Assassins

Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier

It will be a particularly brutal kill, even by her standards.

She sat in warm shade at an outdoor café along the Calle de las Huertes, not far from the Prado Museum. Sonia needed to work in public spaces, needed to witness the human cost. Tourists, students, illegals, and the unemployed crowded the surrounding tables—all strangers. But that was nothing new. She could touch them only by wounding them, as she had been wounded. What would millions of Experiencers think if they knew a coward lurked behind Simone The Slayer?

Black-shirted waiters circulated between the tables. A few feet away a woman in a white sundress laughed. About thirty years old, she wore Experiencer glasses, the lenses polarized for the sun, and a headscarf. The bearded young man sharing her table kissed her neck playfully, and she laughed again. Of the hundred or so people visible to Sonia, maybe two-thirds of them wore Experiencer glasses, and many of them were fully immersed, the lenses gone a dully-reflective silver, like drawing a screen between the outer world and Labyrinthiad. Holding hands, an older couple in matching tropical shirts strolled out of the umbrella shade of the cafe and crossed the sun-struck plaza. Pigeons swooped and plunged, their black shadows gliding over the bricks. Motorbikes threaded through the moving crowds, their two-stroke engines making a lawn-mower racket.

“Hasta luego.” It was the bearded man. He stood up and blew a kiss at the woman in the white sundress. She laughed and waved at him, like she was brushing off a fly. Walking backwards from their table, he bumped into Sonia. She jerked away. “Perdón,” he said, turning and bowing. She scowled at him; Sonia didn’t like to be touched. He shrugged and left her alone. His girlfriend touched the right temple of her Experiencer glasses. The lenses turned silver. Sonia looked away.

It was time.

Sonia placed her Cube next to her napkin, leaned forward, and whispered the unlocking code. Glowing symbols floated above the table. Her long fingers made slight, almost imperceptible motions as she manipulated content, combining and recombining intricate patterns. The military-grade throat mic picked up her sub-vocal directions and voiceovers. Sonia’s custom software reshaped her tonal qualities to create her character’s signature voice—a voice that had insinuated itself into a million nightmares. Simone.

It was ready.

Sonia reached for her neglected macchiato. She sipped, absently licked bitter foam from her lips, set the cup down. Taking a pause. Virtual murder was still murder—the murder of emotional attachments. She ought to know. Sonia had cherished the character Emi Nakano, until the Editors discontinued Emi’s existence on the grounds of inadequate popularity scores. When Emi suffered death by Editor, something died in Sonia, too. Now she felt connected only to the pain she caused. Maybe she had replaced her Emi Nakano obsession with her own meta assassin—but so what? Call it the failed transfiguration of revenge.

All right.

She uploaded her data to a rendering engine that converted her C-sym programming into a finished scene. A final hesitant pause . . . and she slipped the module undetected into the vast meta story that was Labyrinthiad. Like slipping a dagger between ribs to pierce the heart of a created world. In a moment, Ellis Ng would “die.” Was Sonia the only one who recognized Ellis as nothing more than an emotional trap for the self-deluded?

Sonia’s hands shook as she reached for her coffee. She emptied the cup and set it down. A cigarette would have helped her nerves, but they were banned now even in Europe.

Mileva Kosich, sitting on a bench across from the Office of Public Affairs, eye-flicked behind her Experiencer glasses. It was her lunch-break and she just had time to meet her virtual friend, Ellis Ng. Belgrade disappeared, and Mileva was gliding in a sunboat over a crystal blue pond. Ellis approached in his own sunboat, its solar net billowing like a gossamer shell. Of course, Ellis was legion, and millions of Experiencers considered him a friend, but that didn’t undercut Mileva’s joy at the sight of his approach. Everyone enjoyed their own personal Ellis. He stood up and waved with two fingers extended (his customary greeting), making the boat rock. A black-winged personal flying suit swept down out of the empty sky. Mileva caught her breath. Simone! The assassin fired a projectile and Ellis Ng’s sunboat exploded in a plume of flesh and fiberglass. Shocked, Mileva fumbled her glasses off. She sat on the bench, too upset to move.

Sonia killed only the popular characters. Five so far. And once slain, they resisted the Editor’s attempts to resurrect them. Sonia’s killing routines remained with a character and haunted them even in virtual death. The resurrected were lifeless zombies compared to their former selves. Their popularity, as defined continuously by the Experiencers, plummeted and they were quickly edited out. Of course, “life” in Labyrinthiad was an oxymoron, perpetuated by the mock-divine spark of rudimentary AI. Characters like Ng became the perfect companions because they analyzed your personality and speech and fed you tailor-made conversation. Nevertheless, waves of real despair followed the death of young eCelebs. Taking down beloved characters and the income streams they represented to the Publishers was dangerous. Real world dangerous.

Hachiro Jin, closed inside an egg-shaped Sleep Pod in the Helsinki Airport, touched the temple of his glasses and went full-immersion. It would be pleasant to pass a few minutes with Ellis Ng. The virtue of a virtual friend was availability without complications. Hachiro’s layover was four hours, more than enough time to catch up on sleep and conversation with a friend who seemed perfectly to understand the worries of a forty-three-year-old businessman. Ellis, waiting for Hachiro on a red footbridge in the Sankeien Gardens, smiled and raised his hand—and then collapsed, a shaft protruding from the back of his head. Simone The Slayer stood a moment in his place. “Gomen-nasai, Hachiro-kun,”she said, flashing a lifeless smile before flickering out of existence. In the Sleep Pod, Hachiro ripped off his glasses, swearing.

Sonia waited for the reaction. Any moment now. Then a waiter stepped in front of her, blocking her view. He bent forward, reaching for her empty cup, his eyes a turquoise gleam. Just like the eyes of Sonia’s character-killer, Simone. So many people affected body modifications that emulated favorite Labyrinthiad personalities. This waiter had even added Simone’s signature scar, like a back-slash setting off the corner of his mouth.

“Would you like something else?” he asked.

“No.”

Annoyingly, he lingered, staring into her with his faux-Simone eyes. Sonia squirmed in her seat. Hadn’t she seen this man before, on the sidewalk near her apartment? Was he even a waiter? His shirt didn’t exactly match the other waiters’ shirts.

She forced herself to return his stare. “What do you want?”

The waiter grinned, said, “Stay as long as you like,” and walked away, leaving her empty cup on another table.

Juanita Torres’ physical body reclined in the passenger seat of her self-driving Elon IV. The car negotiated Chicago traffic on its way to the law offices of Ferguson & Torres. Behind her Experiencer glasses Juanita had eye-flicked herself to a virtual tent pitched in the high desert of New Mexico, where she lay quietly with Ellis. Sometimes Juanita simply needed to be alone with her friend, without words. It was a meditation, a stress-reliever. A timer would call her back to the car when they approached the office. Beyond the open tent flap pink and yellow layers of sunrise set off the jagged line of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. Then a figure appeared, blocking the view. Simone The Slayer in a panther-black body suit ducked into the tent, expertly wound a shiny garroting wire around Ellis Ng’s neck and snapped it taut. Blood sheeted over Juanita, splattered the tent fabric, making a sound like rain. Juanita slapped her Experiencer glasses off and sat up in the car, screaming. Simone’s muffled laughter drifted up from the floorboards near her feet.

A collective shudder swept through the café and across the open plaza. Random people stumbled to a stop. Sonia winced, feeling their pain—her connection to other people. What would she be without this shared suffering? She wasn’t brave enough to find out. She had never been brave enough. The pain she caused was her only tie to others.

The woman in the white sundress and headscarf a few tables away began weeping, her shoulders visibly shaking, and then slammed her glasses hard on the tabletop, even as others hastily donned theirs. Sonia’s segment was loose in Labyrinthiad. You could feel it. Like a sudden pressure drop before a coming storm.

Only one man failed to react.

At a table across the open café space, his Experiencer glasses parked on top of his bald head, he never took his eyes off Sonia. A broad, stocky man in a dark blue collarless over-shirt. Two University girls, awkwardly holding each other in grief, crossed in front of him. When Sonia could see again, the table was empty.

Quickly, Sonia pocketed her Cube and dropped five Euros on the table. She stood, rattling her chair back, and walked quickly away from the café.

She cut through a narrow cobblestone alley, intending to double back and make her way to the Arguelles neighborhood. There she kept a safe room unconnected to her Sonia Andrijeski identity—a name with shallow roots. In Arguelles she would hide in the camouflage of rowdy students and jangling nightlife.

The yellow walls of the alley loomed over her. Dead vines trailed from boxes under shuttered windows. Sonia quickened her pace, and then stopped, gasping, when the bald man stepped around the corner and stood in her way. She scuffed back, glanced over her shoulder. She could run but he would easily catch her. They both knew it. He grinned.

“For an assassin,” he said, “you’re a mousy thing.”

She retreated another step, and he moved toward her. A little dance.

“I’ll scream,” she said.

“You won’t.”

A pink cloud boiled out of a device in his hand. Sonia heard herself cough, as if the cough were un-synced with her collapse. The cobblestones came up and slammed her shoulder. The bald man stood over her. He tucked his device away, started to bend down. The sound of a motor ripped into the alley. She seemed to hear it after the bald man had already turned in reaction—Sonia’s pink cloud reality.

The bald man fell, his body landing next to Sonia with a sickening and off-timed thud. She blinked heavy lids. A red puddle oozed away from the fallen man and began investigating the channels between cobblestones. Sonia managed to push herself back before it touched her. She looked up. A man holding a gun dismounted a blue Vespa and approached her. The waiter from the café, the one with Simone The Slayer’s eyes and scar. He tucked his gun into his waistband, pulled his shirt over it, and hunkered next to her.

“He would have taken you back to the States,” the waiter said, his words almost-but-not-quite in sync with his lips. “But I don’t take people back.” He shrugged. “Private contractors, right? Some are more full service than others.”

Sonia squinted, trying to interpret what he’d said as anything other than an obvious threat. She struggled to get up. The waiter watched her, like he was watching a representative of an unrelated species. A true killer’s coldness reflected in a virtual killer’s eyes. God, he was a fan. Sonia grasped at self-control. Her voice barely broke when she said, “Don’t hurt me, please.”

He pressed his hand to his chest, as if he couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “I would never. I admire you too much. At least, I admire Simone. Professional respect crosses worlds.” He reached out quickly and picked something up. Her Cube. Sonia’s hand twitched involuntarily. And the gun was back in the waiter’s hand and leveled at her.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Give me your key, promise to never upload to Labyrinthiad again, and you can go.”

“What?”

“I’ve been watching you for days. I could have taken you out any time. Giving you a chance to walk away, that’s me showing respect for what you created.” He held the Cube up. It contained Simone’s unique code, all her untraceable killing routines. “Decide now.”

Sonia tried to rub the fogginess out of her eyes. “You want to be her. Simone.”

“The key. Deal or not?”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then I hurt you.”

Numbly, she recited the code.

The waiter held the Cube in the palm of his hand. He voice-entered the code. The Cube glowed blue, ghostware deploying raw content for manipulation. He stared avidly at the display—Simone The Slayer in utero—then turned the Cube off, pocketed it, and, without another word, walked away.

Never upload to Labyrinthiad again? Impossible. But without Simone to connect to the common suffering, who was she? What was her purpose?

The killer mounted his Vespa and zipped out of the alley, leaving Sonia standing next to the dead man. A trace of motor exhaust lingered. She cringed, alone and exposed, and stumbled back the way she’d come, her head throbbing. Soon she found herself in the anonymous safety of the crowded plaza, surrounded by people she could no longer hurt. Woozy, she stopped and covered her eyes. A wave of pink-cloud dizziness swept through her and she started to fall, barely catching herself. Someone took her arm, steadied her. Sonia stiffened.

“Are you all right?” It was the woman from the café, the one so upset by Simone’s kill that she had slammed down her Experiencer glasses. Others stopped, concerned. Is she sick? Give her some room. A young man produced his phone. Should I call for medical?

Sonia shook her head. “No, don’t.”

The woman, still holding Sonia’s arm, searched her face. “You’re sure you’re all right? You looked like you were going to faint.”

“Just a little dizzy. I’ll be okay.”

“At least you ought to sit down. There’s a table. I’ll get you a glass of water. My name’s Mia, by the way.”

Why was she so kind? Why was anyone? After a too-long pause, Sonia said, “Thank you,” and they sat at a table near the one from which Sonia had exploded an emotional bomb. A bomb that had wounded many people, including Mia and perhaps others who later paused out of concern, not knowing they were solicitous of Simone’s creator.

Sonia attempted a smile, “I’m not usually like this.”

Mia stared back uncertainly, “Don’t worry about it. I’m a bit of a mess myself. The Slayer struck again. Simone. That bitch.”

Sonia picked up her lemon water, sipped, then held the cold, sweating glass in her hands. “Someone should take her down.” Her words sounded odd to her, yet familiar. In a moment she realized: Simone.

Mia’s eyes widened as she leaned back in her chair. “They . . . they’ve tried.”

“Maybe it will be someone who knows her.”

Sonia noted absently the sound of scrabbling chair legs on cobblestones. Standing now, backing away from the table, Mia said, “Nobody knows her.”

Sonia nodded. Her head cleared. “Yes, of course. Nobody does.”

About the Author

Since 2003, Jack Skillingstead has sold more than forty short stories to major science fiction and fantasy publications. His work has been translated into Russian, Polish, Czech, French, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese. In 2013, his novel Life On The Preservation was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Jack has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

Burt Courtier has worked as a documentation manager, business editor, and freelance writer in Japan and the U.S. His non-fiction work appeared in Japan Quarterly. Burt lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter.

Prosthetic Daughter

Nin Harris

Transcript #56565: Admiral Zhen-Juan’s DataStreamLog

Data theft is identity theft.

We sat through so many lectures and briefings that recycled this information. At the academy, the lecture-borgs would do their rounds from class to class every morning and before the end of the day.

It should have been enough. It wasn’t enough. Data-hacks still happened. Vanished identities, vanished memories. People who were mere husks, ready to be reprogrammed by unscrupulous dealers. I never thought I would be one of them. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention.

Protect your memory nodes. Sleep safe.

Jacking into someone’s node is theft.

We had nodes installed three generations back. According to my Ah Ma, for hundreds of years we would not have been identifiable as human to our ancestors. Prosthetics had become part of who we are. We’d evolved, or devolved from people who could do complex mathematical conundrums in our heads without augmentation and who could memorize entire lists and taxonomies, to people with augmentations implanted into our nodes.

Ah Ma said this to me once: “Our tragedy in life is that we will never know what our ancestors knew. At least, not in the same way they did. In a way, we are all like you, child. You have prosthetics correcting your spine, but we were all fitted with prosthetics in our brains since we were children.”

“You couldn’t have stopped them from doing it to us if you hated it that much?” I asked Ah Ma whenever she started bemoaning our prosthetic brains. I asked her annoying questions like this mostly because I was annoyed by her constant lamentations in my teenage years. As annoyed as I was by the reminder that I was not as physically able as the rest of my family members. I had needed corrective surgery in order to jump, to run. To do all of those things required of a cadet in a military academy.

Ah Ma would look at me and say, “And what would happen to you on this planet if you had? Would you have been able to be a cadet?”

Oh Ah Ma. If you had stopped it, I would still have been with you and Ah Pa. With my brothers and sisters. But instead, here I am on a circuit station when I am not jumping in-between time-streams as a time-and-space-hopping Admiral.

I could have reached you in time if the pod with my data-wiped body had not been on a hijacked hospital station in an interstellar war zone. But there are never any guarantees in space. There are far less guarantees in time.

My ancestors came from a distant Earth. More specifically, most of them came from Fujiuan in China, although there were intermarriages between my Fuzhou, Hainanese, and Cantonese ancestors. Various other provinces and dialects intermingled through time and intermarriages and various religious conversions: Buddhist, Methodist, and Muslim. During the great exodus from Earth, my ancestors ranged across the skies led by a Bunian Interstellar Armada. Once re-settled on a planet close in climate and temperament to Earth, my ancestors became involved in the terraforming of the planet.

As a society was established, they became farmers, and then a family of food-sellers. Because we lived on a planet that was predominantly populated by apsaras, Malays, Pattani, and Chinese Muslims, we sold: halal long-boiling soups, chicken and mutton kut teh, and handmade noodles tossed in sesame oil and soy sauce before being served with fresh pak choy from my father’s gardens, and roasted duck. These were consumed eagerly by off-duty hungry officers and common-folk alike. Our cafeteria was very popular with the military. I grew up used to the sight of members of the Bunian Fleet in their various uniforms: tunics and tights for the cadets, long button-down military coats for lance-corporals, and jumpsuits that looked lighter than air for the higher ranking commodores, lieutenants, and admirals.

One of them, Surgeon-Admiral Mei-Lee, became my sponsor in the academy. She started teaching me military history and strategy every time she visited. Surgeon-Admiral Mei-Lee told my Ah Pa, “There’s a fine military mind in your home. I hope you will not be too selfish, let us take care of her. I can correct her spine with prosthetics. And we will nurture her talents for strategy.”

Hundreds of years away from that moment when I eavesdropped, I now know my first foster-mother was not guided by altruism alone. She was genuinely curious to see if she could fix me, if she could turn me into a Fleet Admiral. That was not the first time I was adopted. First by the military, later by my second foster mother on Teja-II. I had a family stolen from me, but I have had three mothers in my lifetime. I suppose that counts for something.

Jacking into someone’s node is identity crime.

Jacking into someone’s node is death.

“I could do it so well, no one would know who you were. I could do it so well, you won’t know who you are,” Yun-Li said to me once, her eyes dancing as she stole three preserved plums from the small box of preserved fruits I kept in the shelf beneath my desk.

I swatted at her fingers with a translucent ruler but her fingers danced as fast as her eyes and the thoughts that flitted there. We were talking about the lecture-borgs who periodically entered our course-rooms to deliver the service messages of the day. The units used to be professors and higher officers of the Bunian Fleet who were completely mind-wiped thanks to data-hacks.

“I supposed you could,” I remembered saying doubtfully as I looked at the curves of her heart-shaped face, “but why would you want to do such a thing?”

She shrugged. “Why not? It would be fun. And you’re so tedious, who would miss you?”

Yun-Li had a gift for saying precious things like this. With a droll, matter-of-fact expression, she was able to make the people around her feel like she had said the funniest and wittiest thing a person could say, but the bite it left was like the aftertaste of poison lacing a bowl of mung bean sweet porridge.

“My family would miss me,” I said. My voice was as stoic as my face was long.

“They wouldn’t miss you, Horseface. Not if they couldn’t remember you,” Yun-Li said, coy as she played with her fingers, a habit of hers that I found annoying.

“That’s not possible,” I said, my incredulity no doubt lengthening my dolorous lantern-jaw. “That would require a multi-way data-hack. It’s impossible to hack into someone’s memories to that extent, not with the limited data-nodes we all possess, not even with the amount of offloading we do through our cerebral prosthetic implants. What you’re suggesting is hacking an entire family’s data-node. That would involve cutting them off from their host!”

I didn’t then know why, but my heart sank the moment I said it. Yun-Li’s eyes gleamed like a cat spotting untended mackerel.

“Cutting them off from their host, yes, that would be an interesting challenge,” Yun-Li mused. “Perhaps, it would be more effective to cut an entire clan, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s not possible! Think of the amount of work that would take,” I said, scoffing a bit louder than I should have. I should have known Yun-Li would take it as a challenge.

“Anything is possible if you possess the right connections and the wealth to make it happen,” Yun-Li’s voice was matter-of-fact even if she almost purred as she extended the words.

I really should have been wary of that purr.

“After all, we have living proof of that over there.” She pointed at the lecture-borg who was talking in a careful register about the coordinates of the next solar system and military armaments on its outer asteroid belt.

“Yes, but most of those came from more cybernetically advanced planets,” I argued.

“So did I,” Yun-Li said pointedly, an arched eyebrow reminding me that her parents were apsara nobility who had been transferred to our world, one of those civilizations more sophisticated Bunian Empire planets referred to as “backwash planets.”

Yun-Li always made sure we understood we were far beneath her. Especially one who came from a healthy but entirely peasant stock of farmers and food-sellers who had worked their way up in the world through goodwill and backbreaking labor.

By the time I left the academy, data theft was actually becoming quite redundant.

Our civilization didn’t need so much a sense of individual identity. Complete cyborgs, lecture-borgs, vessels, or prosthetically-enhanced humans—we all were reprogrammed to a certain degree. Everyone was copying everyone else’s military formation strategies and improving upon them. Why would anyone need to steal my identity? Why would anyone want to perform a data theft so total? How could elision be a thing so total, so complete?

To my mind, it would require a rather colossal grudge. What had I ever done to Yun-Li? I’d been cordial with her, occasionally kind. I amended this earlier assessment of mine, however. With some people, any reason would do. For Yun-Li, no reason was a perfect reason. Perhaps it started when I began distancing myself from her, wearied of her constant need to maim others with her words and her aristocratic put-downs. But now that I muse upon it, I think I unknowingly challenged her that afternoon. It was a challenge she never forgot, a game she decided to play because it amused her.

I never considered myself important enough that anyone would want to steal my identity. By the time I reached my thirties and was promoted as Commodore, it was inconceivable that such a thing would happen—particularly not to me. Not when there were more important officials, more luminous members of the younger academy. Who would want to steal my identity? I wasn’t even special. I was nothing.

Yun-Li said so more than once, during and after our time as cadets. She was still a Captain and chafed with resentment at what she felt was preferential treatment accorded to an inferior.

“I still don’t understand why you got promoted to Commodore,” she would say laughingly as she swiped more of my inexhaustible resources of candied ginger and salted plums. “You’re so boring. Dreary and homespun. And so depressed all of the time. You’re not even that bright! I’m smarter than you!” she would assert.

“I don’t understand why you’re always talking to me if you think I’m all that dreary,” I would protest mildly, even as I chewed on candied ginger while programming a sequence of maneuvers onto my console which followed me wherever I went. All we had to do on the station was press a thumb and forefinger in a certain way, and the screen would open in front of us (although in reality, what we saw was transmitted through the cyber-optic interface grafted onto our eyes when we were babies).

We were stationed together on Perak-IV, a satellite on an elliptical orbit around our planet. There, we learned to create different battle simulations, and were helmeted into neural suits so we could enter those simulations. I had been top in the class for strategies and simulations before Yun-Li joined us.

Inexplicably, she rose very quickly in our ranks.

She did this by staying close to me. She didn’t seem to like me very much, but she’d attached herself to me, nonetheless. I grew as used to her as you would to anyone you were forced to have anything to do with. Beggars aren’t choosers if you’re in the Bunian Fleet. You are stationed wherever your superiors say you are stationed. You are grouped together with people you may not like. Matters not. You need to work together as a unit. So I endured Yun-Li. And she followed my lead, though she was vocal in her scorn.

What we had been taught to do on our tablets with diagrams and charts, intricate beyond belief were now envisioned into more dimensions than I could ever imagine.

I thrilled to enter that space. I allowed my consciousness the illusion of being untethered from my body as the stars spread around me. I was on a battle ship piloted sometimes only by me and what we called ghosts, simulated crews of ships. We entered into the thick of battle with myriad vessels from rival Bunian Fleets, for out here, some of the Imperial houses of the Bunian had broken away from the Empire, and fought for planetary resources, and dominance.

We won all our battles, both simulated and real.

I suppose you could say we were a good team, although it became uncanny how good Yun-Li was at reading me, at anticipating my every move. It was frightening how her pristine, near-perfect strategy simulations were like mine, even if I never showed them to her before we pitched them to the Fleet Admiral.

There was a popular song when I was a teenager that went something like this:

We are all nodes but who is the host, who is the host?

The host travels the skies from valley to coast,

The host holds all that we offload,

The host returns us to the ancestor’s roads. 

We are all nodes but where is the host, where is the host?

The host travels the stars from galaxy to galaxy

The host churns our dreams in a roiling cosmic sea.

I was never the most cheerful of sorts. You could call me a plodder, who was more than happy when the generals or lecture-borgs instructing us made us do equations and diagrams in primitive ways—using abacuses and calculators, and sheets of parchment they’d procured for us. We had to prepare for every eventuality, they said. We never knew where we would be stationed. Some planets had little to no equipped tech. Some planets had colonists with no nodes installed. Not at the nape of their neck, not injected into their cranium, not at the base of their spine.

I thought it sounded heavenly but not everybody agreed.

Perhaps if I had grown up on one of those planets, I would still have a home and a family. But if I had grown up on one of those planets that were not even honored with the term “backwash,” I would not have met Zhilang here on Teja-II. I would not have caught them stealing orchids from the nursery while I was doing my rounds as the astro-horticulturist on call.

We would not have talked long past my duty, they would not have drawn me to their quarters where they prepared spinach noodles drizzled with sesame oil. I would not have collapsed into their arms, crying at the loss of my name, my identity.

“Zhen-Juan is a beautiful name, one that befits you,” Zhilang told me as they stroked my hair and caressed the side of my face.

“That is not my name,” I said. “The name that they gave me when they rehabilitated me was Jaya-Sri.”

“Rehabilitation is the first step in recovery from data-theft, but it is not the only step. You can make the identity you want. You can make the life you want fit the name you give it. Do you not think Zhen-Juan a lovely name?”

Lulled by the quiet beauty of Zhilang’s voice, drunk on the limpid perfection of their eyes, I agreed. I took the new name as my own because it felt right. Zhilang became my family and my place in the world. It did not take too long before I moved my things into their quarters, and buried my gnawing emptiness within the soft cocoon of their arms, and the fragrant net of their long hair.

I started growing soybeans hydroponically in the spacious backyard in our quarters, artificially lit and kept humid by Teja-II’s advanced light and weather systems. I started making soybean curd for both of us to enjoy, sweetened with ginger-infused syrup. I began the process of regaining what I had lost, and enacting the parts of the fail-safes set into place when we realized what Yun-Li had done but knew it was too late to stem the inevitable tide. Tracing back your steps to your home planet from across a thousand years is not something we were taught in the academy.

What do you do with a data thief? Do you skin her, or turn her into a forgotten cylindrical drive, fit for powering vessels that transported crude fuel from planet to satellite, from planet to planet?

Teja-II is a circuit-station that traverses the horsehead nebula from end to end, collecting supplies, travelers, and human resources, a moveable fixed point in most navigation systems, which meant that ships, cruisers, minor battle-stations, and other interstellar vehicles were always able to find Teja-II wherever she was. Teja-II is also in the second Tier of circuit-stations, equipped with drives that would be able to traverse galaxies in a blink of an eye. A hundred years? No problem. Surfing galactic currents kept Teja-II on its course, but it was a loop. Which meant that a mere ten years had passed for me and people on more advanced planets. But not for the denizens of backwash planets. Some of this technology was distilled further in the little bullets of motion the Bunian Fleet use to jump through timelines to fix errors in our exodus across the universe.

Teja-II medics recognized enough that I had been the victim of a severe data-theft after they had rescued my capsule from the abandoned hospital station. Bits of my memory that had been formatted out of me were recovered. Bits of it. But not the name of my family, nor the coordinates of my home planet.

(Oddly, I have no problem at all remembering Yun-Li. It was no kindness she did by leaving all of those memories in whilst removing those that were so integral to my sense of self. Or so she thought.)

Yun-Li knew how to bend others to her will, even if they hated her. Even if they feared her. With her heart-shaped faced and a mindboggling array of colorful thigh-high boots, she tapped her own rhythm on the hearts of people’s around her. She played with people’s perceptions even as she cobbled together her military strategies out of the charts and plans she pilfered through her infiltration of my nodes.

To hide the trace of her thefts, she would often claim she had read several hundred books of military strategy, some ancient enough to have originated from a long-imploded Earth. Perhaps she could have come up with those strategies on her own. We read the same books. But no—it was sweet vengeance for her to steal. It is a perversely circular logic, but that is Yun-Li for you. She was self-destructive even in her urge to destroy others. She needed the danger of risks, of transgressions out in the open. Why else would she have left her data signature imprinted, one over one of my irises, the other on the mole above my right thigh?

Yun-Li wore her generosity of programmed curls in four flat buns at the back of her head, augmented with mother-of-pearl and zirconium chopsticks. Her cybernetically-enhanced irises were as hard and cold as her features were warm. I’ve heard her described by a rival as having eyes that had no emotion, only coldness. I would have agreed with the sentiment, had I not found her rival equally disturbing. I did not see the coldness in Yun-Li’s eyes as reflective of frigidity or the lack of emotion, however. Her ice, was as extreme as much of her was extreme, from her curves that were shown off to advantage in the exquisite cut of her various uniforms, to the elegant artifice of the flight formations she drafted in interstellar strategy class. Within the ice, a flicker of something. Was it hurt or avarice? You could never tell with Yun-Li.

Like quicksilver, she was prone to acts of charity as much as acts of negligence or of casual cruelty. But her lower lip would be an indicator of her moods far more accurately than her eyes. An obstinate hardening, a vulnerable wobble, a pout that tried too hard to be seductive. In our postings together, I had learned to decipher Yun-Li’s moods but not enough to decipher her zeal for destroying me.

Spasmodic, the remembrance of her is a tic in the middle of the night that needs to be pushed aside. Along with vengeance. Along with guilt.

I nestle against my mate, their tranquil snores soothing my painful memories. They stir in my arms and turn, nuzzling into my collarbone before slipping into deeper sleep, their level of unconsciousness signaling itself on my own nodes. We share some data-streams between our nodes, as is usual for those who have opted for life-mating.

We make our own identities. Or we lose them, as Yun-Li lost hers when she tried to siphon away mine.

With this next journey that I have to make comes a decision and a choice.

Always, I struggle with these choices. Between the life I lead here and my desire to return to a past that had been stolen from me. Between that and what the Bunian Fleet requires of me in their constant covert operations to correct the past. To correct the fabric of our civilizations

I breathe in the herbal fragrance of my spouse’s newly washed hair and close my eyes against the tears that no prosthetic consciousness could halt.

I did my research over the years of progressing from apprentice horticulturist on Teja-II to being chief horticulturist after my foster parent and mentor passed on. I was able to trace my steps back to the counter-commands my first foster mother dispatched along with my body. I was able to contact the Bunian Fleet with the missive that led to my double-life. On Teja-II as a horticulturist, and elsewhere, whenever I was needed to tactically inject myself into the mistakes committed by the Fleet in the past—mistakes such as the total obliteration of the human race in more than one galaxy. Small mistakes in the grand scheme of things, the Imperial Ones would have us believe.

(My second foster parent’s brain is now encased in a metal cylinder powering a battleship, two galaxies down, which is probably the end that’s waiting for me, after all of my adventures through time and hyperspace are done.)

At night, Zhilang and I cook our meals together. They love my mutton kut teh although I could never cook it as well as my Ah Ma. We play draughts on a marble board, and then we settle to bed, to read. They favored epic historical romances of intergalactic ship-wars in the early days of the Bunian Empire. They delighted in reading those romances to me.

If Yun-Li had not been so enamored of her own intelligence, she would have realized a fundamental truth about the person she was attempting to elide.

There are many versions of me.

Perhaps the version she thought to override has a copy somewhere with the host, the unspecified host of my node-clan. Suffice it to say, there are versions of me she would not be so happy to absorb. Like that version of me who spent most of her life partly paralyzed because of a flaw in her lower spine.

I have an extra node. A node that rests at the base of my spine.

It was put in there by Surgeon-Admiral Mei-Lee. There, at the base of my spine is the memory of my life in paralysis, and later with a stooped back and a limp, after my father paid for the best surgery he could afford. There, at the base of my spine lay a set of invisible teeth, waiting to chomp at the hands that robbed me from my family.

We did what we could to undo the data-hack, a virus that had already begun eating away most of my memories.

“It is linked to the central node of your family’s data-banks,” said Surgeon-Admiral Mei-Lee as she checked the readout on her screen, invisible to me except in the furrowing of her brow and the movements of her irises from left to right, up and down.

“How could you have been so careless!” My first foster-mother fumed.

“What . . . does that mean what I think it means?” I asked. I was propped on the padded operating chair, not feeling anything beneath my neck as machines drilled into my nodes beneath me.

“I am so sorry, but yes, it does mean that this data-hack is almost ineradicable. In about five weeks, your family’s memories of you will be wiped. If we lived on a less advanced planet, perhaps this would not have happened. But offloading memories onto a host has been part of our lifestyle for three centuries now.”

“Can we not find the host where the memories have been offloaded?” I asked, desperate. I could not feel my body, but my brain felt all the pain that was necessary. To be forgotten, to be cut away from a heritage of love. It felt unimaginable.

Mei-Lee shook her head sadly. “I wish we could. I really do. But the hosts are peripatetic and difficult to access. I’ve contacted the Surgeon-Admirals of the Bunian Fleet for you but they said even they cannot access the host. Only those in imperial command can do such a thing, but they are over a thousand light-years away from us. We do not have the means to reach them. But I will do my best. We’ll transfer you to a hospital station, and arrange for you to be brought to Imperial Command.”

