Twisted Knots

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Lilian attached yet another mobius strip to her underwater diorama. Undulating in blue, they crisscrossed in gossamer nets across the shoebox, a miniature biosphere where sharks and fish roamed.

Yet, these waves, as Lilian pronounced them to be, seemed more alive than the animals that hung in them, thought her mother Shulin. No one expected six-year-olds to finish their own science projects, and Shulin found herself wrapped up in another one of her daughter’s assignments, taping invisible strings to the top of the cardboard box.

Lilian helped her mom weave the hanging model sea creatures, made of fine crimson silk cloth usually reserved for the outfits of only her mom’s most exquisite carved puppets. Even as their family pinched pennies for clothes and meals, buying only used t-shirts and cheap biandang lunches in Flushing’s Chinatown, Shulin felt her daughter’s education should not be something they stiffed on.

When Shulin ran out of extra fabric in the cupboard, she made discreet cuts from the robes of her cast of characters, taking in the outfits of flying swordsman Weiting, evil renegade Chih-hao, court princess Hsinyi, and some of the court attendants. A snip here and there to become another octopus or luminous piece of coral.

Later at night, when the honks and general hubbub from outside died down and Lilian’s dad finally returned from his day-laborer job to eat cold rice congee dinner, Shulin sat on the sofa set to closing up these omissions in her puppet’s garb, as Lilian brushed her teeth for bed. Lilian brushed her teeth in continuous arcs without lifting up her hand, a strange habit she picked up from as long ago as Shulin could remember.

“Tell me a story,” said Lilian when she was done. Her green eyes would sparkle and dance behind her glasses. It was her nightly demand as the family princess.

Every night, Shulin would succumb to Lilian’s wishes. Lilian, in second hand polka-dotted pajamas, watched the dead eyes of the budaixi puppets suddenly animate. She would laugh as the old man next to the sea would fall into the waters looking for his cane and gasp as the princess jumped out of her palace and onto tiled roofs, her delicate gown behind her. In her hands, she would play with one of the mobius strips she always had lying about in the room, running her fingers along the path that never seemed to end, even when the play came to an end and the moon whispered it was time for bed.

In Lilian’s cubicle hung five mobius strips, one from when she was very young, and four from the course of her teenage years to her present twenty-four-year-old adult life. Each represented a pivotal time in her life, but she rarely talked about them, just as she rarely spoke much in general.

On her desk sat a lump of pink flesh marinating in a thick clear gel on an antiseptic tray. Beside the hunk of flesh balanced several fine-tuned battery-powered lasers against the edge of the tray. These Lilian used to manipulate the flesh, as crucial to her trade as scalpels are to surgeons. In the corner of her desk was a small photo, faded and worn and slightly blurry, barely recognizable as the breathtaking court princess puppet Hsinyi.

Lilian turned on the laser and changed the intensity of the green stream that suddenly appeared on the flesh. The bright laser drove a straight line directly onto the pink blob. A searing smell of roasted meats wafted towards her as she chiseled first in vertical lines, then filled the rest of the canvas with her signature uninterrupted loops.

“Good job, but be careful that the marbling matches the visual stock,” said Ken, her supervisor as he walked by.

Lilian just nodded without comment and continued scrawling with her laser.

She could hear Ken saying at another cubicle, “You might want to try holding the laser at a different angle.”

Ken always had to make some comment, as if worried that his presence would be superfluous without an unnecessary pointer. Every day he made a few rounds with at least one reminder to each employee.

Lilian’s coworkers called her an artisan. The steaks she created resembled the Angus they tried to reproduce like no other cell-cultured product. Lilian made these sears with pursed lips and furrowed brows and took no more joy in their production than turning on her morning coffee machine.

She saw it not as an art, but as a rote, mechanical job.

Neither was she doing it to save livestock from the cruelty of the modern meat industry, as others working in her field have proclaimed as their raison d'etre. In fact, here she ate more live steaks than ever, as a form of taste test and comparison. Her company even had a monthly allowance for (real) steakhouses in the metropolitan area, which she took advantage of without remorse. She often invited Jose and put her steak on the bill.

Instead, what fascinated Lilian was topology. She loved the whorls of continuity, idiosyncratic shapes that seemed to defy nature itself. Tubes that wrapped in among themselves but never ended. She pictured herself as an ant crawling through these tubes for eternity. Sometimes she would glance over at her mobius strips dangling against the gray dividers and imagine herself as a tiny puppet pulled by invisible hand stuffed within—or pulled by a set of gossamer strings perched from above—alongside the mobius strip surface, pulled towards the endlessness that lay before her, in repeating loops over and over.

She put this picture in her head as she detailed the commercial meats, these wedges of flesh that had never rested on any bone and had never been held in a hand of a butcher.

She heard the light ring of a bell, slid her finger past the power sensor and put down her laser. She’d finish the rest of these raw hunks after lunch.

“I call it the sound of emptiness inside,” said Lilian. She was sixteen, sitting cross-legged and pushing her index finger against a plushy piece of dough. It moved, striking another equally dense fried piece of dough.

“I don’t get it,” said Jose, short for Josefina, Lilian’s best and only friend. “I don’t hear anything.”

“You’re probably just used to all the noise in the restaurant,” said Lilian.

Jose’s dad would often take her daughter to the dim sum restaurant in Flushing where he worked as manager. Sometimes they’d invite Lilian to the restaurant, too. Jose’s dad would treat her to beef noodle soup, something that was not on the menu, but he would yell out in Spanish to the chefs to make it for the staff. He said he craved it growing up in Texas next to a noodle stall. Lilian would chew on the beef, thinking of how stringy the ligaments and connective tissue were. At the time, she didn’t know what it was that made these fibers get stuck in her teeth.

“I don’t think hearing some plates clatter’s gonna make me deaf,” said Jose. She made a tentative jab at the doughy circle herself. Then, she touched one of the mugs dangling to its right. “Wouldn’t it be better called firefighter’s breakfast?”

Lilian said, “It actually would be better called ‘Torus.’” But, Jose was too absorbed in picking out the green sprinkles of the vanilla frosted to take note of the term.

“I wonder if I should move up the left . . . ” Lilian’s voice trailed off as she watched Jose pull one of the doughnuts from the floss string holding it in place.

A cut formed on the side of the ring where the floss pulled through it.

Then Jose took a bite. It was raspberry frosted with sprinkles. Jose said it tasted vaguely purple.

“Oh, no, Jose, you ruined it!” said Lilian.

Lilian thought of the imaginary tiny little puppet running across the surface doughnut looping in and out of the hole, never stopping to rest. Then, she imagined a giant finger pushing against the doughnut, squishing a mug hole into one end, while the doughnut hole served as the handle. Now, with Jose’s slice through the ring, these abstract illusions were destroyed.

“You’ll get over it. Here, have a doughnut,” said Jose. She pulled another one off its string, tearing it as well. This time it was double chocolate glazed.

As Lilian munched, Jose asked the questions, their typical interaction.

“Is this thing supposed to make a sound?” asked Jose, gesturing towards the hanging doughnuts and coffee mug.

“No, it’s a mobile. You’re thinking of a wind chime.”

“A mobile, like one of those old cell phones?”

“No, not mo-bull, a mo-beel.”

“Mo-beel,” said Jose, exaggerating the long ‘e’ vowel. “What’s it for?”

“It highlights the shapes and the movement of each of the pieces, creating an aesthetic composition,” said Lilian.

“Oh, I get it. My baby sis, Gabriela, has one. It stops her from crying. But hers is made up of monkey, giraffes, cute animals like that and has lullaby music. Have you thought about putting music to yours?”

“No, not really.”

“How about a jingle about a complete breakfast?”

“No, it’s not about breakfast.”

“A coffee mug, doughnuts . . . ” 

“They’re homeomorphic,” said Lilian. “They are spaces that can be pressed into one another without cutting or using glue. Like taking play-doh and working it . . . ”

“Oh, you’re talking about those shapes again,” said Jose.

“Well, spaces, really,” said Lilian. “The shape is secondary.”

“It’s a good doughnut,” said Jose. “Next time don’t let it hang so long before inviting me over. It got kind of dry.”

Jose clapped Lilian on the back. Then, she passed her an electronic chip the size of a fingernail. “I put some music on this. It’s for our social studies skit on the Spanish American War. But, you could probably use it for the mobile. It sends a pulse that I think would make the mobile spin. Hang it up with it and watch the shapes move along to the tune.”

After Jose left, Lilian taped the chip to the mobile. She activated it with her phone and watched the homeomorphic breakfast entities dance in the wind to the fast beat of Spanish hip-hop.

For a moment, she thought she saw a glint in the air, something that felt like the room pulled in on itself. But, even before she could put a finger on it, it disappeared.

That was the night her dad asked for a divorce. Seven months later, her mom left her with $500 and a note that she was returning to her native Taiwan without her. Go to Ms. Lee’s. She will be taking care of you from now on.

Lilian wondered if it was her own playing with spaces that had breached something in the air, something in the space-time continuum that made the world turn upside down. Like hanging from the top edge of the doughnut hole, seeing the world topsy-turvy, flipped and warped to something unrecognizable.

Lilian wedged herself between two rather large butts in the empty subway seat. It was early in the morning and her stocky neighbors on either side held twin paper coffee cups. She was wearing white trousers and simple flat pumps.

Now these white trousers were sandwiched by neighboring legs of black work trousers. She imagined seeing it from a birds-eye view. She was always good at changing her perspective to see things. Their legs would look like an Oreo, she decided.

She opened the novel she was reading, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a suggestion that Jose had sent over.

Lilian liked the way books could screen herself from the world. She liked the heft of the book. But, most of all, she liked how she can fold herself in there, wrapped up into a story, like time warped, nudged, and shaped into a convincing form, much like her topological spaces. Much like puppet plays, she thought. But then, put it out of her mind, like she always did when thoughts like that popped their way in.

She had started taking classes in the nearby university on topological spaces alongside her job. Work during the day and classes in the evening. She barely had time to shower. After her parents left her she convinced herself that she had to be practical and make a life for herself, because no one could take care of herself but herself. She put all thought out of her mind to be a mathematician, and instead focused on biology. She could work in a lab, make a steady income.

Mrs. Lee was always pleasant to her, but never treated her like a child. She knew once she hit eighteen she was on her own.

In the end, she majored in biological illustration. There was an artistic side of her that loved curves and spaces that she could not chase away. She interned as a technician for a museum, where they hired her part time. It was Jose (who she kept in touch with even throughout college) that found her a job in the artificial meat industry, a hint from her dad who rose to own a few classy chain restaurants in Queens.

But, now, sitting in this tiny crevice under the fluorescent lights of the subway car, staring over the pages of her book at the heads nodding asleep, she rethought her plan for life. Wasn’t there more than simple existence?

She thought of puppets that played out heightened moments of drama and passion—how wonderful they could live so fully, even if inanimate, even if only in tales. Then she tossed the thought out of her head as she continued where she left off in her novel. The subway jerked as it passed yet another stop.

She followed Josef Kavalier’s flight to America from Prague. She imagined her mom’s flight the other way, from her fallen-apart marriage to Taiwan, many years ago. The novel spoke of magic and she thought of her mom, the sole budaixi puppet master instructor in Queens, making the puppets come alive when she was just a kid, breathing animation into otherwise mere fragments of wood and cloth. Every time the novel mentioned the golem, she felt a restlessness in her. Golem, the being of clay that could be given life with a mere name.

She searched for golem on her phone. . Emet. The words that breathed him to life.

Her hands shook and she dropped her phone onto the shiny shoe of the man sitting next to her. “Ow,” she heard, not daring to look up, and saw some droplets of coffee splash onto her phone.

She breathed a sorry, just as the owner of the shoe picked up the phone to hand to her. She finally looked up to stare into the eyes of a man with shaggy brown hair who looked uncannily like evil renegade Chih-hao, down to the same sour grin and all, from her mom’s puppet days in Flushing. He was wearing a pink-and-yellow-striped tie against a white button-down and holding a cup of coffee in the other hand. Lilian dropped her glance and peered instead into the Windsor knot at his neck, her mind racing, following the bends and loops of the narrow silk path. She caught herself staring.

She plucked the cell phone from his open hand, wiped the coffee splashes off its screen on her pant leg and rushed to the subway doors. The scratchy broadcast told her the next stop was hers. She dashed through as the doors pulled open.

Something felt right about the golem. Something felt true, like allegorical tales her mother would weave when she was a little older, in her teenage years.

In her head, she heard her mother’s voice recount the story of budaixi puppetry before bringing to life each new fabricated tale:

“Three hundred years ago, in Quanzhou province in Fujian, a talented student named Liang Binglin nearly lost heart from failing the imperial exams. These were exams whose passage was required to become a government official. He heard of the legendary Xiangong Temple at Nine Carp Lake and the ability of its deity to predict the direction one’s life would take. Moved by this talk, he visited the temple and prayed to the deities. That night, in his dreams, one of the deities wrote in the palm of Liang’s hand: , Gongming gui zhangzhong. Achievement lies within your hands.

“Upon awakening, joyous with this knowledge, he took the exam again only to end up failing. Frustrated and dejected, he decided he wouldn’t take the exams anymore.

“As he was walking down the street, he came upon a stage for puppet theater. As he watched the puppets dance, a thought struck him. He would carve his own puppets, use his own hands to move them—if not anything but as a means to wash away the tides of his chagrin. His own crafted screenplay would accompany these puppets.

“Little did he realize this was the seed for an art form that would grip his audience and the many to come after him—and lead him to his eventual success and achievement, riches and fame.”

Her mother would then look up at Lilian, grasp her right hand and trace a series of indecipherable character strokes in her palm. Her mom’s hand was warm, her fingers light.

Lilian felt sure these words conveyed something important she could not grasp, as her mom let out an enigmatic smile.

Did the puppets come to life much like the golem? Did her mother really breathe the essence of the living into them? Or was it her own imagination? The haziness of her earliest memories colored her thoughts, and she couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction.

But, as much as conviction told her that the notion of the golem was real, conviction equally accorded her the certainty that it wasn’t from a written utterance or word. It wasn’t emet.

She was convinced it was not a word. No, she didn’t trust words. They were imperfect, everyone had different intonations, different lilts. Just tongue, lips, and teeth coming together.

Achievement lies in your hands, she thought. She fiddled with her mobius strips.

No, it was a space. It was an arrangement of space.

Lilian knew from the pit of her gut, radiating outward to every fiber of her being, that should a golem exist, it would be brought out through topology. Her mom sometimes spoke of qi and of humors, of the vitality that dispersed and surged. She could imagine the flow of these vital essences around complicated topological spaces, intermingling loops of pipes. Valves that kept going forever, circulating the flow of qi.

If she could only harness it.

She spent the next few days chiseling out the spiral spectrums on her hunks of meat, thinking of the many stories her mom told her. For the longest time, she thought them only painful memories. But, now, she realized there might be something important in them.

She replayed the flying swordsman Weiting, whipping out his double-edged blade and spiraling towards the rogue warriors. She heard the pleading of evil renegade Chih-hao, a man she perhaps met on the train days ago, or at least his doppelganger, a mortal enemy asking his life to be spared. And most of all she revisited the heartfelt romance and martial facility of court princess Hsinyi, who was capable of compassion and strength all at once.

She could feel Hsinyi’s light steps and her swan swings, graceful slaps that would paralyze those who betrayed her. Her touch would also heal the innocent simply from the purity of her heart. And of course there was the fire-breathing dragon, glittering in its many arrow-proof scales. Lilian never thought it strange before, but now suspected that this rain deity was made fire-breathing by her mom catering to an American audience.

For days she thought of these tales, as she carved fake meat with her laser, with only Ken’s bumbling critiques as interruption. She imagined the puppets reenacting fights, tumbling sheets of fabric, thick with adventure and drama and threatening voices. Then she would fuel her imagination with evenings in topology class, listening to her professor’s nasal voice drone on about quantum topology, the light of his laser pen shining at twisted knots.

Much like her own laser teasing knots into the stem-cell dough in front of her. The pink meat so much like the mud flesh of the golem.

And just like that—on an unusually hot, sticky spring day where her sweat cooled under the high fan of air conditioning—she felt, like the way the brain folds into wrinkles, the fleshy stem-cell dough fold into sentience.

The secret was never the whispered word, but a kind of topological perfection that the universe bowed to.

Sensing the sentience as qi flow within this mound of meat, Lilian’s heart couldn’t help but palpitate. She thought of the beauty in which gravity bent space-time. If forces could manipulate and bend dimensions, then the rendering of physical matter into certain configurations could possibly bend the dimension of consciousness.

The meat, a protobrain, as she deemed it, pulsated with life. She seared into it whorls and chutes, a number of pervious pockets as well as continuous grooves.

As she prodded the piece of thinking meat with a soft measuring apparatus to check its pliability, she couldn’t help but think that consciousness was simply a dimension where sentient thoughts exist. It was a matter of pulling matter into the right curves as an entryway into this dimension.

Energy allows consciousness to move, she thought. If energy was broken, flow wouldn’t be directed the right way. Continuity without breakage as key. And she had done it. She had unlocked the key to consciousness, the path to the dimension of this existence, through a kind of homologous act. All it took was imprinting the hunk of lifeless flesh with a homeomorphic form representing the space of the dimension where consciousness lies. Not an easy feat, but she fulfilled it nevertheless.

She wiped off a bead of sweat from her brow, hid her work in her drawer from the wandering eyes of Ken and proceeded on another piece of meat. She seared this raw meat the usual way for artificial beef, so she could fill her employment quota and not raise Ken’s suspicions.

After she was done for the day, she took her coffee mug, and filled it up at the machine. (Ken gave mugs to all the employees that said, “Cup of joe for workers ready to go!”) She stroked the hole of the handle with her fingers. An impeccable torus. She took a sip of the hot liquid, conspiring her next move.

“Hey, Jose, I need a favor.” Lilian cradled a phone to her neck.

“Let me guess. RAM? Or hard drive?” Jose’s husky voice sounded strained.

“Neither. Is this a bad time?” asked Lilian.

“No, I’m just working on this head. I can’t get the ears to screw in right.”

“I see,” said Lilian.

“So, what is it that you need?” asked Jose. Lilian could hear a soft periodic grating sound, and imagined Jose holding down a robotic ear, sandpapering away the softer notches around the titanium latch, as she has seen her do in person.

“A mimeoshell,” said Lilian.

Dead silence.

“Hello,” said Lilian. The grating sound continued after the pause.

“Yeah, I heard you. I think. Did you say mimeoshell? You want a body?”

“Yes.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

Jose’s questions made Lilian feel more at ease. At least her request wasn’t so outlandish that Jose hung up. She could do that sometimes, too, hang up, if she didn’t care to talk to you anymore. But, Lilian knew that nine times out of ten, Jose’s curiosity would win over reservation.

“Okay, tell me what it’s for.”

Lilian spent three minutes filling her in. It was the most she had spoken in a month. Jose listened raptly.

“And . . . it’s alive?” asked Jose.

“Sentient, I believe is the word you’re looking for,” said Lilian.

“If this wasn’t you, I wouldn’t believe it.”

“So, will you do it?”

There was a pleading lilt in Lilian’s voice. She used that supplicating tone on Jose when she needed to borrow money for mobiles and other projects she poured her heart into. She knew Jose couldn’t resist it.

“I’d have to ask,” said Jose.

Lilian pressed further. “Here, think of it like this. You want to spend your whole life working on soulless shells that sit in reception desks, telling visitors where the bathroom is? Or do you want to see your creations come to consciousness?”

Lilian hung with up Jose, with a promise from Jose to lend a head only if she got clearance from her partner. Luckily, Jose was dating the head funder, a formidable Clarissa Kale, who made the calls. She’d have to give Clarissa a convincing reason. Jose wouldn’t lie, but Lilian hoped she’d at least round off the details to make it sound a little less loony.

It worked. The golem flexed real, animate fingers, with articulations at the joints. It batted expressive eyes to match. Sentience. A soft stream of viable life coursed in a hard titanium-alloy body.

But, even as Lilian was reveling in this success, the golem plotted its own adventure. In a few days, it made its escape to Taiwan.

Lilian didn’t know how it happened, but she found herself on a plane with three layovers, with even more borrowed cash and a mouthful of apologies. Poor Jose. Her head’s on the line because of me.

Which is why she would get him back. No question about it.

Lilian checked her phone at her Frankfurt airport connection.

He’s landed at Taoyuan airport. He’s heading south, getting on the high-speed rail. Both Jose and Lilian had found it hard to think of him as an “it.” When they slipped that pulsating red protobrain in the cranium cavity and connected its tissue with clamps, she saw a spark light up in the golem’s cavernous eyes that she had never seen in any of the humanoid robots that Jose had crafted before.

Lilian fingers flew as the other hand conveyed sausage and fries to her mouth. Okay, I’ll be boarding in half an hour. Will be on the chase.

Luckily, Clarissa had the foresight to order Jose to put a GPS on the body, a small chip behind the ear.

After Lilian landed, she grabbed a taxi, ran to the high-speed rail from its drop off point, collected her ticket that Jose bought online, and took the first train south.

Passengers brushed up against her and she knocked over someone’s suitcase. Crowded, no seats were left. It was Qingming festival, days set aside for the sweeping of the tomb. All of Taiwan was on the move, heading to ancestor’s graves to burn joss paper and offer porcelain cups of tea and wine to pay respects and placate the departed.

It seemed ironic that rather than traveling for the once-living, she was following the lifeless that came to life.

But, she knew why it was happening. She had left her mark on her creation. A Frankenstein that had a volition on its own, but still followed ingrained patterns, predictable like an ant running on a track of spatial loops.

Through her topological bending of space, Lilian endowed the golem with her own prejudices. There were numerous forms or continuous roads that led to perfection, and Lilian’s own rendering was a signature mark. Like Picasso’s blue period, or the swells and curves of Gaudi’s work. The consciousness had her trademark on it as legible as someone’s penmanship that slants left with wide loops.

And her imprint led her to her most deeply-seated longing. Her mother.

Broken Chinese and some sprinkling of spoken Hokkien, and copious text messages from Jose, led Lilian to a small village at the southern tip of Taiwan.

Lilian pushed through a crowd and planted a seat onto the puddle-ridden lawn. It rained earlier and the ground was thick with mud, the cold wetness seeping into her shoes. Lilian wrinkled her nose. The air smelled dank, mud mixed with incense and jasmine flowers.

The sun had set and the darkness was a perfect backdrop for the stage lighting that fell on an enormous architectural feat built in front of the village temple. It seemed like a remote place for a production of this kind, but from the gossip of surrounding towns, she learned of her mother’s fame. . Or as they called her in spoken Hokkien, pòo-tē-hì lú-ông. Queen of budaixi.

It had to be her mother, even if she had taken on a new stage name.

Hsinyi. Court princess. The star of her own story. Even though her mother used different characters to write it. Instead of happy-harmony, she used fragrant-ceremony for her new epithet. It seemed fitting, sitting at her production, this staged performance, a ceremony amidst the aroma of burned incense.

As Lilian stared into the stage, all the interlaced voices of Mandarin and Hokkien around her hushed as the lights dimmed again and re-brightened to signal silence. The curtains opened to reveal a backdrop of mobius strips.

Her eyes fell on a jungle of diaphanous bands, loops hanging off loops, in all different widths of silk dyed in all shades of red, from a gentle blush to fiery scarlet.

She witnessed in her hard chair an emotional tumult of a play, about a mother leaving a child. Of financial necessities, dreams shattered. Of being haunted by loss.

It was nothing like the dragons and palaces and adventure of the kind she was used to as a child. She abided twists and turns, and moments of penetrating revelation. It pulled at her insides, played her as if she too were a hand puppet.

Her mother’s guilt and agony working into her limbs, called upon her to move, pulled her chest closer to the stage, her thumping heart drawn like gravity. As if space itself had collapsed and bent between where she sat and where her mother must be, somewhere behind the stage.

She realized it for what it was. It was her mother’s own command of topology, not through lasers and the prying at meat and more comprehensive manipulation. It was the whole air around her, circulating, passing about, the audience absorbed into this dimension just as she was. Her mother’s skill was not employed to put consciousness where none lay, but to imbue consciousness where consciousness already resided. To breathe life into those already living through the production. Her mom gave soul through the gliding gestures of the lavishly carved puppets.

Lilian realized if she could map it out mathematically, the hand gestures, their movements across the stage, the peaks and valleys of their sorrowful songs, it would sum up to continuous tunnels and loops, the kind that had awaken her very own golem. But, it was more expansive, more expressive than her own. Years of experience and pain accumulated into something much more powerful. A dynamic link to this dimension of consciousness.

And the last scene, as the light dimmed, a child returned. Lilian squinted at the stage. It was her golem. Dressed up in a wig and what looked to be four layers of robes, it stood out from the carved wooden figurines simply from being there, from a stony existence. It didn’t even seem to move. But, its eyes gleamed a wild impassioned blackness, as black as the space in doughnut holes, in black holes.

It was the prodigal daughter, somehow alive even though it made no movements. Lilian could feel its sentience, its neural activity, even under its stage cues of inertness. She suspected the rest of the audience could, too. It was a cold impact, the fiery eyes mixed with silent paralysis.

In the end, she never saw her mother. She couldn’t stay to watch the puppet masters come out from behind the scenes. She left, with a cocktail of emotions, pain and resentment, but also a kind of tender respect. Perhaps her mother had enchanted her through a mathematically-rendered spell put into stage once more, just like when she was a tiny child.

She returned back to the US and quit her job.

The golem eventually followed her back. She had fed it neural instructions via a wireless connection with Jose’s help before she left.

Lilian and Jose started up their own business. It involved robotics and topologically enhanced meat as a neural network for their creations. It was a small company catering to very exclusive and covert clientele. It would be an understatement to say that they encountered quite a few ethical quandaries.

One day Lilian’s mom Shulin, now known as the talented Hsinyi, found in the mail, a series of large packages and a script for a puppet production.

She flipped through the pages of the script and came across a set of characters, ones she contemplated with nostalgia. The tale was about a family broken apart, ran asunder, about a main character growing up with foster parents that never loved her and about the beauty she found instead in mathematical principles and higher loftier kinds of truth. How the hollowness of a continuous tube can substitute maternal caress. It was a harsh script, but with moments of poignant comedy.

Two weeks later, on a cloudless night, when the moon shone to its fullest capacity, Shulin-now-Hsinyi took out these neurologically enhanced robots, dressed up in period garb, to a tiny seashore stage on an isolated island in the outskirts of Taiwan, in the midst of the Pacific. It was a small audience.

Behind the curtain, the laughter of locals drowned out the sobs of a mother. When the play ended, she bowed and returned backstage. Before she changed out of her qipao, she turned to one of the dolls, black-haired, green-eyed, only mechanical, but she felt could sense real warmth behind the embrace.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires stares at skies and wonders what there is to eat out there in the cosmos. Spires aspires to be a 3-D printer/replicator gourmand, but will happily concede with producing and consuming quixotic fiction and poetry. Trips to East and Southeast Asia continue to influence her writing and leave her craving durian, fermented foods and copious amounts of wonder that fuel her body, spirit and imagination. She currently lives in Taipei, Taiwan. You can find her huddled in a mosquito net, speeding through night markets and trudging up the escheresque subway stairs scattered across this urban landscape. Her works have appeared in various publications and are forthcoming in magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, LONTAR, and Retro Future; as well as anthologies of the strange and delightful, such as Sharp &ampl Sugar Tooth and Ride the Star Wind.

Reversion

Nin Harris

Family gatherings are mandatory for three reasons in the annals of Tamilian life either on Rig-VII or on its sister planet, Psychereon. Weddings and funerals were a given. Reversions, however, were rarer occurrences and Aakriti had never attended such a ritual.

Aakriti was on shore-leave, after serving six months on an oil-rig in the middle of Ocean Alpha-Two as a senior rig engineer, a fortuitous time for a family reunion and for the wedding of her brother. Earlier, she had endured a polite reunion with her immediate family members, and her extended family members on the planet. It had been painfully strained but not as unpleasant as her first reunion with Auntie Rukumani after she had been extracted from Tortz in wailing, dejected despair. Chill pebbled her skin, which was already chafed by the silver-beaded choli. The saree was draped over a chair, a deep indigo silk embroidered in silver thread with silver beads and tiny mirrors sewn in. A soft fuchsia and indigo shawl would be draped over the three-quarter sleeves of her choli once she was dressed. She would have to put them on soon, Aakriti thought as she walked reluctantly to the chair.

“Do you need help getting into that saree? The ceremonial pleats can be such a bother,” asked her cousin Vashti from the bed where she was reading the news from one of the bubble readers that bobbed up and down with the movement of her head.

“I still remember how to do the ceremonial pleats, Vashti,” Aakriti answered as she rubbed her hands up and down her pebbled forearms.

“But you just don’t want to wear it, do you?” Vashti pushed the bubble reader away and watched as it bounced off one of the walls. “Aakriti akka, you don’t really have to go through with the Reversion, you know? Not all of us agree with what the elders want. Don’t you miss being Aakavi?”

Aakriti shrugged, “I am not sure if I know what it means to miss that. I only know that I will be better off without the dreams.”

“You were always my most interesting cousin, Aakriti akka. Especially because you didn’t care what anyone thought about you. Just going off like that, running away from engineering. Becoming Aakavi.” Vashti’s voice was half-envious, half-sad.

“That was another life, Vashti. Literally another life.”

“You were happy, weren’t you, akka?”

Aakriti pursed her lips. “I’m not sure happiness even came into it, honestly. It was just something that felt right, like finally finding gravity-adjustment gloves that fit.”

Vashti asked, “Look, akka, not all of us . . . ”

Aakriti cut her off, appreciating the concern, but not able to endure it. “Look, I will probably need help with the back and front folds of the saree, so yes, let’s get this on me.”

Vashti gave Aakriti a quizzical look before getting up, her limbs all elegant languor. Working from opposite ends of the cloth, the cousins made the elaborate pleats that were customary of the Ruling Families of Rig-VII as they wound the cloth around Aakriti. Aakriti had been taught this art on her fifteenth birthday.

Once she was dressed, Aakriti poured herself a glass of water, while Vashti retreated back to her chair. Aakriti stared out of the window. As far as fuel planets went, Psychereon was rather idyllic, possessing a shoreline of soft, powdery crimson sand, beachside towns with casinos and spiritual retreats. Viridian green waves lapped with ominous avarice against the glittering red sands of the shoreline, licking swathes of barnacle-encrusted rust upon dark metal pilings of tall, lonely oil rigs that loomed far out beyond the safe waters of the harbor.

Psychereon was nicknamed “Double Trouble” amongst off-planet engineers and drillmasters because currents existed both on the ocean and in the sky. The polarity of the planet played havoc with the movement of the wind and of the waves, causing the drilling of precious oils and gasses to be more challenging than on most fuel planets. The oil rigs had foundations that were drilled deep into the ocean bed, and they were fortified on all sides with flotation platforms positioned to ensure stability within flux. The currents of the planet were further complicated by the two satellites in the sky and their relative proximity.

Climate-wise, it was far from being the safest planet in the solar system. The inhabitants had simply learned to adjust.

The silhouette of the oil-rigs resembled neglected ancient cities once inhabited by the crane people who existed in the autochthonous mythologies of Rig-VII. Growing up on Rig-VII, Aakriti had been taught the stories of the crane-people along with those of the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and the Panchantantra. The crane people had existed long before the Tamilian fleet of spaceships had settled on Rig-VII. The crane people walked on legs as long as stilts, and had wings on their backs that transformed them into seafaring birds. The crane people possessed a powerful folk fetish system, and were equipped with a capacity for re-invention that Aakriti had envied.

More than anything in her teenhood, she had wanted to be a crane person, she had wanted the ability to change, to re-invent, to be a different person. When her child was born, she had constructed a mobile of sorts for her young, even if the nursery was underwater, for Tortzian young were amphibious in later life, but wholly reptilian upon birth.

Perhaps she had been a crane person of sorts on Tortz.

