges had been with me since Berlin. Berlin had been cut off, but the Oranges were still mine. Mine. When I returned home, I placed the flowerpot under a bright light and ran my fingers up and down its small stems.

“Grow, damn you,” I said, sliding into a chair with a wine bottle. I washed the taste of cognac out of my mouth and wished for the taste of orange.

I do not recall the rest of the night.

Within a few weeks, the orange tree grew, burying its great roots in the rug beneath it. Eventually, three beautiful orange blooms sprouted, then came the Three Oranges.

I plucked them from the tree. Rubbed them across my lips, flicked my tongue over them. Tasted them. Knew them. Never let it be said that I have no control, for I placed them in the pocket of my greatcoat.

I decided to meet Prokofiev in a car — a big, shiny black one that swallowed the passenger’s vision and made him forget about Paris. Those black holes were magical, I must confess. Immediately, the victim’s esteem and spirits would plummet and sink into the floorboard.

I brought the Three Oranges and scratched at their peels until citrus filled the air. The fairies must have giggled as I tickled their skin. Winter lingered outside, and steam rose from streets, smoke from houses. The door opened, and Sergei Sergeyevich stepped inside.

I was obvious, all wrapped in leather, bald head, fur hat in my lap, with hard, penetrating eyes. I drew him nearer than he would’ve liked, bent toward him, my lips sending warm breath onto his ear. He sat stock-still. I brandished the Three Oranges, wielded them like hand grenades, laughed, and slid back into my seat after he accepted them.

“From the motherland.” I smiled. I wanted to break each of his fingers.

“What shall I do with them? Juggle them?” Prokofiev asked and exhaled all of his worry. He chuckled. Thought that, perhaps, I was there to fucking critique Love for Three Oranges? That insulted me. This was hard, so hard, and he laughed. “If this is some sort of message, you should speak clearly.”

“What do you think you should do with them?” I pressed one thumb hard against the other and noted all of the colors my thumb could become. Pink. Red. Purple. Blue. White. Streaks of white against a pink background. Yellow on some days. “The longing you must feel — without them for so long. I don’t think you’d prefer to juggle them at all.”

His eyes brightened. For a moment, he held the Oranges in his hands, turning them over and caressing them with his thumbs. No doubt imagining things beyond juggling. I pressed harder.

“Do you have water, then?” he asked, now subservient and meek. Hopeful. Oh, how he smiled and the light in his eyes danced, in spite of the black hole of the car. He was Paris. I was Moscow.

I turned over an almost empty bottle of vodka and shook the remainder of it onto the car’s floor.

He tried to capture the Oranges in the crook of his arm. They rolled back and forth against his coat, awkwardly tumbling across the wool. The first fell as he jostled for the door handle. Strange how uncoordinated some of us are in the moments we most need our agility. Strange how those nimble fingers could betray him at such a time.

I picked up the first Orange, and I jabbed my thumb into its flesh, digging back and forth. Juice burst onto our faces, our jackets, our hands. He abandoned his escape attempt and watched.

My tongue flickered like a serpent’s. I thought of the Cockroach and the Composer in Moscow, taking turns with the Oranges, discovering just where to press and where to rub.

The first Orange exploded and opened like a magnificent flower, and I devoured it as I unpeeled the rest of it, tossing aside the peels haphazardly as if undressing a woman. The first fairy, red and white and tiny and angelic, emerged from the discarded, spent peel.

“Do you have water?” she asked. “Water. Please, water.”

I wiped my hands on my knees. His lips had parted, but he said nothing and no longer moved.

“Have you been away for so long that you’ve forgotten them? That you’ve forgotten the rules?” I asked.

“Water or I’ll perish!” the fairy said.

She pressed her hands together. I had not warned her. Her pleading was genuine and excruciating.

How she begged. She slid onto the seat, already withering like a days-old cut flower. Water or death. A rather slow death for something so small. I had watched her closely as she perished, slowly drying out, flesh splitting like cracked earth in a drought, tender cheeks splitting like an over-ripe tomato. Blood eased out of the wounds, slow like lava, then the muscle tore apart like frayed rope. Tendons unraveled. Organs shrank and wrinkled, folding on top of themselves until they no longer existed. The fairy would still scream as her bones too disintegrated, turning into dust.

Prokofiev’s face — Oh, now it was priceless. I bit my lip and tasted blood so I wouldn’t laugh.

(Some of my colleagues at the Center enjoy over-the-top torment. Treatments involving rats and tubes and stomachs or fucking spouses or children in front of subjects or beating subjects then sodomizing them with clubs and sticks and bottles. “Why am I here?” Silence. Crack. “Where am I going?” Silence. Crack. I sympathize with my friends back east. They have their own problems, the Cockroach nibbling at their backs and heels instead of wiggling his antenna from a distance. One has to have a bit of fun. Still, how crude. How unimaginative. How undelightful. Nothing at all like this.)

