A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones

Genevieve Valentine

There’s a cloud across Europa.

Every time Henry looks out at the flat, grey disc, he tries to think what you’re meant to think: We’re almost there, soon you can breathe, it’s nearly rain.

He tries.

Henry knows, every time he goes out on the ice in a crawler to fix a transmitter, that he’s driving over the work of generations.

They’ve been here for centuries: drilling through ice until they hit water, sending drones to scoop molecular mess from the Storms planetside, spreading kilometers of fertilizer to bleed nitrogen, cultivating native algae and some bacteria they’d carried with them, bright little soldiers for hundreds of years, kept inside until there was enough atmosphere for any of them to survive on their own.

A few did, these days, in little patches gripping the ice; they were well-marked, so you wouldn’t run over them.

(The biologists promised that if all went well, there might be hydroponic gardens on the surface, someday.

That was all they could promise. There wasn’t any rock to rest soil on; there would never be trees, here.)

They’re trying, though, trying for any life they can make or build or find. None of them is ever going back home again. They’re determined to find everything here that’s worth finding.

These days, when he goes to the far side, the bio team sends him with sonar in case there’s sea life that won’t come near the equator, where the pull from Jupiter is so great that the ice stretches and cracks. It makes sense, says the bio team, that some species would find a less volatile home.

Henry doesn’t blame them. He prefers the quiet, too.

The year before Henry and his parents reached it—while they were in that long, heavy sleep around the sun—there had been the first discoveries of animals under the ice, eyeless and white and in numbers.

That was the first generation of people who began to call Europa, home.

Not that the name really takes; there are a lot of names on Europa, and the more you think about them, the harder things get.

The whole place is chaos.

The ice itself is pulled and scratched and pockmarked with so many things that needed naming that they ran out of just one sort, and now you start a speed-test marker in Greece and finish it in Ireland, mythologies piled on top of one another, linae and maculae and craters.

They all mean something—this is where a foreign body hit, this is where the surface fractured as Jupiter’s gravity pulled the water close, this is where the ice has sunk deep enough you can’t get a sledge out of it—but the longer you’ve lived in the base, he thinks, the more you realize this moon has been slapdash from the beginning.

The base is between Cadmus and Minos, north of the pole, on a plain of ice that’s thick enough and calm enough to build on. They use other linae for distance markers, or for transport. Pryderi goes almost down to Rhiannon, near the south pole, and whenever there’s something that needs testing on the far side of the cloud, that’s the trench they set the drone into.

Pryderi was the Welsh myth. That had been his second name (the one his true parents gave him after he was found, with meanings that must have been like scrapes—worry, care, loss). It was what they gave him after they realized what he really was, a name piled on top of his other one.

The Gliese 581 probe team works on the far side of the base, where there’s the least interference and they can actually run their machines.

(They’re left to themselves. There are thirty nations here using the halting translators on their comms just to get by, but they haven’t invented the tech yet to get you to understand the interior jargon of a Gliesian. That’s a fever all its own.)

The first probe’s already gone up. They’re building another one. This one’s supposed to hold two people.

There’s a big signup where you can volunteer, if you want to go.

The first-gen arrivals from Earth don’t go near it, like they’re afraid proximity triggers acceptance. They’re still adjusting to artificial gravity (70% of Earth g, but that 30% keeps you off balance a good long time), to nutritional yeast pills, to eternal day underneath the Storm. They’re not going one inch into a place stranger than this one.

Everyone from the Gliese team signed up. That crew has only ever looked at this place as the launchpad to where they’re really going.

Henry stands across the hallway from the sign-up sheet, sometimes, but never puts his name down.

His parents brought him here. That should be enough to keep him here.

(If it isn’t quite, he’s not sure anywhere else would be better.

Earth must not have been; his parents left.)

He takes the graveyard shift at the comm, when they’re on on the far side of the planet or occluded by the other moons, and nothing interesting ever comes through.

He’d just as soon be alone. This place is too full of strangers; he’d rather keep out of the way.

It’s easier just to watch the blips of the open comm pinging itself in a loop for hours than it is to look up and see the cloud.

Earth launches a civilian transport.

It’s nearly five years behind schedule; rising water means that a lot of countries are falling apart by inches, to disaster and disease, and it’s harder to get by even in places where the grid’s holding steady.

Mainland space programs got popular in a hurry.

India had won the bid to build the latest ship, and the right to 40% of the passenger manifest, so after the scientists and engineers and psychologists and adventurers had their slots, India could rescue some of its own.

(It’s a refugee ship, but that was a name no one wants to give it, not even Henry.)

When the notice comes in from Bangalore Ground Control (on a 51-minute delay—they’re on the far side), he sees that alongside the ISI numerical designation, they’ve given it the name Manu.

He’s the only one in the comm room, just him and a bowl of bright yellow algae the bio team’s put in for morale, and he has time to look up the name and see the myth behind it—he was the first man, who built a ship to escape the cleansing flood.

It’s almost enough to make him laugh.

He tags the transmission alongside his name in the database, and repeats the ISI sig and launch time, and says, “Roger that, Hammond and Preetha at Bangalore Ground Control, good night and godspeed.”

Then he sits back and sighs, “Why would you name a ship after a flood story if it’s headed to a warming ice planet?”

Bad luck or desperation. Neither one is good.

He wonders how bad things are, back there; if the house he remembers has been swallowed by water.

He wonders how soon it will be before the surface is as blue and unbroken as Neptune.

(It’s something the counselors remind newcomers, over and over, to accept.

The trips these ships make are only ever one way.)

Two hours later, just as he’s headed to sleep, he gets a message on a private channel.

For the record, I objected to the name. Also for the record, close your channels when you’re being rude.

Kai Preetha, ISI Bangalore.

Henry’s never had a message before.

(His parents were here with him, so there was no need, and there was no one back on Earth to miss them—if there had been, they might not have left.)

For a week, he looks at it every night before he goes back on shift.

He wonders what Bangalore looks like, now that the waters have nearly reached it.

After some flashes of pride he can hardly bother defending even to himself, he writes back, Sorry. You get superstitious here, but you’re not supposed to get rude. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.

They can see its slingshot around the sun, from where they are. It’ll be gone to Earth’s eyes, soon, and out of range for weeks.

Preetha writes back, Watching the journey from here. Will let you know when we lose them on instruments.

There’s no other activity from Ground Control over the feeds. She’s there alone. She’s the night shift.

When the message chime comes next, he starts, sits up. (He didn’t realize he’d been waiting for anything.)

Lost it.

Then, a separate line, as if, at the last second, she couldn’t help it.

What does it look like from there?

They’re nearly an hour apart. Whatever he’s looking at has already happened for her; whatever he tells her will arrive too late to be of any real use.

Curiosity, then.

He looks at the readout from the Evrard Telescope, which the first generation sent out far enough away that none of the minor moons can strike it—a clear, sharp eye on the system they’ve left behind.

It’s beautiful; it’s always beautiful, from this far away.

Like a splinter of mirror, he writes, swinging clear of the fire. But that was a while ago. By the time you get this, who knows.

Jupiter spins so fast that not even its storms can keep up; the clouds beneath them are always shifting, so it feels like they’re dragging, like the planet that eats the horizon is uncoiling to devour them any moment.

The shift would drive him crazy, probably, if the moon ever moved.

(They’re locked—there’s no rotation, just the constant steady bask of light.)

The windows on the station go darker when it’s supposed to be night, some vestige from home they don’t need any more. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Earth as more than a little blue marble you could see now and then, if you were with an off-base assignment out to the dark side where you could even see the sky.

The planet eats it up, from where they are.

They mark the days with calculations; you can’t do it from looking at the Red Storm.

Still, it’s for the best. It helps you get used to living in the past. On the scale they’re working with, everything you look at is an imprint of something that’s moved on by now.

What he doesn’t say: Earth could go up in smoke, and they wouldn’t know for an hour.

You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.

The bio team gets a report of more extinctions Earthside. It’s just paperwork; everyone knows they’re gone. They just have to wait out the standard time, to make it official.

The WWF starts negotiations to send up a manned veterinary transport of deep-sea and Arctic specimens, who can be kept there until there’s enough greenhouse for them to breathe.

The project’s code name is Ark.

Henry thinks it’s maybe no wonder the names on Europa are patched together; eventually you run out of myths and have to start over.

What’s your favorite animal? That you’ve seen, he adds, to make it fair.

Birds, Preetha writes him. Or spiders. Anything that eats mosquitos. What’s yours? That you’ve seen.

He writes, There’s a limpet species here the bio team is naming Methuselah. They’re still trying to date how long it’s been in stasis down there.

Later, so late he can’t help himself, he writes, When I was eight, my parents took me to the zoo Earthside, so technically I remember elephants and penguins. But they took me because we were going to Europa, and this was our last chance to see them. I closed my eyes a lot, for revenge, I guess.

A few days later, there’s a picture.

The water has risen over the road—it must be a boat journey just to get to Ground Control, he can see the front edge at the bottom of the frame—and everything is so green his eyes hurt just to look at it, and for a second it’s hard to breathe.

That’s not home, he says to himself. That’s the place you’re doing all this for. Home is where we go next.

(It’s what the counselors tell you to say, when you feel a panic attack coming on.)

It takes him a moment to register there’s a lake in the photo, and a bird perched in the foreground, brown with turquoise wings and a sturdy beak.

Kingfisher.

He wonders how far out of her way she went to get the shot. He wonders if she knows this is the first bird he’s seen in a long time.

He goes out and takes a photo of the screen on the monitor they have over one of the open patches on the ice, where they can keep an eye on the limpets, clinging to rocks in water almost as sharp turquoise as the kingfisher, once the light gets in.

He takes a photo of the bright yellow algae in the empty comm room.

He sends them to her, titled A Trip to the Zoo.

His parents hadn’t lived to see it, but Henry saw the launch of the first Praetoria, headed for Gliese 581.

It was powerful and maneuverable, and he’d never shaken the feeling, all through the testing process that happened on the ice outside the comm center, that it looked like a mutant spider puppy in a robot suit.

They’d launched it right through the cloud.

It turned into a phoenix for a second in takeoff, punched a little bright spot against the grey, and vanished. The cloud slid closed behind it a moment later, smooth and opaque as a door.

The Gliese team had data coming in all the time. Four people tracked it 24/7, parsing headings and and fuel readings, initializing processes as the lag time got longer and longer; small things that hardly mattered, just things to tell it before it was too far away and there was nothing they could do.

But they hadn’t seen Praetoria since the cloud swallowed it. The rest of their lives, they never would.

(It was for the best that Henry was on a detail whose results were confirmed every time a transmitter started up again.)

His supervisor, Wen, calls him up to make a trip in the crawler.

(Moonside duty used to be split evenly, but now she has a kid; after you have a kid on Europa, your days taking risks are over.)

“I think a board just fried,” she says. “Nothing critical. I’m impressed it took this long. We’re up to nearly a year before they start going.”

(She’s fifth generation; her great-odd-grandparents had to hold handrails to keep from floating away, and never left base because the radiation shield wasn’t strong enough to cover more, and replace the transmitters every month or lose contact with Earth when the shear shorted everything out and left them in the dark until they were on the near side of Jupiter again.

Earth is just a concept to Wen, like Gliese; she calls this home.)

He heads north.

It’s hard to take, suddenly—it’s worse, having looked at something as green as what Preetha sent, and looking now at an expanse of grey above him and below him, unbroken except for the red storms that loom over his shoulder, if he wanted to look.

(It was dawn when Preetha took the picture; shadows were tucked under every leaf, and he’d looked at them and tried to remember what a real day looked like.)

This isn’t home, he writes her. Gleise might be. We can scrape out a living here until we know. But this isn’t home, not really.

She writes back, I hope you’re wrong.

It’s struck him, before, that he’s wrong.

It’s never struck him before, that there’s hope.

The facilities team spends more time on the twilight edge of the moon, south of the equator.

They’re building a bigger civilian station for the passengers of the Manu, and all the passengers who are lined up to follow them. It’s huge; it’s something that can hold all the people who will need to rally here and go on, as soon as they hear back about Gliese.

Nobody says anything—supplies arrive at intervals, two and a half years after someone on Earth sent them, and they use everything in cargo and everything they can salvage of the transports, and grumble about the extra strain on radiation shields and what must pass as food on Earth these days, if this is the best they can do.