Perhaps if she had remained there, she would have been happy, would have merged into the lives of her mate and their offspring. Perhaps she would have stopped speaking Intergalactic Lingua or Tamil. Those languages were not necessary in a world where she could be stripped of all usual ways of communication, except for the one that lay in the heart of underwater undulations which penetrated her dreams with the memory of squidgy, ridiculously expressive tentacles caressing her sensitive skin and impaling her with far more depth and flexibility than anything she had ever experienced.

Her throat clenched like the fists at her sides at the memory.

It was getting colder.

Hungrily consuming the rays of the sun, the solarglass façade that shelled the serviced condominiums for the Double-T conglomerate powered the individual units allocated to their officers and engineers on shore leave. Aakriti kept two of the walls of her apartment curtained, obscuring the view of the dark green ocean, and the oil-rigs. Overhead, a lone mini container airship bobbed, buoyed by the currents of the skies, further agitated by the late afternoon grazing of the Zirafahs on the umbrella trees native to the planet.

On Tortz, Aakriti had been Aakavi. She had dressed often in tuxedos. She learned mathematics by day, and drove tourists to the edge of half-sleeping volcanoes at night. As Aakavi, she learned how to make, string, and play a zither, officiate at impromptu wedding ceremonies, and how to read the script of the Tortzians, the tentacled inhabitants of the planet Tortz, who loved their epic dramas and trashy pulp romances that sold as bestsellers to every solar system in the Conglomerate.

Aakavi had a daughter with Vazakh, a Tortzian engineer on that planet, participating in the ritual of marriage and the mingling of their DNA in one of the Holy Procreation Labs. This was a scant half a decade before she was transferred mandatorily out of Tortz, along with the rest of the humans, leaving her part-reptilian, part-cephalopodic mate and their hybrid offspring behind. When she had returned to Rig-VII, the matriarch had ordered Aakavi to revert back to Aakriti. She fought a long battle against it with their family but soon resigned herself to the inevitable. There did not seem to be any way back for her. All modes of communication back to Tortz had been closed, even though she still dreamed about her spouse and their life together before their enforced separation.

The first time she had met the multi-faceted eyes of her mate, Aakavi had partially recoiled at the difference. It had not been a marriage of passion, but rather an anthropological experiment carried out by human researchers on Tortz. The Tortzians did not identify to their bodies the way the humans identified to theirs, most of the time. It was easier to slip in-between identities, to become comfortable as just Aakavi, without the pronouns that defined her life on Rig-VII. She had agreed to the union in part because she thought that understanding Tortzian physiology would help her understand herself.

It was to be a celibate union. Most of the couples had opted for that, as had Aakavi and her mate. The mingling had been achieved by both parties pressing their thumbs to a panel that processed their imprints and created an embryonic environment for the development of a fetus. They had lived together in a comfortably accoutered Tortzian pod.

Their physical union came only after their child was two years old, another action recommended by the Society, for the more adventurous and curious. They were provided with carefully annotated diagrams about methods of insertion and pleasuring. They went at it carefully at first, and with more enthusiasm and derring-do towards the end of their married life, right until the point where the project was halted by the Galactic Union’s newly appointed President as an abomination against human nature and biology.

The Matriarch of the Kanapathy family was a slender scientist wearing a dark blue saree upon which the neighboring constellations were embroidered. Professor Rukumani’s eyelids were expertly filled in with color behind her owl-rimmed eyeshields. Vashti stood beside Aakriti, almost protectively. Rukumani waved the younger woman away and looked at Aakriti in the same way that had made Aakriti feel ashamed ever since her return from Tortz. Aakriti flinched from that gaze, her insides curdling.

“The saree becomes you. You look like your mother,” was Rukumani’s terse greeting, before she embraced her niece in a gingerly manner.

“Thank you, Auntie Rukumani,” Aakriti’s voice was dutiful in a lifeless way. Vashti raised her eyebrows at that, but Aakriti shrugged helplessly. What else could she do?

“Your mother would die again. She would die thirty times if she knew how you’d allowed your body and your womb to be defiled, Aakriti. Defiled!”

Beside her, Vashti sighed in annoyance. They had heard many iterations of this in the past week, and in the weeks after Aakriti had been extracted from Tortz.

“Oh, come off it, Rukumani. Aakriti is not the only person in this family to have indulged their curiosities about interspecies sexual unions. Or have you forgotten, hmm?”

Aakriti looked up, startled, at the booming new voice. It was Cousin Sharanya, the Holy Sage that she had been introduced to earlier that day, the one who was to officiate her Reversion Ceremony two days after her brother’s wedding.

Sharanya said, “We’ve all dabbled in much wilder activities in our youth, Aakriti. Don’t let your Auntie hoodwink you into believing otherwise. Or have you forgotten how we had to pull you away from your Zeta Alpha II lovers?”

Rukumani’s features were wrought in a mask of consternation, the effort of pulling her composure back together visible in the tautness of her neck and the cast of her jaw. She said, “Have you had far too much toddy to drink, Sharanya? You are sounding rather unhinged.”

Sharanya snorted, her white eyebrows raised. “No. But I make it my work in this dimension to shatter illusions, and our relative has choices to be made before she performs the Reversion.”

“Choices, what choices? She has to follow what is dictated by the tenets of our faith and culture!” Auntie Rukumani said, her voice booming and causing nearby cousins to flinch into themselves.

“The sounds of one who protests too much is grating upon my holy ears,” Sharanya retorted, “my Holy Sage ears, might I remind you.”

“Bother that!” Auntie Rukumani snapped, her head reared back as though in preparation for another tirade.

Aakriti uttered a small sound of distress. Sharanya nudged Auntie Rukumani aside to hug her cousin. “The Reversion Ceremony is not as frightening as you think it is, Aakriti, or Aakavi, if that is your preference,” she said, looking squarely at Aakriti before winking.

“I can promise you this—it certainly will not be what your Auntie hopes it to be. When we connect to the center of who we are, we make choices about how we want our connection to be. I made that choice during my reversion. In fact, the person who never went through a reversion, was your fantastic Auntie here. But we know all politicians are hypocrites, huh?”

Auntie Rukumani gasped and then quickly walked away from them, her shoulders stiff in affront, or embarrassment. It was hard to tell from the back, Aakriti thought, even after all of these years.

When Aakriti had been a toddler, Professor Rukumani had been a doting Middle Aunt, a gentle scientist who slowly taught her charge the fundamentals of both biology and chemistry. She paid for the girl’s education after her parents had perished aboard a space station during a freak accident. This changed after Rukumani became first Professor Rukumani on Rig-VII’s University of Intergalactic Sciences, and then Vice-Chancellor. She started to spout party hard-lines, and became a member of the Tricolor party, who managed to get their candidate elected as the President of the Galactic Union. Aakriti often missed the woman her aunt had been, but there was no reversion for aunts who had grown into terrifying politicians. Aakriti uttered a shuddering sigh, and said to Sharanya, “Thank you, you have no idea how much I needed that.”

Sharanya gave Aakriti an impish smile, squeezing her shoulders, “I understand, my dear. Don’t worry, it won’t be as bad as you think, the Reversion. Trust me.”

She winked before walking away from Aakriti towards the betrothed couple. Her brother was dressed in a long shirt of gold silk with matching gold and white salvai and vesti. Aakriti gave him a half-hearted wave which he returned in the same gingerly manner of her aunt. She recoiled from the revulsion in his eyes, and wished she didn’t have to attend his wedding ceremony.

“Leave him be, akka. Once he’s married you don’t ever have to see him again,” said Raehan, Vashti’s elder brother. His eyes upon hers were filled with a milder curiosity than Vashti’s.

“That much is true, but that isn’t a wish one wants to have about one’s own siblings,” Aakriti said in a sad voice.

“These things happen. Look, Rajesh has cut off ties with our family, and none of us have been as exciting as you. We lost our sibling because he married someone from the Kumaran clan. If it’s not kinky alien sex, it’s an old business disagreement. That’s the human way.”

“Well, there you go. I need to be purged so I can be human enough to have silly feuds with other humans,” Aakriti said.

Raehan’s laugh was rueful. “I’m sorry you have to go through this, akka. If you wanted to fight against it, you know we have your back, yes?”

“You’re a good man, Raehan. I appreciate that. But, I’m going to need some time alone, if that’s alright?” Aakriti said.

“Of course,” Raehan said, his voice warm. He squeezed her shoulders, much in the same way as Cousin Sharanya did.

She supposed shoulder-squeezing was one of those human things she had forgotten how to do. Aakriti retreated to a sofa hidden behind a landscaped indoor feature to wait for everyone to move towards the ceremonial hall. She peeped at Auntie Rukumani, who had wasted no time engaging the president of the Double-T conglomerate in conversation. Her boss, Aakriti thought in despair. Her life was a carefully controlled prison, and she had lost the strength, spirit, and adventure she possessed as Aakavi. She felt different. She felt fake.

Every now and then, she dreamed of Vazakh. The union was not one of love, but in the waters that they inhabited together, their entire selves cohered. Her dreams were thus of loss, and of a deep longing that went beyond bodily impulses.

They had to mate in the water, or the friction would have killed Aakavi. In the water, the scaled tentacles became malleable, porous, yet slick with lubrication. The suction pads that attached to her limbs provided pleasure that Aakavi had never associated with those parts of their body. Once the couple had grown used to it, their eyes would meet, and understanding began. Language happened, and with that knowledge, a connection so deep that this separation felt like a starvation of the spirit.

When Aakriti neglected to talk about the sexual part of the union with her curious cousins and siblings, she was not protecting them from the knowledge of the potential for pleasure that lay within the violet streaked pearl of her partner’s tentacles, lightly scaled on the topside, silky and gelatinous on the underside. What she needed to conceal was the language that had changed them both. That language had cleaved open her mind, and had allowed her to communicate with Vazakh at a deeper level than previously possible. The gift of language allowed her to understand es dreams, as e projected thoughts of concern and caring about their child, and es desire to have more children.

Aakavi began to understand deeper the romanticism of the Tortzians, outside of the artificial languages the Tortzians constructed with mechanical communication devices. What she learned was the Tortzian Deep Language. And with that knowledge, everything had changed.

Aakavi’s fluctuation in-between identities had meant less than nothing to Vazakh. They were all the same to em, who only understood the curious warmth and heat of the human body, so much heat that occasionally, when they rubbed up against each other outside of a liquid medium, Vazakh’s scales began to drop off. The Tortzian Deep Language was as liquid and as natural as love was, even love that blossomed as an afterthought.

Now, even on a planet that was mostly ocean, Aakriti was always thirsty. That thirst caused her to leave her comfortable seat in search of drinks. She filled a tall glass of water from one of the water pitcher tables and drank as she circled people. Some averted their eyes, and others came up to her to make summary small-talk. The liquid slid down her throat with the slight murky unease of memories. She refilled the glass from another pitcher before following the rest of the guests towards the temple that was located on the northernmost side of the courtyard. Her cousins went first, and then her siblings and her aunt. She brought up the rear and was one of the last to bless the thali laid out on bronze trays.

Inside the temple, the priest was waiting beside the open flames of the holy fire, waiting to officiate and to perform the Ganesha Puja. A gold statue of the elephant god graced the northernmost wall of the temple, almost taking up the height of the peacock green wall. Upon it, elaborate miniature scenes of Ganesha’s life as a child in the celestial gardens of his parents were painted in gold. Aakriti clutched at her necklace of gold and walked in brittle footsteps towards the side of the dais where guests sat on allotted chairs. On the dais, her cousin led his bride around the holy fire as incense rose up in the air. Beside the officiating priest, Cousin Sharanya stood, regal in her pristine white robes. She inclined her head at Aakriti, her eyes indicating understanding.

Reversion meant re-integrating with one’s culture after contamination with an alien culture. It was a backlash against the various interspecies experiments conducted by the Society of Interplanetary Anthropologists, now disbanded and excommunicated from the Galactic Union for their collaboration with the Holy Procreation Labs. Reversion included witnessing this wedding and other ceremonies. Reversion included immersion, and a pledge to honor her ancestors and her customs. She did not know much else beyond that. It was not an Earth-originating ceremony, but one created on Rig-VII to ensure cultural purity, a ceremony that ensured that centuries since they had settled on this solar system, certain customs remained constant. At least that was what Auntie Rukumani had told her. But Cousin Sharanya had planted a seed of doubt in her heart.

The golden moon dropped low in an aquamarine night sky as the indigo waves crashed upon the beach. Soon it was joined by its twin, a rust-colored satellite that cast orange patterns upon the waves. Aakriti watched the oil-rigs in the distance until a disturbance on the beach caught her attention. There were lights flashing on the beach, and a strange glow as a vessel rose up from the waves. Her curiosity piqued, Aakriti threw on a caftan over her sleeper’s jumpsuit, and put on her shoes. She pulled the hood of the caftan over her head and pressed her palm against the hermetically sealed door, stepping back as it softly whizzed open. She then padded down the carpeted hallway and entered the tube-lift. Gaining the ground floor and the entrance, she ran towards the beach, curious about the lights, desperate for any diversion against her thoughts, and her dreams.

By the time Aakriti reached the beach, only the two moons of Double Trouble illuminated the sands. The vessel had gone, as had whomever was receiving it on the beach. The waves looked warm and placid. It was a nice time of year for a swim. Aakriti divested herself of her clothes and waded into the waves for a strong swim around the bay.

As she cut through the waves in sinuous strokes towards Diamond Beach, she noticed light beneath the water. She dove beneath the waves. A small submarine seemed to be following her. She swam towards it. The submarine stopped, and then started moving in the opposite direction. Aakriti gasped and moved upwards to breathe. Above her the twin moons illuminated the dark green waves with golden-and-rust-colored light. Aakriti gulped in air before she dove beneath the waves again. The submarine was gone. There was no sense in wasting time, she thought, even though her heart was filled with a sudden, insane hope. Around her, the waves rippled and undulated in the rhythms of the Tortzian Deep Language.

Aakriti sobbed in surprised longing.

The winds surged and ebbed around them, almost like a sentient force. The winds were always stronger in the afternoon because of the aerial cross-currents. Occasionally, when the winds blew too strong, it was not unusual to see someone toppled off their feet and bobbing around on the ground like an oversized translucent beach ball. The suits were effective, but they were far from efficient. Vashti yelped and ducked as a lividly purple fruit dropped nearly a hundred feet near them. The cousins stopped as the earth beneath them shook. Not all of them were used to the ways of the veldt. Aakriti had taken them out on a short field trip the week before but that had not been nearly enough to acclimatize them.

“Press the ‘repel’ button!” Aakriti barked at her cousins as she pushed her own button on the hiking suit. They followed her lead and they were soon all bobbing together within their own security bubbles of force that protected them from the fruit.

“This planet is ridiculous, what made you decide to live here?” said Raehan through the microphone inside his helmeted suit as he bounced against the ground in his bubble.

“This was as far as that leash Auntie Rukumani has around my neck could extend. Where else would I go?” Aakriti’s answer was matter-of-fact, but everyone fell silent on the communication channel. She felt rebellion in their silences, and knew that all she had to say was a word. A single word. And they would. If she only asked them. She shook her head and urged her cousins onward.

The impact of the umbrella fruit caused there to be small craters everywhere on the grassy cover. Within the craters, tiny spores that lived caught on the furry skin of the dense fruit blossomed into mushrooms, therefore ensuring that each time the long lipped Zirafahs pulled sweet leaves off the tops of the umbrella trees, the veldt was assured of the survival of both the trees and the red-topped mushrooms. The umbrella trees predated the arrival of humans, but the Zirafahs had been introduced by them to modify the ecosystem, and to ensure there would be enough oxygen for a livable climate. There were many unexpected benefits to the bio-engineering of the giraffe specimens in their bio-banks.

The species named after the giraffes of Earth were several times the length and height of an ordinary giraffe, but in dimensions and shape, they were almost similar. Nobody messed with the Zirafah, they were the natural pruners of the trees, and the fruit that dropped to the ground from the tops of the trees during their mealtimes had an armadillo-tough skin, with a fuzzy fur covering. The long drop would crack the skin—and the bodies of any hapless travelers, to reveal a soft, gelatinous yellow fruit which provided sustenance for the inhabitants of Psychereon.

They had no time to reflect upon Psychereon’s peculiar ecosystem as they struggled against the winds. There were pauses, moments when it was suggested that her cousins were ripe for an adventure. She thought about Cousin Sharanya’s words. Something made her press on until they reached the Old Elephant Temple.

Reversion required no less than thirteen rites of ablution carried out in thirteen different pools found in the Old Elephant Temple. Each pool contained a cocktail of different chemicals and water, intended to purify the body and to cleanse it of any residual alien spores. Next came the drinking ceremony, meant to purge any alien toxins out of the blood. Part-superstition, part-biology, and partly a constructed devotional to fit a new time, the act of Reversion lasted nine hours. By the end of it, Aakriti could be pronounced fully human again.

In the first pool, Aakriti allowed herself to be fully submerged in water that felt and tasted like herbal jelly.

In the second pool, the liquid was unbearably ticklish against her skin and her throat tightened as incense wafted through the space and her cousins threw flowers on top of her head.

By the tenth pool, her skin, and the beige saree she wore were streaked with color in frenetic striations that overlapped and clashed with each other.

Finally, at the thirteenth pool, Aakriti started to hallucinate. This pool was filled with pure water, water that contained the same alkaline content as the waters of the Ganges on a long-destroyed Earth. As she plunged, her long-hidden bio-implanted gills finally feathered open, allowing her to breathe underwater. She opened her eyes, startled at the re-awakening of a self she thought she had left behind on Tortz.

Auntie Rukumani is going to be so disappointed, she thought to herself, even as reality ruptured and she dissolved into the Tortzian Deep Language that crammed every molecule of the holy water. Before she could sink further, muscled arms pulled her out, and she could hear people screaming in the background.

“If she dies, I’m holding you accountable, Auntie Rukumani,” yelled Vashti in outrage.

“Aakriti akka? Akka?”

She tried to let them know she was fine, but found that she could not open her eyes, nor talk. She sank back into the embrace of sleep.

When she regained consciousness she was on a bed, with tubes connected to her.

Vashti was asleep on the visitor’s couch that hovered next to the hospital bed. Aakavi sat up slowly, surprised to discover that she could actually move, and that her muscles were not as rigid as she had been expecting upon awakening.

“I’m here, I’m awake,” Aakriti said.

“You frightened us. You wouldn’t move, and there was a small whirlpool happening in that thirteenth pool.”

“Was that when I passed out? Because I remember that happening very differently.”

“The doctors said that the different chemical compounds used in the pools reacted differently to the atmosphere of Psychereon. This is the first time the full Rites of Reversion have been practiced here, and they didn’t do a proper biochemical test. Someone else said that the pools had been,” Vashti took a deep breath, “ . . . tampered with.”

Aakriti softly cursed beneath her breath. “So it wasn’t supposed to have hallucinatory qualities?”

“Were you on a trip?” Vashti asked, her eyes now dancing with amusement.

“It was a pretty good trip, I must say.” Aakriti chuckled weakly before a coughing fit stopped her.

“What happened to my . . . ”

“Oh, I’m so sorry akka. The chemicals affected your lungs. The doctors said you’re going to be asthmatic for life now.”

“Fantastic. I wonder how my employers will take that.”

A full bill of health and fitness was required to work on the oil rigs of Psychereon.

“Auntie Rukumani’s already talked to them, akka.”

Vashti’s tone of voice told her the news was not good.

“Am I fired? That was fast. Didn’t I just . . . ”

“It’s been a week, akka. A week while the doctors worked on you. They found your gills. How did they miss it the first time?”

Aakriti waved her hand, “It was a procedure done on Tortz. My . . . mate paid for it, to conceal my changed attributes so I would be protected.”

“I guess it didn’t work, huh?”

“Well, whatever the chemicals were supposed to do to restore my humanity, they failed. I’m now back to being what I was on Tortz, I suspect. Even the lungs.”

“The lungs, akka?”

“I’m not asthmatic, really. I’m just amphibious, and my lungs had been modified so I could breathe underwater. It was the shock of the transformation that probably knocked me unconscious. That and whichever buffoons ripped me out of the water.”

“That was Raehan and Devin pulling you out. They didn’t know. We didn’t know. Does this surgical transformation mean you’re a mermaid now?”

Aakriti laughed.

“I don’t think I’m mermaid material. But what else is supposed to happen to me now, Vashti? What’s Auntie Rukumani planning?”

“They’re taking you home to have our own scientists study you, remove the implants and then have the Reversion happen in the right circumstances.”

“Shit!” Aakriti cursed.

“That’s what I thought you would say. Or rather, I thought you would say something stronger, akka.”

“I’m not leaving Psychereon,” Aakriti said firmly.

“But,” Vashti protested.

“No! And what’s more, you’re going to help me.”

“Help you? Now? We would have put a stop to it earlier.”

“Yup. Now. I’m finally taking you up on your offer. All of you. Sorry it took so long, I’m sure I should have done it sooner but . . . ”

Vashti said, “Offers of help don’t come with deadlines or time limitations, akka. Doesn’t work that way. Or it shouldn’t. Wait for a while, I’ll call my brothers.”

Aakriti was not the sort of person who could patiently wait. Slowly, she considered the tubes that were attached to her. She removed them one by one before carefully standing. They had left her nice bedroom slippers. She put them on gratefully and then started shuffling slowly across the hospital room she had been given. It was rather luxurious, she thought. Far more luxurious than her own quarters. She supposed there were perks to being her domineering Auntie’s niece and ward. She moved back to the window. They were ironically closer to the ocean here at the hospital, which was built next to one of the biggest waterfronts in the city. People got into fights at the casinos, an orderly had told her in a confidential tone the one other time she had been admitted here. The moons shone on the deep green waters of the ocean at night.

Aakriti remembered all of her midnight swims in that ocean, and recalled the careful notes taken by the marine biologists who had initially traversed the oceans of the planet. There were no monsters in the deep on Psychereon. The sea life was generally considered to be harmless. Which is not to say the oceans were not without danger, Aakriti supposed. She briefly fantasized about exploring the oceans at a deeper and more immediate level than any of the marine biologists had been able to attain.

She looked up as her two burly cousins entered the room, following a determined Vashti who brought clothes, a silver duffel bag, and a hiking suit. All three of her cousins had garbed themselves rather prematurely in those hiking suits.

“Those suits are not needed,” Aakriti said briefly as she walked towards them.

“Why not? Aakriti akka, are you okay? If we’re going to get into trouble with Auntie Rukumani this had better be worth it,” said Raehan.

“I hope it will be, for me at least,” Aakriti said, while she allowed Devin to examine her gills. She remembered that he was a medical doctor. A specialist, even.

“Were you the doctor who examined me earlier?”

“Afraid not. I have no jurisdiction on Psychereon. But you do seem to be stronger than claimed by that doctor. Open your mouth?”

Aakriti opened her mouth obligingly as Devin peered in.

“Hmm. Interesting. I think reversion is wasted on you, akka.”

“Now that is an interesting observation, Devin,” Aakriti said in mild tones as she stared at her curly-haired cousin.

“Yes. See the thing is, you’re no longer human. It’s amazing the work that’s been done to help you blend in during the first twenty health screenings that took place after you voluntarily relocated from Tortz. But it’s nothing even our best doctors and scientists can change. You’re irrevocably a hybrid, a non-human.”

“My relocation wasn’t entirely voluntary, Devin,” Aakriti said. “I was happy on Tortz before they ripped me away.”

Devin looked uncomfortable so she decided not to press the issue.

“So where are we headed anyway?” asked Raehan who had been quiet.

Aakriti moved back to the window.

“Down there,” she said, pointing at the pier that overlooked the dark green waters that gleamed in the neon lights of the casinos.

They walked with Aakriti down to the beach. Devin and Raehan managing to get her discharged from the hospital with a combination of expertise and charm. She was going to miss her cousins, Aakriti mused with some surprise.

Beyond the pier lay the boardwalk, and steps leading to the small pocket of red sands that was the beach.

“Are you sure?” asked Raehan doubtfully as she began to take off her sweater and her top.

“You heard Devin. I’m amphibious. No longer human. And I want this.”

“Wanting is not the same as having, not always,” Devin.

“That needs to change. That should have changed.” Vashti said, firmly.

“I agree. And that’s why I need to do this. It’s for you as much as it’s for me,” Aakriti said.

“Why is that?” Devin asked, as he carefully sidestepped a broken bottle in the grainy red sand.

“So you know that you can have what you want. And you don’t have to follow Auntie Rukumani’s rules and modified rituals of our forefathers. If the traditional ways of our people make you happy, go for it. But if you need to fly like the crane people or swim like our Rig-VII dolphins . . . well, don’t be stopped. Auntie Rukumani knows less now than she knew before.”

“She was great before she became a politician,” Vashti said, her voice sad.

“That she was. But no good ever came from politics,” Devin said before he turned to Aakriti, deep concern in his eyes. “Aakriti akka. There’s just Ocean out there.”

Aakriti gave a sigh of longing, “I know.”

“Auntie Rukumani will only find another way to retrieve you. There are submarines, you know?”

“I know. Let her try. Let her fail.”

Devin nodded, “Alright. Let’s do this.”

“But we’re going to be leaving food for you underneath the pier every day, okay?” Raehan added.

“Why the pier?” Aakriti wrinkled her nose.

“Well, you’re departing from here.”

“Leave it at Diamond Beach.”

“You’re going to swim from here to Diamond Beach? That’s impossible!”

Weary as she was, Aakriti chuckled. “I’ve done it before. I’ll be fine.”
She hugged her cousins awkwardly. “You might want to look away, I’m removing the rest of my clothing now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, it’s going to be cold,” Raehan fussed.

“Not human anymore, remember?”

Finally, they turned around. She removed the rest of her clothing and waded to the water’s edge. As she entered the water to her neck, she watched as they turned towards her.

With a wave, Aakriti dove into the water, and reveled in the feeling of her gills flowering at the sides of her neck.

She swam silently out of the harbor in smooth, steady strokes, even though she had been tired before. The fatigue left her as her eyes adjusted to the liquid darkness of the deeps, no longer illuminated by the light of Psychereon’s moons.

The submarine was waiting for her halfway between Casino Strip and Diamond Beach, and as she approached, a dark, tentacled figure swam out. Aakriti did not feel particularly surprised.

Some rescue, she vocalized in the Deep Language as Vazakh reached her and took her palm in es tentacles.

It would not have been safe to venture closer to humans. I have our young on board.

Sure, make your excuses, Aakavi flung at em crabbily. Why did you run away from me the other night?

I knew you’d be able to find your way back to us. I left enough clues in the water. In your dreams. And you needed to make your choice. If you wanted to be with your people, I did not want to stop you. Cousin Sharanya said to let you come around. She asked me to give her some Deep Language messages to pass to you, so I did. Did you get it?

Vazakh sounded hopeful. Aakriti laughed. If e only knew what the tampering of the thirteenth pool had wrought. And it figured that Cousin Sharanya could actually speak the Deep Language.

Yes, I got it, honey. But I wish you hadn’t run away from me like that. Her Deep Language emanated in disapproving swirls from her gills and her skin which was fast changing in the language-infused waters, becoming more iridescent, and less mammalian.

Besides, our young needed a steady regiment or this relocation would have really upset them. They were not ready to be reunited with you.

Well, tough. And they’re going to be upset anyway when we move back to Tortz.

The silence that imbued the water around her was now filled with the deep shame of Tortzian failure. She had learned enough of the language to understand that her mate was bracing for her disappointment.

Wait. Why are you quiet?

There’s no way to get back to Tortz, love. I got out just before the Tortzian Planetary Authorities sequestered the planet from the Galactic Union. We’re exiled for good now.

The sound-meaning of love was awkward in the vibrations around and inside her. It was the first time Vazakh had ever communicated that emotion to her. Aakavi wished e had not done so when e was trying to obviously tell her bad news but apparently that was what married couples did. She’d seen her uncles pull similar stunts at that, she mused to herself.

Are you saying . . . ?

Yes. If her mate could sigh, she though e would sigh. The touch of es tentacle was like a sigh. A woebegone sigh. Tortzians were so silly and so dramatic, she thought fondly.

We’re going to have to make a home here on Psychereon, love.

Auntie Rukumani will be so overjoyed to know this, Aakavi said sourly before she allowed her mate to embrace her with all of es squidgy, apologetic tentacles, even the one that brought her lavish amounts of indecent pleasure. Especially that one.

About the Author

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial 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, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed. Nin is currently seeking representation for Watermyth, the first novel of the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms mythic clockpunk fantasy sequence.

The Stone Weta

Octavia Cade

Hemideina maori

In winter, the mountain stone weta crawls into crevices, into cracks in the stone and it squats there, waiting. It is a creature of summer days and winter strengths, of cryogenic hibernation. When the world freezes about it, becomes a stretch of snow and ice and darkness, the stone weta freezes solid in its bolthole. Eighty-two percent of the water in its body turns to ice; the weta is climate in a single body, it is a continent broken off and geology made flesh.

When the weather warms the weta thaws, resumes its life amidst the stone monuments of the Rock and Pillar range.

Female weta survived the cold more readily than the males. The Stone Weta laughed under her breath. There was a frigidity joke to be made there somewhere, but in her experience winter was a time to lie low and endure and women were better at that, overall, than men. Resistance was revolution, sometimes, blood and dramatic acts, but more often it was survival. More often it was preservation, and the data she carried with her was for preservation more than revolution.

The new data she’d received, smuggled over from Resurrection in a tiny drive, hung down between new breasts. The Stone Weta was still getting used to the weight of them, in love with the curves of the body she’d always felt she was meant to have. The university had been supportive of her transition, colleagues coming by with easy-freezing foods so she wouldn’t have to cook so soon out of the hospital, and there was still some leave left. But the Stone Weta didn’t like to leave data where it might be searched for, or where someone could stumble over it when they popped by to fill up her cupboards.

“There’s such a thing as too dedicated,” said her doctor when the Stone Weta decided to come back to work early. The invertebrates could wait, he argued, but what he didn’t know was that they were only an excuse. The Stone Weta had an insulated lockbox hidden up in the Rock and Pillars, buried deep in a lonely crevice.

The lockbox was stuffed with climate data. Information come from another country, an administration that was purging files—and the Stone Weta was a biologist with colleagues in other disciplines, and she kept their geology for them.

Selaginella lepidophylla

A desert dweller, the resurrection plant is adapted to dehydration, to the long dry seasons of its arid environment. Parched for short periods, its outer stems curl into circles, but as the waterless days endure the resurrection plant hunches further down, its inner stems compressing into spirals and minimizing surface area. Tucked in, the resurrection plant survives almost complete desiccation. Until the rains come it takes on the appearance of a dead thing, but beneath the surface there is revival waiting.

Resurrection was raised on the southern borders of the Chihuahuan desert. She played there as a child—carefully at first, until she learned to adapt her play to climate—and she was grateful for that apprenticeship in aridity. It had taught her what it was to have boundaries, and what it was to have them broached. Water evaporated out in the desert; sweated through skin that seemed sometimes to be a too-permeable thing.

But then all borders were permeable. There wasn’t a wall built that couldn’t be overcome, and although Resurrection had relatives she no longer saw, could no longer see for they were afraid of leaving a country they might not be able to return to, she had other means of contact.

A botanist was expected to attend conferences, to promote the conservation of her region. “Mexico has one of the most biologically diverse deserts on the planet,” she said, talking of the work she was doing, the population surveys, the challenges of long-term monitoring. “We have a responsibility to ensure the preservation of this natural wonder.” She took some of the attendees on a field trip, introduced them to ecologies not their own. In the middle of the hike, one of the foreign scientists—a woman who was deliberately, inanely chatty in her conversation and as such roundly ignored by the rest of the party—stumbled in the sand. When Resurrection took her hand to help her up, a drive was pressed into her palm.

“Thanks,” said the scientist. “Clumsy me! Always tripping over my own feet.”

“You’re welcome,” said Resurrection, pocketing what was given her without a glance. “But it wasn’t your feet you tripped over. Have you seen this plant?” She explained about the curling as the others gathered round, demonstrated the beginnings of reversal with her water bottle. “It’s amazing what can survive out here,” she said.

For all the drama of above-ground, of the resurrection leaves, it was what was buried beneath that she found most important.

Root systems went deep in the desert.

