Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 70

Table of Contents

Astrophilia

by Carrie Vaughn

The Switch

by Sarah Stanton

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

by Sunny Moraine

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films' '60s Science Fiction

by Mark Cole

To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: The Exceptional Smurfette, or Being One of the Guys as a Superpower

by Ekaterina Sedia

Launch Day

Art by Cristi Balanescu

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Astrophilia

Carrie Vaughn

After five years of drought, the tiny, wool-producing household of Greentree was finished. First the pastures died off, then the sheep, and Stella and the others didn’t have any wool to process and couldn’t meet the household’s quota, small though it was with only five of them working at the end. The holding just couldn’t support a household and the regional committee couldn’t keep putting credits into it, hoping that rains would come. They might never come, or the next year might be a flood. No one could tell, and that was the problem, wasn’t it?

None of them argued when Az and Jude put in to dissolve Greentree. They could starve themselves to death with pride, but that would be a waste of resources. Stella was a good weaver, and ought to have a chance somewhere else. That was the first reason they gave for the decision.

Because they dissolved voluntarily, the committee found places for them in other households, ones not on the verge of collapse. However, Az put in a special request and found Stella’s new home herself. “I know the head of the place, Toma. He’ll take good care of you, but more than that his place is prosperous. Rich enough for children, even. You could earn a baby there, Stella.” Az’s wrinkled hands gripped Stella’s young ones in her own, and her eyes shone. Twenty-three years ago, Greentree had been prosperous enough to earn a baby: Stella. But those days were gone.

Stella began to have doubts. “Mama, I don’t want to leave you and everyone—”

“We’ll be fine. We’d have had to leave sooner or later, and this way we’ve got credits to take with us. Start new on a good footing, yes?”

“Yes, but—” She hesitated, because her fears were childish. “What if they don’t like me?”

Az shook her head. “Winter market I gave Toma the shawl you made. You should have seen him, Stella, his mouth dropped. He said Barnard Croft would take you on the spot, credits or no.”

But what if they don’t like me, Stella wanted to whine. She wasn’t worried about her weaving.

Az must have seen that she was about to cry. “Oh, dear, it’ll be all right. We’ll see each other at the markets, maybe more if there’s trading to be done. You’ll be happy, I know you will. Better things will come.”

Because Az seemed so pleased for her, Stella stayed quiet, and hoped.

In the spring, Stella traveled to Barnard Croft, three hundred miles on the Long Road from Greentree, in the hills near the coast.

Rain poured on the last day of the journey, so the waystation driver used a pair of horses to draw the wagon, instead of the truck. Stella offered to wait until the storm passed and the solar batteries charged up, but he had a schedule to keep, and insisted that the horses needed the exercise.

Stella sat under the awning on the front seat of the wagon, wrapped in a blanket against the chill, feeling sorry for the hulking draft animals in front of her. They were soaked, brown coats dripping as they clomped step by step on the muddy road. It might have been faster, waiting for the clouds to break, for the sun to emerge and let them use the truck. But the driver said they’d be waiting for days in these spring rains.

She traveled through an alien world, wet and green. Stella had never seen so much water in her whole life, all of it pouring from the sky. A quarter of this amount of rain a couple of hundred miles east would have saved Greentree.

The road curved into the next green valley, to Barnard Croft. The wide meadow and its surrounding, rolling hills were green, lush with grass. A handful of alpaca grazed along a stream that ran frothing from the hills opposite. The animals didn’t seem to mind the water, however matted and heavy their coats looked. There’d be some work, cleaning that mess for spinning. Actually, she looked forward to it. She wanted to make herself useful as soon as she could. To prove herself. If this didn’t work, if she didn’t fit in here and had to throw herself on the mercy of the regional committee to find some place prosperous enough to take her, that could use a decent weaver . . .no, this would work.

A half-a-dozen whitewashed cottages clustered together, along with sheds and shelters for animals, a couple of rabbit hutches, and squares of turned black soil with a barest sheen of green—garden plots and new growth. The largest cottage stood apart from the others. It had wide doors and many windows, shuttered now against the rain—the work house, she guessed. Under the shelter of the wide eaves sat wooden barrels for washing wool, and a pair of precious copper pots for dyeing. All comfortable, familiar sights.

The next largest cottage, near the garden plots, had a smoking chimney. Kitchen and common room, most likely. Which meant the others were sleeping quarters. She wondered which was hers, and who’d she’d be sharing with. A pair of windmills stood on the side of one hill; their trefoil blades were still.

At the top of the highest hill, across the meadow, was a small, unpainted shack. It couldn’t have held more than a person or two standing upright. This, she did not recognize. Maybe it was a curing shed, though it seemed an unlikely spot, exposed as it was to every passing storm.

A turn-off took them from the road to the cottages, and by the time the driver pulled up the horses, eased the wagon to a stop, and set the brakes, a pair of men wrapped in cloaks emerged from the work house to greet them. Stella thanked the driver and jumped to the ground. Her boots splashed, her long woolen skirt tangled around her legs, and the rain pressed the blanket close around her. She felt sodden and bedraggled, but she wouldn’t complain.

The elder of those who came to greet her was middle aged and worn, but he moved briskly and spread his arms wide. “Here she is! Didn’t know if you would make it in this weather.” This was Toma. Az’s friend, Stella reminded herself. Nothing to worry about.

“Horses’ll get through anything,” the driver said, moving to the back of the wagon to unload her luggage.

“Well then,” Toma said. “Let’s get you inside and dried off.”

“Thank you,” Stella managed. “I just have a couple of bags. And a loom. Az let me take Greentree’s loom.”

“Well then, that is a treasure. Good.”

The men clustered around the back of the wagon to help. The bags held her clothes, a few books and letters and trinkets. Her equipment: spindles and needles, carders, skeins of yarn, coils of roving. The loom took up most of the space—dismantled, legs and frames strapped together, mechanisms folded away in protective oilskin. It would take her most of a day to set up. She’d feel better when it was.

A third figure came running from the work house, shrouded by her wrap and hood like the others. The shape of her was female, young—maybe even Stella’s age. She wore dark trousers and a pale tunic, like the others.

She came straight to the driver. “Anything for me?”

“Package from Griffith?” the driver answered.

“Oh, yes!”

The driver dug under an oil cloth and brought out a leather document case, stuffed full. The woman came forward to take it, revealing her face, sandstone-burnished skin and bright brown eyes.

Toma scowled at her, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She tucked the package under her arm and beamed like sunshine.

“At least be useful and take a bag,” Toma said to her.

Taking up a bag with a free hand, the woman flashed a smile at Stella, and turned to carry her load to the cottage.

Toma and other other man, Jorge, carried the loom to the work house. Hefting the rest of her luggage, Stella went to the main cottage, following the young woman at a distance. Behind her, the driver returned to his seat and got the horses moving again; their hooves splashed on the road.

Around dinner time, the clouds broke, belying the driver’s prediction. Some sky and a last bit of sunlight peeked through.

They ate what seemed to her eyes a magnificent feast—meat, eggs, preserved fruits and vegetables, fresh bread. At Greentree, they’d barely got through the winter on stores, and until this meal Stella hadn’t realized she’d been dimly hungry all the time, for weeks. Months. Greentree really had been dying.

The folk of the croft gathered around the hearth at night, just as they did back home at Greentree, just as folk did at dozens of households up and down the Long Road. She met everyone: Toma and Jorge, who’d helped with the loom. Elsta, Toma’s partner, who ran the kitchen and garden. Nik and Wendy, Jon and Faren. Peri had a baby, which showed just how well off Barnard was, to be able to support a baby as well as a refugee like Stella. The first thing Peri did was put the baby—Bette—in Stella’s arms, and Stella was stricken because she’d never held a wriggly baby before and was afraid of dropping her. But Peri arranged her arms just so and took the baby back after a few moments of cooing over them both. Stella had never thought of earning the right to have her implant removed, to have a baby—another mouth to feed at Greentree would have been a disaster.

Elsta was wearing the shawl Stella had made, the one Az had given Toma—her audition, really, to prove her worth. The shawl was an intricate weave made of finely spun merino. Stella had done everything—carded and spun the wool, dyed it the difficult smoky blue, and designed the pattern herself. Elsta didn’t have to wear it, the croft could have traded it for credits. Stella felt a small spark of pride. Wasn’t just charity that brought her here.

Stella had brought her work basket, but Elsta tsked at her. “You’ve had a long trip, so rest now. Plenty of time to work later.” So she sat on a blanket spread out on the floor and played with Bette.

Elsta picked apart a tangle of roving, preparing to draft into the spindle of her spinning wheel. Toma and Jorge had a folding table in front of them, and the tools to repair a set of hand carders. The others knit, crocheted, or mended. They no doubt made all their own clothing, from weaving the fabric to sewing, dark trousers, bright skirts, aprons, and tunics. Stella’s hands itched to work—she was in the middle of knitting a pair of very bright yellow socks from the remnants of yarn from a weaving. They’d be ugly but warm—and the right kind of ugly had a charm of its own. But Elsta was probably right, and the baby was fascinating. Bette had a set of wooden blocks that she banged into each other; occasionally, very seriously, she handed them to Stella. Then demanded them back. The process must have had a logic to it.

The young woman wasn’t with them. She’d skipped dinner as well. Stella was thinking of how to ask about her, when Elsta did it for her.

“Is Andi gone out to her study, then?”

Toma grumbled, “Of course she is.” The words bit.

Her study—the shack on the hill? Stella listened close, wishing the baby would stop banging her blocks so loudly.

“Toma—”

“She should be here.”

“She’s done her work, let her be. The night’s turned clear, you know how she gets.”

“She should listen to me.”

“The more you push, the angrier she’ll get. Leave her be, dearest.”

Elsta’s wheel turned and purred, Peri hummed as she knit, and Bette’s toys clacked. Toma frowned, never looking up from his work.

Her bags sat by one of the two beds in the smallest cottage, only half unpacked. The other bed, Andi’s, remained empty. Stella washed, brushed out her short blond hair, changed into her nightdress, and curled up under the covers. Andi still hadn’t returned.

The air smelled wrong, here. Wet, earthy, as if she could smell the grass growing outside the window. The shutters cracked open to let in a breeze. Stella was chilled; her nose wouldn’t stop running. The desert always smelled dusty, dry—even at night, the heat of the sun rose up from the ground. There, her nose itched with dust.

She couldn’t sleep. She kept waiting for Andi to come back.

Finally, she did. Stella started awake when the door opened with the smallest squeak—so she must have slept, at least a little. Cocooned under the covers, she clutched her pillow, blinking, uncertain for a moment where she was and what was happening. Everything felt wrong, but that was to be expected, so she lay still.

Andi didn’t seem to notice that she was awake. She hung up her cloak on a peg by the door, sat on her bed while she peeled off shoes and clothes, which she left lying on the chest at the foot of her bed, and crawled under the covers without seeming to notice—or care—that Stella was there. The woman moved quickly—nervously, even? But when she pulled the covers over her, she lay still, asleep in moments. Stella had a suspicion that she’d had practice, falling asleep quickly in the last hours before dawn, before she’d be expected to rise and work.

Stella supposed she would get a chance to finally talk to her new roommate soon enough, but she had no idea what she was going to say to her.

The next day, the clouds had more than broken. No sign of them remained, and the sun blazed clear as it ever had in the desert, but on a world that was wet, green, and growing. The faint sprouts in the garden plots seem to have exploded into full growth, leaves uncurling. The angora in the hutches pressed twitching noses to the wire mesh of their cages, as if they could squeeze out to play in the meadow. Every shutter and window in the croft was opened to let in the sun.

The work house was wide, clean, whitewashed inside and out. It smelled of lanolin, fiber and work. Lint floated in beams of sunlight. Two—now three—looms and a pair of spinning wheels sat facing each other, so the weavers and spinners could talk. Days would pass quickly here. The first passed quickly enough, and Stella finished it feeling tired and satisfied.

Andi had spent the day at the wash tubs outside, cleaning a batch of wool, preparing it to card and spin in the next week or so. She’d still been asleep when Stella got up that morning, but must have woken up soon after. They still hadn’t talked. Not even hello. They kept missing each other, being in different places. Continually out of rhythm, like a pattern that wove crooked because you hadn’t counted the threads right. The more time passed without them speaking, the harder Stella found it to think of anything to say. She wanted to ask, Are you avoiding me?

Stella had finished putting away her work and was headed for the common room, when she noticed Andi following the footpath away from the cottages, around the meadow and up the hill to the lonely shack. Her study, Elsta had called it. She walked at a steady pace, not quite running, but not lingering.

After waiting until she was far enough ahead that she was not likely to look over her shoulder, Stella followed.

The trail up the hill was a hike, and even walking slowly Stella was soon gasping for breath. But slowly and steadily she made progress. The path made a couple of switchbacks, and finally reached the crest of the hill and the tiny weathered shack planted there.

As she suspected, the view was worth the climb. The whole of Barnard Croft’s valley was visible, as well as the next one over. The neighboring croft’s cottages were pale specks, and a thread of smoke climbed from one. The hills were soft, rounded, cut through with clefts like the folds in a length of fabric. Trees along the creek gave texture to the picture. The Long Road was a gray track painted around the green rise. The sky above stretched on, and on, blue touched by a faint haze. If she squinted, she thought she could see a line of gray on the far western horizon—the ocean, and the breeze in that direction had a touch of salt and wild. From this perspective, the croft rested in a shallow bowl that sat on the top of the world. She wondered how long it would take to walk around the entire valley, and decided she would like to try some sunny day.

