The Found Girl

David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Melissa stalked a trash compactor in the Elemental Caverns deep in the depths below the Street, where steam hissed from newly regrown pipes and oversized dendrites spread across the ancient brick of the connective tunnels. The glowing moss that dripped brown water filled the air with a faint glow, enough to let Melissa squint her way through the Caverns.

The Street gave her the mission the usual way: pictographs glowing on the side of the steps leading up to the two storied, red brick building the Found Children called The Castle. She had puzzled for a moment as to what the “trashcan + clamp” had meant, but eventually she’d figured that the Street lost a compactor and needed it retrieved.

And of course, she knew the quartered circle that indicated the caverns.

The Found Children didn’t like the Caverns. They were haunted. With so few real people around anymore, ghosts and demons felt free to roam a world filled with buildings that moved and talked, where mysterious magics dusted the air and flitted around.

So Melissa accepted the Street’s request. She wouldn’t let any of the younger children risk waking the demons.

After all, La Llorona lurked this far under the Street. Melissa glimpsed her bedraggled hair and torn up clothes the last time she’d rescued a lost machine for the Street. Held her breath and hid as the demon ghost snuffled and tramped around the darks of the Caverns.

“Hello,” she whispered to herself. She stopped at the concrete edge of an ancient sewer and knelt to look into a puddle of muck collected in a depression. The telltale kinked track of the compactor looked fresh. The muck would dry out in six hours, maybe twelve on a humid day. He had been by here recently, then, headed deeper into the caverns. On tiptoes she headed deeper, swallowing hard and hoping she was being ghost-quiet.

Scuffling whispers echoed through the stale air from deeper in the caverns.

Melissa froze.

The sounds carried the scent of earth and water. She looked around a corner carefully. Somewhere, deep along one of the arrow-straight tubes, a faint fire flickered.

“La Llorona,” Melissa whispered to herself, the back of her neck prickling.

Melissa knew the stories from her days hiding in the Outskirts. Alien and incomprehensible the old demon stalked abandoned, wet sewers, snatching up wayward orphans, devouring those who had lost hope.

If La Llorona showed, she would tempt Melissa with her demonic tongue. Melissa shied away from the tunnel, keeping her hope, keeping her strength.

She looked down at the tracks. The trash compactor had been wooed by La Llorona’s voice and tricked into coming down here, no doubt. And the Street needed it rescued. And the Street was good to the Found Children. It had given them a safe building, and good food.

Melissa steeled herself and followed the tracks where they led, right down the tunnel toward La Llorona. The glow down that way was brighter, and the smell of smoke unmistakable.

“Infernal fire,” she said softly. The smells of rotting things and burned flesh overwhelmed the purer smells of earth and water.

Smoke should be sweeter, but no one told La Llorona that.

Halfway down, the trash compactor shuddered in spastic circles, twitching a half turn to the left, then backing to the right one full turn. Back and forth he stuttered in little circles, and Melissa could tell the machine was caught between the call of La Llorona and the freedom and sweet air of the Street.

Right now Melissa wanted nothing more than to call on the beautiful, angelic, and pure Blue Lady to come save her. The same Blue Lady that had appeared in the Outskirts, and given her food. Then told her and the Found Children about the Street, and the safe place.

But the Blue Lady didn’t always come when you screamed and prayed. And it was better to save your prayers for when you really needed them. So Melissa gritted her teeth and approached the wayward machine.

Fortunately, the Old Man on the Street had shown her what to do in cases like this. When the trash compactor paused to reevaluate its path she leapt onto its chassis, her muddy feet scrambling up and over its metallic arms and mouths. On top was a button covered by a clear plastic guard. She flipped up the guard and mashed the button down, then whispered, “I am lost, take me home.”

Immediately, the trash compactor stopped twitching, oriented itself back the way Melissa had come, and trundled off. She clung to it, her bony knees hooked into one of its bumpers, her fingers clutching the front edge, her slim body laid across the top. The little treads whirred and the compactor sped up with a flurry of dank water and mud as it carried them away from La Llorona, and then eventually with a burst of light, out of the Elemental Caverns entirely.

“You did good work with the trash compactor,” the Old Man said, walking beside her down the center of the asphalt strip, “that took a lot of courage. I know you don’t like being underground.” Melissa looked up at him. He wore a simple cream-colored suit with a pink tie. Sometimes he dressed differently—when she met him he had been wearing sandals, khakis, and a patterned shirt—but he otherwise always looked the same with his lined and careworn face and the shiny implants at his temples, forehead and base of his skull.

“I guess so,” she said, walking beside him. Her head came just above his elbow, and she wore the same long skirt and t-shirt that she had worn that morning into the caverns. The t-shirt had a stylized rocketship on the front with three colorful monkeys hanging off it as it shot into space.

“We appreciate it, nonetheless. Even if we lack courage ourselves anymore.”

“You mean you’re afraid?” she asked. “But you’re an adult.”

“No, we’re not afraid, either. Not afraid, not courageous. It doesn’t apply to us any more.”

“Because you . . . transcended?”

“Yes,” he said, steering her toward the front steps of the safe building. The Castle. The other kids, all younger than her, had finished playing for the day and were heading back toward The Castle. Most of them were dirty, a few nicked up from playing rough, but they were otherwise healthy and in good spirits. They had a freedom now that they had lacked before, and they reveled in it.

The only cost to that freedom was the occasional task laid on them by the Street. Most of the cleaning things she let them handle, but as the oldest, she took the difficult things like the trash compactor onto herself. She couldn’t let any of the younger ones risk themselves with La Llorona.

“Do you miss it?”

“Feeling afraid?” he asked. “Or courageous?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet,” he said. She imagined a smile further creasing his face, but it remained calm. “We still remember it, after all. We remember the fear and courage of all of us. And that’s enough, in a way. Though it’s nice to actively see yours. We take some pleasure in knowing these things are still around and still possible.”

“Is that why you like my art?”

“Well, we like neo-primativist compositions. And your color choice is fairly unique for someone of your age and background.”

“Thank you. I think.” She stopped at the base of the stairs, then turned to look up at him.

“What for?” he asked.

“For this,” she said, spreading her arms, indicating the Street as a whole. “You make it safe and clean and okay for us.”

“You make it clean, you and your friends.”

Melissa glanced up the stairs. Darkness was settling and the others had all gone inside. When she looked back, the Old Man was walking away, his hands in his pockets. Far beyond him, down at the east end of the Street, a ten foot tall block of walking metal, a checkpoint sentry, ambled forward awkwardly and then squatted to block that end off from unwanted guests. Another such sentry blocked the west end.

As she kept looking to the east, a bright light flared over the city. The silhouetted skyline was darker than it had been this time a year ago. A pillar of light grew, glowing blue and white, reaching for the heavens. Melissa wondered what it was.

An invocation for the Blue Lady lingered on Melissa’s tongue long after the pillar of light faded and vanished, but never passed her lips.

“What’s out there?” Melissa asked the sentry the next day, craning her head as she looked up at the strips of steel along its side. “Now, I mean. It’s all changed. I don’t understand it anymore.”

“You were out there before, weren’t you?” the sentry replied.

Parts of the steel block could change and move, revealing barriers, maybe weapons even, but she couldn’t be sure of that. It was doing that now, to talk to her. The booming voice coming from a new porthole opening up. Small machine irises bloomed and twisted to point themselves at her.

Nothing got past the sentry without the Street’s say-so. Except La Llorona.

Melissa guessed that only the Blue Lady could stop the demon. But she hadn’t seen the Blue Lady since she came to rescue the Found Children.

“Yes,” Melissa said. The sentry must know her story, she thought. But then, he hadn’t appeared until just after most of the adults in the city transcended. Maybe the sentry wasn’t like the rest of everything here on the Street, knowing what seemed like everything there was to know. “My mother and I lived on the streets for years, when I was little. She died four, maybe five years ago, I don’t know any more.”

“How did you fare on the street?” the sentry asked.

“Well enough,” she replied. “We sang songs for people on the streets, back when they were filled with people. Sometimes people put money in the cup. Sometimes we went to the shelters, but mom was scared of them.”

“You still tell stories, don’t you?”

“When the other children need them,” Melissa replied. “To explain the world.”

“How often does that happen?”

“All the time,” she said, flashing a smile at the sentry, and stepped across a steel ribbon in the road that marked the edge of the Street. Over to the other side. Nothing much happened, though she felt a tingle that told her the sentry had looked at her very closely. She turned her head and smiled again at the steel block and walked out into the north-south road. No vehicles used it any more, and outside of the Street, she could see weeds and grass had begun to sprout in the cracks.

This road itself seemed to be a no-man’s land. “Her” street did not continue on the other side, there was just a blank wall, the side of what had been a large hospital that had declined rapidly in the last six months. There were hardly any patients any more. And those that needed help, she heard, got it from machines grown in their own homes.

“It’s nice out there,” the Old Man said from behind her. She turned back. He leaned against the sentry, but she hadn’t seen or heard him approach. He was wearing jeans and sneakers now, with a tie-dyed t-shirt. “The transcended are pitching in to help the people left behind in a big way. It’s relatively safe for a girl on her own, even one as young as you. Safer than it was before you came to join us in The Castle.”

“I like the Street,” she said, turning to face him now. A shiver ran down her spine as she stood in the middle of the road, knowing in that instinctual way that she should not be able to do this, to stand where cars had once whipped by, and more to stand outside the protection of the Street. Spirits were out here, demons and all the rest, like La Llorona. She looked around again and took in the vacant buildings, the closed off streets, the emptiness of it all. Far away, to the south, she could see figures moving across the road, dim outlines in the distance.

“The Street likes you,” the Old Man said.

“Are you the King of the Street?” Melissa asked. Or President. Or leader. She didn’t understand the new world.

She’d barely understood the old one. The busy streets, the cars, the busy and stressed people. Suits. Acrid air. Factories. Hunger. Steel buildings. Jobs and homes.

Planes. She wondered if she’d dreamed them. Like metal birds, filled with people, going here and there, far over head. She missed the contrails.

“No,” the Old Man said, “this is just a facet of the Street. This body was once an individual that lived here in one of the apartments. Now he is part of the Street, speaking to you with the voice of all of us. One of us.”

