(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

E. Catherine Tobler

Close your eyes. As you travel farther away from me, your ship becoming little more than a pinprick of light amid infinite pinpricks of light, I want you to remember me as I was the first time you saw me, in the field. The day I glowed.

All right, it was an interface malfunction, but I still glowed. You told me I had been set on fire, that I was all colors and so seemed white, holy, pure.

How we laughed.

Query: If two interstellar ships leave Point A in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities in opposite directions, at what distance does communication between Ship A and Ship B break down?

As first meetings go, it wasn’t terrible.

When you’re assigned a new partner, you never know how you’ll mesh. In this business, it usually doesn’t matter. We are expendable and know that from the outset. What matters are the multitrillion dollar cargoes of compressed titanium, the ships, the Manifest Destiny. The fallibility of machines in the vastness of deep space means bringing a human to tend them, to coddle when needed. Assigning one crewmember per ship keeps costs down. Keeps the murders down, too. The company took its time in understanding this. They tried multiple configurations: complete crews with chains of command; pairs; loners.

The traditional chains of command became problematic almost from the outset, crews slaughtering each other over money and station when they realized both were all they would have in the deep black. Sometimes it went quickly: the men killed each other over the women, the women killed each other over the men. When the wreckage of the Prospero was finally recovered, the company required only two more similar incidents to convince themselves.

Launched-as-pairs had more success in the early years, but the fucking ruined everything. Regardless of sexual orientations, interests, configurations, it always came to fucking. Two humans, confined in an enclosed space for more years than one can rightly imagine when the contracts are signed, create an immense amount of havoc, destruction, ejaculate, and blood.

Providing crewmembers with other means of relief for such long voyages was deemed outside the company’s scope, if lacing MREs with birth control and controlling one’s carry-on luggage was not. Even employing homophobes in an effort to avoid such base desires did not have the desired outcome. They fucked, killed their partner, and then went insane as the ship drifted untended. One can presume with half a dozen such reported incidents, there were three to five times more that number.

The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally-invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

Response: “If” is a terrible word. When two interstellar ships leave Point A. There is no if involved, for the ships do leave, in the same instant, travelling at identical velocities. Ship A heads toward illusory west. Ship B heads into illusory east. Point A becomes the anchor around which all other stars move, a point where you can calculate all those distances you love so well.

At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce. But even voice becomes too heavy in the deep black, so thought and emotion are condensed into communiques, nearly old fashioned letters which speak perhaps twice as well as any VR interface might. They are slow, but allow for harder truths. In the end, there will be only silence, even as the ships whisper via radio, via small Bracewell probes launched into the black in an attempt to extend communication range. Ships don’t care how long a thing takes. Neither do loners. Usually.

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake.”

They were the first words I spoke to you as I waited for your avatar to log in to the virtual environment. The first place I conjured for you was that field, empty but for the grass and the sky. Earth blues and greens, mid-summer, northern hemisphere. It could have been anywhere of course. I chose these intentionally. Not to ground you in something familiar, but to show you something familiar to me.

“Sometimes the avatar takes a while to come online.”

I could see your name on my console, small and green and hovering in the lower left. You weren’t a known entity to me then, but Company-approved nonetheless and green-lighted. I walked a slow circle as I waited, hands outstretched to brush the scentless white blooms that reached up through the grass. I couldn’t feel the grass either, of course, but memory filled those blanks easily enough. Drought grass stubble, my palms would itch. The grass moved in a slow wave even though there was no wind. If I concentrated elsewhere, the scent of coffee intruded, so I didn’t.

You coalesced from copper clouds. Tall, though not as tall as you would become. Pale, but not so pale yet, either. I stopped pacing and curled toes into grass that did not exist. “I don’t mean to get you out of bed.” Of course, I did; the Company required such things. “Can you confirm the distance?”

Your voice cracked as it came online—I blamed the interface even then, because your voice was only ever even from this moment on. “Eleven,” you said, and it seemed as though you had not spoken for a very long time. “Eleven point two AU.”

“And the other?” My hands paused in the grass even as yours reached for it. “Earth?” How far were we at this point? Was your ship processing data as it should? Our numbers should match, they should always match.

It happened then, that burst in the interface and your eyes went wide. I thought I could see my reflection in your eyes (you chose blue, so did I)—the way I seemed to glow as if lit from within, but nothing inside me would ever burn so bright.

You told me I had been set on fire, and your hands reached from the grass, toward me. I did not move, knowing there might be a touch, avatar against avatar, but I would not feel it. All colors you said and looked as though you were warming your hands against a campfire. “Holy, pure.”

We laughed, maybe the first thing we did in unison. We both knew it for a lie, considering where we were and who we must be. Loners.

“Can you confirm the distance?”

Your head came up, eyes taking in the landscape beyond me. Your hands slid into your pockets that formed at the mere idea of pockets crossing your mind, a place to put your hands so they would not enfold me. Your avatar flared with light then, a pulse of blue as the interface crackled.

“Two hundred seventy-seven thousand—”

Our minds have trouble comprehending such distances. The system compensates, makes it momentarily bearable. I drew up a chart between us, a familiar thing to anyone schooled in astronavigation (we both were). My fingers pulled gleaming lines like neon spaghetti from apparent nothingness, to illuminate the distance from here to there, but not back again.

“ . . . six hundred AU,” you finished. How could we be so far away from Earth?

“Sleep now,” I said, and erased the hovering lines with a sweep of my hand. You would be tired. It was hard coming out of hypersleep—in the latter days and when ships flew with full crews, it was the point when a good percentage of shipboard deaths occurred, crew disoriented and wary of everything. A body needed time. A body needed distance.

“Online in another two hours for recalibration.”

Query: Do east and west exist in space? North and south?

You will think your ship is haunted; the Company tells us it is a commonplace belief, so includes this amusing anecdote in all briefings. You always laugh, until you sign the contract, find yourself on board and in the depth of space, and start to hear things. Most cities are haunted and as your ship is a city for one, so too does it hold its ghosts. You bring them on board with you—eidolons, fears, illusory things that should be beyond people of our training and education. Still, Einar murmurs.

Einar is more like a city than not, despite its population concerns. A vast array of universe-traversing equipment rises around your room as it does mine, a one-room studio which looks much like the spaces we occupied before the Company offered its contract. Beyond the borders of tidy, automated kitchens and icon-laden desks, is a window that surveys the labyrinthine network of power conduits and production stations. Stations only you will use, but not today. In the distance, a vacuum door lit overhead with a perfectly white LED sign which reads “Cargo Observation.”

You won’t like this door, no one does. It will come to be your least favorite part of the ship. You can cross the pleasantly padded deckplate as you want, jog through the maintenance corridors to clear your mind, but the door you will avoid. It is the starkest reminder that you are somewhere else, somewhere far from home. Such reminders are reason enough to keep the window’s opacity set to maximum, preserving the room’s Terran simplicity. Your desk is orderly, fingerprints erased almost as they are left. Beyond this space, the conduits and especially the door, will fade.

Not that you see them often. Any corridor can be transformed with the brush of a hand, any thought overlaying the great gerbil maze with varying degrees of falsehood. Atmosphere condensers become the trees of Central Park in early fall, with customizable time-of-day and alterable crowd density controls. Neat stacks of cargo crates make for lovely park benches and with one simple command, squirrels will always come for the acorns you never hold.

The surreality of the corridors have hidden the haunting for some time, daunted your belief. The Company told you, after all, that you would hear things on occasion. The Company was diligent enough to train you on the sadly predictable failures of the human mind during long periods of isolation. Is it worse or better then, time spent together? It’s hard to say, because while it eases one ache, it intensifies others. We may come to think the sounds are us, moving ever closer to each other, stumbling in dark corridors as we reach for each other’s light, even though we know this is improbable. We occupy identical ships, with identical cargoes, heading in opposite directions.

It was certainly one of the squirrels. You think you hear a metallic bang, like a foot stubbed somewhere deep in the corridors. The squirrel that was not there never turned, merrily eating the acorn that was not there, that had never been in your hand, and surely didn’t respond when you asked, “Did you hear that?”

A proper New York squirrel always turns at the first shock of sound, gone to the treetops after a noise like that. Street animals know best that cruelties always awaited the careless in a city. Even Einar. Perhaps especially so.

Response: You will come to understand that north, south, east, or west do not exist within in the limitless black of space. Compass points lose merit where there is no center from which to reach. There is no pole, no equator. Compass points can be manufactured as one manufactures anything. From the requirements of one’s mind, anything might spring.

Begin at any stable point—a galaxy, a planet—understanding that stability is also a myth, for everything is in constant motion (see: Newton, 1687; Kepler, 1609). Visible objects are useful, but understand that visibility is likewise a myth. Light requires time to travel its distances, so what you see is no longer what exists. Galactic equator, grids infinitesimally divisible, you limit yourself with four directions.

My field, your field. They come to be one and the same, though more often than not we choose my field with its long grasses and blue sky. You say you feel like an intruder here. You like that feeling and I come to like having you here. I know I can always turn the interface off if I need to be alone, but less and less do I find myself needing that. We stay longer every time. If the connection drops, we come back a moment later, right where we were before as if never gone. Even after breaking for sleep, we come back like that. Picking up a never-ending conversation.

There is a couch in the field today, red and velvet and if we close our eyes—our real eyes and not our virtual eyes—we can almost feel it. I like it best when it’s brushed backwards. When I look at your hands splayed across the fabric, I watch how you stroke it backwards, too. Against the soft grain, so the light sheen turns to dark matte. My cheek rests against your cheek and if I close my eyes I can feel that connection, too.

I can’t remember how it happened—it’s too far gone now and I could calculate the AU, but I don’t. I can’t remember how talk of charts and distances and shipwide pressures turned into talk of family, of things we had and would never have. We were loners—we had forgone marriage and children, we had never formed the bonds so many others do. I always wondered what that would be like, to find someone you could tolerate for such a long journey. There were near misses for you and me both, the glance of an asteroid off the port side, but no impact, no hard strike.

There was an asteroid, you say. Or rather, a meteor. All right, a micrometeor shower. Like rain on the hull. Did the ship incur damage? No, nothing like that. No shield fluctuation, no hull breach. It’s an explanation of a sound you can’t otherwise explain: the squirrel hadn’t been there, after all, and part of your rational mind knows this. It’s an explanation of a thing you can’t otherwise understand: one body moving through another, each with a different destination. I picture our ships, moving ever farther apart as they close in on their destinations.

