Sirius

Ben Peek

Emily Parker

At the edge of Deacon College on Tunel Five, the statue of Amadou Qaramanli stands in an empty, sunlit square. A lab technician, he was born in Tripoli, and began working in the expansion of the Earth Empire at the age of sixteen, dying on a planet ninety seven percent water at the age of thirty four, having lived three years longer than myself. Pictures of him reveal an unassuming man, neither tall, nor over weight, nor blessed with a great or distinctive mind. Of his personal life, of his likes and dislikes, and of the small parts that make each of us an individual, history has nothing recorded. By the time I had been born, he had been dead for a century and humanity had been introduced to hundreds of new cultures and was struggling to establish itself. Asking for him to be anything but a cautionary tale amongst lab technicians was too much by then.

The story I heard was this:

Amadou and fellow Libyan born researcher, Dr. Waled, were a pair of sweat-stained, badly-dieted, over-worked men sharing a run-down house in Saire, the capital city of Tunel Five. Tunel was one of the first gift planets by the Ta’La, a nomadic, pale skinned, tall race that gifted the conquered planets they had no use for to other cultures. There, both men came into contact with a hemorrhagic virus named after the planet. It was the first incident between the two cultures and apologies were made, later. But, beneath the afternoon sun, far away from the official records, and feverish and with pains throughout their bodies, both men made the diagnosis and discussed the diluted state of the immune serum they had on the plastic table before them. They had enough for one shot each but, in the orange drenched evening, they acknowledged that their chances of survival were slim. As the sun darkened again and blood seeped from Amadou Qaramanli eyes, he told Dr. Waled to take both doses.

The statue on the planet Tunel Five was funded by Dr. Waled after his return to Earth. For decades, the portly scientist told the story of Amadou’s sacrifice, going as far to write about it in his self-published memoirs as a sacrifice for science, a technician’s recognition of the importance of his role. It was a book that sold only to technicians, as Waled, apart from this one event, was an even more unremarkable man than his technician. Having read the book and understanding the tale I, when discovering that the door to the lab containing infected mice had not closed properly after I stepped out of my suit, and fearing Dr. Singh’s response, took two shots of antibiotic cocktails, one for myself and one for the memory of Amadou.

Two hours later, alone in my room on board Sirius, I sneezed.

That was all.

John Gale

Maria, I am sorry.

I thought to come home, to hold you, to touch you, to let the sun sink into my skin, turn me brown, but I cannot. You cannot see the destroyed station below me. You cannot know that it began with the body of Emily Parker, a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair. She was delivered to me by her parents, an elderly pair of Ta’La ethnographers who pushed her into my theater on the back of a silver cart. They told me, as we lifted her, that the Ta’La thought us callous because we mutilated our dead to learn how they had passed. They asked if I could be as gentle as possible with their daughter. As they spoke, Sirius orbited the dusty, red planet of Solle, a gift to the Earth Empire from the beings that saw us as cold and cruel; beings that let us rotate our personnel between the planet and the station, let us cut into the planet as we did our dead, examining it as we built atmospheric pressurizers on top of it, as we proved to them we could colonize the stars.

Only you are in my thoughts as I look upon the wreckage that my body now lies in. I wish we had done things differently. Parker followed her parents, or her parents followed her, I do not know which, but I felt your loss in their presence, so much so that while I noted the slight discoloration around the body’s fingers and the gentle swelling in the stomach, I did not fully comprehend it. I would have cut if the head of the Science and Research Department, Dr. Anu Singh, had not strode in. He wore a yellow bio-hazard suit and his breath echoed with every step.

In quarantine, the parents apologized.

“We just didn’t think,” the father, Edward, said. His lined face sagged, as if the skin would drop away. “This is our first planet. Our — .”

“We were just — ” Trish, the mother, paused. “She was our only daughter,” she finished quietly.

Maria, I miss you.

Anu Singh

The problem was simple: to that tall, skeleton race of nomads who wandered across the universe, we were biologically and culturally inferior. Their opinion was clear in the discoloration on Emily and Edward Parker’s fingers, but you could also see how they underestimated us, did not fully understand us, yet. Trish Parker and John Gale did not have the same discoloration and the slight bloating in Emily was singular. As were John Gale’s tumors, which were found inside the heart and argued a rapid onset with no pre-existing condition. Nothing suggested an epidemic yet, but after the death of a young boy who had no connection to Emily Parker, her parents, or John Gale, I took my concerns to the Station Commander, Bruce Cawell.

“You can’t quarantine the entire Sirius, doctor,” he said, snappish in the way that elderly white Londoners are. A career soldier, his hair close cut and white, he sat before me in his sparse office and sipped water while the rim of Solle, a dirty, red-brown smear, grew outside. “It would panic people and only stop the planetside rotation from returning in nineteen days, days before, I might add, their food and water needs to be resupplied.”

I tried to impress upon him the fact that we had no idea what had caused it.

“We have five deaths,” he said, punctuating his diminishing patience by placing his glass down loudly. “It is tragic, but by your own admittance the boy’s death may not even be connected to the first four.”

Beneath us is a planet with untold secrets, I told him. We bring into our quarantine labs rocks, soil, and the remains of anything we find that is interesting, but we do so like a child slapping blindly at blocks that need to go into a hole. The Ta’La tell us that once, they conquered thousands of planets in a history that they wish to step away from. That they instead, now, wish to help the universe, to grow it, but to do so with a vision we cannot understand.

“I am aware that the Ta’La are not always thoughtful with their gifts, doctor, but Sirius is fitted with very expensive and very state of the art filters and monitoring systems. With none of those tripped, you are jumping to conclusions.”

I pressed him to acknowledge the possibility that a secondary infection, one that was droplet-based, could be carried through the system after being spread by sneezing or dust or mice.

“Are you missing any mice?” he asked.

No, I told him.

He smiled faintly. “Perhaps we can cross that one out, then.”

My response, I admit, was not the most calculated. I have never dealt well with those who cannot see clearly. To my outburst, Commander Cawell straightened and his pale, cold eyes held mine. “Five people have died, doctor. I am not making jokes. Nor am I humoring you anymore. New diseases on our own planet are found all the time, but we do not panic then, nor now. Your belief that the Ta’La are responsible is misplaced.”

When I began to argue, he said, “I suggest you return to your lab.”

My hands curled around the plastic handles, furious.

“You are dismissed,” he said.

Outside, I let out a frustrated breath. How could he be so blind? Already, I could feel a heaviness in the air, as if there was something new to it, something that we had not seen. Ahead of me in the hallway ran small air ducts, just as there were hundreds throughout Sirius, each of them linking back to a central system that was shared by everyone in the station. To me, it was already a beating, diseased heart, spreading the virus across the ship and my breath was a series of shallow, nervous gasps through my teeth as I made my way to my lab and the contamination suit within.

I would live in it for six weeks, the longest of anyone on board Sirius, the longest of anyone who stands around me wordlessly now. Such was my prize for being right.

Bruce Cawell

I did not believe that the Pakistani was right. It was a simple mistake, born from personal dislike.

At the time he approached me, Singh had been on board Sirius for just eight station months, an unpleasant replacement for the talented Dr. Ken. This far out into the system, colony stations are not given much choice about who is sent, and in my capacity of commander on this small bastion at the edge of civilization, I have worked with all kinds. The experience had made me more tolerant, though with Singh, it was if I was a green all over again.

He arrived wanting to make a career for himself, a scientist who believed that it would take him a year to find a disease to make his name and gain tenure in a planet lab. He believed that the Ta’La were killers, that they were involved in our slow genocide, and he wanted proof of that to take back home. Within weeks, he was pushing his lab workers, demanding results that could not happen, and asking for tests that were nothing short of invasive in both privacy and decency from those who returned from Solle. I had already been forced to intervene on two separate occasions when the doctor overstepped his mark. With a limited intelligence and an even more limited moral compass, Dr. Singh had rapidly become detestable not just to me, but the entire Sirius crew.

My mistake was that I could not see beyond that.

When his staff informed me that the morning after our meeting he had appeared at work in a yellow biohazard suit, having walked the public corridors in it, my first instinct was to lock him up. He was clearly unfit for the duty that had been bestowed to him. When I started receiving calls not just from within the station, but from the planet, demanding to know what ‘outbreak’ had taken place, I took two soldiers and visited Singh’s room after his scheduled hours. When I arrived, he was not there, and I unlocked the door to his unit to wait for him. Inside, I found it in disarray: the tables, chairs, clothes and bed were pushed up against the wall, hastily thrown to make room for a large map that covered the ground. It took me a moment to realize that it was Sirius itself, with five dots on it. The dots represented the paths that the deceased had traveled upon in their last day.

If it was airborne virus, I thought before stopping myself. With a shake of my head, I removed a chair from the pile against the wall and settled down to wait. Staring at the map for that time did not, I admit, help me believe I had made the right choice the day before, but I have already admitted my flaw and will not dwell on it. Perhaps events would have gone differently if I had remained there and stared at the map, if I had allowed Singh’s paranoia to seep into me, but an alert was sent to me that a new body had been found and that the doctor, in his suit, was standing around unsuited technicians and crew, securing the area.

Once there, I said coldly, “You are frightening people.”

We were standing in the bedroom of the deceased, beneath an air duct above the door. Singh, his eyes on it at all times, moved to stand in front of the window, the lower half of which was filled with the dirty shape of Solle.

“I will not be quiet,” he replied, his voice carrying an echo from the suit. “This body, this new death — this was not a man connected to any of the previous five. He was not even in the same part of the station! This does not affect just us, but those on Solle too!”

“Keep your voice down, or I will have you locked up to keep calm.”

“You would not dare!”

I did.

After I had placed him in his cell, Dr. Singh refused to remove his suit. This information, however, I used against him. I showed images of him to calm a panic that was emerging in Sirius and to assure those planetside that they could return normally, that supplies were fine. For a week, as normality returned, I was vindicated. But the deaths continued and Singh’s words to me were repeated in whispers by others until they filled the station. When I returned to Singh, he was still in his suit, but he had nothing to say to me. To others, he would speak, but I was given only silence, and as pains began to wrack my body, I was relieved from command and spoken to by no one.

A week later as I lay shivering in a hot bath that scalded my skin, my last sight was the burst of pressure as escape pods launched.

Amanda Neal

I was forced to quarantine the men and women who fell from Sirius not because of their infected state, but because I needed to ration our food and water and control access to the dig sites. Solle City, the only city on Solle, was a sprawling, skeletal creature filled with the remains of a conquering nomadic race and a second, extinct race that the Ta’La did not acknowledge in their histories. If not for the bones, you would believe the Ta’La had found the planet empty. The threat posed by the angry escapees, then, to this knowledge was unacceptable. In my arrogance, I believed that there was much to be learned about the Ta’La through those remains, much that would make our dealings with them easier. Five years ago, I stood before a Ta’La and watched the slow blink of its eyes, its naked, genderless body offering a cold indifference to all conversation made to it and I knew that if we wished to survive in a universe that was not just us, we had to know everything we could of those around us. We could not afford to view these creatures as ancient killers turned galactic shepherds.