The Stone Weta always copied any data she was given before she buried it in the Rock and Pillars. Caching data was a useful fallback, but caches had been discovered before. The Stone Weta had only heard bits and fragments, passed on from her own minimal sources, but Bristlecone Pine had gone silent. Arrested, most likely, with her data confiscated and, presumably, destroyed. 

Now it was spread internationally, each piece of information replicated and hidden at several sites. The Stone Weta didn’t know all of them. She only knew who she was to pass her data sets on to. That way her potential for betrayal was limited.

“Not that I would, not if I had any choice,” she promised. She tried very hard not to think of the choices that Bristlecone might have been given. (The choices that might have been taken away.)

“We all like to think that we’d be brave,” said the Glass Sponge. She’d come to stay for the party the Stone Weta was throwing, to celebrate her new shape with friends while she could.

“A Show-Us-Your-Tits Party,” said the Glass Sponge, into her third wine and tactful with it.

“You’re all class,” said the Stone Weta, emptying the bottle. “Such a fucking lady. And you should be so lucky.”

The Glass Sponge sighed, wistful, and the Stone Weta sniggered into her glass. She’d been recruited by the other woman a couple of years previously. They’d flatted together at uni, and the Stone Weta hadn’t ceased to be amazed that such were the things resistance was made of—the memories of Dunedin winter, cheese rolls and tramping; a history of shared homework and early morning lectures. Soft power and social circles.

“My turn to find someone soon,” she said.

Scolymastra joubini

The glass sponge crouches on seabeds beneath the Antarctic ice. The silica skeleton sways in the dark water, chilled by the currents of a continent. It is the oldest organism on the planet; for 15,000 years, perhaps, the glass sponge endures a long night, its growth a slow and silent thing. But the ice shelves collapsing above, calving off in response to climate, have brought light and plankton in levels the glass sponge is not accustomed to and it grows wildly, branches out quickly while destruction takes place above it.

The Glass Sponge spent her summers in the Antarctic, trying to determine the effects of a shifting climate upon polar biota. She was part of a community there: scientists stacked on top of each other, a small society isolated by climate and vocation.

Her secondary role there was an open secret. Scott Base was a facility set up for knowledge and the sharing of it, run by a country that was far enough away from the seats of power that it was frequently overlooked. Being small and hidden away at the bottom of the world had its uses, and unimportance was as much a defense as armor.

“Don’t you ever want to just come straight out with it?” the Glass Sponge was asked. “Say to hell with it, Scott Base will take your data, send copies to us and we’ll store it away where no one can tamper with it.”

“I’m sure the government would love that,” she said.

“It’s not like New Zealand hasn’t told a superpower to fuck off before. We did it on nukes, we can probably get away with it on climate. It might encourage those bastards in Wellington to finally take a stand for once.”

“If Wellington wants to come out on data protection I won’t stop them,” said the Glass Sponge. “But I’m not in charge of what we do here, and I’m not just talking about the Base. I didn’t set up this network. The person who did is responsible for scientists all around the world—and not all of them live in countries that wouldn’t sell them out if power came knocking.”

There was no answer to that. The Glass Sponge waited to be asked who was in charge, but the question never came. She took that discretion for the support that it was and was grateful.

Besides, even if she were aware of the real-world identity of the Sand Cat she would never have shared it. Some secrets weren’t hers to tell.

Felis margarita

The sand cat protects itself from sunlight, and from the lack of it. The desert is a place of extreme temperatures and the bottom of its feet, the spaces between its toes, are thick with fur for when the sand is scalding in the noon sun. This fur blurs its footsteps, and the tracks of the sand cat through the dunes are hard to follow.

The sand cat, relative to its size, bites harder than any other feline.

The Sand Cat learned early and well the importance of preservation, and of libraries. The Timbuktu manuscripts were the pride of her city, hundreds of thousands of them spread through numerous private households. As a girl, the Sand Cat had seen her uncle inherit the family library, had seen him swear to protect it for the whole of his life, as was right and good.

As a woman, the Sand Cat had seen those manuscripts a source of danger as well as pride. The Islamic fundamentalists in northern Mali had tried to destroy them, and while they had managed to burn some the people of Timbuktu had come together to preserve the rest. Manuscripts were bundled up, were buried, were smuggled out of the city to safety, a costly and perilous process but one that had resistance and love of learning down the very spine of it. Residents endangered themselves, endangered their families, by accepting small parcels of text to hide in their homes. People were beaten every day on the streets for lesser crimes. They were mutilated, they were executed.

They hid the manuscripts regardless.

When the Sand Cat saw the same thing happening again, albeit in another country and with another target, perpetrated this time by government instead of rebels, she refused to countenance it.

The very idea offended her. It offended her down to the marrow, and the Sand Cat felt herself begin to hiss with rage.

“Why do they keep trying to do this?” she spat. “It is knowledge they go after every time!”

“Of course it is,” said her uncle. “People who know nothing can be controlled.” His texts had been saved, but the effort had turned his hair to iron.

“It has done the same to my heart,” said the Sand Cat.

Timbuktu had taught her the value of knowledge, and of preservation. It had also taught her how to network. The Sand Cat was involved in setting up reforestation projects, working to increase planting and this gave her access to scientists involved in similar projects in other countries. It was perfectly normal for her to consult with them on best practice, on their strategies for environmental conservation and how best to involve affected communities. Such consultation was not only normal, it was encouraged.

And if the conversation wandered, what of it?

Geckolepis megalepis

The fish-scale gecko is an escape artist of particular and gruesome aspect. Its sister-species amputate themselves in the face of predation, but the fish-scale gecko holds its escape in its skin instead of its tail. That skin is large-plated and scaly, and its attachment to the flesh beneath is temporary. When the fish-scale gecko is grabbed or threatened, it sheds its skin and skitters, bald and pulsing, into trees.

The Fish-scale Gecko was in constant contact with the Sand Cat. Madagascar was not Mali, but the Fish-scale Gecko spent her days as a park ranger, encouraging eco-tourism in the tropical forests. “Poverty is a trap,” she said. “People need to live. And if slash-and-burn is the only way for them to make a living, then that’s what they’ll do. You have to find a way to make sustainable use of the forests economically viable.”

The Sand Cat knew that, but she made appropriate noises anyway, was seen to take notes. Escape was a useful survival tactic but camouflage was better. “Eco-tourism is proving a viable option, then?” she said.

“Over fifty percent of visitors take part in some form of eco-tourism. The forests are a big part of that. Something I’ve found tourists particularly enjoy is being hoisted up into the treetops. It gives them a whole new perspective on rainforest ecology. That’s particularly useful given how much tropical forest cover is decreasing globally.”

Other operatives might hide the data entrusted to them in the ground, but the Fish-scale Gecko was a creature of heights and canopies, and when she stashed it was arboreal.

“Is this just at the one location?” asked the Sand Cat.

“For now, but it’s a popular activity. Too popular, perhaps. I begin to think all the activity in one area is compromising the local ecology.”

Over the monitor, the Sand Cat froze and it was almost imperceptible, had not the Fish-scale Gecko been looking for it. “That is . . . concerning.”

“I’ve been scouting for new sites. But we’ve a busy program of local events coming up, so I might have to put it off for a little while.”

“You’ve been so helpful,” said the Sand Cat. “I really appreciate the time you’ve spent advising me. I realize I’ve been adding to your workload. Would it be useful to put our consultations on hold for a few months?”

“That’s probably a good idea,” said the Fish-scale Gecko. Her skin itched, and she could feel the talons closing around.

“We’re going to miss you.”

“I’ve still got a few months,” said the Stone Weta. “But thank you. I’ll miss you too. I’ll miss everyone here. The department’s been good to me, and that’s in no small measure down to the administration. Down to you.”

“My pleasure,” said her department head. “You’ve been a real boon to us. It’s not many universities can say that one of theirs has been tapped for Mars.”

“Mars needs entomologists too!” said the Stone Weta. The first manned mission, a colony group of scientists and that mission one way. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity, to help create an ecosystem.”  

“You’ve certainly had practice,” said the head. Her voice was carefully bland. “I mean, of course, your work up in the Rock and Pillars. Though I suppose that’s as much preservation as creation.”

“It’s an extraordinary interaction between organism and environment,” said the Stone Weta. “It deserves to be protected.”

“Absolutely. Oh, talking of the extraordinary, you won’t believe what’s turned up in my inbox. Accusations that someone at this university is smuggling, if you can believe it. Smuggling data. Ridiculous—sounds like they’re fishing to me. I forwarded the email on to Foreign Affairs, told them I didn’t know anything about it.”

“Don’t you?” said the Stone Weta, her voice level.

“Not a thing,” said the head. Her gaze was very direct. “And I certainly don’t have time to go looking. I’m too busy hunting for a replacement for you!”

“I’m sorry to cause you trouble,” said the Stone Weta.

“If you’re that sorry you can help out. There’s a young woman visiting next week, come for an interview. She’s a potential grad student, looking to do her PhD. Was recommended by a colleague over in Suva—she did some summer fieldwork there in her undergrad. I’d like you to talk with her, see what you think. I hear she’s very independent-minded. I like that in this department.”

“I’ve noticed,” said the Stone Weta.

Asterias amurensis

The Japanese seastar owes its success to adaptability and reproductive strategy. It owes that success, as well, to the interconnection of the world. Its larvae spread through ballast waters, are shipped to other oceans and other countries. It is one of the most invasive species alive, and there is hungry persistence in each of its five arms.

One of the things that the Japanese Seastar enjoyed most about marine biology was that it gave her the opportunity, so often, to speak with others in her field. The marine environment was linked, all of it flowing together, and the conferences were frequently global in subject as well as in participants.

She had just attended a particularly interesting session on the effects of climate change upon Antarctic glass sponges. Her own contribution, as one of a panel on combating invasive species, was scheduled for later that afternoon. It promised to be popular—invasion was an issue that could exercise many a biologist.

“We so often have to deal with pests. It’s rewarding to find a way to hit back! A job for scientists of sneakiness and strategy.” She grinned coquettishly as she said it, circulating through the morning tea, relishing responses. The Japanese Seastar was aware that she looked pretty and small and unthreatening. Charm was her greatest asset.

“I need a deputy who can make connections quickly,” the Sand Cat had told her. “Someone who can accurately and discreetly assess the character of others. Someone people will trust.” 

“I’m your woman,” the Japanese Seastar had said. “I’ve a very long reach. Fingers everywhere!” And held them up, wriggling. The nails were brightly painted.

It amused her to take the name of an invasive to fight invasion. She’d seen what happened when things went wrong. It wasn’t enough to store data online, to spread it over the net where everyone could see it. Viruses could change that data easily enough, falsify findings and make the effects look smaller than they were, make the data less of a threat—and without a hard copy to compare it to, without the original data cached, it was difficult to prove the tampering.

The Japanese Starfish didn’t hold a cache. Instead she held drives in her bright pretty handbag, and handed them out like candy at conferences, albeit quietly and carefully. A good proportion of the scientists attending worked for her anyway, and the contents of their own handbags would later disgorge in other waters, and go to ground in foreign shores.

“I’ve felt a chrysalis for so long,” said the Stone Weta. “Transformation comes easily to me.” Change of body, change of purpose. Change of planet. “Well, not always easily. But it comes and I have learned to adapt to that. It doesn’t work that way for everyone.”

“If you think I don’t understand necessity and change you can think again,” said the girl. The girl—she wasn’t very much younger than the Stone Weta. And she had a name, but the Stone Weta tried not to think of it. That name was irrelevant—she was here to see if there was a Fish-eating Spider, not a tired young woman from Tuvalu, forced into immigration as a child because of rising waters.

“Why Dolomedes dondalei?” asked the Stone Weta.

The girl who might be the Fish-eating Spider shrugged. “There aren’t many species where individuals go hunting for prey bigger than they are,” she said. “I found it refreshing.”

“You’re angry.”

“My home is being swallowed up by climate. No one gives a shit. You think my family was the last to leave? Hell, we weren’t even the first. We left years ago. I can’t even speak the language anymore! How’s that for transformation?

“No one gives a shit,” she said again. “It’s all screwing with data now, trying to pretend that nothing’s happening. Fine. We’re all going to pretend everything’s fine. I can pretend too. But I’m going to pretend with an insect I can at least admire for gumption, because God knows the people around me don’t have any.”

“It’s a dangerous identification though, isn’t it?” said the Stone Weta, remembering the sound of ancient trees gone quiet, of the silence where Bristlecone Pine had been. She couldn’t let anyone else get involved without making sure that they knew the risks they were taking. “Identification like that might make it easy to forget that hunting generally goes the other way.”

The girl narrowed her eyes, and for an instant the Stone Weta could see in them the shadow of many legs. “Sometimes danger is necessary,” she said.

Dendrocnide moroides

The gympie gympie covers itself with stinging hairs and neurotoxin. It is one of the most poisonous plants in the world, and one of the most painful. A human who brushes up against a gympie gympie will experience agony for up to two years: it is a most persistent reminder of trespass.

It flourishes best after disturbance, when the ground is overturned and in full sunlight.

The Gympie Gympie buried her caches in shallow soil. She didn’t use a single lockbox, didn’t add to the same location more than once. Instead there were a dozen little burials, all in the open air with gaps in the rainforest canopy above. Atop each burial she planted a small specimen of D. moroides.

She wore protective gear when she planted; amused herself by picturing what would happen if some poor bastard came looking for what he shouldn’t. The Gympie Gympie’s ancestors had walked the tropical ecosystems of northern Australia for tens of thousands of years before the Europeans came, and she had been raised with their knowledge, had gone away to university for ecology and come home to her own lands.

She didn’t much care if she were followed; there were more dangers here than interrogation, than imprisonment and the betrayal of science. No one that followed would know those dangers like she did. Anyone alien enough, who didn’t know what they were getting into, deserved what they got as far as the Gympie Gympie was concerned. There was a reason she supplemented the buried seeds of science with silica and poison, and it was so the lands of her childhood weren’t ravaged further than they had to be when the climate turned.

The Sand Cat might have prioritized preservation, but the Gympie Gympie was all about justice. Her own country wasn’t so fucking innocent, and she had no pity left in her burials for guilt.

Buellia frigida

This Antarctic lichen of the Dry Valleys grows slowly, perhaps a single centimeter for every millennia, but it does grow. The lichen is so accustomed to extreme cold and aridity that it is used as an approximation of what life may be capable of on Mars. Experiments on the International Space Station, where the lichen is exposed to the conditions of space, as well as to a simulation of Martian environments, prove that the lichen is capable of enduring both.

The Antarctic Lichen floated through the ISS, making her way to the docking port. The transports to the Mars colony were almost ready to go, and the scientists that had been ferried up and through the ISS to their respective ships had almost been offloaded. Only a few were left, and the Antarctic Lichen, assigned on permanent rotation to the Station, was going to say goodbye.

She didn’t know the Stone Weta, had never been informed of her true name, but when the Stone Weta had first stepped aboard with the tattoo curling round her forearm, all spiky legs and long antennae and big striped body, the Antarctic Lichen had recognized her.

“Nice ink,” she said.

“Kind of a last minute reminder,” said the Stone Weta, smirking. “I’m still not entirely sure of what. Endurance, maybe.”

“Persistence,” said the Antarctic Lichen. “Rebirth, into a different world.” The world below them hung in space, green and blue and with the ice at its edges draining, the polar caps melting away almost as she watched.

“Transformation,” said the Stone Weta. “I am . . . familiar with the concept.”

There was little chance to talk. But as the Stone Weta prepared to disembark, the Antarctic Lichen gave her a small box. “If you could transport that over to your ship I’d be grateful,” she said. “Last minute additions for Buellia. Just pass them on, please.”

Anyone around them would have thought the box was to be handed over to the colony’s botanical department. B. frigida was making the trip, after all, and it gave the Antarctic Lichen some comfort to know, after all her experiments on it, that if the lichen’s native environment was at risk then there was, still, the potential for it to survive on other worlds.

Mars had the potential to preserve a lot.

“It’s amazing what can survive in such inhospitable places,” said the Stone Weta.

“I have every faith,” said the Antarctic Lichen, waving through the window in the airlock. It was perhaps paranoia that made her send data to the open plains of another planet, but she couldn’t keep hoarding on the ISS, where there were limited opportunities to unload.

Data that couldn’t be shared was always at risk.

The Fish-eating Spider stared up into the dark. Though she could not see it, the ship carrying the Stone Weta had begun its journey to a harder planet. The Fish-eating Spider did not envy her. She would have missed the stream-sides, the night-sounds of water and the creatures that lived beside it. The way the earth smelled when she turned it over for burial, the shovel new-bought and shiny in her pack.

A drive of smuggled data hung between her breasts, waiting for the morning.

About the Author

Octavia Cade has a PhD in science communication and has most recently been researching seagrasses. Her stories have appeared in places like Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. She particularly likes to write mash-ups of science history and speculative fiction–a short novella on Ernest Rutherford along these lines, “The Ghost of Matter,” recently won a Sir Julius Vogel award. She attended Clarion West 2016, and is currently working on a scifi novel about marine conservation in future New Zealand.

In the Blind

Sunny Moraine

Space is an eye that never sees, an ear that never hears, a mouth that never speaks.

Her third sleep period in orbit, Nic woke up to the phrase rattling around in her brain, whispering into the spaces between and within and around her skull. Flitting like a moth and always fluttering out of the reach of her vision and hands whenever she tried to catch it with either.

Words. They blurred and weaved around each other. She floated there in her warm, soft cocoon and let them flow through her and didn’t try to make sense of them. No obvious reason to try, nothing to be gained; it was some dream-bullshit, creepy as hell but plenty of things were.

Two weeks later and the words won’t leave her alone, asleep or waking, and now, as the last of the lights flicker and die, they return, circle those dying lights, throw themselves against her. They demand her attention. They demand to be made sense of.

Truth is, they’re the only thing that makes sense anymore.

“Nothing?”

Nic doesn’t look toward the hatch. Doesn’t look away from the comm unit at all. Like it might do something if she stares at it long enough. Like that’s a thing she actually believes. Like it’s a thing she ever fucking could.

Though, Christ, it might be nice to be able to do so.

“Said I’d wake you if there was anything, Marlie.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. It’s so dry up here and she’s getting headaches more and more frequently these days. “Did I wake you?”

“You don’t have to be an asshole about it.” Marlie’s tone is vaguely stung—prelude to sulky. She doesn’t do that much, but shit, when she does she really commits.

Nic stares past the pink blur of her own knuckles at the comm unit. It’s so new. It’s the size of an old laptop and set neatly into the side of the module, console so smooth and clean and shiny, like they got so freaked out by the aesthetics of the older generations of space travel—all dials and buttons and knobs and flashing indicator lights—that they went all the way to the other extreme and created something so pristine that, but for the screen set into its surface, it defies any visually obvious purpose.

It’s blank. It’s blank in every way that matters.

Would be way too easy to call it the eye in this situation. Blind eye, screen not black but a milky blue-gray the color of a cataract. No, it’s not the eye.

The eye she’s staring at is staring right the fuck back at her. Beyond and just to the left of the unit: softly rounded transparent dome broken into separate frames, single large circle in the center and smaller curving-rectangle panes surrounding it. Pale as bone, framing black. Whatever tiny pinpoints of brightness ever pierce it might as well not even be there.

No one is talking to them anymore.

Marlie floats in place for a moment or two, head down, mouth tight. Finally: “I’m gonna run through another diagnostic series.”

Nic shrugs. It feels mechanical, the connection between her brain and her muscles not quite right. “You do whatever the fuck you want.”

Won’t hurt anything. Won’t help. It’s not the unit. It’s not anything inside or attached to the module. Marlie’s not stupid; she knows this. But Nic gets it.

Can’t just do nothing. Or you technically can, but.

Marlie is gone. Nic doesn’t look away from the window. Only when her eyes begin to burn and sting does she realize that she hasn’t been blinking.

If what they say about an abyss is true, it’s beyond stupid to get into a staring contest with one.

And yet.

Back when there were still four of them up here, three had calls from home every weekend and Nic never did.

Exceptional, Nic always has to be.

Marlie has a long-time girlfriend. Common courtesy sent everyone else away when someone was watching theirs, but more than once Nic caught a glimpse of Marlie during one of Anna’s throaty messages, saw her face, felt a twinge of something between fascinated curiosity and equally fascinated envy, resented herself for feeling both of those things. Not Nic’s fault, the endless series of cold foster homes, the friends who she never got very attached to because they never seemed to last, one-night stands that she actively kept from becoming anything more. None of it her fault.

Only made it worse, feeling that way.

Ty and David—husband and a baby daughter, wife and two teenage boys respectively. Very domestic. Smiling spouses, smiling kids. Occasional wistfulness but never any real angst.

Seemed so simple.

Floating in her cocoon and trying to sleep and failing, imagining what it was like to know that at regular intervals, someone was calling across all that distance just for you, crying your name at the sky.

She knows that, when they looked at the window, they never saw what she sees.

Which is distance unutterably vast. Uncrossable. Impenetrable. Blind and deaf and mute.

Another few hours and, because there’s nothing else to do except listen to nothing, Nic pulls up the last communication. The final stream of images and sound. The thing that grabbed Ty and David and drew them back down, drew them home with promises to send word, to explain what they had seen and hadn’t seen, and to return.

Did she believe them even then? She doesn’t know.

The conversation itself is brief. There’s very little information. There’s a talking head—not the woman they were used to dealing with, and that should have been the biggest warning sign. The next one should have been the calm in his voice, an utterly determined steadiness like a smooth paving stone laid over uneven ground. Those kinds of stones rock from side to side when you step on them. They aren’t steady at all in the end. But he didn’t get stepped on. He cruised ahead and only afterward did they start to take it in, get what it might mean.

Be advised: they had a situation. It was concerning. They were working to determine its nature.

Earth’s vagabond children falling endlessly in high orbit should stand by.

And that was all she wrote. Spoke. Whatever.

About an hour before that, all their access to the net had abruptly cut off. That was irritating but not necessarily unusual. They were going to ask about it when they got a free second, but then all the seconds were gone. Evaporated. Vapor shimmering in the vacuum.

Nic watches that calm talking head. Cool voice. Cool pale face, like that polished stone. And now that she watches this for the umpteenth time, Nic understands that he was probably chosen for that precise quality of polish, of impassivity. No sense in panicking people who can’t do anything. And they probably did believe it would be okay.

People always do.

Nic cuts the screen off and lowers her face into her hands.

“I keep thinking maybe we should’ve gone down there with them.”

Marlie’s turn to stare at the comm panel. Not in front of it the way Nic has been but instead merely near it, a few feet away, arms crossed. Hugging herself. It’s a somewhat awkward position in zero-g but she seems determined to maintain it anyway.

Nic looks at her. Looks away. She would very much like to be somewhere else, doing something else, but she’s never taken well to busywork, and even if there’s more in the way of necessary tasks to go around with a crew of two . . .

Christ, it all feels so fucking pointless.

“Why?”

Stupid question. She deserves the look Marlie shoots at her. “Because then we’d know. It’s killing me, not knowing. Nothing to do except sit up here.” Glare. “How the hell are you so calm?”

This is not calm. Nic shrugs. “Like you said. There’s nothing to do up here. Nothing to do but wait.”

“For how long?” Marlie’s voice is soft—and this is what neither of them has been willing to ask aloud. How long do we wait? How long before we start drawing some truly awful conclusions? How long is it appropriate to believe they’re working to determine its nature?

What is it?

Nic doesn’t answer. There is no answer. She’s been turning the question over and over in her mind, approaching it from every angle she can think of, and she’s got nothing.

She stares down at her own hands. She’s a habitual nail-biter and those nails are stripped down to the quick, here and there red raw skin and spots of blood.

Marlie gazes at her for a while longer, until Nic can’t take it anymore and moves to another module, sucks a packet of tomato juice.

Sweet and vaguely metallic. It tastes like her blood.

Nic used to dream about ships lost at sea.

Always the same. Night—of course her mind would always set these things at night. A vast inky sky, no trace of stars. Still water. She learned in high school what it meant to be becalmed—abandoned by the wind. By the air. She thought about fish who die when they stop moving. The purpose of a ship is to move. What’s a ship when it can’t do that anymore? Sailors existing on and in a null space devoid of any coherent definition, slowly losing their own purpose, which is to be alive.

But before that, the inky night is silent. If they speak, it’s only to each other. If they hear a voice, it’s only one from their fellows. Nothing from land. Nothing from other ships. No radio, no satellites. No net. In the still night, on the still water, the world itself might end for all they know. If they make it out alive, with their purpose intact, they might return home to find that home is no longer there. They can scream for help all they want; no one is going to hear them.

All around them, an abyss of water and sky.

In her dreams she drifted through that night, between the water and the sky. The ships were full of ghosts. She came awake lost in the stillness, and even if it was a nightmare, it was quiet as it settled into her bones. She never screamed. She never made a sound at all.

When she arrived on the station, the dreams stopped. They’ve never come back.

Now she suspects that it’s because her brain feels no need to bother with them. Not when she’s so close to the real thing.

“It’s all dark down there.”

Nic looks up from the open access panel, screwdriver poised. What she’s doing with it . . . Who the fuck even knows. She did know, when she decided to do it, but over the course of the last twenty-four hours, it’s been getting progressively easier to let things slip from her mind. That old much-clichéd image of sand through someone’s fingers; it works better than just about anything else for analogizing this feeling. Helplessness. Pointlessness. Why would someone want to hold onto sand in the first place?

Marlie by one of the nearer windows, holding herself in place by the grab-bar overhead. Staring out. It’s a small collection of modules but there’s enough space for two people to give each other some room if they cared to make the effort. It would be nice if she would, but throughout those porous twenty-four hours, Marlie has been finding reasons to be close.

Nic is battling resentment. Wondering more and more if there’s a point to that either.

“The hell’re you talking about?”

Marlie doesn’t look up, gestures with her chin at the window. “Night side. Can’t see any of the lights. The big population centers. It’s all off.” She does glance up then, and her eyes are flat. “You’ve noticed.”

Not a question.

Nic shrugs. “I guess. Maybe.” She had to have done so. How could she miss it?

When did it happen?

“They turned out the lights,” Marlie says softly. “Just cut ‘em off. Straight up. Flipped a damn switch.”

It’s dimly troubling to hear Marlie talking like that. Nic lowers the screwdriver and tips her head against the cool smoothness above the open panel.

“My girl was into conspiracy theories,” Marlie continues, just as soft. “You believe that? Never could talk her out of the ones she loved. And she was so rational otherwise. Had her head on so straight. But she believed the government was hiding alien bodies in the desert, and she believed the world was run by this cabal of secret government agencies, and she also believed that there was this big central switch for everything. Power grid, telecom, the net, everything. Some They could cut it off at a moment’s notice. On a whim.”

Nic blinks at her. This is the most she’s heard Marlie say at one stretch in a long time. Feels like years, though she’s only known Marlie for two.

“I’m thinking maybe she was right,” Marlie whispers. “Seems like it happened so fast. How else do you explain it?”

“It’s fuckin’ stupid.”

Immediately she’s sorry. She intended bluntness to the extent that she didn’t give a shit whether or not she was blunt, but she knows this is likely to hurt, and she doesn’t want that.

She might get to that point. But not yet.

However, Marlie doesn’t appear upset. Doesn’t appear fazed at all. Just keeps on staring down at that lightless spinning ball. Soon they’ll probably come up on sunrise.

“Yeah. It’s stupid.” She smiles faintly, tucks loose strands of her dark hair behind her ears. “Thing is, I think she knew that. That was her faith. She needed to believe there was a plan. It’s comforting if someone out there is in control of everything, y’know? Even if they’re evil as shit.” Laugh. Nic’s flesh is trying to crawl off her bones. “She was aware. She was too smart not to be.”

“People been believing in shitty gods for a long damn time.”

Marlie nods. “Throwing virgins into volcanoes. Better that than thinking we’re all alone, right?”

“We are alone.”

Slim, lovely curve of the globe, suddenly gilded. There was no light; now the light is everywhere, surging over the world. Cloud shadows thrown across the face of the water, delicate pinks and blues and golds. It’s all so gentle. It’s all so fragile.

It looks so empty.

“Yeah,” Marlie says, and pushes toward the corridor. She doesn’t look back. “Yeah. We are.”

A week and a half before launch, Nic went to a fortune teller.

Kitschy racist carnival bullshit. She was at the carnival anyway, drank too much cheap piss-water beer and snuck a little unobtrusive weed she knew she could conceal in a test, and instead of stumbling out the gates to call a car, she stumbled into that damn tent and plopped herself down at the table and forked over a couple of rumpled bills.

Fake velvety drapes everywhere all red and purple, clicking with plastic beads. Carpets and dollar store cushions. Hunched woman mostly obscured by shadow thick with incense. She could have been any age; Nic caught a glimpse of an unsettling amount of makeup and not much more. Raspy voice, gritty with fry. Something oddly pleasant about it. She watched slender hands sporting jeweled acrylic nails waving over the crystal ball, listened to the lines about concentration and focusing on the future and opening herself to the spirits. What the hell, she was game. Not like it was going to do her any harm, and the woman already had her money.

So she concentrated. Focused. Opened.

And the woman was silent.

Dead silent. Dead fucking silent, for a long time. Nic was floating on a haze of mingling chemicals, musing, and it took her a while to realize it, and by then she was also realizing how weird it was. The woman sitting there across from her, hands flat on the table, staring at her. Not blank. Not in some kind of trance. Just as focused as Nic was allegedly supposed to be. Silent and staring, her eyes gleaming on and off as she blinked.

At some point it got way too creepy, so Nic did what she should have done all along, got the hell out of there and got her ass into a car and made her way home to sleep it off. Cursed herself for an idiot the next miserable morning.

All night, the carnival lights strung overhead, winking on and off. In her head, winking off one by one, flickering out like the fortune teller’s eyes, silent after the final message. The last thing the woman said, before she said nothing at all.

Which she doesn’t remember. It was some shit about spirits. Told her nothing in the end.

It wasn’t important.

Marlie spends a couple of hours crying, silently. Steadily. Nic does what she can to avoid her, but somehow it doesn’t work; in every capsule, there she is. In some corner or against some wall, hugging herself again, not looking at Nic, and crying. It’s infuriating; Nic wants to seize her by the shoulders and shake her. Scream in her face. It’s not doing anything. It’s not doing any good, so cut it the fuck out. She fights it back.

That wouldn’t do anything either.

If nothing else, she should scream at Marlie for wasting moisture. But even that much is pointless, regardless of whether or not it would work. Oddly, despite her flat cool confrontation of this, she hasn’t allowed herself to think through those particular ramifications.

Marlie cries. Nic makes a determined effort to ignore her. Below them the world spins on, cradled by the darkness.

Finally Marlie looks up. Wipes her eyes and sniffles. “I’m never gonna see her again. Am I.”

Not a question. Nic shrugs, deeply noncommittal.

“I was supposed to be with her in two weeks. Remember? I was due to head back with Ty. I was gonna be there in time for her birthday.” She wipes her nose and gives Nic a watery smile. “Our anniversary is three days after that. We were gonna make it one big party.”

Nic says nothing. Why the fuck are you telling me this? But that’s another stupid question. Marlie is telling her because there’s no one else to tell. No comms. No net.

Only the black.

“And now I’m never gonna see her again. We’re never gonna have another anniversary.” Marlie swipes angrily at her nose. “Shit, she’s probably dead.”

Probably. Nic looks away.

“Why haven’t you said anything?” Still angry. Angrier, and the anger is both directed at Nic and not directed at Nic. Resentful but in a way someone is resentful when they’re merely looking for a target. “Don’t you have anyone down there?”

Honesty. “No.” She pauses, and the cruelty rears up in her and she can’t stop it. The darkness out that window, the silent void, and she can’t help it. It’s the only fire she can reach. “I’m glad about that.”

Marlie stares at her for a long, long moment, eyes wide in the periphery of Nic’s vision. At last she shakes her head.

“I feel sorry for you, Nicole. I mean that. I really do.”

“Not as sorry as I feel for you.” In her ears, her tone is dull. Lifeless. She’s clearly lying; she doesn’t feel much of anything. “Why don’t you go cry some more.”

She drifts out of the module and doesn’t look back.

All those stories about being the last two people alive, the last two in the whole world. Always seem massively improbable; what are the odds the human population would whittle itself down to a count of two before vanishing entirely? Not impossible by any means, but for Nic it never rang true. It was a plot device; nothing more.