But with every work detail they send down the linae, and every inch of polymer caulk they seal into place, what they’re saying is, This has to be built, here, soon.

Home won’t last.

He makes a delivery of some of the ruined transmitter parts. The building team will break down a motherboard to the molecular level, and build whatever they can from the rest. He imagines fountains made entirely of transmitter parts that Jupiter burned out.

Halfway back to the base, he turns, angles away from it all and out to the bare plains.

(He’s been here long enough to read the ice, and his pace never falters. He can be alone in no time at all.)

When he’s far enough from the base to breathe again, he parks the crawler and seals his suit and goes out onto the ice.

He looks up at the flat grey disc that caps the sky.

Electricity skitters across it, far up, where the radiation shields and the wind shear crack against the edges of this new, delicate thing that will make it safe to breathe, one day.

(Once or twice, he’s caught Wen looking out the comm room at the cloud, tears in her eyes.

It’s what her family came here to work on, back when they didn’t have the luxury of a civilian station team, or a Gliese probe. Her family came and worked on it when they were fighting for every breath.)

It’s silent here; he notices the wind.

Maybe it’s happened, he thinks. Maybe the numbers have quietly ticked over while he’s been gone, from that yellow dial at the airlocks over to green.

Maybe he can take off his helmet, take a breath, live.

The darkness presses against his chest.

(He remembers watching the sky from Earth as a boy, five or six, thinking how big the moon was, how lonely and anxious it felt to look for it on cloudy nights when its light was swallowed up, when it vanished whole.

His mother explained once that the light is always there, even if you can’t see it, but when you’re little, and your parents have told you that you’re leaving Earth, sometimes you don’t care much for physics.)

In the distance there are pinpoints blinking in and out, signal lights from the base. They’re almost level with the horizon.

If he drove another three minutes, he might not be able to see anything at all, except the cloud, and the shadow it casts across the ice.

Though he’d lose his grip, maybe, if he did. The farther away you get from the base, the weaker the gravity field gets. At some point, it’s not safe.

If you drove to the edge of the cloud, to see the sky whole, you’d begin to come apart.

He looks up at the cloud, at the spot where he knows Ganymede is passing.

Galileo saw this moment; he marked this position on his notes, a long time ago.

The light’s still there; his mother taught him.

(He wonders what would happen if he gathered all his strength and jumped.)

It’s too late to make it back to base; he calls it in and stays the night in the bunk in the back curve of the crawler, hooks crimping the ice underneath him so he won’t roll away in his sleep.

(Pods have bunks, with lightweight masks you strap on to recycle the air, so you can sleep without a helmet. There are comforts now, on Europa, to make you feel at home.)

The sonar attachment bleats over and over, calling through the ice, looking for anything with a heartbeat.

Do you have a favorite moon?

Luna, she writes. Of yours, I like Sinope. It’s an imposter—the dust is red and everything else in the Pasiphae cluster is grey, but no one can prove why.

He’s never thought of it that way, but he likes it.

(Sinope was the Greek who outwitted Zeus by asking for a wedding wish, to stay a virgin. One name that’s suited, at last.)

He writes, The transport will have to pass it, as they navigate the outer ring towards the center. Close enough to hit it, probably, knowing this navigation team.

She doesn’t write back.

He tries not to worry. Storms happen—more and more often now, from the reports. Sometimes the whole planet goes dark.

(He knows that feeling. He lives under the cloud.)

When she writes back, it’s short.

Don’t tell me what they’ll see. It makes it harder.

It feels like a stab between his shoulders, reading it.

He’s forgotten that most people who do what he does do it because they long for the sky, and the moon, and a chance at the new worlds; that, for most of them, being alone is the side effect, not the object.

It feels like something he should have known.

He imagines her, suddenly, in the place he was when he first felt really alone—in the same little desk, looking at Galileo’s notes and holding his breath, trying to be quiet, feeling heavy all over and wondering if his heart would give out.

The notes are taught in the Jupiter courses at the prep school for emigrants, in a single slide, to explain the discovery of the first four moons. Then it’s the images from Pioneer 10, and the video from Voyager (low-res and jumpy, solar system silent films), and then learning the song that names all sixty-six orbiting bodies, with clapping.

(He was nine when they set out, so young that he’s forgotten in swaths what he might have known of home.

He remembers the song, in patches that leave out Kallikore and Kore; he remembers seeing a meteor shower once, as his mother pointed at the sky and explained what was happening, and where they would be going soon; he remembers being betrayed by how much of the sky disappeared once they were moonside.)

He doesn’t remember, now, how the moons were lined up when they approached Europa—if they were like the notes, or not.

He barely remembers the moon that hung above Earth, the one you could see without ever meaning to.

If he’d known, he’d have stood in the dark every night, counting craters and seas, storing up.

On January 12, he writes her.

What does it look like, from there?

She writes, Like a bead of jasper, and four small stones.

He’s looked at Galileo’s drawings, since, a thousand times, the careful circle and the five or six or eight-point stars in line.

Sometimes there are only two or three stars, their different magnitudes noted. Sometimes one was noted as too bright, because one moon was in front of another, and he could only record what it looked like from that far away, with what little he had.

On January 8, 1610, Galileo didn’t think to count Callisto, too far away for him to see. (He’d been armed with a telescope so weak it must have been hardly better than cupped hands.)

He feels for Galileo, imagines the man sitting up and frowning at his notes, trying to decide how this could be, bodies moving in and out of sight.

But on January 13, the circle is flanked by all four stars.

This is the one they showed in school, captioned, “We have known about Europa ever since Galileo recorded it,” as if the first time he had pointed the scope at the sky, he’d counted the moons and moved on.

(They never say what it must have been like to sit there for night after night and feel locked out of the truth. They never say that it took him a while to even be certain they were moons, not stars.)

After that night, the scientists’ fever takes over, and Galileo sometimes takes several observations in a night, trying to pin down what the moons were, how fast they moved, what this rotation meant for the Earth he was standing on.

But Henry doesn’t come back to those. He knows what it looks like when someone’s forming a hypothesis.

He always looks at that first notation, January the thirteenth, all four moons drawn emphatically eight-pointed, the handwritten notes uneven, as if his hands were shaking, as if couldn’t help himself; for the first time, he had looked at something and really known.

He sends the notes to her.

She writes, I hope someone draws by hand for us, when they’re nearing Gliese, so the people who make it home will have something to remember it by.

He writes, If it works, that would be wonderful. Not sure how exploration works, these days. I had these—they didn’t make this home.

But he doesn’t send it. Something stays his hand, every time; it sits and sits, and he doesn’t know why.

The civilian dock is practically a city, sprawling and huge and too far from the base to be considered real, so the ISI representative moonside declares that the Manu will land in New Mumbai.

Henry takes watch in the comm room, so Wen can join the contingent heading out to the naming ceremony in the audience hall there.

(Fifth-generation status means you attend a lot of ceremonies.

“Worth it?” he asked once.

She said, “Depends. Is there food?”)

He writes to Preetha, to tell her that Manu will be landing in a place named for home, a city long since swallowed by the tide.

It’s fitting, he thinks, that there should be all the names possible, as if the moon’s gathering everything that had been left behind, back home.

Europa had never escaped the little wars of nomenclature.

Galileo had tried to name the first four moons in honor of the Medici brothers; they’d be standing on Francesco, maybe, if the term had stuck.

Galileo had held steadfast to his right to name them. He’d fought against suggestions of using the names of Tuscan nobles (Victripharus), and leaving them nameless (as The Comets of Jupiter), and long after it had been named Europa by someone else’s measure, Galileo still called it Jupiter II, refusing to give in.

It had been one name piled on top of another from the very first, long before anyone had ever set foot on it, long before they knew it was ice; before they knew anything about it except that it held steady, and so it was a moon, and not a star.

The next message he gets from her comes over official channels, and by voice.

“This is ISI Bangalore Ground Control. There’s been an H9N2 outbreak in the city. Hammond is infected. At the moment, everyone who was at Ground Control in the last forty-eight hours is under quarantine. There weren’t many of us, so the main team will hold steady elsewhere for now. We have supplies and medical staff standing by outside. Data collection and monitoring of ISI Manu will continue as scheduled. I’ll keep you apprised of developments. Kai Preetha, over and out.”

(”You okay?” Wen asked him as he stood up, and he said, “Fuck,” more emphatically than he’d ever said anything to her, more than he remembers ever being.

He staggered to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, tried not to vomit.

She already had it.

She was sick, he knew it, he could tell, something in her voice that had been trying too hard not to shake.

He’d only heard her voice twice, but some things you can tell.

Planetside made him dizzy; he projected the kingfisher picture at full opacity on his windows until he could look around again.

It resembled her, he’d decided a long time back; he’d never seen her, but the way it looked across the water like it could see the future seemed about right.

Its name was Halcyon smyrnensis, and Home, and Preetha; one name piled on top of the other.)

On the next pass, he repoints the telescope and takes a picture of Sinope, a little red glint in the garland of minor moons.

This is what Sinope looked like fifty-three minutes before you opened this message. She says, Be well.

He thinks about what will happen in the time it takes the message to get there. They’ll be on the far side of Jupiter by then, and the lights will be coming up slowly, pretending dawn, and he’ll be here with channels open, hoping she’ll come on the line and tell him that, fifty-three minutes ago, she was cured.

(It’s hopeless. He knows already. Whatever news comes across that line won’t be good, and he won’t know until it’s too late. You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.)

But the light from Europa right now would be reaching her by then, and she would have a picture of Sinope.

Sometimes just looking at a moon was medicine; if it worked for Galileo, it was worth a try.

She doesn’t answer.

He puts a cot in the comm room.

Wen doesn’t say anything.

(It’s for the best. If he explained that he had a picture of a kingfisher, and that he’d sent Galileo’s notes to an interplanetary Ground Control, and that they should send paper and pencil on the probe to Gliese, and that he had to stay right where he was in case he heard back from Bangalore, it wouldn’t look good.

She wouldn’t argue—she seemed to know when people had their reasons—but she wouldn’t think the reasons were connected, and they are; they are.)

The message comes back a week later, over official channels.

It’s patchy, as if the machinery is going, or her voice is.

He sits more forward in his chair with every word.

“Dr. Hammond died. Sometime early morning, maybe 0430, actual time unknown—I didn’t sleep for very long, but when I woke up she had gone. It’s just me.“

The horror fades. Panic edges in.

Where are the others, he almost yells into the mic, who would leave you alone like this, but the question would take an hour to reach her, and that isn’t the thing he wants her to hear from him last.

(It would be the last; her voice is going, he realizes now what it means.

This will be the last.

His hands are shaking.)

So instead he says, “Roger that, Preetha. Please update us with any message for the Manu, and continue to report.”

He says, trying to be steady, “Everyone from home wishes you well.”

They send an ethicist and a psychologist to the comm center a few hours later, to talk to Henry and Wen about whether the ship should know.

“This puts them under a lot of unnecessary stress,” one of the ethicists argues.

“Good,” Henry says. “They have a lot to live up to.”

The other one says, “Informing them of a change like this could be more stressful than useful. They already know the importance of a clean landing on this.”

He says, “After this they fucking well better.”

Eventually, Wen snaps.

“This entire operation hinges on the crucial importance of full information,” she says, cutting off the psychologist halfway through a sentence about perception of failure. “It’s been that way since my forebears set foot here. Earth trusted them enough to send them. If we can’t trust them with information, we should tell them to turn around. Do you want to tell them that? Because I’m not going to.”

And before they can object, she hits the button to bounce it to the transport, so the skeleton crew that’s still awake will know what’s happened.

When they’re gone, muttering about calling her before the Ethics Board, Henry says, “There might be a record of something else on the Manu.”

She looks over at him, parsing what he’s done.

“Sometimes records are faulty,” she says. “Sometimes Jupiter interferes.”

They sit side by side, looking out at the cloud and the ice and the red day rising, channels open for messages that don’t come.

(The message Wen sent is a duplicate.

Henry hit Send before they ever showed; he hit Send before he ever paged Wen and told her there was something she needed to see.

He hit Send as soon as it came over the transom, and his hand stopped shaking.)

“To the Europa Base, and the crew and passengers of the Manu: We on Earth who have dreamed of exploration honor your mission, and have faith that what you work to build will come back to you a hundredfold.

For those who will go on to Gliese 581, that hidden world that holds our future in it; you are the children of Galileo, and we send our hopes with you.