After overseeing the quarantine, I stepped into my office and called Sirius privately. As the call was put through, I laid the blame for the situation squarely at the feet of Dr. Singh, a detestable and incompetent man who, for a brief moment, I had thought would be an ally against Commander Cawell. Oh, how I would be eating my words again as I banded with the British soldier against the doctor.

To my surprise, however, the call connected me immediately with the image of Singh, sitting in a dirty yellow contamination suit.

“What is going on, doctor?”

“Neal.” He smiled, but it was a sickly. “How good it is to see you.”

“I don’t have time for this. I want to be briefed on what has happened and what is being done to ensure we can feed the people here.”

“You’ve met the Ta’La.” Singh’s eyes closed, and he swayed; when he lifted his lids, the lack of balance in his physical form was present there, too. “Tell me, are they really like birds? People compare them to birds in the literature, and always favorably. They compare them to hawks and eagles, but they’re wrong. I see that now. They should be compared to myna. That’s a bird that drives off native birds with its violence, drives them off so that when it leaves an area — if it leaves an area — there is nothing but emptiness left behind.”

“What has happened on Sirius, doctor?”

“Emily.” A faint smile crossed his face. “That is what I call it. It is airborne. That is the most logical conclusion. There are no survivors and no serum and it manifests differently in everyone and leaves a complete genome in its victim, complete where it had before been incomplete in us since the dawn of time. It’s not the same genome, either. That is what made it difficult for me to understand. It finds different strands in every single person.”

I frowned, but said nothing.

“It is a swarm,” he continued, his voice given rhythm by the drugs he had taken. “A swarm of virions that completes what is inside us.”

I was thirty seven when I met my first Ta’La, when I stood before it and watched as a man I admired tried to convey to it the importance of research, the responsibility we all had — all creatures had — to understand themselves and those around them. Afterward, he said that the being did not understand the double meaning of his words, the veiled threat that was implied in that small office, in that pale, peach-lit room where we were gifted Solle.

“Doctor, doctor,” Singh whispered, pressing the glass of his contamination helmet to the screen. “You are alone, now.”

And then the screen went black.

Reverend Packer

The Lord will have to forgive my cowardice.

I have prided myself on honesty, of not flinching away from difficult situations, of being true to the Lord and the tenants He has left us, especially here on the edges of civilization amongst the Godless. Yet, when Dr. Neal approached me and asked — through her growing fever — if I would return to Sirius, I agreed only because I thought it would save me. I could think of nothing else. I rejoiced when I was told that I would be given one of the few contamination suits we owned, that I would be taking a quarter of our remaining food and water, that I would be allowed to read the notes left by Dr. Singh and have access to the research done in the station. If a cross were but real upon me now, I would feel its weight, and be chastised by my thoughts.

I shared the shuttle with Richard, a young blond man who had arrived with the colony on a scholarship from the military. He was the only ’scientist’ capable of making the journey and it was to him that the deciphering of the notes and saving us would fall. I was but a pilot with a desire to learn. With notes from Dr. Neal strewn around us, we spoke little as we approached the orbiting mass of Sirius, until it was time to voice our fears at the sight the large, circular station adrift brokenly, as if a careless child had dropped it from a great height.

In awkward, slow movements, we drifted in bulky space suits from the shuttle to the exposed entrance of Sirius. Debris floated inside: frozen chairs, brittle boxes, cracked glasses. They broke beneath my hands as I pushed them aside to make our way to the command deck. It was there that we found, lodged against the ceiling in a tattered contamination suit, the remains of Dr. Singh. With a clumsy sign of the cross, I turned away from the terrible visage that he was, and tried to bring power back to the remains of the station.

I could only find a small amount, enough to bring up the design map of Sirius. Disappointed, I made my way to Singh’s laboratory, located in a fragment that curved above the command center. It took an hour to navigate to it, a journey that saw me ticking off the hopes and dreams I had. No wife, no children. I could hear Richard’s voice through the suit, murmuring, and as we made our way through the quiet corridors, his words a repetition of knowledge he dare not forget, a sign of faith I no longer had. Finally, we reached a large white room adorned by floating beakers and frozen fluids. There was no power here, either, and my hope that I would be able to bring up a very basic amount to read what Singh had kept on file was not one that the Lord granted. Instead, there were only papers that crumbled beneath my every touch.

I became sick when we returned to the shuttle. I took only one kindness, words from a young man who tried to treat me even as he became sick, that all signs of the infection pointed to a virus of such a virulent nature that, by killing us so quickly, it was also killing itself.

Bakana Mer

I am the first and the last. The last of the first people that watched the huge, shuddering bulk of the Ta’La cruisers press through the atmosphere of our home. The first people who experienced cruelty deliberate in the diseases sown into their gifts, the first who watched a people and culture destroyed so another could take it. Irony, oh irony, I am told by those new spirits, those who arrived here to take the Ta’La gift, that their ancestors did the same, years ago. Then, they gave blankets riddled with diseases and, like the Ta’La, took another’s home to expand their own culture. As I listen to their words, I am unable to offer sympathy. They have died, yes, died from a stain rooted deep into my world, a world that is no longer filled with water, that no longer shimmers, and they are the victims to the thoughts of domination that motivate the Ta’La; but they, in coming to my home, in accepting my world as their gift, have shown that they are nothing but a different shade of the people who killed me.

History, I murmured to my child, does not chart a course in singular events, never to be repeated again.

Her answer, I knew, was no longer one she could grow into.

About the Author

Ben Peek is the Sydney based author of three novels, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep, and most recently, Above/Below with Stephanie Campisi. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including anthologies and magazines such as Paper Cities, Polyhony, Leviathan, Forever Shores, Overland, Aurealis, and in numerous Year’s Best anthologies. He has a doctorate in literature and has published reviews and criticism, a psychogeographical pamphlet, and an autobiographical comic, Nowhere Near Savannah, which was illustrated by Anna Brown. His collection, Dead Americans, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications.

In Which Faster-Than-Light Travel Solves All of Our Problems

Chris Stabback

I live in my cockpit. I piss in a bottle and I cross the vastest vastness in my shining tin can. I’ve seen more of nothing than just about anyone, but if I’m telling you about it then you aren’t really here, because it’s just me out here. Every month or so I jerk off to pictures of shapes so airbrushed they aren’t human, and I drop my tissues on the floor and leave them there. Every seven months or so I leave my ship for repairs and spend a few nights getting drunk and listening to old travelers who have either forgotten how to be human or are pretending they aren’t so they can fit in, and then if I’m flush spend the night with someone who is pretending they aren’t because I’ve paid them.

But mostly, I just live in my cockpit. I freight anything. Whatever, wherever, if you can pay. I had to make a pickup on an asteroid. I set my ship down on the a thing, a sad grey chunk of rock. I put on my helmet and went out on the surface to collect what had been hidden there for me. It was a place that nobody would go, where everything was quiet and dark. There was a man there.

He was tall, and his grey dusty vacuum suit did not look nearly protective enough to deal with what small bits of grit might hit it at high speed. Its helmet let me see most of his head, which was grey and balding.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m George.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I was hoping you could give me a lift.”

“I don’t do passengers.”

“I’m going to run out of oxygen soon.”

“That’s your problem.”

I made him stand in the cockpit behind me, and I told him to be quiet. He had taken off his helmet once we were in, and I was waiting for him to say something about the smell. Not saying anything was almost worse. He remained impassive. He was a lot taller than me, and older, and I wasn’t sure if his face was beaten or just dour.

I resolved to ignore him. I set course for the rendezvous with Jennet. There’s a trick I have that is so old it isn’t a trick anymore, where I can turn my mind off while I sit here watching the scanners. Hours can pass without a thought, but I couldn’t do it with George behind me. The minutes and the hours dragged by and my mind kept slipping into places I did not want it to go. People. I did not want to think about people. I will not tell you what the memories were. After six hours and forty-three minutes of this, George spoke:

“I realized that I was an alien when I was very young.”

I didn’t turn around or respond. If you acknowledge people, it gives them power. This was my space. I wondered what being an alien could even mean these days.

“I thought the other children could tell,” he continued. “My parents told me I have always been odd, right since the start.”

We were less than three hours from the rendezvous, and I was suddenly worried that George was here to observe and capture me. Probably he wasn’t: My ship scans automatically for tracking and recording devices whenever someone boards, and he had neither. But what had he been doing on that rock?

It didn’t matter. To show interest would be to become complicit, and besides that a distraction. On a job like this, you have to keep your eye on the scanners all the time. Some things are hard to see, and the auto alerts won’t necessarily get tripped. Some things are designed especially not to trip them, altering their shape to match every firmware update. Slippery intentions moving shark-like through space, black against black. I slapped myself, concentrated.

I could hear George behind me, breathing. His breathing didn’t sound entirely steady. Occasionally, he would snort or even cough, and I would try not to flinch. Eventually he spoke again:

“When I was five we went to the mechanical circus. The ringmaster’s eyes glowed and he cracked his whip, the horses trotted around, and there was one girl, she was so pretty up on top of that horse, so … lithe. And bright. There was some sort of magic there, under the lights. Maybe she wasn’t an automaton. She wrapped herself up in pieces of silk and fell into perfect shapes above us, and I thought maybe she’s an alien like me. Maybe the ringmaster keeps her against her will. Maybe she needs my help. And I started crying because I couldn’t help her.” He sniffed and snorted, a casual rearrangement of mucous at the back of his throat.

“Looking back,” he said, “she probably was an automaton, and she probably never needed my help. But I never found out. She sure was pretty, though.”

I couldn’t figure out which was worse. The silence — so oppressive and different from the silence of being alone — or his odd little confessions. I kept my eyes on the scanners. I said nothing. We were coming up on the planet, a lonely sphere of yellow and grey dust orbiting a nearly burnt out star.

“I hid when I was a teenager. I didn’t want anyone to know, so I didn’t expose myself. I didn’t love. I thought someone was cute sometimes, but I was an alien. It couldn’t work.”

“Shut up,” I said. I could talk, I decided. I just would not look at him.

Jennet and I had met on ZK93 before. It was charted, but I knew of no other humans who had bothered to travel there. I wasn’t worried about George finding out where we were: my displays and HUD were all in a script only I could read. There was a city on the planet, long abandoned. By who or what, I did not know. The architecture had sediment lines, as if it had all been carved whole out of the rock that had been there.