Prokofiev patted his pockets and threw the contents on the seat. A silk handkerchief (I kept it), a carnation (stepped on it), a thick brass key (threw it out the window), a pipe (sold it thirty years later for a tidy sum), papers (burned), pencil (broke in half), passport (he had the foresight to remember to pick that one up) — piss-all to drink. Hah! I bit my tongue again. Piss-all to drink.

I retreated to my corner, hands resting in my lap, fingers interlocked. One Orange lay on the floorboard next to the dying fairy.

He held the last orange between his knees. It bulged, soft and sweet.

“I wouldn’t open it,” I told him. I unfolded myself and placed my hand on top of the Orange. He jerked at my movement, as if I had touched him instead. I placed one foot on the other Orange. “Not here.”

We watched the fairy fall apart and die. He picked up the discarded peels, followed the minute dimples with his thumbs. Tears rolled down his cheeks. I managed to whistle the “March” from Love for Three Oranges.

“In Moscow,” he said. He swallowed hard. I already knew he’d return.

“In Moscow,” I agreed. “You realize you have a choice, though. Return the Oranges to me. You live in Paris. Or elsewhere. Forget about the motherland. You needn’t return to Moscow at all.” My head swam. I needed a cigarette. I wanted him to say yes. More than that, I wanted him to say no. “But the Oranges must.”

I took the Orange from between his knees and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“You can replant them. Return them to life.”

I nodded. “The peels usually suffice. Squeeze enough juice from them.” I squeezed again. “Scrape it out with a penknife. If not?” Again, I squeezed. “As long as there is one, there are three. They’re like a trinity, Citizen Prokofiev. Almost holy.”

He stared at the Orange. “All three will return with me. To Moscow.”

“All three.” I pressed my palm against my chest. I could barely feel my tired heart beating. “I promise.”

His skin was still quite pale but some measure of red had begun to flush into his cheeks. “You promise.” He snorted. “I won’t go until I have them.”

He had no cause to believe my promises, less so in the darkness of the car. The fairies would return as long as something remained of them. So he clambered out, scooping up his passport, and ran down the street. His jacket flapped behind him in a quick rhythm like the flapping of a bird’s wing.

Had Prokofiev appeared brighter in the car or on the street? He was dull to me in both environments. Gray.

I crushed the second Orange underfoot, smashing it until the lump flattened into dry pulp and her screams ended.

When I stepped out of the car, it drove away and disappeared, but I took that last Orange with me.

We stopped at a cafe, me and my Orange. We shared a seltzer water and cigarettes. No one noticed as she expanded.

She sat in the chair next to me, a fully-grown (and developed) woman. She wore a long, red dress, pearls, and long, black gloves that were smooth to the touch. I held her hand in mine and squeezed too hard, as if she were my thumb back in the car.

She wrenched her hand from mine. “That hurts, Stepan.”

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry. “Our time.”

She stared at me. I found it both hard to look away and to not do so. “Is short.”

I blinked. “You’re certain he will accept?” I was.

“I am. His love for us is boundless.” She glared at me accusingly. I deserved it. She was right. She was pouting.

His love. “What if there was another option?”

It was her turn. She blinked at me with her heavy, dark lashes. “I didn’t think there were any other options.”

As if she could know what her options were. “We could sail for North America. Canada.”

“Don’t be foolish, Stepan.”

“I’m not. It could be done. You remember the Normandie.”

“Why? There’s nothing for us there. You don’t love me.” She rolled her eyes.

“Love you.” I thought of the dead fairies in the black car.

“Yes. Love.”

An impossible thing. “No.”

“Don’t ruin the evening, then. And don’t ruin your career.” She placed her hand on top of mine and stroked my knuckles. “You have such beautiful hands. They are instruments, Stepan. Different than his, but you should have no shame in your art.”

We drank and ate well that night. When we returned to the apartment, I unpeeled her again. She tasted and smelled like the dead fairies in the car. We made love in the dark, black as the inside of that fucking car.

Some time before dawn, our eyes met. Neither of us blinked.

“I could learn to love you. I could try. I do try.” My voice was quiet, desperate.

“You haven’t it in you, Stepan,” she said, then rolled over and pulled a cigarette out of the case. I propped myself up on my elbows as she lit it, illuminating the off-white walls and all of its imperfections. I slid down, haloed in shadow by her shoulder. “Don’t take it personally. I know you’ve tried. For that, I am grateful.”

“If I set you free,” I said, “where would you go?”

“If you set me — where . . . ?”

“Yes. Now. Where would you go?”

“I don’t know.”

I sat upright and pushed her shoulder into the bed. She stared at me, smoke trailing from her nose.

“Would you go to him? Would you go to him?”

“I — ” She paused. “No. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, Stepan, I promise.”

As she finished the sentence, she clawed at my face, but I struck quickly with my knife, scratching death across her throat. I held her by her shoulders, and she flailed, cutting at my face with her nails. She lacerated my forehead open just above the left eye before I gained control.