Melissa still didn’t get it. She looked off in the distance, away from the Street and asked the same question she asked every week, just to reassure herself that she wasn’t trapped. “Can I leave the Street?”

“If you want to,” the Old Man replied. “You’re not our prisoner. Or even our ward. Though we would have . . . concern for you. We would prefer you to stay.”

“Concern?”

“Accidents still happen. The world is safer, but not completely safe.”

Melissa thought about La Llorona hidden away beneath the Street, hiding in the caverns down there. Was the Street completely safe either?

She wondered if the Blue Lady would help her if she left the Street? She thought so. She had seen her, after all, in the Outskirts.

But if Melissa left the Street, she would leave the Found Children alone. And who would warn them about La Llorona? The Street did not seem interested.

“I’ll stay,” she said, and walked back through the sentry’s gates. “For now.”

“. . . La Llorona lost her children a long, long time ago. Some say she drowned them, and was cast back into the world after she killed herself. And that’s why we must fear her. She’s looking for lost children,” Melissa said, looking around at the other children.

Only ten of the thirty in The Castle sat and listened to her tales on the benches by the sidewalk, mostly the youngest ones. They sat with their lunch—provided, as always, by the Street—and listened in fascination edged with disbelief. Last week she had twelve listeners. More the month before.

“I saw her in the Elemental Caverns,” Melissa said, stomping a thinly-shod foot on the concrete sidewalk. “Right here. Right beneath our feet. She will take you and bind you and make you hers forever.”

That sent a shiver through them. “Stranger danger,” muttered one of the kids, repeating one of the old warding phrases they’d all learned and passed on to each other. Even though they stayed within the long block that made up the Street, the freedom within it was nearly unfathomable. To be able to run and play, beyond the tightly fenced playground behind their building . . . this was a freedom they had never known in their lives. Food. Warmth.

Melissa thought back to the lessons she had been taught. The stories she’d been told about the world. “There is evil and there is good, in the world,” she repeated. “Demons, like La Llorona, want to capture us and steal our energy. But there are angels out there. And they want us to be free, and to laugh and play. It makes them happy to see that.”

Her mom had made angels out of bits of wire and bottles that she found. Twisted metal wings wrapped onto the bottles, with bottle cap faces. When they’d stayed in the tent on the Outskirts, her mother had made hundreds of them. “They protect us,” her mother had said. “From the government. They hide us from the bad people who’ll take you away from me.”

But then she’d died. Killed by the demon that ripped her up from the inside and made her cough blood. And Melissa had been left alone to sing on the street, to beg for food.

Alone while people started to fade away, and the city got silent.

Alone until the beautiful Blue Lady came out to the Outskirts and talked to her. Invited her to come to the Street.

A little boy with braided hair raised his hand and broke through Melissa’s memories. “Is the Street an angel?”

Melissa opened her mouth. And didn’t have an answer.

The others scattered as they realized she was done, their lunches finished, their attention waning. She didn’t blame them, but she hoped they would take what she said to heart. Many of them didn’t believe in La Llorona the way she did, they hadn’t smelled her fire, heard her strange and demonic language. Some of them had been reading things, learning history from the Street.

Even some of the other children who’d hunkered in the Outskirts, near that abandoned factory that Melissa had hid in after her mom died, had stopped believing.

The Old Man was standing there, watching her. Today he had gone back to the cream-colored suit, but with a peach-colored tie.

“We really enjoy your stories,” he said to her, “the way you teach the children what you know about the world.”

“They need to know,” she said. “And no one else wants to do it, I think. Is that why you want me to stay?”

“We want you to stay for many reasons,” he said, “but your stories are a part of it.”

“What do you mean? You must know far more than I do,” she replied. “You transcended.”

That was why everyone left. She hadn’t understood, not talking to other people. Hiding in the parks. Begging.

Did you ever use your mother’s old phone? the Blue Lady had asked. Or play with a computer? They get faster and faster. And better. And some people use mind interfaces. Or speak to them.

Technology got faster. Better. And then technology started designing technology. Evolving. What used to take a lifetime took a decade, then years. And then last year, months. Weeks. Days.

People transcended. Became other things. Many other things. Some were still here. Some had left. Some were different.

Some stayed the same.

The Found Children had been left behind.

“Transcending was the problem,” the Old Man said. “In some ways, we’re only the sum of our parts. The collective that is the Street is made up of only so many individuals, with so much life experience, with so much knowledge, or emotion, or wisdom. If we do not take care to find more, to cultivate more, we could easily stagnate and die. Believe it or not, it has happened to collectives already, others elsewhere have encountered this. It took one such collective in Switzerland just a week, in your time.”

“In my time? Isn’t my time the same as yours?” Melissa asked, walking along the sidewalk, watching the other children run and play. Some of them were playing tag, others had a more complicated game of make-believe going on. A couple of the others had started a painting project early, only they did not seem to be doing quite the nice, even job the Street had suggested. The Old Man took that in as well, but smiled with approval.

“Machine intelligence has multiplied us, in a way. Everything happens faster, your experiences seem exponentially slower. We can make very complex decisions in the blink of your eye.”

“That changed you,” she said.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t want to change,” she replied, not sure where the defensiveness had come from, suddenly. She didn’t want to become a robot body for some larger entity like the Street. Even if the Street was made of all the minds of people who had lived in these buildings a year ago. “I want to be me, forever.”

“Indeed,” the Old Man said, and that was all on that subject.

The next night, a tribe of adults entered through the western checkpoint and set up camp on the opposite side of the Street from The Castle. They rolled up in a small caravan of vehicles, including one large truck with tarp-covered objects on the back. Much to her excitement the people seemed mostly normal to Melissa, though they greeted her with a deference that surprised her. The other kids stayed away, mostly, only peering-through-the-windows curious right now. They had had so few visitors through the Street in the months since the transcendence, since the neighborhood became the Street.

“They’re heading to the spaceport,” the Old Man had explained to her. “We’re giving them freeway and a camping spot in exchange for some things they will make for us in space, in zero gravity.”

Melissa looked up as she crossed the Street, at the stars overhead, thinking about his words. What kind of people would want to go there? She was meet-them curious, so she approached a small group gathered around a grill. There were only a few others that she had seen, beside these three, and they were busy with tasks she could not see.

Once they had finished the greetings, and Melissa explained who and what she was—careful to emphasize that they were in the Street’s safekeeping—she asked what they were doing, where they were going.

“To space,” one of them replied, light in his eyes. His curiosity and passion lit a small fire in her. “We’re going to be adapted to life in zero-gee, and we’re going to explore the solar system. Maybe beyond, if we can figure it out. The transcended are making huge strides toward that, now.”

“So you’re not transcended?” she asked.

“No, but we’re going to be modified, enhanced,” said one of the women, a similar light in her eyes. “In those,” she said and jerked a thumb toward the tarp-covered objects. “Some of our friends are already undergoing the changes.”

“Changed? Enhanced?”

“Do you want to see?” said another of the women. And without waiting for Melissa’s response, she climbed up on the back of the truck and started undoing one of the tarps. She lifted the edge, and Melissa could then see underneath. Machinery, wrapped around a green glowing tank, beeped and blinked at her. Inside, she could dimly make out a human form, only it wasn’t quite so human any more. The body was changing, slowly, very slowly. Elongating here and there, widening in the limbs, flattening. New lumps on the body showed implanted machinery, perhaps, or new organs grown to perform whole new tasks the human body could never have evolved to perform.

“Are you still you?” she asked the woman holding the tarp.

“We’re still individuals,” she said. “Linked, by technology in our heads, some of the same technology that allows people to transcend. But we use it differently.”

That night, Melissa stood on the rooftop of The Castle, looking up at the sky. Lights moved across the stars now, something she had never noticed before. Were they angels, going about a heavenly mission? Or more like these people, exploring the worlds beyond hers? Perhaps both, now that she thought about it.

But as she watched, shrill cries broke the night. She looked down at the visiting tribe, but they were all asleep, and undisturbed.

The cries went on for a full minute, and then trailed away. Melissa hurried inside. They had come from somewhere on the Street. They had to have been caused, she knew, by La Llorona.

Only La Llorona could sound that sad and scared.

The next day, the tribe readied to depart. Some of the orphans ran around, their hesitancy overcome, and they were now doing tasks for the visitors, little things that earned them treats or simple pats on the head. Melissa walked back and forth along the Street, almost like a nervous hen, keeping an eye on her chicks. Surely, La Llorona slipped up onto the surface with the tribe?

No, the Street would have noticed, she felt. It would not have allowed that. No, besides, La Llorona came from the depths, from the caverns, coming up from under the Street.

Once the tribe had moved on, she was joined by the Old Man again, walking the length of the Street. He asked her what she had thought of the visitors, if she wanted to go with them, what she had been working on artistically.

But she could also sense that he wasn’t quite as engaged with the questions as he usually was. Something was missing in his attitude, and as they neared the western end of the Street, he guided her down an alley. It ended, a hundred feet down, in a blank wall erected since the transcendence, physically blocking the Street off and helping make it more of an enclave.

Between the street and the wall lay a boy’s body, bloody and tattered, surrounded by sparkling shards of glass. She looked up at once, instinctively, but there were no windows on the buildings that formed the alley. She looked back down and whispered, “La Llorona. I heard the screams last night. I’ve warned you. Why don’t you listen to me?”

She wiped tears from her cheeks.

“You think she did this?” the Old Man asked, walking close to look at the boy. He was not one of the Found Children. He was an outsider, from a nearby neighborhood. She had seen him before, a little younger than her, but at the time imperious, walking like he owned the world and smiling at the Found Children, but not talking to them. Now he was dead, the life gone from his body.

She looked up and met the Old Man’s eyes, looking into them for what she thought must truly be the first time. She found herself falling into them, as though under a spell, seeing in him time and space, the stars of eternity, the soul of hundreds, maybe thousands. How many were dead now, like this boy?

“He was one of us, you know,” the Street whispered, in the body of this Old Man. “He is one of us. But a piece of us was in there when this happened. And now it’s gone.”

