Sunlight Society

Margaret Ronald

When the Fourth Street biolab went up, I didn’t think of Casey right away. I was working in the far side of the complex, which meant I was one of about four hundred people who got to see the entire dome rise up off its foundations, rotate counterclockwise ninety degrees, and shoot up into the sky. My immediate reaction followed the same pattern as everyone else: first What the hell, then, just before a needle of light vaporized the biolab, Are those people up there?

I could hazard a guess at the second question; I’d gotten that far into the shadow organizations, even then. I knew enough to guess at the identities of some of the blurry shapes darting through the smoke, shapes that official press releases would call confabulation and that the conspiracists would call aliens or Muslims or Freemason-built androids. The shadow orgs had been sloppy that time; usually they didn’t like to be seen at their work, but there’d been so little warning that they’d had no choice but to break out the big guns. Literally, in this case.

But that wasn’t what came to mind as I stared up into the sky, the glare of that solar blast fading bit by bit from my retinas, my nethead links relating the intensity of that blast, the projected knock-on effects on the rest of the Niobe web, the first stirrings among the dataminers. Instead, I just thought Casey would love this. I kept coming back to that thought over the next few weeks, even after word got out about the low-rent terrorists who’d gotten so close to taking over the biolab that vaporizing the whole place was the only alternative. Even after the arrests started.

I still think it’s true.

Today marks the first time I’ve been allowed into the Albuquerque facility. My credentials have been checked and re-checked so many times that they could probably tell you the weight and density of my last three bowel movements. Even so, they’ve been cutting corners on security, just so they can get me in here.

I fully expect that within twenty years, someone will have figured out a way to install nethead technology in anyone regardless of individual brain structure. But until they do, I’m pretty much guaranteed work wherever I go. And there’s even fewer of us netheads with the proper security clearances to get into the Madison facility, let alone Albuquerque. I’m a valuable commodity.

The facility isn’t much to look at: any decent biolab would have more apparent security. My nethead links are telling me otherwise, though; streams and warnings buzz against my skull so hard I can almost feel my teeth rattle. It unnerves me in a way that Madison didn’t, and Madison’s where they keep the host site for the Niobe satellite web. Enough solar power to — well, to blow up a biolab, for instance — focused onto the energy collectors for five dozen countries, and it’s still less well protected than this place.

It’s cool and dark inside the guard shack, and the back of my neck prickles after the blazing heat outside. The guard’s got a laser sight wired into his left eye; the silver tracery of it fades into his pale complexion much more smoothly than the similar patterns on my own skin. He gestures to the marks while the machines verify my ID. “Looks nice.”

“Thanks.” It’s striking, or so the nethead PR department says. They claim that’s why they want my image for their publicity stills, not just to provide the illusion of diversity. Some days I think they even believe it.

“Been here before?” The guard knows I haven’t — a glance at the screens could tell him as much and more — but sometimes courtesy trumps efficiency.

I shake my head. “I’ve been to Madison.”

“Madison, pfft.” He grins. “That’s nothing to what we got — ” He stops and turns red, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. I used to have that reaction, way back when I was sharing what I knew with Casey, when I tried to tell her that the comics we’d read were — well, not true, not close to true, but had some basis in reality.

“Got what?” I ask, as the computers spit out my ID and agree that yes, my fingers and retinas appear to be my own.

“Well, you know. Them.” He opens up the doors, and the flickering readouts in my periphery flare and scramble into new configurations. “The heroes.”

The official story of Casey and me is that we were kids together, grew apart, came back together, screwed around, and then split up for good once I realized how crazy she was. Both times it was the heroes that brought us together, the first time through the comics that had come out in the wake of Maxentius sightings and the rumors about the Sixth Seal group. We read them all, regardless of quality, lying on our backs in the vacant lot behind her house, ink on our fingers and intent discussions of whether Mistress Fivepoint could beat Jack o’the Green or if they’d just team up against Memetek. The second time it was because in my first months as a full nethead I learned so much about the shadow organizations, the reality behind all those rumors, and I could only think of one person I wanted to share that with — Casey, who could rattle off the Liberty League’s oath or Red Knight’s transformation mantra as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance.

Both times it was her head, or what was wrong with it, that split us up.

It’s a useful official version. But one thing you learn when you start getting involved in the shadow orgs is that the official version means very little. After all, none of them show up in any official version, except in the records of what didn’t happen, the plots that failed, the disasters averted.

Or, sometimes, in the lists of people who’ve disappeared.

The transport behind those metal doors takes me maybe eight floors down, with that bone-twitching stutter you only get from passing through negation fields. I don’t notice it; I’m too busy dealing with the sudden silence in my head. I can handle it — mental stability is one of the most important factors that they test for in determining nethead fitness — but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Particularly because the one link that does remain is the one that got implanted when I started working for the shadow orgs. For insurance, they told me. The Niobe GPS link.

I remember the Fourth Street biolab, and the back of my neck goes abruptly hot again.

When the doors open again, though, all thoughts of the world outside vanish. The visual input’s bad enough: between the scream of light on my right from what might be a laboratory and the dizzying drop twenty feet ahead of me, I can barely register mundane details like the polished-glass sheen of the floor, the central spindle of memory staves, the man waiting for me just to the side.

But all that’s nothing compared to the chatter of computers on every side, the information in patterns I’ve never seen before. It’s like being picked up from one set of rapids and dropped into another, and it takes all of my concentration not to drown.

The biggest difference is that there’s not much trace of nethead work. It’s tradition to leave our marks on the usernodes, stegans encoded into the streams of data like graffiti in a canal, but here there’s only two: Klaatu Barada Nikto! from the designer of the Niobe web, and Welcome to Olympus (plus a handy map) from a woman who’s now on permanent detail with the Secret Service. If this were a normal job, I’d be tempted to add my own mark to the tabulae, but right now I don’t trust what I’d leave.

A permanent link unscrolls with the boxy look of official work. IN RESIDENCE: Kazemusha/Lady Nettle/Oculus/Matthew Glendower/Maxentius . . . The list goes on, code names and real names (not that it matters which is which, this far in) and designations I’ve only seen in the most hidden records. Names to conjure with.

And finally I recognize the man who’s been standing just to the side of the entrance. They’ve sent the shining face of the org to meet me.

He’s just like Casey and I always imagined, resplendent in ivory and gold, and while he doesn’t have the red cape the comics gave him, I get the sense he’d like one. Barrel chest, brilliant smile, voice with enough bonhomie for a tri-state area. “Bit overwhelming, eh?” Maxentius says

“A bit,” I agree weakly.

“It does that to me too, sometimes.” No it doesn’t, I think, but he’s not talking about the information overload. He gestures to the vista behind him: dozens of circular floors leading off a central shaft, lifts and elevators between for those who can’t just fly. “This sight — when I tire of it, then I’ll know the skein of my days has run out. Good to meet you, Seth.” He clasps my hand and shakes it vigorously.

“Good to meet you.” I’ve read papers on how much force that hand can exert, how many diamonds it can crush into powder.

“And you’re here to see Glendower. Splendid.” He turns and strides forward across the gleaming floor. I follow, and if it looks like I’m not gawking, that’s because I’m only doing so in my head. Of the levels I can see, some are sterile white and glassed in; some hold weapons and implements I can only guess at; a few look inhabited, homes for those who can’t or won’t stay outside in the world they claim to protect. A blur on the next floor up, across from us, resolves into a sparring match between two figures I’ve only heard rumors of, and even then I have to slow the visual down by a factor of ten to get a glimpse.

At the far end of the walkway, Maxentius glances over his shoulder. “Come along, lad! Mustn’t keep him waiting!”

Of all the members of the shadow organizations, Maxentius has read too much of his own press. He really does talk like a comic book; ‘lad’ is nothing to worry about.

Still, it bothers me, and not just because I can remember one too many cops calling my father ‘boy’ on one too many late-night drives.

There are some things I know for sure about Casey: she loved superhero comics; she didn’t keep in touch with her family after graduating; she wrote pamphlets for the Oakland Anti-Gnosis society; she couldn’t keep a job for more than six months at a time; she could make fantastic biscuits out of damn near any ingredients she had at hand. When her parents moved away the first time, when we were in school, it was because the first round of mandatory testing had come through. I was on the track to being a fully-functional nethead; Casey had tested positive for a number of dysfunctions, including predisposition to schizophrenia.

There are things I wonder about — whether the chemical imbalances in her brain were caused by her father’s exposure to some of the nastier weapons of the Second Chinese War, whether she knew what a risk I was taking associating with her, whether we should have gone ahead and slept together after all.

There are things I’ve been told about her in the wake of Fourth Street, about her mental state and the company she kept. These are things I will never believe about her.

Maxentius leads me around one side of the silo shaft, through what looks like a trophy room (it’s not, according to the nethead stegans). He’s rapidly figured out that I’m not listening to him, but that doesn’t stop him; in fact, I think he’s taken it as license to ramble on.

I catch a glimpse of someone I think is Pale Rider down one hallway. If it is him, that means this particular shadow organization has gone global. Most of them have; a few nationalists cling to their identity in places like Turkmenistan and France, and somehow I’d always assumed the U.S. shadow orgs would be the same way.

Of course, they have the Niobe web. That automatically makes them global; I’ve got the reminder in my skull if I ever forget that.

We walk past cases holding remnants of past work, plots unraveled, events that were hushed up and now only remain as a footnote to history. Still talking, Maxentius gestures vaguely at what looks like a giant pair of shears. “. . . didn’t tell us that the phase shift had affected only half of her, and the other half was stuck in another dimension entirely!” He chuckles, and I remember to smile. “Down this way. Glendower, are you there?”

A gray-haired man in a white shirt and bow tie — there’s even a tweed jacket, the kind with the elbow patches, tossed over a chair — waves back without looking. He’s talking to a woman I don’t recognize. I wouldn’t know her if we met on the street; I’d only know her if she wore her mask. She folds up her clipboard, nods to Maxentius, and fades into invisibility with a faint scent of calla lilies.

Glendower’s in his late fifties but looks older. He walks with a cane, and while he doesn’t have the same build as Maxentius, he’s not a small man either. His gray hair is still thick, but there are autofocusing spectacles perched on his nose, and when he pulls a chair over and sinks into it, it’s clear that standing for so long was a strain for him. He’s the one who pushed through my security clearance, since the virus affected the orgs’ datalogs and he’s the one who has to work with them. Bookkeeper to the gods. “Well, Mr. Carson, what do you think of our little home?”

“It’s amazing,” I say, truthfully, and then a touch of the perverse prompts me to add, “if a little rough on visitors.”

To my surprise, it’s not Glendower who answers, but Maxentius. “The price of our work,” he says with a regretful sigh. Maxentius doesn’t hide his feelings much; the man’s all surface, glossy and deep as a four-color page spread. “These days, to defend the innocent requires one to have a home of which all are innocent.” He sees my expression and shakes his head. “I assure you, lad, we’re all on the same side here. We are protectors of the world we love, sworn to defend it.”

He’s entirely serious, and of all the members of the shadow orgs, he embodies those values the most. And yet I can’t help myself. “‘To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal,’” I quote. Glendower shoots me a sharp look.

Maxentius, though, hasn’t noticed. “Yes! Exactly.” He shakes my hand a second time, beaming, and nods to Glendower. “I must be off. Good luck — I hope we’ll see you here again.”

I watch him go. He rescues kittens; that much is a matter of record. It’s part of why there’s now a cleanup detail assigned solely to him. The shadow orgs may prize their secrecy, but Maxentius does make a useful distraction. And, after all, they are all on the same side.

I shouldn’t have made fun of him. It’s not his fault he’s an innocent.

Glendower’s watching me, but unless he’s a nethead — and I know he’s not — he can’t see everything I’m doing. “I’ve set up a contact terminal for you,” he says. “We’d been meaning to change out our security, but good netheads with clearance are few and far between, and I’m afraid we were caught with our trousers down. The virus doesn’t seem to be actively hostile, but my projections show it stopping work outright if it overloads any more of our systems. At the moment it’s benign, just irritating.”

“I can imagine.” Twenty years ago, we’d have been fine with a microsecond lag; forty years, and a five-second lag was nothing. But technology spoils us — I should know, I’ve got a few dozen terabytes’ worth of it in my head. I switch from wireless to node work, and put my hands on either side of the contact terminal, relying on the points wired into my fingertips to carry me in. “I can upgrade some of your security while I’m here, but it’ll just be a patch-up job till I can come back, and I don’t yet have clearance for a second visit. You sure you couldn’t fix it yourself?”