We were both liars. I knew she would return to him. She knew I would never let her leave.

As she bled out, I gathered the peels and placed them in a moistened handkerchief. I slipped it inside my pocket, along with all of my operational funds. And I ran.

In my dream, I placed the Three Oranges in an orange car. They drove away, my beautiful fairies still encased in their peels. I wanted to watch my oranges drive an orange car, but the Cockroach nipped, nipped, nipped, and drew blood. My gun liquified in my hands. I vomited bullets. He cut me down, and I fell to my knees, screaming.

“Do you really think us so helpless, Stepan?” the Oranges said as the Cockroach dragged me back to Moscow. Their voices were beautiful, calm, bright. “Our magic is unexplainable, and yours comes from mere terror. We’re fairies, Stepan. You’re only a man.”

I kept the orange peel moist, wetting the handkerchief every day. Prokofiev returned to Moscow.

I scraped orange zest into pots, placed large lights above them, and never allowed the soil to dry.

Hermes died in 1937 or 1938, along with almost everyone else I knew. Almost.

In the 1940s, the Center and I threatened one another, baring our teeth across an ocean, but the old Cockroach interceded. He was almost jovial about letting me go, although I did not imagine my information was as dangerous to the Center as they might have suspected at that point.

I read about Prokofiev in the papers occasionally. They printed his image and discussed his great works.

One day, Citizen Prokofiev was not alone. Her face radiated in the gray background of the photograph. She was a monochrome sun in the overcast dawn. A star in the night sky. A lit cigarette in a black car. I laughed at the realization. The fairies truly controlled their magic.

I cut out her image, leaving Prokofiev alone in his frame, folded her.

I keep her close always.

I continued to seek out Prokofiev, to read about the public details of his life. Highs and lows. Mostly lows. Misfortunes. Denunciations. Pleas. These things no longer amused me as much as they once did.

Now, the flowerpot stands in front of my south-facing window. I water the barren soil once every few weeks, never allowing it to dry. I have waited decades for the soil to break, for a sprout to appear. Nothing grows there, not even in the summer.

Eventually — and on the same day — Prokofiev and Stalin die. What becomes of the Three Oranges? Who will they haunt now? I do not know. I wonder. I scan newspapers for clues. I read American magazines. I cannot find answers in Frigidaire ads and articles about the World Series.

I do not think their deaths a coincidence, but I have no contacts remaining in the Center. If I were to get the Americans’ attention, would they tell me what they knew about the Oranges in exchange for those old lists, for names and networks and codes, in exchange for my freedom and safety? In exchange for the last of my magic? I wonder these things in the dark winters, the nights as black as cars.

It is always cold in Canada.

There are no oranges.

About the Author

D. Elizabeth Wasden manages volunteers for a small nonprofit on the Delmarva Peninsula. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, G.U.D., and Electric Velocipede. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2009.

Neologism and Linguicide

Kerry Tynan Fraser

Languages, like species, mutate and evolve.

Take English for example. When I taught English overseas I learned a funny thing: there’s more than one kind of English. There’s Canadian English, which I can speak and teach, but there’s also American English, there’s the Queen’s English and there’s Australian English. While we’re at it, there’s also Jamaican English, Scottish English, South African English and many others.

There are also dialects of these many kinds of English. There’s Hawaiian English and Newfoundlandian English. There’s Alaskan English which gave us “cache,” and “cabin fever.” And there are the many Creoles and Black Englishes which brought us hundreds of common words and word usages such as “funky,” “foxy,” “jive,” “zombie,” and “jazz.”

And there are forms of English that come from blending languages and ethnicities: Hinglish is Hindi and English, Spanglish is Spanish and English and Newyorican is a mixture of Puerto Rican and New York English.

I am reminded of this problem as I try and submit stories and articles to publishers in different countries. In America I have to edit one way, in the UK another and so on. It’s true that English is shaping up to be one of the most dominant languages on the planet, but English itself is changing, it’s evolving, and it is evolving us. As Marshal McLuhan said, “First we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”

Languages grow and languages can just die as well. We’ve all heard of the sad scenario of species becoming endangered, but the famous anthropologist Wade Davis warns of a similar problem happening to the richness of the world’s cultures. Davis warns of endangered cultures. Just as quickly as English is becoming one of the first planetary super languages; so too are thousands of native languages and millions of words perishing daily. How we preserve or destroy these languages and how we cultivate linguistic habits, will determine what we are able to think in the world of the near future.

