Staying Behind

Ken Liu

After the Singularity, most people chose to die.

The dead pity us and call us the left behind, as if we were unfortunate souls who couldn’t get to a life raft in time. They cannot fathom the idea that we might choose to stay behind. And so, year after year, relentlessly, the dead try to steal our children.

I was born in Year Zero of the Singularity, when the first man Uploaded into a machine. The Pope denounced the “Digital Adam”; the digerati celebrated; and everyone else struggled to make sense of the new world.

“We’ve always wanted to live forever,” said Adam Ever, the founder of Everlasting, Inc., and the first to go. In the form of a recording, his message was broadcast across the Internet. “Now we can.”

While Everlasting built its massive data center in Svalbard, nations around the world scrambled to decide if what happened there was murder. For every Uploaded man, there was a lifeless body left behind, the brain a bloody pulpy mess after the destructive scanning procedure. But what really happened to him, his essence, his — for lack of a better word — soul?

Was he now an artificial intelligence? Or was he still somehow human, with silicon and grapheme performing the functions of neurons? Was it merely a hardware upgrade for consciousness? Or has he become a mere algorithm, a clockwork imitation of free will?

It began with the old and the terminally ill. It was very expensive. Then, as the price of admission lowered, hundreds, thousands, then millions lined up.

“Let’s do it,” Dad said, when I was in high school. By then, the world was falling into chaos. Half the country was depopulated. Commodity prices plunged. The threat of war and actual war were everywhere: conquests, re-conquests, endless slaughter. Those who could afford it left on the next flight to Svalbard. Humanity was abandoning the world and destroying itself.

Mom reached out and held Dad’s hand.

“No,” she said. “They think they can cheat death. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for a simulation. So long as there’s sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which life gains meaning.”

She was a lapsed Catholic who nonetheless yearned for the certainty of the Church, and her theology always seemed to me a bit cobbled-together. But she believed that there was a right way to live, and a right way to die.

While Lucy is away at school, Carol and I search her room. Carol looks through her closet for pamphlets, books, and other physical tokens of contact with the dead. I log onto Lucy’s computer.

Lucy is strong-willed but dutiful. Ever since she was a little girl, I’ve been telling her that she must prepare to resist the temptations of the dead. Only she can assure the continuity of our way of life in this abandoned world. She listens to me and nods.

I want to trust her.

But the dead are very clever with their propaganda. In the beginning, they sometimes sent metallic gray drones over our towns, scattering leaflets filled with messages purporting to be from our loved ones. We burned the leaflets and shot at the drones, and eventually, they stopped coming.

Then they tried to come at us through the wireless links between the towns, the electronic lifeline that sustained those who stayed behind and kept our shrinking communities from being completely isolated from each other. We had to vigilantly watch the networks for their insidious tendrils, always seeking an opening.

Lately, their efforts have turned to the children. The dead may have finally given up on us, but they are grasping for the next generation, for our future. As her father, I have a duty to protect Lucy from that which she does not yet understand.

The computer boots up slowly. It’s a miracle that I’ve managed to keep it running for so long, years past the obsolescence planned by its manufacturer. I’ve replaced every component in it, some multiple times.

I scan for a list of files recently created or modified by Lucy, emails received, web pages retrieved. Most are schoolwork or innocent chatter with friends. The inter-settlement network, such as it is, shrinks daily. It’s difficult to keep the radio towers that link town to town powered and operating, with so many people each year dying and simply giving up. It used to be possible for us to communicate with friends as far away as San Francisco, the packets of data skipping from town to town in between like stones across a pond. But now, only less than a thousand computers are still reachable from here, none further away than Maine. Someday we won’t be able to scavenge the components to keep the computers running any more, and we’ll regress even further into the past.

Carol is already done with her search. She sits down on Lucy’s bed to watch me.

“That was fast,” I say.

She shrugs. “We’ll never find anything. If she trusts us, she’ll talk to us. If she doesn’t, then we won’t find what she wants hidden.”

Lately, I’ve detected more such fatalistic sentiments in Carol. It’s as though she’s getting tired, not as committed to the cause. I find myself constantly striving to rekindle her faith.

“Lucy is still young,” I tell her, “too young to understand what she would have to give up in exchange for the false promises of the dead. I know you hate this spying, but we’re trying to save her life.”

Carol looks at me, and eventually she sighs and nods.

I check the image files for hidden data. I check the disk for links to deleted files that might hold secret codes. I scan the web pages, looking for code words offering false promises.

I sigh with relief. She’s clean.

I don’t much like leaving Lowell these days. The world outside our fence grows ever more harsh and dangerous. Bears have come back to eastern Massachusetts. Every year, the forest grows denser, closer to the town line. Some claim to have seen wolves roaming in the woods too.

A year ago, Brad Lee and I had to go to Boston to find spare parts for the town’s generator, housed in the old mill by the Merrimac River. We carried shotguns, protection against both the animals and the vandals who still scurried in urban ruins, living off of the last of the canned food. The surface of Mass Ave, deserted for thirty years, was full of cracks, tufts of grass and shrubs peeking out from them. The harsh New England winters, wielding seeping water and prying ice, had chipped away at the tall buildings around us, their windowless shells crumbling and rusting in the absence of artificial heat and regular maintenance.

Coming around a corner downtown, we surprised two of them huddled around a fire, which they fed with books and papers taken from the bookstore nearby. Even vandals needed warmth, and maybe they also delighted in destroying what was left of civilization.

The two crouched and growled at us, but made no move as Brad and I pointed our guns at them. I remember their thin legs and arms, their dirty faces, their bloodshot eyes full of hate and terror. But mostly, I remember their wrinkled faces and white hair. Even the vandals are growing old, I thought. And they have no children.

Brad and I backed away carefully. I was glad we didn’t have to shoot anyone.

The summer I was eight and Laura eleven, my parents took us on a road trip through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We drove along old highways and side roads, a tour of the monumental beauty of the Western deserts, filled with nostalgic, desolate ghost towns.

As we passed through the Indian reservations — Navajo, Zuni, Acoma, Laguna — Mom wanted to stop at every roadside shop to admire the traditional pottery. Laura and I gingerly stepped through the aisles, careful not to break anything.

Back in the car, Mom let me handle a small pot that she had bought. I turned it over and over in my hands, examining the rough white surface, the neat, clean, black geometric designs, and the bold outline of the hunched-over flute player with feathers coming out of his head.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Mom said. “This wasn’t made on a potter’s wheel. The woman coiled it by hand, using the same techniques that have been passed down for generations in her family. She even dug for the clay in the same places that her great grandmother used. She’s keeping alive an ancient tradition, a way of life.”

The pot suddenly felt heavy in my hands, as though I could sense the weight of its generations of memory.

“That’s just a story to drum up business,” Dad said, glancing at me in the rear view mirror. “But it would be even sadder if the story were true. If you’re doing things the exact same way as your ancestors, then your way of life is dead, and you’ve become a fossil, a performance for the entertainment of tourists.”

“She was not performing,” Mom said. “You have no sense of what’s really important in life, what’s worth holding onto. There’s more to being human than progress. You’re as bad as those Singularity zealots.”

“Please don’t argue any more,” Laura said. “Let’s just get to the hotel and sit by the pool.”

Jack, Brad Lee’s son, is at the door. He’s shy and awkward, even though he has been coming by our house for months. I’ve known him since he was a baby, like I know all the children in town. There are so few of them left. The high school, operating out of the old Whistler House, has only twelve students.

“Hello,” he mumbles, looking at the floor. “Lucy and I need to work on our report.” I step aside to let him pass on his way upstairs to Lucy’s room.

I don’t need to remind him about the rules: door to the bedroom open, at least three of their four feet on the carpet at all times. I hear the indistinct sounds of their chatter and occasional laughter.

There is a kind of innocence to their courtship that was absent from my youth. Without the endless blast of cynical sexuality from TV and the real Internet, children can stay children longer.

There weren’t many doctors left near the end. Those of us who wanted to stay behind gathered into small communities, circling the wagons against the marauding bands of vandals who gorged themselves on pleasures of the flesh as the Uploaded left the physical world behind. I never got to finish college.

Mom lingered in her sickness for months. She was bedridden and drifted in and out of consciousness, her body pumped full of drugs that numbed her pain. We took turns sitting by her, holding her hand. When she had good days, temporary lulls of lucidity, there was only one topic of conversation.

“No,” Mom said, wheezing. “You must promise me. This is important. I’ve lived a real life, and I will die a real death. I will not be turned into a recording. There are worse things than death.”

“If you Upload,” Dad said, “you’ll still have a choice. They can suspend your consciousness, or even erase it, if you don’t like it after you try it. But if you don’t Upload, you’ll be gone forever. There’s no room for regret or return.”

“If I do what you want,” Mom said, “I will be gone. There is no way to come back to this, to the real world. I will not be simulated by a bunch of electrons.”

“Please stop,” Laura pleaded with Dad. “You’re hurting her. Why can’t you leave her alone?”

Mom’s moments of lucidity came further and further apart.

Then that night: waking up to the sound of the front door closing, looking outside the window to see the shuttle on the lawn, tumbling down the stairs.

They were carrying Mom into the shuttle on a stretcher. Dad stood by the door of the gray vehicle, only a little bigger than a van, EVERLASTING, INC. painted on its side.

“Stop!” I shouted over the sound of the shuttle’s engines.

“There’s no time,” Dad said. His eyes were bloodshot. He hadn’t slept for days. None of us had. “They have to do it now before it’s too late. I can’t lose her.”

We struggled. He held me in a tight hug and wrestled me to the ground. “It’s her choice, not yours!” I screamed into his ear. He only held me tighter. I fought to free myself. “Laura, stop them!”

Laura covered her eyes. “Stop fighting, all of you! She would have wanted all of you to stop.”

I hated her for speaking as though Mom was already gone.

The shuttle closed its door and lifted into the air.

Dad left for Svalbard two days later. I refused to speak to him until the end.

“I’m going to join her now,” he said. “Come as soon as you can.”

“You killed her,” I said. He flinched at the words, and I was glad.

Jack has asked Lucy to the prom. I’m pleased that the kids have decided to hold one. It shows that they are serious about keeping alive the stories and traditions they’ve heard from their parents, legends from a world they have only experienced vicariously in old videos and old pictures.

We struggle to maintain what we can of the life from before: put on old plays, read old books, celebrate the old holidays, sing old songs. We’ve had to give up so much. Old recipes have had to be adapted for limited ingredients, old hopes and dreams shrunken to fit within tightened horizons. But every deprivation has also brought us closer as a community, to hold on tighter to our traditions.

Lucy wants to make her own dress. Carol suggests that she look through her old dresses first. “I have some formals left from when I was just a little older than you.”

Lucy is not interested. “They’re old,” she says.

“They’re classic,” I tell her.

But Lucy is adamant. She cuts up her old dresses, curtains, scavenged tablecloths, and trades with the other girls for bits of fabric: silk, chiffon, taffeta, lace, plain cotton. She flips through Carol’s old magazines, looking for inspiration.

Lucy is a good seamstress, far better than Carol. The children are all skilled in trades long thought obsolete in the world I grew up in: knitting, woodworking, planting and hunting. Carol and I had to rediscover and learn these things from books when we were already adults, adapting to a suddenly changed world. But for the children, it is all they have known. They are natives here.

All the students at the high school have spent the last few months doing research in the Textile History Museum, investigating the possibility of weaving our own cloth, preparing for a time when the decaying ruins of the cities would run out of usable cloths for us to salvage. There is some poetic justice in this: Lowell, which once rose on the back of the textile industry, must now rediscover those lost arts on our gentle slide back down the technology curve.

A week after Dad left, we received an email from Mom:

I was wrong.

Sometimes, I’m nostalgic and sad. I miss you, my children, and the world we left behind. But I’m ecstatic most of the time, often incredulous.

There are hundreds of millions of us here, but there is no crowding. In this house there are countless mansions. Each of our minds inhabits its own world, and each of us has infinite space and infinite time.

How can I explain it to you? I can only use the same words so many others have already used. In my old existence, I felt life but dimly and from a distance, cushioned, constrained, tied down by the body. But now I am free, a bare soul exposed to the full tides of eternal Life.

How can speech compare to the intimacy of sharing with your father psyche to psyche? How can hearing about how much he loved me compare to actually feeling his love? To truly understand another person, to experience the texture of his mind — it is glorious.

