Semiramis

Genevieve Valentine

The worst thing about being a sleeper embedded somewhere long-term was that inevitably, eventually, you started to care.

The worst thing about being embedded long-term as an administrator at the Svalbard Seed Vault was that when you inevitably started to care, you started to care about things like proper political geo-temperate arrangement of seeds, and there was just no one else in their right mind who was going to care about that with you.

That was half the reason I recruited Lise.

Ever since Svalbard had been put under review, it had been hell and a half trying to figure out how to recruit a domestic cover who could carry seeds off the island. And for something this long-term in a place as small as Longyearbyen, you needed domestic cover, or people started to suspect you for keeping apart.

The locals were out of the question, and once we were under review it was more than my life was worth to try to smuggle someone over if they didn’t already have some international clearance.

(”Under review”: the Global Coalition was interested enough in Svalbard to station spies at the ports.)

Lise had been a loose affiliate of my organization, years back. She’d dropped off the map, but it only took two tries to contact her, and one meeting to convince her.

“Good choice,” said the guy who’d met her, when he called weeks later to seal the deal. “She’s got contacts at the mine at Sveagruva. She’s already on a plane to Oslo; she’ll catch a boat out to you next week.”

The rest of the timeline was already set, for the short-term: quick public courtship, cohabitation. When our orders came in, she’d make the initial runs off the island, and then once there was a routine in place she could quietly vanish whenever things soured.

Until then she would live with me on Svalbard and keep an eye on Coalition business in town and whatever the mining company turned up.

I would keep making visits to the Seed Vault, taking inventory, ticking off names on my list, waiting for the day when I’d get the order to move out two or three seeds at a time and pass them off to whoever the highest bidders sent to collect.

(The day I was really waiting for was the day I could tell someone, “This one’s drying up. We’ll be looking for some decent soil, to grow it for re-harvest,” and have their eyes light up, too.)

“Coalition Peacekeepers just showed up — they blocked the port,” Lise says, knocking mud off her boots. “They’ve already dispatched a zoo team to look for polar bears.”

I whistle. “How many of them?”

“Enough to make sure you don’t get one fucking seed out of here,” she says. “Good luck.”

(She was a decent recruit — she’d done admin at the Millennium Seed Bank before it got militarized, had some clearance, had some brains — but she wasn’t a believer, and it showed.)

I frown at the printout in front of me — scientific names and common names and country of origin marching in four-point font for two hundred pages.

“We’ll find a way around it,” I say. “This could just be like the review. It could be years before we have to worry.”

We plan in years.

She shoulders her rifle. “I’m going out.”

Rifles are standard issue in Longyearbyen, one of the few places you can still get one. It’s required outside the city, for protection against polar bears.

(She mostly goes out to the bird cliffs and takes shots at poachers.)

“Don’t kill anyone,” I say. We need to keep cover.

A gust of cold wind, and she’s gone.

Absently, I check off Acer palmatum on the list, but my concentration is already gone, and I end up staring out the window at the shadows that gather inside shadows all over this place at night.

I don’t notice the Peacekeeper boats have moved into place until someone inside one turns on a light.

We measure time two ways.

One is the paper calendar I get at Christmas from the woman who poses, twice a year, as my sister.

Longyearbyen went nearly paperless after the Global Coalition’s Environmental Imperative was released. (We had to preserve any trees that would grow, it said; now that the waters were rising, arable land was sacrosanct.)

Tax on physical mail was obscene, but the calendar was how I received most of my instructions, so I paid.

One random day a year was “Semiramis (observed)” — the day I sent my ID over a landline, by voice.

I chose the name; she was the queen for whom they’d built the hanging gardens in Babylon.

By then I had started to care.

“Happy Semiramis,” Lise always said when she checked off that calendar day, in a tone that made me feel like I was giving away too much.

It was the only paper in the house, save the printout of the Seed Vault inventory. That had been granted exemption — pulp for the good of the nation.

Lise was the one who started ticking off days on the calendar, the very first year she arrived.

I hadn’t asked why. We didn’t like each other enough back then to get into a round of questions, and by the time we’d reached a truce it wasn’t worth asking. In this line of work, you learn just to live with people.

The other way we keep time is by tracking how much coal is worth.

Most of the coal mined on Svalbard went directly into the air conditioners at the Seed Vault, to keep the temperature at a constant zero Fahrenheit. The price of coal went up the warmer it got outside, and the more of it we needed, and the less of it there was.

This was the calendar we kept for the rest of the world, to measure how bad things were getting.

Two years back, Lise had come home and said, “We passed gold on the index. Things must be rough down South.”

“Did the Coalition do anything?”

“We got an embargo — no export under threat of treason,” she said, shrugged. The coal was meant for the Vault, not for sale, and Svalbard was already under review; it wasn’t as though anything got off the island anyway, unless the Norwegian government found some country down South with the money to buy.

(Down South: anywhere beneath the Arctic line, where water levels were rising and cities were being swallowed up. Shanghai and New York had gone early, London and Copenhagen a few years later. The Maldives had vanished right off the map. Their government operated out of Mumbai until that went under, too.

The whole South was just governments sprinting for high ground, these days.)

After the Peacekeepers come, I don’t see her for two days.

The Sveagruva mine is battening down in the wake of the Peacekeepers, and she works long hours up there. Sometimes it’s easier just to sleep over.

I go out to the Seed Vault every day, in the bright green parka that makes me look like a tourist. I leave the Snow Cat and walks the last mile (less threatening), and try not to stare at the ships.

It’s surprising how high the water has risen. My first year, passing ships had been so low I could look down onto their decks; now they’re nearly eye level.

The Peacekeepers are already stationed outside, asking my business.

That’s a mistake. If you ask someone about their business, they might tell you.

(Years back, when I was still so new that I worried how I’d ever overcome my apathy about seed packets in a fucking basement, some botanists came to drop off seeds. One of them talked at me for twenty minutes about the runaway metabolism of Castanea sativa.

“Can you imagine a future without chestnuts?” she said, and handed me the envelope, and sighed. “It’s so precarious, now, with so few species allowed to grow at all. This is the last surviving breed — the very last.”

I looked at the woman in mild terror. I already knew that I was doomed to be interested one day; that didn’t mean it wasn’t an awful thing to anticipate.

Norway sealed Svalbard to donations a year after that. By the time I’d developed interest, I was alone.)

I give the Peacekeepers a more detailed description of my business than anyone has ever wanted.

“It’s the recalcitrant seeds that we really have to watch out for,” I explain about five minutes in, and then I start on runaway metabolism and desiccation effects and where we’ll be when we can’t grow chestnuts any more, and the Peacekeepers look at me pretty much the way I’d expected them to.

Still, they move aside.

I ask them, “Where’s home for you?”

“Scotland.”

“How are things there?”

They don’t answer.

(No answer: Under occupation, or under water.)

Inside, I’m relieved beyond reason the Tuberaria guttata seeds are doing well.

It had been drowned out of the Mediterranean and Wales and the States years back. This sample had been harvested from Scotland, and it doesn’t sound like there are going to be many more chances at it.

When I come home, Lise is sitting in front of the little coal stove, still in her yellow coat.

It’s a comfort. We’ve lived together for nearly eight years, and after a while you just get used to seeing someone.

(The first time I was embedded somewhere I fell in love with my domestic-cover operative. It went badly. I’ve learned not to overthink these things.)

I hang my coat. “How has it gone? Peacekeepers giving you trouble yet?”

“Their ships are upsetting the fish,” she says. “The birds are just circling. Bad enough that the cliffs are disappearing underwater. Now they’ll starve, too.”

The bird-cliffs are covered this time of year, auks and terns and kittiwakes. I went out there once, with Lise, to check out escape routes. It was a chaos of feathers and noise and the green and yellow lights of the Aurora, and I left as soon as I realized it would be impossible to scale the cliffs.

Lise goes back all the time.

(One year, early on, she brought back a tern that had been on the bad end of a fight, and she fed and warmed it all night until it died. Then she took the body outside. What she did with it she never said, and I didn’t ask. You learn to just live with people.)

I make coffee on the stove, keep one eye on her face as her expression gets darker.

By the time I sit next to her, I’ve made up my mind.

“I brought this,” I say, and pull an envelope out of my pocket.

It’s an archival envelope, unlabeled; inside is a single seed.

“Tuberaria guttata. Spotted rock rose. The flowers last less than a day. This one’s from Scotland, but it sounds like they’ve drowned by now. These are going to be worth a lot of money.”

She hasn’t taken the seed out. She’s just looking at it still tucked inside the envelope. I didn’t think her expression could get darker, but I was wrong.

“Have the orders come in?” she asks.

I should have expected concern. She thinks she’s been cut out of the loop.

“No, no,” I say. “Still waiting to hear. I just — I wanted to bring this one out. Call it a dry run.”

“Are you going to sell it?”

Suspicion I hadn’t expected.

“No,” I snap. “I just wanted you to see it.”

She looks up at that. I freeze and wait; if she calls it a present, I’ll deny it to the death.

But she only says, “Isn’t it enough you’ll be taking out the others?”

She’s not a believer, and it shows.

I pluck the envelope out of her hand.

“Two million seeds,” I say. “Will they really miss one?”

“There used to be two million birds,” she says. Her voice is strained, like she’s trying not to care.

We sit in silence until the fire goes down and the cabin’s warm enough to sleep in.

(We sleep in the same bed. This is too long-term an arrangement to be a gentleman and sleep on the couch. You plan in years.)

It takes six weeks before Peacekeepers and Svalbard locals have finished jostling for territory.

It means the worst, of course — no one’s under illusions. It means that “under review” has turned into “Coalition Protectorate” in some back room in some inland country, and the highest-bidding corporation will be moving in to take over the coal mines, and soon the Svalbard Seed Vault will be powered by Mainland Oil or MediaVox.

It means my orders are going to come through any day, so we can have a little of our own back before the MediaVox Seed Vault opens for business.

I go every day, now, just to keep the Peacekeepers used to my face.

Lise comes home from the mine, shoulders her rifle, goes out again. I don’t know where. The Peacekeepers are crowding us out wherever they can.

By now I’m staying up nights, too, researching what nations have gone under one way or another.

It’s really something how hard the Coalition works to keep its member nations separated. Once they get their import taxes and their offshore data charges and their streaming-feed embargoes on you, there’s no communicating with anyone — you might as well be submerged in the sea.

You have to strike early, before the locals have submitted to all the red tape.

You have to act before they know to stop you.

Semiramis comes.

I make the call from the loudest pub in town.

“It’s soon,” my fake sister says. “Be ready to move out past the Peacekeepers.”

I snap, “Then Lise will have to swim, because these boats aren’t budging. We need time.”

“We need at least one good run,” she says, “to make this worth it. It has to be soon.”