Glendower shakes his head. “It’s rapidshift. I just don’t have the speed to keep it from mutating as I’m working on it. That’s nethead work.”

Of course it is; I created the damn virus. My consciousness is already split between the terminals that dot the base; I damp wireless input to make up for it and start searching.

Glendower waits for a response from me, then shakes his head and laboriously gets up from the chair. He’s got a pacemaker; I can sense the pulse of it like a cricket in the room. “It’s rare to have a nethead down here,” he says, opening a cabinet and pouring a glass of tonic water. “I had to argue just to get the first few working on our security.”

“You’ve got failsafes in place, though.” Those failsafes gave me nightmares for weeks, after I first found out that the Niobe web wasn’t just for solar energy.

“True.” He pours a second glass and sets it on the shelf next to me. I nod my thanks but don’t take it. We’re both silent a moment; realtime maybe ten seconds, wiretime much longer, long enough for me to cordon off my virus and distinguish the main archives from what I’m looking for. They don’t let these out to the general public; they don’t even have access through the Madison facility. The Oculus records.

“You didn’t need to tease Max like that,” Glendower says quietly.

“Probably not.” I’m sorting through records, searching by time, date, subject, even setting aside a part of my brain to flash through random stills, looking for Casey. Oculus’ uploads take up entire spindles; I’ve heard that no one knows why it records everything it sees, but they don’t want to upset it by asking. “It just bothered me.”

“When he finds out you quoted the mission statement of the Klan at him, he’ll be a mess. Max doesn’t work well when he has a crisis of conscience.” He settles back into his chair with a grunt, and tonic water splashes over the back of his hand.

“Then he’ll only be saving the world eighty percent of the time. I’m sure the rest of you can cover the remaining twenty percent.” Something about the virus cordon is bothering me, but I’m so close — and there she is, Casey’s face blurring by, the brief video record categorized with about four hundred others, each no more than a couple of minutes.

“Would you be willing to help out with that twenty percent?”

I stop, sliding Casey’s record into my personal memory like a shoplifter sliding a necklace into his pocket, and turn to face him, keeping one hand on the contact terminal. “Sorry?”

Glendower smiles and thumps his cane on the floor. He needs that cane, I know; an accident when this place was being built wrecked his right foot, and he hasn’t had it replaced. “If nothing else, this incident highlights our need to have a nethead on the team. You’re the best, you’ve got the offline intelligence we need, and you’ve shown great discretion in your work for us here and in Madison.”

Discretion. Right. Which is why I’m now fixing a problem I created. It’s tempting, though — I can imagine Casey saying Who wouldn’t jump at a chance to be a superhero? Or is it only that I want her to say that?

I unpack Casey’s record for later viewing, thinking of the smell of hot dirt in the vacant lot and four-color ink smudged across my fingers. “Let me think about it.”

“Well.” Glendower sighs, then leans over and sets his glass down on the far terminal. “I understand, you’ve got doubts. After all — ” the screen behind him lights up, “ — I think I know why you’re here.”

Casey stares down at me from Glendower’s screen, twenty times larger than life, and I finally recognize what the virus report is telling me: someone, probably Glendower himself, got to it first. I stare at Casey’s image on the screens — an ID photo, not a mug shot. They’d only had mug shots for the ones who’d gotten arrested, and Casey didn’t even make it that far.

Glendower nods. “She was important to you.”

“She was.” I open the video record that I went through so much to find. It’s only about twenty seconds’ worth of Oculus’ point-of-view, showing a door bursting open. Casey crouches at the far end of the room, frizzy hair tied up in a bright red cloth, eyes wide and dark.

She’s just as I remember her.

The record shows her turning and reaching for something — a gun? a phone? a vial that could be her medicine and could be something else entirely? All of them are on the same table. She never even touches it before a flash of light from the door cuts her down.

I close my eyes, then open them to face Glendower, and behind him, Casey. “You knew?”

“We’re everywhere, Mr. Carson. We knew.” He looks over his shoulder, at the image of a smiling dead girl. “She’d been part of the Fourth Street terrorist cell. We got to the lab first, but when we came to apprehend her — ”

“Don’t.” I can see what happened. I take another look back into the Oculus records; someone’s lumped all of the recorded deaths together, whether criminal or civilian or just plain dumb luck. Glendower’s assembled them for his own penance, I guess. He doesn’t let himself forget either.

It’s not enough.

“My offer still stands.” He props his hands on his cane and gazes at me. Casey does the same, over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first to forsake vengeance and turn your considerable talents toward a good cause. Or — ” he sits back a little, “ — you can take that vengeance on me. I won’t stop you.”

My breathing slows, and the hand that isn’t on the terminal curls into a fist. I could do it. I could kill him in any number of ways — stop the pulse of his pacemaker, use the autofocus in his spectacles as a link into his optical nerve and burn his skull from the inside out, scramble his neurons till he’s a drooling vegetable — and walk away. I might even get out of here unscathed, depending how what method I chose.

But kill him, and there’ll be another just as certain that they’re justified in their actions. Because it’s their job to save the world. They’re everywhere already, and so many of them wear masks. They say it’s to protect their identities, but it’s also so that we’re never sure who’s one of them, who’s watching. They’re always anonymous again in daylight.

Who was that masked man? I don’t know, but there’s twenty more of them outside.

Or join them. That’s the logical ending for a nethead; most of us find one big project and stick with it, and this would be in a good cause. If the terrorists had gotten their hands on the Fourth Street biolab, the result could have killed thousands. How many lives could I save that way, how many Caseys could I save . . .

I snip the virus out of the system with an absent thought and take my hands from the terminal, switching back to wireless. “Let me think about it,” I say again, and this time I’m not stalling, I’m pleading.

Glendower nods. “I’m sorry,” he says, bowing his head. “About your friend’s death — I’m sorry.”

And that decides it. Not I’m sorry we killed her, but I’m sorry about her death. Sidestepping the responsibility. Making it an act of God.

I take a few steps toward the exit, hesitant and unsteady. It’s not acting; I have to retract some of my motor skills to handle the download, the massive quantity of Oculus records pouring into my head. But Glendower sees it as the agony of indecision, and he lets me pass. He’s a good man; he wouldn’t deliberately hurt someone like me.

I find my way to the exit unhindered — I think Maxentius, or maybe one of his cleanup crew, waves to me as I go by. As the doors close, I wonder with the portion of my brain that isn’t unpacking records if I’ll make it out of here at all. If the shadow orgs wanted, they could kill me right here, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

But these are the good guys.

In the silence of the transport I have time to craft the message that will go out with each clip. It’s not much, just a few lines for each record, an autovoice that’s recognizably my own. And links, archives, paths to data that isn’t shared or acknowledged, not even by netheads. Even crafting this, having a message like this unsent in my skull, is punishable by federal law.

The guard waves me through, and I step out into blinding sunlight. The world of data flows around me again — and this time I leap into it, sending out into all nodes, the conspiracists and the news media and the archives. The Niobe GPS activates, and above me the satellite web moves, shifts, focuses.

It’s not enough to stop me.

These people have died because of the shadow organizations, I say over each clip, each death, each victim of the shadow orgs. The desert sunlight shifts, shading from yellow-white to blazing, bright enough to hurt my eyes. They were deemed guilty and executed without trial. The guard is yelling, first running after me and then, as he realizes what’s happening, back to the shade and safety of his bunker.

They were unlawfully executed. And links, lists, the shadow orgs and all their work, thrown open to the world they claim to protect. If they can’t take the scrutiny, they don’t deserve to last.

I turn my face to the incandescent sky and smile, racing to meet the sunlight.

About the Author

Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.

The Bells of Subsidence

Michael John Grist

The Bell is coming.

It’s night, and I’m lying beside Temetry on a cold grey crater of this world’s endless desert, listening to the oscillations of the Bell. At times we glimpse its Brilliance, the after-image of its long and branic toll splashing across the plush black firmament like an endless corolla borealis. I imagine it far overhead, arcing through the universe, plancking the anthropic landscape from yoke to clapper, and can think of only one word to describe it.

“Godly,” I whisper.

Temetry nods by my side. He doesn’t speak, not since the last Bells came when we were babies, but I know what he’s thinking. I’m thinking it also.

“How are your non-orientable insects?” I ask.

He shrugs. This shrug means he’s had no breakthroughs. I know it, because he’d not be here with me if he had. The men of this world would have taken him for the Gideon heat-sink long ago.

“I won’t forget you,” I say to him quietly.

He turns to me, and smiles, because he knows I cannot keep that promise. The Bell is coming tonight. His hand worms the grey sand, folds my fingers within his own, and I remember that he is the most beautiful thing I have.

“I love you,” I whisper to him. His fingers tighten, rippling over mine in Euclidean gymnastics, until our hands are joined partway between a reticulated conch shell and an intersecting Klein bottle.

I laugh. It is our joke, a vestige of what Subsidence has brought us both. We are only 11, and I love him, because I know in my heart that he will never forget me.

“I’ll whisper your name to the branes until I die,” I promise him, feeling the urgency of this moment, alone in this crater for the last time.

His smile turns sad. It is the last abiding image I have of him, because then comes the sound of old Ingen, and the moment is lost. She is huffing and panting her rooty head over the crater-lip. This place is no longer special or secret. Temetry’s dazzling smile is sad, forever, because I’ll never see him again.

Ingen is my mother, and she uses me.

She plucks me from the crater without even glancing at Temetry. I don’t think she even sees him anymore. Arm in arm we stroll back to the Gideon bore, and she chatters on about her day, about what permutations she wrought in this planet’s atmosphere, what gains in the heat-sink they explored.

We arrive at the bore-head, a silver pipe in this dry planet’s haunch, and she kneels before me in the grey sand, her hands on my shoulders. I know this is how she talks to her simulacra, plugging fresh wavelengths into their pea-sized minds, laying in the algorithms of growth. I am just another of her extremities, to be ordered, wound, and sent chuttering on my way.

“You must forget that boy, Aliqa,” she tells me. “He’s lost, too far under the Bell. You know that, don’t you? He can’t follow where you’re going.”

She aspires to love me, but I know the thing she loves most is herself.

“Yes mother,” I reply. I am polite and correct, a good Gideon girl.

Ingen ruffles my hair in the way I hate. I am not an infant anymore. Temetry would never do it. “Good girl,” she says, and she leads us into the bore-head. We stand atop the dimple, and she initiates the involutions.

Space folds, and I taste the familiar feel of my mother’s mind in my own, twisting the anthropic plane. A moment later we emerge in our living room.

“Go to your involutions, Aliqa,” Ingen says. “Hone your mind for the Bell.”

I go. In my room I close my eyes, stand upon my dimple, and begin. Far into the night I manifold four dimensions in non-Euclidean space, inverting Tesseracts, decanting Klein kettles, shaving Möbius strips into interlocking many-twisted chains.

I finish in the dark morning, as ever unable to speak or think, the involutions have so stripped away my sense of self. I sit on my bedside vacantly, emptied into submission, until the folds of my mind remember the shape they ought to take, and I can heal.

Then I will sleep.

This is not my hope. It is my mother’s hope for me. She will have me upon the Bells though she must strip the last shred of self from my mind. I am matter to be prepared, used, and replaced.

In my non-state I struggle to think of Temetry, but there is nothing of him there. No I, no you, only the endless entangled looping of the branes.

Pink dawn comes, and on a Gideon screen in my empty room I watch the Bell snuffing down over the grey desert.

It is immense, a vast colorless ark that fills the horizon, eclipsing the grey desert I have known all my life. At the atmospheric boundary its toll emerges as a jarring rumble in the earth, a Brilliance so complex with harmonies and grace notes that it makes all the simulations I’ve heard seem like one-fiddle jigs. The sound is a universe of its own, oriented through the branes in ways I cannot grasp.

It snuffs down, and all I can think of is Temetry. He will be out there somewhere, sitting the grey crater-sand, folding paper with his hands, his eyes sad as the first sun rises. Before him will be an array of non-orientable sand-hoppers, each folded like Möbius strips with only a single side. Each of their eight limbs will be perfectly formed, aligned, so life-like they could at any moment hop away. He will have sat awake all night folding them, as the only thing he can do.

He will watch as this Bell lands, and he will name it after me, for he knows it will be the Bell that takes me away.