Just interplanetary dust, you say. If you could wipe the ship’s windows clean, you would.

Query: What about the aliens?

I become well schooled in conversations, hearing you even when you aren’t there to reply. Is it that I know you so well by this point, or is it that you remain elusive and blank-slate, so any reply from my own mind will slot where your own would go? Is it that I am a similar slate, empty until you arrive with your words? You’re more distant now and I shouldn’t feel it, but I do. I mark the distance in logs, charts, tables. Soon, we will pass beyond all communication.

I wake in the night feeling hands on me. Insistent. These hands prove that the shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that’s never the best route to take. Thumbs knead into flesh, pull open, feast. Canvas beneath fingers, painted in firm strokes. I wake, heavy with blood, startled it hasn’t boiled through my skin, left me in a puddle. I am alone, I should be beyond this point. Should never have come to this point.

The deck is solid beneath my feet when I run. Running gives me a focus, sets those concocted hands at a firm distance if only for a while. What I can reach of the corridors in four looping circuits amounts to ten kilometers. Just over six miles of corridors that can look like anything I want them to. I could run mountain trails, trees bleeding from gold to orange and back again. There could be birdsong, a breeze to cool the sweat on my skin, but there is only the black anthracite luster of the corridors I have come to prefer. I don’t look at the door with its LED lights.

I’m moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination. The cargo is quiet; compressed titanium never fusses, only rests in its countless cases (one million, four hundred thirty thousand—it’s my job to count the countless and that number is almost the distance from Saturn to Sol, almost).

Did you hear that?

I ask you, even though you are not there. But there is a thump before the machine whir swallows any other sound.

An emphatic no.

Response: Everyone asks about aliens. There is a clause in the Company contract about that too, about the distances involved—distances which you are about to experience should you agree to Company terms and sign your life away. Yes, alien life probably exists in the deep black, but these distances, the Company says, make any extraterrestrial contact unlikely.

Given the number of galaxies, the number of stars within those galaxies, the number of stars which support planetary systems, to presume life doesn’t exist somewhere is foolish, but you will likely not encounter it. Consider how difficult it is to haul the cargo you’re about to haul. Consider the distance involved, the communication depravation you are about to endure.

Of course, there are protocols one should follow, if the unlikely proves likely and one is not immediately killed or fucked or fucked to death. These are detailed in contract subsections which no one reads.

(A foolish presumption perhaps, but what if true? What if there’s a reason for all the silence? What if there is simply no one else? No one wants to dwell on that. Not even loners.)

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake. Don’t get out of bed.”

If you are like me, and surely over these past months we have established that you are and I am, and we are—then you are awake most hours, even if in bed. Time ceases to matter really. The ship keeps time, but we don’t always follow along. In space, it’s always night beyond the windows, no matter the glow that fills the corridors.

My voice probably crackles and spits, fat dripping into a fire, echoing in reverse at times the way yours does now. I’m getting farther away. This message will be delayed—is it three months now? I could calculate it, but I don’t.

I can hear you say it’s fine and I picture you sitting bolt upright in bed, because it’s the way I came to your last message. It didn’t matter—it was fine—whenever the words came, whenever you came. It was the turning of one body into another in the tangle of the bed sheets, across countless (no) astronomical miles. It was that voice, welcome at any hour, because it managed to be a bridge in the distance we believed we needed. Distance from everything else, so we could find each other here. Deep impact.

Your room is wholly dark but for the hologram of me—the windows don’t let the white LEDs bleed through, there is no door, only this warm darkness that crackles with me. It won’t be bright, this hologram; distance precludes that now. Space tears at the message in transit. You quickly learn to gauge how close someone is to you by how much of them has been ravaged away. Next time, it will be only voice, and after that— I imagine the way you study me, hands reaching for sheets the way they once reached for field grass, the way they once reached for me and maybe still do. If you are anything like me.

Much like the last message you sent me, it doesn’t matter what I say. I tell you about the ship, I tell you about my days, which are quiet and filled with running. There are books to read, of course; so many books, carried as far as they’ve ever been carried. There is the occasional squirrel—you taught me how foolish they are and they aren’t there at all, but I’ve named them all, even though they are all the same, the same as every leaf that falls loose from Central Park’s autumn canvas. I erase every soul in the park with the slide of one finger, but for one figure I keep distant and shadowed with your name. The ship is good, the cargo is complacent, and I’ve not been killed, fucked, or fucked to death by aliens.

Status quo. Query: How are you?

You don’t dream, so I tell you all of mine, as if you will somehow understand and acquire the ability through me. Improbable, I think, if I cannot even press my hand to your hand, but I keep telling you what happens when I appear to be asleep. I dream about that door.

Cargo Observation. Why do crates (one million, four hundred thirty thousand) of compressed titanium require observation? Were these ships used for something else before we hauled such trouble-free cargo? I don’t know, but in the dream I go to that door and press my hand against its flat surface. It’s as cold as anything you can imagine—we are in the depths of space, we know cold and can imagine plenty. The door doesn’t so much open as it disappears and I’m not sure what I expect to find on the other side, but it isn’t the familiar anthracite corridors I encounter.

I am running then, moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination, but my destination is not the command module—not mine, because this one is just that much different. It’s cleaner, colder, and it has a scent of salt. Of another body. Aliens, I think, and for a moment panic wells up, but then— Then.

You stride through the access hatch and your rough palm notches against mine and if I could teach you how to dream it would be in this moment, when we know the warmth of each other’s fingers in the dead cold of space. It would be when we realize that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, that we have been travelling on this vessel together all the while. You were only ever through a doorway and I was only ever through a doorway, and perhaps this is noted in the Company contract—perhaps we agreed to it, felt a wariness for the door because of strings attached, because if we knew we were not alone—

Not loners at all. And we know what happens to not-loners, so my hand slides from yours and we step back, as if performing a dance, and there is a hard flicker—a burst of energy through the interface, and your pale face illuminates, as bright as the sun we have not seen in years, and you tell me I’m glowing, I’m glowing.

Close your eyes. I want you to remember me this way.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Aquatica

Maggie Clark

When Host laughed, her esca wriggled, and the gills behind her pectoral fins vented hard enough to stir up the silt. Organ tumbled in the waste-stream’s wake, but kept one tiny black eye fixed on her bobbing, bioluminescent beacon—the first he had seen in six turns of the current along the foreign reef.

“I almost ate you, little one,” said Host. “Are you not too big to be wandering around on your lonesome? Does your gut not grow stunted, your digestion weak? Come, latch on—there is always room for one more.”

Organ’s gaze darted about the glow of her scattered bone spikes. Sure enough, two others were already fused to Host’s underside—the first recent enough that one dull eye still gazed back; the other reduced to little more than his seed, a dangling pair of gonads with no speech, no sight, no mind. In his hunger, Organ felt a muscle-cramping urgency to bite into Host’s skin. The proximity of her pheromones did not help.

“No, thank you,” said Organ, faintly, as he began to swim away. “I’m fine.”

Host at first said nothing, but when even the most furious pumping of his caudal fin brought no relief from her scent, Organ knew he was being followed. He could only keep up such a pace for so long, though, and in his exhaustion eventually dropped close to the silt, picking feebly at motes of dubious sustenance. Her long, sharp teeth soon lit the way.

“You will die out here, little one.”

Organ felt grains of sand sit poorly in his gullet—the beginning, he knew, of that very end, unless a serpent sensed him sooner, or one of the scuttling shelled creatures with long, snapping pincers that lurked in the crevices of rocks. He turned an eye Host’s way and worked the shiver of his body-length as if to say—“And I will die with you as well.”

But Host did not snap him up at once, as for a moment Organ feared she would. He knew her kind to be fiercely competitive among its own—one Host even feeding off another’s drifting egg sacks when territory was at stake—but whether the protectiveness he watched them extend to others of his kind would survive a refusal to merge as firm as his, he had no way of knowing for sure. The size difference alone gave him to fear the worst.

“But you will live, too, will you not?” said Host instead. “I will carry you into the next generation and your vitality will not go to waste.”

Organ shook with weak amusement, enough to make him brave. “Come now,” he said. “I have heard your kind sing greater virtues of the merge than that. Why, some promise knowledge far beyond what you say our minds can manage on their own—all of Host-kind’s wisdom coursing through our blood streams, if only we would take a bite! Still others invite us to ride with them, to witness distant wonders not one of us could ever visit on his own. Never mind that we will have ceased to be ourselves by the time we arrived.”

Host eyed him awhile, her long maw twitching just inches over the murk. “Would you rather I promised you such things? Told you I can still hear the other two? That their bodies may move less and less of their own volition, but inside me, their thoughts remain just as strong—or, no, even stronger—as when they first felt the calling to my flesh?”

“No.” Organ paused to choose his words carefully, conscious of how tremulous and small his breathing and body movements now seemed beside her sturdy boom, the heavier gestures of her fins. “But I am surprised that you do not lie like the rest. So many do.”

Host laughed again, her whole spine twisting in the act. Still her movements did not seem to Organ hostile. “We are not all of us users by intention, little one,” said Host. “By design, perhaps, but—come now, surely you understand. This has always been the way of things. What is to be gained by running from it? From dying alone, from hunger or predation? From giving nothing back to the circle of life that gave you life at all?”

Organ’s small pucker of a mouth opened and then closed. His gills flared but took little in. What life? he thought but dared not ask, What life have I been given? “Oh, never mind,” he said, and started down the reef again. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“No, please—try me,” said Host, easily keeping pace. Organ struggled to keep her scent from overwhelming all his other thoughts.

“It’s something I heard once, in the sweet waters of my nursery,” he said after a while, and at first only to distract himself from his hunger and her pheromones. “I heard it from the Hosts who lined the edges of the stream where I was born and reared. The ones who guarded us from all other dangers as we matured.”

“I have not done that good work yet myself,” said Host, watching Organ closely with one great big eye. “But I hope to give rest to an egg sack soon, and see it fully hatched and grown. Such talk there is, too, among the elders at the nursery!”

“Ours spoke of a very special stream,” said Organ. “A stream powerful enough to melt the solid above us, just as it comes from melted solids deep below.”

“Why, little one!” said Host. “What a giant notion for so small a creature! I had no idea your kind could hunger for such big bites.”

