The Sum of Her Expectations

Jack Skillingstead

Amrita stabilized the escape pod. Her hands were shaking; she had barely gotten out. The Meghnad Saha, a Class B planet surveyor she’d called home, retreated from the aft view screen, dropping rapidly from the orbital plane, pulled down by a force from the planet.

“Tripp?” Amrita said.

After a moment, a voice from the surveyor: “It doesn’t appear I’m going to be able to stop this thing.”

“You should have come with me in the pod.”

“Hindsight. I’ll keep trying. Here comes the blackout. Goodbye. Sorry . . . ”

“Tripp?”

Nothing.

Amrita tracked the Meghnad Saha all the way to the surface. She tried repeatedly to resume contact but Tripp wouldn’t answer. Transcyber Reactive Positronic Personality: Tripp, for short, and the only friend Amrita had, or wanted. If he survived the crash, she wasn’t about to abandon him. She blinked tears away and began to configure her escape pod for descent.

The Kabbhan forbade landing on Trappist-1e, or even approaching the planet within a designated radius of three hundred thousand kilometers. Because the Kabbhan stargates had made interstellar travel possible for humans in the first place, everyone respected this single restriction. Everybody but Amrita, who was signatory to no such agreement.

A proximity alert began beeping in the escape pod. Amrita considered a quick burn for radical descent. Get down before anyone could stop her. But it was already too late.

The Kabbhan star cruiser emerged like a sperm whale from a shot glass. Above the planet’s horizon an elongated node appeared, squeezed forth, and popped: the cruiser, bigger than anything Melville dreamed of, came alongside Amrita’s two-seat escape pod in synchronous orbit one hundred and eighty kilometers above the planet’s largest continental mass. Amrita put her nose to the viewport. A massive wall shut out the stars.

With the back of her hand she wiped sweat off her upper lip, and waited. Eventually, the alien spoke, via comlink—at least it appeared that way. The green comlink indicator blinked on Amrita’s vaporware display, and she heard the expected transmission hiss. But she knew Kabbhan technology was not what it appeared to be. Even calling it technology was a mistake.

Earth ship. Prepare to receive Kabbhan personnel.

“What?”

Out of nowhere, a man appeared at her elbow, already strapped into the right seat. Amrita would have jumped out of her skin, if that were possible. Actually, it was possible; the Kabbhan had demonstrated as much by becoming the only known race to have achieved transphysical migration.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

The man turned to her. “The sum of your expectations.”

“I’ve heard that one before. You’re a Kabbhan presentation?”

The Kabbhan probed minds to find materials with which to construct compatible presentations. A Kabbhanian presentation acted as a surrogate presence. No one had ever seen an actual Kabbhan and very few had seen their presentations. Those who had seen a presentation reported a disorienting experience. While the presentation existed only in the probed subject’s mind, it activated all the necessary neural and sensory pathways to create an apparently physical manifestation. Apparent to the one being probed, at least. In short, the right seat was empty.

“You may regard me as Dad.”

“Dad! I don’t think so. Besides, you don’t even look like him.”

Not that Amrita remembered her father, her “dad,” except as a degraded holo she’d discovered in a lockbox after her mother died. Among the few important documents still mandated to exist in physical form were scattered a handful of personal items, trinkets accumulated over a long life. Amrita used her thumbnail to pry open a silver locket stamped with an impression of Shiva—and wham! her father leaped out and stood flickering before her. She knew it was her father, because who else could it be? Old fashioned hololockets like this one had been romantic keepsakes when Amrita’s mother was young, and she had only ever loved one man—as she frequently reiterated. In later years, after she found happiness with a microbiologist named Brenda on the colony world Deneb V1, she added: One was enough.

The holo had been that of a young man, handsome, after a predictable fashion. But there was a sly, cunning light in his eye that suggested a con man’s motivations. Eye, not eyes. The holo’s degradation had turned Amrita’s young father into a puzzle of many missing pieces—including the piece with his right eye. A therapist had once suggested that Amrita had spent her life, unconsciously of course, searching for the missing pieces of dear old dad. It accounted for her lack of respect for rules and authority figures. Amrita responded: “You’re joking, right?” She had been under court order to participate in ten therapeutic sessions. The court order came as a result of a juvenile misadventure involving a stolen moon skimmer and a high-speed chase across the Mare Serenitatis. Had she been eighteen instead of thirteen, the consequences would have been dire, not therapeutic. The “You’re joking” remark had been in session number two. The next eight preceded unproductively.

This Kabbhan presentation didn’t look anything like the holo. It was older, for one thing. A man of late middle age, with silver-streaked hair combed back in a pompadour, and wrinkles around his brown eyes.

“There is no error,” he said.

“I hope you don’t think you’re going to stop me. Because I’m telling you right now, I am going down there to get my friend.”

“Stopping you isn’t my intention. I’m here to assure your survival. We Kabbhan feel a certain responsibility towards less evolved species endangered by our discarded artifacts, even though our warnings have been explicit. Shall we descend now? If you are prepared, of course.”

“I’m prepared. Dad.”

Amrita manipulated vaporware toggles, like twiddling fingers in a particularly well-organized steam cloud. The pod altered orbital trajectory, and Trappist-1e’s very large horizon became larger still. Amrita glanced at the rearview screen. The Kabbhan starship was gone, as if it had never been there. And it hadn’t been. Like Dad, the ship had been the sum of Amrita’s expectations, this time in regards to alien spacecraft. The Kabbhan thought that beings stuck in the physical required corresponding illusions. Maybe they were right.

Amrita’s escape pod burned through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed. Curtains of fire fluttered across the ports, then blew away, revealing an expanse of salmon-colored twilight. It was midday on Trappist-1e and as bright as it ever got. Six more alphabet planets hung in the sky like a God’s game of crescents and balls.

From altitude, the self-expanding megalopolis looked like a continent-covering crust, an eczema salted with glittering lights.

“What a sight,” Amrita said.

Dad nodded. “When the last of us migrated out of the physical, the automated city-builders on this colony planet ran amok. That was more than a hundred Sol years ago, by your time measure.”

“There’s so much.”

“Indeed. Construction has proceeded unchecked, consuming every available mineral resource, husking out the planet even as it gradually covers its surface with an abandoned-before-built city.”

“What happens when the builders run out of land?”

“They continue into the sea, erecting piers and floating platforms on the surface, and submerged suburbs of pressure domes and interlinking tubular passageways. They can and do build anything.”

Amrita banked the escape pod and dropped several thousand meters, slipping across the sky at dizzying speed. She felt it in her gut, the swoop of gravity-assisted acceleration. Dad sat placidly, watching out the port. As they drew nearer, details emerged from the crust. Towers, blocks, domes, heptagons, pyramids, complex ribbons of transportation infrastructure . . .

“There,” Dad said.

A trench of smoldering destruction. Amrita slowed the pod’s descent, swooped in close, and hovered. Machines, like giant stalk-legged spiders, swarmed the trench, collecting into piles the remains of shattered buildings. Energy beams fired from the spiders’ underbellies. Brilliant flashes, like small nuclear detonations, burst upon Amrita’s eyeballs. She looked away and spent a few seconds blinking the blue-white afterimages out of her eyes. When she looked back, the debris had been reduced to slag.

“The city-builders will digest the material,” Dad said, “and recycle it into the construction matrix.”

The builders, or nanoswarms, grew buildings from the ground up. Even now, the trench gradually filled with new growth, like an invisible surgeon knitting a wound.

Amrita flew her pod over the trench. At the end of it lay the Meghnad Saha, broken-backed and nose up. Smoke trailed from rents in the engine compartment and crew cabin, while instruments of the city proceeded with dissection. Giant mechanical mantises peeled off titanium plates, like strips of bark from a fallen tree. They cast the plates down for the spiders to gather, evaluate, and slag.

Amrita loitered above the spectacle. She opened a channel. “Tripp?”

White noise.

Dad said, “He may not have survived.”

“Or he may have survived.”

Dad put his hand over hers. Amrita’s parietal lobe received nerve impulses, as though someone was actually touching her skin. Dad’s eyes swam with empathy, which she didn’t trust. “I need to know for certain,” Amrita said, and pushed her hand forward. The illusion of Dad’s fingers slid away. She reached into the vaporware display, activated the sensor array, and swept the wreckage.

“He’s not there. I don’t read his power core’s signature.”

“Perhaps he has been digested.”

“The radioactive core would still register.”

Amrita broadened the search, scanning the surrounding area as rapidly as possible, worried that the builders would take notice and pull her down with tractor beams, just as they’d done to the Meghnad Saha. Then Tripp’s signature appeared. “Got him! He’s on the move.”

She locked down the location and deactivated the sensor array. “Do you think the builders know I’m here?” Her pod was shielded from sensor examination, but then the Meghnad Saha had been, too.

“I’m afraid they do now, Pumpkin.”

Pumpkin?

That was the color of the Martian sky above Burroughsville, the main Cydonia colony, where Amrita spent her first six years. Her real dad had never called her ‘Pumpkin’ or anything else that she recalled. She had only one vague and retreating memory of him walking out the door of their hab. She didn’t remember him; she remembered his back as he walked away. She remembered the door sliding closed, leaving her fatherless. She remembered her mother’s tears. And anger. Not long after that her mother requested reassignment to Luna, dragging Amrita along to the land of stark desert contrasts and no friends. The moon skimmer incident was inevitable, and would have happened sooner, if Amrita had been tall enough to reach the controls.

Pumpkin was what Ideal Dad called her—back when she was five years old and in need of a father who called her something, anything. Ideal Dad: AKA made-up-dad: AKA Kabbhan presentation. From the quantum flux the Kabbhan had probed her mind and found a ghost who had never lived. Amrita now recognized the physical template, though, the silvered pompadour, the kind eyes. They belonged to a man she used to see walking around the buried corridors between Burroughsville habs. Some kind of maintenance man, originally from New Delhi, on Earth.

“Please,” she said to the presentation, “don’t call me that again.”

Dad nodded. “All right, Amrita.”

“Nobody in my life has ever called me ‘Pumpkin.’”

Dad listened respectfully.

“And don’t look at me that way, either.” Amrita said.

“I’m sorry. Am I looking at you incorrectly?”

Amrita narrowed her eyes. “Are you being funny?”

“I doubt it. Before the Great Migration I was considered by my friends to be on the dour side. Also, in the quantum flux, no one tells jokes. We Kabbhan no longer exist as individuals, except when it becomes necessary to create a presentation. Telling jokes in the flux would be like telling jokes to a mirror.”

“I don’t know if you’re being serious.”

“Then I am a poor communicator, which is a failing I was not accused of prior to migration.”

“Okay, that’s plenty.”

“Plenty?”

“Of you talking.”

Amrita looked for a place to set down. She flexed her hands, worried. “The builders won’t attack?”

“Attack? The builders don’t attack anything. They’re hungry for building material, that’s all.”

“It looked like they were attacking the Meghnad Saha.”

“Preparing it for digestion,” Dad said. “Local resources are finite. The builders hunt constantly for materials. When your surveyor skimmed the atmosphere it became a potential resource. You were warned of this, were you not?”

“I shielded the ship. It should have been invisible.” Amrita had been attracted to Trappist-1e by its forbiddenness. She had wanted to see what no human had seen, and she wanted to see it because everyone from the Kabbhan themselves to the Gate Authority in the Epsilon Cygni system had told her she couldn’t.

“Insufficient,” Dad said. “Your sensor scan revealed you.”

“All right. Will the builders try to digest me?”

“Of course not. They don’t digest living organisms.”

“That’s great for me, but Tripp isn’t a living organism.”

Amrita concentrated on her maneuvering controls. She lowered the pod between soaring towers that reduced even the twilight to full night. Landing lights planted cones on a pristine avenue no Kabbhan (or human, for that matter) had ever trod. Gear extended, and moments later pneumatic suspension units absorbed the pod’s touchdown.

Amrita idled the engines and unstrapped. “Tripp is close. I’ll go get him. When I come back, you’ll have to give up your seat.”

Dad nodded. “Of course. I’m not actually in the seat, anyway. But I don’t think you should leave the pod.”

“Why not?”

“The builders won’t harm a living organism, but once you climb out, the pod will become a construction resource. They seized your planet surveyor only after you abandoned ship.”

Amrita bristled. “I didn’t abandon anything. Tripp shoved me into the pod. He overreacted to the builder’s tractor beam.”

“Yes. It wouldn’t have pulled the ship down, not while you were aboard.”

“Tripp was trying to protect me.”

Dad regarded her empathetically. “I see.”

Amrita switched on her comlink. “Tripp? You’re out there. Answer me.”

He didn’t reply.

“He’s probably turned off his communication device. Receiving your signal might direct the builders to him. Amrita, remaining here is dangerous.”

“You said the builders wouldn’t digest a living organism.”

“No. But once you walk away, your ship becomes a resource. I suggest you fly us out of the city. I will give you a safe destination.”

“I’m not leaving Tripp.”

“Hmm.” Dad tilted his head. “He’s artificial, isn’t he?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

Dad tapped two fingers against his lower lip. It’s something Amrita herself used to do when she was little, a pensive tick that she transferred to Ideal Dad to help make him more real. It really irritated her that the Kabbhan presentation had adopted it. The maintenance worker from New Delhi had probably had ticks and mannerisms of his own, but Amrita pointedly avoided learning what they were. She wanted only to see him in the corridor sometimes and think, My dad’s going to work. But at night she hoarded his image and turned it into a wonderful father. He wasn’t a maintenance man but a gardener. Like Ideal Dad himself, the garden didn’t exist. Amrita liked to imagine it in a vast underground vault with a pretend sky adrift with fluffy white clouds. She liked to imagine tall sunflowers (she’d seen pictures in school) nodding on their stalks. Dad played a game with her, telling stories of the sunflowers, which were special Martian sunflowers and could think and had personalities because they contained the lost souls of the vanished inhabitants of Mars.

Amrita put her helmet on. “He’s inside that tower. I’m going to get him. I’ll remote-fly the pod, set it to execute an evasive pattern to avoid the tractor beams and then return. That should work, if I make the pattern tricky enough.”

“It might. For a short time.”

“It’s going to work.”

Dad sighed.

Amrita programmed the maneuver, then belted on her sidearm and climbed out of the pod. She felt the planet’s pull, the gravity twice that of Mars but significantly less than Earth’s. She had lived on both worlds. Earth was prettier, but Mars (and Luna) was easier on her spine. The heating coils in her suit warmed her against the outside temperature, which hung just above freezing. How was anybody supposed to live on this planet?

When she turned, Dad already stood in the street. She said, “Please don’t do that anymore, either.”

“Don’t do what anymore?”

“Pop in and out. If you’re going to act physical, act it all the way.”

Dad nodded. “If it makes you happy.”

“Nothing makes me happy. Hold on.”

She used her wrist controller to spin up the pod’s engines. Dad watched her impassively, tapping his lower lip.

“Stop doing that,” Amrita said.

Dad stopped.

Amrita focused on the pod. It began to rise. The speed of its ascent increased. Amrita held her breath, waiting for the invisible lasso of a tractor beam to grab the pod and smash it down. But the pod climbed above the skyline and darted away—safe, for now.

“If it doesn’t come back,” Amrita said, “We’re all marooned here.”

“I’m not here in the first place,” Dad said. “But leave that aside. You are marooned whether or not the pod returns.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your pod cannot withstand the forces found within our gate.”

The Kabbhan stargates linked distant locations within the Milky Way. When humans discovered the gate shimmering in Jupiter space, it had opened the galaxy to human exploration. Only the gate in the Epsilon Cygni system was forbidden. Entering it, Amrita had been instantly transported across nearly twelve parsecs to the Trappist-1 system.

Amrita’s heart beat faster. She had suspected the escape pod was insufficiently sturdy for the stargate, but she had intended to chance it, anyway. Now she didn’t know what to do. Taking a risk was one thing, suicide was another. “Another ship will come,” she said.

“No ships come here.”

“Mine did.”

“Amrita, no one wants to come here.”

“I’ll figure something out.”

Dad nodded, as though he were nodding at a child who had just vowed to stay up all night.

“I will help you settle on this world. There is a lovely island situated on the terminator, where the temperature range is more compatible for your human physiology. In your remaining lifespan the builders will not reach it. Conditions may be challenging at first.”

“Well, shit,” Amrita said.

“Everything is going to be okay . . . ”

Pumpkin.

With her dad, Amrita walked alone down the broad Kabbhan avenue. From deep in the city came the creaking, groaning sounds of nano construction.

“What a waste of time this place is,” Amrita said. “All these buildings and no one to live in them or work in them.”

“Time,” Dad said, shaking his head. “An odd concept.”

Amrita looked at him, unable to ignore what she rationally knew wasn’t there. “What’s odd about it?”

Dad said, “First of all, ‘time’ is an artificial construct. How do you waste a construct? In the Flux—”

“Dad? I’m not in the mood.”

“Of course, sorry. In the Flux we aren’t influenced by moods.”

“Okay.” Amrita stopped walking and turned on him. “If it’s so wonderful in the Flux, what are you even doing here?”

“I’m not here.”

Amrita closed her eyes briefly. “You know what I mean.”

“I told you. I came to help you survive.”

“Right. Because you feel responsible. Now what’s the other reason?”

Dad shrugged. “I happen to enjoy inhabiting a presentation. Among my fellow Kabbhan that makes me unusual.”

“I hope you’re having a wonderful time.”

“I am.”

“That’s great.” Amrita looked around at the buildings. “He should be right here. Tripp, it’s me! Tripp!”

Her words echoed down the canyon of tall buildings, all of them black and shiny-smooth and hollow. She approached the nearest, a tower that rose hundreds of meters, an immense heptagonal spear ending in a rounded point. The entrance to the lobby, or whatever the Kabbhan called it, stood open and doorless. Her helmet lights revealed the empty interior. She stepped inside and tilted her head back. Load-bearing supports crisscrossed all the way to the point. That was all.

“It’s called a shell,” Dad said. “I knew you were wondering.”

She didn’t say anything.

“The builders execute the architect’s plan, create basic structures, the interiors to be added later, according to the wishes of future inhabitants. As there are no future inhabitants, the city itself is now, and will remain, a shell.”

“I don’t care,” Amrita said. “I just want to find my friend.”

From far away, a small voice, almost inaudible, said, “I’m here.”

Amrita squinted. The voice was so faint, she wasn’t sure she’d even heard it. Wasn’t sure whether it was outside of her head, or inside of it, another Kabbhan illusion, or what. She turned up the gain on her headset.

“Tripp?”

“Over here.”

She swung her headlamps in his direction. Tripp stood in a far corner of the shell, his back against the wall. He looked more or less human—well, less—but he had two arms and two legs and one oval-shaped head. She walked toward him, her footsteps echoing.

“What happened to you?”

“My leg was damaged in the crash. I barely managed to hobble this far. They almost got me. Now I can’t move without falling.”

“They won’t get you,” Amrita said. “I won’t let them.”

Dad cleared his throat. Amrita ignored him.

“You can’t stop them,” Tripp said.

Amrita crouched and began examining the damaged leg. At the knee, a couple of carbon fiber rods bent in the wrong direction, inhibiting articulation.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said.

“Oh, I’m not really. It’s just my positronic brain pretending to feel human emotions, so I will seem more companionable.”

She looked up. “We’ve discussed your honesty on this topic before.”

“Sorry.”

Amrita produced a multi-tool and began fiddling with the leg.

“The weird thing is,” Tripp said, “I’m not even sure I want you to.”

She looked up. “Want me to what?”

“Stop them.”

Amrita stopped fiddling. “Why the Hell are you saying that?”

“It’s strangely compelling.”

“What’s strangely compelling?”

“To become part of the city,” Tripp said. “I don’t know. Would it be so bad? Maybe it’s because I’m already artificial, but these last hours, pretending to feel so afraid even when you were not here, hiding, getting my apparent dread of extinction organized to display when you showed up—it’s really made me think. My whole existence has been nothing but a performance.”

“Tripp!”

“I’m serious. If I simply walked out there, exposed myself, let them slag me, allowed myself to be digested and my elements to be recombined into the building matrix, wouldn’t I be part of something greater than myself?”

“Tripp, please be quiet now.” Listening to him made her feel lonely. “I think the crash must have damaged more than your poor leg.”

“No, my brain is fully functional. You know, I was in communication with the Meghnad Saha even as the instrumentality dismantled her. She didn’t display fear, because that isn’t part of her reactive programming mask. But she was excited. I’m certain of that. This may sound strange to you, but in the end she believed that to be digested was the greatest adventure. At least, that’s what she said.”

“She did not.”

“I suppose she may have been regurgitating something from the library that got mixed up in her damaged memory core. Anyway . . .

“Hold still, please.” Amrita loosened the bolt that attached the bent rods to Tripp’s knee swivels. The bolt dropped to the ground. Gritting her teeth, she got a firm grip on one of the bent rods, wrenched it back and forth until it suddenly came loose. She fell on her ass, still holding the rod.

“He’s right,” Dad said. “We Kabbhan, like all physical beings of limited duration, lived our lives in fear. After the Great Migration, fear vanished—along with our individual personalities, of course. It may be the same for artificial beings when faced with the prospect of joining the greater reality of the city.”

Amrita rolled to her knees. “Have either of you even considered the virtue of silence?”

“Either of you?” Tripp said. “Who else are you talking to?”

“Nobody. My dad.”

“Which is it?”

“They’re the same thing.”

Amrita resumed work on the second bent rod. She twisted and wrenched and pulled. It came free of its upper swivel but not the lower. Finally she gave up and let it dangle.

“Try that,” she said.

Tripp moved his good leg forward, planted it, then moved his damaged leg. The dangling bar tapped against the other rods and the knee wobbled slightly side-to-side. Tripp waved his arms for balance. Amrita scrambled to her feet to catch him, but he managed to remain upright without her.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Unstable. I’m not sure this will work.”

“Keep practicing, walk around.”

“All right.” Tripp walked away into the shadows, the dangling carbon rod making a tap-tapping sound like a blind man’s cane.

“The builders will very probably take him,” Dad said.

Amrita turned on him, annoyed with herself for accepting his presence outside her head, where it wasn’t. “I could use a little optimism around here. You’re supposed to be helping me, right? Well, do some helping, why don’t you? Get us away from where Tripp is in danger. Get us to that island.”

“I can take you there. The builders have no interest in a biological. But Tripp will inevitably be noticed.”

Amrita paced around, working her hands together, thinking. “What if I turn the builders off? Isn’t that what your people should have done before the Great Migration?”

“That isn’t possible. In the absence of Kabbhan oversight, the builders have adapted and become self-motivated to complete the architect’s plan. Only the architect can cancel the build.”

“Who’s the architect?”

“Since they were left running, the builders devised their own plan.”

“The builders are their own architect?”

“Exactly.” Dad spread his arms and turned in a circle. “They build. It’s what they do. It’s all they do. When the original plan was complete, they simply extended the parameters to include the entire planet. That way they will remain busy and fulfill the dictates of their primary function. But they are not sentient. No amount of logical persuasion will convince them to abandon their own plan.”

“That leaves Terminator Island, or whatever you call it.”

“The island has no name. Nothing here does.”

“Let’s just go. Tripp!”

They emerged from the building in time to witness the arrival of a ten-meter-tall spider. Moments later, the pod came zig-zagging out of the sky and settled onto the same spot it had previously occupied. The spider stalked toward the pod.

Amrita yelled, “Run!”

Since she was the only one with working legs, she ran alone—though Dad appeared to be running beside her.

“How am I doing?” he said.

“What?”

“You said you wanted me to be physically consistent.”

Behind her, Tripp’s dangling carbon rod clicked and knocked against his leg, like a syncopated timer.

Amrita ripped her sidearm out of the holster but hesitated. “Dad, you’re sure that thing won’t attack me?”

“Yes.”

Amrita triggered her weapon. A pulsing white particle discharge cut across one of the spider’s legs, severing it above the first joint. The spider stumbled and began tracking left. Amrita ran back to Tripp, pulled his arm across her shoulders, and helped him walk the remainder of the distance to the pod. He was light for an artificial.

“Stand here.” Amrita climbed the ladder and reached down. “Give me your hand, I’ll pull you up.”

But Tripp wasn’t looking at her. He watched the spider circling itself, partially hobbled, and, to Amrita’s horror, Tripp began limping towards it.

“Tripp, what are you doing! Stop.”

Without looking at her, Tripp said, “You should fly away now. It’s important that I serve a larger function. While the Meghnad Saha existed, my part of the larger function was assured. There is no larger function on your island.”

“Our friendship is a larger function.” Amrita felt an ache in her chest.

Tripp didn’t speak again but limped, loose rod tapping, over to the spider and held up his arms. The spider took notice, stopped chasing itself around in a circle, and slagged him.

The ache in Amrita’s chest intensified and became unbearable. “Why?”

From the right seat, already strapped in, Dad laid a comforting illusion on her shoulder. Her brain told her it was a father giving her a reassuring squeeze.

“We’d best go now, Pumpkin.”

She buckled herself into the pilot’s seat, roughly wiped her eyes, spun up the engines, and sped into the sky, reaching maximum thrust within seconds. They achieved altitude and raced toward the sea.

On tidally locked Trappist-1e, Terminator Island stood on the edge of eternal night. Amrita knelt in the powdery blue sand, breathing inside her helmet. “I don’t see any builders.”

“They exist everywhere but are too small to see.”

“If they’re on the island, why aren’t they already building their damned city?”

“It would be disorderly. The builders follow the architect’s plan, in this case their own plan. And the plan is to build contiguously outward from the main continental mass. These builders would not become activated until the project arrived after crossing the ocean. That is a distant occurrence. In the meantime you can use the builders for your own project, once I tell you how to activate them according to your deeper architectural desires.”

“I don’t have any deep architectural desires,” Amrita grumbled.

Dad, standing over her, said, “Of course you do.”

Amrita was not Kabbhan. The nanobuilders did not naturally synch with her inner architect. But, because she was the only game in town, at least until the city arrived, eventually they made a connection. A good thing. The Trappist atmosphere was unbreathable, at least for humans. Sooner or later (probably sooner) the pod’s emergency atmospheric conversion processor would break down.

The builders started . . . building. Amrita had been dozing in the pod, lulled to unconsciousness by the wheeze and huff of the processor, which sucked in air and displaced most of the carbon dioxide with an artificially produced mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. The conversion unit was designed as a temporary stopgap. The replicating oxygen/nitrogen molecules on board would soon be depleted, and that would be the end of Amrita.

A creaking, groaning sound plucked at her awareness, and she opened heavy eyelids. The atmosphere in the pod was thin, just barely enough to support her life. But like that she was wide awake. Around the pod, for a radius of fifty meters or more, walls built themselves up, gradually creating an enclosed space. At the same time invisible builders filled the still-exposed interior space with walls and corridors and furniture and apparatus familiar to Amrita, including a large atmospheric conversion unit. Fascinated, Amrita tore into a packet of emergency rations and watched the show. The builders worked quickly.

At the point when she knew exactly what the builders were creating, Amrita turned to Dad, who was always at her side.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said.

“Your architect is a deep expectation, beyond your conscious control. I’m sorry. The builders are designed to synch with Kabbhan brains, which were more limber, not human brains. This is what you get, I’m afraid. At least it is life, yes?”

Outside the pod, a copy of Amrita’s Burroughsville habitat took shape.

Black. Inside the hab, if she wandered too far, the soothing blue and gold tones of her remembered home in Burroughsville segued into the shiny, smooth, black “shell” material of the Kabbhan city. Mostly, Amrita stayed in her room, reading her way through the pods’ mirror library from when it was attached to the Meghnad Saha. A couple of times a day she left the hab and crossed to the farm. The walls of the farm enclosed a space twice the size of the hab. Using seeds and fertilizer packets from the escape pod’s long-term planetary survival stores, Amrita had begun to grow her future diet of bland vegetables. Already leafy shoots had emerged. The sight both encouraged and depressed her. How long would she be stuck here?

Sometimes, on her way back to the hab, she paused to gaze out over the sea. Beyond the horizon, the builders continued their work on the continent and beneath the waves. Tripp was now part of that building matrix. If he could pretend fear why couldn’t he have pretended loyalty and stayed with her? Tripp was part of the city, but what was Amrita part of? She had spent her life devising ways to separate herself from her fellow humans. Now, for the first time, regret wormed into her heart.

“I don’t understand why he did it,” she said one evening, when Dad came in to say goodnight. “I thought we were friends.”

Dad sat on the bed. It was a perfect duplicate of Amrita’s childhood bed. When she lay down to sleep, her legs extended beyond the mattress. “Perhaps the friendship was more one-sided than you like to believe.”

“You didn’t even know him,” Amrita said.

“Was there something to know? He was artificial. Kabbhan could not have created a presentation from him, even. Tripp had more in common with the builders than with you.”

“Stop talking to me,” Amrita said. “Can’t you stop and go away? I don’t need you anymore.”

Dad held her hand. “Do you really want me to leave, Pumpkin?”

By force of will, Amrita almost convinced herself that she couldn’t feel the hand gently squeezing hers. She would have pulled free, except she could see, in her mind’s eye, the grim comedy of her lying alone on the bed, talking to herself while twisting and pulling away from someone who wasn’t there. It was easier to accept the illusion. Just as it had become easier to accept the illusion calling her “Pumpkin.” Was there any point in fighting it? Besides, it would be too lonely without Dad, even though Dad wasn’t really there.

“At least make yourself appear in your original Kabbhan form.” she said. “The Dad thing bothers me.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. I no longer possess a self-image. To appear Kabbhan now would require a living Kabbhan mind from which to draw.”

“You won’t try?”

“I’m afraid it would be pointless.” Dad shook his head and chuckled. “You know, I’m really enjoying my temporary individuality.”

“That’s wonderful.” Amrita turned away.

“But—”

“But what?” She turned her head and looked at him.

“Nothing.” Dad smiled kindly. “I went to the underground garden today.” He gave her ankle a fatherly squeeze.

Amrita groaned. Not this again. She turned away, facing the wall. “There is no underground garden.”

“The sunflower people want to tell their story, the story of old Mars.”

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Amrita said.

“Why don’t I tell you a little of it?” Dad suggested.

“Jesus. I just said—”

“It’s fascinating, the story of old Mars.”

“Stop talking now.”

“Don’t be sharp with me, Pumpkin.”

Amrita rolled over and sat up. “It bothers me that you won’t stop talking when I tell you to stop. You used to stop.”

Dad folded his hands in his lap and looked at them. “I appreciate,” he said, starting slowly, seeming to hunt carefully for the right words, “that I sometimes make you uncomfortable. But I hope you can appreciate that I’m not a mere thing, a device, you can choose to turn off and on at will. I’m not an artificial, like your so-called friend, Tripp.”

“Leave Tripp out of it.”

“I would like to,” Dad said. “But I find your morbid attachment disturbing.”

“Disturbing.” Amrita’s childhood room seemed too small, the air too thin. Childish and colorful drawings she’d once created on a Play-And-Swirl pallet adorned the walls, primitive renderings of her little Burroughsville family. Mom and Ideal Dad. The goddamn maintenance man. Amrita stood up. She felt crowded—which was ridiculous, when you thought about it. “I’m going outside.”