Repopulating the Earth. Also would never work, not with two. Nowhere near enough genetic diversity. Survival really would be impossible, long-term.

When the species is snuffed out, there will be many, than a few, then none. Not a cycle back around to an apocalyptic Adam and Eve and then final ultimate extinction.

That’s what she told herself before and that’s what she tells herself now, watching that Pale Blue Dot spin through the darkness whenever she closes her eyes. No contact with the surface means that they have no confirmation in any direction. All they know is that no one is answering, which could mean any number of things. It definitely doesn’t have to mean that everyone down there is dead.

They have no reason to assume that.

Don’t you have anyone down there?

Five hours later, something in her breaks, and she practically hurls herself into the comm chamber and lays her hands on the console, her breath rushing in and out of her lungs like a tide pulled by a moon whose orbit has gone mad. Her vision is fuzzy at the edges, as if she’s not getting enough oxygen.

Possibly she’s not.

She has no one. She left no one behind. Unattached, untethered, she’s been floating. Now she considers the death of literally everyone else—almost everyone—and it’s eating her insides, acid lurking in her belly for such a long time and abruptly activated. She doesn’t give a fuck.

That’s very wrong.

She watched them all watching those communications from home, those messages in their electronic bottles making the crossing in seconds. But she never watched the vids. There was no reason to, and it wasn’t her business, and the thought of doing so made her jaw and her gut clench. But now she’s calling them up, her fingers flying over the keypad. They all have their own data folders but none of the folders are password protected; there’s no real need, and everyone respected everyone else’s privacy. Everyone trusted each other.

They did.

Play.

Ty’s husband, smiling widely, holding a little girl of no more than two on his lap. Dark braids twisted up with little multicolored hair-ties, huge and eerily knowing dark eyes. She sucks thoughtfully on her thumb and reaches toward the screen, pops her thumb out of her mouth, and laughs.

Play.

David’s wife, pretty young redhead leaning forward toward the camera. Low-cut blouse. Two blond boys standing just behind her, waving. Toothy grins. One of them is holding a cat. Small cat; probably not much more than a kitten. He makes the cat wave and the cat squints with profound resentment. The woman rolls her eyes.

Play.

Middle-aged woman with silver hair—dyed or natural, it’s impossible to say. She has her hand over her mouth and she’s crying. She doesn’t look precisely sad, or angry, or worried. She looks like she might be feeling all three at the same time and in equal amounts. She shakes her head—negation. Denial. No can accommodate a universe of meaning, and none of it matters anymore.

For all of them, this was their last message.

All silent. No speech in any of them. Nic doesn’t know whether it’s something about how the vids saved or something wrong with the speakers, and she doesn’t care. It’s bad enough to watch them all and feel something indefinable and wretched slamming into her over and over. No, she has none of this. She has no last message. Only the one from Mission Control telling them about the concerning situation, telling them to stand by and wait for further communication.

So certain that further communication would be forthcoming.

Nic cuts off the comm and remains where she is. After a few seconds she lowers her face into her hands.

That’s when Marlie hits her in the head with a wrench.

Nic has always assumed that when she died, she would die alone.

That’s because as far as Nic is concerned, everyone dies alone. As far as Nic is concerned, to die is to be alone. And then to not be at all.

Like a country from which you’ve been banished, the verb is simply no longer available to you.

Not even pain, not at first. Merely an explosion of pure white spider-crackling at the edges as it envelopes her, thinking of webs and lightning snaking toward the ground and the branches pathways of nerves. Veins, full of light. It’s beautiful, and she expects to stagger, and of course she doesn’t because she’s standing on nothing. Instead she reels as the force of the impact knocks her backward, and the crown of her head collides with a protruding section of bulkhead and the light explodes again. A secondary blast. Shockwave. Still no pain; only a sense of all-permeating heaviness, as if someone has stuck a hose in her ear and filled her skull with lead.

She’s confused.

Someone is screaming.

Nic doesn’t know who. Can’t determine it from the information she’s getting. Can’t see much and her hearing amounts to a muffled drone as though she’s sinking into water the full depth of which she hasn’t yet discovered. She keeps going down and down.

Not her screaming. Too angry. The kind of angry that comes to blows. The blurred watercolor image of Marlie’s face, features twisted with rage, every inch of her skin a furious red, her teeth bared. Feral. A sense of the danger a wounded animal presents. Pain is a prerequisite for hatred; anyone who has ever felt hatred understands this.

Loneliness is a prerequisite for both.

A darker gray blur smeared across her field of vision, bizarrely slow; the wrench again, and Nic is bringing her arm up in a useless bid to defend herself at the same time as she makes fumbling use of the bulkhead to push herself down and away, executing a clumsy dodge under Marlie’s left arm. Her eyes are clearing and she’s also finally starting to feel the pain, and it’s fucking massive, starting as a tsunami and swelling to a full-on tidal wave plunging down on her and carving away great gouges of her shoreline. But she’s dimly aware that all she can afford to pay attention to is what she can see, what little she can hear, and out of the corner of her still-foggy eye she sees Marlie catching herself on a grab-bar, doing the best approximation of a spin as she can, brandishing the wrench and snarling.

Yelling, her throat raw and every word pulsing blood from her nose into the top of her head: What did I do, Marlie? What the fuck did I DO?

Good Christ, that’s such a stupid question.

Not that she was watching the vids. Not even that she’s been progressively bitchier and bitchier as all this silent time has slipped past them. It’s simply that she’s here at all.

Last two people on Earth. Off it. It was never going to work very well.

Together, alone.

Marlie smashes the wrench into another bulkhead as Nic ducks, pushes off with her feet and dives toward the comm. Marlie is chasing, swinging at her. As she approaches the console, Nic realizes that she never turned off the vid and that it never cut itself off either; that woman’s face is still on the screen, her tears, her unbearably sad eyes, her hands—once shaking, now locked into the perfect stillness of freeze-frame. Except those eyes are following the long-standing rules of countless portraits hanging on countless walls: the eyes are moving, following this hideously absurd scene, falling on the two of them no matter where they are.

Not evaluating. Not picking a winner or a loser. This woman has already made up her mind.

“Bitch,” Marlie grates, breaks open a cupboard and sends little plastic packets containing spare parts cascading outward. Nice bats them away. “You fucking bitch, you—”

The viciousness pumped into her own words has her momentarily distracted, and Nic doesn’t wait; she lunges—much as she can—and seizes the wrench with both hands, Marlie’s fist sandwiched between hers, giving it yank after sharp yank. With a shriek of surprised anger, Marlie holds on, and all Nic succeeds in doing is pulling them close, so close, the heat of Marlie’s body and breath enveloping her. Breathing her in. Fierce life. Defiance. She’s burning from the marrow outward and all at once Nic can do nothing but gaze into those blazing eyes, her own anger and her fear overwhelmed by bizarre awe.

Marlie might be insane, or she might be the strongest person Nic has ever known, or it’s also possible that there’s no meaningful distinction to be made there, and Nic reaches into herself, scoops out all the exhausted poison and flings it into the maw of the blackness. Leans in across the last few inches and tips her head against Marlie’s shoulder. She’s still holding the wrench, but only holding on. Not fighting.

And Marlie stops.

“What were you gonna do?” Nic doesn’t lift her head. Her eyes are closed. This feels good. “When I was gone. What the fuck were you gonna do then?”

Marlie hiccups. Doesn’t answer. Nic can’t see her face.

But her free arm is rising—circling around Nic’s back. It’s too clumsy and too rough to be an embrace, but it’s not completely unlike one. She sniffles, releases a sound that might be the shambling remains of a laugh.

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. Finally Nic does lift her head. They’re turning in place, a lazy spin, and the window framing a fragmented Earth is coming into her view. Night side. Completely dark. Maybe, Nic thinks dimly, if someone is down there, they still have fires. Oil to burn as lamps. Batteries to give them access to a faint glow. It’s not impossible.

But it’s also not the case.

“How long you think we can keep going up here?”

Good. She can face the question now, grapple. “A few weeks? Little over a month, if we ration?”

Marlie nods. Pauses. Then: “Is there a point?”

“To what?”

“Rationing.”

“I guess there isn’t.”

Another nod. They spin like two worlds orbiting in close tidal lock, and gradually Nic releases the wrench. As she does, Marlie pushes her back and hefts it, and Nic watches her with weary apprehension, part of her cycling up for another round.

But Marlie moves past her, toward the comm console. She stops in front of it for a second or two, gazing down at it with only the edge of her cheekbone visible, edged by the light like a crescent moon. Then, before Nic can say or do anything to stop her, she whips the wrench up and back and brings it down with what’s clearly all her strength on the smooth white face.

Over and over. Nic looks away, wincing. It’s like watching a person getting their skull caved in.

Because there’s the face of that woman on the screen, and while she doesn’t take the first blow, she takes the second, third, fourth, run through with cracks and then shattered, glittering fragments scattered into the air like stardust. No more sad face. No more weeping eyes. Whatever she had been in the middle of saying, trying to say—gone now.

Marlie continues for a while, before Nic at last reaches for her and catches her wrist in a gentle grip, and then she slows. Stops. She’s panting. Not crying, though near to it. Near enough.

She tosses the wrench away. It hits a panel across the room and wanders, aimless.

Beyond the broken panes of the window, the sun is beginning to rise.

Nic has always assumed that when she died, she would die alone. And that might yet be true. When she dies, no matter who is or isn’t present with her, the tumble she takes into the darkness will be completely solitary, a final solo dive. A future into which someone might peer and find nothing to say.

But before that, there’s something else. This concerning situation and the nature she’s determined.

Watching that sunrise, a hand clutched in hers and the hot tidal rush of breath in her ear, it comes to her that she’s the least alone she’s ever been. So maybe that’s purpose enough.

Space is an eye that never sees, an ear that never hears, a mouth that never speaks.

That was always true.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, among other places. They are also responsible for the Root Code and Casting the Bones trilogies and their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone is available from Undertow Publications. In addition to time spent authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometime college instructor. They unfortunately live just outside Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.

A Man Out of Fashion

Chen Qiufan

Waking from an endless dream, Du Ruofei found himself naked in bed.

For a long while he simply lay still. The dream had lasted so long that he had forgotten where he was supposed to be. Finally, he recognized the dilapidated apartment he had been renting for the last three years: unfashionable décor dating from the 1990s; sagging gypsum board ceiling; scratched wooden baseboard under wallpaper yellowing after many rainy seasons, with green patches of mold in the corners. The bed, desk, and dresser were all made from cheap particleboard. He knew which doors were broken, and which door was the dam holding back a flood of clothes redolent of mold.

He sighed. Nothing had changed. The dream was, after all, just a dream. He ran his hands over his pallid skin, examining his wrists, neck, and the insides of his thighs: everything was smooth, normal. In his dream, these spots had been stuck full of tubes and needles, connected to machines whose names he didn’t know, buzzing and humming so loudly that it nearly drove him mad. The noises from his dream persisted in his mind. He waved his arms, trying to chase away the invisible swarm of bees.

The curtained windows glowed white, making it impossible to tell the time of day. Out of one corner he glimpsed tall buildings drifting through the haze of smog. Pollution was the reason he kept his windows shut year-round, relying on air-conditioning for fresh air.

Without putting on a strip of clothing, he climbed out of bed and turned on his PC, confident that no one was going to intrude on his privacy. His roommate had just moved out, and for the time being, he was paying double the rent, a thought that made his heart sink a little. He was trying to make ends meet by working as a freelance translator, but editors frequently delayed paying his invoices for as long as possible, and the income stream was far from steady.

Something seemed to be wrong with his computer.

All signs pointed to the network functioning properly, but Ruofei’s favorite websites showed the same headlines as yesterday, June 26, 2018. He clicked on the somehow-familiar titles, only to be shocked anew by the content.

The final group of the fortunate few will enter hibernation today.

Familiar faces scrolled past the screen: business magnates diagnosed with fatal diseases, politicians past their prime, comedy stars, prominent mathematicians, hacking prodigies, Miss Globe . . . most of the hibernauts had received their coveted places in the hibernation chamber as the result of a complicated and opaque formula devised by the UN Future Affairs Office. A special drug would allow them to sleep for hundreds of years, accompanied only by their private dreams and wishes, waiting to be awakened by future generations.

Who may be robots! wrote the article’s author.

Among the processed commercial headshots of the cream of society, Du Ruofei saw a young face, sallow, stiff, peculiar, clearly out of place though not exactly repulsive. The face seemed to be struggling to smile, but utterly failing. The crooked lips and twisted muscles gave off an air of reluctance and awkwardness. He read the caption beneath the image.

Du Ruofei, aged 24, from Shanghai, is the only winner of the hibernation lottery!

He was looking at his own face.

Shaking, Ruofei stood up. He couldn’t understand any of this. Was his dream real? If so, how could he explain what he was seeing now? Or maybe he was only in the middle of yet another dream in the long slumber of hibernation. His fragile body was still trapped in the pure white cocoon, waiting for the right moment to emerge.

He walked up to the door and twisted the knob, expecting to see the familiar dim hallway that led to the cramped, dirty common room.

White light filled his vision. He saw—

—a milky-white bubble.

His whole room was wrapped inside the bubble. Against the smooth surface, Ruofei saw projections of the familiar sights of twenty-first-century Shanghai: skyscrapers, elevated highways, narrow alleys, streets lined with Chinese parasol trees.

Ruofei caressed the illusory city. The thin membrane of the bubble deformed under the pressure of his hands: the skyscrapers twisted and bent, the horizon undulated. He pressed harder; the membrane stretched thinner.

A sudden burst of fluorescent blue text, and the city swayed, creased, collapsed, dimmed. The translucent bubble, like a shed snakeskin, fell in heaps to the ground.

The sight revealed behind the collapsed membrane astonished him. He was standing in the middle of a space that reminded him of a sports stadium. All around him were rings of rising seats, in which countless maggot-like shadows wriggled. Blinding flashes came to him from every direction, and he shaded his eyes, unable to see anything. Some kind of noise-canceling system seemed to have been suddenly shut off, and he was inundated by waves of wild cheers and applause.

The cheers were at least human. He sighed with relief. Almost subconsciously, he bent down and covered his privates, realizing that he was nude.

The cheers grew even louder, now also mixed with laughter. Abruptly, all noise ceased.

A cacophony of male voices followed, speaking simultaneously in multiple languages. Somehow, Ruofei realized that the voices were introducing him to the crowd. Spotlights highlighted his nude body, and he wanted to escape back into his own room—but when he turned around, he found only emptiness. He was like a monkey who had been shaved smooth all over, exposed to the gaze of an innumerable multitude. He almost fainted from the shame.

A figure appeared some distance from him at the center of the stage and approached slowly. From the shape of the body, he realized that it was a woman. Her head was bald, decorated with strange, complex patterns. Her features suggested a Eurasian heritage. At first glance, he thought she was also nude, but as she got closer, he realized that she was covered by a skin-tight membrane that gave off a shimmering sheen as the light changed with every step.

Astonished, Ruofei made no move. The woman walked up to him, holding up a football-shaped device. She aimed it at him, and a spray of mist shot out of the nozzle. He covered his face with his hands and squeezed his eyes shut, terrified that the spray was poisonous.

Nothing happened.

He opened his eyes and saw that where the spray had struck his arms, a thin membrane had precipitated against his skin, plastic-like, but far lighter and breathable.

Understanding dawned on him. Embarrassed, he stood up straight, keeping his hands over his privates as the woman continued to spray him, covering him in a new outfit—though the outfit was crotchless, as he refused to move his hands.

An odd expression appeared on the woman’s face as she reached out and shoved him. He stumbled, his hands shooting out to keep from falling. By the time he had recovered, the woman had managed to spray a patch over this most critical part of his clothing.

She handed over a tiny device shaped like a termite with a long abdomen. She pointed at her ear.

Still confused, Ruofei placed the device in his ear. The woman began to speak, and in his ear, Ruofei heard proper Standard Modern Mandarin. The words didn’t match the movements of her lips, as though he was watching a dubbed film.

“I’m your mate,” she said. “Azul450-Qin-Ye.”

Three hundred years have passed.

Du Ruofei stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of the apartment, gazing at a completely changed world. The same thought looped through his head.

His mother had given birth to him at the age of thirty-four, a premature, frail baby delivered by C-section. The only good news was that he was alive. The bad news, however, came in an unceasing stream in the following years: after a botched flu vaccination, he was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder involving loss of control over his facial nerves; when he was five, his parents divorced; when he was eight, the principal of his school persuaded his mother to withdraw him because so many parents had complained that their children were suffering nightmares from looking at his face; between the ages of ten and seventeen, the long middle-school and high-school years, he suffered more than the usual share of pain and endured the nickname “Poker-Face”; at seventeen-and-half, he was rejected from art school as the result of a face-to-face interview, and could only specialize in foreign languages at a night school.

Any normal person would have blamed all of his misfortunes on that flu epidemic.

His eyelids did not close completely, and the left corner of his mouth was skewed, giving his face the general appearance of a sloppy rubber Halloween mask. Years of acupuncture and physical therapy improved his control over the twitching eye muscles—as long as he didn’t try to smile.

Over its long history, humanity evolved a marvelously sensitive system for processing facial expressions. At a glance, one could tell the subtle difference between an insurance salesman’s fake grin and the genuine smile triggered by a sweetheart’s bouquet. An electric shock to the face and a good joke would both cause the zygmaticus major muscles to contract, pulling up the corners of the mouth into a smile. The secret, however, lay in the orbicularis occuli muscles around the eyes. Only a smile from the heart would contract these muscles to tighten the cheeks and pull down the brows, leading to subtle creases around the eye corners.

Earlier in his life, Ruofei had locked himself in the bathroom to practice his smile in the mirror. His mother suspected him of masturbating because whenever the door opened, his face was filled with an expression of empty melancholy.

Since the orbicularis occuli muscles couldn’t be consciously controlled, the human mind was primed to notice this detail and tell real smiles apart from fake ones. But for Ruofei, since his orbicularis occuli muscles stayed loose, he could smile only one kind of smile, the kind deemed fake by everyone.

His smile was thus the source of all his tragedy.

Many times, his mother cried in private for his condition, but she never shed a single tear in front of him.

One time, when he was five, he lay in bed and heard his father scream He doesn’t even know how to smile! Then the sound of a slap to the face, a long silence, the slam of a door, followed by suppressed sobs. With all his strength, Ruofei, lying in darkness, forced a grin onto his face, but his father never returned.

After his mother had completed the paperwork to withdraw him from school, she cursed and swore the whole way home. His small hand, squeezed so tightly in his mother’s grip that it hurt, felt the tremors of her pain. His mother never once turned to look at him.

A bald man who claimed to be an expert at curing neural disorders ran into him in the hallway of the tiny hotel. He leaned down to squeeze Ruofei’s cheek. You smile just like your mother. His mother stayed in the bathroom for over an hour, and the sound of running water never stopped.

He knew all of it.

He could imagine the many silent weeping hours that still awaited her.

He decided to end this tragedy, to give his mother a chance at bowing out of the show. He imagined all the ways he could kill himself, and the method that called to him the most was to suffocate by overdosing on laughing gas. Such morbid humor was perhaps the only way he could imagine giving value to the world. Out of cowardice, or perhaps courage, in the end he chose the gentle exit of leaving his mother behind to pursue a new life in the big city.

Three hundred years earlier, he was a lonesome man living at the periphery of society. Away from family and friends, he struggled to make a living. But life cast him aside and imposed in his way obstacle after obstacle. His dreams, like soap bubbles, expanded and then burst, leaving no trace.

Then, overnight, everyone called him fortune’s favorite, just because he won the lottery that would allow him to leave the old world behind.

Azul450-Qin-Ye’s slender fingers brushed across Ruofei’s left eye, as if seeking proof of the truth of his story.

“You are cool,” she said. “You’re not at all like the others. You’re brand new.”

No one had ever described him that way. In his memory, from the time his father left, everything in his life was old, used up. Beat-up backpack, worn pencil box, used textbooks, frayed clothes handed down from older cousins, his father’s old shoes loose on his feet, socks so tattered that the patches had patches . . . he felt that even his heart was ancient. From the moment his parents had separated, he no longer grew, but only aged.

Yet, this “mate” from three hundred years in the future called him “new.” He found it incomprehensible. In fact, in this brave new world, the meaning of “mate” was also brand new.

The woman told him that since the birthrate had fallen so low, she and others like her had all been grown in incubation vats. “Azul450” designated her genotype, while “Qin-Ye” commemorated the family names of her foster parents. However, she preferred to be called “Jingjing” by her friends.

“In my time, that’s the sort of name we give to pandas,” said Ruofei.

“What are those?” she asked, utterly confused.

He realized then that pandas had probably long since become extinct, though he had seen many fantastical animals parading through the streets. This new world’s biotechnology had advanced to the point where new creatures could be assembled like Lego blocks, but the people seemed to lack interest in extinct species such as pandas, dinosaurs, mammoths, and dodo birds.

This was an age that worshiped novelty above all else.

According to Jingjing, the practice of bonding for life (or at least intending to be bonded for life) had disappeared. Mates negotiated and determined the duration of their time together. Monogamy had been abolished, and the law protected one-to-many as well as many-to-many limited-time bonds.

“In my time, this would have been considered a sign of fickleness in one’s affections,” said Ruofei.

“We think of it like this—” Jingjing spat out a string of syllables, a word he didn’t know. The basic idea was something like this: the old is already a part of me; only the new can unlock the potential of the future.

Ruofei thought this over.

“If you don’t like me, we can terminate the bonding agreement at any time and find you a new mate,” said Jingjing. “You’re our guest, after all. We have a duty to make you comfortable.”

Jingjing’s expression was so guileless that Ruofei looked away in embarrassment.

“How . . . how did they pick you to be my mate?”

Jingjing’s face lit up—even the patterns on her forehead began to swirl and change.

“I won the lottery!”

Aha, thought Ruofei. Apparently some things never change. But he had a more important question.

“What happened to the other hibernauts?”

Jingjing looked away. “You’ll find out . . . at the appropriate time. I can tell you that you’re the only one who’s ever awakened.”

Ruofei pondered the many possibilities encompassed by this answer.

“There’s something else you should know.” Jingjing pointed above their heads. “Thawing you out and maintaining your lifestyle both require funds. We’ve decided to grant your livecast rights to the three broadcast networks. A portion of the income generated by advertising and pointcasting will be directed into your personal account.”

Ruofei glanced up at the glowing ceiling. He couldn’t see any cameras, but he figured that saying “no” at this point wasn’t a possibility.

“I understand,” said Jingjing as she put a hand on his shoulder. “People from the past had a kind of obsession with ‘privacy.’ They were . . . overprotective of the sense of self. Believe me, put that old self away. You’ll be rich.”

As though suddenly remembering something important, she added, “At least you now have the possibility of becoming whatever you want to be.”

During the past three hundred years, two total wars and over four thousand regional wars had erupted over the surface of this planet. At least once, the world stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Three times, extreme ecological crises threatened mass extinctions. Governments and borders changed countless times.

In contrast, technological progress, made by generations of scientists standing on the shoulders of giants, had been steady. There were multiple breakthroughs in materials science and biotechnology, but due to the destruction of high-energy particle accelerators in war, theoretical physics never developed to the point of enabling interstellar flight.

For Du Ruofei, however, none of this was as important as one particular development.

He gazed into the perfect face in the mirror. The features were flawless, symmetrical. His eyes shone like the glint off the edge of a sword. His nose was straight and refined. The most striking feature was his mouth, whose lips were of just the right thickness. He smiled, and two sensual dimples appeared on his cheeks. Bright, impossibly straight teeth peeked between the lips.

He pulled back from the mirror, and the augmented reality effect disappeared, returning his face to its habitual, unnatural state, full of flaws and pockmarks. He glanced away, as though seeking an escape.

“How do you like the face I picked for you?” asked Jingjing.

“It’s . . . good. Except . . . except that it doesn’t look like me.”

“This is the most popular face this season,” said the sales clerk. “We can always make minor adjustments once you start wearing it. It takes just an hour to fix the mold. And if you get sick of it, we offer two free exchanges.”

“Why don’t you give it a try?” said Jingjing encouragingly.

“Let me think about it.”

Ruofei was unsettled by this world, full of men and women more handsome than any he had seen in his life. But the repetitiveness of aesthetic perfection was exhausting him. When everyone sported perfectly symmetrical features cut to the proportions of the golden ratio, it was the imperfect faces that struck deeper impressions.

“How do you recognize anyone if they are constantly changing their shells?” he asked Jingjing.

“The superficial features may change, but poses and subtle habits don’t, and neither does the timbre of the voice. Retina patterns and DNA sequences are constant. All these are stored in a central database. You can look up anyone’s data when you meet them.”

“Don’t you find it odd to see someone else with the exact same face as yours? Or to see your lover changing looks? In my time, there was a superstition that the moment you meet another person who looks just like you, you’ll die.”

“Like I said—”

“The old is already a part of me; only the new can unlock the potential of the future.”

“You’re a quick learner.”

“But I still can’t get used to it.”

“Then let me wear your face tomorrow. I’ll help you adjust.”

“Don’t! I can’t stand this face.”

“Then change to something new.”

Ruofei said nothing. He had run out of excuses to resist, but the pull of traditions from his previous life forced him to ask one more question. “What if I want to change back?”

“Anytime, anywhere.”

Du Ruofei, the time traveler who came from three hundred years earlier, was the most coveted guest in this new age. He was invited to all kinds of events, where his stories of the strange customs and practices of the ancient past fascinated audiences. Any party without Du Ruofei could not be considered truly first-rate.

At the opening ceremony for a somatic singing competition, Du Ruofei was invited to perform a song from the twenty-first century. He chose the theme song from the last Olympics he could remember before going into hibernation.

He thought of it as the last song of the old world, for that world had ceased to exist the moment he entered the hibernation chamber.

The number of viewers crested as he sang the chorus, though many had complained to the broadcasters that Ruofei’s singing was upsetting their digestion as well as their pets. But polite applause still filled the venue.

Du Ruofei, now preternaturally handsome, and Azul450-Qing-Ye, in an elegant evening gown, walked together into the VIP section. The competition consisted of each contestant generating vibrations from different parts of their body, which, after processing by a snail-shaped synthesizer called an Auto-Soma, was turned into a symphonic soundscape. To enhance their somatic singing, the contestants had implanted into their body various objects of different materials and acoustic qualities. Integrated into muscle and bone, the implants turned each body into a unique musical instrument.

Listening to the eerie music literally made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, but Ruofei maintained his mesmerizing smile.

At an exclusive party, Ruofei described for the guests his life in old Shanghai: squeezing onto the subway, queuing up to buy lunch at a 7-11, downloading pirated films, translating meaningless clickbait celebrity gossip, watching couples kiss in the street, running to get home before the rain, showering, and sleeping. When the guests heard that the average Shanghainese would spend more than fifteen hours a day working, they gasped in shock. Some had been so stunned that they forgot to suck on the tubes next to their mouths that dispensed simulhol.

And when he mentioned that sometimes he would call his mother at home but find himself with nothing to say, the elegant ladies made exaggerated sad faces to show how much they were touched.

I guess three hundred years aren’t that long, thought Ruofei.

Gradually, he grew to like and to even crave such performances. Wasn’t this exactly the life he had wanted so much in the old world but could never obtain? To dress up every day, to dine on fine delicacies, to mingle with the famous and powerful, to be constantly bombarded by the new. The elites who invited him were so skilled at subtle manipulation via words and expressions that he often felt eerily pleased with himself, as though he oozed wit from every pore.

Jingjing explained that the elites were not bred in incubation vats. Their origin was in fact shrouded in mystery. As children, they were implanted with precise neural programming for language and body expression so that, as adults, they would fulfill their social interaction duties and perform the prescribed etiquette routines with perfection. They were social managers under management.

The real authorities, the ones who made the rules, lived in a space station in near-Earth orbit. People on the surface could only communicate with them from a data tower on the north coast through an encrypted satellite link.

There was one time, Jingjing recalled, when those tightly-controlled facial muscles had seemed to malfunction, and the elites had worn expressions of terror and embarrassment.

On one occasion, as Ruofei entertained his audience with tales of how in his old life, to save money, he had removed the lightbulbs from his apartment, unplugged all uncritical appliances, and even dimmed his computer screen until he could barely make out the text, a scholar suddenly interjected, “Sounds like something a three-legged crow would do.”

Everyone present laughed.

“What’s a three-legged crow?” asked Du Ruofei. Surely the scholar meant something other than the mythological creature from ancient tales, symbolizing the sun?

The laughter stopped abruptly. People exchanged looks, but no one answered him.

Jingjing squeezed his hand and whispered, “I’ll tell you later.”

Ruofei suddenly had the sensation that even this perfect world had its own cracks and seams.

The Three-Legged Crow was a group of extremists that threatened the security of the world order. They viewed modern technology as the enemy and sought to destroy automation systems and consumerism. The Three-Legged Crow had its own system of quasi-religious beliefs, with the preservation of the so-called “essence of humanistic civilization” as its ultimate goal. Since their opponent, the modern world, was far too powerful, members of the group could only eke out a living in distant, rural wastelands, waiting for a chance to strike at the heart of civilization.

“So . . . are those in the Three-Legged Crow evil?”

Jingjing’s eyes flickered in the dim light. “I think . . . they just view the world differently.”

“Why did everyone look at me so strangely earlier?”

A long sigh. And then, “Members of the Three-Legged Crow attacked the base with the hibernation chambers. You’re the only survivor.”

Ruofei’s heart clenched. He understood everything.

Driven by an irresistible curiosity, Ruofei gathered all the information on the Three-Legged Crow he could find, but as could be imagined, there wasn’t much. Moreover, from different sources, he got different, conflicting impressions that left the group even more mysterious in his mind.

He found himself changing.

Habituating to the endless pursuit of the new meant also habituating to an interminable sense of weariness and dissatisfaction. He was tired of his possessions and clothes, which could be changed whenever he wanted, tired of his own face, tired of even Jingjing, despite her constant efforts at renewing herself. Her skin, once a glowing vision of perfection, seemed to dim in his eyes day by day, revealing intolerable flaws. He knew this was the mechanism by which boredom operated in the brain.

There must be something constant under this inconstant exterior, he thought. Though he was beginning to doubt whether he knew the real Jingjing at all. Surely she was also fighting her own war against boredom?

Several times, Ruofei almost brought up the topic of changing mates, only to swallow the suggestion at the last possible minute. Like a baby bird being imprinted, a kind of unique bond connected him to her, the first human being he met in this new world. This was a bond that could not be replaced by any sense of novelty.

From time to time, he thought about his father. A kind of rebelliousness, rooted in the old world, was perhaps the real obstacle to his completely embracing this new way of thinking. He did not want to become like his father.

Side effects followed: headaches, nausea, but there seemed no clear cause. Finally, after a psychedelic art exhibition, as he vomited in front of a glass wall, he watched the reflection of a beautiful but unfamiliar face approach from behind his own beautiful but unfamiliar face—Jingjing, who had just changed faces again.

“Do you need medicine?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had this happen before.” He cleared his throat, and the effort hurt. “I feel bloated, or maybe my body just isn’t adapting. Do you ever travel and feel out of sorts?”

Jingjing shook her head. “You need to be checked.”

An instrument that reminded him of a white octopus wrapped its arms around him and tentacles probed into his orifices. They were smooth, pneumatic, simulating the feeling of human skin and body temperature. He felt a series of tremors before the tentacles pulled out.

“I see,” said Jingjing, glancing at the data streaming over a transparent membrane. “You’re overloaded.”

“What?”

“The human mind has its own bandwidth limit. Being stimulated by too much information will lead to rejection reactions, manifesting in symptoms of suboptimal health. This is a theory long accepted since the last century.”

“What can be done?”

“You can clean.” Jingjing showed him a flat, thin slate, on which the information he had been exposed to that day was categorized and sorted: social encounters, VIPs, newsworthy events, rituals, trivia, emotional experiences, dreams . . .

“You can delete whatever memories you no longer need. Throw them into the trash and empty it to reduce the cognitive load.” Jingjing’s golden eyes stared at him. “But you can’t do this because your brain comes from the past. You don’t have the implant port for the memory-manager. Unless . . . ”

“Unless what?”