Organ fixed one eye coldly on her and burst ahead—if only for a few moments, before his weakness again took hold.

“Now, now,” said Host, easing up beside him. “I meant nothing by it. So you want to go to the place where the earth struggles to cut a hole in the sky? And you think you can make it all on your own, before the rest of you shuts down?”

Organ turned from the seeming incredulity in Host’s stare. “I aim to try,” he said. “It’s my lifetime, is it not?”

“You might be the strangest of your kind I’ve ever known,” said Host. Organ saw himself reflected as the tiniest fleck in her large, dark eye. “Mind if I follow you for a while?”

“If I said I did, would you leave me alone?”

Host laughed again—and this time, the violent wriggle of her esca caught the notice of another, hapless creature, no doubt thinking that it, in fact, was on course for a juicy meal. Instead, the instant it seized upon Host’s lure, Host’s jaw snapped shut and her prey shook violently in the grip of her teeth until at last it fell still.

“No,” said Host, after she had swallowed the bulk of soft-bellied creature. “I suppose not. But—there are advantages, no?”

Organ’s insides knotted at the merest whiff of a tendril of flesh still hooked about one of Host’s jagged, gleaming teeth. With great reluctance, but greater hunger, he darted in, nibbled a bit off the end, then darted well ahead to swallow. Host for her part made no smug comment, while the warmth of the meat moved easily, at least, through Organ’s aching gullet—and seemed to take with it the remainder of the sand. Still he sensed a weight lodged inside him, deep and raw: a little sac just below the ridge of his cheek, which pressed at him with more urgency now than he had ever felt before.

They swam at the great height of the reef’s crest for two more changes of the current—Organ working his fins routinely to exhaustion; Host swimming idly, sometimes barely propelling herself forward, by his side. For all the brightness of her esca, her spikes, and her teeth, her massive body cast a fearful shadow upon the silt, and for the first time since Organ had set out from his nursery, he did not sense imminent predation in the darkness all around. For a long while in their travels, Organ spoke very little, and Host even less—except when she posed the inevitable question, asking him his reason for a voyage that would still end at best in a lonely death.

“Because I want to know why I am here,” said Organ once, while resting.

“But that’s easy—to propagate, of course.”

“Why, though? To what end?”

Host studied him with one great black eye. “The stories among your kind are not enough, little one? All those Organ-songs about the great circularity of all being?”

“And what does your kind know of those?”

“Much,” was all Host would say. Organ felt too much resentment for her age, and the age of all Hosts, to ask for more.

Organ recalled the first time he had seen her kind, back when he and the other eggs from his clutch were still indistinguishable from one another—each just two big dull eyes and a whipping tail, blindly ravenous and desperately swimming towards a sweetness they could not yet name. There had been so little time to get his bearings when the long sheet of eggs that held him scattered, but one eye through the lens of his soft-shelled cradle fixed just the same on the flash of glowing teeth that had brought such swift and indifferent ruin to his kin: the Host on territorial rampage through waters just beyond the safety of the nursery. Then his own egg sac tore for all his frantic writhing, and when he was free of it his first sensation of the world at large was a scent so rich it immediately deadened the whole of his olfactory nerve. Instinct alone kept him moving until that central sight returned—of fear, of salt, of kindred and of stranger flesh, and finally of the distant call of food.

At the bottom of an eddy in the lushly glowing nursery, an older member of Organ’s kind lay half-buried in the sand, his dorsal sheared and his pectorals torn clean off: a far less fortunate victim of another Host’s attack on floating, unborn young. The richness of the water allowed him sustenance enough to meet his death more slowly—though even then, without the Hosts forever circling the perimeter, a scuttling hard-shell would have made quick work of him. For a time, though, he still could gape and whisper at the new arrivals gathered all around him—teaching them how the currents kept to patterns that would mark the passage of their youth; how all earth’s creatures lived in a great, round melt in an otherwise frozen universe; how brief their lives would be, and how that brevity made them strong though most were fated to be small.

“You give of your whole selves to the future,” said the old one, wheezing. “No Host can say the same. Pity them, Organs! Pity their long misery—far longer than my own—for they can never return in full to the eggs that made them. They lay the nests that we have seeded, and then move on. Never will they find such rest as we who will be reborn.”

Within eight currents, the few Hosts from Organ’s clutch had already grown far larger than their kin, and they started to swim in more exclusive ranks according to the size range of their glowing teeth and spikes. For them, the old Organ’s fading speeches proved of only passing interest; their eyes were now fixed on the twisting bodies of older Hosts, telling far older stories up above.

The rest in turn were starting to feel a hunger that the sweet water alone would no longer sate. After the old one had ceased to gape and suck breath in the sand beneath them, the first of Organ’s kind darted up and out of the eddy, heading straight for one of the long-toothed creatures that lingered so alluringly at the fringes of the stream. For currents now, the rest had watched these strangely kindred giants battle and heard their boastful calls—but the first mistook his aim and struck one in her esca. His death, at least, was swift.

One current later, others driven wild by their sense of smell forayed up and out, this time with greater success—the Hosts’ bellies beginning to swell with tiny new appendages; up to a dozen fresh mouths forever fused into their skin. Organ smelled the lurking Hosts just as powerfully as his brothers, but the giants’ gleaming teeth still brought to mind the terror of his first memory, and by holding back a little while he began to bear witness to the changes swiftly set upon his kin. The heavy silences where their mouths once stirred, their fins once moved. The useless folds where their eyes once lived.

A new Host arrived soon after, giving rest to a fresh sheet of eggs that Organ soon spied floating in the depths about the nursery, and she shared with the other Hosts what she had heard and seen along a distant, sandy stretch not twelve whole currents out. There, she said, a warm stream was projecting itself higher into the biting chill of the solid sky than any she had seen before; and a matching, piercing whine was coming from the solids of the sky like it was wounded, or maybe fighting back.

Organ looked to the clutch of new eggs drifting in the distance, far above the shallows of his nursery, and wondered then if they were not all trapped inside a greater egg. If all that was needed to escape his brothers’ fate was another violent wriggle—a desperate bursting out before still larger teeth and bony spikes came crashing in. Or perhaps the whine this Host had heard was another kind of seed? Perhaps the whole of this place had not yet been fertilized, let alone deposited near lands where the young within would further grow?

Organ had some sense of his chances when he swam up and out from the eddy just as the next batch of frantic young came pouring in, but currents would pass before he realized how fortunate his size had been in at least one regard—for in the midst of one of their heated tussles, the giant, sharp-toothed Hosts had completely failed to see him darting past. And though Organ swam eye-to-eye past more than one of his older, atrophying brothers, not one was in any position anymore to cry out on the Hosts’ behalf.

Organ woke with no recollection of having first fallen into the daze that often took him as he swam—let alone of Host scooping him into the tangle of her bony spines, where his weakening body had further rested while she swam. Even after regaining most of his alertness, Organ still reeled from what extraordinary images had just wended through his mind—of swimming endlessly in gaping mouths; of being trapped forever in blood streams larger than whole reefs. He trembled then, and in trembling realized Host’s skin was so close now that Organ’s whole body ached for want of pressing up against hers, and of letting that most natural of processes begin.

“Where—” he said.

“We’re close now, little one,” said Host. “Save your strength.”

But through the inky haze of his mind, Organ saw illumined a fact that would not commend his little body to further rest. “Why are you helping me?” he said. “What does my journey matter to you? You, who will live for all of my forever, and the forevers of all my brothers, and the forevers of all their kindred offspring besides?”

“Oh, little one,” said Host. “You think the world no less full of questions for we who swim so much longer in it? We who watch your kind give yourselves unthinkingly up to us—again and again? We who have as our ultimate duty your protection as younglings, and then the preservation and good use of your seed after you have latched and aged away?”

Organ leaned against Host’s bone spikes, which twisted steadily with every flick of her caudal fin—itself four times the size of him.

“Do you think there are other melts out there?” said Organ. “And streams so strong and hot they can run from one great melt of a world to the next?”

“The way I sense tell of it,” said Host, “our melt was made by a density of solids that could not sustain itself forever. Heat formed from the friction, the unfathomable pressure of so much solid, and lo! Our world was formed—a hot melt with a solid skin cast over it, over which a cooler melt was made possible by constant venting of the hotter melt’s excess. So do I think all this friction, all this density singular in the vast solid of the universe? No—it cannot be. There must be pockets just as dense out there—solids that have had to melt just like ours, and in melting filled themselves with creatures far beyond our wildest imaginings.”

Organ felt a feeble gladness come upon him. “I’ve never known a Host to be a dreamer,” he said. “I hardly thought you had need of dreams, when you already had so much else. Our whole lives—mine and my brothers—bleeding out to greaten yours.”

Host was silent for a long moment. “Soon you will have to decide, little one, whether or not to add yourself to that long line of givers, or die a dreamer out here instead.”

“I have already decided,” said Organ, and he struggled to lift himself from the twisting skin of Host’s tremendous back. “I want to see where the waste-stream from the melt below pierces the solids up on high. I want to hear the screaming of the sky.”

“As you wish,” said Host. “We’ll be there soon enough.”

And sure enough, there were few ridges left before they saw the great hot plume rising from an outcropping in the earth, and felt the warmth of their surroundings rising, and tasted a richer spread of metals than any Organ had experienced before. Nor were these new sensations altogether pleasant in his condition, for as the duo moved now his skin felt a shifty stranger upon him, and his bowels seized whenever he made any attempt to swim.

“Higher,” said Organ, faintly. “Please—I want to go—”

Host swam them up—up higher than Organ now knew he would ever have been capable of going on his own. The surrounding warmth abated as they neared the frosty impasse of the solid sky, but up close he could still see the deep, rounded indent the hot waste-stream of the earth’s gills was leaving in its wake. He could sense, too, a rumble unlike any he had ever heard before—and as the other Host had said, it did indeed seem to be coming from inside the wounded sky. Intensifying, even, as if the sky’s indignation were getting worse with every passing moment that the heat of the deeper melt was set upon it.

“Extraordinary,” said Host. She was careful to avoid the stream directly, and took her time around the whole of the phenomenon—Organ struggling not to drowse or daze as he scanned the whole of the stream for that greater and sustaining truth he had hoped might be lurking in its vicinity.

“Well?” said Host at last. The outrage of the sky seemed to be reaching a deafening zenith, and she dropped down a ways as if to better sense him speak.