“A walk sounds nice, Pumpkin. I’ll come with you.”

“Please don’t.”

Amrita suited up, cycled through the airlock. Dad stayed with her every step of the way, acting the part of a physical presence without interruption, just as she’d once requested. She walked along the shore until she began to feel tired. Dad never stopped talking.

“The Sunflower Martians lived thousands of years ago, back when sparkling blue water filled the canals and riverboats propelled by solar sails navigated from community to community, trading goods and stories.”

Amrita kicked at the powdery sand. “There were never any canals on Mars.”

“Nonsense!” Ideal Dad said.

She stopped and looked back. Ideal Dad kept talking, but she was getting better at ignoring him. From this distance, the hab and farm buildings appeared small and generic—except in scope, no different than the shells of the city.

I found some shells on the beach, she thought, a little hysterically. And then she realized something.

Ideal Dad was saying, “The Martians chose sunflowers because the flowers are so bright and sunny and optimistic, just like the Martians themselves used to be.”

“Hold up,” Amrita said.

“What is it, Pumpkin?”

“If the builders can recreate my old Burroughsville hab, why can’t they recreate the Meghnad Saha?”

For the first time in days, it seemed, Ideal Dad became quiet.

“Well?” Amrita said.

“We should be getting back home now.”

“Answer my question.”

“A spaceship is very complicated.”

“The hab is complicated, too.”

“The interiors exist as a deeply imprinted memory with an emotional toggle from your childhood.”

“Tripp and I lived together on the surveyor for a long time. That’s imprinted, too.”

“It’s not the same.” Dad’s tone suggested the conversation was over. He turned and walked away, back toward the hab, kicking up no sand, leaving no footprints. After a few meters, he disappeared. Amrita stood there, as if trying to catch a glimpse of a mirage. It had been a long time since Dad had last pulled his disappearing act.

She woke on her hab bed and lay still, listening. Somebody was in the corridor outside her room. She got up and padded over to the door, slid it open a few inches. A man, his back to her, walked away toward where the corridor curved. A different man. Carrying a long-handled static duster, he was dressed in the green jumpsuit worn by maintenance workers in Burroughsville, a long time ago. Amrita slipped into the corridor and followed him. He rounded the corner. She ran to catch up.

“Hey.”

He paused and turned his head, his face in partial profile. It was Ideal Dad, and it wasn’t Ideal Dad.

“What are you doing?” Amrita said.

“It’s late for you, kid. Where’s your mother?”

“I don’t like this.” Amrita stepped back. “Don’t do this.”

The maintenance man grunted and continued on his way, toward the next bend in the corridor, occasionally swiping the walls with his duster. Around that next bend the shiny black shell material replaced the phony representation of Amrita’s hab. She didn’t follow him. She was afraid to.

That day on the beach, it was the last time Ideal Dad appeared. Amrita spent her days alone in the hab. A heavy lethargy came over her, and she stopped going to the farm. The process of suiting up and cycling through the airlock made her tired even to think of it. She barely left her room, where she slept a lot, and nibbled on the last of the pod’s emergency rations. Every night she heard the heavy shoes of the maintenance man clocking down the corridor, but after that first time she stopped going out to investigate. It was all inside her head anyway.

One night, lying in the dark, on the precipice of sleep, Amrita heard something, a minute creaking, groaning. The sounds of nano builders at work. She sat up and waved her hand over the bedside lamp sensor. The light came up. In a corner of the room, a child’s desk took shape. It was a fully interactive FunDesk. Amrita’s eyes widened. Up to now the room had duplicated her childhood hab, recreating what had actually been in it. But she had never had a FunDesk, though she’d repeatedly begged her mother for one.

Amrita swung her legs off the too-short bed. She wriggled her toes in the carpet—then stopped when she realized it was the same thing she used to do when she was five years old. The desk finished building itself. Cherry apple red swept away the shell-black look. What next, duckies on her underwear? The room was infantilizing her. Only it wasn’t the room.

Footsteps crossed the floor on the other side of the wall common to the family quarters. Not the heavy tread of the maintenance worker. Amrita, suddenly terrified, approached the curtain between her bedroom and the family’s common space. In all these weeks, no one had appeared in the family space. Amrita lifted the curtain aside in time to see a man pass into the corridor, his back to Amrita, a young man with squared shoulders.

“Wait,” Amrita said, her hand reaching out.

The door slid shut behind him.

Half dressed, barefoot, she pursued him, but was afraid to catch up. They followed the curving corridor and came to the airlock.

Amrita found her voice. “You can’t do this to me.”

The man turned. A piece of his face that included his right eye was missing.

“All I ever wanted to do was stay,” he said, “but you won’t have it.” His voice sounded garbled, as if he were talking around a mouth full of mud. It wasn’t a human voice at all, but maybe the voice of a creature that had stopped physically existing a very long time ago. As he opened the airlock’s inner door, his face began to melt. He shuffled into the airlock. The inner door closed with a decisive clunk. Amrita rushed to the little round window. The airlock was empty, with the outer door never having opened. She was alone again, but hadn’t she always been?

Amrita moved out of both the infantilizing room and the false representation of her old Cydonia family quarters. She dragged everything she needed down the corridor and around the second bend, and there she made a place for herself enclosed by the shiny black shell material. She craved the inconvenience of reality. She needed it, if she was going to have a chance.

Amrita resumed tending the farm. She required food, enough to go beyond the limits of her pod rations. It would take a long time to accomplish what she intended to accomplish—if she ever did accomplish it.

She mind-sifted nanos in the blue sand, and worked doggedly to reconstruct the Meghnad Saha. Hours and hours she spent remembering every detail of her lost surveyor. She started in the morning and ended at night, curled on the hard shell material, concentrating until her mind went slack with fatigue. On the beach—slowly, slowly—the ship began to rise. First the landing struts and feet and then a skeletal approximation of the superstructure. She wouldn’t need the whole thing, just the essentials. Structural integrity. Ion propulsion engines. One pressurized cabin . . .

Tripp visited her in a dream. He was his old self, undamaged and companionable. His blank face swiveled toward her. I’ve got your back, he said, but it was just Amrita’s deep architect of loneliness trying to manufacture the loyalty Tripp, in the end, had been incapable of. She sat up and angrily wiped away tears. “I don’t need you anymore. I’m getting out of here.” By “here” she meant more than Trappist-1e.

She wanted so badly to abandon the abandoned part of herself.

Amrita tried something new. Before sleep she focused on the missing pieces of her spaceship reconstruction but did not struggle consciously to recreate them. The builders were smart. Once they knew exactly what you wanted they could, as Dad had said, build anything. They had done it with the oxygen conversion unit and other details in the hab. Since then Amrita had been trying too hard, getting in her own way and in the way of the builders.

The builders resumed work and they worked rapidly.

“Ready to fly,” Amrita said, standing by the surveyor, her gloved hand flat against the hull. She turned back to the hab and saw nothing more than a collection of black shells. Of course, it was different on the inside. But she would never visit the inside again. After a minute she turned away and opened the hatch on the underside of the reconstructed ship and hauled herself up. Minutes later the Meghnad Saha, streaked out of Trappist 1-e’s atmosphere and towards the Khabbhan gate. She was going home.

About the Author

In 2001, Jack Skillingstead submitted a story to Stephen King’s “On Writing” contest. He won and not long afterward began selling regularly to major science fiction and fantasy markets. To date he has sold more than forty stories to various magazines, Year’s Best volumes and original anthologies. In 2003 his story “Dead Worlds” was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and in 2009 his novel Life on The Preservation was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Jack lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

The Nightingales in Plátres

Natalia Theodoridou

“ . . . if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim . . . how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!”

[ . . . ]

“Silently they rode for three days; but on the fourth morning Abraham said not a word but lifted up his eyes and beheld Mount Moriah in the distance.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Stranded, nomads on a nomad rock. Tied down on this unnamed planet for precious months, without reason, by forces we cannot comprehend. Nomad fathers and nomad sons. Punished, perhaps? By God, by Panayía. For what deviance? It is hard to know His will. Harder yet to know His ways of measuring transgression.

These thoughts keep Captain Yánnis Bostantzóglou awake through the sleeping hours—these, and the incessant song of nightingales echoing through the spaceship’s hull. A line from an antique poem by the ancestral Seféris plays in Yánnis’ mind, about Helen, and Agamemnon, and the futile struggles of Greeks: “The nightingales,” it went, “the nightingales won’t let you sleep in Plátres.” And they don’t, they don’t. As if the entire damn ship was built to fit that one, old verse.

And what have we got but old verses? Yánnis asks himself, as has been his usual manner of late. Because who else can he burden with such questions?

He looks over to the sleeping figure of his young son. His breathing is regular, calm. He is not dreaming, then, and the nightingales don’t bother him.

The nightingales, the nightingales. Is this Plátres? Yánnis wonders. And are these nightingales? Empty imitations of birds frozen in embryonic banks, deep in the ship’s womb, recordings played over and over and over, plucked from a past none of us have known. What is asked of us? All we have to do is believe. And isn’t faith the hardest thing to get when you don’t already possess it, but the easiest thing to keep when you do?

They tried to program the ship to cease the nightingale song during the sleeping hours, or at least dim it, make it less intrusive, softer, a lullaby even. They found it was one of the features that were impossible to access and modify. For some reason, the people who built the ship wanted it to always echo with the song of nightingales. Something about the song’s effect on the population’s health, they guessed. Or maybe they had just been told to do so by God, and they, of course, obeyed.

Will our great-great-grandchildren have forgotten all about the birds of old Earth? Will they think them a myth made up by their senile ancestors, a rumor propagated by those disembodied songs, these ghosts of birds past?

The boy shifts in his berth. His long hair crowns his head, curly and strong, like a halo. His son’s head. His son’s hair. This gift of a son.

Yánnis gives up on trying to sleep—besides, the whole ship will soon come to life for another make-believe morning. Another shift of waiting for the wave that will get them off this rock, another prayer to be allowed to continue on their long, slow journey to the system of Tau Ceti. Another day on Nóstos II.

He sits up on his berth and runs his fingers through his long beard before tying it with an elastic band. All the men wear their beards this way. It would be easier to keep them short and trimmed, but this is not the tradition. Nóstos II is nothing if not traditional.

Yánnis slips out of his compartment as quietly as possible so as not to disturb Panayótis. He makes his way along the jungle that spans the bulk of the ship. The nightingale song is even louder out here. Yánnis lets the vegetation brush against his face and breathes in the warm, moist air. It is a good life, this, despite everything.

He enters the prayer room, his head hung low, his hands clasped in front of him, as is the proper way. There is a single flame burning in the old manouáli candlestand. It smells faintly of beeswax—an artificial scent, of course, as they ran out of natural beeswax candles long before Yánnis was born. The flame has almost consumed the entire stalk of the candle and is lapping at the sand that fills the bottom of the manouáli. There is no other light in the prayer room.

Yánnis approaches slowly and lights another candle. “For Léna,” he whispers. His breath still catches whenever he utters his wife’s name. Léna’s sister Maríka is single. She’s also the best genetic match for Yánnis. Soon, they would have to be wed. But not yet. Not before the widower’s sorrow has turned into a dull ache, no longer the sharp stab of a blade. It’s only been fifteen Earth months. They still measure time in the traditional way.

The flickering flame of the candle casts shadows across the room. Yánnis runs his hand over the tiny boxes that line the walls until he finds the one that holds Léna’s bone, right above his ancestors’. Léna, Léna. She only got to enjoy their son for three short years. “This is the bargain I made,” she told him with her last breath.

He traces her name with his finger, and then he bends over and touches it with his lips. He does not kiss it. He vowed never to kiss again after that day, the day they crashed. Not even his son. Not even Panayía.

He turns to face Her icon, almost indiscernible in the half-dark of the prayer room. Panayía Hagiosorítissa. Madonna Advocate, he prays silently, advocate for us, so we can get off this unholy place.

He contemplates the Virgin Mary, clad in deep purple, head covered, facing him just so, her arms raised in supplication. She is alone in this icon, without her Child. She is pointing towards Her Son, presumably to an icon of Christ that would be standing next to hers. Is this loneliness of the divinity what drove Léna to ask Her? To make the heaviest táma, to bargain her life for a child? And the lonely God provided, She did.

It was Yánnis’ earliest known ancestor who carried the icon with him as he was fleeing genocide in the early 1900s, not even a century before Nóstos began its own journey. All the way from Anatolia to Greece, across the Black Sea, and the icon was all his ancestor took with him. Half his family drowned, but this, this he saved. He, too, had made a táma in exchange for safe passage. What price he’d paid, no one knew, but when the Bostantzoglaíoi stepped onto Greek soil, the icon, they say, wept tears of salt.

Our fleeing so different, Yánnis thinks, and yet so similar. A leap of faith across the black, manifold sea of space. And then, he kneels in front of Her icon, makes the sign of the cross in the traditional way, and begs, his prayer full of questions.

“Panayía, what have we done wrong?” he asks. “Why are we bound on this dead, rogue planet? Why can’t we move? What do I have to do? Help us go. Help us, help us. Panayía.”

“Father?”

He didn’t hear his son coming in, or he wouldn’t have spoken his despair out loud. He dries his eyes quickly and hopes the candlelight is not enough for Panayótis to make out the fear on his father’s face.

“What is wrong, son?” he whispers. “Why aren’t you asleep?” He opens his arms, inviting the child to come near.

“The nightingales,” the sleepy boy whispers, rubbing his eyes. He still lingers near the prayer room’s entrance.

“Ah, yes, the nightingales.” Some people get used to them, eventually. Some don’t. Yánnis pats his knees. “Come here,” he says.

The child approaches and hides inside his father’s arms. Yánnis touches his forehead to his son’s and rests his arms on the boy’s shoulders as gently as he can, as if afraid to touch him, to hug him, so as not to harm him. This is how fragile he thinks him, his son, his only son. The precious, rare son. They named him after Her. How could they not?

“Here,” Yánnis says, lifting the child above his head, “give Panayía a kiss.”

Panayótis crosses himself as his father raises him closer to the icon, and then kisses the Virgin Mary’s forehead. His lips leave behind the faintest of marks on the ancient luster.

“Well done,” Yánnis says, caressing the boy’s hair. “Now off. Go find Aunt Maríka. I have work to do here.”

As soon as he’s alone again, Yánnis kneels before the icon and plunges back into his prayer.

This planet is death. It has no star. No name. No air.

He lifts his arm and touches the bottom of the wooden icon with his fingers.

“Are you punishing us, Panayía?” He closes his eyes and hits his forehead with his fists, again and again. The repairs have been completed for months. They have waited too long for a Dirac wave that their space drive can grip. They have waited and waited and waited. “Tell me what I have to do,” he pleads.

Then, there is the voice. It shakes him, utterly and completely. It obliterates every other thought and fills his mind, his breath, this room, this life, this vast, vast space.

YOUR ANCESTOR SAID, MAY MY SEED DIE OUT, IF ONLY I WOULD GET TO SEE THE SUN OF GREECE.

Is this true?

YOUR WIFE SAID, MAY WE NEVER REACH THIS NEW EARTH, IF ONLY I WOULD GET TO NURSE A SON.

It cannot. This cannot.

THEY WERE SELFISH, YANNI. WILL YOU BE SELFISH TOO?

Tears flood Yánnis’ eyes. The lonely God finally speaks. She speaks to him and he’s on his knees. He’s on his knees and there is terror in his heart.

“What are you asking? I will gladly give You anything.”

A SACRIFICE.

The air is knocked out of his lungs. He has no voice, and yet he manages to speak. “What sacrifice?” he asks. “My life? My light? This very ship?”

THE SON WHOM YOU LOVE.

He opens his mouth to speak and closes it again. But I have only one, he wants to say. I have no other than the one whom I love.

Then the awful question blooms in his mind: Has he always known he’d have to give him up, eventually, his son, his only son? And then, the thought: Curse you, my ancestor, my root. Curse you, Léna, my love. How could you? And then: How could you not?

GIVE HIM UP, YANNI, the voice says.

GIVE HIM BACK.

Yánnis stands up, his hands curled into fists. He wants to shout. He wants to cry out: Why would God demand such things?

But then he falls to his knees again. He refrains from mouthing such questions. For the will of Panayía is unknowable and great, and to seek to know it is to seek to extinguish one’s mind. So, instead, he thinks of how Léna, when she was to wean the child, blackened her breasts with soot. And he is reminded again of the philosopher’s unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lying beneath everything, of Abraham’s leap of faith, and of Agamemnon’s—that one more dreadful still; because his leap had been a bargain, not a test.

Did Abraham doubt? Yánnis wonders. Did Agamemnon?

A son for a son. A daughter for a deer, a deer for a wind. Is it a sin to doubt?

Both these fathers were spared the unthinkable pain, Yánnis thinks to himself, so why wouldn’t he too? Why would he be any different, his faith lesser, his leap greater?

“Without you, Panayía,” he says out loud, his words echoing in the darkened prayer room, “what would living be but despair?”

The brightness of the corridor hurts his eyes. He rests his back against the thick layer of ivy that covers the walls on one side of the prayer room door. His head is spinning, his eyelids burn. He brings his trembling hands to his face—to hide it or to block out the light, he’s not sure. It takes him a while to realize his beard has come undone.

“Are you all right, Yánni?”

Maríka has grabbed his shoulder and is squeezing it gently. He didn’t see her coming.

“Did you hear?” he asks.

“Hear what?”

He takes a good look at Maríka’s face, her dark eyes, her arched nose. No. She has no idea. God chose him. Him and him alone.

“Where is my son?” he asks.

She brings the back of her hand to his forehead, the way mothers do to feel for a child’s temperature. “I’ve sent him to the database to study. What is wrong with you?”

He thinks of Seferis’ poem again, his Plátres inhabited by myths. In that poem, Teukros, the exiled youth, sent to found a new home in Cyprus, ran into Eléni, who revealed to him she never went to Troy. The sacrifice, the war, the dead, the long trip home—it was all for nothing.

Does he remember this right?

A daughter for a deer, a deer for a wind, a wind for a war, the war for naught. Léna, no, Eléni, nothing but a phantom, a cloud. An empty shirt, that Helen.

Let’s call this planet Moriah, he wants to say. Let’s not call it Aulis.

He looks at the monitor across the hall. It’s displaying the ship’s surroundings, the empty, barren planet that has trapped them, that is testing them—because what else can this be but a test, this irrational becalming?

“Isn’t it funny we have been stuck on a nomad planet for so long?” he asks. Little gravity, no atmosphere. This is a place where no one is meant to stay for long. “Nomads on a nomad land. Isn’t it?”

“Funny is not the word I would use.” She studies him, her forehead crinkled, her eyebrows furrowed. Maríka always worries about everyone, but she worries for him and Panayótis most of all.

“I’ve been praying to Her a long time, but this time, Maríka, this time She answered.”

Maríka takes a step back and stares at him. “What are you talking about?” She glances at the prayer room door, then looks at him again, a kind of realization settling on her face.

Maríka is a believer. She will understand. If not now, then later. Eventually, she will. He extends his empty palms towards her, as if to show her the bleeding marks of nails. “Panayía spoke to me,” he says simply. “There will be a wave this time. I know there will.”

“It’s been months. We should have come across a wave a long time ago,” she says.

Grasping for reason, when faith is all that will do.

“It’s not normal for them to be so far apart. Why now?” she asks.

He brushes his beard with his fingers. He spots the elastic band on the floor and picks it up. Then he ties his beard neatly again. His hands are not trembling anymore. “Bring the good news to the others. Tomorrow we are taking off,” he insists. “God wills it.”

She shakes her head slightly, lost for words.

He takes her hand. “Tomorrow, we are leaving this planet,” he says again. “Today, we must celebrate.”

Yánnis always finds the celebrations on Nóstos II somewhat uncanny. Strange, paradoxical. This group of a few hundred souls has never set foot on Greece, on Earth even, and neither had their parents. And yet, they are Greeks. They are from Earth. They grow up with songs and images and words from a world long gone. Their culture, nothing but a pastiche of references, and yet deeply their own. They learn the histories by heart, the dates, the names, the genocides. They carry the bones of their ancestors with them, along with their stories of miracles. They carry the faith. And their faith has carried them far in return. God ordered them to find a new Earth for themselves when the old one was on the brink of destruction. They did as they were told.

Some of them doubt, of course, but this cannot be helped. Is this why they have been imprisoned here on this death of a planet? No, Yánnis knows, it is not, no matter how tempting it might be to entertain that possibility. This is on his family and his ancestors, which means it is on him and him alone. He is the one who should carry it. His shoulders. His hands.

The dining hall is filled with low round tables at which one has to sit cross-legged. Aromatic plants are lining the walls—jasmine, and gardenia, and honeysuckle. The fragrance fills the air sweetly, mixed with the musty scent of damp soil. It might rain later tonight.

Yánnis is sitting under the gravure of the first astronaut to set foot on Mars, planting the Greek flag, back in the 1960s. His name was Anastásios Bostantzóglou, and one of his bones is resting in that little box right beneath Léna’s.

Around Yánnis, in a circle, is his extended family, and then, in larger circles beyond them, sit the families that make up the rest of the ship’s human cargo. And next to him, of course, Panayótis. The son, he thinks of him now, for he can no longer think of him as his own. The son whom I love.

The nightingale song seems louder tonight.

Before the leader of each family, the mothers, the fathers, the grandparents if they are still alive, is a container filled with flatbread made in the old way, just flour and water and salt. It is sour and dense. Familiar. Before each adult in the room rests a cup with a single sip of wine in it.

Yánnis does the sign of the cross and most of the people in the hall do the same. He fights the urge to glance at the son, to etch his posture in his memory, his three fingers touching together, his hand to his forehead, to his belly, to the right shoulder, then to the left.

“Let us eat,” Yánnis says. He picks up the first flatbread. For a moment, he stares at his hands. My hands, he thinks. Can they do what needs to be done? He breaks the bread and passes it around. So do the other leaders. They eat their simple meal, and when they are done and they have all drunk their sip of wine, they know it is time to relax and enjoy a few hours of conversation and storytelling.

Even though tired, people seem cheerful enough. The conversations get louder as time passes. There is laughter, the occasional heated argument. It may sound like a fight, but it is all in good spirit. Let the bloods light up, as the ancestors said.

If there is any doubt among them that they will finally get off this barren planet, it doesn’t reach Yánnis’ ears. Only Maríka regards him with what could be concern. Or perhaps suspicion? Could it be that she knows what is to be done by him? But no, it couldn’t, of course.

As if to reassure him, Maríka hands him his bouzouki. “Play us something, Yánni, will you?”

He hasn’t played the instrument in a long time. It hasn’t felt right since Léna died. How could his hands make music ever again? But tonight, it seems fitting. His father taught him when he was young. He listened for hours to all the great players of old, to Manólis Chiótis, Yórgos Zabétas, Vassílis Tsitsánis, Chrístos Nikolópoulos and so many others, watched videos of them playing over and over and tried to imitate their hands as they trembled over the strings like birds caught in a snare.

It takes him a few moments, but then his hands recognize the instrument, the wood warms to him, and he remembers how to pinch the strings just so. He chooses an old, sorrowful song from 1961. I came back to your doorstep tonight / to sing for a last time. Maríka joins in, her voice deep and viscous, like warm molasses. I am leaving tomorrow, the lyrics go, everything is over. Maybe he should have chosen a different one. Is he giving away too much? Are they going to know? This is my last song / the birds cry along. But no, it is fitting. Yánnis sighs deeply as he riffs over the melody of Maríka’s voice. He remembers her as a child, her and Léna, long braids down their backs, singing doleful songs, even then.

Those sad Greeks with their sad, sad songs.

He turns to her. “Maríka,” he tells her. Maríka. She could have been his mate, in a different life, a different place. “Maríka, you sing like a nightingale.”

When putting the son to sleep that night, the last night, kneeling by the child’s berth, he looks at the boyish mouth and thinks again of Léna’s blackened breast, the mournful undoing of what used to signify nurture and life. He looks at the child’s slender limbs, and his mind conjures up the trembling limbs of fawns.

“Oh God,” he whispers. “Oh God.”

“What is it, papa?” Panayótis mumbles, almost lost to sleep.

Yánnis buries his face in the son’s curls and breathes in deeply. Not yet, please, not yet. Soon, but not yet, he tells himself. As soon as he’s asleep. He thinks of the childless Panayía, of Abraham, of Agamemnon.

The lonely God will provide.

“Shhh, son,” he says. “Listen to the nightingales. Just listen to the nightingales sing.”

Even in the isolation room, the birdsong is there, loud, ever-present, relentlessly looped. Why did they do that, the ancestors, the ones who built this ship?

Why do parents do the things they do?

His body is spent, crumpled on the floor of the isolation room, where his people have stored him while they deliberate about how best to deal with him. Him, Yánnis, the murderer—worse, the filicide.

The ancestors left them no laws—only a handful of old texts with which to rule their lives. Bibles and poems and songs. Perhaps these are all we need.

He brings his hands in front of his eyes, takes a good look at them. They are the same hands they’ve always been—and yet, not the same. Not at all.  

These hands of mine. Did I really think He would stay my hand at the last minute? Or that She would replace the son with a fawn, or a lamb, or a golden ram? Yes. I thought this was a test of my faith, I did. Was this my shortcoming? This hope that I could do the unthinkable wholeheartedly and still keep the promised son, my faith entire?

Did I fail the test? No fawn, no lamb. Only murder.

A son for a wave.

He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, wonders what it would be like lifting them to face the sky.

You are not the God I thought You were, he says silently. Nor I the man I thought I was.

His throat is dry and raw, as if he has been screaming for hours, although he hasn’t. He hasn’t made a sound since. Since.

And the nightingales, he wonders, why won’t they cease their singing?

He covers his ears with his palms, his eyes wide open, trying not to blink, because every time he blinks, there it is, the son’s body too terrible to contemplate, impossible to behold.

When Maríka walks in, hours later, she sits on the floor next to him, but she refuses to turn her gaze upon him.

“They are deciding what to do with you,” she says.

He nods, but he doesn’t reply.

“Why did you do it, Yánni?” She almost chokes on his name.

He is silent for a long time. She finally moves to leave, when he says, “God asked me to.”

She faces him. Her eyes are red. “Why? In return for what?”

“They’ve detected a wave, haven’t they?”

She understands now, he knows she does.

“Haven’t they?” he asks again.

She nods.

This is it, then. The seas are finally rough enough for this Greek ship to sail. He dared to think himself an Abraham, when all he ever was, an Agamemnon.

What a monstrous paradox faith is.

He doesn’t say anything, because there is nothing left to be said.

But she isn’t done. “This was not your decision to make!” she shouts.

“You are right,” he says. “It was God’s.”

A cruel God’s, he wants to say. The will of a God whom I do not know. But he doesn’t say any of this. Because who can live without faith?

Maríka turns around and leaves without a word.

It doesn’t take them long to decide. They need to wash themselves clean of him. Wouldn’t anyone? He does too. Maríka is back with the news. Her face is ashen. Her arms hang limply at her sides.

He stands up in the middle of the isolation room, ready to hear his fate. This time, she walks up to him. She puts her arms around him, startling him, and she hugs him tight and close.

“Do they believe me?” he asks.

She takes his head in her hands and looks him straight in the eyes.

“Some do. They thank you. I do, too.” She looks at him sternly. “We are ready to go.” She pauses. Tears shine in her eyes. Then she lets her words flow out. “Is it worth it, Yánni?” she asks. “Our lives, our survival, the new Earth, if killing children is what we have to do to get there? How can we go on after this?”

Poor, terrible Agamemnon.

He pinches a tuft of her hair between his fingers. “Weren’t we children, once, Maríka?” he asks. “Weren’t we sacrificed too?”

She stares at him, silent. The nightingales sing on, relentless, like an accusation. Is this what they’ve always been?

“We won’t get to see the new Earth,” he continues. “Our children . . . ” He trails off, his knees giving way underneath him. He steadies himself. “The children you will have won’t see this new Earth. They were never going to.”

She shakes her head, covers her eyes with her palms. “Yánni—” she says and stops.

“Tell me the rest of it,” he says. “It’s all right.”

She looks at the floor. “You are staying here,” she says. “We are leaving you here.”

Exile, then. They won’t even dirty their hands with his death. He nods.

“Will you take him with you?” he asks. “Put his bone next to his mother’s, have your children’s children bury him with his ancestors when they get there? Will you make it so?”

She tries to speak, but a sob escapes her instead. “Of course,” she says after a few moments. She’s crying now, doubled, her arm on her belly, as if she was the one who received his stab. “Of course I will, of course, of course.”

He waits until she collects herself and dries her face.

“You saved us,” she says. “I cannot understand the thing you did, how you brought yourself to do it.” She looks him in the eyes now. “And I will never forgive you.” Her voice breaks. “But you saved us all.”

For how long? he wants to ask. Until the next bargain? The next desperate weakness, the next loving sin?

Instead, he speaks the philosopher’s words again: “In one hundred and thirty years, we got no further than faith,” he says. “We’ve come so far, but we’ve really gotten no further than faith, Maríka.”

Few come to see him off. Maríka is there. Most of the others look at him with a mixture of terror and awe. They could have executed him, but what narrative would that be? What stories would their children tell, about how they were delivered from the nameless nomad planet that snared their ship, once upon a time? And about the holy wretch who saved them?

Maríka weeps as he puts on his suit, the material tight against his skin. His helmet feels small around his head, heavy. Once he seals it, it blocks out all sound but his breath.

He is ready to step off the ship and they are about to seal the airlock behind him, when Maríka orders everyone to stop.

People protest weakly. They want this over with.

“Maríka,” he says. “Let me go.”

“Just wait!” she yells, and she disappears into the ship.

She comes back a few minutes later, panting, holding the bouzouki. She hands him the instrument and nods. Doesn’t ask anyone’s permission. Doesn’t say a word.

He puts as much distance as possible between himself and the ship before takeoff. Not that it matters. What could possibly matter anymore?

He sits down and watches as the ship grips the invisible wave and departs, finally free of this place. The son’s body is flying again among the stars. Was it worth it, then? The sin, the pain, the sacrifice? The bargain? Yánnis pictures the icon of Panayía in the prayer room, the soft light of the candles, the silent, ancestral bones. He whispers his wife’s name, again and again, like a prayer. “Léna, Léna, Léna.”

Then he makes the sign of the cross for the last time and bids everything farewell.

Here I am, he thinks. Not Moriah, after all. Not even Aulis.

Yánnis takes in the barren landscape. The surface of the planet is ragged and marked by hundreds of craters, not unlike Earth’s old moon. A place of much violence. A broken place.

Then, he notices it. For the first time in his life, everything is silent. There are no birds here.

Nothing like my Plátres.

“And just what is Plátres?” he recites. “And this island, who knows it?”

Not even the ancestral poet had dared answer that.