“You agree to undergo surgery.”

Inside and out, Du Ruofei was now a new man.

Every day, he set aside some time to delete unnecessary memories, leaving more room for fresh experiences. He got rid of memories of anyone he met who wasn’t deemed important—even if they met again, it was no big deal to repeat the ritual of mindless introductions. Polite social conversation about the weather—delete. Repetitive sights in the streets—delete. Nostalgia triggered by recounting stories about the past—delete.

He didn’t need to be weighed down by the past. He was a new Du Ruofei, a machine skilled at piecing together bits and pieces of the old world into exotica for the delectation of the new world.

Yet, the invitations for him to attend fashionable parties and cool gatherings slowed to a trickle.

He hypothesized that in this novelty-obsessed world, the sensation of newness he generated was fading, much like the impression left by foamy surf on the beach, the sweetness left by candy at the tip of the tongue, the warmth left by Jingjing’s fingers on the skin of his chest.

What was going to happen to him? Could he integrate into this world as an ordinary man? Somehow, he sensed a subtle change in the way others treated him. There was a polite distance, tinged with a hint of fear. He heard rumors that he was the next target of the Three-Legged Crow, though no one knew what they planned.

Ruofei had never imagined that his own name would one day be linked to a group of anti-government extremists. Based on the news streams he had tapped into, members of the Three-Legged Crow were fanatics who relied on violence, assassinations, and kidnappings to express their ideas. They believed that the only hope for humanity was to cast off the chains of all technology and material wealth, to return to nature and find true inner peace in the wilderness.

From the blurry, shaky footage of their violent attacks, he saw shadows of the old world. He grew terrified.

It happened when he was delivering a commencement address.

In this new world, there were still institutions that served purposes similar to schools—or maybe it was more accurate to describe them as summer camps. Students were free to pick from among tens of thousands of different classes. There were no teachers. All teaching materials were presented via augmented reality. Students assembled into groups based on common interests and completed research projects suggested by the material. It was said that these educational institutions prized students who worked well with others and helped each other.

Predictably, Ruofei gave a speech excoriating the old world’s rigid, hidebound school system: foolish teachers, useless and boring information, the only thing worthwhile being rebellious classmates. He even made up a story of his first love. For four years, he admired a girl from afar. Each day, he watched her take her seat by the bright rays of dawn and depart from it under the gentle glow of the moon. They had never spoken to each other. Even an inadvertent touch or an occasional, accidental eye contact would set off fireworks in his mind.

“However,” he continued, “in my imagination, we held hands, kissed, got married, raised kids, grew old together. It was a most marvelous memory, even if it never took place.”

He stopped and waited for the applause, but only silence greeted him. Something wasn’t right.

Among the sea of perfect, young faces, one stood up. Hesitantly, he asked, “Do you think people were more satisfied with that kind of old-fashioned relationship? Or . . . maybe what I really want to ask is this: as the only person who has experienced both the old world and the new, which era has made you happier?”

Unprepared for the question, Ruofei struggled to come up with an answer. But just as he was about to speak, the MC rushed over to say that due to time constraints, they had to end Ruofei’s speech right away. Students grew agitated in their seats, and dissatisfied murmurs filled the hall.

Later, in the darkness, Ruofei glanced at Azul450-Qin-Ye, lying next to him in bed. By the faint glow of the metropolis outside their window, her new face was another vision of perfection.

“Are you happy?” he asked, uncertain what answer he preferred.

Slowly, Jingjing opened her eyes, as though expecting this question all along.

“Why haven’t you asked to change your mate?” she asked. “You know you can do it any time.”

After a moment of silence, Ruofei said, “You are not a shirt, a gadget, a goldfish, or a plant—I can’t discard you the moment I want something new.”

“I don’t understand.” Her voice was confused, uncertain.

“I don’t understand either. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned. Can’t keep up with the world—”

The passionate kiss stopped his words. The woman who embraced him seemed a stranger who cared nothing for the rest of the world. It was as if a shell that had imprisoned her had fallen off, as though some wild beast roared from the depths of her soul.

“You’re special,” Jingjing panted. “Maybe they’re right.”

“Who are they?”

Jingjing subtly glanced to the side, reminding him that the livecast cameras behind her were still on.

“They are the ones who let you become who you are.”

Understanding dawned on Ruofei. “I want to see them,” he growled. His fingers dug into Jingjing’s skin.

Jingjing let out an animal-like howl. She closed her eyes, as though two gems had been covered by black felt.

She moved against him, speaking to him without words. Be patient. The opportunity will come.

A global athletic competition was going to be held soon. It was called the “Olympic+ Games.”

Unlike the old Olympics, the new games no longer limited competition to the human body’s capacity for speed, strength, and technique; instead, the emphasis was on integration with new technology. Thus, the games, held once every four years, were an opportunity for medical equipment manufacturers, arms dealers, and genetic engineering firms to show off their newest products. The contestants, like superheroes, upgraded their bodies to pursue new records unbounded by the limitations of the human body.

Ruofei was asked to deliver a speech at the opening ceremony.

He turned down the honor.

His refusal became a topic of speculation. Some thought that he had received threats from the Three-Legged Crow; others whispered that he was bored with his life. Rumors even spread that he had requested to be returned to hibernation.

Ruofei refused to answer any questions related to his decision, deepening the mystery.

Finally, the invitation that he could not refuse, the invitation that he had been waiting for, came. It was from the space station, and Jingjing was asked to take him to the data tower.

We know you have questions. We’ll answer.

The data tower was on the northern coast. Even in high summer, the foam from the pounding surf solidified into white frost in midair, and, blown by the strong gusts, tumbled along the beach like fragile creatures chasing one another.

The high-speed train didn’t go directly to the tower, so the two of them had to hike along the slate-gray sea, leaning into the cold gale and getting buffeted by sheets of hail. Their footprints persisted for mere seconds before the wind wiped them away. The wind also made it impossible to talk, so they struggled on in silence. The tower, a central column with radiating support pylons, rose from the water and pointed into the sky, glinting white like a seashell.

Before they entered the security gate at the base, Jingjing explained to him that no cameras were allowed inside. Thus, the livecast would be paused for the duration and be substituted with other programming.

They rode the elevator to the floor specified in the invitation. After multiple security checks to verify their identities, the pair stood in the communication chamber. There was no visible machinery or input surface, and random geometric figures flowed across the spherical ceiling. Supposedly, this setup wasn’t intended to protect the equipment but to safeguard the fragile nervous systems of the human users.

“Be careful.” Jingjing looked at him as though she wanted to say something more. Then she withdrew, leaving him alone in the room.

The patterns in the ceiling changed. Now they resembled undulatus asperatus, the roiling clouds before a storm.

Welcome, Mr. Du. We’ve been observing you for some time. It’s good to finally meet face to face.

The voices, speaking in sync, were androgynous.

“Great to . . . meet you too. But I must confess that I don’t understand the purpose of this meeting.”

The parameters of your behavior model have been displaying some wild swings in the last few weeks. We cannot explain such shifts unless you are harboring doubt. Your doubts, unresolved, may become everyone’s doubts.

“I doubt I’m as influential as all that.”

Let’s get to the point then. You’re threatening our entire value system.

“I think . . . I’m just not used to this new way of life.”

A sudden feeling of absurdity seized Ruofei. He was literally trying to justify monogamy to the ceiling.

No. You’re doubting the very foundation of this world. That is why your body is showing signs of rejection.

“I’m not—”

Look at yourself!

Countless faces appeared on the ceiling.

The refined, handsome, perfect faces drifted across the ceiling like tentacleless jellyfish. Each was a face that Ruofei had tried at one time or another. At this moment, all the mouth corners drooped and eye corners stiffened, smiling in that empty, anguished, false manner.

Pained, Ruofei lowered his eyes. But beneath his feet was another familiar but also strange face. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

Because you’re special. You bear a responsibility to this world.

“I’m nothing more than an outcast who won the lottery. I had no choice.”

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Right? Why can’t you perform your role as an idol like you’re supposed to?

Ruofei began to laugh. He couldn’t help it.

“No, you’re the fool, sitting up there on your throne in space like some despot of old. Your people are tired of this life of endlessly chasing the latest and newest. They can’t see a future in it. They want another possibility.”

And you’ll provide them that?

“I’m only speaking the truth from my heart.”

The ceiling dimmed, as though the speaker at the other end of the link was deep in thought. The pause grew so long that it became suffocating.

Ruofei leaned against the wall and sat down. The whole room glowed with an anxious red.

We’ve made a mistake in our calculations concerning you. We have to correct the error.

“What correction?” Ruofei realized that he could no longer move his feet.

A minor surgery lasting only a few minutes. You won’t feel a thing.

“Don’t even think about it!”

Ruofei fought against the invisible force immobilizing him, but the more he struggled, the more stuck he became. Suddenly, some force dragged him toward the center of the room and held him there. From far away he heard knocking noises as well as the faint voice of Jingjing.

“Jingjing! Help!”

A smooth tentacle dropped down from the ceiling, nimbly twisting as it sought the brain port at the base of Ruofei’s skull.

“I’d rather be killed by the fanatics from the Three-Legged Crow!” Ruofei grimaced and dodged the tentacle.

All of a sudden, the mysterious force disappeared. Ruofei collapsed to the ground.

How can you—

Before the voices could finish, the floor beneath Ruofei whorled open. He was pulled into the hole, and, as though guided by a transparent tube, slid through the many floors in the tower like a bullet shot down the central column. Faster and faster he plunged, and he felt his innards flattened by the acceleration until, with an abrupt turn, he fell into endless darkness.

As he suddenly sped up again, he lost consciousness.

Ruofei was watching a film starring himself. All of the scenes were so strange, so illogical, as though cut from films from different genres in different periods, spliced together randomly, and then played back as a long, under-cranked reel.

He saw himself being stuffed into a silver hover car by people dressed in black. The hover car then swept with incredible speed through mountains, valleys, tunnels, highway recharge stations, streets and alleyways until it reached a beachside concert that had just ended, with scattered bottles and cans on the sand, simulhol dispensers, quick-mold masks, aphrodisiac sticks, and used injectors glinting everywhere like seashells. A speedboat rushed toward the coast, hopping over the waves.

The black-clothed people carried Ruofei onto the speedboat. Like a twitching sperm, the speedboat raced toward a large ship in international waters. He was lifted high by a crane and then gently deposited into a coffin.

Men and women dressed in elegant clothing from a bygone age sat around a stage, among them a beautiful man who smiled at him, revealing shell-like teeth. Spotlights swung to focus on the coffin at the center. After a drumroll, the coffin cover slowly slid open, revealing his sallow, deformed old face. The audience called for him to smile. He obeyed, and sustained applause followed.

Music, champagne, dancing, singing . . .

A beautiful woman led him through the narrow and twisted hallways of the ship. Just before they entered her cabin, another woman stopped them. The first woman shouted in rage, and summoned sailors to tie up the second woman, stuffing her into a large cask. Apparently the first woman was the captain’s lover. Ruofei stared at the woman in the cask, thinking that she seemed somehow familiar. Before they pushed the cask off the side of the ship, the woman inside cried. Suddenly, Ruofei realized that the woman’s face was one of the many once worn by Jingjing. The cask sank into the water and then floated up, bobbing as it disappeared into the darkness.

Finally, the ship reached the end of its long journey and docked at a harbor. They crossed dense tropical forests, dirty slums, neon-lit commercial sex districts, and entered a magnificent palace, where nearly nude men and women cavorted in sacred dances to outlandish drumbeats. They surrounded Du Ruofei and lifted him into the air. A woman wearing a black veil appeared, and everyone knelt to her. Ruofei saw that on the back of every neck was a tattoo of a three-legged crow.

They pushed Ruofei to stand in front of the woman, whose eyes shone with an eerie golden light.

She lifted one hand and pressed it against Ruofei’s chest. He closed his eyes, expecting his chest to be torn open and his heart ripped out.

“Are you happy?” the woman whispered.

Shocked, Ruofei tried to open his eyes. But the hand gave him a gentle shove, and he fell backward.

The same scenes began to run in reverse in rapid succession until everything faded to black.

An acrid smell filled his nostrils, waking him. He found himself in a tiny hut. There was no palace, no woman in a black veil. There was only a crude wooden bowl bubbling over what was left of an open-pit fire.

“You’re finally awake.”

He turned at Jingjing’s voice, but he saw an unfamiliar face lit by the soft light of dawn.

“This is the original me.” The woman drew close to him. It was a plain, imperfect face, but a face that struck him with inarticulable power.

“ . . . I hope you don’t mind.”

Ruofei hadn’t realized how long it had been since he had seen an unmodified face. He was touched.

“Not . . . not at all,” he said. He felt clumsy as he tried to assemble the words. “Where am I? What happened?”

“This is the wilderness, far from the panoptic gaze of the space station. Three days ago, you were almost turned into a puppet. We rescued you.”

He lowered his gaze and saw the three-legged crow tattooed on Jingjing’s arm. His face froze.

“Have you been lying to me all this time? Why?”

“Listen to me. I can explain.”

Her voice was as placid as the sea before dawn.

The Three-Legged Crow wasn’t nearly as fanatical or violent as rumored. Members believed that a spiritual nature pervaded all beings, so that worshipping idols or any infallible authority was a laughable error. There was a compact that bound all things in nature, and humanity was merely one party to the compact, no more noble or special than any of the other parties. The technology-driven novelty-lust promoted by the new world was not only damaging to the relationship between humanity and nature, but also disruptive of the common web of bonds between all creatures and their environment.

Worse still, humanity thought of itself as the only subject. Lost in an endless narcissistic dream, humans maintained only a compact with technology, having abandoned the capacity to connect with the wider universe.

“We call that capacity wildness,” said Jingjing. She bit her bottom lip, as though trying to forget some unpleasant memory. “In order to successfully integrate into the new world, you have no idea how much training I had to undergo to disguise my wildness under a veneer of so-called ‘civilization.’ I was absolutely disgusted.”

Ruofei finally understood the source of the odd quality he had detected in his mate.

In a society devoted to the pursuit of the new, some must be out of fashion. Each bored soul was potentially a recruit for the Three-Legged Crow. Like cancerous cells slowly dividing, they infiltrated every nook and cranny of the new world. Azul450-Qin-Ye was one of them.

“So . . . you’ve been acting with me all along.” Ruofei felt wounded. “I suppose acting is the custom of the new world.”

“Yes and no.” Jingjing didn’t avoid his gaze. “You’re extremely important to us. You’re a man from outside of our era. You can influence many with your observations, your stances, your choices.”

“Then why did you kill all the other hibernauts?”

“Lies.”

“But you’re the one who repeated those lies to me.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Jingjing dropped her gaze. “You’re special . . . to me.”

“If I had petitioned for another mate back when you first brought up the idea, would you still think I’m special?”

“Are you certain I’m still the same woman as the Azul450-Qin-Ye you knew then?”

Ruofei had no response to that. Jingjing held his hand.

“You are that man. Help me.”

“I’m no one. I’m nothing. How can I help you?”

“You’ll find out. But we need to get going. It’s almost time.”

Back in the old world, Ruofei had never experienced such landscapes devoid of signs of civilization.

Riding on giant deer-like creatures, they departed from the Three-Legged Crow camp and passed through a kingdom of wildness birthed by time and gravity. The kingdom’s history was far apart from human rationality, and yet it was also full of the chaos, lusts, taboos, and ignorance projected thereon by human nature. Order emerged in places far older than Hammurabi’s code and Solon’s laws; mountains and rivers moved in accordance with their own regularity, merging into oneness. The bodies and treasures buried here bore witness to the process by which humanity emerged from wilderness and then returned to it in another form. Countless living things nested and multiplied here, generations without end.

The weather was unpredictable, temperamental. Ruofei found the extreme variation difficult to adjust to, but Jingjing seemed to find delight in the uncertainty itself.

“Life in the new world is rich but empty. We look at nothing but ourselves, thereby cutting off our links to the world and everything in it. Rocks, clouds, and our bodies are all reflections of nature’s laws. Only when we’re completely immersed in them can we appreciate their beauty and become aware of the entirety of the system’s meaning, including the irrational, the corrupt, and the cruel.”

As she preached, Jingjing also showed him how to eat a wriggling larva to derive nourishment.

Ruofei missed most the automatic shower stall.

Finally, the journey took its toll. Ruofei fell ill. His face turned as pale as the larva, and his body trembled like a cicada’s exuviated shell dangling in the wind. Jingjing squeezed a cup of dark green liquid out of a thorny plant and held it in front of Ruofei’s lips. He took one whiff and vomited.

“Trust me,” said Jingjing, her eyes full of love. “Drink it.”

Ruofei drained the cup in one gulp.

He fell into a bottomless abyss. He was stabbed by needles, drowned, burned, shocked, bitten by chitinous jaws.

He saw a giant three-legged crow spread its wings to cover the sun. Black feathers fell to the earth, and, carried by streams and blood, passing through the food chain and nervous systems, entered the body of every person, leading to violence, instability, massacre, chaos.

With a shock, he realized that the wilderness was the only true form, and the new world was but a projection. The moment a person stepped across the border between the two worlds was also the moment the human shadow turned into animal, river, rock, and grass.

He tried to describe this chaotic world using words, but the moment he spoke, all meaning disappeared like an intricate papercraft palace bursting into flames.

He fell into a coma, hallucinated, woke up, and then began the cycle anew.

Finally, as he felt himself pressed to the limits of endurance, on the verge of a slumber from which he would never awaken, his soul was yanked from his body and hauled through an endless tunnel.

A pale, creamy light glowed at the end of the tunnel.

“You made it!” Jingjing was holding his sweat-drenched body, murmuring into his ear. “You’ll be fine now. You’ll be fine.”

As the sun set, they finally reached the edge of the new world.

“Do you remember what you must do?”

“First, I must turn you in to the authorities as the Three-Legged Crow spy responsible for sabotaging the data tower.”

“Uh-huh.” Jingjing tilted her head to look at Ruofei with a smile.

“Next, I’ll agree to deliver a speech at the opening ceremony of the Olympics+, though I should act as though I came to this decision reluctantly, after much psychological struggle.”

“Very good. Continue.”

“After my memory-manager reconnects to the network, encrypted data hidden in memories categorized as ‘dreams’ will take over and substitute the Three-Legged Crow’s declaration for the official text of the address. And then . . . ”

“And then, your speech, livecast to every corner of the new world, will serve as a signal flare. Three-Legged Crow recruits across the globe, until now dormant, will rip off their disguises and show their wildness. Together, they’ll overthrow the tyrants in the space station. At that moment, you, Du Ruofei, will be celebrated as the hero from the wilderness . . . ”

“And you’ll be careful, right?”

Jingjing nodded. “Nothing will happen to me.”

Things did not go as planned.

At the border control station, Jingjing pressed her hand against Ruofei’s chest. Before a single heartbeat, she had been dragged away, and the two of them were shoved into two separate hover cars and sent on their way to the security center. Through the narrow windows on the hover cars, they could only see each other’s eyes. Jingjing’s eyes, lit by the golden fireworks that exploded overhead, were fearless and calm.

The hover cars became stuck among the parade floats celebrating the opening of the Olympics+. The enforcement agents had no choice but to take the two out of the cars, unshackle their feet, and bring them on foot through the jubilant crowd.

Ruofei knew that agents of the Three-Legged Crow had spread the news through the media that the Man Out of Fashion had returned and was about to deliver a speech. This was what had forced the authorities to act so quickly.

Ruofei and Jingjing made their way through the crowd slowly. Their tattered clothes and grimy faces made them seem like mendicant monks of old, but the crowd treated their unexpected costumes as a new trend in fashion. High on drugs and simulhol, the euphoric mob knelt down to worship them, and some even lifted them onto their shoulders.

Surfing the crowd face-up, Ruofei turned to look at Jingjing, similarly adrift above a sea of people. The drumroll began, and they smiled at each other. Under the starry sky, they glided over this liquid humanity, passing parade float after parade float, each an island with its own distinct scenery. Dancers on the islands wriggled and twirled passionately, leaping through forests of rainbow-hued beams, scattering fluorescent confetti into the air.

Abruptly, Jingjing sank out of sight and disappeared under the surging sea of bobbing heads. Ruofei rolled down from the crest of his own wave, but enforcement agents caught him and held him to the ground.

“Don’t struggle if you want to see her again,” growled a low, rumbling voice.

They frog-marched him into the arena where the opening ceremony was being held. After a long, dark tunnel, he was pushed into the security center, lit bright as day. A group of elegantly dressed men and women waited for him as he was scanned from head to toe. He sat down, and a beautiful man sat across from him.

“We’ve received orders to have you deliver the speech,” said the man. “However—”

He shoved a transparent slate into Ruofei’s hands.

“—you must read exactly what’s written here. Otherwise, your wild companion will be—”

The wall facing Ruofei turned transparent, revealing Jingjing lying on an operating chair, a thick cable plugged into the base of her skull. Her expression was as empty as a puppet’s.

Ruofei tried to get up, but was held down.

“Don’t worry. We’re all civilized people here. This isn’t your age.”

Another wave of cheers swept through the arena outside. It was almost time.

Ruofei glared at the beautiful man, his eyes spitting fire. In the end, he looked away. “I’ll do as you say.”

The beautiful man smiled and got up. As he was about to walk out the door, he turned around. “Remember to fix yourself before you get up there. This will be livecast to the whole world.”

Ruofei stared into the blurry mirror, trying to remember how many faces he had gone through. He failed, but he knew that the face he wore now would be the penultimate one, one worth remembering. He smiled at himself in the mirror, perfect and fake.

Memories from centuries ago swept back in a wave. Is all this worth it?

Jingjing’s eyes flashed through the mirror.

He rubbed the special ointment over his face until his face from three hundred years earlier returned.

Amidst thunderous applause, Ruofei slowly climbed onto the dais. Spotlights followed him as his pale, asymmetrical face was projected onto the giant screen. He smiled, and the crowd exploded into cheers. The media had been crafting the narrative that Ruofei was a hero who had escaped from the kidnapping attempt by the Three-Legged Crow. On the other hand, Jingjing, the sleeper agent, had been completely wiped from the story, as though she had never even existed.

After his eyes had adjusted to the bright lights, Ruofei saw the VIP seats filled with elegant, beautiful men and women dressed in the clothes of a bygone age. The beautiful man who had threatened him sat among them. He smiled at Ruofei, revealing shell-like teeth.

He experienced a sense of déjà vu. Everything was as he had dreamed during his coma, except backwards.

He nodded, and the crowd quieted. The slate in his hand glowed, revealing scrolling text.

People of the new world, fortune’s favorites! he read. His amplified voice sounded like the booming voice of the gods revealing an oracle. Camera flashes flickered in the dark seats, as though the twinkling stars had formed a ring around him.

 . . . Three hundred years ago, we used to have games like these. Back then, our motto was “faster, higher, stronger,” because we were slow, base, and weak. All pain came from physical deprivation and our imperfect bodies. Humans fought and oppressed one another for a place closer to the narrow apex of the pyramid. For so little, so many sold their bodies and souls, suffered unbearable horrors. We saw no way out—at least I couldn’t . . .

He waited for the encrypted data in his memory-manager to come alive.

 . . . Three hundred years later, you’re free from that old nightmare. You can change your home, your job, your mate, and even your body without a second thought. Your philosophy is to derive pleasure from each coming second. Your motto is, “newer, newer, newer!” On your faces, I observe joy and satisfaction that I’ve never seen. So when some of you tell me that you yearn for the past, I confess that I’m utterly baffled. Maybe I’m simply too old to understand. After all, a three-hundred-year-old brain is not the latest model . . .

He paused and surveyed the millions in the darkness who hung on his every word, as though he had rehearsed for this moment. Letters and words coalesced out of the darkness and floated in front of his eyes.

 . . . I can think of only one possibility. Ruofei read from the speech crafted for him by the Three-Legged Crow. Quickly, he glanced down at the thin slate and his face froze.

The slate was showing the exact same speech.

 . . . Your bodies, pulled by an irresistible tide, are surging toward the future, but your souls are anchored to the same place . . . you’re tired; you want to slow down, to take a break . . .

Struggling to suppress his panic, Ruofei’s eyes darted between the two speeches, comparing and finding no contrast. His speech slowed and grew hesitant. Sweat beaded on his brow. Was this a joke or had he been deceived?

 . . . but always, a voice reminds you, faster, faster! Something new is ahead of you, and you don’t want to fall behind, to be out of fashion, to be forgotten . . . the voice never stops, because the force that propels you toward destruction is also the source of the voice’s . . .

Life.

Ruofei stopped, staring into the darkness without expression, as though finally in possession of the secret of this world.

A wave of noise, like the bursting of foamy bubbles when the tide recedes, gently swept across the arena. It was the sound made by all the electronics in the arena being destroyed by an EMP strike. All the lights went dark, and the audience turned into a panicked mob, pushing, shoving, climbing, scrambling over one another. Silver beams from emergency lights came to life outside the arena and swept across the clouds, illuminating the broken seats, the simulhol dispensers, quick-mold masks, aphrodisiac sticks, and used injectors glinting everywhere like seashells on a beach.

Several people dressed in black dragged the stunned Ruofei off the dais and rushed through the emergency evacuation tunnel. A silver hover car was already in place. They pushed him into the car, and the car sped away at an incredible speed, through streets and alleyways, highway recharge stations, tunnels, valleys, and mountains.

The black-clothed people injected Ruofei with something. Gradually, he could no longer feel his body. He felt his consciousness stretching, expanding and extending in every direction until it was so thin and so diffuse, like fog or wind, formless, ungatherable, adrift.

He saw himself preaching from an altar. The faithful of the new world, draped in black capes, kept their heads lowered. A monotonous, cold electronic music swelled and ebbed like the tides—upon closer examination, it was the sound of millions chanting sacred scriptures. He felt himself growing smaller and smaller as the faithful in the congregation grew larger and larger until they were like a forest of statues, falling toward him. Their faces emerged from the shadows, and Ruofei found himself struggling to breathe—teachers, classmates, relatives, neighbors, convenience store clerks, garage mechanics, doctors, nurses, passers-by who looked at him oddly . . .

And they smiled at him, all at once. That trademark, frozen, fake smile.

In despair, he curled up. There was no escape.

A rumbling came from behind the faithful, followed by crisp or subdued crashing noises. The statues, like bowling pins, fell and broke into pieces. The smiles broke up into torn flesh and torrents of blood. His salvation screeched to a stop: a gigantic, silver hover car, its wings and windshield bloody and covered by scraps of flesh. The wipers came to life, clearing out a view of the inside of the vehicle.

It was his mother.

He wanted to hug her, but he found himself stuck in place, unable to take a single step. Two trails of bloody tears ran down her face. Slowly, oh so slowly, his mother swung a spade covered in wet sand. The metallic blade swept through the air, sloughing off tiny sand grains like clouds and birds, suspended in midair, their motion only detectable by the glint of the sun.

The spade struck the left side of Ruofei’s face, the sand ground against his skin, and his body was propelled into the air by that enormous force.

Everything faded to black. He seemed to hear voices murmur.

Wake up, now. Wake up.

Ruofei came to a view of pure white. He found himself inside the communication chamber of the data tower. The room was completely empty except for him.

He tried to stand up. The effects of the drug hadn’t completely dissipated, and he felt dizzy, weak. He leaned against the wall like a fly about to drown in a sea of milk.

How do you feel? The booming voice seemed to pierce straight through his chest.

“Why . . . why am I here?”

You’re actually dead. This is Heaven, or maybe Hell. It all depends on whether you cheated on your taxes.

 . . . 

You’re not amused? I thought this joke was from your time.

“I’m not in the mood. Did you bring me back here for the surgery?”

Oh, there’s no need for that. You’ve already served your historic purpose.

“I don’t understand.”

Which part, exactly, don’t you understand?

“The speech you forced me to make and the speech the Three-Legged Crow wanted me to make were exactly the same. Why?”

The Three-Legged Crow believe that everything in the universe is connected, don’t they? We all exist together in one large system. You, at this time, in this place, served the system. It mattered not who you chose to represent.

“If the ultimate result would be the same regardless of who I chose, then why did you go to so much trouble?”

That’s part of the compact.

“What compact?”

A long silence.

“What compact?” Ruofei shouted.

A gigantic face loomed out of the ceiling, an unfamiliar, refined, but tired-looking face. The image broke up into countless smaller faces, all with the same expression. The faces swirled like a kaleidoscope, coalescing into different scenes: streets, dance parties, intimate lovers, predators seizing prey, wild deserts . . . it was impossible to tell how the scenes were connected with one another, but the colors grew ever darker over time, as though indicating different eras, until everything turned black; yet, in that darkness, bits of light flickered: hover cars at midnight, a lighthouse beyond the sea, the gaze of a lover . . .

Suddenly, all the scenes swirled into a single spot, vanished, and the room returned to empty white.

The compact between me and humankind.

“Who are you?”

I’m the manager, the data center, the algorithm. I’m the god who can predict the future.

“Predict the future?”

The probability it will rain, the employment rate, the popularity of a new face, the fashion trends next season, demographic projections, behavior patterns of individuals or groups given certain conditions . . .

“You use these to . . . control humanity?”

I prefer the term “guide.” Humanity is too sensitive, too weak, like reeds in the wind.

“Then why does the Three-Legged Crow exist?”

A chess game requires two players. Civilization, like life itself, requires endless stimuli. Otherwise, it will age and die.

“Then I’m nothing more than another stimulus? Out of all the hibernauts, why did you pick me?”

Your companions were largely the elites of the old world, those who had achieved much success. They would not be content to follow the path laid down by another, even if it were newer and better. They possessed too much ambition, too strong a desire to lead, to conquer fate, to take arms against a sea of troubles. Ultimately, their trajectories bent toward destruction. We tried, but the stimuli they gave this world were too strong. But you . . .

The androgynous voices seemed to tremble with laughter.

Ruofei’s face flushed with heat and his heart pounded. He knew the answer. He felt like a defendant waiting for the verdict.

 . . . you are nothing like the rest of them. You’re an unfortunate wretch, passive, gentle, content, patient. You’re like a mirror that brings attention to the diseases of this new world. You allow everyone to reflect on their own life, but not so much that they begin to doubt the foundation of the system. To be honest, you were slightly too passive. That’s why we had to give you a mate—

“Jingjing was also a part of your plan?”

Oh, please don’t misunderstand. Everything she did was out of her own free will. She wanted to study how people in the past built emotional relationships; she analyzed your character. In her mind, everything she did was for the compact. We simply allowed her to go where she was already heading.

Ruofei felt utterly ashamed. He thought his fate had been transformed with the lottery, but in fact nothing had changed at all. He was still a failure—even worse, he has been failing for three centuries.

“You’re all frauds!” He pounded the wall. He felt such anguish, but tears would not come out.

Once again, scenes appeared on the empty ceiling. They were shots from all over the globe: elegant, earnest young people held signs and gathered to protest in front of landmark buildings in every city. They were orderly and calm, their hands raised and their eyes full of doubt. Their shadows fell across the clear glass walls like ranks of angels waiting to take flight. Suddenly, a burning meteor flew over the crowd and struck the wall, breaking apart the perfect reflections.

The cameras closed in on a single youthful face. Rage, confusion, and anxiety warred across those perfect features. Then, the face smiled.

The reckless smile spread everywhere, like a plague.

Like we said, a certain amount of wildness is good for health.

Ruofei stared at these new humans, at their fascination with this new fashion. He began to understand.

“What’s going to happen to Jingjing?”

She has a choice to make. Like many other former members of the Three-Legged Crow, she could choose to become one of us, and enjoy the privileges of the new world. She could also choose to become an idol of wildness. But, as you know very well, idols are mere symbols. They exist solely in stories.

Jingjing’s eyes flashed before Ruofei’s eyes. His heart clenched hard.

“What about me? What choice do I have?”

The communication chamber returned to its pure white state. The voices sank into silence, as though absorbed by some complicated computation.

A confused Ruofei stood in the streets of Shanghai.

Skyscrapers, elevated highways, narrow alleys, streets lined with Chinese parasol trees. Everything was as he remembered.