We argue about Peacekeepers for a minute or two in low voices, and then I talk nonsense about the weather for another five minutes, just in case.

(It’s not all nonsense — I tell her about the sea level, and she says, “We moved,” and I imagine the overpacked cities picking themselves up, buildings and all, and climbing the mountain as the water rises.)

When I come home, Lise doesn’t tell me, “Happy Semiramis.”

I can hardly be offended, but this is the first time I notice that she stopped marking days a long time ago. That worries me.

I don’t mention yet that our time to act is coming. I have a feeling I’d better have a plan before I try to get her in on it.

I’m beginning to understand the frustration of not knowing everything. My fake sister hasn’t told me what they think the Coalition will do to me, when they find out what’s happened.

It’s a when, not an if. Lise has been positioned to survive, as a condition of her participation. There’s no such provision for me. Never has been. Sometimes when you take a job, it’s your last one.

Still, I make a few more dry runs, just to keep in practice for when my orders come.

I pick some seeds that will grow in any soil (as dumb as it is, I still want to plant something, once, and watch it grow). I pick some seeds because they’re rare enough to make a decent bribe if things go south.

I pick a bird of paradise, a seed with a sharp red tuft, for no reason except that it’s been ten years since I’ve seen anything red; the Aurora is yellow and green, and the rest of the world is the tight dark of seeds, and envelopes paler than skin.

I should have planned a little more, for when this started to creep over me, but there’s no knowing how it will creep up on you until you look at a tufted seed and blink at how bright it is.

I didn’t even look up what happened to the Hanging Gardens until after I had picked the name. Turns out the ground swallowed them, but what can you do?

Every time I bring something home I hand her the envelope, so she can’t say I held out on her.

She should know what she’s doing when the time comes, and she should know the worth of what she’s carrying. I don’t plead anybody’s case — I’m not like that botanist with the chestnuts. This is business.

Usually she only glances inside. I tell her what they are and what long-gone country they came from, and she gets that drawn, sad look I’m starting to see in the mirror.

Once, she opens the envelope and says instantly, “Bird of paradise.”

I’m so surprised I smile.

She hands it back “That’s a slow grow. Good luck getting it to the blooming stage.”

“You never know,” I say.

(We plan in years.)

As part of the negotiations to keep everyone in Svalbard from turning on them, the Coalition ships finally move back out of fishing range.

They open a big enough gap on the north side of the water for seals and bears to pass; in return, the rifle-bearing locals promise to stop mistaking Peacekeepers for polar bears at night.

Thousands of birds have died from starvation in the meantime, Lise tells me that night.

“The shore under the cliff is a graveyard,” she says.

“At least the seals will be fed,” I say.

Her eyes are red. She doesn’t answer.

I imagine her skidding through the slush all the way to the cliff, seeing what she saw, and the Peacekeeper boats just out of rifle range.

I make us coffee.

A week later, Sveagruva lets its employees go.

“It’s just an interim measure,” Lise parrots, “to preserve the facility until new management can be chosen.”

I nod. “Very reassuring. Doesn’t sound at all like a MediaVox move-in.”

“Yeah,” she says. “This coal brought to you by.”

She already looks antsy about being cut off from information.

“Lise,” I say, serious. “We’ll figure a way off Svalbard for you. I’m not going to strand you here. That wasn’t the deal.”

She slings her rifle over her shoulder, disappears.

Our orders come in.

There are a hundred seeds on the list — one good run. They could be carried in someone’s coat pocket, in the fingertips of a pair of gloves, if people were still allowed in or out.

The new coal boats have clearance, but Lise isn’t employed there any more. Coalition companies start with clean slates.

“Somehow we have to get you on a ship,” I say.

She says, like we were having a totally different conversation all along, “Are they going to sell the Vault, do you think?”

I have no answer. I don’t like where this is going.

She sits back against the couch, stares at the tiny fire in our tiny stove.

“At first I thought they’d sell it off all in one piece, to one of the inland countries that can still grow something. That would be better than nothing. Any growth is better than letting things die — expensive wheat is better than no wheat. That, I would have been all right with. I would have let that happen.”

She means, I would have turned you in.

She’s using past tense, so I’m probably fine, but still I look around to make sure she’s not within reach of her gun.

She sighs. “But seeing how they’ve managed things,” and when she pauses I know she thinks of the birds, “I wonder if they’re worse than we are, and we’re better off just because we can call a theft a theft.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say, though it’s true.

She pulls something from the inside of her jacket — a seed envelope.

The little rock rose seed tumbles into her open palm, and for a second I hold my breath like it will sprout.

(I need a drink.)

Lise doesn’t look at me. “What color does it bloom?”

“Yellow.”

She nods and curls her fingers around it. I think about telling her to give me my bribe back, but I don’t. It was probably a gift. Happy Semiramis.

“I’ll join up with the people from the Gene Ark, when they show,” she says. “They never wait long to barge in and take tissue samples from native species, and they’ll need the help. I can get out that way, and come back as soon as I can.”

She says it like she’ll actually make it back here, like we haven’t done all this work for a shot at one hundred seeds before the other, smarter thieves close in.

Still, a hundred plants isn’t bad. A hundred and one — she’ll take hers with her.

“All right,” I say.

After a while she says, “You know, I’ve never been inside the Vault.”

I sit down beside her. Our shoulders are touching.

“It’s a long hallway,” I say, “and then some seeds.”

We sit awake long after the fire goes out, watching shadows gathering inside shadows, waiting for morning.

(Inevitably, eventually, you start to care.)

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, and her film and TV writing has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

Trickster

Mari Ness

The god came to me on a night when both moons were dark, allowing us to see the stars. Not that I could, hidden as I was behind mats and screens and hangings, but I knew the stars were there, one of the rare nights we could be sure of this.

He should not have come. But he is a god, and they do not always do what is right, or wise. He shone — I have no other word for it — in the unlight, in the dim bits of candle and lamp and star that had made it through the cracks in my room. Shone, with his black skin and the hands that he had made, for some unaccountable reason of his own, red this evening. His face was a blank oval, truly blank, with no hint of eyes, mouth, or nose in that utter smoothness. And yet — I knew, without knowing how I knew — that behind that blankness his beauty was greater than I could imagine, that I could handle knowing. They hide themselves from us in kindness, they say, though we do not have many examples of their kindness.

Trickster. My body tensed, though I knew it would be better not to, to appear — to actually be — as calm as if this were merely the visit of a friend.

I had a blue candle by my bed, for moments like this, but I did not light it. Too undignified, I might have said; caught by his red hands, I might have added. Whatever the truth, it remained unlit.

Silence stretched between us. His place to speak first, but he did not. Perhaps he thought I was sleeping — I have been told that the gods do not always understand the difference, that they slip in and out of our dreams as easily as they slip from the sky to here, that they themselves do not sleep, although they dream. I do not know. Even now, I am not so familiar with gods. But I suspected — no more than that — that he was silent not because he thought me asleep, but to discomfit me, to make me uneasy. More uneasy, that is; I was uneasy enough with his presence.

Trickster.

More silence.

I would never sleep with him in the room, and my bones still ached with fatigue, one reason I was inside, instead of searching the stars. “You should not be here,” I said.

In the darkness, in the blankness, I could have sworn he smiled, although I could not see his mouth. “You should not have spoken first.”

Unthinking, I treated him as I might a more normal — a more mortal — visitor: “You wanted me to.”

“Who knows what one like me wants and desires?”

And this is a reason not to welcome the visits of gods, particularly this one: they can be oh, so irritating.

I have heard three tales of the coming of the gods: that the universe, lonely, threw up beings of fire and water and wind and iron to bear her company in her eternity that would not be like us, mortal flies too brief to observe. That the gods were once mortal, as we, until they drank a lake of fire, and drained it to its cobalt deaths, and filled with fire, began to stalk the world.

And the third: that the gods are not gods at all, but mere tricksters all, with the trickster at their head, whose greatest trick is to seem the least and weakest of these, and trick us into believing these beings gods.

“What do you wish?” I said, to prevent this conversation from moving in dizzying circles, towards words that could, I knew, warp my dreams, my mind, or worse, change my memories, my thoughts, causing me to rethink friend and foe. Sometimes, I had to admit, to our benefit — the gods had quite often interfered to stop mortal quarrels and wars for reasons of their own — and quite often, not; for every war they had stopped, they had begun something else — a war, a terror, a celebration — for their own amusement, not our own. They are not evil, you understand, the gods. Evil is a thing of mortals. Some might even be named beneficial, good, if even those tend to the…capricious. They are, instead, bored. Even those thinking of the happiness of mortals. Perhaps especially those thinking of the happiness of mortals.

This one had no such thought in mind.

“I need you to kill one of us,” he said.

Have I mentioned that I could have sworn he was smiling?

We have tales of the wars of the gods, tales where they have beaten or stabbed or poisoned or eaten one another, only to be miraculously restored in a moment, or less, or upon the next rising of the moon. Our earth bears scars of their passage: a boiling mountain here, a crater there, a lake of ice that will not melt in the center of a desert, and more. I have seen some of these places myself, although they are all old, very old. The gods mostly gave up warring amongst themselves — if not with mortals — long ago, when, the songs said, they realized that they could not die.

Mostly.

Silence filled the room, so strongly that I had no choice but to speak the obvious.

“How do you expect a mortal to kill any of you?”

“By taking you to a place where we are a little less immortal.”

Another shock.

“Is there is such a place?”

“I am not certain,” he said, and I could not see his face, could not know if he was telling the truth. “But I know where it is, if it exists at all.”

“Where?” I demanded.

This time, he let the light shift, let me see the smile on his face. “One of the moons,” he answered. “But you must not ask for all our secrets.”

We did not always have moons, say the stories and songs. Once, we had only earth, and the stars, and in the day, the sun.

Then a green light, then a blue, moving slowly through the sky, dimming our stars.

Moons.

A gift from the gods, say some of the songs. A curse, whisper some of the stories.

At the festivals, the children sing of their coming, though they have never known a world without a moon.

“The moons are not a place,” I said sharply. “They are only….” I struggled for the right word, gave up in vain. “Lights.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “They are places, places and reflections of light.”

Useless to argue this point. “Why?” was all I could think of next.

“Balance,” he said, in a lighthearted tone.

The gods have informed us that they number thirteen — precisely thirteen. It is an awkward number, one they consider unlucky, for reasons they do not tell us.

Because it is their unluck, not ours, many of us arrange our homes in elements of thirteen — thirteen windows, thirteen screens, thirteen plates, thirteen hangings, thirteen cups. I have known women to hope for 11 children to make a family of thirteen; couples who have joined with others, to have thirteen people in their household, thirteen to stand against the gods.