Melissa turned and ran from him then, running back to The Castle, running to the hidden room she had once used, high in The Castle, and shut herself in. She held her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth, crying softly lest anyone hear her. She had not needed this room, this tiny closet of freedom since she arrived here, holding the Blue Lady’s hand. Scared of the new children. Scared of the Old Man.

The close walls, the musty smell, the semi-darkness enclosed her, comforted her. Here she was trapped, and yet free, free from everything out there that wanted to consume her, from La Llorona and the Street, the Old Man and the other children. The dead child.

Death. The Street didn’t seem to fear it, at least not the way she did. The violent, brutal murder of that child, the child who had no doubt been the source of the cries the night before.

Melissa cried herself to sleep.

The blue glow woke her, late in the night. It appeared first around the edges of the secret door that led into her private space, and then the door opened. Melissa tried to block the glare with her hand, but then it subsided on its own, revealing a beautiful woman, dressed in blue, radiating blue light from her skin. She had a soft and sympathetic smile, and reached a hand out toward Melissa.

Melissa smiled widely, her own hand meeting the Blue Lady’s, feeling her fingers touch that warmth. She held on, and the Lady guided her out of her hiding place. Melissa climbed down and stood before her looking up.

“It’s you,” she whispered.

“Hello, Melissa.”

“Why did you come?” Melissa asked. “I didn’t call you.”

“You did,” she said, “when you saw Rafael in the alley, don’t you remember?”

She nodded, but couldn’t actually remember. Her mind had been a whirl then.

“I must have,” Melissa whispered.

“Do you really think it was La Llorona?”

Melissa nodded, though she had actually become less sure since leaving the boy’s body. His death didn’t mesh with anything she knew about La Llorona, and doubt had begun to creep into her mind that she wasn’t real at all. The Blue Lady’s presence threw those thoughts into disarray once more.

“Do you know where we can find her? You said you saw her under the Street, right?”

“Yes,” Melissa said, then shook her head. “No. No. But, I do know . . . I did come near the lair of a demon once, a few days ago.”

“You knew it was a demon?”

“Who else could live like that?” she asked, shuddering. Deep in the sewers, the burning reek of its lair infesting the Elemental Caverns and fouling the sweet smell of smoke.

“Can you show me?”

“I . . .”

“It will be safe,” the Blue Lady said, “you called on me to protect you, and I will. But I need to see this place. I need you to lead me there.”

“Okay,” Melissa said, and took the Blue Lady’s hand again.

Together they walked out of The Castle into the cool night. The other children were all asleep, or hiding themselves, and she knew it was better if they did not see her with the Blue Lady. They would be scared, even if they believed Melissa’s stories, they would know this meant danger lurked nearby. And she did not want them to be afraid, any more, ever. She wanted them to be free of that, too. Fear was horrible, awful, and if the Street no longer feared death, maybe that was for the better.

Melissa led the Blue Lady to the entrance she used for the Elemental Caverns, a grate that had been stacked with boxes to keep it from being pushed up from underneath. Together, they pushed the boxes to the side and slowly crawled down the ladder inside to the concrete path inside. Melissa went first, swallowing her fear, and looked around carefully after beckoning the Blue Lady down.

Melissa began creeping toward the place she had last seen the glow of the demon’s fire, but the Blue Lady walked without fear, her stride long, her feet loud on the concrete. Melissa tried to hurry quietly, but gave it up, drawing strength from the Blue Lady’s fearlessness.

Before they reached it, she could smell the sickly smoke, see the glow reflecting on the walls. Within another minute, she was at the place she had found the trash compactor, the dried muck there still churned from where it had been turning its erratic circles.

Another few steps and she saw the shadows moving on the far wall, occluding the glow of the fire. Melissa froze in place as the demon stepped around the corner, ragged looking, long, straggly hair hanging from his head.

His head?

Melissa’s thoughts swirled with confusion. The face she saw was certainly a man’s. This was not La Llorona. Or was it? Was La Llorona tricking them?

She didn’t have time to think further, as the demon breathed words in the demon language, and Melissa felt her knees shake with fear. He carried something in his right hand, long like a gun, but strangely shiny.

Melissa wanted to back away but could not, her body would not respond to her. But then the Blue Lady, who she’d almost forgot about, stepped around her. The demon started to raise the thing in his right hand, screaming something in his language at the Blue Lady. Her hands moved in a flicker and filaments shot from her fingers, glittering in the firelight. They whipped across the intervening distance and in a blink the demon was pinned against the wall.

His gun fired, the sound unmistakable in the confined space, but the filaments had pinned it to the wall as well, and it discharged harmlessly at the floor. The Blue Lady strode forward, her calm undisturbed. She had been right, Melissa was safe with her.

“It’s okay, you can come closer,” the Blue Lady said, beckoning Melissa to her side. She followed, coming closer to the demon, and seeing that he was not, in fact, a demon, but just an angry bad smelling man with long hair. He spat words at the Blue Lady and jerked the trigger again on his gun, but it would not fire now.

A thousand little shards of glass were embedded in the concrete around his feet. Melissa crouched down to look closer at them.

“That is what killed the boy,” the Blue Lady said, reassuring her. “Not La Llorona, or anything else. Just this awful man’s awful weapon.”

“Who is he?” she asked.

“A man, just a man from across the ocean.”

“From where?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” the Blue Lady asked, and Melissa had no answer.

“You were right, when you thought of him as La Llorona,” she said. “Not everyone transcended, or chose to. He’s an individual. He is the last remnant of a meme that has worked its way through all of human history, that believes a race or a nation are exceptional and destined to great things in history. He’s a nationalist. Transcendence ignores such boundaries, but he wants them back and is willing to hurt people in the name of this desire.”

Melissa nodded, understanding and yet not understanding at all. Her mind was unraveling, and then remaking connections.

“You are the Street, aren’t you?” Melissa asked. “Another aspect of it.”

“I am,” she said, turning now to look down at Melissa. “Abandoned children talk about the legend of the Blue Lady. We felt you would trust us, let us take care of you, if I found you.”

But Melissa didn’t answer, didn’t say anything else, just walked away.

Melissa stopped telling her stories.

There seemed little point any more. La Llorona was not real. There were no demons, only sad and pathetic men living in a sewer, killing children because of an idea.

The children were safe, as safe as could be on the Street. No matter what Melissa warned them about.

The Street now understood how the man had snuck in. It knew about the “glass flechettes” and could prepare for them. The orphans were not in danger, and there wasn’t much her stories could do. The world was strange. Stranger than the one she’d been born into. The children seemed to adapt to that easier than her.

“Why aren’t you telling your stories any more?” the Street asked her. The Old Man was back, dressed in flowery shorts and a white t-shirt with sunglasses and a straw hat. The hat mostly covered the metallic growths on his head.

“I can’t believe them any more, not after what I saw, what I know. I question everything.”

“That’s understandable,” the Old Man said, his eyes sad. “We’ll miss your stories, though.”

“I’ll miss them too,” she replied.

“Do you want to join us?”

“Become like you, or the Blue Lady, or the boy in the alley?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Yes,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I . . . want to be more like them, the tribe that passed through. But I want to remain myself. It seems like dying, becoming part of the Street.”

“It’s not,” the Old Man said. “I can even introduce you to the boy whose body you saw. He is alive and happy within us.”

“But he isn’t himself, alone. He can’t ever be free and alone, like I was when the Blue Lady came to me. I can’t be me.”

“Are you still yourself when you work with the other kids to clean the street, moving as one unit to accomplish a task?”

“Yes, of course. But I haven’t changed, I am still myself,” she said.

“But who are you, yourself?” he asked. “Are you the same person here, right now, that you were before you learned the truth about La Llorona, or the Blue Lady? You have changed, even in that. Transcending would hardly be different. You are nothing more than colonies of bacteria and cells, all working together to a greater whole. We are not that much different.”

She had nothing to say to that, for now, only looked off toward the east. The tribe had left days ago, and must be to the spaceport by now. She thought about trying to catch them, but it seemed like a long way to go on her own, even in a world mostly safer than the one she had grown up in.

“The children would be safe?” she asked.

“We are very invested in them,” the Old Man replied.

“Why?”

“Like we said to you before, we need new input, to stagnate for us would be like death.”

“So you’re afraid of it?”

“As much as we are of anything,” he replied.

“You want the children to join with you?”

“If they choose to,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll enjoy their play and their art and their curiosity. Maybe they will go out into the world and return to us with their experiences. Maybe they will join us and add their individual creativity and spark to our collective.”

She looked off to the east again and sighed.

“You are a strange guardian, Street. But better than none, I guess. Thank you for the offer, but I think I would like to leave. Is there another tribe passing through soon?”

“In a week, your time,” he said, “or you can catch up with the last one. It’s not that far.”

“You would let me go?”

“Of course. We told you, you are not our prisoner.”

“Then I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll need to pack some food.”

“No need. I’ll make arrangements. Just ask and we will make sure you have what you need delivered. I will order the sentry to make a bike for you.”

Melissa swallowed. This was it. This was really happening. They walked silently along the Street. At the end, once more, Melissa stepped over the boundary to the other side.

The sentry thundered from its niche between two houses, blocking out the sun as it approached. From inside something gurgled and belched, a puff of smoke leaked out, and then a bike slid out from a compartment in a gush of green liquid that turned into smoke and wafted away.

Melissa took the handles.

“The offer will stand, to join us, if you come back,” the Street said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Good bye, Melissa,” said the sentry as it settled back toward its niche.

“Good bye, Street,” she said, and turned back toward the world without a Blue Lady, or La Llorona, or Santa Claus.

But maybe, she thought, full of other wonders.

About the Authors

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

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

Robot

Helena Bell

You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat; don’t lose the pamphlets my husband has brought home from the hospital; they suggest I give you a name, do you like Fred?; don’t eat the dead flesh of my right foot until after I have fallen asleep and cannot hear the whir of your incisors working against the bone.

This is a picture of the world from which you were sent; this is a copy of the agreement between our government and theirs; these are the attributes they claim you are possessed of: obedience, loyalty, low to moderate intelligence; a natural curiosity which I should not mistake for something other than a necessary facet of your survival in the unfamiliar; this is your bill of manufacture; this is your bill of sale; this is a warrant of merchantability on which I may rely should I decide to return you from whence you came; this is your serial number, here, scraped in an alien script on the underside of your knee; the pamphlets say you may be of the mind to touch it occasionally, like a name-tag, but if I command you, you will stop.

