Scattered Along the River of Heaven

Aliette de Bodard

I grieve to think of the stars
Our ancestors our gods
Scattered like hairpin wounds
Along the River of Heaven
So tell me
Is it fitting that I spend my days here
A guest in those dark, forlorn halls?

This is the first poem Xu Anshi gave to us; the first memory she shared with us for safekeeping. It is the first one that she composed in High Mheng — which had been and remains a debased language, a blend between that of the San-Tay foreigners, and that of the Mheng, Anshi’s own people.

She composed it on Shattered Pine Prison, sitting in the darkness of her cell, listening to the faint whine of the bots that crawled on the walls — melded to the metal and the crisscrossing wires, clinging to her skin — monitoring every minute movement she made — the voices of her heart, the beat of her thoughts in her brain, the sweat on her body.

Anshi had once been a passable poet in San-Tay, thoughtlessly fluent in the language of upper classes, the language of bot-handlers; but the medical facility had burnt that away from her, leaving an oddly-shaped hole in her mind, a gap that ached like a wound. When she tried to speak, no words would come out — not in San-Tay, not in High Mheng — only a raw croak, like the cry of a dying bird. Bots had once flowed to do her bidding; but now they only followed the will of the San-Tay.

There were no stars in Shattered Pine, where everything was dark with no windows; and where the faint yellow light soon leeched the prisoners’ skin of all colors. But, once a week, the prisoners would be allowed onto the deck of the prison station — heavily escorted by San-Tay guards. Bots latched onto their faces and eyes, forcing them to stare into the darkness — into the event horizon of the black hole, where all light spiraled inwards and vanished, where everything was crushed into insignificance. There were bodies outside — prisoners who had attempted to escape, put in lifesuits and jettisoned, slowly drifting into a place where time and space ceased to have any meaning. If they were lucky, they were already dead.

From time to time, there would be a jerk as the bots stung someone back into wakefulness; or low moans and cries, from those whose minds had snapped. Shattered Pine bowed and broke everyone; and the prisoners that were released back to Felicity Station came back diminished and bent, waking up every night weeping and shaking with the memory of the black hole.

Anshi — who had been a scholar, a low-level magistrate, before she’d made the mistake of speaking up against the San-Tay — sat very still, and stared at the black hole — seeing into its heart, and knowing the truth: she was of no significance, easily broken, easily crushed — but she had known that since the start. All men were as nothing to the vast universe.

It was on the deck that Anshi met Zhiying — a small, diminutive woman who always sat next to her. She couldn’t glance at Zhiying; but she felt her presence, nevertheless; the strength and hatred that emanated from her, that sustained her where other people failed.

Day after day they sat side by side, and Anshi formed poems in her mind, haltingly piecing them together in High Mheng — San-Tay was denied to her, and, like many of the Mheng upper class, she spoke no Low Mheng. Day after day, with the bots clinging to her skin like overripe fruit, and Zhiying’s presence, burning like fire at her side; and, as the verses became stronger and stronger in her mind, Anshi whispered words, out of the guards’ hearing, out of the bots’ discrimination capacities — haltingly at first, and then over and over, like a mantra on the prayer beads. Day after day; and, as the words sank deeper into her mind, Anshi slowly came to realize that the bots on her skin were not unmoving, but held themselves trembling, struggling against their inclination to move — and that the bots clinging to Zhiying were different, made of stronger materials to resist the fire of Zhiying’s anger. She heard the fast, frantic beat of their thoughts processes, which had its own rhythm, like poetry spoken in secret — and felt the hard shimmer that connected the bots to the San-Tay guards, keeping everything together.

And, in the dim light of Shattered Pine, Anshi subvocalised words in High Mheng, reaching out with her mind as she had done, back when she had been free. She hadn’t expected anything to happen; but the bots on her skin stiffened one after the other, and turned to the sound of her voice, awaiting orders.

Before she left Felicity, Xu Wen expected security at San-Tay Prime’s spaceport to be awful — they would take one glance at her travel documents, and bots would rise up from the ground and crawl up to search every inch of skin, every body cavity. Mother has warned her often enough that the San-Tay have never forgiven Felicity for waging war against them; that they will always remember the shame of losing their space colonies. She expects a personal interview with a Censor, or perhaps even to be turned back at the boundary, sent back in shame to Felicity.

But it doesn’t turn out that way at all.

Security is over in a breeze, the bots giving her nothing but a cursory body check before the guards wave her through. She has no trouble getting a cab either; things must have changed on San-Tay Prime, and the San-Tay driver waves her on without paying attention to the color of her skin.

“Here on holiday?” the driver asks her in Galactic, as she slides into the floater — her body sinking as the chair adapts itself to her morphology. Bots climb onto her hands, showing her ads for nearby hotels and restaurants: an odd, disturbing sight, for there are no bots on Felicity Station.

“You could say that,” Wen says, with a shrug she wills to be careless. “I used to live here.”

A long, long time ago, when she was still a baby; before Mother had that frightful fight with Grandmother, and left San-Tay Prime for Felicity.

“Oh?” the driver swerves, expertly, amidst the traffic; taking one wide, tree-lined avenue after another. “You don’t sound like it.”

Wen shakes her head. “I was born here, but I didn’t remain here long.”

“Gone back to the old country, eh?” The driver smiles. “Can’t say I blame you.”

“Of course,” Wen says, though she’s unsure what to tell him. That she doesn’t really know — that she never really lived here, not for more than a few years, and that she has a few confused memories of a bright-lit kitchen, and bots dancing for her on the carpet of Grandmother’s apartment? But she’s not here for such confidences. She’s here — well, she’s not sure why she’s here. Mother was adamant Wen didn’t have to come; but then, Mother has never forgiven Grandmother for the exile on San-Tay Prime.

Everything goes fine; until they reach the boundary district, where a group of large bots crawl onto the floater, and the driver’s eyes roll up as their thought-threads meld with his. At length, the bots scatter, and he turns back to Wen. “Sorry, m’am,” he says. “I have to leave you here.”

“Oh?” Wen asked, struggling to hide her fear.

“No floaters allowed into the Mheng districts currently,” the man said. “Some kind of funeral for a tribal leader — the brass is afraid there will be unrest.” He shrugs again. “Still, you’re local, right? You’ll find someone to help you.”

She’s never been here; and she doesn’t know anyone, anymore. Still, she forces a smile — always be graceful, Mother said — and puts her hand on one of the bots, feeling the warmth as it transfers money from her account on Felicity Station. After he’s left her on the paved sidewalk of a street she barely recognizes, she stands, still feeling the touch of the bots against her skin — on Felicity they call them a degradation, a way for the San-Tay government to control everything and everyone; and she just couldn’t bring herself to get a few locator-bots at the airport.

Wen looks up, at the signs — they’re in both languages, San-Tay and what she assumes is High Mheng, the language of the exiles. San-Tay is all but banned on Felicity, only found on a few derelict signs on the Outer Rings, the ones the National Restructuring Committee hasn’t gone around to retooling yet. Likewise, High Mheng isn’t taught, or encouraged. What little she can remember is that it’s always been a puzzle — the words look like Mheng; but when she tries to put everything together, their true meaning seems to slip away from her.

Feeling lost already, she wends her way deeper into the streets — those few shops that she bypasses are closed, with a white cloth spread over the door. White for grief, white for a funeral.

It all seems so — so wide, so open. Felicity doesn’t have streets lined with streets, doesn’t have such clean sidewalks — space on the station is at a ruthless premium, and every corridor is packed with stalls and shops — people eat at tables on the streets, and conduct their transactions in recessed doorways, or rooms half as large as the width of the sidewalk. She feels in another world; though, every now and then, she’ll see a word that she recognizes on a sign, and follow it, in the forlorn hope that it will lead her closer to the funeral hall.

Street after street after street — under unfamiliar trees that sway in the breeze, listening to the distant music broadcast from every doorway, from every lamp. The air is warm and clammy, a far cry from Felicity’s controlled temperature; and over her head are dark clouds. She almost hopes it rains, to see what it is like — in real life, and not in some simulation that seems like a longer, wetter version of a shower in the communal baths.

At length, as she reaches a smaller intersection, where four streets with unfamiliar signs branch off — some residential area, though all she can read are the numbers on the buildings — Wen stops, staring up at the sky. Might as well admit it: it’s useless. She’s lost, thoroughly lost in the middle of nowhere, and she’ll never be on time for the funeral.

She’d weep; but weeping is a caprice, and she’s never been capricious in her life. Instead, she turns back and attempts to retrace her steps, towards one of the largest streets — where, surely, she can hammer on a door, or find someone who will help her?

She can’t find any of the streets; but at length, she bypasses a group of old men playing Encirclement on the street — watching the shimmering holo-board as if their lives depended on it.

“Excuse me?” she asks, in Mheng.

As one, the men turn towards her — their gazes puzzled. “I’m looking for White Horse Hall,” Wen says. “For the funeral?”

The men still watch her, their faces impassive — dark with expressions she can’t read. They’re laden with smaller bots — on their eyes, on their hands and wrists, hanging black like obscene fruit: they look like the San-Tay in the reconstitution movies, except that their skins are darker, their eyes narrower.

At length, the eldest of the men steps forwards, and speaks up — his voice rerouted to his bots, coming out in halting Mheng. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” Wen says in the same language. “I’m from Felicity.”

An odd expression crosses their faces: longing, and hatred, and something else Wen cannot place. One of the men points to her, jabbers in High Mheng — Wen catches just one word she understands.

Xu Anshi.

“You’re Anshi’s daughter,” the man says. The bots’ approximation of his voice is slow, metallic, unlike the fast jabbering of High Mheng.

Wen shakes her head; and one of the other men laughs, saying something else in High Mheng.

That she’s too young, no doubt — that Mother, Anshi’s daughter, would be well into middle age by now, instead of being Wen’s age. “Daughter of daughter,” the man says, with a slight, amused smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll take you to the hall, to see your grandmother.”

He walks by her side, with the other man, the one who laughed. Neither of them speaks — too hard to attempt small talk in a language they don’t master, Wen guesses. They go down a succession of smaller and smaller streets, under banners emblazoned with the image of the phuong, Felicity’s old symbol, before the Honored Leader made the new banner, the one that showed the station blazing among the stars — something more suitable for their new status.

Everything feels… odd, slightly twisted out of shape — the words not quite what they ought to be, the symbols just shy of familiar; the language a frightening meld of words she can barely recognise.

Everything is wrong, Wen thinks, shivering — and yet how can it be wrong, walking among Grandmother’s own people?

Summoning bots I washed away
Ten thousand thousand years of poison
Awakening a thousand flower-flames, a thousand phoenix birds
Floating on a sea of blood like cresting waves
The weeping of the massacred millions rising from the darkness

We received this poem and its memories for safekeeping at a time when Xu Anshi was still on Felicity Station: on an evening before the Feast of Hungry Ghosts, when she sat in a room lit by trembling lights, thinking of Lao, her husband who had died in the uprisings — and wondering how much of it had been of any worth.

It refers to a time when Anshi was older, wiser — she and Zhiying had escaped from Shattered Pine, and spent three years moving from hiding place to hiding place, composing the pamphlets that, broadcast into every household, heralded the end of the San-Tay governance over Felicity.

On the night that would become known as the Second Ring Riots, Anshi stood in one of the inner rings of Felicity Station, her bots spread around her, hacked into the network — half of them on her legs, pumping modifiers into her blood; half of them linked to the other Mheng bot-handlers, retransmitting scenes of carnage, of the Mheng mob running wild in the San-Tay districts of the inner rings, the High Tribunal and Spaceport Authority lasered, and the fashionable districts trashed.

“This one,” Zhiying said, pointing to a taller door, adorned with what appeared to be a Mheng traditional blessing — until one realized that the characters had been chosen for aesthetic reasons only, and that they meant nothing.

Anshi sent a subvocalised command to her bots, asking them to take the house. The feed to the rioting districts cut off abruptly, as her bots turned their attention towards the door and the house beyond: their sensors analyzing the bots on the walls, the pattern of the aerations, the cables running behind the door, and submitting hypotheses about possible architectures of the security system — before the swarm reached a consensus, and made a decision.

The bots flowed towards the door — the house’s bots sought to stop them, but Anshi’s bots split into two squads, and rushed past, heading for the head — the central control panel, which housed the bots’ communication system. Anshi had a brief glimpse of red-painted walls, and blinking holos; before her bots rushed back, job completed, and fell on the now disorganized bots at the door.

Everything went dark, the Mheng characters slowly fading away from the door’s panels.

“All yours,” Anshi said to Zhiying, struggling to remain standing — all her bots were jabbering in her mind, putting forward suggestions as to what to do next; and, in her state of extreme fatigue, ignoring them was harder. She’d seen enough handlers burnt beyond recovery, their brains overloaded with external stimuli until they collapsed — she should have known better. But they needed her — the most gifted bot-handler they had, their strategist — needed her while the San-Tay were still reeling from their latest interplanetary war, while they were still weak. She’d rest later — after the San-Tay were gone, after the Mheng were free. There would be time, then, plenty of it.

Bao and Nhu were hitting the door with soldering knives — each blow weakening the metal until the door finally gave way with a groan. The crowd behind Anshi roared; and rushed through — pushing Anshi ahead of them, the world shrinking to a swirling, confused mass of details — gouged-out consoles, ornaments ripped from shelves, pale men thrown down and beaten against the rush of the crowd, a whirlwind of chaos, as if demons had risen up from the underworld.