In the house of the Lady of the Waters, we, too, keep to thirteen women, thirteen students of her gifts, no more and no less, although we serve her, and would not — so we say — bring her bad luck. We do not know if she believes us. Her eyes, you understand, are not human, when we see her.

Thirteen. Out of balance, out of symmetry. They cannot pair up evenly, in thirteen, and so they do not, forming circles of twos and threes and fours and fives that come together for a time and then break up again. They cannot divide by gender, and so they do not, with some of the gods choosing to be women, and some men, and some both, and then switching, for no apparent reason. Even as others, including our Lady of the Waters, try to cling to the names we have given them, to the genders they have chosen.

But they cannot die, and they cannot birth another, and so they remain: Forever out of balance; forever out of symmetry. Forever doomed with bad luck.

I have watched my child die in my arms.

I do not think the gods understand bad luck.

I sat in silence, contemplating. He spun three balls out of nowhere — or from his sleeves, I could not tell — and began juggling them.

“Which god did you have in mind?” I asked, trying to sound as casual as we were merely discussing the weather.

As sung in the house of the Lady of the Waters, these are the names mortals have given the gods: The Lady of Waters, the Dreamweaver, She of the Clouds, the Corn God, the Smoke, He of Shining Feathers, The Lord of Rats, the Shadowcrafter, the Crippled One, the Lord of Chains, the Lord of Fury, the God of Silver, and the Trickster.

What they may call themselves, we do not know. I have been told, and this may be true, that the gods at one time had no names: they were just what they were, and no more, until they encountered — or until they made — mortals. Yet we, as mortals, have a desperate need of names, and so, we when found the gods, we named them, often many times. My own Lady of Waters is also the Woman Who Weeps, the Girl of Snow, the Ice Bird, the White Crone, the Grey Waters, the Bloody Girl of Red Skin and Hands. (She is not consistent, this lady, in her age; one of my teachers believed that she finds this shifting amusing.)

Sometimes, when we call their names, the night shifts, and even through the light of the moons, we can see the stars.

I did ask, once. “Are you truly gods? Or is that a trick?”

“That would be telling.”

So now you know as much as I.

“Not the Lady of Waters,” he said. “I know you serve her.”

Serve was perhaps not the correct word, although it worked as well as others. I learned from her, in turn for singing songs for her amusement, telling tales of her generosity and bountifulness to those that came to this temple, so that they in turn would be responsive, would sing something to amuse her and bring something to light the dull eternity of her days. And in turn, I learned of healing, of change, and sometimes — sometimes — she would grant me the power to bring ease, or healing, to a child.

A bargain. A poor one, sometimes, except when a child smiled at the end of pain. I would do nothing to stop that.

I did not bother to explain. “Then what god did you have in mind?”

“The God of Silver.”

The gods still tried, now and again, the whispers said, tried to kill another, or tried to birth another. It was their number, thirteen, that kept them powerless against mortals — to a certain extent; that kept them dependent upon us — to a certain extent. (My own teachers questioned both the powerlessness and the dependency.) Should the gods ever number twelve, or fourteen —

Well.

Balance would be restored.

Not something mortals should strive for.

Interesting. I knew as little of this god as I knew of any other, but he was said — or she was said, this was one of the gods bored with the mortal concept of gender — to be one of the more benevolent of the gods, a god of peace, a god who had turned from the greed of gold and gems to be content with the beauty of the lesser silver.

It was only a tale.

But this was also a god that — if the tales were right — had spent less and less time with mortals, more and more time hidden in the sky, behind the clouds. I had heard some begin to refer to him as the Cloud God, although that was not quite correct: a goddess controlled the clouds and the rain, a sister and rival and friend and lover of my own Lady of the Waters, who had seized the rains of the air even as my Lady seized the waters and snow of the earth. We spoke to She of the Clouds as well, and had even seen her kiss my Lady, although we could never be certain if it was love or hate that bound them. And my Lady had other lovers, mortal and god. Still, my Lady had been able to speak to She of the Clouds and persuade her to break a mortal drought or two, to let waters fill the earth and raise the corn, before (this was said in much softer voices) — both She of the Clouds and the Lady of Waters had dragged the Corn God into the mud and had their way with him, again and again.

The corn and crops had grown strong that year.

The God of Silver had only watched, but he had never had much of an interest in growing things.

And so. This was all whispered, not known, but the God of Silver had had less interaction with the other gods, less interaction with mortals, even if those moments with mortals had all been benevolent….

“Why?” I asked. I could not puzzle it out.

“Because he stole my owl,” the Trickster said.

I had not known the Trickster had an owl.

“He also killed your son.”

I am here because of that son.

I am here because my son was dying, because my son died. The Lady of the Waters is one of the more…beneficent…of the gods, when she remembers to be: she knows tricks of healing, of removing pain. She had aided me in the last hours of my son’s death, removing his pain, at least, although she had told me, with what almost seemed compassion, that she could not have saved him, that even the gods can do nothing when it is too late. I did not know whether I could believe her. I did know that I would do anything I could to prevent another death of a child, and so I nodded in acceptance of her words, and immediately began to learn anything I could of her.

She had never told me that the gods had killed him.

I took a sharp breath. I did not know whether I could believe him, or not, but he was already speaking of something else, as if the truth of my son’s death was nothing. And perhaps, to him, it was nothing, although at his words the dull pain I carried, as a constant, had flared into agony. He was speaking of boxes and balls and lights; I could only half listen.

“I do not claim this will be simple,” he said.

That I could respond to. “No,” I said, allowing the irony to fill my voice. “You simply claim that I can go to a moon — a moon — and kill a god. I fail to see the complexity.”

“I was thinking more that you would need some very special clothing.”

I gestured at the wheeled chair beside my bed. “And this?”

“I do not think that will be a problem on the moon.”

I had never had a portrait done of my son. I had meant to, eventually — artists were expensive, but not entirely beyond my reach at the time — but I had always thought we would have time later. Later. I had always thought we would have a later.

I have no gift for recalling faces, no gift for picturing people in my mind. I try, oh how I try, but I am never sure, now, if the face I see when I think of him is his.

My hands were white on my chair. “Agreed.”

None of the gods claim dominion over death.

And death claims no dominion over them.

He explained more to me, explained, over my protests, that this would have to be done tonight, when both moons were dark, although he could not explain why. (Or, why, knowing that this must be done in the dark of the moons, he had not thought to prepare me for this earlier.) He gave instructions, some detailed, some not, and warnings, some detailed, most not.

“Remember this,” he said, when I opened my mouth to protest again. “The God of Silver killed your child. As the others laughed, or wondered, or lost themselves in bright dreams.”

Even if I could protest — even if I could be sure that he would not kill me if I refused — how could I refuse, after that?

Even if I could not trust a single word he said.

I would take the chair, he assured me again. It would be useful for more than traveling on a moon.

About the chair: I had been careless. Nothing more, nothing less. After my son…well, no need to dwell on that. The Lady of the Waters had saved me, but not healed me. I did not know why, and did not think to ask. Did not dare to ask; I did not want her reasonings, or her unreasonings. I adjusted, and I have no more to say of that.

I used a wheeled chair, in this house with its smoothed floors of stone and running streams and waterfalls. I lowered myself into hot and cold springs, and listened to the water, and wheeled myself where I would in this house, and sometimes elsewhere.

To this day, I cannot be certain where he actually sent me. It looked like a cave of blue and green and light, but it felt — different. I have no other words. But I had reason, later, to believe that in this, the Trickster was telling the truth, and I was on one of the moons. Or rather, inside one of the moons: I could not see the sky. (A disappointment, that; in the back of my mind I had rather wondered what my home would look like, from the sky.) I felt lighter. Untethered. Very untethered. I realized, in horror, that I was almost sliding up from my chair. I grabbed my handrests in panic, only then realizing that my hands had been enclosed in some sort of white gloves, and were light and clumsy at the same time. I sucked in a panicked breath — and nearly choked on it. This was not the air I was used to, but something else, with an odd half stink to it that I could barely recognize. I could feel my heart racing.

Something was on my head, something heavy and solid and light all at the same time. I drew up one hand — carefully clinging to the handrest of my chair with the other — and tapped at it gently. Something clear, like, and yet unlike glass, I thought, although I could not tell, through the coverings of my hands. I could hear the echo of my own breath. My hands moved so oddly in this place. I looked down at my legs. I swallowed again. Perhaps I could —

I pushed down with my hands, harder than I meant to, and let go of the chair, finding myself floating up. I could not help it; even in my terror, I grinned at this, even as I found myself floating down, lightly, as everything was here. I saw my feet touch the ground, spread out my arms in instinct —

— and saw my legs collapse, even in the lightness. My arms and hands followed. I would need to return to my chair.

I said that I had adjusted. Not that it had been easy.

Returning to the chair was harder than it sounds. I’d never had problems pulling myself around with hands and arms before, but the blue and greenness of that cave, combined with whatever was wrapped around my head, badly distorted my vision, and my weight and body felt all wrong. I pulled, only to find myself lighter than expected, crashing into two rocks almost impossible to see in the colors. And sliding along the ground, with my body so light, was nearly impossible. But I managed it, hand over hand at last, climbing into the chair and twisting my body around. I took another deep breath.

Look for the light, the Trickster had whispered, before I had blacked out and found myself here, but everything in this cave — cave? Moon? I could not decide — was light. I turned my head about, difficult though that was under the circumstances, and found a place where the blue light seemed to be a little brighter, and began to wheel myself there.

Easy and difficult. No one had thought to smooth the floor for me — a common practice of mortals and immortals. And I was completely unused to the strange lightness of the place; a single push sent me rushing forward, almost bouncing into a rock. Maneuvering around that rock took its own care.

But I could not help grinning. I might be headed to kill a god, but gods, this lightness was fun.

So much fun that I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me, or notice the curtain of silver and blue until I rolled through it.

My years at the House of the Lady of Waters had not been…evil, exactly. No. They had been good. In that House, I had found a measure of contentment, of peace, among my new found sisters. I had begun healing as duty, but soon found it something more, even taken a certain joy in memorizing endless lists of herbs, in determining when we could apply to the Lady for mercy, and when we should not. The floors of the House were wide and flat, separated by curtains and screens easy to shift and move. My patients watched me with mingled hope and disbelief, and those who could not be saved listened to tales of my son, my mother, my grandfather. I had known pain, and so I could hold them.

Contentment. Peace. Even, at times, a certain joy, even when I wept.

But never fun.

Behind the curtain, a room, of sorts. Words fail me when I try to explain this second place. To begin with, it was large — beyond large. Vaster than any room I had ever seen before in my life, or would, I suspect, ever see, so long I could not see the end of it. And high: I could have easily stacked the temple of the Lady of Waters four times over, and still not reached its ceiling, and that temple was no short building. Like the caves I had passed through, it was filled with blue and green light, but somehow brighter, and I could see more lights — lamps, perhaps, although nothing like any lights I had seen before — scattered about the room. The pinpricks of light that dotted the ceiling, shining blue and green, might be more of those lamps; I could not tell. Whatever the Trickster placed upon my head also distorted my vision.