Grey sand fills the screen, and it lands. I feel the branes tremble around me. This is my life, now. Tears run down my cheeks as I realize what it means. I will truly never see Temetry again.

Then old Ingen is at my side, dabbing at my cheeks with her sleeve, hustling me to the door.

“Don’t worry on my account, child,” she bustles, and I realize she thinks my tears are for her. “Old Ingen will abide. There’s much work to be done here yet, don’t cry for me.”

I want to tell her I am not, but bite my lip hard. There is no need to be cruel, now. It will change nothing, only hurt us both more.

At the door she holds me again by the shoulders, and I see that she too is crying. She runs her hands down my sides, smudges away a non-existent speck of dust, and I wonder. Perhaps she does love me after all. Perhaps she is sad to see her most talented creation disappear.

“Be a good girl,” she says. “Do as they say, be polite.”

I smile and nod a this fallacy. We both know I will have no choice. For the next five years I will be indentured to the Bell, and my mind will not be my own. There will be no need for me to do a thing, except survive.

“You’ll make me proud, Aliqa,” she says. “Don’t worry about that.”

I smile, I nod.

We enter the Gideon bore together. The world flutters like a butterfly kaleidoscope, I taste my mother’s mind for the last time, and the next phase of my life begins.

We are a class of 100, boys and girls of Bell-age, drawn from all the Gideon bore-holes sunk into our planet. Spotless white simulacra gather us in a vast hall, colorless as the Bell’s exterior, and move us to stand upon our marks; dimples in the smooth flooring.

I let myself be shunted into place by their cold palms. I look down at my dimple, and wonder briefly how many have stood here before me, how many have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence alive.

I push that thought aside, and in the seconds before it begins, try to sequester what parts of myself I can, hidden within the folds of my mind.

Then the anthropic plane is unleashed upon us.

It is unlike any involutions I have done before. It is an inexpressible order of magnitude larger. In the face of it, I am obliterated. I am rewritten.

An endless torrent of images pounds through the thin capillaries of my mind, effortlessly scrubbing away all the tiny levees and dams I have prepared against it; a tidal surge of unorientable, non-intersecting, non-Euclidian possibilities.

As the torrent comes, I cannot help but seek order from the chaos; raveling and inverting Klein bottles, stacking and nestling them within each other like Matroska dolls, folding tesseracts upon themselves, helixing Möbius strips into Riemann planes. Around me the 100 do the same. Together, by the combined resonance of our efforts, we will planck the branes for the first time. We will build our own Brilliance. Through our efforts, the Bell will toll.

I barely feel the effects of gravity, as the Bell rises up through the atmosphere, and leaves my desert world behind.

Only when it is over, and it has been over for six of the eight rest hours allotted to us, do I begin to remember who I am, where I have come from, and what I have done.

The Bell has already left my world. Ingen is gone, left behind. Temetry is gone. All the things that tied me to who I was are gone.

I feel more than an ache, I feel an erasure. Already I have lost so much of what I was. My mind has diminished, has enlarged, has shrunk.

I am lying on a double-bunk cot in a dark room, where the simulacra brought me. Beside me a girl’s hand dangles down from the cot above. One of her fingers is marked by a line of lighter skin, and I wonder that she had once worn a ring.

I push her hand. It sways nervelessly.

“Wake up,” I say to her hand.

“She’s under the Bell,” comes a voice. There is another girl standing in the semi-dark before me, her hair in ratted pigtails. She smells overpoweringly of sweat.

“I’m Aliqa,” I say to her.

“Mazy,” she answers. Her eyes are shot through red. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I was?” I mumble. My lips seem thick, foreign appendages on my face. “What did I say?”

“The same as all these others,” Mazy says, and gestures at the groaning, sleeping, moaning bodies of the other 98 of us, stacked like folded tesseracts in our cots. “A load of old balls.”

I can’t help the frown from crossing my face. I was raised to be correct. Mazy laughs more when she sees my expression, then she leans in, and her sweaty stench rolls in with her.

“You listen to me, girl. You aren’t special, no way no how. Nothing in that brain of yours is worth going under the Bell for. You just let it go, let it all go, and you and me’ll be pals. You hear me?”

I blink hard, as if it’ll somehow push back her smell. It doesn’t.

“And if I don’t?”

Mazy laughs again, leans back, and gives the nerveless hand hanging from the cot above a playful shove.

“Then it don’t hardly matter a thing now, does it?”

She winks. She walks away.

There’s a little over an hour left before our next involutions; the red digits of a countdown clock on the distant black wall glow fuzzily. In the dim light I look at the white band round the girl’s nerveless hand, and wonder who gave her that ring, and what it might have meant. I listen to the others moaning, as Mazy said. They are whispering names, whimpering, crying in their sleep.

For a little while, I cry too.

Soon the simulacra come for us again, and carry us back to our dimples. I let them lift and maneuver me. I feel too weak to move more than my eyes. They lay me in my allotted space, and as I wait for the barrage to open, I think about Temetry. I know now that I cannot hope to hide him in an enfoldment of my mind. I can only say goodbye, again and again, until one day the Bell scores him from my mind forever.

“I won’t forget you,” I promised him on the sand, but I have not the strength to keep that promise. I am too small.

Then the barrage begins again.

I don’t come back to myself for a long time. When I do, it is to the freckled face of Mazy, up close to mine. She is lying by my side, sharing my cot, her tousled red hair on my pillow. I feel her warm breath on my lips. Her arm is wrapped around me. I try to shrug it off, but sharp pain aches through me, and I fall still.

Mazy stirs, and her eyes slit open. Her irises are deep green. She smiles at me.

“I thought you’d gone under,” she whispers. “It’s good to see you back.”

I open my jaw, struggling to ignore the pain. “How long?” I whisper.

Mazy shrugs. “Weeks? I forget. They really worked you good that time, though.”

“What?” I ask. My mouth is so dry. “What do you mean?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she pushes herself up on her elbow, reaches to my face, and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. I try to pull back.

“Stop it,” I mumble. “Get off my cot.”

“Your cot?” says Mazy. “This is my cot. You climbed in here yourself.”

“What?”

“After they were finished with you, whispering that damned name.”

I am confused. How could I climb here without knowing it? What cot am I in? “What name?”

“Temetry,” she says, and watches my face for the reaction. There is none, because the name means nothing to me.

“Who’s Temetry?” I ask.

“I don’t know. You were the one screaming it, in the middle of the involutions. They had to pull you off the floor and double your involutions to shut you up.”

Her words shake me. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“Not after a session like that, I’m not surprised.”

I lay there and say nothing.

“Was he a boyfriend?” Mazy asks.

I don’t answer. I try to cast my mind back, feeling as though I am probing a fresh wound. My mind is raw. Temetry. I reach back, back, and touch upon something. I handle it gently, calmly as I would a sand-hopper, lest it take fright and skitter away. Temetry; a feeling more than anything, a sense of something, insubstantial and shifting, but something definitely good.

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe a friend.”

Mazy snorts, and runs her hand through my hair again. My body aches too much to push her away. “Well, you’re my friend now. You and me. I’ll look after you, don’t worry.”

I don’t worry. I lie there, and wonder who Temetry might have been.

Months pass. The cots grow quieter every night, as memories are plancked out of our minds. Soon there is no one left to miss, no home to yearn for, no one to cry for. More of us go under the Bell.

Mazy shares my cot every night. She smooths my hair. When I become quiet, she speaks the name to me; Temetry. It has no meaning in itself, it is just a word that we share, something to bond us together. We lie in each other’s warm arms, and wonder on what it might mean.

Our lives are involutions and sleep. Tolling the Bell becomes something rote, ringing out our Brilliance across the universe in our wake. There are no questions to ask of each other, because there is no past to speak of. There are only questions in the now.

“Where do you think the Bell is going?” Mazy asks, most nights. I spin stories for her of all the furthest systems I’ve heard of, worlds where the people travel through Gideon bores and harvest the heat of stars on desert planets. Mazy smiles, laughs, and tells me about planets where everything is an endless city, and people drink the blood of plants and fly through the sky on rainbows and just have all the fun you could imagine.

I wonder if I we are from an endless city, or a desert, or a jungle. I wonder what Temetry is. Is it a place, a person, or a thing?

Around us, the 100 dwindle. I forget my own name, and she forgets hers. We come to know each other by touch, by feel, by the one word that stays with us; Temetry. It becomes a totem.

Then one day, I wake in her arms, and she is still. I shake her, but she doesn’t move. I open her eyelids and look into her eyes, and see within her a void, carved and hollowed out.

Her heart beats, her body lives, but her mind is gone. She is under the Bell.

Within a day she is only a memory.

Simulacra move me to my own cot. The others are removed. Lying there, wondering on the meaning of this word Temetry, I realize I am the only one left.

The only one left? Were there others?

I am to be captain.

Days pass and there are no involutions for me. Simulacra come in and out of my room, nameless as ever, and occasionally I ask the word at them.

“Temetry?”

They never reply. Their white bodies and flat blank faces seem to look past me. They bring me training cycles that I am to rewrite my mind with, sad stories of the origin of Subsidence, but I cannot watch them for long. All I want to know is the origin of this hole within me, this thing that I have lost.

I set down the latest of the cycles and exit my room. I walk the corridors and call out the word Temetry, though there is no one to respond. White-bodied simulacra move by me at times, carrying shapes on their flat white palms that seem to defy dimension. Pieces for the clapper, I presume, that revolve and involute as I watch.

I wander for days. When I’m hungry I eat, food brought by the simulacra as I need it. When I’m tired I sleep. I know these explorations are pointless, that even were I to walk a hundred years I would never cover more than a hundredth of the whole of the Bell. But that doesn’t seem to matter now.

I walk the involution rooms, hundreds of them, each stretching on and on, every one of them a hammer to hit the clapper at the Bell’s core, to keep us moving, to keep Subsidence alive if only in memory. I wander over dimples where generations have involuted the anthropic planes before me, where generations have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence moving.

I am alone, now, but for this word that haunts me; Temetry.

This is my odyssey. I know that as well as any.

I am sitting at a port looking out over our sparkling Brilliance, a branic contrail sizzling back through space like corolla borealis, when the captain comes to me. He sits by my side. I am not surprised. I have expected this for a long time.

He is very old; his face riven with lines deep as the dimples. He is the first living thing I have seen for as long as I can remember.

He sighs, and smiles at me.

“Temetry,” he says.

I smile back. Though we have never met, never spoken, I feel I know him well. “Do you know what it is?”

He shrugs. His eyes flicker with quiet amusement.

“I heard it in the Brilliance. You tolled the word into space. Even now, that word is floating through the anthropic planes, reverberating, echoing forever.”

“I wish I knew what it meant,” I say.

He only smiles.

We sit quietly for a long time, as the Brilliance ripples out like a whip-tail from our Bell, glissandoing into space.

“What happened to the others?” I ask him, at last. I don’t know who they might be, but I know there were others. I am not the only one the Bell took for fuel.

“They went under the Bell,” he replies, his voice soft. “Left behind on the planets we passed. They’ll live out quiet, uninspired lives. They’ll procreate.”

“And what about me?”

“That’s your choice. You’ll be captain, if you want. You’ll steer the Bell, and ring out your beautiful, mournful, sweet Brilliance to the universe. The other Bells will hear, and know you, and Subsidence will continue. Or you will not.”

“What else would I do?”

He shrugs, answers slowly. “Leave. Start a new life on the next planet. Forget about the Bells, about the branes and the Brilliance.”

I see it in his pale blue eyes. He has already made that choice, and left this place behind.

“Where will you go?” I ask. His gentle smile gives me the answer. We both know the Bell keeps no logs. There is no home for him to return to. There is nothing left in his mind now but the beauty of the branes.

He stands up.

“Goodbye, child,” he says. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

He walks away down the long and arcing corridor. I watch him go.

The simulacra come for me as darkness falls across the Bell. They wipe away my drying tears, and carry me to my dimple. Through the long hours of the Subsidence night, I planck the branes that toll us through space.

We will snuff upon a planet soon. There will be a hundred waiting, thinking glory and duty await, ready to sacrifice their minds to the might of this Bell, to the continuation of Subsidence, trusting me as their captain to lead.

But lead to where?

All I have is this word. I dream it while the planes reticulated about me, Temetry. It has no meaning, but I feel its weight, like a Gideon bore sucking me down. I am not free. I am not alone. I am weighted to this dying Empire, and there is only the grace of the branes to tell of my loss.