He closes his eyes. For a moment, he thinks of praying, but he pushes through the reflex. Instead, he picks up his bouzouki. He wonders if the first Bostantzóglou to have owned it ever thought it would end up on a nomad planet, millions of kilometers from Earth.

Yánnis brings the instrument close to his torso, traces the ribs of its hollow body with his fingers. It feels strange in his arms now, lighter. He places his hands on the neck of the bouzouki and fumbles with the strings, his fingers clumsy in the protective layer of his suit.

He plays a chord. There is no sound, of course. Not here. There is no more music to be made by these hands. These hands, my hands. They’ve already played one more song than he’d expected. It should be enough. He holds his breath and listens, wishing for the song of nightingales.

He tries another silent chord.

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar. Originally from Greece, she has lived and studied in the US, UK, and Indonesia for several years. Her fiction has appeared in KROnline, Interfictions, Crossed Genres, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, and elsewhere. Occasionally, she tweets as @natalia_theodor.

The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon

Finbarr O’Reilly

“There are of a certainty mightier creatures, and
the lake hides what neither net nor fine can take.”
—William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

The first time I met Más, he was sitting on the quayside in Ballyvoloon, carving a nightmare from a piece of linden. Next to him on the granite blocks that capped the seawall lay a man’s weatherproof jacket and hat, in electric pink. The words “petro-safe” were pin-striped across them in broad white letters, as if a spell that would protect him from the mechanical monster he whittled.

Short of smoking a pipe, Más looked every inch a nineteenth-century whaler. Veined cheeks burned and burnished by sun and wind to a deep cherry gloss, thick gray hair matted and flattened from his souwester and whiskers stiff enough with salt to resist the autumnal breeze blowing in from the harbor mouth.

I had arrived in Ballyvoloon early on a Friday morning. My pilot would not fly till Monday, so I spent the weekend walking the town. Its two main streets, or “beaches” as the locals called them, ran east and west of a concrete, T-shaped pier.

It was near the bottom of the ‘T’ that Más set out his pitch every day, facing the water, but sheltered by thousands of tonnes of rock and concrete.

Ballyvoloon was a town best approached from the sea. The faded postcards on sale along the beachfront showed it from that rare perspective. Snapped from the soaring pleasure decks of ocean-going liners long scrapped or sunk, ribbons of harlequin houses rose from coruscant waters, split by the immense neo-Gothic cathedral that crowns the town. Nowadays, the fret-sawn fascias of pastel shopfronts shed lazy flakes of paint into the broad streets and squares below. It has faded, but there is grandeur there still.

Between the town’s rambling railway station and my hotel, I had passed a dozen or more artists, their wares tied to the railings of the waterside promenade, or propped on large boards secured to lampposts, but none dressed like Más. Nor did any carve like him.

“That looks realistic,” I said, my heart pounding, as he snicked delicate curls of blond wood from the block with a thick-spined blade.

“There’s not much point sugarcoating them,” he said, his voice starting as a matter-of-fact drawl, but ending in the singsong accent of the locals.

“How long have you been a sculptor?” I asked.

“I’m not a sculptor. This is just something to occupy the hands.”

“The devil’s playthings, eh?”

He stopped carving and looked up at me through muddy green eyes.

“Something like that.”

Más lowered the squid he was working on and cast around in the pocket of his jacket. He removed three of the monsters, perfectly carved, but in different sizes and woods, one stained black and polished. The colors seemed to give each one slightly different intents, but none was reassuring.

Other artists carved or drew or painted the squid, but they had smoothed out the lines, removed the barbs, the beaks, gave the things doe-eyes and even smiles and made them suitable to sit atop a child’s bedclothes or a living room bookshelf.

Más did the opposite. He made the horrific more horrifying. He made warm, once-living wood look like the doubly dead, glossy plastic of the squids. These were not the creatures we had released, but their more deadly and cunning offspring.

I hid my excitement as well as I could.

“Sixty for one or one hundred for a pair,” he said.

Más let the moment stretch until the sheer discomfort of it drove me to buy.

His mood brightened and he immediately began packing up his belongings. I had clearly overpaid and he could afford to call it a day.

“See you so,” he said, cheerfully and sauntered off into the town.

Once I was back at the hotel, I unwrapped the parcel and inspected the sculptures, to confirm my suspicions.

The other artists may have outsold Más’s squid six or seven times, but he was the only of them who had seen a real one.

“Twelve years after the squid were introduced, the west coast of Europe endured a number of strange phenomena. Firstly, the local gull population bloomed. The government and the squids’ manufacturer at the time said it was a sign of fish stocks returning to normal, that it was evidence the squid were successful in their mission.

“Local crab numbers also exploded, to the point that water inlets at a couple of coastal power stations were blocked. The company linked this to the increased gull activity, increasing the amount of food falling to the seafloor.”

—Hawes, J. How We Lost the Atlantic, p32

The first flight was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours before sunset. This would give me the best chance of spotting things in the water, as it was still bright enough to see and anything poking above the surface would cast a longer shadow.

The pilot, a taciturn, bearded fellow in his sixties called Perrott, flicked switches and toggles as he went through what passed for a safety briefing.

“If we ditch, it will take about fifteen minutes for the helo to reach us from the airport. The suits will at least make that wait comfortable, assuming, you know . . . ”

We both wore survival suits of neon-pink non-petro, covering everything but hands and heads. His was molded to his frame and visibly worn on the elbows and the seat of his pants. Mine squeaked when I walked and still smelled of tart, oleophobic soy.

“Yes. I know,” I said, as reassuringly as I could manage.

As he tapped dials and entered numbers on a clipboard, I thought of my first flight over water.

My sea training was in Wales, where an ancient, ex-RNLI helicopter dropped me about half a mile from shore. It was maybe twenty-five feet to the water, but the fall was enough to knock the breath out of me. The crew made sure I was still kicking and moved back over land. The idea was to get me to panic, I suppose. They needn’t have worried. The helicopter was away for a total of eight minutes and if my heart could have climbed my gullet to escape my chest, it would have.

After they pulled me back up, I asked the winchman how I had done.

“No worse than most,” he shouted.

He took a flashbang grenade from a box under the seat, pulled the pin, and dropped it out the open door. He counted down from four on his fingers. Over the roar of the rotors, I heard neither splash nor detonation. The winchman made sure I was harnessed, then pointed out the door and down.

A couple of miles away, I could see three or four squid making for a spot directly beneath us, all of them moving so fast they left a wake.

He gave me a torturer’s grin.

“Better than some.”

“We seen them first, the slicks. That’s what they looked like in the pictures, like some tanker or bulker had washed her tanks. But as we got close we could see it was miles and miles of chopped up fish. And the smell! That’s what the locals still call that summer—the big stink.

“When we got back we found out the squid had become more . . . hungry, I suppose, and instead of pulling the bits of plastic out of the water, they started pulling ‘em out of the fish. Sure we had been eating that fish for years and it never did us any harm.”

—Trevor Cunniffe, trawlerman, in an interview for Turn Your Back to the Waves, an RTÉ radio documentary marking fifty years since the squids’ introduction

After two days of fruitless flights, I was grounded by fog. Late in the afternoon, I went to a pub. I sat at the long side of the L-shaped bar, inhaling the fug of old beer and new urinal cakes.

The signage, painted in gold leaf on the large windows, had faded and peeled, so I asked a patron what the place was called. “Tom’s” was the only reply, offering no clue if this was the original name of the pub or the latest owner.

Between the bottles shelved on the large mirror behind the bar, I saw the figure of a man in a candy-striped pink jacket through the rippled privacy glass of the door. It opened and Más walked in. He gently closed it behind him and moved to a spot at the end of the bar. He kept his head down, but couldn’t escape recognizing some regulars and nodded a salute to them.

Emboldened by alcohol, I raised my drink.

“How is the water today?” I asked.

The barmaid gave me a look as if to ask what I was doing engaging a local sot, but I smiled at her for long enough that she wandered off, reassured or just bored at my insincerity.

“About the same,” said Más. “Visibility’s not very good.”

“No,” I said. “That’s why I’m in here. No flights today.”

“Are you off home then,” Más asked.

I interpreted the question as an invitation and walked over to take the stool next to him.

“Not quite,” I said. “Will you have a drink?”

“I will,” he said. “So, what has you in town?”

At first, Más didn’t seem too bothered when I explained who I worked for, or at least he didn’t ask the usual questions or put forward the usual conspiracy theories about the squid.

“A job’s a job, I suppose.”

His eyes wrinkled, amused at a joke hidden to me. “So do ye all have jobs in England, then?”

Ireland had been on universal income for the better part of two decades. It was hard to see how people like Más would have survived otherwise.

“No, not by a long chalk. The only reason I got this one is I wasn’t afraid to cross the sea in a plane.”

“More fool you.”

“You have to die of something, I told them. And it was quite exciting, in the end.”

As the light faded, the mid-afternoon drinkers gave way to a younger, louder crowd, but Más and I still sat, talking.

I described the huge reservoir near where I lived in Rutland, where people could still swim and sail and fish, and how everyone worried that the squid would somehow reach it, denying us access, like Superior or the Caspian.

He asked me what on Earth would make me leave such a place.

“I wanted to see the world. I needed a job,” I said.

He laughed. “Those used to be the reasons people joined the Navy.”

Perrott’s plane was old, but well serviced. It started first time and once we finished our climb, the engine settled into a bagpipe-like drone.

We crossed the last headland and the cheerful baize below, veined in drystone walls, gave way to gray waves, maned in white.

He radioed the Cork tower to tell them we were now over open water and that the rescue team was on formal standby.

He adjusted the trim of the plane to a point where he was happy to let the thing fly itself and joined me in scanning the waters below.

It was less than half an hour, until his pilot’s eye spotted it. Perrott took the controls again and banked to give me a better view. I let the video camera run, while I used the zoom lens to snap any identifying features.

From the size of the blurred shape rippling just beneath the surface, I could tell it was old, seventh or eighth generation, perhaps, but I really wanted a more detailed look.

I told Perrott I would like to make another pass.

“If only we had a bomb, eh?” he said. Sooner or later, everyone suggests it.

“We tried that,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

Perrott had signed a non-disclosure agreement before the flight. It didn’t matter what I told him. Most of it was already on the Internet, in any case.

“Yes. First they bombed an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico and opened up its wellhead. Miles from shore, so any oil that escaped would be eaten by the squid or burned in the fire.”

Hundreds of thousands of the things had come, enough that you could see the black stain spread on satellite images. I had only watched the video. I couldn’t imagine how chilling it had been to observe it happen live.

“Then the Americans dropped three of the biggest non-nukes they’ve got on them.”

“It didn’t work, then?”

“No. Any squid more than a dozen feet or so below the surface were protected by the water. We vaporized maybe half of them. After that they stayed deep, mostly.”

I didn’t tell Perrott about the Mississippi and how the squid had retaliated. Let him read that on the Internet too.

“Well, they may be mindless, but they’re not stupid,” he said.

We flew on until the light failed, but, as if it had heard him, the beast did not reappear.

“It would be wrong to think of the squid as a failure of technology. The technology worked, from the plastic filtration, to the self-replication and algorithmic learning.

“Also do not forget that they succeeded in their original purpose—they did clean up the waters and they did save fish stocks from extinction.

“The failure, if you can truly call it that, is ours. We failed to see that life, even created life, will never behave exactly as we intend.

“The failure was not in the squids’ technology, or in their execution. It was in our imagination.”

—From the inaugural address of Ireland’s last president, Francis Robinson

A basket of chips and fried ‘goujons’ of catfish had appeared in front of us, gratis. I dived in, sucking sea salt and smoky, charred fish skin from my fingertips. Más looked over the bar into the middle distance.

“Don’t tell me you don’t like fish,” I said. “That would be too funny.”

“That’s not real fish.”

Más had progressed to whiskey and a bitter humor sharpened his tongue.

“It tastes pretty real,” I said. I had heard all the scare stories about fish farming.

He held up a calloused hand, as if an orator or bard about to recite. The other was clenched, to punctuate his thoughts.

“Why is it, do you think, that we are trying to replicate the things we used to have?

“Like, if most people can still eat ‘fish,’ or swim in caged bloody lidos, or if cargo comes by airship or whatever, then the more normal it becomes. And it shouldn’t be bloody normal. It’s not normal.”

The barmaid rolled her eyes. Clearly, she had heard the rant before.

I told him I agreed with the swimming bit inasmuch as I wouldn’t personally miss it terribly if I could never do it again, but that farmed fish didn’t bother me and that I thought most people never considered where their goods came from, even before the squid.

Disappointment, whether at me or the world, wilted in his face before he let the whiskey soften him again. His shoulders lowered, his hands relaxed and the melody of his voice reasserted itself.

“When I was a boy, my father once told me a story about trying to grow trees in space.”

I coughed mid-chew and struggled to dislodge a crumb of batter from my throat. With tears in my eyes, I waved him on. I don’t know why, but it amused me to hear an old salt like Más talk about orbital horticulture.

“Well, these guys on Spacelab or wherever, they tried growing them in perfect conditions, perfect nutrients, perfect light, even artificial gravity. They would all shoot straight up, then keel over and die. Every tree seed they planted—pine, ash, oak, cypress—they all died. Nobody could figure out what was wrong. Everything a plant could need was provided, perfectly measured. These were the best cared for plants in the world.”

“In the solar system,” I ribbed him.

“Right. In the solar system. Except for one thing. Do you know what was missing?

“No. Tell me.”

“A breeze. Trees develop the strength, the woody cells, to support their weight by resisting the blow of the wind. Without it, they falter and sicken.”

I didn’t really get his point and told him so.

“You can’t sharpen a blade without friction. You can’t strengthen a man, or a civilization, without struggle. Airships and swimming pools and virtual bloody sailing. It’s all bollocks. We should be hauling these things out of the water, like they said we would.”

He gestured through the window of the bar to the gray bulk of the cathedral looming in the fog.

“There was a reason Jesus was a fisherman,” said Más, as if a closing statement.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

The barmaid leaned over the bar to clear the empty baskets.

“Jesus was a carpenter, Más,” she said.

“Six sea scouts, aged eleven to fourteen, had left the fishing town of Castletown-berehaven in a rigid inflatable boat, what they call a ‘rib.’ Their scout leader was at the helm, an experienced local woman named De Paor.

“The plan was to take the boys and girls out around nearby Bere Island to spot seals and maybe porpoises.

“About an hour into the journey, contact was lost. The boat was never found, but most of the bodies washed up a day or so later, naked and covered in long ragged welts. Initial theories said they must have been chewed up by a propeller on a passing ship, but there was nothing big enough near the coast.

“Post-mortem examinations clinched it. The state pathologist pulled dozens of small plastic barbs from each child. They were quickly identified as belonging to the squid.

“A later investigation concluded that the fault lay with a cheap brand of sunscreen one of the children had brought and shared with her shipmates. A Chinese knock-off of a French brand, it contained old stocks of petro-derived nanoparticles. Just as the squid had pulped tonnes of fish to get at the plastic in their flesh in year twelve, they had tried to remove all traces of the petro from the children.”

—Jennings, Margaret, When The World Stopped Shrinking, p34

Más’s house was beyond the western end of the town, past a small turning circle for cars. A path continued to a rocky beach, but was used only by courting couples, dog walkers, or drinking youngsters. A wooden gate led off the beach, where a small house sat behind a quarter-acre of lawn and an old boathouse.

Síle, the barmaid, had told me where he lived. Más usually gave up carving at about four, she said, had a few drinks in a few places and was usually home about six.

I started for the main house, when I heard a noise. A low murmur, like a talk radio station heard through a wall. It was coming from the boathouse.

I made my way across the lawn. Almost unconsciously I was walking crab-like on the balls of my feet, with my arms outstretched for balance. The boathouse was in bad shape. Green paint had blistered on the ship-lapped planks and lichen or moss had crept halfway up the transom windows above the large double doors.

The fabric of the place was so weathered I didn’t have to open them. Planks had shrunk and split at various intervals, leaving me half a dozen spyholes to the interior. I quietly pressed my eye to one and peered inside.

Under the light of a single work lamp, I could see Más standing at a bench, his back to me, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Without the souwester, he looked more like an ageing rock star than a fisherman and more like twice my age than the three times I had assumed.

Beyond him lay several bulky piles, perhaps of wood, covered by tarpaulin and shrouded in shadow.

A flagstone floor ran all the way to the other wall, where there lay a dark square of calm water—a man-made inlet of dressed stone, from which rose the cold smell of the sea. A winch was bolted to the floor opposite a rusty iron gate that blocked the water from the estuary. Smaller, secondary doors above protected the interior from the worst of the elements.

As he worked, Más whistled.

I recognized enough of the tune to know it was old, but its name escaped me. It felt as manipulative as most traditional music—as Más whistled the chorus, it sounded like a happy tune, but I knew there would be words to accompany it and odds were, they would tell of tragedy.

Más began to wind down, cleaning tools with oil-free cloths. I had told myself this was not spying, this was interest, or concern. But suddenly, I became embarrassed. I silently padded back across his lawn. I would call on him another night.

As I stepped back onto the path between two overgrown rhododendron bushes, my foot collided with a rusty old garden lantern with a musical crash. I just had enough presence of mind to turn again so I was facing the house, trying to look like I had just arrived.

It was in time for Más to see me as he emerged from the boathouse to investigate. I waved as nonchalantly as I could.

He leaned back inside the door and must have flicked a switch, as his garden was suddenly bathed in light from a ring of security floods under the eaves of his house.

I waved again as he re-emerged, confident that he could at least see me this time.

“Oh it’s you,” he said.

“Hi. Yes, the barmaid, Síle, gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.

“Well, come in so. I have no tea, I’m afraid. I may have some chicory.”

I raised the bottle in my hand and gave it a wiggle.

“In the early days after their ‘revolution,’ the squid featured in one scare story after another. They would evolve legs and stalk the landscape like Wells’s Martians, they would form a super-intelligence capable of controlling the world’s nuclear arsenal, or they would start harvesting the phytoplankton that provide most of the world’s breathable oxygen.

“In the end, they did what biological organisms do—they found their own equilibrium. Any reactions of theirs since are no more a sign of ‘intelligence’ than a dog defending its front yard.”

—Edward Mission, The Spectator’s Big Book of Science

Perrott banked the plane again. It was the first flight during which I had felt ill. The day was squally and overcast, the sky lidded with a leaden dome of cloud.

The squid breached the water, rolling its “tentacles” behind it. There was no reason for the maneuver, according to the original designers, which made it look even more biological. But even from this altitude, I could see the patterns of old plastic the thing had used to build and periodically repair itself.

“He’s a big one,” said Perrott, who was clearly enjoying himself.

The beast dived again. Just as it sank out of sight in the dying light, I counted eight much smaller shadows behind it. Each breached the surface of the water and rolled their tentacles, just as their colossal “parent” had.

“Shit.”

These were sleeker machines, of a green so deep it may as well have been black. There was no wasted musculature, no protrusions to drag in the water as they slipped by. These things would never reach the size of the squid that had manufactured them, but that didn’t matter. They were fast and there were more of them.

“Problem?” said Perrott.

“Yes. Somebody isn’t playing by the rules.”

“I had a friend. Val. Killed himself.”

Más had had a lot to drink, mostly the whiskey I had brought, but also a homemade spirit, which smelled faintly methylated. His face sagged under the influence of alcohol, but his voice became brighter and clearer with each drink. The stove roared with heat, the light from its soot-stained window washing the kitchen in sepia.

I wasn’t sure if he was given to maudlin statements of fact such as this when drunk, or whether this was an opening statement, so I said “I’m sorry to hear that. When did that happen?”

“A while back.”

I was still adrift—I didn’t know if it was a long time ago and he had healed, or recently and his emotions were strictly battened down. Before I could ask another qualifying question, he continued.

“When we were teenagers, a couple of years after the squid were introduced, Val and I went fishing from the pier one October when the mackerel were in.”

“By God, they were fun to catch. Val had an old fiberglass rod that belonged to his dad, or his granddad. The cork on the handle was perished, the guides were brown with rust, but as long as you used a non-petro line, the squid didn’t bother you in those days. We caught a lot of fish that year.

“So as we pulled them out, I would unhook them and launch them back into the tide. They were contaminated with all sorts of stuff, heavy metals, plastic, even carbon fiber from the boat hulls. After I had done this once or twice, Val asked me why. I said ‘well you can’t eat them, so why not let them go.’ And Val said ‘fuck them, they’re only fish.’

“After that, every fish he caught, every one, he would brain and chop up there on the pier and leave for the gulls to eat. He was my friend, but he was cruel.

“The trouble with the squid is they think about us the way Val thought about fish. We’re not food, we’re not sport. I’m not sure they know what we are. I’m not sure they care.”

For a moment, sobriety surfaced. Más looked forlorn. I dreaded the words that would come next. I had become quite good at predicting his laments and tirades.

“We don’t fight for it, for the territory, or for the people we lost. For the love of God, these things ate children, and we just accept it. We should be out there every bloody day, hunting these things.”

I told him I understood the desire to hurt them, that many had tried, but it just didn’t work like that. That most people preferred to pretend they just weren’t there, like fairy-tale villagers skirting the wood where the big bad wolf lived.

“But why,” he demanded.

“Well they are ‘protected’ now, for starters,” I said. “They fight back. But I suppose the main reason is it’s easier than the reality.”

“Easier,” he scoffed.

He raised his glass, to let me know it was my turn to speak. But I didn’t know how to comfort him. So I let him comfort me.

“Your family owned trawlers, right? What’s it like? To go out on the ocean?”

Drunk, in the heat of his kitchen, I closed my eyes and listened.

“The raincoat suicides were a foreseeable event inasmuch as such events happen after many profound and well-publicised changes to people’s understanding of the world around them. The Wall Street Crash, Brexit, the release of the Facebook Files. It is a form of end-of-days-ism that we have seen emerge again and again, from military coups to doomsday cults.

“Most of the people who took their own lives had previously displayed signs of moderate to severe mental illness. That the locations of more than two hundred of the deaths were confined to areas with high sea cliffs, such as Dover in England or the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare, adds fuel to the notion that these were tabloid-inspired suicides, sadly, but predictably, adopted by already unwell people.”

—Jarlath Kelleher, The Kraken sleeps: reporting of suicide as ‘sacrifice’ in British and Irish media (Undergraduate thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology)

He pulled the tarpaulin off with a flourish. The green-black boat sat upside down on two sawhorses, like an orca, stiff with rigor mortis, beached on pointed rocks.

It was a naomhóg. In the west, I found out later, it was called a currach, but this far south, people called it a naomhóg. Depending on who you asked, it meant ‘little saint’ or ‘young saint,’ as if the namers were asking God and the sea to spare it.

It was made of a flexible skin, stretched tightly over a blond wooden frame. I dropped to the floor to look inside, still unable to talk. I knew nothing about boat-building in those days, but the inside looked like pure craftsmanship.

It was almost the most rudimentary of constructed vessels and in place of oars it had long spars of unfeathered wood. But where a normal naomhóg was finished with hide or canvas and waterproofed with pitch, Más’s boat was hulled in what looked like glossy green-black plastic stretched over its ribs and stapled in place on the inside of the gunwale.

I ran my hand along the hull. The skin, which looked constantly wet, was bone-dry and my fingers squeaked. They left no fingerprints. I knew instantly what it was, but I wished I didn’t.

“Will you come with me? I’d like to show you my harbor. We might even catch something.”

He was so proud, of his vessel, of his hometown. I couldn’t say anything else.

“I will,” I lied. “Tomorrow, if the fog lifts.”

“I remember the harbour before the squid. The water teemed with movement. Ships steamed up the channel to the container ports upriver, somehow avoiding the small launches, in a complicated dance against outgoing or incoming tides, taking people to and from work at the steelworks on the nearest of the islands. Under the guidance of a harbourmaster sitting in his wasp-striped control tower, warships slipped sleekly from the naval base to hunt drug smugglers or Icelandic trawlers. An occasional yacht tied up at the floating pontoon of a small waterside restaurant. In summer, children dared each other to ‘tombstone’ from the highest point of the piers.

“When I returned to the island, it might as well have been surrounded by tarmac, like a derelict theme park. Nobody even looked to the sea. It was easier that way.”

—Elaine Theroux, The Great Island

It was bright outside when I left Más’s house. He had more friends, or at least acquaintances, than I had thought. None outwardly seemed to blame me for what had happened. Many expressed surprise he had made it that far.

Más himself had been less forgiving. After I turned him in, the local police superintendent let me talk to him. Más told me he hated me, called me a “fucking English turncoat.” He spat in my face.

I told him he didn’t understand. That he had been lucky until now. Lucky he hadn’t been killed. That they hadn’t retaliated.

I wanted to tell him we were working on things to kill them, to infect them, to turn them on each other. I wanted to tell him to wait until the harbor mouth was closed, that the nets were in place, that he could soon take to the water off Ballyvoloon every day. That I would go with him.

But I couldn’t and none of it would have mattered anyway.

I had betrayed him. And I found I could live with it.

Between Más’s house and Ballyvoloon is a harbor-side walkway known simply as ‘the water’s edge.’ The pavement widens dramatically in two places to support the immense red-brick piers of footbridges that connect the old Admiralty homes, on the other side of the railway line, to the sea. I climbed the wrought iron steps to the peak and surveyed the harbor, my arms resting on the mossy capstones of the wall. The sun was rising over the eastern headland, bright and cold.

I took the phone from my pocket and watched the coroner’s video.

It was mostly from one angle, from a camera I had often passed high atop an antique lamppost preserved in the middle of the main street. The quality was good, no sound, but the colors of Ballyvoloon were gloriously recreated in bright sunshine. The camera looked east, past the pier and along the beach to the old town hall, now a Chinese takeaway.

There, just visible over the roof of the taxi stand office, sat Más on his rock, whittling and chipping at a piece of wood. The email from the coroner said he had sat there there all morning, but she must have supposed that I didn’t need to watch all of that.

At 4pm, his usual knocking-off time, he stood, stretched his back in such an exaggerated way I thought I could hear the cracks of his vertebrae, and packed his things into a large, waterproof sail bag. Carrying his pink-and-white jacket over one arm, he walked toward the camera, hailing anyone he met with a wave, but no conversation.

However, rather than cross the beach for the bar at Tom’s, he turned left down the patched concrete of the pier.

At that time of day it was deserted. The last of the stalls had packed up, the tourists had made for their trains or their buses.

The angle switched to another camera, on the back of the old general post office, perhaps. It showed Más standing with his toes perfectly aligned to the edge of the concrete pier’s ‘T.’ After a few minutes, he removed several things from his pockets, folded his jacket, and placed it on the concrete.

He opened the bag and withdrew a banana-yellow set of antique, old-petro waterproofs. He stepped into the thick, rubbery trousers before donning the heavy jacket and securing its buttons and hooks.

He walked to the top of the rotten steps, looked up at the cathedral and made a sign of the cross. Then he descended the steps, sinking from view.

There was nothing for more than a minute, but the video kept running, the pattern of wavelets kept approaching the shore, birds kept wheeling in the sky.

In a series of small surges, the prow of the naomhóg emerged from under the pier, then Más’s head, his face towards the town, then the rest of his body and the boat.

I had to hand it to him. He could have launched his vessel at dead of night from the little boathouse where he had built the others, but he chose the part of town most visible to the cameras, at a time when few people would be around to stop or report him.

With each pull on the oars, he sculled effortlessly through the gentlest of swells, his teeth bared in joy.

His yellow oilskins shone in contrast against the dark greens of his boat and the surrounding water as he made for the mouth of his harbor and the open sea beyond.

“Yet fish there be, that neither hook, nor line, nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine.”

—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

About the Author

Finbarr O’Reilly is an Irish speculative fiction writer who likes to explore how broken technologies or unearthly events affect intimate locales. Why would you want to write about alien battleships invading New York when you can imagine little green men asking for directions from a short-tempered undertaker in Carrigtwohill, Co Cork?

Finbarr has worked as a journalist for almost twenty years, most of those as a sub-editor (copy-editor) in newspapers such as the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, and Daily Telegraph. He currently works as the production editor of a magazine for car dealers. He believes it is testament to his powers of imagination that he has never purchased an automobile and doesn’t drive.

Like many Irish writers, Finbarr lives in self-imposed exile. He currently resides with his wife and two children in a small town in Lincolnshire, UK, too far from the sound of gulls and the smell of saltwater.

The Psychology Game

Xia Jia

This is a globally popular reality TV show.

The structure of the show is simple. The screen is split in half: on the left, the patient reclines in a sling chair; on the right sits the therapist. To preserve anonymity for both participants, their faces are replaced by vivid software-generated 3D cartoon versions and their voices processed to remove identifying characteristics. Nonetheless, through facial expressions, gestures, poses, and tone, the audience can grasp the total context of the conversation.

The patient and the therapist are not in the same room (sometimes they may even be on opposites sides of the globe), and the only way for them to speak to each other is through the show’s communication link. Their conversation is live-streamed in its entirety, except for occasional bits of personally identifiable information that are automatically filtered by software. Both participants volunteer to be on the show. The patient receives a fee, enough to pay for the counseling, and the therapist gets to make a name. Although many have raised concerns about the format of the show, it has consistently performed well in the ratings.

On the show, you hear the most private confessions of other people. You realize that happy people are all alike, but every unhappy person is unhappy in their own way. Step by step you begin to play the role, and you see yourself reflected in those people. You feel that they are voicing doubts and conflicts in your heart that you’ve never been able to put into words. Yes, yes, it’s exactly like that, you say to yourself again and again, what would I do if that happened to me?

You feel curious, excited, disgusted, angry, frustrated, sympathetic, melancholic, oppressed, fearful, anguished, confused, desperate, ecstatic . . .

During the broadcast, there is a constantly increasing counter in the lower right corner of the screen, telling the audience how many viewers, struggling with pain, have found courage through this show and managed to seek professional help.

Therapist: Did you say you’ve been feeling unwell?

Patient: Yes . . . I think I might be suffering from depression.

Therapist: When did it start?

Patient: About a month ago.

Therapist: What, specifically, has been bothering you?

Patient: I’m tired, and I lack energy. Sometimes I stay in bed the whole day, not wanting to get up.

Therapist: How’s your sleep?

Patient: I wake up every morning around three or four, and then can’t fall asleep again. That’s the worst part.

The most controversial part of the show is a little ritual before every counseling session. The patient is presented with two pills, one red and one blue, and the patient must pick one—an obvious homage to The Matrix. The two pills represent two possible therapists, one an actual, licensed mental health professional, and the other a virtual creation of artificial intelligence software.

Neither the patient nor the audience knows whether the talking head on the other half of the screen is a human or a machine. 

Therapist: Anything else?

Patient: Well, I have this unsettling feeling.

Therapist: Tell me more about this unsettling feeling.

Patient: I just feel . . . very anxious. All sorts of different thoughts run through my brain, and every little thing seems so involved that I don’t want to do anything.

Therapist: When you say you don’t want to do anything, is it because of the effort it takes?

Patient: It’s not about effort, but because it feels . . . so uninteresting.

Therapist: You’ve lost interest in things?  