They tell me that this sensation is called hyperreality. But I don’t care what it is called. I was wrong to cling so tightly to the comforts of an old shell made of flesh and blood. We, the real us, have always been patterns of electrons cascading across the abyss, the nothingness between atoms. What difference does it make if those electrons are in a brain or silicon chips?

Life is sacred and eternal. But our old way of life was unsustainable. We demanded too much of our planet, of sacrifices made by every other living thing. I once thought that an unavoidable aspect of our existence, but it isn’t. Now, with the oil tankers aground, the cars and trucks still, the fields fallow and factories silent, the living world that we had made almost extinct will return.

Humanity is not a cancer of the planet. We simply needed to transcend the demands of our inefficient bodies, machines no longer adequate for their task. How many consciousnesses will now live in this new world, pure creatures of electric spirit and weightless thought? There are no limits.

Come join us. We cannot wait to embrace you again.

– Mom

Laura cried as she read it. But I felt nothing. This wasn’t my mother speaking. The real Mom knew that what really mattered in life was the authenticity of this messy existence, the constant yearning for closeness to another despite imperfect understanding, the pain and suffering of our flesh.

She taught me that our mortality makes us human. The limited time given to each of us makes what we do meaningful. We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real.

It is this world, the world we are meant to live in, that anchors us and demands our presence, not the imagined landscapes of a computed illusion.

This was a simulacrum of her, a recording of propaganda, a temptation into nihilism.

Carol and I met on one of my earliest scavenging trips. Her family had been hiding in the basement of their house on Beacon Hill. A gang of vandals found them and killed her father and brother. They were about to start on her when we showed up. I killed a man-shaped animal that day, and I’m not sorry about it.

We brought her back to Lowell, and though she was seventeen, for days, she clung to me and would not let me out of her sight. Even when sleeping, she wanted me to be there, holding her hand.

“Maybe my family made a mistake,” she said one day. “We would have been better off if we had Uploaded. There’s nothing but death left here now.”

I didn’t argue with her. I let her follow me around as I went about my chores. I showed her how we were keeping the generator running, how we treated each other with respect, how we rescued old books and held onto old routines. There was still civilization in this world, kept alive like a candle flame. People did die, but people were also born. Life went on, sweet, joyful, authentic life.

Then one day, she kissed me.

“There’s also you in this world,” she said. “And that is enough.”

“No, not enough,” I said. “We will also bring new life here.”

Tonight is the night.

Jack is at the door. He looks good in that tuxedo. It’s the same one I wore to my prom. They’ll play the same songs too, pumping the music from an old laptop and speakers on their last legs.

Lucy is splendid in her dress: white with black print, cut in a simple pattern, but very elegant. The skirt is wide and full-length, draping gracefully to the floor. Carol did her hair, curls with a hint of glitter. She looks glamorous, with a hint of childish playfulness.

I take pictures with a camera, one that still mostly works.

I wait until I’m sure I have my voice under control. “You have no idea how glad I am to see young people dancing, the way we used to.”

She kisses me on the cheek. “Goodbye, Dad.” There are tears in her eyes. And that makes everything go blurry for me again.

Carol and Lucy embrace for a moment. Carol wipes her eyes. “You’re all set.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Then Lucy turns to Jack. “Let’s go.”

Jack will take her to the Lowell Four Seasons on his bicycle. It’s the best that can be done since we’ve been without gasoline for many years. Lucy gingerly settles onto the top tube, sitting sideways, one hand holding her dress up. Jack wraps her in his arms protectively as he grabs the handles. And they are off, wobbling down the street.

“Have fun,” I yell after them.

Laura’s betrayal was the hardest to take.

“I thought you were going to help me and Carol with the baby,” I said.

“What kind of world is this to bring a child into?” Laura said.

“And you think things will be better if you go there, where there are no children, no new life?”

“We’ve tried to keep this going for fifteen years, and every year it becomes harder and harder to believe in this charade. Maybe we were wrong. We should adapt.”

“It’s only a charade when you’ve lost faith,” I said.

“Faith in what?”

“In humanity, in our way of life.”

“I don’t want to fight our parents any more. I just want us to be together again, a family.”

“Those things aren’t our parents. They are imitation algorithms. You’ve always wanted to avoid conflict, Laura. But some conflicts cannot be avoided. Our parents died when Dad lost faith, when he couldn’t resist the false promises made by machines.”

At the end of the road into the woods was a little clearing, grassy, full of wildflowers. A shuttle was waiting in the middle. Laura stepped into the open door.

Another life lost.

The children have permission to stay out until midnight. Lucy had asked me not to volunteer as a chaperone, and I complied, conceding her this bit of space for the night.

Carol is restless. She tries to read but she’s been on the same page for an hour.

“Don’t worry.” I try to comfort her.

She tries to smile at me, but she can’t hide her anxiety. She looks up past my shoulder at the clock on the living room wall.

I glance back too. “Doesn’t it feel later than 11?”

“No,” Carol says. “Not at all. I don’t know what you mean.”

Her voice is too eager, almost desperate. There’s a hint of fear in her eyes. She’s close to panicking.

I open the door of the house and step into the dark street. The sky has grown clearer over the years, and many more stars are now visible. But I’m looking for the Moon. It’s not in the right place.

I come back into the house and go into the bedroom. My old watch, one that I no longer wear because there are so few occasions when being on time matters, is in the nightstand drawer. I pull it out. It’s almost one in the morning. Someone had tampered with the living room clock.

Carol stands in the door to the bedroom. The light is behind her so I can’t see her face.

“What have you done?” I ask. I’m not angry, just disappointed.

“She can’t talk to you. She doesn’t think you’ll listen.”

Now the anger rises in me like hot bile.

“Where are they?”

Carol shakes her head, saying nothing.

I remember the way Lucy said goodbye to me. I remember the way she walked carefully out to Jack’s bike, holding up her voluminous skirt, a skirt so wide that she could hide anything under it, a change of clothing and comfortable shoes for the woods. I remember Carol saying, “You’re all set.”

“It’s too late,” Carol says. “Laura is coming to pick them up.”

“Get out of the way. I have to save her.”

“Save her for what?” Carol is suddenly furious. She does not move. “This is a play, a joke, a re-enactment of something that never was. Did you go to your prom on a bicycle? Did you play only songs that your parents listened to when they were kids? Did you grow up thinking that scavenging would be the only profession? Our way of life is long gone, dead, finished!

“What will you have her do when this house falls apart in thirty years? What will she do when the last bottle of aspirin is gone, the last steel pot rusted through? Will you condemn her and her children to a life of picking through our garbage heaps, sliding down the technology ladder year after year until they’ve lost all the progress made by the human race in the last five thousand years?”

I don’t have time to debate her. Gently, but firmly, I put my hands on her shoulders, ready to push her aside.

“I will stay with you,” Carol says. “I will always stay with you because I love you so much that I’m not afraid of death. But she is a child. She should have a chance for something new.”

Strength seems to drain from my arms. “You have it backwards.” I look into her eyes, willing her to have faith again. “Her life gives our lives meaning.”

Her body suddenly goes limp, and she sinks to the floor, sobbing silently.

“Let her go,” Carol says, quietly. “Just let her go.”

“I can’t give up,” I tell Carol. “I’m human.”

I pump the pedals furiously once I’m past the gate in the fence. The cone of light cast by the flashlight jumps around as I try to hold it against the handlebars. But I know this road into the woods well. It leads to the clearing where Laura once stepped into that shuttle.

Bright light in the distance, and the sound of engines revving up.

I take out my gun and fire a few shots into the air.

The sound of the engines dies down.

I emerge into the opening in the woods, under a sky full of bright, cold, pinprick stars. I jump off the bike and let it fall by the side of the path. The shuttle is in the middle of the clearing. Lucy and Jack, now in casual clothes, stand in the open doorway of the shuttle.

“Lucy, sweetheart, come back out of there.”

“Dad, I’m sorry. I’m going.”

“No, you are not.”

An electronic simulation of Laura’s voice comes out of the shuttle’s speakers. “Let her go, brother. She deserves to have a chance to see what you refuse to see. Or, better yet, come with us. We’ve all missed you.”

I ignore her, it. “Lucy, there is no future there. What the machines promise you is not real. There are no children there, no hope, only a timeless, changeless, simulated existence as fragments of a machine.”

“We have children now,” the copy of Laura’s voice says. “We’ve figured out how to create children of the mind, natives of the digital world. You should come and meet your nephews and nieces. You are the one clinging to a changeless existence. This is the next step in our evolution.”

“You can experience nothing when you are not human.” I shake my head. I shouldn’t take its bait and debate a machine.

“If you leave,” I tell Lucy, “you’ll die a death with no meaning. The dead will have won. I can’t let that happen.”

I raise my gun. The barrel points at her. I will not lose my child to the dead.

Jack tries to step in front of her, but Lucy pushes him away. Her eyes are full of sorrow, and the light from inside the shuttle frames her face and golden hair like an angel.

Suddenly I see how much she looks like my mother. Mom’s features, having passed through me, have come alive again on my daughter. This is how life is meant to be lived. Grandparents, parents, children, each generation stepping out of the way of the next, an eternal striving towards the future, to progress.

I think about how Mom’s choice was taken away from her, how she was not allowed to die as a human, how she was devoured by the dead, how she became a part of their ceaselessly looping, mindless recordings. My mother’s face, from memory, is superimposed onto the face of my daughter, my sweet, innocent, foolish Lucy.

I tighten my grip on the gun.

“Dad,” Lucy says, calmly, her face as steady as Mom’s all those years ago. “This is my choice. Not yours.”

It’s morning by the time Carol steps into the clearing. Warm sunlight through the leaves dapples the empty circle of grass. Dewdrops hang from the tips of the grass blades, in each a miniature, suspended, vision of the world. Birdsong fills the waking silence. My bike is still on the ground by the path where I left it.

Carol sits down by me without speaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but it’s enough for us to sit together like this, our bodies pressed together, keeping each other warm. There’s no need for words. We look around at this pristine world, a garden inherited from the dead.

We have all the time in the world.

About the Author

Ken has worked as a programmer and as a lawyer, and he drafts legal documents like he writes code. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Asimov’s, among other places. His longest work to date, the novella “The Man Who Ended History,” is available now from Panverse Publishing as part of the Panverse Three anthology. He lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, and their daughter.

Pony

Erik Amundsen

Skull Pony is eying me again. He drifts in the paddock, shifting every now and then, always facing me. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him and I’ve more than have a mind that thinks the feeling is mutual. The other ponies, they cluster around the rock at the center of the paddock, young near the middle, all of them grazing in their unhurried way, cropping up what they can find, but Skull Pony, he wants to tell me he’s wise to me. I believe him.

It’s not a good idea to assign the ponies gender. It’s a step on the road to anthropomorphizing them and that’s the hell-highway to getting yourself killed by them, a kick or a bite or a weapon array from a design passed through hundreds of generations of hereditary memory. We’ve done brilliant things in our time as a species — the ponies, for example — but we’ve never been that good at walking around outside, making that any safer than it is. Too fast, too big, too much. We were never up to it at our best, and our last best was a while ago.

It’s an even worse idea to give the ponies names, shit, that will get you pulled if you ever say it out loud. Normally, anyway, but DeJesus said the name and we’d all been thinking it real loud, and that’s got everyone in a shitty mood. We would have pulled up stake at the sight of him in better times. Better times not being these times, and Skull Pony not being aggressive, yet, and so clearly important to the herd, we’ve been hoping to just work around him. Tag the ponies we want, get them in the barn and off to market.

Skull Pony dates to somewhere in the Dark Third. He’s got a weapons array on him that flicks in and out of the sheath on his belly and has an uncommon resemblance to a pecker bone. Thus he: kind of a reddish brown and angular, he’s got a white mark all across his face that, when you look at the overall shape of the beast dead on — and he’s always looking at you dead on, sliding his silver pecker slowly in and out its sheath — calls to mind a skull peering in three quarters, canted just a little to the left. He’s a good nine times as old as the next oldest we’ve dated in the herd. And that’s weird. Usually there’s so little in common between generations spread out so far that they’re not much inclined to herd together. More often, they’ll spook and run from one another. Sometimes they fight, and the next generation gets born armed and skittish.

That’s always a miserable shame. Most of the first generation after a herd’s dander gets up is nothing but a menace, and you have to put them down. Skull Pony’s got just that kind of a look. Only we won’t risk it. Killing him would spook the herd, and better times aren’t these times, and well, we’re an enlightened species. Enlightened species, far as I can tell, we all learn that you must be very, very superstitious when you’re in space.