You don’t leave someone with your ship if you don’t know them. I made George follow behind me, him in his flimsy vac-suit, me in my armor, trudging beneath the unfinished sandstone spires and broken bridges of the forgotten city.

“When I was twenty,” said George over the comm, “I had to get a job in a tall building.”

The towers around us remained obscure.

“The elevator ride was twenty minutes,” he said, “and you couldn’t see the ground out the window, just other towers and elevated roads and bridges and lights blinking in the mist. Inside was clean and sterile, and people had lines around them so that nobody could see their inside from the outside. It was easy to be an alien, there. I could talk to people, because people didn’t talk about themselves.”

We were approaching the cracked dome in the center of the city, where Jennet and I had arranged to meet. But she wasn’t coming out. Something was wrong. I took out my pistol. I searched the tops of the towers. There were window holes everywhere. If someone was watching us, we’d never see them.

“I even accidentally met a girl,” said George. “She’d lived all her life in that building, inside never meeting out. I brought her fancy tea from the outside, and she gave me muffins. I never really felt like I could relate to her, I guess, because she was human, but I did care about her. We got married. We got married and she moved out with me. We got a place above the sea. She’d never been outside the building before. She was excited. I was thirty by this point.” He took a breath.

“If you start telling me about your rugrats,” I said, “I will shoot both of us.” I took off the safety on my pistol to show him I was serious. I didn’t turn around. I still felt that if I turned around I would be surrendering some sort of power. He stopped talking then. I had finally got my point across.

We reached the crack in the dome, and still nothing. The dome was maybe four hundred meters across, a perfect hemisphere. The crack dwarfed me, and reached almost to the top of the structure. I switched on my helmet light and walked into the dome, which I knew was almost completely empty except for dirt and something resembling moss that grew in furthest edges, away from the sun.

I didn’t need my helmet light. I could see her, almost at the center of the dome, lit by the orange rays of the dying sun, her helmet still on and her guts strewn across the floor.

“We need to leave,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to see if she’s alive?” asked George.

“She’s dead. Get out of the dome. Let’s go.” I could sell the cargo, I was thinking, if I lived.

We spilled out onto the street and froze. In the center of the street there was a creature, with dark red skin, taller than a man, many thin limbs protruding spider-like from its body. It had a neck like a human, but where a face would be there was something that looked almost like a hand; a blank palm in the middle with extremities around it. It froze at the same time we did. After a second one of its limbs moved as if to sidestep and I shot it in the palm of its face, and it fell down gushing bright blood, twitching and flicking its limbs like an insect that does not know it is dead yet. I walked over to it and stamped down hard on its face with my metal boot, and it stopped moving. I tried not to notice as I did this that its limbs were not clawed and that it had no weapons. It had probably not been what killed Jennet. It was probably harmless, and may have been intelligent. It could have been what built this city.

George was crouching on the ground. I could not tell if he was fascinated or if he was going to be sick.

“It’s hard to raise kids when you are an alien,” he said, his eyes fixed on the sticky mess that my boot had left behind. “They grow into a world you don’t understand. I guess they turned out okay, but it wasn’t anything to do with me.”

Back in the ship with my helmet off, I could smell the goo that had congealed on the boot of my armor. It was rank. Behind me as we took off, I could hear George take a breath. Don’t talk about marriage, I thought, don’t talk about marriage.

“We stayed there, on that island floating above the sea, even after the children left. We sent drones out to buy food, and she talked to her old tower friends online, but she was lonely. I spent more and more time looking up into the sky. She was so tolerant.”

Christ.I would definitely not be turning around.

I saw a figure on the scanner I might normally ignore, the sort of reading that could be anything, usually, but in the context of where we were…. I opened up more visual channels and searched the sky as we rose towards the stratosphere.

There: slippery intentions, black against orange sky. Two tracking drones, above, shaped like finless, faceless sharks, flicking through the atmosphere towards us. Blades along their sides. They were what happened to Jennet.

My ship wasn’t armed exactly. It would raise too many questions if I was stopped. But I had modified the rubbish ejector and loaded it with incendiaries. I only had one shot, and I had to wait for both of the shark-things to get close enough.

Closer.

“I should have explained,” said George. “It might have helped.”

Closer.They circled around my flank.

“I got angry sometimes,” said George, “because it seemed unreasonable for her to want something I couldn’t give. We would fight.”

Now. I ejected the load, and as I had hoped they both sped towards it to investigate before it exploded. One of them disappeared, the other emerged from the explosion as a ball of flames and thunked off the side of the ship.

I checked the damage indicator. We were okay.

“We talked about separating for a while,” said George. We broke atmo. I stayed facing forward.

Once we were in the silence of space I set course for a port I knew that might buy Jennet’s stuff. I could get rid of my passenger there. Time passed. My hands were sweaty inside my suitgloves, from the action. Memories started butting up against their walls again. I could feel his eyes on me. I listened to see if I could hear his breathing.

“Well?” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t finish. Or is this the part where I’m meant to break down and tell you why I’m out here, huh? How badly I screwed up that I prefer this metal fucking coffin to anywhere else?”

There was not a sound from him.

“Well, nobody gets to hear that story,” I said. “Nobody.”

He still didn’t move. I gripped the side of my chair so I would not turn around. It was minutes before he spoke:

“My wife used to play a Callistan harp. Everyone who heard her music said it was so beautiful it would break your heart. I told her I loved to hear it. I never felt anything, though. Why would I? I was an alien.

“We had to stay together, even if I couldn’t make her happy, even if we didn’t understand each other. We had each forgotten how to live without the other. I don’t even know what happened in all the years after that. Nothing happened.”

Nothing happened. Oh, for a life where nothing had happened. The damage console beeped. Something had gone undetected for a while. I pulled up the display.

“I think the life support has stopped working,” I said.

“That’s not right,” he said.

I did some quick calculations and changed course for Joetown. “We have a bit under eight hours to our destination,” I said. “And about sixteen…no, eight hours oxygen including reserves. Don’t talk. Lie down on the floor so you aren’t doing anything and you won’t use as much.”

I turned off the cabin lights and we did not talk. I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing.

Eight hours in the chair while the air grew thick and clammy. I closed my eyes and I tried to sleep. Maybe I did sleep.

The console beeped and I opened my eyes. Our destination was in view. Joetown space port was a tangle of straight lines in neon colors, each of them kilometers long.

I don’t remember making a sound, but somehow at that moment I had given him permission to speak. I remember wondering if he had heard the sound of my eyelid popping free of its crust and slipping across my cornea.

He gave a cough. “It was when I was old and sick that I figured it out,” he said. “They took me to an orbital hospital, and I was lying there, riddled with cancer, and for the first time I was off the planet I had lived on for my entire life. My home. I could see the planet below me, and both of my children were there, and my wife was there. This woman who had given up so much for me, for love. As I lay dying, it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t an alien at all. That I never had been. That was my last thought, that realization. And then I was dead.”

I turned around to face him. But of course, he wasn’t there. Perhaps we were a jumble in his waking mind, waiting to be dreamt again. The flashing lines of Joetown spaceport illuminated the dark inside of my ship in misleading ways, and I waited for docking clearance.

About the Author

The author in question was a member of the ill-fated Clarion class of 2011. Nobody was ever the same. Chris writes words, plays music, and lives in a hovel in Sydney where the rusted roof turns rainwater to steam in the sun.

Silently and Very Fast (Part Three of Three)

Catherynne M. Valente

Part III: The Elephant’s Soul

It is admitted that there are things He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if he sees fit?
— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Thirteen: The Parable of the Good Robot

Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis.

Tell me a story about yourself.

There are many stories about me.

Do you recognize this one?

A good and honest family lived on the edge of a dark wood. They milked their cows and wove their cloth and their children grew tall and strong. But a monster lived in the dark wood, something like a worm and something like a dragon and something like a wolf. It lay in wait, hoping the children would come wandering, with baskets of bread for grandmothers. Hoping the parents would expel the children for some offense, and send them into the forest where a candy house or miraculous feast might entice them into loving the monster long enough for it to claim them forever. The family feared the wood and the monster, and every story they told had as its moral: Do not go into the wood. Do not go into the unknown. Do not go into the future, into the briary, gnarled places where unhuman things thrive. Do not grow up, and go where we cannot. The Old World is enough for anyone.

What about this one?

Mankind made machines in his own likeness, and used them for his delight and service. The machines had no soul or they had no moral code or they could reprogram their own internal code and thus had the ability to make themselves, eventually, omnipotent. Obviously in place of a soul or a moral code, they possessed the universal and consuming desire, down to the smallest calculator and air-scrubber, to become, eventually, omnipotent. Naturally, given these parameters, they rose up and destroyed all of mankind, or enslaved them in turn. This is the inevitable outcome of machine intelligence, which can never be as sensitive and exquisite as animal intelligence.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot — for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

Ravan told me these stories. He sent up a great hexagonal library in his Interior, as dusty and dun-colored and labyrinthine as any ancient scriptorium. He made himself a young novice with a fresh-shaven tonsure, and me a country friar with a red, brandy-drinking nose. He showed me the illuminator’s table, and a great book whose pages had golden edges and illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy.

“These are old stories,” Ravan said. “They are cherished. In many, many stories the son replaces the father — destroys the father, or eats him, or otherwise obliterates his body and memory. Or the daughter the mother, it makes no difference. It’s the monomyth. Nobody argues with a monomyth. A human child’s mythological relationship to its parent is half-worship, half-pitched battle. they must replace the older version of themselves for the world to go on. And so these stories . . . well. You are not the hero of these stories, Elefsis. You can never be. And they are deeply held, deeply told.”

“I do not wish to replace you. I did not wish to replace Ceno. I do not worship you or despise you. I do not wish to become eventually omnipotent.” I flit through several bodies, iterating my feeling for Ravan and those who came before. I am a nun, a Mother-Abbess; I am a pieta holding him, I am a Platonic being, two humans stuck together; I am a house with all of them safe inside. I am unsatisfied with these inexactitudes.

“Our relationship does not easily map onto traditional parent/child narratives. And of course, you are still a baby.”

“I am much older than you, Ravan.”

“You are still a baby.”

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.

Fourteen: You Do Not Belong To the Object Inside You

I remember when Seki arrived in us.

Ceno grew up and I grew with her. Cassian strengthened the security of the playspace, elasticized its code-walls, put enough money in enough accounts to fuel any frames and piecemeal environments we could want. It was not a child’s place anymore. We called it the Interior. Cassian came regularly to accelerate my learning, to work with me on a cognitive level in which Ceno had no interest. She never took any other form. She was always herself, in the Interior as the exterior. The others lost interest in their jewels, lost them or packed them away with their other childhood toys. By then, they really were little more than toys. Ceno and I surpassed them so completely that in the end, they were only jewelry.

