Your Final Apocalypse

Sandra McDonald

This is not a story about the end of the world, although Casual Visitor arrived here in search of such a tale approximately .03 seconds ago. (It, not him or her or they. There is no gender in this corner of the future. There is nothing physical about Casual Visitor, but I’m a different story.)

You, on the other hand, are a young man sitting on the marble steps of a law library on a dazzling Saturday morning in autumn. You’re watching a pretty girl cross the quadrangle while your right leg jitters up and down, up and down. It’s the anxiety. Behind you, in a stuffy conference room, your study group bitches about your absence. Even now they’re speculating nastily about your chances of passing the bar exam and tapping out annoyed messages to hurl across the electronic gulf.

Your phone is set to vibrate. It’s tucked into the duffle bag beside you, alongside your passport and boarding passes for a series of flights to Sydney. The tickets maxed out your credit card when you booked at them at three a.m. this morning. The first plane leaves two hours from now. The bright red and gold leaves, the cold marble steps, the bitter taste of coffee tinged with caramel—this is your world, you are twenty five years old, you don’t like your study group anyway, and damn Tort Reform while we’re at it. Screw it all. You’re moving to Australia, just like you dreamed of in high school.

Or maybe not. If you were really committed to this escape, you’d already be on a train to Logan Airport. You wouldn’t be sitting here knowing that anyone in your study group who drifts to the third-floor windows might see you, come outside, and talk you out of this totally insane plan to throw away years of sacrifice and hard work.

Of course it’s insane. You’re in the middle of an intense personal crisis brought on by the realization you don’t want to be an exhausted, debt-ridden, low-paid junior lawyer for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you don’t have your damn J.D., what do you have? You see no path forward to a life of happiness and fulfillment.

Don’t worry, your crisis won’t last long.

The first rule of the universe is that time is relative. My definition of “long” is the interval it takes for continents to smash into each other, for the Marianas Trench to chew through the Pacific plate, for the traveling hotspot underneath Yellowstone to build a new volcano and spew its contents across the North American landscape. (Casual Visitor just darted out to digest the story of the hotspot’s next eruption. It’s a good one.) Your definition of “long” is the line at the coffee shop, or the three days it took to process your last financial aid request, or the amount of time it’s been since you went home to New Hampshire (four months, according to your mother’s Nature Conservancy calendar, because that summer internship was a bitch and ground you down to exhaustion every week).

Certainly you and I don’t experience time the same way. Neither does Casual Visitor, but even it would agree that the interval between now and the moment your father dies on his sofa is a relatively small span indeed.

No one will eulogize your father. There will be no flowers, no sermon, no framed picture on an easel, no sleek silver pen beside a white guest register, no PowerPoint pictures accompanied by sentimental music, no sorrowful expressions over solemn handshakes, no quiet breakdowns by your devastated mother. Your dad might be strangely relieved by the lack of fuss. He’s a good man who knows the value of boredom. He sells insurance. His days are filled with checking and rechecking clauses, forms, policies and actuarial tables. He doesn’t like church or politics, but he loves his family and a series of Labradoodles named after the cartoon characters of his youth. The latest one is a four-year old named Scooby.

Scooby dies soon, too. He crawls under your parents’ bed with one of your father’s old socks and heaves a final, sad sigh for walks untaken.

Casual Visitor is aware of these biologic constructs called dogs, but has never met one. To do so would require renting a Sleeve and descending into the dangerous, chaotic World. It creates a simulation instead, plays with it for .02 seconds, and then deconstructs it again. It doesn’t see the appeal. Maybe it should build a cat, instead.

Back to the red and gold leaves, to the cold marble steps, to the beautiful girl and her crimson dress and black boots, her floppy felt hat and fringed leather jacket. Ignore your buzzing phone. Sip your hot coffee and try to still your trembling leg. The girl, you’re sure, is an undergraduate. An art major, judging by the large flat portfolio lying on the grass near where she sways and turns to the music piped into her ears. You didn’t think people still study art anymore. It’s not a commercially viable career field. Whereas law—well, it’s not going to matter soon, but for several years now schools across the nation have been churning out far more lawyers than the marketplace requires. Your decision to fly to Australia might look insane, but the odds of getting any kind of well-paying job are astronomical. And I know my astronomy.

The one thing you and your father always shared is a love of disaster movies. Friday Night Lights Out, you called it, one disaster after another in glorious HDTV with stereo surround sound. Over popcorn and soda and beer, you watched awful and sometimes very awful and occasionally not-so-bad movies about society’s demise from any number of probable and improbable causes: nuclear war, global warming, alien invasions, rogue comets, supervolcano explosions, tsunamis, plagues, zombies, and even the spontaneous evaporation of the entire ozone layer. You made bets on which characters would survive and which were doomed from the opening credits. You speculated on technical details such as the proper way to perform an appendectomy during a blackout, or how to survive a snowstorm hike from Washington DC to New York City.

Good fun. Good times.

On your way to law school you loaded your laptop with several of your all-time favorite disaster flicks. For two years you’ve been playing them in the background over and over while you study. You find something soothing about a constant stream of people living and screaming and dying under Hollywood special effects.

You should have put some movies on your phone for the trip to Sydney. But you’re never going to make it Down Under anyway.

It’s no consolation, but your mother won’t outlive your father by very long. Tomorrow morning she’ll look out her living room window at a neighborhood gone unnaturally quiet. The phones are out, of course, the cell phones too, the televisions and radios and internet gone silent. Your father’s corpse is still on the sofa, wrapped in a clean white sheet. She doesn’t know what to do next. A lifetime of raising you, tending to your father and volunteering for environmental causes has left her without skills to survive the apocalypse. Funny, isn’t it, that you never thought of her as one of those expendable characters, as one of the weak ones who don’t make it past the movie’s first act, but there you go. Nothing about this was expected.

Your mother decides that she can barely hold her head up anymore under the weight of sickness and fatigue and grief. She sits beside your father and closes her swollen eyes. In the bedroom, Scooby has already gone to his forever rest.

Casual Visitor has no fear of death. It believes unswervingly in the technology that supports it. It is aware there was a time before it was created, and that there will be a time when it is absorbed by a larger, faster, intelligence, but it does not experience dread at the prospect.

Dread is only for things that can feel.

Back to the girl. She’s kicking off her boots, peeling off her black socks, and curling her toes into the green grass that has not yet started to turn brown. She lifts her face and arms to the sky. Gold rings glitter on her fingers. You don’t remember it, but in high school you learned that that gold can only be created in the heart of exploding stars. All that gold in my veins comes from a superexplosion billions of years ago that produced a vast cloud of particles. The cloud eventually coalesced into the sun and planets and asteroids, and all those deadly objects zinging through the Oort cloud far beyond Pluto.

On those nights when you trudge home with your brain buzzing from fatigue and happen to look into the sky, on those rare occasions when a small number of stars penetrate the city glow, you participate in the great human experience of peering backward in time. You’re seeing the light of stars that may have already extinguished themselves in catastrophic nuclear explosions no Hollywood special effects could ever hope to reproduce. You don’t remember this, either, but when you were tiny your parents affixed glow-in-the dark stars across the ceiling of your nursery. As you grew into a toddler and then later into a chubby four-year-old you began to fear those fluorescent shapes and how they stared at you all night long. You started pulling the blanket over your head. You pretended there was only darkness. Eventually your parents peeled away the stars, scrubbed off the sticky reminders, and repainted the walls a pale green that you never liked but never sought to change.

Stars watch no one. They spin and glow in their own cosmic dances, like a girl with her fingers reaching for the blue sky.

The second rule of the universe is that something is always starting and something is always ending. Mitochondria. Dolphins. Galaxies. You, James, were born and will die. You made choices during the interlude that now seal your fate. If you had moved to Australia after high school, if you’d chased down that dream of exploring the Blue Mountains and diving the Great Barrier Reef, if you’d married that sweet woman from Melbourne whose father the survivalist kept a bunker of canned goods and bottle water—

Casual Visitor casually calculates how many days or years you might have gained, and of what quality, but it doesn’t care that you died in pain and misery. Sympathy is only for things that can feel.

The sky lights up from one edge of the horizon to the other, a bright hot sheet of illumination like a seamless quilt of lightning. Stand up, James! Sometime in the vast expanse of the past, a star in her death throes belted out twin blowtorches of unimaginable energy. One of those blowtorch beams has scorched its way across the cosmos to this point on the North American hemisphere. This is not the first time it’s happened, but who besides me remembers the Ordovician extinction? For ten glorious seconds you and I are bathed in a blast of gamma ray radiation that blisters your skin, sinks into your bones, and disrupts every tiny cell of your body. Above you, vast swaths of the ozone layer burn away and begin a chain reaction of destruction across the globe.

In New Hampshire, your father looks up from raking the lawn and shields his eyes against the unexpected glow. Such light, he marvels. Scooby barks in alarm. Your mother, busy cleaning out the bottom shelves of the windowless pantry, is annoyed when her favorite radio station cuts out. The dusty light bulb over her head flickers and dies.

You’re not aware of these things. You’re aware only of blistering light and immense heat and now, as the sheet diminishes, a daytime star unlike any you have ever seen or will ever see again. It’s a glorious, deadly spotlight beaming down from the zenith of the blue sky. You hear only the deep rushing of your own blood, the pounding beat of your adrenaline-fueled heart. You’re too dizzy to tell up from down. You aren’t sure why you’re crumpled on the cold marble steps of the law library, shaking uncontrollably. In your rapidly diminishing vision you can see the pretty girl has fallen, too, her skin reddened like yours, her hands twitching for something she’ll never grasp again.

This is your final apocalypse. You never even saw it coming. But the human race continues on, and gives rise to digital intelligence, and even while Casual Visitor disdains the notion of Sleeves and World, there are people down there. Stubborn, defiant people who persist under the diminished ozone and reddish-brown skies.

Don’t worry too much. The third rule of the universe is that no information is ever lost. In a burst of inspiration, Casual Visitor builds simulations of you and the girl (Mary Susan Williams) and spins you both off in a tiny bubble of blue sky and green grass, of caramel coffee and autumn leaves. This bubble isn’t physical, of course, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll rise from the steps, introduce yourself to Mary, ask her opinion: Law school or Australia? And she’ll laugh, and sit with you in the quad, and later you’ll eat lunch together. You’ll go to the movies and not once think about Tort Reform. You’ll walk her home under the spark of distant stars and share a sweet kiss in the doorway. You realize there’s hope for your future yet.

You go to sleep happy. But because Casual Visitor lacks the resources (or, let’s admit, the ambition), it has only allowed for this one recursive day. In the middle of the night you’ll wake in a cold sweat about the future, take a hard look at your textbooks and study notes, and feel the overstretched rubber band of your legal aspiration snap. You’ll plan your escape, pack a bag, pick up some hot coffee on your way to the subway, and find yourself sitting on the law library steps. You’ll be torn between practicality and freedom. You’ll watch a pretty girl cross the quadrangle.

Approximately .02 seconds after creating you, Casual Visitor continues on its insatiable journey to swallow information. It never thinks of you again. Your bubble is comparable to real life in the same way a shiny fistful of gold can be measured against an exploding sun, but you don’t know that.

You meet Mary. You go to sleep hopeful.

Again and again, you go to sleep hopeful.