So I tell it to the branes. I dream them filled with this thing that is Temetry, this thing that matters so much even the Bell could not scrub it from my mind. I sing it, watch it spiral out into the dark, and wait for the Bell to snuff down.

We come to a planet. It is black with vegetation, life creeping every inch of crust beneath twin helixing suns. There are 100 waiting, adepts, all of them young.

I walk out amongst them. The black vines underfoot writhe at my touch.

These people do not know what I have brought to them. They look at me as though I am a god. They have adapted to the light of this place; their skin is dark, their violet eyes are wide, but they are people like me. I wonder at their dreams, at their lives, at the new adaptations the Bell will force upon them.

The captain’s words haunt my mind.

They talk to me, honor me, offer feasts in my name, but I do not know my name. The honor is for Subsidence. The feasts are for the Bell.

I stand for a long time, looking out at them and their world as though through glass, studying a thing I once knew. I watch their twin suns spiral overhead, patterns dictated by forces unleashed at the start of the universe, tracing through time, inexorable, unstoppable.

One of their leaders comes to me at last. She is tall, regal, dressed in long robes of finely braided black twine. I know to her violet eyes these fabrics have color. To me it is all the same.

“Is something wrong, Bell-captain?” she asks, her eyes downcast.

I look over her 100 and wonder how I can steal away their minds. I look over her black world and wonder if I could adapt, could make it my home.

“Do you know what Temetry means?” I ask her.

She looks up briefly, and I see in her eyes the frisson of confusion.

“Is this a test?” she asks warily.

I wonder if it is.

I walk past her, to the first of the 100.

“Do you know Temetry?”

I ask them every one, but none of them know, and at each of their answers the path before me becomes more clear, like order folding out of the branes.

I return to my Bell with none aboard. I will sound the clapper myself. I will toll the distances alone, and at each planet waiting for me, I will ask my question.

I will not fade away like the captain. I will not give my life to Subsidence. I will find the meaning of Temetry, and make of it my home.

Years pass.

Always there are more planets; worlds of lavic sulfur ice, worlds of ammonia oceans, worlds of aluminum sands, and on each one, the descendants of Subsidence. They live afloat on tar-balked ships of petrite, in cloud-castles held aloft by technologies long forgotten, in Gideon bores beneath the ground, in bubbles of molten neon endlessly revolving through the core.

At each I am met by the 100, and hopes that Subsidence has resurged, that the hand of the empire will once again come to steer their lives.

I bring no solace, only questions. I ask every one of them of Temetry, but none of them know. I leave them behind, my Bell empty and sounding only with my voice, my dreams in the Brilliance, my turn of the branes.

I see the wonders of the Universe from my dimple. There are galaxies yet forming, out near the discordant rim of existence. I see red shift blur the anthropic landscape about me, feel the echo of entropy as it is born. I hear the stripling birth-song of stars yet to bloom, the grand harmonies of systems flung out like the petals of a sand-flower, spiral arms interwoven as though the arms of long-lost lovers.

I dream of Tesseracts, and Temetry. I enfold Klein bottles and slice Möbius strips, and think of Temetry. It is the only thing to sustain me. A hundred times I have thought to leave the Bell behind, and a hundred times I have pulled back, held by this weight in my middle, pinning me in my place.

At each planet I tell them I will take none of their 100. At each I tell them to forget Subsidence. The Empire is gone. It is dead.

And I travel alone, in my Bell.

Others come.

I feel them first as grace notes in the rippling Brilliance, the tolling of loss through the branes. I feel them gathering at my back, tracking me through my enfoldments, keeping pace, adding their long melancholic tones to the anthropic landscape about me.

The sound of them fills me with sadness. I need not see them, the large colorless hulks of their Bells, to know they have come because of me. But I have nothing to give them.

Every passing day there are more. They swarm at my back, each Bell a string to planck the branes, to make the anthropic landscape tremble with ordered life. I feel them rising as though a wave, cresting behind me, an orchestra to pulse my dreams of Temetry to the universe.

At the next planet, a world of grey lead mists, I meet the first of them.

He is young, as I once was. Has it been 20 years? His hair is long and dark, his skin pale, his eyes so full of yearning.

He stands before me, looking at me as though I can give him back what he has lost. This world’s 100 watch us, there in the boiling mists with our two vast Bells snuffed down behind us. I do not know what to say.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“I am searching for a thing I can’t remember.”

He nods. He steps closer. I feel his need to reach out, to touch me, to know me.

“Temetry,” he says.

I nod. I watch as his eyes fill with tears. He makes no effort to brush them away. They slide down his cheeks like the oscillating Brilliance of the Bells.

“Why are you following me?” I ask.

“Because you are beautiful. Your search is beautiful. In the emptiness your tolls ring with meaning.”

“But I do not know the meaning. It is only a word.”

He smiles, steps closer, as though he is grateful for this.

“I remember nothing,” he says. “I do not know who I am, or where I came from. Your word is everything to me.”

I shake my head. I do not want this. I cannot be responsible for him.

“You should not follow me. It is a dream I have followed for too long. It has no meaning.”

“You are wrong,” he says, his voice firm. “It is the light of all the Bells. Your tolls spill hope through the universe.”

I too feel like crying to hear him say it so. I have no hope. Only the endless reticulation of the branes, and the black of space, and a word that is empty at my core.

“Don’t follow me,” I tell him. I can do nothing else. “Please. I am as lost as you.”

I do not speak to the 100. I return to my Bell. I have been a fool to continue this long. I am a fool with impossible dreams.

That night I resolve to leave the Bell at last. I will make my life among these people in their thick mists. I will learn their ways, and forget the word that has haunted me for 20 years. I will at last be free.

That night I dream of Temetry. It is a swollen river flowing from the clapper of my Bell, spreading out across the universe, dappling the branes with its flavor, ringing out for melancholy, and loss, and a thing once loved. It is beautiful, endless, threading the anthropic landscape with hope.

I wake to a thought that upturns my world.

I dare not think it, can scarcely imagine it. As I hurry to the first dimple I ever used, I cannot voice it aloud in my mind. It is too large, too terrifying, and I cannot bear any more, not now, not so close to the end.

But I must know.

At the dimple I enter the involuting trance, turning non-orientable shapes in non-Euclidean space as I have a thousand times before, until I can feel the flow of anthropy unfolding around me, the branes swelling like budding fruit within, opening the pathways that will allow my Bell to travel through the enfoldments of space.

But I do not travel. I reach out.

Here is my own trail. I can feel it in my Bell’s Brilliance, the hints of what I was 20 years ago, stitched together and held fast by the single word that remained throughout, spreading back from now to the time I was a child: Temetry.

It arcs up through the mesosphere of this leaden planet and out into space. It is the path I have left, the vibrations of Temetry that these other Bells have followed, the hope they have sought.

I speed my involutions, turning the endless flood of images harder than I have for years, reaching back, tracking my Brilliance through enfoldments and entropy, piecing together the reverberation of my travels through Subsidence’s empire.

In the midst of it, I launch the Bell. I can feel Temetry thrumming through me like a geyser of hope, a feeling I cannot hide, cannot mask from the other Bells. If I am to do this, they will surely follow. I do not care. Let them. All that matters is Temetry.

My Bell races the branes, back along a trail I have written across the stars for these past 20 years, with the fleet of Subsidence in my wake.

Days pass by, perhaps weeks, swimming up the contrail of my Brilliance to its source. I have traveled back through so many years already, five, perhaps ten. I have spun together the fading echoes of Temetry I left scattered through the darkness, leaping from tone to tone, straining at the limits of my shuddering mind to hold the trail together.

Then the trail is gone.

Its notes are too diffuse, split apart and wafted by solar winds and the expansion of the universe, broken by entropy, the echoes too faint for me to hear. I strive for it, I reach out desperately, but it is gone.

I collapse about my dimple. I feel like a child again, rewritten by her first involutions, scarcely able to think. There is only Temetry, and my failure. I sag there, and sob, because now I have lost all hope. It has dispersed, been erased, rubbed out by the endless reshuffling of the universe. Time has blown away my Brilliance. There is no more trail to find.

I sob, and sob, until sleep finds me.

I wake to a hand on my shoulder. It is a young man, but I do not know him. He is dressed in the clothes of a Bell captain. He has long dark hair, pale skin, and such a yearning in his eyes.

“Do you know Temetry?” I ask him.

He shakes his head slowly. He is sad, I feel that much.

“No,” he says. “But I can help you find it.”

I sit up. In his eyes is a desire burning as deep as my own.

“How?”

He steps back, and gestures to the involution hall around us. I rub the tears from my eyes, and see there on every dimple, at every one of the 100 stations, a Bell captain looking back at me.

It is impossible. There is only one captain to a Bell. My jaw drops slack.

“They want to help,” he says. “All of us, we want to help.”

I look around at them, back to the young man, and feel something cinch tight in my chest. There is a weight there, it has been there for such a long time, too much for me to bear. Perhaps now I will have the strength.

“Why?”

He smiles. It is sad, but laced with quiet strength.

“Because you give us hope.”

He does not wait. He moves to my side, where he takes up the one remaining dimple. I look around once more. The hall is full, as it has not been since I was a girl.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

And the involutions begin.

It is more than it ever was before.

Where it was a torrent before, now it is an inferno. It is chaos incarnate, blazing through our minds, a violent tsunami of impossibilities to be ordered and stacked.

And we stack them. Beneath the torrent, we stand. From its burning and furious heart we hundred Bell-captains forge the pure and startling music of the branes, each sounding a perfect note that entwines perfectly with the others. As the brutal force of the anthropic plane blasts across us, our notes rise and interweave like pillars into the sky, glissandoing harmonies I never heard before, chords that should ring false but now, under the combined force of our involutions, ring true. Our symphony swells through the chaos, growing into a thing larger than any one of us, larger than the sum of us, larger than Subsidence itself ever thought possible.

I soar on it. I feel it propelling me from behind, feel the will of the others beneath me, lifting me above the inferno, giving me the strength to do what I must.

I toll the clapper with their strength, and the Bell roars across the empty gulf of space faster than it ever flew before. I trawl the anthropic plane with their will, gathering up the long-faded remnants of my Brilliance, tracking the distant branic echoes that were once the word Temetry, sung out into nothing.

Faster, further, we hurtle back through the long years of my lonely voyage, and I feel the captains trembling around me. The inferno is too furious, the task too vast, and one by one they reach their limits. The anthopic flow overcomes them, and they slip beneath the Bell.

But we do not stop, nor slow. Less than ten remain, but we have been honed to incandescent perfection by the raging of the branes. I stand at the cutting edge of our Brilliance and hack into the decayed trail I left as a child, fusing the many parts together until the path emerges, and leads back, and back, and back.

The young man by my side shudders and drops limp. Somewhere far off simulacra carry him away, but I cannot stop. I am roaring now, tearing into the meat of the fabric of all things, forcing entropy to reform, meshing light from dead stars with the frequencies of interstellar dust blown on solar winds, building a tapestry of all chaos, of all order, pounding it in the furnace of this collective mind, smashing it until I totter under its weight, forging from it the single molten trail that I must follow.

Explosions, as the world begins again. Light floods out. Subsidence is born on a far-gone planet, and grows out into the galaxy. They spread, and spread, until their Empire is stretched so thin there is no union remaining, and entropy consumes them. All that remains is the Bells, their last vestige of civilization, ferrying their memory to worlds slowly sinking back into isolation and simplicity.

I read the history of all the Bell captains in the diffuse echoes of their Brilliance, and I understand why they have followed me here. Without Temetry, I would be just like them; as empty as Subsidence, as empty as their Bells, left orbiting like hollow moons about dead and dying planets.

The inferno rises, and rises, and at last, breaks.

Involutions rendered a hundred-minds strong finally crash as spume all about me. Everything is rewritten. Everything is under the Bell. We collapse, and around us this vast ship finally comes to a long, lone toll, as we snuff down upon a dry world, a grey desert planet, stocked with heat sinks and Gideon bores.

I stagger to the glass to look out over the world that was once mine. It is all craters. I fall in the corridor, struggling to hold on to what I am, as the sands billow up around us.

Simulacra wake me with water. The corridors are empty. I remember the long search, but there is no sign of the other captains. Perhaps they have already gone out, to my world, to find Temetry. Perhaps they all fell under the Bell.