Organ’s first thought was of denial when he found that he could not answer—nor could he even lift his mouth from the heat and richness of Host’s skin. Then shame flooded him as he realized what had happened; he tugged and tugged but could not tear himself from Host’s body now that a little sac within his gullet had loosed its holdings, which in turn had swiftly risen to consume his mouth and meld the surviving pulp to similar upon her flesh. It took Host a few moments longer to register what had happened: what Organ’s sluggish, worn-out body had done against his greater will.

“Oh, little one,” said Host. “I am sorry.”

There was fresh blood-warmth pumping through him, though—enough, for the moment, to restore his vision and give strength back to all other, failing senses. Enough for him to bear witness, while stuck astride Host’s backside, to the sudden shattering of the sky that followed, and the bright light that poured soon after through it. As Host scrambled to evade all the tumbling debris, Organ stared with one fiercely gleaming eye at the long and rigid esca emerging from the hole and sweeping its glow over the surrounding murk. Behind it appeared a hard-shelled creature with lines much smoother and much straighter than Organ had known to exist on any reef, or in the crevices of any rock. He could hardly comprehend at first the sight of this new creature’s one great, dark eye, which dwarfed even Host’s massive body within its glossy lens.

Host in turn did not move—as frozen, then, as the sky from which this hard-shelled entity had just descended. Struck silent, perhaps, by the sheer novelty of its domineering size. But after a moment, Organ knew just what to do—even though he could no longer speak, and even though he was thirty-times too small against Host’s side, and thirty-times more against the new arrival. For all that it was worth, Organ fixed his little black eye upon the giant approaching them with its toothless maw outstretched, and wriggled the whole of his body as if to free itself from the expansive egg of his first and fatal world.

Hello, said some of his last free movements to the queer, dark seed from yonder. Hello hello hello!

About the Author

Maggie Clark is a doctoral student of English Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, where her work with the literary analysis of scientific non-fiction amply complements her passion for speculative fiction. Her science fiction has been published to date in Lightspeed and Daily SF, and her first scifi short story, “Saying the Names,” won a 2011 Parsec Award.

Everything Must Go

Brooke Wonders

Split-level ranch-style home features a spacious and private fenced backyard with a covered deck and small dog run.

The blue-gray house at 1414 Linden Dr. is afraid of the dark. The foreclosure crisis hit its neighborhood hard, and in house after house, lights wink out and never turn back on. The house at 1414 waits for new families to move in, and sometimes they do, but more often than not the owners abandon their property. Linden Drive grows increasingly desolate, and 1414 clings to the warmth and safety of its inhabitants, sure that it is too well-loved to be left behind.

Its family owns a dog, an ancient mutt with a gray-frosted muzzle who spends most of his time in the backyard, sprawled on his side in the brown grass. The house has long admired the diligence with which the mutt defends its home. When neighbors pass by with their own dogs, Lucky drags himself over to the gate connecting his run to the front yard and lets loose a fit of barking. But one morning in late summer, a man with two collies strolls past, and Lucky doesn’t bark.

Two thick branches of English ivy pull away from 1414’s exterior and wend their way around the corpse. The rusted hinges of its cellar-door croon a lullaby of creaks and whines as they gape wide to receive Lucky. The house pulls the vine-choked body deep inside its walls. Tucked between sheets of plaster and insulation, the dog mortifies; soon the basement reeks of decay. Upstairs, a girl mourns her lost pet.

East-facing bedroom catches morning light, a bonus in wintertime.

The daughter at fourteen is a folded-up girl of elbows, knobby knees and angles a which-way. She loves origami, late into every night creasing out birds of paradise, pagodas, sea horses, and lotuses that trip from her fingertips. From her ceiling hang a thousand cranes it took her months to fold, multicolored and hopeful, made of wrapping paper, construction paper, butcher paper, wax paper, glitter paper, natural-wood-pulp paper. Origami paper proper she treasures, hoards like allowance money or dragon’s gold. The house thinks of the folded-up girl as Paper, and loves her.

Corner bedroom features windows on two sides. Bright and airy!

The son is growing wings. They first appear after his thirteenth birthday party, when his mother burns the cake and then locks herself in the bathroom while his father sits alone in the garage, drinking whiskey and building birdhouses out of scrap. The son packs a suitcase and explains his plans to Paper: he’ll escape out his bedroom window, run away to join the circus. His sister talks him out of it, to the house’s relief. The boy’s wings begin as nubbins protruding from each shoulder blade that ache and ache as he grows. By seventeen, nubbins have grown into a skeletal wing-structure, hollow bones covered in tufted feathers and long pinions, though he cannot yet lift himself off the ground. The house thinks of the winged boy as Bird, and loves him.

Third bedroom, slightly smaller—use it for storage, or turn it into baby’s first bedroom.

Their mother has her own workspace wherein she fashions elaborate textile art from found objects, fabric, and yarn. Lately, though, the house has noted a desperate loneliness threaded through her. Husband at work, kids at school, she fritters away her time following the soaps, crocheting blankets only to unravel them. She ties each member of the family to her via thick silken cords, cords whose color changes depending on her mood: crimson for anger, cerulean for disappointment, jet for possessiveness, silver for regret. The house lets these strings tangle throughout the hallways, following the arcing filaments from room to room. The house tries to warm to her, but she’s metal-cold, her voice scissor-sharp. The house fears her, and calls her Needle.

Two-car garage.

A grease-stained man who smells of slaughter, their father lives in the garage when he doesn’t live at his butcher shop. The house envies him his children’s unconditional love: they crouch at his elbows as he shingles a miniature roof, then fight over who gets to help install his latest creation. A neighborhood’s worth of elaborately finished birdhouses dot the backyard, attracting flocks of cardinals, rooks, and wrens.

But the house knows where the father keeps his skeletons, round glass secrets full of intoxicating oblivion stashed everywhere: in the trunk of the car, in with the New Year’s decorations, beneath the bathroom sink. When the couple’d first moved in, before there were papers or birds between them, he’d kept this secret, and long has the house tracked the ebb and flow of his addiction. It calls him Glass, for the bottles that clink like chains and sing to him from within their hiding places.

Kitchen has no dishwasher but plenty of counter space.

The teens have never seen their parents in the same room at the same time. Needle pours canned green beans and mushroom soup into a casserole dish, then retreats to the pantry just as Glass heads to the fridge for an ice water. Only once he’s wandered back to the garage does she reappear. Though the parents play elaborate hide-and-seek, the walls speak; every night the teens lie awake in their beds and listen to their parents argue.

—The mortgage is too expensive; where can we cut back?

—Do we really need another birdhouse?

—We don’t need more of your wall blankets, that’s for sure.

—It’s not a wall blanket, it’s fiber-art.

—If we can afford your art, why can’t we afford mine?

The house rustles the homemade tapestries that line its walls, drapings heavy with dust and guilt.

Downstairs master bedroom for maximum privacy.

The walls shout louder and louder, the house hating every resonant echo, until the only way the kids can sleep is by pressing palms deep into their ears. As if to compensate for the increase in noise, both parents have begun to fade from view. Their mother flickers in and out like TV static, as if she’s trying to switch to a different channel. Their father’s skin has become glass, behind which amber alcohol roils.

Bird catches his father getting dressed one morning, the flab of Glass’s belly hanging translucent over his belt-buckle. He watches his father remove a fifth of Jack from its sock-drawer hideaway and down a few quick swigs. Through his father’s transparent flesh, Bird can see the liquor slide slow down Glass’s throat until it joins the tawny liquid sloshing waist-high. Tiny waves break against his bellybutton. The immediate difference is imperceptible, but as the days rush by, Bird watches the amber tide rise from bellybutton to chest to clavicle, until Glass has filled himself up nearly to the brim, his eyes shiny as bottle caps.

Carpeted staircase with banister leads down to the lower level.

The house wakes in the middle of the night to a boot kicking through the safety wall of the stairwell landing. It groans through every vertical beam. Glass stands on the stairs, lamplight refracted through him casting whiskey-colored cracks across the house’s interior. Needle’s splayed against the banister, eyes rimmed red with crying, her lip split bloody.

The next morning, Glass spackles over the hole. The house, wounded, shrinks ever smaller. Does your room seem tinier than usual? Paper asks Bird one day. Bird nods, but they’ve gotten older and taller; they aren’t children anymore. The house is grateful for these excuses.

All bedrooms have walk-in closets

Paper folds a dollhouse. The first piece of butcher paper she cuts is massive. It creases down into an eleven-room suburban ranch home identical to her own. Then small squares for all the furnishings. She sets it up like a diorama on top of her chest-of-drawers, back in the deepest recesses of her closet where no one else goes. Its white picket fence spills off into darkness, disappearing behind her winter coats. She folds up father, mother, brother, sister, and stuffs them inside. The house notices that a streak of red mars the mother-doll’s face. Once her parents have gone to bed, Paper steals matches from the pantry and sets the folded father on fire; he crumbles to ash in her metal waste-bin.

Within the hour, Glass slams out the front door. In his wake, a heavy silken thread lies twitching like a coral snake on the lawn, one crimson end severed and fraying. Needle moves methodically from room to room, packing Glass’s belongings into boxes. Gasping cries push past her lips, her sorrow the crackle and shush of a blown speaker, a low rasp on repeat. The house howls wind through its eaves in mourning.

Bird seeks out Paper. Pushing open the door to her bedroom, he finds her sitting inside her closet, folding. She’s trying not to cry, the hitch in each inhale synched in time to her mother. Bird catches Paper’s hands in his to still their darting movements and flutters his wingtips across her fingers. She begins to comb through his feathers in long, even strokes and her breathing steadies long enough for her to confess her crime. Bird assures her that it couldn’t possibly have been her fault, that she had nothing to do with Glass leaving, then helps her dispose of the small pile of new-made origami fathers that litter the floor.

Low ceiling in the living room makes for a cozy living space.

Every piece of furniture stands halved. Of the dining table, only two legs remain, its lacquered surface leaning out over empty space. Half a filament glows dimly within the halved light bulbs inside every light fixture, each under a halved lampshade. The rug is halved, and the refrigerator is definitely halved, as suddenly there’s a lot less food in the house. Glass sends money, and so far they’ve managed to save the house, but Needle struggles to get dinner on the table.