The crowd spread as they moved inwards; and Anshi found herself at the center of a widening circle in what had once been a guest room. Beside her, Bao was hacking at a nondescript bed, while others in the crowd beat down on the huge screen showing a sunset with odd, distorted trees — some San-Tay planet that Anshi did not recognise, maybe even Prime. Anshi breathed, hard, struggling to steady herself in the midst of the devastation. Particles of down and dust drifted past her; she saw a bot on the further end, desperately trying to contain the devastation, scuttling to repair the gashes in the screen. Nhu downed it with a well-placed kick; her face distorted in a wide, disturbing grin.

“Look at that!” Bao held up a mirror-necklace, which shimmered and shifted, displaying a myriad configurations for its owner’s pleasure.

Nhu’s laughter was harsh. “They won’t need it anymore.” She held out a hand; but Bao threw the necklace to the ground; and ran it through with his knife.

Anshi did not move — as if in a trance she saw all of it: the screen, the bed, the pillows that sought to mould themselves to a pleasing shape, even as hands tore them apart; the jewellery scattered on the ground; and the image of the forest, fading away to be replaced by a dull, split-open wall — every single mark of San-Tay privilege, torn away and broken, never to come back. Her bots were relaying similar images from all over the station. The San-Tay would retaliate, but they would have understood, now, how fragile the foundation of their power was. How easily the downtrodden Mheng could become their downfall; and how much it would cost them to hold Felicity.

Good.

Anshi wandered through the house, seeking out the San-Tay bots — those she could hack and reprogram, she added to her swarm; the others she destroyed, as ruthlessly as the guards had culled the prisoners on Shattered Pine.

Anshi. Anshi.

Something was blinking, insistently, in the corner of her eyes — the swarm, bringing something to her attention. The kitchens — Zhiying, overseeing the executions. Bits and pieces, distorted through the bots’ feed: the San-Tay governor, begging and pleading to be spared; his wife, dying silently, watching them all with hatred in her eyes. They’d had no children; for which Anshi was glad. She wasn’t Zhiying, and she wasn’t sure she’d have borne the guilt.

Guilt? There were children dying all over the station; men and women killed, if not by her, by those who followed her. She spared a bitter laugh. There was no choice. Children could die; or be raised to despise the inferior breed of the Mheng; be raised to take slaves and servants, and send dissenters like Anshi to be broken in Shattered Pine with a negligent wave of their hands. No choice.

Come, the bots whispered in her mind, but she did not know why.

Zhiying was down to the Grand Master of Security when Anshi walked into the kitchens — she barely nodded at Anshi, and turned her attention back to the man aligned in the weapons’ sights.

She did not ask for any last words; though she did him the honor of using a bio-silencer on him, rather than the rifles they’d used on the family — his body crumpled inwards and fell, still intact; and he entered the world of the ancestors with the honor of a whole body. “He fought well,” Zhiying said, curtly. “What of the house?”

“Not a soul left living,” Anshi said, flicking through the bots’ channels. “Not much left whole, either.”

“Good,” Zhiying said. She gestured; and the men dragged the next victim — a Mheng girl, dressed in the clothes of an indentured servant.

This — this was what the bots had wanted her to see. Anshi looked to the prisoners huddled against the wall: there was one San-Tay left, an elderly man who gazed back at her, steadily and without fear. The rest — all the rest — were Mheng, dressed in San-Tay clothes, their skin pale and washed-out in the flickering lights — stained with what looked like rice flour from one of the burst bags on the floor. Mheng. Their own people.

“Elder sister,” Anshi said, horrified.

Zhiying’s face was dark with anger. “You delude yourself. They’re not Mheng anymore.”

“Because they were indentured into servitude? Is that your idea of justice? They had no choice,” Anshi said. The girl against the wall said nothing; her gaze slid away from Zhiying, to the rifle; finally resting on the body of her dead mistress.

“They had a choice. We had a choice,” Zhiying said. Her gaze — dark and intense — rested, for a moment, on the girl. “If we spare them, they’ll just run to the militia, and denounce us to find themselves a better household. Won’t you?” she asked.

Anshi, startled, realized Zhiying had addressed the girl — whose gaze still would not meet theirs, as if they’d been foreigners themselves.

At length, the girl threw her head back, and spoke in High Mheng. “They were always kind with me, and you butchered them like pigs.” She was shivering now. “What will you achieve? You can’t hide on Felicity. The San-Tay will come here and kill you all, and when they’re done, they’ll put us in the dark forever. It won’t be cushy jobs like this — they’ll consign us to the scavenge heaps, to the ducts-cleaning and the bots-scraping, and we won’t ever see starlight again.”

“See?” Zhiying said. “Pathetic.” She gestured, and the girl crumpled like the man before her. The soldiers dragged the body away, and brought the old San-Tay man. Zhiying paused; and turned back to Anshi. “You’re angry.”

“Yes,” Anshi said. “I did not join this so we could kill our own countrymen.”

Zhiying’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Collaborators,” she said. “How do you think a regime like the San-Tay continues to exist? It’s because they take some of their servants, and set them above others. Because they make us complicit in our own oppression. That’s the worst of what they do, little sister — turn us against each other.”

No. The thought was crystal-clear in Anshi’s mind, like a blade held against starlight. That’s not the worst. The worst is that, to fight them, we have to best them at their own game.

She watched the old man as he died; and saw nothing in his eyes but the reflection of that bitter knowledge.

White Horse Hall is huge, so huge that it’s a wonder Wen didn’t see it from afar — more than a hundred stories, and more unveil as her floater lifts higher and higher, away from the crowd massed on the ground. Above the cloud cover, other white-clad floaters weave in and out of the traffic, as if to the steps of a dance only they can see.

She’s alone: her escort left her at the floater station — the older man with a broad smile and a wave, and the second man with a scowl, looking away from her. As they ascend higher and higher, and the air thins out — to almost the temperature of Felicity — , Wen tries to relax, but cannot do so. She’s late; and she knows it — and they probably won’t admit her into the hall at all. She’s a stranger here; and Mother is right: she would be better off in Felicity with Zhengyao, enjoying her period of rest by flying kites, or going for a ride on Felicity’s River of Good Fortune.

At the landing pad, a woman is waiting for her: small and plump, with hair shining silver in the unfiltered sunlight. Her face is frozen in careful blankness, and she wears the white of mourners, with none of the markers for the family of the dead.

“Welcome,” she says, curtly nodding to acknowledge Wen’s presence. “I am Ho Van Nhu.”

“Grandmother’s friend,” Wen says.

Nhu’s face twists in an odd expression. “You know my name?” She speaks perfect Galactic, with a very slight trace of an accent — heard only in the odd inflections she puts on her own name.

Wen could lie; could say that Mother spoke of her often; but here, in this thin, cold air, she finds that she cannot lie — any more than one does not lie in the presence of the Honored Leader. “They teach us about you in school,” she says, blushing.

Nhu snorts. “Not in good terms, I’d imagine. Come,” she says. “Let’s get you prepared.”

There are people everywhere, in costumes Wen recognizes from her history lessons — oddly old-fashioned and formal, collars flaring in the San-Tay fashion, though the five panels of the dresses are those of the Mheng high court, in the days before the San-Tay’s arrival.

Nhu pushes her way through the crowd, confident, until they reach a deserted room. She stands for a while in the center, eyes closed, and bots crawl out of the interstices, dragging vegetables and balls of rolled-up dough — black and featureless, their bodies gleaming like knife-blades, their legs moving on a rhythm like centipedes or spiders.

Wen watches, halfway between fascination and horror, as they cut up the vegetables into small pieces — flatten the dough and fill up dumplings, and put them inside small steamer units that other bots have dragged up. Other bots are already cleaning up the counter, and there is a smell in the room — tea brewing in a corner. “I don’t — ” Wen starts. How can she eat any of that, knowing how it was prepared? She swallows, and forces herself to speak more civilly. “I should be with her.”

Nhu shakes her head. Beads of sweat pearl on her face; but she seems to be gaining color as the bots withdraw, one by one — except that Wen can still see them, tucked away under the cupboards and the sink, like curled-up cockroaches. “This is the wake, and you’re already late for it. It won’t make any difference if you come in quarter of an hour later. And I would be a poor host if I didn’t offer you any food.”

There are two cups of tea on the central table; Nhu pours from a teapot, and pushes one to Wen — who hesitates for a moment, and then takes it, fighting against a wave of nausea. Bots dragged out the pot; the tea leaves. Bots touched the liquid that she’s inhaling right now.

“You look like your mother when she was younger,” Nhu says, sipping at the tea. “Like your grandmother, too.” Her voice is matter-of-fact; but Wen can feel the grief Nhu is struggling to contain. “You must have had a hard time, at school.”

Wen thinks on it for a while. “I don’t think so,” she says. She’s had the usual bullying, the mockeries of her clumsiness, of her provincial accent. But nothing specifically directed at her ancestors. “They did not really care about who my grandmother was.” It’s the stuff of histories now; almost vanished — only the generation of the Honored Leader remembers what it was like, under the San-Tay.

“I see,” Nhu says.

An uncomfortable silence stretches, which Nhu makes no effort to break.

Small bots float by, carrying a tray with the steamed dumplings — like the old vids, when the San-Tay would be receiving their friends at home. Except, of course, that the Mheng were doing the cutting-up and the cooking, in the depths of the kitchen.

“They make you uncomfortable,” Nhu says.

Wen grimaces. “I — we don’t have bots, on Felicity.”

“I know. The remnants of the San-Tay — the technologies of servitude, which should better be forgotten and lost.” Her voice is light, ironic; and Wen realizes that she is quoting from one of the Honored Leader’s speeches. “Just like High Mheng. Tell me, Wen, what do the histories say of Xu Anshi?”

Nothing, Wen wants to say; but as before, she cannot bring herself to lie. “That she used the technologies of the San-Tay against them; but that, in the end, she fell prey to the lure of their power.” It’s what she’s been told all her life; the only things that have filled the silence Mother maintains about Grandmother. But, now, staring at this small, diminutive woman, she feels almost ashamed. “That she and her followers were given a choice between exile, and death.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Wen says. And, more carefully, “Does it matter?”

Nhu shrugs, shaking her head. “Mingxia — your mother once asked Anshi if she believed in reconciliation with Felicity. Anshi told her that reconciliation was nothing more than another word for forgetfulness. She was a hard woman. But then, she’d lost so much in the war. We all did.”

“I’m not Mother,” Wen says, and Nhu shakes her head, with a brief smile.

“No. You’re here.”

Out of duty, Wen thinks. Because someone has to come, and Mother won’t. Because someone should remember Grandmother, even if it’s Wen — who didn’t know her, didn’t know the war. She wonders what the Honored Leader will say about Grandmother’s death, on Felicity — if she’ll mourn the passing of a liberator, or remind them all to be firm, to reject the evil of the San-Tay, more than sixty years after the foreigners’ withdrawal from Felicity.

She wonders how much of the past is worth clinging to.

See how the gilded Heavens are covered
With the burning bitter tears of our departed
Cast away into darkness, they contradict no truths
Made mute and absent, they denounce no lies

Anshi gave this poem into our keeping on the night after her daughter left her. She was crying then, trying not to show it — muttering about ungrateful children, and their inability to comprehend any of what their ancestors had gone through. Her hand shook, badly; and she stared into her cup of tea, as hard as she had once stared into the black hole and its currents, dragging everything into the lightless depths. But then, as on Shattered Pine, the only thing that came to her was merciless clarity, like the glint of a blade or a claw.

It is an old, old composition, its opening lines the last Anshi wrote on Felicity Station. Just as the first poem defined her youth — the escaped prisoner, the revolution’s foremost bot-handler — this defined her closing decades, in more ways than one.

The docks were deserted; not because it was early in the station’s cycle, not because the war had diminished interstellar travel; but because the docks had been cordoned off by Mheng loyalists. They gazed at Anshi, steadily — their eyes blank; though the mob behind them brandished placards and howled for her blood.

“It’s not fair,” Nhu said. She was carrying Anshi’s personal belongings — Anshi’s bots, and those of all her followers, were already packed in the hold of the ship. Anshi held her daughter Mingxia by the hand: the child’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t speak. Anshi knew she would have questions, later — but all that mattered, here and now, was surviving this. “You’re a heroine of the uprising. You shouldn’t have to leave like a branded criminal.”

Anshi said nothing. She scanned the crowd, wondering if Zhiying would be there, at the last — if she’d smile and wish her well, or make one last stab of the knife. “She’s right, in a way,” she said, wearily. The crowd’s hatred was palpable, even where she stood. “The bots are a remnant of the San-Tay, just like High Mheng. It’s best for everyone if we forget it all.” Best for everyone but them.

“You don’t believe that,” Nhu said.

“No.” Not any of that; but she knew what was in Zhiying’s heart, the hatred of the San-Tay that she carried with her — that, to her little sister, she would be nothing more than a collaborator herself — tainted by her use of the enemy’s technology.

“She just wants you gone. Because you’re her rival.”

“She doesn’t think like that,” Anshi said, more sharply than she’d intended; and she knew, too, that she didn’t believe that. Zhiying had a vision of the Mheng as strong and powerful; and she’d allow nothing and no one to stand in its way.