The citizens of Earth wish you good journey, and good homecoming.”

He takes a crawler out to the dark side.

Ahead of him is a blue marble (behind him is a bead of jasper).

The blue marble isn’t winking—looking from here, there’s no marked difference from what it used to be. It will take some generations yet. When the water swallows up the last of it, the Evrard Telescope will show a surface of near-unbroken blue.

The grandchildren of Europa will be taken out to the dark side (no helmets, by then), and they’ll hold up binoculars and be instructed to look carefully for the bluest thing they can see.

(It won’t be Rigel, the teacher will have to remind them. Keep your eye out for something steady—you’re looking for a moon, not a star.)

Through his binoculars, he can see India passing out of sight; somewhere on what’s left of the land is the place where Kai died, fifty-three minutes before he got her last transmission.

It’s the first time he’s looked at something, and really known.

(Preetha means, The palm of the hand; it means happiness; it means beloved; one on top of the other.)

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, and her film and TV writing has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

England under the White Witch

Theodora Goss

It is always winter now.

When she came, I was only a child—in ankle socks, my hair tied back with a silk ribbon. My mother was a seamstress working for the House of Alexandre. She spent the days on her knees, saying Yes, madame has lost weight, what has madame been doing? When madame had been doing nothing of the sort. My father was a photograph of a man I had never seen in a naval uniform. A medal was pinned to the velvet frame.

My mother used to take me to Kensington Gardens, where I looked for fairies under the lilac bushes or in the tulip cups.

In school, we studied the kings and queens of England, its principle imports and exports, and home economics. Even so young, we knew that we were living in the waning days of our empire. That after the war, which had taken my father and toppled parts of London, the sun was finally setting. We were a diminished version of ourselves.

At home, my mother told me fairy tales about Red Riding Hood (never talk to wolves), Sleeping Beauty (your prince will come), Cinderella (choose the right shoes). We had tea with bread and potted meat, and on my birthday there was cake made with butter and sugar that our landlady, Mrs. Stokes, had bought as a present with her ration card.

Harold doesn’t hold with this new Empress, as she calls herself, Mrs. Stokes would tell my mother. Coming out of the north, saying she will restore us to greatness. She’s established herself in Edinburgh, and they do say she will march on London. He says the King got us through the war, and that’s good enough for us. And who believes a woman’s promises anyway?

But what I say is, England has always done best under a queen. Remember Elizabeth and Victoria. Here we are, half the young men dead in the war, no one for the young women to marry so they work as typists instead of having homes of their own. And trouble every day in India, it seems. Why not give an Empress a try?

One day Monsieur Alexandre told my mother that Lady Whorlesham had called her impertinent and therefore she had to go. That night, she sat for a long time at the kitchen table in our bedsit, with her face in her hands. When I asked her the date of the signing of the Magna Carta, she hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and said, As though I could remember such a thing! Then she said, Can you take care of yourself for a moment, Ann of my heart? I need to go talk to Mrs. Stokes.

The next day, when I ran home from school for dinner, she was there, talking to Mrs. Stokes and wearing a new dress, white tricotine with silver braid trim. She looked like a princess from a fairy tale.

It’s easy as pie, she was saying. I found the office just where you said it was, and they signed me right up. At first I’m going to help with recruitment, but the girl I talked to said she thought I should be in the rifle corps. They have women doing all sorts of things, there. I start training in two days.

You’re braver than I am, said Mrs. Stokes. Aren’t you afraid of being arrested?

If they do arrest me, will you take care of Ann? she asked. I know it’s dangerous, but they’re paying twice what I was making at the shop, and I have to do something. This world we’re living in is no good, you and I both know that. Nothing’s been right since the war. Just read this pamphlet they gave me. It makes sense, it does. I’m doing important work, now. Not stitching some Lady Whortlesham into her dress. I’m with the Empress.

In the end, the Empress took London more easily than anyone could have imagined. She had already taken Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford. We had heard how effective her magic could be against the remnants of our Home Forces. First, she sent clouds that covered the sky, from horizon to horizon. It snowed for days, until the city was shrouded in white. And then the sun came out just long enough to melt the top layer of snow, which froze during the night. The trees were encased in ice. They sparkled as though made of glass, and when they moved I heard a tinkling sound.

Then, she sent wolves. Out of the mist they came, white and gray, with teeth as sharp as knives. They spoke in low, gutteral voices, telling the Royal Guards to surrender or have their throats ripped out. Most of the guards stayed loyal. In the end, there was blood on the snow in front of Buckingham Palace. Wolves gnawed the partly-frozen bodies.

Third and finally came her personal army, the shop girls and nursemaids and typists who had been recruited, my mother among them. They looked magnificent in their white and silver, which made them difficult to see against the snow. They had endured toast and tea for supper, daily indignity, the unwanted attention of employers. Their faces were implacable. They shot with deadly accuracy and watched men die with the same polite attention as they had shown demonstrating a new shade of lipstick.

Buckingham Palace fell within a day. On the wireless, we heard that the King and his family had fled to France, all but one of his sisters, who it turned out was a sympathizer. By the time the professional military could mobilize its troops, scattered throughout our empire, England was already hers to command.

I stood by Mrs. Stokes, watching the barge of the Empress as it was rowed down the Thames. She stood on the barge, surrounded by wolves, with her white arms bare, black hair down to her feet, waving at her subjects.

No good will come of this, you mark my words, said Mr. Stokes.

Hush! Isn’t she lovely? said Mrs. Stokes.

You have seen her face in every schoolroom, every shop. Perhaps in your dreams. It is as familiar to you as your own. But I will never forget that first glimpse of her loveliness. She looked toward us, and I believed that she had seen me, had waved particularly to me.

The next day, our home economics teacher said, From now on, we are not going to learn about cooking and sewing. Instead, we are going to learn magic. There was already a picture of our beloved Empress over her desk, where the picture of the King used to be.

At first, there were resistance movements. There were some who fought for warmth, for light. Who said that as long as she reigned, spring would never come again. We would never see violets scattered among the grass, never hear a river run. Never watch young lovers hold each other on the embankment, kiss each other not caring who was watching. There was the Wordsworth Society, which tried to effect change politically. And there were more radical groups: the Children of Albion, the Primrose Brigade.

But we soon learned that our Empress was as ruthless as she was beautiful. Those who opposed her were torn apart by wolves, or by her girl soldiers, who could tear men apart with their bare hands and were more frightening than any wolves. Sympathizers were rounded up and imprisoned, encased in ice. Or worse, they were left free but all the joy was taken from them, so that they remained in a prison of their own perpetual despair.

Her spies were everywhere. Even the trees could not be trusted. The hollies were the most dangerous, the most liable to inform. But resistance groups would not meet under pines, firs, or hemlocks. In many households, the cats were on her side. Whispers of disloyalty would bring swift retribution.

And many said, such traitors deserved punishment. That winter was good for England, that we needed cold, needed toughening. We had grown soft after the war, allowed our dominions to rebel against us, allowed the world to change. But she would set things right. And so the resistance movements were put down, and our soldiers marched into countries under a white flag that did not mean surrender. Those who had tried to be free of us were confronted with winter, and sorceresses, and wolves. Their chiefs and rajahs and presidents came to London, bringing jewels and costly fabrics to lay before her feet, and pledged their loyalty.

Our empire spread, as indeed it must. A winter country must import its food, and as winter spreads, the empire must expand to supply the lands under snow, their waters locked in ice. That is the terrible, inescapable logic of empire.

I was a Snowflake, in a white kerchief with silver stars.  Then, I was an Ice Maiden. The other girls in school nodded to me as I walked by. If they did not wear the white uniform, I asked them why they had not joined up yet, and if they said their parents would not let them, I told them it was their responsibility to be persuasive. I won a scholarship to university, where I was inducted into the Sisterhood of the Wolf.

My den mother encouraged me to go into the sciences. Scientists will be useful to the Empress in the coming war, she said. Science and magic together are more powerful, are greater weapons, than they are apart. And there is a war coming, Ann. We hear more and more from our spies in Germany. A power is rising in that part of the world, a power that seeks to oppose the reign of the Empress. Surely not, I said. Who would oppose her? A power that believes in fire, she said. A fire that will burn away the snow, that will scorch the earth. That does not care about what we have already achieved—the security, the equality, the peace we will achieve when her empire spreads over the earth.

When I graduated, the Empress herself handed me a diploma and the badge of our order. My mother, who had been promoted to major-general, was so proud! All of us in the Sisterhood had been brought to Buckingham Palace, in sleighs drawn by reindeer with silver bells on their antlers. We waited in a long room whose walls were painted to look like a winter forest, nibbling on almond biscuits and eating blancmange from silver cups with small bone spoons. At last, we were summoned into her presence.

You have seen our beloved Empress from far away, from below while she stands on a balcony, or from a sidewalk as she is drawn through the city streets in her sleigh. But I have met her, I have kissed her hand.  It was white and cold, with the blue veins visible. Her grip was strong—stronger than any man’s, as she was taller than any man. Her face was so pale that I could only look at it for a moment without pain. Her black hair trailed on the floor.

You have done well, she said to me, and I could hear her voice in my head as well as with my ears. To hear that voice again, I would consent to being torn apart by wolves.

You have never seen, you will never see, anything as magnificent as our Empress.

Where did she come from? Some say she came from the stars, that she is an alien life-form. Some say that she is an ancient goddess reborn. Some say she is an ordinary woman, and that such women have always lived in the north: witches who command the snows.

The question is whispered, in secret places where there are no hemlocks, no cats: does human blood flow in her veins? Can our Empress die?

I met Jack in the basic physical training program required for all recruits to the war effort. My mother had used her influence to have me chosen for the Imperial Guard, the Empress’s personal girl army, which could be deployed throughout the empire. After basic training, I was going to advanced training in the north, and then wherever the war effort needed me. He was a poet, assigned to the Ministry of Morale. He had been conscripted after university—this was in the early days of general conscription. He was expected to write poetry in praise of the Empress, and England, and those who served the empire. But first, we all had to pass basic training.

We stayed in unheated cabins, bathed in cold water, all to make us stronger, to bring the cold inside us. Each morning, we marched through the woods. The long marches, hauling weapons and equipment through the snow, were not difficult for me. I had been training since my university days, waking at dawn to run through the snow or swim in the icy rivers with the Sisterhood. But he was not as strong as I was. He would stumble over roots or boulders beneath the snow, and try to catch himself with chilled, chapped hands—the woolen gloves we had been issued were inadequate protection against the cold. I would help him up, holding him by the elbow, and sometimes I would carry part of his equipment, transferring it into my pack surreptitiously so the Sergeant did not see me.

Why are you so kind to me, Ann? he asked me once. Someone has to be, I said, smiling.

The other girls laughed at him, but I thought his large, dark eyes were beautiful. When he looked at me, I did not feel the cold. One day, I sat next to him at dinner. He told me about Yorkshire, where he was born—about the high hills, the sheep huddled together, their breaths hanging on the air.

Perhaps I should have been more like my father, he said. It was my headmaster at school who first read my poems and told me to apply for a scholarship. There I was, a farmer’s son, studying with the children of ministers and generals, who talked about going to the palace the way I talked about going to the store. I kept to myself, too proud or ashamed to approach them, to presume they might be my friends. But my tutor sent my poems to the university literary magazine, and they were published. Then, I was invited to join the literary society. I thought it was an honor—until we all received letters from the war office. So here I am, losing my toes to frostbite so I can write odes for the dead in Africa—or for the war they say is coming.

We all believed that war was coming. The newspapers were already talking about a fire rising in the east, burning all before it.

It’s a great honor to write for the Empress, I said.

Yes, of course it is, he said after a moment. He looked at me intently with those dark eyes. Of course, he said again, before finishing the thin broth with dumplings that we were told was Irish stew.

We spent more and more time together, huddled in the communal showers when we could, telling each other about our childhoods, the foods we liked, the books we had read. We wondered about the future. He hoped that after his compulsory service, he could work as a schoolteacher, publish his poems. I did not know where I would be assigned—Australia? South America? There was always unrest in some part of the empire.

One day, the Sergeant said to me, Ann, I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m just going to warn you—there’s something not right about Jack Kirby. I don’t know what it is, but Thule—who was her wolf—can’t stand him. I don’t think a general’s daughter should show too much interest in that boy. You don’t want anyone questioning your loyalty, do you?