Patient: Yes. Eating, shopping, going to the movies . . . everything feels pointless.

Therapist: Well, it does sound like you are depressed.

Every episode lasts an hour. During the show, the audience can log in at any point to vote for or against the therapist, and the vote tally is updated live. Therapists whose support falls too low are eliminated from the show.

However, no one knows if the eliminated therapist is human or machine. For every therapist on the show, the producers provide the audience with a personal profile replete with details—birth date, family history, and a full CV. After every episode, passionate debates erupt online as viewers scrutinize every aspect of those profiles, seizing on the most minor apparent discrepancies. If someone claims to have gone to school with one of the therapists and posts their class photo or snapshots of parties, someone else will jump in the next second to point out signs that the photos are faked. The truth remains ever elusive.

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer defeated the reigning chess world champion, Garry Kasparov. In 2011, supercomputer Watson, jointly developed by IBM and the University of Texas, defeated two human contestants on the most popular quiz show in America, Jeopardy!. In 2017, a documentary series about an intelligent talking toy called iTalk and its effect on autistic children, “Let’s Have a Talk,” touched the hearts of hundreds of millions around the globe. In 2020, the online livecast reality show “The Psychology Game,” produced by Microsoft Research Asia and Safer Media once again brought artificial intelligence into the spotlight.

Interviewer: What made you sign up for the show in the first place?

Patient: I’d say curiosity, for the most part. I watched a few episodes, thought it was interesting, and decided to sign up and have a go.

Interviewer: Have you ever had psychological counseling before?

Patient: No. I’ve considered it, but it never got beyond that.

Interviewer: Is it because getting counseling still comes with a bit of stigma?

Patient: Yeah. Even though nowadays getting counseling is so common—how does that joke go? “It’s out of the blue for someone to not be blue!”—I still get the jitters when it comes to making an actual appointment with a mental health professional. It’s like that superstition about how there’s nothing wrong with you when you don’t go to the doctor, but as soon as you go, all kinds of problems show up . . . I don’t feel comfortable talking to my family about it either because they’ll worry. And what will others say if they knew I’m getting counseling?

Interviewer: But you don’t feel these worries when it’s on TV?

Patient: Yeah . . . if I get to be on TV, I don’t care about saving face. Besides, on the show no one can see your real face, you know?

In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing suggested in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” a test for whether machines are able to develop the same kind of intelligence as human beings, based on the principle of imitation.

Imagine a sealed dark room, where a person of common intellect (B) sits next to a machine (A). There is another person outside of the room (C) who feeds a constant stream of questions to A and B, who will provide their answers to C with typed answers on a paper tape. If C is unable to tell A and B apart after several rounds of interrogation, then it seems that we must acknowledge the absence of a fundamental difference between a person and a machine.

The key to the Turing Test is that there is no rigorous definition of “mind/consciousness/soul.” Turing thus sets aside the question “Can machines think?” and substitutes a more operable question: “Can machines do what we thinking beings can do?”

But can those two questions really replace each other?

For example, machines can write poetry, and some machine-generated poems read better than the productions of humans without a talent for poetry. If we devise an artificial set of standards for scoring poems, it’s very possible that we can design a machine whose poetry will score better than the vast majority of humans’. But is this really equivalent to how humans understand and appreciate a poem?

Interviewer: So, being on the show isn’t quite the same as real life, is it?

Patient: Right . . . it feels like I’m performing a little bit.

Interviewer: Do you mean that what happened on the show was an act?

Patient: I wouldn’t go that far. It’s like this: while I talked about my life on TV, I felt like I was also observing myself from the side. I wanted to see what was wrong with this person, why was he so miserable. This feeling got especially strong when I told this sad story—something I’d never told anyone else—suddenly, I felt so empathetic. How on Earth was he able to keep this all to himself, for all those years? Tears started to roll. And before I knew it, I was bawling.

Interviewer: Right, I saw that part too.

Patient: I wasn’t going to tell the story, and I didn’t plan to cry at all. A complete surprise.

Interviewer: Did you feel better after crying it out?

Patient: It doesn’t work like that. That was only the start, and I have to learn to face my emotions—the therapist said so.

Interviewer: Did you find the therapist helpful?

Patient: I really agree with one thing that he said: the cognitive process behind the emotions is more important than the emotions themselves.

Interviewer: What does that mean to you?

Patient: Let’s take the example of the sad story I told on TV. Everyone feels sad once in a while, right? But at the time when that happened, I forced myself to feel nothing. Everyone thinks that a man can never show that he’s hurt. Even if he’s falling apart, he’s got to stand there and take it. So that’s what I did, but I never forgave myself for it.

Interviewer: Is this the cognitive process behind your emotions?

Patient: Yes. Deep down, I knew that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be, but I had to keep up the show. Everyone thinks I live a perfect life, but inside, I’ve always felt like a failure.

At an international conference in 2013, Hector Levesque, a computer scientist from the University of Toronto, presented a paper criticizing the Turing Test. He argues that Turing’s human-machine games cannot accurately reflect AI’s level of intelligence. The real challenge for AI is answering certain types of questions:

Kate said “thank you” to Anna because her warm hug made her feel much better. Who felt better?

A. Kate
B. Anna

Questions like this are based on the linguistic phenomenon of anaphora. To determine the antecedent of “her,” one needs not a grammar textbook, a dictionary, or an encyclopedia, but common sense. How can an AI understand under what circumstance one person would say “thank you” to another? How can an AI know what actions would make one “feel much better”? These question touch upon the very essence of human language and social interaction, the very areas where AI remains most limited.

It’s easy to build a robot that can play chess with people, but far harder to create a robot that can understand the losing chess player’s complaints.

Interviewer: Do you think your problems can be resolved?

Patient: The therapist says so, but I’ll need time.

Interviewer: Do you still want to continue with the counseling sessions then?

Patient: Probably, yeah. To be honest, before the show, I didn’t really know what counseling involved. I felt quite repulsed back then—felt like letting someone dissect your brain and inspect the pieces. But therapists don’t have superpowers. They can’t read your mind; you have to tell them what you’re thinking.

Interviewer: You mean you don’t feel as repulsed anymore?

Patient: Yeah, I’m starting to understand what this is all about.

Interviewer: So you would say that this show was useful to you?

Patient: Yeah, I didn’t expect that this would happen.

Interviewer: May I ask when would be your next counseling session?

Patient: I’ve made my appointments already. I’ll go once every week, starting next Tuesday.

Interviewer: Will you be seeing the same therapist you met on the show?

Patient: Yes, the same one.

Interviewer: You’ll see him in person?

Patient: No, we’ll use video chat, same as on the show. Even our faces will be masked. It feels more relaxed that way.

In counseling, sometimes the therapist needs to play the role of a neutral, trustworthy listener and companion, but sometimes the therapist needs to engage with the troubling scenario; sometimes they must call upon logos, other times pathos.

Machines cannot interpret human emotions, but they can learn to use certain procedures to process problems involving emotions. This is not unlike how a machine that does not understand what poems are can still compose passable poetry. From this perspective, it’s possible to conclude that machines can do the job of therapists, because psychological counseling is built on the belief that human emotions can be effectively processed, just like poetry and a lot of other things.

However, sometimes the urge to solve a problem is also the cause of the problem in the first place. Take insomnia as an example. For some insomniacs, the source of their inability to fall asleep is the desperate craving for sleep. “I can’t fall asleep” and “I really want to sleep” become a mutually-reinforcing cycle of paradox. A machine therapist can tell the patient: “The reason you can’t fall asleep is because you are too desperate to fall asleep. Take it easy.” But “take it easy” can’t break the cycle of “I can’t fall asleep—I really want to sleep” because ultimately, trying to “take it easy,” in this case, is equivalent to “I really want to sleep.”

The same applies to some cases of depression. Depressed patients are often frustrated by the feeling that they’re failing at “I want to be happy,” which then leads them to ruminate on “what can make me happy?” However, asking this very question makes “I want to be happy” an impossible mission. For depressed patients, “I want to be happy” and “I can’t be happy” then become a circular paradox similar to the insomnia cycle. When there’s no distinction between cause and effect, there’s no place to begin the processing.

Machines cannot process such paradoxes, and humans who are accustomed to machines’ way of thinking are not any better. However, if we can forget about the paradox—forget about the effect, forget about the cause, forget about the ends and the means, forget about “I can’t fall asleep” and “I want to be happy,” even forget about this irksome “I”—then the paradox itself will vanish altogether.

The Chan Buddhist Master Huineng once said: “The Bodhi is not a tree, and the mirror does not reflect. In eternal nothingness, how would specks of dust collect?”

Interviewer: One more question—are you ever worried that your therapist might be a machine?

Patient: Well, how do I put this—

Interviewer: We won’t get into the question of whether machines should be therapists. Let’s focus just on your feelings. Have you ever felt worried, at all?

Patient: I guess I don’t think people are any more reliable than machines. We used to question driverless vehicles, question how machines can cook, diagnose patients, and prescribe drugs, but nowadays these things are so commonplace. Machines won’t drink and drive, won’t spit in your food because they are having a bad day, won’t prescribe you expensive brand drugs to get the manufacturer’s kickback. Anyway, I never worry about having machines do these things for me.

Interviewer: But isn’t psychological counseling different?

Patient: I don’t think it’s that different. People used to oppose AI diagnosticians too. They said that machines can’t empathize, and they don’t know what it means to be in pain or uncomfortable, but then all these objections turned out to be irrelevant. Mental illnesses are illnesses too, and there is a process to be followed. Human or machine, why does it matter—as long as they solve the patient’s problem? And to be honest, human therapists have feelings too. If you keep on unloading your emotional garbage onto them, wouldn’t they suffer too? Sometimes I think using human therapists is kind of inhumane.

Interviewer: You mean that it might actually be better if we handed everything over to artificial intelligence?

Patient: Depends on which one works better. Technology is always evolving and getting better, and maybe it’s inevitable that machines will replace humans one day.

Perhaps the key to the problem is this: in an era of technological explosion, we are forced to constantly evaluate and distinguish between the kinds of work that absolutely require human judgment, and the kinds of work that can be performed by machines (or are even better when performed by machines). During this process, our pride at our own uniqueness is constantly assaulted. We may ultimately find out that in many situations, a human being is not essential to another human being.

This will make us anxious, frustrated, or even lead us to plunge down the dark pit of despair, but at the same time, it also forces us to think about what humans really mean to each other—similar to the way each psychological counseling session is also an opportunity to understand ourselves better as we dig into our own emotions and thoughts.

To date, machines are still unable to answer that oldest of questions, “What is human?” Even as everything accelerates around us, we mustn’t forget to turn back and reexamine the oracle from thousands of years ago:

γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Originally published in Chinese in Knowledge is Power, September 2015.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Recently, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990″ as the topic of her dissertation. She now teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

She has been publishing fiction since college in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld, Nature, and Upgraded.

Intro to Prom

Genevieve Valentine

1. Marine Biology

Jack had promised to pick her up for fishgazing, but he’s late, and by the time he comes out of his house she’s forgotten her promise and started counting the windows.

“Celandine,” he says, quietly. Disappointed. He can always tell when she’s been counting; they’ve had time to get used to each other.

She makes herself look at him. She smiles, smooths her hands down her skirt, swings a leg over her bike. (One hundred seventy-two dark windows—she hadn’t gotten to the end of the last row, and it feels like leaving something undone, like a door’s still open or water’s boiling.) She pedals until her legs are shaking. Behind them, dark windows. Ahead of them, the sky.

They make good time even with the detour around Willow Square, and the fish are still feeding when they get to the hill. They leave their bikes on low ground—Mara and Robbie never come this close, it’s fine—and walk on foot up the path they’ve worn into the grass.

Dead birds are everywhere underfoot (they kept trying to escape), and it takes a while to reach the top of the hill without stepping on the bones. Back in town, the strings of streetlights are glowing yellow; she can see her bedroom, if she turns around.

“Don’t look back,” Jack says. The hill’s steep, and he’s out of breath, and he sounds more frightened than he is.

“Coward,” she says anyway, just so he’ll frown at her. She likes when he’s angry. Makes her feel better.

At the top of the hill they lie back in the grass. It’s brittle after so long without water—even the insects won’t live in it now—and it scrapes her calves, the backs of her arms, the palms of her hands when she sinks her fingers into the dirt and grips as hard as she can.

Above them, the fish swarm in darts of blue and gold and black. It’s day; they glint, sometimes. Sometimes, the long thin shadow of an eel slides across the sky.

She’d thought the crack in the sky was an eel, the first time she saw it.

“Just pretend it is,” Jack had told her. “Close your eyes and count to ten and try.”

He’d been looking at her like he wanted to kiss her. “It helps,” he’d said. Jack’s a fucking idiot.

The fish move above them, never touching.

“It’s bigger,” she says after a while.

After a while he says, “Yeah.”

It’s a lie, but she keeps looking up, hoping.

When it’s too dark to see anything, they go back down the hill toward the grid of lamps in Venture, through the wide dark avenue that splits the West Side from the East; their bikes are the only noise, all the way home.

For prom, Jack used the car. It was only for special occasions (gas was tough to come by), but prom counted.

Celandine had found a skirt that swished at her calves. Her hair was pinned up on one side; she’d put on lip gloss. Her shoes slid off her feet if she wasn’t careful, but they were in Venture. Where was there to run?

Jack wore what he always wore, but when he smiled and opened the car door for her it made him seem more polished, somehow. Special.

The gym was strung with lights, and music trembled under their feet as they got closer. (Loud music scared the insects.) Jack reached for her, pulled back at the last second.

Mara and Robbie had already arrived, and were dancing so hard the floor was creaking. Mara, who never bothered to dress up, had a necklace made of safety pins and didn’t even seem to notice they’d gotten tangled in her hair. Robbie’s white button-down was soaked through. How early had they come? How long had there been music playing that Celandine hadn’t heard?

Didn’t matter now. She and Jack took up a position not too far away—you had to leave a little space at the beginning of the night, or it looked like you were trying too hard—and joined in.

And it was so good, in the gym with the dim strings of lights and the bass vibrating in her eardrums; the heavy swing of her body and the impact of her heels on the ground and the thin cold relief of air with every breath. She pretended there were other people. She pretended she’d never heard this music before. She danced until her shoulders ached.

Once or twice at the beginning they’d tried something else—Robbie stole Jack’s bike and everyone took sides and schemed, all four of them met at the diner and tried to have a meal—but it was too much, on top of everything. Only prom worked.

Eventually, inevitably, there was a slow dance. Robbie looked at her so long it became obvious; then he came over and held out his hand.

Jack stepped back (you never fought the prom selection, that was against the rules). Celandine put her arms around Robbie’s shoulders, and Robbie put his hands on her waist, and the song floated around the gym as they swayed back and forth. Behind them Jack and Mara conferred in low voices.

“How could you,” Mara snapped during the next song, storming up to them, and Celandine perked up. She liked the dramatic ones, and only Mara really knew how to do them.

This felt like the end of the second season of MEMORIAL, KANSAS—the way Mara was standing, the mood of the song—but it was hard to tell from just the opening. Celandine tried to remember if Mara and Robbie could have seen it.

“Mara, come on, don’t make a scene,” Robbie said like he was reading off a card. His hands were tight on her hips; he was looking at Mara.

“Well, you could avoid a scene if you could keep your hands to yourself instead of ditching me on prom night. Has this been going on all year?”

“Of course not!” Celandine said. This wasn’t MEMORIAL, KANSAS after all, and the surprise made her sound patently false, which was too bad. The dramatic ones were important to get right.

Robbie gasped, even more unconvincing. “Mara, please—”

“Did you know she was coming tonight? Were you planning all along to leave me for some bitch from the East Side?”

Celandine bit back a grin. She had no idea where this was going.

Behind them, Jack said, “Hey, that’s my friend you’re talking about.”

“And you’re a coward too,” Mara said, too sharp suddenly, spinning to face him with an accusing finger already pointed. “This is what happens when you lie about your feelings and hide behind bullshit for years.”

Jack looked like he was searching for an answer, and Celandine rolled her eyes. Mara was good at being angry, but she always lost the thread halfway through and it stopped being fun.

“Mara, please don’t say such things,” she said, solemn. Someone was going to save this prom. “We didn’t mean for this to happen. The heart wants what the heart wants.”

Mara’s eyes glinted. “My heart wants you dead in a ditch. Should I do something about that?”

It felt like a punch.

“Yes,” Celandine breathed.

But no one was ever serious when she wanted them to be. Mara was shaking her head; Robbie’s hands were too tight; she couldn’t see Jack, but she knew how he looked whenever she brought it up. She didn’t know what to do now. The song was ending.

“Let’s get out of here,” Robbie said finally. “It’s a beautiful night.”

Another slow song was playing—it was only slow songs, by this hour—and Robbie slid an arm around her waist as they walked out into the cool darkness.

Jack and Mara watched them go. Usually there was some idea of how things were going to go after prom, some arc everyone had agreed on, and Celandine wondered what they’d end up doing, suddenly left to themselves. Arguing, or raiding stores, or having sex in the car, or being gloomy. They both liked all those things.

She didn’t really like anything anymore. Arguing, sometimes, but Jack didn’t like fighting with her and Mara was too good at it.

“You’re a fool to ever leave her,” she said.

Things like that sounded better on prom night. Other nights talking felt like dumping salt in her mouth, but prom night was always important, and everything she said pinned her to the moment, to the sound of beetles crunching under her shoes.

“I’m a fool to believe she’d have me,” Robbie said.

“So I’m just a sub for the woman you really love?”

“No,” he said. He was terrible at this. “How could anyone not want you, on a night like this?”

All the romantic shit he ever said was conditional, like he was afraid she’d catch feelings otherwise. She tried not to be offended, but they’d had enough proms by now. She’d never had a feeling yet. Honestly, he should know better.

She smiled, felt the slime of her gloss as her mouth slid away from her teeth. “Want to go look at the fish?”

He looked away. “You’re an asshole,” he said. He didn’t let go of her waist.

They walked the long way around Willow Square and split freeze-dried ice cream, the MADE-FINE FUN TIME DINER neon sign reflecting in the package. Then they made out next to the old research complex, because the birds were still afraid of the noise it used to make when it was running, so there were no bones.

“We could go somewhere if you wanted to have sex,” Robbie’d offered once, and she’d considered it—he was handsome and she was going to die, she might as well—but she preferred them here, in the dark and a little afraid.

Usually Jack picked her up in the car after, but Mara must have really stung him, because long after she was tired of making out with Robbie nobody had shown.

Finally they gave up. Robbie stepped away—“You’ll be all right?” and she nodded, because what else was she going to do—and turned back to the West Side, head down. He’d never looked at the crack in the sky, after that first time. She wished she didn’t want so badly to make him look.

Celandine stayed there a while, listening to the hum of the generator that was still on in the research complex, wondering what it was powering. It must be important; they’d kept it on when they left.

She walked home the long way, slowly, mindful of her shoes.

None of them crossed Willow Square. That’s where the body was.

2. Civics

A few days before prom, Jack and Celandine meet Mara and Robbie outside the Made-Fine General Store, all the bird skeletons swept into a single pile out of the way, and draw lots. It’s Robbie’s turn.

“Okay, so I’m taking . . . ” he pulls slips of paper out of the shoebox, “Celandine over, and I’ll leave with . . . Jack.”

Everyone nods, to seal the deal, and steps over the broken glass to shop.

(There are no limits to prom. You can shop in the General Store. You can break into empty houses. You can go to the fancy boutique in Willow Square, though none of them ever have. It’s prom; prom is for the living.)

On prom night, he waits by the neutral strip in the middle of town, on the hood of his car so the bugs don’t run over his boots, and looks at the ice cream shop just to have something to long for.

He grins as she rounds the corner. He likes Mara a lot, when he likes Mara.

Mara doesn’t put much effort into prom, but her jacket suits her. Celandine had dressed her, once—a filmy dress someone inexplicably brought to Venture, and it had looked like Mara was emerging from the wreckage of a ship.

He’d fingered her after, because she asked and he had no reason not to get to second base with somebody, and he’d appreciated the way the fabric slipped away under his hand, but it wasn’t like Mara had enjoyed it more than usual because she was in a dress. She gave it back to Celandine. He’s afraid of the day Celandine will wear it, because he’ll probably feel very different. He feels different about anything, when it’s Celandine.

Mara’s jacket is military gray, with MADE-FINE SECURITY FORCES patches. She shoves up the sleeves, always, until the music’s really going and they’re flapping over the tops of her fingers like puppets she’s shaking to death.

She frowns. “What are you going to do when that shirt falls apart?”

“The guy had two more, I should be fine.”

Then he braces. She never believes him when he says he didn’t know someone, when she asks about a storefront or a suit jacket and he shrugs. She thinks everyone else in Venture got together all the time for picnics, and the things he and Celandine use must have special significance because of who they came from.

But she’s quiet now; maybe she wants an easy night.

(And he didn’t know everyone in Venture. He didn’t even know everyone at the high school. If he had, he’d have noticed Mara and Robbie were missing.)

Mara doesn’t like being inside the restaurants, so they sit on the hood of the car and eat frozen berries from a bag before they head to the gym.

They’re the first ones; the lights are on and the music’s going, and they take up their stations and dance.

Jack doesn’t feel like he inhabits his body much anymore. Sex did that at first, but the novelty’s gone. Drugs did, for a while—he went through whatever the clinic left behind, and there are a few months he doesn’t remember. Detoxing had definitely made him feel like he inhabited his body, but in a way he never wants to think about again.

Dancing works, sometimes, if it’s the right song and all four of them land a beat at the same time so that the floor of the gym shakes. Dancing is supposed to be what works. He tries.

Tonight he and Mara are in love; Celandine and Robbie are the friends who’ve been dying for this to happen, who get to hoot and make gagging noises as he and Mara slow dance. (“Like the Hollywood Hills party in TEEN SENSATION CLARA CLARK,” Celandine explained. Jack had nodded. Robbie and Mara had exchanged a blank look, but the library had both seasons in hard copy, so it was fine.)

It’s good to change the story sometimes. They’ll all go home friends, happy and young. He’s looking forward to it.

Robbie rushes them when he and Celandine get there, hugs them so close it hurts. “You fucking did it,” he crows over the bass line, “you did it, I’m so proud of you, man!”

“Hey, I asked him, you be proud of ME,” shouts Mara, and Jack and Robbie both laugh. A little apart, Celandine’s slipping off her shoes. Her dark hair’s braided back; he can see the line of her jaw.

“You kids be good,” Robbie calls as he heads back to Celandine, “we have a bet going about how soon you’ll get engaged, don’t mess this up.”

“You know I’ll win,” Celandine smiles, a click more subdued than she should be. She’s looking right at him.

Celandine always looks at him, on prom night; it pins him into his body, just for a second, every time.

(“You’re fucked, then,” Mara said when he told her, and he’d shrugged and looked up at the crack in the sky.)

Jack had never said a word to Celandine before the company showed up to take her out of class.

Celandine had never put a toe out of line, either. (Jack was already drinking by the time his mom brought them to Venture to give him stability.) When the Made-Fine Security Corps came for her, she marked her place in her textbook and drew a line under her notes before she stood up and went with them.

Mr. Smith hadn’t said anything to stop them; he never even asked what she’d done. He’d turned to the projector and pointed at stages in the life cycle of coral. And Jack had sat through it.

Later it seemed like a nightmare that he couldn’t think what to do except return to a sentence half-written, the diagram with blank ID labels that had to be filled so he could study. But he wasn’t in a position to do anything, and it was easy not to ask; it was easy to be hopeless and to label fish with their names.

(Later, after it was too late, he assembled the news: Made-Fine was on trial for illegal waste dumping, had poisoned the ocean. And Venture—their bubble-city PR move, on an island, out from under American interference—wasn’t a “prototype sustainable township” for marine research. This wasn’t a test of the Made-Fine Transparadome protecting cities from rising water, or experiments restoring marine life. They were growing algae mats, to cast doubts on why the fish had really died. Algae is an act of God; God’s allowed to kill anything.

Celandine’s father and his mother and every adult in this bubble town had agreed to be here because a company asked, so they could make algae and cast doubt. And Celandine found out, and she had told everyone.)

At some point, his mother came home. He couldn’t bring himself to ask any questions. It felt like giving dignity to it, to ask why, like it was a thing that could have a reason. He locked himself in his room.

A few years before Venture, his mom had taken him to an old-fashioned amusement park, and he’d ridden one of the roller-coasters (had lied about his height to get on). The opening gate they chugged through was shaped like the head of a wolf, because of some backstory he’d been too scared to listen to. He only remembered sitting at the top of the first drop, the sudden horrible understanding of how helpless he was against a machine with a will.

He waited for everyone to get penned in and shot. Surely there was an uproar on the mainland. Surely there was so much anger at the company—so much trouble coming for the guilty—that they’d have to kill everyone in Venture to keep the secret.

But the Made-Fine Security Forces never came. The government never came. No one even punished Celandine’s dad for bringing classified documents home. When reporters called in for comment, Made-Fine Security took Celandine out of house arrest to the video feed in City Hall; during school, so no one would see. (He didn’t know until later.)

He kept taking notes about fish names. Everyone’s parents kept making algae mats. Week by week, the tide came in and never went out.

Finally, when the water was waist-high outside the dome and Made-Fine realized there was no point in a drowned city, they sent duck trucks and a company boat to evacuate them. Made-Fine employees scrambled onto the passenger loaders with half-packed suitcases, rushing to get aboard before Made-Fine sealed Venture shut and let the ocean take it back. You got a seat if you signed an NDA.

Almost everyone went. His mother went, packing up with her team into a truck with classified research in it; she looked over the crowd to make sure he was near a truck and holding a suitcase, and waved before she ducked inside.

He signed the NDA. He told the other kids in the truck they were fucking losers and he was going to ride with his mom. He told the soldier standing guard that Mr. Smith had asked him to help burn some things and he’d be going with the teachers later. Nobody stopped him as he moved past the clusters of trucks in the airlock queue.

It was chaos, but it didn’t feel like it should have. It should have felt like a fight. They were being taken somewhere at the mercy of Made-Fine, and everyone was signing an agreement and getting in, because it was that or drown. A few people were screaming, horribly. They got sedated by medics and put into a separate truck. At the time he hadn’t understood it.

You could hear the airlock from almost anywhere in Venture; it shook the sky as it sealed and unsealed. He locked the door to his room and turned up music as loud as he could. His courage would fail him if he heard them sealing him in. He needed to wait until there was nothing to be done.

(They never even powered down the grid. Things are starting to fail, and eventually it will just be the dark, but the company didn’t even care enough to turn off the lights. Whatever Venture cost them, the company could afford.)

He thought he’d stayed behind alone—brave, somehow—until he saw Celandine under the trees near the Square.

She’d cut her hair. Her eyes were rimmed red, and her hands were shaking; she was spoiling for a fight.

“Are you fucking serious,” she’d said when she saw him, like he’d masterminded the whole thing, like Made-Fine had been sending him credits on the sly for all the good work he’d been doing covering their tracks.

But it was only anger with nowhere to go. He understood. She’d wanted to die alone; now it would be harder. He thought he’d wanted that, too.

“I didn’t know,” he’d said, and she hit him.

He’d cataloged the bruises, after, as he was measuring out the first few rows of painkillers. A ladder along his ribs, deeper where he’d tried to twist away from her wide swings and she’d switched to uppercuts instead. One of them had just missed his kidneys, the bruise a strange green spiral across his stomach that lingered longer than any of the others. (That’s the one where she broke two fingers.) One to his right eye that swelled it shut for a week. One open-handed crack right across the jaw.

That was when she screamed; the broken fingers.

The day after the fight, he’d come to her house and helped her patch them up. Too late to pretend they weren’t in it together.

Nothing’s felt like that since. Not good—it was the most pain he’d ever been in—but still it hadn’t felt like an attack. It felt more real than any promise an adult had ever given him. It felt like something they were agreeing on. Everything was broken, and now so were they.

His mother had said the algae was going to be important for nutrition. The fish that were gone were gone; it could do them no harm now. She hollowed as she spoke, empty and fragile and wrong. The lie inhabited so much of her that once it was out, nothing was left.

Not Celandine. She looked like she’d eaten the sun. He’s never believed anything so much in his life as he believed Celandine when she was hitting him.

As he bandaged her fingers that second day, she’d asked him, “Would you have stayed if you knew I was here?”

“I hope this heals right,” he’d said.

He’s thought about it since. He’s had plenty of time. But there’s no urgency to answer; it’s too late, and she’s a machine with a will.

3. Sports Medicine

Robbie sleeps in the pressure suit.

At first it was just practical—by the time he and Mara were free, there was the crack in the dome, and they all assumed it would all be over any day. The pressure suits were from Celandine and Jack, from emergency kits in City Hall, and every night he slid it on and slept half-sitting on the couch in his old apartment, listening for the sound of running water.

Now it seems stupid. The suit’s clammy, and every morning he wakes up right where he is, exactly the same. That hasn’t stopped him doing it—it’s a habit that makes too much sense to break. But he knows not to tell Mara. She’d even gotten itchy about him praying, because if you got to rely on something then Birch had something to take away. Outdoor time. Your parents. Your holy book.

(She keeps her suit wadded up in her bedroom closet, the helmet on the bathroom counter, like it will prove how little she cares.)

In the morning after he’s taken a shower with water that smells like algae, he checks the calendar—it’s nearly prom—and looks outside.

“Something’s moving in Willow Square.”

“Fuck you,” says Mara, around a mouthful of peanut butter.

“I’m serious,” he says, watching a shadow a long way away. It could be anything.

“Well, it’s not him. Celandine probably caved and went shopping.”

He knows it’s a lie; he knows she knows. He makes a cup of instant coffee (it also tastes like algae) and forces himself to drink the whole thing slowly before he checks outside again. Nothing’s moving, now. Maybe he imagined it.

“Snap out of it before we meet them,” Mara says as she gets up, but it’s not unkind. She even rests a hand on the back of his head a second, fingertips pressing a little against his skull like she can hold his fears in.

She’s right. There’s nothing left in Willow Square to cast a shadow. Still, he looks out the window until they leave for neutral ground.

Officer Birch jumped from the clock tower of City Hall when he realized Made-Fine was never coming back for him like they promised, and he’d been keeping Mara and Robbie locked up for nothing.

(Loitering, technically, and then vandalism when Birch yanked Mara’s arm and she banged into the railing. They were the only people ever put in Made-Fine’s Rehabilitation Center. Turned out the operations team had threatened to go public with poor work conditions in the dome. Only four people on the team had kids. Things got quiet after they were in company custody.)

Birch never mentioned the evacuation. He said their visitation rights had been curtailed for mouthing off. When they didn’t see any other staff, he said there were layoffs. Robbie still doesn’t know what actually happened, that Birch cracked and told them and opened the door.

(For a while he thought the company must have had something on Birch until his mom died or something, and then he caved. But that would mean Made-Fine was still telling him anything, and Robbie doesn’t think so. That day was just Birch’s limit. He hasn’t decided what of.)