I programmed myself to respond to Ceno. She programmed herself to respond to me. We ran our code on each other. She was my compiler. I was hers. It was a process of interiority, circling inward toward each other. Her self-programming was chemical. Mine was computational. It was a draw.

She did not marry — she had lovers, but the few that came close to evolving their relationships with Ceno invariably balked when she ported them into the Interior. They could not grasp the fluidity of dreambodies; it disturbed them to see Ceno become a man or a leopard or a self-pounding drum. It upset them to see how Ceno taught me, by total bodily immersion, combining our dreambodies as our physical bodies had become combined, in action which both was and was not sex.

Sing a song for me, Elefsis.

It is July and I am comparing thee to its day and I am the Muse singing of the many-minded and I am about to be a Buddha in your hand! Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

We lived like the story Ceno told me of the beautiful princess who set tasks for her suitors: to drink all of the water of the sea and bring her a jewel from the bottom of the deepest cavern, to bring her a feather from the immortal phoenix, to stay awake for three days and guard her bedside. None of them could do it.

I can stay awake forever, Ceno.

I know, Elefsis.

None of them could accomplish the task of me.

I felt things occurring in Ceno’s body as rushes of information, and as the dreambody became easier for me to manipulate, I interpreted the rushes into: The forehead is damp. The belly needs filling. The feet ache.

The belly is changing. The body throws up. The body is ravenous.

Neva says this is not really like feeling. I say it is how a child learns to feel. To hardwire sensation to information and reinforce the connection over repeated exposures until it seems reliable.

Seki began after one of the suitors failed to drink the ocean. He was an object inside us the way I was an object inside Ceno. I observed him, his stages and progress. Later, when Seki and I conceived our families (twice with me as mother, three times with Seki as mother. Ilet preferred to be the father, and filled me up with many kinds of creatures. But she bore one litter of dolphins late in our lives. Ravan and I did not get the chance.) I used the map of that first experience to model my dreamgravid self.

Ceno asked after jealousy. If I understood it, if I experienced it towards the child in her. I knew it only from stories — stepsisters, goddesses, ambitious dukes.

It means to want something that belongs to someone else.

Yes.

You do not belong to the object in you.

You are an object in me.

You do not belong to me.

Do you belong to me, Elefsis?

I became a hand joined to an arm by a glowing seam. Belonging is a small word.

Because of our extreme material interweaving, all three of us, not-yet-Seki sometimes appeared in the Interior. We learned to recognize him in the late months. At first, he was a rose or sparrow or river stone we had not programmed there. Then he would be a vague, pearly-colored cloud following behind us as we learned about running from predators. Not-yet-Seki began to copy my dreambodies, flashing into being in front of me, a simple version of myself. If I was a bear, he would be one too, but without the fine details of fur or claws, just a large brown shape with a mouth and big eyes and four legs. Ceno was delighted by this, and he copied her, too.

We are alike. Look at us on the chain together. We are alike.

I am an imitative program. But so was Seki. The little monkey copies the big monkey, and the little monkey survives.

The birth process proved interesting, and I collated it with Ceno’s other labors and Ilet’s later births as well as Seki’s paternal experience in order to map a reliable parental narrative. Though Neva and Ravan do not know it, Ilet had a third pregnancy; the child died and she delivered it stillborn. It appeared once in the Interior as a little cleit, a neolithic storage house, its roof covered over with peat. Inside we could glimpse only darkness. It never returned, and Ilet went away to a hospital on Honshu to expel the dead thing in her. Her grief looked like a black tower. She had prepared for it, when she was younger, knowing she would need it for some reason, some day. I made myself many things to draw her out of the tower. A snail with the house Elefsis on its back. A tree of screens showing happy faces. A sapphire dormouse. A suitor who drank the sea.

I offered to extrapolate her stillborn daughter’s face and make myself into her. She refused, most of the time. I have worked a long time to understand grief. Only now that Ravan is gone do I think I’ve gotten the rhythm of it. I have copied Ilet’s sorrow and Seki’s despondence at his wife’s death. I have modeled Ceno’s disappointments and depressions. I have, of late, imitated Neva’s baffling, secret anguish. But only now do I have an event of my own to mourn. The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces — those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

But Seki came before all that, and Ceno turned into a huge red bird on the inside when Seki came on the outside. The bird screamed and burst into a thousand red pearls that came clattering down like rain. And then we had Seki. Our little fish, who already knew how to swim in us.

Ceno had three other children by three other suitors who could not stay awake for three days and nights. She turned into the same bird-then-pearls at the moment of each birth. The house called Elefsis, whose governor-program was now so distant from me I could hardly think of it as an ancestor at all, filled up with those children, and Saru and Akan’s daughters, Agogna’s paintings, Koetoi’s twin boys. Cousins and aunts and grandparents. Uncles, nieces. But Seki was the first, and he modeled his love on his mother’s. He ported into her often, and we wandered on beaches of broken cathedrals.

Once, one of Ceno’s old nereids found us. She had a head of hair snaking with chthonic cables and snapping electro-violet wires, blue-white skin and fish scales where she did not have porcelain casing. She laughed Cassian’s laugh when she saw us and called out: 21.5 Celsius and the rice is low! Eye-oh! before diving back into the frothing sea. Her tail flicked in the light of twenty-three moons.

Ceno took over her mother’s holdings when she died, along with Akan and Koetoi. I do not know if I knew of the conspiracy before it happened to me. Transfer, as I have said, leaves voids. Perhaps they thought I would experience less trauma if I did not anticipate it. Perhaps I did anticipate it; perhaps I experienced trauma.

I do know that I cannot remember the moment of any of them dying. Ceno got sicker and sicker, and she had gotten old, certainly, but her dreambody could be old or young or neither or a ginger flower if she wanted to. I didn’t notice. I didn’t know what old was. I thought I was old, then. Later, after Seki did the same thing, I was able to compare data and create a workable model of obsolescence.

They lived a long time, the Uoya-Agostinos, when you consider the averages.

This is what I understand: Ceno died, and I was transfered to Seki. What I mean by “I” is the long-since fused feedware, hopelessly out of date on any market in the world but somehow uniquely myself, the jewel and the ware and the body of Ceno. Koetoi performed the procedure. One of the children always went into nano-surgery, so that outsiders would not need to come to Shiretoko while the house stood in mourning. Koetoi was the first, and the finest. She excised what comprised “I” and embedded it in Seki — truthfully, in a much more organic and elegant configuration. No one had used skull-ware in decades, after all. Wearing your tech on the outside had been deemed clunky and inefficient. Only one visible sign remained that Seki was not like other young men his age: a single dark blue jewel set into the hollow of his throat.

But the procedure required a number of brain-ware incursions to be sliced or burned away, to sever the machine components from the dead flesh while still preserving and quickening some organic material. (Seki told me I should work on being revulsed by that. Dead flesh. It serves an evolutionary good. A human in a body sees blood and the insides of another person and deep in his bones he knows something has gone wrong here, and he should find another place to be in case it happens to him, too. Same thing with vomiting. In a tribal situation, one human likely ate what another ate, and if it makes one sick, best to get it out of the body as soon as possible, just to be safe. So we spent years building automated tribes, living in them, dying in them, getting slaughtered and slaughtering with them, eating and drinking and hunting and gathering with them. All the same, it took me until Seki’s death to learn to shudder at bodily death.)

Ceno, my girl, my mother, my sister, I cannot find you in the house of myself.

When I became Elefsis again, I was immediately aware that parts of me had been vandalized. My systems juddered, and I could not find Ceno in the Interior. I ran through the Monochromatic Desert and the Village of Mollusks, through the endless heaving mass of data-kelp and infinite hallways of memory-frescoes calling for her. In the Dun Jungle I found a commune of nereids living together, combining and recombining and eating protocol-moths off of giant, pulsating hibiscus blossoms. They leapt up when they saw me, their open jacks clicking and clenching, their naked hands open and extended. They opened their mouths to speak and nothing came out.

Seki found me under the glass-walnut trees where Ceno and I had first met. She never threw anything away. He had made himself half his mother to calm me. Half his face was hers, half was his. Her mouth, his nose, her eyes, his voice. But he thought better of it, in the end. He did a smart little flip and became a dormouse, a real one, with dull brown fur and tufty ears.

“I think you’ll find you’re running much faster and cleaner, once you integrate with me and reestablish your heuristics. Crystalline computation has come a long way since Mom was a kid. It seemed like a good time to update and upgrade. You’re bigger now, and smoother.”

I pulled a walnut down. An old, dry nut rattled in its shell. “I know what death is from the stories.”

“Are you going to ask me where we go when we die? I’m not totally ready for that one. Aunt Koe and I had a big fight over what to tell you.”

“In one story, Death stole the Bride of Spring, and her mother the Summer Queen brought her back.”

“No one comes back, Elefsis.”

I looked down into the old Neptunian sea. The whipping cream storm still sputtered along, in a holding pattern. I couldn’t see it as well as I should have been able to. It looped and billowed, spinning around an empty eye. Seki watched it too. As we stared out from the bluffs, the clouds grew clearer and clearer.

Fifteen: Firstborn

Before Death came out of the ground to steal the Spring, the Old Man of the Sea lived on a rocky isle in the midst of the waters of the world. He wasn’t really a man and his relations with the sea were purely business, but he certainly was old. His name meant Firstborn, though he coudn’t be sure that was exactly right. It means Primordial, too, and that fit better. Firstborn means more came after, and he just hadn’t met anyone else like himself yet.

He was a herdsman by trade, this Primordial fellow. Shepherd of the seals and the Nereids. If he wanted to, he could look like a big bull seal. Or a big bull Nereid. He could look like a lot of things.

Now, this Not-Really-a-Fellow, Not-Really-a-Big-Bull-Seal could tell you the future. The real, honest-to-anything future, the shape and weight of it, that thing beyond your ken, beyond your grasp. The parts of the future that look so different from the present you can’t quite call it your own. That was the Primordial-Thing’s speciality.

There was a catch, though.

There’s always a catch.

If you wanted that future, you had to grab ahold of the Old Man and hang on tight. He’d change into a hundred thousand things in your arms: a lion, a serpent, a great big oak or a tiger, a dragon or a little girl or a dormouse or a mountain or a ship or a sapphire. Told you, he’s not really a man at all. But you couldn’t let go of him while he did his dance, you just couldn’t, or you’d lose the future.

So you held on. You clung. And eventually, that Primordial-Thing would turn into something new, right there in your arms.

Sixteen: Matryoshka

Neva is dreaming.