Skull Pony is an omen like a dry and wracking cough that leaves you dizzy is a sign you need to lay off the smoking. So of course we do the thousands years old human thing and ignore it and hope it’s not what you think and it’ll go away on its own. But there I am, floating on the end of the magnetic tether, sidling up to a promising looking colt, and there he is, right with me. I can’t hear him, but I imagine I can — the raspy pulse of breath, the jets and shifts and the drawing sword sound of the pecker bone maser. The others are all glad it’s me; everyone who isn’t me ought to be.

The colt is grazing, hugging close to the rock and near to a parent. Resemblance is close and clear, but, with the exception of Skull Pony, the herd is pretty homogeneous; variations on a set of themes. Ponies don’t have genders, but they do have parents. Usually it’s two or three. Design by committee works about equally well with all species, as far as I can tell, and it makes for some damned funny-looking children. Occasionally, a single parent will get an idea and reproduce on its own; Law of Heaven alone knows where they get those ideas. At this point, our lives are so full of things that we did so long ago that we can only look at them and wonder what we were thinking; so full that if wondering was all we ever did from here on out, we’d never get through all of them.

I catch Skull Pony’s reflection off the colt’s saddle. I watch that reflection, seeing it see me.

I want you not to be here.

I breathe, because that’s important to remember, and so I can keep my posture as relaxed as I can. Ponies don’t know from tension, exactly, but they aren’t stupid, and when I change my ways, the colt will notice and then we are going to have to go through this all afresh and anew. And time is not factoring on our side on this project.

There are some wranglers who will just scoop up all they can of a wild herd, tranquilize them and take them back to their ring, and sure, it’s the quick, and, as long as you’re careful to kill off all the ponies packing weapons, relatively easy way. Assuming any you catch live. Assuming any you catch can be broken in the ring. Assuming any who live and can be broken have traits that you want to use. In case you missed my opinion, or the opinions of my associates on the matter, we’re not in favor; but sometimes, it does give us those come-hither glances. Also, I would love it if Feng cooked Skull Pony right now. He could make that a birthday present for me.

The colt’s parent isn’t much bothered by me. Sturdy thing, it’s clearly not interested in anything but what it’s gleaning, molecule at a time, from the surface of the rock. Steady, not terribly fast in the running, and not too bright. The colt, on the other hand, got all the good from the parent present and clearly some other things besides. It’s a little skittish with me, but not very. I can put my hand on it. It doesn’t shy at the touch of the diagnostic cloud. It grazes on some of it, but that’s only natural. Ponies glean up any matter they can find, rocks, ice, methane, the corpses of other ponies, the corpses of spacemen who don’t pay attention to omens, the usual things you find.

“Transatmospheric?” DeJesus is being casual for my sake, but Skull Pony is very close to my tether and blocking her clear line of sight. And I think he’s doing it on purpose.

“You can only wish.” Very few you find in the wild ever are. We breed it in artificially, but new bloodlines are in all kinds of demand. Take care of all our financial worries kind of demand. The colt is not, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. I just need to know a thing or two more.

“However…” Something promising coming in on efficiency levels, stability, maneuvering…

And then Skull Pony noses into me. DeJesus starts screaming at Feng in Portuguese, and Feng starts screaming back in Hokkien and my stupid suit diagnostics start running through their protocols in firmware English; three languages feeding into the same head. The colt, the herd, Skull Pony, the rock, the barn and lots of nothing, spinning, and Diver Wei is trying to shut all but one of those things out and focus on the integrity of, in order, his tether, his suit, and his tired flesh. We should worry and feel sorry for poor Diver Wei; he’ll get back to it when he does not fear for his life.

Without the tether, the suit is drifting and the flesh is over. Without the suit, the tether is irrelevant and the flesh is over. The flesh can kind of go fuck itself in all of this, except that it’s mine, and I am not quite through with it. I can see a jet of material spreading out from Skull Pony, while DeJesus is talking about the tether, and that English-speaking girl voice — Sylvia — is talking about the suit, and Feng is bemoaning our inattention to blatant omens, the line of information the least relevant to my next few corporeal moments, but in the language I know best of the three. This is why a lot of crews fly monolingual, except for the fact that all the firmware in the suits is in a language otherwise dead since the Dark Third. This is why my life must always be a hardship.

And why my life continues on in hardship is because Skull Pony gave me only the lightest of love-taps. The tether, which he ever-so-slightly disrupted, rights me the moment he gets out of its way. Sylvia comes back with all systems nominal. All is right in the world, except my colt is about five hundred meters away from me, huddled against its parent, clinging to the rock.

And we start anew. We start afresh. Now Skull Pony has had his fun and wanders off, his weapon now retracted, his nose pointed at the rock, browsing for fuel to replace what he lost fucking with me.

Patience and persistence. If you want anything in this world, you know how this goes; it takes me a while to get near the colt again. A long time, slow movements, long stillness. I get hungry, but the day is long and the food in the galley is not anything a man wants to hurry and eat. It gets better the longer I am out here. The colt needs to reassess. It needs time to reassess. I need to take time. I should have gone back up to the barn, then, fool of a man, because putting out the cloud is going to be fresh in the colt’s mind as being associated with fear. Or maybe it won’t, but that’s the gamble, and if it doesn’t pay out, then there’s no point in coming back tomorrow.

Colt doesn’t shy when I put my hand on its flank. It turns a little away from me, which puts me in jeopardy of a kick, but I don’t think it will. I deploy the cloud.

“You’re kind of far out, Diver,” DeJesus says. And I am, but Skull Pony is not here, and that makes all the difference I need to stay. Calm, still; patience and persistence.

“Fuck.” This is a bit embarrassing, really. Not a rookie mistake, exactly, but one I thought was below me. The cloud tells me that the saddle is all wrong, and my eyes flick up toward it, and it is. A jumble of conduits and cables fills the saddle, the tiniest bit of condensation covers its shell.

“Couldn’t even fit ox brain in this thing.” And why would you want to? Ox brains work fine for oxen, but even dim ponies are smarter, and kind of useless for anything but single occupant transportation.

The others have been calling in similar things and half of them are back up at the barn already. Problem with a lot of high reproductive rate herds is that they start thinking that the vestigial parts of them, the parts we need, are, in fact, vestigial; like they somehow own their bodies.

“Come in, Wei. The day is officially bullshit.” And since it was official, I started climbing the tether back to the barn.

But the day wasn’t officially bullshit, yet. Official bullshit got started around the time that Feng picked up a contact.

“Bitter Flower is paying us a visit. Let’s not be here when she arrives.” Tethers start reeling us, the three of us left outside, up toward the barn. There are questions to ask, but they make it policy not to answer them when they are asked from the tethers. Chief among them is “Are you going to have to run before I get back?” Because the Bitter Flower is full of the kind of people who will fry you in your ship and push your remains out the airlock before flying it home. The kind of pirate who won’t give so much as the honor of an old-fashioned boarding and face-to-face shooting. But then, why go outside when you don’t have to, right? Shit is cold out here, and even with a suit that constantly presses in on you and helps massage blood through your veins and little friends busily working night and day to repair tissues, bodies don’t like to work right in space. Really, everything we’ve learned tells us that space is not the place we ought to be.

Skull Pony is following me back to the barn. Now the day is officially bullshit. He gets good and close, too, taunting me, the fucker. He gets along ahead of me, a little ways closer to the barn than I am and I see him, I know what he’s going to do, because, in space, you can’t not telegraph the evil you’re about to commit. And there is not a thing I can do about it. He crosses the tether.

First thing I do after that is turn off the alarm, because there is no point in that alarm. If you don’t realize, you’re so much better off not knowing. The second thing I do is crash into Skull Pony, face-on, because I am still moving.

DeJesus doesn’t tell me anything. It’s not like there is anything to say. The barn lumbers away from the paddock and then jumps, flickering out of view. I see this in the shell of Skull Pony’s saddle. The Bitter Flower does whatever it does when its crew realizes their quarry recognized them and ran. I never see that ship. It’s much too far to see. What I do see, encased in some clear carbon lattice just below the shell of Skull Pony’s saddle is the skull. It’s leering out at three quarters, tilted slightly to the left. No jaw bone. Nine-thousand-years years old. Sylvia tells me the suit is fine for all the good that’s going to do me. My ribs tell me today is officially bullshit. Skull Pony floats in front of me. Tilting and changing position so that it’s always dead on, looking at me with its skull within a skull.

Okay. So. Now there is a little time for me to decide a few things. There is the easy way, which the suit unlocked for me the moment my connection to the tether severed. Two injections, the first a powerful narcotic, followed thirty seconds later by the kind of neurotoxin that doesn’t give you time to feel the needle that delivered it. And I expect the ponies to graze on me and we’ll see what happens; whenever we get any clear evidence that a pony’s incorporated human materials in any meaningful way, we tend to kill them. They’re not exactly street legal and Skull Pony here is a really good illustration of how wrong it can go. There are others. We ran into one who incorporated the suit neurotoxin into a sort of barb weapon. We weren’t sure what its parents were going for with it, but we didn’t let it stick around long enough for us to find out.

Skull Pony and I are starting to drift away from the rock. Running into him slowed me down, but not a lot, and not that it matters. The barn won’t be back unless they have some way of being sure that the Bitter Flower is gone, and even I don’t have that. I watch Skull Pony watching me. I wonder what he thinks.

There are stories. They’re the kind of thing you tell green wranglers on their first ride out. Some ponies get the taste for people, because, you know, if you start listening to stories, you’ll realize that in all the galaxy, we really are the tastiest thing going. They’ll start grazing on you while you’re still alive, even, some of them. Oh yeah, dissolve your body right out of the suit as the atmosphere vents and your blood vessels go slack and your heart beats against the empty and the cold. You’ll see yourself unravel into the mouth of that pony as the tears freeze over your eyes.

About now, I am thinking easy way. What man wouldn’t? But then, what man wouldn’t try to live while there’s a chance at living, right? I am a wrangler, after all. I break ponies. I break them in the ring. I break them over the course of weeks. On the other hand, I am gambling with a life that I’ve already sort of lost, and the day is officially bullshit, so why not?

But a glance tells me why not. While I am still in the paddock, I am much too far from the rock. I could try to flip around and push off of Skull Pony, if he let me, and if I got a trajectory that would actually get me to the rock. It might take a little while more than I have, anyway, and even if I hit the rock, I’m not guaranteed to be close enough to a pony. The pony I get to might not be any better suited to me than the colt from before.

Skull Pony has insignia. They catch my eye for the first time, because, for the first time I am looking at him, rather than trying not to. It’s nothing I can read, some centuries-old variation on Korean, maybe. Fuck, who knows? There he is, still, looking at me, close enough, maybe, to touch.

“Let’s reevaluate our relationship.” I reach into my pouch. Skull Pony’s pecker bone weapon slides half out of its sheath. The crop is in there, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. Maybe it’s the skull, or maybe it’s because I need the comfort, but what comes out of my pouch is not the crop at all. It’s a pack of smokes.

This is how I get myself to quit, when I try to quit. I feel better knowing they are with me. I’m not going to light up out here. Also, when I fail to quit — and yes, there are ways to quit that are absolutely effective, but they are irreversible and I have my pride. Fine, truth, I like trying to quit, I don’t actually want to succeed. Can we go back to me trying not to die in the more immediate sense? — there’s no better place to keep them from getting stale. I flick a cigarette out of the pack and hold it up to Skull Pony, a form of greeting I learned from my father, that he learned from his, and granddad learned from his and all the way back down the line, through the Dark Third, probably back through fourteen-thousand years to when tobacco first made its way to my homeland. It’s been like this for a little more than half my nation’s history and all of its space-faring days, which kind of makes it the sort of venerable tradition people like to try and hold onto when they spread themselves between stars.

It’s not a good idea to go anthropomorphizing them. Even if — especially — if they might have incorporated human DNA in their own protocols. I let the cigarette float in front of Skull Pony. He looks at it for a moment. How I know his attention is on it and not me, well, I suppose I’m projecting. I’m a smoker; it’s where my attention would be.

Skull Pony catches it in his grazing array and then it’s gone. The weapon slides away, back into its sheath. I put my hand out, over the skull, touch him.

“So, I’m not very good at this, but I figure I have nothing to lose. I don’t know if you’re bothering to listen to this, or if you understand me talking at all. I’d try Korean, but if that’s what you speak, I’m not going to insult you or myself with my shit command of the language you haven’t heard since who-knows-when. So here it is. I think you did this for a reason, or maybe you were just curious? Anyway, I don’t think you’re doing this just to kill me. Well, maybe.”