I look out and see this planet’s atmosphere sparkling like corolla borealis, flecks of mist catching the reflections off my Bell’s sloping sides. I feel the branes thrumming around me, through my mind, filling me with possibilities.

I exit with nothing but the captain’s clothes on my back. This place is a desert, and the air is hot and dry. I feel the heat from their sinks radiating up from the grey sand. I walk a little way, past the silver Gideon bores, past the crowds of people watching and waiting. I see the 100, hastily turned out and waiting for admittance, flanked by their parents, grand and fierce expressions lashed across their faces.

They watch in confusion as I climb a dune and sit at the top. The vast weight of my Bell towers above me, shadows everything. I am yet its captain.

A man walks from the crowd to join me. He is perhaps as old as me, dressed in simple brown smocks. He sits by my side, but says nothing, only looks at me as though he knows me, with sorrow, with love.

He holds something out to me, on the palm of his hand. It is a speckled white sand-hopper. It is a pretty thing, its long legs stretched out to skein it over the hot desert surface. I reach out, thinking to touch it, expecting it to flee, but it does not move. I touch its back, its side.

It is folded paper. I lift it from his hand, turn it over in my hands. The folds and twists of its craftsmanship are stunning. All of its limbs, its sinewy body, its whip-thin antenna, are folded from a single sheet of paper. It has been twisted into a single side, like a simple Möbius strip, non-orientable.

I have never seen anything like it. It is beautiful. In all my travels, in all my years upon the Bell, I have never seen anything so alive brought out of the folding.

I turn to the mute man, look into his eyes.

“Temetry?”

About the Author

Michael John Grist is a science fiction & fantasy author and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. His stories can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and Andromeda Spaceways, and he is currently writing an epic fantasy novel. He runs a website featuring his writing and photographs of the ruins or ‘haikyo’ of Japan; filled with dark short stories and matching images of abandoned theme parks and ghost towns. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgrist.

From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

Gary Kloster

Monkey waited until the sky over the Gulf had gone all black and empty except for a billion stars before he pulled himself back onto the sailboat.

“Ceegee’s roughed your stuff,” he said, perched dripping on the rail. “They rough you too, Cesar?”

I spit in the ocean. When the cutter caught me, the ceegee boys had swarmed aboard and slammed me down so that some officer, all pretty in her white and brass, could question me.

Who’re you, where you going, where you been? Where’s the sugar? Over and over she’d asked, while her boys tore the boat apart. She hadn’t liked my answers. She knew I was lying, even when they couldn’t find anything. Finally, she had her boys rip my shorts off and gave me to her machines.

The ceegee robots had tentacles, reeking of rubber and lube. Those thin limbs had pushed between my teeth and down my throat, burrowed up my nose and shoved themselves deep into my ass. Searching all my hidden places.

They had wrecked my boat, and then they wrecked me. Those slick machines had left me choking, shitting, bleeding, puking. Sobbing. For all that wreckage and pain though, they hadn’t found one speck of sugar.

Because a little monkey I’d found floating in the middle of the gulf days before had looked at the empty horizon and told me the Coast Guard was coming.

“Ceegee assholes,” I said. “Course they’d rough a South Padre boy.”

“You want to rough them back?” Monkey’s eyes, glittering with starlight, met mine.

“How?”

Monkey curled his tail in and untied a thin white rope from it. “Haul this up.”

“The sugar?”

“Yes. Plus something I took from their boat while they were busy with you.”

“A gun?”

“Gun’ll just get you killed,” Monkey said. “Got you something better.”

The rope ended in my drybag, and I opened it up. Three sealed boxes of sugar. Illegal pharma, or nano, or data or who-knows. South Padre pirates just called it all sugar, and gave dumbasses like me boats and money to haul it. Something else nestled between the boxes, a thin tablet of glass and aluminum.

“What am I suppose to do with a ceegee computer?” I could feel the rawness in my throat, in my ass, the ache deep inside me from being helpless and naked and violated while that ceegee officer and her boys had watched. A gun seemed like a better gift.

“Rough them,” Monkey said. “I can teach you.”

I frowned, turning the thing in my hands, not sure. Just a computer, encoded, locked, useless to me, but Monkey gave me a grin.

Why should I argue with the magic talking monkey? He’d saved me from either being sent to a work camp by the ceegees or being crucified by the pirates back home. So I held the computer and listened to him talk, and slowly the hurt and fear curled up inside me into a knot tight enough to ignore.

Excerpted from the astronomy site, Constellation Prize:

Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova? Really?

Worst. Cover up. Ever.

Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’ll force those apes to look up for once.

We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves — Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.

We just have to agree on the narrative. We know what’s happening — a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.

We know that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We know. Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)

Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.

ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

We know.

How stupid do they think we are?

Well, I guess we did vote for them.

“Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.

“He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.

She smirked and ran her fingers through his fur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”

I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.

Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.

It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.

“You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.

“No.” My cut from that sugar run would pay our squat rights for two more months. By then, Monkey said I wouldn’t need to risk my ass out on the ocean any more. Touching the tablet beside me, thinking of all I’d learned in the past few weeks from him and this little window into such a strange, wider world, I believed him.

“Good,” Sophie said. Then, “Mom worried.”

“Mom noticed?”

Sophie’s fingers traced Monkey’s back. “She cried.”

“She wouldn’t have had to, if she’d sobered up long enough to do her job and paid our rights. Then I wouldn’t have had to go.”

Sophie blinked back tears, and my throat went tight. “Christ,” I sighed, staring at Monkey. He stared back at me, big eyes innocent.

“What are you looking at, furball? You keep saying it’s almost time, well, I say it’s past time. Start talking. Teach her. She needs this.” Monkey stayed silent for a second, and I added, “You make me look crazy, and I’ll throw you out for the gulls.”

Monkey stuck his tongue out at me, but then he turned and faced my sister.

“Sophie,” he said, his voice too deep for his tiny body. “Would you like to be a doctor, like your mother?”

Sophie’s tough. She didn’t throw Monkey off her, though she snatched her hand away.

“What?”

“I can teach you. The way I’m teaching Cesar to work his computer,” Monkey said. “I can teach you to help people, the way your mom used to. You want to learn?”

Sophie looked at the little animal in her lap, eyes wide, lips starting to move, then the balcony door scraped open. Mom, red eyed and bleary, grimaced out into the bright daylight.

“Who the hell you talking to out here?”

“Cesar’s monkey,” Sophie said.

Mom stared at Monkey. “Rats with thumbs. Carry disease y’know. Should. . .” Her voice trailed away and she stumbled away from the light, back inside. The sound of plastic bottles rattled through the door, her searching for another swallow.

Sophie shoved the door shut. “What is he, Cesar?”

“Magic,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know. Little bastard won’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you what you need, Cesar.” Monkey’s tail curled loose around Sophie’s wrist. “So you and yours can leave this place.”

“So we can be safe?” Sophie asked.

Monkey stared at me with his dark eyes, not answering, so I did.

“Not safe, Sophie. Strong.”

Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

Bogie 1’s leaving the system today. (Don’t start with the quibbles. She’s in the Kuiper belt, and that’s my finish line. Going as fast as she is, it’s not like she’s going to turn around.)

She came, popped her baby, slung around the sun, and now she’s off to boldly go wherever the hell she’s going next.

Which just leaves us with Bogie 2. Which is definitely headed straight at us, after those course corrections we saw it fire off last week.

So what the hell is it?

An instrument package? An ambassador? A bomb?

Maybe it’s a fucking fruit basket.

The answer is, we don’t know. And since both ships refuse to return our calls, we won’t know until it gets here. Frustrating, init?

Gosh, if only we could do something, like meet it half way, wouldn’t that’d be great? Oh, but to do that we would need a space program that wasn’t a complete fucking joke.

I know, we couldn’t afford it. Billionaires needed tax breaks and artists needed grants to paint their asses blue. I get that.

I’m just saying it might’ve been nice to have the opportunity to be proactive here, instead of just watching as Bogie 2 cruises in.

Because while it’s probably not a bomb, it’s not like we could do shit about it if it was.

I guess we’ll have to be content in knowing we spent our money on more important shit. Like winning the war on drugs, amiright?

Christ, we are such dumbasses. If it is a bomb, we deserve it.

The girl slammed the man down in our living room, scattering vodka bottles, screaming for the doctor.

I don’t know how she hauled him up all those stairs, big as he was. She had though, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to me tell her the doctor was too hung over to help.

She yelled, I yelled, the man bled and groaned, then my sister shoved in.

“Shut up, Cesar, and hold him,” Sophie snapped at me, wiping blood away from the knife handle that protruded from the man’s belly.

Too confused to argue, I did what she said. The girl shut up too, staring at Sophie. I wondered why she didn’t protest about a kid taking charge, but shit, Sophie was doing something.

Her hands danced across the man, pressing and poking into his neck, armpits, and groin. He groaned once, then passed out. Sophie jumped up, ducked into her room, and bounced back before I could yell at her with a suture kit and drug vials.

“Thought Mom sold all her shit.”

“Not what I hid,” Sophie said. “Grab the knife.”

“Why?”

“Cause when I tell you, you’re going to pull it out.”

“What?”

“Do it, Cesar,” Sophie said, her voice taking that crisp tone our Mom’s used to get before she whupped us. “Do it just how I say, or he’ll bleed out. And if I lose my first patient cause of you, you’ll be my second.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Sophie gathered her supplies, paused to look at Monkey, who nodded at her. Then she started telling me what to do.

“Rest, clean water, and meat if you can get it. He lost a lot of blood.” Sophie sounded exhausted, but she stood straight as she explained to the girl what her father would need. I listened and spun the knife in my hand, wondering what the hell to make of my little sister.

“Thank you.” Lisa, the girl, she was about my age. “We owe you.”

I stilled the knife, looked at the anchor branded into the skin of the girl’s arm. “You’re fisherfolk?”

“Yes. We’ll get you fish, whatever you want.” For the first time I noticed her long braids, her rich red-brown skin and my tongue went all sideways.

“Fish. Well — ”

“What the hell’s this?”

Mom stepped into the room, ragged with involuntary sobriety. She looked at the man stretched across our floor, a row of stitches marking his belly. “Who the hell did that?”

“I did,” Sophie said, almost a whisper.

“When’d you decide to play doctor?”

“When you got too drunk to be one.”

Mom stared at her, red-rimmed eyes almost focusing for once, then she turned away, stumbling back into her room.

“Who was — ”

“Nobody,” I told the girl, my tongue free again. “You got a boat?”

“Course we do.”

“Good,” I said, “We’re going to need a ride, sometime soon.”

“That we can trade you, easy.” She smiled at me, and I smiled back, a little dizzy again. I looked away from her to catch my breath and caught sight of Monkey’s tail disappearing into Mom’s room.  

Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

A year’s passed since Bogie 2 blazed across the sky, broke up and dropped its pieces into the deepest parts of the ocean, and what’s happened?

Nothing.

So is that all the show our visitors planned for us?

Doubtful.

They’re down there, doing something. Spying? Colonizing?

Poking Cthulhu with a stick?

I have no fucking clue. None of us do. Us curious Georges gotta wonder, though. We stare at the waves and try to imagine what’s going on down there. What are they doing, what are the planning?

When are they coming out?

Because they will. They didn’t come all this way for nothing. Someday they’re going to surface, and then what?

In the comments, in my inbox, everyday, that’s the question, over and over. What are they going to do to us?

Christ, how the hell should I know?

All we can do is watch the sea and wait, and hope that maybe, if we’re lucky, they won’t fuck us over anymore than we’ve already fucked ourselves.

“Where you folk going?”

Samuel had a rough voice to go with his big body, but he treated me nice. He treated Sophie like a saint.

“New Orleans,” I said.

“Orleans? Why in hell would you want to go somewhere more messed up than South Padre, boy?”

Because a man waited there with three new US national ID cards, each of them tied to grey market credit lines flush with the money I’d drained from some private accounts last week. A certain ceegee officer and her boys were going to be wondering where all their money had gone, soon.

I just smiled. “No worries, Samuel. You get us there, we’ll be fine.”

The big man grumbled, but went back to his rigging, rubbing his hand over the raw pink scar on his belly. His daughter helped him, and when Lisa caught me staring at her she smiled.

“We should bring them along.”

Monkey’s whisper made me jump, but he clung to my shoulder easy enough, lips brushing my ear as he spoke. “We’ll need more people on the mainland.”

“What for?” I asked, turning to the rail, away from the fisherfolk.

“Getting stronger. Look.”