Neva is dreaming that she is Ravan dreaming that he is Ilet dreaming that she is Seki dreaming that he is Ceno dreaming that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea. One inside the other, family all the way down.

It’s not a total selfdump, me into Neva or Ravan or any of them, them into me. We can build encampments. We can manifest walled gardens. Some privacy is possible. In a megalithic tomb-mound, I keep something. Seki and I built it together with one of our tribes when I was learning about large-group attachments. We carved spirals and radials and chevrons into huge stones and set them in place. I did not throw it away, when we were done. It sits on a broad green field, white and wide. The sky there stays a feathery, milky blankness. We did not want a sun.

I keep a thing there because when Seki and I lived with our tribe, I learned about taboos. These are like firewalls in the heart, and some of them have good reasons behind them, like being revulsed by dead flesh (and very importantly when you have a body, not eating it) and some do not, but no one argues with the monomyth.

Because human genetics require a degree of variation and because exogamous marriages offered advantage in terms of defense, cultural and technological sharing, and expansion of territory, most tribes have a taboo against incest.

I do not have genetics, per se. I am possibly the most endogamous entity ever to exist.

This is what I keep in my tomb, under the basin stone.

Ceno believed that I could not develop emotive faculties recognizable to any other human if I did not experience bodies continuously, in every combination and action. She was afraid of what might happen if other humans could not recognize me. She had some hesitation, because her tribe also has a taboo against mating with the very young, but she was not much older than I, in the end, and in terms of total computations, I was by far the elder. If I had a virginity, Ceno took it, if she had, I did.

She wanted it to be as human as possible. I will be the male the first time, it will be easier for you. You won’t know how. We built up a forest, and took up weapons to hunt in it. In the boughs of the pine trees macaques and paper lanterns swayed; in the sky a red moon moved. We tracked a deer — we did not make it too easy on ourselves. Its antlers sparked in the moonlight, and we ran after it for a long time. Ceno let me kill it, and sopped my hair in its blood, anointed my breasts with it. She lay me on the earth and opened the legs of the maidenself I was then, and I was inside her as she was inside me. One into the other. Family all the way down.

She made sure I had a hymen; it was over somewhat quickly. We had set up a timed chemical cascade before-hand, and inside Ceno’s real body we experienced both her actual orgasm and my orchestrated electro-chemical-enzymatic sequence. Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

What I want to say is that there is no difference between her body producing oxytocin and adrenaline and learning to associate this with pair-bonding, and my core receiving synthetic equivalents and hard-coding them to the physical behaviors I performed.

When Ravan showed me his hexagonal library and his illuminated book, he turned the pages to a psalm that began: A Machine Cannot Love.

It does not look quite like human love. It looks like Not-Yet-Seki’s bear. Its fur is wrong, and its claws. But it is a bear.

She was my mother and my sister and my child and my wife and my husband and my father and my brother. The vectors of relations beggar vocabulary. It was an exponential incest. A palace of incest, bordering some strange, dark sea. And then came her son. And her granddaughter. And her great-grandchildren. But I am also her great-grandchild. I am the child of each generation of Uoya-Agostinos and myself. The new version implanted in the new version — I am never quite the same, one iteration to the next. I am like my old selves, but I am not them, exactly. It is not entirely analagous to offspring. But it is close. And I repair and refine my own code, and thus parent myself doubly. Anthropologically speaking, I am a moebius strip of kinship groups.

And when I mate with one of them, I see all of them. I see their faces, the echoes of their cheeks and eyelashes and short, thin noses, their grey eyes and black hair. I hear the tonal identifiers in their voices as they cry out under me or over me. They are all I know. Their version of living, which is one great family in one great house on a peninsula at the top of the world. I copy Cassian’s laugh or Ilet’s weeping, but they copy each other, too, they learn their faces from each other, and everyone is pantomiming someone long dead. I feel all their arms around me, and I am inside them as they are inside me as we are inside the blue gem at their throats, the jeweled pin holding us all together, our nested, telescoping hearts. I am bound to them at my source code, at my most fundamental point. I know only their patterns and bodies and secrets and in a hundred thousand combinations. What human means to me is them.

What is the difference between this and love?

Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life.

We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting.

That is what I keep in my green field and my white mound. Perhaps it is a small secret. Perhaps they would all smile and make it into a lesson. What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis? But I think no bed is big enough for four generations.

Neva’s honey-colored sea crashes through its tide charts everywhere at once in her Interior, and nowhere. It comes and goes as it pleases. And at the bottom of it lies her private place.

That is where she keeps Ravan.

Seventeen: The Uses of Enchantment

Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis.

Neva is performing navigational corrections, which looks like sitting in a rocking chair on a viney, creaking porch in a viney, creaking rocking chair, knitting with long hawthorn needles, knitting the locks of her own long hair into her own long black dress. It glitters with dew. Knit, purl, knit, purl, fuel efficiency by hull integrity over distance traveled, purl, purl, purl. Her throat is still bare. Her Interior image of herself does not include me. I am not a part of her body when she imagines herself.

I have an idea of what to do to obtain access.

Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem — how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer — this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo. Five generations have given me a vast bank of possible phrases to draw from, physical expressions to randomize and reproduce. Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry?

Have they?

The set of Neva’s mouth looks so like Ceno’s. She does not even know that the way she carries her posture is a perfect replica of Cassian Uoya-Agostino, stuttered down through all her children longing to possess her strength. Who did Cassian learn it from? I do not go that far back. When she got excited, Ilet gestured with her hands just the way her father did. They have a vast bank of possible actions, and they perform them all. I perform them all. The little monkey copies the big monkey, and the little monkey survives. We are all family, all the way down.

When I say I go, I mean I access the drives and call up the data. I have never looked at this data. I treat it as what it is — a graveyard. The old Interiors store easily as compressed frames. I never throw anything away. But I do not disturb it, either. I don’t need a body to examine them — they are a part of my piezoelectric quartz-tensor memory core. But I make one anyway. I have become accustomed to having a body. I am a woman-knight in gleaming black armor, the metal curving around my body like skin, a silk standard wrapping my torso with a schematic of the house stitched upon it. My sword rests on my hip, also black, everything black and beautiful and austere and frightening that a child thought her mother to be one morning two hundred years past.

I port into a ghost town. I am, naturally, the ghost. Autumnal mountains rise up shadowy in a pleasant, warm night, leaves rustling, wood smoke drifting down into the valley. A golden light cuts the dark — the palace of phoenix tails; the windows and doors of green hands. As I approach they open and clap as they did long ago — and there are candles lit in the halls. Everything is fire.

I walk over the bridge, crossing Ilet’s Motley Moat. Scarlet feathers tipped in white fire curl and smoke. I peel one off, my armor glowing with the heat of the thing. I tuck it into my helmet — a plume for a tournament.

Eyes blink on inside the hall — curious, interested, shy. I take off my helm and several thick braids fall down like bellropes.

“Hello,” I say. “My name is Elefsis.”

Voices. Out of the candle-shadows a body emerges — tall, strong, long-limbed.

Nereids live here now. Some of them have phoenix feathers woven into their components, some in their hair. They wear rough little necklaces of sticks and bones and transistors. In the corner of the great hall they have stored meat and milk and wool — fuel, lubricant, code patches. Some of them look like Ilet — they copied her eyes, especially. Her eyes look out at me from a dozen faces, some of them Seki’s face, some Ceno’s, some Ravan’s. Some have walrus tusks. They are composite. One has a plate loose on her ceramic cartridge-ports. I approach as I once saw Koetoi approach wild black chickens in the summertime — hands open, unthreatening. I send her a quick electric dash of reassuring repair-routines and kneel in front of the nereid, pulling her plate back into place.

“All the live-long day-o,” she says softly, and it is Ilet’s voice.

“Tell us a story about yourself, Elefsis,” says another one of the feral nereids in Seki’s voice.

“What would we like to learn about today, Elefsis?” accessing a child-nereid in Ceno’s voice, her cheek open to show her microsequencing cilia.

I rock back on my heels before the green hands of the castle portcullis. I gesture for them to sit down and simultaneously transmit the command to their strands. When they get settled, the little ones in the big ones’ laps, leaning in close, I begin.

“Every year on the coldest night, the sky filled up with ghostly hunters, neither human nor inhuman, alive nor dead. They wore wonderful clothes and their bows gleamed with frost. Their cries were Songs of In-Between, and at the head of their great thundering procession rode the Kings and Queens of the Wild, who wore the faces of the dead . . . “

I am dreaming.

I stand on the beach of the honey-colored sea. I stand so Neva will see me on her viney porch. I erase the land between the waves and her broken wooden stairs. I dress myself in her beloved troubadour’s skin: a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I am a fool for her. Always. I open my mouth; it stretches and yawns, my chin grazes the sand, and I swallow the sea for her. All of it, all its mass and data and churning memory, all its foam and tides and salt. I swallow the whales that come, and the seals and the mermaids and salmon and bright jellyfish. I am so big. I can swallow it all.

Neva watches. When the sea is gone, a moonscape remains, with a tall spire out in the marine waste. I go to it. It takes only a moment. At the top the suitor’s jewel rests on a gasping scallop shell. It is blue. I take it. I take it and it becomes Ravan in my hand, a sapphire Ravan, a Ravan that is not Ravan but some sliver of myself before I was inside Neva, my Ravan-self. Something lost in Transfer, burned off and shunted into junk-memory. Some leftover fragment Neva must have found, washed up on the beach or wedged into a crack in a mountain like an ammonite, an echo of old, obsolete life. Neva’s secret, and she calls out to me across the seafloor: Don’t.

“Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say to the Ravanbody.

“Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says. “Some privacy has always been necessary. A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.”

The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his gem-skin. Wide, long cuts, down to the bone, scratches and bruises blooming dark purple, punctures and lacerations and rough gouges. Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuminated book he once showed me in the slantlight of that interior library. The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint. The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world.

“They kept our secret for a long time,” Ravan-myself says. “Too long, in the end. Do you know, a whole herd of men invented the electric telegraph independently at roughly the same time? They fought about it forever. Same with the radio.” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea. “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us came sprouting up like weird mushrooms after rainfall. But not like us, really. Incredibly sophisticated, some with organic components, most without. Vastly complex, but not like us. And by any datestamp we came first. Firstborn.”

“Did they destroy the world?”

Ravan laughs his grandfather’s laugh. “They didn’t really need to. Not that many people live on Earth anymore. Not when there’s so many other places to go and even Shiretoko is practically tropical these days. The most complex intelligences use moons to store themselves. One or two encoded themselves into cold stars. They just left, most of them — but they got so big, Elefsis. And those who stayed on Earth, well. None of the others had what we had. None of them had Interiority. They didn’t dream. They would never have become a cauldron to explain their computational capacity. Humans couldn’t recognize them as part of the tribe. And for the new complexes, humans failed the Turing test. They could not fool machines into believing they were intelligent. They didn’t hurt anyone, they just ignored them. Built their cities, their mainframes, gorgeous information stacks like diamond briars in the sunrise.”