Bird cycles from bedroom to kitchen, twice a day stopping before the half-fridge only to slam it closed in disappointment. The house remembers when it was just a wooden frame, before the contractor had installed its drywall; it imagines Bird must feel something similar: hollowed out and vulnerable.

Paper begins to watch her weight as if she hopes to become parchment, as transparent as her mother. Only the house counts how many times each day Paper locks herself in the bathroom and steps onto the scale. It dislikes the purple veins running so close to the surface of her skin, the curve of her lungs as they contract and expand within her ribcage, her bones visible like an abandoned building exposed to years of bad weather. If Bird notices his sister thinning, he says nothing.

Since Glass left, Bird sleeps on the floor of Paper’s room most nights, and they lie awake talking until all hours, imagining the futures they’ll have when they finally escape. Bird jokes that together they’re a paper bird, one of his sister’s folded cranes but with the power of flight. By their powers combined, they could fly far away from home. His broad wings span the room, a comfort. The house worries that the two teens will be divided next—half a Paper, half a Bird. It vows to keep them safe as houses.

Carpeted upstairs hallway means children can run and play in safety.

Paper grooms her brother’s wings every day, and they grow in strength, though their pristine blackness is occasionally marred by molt. One morning, while finger-combing near his spine, she notices what the house has known for weeks: that several of his primary feathers have been cut about a third of the way down, at sharp angles.

That night, she pulls down all thousand of the cranes that roost against her ceiling, littering her floor with their rainbow corpses. The house admires her ingenuity, the trap she’s laid to catch the wing-clipper.

Crunch, crunch in the dark and Paper leaps up to flick the light-switch. Needle’s outline is a staticky blur, but her sewing shears, poised over one black wing, glisten in the sudden brightness.

Bird wakes in a rage. Before his sister’s eyes, Bird’s features morph into something else, someone the house doesn’t recognize. Surely this nightmare beast can’t be its own winged son? Bird’s face twists into a black beak, his fingers curl into talons, and his feathers beat a furious whirlwind. He lunges at his mother, but she vanishes into white noise.

Downstairs half-bath for guests.

Their mother drifts through the hallways, visible only as a human-shaped distortion in space. Paper watches her mother pace, white-gray ants suffusing the outline of a woman. The house wonders why Needle has not yet returned to her textiles. Bins of crewel, quilting and lace clutter the craft room floor, gathering dust. The house finds this odd, as the craft room is the only space that has yet to be plagued by black holes.

Glass’s exit left holes strewn everywhere—by the work bench in the garage, in front of the refrigerator, hovering over the couch in the den—and Needle keeps falling into them, a phenomenon that concerns the house. The teens generally avoid the holes, though they’ve accidentally created a few: Their dad has hidden bottles everywhere, and whenever they find one, it implodes into a new hole, reality warping around an empty center.

One day, while playing find-the-bottle, Paper catches Bird drinking deep from a fifth of whiskey they’d discovered not a week earlier, one she’d thought had burst into the usual hole. She snatches the bottle from his hand and shatters it against the porcelain sink. Bird’s face begins to elongate into that horrible beak, skin shifting to barbed feathers, hands to scaled talons, as if he’s swallowed a black hole and it’s consuming him from the inside.

From the empty silence surrounding them comes the susurrus of their mother’s presence. Then mother and son are wrestling on the bathroom floor, him a winged, clawed monster, her a disembodied hush and ten fingernails that rake deep red furrows down his biceps. Paper squeezes her eyes shut tight as fists.

The house knows the three of them can’t go on like this, wants to help, and does what it can, battening down the insulation to keep in warmth against oncoming winter.

Master bathroom features two sinks and a separate shower area.

Paper arrives home from school to find the dim outline of her mother seated on the bathroom floor, the under-sink cabinet open and a whiskey bottle next to her. Eyes unseeing, Needle’s hands clutch at empty air. A black hole shimmers unreality beneath her. Paper wants to grab her hands and pull her away from the danger, but she’s been here before: If she’s not terribly careful—the house has watched it happen too many times—she’ll be sucked in as well.

Paper sifts through her mother’s sundry crafting bins until she finds something she thinks will work: a long skein of heavy cord in pale blue. She makes a lasso of cord and loops it over her mother’s shoulders, grips the end, and tugs. Needle tumbles free and the hole blinks out into memory.

Her mother lies comatose, her outline shimmering, a needle held up to light and turned this way and that so its eye flickers into and out of existence. Needle stares through her daughter, and Paper feels as invisible as she’d ever wished to be. She takes her mother’s cold hand in hers. Gently she loops blue cord around Needle’s bloodless fingers. Round and round it ravels. Paper is painstaking; she threads the skein about her mother’s every limb in ever-tightening circles, tugging the cord taut against her mother’s incorporeal corpus.

It takes all day and late into the night for Paper to wind cord, thread, yarn, and string—two full bins of material—around her mother’s body, a body shaped just like her own will be someday. Wrapped up like a spindle or a mummy, Needle can once again be seen. She meets her daughter’s eyes, pupils contracting and expanding in bewilderment.

Needle moves around the house more freely after rejoining the land of the visible, stacking boxes of their father’s things in the garage and out of sight, returning to her crafting, even hugging Paper every so often, though Bird still won’t go near her. The house, thrilled to have Needle back, stretches happily through the long wires inside its walls, solid in the surety of their connection to the outside world. The house can appreciate ties that bind.

Small attic for extra storage.

Bird’s slept in the attic since his mother’s attempted pinioning. He tugs the pull-down ladder up behind him each night, just to be sure. Skin mottled with brown tufts of downy feather, face craggy with shadow, he hunches his back under the weight of the full-grown wings arcing over his head. Bird has been working, saving up for his great escape, and he’s finally made enough, just six days shy of eighteen.

Paper’s stolen her mother’s shears; with them, she cuts Bird free of the silvery blue cord binding him to Needle. She holds out a loose twist of yellow embroidery thread, one end attached to the attic furnace. He recoils, hissing, but she pats his arm to reassure him: he’s tied only to his childhood home, not to Needle. His eyes are falcon-hooded; nevertheless, he allows her to encircle his wrist with the thread. It glimmers in sunlight, golden bright and joyful. He stands to his full height, aware that he’s taller now than their father had been. Stretching dark wings, he’s poised to swoop down from the attic window.

The house is having none of this. It bares paned-glass teeth and snaps a sill shut on Bird’s boot heel. Bird and Paper cry out, and then she braces herself against the window-frame and yanks upward, and Bird loosens his shoelaces and dives downward, and there’s just his black boot stuck in the house’s craw as he swoops low, then speeds sky-high. Windows rove wild-eyed; doors slam open and shut, enraged. Their father’s frayed red thread is still out on the lawn, its color faded to pink. Paper stares after her brother until the black dot of him winks out against the horizon, yellow thread pulled taut as it spools out thinner and thinner.

All through the night, the house growls and shudders like earthquake, terrified that soon it will be plunged into darkness. It’s grown too much like Needle, in her desperation and possessiveness, and too much like Glass, wanting only to be filled. The house’s fears form a yawning black hole that encompasses its plot entirely, as if the earth planned to open like a cellar door and suck the neighborhood underground like a hundred birdhouses perched atop quicksand. The house is immobile and has no means of escape, but it’s seen the family deal with enough such holes to understand their operations.

The dog is in a state of advanced decomposition when the house coughs Lucky up from its bowels. It’s swaddled the body in insulation, but that doesn’t much contain the stench; Paper finds the corpse almost immediately. Tugging a sleeve over her nose, she rolls it into the garden with a rusted shovel and leaves it to mulch. By summertime, the remains will be skin and bones and the hydrangea blooms nearby especially lovely.

Paper walks upstairs to stand before her mirror, turning sideways as if reveling in the acute angles she’s made of her body. Taking one hand in the other, she folds herself in half, then does it again and again and again. By the time the house realizes, long before it can formulate a plan to stop her, she’s disappeared. Her mother finds her that evening, a single sheet of translucent paper, a note explaining what she’s done. Needle and the house are left alone.

Large manicured front lawn with mature trees. Please call Arbor Realty to schedule an appointment to view this property.

A mess of bishop’s weed obscures the walkway. A lattice trestle covered in ivy creeps upward toward the roof’s edge. The house’s eyes are shut, mouth closed and locked up tight. Neighbors who walk past keep on moving; dogs pull their owners across to the other side of the street. The house mutters, settles into its cracked foundation. It monitors the single bright yellow thread that arcs into the distance, waiting for any movement on the line, any sign that its winged boy will soon fly home.

About the Author

Brooke Wonders writes fiction that thinks it’s true and memoir that thinks it’s fabulism. Despite these oxymora, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Monkeybicycle, Daily Science Fiction, and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of Clarion UCSD 2011, she shares an urban shoebox with fellow writer and partner in crime James Will Brady.

Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

Mark Cole

“Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.”

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

Robots. That’s what most people think of first when they think of Isaac Asimov—and certainly, his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics are among the best he wrote. But he also came up with another unique and equally memorable science fiction concept: psychohistory.

Psychohistory (originally hyphenated as “psycho-history”) first appeared in the short stories Asimov would later collect in his episodic novel Foundation. Set in a distant future, the book details a vast, galactic empire which has controlled thousands of inhabited worlds for 12,000 years. The empire is on the verge of breakdown. However, very few people have realized this, primarily those working with the great mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon’s mathematical models have shown conclusively that the Empire will collapse within a few hundred years, followed by a 30,000 year dark age before civilization is rebuilt.

Seldon’s great accomplishment was his reinvention of the discipline of psychohistory. What had been little more than a set of vague axioms became, under his leadership, a profound statistical science, capable of charting the rise and fall of civilizations—and even, Seldon argued, of guiding the course of civilization so that the 30,000 years of darkness could be reduced to a mere millennium.

The underlying logic of psychohistory resembles Boyle’s gas law: The molecules in a gas move in a purely random way, and yet, collectively, that random behavior become predictable. So if you get enough people together (and Asimov very carefully avoided any suggestion of just how many), you could reduce the apparently random actions of billions of human beings to a set of physical laws describing the behavior of civilizations. That number, the Seldon constant, was extremely high—high enough that it could only be found in the vastness of the Galactic Empire.

On the surface this sounds fairly plausible, even if the degree of accuracy Seldon claimed for his work doesn’t. Yet it is far from clear that Asimov believes in his own invention. As in his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics, Foundation works because of the tension between the turn of events in the plot and whether they will lead to the next scheduled “Seldon Crisis.” Will the plan succeed, or will it fail?