“What can I do then?” I cried out.

“Keep still, don’t fidget, we’re still working on your nodes,” Mei-Lee said. “Our knowledge may not be as sophisticated as the technology Yun-Li has been using to siphon your memories, but we can do what we can. I’m sending you to the hospital ship where one of the moveable stations can collect you. But hold still!”

“I don’t know if I’m fidgeting, I can’t control my body right now, remember?”

My first foster mother sighed. “You’re right. I’ll have to fully anaesthetize you then. I am so sorry. We can continue this discussion after we’ve done with the procedure.”

“No, wait!” I said, thinking quickly.

She quirked an eyebrow, and listened as I told her my plan. Mei-Lee gave an appreciative laugh. “Well, General, you may or may not be a vegetable in about five weeks from now but you’re one of our finest strategists. I will do what I can to make your plans come true. And we’ll figure out the rest.”

Of course they promoted me to General five weeks before I was going to lose the memories that tied me to time and place. They thought it was a gift. I laughed in those days as I laughed at everything. With the ghost of my dolorous and ironic humor. With a lacing of acrid pain.

She nodded at one of the junior surgeons who administered the neuro-anaesthetic.

It amuses me to think that I have traveled back and forth over a millennium’s worth of light-years. Past me, and present me. The name that I had lost. And Yun-Li, where I have left her.

I wish our efforts had been enough—but our knowledge and our technologies had been inferior to those on Teja-II. Too inferior to the other Bunian Fleets. By the time I discovered the coordinates of my home, and found my true name, my Ah Ma and Ah Pa had all passed on. By the time I regained all of my memories, I was a thousand light-years away.

But you and I, Yun-Li. You and I have become immortal through the alchemy of superluminal flight. Through the hacks in our systems. And you, Yun-Li, you have forgotten your name, as I had forgotten mine.

Yun-Li wears my name now as she serves me mutton kut teh and chrysanthemum tea. I am seated at a marble-topped table in a multi-winged heritage Chinese Muslim restaurant. It sprawls over the site that used to contain our home, our cafeteria and the sprawling soybean and vegetable gardens. Crouched and bent, she walks with an unmistakeable limp, one that used to define who I was as a person.

Around us are an assemblage of cybernetic humans, people consuming food through holographic proxy, with a scatter of other bio-technically enhanced humans. This is part of the present that I will need to correct. A part of the mission that I am on, to restore humanity to the universe in the closest approximation of their original forms.

Upon her spine, the phantom of the injuries that had maimed me as a teen.

Yun-Li no longer looks even partially human. Her face is a prosthetic, marble-like in shape and texture. She walks with a metallic clank that tells me most of her body is now inorganic. But the teeth on her spine remain, a remnant of the person I was. Inexplicably, the four flat buns are still neatly arranged at the back of her head, a remnant of the girl-cadet who attached herself to me with such honeyed malice.

An imperial decree renders her immortal penance, long after I had left this quadrant of our galaxy. Long before I had finally gained my audience at the center of the Bunian Fleet.

Long before I was made one of the time-jumping Admirals.

Yun-Li wanted to hack into my memories and who I was. It was not so difficult to allow her to absorb a version of me she had never known. A maimed version of me, who thought she would serve in her father’s cafeteria her whole life. A version of me without the corrective prosthetics.

Now, as Yun-Li’s eyes meet mine without a trace of recognition, I wonder if I will return to her a name, and an identity. Would that be a compassion or a further cruelty? I have the implant that will fit easily in the node that she carries behind her left ear. I have another implant that will return to me the rest of my memories that she took on her own without sustaining the paralysis we planted as a trap.

I dip my chopsticks into the bowl of meat infused with herbs. The tenderness of the meaty grain, so succulent against the tongue. The meat bone tea Yun-Li cooks is so like the dish made by my Ah Ma, so many hundreds of years ago. I close my eyes to enjoy my meal. Yun-Li cooks like my mother, because she lived in my stead. She is now required to keep those traditions going, year after year, until every last bit of her that is organic will be replaced. Well, in this timeline at least.

Did my parents not recognize her eyes were not mine, that her laughter was not mine? Perhaps if we had not been culturally conditioned to offload all of our memories to the host, this would not have happened. Where is the host? Where is it?

But in a way they had that version of me who lived with them before the surgery that straightened my spine. Before I left them to join the military. Before I started doing the dirty work of the Bunian Empire’s higher military command, albeit with a slight detour thanks to the ceaseless interstellar wars in our galactic quadrant.

They got the daughter I could have been.

“Are you sure you want her to achieve her ultimate goal?” Mei-Lee asked me that one last time.

“It’s not really an ultimate goal if she loses her own memories is it?” I said thoughtfully. We had already placed a counter-virus in my nodes, and the moment when my memories and the memories of my parents were erased, would also mark the erasure of Yun-Li’s presence. That was my request. Mei-Lee wanted her turned into a ship’s generator.

I paused. And said, “I do not want my Ah Ma and Ah Pa to feel the pain of knowing what happened to me. The pain of knowing their memories of me have been replaced with memories of . . . a cuckoo in the nest. I will be far away from you. I do not know how long it will take before I return. Before I carry out the mission you have entrusted to me.”

Mei-Lee nodded, “So you consent to letting Yun-Li be a . . . prosthetic daughter?”

Despite my sadness, I could not help but laugh. “Yes, until I figure out my way back to where I should be.”

“Out of all of our graduates from the academy, you are the one who would be able to figure that out,” said my first foster mother.

“You have that much faith in me?” I asked, my eyes welling up one last time as the person I had been.

“We always had that faith in you. I always had that faith in you.” Mei-Lee said.

“I never understood why,” I said plaintively.

Mei-Lee smiled and squeezed my hand as I went under. “You will,” she said.

And that was my last memory of home before they transferred me to the hospital station. The hospital station that was hijacked and occupied by a rival Bunian Fleet, effectively cutting me off from the nodes that sustained me and which would have given me the coordinates of my home planet.

(What a circuitous route I have taken, through a lifetime on Teja-II, through another lifetime with the Bunian Fleet! All of the parts of me my sweet Zhilang does not know.)

Yun-Li meets my eyes, and asks me if I would like some more chrysanthemum tea.

I allow her to bring me a pot. I sip my tea as I deliberate, like my Ah Pa, like all of my ancestors, through all the years that separate us from our homelands.

Across the centuries, the advice of my Ah Pa rings in my ears, “Rise up in the ranks, my daughter. Be one of the Imperial Fleet’s Higher Command. But do not be like them. Wherever in life you are my daughter, remember the doctrines of our people. Always remember to be kind.”

But Ah Pa, what she did stole you from me. Stole my family from me. If I had the power, if I could, I would fight my way back through all of those years, I would hunt down the data-host. I would stop Yun-Li in her tracks. I would never lose all of you.

Ah Pa, Ah Ma. I’m coming home to you. I will do whatever it takes to fight time itself, fight technology, fight destiny until I am by your side again. That was why I agreed to carry out these time-jumping covert missions. Through all of these interstellar gateways and circuits through the universes.

Through all of the wonders of the universe I have seen, there is only one wonder that I chase, of sitting down to dinner with you, as your true daughter, on Yunglo XIV-V.

Data theft is murder and will incur severe penalties.

This has been a message from the Ministry of Cybernetic Safety and Defense. Yunglo-XIV-V.

About the Author

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include: Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed. Nin is currently working on Watermyth, the first novel of the Watermaidens Trilogy.

How Bees Fly

Simone Heller

This is how you defend yourself against the demons of old, should they cross your path: You grind down their bones with a millstone and burn them; the ash you bury under a Blackwillow tree and salt the whole field where you happened to find them. You seal off their artifacts and other possessions behind a grade-3 lock, and you melt the key in the fire of your community’s smithy. Their scriptures, should you really get your hands on them, you throw onto a cart driven by a sacred gearbeast and program it to walk into one of the acid lakes.

This is how it is sung. This is how it is done. This is how it is safe.

In my lifetime we only found one demon in our community, and it turned out to be the skeleton of a wild dog. But there were stories, reaching us via grease merchants and traveling codemongers, about outposts that had been poisoned by the dreadful emanations of a sole demon’s finger bone, about how the Society of Illiterate Enlightenment hunted down a single line of equations threatening to undermine the foundations of life.

So it was quite a surprise to me to encounter not one, but two demons on the track from the beehives to the rust pasture. At first they seemed like decent people to me, travelers seeking shelter from the oncoming chemstorm, refugees from the lowlands possibly. Ours was a thriving community, high up in the foothills above the vapors, and visitors were not that uncommon. I hailed them, even looking forward to the prospect of company in the evening and hearing some news and stories. But my steps faltered as they hailed me back, and I knew them for what they were. I was the midwife for our community, responsible for life, death, and bees. I had visited the dead places during my journeyman years and had seen the crumbling statues of the demons in their tombs of stone. There was remarkably little resemblance between the statues and the real thing, but I knew them by the way their broad tongues curled around the words of the Unified Speech, by their smooth skins, by the warmth of their bodies.

They uttered words of malice, but you can’t really listen when the poison is already seeping in through your skin, and you feel it constricting your lungs and turning your organs into pulp. That’s what the stories said, and that was the way I felt. I have years of experience regarding bodily functions, though, and I realized that even the fastest acting poison wouldn’t have such an immediate effect. Fear, on the other hand, would.

It would have been my duty to deal with the demon threat there and then. I am no stranger to killing, you see. I have to kill weak queen bees not apt to assemble a hive, and weak young ones not apt to survive their first storm season. But the demons were not weak, or that’s what I told myself, and I was not fit to slay them.

Something touched my elbow, then, burning through my stormskin, and I jerked back, cradling my arm close to my body. One of the demons had come up to me, and it looked at me with its eyes shining white, the smooth skin of its face crawling into so many folds.

“Are you alright?” it said.

I backed away, poised to run and ring the bells. We had to juice the gearbeasts and evacuate, we had to raise volunteers to contain the demons, we had to call the Society’s salters.

“Don’t run away, please.” It raised its empty hands and didn’t try to touch me this time.

I very nearly laughed. By all estimations I was dead already, and now this demon tried to be gentle with me? I looked at it for real, past the hideous first impression of its glaring features. Its hooded cloak was in tatters, nothing near offering protection from storms or even the rust brushes you might step into any time. It carried no weapons I could see. Just a small crate on its back, full of vile secrets, no doubt. And it had positioned itself between me and the other one.

Maybe its partner planned something heinous behind its back; their cunningness was a staple of the stories. So what under the leaden sky did they want with me?

Then I caught a glimpse of his partner, just standing there, panting, one hand on her back. Yes, he and her, I was sure of it. Because the female demon was pregnant.

Maybe I made a mistake, then; maybe I should have let them perish in the storm to burn their remains afterwards. But wouldn’t they have survived the onslaught, they who had poisoned the whole world with their evil contraptions? Anyway, I couldn’t risk them following me back home, so I showed them the way to the shack on the rust pasture before I ran.

Still bewildered that they had let me go, I made a small detour. There are only so many duties one can abandon on a given day, and I had to ground the beehives before the storm hit. Our community would need the collected juice even more now, to fuel the underground growlights, after the dust the demons’ feet had trodden upon was burned and salted, for—what, three years? Five? A living demon encounter was something unheard of. They might as well bring the whole mountainside down on us, just to make sure. The Society has no special love for the communities, you know, and they do not shy away from sacrificing what has been tainted.

I nearly stepped on a dead bee on the trail. The undersides of its black wings were plain as it lay on its back, its jeweled eyes no longer looking at the skies. Poor thing hadn’t made it back in time; always a bad choice, even with just the pre-storm tingling in the air. There was no time for a ritual, so I picked it up, wrapped it in a kerchief and put it in my pocket. I do not name them, but believe it or not, I can tell each and every one of them apart and had already been worrying about this one.

Grating and hammering sounds greeted me at the settlement. The gate was already closed; the slabs of the enclosure, partly molten during a particularly heavy storm season a few years back, shone in the eerie light created by the dust already rising on the horizon. Nearly everybody would be tucked in safely by now, food and water at hand, and a good storyteller or singer, if you were lucky, or a heap of mending work, if you were not. I should have been with Eliss, Olmen, and Gashke in case their clutch emerged early. Instead I waved and yelled from a distance so that the headman was already awaiting me on top of the palisade.

I nearly didn’t find the words. Demon infestation, a curse as severe as they came, sounded too harmless for the things that prowled our pastures.

“Tell the people to shine the light and arm themselves! Demons! Two demons! Out in the shack!” I had to gasp for air and saw the headman’s tongue flicker in disbelief.

“You are sure.” Yet his tone suggested that he was not, that he begged me to deny it.

“I swear by the leaden sky—they live and breathe and talk, all soft skin and vicious eyes, like it is sung. They must have crept up from one of their old underground lairs.”

He stroked the aluminum rings dangling from his neck with a trembling hand and looked out beyond me, at the sky. “Our reflector is already covered. Calling the Society will have to wait. I’ll let everyone prepare to leave just in case. But we won’t say that the two demons are alive! We can’t have a panic during a storm.” He looked at me for a long while then, and I wished him to open the gate already so that I could grab my things and get to Gashke’s in time.

When he spoke again, he had to try twice until his voice carried. “You . . . Salpe, you know what I have to do, don’t you?” I shook my head in denial, because, no, not now! But his voice grew stronger, even as he tore at his collar-rings in pain. “I have to tell you that the Covenant of the Communities doesn’t extend to you anymore. You are considered tainted until proven otherwise.”

“I’m going to die in the storm! Open the gate! I’ll go to an outlying cellar and sit it out on my own. Please! I never talked to them and didn’t touch a thing.”

He couldn’t even look at me anymore. “You know the ritual. You are no longer welcome nor may you exercise your right to seek shelter behind our enclosure. I’m sorry.”

Yes, I knew. This was how it was done. This was how it was safe. There was nothing more to say, just my voice wouldn’t stop. “I . . . I grounded the hives for you.”

But his head had already disappeared behind the slabs.

You should not think of me as one who succumbs easily to death. I fight for every weakling brood, to get breath into failing lungs, to get movement into still limbs, to give them a spark of life that will demand its place in the community with a bold cry. Only if I see no way they could stand on their own limbs when I lower them to the floor do I tell the parents and carry out my duty.

The first gusts caught me up on the ridge: The neatly sealed hovels and roundhouses below me disappeared behind veils of dust, loose brushes and debris rapidly piling up at one side of the enclosure. Looking back was useless, though, wishing I was there, snuggled up in a blanket and talking in hushed tones while the wind rattled the roof. There was only one way for me. Because if anyone could handle the tainted, cure them or contain them until the taint shows or is proven void, it was the Society. I would climb up to their citadel, warn them about the demons, and see what they would do with the likes of me. Maybe I would prove the headman wrong and be allowed back into the settlement after all.

I knew this trail well enough, at least its first part. Bleached skeletons of stones lined the path, lichen and softer rock dissolved long ago. The citadel’s slender tower soared above me, overlooking the frontier communities. It didn’t seem any closer, although I had long climbed past the small crevasse where we left our quota in food for the brothers and sisters, and where I placed the occasional young one for them to raise and train.

Ridge upon ridge faded into dust, and a crackling sound haunted the sky. It had been mid-afternoon when I set out, but now I was struggling forever through the half-light filtered by the multitude of particles in the air. Chemstorms were the breath of corruption, chasing the lowland vapors to the higher ground in rapid gusts, each one laden with a new poison. The effects were manifold, corroding, blistering, gnawing away at any surface. My stormskin would only blunt the first tingling sensation, but we were far beyond that now. Cold fingers caressed the exposed areas of my skin and probed ever deeper. Soon it felt like I was breathing ice, and where I had made a hundred steps before, I made only fifty now, thirty, twenty.

Lightning ghosted through roiling clouds, sizzling down upon the upper ridge. As I craned my neck to look at the citadel, the chafing of my blisters against my collar made me whimper. The tower appeared to be gone, wiped from the earth by the storm. I felt my legs buckle. A small pause, then. I sank against a boulder and looked up at the strange beauty of the many-colored clouds. I wouldn’t close my tearing eyes, but the blackness crept in anyway. Just as I wasn’t sure of my failing senses any more, a specter strode out of the dust, a sleek figure with a beaked mask. Had they come to get me? How could the Society have known about me? When the figure bent down over me, I got a look through the clear visor of the mask. I looked into the shining eyes of the demon.

I woke up in a blanket that smelled of grease. Gusts tore at the roof, rattling the tools on the wall and the walls themselves. Into the rattling, two voices weaved, not storm-hushed, but arguing.

“ . . . bring it in just like that? As soon as it’s twitching a limb, I’m throwing it out.”

“Shhh, all will be well.” This voice I knew: the demon. “We need help, and you know it.”

“To blazes with your shhh!” The hard voice again, with a strain to it that was more than frustration; the demoness. “We have always managed on our own. And how could these primitives help us anyway? They don’t know a thing. They reject the very act of knowing, in case you haven’t noticed. You’re lucky it didn’t tear your throat out while you carried it.”

There was some shuffling and panting; wood creaked.

“See? Come, sit now. This is a new place; it may be different. And besides, no one deserves to be left outside in this turmoil.”

The demoness only growled.

I opened my eyes to slits. I was in the shack, ropes and poles dangling in a slight draft above my head. They had sealed the door inexpertly with some of the cloth sacks stashed in here. On the remainder, they had placed me, next to a currently lifeless gearbeast we used for clearing the fields after storm season. In the far corner, huddled around a flickering grease lamp, the demons whispered their plans into each other’s ear. The male demon placed the palm of his hand on the forehead of the other one. He looked well for having been out in a chemstorm, his skin smooth as ever; his mate, not so much. Her breathing was shallow and pained, her whole posture rigid. Good.

She was still in a better shape than me, anyway. I felt the outer layer of my skin catch on the blanket and come off in places, and I’d have started to cough up bloody lumps, no doubt, but for my lack of strength. No pain, though, curiously.

They must have touched me, I realized. The very air seemed to congeal in my lungs, the same air they breathed in this confined space. A choked sound struggled up through my throat.

“You’re awake?” The demon got up immediately. “Take it easy. You got badly hurt out there. Allow me to renew your dressings, please, and you’ll feel better soon.”

I wanted to wriggle out of my whole corrupted skin in one piece. This gentleness was his ruse. Why not stand by and laugh while I succumbed to the poison?

Storm-times, they teach you about detachment. Worry too much about the howling winds and how they might destroy all that’s precious to you, and you go mad with it. Best to let them rage above your head until it’s over. Even so, I came close to shrieking as the demon lifted my blanket.

His vile concoctions felt nothing like my heated poultices. First, his hands were warm, not burning, but comfortable, the tainted part of me thought. But soon my skin turned cool and tingled. I shuddered.

“No need to eye me like that,” he said. “This is just a salve to repair damaged areas and avoid infection. It might feel a little bit fuzzy. That’s because it kills the pain.”

You’d have to be a demon to come up with the idea of killing something as useful as pain. I had to get this stuff off of me. Until then, I lay perfectly still and listened to the constant patter of particles against the sheet metal door, trying to get my mind to another place. I thought of the clutch. Stormborns, maybe. They say stormborns are as tough as old iron bars, but in my opinion the real unbreakables are the ones that emerge in the settling dust of a storm’s aftermath.

“For your inner burnings, we already fed you something while you were unconscious. So how about a small repast?” I watched the demon close the lid of his jar and stash it into an oilcloth satchel. Then he helped me sit, awkwardly, avoiding the areas he had treated. Immediately, I moved away from him, even though it made me dizzy.

“I guess we have to share the meal, then?” he asked. “Would you eat with us if we took the first bite?”

I wondered why it was that he wanted me strong. Why follow me through the storm in the first place? Life-saving was not a common pastime of demons.

He had already unwrapped a longish, ribbed brown object and placed it on the paper it had been in, then he helped his mate walk over to my resting place. But she shook off his hands and drew the blanket on her shoulders tight around her bloated frame. This one had a stronger face than her male counterpart, stark angles and a blade of a nose. She still was ugly, though, flat-faced and showing not a single vibrant color, just shades of dirt.

“We should introduce ourselves, don’t you think, before we share a meal? My name is Cirrus, and this is Haze.”

The ghost of laughter bubbled up from my lungs. Everybody knows that demons don’t have names, and then to think I’d fall for just two randomly chosen phenomena of the sky you could watch every other day?

“Our names sound funny to you, then?” he asked. “Tell me, how do you name yourselves? We never got the chance to learn any of your names.”

What a vile thing to do—to try and pry the names from those you poisoned, to keep them like a trophy. I said nothing.

The demoness snorted. “Such a waste of time. Can it even talk?”

Her mate looked at me. “I believe it’s a she.”

“It’s a monster.”

I felt anger hiss up my throat and battered it down. That’s what they’d have liked me to be, a monster, tainted by their corruption, when they were the ones that had come to devastate one of the most prosperous settlements of the High East.

The demoness went on. “Each and every time, Cirrus. Each and every time they have attacked us, hunted us. Sent those masked lunatics with their half-rusted armory after us. And I can’t protect you, not anymore. I’m just stupid deadweight now.”

“It’s no dead weight, not yet! And that’s why we need help.” The demoness shook her head and wanted to get up, but the demon held her. “She . . . you helped us once,” he said, looking at me, then back at his mate. “We can’t run again, love. What if another storm hits? We only have one suit left. It’s too dangerous.”

“You made it dangerous enough in here.” The demoness pouted her grotesquely flexible lips. “I tell you what I’d do, if I were still able to perform my duties. I’d bind her up until the storm’s over. But you won’t do that, will you?”

Being barely able to sit, I didn’t feel like something those two had to be afraid of. It had to be the egg frenzy for sure, as the demoness was obviously nearing her term. But I felt a strange kind of pride suddenly to be a monster to demons.

For all her display of strength, the male demon treated her like any sensible adult would have, giving her a far bigger share of the food than the sliver left for himself, second only to the big chunk he offered to me.

We teach our young ones about the taste of poison from their very first day, as they begin to stick their tongue to everything they come upon. Only sometimes, it has no taste at all. For all it was worth, the food of the demons had a very distinctive flavor—in such a way actually that I couldn’t avoid a surprised sound, pleasantly surprised, as it was. I stuffed another piece into my mouth, its sweet stickiness crumbling between my teeth, and another, and another, licking off the last crumbs between my fingerpads. Only then did I realize that the demons were watching me. They looked at each other and started to laugh. I swallowed fast, just to make sure I wouldn’t spit it out again, in front of their feet, to show them how revolting their produce was to me. They laughed even harder, dabbing at those mostly white eyes with sleeves so threadbare they would have been used to wipe the floor in my house and nothing else. Almost like people who hadn’t had a good laugh in a very long time, and the more their bodies remembered how to do it, the deeper they sank into the laughter.

I didn’t know what to do. Normally, sitting out a storm, I would have chimed in, happy to have provided a chute for the tension to drain away. Here, with the laughter of two demons in my ears, my unease only grew.

You might think that I’d have taken courage from the lack of true evil these demons had managed to exhibit until now. But it was rather disturbing. How could these be the same demons whose legacy ravaged the land even as they laughed without a care?

I retreated to a corner and contented myself with watching them. They hid their true intentions well. The male demon went through his possessions, showing me this and that. They did not make sense to me at all, and whenever he began to explain, I closed my eyes and ears to his corruption. Their immaculate shine without the natural imperfections of the smithy told me enough about their evil nature. But one thing did capture my attention.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

And I knew. A merchant had scratched travel routes into the dirt for me once during my journey of the five founding settlements. But this, a map on paper, was something else. It showed the distant places no one had ever visited; the shores of the Quiescent Ocean harboring the vast ruins of the demons’ old haunts to the West, and to the East an endless stretch of plains lost under the vapors.

“See, this is your home—these mountains are the ones you can actually see outside. And this”—his finger went across a good portion of the paper—“is where we came from, our shelter. Our settlement.”

An underground lair full of demons, and two of them crawling up to the light, finding a route to our mountains, accurately marking each community and citadel on their way. Were they scouts, sent to investigate a place to attack? Or were they simply seeders of poison, laying their eggs near settlements so that their spawn had something to feast upon when hatching?

I didn’t as much as flicker my tongue, so he put his map away. But it had etched itself into my brain. The path from their lair was marked with a series of black scrawls. There could be dozens of them, more even; a settlement, he had said. This map would enable them to find us and enslave us easily. It is said that even to look at a piece of scripture can ruin your mind forever. And rightly so. I had to make sure the map never left this shack.

As long as I remember there haven’t been any chemstorms like those of the stories with their fortnights of cowering in the dark. The three to five days we usually got were all I needed, though. Sooner or later, my time had to come. Both demons went to sleep.

With the crackling storm for cover, I crawled over and rummaged through their possessions.

I had not yet given up returning to my community. I had withstood the demons’ poison so far. If I could only prove that there was still some part of me untainted, even after being exposed to them for days, then maybe my kin would take me back, or at least take a vote instead of obeying a rash decision by the headman alone. But if we were ever to be safe again, the map had to be destroyed.

As my fingers brushed a sleek device, I remembered how the demon had pushed a protruding knob on one of his objects and thus opened a secret compartment. Feeling a similar, barely perceptible knob, I pushed.

And out of nothing, out of the darkness, the demon’s voice came alive, booming and tinny.

“ . . . settlement on day 326, hostile as all others, we guess. Food is running out, as the season yields almost no edible plants . . . ”

I dropped the thing with a squawk. The voice thundered on. Why had I not been able to feel his warm body, when he had lurked so close? And what was he talking about? I crept backwards, afraid of finally getting hurt, when the light came on. The demon sat up in the far corner, squinting at me. I looked at him, the voice booming on in blank air, and a hiss of incomprehension and fear escaped my lips.

Sluggishly, the demon padded over, picked up the device and pushed the knob again.

Save for the raging storm, all went quiet.

He looked down at me. I was crouched among their scattered possessions. I would die untainted, I told myself, if he killed me now. Even if no one would ever know about my noble death.

The demon knelt and bagged everything anew. Only the sleek device he kept. “This is for . . . well, for keeping the sound of the voice, the sound of anything, actually, to have access to it later. See?”

He fidgeted around with it and spoke. The knob was pushed again, and the device repeated his words: “We made a new friend from the settlement on day 327. She doesn’t talk much yet, but I can tell she is very interested in our research.”

I tried to look as uninterested as ever. But I guess I was not very convincing after being caught up to the elbows in their things.

As if to mock me further, the demon opened the secret compartment I hadn’t been able to find, and took out a tiny object. He placed it into a box, took a similar object out and slotted it into the secret compartment.

“We also use it to listen to sounds from long ago, from distant places.”

As he pushed the knob again, other voices came forth. Different voices, some together, some alone, some jubilant and full of hope, some tear-stricken. Old and young voices, with short words or long litanies. One or two even sang. The demoness joined us and put an arm around the chest of her mate and hugged him tight while they listened. Listened to a multitude of demons in their underground lair, wishing for these two’s safe return.

It was a thing of terror. And a thing of beauty: I wished my community would have been able to do such a ritual, so that I could have memorized their parting wishes and listened to them in my head at least. I wished it were the voices of my clutch brothers and sisters, my housemates, even the stupid headman, that spoke out of the device.

Oddly enough, the demons didn’t punish me at all. They just continued to act like normal people waiting out a storm. All this—and the fact that I was still alive, well fed, and healing nicely—terrified me. How could they behave like this, without a single lapse back into their true nature? All this acting couldn’t possibly be for my sake.

What really got me, though, were their small gestures. The way he made her hair into short braids, small shining carapaces and slag chips he must have collected for this task going into each strand; I was fairly sure that no one ever had trimmed and colored my collar-feathers with such affection. The covert, almost shy way he tried to talk to the demonspawn in her belly, and how she accepted it after digging her nails in her palm first, then stroking his head with a hand marked by red half-moons.

What is it like, I began to ask myself, to have this warm blood running under your paper-thin skin, its blue-green pulse visible for everyone? How could they look at each other with such love when their hearts were full of poison, as it is sung? They began to feel like a fabrication to me, not the true demons that had ravaged earth and sky.

I tried to banish these thoughts with a ritual. My fingers found the dead bee I had pocketed earlier. Its iridescent black wings were undamaged, its miniature joints greased and free from dirt. I placed it on the floor looking to the East for the Ritual of Reviving and began to sing the bee from its sleep, humming the long, calm tones and dance-stepping around it. At each new cadence of the chant, I moved the bee so it faced another cardinal point, all save North. Bees were never placed northward.

The demon had taken an interest in my actions and watched the whole ritual, waiting with me after it was finished. We waited a good long time. But the bee would not buzz to life. I took it up again, moved its wings tentatively—nothing.

Maybe the presence of the demons had damaged it after all, irrevocably. I let him take it from me and examine it. Only when he made moves to disassemble it did I take it back. Civilized people don’t break things just to gawk at their inner workings.

“You could be so much more, you know,” he said with regret in his voice, “if you just let go of this superstition. It’s not getting you anywhere.”

I, having revived many a bee in my life, chose to disagree. But this bee wouldn’t fly, so I stuffed it back into my pocket.

I had clearly triggered a new idea in the demon, though, because he took up his sleek device again, to put another object into its compartment. This time, he managed to startle not only me, but also the demoness. As a whole new kind of sound emerged from the thing, she jerked out of her light sleep with a bewildered look on her face that softened to delight even as she shook her head. I had long fled from the noise and pressed my back against the wall. But I felt something tugging at me. Yes, there was a distinct rhythm and a melody—no, many melodies—of sorts. My big claw tapped the floor despite myself. I was still trying to figure it out when the demoness got up and took the demon’s offered hand.

And the demons danced!

It was impossible. Of all things, demons were not supposed to dance. They were not supposed to be harbingers of joy. And yet that was what I saw: Their movement was slow and solemn, no ritual at all, but pure affection and delight. I could see it in the way their faces relaxed, the way their bodies melted into each other. For that short moment, they were one with the music, one with one another. I almost longed to be one of them, to hold back the loneliness tearing at me.

When the music drained away, they stayed there in the middle of the room, and I did not so much as breathe.

So these were the mighty demons of old, their clothes torn and their hair matted, clutching each other to push away their weariness and struggles.

Some loose material smashed into the far wall of the shack, causing us all to flinch. Demon and demoness disengaged themselves.

As much as the dance had transported them to another place, another time, their return plunged them into a mood. The demoness began to pace, more agitated than ever. She kept her back to the demon, but I watched her wipe furiously at her eyes.

“There is no help here, Cirrus. Promise we’ll flee.”

“What about the child?” he said.

“There is no child.”

I could see his pain, and how he longed to go to her. “I was able to feel our child just moments ago. So don’t give up yet.”

You should think that her voice would match her tears, but it was flat and dead. “We made a deal not to talk about it. No child can be born under the leaden sky. It won’t live.”

“You don’t know that. It might.”

“Then it will die soon after. It was a mistake. Look at me, I’m useless like this.” She pointed at me, still against the wall, wishing I was invisible. “They’ll kill us as soon as they get the chance.”

It felt like she burned me to cinders when she turned her back on me, and their gazes locked, both stubborn, both broken. I didn’t want to be a monster to them anymore. Clearly, they were no threat to anyone, they had even saved my life. I pitied them and felt bad for their plight. If this was the taint, I’d have had to tear my heart out to avoid it.

After a few moments, the demon looked away. “Alright. As soon as the storm’s over, we flee.”

“No!” I blurted out.

They both turned around and looked at me.

“You speak!” the demon said, at the same time the demoness growled, “You won’t hold us. I may not be in my best fighting form, but you’ll not stand in my way.”

“No,” I said. “No. I mean, your demonspawn. Your child. It will live. I hatch young ones all the time under the leaden sky. I am Salpe, the midwife of my community. I will help you.”

Within a few more hours, the storm moved on. As soon as the crackling in the air subsided and the wind settled, we tore the cloth sacks from the door.

It was late afternoon. The clouds were up high and wind-swept, and we stood and watched the landscape reappear through the dust. Even the demoness was outside, helped along by her mate.

The demon came to stand beside me. “You know, I was the one who wanted to go exploring and dragged her out to this wretched place,” he said. “Still, every day I rejoice in the sight of the sky.” But he didn’t look up at the sky at all, he looked at her. “In the shelter . . . the underground lair, it is but a distant dream. Salpe, if you have to make a hard decision later on, save her, please.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. We had spoken a lot over the past hours, and I had promised to bring their young one into the world; my hard decision was already made.

In this moment, something blinked once in the direction of the settlement. Then, through the settling clouds of dust, a clear beam of light shot upwards, slanted and aimed for the slender tower that loomed over the mountaintops. They had uncovered the reflector. It was such a fast and efficient way to call the citadel—no courier needed, no delay or risk at all. And everyone who saw the beacon slicing the sky knew to keep away and stay safe.

At the demoness’ muffled cry, my first thought was that she, too, had seen it. But it was the demonspawn, ready to enter the world.