The shed seemed even smaller when she was standing next to it. Strangely, part of the roof was missing, folded back on hinges, letting in light. The walls were too high to see over, and the door was closed. Stella hesitated; she shouldn’t be here, she was invading. She had to share a room with this woman, she shouldn’t intrude. Then again—she had to share a room with this woman. She only wanted to talk. And if Andi didn’t like it, well . . .

Stella knocked on the door before she could change her mind. Three quick, woodpecker-like raps.

When the door swung out, she hopped back, managed not to fall over, and looked wide eyed to see Andi glaring at her.

Then the expression softened, falling away to blank confusion. “Oh. Hi.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Andi leaned on the door, blocking the way; Stella still couldn’t see what was inside.

“May I come in?” she finally asked, because Andi hadn’t closed the door on her.

“Oh—sure.” The woman seemed to shake herself out of a daydream, and stepped back to open the door wide.

The bulk of the tiny room was taken up by a device mounted on a tripod as tall as she was. A metallic cylinder, wide as a bucket, pointed to the ceiling. A giant tin can almost, except the outer case was painted gray, and it had latches, dials, levers, all manner of protrusions connected to it. Stella moved around it, studying it, reminding herself not to touch, however much the object beckoned.

“It’s a telescope, isn’t it?” she asked, looking over to Andi. “An old one.”

A smile dawned on Andi’s face, lighting her mahogany eyes. “It is—twelve-inch reflector. Century or so old, probably. Pride and joy.” Her finger traced up the tripod, stroking it like it was a favorite pet.

Stella’s chest clenched at that smile, and she was glad now that she’d followed Andi here. She kept her voice calm. “Where’d you get it? You couldn’t have traded for it—”

“Oh no, you can’t trade for something like this. What would you trade for it?” Meaning how many bales of wool, or bolts of cloth, or live alpacas, or cans full of fish from the coast was something like this worth? You couldn’t put a price on it. Some people would just give it away, because it had no real use, no matter how rare it was. Andi continued, “It was Pan’s, who ran the household before Toma. He was one of the ones who helped build up the network with the observatories, after the big fall. Then he left it all to me. He’d have left it to Toma, but he wasn’t interested.” She shrugged, as if unable to explain.

“Then it actually works?”

“Oh yes.” That smile shone again, and Stella would stay and talk all night, to keep that smile lit up. “I mean, not now, we’ll have to wait until dark, assuming the weather stays clear. With the roof open it’s almost a real observatory. See how we’ve fixed the seams?” She pointed to the edges, where the roof met the walls. Besides the hinges and latches that closed the roof in place, the seams had oilskin weatherproofing, to keep rain from seeping through the cracks. The design was clever. The building, then, was shelter for the equipment. The telescope never moved—the bottom points of the tripod were anchored with bricks.

Beside the telescope there wasn’t much here: a tiny desk, a shelf filled with books, a bin holding a stack of papers, and a wooden box holding pencils. The leather pouch Andi had received yesterday was open, and packets of paper spread over the desk.

“Is that what you got in the mail?”

She bustled to the desk and shuffled through the pages. “Assignment from Griffith. It’s a whole new list of coordinates, now that summer’s almost here. The whole sky changes—what we see changes, at least—so I make observations and send the whole thing back.” The flush in her brown face deepened as she ducked away. “I know it doesn’t sound very interesting, we mostly just write down numbers and trade them back and forth—”
“Oh no,” Stella said, shaking her head to emphasize. “It’s interesting. Unusual—”

“And useless, Toma says.” The smile turned sad, and last night’s discussion became clear to Stella.

“Nothing’s useless,” Stella said. “It’s like you said—you can’t just throw something like this away.” This wasn’t like a household that couldn’t feed itself and had no choice but to break up.

Three sharp rings of a distant brass bell sounded across the valley. Stella looked out the door, confused.

“Elsta’s supper bell,” Andi explained. “She only uses it when we’ve all scattered.” She quickly straightened her papers, returned them to their pouch, and latched the roof back in place. Too late, Stella thought to help, reaching up to hold the panel of wood after Andi had already secured the last latch. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Stella got a better look at Andi as they walked back to the croft. She was rough in the way of wind and rain, her dark hair curly, pulled back by a scrap of gray yarn that was unraveling. The collar of her shirt was untied, and her woven jacket had slipped off a shoulder. Stella resisted an urge to pull it back up, and to brush the lock of hair that had fallen out of the tie behind her ear.

“So you’re really more of an astronomer than a weaver,” Stella said. She’d tried to sound encouraging, but Andi frowned.

“Drives Toma crazy,” Andi said. “If there was a household of astronomers, I’d join. But astronomy doesn’t feed anyone, does it? Well, some of it does—meteorology, climatology, solar astronomy, maybe. But not what we’re doing. We don’t earn anyone a baby.”

“What are you doing?”

“Astronomical observation. As much as we can, though it feels like reinventing the wheel sometimes. We’re not learning anything that people didn’t already know back in the day. We’re just—well, it feels like filling in the gaps until we get back to where we were. Tracking asteroids, marking supernovae, that sort of thing. Maybe we can’t do much with the data. But it might be useful someday.”

“There, you see—it’s planning ahead. There’s use in that.”

She sighed. “The committees mostly think it’s a waste of time. They can’t really complain, though, because we—those of us in the network—do our share and work extra to support the observatories. A bunch of us designate ration credits toward Griffith and Kitt Peak and Wilson—they’ve got the region’s big scopes—to keep staff there maintaining the equipment, to keep the solar power and windmills running. Toma always complains, says if I put my extra credits toward the household we could have a second baby. He says it could even be mine. But they’re my credits, and this is important. I earn the time I spend with the scope, and he can’t argue.” She said that as a declaration, then looked straight at Stella, who blushed. “They may have brought you here to make up for me.”

Stella didn’t know what to say to that. She was too grateful to have a place at all, to consider that she may have been wanted.

Awkwardly, Andi covered up the silence. “Well. I hope you like it here. That you don’t get too homesick, I mean.”

The words felt like a warm blanket, soft and wooly. “Thanks.”

“We can be kind of rowdy sometimes. Bette gets colicky, and you haven’t heard Wendy sing yet. Then there’s Jorge and Jon—they share a bed as well as a cottage, see, and can get pretty loud, though if you tease them about it they’ll deny it.”

“I don’t mind rowdy. But I did almost expect to find a clandestine still in that shed.”

Andi laughed. “I think Toma’d like a still better, because at least you can drink from it. Elsta does make a really good cider, though. If she ever put enough together to trade it would make up for all the credits I waste on the observatories.”

As they came off the hill and approached the cluster of cottages, Andi asked, “Did you know that Stella means star in Latin?”

“Yes, I did,” she answered.

Work was work no matter where you were, and Stella settled into her work quickly. The folk of Barnard were nice, and Andi was easy to talk to. And cute. Stella found excuses to be in the same room with her, just to see that smile. She hadn’t expected this, coming to a new household. But she didn’t mind, not at all.

Many households along the Long Road kept sheep, but the folk at Barnard did most of the spinning and weaving for trade. All the wool came to them. Barnard also produced a small quantity of specialty fibers from the alpaca and angora rabbits they kept. They were known for the quality of all their work, the smoothness of their yarns, the evenness of their weaving. Their work was sought after not just along the Long Road, but up and down the coast.

Everyone spun, wove, and dyed. Everyone knew every step of working with wool. They either came here because they knew, or because they’d grown up here learning the trade, like Toma and Nik, like Bette would in her turn. As Andi had, as Stella found out. Andi was the baby that Toma and Elsta had earned together.

Stella and Andi were at the looms, talking as they worked. The spring rains seem to have broken for good, and everyone else had taken their work outside. Wendy sat in the fresh air with her spinning wheel. A new batch of wool had arrived, and Toma and Jorge worked cleaning it. So Stella had a chance to ask questions in private.

“Could you get a place at one of the observatories? How does that work?”

Andi shook her head. “It wouldn’t work out. There’s three people at Kitt and two each at Griffith and Wilson, and they pick their successors. I’m better use to them here, working to send them credits.”

“And you have your telescope, I suppose.”

“The astronomers love my telescope,” she said. “They call my setup Barnard Observatory, as if it’s actually important. Isn’t it silly?”

“Of course it isn’t.”

Andi’s hands flashed, passing the shuttle across. She glanced up every now and then. Stella, for her part, let her hands move by habit, and watched Andi more than her own work. Outside, Wendy sang as she spun, in rhythm with the clipping hum of her wheel. Her voice was light, dream-like.

The next time Andi glanced up, she exclaimed, “How do you do that? You’re not even watching and it’s coming out beautiful.”

Stella blinked at her work—not much to judge by, she thought. A foot or two of fabric curling over the breast beam, only just starting to wind onto the cloth beam. “I don’t know. It’s what I’m good at. Like you and the telescope.”

“Nice of you to say so. But here, look at this—I’ve missed a row.” She sat back and started unpicking the last five minutes of her work. “I go too fast. My mind wanders.”

“It happens to everyone,” Stella said.

“Not you. I saw that shawl you did for Elsta.”

“I’ve just gotten good at covering up the mistakes,” Stella said, winking.

A week after her arrival, an agent from the regional committee came to visit. A stout, gray-haired, cheerful woman, she was the doctor who made regular rounds up and down the Long Road. She was scheduled to give Bette a round of vaccinations, but Stella suspected the woman was going to be checking on her as well, to make sure she was settling in and hadn’t disrupted the household too much.

The doctor, Nance, sat with Bette on the floor, and the baby immediately started crying. Peri hovered, but Nance just smiled and cooed while lifting the baby’s arms and checking her ears, not seeming at all bothered.

“How is the world treating you then, Toma?” Nance turned to Toma, who was sitting in his usual chair by the fire.

His brow was creased with worry, though there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. “Fine, fine,” he said brusquely.

Nance turned. “And Stella, are you doing well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Stella said. She was winding yarn around Andi’s outstretched hands, to make a skein. This didn’t feel much like an inspection, but that only made her more nervous.

“Very good. My, you’re a wiggler, aren’t you?” Bette’s crying had finally subsided to red-faced sniffling, but she continued to fling herself from Nance’s arms in an attempt to escape. After a round with a stethoscope, Nance let her go, and the baby crawled away, back to Peri.

The doctor turned her full attention to Toma. “The committee wants to order more banners, they expect to award quite a few this summer. Will you have some ready?”

Toma seemed startled. “Really? Are they sure?”

Barnard supplied the red-and-green patterned cloth used to make the banners awarded to households who’d been approved to have a baby. One of the things Nance had asked about when she first arrived was if anyone had tried bribing him for a length of the cloth over the last year. One of the reasons Barnard had the task of producing the banners—they were prosperous enough not to be vulnerable to bribes. Such attempts happened rarely, but did happen. Households had been broken up over such crimes.

The banner the household had earned for Bette was pinned proudly to the wall above the mantel.

Nance shrugged. “The region’s been stable for a couple of years. No quota arguments, most households supporting themselves, just enough surplus to get by without draining resources. We’re a healthy region, Toma. If we can support more children, we ought to. And you—with all these healthy young women you have, you might think of putting in for another baby.” The doctor beamed.

Stella and Andi looked at each other and blushed. Another baby so soon after the first? Scandalous.

Nance gathered up her kit. “Before I go, let me check all your birth control implants so we don’t have any mishaps, eh?”

She started with Elsta and Toma and worked her way around the room.

“Not that I could have a mishap,” Andi muttered to Stella. “They ought to make exceptions for someone like me who isn’t likely to get in that kind of trouble. Because of her preferences, you know?”

“I know,” Stella said, blushing very hard now. “I’ve had that thought myself.”

They stared at each other for a very long moment. Stella’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. She wanted to flee the room and stick her head in a bucket of cool water. Then again, she didn’t.

When Nance came to her side to prod her arm, checking that the implant was in place, Stella hardly felt it.

“Looks like you’re good and covered,” Nance said. “For now, ‘eh? Until you get that extra banner.” She winked.

The doctor stayed for supper and still had enough daylight left to walk to the next waystation along the road. Elsta wrapped up a snack of fruit and cheese for her to take with her, and Nance thanked her very much. As soon as she was gone, Toma muttered.

“Too many mouths to feed—and what happens when the next flood hits? The next typhoon? We lose everything and then there isn’t enough? We have enough as it is, more than enough. Wanting more, it’s asking for trouble. Getting greedy is what brought the disasters in the first place. It’s too much.”

Everyone stayed quiet, letting him rant. This felt to Stella like an old argument, words repeated like the chorus of a song. Toma’s philosophy, expounded by habit. He didn’t need a response.

Stella finished winding the skein of yarn and quietly excused herself, putting her things away and saying goodnight to everyone.

Andi followed her out of the cottage soon after, and they walked together to their room.

“So, do you want one?” Stella asked her.

“A baby? I suppose I do. Someday. I mean, I assumed as well off as Barnard is I could have one if I wanted one. It’s a little odd, thinking about who I’d pick for the father. That’s the part I’m not sure about. What about you?”

Besides being secretly, massively pleased that Andi hadn’t thought much about fathers . . . “I assumed I’d never get the chance. I don’t think I’d miss it if I didn’t.”

“Enough other people who want ‘em, right?”

“Something like that.”

They reached their room, changed into their nightclothes, washed up for bed. Ended up sitting on their beds, facing each other and talking. That first uncomfortable night seemed far away now.

“Toma doesn’t seem to like the idea of another baby,” Stella prompted.

“Terrified, I think,” she said. “Wanting too much gets people in trouble.”

“But it only seems natural, to want as much as you can have.”

Andi shook her head. “His grandparents remembered the old days. He heard stories from them about the disasters. All the people who died in the floods and plagues. He’s that close to it—might as well have lived through it himself. He thinks we’ll lose it all, that another great disaster will fall on us and destroy everything. It’s part of why he hates my telescope so much. It’s a sign of the old days when everything went rotten. But it won’t happen, doesn’t he see that?”