The thing Robbie hates most about it is that after all that shit, he and Mara still had to walk outside with Birch like they’d been through something together instead of Birch happening to them every day for years.

And then outside, they actually had. They’d all stared together at the empty windows and the dead squirrels and the thousand roaches and the birds flying desperate circles, like they were a unit and not a man who had condemned two kids to die. When Celandine and Jack first saw them, they’d seen them all together. Robbie will never get that back. He’ll never be totally free, so long as either of them remembers Birch.

(He used to think things like that sounded dramatic. Now he kind of needs them, just to keep track of time.)

Mara must have been thinking the same thing—she and Robbie bolted over just to get the fuck away from Officer Birch. And Celandine and Jack had looked like monsters, like people cut into the wrong film footage; he can’t imagine now how scared he must have been, to run toward two strangers who were so obviously not right.

“The comms,” Celandine said. Jack was already pedaling toward City Hall.

Jack’s the first person Robbie ever fell in love with, because of the way he raced up the stairs of City Hall trying to save them.

Birch was looking at Celandine like she must have murdered everyone in town herself.

“I’m a Registered Corrections Officer of Made-Fine Security Services,” he said, chest straightening like the company name made him bulletproof. “What’s going on here?”

“The company left you to die,” Celandine said.

(Mara has never forgiven Celandine. Robbie doesn’t actually trust Celandine much—they make out and whatever, but he’s also been to the compost pit to see if there were bodies. That silence between Birch’s question and her answer was the most he’s ever liked her, because at least she could tell when someone was a piece of shit.)

Birch lost it—he screamed at her to do something, and when she didn’t answer right away he drew his stun gun like he could electrocute her into making the company come back.

“Look at the sky,” Celandine said. Not like a dare; like she was compelling him to do it. Like she was a ghost who’d been waiting for him.

Birch must have been thinking the same thing. Still, he looked. He made a weird gurgling noise.

Robbie didn’t move. Whatever it was, Birch didn’t deserve to have Robbie experience it with him.

(He and Mara looked later, when they were alone. Mara cried so hard she choked and then made him promise not to tell anyone. “I won’t,” he said, like there was an Anyone.)

When Birch ran toward City Hall they all followed him, to see what the comms had brought up and to keep him from stun-gunning Jack.

Jack was cycling through channels, alerting for survivors in need of pickup. (“Not previously known survivors,” he kept saying, and Robbie’s stomach sank.) It was static on the other end of the comms the first time he cycled through. The second time it was silence.

After a few hours, Celandine said, “Do you think the water’s too deep, now, anyway?”

Robbie felt the blood draining out of his fingertips.

“We don’t know if there’s anyone left,” Jack said later, outside. They were eating. Birch had staggered off somewhere; no one had gone looking for him.

“Like, they’re all dead?” Mara asked, between bites of candy bar. (They ate candy the first few days; rations but also a party.) She sounded angry they might have died, but Robbie suspected she was just angry that she’d missed it.

“The flood never stopped. They kept saying the water table would drop, but.” Jack gestured at the dome over their heads; in what was apparently the midday sun, the light around them was a murky blue.

“It’s too late now,” Celandine said.

Robbie didn’t look up.

He still hadn’t looked up, the day Birch jumped from the clock tower in City Hall. The whole town was so quiet Robbie could hear two hundred bones breaking at once from where he was sitting in the kitchen eating canned peas.

Robbie and Mara had already claimed the West Side in a way that feels, now, like Mara and Celandine had decided it was something they’d need. After the noise they converged on Willow Square.

It looked like someone had made a doll of Officer Birch and stuffed it with pudding, and there was no blood, which made it worse, somehow. If there was blood everywhere then he would definitely be dead and there would be nothing anyone could do about it, but having him still whole suggested he might still be alive, and someone had to go check on him—maybe even help him.

Celandine and Jack looked at each other. Celandine called out, without really looking over, “You guys stay where you are.”

Robbie, who would not have checked on Officer Birch if they’d found him on fire, stayed the fuck where he was.

Jack stepped forward. Carefully, like noise would split the body open. “Are we going to . . . bury him? A funeral?”

“No,” Mara said.

Jack looked at her. “So where would he go?”

“Compost heap.” She licked her teeth like she was getting rid of something. Then she left.

Robbie wanted to go with her, desperately, but he couldn’t move. He was still trying to piece together the sound he’d heard with the body in front of him. One of the legs (shorter now, too short) was starting to deflate.

After a while he said, “I hope he felt it.”

Celandine looked at him. Then she seemed to accept something—he didn’t think she really understood anything, just accepted things—and went home.

Jack looked uncomfortably between the body and Celandine, the body and Robbie, like he genuinely wanted to make sure honors were done to the dead.

He cared so much about things, for such a long time; it’s why Robbie loved him as long as he did. What else was there to do, when you were waiting to die, but love something and try to hold on?

They never went back to City Hall. The candy wrappers are still sitting there, as far as he knows.

Celandine draws for prom. She’ll show up with Jack, leave with Mara.

It will be an early night—Celandine and Mara never last long—but otherwise it’s a good lineup. He’d just as soon avoid Celandine. (She always wants to look at the crack in the dome. He doesn’t mind kissing her, but if he thinks about it too long it’s like kissing someone who’s already dead.)

He looks at Mara. “You gonna shop?”

“I want the shirt you wore a few times back,” she says, and he’s surprised to feel the sting of not getting to go shopping with her. Then he says, “Oh cool, okay, sure,” and they head back home.

He and Mara live in one house. They didn’t talk about it; they just walked into a house and set up. (That was the second or third night. The first night they’d slept outside City Hall, keeping watch by turns, in air that had seemed fresh, by comparison, back then.)

At first it had seemed weird to not be closer to Celandine and Jack, but it’s for the best. He and Mara have the suits. He and Mara would be leaving, when the time came. Better not to be next door when it happened.

Sometimes at the beginning, when they went shopping, Mara would put on the ugliest things she could find and strike poses like the movies that played in the jail on Saturdays. He always laughed, not even because it was funny but because he was so fucking happy not to be in there anymore that even a reminder of it was actually a reminder they were out.

Not free, though. Not until the sky falls in.

“We haven’t watched a movie in a while,” he says, over the crunch of beetles.

She frowns. “What’s left?”

None. The only physical movies had been in the library; anything on the network is gone. They looked for things on people’s computers—they’d seen the first season of THE COVE AT SUNSET, and a lot of porn that was hilarious at first and then felt like you were haunting people. By now it was a competition between things you could watch again and things that made you worry too much about time: the fish, and the slimy bloom on the south edge of the dome, and how long it’s been since you thought about anyone up there as anything but dead.

After a second he says, “Let’s play STREET RACE 6 with the audio from THE SISTERS OF IVORY HALL.”

Mara thinks it over. “So . . . Evangeline Camden is the biker?”

“And Mr. Percy is the cop.”

Mara half-smiles. “That sounds like a good movie.”

It’s a terrible movie. But they portion out the whiskey from somebody’s apartment, and they laugh a lot, and it’s something they’re choosing to do because they can, and it’s fine, so long as you don’t look outside.

Jack’s wearing the same thing he always wears, and it’s a comfort. A different outfit every time makes you think about how many people left things behind; about how many proms there have been.

(Too many. They all still look the same. Somebody needs to get older.)

Showing up with Mara is just normal, so he doesn’t think much about the story. He’s bad at it—he tries to follow along, but it always happens too fast. If there were anyone else around to do this, no one would pick him.

Prom stuff is always best with Mara. Mara prepares with him beforehand, so he feels like he knows what he’s doing. Celandine always manages to come up with something that sounds almost right but just different enough to lose him, and it moves too quickly and he ends up lost and just coasting until they can shut up and make out.

When it’s his and Jack’s turn to leave together, Jack likes to start the story early, leaning forward between songs to see if Robbie has ideas, his forehead shiny from sweat and his teeth white when he smiles. It’s always easier, looking at Jack, to feel like he’d do whatever.

This time, “whatever” is that Jack moved away and has come back, and he’s had a crush on Robbie all this time. It goes pretty well; he asks Celandine for a dance, and Jack cuts in awkwardly and Robbie pretends to be surprised Jack wants to dance with him and not Celandine, and he doesn’t have to pretend he’s blushing when Jack winks at him.

(He checks for Celandine once or twice later, because sometimes she gets upset if people aren’t doing prom right, but she’s off dancing alone, sort of empty in a way Robbie ignores. He’s dancing with Jack. It’s a good prom.)

They leave before Celandine and Mara can start to get weird, and Jack drives him to the park that has a few trees that died from thirst and a fountain right in the center. It went stagnant and they never fixed it. (They’re all afraid to fuck with the water filtration system.) Now it’s a bunch of weeds and, if you go closer, hedgehogs and birds that got desperate for water and drowned.

They stay in the car.

They make out for a while, until the crickets get going and it’s impossible to think about anything. There have been proms where Robbie and Jack had sex in the back seat; Robbie kind of likes it. Sex is what you do to celebrate the bugs dying off in the winter, or to feel like someone’s really listening to you.

But what Robbie aches for is his parents. Sometimes he feels he has to say something or he’s going to forget them. Jack had told him about the people sedated and dragged out—those must be his parents, his parents and Mara’s parents, and he wants so much to know what they looked like, just to be sure, just to know his parents didn’t want to leave him. But—better not to ask.

“Last night we watched STREET RACE 6 with the audio from THE SISTERS OF IVORY HALL,” he says instead, just to stop himself from saying his parents’ names.

Jack grins like that’s the best thing he’s ever heard, says, “Show me,” starts the car.

Robbie wasn’t expecting that—he feels traitorous, like he always does when he mentions Mara, and then he feels stupid for saying something he knew was going to make him feel bad—but Jack’s humming as he backs out.

As they’re pulling away, one of the tree branches tears off the trunk and crashes onto the sidewalk.

Robbie slams his hands on the dashboard, like it’s the car that’s crashing. Jack lets the truck roll to a stop, so nothing jars, and Robbie eventually forces his shoulders to loosen his arms, makes his lungs push in and out.

“Maybe I just want to go home,” he says, after too long.

Jack drops Robbie at the border to the West Side; he curls his hand around Robbie’s knee but doesn’t say anything. Venture is big enough that Robbie can watch the truck for nearly a minute before it’s out of sight.

In his room, he pins the curtains closed and turns on THE SISTERS OF IVORY HALL as loud as he can, so there’s no room left for the sound of a heavy branch falling.

It’s the sound of the morning Birch jumped. It’s the sound he hears every time Celandine mentions the crack in the dome. The sound his body will make when the water rushes in.

He sleeps in the suit.

4. Physics

Mara goes to the comm center to call all the people she’ll never forgive.

Her parents, for agreeing to work here; the medical loans that had them so desperate to start with; Made-Fine. Officer Birch, whose death didn’t nearly make up for what he did; Celandine, for everything, all the time.

There’s no sound on the other end. At this point, the entire system groans as she starts it up, and every third or fourth time she’ll get an alarm that the system doesn’t have any receptors in range. Sometimes it goes dark halfway through her SOS. None of them will even know what to do when it goes; you didn’t learn how to fix things until you were older, and the company was sure you could be trusted.

She respects that it even turns on. It’s gonna die any day, but it’s going with dignity, giving up in stages.

Mara likes machines. She wanted to join the mechanical engineering program at the high school, before she got locked up. Her parents talked about it when they visited like it was something she’d be allowed to do when she got out, which was her first clue she was never getting out.

Outside, she looks at Birch’s bones.

There was a while when the whole thing was disgusting. Once she had to turn back because of the smell, and there’s still a stain on the sidewalk. But the nice thing about having too many insects is that they’re more than happy to take care of a corpse. Now it’s just some bones inside a Made-Fine jacket. (She cannot believe this asshole was still wearing his company jacket when he jumped. Some things are fucking sad.)

For how much they all avoid it, Mara’s seen each of them in Willow Square. Jack first, gripping his handlebars with white knuckles; when he saw Mara he actually started to bike over like he was going to protect her before he realized he’d have to go past the body and stopped.

Robbie came a few weeks after, at the farthest possible edge where you could still see it; she’d caught his eye, and he’d nodded. She’s never mentioned it. He’d come to make sure Birch was really dead, and she doesn’t think that’s strange. It’s important to know some people are nothing but bones.

Celandine came when the body was almost gone—the gases dispersed, the liquids dried up, the fat under the split-open skin carried off by ten thousand dutiful bugs. The streetlights were on, a waste of energy that no one did anything about because it was easier to leave this grid on than admit to being afraid of the dark. Celandine stood in the middle of the town square and looked at the body for close to an hour, never moving, even when the ants started walking across her boots.

Mara doesn’t know what she was thinking. (Mara has never once known what Celandine was thinking.) Celandine never even saw her. She just stood there for an hour, and then walked home, carefully out of the puddles of light.

None of them know about the others. Mara likes that she knows more about something than everyone else, even about stupid shit that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore. Might as well know what’s going on.

The bones are scattered now. It would look like the wind caught them, if there was any wind, but the industrial fans died early, and the air is stale and still. Mara kicked them. She’d gotten a burst of static over the comms that turned out to be another relay dying, and since it was too late to beat him to death, she settled for the bones.

Some days the only thing that gets her out of bed is knowing that whenever the sky falls in, the sea worms will suck the marrow right out of Birch’s remains, and she’d hate to miss that.

Once she went all the way to the edge where the dome met the ground. The nano-sealant was creeping up—waist-high already—and had its thousands of soft gray fingers disappearing into the rocks. It had crushed some of them, pushing out the space between atoms, and she’d imagined everybody above ground slowly consumed by the gentle cloud of something that you created and couldn’t stop.

She pressed her face to the glass. Outside, the worms were alive in the sand.

Robbie told her that her parents had to be drugged and dragged out, that they hadn’t left her. They were probably trying to reach her on the comms—they were trying to reach her. (Or Made-Fine had killed them; just as good. If they were dead, it would explain why they hadn’t come.)

It was like looking across the fields back home, if every strand of grass was waiting for a meal.

She’d never gone back. Some things felt like punishment even when no one could see.

The dome groans as she heads down the stairs—the tide must be coming in—and she makes herself look up. She’s not Robbie. She has some courage.

It’s day; there’s a little shine to the sludge. Shadows make long slow shapes with a tail right at the end.

She can see the crack. It’s bigger.

“Oh sure, fuck it,” Mara says, because why not have whales, too. She hasn’t seen a fucking whale in her entire life, and now there’s one above the reef in whatever new ocean this is. That whole reef is going to collapse into the dome—it’s going to kill hundreds of fish and all the coral that’s managed to grow here and now it will probably sink a whale.

It’s prom night. She’s going with Jack, and honestly she’s forgotten who she’s leaving with.

She wishes you could show up and leave with the same person sometimes. It’s prom rules that no name goes back in the box once you draw it, but eventually they’ll run out of other stories. Eventually someone will have to admit they want to be with the same person all night.

(There have been so many proms. Too many. They’ve been here so long; they never get older.)

She’s supposed to meet Jack outside the ice cream parlor. She goes to the diner instead, eats some mossy-tasting salami that looks better if you hold it up to the neon sign and two handfuls of frozen fries heated in the microwave just long enough that the edges are hot and the inside’s still icy.

She wants a tomato. She’d dig someone’s eye out for a tomato.

She’s two servings into the freeze-dried ice cream when the rest of them find her.

“Oh thank God,” Robbie says, and Celandine lets out a heavy breath, like this is one of her movie things and they were on the verge of something terrible if they didn’t find her in time.

Jack just says “Mara” quietly, like he’s happy to see her or like he understands, and that’s what makes her stand up, that fucking tone in his voice like all of this is something she did for prom’s sake—and maybe it was, she can eat frozen fries any time, maybe it was for prom’s sake that she did something no one’s ever done—and fuck, is that worse? Is it worse to give in without knowing it? Does it even matter if you know anything when the crack in the sky is waiting to drown you and you’ll never eat a tomato again in your whole life, which feels like a fucking long time suddenly? She can’t breathe.

“Why didn’t you show up?” Robbie asks—stupid, stupid Robbie, who sounds like maybe she just forgot.

“Because I didn’t feel like dancing when I’m going to fucking die in here,” Mara snaps, her voice way too high in her own ears. She can’t see anymore, her eyes are standing water and she hates all of them. Jack makes a soft noise; there’s the sound of someone moving, stopping suddenly.

A beetle lands on her cheek—desperate for water—and Mara has to scrape it off and crush it.

When she blinks her eyes open again, she sees it was Robbie who stepped closer. He looks like shit. He’s never going to forgive himself for that day behind the high school, the cigarette that was just illegal enough that Made-Fine had an excuse. She doesn’t want him to ever forgive himself.

It’s Celandine who says, “Yes, you will.”

For a second, nothing else makes a sound.

Mara tries to laugh, but it doesn’t take. “Soon?” she manages, trying to get acid into it and failing. Robbie makes a noise.

Celandine says, “Very soon. It will be over, I promise.”

If she’d sounded earnest Mara would have punched her, but she sounds like always, like a movie you don’t care about that somehow knows you don’t care. The same lines play over and over until you forget what you were supposed to feel the first time. You start to laugh when the woman screams, when the monster lumbers across the stage they’ve set up to look like a swamp except for the one plant, forgotten, still in the pot. You owe it nothing. It’s haunted by what other people love and think. You don’t have to think anything. You don’t have to love anything. Nothing’s going to happen to you.

Celandine says, “How about next time I arrive with Mara, leave with Jack,” even though she doesn’t have the shoebox. No one argues. Partly, Mara’s relieved to feel invisible. Partly she hates Celandine, because that’s how any of this happened: someone did something, and no one argued.

After that the night’s kind of over. Robbie walks next to her until Jack and Celandine are well out of sight. Then he says, “Can I?”

She nods. Not in front of the others—Robbie knows better—but she gets so hollow after she cries, and even after everything it’s nice to have Robbie.

When he scoops her up, he barely misses a step, and she can drop her head to his shoulder without opening her eyes. She knows what his whole body feels like, even when they’re separated. When they die she’s going to miss him.

“We’re not going to die,” he says—she didn’t realize she’d spoken. She doesn’t answer. He’s not a fool; he knows their chances.

She has nightmares where they make it—the pressure suits, the burst of impossible energy, the surface—and there’s nothing left but the sun and the water, and they don’t even know where to set out.

She says, “They left without us. We’ll never get that back. Doesn’t matter how far we swim.”

His hands tighten around her shoulder, under her knees.

At home he helps her get into the shower. He makes instant coffee from the hoard of packets, and when she shakes her head, he drinks it himself.

He helps her into the suit, before he goes into his room. The helmet fogs up as she breathes. When he’s gone, she takes it off.

5. Statistics

Before the dance, Celandine rings the bell on the West Side border next to the ice cream store. When Mara shows up, Celandine says, “Come get ready at my house.”

She knows Mara will agree. Her house is nice. All the rooms in her place feel haunted—nothing you can do about that—but she keeps them pristine, because who wants to die in a gross house?

(Jack had spent the first year in different apartments, moving when he got sick of the view or the pipes stopped working. Eventually she’d admitted that seeing the light go out in his window frightened her. He’d moved in next door. There’s always a lamp on.)

Mara sits at Celandine’s kitchen table, frowning, and lets Celandine do her hair. It’s curly, and Celandine twists loose handfuls, pinning them together into a bun at the back.

“It’s just going to fall apart when I dance.”

“You haven’t even seen it.”

“Nothing you’ve tried ever sticks.”

Celandine sets down the copper wire she’d braided into a headband the night before. “Use paper clips, then,” she says, goes into her bedroom to change.

Celandine’s prom dress is a yellow coat. She took off the SPF collar—seems cruel, somehow, to keep it on.

Mara’s gone outside to wait. She’s wearing a flannel shirt cinched with a utility belt from the sports section, and she’s stuck the headband through the off-center knot of Celandine’s work. She’s probably trying to apologize.

The music’s booming when they got there; Celandine can hear it three blocks away. The boys are dancing, frantic. Robbie has on an oiled-canvas jacket that makes him look like a fisherman, with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows and fastened somehow, so only the body of it swings as he moves. Jack’s worn what he always wears.

(“I’m not going to let anything about this change me,” he’d said early on, crying into his sleeves, heaving angry breaths that arched his back until it almost touched her hand.

Of course it will, she almost said, don’t be stupid, but she didn’t. This was back when she still worried a little for his feelings.)

She and Mara practically pogo into the gym. Celandine forgets to even think of a story; she has her eyes squeezed shut, plants her feet and swings her whole body in time with the music. When the slow dances start she staggers outside without quite opening her eyes, shoves her hands in the pockets of her dress, and sways back and forth in the air that always feels too cold and too damp after prom.

There’s a soft groaning sound from far away.

“Jack,” she says, too loud.

She keeps her eyes shut, but she feels how warm he is when he comes closer and listens.

“It’s not the dome,” he says. “Just the generator.”

“Are you sure? Can you see it from here?”

“I’m sure.”

She’s trembling now. It really does get cold at night. She’s relieved Jack doesn’t touch her. She wants him to stand here forever, close but not touching, and lie to her about the sounds in the dark.

“Mara and Robbie left,” he says after a little while. “Back when the slow dances started. You want to go home?”

“No.”

“You want to dance?”

They never slow dance, but she really is cold. It’s very dark tonight. “If you want.”

He shrugs. “We could just go to the diner if you want somewhere else to be.”

“Let’s go to Willow Square.”

“What?” He pulls back. “Celandine, come on. No.”

“You chicken?”

“About what? Not like he’s running the police station down there.”

There’s no reason to ever go back there. It’s only that Celandine wants so badly for something to be final. She wants to look at a thing with a witness and be certain; she wants something to be over with. Anything. She wonders if Jack drove Robbie over tonight. Maybe she can lie down under the wheels.

She squeezes her eyes shut tighter, until she doesn’t want that anymore.

“Let’s just go,” she says. “Prom’s over.”

He drives her home. Then he brings out a can of spray cheese and some crackers still cold from the freezer and a whole chocolate bar and some orange juice he made from concentrate. They sweep the bugs off his porch and eat, and he runs through the last season of THE COVE AT SUNSET. It was his favorite show; she likes to watch him talk about it, until he reaches the last few he ever saw. Then it’s sad. No matter what had happened above ground, there were at least a few more he’d never seen.

(They’re definitely not making THE COVE AT SUNSET anymore. That town is ocean now.)

After a little pause he says, “Do you want to be quiet? If not, I’ll make something up.”

She’s wanted it to be quiet while he was talking, but now she misses it, and if she looks toward the center of town, she can see something moving.

“Let’s keep going.”

He coughs around his chocolate bar. Then he pulls it together.

“Okay, so, we know Susie lost the campaign for student council at the city college. We can assume this was when she decided to . . . become the Cove’s first serial killer.”

She keeps her eyes on his face, ignores the shadows. “No way she’s the first. That Cove has been fucked up a long time. Second, minimum.”

He smiles. This is his favorite game.

“Right, of course. The town’s still shaken by the long-ago crime spree of the infamous . . . ” he raises his eyebrows, waits.

“Seacove Slasher.”

“I mean, that’s fine, but it’s not really descriptive. The Cove wouldn’t settle for something that vague. We need more M.O.”

“I don’t want—“ she stops. He’ll know why she doesn’t want any gore with her murder mysteries. “The Cabinet Killer?”

He frowns, thoughtful. “Yeah, okay—the Cabinet Killer, who killed victims in an extremely quick and painless way,” he glances over for her nod, “and stuffed their bodies in pantries for the authorities to find.”

“How many people did he kill?”

“Seven. Teen,” he adds, when she makes an unimpressed face.

“Mm. How did they catch him?”

Jack stretches his legs down the stairs, slumps back against his propped-up arms. “Not Sheriff Daniels, obviously.”

No crime in Sunset Cove had ever been solved by Sheriff Daniels, who spent most of his time talking in circles with his ex-wife, until she died; just before Venture got cut off, the show introduced his secret daughter, which didn’t bode well for him solving any crimes in the future.

“Lisa Avalon,” he says. Lisa had the leftover subplots—entrepreneurial housewife, amateur detective, bookstore employee pining over guest stars. She’d be available for this. “And after the Cabinet Killer nearly got her, Derek Howard joined.”

“No way. That guy doesn’t have the stomach for it.”

He’s quiet, and she thinks maybe he’s angry (her stomach turns over), but when she looks he’s just smiling in the way that always makes her want to throw rocks at the dome until it caves in.

He opens his mouth to say something, then stops and looks toward the town. She freezes, just in case. There are never noises there—not like there’s a breeze, and the birds are dead—but sometimes you hear phantom sounds. Can’t help it. Your mind misses things even if you don’t.

“So,” he says. “Lisa Avalon, trying to solve the Case of the Cabinet Killer, teams up with . . . ”

“Susie’s dad. It’s where Susie got the idea, obviously—listening to her father talk about it. She learned too much about it. Killing just made sense after that.”

Jack stands up and goes inside, as fast and quiet as a dream. He’ll never be angry enough to say something about what she did. He’ll never blame her. He’ll never give her an excuse to hate herself like she wants to.

She sits on the porch until the dark grows into the murk of morning. At some point, she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, a bird’s died; near the bend in the road, well past the streetlights. That’s what had made the shadows. She didn’t know there still were any birds.

She screams for a little while, brushes the beetles off her coat, goes inside to shower.

The problem, she’d discovered as her father confided in her because he couldn’t bear it anymore and thought she would keep the secret, was that when you felt something so much that it made your hands shake, felt it so much you did something that should have killed you, you disappeared into that feeling. Some horrible endless well of that feeling would always be waiting, heavier than you and inexhaustible.

The only way to keep going was to not care, as hard as you could, so the feeling forgot you were there. For the length of a prom you walked where you wanted without going under. All of them are dying, and there’s nothing to stop it; what else was there to do but be young?

Every time she sees Jack, she’s standing over the well: horrified to be caught, relieved to be back where she deserves.

Once, early on—before Robbie and Mara, just after she stopped worrying about Jack’s feelings—she said, “I should kill myself.” She’d stayed alive to show the company she wasn’t afraid, and to make her father suffer when he made the choice they both knew he’d make. By then, some of propelling anger had burned out, and she didn’t mind getting it over with. The cat that someone left behind was doing well enough with the rats (it would last another six months), but birds were starting to die, and there were more insects every month. She was a blip in an ecosystem. She might as well.

Jack had reached out like he was going to touch her. He cleared his throat a few times. Finally, when he could sound like he was playing it cool, he’d said, “And what would I do all by myself for the next fifty years?” with a queasy smile at the end like he was going to charm her into staying alive.

The crack had appeared not long after, so that was one worry out of the way.

She takes the bike path alone and lies on the brittle grass to look at the sky. The crack is bigger, but it’s taking so terribly long. The land is dead under them. They’re dead inside this. It feels like a hundred years; she doesn’t know what’s keeping it.

They have the lights on all the time. It attracts the fish. The weight of the coral reef should be speeding things up. They’re a lamp on the bottom of the goddamn sea, she doesn’t know what else she has to do. She needs something to be over with.

When the moment comes, she’s going to fight the water. It’s so embarrassing she’s never said it out loud, not even to Jack. It’s important not to let people attach themselves to you, if you’re planning not to be around for long.

When the dome cracks and the water crashes in all at once, and Robbie and Mara are scrambling for the pressure suits that will save them from the ocean long enough to die in the sunlight, and Jack’s doing whatever heroic thing he can with his last minutes, Celandine’s going to be gasping for air forgetting to close her eyes and gulping salt water from screaming like a fool. Seawater’s so thick, and it burns so badly if you keep your eyes open.

The clock tower at City Hall, the one Birch jumped from, strikes seven. She brushes dead grass off her prom skirt and straightens the knot of necklaces she’s worn because the weight keeps reminding her to breathe.

She walks past six thousand seventy-two windows that will never light up again. She goes around Willow Square.

Robbie meets her at the diner. Prom’s lifted from THE COVE AT SUNSET; Jack’s been in love with Celandine a long time and has just been too afraid to say so until tonight. Mara’s going to admit a crush on Robbie, and they’re going to come back here, after, for ice cream.

(“She likes me anyway, but the ice cream can’t hurt,” Robbie said when they were planning, and Celandine nodded once she realized he was serious.)

The gym’s lit up—it always is—and the music is playing—it always is. Robbie rushes ahead to catch the end of a song he likes. They’ll never have new music; you get attached to what’s still there.

Inside, Jack and Mara call to him, and he whoops and joins in. Their thumping steps echo out into the street.

The dome is dark when she looks up; shadows on shadows, the end of everything.

She waits for a new song, because it makes a better entrance, and then she squares her shoulders and heads inside. The dome makes a soft horrible sound that doesn’t matter; at prom she won’t be able to hear.

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is a novelist (her most recent is near-future political thriller Icon) and comic book writer, including Catwoman for DC Comics. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen Year’s Best collections, including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her nonfiction has appeared at the AV Club, NPR.org, The Atlantic, and the New York Times.

Shiomah’s Land

Nisi Shawl

I guess I’ll never know for sure whether my mother meant to throw herself to her death beneath the wheels of a god’s carriage. She certainly had something in mind, for she kissed my forehead before she left me, first brushing my dark, unruly locks aside. Then she told me to stay still, and ran off towards the road. It looked to me as though she slipped, though she was actress enough to do that on purpose.

Perhaps she only meant to be maimed, slightly. Stories were told of mortals who had been restored after such accidents and given handsome gifts as well: metals, or strange fabrics. She may have been aiming for these riches.

I didn’t try to stop her, confident that she must know what she was doing. I was very proud of my mother; was she not the greatest glee-woman walking? She taught me all I knew.

Of course, anyone who has passed a Fertility Trial is exceptional, but the thrilling tale my mother told of hers convinced me that she was without match. Apparently she agreed with me, for when she was fit for travel we spent very little time with my father and his people.

I must have been about nine or so when we heard that my father’s people had sent someone out to look for us. Or for me, to be more specific. They had been content to leave me in my mother’s care at first, but I was now big enough to work strongly in the fields. Naturally, we decided to flee.

We took a raft a long way down a river, singing our way to Kimp Sinn, the city. It was said that the walls of Kimp Sinn were lined with foodholes, that one could see the gods on every corner. In a manner of speaking, these marvels were quite true.

Kimp Sinn is on an island in the sea. It is reached (unless you are a god) by a long, waltzing causeway. I still can remember the feeling of exhilaration we shared as my mother and I walked through the blue and white sky, gulls screaming around us.

In the city we found that many people had arrived there before us and were already well entrenched. The plenteous foodholes, which produced more than enough food for all, were controlled by certain individuals and groups. If no one could give them something of value in return for it, the food they could not eat was dumped into the sea. The gulls love Kimp Sinn. Their droppings white-wash the walls.

And as for seeing the gods on every corner, that was almost right, for everywhere there were glowing colored squares busy with flickering images of the gods. Some of them were said to reside upon the mountains of the island. Once in a great while one of their little silver carriages would roll down the hollow god road . . .