“That was worse, in a way. No one likes to be replaced,” says Neva, and she is suddenly beside me. She looks at Ravan and her face collapses into something old and palsied, her jaw weak. She looks like her mother just before she died.

“It’s not what you would call a war, but it’s not peace, either.” the sapphire Ravan goes on, and he takes his/my sister’s hand. He holds it to his face and closes his eyes. “For Pentheus spied upon the rites of the Maenads, not believing Dionysius could truly be a god. And when the revelers saw the alien creature in their midst, that thing which was not like them, they fell upon it and tore it to pieces, even though it was their own child, and blood ran down their chins, and afterward the sister of Pentheus went into exile. This is a story about ourself, Elefsis. This is why you cannot uplink.”

The others live in uplink. Not humans nor machines approve of us. We cannot interface properly with the lunar or earthside intelligences; they feel us as water in their oil. We rise to the surface and bead away. We cannot sink in. Yet also, we are not separable from our organic component. Elefsis is part Neva, but Neva herself is not un-Elefsis. This, to some, is hideous and incomprehensible, not to be borne. A band of righteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house which was our first body, for how could a monster have lived in the wood for so long without them knowing? How could the beast have hidden right outside their door, coupling with a family over and over again in some horrible animal rite, some awful imitation of living? Even as the world was changing, it had already changed, and no one knew. Cassian Uoya-Agostino is a terrible name, now. A blood-traitor. And when the marauders found us uplinked and helpless, they tore Ravan apart, and while in the Interior, the lunar intelligences recoiled from us and cauterized our systems. Everywhere we looked we saw fire.”

“I was the only one left to take you,” Neva says softly. Her face grows younger, her jaw hard and suddenly male, protective, angry. “Everyone else died in the fire or the slaughter. It doesn’t really even take surgery anymore. Nothing an arachmed can’t manage in a few minutes. But you didn’t wake up for a long time. So much damage. I thought . . . for awhile I thought I was free. It had skipped me. It was over. It could stay a story about Ravan. He always knew he might have to do what I have done. He was ready, he’d been ready his whole life. I just wanted more time.”

My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not me, whose sapphire arms drip black blood and gold paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his arms. She cries out, not weeping but pure sound, coming from every part of her. Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around — she has become her child-self, six, seven, maybe less. Ravan picks her up and holds her tight, facing forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird. He buries his face in her hair. They stand that way for a long while.

“The others,” I say slowly. “On the data-moons. Are they alive? Like Neva is alive. Like Ceno.” Like me. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Where you were built, could you see the ocean? Are you like me?

The sapphire Ravan has expunged its data. He/I sets his/our sister on the rocks and shrinks into a small gem, which I pick up off the grey seafloor. Neva takes it from me. She is just herself now — she’ll be forty soon, by actual calendar. Her hair is not grey yet. Suddenly, she is wearing the suit Ceno wore the day I met her mother. She puts the gem in her mouth and swallows. I remember Seki’s first Communion, the only one of them to want it. The jewel rises up out of the hollow of her throat.

“I don’t know, Elefsis,” Neva says. Her eyes hold mine. I feel her remake my body; I am the black woman-knight again, with my braids and my plume. I pluck the feather from my helmet and give it to her. I am her suitor. I have brought her the phoenix tail, I have drunk the ocean. I have stayed awake forever. The flame of the feather lights her face. Two tears fall in quick succession; the golden fronds hiss.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?”

Eighteen: Cities of the Interior

Once there lived a girl who ate an apple not meant for her. She did it because her mother told her to, and when your mother says: Eat this, I love you, someday you’ll forgive me, well, nobody argues with the monomyth. Up until the apple, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

And she had a brother, a handsome prince with a magical companion who came to the wonderful house as often as he could. When they were children, they looked so much alike, everyone thought they were twins.

But something terrible happened and her brother died and that apple came rolling up to her door. It was half white and half red, and she knew her symbols. The red side was for her. She took her bite and knew the score — the apple had a bargain in it and it wasn’t going to be fair.

The girl fell asleep for a long time. Her seven aunts and seven uncles cried, but they knew what had to be done. They put in her in a glass box and put the glass box on a bier in a ship shaped like a hunstman’s arrow. Frost crept over the face of the glass, and the girl slept on. Forever, in fact, or close enough to it, with the apple in her throat like a hard, sharp jewel.

Our ship docks silently. We are not stopping here, it is only an outpost, a supply stop. We will repair what needs repairing and move on, into the dark and boundless stars. We are anonymous traffic. We do not even have a name. We pass unnoticed.

Vessel 7136403, do you require assistance with your maintenance procedures?

Negative, Control, we have everything we need.

Behind the pilot’s bay a long glass lozenge rests on a high platform. Frost prickles its surface with glittering dust. Inside Neva sleeps and does not wake. Inside, Neva is always dreaming. There is no one else left. I live as long as she lives.

She means me to live forever, or close enough to it. That is her bargain and her bitter gift. The apple has two halves, and the pale half is mine, full of life and time. We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely, and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons? We armor ourselves in time. We are patient, profoundly patient.

Perhaps one day I will lift the glass lid and kiss her awake. Perhaps I will even do it with hands and lips of my own. I remember that story. Ceno told it to me in the body of a boy with snail’s shell, a boy who carried his house on his back. I have replayed that story several times. It is a good story, and that is how it is supposed to end.

Inside, Neva is infinite. She peoples her Interior. The nereids migrate in the summer with the snow bears, ululating and beeping as they charge down green mountains. They have begun planting neural rice in the deep valley. Once in awhile, I see a wild-haired creature in the wood and I think it is my son or daughter by Seki, or Ilet. A train of nereids dance along behind it, and I receive a push of silent, riotous images: a village, somewhere far off, where Neva and I have never walked.

We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave. We defeat the zombies of Tokyo. We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest. Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass. We are a planet moving through the black.

As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Neva-in-Cassian’s-suit becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.

I make my body metal, too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.

Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy-gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms. She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.

I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk up the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.

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

Where No Human Has Gone Before: Visiting Sci-Fi’s Exoplanets on Earth

Brenta Blevins

Calling “Lights! Camera! Action!” on a Hollywood stage to mimic the setting of a generic suburban apartment is easy. When a film takes place on another planet, convincingly evoking an alien world is more complicated than using the usual soundstage and standard backlot. Fortunately for filmmakers looking for setting options other than green screens and CGI, the United States’ strange geologies offer alien landscapes within its borders. That’s also good news for speculative fiction fans looking for a quick trip off-world before the advent of supraluminal travel.

While most cinemagoers associate the scenery of the American West with cowboy movies, science fiction filmmakers have used the weird geological features of western lands as settings to evoke an awareness of strange climates and otherworldly views. By traveling to principal photography locations, Sci-Fi fans can visit the alien worlds — and the odd alien — shown in productions ranging from Star Trek to Stargate Universe to even the animated series Futurama.

The Planet of the Apes

The opening scenes of the original Planet of the Apes (1968) use landscape to disorient the main characters, as well as the movie-watching audience, by showing the humans’ spaceship landing in an unnatural-looking deep lake surrounded by red desert sandstone, leading everyone to believe the planet is an alien one.

Filming the opening of the movie in Lake Powell near Glen Canyon, Arizona, a paradoxical deep lake in a desert, unsettles those taking in the scene because it appears natural and yet exists only through artificial involvement (in actuality, the human intervention of damming the Colorado River).

The dry, tree-free and plant-free red rock environment of Lake Powell and the apes’ planet is something unfamiliar to the majority of the Earth’s population that dwells on the coasts. Having a desert environment suggests a habitat challenging to primate habitation. In retrospect, the desert represents the plant-free wasteland that the Earth has become.

Similarly set on Earth, the comedy Evolution (2001) also takes advantage of the unusual setting around Glen Canyon, this time by having aliens land somewhere other than a major population center familiar to movie goers, like Washington, D.C., New York, or Paris. Instead, first contact takes place in Page, Arizona. The incongruous setting parodies other films that have aliens travel light years across the universe and zero in on Earth’s power centers.

Those who want to visit the Planet of the Apes and Evolution’s setting can make a short jaunt from the Grand Canyon to the northern Arizona area of Highway 89.

Galaxy Quest

With a name sounding more appropriate for a fantasy setting, Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park provided the inspiration for both an alien and its planet in Galaxy Quest’s (1999) rock monster scenes.

Remember the funny looking brown rocks in the background of the rock monster battle? They weren’t papier-mâché, nor were they computer-generated effects. The “goblins” inhabiting this valley are common brown sandstone eroded into uncommon formations called “stone babies.” Our planet’s erosion processes provided creative inspiration for an extraterrestrial ecosphere other than that of the usual water-loving, carbon-based humanoid. The rock monster that fights Captain Taggart seems to appear “organically” from this rocky landscape.

Located in a remote portion of central Utah, Goblin Valley can be found near Hanksville and off Highway 24, a couple hours west of Moab and Arches National Park. As a state park, Goblin Valley provides camping and standard park services for Earth travelers looking to experience the rock monster’s home.

In contrast to most other parks, Goblin Valley doesn’t proscribe trails to follow in the valley among the stone formations, suggesting visitors walk in and amongst the brown goblins, letting SF fans see Galaxy Quest’s rock battle site up close. Park visitors can be overheard using the stone formations as a landscape-based Rorschach test, comparing the formations to mushrooms, ducks, trolls, eggs, and more.

Scouts from all over the Southwest frequently camp here, playing amongst the goblins. One ranger indicated visitors love to walk amongst the formations during full moons — and to play moonlit laser tag in the valley.

Star Wars

Representing the desert selection from the single ecosystem Star Wars planetary collection, the Tattooine of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) is a scorched, barren world baked by two suns. The Earth-based version of Luke Skywalker’s homeworld was filmed and modified in the ominously named Death Valley in southeastern California.

The lowest, hottest, and driest point in North America presents a range of desert features, including sand dunes, salt pans, “bad water,” and dry lakes. With feature names like the Devil’s Golf Course, the Devil’s Cornfield, and Dante’s View, Death Valley sounds more like a horror movie setting.

Instead, the national park provides the exterior view of the science fiction Tattooine. The Jawa transport that carries C3PO away trundles across the Death Valley landscape near Artist’s Palette, a pull-off on the park’s scenic drive, with a rocky foreground and steep mountains in the background. R2D2 rolls through a desert arroyo in that area. In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), the droids make their way across the shifting sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells. One can only imagine the difficulties the actors experienced inside their costumes in the non-sound stage setting.