Stella shrugged. “Those days aren’t so far gone, really. Look at what happened to Greentree.”

“Oh—Stella, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that there’s not anything to it, just that . . .” She shrugged, unable to finish the thought.

“It can’t happen here. I know.”

Andi’s black hair fell around her face, framing her pensive expression. She stared into space. “I just wish he could see how good things are. We’ve earned a little extra, haven’t we?”

Unexpected even to herself, Stella burst, “Can I kiss you?”

In half a heartbeat Andi fell at her, holding Stella’s arms, and Stella clung back, and either her arms were hot or Andi’s hands were, and they met, lips to lips.

One evening, Andi escaped the gathering in the common room, and brought Stella with her. They left as the sun had almost set, leaving just enough light to follow the path to the observatory. They took candles inside shaded lanterns for the trip back to their cottage. At dusk, the windmills were ghostly skeletons lurking on the hillside.

They waited for full dark, talking while Andi looked over her paperwork and prepared her notes. Andi asked about Greentree, and Stella explained that the aquifers had dried up in the drought. Households remained in the region because they’d always been there. Some survived, but they weren’t particularly successful. She told Andi how the green of the valleys near the coast had almost blinded her when she first arrived, and how all the rain had seemed like a miracle.

Then it was time to unlatch the roof panels and look at the sky.

“Don’t squint, just relax. Let the image come into focus,” Andi said, bending close to give directions to Stella, who was peering through the scope’s eyepiece. Truth be told, Stella was more aware of Andi’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder. She shifted closer.

“You should be able to see it,” Andi said, straightening to look at the sky.

“Okay . . .I think . . .oh! Is that it?” A disk had come into view, a pale, glowing light striped with orange, yellow, cream. Like someone had covered a very distant moon with melted butter.

“Jupiter,” Andi said proudly.

“But it’s just a star.”

“Not up close it isn’t.”

Not a disk, then, but a sphere. Another planet. “Amazing.”

“Isn’t it? You ought to be able to see some of the moons as well—a couple of bright stars on either side?”

“I think . . .yes, there they are.”

After an hour, Stella began shivering in the nighttime cold, and Andi put her arms around her, rubbing warmth into her back. In moments, they were kissing, and stumbled together to the desk by the shack’s wall, where Andi pushed her back across the surface and made love to her. Jupiter had swung out of view by the time they closed up the roof and stumbled off the hill.

Another round of storms came, shrouding the nighttime sky, and they spent the evenings around the hearth with the others. Some of the light went out of Andi on those nights. She sat on a chair with a basket of mending at her feet, darning socks and shirts, head bent over her work. Lamplight turned her skin amber and made her hair shine like obsidian. But she didn’t talk. That may have been because Elsta and Toma talked over everyone, or Peri exclaimed over something the baby did, then everyone had to admire Bette.

The day the latest round of rain broke and the heat of summer finally settled over the valley, Andi got another package from Griffith, and that light of discovery came back to her. Tonight, they’d rush off to the observatory after supper.

Stella almost missed the cue to escape, helping Elsta with the dishes. When she was finished and drying her hands, Andi was at the door. Stella rushed in behind her. Then Toma brought out a basket, one of the ones as big as an embrace that they used to store just-washed wool in, and set it by Andi’s chair before the hearth. “Andi, get back here.”

Her hand was on the door, one foot over the threshold, and Stella thought she might keep going, pretending that she hadn’t heard. But her hand clenched on the door frame, and she turned around.

“We’ve got to get all this new wool processed, so you’ll stay in tonight to help.”

“I can do that tomorrow. I’ll work double tomorrow—”

“Now, Andi.”

Stella stepped forward, hands reaching for the basket. “Toma, I can do that.”

“No, you’re doing plenty already. Andi needs to do it.”

“I’ll be done with the mending in a minute and can finish that in no time at all. Really, it’s all right.”

He looked past her, to Andi. “You know the rules—household business first.”

“The household business is done. This is makework!” she said. Toma held the basket out in reproof.

Stella tried again. “But I like carding.” It sounded lame—no one liked carding.

But Andi had surrendered, coming away from the door, shuffling toward her chair. “Stella, it’s all right. Not your argument.”

“But—” The pleading in her gaze felt naked. She wanted to help, how could she help?

Andi slumped in the chair without looking up. All Stella could do was sit in her own chair, with her knitting. She jabbed herself with the needle three times, from glancing up at Andi every other stitch.

Toma sat before his workbench, looking pleased for nearly the first time since Stella had met him.

Well after dark, Stella lay in her bed, stomach in knots. Andi was in the other bed and hadn’t said a word all evening.

“Andi? Are you all right?” she whispered. She stared across the room, to the slope of the other woman, mounded her under blanket. The lump didn’t move, but didn’t look relaxed in sleep. But if she didn’t want to talk, Stella wouldn’t force her.

“I’m okay,” Andi sighed, finally.

“Anything I can do?”

Another long pause, and Stella was sure she’d said too much. Then, “You’re a good person, Stella. Anyone ever told you that?”

Stella crawled out from under her covers, crossed to Andi’s bed, climbed in with her. Andi pulled the covers up over them both, and the women held each other.

Toma sent Andi on an errand, delivering a set of blankets to the next waystation and picking up messages to bring back. More makework. The task could just have as easily been done by the next wagon messenger to pass by. Andi told him as much, standing outside the work house the next morning.

“Why wait when we can get the job done now?” Toma answered, hefting the backpack, stuffed to bursting with newly woven woolens, toward her.

Stella was at her loom, and her hand on the shuttle paused as she listened. But Andi didn’t say anything else. Only glared at Toma a good long minute before taking up the pack. She’d be gone most of the day, hiking there and back.

Which was the point, wasn’t it?

Stella contrived to find jobs that kept Toma in sight, sorting and carding wool outside where he was working repairing a fence, when she should have been weaving. So she saw when Toma studied the hammer in his hand, looked up the hill, and started walking the path to Andi’s observatory.

Stella dropped the basket of wool she was holding and ran.

He was merely walking. Stella overtook him easily, at first. But after fifty yards of running, she slowed, clutching at a stitch in her side. Gasping for breath with burning lungs, she kept on, step after step, hauling herself up the hill, desperate to get there first.

“Stella, go back, don’t get in the middle of this.”

Even if she could catch enough of her breath to speak, she didn’t know what she would say. He lengthened his stride, gaining on her. She got to the shed a bare few steps before him.

The door didn’t have a lock; it had never needed one. Stella pressed herself across it and faced out, to Toma, marching closer. At least she had something to lean on for the moment.

“Move aside, Stella. She’s got to grow up and get on with what’s important,” Toma said.

“This is important.”

He stopped, studied her. He gripped the handle of the hammer like it was a weapon. Her heart thudded. How angry was he?

Toma considered, then said, “Stella. You’re here because I wanted to do Az a favor. I can change my mind. I can send a message to Nance and the committee that it just isn’t working out. I can do that.”

Panic brought sudden tears to her eyes. He wouldn’t dare, he couldn’t, she’d proven herself already in just a few weeks, hadn’t she? The committee wouldn’t believe him, couldn’t listen to him. But she couldn’t be sure of that, could she?

Best thing to do would be to step aside. He was head of the household, it was his call. She ought to do as he said, because her place here wasn’t secure. A month ago that might not have mattered, but now—she wanted to stay, she had to stay.

And if she stepped aside, leaving Toma free to enter the shed, what would she tell Andi afterward?

She swallowed the lump in her throat and found words. “I know disaster can still happen. I know the droughts and storms and plagues do still come and can take away everything. Better than anyone, I know. But we have to start building again sometime, yes? People like Andi have to start building, and we have to let them, even if it seems useless to the rest of us. Because it isn’t useless, it—it’s beautiful.”

He stared at her for a long time. She thought maybe he was considering how to wrestle her away from the door. He was bigger than she was, and she wasn’t strong. It wouldn’t take much. But she’d fight.

“You’re infatuated, that’s all,” he said.

Maybe, not that it mattered.

Then he said, “You’re not going to move away, are you?”

Shaking her head, Stella flattened herself more firmly against the door.

Toma’s grip on the hammer loosened, just a bit. “My grandparents—has Andi told you about my grandparents? They were children when the big fall came. They remembered what it was like. Mostly they talked about what they’d lost, all the things they had and didn’t now. And I thought, all those things they missed, that they wanted back—that was what caused the fall in the first place, wasn’t it? We don’t need it, any of it.”

“Andi needs it. And it’s not hurting anything.” What else could she say, she had to say something that would make it all right. “Better things will come, or what’s the point?”

A weird crooked smile turned Toma’s lips, and he shifted his grip on the hammer. Holding it by the head now, he let it dangle by his leg. “God, what a world,” he muttered. Stella still couldn’t tell if he was going to force her away from the door. She held her breath.

Toma said, “Don’t tell Andi about this. All right?”

She nodded. “All right.”

Toma turned and started down the trail, a calm and steady pace. Like a man who’d just gone out for a walk.

Stella slid to the ground and sat on the grass by the wall until the old man was out of sight. Finally, after scrubbing the tears from her face, she followed him down, returning to the cottages and her work.

Andi was home in time for supper, and the household ate together as usual. The woman was quiet and kept making quick glances at Toma, who avoided looking back at all. It was like she knew Toma had had a plan. Stella couldn’t say anything until they were alone.

The night was clear, the moon was dark. Stella’d learned enough from Andi to know it was a good night for stargazing. As they were cleaning up after the meal, she touched Andi’s hand. “Let’s go to the observatory.”

Andi glanced at Toma, and her lips pressed together, grim. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’ll be okay.”

Andi clearly didn’t believe her, so Stella took her hand, and together they walked out of the cottage, then across the yard, past the work house, and to the trail that led up the hill to the observatory.

And it was all right.

About the Author

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. The tenth novel in the series, Kitty Steals the Show, is due out in 2012. She's also written novels for young adults (Voices of Dragons, Steel), two stand-alone novels (Discord's Apple, After the Golden Age), and more than fifty short stories. She's been nominated for the Hugo Award for best short story, and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. After living the nomadic childhood of a typical Air Force brat, she's managed to put down roots in Colorado, where she lives with her fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies.

The Switch

Sarah Stanton

It starts out like this: halfway up a ladder looking at the stars. Xiao Zhu is behind me with the paint pots, whistling something tuneless to himself. I’ve got a brush in my hand and a delicate tracework of flowers in front of me; there’s a job to be done, and Lao Yang is waiting. But all I can think of is the stars.

We don’t see them that often, not the real ones. On the streets of Beijing you can see them every night, a glorious winking parade for the people who made them, but in the courtyards, the behind-spaces where we live and work and play, we just see clouds. Ever since I was a boy, there’s been a roof of smog over my head. And these days people think there’s something suspicious about stars. They’re for farmers and foreigners and dissidents, people who know how to find them and still want to. But they’re up there tonight, faint specks in the muck, and my hands go still as I stare.

Lao Yang coughs behind me. It’s a smoker’s cough, full of sound and fury, but it’s also a warning: there’s a job to be done. I turn my eyes to the roof beam, to the beautiful tracery of blossoms and leaves, and begin to fill in the green. Xiao Zhu begins to wander the courtyard, a young man’s amble, taking in the neat tiles and the potted pomegranate in one corner. Lao Yang just waits.

The paint takes shape under my brush as if it were a living thing. Red, green, blue, gold; it drifts across the wood and makes it real. When I have chased the last of the color into the corners, Lao Yang helps me down the ladder, and the three of us look up in silence at what we have done.

“It’s finished,” he says.

I nod.

“Three months’ work,” he says.

I nod again.

We walk out onto the street, sharing a steady silence between us. Xiao Zhu is already busy at the gate, stabbing at a small control panel with his slim fingers. We turn and look at the image of a house, the stone lions guarding its door, its roof beams painted like a sunrise. Above us, the false stars shine clear and unadorned.

Xiao Zhu hits the switch, and the hologram collapses. There is a quiet shimmer, and then nothing. The street remains unchanged.

Lao Yang smiles. “Let’s go home.”

It starts out like that, but that’s not where it started. It started fifteen years ago, when the hutongs disappeared. Those narrows alleys, pinpricked by public toilets and hawkers, the sights and the sounds and the pervasive smells, and on either side the courtyard houses, the heritage of Beijing. They were already vanishing by the close of the twentieth century, whole stretches of history being leveled to make way for apartments and poor quality condos. A lucky few were protected, turned into tourist traps and holiday homes. Gulou, Nanluoguxiang, Liulichang Jie: their names trip off our tongues like ancient mnemonics. But eventually, they too disappeared.

Lao Yang was forty when he saw the demolition sign go up above his door. He lived in a protected hutong, a heritage-listed area. When he went to register his protests with the local authorities, he was waylaid by plainclothes agents and beaten. That was the day the first hologram went up, in front of the place Lao Yang used to call home. Seen from the street, it looked like any other courtyard house, elegant and serene. From behind, it was a sick pile of rubble. He tells us over and over how he could put his hand through the mirage, how in that moment what he saw and what the world saw changed forever.

The next day, Lao Yang’s whole street was cloaked in holograms. The usual smog had subsided into a pearly blue. The crude demolition notices had vanished from the doors, to be replaced by fresh coats of vermillion paint. Lao Yang looked at them and knew that there was rubble waiting behind. And the holograms spread, street after street, so fast you could see a workman in the morning and know your whole district would be gone in the afternoon. I was just a boy when it happened, but I remember the spread of blue skies and green leaves like it was Chinese New Year. I didn’t understand back then. All I knew was that the city was beautiful, and I never wanted to leave.