But not enough to keep me from from seeing the other oddness of the room: it was filled, even in its vastness, with things. Boxes made of some odd shimmering material, furniture, stacked up neatly for the most part, with a large table here and there holding more boxes, or, oddly, pictures — pictures that, when I looked at them, seemed to move. No, not seemed. They did move. Why would anyone put a picture like that upon a table, instead of placing it in a position of honor against a wall, with lights shining upon it?

Although the walls here seemed very far away.

And between the tables and boxes and pictures, other objects that looked so strange I could not even begin to guess their purpose. All, naturally, littering the floor, making navigation with my chair difficult to impossible, even without the strange feeling of lightness.

“So that’s the trick,” I said, through gritted teeth.

I should have seen it: it featured in a thousand tales of the gods: the quest that ended in the impossible task, solved only with the unexpected aid of those helped along the way. (A symbol, my mother told me, of the importance of small kindnesses, a quality not associated with many of the gods.)

Not that I had quested, exactly, or taken a particularly long journey — it could not have been more than a few hours after my arrival here. But I had certainly been given the impossible task.

I did not believe this was his last trick.

They claim the gods can love. We had seen it, sometimes, in the House of the Lady of the Waters; we had heard and sung the tales. I had wept, hearing of the lost love of the Dreamweaver and the Lord of Rats, now immortal enemies. (And thus, the song sang, the danger of dreaming of rats.)

They claim.

No one had claimed that the gods kept boxes and boxes and boxes hidden on a moon.

It might have been days later, or merely hours. All I knew was my bladder hurt, my hands hurt, my neck hurt. Whatever the Trickster had wrapped me in was distinctly uncomfortable.

And I had found it — or rather, them.

Completely by mistake. I had thought, perhaps, that an odd tube shaped implement might conceal what I was looking for — it was as good a place as any, and I was tired of boxes that would not open and empty boxes and boxes filled with some sort of metal strings. I had pushed my wheels, hard, in the hopes of bouncing over some smaller objects scattered along the floor, something that had worked all too well, sending my chair flying into a box and tipping it over. Tipping me over as well.

By the time I managed to right myself and the chair — a task made easier by the odd lightness of the place, and considerably harder by these wrappings I was in and the growing pain in my bladder I was ready to curse every god past damnation and kill them by strangling them myself. No matter that the gods were supposedly immune to such things; I was angry enough to make it work. I was about to cry out to the Trickster to beg to return, to see if I could someone trick him —

And I saw them.

As the Trickster had described: small metallic balls, vibrating, almost humming, I thought. Thirteen of them. They looked so innocent. Simple. Nothing more than children’s toys.

How could these possibly harm a god?

I had always thought, always believed, that the gods did not slay us because they were too busy with their own games against one another. But I could not deny that many mortals had died in these games.

If the gods were in balance…

Did that mean they would be able to stop the beneficent acts of the Lady of the Waters? Of She of the Clouds?

I did not know. Gods, if I only knew more of the gods!

A trick, the Trickster had said. He would know, certainly, and yet…

The balls had tumbled to the floor and rolled about. I would have to pick them up, one by one, from the chair. While wrapped in something that made it nearly impossible to bend over from the chair to the floor. I could tumble to the floor, I thought, especially in this lightness, and roll around until I had gathered all the balls, and then drag myself up in the chair again. Or I could continue to search through the boxes and items on the table for something that would help me grab the balls from my chair….

…I rolled myself off my chair and onto the floor.

I hit it softly, gently — gods, this place could be such fun, if I were not in such pain — and began to roll and pull myself towards the balls. Careful. The last thing I wanted to do was push the balls away by accident….

…my glove covered one of them.

Bells. Bells. Everywhere, bells —

The gods are not, as mortals, confined to a single shape, or name, or sound, or word, shifting at a thought from one thing to another.

It is one of many reasons we eye birds and rats so warily.

I had, however, never heard that they took the shape of bells.

A shower of simmering silver. No. A cloud. No. A column — pointless to describe this; I did not have the words. I did not think any mortal had the words. But I did not question what it was.

The God of Silver. And another, a figure shrouded in a cloak and hood, leaning upon an iron cane. The Chained One.

The Trickster had failed to mention that possibility.

I hurriedly began to pull myself towards my chair — rolling over more of the balls as I did so. The sound of the bells grew overwhelming. If the gods spoke to me, I could not hear them. I could not even hear myself. I dragged myself up to my chair, but not before crashing it into more tables, more boxes, and turned the chair to face them.

It would have been easier if I could have seen their faces. I had thought the Trickster terrifying, but this was far worse.

“You will return that,” said a voice, filled with silver. Outside, and yet, inside my head, all at once, echoing, the way the Lady of the Waters voice would sound on her visits. The way the Trickster’s voice had not.

The God of Silver killed your child. As the others laughed, or wondered, or lost themselves in bright dreams.

“Wait,” said a second voice, filled with iron. “This has the touch of the Trickster upon it.”

“And a pathetic touch, even for him. Look at her.”

I was certainly looking at him.

“I see a certain darkness.” If iron could be curious, this was. “Tell us. Why do you believe you are here, child?”

I did not know if they would know a lie, or not, even if I could have thought of one. “My son.”

“Ah.” No compassion in that iron. “So beautiful, that darkness.”

“And so easily illuminated.” The contempt, the dismissal, sang through my mind. “so fortunate, for mortals, that their deaths can bring so much light.”

I had grown to…live…with the loss of my son, if not accept it. It had been my fault, I knew; if I had only come to the Lady of the Waters sooner, if I had only learned healing sooner, paid more attention to what was important, rather than what was not — The old familiar pathways of guilt and longing filled my mind. Easier to feel guilt, in some ways, than to miss my child, to long for his crinkled smile, the way he was constantly but constantly underfoot, crowing, crying, laughing —

I had never loved anything, or any other person, as much. I doubted the gods could understand that kind of love.

The words echoed in the room, in my voice. I swallowed, and fumbled in my lap for one of the balls.

For a brief moment, I allowed myself to think of the Lady of Waters.

I threw the ball at the silver light.

The silver shifted, and I could see the ball continue its flight, down to the end of this impossibly long room…

“Damn,” I said.

The silver cloud — column — shower — whatever it was — grew larger, more brighter. It was coming towards me. In desperation I grabbed the next thing I could — a box covered in red symbols on a nearby table — lifted it, and threw it. Too hard: I had not accounted for its seeming lack of weight, and it sped through the room faster than I could have imagined.

Someone — it might have been me, but I do not think so — shouted, “No!” and the bell sound changed, to a sound I have never heard before, a terrible whine and shriek and pulsing sound all at once, and the world exploded into fire and light and —

In their way, all the gods do tricks. Deliberately, to entertain the eternal sameness of their lives, and mistakenly, not knowing how mortals view their doings and broken promises.

But the Trickster made such doings his life. Even our mortal lives were filled with the tales of his ruses and deceits, the games he had played on mortals and his fellow gods. They had even banished him, from time to time (although some tales claimed this was only to restore the balance and their luck, and the Trickster was the easiest to remove), never to the gain of mortals.

He could, when he chose, be beneficial: win a game against him, and find a pot of gold in your home. Lose a game, and find yourself a bird, or granted a harp that would sing only insults. Win a game against him, and find your clothing gone. Lose a game, and find yourself the ruler of an empire.

The gods themselves could not trust him. Nor could I.

Light, bursting into a thousand pieces and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and oh gods was I sick so sick and everything was dark and light and colored and dim and I was falling and falling and I would never hear again and ah the light and the darkness —

It was not he who killed your child.

Green, green rocks flying past me, spinning.

But it was also not he who failed to save her.

I do not remember the rest of that fall.

I have heard three tales of the coming of mortals:

One, that the gods, in their beginnings, saw endless fire and water and mist, and wanted something that would change, that would die and be reborn. And so they made plants, and later animals, and at length, craving speech, mortals. Mortals who in their quarrels and loves and above all, deaths, would always be different, even as they always remained the same, always repeating their lives again and again.

Two, that our gods did not create us at all. That, traveling from a place to another place, they encountered us, mortals, created by other gods, and decided to settle here, and watch.

Three, that we were not created by any gods at all, but merely, like the gods, thrown up by the universe, in its ongoing chaos of fire and stars and water and heat. Pure random chance that they are gods, doomed to watch the universe live and die, and we are not, doomed to see only a portion of life and death.

I do not know the truth of any of these tales.

I awoke wrapped in blankets from my own bed, on the small balcony just outside my room. My other wrappings had been removed; I could feel the chair against my back, and the hard lumps there. At some point, I must have finally emptied my bladder — I tried not to think about that too much — but someone had dried and cleaned me. A glass of water had been left by my chair; I seized it, and drank deeply. I pressed my fingers — my unwrapped fingers, that could feel and move freely — against my arm rests. Real. Solid.

Alive. I had somehow lived through that.

My chair had somehow lived through that.

The gods can work miracles, at need.

I placed my face in my hands, for a moment. When I looked up, the night was full of shattered light.

When I was injured, I had to learn balance all over again. The balance I had learned as a child was lost completely, and I must need learn new things.

I learned all that I knew from mortal teachers. The gods, I learned, know nothing of balance.

A terrible description, shattered light, but I can think of no other word: streaks of burning green, crackling and dimming and reappearing again. Where they reached the ground, they set it on fire, so that the earth, too, was throwing up flames. I could hear — I thought I could hear — screams in the distance. I certainly heard cries behind me, in the house of Lady of the Waters.

And I heard his footsteps behind me. He wanted me to hear; the gods can move silently if they wish. He wanted me to turn towards him.

I do not know when we began to worship the gods, to bring them offerings of gem and food and clothing, to build high temples where they might sit and dispense judgment. Or miracles. I do not know if it was our idea, or theirs, if they needed the stimulation, or if we needed the reassurance, the hope of occasional aid.

I only know when I stopped.

I didn’t thank him for saving my life. For one thing I wasn’t sure he had. For another, I wasn’t grateful. I didn’t bother to tell him my story either; I was certain he already knew it.

“You lying bastard,” I said instead. “You didn’t want me to kill a god at all. You wanted me to do that.”

No need to point, but I did anyway, at the falling green lights, the fires sparking against the earth.

“Well, I wouldn’t have minded.“

“Not that I could have done it anyway,” I said. I saw them again, standing against the flames and fires, vanishing before the fires could touch them. “Could I? Those balls — you placed them near something else, that box, hoping I would feel threatened and use that instead, and — ”

I choked on my own words.

“It’s not a trick if you tell the process.”