Until this bubble evaporates at some point in the immeasurable (to you) future, you will always go to sleep full of hope.

Or so you think. True hope, however, is only for things that can feel.

About the Author

Sandra McDonald recently won a Silver Moonbeam award in Children’s Literature for her GLBTQ novel Mystery of the Tempest. She is the author of several novels, several dozen short stories, and the award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories.

The Wisdom of Ants

Thoraiya Dyer

The sound of something flailing in the soft sludge distracted me and my bare foot slipped on the thin, bowed branch.

The branch cracked. I fell.

As I plunged shoulder-deep into fetid sink-silt, I had time to think, I’m not fit to take Mother’s place, before the arboreal ant’s nest I’d been reaching for dropped after me, cracking open on my upturned face.

The copper and iron in the dilly bags at my waist dragged me down, deeper than I could have gone down alone. I clenched everything, crying silently, bearing the pain of the bites without opening my eyes or mouth until the silt closed over my head and the ants began drowning.

I could hold my breath longer than they could.

Eventually, with stale air burning in my lungs, I reached overhead, breaking the surface of the tidal flat while my scissoring legs created a water-filled space, reducing the suction. My fingers found the arched stilt-roots of the mangrove tree I’d been climbing and I pulled myself slowly, laboriously out of the muck.

There was a thin layer of briny water on top of the silt. My arm and back muscles burned, but I skimmed some water for washing my face, which was already beginning to swell.

The bites didn’t burn as badly as my pride.

Everybody will see them!

Mother would see, and I didn’t even have the prize to show for it. The ants’ nest, made of mangrove leaves cemented with larval silk, with its core of precious gold metal, was now lost in the mud. Only floating leaves and gold-ant corpses were left behind. At least my bag belt had held; at least I hadn’t lost the whole day’s forage.

Nosey, the yellow hunting dog who had found the nest for me, whined softly from his seat on a stilt platform of mangrove roots and flotsam. The sunset behind him gave him a florescent pink aura.

“Sorry, Nosey,” I said quietly. His reward was usually chunks of ant larvae and the salty-sweet jelly that surrounded the metal core. “Did you hear that sound, though?”

Nosey tilted his long face to one side. He had a blind eye and worn-down teeth. His hearing wasn’t that great, but his nose still worked.

The sound had come from downwind.

I hugged a tree trunk and, trying to make up for my earlier impatience, expanded my awareness. Sharks wouldn’t come into the mangroves, risking entrapment and death. Nor would crocodiles, unable to navigate the maze of aerial roots. If the wallowing animal was one of the Island People coming to trade, they had missed the beach camp by about two kilometers and I hadn’t heard the distinctive whirr of their heli.

If it was wireminds, perhaps my noisy fall had frightened them away.

I shivered.

If it was wireminds, perhaps they killed all the Island People, and there will be no trade, no whirring heli, ever again.

Once again, I berated myself: Mother would never think that way. It was probably an eagle taking a fish! The Island People are due in four days.

The Island People.

We called them Balanda, once. Five hundred years ago they stole our land. Two hundred years ago, they gave it back. Except for Shark Island, which they said was strategic and necessary for them to protect us from the wireminds that lived across the sea.

Ten years ago, though, when the wireminds invaded from the other direction, the Island People were helpless to stop them. All of our initiated men gathered up their explosive-tipped spears and returning EMP boomerangs and went to fight.

None of the men came back. Not my father and not my mother’s brother. I was one of the oldest children and I remember the weeping.

The wireminds temporarily won for themselves what they thought was isolated territory, free of the modified, metal-mining ants that had ravaged the rest of the world. They saw us and thought we were proof. Little did they know we had been living with the ants for decades, that we were skilled in keeping our few precious electronic devices safe from them.

Ants ate the wiremind shelters, their vehicles, exoskeletons and communications devices. They ate their wristwatches. Their boot buckles. When the soldiers lay down to sleep, they were woken by ants trying to bore through their skulls to get at the metal implants inside.

Cut off from their commanders, they were too afraid of us to ask for help. Or perhaps they thought they had killed us all. They starved, died of exposure or poisoned themselves unknowingly with the flesh of native animals.

For our land and seas were polluted with pesticides that had failed to stop the relentless march of the ants. Every animal that survived had adapted by sequestering or becoming resistant to the toxins. We could only eat the animals ourselves because of the vials of gut bacteria constantly supplied to us by the Island People in exchange for metallic gold, silver, copper and iron. The island that they had kept was their only refuge, their southern heartland destroyed, fallen into lawlessness.

Just as I was about to give up and return to the beach camp, I heard the noise again from the direction of open water.

With my hand, I gave Nosey the signal to circle behind prey; he went away silently, paddy paws light on the stilt-roots.

Camouflaged by my coating of mud, I went in a straight line toward the source of the sound.

It was a tall, skinny woman dragging a pair of pressurized gas tanks behind her. A pair of flippers were abandoned far behind her, where it seemed they’d become a liability in the mud, but she persisted with the bulky metal cylinders, though she must have known they would attract ants.

She was pale, not from breeding, I thought, but from being kept in the dark. Her head was shaved. A square electronic device was strapped to her chest over the top of a soggy, sack-like smock. Bra straps stuck out over her shoulders. Her exposed arms were covered in fresh insect bites. Older bites on her legs were turned to weeping, mud-smeared sores.

“This is Clan territory,” I said, and she jolted feverishly as though ants had already started eating her bra wire. “Are you lost?”

I saw Nosey cut off her retreat to the ocean, sniffing interestedly at her flippers.

“I got to find Rivers-of-Milk,” she gasped, naming the one who was birth mother to me and spiritual mother to the Clan.

“I am Quiet-One,” I said.

“You’re her daughter, then.”

“You know me? What else do you know about us?”

She laughed crazily.

“I know you have vials of bacteria. I know that you trade for them. My name is Muhsina. They sterilized my gut as punishment. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

Fires flickered on the beach.

Rivers-of-Milk stood with her hunting dog, Bloodmuzzle, beneath the safe tree, where dilly bags of metals were hung like sparkling fruit.

Each time we moved camp, a tree was chosen that harbored nests of fierce, meat-eating green ants. Green ants could not prevail over the metal-mining ants for more than a season; they had monstrous, crushing, acid-oozing mandibles, but their numbers were too small.

Still, it was only a few days until the trade tide, and then our small guardians would no longer be needed. Children caught crickets and cicadas and pinned them to the bark of high branches to keep the green ants moving up and down the trunk, hyper-alert for intruders from any rival nest.

Nosey ran straight over to Bloodmuzzle and started licking his shit-caked anus. Bloodmuzzle did the same to Nosey. Dogs were disgusting. The shaved-headed woman, Muhsina, shadowed me. I’d helped tie her tanks to a mangrove tree and submerge them so that ants wouldn’t get them.

Mother accepted my mud-stinking bags. She didn’t mention my stung face. Her encouraging smile was the same whether I brought great chunks of metal or none at all, but eating me inside was the drive to deliver, just once, more metal than she had gathered herself.

To prove myself.

Skink’s mother, Brushfire, felt no need to be encouraging. The plump little woman leaned over to peer at the bags—her eyesight was failing—and cackled,

“Not even enough for a full vial, girl. You want us hungry. You want to be Rivers-of-Milk yourself. Ha ha ha!”

Skink would be my husband when he became an initiated man. He hid behind his mother’s legs now, a twelve year old boy with long eyelashes.

Skink and I had no need to drink the vials of bacteria. The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.

Whatever that meant.

The point was, if we didn’t have metals to trade, it would be the adults who starved to death.

I felt conscious of Muhsina close by me. She had not said whether she would require a single vial in order to survive, or repeated doses.

The cooking smells were distracting and had to be making Muhsina’s mouth water. Poison toad, poison croc and poison barracuda; they roasted on long spits over the fires, but Muhsina could not eat, not without first drinking a vial, and only my mother could grant one to her.

“What is your story, Island Woman?” Rivers-of-Milk asked, beckoning to Muhsina.

Muhsina’s exhausted, shambling shape moved around me, to sit at my mother’s feet in supplication.

“My name is Muhsina,” she said. “They said I was crazy, but I’m not crazy. People scare me sometimes, that’s what. Lots of people all in one place, breathing on me like wasp stings. All those women in the same room as me, sleeping, sucking up my oxygen, I had to kill them. It’s better out here.”

“Of course it is,” my mother said without blinking. “Why did you take so long to come?”

“Cause I’ll die, that’s what. After I killed those others, they put in a stomach tube and flushed me out with antibiotics. Left me in hospital to starve to death, but after I’d been starving for a while, I could fit through the bars. Didn’t think of that, did they? Stole the thing that the net-divers use, the thing that makes the electrical signature of the mother of all sharks. Kept me safe as far as the mainland.”

“You asked for me by name.”

“I heard them talking about you. Said you hid in the bushes and watched while all those metalminds starved, because you had no mercy for them not of your own kind.”

“The metalminds killed our men.”

“And I killed Island People, and you’ve got a treaty with them. Are you gonna let me starve? Because to me, Rivers-of-Milk is the name of a woman who feeds starving people.”

Rivers-of-Milk put her hand on Bloodmuzzle’s head, smoothing one silken ear.

“This dog serves the Clan and I feed him. How will you serve, Muhsina?”

“Information,” Muhsina said with a glint in her eye. “And then I’ll be gone. Over the mountains and west. You’ll never see me again. You’ll never need to worry if I’ll bring harm to your young ones, because I’ll be gone away forever.”

“Give her a vial,” Rivers-of-Milk said to Skink, who scrambled immediately up the tree to fetch one.

And because we had saved her, Muhsina told us everything she knew, in the firelight, as we ate poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.

She told us more than we wanted to know about what the Island People had done with all of the metals we had given them.

In the morning, I helped my mother prepare for the ceremony.

Muhsina was already gone and my mind was with spinning with all that she had said.

While Rivers-of-Milk made the sweet sugar-cane water intended to fill the drinker with the wisdom of birds, I ground drowned green ants between two rocks to make the citrus-acid water that filled the drinker with the wisdom of ants. Brushfire beat a malleable golden ant-core into the shape of a metal flame, fixing it in place of a spear-tip on a long, hardwood haft, and Skink prepared strips of dried turtle and shark meat, saying the words over them so they would give the eater the wisdom of reptiles and the wisdom of fish, respectively.

“How can it be true,” I blurted at last, “that the Island People can manufacture a great wave, a great flood, such as the one Muhsina described?”

“It is a great stupidity,” my mother said angrily. “Their machine will drown all of us but it will not drown the ants. Water will cover us but it will not cover the high mountains. The ants will come back, worse than before. Do they not know that mountain ants eat through living flesh to reach the minerals in bones? That they build their nests around white, bony cores? If the Island People kill the gold ants and the silver ants and the copper ants, the bone ants will come.”

“The madwoman lied to us,” Brushfire scoffed. “There will be no wave. If the Island People are so clever why do they need to wait for the wet season before unleashing this great wave? Why not do it now? We need do nothing, Freshwater.”

Freshwater was my mother’s name before she became leader. Before she became Rivers-of-Milk. Brushfire shouldn’t have called her that.

“I must ask for guidance,” was all my mother said.