I understand now. People believe what they see. These government holograms, they make Beijing a dream town, a false perfection that follows you home and leaves you at the door. We don’t see the demolition, the shaky buildings, the squalor. There are clear skies every day even though it hurts to breathe. We are a city of flickering images, of fantasy, of fraud, and nobody objects because nobody sees anything to object to. There are stars above us at night. Who cares where they come from?

We troop out of the hutong in single file, Lao Yang, Xiao Zhu and me. We never talk much after a job: we have done something majestic, something monstrous, and the silence is almost holy. We make our way through the winding streets like an ant trail, left, right and left again, until we reach the main road, bustling with cars. Xiao Zhu flags a taxi and bargains the price down to something we can afford. He sits in the front and we sit in the back, while the driver putters us home.

I met Lao Yang three years ago in a dingy noodle shop which had looked much cleaner from the outside. We were sitting side by side, slurping our noodles like some triumphant symphony. I had a book propped up against the vinegar pot and was considering it thoughtfully as I chewed. Not that I’m an intellectual or anything; I’m a man who works with his hands. But I like books. There’s something honest about a printed page. You know what it is today, and you can make a fair guess at what it’s going to be tomorrow.

Lao Yang peered over at my paperback. ‘You’re reading,” he observed.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?”

I hooked a noodle out of my bowl. “I like words,” I said.

“You a writer?”

“No,” I said. “Just a laborer.”

Lao Yang considered this. Then he grunted. “Let’s have a few beers.”

I guess that’s where it really started: me and Lao Yang, getting drunk together in a deadbeat little noodle shop like any other in Beijing. That’s when he told me about what had happened to his home, the place he’d brought his wife back to and the place where his children grew up. He told me he had a plan to bring back the hutongs, as good as they’d been or better. He already knew a kid who could manipulate the hologram systems, knock out the feed to a single house. All we had to do was rebuild the ruins behind it, hit the switch, and watch the fantasy be replaced with something real.

We’ve restored twenty-odd courtyard houses so far. Some of them have been left vacant and fallen into disrepair; these are the small jobs, just repairing and repainting and finally, hitting the switch. The bigger jobs are the houses which were actually destroyed, demolished to make way for property developments which never came around. These we rebuild, brick and timber and roof tiles, until the only difference between the house and the hologram is the color of the sky. We are the quietest dissidents in Beijing. When we do our job right, nobody knows we were ever there. But little by little, the three of us are fighting to bring the barrier between truth and illusion down.

Home is the first courtyard house we ever fixed up, on the outskirts of Gulou. Lao Yang’s house. When we arrived it was little better than a heap; now a crab-apple tree hangs lazily over the courtyard, and goldfish drift in the ornamental urns. The only furniture we have has been salvaged from demolition sites, old moth-eaten futons and wobbly tables, giving the place an eccentric, creaking charm. We’ve never been able to afford to buy new things for ourselves.

Xiao Zhu goes into the kitchen to boil water for noodles. I join him, helping to shake the little flat cakes out of the packets and into the bowls.

“You did a good job today,” he says. “All those colors. Really pretty.”

“You too,” I say, tearing open a seasoning sachet.

I never quite know what to say to Xiao Zhu. He’s a young guy, good with all the technology which has long since left me and Lao Yang behind. He’s got a thick mop of hair and a rakish smile and he dances when he walks. He could’ve been a TV idol, but he became a dissident instead. He’s the one who works the holograms for us, when all the hard labor is done; he helps out here and there with the painting and tiling, but his real job is something I can’t even begin to understand. I don’t know where Lao Yang found him. But he’s part of the secret, and that makes him family. I just wish I knew what to say.

We carry the steaming bowls of noodles out to the courtyard and sit down. Lao Yang hawks and spits into the bushes, picks up his chopsticks and digs in. Xiao Zhu and I eat slowly, making each bite last. When we’re done, Lao Yang lights up a cigarette, puts his feet up and eyes us across the table.

“That was our twenty-eighth house,” he says. “From here in Gulou to Chenxiang Jie and out to Dongjiaominxiang, we have brought twenty-eight courtyard houses back to reality. Nobody knows it but us, but we are making the past the present, and the present the truth of the past. The future is ours. And I think it’s time to move on.”

“Double prosperity,” I murmur.

“Double prosperity,” Lao Yang agrees. “Twenty-eight is an auspicious number. We’ve talked about this before, and I think we’re ready. There’s a jewel at the heart of this city, a treasure lying forgotten, and it needs to be saved. We can save it, if we’re willing to try.”

“The Forbidden City?” says Xiao Zhu. “We’re talking about the Forbidden City again? It’s massive. We’d be dead before we finished.”

“Not if we had help,” says Lao Yang, and a gleam creeps into his eyes. “What have we been playing at, these past three years? Pockets of reality here and there. Drops in an ocean. But if we could rebuild the palace—shut the holograms off and let people see the truth through the haze—that’d be worth dying for. I know a guy. He’s got a construction company. He’ll come in and help us for a price. We can do it! Give the people back their history! The government thinks they own our futures. Let’s fight them with the past!”

I pick up our bowls, toss the chopsticks in with a clatter. “We’ll talk about it,” I say. And then, apropos of nothing: “If the past and the present and the future had a battle, who would win?”

“The future,” Xiao Zhu says softly. “The future always wins.”

The next day, I head over to Houhai to see my girlfriend. She’s a sweet thing, a little younger than me, and has no idea what I get up to in the small hours of the night. Sometimes I think I should marry her, but then I remember I have no money, no job, no future. I am a down-and-out hero, not a husband. At these times I hold her tighter, kissing her with a sweet desperation; when she finds out the truth, we are finished. But the sun is bright today, the holographic sky projecting a deep and powerful blue, and we walk around the lake hand in hand while she chatters about her extensive circle of friends. I drift in and out, thinking about what Lao Yang said. Restoring the Forbidden City. Bringing it back to reality. Could we really pull it off?

“Oh!” my girlfriend exclaims, her eyes falling on a nearby shop. “They’ve put up the lanterns for the festival!”

“They’re not real lanterns,” I sigh. “They’ve just altered the hologram.”

“Hologram, real lanterns, what’s the difference?” she says. “They’re pretty!”

She rushes over to the shop and insists on posing for a photo, two fingers up in a cheeky V-sign. I dutifully hold her bag and snap the picture with her smartphone, assuring her she looks beautiful in every way.

“I’m going to eat so many mooncakes this year,” she says. “I always do. Every year when they come out in the shops, I go in and scold them. You’re going to make me so fat! I say. But I just can’t resist them.”

“You’re not fat,” I say absentmindedly. I’m thinking about the palace, how we’re going to shingle those roofs. Then my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Xiao Zhu.

“They’ve got Lao Yang,” he gasps.

I stop dead. “Who has?”

“The cops. Or someone like them. That guy he met was a plant, or a rat, or something. They grabbed him this morning on his way to where they were meeting. I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“Calm down,” I say, trying to sound soothing without arousing my girlfriend’s suspicions. “Where are you now?”

“Back at the house. I don’t know how long we’ll be safe here, though. He’ll have to tell them everything.”

“I’m coming over right now,” I say. “I’ll get a cab.”

“Don’t take the first one,” he says, and hangs up.

Xiao Zhu is pacing the length of our courtyard, one of Lao Yang’s cigarettes on his lips. The smog is thick today, outside the holographic curtain, and I have to squint to see him.

“It’s over,” he says. “Him and his fucking double prosperity. They’ll come for us, and we’ll never see the light of day again. Not that we are now. Not that we ever have.”

I sag onto one of our dilapidated couches. “It’s not over,” I say. “There’s still the two of us. You can work the holograms, and I can do everything else. It’ll take us longer to finish a house, but it’s what he’d want us to do. To keep going. To keep making things real.”

Xiao Zhu snorts. “You’re just like him. Big dreams. Today the Forbidden City, tomorrow the stars. What are you in it for anyway? What are you hoping to change?”

I start to speak, and then pause. What am I in it for? I loved the holograms as a kid. I remember people cheering when they switched them on in our street, watching the sky turn blue and the grass turn green. We never even had grass before. But then I grew up, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for ten years. Not the real sun. Not the stars. And I started looking at houses and shops I had known all my life with suspicion. What did they really look like? I knew what they looked like inside, because government-sponsored holograms stop at the door. But the truth of them was as foreign to me as if I had never seen them before.

When Lao Yang approached me that day, I slurped at my noodles and listened to a dream. He wanted to live in Beijing—not a copy or a model, but a real city, a city that breathed, a city that had shit on the pavement and smog in the air but was free, effervescent and alive. He wanted a place that could move from past to present to future of its own accord, without technological intervention. He wanted his home back. And I wanted to help him.

“I’m in it because sometimes you just fight,” I say, finally. “And you keep fighting until it’s done. Lao Yang’s out there. He’s an old man and he’s hurting. But he’s helped you, and he’s helped me, and I’m not going to let him disappear. I said something dumb before. I said there’s still the two of us. That’s not true. There’s three like there always was. I’m going to try and help him. And you’re coming with me.”

Xiao Zhu lights another cigarette, blows the smoke out into the haze. “Nice speech, big guy. In a battle between the past, present and future, who would you be?”

I growl. “The future. The future always wins.”

Two days later, we have the names of the people who took Lao Yang and where they’re hiding him. Xiao Zhu bribed a local guard and wouldn’t tell me where he got the money. We have a plan, too, but I don’t trust it. It relies too much on gadgets, on things I’ve never learned to think of as real. This is Xiao Zhu’s world, and it makes me uncomfortable. But there’s nowhere else to turn.

We’re standing in front of the Ru Jia hostel in east Chaoyang. Just like home!, the sign proclaims, and I believe it. I’ve met plenty of people who get beaten at home. Behind this facade is a black jail, an illegal holding facility for protesters and political dissidents. This is where they’re keeping Lao Yang, stripped naked and starving, pulpy and bruised; for once, I don’t have to see it to know that’s it’s true.

I look over at Xiao Zhu. “Ready?” I ask.

He nods, and pulls the hope of our whole campaign out of his pocket. It’s a portable holographic projector, powerful enough to generate a large object or change the appearance of a room. I have no idea where he got it; they’re normally only found in large hotels or function halls, helping to create a dream wedding at a fraction of the cost. He studies it intently, thumbing buttons as he perfects the image, confirming every last detail. A guard left the building half an hour ago, and I watch over Xiao Zhu’s shoulder as he is recreated, down to the pores on his skin, on an alien machine.

“Ready,” Xiao Zhu says at last. He pushes a button, and the guard flickers into existence by our side. My stomach lurches involuntarily. If something like this passed me on the street, I’d think it was real. Xiao Zhu curls his hand around the projector, concealing it from sight, and the two of us walk up the steps of the Ru Jia with our holographic guard close behind.

“You programmed the speech?” I whisper.

“Everything you said,” Xiao Zhu replies. “We’ll be fine.”

I knock on the door, then jump back behind the guard and try to look penitent. The door opens a fraction and a man peers out.

“Yeah?”

“I got ‘em, sir,” the false guard says. “The two that were with Lao Yang. Figured I’d drop them off here until the courts decide where they belong. Should I throw them in with their pal?”

“Do that,” the man says, “do that. Make sure they feel welcome, too—ha, ha!”

“Yessir,” says our guard. “I’ll treat them just right, don’t you worry about that.” The door creaks open further, and we step inside.

The first thing that hits us when we enter the jail is the darkness. The second is the stench. Somewhere in another room a woman is sobbing, an endless, throaty sob that sounds like it could eat up the whole world. For the first time in years, I find myself longing for the comfort of holograms. Our false guard leads us down the corridor to the room where Lao Yang is being held; as we get closer, the stench grows stronger, and I start to panic. When we stop, it’s at Room 28. Double prosperity. I want to cry.

I open the door. It’s not locked—the people here know what happens if they run. Lao Yang is lying in a ball on his bed, shaking in time to some unknown beat in his head. There’s dried blood on the sheets, and a dank smell in the air. I run to him. “Lao Yang, it’s me,” I say. I say it over and over, willing him to respond. At last he raises his head, a distant look in his eyes. “Oh,” he says. “So it is.”

We lift him to his feet, cradling his body and wincing as each new bruise is revealed. Xiao Zhu takes the clothes we’ve brought from his pack, and we dress him as gently as we can, first pants and then arms up for the shirt. Lao Yang says nothing as we fuss over him, swaying unsteadily like a sapling in the wind. It is as if knowledge and years have all been beaten out of him, leaving him back as he began, an empty seed. When I reach out to him, I find myself stroking his hair as I would a child’s.

“We should get moving,” Xiao Zhu says. “I’ve reprogrammed the projector.”

“Just give me a minute,” I say. I look at the old man twitching feverishly in my grip, try to catch my gaze with his own. “Lao Yang, we’re going to get you out of here now. Just think of this time as a hologram. It was a bad one, but we’re going to hit the switch and bring you back to reality. You’ll never need to be afraid again.”

Lao Yang’s gaze wavers, but he nods. I turn to Xiao Zhu. “Let’s go.”

We pack up the bag and sneak out into the corridor, Lao Yang hobbling between us. The guard is slouched by the door, watching some trashy late-night television and tossing sunflower seeds into his mouth.

“Are you sure this will work?” I whisper. “It’s so melodramatic.”

“It’ll work,” says Xiao Zhu, and as he pushes the button, he grins.

A van slams through the opposite wall of the corridor, sending glass and masonry flying through the air. A brick lands on the horn, setting off a piercing wail. Lights flash and spin manically. Despite myself, I sniff. Melodramatic. The guard jumps up, shouts for someone, anyone, and rushes to inspect the damage. We run for the door, Lao Yang propped up between us, our footsteps camouflaged by the racket. We have about five seconds before he realizes there’s no van after all.