Suffice it to say that I had a great deal to learn on this day. It turned out that the sheen of sweat on the demoness’ brow I had attributed to her warm blood wasn’t the only bodily disadvantage she had to cope with. Viviparity is a bloody mess. As if it isn’t enough to shove an egg out of you, a living, breathing being took part in a process two women could otherwise manage without much fuss. The whole thing was a procedure you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. As it was, my worst-enemies-turned-friends were afflicted with it, and so I had to deal with it, too. But the headman hadn’t cried for the loss of his midwife for naught. I had seen many a creature to life before, and so, in the early morning hours, under the jewel eyes of the lifeless gearbeast, the demonspawn was born.

“Is it whole? Is it well?” the demoness asked shakily.

It was a little abomination, all soft and wrinkly. I should have killed it there and then; it would have been my duty. But I placed it into the arms of the demoness instead, all the while thinking: I can still do it. As long as I haven’t placed it on the floor on its tail and legs, it is not officially alive. Well, it had no tail to begin with, so who was I lying to?

I had to fend off the demons’ efforts to draw me into their warm hugs and left the three of them to their bliss.

I had to come to terms with what I had done and what I would do. So I went out to de-ground the hives. I still knew some of my duties.

True, I had failed my community in many ways, but what was the harm? Nobody needed to know. The demons had promised to leave as soon as possible. They posed no threat to anyone. I’d even point the brothers and sisters of the Society in the wrong direction, if need be. Because they would come, soon, and in full strength after they’d heard what was afoot. Two living demons. They were going to hunt them forever.

Two demons with a young one, one weak with afterpains, the other weak from hunger, with nowhere to go. And it was me who had given the warning. Me who had sealed their fate.

It is never a good idea to care for bees when agitated, as they are susceptible to troubled minds. When I took off the metal netting, I was greeted by an angry hum, and a host of bees swarmed up. One of the hives was damaged, the bees lost, but the rest of them began to settle on me, always drawn to the buzz, and when there was no more room, they circled me. Very carefully, I took out all the juicecombs. They would have to be integrated into new hives.

The guilt I felt drove me back, bees all over and around me. Still I thought: let them be gone, please, let them be gone when I reach the shack. The sooner they ran, the better their chances.

But I wasn’t so lucky.

Long coats billowed behind them, bulky over all kinds of forbidden contraptions; hosed masks looked like vicious beaks from afar. I myself delivered the herbs that went into those hoses to cleanse corruption from the air the scouts of the Society of Illiterate Enlightenment breathed.

There were two of them, and they had already marked the shack as contaminated, the skull symbol designating the forbidden and the poisoned a wet green splotch on the door. It was a demon’s skull, with its hole for a nose, no snout at all, actually. Just that flat, caved-in mask of a face.

The door was barred from the outside.

I heard the demon yell within the shack, holding back the demoness and trying to plead with the scouts at the same time. I was surprised she could even lift her head from the pallet after the madness of birthing, but she snarled that she would destroy them all.

The scouts clearly believed her. Their collar-feathers raised, they stood their ground, claws dug into the dirt.

“Brother Assel, quick!” The female scout pulled at the unwieldy pack attached to the back of the other one. “Do the Ritual of Incineration as long as they are confined!”

He began chanting immediately, raising a hose attached to his artifact, moving his arms in complicated patterns. I saw the whole structure of the shack shudder as someone within threw himself at the entrance. And I stood there on the track again, back at the side of my people, the monsters snarling behind the locked door. Or were they?

“Stop!” I cried. The sister turned around, but the brother was far too disciplined as to interrupt a ritual. “They are harmless! There’s no need to incinerate anything!”

“You’re the tainted one! They warned us about you. You, too, shall be cleansed!” At a slight touch of the sister’s hand, the male scout turned on me, still chanting.

I had died hundreds of deaths in my mind those last days, and none had come to pass. To die now at the hands of my own was simply not conceivable.

I flung my arms wide. The bees were as ever drawn to the buzz, and descended in a glittering cloud upon the scouts.

My bees, you see, have a sting. They’re able to deplete all their juices at once, nothing held back. One of them teaches you respect, five give you a burn for a week, but a whole swarm rends you to a shivering puddle. The scouts lashed about, fled a few steps, but went to their knees fast. It smelled of burned scales, and when they spoke, their voices were slurred.

“You . . . you won’t esc-c-cape. We’re but the v-v-vanguard! The host . . . will d-d-destroy you!”

I watched them crawl away, barely able to carry their artifacts. As soon as they had vanished from sight, I opened the door. This time, I allowed myself to sink into the warm embrace of the demon. I felt depleted as if my sting, too, had been spent on the scouts.

My gaze fell to the bees, hundreds of them, lying dead on the ground. That’s the price they pay for the sting. This was too much for me. I had just lost my community and my home, irrevocably, and now there was not a single bee left. They were all dead like the one in my pocket, lost forever. The Ritual of Reviving would take days for such a mass of bees, days we didn’t have. I went to my knees, scooped up a handful of the lifeless husks, and cried. Sobbed for dumb dead bees, of all things.

The demon, seeing what was wrong, took some of the bees from my hands, dusted them off and placed them on the floor, not for ritual, but randomly, iridescent wings up.

“Look, Salpe. You don’t have to do the ritual. It’s just superstition. They need the light, that’s all. The daylight on their wings makes them fly.”

He explained a lot more about the bees and the rituals. About juice made from light and other things I had never known. And this time, I listened, while one after another, the bees buzzed up around us. That they were not living jewels but an ancient artisan’s constructs fueled by light made them all the more precious to me. Soon we laughed as they glittered and zipped about, newborns in the calm air.

“They won’t help against this host.” The demon said it casually, but I knew the lines on his face meant sorrow.

“No,” I answered. “They won’t.”

“So we run.” His eyes searched the horizon, not believing he would ever reach it.

I swallowed. “I was the one . . . I was the one that made them aware of you. I’m so sorry.”

He nodded once. “It was your duty, wasn’t it?”

“Listen. You take the gearbeast in the shack,” I said, “so your mate and the young one can ride. I brought juicecombs.”

“Do I look to you like I could ride ten hours a day?” The demoness, who must have watched us from the entrance, limped over, the young one on her shoulder. “This host, they have gearbeasts of their own, and they’ll ride them twenty hours, without someone trailing along on foot.”

“Then . . . ” The demon closed his eyes. “Then I’ll go and lead them away from you.”

“Cirrus,” she said, and the weary warmth in her voice was chilling me. “You heard them. They search for both of us. We have to give them what they want. They want to kill two demons? Let them have two demons.”

We both looked up at her. She was pale, her eyes shining wild. But she meant it. All that it implied.

“We can’t . . . ” the demon began.

“We can. You said it yourself before. Running is not an option anymore.”

“But our child?” He made a move to take it from her. “I won’t bring it into . . . ”

I went between them. “Your young one,” I said. “Place it on the ground.”

They squinted at me, as if they saw a hint of the monster again.

“Hold it, if you must. But let it stand on its feet.”

Reluctantly, they did, supporting it. It looked around with its blue eyes and kicked its feet, unbelievably clumsy without a tail, but for a moment, it stood.

“Now it is accepted as a member of my kinfolk.” I flicked my tongue. “I brought this upon you. They’re hunting for two demons. They know nothing about your young one. I will take it.”

And so it was decided.

They gave me everything they had. Spare clothes, stormsuit, shining instruments. Their meager supplies and instructions on how to feed the young one. The map that would lead me to their lair. They would go to the citadel naked, with no weapon but the fear that preceded them. They walked like warriors nonetheless. I could not see them as the ugly, vile apparitions anymore, but I was sure they were a terrifying sight, eyes blazing and smooth skin burning.

I insisted they take their sleek sound device with them, for I knew it was precious to them, and meeting your fate was easier with something to make the heart soar. Even then, the demon gave me most of the flat objects that went into the device.

They hugged me one last time and kissed their young one, and when they turned their backs, I wanted to run after them and find another way.

“Wait!” I called. The demoness strode on, each step a little stronger than the last, but the demon turned around.

“You have to tell me how to name your young one, your child,” I said when he had come back.

He took my hand and gently placed my clawed fingers on the small chest. “No. We decided that you should do it. Choose a name you won’t laugh at, will you?”

And as I watched them set out across the pastures and disappear in the mellow post-storm light, the small creature warm and wriggling at my chest, a name came to my mind: Dawning.

I think her parents would have liked it.

I wasn’t there to witness what happened. I just saw what was to be seen from a distance, speeding west on the back of the old gearbeast, making the best of the diversion. And, oh, there was plenty to see.

This is how I imagine it. Up at the citadel, the host assembled, fully armed on their gearbeasts, equipped with every last contraption from their vaults. Approaching them, the demons walked confident, as if they could take on the whole host, the demoness shrieking poison down on them with her voice.

Probably they hadn’t danced. Probably it had been another sound from their clever device that had startled the brothers and sisters, terrified them with noises out of the air and malice yet to come. But even so, I like to think that they put their music on and danced, in their last moments, when some frantic brother, carrying a heretic weapon he only knew how to use with a shoddy ritual, hectically went through the required steps. The Society never understood what kind of forbidden, old, truly demonic powers they had at their disposal.

So, in their terror, they unleashed something, to wipe the threat of the two living demons from the earth forever. And with it, they obliterated themselves.

A blinding white light split the sky. I reined in the gearbeast, and moments later a boom shook the earth. Vast clouds of dust rose. When they cleared later on, I saw that the tower of the citadel was no more.

I am truly tainted now. I know how bees fly.

With all the juicecombs I have harvested, the gearbeast can go on for months, and even then I have the swarm with me. Nobody will follow me. The sacrifice of Cirrus and Haze made sure that no one who knew about my involvement or the young one lives on. And as long as I have to travel, as far as I have to go, I know one thing: I am not going to raise a demon. It is a child of explorers, a child of hope, a child born under the leaden sky.

This is how it was done. This is how it is taught. This is the story I will tell. We are all the monsters our society brings up and the monsters we choose to be—whether it be me from my community or you in your underground lairs.

About the Author

Simone Heller lives on an island in the river Danube in a town near Munich, Germany. As a literary translator, she lends her voice to writers in the sff field by day; by night she speculates on what-if questions in her own words. Obsessions include linguistics (in which she holds a master’s degree) and cartography (in which she holds on to a collection of maps far more extensive than her wall space).

Rain Ship

Chi Hui

0

The funeral was as simple as I expected.

Visitors passed by the coffin one by one. The cold moss-light was centered on the coffin’s translucent lid. Under the dim lighting, Abani’s face seemed once more full and round. Her final hours had been painful, but fortunately—for all of us—she hadn’t held out too long. I heard crying, and saw it was Laila. She was supposed to become a sister in our family this year, but now it looked like that would have to wait. Mourning rituals were necessary. They were for the living, not the dead.

My maternal aunts walked by the coffin. I supported my weeping mother. Grief had shortened her, curled her up, bowed her back. I let the tears slide down her cheeks, not wiping them away.

Behind the aunts were the girls born in this home, and then the boys. The boys look puzzled and sad, but they didn’t keen like the girls. They had, after all, grown up elsewhere, in various fathers’ households. They probably had only vague recollections of Abani.

Blood had summoned us together. That’s what the funeral said. Blood kept us in this world, and now we’d returned to those who’d given it to us. They had been waiting at the other end of the world for a long time, extending a welcoming hand.

Sing for her. She is finally at peace.

The children sang first, starting the dirge. Then the sisters joined in, followed by their respective families. And then the boys. It was an old lament, praising sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, children living and children sacrificed1. Mother clutched my hand, my fingers going numb. She sobbed as if there was no end to her tears.

When she finally stopped crying, we had buried Abani. We were sitting on our home’s old fashioned iron pipe.

She still clutched my hand.

“How long will you stay?” she asked hopefully.

“I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Her voice was tense, her sad, moist eyes watching me. She wanted me to stay. She always wanted that.

“I’ve booked a ticket. Hill Four has excavated a big site. They want me back as soon as possible.”

“You’re not an archaeologist.”

True, I wasn’t an archaeologist. I’d been a soldier. Now I was a mercenary. Excavations of ancient human sites made people rich, and interstellar pirates sometimes caught wind of the spoils. My work was protecting such sites. My boss paid me to use my head and risk my ass. Some thought it wasn’t suitable work for a woman, but I’d been at it for years.

“They need me.”

“Your family needs you.”

I looked at her, knowing my expression was blank. Every time she reached out to me, I retreated into my shell, aloof. That was how I resisted my family.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” I repeated.

“You should find a family and settle down. Or else come back here to stay. A girl can always return to live among her sisters.”

I studied my mother.

She’d aged a lot in the past fifteen months2. And I had grown up. I knew this, but it was difficult to process. I still felt like that dazed child, staring blankly, watching mother’s pleading face. I still remembered a long winding path, on either side the flowers of small succulent plants blooming in profusion. They had been dark red, like blood, or the evening sun.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” I said. “Otherwise they’ll hire someone else. Out on the frontier there’s no shortage of mercs willing to hazard their lives.”

She began to cry again. After a while she wiped away her tears, sighing. “You’re a rough, thick-skinned girl. I wasn’t a good mother, I know. I’m sorry, Jin. I’m sorry.”

She was always like that, apologizing endlessly. She was like that before the incident, and she hadn’t changed since.

I don’t need apologies, Mother.

I turned to the window, trying to imagine the planet I was about to visit. I recalled the space station, its translucent dome, people looking up at a sky full of bright, cold stars. Whenever I was there I liked to watch the heavenly vault spin slowly. I imagined it reversing direction, and everything starting over.

What I wanted was to have never been born.

1

Hill Four is 3,000 light-years from Earth. From there, the Milky Way is not the pale white band you see from Earth, but a massive disk crowning the heavens. Hill Four’s sun hangs alone in the sky, giving its meager heat. It was flung off the galactic plane with its planetary children in tow. From an altitude of 3000 light-years it looks down upon the Milky Way’s spiral arms.

Despite its bleak and deadly surface, Hill Four was suitable for colonization. Underground, the vast Underhill Sea covers almost three-quarters of the planet’s inner surface. Life thrives on geothermal energy down in the darkness. Humans came here first. We Ruderans followed in their footsteps much later.

As my ship entered the spaceport, I saw the transport carrying the relief merc team had arrived before me. They were busy unloading an arms shipment.

“Well if it isn’t the lone she-paladin. Long time no see.” It was Old Mortar hailing me, without malice. All of his mercs were men. There were many female mercenaries out here, but lone operators like me were scarce. Old Mortar and I had rubbed each other the wrong way for many years, quarreling frequently. Now we reluctantly tolerated each other, maybe even respected each other a bit.

“Been a long time. How was your holiday?”

“Went from bad to worse. The boys have been drunk this quarter3, the shit-stains. I had to knock some sense into them. Keep that to yourself. The Doc wants you to get over there to the Rain Ship ASAP, and bring your kit. My people will hold down the fort here. They need at least one person with law enforcement powers over there.”

“Rain Ship?”

“You haven’t heard? They found a portal of the old gods on the bottom level of the station. On the far side they found . . . well, it’s a spacecraft for sure, but it’s damn frightening. Honestly, I’m glad me and the boys don’t have to go over. I don’t wanna see any more of it.”

“How big is it?”

“How big?” Old Mortar grew uneasy. “Too big to see in one glance. There are clouds inside of the thing, child. And rain!”

Old Mortar and his boys had enough weapons and equipment to fill a ship, but I had only a small backpack. After putting my gear in order, I received a message from Dr. Hort on my terminal, confirming everything Old Mortar had said.

I passed through the shipyard, then took a hundred-million-year-old human elevator down to the lower levels.

We used to call these wise prehistoric beings gods4, as Old Mortar still did. But I’d always preferred to call them giants. They’d built this spaceport, and it was like a city. This elevator was the size of an apartment building. I raised my head to behold the vast space, imagining a creature sixteen times my size standing here. They’d come from Earth, their footprints covering many worlds, and at some point they had mysteriously vanished. And then we had tracked them, cutting their sign, only to find these great, mysterious, indescribable constructions.

An archaeologist had showed me a rubbing of one of their footprints. It was big enough for an adult Ruderan to comfortably lie in. Later I saw an ad for beds shaped like that—the lengths boring people go for a little spice in their lives.

About nine standard months ago, Hill Four orbital sites had been discovered. Then the ruins on the Underhill seabed were found and excavated. Suddenly this desolate frontier became a hot spot. Operating on the principle that development and exploitation should advance in tandem with archaeological research, archaeological teams blazed trails, studied ruins, certified safe zones, and finally left them to developers. These builders brought rope and tents and building materials, and the human station quickly became a Ruderan city. Two mercenary teams were on duty here, and a few wandering loners like myself.

But I couldn’t get used to this human architecture. The station was huge and strange, built into a spherical space vast enough to contain a Ruderan capital city, and one or two artificial lakes.

Old Mortar’s mercs were already in place. Those who’d just been relieved came down the wall on rope ladders, expressions eager, hankering for a quick return to the city. They would get drunk and sleep, then seek out girls.

Dr. Hort had sent my itinerary. I was summoned to the portal Old Mortar had mentioned, but I decided to visit the bar first. Hort might get angry, and she might not.

Sometimes I have premonitions. These feelings usually presage something terrible.

The bar was practically empty. It was seven, a work stretch5, so most people were on duty. I sat down, ordered a cup of corn juice, and put a roll of money on the bar. The barkeep’s eyes lit up, but almost immediately he seemed to lose interest. For the past month, this bar had been my intelligence purchasing hub, and that roll of bills included the barkeep’s fee.

“Anything interesting lately?” I whispered.

“Can you be more specific?”

“The new site, the discovery. Since I sat down I’ve already spotted three relic hunters in this dump.”

“You’re worried about relic hunters?”

“They’re for Old Mortar to worry about. I’m headed to the other side. Any pirate activity lately?”

Before answering me, the young man looked around for a moment. He and the owner belonged to the same family. In fact the bar was their family business6. I liked these people. They were careful and smart. They knew what to do and when to do it.

“About a stretch ago there were five people here, armed. Strangers. I didn’t like the look of them. They drank a lot, then took two sober-up pills each. They just left, actually.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Up. Probably back to the shipyard.”

Frowning, I used my terminal to access the shipyard and make inquiries. There was no one there. The monitors should have spotted these five eye-catching fellows.

If I’d been a pirate, I might have found it difficult to dress up and infiltrate a space station, although a bribe would have gotten me into the navigation tower. I would have looted one of those freighters, when it was loaded with human relics and awaiting take-off clearance. The next one was due to launch at eight. Freighters had only one stretch of vulnerable down time between landing and launching. If those five strangers were raiding a freighter, they must have been real alcoholics to need a bar-run during the operation.

Unless they—

The mercs were changing shifts now. The last shift was leaving, and Old Mortar’s boys had just arrived. Now was precisely when the station’s guard was most lax. What if the five weren’t after a freighter? If they wanted something the archaeologists had discovered on the other side of the portal, their only option was to capture the portal—

I slammed a bill down on the bar as I rushed out. I placed a call as I ran.

“Old Mortar!” I exclaimed, “put your guys on alert. We may have a situation—”

The deafening explosion roared through our connection. I stood in the corridor, holding onto some netting and peering down: a rushing plume of smoke and dust rose from the lower levels. Such massive destruction, but in the context of the vast spherical space containing it, it was miniscule.

2

After an endless moment watching the explosion balloon, I terminated my call, shouldered my pack, and used my tail to retrieve two gleaming bullets7. Drawing my gun, I rushed against the flow of the crowd toward the lower levels.

The portal was at the very bottom of the station’s vast spherical space. I felt like I was rushing down the side of a titanic bowl, my duty carrying me along like a whirlpool, as the panicking crowd charged upward. At least they were staying out of my way, in deference to my weapon.

Halfway down, I spotted Lana Guer and her family sisters. These women were relic hunters8. I had arrested them for smuggling before. They had numbered six, but now they were only four, dejected and covered in dust. Lana’s eyes were bright with horror.

“What’s the situation down there?” I demanded.

She glared at me, even now summoning up her old arrogance.

“I’m not looking to arrest you! Whoever dared to set off bombs on my turf is getting disemboweled! Now where are your other two sisters? Down there?”

Her twitching tail-tip confirmed my guess.

“I’m going down. Maybe I can help you, if you hurry up and help me. What can I expect down there?”

Her expression softened. “I’m not sure . . . ten, maybe fifteen people. Heavy guns and explosives. They blocked off two corridors, the two where Old Mortar’s guys are quartered. Nini and Jilin are in there too. We couldn’t get through. I couldn’t help them . . . ” She shook her head in torment. “They’re wearing masks. I heard them shouting. Sounded like Northern An9.”

“Thanks, Lana.”

She nodded, then ran on, but suddenly stopped and turned around.

“Jin?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a cruel little bitch. But don’t let those fuckers kill you.”

She thrusted her middle finger at me, then ran up the corridor.

After passing through two winding tunnels, I heard my first mark10. He was about three tunnels away, speaking loudly. I understand a little Northern An. At first I thought they’d already neutralized Old Mortar’s mercs—but no. The raiders hadn’t taken the portal yet. Old Mortar’s fierce troops had been hiding in the portal corridor, lying in wait.

I grinned silently.

Stepping lightly, I drew my dagger. I took a roundabout route and eventually spotted my mark hanging in a look-out net11. I crept up, gathered a support line in my hand, then another, and a third. My dagger struck. The raider tumbled down from his post, net piling around him on the floor. I pounced and buried my blade in his heart.

He looked at me in shock, and then his eyes dimmed.

I pulled out the dagger, wiped it on the netting, sheathed it, and moved on. These people were real professionals. First they’d bombed the merc barracks, dividing the enemy, creating panic—objective clear, actions quick and decisive. I’d have been the one dying on the floor now if I hadn’t been so ruthless.

Racing against discovery, I advanced down the ground level passage, taking out another pirate along the way. I came to the door leading to Old Mortar’s holdfast. Unfortunately, I made a bit of noise while disposing of the raider guarding the door: Just before my rounds opened his head, he turned and squirted a whole clip into the tunnel wall. The report was deafening in the confined space of the tunnel.

The massive door was dead-bolted from the inside. I frantically pounded out a merc passcode, then began to repeat it, knowing more pirates would soon arrive. The door opened a crack, and I squirmed my way in. Then I was on the other side, helping someone—I didn’t know who—shut and bolt the gargantuan door.

I turned around to find Old Mortar glaring at me. His tail was bleeding and his head was bandaged. Behind him stood two of his mercs, also in a sorry state.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Jin?”

“Trying to rescue your asses.”

“There are at least twenty fucking raiders out there12. With you there are six of us left.”

“Seventeen,” I amended. “Seventeen fucking raiders out there. I killed three.”

“So each of us just needs to ice two and three-quarters pirates. Our prospects have improved.”

I chose to pardon the old fucker’s sarcasm. He’d started with thirty men, six of whom belonged to his family.

“What about civvies?” I asked.

Old Mortar shook his head. “The two Guer girls, three researchers . . . I let them go through the portal. Any ideas on how to proceed?”

I shrugged. “We all go through the portal and shut it from the far side. Safest bet.”

Old Mortar shook his head. “I still have people stuck in the barracks,” he said. “I’ve signaled the Hill system fleet for help. You take this ansible and go through, then shut the portal.”

“And you?”

He shrugged gloomily. “I can’t leave my people behind.”

I glanced at the weary mercenaries. “Seems a few of your men might not agree.”

“Those who wish can follow you,” Old Mortar said.

Two young mercenaries glanced at each other, then got up and moved to my side. They were not Old Mortar’s relatives, and clearly didn’t want to follow him on his reckless path. They apparently did not believe that the Northern An pirates would treat their captives well.

“You sure?” I asked Old Mortar.

He flicked his tail impatiently. “Go through, and close the portal.”

I nodded and turned, leading my two mercs toward the strange artifact. Made and used by giants long ago, it was as high as a ten-story building to us. We created ripples on its mirror-like surface as we stepped through. I felt I was falling in every direction at once. My body didn’t seem to exist, while my soul seemed dragged through multicolored light. Then my feet were touching ground. The two young mercs were kneeling beside me, one trembling, the other crying.

This was not the first time I’d crossed a human portal, but no matter how many times I did it, the sensation was unnerving.

I spit bile, and looked up.

And I saw.

3

We were inside a titanic spacecraft, if that’s what it was. ‘Rain Ship’ was shuttle-shaped, and in terms of our apparent gravitational orientation, it was standing erect. The long axis was at least a kilometer high13. I could only vaguely discern the summit. The horizontal axis was at least 400 meters long. At the ship’s center, enclosing most of the long axis, crystalline walls formed a suspended space like a six-sided prism.

The outer shell of the spacecraft was built around this floating space. The ancient humans had built cabins and facilities on the inner surface of this shell, simple yet solid, which remained intact after one hundred million years. A walkway spiraled up the shell, connecting the cabins. Bridges and tunnels extending from this walkway—and various cabins—connecting to the floating, crystalline space.

Which was a great tower of ecological habitats.

For some reason my eye was drawn to one facet of this dazzling jewel: a small path winding through thick grass, only the flagstones of the trailhead visible, ancient stones cracked and pierced by tenacious green growth.

Ecological spaces filled almost the entire spacecraft, divided by panels of polarized light into self-sustaining ecosystems. Thick clouds filled the upper spaces. Mists curled and rose on grasslands, on leaves of grass twice my height. Fine rains descended on gardens, inaudible. The ship was silent, but I saw raindrops gleaming on leaves.

Big, titanic, colossal, beyond description—I quickly spent my ammo, adjective-wise. I just stood there, looking up in awe. The giants that had built this ship, this great hall, had vanished a hundred million years ago. But rain fell continuously down this great pillar of ecologies.

Now we Ruderans were here, trespassing, feeling small and insignificant, and compelled to silence.

I stared dazedly until a sound on the walkway below caught my attention. The two Guer girls had emerged, holding archaeological grinding lasers like guns. They looked nervous, eyeing me and my two mercs.

I didn’t bother asking how they got down there, but immediately straddled the railing, hung from it, and slid down to their level. I appraised the two unarmed girls, wondering what could have been going on in Lana’s head.

“Catch.” I took two pistols out of my pack and tossed them to the girls. “Better than those lasers. Nini, yours is pointed the wrong way. Try not to decapitate yourself, okay?”

She hastened to put down the implement, as though it had grown hot in her hand. Jilin eyed me doubtfully. She was brainier than her sisters. “Since when are you helping us?”

“Since I met Lana on the other side. She asked me to find you. I’m happy to let the Guer family owe me a favor, or two.” I waved my gun at the mercs, summoning them down. “Where’s Dr. Hort? I need her to help me close the portal ASAP.”

“Close the portal?” Jilin seemed incredulous.

“How long do you think Old Mortar can hold out over there?”

Jilin said nothing.

“Dr. Hort is in there,” Nini said, gesturing to a massive ancient human door that was open a crack. “We have our own situation on this side. The doctor sent us to have a look.”

“Situation?”

“Someone else is in here with us.”

“You’re fucking joking.”

“My mother likes to joke. I do not.”

Dr. Lee Hort and her assistants had occupied a small corner of the ancient human control center. They huddled together, panic-stricken. Various instruments and equipment lay piled to one side. A small moss lamp hung over a portable lab table14. Starlight pierced the command center’s vast transparent screen, weakly lighting the area. A small spacecraft was vaguely discernible, hanging in the ancient ship’s docking bay like a moth.

My entrance surprised the researchers.

“Jin?” Dr. Hort stood. “When did you get back? I thought you were due in next quarter. How did it go back home? Everything okay?”

I raised a hand and interrupted her. “There’s no time for all that, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry.” She lowered her head. “I just . . . you know, these things, I’m nervous.”

“Never mind.” I glanced at the ship. “When did that arrive?”

“Just now,” a young lab tech said. She was a sister in the Hort family. “We heard an explosion and ran over to see it.”

“Explosion?”

“They couldn’t open the hangar door, so they blasted their way in.”

“They? How many?”

“We’ve seen just one.”

“Do you know where he’s going?”

The girl shook her head.

I studied the ship more carefully: a two-seater shuttle, fast, suitable for carrying light firepower, a popular model among relic hunters and loner pirates. I had a similar one. No matter what this explosive visitor was after, he was not a novice. Directional detonation, choosing the weakest point in the meter-thick, airtight bay door, and afterwards using his own ship to plug the hole and prevent depressurization of the bay—

I tried to clear my head. “Dr. Hort, for the moment let’s set aside the question of this lone gun. We have three mercs and at least five weapons. We need to go up right now and close the portal from this side.”

The good doctor seemed shocked. “You’re proposing we trap ourselves in this ship with that desperate rogue?”

“You need to understand the situation on the other side,” I said, growing impatient. “If we don’t close the portal, then we’re dealing with a gang of desperate rogues, not just one.”

Still reluctant, she finally nodded her assent.

“Get your techies together. We need to use the ansible I brought to contact Hill system security management. Nini, Jilin, you stay here. You two . . . ” I glanced at my mercs. “ . . . you’re with me.”

The two young mercenaries exchanged a glance, but surprised me by not objecting.

We climbed up the research team’s rope ladder, ascending 40 ta15. Sliding down a rope ladder is easy, but climbing is hard work. Behind me I heard the two women breathing. They didn’t complain—yet another surprise.

The portal’s control console was a massive, complicated thing. Fortunately, Dr. Hort had already interfaced it with her team’s smaller, portable version. She entered a series of commands, and the mirror-face of the portal dimmed. At last it seemed to break apart inside its frame, dissolving in particulate light. I felt relieved.

I just hoped Old Mortar’s luck would hold.

“Contact!” cried the young researcher, who’d been fiddling with my ansible.

The gunfire was faint. It sounded like cracking nut shells. At first I barely reacted, thinking it was coming through the link. Then the communicator went mute, smoke issuing from a bullet hole in its power unit. The researchers stared blankly, unable to process what had happened.

I turned in the direction of fire, spotting someone almost two hundred meters away on our level. He’d hit our ansible from quite a distance. With that kind of accuracy, why not hit me or the mercs first?

I had no time to think about it. I motioned for the researchers to hurry back down the ladder. I drew my gun and moved to the corner of the portal chamber. The outer wall also had a rope ladder, but using it would surely give the shooter an easy target, so I decided to climb up a human-era pipe16.

This turned out to be a mistake. I should have returned to camp with the others, where we had the advantage of numbers. I was tired and frantic after a twenty-four hour subspace jump, and non-stop action since landing. All these exigencies had worn down my intellect. I’d thought the shooter was one of the pirates. Since I’d already killed three of them, I thought I could take this one alone.

At least, I thought so before his gun was against my forehead.

“Hi there beautiful.” His voice was happy, self-satisfied. “Climb up the rest of the way. I’ve been waiting long enough.”

4

I slowly lifted my head to face him, and the muzzle of his weapon, striving to keep my movements non-threatening. The intruder was about my age. He sported a head full of spiky brown hair, and wore a simple combat model pressure suit. His battle-pack was the same brand as mine.

But the gun in his hand was a Uran-571, large caliber, strong firepower, strong recoil, capable of ripping large holes in bodies. Not my weapon of choice.

“Slowly. Up you come.”

Grinning, he reached for the two guns holstered on my waist. Then he patted down my ankles, checking for back-up weapons. He nodded, indicating I could stand. Face to face, he was a bit taller than me, ordinary-looking except for the garish scar tissue on his forehead: a white line spanning hairline to brows, probably a knife wound.

“Turn around,” he ordered.

I couldn’t place his accent. His Common Tongue was pure, not colored by Northern An or any other dialect. As I slowly turned around, I caught him in my peripheral vision pulling tri-cuffs out of a pocket17.

His model of pressure suit has a shortcoming: it slows you down a bit.

I lashed out my tail and seized his wrist. The tri-cuffs rang against his pistol as they went flying. Before he could retrieve his weapon, I dove to one side, rolled through the gigantic half-closed door, and rushed out of the room. I fled down the seemingly endless walkway. I came to a rope leading down to lower levels of the spiral, and my pursuer emerged behind me, gun raised.

I grabbed the rope and jumped. My feet slammed against the wall. I pushed off, rappelling, traveling swiftly downward. Suddenly he was above me, peering over the edge. Contemplating the rope. My blood froze in my veins. If he cut the rope I would fall a hundred meters and end up a splatter of fine red paste on the ground floor.

But he didn’t cut the rope. He just grinned, as if at some cosmic joke. Fucking hilarious. Especially when I failed to grab a safety net, for the second time, and like a fucking novice continued to plunge. His eyes flashed a strange dark green, reflecting the polarized light of the great pillar of ecologies.

Rappelling, I landed on the next floor down. When I looked up, the intruder had vanished.

A good mercenary should always have spare weapons. I cannot be considered a bad merc, and this was not the first time I’d lost weapons to an opponent. My tail opened my pack as I ran, and retrieved the small-bore pistol within. Its stopping power was weak, but just then it was all I had.