This is a list of the chores you will be expected to complete around the house when you are not eating the diseases out of my flesh; this is the corner of my room where you may stay when you are not working; do not look at me when you change the linens, when you must hold me in the bathroom, when you record in the notebook how many medications I have had that day, how many bowel movements, how the flesh of my mouth is raw and bleeding against the dentures I insist on wearing.

The pamphlets say you are the perfect scavenger: completely self contained, no digestion, no waste; they say I can hook you up to an outlet and you will power the whole house.

You may polish the silver if you are bored; you may also rearrange the furniture, wind the clocks, pull weeds from the garden; you may read in the library any book of your choosing; my husband claims you have no real consciousness, only an advanced and sophisticated set of pre-programmed responses, but I have seen your eyes open in the middle of the night; I have seen you stare out across the fields as if there is something there, calling you.

Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?

Help me to walk across this room; help me to wipe bacon grease from the skillet—do not think I do not see you trying to wash it with soap when I am done.

Help me to knit my granddaughter a sweater, she is my favorite and it is cold where she will be going; if you hold my hands so they are steady I will allow you to terrorize my Bridge club; I will teach you the rules: cover an honor with an honor; through strength and up to weakness.

Help me to pronounce atherosclerosis when I am speaking with the physician; remember the questions I must ask him; recite my list of medications when asked; if you would like, we may go early so that you may sit with me in the waiting room with all the others like you and me.

Do you see that one?; that is the way you will carry me when my other foot has gone down the black froth of your mouth.

Lie to me about my children; tell me they have called and called again; I think perhaps you are keeping them from me; I think you hope I will forget them and change my will so you may have everything when you have devoured my body completely.

These are my personal things which you may not touch; these are the magazines you may read; these are the newspapers you may not read; the pamphlets say you have no interest in the affairs of the world and thus it is not necessary for you to have them; I wish you would not look at me when you swallow my tendons, my calves, my patella; I wish you could feel so you would know isolation.

The pamphlets say I should compliment your body as it changes: your skin has taken on a waxy texture inconsistent with the evil robot I know you are; your amber eyes glow like bonfires intent on destroying the savannah; your breath smells like swamp gas.

Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?

Evolution is a quirk of humans and other sentient species; you are not real, not alive, your changes may be slow and insistent but they are the result of the consumption of my flesh.

The pamphlets claim you are neither human nor alien and incapable of willful intent; you are not devious; you do not conspire to replace me, to wear my dresses, court my husband and disown my children; you are unthinking, unplanning, harmless; you are here for my comfort, I should thank your world for sending you.

You have no family; you are a construct, a robot; you were not born; you will not die; you have only the home I give you and learn only the things I teach you.

These are the toys and letters I sent my children when I was abroad, these are the folds and refolds my husband made so I would think they had been read.

This is a closet for all your things; this is its lock; this is a key; do not lose it, it is the only one.

This is the way to stumble like a human; this is the way to delete your messages from the people with whom you no longer wish to speak; this is the way to reclaim your childhood by clinging to anger and hurt; this is the way to insult your neighbors while making it sound like you are paying them a compliment; this is the way to eat ice cream in the middle of the night because you are old and no one is looking; this is the way to ignore your husband when he calls out to you from the porch and you are in your own world, sitting high in a swing and your legs are not chewed off at the knees—you are back in your space ship, you are finding a new planet, a new species, forging new treaties and living the life you always knew you would live without consequence or regret—there are no mistakes, no cardiovascular impairments—you are not host to an alien robot hell-bent on devouring you.

I think you are beginning to look a little like me; usurper; slut; flesh-eating mongrel; ingrate; monster; orphan; spy; speaking to you now I feel a stranger’s hand inside my jaw moving it for me.

My granddaughter has sent me a note expressing the appropriate level of gratitude for the sweater—it is warm and tight knit and shines like burnished steel—it is cold for our kind where she is going and now she will be comfortable; she wonders if she will be a famous explorer; she wonders if the sun flashes blue before disappearing beyond the horizon of deep space; I have left the note on the dresser in your room.

You will have to write my correspondence for me; you will have to go to the market and buy avocados which do not give in; you will learn to make a roux; you will touch my husband’s shoulder when he is about to fall asleep in church; you will watch the news and tell me when the next ships leave; the pamphlets say you are happy for this opportunity to be helpful; your only desire is to assimilate into our culture; you do not miss your home.

They say you will stop eating when only good flesh and good circulation remain; you are designed as a recycler; the flesh you have taken from me is converted into energy which fuels I know not what; you are a marvel; in a thousand years our scientists could not understand the science your makers have wrought.

I dream you will not stop; I will shrink to the size of a basketball and you will carry my head under your arms; you will tell people your name and it will be my name; you will tell people your husband is my husband, my children your children, my home is yours as well; you will place me on the sill and one day, when the window is open I will fall down and roll into the garden, into the fields and I will watch you from the horizon, the blue of my eyes glowing in the night when you pretend to look for me.

Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

Am I only meat to you? A mother, a friend, a tyrant?; do you sleep, do you dream, do you derive satisfaction by making more and more of me disappear every day?

There is a story my husband told me before I went abroad and I was afraid we would not find anything, we would fail in our mission: we can only see what we expect to see; when Pizarro sailed across the Atlantic, his ships appeared as great white birds on the horizon and not until he strode onto the beach, his armor shining like a burnished oyster shell, did the Incas realize he was a person at all.

About the Author

Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and a Tax LLM which fulfills her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer Magazine, Brain Harvest, and Rattle.

muo-ka’s Child

Indrapramit Das

Ziara watched her parent, muo-ka, curl up and die, like an insect might on Earth.

muo-ka was a giant of a thing, no insect. Ziara was the one who’d always felt like an insect around it. Its curled body pushed against the death shroud it had excreted in its dying hours, the membrane stretched taut against rigid limbs. She touched the shroud. It felt smooth but sticky. Her fingertips stuck lightly to it, leaving prints. It felt different from her clothes. muo-ka had excreted the ones she wore a month ago. They smelled softer than the death shroud, flowers from Earth on a distant, cosmic breeze. She raised her fingers to her face, touching them with her tongue. So salty and pungent it burned. She gagged instantly, coughing to stop herself retching.

“muo-ka,” she said, throat thick. “You are my life.” Ziara thought about this. “You are my life, here.” She meant these words, but felt a hollow, aching relief that muo-ka’s presence was gone.

She closed her eyes to remember the blue rind of Earth, furred with clouds, receding behind the glass as she drifted into amniotic sleep. Orphan. Volunteer. Voyager. A mere twenty years on that planet. When she had opened her eyes after the primordial dream of that year of folding space, the first thing she saw and felt was muo-ka pulling her from the coma, breaking open the steaming pod with predatory lurches. Its threaded knot of limbs rippling like a shredded banner in the sweltering light, stuck on the leviathan swell of its dark shape. She had opened her mouth, spraying vomit into the air, lazy spurts that moved differently than on Earth. muo-ka had pulled her out of the pod and towards it, its limbs sometimes whiplashes, sometimes articulated arms, flickering between stiffness and liquid softness so quickly it hurt her eyes to see that tangled embrace. Stray barbed limbs tugged and snapped at the rubbery coil of her umbilicus, ripping it off so pale shreds clung to the valve above her navel.

muo-ka had grasped at Ziara’s strange, small, alien body, making her float in the singing air as she tried and tried to scream.

Ziara watched the shroud settle over muo-ka. Already the corpse had shrunk considerably as air and water left it. Its body whistled softly. A quiet song for coming evening. With a bone knife, she cut small slits into the shroud to let the gas escape more freely, even though the membrane was porous. The little rents fluttered. A breeze ruffled the flat waters of the eya-rith basin into undulations that lapped across muo-ka’s islet, washing Ziara’s bare feet and wetting the weedy edges of the stone deathbed. The water sloshed in the ruined shell of the pod at the edge of the islet, its sleek surfaces cracked and scabbed with mossy growth. Inside was a small surveying and recording kit. She had discovered the kit, sprung free of its wall compartment, shattered and drowned from the rough landing. Even if it had worked, it seemed a useless thing to her now.

When the pod had once threatened to float away, Ziara had clung to it, trying to pull it back with her tiny human arms, heaving with frantic effort. muo-ka had lunged, sealed the wreck to the islet with secretions. Now it stood in a grassy thatch of fungal filaments, a relic from another planet.

muo-ka had no spoken words. Yet, its islet felt quieter than it had ever been. Ziara had learned its name, and some of its words, by becoming its mouth, speaking aloud the language that hummed in a part of its body that she had to touch. It had been shockingly easy to do this. What secret part of her had muo-ka unlocked, or taught to wake? muo-ka’s skin had always felt febrile when she touched it, and when it spoke through her she felt hot as well.

The first thing it had said through her mouth was “muo-ka,” and she had known that was its name. “Ziara,” she had said, still touching it. “Jih-ara,” it had said in her mouth, exuding a humid heat, a taste of blood and berries in her head. Ziara had disengaged her palm with a smack, making it shiver violently. Clammy with panic, she had walked away. It had felt too strange, too much like becoming a part of muo-ka, becoming an organ of its own.

Ziara rarely spoke to muo-ka in the time that followed. When she got an urge to communicate, she’d often stifle it. And she did get the urge, again and again. In those moments she’d hide in the broken pod on the islet’s shore. She’d curl into its clammy, broken womb and think of the grassy earth of the hostel playground, of playing catch with her friends until the trees darkened, of being reprimanded by the wardens, and smoking cigarettes by the barred moonlight of the cavernous bathrooms, stifling coughs into silent giggles when patrols came by. Daydreams of their passing footsteps would become apocalyptic with the siren wail of muo-ka’s cries. It never could smell or detect her in the strange machinery of the wrecked pod. She assumed the screams were ones of alarm.