They were past the cordon now, and the maw of the ship gaped before them — the promise of a life somewhere else, on another planet. Ironic, in a way — the ship was from the San-Tay High Government, seeking amends for their behavior on colonized stations. If someone had ever told her she’d ride one of those as a guest…

Nhu, without hesitation, was heading up towards the dark tunnel. “You don’t have to come,” Anshi said.

Nhu rolled her eyes upwards, and made no comment. Like Anshi, she was old guard; a former teacher in the Mheng schools, fluent in High Mheng, and with a limited ability to control the bots. A danger, like Anshi.

There was a noise behind them — the beginning of a commotion. Anshi turned; and saw that, contrary to what she’d thought, Zhiying had come.

She wore the sash of Honored Leader well; and the stars of Felicity’s new flag were spread across her dress — which was a shorter, less elaborate version of the five-panel ceremonial garb. Her hair had been pulled up in an elegant bun, thrust through with a golden phoenix pin, the first jewel to come out of the station’s new workshops — she was unrecognizable from the gaunt, tall prisoner Anshi remembered, or even from the dark, intense leader of the rebellion years.

“Elder sister.” She bowed to Anshi, but did not come closer; remaining next to her escort of black-clad soldiers. “We wish you happiness, and good fortune among the stars.”

“We humbly thank you, Your Reverence,” Anshi said — keeping the irony, and the hurt from her voice. Zhiying’s eyes were dark, with the same anger Anshi remembered from the night of the Second Ring riots — the night when the girl had died. They stood, staring at each other, and at length Zhiying gestured for Anshi to move.

Anshi backed away, slowly, pulling her daughter by the hand. She wasn’t sure why she felt… drained, as if a hundred bots had been pumping modifiers into her blood, and had suddenly stopped. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected — an apology? Zhiying had never been one for it; or for doubts of any kind. But still —

Still, they’d been on Shattered Pine together; had escaped together; had preached and written the poetry of the revolution, and dared each other to hack into Felicity’s network to spread it into every household, every corridor screen.

There should have been something more than a formal send-off; something more than the eyes boring into hers — dark and intense, and with no hint of sorrow or tears.

We do not weep for the enemy, Anshi thought; as she turned, and passed under the wide metal arc that led into the ship, her daughter’s hand heavy in hers.

In the small antechamber, Wen dons robes of dark blue — those reserved for the mourners who are the closest family to the dead. She can hear, in the distance, the drone of prayers from the priests, and the scuttling of bots on the walls, carrying faint music until the entire structure of the hall seems to echo with it. Slowly, carefully, she rises, and stares at her pale, wan self in the mirror — with coiled bots at its angles, awaiting just an order to awaken and bring her anything she might desire. Abominations, she thinks, uneasily, but it’s hard to see them as something other than alien, incomprehensible.

Nhu is waiting for her at the great doors — the crowd has parted, letting her through with an almost religious hush. In silence, Wen kneels, her head bent down — an honor to the dead, an acknowledgement that she is late and that she must make amends, for leaving Grandmother’s ghost alone.

She hears a noise as the doors open — catches a flash of a crowd dressed in blue; and then she is crawling towards the coffin, staring at the ground ahead of her. By her side, there are glimpses of dresses’ hems, of shoes that are an uneasy meld of San-Tay and Mheng. Ahead, a steady drone from the monks at the pulpit, taken up by the crowd; a prayer in High Mheng, incomprehensible words segueing into a melodious chant; and a smell of incense mingled with something else, a flower she cannot recognise. The floor under her is warm, soft — unlike Felicity’s utilitarian metal or carpets, a wealth of painted ostentation with patterns she cannot make out.

As she crawls, Wen finds herself, incongruously, thinking of Mother.

She asked, once, why Mother had left San-Tay Prime — expecting Mother to rail once more at Grandmother’s failures. But Mother merely pulled a low bench, and sat down with a sigh. “There was no choice, child. We could dwindle away on San-Tay Prime, drifting further and further away from Felicity with every passing moment. Or we could come back home.”

“It’s not Grandmother’s home,” Wen said, slowly, confusedly — with a feeling that she was grappling with something beyond her years.

“No,” Mother said. “And, if we had waited too long, it wouldn’t have been your home either.”

“I don’t understand.” Wen put a hand on one of the kitchen cupboards — the door slid away, letting her retrieve a can of dried, powdered shrimp, which she dumped into the broth on the stove.

“Like two men carried away by two different currents in the river — both ending in very different places.” She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”

“Is that why you’re not talking with Grandmother?”

Mother grimaced, staring into the depths of her celadon cup. “Grandmother and I… did not agree on things,” she said. “Sometimes I think…” She shook her head. “Stubborn old woman. She never could admit that she had lost. That the future of Felicity wasn’t with bots, with High Mheng; with any of what the San-Tay had left us.”

Bots. High Mheng — all of the things that don’t exist anymore, on the new Felicity — all the things the Honored Leader banished, for the safety and glory of the people. “Mother…” Wen said, suddenly afraid.

Her mother smiled; and for the first time Wen saw the bitterness in her eyes. “Never mind, child. This isn’t your burden to carry.”

Wen did not understand. But now… now, as she crawls down the aisle, breathing in the unfamiliar smells, she thinks she understands. Reconciliation means forgetfulness, and is it such a bad thing that they forget, that they are no longer chained to the hatreds of the past?

She reaches the coffin, and rises — turns, for a brief moment, to stare at the sea of humanity before her — the blurred faces with bots at the corner of their eyes, with alien scents and alien clothes. They are not from Felicity anymore, but something else — poised halfway between the San-Tay and the culture that gave them birth; and, as the years pass, those that do not come back will drift further and further from Felicity, until they will pass each other in the street, and not feel anything but a vague sense of familiarity, like long-lost families that have become strangers to each other.

No, not from Felicity anymore — and does it matter, any of it?

Wen has no answer — none of Mother’s bleak certainties about life. And so she turns away from the crowd, and looks into the coffin — into the face of a stranger, across a gap like a flowing river, dark and forever unbridgeable.

I am in halves, dreaming of a faraway home
Not a dry spot on my moonlit pillow
Through the open window lies the stars and planets
Where ten thousand family members have scattered
Along the River of Heaven, with no bridges to lead them home
The long yearning
Cuts into my heart

This is the last poem we received from Xu Anshi; the last one she composed, before the sickness ate away at her command of High Mheng, and we could no longer understand her subvocalised orders. She said to us then, “it is done”; and turned away from us, awaiting death.

We are here now, as Wen looks at the pale face of her grandmother. We are not among our brethren in the crowd — not clinging to faces, not curled on the walls or at the corner of mirrors, awaiting orders to unfold.

We have another place.

We rest on the coffin with Xu Anshi’s other belongings; scattered among the paper offerings — the arch leading into the Heavens, the bills stamped with the face of the King of Hell. We sit quiescent, waiting for Xu Wen to call us up — that we might flow up to her like a black tide, carrying her inheritance to her, and the memories that made up Xu Anshi’s life from beginning to end.

But Wen’s gaze slides right past us, seeing us as nothing more than a necessary evil at the ceremony; and the language she might summon us in is one she does not speak and has no interest in.

In silence, she walks away from the coffin to take her place among the mourners — and we, too, remain silent, taking our understanding of Xu Anshi’s life into the yawning darkness.

“With apologies to Qiu Jin, Bei Dao and the classical
Tang poets for borrowing and twisting their best lines”

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

What Everyone Remembers

Rahul Kanakia

I remember being with maman in the cabin of her ship, anchored someplace where the wind was always howling, the temperature was always freezing, and fires were always dancing just beyond the horizon. I spent most of my time inside the mattress where she slept, burrowing as close as I could to maman so that I could feel her solidity and heat spreading out above me without burrowing so close that I came in contact with the harsh light and cold air. It was a delightful spongiform environment, flecked with tinier insects — mites and flies and spiders — and with the crumbs of food and flakes of human skin on which the lesser creatures fed. Life was not hard for me there.

But maman frightened me. When I emerged from the mattress, she would sometimes grab me, pinch my useless wings and interrogate me in front of bright lights. She’d put me in her nest of tubing and plastic cupboards and order me to run from one place to another as quick as I could. She would touch delicate golden wires to my various legs and my body would dance with strange impulses.

Usually my days passed in total silence, except for the few occasions when maman interacted with the other occupant of the ship, Uncle Frederick. These conversations were always initiated by Frederick, who would stare at her for a long time, then nod. They’d go onto the deck, shut the cabin door behind them, and talk in very low voices. On one of these occasions I oozed out through a crack in the doorway and tried to listen to them more clearly.

They were huddled together behind the wheel of the ship.

Frederick said, “…have to interact with her. Want all of her descendents to be poorly socialized?”

“It is an insect,” maman said. “Don’t anthropomorphize it. It can be anything it wants to be. Why should it carry all our human baggage? I want to give them a blank slate.”

“And what about survivors? What if she finds more of us? Or if her descendents do? What will they think of us if we don’t at least try to be kind to her?”

“I developed it. I know what is best for it.”

“And I risked my life to keep her alive. Food is getting low. I’m not bringing more supplies unless I can get some sort of input.”

“Fine, talk to it, if that will make you happy. But don’t involve me.”

After this, there was one day when she did not pinch me. Instead, she called out, “You’ve been hiding from me.”

“No,” I said. “I always come when I hear you calling for me. But sometimes I don’t hear.”

“No more hiding. I’ve given the whistle to Frederick. You must go to him whenever he calls for you.”

“Please, not the whistle,” I said, but she had already turned away.

The next day, my restless burrowing was interrupted by a sound that dragged hooks all across my body. Despite the pain, I tried to resist that insistent tootling. I stayed still for minutes, until the whistle had become near continuous, before I scuttled across the sticky deck of the cabin, up the stairs, and out into the freezing night.

Uncle Frederick lived in the cabin underneath the stairs. During the day he was largely quiescent: a vaguely human bulk that I sometimes perceived in the distance. But during the night he would lumber up the stairs and outside. He’d be wrapped up in seven layers of cloth and nylon and plastic. He’d seat himself down carefully on a mat, and stare up at the sky for hours.

I insinuated myself into the folds of his jacket to avoid the buffeting blasts of wind.

His body rumbled with speech. “Took you long enough to get here, didn’t it?”

All along the horizon line, fires blazed just out of sight, filling the sky with a sunset glow, even though it was midnight.

“You’re getting a good look aren’t you?” Frederick said. “It’s not so scary there. And it’ll be even less scary for you.”

“You’re…you’re taking me to the shore?” I said.

“Eventually. When your mother and I are gone, you’ll need to forage for food. Don’t worry, though, by then you’ll have help.”

“Are there more people, then? On land?”

“I meant that you’d have help from your own kind.”

“Oh.” The prospect of meeting more of myself was disgusting. I thought of them scrambling all over maman and felt slightly ill. “I would have liked to see more people.”

“Well, maybe you will. What would you do if you saw them?”

I nestled more deeply into Frederick’s jacket. “I wouldn’t ever bother them. I know that you and maman don’t like to be bothered.”

“No, no, there’s no need to be afraid of us. You should think of yourself as one of us.”

I moved deeper into Frederick’s garments. He shuddered. His hand twitched and started scratching the places where I had been. “I’m sorry,” I said. “So sorry. I won’t touch you again.”

“No, that’s my problem. I’m not used to people shaped like you. But you’re fine. You’re beautiful.”

“When are there going to be more of me?”

“Soon. When your egg case bursts, there should be forty or fifty more of you.”

I shifted my egg case uneasily, pressing it against Frederick’s bulk as if to stop it from splitting open right there. I’d seen what happened to the mothers of the spiders and flies in maman’s mattress.

“Will I have to die, then?” I said

“Die?” Uncle Frederick said. His body shook slightly. “No, never. You really don’t know, then? You’re never going to die. All your children will remember everything you remember. It will feel like closing your eyes to give birth, and then opening them in a new body. You’ll live forever.”

At the time, this was not a shock for me. I was too young to appreciate the gift that maman had engineered into me.

Frederick was silent for long moments after this. When I assayed a crawl up onto his face, I caught a brief glimpse of tear-stained eyes before an instinctive sweep of his hand dropped me to the deck with an exoskeleton-jouncing crash.

I picked myself up off the damp, salty deck and scurried back to the safety of maman’s mattress.

Frederick and maman were arguing again. I did not have to try hard to hear them, since the cabin hatches had been left open in order to air out the stale and dusty smells.

“I told her,” Frederick said.

“And you’ve put your own spin on it. Called it ‘immortality’ or some such nonsense. You won’t rest until you’ve fully humanized it, will you?”

“You know that she thinks of you as her mother, don’t you?”

“I’m no such thing.”

“You are the only mother her species will ever have. All the millions and billions of her descendents will only remember one childhood: her childhood. You have to pay more attention to her psychology, to her development, to her socialization and her adjustment. Every interaction her species will ever have is going to be governed by the shadow of you.”

“Don’t project,” maman said. “I barely remember my own childhood.”

“And why is that? Why are you so cold?”

“You’ve made it clear that you have the upper hand here, Frederick, so I suppose I can’t stop you from telling it whatever you want. We can even decant another, if you think I’ve ruined this one. You can train the next one to call you papa.”

“A second Eve?”

“Sure, or two more, or three, or a hundred…whatever it will take to satisfy you.”

“And have a hundred nations spring up to fight with each other, bomb each other, and create another disaster?”

“It will happen eventually.”