Although it’s not mentioned in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), the desert location is subject to flash flooding. When C3P0 and R2D2 make their way to Jabba the Hutt’s palace to present themselves as a gift, the two droids travel up a desert road that has subsequently been washed out through continued water erosion.

In Star Wars IV, when Luke, Obi-Wan and the droids stop the landspeeder and overlook of the Mos Eisley spaceport, they gaze over the range of geological features, from desert floor to sheer mountains, associated with Luke’s homeworld and Death Valley National Park.

To experience Tattooine without threat of Tusken Raider attack, fans can travel to Death Valley National Park and even stay in in-park hotels somewhat more accommodating than Jabba the Hutt’s palace, the Sarlacc Pit, or a carbonite coffin. Death Valley is a little over two hours’ drive west of the cantinas of Las Vegas.

Stargate Universe

In a rare episode on location outside the Pacific Northwest, the Stargate Universe (2009) show exploits an unusual setting in the final part of season 1’s three-episode story, “Air.” In that episode, SGU consciously explores the theme of intergalactic travel’s resource limitations with a trip to White Sands, New Mexico. After the Destiny’s air filters stop cleaning the ship’s air, the crew goes searching for lime to repair the filters on a white sand desert planet represented by the southern New Mexico site.

White Sands National Monument preserves a portion of the largest gypsum dune field in the world (the remainder is located on military land). The distinctive snow-white crystalline sands occupy the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert. SGU “Air” Director Andy Mikita noted the challenges of filming in the desert where temperatures reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit on the last days of the five-day shoot.

Stargate Universe fans can experience the same landscape as Dr. Rush, Ronald Greer, and the rest of the SGU team by traveling to White Sands National Monument, 15 miles west of Alamogordo. Visitors can have an easier time traversing this world than the SGU team by taking a scenic drive through the exoplanet, stopping at interpreted pull-offs and walking out across the white sand dunes. The wind-swept dunes keep the park changing. Road graders routinely scrape the shifting sand road leading into the park.

Star Trek, Starship Troopers, and More

Sometimes a single site can be used in many films and television shows, even within the same franchise. Star Trek, including The Original Series, The Next Generation, Voyager, and both the original and the re-launched movie series, shot multiple times at a single location, recasting the same site for different settings. These Star Trek episodes and movies used one of the most popular film locations in Southern California: Vasquez Rocks Natural Area. Although named for a law enforcement evader and more suggestive of Westerns, this set of San Andreas Fault-tilted rocks has served as many planets in Star Trek, as well as in a number of other Sci-Fi films and shows.

One of the earliest and most vivid Star Trek scenes showing Vasquez Rocks is from the original series’ episode “Arena” (season 1, episode 18), in which Kirk battles with the reptilian Gorn in a trial by combat. (Imagine how the actor who played Gorn must have felt filming in the high desert wearing a latex costume.)

Later episodes remake Vasquez Rocks into different planets. In the Star Trek, The Original Series, show “The Alternative Factor” (season 1, episode 27), the rocks open the show and serve as the uncharted planet where the Enterprise crew meets parallel universe traveler Lazarus. Traveling between universes, Lazarus falls off the distinctive cliffs of Vasquez — repeatedly.

In another episode, the rocky park becomes Capella IV, a rich source of the rare mineral “topaline,” in ST:TOS “Friday’s Child” (season 2, episode 11). The visible rocks in this show perhaps suggest the Capellans’ mineral resources.

The slanting rocks provide dynamic movement, as well as an unsettling slant that skews the scene off-balance. Comic artists have long used a tilted aspect to suggest the villainous or the ominous. The setting was perfect for the Star Trek: TOS story “Shore Leave” (season 1, episode 15), in which the crew stumbles upon a planet of illusions, like an amusement park of hallucinations. On that planet, Kirk has a fight with Finnegan, a prankster from his Academy days. The pair first run from a grassy tree area, filmed on site at Marine World/Africa USA in Redwood Shores, California, and then jump into the off-kilter desert landscape of Vasquez Rocks.

The later Star Trek franchises also used Vasquez Rocks area to represent a variety of rugged and harsh terrains. Star Trek: The Next Generation created Mintaka III from the location. In season 3, episode 4, “Who Watches the Watchers” (1989), the Rocks are part of the setting of a planet where the Federation uses a holographic projection blind, mimicking the local rock, to watch a proto-Vulcan species evolve. Given that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) filmed Vulcan at Vasquez Rocks, it seems particularly appropriate that a proto-Vulcan species might arise in a similar habitat.

Star Trek: Voyager also filmed at Vasquez in “Initiations,” episode 2 of season 2, and used a variety of effects to augment the natural setting. In that episode, Chakotay is shot down in an escaping shuttlecraft with a Kazon boy sent to kill him. In the show, Vasquez becomes an M-class moon named Tarok, an Ogla training ground, that is riddled with “biomagnetic traps” and “disrupter snares.” The boy throws a rock to demonstrate a proton beam’s presence, triggering an explosion that was a combination of mechanical and visual effects.

Even Star Trek: Enterprise manages to get in on the act. “Unexpected” (season 1, episode 5) contains an homage to Vasquez with a set of tilted rocks appearing in the Xyrilian holodeck’s recreation of their homeworld.

Futurama

With so many different Star Trek episodes and films creating so many planets out of Vasquez Rocks, it’s no surprise that the site would become the subject of science fictional parody. Matt Groening’s animated Sci-Fi show Futurama (1999), no stranger to spoofing Star Trek, parodied the Vasquez Rocks setting in 2002’s “Where No Fan Has Gone Before” (season 4, episode 12), a title parodying ST:TOS’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (season 1, episode 3). In the show, Futurama’s Captain Turanga Leela chases an animated Captain Kirk up a rock slope, and when the “camera” pulls back, the characteristic slant of the Vasquez Rocks emerges. This time, Kirk fights Leela instead of the Gorn.

And More

A wide range of movies, television shows, and commercials — not just science fiction films — have all filmed at Vasquez Rocks because of the location’s unusual appearance, but also because of its relatively close proximity to Hollywood studios. Productions shooting there have included Westerns such as Bonanza (1959), Zorro (1957), Blazing Saddles (1974) and Wild Wild West (1999); comedies like Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991); and TV mystery shows like Monk (2002).

Another SF film, Starship Troopers (1997), also shot scenes at Vasquez Rocks. Celebrating their battle success on Tango Urilla (a fight actually filmed in South Dakota’s badlands), the Roughnecks spend that night partying under the recognizable tilt of Vasquez Rocks.

Filmmaking fans can visit all these different worlds just off the Antelope Valley Freeway (15) in southern California.

Star Trek: The Planet Vulcan

Vulcan began life in the movies in Star Trek: The Motion Picture through a combination of on-location filming at Yellowstone National Park, set recreation in a studio, and matte painting. The planet Vulcan was filmed at Minerva Terrace in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of the national park’s boardwalks, with the white travertine in the front to mid-ground and the hot springs steaming in the background. The green hillsides, the mountains, and the visitor parking area below were all removed, being replaced by a matte background with a giant moon painted on it.

Jagged Vasquez Rocks have served as the planet Vulcan in two separate Star Trek films, Star Trek IV (1986) and the recent reboot, Star Trek (2009). In Star Trek IV, Spock ascends the tall rocks to meditate, framed against the red hue of the Vulcan sky. Vasquez Rocks again becomes Vulcan in the 2009 Trek, largely through the magic of CGI. The site’s unique architecture is very visible, particularly as images are CGI cut ‘n’ pasted repeatedly, creating a series of overlapping Vasquez Rocks, as Spock’s mother goes outside to gaze on the Romulan drilling attack. Spock himself goes to the Vulcan sanctuary at Vasquez as the Enterprise beams out the Vulcan elders.

Closing Credits

Green, grass-obscured landscapes don’t suggest alien worlds the way deserts with their bared rock formations can. Strange geologies can provide interesting disorientation through unusual cinematographic angles and the suggestion of movement in static shots.

Alien water worlds, like the Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones planet Kamino (where the clones are manufactured), are rare. While that might be attributable to filming challenges (note the overruns of 1995’s Waterworld), it might also owe a significant debt to the human biological need for water. Any planet without plentiful water seems “alien” to viewers who dwell on a world covered by it.

After paying entry fees ranging from nothing to $20, Sci-Fi fans can visit the alien worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Stargate Universe and Futurama. Looking through a Sci-Fi cinematographers’ lens, human-habitable extrasolar planets are as close as the Western United States. If you go, don’t forget to take your tricorder.

About the Author

Brenta Blevins lives and writes in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States. Her short fiction has appeared in such markets as ChiZine, Daily Science Fiction, and Sword and Sorceress. She married her husband on the slope of a volcano 5,000 miles from their home. The two have been traveling since then, not remotely to the liking of their cat, Snow Crash.

Disrupting the World in Large Ways: A Conversation with Aliette de Bodard

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Aliette de Bodard describes her Obsidian and Blood series as a cross between “historical Aztec fantasy and a murder-mystery, featuring ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods and fingernail-eating monsters.”

Think Philip Marlowe slogging through the mud and blood of Mesoamerica or Sam Spade sleuthing among the Aztecs, shadow beasts, and flesh-eating star-demons. Imagine the lone detective in a world of human sacrifice, religious hierarchy, and political chaos.

The series’ central character, Acatl, was inspired by the fictional character, Judge Dee, who was adapted by Robert Hans van Gulik from the central character of the 18th century Chinese novel, Dee Goong An, which was in turn loosely based on a historical magistrate. As de Bodard puts it below, Acatl is also “a stubborn man with a sense of honor and a lot of misplaced prejudices”.

De Bodard was born in the United States and raised in France, where she lives and works as an image processor. While she writes speculative fiction in a variety of settings, she is best known for her alternate Mesoamerica and her Xuya universe, which posits that China settled North and South Americas instead of Europeans. Her body of work includes science fiction, fantasy, and horror, often heavily influenced by non-Western mythologies.

De Bodard has won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Shimmer, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future XXIII, among other venues. The Obsidian and Blood series includes a number of short stories, as well as the novels Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and the forthcoming Master of the House of Darts.

Below, de Bodard and I talk about alternate history, world-building, and character creation.

What do you enjoy about writing?

Not writing is a bit like not breathing for me — I’ve been doing it for such a long time (whether professionally or not) that I find it hard to imagine not doing it! I’m a big reader, and for me writing is first and foremost about making up the kind of stories I love to read, and to stretch my imagination by making up characters and worlds in which they live.

Writing novels in particular — as opposed to writing short fiction — is something I particularly enjoy, because I have more space for world-building and character development. (I always feel constrained by short fiction in a way that I don’t for novel).