The Rain Ship was quiet. I gripped my pistol, moving slowly, keeping an ear close to the wall. I heard the intruder’s footsteps, could barely distinguish that he was moving downward. I guessed he was headed to the researcher’s camp, the ship’s control center. Besides the portal, the control center was the most strategically important part of the ship.

Luckily, it sounded like he was taking the main staircase. I knew a shortcut.

Once again I got on the rope and started rappelling down, slowly and carefully this time. I couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore.

As I neared the bottom, a gunshot pierced the silence, then a second and a third.

I let go of the rope and hit the floor. In a flash I was up and sprinting in the direction of the gun reports.

5

I ran to the corner separating me from the action, adjust my breathing, gripping my weapon, finger on the trigger. I leaped around the corner, ready to—

Fuck.

I blinked.

The intruder was on the ground, unmoving. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Dr. Hort held a small lady’s pistol, trembling, finger still squeezing the trigger, seemingly unaware that the weapon was spent.

I walked lightly toward her. “Doctor . . . ” Her shoulder trembled, and I reached out and held it. “Dr. Hort, it’s me. Don’t be afraid. It’s over. You got him.”

Softly consoling her, I removed the gun from her stiff hands.

The intruder groaned something unintelligible. Lee Hort flinched like a rabbit, and I quickly moved past her, aiming my gun at the intruder’s head. I noticed there was no blood. There were three small craters in his pressure suit, which was designed to withstand vacuum and micro-meteor impacts. Hort’s three bullets had been no problem, but I reckoned this man’s ribs weren’t comfortable just now.

I nudged his backpack with my foot until the tri-cuffs fell out. Soon he was firmly shackled.

“It’s all right, Doctor,” I said to Lee Hort.

Others who had heard the gunshots soon arrived. The corridor became a noisy, crowded place. The intruder struggled, trying to rise, and I shoved him back down. Everyone was perplexed, except for Lee Hort. She stared at the intruder with a mix of fear, hatred, and deep shock.

6

“What is your name?”

“ . . . ”

“Which mercenary group are you with?”

“ . . . ”

“What are you doing here? Why did you shoot our ansible?”

“ . . . ”

“How about I just dispose of you right now?”

“ . . . ”

No matter what I asked, the bastard remained tightlipped.

He was tri-cuffed to a pipe—Nini’s idea—just near enough to our camp to keep an eye on him.

Dr. Hort seemed better than before, striving to appear calm, but every few minutes she glared at our prisoner, her shock returning.

“Okay,” I whispered, “one last question. What is your relationship with the doctor?”

His shoulder twitched, but he remained silent.

I sighed and returned to the heart of the archaeologists’ camp. The researchers talked quietly amongst themselves, while my two mercs sat apart from the rest. Jilin and Nini were studying the broken ansible.

“I think I can fix her,” Jilin Guer said, sitting amid scattered parts. Proudly she added, “I can’t fight, but I can do this.”

“Her?”

“All ansibles are girls,” Jilin said gravely. “They’re the best at sending messages.”

Some of the archaeologists laughed. Jilin proudly cocked her head.

Lee Hort sat alone, apparently deep in thought. Her fingers were interlaced before her, still trembling slightly.

I walked over.

“Doctor, can we talk alone?”

“Okay.” She got up, clearly nervous, and I took her further from the group, hoping that no one would overhear our conversation. “Thank you for saving me,” she whispered.

“As far as I can see, your marksmanship was fine. You didn’t need saving. But I think you know him.”

Hearing this, she jerked back, as if ready to flee. But she stood rooted, hands clenched together, glancing back at her archaeologists—her family.

“I did not . . . expect him to find this place.”

“Who is he?”

“Dar,” she said, taking a deep breath, as if she’d come to a momentous decision. “Yes, that Dar.”

“Oh,” I said. “Fuck.”

Along the galactic edge, Lee Hort was legendary, not only because of the large number of ancient human sites she’d unearthed, but also due to her unique past. She’d grown up in a sect of the extreme Darwinian Church18. These people were totally insane. Eschewing the standard Ruderan practice of choosing one child per litter at birth, these Darwinians raised the whole litter to age ten, then forced them to fight each other to the death19. The last child standing entered the family.

But they made a mistake when raising Lee and her litter-mates. They underestimated the boy named Dar, who decided to put an end to the sect and its horrific child abuse. After the adults had entered their temple to hear their priest evangelize, Dar locked the tunnel doors and lit a fire. The adults died of smoke inhalation. Then Dar returned to the dormitory and killed his litter-mates.

Lee Hort escaped calamity because she’d gone out to fetch water. Dar also fled, and later discovered that firefighters had rescued Lee. The massacre had shocked all of Orchid Autonomous Sector. The details of the incident were still well-known years later.

Dar had never been found. Some people said he was dead, others that he became a mercenary, or a pirate—one of those professions that meant killing for money, at any rate. Every now and then, someone claimed to have encountered Dar, and the stories were usually horrific. It was said he killed a space station’s entire population of extreme Darwinists, and that he sent a ship full of pilgrims to its doom in a star.

These stories also disturbed Lee. After she was taken in by the Hort family, she enjoyed a normal and happy upbringing. But no matter how much she achieved, how many ancient human sites she discovered or how many honors she was awarded, people still thought of her as that escaped litter-mate, someone not meant to survive. They couldn’t help associating her with her litter-mates, who died so unnaturally. I heard she donated a fortune to an organization that helped children. She had pushed the Alliance Parliament to pass a law declaring all extreme Darwinism churches illegal. For someone bearing such a tragic past, she was doing remarkably well.

But . . .

“We can’t escape our pasts, Doctor,” I whispered.

She smiled bitterly, nodding.

7

After an hour or so, a frustrated Jilin announced she needed to rest. I told my two young mercs to do likewise. I didn’t know when we’d be leaving this place. If we couldn’t fix the ansible, we’d have to wait for a rescue ship from the Hill system capital to find us.

“Shift change,” I explained to Dr. Hort.

She nodded wearily, and divided her people into two teams. Then she went to sleep.

Nini Guer was wide awake, sitting on a mat and seemingly bored to death. She fiddled with the pistol I’d given her.

“Careful with that,” I said.

“I unloaded it.” She shrugged. “I’ll be better with this than that damn laser grinder. Jilin can’t fight. I have to look after her.”

I laughed. Sometimes I envied those with close blood ties: men or women, familiar with each other, caring for each other. You could trust your sisters or brothers. You shared everything, including pain.

“What are you laughing about, Jin?” Nini watched me curiously.

“Nothing, I just . . . you’re lucky, having family, you know.”

“Why don’t you find one? What about a female mercenary family?”

I reached out and rubbed Nini’s head. She regarded me, head askew, but didn’t stop me. She was only fourteen years old. Under the Guer family’s wing she’d traveled all over the stars, undaunted, never alone. I was already twenty-six, and still alone, traveling from star to star, battlefield to battlefield. When my last partner and I had dissolved our partnership, he said my fearlessness in battle was down to a death-wish. He said I was in a hurry to die.

“I’m used to being alone,” I said. “The reason is complicated.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Sorry, no.”

Nini made a face. She didn’t understand, and explanations probably wouldn’t help. Moreover, she did not seem terribly interested.

“Okay,” she said, “change of subject. I don’t like that doctor.”

“Dr. Hort? She’s got her baggage, but she pays my salary.”

“But do you like her?”

“Why, Nini? What is it about her?”

“I hate her.” This Nini was straightforward. “Lana never put herself first. She always let us rest before she did. And she never would’ve done what Hort did . . . put grinding lasers in our hands and push us out into danger, like cannon fodder, while she and her relatives hid.”

“But Lana would send you into battle, right?”

“She’d be there with us, to protect us. Not hiding in the rear like your doctor, a coward and a thief.”

“Thief?”

“Lana discovered the portal. Hort snatched the archaeological evidence from our hands.”

I raised a brow.

Generally speaking, relic hunters were not qualified archaeologists—but Lana was a veteran in this game. It was not hard for me to believe Nini. “Didn’t Hort compensate the Guers?”

“Not really.”

“Come on. Are you sure?”

“I’m not lying, Jin. You got some way to make this right?”

“No.”

“No?”

“She pays my salary, remember?”

“Wow. How predictable.”

Nini pouted. I laughed and rubbed her head. “Where’s the water and biscuits?”

The water was bottled, and the biscuits damp, not very appetizing. I carried both to the man in tri-cuffs. He seemed to be napping, but heard my approach and raised his head. His eyes widened when he saw the food in my hands. He pretended indifference, and his face was suddenly like Lee Hort’s. I was surprised I hadn’t seen the resemblance before—surely they were litter-mates.

“Would you like something to eat, Dar?” Was that a micro-expression of surprise? If so he quickly hid it with a sneer, and shook the tri-cuffs. “I’ll unlock a hand for you. Don’t try anything funny.” He acted tough, but when I unlocked his right hand, he breathed in relief. He had a broken rib, or two, I remembered. Although the bullets hadn’t penetrated his suit, they’d hit him hard. “Let me see.”

“Fuck off.” These were his first words in captivity.

We glared at each other a moment, neither of us looking away. I pulled on his pressure suit’s front zipper. “What are you hiding?”

Obviously injured, he grimaced in pain, but he wouldn’t let me open the suit. Then I remembered something embarrassing from my time in pressure suits. His suit seemed quite old. “Need the bathroom?” I asked.

If looks could kill—but he nodded.

I un-cuffed him from the pipe and escorted him to the portable toilet set up by the archaeological team. He impatiently rushed inside.

A few minutes passed, then another few.

I knocked on the door. “Listen pal, finish up and get your pants on. I’m about to put a bullet through this door.”

I heard a muffled curse.

“What was that?”

“Do you have anything I can wear?”

I turned to see Nini rolling on the floor and stifling laughter. She managed to point to a heap of white lab uniforms. I went over and found something approximately Dar’s size. I gripped my pistol tightly. This guy might be planning an escape attempt, but it didn’t seem so. Fifteen minutes after I pushed the uniform through the barely open door, he emerged clothed, carrying the ragged pressure suit and looking embarrassed, but considerably less dejected.

“Hand and tail.” I shook the cuffs at him.

He glanced around, perhaps reckoning his odds, escape-wise. Nini had stopped laughing. She played with her gun. I didn’t know if she’d reloaded it.

Finally, Dar let me cuff his left hand and tail, and return him to the pipe. He grabbed the water and gulped down as much as he could. I checked his ribs: they were bruised but didn’t seem broken.

“You’ll live, for the time being,” I announced.

“That’s a pity,” he said through a mouthful of biscuit.

The prisoner was less hostile on a full belly—but he answered my questions with yawns.

“You’re not likely to believe anything I say,” he finally explained. “Why not just let me sleep?”

I sighed and played out the chain of his cuffs a bit, so he could lie down.

I turned to leave, and suddenly Dar said, “By the way, don’t let your girl repair the ansible. If she gets it working, you’ll regret it.”

“Why?” I asked, puzzled.

But he was already snoring.

8

I carried the basket, walking along the narrow path among the blooming, crimson flowers. The leaves of the short, fleshy plants were a warm purple. They gleamed under a light drizzle. Carrying the basket was a labor—it contained six sleeping infants, too heavy a load for a ten-year-old.

I returned via the same path. Headed out, the basket had contained six babies. Returning, it held only one.

I took the child through a long underground tunnel, attracting curious looks.

I can picture that underground Temple of the Five like it was yesterday20. I went through the gate, around the massive inverted bell21. It was said that in the past, priests would ring the chime during times of war or plague, times when the population had shrunk. The chime summoned people for an announcement: the population control law was temporarily suspended. You could raise every child in your litter, rather than killing all of them but one. But the last time it was sounded, Abani’s Abani was still a child22.

The priest greeted me as I entered the temple. I was a child holding a smaller one: he seemed to guess what had happened. “What about your mother?” he asked kindly.

“I want to leave her here,” I said, ignoring his question.

He looked at me sadly. “Will you stay as well?”

“I’m going.”

“What is her name?”

She didn’t have one yet. My father had left us, and my mother did not want his children, not even one. She’d refused to name them, and she’d lacked the courage to kill them. So she’d asked me, begged me to . . .

“Her name is—”

“Jin . . . Jin!”

I was shaken awake. My anger flared, and I reached for my gun, but it was only the familiar face of Lee Hort—an irritant, to be sure, but perhaps meriting continued life. Besides, if she died, that would be the end of my salary. I withdrew my hand from the gun. “What the hell? Can’t I just get a few winks?”

She looked nervously at Dar. “I have something to tell you, Jin.”

I bared my teeth and got up, muttering curses. My voice was low, but the performance was enough to make Lee Hort blanche. She said nothing as she guided me down an empty corridor. Passing Nini and Jilin’s sleeping mat, I saw that the ansible was nearly repaired.

“What is it already?” I asked.

“It’s Dar,” Lee said, biting her lip. “I remembered you have law enforcement powers.”

“Correct.”

After ten years of frontier chaos, Orchid Autonomous Sector officials had decided they might as well delegate frontier law enforcement to mercenary groups, and assessment to independent mercs. We had the right to arrest, incarcerate, and in extreme cases, execute offenders. Frontier prosecutors (usually merc agency men, or arms dealers) reviewed our handling of cases. Most of the time, the Law Enforcement Proxy Act protected our freedom. Only rarely did one of us overstep, prompting the sector’s government fleet to interfere.

In two short years, money, blood, and power had woven a unique network of frontier order. I was a link in the chain. Independent mercs and mercenary captains had the same level of law enforcement power. We were meant to check and balance each other.

“Dar is category A wanted. You have the right to execute him, don’t you?”

“Only in extreme cases, Doc. For example, if he threatened someone with a gun, or tried to escape. But I can’t execute a prisoner that has been arrested. That requires prosecutor level power.”

“But . . . if an extreme situation unfolded . . . ”

My eyes narrowed. Her implication was clear. “Extreme situations happen. But that wouldn’t be to my advantage. I don’t like killing, Doc.”

“I heard your family is in debt. I mean your mother’s family.”

Of course we were in debt. When Abani was dying, we’d spent a lot trying to save her. All of that money was borrowed.

“A lot of debt,” I admitted.

“Maybe I could help with that.”

I studied her eyes, failing to read her.

“Are you worried he’ll escape?”

“I don’t fancy a lifetime of looking over my shoulder.” Lee spoke softly. Every word seemed bitten off and spit out. “He will find a way to my door, eventually. We were born together. Six children, and two have survived. He will find me, to correct this . . . error.”

“Living is not a mistake.”

“Being alive at the same time as your litter-mate . . . that’s the mistake. He will kill me. As long as there’s a chance of him escaping, my life is in danger. If I could pray to the Five, I would beg them to . . . ”

“Let him die,” I said.

“Please don’t say it like that. It’s so . . . ” She turned away and seemed to cry, but she said dry-eyed: “I know you’re worried about that debt. I can help, Jin.”

The proposition was clear: blood money. I find a reason to kill Dar, and she pays off the debt. “It’s a lot of money. Close to six hundred thousand, Doc.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I had few compunctions regarding murder. I’d been a soldier. I’d complied with orders to kill. Later I became a mercenary, and took money for murder. I’d killed for hatred, and simply for fun. I’d probably tried every kind of murder. Death was death. Such a stark outlook would never earn me priestly dispensation, or legal pardon—but here on the frontier, this point of view was the most conducive to survival.

“Then draft an IOU, Doc.”

She raised her brows. “Do you mean to borrow money from me?”

“No, you’ll borrow from me.” This was an old way of paying blood money. You needed a pretext, namely a document claiming you had borrowed from the assassin. Then you were just settling accounts.

Lee Hort was wise. She thought for a moment, then showed her understanding with an uneasy smile.

9

I didn’t sleep much, contemplating this new deal with Lee. I walked around camp and saw Dar was awake. Hands cuffed with tail behind his back, facing away from the others, he looked uncomfortable and dazed.

I sat down beside him.

“No biscuits this time?” I was surprised he’d spoken first.

I took out a pack of compressed biscuits for him, unlocked a hand. He devoured the meal. I sat there and did not speak.

After a while he couldn’t help himself: “What’s your name?”

“Jin.”

“Just Jin?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t have a family?”

“Nope.”

“So, you like to fight alone?”

“You bet.”

“Relic hunter?”

“Merc, bodyguard, killer . . . I do it all. And what are you?”

“You could call me a relic hunter. I also work alone. No one’s brave enough to let me join their family.” He smiled. “I’m notorious, you understand. I’m sure Lee has told you the story.”

“I didn’t need her to tell me. You’re a household name. Now tell me, really . . . what are you doing here?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Lee thinks you’re here to kill her.”

Dar chewed some biscuit. For a moment his expression was blank. “She really thinks I’d do that?”

“Wouldn’t you? Never mind what I might or might not believe. This stubbornness gets you nowhere. We’re waiting for a rescue team, and you’re cuffed. Ten years ago you were convicted of murder. How long until you’re shot dead, do you think? You must’ve sought out Lee for a reason. Do you plan on taking it to the grave?”

He finally answered with a bitter laugh. “I’ll be shot regardless. Back then I really did light up that fucking temple. But I didn’t kill those children. Not a one.”

I stared at him.

As if an old taboo had finally lifted, he began to talk, voice low and urgent: “They wanted us to kill each other. I didn’t want to, so I lit a fucking fire. I knew I’d become a wanted criminal, so I fled. I learned about the other children from the news. I burned that temple to save them. Of course I didn’t want them dead. I’ve always wanted to find Lee and tell her what happened, but I never had the chance. I was hunted. I had to run to the edge of the galaxy. Then she graduated from university, and came out here for her research. I thought I finally had my chance. So I watched her, and waited. I came close twice, but both times she found out, and fled. This time wasn’t planned, but I heard about a group of pirates planning a raid here, at Lee’s excavation. I was worried about her, so I came. I wanted to warn her of the danger, tell her I didn’t kill our litter-mates, tell her she needn’t fear me. But she was too afraid.” He laughed. “Before I could tell her anything, she shot me.”

“How did you get hold of the ship’s coordinates?” I asked. It is difficult to find a ship in space, unless there’s a beacon and you know the frequency. Or do what we did: jump right to it through a human portal.

“The pirates had your signal data.” He shook his head. “Their original plan was a pincer attack, blow up the portal, then board the ship from this side and fly off in it. But I asked about their plan, after getting one of them drunk, and got the signal data. I wanted to keep them from getting here, so I shut off your archaeologists’ shipboard signal. Then I shot that ansible. So they can’t find us.”

“But now the rescue team can’t find us.”

He shrugged. “Better that than eventually finding corpses.”

“Well, yeah . . . ”

Dar smiled. “You don’t believe me.”

“Without some proof, it’s difficult.”

“As you please.” He turned to gaze at the great pillar of ecologies. It had been raining in there for days. It seemed it would never stop.

“I admire the ancient humans,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you know about them?”

“I’m a mercenary, not an archaeologist. Not even a relic hunter.”

“They had one child per birth.”

“Really?”

“A human woman could give birth many times, but each time it was just one child.”

“So they didn’t have to choose?”

“They didn’t have to choose.”

“That’s . . . well, I envy them.”

“Me too.”

“So you really know about them.”

“Does that surprise you? Relic hunting is the best archaeological university.”

“Lee would certainly disagree.”

He gently laughed. “Some say it is precisely because of their lower fertility that they went extinct. After war or famine, they couldn’t replenish their populations.”

“Do you believe that?”

“The species that made the Rain Ship? Destroyed by low fertility?” He studied the rain pillar in wonderment. “What do you think?”

We sat in silence, watched slanting rain lash leaves of grass.

It was raining that day. I remember the rain washed the leaves of the fleshy plants clean. They were translucent. When I took the infants out of the basket one by one, raindrops fell on their little closed eyelids. My hands were damp from the mist. Abani once told me an ancient story: she said every raindrop is the soul of a dead child. Those that we abandon at birth, their souls have no names, so after they fly to the heavens, they fall back down and permeate the earth.

I shook my head, driving away these thoughts. But as I’d tried to tell Lee Hort, we can’t run from our ghosts.

The camp was asleep, for the most part. Lee Hort sat with her back to us. The time was right.

“Up,” I said, unlocking Dar from the pipe. “We’re going for a walk.”

He looked confused but said nothing, following me down a long spiral stair. At the bottom there was a human lift. I turned it on and it seemed to be powering up normally. We descended to the bottom of the spacecraft and looked up from there. At least thirty meters above hung the earthen base of the ecological pillar. The soil was permeated by rainwater, by gurgling veins of it.

There must be bones buried in there, I thought. I still remembered digging in the soil with my hands, excavating shallow pits, and one by one placing the little bodies, already silent and unmoving, in the earth.

I shook my head. I released Dar and shoved him forward. He staggered a few steps, chuckling.

“She paid you, didn’t she?”

I squeezed the trigger.

10

Back above, the camp had been awakened by my gun shots. They crowded around and asked what happened.

“He picked the lock, and I caught up,” I said. “I fired two shots. He jumped into a tunnel.”

“What kind of tunnel?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know. About two meters high, no lights, pitch black. I didn’t follow.”

Lee exchanged a look with her team. I suddenly realized that her relatives knew about the blood money. Of course they did: the vast majority of families pool income. A large expenditure can’t be hidden.

“That’s a garbage processor,” said one researcher. “The humans used it to treat rubbish . . . which gets squeezed, frozen, crushed, and finally airlocked, or put into the pillar as fertilizer.”

“Do you think it’s still working?” I asked, shivering.

“The lift is still in operation, and we’re convinced the spacecraft is getting inexhaustible energy from space folding, so . . . ” The researcher grimaced. “We probably don’t have to worry about that guy. I’m glad you didn’t go in, Jin. “

“By the Five,” I muttered.

When I’d reassured everyone and they’d returned to their own affairs, I pulled Lee aside and showed her a blood-stained handkerchief. Inside was a crushed bullet.

“What is this?”

“I killed him. Shot him in the back of the head. The first bullet is still in there. This one came out through his mouth. This is his blood. Evidence. You can test it.”

She looked pale, ready to vomit.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s better this way. I’ll have to make the body disappear, of course, but you need some DNA, so you know you haven’t wasted your money.”

“I know . . . by the Five . . . ” Lee took a deep breath. She put the bullet and handkerchief in her archaeological bag. “When we get out of here, I’ll pay you in installments.”

I watched her. Dar had said he didn’t kill his litter-mates. If that was the truth, then who did it? As I watched her leave, I secretly prayed that I hadn’t made an irreversible mistake.

11

Events took a turn a binary later23.

Obeying Lee’s summons, I arrived in the portal chamber. She looked nervous. “We’re going to start the portal to see if the pirates are gone. They generally don’t linger after a raid, but . . . ”

The portal was silent. There was no mirror-glimmer on the surface inside the frame. “System checks are normal,” she said. “But it’s possible they blew up the other side.”

“Trapping us here,” muttered a young researcher.

“There’s an observation ship in the hangar below,” Lee revealed. “We could take it back to Hill Four. But it only accommodates six people.”

There were more than six of us, of course: Lee Hort and her four team members, myself, Nini and Jilin Guer, and my two mercs. Even if we could access Dar’s two-seater, we couldn’t all leave. I frowned, looking around. “Where are the Guer girls?”

“I don’t know. Last I saw they were below, working on the ansible.”

We searched all over both levels of our home turf, but there was no sign of Nini or Jilin. The repaired ansible was on their rest mat, next to a piece of paper, a nearly illegible note: ‘Rescue coming in twelve stretches.’

But this line had been messily crossed out.

I squatted to adjust the ansible. This instrument could also monitor spacecraft within the solar system. Most were still concentrated near the Hill Four orbital station. They seemed to be mobilizing for an assist, but Rain Ship was a considerable distance away. Although coming through the portal only took one step, Rain Ship was actually located in Hill system’s encompassing asteroid belt, far from planets and gravity wells, deep in the darkness.

To make long-range leaps, ships required boosts from gravity wells. The quickest way to reach us was a jump from Hill Eleven’s well. A twelve-stretch run from Hill Four to us would be quite a rush, but it was possible, barring exigencies.

But there were already several spacecraft nearby.

I brought them up on the holographic display and uttered a curse: three small spacecraft, and a massive barge. No official registration codes. Dar had said these pirates intended to take the Rain Ship. Looked like they wanted to tow it away. A human ship containing ecosystems: I wondered what it would go for on the black market. The pirates were halfway here from Hill Eleven. They’d be upon us in two stretches.

The archaeologists crowded around me. My two mercs silently watched the ansible’s light show.

“Do you intend to surrender, or fight?” I asked.

“Fight,” said one of the mercs, a small fellow with short, black hair. He seemed totally sincere. “I’d rather die than be captured by Northern An barbarians.”

As we prepared to resist the pirates, we finally learned what had become of the Guer girls: they’d flown off in Dar’s ship. Lee had been planning to use it as intercepting firepower, so she was furious, unleashing a torrent of curses. The speed and variety of this foul language put my own veteran abilities to shame. I felt I could learn a thing or two from the good Doctor.

“Hey,” I interrupted, “at least they sealed off the bay before they left.”

“They didn’t know if their seal would hold. They left us here to find out, the shit-digging little bitches!”

I rolled my eyes and left Dr. Hort cursing endlessly. I traveled to the uppermost cabin on the ship’s hull. After studying Rain Ship’s schematics, I had a plan in mind. I was dealing with three small spaceships, which meant at least twelve people and up to eighteen—not counting the pilots. We were only three mercs and six guns—no, seven. But Dr. Hort’s gun only fired three rounds. Basically useless.

I explained my plan to the two young mercs. They listened gravely. I didn’t doubt they would implement my plans and follow orders. Although I wasn’t their captain, I had followed some very good senior mercs in my time who, like me, stepped up to fill a leadership vacuum.

Had they felt like I did now? I was nervous, worried, not knowing if my plan, which would gamble everyone’s lives, would end in victory or disaster.

But we had no choice. Which actually made things very simple.

On my orders, the two mercs vanished down a corridor. I stayed on the top floor, tossing white coveralls here and there, littering the corridor with archaeological instrument parts and damaged ansible components, so it looked like the area had been evacuated quickly. Looking down from my high vantage, I saw Dr. Hort creating the same effect down near the portal chamber.

After a while, she nervously gestured up at me, signaling that our guests had arrived. Then she disappeared into the shadows. We’d found a massive cabinet in one of the ancient human rooms, big enough to conceal the archaeological team. If we mercs were killed, they might still escape unharmed.

I slowed my steps, adjusted my breathing, and hid in an adjoining cabin. There were many strange things strewn about in here. Most I couldn’t name, but they were generally solid, suitable for a makeshift bunker.

Not that I intended to fight in here.

I was separated from Rain Ship’s airtight fore-compartment by one wall. These pirates’ strategy was clearly superior to Dar’s. They didn’t use explosives, but somehow managed to open this small compartment’s access panel. So, I had been right about their ingress point. We were off to a good start. And now I knew they had at least one expert relic hunter among them—not your run-of-the-mill plunderer, but someone with a high level of ancient human technological knowledge.

I put my ear to the wall, heard landing gear touch the floor of the compartment. The space was large enough to be used as a docking bay by a Ruderan ship. For the first time I was grateful for ancient human size.

One, two, three . . . at five, the sound of their footsteps got too confusing to reckon their number. I waited patiently. Through gaps in my makeshift fort, I watched the armed pirates pass one by one through the airlock.

They soon found the junk I’d scattered about. One suggested, in his husky Northern An dialect, that they take the staircase—but at that moment my short black-haired merc ran up quickly from below. He was unarmed, hair disheveled, dressed in the white lab coat of a female lab tech.

The pirates pointed at the lower stretch of walkway, shouting excitedly. Rather than taking the stairs, many opted for the more direct route of several archaeologists’ ropes, one by one getting on and sliding down.

My luck was simply too good to be true: they left just one man on guard.

When the rest of them had vanished down the walkway, I moved fast and silent. Before the sentry knew what was happening, I had him choke-held, squeezed, quietly dying.

I didn’t waste time looking down to see how many were still on the taught ropes. I just started cutting. Blood-curdling screams issued from below, one after another, drawn out syllables of terror that ended abruptly. I hurried back to my redoubt, counting fading echoes of screams.

One, two, three . . . five24.

Truly an auspicious number, thank the Five.

Below, the other pirates were shouting curses. I heard several rushing back up the walkway—and exposing themselves in the process.

I didn’t hear the gunshots, but I heard the thud of heavy objects hitting the walkway deck. No screams meant good marksmanship, headshots. One, two, three—the footfalls grew confused. I caught sight of a figure in white, high up in his hide site, packing away a sniper rifle, then vanishing.

I didn’t know if the two young mercs could kill the rest of the pirates, but I didn’t waste time thinking about it—gunfire rang out sporadically, mingling with cries and footfalls. A pilot finally emerged from one of the ships, unable to bear what he was hearing, needing to see.

This pirate looked frail. I pistol-whipped him in the back of the head. Two minutes later he was tri-cuffed to a shelf frame. Crouching low, I ran through the airlock into the fore compartment.

Lee had suggested we emergency-fuse the airlock, to keep the pirates out, but I’d told her it wouldn’t work. These fellows weren’t stupid. Pirating for long enough teaches you a few tricks, not to mention ruthlessness. They would have blown open the lock, then waited for decompression to kill us all. Besides, we needed their ships to escape.

The pilot of the second ship ran down his boarding ramp, gun leveled. I was far away, and my first shot missed. He ducked behind the ramp and started taking pot shots. Then the clever fellow in the third ship decided to be very fucking clever: he initiated the hatch opening sequence, intending to take off.

I turned and fled, bent low and weaving to avoid any parting shots, but the trigger-happy pilot was also running for it. I made it through the airlock and plunged into the corridor, chasing my breath. My enemy was not so lucky. He was rushing back up his boarding ramp when the hatch opened. Gale-force decompression sucked him into the void.

I didn’t hear his screams, of course.

The third ship lifted off, then came about to face me and the transparent airlock. I stared into its muzzle cannons, wondering how long I had.

A little moth appeared in the void beyond the hatch.

It was Nini and Jilin. I knew it was them—I’d let them take Dar’s ship, after all. And I knew it was Nini who opened fire, and Jilin piloting. They flashed by the open compartment, pouring torrents of plasma into the pirate craft.

I didn’t bother to watch the outcome.

Because a gun was pressed into the back of my neck.

12

“Bitch.”

He had a rough Northern An accent. Just hearing it made me nauseous. I smelled strong sweat and alcohol, and the familiar bouquet of unwashed pirate in old pressure suit. He reached out and took my weapon.

Slowly I turned around.

Seeing him for the first time, I knew he was the leader. I couldn’t say why. Maybe it was something in his cloudy eyes, or the crude decorative patterns on his pressure suit—or the frightened sound that issued from the pilot cuffed to the shelf.

“Your men are dead, bitch.”

My gorge rose again.

I didn’t even know the names of my two mercenaries, but I didn’t think they were dead. Their orders weren’t to fight to the death. If the tide turned, they were supposed to run. Rain Ship was huge, a world unto itself. There were many places to hide, from which to launch guerilla warfare, if necessary. But if they were alive, this bastard was fast and clever.

I looked around, sizing things up. Quiet. No sign of other pirates.

“Your people are dead,” I boldly guessed.

His lips twisted to reveal his ratty teeth. His fist came out of nowhere, knocking me to the floor. My head buzzed and the world spun. When I could think clearly, I found that he’d dragged me to the topmost bridge leading to the pillar of ecologies.

“You’re goin’ down.” He was clearly insane, foaming at the mouth. “I want to see you splatter like mud.”

“Your family members really made a fuss as they fell.” I was deliberately provoking him. Not a sensible move, but I had no sensible move left. He kicked me hard. I rolled, nearly falling through a gap in the railing and into the abyss.

Before I could get up, he rushed over and initiated the beating proper. I tried to protect my head and face, crawling, rolling, gradually approaching the end of the bridge—where it met the pillar of ecologies, and its outer shell of polarized light.

Punches and kicks rained down on me. Protecting my head, curling up, I gradually left the pain behind and went to a strange place.

Why did those ancient giants build these high, perilous bridges? Had they deliberately set up a dramatic venue for suicides? You could jump from the bridge, or you could enter the beauty of the column and then jump. I would have made a morbid archaeological theorist.

“Get up you wretch.” The pirate leader kicked me again. “Time to die.”

I laughed hoarsely.

A second later there was a gun report—a clean shot, the pirate got it in the back of the head. Clearly Lee Hort had learned from experience, not wasting rounds on the pressure suit. Her marksmanship was surprisingly accurate.

I looked at her, wiping blood from my eye. That bastard had kicked my forehead. I might end up with a scar like Dar’s.

“Nice to see you, Lee,” I said.

She did not move, but stared at me with a disturbing focus. She leveled her gun, with a hint of hesitation in this movement.