“You don’t understand. They won’t be like that. Not if we do our jobs, they won’t. They’ll remember this, every single one of them…they’ll look into each others’ eyes and see themselves. They’ll see that the good of everybody is the most important thing, and that if the race goes forward, then their memory will go forward, and they’ll live forever.”

“I know that my survival depends on your survival,” maman said. “But that hasn’t prevented me from developing a hatred for you. Why should they be different?”

When maman came in, she was smiling. She stared at the mattress for a long moment.

She was far away, too far to be able to catch me up, so I scrambled out of the mattress and called out, “Is my name ‘Eve,’ then?”

Maman frowned. “No,” she said. “You don’t need a name.”

“Why not?”

“What is it that you call me?” Maman was creeping closer, and I skittered back slightly.

“Maman.”

“Where did you get that name?”

“In the books that Frederick showed me, that is what the elephant called the woman who took care of him.”

“You liked his idiotic books?”

“Nnnnooo.”

“Good. You don’t need them.” She crouched and spread her hands on the edge of the mattress, and looked at, past, through me.

“Your memory is good,” maman said. “I know that, from the mazes I had you run. Please. Try to remember my face. You must never forget me.”

She coaxed me up onto her hard, pitted hands — those hands that were like whole worlds to me — and lifted me up right in front of her face. This was my first good, long look at her. Usually, I only peeked at her with sidelong glances, in order to see if she was about to come after me.

Her strangely-scented breath shivered right through my body, and I looked up with kaleidoscopic sight at her enormous face. Since then, I’ve seen many human faces. But, in my memory, there is nothing human about maman’s face; it is a machine of snorting nostrils and slowly dilating pupils.

Then she grabbed me by the wings and performed more tests on me.

A few days later, Frederick motored away in the dinghy. He was heading off to the shore: to the fires. I was happy when he left, since I would not have that whistle tugging at me. But I was also sad. I crept into maman’s workroom, where she was poking her head into and out of her refrigerator and other equipments. I was all alone with her. Now that Uncle Frederick wasn’t here to protect me, she could do anything.

She grunted as I crossed the threshold. She had not turned around. It was my first clue that she was always trying to sense where I was.

“Is he ever coming back?” I said.

Maman did not say anything. She played with her implements. As I waited, she picked up a very sharp tool that I had never seen her use before. I knew that she was not working. She was trying to scare me into running away.

“Did you send him away because of me?”

She turned towards me and pursed her lips. “He’s left before. The last time was several months ago, when you were very young. He is going to get more food and gasoline.”

“So he isn’t gone forever?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll hear the whistle again, soon enough.”

Several days later, when Frederick came back, I was still ecstatic at having had such a long and nonviolent conversation with maman. She had not come for me since we’d spoken. I climbed up top and watched him unload the dinghy. Maman came out and helped him as he lifted things up.

“What was the land like?” I said. “Did you walk into the fires?”

Maman and Frederick exchanged a look. He handed her a satchel of cans. Everything in the boat was blackened with soot.

“The forests are still burning, but the fires are mostly gone from the city,” he said.

“Did you see any humans?” maman said.

“A good number,” he said. “They’re starting to emerge.”

She looked down at the cargo. “Did you have to fight?”

“Some,” Frederick said.

They continued loading in silence, and didn’t respond to my increasingly chipper questions. I scurried back and forth across the length of the metal hand-rail, and barely avoided being inadvertently slapped under Frederick’s hand.

I’d hoped that Frederick would be too tired from his journey to use the whistle, but as night fell, I heard its shriek. It was even more terrible than I remembered.

I ran out and settled on his chest.

He was quiet for several moments, then said, “You’ll be kind to the people you find, won’t you?”

“I won’t even bother them at all!” I said. “Except maybe when they’re sleeping would it be maybe okay if I went inside their mattresses?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant…will you help them? They won’t be having as easy a time as you. Will you tell them where food is? And not hurt them?”

“Talk to them…?” I said. “But…will they…will they have whistles?”

“No, of course not. They don’t even know that people like you exist. They’ll probably be surprised to see you. But they’ll want your help. They’re hungry and they’re dying.”

“Why don’t they get more cans?”

“They can’t find them. And nobody is making more.”

“Then why don’t they eat the spiders and the flies and the crumbs of…”

“They can’t. They’re not like you. You’ll need to talk to them, and ask them questions, and see what they need, and do what they want, just like you would for your mother.”

“Just like maman?” I said. “But maman doesn’t need any help from me.”

“If she needed it, wouldn’t you help her? These people will need your help very much.”

“Okay.” I lay there on Frederick for a while, and then murmured, “But they won’t have whistles, will they?”

After Frederick let me scurry into the warm insides of the ship, he called maman onto the deck. I was too chilled to be willing to go farther than the door in order to listen to them.

“…more survivors than I expected…” he said.

“You knew there would be some,” maman said.

“But they’re starting to organize.”

Maman didn’t say anything. I imagined her plucking up Frederick by the arms and running her tests on him while he kicked around uselessly.

“Eve is terrified of human beings,” Frederick said. “I’m not sure what she’ll do when she encounters the survivors.”

“It will do what it decides is right.”

“It won’t do anything. It associates human beings with silence and neglect and electric shocks and tests.”

“According to those tests, it is in good health. It’s ready for reproduction.”

“I told you to pay attention to her socialization. You neglected her so much…I don’t think she’ll ever be able to interact normally.”

“I told you to do what you thought was necessary. You are still free to try to cure the psychic wounds I supposedly inflicted on her. You brought enough supplies to buy you that.”

“I had to kill a man in order to get these supplies. Next time, I doubt I’ll be lucky enough to find such a poorly-defended cache.”

“You brought enough for a few months. That is more than enough time.”

“Or barely enough. If we have to start over.”

“You want me to hatch another female?” maman said.

“We need to make the decision now. I think that Eve is too traumatized. She’s not going to be able to function. We need to start over. You won’t do any tests on the next one. I’ll take care of her. I’ll teach her all the things you held Eve back from: technology, art, literature, history, everything…Eve is such a fast learner…she really could have — ”

“She disgusted you,” maman said. “You didn’t want anything to do with ‘that damned roach.’ Until it first spoke, you called this a crazy scheme.”

“And how much earlier could she have spoken, if someone had been talking to her?”

“Why should their language be English? Why not something better? Something more suited to them?”

“You knew the kinds of things her mind was capable of. And you were still willing to drive her crazy, and stunt her forever. In fact, that’s pretty much what you did.”

“Did our art and literature and history help us? No. If its descendents create a better world than ours, they will do so because of their inhumanity.”

“That’s all moot now. There are too many survivors. That changes everything. This won’t be a post-human world. It’ll be a human one. The next Eve needs to be as human as possible.”

“No,” maman said.

“I risked my life to keep this boat running! Risked it four times now. You’ve contributed damn all. I could have lived twice as long if I’d gone off on my own, without you.”

“I’ll hatch another. But we won’t be ’starting over.’”

“Then the two of them will go to war eventually. Even you must see that there can only be one of them.”

“I won’t destroy it. It is perfectly healthy. Billions of dollars and lifetimes of work were spent in creating it. But I will start decanting another progenitor tomorrow. This discussion is over.”

The two of them entered. I waited until Frederick had gone off into his cabin and maman had settled down into bed. Then I crept up to her ear and softly whispered. “So I’ll have a sister, then?”

Maman’s hand twitched and I skittered away. I heard a soft exhalation of air, and waited for the words that would come next, but she never said anything.

I stayed in the mattress for hours, stewing in excitement and confusion. I hadn’t known that Frederick disliked me so much. I was sorry that he’d had to yell at maman because of I hadn’t given him the right answers. I knew that maybe Frederick wanted to be mean to me, but I was so happy that maman had stood up for me and said such good things about me. I knew that she loved me, just like the elephant’s maman had.

But, shortly before dawn, I felt the whistle. It was not the normal time for meeting with Frederick and I was especially lethargic. I lay in the mattress. The whistle cut through me again and again, but I didn’t want to move. Finally, I started to leave my burrow. The whistling was coming from Frederick’s cabin, where I’d never visited. I was on the edge of the mattress now, and was about to drop to the floor.

Something picked me up by the wings. “Wait,” said maman.

She got up out of bed and dropped me onto the mattress. She walked into Frederick’s cabin, and I heard the sound of three slaps. When she came back, the whistle was in her hand.

She grabbed me and took me into her workroom, then locked the door behind her.

Frederick pounded on the workroom door. “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Stay back,” maman called. “If you try to break down that door, I’ll destroy the rest of the specimens. Then you’ll never get your second chance.” Maman held me down with pressure against my back.

“You don’t know how many people I saw out there,” he said. “There were hundreds of them, already organized into bands, tribes, and families. We’re going to make it through this catastrophe, you know.”

Then I felt the worst pain I’d ever had in my life. All my legs tried to move at once, but they moved in different directions. I craned around, trying to look up, and glimpsed a metal syringe pulling away from my posterior.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about all night,” Frederick said. “About how humanity is going to endure. And how maybe it’s wrong for us to play God. Maybe the real catastrophe will be when all these creatures: so tiny, so intelligent, and so efficient, descend on the survivors. I’m wondering, I really am, if unleashing Eve — any Eve — is the right thing to do here.”

“What’s happening?” I said. Maman didn’t answer. She sank back, against the door. Frederick kept pounding on it. I lay there in the shallow receptacle where she’d set me down. After a few moments, maman got up and bustled around the workshop. Frederick kept saying things in the background, but I was no longer paying attention. What had maman done to me?

It seemed like hours later when I heard a crashing noise. The door flew inwards, and Frederick charged. Maman was standing next to the door. She jabbed him with a needle. He turned towards her and slapped her on the face. He hit her again and again. She hit back at him, but it didn’t seem that she was hurting him very much. Finally he saw me on the table, and took a step towards me. He fell down. Maman got up, and looked at him for a few moments. She took him by the feet and dragged him out of the workroom.

For the next thirty days, it was just the two of us. Maman only spoke to me one time. She told me that I was carrying eggs, and that I would soon be hatching into fifty new bodies. And even though the bodies would think and feel different things, all of them would think of themselves as me. I lay in her mattress as the eggs swelled. Sometimes she plucked me up by the wings and examined me under a looking glass. I think she’d become afraid to run electricity through me.

After one of the tests, she nodded to herself. She put me in a covered box and went out to the dinghy. I heard the motor start, and we traveled for several hours. I felt the boat hit something. I felt her pick up the box and carry it along with her. We were walking. Was I on land now? The box was still covered. I could not see where we were or where we were going. My abdomen was swelling. My body was aching. I felt a heavy pain along my back.

Frederick had tried to kill me. Now Maman was abandoning me. Was I so disgusting? For a moment, I was very angry with them. I wanted to hurt them all. Then I realized how awful I was. The reason that Fred and Maman had hated me was because I’d been such a brat about the tests and the whistle. But I swore that I’d show them they were wrong about me. I’d help every human being I saw. I’d be their best friends. I would do anything they wanted and I’d never, ever shy away or complain.

When the cover was taken off the box, I was in a dark alcove, like a cupboard or shelf made of stone. Warm air washed over me. I could see a light bobbing up and down in the distance. A door opened, and I saw maman silhouetted against the light of the sun. I tried to run to her, but I couldn’t move.

About the Author

Rahul Kanakia grew up in Washington, D.C.. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics in 2008 and subsequently returned to D.C. to work for the World Bank on environmental operations in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He currently lives in Oakland, C.A., and works as an international development consultant. His short stories have been published by Clarkesworld, Redstone, Nature, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

All the Painted Stars

Gwendolyn Clare

They are not the Brights, and so I hesitate to save them. Part of me is eager, and part of me ashamed.

Even through the haze of plasma blasts dispersing over their shields, I recognize the ship as a Bright construct — too much glass, arranged in sharp geometric panels so the entire upper surface glitters with reflected starlight. Still, I know the pilots must not be Brights. First, because they fly clumsily and appear not to know how to fire the main cannon. Second, because the Brights went extinct some twelve hundred solar cycles ago.

I decide to take a closer look at their attackers, and the fibers in my flesh tauten with anticipation — though I tell myself I will just look, not engage. Intent ripples down my middle tentacles to the interface between flesh and machine, and my little stellate-class fighter zips nearer. The attackers have seven mid-size cruisers, nothing so cumbersome as the Bright ship nor so whimsical — boxy and compact, and decked with weapons. I do not recognize the design. Some backwater species, no doubt. I am patrolling near the edge of protected space, so it is to be expected.

I choose a wide selection of frequencies and broadcast an audial message to all the ships in the vicinity. “Hostile vessels, please be informed you have entered protected space. Under the laws of the Sheekah, acts of genocide are punishable by death. Power down your plasma weapons.”

The attackers do not respond. But then, if they do not know our laws, what is the chance they know our language?

I broadcast the same message in the Bright language, and then add, “You must provide evidence of personal grievance to a Sheekah enforcer prior to engaging in interspecies violence.”

I wish I did not feel a surge of excitement at their silence, at the continued barrage of plasma fire.

I spin the fighter nervously, considering my options. The aggressor may hold a legitimate grievance and simply suffer from an onboard system too crude to translate the transmissions. Or they may have chosen to ignore me, assuming my tiny fighter poses no threat. A compromise then: I will destroy one ship at a time until they relent.