“And is that a trick?” I said, pointing at the sky again.

“No,” said the Trickster quietly, and I knew — how I knew — he was telling the truth.

I could not explain it, but I could feel it, the sudden lack of balance in the world. Not from any evidence or measurement, but present, none the less.

And the change did not favor mortals. I could feel that as well.

How the loss of one moon — a moon that blocked our sight of the stars — could do that, I could not have explained, but I knew it, without needing to be told, as well as I knew that the screams behind me were no trick as well.

“Get out,” I said. Reckless beyond thought, to order a god, but I was too angry, in too much pain, to spend much time thinking. “Get out, you miserable bastard.”

“Only after I give you a gift.”

“Get out.”

“I owe you.”

“You do,” I said through gritted teeth. “You used me, used my child, used me knowing that the other gods would never see a woman in a chair as a threat, would never stop me from picking up whatever that was, and you destroyed a moon and helped destroy my race. So get out.”

“Oh, I don’t think I owe you for any of that,” said the Trickster. “That was just part of the trick. No. I owe you for the lie.”

“The lie? You told thousands. Get. Out.”

No one could accuse the Trickster of following instructions. “I lied about the God of Silver. In part. He did steal my owl.”

I wished that a mortal fist could harm his immortal skin.

“But it was not he who killed your child. That was a toy of the Lord of Rats and the Crippled One. If you had killed the God of Silver, or the Chained One — well. You would have killed an innocent.”

If this was meant as comfort, it failed. Rage filled me all over again.

“But — and this is important — that was the only lie. I left things unsaid, but only those words spoke untruths. Nonetheless. For those words, and for your assistance, a gift.”

A burning touch of lips against my forehead.

“I don’t want any of your damned gifts.”

He spread three cups upon the long table I kept against the wall, to store flowers and books and other things. Before, when those things had still mattered. “You will want this one,” he said, and explained.

When my son was born, I sang all the songs to him: the sleeping songs, the baby songs, the songs of mortals and gods.

I told him tales as he grew, eyes large in his tiny face, tales of warning and danger. Tales of the Trickster. Tales of rats. Tales of chains.

The Trickster vanished as he had come, unseen, unwanted. I stayed in my chair, watching the falling remnants of the moon, until, tired beyond all exhaustion, I fell asleep.

We have three tales of dreams: that they are ours, only ours, untouched by gods, and that dreams are the only place where we can roam free of the gods, even when they seem to walk in our dreams. Or that they are not ours at all, but creations of the Dreamweaver, who spins our dreams on dark wheels and laces them into our mind. Or that they are ghosts, unable to journey to the land of the dead, or be reborn, whether by a trick of gods or mortals or balance or luck, and so they crawl into our minds in sleep, for comfort or sorrow.

That night, I dreamt of my son, laughing on the moon, and behind him, silver rain and chains and laughing rats.

I was woken by the scent of water.

“They tell me you have destroyed one of the moons,” the Lady of the Waters said, her voice musical, flowing, overwhelming. Far stronger than the Trickster; far more there than either of the two that I had met — and not killed — upon the moon.

I kept my head bowed, and did not answer. I had no need: even in the day sky, green streaks were still falling, and the Trickster was no place to be found.

“You will not want my congratulations.”

That, at least, was true. I did not dare to look at her, to become lost in her beauty, her kindness…

“And what are these?”

“Gifts from him, my Lady,” I said, allowing the weariness to seep through my voice.

“Ah,” she said, moving forward to look at the table, where the three cups rested, upside down.

So almost human, her curiosity. She allowed me to hear one footfall, then another; I could almost think her a woman like myself. Could almost forget.

“And what were you to do with these gifts?”

A sharpness in that waterfall.

“Store a ball he took from the moon,” I said, wearily. “He said it was too dangerous for me to touch, but that I should live with it, in remembrance.”

I thought — I thought — that her eyes looked more alert. Or greedier. I could not have told; even after all this, I was still helpless at deciphering the expressions of immortals. I could see the shimmer of her robes as they swayed. “Three cups. Three cups. In one of these, you say?”

“Yes, Lady.”

“Left by him.”

Her back was to me. I decided I could lift my eyes, just a little.

Her glowing hands — hands of water, hands of light — were moving above the three cups, shifting them about the table, tapping each lightly. I wondered if she could see through the cups, if the gods had been granted yet another gift we did not have, or if she could hear something, sense something, that I could not. Had the Trickster foreseen this?

I did not dare take the risk. “The wrong one — the wrong ones — will kill. Will blast the other moon, and — Lady, I beg you.”

She must have heard something in my voice. “Trust me, my child. Trust me.”

Her voice was a rush of water. I took a deep breath, and placed my fingers on the wheels of my chair, and pushed.

My chair is generally silent, but not now: I thought I could hear every clatter, every movement of the boards. I heard water. I heard cracks. I heard the ball in my hand sink into her lower back, pushed by my weight and the weight of my chair. I heard her soft cry, a sound like shattered glass, only more musical, more beautiful. I remembered the song she had sung, as she stood by his bedside and watched my son die.

And against my hand, the Lady of Waters turned into water, a great rush of gray and water that splashed and pushed against me. I had not expected that; had not braced my chair against the water, and found myself pulling the right wheel of my chair with one hand as with my left I continued to hold the stone against the water. Until a pool of water formed, beneath my chair, reflecting the colors of the room.

Ordinary water. Even I, mere mortal, did not need the sudden stillness of the stone in my hand to tell that. Even I, mere mortal, could feel the shift in the air.

The rush of water had knocked down all three cups. Nothing had been under them.

As I have said, I have never loved anything so much.

He knew that much truth, the Trickster.

I wheeled myself out to the balcony.

The stars glittered above me. I stared and stared. The other moon still floated someplace in the sky, I knew, the moon I had not visited, and doubtless never would. The moon that promised magic and dreams. The moon that, on its own, would still allow us to glimpse the stars.

I bowed my head, made myself look as weak, as pitiable, as mortal as possible. They would be coming soon, I knew, to mourn their sister, their lover, their rival, to rejoice in their reborn balance. I gripped the stone in my hand, concealed beneath my robes. I would not allow this balance to remain for long.

About the Author

Mari Ness lives in central Florida with two cats who think her fingers should spend less time on a keyboard and more time in their fur. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. On Thursdays, she blogs about Oz and other works of the fantastic for children over at Tor.com. You can also follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

Building Forests, Remaking Planets

Sarah Goslee

Last September the popular science news was full of stories about Ascension Island¹. This small volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic was nearly barren when Charles Darwin described it in 1836, supporting only 25 or 30 species of small plants, a flightless bird, and a land crab. But today the mountain is covered by a thriving and diverse cloud forest. What happened? Joseph Hooker happened². The English botanist was asked by the Royal Navy to improve the island by increasing soil and water availability so that it could better serve as a stopping point mid-ocean³. Hooker suggested planting trees on the mountain to improve water cycling, and planting other species on the steep slopes to hold soil, much as we do now on steep embankments.

For the next few years, regular shipments of plants came to the island, whatever the botanical gardens thought might be appropriate (or had extra of, perhaps). They were planted and tended, and at least some of them thrived, creating the lush forest found today. In the popular press, this remarkable unplanned experiment was billed as offering insights into how we might someday terraform Mars, making it habitable for terrestrial life, and especially for humans. The greening of Ascension is an artificially-enhanced example of primary succession, a speedy version of the process by which newly formed land becomes a thriving ecosystem. Does this example tell us anything that can be used to guide the greening of a whole new planet?

Primary succession is a fascinating process, but usually very slow. New land, devoid of life, is created by volcanic activity or uncovered after thousands of years of glacial ice. First microbes colonize the ground, beginning to establish nutrient cycling and to turn rock fragments into soil that can someday support plants. Pioneer species such as lichens, tolerant of extreme conditions, aid in creating soil. This new soil holds water and nutrients, allowing hardy plants to move in. Small animals follow, often insects and spiders, and finally after centuries of development more specialized plants and animals become established. Each set of species makes it possible for the next to survive, and is replaced by those newcomers.

Primary succession sounds orderly and well-regulated, but it is actually slow and messy, and highly dependent on which species arrive and in what order. When Hooker started trying to modify Ascension Island, it had already reached the pioneer species stage, with basic nutrient and water cycling and soil development established (only a million years after it rose from the sea). Hooker sped up the next steps in the process by sending all sorts of plants that probably would never have reached the island unaided.

Ascension Island, and any terrestrial primary succession, has a tremendous advantage over any terraforming project, Mars for example. Earth already has an oxygen atmosphere, a well-established global hydrological cycle and a favorable temperature range. Mars has none of those things. Instead, future planetary engineers will need to compensate for the initial conditions by careful planning, and by their knowledge of how primary succession works on sites like Ascension. Here, as in so many human endeavors, intelligence will help us overcome physical challenges.

Is planetary engineering even possible: can living things change an entire planet, and can people do so? The answer to both parts of that question is unequivocally yes. Our oxygen atmosphere, necessary to support animal life, is a byproduct of photosynthesis, which causes plants to release oxygen. Global warming is a clear demonstration that humans can change the planet: here both atmospheric composition and the related global climate have been altered as a direct result of human activity. In both cases the changes were accidental, unexpected by the organisms causing them and even actively harmful to those organisms. If planned instead of haphazard, though, it should be possible to choose and direct the outcome of planetary engineering efforts.

Terraforming a barren planet like Mars will require a combination of physical and biological engineering⁴. The physical engineering will modify the inhospitable environment, making it possible for Mars to support hardy pioneer species. Right now terrestrial organisms would find Mars an impossible environment. Once that is accomplished, a carefully-planned sequence of species can be introduced to further modify the environment into something more suitable for human use.

The first challenge will be to raise the surface temperature so that liquid water can exist at least part of the time. The greenhouse effect currently worrying terrestrial climatologists would be beneficial on Mars. Releasing carbon dioxide from the Martian polar ice caps, or even releasing more effective custom-tailored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, would create a positive feedback loop because heating the planet melts more carbon dioxide ice, increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases and warming the planet more.

This engineering process creates an atmosphere high in carbon dioxide, not an ideal condition for human purposes. But once Mars can support terrestrial species, biological engineering comes into play. Seeding Mars with cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), lichens, and other cold-tolerant photosynthetic organisms will cause the development an oxygen-rich atmosphere, though it will be a very slow process. The growth and death of these organisms creates soil, simultaneously breaking rock fragments into smaller particles and enriching it with organic matter and nutrients. Mosses can eventually be added. They are not only more efficient at photosynthesis but also capable of storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as peat.