Well, I should have guessed. Even with Dar, her three shots had landed near his heart. Only the pressure suit saved him. And the pirates couldn’t have gotten the archaeologists’ beacon data without someone on the inside.

Unbelievable. How much did you sell to them, Lee? And why did they finally decide to kill you? Did you get too greedy?

I didn’t say any of that. No, my words had to strike a fatal blow. “Your litter-mates, Lee. Those you murdered, they all have names.”

She clenched her jaw, her lady’s gun trembling.

“Do you know why we don’t name the doomed litter-mates? Because infants with names are tied to earth after they die. They stay with the people who killed them, Lee. They’ve stayed with you.”

Her face twitched into something like a smile, hideous and sad.

“Dar is still alive,” she said, “I saw him.”

“So I have to die?”

“What do you think, Jin?”

“Dar,” I said, raising my voice, “kill her.”

Lee reacted instinctively, turning to look, and I leapt at her, knocking her to the ground. The gun flew out into the abyss. The two of us wrestled, rolled, tearing and biting, and I took another beating. I hadn’t expected such ferocity and strength.

When I realized we’d rolled to the end of the bridge, an impulse seized me. The gloomy sky above descended, mist and rain like a shroud—

I grabbed Lee Hort and pulled her with me into the void.

And then I was rolling in wet grass, and I felt rain on my cheeks.

My gamble had paid off. No matter how high your entrance into the pillar of ecologies, you will be safely transported to the ground floor. I knew the ancient humans wouldn’t let me down.

Lee Hort was struggling to get up. She was in better shape than me, after all—she hadn’t been beaten by a pirate leader.

“I’ll . . . kill . . . ”

She didn’t get to finish this sentiment. She pitched forward, her eyes suddenly wide, then softly closing. Dar was behind her.

“Good of you to show up,” I managed.

“One of your boys was in trouble. I had to help him, so I’m running a little late. You alright?”

“About to fall apart, but I think I can be reassembled.”

I knew this joke wouldn’t land, but that’s not why he didn’t laugh. He was contemplating the semi-conscious Lee, gripping his gun.

“No Dar,” I said, my voice a mere rasp now. “That’s not you.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“It wasn’t you back then.”

“Maybe I’ve changed.”

“Really?”

He was silent for a moment, his cold glare softening. He looked up, taking in his surroundings. “We’re inside the pillar?”

“I think so.”

“But how—”

I joined him in looking around.

The pillar of ecologies was big enough from the outside, but the space we were in now was clearly larger. It was like a crystal honeycomb, a space divided into countless six-sided, prismatic worlds. I couldn’t see the limit of the sky, or the edge of the earth.

From where I sat in the grass gazing up, I saw no trace of anything like a spaceship interior—only the small glowing portal by my side. Beyond that was endless space. The edges of polarization plates were visible as dim lines against a far void, each habitat thus vaguely delineated, but somehow I sensed they were permeable. You could walk through them, traveling between ecologies in the pillar—if we were still in a pillar. I put my hand through the nearest plane, and rain continued to fall on my palm.

And then my imagination grew by an order of magnitude. Maybe there were many pillars, comprising their own pillar-space or matrix. Perhaps each pillar contained portals leading to other Rain Ships.

“Those polarizers . . . ” Dar’s voice was hoarse.

“Subspace partitions,” I amended.

He nodded.

I didn’t really understand this ancient human technology. I knew they had divided subspace, like our scientists do in the lab—though our primitive subspace divisions are no bigger than your finger.

But here were countless pillars of subspace, linked by portals, forming a limitless paradise.

“How many Rain Ships do you think we’re seeing here?” I asked.

“Do we have to count?”

We were laughing together, and I felt somehow reborn.

Standing up, I ignored the pain in my back and skull. I walked slowly through the tall grass. I wanted to see more.

Dar stayed with me. “What do you want to do?”

“Visit other Rain Ships.”

We approached the portal. It flickered with a weak gray light—but on the far side a very different light was visible: a brilliant white radiance. We couldn’t know what the situation was over there. A vacuum maybe? Or bitter cold, or scorching heat.

Dar supported me, and I didn’t shake off his hand. We entered the portal together.

The new ship was about the same size as the last one. The structure was also similar. Some of the instruments were still running, and corridors lit up for us as we entered them. But there was still no sign of the ancient humans. Only their machines remained, ancient, stubborn, and powerful, still running long after their creators’ extinction. We passed through cabins and halls, and finally climbed a windowsill. We stood under the huge porthole, staring in awe at an unfamiliar star-scape.

I’d never seen such a star: fiery red, blazing, immense. Dazzling, yet dim compared to the blinding, white-hot star behind it. We were in or near the galactic core. The sun-crammed fields were almost too bright to look at.

“What’s that?” Dar was pointing at a protrusion on the side of the spacecraft.

I tried to identify the bulge, which resembled a smaller Rain Ship. The hull was translucent, and within there seemed to be an embryonic pillar of ecologies. It clung to the larger ship—no. More like it was gradually breaking away from, growing out of, the larger vessel.

A birth.

I touched the ice-cold hull of this Rain Ship, feeling the rough-hewn wall. Everywhere on this ship it was the same dull gray-brown. It had grown up without people, and so hadn’t been painted or finished. Walls and pipes reverberated with circulating machines and liquids, and buzzed with electrical currents. The new Rain Ship was being made in accordance with the parental model, a new life that would not be sacrificed.

I imagined the primordial epoch when the ancient humans had created these ships, giving them the ability to reproduce, and sending them to every corner of the universe. And yet, their internal subspace ecological pillars were networked. As the ships multiplied, their shared ecological space grew, eventually becoming a vast promised land. Even after the demise of their creators, the Rain Ships continued to grow, waiting endlessly. Cleaving to their original purpose, they continued to fly.

No matter how far you go—across star fields, across the universe—the part of the world you love, the part you create, is always with you. If you take one step into a Rain Ship, you can go home.

0

A quarter later, we were in the capital of the Orchid Autonomous Sector.

The touring prosecutor announced the end of the hearing. In the court’s exit hall, he privately embraced me. Lee Hort and her family had lost their archaeological licenses. They were now in prison.

Dar was there to pick me up. He was using a pseudonym, and he’d grown a beard. No one recognized him. The story of Hort was, like all miserable stories, remembered by everyone.

“I thought you’d have your law enforcement license revoked,” he quipped.

“The prosecutor owes me.”

“It must be a great debt.”

“Yeah, pretty big.”

I didn’t get into the details, and Dar didn’t press me. We stopped in a square, bought two desserts, and ate as we strolled.

“Old Mortar has returned to work.”

“He took two shots in the stomach. I thought he’d rest at least half a month.”

“From a long bitter life we’re on the run, right?” Dar said, smiling.

I answered with a tight-lipped smirk25.

“So you didn’t get your blood money,” he observed.

“My financial backer is squatting in prison. And my target is very much alive.”

“I took a job.”

“Oh?”

I wanted to tell him that he resembled his sister when he was pretending nonchalance. But I didn’t. Some things you can’t say, no matter how evident they are.

“I’ll be working in Rain Ship space. A city has been discovered, an ancient human city. Everyone’s rushing there. There’s a fellow who’s willing to pay us. Would you come with me? I’m not much of a bodyguard on my own.”

“All right.”

“We’d leave tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

“You seem a bit preoccupied.”

I smiled, licking the ice cream off my hands, and waiting.

When she came by, it was like the whole world lit up. Of course she didn’t notice me. And I didn’t watch her too obviously. We were from different worlds. I wore an old brown military uniform, hair cropped like a man’s. Two guns were stuffed in my jacket. She wore a bright skirt, and she smiled brightly, in high spirits.

She approached, passed close by me, and then she was walking away.

“Who’s that?” Dar asked.

I said a name.

“I thought that was the name on your ID.”

“I haven’t used it for a long time. I gave it to her.”

“Is this a story I should know?”

“Maybe.”

I got up and walked on, not looking back. In my memory, rain permeated the earth, never ceasing.

I gave my name to that child. After my father ran away and my mother refused to fulfill her duties, I picked her up and chose her to live. I killed and buried her litter-mates, and sent her to the temple. A good person eventually adopted her, and she had my name. She lived the life I might have.

That’s okay, I reckon. In that rain, we all died. She became me, and I became a nameless infant, and ultimately flew away to the stars. I left myself, then discovered the secret of the Rain Ships. I met Dar. This is good—a new sense of meaning, a new destiny.

Dar did not ask about her again. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt peace and warmth.

“Tell me about the new job,” I said. “How much are we getting?”

He looked at me and laughed.

There’s something about his dark green eyes, but that is another matter entirely.

Echoes

I have been watching them grow and develop.

A young, impulsive, curious, short-lived species, I watch them mature generation by generation, as waves erode the banks of time. Individuals are not significant, and history is transient as a fleeting cloud.

But you can still marvel at everything they’ve created, everything they excavate—because their footsteps extend far, because of what they discover, what they believe in, and what they persist in.

There are times when you can’t help wanting to write down their stories and record their voices—their loves, hopes, bewilderments, sacrifices, and agonies. I choose to record their most dazzling lifetimes.

Jin died shortly after the end of this story, in a rebellion at the new Rain Ship colony. Dar died with her. They had no time to fall in love. When they died they were still mere acquaintances.

I got hold of her diary, and I’ve speculated on her thoughts. I’ve written her story from both a human and a Ruderan point of view.

At times like this, watching young lives burn out so quickly, I have an impulse. I want to reach out and make contact—gently push one of them this way or that—

Time can seem to ripple. History can leave vestiges. I know watchmen have made such contact before. Species more ancient than humans, they who watched us before we became the watchers, have done this before.

The universe cannot afford such contact. The ancients have warned me.

But in the end you will do it anyway, they have prophesied.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, January 2014.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

Footnotes:

1 - Due to their high birthrates, the Rudera have from the beginning of their civilization enforced strict birth control, allowing just one child per litter to survive. Parents or priests choose the lucky child, and kill the rest. The sacrificed infants are not named, but are generally referred to as “litter-mates” or “link births.”

2 - Ruderans, intelligent descendants of rats, live at most eight years. They reckon their lives by months. A 100-month lifespan is common and respectable.

3 - A Ruderan unit of time, a quarter of a month, or eight days.

4 - The Gods referred to here are ancient humans. Times change. Nothing lasts forever, including civilizations.

5 - The Rudera divide a standard day into eight parts or ‘stretches’, each stretch equal to three hours of human time. Like most rodents, the Rudera sleep in frequent short spells. Their work and leisure are also divided into small pieces. During odd stretches they work. During even stretches they rest, drink, shop, or spend time with their families. As a result, Ruderan work and leisure are closely intertwined.

6 - Ruderan families are quite different from human families. Men and women do not live together, except during periods of fertility. Families are generally composed of three to five members of the same sex. Male families only accept male members, and female families only take females. Most families carry out joint undertakings, working together. When they move, they move together. When it comes to Ruderans, marriage means entering a family of brothers or sisters, not uniting with someone of the opposite sex.

7 - Ruderans have only four fingers on each hand, but the tip of a Ruderan tail is divided into three small, dexterous appendages.

8 - Relic hunters are those who, legally or illegally, take relics from human ruins. Most are armed. There is not much division of labor along gender lines among the Rudera. Women do most things that men do.

9 - In the Ruderan era, Earth has two major continents: An continent and Mu continent. Northern An refers to a dialect spoken in the Northern part of An, where the inhabitants are known for their ferocity. The Ruderans have become star-faring, but most haven’t joined the Ruderan Galactic Alliance, preferring to raid and rob, drifting between solar systems.

10 - Having evolved from burrowing rodents, a Ruderan’s hearing is better than her sight.

11 - A net hung from the ceiling and walls of a tunnel for Ruderans to climb. They can’t climb like their ancestors, but are still much better at it than humans.

12 - Ruderan counting is based on eight. Twenty people in their language is “sixteen-four,” but in order to facilitate understanding, the human system is used here.

13 - Human units of measurement are used here, for ease of understanding.

14 - A Ruderan is about one-sixteenth the height of a human. This makes harnessing fire difficult. Their custom is to use cold light or bioluminescent moss for illumination. Even now, during their space age, they maintain this tradition.

15 - A Ruderan unit of length. Ten ta are about 1.03 meters. For ease of understanding, meters are used in subsequent descriptions.

16 - Although not as good as their ancestors, Ruderan climbing ability excels that of we humans.

17 - The first Ruderan handcuffs weren’t much different from the human model. But field tests quickly revealed that upgrading to a three-ring design was necessary. For Ruderans and their dexterous tails, human-style handcuffs aren’t a sensible way to deal with criminals.

18 - Originally named Church of Biological Truth and Survival of the Fittest, this sect advocates following the survival principle of natural selection. It is rendered “Extreme Darwinism” for ease of understanding.

19 - The Ruderan lifespan is short. Growth and development are fast. Age ten here means ten months old.

20 - Ruderans worship the earth more than the heavens.

21 - Compared to the common bell used by humans, an inverted bell placed on the ground is better for propagating sound in an underground city.

22 - ‘Abani’ is the title of the eldest female in a family. Similar to the human ‘great-grandmother.’

23 - A ‘binary’ is simply two Ruderan stretches, a work stretch plus a leisure stretch considered as one unit.

24 - The Rudera believe that five is a holy number, and good luck. This is because five is the first number a Ruderan needs both hands to count to. (Ruderans have only four fingers per hand.)

25 - This is a limerick handed down among mercenaries. It goes, “From a long bitter life we’re on the run! Fuck the enemy’s mom with your big gun! What good is wealth to a diseased old fart? Let’s die young tearing enemies apart!” As a female, Jin obviously doesn’t like the second line.

About the Author

Chi Hui was born in northeast China. She has been an editor and writer for Science Fiction World, China’s premiere genre magazine. She has garnered numerous nominations and honors, including a 2016 Chinese Nebula Silver Award for her novel Artificial Humanity 2075: Recombined Consciousness.

Dragon’s Deep

Cecelia Holland

Once, in the fishing village of Saint Mary Under The Hill, in the duchy of Asturias, there lived a girl named Perla. One summer day she sat outside with her sister packing dried fish into casks, to feed them through the winter, and her sister began giving her advice.

“You’re a fool not to marry Ercule, Perla. Heed me. We’re not rich, you aren’t that pretty, and you’re too clever. Take Ercule. Who else wants you?”

Perla set her teeth together, her face rough with embarrassment, and watched her hands shoving dried fish into the salt. Her sister had married the biggest lout in the village, and already had two babies; Perla thought she wanted company, and some hot words to that effect sizzled in her throat. She glanced up, ready to snap back, and saw her sister looking past her toward the road, her face falling open in astonishment.

“Sweet Heaven.” Her sister sprang up and ran through the little circle of huts toward the beach, waving her arms to the men along the shore. Left behind, Perla straightened slowly to her feet, her eyes on the glittering parade of horsemen prancing down the road toward her.

One galloped forward, waving a stick. “Down! Down, you little fool, for the Duke!”

She went to her knees, gaping up at them. There were half a hundred mounted men, but the first few were the ones she stared at. They wore mail, with long coats over them figured in gold and silver thread, spurs on their steel-covered feet, their horses sleek and fine. The one in the middle wore a gold circlet over his helmet. The one with the stick hit her across the shoulders.

“Down!”

“I am down,” she cried, and doubled up, her arms over her head.

“All of you, down,” the crier shouted, and she heard voices behind her and knew the rest of the village had gathered, and she was glad not to be alone. Another of the knights began to shout, talking the way the priest did when he recited something he had by memory.

“You people of the fish and the sea! People of the village you call for the Holy Mother of God! This is to inform you that his Highness the Duke has discovered that you are the best fishermen in his country. This village has taken in more fish in the past years than any other.”

There went up an uncertain cheer. The bull-throated voice went on. “Therefore, the Duke has decided that henceforth you will give him double the amount of taxes. And we are here now to take what you owe.”

The cheer fell into a stunned silence. Perla, still curled up on the ground, looked backward past her feet toward the rest of her people behind her. Most of them had gone to their knees. Now the rest did also, their faces tilted up, pleading.

All except her brother Marco. He stepped forward, past Perla, going out there all alone before the Duke, and said, “Sir, we cannot. Already we give most of our catch to you. We have to live.”

Cautiously Perla lifted her head out of her arms and saw the Duke there before her, his horse’s feet pattering at the ground. His stirrups were covered with chased silver. Fringe hung from his saddlecloth, his reins. Behind him were too many horsemen for her to count. She began to plan how she would run when they charged.

“Then catch more fish,” said the Duke, between his teeth, and waved his arm. His knights jogged forward. For a moment Perla’s brother stood, his feet widespread, his hat in one hand, and the other hand still out, beseeching, and then he hurried backward, and went to his knees. The knights scattered through the village, and the pillaging began. Perla sprinted toward the nearby woods, staying low to the ground.

When they had gone, when they had taken everything, and the girls and women who had been able to escape had crept back to their trampled huts, the villagers gathered as they were accustomed to in the evening, building a fire in the shelter of the cliff and cooking what little remained to eat.

Perla sat with her arms wrapped tight around her sister, who had not gotten away. The Duke’s men had caught her with her babies and in exchange for their lives she had let them rape her. She had saved her children, she kept on saying this, while the two little ones sobbed into her skirts, and her husband would not look at her.

Ercule, whom her sister wanted her to marry, sat there with the other men, behind Perla’s brother Marco. Ercule had done nothing, not even a useless plea like Marco’s. She lowered her eyes, clutching her sister against her.

The night came, and the light of the fire shone on them all. Usually when they gathered they drank, they talked and joked, sang the old songs, and retold the old stories, but this time they huddled somberly together and considered what had happened to them.

“We can’t stay here,” said one, and a few here and there grunted, agreeing.

“Where else should we go? There’s always somebody like the Duke.”

Perla hugged her sister, angry. It was unseemly for a woman to speak up, at least until all the men had spoken, but now they were all calling out stupid ideas, like hiding, or running, or changing who they were. Someone—old Juneo—even said, “We can be pirates.”

Now Marco stood. He was short, square-shouldered, strong as an ox from casting nets and rowing; Perla’s heart leapt for him, brave and sensible. He would have an answer. Everybody quieted, seeing him. Everybody respected Marco.

He said, “We need to make one more great catch, before the winter. The Duke won’t come back this year. He thinks he has it all. If we can pull in one great catch, we can all live through this.”

“The fish are going,” said an old man. “This is the bad time of the year for fish along this coast.”

“Here,” her brother said, his voice steady. “And south of here, where everybody fishes. But in the north, where the coast turns eastward, there are always great schools.”

A general grumble. A sharp voice called out, “That’s too risky.”

“It’s not for nothing called Dragon’s Deep,” someone else said—a woman’s voice, Perla looked around, started, and saw one of the fishwives standing up, her hands in her skirt.

Now Ercule stood. “Most of the other fleets avoid those waters. But I’ve always heard they’re prime fishing waters, just that there are a lot of reefs.”

He gave a look at Perla, to see she saw him doing this; he puffed out his chest a little.

Perla’s sister’s husband called out in a hoarse voice. “Bad storms hit that cape. I’ve heard there’s an eddy under the cliff. Bad currents. Nobody goes there.”

“There’s a reason there isn’t a village for miles off that headland.”

Marco stood, his hands at his sides, waiting for the clamor to die down. In the first lull, he said, “Or we could get all our scaling knives and gaffs together and attack the Duke and his men, and take our fish back from him.” He was smiling; he gave a little shrug.

Nobody said anything. In the firelight, Perla saw them look from side to side and down, one man after another, and the wives also, one to the next, and there was a long silence.

Marco said, “Then we fish Dragon’s Deep.”

Perla’s sister’s husband flung his hands out and  stepped back, away from the rest. “Not me. I have a wife and children. I’ll take them into the forest first.”

Marco wheeled, casting his gaze like a net over the other men. “Who else is a coward? Who else is afraid of rumors and gossip?”

No one spoke for a moment; the men were looking at one another, and a few shook their heads, and then Perla jumped to her feet.

“I will go, Marco. I will go with you, if nobody else dares!”

Marco gave her a broad smile, and held out his hand. His voice swelled. “Who else is as brave as a girl? All you men. Will you let a girl go first?”

Ercule cried, “I am going.”

Then, in a rush, others called out. “Yes, me, I will go, I will go,” a jumble of voices, until all but a few had agreed. But then they stood nervously, looking around, their faces fretted.

Marco stood smiling around him, his hands on his hips. “Good. We’ll start tomorrow. It will take us a couple of days to get up there.”

“Beautiful,” she murmured, and shivered.

The bay stretched out before them, dark blue to the north, paler as the water shallowed toward the beach, and the beach an arc of pale brown sand. The wind was driving from the west but the headland behind them blocked most of it and the little combers that ran into the sand were tame and mild. In the shallower, green-blue water, she could see the dark reefs. There was a reef directly below their boat now, the lumpy stone waving green with seaweed and alive with fish.

Yet the broad bay was empty, desolate. No village showed, no smoke, no single hut. From the edge of the beach, the sheer headland stood up like a tower, flanked by steep green slopes, and beyond them the snow caps of the mountains.

All along the clean pale beach, in the high line of driftwood, were the ribs and planks of boats, old wrecks, sunbleached. Some looked burned. And down on the bottom in the clear blue depths she saw a boxy stern and part of a thwart poking out of the sand. Nowhere was there a sign of a living man, except those newly come.

A gull wheeled above them, screeching. She thought, for an instant, she caught a note of warning in its voice.

Marco was giving crisp orders. “Perla, you go ashore, and make us a camp. We should have brought some other women with us, to help you, but we’ll pitch in when we get ashore this afternoon. Ercule, Juneo, shake out the nets.” He put his hands around his mouth, to shout to the other two boats, and Perla grabbed his arm.

“I’m not going ashore! I didn’t come this far to watch you, Marco.”

Around them on the boat the other men laughed and nudged each other. Juneo said, “Marco, I hope you’re handling the lines better than you handle her.”

A general hooting followed that. Perla lowered her eyes, ashamed, thinking she had made a fool of herself, and of Marco. But her brother took her by the chin and turned her face up.

He was smiling. He said, “Yes, you should fish with us.” He glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the crew. The other two boats had drawn closer. He said, “I remember when you were the only brave one in the village.”

That sobered the other men. Ercule and Juneo turned to the barrels that held the fishing nets, and Lucco and the skinny boy Grep sat on the two front rowing benches and ran the oars out. Perla lingered there, in the middle, wondering what to do, and Marco put his hand in hers and drew her back beside him at the tiller.

The other boats rowed in a widespread line across the bay from west to east, the headland behind them looming up above the unbroken stretch of beach. Marco called out for the oarsmen to raise their oars. The warm sun glistened on the bay; looking over the side Perla watched fish as long as her arm, in schools that seemed endless, weaving slowly through the open water. The men had trailed the net out behind them, and Marco let the boat drift slowly along, down the sun from the fish.

The yell from Juneo jerked them all upright. The netsman was hauling on his net, and beside him Ercule bellowed also: “Help! Help!”

With a roar the two rowers bounded to grip the nets, to try to haul in the catch. Marco gave a whoop. He pushed the tiller into Perla’s hands and leapt back there to join them. She gripped the tiller with both hands and looked back, amazed, as they dumped a huge slithering silver avalanche of fish into the back hold of the boat.

Marco came hurrying back, his face ready, his smile abeam. “I knew this would work.” He slid onto the bench beside her and grabbed the tiller away. “Row!” He lifted his voice to shout orders. “Row!”

Perla laid her hand on the gunwale; down the bay she saw the other two boats also hauling in their catches, and the tiny figures waved their hands over their hends and she could hear their thin cheering voices. Marco laid the tiller over.

“Down there! Under the headland, where the water’s sheltered—row!”

The boat felt different now, even Perla could sense it, heavier with the load of fish. The men pulled strongly; Lucco squirmed deftly out of his shirt between strokes. The sun blazed on the water, but as they drew nearer the high stone crag blocked it, and cast a shadow out over the deep.

Marco called, and the men shipped their oars and ran to the nets. The other boats were rowing fast after them. Perla stood up; this time she meant to join them bringing the nets in.

She felt the boat under her quiver slightly.

Marco called, “Juneo, cast the net!”

“I—I—” Juneo was balanced on the stern of the boat, the rolled net gripped in his hands; he turned his white face toward Marco, and then the boat began to slide sideways.

Marco yelled. Perla grabbed hold of the gunwale with both hands. The boat was spinning along at the edge of a whirling circle of water; at the center the water sank down, and down, all spinning, and widening, so that their boat now lurched and swayed, tipped halfway into the vortex. Perla shouted, “Marco, what should I do?”

Then up through the center of the eddy came the dragon.

Its great horned head reared up into the air, its long neck arched, its shoulders thrusting through the whirl of the water. For an instant the men on Perla’s boat stood frozen where they were, their faces lifted up, and then Marco bounded toward the mast, and the gaff tied to it.

“Get back, Perla!”

She took a step back, but the red horned head towering over her was turning toward her, toward the boat, and the long jaws parted and a gust of green flame erupted from its throat. The ball of fire hit the boat by the forward thwart and it exploded into flames. Perla leapt overboard.

She swam away from the boat, but the whirlpool caught her; in spite of her thrashing arms she went skidding down the side of the eddy. The beast loomed over her, enormous, its red scales streaming water. She saw its head dart past her again and rear up, a man clutched in its jaws. She screamed; that was Lucco, from her boat, his arms waving. The dragon flipped him up into the air, so that he fell headfirst, and swallowed him on the way down. The huge head swung around again. Away from her. She struggled in the furious current, trying to swim across the tow, get out of the whirlpool, but it was carrying her swiftly downward, always closer to the dragon. A scream reached her ears, and she saw the wedge-shaped red head rise again, another man in its teeth.

Then the wave of the whirlpool brought her directly against the dragon’s side. Her fingers scraped over the slick red scales, trying to grab hold. Above her the beast’s spines rose like giant barbs, and she lunged up and caught one and held on.

The beast was still rising. Clutching the spine she was borne higher up into the air. All around her, below her, the water tossed, full of men, some screaming and waving their arms and some trying to swim, and the dragon caught another, and another, its head darting here and there at the end of its long neck. She tied her belt to the spine, to stay on. She saw Marco, down there, on the lip of the eddy, and tried to yell, but he disappeared in a gust of steam. The dragon breathed out again, and the last of the boats burst into flame.

She clung to the spine, thick as a tree bough, polished smooth and sleek as gold; she was sick to her stomach, numb with fear, sure that Marco was dead, that they were all dead. The beast whirled and her head struck the spine hard enough to daze her. The sky whirled by her, and then, abruptly, the dragon was plunging down.

She flung her head back, startled alert again, and fought to untie her belt. The wet knot was solid. She fought to pull the belt loose off the spine, while the dragon dove down into the dark green water, but the belt held her, and just as the sea closed over her head she gasped in a deep lungful of air.

The sea rushed past her. They were going down into the darkness. She looked up, saw a body floating limp in the shrinking patch of pale water. Then the dragon was swimming sideways, into an underwater cave, or a tunnel.

The light vanished. In the pitch darkness, surging along on the dragon’s back, she could not imagine an end. She had to breathe. Her lungs hurt. The dark water rippled on her skin. Her fists were clenched around the spine, her body flying along above the strong-swimming beast. She had to breathe. She kept still a moment longer, counting. Surely something would happen. When she got to ten she counted again. Her lungs ached. She could see nothing. Strange lights burst in her eyes, in the dark, and were gone. Nausea rose in her throat. Then the dragon was swimming upward, toward the pale surface.

She held her breath again, counting, and at eight, she burst into the light and the air.

She gasped, clinging to the spine, looking around her. Her whole body shuddered. They were inside the headland; some underwater passage connected it to the sea. Sheltered inside the sheer rock walls lay a lagoon with a little brown beach. The dragon was swimming toward the beach. She gripped her belt; with a leap of relief she saw it had frayed almost apart in the wild ride, and with her fingers she ripped it off just as the dragon reached the shallow water. She plunged down the red scaled side and ran up onto the sand.

The brown cliff there rose impossibly high and steep. But the face was runneled and cleft with caves and seams. She ducked into the nearest of hollows and went back as far as it went, only a few feet of a narrow twisting gorge that pinched together into nothing.

Far enough, she thought. It can’t reach me here. She crept cautiously up nearer the beach, to see out.

The dragon had lain down right in front of her, only about ten feet of sand between her cave and its head. So it knew she was there. But it stretched out, relaxed, well-fed, half-asleep. She leaned against the rock wall behind her and looked it over.

The red, horned head lay half-turned toward her, the eyes closed, rimmed in gold, the wide curled nostrils also gold-trimmed, oddly delicate. The long red neck led back into ridged shoulders with scales as big as a house. At ease, the beast sprawled between its forepaws, their curved claws outstretched. The massive bulk of its body curled away, its tail half in the water still, a net wrapped around one spine.

She watched it until the daylight was gone. Once, in its sleep, its jaws parted and gave a soft greenish burp, and a little round stone rolled out. Still sleeping, the beast’s long red tongue licked over its lips, and it settled deeper on the sand.

The sun went down. In the night, she thought, she could escape, and she edged closer to the beach. Just as she reached the mouth of the crevice the dragon’s near eye opened, shining in the dark, fixed on her. Perla scuttled back into the deep of the crevices, all her hair on end. She thought she heard a low growl behind her.

She wept; she wept for Marco and Lucco and the other men, and for herself, because she knew she was lost. At last she slept a little. When she woke, it was morning, and she was so hungry and thirsty she went back to the mouth of the crevice.

The dragon was still there. It stood looking away from her, the sun blazing on its magnificence, the red scales, darker at the edges, and the shining spines along its backbone. Then the narrow-jawed head swung toward her, high above her on the long arched neck. On the broad space between its eyes was a disk of gold. Its eyes were big as washtubs, brilliant red flecked and edged with gold.

It said, in a voice so deep and huge she imagined she heard it through the bones of her head, not her ears, “Why don’t you come out so I can eat you?”

“Please don’t eat me,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t I? You’ll just die in there anyway.” It gave a cold chuckle. “And by then you’d be too thin to bother digging for. Tell me what you’ll give me, if I don’t eat you. Will someone ransom you?”

She stood at the mouth of the crevice, her hands clammy and her throat thick with fear. No one from her village had anything to ransom her with, if the village even still survived, with all its men gone. She thought desperately of what she herself could do, weave, sew, cook, haul water.

“Can you dance? Sing?”

“I—”

The dragon said, “Tell me a story.”

A cold tingle went down her spine. “A story,” she said.

“If it’s good enough, I won’t eat you.” The dragon settled himself down, his forepaws curled under him like a cat’s, waiting.

She gulped. The village’s stories were old and worn, which was why the villagers told them, and retold them, like the imperishable favorite about how old Pandun had his eye put out while looking through a knothole in the bathhouse at the women bathing. She knew at once such stories would not satisfy the dragon, much less save her life.

He was waiting, patient, his jeweled eyes on her. She realized since he had begun speaking to her she had thought of him as “he.”

That gave her a wisp of an idea. She sat down in the mouth of the cave, her heart thundering, and began, “Once there was a king. An evil king.” Like the Duke. Her mind sorted through the possibilities. “He stole everything from his people and he killed many. But he did have one thing he loved, his beautiful daughter.”

She spent some time describing the beautiful daughter, so that she could plan the next part. The dragon was utterly silent, his eyes steadily watching her, his long lips slightly smiling.

“He was so jealous of her that he put her in a tower by the sea.” The story was growing stronger in her mind, and she let her voice stride out confidently, telling of the tower, and the wild storms, the sunlight, and the birds that came to sing to her in her window. “There she lived lonely, singing to the birds, and grew even more beautiful, but no man saw her except her father.

“But one day a prince came by.” She made the prince like Marco, solid and honest and brave. Dead now, probably, dead in this dragon’s belly. Her voice trembled but she fought herself back under control. She gave the prince a red charger and red hair, which she saw amused the dragon. “The prince heard her singing, and climbed up the tower wall to her window. They fell in love at once, because she was beautiful and good, and he was handsome and brave and good. But before he could carry her off, the King burst in on them.”

The dragon twitched, and she leaned toward him a little, intent, knowing now she had him. “The King had his sword, and although the prince tried to fight back, he had no weapon. So the King got him down quickly.”

The dragon growled. She kept her voice steady, speaking over the rumble. “But he did not kill him. Instead, he told the prince, since he was such a lizard that he could scale a castle wall, he would become the greatest lizard. And he turned him into a dragon, and cast him into the sea.”

The dragon lifted its head up and roared, not at her, but to the sky, and then quickly sank down again, his eyes blazing.

“But the princess. What happened to her?”

Perla was ready to run for the end of the crevice, if this did not suit. She fixed the dragon eye to eye. “Her heart was broken. She fled from her father—”

“Good.”

“And now she wanders through the world looking for her prince. Only her love can change him back from the dragon. But every day she grows older, and every day, the dragon grows more like a dragon, and less like the prince.”