My neurochemical balance adjusts, heightening awareness and reducing reaction time, and I cannot help but enjoy the feel of neurons singing for battle. I trigger the thrusters and slice through the void toward the nearest ship, my body fibers tensing against the heavy acceleration. My fighter is a difficult target to hit — shaped like an eight-pointed geometric star, with just enough room for my core mass in the middle and a tentacle stretching down each ray of the star for interfacing. Stellate-class fighters are highly maneuverable, but I am still outnumbered six to one. This is why I am an enforcer: I am one of the few Sheekah violent enough to accept such odds with glee.

I fire my own weapons in quick, precise bursts, and the reactors of the first cruiser explode in a glorious ultraviolet light-show. Now I have the attention of the rest; two of the remaining cruisers break off from their engagement with the Bright ship to pursue me. I dance away like a comet on an eccentric orbit, there and gone again before they can look twice.

When I repeat the transmission, I should be saddened that they still do not cease fire, though in truth the challenge thrills me. I dart through their fleet and destroy two more cruisers, pausing between each explosion, but the remaining cruisers seem if anything incensed to further violence.

I am closing in on the fourth cruiser when my fighter is hit.

Stellate-class fighters are much too small to carry shield generators, relying instead on maneuverability to avoid getting hit. Ironically, it is not a plasma blast that finds my little fighter, but a shred of shrapnel from one of the cruisers I destroyed. Through the interface, I feel the shrapnel impact as if it were slicing my own flesh, and then one of my tentacles goes numb, a safety precaution against excess stimulation. I run diagnostics and discover that one ray of the star is badly damaged, the thrusters useless.

Well. This changes things.

My fighter has a Stillness Bomb installed, though I have never before activated it. Use of the Stillness is tightly regulated under Sheekah law — it is considered a last resort. But here I am, damaged and outnumbered, and the Brights were never formally removed from our list of treatised allies so I am justified in using the Stillness to defend the Bright ship. A technicality, of course, since I know the inhabitants aren’t Brights, but it allows me to use the weapon nonetheless.

To save them, I need to maneuver into contact with their hull, a task I struggle to accomplish without my full array of thrusters. After long seconds of angling, I pass through the Bright shields and stab into the ship, one of the rays of my fighter penetrating the hull. The ray unfolds, sealing the two vessels together and leaving one of my tentacles dangling down through an open aperture into a hallway in the Bright ship. This fusion complete, I can now calibrate the Stillness Bomb to avoid the Bright ship and its occupants. When I am certain the weapon identifies the Bright ship as an extension of my fighter, I meticulously disengage three levels of safeties and activate the Stillness.

My fighter shudders, straining to stay attached to the Bright ship, then goes still. For a moment, nothing seems to have changed, and I wonder if perhaps the weapon was damaged in the firefight. Then the attackers’ plasma weapons sputter and die out, and the four remaining cruisers start to drift very slowly out of formation. The motion is barely perceptible, but it fills me with a cold, sick dread. All those lives snuffed out, and what if my judgment was wrong? What a wretched Sheekah am I, who would choose this life of killing.

I do not have long to think on it, though, because the stress of activating the weapon has exacerbated the damage, and my fighter’s systems are failing. I must abandon it or die with it. I consider the second option — after all, what am I without my fighter? — but the automated preferences are set for survival, so the fighter disconnects me without waiting for my decision.

As soon as the emergency disconnect triggers, I am blind and suffocating. I fall through the aperture of my fighter into the Bright ship, bits of metal interface still clinging to my tentacles, and I land hard. I flop helplessly on the deck, unadapted for artificial gravity, and without my fighter I sense nothing. My circulatory fluid is slowly turning toxic, and even if the atmospheric composition were appropriate, I have no organs designed for interfacing with air.

I need lungs or I will die. I need visual and auditory organs, too. Immobile as I am, I must wait for the telltale vibration of feet upon the deck, heralding the arrival of the aliens. I think I feel it now, I can’t be sure — even my ability to feel the shudder of metal against my flesh is dulled without the electronic stimulus of my fighter.

I flail my tentacles, panicking, and find nothing but empty air. To calm myself, I focus on the task of slowing all nonessential bodily functions. This will buy me a little time, I hope. I cannot quite think rationally with all my neurochemical feedbacks screaming at me to adapt, to survive.

Again, I flail desperately, but this time one tentacle lands on bare flesh. Yes! I eagerly wrap my tentacle around the limb and begin probing for genetic information. Stem cells are ideal — they retain the broadest memory of how the organism as a whole works — though gametes provide a useful perspective, too. I do not dare to hope for embryonic cells, because that would require an incredible stroke of luck and my luck has not been good today.

The stem cells of this species have disappointingly limited potency, but I explore enough to start appropriating their genetic design. The toxin buildup in my circulatory system clouds my thoughts and slows my progress. I hope what I can glean from this individual will be sufficient.

I begin to understand this species as my body begins to integrate their design. They are bilaterally symmetric, endoskeletal, bipedal, endothermic, sexually dimorphic. (Definitely not Brights — if I had any doubts about that, they are gone now.) They have sensory organs for electromagnetic radiation, compression waves, and chemicals. I grow the lung tissue first, so I will be able to breathe as soon as my cellular respiration has altered, then I focus on retinas and cochleae.

As my new senses sharpen and stabilize, I gain awareness of the aliens. There are several of them encircling me, black handheld weapons cradled in their arms. They raise their weapons menacingly, and raise their voices as well; the one I am touching emits a shrill warning call. I begin to realize how very dire my situation is. Have I violated a taboo against physical contact? Perhaps they are a race of clinical xenophobes? I do not know what I have done to agitate them so quickly after I saved their lives.

I was never meant to be an ambassador — I do not have the training, and I am too violent besides. I have spent the last thirty-six solar cycles alone inside my fighter, engaging with other species only in my capacity as an enforcer of Sheekah law. And now I find myself in contact with a new species, trying to remember how to mimic physiology, to become one of them. I fear I have already ruined any chance of rapport.

When I am sure I have collected sufficient genetic data to survive in their atmosphere, I unwrap my tentacle, releasing the gene donor. I suck down my first lungfuls of oxygen through newly formed facial orifices.

And the difficult part begins.

They do not kill me right away. I take this as a good sign. They lift me onto a mobile platform and move me to a room with other platforms, some of them occupied by members of their own species. These ones do little in the way of moving or vocalizing, but they also leave me with two males holding weapons. I do not try to ask the killers for more gene donation.

Time passes. Other aliens — ones who do not carry weapons — are often present, watching me, waving diagnostic equipment over me, trying to communicate. I have no translating abilities without my fighter, so I must learn their language the slow way. I grow legs and arms, I learn to metabolize their sugars, I grow vocal chords and lips and a tongue to shape their words. I wonder if my fighter is irreparably damaged, which would mean all this effort to survive is a waste.

I am learning names. Mosby, Rosenberg, Liu; Ahmed, Levitt, Jones. But I do not know what to tell them when they ask for mine. I pause, they think I do not understand and gesture more vigorously towards me. Mosby Rosenberg Liu Ahmed Levitt Jones, they repeat, touching themselves with their hands, then they aim their digits at me and wait for an answer. What can I tell them? Sheekah are named when they choose their lifepath — as a pilot, my name is the name of my stellate fighter. Or at least it was. My fighter is damaged, I am no longer interfaced, and I have taken a new form, yet I am hardly in a position to ask them to name me as a true ambassador would. I cannot even communicate what the problem is.

“Ohree,” I eventually say. It was my childhood nickname long ago. Fitting, because I am so like a child now — awkward and unplaced.

“Ohree,” they repeat, and the name sounds distorted even though we share a vocal anatomy now.

I cannot explain anything, I cannot ask for anything. I can only point to an object and earn a garble of syllables for an answer. Does “medbay” describe the platform, the material it is made of, the function it serves, or the person lying prone upon it? Is “door” the word for an egress, or the object that blocks the egress? For the first time since I was a child, fumbling to find my lifepath, I feel hopelessly frustrated.

Liu and Rosenberg are in the room with me when I decide I no longer care about upsetting them. If they tell the killers to shoot me, then I will be shot, and at least that will be a change from what I am now. I slide off the platform, balancing uncertainly with my new bipedal body, and take careful steps toward one wall where there appears to be some kind of interface terminal. Rosenberg makes loud vocalizations, and I ignore her.

The terminal has a manual interface — buttons to be depressed by fingers, unthinkably primitive — which I rip out of the wall. I press one palm to the exposed circuitry and close my eyelids, concentrating on the task of growing a direct electronic interface of my own.

They still haven’t shot me yet.

I learn this terminal was designed for accessing the medical portion of the ship’s database, which is unfortunately not the portion that I need. I mentally slip behind the front-end processes and gain access to the database in its entirety. It is very large, and organized with the dubious logic of Bright minds, information twisting and twining back on itself like a jumble of vines grown together. Eventually, I access the language files for these aliens and use what little I know to identify “English” as the dialect I need to download.

When the task is done, I disengage from the terminal and resorb the interface into the flesh of my hand. “Now,” I say, “this will be easier.”

“Incredible,” says Liu, shaking his head. The gesture makes me wonder if I should have looked for a file on nonverbal communication among humans.

Rosenberg stares at me, and then says, “Someone better get Mosby.”

Upon my life, I do not know why it was so important to fetch Mosby. He asks the most inane questions, while Rosenberg holds her lips tight together and Liu backs away as if ceding the whole room.

Once I prove to Mosby that I am now conversant in his language, the first thing he says to me is, “We need to know about that weapon you fired.” Mosby is the most important of their trained killers and holds the title of “colonel.” He tells the other killers what to do.

I don’t see the relevance, but I answer his question anyway. “It produces a sort of space-time whiplash that disrupts neurological functioning. Fatally so, in all organisms we’ve encountered so far.”

“Is it still usable?”

I stare at him for a moment. “No, that’s unlikely. The damage to my fighter is too extensive. Were you planning to commit genocide in the near future?”

Mosby’s face scrunches up in an expression I do not understand. Rosenberg takes a step forward, places a hand on his arm, and says to me, “Of course not. The Colonel’s just worried about defending the ship against another attack.”

“That is no longer my concern,” I say.

“What do you mean ‘not your concern’?” Mosby says, his volume and pitch rising. “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of interstellar policeman?”

“I am no longer interfaced with my fighter.”

Mosby says, “Listen, you — ” but Rosenberg drags him by the arm out into the hallway.

They talk. I cannot quite hear, but I believe I have displeased one or both of them. I am not sure how — it was not my intention.

Liu, who seems to avoid standing in proximity to Mosby, comes closer again now that Mosby is elsewhere. “Don’t judge all of us based on the likes of Mosby,” he says. “There’s a reason they put a civilian in charge of the expedition.”

I don’t know who “they” refers to, but I doubt it matters. “I am not here to judge you. The only judgment I am authorized to make is to determine the legitimacy of grievance in interspecies conflict.”

Liu does something with the muscles in his lips. “I’m sorry, it’s easy to forget you learned our language less than an hour ago. I meant that you must be forming impressions of what our species is like, and Mosby isn’t representative. Not of all of us, anyway.”

“I will take that under consideration.”

Rosenberg returns alone. She apologizes for Mosby’s behavior, though I would not have known he behaved inappropriately if she and Liu had not told me. Rosenberg is a leader, but not a killer, and seems to have incomplete authority over Mosby.

“So,” Rosenberg says as she leans against the exam table next to mine. “You saved our butts out there, and now you’re stuck with us. First of all: thank you. Second, if we could impose upon you further, we could use some help navigating this region of space.”

Now I am truly confused. “You do not know where you are going?”

Rosenberg lets out a breath noisily. “The Brights left this ship in our home system a little over thirteen thousand years ago. When we discovered it, their recorded instructions were… cryptic, but the nav system came pre-programmed. We’ve been following the course they set for us, but obviously we’re having some trouble with the locals along the way.”

Her lengthy reply does not actually answer my question. I try to rephrase it to be clearer. “What is the purpose of your journey?”

“We’re going to Bright space. It’s not clear why they want us to come, but we couldn’t pass up an invitation like this.” She raised a hand as if to indicate the room, or perhaps the ship at large. “I’ve done some poking around in the database to learn about your species, so I know the Sheekah were allies of the Brights once. Would you consider helping them now, even if they’re not here to ask for it?”

This surprises me. “You do not know?”

“Know what?”

“They are gone.”

“Gone,” Liu interjects loudly, before Rosenberg can answer. I do not understand why he repeats the word — perhaps I misused it.

“The Brights went extinct,” I clarify. “They developed a genetic anomaly that spread from cell to cell throughout the body, causing widespread genomic degradation, and was, like a pathogen, highly transmissible between individuals. Many Sheekah were infected trying to help them before the Ambassadorial High Council declared quarantine.”

“Gone,” Rosenberg says and goes silent for a minute. (Does everyone need to say this word?) Something appears to be wrong with her, but I do not know what to do. Eventually, she says, “Did they know they were dying off when they left us the ship?”

I do a little quick math, converting unfamiliar units of time based on what I gleaned from the ship’s database. “Given the age of the ship, that seems probable.”

“I guess now we know why they named the ship Legacy.” She puts her hand over her mouth, as if to hold in the words, but I can still hear her clearly. “We have to figure out where we’re going, and why. Would you consider helping Ahmed with the database?”

I stare, not knowing how to respond. What happens to those I protect after I enforce the law has never been my concern. I wonder what it would feel like to be invested in their fate, but all I can feel is the absence of metal against my skin, the ghost-memory of tentacles I no longer possess.

“I am here,” I say dispassionately. “I will help with what I can.”