Later, decades or centuries after the project is started, animals can be added to the mix. When the ecosystem can support insects, flowering plants can also be introduced; they would not thrive without pollinators. Arctic and alpine plants are already adapted to cold climates, making them perfect for this stage of terraforming. This is roughly where the Ascension Island project started: some soil, an oxygen atmosphere, a habitable climate. Pollinators and pest insects alike probably came along with the plants as hitchhikers, another advantage of being immersed in a biologically active world.

One of the key questions seems fairly simple at first: how do you choose which species to put together to create and maintain a functioning ecosystem? The easiest approach is the Ascension tactic: plant a bunch of things and see what happens. Simply let the ones that can thrive do so, and the ones that can’t will become extinct. But as hard as it was to ship plants to the South Atlantic, it will be much harder to ship them to Mars. Is there a better way to choose what to introduce and in what order, to go from the messy and chaotic process of primary succession to something more orderly and efficient?

Building a successful community requires juggling many dynamic and interrelated factors — atmosphere, soil, water, nutrients, plants, animals — all while keeping the system moving toward the ultimate goal of the terraforming project many centuries in the future. Any species a planetary engineer adds has to be able to survive in the current conditions, to coexist with the other plants and animals present, and to move the environment in the correct direction.

Right now ecologists don’t know nearly enough even to build community types here on Earth where the environment is already hospitable, but community assembly and functional ecology are very active research topics. Scientists are very interested in understanding how ecosystems form without human manipulation, and in the functional role that each species performs within that ecosystem. Besides terraforming, this knowledge has many smaller-scale applications, including agriculture, conservation management, controlling invasive species, and planning for future climate changes.

Combating climate change gives planetary engineers a chance to develop their skills here at home. Many different schemes have been proposed to terraform Earth itself, to undo the inadvertent atmospheric changes we’ve already caused. Fertilizing the ocean with iron to increase algae growth, thus storing carbon dioxide, and injecting sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight warming the Earth, have both been suggested⁵. Either of these strategies could be part of terraforming other planets.

Humans can change the atmosphere, and the plants and animals found, on large scale, both at home on Earth and someday on other planets. But just because we can do these things it doesn’t necessarily make them a good idea. There’s concern that, if we try out planetary engineering solutions to anthropogenic climate change and other problems here on Earth, we’ll just make something else go wrong, maybe even destroy the planet. Scientists don’t understand everything about global cycles, so causing new problems while solving old ones is entirely possible. It’s unlikely that we’ll destroy the whole planet, though: an active biological system is hard to kill off, though we could easily make it uncomfortable for humans or other species. Just as rats and cockroaches are said to be able to survive after a nuclear disaster, something will always thrive.

On another world, the initial lack of an active biosphere makes it hard to get things going. And there’s another question to grapple with when deciding whether to terraform other planets: is it ethical to make another planet into an Earthlike world? Bioethicists have thought deeply about that question, and have come up with a spectrum of possible answers⁶.

On one end are the preservationists, who believe that all of nature, even a lifeless planet, is deserving of protection, and that terraforming or any other planetary modification is wrong. On the other end are the anthropocentrists, who recognize the evolutionary imperative to reproduce ourselves encoded in our genes. Spreading our species is the highest goal, and terraforming other planets is the only way to extend our habitat beyond Earth. Nature is only valuable in so far as it benefits humans.

The zoocentrists and the ecocentrists fall in between. Both groups recognize the ethical importance of organisms other than humans. Zoocentrists recognize the intrinsic value of higher organisms, those animals capable of feeling pleasure and pain. Terraforming Mars poses no ethical problem for zoocentrists if it is lifeless or supports only microbial organisms. Ecocentrism assigns intrinsic value to every species: all have the right to live and reproduce, regardless of complexity or relationship with humans. Nonliving things are not included. A barren Mars could be terraformed, but not one that supports microbial life.

When deciding whether terraforming Mars is justified there are three questions to consider⁷. Does this terraforming project improve the situation of humanity? Of all life? Of Mars itself? The first question is easy: spreading the human population and associated terrestrial organisms among more than one locale makes it far less likely that we’ll be wiped out by a sudden catastrophe. Following that logic, not establishing outposts on other planets is the immoral choice. Given that the only life proven to exist is right here on Earth, the answer to the second question is also “yes,” until and unless extraterrestrial life is found.

The third question is the key: is a living planet better than a naturally-lifeless one? Who decides, and how? How hard should we hunt for microorganisms before beginning a terraforming project? Both the scientific and philosophical components of terraforming have been considered in detail in Kim Stanley Robinson’s award-winning Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Preservationists and those in favor of terraforming debate and act in a well-thought-out and thoroughly researched work of science fiction.

Not just Mars, but also Venus, Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan are considered good candidates for terraforming (see Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, the science behind which Paul wrote about in Clarkesworld #36, for speculation about Europa, Titan and other outer system moons). Mars is the most Earthlike, and could be made habitable, if not for unprotected people then for plants. The artificial cloud forest on Ascension Island provides inspiration for scientists studying the development of ecosystems on barren land, but was too haphazard to offer much guidance for terraforming projects on other planets. Ecologists and planetary engineers are actively studying terraforming and similar areas. The more we learn about designing and managing ecosystems, with all their interrelated component parts, the more effectively we will be able to tend our current planet and remake others to bring them into the fold.

Footnotes:

1 Many such stories are available online. One particularly good one appeared in The Economist: Another Green World 2010 http://www.economist.com/node/17722704

2 Morse, Adrian. The Island as Laboratory: Ascension Island, Joseph Hooker, and Imperial Botany. http://www.adrianmorse.com/ascension.pdf

3 Wilkinson, David M. 2004. The parable of Green Mountain: Ascension Island, ecosystem construction and ecological fitting David M. Wilkinson Journal of Biogeography 31: 1-4. http://www.livjm.ac.uk/BIE/greenmt.pdf

4 Graham, James M. 2004. The Biological Terraforming of Mars: Planetary Ecosynthesis as Ecological Succession on a Global Scale. Astrobiology. 4: 168-195. http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/153110704323175133

5 Keith, David W. 2000. Geoengineering the Climate: History and Prospect. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25: 245-284. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.245

6 Fogg, Martyn J. 1999. The ethical dimensions of space settlement. IAA-99-IAA.7.1.07 http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/EthicsDTP.pdf

7 Fogg, Martyn J. 1999. The ethical dimensions of space settlement. IAA-99-IAA.7.1.07 http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/EthicsDTP.pdf

About the Author

Sarah Goslee is an ecologist working on agricultural issues at a government lab in Pennsylvania and a regular contributor to the Crossed Genres Science in My Fiction series. She likes to figure things out and tell people about them, and writes regularly on a diverse array of topics including fiber arts, medieval science, and Viking culture.

Braided Together: A Conversation with Erin Hoffman

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Erin Hoffman’s first novel, The Sword of Fire and Sea, opens on an island. And the brief paragraph reveals most of what we need to know about the central character:

Though the coastal island of Siane’s Eye was lush with whispering palms and tropical flowers too exotic for the names of men, the wind that swept ever outward from its alabaster monuments came chill as a lifetime of penance. It prickled Vidarian’s skin, but he hardened himself to it; the Sisters would not see a Rulorat captain hiding his hands like a saltless boy.

Throughout The Sword of Fire and Sea, conflict prickles Vidarian’s skin, but he hardens himself to it — he stands his ground, rises to the occasion, and exceeds even his own expectations. There is a confidence and surety to Hoffman’s prose that suggests mid-career or late-career, but surely not debut novelist.

Hoffman has, indeed, been around for awhile, working primarily in the video game design industry. You may have heard of her referred to as EA Spouse, in reference to her game industry quality of life activism, or as “the Upton Sinclair of the game industry” as they’ve called her at The Escapist. You may have heard of her as a “secret Enchanted Griffon,” or recently as the author of Sword of Fire and Sea released this month by Pyr Books.

In short, Hoffman is a gamer, a designer, and a novelist… she is also a “she,” which is not uncommon in the world of speculative fiction, but surely is in a gaming industry that traditionally has been dominated by men.

From 2008 to last year, Hoffman was the Lead Designer at HumaNature Studios, a small, independent game studio that makes games and apps “that are charming and playful, and that help people connect with each other in expressive and creative ways.” HNS puts particular emphasis on developing games that appeal to women and to “non-gamer types.” She currently is a Lead Systems Designer at Zynga, whose primary audience is also female and non-traditional gamers.

A graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a major in Philosophy, Hoffman is known to say and write things that either make you grin or gnash your teeth. Here, she explains the name of her game design consulting business, Philomath Games:

Game development, like all disciplines, shares a general unifying philosophy. But what I found during my explorations in philosophy was that a love of knowledge — the philein sophia — can make a person shut down. If knowledge is your goal, if having it gives you superiority, there is a tendency to achieve that knowledge or level of expertise and then stop, rigorously defending the position that one strove so mightily to earn.

Philomathy, by contrast — the love of learning — never stops. There are no plateaus in learning, only a continuing process. This rather Buddhist idea is how I approach my career and my life, so it felt right to name my little one woman band after it.

For Hoffman, there is no stopping… Her career has been marked by a willingness to push and pull, to stretch, collaborate, and combine old ideas (and technologies) with new in even newer ways. She is very much the Designer at Play, but also a Designer on a Mission — a mission that in no small way involves having loads of fun doing what she loves. Her desire for better ways of creating better games and better lives in a rapidly changing world has lead her to step on some toes and to poke more than a few people in the eye. Not only does she love learning, she despises injustices and, dang it, does something about them when she sees them.

It’s no wonder that her novel, Sword of Fire and Sea, tells the story of Vidarian and Ariadel who rise to the challenge of saving the world — and the magic in that world — before universes collide.

Hoffman has written a classic Epic Fantasy that reads like the Adventure Fantasy of yesteryear while seeming utterly new at the same time — fast-paced fantasy with depth and grandness, an immersive secondary world, broad sweep and high stakes. Ultimately, like good fiction of any genre, Sword of Fire and Sea is about making hard decisions that matter — to the individual, to his friends, to the world.

Hoffman has worked on such games as Kung Fu Panda World (Lead Designer), PuzzleSmash: Book of Secrets (Creative Director), and GoPets: Vacation Island (Lead Designer). She got her start in game design from 1999 to 2004 as an Assistant Game Designer, Races Assistant, and World Builder on Simutronics’ DragonRealms. Her table-top credits include an unreleased RPG called Black9.

Over the last decade or so, Hoffman has become increasingly interested — obsessed with? — the nature of story and games and how the two realms “braid together in ways [she] didn’t expect.”

Below, we talk at length about writing, breaking rules, playing in natively game-like worlds, motivating characters, and the complex interweaving of game and story.

What do you enjoy about designing games (of any sort)? And how does that enjoyment differ from playing them?