We stop for breath in a small park two streets over, flattening ourselves against the trees for cover. I hold onto Lao Yang as tightly as I dare. I don’t believe what I said to him; reality is smog and shit and beatings, and you can’t hit the switch on that. But when you’re looking into the face of a broken man, what can you say? Beijing is a city of holograms, and that’s reality. It’s a city where you can get picked up off the street for no reason, and that’s reality. But we got in and out. We rescued a friend. That’s reality, too.  “It shouldn’t have been that easy,” I say. “We should have had to fight them.”

“I wanted to fight them,” says Xiao Zhu. “All those people in there, and that sobbing. We should have rescued them all.”

“That trick wasn’t going to work twice,” I say. “We did what we could. We fought until it was done.”

Xiao Zhu considers this, while the traffic roars past us and the holographic stars shine down. Then he turns to me, and the light in his eyes is brighter than them all.

“We’re not done,” he says. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Two minutes later, with my heart in my mouth, I watch the hologram go down.

The bright blue and yellow paint of the Ru Jia flickers, becomes faded and dull. Cracks appear in the plaster, windows become fractured and dusty, and the grass around its borders suddenly dies. For the first time in years, I see an eyesore on the streets of Beijing. And it stands out. It shouts its presence to the world. It makes me smile until I hurt.

“Tomorrow morning, people are going to be asking questions about that,” says Xiao Zhu. ‘They’ll probably even have a look at what goes on inside.”

Lao Yang lifts his head. “What did you do?”

“I released a virus into their system, one that operates on a time delay. It’s knocked out their projector and it’ll block any attempt to fix it. I did it to cover our escape, but—” and he grins, helplessly, “it has an upside, too.”

“Xiao Zhu,” I say, “I could kiss you. Let’s go home.”

It’s funny. We spent three years picking away at the scab of history, but we never pulled it off until tonight. Twenty-eight courtyard houses are scattered throughout Beijing. They are beautiful, and they represent truth, but they never changed the world. All those roof beams, those delicate flowers, the tiles and the urns and the towers never did so much as hitting a switch and showing reality as it is. Our greatest triumph wasn’t renewing the past, but exposing the future. And in a battle between the past, present and future, the future always wins.

About the Author

Sarah Stanton grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Halfway through university, she abandoned a promising career in not having much of a career when she transferred from an opera performance course into a Chinese language major, having fallen for the Middle Kingdom more or less overnight. Three years, two exchange programs and one potential firework accident later, she has settled in Beijing as a freelance translator and editor specializing in contemporary literature. As a writer, she has been published in a variety of magazines and indie projects, including Voiceworks, Hunger Mountain, Asian Cha Journal and dotdotdash. She is a recipient of the Talus Prize and was recently shortlisted for the James White Award.

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

Sunny Moraine

Ping.

Vita. Wake up.

Spinning through the dark, I hear and feel CERA’s alert both at once, a sound that is a vibration like a plucked string between my sealed eyes. I shift in the padded transit cocoon. I move hands that barely feel like mine, and I feel wires pulling the jacks in my skin at the same instant as my fingers hit the tape over my eyelids. I wedge my nails under the strips and they come away like old skin. My tongue feels like a dry slug trapped between my teeth and my soft palate. But all of this is distant. I’m in high orbit over myself, and I can choose where I want to place my attention.

I chase the plucking string to its source.

All at once I learn a number of things, data nestled at the point where I and CERA intersect, waiting for me to retrieve it. I flip through it like a printed report; it helps to imagine these things in physical terms. This is how I was trained and in moments of partial consciousness it’s best to fall back on what you know at the most basic level. And here are the new things I know: as far as CERA can determine, re-emergence into normal space has occurred. There are a number of equipment malfunctions. Most of the sensor array appears to be offline. The primary Q-drives are offline. The differential sail is online and can be deployed if needed. Life support is online.

I am alive. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Chronometrics are offline.

Shit.

Extensive systems failure was a distinct possibility; we knew this as well, and I was told it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the launch, as if it might make a difference. It makes no difference now in the most complete possible sense, but I punch a weak fist into the padding of the cocoon.

CERA’s plucked string voice in the center of my head—she’s waiting on my command. She’s a smart AI but even so she operates at about the intelligence of the average Labrador. She can think. But in situations featuring high degrees of uncertainty she needs instructions.

Do we have visual?

She shivers an affirmative into me. I feel something approaching relief; I’m flying blind in every meaningful way but one, then. My craft can’t tell me exactly where or when I am, the composition of the space around me, the relative location of any neighboring bodies, or whether I’ve gone anywhere else at all. But I can see.

At my command CERA engages my optical feed. But my body jerks in protest, though the cocoon swallows the movement. This isn’t right. I can feel myself blinking, lifting my hands to my eyes again—the frantic movements of the abruptly blind. Because all of my vision is blackness.

Here’s a dream that’s also a memory: Kendra and I are in our closet of a kitchen in the slightly larger closet of the apartment that we shared for those last three years, and I’m excited about work, about the breakthrough we’ve just had, about possibilities. I’m pacing in what room there is to pace. Kendra is sitting on the counter and her legs are swinging like a child’s. She’s eating an orange. I remember—and I dream, God, over and over—that at the height of my excitement, the part about the possible applications of the technology, I braced my hands on either side of her hips and kissed her and the taste of her and that orange filled my mouth and both were a kind of sweet alchemical perfection. I remember that the lights were off and the sun was westering through the window. I remember that her hair flashed a deep gold in the corner of my vision as I slid a hand into it.

I remember these things with a clarity that doesn’t apply to anything I said aloud to her. At the time, I thought that the things I was saying were the most important part of that moment.

I know better now. But my mind loves to remind me.

CERA is telling me that the visual feed is fine. I shove her back into another round of diagnostics. I have no idea if an AI at her level can feel—though after a year in training with her and a third of a second in nearly constant uplink you’d think I’d know her well enough to tell—but I could swear that she’s getting tense.

I understand that the system could have broken down in such a way that CERA can’t see the damage even when she runs the full set of diagnostics. I know that this is possible. But knowing it is useless. We have no plan for that scenario.

CERA, if the visual is working then why can’t I see stars?

I don’t know, Vita, CERA pings me, and of course it is. Without any of the rest of the sensory array, how could she even begin to collect herself into an answer?

Speculate?

It’s a half-literal stab in the dark. I don’t even know if CERA can speculate that way. I drift in the cocoon, in warm darkness, and I listen to the silence of her thinking. I know it’s wild anachronism, but I imagine immense gears turning in blackness, grinding through numbers like meat.

It’s possible that the craft has emerged into normal space-time far beyond the edge of any local galactic groups or clusters.

I’m not sure. I am just as much in the dark as you.

I have to take a breath and hold it, listening to my pulse pounding between my ears—and I’m trying to ignore that last, that part of her voice that twists away from chilly digital delivery and into something a whole hell of a lot familiar. All that time we spent together, I didn’t mean for that to happen.

Too late now. And I have bigger problems. Because what she’s saying . . . It would be beyond miscalculation. It would be disaster. Which I planned for before I climbed into my soft cocoon world, but it’s never quite the same as being faced with the fact of it—you think you can teach yourself to expect the worst, to train your mind to bend around and against it like a reed.

But there are some things you can’t plan for.

How remote is the possibility?

CERA tells me. I swallow the number down and it burns. I know: it doesn’t matter how remote the possibility is if it’s actually what’s happened. I float and I try to think. I turned off the visuals but now I cut them back in again and stare at the darkness.

Nothing. Not even the faintest specks of light. If the rest of the sensory array was online I would have ultraviolet, infrared. But I don’t. All I have is what’s in front of me. I just need to be sure of what that is.

CERA, I say. Give me full interface.

I can feel it, a widening of everything. The visuals are still engaged as I dive into her, spreading myself into her channels and pathways, hunting for a sign.

Here is another dream that’s also a memory. I have this one less frequently, but it does come. I wonder sometimes if my brain makes greater sport of the ones that hurt or the ones that feel wonderful until I wake up and the rest of my memory asserts itself. Does it hurt more to live in the parts of the past that were genuinely good? I still don’t know.

But in this dream Kendra and I are fighting. It was a very bad week. Now we have arrived at its apex, the black spike of it, and it’s about to drive itself into both of our spines and cripple us.

You can’t ask me to choose, I’m saying. I’m close to yelling. We are standing in a half-lit living room, the TV on mute and nothing but a colored blur. We’re both so tired and that only makes it worse. That’s bullshit, Kendra. We made a deal when we got here. You can’t ask me to choose now.

Things change, she says. Her arms are crossed and all of her feels small and cold like a body in space: distant, receding. In this moment I begin to understand that she is already leaving me. That she has already left. Why can’t we change with them? I’m not asking for anything unreasonable.

This is the part where I let out a cough of laughter. It’s calculated to convey just the right amount of scornful incredulity. I recall that I was proud of it at the time. I’m sorry, have you completely missed everything I’ve been doing for the last four months? Did you check out when I was explaining it? Or did you just not get it?

She’s smaller, colder. Goodbye, Kendra. Goodbye. I’m not stupid, she says. In this memory—and how close it is to the truth, I can never be sure—she is literally backing toward the door. And yes, I missed it. You weren’t here. I missed you.

I missed you too, I’m saying, but what should be an olive branch feels like a blow. I want to hurt her. I want to make things better. I want to be anywhere but this moment, which is why I keep coming back to it. But things are—this is important. You know? It’s really fucking important.

A lot of things are important. She’s fading. Red shift. The blackness that is the hallway and the night. There is an entire universe outside of us and I’m losing her to it. We’re important. We were. Now I’m going to go do something important by myself. I’m sorry. I’ll call you.

She didn’t. I never blamed her for that.

The higher functions of the sensory array are not salvageable. I’m not sure how long it takes for me to discover this, but in the end I’m sweating and aching, my muscles tense with the effort of untangling miles of digital pathways only to discover total burnout. A blackened hulk where a fantastic intricacy of pseudo-organic computing used to be, comprising all of the parts of CERA that are devoted to the analysis of where we are, when we are, what’s around us and how close and how big it is and what it’s made of and what we should do in response to all of that information. Chronometrics is adjacent in the solid-spin core. It’s all gone.

I’m sweating against the cocoon’s padding. I want to beat against the sides of the thing until I’ve pounded my fists into fucking pulp. I want out. And what would I see?

I can’t fix what’s burned out in transit. I don’t even know what happened to burn it out. That piece of time is blank in the logs, just as much a charred lump of uselessness as the broken array.

We didn’t plan for this because we couldn’t. But I know it’s more than that. We didn’t plan for it because we moved too fast. Because I did. Because I was running.

Here is a memory that isn’t a dream. It doesn’t need to be. I have this one saved. I have them all saved, all her vlogs, but I don’t watch most of them. There are two that I come back to, over and over. They’re the only two I need, because while the others can hurt me, it’s only background. After this long, I am refined in my taste for self-torture.

The first one: it’s only fifteen minutes long. She’s showing the viewer around the village where she’s working—it’s mostly huts made from tin and wood and mud. Large families crowd outside several of them, the children naked, the older children and the women wrapped in brightly-colored fabric. Dogs roam the dirt. Mothers carry impossibly heavy loads on their heads. Men stand with farming implements in their hands or lean against ancient trucks, squinting into the sun.

You know this. You’ve seen it before. It’s beyond a trope, beyond cliché—it’s what we build to look at when seeing is too hard.

But here’s the thing. Two things. I saw them immediately.

The first thing is that the people are smiling. They’re waving. This isn’t some kind of appeal for charity or pity. The women look happy: they laugh together and I see them pull Kendra into a hug. The men nod and say things I don’t understand. They gesture at one of the trucks, the bed of which is piled with sacks of what might be grain. The children are skinny but they don’t look unhealthy. The sun is high and hot—I can practically feel it through the screen, sucking the moisture out of my skin—but they don’t look beaten down by it. They show me things. Their village well. They show me their school, which is a room filled with neat rows of desks and a wall covered with crayon drawings. At the front of the room is a wide LCD screen.

The message is clear: these people are doing well. Whatever has been done there is working. The video is meant to be seen by particular people with access to particular bank accounts, and as such I know what I see is filtered and framed for consumption, but I also believe it, because it feels true. It doesn’t feel like clever staging. What she and her group were doing—it was working.

And here is the second thing I see: Kendra, Kendra smiling, tucking a glossy black strand of hair behind her ear. Kendra smiling with her already dark skin darkened further by the sun and wind—dark and glowing like the heart of a coal. Kendra, happier than I ever remember seeing her with me.

The message beneath the message is clear, and the fact that I know that she never meant for me to see it makes no difference at all. Leaving me was the best choice she could have made.

I don’t blame her, or them, or anyone. But it doesn’t help. There’s no one left alive to blame.

Troubleshooting is different when the computer has been jacked directly into your brain for the better part of two years. You know it like you know your own internal workings, which is to say not well at all. But you can feel your way through it in a more instinctive fashion. You’re fumbling in a dark room—in a very systematic way, in a grid pattern, protocol by protocol—but you feel that it’s a room in which you already know the layout. You’ve been here before. You saw it once, in a memory. In a dream.

I lose time when I’m fully interfaced with CERA’s systems. Some of it is simple micro-focus, and some of it is that inside CERA, time doesn’t work the same way—I always found that appropriate, considering what we do. So I’m not sure how long I work inside her, feeling the pieces of her back together, turning them to make them fit, discarding the ones that seem twisted or misshapen beyond repair. At some point I feel a buzz and I pull back enough to hear her.

Partial array function has been restored. Gravimetrics are online. Proximity detection is online. All other sensory systems remain non-functional. Chronometrics are still non-functional. Same old, same old.