Not many considered our “songs, dances, plays, and fooleries” as worth watching above a moment, much less offering goods for the privilege. Not when they could watch the god shows for nothing. That first evening my mother traded her horn earrings for some dairy and ceery for us, some sweet for me, and a little smooth for herself. We had to trade again to get a roof space to sleep on.

The next day we learned to catch and kill rats. There were two foodholes in Kimp Sinn that operated only when a ratskin had been dropped in. The generous caretakers of these places inserted the ratskins for one, taking only part of the food for themselves. Thus we made our way in a place where our work meant nothing.

We were waiting for one of the ships that Kimp Sinn’s natives boasted sometimes came calling to the port. None came for a long time. They told us it was because of storms, though the sea was calm as far as any could see. My mother believed them, she said, “for the sea is very big, Teekoige.” At last a ship came, but it was going North, back toward my father’s home.

As we waited for a Southern voyager, passing the days on the pier and the streets, hunting for rats and trading away our trinkets, I became aware of a secret interaction between my mother and a man named Obelk, one of those who took our ratskins. I got the feeling that he wished her to do something that she would rather not. It must have been something awful, or she would have told me about it, I am sure.

My mother cut off and traded her hair. I remember how heavy and dark it was, like sweet or sorghum.

One day Obelk refused to trade with us. The others did the same, at his foodhole and the other where ratskins were accepted. We could not even get fresh water.

So I know my mother was in a desperate state as we walked alongside the god road. But I do not know what was in her mind. I did not see her expression as she died.

She was thrown high into the air, then came thudding down in the road behind the slowing carriage. I ran screaming to her, but just as I reached her I was seized in a cold grip and lifted from her side. I stopped my screaming then, too frightened to breathe. I was carried to the carriage; up to a window in the wall, a window covered with glass.

Behind the glass I saw a beautiful round white face, appearing to me like a full moon in the night. The moon smiled and said something I couldn’t hear through the glass. The cold grip deposited me in a sort of bin at the back of the carriage, shutting the lid on me and plunging me into total darkness. I felt the carriage move.

I finished crying for my mother. I knew that she must be dead. After the movement had stopped I was taken from the bin by the cold grip, which as I saw belonged to a tall, shiny man, astonishingly costumed all in metal. For some reason I could not fathom, I fell instantly asleep.

When I awoke I was alone, and I felt far away from death, my mother, silver carriages, rats, Kimp Sinn, gulls, the moon, and myself. I know now this was the result of the chemicals with which I had been treated. I lay there then not knowing this and not caring. I finally got up because I had to pee. Hunkering over the slit, I noticed that my locks no longer fell over my shoulders. Feeling with my hand I found that an outrageously short fuzz was all I had covering my head. Also, I was naked (something that had not sunk in while I squatted peeing). I looked around for my clothes, but they were not in sight.

There was a mirror on one wall. At first I did not realize what it was, because I was unaccustomed to such large, clear mirrors. It showed me not only my bony face but my pitiful brown nakedness, the pale sea-colored walls behind me, the slit, the foodhole, and the bedmat from which I had just risen. It acted like a mirror, so I believed it was one. But suddenly it was no longer a mirror; it glowed like the god images on the walls of Kimp Sinn. Like a growing jewel, a picture of the moonface appeared, framed with lavender hair. I looked away.

“Teekoige!” called the picture’s voice. My name, I thought, but I did not respond. “Teekoige? Teekoige!” The image faded.

I turned to the foodhole. It gave me some bean and veg and some nice flavored water. I did some stretches, automatically at first. As my body warmed up, my thoughts began to cohere. I went over recent events. My mother’s death maintained its distance. It was like something I had been sad about a long time ago.

One heard of those who had been actually taken up by the gods. These rare individuals were never again seen by mortal eyes.

In a little while the square called me again. I ignored it. Then it threatened to shut off the foodhole and the sluice for the slit until I “learned to mind my manners.” This provoked me into answering that I did not need to use my manners to deal with a talking picture square. After a brief silence the light dimmed out and the mirror returned again.

Shortly, it began to move, opening inward like a door. I snatched up the sheet from the bedmat to wrap myself in it. I need not have bothered, though; my visitor was also naked. Her skin and hair shining, the god who had killed my mother (but it must have been a very long time ago) said hello to me, half frowning, half smiling.

“Hello, Teekoige, then, if you will have no graven image,” she addressed me.

“Hello—” I replied, with a heavy pause.

She took her cue. “Amma.”

“Hello, Amma, midam,” I said, happy that my mother had taught me something of the ways of the gods. Amma is worshipped for her effect upon moods, storms, accidents, and sudden changes. I curtsied deeply.

“I am sorry about your mother, Teekoige,” she said, as if that took care of everything. For her it did. For me it only brought the realization that my mother may not have been entirely responsible for her own death.

Amma immediately wanted to know why I “would not speak with her over the vee,” gesturing to the mirror. I could not answer her, so she continued. “Why did you manipulate me into coming here? Are you planning to kill me?” she asked with a friendly sneer. “No, of course not; we both know that that is impossible. Why?”

“I will do what you want me to do, midam,” I replied slowly, “but I had no idea I should have treated that trick as though it were a real god. Such a thought never occurred in my head.” I had a lot to learn.

Amma, however, seemed well pleased with my answer. My ignorance was exactly what she wished for, “for I shall not have to unteach you a lot of tiresome misconceptions, like those city-bred mortals.

“My dear girl,” she went on, “you are absolutely perfect. Except for that horrible name.” She clasped her hands together above her breasts, her nipples glowing like large rosy pearls. “You must have a stage name, something more mellifluous and resonant. Shiomah, that is it. Amma’s Shiomah.”

Amma was a merry god, though capricious. Her form was always that of a beautiful, slightly plump woman with hair and skin of varying colors. She used also to remove part of the weight of her hair so that it floated up shimmering behind her head as she walked or glided along. She never cheapened her elegance with so much as a ring. This was a marked divergence from universal custom; even bioservs wore shorts or tunics or something.

Amma created and recorded adventures and dramas that were highly popular among the gods. She had nothing to do with the pictures that moved on the corners of Kimp Sinn. Those, she told me, were Nyglu’s idea, produced by machines.

Machines are the gods’ power. Machines give them their lives and their beauty. Amma showed me large and small machines, simple and complicated ones. Some are inside the gods, some embedded deep within the world, some fly constantly around the sky. Carriages, vees, foodholes, and servs are all machines. Machines speak and listen and reproduce and repair. They are toys and tools and objects of desire.

Amma knew me inside out with the help of these machines. Silver circles embedded in her hand allowed her to instruct them as to her wishes. They gave her all my secrets as I slept. They whispered to me through my dreams, teaching me things I would not remember until I needed to know them. I wore a ring in my ear that spoke her commands to me when she herself was elsewhere.

She controlled me in many ways; at first through my awe and also, I later realized, by using the words and intonations of my mother. After a while I just wanted to please her, and for a very long time she did not even have to threaten me with the punishments she held in readiness.

I controlled nothing, directly. I could not even cause a door to open until Amma ordered a serv to accompany me everywhere, operating its fellow machines for me. Even over this I had less than absolute power. It did nothing that conflicted with its basic paradigms, and often, at first, I gave it impossible instructions.

“Go drown yourself,” I told it one day, in a foul mood after my sixth failure at forming a difficult construction in the Creative Mode (the gods’ most difficult language). I knew perfectly well that the serv was operable under water, but I thought that it would at least try to obey me. Instead it put itself on standby, locking in place and emitting a distressed, hiccupping click. Some device must have alerted Amma, for she came into my room almost immediately, with another serv that deactivated and removed my companion.

“You must not deliberately incapacitate my machines, Shiomah,” she said, calm but stern. Her eyebrows lowered into a lovely frown. “This particular episode does not stem from ignorance, does it?” I shook my head, chagrined. “If this continues, you will be denied all service.”

I glanced around my quarters. They were pleasant: sand-colored, papery-feeling walls, russet and amber appointments, wide windows from which to see the sea. Still, it was no place in which to be involuntarily confined. But I did manage to confound my serv on one other occasion, though not exactly intentionally. It was just that I couldn’t understand why I didn’t miss my mother more, and I thought perhaps if I had something tangible to mourn . . .

This time two units came; one to attend to the damaged serv, the other to accompany me to Amma’s tower. I followed it up, a heavy lump of apprehension inside my chest refusing to respond to the lift of the glide-way.

A rain the color of peridots curtained the entrance to my mistress’ apartment. I stepped through. As sometimes happened, the rain failed to cease falling, and I was drenched.

The sun was at its zenith, and the iris of the tower’s ceiling had contracted to a slit. Below its short overhang, a long window curved continuously, circled by blue sky. Amma sat with her pale green legs curled beneath her, bent forward to look at a display board set in the floor. Raising her face to me, she seemed about to laugh at my wetness, but then a deliberate lack of expression smoothed away the beginnings of her dimples. I took a towel from a knob on the wall behind me and dried myself as I went to sit before her.

“You sent your serv to bring you your mother’s remains,” she half asked, half stated.

“Yes, midam.”

“You knew the task would be difficult. Did you know how difficult?”

“I thought that it could ask for assistance; take a carriage; make inquiries.”

“Inquiries of the gulls? Assistance from the herring? What do you suppose has become of your mother in all the time I have had you?” Her questions brought up that strange numbness in me, stronger than ever, a broad, flat humming that drowned out my answer as I formed it. I suppose I must have imagined the citizens of Kimp Sinn taking her away, burning her, urning her ashes. But the overwhelming nothing that I felt negated all possibilities. I hung my head in silence, ashamed of my speechlessness. How could I know that she had suggested this, had planted in my mind this bland substitute for grief?

“I will tell you what happened, my dear,” Amma said, perhaps moved to some sort of divine contrition by my dumbness. “She was removed and disintegrated by the road’s maintenance mechanisms. By now she is scattered far and wide, and still dispersing.”

She paused, her soft green fingers touching me under my chin, tilting my head upwards. “You were asking for all the birds of the air, all the fish in the sea, every blade of grass upon the dunes, every sandcrab on the beach.” She stopped again, holding my eyes with hers. “Why did not you ask me?”

The spell of numbness had passed at her touch, but still I couldn’t answer. It had come to me that Amma did not want me to have a mother, alive or dead. How could I tell a god she was jealous of a mortal?

“Why did you not take her up in your carriage, with me?” I asked, neglecting to use the honorific. Her eyes narrowed, measuring me closely.

“I thought you might be of use to me,” she replied, dropping her arm, “but I saw no need to carry around a corpse. Would it have been pleasant for you, in that dark, unfamiliar place, crowded in with your mother’s body? I wanted you in the best shape possible, confident, unbroken, trusting yourself against the unknown.” She stood suddenly, and raised me delicately with her fingertips. “Even in shock, your face seemed so dazzlingly young, yearning to see me through my window . . . I thought you might be of use to me,” she repeated, “and it begins to look as though I was right.” Affirming her own good judgment, she nodded, smiling a small but brilliant smile.

To please her, I learned. I learned the shape of the world and the depth of the skies and their ways. I learned the gods’ habits and slow history. Sometimes I came upon obstacles in my search for knowledge: blank walls or steps built up into empty air. Amma approved of my frustration as a sign of my curiosity, helping me when she could and promising that in time I would know all.

Contrary to what my mother had taught me, I learned that individual gods do die. If they are not done in by one of their peers or by some accident during one of their frequent flirtations with death, they do themselves in. Five hundred years is the average lifespan. Many extend this several times, however, by being reborn.

But even this measure can only temporarily rescue a world-weary god. Sooner or later one particular copy will develop such a deeply ingrained disgust for the futile repetitions that the process is discontinued.

I discovered that the gods did not take such a deep interest in the affairs of mortals as was generally supposed. The interest was sporadic, shallow, a matter of fashion. During one of the periods when it was considered stylish to notice mortals, the causeway and the city of Kimp Sinn were built, the scattered foodholes installed about the land to supplement the crops, the Fertility Trials viewed avidly. But the divine population of the island had been steadily decreasing, the wonder of mortal ways having palled centuries ago for most.

The exception to this was the ancient river god, Nyglu, the aforementioned producer of the vee shows of Kimp Sinn. He was also the innovator of the ratskin-trading foodhole. Nyglu’s all-consuming passion was the study of mortals, by means of any and all disciplines. Considered by most a boring eccentric, Nyglu was included in Amma’s circle partly because of some obscure genetic relationship between the two and partly, I think, because of Amma’s taste for the odd and sensational.

Throughout their friendship she had humored his harmless pastimes, learning mortal speech at his insistence. Hearing of my acquisition, he had made her promise that I would be introduced to him at the first opportunity.

Amma held back on this for some time. She relieved me of some of my awe and fed my own good opinion of myself until she felt I was ready. It was her plan that I should confront Nyglu with at least an elementary knowledge of the gods’ languages and etiquettes, and with all my native audacity intact.

The meeting took place in my own quarters: familiar ground for me, new to my interviewer. He stared as though he would like to trap me on his sticky tongue. His eyes glittered beneath large, horny ridges. His skin was rough, wrinkled, and sprinkled with warts. He addressed me in First Speech, the one used with low-order mechanisms and bioservs. “Is it good that you are Amma’s Shiomah?”

“Couldn’t be cleaner,” I replied, using the latest Juvenile Swerve. I switched to Obligatory Contract. “I understand that the information I represent carries some value to you, Mr. Nyglu?”

He actually blinked. Then we got down to negotiations, which went very much, I thought, in my favor. Credit goes to Amma for coaching me in being able to read the face of one so—different. But Nyglu had never needed to be shrewd, as I and my mother had. It was like bargaining with soft wax.

Amma was delighted with the outcome. She rewound the contract and played it through after Nyglu had gone, chuckling at the extent of my boldness. “So he actually paid you for the recordings I made when I found you, before you first woke up? He might have gotten those as a gift from me, had he asked.”

“But I gave him no time to think of asking. And you said that I could offer them, midam.”

“Yes, but it was your idea. And so was this performance you scheduled. I suppose you will need to use a bioserv for at least part of it.”

“If I may.”

She glanced at me from the corner of one mirthful eye. “Of course you may. I wouldn’t miss it for an asteroid.” She returned to scanning the contract. “Very good, especially this last part.”

“The consultant clause?”

“Yes. Nyglu has never been able to get anyone to wade through his material before, so you flatter him, even at this price.”

It bothered me for awhile that I had not asked for a higher fee to review his work, but as my mother always said, it does no harm to have your customer feel he’s gotten the best of the deal. And I certainly did well with what I had won.

The gods lived in weary anarchy, most having rubbed away the edges of their more troublesome desires by way of fulfillment, long ago. Aesthetic and social pressures exercised the only control. Any serious problems that developed (usually with the younger deities) were dealt with by somewhat interested parties, informal groups with as much license to punish the offenders as their own level of annoyance allowed.

Under Amma’s protection I had just about any rights she chose to give me. She bestowed upon me all the privileges and powers she thought I could grasp. I set out to increase my earthly store with an earnest intensity that my protectress found amusing. To the gods, wealth is no more than a diversion. I was a bottomless coinpurse, an everladen tablecloth, for Amma.

She adored the havoc my childish temper and unconventional questions wreaked upon her circle of acquaintances. These occurrences were a little like my earlier effects upon the servs, but for some reason she found them much less irritating.

For instance, once she brought me with her to try out a new toy, a boat a lover had just given her. The lover, a minor god without physical affectations, was called Weyando. He was on board to demonstrate the boat’s principles of operation, as he was the engineer of both the hull and the living sail. Also present was a certain young Lizore, related somehow to Weyando, and apparently to be my charge should Amma and Weyando find themselves too busy to attend to her.

Had she been a mortal I would have judged Lizore to be about four years of age. Actually she had just turned twenty-five, though she was still considered a child by divine standards. Although she appeared properly aloof in the presence of Weyando, her eyes took on a more interested expression the moment she was left in my care.

“Hurry, show me,” she asked at once. “Are your genitals like mine?”

“Somewhat,” I admitted. “Would you like to look at them, midam?”

“Yes, I just said so,” she snapped. “I suppose you will want to see mine? All right, then.” She reached for the hem of her shift.

“No,” I said, “just tell me something, please. Answer a question.”

“A question you shouldn’t ask?” I nodded. “All right.”

“What relation are you to Weyando?” Even I was astounded by my daring. Held distinct from sexual practices, the reproductive secrets of the gods are exactly that. Secrets. This was one of the topics upon which Amma had adamantly insisted that I remain uneducated. Any bioserv that became precocious enough to be coaxed into speculation upon the subject promptly disappeared.

Lizore’s steely eyes glinted with new respect as she answered me. “His eggson is my spermfather.” She looked up at me expectantly, and I nodded in a show of understanding, lifting my hem to her examination.

“We are very nearly identical,” she reported, in a disappointed voice.

I was quite as dissatisfied with my end of the bargain, until Amma explained Lizore’s terms and others just as confusing. But that was much later, when she asked me to have her child.

Weyando’s gift was a success. The water foamed and hissed away below us, constantly changing into itself, showing all the colors of my mistress’ moods. The sun warmed the sail, which turned itself constantly to the heat, a billowing net filled with a wind of light. At night soft breezes pushed against its unfurled membranes, sailing us through the phosphorescent dark.

Day or night, Amma and Weyando were together: guiding the ship, gazing into each others eyes, satisfying themselves with one another’s sight, or sound, or smell, or touch, or taste.

Lizore and I were much in each other’s company. Five days after our first encounter, I posed a question with an impact that far outweighed that of the first one I had asked. As Lizore and I silvered ourselves with glittering scales from the hull, she laughed at some witless pun I made. “Really, Shiomah,” she giggled, “you’re not at all boring. I find it hard to believe you are a mortal.” She said it to praise me, so I tried to hide my offended pride, but my reply came sharply.

“If we mortals are so boring, midam, why did you gods bother to create us? If we are inferior, we are your work.” The paradox struck Lizore just as if I had slapped her baby-fat cheeks. Mortals, she had been taught, were tacky. Stupid, clumsy, disease-ridden—they were all this, and a great deal more that was anything but necessary.

“Come,” she ordered, heading for the stern. At our approach, her spermfather’s eggfather locked the controls and turned to her trouble-filled face. Amma lifted herself up from the deck on one elbow, watching with the expression of one about to be entertained. “Weyando,” Lizore asked, “why do we need mortals? What did we make them for?” A short but devastated silence followed.

Amma rose from her languid pose. “I’ll call the copter,” she said.

“But why did . . . ” Lizore started again querulously.

“Later,” Weyando told her, with a quelling and emphatic glance in my direction.

After her guests left, Amma began to laugh aloud, tickling my ribs till I joined her. Her voice sounded like a wind chime, the separate notes hanging in the air and striking one another like strung shells, soft yet clear.

When we had calmed down a bit, she made me sit with her on a little wooden bench. Then she took me by both hands and explained at length why my question had caused such discomfort.

“The gods do not need mortals at all. For any reason.” At times, she said, there had even been crusades to have them wiped out. “But that’s not at all fashionable now,” Amma reassured me.

“And—” I coaxed her, knowing there must be more.

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“And the gods did not make the mortals.”

She nodded, pleased at my quickness. “The gods—were mortals, at one time.”

“It is not general knowledge. Especially not among children. But, yes, our remote ancestors and yours are one, the same.” Her cheeks dimpled; she was fond of the unorthodox, and I piqued her with my impertinence.

“No doubt these facts had a bearing on the defeat of the drive for our extermination, midam.” She nodded, eyes and hands suddenly intent upon disentangling some snarl in my hair. I continued my conjectures silently for a moment as we skimmed over the still sea.

I myself could see the advantages of maintaining some sort of gene pool. I asked her whether there were any mortals who had been made into gods. I had in mind those who had been “taken up” before me, and of whom I had never heard or seen anything during my time with the gods.

She answered me with irritating equivocation. “Yes. Well, no, not really, although in a way, yes.” I begged saucily for her to be more explicit.

“You know how we grow ourselves again, after we are dead?” I did. “Well, sometimes that is done with mortal flesh, and we turn them into a god that way.” I thought it a rather crooked path to immortality, but I could not disapprove of it when I reflected upon the sort of god that Obelk the rat-trader would make.

I thought again of the foodholes and those who held command over them when I went for the first time to one of Nyglu’s mudrooms. At all his homes he had these moist, dark retreats.

While reviewing here what he had written (more material was available for my scrutiny now that Amma had made the mortal origins of the gods explicit), I asked him his opinion of Kimp Sinn.

He seemed unsure at first of how to answer. “It works well enough, I think,” he equivocated, paddling his webbed feet in a dark pond.

“Well enough at what?” I asked impatiently. I sat cross-legged atop a table of long stone slabs, the driest spot I could find. “What is this city of the gods supposed to do?”

“It—you see, it provides a goal for the ambitious, and even for the less motivated an example—” he broke off and glanced up at me shyly “—of the beauty of our relationship.”

“Our relationship?” I asked incredulously. We spoke Modal Society, but business still formed the main basis of our intercourse, as far as I was concerned.

“I speak generally, of course,” Nyglu hastened to assure me. “Of the relationship between mortals and the gods, the gentle mentoring, the poignant reminder of our slower yet always inevitable decline, experienced in miniature before our eyes by your own people.”

“Oh.” From the divine vantage, all our petty strivings, Obelk’s and my mother’s and those of me myself must look equally vain, foolish, and pointless, and harmless on the whole. “How old are you, Nyglu?” Another of my tactless questions, with a wholly unexpected answer.

Nyglu flopped down on his knees before me. “What matters the difference in our years, charming child? My love for you is ageless.”

I felt lost. Was this a scene from some play in my repertoire? My lines, what were they? Cautiously, I extended my hands. It took a moment for the god to look up from his submissive pose. Then he seized my palms in his slippery grip and touched them several times with his sticky tongue. I withdrew quickly, disguising my disgust.

“Amma,” I managed to pant out in my fright and confusion. “She must not discover us.” And I felt this to be true, no mere excuse for separating myself from him.

“Oh, sweetness, surely not,” he said, his voice sad with longing at the loss of contact. “I can conceal our involvement from her. Trust me. Trust in my powers. Oh, Shiomah, we could make each other so happy.” I didn’t think so. But I let him touch me, just a little. Just a little more.

It was not too long after this that I progressed to the point where Amma felt I was of some use to her in her dramas. I played first for her the role of Juusli, a young god who rebels against the ennui of immortality by refusing to behave in a socially responsible manner. Among Juusli’s foibles was a refusal to allow her body to age into puberty. The piece was years in the making, so Amma had my growth temporarily halted.

Weyando came back to play the part of Jez, a more conventionally-minded contemporary of Juusli’s. No mention was made of the way that I had provoked Lizore’s speculative outburst, but he did not bring his eggson’s eggwife’s daughter to play with me again.

The part of Jez’s spouse, whom Juusli spends much of the piece trying to seduce, was filled by a beautiful bioserv that Amma referred to as a dryad. Amma spent much time with this pale and lovely creature, giving it detailed instructions covering every nuance of its role. The dryad would try to follow her directions exactly, and if the results were not desirable, Amma would once more go over the entire action, changing it if necessary.

Sometimes I believed that the dryad performed poorly on purpose, simply to deprive me of my mistress’ time. Professional pride kept me from following its example.

We spun around the globe, recording different parts of the story in different areas: ruins, deserts, the homes of friends, jungles, lakes, glaciers . . . I saw that the sea was large, that mortals counted for nothing against the world’s immensity. And that though outnumbered six-hundred-to-one, the divine five thousand leave more of a mark upon the earth than the mortal three million, because they are more able to work on the world’s scale.

There was a valley along a dead, dry river. All soil had been stripped from the land by some bored deity, and the bedrock had then been chiseled into tunnels and spires, a maze for the wind. Low, shuddering groans and high sounds that yearned to become music played around us there. Haunting murmurs and keening whistles accompanied every scene. It was easy to portray Juusli’s essential loneliness in this land that mourned for itself.

Once I looked up from the action of one of these scenes and saw to my surprise that tears fell from Amma’s eyes. When she signaled an end to the session, I followed her to the other edge of the plateau we worked upon. As we walked she seemed oblivious to me, but reaching the drop-off she stopped and called me to her.

Her tears left starry trails on her indigo skin, shining like her hyalescent hair. “Your performance is quite moving, Shiomah,” she told me in a low, steady voice. “I am proud.” So was I, for the scene just completed had been rather difficult. Juusli was struggling with the ghosts of her dead selves as they urged her to fling herself to another death. The difficulty lay in creating the physical impression of resistance while wrestling with the air. Departing from her usual procedure, Amma had chosen to screen-animate these devils after the recording, rather than manufacture bioservs which would only be demolished during their plunge into the canyon below. I was glad to have met this challenge so well, but I didn’t think Amma cried for joy in my competence. I waited and hoped for an explanation.

Instead she asked, “If I were to assure you, Shiomah, that you would be given immortality if only you jumped over the edge of this plateau, would you do it?”

I thought of my mother, tossed high into the air, dead, no doubt, before she hit the ground. “No.” I paused, weighing my position. “Of course I would have to, if you commanded me to, wouldn’t I?”

“But you have already answered my question,” she stated, dismissing mine. “Here is another. If I asked you to throw me down there, would you?” I started to speak, but she continued. “If I did not tell you to, but asked, with no authority.”

I could not picture autocratic, arbitrary Amma with no authority, though I tried. “What would become of me, if I did?” I inquired.

My mistress laughed, all melancholy suddenly gone from her manner. “You funny thing! So selfish, so practical. Never mind. I will not ask you to kill me, for you would surely find it an annoying task.” Taking my hand, she returned with me to the others.

A later sequence was recorded on Nyglu’s estate. Before his current obsession took hold of him, Nyglu had been fascinated with the order of amphibians, as his personal appearance showed. Perhaps this is why mortals associated him with rivers, and with fresh water in general. He certainly associated himself with it. Pools, bogs, swamps, and wet places of all sorts made up the bulk of his “grounds.” When we visited he still took great pride in showing the estate to his visitors, pointing out the particular species he had reconstructed from his studies. Some were immense and ugly, others small and subtle, effacing themselves into the dark, decaying backdrop.

There were also experiments, whims come to life. My favorites were the triphibians, a sort of winged salamander. Mottled scarlet and sky blue, one came and perched briefly on my arm then skimmed away. Seeing my delight, Nyglu hatched three eggs for me, and I spent my free time feeding and observing the larvae. Soon I had tame triphibians of my own, but I had to leave them behind when we went to the moon. Nyglu promised that they would be mine again when we returned.

The dryad was packed away in her trunk, and we coptered off to meet Amma’s sky shuttle. Weyando stayed behind; his character, Jez, didn’t appear in the final scenes. As we floated away from the world, its immensity was belittled.

We spent a long time in orbit because of a hitch in the preparations for our landing. An ancient resort on the moon’s surface was to have been restored to habitability without destroying the period flavor of the setting. Some too authentic material used in the repairs had ruptured and released most of the complex’s air. The old oxygen machines below the surface had long since been dismantled, and regular flights to and from Earth had stopped decades ago, at the end of the last space craze. It was a couple of days before more air was brought up. Trouble arose, due, in part, to our long confinement on board the shuttle.

In preparing me for the profession she had chosen for me, that of acting roles in her creations, Amma had given me access to all sorts of old cubes and reels. After I used up all the sleep tapes, she even taught me to read; not pictos like mortal writing, but words composed of letters, like these. While examining some written antiquities during the delay, I learned with real shock that the Earth had once been almost literally covered with mortals.

I ran to Amma in her cabin, craved to see her, was quickly admitted. What atrocity, I demanded of my mistress, had reduced the mortal population fifty-thousand-fold? As I asked this, I actually clutched Amma’s elbow to stop her from turning away from me. She froze.

I whipped my hand away, startled at what I had just done. I had tried to use force to press my will upon a divinity.

But when she again faced me, she was smiling. Sadly. As if she had expected this to happen, while at the same time hoping that it never would. As though I had pleased and pained her both, at once. “I will answer you, Shiomah,” she said, “but first I am going to show you something. Something I ought to have shown you long ago.” She extended her left hand.

Not for the first time I noticed that the sides of her fingers and the edges of her palm were lined with numerous shining dots. “Activation of one of these circuits,” she told me, “will wipe out a selected memory in your brain. I have chosen your mother’s name.” She let this sink in, then went on.

“Activation of a second will deprive you of the use of the centers of conscious volition. And the third,” she promised, “will prevent the operation of your autonomic systems. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. “Yes, midam.”

“Now. There was no disaster, no epidemic, no mass murder of mortals. The current population, my dear, is a result of time and care and thoughtful planning.” She made gestures with her hands like a prince in a story, dispensing coins to a crowd. “Birth control, ample food, lebensraum—the ancient fifty billion never had it so good.” I still had a lot to learn.

It was difficult after the revelation of these threats to reassume the role of Juusli, a character whose last motivation is fear. With relief I removed my pressure suit in the simulated vacuum of the closing act, the heroine succumbing to the hallucinatory call of dust sirens. It was an ambiguous ending, with Juusli unharmed, drifting away with the sirens (specially made bioservs, of course), leaving a sparkling trail of palpable looking dust.

When we returned to Earth, Amma let me age again, though more slowly than mortals are accustomed to do. She used me in other, smaller works, or in the social games she played with the other gods. Sometimes she devoted her enormous energies to my training, sometimes she seemed merely to relax and enjoy my company. Her attentions were far from constant. I would be ignored for months, a year at a time, then taken up again without, apparently, a beat skipped.

One afternoon, when I had been with her nearly fifteen years, she fancied she would make love with me. My body was that of a fourteen-year-old, an awkward, pudgy beauty, but she was attracted. How can the gods ever tire of such pleasure?

In time our desire was heightened by a burgeoning love. My adoration was natural, inevitable even. I think I had only been waiting to release it until I received some sign from her.

As to why she loved me I can only say that not even mortal passions are easily subjected to analysis. Amma’s love was fierce—and ridiculous, on the face of it. I still had pimples, at times. My nose was too long. I thought perhaps she confused me with Juusli, the first character she had created for me.

No deity questioned Amma’s absorption with me. Such fascinations were not unheard of. Sometimes the infatuated god went as far as actually regrowing the mortal undeified, merely in faithful reduplication of the beloved original.

Those foolish gods. They should have known that this would not be enough for Amma.

She contrived to have me conditioned into partial godhood while growing and then secretly disposing of the expected replacement. Immortality was given to me for as long as I can stand it, and the powers of the god machines were made mine.

The sins of my “mortal counterpart” were not visited upon the new Shiomah. Weyando’s eggson’s spermdaughter was again allowed into the circle of my influence. Others that I had alienated upon Amma’s instructions made me welcome in my new guise, with calls of congratulation and invitations to their estates. With all this obligatory gaiety, it was almost a year before we settled in again back on the island.

Amma became more and more attentive. She involved me in the details of her creations, seeking advice on costume and dialogue for her daring depiction of a god in mortal disguise. I decided to have my rooms dismantled, as I spent nearly all my time in hers. Everything was packed away except the terminal when she came to me with her offer of marriage.