“You’ve fed me,” Ziara said to the corpse. “And clothed me. And taught me to leap across the sky.” Those stiffened limbs that its shroud now clung to had snatched her from the air if she leaped too high, almost twisting her shoulders out of their sockets once. She’d landed on the mud of the islet safe, alive. In the shadow of muo-ka she’d whispered “Fuck you. Just, fuck you. Fuck you, muo-ka.”

She had tasted the sourness of boiled fruit at the back of her throat. muo-ka covered the sky above her, and offered one of its orifices. Gushing with the steam of regurgitate cooked inside it. She’d reached inside and took the scorching gumbo in her hands. The protein from dredged sea and air animals tasted like spongy fish. It was spiced with what might have been fear.

Ziara didn’t have an exact idea of how long it had been since muo-ka had pulled her into the air of this world from the pod. She had marked weeks, months and years on a rock slick with colonies of luminescent bacteria. Left a calendar of glowing fingerprints that she had smeared clean and then restarted at the end of every twelve months, marking the passing years with long lines at the top. She had three lines now. They glowed strongest at dusk. If they were right, they told her she was twenty-four years old now. muo-ka had been her parent for three years.

Not that the number mattered. Days and years were shorter here. muo-ka had always lingered by that rocky calendar of fingerprints, hovering over it in quiet observation when it thought she wasn’t looking, when she was off swimming in the shallows. Watching from afar in the water, she could always taste an ethanol bitterness at the back of her throat and sinuses. A taste she came to associate with sadness, or whatever muo-ka would call sadness.

muo-ka had never washed the calendar clean. It had never touched it. It had only ever looked at that glimmering imprint of time mapped according to a distant world invisible in the night sky. The dancing fingertips of its incredible child.

The evening began to cast shadows across the shallow seas. Across the horizon, uong-i was setting into mountains taller than Everest and Olympus Mons. uong-i at this time was the blue of a gas flame on a stove, though hot and bright. Sometimes the atmosphere would tint it green at dawn and dusk, and during the day it was the white of daylit snow. But now it was blue.

Ziara touched muo-ka’s shroud again. It was drier, slightly more tough as it wrapped around the contours of the moaning, rattling body. She lit the flares by scratching them on the mossed rocks. The two stalks arced hot across the water, sparks dancing across her skin. She plunged them into the soil by the deathbed.

Her eyes ached with the new light. Again, she remembered her first moment with muo-ka, remembered her panic at the thing ensnaring her in blinding daylight. The savagery with which it severed her umbilicus, the painful spasming of its limbs around her. She remembered these things, and knew muo-ka had been in as much panic as she had. She had long since realized this, even if she hadn’t let it sink in.

From her first moment here, muo-ka remained a giant, terrifying thing. The days of recovery in the chrysalid blanket it wove around her. She’d been trapped while it smothered her with boiling food from its belly, trying and failing to be gentle. Fevers raging from nanite vaccines recalibrating her system, to digest what her parent was feeding her and breathe the different air, the new soup of microbes. “Stop,” she would tell muo-ka. “Please stop. I can’t eat your food. I’m dying.” But it would only clutch her cocooned body and tilt her so she could vomit, the ends of its limbs sharp against her back. It would continue feeding her, keep letting her shit and piss and vomit in that cocoon, which only digested it all, preventing any infections.

Sure enough, the fevers faded away and one day the cocoon came off in gummy strips. Ziara could move again, could move like she had on Earth. At first it was an aching crawl, leaving troughs in the rich mud of the islet. But she’d balled that mud in her fists and growled, standing on shaking legs. She watched her human shadow unfurl long across the silty islet, right under the eclipsing shape of muo-ka above her, its limbs whipping around her, supporting her until she shrugged them off.

Ziara had laughed and laughed, to be able to stand again, until phlegm had gathered in her throat and she had to spit in joy. So she walked, walked over this human stain she had left on the ground, walked over the wet warmth of muo-ka’s land. She walked until she could run. She was so euphoric that she could only dance and leap across the basin, flexing her muscles, testing her augmented metal bones in this low gravity. Sick with adrenalin, she soared through the air, watching the horizon expand and expand, bounding from rock to rock, whipping past exoskeletal flying creatures that flashed in the sun. muo-ka watched, its leviathan darkness suddenly iridescent. Then Ziara stood in one place panting, and she screamed, emptied her lungs of that year of deep sleep through a pierced universe. She screamed goodbye to the planet of her first birth. As this unknown sound swept across the basin, muo-ka’s limbs glittered with barbs that it flung into itself.

Ziara nodded at this memory. “muo-ka. Leaping? You taught me to walk,” she said with a smile.

She had avoided muo-ka’s oppressive presence by hiding in the pod. She would shit and piss, too, under the shade of the tilted wreck, in its rain of re-leaked tidal water. When she didn’t want the smallness of the pod, she slipped into the basin’s seas, walked across the landbridges and glittering sandbars to swirling landscapes of rock and mud fronded with life-colonies that clung like oversized froth. But always her parent would be looming on the horizon, its hovering shape bobbing over the water, limbs alternating in a flicker over the surface as it dredged for food. Sometimes it would soar over her in the evening, its blinking night eyes flickering lights, stars or aircraft from the striated skies of Earthly dusks. With those guiding lights it would lead her back to the islet. Her throat would throb in anger and frustration, at the miles of watery, rocky, mountainous horizon she couldn’t escape, but she’d know that straying far would likely mean she’d be killed by something on land or sea that was deadlier than her.

It took her a while to have her first period on the planet, because of the nanite vaccine calibrations and the shock of acclimatisation. All things considered, it hadn’t been her worst. But she had recognized the leaden pain of cramps immediately, swallowed the salty spit of nausea and gone to the pod again. She’d squatted under it and bled into the unearthly sea.

Looking at that, she’d wondered what she was doing. Whether she was seeding something, whether she was changing the ecosystem. She’d felt like an irresponsible teenager. But looking at those crimson blossoms in the waves, she’d also felt a sudden, overwhelming longing. She’d become breathless at the thought that there was nobody else in the world. Not a single human beyond that horizon of seas and mountains and mudflats. Only the unbelievably remote promise that the mission would continue if the unmanned ship that had ejected her pod managed to return to Earth, with the news that the visitation had been successful. Another human might be sent, years later, maybe two if they could manage, hurtling down somewhere on the world with no means of communicating with her. Or a robot probe sent to scour the planet until it found and recorded her impact, just like the first probes that had seeded messages and artifacts to indicate Ziara’s arrival.

But at that moment, she was as alone as any human could be. It was conceivable that she might never see a human again. Her eyelids had swollen with tears, and she’d watched her blood fall into the sea. She hadn’t been able to see muo-ka from under the pod then. But she’d heard it secreting something, with loud rattling coughs. She’d sat and waited until her legs ached, until the rising tide lapped at her thighs.

Later she’d found fresh, coarse membranes strewn across the ground next to her rock calendar. They were waterproof.

New clothes.

Ziara had wrapped the membranes around herself like a saree, not knowing how else to wear them. She became light-headed when she caught the scent of flowers in them. It was a shocking sensation, a smell she’d never encountered on this world before.

muo-ka had been absent that whole day. When it returned, lights flickering in sunset, she held out her hand. It lurched gracelessly through the air as if caught in turbulence, before hovering down to her, curtaining her in softened limbs. Her palm fell against the familiar spot behind the limbs. She flinched at the heat.

“Thank you,” Ziara said.

It said nothing through her, only unfurling, drowning the back of her throat in bloody sweetness.

muo-ka had been dying for months. It had told Ziara, in its sparse way, a cloying thick taste of both sweet berried blood and bitterness in her head.

“Sick?” she had asked.

“Sh-ikh,” it had said in her mouth. “Ii-sey-na,” it said, and when the word formed in her throat she knew it meant “death.”

“Sorry,” she had whispered.

“Euh-i,” it had said. No. Not sorry.

Ziara had let it talk for longer than ever before. For hours, her hand flushed red from its heat. It had told her several words, sentences, that made up an idea of what to do with its dead body. Then it went on, forming concepts, ideas, lengthier than ever before. muo-ka told her many things.

Ziara thought about her relief, now, looking at dead muo-ka. It disturbed her, but it was the truth. There was a clarity to her world now. To this world. She would move along the mudflats and sandbridges and mountains. She would make blades of her parent’s bones, as it had told her, and explore the world. She would finally go beyond that horizon, which now flared and dimmed with the setting of uong-i.

She was an alien, and the world would kill her, sooner rather than later. Even if by some miracle the second human arrived in the coming months, he’d be too weak to help. If one of the leviathans adopted him—and it would be a man that fell this time—it might even violently keep Ziara away from him as its own child, and she had no chance of fighting that. She knew nothing about the dynamics of this adoption. She was the first, after all. They had come into this without much knowledge, except their curiosity and gentle handling of the initial probes.

Until and unless Earth sent an actual colonization team that could touch down a vessel with equipment and tools on the surface, humans wouldn’t be able to survive here without the help of muo-ka’s kind. As muo-ka’s child, she wondered if she might be able to befriend one of them, or whether she’d be killed in an instant.

Ziara shook her head. It was no point overthinking. She would walk this world, and see what came. She had chosen this, after all. She hadn’t chosen her parent, but there it was, in front of her, dead as she was alive. And she was alive because of it.

The blue dome of the gas giant appeared over the horizon, filling the seas with reflections. In the sparking light of the flares, Ziara waited. The shroud had fossilized into a flexible papyrus, with an organic pattern that looked like writing, symbols. The shrunken behemoth finally vented its innards as the stars and far moons appeared in the night sky, behind streaks of radiant aurora. Ziara clenched her jaw and began to scoop the entrails up to give to the sea, as was dignified. For a moment, she wondered what the deaths of these solitary creatures were normally like. She had seen others on the horizons, but always so far they seemed mirages. They lived their lives alone on this world, severed from each other. It had to be the child that conducted the death rites, once it was ready to move on. Perhaps they induced death in themselves once their child was mature enough.

She stopped, recoiling from the mess.

In the reeking slop of its guts, she saw muo-ka replicated. A small muo-ka. But not muo-ka. A nameless one, budded in its leviathan body. It was dead. The child’s limbs were tangled in the oily foam of its parent’s death. The body was crushed. Her hands slid over its cold, broken form.

muo-ka had budded a child. A child that would have done muo-ka’s death rites once it had matured, ready to go on its own.