Days pass. I interface again with the Legacy database and develop a rudimentary understanding of the systems architecture. This helps, a little, to alleviate the ache of losing my fighter and my lifepath with it. At least when my mind is occupied, I am not dwelling on how wrong everything feels. I try and fail to explain the database to the technologists, who cannot grasp the Bright way of thinking. Whole sections of the ship are offline and locked down, and I am surprised they made it this far with such limited control.

I also learn more from the database about these humans; they live short lives, for instance, the equivalent of only nine or ten Sheekah solar cycles. I must seem ancient to them, though among the Sheekah I am considered young. They have so little time — this helps me understand why they seem so desperate to accomplish something, even if they do not know the nature of their task.

I grow irritated with the technologists. They are always near, bothering me with questions, even though they do not generally understand the answers. After the long cycles of solitude in my fighter, I am unused to tolerating so many individuals in such close proximity. I look for something else to do.

Instead I help the botanist, Keene, revive some of the plant species, the ones whose genomes indicate they will be harmless to humans. It is tiring but not particularly difficult work; I must grow a temporary interface with which to access the genomic database, and my body requires extra sustenance to provide the molecules with which to shape the seeds. Keene seems very pleased with the results. I care little for reviving extinct species from the Bright homeworld, but it also costs me little, so what does it matter either way? The Brights loved their botany and would not have wanted Legacy to fly with empty solaria. Indeed, from what I learned of the systems architecture, I suspect healthy solaria will prove important for restoring and optimizing certain functions elsewhere on the ship. Not that this matters to me.

I miss my old self. I think about fixing my fighter, but I can find only some of the tools and none of the spare parts I would need for the task aboard Legacy.

I consider ending my existence.

I sit on a bench in the aft solarium, which remains dark and unused and skeletal. In the central solarium Keene’s seeds have begun to sprout, so I come here instead to avoid the curious visitors drawn in by the promise of green growth. Back here, if I hold very still, I can feel the subsonic hum of the main engines vibrating the hull.

Through the geometric panes of the ceiling and walls, the stars look strangely close, as if the hull were not clear at all but rather painted with the likeness of stars. I stare into space, remembering how this view used to belong to me every hour of every cycle. It’s not the same, of course — these human eyes see such a narrow spectrum — but at least it feels familiar.

The aft solarium doors breeze open and Liu, the psychologist, enters. I do not look away from the stars but I can tell it is him from the way his soft gait whispers on the deck. He takes a seat next to me on the bench. Humans are highly social and require near-constant interaction and stimulation when conscious.

“How are you adjusting?” he says.

I think my habit of sitting here alone disturbs Liu. He does not understand me at all. “I do not know if I wish to adjust.”

“Look — I know this isn’t where you want to be, but the truth is, we could use your help here. The Legacy database is thirteen thousand years out of date and so huge we can’t find what we’re looking for most of the time anyway. We could use a guide who knows what they’re doing.”

I lower my gaze to look at him. Humans seem to desire a quite specific quantity of eye contact while communicating — not too much, not too little — though I have not yet mastered the exact proportion. “I am not an ambassador,” I say. “I was trained to be an enforcer of the law. I cannot perform another life.”

Liu’s brows tighten and draw together. “Life?”

“Job,” I say, to clarify. I have not yet discerned why they have two words for this concept.

Liu exhales forcefully and leans back against the bench, stretching his legs. If the gesture means something, it is lost on me. Humans rely heavily on nonverbal communication, much of it subconscious, and it frustrates my efforts to understand them. Or rather, it would frustrate me, if it were important for me to understand them. Which it is not. Because I think I will kill myself today.

After a while, Liu speaks again. “In the ship’s logs, the Brights say they left us Legacy because they knew we would someday build conservatories.”

I do not know the word. “Conservatories?”

“Places where we cultivate plants for aesthetic value.” He points at the solarium ceiling. “The architecture usually looks something like this. Anyway, at the time when they left us the ship, humans had barely started getting a handle on agriculture. We didn’t build conservatories until thousands of years later.”

“Are plants of great cultural significance to you now?”

“They’re not central to our society, no. Well — Keene might argue otherwise, but most people don’t think twice about the cultural value of plants.” He lifts his shoulders in an unfamiliar gesture. “I don’t know. Maybe the Brights saw what they wanted to see in us.”

“As you see what you want to see in me.”

“The point is,” Liu says, “you hardly ever get the ideal situation you’re hoping for. But if you’re lucky, you find something that will suffice.”

“I am not an ambassador,” I say again.

“No, but you’re close enough for us.”

Maybe I will wait until tomorrow to kill myself.

Tomorrow comes, but the humans distract me. Over the comm, they say they have desperate need of me in the systems control room. And what does it matter if I delay another hour, another day? So I go to them.

The systems control room lies buried deep in the ship, in one of the few areas with no view of the stars. The room itself is dimly lit and decagonal, a display and a crude manual interface affixed to each of the walls. Rosenberg and Mosby are there with Ahmed, the chief technologist, and a subordinate technologist whose name I do not recall.

I move too quietly for them to notice my arrival. (Always, these details I cannot seem to get right. I wear human skin, but it will never fit exactly.) To announce myself, I say, “What has happened?”

Four pairs of eyes look in my direction. As soon as they register my presence, everyone tries talking at once. Rosenberg and Mosby quickly turn on each other. These humans spend so much time arguing about what to do, it’s amazing they ever get anything done.

Finally, the rest of them agree to quiet down so Ahmed can speak. “We’re getting power fluctuations all over the ship. Life support keeps trying to shut down — we’ve had to force a restart three times in the past fifteen minutes. No idea what’s causing it.”

This does not surprise me. The Brights did not design their systems architecture to be solid and immutable, but rather flexible and adaptive. “I will look,” I say.

I place my palm on an exposed patch of hardware, grow an interface, and begin sifting through the diagnostic reports. Bright diagnostics are so literal they are almost evasive — always describing what is happening, but never hinting at why. I skip past the reports and prod gently at the underlying systems, doing the command equivalent of poking life support with a stick to see if it twitches.

Life support seems raw and hypersensitive, overreacting to stimulus. The shields seem lethargic, the main engines argumentative.

I mentally pull back to give my analysis to the waiting humans. “Legacy is experiencing some sort of systems destabilization, possibly triggered by the introduction of plant life in the central solarium. The ship is attempting to re-evaluate resource allocation and re-integrate, but systems integration seems to require guidance.” For clarity, I add, “Guidance from a Bright engineer.”

Predictably, Mosby wants to know if the power to the main cannon can be restored, and Rosenberg starts arguing about prioritization. Humans are a confrontational and violent people, whatever Liu might say to the contrary. Perhaps I understand this better than any trained ambassador could. Sometimes I even see a little of myself in them. Were I still an enforcer, would I not take great care to restore my weapons systems? Of course I would.

But I tell him, “Systems integration is a very complicated process. I most likely will not be able to complete it at all, let alone to your desired specifications.”

This silences them. They all stare at me, wide-eyed. Have I somehow misspoken? In a situation like this, am I supposed to ply them with false hope instead of giving an honest status report?

I do not know the Brights the way an ambassador would; I am too young to even have spoken to anyone with first-hand knowledge of the Brights. I have only a superficial understanding of their thought patterns, and this is a task best reserved for someone who truly knew them. If not for a Bright itself.

I cannot do what the humans expect of me. And yet, I must try.

I close my eyes to block the stimulus so I can delve deeper. Soon, I can visualize the interconnected web of the ship’s systems, each hub enmeshed among the others as if held in place with thick, pulsing vines. The offline sectors and systems appear marooned and dark, disconnected from the vital flow of the web.

Concentrating, I examine the systems more closely. Here: movement, change. And here, and here. Everywhere I scrutinize, the deep structural connections are unraveling, senescing, peeling away like flower petals destined to be supplanted with fruit. It is a process I understand only with academic distance — from my examination of plant genomes, not from personal experience. Still, I recognize the patterns as organic design, organic thinking. Only the Brights would build a ship as convoluted and self-referential as a genome.

Back in the control room, the humans are getting restless. “What is going on?” demands Mosby.

I retreat from the depths enough to answer him. “The architecture you have now was never meant to last. It is…” I do not know why I pick the word: “juvenile.”

Mosby opens his mouth but Ahmed looks at him says, “Less talk, more work.”

I must agree with Ahmed.

Ignoring the sounds of the control room, I return my focus to the Legacy’s architecture. I pull myself deeper, down into the disordered conglomeration of systems, losing awareness of my physical body. I focus all my mental acuity to study the ship.

It wants to grow, to metamorphose, to mature. I can tell this much: growth could be good, but it also could be cancerous. The old connections run dry and slough off, and the systems sprout wild new vine stubs that quest in every direction. Left to their own devices, the systems will strangle themselves with malformed, overgrown connective structure. But how am I to guide this process, rife with botanical zeal only a Bright could comprehend?

I pause, thinking. Metamorphosis is an animal concept. They are not vines, they are tentacles — and tentacles I understand. I think of my stellate fighter, how cleanly designed it was, with its eight rays each encapsulating a tentacle, and all the neatly arranged interfaces. And at the center, my brain to process and control.

So, me — and by extension, the control room — at the nexus of the web. The strongest connections, thick and steady, direct from each system to the nexus. Lesser connections, flexible and mutable, exchanging information among the systems themselves. I weave the ship the way I would weave my own flesh, easing the nascent tentacles over a new growth template as if it were a foreign genome to be integrated.

When the connections have been laid, the most delicate part still remains to be done: I carefully extract myself from the center of the web, leaving behind the shell of the control room, not so much a vacancy as a resting state. I pull away, leaving all the connections intact, the hollow space waiting patiently for its next command.

It is done. And, if all is right, it will even be receptive to the humans’ control.

I rise slowly, like floating up to the surface from the depths of an ocean, the lights and sounds of the control room wavering and resolving. I blink, eyes slow to focus as the ciliary muscles reawaken to their duties.

On every wall of the room, the display screens shine with dazzling varicolored light. My tear ducts water, my pupils hasten to contract. I see the humans shading their faces with their hands, so I know my body’s reaction is not an oversensitive after-effect of deep interfacing. The screens are very bright.

Yes, I realize. The screens are Bright.

“They’re beautiful,” says Rosenberg, “even if it hurts to look at them.”

Ahmed is still bent over a console. “There’s an audio recording, too, but the frequencies are all ultrasonic.”

Rosenberg asks, “What are they saying?”

“It’ll take a while for the translators to work it out,” says Ahmed.

“Unnecessary,” I say. I force some crude adjustments to the anatomy of my ears, expanding the range of my hearing. The recording is part-way through the message, but I wait until the end and it loops back to the beginning. “Roughly translated: the Legacy’s destination is a research base on a dwarf planet in the outskirts of the Brights’ home system. They hope that, in the time it has taken your primitive species to develop interplanetary travel and discover Legacy, the pathogen will have gone extinct. The research base contains preserved samples of healthy Bright genomes. If you have the technology to restore plant biota from the genomic database and shepherd Legacy through the transition to maturity, you will be able to restore the Brights.”

Everyone goes quiet. What have I done, meddling in the fate of these humans? An ambassador would have known better than to do for them what they cannot do themselves; I was a fool to think I could help without entangling myself. I feel nauseated, an unfamiliar physiological response to this upwelling of emotions inside me.

Ahmed is the one who says what they all must be thinking. “But it wasn’t us who brought back the plants and guided the ship, it was you.”

Which means the task of restoring the Brights falls on my shoulders, not theirs. “I know,” I say, and rush from the room.

Hiding in the aft solarium, I stare out at the painted starscape. By human means of reckoning, this region of space was my home for three lifetimes: cold empty death punctuated with tiny oases of energy and life. They all belonged to me, once. I felt at home in the void, satisfied with what I was, and now I am trapped behind this glass and can only yearn for that silent solitary existence.

At my core I am a fighter pilot — a thug, a killer. I was made to do what the rest of the Sheekah, with their delicate dispositions, could not. How can anyone expect me to resurrect a whole sentient species when all my training and experience has been in dealing death, not life?

I am no one’s savior. It is too heavy a burden to bear.

Liu comes in: shuffle, shuffle, soft steps on the deck. He approaches hesitantly, hanging back as if he doesn’t wish to intrude on my thoughts.

“Rosenberg sent you?” I say. I am learning how their hierarchy works.

Liu takes the words for an invitation and joins me on the bench. “She wants me to try talking with you.”

“We have now spoken.” I look at him. “You may report success.”

“Why, Ohree, that was almost a joke. Are you growing a sense of humor to go with the mammalian physique?”

“Doubtful,” I say, looking away again. Though maybe I am.

Liu lets out a loud breath. His vocal pitch drops lower. “You know what I’m here to ask you about.”

“Rosenberg wants me to continue with you to your destination. Rosenberg wants me to revive the Brights.”

“We can’t do it without you, obviously.”

“You do not understand. The process will not be a simple one, like with the seeds. Brights are very complex organisms. I will have to adapt my whole physiology, I will have to gestate the embryos inside me.”

Liu is silent for so long that I give up my view of the stars and turn to face him. He is staring at me. “What exactly do you have on your to-do list that ranks more important than this?”

I pause. “If they made the smallest mistake, if even one gene region is tainted with pathogenic code, I will die.”

“Since when were you more afraid of dying than of not having a purpose?” Liu’s lips curl in an expression I now know to indicate amusement. “How human of you.”