Wow. That’s actually quite a difficult question. There is so much I enjoy. Half of it is that it’s a big logic puzzle of sorts — you start with a problem (how do we create feeling X given constraints Y?), and iterate, and bake, and meditate until eventually, generally after great toil but sometimes in utter random serendipity, the exact right answer pops out of the ether. The other half is more purely expressive — what emotions should we create, and how do we pair those emotions with moments — of realization, of challenge, of insight, of triumph, of regret — all of which games are especially good at.

All this is quite different from playing games. I like playing games, very much — especially older “feel”-oriented games from mid-generation consoles like the Sega Genesis — but I’m at a point in my game designing career that I feel like I’m searching for something, that the design is so important that it’s hard for me to turn off the creating/analyzing part of my brain when I play a game. I think that this is probably a phase, albeit a long one.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction?

Many things in many different dimensions. I like finishing things and inspecting them, polishing them. I like creating things. I feel like if I can perfect something on the page — the something is usually an idea in some form, an animated metaphor — it has a chance of lasting, of becoming itself in other media (music, screen, game). I like the alchemy of crafting emotional experiences. I really like when I get it right and I hear from a reader that they experienced this complex progression of puzzlement and revelation and wonder exactly as I was hoping they would. That’s the best part.

Where does a novel usually start for you — image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether? And how do you develop the novel from there?

Stories seem to have two “starts” for me (I’ll spare you a lengthy biographical ramble about the presence of dichotomies throughout my life). The first start is the emotional start, where a character (or a species) usually peeks up and goes “Hello! Write me plz!” I say, “Well, that’s nice,” and put them in a cupboard. They don’t get to come out again until I know what their story is, and why it is.

Once I know that, I start working on the plot, which involves a lot of time and a collection of terrifying dentistry tools. Also, frequently, animals, and long hikes in the woods. At some point it will all click together and I start fleshing out a detailed outline. I am one of those obsessive outliners. I very rarely start work on something until I know all the “big moments” in the book and the fine detail on at least the first third. Things change, of course, but almost never so drastically that my original outline would be unrecognizable. The actual writing process is when I jam in as many cool things as I can think of. Like the telepathic whales. The two halves of this come together when, as has happened a few times, characters I created for a specific purpose insist on coming back and being more important than they were supposed to be. They’re uppity, characters are.

What makes for a compelling protagonist in general and a compelling Epic Fantasy hero in particular? How did you go about creating Vidarian and Ariadel?

It’s funny, this question feels like something of a trap. There is probably no one right answer and yet there are dozens of wrong ones. (I’m imagining a dozen authors out there wagging their fingers at me as I answer this.) And I think that characters should be people (even if they are not human) and so it feels somewhat unfair to judge them as worthy or unworthy. But I think the callous answer is that a well-rendered protagonist is exactly who he or she needs to be, as dictated by his or her circumstances.

This may be less true for other forms of fiction, but I think it is true for Epic Fantasy. Forces in the world collide, and the protagonist is the one person who is more caught in the middle than anyone else. They may not be chosen by a conscious watchmaker, but they are ‘chosen’ by circumstance, by the laws of physics. And they have to deal with being chosen, and you paint in their background to make the how of their dealing as interesting and meaningful as possible. You lay down the bricks of their experiences to make their choices as difficult as possible. And then you lacquer it over to make it all look effortless.

What are some of the main things readers of Epic Fantasy are looking for? And how do you both meet and subvert those expectations in The Sword of Fire and Sea?

Well, here’s the thing. I’m moving at heretically high speed in Sword, and in its follow-ons, Lance of Earth and Sky and Shield of Sea and Space. I showed my synopsis to a writing group once and they all told me I was absolutely insane, that the plot couldn’t fit in one book. And I think in terms of many current expectations of Epic Fantasy they’re probably right. But I’m really writing adventure fantasy, even though it is also epic, and my lodestars are the speed and engagement that books like Treasure Island had, and what Elmore Leonard says about writing (”I leave out the parts people skip”). That’s what I’m trying to do here. And I’m so thrilled when a reader or reviewer responds to it. What I’d say, also, to the “you can’t do Epic Fantasy that way” is that we used to! Before the (as my husband calls them) kitten crusher fantasies of Jordan (and like many thousands I loved the first four Wheel of Time books) there were tightly-paced epic adventure trilogies. Magic’s Pawn, Dragonflight, and, as Lou Anders pointed out, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. I’m reaching back to that tradition and writing books for people who like to fly through pages and be enthralled by book two even if they haven’t read book one. And for people who like to know where a book series ends, and that it ends.

What goes into the creation of a compelling antagonist?

Well-done antagonists are invariably more interesting than protagonists, or maybe that’s my rule-breaker bias. But how you build the antagonist is at least as important as how you build the protagonist. Most readers will project themselves into the protagonist, and fill in what you leave out — but the antagonist has to be meticulously detailed and bulletproof.

The kind of antagonist you create really depends on the kind of story you’re telling. Do they represent the establishment, or the insurrection? The good-intention-gone-astray, or the psychopath? The system, or the monster?

I think you can tell a lot about an author by their antagonists. One of the most important things that I know of from a creator standpoint is that, as an author, you must love your antagonist. It’s easy to love a protagonist, even if they drive you crazy. It’s harder to love the bad guy. But I think better fiction comes out when you do.

Come to think of it, what is Sword of Fire and Sea about, anyway?

Everything! A world in peril! A chaos goddess! Gryphons! True love! The price of magic! Truth, justice, and telepathic whales!

Okay, knowing that that may not be terribly helpful, and that even if the book was about everything you probably wouldn’t believe me: I think the book is about breaking rules. And I don’t mean that in the frivolous fifth grader sense. It’s about how hard it is to break rules, how no one has all the answers (especially the people who tell you that they do), and how we have to go on making decisions and living our lives anyway. It’s about fearlessness, and legacy, and being true to what you believe in. It’s about making really hard choices when the world itself is against you.

(So, you see? It’s about everything.)

Is there anything you wish you’d known before you took the plunge into writing The Sword of Fire and Sea?

Probably that the end of part two would be incredibly difficult. I think this is not uncommon, though different writers tend to have different troughs. I go through this awful period where I’m convinced it’s all garbage and everyone will hate it and I’ll lose everyone who loves me. It’s completely irrational, of course. And I say it only because I’m pretty sure other people go through it too, and the urge to quit at that moment is at its most ferocious. But the only thing that really solves it is to keep going forward. What makes it hard — as my husband can attest to from watching me go through this story after story — is that because it’s so deeply inside your head you’re convinced that you’re right, and that this kind of deep depressive voice is actually the clear-headed one. And even knowing that this happens, it still feels real every time, and it seems to happen every time. I have to fight my way through it word by word like chiseling through rock. Then I hit the beginning of the last-seven-chapters point and everything starts to fly. That part makes it worth it. It can’t be said enough that it’s very important to finish things.

In what ways is your recent novel Sword of Fire and Sea a game? Or, at least, like a game?

In many ways. The world actually began as a shared universe for an online email- and chat-based RPG. I had a dice system for rolling up new characters. This was when I was a teenager. For some reason that I still don’t quite understand I had an urge to make my own world and write in it rather than joining one of the many fan writing groups (which were great and I did participate in some of those, too). Our writing group at its peak had about forty people in it playing all over the world. When I set about to become a Serious Writer I put all of it aside, only to return several years later and find that there was a lot in that world that I still cared about deeply. I did a massive update on it — set a story about 1,600 years in the future from where we had been writing, filled in a ton of things that had happened in the interim, changed around a bunch of world dynamics — and Sword was born. There are hints throughout of the “older world” for anyone who knows it and is looking carefully, and I think the “new world” is richer for them.

My favorite worlds have always been natively game-like. In their basic world rules you immediately want to interact with them. When you know that Anne McCaffrey’s Pern has five types of colored dragons, you immediately want to match yourself to one. When you know that in Piers Anthony’s Xanth every person has a unique magical talent, you want to pick out a talent for yourself. These rule structures are very game-like and enhance the poetry of a world. In addition to making it accessible, they give you a framework that exposes the theme and meaning in a world much more clearly than worlds that do not have these structures. Character classes are extremely powerful things.

Wait, can you expand on “natively game-like” some more?

Ah. In both of those worlds, their most fundamental world-rules (Xanth: talents; Pern: dragons) set in the reader’s mind an expectation. The rules themselves act as foreshadowing. If you know that riders of gold queen dragons are powerful, you wonder what will happen when a “nobody” manages to bond with one. The premise of the first Xanth book is a protagonist who is ostensibly born without a talent. These stories play on inherent expectations you have when the world is described in the simplest possible way. Games do the same thing.

In a game world, you have a setting, and objects within it; you inspect the setting, develop an expectation about what will happen if you interact with it in a particular way; enact that interaction; and revise your expectations for your next interaction based on the result of your first interaction. James Paul Gee describes this as the way in which games tap a learning and mastery process that parallels the scientific method. The same basic things are at work in the infamous “gun on the mantelpiece” in storytelling.

[Note: Hoffman is referring to the following "rule" of storytelling: If there is a gun on the mantelpiece early in the story, it better go off by the end of the story. Conversely, if the gun goes off in end, it sure as heck better have been on the mantelpiece in the beginning.]

What are some of the game mechanics of Andovar? And how do those mechanics tell the story?

In the beginning (so as not to spoil), the core mechanic set has to do with elemental magic and its role in the world. We begin in a world where the major influencers and power-brokers are or were at one time elemental magic users. But this magic has greatly diminished over time, and so its practitioners turned to the elemental goddesses for more power, becoming priestesses. Magic has also become very compartmentalized; almost all humans at this point have an elemental lineage in their blood, and if they cross those elemental boundaries — if a fire woman has a child with a water man, for instance — the children run a high risk of a malady called blood plague, which can kill them all the way into their mid-twenties. This means that most political boundaries are now drawn along elemental lines. Gryphons, who hold even more ancient knowledge than the priestesses, interact only with the priestesshoods now and are unknown to the wider population. There is a gate between worlds, and this becomes important later in disrupting the balance of power in the world. The hero, Vidarian Rulorat, is the last survivor of his family, which controversially crossed those elemental boundaries in his great-grandparents’ time. So that is the expectation set.

What new design techniques (or wisdom) did you bring to Andovar after all those years of designing video games?

Probably the most challenging thing was expanding the world in such a way as to take some of the very familiar mythological figures — gryphons, centaurs, dragons — and cast them in a way that connected with the world systems. Andovar has always been a sort of metaverse that bridges multiple worlds, so there is a ‘logic’ behind everything fantastical in it. Then there was the challenge of making these elements inclusive enough — creating a broad palette for people to play with in their minds while reading — and modern enough, in terms of the expectations we now have from the cross-pollination of all kinds of other media, and how we can connect with it so rapidly in the internet age.

And what can novels teach designers — and game-masters — about games?