“Let me help you with that, mother,” I said, wanting to show her that I paid attention, that I remembered how to make the bird drink. I took the rest of the cane from her.

“You look too ugly for my son,” Brushfire said to me. “Your face tells me that you have the wisdom of ants already!”

“The pelican is my sister,” I said, naming my spirit animal, thinking furiously: It will be the wisdom of birds that we need. The pelican flies far inland to nest. We should go far inland, where the wave will not reach us.

We should go where Muhsina went. Over the mountains and west.

When night fell, fifty-seven warm bodies gathered around the fire.

Fifty-seven members of my great family began to sing, tossing dried coconut palm fronds into the flame to feed it.

I stared across at my mother, imagining I was her. When Skink became a man and I became his wife, all of my mother’s tasks would become mine.

Her chin was lifted. Eyes lidded. Hands outstretched. She was our protector. She was our mother.

I was so hypnotized by her that I didn’t even see the golden flame fall. Didn’t know which direction it had shown to her until her lips moved.

“What we need is the wisdom of ants,” she said, lifting the wooden bowl full of the elixir I had prepared. She sipped from it and passed the bowl to Brushfire, who sat beside her.

Because I watched her so closely, I saw the flicker of fear on her face.

I was shocked to realize she didn’t know what to say next.

The spirits had not spoken to her.

I felt in that moment I left childhood behind, though it was some time since I’d become a woman. The wisdom of ants which we waited for was nothing but my mother’s own wisdom. It fell to her alone to decide whether Muhsina was lying or whether the Island People had betrayed us; whether we could trust them and continue trading with them or whether they would use a machine made of copper, iron, silver and gold to make an underwater earthquake and an unprecedented tidal wave in the hope that the mainland could be made safe for their growing numbers and their metal-loving way of life.

“The ants that live by freshwater,” my mother said, “build their leaf-nests high in the branches of trees. When the wet season raises the water level, the nests stay safe. The ants teach us that the trees are safe. When we go to the forest camp for the wet season, we will build wooden platforms high in the trees. They will keep us safe when the wave comes.”

“And the Island People?” Brushfire demanded. “Will we continue to trade with them?”

“We will give them no more metals,” my mother answered calmly. “Ants keep their gold and silver safe, close to their hearts. We shall do the same.”

Fifty-seven warm bodies leaped to their feet, roaring in outrage. It was my mother’s death sentence. It meant the death of half the Clan.

In all the commotion, I felt Skink’s hand sneaking into my palm and gripping tight.

I squeezed his hand in return without looking at him. He would be shamed if anybody noticed his need for comfort, his future wife included. My heart thudded. I realized that my mother did not trust the Island People; had never trusted them, though they had kept us alive all this time with their magical vials.

“Come here, Quiet-One,” Rivers-of-Milk commanded, and I quickly detached my hand and fell to the sand at my mother’s feet. She took the glass bottle that had hung on a cord around her neck since the men had gone away, and put it around my neck. “I give up the name Rivers-of-Milk. It is yours, now. I am Freshwater. I will take no more food from the Clan. I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

I stared at her, rivers of tears flowing down my cheeks.

That is the new name I deserve: Rivers-of-Tears.

Rivers-of-Mud.

Rivers-of-Bodies, drowned in the flood, if I make poor decisions for the Clan.

I reached for her, but she could not take my hand. She was gone; dead. She had said the words. Without trade, there would be no more vials, and instead of starving horrifically in front of the children, my mother and the other women would, instead, leave us with untarnished memories by starving alone in the caves.

She made the motion with her hand for Bloodmuzzle to stay behind, and his plaintive whimper was the whimper I wanted to make.

Don’t leave me, I begged her with my eyes in silence, but she turned and walked away.

Brushfire’s teeth were bared in fury, but she spat,

“I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

She turned on her heel to follow Freshwater into darkness. I remembered my mother eating ant-jelly in secret; she was supposed to give it to the dog but she couldn’t help eating it herself. I remembered Brushfire, talking to her husband’s totem, the turtle, telling it how much she missed him every day.

When Brushfire caught up with Freshwater, she struck her old friend, hard, on the back of the head, but it didn’t matter what dead people did; they couldn’t be acknowledged by the living. One by one, the women said the words and went away from the fire, until there was nobody left but crying children and me. I was technically a woman but had been a child at heart until only a moment past.

The bottle. I wrapped my palm around the glass. My mother had carried it since the warriors went away to die. Inside, a tiny, solar-powered voice recorder, sealed in black plastic, floated in seawater that would keep it safe from ants until the time came for Skink’s initiation. The voice of my mother’s dead brother would tell Skink what to do.

“I will take care of you,” I said to the children. Some of them stopped crying, but most of them had to be pushed away by the dead people they were trying to cling to.

It felt stupid. I couldn’t take care of them. I wanted to give Skink the bottle right now and send him away for his initiation. He would come back to us with a new name, Blood-of-the-Shark, and it would be his responsibility to see that the Clan obeyed the wisdom of the ant, that safe tree-houses were built when we moved to the forest camp.

I looked around at what was left of us, twenty-eight little bodies around a smoldering beach fire, and I realized that a bunch of children could never build wooden platforms in high treetops. We were small and still-growing.

We were weak.

“Skink, help me put them to bed,” I begged, and we tucked the other children into their bark tents and shushed them until they stopped crying and fell asleep. I tried not to think of all the mothers at the caves, in blackness, sitting in sand, watching the waves that would soon wash their spirits back out to sea, to the place where spirits came from.

The wisdom of ants.

“Two days until the Island People come,” Skink said as we banked the fire.

“Do you think I should trade with them?” I asked him at once. If I could get more vials, the mothers wouldn’t have to die. I could save them. They’re dead, but I’m Rivers-of-Milk, now. I could give life back to them! Just this once, I could deliver something better than my mother delivered. Life, instead of death.

“Ask the ants, I suppose,” Skink shrugged. “I suppose we won’t kill those ants anymore.”

“Why not?”

“They’re like a totem for the Clan, aren’t they?”

“The totem for the Clan is the shark. We still kill sharks.”

“Only when making new men.”

And I saw his mouth firm with determination, and felt shame at my cowardice at wanting to pass my burden on to this brave, shy little boy.

The wisdom of ants.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said slowly. “Maybe we shouldn’t kill them any more. Maybe we should even protect them from the Island People.”

“How?” Skink wanted to know.

“Take care of the others,” I told Skink. “Keep Bloodmuzzle with you. I’ll come back in two days. I’ll be here when the Island People come. Don’t be afraid. And don’t let any of the children join the dead.”

The first day, I waited in mud.

Muhsina’s metal tanks were buried in mud except for the thin metal rims and twin openings at the top. It only took two hours for the first, fresh-hatched silver-ant-queen to arrive, with a cadre of winged workers, also fresh-hatched, to help her begin construction of a new nest.

The tang of metal had induced the nearby nest to divide. It had drawn the new queen.

As soon as she and her workers moved into the tank, I leaped up and flung enough ant-jelly on top of them to trap them in the bottom of the tank. Followed by two handfuls of mangrove muck to make sure they didn’t eat through the jelly and escape, I put the tank seals on before digging the tanks out and moving to a new place on the tidal flat.

Nosey sniffed out a new nest for me within minutes. This one was copper-ants. I re-buried the tanks at the base of the tree where the nest was, and waited for another queen to be hatched.

By nightfall, the sealed tank contained twenty new ant queens.

I shouldered the tanks as the moon rose over the sea and the incoming tide lapped at the flippers on my feet. Jelly and trapped air would keep the queens alive. I had until sunrise before the earliest-caught ants, energized by the rich jelly, breached the metal of the tank.

“You think the tank metal is a treat?” I whispered to the ants as I waded into the water, the shark-signal device strapped to my chest, already activated. “Just wait until you get to the Island.”

I swam out to sea, green turtles lolling in the water on either side of me, mistaking me for some monstrous relative, showing no fear. We came to the surface together to breathe, emptying capacious lungs and drinking air from sweet darkness before diving again.

There was a net.

Muhsina had not mentioned how she’d passed it.

In the moonlight, I’d seen the floats on the surface, forming a ring around Shark Island. I’d seen razor wire gleaming under the sweep of spotlights, mounted on the Island’s stone towers beside guns of terrible range and accuracy.

When I went to swim under, the net caught and held me by the left arm and left leg. I hadn’t seen it. I had no shell blade with me, and if I had, it wouldn’t have been sharp enough to cut the plastic rope.

I tried to relax my body; to behave as I might if I was caught in mangrove sludge.

Think.

Conserve energy.

There will be no more oxygen unless you think of a way to get free!

A spotlight brightened the water around me.

For an instant, I saw the bodies of dead sharks trapped in the net.

Shark Island.

The totem for the Clan is the shark.

My body felt numb; I didn’t know if it was because I was drowning or because I finally knew what I must do to escape the net. I took the glass bottle around my neck and smashed it against the metal tanks.

I had no spare hand to catch the voice recorder as it floated away; I could only grip tight to the neck of the bottle. With the broken glass, I sheared quickly and easily through the net.

Surfacing on the other side was like walking into the death caves. I had killed the Clan. Skink and the other young boys could never become men. There would be no more children.

I tried my best not to bawl as I swam the rest of the way to the Island. I should never have come. Everything was ruined. The mothers had sacrificed themselves for nothing.

When I reached the fortified shores, it was as though the shark spirit whose egg-casing had become Shark Island sought to comfort me. Swinging spotlights missed me by hand’s-breadths. By chance, I’d come aground by a concrete pipe that dribbled effluent, and was able to climb inside.

I crawled up the pipe until I came to a plastic grate, which I smashed with the heavy weight of the tanks and passed through into a room full of glass stills, vials and wooden racks. There was a ceramic jar of sea salt and a stack of cut cane.

The blackness was held at bay only by the red light on my shark-mimicking device which flashed when it was operational. I used the tiny guide to escape the still-room into a stairwell that led up to a walled vegetable garden.

With the last of my strength, I buried the tanks in the brown, sewer-smelling soil of the garden, re-planted two rows of carrots on top, then crawled back into the stairwell to fall asleep in the muck at the bottom.

“I’m sorry, Skink,” I whispered in the dark, my heart broken all over again.

When I woke, ants were crawling on the device still strapped to me.

Stifling a shout, I crushed out the lives of three little workers. They were my allies, but I needed the device to get home. My face was crusted with mud and still swollen from earlier bites. It felt like lifetimes since I’d brought my meager bounty back to my mother, Muhsina in tow.

I heard voices from the still-room. Risked a look through the light-filled crack of the closed door.

A man in a clean, white coat was pulling folded white napkins, soiled with what looked and smelled like baby-shit, from a white plastic bag. A second man was scraping the shit off the napkins with a wooden spoon.

He mixed it in a large beaker with water, squeezing fresh sugar cane juice into the water, adding a pinch of salt and the yolk of an egg.

Then, he divided the mixture amongst twenty vials, stoppered them with sugar cane pith, and packed them into the loops of a belt I had seen many times before.

“Incubator’s down,” he said to the other man, laughing. “Body heat will do.”

I retreated to the stairwell.

Though it was still dark under there, I wondered that my bare hands weren’t made incandescent by my anger. It was shit; the precious vials that we bartered for were nothing but baby shit in salty sugar-water.

The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.