I stared at her across the wide, bare floor. She was colored all turquoise, with hair like ethereal jade. She clashed horribly with what was left of the decor.

“Well?” she asked, a little sharply. “Don’t you want to be my wife?”

“Oh yes, yes Amma,” I managed to reply. Since being deified I no longer referred to my mistress as “midam.” “I do, I’ll be so happy, I’ll make you so happy, only I am very much surprised . . . ” I trailed off. I came towards her, one eye on the terminal’s screen. I did love her, and it meant so much to me to please her. She kissed the top of my head and clasped me to her.

“You should be used to receiving surprises from me by now,” she said as she released me, smiling. “In time, you will grow accustomed to my ways, and come to find me quite boring, no doubt.”

I shook my locks in vigorous dissent. “Never, no, never, Amma.” I took her hands in mine and kissed each sea-colored fingertip, saying “You are so sweet, so generous, so full of precious secrets—” I came to one of the little silver circles with which she controlled her underlings.

“Oh, yes, that reminds me,” she said when I did not continue. “I almost forgot to tell you. I’m going to have those signals removed, those ones I told you about on the moon.” I met her eyes. They were dark, gravely serious in her expressive face.

“The ones you said could erase my memory or destroy my nervous system?”

She nodded. “So. Now that you’ve consented to engage yourself to me, there’s no danger of those circuits ever being engaged.” She grinned, suddenly in an impish mood, and I perceived the pun (no pun at all in mortal speech) almost at the same time as I saw the call light blink on the com screen. Pretending to be disgusted with the lowness of her humor, I managed to shove her playfully through the door before she noticed the flashing signal.

As I had expected, it was Nyglu. His warty face showed satisfaction to my trained eyes. “I have the body,” he reported, “and the other arrangements are underway.”

“Very good,” I told him. With the passage of time I had grown used to my deepening contact with Nyglu and the leverage it gave me. “Then you may count on my presence in your mudroom—” I hesitated. Amma had planned to leave for Nyglu’s estate this evening, but there was no telling when I’d be left alone there, now that we were betrothed. “Whenever I can come without Amma knowing,” I hastily amended. Nyglu looked like he wanted to protest, but to whom? Not to me. I switched off the screen and went looking for my mistress.

We were wed in a short but impressive ceremony aboard the ship Amma had been given by Weyando. I begged her to wear some form of clothing, and at last she compromised by causing her hair to cling to her nakedness, covering almost all the right places. By contrast, I was draped in fluttering, dune-colored fabrics designed to hide the tiny scars and other imperfections my body carried. True, we might have said that Amma had caused my replacement to be grown bearing these marks, but I desired to avoid explanations.

The wind sang in the rigging, our only choir. The sky, as ever in those latitudes, was a vaulted dome of blue. The child Lizore joined our hands as we pledged our love, “as long as its life continues.” After kissing one another’s eyelids, we turned to bestow our wedding gifts upon our guests, all of whom, at Amma’s insistence, were present.

As we passed among her friends and relatives, Amma made sketchy introductions to those I had not yet met. “Hayvre, Lizore’s eggmother,” she named one black, black woman who reached out to clasp my hand in one sporting two thumbs. “Elleefaw” was a tiny, shaggy, sexless looking god in spiked heels. I recognized the name as belonging to the deity of unpleasant truths.

“He makes the best monuments. We used the Hill of Glass in my last piece, Elleefaw,” she said to the short, red-furred god. “It was perfect, especially the way it opens and closes like an eye.” Elleefaw nodded his approval of this tribute, running his own sharp eye up and down my pudgy awkwardness. I felt uneasy in his presence, and I wasn’t made more comfortable by the remark he made as he walked way. “Now you’ll each find out what the other is really like,” he announced over his shoulder, clip-clopping off across the deck. But surely we had learned all that in over twenty years?

I was glad to see Nyglu, preferring his familiar strangeness to these upsetting new acquaintances. Our encounters had been curtailed since the betrothal, and he was glad to stay by my side when I asked him to, as a sort of buffer.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t broadcast the ceremony like everyone else does,” he complained to us in a mildly fretful tone. “But I must admit that I am enjoying myself,” he added politely (and perhaps also to prevent Amma from detecting his morose jealousy).

My mistress hadn’t explained to me her reasons for an in-person celebration, but now she said, “This one isn’t for show. This one is going to last.” With a fond look she walked away from me, taking our glasses to be filled with the bright, frothy drink that was being served.

Still disturbed by Elleefaw’s pronouncement, I was silent until Nyglu wondered out loud if anything was wrong. “Do you think everything will change now?” I asked him. I expected denial. His precarious happiness, his treasured times with me, would work to keep him from accepting the possibility of a different course in our lives.

Instead, he shrugged, resigned. “Change,” Nyglu answered, “is Amma’s only constant.”

For several months after our marriage, all remained the same. I continued to work for Amma as before, to make furious or languid love with her, to study and transact my own business. I acquired islands, asteroids, and watersheds entirely my own, as well as other, less common commodities. Nyglu took care of this for me, with all the discretion I relied upon him for.

Then Amma decided that we were going to have a child. The new Shiomah might have asked upon deification how gods were born. Perhaps Amma attributed my lack of curiosity on the subject to habits formed in earlier days. I could hardly tell her of my source. Instead, I massaged her hands, pulling and stroking her pale violet fingers as she recited the possibilities to the tower’s open ceiling, full of stars.

“We can mate as mortals do,” she whispered, “or we can let machines do it for us. Two males can join genetic material, or two females. We can mate with ourselves or with those long dead. Just as soon as you’re ready,” she said, “we’ll start taking the enzymes that neutralize the sterilizing compounds.” She sighed as I dug into the fleshy mound beneath her thumb.

“And then?” I asked. But in answer Amma held her hand to my mouth and brought mine in turn to her delicately nipping teeth. Her excitement at the thought of conception made further details impossible to come by until dawn.

What Amma offered me was the opportunity to impose my genetic message over that of a microscopic animal. The animal would then be injected into a donated sperm cell, and the sperm cell would join with an egg of hers. This was fine with me; I leapt at the chance for another sort of immortality. Amma and I disagreed on only one important point; I wanted her to carry the baby in her own body. Even for just a short while. She would not; not even her innate love of the curious made pregnancy appealing to her.

I offered to bear the child within my own body. She pointed out that to do so would endanger the lie we lived. “Only a mortal would allow itself to be invaded in such a manner,” she declared hotly. Anyway, what did it matter that our wombs were empty; we would still be mothers as the gods saw things.

It mattered to me.

Weeks passed. I took to sulking in my old refuge, the brown and russet rooms I had occupied before our marriage. Gradually I brought the furnishings out of storage, determined to be comfortable in the midst of my self-imposed exile. I avoided Amma, keeping to my own apartments as much as possible.

Finally she came to me, persuasive and proud. I slouched on my couch seat, not looking up as she lowered herself beside me.

“Don’t pout, Shiomah,” she said, putting an arm around me. She laughed. “I could walk to Kimp Sinn on your lower lip.” That made me smile, but I quickly pretended that I never had.

“Our ways are better, you will see,” she continued, coaxingly. Pale blue, she rested like a piece of sky on the brown slopes of my shoulders.

I shook her arm off, standing up and walking away angrily. “Your ways? You have no ways. You do nothing except let things be done for you.” In the silence that followed I felt the presence of Elleefaw, happy that we did no better than he had expected.

“Oh, Amma,” I said remorsefully, turning back to her again.

“Why do you oppose my will?” She was displeased that I had a will, rather than a mere collection of childish whims, that I had walked away from her, that I stood and she sat. Seeing this, I knelt, thus allowing her to continue to be gracious.

“Have I not treated you well, my dear?” she asked. Her fingers sought my hair, toyed with my tangles. “Have I not given you everything you ever desired, and more?” No, I thought, for my mother is gone, and you refuse to take her place. Deaf to my inner voice, Amma continued to talk of how she had spoiled me, ignorant of my deepening resolve.

“So you must understand,” she concluded, “that it will be best for both of us if you yield to me in this.”

“No,” I said, and her hand ceased fondling my locks. “If you make a child this way, it will be without my consent. You will have to kill me then, to keep me from confessing our crime.”

She stood, pushing me away from her. Her celestial face paled, a touch of cirrus in the sky. “You can’t mean it,” she said, quietly appalled. Bestowing immortality directly upon a mortal, as she had done, was inconceivable; the punishment for our deception would be of a kind with it. The gods are jealous.

“But I do mean it,” I said, rising and meeting her eyes without wavering. “No machine or half-animal is going to carry our child, Amma, not while I live.”

She stared until she saw that I was in earnest. Then, for the first time in my life I experienced divine wrath. She stamped the floor with one lovely foot and clenched her fists in front of her angrily heaving breast. “You fool!” she shouted, purple smudging her pale blue cheeks. She laughed harshly, metallically, an untuned gamelon. “You funny, funny fool.” Then she activated the first of the three circuits she had shown me years ago as we orbited the moon and had, of course, never disabled.

My mother’s name is gone, removed from my mind and all my records. And the erasure is permanent and self-reinforcing. Even if someone told me what my mother was called, I would forget the sounds as soon as they were said. Even if I wrote her name here as it was spoken, I would forget it as soon as it was read.

Amma is a capricious god, but thorough.

But shrewd as I am, I had made my preparations. Even as she was proving her remorse by destroying her other controls, I left and fled here.

I do not know if she was fooled by the death of my double. Nyglu was careful, but perhaps she will discover that he hid it for me when she thought she’d had it destroyed.

Perhaps she will not be deceived. Perhaps she will come and test my defenses. For all I can tell, though, she is even now working on another Shiomah, perhaps one just a little less hard-headed. I left her plenty of tissue samples.

It was foresight that made me search out this corner of the world, rich in plant life and rare minerals. It is mine through my efforts, and I have stocked it with my treasures. My horses, and cattle, and machines, and Fertility Manna. My plunder and purchases.

And the men and women, my mortals. I will take very tender care of my little mortals. And they will bless the land in my name.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2001.

About the Author

Nisi Shawl wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist and Tiptree Honor novel Everfair, and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her stories have appeared in Analog and Asimov’s magazines and many other publications. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a Clarion West board member.

Red Lights, and Rain

Gareth L. Powell

It’s raining in Amsterdam. Paige stands in the oak-paneled front bar of a small corner pub. She has wet hair because she walked here from her hotel. Now she’s standing by the open door, holding half a liter of Amstel, watching the rain stipple the surface of the canal across the street. For the fourth time in five minutes, she takes out her mobile and checks the screen for messages. From across the room, the barman looks at her. He has dark skin and gold dreads. Seeing the phone in her hand again, he smiles, obviously convinced she’s waiting for a date.

Outside, damp tourists pass in the rain, looking for the Anne Frank house; open-topped pleasure boats seek shelter beneath humped-back bridges; and bare-headed boys cut past on scooters, cigarettes flaring, girlfriends clinging side-saddle to the parcel shelves, tires going bop-bop-bop on the wet cobblestones. Paige sucks the froth from her beer. On the other side of the canal, a church bell clangs nine o’clock. As it happens, she is waiting for a man, but this won’t be any sort of date, and she’ll be lucky if she survives to see the sun come up tomorrow morning. She pockets the mobile, changes the beer glass from one hand to the other, and slips her fingers into the pocket of her coat, allowing them to brush the cold metal butt of the pistol she’s carrying. It’s a lightweight coil gun: a magnetic projectile accelerator, fifty years more advanced than anything else in this time zone, and capable of punching a titanium slug through a concrete wall. With luck, it will be enough.

She watches the barman lay out new beer mats on the zinc counter. He’s just a boy, really. She should probably warn him to leave, but she doesn’t want to attract too much attention, not just yet. She doesn’t want the police to blunder in and complicate matters.

For a moment, her eyes are off the door, and that’s when Josef arrives. She hears the swish of his coat, the clack of his boots as they hit the step. She sees the barman’s gaze flick past her shoulder, and his eyes widen, and she turns to find Josef standing on the threshold, close enough to kiss.

“Hello, Paige.” He’s at least five inches taller than she is; rake thin with pale lips and rain-slicked hair.

“Josef.” She slides her right hand into her coat, sees him notice the movement.

“Are you here to kill me, Paige?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“I know.”

He flicks his eyes in the direction of the bar, licks his bottom lip. “What about him?”

Paige takes a step back, placing herself between the “vampire” and the boy with the golden dreadlocks. With her hand still in her pocket, she curls her index finger around the trigger of the coil gun.

“Not tonight, Josef.”

Josef shrugs and folds his arms, shifts his weight petulantly from one foot to the other.

“So, what?” he says. “You want to go at it right now, in here?”

Paige shakes her head. She’s trying not to show emotion, but her heart’s hammering and she’s sure he can hear it.

“Outside,” she says. Josef narrows his eyes. He looks her up and down, assessing her as an opponent. Despite his attenuated frame, she knows he can strike like a whip when he wants to. She tenses, ready for his attack and, for a moment, they’re frozen like that: eyes locked, waiting for the other to make the first move. Then Josef laughs. He turns on his heel, flicks up the collar of his coat, and steps out into the rain.

Paige lets out a long breath. Her stomach’s churning. She pulls the coil gun from her pocket and looks over at the barman.

“Stay here,” she says.

She follows Josef into a small concrete yard at the rear of the pub, surrounded by walls on all sides, and lit from above by the orange reflection of city lights on low cloud. Rusty dumpsters stand against one wall; a fire escape ladder hangs from the back of the pub; and metal trapdoors cover the cellar. Two stories above, the gutters leak, spattering the concrete.

Josef says, “So, how do you want to do this?”

Paige lets the peeling wooden door to the street bang shut behind her, hiding them from passers-by. The coil gun feels heavy in her hand.

“Get over by the wall,” she says.

Josef shakes his head.

She opens her mouth to insist but, before she can speak or raise the gun, he’s closed the distance between them, his weight slamming her back against the wooden door. She feels his breath on her cheek, his hand clasping her throat. She tries to bring the gun to bear but he chops it away, sending it clattering across the wet floor.

“You’re pathetic,” he growls, and lifts her by the throat. Her feet paw at empty air. She tries to prize his hand loose, but his fingers are like talons, and she can’t breathe; she’s choking. In desperation, she kicks his kneecap, making him stagger. With a snarl, he tosses her against one of the large wheeled dumpsters. She hits it with an echoing crash, and ends up on her hands and knees, coughing, struggling for air. Josef’s boot catches her in the ribs, and rolls her onto her side. He stamps down once, twice, and something snaps in her left forearm. The pain fills her. She yelps, and curls herself around it. The coil gun rests on the concrete three or four meters away on the other side of the yard, and there’s no way he’ll let her reach it. He kicks her twice more, then leans down with his mouth open, letting her see his glistening ceramic incisors. They’re fully extended now, locked in attack position, and ready to tear out her windpipe.

“Ha’ enough?” he says, the fangs distorting his speech.

Paige coughs again. She’s cradling her broken arm, and she still can’t breathe properly. She’s about to tell him to go to hell, when the back door of the pub swings open, and out steps the boy with the golden dreads, a sawn-off antique shotgun held at his hip.

“That’s enough,” he says. His eyes are wide and scared.

Josef looks up with a hiss, teeth bared. Startled, the barman pulls the trigger. The flash and bang fill the yard. Josef takes both barrels in the chest. It snatches him away like laundry in the wind, and he lands by the door to the street, flapping and yelling, drumming his boot heels on the concrete.

“Shoot him again,” Paige gasps, but the young man stands frozen in place, transfixed by the thrashing vampire. He hasn’t even reloaded. Paige uses her good arm to claw her way into a sitting position. The rain’s soaked through her clothes.

“Shoot him!”

But it’s too late. Still hollering, Josef claws his way through the wooden door, out onto the street. Paige pulls herself up and makes it to the pavement just in time to see him slip over the edge of the bank, into the canal, dropping noiselessly into the water between two tethered barges. She turns back to find the boy with the shotgun looking at her.

“Is he dead?”

She shakes her head. The air’s tangy with gun smoke. “No, he’ll be back.” She scoops up her fallen coil gun and slides it back into her coat pocket. Her left arm’s clutched against her chest. Every time she moves, she has to bite her lip against the pain.

The boy takes her by the shoulder, and she can feel his hands shake as he guides her into the pub kitchen, where she leans against the wall as he locks and bolts the back door.

When she asks, the boy tells her his name is Federico. He settles her on a barstool, plonks a shot glass and a half-empty bottle of cognac on the counter, then goes to close the front door.

“I’m going to call the police,” he says.

As he brushes past her, Paige catches his arm. “There’s no time, we have to leave.”

He looks down at her hand.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he says. “Not until you explain what the hell just happened.”

She releases him. He’s frightened, but the fear’s manifesting as anger, and she’s going to have to do something drastic to convince him.

“Okay,” she says. She puts her left arm on the bar and rolls up the sleeve, letting him see the bloody contusions from Josef’s boot, and the splinter of bone, like a shard of broken china, sticking up through the skin.

“What are you doing?”

“Shush.” She takes hold of her wrist, forces the arm flat against the zinc counter, and twists. There’s an audible click, and the two halves of broken bone snap back into place. When her eyes have stopped watering, she plucks out the loose shard and drops it with a clink into the ashtray. With it out of the way, the skin around the tear starts to heal. In less than a minute, only a red mark remains.

Frederico takes a step back, eyes wide, hand pointing.

“That’s not natural.”

Paige lifts the half-empty bottle of cognac with her right hand, pulls the plastic-coated cork with her teeth, and spits it across the bar.        

“Josef heals even faster than I do,” she says. “You blew a hole in his chest, but he’ll be as good as new in an hour, maybe less.”

“W-what are you?”

Paige takes a solid nip of the brandy.

“I’m as human as you are,” she says, and gets to her feet. She can feel the stiffness fading from her limbs, the hurt evaporating from her ribs and arm. “But Josef’s something quite different. And trust me, you really don’t want to be here when he comes back.”

“But the police—”

“Forget the police. You shot him, that makes it personal.”

Federico puts his fists on his hips.

“I don’t believe you.”

Paige jerks a thumb at the back door. “Then believe what you saw out there.” She stands and pats down her coat, making sure she still has everything she needs. Federico looks from her to the door, and then back again.

“Is he really that dangerous?”

“Oh yes.”

“Then, what do you suggest?”

Paige rubs her face. She doesn’t want to be saddled with a civilian, doesn’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s well-being; but this young man saved her life, and she knows she owes him for that.

She sighs.

“Your best bet’s to come with me, right now,” she says. “I’m the only one who knows what we’re up against, the only one with even half a chance of being able to protect you.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

She looks him square in the eye.

“Because I’m not the one who’s going to come back here and rip your throat out.”

She lets Federico pull on a battered leather biker jacket two sizes too large, and they leave the pub and splash their way down the cobbled streets in the direction of the Red Light District, and Paige’s hotel. As they walk, she keeps her eye on the canal.

Federico says, “Is he really a, you know?”

“A vampire?” Paige shakes her head. “No. At least, not in the sense you’re thinking. There’s nothing supernatural or romantic about him. He’s not afraid of crosses or garlic, or any of that bullshit.”

“But I saw his teeth.”

“Ceramic implants.”

They cut across a square in the shadow of a medieval church. Federico has the shotgun under his jacket, and it makes him walk stiffly. The rain’s still falling, and there’s music from the bars and coffeehouses; but few people are out on the street.

“Then what is he? Some sort of psycho?”

Paige slows for a second, and turns to him. “He’s a guerrilla.”

“I don’t understand.”

She starts walking again. “I don’t expect you to.” Her right hand’s in her coat pocket, gripping the coil gun. She leads him out of the square, across a footbridge, and then they’re into the Red Light District, with its pink neon shop fronts and narrow alleys. Her hotel’s close to the Central Station. By the time they get there, they’re both soaked, and stand dripping together in the elevator that takes them up to her floor.

“In a thousand years’ time, there’s going to be a war,” she says, watching the floor numbers count off. “And it’s going to be a particularly nasty one, with atrocities on all sides.”

The lift doors open and she leads him along the carpeted corridor to her room. Inside, the room smells stale. It’s been her base of operations for nearly a month, and she hasn’t let the cleaner touch it in all that time. She hasn’t even opened the curtains.

“The vampires were bred to fight in the war,” she says. “They were designed to operate behind enemy lines, terrorizing civilians, sowing fear and confusion.” She shrugs off her coat and drops it over the back of a chair. “They’re trained to go to ground, blend in as best they can, then start killing people. They’re strong and fast, and optimized for night combat.”

Federico’s standing in the doorway, shivering. She ushers him in and sits him on the bed. Gingerly, she takes the shotgun from his hands, and lays it on the sheet beside him; she then drapes a blanket around his shoulders.

“After the war, some of them escaped, and they’ve been spreading backwards through time ever since.” She crosses to the wardrobe, and pulls out a spirit bottle. It’s a liter of vodka. She takes two teacups off the side and pours a large measure for him, a smaller one for herself. “They’re designed to survive for long durations, without support. They can eat just about anything organic, and they’re hard to kill. You can hurt them, but as long as their hearts are beating and their brains are intact, there’s a chance they’ll be able to repair themselves, given enough time.”

She puts the bottle aside and flexes the fingers of her left hand—there’s still an ache, deep in the bone.

“That’s important,” she says. She kneels down in front of Federico, and takes his hands in hers. “The next time we see Josef, we’ve got to kill him, before he kills us. And the only way to do that is to do as much damage as possible. Stop his heart, destroy his brain, and he’s dead.”

She takes one of the teacups and presses it into Federico’s hands.

“Sorry,” He says, accepting the drink, “did you say that this war is going to take place?”

“A thousand years downstream, yes.”

“So it hasn’t happened yet?”

“No.”

He frowns.

“Who are you?”

Paige reaches for her coat, and pulls out the coil gun. “I’m a fangbanger, a vampire killer.”

“And you’re from the future too?”

Paige stands.

“Look,” she says. “All you need to know tonight is this: When you see Josef, shoot out his legs. That’ll immobilize him, and give us time to kill him.” She stops talking then. He can see Federico’s had enough for one night. She slips a pill into his next drink and, within minutes, he’s asleep, wrapped in the blanket, with the shotgun clasped protectively across his chest.

Alone with her thoughts, Paige moves quietly. She turns out the bedside light and crosses to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtain. It’s after twelve now, and the trams have stopped for the night. The streets are quiet. She feels she should congratulate Josef on his choice of hiding place. Amsterdam is an easy city in which to be a stranger; there are so many tourists, so many distractions, that it’s a simple matter to lose yourself in the crowd. If she hadn’t known what to look for, she might never have found him. But then, she’s been a fangbanger for a long time, and she’s learned to piece together seemingly unrelated deaths and unexplained crimes; to filter out the background noise of modern urban life in order to reveal the unmistakable M.O. of an active vampire. She leans her forehead against the window glass; heart pumping in her chest, knowing it won’t take Josef long to track her down. She’s been doing this job for enough years, waded through enough shit, to know how dangerous a wounded vampire can be.

At 4am, the sky starts to gray in the east. Federico’s still asleep, and Paige gives up her vigil. She tucks the coil gun into the back of her belt, pulls on a sweater to cover it, and wanders down to the hotel restaurant. When she gets there, she finds the place empty, although she can hear cooking sounds from the kitchen as the staff gear up for the breakfast rush. She helps herself to a cup of coffee from the pot, and a large handful of sugar sachets, and takes it all over to a table by the window, where she stirs the contents of the little packets into her coffee. There are sixteen altogether, and she uses them all. Then, leaving the sticky mess to cool, she rests her left arm on the table, and clenches and unclenches her fist. Everything seems in order. The tendons move as they should, and there’s no trace of the break. It doesn’t even ache now. Satisfied, she takes a sip of the lip-curlingly sweet coffee. It tastes disgusting, but she needs the sugar to refuel the tweaked macrophages and artificial fibroblasts that have allowed her to heal so quickly.

Outside the window, it’s still raining. She watched the drops slither on the glass. It makes her think of Josef in better times, before he had his fangs implanted. She remembers him as bright and swift and clever; a sociopath, yes, but still her best student. And there it is, her dirty little secret, the inconvenient truth she’s been hiding from Federico: the reason she makes such a good vampire hunter is that during the war, before the vampires were deployed against the enemy, it was she who trained them. She was a military psychologist at the time, an expert in guerrilla warfare. While combat instructors taught the vampires how to kill, she showed them a range of nasty tricks culled from a thousand hard-fought insurgencies: from the Scythians of Central Asia to the soldiers of the Viet Cong, and beyond.

She remembers her penultimate briefing in particular.

“The vampire’s a powerful archetype,” she said to the cadets. “It’s an expression of our darker side. It plays into our most primal anxieties, from the threat of rape to the fear of being eaten.” It was a hot day, and the sun blazed through the classroom windows. She walked up and down in front of her students, hands clasped behind her back. At the rear of the room, the surgeons waited with their trolleys, ready to wheel the young men and women down to the operating theater, one-by-one, in order to implant their fangs and night-adapted eyes. “To complete your mission, you must be prepared to kill. You must become assassins—anonymous killers in the night, spreading panic and mistrust.” She stopped pacing and turned to Josef. He sat in the front row of the classroom, chin on fist, eyes blazing, and she knew it would be the last time she’d see him before his transformation. “If you do your jobs correctly,” she said, “each of you will be worth a hundred troops. You’ll demoralize the enemy, eat out his fighting spirit from the inside. You’ll have the soldiers worried about their families, the families suspicious of their neighbors. But in order to achieve this, you’ll have to move like shadows, and show no mercy. Do anything that needs to be done, be ruthless, and be prepared to strike anywhere, at any time.”

She had taught them every psychological trick she knew, and shown them how to exploit the power of myth, how to generate fear and horror from darkness and blood. From their test scores, she’d known they were intelligent. In fact, she’d personally overseen the original selection process, picking only those recruits with the right balance of brains and insanity—those clever enough to survive the mission, but also psychotic enough to become the monsters they’d need to become in order to succeed.

And then later, when the war went temporal, spilling into the surrounding decades, they came back and she briefed them again, only this time on the peculiarities of each of the time zones in which they were to operate, giving them the background they’d need in order to blend into each zone’s civilian population.

Sometimes, she wonders if her history lessons inspired their eventual escape into this dim and distant past, far from even the outermost fringes of the conflict. One thing’s for certain: since they mutinied, and back to these primitive times, she’s had to travel all over the place in order to hunt them down. She’s tracked individual vampires across half a dozen decades, in Los Angeles, Cairo, Warsaw, and London.

Now she’s here, in Amsterdam.

And suddenly, there’s Josef.

He’s standing in the shadow of a doorway on the other side of the street, watching her through the glass. He has his hands in the pockets of his black raincoat. Their eyes meet for a second and Paige can’t breathe. Then he’s gone, moving fast. Between parked cars, she catches a glimpse of him crossing the street, heading for the back of the hotel. With a curse, she pushes herself to her feet. Josef will know which room she’s staying in—a simple phone call will have furnished him with that information—and now he’s after Federico, hoping to kill the boy before tackling her.

Paige bursts out into the foyer. Her room’s on the fourth floor, so there’s no time to take the stairs. However, luck’s on her side: this early in the morning, the elevators all stand ready, their doors open. She slams into the nearest, and slaps the button for the fourth floor. Then, even as the doors are closing, she’s pulling the coil gun from her belt and checking its magazine.

Paige kicks her shoes off in the elevator and pads along the corridor in her socks. As she nears her room, she hears the door splinter: Josef’s kicked his way in.

“Damn.”

She lifts the coil gun to her shoulder, and risks a peek around the frame. The room’s dark. She can see a faint glow from the curtains. There are shadows all over the place: chairs, desks, and suitcases. Any one of them could be a crouched vampire.

“Fuck.”

She ducks back into the corridor and takes a few quick breaths. If Josef’s still in there, he’ll have heard her already—and there’s a good possibility Federico’s already dead. She flicks off the coil gun’s safety catch. There’s nothing beyond this room but window: the chances of civilian casualties are slight. Stepping back, she gives the trigger a squeeze. The gun whines. Holes appear in the door. Splinters flick out. The TV sparks. A chair blows apart.

And there, in the maelstrom: a shadow moves.

She tries to hose him down, but he’s moving too fast. He hits the wall and pushes off; hits the floor and rolls; and then he’s running on all fours, leaping at her throat before she can draw a bead.

Paige rolls with the impact, still pressing the trigger. Scraps of material fly from Josef’s overcoat. An overhead light explodes. Blood sprays. His ceramic teeth scrape her neck, grazing the skin. Then his momentum carries him over her head, and she uses a Judo throw to heave him into the corridor wall. He hits like an upside down starfish, arms and legs splayed, and then falls to the floor.

They both lie panting.

The carpet’s soft. She rolls onto her side. Josef’s lying on his front, looking sideways at her. His eyes are as blue as a gas flame. This is the first good look she’s had at him since he left her class, and he looks older and harder than she remembers. His fangs are white and clean. Blood soaks into the carpet from a hole in his side.

He doesn’t move as she elbows herself up into a sitting position; but, as soon as she lifts the coil gun, he twists. His wrist flicks out, and a pair of shiny throwing stars bite Paige’s arm. She cries out and the gun drops from her fingers. Instinctively, she reaches for it with her left hand, but Josef’s anticipated the move: he pushes himself towards her, delivering a kick to her cheek that shatters the bone.

Paige falls into the open doorway of her room. Black spots dapple her vision. She feels Josef grip her leg. His hands work their way up. He’s climbing her, using his weight to keep her pinned down. She tries to fight back, but she’s still dazed. He swats her hands away from his face.

Then he’s on her, his thighs clamped across her hips, his knees pinning her arms. He wraps his fingers in her hair, and yanks her head back, exposing her throat. His fangs are fully deployed. She sees them through the hair hanging down over his face, and cringes, expecting him to lunge for her throat.

Instead, Josef clears his throat

“I don’t want to kill you,” he says around his teeth. He pulls away, and his incisors slip back into their sheaths. He lets go of her hair and sits up, straddling her. Paige blinks up at him as he smoothes back his wet hair. “I just want to talk.”

They end up slumped against opposite walls of the corridor. Josef’s bleeding onto the carpet; Paige feels as if she’s been hit by a fire truck. One side of her face throbs with pain, and the eye above her broken cheekbone won’t focus properly.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” Josef says.

She gives him a look.

“You’re a killer.”

“Not anymore.” He lets his shoulders relax, but keeps one hand pressed to the bullet hole in his side.

“But Federico—”

“I haven’t touched him.”

“He’s still alive?”

Josef shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. You sprayed a lot of bullets in there.”

And suddenly, they’re falling back into their old pattern: teacher and student—and she knows there’s something he’s not telling her.

“What’s going on, Josef? Why am I still alive?”

He tips his head back, resting it against the wall.

“Because things are different now,” he says. “I’m different.” He reaches into his coat and pulls out a photograph, which he Frisbees across to her.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, you know? Not here, and not at the pub.” He dips his chin and looks at her. “Just acting in self-defense, trying to stop you from killing me.”

The picture shows Josef holding a child, maybe four or five years old.