In fact, the plan does fail by the end of the second novel, although this happens only because of an event which no one could have predicted: the rise of a mutant leader with enormous mental powers.

Whether he believed in psychohistory or not, Asimov was not alone in suggesting that a scientific approach to history would allow us to predict future trends.

Karl Marx’s notion of historical materialism was one of the first attempts at a scientific approach to history. In his view, the motor driving all of history was the means of production. As new technologies and methods changed how people produced the things they needed, he argued, this changed all of society. This historical progression would lead inevitably through a series of necessary steps towards the ultimate goal of history: socialism.

While many socialist thinkers have tinkered with Marx’s basic formulation, most versions start with what is called “primitive communism” (in prehistoric tribal societies), followed by ancient society, feudalism, and finally capitalism. Each one of these stages represents a different way in which people produced the goods they needed to survive—and a different way of living.

It should be noted, however, that, despite the term “scientific,” Marx’s system is not empirical but deduced from his own first principles.

Many of Asimov’s readers have in fact suggested that Marx was one of the major influences on psychohistory. However, Marx’s historical materialism bears little resemblance to Asimov’s conception. Seldon’s system appears to include far more than the purely economic factors Marx would allow—with the second crisis leading to the establishment of what amounts to a religion. What is far more important, though, is that Marx pictures a clear, evolutionary progress, each stage representing a more advanced society than the last, whereas Hari Seldon’s science predicts not a progression, but the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations—both development and decay. Psychohistory more closely resembles the work of a handful of 20th-century thinkers who dared to reject the standard, evolutionary view of society: most notably, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin.

Spengler was the first to propose a cyclic view of history in his 1918 book, The Decline Of The West (a second volume followed in 1923). He identified eight great world cultures—Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Classical (Greco-Roman), Arabian, and Western—and drew parallels between their development and decline. These parallels led him to believe that civilizations were organic, with a distinct life-cycle and a 1000-year lifespan. He divided this cycle into four stages: Spring, a period of cultural birth based largely on a new conception of God; Summer, marked by the rise of the earliest cities and the development of critical thought; Autumn, a time of rationalism, organization, and urban development; and Winter, when the civilization begins to break down, abstract reason falters, and people lose faith in their religious beliefs.

But it was Spengler’s assertion that Western Civilization had begun to decay that made his book an enormous success in his native Germany. It came at a time when the country was in the midst of moral and economic chaos, and it offered an explanation for Germany’s failures in World War I. To Spengler, democracy was a decadent form of government, one typical of a society deep in the winter of its existence. His vision of a vibrant new society run by a strong leader caught the imagination of the burgeoning Nazi movement. Spengler himself, while he agreed with many Nazi ideals, found Hitler absurd and distanced himself from the movement before his death in 1936.

While British historian Arnold Toynbee showed clear signs of Spengler’s influence in his massive work, A Study of History, he rejected the German historian’s organic vision of society in favor of a more complex model. His dozen volumes (published from 1934 to 1961) covered a far larger number of civilizations—21, although some of his divisions are debatable—in far greater detail. Rather than Spengler’s deterministic approach, with its rigid patterns every civilization had to follow, Toynbee believed that new challenges created a civilization, forcing its people to find new ways to overcome them and new ways to live their lives. Without these difficulties, a society would quickly stagnate, its creative impulses untapped—and yet, too great a series of disasters could easily destroy the fledging civilization.

Once established, it was a small, “creative minority” that kept a new civilization running—and it was the breakdown of this minority that ultimately led to a civilization’s decline and death. While it predicted specific events within the lifespan of a civilization (such as a “time of troubles” and dark ages), his system saw these as the result of the actions taken by the people within that society. However, he also observed that these actions created similar results in one society after another and fell into predictable patterns.

Although most historians ridiculed it, Toynbee’s work seized the popular imagination. One finds, for example, a society of Toynbeean scholars playing a sizable role in Charles L. Harness’ classic SF novel, The Paradox Men, and he plays a key role in Ray Bradbury’s story, “The Toynbee Convector.” Whatever its value as an actual theory of metahistory, Toynbee’s work defined the way in which many people viewed the past for the better part of a century. While his theories may not always match those of the fictional Hari Seldon, the resemblance is strong enough to suspect that, as he was for a great many others, Toynbee may have been one of Asimov’s more important inspirations.

While not as widely known as either Spengler or Toynbee, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin offered a third similar theory best remembered for the categories he divided civilizations into: the ideational, in which the spiritual dominated society, and the sensate, which was concerned with purely material things. At rare intervals, a combination of these two impulses in society resulted in the integral or idealistic stage, which was a perfectly balanced combination of the two: He claimed this could be found in both Classical Greece and the High Middle Ages.

However, unlike Spengler and Toynbee, Sorokin saw the shift from one stage to other as something that could happen at any time. While he identified patterns and trends in history, he hoped that with proper guidance from those aware of the nature of human civilizations, it would be possible to guide mankind to its next ideational stage, without the horrors he had witnessed during the Russian Revolution.

After Harvard removed him from his position as the founding Chairman of the Sociology Department, he went on to found the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism in 1949, which had as its goal the elimination of future wars by using his historical insights to promote love and understanding. It sounds suspiciously like a real-world Seldon Institute—although the first of Asimov’s Foundation short stories actually appeared seven years earlier.

Even with this widely-varied collection of theories, none of them match the most distinctive characteristic of Seldon’s theories: They do not make any mathematical predictions.

For that, one has to move from history to modern economics, which insists that it is a mathematical science, capable of making precise predictions. The Nobel Prize in Economics routinely goes to the creators of sophisticated mathematical models of human behavior.

Unfortunately the parallel ends there, as no one expects these models to predict actual economic behavior.

While no economist would ever put it quite that way, they will blame any failure of real behavior to match their predictions on factors which are not part of their model. Human behavior is enormously complex, so there can be no shortage of possible explanations for any deviation from their predictions. Free market economics deliberately simplifies human behavior, focusing only on a few things which they argue are the main factors driving our economic interactions.

Ironically, the Austrian School of Economics, while it still believes in the laws of free market economics, has rejected this precision, and refuses to make mathematical predictions. Instead, they claim that the results predicted by their theory always take place, even if the actual results—warped by things not covered by their theories—are radically different from their predictions, or even their exact opposite.

In fact, some—like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, borrowing a page from Immanuel Kant—go so far as to argue that their conclusions can not be disproven by any awkward failure of reality to match their predictions. They are a logical conclusion of a logical system, and thus are true, whether they actually describe what happens or not. Hoppe goes so far as to argue that the same is true of socialism, and that both systems are immune from any empirical attempts to disprove them.

Which is about as far from the mathematical certainties of psychohistory as it is possible to get.

Looking closely at all these theories, one finds that they are controversial at best and bear little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s work.

By the early part of the 20th century, for example, an important Marxist theorist like Antonio Gramsci could reject the notion that history led inevitably to the proletarian state. By then, it was obvious that capitalism wasn’t about to turn into socialism anytime soon. So, following Gramsci’s lead, Marxists became far more interested in cultural issues. One noted socialist scholar, Theodor Adorno, actually tried to fuse Marxism with some of Spengler’s insights, shorn of most of their determinism. It seems at best an unlikely combination, one that Marx would never have approved.

It should also be noted that, despite the many similarities between the three cyclic theories, they are also enormously different, enough so that they can’t be seen as different approaches to the same basic “laws” of history. While it was inevitable that Spengler’s amateur status would lead other historians to reject his work, even Toynbee, who was a professor of modern Greek and Byzantine history, encountered a great deal of opposition from his fellow historians. All three men routinely faced accusations of poor scholarship, dubious conclusions, and even twisting the facts to fit neatly into their preconceived categories. Nor has time been kind to their reputations. All three have been largely forgotten, their work rarely cited by other historians, and the entire idea of comparative history ignored except by a few modern scholars like Harold Adams Innis and Samuel Huntington.

There is even a real-world discipline that calls itself psychohistory, although it bears little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s version.

In the real world, psychohistory is an attempt to apply psychology to history, to gain a greater understanding of what caused past events. It tends to focus on issues related to childhood—and most notably, questions of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Some psychohistorians hope that by perfecting our methods of rearing children, we might eliminate war and international hatreds. This is about as close to Asimov as it gets.

Psychohistory has never quite emerged from its academic shantytown and remains controversial. There are no departments of psychohistory, even if a few colleges do have courses in it. Many of their fellow historians have questioned their vast grab-bag of assorted methods and think that their reconstructions of past historical figures involve a lot of guesswork. Others question whether it should be considered a separate discipline at all, as mainstream historians have long attempted to explore psychological motivations.

One aspect of the real psychohistory, however, points in a very different direction—towards a forgotten understanding of history that might have more bearing on Hari Seldon’s story than Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, or Sorokin. For it does not always look at mass psychology, and cultural analysis, but it also attempts to understand the psychological motivations of historic individuals.

While the image of history as an ever upward, evolutionary process may have been the orthodox belief at the time of Spengler, it had itself replaced an even older view. Rather than seeing history in terms of sweeping trends, this older view held that it was the choices made by individuals which have shaped history. It is a view which has never quite died, finding support at the time from a number of mostly Catholic scholars, notably Christopher Dawson, Hilaire Belloc, and Sir Herbert Butterfield.

Despite all of Hari Seldon’s talk of grand historical trends and mathematical predictions, the irony is that the new future he crafts is ultimately the result of the actions of a single man: Hari Seldon.

It is his refinement of the science of psychohistory, his predictions, his establishment of the Seldon institute, and the shadowy Second Institute that reshape history. Even though he may have made his choices based on mathematical models, they are still his choices. Without them, the history of the galaxy would have looked quite different.

Whether or not Isaac Asimov believed that psychohistory was possible, the story of Hari Seldon is not of one of randomness and blind forces, determinism, and the laws of science, but of a single remarkable man whose actions reshape the history of the galaxy.

One does have to wonder, however, if Dr. Asimov ever noticed this.

About the Author

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

The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

Peter Hodges

Mark Lawrence is the author of the recent fantasy series The Broken Empire. There are two books in the series to date: Prince of Thorns and King of Thorns. Written in the same literary vein as Joe Abercrombie and George R. R. Martin, the story is a bleak portrayal of Prince Honorious Jorg Ancrath, scion of a noble family who has vowed to once again unite a group of disparate kingdoms into an Empire.