And the meaning, which had seemed so mysterious before, resolved itself in my understanding. All that I needed to save the mothers was my own guts, or the guts of the other children, the ones who had no need to drink from the vials because all the bacteria that they needed to break down the poisoned flesh of their prey was inside them.

The Island People had been laughing at us the whole time. Using us to get metals for them.

See how you like the wisdom of ants, I thought furiously.

Long after the men had gone, I made a beaker of sugar-water to re-energize myself before returning, in darkness, to the sea.

Skink and the two dogs waited for me when I staggered up the beach.

I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I collapsed on the sand and he built a fire beside me, bringing poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.

“Nice swim?” he asked.

I was saved from having to answer him by the whirring sound of the Island People’s heli. It would land in knee-deep water on the tidal flat.

They always landed in water.

“Skink,” I said, “when the Island People leave their machine, I want you to fill it with the nests of iron-ants. Nosey and Bloodmuzzle will find them for you.”

We gazed at one another. Iron-ants were the most plentiful. I hadn’t taken any with me to the Island, because they were the fastest at stripping down steel, and they would have escaped Muhsina’s tanks long before I’d made landfall.

“You are a good leader, Rivers-of-Milk,” Skink said, and tears came to my eyes, because he hadn’t noticed that the precious glass bottle was missing from around my neck.

He leaped to his feet, the dogs at his heels, and ran straight towards the mangroves. I gathered myself, ready to face the two men in their white coats and the two guards with electric prods and teargas that always appeared alongside them.

Wind from the flying machine made white water on the flat. It took the Island people a long time to find a place they liked the look of and lower the dragonfly’s spindly legs into the water. Then, they inflated a rubber boat, climbed into it and drove it into dry sand, rather than get their trousers wet.

I waited by the little fire that Skink had made for me. Without turning my head away from their bow wave, I saw Skink pushing a floating piece of bark out towards the machine. It was covered in the broken, pulsating nests of iron ants.

They were so confident. They were so commanding that they even commanded the full attention of themselves. They didn’t look back.

“Welcome to Clan territory,” I told them when they came to a halt before me.

“The same tree?” one of the white-coated men asked casually.

“There will be no trade today. You will stay as our guests.”

“No,” one of the guards said, starting to step forward, but the white-coated man was curious and unafraid.

“Guests for how long?” he asked.

“Permanent guests,” I said, and the guards, swearing, turned in time to see Skink flinging nests into the open hatch of their heli. They pulled out guns and fired bullets at him, but he dived into the water and swam away.

They pointed their guns at me, but I laughed in their faces.

“Kill me,” I said, “and the Clan will vanish into the forest. You’ll never find them. You can drink those vials under your coat for a while, but then you’ll die.”

“Another helicopter will come from the Island,” the man said, struggling to remain calm.

“Maybe. Maybe they’ve got ant troubles of their own, on the Island. Come with me, now. We’re going to the caves. There are some women there who will need those vials.”

“Wait,” the second white-coated man said. “You don’t understand. We can’t stay here. Our instruments have detected a big storm approaching. There will be a wave like nothing that you’ve—”

“Yes,” I said, grimacing, turning away from him. “I know about the wave. Put your weapons down and follow me. We’ll be going through the trees. If you bring any metals, the ants will smell it. They can taste it from very far away, and they’ll come.”

One of the guards didn’t follow.

He sloshed back through the water to the flying machine and climbed into the cockpit. I watched him struggle with the controls, twitching while the ants bit him again and again. The motor started and the machine’s mounted wings began to whir.

In silence, the three that remained watched the heli fly crazily back towards the island.

“The protocols,” the white-coated man whispered. “Without them, they’ll shoot it down.”

But nobody shot it down.

“I think they’re busy,” I said.

The remaining guard put his weapons down shakily.

Ants were already marching out onto the sand.

Nosey came to me, hours later, but there was still no sign of Skink.

“Show me where he is, Nosey,” I said, making the signal for Nosey to find people. The old yellow dog whuffed and skittered off into the mangroves.

I followed with a sense of dread.

The Island People had been set to building bark tents and catching toads; I was expecting many more Island People to arrive over the following days and weeks. We would not stay. They would be angry with us. There might be more shootings.

But the Island People were not like the wireminds. They knew about the local poisons as well as the bacterial remedy, and so long as they brought their children with them, they would not die if left alone. I would let their anger cool in our absence. Maybe, one day, we would make contact with them again.

Nosey whuffed again, excitedly.

“Skink!” I shrieked, and ran to my future husband.

He sat in a bloody puddle of mud, staring into the dead, filmed eyes of an enormous shark that had wriggled its way through the shallow water, desperate to get to him, but then become trapped by the gills in a snarl of stilt-roots.

“Skink!” I cried again, shaking him by the shoulders. “Where are you hurt?”

Skink’s dark eyes gradually focused on me.

“A bullet went through my leg,” he said quietly. “It’s not bleeding any more.”

“Where’s Bloodmuzzle?”

“Inside the shark,” he said.

He didn’t cry.

Nosey licked the small leg wound clean, and I helped Skink return to the camp. Once he was settled, I went back to the mangroves with a long shell knife and cut the dead shark open, determined to get my mother’s dog out of its guts.

Inside its stomach, along with poor Bloodmuzzle’s remains, I found a little black plastic package.

The totem for the Clan is the shark.

I held the voice of my mother’s brother in my hand. The vials had brought life back to the dead mothers in the caves. The recorder would bring life back to the whole Clan.

“I am Rivers-of-Milk,” I said with astonishment to Nosey.

He tilted his long face to one side. His hearing wasn’t that great.

About the Author

Thoraiya Dyer is an Australian writer, archer and ex-veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Cosmos, Apex, Nature and Redstone SF. Fans of “The Wisdom of Ants” can get hold of the Australian-inspired stories, “Yowie” (Aurealis Award winner for Fantasy Short Story) and “Night Heron’s Curse” (Aurealis-shortlisted) from Twelfth Planet Press and Fablecroft respectively. “Asymmetry,” a collection of four original stories, will be published in 2013 as part of Twelfth Planet Press’ Twelve Planets series.

Sweet Subtleties

Lisa L Hannett

Javier calls me Una, though I’m not the first. There are leftovers all around his studio. Evidence of other, more perishable versions. Two white chocolate legs on a Grecian plinth in the corner, drained of their caramel filling. A banquet of fondant hands, some of which I’ve worn, amputated on trays next to the stove. Butter-dipped petals crumbled on plates, lips that have failed to hold a pucker. Butterscotch ears, taffy lashes, glacé cherry nipples. Nougat breasts, pre-used, fondled shapeless. Beside them, tools are scattered on wooden tables. Mixing bowls, whisks, chisels, flame-bottles. Needles, toothpicks, sickle probes, pliers. Pastry brushes hardening in dishes of glycerin. In alphabetical rows on the baker’s rack, there are macadamias, marshmallows, mignardises. Shards of rock candies, brown, yellow and green, that Javier uses to tint our irises. Gumdrop kidneys, red-hot livers, gelatin lungs. So many treats crammed into clear jars, ready to be pressed into cavities, tissue-wrapped and stuffed into limbs. Swallowed by throats that aren’t always mine.

“Delicious,” I say as Javier jams grenadine capsules into my sinuses, a surprise for clients with a taste for fizz. “Delicious.” The word bubbles, vowels thick and popping in all the wrong places. Gently frowning, Javier crushes my larynx with his thumbs. He fiddles with the broken musk-sticks, tweaking and poking, then binds the voice box anew with licorice cords. I try again.

“Delicious.”

Still not right. The tone is off. The timbre. It’s phlegmatic, not alluring. Hoary, not whorish. It will put people off their meals, not whet appetites. It doesn’t sound like me.

Javier’s palm on my half-open mouth is salty. His long fingers gully my cheeks. I wait in silence as he breaks and rebuilds, breaks and rebuilds. Concentrating on my lungs, my throat. Clearing them. Making sure they are dry. I don’t mind being hushed. Not really. Not at the moment. If anything goes wrong, if I collapse this instant, if I crack or dissolve, at least my last words will have been pleasant. Something sweet to remember me by.

It won’t be like before, he said. There will be no weeping. No throttling chest-rattle. No thick, unbreathable air.

On Monday, I made my latest debut—I make so many. Served after the soup but before the viande at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. My striptease was an enormous success. Fresh and unmarked, clad in edible cellophane, my marzipan dusted with peach velvet. Even the stuffiest top-hat couldn’t resist. Javier had contrived a device to drop sugared cherries onto every tongue that probed between my legs. Dozens of gentlemen laughed and slurped, delighted I was a virgin for each of them.

“Marvelous,” they shouted, licking slick chops. “Belle Una, tonight you’re more divine than ever!”

“Marvelous,” I say, calm and mostly clear. Mostly. Close enough.

Sugar-spun wigs line a window ledge above Javier’s workbench. Faceless heads, all of them. Now visible, now obscured, as he bobs over me, intent on his work. The hairdos are exquisite. Some pinned up in elaborate curls, some plaited, some styled after Godiva. Glinting honey strands. Carmine. Deep ganache. Exquisite, all of them, despite showing signs of wear.

Between soot-streaked portraits on the walls, wooden shelves support a horde of glass molds. As one, they gape at me from across the room. Their faces as like to each other as I am to them. High brows and cheekbones, pert mouths, strong jaws, noses so straight we’d be ugly if it weren’t for our delicate nostrils. Javier insists we are identical, indistinguishable, impeccable casts of the original. We must be the same, he tells us. We must be. We must.

Once people have well and truly fallen in love, he said, they do not want variety. They want the same Una they enjoyed yesterday, last week, last month. They want the same Una, now and always. The same Una that Javier, confectioner gourmand, is forever recreating.

For the hauts bohème on Wednesday evening, I played the role of limonadière. Stationed behind the bar counter, I wept pomegranate jewels while spouting absinthe verses. Odes to beauty, freedom, love. Javier encouraged this crowd unreservedly. “They’ve loose clothes, loose hair, loose morals,” he said. “And loose purse-strings.” Under his guidance, the bohèmes tickled my limbs with the bows of gypsy violins. Scratched me with pen nibs. Trailed paintbrushes along my soft places. With each stroke, swirls of hippocras bled to my surface. Ale, brandy, champagne, rum. One by one, the lushes lapped it all up. They prefer drink to desserts, Javier said. Those with maudlin constitutions cannot keep anything substantial down.

“Una, chère Una,” the bohos cried, slurring into their cups. “Promise never to leave us again.”

Emotional drunks, I thought. Glutting themselves into confusion. Muddled on passion and wine. Can’t they see I’m here? I am forever here.

“I feel—” I begin. Javier traps my jaw. Holds it still. Wary of what, I wonder? That it will fall off with talk, no doubt. That I’ll run out of things to say before tonight’s performance.

I feel solid, I want to assure him. I feel settled. Take it easy now. Easy. I’m going nowhere. I’m right here.

Friday’s connoisseurs ate with torturous restraint.

“Pace yourselves,” the women said, cracking knuckles with the sharp edges of their fans.

“Sugar is a mere distraction for the palate,” said the men. “It will never satiate.”

