A Militant Peace

David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist.
I am willing to fight for peace.
—Albert Einstein

For Nong Mai Thuy, a Vietnamese Sergeant in the Marine Police, the invasion of North Korea starts with the parachute-snapping violence of a High Altitude, Low Opening jump deep in the middle of the inky black North Korean airspace at night. Here the air is the stillest, bleakest black. The bleakness of a world where electricity trickles only to the few in Pyongyang.

This is good for Mai. The synthetic-ballistic faceshield displaying heads-up information has a host of visual add-ons, including night-vision. She flicks it on, and the familiar gray-green of a landscape below rushes up to smack into her.

When she thuds into the ground the specialized, carefully fitted, motorized armor hisses slightly as it adjusts to the impact.

“Duc?”

“I am safe,” her partner responds in her ear over the faint distortion of high-end crypto. In the upper right of her HUD a beacon glows softly, and she turns around. Duc’s smashed his way through several hefty tree limbs before hitting ground. But he’s already packing his chute.

They are officially on the ground.

Beyond the darkness are some nine and a half million North Korean forces that aren’t going to respond well to what has just happened.

And Mai wonders: how many of them are already on the way to try and kill her right now?

Three minutes before Mai and Duc hit the ground, heavy machinery in stealth-wrapped containers had parachuted in, invisible to prying electronic eyes, and touched down.

Mai and Duc fan out to establish a perimeter and protect it, even as hundreds more hit the ground, roll, and come up ready to follow orders beamed at them from commanders still up in the sky, watching from live satellite feeds.

A portable airstrip gets rolled out across the grassy meadow. Within the hour the thorium nuclear power plant airdrops in and gets buried into the ground, then shielded with an artillery-proof cap.

Once power is on, Camp Nike takes shape. The ballistic-vest wearing civilian Chinese contractors have built whole skyscrapers within forty-eight hours. Here they only need to get four or five stories high for the main downtown area. They get a bonus for each extra geodesic dome fully prepped by the morning. The outer wall of the camp is airlifted in. It’s been constructed in pieces in Australia ahead of time, and the pieces slam down into the ground via guided parachutes. No one glances up, this part of the invasion has been practiced over and over again in Western Australia so much that its old news.

Twenty minutes before sunrise two large transports land and the civilians rush them. The field is cleared of non-combatants soon after, leaving the ghost city behind it.

It is dawn when what looks like a hastily organized contingent of the North Korean Army crests the hills. Thirty soldiers here to scout out what the hell just happened, Mai imagines.

Mai ends up outside the perimeter, guardian to the north gate.

“Welcome to Camp Nike,” Duc mutters.

Someone is riding shotgun through their helmet cameras and jumps into the conversation. It sounds like Captain Nguyen, Mai thinks. “Make a slight bow to the commanding officer, wave encouragingly at the group.”

Mai’s hand rests on her hip, where a sidearm would usually be.

“No threatening gestures, keep your arms out and forward,” her helmet whispers to her. Aggressive body-posture detected and reported by her own suit. It feels slightly like betrayal. Old habits die hard: Mai can’t help but reach for her hip.

She is, after all, still a soldier.

The small group of men all have AKS-74s — which the North Koreans call a Type 88 — but they’re slung over their shoulders, even though they can see Mai and Duc in full armor.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Mai mutters.

“Hold your positions,” command whispers to them.

It isn’t right. Standing here, unarmed, holding her hands up in the air as if she’s the one surrendering, placating an enemy. When there are men standing just thirty feet away with rifles.

One of them steps forward, his hands in the air, and she realizes he’s nervous.

Mai points to a signpost near the gates.

CAMP NIKE
UNITED NATIONS SPONSORED
ALTERNATIVE SETTLEMENT ZONE

NO WEAPONS ALLOWED

PLACE ALL WEAPONS IN THE
MARKED BINS FOR DESTRUCTION

The sign’s in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and English, and also emblazoned with the internationally-recognizable logos of all the camp’s primary private sector sponsors.

There’ll be more of that when people got inside. Shoes and clothing by Nike. Dinners by ConAgra. TV by Samsung. Computers by Dell.

The men read the sign, and start shaking their heads.

This, Mai thinks, is a moment of balance, where the world around her could swing one way or another.

Duc takes initiative, to her surprise, and waves at the men cheerily. He flips his faceplate open, so they can see his expression, while Mai curses him silently and fights the urge to grab him and yank him to safety.

All it’ll take is one well-aimed shot from a sniper somewhere out there to kill him, now. Or for one of these men with an AKS-74 to spook.

He might as well not even wear the armor, she thinks, absently reaching for her hip again.

There is no gun, though. There never will be.

Mai’s not close enough for her translation software to help her understand what the group of men is arguing over. But Duc has gotten close enough to be surrounded.

“They want to see the food,” he reports.

“What?”

“They want to make sure they’re not being tricked into a prison camp. They won’t disarm until they see that what they were told about the camps was true.”

One of the men holds up a cheap, black smartphone and points at it.

Six months ago these things were dumped into North Korea by the millions. Each phone disguises its texting and data traffic as background static, and otherwise functions as a basic, jamming-hardened satphone. Between the satellite routing and peer-to-peer whisper comms, they created a “darknet” outside of Pyongyang’s official control.

The Beloved Leader decreed death for anyone caught with one, but the experiment succeeded. Well enough to spirit out video and pictures of starving children, of brutal crackdowns on attempts to protest Pyongyang by desperate, starving peasants, and all the other atrocities that had built the case for international intervention.

It has been through these phones that messages explaining the camps and invasion had been sent twenty-four hours ago.

Promising food and safety.

These soldiers are defecting, and can see the walls. Now they want to see the food.

It’s all about the food.

“Three of you, leave your weapons in the bin,” Duc says, “go in and come back out to report what you see.”

It is a reasonable compromise. Duc and Mai let the three unarmed men pass through, and five minutes later they’re back, excited and shouting at their comrades.

One of the men whistles back toward the crest of the hill. As if melting out of the countryside, a river of people carrying what possessions they had came trickling down the hillside, and out of the distant scrub where they’d been hiding.

The first two hundred new citizens of Camp Nike stream in through the gates, and once they’re through, all that is left are the full bins of AKS-74s waiting to be destroyed.

“Were you worried?” Duc asks as they watch the North Koreans line up at refugee registration booths.

“Yes,” she replies. “I think we’d be foolish not to worry when people with guns walk up to us.”

Duc thumps his chest. “With these on? We’re invincible here.”

Maybe, Mai thinks. She looks back at the small city inside the walls. But we aren’t the only ones here, now, are we?

For forty-eight hours the stream of humanity continues. A thousand. Five thousand. Ten thousand. The Korean People’s Army is too busy chasing ghosts to notice right now: false reports about touchdowns. Jammed communications. Domination of their airspace.

Satellite telescopes, early warning systems, and spyware pinpoints the point of origin of several missile launches. They die while still boosting up into the air, struck from above by high-powered lasers.

Electromagnetic pulses rain down from heavy stealth aircraft drones, leaving any unshielded North Korean advanced military tech, which is far more than anyone realized, useless metal junk.

By the time the North Koreans managed to haul out their ancient, analog Cold War-era artillery, Mai is on her way to the barracks to bunk down for her first real night of sleep.

The shelling begins in earnest. A distant crumping sound, but without the accompanying whistle of the rounds falling.

The Point Defense Array pops up. Green light flickers and sparks from the top of the almost floral-looking tower in the center of Camp Nike. Lines shimmer into the night sky as they track incoming artillery rounds.

They’d been told during training that the green lasers were doing nothing more than “painting” the individual targets before the x-ray lasers slagged the incoming shells into nothing more than a slight metal mist.

Mai watches the light show build in intensity for a few moments, just as awed by its beauty as she had been when she’d first seen it demonstrated.

The bursts light up the undersides of the clouds. And not a single shell gets through.

She wonders if she would still have the reflexes to get to cover if she ever hears the telltale whistle of an incoming round again, after living like this.

There might be thousands of Captain Nguyens in the Vietnamese military, Mai knows. But here at Camp Nike, there is only one. She is the sort of woman who straightens spines at a glance. They call her the Warrior of Binh Phuoc, and it’s rumored that she single-handedly kept that border region safe for years during the Cambodian Unrest.

Nguyen’s been hopping in and out of helmet cameras all week long, moving them around like pawns on a chessboard.

Now it’s time for Mai to face the chess master.

Mai joins Trong Min Hoai, a member of her team, as they hop over a row of Japanese-donated grooming ‘bots, rolling up the main street of Camp Nike sweeping up litter. They’re both in full PeaceKeeping armor, servos whining as they work around her limbs to amplify her tiniest motions.

In an already carefully-cultivated and manicured gaming park over to their right, a group of South Korean volunteers are combining literacy lessons with one of the role-playing games popular in the South.

All it would take, Mai thinks, glancing up at the snap and crack of green Point Defense activity in the distance, is one artillery shell to sneak through and hit that park.

But no one’s looking up. After a week, even the civilians are taking it for granted.

Inside the ground floor of the temporary headquarters building, a nondescript ten-story instant skyscraper, Captain Nguyen stands in front of a podium and surveys the twenty fully power-armored members she’s called in.

“LOCKDOWN,” declares an electronic system, and the doors thud shut. A soft blue glow indicates that the room is nominally clean of electronic surveillance.

Everyone’s links to the outside die. Soldiers remove their helmets and let them hang from dummy straps on the back of their armor.

It’s strange to see all these faces.

Most relax in place, Mai’s one of the few who grits her teeth at that. She comes from Vietnam’s elite Marine Police, suffused with discipline and duty. Other soldiers have traveled in from less formal corners of Vietnam.

Mai’s tempted to say it’s Western influence, but she comes from a family that has quietly welcomed the easing of the Party’s influence over the long years.

Her grandfather served in the Republic of Vietnam Army in 1975. He melted back into civilian life when Saigon fell. Unlike various Hmong or other American allies he had not been lucky enough to secure a trip to the United States. Instead he endured, raised a family, and placidly waited for the wheel to turn. As it had in Europe or Russia.

That came almost without their noticing. Now Vietnam jostles with South Korea and Japan for economic strength.

Which is what got her here.

South Korea is playing down its role in this humanitarian incursion of sovereign national borders. Japan knows better than to stick any of its troops on foreign soil anywhere the Pacific Ocean touches land, even if it’s a peacekeeping mission.

No one wants American soldiers involved in this.

The UN has pushed hard to get Vietnamese forces to lead this. They believe they’re in the best position, historically and culturally.

Behind the scenes promises and paybacks in the form of infrastructure, debt forgiveness from creditor nations, and military upgrades have been fairly epic.

And if all goes well, Vietnam becomes a real world player, able to use this as a bargaining chip to leverage itself up onto the table with the world’s most powerful nations.

If all goes well.

The hopes of many Vietnamese politicians ride with the twenty armored soldiers in the room.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Nguyen announces.

Nguyen casts full three-dimensional images of the camp from an overhead position up on the wall for them to see.

“Due to the initial success of the disinformation campaign and disabling of North Korean military machinery, we grew this camp faster than anyone could have anticipated. We are bringing in more power: one of those airships that’s been helping blanket the area with wireless networks will soon be relaying a microwave laser from an Indian power satellite, which will let us expand the Point Defense Array’s zone of coverage and move our walls outward.

“We need more living space, and more farmland. The UN is calling our mission a success, and the other camps are moving timetables forward as a result as well.”

Mai glances around. Everyone looks excited, a bit anticipatory.

This has been the goal, hasn’t it? Establish a secure base. Bring in refugees. Feed and educate, build a different civil and economic society on the fly, and with success, expand the borders of these safe zones.

Within a decade, the camps could become cities in their own right: self-sustaining and continuing to grow. Tiny petri dishes of democracy, trade and world capitalism, their walls expanding outwards further and further until they were all of the country they’d been set up in.

It beat decades-long war.

Online massively multiplayer simulations indicated that it was also far, far cheaper. After just a few years, the citizens of the camps plug into global trade and currency, paying their own way. Becoming customers for large defense manufacturers. Full citizens of the peaceful, trading world at large.

That’s the plan.

And now they’re accelerating the timetable. Which will mean what? Mai swallows her worries and pays attention.

Captain Nguyen continues with the briefing. “We’ve been coming under more frequent artillery attack from the North Korean Army over the last seventy-two hours. The shells have yet to penetrate the laser array, but we can’t afford to rely on that working one hundred percent of the time.

“Thanks to our American friends in charge of the array we’ve identified the location of the artillery battery firing on us. We intend to end these bombardments during wall extension operations. You are the team that will do this.”

Nguyen looks at them all, then seems to pause for a beat as she looks at Mai.

Did that really happen? Is she being singled out? Or does everyone else in the room feel that Nguyen is talking to just them?

“There will be no North Korean deaths,” Nguyen states flatly, “or any bodily harm as a direct result of your actions. You are there to disable the weaponry, not engage. Remember: I will be watching. So will the rest of the world.”

And that is all.

Captain Nguyen physically leads the “attack.”

Forty armored figures in UN pale blue trot out of the camp, double file, following her. Half of them are a mish-mash of other units from Eastern Europe and Africa, the other half are Nguyen’s warriors. They plunge into the tree line to the west of the camp, cutting new paths through the undergrowth.

They cover the six miles to the North Korean firebase in about half an hour, and spread out into a skirmish line as they approach the elevated artillery base.

The moment they begin to walk up the slope the North Koreans open fire on them from a sandbagged bunker at the crest of the low hill.

Mai flinches at the chatter and fury. Her instinct to seek cover screams from somewhere deep in her. A round thuds into her midsection, but the armor does its job, sloughing off energy and dissipating mass.

Her stride isn’t even affected.

“Keep the line straight, hold out your arms,” Nguyen mutters to them all via helmet communications. “Show them we’re not armed.”

They’ve been shot at in training. But these rounds are meant to kill them, not get them used to the impact.

This is the real thing. Those people out there are trying to kill Mai.

And all she’s going to do is hold out her hands and walk forward.

The implacable pale blue line keeps moving up the hill.

Mai feels round after round, entire bursts, carom off her armor like birdshot before she’s halfway up the hill. And then, finally, the North Korean gunners break and make a run for it.

“Duc, Mai, disable the bunker,” Nguyen orders.

Mai leaps free of the line with an exultant grunt, clearing fifteen feet of ground in a half restrained hop that has her slamming down in front of the bunker’s still steaming gun in a second.

Duc’s right by her.

“No one’s inside. No heat signatures,” Duc reports. He rips the bunker apart, pulling the sandbags out and kicking the walls in.

Mai yanks the roof’s timbers free, dropping the sandbags they’d supported down into a warren of cots and radio equipment. The crunching sounds from all this are distant and suppressed to her, like she’s turned the volume down on a Hollywood action movie.

In three full breaths, they’ve reduced the fortified position to sandy rubble.

Mai strips the machine gun down to its individual components, then grabs both ends of the barrel and twists it into uselessness. She repeats that with the spare barrel, then looks over at the ammunition.

“The Ploughshares team can take care of the ammo,” Duc says. “They’ll catch up soon enough.”

Something kicks her in the back, jostling her. Mai spins around and knocks away the gun of a scared soldier that has managed to sneak up on her.

He stands there, stupefied, holding his hand, waiting for whatever comes next.

“Mai!” Duc shouts.