“Oh,” she said, fingers squelching in the translucent mud seeping out of muo-ka’s child. “Oh, no. My muo-ka. My dear muo-ka,” she whispered, to both corpses.

muo-ka had budded a child, and finding a mature child already ready to venture out into the world, it had crushed the one growing inside it. Only ziara was muo-ka’s child.

“You brought me to life,” ziara said, leaning in her parent’s guts, holding her dead sibling, wrapped in clothes her parent had made. Her face crumpled as she buried it in the remains of muo-ka’s life, her body shaking.

ziara left her sibling in the sea with muo-ka’s guts. Using the bone-knife, she cut away the death shroud carefully and wore it around her shoulders. One day, ziara swore to herself, she would translate the symbols it had excreted on it. Her parent’s death letter. She sliced off a part of the deflated hide, scrubbed it in the sea, and wore it as a cowl to keep her head warm during nights. The flares had smoked out. She looked at muo-ka curled dead. It had told her the creatures of the air would come and consume it, slowly, as it should be. She felt bad leaving it there on that stony deathbed, but that was what it had told her to do. She wiped her eyes and face. A bone knife and a whole world she didn’t belong in, except right here on this islet.

A fiery line streaked across the sky. A human vessel. Or a shooting star. ziara gazed at its afterimage for a moment, and walked off the islet and across the shallows and mudflats of the basin. She had named that basin once, or muo-ka had, with her mouth.

eya-rith. Earth, so she would not be homesick.

About the Author

Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Apex Magazine, Redstone Science Fiction, The World SF Blog, Flash Fiction Online, and is forthcoming in the anthology Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (Zubaan Books). He is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia, and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood. Follow him on Twitter (@IndrapramitDas).

Between a UFO and a Hard Place: The Real-Life Science Heroics of Dr. Omond Solandt

Jason S. Ridler

Type the name “Omond Solandt” in a search engine these days, and you will likely find these top four entries. First, a very thin Wikipedia article. Second, an entry for the scholarship named in Solandt’s honour. And third, you will find a detailed article I wrote about Dr. Solandt and his career. If these were your first attempts to find details about this man, you’d be introduced to an incredible intellect: a physiologist who visited Stalin’s Russia as a student; a polio survivor and soldier-scientists who pioneered a branch of applied science; and, a man who walked an atomic battleground and held court with the highest echelons of military science during the deadly and early cold war. He was a man of importance, distinction, and contribution who led an amazing life.  

When I began my doctoral research on Dr. Solandt in 2003, though, the number one entry on him online, currently number four, was from the The Presidents UFO Website: A Tale of Extraterrestrial Politics in the White House, created and run by UFO conspiracy proponent Grant Cameron. The site has an entire section on Canadian UFO material from the 1950s, including letters to and from Dr. Solandt by both Cameron and other UFO enthusiasts and skeptics (which appear to be authentic), as well as letters from engineer Wilber Smith. In the 1950s, Smith worked for Dr. Solandt’s Defence Research Board (DRB), the Canadian government’s defence research organization for the armed forces. Most of the letters concern investigations conducted by the Canadian government when UFO hysteria was running wild in the 1950s. Smith worked on one of these projects and became obsessed with trying to contact UFOs.

But the most upsetting part of the site is a transcribed interview one Dr. Armen Victorian allegedly had with Solandt by phone in 1991. Solandt was 82, ill, and two years away from his death. Solandt is patient and gracious, explaining that DRB tried to keep an open mind about such things, but Smith’s work led nowhere, the investigations turned up nothing, and the evidence of the UFOs was nonexistent and not something he had much interest in. Victorian’s questions were insistent and aggressive, and while pleasantries abounded they also often read as the badgering of an elderly man.

Ten years after his death in 1993, when I started his biography, Solandt’s name was forgotten to all but the most diehard historians of the Cold War in Canada and a few former defence official and scientists. Anyone interested in his life that went online would see Dr. Solandt was a minor cog in the conspiratorial wheel of aliens and UFOs, perhaps a nefarious one.

This state of affairs was obscene. Dr. Solandt’s life was far more interesting than the strained theories on a cruddy website made in the 1990s. He was a true science hero, one whose intellect, dedication to research and efficiency, and meticulous ability to problem-solve led him from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the atomic battlegrounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and beyond.

Though never beyond terra firma.

Origin Story

Born in 1909, Solandt became one of the great minds of his generation in Canada: a penetrating intellect, a pragmatic, technical problem-solver, and an utter beast on the football field. He excelled through public and high school and arrived at the University of Toronto in 1927, ready to conquer any field he found. He became the star pupil of the physiology department’s star teacher Dr. Charles Best, co-discoverer of insulin with Nobel laureate Sir Frederick Banting.

Under Best’s patronage, Solandt cleaned house, earning gold-medal standing for academic achievement. Sadly, a vicious bout of bulbar polio almost killed him, but under the tireless support of his mother he recovered, finished his masters, and prepared for grad work at Cambridge. Best also arranged for Solandt and his older brother Don (also one of Best’s brightest) to attend the 14th Physiological Conference in Leningrad and Moscow in 1935. In Stalin’s Russia they drank cherry brandy, attended opulent buffets, and saw impressive Soviet facilities contrasted with shoeless women repairing railway tracks in winter as shadowy government agents stalked their movements.

At Cambridge in 1938, Solandt earned a reputation as an insanely rigorous researcher while working with Sir Alan Drury, founder of the Lister Institute. After acing the dreaded Royal Medical Exams on the first try (a rare feat), he finished his MA at Cambridge and prepared for a career in physiology. Confident, brilliant, and cagey, Solandt bucked authority if he found he had a better answer, and he often did. He championed talented researchers under his charge, and worked harder than anyone in any organization he ran to set the standard. He had no time for personages of pedigree and vanity, but liked people from any walk of life that were capable and engaged with the world around him, be it the mechanic on the shop floor or a member of the Royal Society. And he prided himself on controlling his emotions, keeping them under wraps so they would not sully his experiments, so while some found him cold, others appreciated his excellent research. This collection of abilities and attitude would find much use after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.

From Tank Doctor to Atomic Expert

Solandt was soon tasked to run the South West London Blood Depot during the Battle of Britain. He earned high marks for its efficiency in supplying blood to hospitals during the worst of the Blitz, as well as rescue work and research for those suffering from crush injuries (being pinned under debris). The British military took notice, too, and soon Solandt was selected to create and run a physiological laboratory for the Armoured Fighting Vehicles School in Dorset. Tank crews were passing out during gun trials just as the armored war in North Africa intensified. Solandt and his team soon realized it was the amount of carbon monoxide being released into the sealed tank, primarily from the Besa machine gun, and began work on ventilation and tank design. Other man-machine problems arose with optics, night fighting, and chemical warfare gear. Solandt and his crew were now in high demand.

Solandt then jumped to the British Army Operational Research Group. AORG was an ad hoc science organization that did for all the British Army what Solandt was doing for the Armoured Corps: using science to solve a range of problems, from antiaircraft system design to lethality-of-weapons studies. Their approach was a new form of applied science known as operational research, in which pragmatic scientific methods from physics to zoology were used to solve problems, improve equipment and training, and even change strategies. Solandt soon became the deputy superintended of AORG under the command of Brigadier Basil Schonland, the famed South African physicist and lightning expert, and eventually ran AORG when Schonland left. At war’s end, he’d been tasked to become scientific advisor to Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before he arrived.  

Instead, in November of 1945 Solandt joined the British Mission to Japan to survey the damage of the atomic bombs. While their main objective was examining structural damage, Solandt’s medical training made him a boon to investigating the impact of the bombs on the Japanese people. So it was that when the Canadian government offered him the chance to lead its first peacetime defence research organization, the Defence Research Board (DRB), they got a genius, a pioneer in operational research, a seasoned leader and manager of military science organizations, and an early expert on the realities of atomic warfare. The kind of career that makes UFO hysteria look like third-rate science fiction.

The Cold Warrior

Solandt led the DRB from its birthing pains to its massive buildup after the Korean War, with over a thousand employees and dozens of establishments, labs, liaison groups and detachments.  As Chairman, Solandt was both a chief executive of a national science organization and a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Canada’s senior military body, where he was given the equivalent rank of lieutenant-general so he would not be pushed around or ignored by the senior services. He stuck out like a sore thumb in his civilian attire, slicked hair, and glasses, and the fact that he was a 37-year-old genius who’d retired his war rank as colonel in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1945, but knew what atomic war actually looked like.

DRB did groundbreaking and valuable work in advanced radar communications, chemical and biological warfare defence, weapons design, and winter warfare research. He sent OR field teams to Korea and more. Solandt was perhaps the most knowledgeable member of the Canadian government on atomic affairs, attending British atomic tests in Australia, working with Canadian civilian nuclear researchers, and promoting atomic warfare courses for the Canadian military. In public, Solandt became a science celebrity in North America and Europe, conducting dozens of lectures on science, warfare, and the atomic bomb long before futurist Herman Kahn became famous for his controversial thermonuclear chats.

The Soviets took notice. They were not pleased.

In the Soviet press, Solandt was portrayed as a cold, inhuman tool of Western imperialism and an abuser of science. A May 1950 article in Pravda quoted Solandt as saying that robots were “cool-headed and able to concentrate under fire.” Such practical statements were taken by Pravda as evidence that the West was preparing to replace human soldiers with robots to face the Red Army. In April 1952, James G. Endicott, a former Canadian missionary from Toronto who was in China during the Korean War, made public speculations about Solandt and the DRB’s biological warfare work. In an interview broadcast by Moscow, Endicott said Canada was manufacturing germs at Suffield to feed the alleged biological-warfare measures the U.S. was employing in Korean War. He then maligned Solandt by falsely quoting him as saying that the prospects for mass death through BW were “extremely heartening.” No evidence of such claims were ever brought to light, but concern grew in government until Ron Kenyon of the Toronto Telegram interviewed Solandt. “This was no fire-spouting dragon as Dr. Endicott would have him,” Kenyon wrote. “He was just not the type to describe the horrors of bacteriological warfare as ‘heartening.’ In fact he had assured me that he had said no such thing.” Endicott’s statements were summed up by Solandt as a fishing expedition for propaganda purposes, and the matter dropped.