A man brushed by his shoulder, his face at once strange and familiar, as though they had met once. In fact, everyone on the crowded sidewalk was astonishingly beautiful. They looked at Ruofei, and behind their gazes there lurked some hidden meaning that he couldn’t decipher.

He had long become used to the odd looks others gave him due to his condition, but this was different.

A young woman approached him from afar, seemingly surrounded by a golden haze.

The sun suddenly dimmed, as though a giant cloud had drifted overhead. Everyone stopped in the street to stare at him.

He squinted, waiting for the woman to come closer.

Her face gradually emerged from the haze, growing clearer. Compared to the beautiful faces all around him, hers was plain and imperfect.

The woman stopped on the other side of the street and smiled at him. Instantly, the cloud overhead seemed to move away, the world brightened, and everyone resumed their own course.

Ruofei used every ounce of strength he had to return the woman’s smile.

A light came on in the darkness, illuminating the stiff smile in the hibernation capsule.

A few white tentacles fell away from the glass and retracted into the octopus-like machine. A woman dressed in black swept the data shown on a thin membrane onto the giant ceiling-screen.

Name: Du Ruofei

Gender: Male

Age: 25

Initial hibernation period: 2018.06.26-2322.07.01

Time awake: 281 days

Suggested course:

The blue cursor blinked for a few moments, and then:

Resume hibernation

A droning filled the room, as though many voices were arguing. Gradually, the voices grew quieter, stopped. The woman in black approached the hibernation capsule and, slightly curious, glanced at the face that belonged to a bygone age. A moment later, she pressed a button. The capsule retracted into the hibernation tank, and the cover whorled close.

Behind her stood a row of identical circular hibernation tanks.

The light went out, and darkness poured in.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, October 2014. This translation is based on a version of the Chinese text that has been substantially revised by the author.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chen Qiufan was born in 1981, in Shantou, China. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Mr. Chen’s surname is written first. He sometimes uses the English name Stanley Chan.) He is a graduate of Peking University and published his first short story in 1997 in Science Fiction World, China’s largest science fiction magazine. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah and other magazines. His first novel, The Abyss of Vision, came out in 2006. He won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award in 2006 with “A Record of the Cave of Ning Mountain,” a work written in Classical Chinese. His story, “The Tomb,” was translated into English and Italian and can be found in The Apex Book of World SF II and Alias 6. He now lives in Beijing and works for Google China.

Fleet

Sandra McDonald

When I officially became a girl, I took the new name of Isa. At the time I was nine years old. In the Umatac village records I’m still a male named Magahet Joseph Howard USN. It’s good luck to be given the name of an ancestor from Before Silence. My brother calls me Shithead, because he’s my brother. But most people call me Bridge, because the governors gave me that. Someone in every village is appointed to stand with one dusty foot in the past and the other planted in the Great Future, ready to take action when ships appear on the blue horizon.

Sounds important. Don’t be fooled. We’re not some backwards cargo cult, building mock radio towers in the magical hope of luring back civilization. Civilization will come again regardless. We’re sure of it.

It’s hot today, late afternoon. I’m sitting on the beach and thinking hard about taking a nap. A dozen yards offshore, blue waves roll around Fouha Rock, where the gods created mankind. No kidding: it’s a giant limestone phallus jutting out of the sea.

“What are you staring at, Shithead?” my brother Rai shouts when the canoes return.

“Your tiny shriveled-up balls,” I yell back.

The men laugh. Among them is my husband Pulan Robert, who comes to me at night with reverence and good humor. He has a second wife, Kami Brittany, who bears him our children and hopes that one day I’ll be gored to death by a boonie pig. She can’t say that too loudly, though, for fear I’ll call down upon her a vengeful taotaomo’na. Those are the spirits that slink through the nunu trees under moonlight, and moan during storms as if in great pain, and brush their invisible cold hands over your nape when you least expect it.

She’s right to worry. I know the names of seven thousand taotaomo’na. Seven thousand ancestors who perished here in the After Silence. There’s a man in Yigo who knows twelve thousand. The oldest woman on the island lives in Dededo, and she knows fifteen thousand. The governors gave them to her, just like they gave them to me, through white caps clamped to our skulls.

I try not to think about the white caps too much.

The men beach the canoes and haul out their catches. Pulan Robert smiles at me and waves over to where Kami waits with our youngest daughter bouncing on her hip. A moment later his smile dims. Our visitors have arrived. Four men, tall and lean, with walking sticks wrapped in copper wire and the green ribbons of Agat village.

Rai stops beside me and frowns. “They’re late.”

“They’re on time.”

“Late,” he insists. “They’ll slow us down tomorrow.”

“Two days to get there,” I tell him. “Then you’ll see Angelina again.”

At sunset our entire village dines on roasted fruit bats, fresh rabbit fish, breadfruit, cakes, and tuba. The musicians play nose flutes and drums for the children dancing around the bonfire. Three of the men from Agat know of me, but the fourth keeps sliding glances my way. Beneath my blouse, my bra is stuffed with soft grass. I wear a wig of long hair, dark and straight.

“Babae?” he asks his companions in Tagalog. Many Filipinos clustered in Agat in the After Silence.

“Oo,” his friends say.

He wants to know if I’m a girl. Yes, they say. But he looks at me doubtfully. Wondering what’s under my skirt, maybe wondering if he can put his hands under there to squeeze and rub.

Pulan Robert puts his arm around my shoulder. He smells like salt and fish and Kami.

“You should stay here,” he says that night, in our bed, as we stare up at the tin and thatch ceiling. Kami’s hut is bigger, but mine is closer to the cooling ocean breeze. Mosquitoes nibble on our arms.

“I have to go. Someone has to remember the dead,” I remind him.

“I’ll come along and keep you company.”

“Rai is coming.”

“Rai is too impatient. He won’t pay attention.”

I kiss his nose. “Rai will always pay attention to me.”

Rai’s impatient because it’s been six months since he’s held his wife in his arms. In the morning, he’s awake before anyone else. At breakfast, somber Irao speaks quietly to his crying children. The fourth from our village is Husto, who has spent the last week pleading to our little governor that he should be excused from this duty. She stands firm. The lottery is fair and the gods have picked him to take his turn digging. I wonder if we’re going to have to physically lift Husto in the air and carry him away, but finally he pries himself away from his weeping mother.

“Travel safely,” Pulan Robert says, with a final warm kiss.

“I will,” I promise.

The men from Agat lead the way down the road. We follow, and only Husto looks back.

Despite the solemn occasion, I like these trips. Before Silence, you could drive all over Guahan on asphalt roads, from the turquoise waters of Cocos Lagoon all the way north to the limestone cliffs at Ritidian Point. The shrine for the Japanese soldiers who killed themselves, the international airport for big jets, the army tanks abandoned after the war—you could visit them all in just one day. Now the roads are all rubble, and bandits control the bridges, and some of the white villages up north won’t let you pass over their lands without payment. Rai and I tried rowing around the island once when we were young. We nearly shredded ourselves on the reefs. Ours is the age of footpaths and walking sticks, and many people die without ever having stepped outside the villages they were born in.

The coastal route to Layon is pretty enough, but I’d like to see more of the old military bases. My namesake Joseph Howard USN worked on one of those. The concrete shells of the buildings are all gutted and stripped out, the roofs blown away by typhoons or leveled by earthquakes. Those ruins are less sad, somehow, than the iron skeletons of hotel high-rises in Hagatna, the resorts where the tourists honeymooned and gambled away their fortunes until the Night of Fire.

Imagine it: two hundred thousand people drinking or dreaming or fucking or hunched over military equipment in the middle of the night, in the middle of the endless ocean, and in the gap from one minute to the next, all the technology died. No telephones, radios, satellites, computers. All the power stations erupted into fire. All the transformers and electrical wires sizzled and fried themselves into charred metal. In the skies above, enormous waves of green light shimmered against the moon and stars. The governors gave me just enough science to know what the Northern Lights are, and why they should never be seen this close to the equator.

I rub my head, remember the tight white caps, and keep walking.

Our first step is Fort Nuestra, high on the bluff, to make our offers to the Lady. She’s not the oldest of our gods, but she’s the one Magellan and the Spanish gave to us while they burned our huts and killed our chiefs. When I was very small, I would pray to the Lady to take away my cock. She never did. I don’t hold it against her, though, not much anyways, because Pulan Robert likes it well enough in the dark.

After praying and leaving gifts we continue on to Merizo. Only a few families are left to greet us. Merizo went to war with Inarajan last year and came out on the poorer end. The fight was supposedly over the ownership of a prized carabao, but was probably about skin color or religion. For now Merizo only has one worker to send to the landfill, a teenage boy with a topknot dangling from his otherwise bare skull.

“I’m going to dig up a radio and battery,” he tells me as we drink tuba by the ruins of a church. “I’m going to call Jesus Christ.”

Merizo’s always been known for this kind of talk. I don’t mind it. Husto, though, announces that Jesus Christ died on the Night of Fire, and this makes the boy’s parents angry. While they argue, I walk away to piss. A woman with limestone white hair follows me. Her left leg drags in the dirt.

“You’re the ‘idge,” she says, the words slurred.

Her name is Nena and she should be dead now, or so the story goes. While working at the landfill she was accidentally buried by the shifting, stinking debris. By the time they pulled her out, she’d been breathing bad air for too long. A quick death might have been more merciful, but Nena’s father carried his only child back to Merizo and cared for her until he died in the war.

“I’m Isa,” I tell her, pulling down my skirt.

“I ‘ound the ‘eet,” she says.

I shake my head, not understanding.

She waves her good hand toward the ocean. “The ‘eet.”

Fleet. She found the Fleet. She wouldn’t be the first. Usually, though, there’s a lot of tuba involved, or smoked weeds, or the fanciful imagination of children.

“I don’t see any ships, Nena.”

“‘ailor,” she says, and gestures toward the jungle.

“Show me.”

Chickens scatter before our feet on a narrow path. From the vines and bushes peek out old cement houses on cracked foundations. One hut without doors or a roof is so overgrown you’d miss it if you weren’t looking closely. Inside sits a white man, his face ghastly with pain and his eyes half-lidded. He smells like shit and urine. In his right hand is a sharp curved knife.

“The ‘eet,” Nena repeats.

The rips in his clothing and long scrapes on his arms say he washed in over the reef, but any fool fisherman from the north can fall over the side of a boat. I kneel in the doorway.

“Good day, sir,” I say. “Can you tell me your name? Your village?”

He struggles to focus. Twitches the knife, as if trying to raise his arm. He starts to ramble—short, disconnected words, none of them in English or Chamorro or Tagalog.

But I know these words. The governors gave me nations and languages before they gave me names to carry. This man is speaking Russian.

My throat goes tight.

To Nena, I say, “He comes from Yona. They speak strange up there. Nothing more than that.”

Her expression falls. “Not ‘eet?”

“Not Fleet, no,” I say confidently. “When the Fleet returns, an armada of ships will sail into the bay bearing food and wine. They’ll set off fireworks and play the United States anthem. This is just a lost fisherman who needs our help. Return to the beach and find my brother Rai. He’s the tallest, the most handsome. Bring him here. But don’t let anyone else see you. They’ll claim the reward his village has for him.”

A new light gleams in her eyes at the mention of reward, and she hurries off.

If Nena had bothered to examine the Russian’s clothes, she would have seen that even stiff with sea salt, the fabric is newer and finer than anything we can weave or dig up here. He’s wearing lightweight boots with fresh rubber soles. For a white man he’s pale—a sailor who doesn’t see much sun. Maybe he came from a submarine. The governors showed us pictures of those.

“Who are you?” I ask in Russian.

His rambling stops. A hairy brown spider crawls down his leg. He doesn’t brush it off.

“Did you come alone? Can I call someone for help?”

“Sergei,” he murmurs.

Maybe that’s his name, maybe someone else’s. Before I can ask his head slumps over and the knife tumbles from his lax fingers. I see dark blood on the back of his skull. There’s a swelling there, a stone-like bump. No other major injuries on him, no jewelry or electronics, only the knife and its leather sheath strapped under his left trouser leg.

He may not have much time left, or he could recover enough to cause serious damage.

As always, I am sworn to uphold Rule Number One.

I squeeze his nose shut and clap my hand over his mouth.

Life is a stubborn habit to break. It’s a sacred thing, to watch the spirit struggle to take flight. You can see it in the flopping fish pulled from the sea, or in the panicking pig as the knife pierces its throat. The Russian makes muffled sounds and jerks his head, but has no strength to fight me off. I pray to the gods and governors for him. No one here will mourn his death with a nine day feast. But most living things deserve kindness in their last moments, to hear words ushering them to the arms of their ancestors.

When she returns with Rai, Nena’s eyes turn accusatory.

“He passed quietly, without pain,” I say. “His people from Yona will want to come and retrieve his bones. Rai, bury him in a shallow grave. But don’t tell anyone, or let them help, or they’ll want the reward, too.”

Rai balks. “What reward?”

I squeeze his arm. “The people of Yona will be grateful to know what happened to him.”

He opens his mouth, maybe to say the people of Yona are nothing but swindlers and drunkards. My fingers dig deeper into his skin. He’s not an idiot, my brother, so he goes silent. Nena, bent over the naked corpse, sniffs in grief.

“‘is clothes,” she says.

“I took them for his people,” I tell her. “His last words were to thank you, Nena. His spirit rests in peace because of your kindness. He asked that you seclude yourself and say rosaries for him. If you don’t, his taotaomo’na will be very angry. Will you do it?”

She nods emphatically. “Yes.”

Back at the church, the others want to know where Rai is. “Too much feasting last night,” I lie, and they sympathize. Everyone here has suffered from the squats before.

Husto gestures to the folded fern leaves in my arms. “What’s that?”

“A gift for the taotaomo’na,” I warn him. “Don’t touch.”

We bid farewell to Merizo and detour into the valley to visit both Tinta and Faha Caves. I worry that Nena won’t do as told. Or that Rai will discover something incriminating that I left behind. But the caves require my full concentration. Back in World War II, the Japanese soldiers spent years raping the women, killing old and young alike, forcing people from their homes to concentration camps. Here, as the end of the war drew near, they herded villagers into caves and tossed grenades in after them. Other victims were tied up and beheaded and left in the dirt.

I don’t have their names—no Bridge does—but we know that the Japanese brutality made the people of Merizo rise up in rebellion. We honor them, too, in this sacred place heavy with memory.

“You tell the story well,” Irao comments, afterward.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell it at all,” I reply.

After the ceremonies we trek back to the coast, where dark gray clouds are rolling in from the south. We make it to Achang Bay before the rain starts. The only shelter is an old fueling station with two walls and a sand floor. Irao and Husto sit to one side of me, and on the other sits the man from Agat who doesn’t believe I’m a woman.

“The gods don’t want us to go to Layon,” Husto says as water pelts down.

“You whine like a child,” Irao tells him.

The man from Agat looks like he’s thinking of putting his hand on my thigh. I slide my fingers along the sheath of my knife, and he decides to stare at the rain instead.

By dusk the weather is clear but it’s too late to continue on. The men look for wood dry enough to burn while I worry about Rai. It doesn’t take that long to dig a shallow grave, and the detour to Tinta and Faha cost us time.

Irao knows me well. “He’ll be along soon.”

“Hmm,” I say.

Eventually the men build a fire, and we eat supper quietly, and afterward they smoke and drink more tuba. Rai does not come. We all stretch out under the dark, starry sky and rising full moon. I’m halfway through the first thousand names in my head when from the jungle arises a long, low, awful moan of pain. Someone—or something—in agony, in torment.

We all sit up in fear.

“It’s a pig,” says one of the men from Amat.

“It’s Anufat,” says Husto, naming the ugliest and meanest of the taotaomo’na. Anufat has fangs and claws, and sometimes not even a head.

Irao tosses sand at Husto. “Stop telling stories.”

“He wants his gift,” Husto insists, pointing to the fern leaves I’d forbidden anyone to touch. “You said it was for him.”

“It’s for another,” I protest.

The moan again: drawn out agony that makes my stomach flutter. Not Rai, I tell myself. But that fear grabs me and doesn’t let go, and after the third terrible time, I stand up.

“I’ll come with you,” Irao offers.

“No. I’ll go alone.” I pick up the folded leaves. “Stoke the fire and stay here.”

By the time I reach the edge of the jungle the fire is bright again, the men nothing but silhouettes. A narrow path, mostly overgrown, curves from behind the fueling station into the nunu trees. Brown snakes curl away from my bare feet. The knife in my hand won’t do anything against a spirit, but I have salt, too, and words, and if I have to run I can run, too, faster than anyone can imagine.

The steady sea breeze shifts the trees and leaves, makes shadows flicker, tricks my eyes with movement—and then a hand clamps down over my mouth, yanks me backward. The dead man’s clothes and knife spill from their leafy envelope and scatter on the ground. My knife gets lost in the bushes. Someone speaks low against my ear, a command of some kind. I stop struggling.

“Who are you?” I ask in Russian, muffled, garbled.

He repeats his command. Be quiet, he’s saying. He pulls me backward through brush into a small clearing where Rai is curled up on the ground, his hands and ankles bound, his mouth gagged.

“I’m a friend,” I insist, the words mostly unintelligible. “Friend.”

His free hand gropes my hips and ass. Looking for a weapon. He finds my cock instead and makes a startled noise. A moment later he yanks me down to the ground against Rai and lays a sharp blade against my exposed throat. My skin stings. Rai grunts. The moonlight illuminates the stranger’s pale face but I can’t see his eyes, or what emotion might be in them.

“Who are you?” he demands in Russian.

“Isa.”

He yanks at my wig, rips at my skirt. My cock hangs out, long and soft. He slaps at it and says, “Not a woman.”

If I had my knife, I’d cut his hand off. Instead I keep my chin up and stare straight at him. “Sergei?”

He hesitates. The slightest flick of his wrist and he can end my life. I’m breathing fast and my insides are watery. Some things you can’t control.

“That’s the last thing he said,” I tell him. “Sergei.”

Another long moment. Then, “How did he die?”

“From his head injury. He said you might come, that you’d tell us everything. Not that you’d attack and try to kill us.”

The Russian sits back on his haunches. Rai grunts against his gag. Carefully I put my hand on his leg. He can’t understand what we’re saying. He thinks that we’re only a few moments from death, and I wouldn’t call him wrong.

“You’re Sergei?” I repeat.

“Yes. He was Vasilly.”

“You’re from Russia?”

“There’s no Russia.” His voice is flat.

“You’re the first visitors from the outside world in a hundred years,” I say, and the thrill of it runs through me. No other Bridge has ever found a man from away. The governors will be happy with me. Maybe I can finagle a reward; fewer workers to the dump each season, perhaps, or some other special favor.

Sergei points his finger and says, “Don’t move.”

He retreats to search through Vasilly’s scattered clothing and boots. In the darkness I tug on Rai’s knots, but my fingers are trembling and the cords are wound too well.

Sergei returns with Vasilly’s knife. He unscrews the base of the hollow grip. Inside are blue fireflies. Electric lights. I haven’t seen those in a long time. The weapon is some kind of tracking or communication device, designed for stealth. He slides out a narrow part and wedges free a luminescent strip. Quick, efficient moves.

“We’ve hoped for your return,” I say, trying to sound awed. “Prayed for it.”

Sergei pockets the strip. “Forget prayers. We’re only here for information.”

“Honored visitor, our governors would be happy to share anything we know.”

He snorts, though I’m the one who should laugh. Information. Fishing reports, maybe? Average daily rainfall? No man treks across the Pacific, dares to swim between the reefs, and subsequently avoids the local population without good reason.

“How is it that you speak Russian?” he asks.

I duck my head. “There was a man, many years ago. He washed ashore the way your friend did. He recovered and lived in the jungle by himself. I would visit him, bring him companionship, and he taught me to speak it.”

He looks at my cock and shakes his head. Imaging perversion, maybe. Defending his imaginary countryman from the likes of me. The truth is much worse, of course. Those white caps, burning hot. My hair never grew back.

“Our governors would greet you with open arms,” I insist. “They’ve kept all the records from the Before time. They know everything about the island and what was here when the world went silent.”

Behind me, Rai struggles quietly against his bonds.

“What governors?” Sergei asks. “Where?”

“I’ll take you,” I tell him.

Sergei wants to leave Rai behind. I can’t risk it. Despite Rai’s many fine qualities, he’s terrible at keeping secrets. Sooner or later he’ll tell Irao and Husto what he’s seen. They’ll tell people at the landfill. Those people will go back to their villages and spread word. And the governors will most definitely not be pleased.

So instead I convince Sergei that the governors despise me and consider me crazy, an insult to their masculinity. They’ll only allow us near their village if a local man guides us. Sergei looks doubtful, but it’s not hard for him to believe that here I’m an abomination. Eventually he unties Rai and lets him stand. I try to soothe over their unfortunate introduction to one another.

“He’s Fleet,” Rai says, both angry and amazed.

“No, not Fleet,” I tell him. “Just a fisherman lost in a storm. He come from Hawaii.”

Of course, we haven’t had contact with Hawaii since Before Silence. Any stray fisherman would have to survive four thousand miles of open sea to reach our shore. But no one ever taught Rai geography.

Still, he’s skeptical. “If he’s a fisherman, why did he want to kill us?”

“He thought we killed his brother. He was afraid.”

Sergei watches us. He can’t understand a word of Chamorro, or maybe he’s just pretending not to. Perhaps they don’t have white caps where he comes from.

“Hawaii,” Rai muses. “We could go there. We could trade, maybe, and no one would have to dig at the landfill anymore. My children, your children—Isa, this could change everything for them.”

“The governors will decide,” I say. “I have to take him there.”

Rai hesitates. He’s my big brother. He used to fight bullies for me when we were dusty children. He cried the day our uncles took me away to Talofofo. He came to walk me home when they were finished burning knowledge into my head. But the mother of his children is waiting for him at Layon.

“I’ll take him by myself,” I tell him. “Go get Angelina.”

He frowns. “No. I’ll come.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll come,” he says curtly.

We circle through the jungle to avoid Irao, Husto, and the men from Agat. For hours we walk along the old highway. No sentries or dogs raise an alarm as we ghost through Inarajan. I wish we had water. Sergei’s careful to walk behind us, never letting Rai or me out of his sight.

“Is there an army?” Sergei asks.

“Not anymore,” I tell him. “Most of the military evacuated or died off After Silence.”

“What about an army of your own people?”

I don’t think that he wants an entire history of the militia here, how the local men trained under the Spanish and fought the Japanese and eventually became the Guam National Guard.

“There’s no need. We only fight each other once in awhile. Do they have armies where you come from?”

“No,” he says, but I think he’s lying.

We trudge on. Boonie pigs trample away in the bushes when our feet come too close. To stay awake, I recite the second thousand of the names in my head. In my fatigue, some syllables slip out.

“What are you saying?” Sergei asks tightly.

“I’m praying,” I tell him. “For your friend. You were very close?”

He grunts.

“He said your name before he died. He sounded . . . fond.”

“He was only a man from my—” Sergei says, and stops. From his ship? From his base? Maybe from his bed.

Carefully I say, “If there are others of your people nearby, they are welcome as well.”

Nothing. I glance back. Sergei has stopped to stare at a faint orange glow in the hills. Rai glances, too, but only for a moment. Those are the lights of Layon. The last gift of the old world. There aren’t many options for garbage on an island like this. You have to pile it somewhere, otherwise you dump it into the ocean—all those car batteries and paint cans, light bulbs and lead pipes, the plastic wrap from food, the dirty diapers and soiled cat litter, generations of toxic messes.

“What’s up there?” Sergei asks.

“An old landfill. They burn off the gasses so they can dig.”

He swats at a bug on his neck. “What are they digging for?”

I shrug. “Anything useful.”

The sky is pink-gold by the time we reach the old satellite tracking station above Inarajan. It’s just a bunch of concrete buildings now, long abandoned, but Sergei pokes around in interest.

“What was this place?” he asks.

“Something called NASA,” I tell him. “People used to visit the moon and this place helped them not get lost.”

“A tracking station.”

“Do people still live up there? On the moon?”

He kicks at an old fencepost. “If there are, they don’t answer when we call them.”

For the first time I really think about the world Sergei comes from. Out there they’ve had the raw materials, factory resources, and technical know-how to manufacture new transformers and power stations. By now they’ve rebuilt the radio stations, the telephone systems, and maybe even the Internet. They probably have medicines like aspirin and insulin, and no one dies of illnesses like appendicitis or childbirth.

All of these things would make life on Guahan easier.

But at a cost. Magellan taught us that.

“Do you trust me?” I ask Rai once we’re walking again.

“What’s kind of stupid question is that?” he asks, brushing thick green leaves from the path.

Sergei says, “Stop talking.”

“You must be completely honest with anything the governors ask you,” I tell him. And then, to Sergei, in Russian, “I’m sorry. I asked my brother not to let them beat me when we reach our leaders. I shame them, the men.”

Sergei says, “If they beat you, why do you dress that way?”

He reminds me of the villagers when I was still Magahet Joseph Howard USN. Dress like a boy. Act like a boy. Can you teach a stone to act like a tree, or a bird to act like a dolphin? The governors said many long-ago ancestors were proud to be Fa’afafine, in the manner of male and female alike. Their approval made the criticism go silent, or at least less vocal.

“I follow my heart,” I tell Sergei. “As all men and women should. Don’t your people do that?”

Sergei coughs. “Perhaps.”

“Vasilly was more than your friend, wasn’t he?” And some of this is just guessing, but a name murmured in longing is hard to forget.

His face turns hard. “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now.”

Several minutes later we reach the outskirts of Talofofo Park. The parking lot has long returned to vegetation, and the gondolas disassembled or left to rust. Here the governors live in the old history museum, flanked by ramshackle huts and old latte stones and the fresh waters of the Ugum River. It’s all small, unimpressive, nothing to look at twice. A sentry yawns when he sees us.

“Who comes?” he asks.

“Rai of Umatuc,” Rai says. “And my sister the Bridge.”

The sentry yawns again and scratches his ass. “What business?”

“This man comes from away,” I say.

Sergei nudges me nervously. “Tell your governors to come out here.”

“The governors are old men who believe in tradition,” I reply. “They’ll give you all the old records here, but we have to do things their way.”

He continues to look skittish. But the sentry shrugs as if unimpressed with our visitor and pushes open the museum door. Inside all is dim and empty. I remember being nine years old and standing here with the children of other villages, waiting for our education from the wise governors. We all thought we’d been picked for a special destiny.

There’s no such thing as destiny. Only inevitability.

The sentry takes us into a courtyard with woven mats circled around a cooking fire. “Wait here.”

Sergei shuffles his feet, undecided, but I plop down and Rai follows.

An old man in a threadbare shirt shuffles from the house a few minutes later. “Isa,” he says, a toothless smile on his face. He shakes Rai’s hand, nods respectfully at Sergei. Behind him, a hunched servant brings out tea. The old man, Kepuha, sits with a creaking of his knees.

I introduce Sergei in Russian and explain that Kepuha, too, knew the mythical old stowaway, learned this strange foreign language.

“We must celebrate your arrival,” Kepuha says, all kindness. “Such a momentous day.”

“They say you can help me with information, sir,” Sergei says.

Kepuha nods. “Yes, much information. All the old missiles. All those other terrible weapons. It’ll be a relief to be rid of them.”

Sergei relaxes. He’s close, now, to what he came for.

Rai can’t follow their words, but he knows some kind of agreement is being discussed. “Honored uncle, will they trade with us?”

“A good question to ask,” Kepuha says.

We all drink our cool, sweetened tea. More servants bring toasted bread, boiled eggs, and strips of bacon. Kepuha turns to Sergei and talks more about weapons. On the roof of the museum, another sentry appears. Some young men carry large baskets through the far end of the courtyard. The skin on my neck prickles.

“Honored Kepuha, my brother and I have family business in Layon,” I say in Chamorro. “We should depart.”

Kepuha waves his gnarled hand. “There’s time to rest. You must be exhausted.”

Even as I watch, Rai’s eyes slide shut. He leans sideways and sprawls into the dust. Sergei realizes at the same time I do that our food is drugged. He leaps up, tries to dart away, but gets no farther than a few feet before a guard knocks him down and kicks him in the ribs.

“My brother—” I say, slurred. “He didn’t—”

“Sleep,” Kepuha says. “You did well, Bridge.”

My ears fill with a rushing noise and the sluggish crawl of my own heart. A sweet cool river, just like the river Ugum, carries me away to darkness.

The next time I see Sergei, he’s screaming. The soldiers have him naked and strapped to a table, a white cap affixed to his head. I know what it’s like to writhe as knowledge is forced into neural connections. Like lightning striking the brain, over and over. But Sergei’s pain is worse because they’re not putting data into his brain. They’re yanking it out.

The back of my throat burns with bile.

Colonel Kepuha of the Guahan Militia stands beside me, watching through the mirrored window. Electric lights illuminate the rooms down here under the museum. Fresh, cool air circulates from pumps. The entire base runs off the power from recycled material dug out of the Layon landfill. Trash converted to fuel. One of the last great technological achievements of the old world. After Silence, our ancestors couldn’t fix the whole island. But they could fix this place.

Sergei screams again.

“Is this . . . necessary?” I ask.

“He wouldn’t answer questions about his homeland,” Kepuha says. “But we’ll find out.”

Take a hump of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Build a fort on it. Build another. Keep building, decade after decade, ports and airfields and depots of concrete and steel. Swap ownership during wartime. Swap it back. Add secret research labs dedicated to memory research. The future looks unlimited. But then civilization collapses, all of it, swallowed up by solar mega-flares, and that hump of land has to fend for itself.

“You did well, bringing him here,” Kepuha says. “We’ll dig up the body of the one you killed and find out what we can from it.”

With effort, I keep my voice steady. “Who says I killed him?”

He turns to me. “Of course you did. You learned your lessons well.”

One foot rooted in the past. One planted in the future. The job of a Bridge isn’t to greet the Fleet, but to stop it.

“What of my brother, sir?” I ask. “He thinks the strangers were fisherman from Hawaii. I’ll make him swear not to tell, and if he does, no one will believe him anyway.”

Kepuha smiles indulgently and starts walking down the hall. “Your brother is a good man?”

I follow. “Yes. Very good and honorable.”

“Even honorable men can have loose tongues.”

“You can trust him as much as you trust me,” I promise.

We’ve reached another window and another memory room. The table inside is empty.

“When you finished your training as a child, how many names did you leave with?” Kepuha asks casually.

I rub the goosebumps on my arms. “Seven thousand.”

“You left with one thousand,” he says. “We give you another thousand more every time you bring us someone from Fleet. A reward for good service. A way to fill the gaps.”

“But that’s not—” I gulp against a new surge of bile. “That’s not possible. I’d remember.”

The doors in the room open and two guards drag Rai inside. He fights them, my brother does, but they’re much stronger. They strap him down and reach for a cap.

Colonel Kepuha says, “No, you won’t remember. You never do.”

Originally published in We See a Different Frontier, edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Fábio Fernandes

About the Author

Sandra McDonald is a former military officer, recovering Hollywood assistant, and perennially patient college instructor who writes across the genres of romance, history, fantasy, science fiction, GLBTQA, and young adult fiction. Her first collection of stories, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories, won a Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction. It was also a Booklist Editor’s Choice, ALA Over the Rainbow book, and Rainbow award winner. Her short fiction has been published in several dozen magazines and anthologies, including the Year’s Best YA, Year’s Best Science Fiction, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Tiptree Anthology, Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and more. She has several novels in print, including the award-winning Fisher Key adventures and asexual-gay thriller City of Soldiers. She currently resides in Florida.

Venice Drowned

Kim Stanley Robinson

By the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.

Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning . . . Of course, one had to ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy. Around the church—San Giacomo di Rialto—all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roof beams made of materials fished up from below: wood, brick lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo’s home was one of these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and drainpipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto, where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.

“You have to meet those Japanese today,” Carlo’s wife, Luisa, said from inside.

“I know.” Visitors still came to Venice, that was certain.

“And don’t go insulting them and rowing off without your pay,” she went on, her voice sounding clearly out of the doorway, “like you did with those Hungarians. It really doesn’t matter what they take from under the water, you know. That’s the past. That old stuff isn’t doing anyone any good under there, anyway.”