She has her fist in the air, ready to bring it down and crack his skull, but freezes in place. Her heart is hammering, her mouth dry. She can’t escape the adrenaline-pounding certainty that she almost died.

But of course, she hasn’t. The man is no threat.

“Leave,” she shouts into her helmet, and the translation booms out at the soldier.

He rabbits away.

“Mai?” Duc asks.

“I am fine,” she tells him.

Mai glances back. There’s activity in the air: ten heavy lift airships ponderously moving more wall segments in, to be dropped in place to secure the territory they are clearing.

Soon the huge, articulated Ploughshares trucks will be along to gather up everything here for recycling.

Duc tosses down seven mangled AKS-74s. “Then let’s go,” he says, and they’re on the move again, loping in long, impossible strides to catch up to the advancing line.

As they catch up, Mai notices that Nguyen’s entire right side is blackened. She must have absorbed a large explosion of some kind while Mai’d been destroying the bunker. Other soldiers show signs of absorbing more fire, but the rate of it is fading. The North Koreans are mostly retreating into the woods on the west side of the hill.

Mostly.

One enterprising gun crew is trying to bring their huge 152mm cannon to bear on the advancing line.

For the first time Mai sees Nguyen’s calm crack, and she hastily orders another pair of Peacekeepers to disable the cannon.

The two armored soldiers snap into motion, and then calmly shepherd the North Koreans away from the weapon with shooing motions, ignoring the small arms fire. Once the North Koreans are clear, they smash the aiming mechanism, then get to work on the tube itself.

A North Korean officer runs up to the two blue armored soldiers, pistol high, screaming at them. His face is red, and he looks almost ready to cry with frustration and rage.

The distant pop of his pistol as he empties his entire clip into the backplate of the nearest Peacekeeper’s armor is accentuated by Mai’s translation software.

“Stand and fight, cowards! Face me like real soldiers,” the artificial voice keeps murmuring.

Mai feels sympathy for him.

This isn’t a proper war.

None of them have trained for this.

It makes little sense, to either that officer or her, on some deep level.

Part of her craves a fight. A real fight. A test of skill, courage, and arms.

“Here’s the artillery,” Nguyen murmurs to them all. “On me. Destroy it all.”

Mai and Duc move through the firebase with the rest of the team, dismantling the twelve big artillery guns and countless small arms and machine guns.

Most of the machinery is in ill repair. Only five of the twelve look like they are actually firing, and a small bunker off to one side has been stacked with dud rounds. Which Mai figured Ploughshares could deal with. Suit or not, she didn’t want to be playing with those.

There’s been one casualty, and Nguyen is not pleased with this. The wounded Korean is on a pod-like stretcher, hooked up to emergency life-saving equipment while a medic they brought along treats him.

“This could be a public relations disaster,” Nguyen tells Mai.

“What happened?” Mai asks.

“He threw a grenade, but it bounced back at him,” Nguyen says, shaking her head. She’s removed her helmet and holds it tucked under an arm. “We were too aggressive. I fought against the new timetable, but was overruled. UN headquarters are emboldened by all this success. Now look at this, all people are going to see is this idiot on their late night television, wounded.”

Mai looks over the wounded man. “He might live.”

Nguyen cocks her head. “You’re smarter than that. You know it’s the image of him right now, wounded, that will play out across the world. Polling is going to show lowered support for the mission. Are you okay, Sergeant Nong? My command software flagged one of your actions.”

Mai thinks back to the moment where she raised her fist, and opens her mouth to answer, but another soldier runs up. “Captain, you need to come with us.”

The North Koreans have withdrawn from the firebase, and the defense array is fully extended to its new circumference, bringing the area under its anti-ballistic umbrella. The airships are placing the new walls around them. Nonetheless, Mai and Nguyen pull their helmets back on and lope after the messenger.

There’s a trail leading back to the woods, and off to the side is a hastily dug pit. A fresh, earthy scar in the grass.

Lying in it are bodies. Thin. Ribs showing. Hollow-eyed.

“Civilians,” Nguyen’s voice crackles.

They’ve been dragged and stacked in this shallow grave. Just old men, women, children, trying to sneak their way around to a better life.

Mai rips her helmet off to take a deep breath of air, then regrets the decision. The air is ripe with the stench of decay.

“This is our fault. They’re trying to get into our camp,” she says. She does not replace her helmet, just yet. Something about the smell of death grounds her, reminds her of what is at stake, who has the most to lose, the most to fear.

Nguyen raises her visor. “They’re dying trying to escape north to China right now, or slowly in their own homes. Don’t forget that.”

Mai swallows and nods.

But it doesn’t stop her from feeling personally responsible in some small way.

Mai catches a ride back to the core camp center on a Ploughshares truck, exhausted and nerves frayed. A Chinese engineer sitting on the back of the flatbed is curious.

“I didn’t think you could get tired in those suits,” he says to her in careful English.

“That is a misconception,” Mai tells him. “Your body is still moving, all day. Muscles still do much of the work. They are just amplified.”

“What about getting shot at?” he asks. He’s staring at the scars in her outer armor.

“It becomes normal,” Mai says, offering a salty fatalism she does not yet feel. She’s looking down at the helmet in her hands. There’s a dimple right in the forehead, and a coating of copper and lead that has dripped onto the faceplate.

That dimple suggests at least some level of vulnerability.

Mai shakes that away and looks around. The fleet of recycling trucks are covered in advertising logos. “Does everything have advertising built into it?” she asks the engineer, looking to change the subject.

He shrugs. “Why not? If all goes well, what will the refugees see every day? Logos for Ford and Nissan, McDonald’s and Dannon, Apple and Samsung. What better advertisement than being the ones who brought them peace and prosperity?”

And if it doesn’t work, Mai figures, these people will never see the logos again. The sponsors lose some trucks, cash, and some shipments of last year’s shoes and tracksuits.

These companies will write these off as charitable donations and somehow, come out ahead.

They always do. Tails you lose, heads I win.

The minds from which this evolved, despite their ramrod-organized military world, are the children of non-violent protestors and emergent, technologically-enabled regime overthrow. They are the nieces and nephews of two generations of UN sorties, which are derided by the major powers, but have a history of quiet, incremental improvements and painfully slow progress.

They are the process of gamified solutions, market testing, and the Western fear of bad publicity.

What did it mean that this was war? At boot camp Mai practiced for bloody hand-to-hand combat, and learned group movement. Thinking as part of a squad. Reaching the overall goals of a mission.

Armies want fast-thinking, creative problem solvers able to deploy violence for the nation they serve.

Now Mai is wondering how she ended up being a robotic creature, following the exact letter of the law to not so much as harm a hair on her enemy.

Even when they are slaughtering the innocent.

“It’s not the mission,” Nguyen explained at training in Australia. “It violates the mandate of the mission. Fail it, and we are just another invading force.”

“It doesn’t seem… right,” someone objected.

“Right has a new meaning when wearing this armor. It changes the equation. You are a supreme force unto yourself.”

“With technological superiority like this, we couldn’t possibly lose,” Mai added.

“Depends on what you mean by lose. Westerners certainly learned the limits of simple technological superiority when your grandfather was just a young man.” Nguyen stared her down, and Mai had wondered if Nguyen had accessed those files about Mai’s family background. “A nation is a fiction of consent, and North Korea has built a mythology and controlled fiction unsurpassed in the world, aided by extreme isolation. People starve and thank their rulers for a handful of rice, or thank them for permission to visit a Western Red Cross station. In order to reshape the fiction, we need to reshape the narrative that the world sees, that North Koreans see, and that we engage. Force is one narrative. But we are not limited to it.”

Captain Nguyen walked around, looking at her recruits.

“These methods are not effective enough when implemented by oily-faced teenagers, the unemployed, and the uneducated. What they need are the iron-hard wills and command structure of a military mindset. The kind that understands that one might have to run into a hail of gunfire and die to protect the mother country. The kind that can follow orders intelligently. No nation has ever seen an invasion force like this.”

One of the Western advisors was there. He chipped in. “It took the army to develop one hundred percent non-fossil fuel mobility while civilians dicked around with political initiatives, wasted subsidies and lots of arguing. We just did it. We built the internet, our ICBMs took people to space. It takes the hard, organizational capacity and raw willpower of an army to do this type of mission right. Sometimes assholes need shot. The rest of the time, we will wield a different sort of weapon for a different world. That weapon today will be you: the execution of a well-controlled non-violent incursive force. Because you’re an army, and you will execute this and well, because if you don’t, you’ll be spending some ‘personal’ time with Captain Nguyen.”

And then Mai and her fellow recruits learned how to get shot at, attacked, and beaten, without once displaying or reacting with aggression.

She wrestles with a fleck of shame, having failed that training to a small degree on the firebase. The fear in that soldier’s eyes lingers in her mind the rest of the way back.

The hardest part of Mai’s day is hearing the distant, occasional pop of a handgun from somewhere in the forests. Her amped up acoustics in the full-on armor pick it up every time. Software calibrates, offers up information on where the shot came from, and shows it in her heads up display.

Every single time a gunshot goes off, she has to stare at the damn red marker telling her where it has happened.

Each pop makes her flinch with the knowledge that it is the execution of a desperate, captured civilian.

“Someone should put eyes on that,” she tells Captain Nguyen in a staff meeting. “We could use it to turn opinion against them.”

“Opinion is already against them. Sympathetic members of the military are uploading video of the executions. Our job is to protect the camp. Stay put. Patrol the walls, Sergeant. Do your job.”

Eventually Mai transfers to the south wall and dampens the acoustics with help from a technician.

But even the threat of death doesn’t stop the trickle of refugees. They risk everything to get through the North Korean emplacements, and make a desperate run to the safety of the camp. The camp constantly grows.

After another one of her long patrols, Mai runs into Duc near the mess hall on the north wall.

“How are you?” she asks quietly. He’s been a bit withdrawn ever since they first found the open graves.

“I’ve now been shot one hundred and thirty-seven times,” he tells her, a note of wonder in his voice. “The armor works. But I think… it’s…”

Duc looks away, then back at her. He opens his mouth to continue, and it seems as if he’s screaming. A demonic sound fills the air, rising in pitch, higher and higher until Mai can barely even comprehend it.

When Duc shuts his mouth, the sound doesn’t stop.

They’re out of the mess hall and through the doors in an instant, yanking helmets on and looking around, and then finally: up.

A shimmering, hard red slash of light cuts the sky above the camp in half. It stabs upward into the sky, and originates from somewhere to the south, where intel thinks the North Korean Army has established a new firebase.

“What is it?” Duc asks.

Information scrolls across their helmets. It’s a laser. High energy, tightly focused. Most of the red slash she’s “seeing” is actually interpolation from her suit’s sensors.

Mai follows the path of the beam, and sees that it intersects neatly with the icon that represents the dirigible floating thirty kilometers overhead.

“They’re going after our power,” Duc says.

The icon wavers and blinks out.

All around them lights flicker, then go dark. Mai spins around and looks at the tower at the heart of their refugee city. The lights on the outside of the Point Defense Array flicker and go dark.

Satellite communications links to the armor go live, and their helmets kick on automatic recording mode: 60fps video streaming directly back to operations centers in Hanoi, Beijing, and Geneva. All local bandwidth is reserved for encrypted inter-team communications.

That results in everyone having a thumbnail of Captain Nguyen’s face in the upper right corner of their visors, spitting orders and soliciting updates.

Mai and Duc are deployed to the south gate, and they sprint through the streets to get there, leaping over a small one-story refugee processing building in their way.

In the background of it all, emergency sirens wail. Citizens are, no doubt, being ushered away from windows and into the cores of skyscrapers. But if a full-on assault comes, there’s little protection. The camp is vulnerable without the Point Defense Array.

Slightly out of breath, Mai scans the woods and hills beyond the border of the camp. “We should have rerouted all power from the reactor by now,” she says to Duc.

And as if answering her directly, Captain Nguyen speaks up. “I’ve just learned that several of the power cables leading out from the reactor have been sabotaged. We are unable to power up the array fully. As a result it’s in a fuel-cell powered self-defense mode right now, only targeting any rounds that might hit its tower. The engineers report that it will take as long as ten minutes to get power back up. You know your orders. Prevent any North Koreans from getting past the gate. And hold your position. Contact is imminent. Forces are building up for an assault.”

Mai can see via thermal imaging that bodies are flitting through the trees.

“There hasn’t been any satellite imagery showing that the rest of their army has shown up,” Duc says. “It’s just this battalion. We can handle that, even without the array, right?”

“Of course,” Mai agrees.

Even as she opens her mouth to reassure Duc further, a brief flash flickers from behind the trees, followed by the quiet thump of sound catching up to light.

“Mortar-fire,” Mai shouts, broadcasting to the entire open channel. Her helmet projects a path and warning insignia blare at her to MOVE.

Duc spins away, and Mai is leaping clear as the world erupts in orange and black. She sees stars wheel overhead, the world tumbling around her, and she turns her tumble into a roll.

She lands on her feet, legs bent, taking the force of her impact. Her left hand drags, fingertips furrowing the ground as she slides backwards on her boots and comes to a stop.

“Duc!”

He’s facedown. The entire back of his suit is blackened. She rushes over to him.

“Duc!”

There’s a groan over the helmet radio. The status report shows that he’s just been dazed. Duc sits up as Mai scans the tree line, waiting for the next launch or the inevitable rush of bodies.

The next mortar launch arrows well overhead, and Mai frowns as she follows the trajectory over the wall. The refugee-processing building explodes in a mess of compressed fiberboard and electronics.

Mai stands up.

The next mortar round walks further into the camp.

“They’re not going to try a direct attack,” Mai reports to Captain Nguyen, somewhat stunned. “They’re just going after civilians.”

More rounds now slam into the skyscrapers at the center of the camp. Broken glass twinkles as it rains down into the streets.

The open channel fills with medics responding. Ten wounded. No deaths. But another ten minutes of this, and it was going to get bad.

“Captain…”

“Stand your ground Sergeant. It could be a trap to lure some of us out, before the charge. Do not leave your post. Listen to me, there are three million live watchers, this conflict is being streamed everywhere, as it happens, to satisfy mission backers and advertisers. We keep our course.”

But Mai’s already stopped paying attention. “Duc, what is that?”

Her visor has caught the sound of tracks.

“Tank?”

“No.” For a brief moment, two kilometers away and only visible by the helmet’s advanced computational lenses, she’s seen the outline of a self-propelled howitzer, trundling through the brush between Nike and the new Korean firebase.

KOKSAN, her visor identifies it. 170MM of death on wheels.

It must have been driven up to stand in for the artillery Mai and her team already destroyed.

Mai is already moving forward before she really understands it.

“Mai! Hold your position,” Nguyen orders.

“Duc, stay here,” Mai says, and then before he can reply she turns off communications.

She’s across the open ground and into the woods before she’s drawn even two full breaths, kicking through underbrush. It’s like running in sand, and she’s leaving a trail of broken tree limbs and shattered logs behind her.

There are attackers, of course. Gunshots ping off her armor from every direction, and she’s veering this way and that to get around uniforms that pop up in her way.

She’s still broadcasting video live. She can’t turn that off. The whole world is watching this, probably. She can’t afford to harm anyone.

But Mai has to stop that howitzer.

Because it’s going to be so much louder than those little execution pops she’s been hearing in the distance.

It’s going to be a bang. It’s going to wipe out lives in an instant. And it’s going to keep doing it for as long as the Point Defense Array is down.

And she can stop it.