Her words made me angry. He was going into the Ministry—wasn’t that good enough? That night, we met in the showers. I don’t want to talk, I said. I kissed him—slid my hands under his jacket, sweater, undershirt. His body was bony, but I thought it had its own particular grace. He told me that I was beautiful, breathing it into my neck as we made love, awkwardly, removing as few layers of clothing as possible. You’re beautiful, Ann—I hear it in my mind and remember the warmth of his breath in that cold place. There had been others, not many, but he may as well have been my first. He is the one I remember.

During our week of leave, he asked me to come home with him, to Yorkshire. His father met us at the train station. He was a large, quiet man who talked mostly of sheep. Look at these pelts, he told me. Feel the weight of them. Didn’t use to get wool like this, in Yorkshire. It’s the perpetual winter as does it. Grows twice as thick and twice as long. But he grumbled about the feed from the communal granaries—not as nourishing as the grass that used to grow on the hillsides, never seen such sickly lambs. And the wolves—not allowed to shoot them anymore. Those who complained were brought before a committee.

We had suppers of Yorkshire pudding and gravy, and walked out over the fields holding hands. I asked Jack about his mother. She had died in the influenza epidemic, which he had barely survived. That was before the coming of the Empress. I could see, from the photograph of her on the bureau, that he had inherited her delicacy, her dark eyes and thick, dark hair. Late at night, when his father was asleep, he would sneak into the guest room and we would make love under the covers, as quietly as possible, muffling our laughter, whispering to one another.

The day before we were to return from leave, his father told him that a ewe was giving birth in the snow. She had become trapped in a gully, and could not be lifted out in her condition. There was no chance of bringing her into the barn, so he and his father, one of the two farm hands, and the veterinarian went out, grumbling about the cold.

I wandered through the house, then sat in his room for a while, looking through the books he had read as a child. Books from before the Empress came, and from after—Prince Frost and the Giants, the Wolf Scout series, the Treasury of English Poems we had all studied in school. I can’t tell you why I chose to look though the battered old desk he had used as a schoolboy. It was wrong, a base impulse. But I loved him, and on this last day before we went back to the camp, I wanted to feel close to him. I wanted to know his secrets, whatever they were—even if they included love letters from another girl. I tortured myself for a moment with that thought, knowing how unlikely it was that I would find anything but old school books and pens. And then I pulled open the drawer.

In the desk was a notebook, and in the notebook were his poems—in his handwriting, with dates at the tops of the pages indicating when they had been written. The latest of them was dated just before camp. They spoke of sunlight and warmth and green fields. Next to the notebook was a worn copy of one of the forbidden books: The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. I opened to the page marked with a ribbon and read,

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils . . .

I slammed the book shut. My hands were shaking. I remembered what the Sergeant had said: You don’t want anyone questioning your loyalty, do you?

By the time Jack, his father, and the other men had returned, I was composed enough to seen almost normal. That night, he came to my room. We made love as though nothing had happened, but all the time I could hear it in my head: I wandered lonely as a cloud—a host of golden daffodils. I remembered daffodils. I could almost see them, bright yellow against the blue sky.

The next morning, as Jack and his father were loading our bags into the sleigh that would take us to the train station, I told them I had forgotten something. I ran back into the house, up the stairs and into Jack’s room, then quickly slid the notebook and book into my backpack.

When we arrived back at camp, I went to the Sergeant and denounced Jack Kirby as a traitor.

I told myself that I was doing the right thing. He would be sent for reeducation. He would become a productive citizen, not a malcontent longing for what could never be. Perhaps some day he would even thank me.

He was sent to a reeducation camp in the north of Scotland. I graduated from basic training, went on to advanced training for the Imperial Guard, and was eventually given my wolf companion, Ulla. Together, we were sent to France, where the war had already started. We were among the first to enter Poland. We were in the squadron that summoned ice to cover the Black Sea so our soldiers could march into Turkey. My den mother had been right: science and magic together created powerful weapons. It took five years, but the fire in the east was defeated, and our empire stretched into the Russian plains, into the deserts of Arabia.

When I returned to England, I asked for Jack’s file. It told me that he had died in the camp, shortly after arriving. The causes of death were listed as cold and heartbreak.

During the Empress’s reign, England has changed for the better, some say. There is always food in the shops, although it has lost its flavor. Once, carrots were not pale, like potatoes. Cabbages were green. They were not grown in great glass houses. The eggs had bright yellow centers, and all meat did not taste like mutton. Once, there were apple trees in England, and apples, peaches, plums were not imported from the distant reaches of our empire, where winter has not yet permanently settled. There was a sweetness in the world that you have never tasted. There was love and joy, and pain sharp as knives, rather than this blankness.

Our art, our stories, our poems have changed, become ghosts of their former selves. Mothers tell their daughters about Little White Hood and her wolf companion. About Corporal Cinder, who joined the liberation army and informed on her wicked sisters.

Our soldiers move on from conquest to conquest, riding white bears, white camels. Parts of the world that had never seen snow have seen it now. I myself have sent snow drifts to cover the sands of the Sahara, so we could deploy our sleighs. I have seen the Great Pyramid covered in ice, and crocodiles lying lethargic on ice-floes in the Nile.

Our empire stretches from sea to sea to sea. Eventually, even the republics that now fight against us will come under our dominion. And then perhaps the only part of the world that has not bowed down to our Empress, the wild seas themselves, will be covered in ice. What will happen to us then, when there are no more lands to send provisions to the empire? I do not know. Our Empress has promised us a perfect world, but the only perfection is death.

You have heard stories of primroses and daffodils, and you do not believe them. You have heard that there were once green fields, and rivers that ran between their banks, and a warm sun overhead. You have never seen them, and you believe they are merely tales. I am here to tell you that they are true, that in my childhood these existed. And cups of tea that were truly hot, and Christmas trees with candles on their branches, and church bells. Girls wore ribbons in their hair rather than badges on their lapels. Boys played King Arthur or Robin Hood rather than Wolf Scout.

I’m here to tell you that the fairy tales are true.

And that, sitting in this secret place, looking at each other in fear, wondering who among you is an informant, you must decide whether to believe in the fairy tales, whether to fight for an idea. Ideas are the most powerful things—beauty, freedom, love. But they are harder to fight for than things like food, or safety, or power. You can’t eat freedom, you can’t wield love over another.

You are so young, with your solemn faces, your thin bodies, nourished on pale cabbage and soggy beef and slabs of flavorless pudding! I do not know if you have the strength. But that, my children, you will have to find out for yourselves.

Your leaders, who have asked me here tonight, believe that winter can end, if you have the courage to end it. They are naive, as revolutionaries always are. Looking at your faces, I wonder. You have listened so intently to an old soldier, a woman who has seen much, felt much, endured. I have no strength left to fight, either for or against the Empress. Everyone I have ever loved—my mother, Mrs. Stokes, Jack Kirby, Ulla—is dead. I have just enough strength to tell you what the world was once, and could be again: imperfect, unequal, and in many ways unjust. But there was warmth and light to counteract the cold, the darkness.   

What do I believe? Entropy is the law of the universe. All things run down, all things eventually end. Perhaps, after all, she is not an alien, not a witch, but a universal principal. Perhaps all you can do is hold back the cold, the darkness, for a while. Is a temporary summer worth your lives? But if you do not fight, you will never feel the warmth of the sun on your cheeks, or smell lilacs, or bite into a peach picked directly from the tree. You will never hold each other on the embankment, watching the waters of the Thames run below. The old stories will be forgotten. Our empire will spread over the world, and it will be winter, everywhere, forever.

About the Author

Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

The Battle of Candle Arc

Yoon Ha Lee

General Shuos Jedao was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.

Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.

The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, when Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.

Korais was speaking to him.

“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.

“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.

Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.

“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.

This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one. People who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.

There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.

Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.

The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problem of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.

It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.

“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”

“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.

“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”

He must look awful if Doctrine was telling him how long until the ordeal was over. Not that he was going to rest afterward. He had to figure out what to do about the Lanterners.

It wasn’t that Jedao minded being recalled from medical leave to fight a battle. It wasn’t even that he minded being handed this sad force of eleven fangmoths, whose morale was shredded after General Kel Najhera had gotten herself killed. It was that the heptarchate had kept the Lanterners as clients for as long as he remembered. Now the Lanterners were demanding regional representation, and they were at war with the heptarchate.

The Lanterner assassin had targeted Jedao during the Feast of Falcon’s Eye. If she had succeeded, the event would have spiked the high calendar in the Lanterners’ favor. Then they would have declared a remembrance in their own, competing calendar. The irony was that Jedao wasn’t sure he disagreed with the Lanterners’ grievances against the heptarchate, which they had broadcast everywhere after their victory over Najhera.

Korais was still looking at him. Jedao went to sit down, which was difficult because walking in a straight line took all of his concentration. Sitting down also took concentration. It wasn’t worth pretending that he heard the last remembrance verses.

“It’s over, sir,” Korais said. “I’ll leave you to your duties.” He saluted and let himself out.

Jedao looked at his watch after the door hissed shut. Everything on it was too tiny to read the way his vision was. He made his computer enlarge its time display. Korais had left at least seven minutes early, an astonishing concession considering his job.

Jedao waited until the latest wave of pain receded, then brought up a visual of Candle Arc, a battledrift site nine days out from their present position and eleven days out from the Lanterners’ last reported position. The battle had taken place 177 years ago, between two powers that had since been conquered. The heptarchate called the battle Candle Arc because of the bridge of lights that wheeled through the scatter-hell of what had once been a fortress built from desiccated suns, and the remnants of warmoths. The two powers probably had called their battle something else, and their moths wouldn’t have been called moths either, and their calendars were dead except in records held locked by the Rahal.

Some genius had done up the image in shades of Kel gold, even though a notation gave the spectrum shift for anyone who cared. Jedao was fond of the Kel, who were the heptarchate’s military faction. For nearly twenty years he had been seconded to their service, and they had many virtues, but their taste in ornamentation was gaudy. Their faction emblem was the ashhawk, the bird that burned in its own glory, all fire and ferocity. The Shuos emblem was the ninefox, shapeshifter and trickster. The Kel called him the fox general, but they weren’t always being complimentary.

The bridgelights swam in and out of focus. Damnation. This was going to take forever. After pulling up maps of the calendrical terrain, he got the computer algebra system to tell him what the estimated shifts looked like in pictures. Then he sent a summons to the moth commander.

He knew how long it took to get from the moth’s command center to his quarters. The door chimed at him with commendable promptness.

“Come in,” Jedao said.

The door opened. “You wished to see me, sir,” said Kel Menowen, commander of the Fortune Travels in Fours. She was a stocky woman with swan-black hair and unsmiling eyes. Like all Kel, she wore black gloves; Jedao himself wore fingerless gloves. Her salute was so correct that he wanted to find an imperfection in her fist, or the angle of her arm.

Jedao had chosen the Fortune as his command moth not because it was the least damaged after Najhera’s death, which it wasn’t, but because Menowen had a grudge against the Shuos. She was going to be the hardest commander to win over, so he wanted to do it in person.

The tired joke about the Kel was that they were strong, loyal, and stupid, although they weren’t any more prone to stupidity than the other factions.

The tired joke about the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, was that they had backstabbing quotas. Most of the other factions had reasonable succession policies for their heptarchs. The Rahal heptarch appointed a successor from one of the senior magistrates. With the Kel, it was rank and seniority. The Shuos policy was that if you could keep the heptarch’s seat, it was yours. The other tired joke was that the infighting was the only reason the Shuos weren’t running the heptarchate.

One of Menowen’s aunts had died in a Shuos scheme, an assassin getting careless with secondary casualties. Jedao had already been in Kel service at the time, but it was in his public record that he had once been Shuos infantry, where “Shuos infantry” was a euphemism for “probably an assassin.” In his case, he had been a very good assassin.

Menowen was still standing there. Jedao approximated a return salute. “At ease,” he said. “I’d stand, but ‘up’ and ‘down’ are difficult concepts, which is distressing when you have to think in three dimensions.”

Menowen’s version of at ease looked stiff. “What do you require, sir?”

They had exchanged few words since he boarded her moth because he had barely been functional. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he was on her moth to make sure she behaved, and he had no doubt her behavior would be exemplary. She also probably wanted to know what the plan was.

“What do you think I require?” Jedao asked. Sometimes it helped to be direct.