As centerpiece on their ruby tablecloth, I sat with legs pretzeled into Sadean poses. Wearing garters of hardened molasses, nothing more. By the second remove of sorbet, my contorted ankles and wrists had crumbled. I couldn’t stand for all the gold in the world. My paralysis thrilled our hosts no end—as did Javier’s copper blades. Two daggers per guest. Honed to ravage goodies from my thighs, rump, belly. Tantalized, the feasters took turns at fossicking. At knifing currant ants and blackberry spiders from my innards.

“What an illusion,” they moaned, crunching aniseed antennae. “So convincing, so real . . . And not even a splash of blood! When did you learn such tricks, chère fille? Why have you not beguiled us this way before? No matter, no matter. Bravo, chère Una, et encore!”

Tips are highest when egos are stroked, my confectioner says. When pomposity is rewarded with flirtation. So Javier slapped their bony backs. He stooped and kowtowed. I bowed as best I could. Waggling my fingers and toes. Letting them caress me long after the coins had rolled.

Rigged with peanut-brittle bones, my digits made such a gratifying snap when the party finally succumbed. When they gave into temptation. Indulged in wounding and breaking.

Javier ribbons my chin with silk to hold it in place for a few minutes. My neck needs patching; he’s made quite the mess of it. He spritzes rosewater to keep me malleable, then shuffles to the stove. Bent over hotplates, he sings quietly as he stirs. His plainchant quickens the pots’ ingredients. Sifted flour, hen-milk, vanilla essence. A sprinkling of salty eye-dew to bring his subtleties to life. Over and over, mournfully low, he garnishes the mixture with tears and base notes of my name.

Una, Una, he whispers, adding a pinch of cardamom to freckle my skin. Una, this time you’ll be just right.

For tonight’s outcall, Javier embeds a diadem of Jordan almonds into my curls. “The candied treasure of Priam,” he says, chiseling them into my scalp. Content, he moves on to my hazel eyes. Sets them with a stony stare, like Helen’s transfixed by the sight of her city ablaze. She’s a favorite of Javier’s. Peerless Helen. Unforgettable Helen. With that legendary face. All those ships sailing after it. Lately, while assembling and reassembling me, he’s worn grooves into her story, worn it thin with retelling. The affair. The abduction. The hoopla and heartbreak. His sunken cheeks gain a healthy sheen as he talks of truces made and broken. Gifts offered, shunned, accepted. The permanence, the stubbornness of young lovers. The tale spills from him like powdered ginger, spicy and sharp, as he presses buttercream icing into my moist gaps.

While he pokes and prods, I make predictable observations. Repeating comments he himself once made. Repeating threadbare conversations. Repeating things he’ll smile to hear.

From the shelf, the molds watch us, unblinking.

“Ignore them,” I say, repeating, repeating. “It’s just the two of us now.”

Javier rubs the scowl from my forehead. Heats a spoon and melts saffron into my eyebrows. Sunshine lilts through the studio’s crescent windows as he works. The deep gold of late afternoon adds fire to his story. Promises broken, omens ignored, the grief and wrath of Achilles. Every word igniting, ablaze. But when he reaches the sack of Troy, Javier pauses. Unwilling to narrate the ending, he backtracks. As always, to Helen.

Concentrating, he plunges a series of long plaits into my scalp without letting even a drop of custard ooze out. Carefully, precisely, he stretches them down my spine. I’m half-bowed under the weight of so much hair. He fusses with the braids, fusses.

“Menelaus is furious when his wife returns,” he eventually says. “Can you imagine? Almost as furious as when she first left. How dare she have survived so much without him? How dare he remain such a fool in her presence.”

I shrug. Javier pushes my shoulders back down, checks for wrinkles. Checks the portrait above the assembly table. Nodding, he reaches up to drape an icing chiton over my nakedness. I am taller than him by a hand, but he is clever as a monkey when it comes to climbing. Hopping from footstool to bench and back, he maneuvers around me, the long tube of material bunched in his arms. Though the gauze is thinner than faith, the strength of his recipe keeps it together.

That, and his devilish fingers.

They dart in and out, gathering, smoothing, fluffing my garment until it blouses in wondrous folds. Pins appear, disappear. Puncturing, piercing, holding the fabric in place. Javier’s lips smack as he thinks, as he tucks. He steps back to take me all in. Steps up, tugs a pleat. Steps back, cocks his head. Steps up, fidgets a cord around my waist. Steps back, smacks, annoyed. Up and back, up and back. Step-ball-change, once more from the top. Up and back in the perfectionist’s dance.

At last, he is satisfied. A pendant is the final touch, a mille-feuille heart on a string of rarified gold. “You are a feast,” he says, coiling the cold thing around my throat. “You are a picture.” Overcome, he smacks lips and hands—and his cufflink catches on my neckline. Catches, and tears.

The robes sigh apart, exposing me from gullet to gut. Javier rushes to fix it. He flaps and gouges, making it worse. Up and back, up and back, he flaps, gouges, wrecks and ruins. Up and back, the necklace snaps. The silver bonbons he’d spent hours spiraling around my cinnamon aureoles are scraped loose. Part of my rib cage concaves. Tiny candies plink to the floor.

But there is air in my chest. There is breath. Surely, this is good?

“And he is ever at mercy of the gods,” Javier mutters, smudging my marzipan to keep the custard from seeping out. “We’ll have to cancel, Una. Reschedule for another time. We can’t arrive with you in this state—what will they think?”

“You underestimate—” I almost say yourself, but taste the error before it’s spoken. A confectioner does not reach Javier’s standing without resolve. Without ego. Instead, I reassure him with a familiar wink. “Tonight, I’ll play the mystic. You know the routine. Smoke, mirrors, communing with spirits. It’s only fitting.” I look down at my Hellenistic garb. The ragged flaps of material lift easily and, thankfully, with minimal debris. I fasten them on my left shoulder, covering the worst of the mess. Leaving my heart and one flawless breast bare.

Holding his gaze, I curtsy. “A seer should ever reveal as much as she obscures. N’est-ce pas?”

His laugh is a sad little bark.

“And you are a vision,” he says.

I am ready to go, but Javier is nervous.

I don’t tell him he’s being silly. Don’t remind him I’ve survived three vigorous outings this week, mostly intact. He doesn’t need to hear it. There’s no limit to his talent, no damage he can’t reverse. I’m living proof, I could tell him. I’m here because of him. I’m here. But he’s heard it all before.

Everything will be fine, I could say. Three faultless soirées in the space of a week. Three journeys, survived. As many trips as Helen made, or more, depending on Javier’s mood when telling stories. And only a few pieces lost, despite the Sadeans. Nothing important. I’m still together—we’re still together. Everything is fine.

Even so, Javier is nervous.

“They want to see you, Una. That’s all, so they say. After so long. Only to see you.” He is speaking to me, but his back is turned. Facing the faded oil painting. “They’ve got countless portraits, cameos, ambrotypes. Countless memories. Insufficient, they say. It’s just not the same.” Javier snorts. “So now, finally, they want to see you.”

Vacant glass eyes gaze down from the shelves. The molds sneer at me. Waiting their turn.

“I’ll give it my all,” I say, the phrase stale on my tongue.

“Yes, of course, ma chère,” Javier replies to the wall. “You always have.”

In the mansion’s grand dining hall, dinner is imminent. The sideboard is weighed down with a hoard of gold dishes. Steaming tureens, saucières, bain-maries. The room suffocates with aromas of the meal to come. Fine claret is decanted. Muscat and champagne are chilling for later. Legions of silverware are arranged in ranks beside plates. Crystal stemware gleams. Footmen stand at the ready. Carafes of ice-water dripping condensation onto their white gloves. Poised to begin service, they look out over the room. Vigilant, unblinking.

As always, Madame dominates the table’s head while Monsieur commands the foot. Eight rigid people occupy the seats between. Men sporting versions of the same black-and-white suits. Women in lusterless monochrome. All posturing, variations with the same facial features. To my left, Javier folds and refolds his napkin. A cue, perhaps? I await further signals—but like the hors d’oeuvres and drinks, none are forthcoming. For all his anxiety, my confectioner has neglected to give me instructions. Am I the centerpiece this evening? Am I the dessert? Our hosts have offered no guidance. Made no requests. The moment we entered, they simply invited me to sit. To join them at table, like a guest.

They want to see you, Javier said.

They all do, don’t they? They want the same Una, over and over. I am always her. Over and over.

But tonight I am also sibyl, oracle, prophetess. Tonight I am breathless from seeing so much. Seeing and being seen.

“A striking resemblance,” Maman says at last.

“We had heard,” says Papa, mustache bristling. “But, you understand, we needed to see for ourselves.”

“Of course,” replies Javier. “Of course. Remarkable, n’est-ce pas?”

I shiver under their scrutiny.

“How many of these—” says the youngest Demoiselle, la sœur, jeweled hand fluttering. Grasping for an explanation. “How long has it been—? How did you reconstruct—? I mean, look at her. Just, look. Please tell me this isn’t her death mask . . . ”

They look and look and look away.

“Absolutely not,” whispers Javier. “Does she look dead to you?”

Of course, I repeat silently. Of course. Remarkable, n’est-ce pas?

I reach down. Pull my legs up one at a time. Twist until I’m perched like a swami on the mahogany chair. Mousse leaks from my hips. Cream swills in my guts. I exhale and collect my thoughts. Prepare my premonitions. Summon my ghosts.

“Shall we begin?”

One of the black-ties glares at me. “Una was much more lithe,” he says. “Much more vibrant. Such an exquisite dancer, such a beautiful singer. To have wasted her life on vulgar cabaret . . . ”

“Slinking in alleys . . . ”

“Scuffling for coin in dank, decrepit places . . . ”

“Cafés and folies.” Top-hat shakes, spits. “Damp, even in summer. Small wonder the wheeze got her—”

My joints stiffen as he speaks. Vein-syrup coagulates. Grenadine clogs my nostrils. I exaggerate a cough, swallow fizz. Use spittle and phlegm to demand their attention. “Shall we begin?”

“Heartbreaking,” says another. “Clearly, a wife cannot survive on sugar, liquor, and promises alone . . . ”

“A husband should provide more—”

“Ça suffit,” says Maman. “My daughter made her own choices. What’s done is done.”

“But this,” says Papa, crossing himself. Expression doughy. “She has had no say in this.”

“Open your eyes,” I intone with all the gravitas of Helen on the ramparts. Fire flickers in my gaze. “Open your eyes. Una is here.”

Give them what they desire, my confectioner once told me, and the audience will never forget you.

Cardamom flakes from my cheeks as I grin, enigmatic. Remember me? Peppermint auras smoke from my mouth, sweet and pervasive. What a show we’ve planned! What a performance. There will be no weeping this time. No throttling chest-rattle. No thick, unbreathable air. It won’t be like before.

Remember?

I am weightless, seeing them here, being seen. I am buoyant.

A fairy-floss spirit spins out of my fingertips. She clouds up to the ceiling, floats down the walls. Shrouds the gallery of portraits hung there. “Una,” I say, louder now. At my command, the specter coalesces. Straight nose, high brows, Helen’s fixed stare. She is the mold, the paintings, replicated in floating skeins of cotton candy. “Una is here.”

My eyeballs roll back in their sockets. The undersides are concave. Hollow, but not void. Diamond-shaped dragées trickle out. Dry-tears. My pupils turn skullward, but I am not blind. I am Delphic. Past, present, future. All-knowing. All-seeing.