When I bite down on my bottom lip, enough of me is still in my body to feel the pain. It’s better than nothing. What about visuals?

The visual feed is functional, she says again, and she sounds impatient, all amusement gone. And then she’s silent. Because what else can she really say?

I don’t know how long I join her in the quiet. I’m out of her and back in me, but time is still slippery, and with chronometrics offline it feels unreal. Which I guess it always was. But at last I stir and open my eyes into the darkness again.

Okay. We’ll work with what we have. CERA, if the beacon is still—

Proximity alert. We are approaching an object. I go still in the cocoon, already vaulting to assumptions. We’re okay. We’re going to be saved.

Even if some part of me knows better.

Here is a memory that will never be a dream. I never get that far. I can approach it in sleep, but as soon as the shape of it comes into view I’m plunging back up, too breathless and too exhausted to scream.

I see it—I am seeing it—on the news, before I know what I’m looking at. It’s shaky cell phone footage, and it’s a wall of water advancing on a shitty little town somewhere and none of this is unusual enough to get my attention, even if I know somewhere in the rear corners of my attention that this one is different.

Here’s what happens: the water is coming and it’s swallowing everything. It’s like someone is pulling a blanket of water up over the land. I’m sitting in a bar near the lab, drinking off a long day, and as I’m watching, idle and only half interested, I’m not sure if it’s live or if it happened already. Not like it matters.

And I see her.

It’s just a second. After, I spend days going over footage and photos and info on where she was then, friends, her mother—God, her mother, who I never liked talking to even when we were still together—and then I go over the body counts and the casualty reports, like I can bend the numbers a different way if I focus hard enough.

Like I can run time backward. Just like that.

But I see her, and she’s scrambling up an embankment with a crowd of people so wet and muddy they barely look human, and then the embankment crumbles under them and they all go down. I don’t see her face when she drowns. My imagination does the heavy lifting for me.

Kendra. Jesus Christ.

How many people died that day? All that time staring at the numbers and I’m honestly still not sure. No one’s sure, of course, but we love to count, don’t we? I know it was thousands. Tens of thousands. I cared about one in all of them. Does that make me a heartless bitch? Was that always part of the problem? Is that where entropy starts?

I can’t change anything, Kendra. But you know I was trying. You know I still am.

I’d twist time around my fingers for you.

Is it a ship? I hadn’t realized how frantic I was getting. Now I can feel it in the strain of my own inner voice. CERA, is it a satellite? Can we—?

Careful, Vita. Gravimetrics indicate that the object is extremely dense. A closer approach is likely to make escape from its gravitational field difficult.

We don’t have the thrust sufficient to climb a gravity well. We launched in space. I tense up and clutch at what’s around me like I can control it with my muscles.

CERA, full stop.

I know I can’t feel us pull to an easy, reverse-thrusted halt in space, but I still feel as though I can. And I feel that thing out there, whatever it is. The thing I’m blind to. I’m in a dark room and now I know there’s something in here with me. Not a satellite. Obviously too much pull. A planet? A star?

I’m so pissed at the malfunctioning visuals, I wish I could tear them out of my eyes. And then I’d really be blind, drifting and bleeding, but I’m suddenly so pissed it almost feels worth it.

What is it,CERA?

Tough to say. Density is estimated at 1 x 1013—but it’s only an estimate. Alpha, beta, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation are all minimal.

No heat or light to speak of. Not a star. Unless.

God.

Everything here is wild speculation. That I’m even here is wild speculation—we were pretty sure this would work, but we weren’t positive. Time, space, how exactly the mechanics of both would work when my little craft shoved them in a blender and hit puree—we didn’t know. It’s too much to call this an experiment: we were flailing around in the dark. I wasn’t afraid of that. But a lot can change in a few million years. If something went wrong. If I went too far. If I’m not where and when I should be.

That thing out there in the dark might be a hungry mouth, open and ready to swallow me.

Visuals on, I stare at black nothing. I will some photons to sneak out of that blackness and give me a clue. But none come. Or I can’t see them. The end is the same.

So here’s what I could do, I think, staring so hard my head starts to ache and the cocoon around me starts to feel like something designed to smother instead of something keeping me alive. I could just drift blind until someone finds me, if anyone does, if anyone’s there to do the finding. I have a week of air. I have enough water to keep me going almost that long, if the moisture reclamation sponges laced into the cocoon’s fabric hold out.

Or I could start being a little more goddamn proactive.

Launch the probe, CERA.

I have one. It was a kind of concession to research outside of the tunnel-vision focus on what we were really trying to do. In case I found anything interesting. Now it might tell me nothing useful. It might be able to tell me, in exquisitely measured detail, just how fucked I am.

But we have to know, don’t we? We always have to fucking know.

I feel the craft eject the probe. I imagine it shooting toward the thing spinning invisibly out there, black and potentially lethal. I don’t trust any of what CERA is telling me. I don’t trust my eyes. I haven’t in a long time.

They never showed me what was there until I didn’t want them to. And then it was all they would let me see.

I ran, Kendra. Okay? I admit it. You got me. I ran. I was always running. Maybe I saw something in you that I didn’t know how to deal with. Maybe it’s just who and what I am. I ran away from you and then after you were gone I ran away from everything.

But we were going to blast a hole through decades and pop out the other side. You weren’t just a little bit excited by that? You don’t think that was worth some sacrifices?

Was it? Was it worth you?

I hate questions without answers. I ran from them, too. Here’s the thing, Kendra—here’s my dirty little secret. I thought maybe, in the future, they’d have neatened everything up. Simplified things. The world would be a less messy place to be in. Everything would fit. Everything would make sense. And in that world, you would naturally come back to me, because we made sense.

I believed in something better. I did. Better… and easy.

And now look.

Iron.

I wait for more. I wait a while. Time spins out—I wonder if I’m hallucinating its passing. The truth is, I’m sort of wondering if there is such a thing as time anymore.

CERA?

The composition of the object is pure iron. It’s very dense. It’s highly probable that it is the last remnant of a stellar object.

I wait again. There’s more silence. In that silence, I think I’m dreaming, and what I’m dreaming of is laying my cheek against something hard and cold in the darkness. Lying down on its surface and letting it pull me into itself. Because this—right here, in the ending-black, circling a ball of solid cold—this is always where I was headed.

We try to make things mean things. We can’t. They don’t.

CERA. Are there any records of any such objects on file?

Everything I know about it is only speculation, Vita.

Tell me.

She does. I stare into the darkness and I listen.

We have a lot of ideas about time, us temporally-bound creatures. I know them. I read all about them years ago in the kind of quantity that requires scientific notation. Some of it was research. Some of it was… well. Passing the time.

Here’s one that I always liked, because it’s not about time, not really. It’s about spacetime, and it’s about probability and the shape of things. That every possible choice we could make has been made, somewhere, in some iteration of the universe. That bad decision you made that changed everything? Somewhere you didn’t make it. You took the other door and you got the lady and not the tiger.

Of course, that leaves an almost infinite number of versions of you that got the tiger instead. And you personally? You only get the one choice. That’s the rule.

The rule broke me. I wanted to break it. That’s why I climbed inside the cocoon. Somewhere there’s a me that came home when I said I would, said the right things, did the right things, and somewhere there’s a Kendra who didn’t drown in a country I still can’t even spell. Somewhere we’re together and we’re happy and we might even get to go on forever.

But I don’t get to make that choice, even if the rules don’t totally apply to me anymore. Even if I broke the one. I get the choice I made. And now I get the darkness.

How long?

CERA is silent for a moment—for her a moment is a decade and I wonder what she can possibly be doing that holds her back from response. Then she vibrates at me out of the center of my cortex.

I don’t understand your question, Vita.

Fuck. How far did we go?

Another moment of silence. This time I can feel what it is: she’s actually thinking through it, reading entire books on the subject, consulting a hundred thousand databases’ worth of info. Getting all she can for me. But of course, when she speaks again I already know the answer.

The theoretical timeframe within which stellar objects could potentially decay into spheres of iron-56 is 101500 years from our temporal point of departure.

One sentence. Very simple. I almost can’t believe it took her so long to come up with that.

There’s nothing, I think. I feel the words behind my lips. Nothing. Not technically correct, but practically true, and the latter means more than the former most of the time. Like: She left me. She’s gone.

I’m gone. I can’t get back. With no one, with nothing, no energy source for the jump, no hand to pull back the slingshot. I can’t move on pure iron. I’m here. Here is the only when I’ll ever be.

My cocoon closes tighter around me in response to the drop in my body’s temperature. I feel a flash of fear of smothering even though that couldn’t happen. But it will. It is. Air, water, food… Here I am in the dark, in my warm little center of the nothing that’s left. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing that I can or should do. In the most fundamental way possible, I am inconsequential, and so are all my stupid little choices. The ones I made and the ones I didn’t. The ladies and the tigers.

And somewhere in that darkness I realize that what I’m feeling is relief.

CERA, I say, and really, the words are so much easier than I thought they would be. Take us away.

I can almost sense CERA’s confusion, though I know that technically she can’t have any. Please specify a destination, Vita.

Random. My eyes are open, staring at a darkness without stars. Iron dark. All I want to do is sleep. It doesn’t matter.

I’m dreaming with my eyes open. I don’t need to close them now if I want the dark; it’s all around me. It’s the night face of everything. CERA is quiet in the center of my head, the cocoon is warm around me, and I drift. I think about water and blood and countries the names of which I can’t spell. I think about light in the strands of Kendra’s hair. I think about choices, ladies, tigers.

I had to come billions of years to understand that it doesn’t matter. That it is what it is. That we had what we had and now it’s over. I shift my hands in the folds of the cocoon, it’s like I can reach into the dark and touch iron, close my fingers around it. Feel the coming cold. Sleep inside it. Dream.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a PhD student in sociology and a writer-like object who has published short stories in Strange Horizons, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Shimmer, among other places. Her first novel Line & Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is forthcoming from Samhain Publishing.

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films’ ’60s Science Fiction

Mark Cole

Hammer Films: The name conjures images of sinister images in garish color, of Frankenstein, Dracula, and a thousand other terrors of the night.

Like some monstrous creature in one of its own films, Hammer has returned from the dead. After a 43-year absence, The Woman in Black recently hit American theaters, with the promise of further films to come.

So far, however, Hammer has announced no plans to explore another important part of its legacy (although one unfamiliar to many of their fans): science fiction. Hammer’s SF films of the ’50s—inspired by the legendary Quatermass serials—were the company’s first venture into horror. Not only did their success encourage Hammer to make its first Gothics, but they played a pivotal role in the development of British SF cinema over the next decade.

While many critics have discussed the Quatermass films and their numerous copies, few have paid much attention to the SF films Hammer made in the decade that followed. They are a curious lot, ranging from true classics to classy exploitation films, from the deadly serious to the just plain goofy, from daring astronauts to topless cavegirls. They reflect the rapidly changing times and Hammer’s own struggles to stay afloat in an uncertain market. But no matter how dark or absurd they can be, they remain eminently watchable, thanks to the care and professionalism that Hammer brought to all its films.

According to Bill Warren’s massive Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, it was the rise of Gothic horror that drove SF out of the theaters at the end of the ’50s. For Hammer, 1957 marked both the end of its initial burst of Quatermass films and the beginning of its horror cycle. This is no accident: Quatermass’ adventures featured strong doses of horror, something nearly unprecedented in SF film at the time they appeared on TV. It was Hammer’s desire to make horror films that led the company first to Quatermass, then to Gothics. These proved so successful that it would be six years before Hammer returned to SF, in a sadly neglected classic.

The Damned (aka These Are the Damned in the U.S.) remains one of Hammer’s strangest and most elusive films. One look at the shocking images on its movie posters tells us that Hammer intended to cash in on the success of MGM’s Village of the Damned. However, while lethal to those around them, the film’s radioactive children are otherwise ordinary: They evoke not horror but pity.

Nor does The Damned look anything like our conception of an SF film. Set in the English seaside town of Weymouth, its stunning widescreen cinematography contrasts the sharp cliffs and rocky seashore with the crowded Victorian streets. In fact, the film takes its time reaching its first SF elements.

It starts like another sort of film altogether, introducing us to a gang of Teddy Boys led by the psychotic King (Oliver Reed) who uses his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field) to trap wealthy tourists. By 1961 many people had become frightened of the growing number of youth gangs and the increase in juvenile delinquency; at first glance, The Damned could be yet another serious drama about violent teens. (It is also one the few elements taken from the film’s source, H. L. Lawrence’s Children of Light.)

But the gang is not the only thing disturbing Weymouth. The army is there as well, and military helicopters buzz constantly over the peaceful town. On top of the cliffs is a high-security research facility run by a soft-spoken scientific bureaucrat (identified only by his first name, Bernard) played by Alexander Knox. As Joan attempts to escape her brother’s control with the help of the gang’s latest victim, retired American businessman, Simon Wells (MacDonald Carey), the two stumble on the underground complex hidden in the caves beneath.  There they find a handful of seemingly ordinary children—only they don’t feel the cave’s chill and are themselves cold to the touch.

One might expect to learn that the military created these children. Instead they are a natural mutation, born of mothers exposed to nuclear fallout. Like the Teddy Boy gang, they are the accidental products of our society. Bernard sees in the children the salvation of mankind. They alone will be able to survive in the smoking ruins of civilization after the inevitable nuclear holocaust. As several of them have already died of natural causes, his confidence seems misplaced.

What many reviewers have missed about The Damned is that the film is very much an anti-Quatermass film. Here it is the scientific hero—attempting to save mankind from destruction—who has become the villain. It is not the children who are terrifying. It’s Bernard’s blasé acceptance of man’s impending destruction; his obsessive secrecy and willingness to murder anyone who might reveal his secrets; the casual inhumanity of his project; and his bland insistence that he loves the children under his care. While we never learn Bernard’s full name, it seems no coincidence that he shares Professor Quatermass’ first name.