Following his arm, I could see something floating in the water. An old door, and on it —

“Jesus,” I swore. “One for each of us, right?”

“You’ll each need one. To learn, to grow.”

I stared at the little monkeys clustered on the makeshift raft, staring back at me. “Grow into what?”

“Something better.” Monkey shifted on my shoulder, and I realized how much I’d missed him being there these last few weeks. He’d helped me crack the ceegee’s accounts and arrange our documents, but he spent most of his time now with my mother, whispering in her ear. “We’re going to help you. All of you. There will be those, though, who won’t like that.”

“The people who make me and mine weak,” I whispered.

“It’ll change, Cesar. Your family will grow, and there are other families, all around the world, growing and learning like you. You’ll come together, someday, and it’ll all change.” Monkey dropped from my shoulder, starting towards the prow where my mother stood, staring out at the waves. Standing straight, clean, sober.

“What are you teaching her?” I called after him, not caring who heard, knowing it didn’t matter.

Monkey stopped and looked back at me, eyes shining with sunlight. “I’m teaching her about hope, Cesar. Hope, and God.”

Something thumped against the hull, and over the rail the new monkeys bounded, eager to teach.

About the Author

Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Baen’s Universe and Writers of the Future 25.

The Romance of Ruins

E. C. Ambrose

Little excites our sense of adventure more than an attractive ruin: a castle on a hill, a vine-clutched pyramid, a masonry wall sheltered in a natural cave. Ruins appear in a variety of roles in the fantasy tale — and it’s rare indeed to find a fantasy without them. Some are indelible settings for pivotal scenes, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Weathertop. Others are destinations in themselves — fabled cities that hide secrets the protagonist must discover. Still others suggest a deeper truth to the story, a layer beneath the obvious reality: a ruined rocket at the center of an apparently medieval city.

What purposes do ruins serve in the fantasy story, short or long? What resonance do they create? How does this sense of history enhance the tale at hand? Looking at the history of European interactions with ruins provides interesting insight into how and why they appear in the realms of fantasy, and how characters respond to them.

[Heidelberg Castle, Germany, one of the most striking of European ruins.]

The origin for our fascination with ruins is likely found in the work of the medieval humanists associated with the Italian poet Petrarch, famed as an author and speaker even in his own time. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Petrarch disdained his own time as decadent, a dark period when men and morality had fallen from grace. Rather than look to the future for improvement, these early humanists instead took their inspiration from the works they translated and disseminated: the writings of ancient Rome.

Clearly, the Romans possessed wisdom and skills lost to their weak descendants, but it might be possible to reclaim that Golden Age. Especially in Italy, but also across much of Europe, the physical remains of the Roman Empire still loomed over their medieval counterparts. In some cases contemporaries incorporated the broken architecture of the ancients into their own structures, creating hybrid buildings with elements constructed a thousand years apart.

[A later period house built into part of the ruined abbey at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]

In places like Trier, Germany, this consumption was a deliberate act, with the former Imperial Palace transformed into a church, its awe-inspiring proportions and ingenious forced perspective harnessed to serve religion rather than state. Petrarch urged the popes, then residing at Avignon, to return to Rome, wresting it back from anarchy and using that rich landscape as the center of a new Golden Age. He even supported the military coup of the peasant Cola di Rienzo, an uprising that briefly succeeded at ruling Rome, only to degenerate into a Roman-inspired madness and collapse.

The landscape of Europe — the origin of many influential fantasy authors and the inspiration for many great fantasy works — grows thick with ruins. To the Italian humanists, Rome dominated the local imagination. Meanwhile, in the Celtic regions from France and Spain to Ireland, pagan tumuli, standing stones, and earthworks rise up as well, creating a palimpsest of history, tangible and mysterious. Ruins of all ages dot the maps of European cities, serving as literal playgrounds, open-air museums, and secret hideouts for the seminal authors who established the fantasy genre. Ruins formed the backdrop of their lives, creating a sense of the richness of history beneath every footstep, around every corner.

[Ruins in the garden at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]

It’s not uncommon in a fantasy novel to find ruins embedded in the landscape and essentially treated as part of the scenery. In the work of many lesser fantasists, scenes may take place in a picturesque ruin, but the ruin itself remains in the background, not drawing the characters’ or the reader’s attention — just as those ruins that spot the landscapes of Europe must become mundane for many who live there and pass them on a daily basis. And for authors like Tolkien and Lewis, whose works inspired not only generations of readers, but American writers as well, this deep history would be fragmented and layered yet again by the ruin of World War II.

In this way, the ruin can speak to the very heart of its world. David Farland echoes the sense of tradition being destroyed in the first volume of the Runelords series, when his characters are led by mysterious compulsion to the Seven Stones rumored to be the foundations of the world itself. They find most of the standing stones already toppled, and the last one breaks while they watch, foretelling great change, perhaps the destruction of all that they know.

The Victorians explored, exploited, and domesticated the ruins around them. Victorian gardens often feature mysterious pathways or broad vistas deliberately constructed to call attention to elaborate and artificial follies made after the fashion of medieval and ancient structures. Monasteries broken by Henry VIII became pleasure gardens and walking paths, and artwork featured delicate human figures dwarfed by the remnants of the past, even as the inhabitants devour the fruits of the present. Ironically, the Victorians turned for their own Golden Age to the very height of the medieval period that Petrarch despised.

[c. 1800 engraving from Trier, Germany shows the medieval church built into the Imperial Baths (artist unknown).]

Pre-Raphaelite painters created images of King Arthur and his knights in a process of both recovering and creating of the myths of chivalry that underlie so much fantasy fiction. The Arthurian tales beloved of the courts of 12th-century Europe were embellished with heroic values even then, and more so in England and America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Little wonder that the generation of authors we now think of as fantasy’s founding fathers looked to the Middle Ages amidst the horror of their own time — a degraded and decadent age if ever there had been one. And they packed their fantasy realms with ruins, both inspiration and reminder of that brighter time.

The most obvious use of ruins in fantasy, then, is the evidence of that Golden Age when humans were greater and more worthy, often possessing nobility, wisdom, strength of arms, and semi-magical talents their descendants no longer have. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is rife with ruins of this kind, the symbols of the prior age. They serve not only as reminders of the fall, but also as hope for the future — that the True King, Aragorn, could return the land to its richness and glory. Indeed, the city of Osgiliath, introduced as a ruin, and the hills of Emyn Arnen, the traditional homeland of Gondor’s stewards, are given to Aragorn’s designated prince, Faramir, to be restored to prosperity.

C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend, offered an interesting example of this conception of the Golden Age in the course of his Narnia series. The children crowned as kings and queens in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, reside in the fabulous palace of Cair Paravel, ruling over a prosperous, peaceful land. But when they return in Prince Caspian they find their beloved home now a ruin, their own age regarded as legendary. The structure of Lewis’s series allows the residents of the Golden Age to return and witness how the very adventure they participated in is elevated by time in the memory of those who are good and true — and despised by their conquerors. Lewis offers the same characters a rare chance to inhabit both the Golden Age and its fallen successor.

Other authors have taken this Golden-Age-ruin concept a few steps further, creating more deliberate echoes that question our understanding of history, confusing past and present. In The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series, a city very medieval in feel is dominated by the curious Matachin Tower — residence of the torturers — which is subtly revealed to be an ancient rocket-ship. Does Wolfe want to reimagine our own time as the Golden Age? The modern ruins standing among a medieval-style society call to mind Petrarch’s obsession with ancient Rome, to the denigration of his own (now revered) time. Thanks to the presence of such clearly non-fantastic elements, The Book of the New Sun is often described as science fantasy, with its merging of fantasy tropes into a setting that must be our own far future, taking the dreams of its readership and mercilessly forging them into the ruins of Urth.

While the ruins in Middle Earth and Wolfe’s Urth alike are significant in the setting and in the mind of the reader, they are rarely so attractive to the characters. Even during Roman times, early tourism centered on the locations of great battles and other moments of legend and history. This enthusiasm vanished for centuries, as peace was overtaken by collapse and war, the Roman roads fell into ruin themselves, and travel became a difficult and dangerous pursuit. Religious travel remained important, but travel for its own sake emerged later on, with stability in local governments easing their way.

For the wealthy European, this often meant an expedition to an exotic locale, perhaps cruising the Nile River to view the pyramids of Egypt, or even mounting camels to cross the desert to the rock-cut tombs of Petra. As explorers and travelers ventured deeper into the unknown, the ruin became a tantalizing destination, a place of mystery and discovery, and the lucky tourist might even take home a mummy or chip off a bit of statuary as a souvenir.

In this role, ruins are often divorced from those who created them. They represent not some Golden Age of our own history that we might mourn or aspire to, but a strange realm already half-fantasy, now invaded, however benignly, by the blundering foreigner. In fact, some hypothesized that the most wonderful or challenging ruins could not have been created by the locals at all, but required the intervention of outsiders. Even today there are those who claim that wonders like the Great Pyramids were created by aliens (or at least with some extraterrestrial engineering expertise).

A new generation of authors, questioning the values of our own societies as well as the legacy of the early fantasy writers, bring a somewhat different approach to the ruin. David Anthony Durham’s The Sacred Band features the juxtaposition of these two views — a post-colonial take on the role of ruins — when a party of travelers composed of a wealthy prince and a few of those apparently fallen indigenous people stops outside a ruined city. The prince displays excitement, eager to explore and learn about this fascinating place, a perspective armchair explorers are likely to echo, wanting to get inside the walls. But to the native travelers, the ruin is a reminder of their former glory, a piece of their own history rather than just a pretty place.

The view of earlier peoples on discovering a ruin is often less positive, with the ruin serving as a source of corruption and superstition. In Europe, attitudes toward pre-Roman ruins reflected concerns about the pagan past. Standing stones and barrows did not represent the wisdom of a greater time, but rather the sinister lurking of a troubling past. The stone circle at Avebury presents a startling example. During a restoration effort in the 1930s, one of the stones was lifted to reveal the crushed remains of a medieval barber, apparently killed while engaged in the popular hobby of pulling down the stones to bury them as pagan artifacts. Dangerous magic may linger in places like this, places we no longer understand or relate to.

[Stonehenge at dawn evokes the mystery of the pagan monument, Salisbury Plain, England.]

Even the travelers in Farland’s work know to fear and respect the power represented by the stones at the heart of the enchanted forest, and do not tread there lightly. Carol Berg uses this charged atmosphere to shroud the ruins of a magical rift town in The Spirit Lens. Destroyed by the battles of a sorcerous family decades before, the place remains a bit outside of reality, where magic is more acute. The hero comes to grief while searching the ruin — even as his companion is tempted by the power that it represents.

Power lurks at the heart of ruins both real and fantasy. Though many visitors to ancient ruins are merely tourists, willing to take photos and stand in awe beneath the sublime destruction of the past, others come deliberately seeking knowledge — and willing to risk the dangers to acquire it. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter revitalized the thrill of the ruin for many who followed the story: He opened a chink in the wall into a cave of gilded majesty. Just as familiar is the legend of the Mummy’s Curse, which then pursued Carter and his team, warning against the seeking of treasure and hidden knowledge.

There is, alas, no truth to the legend of the inscription said to curse the tomb-breaker (although such curses do exist elsewhere). But a tale combining extraordinary riches with great tragedy is sure to retain its appeal throughout the ages. While Berg’s travelers are searching for kidnap victims, the seekers in Daniel Abraham’s An Autumn War explicitly brave the dangers of the ruined city to bring back forbidden knowledge which they hope will help them to defeat magic once and for all. The reader does not witness the journey of General Balasar Gice and his men, only the terrible aftermath as the handful of survivors stagger back from the desert, successful, but forever haunted by what they experienced. The knowledge concealed by the foreboding ruin is dangerous, seductive, but often vital. In Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the palace of men is built atop the ruined palaces of the conquered Sithi — similar to elves — but the voices of centuries of combatants linger in the shadows, distracting the unwary. Ultimately, it is only by respecting the ghosts of the past that the present struggle can be concluded.

A novella written by Charles Coleman Finlay brings our tour of ruins full circle, with a young man raised by trolls seeking refuge and rest in a mysterious ruined city. Like the fantasies in which the ruin’s history is never at issue, this story seems to present the ruin as a backdrop, as the character’s ignorance about the past and his own concerns distract from the ruin itself. The ruin becomes a source of fear — not because of what it inherently contains (as in the Berg novel), but because of the rival madness of its two other inhabitants, a troll woman wild with loneliness and a human searching for a jewel we never learn the meaning of. Finlay’s ruin escapes architecture and history into a realm more purely symbolic. This broken city stands in for the darkness, mystery, danger, and betrayal in the human mind, reflecting the hopes and fears of those who approach it — as ultimately all ruins do. The title of Finlay’s work is, of course, Abandon the Ruins.