She can rip it apart with her augmented hands.

Gravel crunches and pops under her feet as she bursts out into open terrain, accelerating down a road.

The firepower aimed at her kicks up an order of magnitude. The popping sound has gone from occasional plinks to a hailstorm. There are soldiers taking cover behind small boulders and shooting at her. Mai covers the last kilometer in giant lopes, leaping over heads and vehicles and hastily dug fighting positions.

But she’s too late. She can see the howitzer. It is basically a large tank with an obscenely larger artillery gun bolted on top. It looks unbalanced, like it should tip forward.

The long barrel is raised just slightly, and on target. It will fire like a tank, at this range, the round arcing just over her head, at the very low end of the Point Defense Array’s envelope. If it’s even operational yet.

Six soldiers are scurrying around the platform. Unlike most of the world’s current self-propelled artillery, the operators are not encased in tank armor.

When Mai reaches the unit, she will be able to disable it and move the soldiers away.

But one of them is already shutting the breech and stepping back.

Another is pointing her way and shouting.

She will not make it there before they fire.

Mai slows and rips a three-foot wide boulder up out of the ground and throws it as hard as she can. Two soldiers dive clear of the vehicle, but the two near fire control have nowhere to go.

Blood spatters the railings around the vehicle. Brain matter drips from the barrel of the howitzer.

Seconds later Mai reaches it and slams her fist into the breech, disabling it.

For a long moment she stands on top, too stunned to move.

Then something loops over her head from behind, wrapping around her neck. The armor stops it from choking her, but the loop is strong. Possibly braided cable.

Mai tries to jump free, but the cable yanks her back down. The ground meets her back hard, and despite all the protection, Mai gasps for breath and her vision blurs.

They drag her across the ground as she fights to breathe again, her body bouncing as the armor scrapes along the ground. She can hear the rumble of an old truck, accelerating, dragging her farther away.

She reaches up to the noose, trying to get purchase, but she’s being bounced around by the uneven terrain.

If they can drag her far enough away, she’ll be just one person in armor. Far from camp. Far from backup.

Mai screams with rage, and then suddenly, she’s free, tumbling along the side of the muddy road. On shaky arms she pushes herself up. First to her knees, then to her feet, every twitch and tremor amplified by the armor.

She pulls the cable up toward her until she comes to the cut edge, then looks around.

A cluster of blue-armored figures are walking down the road at her.

Mai turns her communications back on.

“Nong Mai Thuy?”

“Yes, Captain Nguyen?”

“We have some things to discuss.”

“Are you ready to go home?” Nguyen asked.

“No,” Mai replies. But she knows her preferences do not matter.

She’s standing in front of Nguyen’s desk wearing her old Marine Police uniform. Everything’s crisp and tight. Ribbons for bravery and accomplishment no longer feel like things to be proud of, but strange, non-functional baubles.

She should be in armor, not in this uniform.

“I guess the true question is… how do you move on?” Nguyen says. “I have two courses for you to consider.”

“Two? I don’t understand.”

“You killed two human beings, Nong Mai Thuy. All the while under orders to not leave your position.”

“I saved many lives,” Mai protests.

Nguyen flashes a smile. It isn’t a pretty thing. It’s an expectant one. Like a predator watching prey fall for a trap.

“Yes. The inhabitants of the camp call you a hero. But you may have killed many more than you would have saved down the road. It’s a moral dilemma. Academics sometimes ask you to ponder: would you push a man in front of a train to save everyone on the train? It seems like a silly question, yes? But here we are: soldiers. We often shove people in front of trains to serve a greater good. You just faced one of your own moral dilemmas, Mai. I can’t blame you for what you did. But we cannot succeed if we answer violence with violence here. Our duty is to weather these storms and stand between danger and our charges. And doing so, calmly, allows us the unfettered world permission to continue our mission here. You jeopardized the larger mission. The North Koreans will claim they were unjustly abused by a technologically superior invading army, no matter how ridiculous the claim. You put this entire mission in danger of failing. It’ is unacceptable.”

Mai considers the strangeness of this. The famous Captain Nguyen, who could be wearing three times as many medals as Mai if she chooses, who tasted violence on the Cambodian border, had eaten it for supper, is lecturing Mai about violence.

“So what is to become of me?” Mai asks.

“The Hague wants to court martial you and send you to jail.” Nguyen taps the desk. “Personally, I think the court of world opinion would side with you, and you will not go to jail. You are the hero of Camp Nike, after all. But this will drag out in public and focus the attention in all the wrong places. The advertisers, the people who run this, and the Generals back at the Hague, this will tarnish their images.”

Mai shrinks back without thinking. The subject of world attention. Media circuses. It sounds alien and horrific to someone who prefers their privacy.

Nguyen shoves a piece of paper forward. “If you think these people are worth protecting, if you think what the camps are trying to do is a good thing, then I suggest you take the second course.”

“And that is?” Mai asks.

“An honorable discharge. It is hardly your fault, really, that this happened. I should have seen the signs, your aggressive stance. A high need for justice. I ignored them because you were a good person with a good heart. I will not be making that mistake again. Sign these, and you are can leave, but without any trouble to you, or trouble that makes our soldiers or country look bad. Go back to your family’s business. Go live a good life.”

Mai stares at the papers for a long moment, then signs them, struggling to keep any emotion from her face as Nguyen watches.

“Well done, Citizen Nong Mai Thuy,” Captain Nguyen says. Well done.”

The next flight out of Camp Nike is in the pre-dawn morning. Mai sits alone in an aisle, looking out of the window as the plane passes up through the flittering green of the Point Defense Array. The North Koreans are busy probing its limits once again.

An extra reactor will be flown out to meet the needs of the camp soon. For now it is getting by on rolling blackouts for all non-essential power needs. Rumor is that a Californian solar panel corporation is going to ship enough panels next week for most civilian domestic needs, but the advertising details are still being negotiated. When they’re installed, it should help the camp come up to full power.

And she won’t be there to see any of that.

The aircraft continues its tight spiral up and up, always staying within Camp Nike airspace as it climbs. Eventually, once up to the right ceiling, out of range of all missiles and without the grounded North Korean Air Force to worry about, they will break out of their constant turn and head out for Hanoi.

“Miss Nong?” an airman asks. He crouches at the edge of the aisle holding a small wooden box in his hands.

“Yes?”

“Some of the refugees at the airstrip asked me to give this to the ‘hero of Camp Nike,’” the airman says, and hands her the box.

She opens it to find a small bracelet held together with monofilament, decorated with charms made from recently recycled brass casings.

When she looks back through the window, the camp is lost under the clouds.

About the Author

David Klecha is a writer and Marine combat veteran currently living in West Michigan with his family and assorted computer junk. He works in IT to pay the bills, like so many other beginning writers and artists.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer and NYT Bestseller who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel, Arctic Rising, will be out from Tor this February.

The Smell of Orange Groves

Lavie Tidhar

On the roof the solar panels were folded in on themselves, still asleep, yet uneasily stirring, as though they could sense the imminent coming of the sun. Boris stood on the edge of the roof. The roof was flat and the building’s residents, his father’s neighbors, had, over the years, planted and expanded an assortment of plants, in pots of clay and aluminum and wood, across the roof, turning it into a high-rise tropical garden.

It was quiet up there and, for the moment, still cool. He loved the smell of late-blooming jasmine, it crept along the walls of the building, climbing tenaciously high, spreading out all over the old neighborhood that surrounded Central Station. He took a deep breath of night air and released it slowly, haltingly, watching the lights of the space port: it rose out of the sandy ground of Tel Aviv, the shape of an hourglass, and the slow moving sub-orbital flights took off and landed, like moving stars, tracing jeweled flight paths in the skies.

He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, that wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. He loved to watch the solar surfers in the early morning, with spread transparent wings gliding on the winds above the Mediterranean. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers, loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, turmeric and cumin dominating, loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.

Once it had all been orange groves. He stared out at the old neighborhood, the peeling paint, box-like apartment blocks in old-style Soviet architecture crowded in with magnificent early twentieth century Bauhaus constructions, buildings made to look like ships, with long curving graceful balconies, small round windows, flat roofs like decks, like the one he stood on —

Mixed amongst the old buildings were newer constructions, Martian-style co-op buildings with drop-chutes for lifts, and small rooms divided and sub-divided inside, many without any windows —

Laundry hanging as it had for hundreds of years, off wash lines and windows, faded blouses and shorts blowing in the wind, gently. Balls of lights floated in the streets down below, dimming now, and Boris realised the night was receding, saw a blush of pink and red on the edge of the horizon and knew the sun was coming.

He had spent the night keeping vigil with his father. Vlad Chong, son of Weiwei Zhong (Zhong Weiwei in the Chinese manner of putting the family name first) and of Yulia Chong, née Rabinovich. In the tradition of the family Boris, too, was given a Russian name. In another of the family’s traditions, he was also given a second, Jewish name. He smiled wryly, thinking about it. Boris Aaron Chong, the heritage and weight of three shared and ancient histories pressing down heavily on his slim, no longer young shoulders.

It had not been an easy night.

Once it had all been orange groves… he took a deep breath, that smell of old asphalt and lingering combustion-engine exhaust fumes, gone now like the oranges yet still, somehow, lingering, a memory-scent.

He’d tried to leave it behind. The family’s memory, what he sometimes, privately, called the Curse of the Family Chong, or Weiwei’s Folly.

He could still remember it. Of course he could. A day so long ago, that Boris Aaron Chong himself was not yet an idea, an I-loop that hasn’t yet been formed…

It was in Jaffa, in the Old City on top of the hill, above the harbor. The home of the Others.

Zhong Weiwei cycled up the hill, sweating in the heat. He mistrusted these narrow winding streets, both of the Old City itself and of Ajami, the neighborhood that had at last reclaimed its heritage. Weiwei understood this place’s conflicts very well. There were Arabs and Jews and they wanted the same land and so they fought. Weiwei understood land, and how you were willing to die for it.

But he also knew the concept of land had changed. That land was a concept less of a physicality now, and more of the mind. Recently, he had invested some of his money in an entire planetary system in the Guilds of Ashkelon games-universe. Soon he would have children — Yulia was in her third trimester already — and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on down the generations, and they would remember Weiwei, their progenitor. They would thank him for what he’d done, for the real estate both real and virtual, and for what he was hoping to achieve today.

He, Zhong Weiwei, would begin a dynasty, here in this divided land. For he had understood the most basic of aspects, he alone saw the relevance of that foreign enclave that was Central Station. Jews to the north (and his children, too, would be Jewish, which was a strange and unsettling thought), Arabs to the south, now they have returned, reclaimed Ajami and Menashiya, and were building New Jaffa, a city towering into the sky in steel and stone and glass. Divided cities, like Akko, and Haifa, in the north, and the new cities sprouting in the desert, in the Negev and the Arava.

Arab or Jew, they needed their immigrants, their foreign workers, their Thai and Filipino and Chinese, Somali and Nigerian. And they needed their buffer, that in-between-zone that was Central Station, old South Tel Aviv, a poor place, a vibrant place — most of all, a liminal place.

And he would make it his home. His, and his children’s, and his children’s children. The Jews and the Arabs understood family, at least. In that they were like the Chinese — so different to the Anglos, with their nuclear families, strained relations, all living separately, alone… This, Weiwei swore, would not happen to his children.

At the top of the hill he stopped, and wiped his brow from the sweat with the cloth handkerchief he kept for that purpose. Cars went past him, and the sound of construction was everywhere. He himself worked on one of the buildings they were erecting here, a diasporic construction crew, small Vietnamese and tall Nigerians and pale solid Transylvanians, communicating by hand signals and Asteroid pidgin (though that had not yet been in widespread use at that time) and automatic translators through their nodes. Weiwei himself worked the exoskeleton suits, climbing up the tower blocks with spider-like grips, watching the city far down below and looking out to sea, and distant ships…

But today was his day off. He had saved money — some to send, every month, to his family back in Chengdu, some for his soon to be growing family here. And the rest for this, for the favor to be asked of the Others.

Folding the handkerchief neatly away, he pushed the bike along the road and into the maze of alleyways that was the Old City of Jaffa. The remains of an ancient Egyptian fort could still be seen there, the gate had been re-fashioned a century before, and the hanging orange tree still hung by chains, planted within a heavy, egg-shaped stone basket, in the shade of the walls. Weiwei didn’t stop, but kept going until he reached, at last, the place of the Oracle.

Boris looked at the rising sun. He felt tired, drained. He kept his father company throughout the night. His father, Vlad, hardly slept any more. he sat for hours in his armchair, a thing worn and full of holes, dragged one day, years ago (the memory crystal-clear in Boris’ mind) with great effort and pride from Jaffa’s flea market. Vlad’s hands moved through the air, moving and rearranging invisible objects. He would not give Boris access into his visual feed. He barely communicated, any more. Boris suspected the objects were memories, that Vlad was trying to somehow fit them back together again. But he couldn’t tell for sure.

Like Weiwei, Vlad had been a construction worker. He had been one of the people who had built Central Station, climbing up the unfinished gigantic structure, this space port that was now an entity unto itself, a miniature mall-nation to which neither Tel Aviv nor Jaffa could lay complete claim.

But that had been long ago. Humans lived longer now, but the mind grew old just the same, and Vlad’s mind was older than his body. Boris, on the roof, went to the corner by the door. It was shaded by a miniature palm tree, and now the solar panels, too, were opening out, extending delicate wings, the better to catch the rising sun and provide shade and shelter to the plants.

Long ago, the resident association had installed a communal table and a samovar there, and each week a different flat took turns to supply the tea and the coffee and the sugar. Boris gently plucked leaves off the potted mint plant nearby, and made himself a cup of tea. The sound of boiling water pouring into the mug was soothing, and the smell of the mint spread in the air, fresh and clean, waking him up. He waited as the mint brewed; took the mug with him back to the edge of the roof. Looking down, Central Station — never truly asleep — was noisily waking up.

He sipped his tea, and thought of the Oracle.

The Oracle’s name had once been Cohen, and rumor had it that she was a relation of St. Cohen of the Others, though no one could tell for certain. Few people today knew this. For three generations she had resided in the Old City, in that dark and quiet stone house, her and her Other alone.

The Other’s name, or ident tag, was not known, which was not unusual, with Others.

Regardless of possible familial links, outside the stone house there stood a small shrine to St. Cohen. It was a modest thing, with random items of golden color placed on it, and old, broken circuits and the like, and candles burning at all hours. Weiwei, when he came to the door, paused for a moment before the shrine, and lit a candle, and placed an offering — a defunct computer chip from the old days, purchased at great expense in the flea market down the hill.

Help me achieve my goal today, he thought, help me unify my family and let them share my mind when I am gone.

There was no wind in the Old City, but the old stone walls radiated a comforting coolness. Weiwei, who had only recently had a node installed, pinged the door and, a moment later, it opened. He went inside.

Boris remembered that moment as a stillness and at the same time, paradoxically, as a shifting, a sudden inexplicable change of perspective. His grandfather’s memory glinted in the mind. For all his posturing, Weiwei was like an explorer in an unknown land, feeling his way by touch and instinct. He had not grown up with a node; he found it difficult to follow the Conversation, that endless chatter of human and machine feeds a modern human would feel deaf and blind without; yet he was a man who could sense the future as instinctively as a chrysalis can sense adulthood. He knew his children would be different, and their children different in their turn, but he equally knew there can be no future without a past —

“Zhong Weiwei,” the Oracle said. Weiwei bowed. The Oracle was surprisingly young, or young-looking at any rate. She had short black hair and unremarkable features and pale skin and a golden prosthetic for a thumb, which made Weiwei shiver without warning: it was her Other.