The first Quatermass films reflected the Cold War paranoia of the age, setting us against an enemy who, while capable of absorbing us into itself, was ultimately from somewhere outside. In The Damned, the enemy we have to fear is our own selves and our own government. It reflects the growing Cold War nihilism of the ’60s, as we began to question our own actions in what seemed an endless conflict that could only end in destruction. It is this dark political edge that led to The Damned’s obscurity.

While blacklisted American director Joseph Losey completed The Damned in 1961, it took two years and the removal of nine minutes to convince Hammer to release it in the UK. It would not reach U.S. for another two years, in a seriously truncated version shorn of another ten minutes—as well as most of its political and philosophical elements. Many critics dismissed this sad remnant of a film without paying much attention to it, and its dark ending did not help it find an audience. Only now that the full-length version is available has it gradually gained the critical recognition it deserves.

And perhaps the film isn’t quite as despairing as we think—not if, after the final credits, we watch Simon and Joan turn his boat around to make one more try at rescuing the children…

It seems strange, but it’s true: After four groundbreaking ’50s SF films, the most typical of Hammer ’60s SF output (and only marginal SF at that!) was its bikini-cavegirl films.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) set the company’s path for many years. One of the first color horror films, it shocked audiences with its garish splashes of gore. The films Hammer made in its wake threw even more blood at the screen and amped up the violence. But as Hammer’s competition (in particular Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe films for American International Pictures) became fiercer, Hammer followed the latest trend in European film and turned to sex to distinguish itself from the herd. By the mid-’60s, Hammer films regularly featured pageant winners and Playboy Playmates. It’s no coincidence that Raquel Welch appeared side by side with Bond girl Ursula Andress on a stunning dual poster for Hammer’s first cavegirl movie, One Million Years B.C. (1965) and its new adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s She.

Most of Hammer’s best-known films seem to have been remakes, sequels, or adaptations, so it comes as no surprise that One Million Years B.C. is a remake of One Million B.C. (1940). In glorious color, the remake rejected the original’s lizards with added fins in favor of some of Ray Harryhausen’s best stop-motion dinosaur work. However, it did retain the curious conceit of rendering dialogue in an imaginary primitive language.

Clearly, Hammer never had any illusion that One Million Years B.C.’s major attractions amounted to much more than Welch’s fur bikini, and Harryhausen’s dinosaurs. It’s purely an exploitation film, albeit a vastly entertaining one, made with Hammer’s usual panache, craftsmanship, and technical savvy.

However, it was extremely expensive, at least by Hammer’s standards. The company decided to get the most out of its investment in 1967 by making Prehistoric Women (aka Slave Girls), which recycles One Million Years B.C.’s sets and costumes (but had no dinosaurs). Supposedly based on a 1950 film of the same name (although the two have little in common), Prehistoric Women’s magical time-travel elements make it fantasy rather than SF. It’s also unique among these films for its English dialogue.

In 1970 Hammer followed these with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, returning to One Million Years B.C.’s successful formula of dinosaurs plus cave girls. Only this time, actor Victoria Vetri and animator Jim Danforth provided the film’s major attractions; J. G. Ballard provided the story; and Hammer included a few nude sequences in the original British version of the film.

The following year, Hammer produced its final cavegirl film, The Creatures the World Forgot—which, while dinosaur-free, offered one-time Miss Norway, Julie Ege. And even more nudity.

The early ’60s was not a good time for SF cinema. The number of new films fell dramatically. Audiences became more demanding, expecting far better effects and more coherent films. While some filmmakers responded by trying to make more intelligent movies, they failed to create new interest in the genre.

Perhaps the best film of this era was Hammer’s classic 1967 adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit (known in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth). It took Hammer nine years to turn Nigel Kneale’s TV serial into a film. The company’s first attempt in 1961 quickly stalled because it couldn’t find American backers. This hiatus, however, allowed Hammer to replace lead Brian Donlevy, whom Kneale detested, with a new Quatermass: Andrew Keir.

The differences between the new film and the two that precede it, though, it are far greater than a change of actors—or the switch from black-and-white to widescreen color. It’s by far the least science-fictional of the three, dwelling instead on myth and legend. While the first two were SF with horror elements, Quatermass and the Pit is at heart a Lovecraftian horror film, centered around a supernatural menace with a science-fictional explanation. After Hammer’s ten years of making horror films, however, the new emphasis makes sense.

It’s another change that’s harder to understand: Quatermass’ role is seriously reduced, so much so that Hammer stalwart James Donald, playing paleontologist Dr. Roney, gets top billing. In the U.S., the film’s advertising campaign made no reference to either Quatermass or the previous installments. Perhaps this is a reflection of the movie’s shift toward supernatural horror; after all, it is not Quatermass’ science that finds the way to destroy the alien menace, but Roney’s occult research.

1968 brought what is probably the strangest film Hammer ever made, and certainly its strangest ’60s film—a movie that seems entirely out of sync with the times that produced it: The Lost Continent.

Hammer had an enormous success with its adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and decided to follow it up with a version of another of his novels, Uncharted Seas. While he was one of the most popular adventure novelists of his day, Wheatley is mostly remembered today for the Hammer films based on his work. In fact, his career had already started to fade by the time Hammer made The Lost Continent.

If one had to try to describe The Lost Continent, it might be simplest to compare it to a pulpy adventure novel written in 1926. Certainly, the one movie that it most strongly resembles is 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, which was also based on a pre-World War II adventure novel and offers a similar combination of thrills on the high sea, hidden worlds, and strange creatures.

In fact, except for a brief opening tease, the so-called lost continent does not appear until the film is halfway over. It starts with Captain Jensen (Eric Porter) trying to outrun the harbor police. His ship is overdue at the scrap yard; he’s smuggling a deadly cargo of white phosphorus, which explodes if it gets wet; and his passengers are all as desperate as he is. Before long, he finds himself dealing with a deadly storm, a hole in his hull, mutiny, and water rushing into a hold full of explosives.

It’s at this point, with Jensen, the surviving passengers and crew all adrift in a lifeboat, that the characters suddenly find themselves in an SF film. First they encounter carnivorous seaweed, then a strange lost world made of ships caught in the weed, then a girl crossing the seaweed wearing what looks like snowshoes and two big balloons on her shoulders. There are mutant monsters and even the Spanish Inquisition

The Lost Continent is an odd and decidedly old-fashioned mixture of disparate elements. While it has not been well regarded over the years, it’s gradually acquired a cult status of sorts—and a deserved one, as it manages to deliver its share of pulpy thrills, if only to those willing to wait for the lost continent’s arrival.

As the ’60s progressed, Hammer grew increasingly desperate. The market shifted towards subtler contemporary horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Haunting. Hammer responded with a series of increasingly bizarre offerings: from naked lesbian vampires to modern-dress Dracula films (one of which features gun-toting thugs dragging Dr. Helsing into a high-rise office building to confront Dracula!) to a kung-fu-Chinese-vampires-meet-Dracula movie.

Moon Zero-Two, Hammer’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey has more than a hint of desperation about it. Billed as “the first Moon Western,” it offers a heady mix of detailed and mostly accurate space flight with a very familiar story about claim-jumpers on the moon. It even has a heroine named Clementine, although actor Catherine Schell is far too elegant and European for a Western.

The film’s animated opening credits distance it from the Cold War concerns of Hammer’s earlier SF, although they have little relationship to the rest of the film. In that opening, two astronauts, one American and one Russian, vie to see who gets to claim the moon—a long, comic sequence set to the film’s psychedelic theme song. Only the astronauts wind up finding that businessmen have already landed and turned the moon into a big tourist trap, forcing them to flee together.

Perhaps these animated figures are meant to represent the film’s American hero and his Russian co-pilot, forced to fly an ancient salvage ship because no one is exploring space any more; everyone is too busy making money. Moon Zero-Two offers extravagant ’60s design, dancing girls in the local saloon, colorful spacesuits, and a female sheriff. Oddly, despite the accuracy of the rest of the film, it also includes artificial gravity and ray guns.

Long neglected, Moon Zero-Two has also assumed cult notoriety, largely thanks to its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It may be absurd, but it’s also absurdly entertaining, thanks as always to Hammer’s innate professionalism.

Hammer’s all-too-brief career of producing the classiest exploitation films ever made slowed to a halt over the next decade, ending finally on television in the ’80s. The company left behind a legacy of great films: horror, suspense, mystery, adventure—and even SF.

In an era when SF had lost its luster, Hammer deserves credit for bringing so many SF films to the screen, even if they do reflect the confusion that had overtaken the film genre. One can only wonder about the films Hammer couldn’t get made: the fourth Quatermass film and its adaptation of 1961’s British SF television serial, A for Andromeda.

Despite the huge success of 2001 and the rush of films that tried to cash in on it, the film industry did no better than Hammer did in finding a new audience for SF film in the late ’60s and early ’70s. That would have to wait until the late ’70s and Star Wars and Alien.

But that’s another story.

About the Author

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

To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress

Jeremy L. C. Jones

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress opens with a deformed teenage boy kidnapping a baby from a hysterical mother. The boy, Pete, has come from the future, using alien technology, to save the baby from the ecological disaster that will soon befall the world she lives in.

Pete is also stealing the child to bolster the gene pool of the future, to bring a fertile human into a time when 26 humans, most of them infertile, fight to keep the human race alive.

The 26 are lead by the brilliant McAllister and live in the Shell, which is sparsely furnished habitat created by the Tesslies, an alien race they believe to be responsible for the devastation of the world.

The novel weaves three timelines: 2013, 2014, and 2035. The 2013 story arc follows Julie Kahn, a mathematician consulting for the FBI. Along with Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford, Kahn has noticed a pattern to a series of kidnappings and burglaries and developed predictive algorithms. In 2014, there’s unusual geological activity under the Yellowstone Caldera and in the Cannery Islands; K. planticola, a mutating bacteria, secretes too much alcohol and kills plants at the roots. In 2035, the majority of humankind is infertile.

Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of more than two dozen books. She has written novels, such as Beggars in Spain, Dogs, Probability Space, and Steal across the Sky, as well as short story collections and books about writing. Her next book, Flash Point, is due out from Viking in the fall.

Many of Kress’ stories, long and short, involve genetics and speculations about the near future. She blends scientific rigor with intensely human characters. The result is often intensely intimate, and always character-driven. Kress has won the Campbell, Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards, among others.

Below, Kress talks about After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, writing, teaching, Gaia, and giving something back to the field. Be forewarned: Some events of the book will be revealed.

In the first pages of After the Fall, we meet Pete,who’s kidnapping a baby. And yet it’s easy to instantly sympathize with him. How did you do that?

[Laughs.] I don’t know. I got a review from a newspaper somewhere that compared McAllister to Fagin [from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist], teaching this band of juvenile delinquents to steal and I thought, “That’s not exactly the book I wrote.”

[Pete and the other survivors] are trying to ensure the survival of the human race and also save these children from the destruction that they know is coming. And that’s not exactly what Fagin is doing. Pete’s basically a good kid. He has grown up with an odd set of morals. They’re the morals that fit the situation and, from the outside, his actions probably look despicable, stealing a baby from a hysterical mother, but I wanted to show how it looks to him, on the inside. Maybe that’s why he’s coming across as sympathetic. I’m glad that he is, because I had a lot of sympathy for him. They’re doing the best they can in an impossible situation.

The novel seems to hinge on McAllister’s wanting Pete to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Right, that’s part of it. The other thing is that I almost never—I was thinking about this the other day—I almost never write villains and there really aren’t any villains in this book. McAllister and her band of “juvenile delinquents” are not villains. The Tesslies are actually trying to rescue what they can and keep this planet going on their own peculiar terms. Julie’s not a villain. Gordon’s not a villain. The only villain, I guess if you want to count it, is the planet, and it’s just going to preserve itself by getting rid of whatever is making conditions [not conducive to] life and, in the moment, that’s us.

Then what do you bounce the protagonist off of?

Sometimes himself, sometimes the fact that human beings being what we are, want conflicting things, and you can’t have both, clashes like love versus loyalty, duty versus love, those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s bad guys. I won’t say I never do villains. But the kind of pure evil villain that’s so common in SF, I just don’t buy. There’s a couple of those guys in history, but not very many. Most people are doing what seems to them reasonable at the time.

It seems like McAllister does everything she can to prevent the kids from thinking in terms of villains. In the end, though, we find out that she has made an assumption about the Tesslies that casts them as villains.

Yes, she made a mistake. She, and everybody else in the Shell, thought the Tesslies had destroyed the earth, and it turns out, of course, that they hadn’t. She has made a misassumption. The book is full of misassumptions. People have assumed the wrong thing in a number of places and that was one thing I was going for.

Where did you start After the Fall? What came first?

[Laughs.] It started with the Gaia theory from James Lovelock which came out in the ’70s, and which now has pretty much fallen into some disrepute, but I was always fascinated by it. I got his book and I read it, and his basic theory is that the earth can be considered as a large self-regulating, non-conscious entity adjusting itself endlessly to make conditions possible for life. For instance, with all the salt that’s washed down into the ocean from the rivers over the millennia, it should be saltier than it is, but it isn’t. There are mechanisms for removing the salt down on the ocean floor, and locking it up in a way that the ocean doesn’t get too salty to support fish, to support life, so that cells don’t burst. And this has turned around in my mind for 30 years now, and at one point it came to me, “Well, if the earth is trying to remove conditions that are inimical to life, the thing on it right now that’s the most inimical to life is probably us, with the climate change, pollution, and dead zones in the ocean.” I thought, “What if the earth started to fight back?”