The words fall on me like a blow. He is right — only two days ago I was contemplating suicide. I fall back on an older argument. “An ambassador would be properly trained for such a task, which I am not.”

“You thought you couldn’t guide the Legacy through her transition, but you could,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that your own society marked you a castaway. It doesn’t matter what life you had before. You are capable of things you haven’t even dreamt of yet, and it would honor us to be the ones who help you discover those things.”

I go very still. I do not dare to hope this could be true. It violates a paradigm so deep-seated in my psyche that I did not even suspect its existence until now.

Liu says, “Humans aren’t in the habit of changing their given names. Surnames, though, were originally descriptive — you were named for your profession, or the village you came from, or your parentage.” He pauses, the silence almost livid in the air. “You don’t have a surname.”

If I was frozen before, now I am a comet lost between the stars — even my molecules feel stuck. I am sure I could not look away if I tried. I know Liu knows how Sheekah naming works.

Liu smiles, though somehow the expression seems grave, as if he understands exactly what it is he’s doing. “I think we’ll call you Ohree Brightbearer, if the sound of it suits you.”

“Yes,” I say, hardly able to breathe. “Yes, it suits me fine.”

I am named, and there is work ahead of me.

About the Author

Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is currently working to add another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Ekaterina Sedia’s Bewere the Night anthology, Daily Science Fiction, and Abyss and Apex, among others.

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

Christopher Bahn

Music and technology have always gone hand in hand — and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical uses of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, computer-science progenitor Ada Lovelace enthused that once the fundamentals of harmony and musical composition were properly understood, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (And there’s something wondrous about a woman at the dawn of the Victorian Age dreaming of something now commonplace with electronic groups such as Daft Punk.) Like computing itself, electronic music began as the arcane province of technology specialists and slowly became a truly democratic force that put the power to change the world — or at least soundtrack it — in the hands of everyone. And because cutting-edge technology is particularly good at sounding alien and futuristic, it’s meshed perfectly with science fiction as a subject matter. Below is a brief history of the ways those three elements — the music, the tech, and the SF themes — have intersected and influenced each other, in various media, over time.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

In 1919, a Russian scientist named Lev Termen invented one of the earliest electronic instruments, which came to be called after the anglicized version of his last name: the theremin. (Termen himself has a history at least as fascinating as his instrument: After emigrating to the U.S. where he scandalously married an African-American ballet dancer, he was kidnapped by Soviet secret police and repatriated to the USSR, where he worked on espionage tech including one of the first bugging devices.) Although its ethereal sound is now practically synonymous with ’50s SF movies, the theremin made its way into cinema 20 years earlier, first via Russian composers like Dmitri Shostakovich, then as a background element in 1933’s King Kong and 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. In 1945, the theremin’s weird warble was used in a pair of thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, to illustrate the emotional chaos of their amnesiac and alcoholic protagonists. But the theremin was first used as a major foreground soundtrack element in the alien-contact classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. Composer Bernard Hermann put two theremins at the center of his score to highlight both the wise and gentle alien ambassador Klaatu and his deadly robot Gort. For a decade after, the theremin was de rigueur for any movie about alien creatures, showing up in It Came from Outer Space, Operation Moon — and much later in Tim Burton’s retro-futuristic Mars Attacks.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Perhaps ironically, the theremin is absent from the first major movie to feature a totally electronic soundtrack, the SF-meets-Shakespeare space drama Forbidden Planet. Husband-and-wife composing team Louis and Bebe Barron got their start as avant-garde musicians in the orbit of the radical composer John Cage, but they made a stab at the more lucrative land of studio soundtrack work with Planet. They hand-built their own circuitry to create the phenomenally eerie music accompanying Leslie Nielsen and company’s journey through space. The main device in the Barrons’ toolkit was a tone-generating circuit called a ring modulator (famously used later by the BBC for the distorted squawks of Doctor Who’s Daleks), which they manipulated with reverb, delay, and other effects. Crucially, they didn’t see their music merely as mechanical sound, instead treating their instruments as actors whose job was to produce an emotional response. Though their soundtrack was hugely innovative and influential, the experience was a mixed success for the Barrons: Because they weren’t members of the musicians’ union, their score was classified not as music but as “electronic tonalities,” denying them a well-deserved shot at an Oscar and effectively ending their Hollywood career.

The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)

The first British group to score a number-one hit in America wasn’t The Beatles, but an instrumental surf-rock band called The Tornados — thanks to a song written by their producer, the decidedly eccentric electronics wizard Joe Meek. Named after the first successful communications satellite to achieve orbit around Earth, “Telstar” captured the early-’60s fascination for the space age with a jaunty, buzzy keyboard-driven melody that incorporated bleeps and whooshes alongside a soaring background vocal. The main instrument here was a clavioline, an electronic keyboard that was a precursor to modern synths, but much of the magic came in post-production via Meek’s jerry-rigged assembly of tape machines, compressors and other devices in his home-built London studio. Meek’s own career was less stratospheric: Though the song sold five million copies and was covered by dozens of other bands, a plagiarism lawsuit (almost certainly groundless) ensured that Meek never saw a dime from it during his lifetime, and mounting pressure from his business problems, his drug use, and his (then-illegal) homosexuality led him to the murder-suicide of himself and his landlady in 1967.

Doctor Who (1963)

Set up in the late ’50s to bring the new worlds of electronic music to British TV and radio productions, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pushed the boundaries of what was possible to do with sound. And with their longest-lasting popular success, the theme song to the venerable science-fiction TV series Doctor Who, they went all the way to the edge of time and space. Although the tune itself was written by Australian composer Ron Grainer, the song didn’t truly come to life until a then-uncredited engineer named Delia Derbyshire got her hands on it. Lacking advanced synthesizers or multi-track recording, she created each note of the song individually, combining them via a series of tape loops of white noise and a simple bass line painstakingly adjusted for speed and pitch. The result was, in a word, fantastic, evoking in a few moments everything important about Doctor Who’s enigmatic title hero — his questing wonder, but also loneliness, outsiderhood, and otherworldly danger that have stayed with him in all incarnations, for nearly 50 years. Side note: One Doctor Who sound you might think would be electronic isn’t: The TARDIS takeoff and landing effect was created by scraping a door key up and down the strings of a piano.

David Bowie, “Space Oddity” (1969)

Most of the music talked about so far was made using highly specialized equipment — often massive, complicated and expensive pieces built by musicians who were also formidable technicians. But in 1967, a British gadgeteer named Brian Jarvis fixed his niece’s broken toy piano by giving it an electronic upgrade, later refining the idea into a simple handheld keyboard operated with a metal pen: the Stylophone. His invention sold millions of copies, but might still be seen merely as a battery-operated toy if not for David Bowie, who used a Stylophone as a key instrument on “Space Oddity.” The first in a string of legendary singles, “Space Oddity” not only made Bowie a star but was a calculated stab at capturing the late-’60s’ fascination and optimism with the idea of space travel — ironically enough, in a bleak but captivating story about a lonely astronaut floating in a doomed spaceship. Still, it was exactly the right song at exactly the right time, and the BBC’s adoption of it as the theme tune for their coverage of the Apollo moon landing helped ensure Bowie’s status as something like an alien ambassador to humanity. Bowie’s love of the Stylophone wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan, either: He used it on a number of subsequent songs, and said in 2002 that he still carries it with him when he travels to help write new material.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The Stylophone may have been just a toy, but the 1960s also saw more complex synthesizers start to make their way into mainstream music, as the technology was refined and made easier to use. After getting his start with a mail-order built-your-own-theremin business in the ’50s, Robert Moog invented the game-changing synthesizer that bears his name, which used transistors that made it small enough to be cheap and portable. It first gained wide public attention in 1968 when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos applied the futuristic instrument to centuries-old classical music on Switched-On Bach, going on to sell more than a million copies and bringing electronica to audiences who never would have been open to it otherwise. Three years later, Carlos’ electro-classical creations got an even wider audience when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned his lens on Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange — the tale of a street thug in a nightmarish near-future Britain who loves Beethoven even more than he loves beating and raping. Kubrick naturally turned to Carlos for the soundtrack, which helped give the movie just the sense of baroque surreality it needed.

King Crimson, “The Court of the Crimson King” (1969)

Pre-’70s Moog synthesizers were hampered by what now seems like a bizarre limitation — they could only play a single note at a time. Even simple chords were only possible by repeated overdubs in the studio, meaning that it was impossible to play any of these compositions live. The Mellotron, on the other hand, worked via strips of audio tape connected to a keyboard, meaning that it could be played live. Sure, it was as heavy as an elephant on Saturn, but what had been impossible was now merely very difficult. Mellotrons show up in pop music as far back as 1965 on songs like The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But they really came to the fore when English group King Crimson made pioneering use of the Mellotron to help found progressive rock with their 1969 debut single “The Court of the Crimson King,” which helped lead to the massive, spectacle-driven arena rock of the ’70s. As prog evolved, it embraced the tropes of science fiction and fantasy for its expansive concept albums, and “Crimson King” was no exception, spinning a Dylanesque allegorical tale about the devil that begins with “prison moons” being destroyed in a solar explosion. In 2006, director Alfonso Cuaron highlighted the song’s SF roots again with prominent placement in his post-apocalyptic film Children of Men.

Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1974)

Jazzman Sun Ra claimed to be an emissary from the planet Saturn — and maybe that’s true, considering just how far ahead of everyone else he was in using electronic instruments, debuting a Wurlitzer organ on his album Super-Sonic Jazz in 1956. A pioneer of ambient music, Ra continued to supplement his recordings with tape effects and other electronic devices throughout his career, and never lost his sense of the cosmic. In fact, his blend of Egyptian, psychedelic and science-fiction imagery, seen in its full flower in his surreal 1974 movie Space Is the Place, helped create the Afrofuturist movement soon to be embraced by the space-funk outfit Parliament.

Kraftwerk, “The Robots” (1978)

As advances like the Moog and Mellotron made electronic instruments increasingly available to any talented musician and not just the technocracy, they infiltrated a wide range of popular music, causing revolutionary new changes in some genres and also allowing the invention of totally new ones. German group Kraftwerk were massively influential in the latter regard, exploring new ways of making pop music entirely with electronic instruments that led directly to synth-pop, electronica, house, and club music, and cast long shadows over hip-hop and other genres. They deliberately courted a technophile style, playing up the machinelike qualities of their music not only by writing songs like “The Robots” and “Metropolis” (the latter a tribute to the pioneering Fritz Lang SF film of the same name), but actually building robotlike mannequin versions of themselves that played their music in concert.

Space Invaders (1978)

The late ’70s also saw the rise of a completely new phenomenon, video games, that would rival and even supplant the movie theater and the concert stage as a natural home for electronic music. Space Invaders, which debuted in 1978, not only sparked a craze for coin-operated arcades, it was the first to feature music playing continuously throughout the game. It was incredibly primitive sounding compared with Switched-On Bach, but it was a start, expanded on later by games like Defender and Donkey Kong on the long road to today’s far more complex game music. And it’s been embraced again more recently by the chiptunes movement, about which more in a moment.

Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science” (1982)

Kraftwerk was just the vanguard of the popularization of the synthesizer. ’70s arena-rock synths were still bulky and expensive, but the ’80s brought new instruments, like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and Yamaha DX7 keyboard, that didn’t require an army of roadies to move and could be bought for a few hundred bucks. And that was the tipping point: Electronic music invaded everywhere, from the pop-rock of Duran Duran and Depeche Mode to the industrial noise of Einstürzende Neubauten and Ministry to the groundbreaking sampled beats and turntablism of hip-hop’s Grandmaster Flash. English musician Thomas Dolby, a confirmed gearhead who was well ahead of the curve technologically, used a combination of Moogs and less expensive synths like the Roland JP-4 to create his biggest hit, “She Blinded Me With Science” — a classic and charmingly goofy example of early synth-pop that tells the story of a brilliant but emotionally clueless mad scientist who falls in love with his assistant.

Scientist, Scientist Meets The Space Invaders (1982)

Created in the late ’60s by a Jamaican collective including eccentric-genius producers Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, dub reggae’s experiments with the electronic manipulation of sound was undeniably trippy and organic, especially in comparison to what musicians in Europe and the U.S. were doing at the time. Dub’s heavy reverb and overdubbing was simultaneously an embrace of cutting-edge technology and an aural recreation of a psychedelic state of mind, and it came to embrace SF ideas as a way to express that duality. It helped that “scientist” has a double meaning in Jamaican slang, indicating not just circuitry and tech but occult symbolism. King Tubby’s protégé Overton Brown, who took the pseudonym Scientist, raised dub’s SF flag high on records like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Encounters Pac-Man. Dub would go on to be a guiding influence on hip hop and electronic music into the ’90s and ’00s.

Metal Heads, “Terminator” (1992)

The rise of hardcore dance music in the ’90s took dub’s innovations firmly into the computer age, creating a whole new world of beats, samples, and rhythm-heavy effects. Under the project name Metal Heads, Scottish-Jamaican DJ Goldie pioneered a technique called “timestretching,” which slows down a piece of audio without affecting its pitch, giving his beats a distinctly metallic tone. The track “Terminator” picked up on that vibe by taking its name — and sampling Michael Biehn’s and Linda Hamilton’s dialogue from — James Cameron’s SF thriller about an unstoppable time-traveling killer robot.