She was poised to run. But the dragon’s eyes were shining. His long lips drew back from his dagger-teeth, and he nodded his head once. Turning, he plunged into the lagoon.

She went cautiously out onto the open sand. Down the beach, water spilled down the cliff in a long fall, and she went there and quenched her thirst, all the while looking for some other way out of the lagoon. The cliff ran all around it like a wall.

In the lagoon, too soon, the whirling appeared, and the eddy deepened, and the dragon’s head rose through it and he swam to the beach and dragged himself out onto the sand. In his jaws he held a long flopping sea bass, which he flung down on the sand.

“Wait.” The voice like speaking bronze. He reared his head back and shot forth a bolt of flame, which blasted around the fish for several seconds.

She went warily up to it, knelt down, and touched the carcass. It was nicely cooked. She peeled back the skin and ate the hot flaky white meat. It was delicious but it tasted a little sharp.

The dragon was crouched there, head and shoulders settled above its sprawled forepaws, his long neck curved, watching her. When she was done, and sitting there licking her fingers, he lay down around her, his head stretched along his paws, half embrace, half prison. The great red eye blinked once in a flash of gold. “Tell me another story.”

After that the dragon let her roam as she pleased around the lagoon, as long as she told him stories whenever he asked. She made up stories about dragons, about princesses, about evil kings, good and handsome princes, about the brothers of princesses, crisscrossing them, sometimes using the same people in one story after another. She tried to make every one different but to her they seemed to be the same, about wanting to go home, to be with whom she loved, and where she belonged.

She was sitting in the sun one afternoon, longing for home, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. The dragon said, “What’s the matter?”

“You ate my brother,” she said bitterly. “You ate all my people. I hate you.”

He gave one of his throaty chuckles, unperturbed. “You eat the fish. You don’t even care about their brothers.”

She cast off the thought of fish, which she had always eaten. “Do you have no family? No tribe? Where did you come from?”

He looked surprised. His huge eyes blazed red as the heart of a fire. “I was always here.” But his stare shifted, and as much of a look of perplexity as she had ever seen came over his long snake-like face. “There were more of us, once. Not many more.” He turned, and flopped away into the lagoon and disappeared.

During the day he often slept in the sun, or went down into the lagoon and was gone for a long while. She guessed he went out the tunnel to the open sea. She wandered the beach, drinking from the waterfall that tumbled down from the top of the cliff and spread its shining skirts across the sand, eating berries growing down the stone wall, and seaweed, crabs and clams, anything else she could find. She worked out stories as she walked, saving bits and pieces when she could not make them whole, and remembering it all in a big over-story she would never tell him, about a girl taken captive by a dragon, who was rescued in the end by a prince.

When he came back, he always had a fish for her, and cooked it with the fire of his breath; no matter what the fish, bass, bonito, or shark, the meat always had a faintly sharp, spicy taste. If he had fed well he burped up lots of stones, some as big as her fist, most toe-sized, clear lumps of colored crystal, red and blue and green. If he had eaten nothing or little he complained and glowered at her and licked his lips at her, and talked of eating her instead, his red eyes wicked, and his tongue flickering.

“I don’t have to listen to you,” she said, holding herself very straight. She turned back to the crevice, where she could get away from him.

Behind her, the deep rumbling voice said, “If you try to escape I will definitely eat you.”

She spun toward him. “But I want to go home. You should let me go home.”

At that he gave off a burst of furious heat, and exhaled a stream of green fire. She dodged him, and ran toward the crevice.

One huge forepaw came down directly in front of her. When she wheeled, his other paw came down, fencing her in.

“You can’t leave!”

She put her hands over her ears, the roar shaking her whole body. The ground trembled under her. He was lying down, curled around her. She lowered her hands. He was calm again, but his great scaled bulk surrounded her. Only a few feet away the enormous eye shut and opened again. “Tell me a story.”

So she had to escape. During the day, she followed the seams and gullies worn into the cliff, hoping to find another way out, but they all pinched out, or ended in falls of broken rock. Once in the shadows at the back of a defile she found a skeleton, still wearing tattered clothes—a cloak with fur trim, and pretty, rotten shoes, even rings on the fingerbones.

The bones were undisturbed. Whoever this was, however he had gotten here, he had never even left the cave.

She had left the cave. She found herself a little proud of that.

One evening, after she told him a story about the adventures of the prince as a dragon, she turned to go back into the crevice, where she usually slept. Before she could reach the cliff he caught her lightly with his forepaw—the long curved claws like tusks inches from her face—and tossed her backward. She stumbled off across the beach, wondering what she had done wrong. The other paw met her and sent her reeling back. She whirled, frightened, her hands out, and he batted her around again. His head suspended over her watched her with a cold amusement. He was playing, she realized, in a haze of terror, not really hurting her. She caught hold of his scaly paw and held tight, and he stopped.

But he did not let her go. He reached down and took her between his long jaws, gently as a mother with an egg. She lay, rigid. Her breath stopped, between two sets of gigantic teeth, the long tongue curled around her. He lay down, stretched out, and carefully set her on the sand between his forepaws. He put his head down on his paws, so that she lay in the hollow under his throat, and went to sleep.

She lay stiff as a sword under him. Something new had happened and she had no notion what he might mean by this. What he might do next. Yet the cavern under his throat was warm, and she fell asleep after a while.

The next day, he dove into the lagoon and was gone, and she began to search from one end of the cliff to the other for a way out. She went back through every crevice, tried to chimney up the sides, and crawled along the tops of huge mounds of rubble. Always, the space came to an end, the cliff pressed down on her, dark and cold.

She crept back out to the sunlit lagoon again. The beauty of it struck her, as it always did, the water clear and blue and dark at the center, and paler in toward the shore, the tiny ripples of the waves, the cream-colored sand. The sky was cloudless. The cliff vaulted up hundreds of feet high, sheer as glass.

As she stood there, wondering what to do, the blue water began to whirl, eddying around, and the dragon’s great head thrust up through the center of it, a white fish between his long jaws.

He saw her, and came to her, cast down the fish, and breathed on it with the harsh fire of his breath, and then, as usual, stood there watching her eat it. She was hungry and ate all the pale flaky meat. Being close to him made her edgy. She had thought of a good story to tell him, with a long chase through a forest, and the dragon’s escape at the end. She could not look at him, afraid of what she might see brimming in the great red eyes.

He sat quietly throughout the story, as he always did. She had learned to feel the quality of his attention and she knew he was deep into this story. She brought it to an end, and stood.

His head moved, fast as a serpent, and he caught her between his jaws. He laid her down on her back between his forepaws. She lay so stiff her fists were clenched, looking up at the wedge-shaped head above her, and then he began to lick her all over.

His tongue was long and supple, silky smooth, longer than she was tall, so that sometimes he was licking her whole body all at once. She was afraid to move. He licked at her dress until it was bunched up under her armpits. His touch was soft, gentle, even tender; stroking over her breasts he paused an instant, his warm tongue over her, and against her will she gasped.

He said, in his deep harsh voice, “It’s only me, the prince,” and chuckled. He slid his tongue down her side and curled it over her legs.

She clutched her thighs together but the tip of his tongue flicked between them, into the cleft of her body. She shut her eyes. She held her whole body tight, as if she could make an armor of her skin. Her strength was useless against him.

But nothing more happened. He slept, eventually, his head over her. She dozed fitfully, starting up from nightmares.

In the morning he went off as usual, and she searched desperately along the cliff face. At the waterfall she stood in the tumbling water, thinking of his tongue on her, wondering what else he would do.

Behind the streaming water she noticed a narrow crevice.

She stepped into it, behind the water, and saw that the slit in the rock angled back into the dark. She pressed herself into it. Water ran three inches deep along the bottom of the crevice. As she worked her way back, and the dark shut down around her, her hands along the walls on either side passed through sheets of water coming down.

She came to a place where the gorge divided in two, one side running to her left, one to her right. It was totally dark. She stood still a while, her mind blocked with fear, and then she realized that there was water trickling over the toes of her right foot, and other was dry. She followed the water.

The crevice walls came so close together her nose scraped in front and the back of her head scraped behind her. The tunnel twisted, turned. In the dark she fumbled along, her heart thundering. She should have brought water. Food. She should have planned this. Thought ahead. Was it night, now, was it dark out, as it was so dark in here? Blindly she crept forward through the crevice in the rock. She could not go back now. He was back there now, he knew she was gone.

The tunnel narrowed, and kinked. In the kink for an instant she could not move, there buried in the belly of the cliff, caught in the wedge of the stone, and she almost screamed. Instead she made herself ease. There was water running over her ankles. She had only to follow the water. She pushed slowly, gently forward, most of her body stuck fast, but her foot moved, then her thigh, her hip, until she worked her way around the bump in the rock.

The tunnel widened. It began to climb upward, twisting and turning, but always up in the dark, until she was helping herself along with her outstretched hands. Then the climb came to an end in a blank rock wall, with water spilling down its surface.

She felt her way along the rock wall, found a place where she could climb, and went up. Her hands groped ahead of her for holds, and her feet pressed against the rock. If she fell from here she might die. Break her leg. Die slowly. Then, reaching up, she realized she could see her hand.

She followed that grip into brighter light. She could see where to put her hands now, and the stone was warm. Above, beyond the edge of rock, was pink sky: the sun just going down. She pulled herself the last few feet up to the grass beside the pool of water, and lay down, exhausted, and closed her eyes, and slept.

She had nothing to eat, but the spring had come; the meadow was full of mushrooms, and the trees of birds’ nests and eggs. She walked a whole day and much of the night, through a brilliant full moon, before she came at last to the high road where it came down from the mountain passes and veered toward the sea. It was deserted. Even from its crests she could not see the coast. Off toward the ocean, a plume of thick black smoke clotted the air; she wondered if the farmers were burning off their fields for the spring planting.

She walked on, eating whatever she could find—roots, nuts, even flowers and grubs. On the third day she came on some travelers, who gave her some bread.

They were surprised to find her walking alone; they said, “Be careful, there are robbers on the highway. The Duke has gone south to a war and there is no law.”

“And raiders on the sea,” said another. “Be careful.”

So she watched out for strangers, walking along, but she thought that she was near her own village, and looked for the path down to it. She wondered what she would find there—if anything were left there. She wept once, thinking of Marco. But she was still walking along the high road, her feet sore, and every muscle aching, when someone shouted, and a skinny boy bounded down out of the rocks toward her.

“Perla! Perla!”

It was Grep, who had rowed third oar on Marco’s boat at Dragon’s Deep. She laughed, astonished, her hopes surging.

Grep bounded around her, laughing. “You’re alive! You’re alive—come, hurry—Marco will—”

“Marco,” she cried, running down the steep path beside him. “Marco is alive?”

“Marco, Ercule, Juneo, me,” he said. They slowed to crawl under a fallen tree. “Everybody else went down in the storm.”

“The storm,” she said, startled.

He put his finger to her lips. “But you’re alive!” He laughed again, joyous, as if nothing else mattered. “Come on—” He ran out ahead up a short, steep slope and onto the flat top of the sea cliff, shouting.

“Look here, everybody! Look here!”

She stood there, looking around her. She knew this cliff, which had stood behind her village. Now on its narrow height stood a cluster of huts inside a ditch—half as many huts as the old village, and now from each one, faces peered out.

And she laughed, delighted, and stretched out her arms, and they were running toward her, her sister, all tears, and her friends.

“Perla! Perla! You came back!” She flung herself into their arms and for a while nothing mattered.

“Where are the men?” she asked, in her sister’s hut. Her sister set a piece of fish before her, a slab of bread, and she reached greedily as a child for them.

“They’re out,” her sister said, vaguely. She said, “The few there are. Marco has been the saving of us.”

Perla looked around the hut, smaller than before, stoutly made with stone footings, a withy wall domed overhead, and covered with straw. There was only one bed, and that small. Her eyes went to the doorway, where half a dozen children hung in the opening, watching her wide-eyed.

She turned to her sister. “Are your children—”

“I lost my little girl in the winter. It was hard.”

“Oh, no. Your husband?”

“He’s dead,” her sister said. She picked up the knife again, to cut the bread. “Do you want more? We have plenty of food.”

“But—he didn’t go with us to Dragon’s Deep,” Perla said.

“He died when Marco took the men up to the highway,” her sister said. She laid the loaf down on the board, and hacked off another slab. “That’s how we have lived, Perla, we robbed the highway. And, at last, we have enough.”

Perla gave a shudder, horrified. “Until the Duke comes,” she said, but she remembered she had heard that he had gone away.

“Why should we not?” her sister said. “Have we not been everybody else’s prey?” Her eyes glittered. “When the Duke comes, Marco will have a plan. Marco always has a plan.” She thrust out the piece of bread. “He brought me this bread. The men all follow him, and he makes sure all of us widows are fed. Just obey Marco. Everything will come well.”

Perla took the bread. “I hope you are right.”

Later, when the men came back, they gathered together in the evening. The men saw her and cheered, and Marco came and hugged her, and she endured also the sweaty hugs of Ercule, and they all shouted her name. “How did you get home? Where have you been?”

She sat down in the circle to tell them her story. They had built a bright fire and all their faces shone in the light. She began, “You remember how we set off to the north, to Dragon’s Deep, to fish there. Because the Duke had come and stolen all our food.”

They murmured, agreeing, and looked at one another. Marco, beside her, leaned forward, a little frown on his face. She fought off the feeling he was not liking this.

“And we got there, you remember, and the fish were thick as grass on the meadow, and we hauled in one great catch—”

“And then the storm came,” Marco said.

The listeners gave a louder rumble of agreement, and Ercule called out, “One boat after another foundered.”

Juneo said, “The sky was dark as night, and the lightning flashed—”

“No,” Perla said, astonished.

“I made it to the shore,” Grep said, “I don’t know how, and then I saw Marco trying to carry Ercule in, and Juneo hanging to both of them, and went to help them.”

“No,” Perla said.

“We don’t want to talk about it any more,” Marco said, and the other men loudly agreed with him again, and the women gestured and nodded and agreed, and Perla sat there dumb and amazed.

They sang some songs, which she had known from her babyhood, and she came near tears to hear them. Then someone told the old story about how Pandun had gotten his eye put out, looking through the hole in the bathhouse wall at the women.

After, she saw Marco to one side, and went to him. He wrapped his muscular arms around her again. “I’m glad you’re back. I was sure you were dead.” He kissed her hair.

“Marco,” she said, “what is this about a storm?”

“We were wrecked in a sudden storm,” he said, smiling. “I don’t know how you got through it. I really don’t know how I did.”

“Marco, there was a dragon.”

He laughed. “You don’t say. Aren’t you a little addled, maybe, from all that time alone? That must be it.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “There. See? Ercule is watching you. Go to him, he’s missed you too.”

“I hate Ercule,” she burst out.

“Well, you’re going to marry him,” said Marco. He was still smiling. Nothing seemed to bother him. She supposed if he had already swallowed the storm story then he was ready for anything.

She said, “What about the Duke?”

“Hah,” he said.

“My sister told me what you’re doing.”

His eyebrows jacked up and down. That at least ruffled him; his face tightened. “I had four men left and a dozen families with children,” he said. “And it was my fault, Perla. I took them there. You were gone. Lucco. All the boats but one. Lost in a storm.” He took a deep breath, drawing back into the shell he had made for himself, the one that smiled all the time. He smiled. “So I did what I had to do. And so will you. Ercule is very handy to me, I want you to marry him.” He leaned over and laid his cheek against hers and walked away.

More like a dragon than a prince, she thought, nearly in tears again. She had not come home after all. She crept back to her sister, to find a place to sleep.

During the following days she drowned herself in work, making her own house, bringing up stones and withies from the deserted village on the beach. The trail up the cliff was steep and hard, but well worn, and the other women helped her. During the day the men went off. She was afraid to ask what they did, but they did not take out the only boat left, which lay always on the beach in the lee of the rock, its nets rotting on the sand. They brought back stories from the highway, gossip, news. At night, when they returned, Ercule came on her.

She held him off for several nights, pushing, shoving, angry, making him shy, but she saw Marco talking to him. After that he was bolder, he forced her to kiss him, and the next night, while he kissed her, he grabbed her breast in his hand. She wrenched away from him, and went inside. It was just past the full moon, and the light shone through the holes in her dome shaped roof, which had not yet been thatched over. She saw him come in, saw his toothy grin, and could not stop him.

The next day he went off with Marco somewhere, and she sat inside the hut and cried. Her sister came and sat by her and patted her shoulder. But when next the men came back they had bread and meat and blankets and a cask of wine, and it was Ercule who sat beside her, and she could not keep him off.

She was afraid to tell stories, and without the constant telling the stories stopped coming to her.

One late afternoon Grep rushed in from the path, leading a stumbling, exhausted stranger. “He was on the sea trail,” he said to Marco. “I thought you should hear him.”

The villagers had all come out to see what was happening, and the stranger staggered into their midst. He was in rags, his face hollow with thirst and grief. One of the women went quickly to him, brought him water, made him sit, and comforted him. The others gathered around him.

He said, “I never saw them—I was asleep—I woke up to find the place burning. Everybody’s gone. Everybody’s gone.”

Marco said, “Where?”

The stranger said the name of the next village up the coast. He was devouring bread and cheese and milk. The widow beside him had already claimed him, whether he knew it or not. His mouth full, he went on, “I hid in the cess pit—the whole village burned to the ground. When I got out in the morning—everybody was gone, or dead.”

Perla thought, Not him, then. Not him. He hunts in the daylight. But her heart leapt.

“You didn’t see them?”

“That’s how I lived. If I’d seen them, they would have seen me.”

Ercule said, “It’s that same bunch who took San Male.”

“Maybe,” Marco said. “When did this happen?”

“Two days ago,” the stranger said. “The night of the full moon.”

Marco gave a short grunt. He turned to Ercule. “I think there was a full moon the night they took San Male. Go up on the high road, ask around.”

“I will,” Ercule said.

Perla thought, he hunts in the daylight. But on his home hunting ground. Off his range, he would be more cautious. Her palms were clammy. If you try to escape I will definitely eat you.

Marco said, “And find out where the Duke is. I heard he was coming back north.”

Ercule said, “I will, Marco.”

Perla swallowed, her hands pressed together at her breast, and looked down at the sea beach below the cliff, where once the village had been—where still a lot of the village remained. A story began to form in her mind, but she had no one to tell it to. If she kept it silent it would go away. She looked out at the broad, rippled sea, burnished in the setting sun.

Ercule said, “What’s got you so pinch-faced? I’ll be back in a couple of days.” He showed his teeth in his ugly grin. “Then we’ll have a good time.”

“I’d rather be eaten,” she said.

Ercule came back with a buzz of news. To her relief, Perla’s courses had begun, and for once she slept untroubled and alone. A few days later, the Duke himself rode down toward the village on the beach.

His charger was black, with reins worked with silver, and silver stirrups. Marco met him at the foot of the trail up the cliff; the villagers all watched from the height.

The Duke’s voice was clear and loud. “I know who you are. Word came to me even in the south, where I was fighting Saracens. Help me defeat these northern sea-raiders, and I’ll make you count of this place. You can go on robbing, unh, taking your tolls on the highway. Just give me half.”

Perla, horrified, saw her brother bow down, agreeing to this. The Duke wheeled his horse and rode away, and Marco came back up the trail to the village.

Perla went to him as soon as she saw him without Ercule. She said, “He is lying. He is lying, Can’t you see that?”

Marco smiled at her. “It’s all right, my darling.” He kissed her. “I was lying too.” More a dragon every day.

Marco said, “They come on the full moon. The Duke says—agrees with me—there have been three attacks this year, all north of here, but moving down the coast. They come in the night of the full moon, burn the village, seize all the people, go before daylight comes. Slavers, obviously. We can figure they’ll come here, if not the next full moon, then the one after. Especially if we all move back to the village on the beach.”

Perla clamped her lips shut. They would be safe on the cliff.

If they stayed on the cliff the dragon would be safe from them. Now Marco was telling the plan. “We’ll dig a ditch just above the high tide line. The Duke will bring archers, who will hide in the ditch, and knights, who will wait in the village. When the raiders come in, we’ll get them between, and we’ll have them.”

Perla bit her knuckle. Ercule swung around toward her. “Well, what do you think of that?” He picked her up and swung her around. “When I am a lord, you’ll be a lady. Hah! Then you’ll like me better.” She clenched her teeth, angry, and thought of getting a knife somewhere, and sticking it up between his ribs.

But the next few weeks all the men worked hard digging the ditch, and Ercule left her largely alone. The moon was waxing. The women went back to living on the beach, in the shells of the old huts; with the summer coming on, these were pleasant in the evening breezes, and close by the water for the children. They talked of taking out the boat to fish, until someone noticed the holes in the nets.

A few days before the next full moon, the Duke rode in, and galloped his black horse on the beach at low tide, all the while staring out to sea. Perla watched him morosely. Talk was his war in the south had not gone well. He needed to defeat someone. Her gaze went to Marco, working hard in the heat to shore up the side of the ditch. Surely he was making a fool out of Marco, who was doing all the work, while the Duke would get all the glory.

The Duke’s handsome young son raced after him. He practiced with his sword, pretending to do battle with hundreds.

Just one, she thought, her heart hammering, and looked out over the sea. Or maybe she had dreamt it. Just a story, after all. Maybe there was nothing but the likes of Ercule, the Duke, and Marco.

Her sister came to her and said, “The moon will be full tonight. We are going into the woods again. Will you come?”

Perla said, “I want to stay.”

“It’s been said—” Her sister’s mouth kinked. “If the Duke can’t have his sea-raiders, he’ll take Marco.”

She said, “I will stay.”

“Ah, you’ve always been a fool, Perla. Now I think you’re a little crazy.”

She knew Marco had spread that word about her, that she was crazy.

She was beginning to wonder, what difference did it make, if everybody else believed something else? Surely they were right?

The sun set, and the round moon rose. She alone of all the women stayed in the beach village, where the Duke’s knights spread out to eat their supper among the huts. Wary of them, she walked down toward the water. She circled the end of the ditch, full of men with bows. Out before everybody else was Marco, with the other villagers.

She climbed up onto the rock at the end of the beach. The moonlight made everything silver and black, glistening sand, the inky pit of the ditch. The sea ran soft and quiet in the windless night, just curling over along the beach. She thought, the knights are ready, either for the attack from the sea, or to attack Marco. Marco had only five men, and the Duke one hundred.

She sat on the rock in the moonlight, dozing, and she dreamt of the great red eye, gold-rimmed, and the deep voice saying, “Tell me a story.”

She opened her eyes. The moon was sinking into the west. Her hair tingled up. Out there, an eddy was forming on the rippled water.

She stiffened, her breath frozen in her lungs. Behind her, a man called out sleepily, “What’s that?”

Marco shouted, “Perla! What are you doing there? Run!”

She twisted to see him running away from the water, dashing for the cliff. The other villagers followed him. So that was his plan. He remembered the dragon after all. Without waiting for her, Ercule and the others at his heels, he raced toward the trail up the cliff, leaving the Duke’s men behind to fight.

The Duke’s men ignored him. To them nothing was happening. A few of the archers in the ditch lifted their bows. One called out, “What are we shooting at?”

The sentry shouted, “Something’s out there.”

Standing in his stirrups to see, the Duke rode to the edge of the ditch, his son behind him, his face stretched in a lopsided yawn. Out on the sea the eddy whirled larger and deeper, sleek and dark in the moonlit water around it. The edge broke hard on the beach. Then the horned head shot up, and the dragon lunged into the air.

Perla leapt down from the rock. “No! Go back—it’s a trap—go back—” Something struck her hard in the back and she fell headlong, almost in the water.

A tremendous brazen roar drowned everything. She felt the waves lapping at her hands, and crawled up toward the dry sand, out of the way. Her back hurt, and blood ran down her side; she twisted her arm around carefully to feel behind her but touched only her sodden dress. Whatever had hit her had glanced off. She sank down, gasping with pain. Then the dragon hurtled up out of the sea past her.

As he went he shot out a green bolt of flame that scorched the ditch from end to end. When the few men who could raised their bows, he swept them up in his jaws.  Some he ate, and some cast aside to go after more. He crossed the smoldering ditch with a bound. Perla, crouched by the rock, heard the ping of the arrows striking his scales.

A horn blew. In a long single line the knights charged down the beach. The Duke led them, his sword drawn. They swept in around the dragon like a surging wave, their swords hacking, the horses whirling and struggling against spurs and bits.

Then another green flame sizzled out and knocked the dark wave back, and with a shriek the dragon reared up, his head high, the Duke between his jaws. Even from the side Perla could hear the armor crunch. A wail went up from the Duke’s men, and they scurried back, away.

The son galloped forward. “Rally! Rally—”

The dragon hurled down the Duke’s body and went straight for the son and the boy wheeled his horse and ran. The great jaws snapped shut at the horse’s tail. The knights followed in a stream. The dragon grabbed another as they fled, and ate him, spitting out the coat of mail and the helmet.

Perla rose, stiff with pain, and limped toward him. He was bleeding from a dozen places, a slash on his neck, a deep gash in his breast, arrows sticking into his scales. She held out her arms to him.

“Are you all right?”

The dragon turned to her, and she saw the first dawn light glisten on the golden disk between his eyes. His voice was harsh. He said, “I am sore wounded, my heart’s blood flows on these sands. If not for your warning they would have had me. I swore I would devour you, if I found you. But you saved me, and suffered for it.” He turned, swaying back toward the sea. “And I remember the stories.”

She said, “I want to go with you.”

He stopped, his neck arched, his head hanging down. His wounds dropped thick globs of blood that burned a moment on the sand and then went out in a wisp of smoke. “I remember the stories. I do not know where these wounds and the sea will carry me.”

“Yet I will go with you, whatever happens.”

His head swung toward her. The great red eyes glimmered, brimming. The long tongue flicked out tenderly over her bare feet. She climbed up over his shoulder and onto his back, sitting astride, holding with both hands to the great spine before her. She had only enough time to draw a deep breath before he plunged back into the sea.

Originally published in The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

About the Author

Cecelia Holland is one of the world’s most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty year career, she’s written almost thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakessy, Two Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, Death of Attila, Hammer For Princes, The King’s Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street, Sea Beggars, The Earl, The King in Winter, The Belt of Gold, The Serpent Dreamer, The High City, Kings of the North, and a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, and Varanger. She also wrote the well-known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975. Her most recent book is a new fantasy novel, Dragon Heart.

The Dragonslayer of Merebarton

K.J. Parker

I was mending my chamber pot when they came to tell me about the dragon.

Mending a pot is one of those jobs you think is easy, because tinkers do it, and tinkers are no good or they’d be doing something else. Actually, it’s not easy at all. You have to drill a series of very small holes in the broken pieces, then thread short lengths of wire through the holes, then twist the ends of the wires together really tight, so as to draw the bits together firmly enough to make the pot watertight. In order to do the job you need a very hard, sharp, thin drill bit, a good eye, loads of patience, and at least three pairs of rock-steady hands. The tinker had quoted me a turner and a quarter; get lost, I told him, I’ll do it myself. It was beginning to dawn on me that some sorts of work are properly reserved for specialists.

Ah, the irony.

Stupid of me to break it in the first place. I’m not usually that clumsy. Stumbling about in the dark, was how I explained it. You should’ve lit a lamp, then, shouldn’t you, she said. I pointed out that you don’t need a lamp in the long summer evenings. She smirked at me. I don’t think she quite understands how finely balanced our financial position is. We’re not hard up, nothing like that. There’s absolutely no question of having to sell off any of the land, or take out mortgages. It’s just that, if we carry on wasting money unnecessarily on lamp-oil and tinkers and like frivolities, there’ll come a time when the current slight reduction in our income will start to be a mild nuisance. Only temporary, of course. The hard times will pass, and soon we’ll all be just fine.

Like I said, the irony.

“Ebba’s here to see you,” she said.

She could see I was busy. “He’ll have to come back,” I snapped. I had three little bits of wire gripped between my lips, which considerably reduced my snapping power.

“He said it’s urgent.”

“Fine.” I put down the pot—call it that, no way it was a pot anymore. It was disjointed memories of the shape of a pot, loosely tied together with metal string, like the scale armor the other side wore in Outremer. “Send him up.”

“He’s not coming up here in those boots,” she said, and at once I realized that no, he wasn’t, not when she was using that tone of voice. “And why don’t you just give up on that? You’re wasting your time.”

Women have no patience. “The tinker—”

“That bit doesn’t go there.”

I dropped the articulated mess on the floor and walked past her, down the stairs, into the great hall. Great, in this context, is strictly a comparative term.

Ebba and I understand each other. For a start, he’s practically the same age as me—I’m a week younger; so what? We both grew up silently ashamed of our fathers (his father Ossun was the laziest man on the estate; mine—well) and we’re both quietly disappointed with our children. He took over his farm shortly before I came home from Outremer, so we both sort of started off being responsible for our own destinies around the same time. I have no illusions about him, and I can’t begin to imagine he has any about me. He’s medium height, bald and thin, stronger than he looks and smarter than he sounds. He used to set up the targets and pick up the arrows for me when I was a boy; never used to say anything, just stood there looking bored.

He had that look on his face. He told me I wasn’t going to believe what he was about to tell me.

The thing about Ebba is, he has absolutely no imagination. Not even when roaring drunk—whimpering drunk in his case; very rare occurrence, in case you’ve got the impression he’s what she calls basically-no-good. About twice a year, specific anniversaries. I have no idea what they’re the anniversaries of, and of course I don’t ask. Twice a year, then, he sits in the hayloft with a big stone jar and only comes out when it’s empty. Not, is the point I’m trying to make, prone to seeing things not strictly speaking there.

“There’s a dragon,” he said.

Now Ossun, his father, saw all manner of weird and wonderful things. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” I said. He just looked at me. Ebba never argues or contradicts; doesn’t need to.

“All right,” I said, and the words just sort of squeezed out, like a fat man in a narrow doorway. “Where?”

“Down Merebarton.”

A brief digression concerning dragons.

There’s no such thing. However, there’s the White Drake (its larger cousin, the Blue Drake, is now almost certainly extinct). According to Hrabanus’ Imperfect Bestiary, the White Drake is a native of the large and entirely unexpected belt of marshes you stumble into after you’ve crossed the desert, going from Crac Boamond to the sea. Hrabanus thinks it’s a very large bat, but conscientiously cites Priscian, who holds that it’s a featherless bird, and Saloninus, who maintains that it’s a winged lizard. The White Drake can get to be five feet long—that’s nose to tip-of-tail; three feet of that is tail, but it can still give you a nasty nip. They launch themselves out of trees, which can be horribly alarming (I speak from personal experience). White Drakes live almost exclusively on carrion and rotting fruit, rarely attack unless provoked, and absolutely definitely don’t breathe fire.

White Drakes aren’t found outside Outremer. Except, some idiot of a nobleman brought back five breeding pairs about a century ago, to decorate the grounds of his castle. Why people do these things, I don’t know. My father tried to keep peacocks once. As soon as we opened the cage they were off like arrows from the bowstring; next heard of six miles away, and could we please come and do something about them, because they were pecking the thatch out in handfuls. My father rode over that way, happening to take his bow with him. No more was ever said about peacocks.

Dragons, by contrast, are nine to ten feet long excluding the tail; they attack on sight, and breathe fire. At any rate, this one did.

Three houses and four barns in Merebarton, two houses and a hayrick in Stile. Nobody hurt yet, but only a matter of time. A dozen sheep carcasses, stripped to the bone. One shepherd reported being followed by the horrible thing: he saw it, it saw him, he turned and ran; it just sort of drifted along after him, hardly a wingbeat, as if mildly curious. When he couldn’t run any further, he tried crawling down a badger hole. Got stuck, head down the hole, legs sticking up in the air. He reckoned he felt the thump as the thing pitched down next to him, heard the snuffling—like a bull, he reckoned; felt its warm breath on his ankles. Time sort of stopped for a while, and then it went away again. The man said it was the first time he’d pissed himself and felt the piss running down his chest and dripping off his chin. Well, there you go.

The Brother at Merebarton appears to have taken charge, the way they do. He herded everyone into the grain store—stone walls, yes, but a thatched roof; you’d imagine even a Brother would’ve watched them making charcoal some time—and sent a terrified young kid off on a pony to, guess what. You’ve got it. Fetch the knight.

At this point, the story recognizes (isn’t that what they say in Grand Council?) Dodinas le Cure Hardy, age fifty-six, knight, of the honors of Westmoor, Merebarton, East Rew, Middle Side, and Big Room; veteran of Outremer (four years, so help me), in his day a modest success on the circuit—three second places in ranking tournaments, two thirds, usually in the top twenty out of an average field of forty or so. Through with all that a long time ago, though. I always knew I was never going to be one of those gaunt, terrifying old men who carry on knocking ’em down and getting knocked down into their sixties. I had an uncle like that, Petipas of Lyen. I saw him in a tournament when he was sixty-seven, and some young giant bashed him off his horse. Uncle landed badly, and I watched him drag himself up off the ground, so desperately tired. I was only, what, twelve; even I could see, every last scrap of flesh and bone was yelling, don’t want to do this anymore. But he stood up, shamed the young idiot into giving him a go on foot, and proceeded to use his head as an anvil for ten minutes before graciously accepting his surrender. There was so much anger in that performance—not at the kid, for showing him up, Uncle wasn’t like that. He was furious with himself for getting old, and he took it out on the only target available. I thought the whole thing was disturbing and sad. I won’t ever be like that, I told myself.