“Shut up,” he said wearily. “I know.”

“I have to buy stovewood and vegetables and toilet paper and socks for the baby.” she said. “The Japanese are the best customers you’ve got; you’d better treat them well.”

Carlo re-entered the shack and walked into the bedroom to dress. Between putting on one boot and the next he stopped to smoke a cigarette, the last one in the house. While smoking he stared at his pile of books on the floor, his library as Luisa sardonically called the collection; all books about Venice. They were tattered, dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by the damp that none of them would close properly, and each moldy page was as wavy as the Lagoon on a windy day. They were a miserable sight, and Carlo gave the closest stack a light kick with his cold boot as he returned to the other room.

“I’m off,” he said, giving his baby and then Luisa a kiss. “I’ll be back late—they want to go to Torcello.”

“What could they want up there?”

He shrugged. “Maybe just to see it.” He ducked out the door.

Below the roof was a small square where the boats of the neighborhood were moored. Carlo slipped off the tile onto the narrow floating dock he and the neighbors had built, and crossed to his boat, a wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas deck. He stepped in, unmoored it, and rowed out of the square onto the Grand Canal.

Once on the Grand Canal he tipped the oars out of the water and let the boat drift downstream. The big canal had always been the natural course of the channel through the mudflats of the Lagoon; for a while it had been tamed, but now it was a river again, its banks made of tile rooftops and stone palaces, with hundreds of tributaries flowing into it. Men were working on roofhouses in the early-morning light; those who knew Carlo waved, hammers or rope in hand, and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an oar perfunctorily before he was swept past. It was foolish to build so close to the Grand Canal, which now had the strength to knock the old structures down, and often did. But that was their business. In Venice they were all fools, if one thought about it.

Then he was in the Basin of San Marco, and he rowed through, the Piazetta beside the Doge’s Palace, which was still imposing at two stories high, to the Piazza. Traffic was heavy as usual. It was the only place in Venice that still had the crowds of old, and Carlo enjoyed it for that reason, though he shouted curses as loudly as anyone when gondolas streaked in front of him. He jockeyed his way to the Basilica window and rowed in.

Under the brilliant blue and gold of the domes it was noisy. Most of the water in the rooms had been covered with a floating dock. Carlo moored his boat to it, heaved his four scuba tanks on, and clambered up after them. Carrying two tanks in each hand he crossed the dock, on which the fish market was in full swing. Displayed for sale were flats of mullet, lagoon sharks, tunny, skates, and flatfish. Clams were piled in trays, their shells gleaming in the shaft of sunlight from the stained-glass east window; men and women pulled live crabs out of holes in the dock, risking fingers in the crab-jammed traps below; octopuses inked their buckets of water, sponges oozed foam; fishermen bawled out prices, and insulted the freshness of their neighbors’ product.

In the middle of the fish market, Ludovico Salerno, one of Carlo’s best friends, had his stalls of scuba gear. Carlo’s two Japanese customers were there. He greeted them and handed his tanks to Salerno, who began refilling them from his machine. They conversed in quick, slangy Italian while the tanks filled. When they were done, Carlo paid him and led the Japanese back to his boat. They got in and stowed their backpacks under the canvas decking, while Carlo pulled the scuba tanks on board.

“We are ready to voyage at Torcello?” one asked, and the other smiled and repeated the question. Their names were Hamada and Taku. They had made a few jokes concerning the latter name’s similarity to Carlo’s own, but Taku was the one with less Italian, so the sallies hadn’t gone on for long. They had hired him four days before, at Salerno’s stall.

“Yes,” Carlo said. He rowed out of the Piazza and up back canals past Campo Santa Maria Formosa, which was nearly as crowded as the Piazza. Beyond that the canals were empty, and only an occasional roof-house marred the look of flooded tranquility.

“That part of city Venice here not many people live,” Hamada observed. “Not houses on houses.”

“That’s true,” Carlo replied. As he rowed past San Zanipolo and the hospital, he explained, “It’s too close to the hospital here, where many diseases were contained. Sicknesses, you know.”

“Ah, the hospital!” Hamada nodded, as did Taku. “We have swam hospital in our Venice voyage previous to that one here. Salvage many fine statues from lowest rooms.”

“Stone lions,” Taku added. “Many stone lions with wings in room below 2040 waterline.”

“Is that right,” Carlo said. Stone lions, he thought, set up in the entryway of some Japanese businessman’s expensive home around the world . . . He tried to divert his thoughts by watching the brilliantly healthy, masklike faces of his two passengers as they laughed over their reminiscences.

Then they were over the Fondamente Nuove, the northern limit of the city, and on the Lagoon. There was a small swell from the north. Carlo rowed out a way and then stepped forward to raise the boat’s single sail. The wind was from the east, so they would make good time north to Torcello. Behind them, Venice looked beautiful in the morning light, as if they were miles away, and a watery horizon blocked their full view of it.

The two Japanese had stopped talking and were looking over the side. They were over the cemetery of San Michele, Carlo realized. Below them lay the island that had been the city’s chief cemetery for centuries; they sailed over a field of tombs, mausoleums, gravestones, obelisks, that at low tide could be a navigational hazard . . . Just enough of the bizarre white blocks could be seen to convince one that they were indeed the result of the architectural thinking of fishes. Carlo crossed himself quickly to impress his customers, and sat back down at the tiller. He pulled the sail tight and they heeled over slightly, slapped into the waves.

In no more than twenty minutes they were east of Murano, skirting its edge. Murano, like Venice an island city crossed with canals, had been a quaint little town before the flood. But it didn’t have as many tall buildings as Venice, and it was said that an underwater river had undercut its islands; in any case, it was a wreck. The two Japanese chattered with excitement.

“Can we visit to that city here, Carlo?” asked Hamada.

“It’s too dangerous,” Carlo answered. “Buildings have fallen into the canals.”

They nodded, smiling. “Are people live here?” Taku asked.

“A few, yes. They live in the highest buildings on the floors still above water, and work in Venice. That way they avoid having to build a roof-house in the city.”

The faces of his two companions expressed incomprehension.

“They avoid the housing shortage in Venice,” Carlo said. “There’s a certain housing shortage in Venice, as you may have noticed.” His listeners caught the joke this time and laughed uproariously.

“Could live on floors below if owning scuba such as that here,” Hamada said, gesturing at Carlo’s equipment.

“Yes,” he replied. “Or we could grow gills.” He bugged his eyes out and waved his fingers at his neck to indicate gills. The Japanese loved it.

Past Murano, the Lagoon was clear for a few miles, a sunbeaten blue covered with choppy waves. The boat tipped up and down, the wind tugged at the sail cord in Carlo’s hand. He began to enjoy himself. “Storm coming,” he volunteered to the others and pointed at the black line over the horizon to the north. It was a common sight; short, violent storms swept over Brenner Pass from the Austrian Alps, dumping on the Po Valley and the Lagoon before dissipating in the Adriatic . . . once a week, or more, even in the summer. That was one reason the fish market was held under the domes of San Marco; everyone had gotten sick of trading in the rain.

Even the Japanese recognized the clouds. “Many rain fall soon here,” Taku said.

Hamada grinned and said, “Taku and Tafui, weather prophets no doubt, make big company!”

They laughed. “Does he do this in Japan, too?” Carlo asked.

“Yes indeed, surely. In Japan rains every day—Taku says, ‘It rains tomorrow for surely.’ Weather prophet!”

After the laughter receded, Carlo said, “Hasn’t all the rain drowned some of your cities too?”

“What’s that here?”

“Don’t you have some Venices in Japan?”

But they didn’t want to talk about that. “I don’t understand . . . No, no Venice in Japan,” Hamada said easily, but neither laughed as they had, before. They sailed on. Venice was out of sight under the horizon, as was Murano. Soon they would reach Burano. Carlo guided the boat over the waves and listened to his companions converse in their improbable language, or mangle Italian in a way that alternately made him want to burst with hilarity or bite the gunwale with frustration.

Gradually, Burano bounced over the horizon, the campanile first, followed by the few buildings still above water. Murano still had inhabitants, a tiny market, even a midsummer festival; Burano was empty. Its campanile stood at a distinct angle, like the mast of a foundered ship. It had been an island town, before 2040; now it had ‘canals’ between every rooftop. Carlo disliked the town intensely and gave it a wide berth. His companions discussed it quietly in Japanese.

A mile beyond it was Torcello, another island ghost town. The campanile could be seen from Burano, tall and white against the black clouds to the north. They approached in silence. Carlo took down the sail, set Taku in the bow to look for snags, and rowed cautiously to the edge of town. They moved between rooftops and walls that stuck up like reefs or like old foundations out of the earth. Many of the roof tiles and beams had been taken for use in construction back in Venice. This happened to Torcello before; during the Renaissance it had been a little rival of Venice, boasting a population of twenty thousand, but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had been entirely deserted. Builders from Venice had come looking in the ruins for good marble or a staircase of the right dimensions . . . Briefly a tiny population had returned, to make lace and host those tourists who wanted to be melancholy; but the waters rose, and Torcello died for good. Carlo pushed off a wall with his oar, and a big section of it tilted over and sank. He tried not to notice.

He rowed them to the open patch of water that had been the Piazza. Around them stood a few intact rooftops, no taller than the mast of their boat; broken walls of stone or rounded brick; the shadowy suggestion of walls just underwater. It was hard to tell what the street plan of the town would have been. On one side of the Piazza was the cathedral of Santa Maria Ascunta, however, still holding fast, still supporting the white campanile that stood square and solid, as if over a living community.

“That here is the church we desire to dive,” Hamada said.

Carlo nodded. The amusement he had felt during the sail was entirely gone. He rowed around the Piazza looking for a flat spot where they could stand and put the scuba gear on. The church outbuildings—it had been an extensive structure—were all underwater. At one point the boat’s keel scraped the ridge of a roof. They rowed down the length of the barnlike nave, looked in the high windows: floored with water. No surprise. One of the small windows in the side of the campanile had been widened with sledgehammers; directly inside it was the stone staircase and, a few steps up, a stone floor. They hooked the boat to the wall and moved their gear up to the floor. In the dim midday light the stone of the interior was pocked with shadows. It had a rough-hewn look. The citizens of Torcello had built the campanile in a hurry, thinking that the world would end at the millennium, the year 1000. Carlo smiled to think how much longer they had had than that. They climbed the steps of the staircase, up to the sudden sunlight of the bell chamber, to look around; viewed Burano, Venice in the distance . . . to the north, the shallows of the Lagoon, and the coast of Italy. Beyond that, the black line of clouds was like a wall nearly submerged under the horizon, but it was rising; the storm would come.

They descended, put on the scuba gear, and flopped into the water beside the campanile. They were above the complex of church buildings, and it was dark; Carlo slowly led the two Japanese back into the Piazza and swam down. The ground was silted, and Carlo was careful not to step on it. His charges saw the great stone chair in the center of the Piazza (it had been called the Throne of Attila, Carlo remembered from one of his moldy books, and no one had known why), and waving to each other they swam to it. One of them made ludicrous attempts to stand on the bottom and walk around in his fins; he threw up clouds of silt. The other joined him. They each sat in the stone chair, columns of bubbles rising from them, and snapped pictures of each other with their underwater cameras. The silt would ruin the shots, Carlo thought. While they cavorted, he wondered sourly what they wanted in the church.

Eventually, Hamada swam up to him and gestured at the church. Behind the mask his eyes were excited. Carlo pumped his fins up and down slowly and led them around to the big entrance at the front. The doors were gone. They swam into the church.

Inside it was dark, and all three of them unhooked their big flashlights and turned them on. Cones of murky water turned to crystal as the beams swept about. The interior of the church was undistinguished, the floor thick with mud. Carlo watched his two customers swim about and let his flashlight beam rove the walls. Some of the underwater windows were still intact, an odd sight. Occasionally the beam caught a column of bubbles, transmuting them to silver.

Quickly enough the Japanese went to the picture at the west end of the nave, a tile mosaic. Taku (Carlo guessed) rubbed the slime off the tiles, vastly improving their color. They had gone to the big one first, the one portraying the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the Day of Judgment: a busy mural. Carlo swam over to have a better look. But no sooner had the Japanese wiped the wall clean than they were off to the other end of the church, where above the stalls of the apse was another mosaic. Carlo followed.

It didn’t take long to rub this one clean; and when the water had cleared, the three of them floated there, their flashlight beams converged on the picture revealed.

It was the Teotaca Madonna, the God-bearer. She stood against a dull gold background, holding the Child in her arms, staring out at the world with a sad and knowing gaze. Carlo pumped his legs to get above the Japanese, holding his light steady on the Madonna’s face. She looked as though she could see all of the future, up to this moment and beyond; all of her child’s short life, all the terror and calamity after that . . . There were mosaic tears on her cheeks. At the sight of them, Carlo could barely check tears of his own from joining the general wetness on his face. He felt that he had suddenly been transposed to a church on the deepest floor of the ocean; the pressure of his feelings threatened to implode him, he could scarcely hold them off. The water was freezing, he was shivering, sending up a thick, nearly continuous column of bubbles . . . and the Madonna watched. With a kick he turned and swam away. Like startled fish his two companions followed him. Carlo led them out of the church into murky light, then up to the surface, to the boat and the window casement.

Fins off, Carlo sat on the staircase and dripped. Taku and Hamada scrambled through the window and joined him. They conversed for a moment in Japanese, clearly excited. Carlo stared at them blackly.

Hamada turned to him. “That here is the picture we desire,” he said. “The Madonna with child.”

“What?” Carlo cried.

Hamada raised his eyebrows. “We desire taking home that here picture to Japan.”

“But it’s impossible! The picture is made of little tiles stuck to the wall—there’s no way to get them off!”

“Italy government permits—” Taku said, but Hamada silenced him with a gesture.

“Mosaic, yes. We use instruments we take here—water torch. Archaeology method, you understand. Cut blocks out of wall, bricks, number them—construct on new place in Japan. Above water.” He flashed his pearly smile.

“You can’t do that,” Carlo stated, deeply affronted.

“I don’t understand?” Hamada said. But he did: “Italian government permits us that.”

“This isn’t Italy,” Carlo said savagely, and in his anger stood up. What good would a Madonna do in Japan, anyway? They weren’t even Christian. “Italy is over there,” he said, in his excitement mistakenly waving to the southeast, no doubt confusing his listeners even more. “This has never been Italy! This is Venice! The Republic!”

“I don’t understand.” He had that phrase down pat. “Italian government has giving permit us.”

“Christ,” Carlo said. After a disgusted pause: “Just how long will this take?”

“Time? We work that afternoon, tomorrow: place the bricks here, go hire Venice barge to carry bricks to Venice—”

“Stay here overnight? I’m not going to stay here overnight, God damn it!”

“We bring sleeping bag for you—”

“No!” Carlo was furious. “I’m not staying, you miserable heathen hyenas—” He pulled off his scuba gear.

“I don’t understand.”

Carlo dried off, got dressed. “I’ll let you keep your scuba tanks, and I’ll be back for you tomorrow afternoon, late. Understand?”

“Yes,” Hamada said, staring at him steadily, without expression. “Bring barge?”

“What?—yes, yes, I’ll bring your barge, you miserable slime-eating catfish. Vultures . . . ” He went on for a while, getting the boat out of the window.

“Storm coming!” Taku said brightly, pointing to the north.

“To hell with you!” Carlo said, pushing off and beginning to row. “Understand?”

He rowed out of Torcello and back into the Lagoon. Indeed, a storm was coming: he would have to hurry. He put up the sail and pulled the canvas decking back until it covered everything but the seat he was sitting on. The wind was from the north now, strong but fitful. It pulled the sail taut: the boat bucked over the choppy waves, leaving behind a wake that was bright white against the black of the sky. The clouds were drawing over the sky like a curtain, covering half of it: half black, half colorless blue, and the line of the edge was solid. It resembled that first great storm of 2040, Carlo guessed, that had pulled over Venice like a black wool blanket and dumped water for forty days. And it had never been the same again, not anywhere in the world . . .

Now he was beside the wreck of Burano. Against the black sky he could see only the drunken campanile, and suddenly he realized why he hated the sight of this abandoned town: it was a vision of the Venice to come, a cruel model of the future. If the water level rose even three meters, Venice would become nothing but a big Burano. Even if the water didn’t rise, more people were leaving Venice every year . . . One day it would be empty. Once again the sadness he had felt looking at the Teotaca filled him, a sadness become a bottomless despair. “God damn it,” he said, staring at the crippled campanile: but that wasn’t enough. He didn’t know words that were enough. “God damn it.”

Just beyond Burano the squall hit. It almost blew the sail out of his hand: he had to hold on with a fierce clench, tie it to the stern, tie the tiller in place, and scramble over the pitching canvas deck to lower the sail, cursing all the while. He brought the sail down to its last reefing, which left a handkerchief-sized patch exposed to the wind. Even so, the boat yanked over the waves and the mast creaked as if it would tear loose . . . The choppy waves had become whitecaps: in the screaming wind their tops were tearing loose and flying through the air, white foam in the blackness . . .

Best to head for Murano for refuge, Carlo thought. Then the rain started. It was colder than the Lagoon water and fell almost horizontally. The wind was still picking up: his handkerchief sail was going to pull the mast out . . . “Jesus,” he said. He got onto the decking again, slid up to the mast, took down the sail with cold and disobedient fingers. He crawled back to his hole in the deck, hanging on desperately as the boat yawed. It was almost broadside to the waves and hastily he grabbed the tiller and pulled it around, just in time to meet a large wave stern-on. He shuddered with relief. Each wave seemed bigger than the last: they picked up quickly on the Lagoon. Well, he thought, what now? Get out the oars? No, that wouldn’t do; he had to keep stern-on to the waves, and besides, he couldn’t row effectively in this chop. He had to go where the waves were going, he realized: and if they missed Murano and Venice, that meant the Adriatic.

As the waves lifted and dropped him, he grimly contemplated the thought. His mast alone acted like a sail in a wind of this force; and the wind seemed to be blowing from a bit to the west of north. The waves—the biggest he had ever seen on the Lagoon, perhaps the biggest ever on the Lagoon—pushed in about the same direction as the wind, naturally. Well, that meant he would miss Venice, which was directly south, maybe even a touch west of south. Damn, he thought. And all because he had been angered by those two Japanese and the Teotaca. What did he care what happened to a sunken mosaic from Torcello? He had helped foreigners find and cart off the one bronze horse of San Marco that had fallen . . . more than one of the stone lions of Venice, symbol of the city . . . the entire Bridge of Sighs, for Christ’s sake! What had come over him? Why should he have cared about a forgotten mosaic?

Well, he had done it; and here he was. No altering it. Each wave lifted his boat stern first and slid under it until he could look down in the trough, if he cared to, and see his mast nearly horizontal, until he rose over the broken, foaming crest, each one of which seemed to want to break down his little hole in the decking and swamp him—for a second he was in midair, the tiller free and useless until he crashed into the next trough. Every time at the top he thought, this wave will catch us, and so even though he was wet and the wind and rain were cold, the repeated spurts of fear adrenaline and his thick wool coat kept him warm. A hundred waves or so served to convince him that the next one would probably slide under him as safely as the last, and he relaxed a bit. Nothing to do but wait it out, keep the boat exactly stern-on to the swell . . . and he would be all right. Sure, he thought, he would just ride these waves across the Adriatic to Trieste or Rijeka, one of those two tawdry towns that had replaced Venice as Queen of the Adriatic . . . the princesses of the Adriatic, so to speak, and two little sluts they were, too . . . Or ride the storm out, turn around, and sail back in, better yet . . .

On the other hand, the Lido had become a sort of reef, in most places, and waves of this size would break over it, capsizing him for sure. And, to be realistic, the top of the Adriatic was wide; just one mistake on the top of these waves (and he couldn’t go on forever) and he would be broached, capsized, and rolled down to join all the other Venetians who had ended up on the bottom of the Adriatic. And all because of that damn Madonna. Carlo sat crouched in the stern, adjusting the tiller for the particulars of each wave, ignoring all else in the howling, black, horizonless chaos of water and air around him, pleased in a grim way that he was sailing to his death with such perfect seamanship. But he kept the Lido out of mind.

And so he sailed on, losing track of time as one does when there is no spatial referent. Wave after wave after wave. A little water collected at the bottom of his boat, and his spirits sank; that was no way to go, to have the boat sink by degrees under him . . .

Then the high-pitched, airy howl of the wind was joined by a low booming, a bass roar. He looked behind him in the direction he was being driven and saw a white line, stretching from left to right; his heart jumped, fear exploded through him. This was it. The Lido, now a barrier reef tripping the waves. They were smashing down on it; he could see white sheets bouncing skyward and blowing to nothing. He was terrifically frightened. It would have been so much easier to founder at sea.

But there—among the white breakers, off to the right—a gray finger pointing up at the black—

A campanile. Carlo was forced to look back at the wave he was under, to straighten the boat; but when he looked back it was still there. A campanile, standing there like a dead lighthouse. “Jesus,” he said aloud. It looked as if the waves were pushing him a couple hundred meters to the north of it. As each wave lifted him he had a moment when the boat was sliding down the face of the wave as fast as it was moving under him; during these moments he shifted the tiller a bit and the boat turned and surfed across the face, to the south, until the wave rose up under him to the crest, and he had to straighten it out. He repeated the delicate operation time after time, sometimes nearly broaching the boat in his impatience. But that wouldn’t do—just take as much from each wave as it will give you, he thought. And pray it will add up to enough.

The Lido got closer, and it looked as if he was directly upwind of the campanile. It was the one at the Lido channel entrance or perhaps the one at Pellestrina, farther south; he had no way of knowing and couldn’t have cared less. He was just happy that his ancestors had seen fit to construct such solid bell towers. In between waves he reached under the decking and by touch found his boathook and the length of rope he carried. It was going to be a problem, actually, when he got to the campanile—it would not do to pass it helplessly by a few meters; on the other hand he couldn’t smash into it and expect to survive either, not in these waves. In fact the more he considered it, the more exact and difficult he realized the approach would have to be, and fearfully he stopped thinking about it and concentrated on the waves.

The last one was the biggest. As the boat slid down its face, the face got steeper until it seemed they would be swept on by this wave forever. The campanile loomed ahead, big and black. Around it, waves pitched over and broke with sharp, deadly booms; from behind, Carlo could see the water sucked over the breaks, as if over short but infinitely broad waterfalls. The noise was tremendous. At the top of the wave it appeared he could jump in the campanile’s top window—he got out the boathook, shifted the tiller a touch, took three deep breaths. Amid the roaring, the wave swept him just past the stone tower, smacking against it and splashing him; he pulled the tiller over hard, the boat shot into the wake of the campanile—he stood and swung the boathook over a window casement above him. It caught, and he held on hard.

He was in the lee of the tower; broken water rose and dropped under the boat, hissing, but without violence, and he held. One handed, he wrapped the end of his rope around the sail cord bolt in the stern, tied the other end to the boathook.

The hook held pretty well; he took a risk and reached down to tie the rope firmly to the bolt. Then another risk: when the boiling soupy water of another broken wave raised the boat, he leaped off his seat, grabbed the stone windowsill, which was too thick to get his fingers over—for a moment he hung by his fingertips. With desperate strength he pulled himself up, reached in with one hand and got a grasp on the inside of the sill, and pulled himself in and over. The stone floor was about four feet below the window. Quickly he pulled the boathook in and put it on the floor, and took up the slack in the rope.

He looked out the window. His boat rose and fell, rose and fell. Well, it would sink or it wouldn’t. Meanwhile, he was safe. Realizing this, he breathed deeply, let out a shout. He remembered shooting past the side of the tower, face no more than two meters from it—getting drenched by the wave slapping the front of it—why, he had done it perfectly! He couldn’t do it again like that in a million tries. Triumphant laughs burst out of him, short and sharp: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Jesus Christ! Wow!”

“Whoooo’s theeeerre?” called a high scratchy voice, floating down the staircase from the floor above. “Whoooooo’s there? . . . ”

Carlo froze. He stepped lightly to the base of the stone staircase and peered up; through the hole to the next floor flickered a faint light. To put it better, it was less dark up there than anywhere else. More surprised than fearful (though he was afraid), Carlo opened his eyes as wide as he could—

“Whoooooo’s theeeeeerrrrrrrre? . . . ”

Quickly he went to the boathook, untied the rope, felt around on the wet floor until he found a block of stone that would serve as anchor for his boat. He looked out the window: boat still there; on both sides white breakers crashed over the Lido. Taking up the boathook, Carlo stepped slowly up the stairs, feeling that after what he had been through he could slash any ghost in the ether to ribbons.

It was a candle lantern, flickering in the disturbed air—a room filled with junk—

“Eeek! Eeek!”

“Jesus!”

“Devil! Death, away!” A small black shape rushed at him, brandishing sharp metal points.

“Jesus!” Carlo repeated, holding the boathook out to defend himself. The figure stopped.

“Death comes for me at last,” it said. It was an old woman, he saw, holding lace needles in each hand.

“Not at all,” Carlo said, feeling his pulse slow back down. “Swear to God, Grandmother, I’m just a sailor, blown here by the storm.”

The woman pulled back the hood of her black cape, revealing braided white hair, and squinted at him.

“You’ve got the scythe,” she said suspiciously. A few wrinkles left her face as she unfocused her gaze.

“A boathook only,” Carlo said, holding it out for her inspection. She stepped back and raised the lace needles threateningly. “Just a boathook, I swear to God. To God and Mary and Jesus and all the saints, Grandmother. I’m just a sailor, blown here by the storm from Venice.” Part of him felt like laughing.

“Aye?” she said. “Aye, well then, you’ve found shelter. I don’t see so well anymore, you know. Come in, sit down, then.” She turned around and led him into the room. “I was just doing some lace for penance, you see . . . though there’s scarcely enough light.” She lifted a tomboli with the lace pinned to it; Carlo noticed big gaps in the pattern, as in the webs of an injured spider. “A little more light,” she said and, picking up a candle, held it to the lit one. When it was fired, she carried it around the chamber and lit three more candles in lanterns that stood on tables, boxes, a wardrobe. She motioned for him to sit in a heavy chair by her table, and he did so.

As she sat down across from him, he looked around the chamber. A bed piled high with blankets, boxes and tables: covered with objects . . . the stone walls around, and another staircase leading up to the next floor of the campanile. There was a draft. “Take off your coat,” the woman said. She arranged the little pillow on the arm of her chair and began to poke a needle in and out of it, pulling the thread slowly.

Carlo sat back and watched her. “Do you live here alone?”

“Always alone,” she replied. “I don’t want it otherwise.” With the candle before her face, she resembled Carlo’s mother or someone else he knew. It seemed very peaceful in the room after the storm. The old woman bent in her chair until her face was just above her tomboli; still, Carlo couldn’t help noticing that her needle hit far outside the apparent pattern of lace, striking here and there randomly. She might as well have been blind. At regular intervals Carlo shuddered with excitement and tension; it was hard to believe he was out of danger. More infrequently they broke the silence with a short burst of conversation, then sat in the candlelight absorbed in their own thoughts, as if they were old friends.

“How do you get food?” Carlo asked, after one of these silences had stretched out. “Or candles?”

“I trap lobsters down below. And fishermen come by and trade food for lace. They get a good bargain, never fear. I’ve never given less, despite what he said—” Anguish twisted her face as the squinting had, and she stopped. She needled furiously, and Carlo looked away. Despite the draft, he was warming up (he hadn’t removed his coat, which was wool, after all), and he was beginning to feel drowsy . . .

“He was my spirit’s mate, do you comprehend me?”

Carlo jerked upright. The old woman was still looking at her tomboli.

“And—and he left me here, here in this desolation when the floods began, with words that I’ll remember forever and ever and ever. Until death comes . . . I wish you had been death!” she cried. “I wish you had.”

Carlo remembered her brandishing the needles. “What is this place?” he asked gently.

“What?”

“Is this Pellestrina? San Lazzaro?”

“This is Venice,” she said.

Carlo shivered convulsively, stood up.

“I’m the last of them,” the woman said. “The waters rise, the heavens howl, love’s pledges crack and lead to misery. I—I live to show what a person can bear and not die. I’ll live till the deluge drowns the world as Venice is drowned, I’ll live till all else living is dead; I’ll live . . . ” Her voice trailed off; she looked up at Carlo curiously. “Who are you, really? Oh. I know. I know. A sailor.”

“Are there floors above?” he asked, to change the subject.

She squinted at him. Finally she spoke. “Words are vain. I thought I’d never speak again, not even to my own heart, and here I am, doing it again. Yes, there’s a floor above intact; but above that, ruins. Lightning blasted the bell chamber apart, while I lay in that very bed.” She pointed at her bed, stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.” Under her cape she was tiny.

She picked up the candle lantern beside her, and Carlo followed her up the stairs, stepping carefully in the shifting shadows.

On the floor above, the wind swirled, and through the stairway to the floor above that, he could distinguish black clouds. The woman put the lantern on the floor, started up the stairs. “Come up and see,” she said.

Once through the hole they were in the wind, out under the sky. The rain had stopped. Great blocks of stone lay about the floor, and the walls broke off unevenly.

“I thought the whole campanile would fall,” she shouted at him over the whistle of the wind. He nodded, and walked over to the west wall, which stood chest high. Looking over it, he could see the waves approaching, rising up, smashing against the stone below, spraying back and up at him. He could feel the blows in his feet. Their force frightened him; it was hard to believe he had survived them and was now out of danger. He shook his head violently. To his right and left, the white lines of crumbled waves marked the Lido, a broad swath of them against the black. The old woman was speaking, he could see; he walked back to her side to listen.

“The waters yet rise,” she shouted. “See? And the lightning . . . you can see the lightning breaking the Alps to dust. It’s the end, child. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found . . . the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living thing died in the sea.” On and on she spoke, her voice mingling with the sound of the gale and the boom of the waves, just carrying over it all . . . until Carlo, cold and tired, filled with pity and a black anguish like the clouds rolling over them, put his arm around her thin shoulders and turned her around. They descended to the floor below, picked up the extinguished lantern, and descended to her chamber, which was still lit. It seemed warm, a refuge. He could hear her still speaking. He was shivering without pause.

“You must be cold,” she said in a practical tone. She pulled a few blankets from her bed. “Here, take these.” He sat down in the big heavy chair, put the blankets around his legs, put his head back. He was tired. The old woman sat in her chair and wound thread onto a spool. After a few minutes of silence she began talking again; and as Carlo dozed and shifted position and nodded off again, she talked and talked, of storms, and drownings, and the world’s end, and lost love . . .

In the morning when he woke up, she wasn’t there. Her room stood revealed in the dim morning light: shabby, the furniture battered, the blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly, as Venetian glass always was . . . but it was clean. Carlo got up and stretched his stiff muscles. He went up to the roof; she wasn’t there. It was a sunny morning. Over the east wall he saw that his boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a few days; he could feel that in his face.

The woman was not in the floors below, either. The lowest one served as her boathouse, he could see. In it was a pair of decrepit rowboats and some lobster pots. The biggest ‘boatslip’ was empty; she was probably out checking pots. Or perhaps she hadn’t wanted to talk with him in the light of day.

From the boathouse he could walk around to his craft, through water only knee deep. He sat in the stern, reliving the previous afternoon, and grinned again at being alive.

He took off the decking and bailed out the water on the keel with his bailing can, keeping an eye out for the old woman. Then he remembered the boathook and went back upstairs for it. When he returned there was still no sight of her. He shrugged; he’d come back and say goodbye another time. He rowed around the campanile and off the Lido, pulled up the sail, and headed northwest, where he presumed Venice was.

The Lagoon was as flat as a pond this morning, the sky cloudless, like the blue dome of a great basilica. It was amazing, but Carlo was not surprised. The weather was like that these days. Last night’s storm, however, had been something else. There was the mother of all squalls; those were the biggest waves in the Lagoon ever, without a doubt. He began rehearsing his tale in his mind, for wife and friends.

Venice appeared over the horizon right off his bow, just where he thought it would be: first the great campanile, then San Marco and the other spires. The campanile . . . Thank God his ancestors had wanted to get up there so close to God—or so far off the water—the urge had saved his life. In the rain-washed air, the sea approach to the city was more beautiful than ever, and it didn’t even bother him as it usually did that no matter how close you got to it, it still seemed to be over the horizon. That was just the way it was, now. The Serenissima. He was happy to see it.