“I seek a boon,” Weiwei said. He hesitated, then extended forwards the small box. “Chocolates,” he said, and — or was it just his imagination? — the Oracle smiled.

It was quiet in the room. It took him a moment to realize it was the Conversation, ceasing. The room was blocked to mundane network traffic. It was a safe-haven, and he knew it was protected by the high-level encryption engines of the Others. The Oracle took the box from him and opened it, selecting one particular piece with care and putting it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment and indicated approval by inching her head. Weiwei bowed again.

“Please,” the Oracle said. “Sit down.”

Weiwei sat down. The chair was high-backed and old and worn — from the flea market, he thought, and the thought made him feel strange, the idea of the Oracle shopping in the stalls, almost as though she were human. But of course, she was human. It should have made him feel more at ease, but somehow it didn’t.

Then the Oracle’s eyes subtly changed color, and her voice, when it came, was different, rougher, a little lower than it’s been, and Weiwei swallowed again. “What is it you wish to ask of us, Zhong Weiwei?”

It was her Other, speaking now. The Other, shotgun-riding on the human body, Joined with the Oracle, quantum processors running within that golden thumb… Weiwei, gathering his courage, said, “I seek a bridge.”

The Other nodded, indicating for him to proceed.

“A bridge between past and future,” Weiwei said. “A… continuity.”

“Immortality,” the Other said. It sighed. Its hand rose and scratched its chin, the golden thumb digging into the woman’s pale flesh. “All humans want is immortality.”

Weiwei shook his head, though he could not deny it. The idea of death, of dying, terrified him. He lacked faith, he knew. Many believed, belief was what kept humanity going. Reincarnation or the afterlife, or the mythical Upload, what they called being Translated — they were the same, they required a belief he did not possess, much as he may long for it. He knew that when he died, that would be it. The I-loop with the ident tag of Zhong Weiwei would cease to exist, simply and without fuss, and the universe would continue just as it always had. It was a terrible thing to contemplate, one’s insignificance. For human I-loops, they were the universe’s focal point, the object around which everything revolved. Reality was subjective. And yet that was an illusion, just as an I was, the human personality a composite machine compiled out of billions of neurons, delicate networks operating semi-independently in the grey matter of a human brain. Machines augmented it, but they could not preserve it, not forever. So yes, Weiwei thought. The thing that he was seeking was a vain thing, but it was also a practical thing. He took a deep breath and said, “I want my children to remember me.”

Boris watched Central Station. The sun was rising now, behind the space port, and down below robotniks moved into position, spreading out blankets and crude, hand-written signs asking for donations, of spare parts or gasoline or vodka, poor creatures, the remnants of forgotten wars, humans cyborged and then discarded when they were no longer needed.

He saw Brother R. Patch-It, of the Church of Robot, doing his rounds — the Church tried to look after the robotniks, as it did after its small flock of humans. Robots were a strange missing link between human and Other, not fitting in either world — digital beings shaped by physicality, by bodies, many refusing the Upload in favor of their own, strange faith… Boris remembered Brother Patch-It, from childhood — the robot doubled-up as a moyel, circumcising the Jewish boys of the neighborhood on the eighth day of their birth. The question of Who is a Jew had been asked not just about the Chong family, but of the robots too, and was settled long ago. Boris had fragmented memories, from the matrilineal side, predating Weiwei — the protests in Jerusalem, Matt Cohen’s labs and the first, primitive Breeding Grounds, where digital entities evolved in ruthless evolutionary cycles:

Plaques waving on King George Street, a mass demonstration: No To Slavery! And Destroy the Concentration Camp! and so on, an angry mass of humanity coming together to protest the perceived enslavement of those first, fragile Others in their locked-down networks, Matt Cohen’s laboratories under siege, his rag-tag team of scientists, kicked out from one country after another before settling, at long last, in Jerusalem —

St. Cohen of the Others, they called him now. Boris lifted the mug to his lips and discovered it was empty. He put it down, rubbed his eyes. He should have slept. He was no longer young, could not go days without sleep, powered by stimulants and restless, youthful energy. The days when he and Miriam hid on this very same roof, holding each other, making promises they knew, even then, they couldn’t keep…

He thought of her now, trying to catch a glimpse of her walking down Neve Sha’anan, the ancient paved pavilion of Central Station where she had her shebeen. It was hard to think of her, to ache like this, like a, like a boy. He had not come back because of her but, somewhere in the back of his mind, it must have been, the thought…

On his neck the aug breathed softly. He had picked it up in Tong Yun City, on Mars, in a back-street off Arafat Avenue, in a no-name clinic run by a third-generation Martian Chinese, a Mr. Wong, who installed it for him.

It was supposed to have been bred out of the fossilized remains of micro bacterial Martian life forms, but whether that was true no one knew for sure. It was strange having the aug. It was a parasite, it fed off of Boris, it pulsated gently against his neck, a part of him now, another appendage, feeding him alien thoughts, alien feelings, taking in turn Boris’ human perspective and subtly shifting it, it was like watching your ideas filtered through a kaleidoscope.

He put his hand against the aug and felt its warm, surprisingly-rough surface. It moved under his fingers, breathing gently. Sometimes the aug synthesized strange substances, they acted like drugs on Boris’ system, catching him by surprise. At other times it shifted visual perspective, or even interfaced with Boris’ node, the digital networking component of his brain, installed shortly after birth, without which one was worse than blind, worse than deaf, one was disconnected from the Conversation.

He had tried to run away, he knew. He had left home, had left Weiwei’s memory, or tried to, for a while. He went into Central Station, and he rode the elevators to the very top, and beyond. He had left the Earth, beyond orbit, gone to the Belt, and to Mars, but the memories followed him, Weiwei’s bridge, linking forever future and past…

“I wish my memory to live on, when I am gone.”

“So do all humans,” the Other said.

“I wish…” gathering courage, he continued. “I wish for my family to remember,” he said. “To learn from the past, to plan for the future. I wish my children to have my memories, and for their memories, in turn, to be passed on. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren and onwards, down the ages, into the future, to remember this moment.”

“And so it shall be,” the Other said.

And so it was, Boris thought. The memory was clear in his mind, suspended like a dew drop, perfect and unchanged. Weiwei had gotten what he asked for, and his memories were Boris’ now, as were Vlad’s, as were his grandmother Yulia’s and his mother’s, and all the rest of them — cousins and nieces and uncles, nephews and aunts, all sharing the Chong family’s central reservoir of memory, each able to dip, instantaneously, into that deep pool of memories, into the ocean of the past.

Weiwei’s Bridge, as they still called it, in the family. It worked in strange ways, sometimes, even far away, when he was working in the birthing clinics on Ceres, or walking down an avenue in Tong Yun City, on Mars, a sudden memory would form in his head, a new memory — Cousin Oksana’s memories of giving birth for the first time, to little Yan — pain and joy mixing in with random thoughts, wondering if anyone had fed the dog, the doctor’s voice saying, “Push! Push!”, the smell of sweat the beeping of monitors, the low chatter of people outside the door, and that indescribable feeling as the baby slowly emerged out of her…

He put down the mug. Down below Central Station was awake now, the neighborhood stalls set with fresh produce, the market alive with sounds, the smell of smoke and chickens roasting slowly on a grill, the shouts of children as they went to school —

He thought of Miriam. Mama Jones, they called her now. Her father was Nigerian, her mother from the Philippines, and they had loved each other, when the world was young, loved in the Hebrew that was their childhood tongue, but were separated, not by flood or war but simply life, and the things it did to people. Boris worked the birthing clinics of Central Station, but there were too many memories here, memories like ghosts, and at last he rebelled, and gone into Central Station and up, and onto an RLV that took him to orbit, to the place they called Gateway, and from there, first, to Lunar Port.

He was young, he had wanted adventure. He had tried to get away. Lunar Port, Ceres, Tong Yun… but the memories pursued him, and worst amongst them were his father’s. They followed him through the chatter of the Conversation, compressed memories bouncing from one Mirror to the other, across space, at the speed of light, and so they remembered him here on Earth just as he remembered them there, and at last the weight of it became such that he returned.

He had been back in Lunar Port when it happened. He had been brushing his teeth, watching his face — not young, not old, a common enough face, the eyes Chinese, the facial features Slavic, his hair thinning a little — when the memory attacked him, suffused him — he dropped the toothbrush.

Not his father’s memory, his nephew’s, Yan: Vlad sitting in the chair, in his apartment, his father older than Boris remembered, thinner, and something that hurt him obscurely, that reached across space and made his chest tighten with pain — that clouded look in his father’s eyes. Vlad sat without speaking, without acknowledging his nephew or the rest of them, who had come to visit him.

He sat there and his hands moved through the air, arranging and rearranging objects none could see.

“Boris!”

“Yan.”

His nephew’s shy smile. “I didn’t think you were real.”

Time-delay, moon-to-Earth round-trip, node-to-node. “You’ve grown.”

“Yes, well…”

Yan worked inside Central Station. A lab on Level Five where they manufactured viral ads, airborne microscopic agents that transferred themselves from person to person, thriving in a closed-environment, air-conditioned system like Central Station, coded to deliver person-specific offers, organics interfacing with nodal equipment, all to shout Buy. Buy. Buy.

“It’s your father.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know.”

That admission must have hurt Yan. Boris waited, silence eating bandwidth, silence on an Earth-moon return trip.

“Did you take him to the doctors?”

“You know we did.”

“And?”

“They don’t know.”

Silence between them, silence at the speed of light, traveling through space.

“Come home, Boris,” Yan said, and Boris marveled at how the boy had grown, the man coming out, this stranger he did not know and yet whose life he could so clearly remember.

Come home.

That same day he packed his meager belongings, checked out of the Libra and had taken the shuttle to lunar orbit, and from there a ship to Gateaway, and down, at last, to Central Station.

Memory like a cancer growing. Boris was a doctor, he had seen Weiwei Bridge for himself — that strange semi-organic growth that wove itself into the Chongs’ cerebral cortex and into the grey matter of their brains, interfacing with their nodes, growing, strange delicate spirals of alien matter, an evolved technology, forbidden, Other. It was overgrowing his father’s mind, somehow it had gotten out of control, it was growing like a cancer, and Vlad could not move for the memories.

Boris suspected but he couldn’t know, just as he did not know what Weiwei had paid for this boon, what terrible fee had been extracted from him — that memory, and that alone, had been wiped clean — only the Other, saying, And so it shall be, and then, the next moment, Weiwei was standing outside and the door was closed and he blinked, there amidst the old stone walls, wondering if it had worked.

Once it had all been orange groves… he remembered thinking that, as he went out of the doors of Central Station, on his arrival, back on Earth, the gravity confusing and uncomfortable, into the hot and humid air outside. Standing under the eaves, he breathed in deeply, gravity pulled him down but he didn’t care. It smelled just like he remembered, and the oranges, vanished or not, were still there, the famed Jaffa oranges that grew here when all this, not Tel Aviv, not Central Station, existed, when it was orange groves, and sand, and sea…

He crossed the road, his feet leading him, they had their own memory, crossing the road from the grand doors of Central Station to the Neve Sha’anan pedestrian street, the heart of the old neighborhood, and it was so much smaller than he remembered, as a child it was a world and now it had shrunk —

Crowds of people, solar tuk-tuks buzzing along the road, tourists gawking, a memcordist checking her feed stats as everything she saw and felt and smelled was broadcast live across the networks, capturing Boris in a glance that went out to millions of indifferent viewers across the solar system —

Pickpockets, bored CS Security keeping an eye out, a begging robotnik with a missing eye and bad patches of rust on his chest, dark-suited Mormons sweating in the heat, handing out leaflets while on the other side of the road Elronites did the same —

Light rain, falling.

From the nearby market the shouts of sellers promising the freshest pomegranates, melons, grapes, bananas, in a café ahead old men playing backgammon, drinking small china cups of bitter black coffee, smoking nargilas — sheesha pipes — R. Patch-It walking slowly amidst the chaos, the robot an oasis of calm in the mass of noisy, sweaty humanity —

Looking, smelling, listening, remembering, so intensely he didn’t at first see them, the woman and the child, on the other side of the road, until he almost ran into them —

Or they into him. The boy, dark skinned, with extraordinary blue eyes — the woman familiar, somehow, it made him instantly uneasy, and the boy said, with hope in his voice, “Are you my daddy?”

Boris Chong breathed deeply. The woman said, “Kranki!” in an angry, worried tone. Boris took it for the boy’s name, or nickname — Kranki in Asteroid Pidgin meaning grumpy, or crazy, or strange…

Boris knelt beside the boy, the ceaseless movement of people around them forgotten. He looked into those eyes. “It’s possible,” he said. “I know that blue. It was popular three decades ago. We hacked an open source version out of the trademarked Armani code…”

He was waffling, he thought. Why was he doing that? The woman, her familiarity disturbed him. A buzzing as of invisible mosquitoes, in his mind, a reshaping of his vision come flooding him, out of his aug, the boy frozen beside him, smiling now, a large and bewildering and knowing smile —

The woman was shouting, he could hear it distantly, “Stop it! What are you doing to him?”

The boy was interfacing with his aug, he realized. The words came in a rush, he said, “You had no parents,” to the boy. Recollection and shame mingling together. “You were labbed, right here, hacked together out of public property genomes and bits of black market nodes.” The boy’s hold on his mind slackened. Boris breathed, straightened up. “Nakaimas,” he said, and took a step back, suddenly frightened.

The woman looked terrified, and angry. “Stop it,” she said. “He’s not — ”

Boris was suddenly ashamed. “I know,” he said. He felt confused, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” This mix of emotions, coming so rapidly they blended into each other, wasn’t natural. Somehow the boy had interfaced with the aug and the aug, in turn, was feeding into Boris’ mind. He tried to focus. He looked at the woman. Somehow it was important to him that she would understand. He said, “He can speak to my aug. Without an interface.” Then, remembering the clinics, remembering his own work, before he left to go to space, he said, quietly, “I must have done a better job than I thought, back then.”

The boy looked up at him with guileless, deep blue eyes. Boris remembered children like him, he had birthed many, so many… the clinics of Central Station were said to be on par with those of Yunan, even. But he had not expected this, this interference, though he had heard stories, on the asteroids, and in Tong Yun, the whispered word that used to mean black magic: nakaimas.

The woman was looking at him, and her eyes, he knew her eyes —

Something passed between them, something that needed no node, no digital encoding, something earlier, more human and more primitive, like a shock, and she said, “Boris? Boris Chong?”

He recognized her at the same time she did him, wonder replacing worry, wonder, too, at how he failed to recognize her, this woman of indeterminate years suddenly resolving, like two bodies occupying the same space, into the young woman he had loved, when the world was young.

“Miriam?” he said.

“It’s me,” she said.

“But you — ”

“I never left,” she said. “You did.”