Menowen’s posture became more stiff. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you only gave move orders as far as the Haussen system,” she said. “But that won’t take us near any useful support, and I thought our orders were to retreat.” She was overenunciating on top of telling him things he knew, which meant that at some point she was going to tell him he wasn’t fit for duty. Some Kel knew how to do subtlety. Menowen had an excellent service record, but she didn’t strike him as a subtle Kel.

“You’re reading the sane, sensible thing into our orders,” Jedao said. “Kel Command was explicit. They didn’t use the word ‘retreat’ anywhere.” An interesting oversight on their part. The orders had directed him to ensure that the border shell guarding the Glover Marches was secured by any means possible.

“Retreat is the only logical response,” Menowen said. “Catch repairs if possible, link up with Twin Axes.” The Twin Axes swarm was on patrol along the Taurag border, and was the nearest Kel force of any size. “Then we’d have a chance against the heretics.”

“You’re discounting some alternatives,” Jedao said.

Menowen lifted her chin and glared at him, or possibly at his insignia, or at the ink painting over his shoulder. “Sir,” she said, “if you’re contemplating fighting them with our present resources—” She stopped, tried again. The second try was blunter. “Your injuries have impaired your judgment and you ought to—”

“—let the senior moth commander make the sane, sensible decision to run for help?” Jedao flexed his hands. He had a clear memory of an earlier conversation with Commander Kel Chau, specifically the pinched look around Chau’s eyes. Chau probably thought running was an excellent idea. “I had considered it. But it’s not necessary. I’ve looked at the calendrical terrain. We can win this.”

Menowen was having a Kel moment. She wanted to tell him off, but it wasn’t just that he outranked her, it was that Kel Command had pulled him off medical leave to put him in charge, instead of evacuating him from the front. “Sir,” she said, “I was there. The Lanterners have a swarm of at least sixty moths. They will have reinforcements. I shouldn’t have to tell you any of this.”

“How conscientious of you,” Jedao said. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t take the bait. “Did you think I had some notion of slugging it out toe-to-toe? That would be stupid. But I have been reviewing the records, and I understand the Lanterner general’s temperament. Which is how we’re going to defeat the enemy, unless you defeat yourself before they have a chance to.”

Menowen’s mouth pressed thin. “I understand you have never lost a battle,” she said.

“This isn’t the—”

“If it’s about your fucking reputation—”

“Fox and hound, not this whole thing again,” Jedao snapped. Which was unfair of him because it was her first time bringing it up, even if everyone else did. “Sooner or later everyone loses. I get it. If it made more sense to stop the Lanterners in the Glovers, I’d be doing it.” This would also mean ceding vast swathes of territory to them, not anyone’s first choice; from her grim expression, she understood that. “If I could stop the Lanterners by calling them up for a game of cards, I’d do that too. Or by, I don’t know, offering them my right arm. But I’m telling you, this can be done, and I am not quitting if there’s a chance. Am I going to have to fight you to prove it?”

This wasn’t an idle threat. It wouldn’t be the first time he had dueled a Kel, although it would be frivolous to force a moth commander into a duel, however non-lethal, at a time like this.

Menowen looked pained. “Sir, you’re wounded.”

He could think of any number of ways to kill her before she realized she was being attacked, even in his present condition, but most of them depended on her trust that her commanding officer wouldn’t pull such a stunt.

“We can do this,” Jedao said. He was going to have to give this speech to the other ten moth commanders, who were jumpy right now. Might as well get in practice now. “All the way to the Haussen system, it looks like we’re doing the reasonable thing. But we’re going to pay a call on the Rahal outpost at Smokewatch 33-67.” That wasn’t going to be a fun conversation, but most Rahal were responsive to arguments that involved preserving their beloved calendar. And right now, he was the only one in position to stop the Lanterners from arrowing right up to the Glover Marches. The perfect battle record that people liked to bludgeon him over the head with might even come in handy for persuasion.

“I’m listening,” Menowen said in an unpromising voice.

It was good, if inconvenient, when a Kel thought for herself. Unlike a number of the officers on this moth, Menowen didn’t react to Jedao like a cadet fledge.

“Two things,” Jedao said. “First, I know remembering the defeat is painful, but if I’m reading the records correctly, the first eight Kel moths to go down, practically simultaneously, included two scoutmoths.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Menowen said. She wasn’t overenunciating anymore. “The Lanterners’ mothdrive formants were distorted just enough to throw our scan sweep, so they saw us first.”

“Why would they waste time killing scoutmoths when they could blow up fangmoths or arrowmoths instead? If you look at their positions and ours, they had better available targets.” He had to be careful about criticizing a dead general, but there was no avoiding it. Najhera had depended too much on exotics and hadn’t made adequate use of invariant defenses. The Kel also hadn’t had time to channel any useful formation effects, their specialty. “The scoutmoths weren’t out far enough to give advance notice, and surprise was blown once the Lanterners fried those eight moths. What I’m getting at is that our scan may not be able to tell the difference between mothdrives on big scary things and mothdrives on mediocre insignificant things, but their scan can’t either, or they would have picked better targets.”

Menowen was starting to look persuaded. “What are you going to do, sir? Commandeer civilian moths and set them to blow?” She wasn’t able to hide her distaste for the idea.

“I’d prefer to avoid involving civilians,” Jedao said coolly. Her unsmiling eyes became a little less unsmiling when he said that. “The Rahal run the show, they can damn well spare me some engines glued to tin cans.”

The pain hit him like a spike to the eyes. When he could see again, Menowen was frowning. “Sir,” she said, “one thing and I’ll let you continue your deliberations in private.” This was Kel for please get some fucking rest before you embarrass us by falling over. “You had some specific plan for punching holes into the Lanterners?”

“Modulo the fact that something always goes wrong after you wave hello at the enemy? Yes.”

“That will do it for me, sir,” Menowen said. “Not that I have a choice in the matter.”

“You always have a choice,” Jedao said. “It’s just that most of them are bad.”

She didn’t look as though she understood, but he hadn’t expected her to.

Jedao would have authorized more time for repairs if he could, but they kept receiving reports on the Lanterners’ movements and time was one of the things they had little of. He addressed his moth commanders on the subject to reassure them that he understood their misgivings. Thankfully, Kel discipline held.

For that matter, Jedao didn’t like detouring to Smokewatch 33-67 afterward, but he needed a lure, and this was the best place to get it. The conversation with the Rahal magistrate in charge almost wasn’t a conversation. Jedao felt as though he was navigating through a menu of options rather than interacting with a human being. Some of the Rahal liked to cultivate that effect. At least Rahal Korais wasn’t one of them.

“This is an unusual request for critical Rahal resources, General,” the magistrate was saying.

This wasn’t a no, so Jedao was already ahead. “The calendrical lenses are the best tool available,” he said. “I will need seventy-three of them.”

Calendrical lenses were Doctrine instruments mounted on mothdrives. Their sole purpose was to focus the high calendar in contested areas. It was a better idea in theory than practice, since radical heresies rapidly knocked them out of alignment, but the Rahal bureaucracy was attached to them. Typical Rahal, trusting an idea over cold hard experience. At least there were plenty of the things, and the mothdrives ought to be powerful enough to pass on scan from a distance.

Seventy-three was crucial because there were seventy-three moths in the Kel’s Twin Axes swarm. The swarm was the key to the lure, just not in the way that Commander Menowen would have liked. It was barely possible, if Twin Axes set out from the Taurag border within a couple days’ word of Najhera’s defeat, for it to reach Candle Arc when Jedao planned on being there. It would also be inadvisable for Twin Axes to do so, because their purpose was to prevent the Taurags from contesting that border. Twin Axes wouldn’t leave such a gap in heptarchate defenses without direct orders from Kel Command.

However, no one had expected the Lanterners to go heretical so suddenly. Kel Command had been known to panic, especially under Rahal pressure. And Rahal pressure was going to be strong after Najhera’s defeat.

“Do you expect the lens vessels to be combat-capable?” the magistrate asked without any trace of sarcasm.

“I need them to sit there and look pretty in imitation of a Kel formation,” Jedao said. “They’ll get the heretics’ attention, and if they can shift some of the calendrical terrain in our favor, even better.” Unlikely, he’d had the Kel run the numbers for him, but it sounded nice. “Are volunteers available?”

Also unlikely. The advantage of going to the Rahal rather than some other faction, besides their susceptibility to the plea, was that the Rahal were disciplined. Even if they weren’t going to be volunteers. If he gave instructions, the instructions would be rigorously carried out.

The magistrate raised an eyebrow. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I’m aware of your skill at tactics, General. I assume you will spare the lenses’ crews from unnecessary harm.”

Touching. “I am grateful for your assistance, Magistrate,” Jedao said.

“Serve well, General. The lenses will join your force at—” He named a time, which was probably going to be adhered to, then ended the communication.

The lenses joined within eight minutes and nineteen seconds of the given time. Jedao wished there were some way to minimize their scan shadow, but Kel moths did that with formations, and the Rahal couldn’t generate Kel formation effects.

Jedao joined Menowen at the command center even though he should have rested. Menowen’s mouth had a disapproving set. The rest of the Kel looked grim. “Sir,” Menowen said. “Move orders?”

He took his chair and pulled up the orders on the computer. “False formation for the Rahal as shown. Follow the given movement plan,” he said. “Communications, please convey the orders to all Rahal vessels.” It was going to take extra time for the Rahal to sort themselves out, since they weren’t accustomed to traveling in a fake formation, but he wasn’t going to insult them by saying so.

Menowen opened her mouth. Jedao stared at her. She closed her mouth, looking pensive.

“Communications,” Jedao said, “address to all units. Exclude the Rahal.”

It wasn’t the first speech he’d given on the journey, but the time had come to tell his commanders what they were up to and brace them for the action to come.

The Communications officer said, “It’s open, sir.”

“This is General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” he said. “It’s not a secret that we’re being pursued by a Lanterner swarm. We’re going to engage them at Candle Arc. Due to the Lanterners’ recent victory, cascading effects have shifted the calendrical terrain there. The Lanterners are going to be smart and take one of the channels with a friendly gradient to their tech most of the way in. Ordinarily, a force this small wouldn’t be worth their time. But because of the way the numbers have rolled, Candle Arc is a calendrical choke: we’re arriving on the Day of Broken Feet. Whoever wins there will shift the calendar in their favor. When we offer battle, they’ll take us up on it.”

He consoled himself that, if the Lanterners lost, their soldiers would fall to fire and metal, honest deaths in battle, and not as calendrical foci, by having filaments needled into their feet to wind their way up into the brain.

“You are Kel,” Jedao went on. “You have been hurt. I promise you we will hurt them back. But my orders will be exact, and I expect them to be followed exactly. Our chances of victory depend on this. I am not unaware of the numbers. But battle isn’t just about numbers. It’s about will. And you are Kel; in this matter you will prevail.”

The panel lit up with each moth commander’s acknowledgment. Kel gold against Kel black.

They didn’t believe him, not yet. But they would follow orders, and that was all he needed.

Commander Menowen asked to see him in private afterward, as Jedao had thought she might. Her mouth was expressive. Around him she was usually expressing discontent. But it was discontent for the right reasons.

“Sir,” Menowen said. “Permission to discuss the battle plan.”

“You can discuss it all you like,” Jedao said. “I’ll say something if I have something to say.”

“Perhaps you had some difficulties with the computer algebra system,” she said. “I’ve run the numbers. We’re arriving 4.2 hours before the terrain flips in our favor.”

“I’m aware of that,” Jedao said.

The near side of the choke locus was obstructed by a null region where no exotic technologies would function. But other regions around the null shifted according to a schedule. The far side of the choke periodically favored the high calendar. With Najhera’s defeat, the far side would also shift sometimes toward the Lanterners’ calendar.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve,” Menowen said.

“If you don’t see it,” Jedao said, pleased, “the Lanterners won’t see it either.”

To her credit, she didn’t ask if this was based on an injury-induced delusion, although she clearly wanted to. “I expect Kel Command thinks you’ll pull off a miracle,” she said.

Jedao’s mouth twisted. “No, Kel Command thinks a miracle would be very nice, but they’re not holding their breath, and as a Shuos I’m kind of expendable. The trouble is that I keep refusing to die.”

It was like the advice for learning the game of pattern-stones: the best way to get good was to play difficult opponents, over and over. The trouble with war was that practicing required people to die.

“You’ve done well for your armies, sir. But the enemy general is also good at using calendrical terrain, and they’ve demonstrated their ruthlessness. I don’t see why you would pass up a terrain advantage.”