Many philosophers have emphasized how important language is in how we think. The creator of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, believed that abstract words have hypnotizing effects and suggested we should remove all words from our language that do not have referents. For example the words “water” and “rock,” both have referents in reality but none of the words “justice,” or “truth,” or for that matter “singularity” (from Transhumanism) have referents; they exist only in the human imagination. George Orwell, who gave us both “Newspeak,” and “thoughtcrime,” wrote at length about how language can be used as a political weapon. Foucault argued that the unconscious assumptions of language keep us in invisible prisons. Wittgenstein believed that culture literally couldn’t evolve until our language evolved, saying things like: “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”

I wonder about this, about this mutation of English and where it’s going, and for this reason I regularly read sites like urbandictionary.com and wordspy.com. Nothing is better for telling us what kind of semantic worlds we are currently inhabiting than studying neologisms: the bleeding edge of language evolution. A “neologism” is a new word. The study of these words as they mutate and evolve languages is widely understood to be an area of linguistics called word formation or word coinage.1

Where do these new words come from? According to Bill Bryson, author of The Mother Tongue there are five main ways words come into being: error, adoption, creation, a natural change in context and finally addition or subtraction:

Error: According to Darwinians, RNA copying mistakes are the source of Nature’s vast creativity, and it’s no different with languages. When words are transcribed incorrectly, or communicated incorrectly, they mutate and become new. For example the word “asparagus” used to be “sparrow grass,” but through linguistic mutation changed into its new form. Similarly, “monkey wrench” was “Moncky wrench,” after its inventor Charles Moncky.

Also, dictionaries sometimes make printing mistakes, which then get copied into other dictionaries. These strange little mutants are known as “ghost words.” “Dord” which means “density,” was accidentally entered into Webster’s New International Dictionary. “Foupe,” should have been “soup” and somehow came to mean “to drive with a sudden impetuosity.” Apparently “syllabus,” “scapegoat,” and “gravy,” are all ghostwords as well. All of this happens when some well-meaning editor makes a simple mistake, but there are also intentional fake entries made into articles and reference works all the time. These words and references are called “Mountweazels,” or “Nihilartikels,” (Nothing Articles). Apparently for satirical reasons, or just old-fashioned pranksterism, writers and editors will make stuff up just to screw with people. My favorite example is when The Economist wrote an article about genetically engineered pet dragons for one April Fool’s Day.

Mistakes like these have long been known to be a source of serendipitous creativity and many of the words we use are the result of transcription errors.

Adoption: Also called “loanwords.” English in particular is a language of adoption. We borrow and integrate words from everywhere. In the purest sense, most of what we think of as English is really a mixture of Norman, Old English, French, Latin, and every other European culture. We use “clichés” without even considering we are thinking in French. We gamble in “casinos,” which are Italian, as are “umbrellas,” “volcanoes,” “broccoli,” “jeans,” “manifestos,” and “wigs.” “Walrus,” and “gremlin,” are Scandinavian. “Intelligentsia” is Russian. “Bog,” “glamour,” “gruesome,” and “weird” are Scottish. “Boycott” and “brogue” are Irish.

There are thousands of examples of loanwords: “pajama” and “shampoo” are Hindi, “ketchup” and “tea” are Chinese, “chocolate” and “chili” are Aztec. “Chess,” “magic,” “angel,” and “peach” are all Persian. “Boondocks” is Tagalog. “Banana” and “mumbo jumbo” are African. And then there are words called “calque” words which are translations from other languages like “flea market” which is from the French “marché aux puces” which literally means “market of the fleas.”

So the English language is a great integrator of words from other languages.

Protologisms: Protologisms are words created by somebody in the hopes that they’ll survive and become part of a natural vocabulary. Where do they come from? Science creates new words all the time such as “quark” and “robot,”2 and acronyms such as “scuba” and “laser” can become popular and common. Writers also create new words. Two writers that come to mind are Orwell (see above) and J.K. Rowling with her “hinkypunks.” I’m tempted to include Shakespeare, but he didn’t so much create words as he did expressions which have become clichés: “love is blind,” “all the world’s a stage,” “brave new world,” “the winter of our discontent.” I could go on but brevity is the soul of wit. When a word has no real etymology, it’s a good sign it was made up somewhere along the way. Protologisms can be invented from onomatopoeia like with “cuckoo” and from phono-semantic matching, which is matching new words with the sounds of similar existing words. The Mandarin term for “World Wide Web,” for example is wàn, wéi, wăng, which means “myriad dimensional net.”

The word “neologism” itself was at one time a protologism: it entered our vocabulary somewhere between the 1400’s and the 1800’s.

Context: “Hamburger” was originally a steak named after the German city where it was popular and the clipped word “burger” followed that. Now “burger” can be applied to any sort of food pressed into a patty: like cheeseburger or veggie-burger. “Maverick” comes from Samuel Maverick, a rancher who didn’t brand his calves; therefore a “maverick” was an unbranded calf. Now it is any person who doesn’t follow the crowd. Words change over time as the culture changes around them. “Apple,” in old English meant any kind of fruit. “Green” was once only a color and now it is the environmental ideology. “Awful” was once deserving of awe. “Girl” was once just a young person, male or female. “Pretty” began as crafty, which mutated into clever or skillfully made, then mutated into refined/fine and landed on beautiful. If you don’t feel like making up new words just wait a while. Given enough time, culture will re-invent itself around existing words.