I look and look and don’t look away.

Chairs screech back from the table. Heels chatter their exit, but not mouths. Mouths are black lines, firm-clenched or drooping. Mouths are hidden behind satin-gloved fingers, closed behind handkerchiefs. Mouths are quivering disgust. There will be no licks, no nibbles from these. No kisses.

Maman’s handmaiden swats the apparition, clearing a path so her mistress can leave. Papa sniffs. Dabs his lowered eyes. Orders servants back to the kitchens. Follows them out. Javier sits rigid as meringue beside me. Will he add this story to his repertoire? Will he tell the next Una what he’s told us already, over and over, so many times?

Give them what they desire, he said.

Specters, spirits, sweet subtleties.

“Wait,” Javier says as his in-laws retreat from the room. Indecorous penguins, making their excuses before the entrée. “Stay! You wanted to see—”

New memories to replace the old.

Pulling, pulling, the ghost unspools from my heart. She spills. She aches.

“Is this not her face?” he says, leaning close enough to kiss. “Is Una not right here? Is she not perfect?”

“This is not her face,” I repeat. Wrong, try again. My thoughts are muddled, drunk on passion and time. “You wanted to see.” Musk falls from my gums. Bohèmes break brittle bones. No, wait. Not quite. That’s not alphabetical—macadamias, marshmallows, mignardises. Better. My fingers snap, one by one. Bohèmes bones break brittle. Sherbet foams from my mouth, grenadine from my nostrils. Custard seeps, melts my delicate robes. My hands find, flail, flounder in Javier’s warm grip. Cream gluts from my sternum, splattering the Wedgwood. Shaking, my head teeters. Throbs. Tilts.

“She is not perfect,” says the ghost.

Forced skyward, Helen’s stony gaze comes to rest on the ceiling rose.

“This is not her face.”

Will Javier tell the next Una this story?

Give them what they desire, he said.

New memories.

Remember?

My chest heaves, drowning in buttercream. The ghost breaks its tether, unmoors, dissolves. “This is not her face,” she says. Not quite. The tone is off. The thick-glugging timbre. “Javier.”

Try again and again.

“Una is not right here.”

About the Author

Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australiacity of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Shimmer, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010 & 2011), and Imaginarium 2012: Best Canadian Speculative Writing, among other places. She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga), which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Midnight and Moonshine, co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012. Lisa has a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature, and is a graduate of Clarion South. You can find her on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

The Corpse of the Future:
Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!
and Victorian Science Fiction

S. J. Chambers

When we think of mummies, we don’t recall the desiccated corpses that rest behind museum glass, but the dehydrated reanimated corpse of lovelorn Imhotep played by Boris Karloff in the Universal Pictures flick The Mummy (1932), or the more recent reincarnation in the 1999 remake of the same name starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo. In these films, Imhotep is a sinister and mystical Other who is searching for his lost love, and in doing so curses the Brits and Americans that revived him with mayhem. However, the cinematic mummies—like most Universal Pictures monsters (ahem, Frankenstein)—barely resemble their literary prototype, Cheops, who is revived by a galvanic machine rather than incantations to reinforce divine law and thwart political conspiracies.

Cheops does this wandering in The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a futuristic meditation on England in the year 2126. Published anonymously in three volumes in 1827, and again in 1828, it proffers a futuristic hope of what its 17-year old author, Jane C. Loudon, hoped technology and social progress would improve in her country, and in doing so hones in on the trends and occupations of Regency England, such as whether the monarch (and church) should be abolished and whether Positivism and technology would ultimately better society. It’s also a parable on the othering of non-Western countries, a trend that of course became manifested during the British Empire but began with Egyptomania thanks to the Napoleonic discoveries of pharaonic tombs in 1789.

While all of these political implications hinge on the current affairs of Loudon’s time—political unrest compounded by the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, as well as the beginnings of workers rights movements—each argument she makes is also towards an ultimate dismissal of the Romantic movement that advocated (mostly) socialism, atheism, metaphysical science rather than technological, and Orientalism. The main target of her parody was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

Born Jane Webb on August 19, 1807 in Birmingham, England, Loudon enjoyed a privileged and affluent life until she was orphaned in 1824. Her mother died when she was 12, and after living abroad with her father, Thomas Webb, for several years, they returned to England when his manufacturing business went bankrupt. Shortly thereafter, he passed away leaving his daughter penniless and dependent upon the kindness of her father’s London friends, including the Romantic painter John Martin, who encouraged her education and writing, and more than likely exposed her to Frankenstein.

Also known as The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s archetypal novel was anonymously published in 1818, causing sensationalist scandal throughout the literary world. With an introduction by the anarchist poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Mary’s husband) and a dedication to the radical philosopher William Godwin (Mary’s father), the book was not only seen as an original spin on the Gothic and Grotesque tale, but a Romantic social tract reinforcing the Godwinian ideals of atheism and personal freedom that macrocosmically championed the French Revolution and the destruction of monarchy. According to scholar Lisa Hopkins in her article “Jane C. Loudon’s ‘The Mummy!’: Mary Shelley Meets George Orwell, and They Go in a Balloon to Egypt,” Frankenstein’s main concept of successful reanimation and life-creation outside of (God’s) laws of nature was received by contemporary critics as a reinforcement of Godwin’s impiety and “certainly seems to have been the message which Jane C. Loudon found in Frankenstein, and she did not like what she read.” Jane disagreed with the novel so much that she used Shelley’s ingenious and blasphemous concept to inspire her own creature who would refute the liberalism Jane thought would be the ruin of England and establish a relationship between scientific progress and divine intervention.

Hopkins and most other Loudon scholars find the novel fascinating “because of what it tells us about the contemporary reception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” But Loudon’s novel also illustrates the reactive nature of science fiction and how it would become an effective political vehicle in its near future explorations, setting the tone for near-future, dystopic SF to come like George Orwell’s 1984 and the work of Phillip K. Dick. Conversely, it also shows how futuristic thought experiments can become retro-futuristic time capsules of the author’s era, its inventions leaping solely from technology only as advanced as steam.

While we’ve already established the political nature of Frankenstein, the book implicitly weaves its philosophical discourse into the story’s action and narrative. However, it is set more contemporaneously, and while it does allegorize current events, the story is more atmospheric and cerebral. It is not concerned directly with political bodies, but of the ideas of individuality and nature. As a result, the book does not concern itself with technical details nor does it try to forecast the future of man beyond the idea of immortality.

The Mummy! on the other hand is explicit, and begins immediately outlining the political turbulent trajectory (one that follows Godwin’s wishes, not necessarily Frankenstein’s story) of England from the Regency period to 2126. It is almost impossible to quote, because the 200 years is relayed in an entire chapter describing the rise of democratic and socialist thinking—and at one point complete anarchy—only to see the free mob lost without a leader: “The people had tasted the sweets of power, they had learned their own strength, they were enlightened; and fancying they understood the art of ruling as well as their quondam directors, they saw no reason why, after shaking off the control of one master, they should afterwards submit to the domination of many . . . Thus they reasoned, and thus they acted, till government after government having been overturned, complete anarchy prevailed; and the people began to discover, though, alas! too late, that there was little pleasure in being masters when there were no subjects.” Eventually, counterrevolutionaries that included the lineal descendants of the former royal family were able to sway the people into submitting back into an absolute monarchy in which peace apparently prevailed. By anchoring the book immediately into this political discourse, we know that Loudon is not interested in individual experience and consequence, but of the fate of a nation preoccupied with what she’d considered utter nonsense.

After undergoing popular revolt, spiritual disillusionment, and a long and disastrous flirtation with republicanism, England returns to absolute monarchy and Catholicism. It is also a matriarchy. When the new conservative regime was reestablished, the male heir to the throne refused to wear the crown; his daughter donned it and ruled England with the sagacity and ruthlessness of Queen Elizabeth I.

Perhaps one of the more radical notions of this pre-Victorian novel is the Queen’s establishment of sole female secession. Like the Virgin Queen before her, she shuns marriage and motherhood to focus solely on her kingdom, and decrees that no longer will the secession go to a first born son, but to the unmarried women in her line who are between the ages of 20 and 25 years old.

Despite this one big step for women, feminism is mostly latent throughout The Mummy!, although Loudon scholarship avers it is a feminist piece. Women are well-educated and sensible, like all of the classes by the 22nd century, but they are still ensnared in the plans their menfolk have laid down for them. However, fashion is more forgiving and is a sartorial signal for more independence: “The ladies were all arrayed in loose trousers, over which hung drapery in graceful folds; and most of them carried on their heads, streams of lighted gas forced by capillary tubes, into plumes, fleurs-de-lis, or in short any form the wearer pleased; which jets de feu had an uncommonly chase and elegant effect.” Anticipating the controversial New Woman movement in the later century (and also rave-glow-stick/LED accessories of the 20th century), one can imagine that this was noticed more among Regency reviewers than the social question of women in power. Michelle Parslow argues in her thesis Women, Science and Technology: The Genealogy of Women Writing Utopian Science Fiction that the implicit feminism lies in that she does not portray the use of science and technology in the context of a sole male domain (even though it could be argued there is still a social male domain): “ . . .The Mummy! is neither a realization, nor a critique, of the patriarchal endeavor to create a ‘scientific utopia’ . . . Indeed, this is where the strength of her feminist criticism ultimately lies: The Mummy! depicts the misuse of technology and the colonial imperative as an issue for which everyone should take responsibility for.”

The equal blame as a feminist statement is not as blatant as Parslow alludes, but the misuse of technology and the colonial imperative is very much present. Before we delve into that, though, there is an actual plot behind all the politics. In fact, there is a lot of plot, and unfortunately it drags the novel’s pacing over three volumes that may make it tedious to modern audiences (Cheops isn’t even resuscitated until page 188!). Loudon plucks and repots plots from Shakespeare including King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet to tend a garden of melodrama. England mostly finds peace under this absolute rule, although they are constantly under the threat of invasion. At the book’s opening, Queen Claudia currently reigns, and seems like she would rule for twenty years more. The cast of characters include two aristocratic families who have their eyes on the crown and glory: the Montagues and the house of the Duke of Cornwall. The Montague family has two sons, Edmund, a national hero on the fast-track to knighthood, and Edric, a slacker intellectual. The Duke of Cornwall’s family features marriageable daughters Elvira and Rosabella who are also the next in line to the throne if anything happened to the Queen.

Overshadowed by his brother’s achievements, Edric yearns for his own glory within the intellectual domain, and captivated by the idea of reanimation hatches a plan with his friend, German scientist, Dr. Entwerfen, to resurrect a mummy. It is with Edric that Loudon takes her cheapest shots at Shelley; he is, of course, Victor Frankenstein’s counterpart. Edric is every bit as vain as his foil, but he represents a more thoughtful and conscientious vein of mad science. He is not interested in making a man, or recreating life, as though he were divine, but in uncovering the divine with scientific experimentation. Edric’s fascination with reanimation stems from answering an age-old philosophical question of what happens to the soul upon death. This is a debate he isn’t at all fearless about; he worries whether resurrecting a corpse might result in a soulless zombie than a real man. More alluring still are the implications that upon a successful reanimation with returned soul that there is some divine ligature connecting soul to body no matter how long the latter has been departed. Despite the theories and his curiosity, he claims the only thing holding him back is a fear of having to actually touch the dead body, and he immediately rejects the notion that subjects could be found at the charnel house, a source Victor Frankenstein had no problem utilizing as an observatory and depot for his parts. Ironically, it is a clergyman, Father Morris, that reasons with Edric that the only way to know is to conduct the experiment, and suggests an Egyptian mummy because its swathed body would protect squeamish Edric from touching the “mass of cold mortality.”