Jedao cocked an eyebrow at her. “We’re not. Everyone gets hypnotized by the high fucking calendar. Just because it enables our exotics doesn’t mean that the corresponding terrain is the most favorable to our purpose. I’ve been reading the intel on Lanterner engineering. Our invariant drives are better than theirs by a good margin. Anyway, why the hell would they be so stupid as to engage us in terrain that favors us? I picked the timing for a reason. You keep trying to beat the numbers, Commander, when the point is to beat the people.”

Menowen considered that. “You are being very patient with my objections,” she said.

“I need you not to freeze up in the middle of the battle,” Jedao said. “Although I would prefer for you to achieve that without my having to explain basics to you.”

The insult had the desired effect. “I understand my duty,” she said. “Do you understand yours?”

He wondered if he could keep her. Moth commanders who were willing to question him were becoming harder to find. His usual commanders would have had no doubts about his plan no matter how much he refused to explain in advance.

“As I see it,” Jedao said, “my duty is to carry out the orders. See? We’re not so different after all. If that’s it, Commander, you should get back to work.”

Menowen saluted him and headed for the door, then swung around. “Sir,” she said, “why did you choose to serve with the Kel? I assume it was a choice.” The Shuos were ordinarily seconded to the Kel as intelligence officers.

“Maybe,” Jedao said, “it was because I wanted to know what honor looked like when it wasn’t a triumphal statue.”

Her eyes went cold. “That’s not funny,” she said.

“I wasn’t being funny,” he said quietly. “I will never be a Kel. I don’t think like one of you. But sometimes that’s an advantage.”

She drew in a breath. “Sir,” she said, “I just want to know that this isn’t some Shuos game to you.” That he wasn’t being clever for the sake of being clever; that he wouldn’t throw his soldiers’ lives away because he was overeager to fight.

Jedao’s smile was not meant to reassure her. “Oh, it’s to your advantage if it’s a game,” he said. “I am very good at winning games.”

He wasn’t going to earn her loyalty by hiding his nature, so he wasn’t going to try.

It was even easier to win games if you designed the game yourself, instead of playing someone else’s, but that was a Shuos sort of discussion and he didn’t think she wanted to hear it yet.

The eleven fangmoths and seventy-three calendrical lenses approached Candle Arc only 1.3 hours behind schedule. Jedao was recovering the ability to read his watch, but the command center had a display that someone had enlarged for his benefit, so he didn’t look at it. Especially since he had the sneaking feeling that his watch was off by a fraction of a second. If he drew attention to it, Captain-magistrate Korais was going to recalibrate it to the high calendar when they all had more important things to deal with.

The crews on the lenses had figured out how to simulate formations. No one would mistake them for Kel from close range, but Jedao wasn’t going to let the Lanterners get that close.

“Word from the listening posts is that the Lanterners are still in pursuit,” Communications informed them.

“How accommodating of them,” Jedao said. “All right. Orders for the Rahal: The lenses are to maintain formation and head through the indicated channel”—he passed over the waypoint coordinates from his computer station—”to the choke locus. You are to pass the locus, then circle back toward it. Don’t call us under any circumstances, we’ll call you. And stick to the given formation and don’t try any fancy modulations.”

It was unlikely that the Rahal would try, but it was worth saying. The Rahal were going to be most convincing as a fake Kel swarm if they stayed in one formation because there wasn’t time to teach them to get the modulation to look right. The formation that Jedao had chosen for them was Senner’s Lash, partly because its visible effects were very short-range. When the Rahal failed to produce the force-lash, it wouldn’t look suspicious because the Lanterners wouldn’t expect to see anything from a distance.

“Also,” Jedao said, still addressing the Rahal. “The instant you see something, anything on scan, you’re to banner the Deuce of Gears.”

The Deuce was his personal emblem, and it connoted “cog in the machine.” Everyone had expected him to register some form of fox when he made brigadier general, but he had preferred a show of humility. The Deuce would let the Lanterners know who they were facing. It might not be entirely sporting for the Rahal to transmit it, but since they were under his command, he didn’t feel too bad about it.

“The Rahal acknowledge,” Communications said. Jedao’s subdisplay showed them moving off. They would soon pass through the calendrical null, and at that point they would become harder to find on scan.

Commander Menowen was drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair, her first sign of nervousness. “They have no defenses,” she said, almost to herself.

It mattered that this mattered to her. “We won’t let the Lanterners reach them,” Jedao said. “If only because I would prefer to spend my career not having the Rahal mad at me.”

Her sideways glance was only slightly irritated. “Where are we going, sir?”

“Cut the mothdrives,” Jedao said. He sent the coordinates to Menowen, Communications, and Navigation. “We’re heading there by invariant drive only.” This would probably prevent long-range scan from seeing them. “Transmit orders to all moths. I want acknowledgments from the moth commanders.”

“There” referred to some battledrift, all sharp edges and ash-scarred fragments and wrecked silverglass shards, near the mouth of what Jedao had designated the Yellow Passage. He expected the Lanterners to take it toward the choke. Its calendrical gradient started in the Lanterners’ favor, then zeroed out as it neared the null.

Depending on the Lanterners’ invariant drives, it would take them two to three hours (high calendar) to cross the null region and reach the choke. This was, due to the periodic shifts, still faster than going around the null, because the detours would be through space hostile to their exotics for the next six hours.

Reports had put the Lanterners at anywhere from sixty to one hundred twenty combat moths. The key was going to be splitting them up to fight a few at a time.

Jedao’s moth commanders acknowledged less quickly than he would have liked, gold lights coming on one by one.

“Formation?” Menowen prompted him.

There weren’t a lot of choices when you had eleven moths. Jedao brought up a formation, which was putting it kindly because it didn’t belong to Lexicon Primary for tactical groups, or even Lexicon Secondary, which contained all the obsolete formations and parade effects. He wanted the moths in a concave configuration so they could focus lateral fire on the first hostiles to emerge from the Yellow Passage.

“That’s the idea,” Jedao said, “but we’re using the battledrift as cover. Some big chunks of dead stuff floating out there, we might as well blend in and snipe the hell out of the Lanterners with the invariant weapons.” At least they had a good supply of missiles and ammunition, as Najhera had attempted to fight solely with exotic effects.

The Kel didn’t like the word “snipe,” but they were just going to have to deal. “Transmit orders,” Jedao said.

The acknowledgments lit up again, about as fast as they had earlier.

The Fortune Comes in Fours switched into invariant mode as they crossed into the null. The lights became less white-gold and more rust-gold, giving everything a corroded appearance. The hum of the moth’s systems changed to a deeper, grittier whisper. The moth’s acceleration became noticeable, mostly in the form of pain. Jedao wished he had thought to take an extra dose of painkillers, but he couldn’t risk getting muddled.

Menowen picked out a chunk of coruscating metals that had probably once been some inexplicable engine component on that long-ago space fortress and parked the Fortune behind it. She glanced at him to see if he would have any objections. He nodded at her. No sense in getting in the way when she was doing her job fine.

Time passed. Jedao avoided checking his watch every minute thanks to long practice, although he met Captain-magistrate Korais’s eyes once and saw a wry acknowledgment of shared impatience.

They had an excellent view of the bridgelights even on passive sensors. The lights were red and violet, like absurd petals, and their flickering would, under other circumstances, have been restful.

“We won’t see hostiles until they’re on top of us,” Menowen said.

More nerves. “It’ll be mutual,” Jedao said, loudly enough so the command center’s crew could hear him. “They’ll see us when they get that close, but they’ll be paying attention to the decoy swarm.”

She wasn’t going to question his certainty in front of everyone, so he rewarded her by telling her. “I am sure of this,” he said, looking at her, “because of how the Lanterner general destroyed Najhera. They were extremely aggressive in exploiting calendrical terrain and, I’m sorry to say, they made a spectacle of the whole thing. I don’t imagine the Lanterners had time to swap out generals for the hell of it, especially one who had already performed well, so I’m assuming we’re dealing with the same individual. So if the Lanterner wants calendrical terrain and a big shiny target, fine. There it is.”

More time passed. There was something wrong about the high calendar when it ticked off seconds cleanly and precisely and didn’t account for the way time crawled when you were waiting for battle. Among the many things wrong with the high calendar, but that one he could own to without getting called out as a heretic.

“The far terrain is going to shift in our favor in five hours, sir,” Korais said.

“Thank you, good to know,” Jedao said.

To distract himself from the pain, he was thinking about the bridgelights and their resemblance to falling petals when Scan alerted him that the Lanterners had shown up. “Thirty-some moths in the van,” the officer said in a commendably steady voice. “Readings suggest more are behind them. They’re moving rapidly, vector suggests they’re headed down the Yellow Passage toward the choke locus, and they’re using a blast wave to clear mines.”

As if he’d had the time to plant mines down a hostile corridor. Good of them to think of it, though.

Menowen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Our banner—”

His emblem. The Kel transmitted their general’s emblem before battle. “No,” Jedao said. “We’re not bannering. The Lanterners are going to be receiving the Deuce of Gears from over there,” where the Rahal were.

“But the protocol, sir. The Rahal aren’t part of your force,” Menowen said, “they don’t fight—”

That got his attention. “Fledge,” Jedao said sharply, which brought her up short, “what the hell do you mean they’re not fighting? Just because they’re not sitting on a mass of things that go boom? They’re fighting what’s in the enemy’s head.“

He studied the enemy dispositions. The Yellow Passage narrowed as it approached the null, and the first group consisted of eight hellmoths, smaller than fangmoths, but well-armed if they were in terrain friendly to their own calendar, which was not going to be the case at the passage’s mouth. The rest of the groups would probably consist of eight to twelve hellmoths each. Taken piecemeal, entirely doable.

“They fell for it,” Menowen breathed, then wisely shut up.

“General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” Jedao said. “Coordinated strike on incoming units with missiles and railguns.” Hellmoths didn’t have good side weapons, so he wasn’t as concerned about return fire. “After the first hits, move into the Yellow Passage to engage. Repeat, move into the Yellow Passage.”

The fangmoths’ backs would be to that damned null, no good way to retreat, but that would only motivate them to fight harder.

If the Lanterners wanted a chance at the choke, they’d have to choose between shooting their way through when the geometry didn’t permit them to bring their numbers to bear in the passage, or else leaving the passage and taking their chances with terrain that shaded toward the high calendar. If they chose the latter, they risked being hit by Kel formation effects, anything from force lances to scatterbursts, on top of the fangmoths’ exotic weapons.

The display was soon a mess of red lights and gold, damage reports. The computer kept making the dry, metallic click that indicated hits made by the Kel. Say what you liked about the Kel, they did fine with weapons.

Two hellmoths tried to break through the Kel fangmoths, presumably under the impression that the Rahal were the real enemy. One hellmoth took a direct engine hit from a spinal railgun, while the other shuddered apart under a barrage of missiles that overwhelmed the anti-missile defenses.

“You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

“It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

“Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

This is too easy, Jedao thought coldly, and then.

“Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

“Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Akkion Dhaved,” said a man’s voice. “I assume I’m addressing a Kel general.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Jedao said. “This is General Shuos Jedao. Are you the ranking officer?” Damn. He would have liked to know the Lanterner general’s name.

“Sir,” Menowen mouthed, “it’s a trick, stop talking to them.”

He wasn’t sure he disagreed, but he wasn’t going to get more information by closing the channel.

“That’s complicated, General.” Dhaved’s voice was sardonic. “I have an offer to make you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “but are you the ranking officer? Are you authorized to have this conversation?” He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The weight of collective Kel disapproval was almost crushing.

“I’m offering you a trade, General. You’ve been facing General Bremis kae Meghuet of the Lantern.”

The name sounded familiar—

“She’s the cousin of Bremis kae Erisphon, one of our leaders. Hostage value, if you care. You’re welcome to her if you let the rest of us go. She’s intact. Whether you want to leave her that way is your affair.”

Jedao didn’t realize how chilly his voice was until he saw Menowen straighten in approval. “Are you telling me you mutinied against your commanding officer?”

“She lost the battle,” Dhaved said, “and it’s either death or capture. We all know what the heptarchate does to heretics, don’t we?”

Korais spoke with quiet urgency. “General. Find out if Bremis kae Meghuet really is alive.”

Jedao met the man’s eyes. It took him a moment to understand the expression in them: regret.