Daft Punk, Tron Legacy (2010)

Kraftwerk may have sent android versions of themselves out to play their songs on tour, but Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took that idea to its logical conclusion: becoming androids themselves. As Daft Punk, the duo stays almost entirely hidden, Residents-like, behind the masks and personae of steel-headed robots — characters they took beyond the music in the clever yet patience-testing arthouse film Electroma. Their greatest mainstream success came in 2010 when Disney brought them on board to enliven the soundtrack of its retro-gamer SF blockbuster Tron Legacy, a perfect marriage of the story’s inherently nostalgic appeal as a sequel to a 28-year-old movie, and Daft Punk’s unflagging futurist approach.

About the Author

Christopher Bahn lives in Minneapolis, where he avoids the cold as much as possible and writes about pop culture, music, film, science fiction, travel, history, and the arts for venues including The A.V. Club, MSNBC, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Momentum, Spaces, The Rake, Request, and Memory Lane. He is also the writer/co-creator of the radiodrama series Where Threads Come Loose.

Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

The writing of The Troupe started for Robert Jackson Bennett with the image of “a boy in the dark, muddy and wounded, holding a body in his arms, and singing.”  He wrote the novel to understand who the boy is and how he got there.

Bennett jokingly calls himself an “accidental horror” writer. Much of that self-identification comes from simplifications and from his having won the Shirley Jackson Award for his first novel, Mr. Shivers. As Bennett discusses below, there are elements of horror in his fiction, but there seems to be more of the strange and weird — the unknowable, the un-understandable — than the scary or terrifying. The unknowable coupled with a desire to know, to learn about the world and oneself, fuels his fiction with a tension that is at times unbearable.

“Writing fiction is an interesting form of self-deception, because it’s a self-deception you’re aware of, and one you consciously initiate,” said Bennett. “It’s a strangely schizophrenic, disparate process: your attention and personality are put through a thresher, split up into facets, and set to work independently on different questions and problems. Your left hand has no idea what your right hand is doing until your left hand encounters a problem and stops, wondering how on Earth it’s going to get out of this one, which is when your right hand swoops out of nowhere with a solution you had no idea you were even working on.

“You learn a lot about yourself, writing fiction,” he added. “You just have to hope the end product is fun enough for everyone else.”

Indeed, his novels are “fun” and disturbing and a pleasure to read. There’s his first novel, Mr. Shivers, a dark fantasy set during the Great Depression as seen from the perspective of hobos riding the rails. His second, The Company Man, pits industry and unions, technology and telepathy. And his forthcoming third novel, The Troupe, which is set in the delightfully strange world of vaudeville.

The Troupe focuses on George Carole, a sixteen-year-old piano prodigy. Carole travels the Vaudeville circuit under the guidance of Harry Silenus, who teaches Carole about the First Invocation (also known as the First Song) which is the very tune the Creator sang in the beginning. It is their job to sing the song of creation to lift the shadows of the world. Here lies one of the fundamental differences in The Troupe as compared to Bennett’s first two novels.

In Mr. Shivers, Bennett uses a shadowy mood, layered atmosphere, and painfully real characters to reveal the darkness of the world; The Company Man takes a scalpel to the heart of capitalism to shake out the grit and grime of corruption. The Troupe, on the other hand, sings of... “hope” isn’t quite the word, but it’s close.

Below, Bennett and I talk about vaudeville, writing, and the search for peace.

First things first, what compelled you to set a novel in vaudeville?

Vaudeville is a fascinating time in American history: it’s when the rails really started to open up, and all sorts of barriers started becoming permeable. The great melting pot that is America actually began to percolate.

Entertainment is always a fascinating expression of a nation’s subconscious, and vaudeville, which was meant to be light, frothy, diverting entertainment for the masses, suddenly became a huge source of cultural cross-pollination: anything strange or exotic would do. Modern country music owes the slide guitar to vaudeville, for example, due to country acts touring the circuits alongside Hawaiian bits.

But moreover, The Troupe is a story about the building blocks of creativity, and how they still resonate today. And vaudeville might have been the first definer of modern American entertainment, so the building blocks it created can still be found now, whether it’s in Looney Tunes, sketch comedy, stand-up, musicals, or even comic books (is there any bigger vaudevillian than Batman’s arch-nemesis?). The people who made movies, and especially comedies, what they are — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy — all started out on the circuits, and none of them have lost their verve.

How much of vaudeville is improvised, I wonder? Is any of it off the cuff, responsive to the audience?

The best vaudevillians had their acts fine-tuned and prepared to the smallest degree. And once they had something down, they never changed it — which is why film killed off vaudeville so quickly. There was never anything new there.

How does orchestrated music like, say, Aaron Copland, speak of a different America? Or is it that Copland speaks differently of the same America?

I would probably say that Aaron Copland speaks more to a Mid-Century America, one that had seen a great deal of trouble and wanted to re-envision itself as something more pastoral, majestic, and peaceful. Aaron Copland wrote about a home we all wanted to go back to: vaudeville, on the whole, just wanted to entertain.

Whose music is likely to show up on a soundtrack for The Troupe?

Probably Bert Williams. I listened to a lot of The Magnetic Fields while writing it, probably because of the whole overly-earnest-emotions thing. But I feel like the 78-version of Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” captures something that’s in The Troupe.

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

I usually start with an image, frequently an image of the ending. The image comes loaded with atmosphere and subtext and other vague abstracts I can’t immediately define. Defining those things, and figuring out how we got there, is the interesting part.

It is probably the least efficient way to start writing: I start with nothing concrete. Not even names, which is quite inconvenient. But I don’t get to choose these things.

What is it about transience (Mr. Shivers) and touring (The Troupe) that sparks your creativity?

Well, there are two practical matters to take into account. One is that it’s a classic story template, going off into the wide world to seek your fortune and all. It’s something the human mind is geared to accept. The second is that the traveling mode usually makes it easier to introduce interesting and surprising situations than a static mode. (Though it can make things a logistical nightmare — readers might wonder, “How does the antagonist keep up with them?” or, “I thought she lost that in Cheboygan. Why does she still have it in South Dakota?”)

But the thing that chiefly interests me is the question of identity. There are some characteristics and beliefs we have solely because of where we come from. Taking characters out of their homes and putting them into strange, challenging circumstances essentially nullifies those characteristics: it forces characters to ask themselves who they are, and to decide how they will act when their friends and family are not watching.

When the world is changing around you, a lot of you will change with it. But some part of you will not. That part you cannot change is who you are.

You were born, raised, educated, and currently reside in the South. Are you a Southern writer? What of the South appears in your writing? Or, put a little differently, what are some of those beliefs and characteristics that you have or had by grace of being born in the South... and how have those beliefs and characteristics been challenged in your writing and travels?

I actually spent most of my formative years in Houston. Which is not really part of any region — it’s Houston. Just as London is not England, and Tokyo is not Japan, Houston is neither quite Texan nor Southern. It’s a huge, huge metropolis, made of satellite towns with no real, definable center. It is also profoundly international — most of my friends were Korean, Pakistani, and so on.

My parents, and a lot of my extended family, are probably a lot more Southern than I am. And I do not think much of that Southern sensibility finds its way into my work. Except possibly drinking.

The interesting thing about growing up in Houston is that Houston — a city which is now founded mostly on large corporations and suburbs, where your neighbors are always in flux and there is no agreed-upon “hangout” for anyone — is largely bereft of intrinsic culture. It is not like New Orleans, which is definitely New Orleans; it is not like Austin, which is most certainly Austin (in fact, the first time I saw someone in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots was when I came to Austin; it was also the first time I saw someone covered in tattoos and piercings, but... that’s Austin). There are definitely parts of Houston that have a sense of character — the Rice Village, Bellaire, the Museum District, and so on — and I got to visit them quite frequently, and I’m happy for that — but my experience of the whole does not.

It is this sense of communal identity, or lack thereof, that has probably shaped a lot of my beliefs and outlook. I always want to ask people — who are you? Is that something you decided, or something that was impressed upon you? Was it really impressed upon you, and did you really choose that, or do you simply think you did?

After all, “character” in Greek translates into “that which is engraved.” The question, then, is who, or what, is doing the engraving.

How much of you is there in George Carole?

Probably more than most characters, and probably more than I’d care to admit. George was initially hard to write for reasons I will explain a little later, but I will say that if I were to meet my sixteen-year-old self today, it would take an awful lot for me to resist punching that condescending little shit in the face. It would probably do him some good.

What makes for a compelling protagonist? How do you create one?

A good protagonist must 1. have functionally believable and preferably interesting characteristics that 2. result in or directly affect clearly-defined, active goals that 3. the protagonist keeps to consistently throughout the story, though 4. keeping to those goals either changes A. what the protagonist thinks of themselves, the world, or both, or B. what the reader thinks of the protagonist, the world, or both.

A lot of the actual character is not determined by a trait of characteristics, but by voice, which is the manner in which things are described, the process of logic their thoughts follow, the way the character engages a scene or other characters, and much more besides. Voice is both the most important quality of any protagonist, and indeed any story, as well as the hardest thing to learn or to teach. Naturally.

George was actually a bit of a challenge, at the start. I first wrote The Troupe from a fairytale perspective, and as such George was initially a naive, soft, somewhat mopey and painfully earnest character. Overall, he was very bland and, as one early reader put it, “kind of a pussy.”

When I heard this, I knew that I had problems with numbers 1 and 2 of the formula above.

Which is when I realized that, if he grew up without a father figure, George would naturally overcompensate, and emulate a discerning maturity as much as possible, and if he’d grown up marvelously talented, he would also be conceited as hell, much more so than the average teenager (which is already plenty).

So I re-imagined him as a bit of a vain, self-important young man, the sort of kid we all know who tries to talk about things he doesn’t know much about while everyone else at the table exchanges glances as if to say, “Well there he goes again, just don’t say anything.” Then he became quite easy for me.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the rules I laid out can, of course, be broken by anyone with a large enough vision or talent. Passive, wandering protagonists don’t matter if the prose, world, or story itself is involving enough.

What about an antagonist?

Antagonists just need cool hats, really, preferably black.

Atmosphere is so central to your novels. How do you capture and create atmosphere?

A lot of atmosphere is in voice — the “how” of looking and talking about things. But there is a sense of physical movement to atmosphere: zipping or touring or stumbling through a background or location. The way this occurs — whether it’s a plod, or a cruise, or a downward climb into what feels like a dark tunnel (though it may be a hallway) — is what builds atmosphere the most.

Description is not necessarily just a means of relaying characteristics: when you describe an object, you inadvertently imbue that object with new characteristics, just as a result of the way you describe it. Describing it shapes the way the audience perceives it. So, you have the option of imbuing objects which are quite still and static with a sense of action. Or you can reduce that feeling of action in a room until it feels like not only is nothing happening, but nothing has ever happened in that room, nor will it ever.

In what ways, if any, is The Troupe a horror novel? In what ways isn’t it?

The Troupe is a horror novel in that it contains creatures and elements that are dark, unnerving, and disturbing.

However, to me, true horror inculcates in the reader a very vicious sort of loneliness: any horror, be it cosmic or slasher, makes you feel powerfully alone, vulnerable, and helpless. That is its chief goal.

The Troupe does not have that goal. It is not so much about feeling helpless in the world, but rather learning about the world and gaining perspective and, most importantly, understanding that there are things you will never understand. It could possibly be about learning to move past that deep loneliness inherent in all of us, and finding peace.

Have you found peace yet?

On occasion. Peace, like happiness, is not a destination at the end of a road: it’s momentary, and frequently coincidental. It just takes work, and a lot of luck, to become the sort of person who can feel happy, or peaceful, with more ease and frequency. I do not think I am quite there yet — but no one really does.

So if you were in vaudeville... what would your act be?

Do you know, I have no idea. A lame answer, but a true one.

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.

2011 Reader’s Survey

Neil Clarke

Every year, we give you the opportunity to pick your Clarkesworld favorites from the prior year. This time around, you’ll have the opportunity to select your favorite story and cover art from 2011, as well as give us a little feedback. Feel free to use the comments area on our site to help promote your favorites. (No attacking other people’s choices.)

You can take the survey at http://clarkesworld2011.questionpro.com.

Please cast your votes by January 30th. Results will be published in our February issue.

2010 Fiction

Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee

Tying Knots by Ken Liu

Diving After the Moon by Rachel Swirsky

Three Oranges by D. Elizabeth Wasden

The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book) by Nnedi Okorafor

Perfect Lies by Gwendolyn Clare

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu

Matchmaker by Erin M. Hartshorn

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman

Semiramis by Genevieve Valentine

Trickster by Mari Ness

Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika by Gord Sellar

Frozen Voice by An Owomoyela

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan

Pack by Robert Reed

Signals in the Deep by Greg Mellor

Staying Behind by Ken Liu

Pony by Erik Amundsen

Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente

A Militant Peace by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

The Smell of Orange Groves by Lavie Tidhar

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

Sirius by Ben Peek

Cover Art

Beckoning Ancient Depths by Alejandro MGNZ

Nautili by Julie Dillon

Connie and Donnie by Patryk Olejniczak

Post-apolacalyptic Fisherman by Georgi Markov

The Towers of KEILAH by Ferdinand Ladera

Off Road by Facundo Diaz

Valley of Mists by Peter Mohrbacher

Into the Woods by Erik Storstein

Forest Spirit by Mike Azevedo

A Sense of Importance by Bryn Jones

Planetary Alignment by Julie Dillon

Reactor by Folko Streese

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.