And then came the UFOs. At least in the press.

For three years Solandt had quietly ignored the rising tide of supposed flying-saucer sightings in Canada and the U.S., but by 1952, there was too much public interest. Solandt told the press that he was “as mystified as anyone else” regarding the sightings of odd lights in the sky and said he and senior scientists were “keeping open minds on the questions.” This included the creation of the aptly titled “Committee Set Up to Deal with ‘Flying Saucers’ Sightings” under the Chairmanship of astrophysicist Dr. P. W. Millman of the Dominion Observatory, and would be given the name Project Magnet (where engineer Wilbur Smith ran his failed tests). No evidence of UFOs was ever found. But for some, the fact that there were committees involved in investigating UFOS was proof enough.

End Game

When Solandt retired from the DRB in 1956, his list of accolades and awards was staggering, from a British OBE to an American Medal of Freedom and a Gold Medal from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (to name three of dozens), not to mention being made a Companion of the Order of Canada in the 1970s. Compared to the rest of his career, the sum total of his involvement in UFO hysteria amounted to peanuts. Sure, flying peanuts from Mars, but peanuts nonetheless. He’s also come a long way on the Internet; in addition to my own work, there’s finally a full Wikipedia entry and a Canadian Encyclopedia entry dedicated to him.

Despite being a straight-laced fellow, Solandt had discovered that much of the breakthroughs in life are not done by the regular joes who tow the party line. As he told a graduating class in 1954:

One of the very real dangers to our North American civilization is our worship of conformity. In almost every walk of life the person who conforms most pliably to the accepted standards of dress and behaviour is most likely to succeed. We must recognize that this enforcement of conformity will finally result in universal mediocrity. New ideas, especially in human relations and often even in science, come from those who refuse to conform.

I’ve always found great solace in Solandt’s battle cry for the eccentric. Thankfully, there has been a bump in Dr. Solandt’s reputation in the growing online environment of the 21st century— from a secondary character in the UFO hysteria of the 1950s to his proper place as one of the finest minds Canada produced in the 20th century, who made distinct contributions to the use of science in warfare against both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. He led a life dedicated to service and helping his country more than personal gain. It is a life worth remembering.

About the Author

Jason Ridler is the author of the Spar Battersea thrillers (Death Match and Con Job) and the short story collection Knockouts. He has also published over 50 stories in such magazines and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen, and more. His nonfiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. His doctoral thesis on Dr. Solandt will be published under the title Maestro of Science: Omond McKillop Solandt and Government Science in War and Hostile Peace by the University of Toronto Press.

The Satirist’s Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

Jeremy L. C. Jones

As a distorted, exaggerated, skewed, and otherwise mutated vision of the reality that surrounds us, satire shares a lot with speculative fiction. It’s to isolate humor as the element that separates the two genres, but it’s not that easy. As far back as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (whose macabre premise could be the stuff of today’s weird fiction) and Voltaire’s Candide (which lampoons Leibniz’s proto-quantum concept of “the best of all possible worlds), satire has not only been grim; it’s been fabulist. And in the past 100 years, everyone from Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs to Philip K. Dick and Terry Pratchett have mined the common ground between science fiction and satire.

Those shades of ambiguity between humor, critique, reality, and fantasy have been well served within the genre in recent years by Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay. Each in his own way, these unique authors have poked and stretched the skin of human existence through the deft use of wild speculation and biting commentary. Their stuff is also deeply funny—that is, if you don’t mind belly laughs with an aftertaste of bile. Clarkesworld spoke with these two literary iconoclasts about the ins and outs of satire, SF, and the fuzzy boundary between the two.

Nick Mamatas is a former fiction co-editor of Clarkesworld, and his works of satire include 2004’s cult classic Move Under Ground and 2011’s Sensation. His new novel, the non-satirical yet darkly reflective Bullettime, is published by ChiZine Publications.

Paul Tremblay is the author of the narcoleptic-detective novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, among others. The dizzying, dystopian Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is his latest book (and first satire), and it also is published by ChiZine.

In light of your new novel, do you consider yourself a satirist?

Nick Mamatas: No, not in light of my new novel. My 2007 novel Under My Roof was a political satire, and so was 2011’s Sensation, but Bullettime isn’t a satire. Some reviews have mentioned “hilarity” amid the horror and such. But satire needs an object. What is Bullettime satirizing?

Anyway, broadly I consider myself a satirist when engaging in satire. When I’m doing something else I consider myself something else. Isn’t there a joke whose punchline is “But fuck one goat…“? I try to keep away from totalizing identities like “satirist” or “goat-fucker.”

Paul Tremblay: Hey, I heard the goat joke in its pig iteration, not for nothing.

My previous narcoleptic detective novels weren’t really satires; certainly not political ones. But with Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, I’m now officially a satirist (I’d like some sort of membership card, if possible), and hopefully a successful one. Humor and absurd situations have been elements of all my novels so far, but the donkey novel is the only one of the three that squarely and broadly takes aim at American politics and culture.

I guess to more directly answer your question, I consider myself a writer in general, but with this particular work, yeah, I’m a satirist.

What is at stake in your new novel?

Nick Mamatas: Nothing. It’s a novel. Novels are important, they aren’t crucial to the culture. It’s a good thing too, since these days anyone can get a novel published if he or she has an email address.

Paul Tremblay: It’s true. I have an email address.

What’s at stake? The fate of the my narrator’s mom and the state of localized Western Civilization! Or at least it is in my novel where there is a small scale revolution at the mega-conglom Farm, a bizarre election that could determine the fate of City, and the narrator (who is an indentured worker at Farm) finds out that his mother might be homeless back in City, which means she’s in danger of being shipped/deported below City to the Pier. He escapes Farm and instead of finding his mother, he finds his deadbeat dad, who is now a Catholic priest. My plan for the book was to start the dystopian novel off with wild, borderline goofy scenarios and have the novel’s tone gradually become more serious and emotional as the reader progressed. Genuine empathy/emotion (and not sentimentality, as John Gardner defined it, “emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration”) is always what is at stake for me as a writer.

How has the role of satire changed in speculative fiction over the years?

Nick Mamatas: It’s become much less important. Speculative fiction has become much less about transparent allegories or satires and such, and much more about itself. There are some “serious speculations” about the future and a lot of earnest adventuring, but not a lot of satire. Of course, there are plenty of SF novels full of kooky political and social ideas, but as it turns out the authors generally believe in their own nonsense about the importance of polygamy, asteroid palladium-mining-backed currencies, and mandatory spankings for willful females.

Paul Tremblay: While I have to admit that I’m much more well read in horror fiction and general lit (whatever that means) than what is marketed as contemporary SF, I agree with Nick. What the heck do I mean by “marketed as contemporary SF?” Well, some recent examples of successful (both in terms of being a good book and having actually sold decently) satires include most of George Saunders’ work (Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and Mat Johnson’s Pym, and they all relied heavily upon speculative-fiction elements.

These are works of SF, but they weren’t marketed as contemporary SF. They were marketed as high literary satire. Perhaps I’m being too paranoid and way too anecdotal (I certainly haven’t done a detailed market analysis because, well, I’m lazy), but it seems to me that in the eyes of the larger publishing world, contemporary satire is the domain of high literature (right? even the canonized satirists Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, according to many, wrote literature not SF), and it trumps us lowly speculative-fiction toilers. Or something like that.

Are satire and speculative fiction inseparable?

Nick Mamatas: Yes. Even if it’s only a minor current within speculative fiction, satire will always have a place in it, because exaggeration is crucial to satire. You cannot satirize the here and now simply through reproduction of it via bourgeois realism. Even Jonathan Franzen, in The Corrections, had to throw in a science-fictional element. Freedom didn’t have one (though he did his tech homework on both mining and birding) and then everyone took the damn book seriously, as though we were supposed to like the characters or something.

Paul Tremblay: To play devil’s advocate… Maybe I’m too broad with what qualifies as satire but some of my favorite satires are devoid of speculative fiction elements: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, plus two more recent novels; Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. All three picaresque novels satirize class/society (with the latter two certainly taking jabs at suburbia) with their over-the-top narrators tweaking their betters, thumbing their noses at societal expectations, etc.

That said, I agree with Nick’s larger point, because I don’t want him to yell at me.

In what ways did writing a novel-length satire, or a novel with satirical elements, change your understanding of satire and of the novel form?

Nick Mamatas: Satires are better when they’re short. There’s always a concern that the issues satirized may become obsolete, but it’s minor issue. Many more people read Nathanael West’s A Cool Million today than the Horatio Alger books it mocks.

Paul Tremblay: I like shorter books in general, so I’m in agreement with that.

This could be said for all novels, but I do think the best novel-length satires spend as much time/focus on developing character(s) as they do their exaggerated plots/situations. To make a clumsy comparison to horror fiction: Generally, a horror story is only going to unsettle/scare/move me if the story is anchored by realistic, empathetic, interesting characters. I think the same can be said for satire. I can certainly enjoy clever scenarios and biting wit, but it’ll only really hit home with me if the story is grounded by the characters. The genius of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and so many of Vonnegut’s books are due in large part to Captain Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, and Kilgore Trout.

In your recent novel, what elements did you try to balance, and what elements were necessarily out of balance?

Nick Mamatas: I’m sorry, I don’t even understand this question. It honestly sounds like it could be asked about anything but a novel—a cake recipe, an ice-dancing routine, the wheel alignment of a 1988 Volvo being outfitted for the Burning Man artcar parade. Anything but a novel!

Paul Tremblay: As I mentioned a bit earlier, I wanted to achieve a noticeable (but not clunky) shift in tone, from comedy to pathos, in the arc of the story. So early in the novel, I really tried to make some of the humor/silliness over the top. By the end of the novel, hopefully, the contrast between the Farm the readers are introduced to is nicely contrasted to the Farm they’re reintroduced to after everything in the novel had happened. I hope that makes sense.

What are you working on now, and what’s sharpening your wit’s edge?