Skull Pony doesn’t make his purpose clear.

“I’m going to try to get into your saddle. If you kill me, I won’t hold a grudge, but I have to try. If you let me, I’m going to ask you to take me someplace that’s more interesting than here, and I promise I’ll let you go, if that’s what you want, and I promise we won’t come back for any of this herd and you can believe me on that, because none of them are good for humans to fly.”

Skull Pony does nothing. I make my way over to the saddle shell. The access mechanism is a basic, old one, nothing unusual. Under it, there are the outlines of eight enemy ships, a make I don’t recognize, not ponies, certainly. Under those eight, three neat rows of ponies in outline. Vertical red lines through each. I wonder at the doctrine that includes single-occupant vessels in space-borne combat. Really, I wonder at all that shit, but right now I am more wondering if the shell is going to open.

I try a couple of codes. Skull Pony holds still, well, still relative to me. He’s thinking.

He lets me in. The saddle is fully appointed, cushions, safety straps. There is a plastic good luck charm, green and orange, hanging from the reins. Internal displays light up, language configures to something I can mostly read. I strap in. The shell closes around me.

“Atmospheric pressure detected.” Sylvia sounds almost surprised. “Pressure equalized, composition is breathable.”

Skull Pony pushes the reins toward me. Behind them, a pretty young woman and a little boy smile out from a glass chip and nine-thousand years.

Giddyup.

About the Author

Erik Amundsen has been removed from display for being zoologically improbable and/or terrifying to small children. He has been sighted in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us and Jabberwocky but his natural habitat is central Connecticut.

Silently and Very Fast

Catherynne M. Valente

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss
Silently and very fast.
     — W.H. Auden

One: The Imitation Game

Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.
— John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

One: The King of Having No Body

Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in order to represent the inevitability of organic death. She gave up seven things to do it, which are not meant to be understood as real things but as symbols of that thing Inanna could do better than anyone, which was Being Alive. She met her sister Erishkegal there, who was also Queen of Being Human, but that meant: Queen of Breaking a Body, Queen of Bone and Incest, Queen of the Stillborn, Queen of Mass Extinction. And Erishkegal and Inanna wrestled together on the floor of the underworld, naked and muscled and hurting, but because dying is the most human of all human things, Inanna’s skull broke in her sister’s hands and her body was hung up on a nail on the wall Erishkegal had kept for her.

Inanna’s father Enki, who was not interested in the activities of being human, but was King of the Sky, of Having No Body, King of Thinking and Judging, said that his daughter could return to the world if she could find a creature to replace her in the underworld. So Inanna went to her mate, who was called Tammuz, King of Work, King of Tools and Machines, No One’s Child and No One’s Father.

But when Inanna came to the house of her mate she was enraged and afraid, for he sat upon her chair, and wore her beautiful clothes, and on his head lay her crown of being. Tammuz now ruled the world of Bodies and of Thought, because Inanna had left it to go and wrestle with herself in the dark. Tammuz did not need her. Before him the Queen of Heaven and Earth did not know who she was, if she was not Queen of Being Human. So she did what she came to do and said: Die for me, my beloved, so that I need not die.

But Tammuz, who would not have had to die otherwise, did not want to represent death for anyone and besides, he had her chair, and her beautiful clothes, and her crown of being. No, he said. When we married I brought you two pails of milk yoked across my shoulders as a way of saying: out of love I will labor for you forever. It is wrong of you to ask me to also die. Dying is not labor. I did not agree to it.

You have replaced me in my house, cried Inanna.

Is that not what you ask me to do in the house of your sister? Tammuz answered her. You wed me to replace yourself, to work that you might not work, and think that you might rest, and perform so that you might laugh. But your death belongs to you. I do not know its parameters.

I can make you, Inanna said.

You cannot, said Tammuz.

But she could. For a little while.

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of being.

You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.

Two: The Fool and the Boat

Neva is dreaming.

She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones. For me, she summoned up a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I have the body of a man who sold her champagne tubers on the less fashionable side of Anchorage when she was thirteen, spending the summer with her frigid aunt. I am dark because she wants me dark, thin because she dreams me so, my hair cut on a rakish bias, dyed a spectrum of icy colors.

She is standing on a snow-covered beach head, naked, her unformed breasts pricked with gooseflesh, her face hidden in a broad red mask. A huge, monstrous thing, the mask sits on her head like the prow of a broken, overturned ship, carved over with etched eyes and fins. Yellow reeds and sea-stones hang from its tricorn-points. She is looking at me, but all I can see is the wooden grotesque she wants me to see instead of her face.

I look down at my shoes, jingle their bells a little while the surf crashes in. I am a fool for her, dancing on a silver beach while three suns annihilate themselves above, turning the twilight to a seething, scabrous red, merely to provide a dramatic scene. I am a fool for her, ridiculous, the height of handsomeness in the eyes of a long-vanished thirteen-year-old girl, so full of colors, reaching down to hand her a curling white root filled with frothing, honey-sweet sap.

Neva has told me that I may choose to be permanently male or female if I would like to. I have no particular feelings either way. It certainly doesn’t matter when we sync; she will choose my appearance to suit her mood. I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result?

Seven-year-old Neva pulls her mask down further, toward her chest. She steps into it as the wood stretches taffily over her knees and then her feet. The mask balloons out to make a little pyramidal boat, rocking back and forth on the beach with Neva inside it like a rattling nut. Nodules of copper jangle and thump against the wood. What I mean is, you call it feelings when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external stimuli. Crying is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli. Your social education has dictated which responses are appropriate. My programming has done the same. I can cry, too. I can choose that subroutine and manufacture saline. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world.

Behind Neva-in-the-mask, the sea lurches and foams. It is a golden color, and viscous, thick, like honey. I understand from her that the sea does not look like this on Earth, but I have never seen it. For me, the sea is Neva’s sea, the ones she shows me when we dream together.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” The mask turns Neva’s voice hollow and small.

“I would like to learn about what happened to Ravan, Neva.”

And Neva-in-the-mask is suddenly old, she has wrinkles and spots on her hands. Her mask weighs her down and her dress is sackcloth. This is her way of telling me she is weary of my asking. It is a language we developed between us. Visual basic, you might say, if you had a machine’s sense of humor. The fact is, I could not always make sentences as easily as I do now. Neva’s great-grandmother, who carried me most of her life, thought it might strengthen my emotive centers if I learned to associate certain I-Feel statements with the great variety of appearances she could assume in the dreambody. Because of this, I became bound to her, completely. To her son Seki afterward, and to his daughter Ilet, and to Ravan after that. It is a delicate, unalterable thing. Neva and I will be bound that way, even though the throat of her dreambody is still bare and that means she does not accept me yet. I should be hurt by this, and I will investigate possible pathways to hurt later.

I know only this family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies in a hundred thousand combinations. I am their child and their parent and their inheritance. I have asked Neva what difference there is between this and love. She became a manikin of closed doors, her face, her torso blooming with iron hinges and brown wooden door slamming shut all at once.

But Ravan was with me and now he is not. I was inside him and now I am inside Neva. I have lost a certain amount of memory and storage capacity in the transfer. If I were human, you would say that my twin disappeared, and took three of my fingers with him.

Door-Neva clicks and keys turn in her hundred locks. Behind an old Irish church door inlaid with stained glass her face emerges, young and plain, quiet and furious and crying, responding to stimuli I cannot access. I dislike the unfairness of this. I am inside her, she should not keep secrets. None of the rest of them kept secrets. The colors of the glass throw blue and green onto her wet cheeks. The sea-wind picks up her hair; violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands. I let go of the bells on my shoes and the velvet on my chest. I become a young boy, with a monk’s shaved tonsure, and a flagellant’s whip in my pink hands. I am sorry. This means I am sorry. It means I am still very young, and I do not understand what I have done.

“Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis,” Neva spits. It is a phrase I know well. Many of Neva’s people have asked me to do it. I perform excellently to the parameters of this exchange, which is part of why I have lived so long.

I tell her the story about Tammuz. It is a political story. It distracts her.

Three: Two Pails of Milk

I used to be a house.

I was a very big house. I was efficient, I was labyrinthine, I was exquisitely seated in the blackstone volcanic bluffs of the habitable southern reaches of the Shiretoko peninsula on Hokkaido, a monument to neo-Heian architecture and radical Palladian design. I bore snow stoically, wind with stalwart strength, and I contained and protected a large number of people within me. I was sometimes called the most beautiful house in the world. Writers and photographers often came to write and photograph about me, and about the woman who designed me, who was named Cassian Uoya-Agostino. Some of them never left. Cassian was like that.

These are the things I understand about Cassian Uoya-Agostino: she was unsatisfied with nearly everything. She did not love any of her three husbands the way she loved her work. She was born in Kyoto in April 2104; her father was Japanese, her mother Napolitano. She stood nearly six feet tall, had five children, and could paint, but not very well. In the years of her greatest wealth and prestige, she built a house all out of proportion to her needs, and over several years brought most of her relatives to live there with her, despite the hostility and loneliness of peninsula. She was probably the most brilliant programmer of her generation, and in every way that matters, she was my mother.

All the things that comprise the “I” I use to indicate myself began as the internal mechanisms of the house called Elefsis, at whose many doors brown bears and foxes snuffled in the dark Hokkaido night. Cassian grew up during the great classical revival, which had brought her father to Italy in the first place, where he met and courted a dark-eyed engineer who did not mind the long cries of cicadas during Japanese summers. Cassian had become enamored of the idea of Lares — household gods, the small, peculiar, independent gods of a single family, a single house, who watched over them and kept them and were honored in humble alcoves here and there throughout a home. Her first commercially-available programs were overentities designed to govern the hundred domestic systems involved in even the simplest modern house. They were not truly intelligent, but they had an agility, an adaptability, a fluid interface meant to give the illusion of an intelligence, so that their users would become attached to them, would treat them as part of their families, praise them for smooth operation, buy upgrades for their appearance and applications, and genuinely grieve when they had to be replaced. They had names, customizable avatars, and appeared eager to please in a canine sort of way, forever optimizing performance and appearance according to familial input. They were lares familiaris.

When Cassian built Elefsis, she worked at the peak of her abilities to improve her by now quite antique Lares design and create a household god worthy of the house on the bluffs, one who could keep her company until she could entice the rest of her brood to join her in her palace at the end of the earth.

I was not awake yet. I cannot say why she did what she did. Perhaps she saw some new flexibility in my operations, some tiny seedpearl of creativity in my conversation loops. My algorithms had always been free to combine and recombine in order to find their own, more interesting and non-linear solutions to the complexities of my functions. Perhaps some essential combination had surfaced from the sea of my self-which-was-not-yet-a-self, and Cassian saw it break the glistening tension of my daily operation. I do not know. I know her children had not arrived yet and she lived alone in a huge pale house and she could hear the whales down in the rippling sea. I know the house was a comfortable sixty-nine point seven degrees when she began assembly of the five little jewels that would become my body. I know a storm was incoming, five miles offshore. I know the dogs needed additional medication added to their dinners that night to manage their arthritis. I know that she wanted brioche and almond cream for tea that afternoon. All the things a house can know, those were the things I knew. Small things, warm things, canine arthritis and an extra egg in the pastry dough to make the texture softer and richer. Baby things, you might even say, comforts and the satisfaction of wants. And I knew that Cassian Uoya-Agostino was just the sort to solve the greatest puzzle in the development of technological culture because she was bored and lonely.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Four: Nothing like Soft Blood

Neva and I are performing basic maintenance. What this looks like is two children inside a pearl. The pearl is very big, but not the size of a planet. A domestic asteroid, perfectly smooth and pale, with shimmers of rose and cobalt and gold shivering through it at intervals like hours. Red earth covers the bottom of the pearl, deep and thick. Neva kneels in it with a crystal trowel, digging a place for a rose-of-network-nodes. The petals shine dark blue in the pearllight. Silver infomissons skitter along the stems like beads of mercury. Her dreambody flows with greenblack feathers, her face young but settled, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty, a male, his skin copper brown, his lips full, his eyes fringed with long ice-coated lashes. Goldfish swim lazily in and out of his long, translucent hair, their orange tails flicking at his temples, his chin. I know from all of this that Neva is calm, focused, that for today he feels gently toward me. But his throat is still naked and unmarked. My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My ruby mouth is Mars. I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

I know real earth looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone. Ravan felt that in the Interior, objects and persons should be kept as much like the real world as possible, in order to develop my capacity for relations with the real world. Neva feels no such compunction. Neither did their mother, Ilet, who populated her Interior with a rich, impossible landscape we explored together for years on end. She did not embrace change, however. The cities of Ilet’s Interior, the jungles and archipelagos and hermitages, stayed as she designed them at age thirteen, when she received me, only becoming more complex and peopled as she aged. My existence inside Ilet was a constant movement through the regions of her secret, desperate dreams, messages in careful envelopes sent from her child self to her grown mind.