He was hungry, and still very tired. When he pulled into the Grand Canal and took down the sail, he found he could barely row. The rain was pouring off the land into the Lagoon, and the Grand Canal was running like a mountain river. It was tough going. At the fire station where the canal bent back, some of his friends working on a new roof-house waved at him, looking surprised to see him going upstream so early in the morning. “You’re going the wrong way!” one shouted.

Carlo waved an oar weakly before plopping it back in. “Don’t I know it!” he replied.

Over the Rialto, back into the little courtyard of San Giacometta. Onto the sturdy dock he and his neighbors had built, staggering a bit—careful there, Carlo.

“Carlo!” his wife shrieked from above. “Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” She flew down the ladder from the roof.

He stood on the dock. He was home.

“Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” his wife cried as she ran onto the dock.

“Jesus,” he pleaded, “shut up.” And pulled her into a rough hug.

“Where have you been, I was so worried about you because of the storm, you said you’d be back yesterday, oh, Carlo, I’m so glad to see you . . . ” She tried to help him up the ladder. The baby was crying. Carlo sat down in the kitchen chair and looked around the little makeshift room with satisfaction. In between chewing down bites of a loaf of bread, he told Luisa of his adventure: the two Japanese and their vandalism, the wild ride across the Lagoon, the madwoman on the campanile. When he had finished the story and the loaf of bread, he began to fall asleep.

“But, Carlo, you have to go back and pick up those Japanese.”

“To hell with them,” he said slurrily. “Creepy little bastards . . . They’re tearing the Madonna apart, didn’t I tell you? They’ll take everything in Venice, every last painting and statue and carving and mosaic and all . . . I can’t stand it.”

“Oh, Carlo . . . it’s all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world.”

“They should be here.”

“Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I’ll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks.” She arranged him on their bed. “Let them have what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.

He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.

“Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”

Carlo groaned.

“Maria says Giuseppe will go with you; he’ll meet you with his boat on the Fondamente.”

“Damn.”

“Come on, Carlo, we need that money.”

“All right, all right.” The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. “I’ll do it; don’t pester me.”

He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s goodbyes and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.

Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had sat down in one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weight belts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling somewhat foolish—but not entirely—he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom . . .

The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.

Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.

Originally published in Universe 11, edited by Terry Carr.

About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer living in Davis, California. He has won two Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, the Campbell Memorial Award, and a World Fantasy Award for his work. His latest novels are Aurora, Shaman, 2312, Galileo’s Dream, Green Earth, and New York 2140.

How to Invent an Alien Language?
A Linguistic Perspective

Olga Kuno

Invented languages spoken by races in imaginary worlds can add credibility to a story, making both the world and the characters feel more real. An author of a science fiction or fantasy novel involving different countries or planets may choose whether to make everybody speak the same language or try to create separate languages. As pointed out above, the latter option can increase credibility, but it comes with its own complications.

Incomprehensible sentences make the text quite heavy-handed and an intermediate variant should not be neglected. A character from a different culture (whether an alien or an elf) could talk the same language as the protagonist (i.e. the language in which the book is written) but with certain systematic mistakes. These mistakes would give a clue about his or her own mother tongue without making the dialogues unreadable or even unclear. Credibility will not come at the expense of comprehensibility.

However, in order for the character’s speech to be believable, the mistakes have to be systematic, or rule-governed. Otherwise, he will just give an impression of an illiterate guy, or of some funny absent-minded stranger, neither of which may be what the author intends. If a whole new language with its own lexicon is invented, the existence of rules and patterns is even more essential. There is no language without rules, no matter how far from Earth it is spoken. But how does one create such a language?

There are two ways to go. One could try to invent a communication system whose rules differ radically from what is actually found in languages of the world. This is indeed a good way to reflect a dramatic contrast in culture and mentality. But, interestingly enough, authors who choose this direction quite often end up “inventing” linguistic characteristics which do, in fact, exist in some real languages (albeit rarer ones). One reason has to do with the fact that world languages are quite diverse.

The other reason is, in some sense, exactly the opposite. There is considerable evidence that our linguistic capacity has an innate component. Of course, the knowledge of English, Russian or Chinese is not inborn, but we are genetically predisposed to acquire language. Universal restrictions, deeply embedded in our minds, make it extremely difficult to even think of rules that would be totally impossible for any human language.

Of course, coming up with such a language would be great for the purposes of showing how different the race in question is from humans. But it is also possible to use what we know about human languages as they are for the same purpose. Specifically, we can look for those rules that exist in world languages but are very rare, and use such rules in the communication systems we invent.

Word Order

Changing the order of words and phrases, while keeping the language identical to English in other respects, is a good way to make a text sound ‘alien’ but comprehensible. This strategy is illustrated well by Yoda’s speech in Star Wars.

Typological facts are helpful in this respect. Languages of the world differ in their basic word order. Consider the simple English sentence, “John loves Mary.” As you can see, the subject (John) comes first. It is then followed by the verb (loves) and, finally, the direct object (Mary) appears. This is the standard word order in English: subject-verb-object. This is why linguists call English an SVO language.

SVO pattern is very common among human languages. Another very popular pattern is SOV (John Mary loves). However, the remaining logical possible orders are much rarer. VSO (Loves John Mary) is still well represented. It is found in about nine percent of world languages, such as Irish and Biblical Hebrew. But the other patterns are found in no more than three percent of languages, if at all. These include VOS, OVS, OSV. An invented language with one of these patterns will sound different not only from English but from over ninety-five percent of languages spoken around the world!

The OVS word order, which is among the rarest ones, is characteristic of Klingon, an artificial language used in the Star Trek series. In a 2010 blog post, a linguist Asya Pereltsvaig illustrates this property by the following example. The sentence “I boarded the Enterprise” corresponds in Klingon to the order “The Enterprise boarded I.” But since Klingon is a full-fledged language, the lexicon used in this sentence will be different as well.

The syntactic rules of Yoda’s language are somewhat more difficult to formulate. As linguists have noticed, some of his sentences are totally identical to English ones (e.g. “You must unlearn what you have learnt”), whereas others use different word order rules. Often, the OSV order can be observed, which, too, is one of the rarest typologically: “Much to learn, you still have.” This tendency is noted, for instance, by Geoffrey K. Pullum in a 2005 blog post.

Yet another element one may consider is the relative order in such phrases as “on the table” or “after lunch.” While in English, on and after are prepositions, i.e. they appear before the noun, some languages use postpositions instead. So, in these languages we would rather get “the table on” and “lunch after.”

Postpositions, found e.g. in Hindi, Finnish, and Turkish, are not as rare as the OVS word order, but their use would make a language sound considerably different from English, Spanish, Russian, and many other tongues.

Affixation

Let us now move from sentence structure to the internal structure of a word. We often add prefixes and suffixes in order to create new words or new word forms.

For instance, -ment in management is a suffix (since it follows the stem), while re- in reread is a prefix (it precedes the stem). Both suffixes and prefixes are quite common cross-linguistically. However, infixes, which are inserted inside a stem, are virtually never found in Standard English and are, in general, rare in Indo-European languages. They are found in Austronesian languages, however.

For instance, consider the following pair of words in Tagalog: gradwet ‘graduate’ and grumadwet ‘to graduate’. (The similarity in sound to the English graduate is non-accidental.) In the second form, the infix -um- is inserted before the first vowel of the stem. Occasional use of infixes will make your language sound unusual.

Case

Yet another property that distinguishes world languages from one another is case. Consider the different forms of the pronoun in the following two sentences:

He loves Mary.
Mary loves him.

We find he in the subject position but him in the position of the object. We also have the form his when the relation of possession is expressed. This is what case is about. Roughly, the same noun appears in different forms depending on the position it occupies, or on its grammatical function. Subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, nouns that follow a preposition, etc. may appear in different forms, depending on the rules of the individual language.

In Modern English (unlike Old English), case differences are found mainly on pronouns. But in many languages, the phenomenon is extended to other nouns, such as John, table, or freedom. Languages differ enormously in the number of case distinction they make. Some have just two cases, roughly, he versus him (e.g. Romanian), others three (Greek), yet others four (some Germanic languages), and so on. Finno-Ugtic languages exhibit more than ten case-forms, and some Daghestanian languages have been argued to have more than forty cases! The Klingon alien language employs this feature as well.

Even though the phenomenon is far from being rare in reality, adding short case suffixes to nouns fulfilling different functions will create a foreign flavor for the ear of an English speaker.

Classifiers

Consider the difference between such nouns as cow and cattle. The former can easily be pluralized: cow-cows; the latter normally isn’t. (Cattles sounds pretty bad.) Also, the former can directly combine with number words, so that we can count: one cow, two cows, three cows, etc. In contrast, in order to count cattle, we need the help of a “counter word,” specifically, head. Thus, instead of the ungrammatical five cattles we get five head of cattle. What we see here is the difference between count nouns (like cow) and mass nouns (like cattle).

Why should this all matter when we talk about rare linguistic phenomena? After all, aren’t all languages like English in this respect? Well, it turns out that they aren’t. There exist languages in which all nouns behave as if they were mass. Chinese and Japanese are classical examples.

In order to combine a noun with a number word in such a language, you always need some counter word, called a classifier (like head in five head of cattle or piece in five pieces of furniture). And so, we get things like three men of student (instead of three students), four things of book (instead of four books), and so on.

Crucially, as you can see in the above examples, the choice of the classifier depends on what is being counted, e.g. man for human nouns and thing for inanimate objects. Different languages have different classifier inventories and thus use them to mark different distinctions. A distinction may be based on animacy (human, animal, inanimate), on shape (flat objects, round objects, cylindrical objects, etc.), or on other properties (for instance, a special classifier for mechanical objects).

One advantage of classifiers is that when you use them in an invented language you can decide which distinctions are going to be particularly basic and important for its speakers. Do they care about animacy, about shape, about the contrast between organic and non-organic, or about something totally different? How do they classify entities into groups? By making this choice you can, through the use of language, tell the reader a lot about the environment and/or the psychology of the creatures. Moreover, you can demonstrate their attitude towards a particular thing or kind. For example, to humans. If your aliens use for humans the same classifier as for themselves, this suggests that they treat us as equals. But if they use a different classifier, and it’s the one that is normally found with animal nouns, we can draw a different conclusion. And in case humans receive the same counter word with chicken, pork, burgers, and sausages, it’s time for them to escape the planet, since apparently, they are treated as edible objects!

Going back to Klingon, we find a strongly related property in this language: different plural markers are used depending on the meaning of the noun. The crucial division is into individuals who are able to use language, body parts, and entities that do not belong to any of these two categories.

Non-existing words

If an author writes a whole text spoken in an elfish, dragonish, or alien language, creating totally new words with totally new roots is almost inevitable. But what if you follow the different strategy and make the characters speak English (or whichever language the book is written in) with a number of elements alluding to their true mother tongue? Would it be useful to add words here and there that do not exist in reality and are thus unfamiliar to the reader?

This could be useful, as long as several rules are observed. First, do not exaggerate. A high number of such words would make the text unreadable. Second, it is preferable to create such new words for new concepts. For instance, do not invent a new string of sounds in order to convey the meaning table. If the character speaks fluent English (or whichever language English represents in the book), why would she suddenly substitute table by her native word? This is not totally impossible, but not particularly likely either. But it would be great to have new words standing for those concepts which are characteristic specifically for the culture and the biological environment of the alien and which lack appropriate counterparts in English. This way, the biological or cultural difference is emphasized by language use.

The invented language may also make more distinctions than English does in a field that plays a particularly important role in the life of the relevant race. For example, it is well-known that Eskimo languages have more words for snow than English does. Actually, linguists have suggested that the difference between Eskimo and English in this respect has been exaggerated.

English does make lexical distinctions between such notions as snow, avalanche, blizzard, frost, flurry, sleet, (snow)flake, etc. Still, a contrast does exist. To illustrate, Eskimo distinguishes between snow fallen on the ground, drifting snow and fallen snow floating on the water. An invented language could make analogous distinctions within a different field. That will not only create the “foreignness” feeling for the reader but will also help lift the veil on the unfamiliar culture.

Our knowledge about real languages may be quite helpful in the process of inventing or even understanding as a reader, a non-existing one. If worked out appropriately, elements of such a language may serve as a powerful tool in revealing the differences between humans and other creatures, emphasizing the tension between them, and familiarizing the reader with the culture of the strangers.

About the Author

Olga Kuno has completed her Ph.D. in generative linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a linguist and a writer. Her fantasy romance novels have been published by several major publishing houses in Russia. One of these novels, Half a Step Away from Love, has been recently translated to English.

Pirate Pharmaceuticals, Robots, and Kaiju:
A Conversation with Annalee Newitz

Chris Urie

Ownership is becoming a bit murkier. As tech advances and delivery systems become more convenient, we slide more and more into the rental economy with large companies retaining power and control. Instead of movie tickets and record shelves, we have monthly fees for Netflix and Spotify. Some companies have even patented genetic strains of farm crops that they license to farmers. A new book takes a deeper look into the future of pharmaceutical pirates, robots, and ownership.

Autonomous is the debut novel from Annalee Newitz. It follows the exploits of Jack, an anti-patent drug pirate who reverse engineers pharmaceuticals so that they can be manufactured and released to those who need it but can’t pay the exorbitant price. Eliasz and Paladin, a highly sophisticated robot, are charged with bringing Jack to justice, but when they discover a new drug from a huge corporation that traps people in a productivity loop until insanity sets in, they join forces to figure out what’s really going on behind a corrupt pharmaceutical industry.

Annalee Newitz is a co-founder and former editor-in-chief of iO9 and current Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. She’s written for numerous publications such as Popular Science, Wired, Salon.com, New Scientist, and more. Her previous non-fiction books include Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Her debut novel Autonomous is out from Tor Books September 19th.

What sparked the original idea for Autonomous?

It started with a single image, of a robot struggling to climb sand dunes and feeling an ache in his actuators. I had just spent the day at a terrifically interesting seismology lab that’s part of UC Berkeley, where researchers stage earthquakes in various ways to test how structures will withstand this kind of disaster. One of their newer tools was an enormous wall of actuators that attach to structures or material, and then exert pressure to emulate the forces of an earthquake. The actuators are controlled by computer, of course, and I kept thinking what it would be like to be a sentient robot whose entire body is just an actuator. And then I started thinking about what it would be like to have actuators instead of legs . . . and pretty soon I had the first glimpse of my robot character Paladin.

Autonomous features a lot of tech that feels completely plausible. In your research, did you find anything you thought was science fiction but actually turned out to be real?

I interviewed a lot of extremely kind and patient scientists about the tech and biology in the book. The thing I knew least about was neuroscience, and I called up a couple of neuroscientists and asked them what it’s like to look at receptors on neurons in the brain. I have this scene where the scientists are watching a drug change someone’s neurological structure, and I thought, “Oh yeah this is totally unrealistic.” But the researchers told me that you can actually see receptors growing in real time, which completely surprised me. One of them said, “Oh yeah, you can see them growing and opening up like flowers.” I knew that our brains are always growing and changing—that’s sort of the definition of neuroplasticity—but I hadn’t quite taken on board how fast it happens.

I’ve read that you find inspiration in scientific papers. Was that the case with this novel?

Absolutely. I read a lot of papers about addiction and neuroscience for this novel, so hopefully I got it sort of right. I mean, the problem is that we have a lot of hypotheses and we don’t fully understand all the ways addiction works. So, I picked one of the most plausible hypotheses and went with it.

I also wanted to include heroic synthetic biologists because I feel like science fiction stories always cast genetic engineers as evil masterminds who are “playing god” or other nonsense. If you actually read papers by people who are working in this field, you’ll see that they are generally trying to save lives and make industrial processes more sustainable and nontoxic.

Did the news story about Martin Shkreli influence your novel at all?

No! I was actually finished with my novel when the Shkreli scandal hit. But he is absolutely the kind of fiendish pharma executive that my characters would be fighting against.

In your research, did you happen to come across an instance of patent abuse or biopiracy that seemed completely out of control?

I think our laws around patenting drugs are completely broken. Drug companies have figured out all kinds of sneaky ways to keep their drugs under patent, by filing what are called secondary patents on one aspect of a drug’s structure or on a technique for making it. Often, pharma companies spend far more money on marketing drugs than on researching the drugs, so it’s not true that they need 20 patents on one drug just to recoup the costs of developing it. If they just spent more money on development, and less on pimping their pills, they would still be making a tidy profit.

I also worry a lot about companies that patent genetic materials. We’re already seeing strains of certain crops getting patented by companies like Monsanto. I’m certainly not the first science fiction writer to worry that these kinds of patents will lead to companies owning life forms, or certain parts of life forms.

What was one piece of information you came across in your research that really surprised you?

I wanted a plausible economic explanation for why people would enter indenture, so I talked to the economist Noah Smith. Like a lot of economists, he loves coming up with scenarios where people have financial incentives to do all kinds of terrible things. He pointed out that we have many rights that we never think about, like the right to work. What if people had to pay for a permit of some kind just to have the right to work and live somewhere? As soon as he said that, it made perfect sense to me—I had just never considered that being allowed to work somewhere was a right in itself. So, Noah helped make the capitalist system in my novel even bleaker than it already was. People who can’t pay for a franchise in a particular city don’t have the right to work there, and the only way they can survive is to sell themselves into indenture.

You’ve published non-fiction books in the past. How is writing fiction different for you?

The best part about writing fiction is that I can say whatever I want about my characters and none of them will get into trouble or be fired. That is always a worry I have as a reporter, especially when I write about people who are doing sensitive work. With fictional characters, I’m completely free to do whatever I want.

Does your fiction and non-fiction work influence each other? How?

Absolutely. I love to write really geeky science fiction that has its roots in plausibility. So, the topics I write about as a journalist inevitably work their way into the background (and sometimes the foreground) of my fiction, just because it’s fun to spin up a speculative world out of the real one.

There are a lot of iconic robots in science fiction. Did any of them inspire Paladin?

Paladin is basically a love letter to mecha in anime, especially Briareos in Appleseed. There are a lot of examples of robot romance in Appleseed, and I love how the anime makes us believe in the sexiness of a giant, bulky cyborg with multiple eyes and antennas on his head.

Jack’s workshop is pretty compact for such complex and intensive work. Do you think bioengineering and high-level chemistry will become more of a garage-type hobby as technology advances and becomes more widely available?

There are already a lot of bio hacker spaces, and I think biotech will undergo the same process of miniaturization that computers have. Jim Munroe has a great novel called Everyone in Silico, where kids have Easy-Bake Ovens to cook up new lifeforms. He’s being satirical there, but I do think that it’s realistic to imagine a future with pocket-sized devices for genetic engineering.

The relationship between Eliasz and Paladin caught my attention. Do you think that over time that humans will begin to treat technology with the same respect as other living creatures rather than things to be disposed of and replaced?

I think that people will treat human-equivalent robots exactly the way we treat each other. We will abuse them, enslave them, accuse them of being less-than-human, and force them to do jobs that we would never do ourselves. At the same time, we will forge bonds of love and friendship with them. We will welcome them into our lives and celebrate them as heroes. The whole process will be messy and terrible and—sometimes—hopeful. I think we will need to have several civil rights movements for robots before they are safe from human abuse and cruelty. Even after all that, there will be micro-aggressions against robots, which I deal with a bit in the novel.

How do you balance conveying highly technical information with pacing of a story?

Carefully! I hope I did a good job avoiding those info-dumpy moments. It helps that I love action and cool fight scenes, so whenever I found myself getting too technical or worldbuildy I would figure out a way to have somebody punch somebody else or blow something up.

What is your favorite giant monster movie?

This is seriously the hardest question ever because I love giant monsters. I’m a fan of Pacific Rim for the fights, and a fan of The Host and Cloverfield for creature design. But the monster I identify with the most is Ghidorah the three-headed space monster from the Toho kaiju universe. (I also love Mecha Ghidorah.) FYI he and I are on a first name basis, so I don’t have to call him “King” anymore. I have spent a lot of time wondering how those three heads get along, and whether they are networked or not. Also, lightning is a badass breath weapon, especially when it’s coming out of three mouths.

What are you working on next?

I’ve just started writing my next novel for Tor Books, which is about time travel. I’m also writing a nonfiction book about archaeology, focused on ancient lost cities. When I’m writing about archaeology, I constantly wish I had a time machine to go back and see what really happened. So maybe my time travel novel is a way to work through those feelings.

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:
The Subtle Art of Promotion

Cat Rambo

The old perception of how publishing works goes something like this: the author delivers the finished work to their publisher, goes through a few editing passes, and after that, their responsibility is done, aside from having to appear wherever the publisher or their agent books them. There’s room for the reclusive genius in this model: Elena Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger. Marketing is something the publisher worries about; an author who hires a publicity agency might even be considered a bit of flim-flammer, relying on hype rather than honest work.

I’m not sure how true this perception ever was, however. If you read Robert A. Heinlein’s biography, you find a certain amount of self-promotion there, and he’s not the first writer to try to drum up publicity in order to push a book or even to have pronounced ideas backed by experience about how their work should be marketed. Thomas Disch mentions Isaac Asimov being noted for “beating the drum of his own reputation” in On SF. And it has always been true that on the publisher’s side of things, the economics of the advance play a major part; books with big advances get big publicity budgets, and vice versa. This makes sense; if you invest a great deal in something, you are more willing to spend a little extra to help it succeed.

Over the course of the last century, unfortunately, those advances have not grown with inflation, particularly for smaller writers. The SFWA minimum pro rate is currently six cents, while if we adjusted it to what its original rate would be in buying power today, it would be three or four times that. It has become more and more difficult for writers to make a living at writing; someone can be a New York Times bestseller and still be worrying about supporting a family, particularly given the erratic nature of writers’ finances. Adding to the difficulty are publishers who adopt a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks policy, quickly ditching authors who fail to immediately sell significant numbers of books.

Based on my talking to fellow writers and looking at the numbers some of them have been kind enough to supply, it seems as though the indies are doing better than those of their fellows sticking totally to the traditional model. This is primarily because they get 50-70% of the net, instead of the 5-15% allotted them by traditional publishing, while at the same time that industry often seems to hurt writers’ sales of e-books by employing what are, to my mind, unreasonably high prices.

Whether opting for indie, traditional, or hybrid, publicity work on behalf of one’s output is less and less optional on the writer’s side of things for everyone except the top tier writers whose fan bases are so established that the publishers know their books are almost guaranteed to sell. Time and time again I have had writers come to me worried that they must create a social media presence because they’ve been told that they must by their agent or publisher. And it’s true that when acquiring books, some publishers look at a writer’s social media, believing that large followings will lead to greater sales.

You can see this pressure to publicize manifest in one form on Twitter, where writers work at projecting their brand as well as writing. It’s a weird balancing act, where they’re working at writing books people will want to read, but also working at attracting readers who might give them a try based on a quip or observation they’ve posted. Sometimes it feels sincere; other times less so. It is undeniable that a strong social media presence will affect sales, but its effect is generally overestimated, in my opinion. Creating consistently good work that brings readers back to look for more will always be the best strategy—although admittedly not one available immediately out of the authorial starting gate.

The question of whether or not a writer has a strong social media presence pops up with particular emphasis in crowdfunding, where often anthology organizers and editors will expect writers to promote both the crowdfunded effort as well as the publication. Sometimes there will be (sometimes not so) gentle pressure to contribute something for a reward level, such as a Tuckerization, story critique, edit, or something else that takes writerly energy. Yes, it’s in the writer’s best interest to promote anthologies they are in, but the likelihood is that such an anthology represents a small part of their output and a pretty minor sum of money.

This requirement for a social media presence disadvantages a number of writers, unfortunately, who produce fine work but fall short in the social media arena. Such a lack may be due to a number of causes. They may lack resources, such as time and energy. They may not have the marketing knowledge or experience to do it effectively, or they may pattern themselves after bad models.

Others may have disabilities or a specific need for privacy. I know I’m not the only writer who has found that unless you are careful about what you do or don’t put up online, you will run into people whose ideas of boundaries may conflict with your own, to put it mildly, and sometimes that threat can even shade into worries about real life violence or harassment, threats to one’s livelihood, or fallout that affects family or friends.

This need for public promotion has gender implications. Multiple studies have shown that men tend to dominate conversations, and this is true online as well. Women often feel less comfortable with self-promotion, due to worries about being perceived as pushy or domineering. And those who do self-promote sometimes do hit such labels, particularly when women are perceived as having spoken more than they actually did. In one study, male executives who talked more than their peers were perceived as more competent, while the opposite held true for female executives. And sadly, women and young adults are more often the target for online harassment. A 2014 PEW study found that the more intertwined your life is with the Internet, the more likely you are to experience harassment.

This growing pressure on writers to have a public persona represents a real problem, particularly for those who are not naturally extroverted. Recently there’s been a discussion circulating on social media about whether or not it’s okay to write an obligation to publicize an anthology into a contributor’s contract. It’s not, but one can see where a frustrated editor might think it’s a valid step. Is there a remedy for this demand on the writer and if so, what is it? It depends on how we approach the problem.

As readers, we can do some of the work. We can share the word of the stuff we’ve loved on social media and our websites. While authors may want to be careful reviewing fellow authors for a variety of reasons, there are plenty of us who just read in the genres we love so much. Word of mouth remains one of the best publicity vehicles around and freely spreading word of the books that knocked your socks off is not just a service to the authors, but to your fellow readers. And it’s something that eventually benefits you yourself: the more you encourage such practices, the more likely you are to find good new titles from other people’s recommendations.

As authors, we can question expectations and push back when they are unreasonable. Those of us who are extroverts or have established presences can make sure that we’re promoting other work beyond our own, and beyond that, that we’re actively looking for voices for whom such amplification is particularly valuable. We can act as mentors to less experienced writers and provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t as well as encouragement.

Publishers and editors can refrain from imposing possession of a robust social media presence on writers as a qualification. They can also recognize resources and facilitate things as much as possible, providing writers with the information they need, such as how organizations like SFWA can assist with book promotion. Their marketing departments can provide authors with cover and illustration graphics to use, samples of successful books campaigns, and press/blogger contact lists.

The shape of publishing is continuing to change. Many writers have moved to a hybrid model, publishing some work traditionally while using independent publishing or crowdfunding models such as Kickstarter or Patreon. Hybrid forms continue to gain power, creating reader-directed texts, a la the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, experimental work that can be read in a multiplicity of ways, and games as novels. While the writers with extroverted personalities and a willingness to share much of their lives with fans may still be advantaged, let’s not allow the quieter and more introverted voices become lost as a result.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and edits from atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her most recent book is Altered America: Steampunk Stories (Plunkett Press, 2017). Information about her online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, along with links to many of her 200+ story publications can be found at her website. Her two most notable achievements of 2017 so far are a shark cage dive and starting her second term as the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Editor’s Desk:
Ask and You Shall Receive

Neil Clarke

As the month came to a close, I found myself without a viable editorial for this issue. I had one I thought would work, but it fizzled and went in the wrong direction. In a moment of desperation, I turned to Twitter:

Over the course of the next few hours, responses—serious and not—rolled in. So far, there have been a couple of really good ideas, but they require a bit of research and more time than I have this late in the month. Many of the others were interesting, but didn’t immediately inspire a whole editorial’s worth of content. However, perhaps it would be fun to treat them collectively and cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster of an editorial from some of them.

Gav Thorpe‏ @GavThorpeCreate: ‘Why do magazines have editorials?’

Oh that’s easy. They were put in place to torture the editors, particularly those who don’t write. Same thing with blogs and introductions in anthologies. Apparently, it’s supposed to make it look like we actually work, aren’t robots, you know, something like that.

Joan Wendland‏ @BandCgames: The future of dystopian novels given the current dystopia we experience every day?

Can’t talk to novels, but with short fiction, I’m not seeing much of a change in the slush pile. I did note a ten percent decline in story submissions immediately following the election, but it’s almost back to October levels now. If people are learning anything from all this, I’m not seeing it applied in the stories. That’s fine though, cause I like that people still prefer using their imagination.

John P. Murphy‏ @dolohov: Optimism in science fiction?

There have been complaints about the lack of optimism in science fiction for many years now. Months ago, maybe at the Nebula Conference, I was talking to someone about this. They seemed to believe that optimistic science fiction is very tied to economic situation and overall happiness with their lives. I’m sure there’s data out there on this, but I haven’t taken the time to see if that theory was true. I have some doubts.

Frabjous the Elder‏ @timothy_boothe:  Why do computers in sci-fi always just look like the computers when the sci-fi was written?

Computer science major here. It’s called a lack of imagination and it bugs me too. I shouldn’t be impressed anytime someone gets a simple hacker-type character or even basic terminology right either.

Marion Deeds‏ @mariond_d: WorldCon has a panel; “Cats in popular culture.” What about cats in SFF?

Sorry, I’m a dog person. I just don’t get the whole cat thing. They seem mean to me, but what do you expect from a shrunken lion? It’s going to have issues. Or did you mean authors named Cat? If so, I like those.

Ziv W‏ @QuiteVague: The effect of Twitter on the fandom ecosystem.

Complicated. Like any tool it can be used for good and evil. That said, I don’t think there is a single fandom ecosystem.

Sabrina M. Pyun‏ @sabrinampyun: Should sci-fi reflect people’s current mindsets about the future or should sci-fi inspire/change those mindsets?

It can do either or neither. There’s plenty of room under the umbrella and more than just those two choices. Don’t tie yourself down.

Susan E. Connolly‏ @susanconnolly: How important is realism in SF? Can we still write stories with aliens on Mars?

As I said above, there’s lots of room under the umbrella. I like hard SF and I like stuff that isn’t. Of course you can write stories with aliens on Mars. You can even write a hard SF story with aliens on Mars if you set it up correctly. Just because they aren’t there now doesn’t mean they won’t be someday.

Mike Caputo‏ @MichaelNCaputo: The death of science under the current administration.

Science can be denied, not stopped.

Stephen S. Power‏ @Stephenspower: Is the future above ground or below?

It depends on how much money you have, though I’ve been thinking lately that it might be under water.

clive tern‏ @CliveTernWriter: How Gattaca is a great film representing marginalization of disability, but used non-disabled actors.

I’ll have to take your word for it since I haven’t seen that movie. Hmmm. Maybe I should watch a bunch of genre movies I haven’t seen yet and write an editorial around that.

Passenger‏ EU @LorcaIan: How to get published in your mag

Like the lottery, you have to be in it to win it. Unlike the lottery, the stories aren’t picked randomly. What makes me think a story is good? That’s a question I’m still not sure how to answer and even if I could, I’d never recommend that you write based on that answer. Write what you enjoy and write it well.

Emily Swaim‏ @swaimea: Return of the novella as a storytelling medium, in regards to companion stories for franchises and the popularity of Japanese light novels

I can’t speak with much experience about the Japanese light novels, but the return of the novella is a rather nice development. You might have noticed that we’ve snuck in a few in the that last couple of years. For us, it’s always been a budget and space issue and I’d love to do more. In some ways, the novella is just catching the tail-end of what caused the increase in short fiction readership in recent years: online and digital publishing. I’ll single Tor.com and Tachyon Publications as two publishers that have made a mark with their novellas. More will follow.

Richard J. O’Brien‏ @obrienwriter: Why so many sci-fi characters are not memorable compared to other genres.

My experience has been quite the opposite. I don’t think you’d find a consensus on this one and that’s probably a good thing. It means there’s still good variety out there and so many more variations on stories left to tell. If the characters today aren’t to your liking, be the author that fixes that.

Well, that was a fun little experiment. Did any of those topics speak to you or did you want to toss me another? Feel free to drop comments off at our website or even via Twitter. Maybe we can make this a bit like the old-timey letters-to-the-editor columns. Might be a fun thing to do from time-to-time!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthologies are Galactic Empires and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two. An android anthology, More Human Than Human is scheduled for publication in late 2017. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
High Priest

Pascal Blanche

About the Artist

Pascal Blanche is a French artist, with more than twenty years of experience in the gaming industry. By day, he works at Ubisoft Montreal as Art Director. By night, he like to work on more personal explorations and likes to build bold new worlds.