(The question was, is: why? I can understand fighting. I fought—really fought—in Outremer. I did it because I was afraid the other man was going to kill me. So happens my defense has always been weak, so I compensate with extreme aggression. Never could keep it going for very long, but on the battlefield that’s not usually an issue. So I attacked anything that moved with white-hot ferocity fueled entirely and exclusively by ice-cold fear. Tournaments, though, jousting, behourd, the grand melee—what was the point? I have absolutely no idea, except that I did feel very happy indeed on those rare occasions when I got a little tin trophy to take home. Was that enough to account for the pain of being laid up six weeks with two busted ribs? Of course it wasn’t. We do it because it’s what we do; one of my father’s more profound statements. Conversely, I remember my aunt: silly woman, too soft for her own good. She kept these stupid big white chickens, and when they got past laying she couldn’t bear to have their necks pulled. Instead, they were taken out into the woods and set free, meaning in real terms fed to the hawks and foxes. One time, my turn, I lugged down a cage with four hens and two cocks squashed in there, too petrified to move. Now, what draws in the fox is the clucking; so I turned them out in different places, wide apart, so they had nobody to talk to. Released the last hen, walking back down the track; already the two cock birds had found each other, no idea how, and were ripping each other into tissue scraps with their spurs. They do it because it’s what they do. Someone once said, the man who’s tired of killing is tired of life. Not sure I know what that means.)

A picture is emerging, I hope, of Dodinas le Cure Hardy; while he was active in chivalry he tried to do what was expected of him, but his heart was never in it. Glad, in a way, to be past it and no longer obliged to take part. Instead, prefers to devote himself to the estate, trying to keep the ancestral mess from collapsing in on itself. A man aware of his obligations, and at least some of his many shortcomings.

Go and fetch the knight, says the fool of a Brother. Tell him—

On reflection, if I hadn’t seen those wretched White Drakes in Outremer, there’s a reasonable chance I’d have refused to believe in a dragon trashing Merebarton, and then, who knows, it might’ve flown away and bothered someone else. Well, you don’t know, that’s the whole point. It’s that very ignorance that makes life possible. But when Ebba told me what the boy told him he’d seen, immediately I thought; White Drake. Clearly it wasn’t one, but it was close enough to something I’d seen to allow belief to seep into my mind, and then I was done for. No hope.

Even so, I think I said, “Are you sure?” about six or seven times, until eventually it dawned on me I was making a fool of myself. At which point, a horrible sort of mist of despair settled over me, as I realized that this extraordinary, impossible, grossly and viciously unfair thing had landed on me, and that I was going to have to deal with it.

But you do your best. You struggle, just as a man crushed under a giant stone still draws in the last one or two desperate whistling breaths; pointless, but you can’t just give up. So I looked him steadily in the eye, and I said, “So, what do they expect me to do about it?”

He didn’t say a word. Looked at me.

“The hell with that,” I remember shouting. “I’m fifty-six years old, I don’t even hunt boar anymore. I’ve got a stiff knee. I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

He looked at me. When you’ve known someone all your life, arguing with them is more or less arguing with yourself. Never had much joy with lying to myself. Or anyone else, come to that. Of course, my mother used to say: the only thing I want you not to be the best in the world at is lying. She said a lot of that sort of thing; much better written down on paper rather than said out loud in casual conversation, but of course she couldn’t read or write. She also tended to say: do your duty. I don’t think she ever liked me very much. Loved, of course, but not liked.

He was looking at me. I felt like that poor devil under the stone (at the siege of Crac des Bests; man I knew slightly). Comes a point when you just can’t breathe anymore.

We do have a library: forty-seven books. The Imperfect Bestiary is an abridged edition, local copy, drawings are pretty laughable, they make everything look like either a pig or a cow, because that’s all the poor fool who drew it had ever seen. So there I was, looking at a picture of a big white cow with wings, thinking: how in God’s name am I supposed to kill something like that?

White Drakes don’t breathe fire, but there’s this stupid little lizard in Permia somewhere that does. About eighteen inches long, otherwise completely unremarkable; not to put too fine a point on it, it farts through its mouth and somehow contrives to set fire to it. You see little flashes and puffs of smoke among the reed beds. So it’s possible. Wonderful.

(Why would anything want to do that? Hrabanus, who has an answer for every damn thing, points out that the reed beds would clog up the delta, divert the flowing water and turn the whole of South Permia into a fetid swamp if it wasn’t for the frequent, regular fires, which clear off the reed and lay down a thick bed of fertile ash, just perfect for everything else to grow sweet and fat and provide a living for the hundreds of species of animals and birds who live there. The fires are started by the lizards, who appear to serve no other function. Hrabanus points to this as proof of the Divine Clockmaker theory. I think they do it because it’s what they do, though I’m guessing the lizards who actually do the fire-starting are resentful younger sons. Tell you about my brother in a minute.)

She found me in the library. Clearly she’d been talking to Ebba. “Well?” she said.

I told her what I’d decided to do. She can pull this face of concentrated scorn and fury. It’s so intensely eloquent, there’s really no need for her to add words. But she does. Oh, she does.

“I’ve got no choice,” I protested. “I’m the knight.”

“You’re fifty-six and you get out of breath climbing the stairs. And you’re proposing to fight dragons.”

It’s a black lie about the stairs. Just that one time; and that was the clock-tower. Seventy-seven steps to the top. “I don’t want to do it,” I pointed out. “Last bloody thing I want—”

“Last bloody thing you’ll ever do, if you’re stupid enough to do it.” She never swears, except when quoting me back at myself. “Just think for a minute, will you? If you get yourself killed, what’ll happen to this place?”

“I have no intention of getting myself—”

“Florian’s too young to run the estate,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “That clown of a bailiff of yours can’t be trusted to remember to breathe without someone standing over him. On top of which, there’s heriot and wardship, that’s hundreds and hundreds of thalers we simply haven’t got, which means having to sell land, and once you start doing that you might as well load up a handcart and take to the roads, because—”

“Absolutely no intention of getting killed,” I said.

“And for crying out loud don’t shout,” she shouted. “It’s bad enough you’re worrying me to death without yelling at me as well. I don’t know why you do this to me. Do you hate me, or something?”

We were four and a quarter seconds away from tears, and I really can’t be doing with that. “All right,” I said. “So tell me. What do I do?”

“I don’t know, do I? I don’t get myself into these ridiculous messes.” I wish I could do that; I should be able to. After all, it’s the knight’s move, isn’t it? A step at right angles, then jump clean over the other man’s head. “What about that useless brother of yours? Send him.”

The dreadful thing is, the same thought had crossed my mind. It’d be—well, not acceptable, but within the rules, meaning there’s precedents. Of course, I’d have to be practically bedridden with some foul but honorable disease. Titurel is ten years younger than me and still competing regularly on the circuit, though at the time he was three miles away, at the lodge, with some female he’d found somewhere. And if I really was ill—

I was grateful to her. If she hadn’t suggested it, I might just have considered it. As it was; “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Just think, if I was to chicken out and Titurel actually managed to kill this bloody thing. We’ve got to live here. He’d be insufferable.”

She breathed through her nose; like, dare I say it, one of the D things. “All right,” she said. “Though how precisely it’s better for you to get killed and your appalling brother moves in and takes over running the estate—”

“I am not going to get killed,” I said.

“But there, you never listen to me, so I might as well save my breath.” She paused and scowled at me. “Well?”

Hard, sometimes, to remember that when I married her, she was the Fair Maid of Lannandale. “Well what?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Oh,” he said, sort of half-turning and wiping his forehead on his forearm. “It’s you.”

Another close contemporary of mine. He’s maybe six months older than me, took over the forge just before my father died. He’s never liked me. Still, we understand each other. He’s not nearly as good a tradesman as he thinks he is, but he’s good enough.

“Come to pay me for those harrows?” he said.

“Not entirely,” I replied. “I need something made.”

“Of course you do.” He turned his back on me, dragged something orange-hot out from under the coals, and bashed it, very hard, very quickly, for about twenty seconds. Then he shoved it back under the coals and hauled on the bellows handle a dozen times. Then he had leisure to talk to me. “I’ll need a deposit.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. There was a small heap of tools piled up on the spare anvil. I moved them carefully aside and spread out my scraps of parchment. “Now, you’ll need to pay attention.”

The parchment I’d drawn my pathetic attempts at sketches on was the fly-leaf out of Monomachus of Teana’s Principles of Mercantile Law. I’d had just enough left over to use for a very brief note, which I’d folded four times, sealed, and sent the stable boy off to deliver. It came back, folded the other way; and under my message, written in big crude handwriting, smudged for lack of sand—

What the hell do you want it for?

I wasn’t in the mood. I stamped back into the house (I’d been out in the barn, rummaging about in the pile of old junk), got out the pen and ink and wrote sideways up the margin (only just enough room, writing very small)—

No time. Please. Now.

I underlined please twice. The stable boy had wandered off somewhere, so I sent the kitchenmaid. She whined about having to go out in her indoors shoes. I ask you.

Moddo the blacksmith is one of those men who gets caught up in the job in hand. He whinges and complains, then the problems of doing the job snag his imagination, and then your main difficulty is getting it away from him when it’s finished, because he’s just come up with some cunning little modification which’ll make it ever so slightly, irrelevantly better.

He does good work. I was so impressed I paid cash.

“Your design was useless, so I changed it,” he’d said. A bit of an overstatement. What he’d done was to substitute two thin springs for one fat one, and add on a sort of ratchet thing taken off a millers’ winch, to make it easier to wind it up. It was still sticky with the oil he’d quenched it in. The sight of it made my flesh crawl.

Basically, it was just a very, very large gin trap, with an offset pressure plate. “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Think about it. Think about birds. In order to get off the ground, they’ve got very light bones, right?”

Ebba shrugged: if you say so.

“Well,” I told him, “they have. And you break a bird’s leg, it can’t get off the ground. I’m assuming it’s the same with this bastard. We put out a carcass, with this underneath. It stands on the carcass, braces it with one foot so it can tear it up with the other. Bang, got him. This thing ought to snap the bugger’s leg like a carrot, and then it won’t be going anywhere in a hurry, you can be sure of that.”

He frowned. I could tell the sight of the trap scared him, like it did me. The mainspring was three eighths of an inch thick. Just as well Moddo thought to add a cocking mechanism. “You’ll still have to kill it, though,” he said.

I grinned at him. “Why?” I asked. “No, the hell with that. Just keep everybody and their livestock well away for a week until it starves to death.”

He was thinking about it. I waited. “If it can breathe fire,” he said slowly, “maybe it can melt the trap off.”

“And burn through its own leg in the process. Also,” I added—I’d considered this very point—“even without the trap it’s still crippled, it won’t be able to hunt and feed. Just like a bird that’s got away from the cat.”

He pulled a small frown that means, well, maybe. “We’ll need a carcass.”

“There’s that sick goat,” I said.

Nod. His sick goat. Well, I can’t help it if all my animals are healthy.

He went off with the small cart to fetch the goat. A few minutes later, a big wagon crunched down to the yard gate and stopped just in time. Too wide to pass through; it’d have got stuck.

Praise be, Marhouse had sent me the scorpion. Rather less joy and happiness, he’d come along with it, but never mind.

The scorpion is genuine Mezentine, two hundred years old at least. Family tradition says Marhouse’s great-great-and-so-forth-grandfather brought it back from the Grand Tour, as a souvenir. More likely, his grandfather took it in part exchange or to settle a bad debt; but to acknowledge that would be to admit that two generations back they were still in trade.

“What the hell,” Marhouse said, hopping down off the wagon box, “do you want it for?”

He’s all right, I suppose. We were in Outremer together—met there for the first time, which is crazy, since our houses are only four miles apart. But he was fostered as a boy, away up country somewhere. I’ve always assumed that’s what made him turn out like he did.

I gave him a sort of hopeless grin. Our kitchenmaid was still sitting up on the box, hoping for someone to help her down. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m hoping we won’t need it, but—”

A scorpion is a siege engine; a pretty small one, compared to the huge stone-throwing catapults and mangonels and trebuchets they pounded us with at Crac des Bests. It’s essentially a big steel crossbow, with a frame, a heavy stand, and a super-efficient winch. One man with a long steel bar can wind it up, and it shoots a steel arrow long as your arm and thick as your thumb three hundred yards. We had them at Metouches. Fortunately, the other lot didn’t.

I told Marhouse about the dragon. He assumed I was trying to be funny. Then he caught sight of the trap, lying on the ground in front of the cider house, and he went very quiet.

“You’re serious,” he said.

I nodded. “Apparently it’s burned some houses out at Merebarton.”

“Burned.” Never seen him look like that before.

“So they reckon. I don’t think it’s just a drake.”

“That’s—” He didn’t get around to finishing the sentence. No need.

“Which is why,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, “I’m so very glad your granddad had the foresight to buy a scorpion. No wonder he made a fortune in business. He obviously knew good stuff when he saw it.”

Took him a moment to figure that one out, by which time the moment had passed. “There’s no arrows,” he said.

“What?”

“No arrows,” he repeated, “just the machine. Well,” he went on, “it’s not like we use the bloody thing, it’s just for show.”

I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times. “Surely there must’ve been—”

“Originally, yes, I suppose so. I expect they got used for something around the place.” He gave me a thin smile. “We don’t tend to store up old junk for two hundred years on the off chance in my family,” he said.

I was trying to remember what scorpion bolts look like. There’s a sort of three-bladed flange down the butt end, to stabilize them in flight. “No matter,” I said. “Bit of old rod’ll have to do. I’ll get Moddo to run me some up.” I was looking at the machine. The lead screws and the keyways the slider ran in were caked up with stiff, solid bogeys of dried grease. “Does it work?”

“I assume so. Or it did, last time it was used. We keep it covered with greased hides in the root store.”

I flicked a flake of rust off the frame. It looked sound enough, but what if the works had seized solid? “Guess I’d better get it down off the cart and we’ll see,” I said. “Well, thanks again. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

Meaning: please go away now. But Marhouse just scowled at me. “I’m staying here,” he said. “You honestly think I’d trust you lot with a family heirloom?”

“No, really,” I said, “you don’t need to trouble. I know how to work these things, remember. Besides, they’re pretty well indestructible.”

Wasting my breath. Marhouse is like a dog I used to have, couldn’t bear to be left out of anything; if you went out for a shit in the middle of the night, she had to come too. Marhouse was the only one of us in Outremer who ever volunteered for anything. And never got picked, for that exact reason.

So, through no choice or fault of my own, there were nine of us: me, Ebba, Marhouse, the six men from the farm. Of the six, Liutprand is seventeen and Rognvald is twenty-nine, though he barely counts, with his bad arm. The rest of us somewhere between fifty-two and sixty. Old men. We must be mad, I thought.

We rode out there in the flat-bed cart, bumping and bouncing over the ruts in Watery Lane. Everybody was thinking the same thing, and nobody said a word: what if the bugger swoops down and crisps the lot of us while we’re sat here in the cart? In addition, I was also thinking: Marhouse is his own fault, after all, he’s a knight too, and he insisted on butting in. The rest of them, though—my responsibility. Send for the knight, they’d said, not the knight and half the damn village. But a knight in real terms isn’t a single man, he’s the nucleus of a unit, the heart of a society; the lance in war, the village in peace, he stands for them, in front of them when there’s danger, behind them when times are hard, not so much an individual, more of a collective noun. That’s understood, surely; so that, in all those old tales of gallantry and errantry, when the poet sings of the knight wandering in a dark wood and encountering the evil to be fought, the wrong to be put right, “knight” in that context is just shorthand for a knight and his squire and his armor-bearer and his three men-at-arms and the boy who leads the spare horses. The others aren’t mentioned by name, they’re subsumed in him, he gets the glory or the blame but everyone knows, if they stop to think about it, that the rest of them were there too; or who lugged around the spare lances, to replace the ones that got broken? And who got the poor bugger in and out of his full plate harness every morning and evening? There are some straps and buckles you just can’t reach on your own, unless you happen to have three hands on the ends of unnaturally long arms. Without the people around me, I’d be completely worthless. It’s understood. Well, isn’t it?

We set the trap up on the top of a small rise, in the big meadow next to the old clay pit. Marhouse’s suggestion, as a matter of fact; he reckoned that it was where the flightlines the thing had been following all crossed. Flightlines? Well yes, he said, and proceeded to plot all the recorded attacks on a series of straight lines, scratched in the dried splatter on the side of the cart with a stick. It looked pretty convincing to me. Actually, I hadn’t really given it any thought, just assumed that if we dumped a bleeding carcass down on the ground, the dragon would smell it and come whooshing down. Stupid, when you come to think of it. And I call myself a huntsman.

Moddo had fitted the trap with four good, thick chains, attached to eighteen-inch steel pegs, which we hammered into the ground. Again, Marhouse did the thinking. They needed to be offset (his word) so that if it pulled this way or that, there’d be three chains offering maximum resistance—well, it made sense when he said it. He’s got that sort of brain, invents clever machines and devices for around the farm. Most of them don’t work, but some of them do.

The trap, of course, was Plan A. Plan B was the scorpion, set up seventy-five yards away under the busted chestnut tree, with all that gorse and briars for cover. The idea was, we had a direct line of sight, but if we missed and he came at us, he wouldn’t dare swoop in too close, for fear of smashing his wings on the low branches. That bit was me.

We propped the poor dead goat up on sticks so it wasn’t actually pressing on the floorplate of the trap, then scampered back to where we’d set up the scorpion. Luitprand got volunteered to drive the cart back to Castle Farm; he whined about being out in the open, but I chose him because he’s the youngest and I wanted him well out of harm’s way if the dragon actually did put in an appearance. Seventy-five yards was about as far as I trusted the scorpion to shoot straight without having to make allowance for elevation—we didn’t have time to zero it, obviously—but it felt stupidly close. How long would it take the horrible thing to fly seventy-five yards? I had no idea, obviously. We spanned the scorpion—reassuringly hard to do—loaded Moddo’s idea of a bolt into the slider groove, nestled down as far as we could get into the briars and nettles, and waited.

No show. When it got too dark to see, Marhouse said, “What kind of poison do you think it’d take to kill something like that?”

I’d been thinking about that. “Something we haven’t got,” I said.

“You reckon?”

“Oh come on,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t keep a wide selection of poisons in the house. For some reason.”

“There’s archer’s root,” Ebba said.

“He’s right,” Marhouse said. “That stuff’ll kill just about anything.”

“Of course it will,” I replied. “But nobody around here—”

“Mercel,” Ebba said. “He’s got some.”

News to me. “What?”

“Mercel. Lidda’s boy. He uses it to kill wild pigs.”

Does he now?, I thought. It had occurred to me that wild boar were getting a bit hard to find. I knew all about smearing a touch of archer’s root on a bit of jagged wire nailed to a fencepost—boar love to scratch, and it’s true, they do a lot of damage to standing corn. That’s why I pay compensation. Archer’s root is illegal, of course, but so are a lot of useful everyday commodities.

“I’d better ask him,” Ebba said. “He won’t want to get in any trouble.”

Decided unanimously, apparently. Well, we weren’t doing any good crouching in the bushes. It did cross my mind that if the dragon hadn’t noticed a dead goat with a trap under it, there was no guarantee it’d notice the same dead goat stuffed full of archer’s root, but I dismissed the idea as unconstructive.

We left the trap and the scorpion set up, just in case, and rode in the cart back to Castle Farm. To begin with, as we came over the top of the Hog’s Back down Castle Lane, I assumed the pretty red glow on the skyline was the last blush of the setting sun. As we got closer, I hoped that was what it was. By the time we passed the quince orchard, however, the hypothesis was no longer tenable.

We found Luitprand in the goose pond. Stupid fool, he’d jumped in the water to keep from getting burned up. Of course, the mud’s three feet deep on the bottom. I could have told him that.

In passing: I think Luitprand was my son. At any rate, I knew his mother rather too well, seventeen years ago. Couldn’t ever say anything, naturally. But he reminded me a lot of myself. For a start, he was half-smart stupid, just like me. Hurling myself in the pond to avoid the flames was just the sort of thing I might have done at his age; and, goes without saying, he wasn’t there when we dug the bloody pond, twenty-one years ago, so how could he have known we’d chosen the soft spot, no use for anything else?

No other casualties, thank God, but the hay barn, the straw rick, the woodpile, all gone. The thatch, miraculously, burned itself out without taking the rafters with it. But losing that much hay meant we’d be killing a lot of perfectly good stock come winter, since I can’t afford to buy in. One damn thing after another.

Opito, Larcan’s wife, was hysterical, even though her home hadn’t gone up in flames after all. Larcan said it was a great big lizard, about twenty feet long. He got one very brief glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, just before he dragged his wife and son under the cart. He looked at me like it was all my fault. Just what I needed after a long day crouched in a briar patch.

Luitprand played the flute; not very well. I gave him the one I brought back from Outremer. I never did find it among his stuff, so I can only assume he sold it at some point.

Anyway, that was that, as far as I was concerned. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, it would have to be dealt with, as soon as possible. On the ride back from the farm, Marhouse had been banging on about flightlines again, where we were going to move the bait to; two days here, while the wind’s in the south, then if that’s no good, then another two days over there, and if that still doesn’t work, we’ll know for sure it must be following the line of the river, so either here, there, or just possibly everywhere, would be bound to do the trick, logically speaking. I smiled and nodded. I’m sure he was perfectly correct. He’s a good huntsman, Marhouse. Come the end of the season, he always knows exactly where all the game we’ve failed to find must be holed up. Next year, he then says—

Trouble was, there wasn’t time for a next year.

By midnight (couldn’t sleep, oddly enough) I was fairly sure how it had to be done.

Before you start grinning to yourself at my presumption, I had no logical explanation for my conclusions. Flightlines, patterns of behavior, life cycles, cover crops, mating seasons, wind directions; put them together and you’ll inevitably flush out the truth, which will then elude you, zig-zag running through the roots of the long variables. I knew.

I knew, because I used to hunt with my father. He was, of course, always in charge of everything, knew everything, excelled at everything. We never caught much. And I knew, when he’d drawn up the lines of beaters, given them their timings (say three Glorious Sun Ascendants and two Minor Catechisms, then come out making as much noise as you can), positioned the stillhunters and the hounds and the horsemen, finally blown the horn; I knew exactly where the wretched animal would come bursting out, so as to elude us all with the maximum of safety and the minimum of effort. Pure intuition, never failed. Naturally, I never said anything. Not my place to.

So: I knew what was going to happen, and that there was nothing much I could do about it, and my chances of success and survival were—well, not to worry about that. When I was in Outremer, I got shot in the face with an arrow. Should’ve killed me instantly; but by some miracle it hung up in my cheekbone, and an enemy doctor we’d captured the day before yanked it out with a pair of tongs. You should be dead, they said to me, like I’d deliberately cheated. No moral fiber. Ever since then—true, I shuddered to think how the estate would get on with my brother in charge, but it survived my father and grandfather, so it was clearly indestructible. Besides, everyone dies sooner or later. It’s not like I’m important.

Marhouse insisted on coming with us. I told him, you stay here, we’ll need a wise, experienced hand to take charge if it decides to burn out the castle. For a moment I thought he’d fallen for it, but no such luck.

So there were three of us: me, Ebba, Marhouse. The idea was, we’d follow the Ridgeway on horseback, looking down on either side. As soon as we saw smoke, Ebba would ride back to the castle and get the gear, meet us at the next likely attack scene. I know; bloody stupid idea. But I knew it wouldn’t happen like that, because I knew how it’d happen.

Marhouse had on his black-and-white—that’s breastplate, pauldrons, rerebraces, and tassets. I told him, you’ll boil to death in that lot. He scowled at me. He’d also fetched along a full-weight lance, issue. You won’t need that, I told him. I’d got a boar-spear, and Ebba was carrying the steel crossbow my father spent a whole year’s apple money on, the year before he died. “But they’re just to make us feel better,” I said. That got me another scowl. The wrong attitude.

Noon; nothing to be seen anywhere. I was just daring to think, perhaps the bloody thing’s moved on, or maybe it’d caught some disease or got itself hung up in a tree. Then I saw a crow.

I think Ebba saw it first, but he didn’t point and say, “Look, there’s a crow.” Marhouse was explaining some fine point of decoying, how you go about establishing which tree is the principal turning point on an elliptical recursive flight pattern. I thought: that’s not a crow, it’s just hanging there. Must be a hawk.

Ebba was looking over his shoulder. No, not a hawk, the profile’s wrong. Marhouse stopped talking, looked at me, said, “What are you two staring at?” I was thinking, Oh.

I’m right about things so rarely that I usually relish the experience. Not this time.

Oh, you may be thinking, is a funny way of putting it. But that was the full extent of it: no elation, no regret, not even resignation; to my great surprise, no real fear. Just: oh, as in, well, here we are, then. Call it a total inability to feel anything. Twice in Outremer, once when my father died, and now. I’d far rather have wet myself, but you can’t decide these things for yourself. Oh, I thought, and that was all.

Marhouse was swearing, which isn’t like him. He only swears when he’s terrified, or when something’s got stuck or broken. Bad language, he reckons, lubricates the brain, stops it seizing up with fear or anger. Ebba had gone white as milk. His horse was playing up, and he was having to work hard to keep it from bolting. Amazing how they know.

On top of the Ridgeway, of course, there’s no cover. We could gallop forward, or turn around and gallop back; either case, at the rate the bloody thing was moving, it’d be on us long before we could get our heads down. I heard someone give the order to dismount. Wasn’t Marhouse, because he stayed mounted. Wouldn’t have been Ebba, so I guess it must’ve been me.

First time, it swooped down low over our heads—about as high up as the spire of Blue Temple—and just kept on going. We were frozen solid. We watched. It was on the glide, like a pigeon approaching a laid patch in a barley field, deciding whether to pitch or go on. Very slight tailwind, so if it wanted to come in on us, it’d have to bank, turn up into the wind a little bit to start to stall, then wheel and come in with its wings back. I honestly thought: it’s gone too far, it’s not going to come in. Then it lifted, and I knew.

Sounds odd, but I hadn’t really been looking at it the first time, when it buzzed us. I saw a black bird shape, long neck like a heron, long tail like a pheasant, but no sense of scale. As it came in the second time, I couldn’t help but stare; a real dragon, for crying out loud, something to tell your grandchildren about. Well, maybe.

I’d say the body was about horse-sized, head not in proportion; smaller, like a red deer stag. Wings absurdly large—featherless, like a bat, skin stretched on disturbingly extended fingers. Tail, maybe half as long again as the body; neck like a swan, if that makes any sense. Sort of a gray color, but it looked green at a distance. Big hind legs, small front legs looking vaguely ridiculous, as if it had stolen them off a squirrel. A much rounder snout than I’d expected, almost chubby. It didn’t look all that dangerous, to be honest.

Marhouse is one of those people who translate fear into action; the scareder he is, the braver. Works against people. No warning—it’d have been nice if he’d said something first; he kicked his horse hard enough to stove in a rib, lance in rest, seat and posture straight out of the coaching manual. Rode straight at it.

What happened then—

Marhouse was five yards away from it, going full tilt. The dragon probably couldn’t have slowed down if it had wanted to. Instead—it actually made this sort of “pop” noise as it opened its mouth and burped up a fat round ball of fire, then lifted just a little, to sail about five feet over Marhouse’s head. He, meanwhile, rode straight into the fireball, and through it.

And stopped, and fell all to pieces; the reason being, there was nothing left. Horse, man, all gone, not even ash, and the dozen or so pieces of armor dropping glowing to the ground, cherry-red, like they’d just come off the forge. I’ve seen worse things, in Outremer, but nothing stranger.

I was gawping, forgotten all about the dragon. It was Ebba who shoved me down as it came back. I have no idea why it didn’t just melt us both as it passed, unless maybe it was all out of puff and needed to recharge. Anyway, it soared away, repeated the little lift. I had a feeling it was enjoying itself. Well, indeed. It must be wonderful to be able to fly.

Ebba was shouting at me, waving something, the crossbow, he wanted me to take it from him. “Shoot it,” he was yelling. Made no sense to me; but then again, why not? I took the bow, planted my feet a shoulders’ width apart, left elbow tucked in tight to the chest to brace the bow, just the fingers on the trigger. A good archery stance didn’t seem to have anything to do with the matter in hand—like playing bowls in the middle of an earthquake—but I’m a good archer, so I couldn’t help doing it properly. I found the dragon in the middle of the peep-sight, drew the tip of the arrow up to find it, and pressed the trigger.

For the record, I hit the damn thing. The bolt went in four inches, just above the heart. Good shot. With a bow five times as strong, quite possibly a clean kill.

I think it must’ve hurt, though, because instead of flaming and lifting, it squirmed—hunched its back then stretched out full-length like a dog waking up—and kept coming, straight at me. I think I actually did try and jump out of the way; just rather too late. I think what hit me must’ve been the side of its head.

I had three ribs stoved in once in Outremer, so I knew what was going on. I recognized the sound, and the particular sort of pain, and the not quite being able to breathe. Mostly I remember thinking: it won’t hurt, because any moment now I’ll be dead. Bizarrely reassuring, as if I was cheating, getting away with it. Cheating twice; once by staying alive, once by dying. This man is morally bankrupt.

I was on my back, not able or minded to move. I couldn’t see the dragon. I could hear Ebba shouting; shut up, you old fool, I thought, I’m really not interested. But he was shouting, “Hold on, mate, hold on, I’m coming,” which made absolutely no sense at all—

Then he shut up, and I lay there waiting. I waited, and waited. I’m not a patient man. I waited so long, those crunched ribs started to hurt, or at least I became aware of the pain. For crying out loud, I thought. And waited.

And thought: now just a minute.

It hurt so much, hauling myself onto my side so I could see. I was in tears.

Later, I figured out what had happened. When Ebba saw me go down, he grabbed the boar-spear and ran towards me. I don’t imagine he considered the dragon, except as an inconvenience. Hold on, I’m coming; all his thoughts in his words. He got about half way when the dragon pitched—it must’ve swooped off and come in again. As it put its feet down to land, he must’ve stuck the butt of the spear in the ground and presented the point, like you do with a boar, to let it stick itself, its momentum being far more effective than your own puny strength. As it pitched, it lashed with its tail, sent Ebba flying. Whether or not it realized it was dead, the spear a foot deep in its windpipe before the shaft gave way under the pressure and snapped, I neither know nor care. By the marks on the ground, it rolled three or four times before the lights went out. My best estimate is, it weighed just short of a ton. Ebba—under it as it rolled—was crushed like a grape, so that his guts burst and his eyes popped, and nearly all his bones were broken.

He wouldn’t have thought: I’ll kill the dragon. He’d have thought, ground the spear, like boar-hunting, and then the tail hit him, and then the weight squashed him. So it wouldn’t have been much; not a heroic thought, not the stuff of song and story. Just: this is a bit like boar-hunting, so ground the spear. And then, perhaps: oh.

I think that’s all there is; anywhere, anytime, in the whole world.

I tried preserving the head in honey. We got an old pottery bath and filled it and put the head in; but eight weeks later it had turned green and it stank like hell, and she said, for pity’s sake get rid of it. So we boiled it out and scraped it, and mounted the skull on the wall. Not much bigger than a big deer; in a hundred years’ time, they won’t believe the old story about it being a dragon. No such thing as dragons, they’ll say.

Meanwhile, for now, I’m the Dragonslayer; which is a joke. The duke himself threatened to ride over and take a look at the remains, but affairs of state supervened, thank God. Entertaining the duke and his court would’ve ruined us, and we’d lost so much already.

Twice I’ve cheated. Marhouse was straight as a die, and his end, I’m sorry, was just ludicrous. I keep telling myself, Ebba made a choice, you must respect that. I can’t. Instead of a friend, I have a horrible memory, and yet another debt I can’t pay. People assume you want to be saved, no matter what the cost; sometimes, though, it’s just too expensive to stay alive. Not sure I’ll ever forgive him for that.

And that’s that. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Originally published in Fearsome Journeys edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

One of the most inventive and imaginative writers working in fantasy today, K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling Engineer trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous Fencer (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and Scavenger (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies. His short fiction has been collected in Academic Exercises, and he has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for “Let Maps to Others” and “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong.” His other novels include Sharps, The Company, The Folding Knife, The Hammer, Savages, and The Two of Swords. His most recent novels are The Devil You Know and Downfall of the Gods. K.J. Parker also writes under his real name, Tom Holt. As Holt, he has published Expecting Someone Taller, Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, Ye Gods!, and many other novels.