Addition or Subtraction: New words are also created by combining and adding to them or by subtracting from them. “Smog” was a portmanteaux created by combining “smoke” and “fog.” “Earthquake” obviously came from compounding “earth” and “quake.” “Ad” came from clipping “advertisement.” And then there is agglutination: forming new words by adding affixes to them. If you found yourself confused in English class about proper usage, it was probably because English is an organic and living language (not to mention its grammar was stolen wholesale from Latin and makes no sense in English.) Nobody really knows what the rules of English are, to be honest, and we just invent rules and words all the time. For example, as author Bill Bryson points out, we have six ways of making “labyrinth” into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. This is because of how many prefixes and suffixes we have in English and how indiscriminately we use them. Incidentally, my spellchecker doesn’t recognize four of these six examples, but it does recognize the word “spellchecker.” We live in an extremely information rich environment and synthetically modifying words and phrases is almost a requirement for speaking now.

Signal and Noise

We are told that the universe always moves in the direction of greater disorder: from a more useful state to a less useful state. But we are also told that some processes (like Life itself and Intelligence) try to combat this trend by cherry-picking the results of that disorder. Life takes all the good stuff and leaves all the bad stuff. As a result, information and entropy are always competing with each other.

For example, all the early developers of Information Science found that the bigger and more complex their communication tools got, the more chance there was for noise to creep into those systems. Specifically the longer telephone cables became, the weaker and more confused the signal passing through the cables got. Signal and noise are like the white-hatted and black-hatted characters in a Western novel, and signal-to-noise ratio is the novel’s plot. This is as true in the growth of our languages as it is in Information Science: the more complex our language and thoughts are, the more room there is for distortion to flourish.

Of the 6000 to 7000 languages that exist on the planet today, a quarter to a half of them are not being taught to new generations, meaning they are effectively dead languages. But new words are also born all the time. Technology and pop culture change word contexts so fast that any example from them I could provide as proof would be outdated by the time this went to print. Text-messaging, blogs, (both neologisms) and digital Darwinism are changing the meanings of words second by second. And it begs the question: how will people speak in the deep future? Will we speak a mishmash language like City Speak from “Blade Runner?” Will we speak in some alternative, pseudo-English like Nadsat from “A Clockwork Orange?” Will we mumble to each other in a managed, totalitarian language like Newspeak? Will we all need Babel Fish to communicate? These are useful things to consider for would-be science fiction authors or to readers interested in what kind of symbolic universe we will inhabit tomorrow.

English is being created as quickly as it is being destroyed, it’s mutating so fast that studying its neologisms can be like watching the succession of fruit flies being born, reproducing and dying in a petri-dish all in a matter of days. Entire subcultures can rise up and disappear overnight, and the chaotic edge of that process is exactly where I want to be.

FOOTNOTES:

1 Except in Psychology, where curiously, “neologism” means something a little different. In that field it refers to the private, tinfoil-hat-words invented by patients, which have no meaning to anyone else. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that only the field of Psychology has invented a neologistic use for the word “neologism,” thereby exhibiting the behavior it is describing. I’m just speculating here.

2 Or in the later case science fiction. Josef Čapek coined the concept of the “robot,” based on a Czech word for drudgery, and Isaac Asimov added the science of “robotics”.

About the Author

Kerry Tynan Fraser spends 9 months of the year working as a private investigator and 3 months of the year working as a Sherpa in the Himalayas. His work has appeared in Surprising Stories, Orion’s Child, Antipodean SF, Aurealis, subTerrain, Filling Station, Descant, Utne Reader as well as many others.

He Had to Die: A Conversation with David Weber

Jeremy L. C. Jones

David Weber has been writing about Honor Harrington for twenty years. The original proposals, as sent to Jim Baen back in the 90s, promised space opera featuring a female naval officer. Harrington was supposed to die in the fifth book in the series. That was half a dozen books ago. Harrington owes her longevity to the fact that her character doesn’t stagnate; she grows from novel to novel.

“Honor Harrington is no James T. Kirk, forever a starship captain,” said Weber. “She’s becoming a player on a bigger and bigger scale.”

Harrington is not always the central character in the Honorverse novels but she is, as Weber put it, “the focusing glass.” Harrington is a rare character in military fiction. She is a woman who leads, not as a man with a woman’s name, but as a leader who happens to be a woman.

After twenty years and eleven novels (with more finished and awaiting release), Weber finds himself in a bit of a tight spot. Each Honorverse novel offers him fewer and fewer plot options. He must plot more and more precisely. Yet, as plot possibilities narrow, character options open up and his characters have more flexibility in their interactions. The result has been decisively positive. Each of Weber’s subsequent novels, in and out of the Honorverse, becomes more and more character-driven without losing any of the fast-paced action. Much of this has to do with the way Weber develops his characters: he throws them into a scene and waits to see what happens next.