Oh, lots. One big thing has to do with motivation. If you’re reading a book and the main character doesn’t have a deep and burning motivation — something they want more than anything else — the book often becomes flat and forgettable. The trick for a game-master is of course pulling this motivation out of the player’s character. It’s more complicated because this motivation can’t just be imposed. But that driving focal point can keep a game on track. Similarly, villains are best constructed when their driving motivations are both plausible — even sympathetic — and directly oppose the motivations of the party.

When you have motivation, conflict (from within the party and without), and escalation, you have a spine for an adventure that can be continually engaging.

Does a novelist play games with or on a reader?

Good ones do. I’d even go so far as to say that most of the success of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown both have to do with the games they play with the reader, setting you up to expect certain things, fulfilling some and reversing others. To ridiculously oversimplify those works. But in both, you keep reading because you want to find out what happens next — not because you have no idea, but because you have hypotheses.

But aren’t novels more linear and games more… non-linear?

You know, I know we’ve always held the line on this linear-versus-non-linear thing when it comes to games, but games are still experienced linearly by the players. Because (most of us) experience time from this moment to the next, linearly, all of our expectations and indeed our internal physics and metaphysics are based on this view of reality. If a game doesn’t make sense in the linear path the player experiences it through — even if there are many other possible paths — it’s going to be unsatisfying. This is mainly why interactive fiction is so difficult; our expectation mechanisms remain the same, and we’re essentially writing a dozen braided stories simultaneously.

How have social networks like Facebook changed the nature of on-line gaming and even table-top gaming?

I think the broader question that actually impacts our creative lives more deeply is how the interconnectedness and high-speed propagation of information — from the internet, now optimized by social networks, Twitter, etc. — has impacted the generation, spread, and success of all creative properties. It’s pretty comprehensive. Creative properties have to be more “meta” than they’ve ever been before. Whereas previously you would have a video game audience, a SF book audience, a film geek audience, a heavy metal audience, you now have hybrid highly erudite audiences that love a cloud of things: Firefly, Paranoia, Lost, Portal, Pirates of the Caribbean. This creates an inherently different creative cocktail with sophisticated influences and expectations. As a creator it seems like you’re under a lot more pressure to be aware of these things than you used to be. It also means that the work is becoming more complex. On the upside, it seems to mean that audiences are more welcoming and open-minded to new things than they used to be.

Generally, though, I think it’s important not to look at the impact of a specific thing — like Facebook — on a genre, but to ask what the driving mass desire behind that thing is (greater instantaneous flow-like connection across a super-geographical space), and try to figure out new ways to use it.

For lack of a more subtle way to ask… Have things changed much over the last five years for women — heck, for men and women — in the gaming industry? And why aren’t there more women designers, do you suppose?

I think they’ve changed quite a bit, both for women and many under-represented groups — cultural minorities across the board. Every once in awhile I’ll look around at work or at a conference and realize with a sort of sinking feeling how far we have to go — but many gains have been made. When you see places like Google and Zynga developing “it gets better” videos, and the IGDA opening up a new diversity Special Interest Group, there is progress. And for women especially I think it’s safe to say there have never been more female video game designers, and I think and hope there will be more in the future. We seem to be seeing more women in colleges interested in game design, and that’s exciting.

As for why there are so few, I think it amounts to cultural momentum — because the small groups that started the media — board games, video games, pen and paper RPGs — were Caucasian men, they have been the cultural focal point. If an industry doesn’t take specific action to be inclusive and grow diversity, it doesn’t happen. Which is why seeing critical mass subcultures growing in the various genders and cultures is a very hopeful sign, because they will protect and advocate to more of their own peers. Now if we could cross more socio-economic boundaries, we’d really be going somewhere… I have this crazy idea about teaching game design classes in anti-recidivism programs…

How can a storyteller — whether a game designer, novelist or graphic novelist, or more and more often a storyteller who works in many media — take fuller advantage of the desire for “greater instantaneous flow-like connection across a super-geographical space”?

The full potential of it is complex, but the beginning of it is just to engage. We are fortunate to be witnessing the earliest growth of these networks, and so they are still foreign enough to most of the population that simple adoption and engagement is fairly rare. Properties that so much as step into the stream win great support with not much effort. It’s important to recognize and adopt the etiquette — provide good content, do not spam, reciprocate, engage personally, follow back, etc. At this point being present — within the new culture, not treating it like another kind of magazine ad — is a good enough start to differentiate. And I think once you start to do this, ideas naturally emerge in how to use the medium itself in applicable ways. For RPGs there are countless possibilities, from making Facebook accounts for characters to building puzzles into twitter to running massively participatory democratic choose-your-own-adventure stories… All technology is a paintbrush…

So Andovar started as a chat-based multiverse and became the setting for a novel. Have you tried to do anything else with Andovar?

I’m in the process of doing a few different things with it. I would like to see ebook choice adventure stories (you click links to make “decisions” and navigate through a branching story) for it and am working on one. I’d like to put together an entry for one of the interactive fiction contests. And my end goal with all of these worlds is to bring new accessibility to text-based online RPGs and reinvigorate the text-based world. So — a lot.

The challenges are many. One of the biggest ones is just keeping track of how everything is used once it becomes participatory. I’ve been a part of enough worlds at this point that I’m keenly aware of the deep ways that players invest themselves into worlds that they play in, and it’s a great and necessary challenge to make sure that that investment of self is rewarded and never abused. I’ve written about violations of that self in the online space (”Someone Stole My Magic Sword”) — it’s a very complicated challenge at scale.

Lastly, what do you see in the future for RPGs?

The next big sea change is really going to be augmented reality, though I’m not currently clear on how long that technology will take to really break mainstream. Once it does it is likely to do big and interesting things to RPGs, to the point that when it evens out we won’t be able to think of RPGs in quite the same way. I am still waiting for greater adoption of the old top-down RPG (think early Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star) as an expressive art engine. There are a lot of these types of games on the Nintendo DS but their developers for some reason keep thinking they need to do weird things with the combat mechanics, to the point of breaking the bubble of the story. Left to my own devices I would have a heck of a good time just creating Phantasy Star style RPGs. I am also still waiting for a Nethack MMO.

What’s next for you in terms of fiction writing?

The Chaos Knight, primarily! I started this thing, and now I’ve got to finish it. I like to think Vidarian and Ariadel deserve the right ending. I’m also working on a short story for the next Homeless Moon chapbook, and continuing to worldbuild and marinate on the outlines of another Andovar trilogy after Chaos Knight is done. Then there are other books and worlds that peck at my brain periodically. That there are so many worlds is part of why I’m obsessed with the idea of a multi-platform social network metaverse super-MUD. Which, at the moment, is also fiction.

Any parting words?

Thanks very much for inviting me! I’m sure I said any number of heretical things. Corrections or further engagement very welcome via my website (erinhoffman.com) or Andovar’s Facebook page, where there are cute griffin giveaways. Sword of Fire and Sea is available on Amazon now! Readers have tremendous power over the fates of authors via their purchasing decisions. Like many who read Clarkesworld, I would just like to keep creating worlds…

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Step Forward

Neil Clarke

In the past, I’ve used these editorials to rattle on about the state of science fiction and fantasy magazines. The subscription and newsstand data for several of the big print magazines is easy to come by and published annually in Locus Magazine. For several years there has been some public concern about the decline in those numbers. Toss in the rising printing and the annual increases by the US Postal Service and you get income and expense lines that, in the most simplistic analysis, appear to be closing in on one-another.

Things aren’t going the best for online magazines either. There isn’t a standard go-to model to run a business like ours and all the old-standbys are unstable at best. Some of these include donations, advertising, t-shirts, affiliate programs and print editions. The economic situation of the last few years has provided our community with declines in one or more of those areas, forcing publishers to be more creative or simply take a broader and more time-consuming approach to generating income.

Survival requires being adaptable and one of the bigger adaptations happening in our field right now is providing ebook editions. The general wisdom is that this is one of the few growth markets in our field and, for now, the distribution and production costs tend to stay relatively flat. This has provided publishers an opportunity to reach new readers and offset losses in other areas. In our case, we’ve been offering EPUB and Mobi/Kindle editions of Clarkesworld for over a year now and it’s one of the main reasons we’ve been able to stay in business even as other revenue streams have fluctuated.

When it comes to genre magazines, there have been a few ebook success stories. One of the best examples is that of Asimov’s and Analog, which have managed to gain audience through ebook subscriptions without significantly impacting their print sales. In fact, overall readership is up. It is very clear that both magazines (published by the same company) have benefited from their relationship with Amazon, and in particular, the ability to offer subscriptions that are automatically delivered to your device/app.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve had about our ebooks is that people have to remember to come back to our site (or another retailer’s) each month to pick up the new issue. It’s a completely valid complaint. The flaw in the system is the delivery mechanism. Think about it. How many of you would listen to podcasts if you had to visit a site for each new issue, manually download the files, and then load them into your player? No, podcasts rely on having a delivery mechanism that makes it easy for you to subscribe and receive files in a seamless manner. With ebooks, no such infrastructure exists. For months, I’ve chased after the major retailers and have had responses that range from “not until we’ve worked out the optimal user experience” (seriously?) to “by invitation only.”

I kept hoping to hear something positive from B&N or Apple, but in the end, it was Amazon that stepped up and offered a possible solution. It was a bit more complicated than I had hoped, but eventually, we worked it out. Now I can proudly announce that Clarkesworld is the third science fiction magazine (behind Asimov’s and Analog) to be available for subscription on the Kindle (device and Android app). Woo-hoo!

What does this mean for Clarkesworld? If we can build a reasonable base of subscribers, it would provide us with a more stable operating budget and permit us to do things like: add more fiction, allow longer stories or add feature columns. If we’re going to do this right, we’re going to need a goal. How about:

Five hundred subscribers by our fifth anniversary (October 2011)

If we reach that goal, I promise to increase the fiction budget to allow us to publish one more original story per issue. Five hundred subscribers would be sufficient to cover that cost and still allow us to put money aside as a financial safety net for the magazine. It would be awesome to be able to celebrate our fifth anniversary in this manner and I hope that we can count on your support to make this happen.With over twenty thousand readers, this should be an attainable goal, but it isn’t something we can take for granted. Tell a friend, tweet, blog, buy or give a subscription. This is the time you can help us the most.

Subscriptions cost $1.99 per month, billed monthly, and single issues are available for $2.99. Amazon set these prices, but I have to say that I’m very comfortable with what they came up with. As you may have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with the prices on our ebooks and according to my data, this is probably the right price point for us. We’ll continue to have sales and specials on back issues, but for now, this is how it will work. Amazon is currently offering a 14-day trial, so why not give it a try?

Oh and if you do subscribe, please give us some feedback. The Kindle magazine files aren’t incredibly flexible, but I’m sure there are ways we can improve.

Thanks!

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.