[Tunnels beneath the Imperial Baths, Trier, Germany — a maze of darkness pierced by light.]

About the Author

E. C. Ambrose is the author of a new dark historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon to start next year with DAW Books. E. C. spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.

The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Jane Carver gnashes her teeth, shakes her head. Ol’ Dutch wants him “a piece.” Taunting, heckling. . . he’s more of a nuisance than an outright threat to Carver.

Besides, Carver’s got a record and doesn’t need another strike against her, so she throws a leg over her “fat-boy” motorcycle and smokes her Marlboro. She’s a self-professed “swamp-trash country girl,” a biker chick, tough as nails. She can take care of herself, thank you very much.

Then Ol’ Dutch goes too far.

“You can say all you want to me,” says Jane Carver. “Sticks and stones and all that, but no man, or woman for that matter, puts hands on me without invitation. It’s not a code or a creed or something I even think about. It just sets me off, and when I get my mad-on the world turns red and hot and Jane isn’t driving the bus anymore. I punch him once. Once.”

That single punch is more than enough to kill Ol’ Dutch and launch Jane Carver into a weird and wild ride that begins standing over a dead body on the sidewalk in front of a bar and leads to Waar, a planet where the sky is “Ty-D-Bol blue,” the locals are purple, and nothing seems quite right.  

Jane Carver of Waar is adventure fiction at its rowdiest. And it’s Nathan Long at his freest, loosest, and most wildly inventive.

Very much a voice-driven, character-rich narrative, Jane simultaneously pays tribute to and parodies Edgar Rice Burroughs’ iconic John Carter of Mars stories.

Long’s previous novels are set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. His first trilogy features Reiner Hetzau and his band of criminals. The premise is simple: the Blackhearts are given the option of punishment for their crimes or they can complete impossible missions for Count Manfred. Fortunately for readers, they choose the latter. In 2006, Long took over as the writer in charge of William King’s iconic Warhammer duo, Gotrek and Felix. Most recently, he’s begun the novel-length tales of Ulrika the Vampire.

In the Warhammer universe, Long favors dark heroes, tight plots, gallows humor, and brutal action.  On Waar, Long eases up on the reins a little and really cuts loose.

Below, Long and I discuss Jane Carver, John Carter, and moving the plot along.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction in general and what did you enjoy about writing Jane Carver of Waar in particular?

In general, I love telling stories. I was an avid reader as a kid, but like a lot of avid readers, the kind that live the stories and want to disappear into the books, I didn’t just want to sit on the sidelines. I wanted to tell my own and pull people into my stories the way other had pulled me into theirs.

More specifically, I love plot and character, and how each generates the other. While I like world building and scene setting, what I really love is coming up with an interesting, engaging character, then figuring out how I can ruin their day with a nasty, twisty, plot. I like the puzzle box challenge of plotting, fitting all the elements of the story into a tight structure in order to make a balanced whole that also moves along at a brisk pace and comes to a satisfying conclusion.

With Jane, what I loved was her voice. So much of my fiction is set in pre-industrial fantasy worlds, in which I have to be careful to describe everything in ways that make sense with the setting. For instance, I can’t describe a charge of cavalry smashing into a wall of infantry like a freight train, because there are no freight trains in that world. With Jane, all that’s out the window. Jane is a modern gal sent to a pre-industrial planet, who has brought her modern vocabulary and idiom with her. If she wants to describe a striped, six-limbed alien as having the face of the MGM lion, or say that the flower of an alien plant was the pink of a hooker’s hot-pants, I don’t have to stop her. She can say whatever she wants.

To me, that’s one of the central gags of the book — taking the old fashioned scenery and situations of planetary romance and seeing them through the eyes — and the vernacular — of someone who doesn’t usually get to be the hero of that kind of book.

Where on earth did you find Jane Carver?

I came up with Jane because, while I loved John Carter of Mars and all its imitators, the heroes always bored the shit out of me. They were always tall, square-jawed, stern-eyed men with no sense of humor and no self-doubt. Jane was my reaction to that. As I said above, I wanted to see what would happen if a different kind of person had the same kind of adventure John Carter and all his stuffed shirt buddies had. And Jane was about as different as I could think of.

I didn’t want to make her a typical adventure heroine either. I didn’t want Jane to start weak and powerless and grow strong through adversity. Nor did I want her to be the cold killer who has abandoned her femininity in order to fight injustice. I’ve seen those heroines too many times before. I wanted Jane to be a kind of woman I’ve met many times in real life, but rarely in books — the boisterous gal at the honky-tonk, the brassy broad at the ren faire, the biker chick who rides her own bike, and doesn’t need any help picking it back up again when she ditches, thank you very much. I wanted her to be woman who could take care of herself, but who too often let her appetites get her into trouble — both of which are ideal attributes for an action heroine to have.

What do you admire about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fiction and his vision of the world?

Edgar Rice Burroughs was a master of invention. He created many fantastic worlds — Barsoom, Pellucidar, Tarzan’s Africa — and characters — John Carter, the Mucker, and of course Tarzan, who is perhaps the most recognizable adventure hero ever.

Burroughs was also a genius at coming up with monsters, races, places, machines, strange pseudo-science, and incredible situations. He is the great American father of genre. Science fiction and adventure fiction would not have been the same without him, nor nearly as fun.

What he was not so good at, however, was plot and character. As I said above, John Carter is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, and ERB’s other characters are the same. They are all pretty much interchangeable. Tarzan on Mars would be John Carter, and John Carter in the jungle would be Tarzan. His plots are fairly interchangeable too, all very linear and episodic across all his series. I hold neither of these things against him, however. He was self taught, and a man of his time and place, writing at the beginning of a genre and inventing it as he went along. If he were alive today, with the benefit of having read a century’s worth of the science fiction and fantasy that he helped invent, he would very likely write with more modern techniques and sophistication. Hopefully he would remain as original as well.

How’d you go about plotting Jane Carver of Waar? 

I am of the note card and three act structure school. Once I have a rough idea for a story and a firm idea of how it ends, I start laying it out in three acts, using the ends of the acts and the mid-point as markers for where my major turns should go, then filling in the scenes around them using post-its. Once I have all my post-its laid out, I pour over them a while, tearing some up and replacing them with others until everything makes sense and the scenes flow smoothly, and there are no continuity problems.

With Jane, I was not as careful with the plot as I normally would be. I would usually be a lot tighter and symmetrical, weaving subplots through and making sure that things at the beginning pay off neatly at the end, but I wanted the book to mimic the Barsoom books not just in spirit but in structure, and, as they were originally written as serial chapters that appeared in pulp magazines, they tend to be very linear and episodic. Dejah Thoris is kidnapped, John Carter races off to rescue her, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, so he races off to rescue her again, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, and so on until he finally saves her at the end of the book. I wasn’t quite as linear as that, but I did let the story follow it’s nose, and play out in distinct episodes more than I normally would.

Can you talk a little about building Waar?

I’m ashamed to say that, just like the plotting, I was not as careful with Jane as I have been with other books. Indeed, I basically just made it up as I went along. I had some basic concepts before I started. I knew I wanted Waar to have a very hide-bound, honor-bound society. I knew I wanted there to be parallels to a lot of the races and animals that appeared in the Barsoom books, but I didn’t want to make it a one-for-one recreation. I deliberately didn’t re-read the John Carter books before I started writing. I wanted Jane to be fueled by the memories of what the Barsoom books felt like to read when I was a kid, not how they actually were.

Is there a part of Waar you’d most like to visit? Least like to visit?

Hmmm. Good question. Of all the places in the book, I think I’d like to explore Ormolu, the capital city of Ora. I set a fair amount of action there, but there is so much more to explore — much more than there was space to mention in the midst of the plot.

As for the place I’d least like to go, I would pick the inside of the Temple of Ormolu, since it is said that, but for its priests, no-one who enters it ever returns to the outside world.

Any advice for writing action scenes?

Be briefer than you think you need to be. I have a tendency to overwrite action, and I really have to watch it. Blow by blow descriptions gets boring pretty quickly. Try to get the feeling of movement and danger into it too. An action scene where there doesn’t seem to be any risk or danger for your hero isn’t going to thrill anyone.

Also, an action scene has to move the plot along just like any other scene. If nothing has changed for your heroes at the end of an action scene, it probably wasn’t necessary.

Will we be seeing Jane Carver again?

Absolutely. I am hard at work on the sequel, Swords of Waar, as we speak.

And what’s next for you?

I’ve got quite a lot coming down the pike. In addition to Jane Carver of Waar, which comes out on March 6th, I have two Warhammer books debuting soon. First is the Gotrek and Felix Anthology, which comes out March 27th, in which I have one short story and one novella. After that is Bloodsworn, the third in the Ulrika the Vampire series, which comes out may 29th. Also Swords of Waar is supposed to come out later this year, but I don’t know the date yet, and I have a few under the radar projects which I can’t talk about yet, but which I’m really excited about. Stay tuned!

Any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief?

I’ll give you the advice I’ve been trying to give myself for the past few months: turn off the Internet once in a while. You’ll be able to concentrate more on your writing, you’ll see things first hand instead of on YouTube, and you might pick up a book by accident and read it. That would be a good thing, particularly if it was mine.

Thanks again for interviewing me. I had a blast!

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.

Writing Is Magic: A Conversation with John R. Fultz

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Madness comes to the King “like a creeping fungus in the hollows of his mind.” The dark sorcerer returns. The Giants welcome the storm. A Prince must avenge his father’s death and take his rightful place upon a distant throne.

From page one, Seven Princes by John R. Fultz cracks open like teeth-shattering thunder and rolls through more than five hundred pages of adventure, dark intrigue, and incisive character development.

This is no flimsy first novel. Seven Princes has the heft of Tolkien’s fiction, the pacing of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter tales, and the character-rich complexity of… well, of a John R. Fultz novel.

“Is war an inevitable part of human existence?” asks Fultz in his debut novel. “Is vengeance worth its cost? What is the nature of reality and what are the keys to mastering it? Which is more powerful — love or hate? What do rulers owe to those who are ruled? How do you kill someone who cannot die? How does a Prince become a true and worthy King? What is the price of wisdom?” These are some of the book’s most prevalent themes.

Written in a simultaneously elegant and effortless style, Seven Princes swallows the reader into a world where the battle between good and evil is as complex as the human heart.

In the interview below, Fultz and I talk about writing as a form of sorcery, bringing characters to life, and the abiding philosophy that informs his work…

What do you enjoy about writing fiction in general and fantasy in particular?

As I tell my students, writing is magic. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way; I’m quite literal about it. Art is a bridge between spirits, and writing is one of the most effective art forms to do this (another is music). Writing joins mind to mind, spirit to spirit, and it defies the restrictions of space and time. You can read Shakespeare or Poe and get inside their mindspace, share their visions, even though they’ve been dead for ages. You can read ancient texts and get fresh meaning and relevance from them. (When it comes to non-fiction, I recommend Marcus Aurelius and Lao Tzu.) Something you write today can be found and read in a thousand years and it will still make an immediate connection with the reader’s consciousness. This is magic.

The written word is the basis for our entire human civilization, and it stems from the ability to tell stories, which separated us from animals thousands and thousands of years ago. By telling each other stories we preserve and pass along vital information…the early myths of every culture evolved in this way. Modern fantasy is simply the latest evolution of those primal myths. In some cases, fantasy fiction is a literal throwback to those myths. Of course, the real difference between fantasy fiction and actual myths is that in a fantasy world myths aren’t metaphors, they are literal realities (as early peoples believed their myths to be). Fantasy speaks to something ancient and honest inside us all. It elevates us from our day-to-day existence into a realm of ideas, archetypes, universal consciousness, and boundless imagination, where the spirit can roam free and expand. When we finish a fantasy story or novel and return to our own reality, we are better for the experience.

In my view, fantasy fiction is a perfectly valid form of literature that can be as enlightening, truthful, and transformative as any “classic” literature. I also enjoy horror and sci-fi, but the fantasy genre has always been my first love.

What do you admire about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ writing? And in what does his influence show up in Seven Princes?