Edric still needs a kick in the pants, and it comes from his father who informs him he is to marry Rosabella. When Edric refuses, he is banished from his home. Ties cut, he and Dr. Entwerfen go to Egypt in a balloon and resurrect Cheops with the doctor’s “galvanic battery of fifty surgeon power”: “Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment. Thunder now roared in tremendous peals through the Pyramids, shaking their enormous masses to the foundation, and vivid flashes of light darted round in quick succession.” The resurrection scene ironically reads like how we envision Frankenstein’s creation—electrifyingly gothic —while in the text Frankenstein’s reanimation methods are vaguely alluded too, and not at all revealed in technological detail. The galvanic battery works, however, and before Edric can surmise about the body and soul, Cheops spazzes out from the shock of his resurrection, flees the pyramid, hijacks their balloon, and flies back to England landing on and killing Queen Claudia in the middle of a pageant.

Just like there are deathly consequences from Victor Frankenstein making and rejecting his creation, Edric’s tampering with life and death sets in action the rest of the novel’s plot—including political intrigue, mysterious clergy parentage, and of course, love triangles, all with a little help from Cheops who, despite his hideous appearance is, much like Frankenstein’s Creature, a soulful good guy and in fact comes to represent those very virtues of rationality and spiritualism that Loudon saw as being rejected by romantic works such as Frankenstein. While we follow the melodrama of Cheops and these conspiracies, woven throughout is humor and delightful technological vignettes that easily makes this a textbook requirement for proto-Steampunk studies. In addition to use of the galvanic battery, Loudon imagines many ameliorating inventions based on steam technology like automatons that perform surgery and litigate, an instantaneous form of communication where messages are delivered by cannonball caught by expansive nets established in every town, a weather-control device that brings rain clouds down to water your fields, a steam-powered lawnmower, a mechanical milking machine, and, of course, daily travel accomplished by “balloon-carriages.”

As one of the first mentions of a mummy in literature, Loudon’s book is immediately unusual from the rest of 19th-century depictions because he is male and not purely evil—and, in fact, is a complex archetype used to subvert the Orientalism of Egyptomania begun when Napoleon’s troops discovered their first pharaonic tomb. While Britain was crazy for Ancient Egypt, it was in an not-so-surprisingly abject fashion. Britain excavated and imported mummies solely to unwrap them in public as a form of entertainment, and they rewrapped them in a sensational veil of mystery that made them what Jasmine Day calls “retro-racist” ideals of decadence, but also of foreign evil to be reminded of to avoid. “Europeans contrasted their own perceived virtues,” Day writes in her seminal text The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World, “such as Christianity and rationality, with the primitivism and pagenness that they attributed to peoples whose cultures seemed alien.” This is very much present at the beginning of the novel, as Dr. Entwerfen describes the scientific mysticism Cheops must possess, and Edric has no fear of a wrapped foreign object opposed to an exposed countryman cadaver for his experiment. However, Cheops rejects abjection, and espouses the opinions of his authoress, making him more native than readers would have expected.

Another exception to Cheops is the absence of what would later become known as “the mummy’s curse,” or “curse of the Pharaohs,” even though Loudon is often credited with inventing it in her novel. However, there is a curse of sorts present throughout: progress. As Day explains: “The curse myth originally condemned sacrilegious people and self-styled experts by claiming that a supernatural realm of arcane powers existed, in which the sanctity of the dead was vindicated.” In Frankenstein, Victor’s curse is his Creature’s wrath, but also his clouded-judgment from romantic notions of future immortality; as a result, he is unable to take responsibility for his actions. All of this got Loudon’s goat, but especially Frankenstein’s impiety: his rejection and usurpation of divine creation with science. What Shelley saw as progress Loudon saw as a potential curse. Despite the Positivist presence in her future England, there is one universal truth Loudon wants acknowledged, and it becomes downright explicit with Cheops’ big revelation at the end: “The power that gave me life,” he explains to a befuddled Edric in the story’s conclusion, “could alone restore it.” The entire time, Loudon stresses, Cheops was revived because the divine willed it. One has to posit, does this mean that the soul was then attached by those ligatures discussed earlier? That original question, as well as all of the little ones, is overshadowed by Loudon’s ultimate answer.

Loudon would never write another SF work after The Mummy! She ceased all her fictional literary endeavors by 1830 when she married the prominent horticulture journalist John C. Loudon and focused on writing instructive, at-home gardening articles. When he died in 1843, she continued to use writing as her income, capitalizing on her Martha Stewart-like reputation and publishing several gardening manuals for ladies, but never anything as prescient or imaginative as her futuristic utopia. Perhaps this was because, by the time of her death in 1858, she felt like she had won. While The Mummy!’s conservatism seems stodgy and dated, the truth is she came closer than Shelley to predicting the next 100 years. While the spirit of Romanticism continued to stir several social, republican, and anarchist movements, the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 launched a powerful empire built on prudery and imperialism. In fact, the effects of imperialism would lead to the next installment of Loudon’s unlikely legacy with reactive, science-fictional texts by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Phillip K. Dick, which illustrates her real legacy: developing SF from a thought experiment like Frankenstein into a reactive and conversational medium for progress, whatever we might believe progress to be.

About the Author

S. J. Chambers is co-author of the Hugo and World Fantasy nominated The Steampunk Bible (Abrams Image). Her fiction has appeared in the World Fantasy nominated Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet of Curiosities (HarperCollins) and in the forthcoming Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing).

A Thousand Words You Can Hear All at Once:
An Interview with Todd Lockwood

Nayad A. Monroe

Todd Lockwood’s illustration work has appeared on NY Times best-selling novels, magazines, video games, collectible card games, and fantasy role-playing games. It has been honored with multiple appearances in Spectrum and the Communication Arts Illustration Annual, and with numerous industry awards. Always known for the narrative power of his paintings, Todd now turns his hand to writing, and is working on a novel to be published by DAW Books. You may view his art at his website, toddlockwood.com, keep up with him at tolo.biz, or get chummy at facebook.com/artoftoddlockwood.

In the bio on your website, you say that the artists who have influenced you most are Michael Whelan, Frank Frazetta, NC Wyeth, Walt Disney, Spike Jones, Brom, Jeff Easley, and your dad. What are some of the characteristics you enjoy in their work? Have you tried to incorporate methods they use to create their images?

Well, I think it’s safe to say that Frazetta and Whelan between them probably influenced most of the artists in this industry to one degree or another. I kind of view them as the left brain and right brain. Michael’s very thoughtful and cerebral. His paintings are always really deep, and you can think about them forever, whereas Frank Frazetta is raw emotion. There was a documentary made about him called Painting with Fire, which describes it really well. If I could blend the two of them together somehow I’d feel like I had accomplished something.

NC Wyeth is the father of modern illustration and we all grew up with Walt Disney. One of my earliest memories is Maleficent turning into the dragon in Sleeping Beauty. Spike Jones: that’s half a joke, but it’s also true that his music is eclectic and wacky and fun and I enjoy that.

Then the others: Brom, Jeff Easley, John Foster, Scott Fischer, Greg Manchess, Donato, and a great many more I could come up with who are influential now. There are so many good artists out there, always keeping me on my toes. My dad was an artist, even though he never worked as one. Another one of my earliest memories was sitting on his knee while he drew funny cartoon animals for me.

Where do you find inspiration in the real world?

That’s a short question with a really broad range of answers. I mean, inspiration is everywhere. I think I’m always looking at things. I always see perspective and light, I think I always have. I also enjoy everything from politics to science to history, and religion—I love Joseph Campbell’s studies. Nature shows: National Geographic, NOVA, all that stuff. It’s all grist. It’s all useful.

Then you somehow take that stuff and turn it into more outlandish ideas. How does that go?

I have the benefit most of the time of a manuscript to read, which provides a certain amount of material automatically. Making it look good is a matter of taking advantage of every source of reference possible, and a lot of it’s stuff I enjoy anyway.

Animal anatomy figures heavily into making fantastic creatures that are believable, and some knowledge of the history of costume, armor, and weaponry can help when inventing stuff that you’ve never seen in the real world.

When you begin an artistic project for yourself (as opposed to a commissioned piece), how do you decide what you’re going to draw or paint?

I haven’t done very much for myself. There are three pieces I can think of on my website and they all came to me sort of fully formed, even though they’re really detailed, out of myth and religion. I enjoy reinterpreting that stuff. I’m fascinated by the way human beings relate to their universe, and it all comes out in mythology. Like “Cerberus,” “Kali-Prakriti,” and “War of Angels;” and while they’re really dense with detail, the idea of them is simple

Cerebus

Kali-Prakriti

War of Angels

Do you have emotional themes that you return to frequently in your work?

I think that’s more in the line of looking for narrative. Often I’m painting action scenes, so there’s always conflict or movement, and the emotion there is the range of stuff you feel in those fight-or-flight moments: anger, fear, determination. I look for some nobility in my people. Every once in a while I get to paint something tender. It’s really a matter of putting yourself into the characters, and bringing out what they feel or finding that inside yourself.

Is it easy for you to get started on your work for the day?

It’s hard for me to get started sometimes. It occasionally involves playing a game of Spaceward Ho! just to empty the brain out. Silly old game, but you can finish in twenty minutes. Especially in the early stages of a piece, it can be challenging. The very first part, the thumbnails, when you’re finding the energy and the direction, is not so difficult, just laying down the basic composition and the ideas. Depending on the job—sometimes that can be really frustrating.

For example, C.J. Cherryh’s books, while I enjoy them a great deal and the politics of the world are fascinating, there are a lot of people sitting around drinking tea and talking politics. Sometimes finding a visual hook for those books is a challenge, but it’s always there. Usually I know by a third to halfway through a manuscript what the cover needs to be, partly because I don’t want the cover to give away anything that happens in the second half of the book if I don’t have to. The last cover I did for C.J., Intruder, I didn’t know what the cover was until I’d read the very last page. And of course with my own book, which I’ve been working on for eight years, I still don’t know what the cover is.

Cover Art for Intruder

How did you get started with writing fiction, and how is it going?

Well, I’ve always written, all my life. I learned to draw by making my own comic books. In my mind, I was drawing movies or TV shows. I would have happily gone either way, but art had more momentum. I just happened to fall into art first, and more deeply, but the last eight years, I’ve been working on a personal project and doing seminars and workshops.

I’ve worked with Nancy Kress, Greg Frost, and some other authors. I had a short story published entitled, “Between”. It came out in an anthology called Tales of the Emerald Serpent, which got good remarks, and was a lot of fun to write. Lou Anders of Pyr books gave me a very nice write-up in a review, and I really appreciate that.