Nick Mamatas: I’m trying to finish a crime novel, Love is the Law, by the end of next month. Right now, I’m expending a lot of energy writing answers to interview questions about Bullettime, though not from anyone who has read the book and wishes to discuss it.

Paul Tremblay: I’m slowly working on a satire of the publishing industry and society’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. I don’t want to give the title away because I might not be done for a while, and I don’t want anyone to steal it! The title is gold, I tell you, gold!

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: Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

Chesya Burke

In 2001, Spike Lee popularized the term the Super Duper Magical Negro (SDMN) while speaking to students at Washington State and Yale University. The reference was about the stereotype of the magical Black person who is written into the story to help the white protagonist on his journey. The characters are often uneducated, male, and desexed. They do not have families of their own (The Stand’s Mother Abigail—the human race is her family) or desires of their own (The Legend of Bagger Vance’s titular character—his sole purpose is to help the white character). Nor do they exist outside of the white characters’ constructed idea of them (Noah Cullen—willingly dies to protect the white criminal character in The Defiant Ones). None of this is news. Everyone’s been bombarded with the image of the passive, Black person who only wants to serve.

A little-mentioned incarnation of this archetype, however, has gone relatively ignored or unrecognized. Henceforth called the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman (SDSPBW), this epitome mixes the fictional SDMN character with real-life stereotype of the Strong Black Woman to create a character who is a seemingly powerful representation of strong, self-assured authority.

To understand this incarnation, it’s best to start by looking at the societal image of the Strong Black Woman (SBW). Supposedly a positive image, this stereotype is constructed as an example of true Black womanism. This stereotype is depicted within society as a Black woman who willingly suffers quietly without help, supporting others selflessly and without reward to herself. The SBW does not complain about her place in society and is held up as an example of how others should be. She is content, accepting, and although not necessarily happy, she is proud of the society she supports.

Unfortunately, within the speculative genre, the real-life image of the Strong Black Woman is often conflated with the Magical Negro to create the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman, which endows these characters with powers that are not only used for the good of the broader white society, but that are also not powerful enough change her status in the world.

For the purposes of distinction, I differentiate the SDSPBW image from its predecessor, the Magical Negro, because of the use of three important factors: submissiveness, mysteriousness, and sexuality. Although the SDMN trope sometimes includes the first two, it is the third aspect that separates the SDSPBW from its antecedent. As a construct, both images work to affirm society’s ideology and current structure, but only the SDSPBW image uses the sexuality of Black women as a way to defend their current social status.

In other words, much like the Strong Black Woman real life stereotype the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman image not only justifies the marginalization of Black women, it is an acceptable fantasy for white society, much like the Magical Negro stereotype. It attributes a false sense of power to Black women through their sexuality which does not translate to actual autonomy for them. Instead it allows white audiences to uphold racial segregation philosophy and ideology.

The sexuality of Black women has been a constructed reality for U.S. society since its beginning. From the image of the temptress slave woman to the Black jezebel, our society has used these images to control Black women’s movement within society. For the speculative genre, Black women have often become a fantasy of hyper-magical femininity portrayed through sexual prowess.

Of the many popular and recurring images that support this idea, perhaps most obvious one is the Tia Dalma character from The Pirates of the Caribbean films. Introduced as Davy Jones’ erstwhile lover, Dalma is a flirty seductress who is more than willing to help the white characters for little or no reward. Originally the powerful goddess Calypso, she once held control over the seas and everything within it. Now she is “bound” into human form because she rejected her white lover, Davy Jones, and her power is reduced to only aiding the heroes on their journey, as she has been denied one of her own.

For this character, the message is clear. Black women are meant to support white men. If they are unwilling to do this, the punishment is swift and uncompromising. Dalma has been relegated to a mere shadow of her former self, and society is better for it. Without Dalma’s current submissive state, the journey of the white men would be in jeopardy, and all of the fictional society would be threatened by the presence of her Black superpowers. Instead, she is depicted as an overly strong, sexual woman, who is rightly regulated to a submissive role for the benefit of this wider fictionalized world.

Another popular image is the longstanding Marvel comic book character, Storm. Best known as the on-again-off-again leader of the X-Men, Storm is the queen of Wakanda (due to her marriage to the comic character Black Panther) and possesses the ability to control all elements of the weather, both on Earth and beyond. Despite all of this power, Storm, like most female comic-book characters, is portrayed in scanty attire, exposed breast and skimpy thongs, as opposed to her male counterparts whose costumes cover their entire bodies. Not surprisingly, her race is a constant presence as Storm is considered beautiful and sexy because “her features don’t fit any conventional classification. Not Negroid, Caucasian, or Oriental—yet somehow, an amalgam of the rarest elements of them all. White hair. Blue eyes.”

This is quoted directly from an issue of Uncanny X-Men published in 1989—not 1889! Through her white features and the quiet strength of the Strong Black Woman, Storm is accepted as a member and often leader of the X-Men. As with Tia Dalma, the endowment of supernatural powers has not changed Storm’s position in society. Rather, these powers have made her more white, relegating her Blackness or “Negroid[ness]” to second-class status. For Storm, supernatural powers not only do not upset the racial and gender hierarchy but they forge a constant battle between her race and gender, causing a binary opposition where she is forced to choose among these two identities. Needless to say, the genre has often chosen the more white identity for her, as evidenced by the light-skinned Halle Berry who played Storm in the X-Men films.

Trying to move outside of these images often proves difficult for Black women. Genre fans sometimes level anger toward Black women when they step outside of their accepted roles. An obvious example of this is with the 2012 controversy of the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Although the characters of Rue and Thresh are described within the book as having “dark brown skin and eyes,” many fans leveled racist insults at the Black actors playing the roles. However, it was the actress Amandla Stenberg (Rue) who received the most flack. Fans tweeted that they were unable to connect to the character after being confronted with her Black presence in the film. The problem was not only that this Black girl did not deserve sympathy, but that she was in the wrong place; she did not belong in their fantasy futurist society. Give her a couple of years, throw her on stage as a teen seductress (àla Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart), and everything will be exactly as it should be.

Taking a look at the broader genre, it’s easy to see that not all Black female characters are depicted as Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Women. However, it’s also easy to see that way too many of them are. The problem is not that there are negative characters who also happen to be Black women (and minority people as a whole), but that there are rarely any contrasting positive images. Even the character of Rue dies after granting wisdom and medicine to the white protagonist. So while the obvious racism is held under scrutiny, the problematic issue of Rue being placed within the text simply to advance the plot for the white character has been left unexamined. Real life Black women don’t have supernatural powers, and they aren’t stronger than white women—but they are expected to be, so this effects the way people interact with them.

One of the problems for genre writers is that, while trying to be progressive by endowing these characters with supernatural powers, they have simultaneously relied on old, worn-out stereotypes—including the sexual aggression of Black women. Whether inadvertent or not, these genre conventions very well may create a space where Black women are more subjugated through the bestowment of supernatural powers, as that appearance leaves the mostly white audience unthreatened in their patriarchal and racial positions in society.

About the Author

Chesya Burke has been writing speculative fiction for over a decade. Her work has appeared in such publications as Dark Dreams I, II, and III: Horror and Suspense by Black Writers, and her short story collection, Lets Play White, received high praise from Samuel Delany and Nikki Giovanni. Several of her articles appeared in the African American National Biography published by Harvard and Oxford University Press. She is the recent recipient of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) scholarship, and is a juror for the 2012 Shirley Jackson awards.

Editor’s Desk: Professionally Speaking

Neil Clarke

I’m quite happy to report that since the last issue, I have not seen the inside of an emergency room. I’m still on the mend from my heart attack, but doing well enough to keep my doctors pleased.

I had hoped to spend the first weekend in September in Chicago, the site of this year’s Worldcon and the Hugo Award Ceremony. Instead, I’m spending the weekend at home. It would have been nice to meet with friends and participate on panels, but given my current situation, several people expressed concern about attending the Hugo ceremony. They are most likely correct.

I’m very grateful to be a nominee this year and would have loved to have participated. Award ceremonies can be stressful, even when you don’t expect to win. Should I win, I’ve asked Kate Baker to attend on my behalf. It’s not fair to ask someone to do that unless you are prepared to give them an acceptance speech to read. My first draft simply read, “If anyone out there is watching the ceremony in NJ, please have them send an ambulance to my house.” The final version was more appropriate, I assure you.

Speaking of awards, the World Fantasy Award nominees were announced a few weeks ago and we received some great news (that I obviously survived):

Best Short Story Nominee: “The Anarchist Wasps and the Cartographer Bees” by E. Lily Yu, Clarkesworld, Issue #55

Best Novella: “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente, Clarkesworld, Issues #61-63 and WFSA Press

Special Award, Non-Professional: Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan & Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld

This is the third time we’ve been nominated for a Special Award and, as usual, the competition is pretty tough. What makes us eligible for non-professional status? The easiest way to put it is that none of us do this for a living. After any significant life-threatening event, like a heart attack, you’ll end up spending a lot of time reevaluating your priorities in life.

I’ve always dreamed that someday Clarkesworld would reach the point where the staff and I would get paid a reasonable wage. That dream has evolved into something more concrete. Becoming “professional” is now a goal.

To my knowledge, there hasn’t been an independent online magazine that has successfully made the jump to paying authors and staff professional rates without dipping into the publisher’s pockets or becoming a patron of some other organization. This doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

In fact, with our current infrastructure for esubscriptions via Amazon and Weightless Books, it’s within the realm of possibility. Increasing our subscriber base, improving the stability of our advertising revenue, and restoring our annual anthology series are all important steps towards achieving our goal and I believe they can be accomplished without sacrificing what we value in this magazine.

So now you know what I’ll be doing in the background for months to come. If you’d like to help, here are a few things you could do:

Tell friends about our subscription options on your blog, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. Let’s try to hit two thousand subscribers by the new year!

Write a nice review over on our Amazon subscriptions page (more important than you might think)

Recommend potential advertisers to us

Subscribe or purchase our books, if you don’t already

Offer to deliver promotional materials to conventions

Send us your marketing ideas

Comment on a story you enjoyed

If you’d rather just read and enjoy, that’s great too! Thanks for your continued support and I hope that we continue to earn it in the future.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.