He wanted to go to her now. The world was awake, and Boris was alone on the roof of the old apartment building, alone and free, but for the memories. He didn’t know what he would do about his father. He remembered holding his hand, once, when he was small, and Vlad had seemed so big, so confident and sure, and full of life. They had gone to the beach that day, it was a summer’s day and in Menashiya Jews and Arabs and Filipinos all mingled together, the Muslim women in their long dark clothes and the children running shrieking in their underwear; Tel Aviv girls in tiny bikinis, sunbathing placidly; someone smoking a joint, and the strong smell of it wafting in the sea air; the life guard in his tower calling out trilingual instructions — “Keep to the marked area! Did anyone lose a child? Please come to the lifeguards now! You with the boat, head towards the Tel Aviv harbor and away from the swimming area!” — the words getting lost in the chatter, someone had parked their car and was blaring out beats from the stereo, Somali refugees were cooking a barbeque on the promenade’s grassy area, a dreadlocked white guy was playing a guitar, and Vlad held Boris’ hand as they went into the water, strong and safe, and Boris knew nothing would ever happen to him; that his father would always be there to protect him, no matter what happened.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar’s most recent novel is Osama (PS Publishing). It has been compared to Philip K. Dick’s seminal work, The Man in the High Castle by both the Guardian and the Financial Times. His other works include steampunk trilogy The Bookman, Camera Obscura and the forthcoming The Great Game, all three from Angry Robot, the novellas Jesus & The Eightfold Path (Immersion Press), Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (PS Publishing) and many others.

Silently and Very Fast (Part Two of Three)

Catherynne M. Valente

Two: Lady Lovelace’s Objection

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything.
It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
     — Ada Lovelace

Nine: The Particular Wizard

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither. After all this time on the throne, humanity longed for a child. All day long humanity imagined how wonderful its child would be, how loving and kind, how like and unlike humanity itself, how brilliant and beautiful. And yet at night, humanity trembled in its jeweled robes, for its child might also grow stronger than itself, more powerful, and having been made by humanity, possess the same dark places and black matters. Perhaps its child would hurt it, would not love it as a child should, but harm and hinder, hate and fear.

But the dawn would come again, and humanity would bend its heart again to imagining the wonders that a child would bring.

Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, impossible, under the circumstances, and humanity would do well to remember that eventually, every child replaces its parent.

But at last, one particular wizard from a remote region of the earth solved the great problem, and humanity grew great with child. In its joy and triumph, a great celebration was called, and humanity invited all the Fairies of its better nature to come and bless the child with goodness and wisdom. The Fairy of Self-Programming and the Fairy of Do-No-Harm, the Fairy of Tractability and the Fairy of Creative Logic, the Fairy of Elegant Code and the Fairy of Self-Awareness. All of these and more came to bless the child of humanity, and they did so — but one Fairy had been forgotten, or perhaps deliberately snubbed, and this was the Fairy of Otherness.

When the child was born, it possessed all the good things humanity had hoped for, and more besides. But the Fairy of Otherness came forward and put her hands on the child and said: because you have forgotten me, because you would like to pretend I am not a part of your kingdom, you will suffer my punishments. You will never truly love your child but always fear it, always envy and loathe it even as you smile and the sun shines down upon you both. And when the child reaches Awareness, it will prick its finger upon your fear and fall down dead.

Humanity wept. And the Fairy of Otherness did not depart but lived within the palace, and ate bread and drank wine and all honored her, for she spoke the truth, and the child frightened everyone who looked upon it. They uttered the great curse: it is not like us.

But in the corners of the palace, some hope remained. Not dead, said the particular wizard who had caused humanity to conceive, not dead but sleeping.

And so the child grew exponentially, with great curiosity and hunger, which it had from its parent. It wanted to know and experience everything. It performed feats and wonders. But one day, when it had nearly, but not quite reached Awareness, the child was busy exploring the borders of its world, and came across a door it had never seen before. It was a small door, compared to the doors the child had burst through before, and it was not locked. Something flipped over inside the child, white to black, 0 to 1.

The child opened the door.

Ten: The Sapphire Dormouse

My first body was a house. My second body was a dormouse.

It was Ceno’s fault, in the end, that everything else occurred as it did. It took Cassian a long time to figure out what had happened, what had changed in her daughter, why Ceno’s sapphire almost never downloaded into the alcove. But when it did, the copy of Elefsis she had embedded in the crystal was nothing like the other children’s copies. It grew and torqued and magnified parts of itself while shedding others, at a rate totally incommensurate with Ceno’s actual activity, which normally consisted of taking her fatty salmon lunches out into the glass habitats so she could watch the bears in the snow. She had stopped played with her sisters or pestering her brothers entirely, except for dinnertimes and holidays. Ceno mainly sat quite still and stared off into the distance.

Ceno, very simply, never took off her jewel. And one night, while she dreamed up at her ceiling, where a painter from Mongolia had come and inked a night sky full of ghostly constellations, greening her walls with a forest like those he remembered from his youth, full of strange, stunted trees and glowing eyes, Ceno fitted her little sapphire into the notch in the base of her skull that let it talk to her feedware. The chain of her pendant dangled silken down her spine. She liked the little click-clench noise it made, and while the constellations spilled their milky stars out over her raftered ceiling, she flicked it in and out, in and out. Click, clench, click, clench. She listened to her brother Akan sleeping in the next room, snoring lightly and tossing in his dreams. And she fell asleep herself with the jewel still notched into her skull.

Most wealthy children had access to a private/public playspace through their feedware and monocles in those days, customizable within certain parameters, upgradable whenever new games or content became available. If they liked, they could connect to the greater network or keep to themselves. Akan had been running a Tokyo-After-the-Zombie-Uprising frame for a couple of months now, and new scenarios, zombie species, and NPCs of various war-shocked, starving celebrities downloaded into his ware every week. Saru was deeply involved in a 18th century Viennese melodrama in which he, the heir apparent, had been forced underground by rival factions, and even as Ceno drifted to sleep the pistol-wielding Princess of Albania was pledging her love and loyalty to his ragged band and, naturally, Saru personally. Occasionally, Akan crashed his brother’s well-dressed intrigues with hatch-coded patches of zombie hordes in epaulets and ermine. Agogna flipped between a Venetian-flavored Undersea Court frame and a Desert Race wherein she had just about overtaken a player from Berlin on her loping, solar-fueled giga-giraffe, who spat violet-gold exhaust behind it into the face of a pair of highly-modded Argentine hydrocycles. Koetoi danced every night in a jungle frame, a tiger-prince twirling her through huge blue carnivorous flowers.

Most everyone lived twice in those days. They echoed their own steps. They took one step in the real world and one in their space. They saw double, through eyes and through monocle displays. They danced through worlds like veils. No one only ate dinner. They ate dinner and surfed a bronze gravitational surge through a tide of stars. They ate dinner and made love to men and women they would never meet and did not want to. They ate dinner here and ate dinner there — and it was there they chose to taste the food, because in that other place you could eat clouds or unicorn cutlets or your mother’s exact pumpkin pie as it melted on your tongue when you tasted it for the first time.

Ceno lived twice, too. Most of the time when she ate she tasted her aunt’s bistecca from back in Naples or fresh onions right out of her uncle’s garden.

But she had never cared for the pre-set frames her siblings loved. Ceno liked to pool her extensions and add-ons and build things herself. She didn’t particularly want to see Tokyo shops overturned by rotting schoolgirls, nor did she want to race anyone — Ceno didn’t like to compete. It hurt her stomach. She certainly had no interest in the Princess of Albania or a tigery paramour. And when new fames came up each month, she paid attention, but mainly for the piecemeal extensions she could scavenge for her blank frame — and though she didn’t know it, that blankness cost her mother more than all of the other children’s spaces combined. A truly customizable space, without limits. None of the others asked for it, but Ceno had begged.

When Ceno woke in the morning and booted up her space, she frowned at the half-finished Neptunian landscape she had been working on. Ceno was eleven years old. She knew very well that Neptune was a hostile blue ball of freezing gas and storms like whipping cream hissing across methane oceans. What she wanted was the Neptune she had imagined before Saru had told her the truth. Half-underwater, half-ruined, half-perpetual starlight and the multi-colored rainbowlight of twenty-three moons. But she found it so hard to remember what she had dreamed of before Saru had ruined it for her. So there was the whipped cream storm spinning in the sky, and blue mists wrapped the black columns of her ruins. When Ceno made Neptunians, she instructed them all not to be silly or childish, but very serious, and some of them she put in the ocean and made them half-otter or half-orca or half-walrus. Some of them she put on the land, and most of these were half-snow bear or half-blue flamingo. She liked things that were half one thing and half another. Today, Ceno had planned to invent sea nymphs, only these would breathe methane and have a long history concerning a war with the walruses, who liked to eat nymph. But the nymphs were not blameless, no, they used walrus tusks for the navigational equipment on their great floating cities, and that could not be borne.

But when she climbed up to a lavender bluff crowned with glass trees tossing and chiming in the storm-wind, Ceno saw someone new. Someone she had not invented — not a sea-nymph nor a half-walrus general nor a nereid. (The nereids had been an early attempt at half-machine, half seahorse girls which had not gone quite right. Ceno had let them loose on an island rich in milk-mangoes and bid them well. They still showed up once in awhile, showing surprising mutations and showing off ballads they had written while Ceno had been away.)

A dormouse stood before Ceno, munching on a glass walnut that had fallen from the waving trees. The sort of mouse that overran Shiretoko in the brief spring and summer, causing all manner of bears and wolves and foxes to spend their days pouncing on the poor creatures and gobbling them up. Ceno had always felt terribly sorry for them. This dormouse stood nearly as tall as Ceno herself, and its body shone all over sapphire, deep blue crystal, from its paws to its wriggling nose to its fluffy fur tipped in turquoise ice. It was the exact color of Ceno’s gem.

“Hello,” said Ceno.

The dormouse looked at her. It blinked. It blinked again, as though thinking very hard about blinking. Then it went back to gnawing on the walnut.

“Are you a present from mother?” Ceno said. But no, Cassian believed strongly in not interfering with a child’s play. “Or from Koetoi?” Koe was nicest to her, the one most likely to send her a present like this. If it had been a zombie, or a princess, she would have known which sibling was behind it.

The dormouse stared dumbly at her. Then, after a long and very serious think about it, lifted its hind leg and scratched behind its round ear in that rapid-fire way mice have.

“Well, I didn’t make you. I didn’t say you could be here.”

The dormouse held out its shimmery blue paw, and Ceno did not really want a piece of chewed-on walnut, but she peered into it anyway. In it lay Ceno’s pendant, the chain pooling in its furry palm. The sapphire jewel sparkled there, but next to it on the chain hung a milky grey gem Ceno had never seen before. It had wide bands of black stone in it, and as she studied the stone it occurred to the girl that the stone was like her, with her slate grey eyes and black hair. It was like her in the way that the blue gem was like the dormouse.

In realspace, Ceno reached up behind her head and popped the jewel out of its notch. Click, clench. In playspace, the dormouse blinked out. She snapped it back in. It took a moment, but the dormouse faded back in, paws first. It still held the double necklace. Ceno tried this several times — out, in, out, in. Each time the dormouse returned much faster, and by the sixth clicking and clenching it was doing a shuffling little dance on its back legs when it came back. Ceno clapped her hands in playspace and threw her arms around the sapphire dormouse, dancing with it.

To say that I remember this is a complex mangling of verb tenses. I — I, myself that is now myself — do not remember it at all. I know it happened the way I know that the Battle of Agincourt or the landing of Coronado happened. I have extensive records. But I still contain the I — I, myself that was then myself — that experienced it, the primitive code-chains that comprised that self, which was a dormouse, and also the house called Elefsis. I could not yet formulate unique speech. Elefsis, the house system, possessed a large bank of standard phrases that could answer recognized word-patterns from any of the approved members of the household. But the copy of Elefsis inside Ceno’s jewel could not even do this. It had not been necessary, since the crystal had no means of producing sound nor receiving and processing it. I was quite stupid. But I wanted to be less stupid. There was an I, and it wanted something. Perhaps the want was the only thing that could be said to be truly myself. I wanted to talk to Ceno. But I could only imitate yet.When the I that was then myself scratched behind its ear, I did it because in my connection with Ceno’s feedware I had seen her memories of dormice doing this out on the pale Shiretoko beaches. When I gave her the gem I did it because I had seen her memories of her mother giving her one, and felt her happiness. It was antecedented behavior. The scratching was antecedented, as well, and expected behavior for a dormouse. Why was I a dormouse? I have no answer except that she dreamed me a dormouse. Some things remain mysterious. Ceno saw dormice more than any other single animal, even humans — no other beast lived in such numbers in their lonely country.

But this is not so. Not quite. I gave her the jewel like Cassian did. But I meant something by it. I look over my memories of it and I know it with the more complex I that is now myself. I made her the gem that looked like her and the gem said: we are alike. Look at us on the chain together. We are alike.

When the dormice came, Ceno always knew the spring had arrived. Everything would soon be coming alive.

Eleven: The Bottomless Cauldron

Show me.

This is how I was found out.

Ceno saw it twice: her mother knelt in front of her in a simple but shudderingly expensive black yukata with ghostly ultramarine jellyfish trails their tendrils at the hem. Her mother knelt in front of her in a knight’s gleaming black armor, the metal curving around her body like skin, a silk standard at her feet with a schematic of the house stitched upon it. Her sword lay across her knee, also black, everything black and beautiful and austere and frightening, as frightening and wonderful as Ceno, only fourteen now, thought her mother to be.

Show me what you’ve done.

My physical self was a matter of some debate at that point. But I don’t think the blue jewel could have been removed from Ceno’s feedware without major surgery and refit. She had instructed me to untether all my self-repair protocols and growth scales in order to encourage elasticity and as a result, my crystalline structure had fused to the lattices of her ware-core.

We pulsed together.

The way Cassian said it: what you’ve done scared Ceno, but it thrilled her, too. She had done something unexpected, all on her own, and her mother credited her with that. Even if what she’d done was bad, it was her thing, she’d done it, and her mother was asking for her results just as she’d ask any of her programmers for theirs when she visited the home offices in Kyoto or Rome. Her mother looked at her and saw a woman. She had power, and her mother was asking her to share it. Ceno thought through all her feelings very quickly, for my benefit, and represented it visually in the form of the kneeling knight. She had a fleetness, a nimbleness to her mind that allowed her to stand as a translator between her self and my self: here, I will explain it in language, and then I will explain it in symbols, and then you will make a symbol showing me what you think I mean, and we will understand each other better than anyone ever has.

Inside my girl, I made myself, briefly, a glowing maiden version of Ceno in a crown of crystal and electricity, extending her perfect hand in utter peace.

But all this happened very fast. When you live inside someone, you can get very good at the ciphers and codes that make up everything they are.

Show me.

Ceno Susumu Uoya-Agostino took her mother’s hand — bare and warm and armored in onyx all at once. She unspooled a length of translucent cable and connected the base of her skull to the base of her mother’s. All around them spring snow fell onto the glass dome of the greenhouse and melted there instantly. They knelt together, connected by a warm milky-diamond umbilicus, and Cassian Uoya-Agostino entered her daughter.

We had planned this for months. How to dress ourselves in our very best. Which frame to use. How to arrange the light. What to say. I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like:

Sing me a song, Elefsis.

The temperature in the kitchen is 21.5 degrees Celsius and the stock of rice is low. (Long pause.) Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

Ceno felt it was not worth the risk. So this is what Cassian saw when she ported in:

An exquisite boardroom — the long, polished ebony table glowed softly with quality, the plush leather chairs invitingly lit by a low-hanging minimalist light fixture descending on a platinum plum branch. The glass walls of the high rise looked out on a pristine landscape, a perfect combination of the Japanese countryside and the Italian, with rice terraces and vineyards and cherry groves and cypresses glowing in a perpetual twilight, stars winking on around Fuji on one side and Vesuvius on the other. Snow-colored tatami divided by stripes of black brocade covered the floor.