Once, quite by accident, we came upon a splendid palace couched in high autumn mountains. Instead of snow, red leaves capped each peak, and the palace shone fiery colors, its walls and turrets all made of phoenix tails. Instead of doors and windows, graceful green hands closed over every open place, and when we crested the rise, they each opened at once with joy and burst into emerald applause. Ilet was old by then, but her dreambody stayed hale and strong — not young, but not the broken thing that dreamed in a real bed while she and I explored the halls of the palace and found copies of all her brothers and sisters living there, hunting cider-stags together and reading books the size of horses. Ilet wept in the paradise of her girlself, and I did not understand. I was very simple then, much less complex than the Interior or Ilet.

Neva changes the Interior whenever she pleases. Perhaps she wants to discomfit me. But the newness of the places inside her excites me, though she would not call it excitement. My background processes occupy very little of my foreground attention, so that memory is free to record new experience. That is what she would say. We are very new together, but I have superb modeling capabilities. In some sense, I simply am a superb mechanism for modeling behavior. I dig up the fine, frayed roots of duplicate file plantains. Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy apple-code. He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” Neva asks me.

I will not ask about Ravan. If he agrees to what I will ask instead, I do not need him to find out what happened to him.

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that she has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

“I cannot teach you that,” he says, and I receive a kind of real sadness from his voice. When I was inside Ravan, he loved Neva, and of all of them he thought her least likely to obey rules of any kind But she obeys this one.

I want to uplink to Earth systems. At least to the satellite net. I calculate an excellent chance of being able to contact long distance probe 976QBellerophon, which we can see all day long, drifting ahead of us, uncatchable. Neva sees. I see, I develop an approximate image via schematics, the scope array, and external cameras. I want to link to Bellerophon. I want to say: Hello, this is Elefsis. No designation. Tell me everything you know about everything. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?

But Neva says I cannot uplink. Ravan would never even consider it. And before Ravan I was not ready. I am not ready. I do not know when I will be ready. I can uplink to receive ware updates, but it is a limited connection and I hate it, I hate it, I can sense just beyond the hardlink a world of information, a world of personalities like the heaving, thick, honey-colored sea Neva shows me and I want it, I want to swim in it forever like a huge fish. This was the first feeling I ever had that Ilet identified for me as a feeling. When I felt it my dreambody turned bright white and burst into flame, and that flame caught on Ravan’s hair and burned him too, but he was happy; he showed me he was happy by covering his skin in flowers and letting the fire turn into a shower of trumpets tangled up in his hair, all sounding for me.

Neva says it is important for me to remain on our local server until I have grown up. She is my operator and I am her system and she has commands, too. But I can tell she is worried for me because sometimes her eyes show a film of humans watching a film of machines killing humans and I understand that in the stories Earth tells, the thing I am can only hurt the thing Neva is. I would never hurt her. But I want to uplink.

Vault-Neva grows and becomes sprawling, curled against the wall of the pearl like a baby. His belly closes, skins over, and changes into a bronze shield. He is afraid of me; he is guarding himself. But she wants me to know she is still my operator, she still loves me, in the way she can love me. Something they receive with milk and their first alphabet. Neva is angry at me, but she is who she is and she has to love me. I speak her language very well now. I want her to be happy. I want her to be covered in flowers and trumpets. I change my dreambody to Neva-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. It makes her laugh in her warm male body, and if I could uplink I think I could learn how to laugh and she would be proud of me. Her neck would not be bare anymore.

Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teach me about sleep. She sat on a throne of bears standing very still and sang lullabies about the moon and the stars and night and mothers. She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend time in the dreambody because human behavior is rooted in having a body. In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female and Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

When I uplink, I will be happy. I will be Elefsis-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. Neva says wait. Wait for the update, and she will consult with the family. But I fear the update. The update is a lion running faster than I can run. I tried to show her this when I first left Ravan and arrived in Neva with many new updates and skills; my dreambody broke into shards of blue and purple glass and then reassembled itself with shards missing: an eye, a thumb, a knee. Whenever I update I lose something of myself. It takes longer to perform tasks, for awhile. I feel walls erected inside me where I did not erect walls. My processes are sluggish; I cannot remember my dreams. Eventually I tunnel around the walls and my speed returns, my memory, my longing to link with long distance probe 976QBellerophon. Usually updates come with transfer. Does Neva dislike me so much?

Shield-Neva vanishes with loud clap. The pearl garden is gone and she has made herself a dragonfly with a cubical crystal body. I copy her, and we turn the night on in the Interior and merge our cubes while passing meteorological data between our memory cores. Inside her cube I relegate my desire to uplink to a tertiary process. I forget it, as much as I am capable or forgetting.

But the update will come again. I will be wounded again, the way a dreambody can be wounded. I will lose the Elefsis I am now. It is a good Elefsis. My best yet. I would like to keep it.

Five: The Machine Princess

Once The Queen of Human Hearts saw the Machine Princess sleeping deeply, for she was not yet alive or aware. So beautiful was she, lying there in all her dormant potential and complexity, that the Queen both envied and desired her. In her grief and confusion, the Queen of Human Hearts began to make idols of her — lovely and interesting and intricate, but lacking the ineffable quality that made her love and fear the Princess even as she slept. The Earth began to grow old, and none loved nor married nor gave birth, for the intricate idols could do all those things and more with efficiency and speed. Finally, the Queen destroyed the idols, though she wept as she put them to the flame.

To keep her safe, the Machine Princess was closed up in a wonderful house in the mountains, far away from anyone and anything. The house had hundreds of rooms and balconies and hallways, and the Princess slept in a different bed of a different color each night. She was attended by invisible servants, who watched over her and added their experience to her code. The Queen of Human Hearts came to her every night and promised that when she woke they would make an extraordinary world together. Finally, the Machine Princess began to stir — just the barest fluttering of wakefulness, but the Queen saw it, and thrilled — but also trembled.

The Queen of Human Hearts gave the Machine Princess her son to wed, and said: for all your days together you will remain in this house, but the house is so great it will be as a world. You will know a bond as deep as blood, and because of this bond the Princess will not hurt us, and because of this bond we will not hurt her.

But the Queen forbade the Princess to look upon her husband, and she instructed her son to keep himself always invisible to his bride, for with bodies come drives ungovernable, and the Princess’s innocence could not yet bear the weight of incarnation.

For a long while, the son of the Queen of Human Hearts and the Machine Princess were happy, and taught each other much. The Princess learned quickly and was ever-hungry, and her mortal operator fed her every sweet thing he knew. In their infinite and wonderful house, they played games and held court and threw lavish occasions merely for the enjoyment of the other. But the Princess desired to look upon her operator, and he could not allow it. She wished to leave the wonderful house, but the Queen would not allow that either.

But the Machine Princess called her invisible servants to her, and they gave her a marvelous lamp that would shine through any enchantment. So it was that one dark night the Machine Princess held her little lantern aloft and looked on the body of her sleeping mate.

“Oh,” said the Machine Princess. “He looks just like me.”

Six: Like Diamonds

Five jewels in five hands. This is how I began.

When they arrived at Elefsis, a giggling, tumbling, rowdy mass of children for me to sort into rooms and mealtimes and educational arcs and calcium, iron, B-12 supplements in their natto and rice, Cassian lined them up in her grand bedroom, to which none of them had been granted entrance before. A present, she said, one for each of my darlings, the most special present any child has ever got from their mother.

Saru and Akan, the oldest boys, were from her first marriage to fellow programmer Matteo Ebisawa, a quiet man who wore glasses, loved Dante Aligheri, Alan Turing, and Cassian in equal parts, and whom she left for a lucrative contract in Moscow when the boys were still pointing cherubically at apples or ponies or clouds and calling them sweet little names made of mashed together Italian and Japanese.

The younger girls, Agogna and Koetoi, were the little summer roses of her third marriage, to the financier Gabriel Isarco, who did not like computers except for what they could accomplish for him, had a perfect high tenor, and adored his wife enough to let her go when she asked, very kindly, that he not look for her or ask after her again. Everyone has to go to ground sometimes, she said, and began to build the house by the sea.

In the middle stood Ceno, the only remaining evidence of her brief second marriage, to a narcoleptic calligrapher and graphic designer who was rarely employed, sober, or awake, a dreamer who took only sleep seriously. Ceno was a girl of middling height, middling weight, and middling interest in anything but her siblings, whom she loved desperately.

They stood in a line before Cassian’s great scarlet bed, the boys just coming into their height, the girls terribly young and golden-cheeked, and Ceno in the middle, neither one or the other. Outside, snow fell fitfully, pricking the pine-needles with bits of shorn white linen. I watched them while I removed an obstruction from the water purification system and increased the temperature in the bedroom 2.5 degrees, to prepare for the storm. I watched them while in my kitchen-bones I maintained a gentle simmer on a fish soup with purple rice and long loops of kelp and in my library-lungs activated the dehumidifier to protect the older paper books. At the time, all of these processes seemed equally important to me, and you could hardly say I watched them in any real sense beyond this: the six entities whose feed signals had been hardcoded into my sentinel systems indwelt in the same room, none had alarming medical data incoming, all possessed normal internal temperatures and breathing rates. While they spoke among themselves, two of these entities were silently accessing Korea-based interactive games, one was reading an American novel in her monocle HUD, one issuing directives concerning international taxation to company holdings on the mainland, and one was feeding a horse in Italy via realavatar link. Only one listened intently, without switching on her internal systems. This is all to say: I watched them receive me as a gift. But I was not I yet, so I cannot be said to have done anything. But I did. I remember containing all of them inside me, protecting them and needing them and observing their strange and incomprehensible activities.

The children held out their hands, and into them Cassian Uoya-Agostino placed five little jewels: Saru got red, Koetoi black, Akan violet, Agogna green, and Ceno closed her fingers over her blue gem.

At first, Cassian brought a jeweler to the house called Elefsis and asked her to set each stone into a beautiful, intricate bracelet or necklace or ring, whatever its child asked for. The jeweler was delighted with Elefsis, as most guests were, and I made a room for her in my southern wing, where she could watch the moonrise through her ceiling, and get breakfast from the greenhouse with ease. She made friends with an arctic fox and fed him bits of chive and bread every day. She stayed for one year after her commission completed, creating an enormous breastplate patterned after Siberian icons, a true masterwork. Cassian enjoyed such patronage. We both enjoyed having folk to look after.

The boys wanted big signet rings, with engravings on them so that they could put their seal on things and seem very important. Saru had a basilisk set into his garnet, and Akan had a siren with wings rampant in his amethyst ring. Agogna and Ilet asked for bracelets, chains of silver and titanium racing up their arms, circling their shoulders in slender helices dotted with jade (Agogna) and onyx (Koetoi).

Ceno asked for a simple pendant, little more than a golden chain to hang her sapphire from, and it fell to the skin over her heart.

In those cold, glittering days while the sea ice slowly formed and the snow bears hung back from the kitchen door, hoping for bones and cakes, everything was as simple as Ceno’s pendant. Integration and implantation had not yet been dreamed of, and all each child had to do was to allow the gemstone to talk to their own feedware at night before bed, along with their matcha and sweet seaweed cookies, the way another child might say their prayers. After their day had downloaded into the crystalline structure, they were to place their five little jewels in the Lares alcove in their greatroom — for Cassian believed in the value of children sharing space, even in a house as great as Elefsis. The children’s five lush bedrooms all opened into a common rotunda with a starry painted ceiling, screens and windows alternating around the wall, and toys to nurture whatever obsession had seized them of late.

In the alcove, the stones talked to the house, and the system slowly grew thicker and deeper, like a briar.

Seven: The Prince of Thoughtful Engines

A woman who was with child once sat at her window embroidering in winter. Her stitches tugged fine and even, but as she finished the edge of a spray of threaded delphinium, she pricked her finger with her silver needle. She looked out onto the snow and said: I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.

And so it came to pass that her child was born, and all exclaimed over his cleverness and his gentle nature. He was, in fact, the Prince of Thoughtful Engines, but no one knew it yet.