And that’s an idea, that’s not a character. Usually characters come to me first. But in this case, the idea came to me first and it came through rational thinking. The part that did not come through rational thinking was Pete, because the characters never do. They sort of pop into my mind. I saw what he was trying to do. He was trying to get kids from the past. And the first scene, as often happens when I write, came almost full, and I wrote it down. After I get a first scene, I have to look at it and think, “Okay, where does this go from here? How does this first scene and this idea become a story?”

Did Pete surprise you at all while you were writing After the Fall?

All my characters surprise me. I didn’t realize he was in love in a 15-year-old-boy sort of way with McAllister, but that came out as I was writing. I didn’t realize that he was going to have quite so many 15-year-old-boy sulks, but that came out, too, as I was writing. I grew quite fond of Pete.

It seems as though Pete and of Julie may be working at cross-purposes.

Well, Julie is the grownup. Pete is the 15-year-old, floundering around, prey to his emotions, doing the best he can, making mistakes, flying off the handle. Julie makes rational decisions based on whatever information she has and she has the adult emotions of wanting to protect and care for her daughter [Alicia]. And Julie’s reliable, which Pete certainly isn’t. They’re not really working at cross-purposes. Pete is trying to save his world and Julie is trying to save her daughter, which is all she can save as her own world.

How on earth does Julie make the decision to give up Alicia?

At first, she just intends to try to confront Pete and maybe stop him. Then as she realizes what happening [in the natural world], she has to be try to get the truth. When she realizes what the truth is, she wants to go with him. And when she realizes she can’t go, at least she can send Alicia. But her initial impulse is to take herself and Alicia, because our initial impulse is always to save ourselves and our children. Incidentally, if the Canary Islands ever did blow in that way, you would get a five-hour warning for a tidal wave that would roll across the Atlantic. I did a lot of research for this story. The science is reasonably accurate.

Are there places where you had to tinker with the science a little, bend the rules?

The Canary Islands blowing is controversial. Half of it did sheer off at one point in history and it did cause a massive tidal wave. I moved the fault line a little bit, so that when the mountain sheers and slides, it does set off the kind of an earthquake that in turn sets off the tsunami. It’s at least theoretically possible. So it isn’t that I changed the science, but I took the most drastic possible view.

I had known some of the science beforehand. As soon as I started writing and researching, I had a nice file of interesting material.  The Canary Island tsunami was there; the fact that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow at any time was there. And in this file I also had the K. planticola, the bacteria that creates too much alcohol. It’s a common form that is on plants already. They did try in Germany to create an alternate version that would convert plant waste to alcohol as a byproduct, and they found out that it would kill all the plants, so they obviously didn’t do anything with it. It never got out of the lab. But because it was in my file, it was something I could do something with. I was thinking about it.

And also, at the time I was writing this, Science News came out with a follow-up on the Iceland volcano. So I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, too. I can use more volcanoes like that.” [Laughs.] So I stuck around until I found information on that. Science fiction writers, they do two things. First of all, they take the things that don’t ordinarily go together and stick them together. And secondly, they try the best they can to make a little bit of knowledge look like a lot of knowledge. Those are two completely necessary tools for science fiction writing.

You move among three time lines and points of view in After the Fall. Did you write each chapter in the order they appear?

The first part appears in the order I wrote it. And then, for the second half, I was going on a roll with Pete, so I set Julie aside and I wrote all of the rest of his sections up till the end. Then I went back and wrote all of Julie’s sections up till the final scene. This is the way I always write. I never really know how things are going to turn till I’m halfway through. When I don’t know where I’m going, I kind of have to follow along and try different paths.

Are you ever going to return to these characters, to Pete and McAllister and Alicia and the rest?

I haven’t thought about it, but you never know. It’s possible. There’s a bunch of them now loose on the planet trying to restart civilization. Incidentally, one of the characters that I had most fun writing was Darlene: the acerbic and unrepentant Christian who keeps assuming that everything is Satan’s work. [Laughs.] If you’re going to pick up a random assortment of people, the way the Tesslies did, snatching whoever happened to be alone and available, you’re going to end up with a couple strange people in the group. I could return to them, yeah.

Flash Point comes out in the fall?

Yes. It’s a YA science fiction set on near-future earth, and it’s about teens who are involved in a reality show. That one started with a character. I had in my mind this really desperate teenage girl, in—it’s not a dystopian U.S., but it’s a U.S. in a bad economic slump, even worse than the one we are in—and her parents are dead, she has a young sister she’s trying to support and a grandmother who was supporting them both and is now dying, and this girl desperately needs a job. So I started with her in a position where she’s applying along with several hundred other girls for a job and the story went from there.

Was writing YA terribly different than writing for an older audience?

No, it really wasn’t. YA has changed so much that there really isn’t much of a line anymore, except that the protagonists are teenagers. You’re allowed sex, you’re allowed violence, you’re allowed all kinds of stuff.

Sounds like there’s a similarity between the protagonist of Flash Point and Pete from After the Fall—desperation and the balancing of the needs of family and of the individual. Is there a lot of Pete in this new character?

This girl is much different. She’s very smart. She’s educated in terms of our world, anyway. She’s much more worldly. She’s much more knowledgeable than from Pete. And she’s functioning in a world she understands.

Not much sulking?

[Laughs.] No, not much sulking. She doesn’t have time to sulk. She’s got too many problems to sulk.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new YA [book]. And I don’t want to talk about it yet because I don’t like to talk about work in progress. But the decision to write YA was simply, like all of my writing, sort of a non-decision. I kind of write when it comes to me. I know writers who say, “Oh, I’ve got a million ideas and I just need to develop them.” I’m not that writer. I don’t get very many ideas that I’m excited about enough to write. And sometimes, there’s a stretch of a month or two where there aren’t any ideas I’m excited about to write, and that makes me really, really uneasy. Just before I started this book, there had been a month with no writing. And then this idea came to me. I’m always so grateful when I get one that I like. I can’t write a synopsis. I’ve never sold a book on a synopsis in my life. I always write the whole book, because I don’t know where they’re going to go. I dive in and then plot as I go along. I don’t even know if I can finish it.

Now you just got back from a two weeks of teaching Taos Toolbox.

I love to teach. And I do a lot of workshops here and there. I tend to rely heavily on critique workshops because I think the best way to learn to write is to actually write, and then get feedback on it, and then re-write it again. These workshops where you’re given prompts and the ideas you’re supposed to be inspired and all the rest of it, I don’t much hold with those. Writing is not a matter of inspiration except for your initial idea. Writing is a matter of sitting down and doing it. And you have to do a lot of it to get publishable. I know Robert Silverberg sold his first story, but we can’t all be Robert Silverberg now can we? You can’t teach imagination, and you can’t teach a feeling for English prose, but you can teach craftsmanship.

Now with the books you’ve written about elements of craft, do you ever get tired of people asking you about viewpoint or talking about description or characterization? Does it ever get old?

It isn’t that it gets old but after a workshop like Taos Toolbox, I get burned out for a while. I don’t want to see a student manuscript for another couple of months. But that works out fine. Because the next one I do will be in October in Seattle, and by that time, I’ll be ready again. I like teaching. I just would not want to do it full-time.

Does teaching feed the writing at all?

No. In fact, it probably takes the same parts of the brain. The thing about writing is that it’s a solitary activity. It’s you and your computer and a bunch of people who don’t exist. And when you spend a lot of your day doing that, it’s good to get out and talk with other people who are in your field. I like conventions. I like SF parties. I like teaching workshops. I like the contact with people. I’m married, so I see my husband, but he also has an actual job, and my kids are grown and gone. So I need this, and also I like it. I like giving back something to the field.

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.

Another Word: The Exceptional Smurfette, or Being One of the Guys as a Superpower

Ekaterina Sedia

This essay is a result of some thoughts that occurred during one of the weekly FeministSF chats on Twitter, when we were discussing exceptionality of female characters in urban fantasy novels—that is, their tendency to be the only woman in the book. This essay is meant to summarize some thoughts on this issue. And to encourage everyone to participate in FeministSF chats, obviously!

We all are familiar with the Smurfette principle—the idea that in any group of characters (such as The Smurfs) only male leads are allowed personalities, while the girl gets to be . . . well, a girl. That’s her whole shtick. It is also nothing new that urban fantasy is lousy with strong female characters—an epidemic well described elsewhere (for example, here). I am here, however, to tell you that the two of them combined created a terrible monster—an Exceptional Smurfette (or Super-Smurfette, if you will), and she is not exactly good news when it comes to representations of women in fiction and advancing the cause of said representations.

Again, elsewhere it has been well established that really, we should have more variety of female characters and various definitions of female strength since the kick-ass heroine is sort of taking over, blinding us to other species of strength (and the very notion that a woman doesn’t have to kick ass to be worthy of the protagonist status.) What troubles me most, however, is the exceptionality: in some urban fantasy books (as well as comic books and movies) this kick-ass heroine is the only woman allowed to inhabit the protagonist space. As a result, she is surrounded by men, is friends with men, is romantically involved with them, and usually is a daddy’s girl. She is, in other words, very much one of the guys.

And really, this by itself, in any given urban fantasy novel, is not necessarily a big deal. It’s just the sheer number of books and movies and other media that present this picture is so great that it becomes a normalized cultural default. And considering that this exceptional lady is just that—exceptional (what with ass-kicking and vampire-hunting and what not), a very insidious pattern is established: A woman becomes worthy of inclusion into a male domain only if she adopts a masculine notion of strength and associated power signifiers, and becomes exceptionally good at them.

Now, I have my fair number of issues with women who shun the company of their own gender—internalized sexism is a problem, and a culture-wide devaluing of all things feminine is a pervasive and often invisible force. Women often receive a message that they should become like men to become worthy, to become better, to be strong—and when we call a girl “one of the guys” we often mean it as a compliment. But the exceptional female raises the bar even higher: To be included in that masculine domain, a woman must become a superhero—something the original Smurfette never had to deal with. Meanwhile, other women who do not aspire to such pursuit are not just absent (as is the case with the Smurf village), but are painted as lesser, jealous, stupid, meddling, and undeserving. Mothers are either absent or incompetent, and fathers or father figures usually get to do a fair amount of character shaping. There are no female friends in most cases: Other women are either rivals or unflattering points of comparison. That is, Smurfs are paragons of feminism compared to this.

This situation is not only found in urban fantasy novels, of course: A slew of recent movies features such superpowered Smurfettes. One of the more interesting examples of it in movies is perhaps embodied by Hit-Girl, Chloë Moretz’s character in the movie Kick-Ass. Even though she is quite young, we can see the making of the Super-Smurfette in her. She is raised by her father, who is pretty much the main influence who shapes her; she has no friends among the girls around her age; and in the end she teams up with a lot less competent, male-superhero wannabe. (We won’t go into the whole thing where he gets to save the day). Don’t get me wrong—Moretz is wonderful in the movie. But she so obviously outclasses the titular character that one cannot help but feel that she is settling just a tad. Why? Because being one of the boys is a reward enough.

It also doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to see the grown-up version of Moretz in Janeane Garofalo’s The Bowler from Mystery Men—another superhero flick (which predates Kick-Ass by good ten years). Her character’s father is firmly dead but still influential in the form of the talking skull inside the bowling ball with which The Bowler destroys her enemies. She is, of course, the only girl in the group—and as far as skills go, she is also the most qualified. Still, she seeks to be a part of The Mystery Men—a group of superheroes with dubious to middling powers, indicating that being one of the guys is as worthy a goal as being a superhero (and in many ways equally desirable and/or challenging.)

This is not a new phenomenon: One only needs to look to the Greek myths, to Athena (the ultimate daddy’s girl), who was positioned as exceptional even among the gods (although there were quite a few goddesses there) because of her persistent commitment to masculinity. I think it is interesting to see Athena’s behavior in The Eumenides—even though she is respectful of the Furies, she is backed by Zeus and has nothing to fear from them. And yet she talks them down, urging them to abandon retribution. She sides firmly with the men, since Furies are the ones avenging wrongdoings done to women. Athena acts remarkably like many urban fantasy heroines who identify more strongly with men and tend to take their side against their own gender. Consider:

“There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,
and, but for marriage, I am always for the male
with all my heart, and strongly on my father’s side.
So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord
of the house, her death shall not mean most to me.”

(Aeschylus. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Oresteia: The Eumenides. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.)

Athena, however, is an exception in the Greek tradition. Along with the absent mother (who was, ahem, eaten by Zeus) she exhibits many characteristics in common with—and provides a curious point of comparison to—modern urban fantasy heroines. After all, wouldn’t the Furies provide a much better model of strength, not dependent on male (i.e. fatherly) backing and approval? But of course, it is not exactly surprising that under the patriarchal system we do not see three women working together; we see one woman who has internalized male values, working within the system where they are allowed the benefit of exceptional status, and disparaging other women who dare to challenge this system of values and dominance.

One would expect that as the time goes on, representations of women in literature would become more diverse. And indeed they have been: There are many versions of female characters and female strength being written about. But the Super-Smurfette still towers large in her dominance. I don’t want to call out individual authors and books, because really, it’s just one way of writing female characters. However, I feel that when one archetype becomes so dominant as to pretty much be associated with the genre (urban fantasy and its heroines conform to this mold often enough for us to have this conversation), it is probably time to challenge that and to ask ourselves: Do our strong, kick-ass heroines need to be walking representations of internalized sexism? Can they function without male approval? Will they die if they occasionally have a girlfriend or two who is not into the whole vampire-fighting business and yet is presented as pleasant and levelheaded? I sure would like to see more of them.

About the Author

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as forthcoming Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, will be released by Prime Books in December 2012.