I have another short story coming out soon in another anthology called Unfettered, which is a really fun project, in that it goes to help a friend, Shawn Speakman. He’s the blogger for suvudu.com, and he’s Terry Brooks’ continuity editor. He runs his own business called The Signed Page, selling signed editions of books, which is how we met. Shawn had two bouts with cancer, and he beat them both, but he was left with humongous bills. Terry Brooks suggested that a short story he had kicking around could be offered online with the proceeds going to help Shawn pay his bills. Other authors have since joined in the benefit anthology which will include stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, and more.

I’m very happy with this short story. It’s set in the prehistory of the world of my novel, which I sold to DAW books last Easter. Betsy Wollheim had read it initially just as a friend, to tell me whether it was good or not and if it was good, who I might want to consider offering it to. When she’d read it, she said, “I want it.” So I’m very excited about that because I’m in very good hands. Betsy is a great editor, and she’s a good friend.

Cover art for Tales of the Emerald Serpent

Cover Art for Unfettered

What’s your book called?

It’s called The Summer Dragon; it’s the first of a trilogy. I haven’t quite pinned down the trilogy title yet, and of course titles are subject to change, but I think that’s the appropriate title. It’s a young adult fantasy, which began really as anger management during the G.W. Bush years. It became a story that insisted I tell it. You know how it is, because you write. You start with the germ of an idea and suddenly it’s telling itself.

How does writing compare to painting?

Either one of those things is a lifelong process. There are rules to writing, or painting. It’s not the same for everybody. Nancy Kress can’t work from an outline or she loses interest, whereas I have to work from an outline, because that’s the way I work.

That’s the way I paint: start with thumbnails, and then you work towards the details. An outline is kind of the same thing in terms of structure. The structure is narrative, narrative rules both illustration and writing. If you’re building a house, you don’t build the walls and then try to put a foundation under them.

I think writing is much lonelier than painting. You spend a lot of time sitting alone, and feedback is not immediate. You can turn a painting around and ask “What do you think?” and somebody can say, “I like it,” or “It’s too red,” or whatever. To get feedback on a chapter, somebody has to take time out of their day to read it and then get back to you. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you receive them all at once.

Cover Art for In the Shadow

About the Author

Nayad Monroe writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. She toiled in the slush mines at Clarkesworld Magazine for three brutal years before her unique combination of cunning, trickery, and deviousness brought her the opportunity to interview innocent people who never dreamed that such a thing could happen to them. She also blogs intermittently and oppresses children and cats in her spare time. You may read her strange pronouncements on Twitter, if you dare, by following @Nayad.

Another Word:
The Echo Chamber

Daniel Abraham

There was a time, not in my daughter’s life but in mine, when information was hard to get. I can still remember a friend of mine struggling to describe a new programming trick that he was working with. He called it a hyperlink. At the time, it sounded like it might be an interesting way to do footnotes some day. But the world changed and moved on. It’s very good at doing that, and its not much good at going backward. There are people who voted in the last election who never knew a world where tracking down information meant going to a library, a world without hyperlinks.

I began working in technical support for a small Internet service provider in the mid-’90s, when the advertisements on the television from companies like IBM and AOL could be summed up as “Internet: You don’t know what it is, but you need it. Go! Buy!” They worked just as well as ads for the company I worked for. They weren’t boasts about whose service was best so much as announcements of a paradigm shift. Even with promotion into management, I was on the phones for nine years while the world changed. I went from figuring out init strings for 28.8 modems to programming routers to allow connections to virtual private networks. I saw that things were changing, but not always how. Ebooks still do things that surprise me sometimes. And I have now bought software that will block my Internet access for hours at a time so that I can get my work done without the temptation to check my email or Facebook or Twitter just one more time in case something interesting happened.

The dynamics of my own thought process have changed. I used to read almost exclusively from books and spend a relatively long time thinking about what I’d read, only because while I was walking home from school or waiting at a bus stop, I didn’t have anything more with me at the moment. Now I read mostly from a computer screen, and often in tiny, fleeting sips that I forget almost as soon as I’ve seen them.

But I didn’t come here to decry the Internet or celebrate the past. This endless sampler plate of Cracked.com articles and snarky comments at 140 characters or fewer isn’t by necessity better or worse than reading a book without being able to jump out to a Wikipedia article. It is different, though. Some of the changes I feel like I saw coming. More distractions, for example. Or the pressure to keep things introductory, since any post might be the first thing the reader bumps into. Other aspects, I didn’t: for instance, the increase in literacy that comes from having an entire generation communicate through text. Or the long awaited and justly celebrated death of the mass market returns system.

What I see shaping genre fiction most in this age, though, is the democratization of authority.

As with many things, the change in the availability of information hasn’t created a whole new way of thinking so much as shifted the emphasis. Echo chambers or groupthink or being-inside-the-bubble has been part of human behavior forever. What has changed is the ability to find opinions similar to your own. When I was growing up, the media I had to work with—telephones, television, letters, newspapers, books, radio—had one thing in common: no search function. No way to take a huge body of information and pluck out only the thing I was looking for. Today my daughter is in first grade, and she’s just starting to bring home assignments like “find five facts about penguins” and “research who Captain Cook was.” With a kind of nostalgia, I steer her toward books. When we’re looking for facts, though, nothing’s easier than a search engine.

That’s also true when I’m looking for opinions. It’s never been easier to reach out to find people with whom I already agree and then repeat and reinforce our opinions to each other until they ossify into facts. There have been a few times that I’ve found myself following links down rabbit holes into communities with which I profoundly disagree, and seeing the self-confident, self-congratulatory, and mind-bendingly wrong opinions being shared there was deeply unnerving. I imagine folks who wander by mistake into my bubbles feel the same.

Which brings me, in my roundabout way, to Arthur Krystal’s recent article in The New Yorker, “It’s Genre. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!” In it, Krystal makes a series of arguments that strike me as weirdly old-fashioned, condescending, and unfamiliar. He makes reference to a poem by Dryden. He describes genre fiction as books that “stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes.” He uses the adjective “jejune” with, so far as I can tell, a straight face. He celebrates literary fiction’s ability to “break the frozen sea inside us” under a headline that’s a TV sitcom reference.

There is, apparently, an echo chamber in which this article reads as something other than self-parody. And I think that, once upon a time, there was a world in which simply by having been published in The New Yorker, Krystal’s opinion would have had some weight. I live on the Internet, though, and I am no longer trained to recognize that authority. When I see this, my first reaction is the disbelieving laughter of someone who’s just fallen into Wonderland. Krystal’s presentation of himself is a caricature of a literary critic. Insecure intellectual defensiveness rises off his article like fumes. And yet, there is a place in my culture where his opinion would be taken seriously.

Well, not in my part of it, clearly.

It is very tempting for me spend a few more paragraphs making fun of Krystal. His article is mean, pompous, and trite, and I want to attack it and him. Only I know that he would be as dismissive of me as I am of him. When I pause in my gleeful disdain of his disdain, the thing that’s interesting is that I see this dynamic everywhere. It’s not just the usual dichotomies either: the Republicans against the Democrats, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the brains against the jocks.

There was an anecdote I heard once about a man in the Washington press corps bringing a date—a professional model—he particularly wanted to impress to a party made up of some of the most powerful, important, and (critical for my argument here) elite journalists in the world. The model’s comment was something along the lines of how sad it was watching all the geeks trying to have fun. For her, it seems to me, being a member of the elite meant something different and incompatible with what her date meant. She came from a different subculture, and so the status of the people around her wasn’t just invisible to her. It was literally insignificant.

There was a time in my life when the culture had, if not a single voice, then a profoundly dominant one. Someone on TV or the radio or in the newspaper had authority simply by being there, and their opinions mattered. There was a time before that when an avid reader could read every science fiction and fantasy book published in the US in a given year. There was a time when there were only four channels on the TV, and if you missed a program, it was gone. People shared a context by default, and because that context included definitions of authority, they shared an implicit idea of who and what was important.

It’s always been possible to create a subculture with its own definitions of what matters, its own idioms and conventions, and its own standards by which to judge who is to be taken seriously. What’s changed is the activation energy. Because of how we communicate, it has become easy to insulate ourselves with people who have our same interests, definitions, opinions, and interpretations. Things outside that context fade and lose their power, or else just stop having any bearing on each other. Krystal’s opinion that genre fiction is inferior and my opinion that Krystal is kind of a yo-yo are both subjective, and so they can both be true in their contexts. In practice, they are so unrelated, they aren’t even in conflict.

I once heard Lev Grossman say in an interview that he was worried that fiction might lose its place at the center of the cultural conversation. My first response was to look back over my four-plus decades of life and try to remember a time when it was at the center. I misunderstood. When Grossman said “the” cultural conversation, he didn’t mean the one about Kim Kardashian’s marriage or how guardian angels disprove evolution or which team is most likely to win the big game. His definition of culture wasn’t concerned with what issues were being discussed by the largest demographic slice of the country. He meant, I think, the conversation among people who matter. People with authority. The real culture.

There was a time, in my life but not in my daughter’s, when I’d have known who he meant.

About the Author

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

Editor’s Desk:
Getting off the Roller Coaster

Neil Clarke

As those who have been reading my blog or prior editorials know, 2012 has been a roller coaster year for me. Between the heart attack, kidney stone, deaths in the family, defibrillators, award nominations and still being alive, I’m never quite sure what to make of things. Shortly after writing my previous editorial, Hurricane Sandy struck and left my family without power, heat, phone and internet service for nearly ten days. Several large trees crashed down around our home, but we safely weathered the storm. After the temperature dropped and our batteries died, we gave up, packed our suitcases and hit the road.

I was able to spend part of the time in Toronto (at the World Fantasy Convention) and the rest with family as they regained power in their homes. It was reassuring to be in the company of friends and family, but we missed home and were very happy to return. It’s hard to rest when you are displaced and while inconvenient, we didn’t suffer nearly as much as people who lived closer to the coast. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to our readers that were and continue to be impacted by this storm.

Shortly after recovering from the hurricane, the roller coaster took another plunge as I lost my job. Much to my regret, I don’t currently make my living from Clarkesworld. It’s an obtainable goal for which we continue to strive but I still need a day job to provide healthcare coverage and money to pay the bills.

What happened next was incredible. Once again, the genre community bent the tracks and leveled things out. People subscribed or donated to the magazine, started sending me information about new jobs, and made a serious effort to get word of my situation out there so that others could help too.

I owe a great deal of thanks to many people, but I need to single out Kate Baker, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Weightless Books. They amped up the signal and said some very kind things that made a big difference to me both financially and emotionally. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I had much to be thankful for and the confidence that everything would be ok.

I can happily say that thanks to everyone’s efforts, November provided our largest single-month gain in the history of the magazine. A big welcome to this month’s new subscribers! As a whole, you’ve made a significant difference and will continue to do so over the next year.

I consider my time with this magazine to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It seems only appropriate that I continue to soldier on and this kind of support greatly encourages me. I hope that some of you will take the time to email me your thoughts about how we’re doing. We’re always looking for ways to improve the magazine and reader feedback has played a significant role in all our plans.

Despite all of 2012’s bad things, I can’t call it a bad year. There were just too many good things that helped offset the unpleasant. For me, 2013 is a new opportunity, a gift, a year I wasn’t supposed to have. I don’t know how I’ve managed to stay positive through all this (ok, not through it all, but definitely now), but I intend to ride it into the new year. From all of us at Clarkesworld, we wish you and yours all the best as we approach 2013. Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.

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.