Burroughs is the Master of Adventure. They say Felix Faust (aka Max Brand) was the “King of the Pulps,” but I think that title would better be bestowed on Burroughs. His Martian Tales series really hit me hard as a kid. I read the first four or five books, beginning with his first novel A Princess of Mars. Those books just drew me in like magnets — especially with their gorgeous Michael Whelan covers. The Martian Tales starring John Carter (i.e. most of them) are the missing links between Western fiction and Sword and Sorcery. On Barsoom (Mars) you have swashbuckling, sword-slinging action alongside radium pistols, flying ships, ancient technology, and tons of monsters. John Carter is plunged from the post-Civil War Old West into the brutal culture of the red planet, and his adventures hearken back to the classic romances of earlier decades. As you can probably tell, I prefer Burroughs’ Martian Tales to his Tarzan work. I also love to point out that John Carter came before Tarzan. With the release of the upcoming John Carter movie, the character is finally getting his “moment in the sun.” I hope the movie lives up to the spirit of Burroughs’ work. From the two trailers I’ve seen, and the creative teams involved, I’m very optimistic. (For a more precise list of reasons why, check out my recent blog post on the subject.)

Burroughs had a taste for pure adventure that has rarely been rivaled. So what if he recycled plots — the guy wrote tons of John Carter and Tarzan books, so some repetition was inevitable. And they say that when you steal from yourself it’s called “style.” Burroughs inspired a generation of pulp writers who came after him, and his work continues to inspire writers today. It was only a matter of time until John Carter found his way to the silver screen. Especially since the Tarzan franchise has been reduced to a kids’ cartoon musical. Perhaps if John Carter is a success, we’ll see a revival of the true, visceral Tarzan character in a new series of movies. I think you can find almost anything you love about a Tarzan story somewhere inside the John Carter tales — and more. They are my favorite because they are full of wild imagination, bizarre aliens, swordplay, romance, and heroism. The very idea that Mars is covered with all of these ancient ruined cities, dried-up ocean seabeds, and lost civilizations is enough to get the imagination going.

I’m not sure if any of my Burroughs influence shows up in Seven Princes, but if it does it’s deeply embedded in the raw sense of adventure that erupts again and again throughout the novel. Of course, today we writers are more interested in three-dimensional characters who are conflicted and complex beings, whereas Burroughs worked more with clear-cut heroes, dastardly villains, and traditional casts of supporting characters. However, the breakneck sense of adventure that made Burroughs so beloved remains as strong as it was a hundred years ago.

Where did Seven Princes start — with an image, a character, something else?

It actually started with an idea called Child of Thunder, the story of “the Giant who was a Man and the Man who was a Giant.” This shows up in Seven Princes as the backstory of Vod the Giant-King. Vod’s story is a romance about a Giant who could take the form of a Man, and it serves as part of the vast backdrop against which The Books of the Shaper are set. Child of Thunder didn’t quite work as a novel…so I dove back into the world I had created and decided to tell the story of Vod’s heirs — the Princes Tadarus and Vireon, and the Princess Sharadza. The book also involves five other Princes from various kingdoms, some in more crucial roles than others. Some day I’d like to go back and tell Vod’s complete story as a graphic novel with the right artist. But to get at the heart of your question, Seven Princes started with a character. The character of Vod. All of my stories begin with character, and character is for me the driving force of the narrative. Plot, theme, and everything else comes from character. The old saying “Character is king,” really applies to the way I write. It’s rare that I find a writer who disagrees with this approach. If you have great characters in a great setting, and you listen to those characters, then you inevitably get a great story.

What goes into the creation of a compelling — or great — protagonist in general and a compelling fantasy protagonist in particular?

I think a compelling protagonist means a character that seems real in as many ways as possible. In fantasy, this can mean many different things, but in general the basic human factor remains the same. Even if you’re writing about a protagonist who isn’t literally human, he (or she) must have something that readers can embrace and identify as essentially human traits. Usually this means some kind of internal conflict or challenge, which accentuates and magnifies an external conflict. “Perfect” characters are boring, and the very nature of humanity is that we are imperfect beings. So imperfect characters are the most interesting. The current popularity of the “anti-hero” in our society is indicative of this idea.

In what ways are you and D’zan similar? Or is there a different character that more closely resembles you?

Actually, I probably identify most with Prince Lyrilan of Uurz. He is the Scholar Prince, a historian, an archivist, and a budding author. His initial goal is to chronicle the events of D’zan’s struggle. The written word is his domain, unlike his twin brother who is a born warrior. I don’t have a warrior twin, but I’m all about the written word.

I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from Lyrilan of Uurz in future books?

Lyrilan is one of the prime viewpoint characters of Book Two: Seven Kings. I can’t say much more about it for fear of giving spoilers, but he has an incredible character arc in that volume.

And how about Sharadza? Who is she, where’d she come from, and what makes her tick?

Sharadza is the daughter of Vod the Giant-King, and her brothers are three of the titular Princes. Her goal in the first book is to master the sorcery that her kingly father refuses to teach her, so she sets out to find her own way into the mysterious world of magic and spellcraft. She is the reader’s entry point into the Shaper’s mystical and mysterious world… Her growth as a woman and a sorceress continues throughout the series.

You mentioned the importance of a great setting. Can you talk a little bit about how you built the world of Seven Princes? What’s the relationship between character and setting in this novel?

I think they are so closely intertwined as to be practically inseparable. The environment in which we grow and thrive (or against which we struggle) tends to define us to a large degree. So all of these characters are products of their kingdoms, including the socio-cultural and moral aspects of these kingdoms. In some cases, characters influence the environment to the point of completely altering it — usually in the cases of great acts of sorcery. Vod had such an impact on the world more than twenty years before Seven Princes begins. Everyone is sort of living in his shadow, so to speak — especially his three sons and his daughter. Vod cracked the world, slew a desert, and brought Men and Giants together.

Throughout Seven Princes you embrace tropes while somehow stripping them of cliche. Is this novel Sword and Sorcery? Epic fantasy? Something else altogether?

Thank you for the compliment; this was a primary goal of mine. You really can’t get away from fantasy tropes when you write fantasy, so instead you have to embrace them and do something new with them. People have referred to my work as “Sword andSorcery” for years, but I don’t put that label on myself. Readers are free to call it what they will, and publishers need labels to market and sell books, so genre labels are handy tools. I think Epic Fantasy is probably closer to the mark with Seven Princes, but then again there are no “hard and fast” definitions for either S&S or Epic Fantasy. The second often involves elements of the first. When I write, I simply create stories that are meaningful to me, the stories that I would like to read. I don’t worry about what genre I’m writing in. I go where my passion takes me, which if you ask me is the key to all good writing. These days it seems like the term “Sword and Sorcery,” which used to be fairly derogatory, has been given fresh life and revived as a viable sub-genre of Fantasy. When I was in a rock band, people used to say “What kind of music do you play?” and it was always a hard answer to give because musicians, like writers, don’t want to limit themselves. If people want to call Seven Princes “Sword and Sorcery” I’m fine with that — just as I’m fine with “Epic Fantasy,” “Heroic Fantasy,” “Dark Fantasy,” and “High Fantasy.” It all falls under the broad Fantasy category, so it’s all good.

Seven Princes is dedicated to Darrell S. I’m assuming the “S” stands for “Schweitzer.” What influence has he had on you?

Yes it does, and you’ll find Darrell’s full name listed among my acknowledgments in the back of the book. Darrell began as one of my favorite writers, then became a longtime mentor, and ended up as one of my dearest friends (who is still one of my favorite writers). I first discovered the genius of his short stories when I read “Mysteries of the Faceless King” in Marvin Kaye’s anthology Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies way back in 1988. (This was also the book that turned me on to the brilliance of Tanith Lee, thanks to her wonderful story “The Sombrus Tower” in that same collection.) “Faceless King” led me on a search to find any more Schweitzer stories that I could…and there are hundreds of amazing tales to discover, as he is a master of the form. I did the same thing with Tanith Lee’s stories from that time onward. I was in college at the time, and I soon discovered the legendary Terminus run of Weird Tales magazine (famously edited by Schweitzer and the late George Scithers). I immediately began sending stories to Weird Tales, and I immediately got several rejections, as any young writer must.

However, every rejection carried priceless writing advice from Darrell. I kept on writing, and I kept on reading, and I followed Darrell’s great work through the intervening years. Throughout the 90s his stories of Sekenre the Sorcerer set a new bar for Sword and Sorcery fiction and Dark Fantasy in general. After 15 years of attempting to write a story worth of publishing in WT, 15 years of polishing my craft, striving to apply the principles of good writing I continued to learn from Darrell (as well as the many other writers I studied — from Dunsany to Silverberg to Lee to Ellison, etc.), I finally did it. Darrell bought my first pro story, “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” and published it in Weird Tales #340, one of the last issues he and Scithers edited. This was a major breakthrough for me, and it inspired a dozen other tales that soon followed.

After corresponding with Darrell for nearly two decades, I finally got the chance to meet him and his wife in person at the 2006 WorldCon (where he introduced me to the great Harlan Ellison — I was tongue-tied). Since then I’ve made it a priority to meet up with Darrell at the World Fantasy Convention every year. It was Darrell who told me a few years ago that the next phase of my career should be writing novels. As in so many other cases, he was right. This is only one example of the tons of great advice he’s given me over the years. I’m known far and wide for singing the praises of Darrell’s fiction, which deserves far more attention than it gets. His Mask of the Sorcerer novel is a great place to start reading if you haven’t experienced his work, as are any of his short story collections. He is without a doubt one of the world’s greatest living fantasists.

Are teaching and writing similar?

Well, both require an intense passion for what you’re doing. Teaching is a calling, not a job. It’s the same with writing. Writers write because they have to write. The same may be true for teachers. Certainly nobody gets into teaching for the money. And while most writers would love to be financially successful, it’s not a prime motivation to start writing. If you want a lot of money you get into accounting, finance, or some other profession that provides those kinds of rewards. In some ways you have to be a very impractical person to be a writer…there are any number of things you could do that are easier and more materially rewarding. The same is true of teaching. I tried the corporate route and was delighted to leave it behind in favor of teaching young people to read, write, and think. One thing that happens when you teach literature is that the lessons you learn from teaching a great story, novel, or poem tend to creep back into your writing. Appreciating, analyzing, and enjoying great works of literature is something that all writers should do, and teaching those works as part of my daily living can often be very inspiring.

What are some of the things your students have taught you about writing?

They’ve taught me to be patient, which is a crucial lesson for a writer (as well as a teacher). Publishing moves at a glacial pace. Sometimes the writing itself also moves incredibly slowly. You can’t rush it. And you can’t rush kids to learn… you can lead them, but they have to follow you willingly. They’ve also taught me time and again that the best stories are those that connect to readers on a basic human level. Readers (of any age) respond to characters that seem real and believable to them. So I try to create characters that readers can relate to, even when they are characters you love to hate.

What’s next for you?

Right now I’m working on the Third Book of the Shaper, Seven Sorcerers. It’s going to be massive. The second book, Seven Kings, is nearly finished; once again the great Richard Anderson has done an amazing cover. I’ve also got the PRIMORDIA hardcover graphic novel coming from Archaia this month (with amazing artwork by Roel Wielinga) and a great “weird history” story called “The Gnomes of Carrick County” appearing in the new issue of Space & Time magazine.

Any parting words of advice, wisdom, or mischief?

I just want to thank the amazing Orbit Books team for bringing Seven Princes and The Books of the Shaper to fantasy fans all across the globe. Orbit is truly a class act and it’s humbling to be a part of their terrific lineup.

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.

And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor

Neil Clarke

It wouldn’t be appropriate to end this issue without sending congratulations to E. Lily Yu and Catherynne M. Valente for their respective Nebula Award nominations for Best Short Story and Best Novella. We’re quite pleased to see “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” and “Silently and Very Fast” on the ballot. Good luck! We’ll be rooting for both of you!

A word of advice to our book collector friends: the signed limited edition of “Silently and Very Fast” that was published by WSFA Press is nearly out of print. You might want to grab one while you can.

In other good news, thanks to the continued growth of our Kindle and Weightless Books e-subscriptions, we will be rolling out some more non-fiction features over the next few months. The first of these is scheduled to debut in our April issue. If you’d like to see Clarkesworld continue to grow, please help us spread the word about our subscription options. Details can be found at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/.

Thanks, as always, for your continued support!

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.