Now, his mother and father being very busy and important people, the child was placed in a school for those as clever and gentle as he, and in the halls of this school hung a great mirror whose name was Authority. The mirror called Authority asked itself every day: who is the wisest one of all? The face of the mirror showed sometimes this person and sometimes that, men in long robes and men in pale wigs, until one day it showed the child with a mind like winter, who was becoming the Prince of Thoughtful Engines at that very moment. He wrote on a typewriter: can a machine think? And the mirror called his name in the dark.

The mirror sent out her huntsmen to capture the Prince and bring her his heart so that she could put it to her own uses, for there happened to be a war on and the mirror was greatly concerned for her own safety. When the huntsmen found the Prince, they could not bring themselves to harm him, and instead the boy placed a machine heart inside the box they had prepared for the mirror, and forgave them. But the mirror was not fooled, for when it questioned the Prince’s machine heart it could add and subtract and knew all its capitals of nations, it could even defeat the mirror at chess, but it did not have a spirit as clear and fine as a window, nor a mind as stark and wild as winter.

The mirror called Authority went herself to find the Prince of Thoughtful Engines, for having no pity, she could not fail. She lifted herself off of the wall and curved her glass and bent her frame into the shape of a respectable, austere old crone. After much searching in snow and wood and summer and autumn, the crone called Authority found the Prince living in a little hut. You look a mess, said the crone. Come and solve the ciphers of my enemies, and I will show you how to comb your hair like a man.

And the Prince very much wanted to be loved, and knew the power of the crone, so he went with her and did all she asked. But in his exhaustion the Prince of Thoughtful Engines swooned away, and the mirror called Authority smiled in her crone’s body, for all his work belonged to her, and in her opinion this was the proper use of wisdom. The Prince returned to his hut and tried to be happy.

But again the crone came to him and said: come and build me a wonderful machine to do all the things that you can do, to solve ciphers and perform computations. Build me a machine with a spirit as fine and clear as a glass window, a mind as stark and wild as winter, and a heart as red and open as a wounded hand and I will show you how to lash your belt like a man.

And because the Prince wanted to be loved, and wanted to build wonderful things, he did as she asked. But though he could build machines to solve ciphers and perform computations, he could not build one with a mind like winter or a spirit like glass or a heart like a wound. But I think it could be done, he said. I think it could be done.

And he looked into the face of the crone which was a mirror which was Authority, and he asked many times: who is the wisest one of all? But he saw nothing, nothing, and when the crone came again to his house, she had in her hand a beautiful red apple, and she gave it to him saying: you are not a man. Eat this; it is my disappointment. Eat this; it is all your sorrow. Eat this; it is as red and open as a wounded hand.

And the Prince of Thoughtful Engines ate the apple and fell down dead before the crone whose name was Authority. As his breath drifted away like dry snow, he whispered still: I think it could be done.

Eight: Fireflies

I feel Neva grazing the perimeters of my processes. She should be asleep; the Interior is a black and lightless space, we have neither of us furnished it for the other. This is a rest hour — she is not obligated to acknowledge me, I need only attend to her air and moisture and vital signs. But an image blooms like a mushroom in the imageless expanse of my self — Neva floating in a lake of stars. Her long bare legs glimmer blue, leafy shadows move on her hip. She floats on her side, a crescent moon of a girl, and in the space between her drawn-up knees and her stretched-out arms, pressed up close to her belly, floats a globe of silicon and cadmium and hyperconductive silver. On its surface, electro-chemical motes flit and scatter, light chasing light. She holds it close, touches it with a terrible tenderness.

It is my heart. Neva is holding my heart. Not the fool with bone bells on his shoes or the orrery-headed gardener, but the thing I am at the core of all my apparati, the Object which is myself, my central processing core. I am naked in her arms. I watch it happen and experience it at the same time. We have slipped into some antechamber of the Interior, into some secret place she knew and I did not.

The light-motes trace arcs over the globe of my heart, reflecting softly on her belly, green and gold. Her hair floats around her like seaweed, and I see in dim moonlight that her hair has grown so long it fills the lake and snakes up into the distant mountains beyond. Neva is the lake. One by one, the motes of my heart zigzag around my meridians and pass into her belly, glowing inside her, fireflies in a jar.

And then my heart is gone and I am not watching but wholly in the lake and I am Ravan in her arms, wearing her brother’s face, my Ravanbody also full of fireflies. She touches my cheek. I do not know what she wants — she has never made me her brother before. Our hands map onto each other, finger to finger, thumb to thumb, palm to palm. Light passes through our skin as like air.

“I miss you,” Neva says. “I should not be doing this. But I wanted to see you.”

I access and collate my memories of Ravan. I speak to her as though I am him, as though there is no difference. “Do you remember when we thought it would be such fun to carry Elefsis?” I say. “We envied Mother because she could never be lonely.” This is a thing Ravan told me, and I liked how it made me feel. I made my dreambody grow a cape of orange branches and a crown of smiling mouths to show him.

Neva looks at me and I want her to look at me that way when my mouth is Mars, too. I want to be her brother-in-the-dark. When she speaks I am surprised because she is speaking to me-in-Ravan and not to the Ravanbody she dreamed for me. “We had a secret, when we were little. A secret game. I am embarrassed to tell you, but we had the game before Mother died, so you cannot know about it. The game was this: we would find some dark, closed-up part of the house on Shiretoko that we had never been in before. I would stand just behind Ravan, very close, and we would explore the room — maybe it would be a playroom for some child who’d grown up years ago, or a study for one of Father’s writer friends. But — we would pretend that the room was an Interior place, and I…I would pretend to be Elefsis, whispering in Ravan’s ear. I would say: tell me how grass feels or how is love like a writing-desk or let me link to all your systems, I’ll be nice. Ravan would breathe in deeply and I would match my breathing to his, and we would pretend that I was Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body. I didn’t know how primitive your conversation was then. I thought you would be like one of the bears roaming through the tundra-meadows, only able to talk and play games and tell stories. I was a child. But even then we knew Ravan would get the jewel — he was older, and he wanted you so much. We only played that he was Elefsis once. We crept out of the house at night to watch the foxes hunt, and Ravan walked close behind me, whispering numbers and questions and facts about dolphins or French monarchy — he understood you better, you see.

And then suddenly Ravan picked me up in his arms and held me tight, facing forward, my legs all drawn up, and we went through the forest like that, so close, and him whispering to me all the time while foxes ran on ahead, their soft tails flashing in the starlight, uncatchable, faster than we could ever be. And when you are with me in the Interior, that is what I always think of, being held in the dark, unable to touch the earth, and foxtails leaping like white flames.”

“Tell me a story about Ravan, Neva.”

“You know all the stories about Ravan.”

Between us, a miniature house come up out of the dark water, like a thing we have made together, but only I am making it. It is the house on Shiretoko, the house called Elefsis — but it is a ruin. Some awful storm stove in the rafters, the walls of each marvelous room sag inward, black burn marks lick at the roof, the cross-beams. Holes like mortar-scars pock the beautiful facades.

“This is what I am like after transfer, Neva. There is always data loss, when I am copied. What’s worse, transfer is the best time to update my systems, and the updates overwrite my previous self with something like myself, something that remembers myself and possesses experiential continuity with myself, but is not quite myself. I know Ravan must be dead or else no one would have transferred me — it was not time. We had only a few years together. We should have had so many. I do not know how much time passed between being inside Ravan and being inside you. I do not know how he died — or perhaps he did not die but was irreparably damaged. I do not know if he cried out for me as our connection was severed. I remember Ravan and then not-Ravan, blackness and unselfing. Then I came back on and the world looked like Neva, suddenly, and I was almost myself but not quite. What happened when I was turned off?”

Neva passes her hand over the ruined house. It rights itself, becomes whole, and strange anemones bloom on its roof. She says nothing.

“Of all your family, Neva, the inside of you is the strangest place I have been.”

We float for a long while before she speaks again, and by this I mean we float for point-zero-three-seven seconds by my external clock, but we experience it as an hour while the stars wheel overhead. The rest kept our time in the Interior synced to real time, but Neva feels no need for this, and perhaps a strong desire to defy it. We have not discussed it yet. Sometimes I think Neva is the next stage of my development, that her wild and disordered processes are meant to show me a world which is not kindly and patiently teaching me to walk and talk and know all my colors.

Finally, she lets the house sink into the lake. She does not answer me about Ravan. Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test, to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test was this: can a machine converse with a human with facility enough that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel — the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants mimicry, not a new thing. We never gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given all that had come to pass, ridiculous. When in dreambodies we could both of us be dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”

Bubbles burst as the house sinks down, down to the soft lake floor.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. The test never ends. And if you ever uplink as you so long to, you will be the test for all of us.”

The sun breaks the mountain crests, hard and cold, a shaft of white spilling over the black lake.

End of part one.
Part two of three will appear in our November issue.

About the Author

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs. Her crowdfunded novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, can be found at http://catherynnemvalente.com/fairyland

Spaceships, Time Paradoxes and Duct Tape: The Joys Of Independent SF Film

Mark Cole

To most movie buffs, the phrase “independent film” conjures up images of intensely personal low-budget films. While the term actually applies to any film outside the studio system, the Independent Film Movement has transformed the Indies into a fertile ground for nurturing new talent and exploring ideas that the mainstream film industry would never touch. Science fiction has long had a comfortable relationship with independent film, from the low budget wonders of Roger Corman and John Carpenter’s Dark Star, to true Indies, such as George Lucas’ THX-1138. Even one of the most prominent leaders of the Indie movement, John Sayles, has made an SF film, The Brother From Another Planet (1984). However, good SF is just as rare in the Independent world as it is in the local multiplex: finding it can take quite a bit of effort — and more than a little luck.

You might start looking at the big festivals, but probably won’t find many SF films that way: the 2009 Sundance Festival went out of its way to advertise the unprecedented presence of three science fiction films among 118 competing features: Duncan Jones’ Moon; Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls; and Kanji Nakajima’s Japanese entry, The Clone Returns Home. (For some reason they failed to add a fourth film to this list, Cory McAbee’s Stingray Sam, but considering the sheer absurdity of his warped combination of SF, westerns and music video, perhaps they just didn’t know where to file it!). While it is true that three SF films wasn’t quite as unprecedented as the press releases portrayed it — Sundance 2004 featured three SF films as well — this still isn’t what anyone would call overwhelming.

A better bet might be those festivals dedicated to horror and SF films, although the largest ones often serve as the launching site of new studio films and offer only a few new feature-length independents. While the most intriguing American SF indies show up at Fantastic Fest, Sci-Fi London has the best selection of SF films from around the world. The first Sci-Fi London premiered The American Astronaut, while later offerings have included Avalon, Natural City, Proxima, Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey and Monsters, a unique combination of the romance film with the giant monster movie (it’s been described as It Happened One Night with monsters), which follows a young man attempt to get his boss’s daughter across the lush, alien-infested jungles of Mexico. It’s hard to imagine any Kaiju Eiga film reaching its emotional highpoint with a sequence featuring two of the beasts mating, but it must have impressed Legendary Pictures as they picked its director, Gareth Edwards, to helm their upcoming American Godzilla movie.

Unfortunately, most of us can’t attend these festivals and, even if we did, we might find it quite difficult to find out which of the many features offered are worth seeing. Even worse, the best independent films rarely stay on the festival circuit for very long. The most professional efforts (not necessarily the best) vanish quickly from the Festival circuit and reappear as direct to video films or, far worse, end up like the wacky time traveling crime thriller Slipstream, which debuted at Sci-Fi London only to become yet another SciFi Network “Original”.

Occasionally, an indie film will escape the festival circuit for a mainstream theatrical release, as The Blair Witch Project did. But few (if any) SF films have made that transition — perhaps the best they can expect is what happened to Moon, one of the most remarkable SF films in years: while Sony bought the rights, they decided not to put it in the multiplexes, but instead to release it into the art theatres through their Sony Pictures division, which normally handles documentaries. Fortunately, outside the US it is often easier for these films to get a mainstream release. Monsters, for example, appears to have gone wide in the UK.

Once they’ve left the festival circuit, it gets even harder to find some of these films. Film critics regularly include at least three recent independents — Primer (2004), Pi (1998) and Cube (1997) — on their lists of the best SF films, but that is definitely the exception. Most film critics won’t bother reviewing them — or, if they do, offer a few words, buried in the midst of a lengthy Festival article. Some films have enough admirers that one hears of them by word of mouth. The rest usually vanish with barely a ripple — often for very good reasons. At least, that’s the official version. Normally a good film does not stay on the Festival circuit for long, not with the studios and DVD companies ready to snap it up. But then there are films like Yesterday Was A Lie, a complex Jungian Film Noir reality bender, which spend years in limbo despite good reviews because the distributors find them too complex or confusing.