There is more than just Honor Harrington on Weber’s bookshelf. He’s been writing professionally since his teens and publishing novels since his mid-thirties. In addition to a handful of standalones, Weber has written or contributed to a wide variety of series, including the Assiti Shards/Ring of Fire, Dahak, Empire of Man, Multiverse, Starfire, War God, Bolo!, and Furies series. In addition to the Honorverse, he’s actively writing novels in the Safehold Saga and the new series that begins with his recent novel, Out of the Dark.

All in all, Weber publishes more than half a million words a year despite a nearly-crippling wrist injury in the 1990s. The accident left him with a shattered wrist and a looming deadline. The doctors put in pins and screws. Undaunted, Weber invested in voice recognition software. The software, if anything, has increased his productivity.

Each of Weber’s books is thick, complex, and gripping. His world-building is thorough and steeped in a love of military history, politics, and human nature. Not to mention technology. Furthermore, he learned from reading the novels of Robert Heinlein, as Weber put it, that “you might as well write what you meant to say.”

And Weber has a lot to say. Weber’s characters are responsibility takers. They don’t complain or whine. They don’t let their good intentions make them sanctimonious. They know they live in a world where “no one gets free pass.” Like Keith Laumer, Weber favors the story of “the competent human being who is going to do what needs to be done regardless of cost.”

Below, Weber and I talk about characterization, violence, and his new, unintentional series that started with the novella “Out of the Dark” which became the novel Out of the Dark. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers but I’ve left a few in because they illustrate Weber’s writing process. The interview concludes with Weber playing around with some possible directions for the new series.

“I don’t have one story I want to tell in perfect fashion,” Weber said. “I have a lot of stories I need to tell.”

And those stories are built around characters. So that’s where we began.

Do your characters ever really surprise you? Not minor surprises, either, but in major story arc altering ways. Surprises that really mess with the big picture, with the whole series.

Not in the Honorverse books. In a couple of other books I’ve had trouble with characters going where I expected them to go, especially in terms of personal relationships. I don’t try to nail things down in too much detail before I write the book. I’m having to do more of that now because of the need to coordinate my timeline. I’d plan something like, “Courier boat departs Manticore for Spindle with news of Eloise Pritchart’s arrival. And here’s the date.” I know how long it takes that courier boat to get to Spindle. That kind of detail planning I have to do now simply because of the distances involved. But in terms of absolutely detailed planning on how the characters are going to develop? That I let happen by ear.

For example, I knew that Hamish and Honor were going to wind up together. Originally, I planned on their not marrying and on Emily realizing what was going on and essentially covering for them. Eventually Emily would die, and Honor would marry Hamish.

Well, two things happened. One is I discovered that I like Emily even more than I expected to. The other one was that watching these characters interact and having structured the societies of Manticore and Grayson the way that I have [certain things] became inevitable. But I didn’t plan it that way.

If I know the character is going to be a central, important character, I try to get the physical image of the character in my mind. I try to get the main personality traits, the ones that are the main motivators in this character’s life, in place. Not in a lot of detail. I just know this is how this person thinks. Then I throw the character into a scene. Sometimes the scene determines what this character is going to have to be. Then I just let that person be whatever that person has to be.

When I introduced Andrew LaFollet, I knew he was going to be a Grayson armsman. I knew what the basic mindset of a Grayson armsman was and I knew that he was going to be personally dedicated to Honor. I can’t remember if I ever told people in the books but Andrew’s brother was an officer in the Protector’s palace security. He was killed in an assassination attempt that Honor foiled. Andrew volunteered for the Protector’s guard because Honor completed the task Andrew’s brother had been unable to complete in protecting the Protector and his family. Andrew joined her guard originally to repay that debt. Then, of course, probably, I think, I suspect that if Andrew had not been a Grayson armsman and if he had been a Prolong recipient, then his relationship with Honor might have been much closer to her relationship with Hamish. It was unthinkable for him to initiate something like that, though. He just could not have done it. And it was equally unthinkable for her to do it because of her position of authority and because she was a Prolong recipient and he wasn’t. That was one reason Honor made him her son’s armsman. In many ways, Hamish was a surrogate father and a surrogate husband. All of that was going on in the back of my brain, but I never formulated it specifically for the reader.

And in some ways I hadn’t realized it for myself until I looked at the scene and said, “That’s why he did it!”

You talk about your characters as though you read your books instead of write them.

I write the book to find out how the book comes out. That’s what let’s me maintain the production level that I maintain.

For a long time I knew people would be angry at me for killing Andrew in Mission of Honor. It was a given. I was surprised by how many people said — as I’d hoped they would — that he died the way he would’ve wanted to die. For want of a better term, his was a good death.

But I wrote the scene four or five times and tried not killing him and the book didn’t work. It took me a while to figure out why that was. Then it hit me. Honor had lost practically her entire family on Sphinx, but aside from an occasional name you hadn’t actually met them. You knew Andrew. So when Honor lost him, you understood her pain, and, therefore, by extension, you understood the pain of the loss of all those people you’d never met.