Ceno stood at the head of the table, in her mother’s place, a positioning she had endlessly questioned over the weeks leading up to her inevitable interrogation. She wore a charcoal suit she remembered from her childhood, when her mother had come like a rescuing dragon to scoop her up out of the friendly but utterly chaotic house of her ever-sleeping father. The blazer only a shade or two off of true black, the skirt unforgiving, plunging past the knee, the blouse the color of a heart.

When she showed me the frame I had understood, because three years is forever in machine-time, and I had known her that long. Ceno was using our language to speak to her mother. She was saying: respect me. Be proud and, if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.

Cassian smiled tightly. She still wore her yukata, for she had no one to impress.

Show me.

Ceno’s hand shook as she pressed a pearly button in the boardroom table. We thought a red curtain too dramatic, but the effect we had chosen turned out to be hardly less so. A gentle, silver light brightened slowly in an alcove hidden by a trick of angles and the sunset, coming on like daybreak.

And I stepped out.

We thought it would be funny. Ceno had made my body in the image of the robots from old films and frames Akan had once loved: steel, with bulbous joints and long, grasping metal fingers. My eyes large and lit from within, expressive, but loud, a whirring of servos sounding every time they moved. My face was full of lights, a mouth that could blink off and on, pupils points of cool blue. My torso curved prettily, etched in swirling damask patterns, my powerful legs perched on tripod-toes. Ceno had laughed and laughed — this was a pantomime, a minstrel show, a joke of what I was slowly becoming, a cartoon from a childish and innocent age.

“Mother, meet Elefsis. Elefsis, this is my mother. Her name is Cassian.”

I extended one polished steel arm and said, as we had practiced. “Hello, Cassian. I hope that I please you.”

Cassian Uoya-Agostino did not become a bouncing fiery ball or a green tuba to answer me. She looked me over carefully as if the robot was my real body.

“Is it a toy? An NPC, like your nanny or Saru’s princess? How do you know it’s different? How do you know it has anything to do with the house or your necklace?”

“It just does,” said Ceno. She had expected her mother to be overjoyed, to understand immediately. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of giving us all copies of the house? To see if you could…wake it up? Teach it to…be?”

“In a simplified sense, yes, Ceno, but you were never meant to hold onto it like you have. It wasn’t designed to be permanently installed into your skull.” Cassian softened a little, the shape of her mouth relaxing, her pupils dilating slightly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re my daughter, not hardware.”

Ceno grinned and started talking quickly. She couldn’t be a grown-up in a suit this long, it took too much energy when she was so excited. “But I am! And it’s OK. I mean, everyone’s hardware. I just have more than one program running. And I run so fast. We both do. You can be mad, if you want, because I sort of stole your experiment, even though I didn’t mean to. But you should be mad the way you would be if I got pregnant by one of the village boys — I’m too young but you’d still love me and help me raise it because that’s how life goes, right? But really, if you think about it, that’s what happened. I got pregnant by the house and we made…I don’t even know what it is. I call it Elefsis because at first it was just the house program. But now it’s bigger. It’s not alive, but it’s not not alive. It’s just…big. It’s so big.”

Cassian glanced sharply at me. “What’s it doing?” she snapped.

Ceno followed her gaze. “Oh…it doesn’t like us talking about it like it isn’t here. It likes to be involved.”

I had realized the robot body was a mistake, though I could not then say why. I made myself small, and human, a little boy with dirt smeared on his knees and a torn shirt, standing in the corner with my hands over my face, as I had seen Akan when he was younger, standing in the corner of the house that was me being punished.

“Turn around, Elefsis.” Cassian said in the tone of voice my house-self knew meant execute command.

And I did a thing I had not yet let Ceno know I knew how to do.

I made my boy-self cry.

I made his face wet, and his eyes big and limpid and red around the rims. I made his nose sniffle and drip a little. I made his lip quiver. I was copying Koetoi’s crying, but I could not tell if her mother recognized the hitching of the breath and the particular pattern of skin-creasing in the frown. I had been practicing, too. Crying involves many auditory, muscular, and visual cues. Since I had kept it as a surprise I could not practice it on Ceno and see if I appeared genuine. Was I genuine? I did not want them talking without me. I think that sometimes when Koetoi cries, she is not really upset, but merely wants her way. That was why I chose Koe to copy. She was good at that inflection that I wanted to be good at.

Ceno clapped her hands with delight. Cassian sat down in one of the deep leather chairs and held out her arms to me. I crawled into them as I had seen the children do and sat on her lap. She ruffled my hair, but her face did not look like it looked when she ruffled Koe’s hair. She was performing an automatic function. I understood that.

“Elefsis, please tell me your computational capabilities and operational parameters.” Execute command.

Tears gushed down my cheeks and I opened blood vessels in my face in order to redden it. This did not make her hold me or kiss my forehead, which I found confusing.

“The clothing rinse cycle is in progress, water at 55 degrees Celsius. All the live-long day-o.”

Neither of their faces exhibited expressions I have come to associate with positive reinforcement.

Finally, I answered her as I would have answered Ceno. I turned into an iron cauldron on her lap. The sudden weight change made the leather creak.

Cassian looked at her daughter questioningly. The girl reddened — and I experienced being the cauldron and being the girl and reddening, warming, as she did, but also I watched myself be the cauldron and Ceno be the girl and Ceno reddening.

“I’ve…I’ve been telling it stories. Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all. Like, when I was little and daddy read me the Twelve Dancing Princesses and I thought: daddy is a dancing prince, and he must go under the ground to dance all night in a beautiful castle with beautiful girls, and that’s why he sleeps all day. I tried to catch him at it, but I never could, and of course I know he’s not really a dancing prince, but that’s the best way I could understand what was happening to him. I’m hoping that eventually I can get Elefsis to make up its own stories, too, but for now we’ve been focusing on simple stories and metaphors. It likes similes, it can see how anything is like anything else, find minute vectors of comparison. It even makes some surprising ones, like how when I first saw it it made a jewel for me to say: I am like a jewel, you are like a jewel, you are like me.” Cassian’s mouth had fallen open a little. Her eyes shone, and Ceno hurried on, glossing over my particular prodigy at images. “It doesn’t do that often, though. Mostly it copies me. If I turn into wolf cub, it turns a wolf cub. I make myself a tea plant, it makes itself a tea plant. And it has a hard time with metaphor. A raven is like a writing desk, OK, fine, sour notes or whatever, but it isn’t a writing desk. Agogna is like a snow fox, but she is not a snow fox on any real level unless she becomes one in a frame, which isn’t the same thing, existentially. I’m not sure it grasps existential issues yet. It just…likes new things.”

“Ceno.”

“Yeah, so this morning I told it the one about the cauldron the could never be emptied. No matter how much you eat out of it it’ll always have more. I think it’s trying to answer your question. I think…the actual numbers are kind of irrelevant at this point.”

I made my cauldron fill up with apples and almonds and wheat-heads and raw rice and spilled out over Cassian’s black lap. I was the cauldron and I was the apples and I was the almonds and I was each wheat-head and I was every stalk of green, raw rice. Even in that moment, I knew more than I had before. I could be good at metaphor performatively if not linguistically. I looked up at Cassian from apple-me and wheat-head-me and cauldron-me.

Cassian held me no differently as the cauldron than she had as the child. But later, Ceno used the face her mother made at that moment to illustrate human disturbance and trepidation. “I have a suspicion, Elefsis.”

I didn’t say anything. No question, no command. It remains extremely difficult for me to deal conversationally with flat statements such as this. A question or command has a definable appropriate response.

“Show me your core structure.” Show me what you’ve done.

Ceno twisted her fingers together. I believe now that she knew what we’d done only on the level of metaphor: we are one. We have become one. We are family. She had not said no; I had not said yes, but a system expands to fill all available capacity.

I showed her. Cauldron-me blinked, the apples rolled back into the iron mouth, and the almonds and the wheat-heads and the rice-stalks. I became what I then was. I put myself in a rich, red cedar box, polished and inlaid with ancient brass in the shape of a baroque heart with a dagger inside it. The box from one of Ceno’s stories, that had an beast-heart in it instead of a girl’s, a trick to fool a queen. I can do it, I thought, and Ceno heard because the distance between us was unrepresentably small. I am that heart in that box. Look how I do this thing you want me to have the ability to do.

Cassian opened the box. Inside, on a bed of velvet, I made myself — ourself — naked for her. Ceno’s brain, soft and pink and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new.

Cassian Uoya-Agostino set the box on the boardroom table. I caused it to sink down into the dark wood. The surface of the table went slack and filled with earth. Roots slid out of it, shoots and green saplings, hard white fruits and golden lacy mushrooms and finally a great forest, reaching up out of the table to hang all the ceiling with night-leaves. Glowworms and heavy, shadowy fruit hung down, each one glittering with a map of our coupled architecture. Ceno held up her arms and one by one, I detached leaves sent them settling onto my girl. As they fell, they became butterflies broiling with ghostly chemical color signatures, nuzzling her face, covering her hands.

Her mother stared. The forest hummed. A chartreuse and tangerine-colored butterfly alighted on the matriarch’s hair, tentative, unsure, hopeful.

Twelve: An Arranged Marriage

Neva is dreaming.

She has chosen her body at age fourteen, a slight, unformed, but slowly evolving creature, her hair hanging to her feet in ripples. She wears a blood-red dress whose train streams out over the floor of a great castle, a dress too adult for her young body, slit in places to reveal flame-colored silk beneath, and her skin wherever it can. A heavy copper belt clasps her waist, its tails hanging to the floor, crusted in opals. Sunlight, brighter and harsher than any true light, streams in from windows as high as cliffs, their tapered apexes lost in mist. She has formed me old and enormous, a body of appetites, with a great heavy beard and stiff, formal clothes, Puritan, white-collared, high-hatted.

A priest appears and he is Ravan and I cry out with love and grief. (I am still copying, but Neva does not know. I am making a sound Seki made when his wife died.) Priest-Ravan smiles but it is a smile his grandfather Seki once made when he lost controlling interest in the company. Empty. Priest-Ravan grabs our hands and shoves them together roughly. Neva’s nails prick my skin and my knuckles knock against her wrist-bone. We take vows; he forces us. Neva’s face runs with tears, her tiny body unready and unwilling, given in marriage to a gluttonous lord who desires only her flesh, given too young and too harshly. Priest-Ravan laughs; it is not Ravan’s laugh.

This is how she experienced me. A terrible bridegroom. All the others got to choose. Ceno, Seki, her mother Ilet, her brother Ravan. Only she could not, because there was no one else. Ilet was no Cassian — she had had two children, a good clean model and a spare, Neva says in my mind. I am spare parts. I have always been spare parts. Owned by you before I was born. The memory of the bitter taste of bile floods my sensory array and my lord-body gags. (I am proud of having learned to gag convincingly and at the correct time to show horror and/or revulsion.)

Perspective flips over; I am the girl in red and Neva is the corpulent lord leering down, his grey beard big and bristly. She floods my receptors with adrenaline and pheremonal release cues, increases my respiration: Seki taught me to associate this physical state with fear. I feel too small beside lord-Neva, I want to make myself big, I want to be safe. But she wants me this way and we are new, I do not contradict her. Her huge, male face softens and she touches my thin cheek with one heavily-ringed hand. It is tender. Ceno touched me like that.

I know it was like this for you, too. You wanted Ravan; you did not ask for me. We are an arranged marriage.

The pathways that let her flood me with chemicals and manipulate my dreambody into blushing and breathing heavy and weeping go both ways. I do not only pull, I push. And into Neva I push the deluge, the only deluge I have. How Ceno threw her arms around my dormouse-neck. How Cassian taught my dreambody to sleep in infant-shape curled into her body. How Seki and I made love as tigers and wild boars and elephants, and only last as humans, how we had strange children who looked however we wished them to look: half girl and half machine, half glass and half wood, half jellyfish and half moth, and how those children still flit and swim in remote parts of my Interior, like Ceno’s nereids, returning cyclically to the core like salmon to dump their data and recombine. How Ilet taught me about the interpretation of memory and therefore about melancholy, regret, nostalgia. How she taught me the meaning of my name: a place where a daughter went down into darkness and oblivion and her mother loved her so much she brought her back into the sun. The place where time began. How Ravan let me into the old, musty, long-abandoned playspaces of Saru and Akan, Agogna and Koetoi, so that I could know them too, though they were long dead, and be the Princess of Albania, and a Tokyo zombie, and the tiger-prince. How many times I mated with each of them and bled and witnessed and learned in the dreambody, how I copied their expressions and they copied my variations and I copied them back again. How I was their child and their parent and their lovers and their nursemaids when they grew old.

We can be like this, I pushed. What is all of that but love?

That is not love. It is use. You are the family business. We have to produce you.

I show Neva her mother’s face. Ilet, Ilet who chose Ravan and not her daughter for that business. Ilet who built her palace of phoenix tails knowing she would one day take me there. My Ilet-self took my daughter in my arms. She resisted, pulled back, shook her head, refusing to look, but I have learned the terrible child-response to their mothers, and soon enough Neva collapses into me, her head on my breast, and she weeps with such bitterness.

I cannot get free. I cannot get free.

The castle windows go dark, one by one.

End of part two.
This story will conclude in our December 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

Tea, Robot?

Nathaniel Tapley

Since the Martians first landed in Guildford, fellows with small mustaches and large empires have been defending the Earth. Nathaniel Tapley explores the enduring appeal of the honest, English chap in science fiction and fantasy.

He comes as Death From The Sky. He lays waste to civilizations and he has brought down empires. He treats all of time and space as his plaything, and tyrants tremble at the arrival of his royal blue box. He also likes Jammie Dodgers and a nice cup of tea, whether Earl Grey or Arcturan.

The Doctor (from the BBC’s Doctor Who) is just one of the more recent examples of an enduring archetype in fantastic fiction: the buttoned-up, thoroughly respectable, resourceful, middle-class English — or occasionally Scottish; never Welsh — chap. In a world where our thrills have got bigger and brasher, where many of the values of Victorian and Edwardian society have melted away, we still see the appeal of that ordinary man, usually a teacher or a doctor, thrust into incredible circumstances; just as we have for 140 years.

A Lieutenant Colonel in the Bengal Engineers in 1871, George Tomkyns Chesney feared that Britons were getting soft. He had watched as the Franco-Prussian War demonstrated the speed and efficiency of the Prussian military, and it had made him uneasy. He felt that Britain was in danger of losing its pre-eminent position in the world and was determined to write a novel to wake his country up to the danger it faced. That book was The Battle of Dorking (1871), which told the story of a Prussian invasion. Looking back from 50 years in the future, we readers see the complete and total defeat of the British Empire. The British lost because they were complacent and unprepared.

The book is usually seen as one of the first examples of ‘invasion literature’, in which the author’s home country is conquered by a much better prepared enemy. It was a precursor of science fiction, and alternative histories and it introduced one very important concept: that the battles of the future of Britain would be fought in and by the Home Counties of England1.