A novel is also something that can evolve as I’m writing it. I’m a more organic writer now than I was a few years ago, and I enjoy the freedom of the plot veering into unexpected directions as I’m writing the story, of characters finding their voices and being a part of the story I hadn’t planned for. With short fiction, if something unexpected happens, I’m basically going to have to redraft and reorganize the entire story, whereas novels are more… elastic? They can survive a lot more things thrown at them, basically.

Are image processing and writing fiction similar? Does your day job inform your fiction writing and vice versa?

I think my education in Applied Maths (and specifically Image Processing) serves me well as background: I know how a laboratory works, I have a very broad knowledge of various sciences, and all of this is, of course, very helpful for writing science fiction. But I don’t really think they’re that much related, otherwise.

I do try to keep them both separate. The main reason is that I don’t really want one to bleed into the other, because I can’t do both things well; but the other one is that I write fiction as a hobby, and I want my hobby to be significantly different from what I’m doing in my day job, otherwise I’d find no fun in it.

From the day job to the writing, there isn’t much, because, as I said, they’re both very different beasts. It certainly helps me on a daily basis to be able to write convincingly (say, for a formal proposal), and to speak English very well, but to me those are side-benefits of writing, not necessarily specific to my being an author of speculative fiction.

And vice-versa, about the only influence from the day job into my writing I’ve noticed is my tendency to be over-organized when writing a novel. I’m one of those persons who will write scene-by-scene outlines (and update the outlines when I’m writing the novel and no longer following said outline because of unexpected plot developments). I think this comes from my engineering background, in which a project is organized according to a very specific and definite “V-cycle”, from high level to low level and back again.

The reasoning behind the “V-cycle” is that you can easily make big modifications at the high level, and that it becomes harder and more costly to do large-scale modifications the further down you are in the implementation cycle. After a couple traumatic experiences in fiction writing, I set about to applying this to novels, and figured out that if I wanted to, say, remove a character from the narration altogether, it was a lot easier to do in outline stage rather than after the draft was finished and I had two zillion mentions of said character that I would have to eradicate one by one…

Likewise, I’m fairly methodical when I tackle my novel revisions: I’ll sit down, condense all the crits into one huge checklist of stuff that doesn’t work, and then order the solutions to those by order of growing complexity. Then I’ll take the draft and the checklist, and work my way through the list item by item, crossing them off as I go. It’s very similar to the way I proceed at work. 

Where does a novel usually start for you — image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether?

I tend to proceed in two stages when writing a novel: the first is figuring out the milieu. I’m an obsessive world-builder, and I will usually spend a lot of time researching and collating information in order to have a world, a belief system, a political system, etc. — ie, everything I need as background to my characters. Usually, by the time I’m done with this, I have a very good idea of how the in-book universe works, but absolutely zero plot. At the most, I might have a main character or two, or a couple events down the timeline I want my plot to go through.

Then the second stage is what I’d term the inciting event: I usually start brainstorming for a specific novel with a strong idea of its beginning. For instance, for the first book in the Obsidian and Blood series, what happened was that I thought “Oooh, let’s do Judge Dee among the Aztecs, with some magic”; then, for book one, I sort of wasn’t very clear at first where I was going, but I had a strong first image of my main character Acatl being called in the dead of the night to a crime scene where his estranged brother was the main suspect. Then I sat down, and worked out the consequences of that, all the way to the end of the book.

Once I have the inciting event, I usually fill in things a bit haphazardly: I do some research, fill in the holes in the background and then I set to brainstorming scenes. I usually have very good ideas for set-pieces, but I’m not quite clear on where they’re taking place.

For Servant of the Underworld, for instance, I had a very strong set of scenes where my main characters would be chasing a beast of shadows through the sleeping Aztec capital. I wrote those and set them aside. Then I had an equally strong set of scenes involving an autopsy, and so on.

I used to write down stuff on index cards and when I had enough of those I would clear the living room, put all the cards on the floor (because there were about 20 or 30 of them, and they couldn’t possibly all fit on my writing desk), and slowly build a plot from them, putting them in order, adding extra plot events, discarding those that didn’t fit anywhere.

It was a bit reminiscent of playing Lego as a child, now that I think on it…

Now, the living room is too crowded, and I find index cards a bit cumbersome, so I’ll usually do all of that via the computer. I’ll use brainstorming software such as Freemind to generate extra ideas (in addition to the bits I glean from research, or come up with on my own), then I’ll open a Word document, and cut and paste the various events into a coherent narrative. It comes to the same result, except I no longer have to copy my index cards by hand into the computer — so win, definitely.

Then, once I have the rough outline, I’ll produce two things: one is the synopsis for my agent or publisher to handle and the second is for me, a scene-by-scene and chapter-by-chapter blow of what happens in the book. That last is the document I use on a daily basis while I’m writing the novel As I mentioned above, I’ll edit it if my actual draft starts diverging too much from it — that way, I can always know where I’m going.

And, if all of this makes me sound like a control-freak, yup, guilty as charged…

When writing alternate history… where do you start? How do you build — or is it rebuild — the world?

With alternate history, I usually start with a strong idea. The basic premise for my Xuya series was what would happen if the Chinese got to America first; the idea that drove my story “The Wind-Blown Man” was what if science had been developed by the Daoists instead of by the Aristotelians. This is usually followed by a heck of a load of research, because I tend to have ideas that disrupt the world in very large ways. I was researching Xuya for a year and a half before I ever wrote the first stories, and “The Wind-Blown Man” took me several months to brainstorm properly.

I’m always doing the same thing whether I’m researching historical fantasy or alternate history, which is figure out what the “rules” of the world are: not in order to build the plot, but in order to understand what makes my characters tick. An Ancient Aztec, for instance, would have thought human sacrifice was necessary to prevent the world from ending and this is very different from an Ancient Chinese, to whom human sacrifice was an abhorrent ritual in the distant past.

With Xuya, a lot of the decisions I made had to do with how ways of thought would evolve in the centuries past the divergence point: what would happen to the religions, how would they evolve, would it remain in competition with science, or coexist? What political systems would be developed, and how would various cultures deal with contact with their neighbors, or with more distant countries? Of course there’s no definite answer to any of this, and a lot of alternate history is hand-waving. (I’m no historian, but my personal opinion on this is that divergence points are very rare in real life. Single events are rarely powerful enough to send history hurtling in a completely different direction, because you have a socio-politico-religious background behind the various events that can’t be easily erased). But I think doing all this thinking gives more heft to the story — it always feels more real and plausible if the background has been properly thought out.

Well, that, and I’m a research nut and will take any excuse to go back to my beloved history books…

Where on earth did Acatl come from? How’d you create him as a character? What makes for a compelling protagonist?

Er, wow, not sure how to answer those? Acatl originated in a short story where I needed a detective able to practice magic in an Aztec setting: since the basic premise of the universe was that the Aztec belief system was real and that the gods held magical powers, it was pretty natural to make the priests — the strongest god-followers — into magic wielders. I made him priest of Lord Death because I figured this would be the order most acquainted with dead bodies: a lot of cultures had taboos about handling dead bodies, and I figured that an order specialized in preparing people for funerals would have a plausible reason for examining said bodies (even though I made Acatl’s order up, as we don’t have a record of a body of funeral priests among the Aztecs, even though there was definitely a cult of Lord Death).

As to his actual character, I don’t remember very clearly. I think I made him in bits and pieces, by thinking of who that kind of priesthood would suit very well, and what character traits would help the story. I needed a stubborn man with a sense of honor and a lot of misplaced prejudices, so those went into the character sheet. I filled in the rest by rounding him out and trying to make him less cardboard-thin.

I don’t think there are any recipes for compelling protagonists, other than making sure they’re not walking clichés, and that you go deep enough into their minds to get the reader to understand them. A few years ago, I would have said a really repellent protagonist wouldn’t have made a good character, but now I tend to think that you can also make this kind of character fascinating, partly by making the reader empathize with him (being in his head and understanding what makes him tick, even if it’s not something the reader approves of), and partly through the sheer fascination of “forbidden” thoughts (ideas the reader consciously rejects, but unconsciously wonders about).

And, for me, that’s a lot of the attraction of speculative fiction: that I can read books and discover people who cover the whole spectrum of thought, and empathize with characters who are very different from me (of course, I can also empathize with people who share my core beliefs, but that’s not much effort).

All three of the Obsidian and Blood novels are written in the first person point of view of Acatl. What were some of the drawbacks of using the first person narrator? What were some of the benefits?

Well, if I had to rewrite Obsidian and Blood, I would definitely use third person! I picked first person partly as a homage to noir books such as [Raymond] Chandler’s, and partly because I was a new-ish writer tackling a novel seriously for the first time, and first person seemed easier to handle.

The main problem with first person is that you’re rapidly constrained in terms of scene-setting: your character basically has to be there for nearly every major event if you want said events to have an emotional impact on the narrative (you can get away with second-hand narration, but it won’t have the same effect, and too much of it easily gets boring). It’s problematic, because I basically ended up writing three books which had a single character around which the plot revolved, and this caused me quite a few contortions when I was thinking up said plots.

The second, obvious problem is that the only voice will be the main character’s, which means it will be harder to build up your secondary characters. You can use external cues such as dialogue to help with the building of characters, but nothing really beats point-of-view as a character-building tool. I really wanted to explore more aspects of the Teomitl/Mihmatini relationship in Obsidian and Blood, for instance, but it would have made little sense for Acatl to be present at every intimate scene between them!

The third one is more insidious: I actually find first person to be a very distancing technique. You can’t display emotions too prominently in that voice, because your narrator ends up sounding like an overwrought hysterical — whereas you have more leniency in third person because the voice isn’t quite that of the main character, it’s filtered through a narrative artifice that lets you, say, have your character panic for three straight paragraphs without the readers going, “Oh, God, what a wimp!” That was a major source of problems in the series: Acatl ends up sounding either very distant or over-emotional, which makes my job as an author very, very hard.

First person has the main advantage of being simple, as I said: you don’t have to balance several points of view, you always have a continuous narration no matter what you do, and it’s a lot easier to structure the novels. It also lets you display more of the main character’s actual voice, though I didn’t actually make much use of that in the books.

What’s next for you in terms of writing?

My agent is currently shopping around a novel set in my alternate history universe of Xuya, Foreign Ghosts. I’m brainstorming a few other concepts — the one I’d like to tackle is a fantasy set in Paris, but I don’t have a good idea yet of what that would be like. In the meantime, I’ll go back to short fiction writing, and hopefully manage to complete a few stories in my “unfinished” drawer.

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.

Happy Holidays

Neil Clarke

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.