“There’s a nine-hour window,” Korais said. “The Day of Broken Feet isn’t over.”

Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

“It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”

Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance when the pain drove through his head like nails.

Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism, processed.

Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.

Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say this. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”

Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

“I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

“General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

Commander Menowen came to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

“Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

“Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

“I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.

“The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

“Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

Menowen nodded slowly.

“Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

“One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

“I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her collection Conservation of Shadows will be published in 2013.

The Future, One Thing at a Time

Matthew Johnson

It’s conventional wisdom in science fiction that the future doesn’t come one thing at a time. This idea, which is sometimes called Campbell’s Rule (or Campbell’s Exception), is explained in these terms in the book On Writing Science Fiction by George Scithers et. al: “You can never do merely one thing. Our world a century hence could be almost as alien as another planet; each change triggers countless others.” As fondly as the book is remembered, history shows that this rule simply isn’t accurate. Different fields of science and technology do not march in lock-step; the world may change more rapidly or slowly for different places and people, and sometimes it really does change one thing at a time.

As literary advice, the rule was probably meant to prevent the sort of shallow stories that focus on a single change or technology in isolation. These are particularly common among beginners and among non-genre writers dipping their toes into the genre, which may be why SF writers and editors hold to this rule so fiercely. The problem is that it embodies an attitude towards technology that forms a big part of why so much older SF feels dated today. It may also lead to a lot of today’s most cutting-edge SF seeming out-of-step in just a few years: just as we laugh at giant computers of old SF novels and the voice-call-only communicators in the original Star Trek, many novels published just a decade ago are already beginning to look left behind. (Nearly all books that depict online social spaces, for instance, portray environments that are nearer to Second Life than to Facebook, while hackers are shown as outlaw programmers rather than basement-dwelling script kiddies.)

Why do we believe that the future can’t happen one thing at a time? In my opinion, it’s based on three fundamental fallacies about technological progress.

First, the fallacy that technological progress is inevitable. This is the idea that the future must be different from the past, but in many ways our lives are fundamentally the same as they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Consider a typical morning: we are likely awakened by an alarm clock (first adjustable, mechanical alarm clock patented 1847), eat a breakfast of eggs, toast or, if we are feeling particularly futuristic, corn flakes (patented 1896); shower in water heated by electricity (first electric water heater patented 1889) or gas (1868); put on clothing made of cotton (made affordable by the cotton gin in 1793) mixed with, perhaps, some synthetics such as nylon (1935), Lycra (1959) or Gore-Tex (1976).

Many technologies basically stop developing, in some cases surprisingly quickly: the development of canned and frozen foods led SF writers to imagine endless variations on technologies for synthesizing and preserving foods, but the food in your pantry and freezer was made in ways that have scarcely changed since the days of Louis Pasteur or Clarence Birdseye. Technologies can even disappear: Although digital watches were once a powerful symbol of futurism, if you’re under 30 you’re unlikely to put one on before leaving the house, preferring to get the time from your phone instead. (Some of these abandoned technologies eventually make a comeback: If you stop for a bathroom break you’re using a toilet that was pioneered in Minoan Crete and then forgotten for more than two millennia.)

When technologies do continue to develop, most of the changes that occurred after the initial flurry of innovation are basically incremental, things that improve the experience of using a technology without altering its basic function. The alarm clock, for instance, has undergone numerous changes—electrification, digital readout, the ability to play music and radio broadcasts—but what it does, and the role it plays in our lives, is unchanged. There are some genuinely disruptive technologies which change the world on a large scale: The classic example is the automobile which, as Scithers notes, shaped the 20th century in dozens of ways, from hollowing out cities to causing wars. But even these technologies soon settle into a state of slow, incremental change. When we drive to work we are using a machine that, while safer, more fuel-efficient, and easier to drive, is fundamentally little different from the Model T.

Moreover, the effects of things like the automobile create their own inertia; they often act as a brake on the changes other technologies might cause. Look at personal computers and the Internet. Not so long ago we imagined that, because of these advances, we would all be working from home, with employers hiring from a global pool of remote employees. Instead we still drive to work in offices (where we may use computers less powerful than the ones we have at home), and our children sit in rows in classrooms, paper and pens in hand, all because cities have been planned for cars and our educational system has been built to meet the needs of 19th-century industrial technology.

Truly disruptive technologies are the exception, not the rule. Few have anywhere near the impact of the automobile or even the Internet. A more typical example would be the microwave, a device that is uncannily similar to the “instant cookers” found in so many imagined futures but which has nevertheless utterly failed to replace the oven. When technology does change society, it’s much more common that only some sectors are affected—and it’s rarely possible to predict which ones and in which ways. Despite being funded by the military, the Internet has had little effect on the life of the average soldier. Nor has it much changed academia, despite the fact that academics were the first to use it. What it changed instead was the music industry. The unexpected collision of the Internet with cheap memory and digital compact discs (which the industry itself introduced, goosing profits in the short term but inadvertently digging its own grave) made it possible for consumers to rip and share songs, leading an entire generation to think of music as something they only have to pay for if they feel like it. Even within that industry, change has been uneven: Classical and jazz have been much less affected, since listeners tend to be older and sound quality is more highly valued, while the sheet-music business is near to dead because files are smaller and no quality is lost in copying.

The second fallacy about technological progress is that all technology progresses at the same rate. This likely has its origin in the roots of SF in the 19th century, in which a small number of basic technologies—primarily efficient motors, mass production, and electric power—led to fairly uniform technological development across much of society. The last 80-odd years, however, have seen a much more varied rate of progress, as industrial technology has largely stalled and other fields, in particular computer and communications technology, have developed in ways that were almost unimaginable based on their starting points. This is why they appear in little or no older SF, or appear in forms that are nothing like how they actually evolved. For all the giant computers that were hell-bent on controlling the world (or were already in control of it), it’s hard to find an example as late as the 1970s of a personal computer on a par with an Apple II, much less an iPad.

Technological progress is also often dependent on factors other than technology itself. One way in which our world would be almost unrecognizable to anyone visiting from more than 25 years in the past is that it is nearly cashless. While bills and coins are still in circulation, it’s rare that we have to pay cash for anything. In that case, though, the technology had been around for years before it had much of an effect. Credit cards were first introduced in 1959, while the magnetic stripe that made them less of a hassle to use appeared in 1970. It was only after a 1970’s Supreme Court ruling allowed banks to operate under the usury laws of their home state—effectively allowing them to set their own interest rates—that credit cards became profitable, rather than the loss-leader service they had previously been. Today it’s hard to imagine our world without credit cards. To name just one example, without them the Internet would be much more like the “world mind” imagined by SF writers than the shopping mall/arcade/peepshow (with a small library attached) that it is today.

This isn’t to say that technology doesn’t change our lives, but the ways in which it does so are subtle, unpredictable, and different for various places and people. This leads to the third fallacy of technological progress in SF: Everyone uses technology in the same way. Most early SF was written by (or from the point of view of) scientists and engineers, and the genre still bears the stamp of that viewpoint today; also, SF writers tend to be enthusiastic early adopters of new technologies, which colors their view. But widespread adoption of a technology (and therefore its continued development) can often depend on the unexpected uses found for it by unexpected audiences. These audiences may also choose not to adopt technologies until they reach a point where they are useful to them.

A good example is the landline telephone, something which we consider to be a fundamental feature of modern life but which never caught on in much of Africa due to a number of factors that prevented the investment in infrastructure needed. That didn’t mean that there was no desire for the technology: When cell phones, which have a much smaller infrastructure footprint, became affordable, they spread across Africa, leapfrogging generations of communications technology and leading to a level of adoption that for some years was higher than in most industrialized nations.

The same phenomenon may happen on a smaller scale, and even in industrial countries. While it was the middle class that led adoption of the personal computer and the Internet in North America, smartphone use rose first and fastest among people with lower incomes for whom it was not an additional computer but a first one, cheaper and more practical than any PC. In rare cases groups may be so selective as to adopt only a handful of technologies, something to which anyone who’s ever seen an Amish man or woman gliding by on rollerblades can testify.

Different groups may also innovate according to their own needs. While we use Facebook to share ironic motivational posters and get in touch with old classmates, Kenyan herders use iCow to connect themselves (and their cows) to vets, breeders, and buyers of meat and milk. As a result, the look of the future may vary depending on where you are and whom you’re with. Similarly, teenagers have often been leaders in determining how new technologies will be used: sharing music files over the Internet, for example, rather than simply ripping the CDs you already own onto your iPod, or using their cell phones for everything but making voice calls.

What’s more significant than how technology develops is how it changes our lives. That, too, is variable and unpredictable. For example, while digital technologies have changed how we do our jobs, what we do remains largely the same; we might do it more quickly, more easily, or remotely, but few of us do jobs that our grandparents wouldn’t recognize. (More people are “the person who fixes the machine when it breaks,” but the job description itself goes back to Daedalus.) In fact, the fastest growing segment of the economy is the service sector, which is probably the most resistant to technological change.

What has changed, though, is our leisure time. Not only do we engage in entirely new pursuits (such as video games) in new ways (such as listening to music or watching video, both of which were once inherently collective activities, mostly in private), our whole attitude towards leisure is different. Where we once defined ourselves through our work, we now do so largely through our play—something that was made possible by the development of digital and communications technologies, but which only a few SF writers imagined. The role-playing game featured in Larry Niven’s and Steven Barnes’ Dream Park, published in 1981, is played live with actors, props, and holograms and available only to the wealthy, a far cry from the millions of players of today’s MMOs. Arthur C. Clarke, on the other hand, not only imagined communications satellites in 1956 but also that these satellites would be used to broadcast porn—though his notion that it would be in the form of documentaries about tantric carvings on the walls of Hindu temples is rather quaint.

The emphasis on play over work has had a significant effect on business and technology. While RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, bet heavily on business needs continuing to drive the mobile device industry, Apple bet on consumers, and we all know how that worked out. What’s interesting is that consumers have become the main influence on how technology develops at a time when our purchasing power has actually declined. This, too, is an unexpected result of technological change, as microprocessors, miniaturization, fiber optics, and other developments have worked together to make media and electronics a cheaper treat and an ever-larger part of our non-working lives. (Teens now spend an average of 10 hours per day consuming screen media.)

What all this means is that we need to re-evaluate just what SF is supposed to do. One of the fundamental premises of classic SF—If this goes on…—ignores the fact that many technologies do not keep going on. Technological, cultural, and economic forces eventually move them into long periods of equilibrium or, at best, slow and incremental change. This is true of most industrial technologies; one of the most popular models of airplane in use today, the 747, went into service in 1969. We’d be foolish to think that it’s not true of computers, genetic engineering, or any other technology you could name. Moreover, when things do go on they do so unpredictably. The complex interaction between culture, economics, politics, and any number of other factors mean that it’s impossible to guess more than two steps ahead with any accuracy. “If SF isn’t able to predict the future, it can take on a more important role, one closer to that currently played by fantasy: to imagine how new technologies, as well as social, cultural and political changes, can enable us to tell stories that we couldn’t tell before, and to shed new light on what it means to be human.

About the Author

Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa with his wife Megan and their sons Leo and Miles, where he works as a media educator and writes fantasy and SF when time and circumstances permit. His novel Fall From Earth was published in 2009, and his short fiction, which has appeared in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, will be collected in 2013 in Irregular Verbs from Chizine Publications. Many of his stories involve food in some way, in particular “Long Pig,” which may be the only fantasy story ever written in the form of a restaurant review.

A Germ of an Idea: An Interview with John Varley

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In Slow Apocalypse by John Varley, sitcom writer Dave Marshall’s life is disintegrating. His career has fallen apart. His finances are a mess. His wife isn’t really speaking to him. It’s all happening in a sort of painful slow motion.

Then Marshall stumbles upon a story that just may be his lucky break—a bacteria that eats crude oil, a vengeful scientist, and a world without petroleum products.

It’s a story too outlandish to be true… until the government cover-ups, media black-outs, and internet conspiracy theories convince Marshall that what he has is not the plot to his next screenplay, but a sneak peek of the apocalypse. In other words, the story might not save his career, but it might save him and his family from something much worse.

A lot happens in the first fifty pages of Slow Apocalypse. There’s great tension between the fast-moving plot and the slow-moving apocalypse. Varley locks on with a close third-person POV that sometimes feels like first-person. And always, there’s the signature Varley story-telling.