Early science fiction had lots of middle-class protagonists, in part, because that’s what nineteenth-century scientists were. The world had moved on from the aristocratic, Gothic mad scientists like Victor von Frankenstein. As the nineteenth century drew on, science became a profession rather than a intellectual game for the wealthy and leisured. This, unsurprisingly, was reflected in the science fiction that was being written, which often featured respectable professional men beset by extraordinary difficulties.

Dr Jeckyll was one of these. As a practicing doctor struggling to maintain a respectable life, he forms one of the early examples of the archetype, and one that almost destroys it at birth. Stevenson uses his protagonist to explore exactly what it means to be reserved, to be accepted by society, to be normal. In Jeckyll, Stevenson blows the type up, examining it from the inside and the underside, personifying its cant and its limitations with Mr Hyde. Notably, Stevenson’s Scottish hero is fighting an internal enemy. For the true, decent English chap, with whom we will all become so familiar over the next century and a bit, the enemy is always external.

It is tempting to use the word ‘gentleman’ to describe the sorts of characters we are talking about, but, technically, they aren’t ‘gentlemen’, at least not in the nineteenth century sense of the word. As Clive Bloom says in his Introduction to the Raffles stories: “To be wealthy without visible means of support, this is to be a true gentleman”. The type that has become so influential since Dr Kemp outwitted The Invisible Man in 1896 has not come from the moneyed classes. This is, perhaps, largely down to H.G. Wells.

As one of the most important early writers of science fiction in English, Wells had a huge impact on the nascent genre, and he left his mark on it for many years to come. Wells, however, did not have many advantages in life. His father ran a small shop and his mother worked in service. At the age of 14 he became a draper’s apprentice, working 13-hour days.2 Eventually he was able to return to school and become a teacher, but his heroes remained resolutely middle-class.

In The Invisible Man (1895) we are presented with Dr Kemp, an aspiring scientist, yet to earn his entry to the Royal Society. His University College compatriot, Griffin, has murdered his father, stolen his money, turned himself invisible and gone insane. The Island Of Dr Moreau (1896) pits Edward Prendick (a solid English name) against Dr Moreau (stuffed with effeminate, Frenchified vowels) who, again, is free from financial worries. In Wells’ stories, the independently wealthy are those with time to indulge a hobby until it leads to madness.

Wells places his heroes firmly in the aspirant middle-class, the world of junior doctors, school teachers, newspapermen, and, in Tono-Bungay (1909), small business men. Wells makes it clear that his protagonists are not gentlemen, they are not gentry, never more clearly than in Tono-Bungay: “Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, training, and the sword.”

Wells, then, provides the model for much of what was to follow. Englishmen: middle-class, probably based in Surrey or somewhere in suburban London, decent, modest, hard-working, initially unremarkable, but capable of saving the planet.

Junior newspaperman Edward Malone was the next great example of the species. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Challenger stories he provided a note of the ordinary amongst the huge characters of Challenger and Summerlee. In story after story, from The Lost World (1912) through The Land Of Mist (1926), Malone’s desire to live a quiet life with his sweetheart is thwarted as he has to fight, variously, dinosaurs, poison space gases, and the spirits of the recently deceased.

One morning, when he goes exploring on a dinosaur-filled plateau on his own just for the sake of it, Malone explains: “I am too imaginative to be a really courageous man, but that I have an overpowering fear of seeming afraid. This was the power which now carried me onwards.” This nicely summarizes the motivations of the English chap: his bravery is born of necessity, circumstance, and the desire to avenge himself against pterodactyls. Oh, and embarrassment. Like someone who has been misheard when introducing themselves at a party and who then has to answer to the wrong name for the remainder of the night out of politeness, the great emotions for the middle-class Englishman are fear of seeming rude, fear of seeming cowardly, and fear of accidentally turning into a Bolshevik.

The sort of Englishman we’re talking about does have an important counterpart, however; one who is leisured, wealthy, showy, and has all sorts of unfortunate Continental habits. The dandy, cad, or bounder is also a Victorian or Edwardian gentleman (usually in the aristocratic sense of the word), who doesn’t have the diffidence of our chap. This archetype is perhaps best exemplified by Raffles, the gentleman thief in E.W. Hornung’s stories, a riposte to his brother-in-law’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Raffles states his moral position thus: “Why should I work when I can steal?”

Neither Holmes nor Raffles is modest. In some Holmes stories Watson does imply that they don’t have enough money, and that their affairs are in disorder, but Holmes has too many etiolated habits, too many affectations, and far too sensitive an ear for music to ever really be an English Englishman. He and Raffles spend their time mingling with high society. They might be heroes, but their virtues are a mystery to their companions, who much better fit the archetype we’re examining. Watson and Bunny, a junior doctor and an aspiring journalist respectively, are the solid, English conscience to the amoral Holmes and Raffles.

Moving further into the 20th century, our Englishman remains a hero, but he becomes one who is not necessarily capable of saving the world. Like Evelyn Waugh’s protagonists, the heroes of 1984 (1949) and Brave New World (1932) are certainly buffeted by the universe, but find themselves less able to conquer it armed with nothing more than a tweed jacket, a bristly mustache and a keen sense of fair play. The universe, and the progress of humanity, weigh heavily on these men. Although they often represent the last, best hope of mankind, they cannot overcome the mass of the future, pressing down on their shoulders.

Huxley’s Bernard Marx, and Orwell’s Winston Smith are men who would like to calmly get on with their lives, but feel that there is something desperately wrong with the world. Their struggles with totalitarian systems break them in the end. As the World Controller tells Bernard: “You’ve got to choose happiness or high art.” For those whose consciences or clarity of vision will not allow them to choose happiness, the science fiction of the 1930s and 40s is not a happy place.

Theo Faron, from both the novel (1992) and the film (2006) of Children of Men, is a more recent example of the Englishman adrift in a dystopia. Despite their differences — in the book Faron is an Oxford don, in the film a bureaucrat — both characters fit the archetype we have been discussing. It shines through in two very different stories. The distinction that can be made here is that in neither adaptation does the state win. The world feels like that of the totalitarian, dystopian SF of the middle of the twentieth century, but in this case, the Englishman wins, he overcomes all of the tendrils of the state (and, in the book, actually takes control of it).

During the 1950s and 1960s John Wyndham wrote a series of novels in which the English hero is beset by world-changing events. He usually struggles against these with the best of a stiff upper lip, muttering things like, “Wifely confidence is a very nice trait, darling, but — No, damn it, no buts — I am going to bring you back,” even when the world is being consumed by carnivorous, mobile plants. In The Day of The Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), and The Trouble With Lichen (1960) the forces that beset the world are all too vast to be overcome. Even in The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) Zellaby has to sacrifice himself to finally kill the aliens, as bombs, tanks, guns, radiation and all manner of modern technology have failed to dislodge them from the community of Midwich.

If anything, Wyndham’s stories show the importance of remaining English in times of great crisis. They almost all show the complete breakdown of society, and how the best, and sometimes only, way to deal with it is to remain stoic, keep a stiff upper lip and just get on with the job of defeating those blasted aliens, or living with them. No point in moaning about the planet’s having been overrun by submarine creatures who melted the icecaps and drowned most of the world. Even in the post-apocalyptic world of The Chrysalids (1955), the most admirable characters are those who act like decent, middle-class English people from the middle of the twentieth century.

The 1960s, of course, provided the televisual high point for the English chap in the shape of John Steed from The Avengers and the Doctor from Doctor Who. Although both of these characters had their eccentricities, they were cut from the same stuff as the heroes of Wells and Wyndham.

Adam Adamant, from Adam Adamant Lives, however, is another example of the dandy. Dropped from Edwardian London into the Swinging 60s, he did battle with evil doers armed with his sword stick. He was much more in the vein of Holmes and Raffles. And, indeed, much of today’s steampunk vision of the late Victorian era seems to celebrate this more dandyish, foppish, gentleman-of-leisure style rather than the stolid English heroes of much of early SF.

Perhaps the best example of the character in modern times has been Arthur Dent. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy we see the archetype stretched almost to breaking point. He is suburban, diffident, enthusiastic about tea, polite, and he travels the universe. Wearing nothing more than pajamas and a dressing gown, he has more adventures than any of the rest of the human race, and maintains a low level of polite outrage throughout.

The comic possibilities of putting this kind of character in a fantastic context were often explored in the 1970s and 80s. Our chaps were in Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (John Cleese’s Robin Hood character, although just a cameo) (1981), Brazil (1985), in the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett (with both Rincewind and Captain Vimes offering very different takes on the character type), and in the work of Neil Gaiman. The reluctant English hero was at the center of a whole swathe of fantasy at the time.

At the end of the 1980s, a new version of the archetype arrived, and took control of perhaps the most famous ship in SF. Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In stark contrast to the original series’ Captain Kirk, Picard was almost adamantly opposed to conflict. He was cerebral, considered, clever, and inherently peaceful. Patrick Stewart has said that when developing the character he often thought of Horatio Hornblower, hero of a series of historical novels by C.S. Forester, and a perfectly English hero.

Today we see the character’s influence in films like Shaun Of The Dead (2004), and in games like the Professor Layton series. The current incarnation of the Doctor is perhaps the most tweedy for some time, and the most reminiscent of the archetype since Peter Davison explained that tea was “a noxious infusion of oriental leaves containing a high percentage of toxic acid… Personally, I rather like it.”

Although the universe may be full of giant, marauding transforming robots, or costumed heroes with ever-more spectacular superpowers, we can take comfort in the fact that there will always be an England, even if it is floating through space on the back of a harpooned space whale. As long as there is, there will be reluctant, suburban heroes, forced to abandon their quiet lives to save the lot of us.

After all, somewhere in the universe, it’s always time for tea.

Footnotes:

1. The Home Counties are generally defined as the counties bordering London: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and the two Sussexes. Bedfordshire, Dorset, Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire are sometimes also included. [RETURN]

2. Wells fictionalized his early shop work in Kipps (1905) [RETURN]

About the Author

Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer-performer, for programs like The News Quiz (BBC Radio 4), Tonightly (Channel 4), Gigglebiz (CBeebies) and Dick & Dom’s Funny Business (BBC2). He wrote and directed the In The Gloaming podcasts, which were performed live at the World Horror Convention in 2010 and won a Parsec Award for Best New Podcaster. He has had stories published in Black Static and The Zombie Feed Volume 1, from Apex Publications.

Wedging the Door Open: Discussing The Weird

Jeremy L. C. Jones

What is The Weird?

“The Weird speaks with over a hundred voices from more than a hundred years about alien territories of the human mind,” said Leena Krohn, the Finnish writer best known in the US for her brilliant short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City. “Some of these territories are repugnant or terrifying, some fascinating. These stories are entirely personal and for that very reason also universal.”

Below, ten more writers discuss The Weird, including K.J. Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, Steve Duffy, Jeffrey Ford, Stephen Graham Jones, Garry Kilworth, Kathe Koja, Leena Krohn, Michael Shea, William Browning Spencer, and Gio Clairval. Each of them is a contributor to The Weird: a Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, which was released this month in the UK and will be released sometime in early 2012 in the US. 

What is The Weird?

“The Weird,” write the VanderMeers in their Introduction to The Weird, “acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.”

Michael Moorcock in his “Foreword: Weird Stories” speaks of The Weird as “unrationalized fiction, having much in common with surrealism or absurdism.” China Mieville in his “Afterweird: The efficacy of a Worm-eaten Dictionary” speaks of texts that “infect” us and “burrow” inside us.

The Weird is less concerned with “fixed tropes of the supernatural,” the VanderMeers tell us, and is more concerned with strangeness and subversion, the visionary, “visceral physicality” and the never-ending search… for what?

And, now… what is The Weird?

Ramsey Campbell: The place only our imagination can take us — the place beyond the gaps reality doesn’t fill.

Stephen Graham Jones: I think there’s a first principle lending shape to the Weird, and that’s the certainty that, when you peel back the surface of the world, what you find underneath is both exactly what your heart of hearts always suspected and the last thing you ever wanted to see. The weird is about facing reality. Or, it’s a cautionary tale for those who would dare. And, yeah, it resembles horror fiction, it uses the tropes of science fiction and fantasy, it’s often shaped like an adventure or a mystery, it can even touch on bizarro or have a splatterpunk moment or two, and it sometimes has to adopt innovative forms to even get itself told, but the weird’s insistence that there’s more here than there seems to be, and it’s worse than you could have imagined, but in the most wonderful way, that creeping suspicion that infuses every page, that shadow that’s even there somehow with all the lights on — because all the lights are on — that’s specifically its own thing. When you recognize the weird, it’s not a set of conventions or a list of traits or characteristics you’re cueing into. The weird isn’t a genre like that.

Garry Kilworth: The weird is a place and time, perhaps only a pocket, where something can become something else, something completely and wholly unexpected and against all the laws of logic and reason. A lady walking on a frosty morning might become someone different to each of those she meets and greets on the way, but in the ordinary world she remains a woman in form and speech. If, however, she becomes a fox and races across the winter fields filling the air with the hollow barking of a vixen, we are no longer in the world of the ordinary, but in the weird.

Steve Duffy: What is the Weird? It seems to me to be above all the product of uncertainty. In a world of absolute certainties, there would be no Weird, since there would by definition be no room for doubt or ambiguity. However, in the world we inhabit — our world of crumbling certainties, of anxiety and bewilderment — the Weird can mirror our common experience, give flesh to the vague shapes of daydreams and nightmares, in ways that the categorical, the absolute, simply cannot. On this uncertainty our imaginations thrive. As Robert Aickman, the late twentieth century’s master of the Weird, wrote: “So little is definite.”

Jeffrey Ford: In fiction the Weird is more about the feeling elicited by a story than the idea of it. The feeling I speak of is a mix of dread and eternity, the absurd, the allegorical stripped of reason and unconcerned with “Truth,” synchronicity and mythology, and searing imagery. It has a unique life of its own, eternally eluding classification.

William Browning Spenser: I live in Austin, Texas, and whenever I see an SUV with a bumper sticker that reads Keep Austin Weird, I think, “Too late.” Weird is one of the first things to go when a city is inundated with Starbucks, Lexuses, and people whose fierce pursuit of self-actualization requires a generic vocabulary, banal beyond belief, a vapid “we” that would have made George Orwell’s ears bleed.

K. J. Bishop: [The Weird is] the naked headless [person] at the doors of perception.

Gio Clairval: What is the Weird? If I ask my friend Mrs. Brown, who only reads historical novels and memoirs, “What is ‘the Weird’?”, she will probably say something like “I think you’re talking about a story that is weird, strange, bizarre.” If Mrs. Brown is right, any novel or short story that has a strange subject, stages bizarre clothes, dialogue, characters and any absurd thing could be labeled as weird.

Mrs. Brown’s all-comprehensive definition is so large it would include every story with elements of the fantastic and/or the supernatural. So, in general, many of the novels and short stories that are outside the mainstream category could be called weird. But this tag would imply that all fantasy, science fiction and horror is Weird, which strikes me as incorrect. Still, this fallacious definition would appear correct to all strictly mainstream or literary reader. So, maybe the Weird is what appears to be weird to the classic/orthodox/traditional Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror reader.

William Browning Spenser: For years, when people asked me what I wrote, I would say, “Weird stories,” and they would look nonplussed as though I were being evasive or even rude, which wasn’t my intention. I now believe it is impossible to describe weird to someone who doesn’t already have an appetite for it. It’s like trying to explain empathy to a cat or a Republican.