That’s why Andrew had to die.

What it came down to, for me, was, “I can’t kill Andrew. I gotta kill Andrew. Why do I have to kill Andrew?”

If killing Andrew had been easy, then he wouldn’t have had to die, right?

If you are going to write about violence, if you’re going to write military fiction — whether science fiction, present day, or historical — you have to play fair with the reader. Most Americans, despite this rap we’ve got as a violent society — most Americans actually have very little personal experience with violence. The images and the attitudes we have are formed by what we see on TV and in the movies. We see occasional real violence on TV but most of what we see is Hollywood’s interpretation of it. And it’s not accurate. It desensitizes us. In On Killing, Dave Grossman is onto something when he talks about desensitization of people who are exposed again and again to this casual violence. Grossman’s thesis, like any thesis, can be over-stretched but I think it is fundamentally correct.

One of the responsibilities you have when you are going to write violence is not to glamorize the combat. I have an immense respect for the military. My personal philosophy is that until human beings turn into something we will no longer recognize, a military organization is going to be necessary. If there’s not something to make people stop, someone is going to keep right on pushing. That’s the bottom line.

As though violence is hard-wired into us? Into our societies?

The problem is that it doesn’t take a lot of Osama bin Ladens to create a large amount of chaos in the world. People can differ with the best way to deal with that sort of situation, but ultimately any solution which isn’t based on the use of force is operating on credit. You have to have the capability to cover your debt with military force. Ultimately. Even if you never use it. The other guy has to know it’s there. Otherwise, it’s like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, saying, “What are you going to do to us?”

I can see some moral arguments in favor of Iran possessing nuclear weapons; moral arguments [along the lines of] if other people have them what right does someone who possesses them have to say, “No, you can’t have them.” But it’s not a moral question for me, it’s a pragmatic question. Absent of some means of compelling Ahmadinejad not to develop nuclear weapons, he’s going to develop them. That’s just the way that it is.

And that’s why the military is always going to be necessary.

Military service is a high calling. War can evoke the absolute best in human beings, such as the willingness to sacrifice anything for a cause you believe in, but it is always a nasty, horrible business at the sharp end. I try to make that clear in the books. Some people operate on the theory that you can’t possibly write it as bad as it really is… so you write it as bad as you can. I think you lose the argument when you do that, because it leads to desensitization. It just goes on and on and on and the reader eventually turns it off.

I prefer more of what I think of as the Alfred Hitchcock approach.  If you look at the shower scene in Psycho, you never see a blow land. You know exactly what happened but you never see a single blow land. I prefer to do it that way and then every so often hit the reader square between the eyes with a vignette that is stark and shows what happens when you hit a human body with a high velocity projectile. One of my main hobby areas is firearms and I was a deer hunter for many years, so I know what happens when a high velocity projectile hits a living body and it is not what Hollywood normally portrays.

Looking back over 20 years of novels, are there any scenes in which you got it wrong, got the violence wrong. Scenes in which you glamorized combat or were too soft or went too far?

I don’t have a specific scene in mind… but sometimes, I think, the most effective way to deal with violence is to not deal with it at all. Set up a situation and the reader knows what is going to happen and then just — don’t show it.

The series that starts with Out of the Dark —

I thought Out of the Dark was going to be a standalone. I found out when I saw the press release that it was going to be a series. If I’d known that it was a series I wouldn’t have been quite so enthusiastic about putting the family into it. Anyone who knows us [the Webers], will recognize the Dvoraks [a family central to Out of the Dark.]

I love this book precisely because of the Dvoraks! Out of the Dark is perhaps the most human book you’ve written (and that’s not a criticism of you other novels but a compliment to this one). Out of the Dark is —

These people, the Dvoraks are crazy! You know, a lot of people were angry with me because they didn’t see the left turn coming, the one I took with the vampires. It was less a problem for the people who’d read the novella “Out of the Dark”. Tom Doherty [of TOR] really loved the novella and he wanted me to expand it. And I said, “Sure!” Well, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at TOR, assumed I would expand it by adding onto the end of it. The teaser he sent to Amazon starts right out talking about the vampires, because the novella’s like 30,000 words long and the the novel is like 110,000 words, so he figured he wouldn’t really be giving much away since that’d all happen in the first third of the book. But the novel ends almost exactly where the novella ends. I went back in and inserted additional plot strands. Patrick likes what I did better than what he thought I was going to do but we’d given away the surprise ending. We wrote a new teaser. If you read the flap copy on Out of the Dark there is nothing in there at all to suggest that anything occult or supernatural is coming. And a lot of people were expecting hard science fiction and they were really pissed when I pulled the vampires out on them.