Varley’s newly-released novel is a bit more reminiscent of Mammoth, his standalone about a mad scientist (and circus owner), time-travel, and animals rights than, say, his Thunder and Lightening novels, which were written in the spirit of Robert A. Heinlein’s juvenile adventures.

Slow Apocalypse is, perhaps, Varley’s least science-fictional, but it is otherwise typical of his writing— set in the near future, character-driven, organically plotted, written sparse prose. There’s certainly much of the hippie in Varley’s writing, especially as he presents readers with questions about personal responsibility and the role of government.

What came first with Slow Apocalypse—the bacteria, the Colonel falling through the window, Dave Marshall, a “what if?” or something else altogether?

What came first was my editor suggesting that she would like to see a post-apocalypse book from me, if I could come up with an idea that hadn’t already been done to death. I got the idea about bacteria eating all our oil, and then the story grew as they always grow, with a few characters and a few ideas. I never know where a story is going when I start it.

You mentioned on your website that Slow Apocalypse is your “attempt to reach a larger audience.” So how does a goal like this effect the writing?

The only way it affected the story was that it was not supposed to be hard science fiction. No spaceships or time travel or things like that. By a strict definition, it is SF, because it involves a new strain of bacteria developed by a scientist in a lab—a mad, or at least angry, scientist, I guess—and the disintegration of civilization. Other than that, I didn’t have to do anything different. My writing has always been about characters and how they develop, plot and ideas are always secondary, and it was the same here.

Where did you find Addison, the protagonist’s daughter? How’d you develop the character?

I don’t consciously develop a character. I see them, and I start to write about them, and they grow as you do that. It’s a mysterious process, and I don’t think about it too much because I’m afraid it wouldn’t work anymore if I did. I can tell you where I got the name. I’m a Disneyland freak. We visited more than a dozen times while we were living in Southern California, on one of those great passes that pay for themselves after you’ve used them twice, and then it’s all free. We were in California Adventure about to ride on one of the kiddie rides, the Golden Zephyr spaceships, and one mother was calling out to her daughter to sit still. I liked the name.

I’m guessing you did a whole lot of research for this novel.

Of course the Internet was helpful. I had to find out about energy, food, and water needs of Los Angeles, where it all came from, how many people the region could support without a constant supply of things from outside. (Answer: not very many.) I was surprised to find that 50% of LA’s power comes from coal burning. Almost ALL of its water comes from elsewhere. I had to find maps of fault lines, and discovered that one passes less than a half a mile south of the apartment building where I was living.

All the locations in the book are scrupulously accurate. Much of that was enabled by actually driving and walking around in the areas I covered and taking pictures. The only location that was fictionalized was the Marshall’s house. I used an actual house on an actual site in the Hollywood Hills as the model, but I placed it elsewhere. There is a Mockingbird Lane in that area, but it’s in a different location from where I have it.

It would have been much harder to write the book without Google Street View. I drove up and down many streets, virtually, and it saved a lot if time and gasoline. I don’t like Google the company, but I used their excellent products because they are free.

The book takes off like a rocket. How do typically you plot your novels? How’d you plot this one? How do you build suspense in a novel in general and how’d you build it in Slow Apocalypse in particular?

Again, it’s like characters, the plot just grows as I write it. I don’t outline, and seldom think more than five or ten pages ahead, until somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, when the ending takes shape. I don’t consciously build suspense, not like Hitchcock did; I just follow the story where it leads.

You grew up in Texas, a state that some folks think of as a country all its own. Do you think of yourself as a Texan? What of your Texas childhood shades your writing, if anything?

You can’t stop being a Texan, much as I sometimes want to when I hear of the political insanity down there. The only tolerable place I know of in Texas is Austin, which many Texans themselves call “The People’s Republic of Austin.” I got out of the place right after graduation from high school, and have scarcely been back since. I don’t think it has much to do with my writing, except the Cajun influence I had when growing up in the southwest corner of Texas, close to the Louisiana coast, inspired two of the main characters in my semi-juvenile books starting with Red Thunder. Many of my classmates were Cajun.

In what ways—artistically, personally, politically, etc.—are you still a hippie? And in what ways have you left that part of your life behind?

I’m obviously not still living in crash pads in Los Angeles or the Haight-Ashbury, and not doing any drugs, not even grass, because I seem to be allergic to it. (Something that’s saved me a lot of money over the years.) I’m still anti-war, anti-pig-capitalist (I am a capitalist, but not a greedy, cheating one), and in favor of tolerance as much as humanly possible. I never got into the loonier aspects of hippiedom, so that is still the same. I’m still and always will be an atheist unless Jesus shows up and changes my mind.

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: Practicing Dissatisfaction

Daniel Abraham

I graduated from college with a BS in Biology. That’s not what you’d call a terminal degree, and the job opportunities that opened before me weren’t exactly in my field of study. I was engaged to a lovely woman who had plans to travel, and so it followed that I did too. In the meantime, though, I needed a job. Not a career, but something I could do to get the bills paid. And, if possible, I wanted something that was fun.

Borders Books & Music had a fair-sized store not far from me, and, being the sort of person I am, I’d spent a fair amount of leisure time there, browsing and drinking coffee and listening to whatever CDs the music staff put over the store system. I applied there, I got the job, and within I’d say a month I didn’t go there for fun anymore. The office politics, the corporate policy, the constantly changing schedules, and the exposure to the public changed my experience. I started having nightmares about faceless people coming up to me and saying, “Yeah, I’m looking for this book?”

The place I’d previously gone to play and relax and enjoy myself had become something else. It became a job. The tradeoff was they paid me. And I got to borrow books. And I got a little store credit every month. Honestly, apart from the office politics, it wasn’t that bad a gig.

One of the unexpected benefits was that, at that time and in the brick-and-mortar book industry, the pressure of the paid-for endcap hadn’t come completely to bear. In my assigned sections, I got to pick which books got the special display. I got to put up staff recommendations with my name on them. Even better, I got to see how much my recommendation made a difference. There was one particular book—The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Elliot Aaronson and Anthony R. Pratkanis—that had barely sold at all until I faced it out and put a recommendation by it. Then we sold five to six copies a month, which might also have been example of the subject.

The world of book retailing is a different place now. The books that get faced out and recommended in the big chain stores are more a reflection of marketing budget. The Borders that I used to work at is an empty building in a dead shopping mall, waiting to be renovated and reinvented, or else knocked down. But there’s a whole new culture of recommendations and reviews and discussion that didn’t exist in those dark days before anyone knew what the Internet was. Now we have review blogs. We have Goodreads. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have even made it possible to review the reviews and say whether a particular comment was useful or not. The conversation about what books are worth reading and why is broader and deeper than I could have imagined back when I could recommend a book just because I liked it—and have the privileged position of retail clerk give my opinion weight.

The thing is, I don’t write online book reviews. I signed up for Goodreads, and I get notifications all the time about things my friends have read and what they thought of them. When I get something from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Powell’s, I’ll cruise through the reviews and see what people said—not just about the book, but to one another in the comments about the reviews. But when the time comes to decide how many stars to give something I just finished, I almost never do.

It took me a long time to figure out why I’m so reluctant, but here’s what I’ve come to: The more I practice something, the better I get at it.

Looking back at how I learned to talk about literature, there are three main models that I was taught. First, there were the book reviews that I did in middle school. They weren’t analyzing the story so much as offering evidence that I’d read it. Plot summary was enough, and I’ve read reviews on Amazon and Goodreads—and sometimes in the bigger magazines—that are pretty nearly that. Here is a book; here is what happens in it. I liked it, or I didn’t. Thank you and good night.

Then there were papers, both in high school and college, that were written more or less the classic five-paragraph style. Introduction with a thesis statement, three things about the book that were interesting, and a conclusion. I have a confession to make here. Mrs. Winters, if you’re out there and reading this, look away now. I mastered this form in high school to the point that my final paper in senior honors English was comparing and contrasting two books I had not at that point actually read: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

I had the handouts from class, and it wasn’t hard to thread them together. Both books were concerned with racial issues. Both took place on rivers. One had characters carried by the current, and the other had characters going against it (no doubt symbolic of something). I got an A- for spelling errors.

That kind of paper is most like literary criticism, and the ideal which my 17-year-old self cheerfully betrayed was that by examining things like the symbolism of rivers and race, we become better readers. I’ve read some literary criticism since then that was done right, and it was a pleasure. But for the most part, I don’t see that in the online reviews. It takes time and a depth of understanding that the Internet doesn’t encourage or reward.

No, the best model of online reviews in my experience is the third model: critique.

I’ve done a lot of critiques over the years. The first were in creative writing classes in college, which could kindly be called the blind leading the blind. I’ve been to professional workshops including Clarion West and Rio Hondo. I was in a local critique group for almost a decade with professional writers including Walter Jon Williams, George R. R. Martin, Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, and S. M. Stirling. There are numerous guides on how to give a good critique. The most basic is the “shit sandwich” approach: You say something good about the work, then all the stuff that was crap in the middle, and end with something else good. The most honest was Maureen McHugh’s description of a good critique: “Say something true and useful.” Regardless, the point of a critique is to find fault—often to take a perfectly good story and reread it as many times as I have to in order to find something wrong, then think about how to fix it.

Reviews—useful reviews, professional reviews, good reviews—are most like critiques given after it’s too damn late to fix anything. They aren’t there to help the author do better, but to guide readers toward books they’d like and away from books they wouldn’t. For that, a good reviewer is worth her weight in gold. Reading as a reviewer means keeping an eye toward what’s good and what’s bad. It’s an act of judgment.

Which is to say, it’s practicing dissatisfaction. And like anything we practice, the more we do it, the better we get at it.

My pleasure at being in the bookstore changed once I was doing it professionally. In the same way, my reading changes when I’m thinking about what I’m going to say about a book. It’s already hard enough for me to turn off my critical faculties and read for joy, for pleasure—to read as a reader. I don’t want to be a critic. I want to be an enthusiast. I want to practice loving the books I read and the experience of reading them without looking for how it could have been better. I want to practice forgiving literature its flaws and shortcomings the way I did when I was a kid, before I got sophisticated and analytical.

Readers owe a debt to good reviewers. A mind trained to do that work has made a trade-off, and that sacrifice was made for our benefit. I want to be warned away from lousy books and pointed toward good ones, then I want to fall into the page and just take pleasure in reading. And so, as a rule, I won’t go online and post what I thought of a book. I’ll try not to pick it apart and find its flaws and think about how it could have been done better.

When it comes to reading, I try to be bad at being unsatisfied. That’s something I’m just as happy to leave to the pros.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Six and Counting

Neil Clarke

We have a little news to report this month. First of all, this is our sixth anniversary issue. Thank you for your support over the years. The last six years have been amazing and you’ve helped make that possible. Considering how much Clarkesworld has managed to grow over the years, I’m eager to see what opportunities the next six provide.

Sadly, one of the team won’t be with us for that. Jason Heller, our non-fiction editor, has turned in his resignation and will be leaving us by the end of the year. In his year with us he’s done a lot great things and helped expand our non-fiction offerings. All of us here wish him the best of luck and continued success. In our next issue, I should be able to announce his successor and reveal some of our plans for the year ahead.

Last month, I mentioned that one of my goals is to be able to start paying our staff a real wage. I focused some attention on the importance of our Amazon and Weightless Books esubscriptions, since they are responsible for the bulk of our income. We do have other sources of income, but a few of them were sidelined by complications in my life and other issues. I’m talking about our annual anthology series and the fabled Clarkesworld chapbooks.

I am very pleased to say that the chapbooks are finally back on track. At this moment, a print copy of our January 2012 issue is sitting on my desk. It’s only a proof, but we should be able to start producing final copies of this and other issues later this month. I hope to have at least four or five issues completed in time for the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto (along with some fun new promotional cards). These will be issued unsigned, but we will be making arrangements to have a small number of signed copies available as soon as possible.

The same life issues put the annual Clarkesworld anthology series, Realms, on hold after the second volume. The series restarts with all the stories from our third year under the name Clarkesworld: Year Three. The introduction explains the name change, so I won’t go into it here, but I can say that it should be available in print and ebook format by the end of the year. Volumes four and five will follow quickly in early 2013.

Last month, I encouraged our readers to leave reviews on our Amazon subscription page. Several of you left some very kind words there and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. The time you spent doing that was extremely valuable to us and impacts our visibility on a site that is responsible for sending us a lot of new readers each month.

Thanks again for a wonderful six years. Catch you next month!

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.