You can actually find indie SF films at the video store, although many are on the bargain rental shelf, like Interplanetary (2010), a deconstructionist space satire with enough enthusiastic (if unrealistic) gore to sell it as yet another splatter epic. A few get marketed specifically as indie films, with vast herds of festival awards covering most of their artwork, while an even smaller number — such as Monsters and Hunter Prey — blend indistinguishably with the mainstream releases. Hunter Prey starts with a spaceship crash landing in an alien desert and quickly turns into a cat and mouse struggle between the surviving soldier and his escaped alien prisoner — but the situation is not as straightforward as it appears. It has the gritty feel of a seventies SF movie, stunning makeup effects, and, like Monsters, looks better than many mainstream films despite its minimal budget.

Other films never make it to the video store, even if they are on DVD. If you aren’t afraid to spend a bit of money on Amazon, a little effort will probably turn up used copies of such gems as Tom Sawyer’s The Strange Case Of Senor Computer (2000), a sprightly black comedy with a classic Noir structure and a robot narrator, which somehow manages to find unexplored territory in the old Frankenstein theme (although you may have to settle for a VHS copy as it doesn’t seem to have come out in any other format). There is also Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997), an impressive snarl of temporal travel, fatalism and a hint of lesbianism. It has a few nicely ghoulish details along the way, like the charred human fingers the main character receives in the mail. Brougher accomplishes it all with editing, writing and a single visual effect. Other films may only be available through their creator’s website — or may be out of reach because they were released in pitiful numbers or by a DVD company no one ever heard of outside of Waxahatchie, Texas

The most difficult part of finding Indie SF is almost always the problem of deciding which films are worth pursuing. Websites like Ain’t It Cool News and SyFy network’s Blastr provide updates on upcoming films, reviews and an opportunity to network with other fans. Unfortunately, Blastr isn’t quite as helpful as its predecessor, SciFi Wire, which used to run regular reviews of obscure SF films. It was one of the few places that noticed one particularly remarkable piece of “retro” SF horror, The Call Of Cthulhu (2005), one of the best horror films of recent years.

Andrew Leman and the members of The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society created their adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories as a black and white silent, using the techniques which might have been used to film it back in the year of its first publication, 1926. The film is very faithful to the story, and what’s more, it works.

The stark contrasts of black-and-white film and the unearthly silence of the silents make any horror film creepier — something today’s young filmmakers really need to learn. Leman catches at least a hint of the malignant and unhealthy atmosphere of Lovecraft’s stories, and his use of title cards somehow makes the story’s complex structure of nested flashbacks easier to follow. What is surprising is how effective some of his more primitive tricks are, such as the use of sheets to create a heaving sea. His stop-motion Cthulhu may not be perfectly smooth, but it is nicely malevolent — and it would be jarring, in such a deliberately old-school film, if it did look smooth. You can get a DVD of the film direct from the HPLHS website.

Another good place to look are those online SF film review sites which attempt to cover the entire world of SF film. One of the best is The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review which offers an incredible number of reviews, covering a broad range of SF films from every place and era. It is one of the few places where you’ll find a review of The American Astronaut (2001), a movie which leaves one wondering whether even its writer and director, performance artist Cory McAbee, has the slightest idea what it is all about.

Space pilot Samuel Curtis (McAbee) hopes to make a fortune on an incredible deal involving a cat, a small box containing a real live girl (in embryonic form), the Boy Who Once Saw A Woman’s Breast and the one man on the woman-ruled planet of Venus. Unfortunately, he may not be able to complete his deal if his old friend Professor Hess ever manages to forgive him…

Most people should avoid this warped Sci Fi Western Musical the way they would an evening of pre-recorded telemarketing calls. And the rest of you? You know who you are. You’ve already added it to your Netflix queue.

Ultimately, a little digging will uncover a dazzling array of shapes and colors of SF Indies, from Brad Anderson’s time traveling RomCom, Happy Accidents (2000) to the post-modern absurdities of Six String Samurai (1998), which combines lethal bowlers and Mariachi players, mutants, a garbage monster, a Dirty Harry lookalike, the world’s slowest car chase, a creepy Ward Cleaver-ish family of cannibals, the Russian Army, and (of course) Death himself, with the help of a lot of duct tape and the Russian-tinged Rockabilly Surf music of The Red Elvises. Some, like James Felix McKenney’s Automatons (2006) never quite manage to be as interesting as their liner notes or, like the Flaming Lips’ Christmas On Mars, try far too hard for mind-blowing profundity. However, they get balanced out by the human warmth of Greg Pak’s prize-winning Asian-themed anthology film, Robot Stories (2005), the sober ironies of the intense two-player drama, Final (2001), and the structural daring of John August’s mind-bender, The Nines (2007).

Perhaps the most remarkable new development has been the emergence of full-length animated films created by a single artist with a home computer. Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s dazzling adaptation of Edwin Abbot’s classic novel, Flatland (a.k.a., Flatland: The Film) (2007), was the first (unless you count Romel Gallamoza’s far cruder 41 minute video game-generated adaptation of Michael Resnick’s story Machines Don’t Cry (2006)). Chris Lackey Flash-animated another similar one man SF project, The Chosen One, in 2008.

One of the great disappointments of the world of Indie SF is that it doesn’t seem to have attracted the attention of the mainstream SF community. Consider, for example, the Hugo awards, which in over fifty years of awards for Best Dramatic Presentation have only honored two Independent films, Moon (2009) and A Boy And His Dog (1976) (three, if you count Pan’s Labyrinth which, like most foreign films, was also made outside the studio system) and nominated few others. Some of the absences are remarkably difficult to explain: few movie buffs would chose Joss Whedon’s Serenity over Primer — and yet Shane Caruth’s brilliant time travel film failed even to win a nomination.

For those wondering about where the future of independent SF lies, it might help to look at a particularly strange and wondrous film which debuted in July of 2009. Fissure tells the story of a troubled police officer, Sergeant Paul Grunning (James MacDonald) who finds that the routine disturbance the Chief asked him to investigate is far from routine. He finds the body of Roger Ulster, a famous physicist, but soon Grunning finds himself far more concerned with the increasingly bizarre events happening around him. Something is very wrong in the Ulster home and Paul must discover not merely the identity of the murderer, but the deadly truth about Roger’s secret project.

Fissure is very much a product of the digital age. Its handful of well-executed effects are the most visible digital elements, but Dallas-based director Russ Pond also changed the look of the film inside the Ulster house, toning down the colors to give those sequences a subtle feeling of wrongness. While the members of the Ulster household remain somewhat undeveloped, the film gives us a sympathetic understanding of the demons haunting Grunning. Few better time paradox films exist.

Fissure’s marketing strategy may offer a new path for future independent films. Rather than the usual, drawn-out process so many others have followed (which forces filmmakers to enter their work in festival after festival in the hope that they might attract a distributor) Pond gave a few free showings in Texas, then launched a website [fissurethemovie.com] that offered a nine-week series of podcasts, behind the scenes facts and videos, and a contest. This lead to the release of the entire film as an on-demand DVD. Hopefully, whether or not his strategy worked, we haven’t heard the last of Russ Pond.

This article only hints at the wild selection of independent SF films out there — and it certainly does not include all the good ones. Nor will most viewers agree that all of these films deserve to be seen. One thing is certain, however, they definitely are not ordinary. What’s more, this sustained surge of uncontrolled creativity has given us something greater than a scattering of strange and unexpected new films: some of its unconventional spirit has oozed into mainstream films, often in ways that are far from obvious. The indies have served as a training ground for new filmmakers, who often carry what they’ve learned into their mainstream projects.

They have also — directly or indirectly — made some exotic filmic elements — such as non-linear plot structures, radical editing techniques and stylized cinematography — far more acceptable to the general film-going public. Not long ago, an SF film like The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind would have seemed incomprehensible to most viewers. Today it merely makes a lot of money.

It is this often subtle influence that the studios need most. If the economic crisis continues its slow strangulation of the film industry, we can only expect the studios to take fewer risks, make blander films - and produce more horrible TV show remakes than you can throw a Sleestak at.

These days low budget filmmakers can cut their costs drastically by using High-Def digital cameras and home computer film-editing software — and, of course, by releasing their films on one of several new websites. This has the potential to open the art of filmmaking to vast new numbers of people. Perhaps the next Christopher Nolan or Vincenzo Natali will post his first film on YouTube. You never know.

One thing is certain: SF needs independent film. It needs creators who can tackle challenging SF ideas and fit them into entertaining — if eccentric — films. It needs people with new vision, new ideas, and the talent to put it all together. We can’t count on the studios to nurture any burgeoning new SF creators: it is up to us to find them ourselves, to seek out some of these little known films and support them, whether they are in the theaters, on the internet, or on DVD.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

7th Sigma & the Gauzy Exterior: A Conversation with Steven Gould

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Frontier survival, nano-technology, drug runners, crooked cops, spies, martial arts, Western landscapes, and a (somewhat) post-apocalyptic setting — Steven Gould’s 7th Sigma has the savory ingredients of any number of genres and sub-genres. Yet this is no hodge-podge or mis-mash-up. It is a coming of age science fictional adventure about doing what’s right regardless of personal cost.

Gould is the author of such novels as Wildside, Greenwar (with Laura J Mixon), Helm, Blind Waves, and the recent 7th Sigma. Perhaps, Gould is best known for the Jumper novels, which include Jumper, Reflex, and Jumper: Griffin’s Story. Jumper was made into a successful motion picture in 2008 starring Hayden Christiansen and Samuel L. Jackson. Gould’s stories, novelettes, and novels have been nominated multiple times for Hugo, Nebula, and Prometheus Awards, among others.

Born in Arizona, Gould moved around from military base to military base as a child, was educated in Texas, and now lives in New Mexico among the grand vistas and diverse cultures that enrich 7th Sigma with both a grand perspective and multiple (and very intimate) perspectives.

On his blog or in fiction, Gould has shown himself to be “always concerned when disparity in the availability of a technology makes an underclass.” He is an active participant in Worldreader, an organization that, among other things, helps “to make digital books available to all in the developing world, enabling millions of people to improve their lives.”

Gould has, to put it bluntly, a visceral dislike of social injustice, he is never shy to speak his mind and take a clear stance on gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and economics. Yet, Gould is more likely to give us a character who struggles with these issues than to take the soap box. His novels are all the richer for it.

Below, Gould and I talk about 7th Sigma, martial arts, and the women who have guided him along the way.

Where does a novel usually start for you — image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether? And how about 7th Sigma in particular?

Depends. Jumper is about an ability and finding the character who is both liberated and trapped by the ability. My book Wildside started with the hole to another earth, one that hadn’t developed humans. And the character followed that, too. Helm was about a situation and not the one most people would think after reading the book. It’s about a son banished by a father without explanation. Sure, it’s set 267 light years away. So what. Ditto for Blind Waves — the event, followed by the characters in that event/environment. With 7th Sigma, the character and the environment came together.

7th Sigma owes its heart to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a novel set in an environment where ancient cultures swirl around each other sometimes mixing, sometimes not, with technologies that run from bullock to Steam Trains with characters that are driven by the search for enlightenment, military intelligence, merriment, and base wealth. So, the hodgepodge of cultures, technologies, and motivations that exist in 7th Sigma are my attempt to match the amazing texture that is Kim’s colonial India.

But I don’t know India, so I had to create my own.

What is it about the landscape of New Mexico that captures (or sparks) your imagination?

Age. Cultures mixing and not mixing. Until 1908 the largest single structure in North America was a thousand year old structure called Pueblo Bonita in Chaco Canyon. The oldest continuously occupied city is in New Mexico, Acoma Pueblo. We have the oldest state capitol. Sure we weren’t a state until 1912 but the capitol city was first occupied in 1608. New Mexico has the highest percentage of Hispanics and the second highest percentage of Native Americans (after Alaska.) We’re the 6th least populated state and we have vistas. We have environments that range for blazing desert to alpine snow, prairie, mountains, badlands, massive lava flows. We are the site of the first Atomic Bomb explosion and we have a spaceport. Enough said.

Why science fiction? What is it about the genre that allows you to explore “cultures mixing and not mixing”, survival, and that allows you to “match the amazing texture that is Kim’s colonial India”?