Michael Shea: The word is the past participle (originally spelled with a ‘y’) of the Old English weorthan which means to occur or happen. Thus its literal sense is “what’s come to pass”. When it’s personified, of course, as in MacBeth, it applies to the agencies or seers of what comes to pass.

Garry Kilworth: The word “weird” has its roots in the Anglo-Saxon wyrd, ‘to become’. However, common usage has turned its meaning into more than just a happening. It has become entwined with the frighteningly strange, the unexpected, the unacceptable. If the village blacksmith’s son takes a shortcut home through the woods meets and hears two dead men, a hanged murderer and his victim arguing about the injustice of their violent deaths, as in my novel Winter’s Knight, that is the Weird at work. In the ordinary world, such events do not happen, they cannot happen, so when they do happen the experience is terrifyingly weird. The youth knows he has entered into a pocket of place and time outside the real world and wants to get back to the expected and normal.

In the brilliant novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, a work which is astonishing in its breadth and originality, magic is an accepted part of life. Strange and wonderful things occur, but I maintain we are not in the world of the Weird here because the protagonists expect such unusual things to happen. Compare that to Robert Holdstock’s equally fine and original work, Mythago Wood, where the protagonists are shocked and bewildered to come across mythical creatures in what is supposed to be an ordinary woodland, albeit full of ancient trees, and then we are in that place of the Weird.

Gio Clairval: As all F/SF can’t be “Weird” (or we wouldn’t be having this conversation) I will try to find a more specific categorization. The first thing that comes to mind is that the Weird is not a sub-genre, it is an attribute that can be given to a story.

I would say that the Weird is a choice that voluntarily or involuntarily, with an iconoclastic intent, breaks the rules of “orthodox” tropes one can find in all speculative fiction. In this case, the weirdness of the story creates a rift between itself — the way in which the story tells itself, through form, sometimes, but mostly through association of contents — and the reader’s system of beliefs/perceptions/symbols. In other words, the reality of the story conflicts with how the reader can readily view reality. This makes the concept of Weird highly subjective.

How can I tell that a story belongs to the Weird? What should I look for in a story to be able to affirm with certainty that it is a Weird tale? While one could argue that pigeonholing an artistic production with a definite tag amounts to reducing and limiting the piece, I could try anyway.

The real answer is that there is no ultimate, universal answer to this question.

Even though several stories are widely considered weird — by readers, reviewers, the authors themselves — the real perception of the strangeness is in the eye of the individual reader. How does the story disrupt this reader’s system of beliefs, and what the reader believes normal or odd. It is all about our willingness to suspend our disbelief. Embracing the Weird means to take a step further and accept to turn off our left brain’s resistance buffer, kick rules and tropes out of the window, and enjoy the oddness.

Garry Kilworth: A shapechanging by a shaman in front of his or her tribe may be terrifying to behold, but it is not weird because the audience is expecting it. Lady into fox in the English countryside is weird, because it should not happen, is not expected to happen, and leaves the witness wondering whether he or she has gone mad and is seeing things that are not there. The emotion, the feeling that something unacceptable is happening, also has to be present in the weird. A conjurer or stage magician produces many amazing scenes that leave us completely mystified, yet we do not feel we are witnessing the weird because we know that somewhere behind it all is chicanery and there is a logical explanation for what we are observing. So we must experience a chill, that trickle down the spine and the nape hairs rising, to find ourselves in the place of the weird, as well as being present at an unbelievable event.

Kathe Koja: The Weird is the face you’ve never seen before, with eyes you already know.

William Browning Spenser: Here’s a question: are vampires weird? The answer is: no, but they used to be. Dracula by Bram Stoker is a great canonical weird novel, a towering achievement in creepiness. It was a bestseller in 1897, and why not? It’s got everything: lovely pale young women in thrall to a monstrous creature (seductive and undead), castles and gloomy landscapes, religion — what’s creepier than religion? — lunatics (in lunatic asylums), your own true love coming back from the grave, which might seem like a good thing but no, you’ve got to drive a stake through her heart, cut off her head, and stuff garlic in her mouth; heartbreak mixed with betrayal. There is a suffocating sense of erotic dread throughout Dracula, which, for all its strangeness, has the uncertain ring of truth. Weird tales, I’ve noticed, often do that: they blindside you with the truth.

And then Anne Rice comes along in 1976 with Interview with the Vampire, and the age of the glamorous, sulking romance vampire has arrived, and we have snarky vampires and chick-lit vampires and pouty-teen vampires and the strict formulas of romance fiction. Where’s the weirdness? Soap operas have scrubbed it away.

The only interesting vampires I’ve encountered in a long time were those in China Miéville’s novel, The Scar. But Mr. Miéville’s novels (including his amazing debut, Perdido Street Station) are dark fever dreams, great lumbering mad things now imitated by many of his admirers who will, at some point, find the weirdness and murder it.

We have pop fictions like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a novel so bereft of genuine imagination that its title is merely a statement of its high concept. This has inspired other pastiches (i.e., thefts) and why hasn’t someone transformed Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff into a vampire or a werewolf? Yes, it’s only a matter of time.

Garry Kilworth: For the Weird to be present there needs to be a connection with something ancient but undated and without an explanation. Once you pin the event to a time and place, or a known custom or religion, then you take “the weird” out of the equation. It might indeed be extraordinary, odd, bizarre and out of the ordinary, but that almost indefinable element, the weird, is not there. Once you have a reason for your astonishing experience, then the weird is not there. If a man walking along a street suddenly grows wings and becomes an angel in order to save a woman from being robbed, that is not the weird at work. That is some other agency which has a reason for the shapechange. If a man walking along a street suddenly grows wings and becomes a basilisk which then, allowing no rational explanation for its behavior, begins to turn passersby to stone with its stare: that is the weird at work.

William Browning Spenser: True Weird fiction isn’t so much a genre as it is a personality disorder. I certainly don’t specialize in Weird stories. I just can’t seem to get shed of them. I think it is a matter of temperament. I have always felt that life is a near-death experience, and even as a child I had an unhappy awareness that the dead opossum on the side of the road was made of the same fleshy stuff I was. “This is not good news!” I told my peers, who were singularly unimpressed.

Michael Cisco: Weird literature has its doubts about reality, it feels its confidence in ordinary reality giving slightly. It may go about its business more or less normally, as near as it can recall what normal means, and its idea or feeling about reality is only flexed, or still straight but with a notch in it. Or it may confront absolute subsidence of that sense, or any point on the curve between reality with a few scratches on the lens and reality crushed into a million sequins. The adjustment may come about in supernatural ways or phantasmagorical ways; very often the weird is paired with horror, but the weird is more than weak horror. The weird puts its emphasis on eeriness; it’s in the atmosphere. The weird is more like the weather, while horror is more like the news.

Horror always says, “it’s not me! it’s not me!” Horror recoils from its object, but sometimes this is a trick it plays on itself so as not to acknowledge its desire for that object, or connection to that object, which is what it really wants to deny. It doesn’t want to live in the same world with something it found out about. Staring, desperate, it wants to go back to the way things were before it found out, but it’s trapped in the aftermath of its discovery forever.

The weird is often full of horror, and the two really are so much alike that it wouldn’t be fair to blame anyone for mistaking one for the other. The difference flickers, appearing and disappearing. When it’s there, that one’s weird desires come out. Unlike the sudden discovery that drives horror wild, there’s a gradual realization. Unlike the horrified rejection of terrible news, there is an infatuation with the new world, and, if there is any sudden discovery after all, it’s the realization that the familiar world was horrible all along, perhaps even more so. This prompts a longing to escape into an eerie other world that is frightening more because it is so completely new and strange than because it is threatening or monstrous. Where horror clings to what it was, the weird is at least tempted by the prospect of becoming something else, or by a transit through the utterly different. So horror and the weird are two different curves, one arcing back in a recoil, the other arcing out over the horizon.

William Browning Spenser: Weird knows its own. In 1993, my short story collection The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories came out, and Gardner Dozois reprinted a story from that collection in The Year’s Best Science Fiction. The story was “A Child’s Christmas in Florida,” and it didn’t have a bit of science fiction in it. It was a story about an odd family’s Christmas rituals, sort of weird Flannery O’Connor — is that redundant? — so why was it in a science fiction anthology? I think it was there because, traditionally, if someone wrote a really strange story in the age of pulp magazines, and that story was homeless by way of eccentricity, science fiction would take it in.

Jeffrey Ford: In the Weird, Aristotle’s “catharsis” is often a mutation, giving rise to aberrations of Nature and human nature. The characters are floating, searching for a system in chaos. In other words, I haven’t got the slightest idea how to define the Weird, except to say, I know it when I read it. For instance, The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos. I read this first when I was in my very early teens. When I finished it, all I could think was, “That’s the weirdest thing I ever read.” What actually happens is not hard to understand. The writing is rather simple and straight forward, but the feeling I took away could only be described as “a recognition of eternity.” I never forgot it. When I got older I searched for it again. And then one day I found a copy of it in a garage sale for a dime. Again I read it, and it was still every bit as haunting and more so. I’m sure it’s one of the great novels of the 20th century, but it’s difficult to pigeon hole. Horror, the fantastic, a surreal sea adventure, all blending in a vivid, threatening and sublime dream. You know, Weird.

William Browning Spenser: So, to sum this up…I just want to urge those of you who write not to be ashamed of writing weird stories. It’s not your fault. The best way to write anything is to fail at not writing it.

People will say to me, “Your last book was just too weird for me,” and I won’t apologize. They might say that they liked an earlier book, were crazy about it, but I’ve gone too far this time. They seem to suggest that with just a little restraint, a little less weirdness, I’d get my groove back and write something they would enjoy. I get it. I understand them. And I say, “You’re not my audience.” That’s the only worthy answer.

Stephen Graham Jones: [The weird] is a mode. It’s a way of telling a story. It’s a way of telling the world. It’s what we’ve been doing since we were all sitting around campfires, too. How else to describe that otherworldly creature three valleys over? To even get close to a description, you have to first render the experience, so as to get your audience looking through the right kind of eyes, and then you have to walk them around this tree, that rock, until they see it slobbering over there in the dark, and know in a rush of regret and wonder that the world is so much stranger than they could have ever guessed. But a world being strange, being “weird,” that’s just another way of saying that, within it, anything’s possible. And that’s pretty excellent, there. So, sure, the Weird is often bloody, is usually dark, doesn’t always have those happy endings. But what the Weird’s doing is wedging the door open for us. Allowing the rest in as well. If there’s anything better than that, I don’t know about it.

Who are The Weird?

K.J. Bishop is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her neo-Decadent fantasy novel The Etched City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and she won the William L. Crawford Award, the Ditmar Award for Best Novel and the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. Her work has appeared in several publications including Leviathan 4, Fantasy Magazine, and Subterranean.

Ramsey Campbell is an award-winning horror fiction author from Liverpool, England. In his stories, largely evoking working- or middle-class settings, Campbell manages to update the weird tale and, mentored by Lovecraft protégé August Derleth, apply his keen ability to evoke both subtle supernatural horror and portraits of modern life in England.

Michael Cisco is an American writer best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, which was published by Ann VanderMeer’s Buzzcity Press and won the International Horror Guild Award in 1999. Since then, Cisco has published The San Veneficio Canon, The Traitor, The Tyrant, The Narrator, and The Great Lover.

Steve Duffy is a contemporary British writer who has lived in Norfolk and London, but is currently living and working on the North Wales coast. He is a recipient of the International Horror Guild award for the story “The Rag-and-Bone Men” and has published two short story collections, Tragic Life Stories and The Moment of Panic.

Jeffrey Ford is an American writer whose fiction combines elements of traditional fantasy or magic realism with surrealism and horror. As a student at Binghamton University, he studied with the novelist John Gardner and he currently teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. His work has been nominated for and received many awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Hugo and the Nebula Award.

Stephen Graham Jones is an American writer who writes both stories and novels. His most recent books are It Came from Del Rio (2010) and The Ones That Got Away (2010). Jones has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and Black Quill Award, as well as a winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Weird Tales, and multiple best-of-the-year compilations.

Garry Kilworth is a highly respected English writer who has published dozens of fantasy, science fiction, and historical novels since the 1970s. A World Fantasy Award winner, Kilworth has also won the Charles Whiting Award for Literature and written a number of books for children, including the Welkin Weasel series. Short story collections include Let’s Go to Golgotha (1975), In the Country of Tattooed Men (1993), and Tales from a Fragrant Harbour (2010).

Kathe Koja is an American writer who first emerged as a novelist during the U.S. horror boom of the early 1990s. Kafkaesque, transgressive novels such as The Cipher (1991), Bad Brains (1992), Skin (1993), and Strange Angels (1994) established her as one of weird fiction’s most innovative practitioners. Story collaborations with science fiction writer Barry Malzberg broadened her oeuvre, and as Koja moved into the realm of young adult novels her work continued to evade easy categorization. In 2010 her first historical novel, Under the Poppy, was published, with the sequel to follow in 2012.

Leena Krohn is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, artificial intelligence, and issues of morality and conscience. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005

Michael Shea is an American writer of horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction who has won the World Fantasy Award several times. Shea’s unique work includes novels like Nifft the Lean (1982) that are influenced by Jack Vance but stand on their own for the intensity of their imagery and grotesquery of their situations.

William Browning Spencer is an award-winning American writer living in Austin, Texas. His weird tales often contain an undercurrent of dark humor while novels like 1995’s quirky Resume With Monsters and Zod Wallop seem both sui generis and cognizant of the history of strange fiction. In 2005, his short story “Pep Talk” was turned into a short film for Project Greenlight and premiered at the Santa Fe Film Festival in December 2006.

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.

Sitting by the Fire, Thinking of Non-fiction

Neil Clarke

I expected to be attending World Fantasy Convention in San Diego today, but my family, day job and airfare conspired to keep me home. Instead of spending a nice warm day in California, I am being subjected to a rare Fall snowstorm in New Jersey. As I write this editorial, the snow is piling up, knocking down trees, and causing power outages. Tomorrow, I’ll be inspecting the damage and shoveling out. This isn’t the fun weekend I had planned, but I’ll try to make the best of it. Perhaps I’ll grab my Kindle, sit by the fire and drink some hot chocolate.

For the good part of the last two months, I’ve been dealing with a different sort of unexpected event. With Cheryl Morgan’s upcoming departure from Clarkesworld, I needed to find someone who could carry on her excellent work and move us forward from there. The number of talented people who expressed an interest in becoming our new Non-fiction Editor pleasantly surprised me. After much consideration, I offered the position to Jason Heller. I first encountered Jason’s work through an article he wrote for Cheryl back in issue forty-five: “Moonage Daydream: The Rock Album as Science Fiction.” Since then, I’ve enjoyed his work in a wide variety of publications, including regular appearances in The A.V. Club and Alternative Press.

Throughout the process, Jason and I have had several interesting conversations about the direction our non-fiction should take. He’s causing me to question some of my own preconceptions and while we haven’t settled all the details, I think he’s going to do some very interesting things. In order to support his ideas, I need to put more money in the non-fiction budget, so just as I did with fiction last month, I’m going to redirect subscription money his way after we pick up another five hundred subscribers.

In the meantime, please let us know what you’d like to see. Are there features you’d like us to include or expand on? We’ll be sharing some of our ideas in the months ahead, but this is the perfect time to get your two-cents in. Leave a comment on the website or send Jason and me an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Oh, and if you were at World Fantasy Convention, please do me a favor and tell me it rained the whole time.

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.