The prose is like a punch in the gut—visceral, simple, and evocative. He eschews the traditional wordiness of fantasists before him, instead letting the simple language convey harsh reality without mincing words. This style lends itself to fast pacing that draws the reader headlong through a world of brutality and evil, where goodness is a flickering shadow in the light of ambition and revenge. The construction of the story’s history has a number of truly excellent surprises, especially as the reader gradually comes to grasp the setting and the underlying rules of the universe.

As a scientist involved in researching artificial intelligence problems, what made you choose a fantasy setting over a science-fictional setting?

Ah! My most asked question, and one that prompted my most viewed blog post.

I have to say I don’t really get it. Should a policeman write crime fiction, a lawyer pen about law firm shenanigans, a nurse put out medical dramas? Should we boffins get our dirty science boots off your fantasy carpet? I guess the easiest answer is that my love of fantasy pre-dates my love of science—my mother read me Lord of the Rings when I was seven—I cried when [spoiler] Gandalf died [/spoiler].

Writing is more about people than setting in any event. I’m sure I could write science fiction and I’d probably enjoy it a lot. I just feel that I enjoy writing fantasy that little bit more.

Does working on problems related to artificial intelligence give you any insight into the nature and/or definition of consciousness? Have you had any (declassified) “aha!” moments, where you linked something in your research to human or animal cognition?

Short answer, “no.”

Artificial Intelligence is a fairly misleading umbrella term that I employ because the media popularised it and people feel they know what it means . . . a little. In truth very few scientists involved in the area will ever talk about their work in those terms. What we do is (as far as we know) a long way from issues of consciousness and revolves around rather dry and abstract Bayesian mathematics aimed at calculating inference from data in order to support decisions. Under controlled conditions these techniques are powerful and useful, but there’s a huge disconnect between those controlled conditions and the general messiness of the real world where only the tiniest of steps have been taken toward intelligent autonomous behaviour.

What was your “elevator pitch” for A Prince of Thorns? Did you sell the manuscript first, or did it go through an agency?

I don’t think I had an elevator pitch. When I finally got “bullied” into sending it out, years after writing it, I emailed four agents off a list. I noticed later that the agency that accepted me had on their submissions page instructions to include in the cover letter a paragraph describing the book. I must have missed that bit first time around. I just said, something along the lines of “hi, I’ve attached the first three chapters of my book” and mentioned a few places I’d had short stories published.

The agent passed the manuscript on to publishers. He told me not to expect to hear back any time soon. Then a few weeks later I had a three-book deal. I’m told every significant fantasy publisher in the UK bid for the rights.

Many authors claim their “overnight success” was actually a journey of many years. Would you share your story on how you came to be published?

Well I guess it was a journey of a kind, and did span many years, but it was never one that was aimed at publication. The only journey was the one on which I slowly acquired the writing skills and the interest to produce a book. I wrote for my own satisfaction and didn’t expect (or yearn) to be published.

I started playing D&D very young when the UK’s first Games Workshop opened outside my school. I was always the Games Master, which exercised my creative side and entrenched an interest in fantasy. After university I spent a year helping to run a fantasy Play-By-Mail game and kept running my part as a hobby for the next decade. That exercised my writing skills more, requiring multiple storylines to be sustained and lots of description, intrigue, violence etc. When I moved to the States I didn’t have time to run the PBM game so I turned to writing short stories. I shared the short stories on online writing groups and improved through the process of critiquing and being critiqued. Short stories turned into longer stories turned into books. There.

In the reviews of your novels, some readers have expressed scepticism over the ability of such a young main character (Jorg Ancrath is barely a teenager when the action starts) to carry the narrative. What made you pick that background for the character?

I have seen people complain that a person so young couldn’t achieve the physical feats described or exert such influence over his companions. That I dismiss.

The reasons for the choice of age are simple and several-fold. Firstly the inspiration for the book was Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange wherein the violent protagonist is of a similar age leading a gang of older reprobates. Secondly, and for quite possibly similar reasons to Burgess, I chose a young age to:

cloud the issue of guilt in his crimes.

highlight the matter of nature vs nurture

place the protagonist close to the events that have shaped him.

give him potential for growth.

explore the changes that are wrought in us through experience in contrast to those that occur through simply growing.

and to focus on the business of moving from childhood to adulthood even when the former has been stolen rather than discarded.

It’s interesting that you say “cloud the issue of guilt” in his crimes. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Jorg does some pretty horrible things—is it up to the reader to decide his guilt? Is there room in his world for redemption, however far away it might seem?

Redemption is the central theme to a vast swath of literature. Particularly in genre writing, but probably forming the core, in one or other form, in the majority of all fiction. It does seem a rather unsophisticated demand to make of a character study though, and the Broken Empire trilogy is in essence a study of one man.

Prince of Thorns is a book that sets out to challenge the reader with a character—to make you think about a real (albeit unusual) person and about the issues of what makes us “bad.” It’s about what is and isn’t forgivable, what role nurture plays over nature, how we react when the badness is done by someone clever, intelligent, charming rather than a villain who has the good grace to look and act as expectation demands. And it doesn’t answer those questions. The trilogy as a whole stumbles toward an answer, but it won’t ever get there. It’s what we scientists call ‘an unsolved problem.”

And yes, there’s a voice clamoring inside us, demanding redemption. Some part of us wants to see normality restored. Jorg can be forgiven anything so long as he repents, suffers, returns to the fold. It’s what we like to read. It’s the closure we’re comfortable with.

There is of course room for any ending and I’m ruling nothing out. However, I do like to avoid being too predictable!

Both novels in your series are written from a first person point of view, with some portions excerpted from the journal of another character. This, historically, is a challenging choice for fantasy authors because your accessibility to the world is severely limited. What made you pick this method? Do you have any regrets at this point? Is there something that you’ve wanted to show that you can’t?

I don’t feel it’s a challenging point of view—even for fantasy authors. Your access to the world is personal, detailed, emotional, and immediate. The type of access denied is the swooping overview generated by hopping between many heads. If you’re telling a story about a person rather than some sprawling conflict then that’s no problem. I’m telling a story about one person—something closer in several ways to literary fiction than traditional fantasy.

It also has to be said that A Clockwork Orange is written in the first person and as my initial inspiration, setting finger to keyboard, I hit ‘I’.

Is the lean prose your own personal style, or a style you’re intentionally using to reflect the world?

I can write in various styles. Possibly I enjoy the one on offer in Prince of Thorns the most. I guess it reflects the character, Jorg, rather than the world he inhabits. I do know I’ve seen people who one or five-star Prince of Thorns, lambasting or lauding the prose, go on unknowingly to five or one-star things I’ve written under other names in different styles, reversing their opinion.

I recently gave a bunch of short stories to an anthology that invited my participation so they could choose something suitable. The immediate feedback was that they liked them all but found them so varied in style and topic that they were amazed to know they were all written by the same person.

I expect this is true of many writers and there’s a tendency and a will to pigeon-hole people for convenience. If a writer has the imagination to write fantasy it seems likely they have the imagination to vary the way they write. The publishing industry is a co-conspirator in this matter, insisting (for good commercial reasons) that an author produce ‘more of the same” and doing so for the simple reason that the majority of readers (whether they admit it or not) want to get more of the same from any given author. If they want something different they reach for a different author (or different pseudonym!).

Has the sheer brutality in some parts of the book earned you any angry readers? Do you have any anecdotes about readers who either really like or really dislike a particular passage?

I have more angry readers than a man can easily shake a stick at. I suspect a lot of the visceral reaction is generated by the peculiar power of “I” which makes the reading experience more immediate and intense. It also engenders in stupid people a close association between the character they’re reading about and the person who wrote him.

To my mind the violence in the trilogy is moderate to mild in the context of the genre. Certainly there are far more gruesome and unpleasant offerings in George R. R. Martin’s work. I feel it’s a combination of first person and the power of the descriptions that has prompted a reaction.

Properly, brutality is measured against the facts. Peter stabbed Paul. The brutality is in the act of stabbing. If the information is conveyed in the line: Peter stabbed Paul—or in the line: I slid my knife into Paul’s eye socket—it’s no more brutal.

Much of the anger has actually been second hand from people who haven’t read the book and are simply piggy-backing off some extreme and misdirected feminist critiques in circulation.

There is, however, one scene in King of Thorns, that gets remarked on a lot. It’s an oddity that says interesting things about people’s perceptions and priorities. By the point that this scene is reached the reader will have breezed through multiple violent deaths of innocent and not so innocent men, women, and children. Here comes a dog . . . In fact the scene has generated my only piece of hate-mail.

I really think you are one sick disturbed person. <snip> That sentence is seared into my brain and has given me nightmares. It might be fiction but it is just horrible. There is no excuse for this sort of thing. The torture of an innocent animal. <snip> I will never ever read another book by you as long as I live. I don’t know where all this darkness comes from with you but you are quite obviously disturbed. I don’t care if you are with 10 kids and 5 dogs. Sick sick sick . . .

I consider it a minor triumph to have stirred such strong emotions within a reader. Particularly “That sentence is seared into my brain.” For someone who focuses as much on writing on the small scale, sentence by sentence, as on the large scale / story-level, “that sentence is seared into my brain” is writing gold.

A more general observation is that people who condemn others for the products of their imagination simply don’t understand what imagination is.

As you begin to reveal the history of the world, you get glimpses of how history and fact become mythology. How do you go about weaving a consistent mythology through a multi-book series?

I tend to wince slightly when admitting that I didn’t outline anything. I don’t plan. I just let the story flow as I write and generally have no idea where we’ll be at the bottom of the page. I’ve not noticed any problems keeping things consistent.

Your magic system is revealed through the evaluations and reactions of Jorg Ancrath. How difficult is it to walk the tightrope between an “unreliable” narrator and maintaining internal consistency in your magic systems? Is internal consistency even necessary as long as magic and its use is kept to a minimum?

I really don’t like the term “magic system” and if I ever pick up a book that starts explaining a magic system to me, as though I’m being instructed from the pages of a role-playing game’s rulebook, I put that book down again very quickly.

I wouldn’t say minimal use of magic makes internal consistency unnecessary, just that it makes it easy. Consistency is important. Magic-systems are not.