Frodo Is Dead:
Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic

Christopher Mahon

In 1966, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” on its infamous April cover. Around the same time, a piece of graffiti began appearing in New York subways: Frodo Lives! It was an interesting crossroads for America—God seemed to be fading out of the lives of many Americans, while Tolkien’s masterpiece was just starting to find its audience. Peter S. Beagle’s 1973 introduction to The Fellowship of the Ring gives some insight into the zeitgeist:

“I’ve never thought it an accident that Tolkien’s works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity . . . The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties . . . but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly . . . [Tolkien] is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams, and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either; he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world.”

Beagle’s introduction portrays Tolkien’s fantasy world as a refuge from the realities of modern day, but it’s common knowledge that most secondary worlds borrow liberally from ours—The Scouring of the Shire, for example, has often been cited as Tolkien bringing the effects of English industrialization to Middle-Earth. But Tolkien himself claimed that one thing definitively sets fantasy worlds apart from ours: magic. Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy-Stories was an early attempt at defining the border between fantasy and reality, and one of his chief claims was that Magic (or “Enchantment”) was both the boundary line and the essence of the fantasy genre, as well as the “fairy-stories” that gave birth to it:

“ . . . a “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.”

The danger that fantasy writers and worldbuilders risk today when dealing with magic is a breakdown between the secondary world and this one, mainly due to the ‘scientific’ way magic is treated in contemporary fantasy. Making magic into a kind of science, similar to modern views on thermodynamics or astronomy, risks creating a kind of causal closure that causes each fantasy world to turn into a mirror-image of our world, complete with historical and philosophical parallels to the Age of Enlightenment and its aftermath. Ultimately, the ideas embedded in modern views of science and ration undermine not only the genre, but fantasy’s claim at meaning and the worldbuilder’s authority over their own secondary world.

In stories and legends like those of Oisin or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the way magic works is usually obscure. Rituals, amulets, illusions, and enchantments abound, but explanations do not. Reference books like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough give some insight into magic traditions, but today it’s expected that fantasy stories include the basic amount of information the reader needs to grasp their worlds’ magic. Consequently, magic is expected to operate on some set of rules that keep it consistent. These rules can be clear or vague, disclosed or not, but they are expected to exist. V.E. Schwab, author of A Darker Shade of Magic, addressed this issue directly in a Q&A with io9:

 . . . my belief, when it comes to rules, is that magic is a component of the natural world, and that just like nature, no matter how complicated it can become, at its core, it should be simple. I try to come up with an intuitive foundation for all of my magic—in ADSOM, that means tweaking the magical foundation to suit the world it’s in—so that no matter what I build on it, the ground is stable. And if I do give magic influence over characters and the story, I force it to become a character in its own right, to mitigate the dangers of deus ex machina.

Here, Schwab deals with the issue of creating a magic system. Systems like thermodynamics, kinetic energy, and gravity are taken for granted in fantasy because they’re familiar to us, but magic draws attention to itself by being cut from whole cloth. Magic, as opposed to other kinds of worldbuilding, asks the author to take the unique step of creating a new kind of metaphysics that will explain where magic comes from, how it operates, and how it relates to beings in their world. This becomes not just a scientific process, but an ontological one.

In this sense, every worldbuilder takes on the role of God when they build their magic: before a secondary world is created, there is an implicit, unwritten equivalent to Genesis where an author decides what should be and creates a universe according to their conscious design. As Schwab notes, magic goes beyond just the operations of nature and often plays a key role in the narrative, showing that magic-building, worldbuilding, and story-writing are intrinsically connected. Indeed, in the most effective fantasy stories, magic becomes an expression of the story’s themes and a direct avenue to meaning.

Though Tolkien warned against treating magic like the “vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician,” that’s often what magic becomes in modern fantasy. Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems provide one of the clearest examples. According to Martin Cahill’s article on Tor.com:

Sanderson’s magic systems all follow a similar structure of net gain, net loss, and equilibrium, according to their own natural laws (which are generally similar to environmental, scientific, and physical laws of our world).

Any magic system can be systematic and internally consistent, but ‘scientific’ magic represents a change in type (not degree) by incorporating the ideas that formed our modern conception of science. Concepts like conservation of energy, experimentation, and natural laws reflect not only the operations of the universe, but the historical ideas that influenced our perspective on them, including positivism, ration, and naturalism. These ideas are in turn embedded with a historical narrative and a perspective founded in the 17th-18th century and developed all the way to the present day. Fantasy worlds are built on ideas, and these ideas have the power to change those worlds in fundamental ways.

A good example of a ‘scientific’ magic system is seemingly found in A Wizard of Earthsea, which has a system based on True Names: in the first book, Wizard of Earthsea, Ged spends an extended period of time in the tower of Kurremkarmerruk learning the names of thousands of things, including individual parts of plants, names of animals, and the different seas. Ged is essentially studying taxonomy, with all the esoteric Latin names exchanged for magical ones. Earthsea’s magic follows rules and can be taught, like surgery or computer programming, and though LeGuin’s world is pre-industrial, it’s easy to imagine a time in Earthsea’s future when magic is rationalized and used to make manufacturing, trade, travel, farming, and communication more efficient over the course of a magical industrial revolution, similar to Saruman’s strides toward mechanized industry in The Lord of the Rings.

But this kind of rationalization isn’t just a possibility with ‘scientific’ magic, it’s an inevitability. Magic is unique because its creation and design reflect its secondary world as a whole, and building magic upon ration and science means implicitly accepting the schools of thought that shaped both of those concepts during and after the during the Age of Enlightenment: Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and others. The philosophies embedded in the ‘scientific’ mindset inexorably change the secondary world to resemble ours, because embedded in ration are blueprints for humanity, societal progress, and the universe. As post-Enlightenment thinker Auguste Comte claimed:

‘As to its operation upon Order, it is plain that true science has no other aim than the establishment of intellectual order which is the basis of every other order’.

If a magic system is built like a science, it can be rationalized like a science within its world, meaning that its rules will be found, quantified, and exploited so that it can be subjugated according to human advantage.

The award-winning animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra provide a strong example of this, demonstrating that subjecting magic to ration inevitably causes a progression from a ‘mystical,’ pre-industrial period to a ‘modern’ one. In the original series, The Last Airbender, ‘bending’ (the magic manipulation of the four elements) is tied up with mysticism, nature, and martial arts. It is innately connected to the spirit world and the balance of the human world, which is maintained by a cyclically reincarnated Avatar, the only one who can master all four elements. There are four nations based around their respective bending techniques (Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, Water Tribe, and Air Nomads), but only a few, select masters of fire-bending may learn the secret of lightning-bending, which is treated with reverence similar to qi-gong within the Fire Nation.

In The Legend of Korra, however, the Fire Nation develops fire-bending into the basis for a steam-powered industrial society, which demystifies lightning-bending and trains benders in the technique en masse to create human electricity plants. One of the key themes of the show is a movement against benders and the monopoly they hold on magical power. Most significantly, though, humans eventually discover how to manipulate the nature of magic and use it to destabilize the natural order of the universe, including the potential destruction of the Avatar cycle.

The Avatar series shows that the process of magic’s subjugation inevitably ends with the re-emergence of similar philosophical and societal issues that affected the world in the wake of the Enlightenment: the application of ration to society and the breakdown of traditions, the rejection of old values and mysticism, the upset of power, and eventually revolts, critiques, and popular movements.

The grand irony of this is that the Enlightenment and its fictional analog always sow the seeds of their own destruction. According to Kenan Malik in his 2015 lecture at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation on the Enlightenment and its legacy, the radical changes and social upheaval brought about by Enlightenment philosophers culminated in a general disillusionment with order:

The late nineteenth century experienced, then, not simply a crisis of faith but also a ‘crisis of reason,’ the beginnings of a set of trends that were to become highly significant in the twentieth century—the erosion of Enlightenment optimism, a disenchantment with ideas of progress, a disbelief in concepts of truth.

When magic is built according to ration, these historical ideas and societal changes will emerge in the secondary world for the same reasons they did in ours. Fantasy then becomes a type of speculative alternate history played out across different worlds: it’s only a matter of time before every Middle-Earth becomes just ‘Earth.’

But apart from the historical dimension, there is a fundamentally philosophical one. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be the inevitable narrative of all ‘scientific’ magic systems, taking on the same relevance it did during the Industrial Revolution: when humans finally master nature, they become like gods, with science/magic offering a path to apotheosis and the ability to reforge the world in our own image.

Even if there are other gods in a given fantasy world, they too, must be subject to rules and limits on their power. Eventually, in the pursuit of knowledge or control over the universe, humanity or its analogs will create a Creature, unseat a god, or utter the words “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Residents of the secondary world (whether elf, human, or other) will find themselves, as Nietzsche described, erasing the horizon, unchaining the Earth from the sun, or holding the bloody knives used to murder their ‘gods.’

The inevitable conclusion of ration and the Enlightenment enterprise, in the primary world as well as the secondary, is the death of God—the same topic Time Magazine brought up in 1966 and the one Friedrich Nietzsche originally described in 1882. For Nietzsche, humanity had used the tools of reason to free itself from reliance or belief in a power higher than itself and now had the chance to transcend reason and shape the world according to its own ideas. According to Malik, “[Nietzsche’s] brilliance at giving voice to the growing disaffection of the age with both faith and reason would eventually turn him into a key figure of the postmodern assault on the so-called Enlightenment project.”

If a world is governed by ration, it will inevitably unravel itself, just as we have unraveled ours. The grand circle will eventually complete itself, ending with Nietzsche and postmodernism finding their way into the secondary world as well as the primary.

If basing magic on science and ration, embedded with the historical and philosophical issues of the past three hundred years, inevitably leads to a world very similar to our own (complete with a postmodern view on life, humanity, and meaning), then the inevitable narrative of all fantasy will be echoes of our own history. One possible alternative is to create a kind of magic that is both systematic and consistent, but embedded with a different perspective on humanity and the universe. Despite the seemingly scientific, taxonomic nature of magic in A Wizard of Earthsea, there is an underlying pattern of meaning to Earthsea’s universe, which is the need for balance and harmony in every aspect of life—though magic can upset the balance, there is an ideal order to the world and human actions. That ‘ideal order’ reflects a distinct perspective on humanity and the meaning of life, one that differs from that of the primary world.

But building a world and assigning meaning to it, even in the context of fiction, becomes problematic in its own right. Whether or not the secondary world reflects a Nietzschean or postmodern perspective, there is pressure from the primary world to conform to it. In his video “Middle-Earth and the Perils of Worldbuilding,” Evan Puschak makes a number of claims about Tolkien’s world, the nature of fantasy novels, worldbuilding, and the relationship between authors and readers. Some of his main points include:

Reading is not the author telling the reader a story—reading is a game in which the author makes implications and the reader uses their interpretive toolbox to create their own interpretation of the story.

Worldbuilding in fantasy novels today is largely based on a passive mindset within the reader because the reader is dependent on the author for the truth about their world.

Fantasy readers’ intense desire to learn about an author’s fantasy world is dangerous because that obsession acclimates readers to passively accepting other forms of ‘worldbuilding,’ including political ideologies.

Puschak’s contentions are a literary expression of the same philosophical ideas that Nietzsche developed a century ago, expounded on by Roland Barthes. The name for the concept Puschak is describing (the rejection of the central authority of the author) is “the Death of the Author,” the literary equivalent of Nietzsche’s “Death of God.”

Within the frameworks of postmodern philosophers and critics, including critical theory, constructing fictional universes and claiming authority over the meaning of the stories told in them dangerously parallels the monopoly on truth originally held by God in Western culture, where ‘God’ is really a byword for dogma, oppression of free thought, and false meta-narratives. Likewise, ‘truth’ or any claim on it is always an attempt to manipulate, oppress, and mislead people through the manipulation of culture by the existing power structure. According to Michel Foucault in his work Truth and Power:

‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth.

By subjecting fantasy to postmodern critiques like these, Puschak and other critics erode the validity of truth or meaning within stories, making sure that not only our world conforms to postmodern ideas regarding the nature of society, culture, and the self, but make sure other worlds obey it, too. These critiques threaten the author’s authority over their own stories, and undermine the claim that literature can touch upon anything meaningful about the human condition. But strangely enough, the struggle over truth waged between our world and the secondary one has already been played out within fantasy itself.

In Terry Pratchett’s famous Discworld series, Discworld is at constant risk of changing into a world much like ours. In 1997’s Hogfather, Pratchett strikes directly at the heart of the matter in a conversation between Death and Susan Sto-Helit, where Death admits that the ideals and fantasies Hogswatch (Discworld’s version of Christmas) represents have no rational justification, and only exist because people believe in them. By the same logic, he admits, human ideals are lies:

TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET [ . . . ] YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

“MY POINT EXACTLY.”

About the Author

Christopher Mahon is a fantasy writer and essayist living in New York. He received his Bachelors in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and currently works as an editor at Outer Places. In his free time he runs The Occult Triangle Lab, a blog on trigonometry, fantasy, and ungodly amounts of milk. Follow him on Twitter @DeadmanMu.

Organic Tech and Healing Clay:
A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor

Chris Urie

Finding yourself within a story is a rite of passage for any reader. There’s that magical moment when you find the analog to a piece of your own soul within the pages of a book. You find yourself with an expanding sense of empathy for characters whose feelings, memories, and experiences are familiar to your own. For fans of science fiction and fantasy, that analog can come in a variety of forms, some human, and some decidedly not.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series of novellas is about a young woman with deep ties to her homeland who ventures out into the stars to attend a prestigious university on another planet. Along the way, she becomes embroiled in an interplanetary dispute between the majority population on Earth and a species of jellyfish-like creatures called the Meduse. An outsider for leaving her people, who are outsiders themselves, Binti uses her skills as a harmonizer and a strange artifact to survive a Meduse attack on her living transport ship. The latest novella Binti: Home has Binti returning to her family and homeland where she encounters a mysterious figure in the night and grapples with how different she has become. Binti’s journey is one of change and self-discovery.

The author of numerous novels, short stories, and articles, Nnedi Okorafor has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award, Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, the Macmillan Prize, and numerous other awards and accolades. Her latest novella Binti: Home was published by Tor this January.

What does science fiction mean to you?

To me as a writer, science fiction has been part of my creative eye. I wasn’t inspired to write science fiction by other science fiction narratives, I started writing it because of trips to Nigeria. I would see glimpses of the future when I’d go there and the future I was seeing there was different from what I was seeing in Western science fiction narratives. I’d see people interacting with technology in unique ways. I’d see technology existing comfortably with specific traditional ways, not in conflict with it. It got me imagining and wanting to see things. I wanted to see what Nigeria would look like in the future and realized that I couldn’t name one satisfactory vision of it that I’d read or seen in a movie (note: I’m not saying I had read every rendering of a future Africa prior, I’m saying that from what I read, nothing satisfied me). And then I started looking beyond Nigeria, West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, South Africa, North Africa . . . Africa as a whole. Then I realized how MUCH there was to write about, to see, to speculate about. And I started writing.

As a reader/viewer, science fiction feeds something in me. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with nature. I spent much of my time traipsing around the empty lot across the street, looking closely at the earth and being fascinated with and researching everybody I’d find (to me, humans are only one of earth’s people). I’d wonder about things like the thoughts of grasshoppers and if ants built time machines we just couldn’t see or understand. I was also obsessed with the mystery of the planets (especially Jupiter, I was and still am obsessed with Jupiter), exploding stars, wispy looking nebulas, and the fact that in a lot of ways, because we haven’t literally touched these places yet, it’s all speculation. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction because I couldn’t relate to the points of views and concerns in them, but I read a lot of science books (my first introduction to Asimov was not through his fiction, but through his science books which I obsessively read). As I got older, technology and its potentials began to also fascinate me. Combine all this with my intense imagination, and you can see why as I got older and discovered science fiction I could better relate to, it became special to me.

Afrofuturist 419 appeared in the November 2016 Issue of Clarkesworld and featured a recorded log entry of a Nigerian astronaut stranded in space. What made you decide to include audio along with the story? Also, how did Lagos, Nigeria traffic almost derail the recording?

It started as an audio story. That was my initial vision of it. A log entry by a Nigerian left behind at a space station. The story was inspired by a 419-scam letter sent to a media source that went viral. It was a scam letter that was more creative than most. The whole money-getting scheme centered around a supposed Nigerian left in space. The minute I read it, after I stopped snickering, I knew I had to write about it and I knew I wanted to write about the Naija man in space because he’d be pissed and a little crazy.

The project was originally meant to be published through the BBC. I wrote the script. Then a sound engineer from the BBC named Robin Warren created the sounds . . . from scratch. The sound effects he used were not digital, they were actual sounds. He went old-school. I can’t remember the things he used, but I think sponges and, of course, water were some of them. The effects are so visceral and clear that sometimes listening to them makes me nauseous. You can practically feel the wet slapping mucousy alien tentacles in the end of the story.

In the meantime, Nollywood directors and actors had to schedule time at BBC studios in Nigeria to do the recording. He only had a window of time and he nearly missed it because of Lagos traffic. But he made it and was able to work with Robin who was in London. So, this project was created in three countries on three continents- Nigeria, England, and the United States. Unfortunately, the project somehow got buried in the shuffle, so we had this awesome recorded story and nowhere to post it. So, I took it to Clarkesworld and they were happy to publish it. And this was when I added the text aspect (which I’d wanted to do all along). It was a lot of work for such a short piece, but I love how it all turned out.

So much of sci-fi tech is built on cold steel, nano-tubes, and lasers, but the technology in the Binti novellas is refreshingly organic and alive. What inspired living spaceships and 1000 mph transports that slide on oil from pitcher plants?

Nature is the greatest artist and scientist. If we human beings, with our rather brilliant, often flawed, sometimes evil, creativity joined forces with our creator (nature), as opposed to trying to control it and treat it like our slave, imagine the wonders we could create. If we worked with nature, we’d also avoid being the target of nature’s epic wrath. This is why when I write about technology, I naturally (pun intended) go in the direction things are already going, i.e. organic.

Pieces of ancient tech whose purpose has long been forgotten are called edan in Binti’s universe. Do you own an item that you hope in 1000 years people will call an edan?

Not surprisingly, the object I choose is organic and not created by humans.

So, I have this seed thing that I bought from a gruff, irritable man selling trinkets (crystals, strange old rings, gemstones, and other objects) on the side of the road in Nigeria over a decade ago. It’s large and smooth, except for these intricate patterned grooves. That thing has appeared in various forms (usually as an alien seed) in three novels I’ve written now. I like to see it as a piece of alien technology that is yet to be activated. It’s sturdy enough for me to see it surviving a thousand years. And I can see it sprouting one day and something strange growing from it.

Here’s a pic:

If not that, then the Pushmi-Pullyu type wind-up toy I got at a birthday party when I was about 5 years old. It winds up and still works to this day. It creeps forward and with each creep goes from one creature to another. Total nonsense, but in the future, it might make more sense to someone. Hard to explain, so here is a pic of both its sides:

Mathematics is more of a magical force in Binti rather than a logical science. What inspired this?

The fact that I’ve always seen mathematics as magical. Growing up, my favorite and best classes were in the sciences and math. For me, I was best at math when I relaxed and came at it sideways. I could solve difficult math problems and mentally visualize equations when I didn’t focus too hard on them. If I did, it would all fall apart.

Also, in the natural world, mathematical shapes are where patterns come from. Everything in nature is mathematical, really. And it’s so pervasive, yet amazing that it’s magical, at least to me.

Binti’s journey takes her farther and farther away from her home and people both physically and figuratively. What is the importance of someone who has become an outsider looking back in?

See, that idea of leaving and then where you’ve left becoming “back,” “behind” is the issue to me. I think you take every experience into you and that’s what makes you, you. I think the past, present, and the future coexist within us all the time. I think we carry more than we want to accept. I think to be “weighed down” is a beautiful thing and can lead to a sort of enlightenment. That said, it can also be disturbing and heavy and tiring and isolating. You see a lot more, from more sides, with more depth, more weight. And in returning, you bring things that can affect and change “home.” Change is life, stagnation is death.

In Binti, you introduced readers to the Meduse, a species of jellyfish-like creatures. I became fond of one Meduse in particular. Okwu has become one of my favorite characters and is a deceptively complex being. What are some of the challenges of creating relatable characters without familiar physical human reference points such as eyes or a mouth?

I based Okwu on someone I know who’s way of thinking and behavior is just . . . alien to me. I’m laughing now, but this is true. So because Okwu is based on someone I know, it’s easy to tap into it. And I spent a lot of time trying to understand the person Okwu is based on and in trying to understand, I had to really step out of myself. And what I also learned was that though I eventually did understand and grow fond of this person, it was still ok to totally disagree with his truth. We didn’t have to hate each other; we could be friends. That was a big big lesson for me.

As far as the physical differences, I’ve just finished the third book in the Binti series and it’s still weird. But it’s not just with Okwu. I encountered this weirdness throughout the story. The biggest example was when I wrote the Oomza Uni launch port in book 2. This is a launch port for people from all over the galaxy. How big should the entrance be? What kind of atmosphere should the various launch port areas have? Language? Sound? Would some of the people view other people as prey? Some people aren’t even to be seen with the human eye! What a headache I gave myself.

How has your time as a professor influenced the creation of Oomza University?

My time as both a student and professor greatly influenced the way I imagined Oomza Uni. It’s an entire planet that is a university; universities are like another planet. University departments have always been like cities to me and that’s what they are at Oomza Uni. What I love about universities is that they are full of super smart people who are so obsessed with such specific things. Extraterrestrials, indeed. And the idea that barely anything is strange at Oomza Uni because most likely someone has research the hell out of it; familiar territory to me.

Binti was your first story set in space? What made you shrug off the earthly shackles and send your characters out into the stars?

A plethora of things led to me writing a story in mostly set in space. When I wrote Binti, I had just left my own family back in Chicago to take a position at the University at Buffalo. My family didn’t want me to take the position at all. I was in a really unstable mindset at the time. I’ve always been terrified of space (because without super amazing equipment, humans die in space) and I tend to write out my fear and pain. And I have always loved Star Wars, which takes place in space and on many worlds. In order to get to other worlds, one must travel through space.

The combination of all these things led me to write my first story in space.

How did your travels to South America and the Middle East influence the Binti novellas?

There is a story behind the 2013 trip that I took with my daughter from Brasilia, Brazil, to Atlanta, USA to Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in two weeks (all for writing festivals). There isn’t space here to tell it. But I will say that that trip evolved both my daughter and I in fundamental ways. Those changes partially led to the writing of Binti, as well.

Seeing Dubai and Sharjah was epic. I have never seen such a complete and glorious clash of the ancient, new, and the idiosyncratic. I felt so foreign there, but at the same time completely at home. Also, when I looked into the Kalifah Lagoon in Sharjah, I saw my first wild and living jellyfish. It was blue and swimming like it owned the place. This moment was the inspiration of the Meduse.

Does the next novella have a title yet? Can you give us a little teaser as to what happens to Binti?

Right now, it’s called The Night Masquerade and I’m not sure if it’ll be considered a novella because of its longer length (but I’m not worried about this at all). It completes the trilogy with a bang (though I suspect there will be more in this universe).

What other projects do you have in the works? Do you have plans to experiment more with audio?

Akata Warrior, the sequel to Akata Witch (my YA fantasy novel set in present-day Nigeria) is scheduled for release this fall, finally. I’ve been working on it for nearly six years. I’ve got a comic book project that should soon be unveiled, a short story for a really cool project called The Years Without Winter, and film projects quietly bubbling beneath the surface. And I’m deep in the edits of my next standalone novel titled Remote Control, which I’ve also been working on for many years.

I’d love to do more audio experiments. The stories decide format, so I have to wait and see.

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
A Doom of One’s Own

Genevieve Valentine

In 1965, Bantam reprinted Dave Wallis’ one-generation apocalypse, Only Lovers Left Alive. The cover was a flat, empty ground with painted figures in monochrome. A motorcycle-jacketed girl stands Bullitt-cool in the foreground, toting a rifle; a young man looms behind her in helmet and goggles. Far behind him is the rest of the gang, one of them wearing a cowboy-ish hat and looking at us over his shoulder, hip cocked coquettishly. The logline blares: Smashing, Looting, Killing, Loving—the Teenagers Take Over the World!

I bought my copy at a used bookstore the day of the election—I was concerned about the outcome, and I’m a nervous shopper. I left with a stack of pulp novels, which I like reading when I’m concerned about outcomes. They’re books full of people who have seen awful things, in stories that assume everything’s a little dire and there’s not much to be done about it except to muddle through. Optimism in dark times is hard for me. I can be practical and make noise and keep moving, but when things are tough, an uplifting speech never cuts it. Even if it has a happy ending, I want something that agrees that the going will be rough. You could tell I was steeling myself for the worst from the titles I bought in a stack ten deep: Deadly Nightshade, You’ve Got Him Cold, Murder Somewhere in This City. (I didn’t think about it at the time; only later did I realize the theme. When you’re a nail, everything looks like a hammer.)

We’ve been mapping a lot of dystopias across real life in the months since. History, despite ready examples, has been getting us nowhere. Star Wars and Harry Potter feel too simple; 1984 and Animal Farm have been happening in increments for too long for us to clutch our pearls about them now. Mad Max, maybe. Dr. Strangelove. The Handmaid’s Tale. Brazil. And in the last few years, we’ve been overrun with stories about what happens when an autocrat takes control of a flawed system. Totalitarians, broken bureaucracies, and dystopias are easy to find. (All of them are warnings and at some point it’s embarrassing to look over the list.)

Batman has more merit. The movie franchise has been spread over more than twenty years under three directors, and the citizens of the most flamboyantly crime-riddled town in the world are only as good as the times. In 1989, the people of Reagan’s Gotham danced alongside Joker’s victory parade, fighting over the pittance he threw. By 1992’s Batman Returns, America was on the verge of electing a Democrat after twelve years, and the people of Gotham City were agitating for a happy ending. They voted Penguin the Mayor (Gotham City, like any democracy, often acts against its interests), but when his callousness was revealed—“I played this stinkin’ city like a harp from hell!”—he was booed off the stage and shamed out of office.

Nolan’s Gotham is thornier—his movies span almost a decade of culture shift, and bend toward Batman as benevolent autocrat. But the pivotal moment of The Dark Knight involves a handful of regular people who, at the last, choose not to act in violent selfishness (and ruin the Joker’s big moment so completely that Batman’s able to win). Even in The Dark Knight Returns, when Gotham falls to fascism, there are a handful of holdouts. The city doesn’t know—a board member offering himself as hostage and Gordon insulting a sham court both happen privately—but the city doesn’t have to. The movie sees them; we see them. There are enough of them, eventually, for it to matter. It makes sense right now to draw parallels to the darkest beats of a Batman movie (any of them; it’s not a subtle city, and these aren’t subtle days). We’re Gotham City, for a version of Gotham where Batman isn’t coming and we have to save ourselves.

Then there’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a book very sure that the center cannot hold. The concept is simple: Every adult in Britain commits suicide—not because of science-fictional spores or great disaster, but because, as one farewell note says, they’re “just so sick and tired of it all”—and teens must learn to fend for themselves in a hurry. It’s a book full of swipes at everything going on, alongside a shrugging acknowledgment that in the end, maybe having is better than not having: parents, schools, steady partners, someone to keep the lights on.

Among the parable of collapse, there are passages so specific and relevant as to be chilling. After a press conference about municipal plans for the rising tide of suicides, the press moves in: “Was the Minister aware that the Association of Undertakers’ Men had protested that Civil Defense Corps workers were paid at a much lower rate than themselves and were a threat to their standards? How much was the housing and entertaining of the World Health delegation costing the government? Was there not a strong case for some measure of price control on coffins? As so many people gassed themselves in the small hours could the Minister arrange for gas supplies to be cut off at night?” It’s a swarm of minutiae that doesn’t get within a mile of the real problem: the despair that it’s too late to do anything about.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a short read for long nights. It unfolds with nightmare logic and doesn’t care much about specifics—the adults disappear and the kids stagger through the world in a telescoping timeline that doesn’t matter much. At first, the book centers around the adults who are at a loss as to how to handle the world they made their way in, narrators who disappear one at a time; the second third is the abandoned teenagers trying to scrape together a pretense of society, operating under a fog of resentful grief that the older generation has left them to clean up this mess. It’s a cycle that plays out repeatedly; those in power resent the responsibility, those without power resent being told what to do, and experience turns everyone, inevitably, into a grownup. (At one point, one of the teenagers runs across a group of feral children who have this metaphor down to a science: They viciously beat and insult that night’s chosen child, who then gets to turn the tables and become Mother and Father, forcing them all into bed.)

The bleakness fades as the book goes on. If you go far enough north, you become an adult; you learn to catch sheep, and value other people’s safety, and make naan on a trash can lid, and compromise on your petty grievances, and settle for a partner you don’t love because it’s the mature thing to do, and plan to raise your children to resent you in their turn. It’s an inevitable cycle, the friction it creates between the generations cycling fast enough that it almost counts as stability.

I read a lot of articles in between chapters of this book. (I’m restless, lately.) Announcements were flooding in from everywhere, and together they were forming the sort of apocalypse scenario that makes the end of Only Lovers Left Alive read like a BBC Christmas special—everyone having liberated the slaves from the fascist warlords, having abandoned the despair of the past, and now hanging out in the Scottish highlands being kind and starting over. It’s nice; it’s useful, to have things to hope for. But we’re still in the deep hours, Gotham City before everyone realizes they’ve installed a villain. Hope is necessary, but hope comes after the action, sometimes. Sometimes you just want to acknowledge that the going will be rough.

Tonight, after another long day in the new republic, I went back to my stack of hard-boileds and started Murder Somewhere in This City. It’s going to be a long night; it’s good to have something to read.

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of four novels; her latest is ICON. Several of her shorties stories have appeared in Best of the Year anthologies. She’s written Catwoman for DC Comics and Xena: Warrior Princess for Dynamite. Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, Interfictions, and The New York Times.

Editor’s Desk:
The Next Chapter Begins

Neil Clarke

For twenty-eight years, I’ve worked in higher education and K-12 as a technology professional. It was a career I loved, but over time, the profession and in particular, the institutional approach to the profession, has made it a less pleasant place to be. Almost five years ago, after my heart attack, I realized that my passion for it had faded, so I began making plans to jump ship.

The last six months have been difficult. I have had some nice milestones in there—turning fifty and Clarkesworld celebrating its tenth anniversary—but it was all overshadowed by events at my day job. I won’t go into specifics, but by Christmas, six people—representing over one hundred combined years of institutional knowledge—resigned. The harm being done to my fellow colleagues and a department that was the legacy of a dear friend became too much for me, so I used a few vacation days before the holidays to get more time to distance myself from the situation and recover.

My mood brightened as I used the vacation to catch up on Clarkesworld and other editing-related tasks. Then, as if the universe was trying to tell me something, Lisa found a new job. The plan all along had been that when Lisa went back to work, we’d both work for a while and then I would resign. After some discussion about healthcare—we’ll have to be on the ACA—and having someone here when the kids come home school, we decided that I should resign now.

The day this issue is published will be my first day as a full-time editor, which isn’t to say I’ve reached the point where I’m making a full-time salary. That’s going to take time, which I finally have. The first order of business is to close the salary gap between Lisa’s job and my old one and to cover the cost of our new health plan. I’ve agreed to do some consulting and knowledge transfer sessions with my former employer, so that should help create a bit more of a buffer before our savings account has to come into play.

As for the impact all this new-found time and energy will have on Clarkesworld, give me a couple of months to work that out. I still have some backlogged tasks that need to be completed and then I can start hammering out a long-range plan. In the meantime, each new subscription, Patreon supporter, or advertiser takes a little bit of the financial pressure away, so this will be one of my immediate areas of focus.The other will probably be targeting more anthology projects, both original and new, including catching up on the remaining Clarkesworld annuals. I’ll probably take on a few more ebook clients as well.

If you are already a subscriber or supporter, thank you. You’ve made this leap possible. If you aren’t a subscriber, there’s no better time than now. I know money is tight for many of our readers and listeners, so if you can’t afford to, you can always help by amplifying the calls for new subscribers/supporters on social media or perhaps adding a review on one of the many sites that sell our digital subscriptions—you’d be really surprised by how much of an impact that sometimes makes.

And while part of me will miss my old career, I’m eager to get started on this new chapter in my life and look forward to the new opportunities it presents. Now, back to work . . . !

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His next anthology, Galactic Empires was published last month and will be followed by the next volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year series later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Fallout

Benedick T. Bana

About the Artist

Benedick T. Bana is a digital arts instructor at the Ateneo de Naga University. He’s also a freelance concept artist/character design online, working for a number of foreign clients. His interests lean towards creating mechanical designs, mechs, cyborgs. He’s fond of using flat brushes, limited use of colors, and darker atmospheres.