If after all these years, you’re not pissing someone off —

— you’re not doing your job. The problem is that since I didn’t know I was starting a series, the books that I left myself are not going to go in the direction that people assume. For example, the focus of the series, as far as I’m concerned, is going to be on how humanity survives its encounter with and eventually kicks the butt of the Galactics who are going to be doing the best to get rid of us before we completely destabilize the equation. The vampires are going to be only a secondary part of the storyline. Also, what I’m considering is —

Wait, you haven’t started working on the second book in the series, right?

No, I’m working on the next Safehold book right now. What I’m positing for the Out of the Dark series is that with the captured neural educators we have the ability to do the bio-enhancements like I was doing in the Mutineer’s Moon series. We can have the strength and all the rest that the vampires have, bio-enhanced humans are going to be able to pretty much match the vampires. We’re not going to be able to pour ourselves through a keyhole or anything, but we can walk around in the sun which only the really old, hearty vampires can do. The vampires will be kind of our ultimate Special Forces soldiers.

I figure Dvorak is going to be the first ambassador to the Galactic Hegemony. They won’t really like meeting him but we’re going to practice sort of the Klingon corollary of the Prime Directive. “We need allies. Here, have some nukes, have some starships. Let us bootstrap you!”

A big part of the storyline for me is actually — and I had more time to work with it in the novel than the novella and hopefully I’ll have even more time to work with it in the series — is Vlad’s having turned into a monster to stop being one and his struggle to not go back to what he was and the fact that he’s worried that he will.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about injecting the bio-enhancement into the series is that it’s going to be 40 or 50 years until the Galactic Hegemony. If I go with the bio-enhancement and life extension then I can keep the characters I have around. And it’s the characters who make this book work.

I do have a lot of dilemmas to solve!

About the Author

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

The Process of Creating “Nautili”

Julie Dillon

For my latest illustration, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to paint. I knew I wanted to include a portrait, so I started with some random shapes using the pattern chalk tool in Painter X (using mostly some patterns of the Fibonacci spiral) and sketched a face within all that mess. Even though I still wasn’t sure about the direction, this supplied me with a basic framework to start from.

When I’m lacking in inspiration, I like to use the pattern chalk brush for getting some random shapes in my early drafts to generate some fresh and unexpected ideas. Using the Pattern Chalk tool is something I learned from Andrew Jones’ tutorials here. Andrew is a hero of mine. His work amazing.

Next, I started defining the face and shapes a little more and flipped the canvas horizontally. Originally I was thinking of making it all more abstract, but I’ve been finding it challenging to make an abstract look properly “finished.” It either looks too sketchy, or it starts getting too rendered and realistic. One of these days, I’ll find the proper balance.

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with the spiraling forms on her head until I realized that they’d make awesome nautilus shells. While rendering the shells, I added in a few other underwater themed elements and colors.

At this point, the portrait began to take shape, but I was still uncertain as to whether or not it should keep it that abstracted or start solidifying the forms.

I accidentally flattened some parts of my draft, so there
were a few steps here that will not be pictured here.

I decided to make all nautili face the same way in order to give the sense that they were all part of a moving swarm and not a random group clustering around the woman’s head. I also began making some drastic changes to the color scheme. I liked where previous drafts were going color-wise, but I’m such a sucker for bright colors that I have a hard time staying away from them sometimes.

Next, I expanded the canvas to include more of the woman’s body and add more nautilus shells in the upper part of the image.

Now it was time to tighten things up a bit, rendering the nautilus shells and trying to figure out how the hands should be positioned..

I decided the colors were too dull, so I set my brush to “Hard Light” and went nuts painting the sky purple and yellow.

Around this point I was tiring of rendering all those darn nautilus shells. This was one of those illustrations that felt like it’d never be finished no matter how many hours I dumped into it.

Finally, it was finished! Here’s what I ended up. Robotic bioluminescent nautili flying through the air with a robotic woman. On another planet or something. I like the composition and colors, even if the narrative makes no darn sense.

An early draft of this article appeared on Julie Dillon’s blog.

About the Author

Julie Dillon is a freelance illustrator working in Northern California. She does science fiction and fantasy artwork for books, magazines and games.

2010 Reader’s Poll Results

Neil Clarke

Last month, we asked you to vote for your favorite Clarkesworld artwork and short fiction published in 2010. The results are in and it’s my pleasure to present the 2010 Clarkesworld Magazine Reader’s Poll winners:

Short Fiction

1st Place - “The Things” by Peter Watts This story has been selected for inclusion in four year’s best anthologies (Dozois, Horton, Kaster and Strahan), was a Parsec nominee and is a current BSFA Award nominee.

2nd Place - “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time” by Catherynne M. Valente

3rd Place - “A Jar of Goodwill” by Tobias S. Buckell

Artwork

1st Place - “Honeycomb” by Julie Dillon

2nd Place - “Soulhunter” by Andrey Lazarev

3rd Place (tie) - “Solitude” by Rafael Sarmento & “My Secret Friend” by Murat Turan

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who participated!

About the Author

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