You’re a father of four, a full-time researcher, and a gamer. Do you have any secrets about time management that you’d like to share?

Actually you’ve not listed the main draw on my time. I’m also a full-time carer for my very disabled little girl. When she comes home from school I hold her and feed/clean/entertain her until I’ve put her to bed at around 9 or 10pm. She can’t be left, she can’t do anything for herself, and my wife’s multiple sclerosis means I have to do it all. I only get to write between 10pm and 1am, or when a respite carer comes to the house for a three-hour session. I’m answering this review at the hospice we get to visit fourteen days a year. We’ve been here two days now and I’ve done a LOT of writing.

So, time management is tricky. Not sleeping does help. Also writing only once and not revising is a boon.

When is your release date for the next book?

The release date for the last book in the trilogy is definite. Emperor of Thorns comes out in August 2013 and is available from Amazon.

About the Author

Peter Hodges has always loved science. When he discovered that people would actually pay him to mix chemicals and set things on fire, his career was set. Working as a chemist and project manager, Peter dabbled in writing throughout his early adult life. His desire quickened after attending Viable Paradise, an annual invitation-only writer’s seminar. He finished three novels over the next four years and endured the slings and arrows of outrageous rejection.

Another Word: It Gets Better with SFF (but SFF has to Get Better, too)

Lev AC Rosen

When I was a kid, I read anything with a wizard on the cover. I was one of those nerdy children who took books to recess and preferred novels for adults when I was eleven.

I’m guessing you know the type. Or are the type. My parents encouraged this and bought me whatever books I wanted. It was pretty awesome. It also shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the first place I was really made aware of queer people was in fiction.

I knew what gay people were, of course. I’d heard other kids in the lunchroom making homophobic comments, so I understood the basic concept, as it were. But the truth is, I was still pretty far away from anything involving sex. Just didn’t think much about it. In the books I read, I understood what was going on when the wizard and the lady got naked. It just wasn’t that interesting. I wanted to see magic of a more literal nature.

That is, until I read the Mercedes Lackey’s The Last Herald-Mage. Like many fantasy series, it’s populated with wizards and bards. Only the main character is a gay man.

I wish I could remember more of my reaction upon first reading it The Last Herald-Mage. I have only a fleeting memory: that it wasn’t a very big deal. I’m sure that’s because of Lackey’s treatment of the matter. I don’t want to say the series is about being gay; it’s more than that. It’s a fantasy epic, but Lackey approached her hero Vanyel Ashkevrons’s sexuality as though she were writing for readers who didn’t actually know any gay people. She showed us Vanyel’s sexuality and explained that it was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, even if Vanyel felt ashamed.

The Last Herald-Mage turned me from someone who had never thought about sexuality to someone who had no problem with the gay aspect of it. After all, if gay people could be wizards, they were just as awesome as everyone else, right?

My own coming out was pretty low-key. I grew up in New York City; I have liberal, loving parents; I went to a school that prided itself on ethical PC-ness; and I wasn’t the only queer kid in class. I didn’t struggle much. But I think back on Mercedes Lackey a lot—how I came across that book, and how it prepared me, during my tween years, to be okay with who I was once I started getting crushes on other guys.

I don’t remember how I found Lackey’s books. Were they given to me? Did I find them in the bookstore, saw that they had both bards and wizards, and simply wanted them on those merits? I wish I could remember. All I know is that I was damned lucky I found them. And I also know that if I hadn’t been brought up in a supportive environment, one series of books wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

But what about kids today? As the battle for queer rights has become more and more visible, these rights have also, in many respects, become more controversial. With the fight for gay marriage, the conservative fight against it, and the rash of tragic, queer teen suicides, it would seem as though queer characters would be popping up all over in SFF. After all, those geeky kids who get teased at school—whether they’re actually queer or just being called it—are the sorts of kids we were in high school. Or at least a lot of us. Marginalized, branded as outsiders, teased for being weird or different—and killing themselves because they’re queer. And to be queer, they’re told, is to be different.

Of all the people out there who didn’t grow up queer, you’d think straight geeks would be the most sympathetic—and the most understanding. Shouldn’t the SFF community be looking out for these kids?

Some within the community are. Malinda Lo has penned some amazing queer YA fantasy. Brit Mandelo writes an entire column on Tor.com called “Queering SFF” and has edited a new anthology called Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction. Cherie Priest featured a transgendered character in one of her Clockwork Century novels. There are queer SFF groups, like Geeks Out and Outer Alliance.

These examples stand out to me, though, because they’re few and far between and don’t get much notice. Even most romantic comedies today feature a stereotypical gay friend. It’s not the best representation, but at least we’re there. In SFF, we’re strangely invisible.

Failing to see queer characters in fiction doesn’t just damage queer kids. Parents read SFF, too. If queer kids have a parent who has never known a queer person in their life, they’ll be much more equipped for raising a queer child if they’ve read queer characters written as actual human beings—and not flat stereotypes or, worse, somehow wrong or immoral.

On the whole, the SFF community seems to me to be divided into three camps. First, the openly homophobic types, who for personal an/or religious reasons—or because they think it’s “evolutionarily backwards” (just like the other 200-plus species who practice homosexuality, right?)—feel queer people don’t deserve to be treated like actual human beings.

In the second camp we have the pro-queer types who love queer characters in their fiction and often are queer themselves.

The third camp, though, makes up the majority of the SFF community: folks who just don’t think about it. These are usually straight dudes who grew up pretty geeky, and who often are still mostly—and hopefully comfortably—geeky. But they just don’t give much thought to queer folks. If they did, they’d probably be cool with them; many probably consider themselves pro-gay rights.

But when it comes to their SFF, this third group finds it odd when there’s a gay character. Some say things like “I just can’t relate to a queer character, cause I’m straight,” but most seem surprised by the inclusion of queer characters. Some say they find the emphasis on sexuality to be heavy-handed—even when the emphasis on the queer character’s sexuality is equal to or less than the emphasis placed on the straight character’s sexuality. When a straight guy kisses a girl, it’s the norm; when a gay guy kisses a guy, it’s emphasizing their sexuality.

I don’t think people who hold this view are homophobes. They’re just used to their SFF being queer-free, and they feel startled by the inclusion of queer character. These are the folks I think are ready to open their minds. I don’t want them to be startled. Ideally, I don’t want them to think it’s any different than straight characters being included. For a start, though, I’d love to see them be happy to encounter queer characters. And I think they can be. They just need a little more prodding. And by prodding I mean more queer characters.

So the next time you read a book where there’s a heterosexual romantic pairing, don’t just accept it. Let that fact surprise you the way a queer romance might. Imagine how it makes that high-school kid feel, the one who still hasn’t found queer SFF. Think of how they look at every straight character in the books they read and are expected to relate to a straight character—but you, on the other hand, get surprised and kinda weirded out by one queer one. If they can relate, can’t you?

I’m not saying every story needs a queer character. Or that it’s a writer’s responsibility to do more than tell a great story. But I do think it’s time for all of us—straight folks included—to think more about where queer characters fit into SFF. And where we stand in that audience. A straight romantic lead is all well and good, but a queer romantic lead could make some teenager feel better about him or herself.

But we’re not going to get more queer characters without demanding them. Straight readers, we need your help—you should be asking for queer characters, too. You should be hoping for them. You should be happy about them, not surprised by them. Remember that we queer folks exist, and we exist in the world of SFF, too. That’s how you show us support; that’s how you take queer characters in SFF from invisible to natural.

We appreciate your support in politics. We love when you say you’re for gay marriage. But you can do more. After all, if you’re going to support us in the real world, you can support us in every world.

About the Author

Lev AC Rosen is the author of the critically acclaimed All Men of Genius, which was an Amazon best of the month, on over a dozen best of the year lists, and has been nominated for multiple awards. He received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Lev is originally from lower Manhattan and now lives in even lower Manhattan, right at the edge. He teaches creative writing. All Men of Genius will be available in paperback in November 2012.

Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

Neil Clarke

Sometime in the next month, I will become a cyborg. My “upgrade” won’t be anything cool like a bionic eye or cranial jack and it won’t be as painful as becoming a Cyberman. I never expected to become a cyborg at forty-six, but thanks to my July heart attack, my heart has sustained enough damage to require the installation of a defibrillator in my chest. As far as mods go, it’s pretty mundane, but it will provide some peace of mind and may even save my life someday.

Now that I’m taking the first step, maybe I should start considering other potential upgrades. Given my health over the last year, a nanobot-based immune and healing system would be particularly useful. I wouldn’t complain about a system that would allow me to learn new skills or languages via software updates. The old cyborg staples of strength and speed wouldn’t be high on my priority list, but are certainly worth considering. Still, the fictional cyborgs we read about often pay a high price for their improvements. Would I really want to be part of the collective, lose my emotions or memories, or become beholden to some secret government organization? What if your new parts can be taken over or subverted? The what-ifs make for a good story. (And now, I brace myself for the flood of cyborg stories.)

November is when many of us celebrate Thanksgiving. I have a significant list of reasons to be thankful this year. Obviously, surviving a major heart attack is up there, but I also have to appreciate the good fortune to be surrounded by good people, access to excellent medical care and the opportunity to become a cyborg. While my story has contained its fair share of bad things, I’m still here, and as Elizabeth Bear pointed out in her column a few months ago, good stories don’t have to be dark. I join the cyborg nation happy to have the opportunity to live. Whirr. Beep.

Cyborgification isn’t the only change this month at Clarkesworld. I am pleased to announce that Kate Baker has agreed to add Non-Fiction Editor to her list of responsibilities. Kate has been our Podcast Director for over three years (a job she intends to continue) and I look forward to having the opportunity to work with her on this aspect of the magazine. We’re carpooling to World Fantasy Convention this month, so we should have plenty to talk about on the long drive.

If you’ll be at World Fantasy, please stop by and say hi to Sean, Kate and I. We love to hear from our readers and authors. I’m also pleased to say that the Clarkesworld single issue chapbooks I mentioned last month will be available at the Prime Books table. I was able to get the January-October 2012 issues completed in time, so we’ll have a limited quantity of each available there.

Finally, I’d like to welcome our new subscribers. We appreciate your support and hope you’ll consider encouraging friends to do the same. It’s been encouraging to see those numbers go up a bit each month and provide the financial stability we need to grow this magazine. Welcome. You have been assimilated.

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.