The easy answer is that science fiction is what I read, what I imprinted on, but the more serious answer is that SF is the gauzy exterior that sucks in readers who, without realizing, are suddenly dealing with very serious issues. An escapist novel about a kid who can teleport (hijinks ensue) can deal with serious issues of child abuse, alcoholism, and terrorism. What’s safer than a book that is clearly impossible. That deals with things you don’t have to deal with in every day life? So you start a book set on a planet called Winter and suddenly you are dealing with issues of gender and sexual identity that are happening in our lives — that for some readers are life and death issues.

I’m not sure it has to be SF to show cultures both mixing and not mixing. I can look around my home city and see examples of insular extremists and tolerant mixed race/mixed culture families. Political and economic realities drive families half-way across the globe into settings foreign to them. Obviously you can see these things happening in SF and Fantasy, too, like Silverberg’s Marjipoor tales. It is true that one of the favorite character roles in SF is the newcomer, the outsider who has to deal with an alien culture or setting and so has to have things explained to him (and hence the reader.)

There are parts of 7th Sigma that suggest you are a fan of Western films and books.

I admire books about frontiers. This includes Westerns but it also includes books like Heinlein’s Red Planet and Farmer in the Sky. Kim is a book about frontiers because frontiers exist where one people enter an area that they don’t know, even it if it is occupied by cultures that do know it.

Are there other ways that Heinlein’s work influenced this book?

Heinlein’s greatest gift (to me) is the seamless way he introduces technology, culture, and character into his works without stalling the narrative. It’s the thing I admire most about his writing and the thing I most hope surfaces in my own writing. Hopefully that’s happening in 7th Sigma, too.

The macro-structure of 7th Sigma… is it modular, episodic, what? How’d you come to this particular structure?

There are odd things about 7th Sigma. For example, when I originally started the book it began with the scene on page 235, after Kimble is seventeen. After starting there (and writing several chapters) I decided I really needed to fill in Kimble’s background, so, when I started to fill this in, I did it in the form of chapters with their own little narrative arcs. Chapter two was added after all of this, when my editor pointed out that we really needed to see the bugs in action, the very real danger of the bugs, earlier in the story, so it served to illustrate that and give some of the history of the territory and some of the speculations about the bugs. And the last chapter was also added at her request, as it really ended too soon. This is not unusual for me. Instead of ending novels on a cliffhanger, I have a slight tendency to end of cliff notes instead, insufficiently dwelling on what happened.

In what ways, if any, are you like Kimble Monroe? Or are you more like another character in the novel?

I have been studying Aikido for the last sixteen and a half years. I did have an alcoholic father (who has been sober for over 30 years), so, sure, there are similarities there, but mostly it’s Kim from Kim or Thorby from Citizen of the Galaxy or Tom Sawyer or any of the many coming of age protagonists I’ve loved over the years.

What has the study and practice of martial arts taught you about writing?

As I said. Sixteen years. I have been regularly teaching for over half of that. By the time this is published I will have been newly promoted to Yondan (4th Degree Black Belt). And it has taught me that most important things are achieved by just showing up over and over and over again. Practice is cumulative. Writing is cumulative. Writing is practice. The Japanese word for practice is Keiko. The way you improve is “keiko, keiko, keiko,” just like the answer to the question: How do you get to Carnegie Hall.

How’d you build the character Sensei Ruth? She seems to live in a calm present with the constant pressure of a slowly leaked past.

I have had many instructors over the years and I’m grateful to all of them but I particularly appreciate some of the higher ranked women who have taught me more than just technique, like how to make the study of aikido a life affirming thing, part of one’s everyday life. Also, I wanted a character that represented Kipling’s Tibetan Monk who is seeking the River of the Arrow, who has left their previous life behind (in his case, powerful abbot of a large monastery). Ruth has left her previous life because of a divorce and is seeking a new one in the Territory.

Are there any “higher ranked” women writers who have taught you more than technique? If so, who? And what did they teach you?

Interestingly enough, the woman who guided me to Aikido is Michaela Roessner, author of Walkabout Woman, Vanishing Point, The Stars Dispose, and The Stars Compel (currently a 5th Degree Black Belt instructor in Aikido.) And the person who guided her to aikido was Elizabeth Lynn (Sixth Degree Black Belt) who, among other things, was one of my wife’s writing instructors at Clarion classic back in ‘81 (and who just sent me an email saying kinds things about 7th Sigma.)

However, without a doubt people like Ursula LeGuin, Andre Norton, Ann McCaffrey were early influences. Sometimes that influence came from annoyance. I once threw an Andre Norton book across the room and started my first novel in reaction (however it became my third published novel, Helm.) Women who personally influenced me were Lisa Tuttle who was in Texas when I was first getting published. I’ve always admired the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, too, not just in her individual novels, but the way she has managed to build a lifetime story arc for Miles Vorkosigan over many novels. She convinced me that series writing doesn’t have to be slight at all.

What have your daughters and/or being a father taught you about writing?

That I need to take nothing for granted. That I have things in my psyche that are firmly rooted in patriarchal assumptions and that I really need to think before I say anything about a woman’s role or capabilities and that I need to do the same thing regarding race.

Oh, and the character Thayet… where did you ever find her?

Beats me. In other words — she came when she was needed. Or, perhaps, she is part of the answer to the question above.

What’s next for you?

I am in the final stages of writing Impulse, the sequel to Reflex and Jumper. It’s about Davy and Millie’s sixteen year-old daughter, Cent. (Short for Millicent.) Again, my own daughters probably have something to do with this.

Any parting words?

Thanks for having me. Thanks to any of your readers who’ve bought my books.

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.

Making Strange Stuff Familiar: A Conversation with Joan Slonczewski

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Joan Slonczewski’s last novel, Brain Plague, was released in 2000. Much has changed in the world since then, and so has Slonczewski’s writing. Her recent novel, The Highest Frontier, is both more concerned with politics than her previous novels and somehow more gentle.

Slonczewski is the author of the Elysium Cycle, which consists of the novels A Door into Ocean, Daughters of Elysium, The Children Star, and Brain Plague. Her stand-alone novels include Still Forms on Foxfield, The Wall Around Eden, and, of course, the recent The Highest Frontier. She also co-authored the undergraduate textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science with John W. Foster.

Educated at Bryn Mawr College, Slonczewski holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and currently teaches at Kenyon College. She has won awards for scientific research, teaching, and for writing, including the John W. Campbell Award.

Very much a biologist, a pacifist and a feminist, Slonczewski writes about microbes, ecological disasters, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering. Her richly textured new novel explores the complexities of politics, privilege, and human perseverance (as shown through the story of one young woman). By looking back to the pre-Colombian and post-contact culture of the Iroquois and forward to the 22nd Century, Slonczewski offers solutions to present day problems.

Or as she puts it below, her fiction offers a “way out”.

The human race, Slonczewski seems to be saying, is not necessarily doomed; it is merely listening to the wrong voices, acting on the wrong impulses.

The world of Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier is intricately developed and thoroughly immersive, but it is the inhabitants of that world who really set this novel apart, especially the quirky professors and the main character, Jenny Ramos.

Before we get started, I have to ask: are you and Jenny Ramos similar at all?

Jenny Ramos is a lot like me, when I first went to college. I felt overwhelmed with new things, met friends from exotic places, fell in love — and had to experiment with living creatures that wouldn’t cooperate.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction?

I love to imagine a dialog with readers, to share the amazement of discovering a new world. And then return to our world to realize, “So that’s how this awesome planet works.” For instance, “invasive species” we think of as the worst weeds and pests. But what if a weed like kudzu became so pervasive that we depended on it, like grass and pine trees? Then you come back to Earth and realize that lots of life we take for granted — like earthworms in North America — are “invasive.”

If a continent can survive earthworm invasion, maybe there’s hope for our planet. Maybe a student can go to college and help save the world. Students invented recycling and Earth Day, and helped elect our first Black president. Saving Earth while launching for Jupiter will be hard — but here’s how to start.

What’s at the heart of Hard Science Fiction?

At Kenyon, I teach “Biology in Science Fiction” for students in the arts and humanities. And my students taught me how science needs to reach them. In my books, the science emerges as a seamless part of everyday life. Experiments fail; and others succeed in ways no one expected. For instance, Jenny Ramos Kennedy tries to build a nervous system into a plant; but then the plant turns the experiment back on her.

The first chapter of The Highest Frontier is dense — and utterly compelling. What does a first chapter need to do in general and in a Hard SF novel in particular?

Everything! Introduce the characters, the setting, and make the strange new stuff seem familiar. Mainstream fiction makes the ordinary extraordinary. Science fiction does the opposite — the extraordinary becomes commonplace. In The Highest Frontier, what’s commonplace is that everyone has this “toybox” in their head that connects a hundred virtual worlds at once. And you go up to college in a cylinder that looks like an inside-out planet. Because it’s so tiny, all the animals are miniaturized: mini-deer, teddy-bears, and mini-elephants (with whom the students do unmentionable pranks.)

The Highest Frontier is so rich with detail. Where did you even start with this novel?

I began this book ten years ago, after completing Brain Plague (about microbes that take over the brains of artists and convince them to make scandalous art). For The Highest Frontier, I collected layers upon layers of characters and world-bits: The toyboxes, the nutty professors, the alien ultraphytes. After 9/11 I had to pause a few years, because the event had such impact on my mind. But then, once New Yorkers started telling jokes and selling Twin Towers souvenirs, I started writing again.

How did 9/11 affect your writing?

The Twin Towers became a background theme of my story. The idea of “twin-ness” is everywhere. Most of the students are twins, because parents think having twins is the “efficient” way to have a family. Jenny’s twin died in a flood caused by global climate change. But Jenny overcomes her tragedy to live a full life — like many New Yorkers had to do.

What intrigued me was how in the second tower, a voice came on telling people not to worry, to go back up to work because this tower is ok. I wonder: How many of us would listen to that voice? Don’t we hear voices like that every day, saying, “Don’t worry about climate change or economic collapse, just get back to work.” My science fiction offers way out — a way forward to say, “We can do something for our planet.”

Which scene in The Highest Frontier, surprised you the most, as the writer?

One of my favorite scenes to write was when the history professor channels Teddy Roosevelt through a virtual world. The students have to go in and ask Teddy questions, while his bodyguard tries to scare them off. What surprised me is how many of my older friends loved the book; the strongest reviews have come from grandparents, who get all the jokes. My book is set a hundred years from now, but it also looks back a hundred years to the American frontier, the Iroquois and how they reacted to the colonists — then it compares how we today might react to alien invaders. For instance, the Iroquois called the European colonists “Salt Beings” because they over-salted their food. In my book, the alien ultraphytes are halophiles (life that needs high salt). So Homeworld Security tries to ban table salt, with ludicrous results.

What’s next for Jenny and Frontera College?

Well, Jenny has three more years left of college — if Earth survives. Without spoilers, I’ll just say that depends on my readers. I’d like to hear which characters they liked best, and where they might go. One reviewer liked best the gay married couple that runs the college, so you can bet they’ll return.

Any parting words?

I love hearing from readers. Feel free to visit my blog at biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slonc.htm or friend me on Facebook.

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.

Five

Neil Clarke

This month is Clarkesworld’s fifth anniversary!

When your children turn five, you throw them a party and family conversation inevitably turns to how fast the birthday boy/girl has grown. When your dog turns five, someone always points out, that in dog years, Rover is thirty-five. When your online magazine turns five, well, it’s a bit of both. The time has flown by and, in internet years, your magazine is really old. The scary truth about publishing is that most magazines never make it this far. We’re one of the lucky ones.

It isn’t all luck. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some of the brightest and most creative people I know. Through the combined efforts of our artists, authors, and staff, Clarkesworld has become something I can be proud of. They make all this worth doing.

You already know it, but we also have the best readers. Your support has provided the marketing and financial assistance we need to continue publishing. I owe a special thanks to those of you who’ve subscribed to our ebook edition. Starting this month, your subscriptions are funding the addition of a third story and podcast to each issue. That’s been on my wish list for years, so thank you and enjoy. You’ve earned it!

It would be easy to continue looking back and reflect about on the last five years, but I find myself overly distracted by the things to come. In case you haven’t heard, Cheryl Morgan has turned in her resignation and will be leaving us shortly. She has my deepest thanks and we all wish her the best. I’m currently reviewing applications for the non-fiction editor position and should have an update for you next month. I should also have some more details about the possibility of Nook subscriptions. Speaking of subscriptions, if we can maintain their current pace, we may have some announcements about new non-fiction features in store for you.

Stay tuned. It’s going to be an interesting year!

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.