“What’s this?”

“It’s my daughter.”

The girl has Josef’s blue eyes and blonde hair. She’s wearing a red dress.

“Your daughter?”

Josef closes his eyes.

“Yes.”

Paige glances at the coil gun, lying on the carpet between them. She wonders if she can reach it before he can reach her.

Josef says, “I don’t want any more trouble.”

Paige lifts a hand to her ruined cheek, and her lip curls.

“So what? You think it matters what you want? So you’ve gone and got yourself a family, and you think that wipes away all the shit you’ve done, all the people you’ve killed?”

She reaches for the gun. Josef howls in frustration, and lunges for her throat. His teeth rip into her esophagus, and she feels his jaw snap shut on her windpipe. His hair fills her face, and he’s heavy on her chest. She can’t breathe, and wonders how many others have died like this. How many others, because of her, and what she taught him?

Josef pulls back, his face dripping with her blood and, as Paige gasps for breath, the wound bubbles.

Josef snatches the photograph from her unresisting fingers. She tries to move her arms, but can’t. Josef’s speaking, but the fangs make it difficult, and she can’t hear him over the roaring in her ears. Her eyes swivel around in panic, looking for help. The guests in the other rooms must be awake now, and cowering behind their peepholes. Some at least will have called the police.

Then, as she twists her head, she catches movement in the room behind her. Federico stumbles into the light. The boy looks dazed and frightened; there are scratch marks on his face, but he has the shotgun in his hands.

There’s a flash, and Josef jerks. Part of his face disappears, bitten off by the blast. Another flash, and he topples from Paige like a puppet with its strings cut, knocking his head against the doorframe as he falls.

Paige slaps a palm over the sucking wound in her neck, pinching the skin together, hoping she can heal before she suffocates.

Federico bends over her. Wordless, she points to the coil gun, and he kicks it over.

“Help me up,” she croaks. As long as she keeps her hand covering the injury, her vocal chords still work.

With Federico’s hands under her shoulders, she struggles to her feet and coughs up a wad of blood. She feels unsteady, but each breath is easier than the last.

Josef lies in a spreading patch of red-soaked carpet. One of his eyes is completely gone; that side of his face is a gory ruin; but the other seems miraculously untouched, and still beautiful. His hands twitch on the carpet like angry spiders.

Paige plucks the slippery, homemade throwing stars from her forearm, and tosses them aside. She points the coil gun at Josef’s heart. Dimly, she can hear sirens pulling up on the street outside.

Josef’s remaining eyelid flutters. She knows he’s down, but he’s obviously not out.

She says, “How many people have you killed, Josef?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she pulls the trigger. The gun whines and his chest blows apart. His heels scrape at the floor, as if trying to escape, and she raises the gun to his face.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She looks away as she fires, and she keeps the trigger depressed until the magazine clicks empty.

When she looks back, Josef’s head’s gone, and there’s a hole in the floor.

The photograph of his daughter falls from his fingers.

He’s dead.

She sticks the spent gun back in her belt. For some reason, her smashed cheek hurts more than her torn throat. She looks around to find Federico leaning on the doorframe.

Paige hawks red phlegm onto the carpet. Then she leans down and takes hold of Josef’s boot. Gritting her teeth, she drags his body back into her ruined hotel room. Moving slowly and painfully, she retrieves the vodka bottle from the dressing table, spins the lid off, and raises the bottle in a toast to her fallen student. She stands over him for a long moment. Then she takes a deep swallow, which makes her cough.

“Goodbye, Josef,” she says. There’s nothing else to say. There’s no triumph here, no closure, nothing but bone-deep weariness. Solemnly, she pours the remaining contents of the bottle—most of a liter of spirit—over his chest and legs; then she pulls a complimentary matchbook from the desk, and strikes one.

The wet clothes go up in a woof of blue flame. The fire spills onto the carpet, and the room fills with smoke.

Paige opens the desk drawer and takes out another clip of ammo for the coil gun. Then she limps back to Federico.

“I have to go,” she says. She has to move on to the next target, the next time zone.

A fire alarm rings, and the sprinklers go off. The shotgun’s on the floor at Federico’s feet. He’s holding the photograph of Josef’s daughter. Water’s running down his face, streaking his cheeks. His dreads are soaked.

“You’re a fucking monster,” he says.

Paige puts a hand to the torn flesh of her throat. She can feel the sides stitching themselves back together.

“I know,” she says.

And with that, she fades away.

Originally published in Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates.

About the Author

Gareth L. Powell is an award-winning author from the UK. His alternate history thriller, Ack-Ack Macaque won the 2013 BSFA Award for Best Novel, spawned two sequels, and was shortlisted in the Best Translated Novel category for the 2016 Seiun Awards in Japan. His short fiction has appeared in a host of magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, Solaris Rising 3, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and his story “Ride The Blue Horse” made the shortlist for the 2015 BSFA Award. Gareth is currently working on a new trilogy for Titan Books. The first volume, Embers Of War, will be published in Feb 2018 and followed by two sequels, Fleet Of Knives and Light Of Impossible Stars. He is also writing a crime thriller.

An Optimist and Pessimist Tackle the Fermi Paradox

Julie Novakova and Tomas Petrasek

The universe around us echoes with the Great Silence. It seems oppressive to some, foreboding to others. We have not picked up any alien transmissions; seen any indications of interstellar travel or construction; met any other civilization. Yet even with propulsion systems based on known technological principles, it should be possible to colonize the whole Galaxy within hundreds of thousands to several million years. Enter the famous Fermi Paradox: Where are they?

We’ve all seen the proposed hypotheses of the “zoo,” “Galactic federation,” or the bleak possibility of an inevitable nuclear apocalypse awaiting any technological culture. But is the Fermi Paradox really such a big paradox? Let us first consider our chances for picking up an alien civilization’s transmission.

Enter the Optimist. “We’ve been transmitting radio waves in all directions for barely more than a hundred years, even less if we consider strong enough transmissions. We’ve actively listened for half a century. I think it’s too short to say that there is no one to listen to.”

“Lovely. But I don’t think you’re right,” another voice intervenes.

Who might you be?

“Just call me the Pessimist.”

The Optimist, unperturbed, continues: “As I said, the fact that we haven’t picked up any alien signals doesn’t mean there are no other civilizations.”

When we consider the likelihood of receiving an alien transmission, we usually think of the famous Drake Equation and the number of civilizations in our Galaxy. But most of its parameters are very poorly constrained, and people can end up with estimates of zero civilizations (“10-18,” the Pessimist nods gravely), or a plentitude of them (“Ten thousand at least,” the Optimist announces).

Perhaps trying to assess only the number of broadcasters within our Galaxy with so many “known unknowns” is not the best approach. What about the detection probability itself? Physicist Claudio Grimaldi has recently published a Scientific Reports article using the signal coverage approach to yield some estimates.

If we focus on the number of technological civilizations only, we tend to forget that the existence of a broadcasting civilization doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be able to pick up its signals. The age and longevity of the signal, the position within Galaxy relative to us, effects of the interstellar medium on the signal’s degradation, or (non)directionality of the transmission all influence our chances of detecting it. For example: A unique non-directional signal sent a hundred thousand years ago is beyond detection; it would be only detectable outside of the Galaxy at this time (but likely degraded too much to be detectable in any case). A one-off signal sent from a star fifty lightyears away at the dawn of our 20th century would have missed the start of our listening endeavors by a margin of a few years.

What’s important is the volume of our Galaxy filled with hypothetical transmissions at a time. Grimaldi concludes that even if we assume high detection probabilities for a given signal and multiple emitters, the mean number of detectable emitters within our Galaxy falls below one. If the model approximates reality well enough, it seems the Great Silence is only to be expected and doesn’t necessarily mean anything dreadful.

Moreover: Would we know an artificial signal if we detected it? True, information-bearing signals are very different from noise and our statistical techniques can distinguish them, but it’s not perfect, and even if we are pretty sure something contains meaningful information, it doesn’t mean we’ll be able to tell whether it’s language—and what meaning it contains. Consider the case of the Indus civilization. It left us ruins of quite complex cities such as Harappa, dating back to approx. 2600 BCE, and many symbols that are still subject to debate as to whether they constitute a language. Measures such as conditional entropy and n-gram Markov chains suggested they possess a syntax, but not all involved scientists agreed with their general validity, though the majority leans toward it.

“See? Receiving alien signals seems improbable, and even if we are at the right place at the right time, there is no certainty we’ll recognize them. No wonder we don’t know of any. No eschatologist thinking needed,” the Optimist says.

The Pessimist frowns. “First, recognition as something likely artificial is not as complicated as language detection or even decryption. Second, it doesn’t really solve the Fermi Paradox. We need just one technological civilization capable of expanding to other star systems to colonize the Galaxy. They should be here—and for all we know, they are not. That means they either don’t exist, or tend to end badly. Doesn’t it scare you?”

“No. It’s not foreboding at all,” the Optimist objects. “Maybe we’re just using the wrong assumptions.”

True enough; can we even expect a complete Galaxy colonization? One would argue that interstellar expansion would be an adventurous business, with unfathomable dangers and uncertainties facing any ship trying to boldly go where no one has gone before, or even a nascent colony. Colonization waves might be slowed down or even stopped by essentially accidental, yet unavoidable factors both external and internal.

But what if interstellar travel is so difficult that it’s near impossible, for ships bearing organic beings at least? It’s also possible that favorability of local conditions plays a larger role than we expect. It’s not just the “trivial” factors such as stellar type, presence of potentially habitable planets. What if, for example, different elemental and isotopic compositions of various planetary systems severely limit the colonization options, and to some extent exploration/self-replication probes too?

If we look at the Earth, we don’t see human settlements everywhere. We have huge cities overflowing with people on one hand, and vast empty spaces—especially deserts and mountains—on the other, and we’re still speaking just about the landmass. Maybe we just happen to sit in the middle of a galactic desert?

Perhaps ecological models can help us out. One of the simplest models of a species’ expansion is the percolation model (widely used also in material science and other fields), using a three-dimensional network of sites that are either connected or disconnected with a certain probability. NASA scientist and well-known SF writer Geoffrey Landis applied the model to an interstellar civilization’s proliferation.

Due to time lags, we could expect that colonies will develop cultures different from their mother culture (and will also have different resources at their disposal). Some may therefore continue exploration, while other ones develop a non-colonizing civilization. If the probability of continuing colonization falls below the critical probability, the growth will stop after a finite number of colonized star systems. If the probability exceeds the critical threshold, there would still exist voids at any given time. It rests on the assumption that there is a maximum distance which allows new colonies to be directly established (in other words, that we could for example directly colonize Proxima Centauri but not the more distant Epsilon Eridani—for that, we would need another site in-between), which seems reasonable, though the actual distance itself would be difficult to constrain. Another assumption is that an already colonized world is not suitable for a new wave of colonization.

It could account for the lack of known interstellar civilizations around us; however, it doesn’t solve the problem of the apparent lack of self-reproducing probes. If von Neumann probes are realistic (which is an assumption in itself), how come we haven’t seen any? Is it because they are mostly instructed to stay away from civilizations? Programmed to only use a very small amount of matter in each system to continue proliferation? Or are we here because we’re lucky and they haven’t converted our system yet?

A nice solution to this aspect of the Fermi Paradox is outlined in David Brin’s Existence. The monumental novel tackles various problems related to it—How unique are we? What happens when any single person achieves the capacity of destroying an entire civilization at a whim? Could seedling ships succeed? Will AIs join us, replace us, merge with us?—but revolves especially around the finding of several alien artifacts, ambassador probes that establish communication with humanity and invite it to join their respective collectives.

To avoid spoilers, let us just say that it may not be a bad idea to look at more biological systems, be they complex ecosystems, epidemiological models, or semelparous plants, when considering the Fermi Paradox—or even things like spambots or chain mail—and to distinguish the survival of civilizations and individuals. Though perhaps counterintuitive, the latter may persist for much longer times.

“So,” the Optimist continues, “it seems that if we look at the Fermi Paradox in a more complex way, it’s not that surprising that they are not here. And we still haven’t mentioned things like colliding domains models, or a singularity where civilizations expand outside the macroscopically observable realm.”

“That’s all very nice,” says the Pessimist, “but you’re completely overlooking other possibilities that may be more likely. Let’s first look at the popular ones.”

Oh yes, the destroyer theories. They’re just as popular as the optimistic (one would be tempted to say naïve) hypotheses of the “zoo” or “federation.”

Despite the vast interstellar distances, civilizations may routinely destroy each other in struggle for resources, territory, or just out of fear of the others striking first, and only those fearful enough to stay hidden remain out there. Do we live in such “dark forest,” like many science fiction stories seem to suggest (recently e.g. Liu Cixin’s aptly titled second volume of his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, or earlier works by Alastair Reynolds, Greg Bear and many others)? Community ecology has a term called “landscapes of fear” that applies to predator-prey interaction. Could similar dynamics be applied to galactic civilizations’ interactions? So far, we have no way of knowing.

“But I fear one possibility that is less impressive, but far more likely in my opinion,” the Pessimist continues, “and that is self-destruction.”

Where does the threshold for the missing galaxy-colonizing civilizations lie? Is there a “Gaia bottleneck” of establishing biogeochemical feedback cycles, leading to the relative scarcity of planets habitable for complex life? Is intelligence so rare? Is advanced technology? Or do advanced civilizations commonly destroy themselves? A pessimist might fear that we’re destroying our environment and ushering forward a new civilization collapse, propelled by drinking water shortage and fertile ground scarcity, local environmental disasters, extinctions leading to severe ecosystem shifts.

“And while we’re doing that, we’re myopic to it and instead of really trying to mitigate it, we’re investing into wasting our resources even more,” the Pessimist concludes gloomily. “Making a tourist flyby of the Moon? Trying to colonize Mars? It’s wishful thinking. Mars is not a spare Earth. You’ll send astronauts there to die from cancer caused by the radiation, or because of some technical failure, and they would still be dependent on Earth. It’s wasting, not gaining resources!”

The Optimist remembers one friend’s remark: “Perhaps manned spaceflight is an illogical decision. It’s expensive, and we can simply gain useful data by robotic probes . . . But perhaps the sparse civilizations which made that decision now cruise the galaxy exploring the ruins of the ones which made the reasonable decision.”

What’s the ideal time for expanding beyond Earth? When does it quickly enough cease to be a deep resource sink and become beneficial in the overall sum? What should such risk assessments look like? There are a number of things that could wipe out our civilization or make it collapse. A large enough asteroid impact or volcanic event, a nearby enough supernova explosion, even a rare solar flare strong enough to fry most of our electronics, even though life itself would remain practically unaffected.

These are all extremely rare events—but they are as unpredictable as it gets. We might get on without any for many millions of years, or something like that could occur next week. How prepared should we be? Would more near-Earth asteroid surveys and testing mitigation techniques suffice? Should we found space colonies as soon as we can, even though they wouldn’t be self-sufficient for decades, if not centuries? Many people would argue that we should invest first and foremost in eliminating poverty, promoting health care and education, and protecting our environment. But this may be a false problem—it’s not either/or. Resources taken off human spaceflight don’t magically appear in solving health, environmental, or social issues. While the Optimist calls for spaceflight support, the Pessimist argues that our attention should focus elsewhere.

The Fermi Paradox may be more relevant for our own future ventures than most people realize—but it’s a pity we know so little about it. Our speculations are countless—but we need more testable predictions and the data to test them. Current and near-future ground and space-based surveys such as K2, Gaia, HARPS, NGTS, TESS, CHEOPS, PLATO and many more will vastly improve our data on exoplanets and their host stars. Telescopes such as JWST may greatly contribute to our knowledge of the planets’ characteristics and potential chances for life. Solar system missions like ExoMars, Mars 2020, or JUICE may tell us more about the (un)availability of conditions for life within our own system, and the uniqueness of Earth.

As to the pressing questions of the likelihood of emergence of intelligence, number of technological civilizations, galactic deserts or habitable zones, expansion speeds, difficulty of interstellar travel, and safety of actively transmitting—we’ll need much more for that. And concerning the tendency of civilizations to survive, communicate, colonize, and make wise decisions about the future, we ourselves are the only example we have so far, and it seems like a good idea to try our best to prove the more optimistic hypotheses—by demonstration.

Is it the Optimist, or the Pessimist who will be proven right? Both presented valid points and raised reasonable arguments, and almost any explanation of the Fermi Paradox we can think of tells us something important about us, our future and choices we should make. Finally, if we are truly alone in the Galaxy, isn’t it the best time to start exploring?

About the Authors

Julie Novakova is a Czech author of science fiction and detective stories. She published seven novels, one anthology and about thirty stories in Czech and started publishing short stories in English in 2013. She’s also a regular contributor of the Czech SF magazine XB-1, publishing both fiction and nonfiction there, and a student of evolutionary biology at the Charles University in Prague.

Tomas Petrasek, born 1984, is a Czech scientist, astronomy advocate and science fiction writer. He has published two non-fiction books about astronomy, one novel, and several short stories. He currently works as a neurobiologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Automatons, Wyrms, and Dead Men:
A Conversation with Elizabeth Bear

Chris Urie

Shrugging off the shackles of the familiar and stepping into a brand-new world, the fantasy genre pulls you deep into elsewhere. Anything is possible—a metal creature can have a message, a dead man can talk, and ice-wyrms can rule the mountains.

Elizabeth Bear’s new novel A Stone in the Skull, kicks off a new series set in a world she first explored in her Eternal Sky universe. The Gage is a brass automaton created by a wizard. He is carrying a message from a powerful sorcerer to the leader of the Lotus Kingdom. A Dead Man is his protector and friend. Together they cross the Steles of the Sky and walk right into conflict.

Author of numerous poetry, essays, short fiction, and novels, Elizabeth Bear has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Locus, Theodore Sturgeon, Hugo, Audie, and numerous other accolades for her writing. A Stone in the Skull is out from Tor Books, October 10th.

What was it about the world you explored in your Eternal Sky trilogy that pulled you back in?

Well, I intentionally set out to create a really vast world, and one with a sense of history and actual change. I find that too often when reading epic fantasy, I come away with a sense of a world that has existed for only a few thousand years, perhaps, and in which technology and social change haven’t really had any effect. So, the world of the Eternal Sky is in a very direct way a reaction against that sense that this fantasy world is the middle of Europe; it’s been the 11th century here for a thousand years, and maybe there’s some uncharted steppes or barbarian lands off to the East and an ocean West and some fur-wearing piratical Northerners with long mustaches . . . but we don’t really talk much about those places except as a source of threats.

I wanted a place with a deep time, and with a real sense of scope, and also the unusual aspect of being a fantasy world where the very land and heavens do, in fact, reflect the gods and political realities of the people living under them.

The Eternal Sky has some very old cities, but kingdoms and empires and nation-states rise and fall around them, borders cross them, technology changes over time—and there are some ancient mysteries under the land.

Do you find it is easier to jump back into a world you’ve already created to find more stories or to build up an idea from scratch?

Established worlds have a lot of foundational work done, which automatically makes it easier. I can concentrate more on plot and character development and less on inventing a world. Of course, in The Stone in the Skull, I’ve jumped half a large continent away from where we were in the previous trilogy set in the Eternal Sky world . . . so a lot of things are different.

You’ve written numerous novels and short stories in a variety of genres. What does your writing process look like? Do you find yourself working in a similar way for each story or does your process change depending on the project?

Well, I do like changing genres—and crossing genres—because, as I tell people, I have a short attention span. Also, I spent my formative years reading and thinking of science fiction and fantasy as one genre, so the marketing categories within that umbrella all seem to be there for reader convenience, so you can find what you feel like reading today.

It’s all fiction that’s concerned with asking “what if” questions, and that’s what I love.

My writing process is pretty chaotic. I got some good advice early on, which was to avoid tying my process to any rituals that might be hard to maintain under different circumstances. I’ve always been pretty good at working under varying conditions—whether it be a hotel room, a coffee shop, or (my preferred location) my own home. I have a bunch of workspaces set up around the house that I can move between, which is useful, too.

Since I’m not a parent and I’m married to another writer, I get to claim whatever space I currently need for working, and so does he. It’s very convenient for both of us.

My story construction process is predicated on the idea that there are no rules, just a toolbox full of techniques that work more or less well in any given application. If one thing isn’t working, I try a different tack. I will handwrite in a notebook, or on scrap paper, or I will type away at the computer. If I can’t make the plot work for me, I try to come at the conflict from a thematic or character development angle. I try to ask what a scene is doing, structurally, if I’m having a hard time writing it from the perspective of what action happens in it.

I’m pretty pragmatic, and I try not to get really attached to the idea that there is one way I must tell stories—I’m for whatever gets the job done, preferably in the most elegant fashion available.

A Stone in the Skull eschews a lot of classical fantasy tropes. Was this something deliberate or did this grow out of the writing and what inspired the story?

That’s interesting, because I was definitely thinking of a lot of the tropes of sword-and-sorcery while constructing it! Two threatened queens, a masterless mercenary with a past . . . The Gage and the Dead Man are, a little bit, my Fritz Leiber homage. I wanted a bantering relationship between them, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and some of that first-half-of-the-20th-century-wandering-heroes dynamic.

It is pretty devoid of farm boys with a secret lineage, I will admit, though there is a gnomic sorcerer or two! And a perfectly good ice-drake!

I was definitely trying to stay away from the classical fantasy tropes of the world-spanning battle between good and evil, at least. This is a trilogy much more about humans and human politics and economics—there’s a war brewing as the book starts, but it has to do with a poorly planned succession and a militaristic border state with poor access to natural resources much more than ideology—and their interaction with the natural world. Which can be a pretty terrifying thing even in our world, and when you add magic and the possibility of angry gods into it . . . well, then, even more so!

The story strikes a balance between feeling enormous in scope yet a very personal journey for each character. Was it hard to find this balance?

Gosh, yes! I worked extremely hard to try to stay very centered in the heads of the four protagonists as they move through a gigantic world. I love the cover art I was given so much, in part because I feel like it demonstrates that contrast so well—the Dead Man in a snowy waste, facing down the above-mentioned ice-drake in an obviously tremendously mismatched battle. The world is very big, and these characters are very small. They’re just folks, really, even if they’re folks that have accidentally blundered into a big chunk of history.

These people have their big concerns—what’s happening on a geopolitical and geological scale—but they have their personal demons too: loneliness and isolation; a quest for a place to belong; a feeling of being inadequate to an enormous task; the grief of having been widowed.

The gods don’t stop playing chess on the board where you’re standing just because you had a terrible day at work.

Alas.

The Gage is one of the most intriguing characters in the novel. What is it about automatons that inspired you? Are there other metal humans in film or literature that inspired it?

I have always been fascinated by automatons and metal and stone people and people who are in some way literally inside a shell—I think because it concretizes (terrible pun) the feeling of alienation that I think everyone has sometimes, of being physically separated from the world and other people by an impermeable membrane. Sometimes, that armor is a blessing; sometimes it’s a curse. As a kid, one of my favorite superheroes was Marvel’s Thing, Ben Grimm, who was a guy who got involuntarily encased in a rocky skin through irradiation, because comic book radiation is great.

I think if I had to say what the direct antecedents of the Gage were, one would be L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman—the book version, who has a very macabre origin. Gages are constructed in a similar fashion to how the Tin Woodman was made; a Wizard takes apart a human being bit by bit, replacing each bit with machinery. Eventually, the entire person has been replaced and an automaton is created.

But because this is a world where magic works, of course, the resultant Gage has the memories of the human being it has replaced. Even though no physical part of that human being remains.

I also drew some inspiration from Paul Chadwick’s graphic novel Concrete, which is an examination of the same trope as The Thing, with a more realistic bent (if that even has meaning in the context of superhero comics) and a focus on how Concrete’s enormous, heavy stone body places restrictions on him just as it grants him extraordinary powers.

The cultures, societies, and even the names in A Stone in the Skull feel deeply rooted within the world. How has your training as an anthropologist influenced this novel?

I can’t escape my training as an anthropologist! Because the first thing they do when you start studying anthropology is do everything possible to get you to question your own cultural assumptions and defaults, and then you can never quite be comfortable and unselfconscious again.

So, it totally influences the way I construct cultures, and how I try to reveal them to the reader. Nobody’s culture looks exotic to them from the inside. It’s homey. When I’m writing from the point of view of somebody who grew up in a fantasy or science fictional setting, I try to make the reader feel at home in that world, rather than making it seem strange to them.

Some of that involves putting a lot of thought into things like justice systems and economics, and trying to make sure that people’s cultural patterns and expectations don’t just default to middle-class white American value systems for no particularly good reason.

A complete world comes with its own myths, legends, and religions. The world you’ve created for this novel is no different. Did you research various real world spiritual beliefs for this novel?

I actually tried very hard to avoid borrowing too much from the real world! There is a monotheistic religion that bears some resemblance to the Abrahamic religions, for example, but it’s very different in many respects. (The most obvious one is that their God is personified as female, and so is Her prophet.) I did do a fair amount of research on the prehistoric civilizations of the Indus River Valley, which were quite advanced for their time but which we don’t know too much about, except in terms of their material culture. And basically, I tried to construct a civilization such as might have grown out of a culture like that one.

It’s not meant to reflect any existing culture of the Indian subcontinent, and definitely not to fictionalize any existing religion. I try very hard to avoid putting real religions of any sort into secondary-world fiction, unless it’s really unavoidable. (I’ve written two series based strongly in Norse mythology, for example, and it’s hard not to use the actual Nordic religions when you sort of need Freya or you’re borrowing heavily from the Poetic Eddas.)

You once described Science Fiction and Fantasy as “willing to break things, to test things, not to take anything for granted.” What did you want to break with A Stone in the Skull?

Well, that’s a big question!

I wanted to talk about assumptions about women in power, and how women hold power, and how women relate to other women around questions of social and political power. I wanted to show a group of people, all of whom have in some way suffered a tremendous loss, finding ways to absorb that loss, grieve it, and still manage to express agency and try to exert a positive, steering force on events that seem much huger and more terrible than they are.

I wanted to create a tremendous, spacious world and give it a sense of being haunted, of having a profound and sometimes terrible past, and a frightening and uncertain but maybe awe-filled future.

Having taught at Viable Paradise and Clarion West, what is the single best piece of advice you’ve been given and what advice can you give to aspiring authors?

The best piece of advice I ever got was from Charlie Finlay, C.C. Finlay, now the editor of F&SF, who told me once back in 2001 or so that there was “always room for excellence.”

By which he meant, the way to succeed as a writer is to be the very best version of you as a writer that you possibly can.

So that’s what I have striven for: to keep getting better with every project.

The best advice that I can give is this: there is no magic get-published button. The object is not to write one piece of fiction and polish it until it somehow sells. The goal is not “to sell a story.”

The goal is to learn the craft and art of writing fiction to the point where you as a writer can sit down every single time and write a good story. An ambitious failure, if it’s not a brilliant success.

Once you have those skills, the sales will follow.

What projects are you working on next?

I am in the final edits on a book called Ancestral Night, coming out from Gollancz in the UK and Saga in the US in early 2019. It’s a space-opera adventure with pirates, ragtag salvage operators, a giant alien praying mantis who is also a pretty good cop, and an A.I. that’s fond of twentieth-century American folk music.

I’ve also got a sequel to Karen Memory coming out next year. it’s called Stone Mad, and it’s either a very short novel or a really long novella. I have the copy-edited manuscript for that on my desk right now.

I have a short story in the new Gardner Dozois anthology, out October 10th. The anthology is called The Book of Swords, the story is called “The King’s Evil,” and it also stars the Gage and the Dead Man, on an ill-advised mission to retrieve an ancient king’s possibly cursed treasure. Because that never goes badly.

And, last but not least, I’m involved in an interactive storytelling experiment with the folks in the Hieroglyph Project at Arizona State University, where I will be constructing a bespoke science fiction story based on reader input!

What can readers expect from the upcoming Lotus Kingdom Novels?

Megafauna, politics, explosions, dragons, politics, armies, bizarre astronomy, more politics, some gunfights, treachery, true love, and a white elephant.

A literal white elephant.

What is your favorite memory from working as a stablehand?

This one gelding, Jake, who was a Polish warmblood and a practical joker. Horses actually do have a horsey sense of humor. He was a big rangy bay, and he liked to trip people while they were grooming him or working in his stall.

There’s no actual punchline to this story. You just have to imagine a 17-hand-tall horse with a hoof as big around as a soup bowl stealthily insinuating that hoof between your legs, or stepping on the very edge of your boot so carefully as not to catch your toes . . . and then laughing at you when you tried to move and fell down into a pile of sawdust and horse poop.

He got me more than once, too.

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:
Grains of Salt, Lumps of Gold

A.M. Dellamonica

Overthinking everything is a cheap hobby. There’s no start-up cost, and you don’t need a library card to do the research anymore, because Internet. It doesn’t require heavy equipment, so you can do it on the bus or the beach.

When I encounter a shiny new idea or a radically different new perspective on something, what I like to do is hoard it, like a dragon. I want to Smaug it on down to my treasure trove and get overthinky AF: find it a nice place among all my other pieces, see what it matches up with, polish it, admire the sparks and glints and rough patches.

I’m not saying this makes me a deep thinker, necessarily. Sometimes it just makes me a slow one. But I find value in the practice because discarding one’s first and second conceptions of a thing can, sometimes, get you down to something more solid.

One such nugget tumbled my way recently at a Timberhouse writing retreat in Ottawa. We were a medium-sized group of professional writers with lots of adult beverages, so naturally we got to talking about the ups and downs of authorial careers. Someone got to polling the group on a specific publishing challenge. Many answers were things they’d heard before, or already tried. Eventually they said, in frustration: “Everybody tells me to do the thing that worked for them!”

Pounce! Drag that nugget down to the cave!

Everyone tells you to do what worked for them.

Isn’t that the nature of advice giving? Is there something fundamentally short-sighted, or lacking in empathy, about only telling people the thing that worked for you? Is embellishing beyond what you’ve experienced simply mouthing off?

This interests me for all sorts of reasons, but in main because I teach writing. I’m basically a paid advice spigot.

Every semester, someone in my UCLA Extension Writers’ Program courses asks if they are better off building a career and rep in short fiction before turning their hand to writing novels. This is a topic that comes up so reliably that I keep my talking points on file.

The short answer? Both paths have validity. Novels make a bigger splash; stories splash more frequently. There’s no guarantee that selling ten or even forty shorts will get you the profile you desire, because so much in publishing is outside your control. But stories-to-novels is the route I remember going, and—just as the Ottawa friend said—it’s what I instinctively want to tell people to do.

What I like about a stories-first model boils down to the idea of practicing craft. Every story is a protagonist, a conflict, a new voice. It’s a beginning-middle-end, an exercise in worldbuilding, and a chance to play with theme. Every finished story gives you experience: perhaps most importantly the experience of finishing. (How do you know when you’re finished? is also an FAQ). So: going with stories teaches you an incredible amount about writing. Much of that learning applies brilliantly to novels.

Buttttt . . . lots of it doesn’t. Plus, some people just can’t do it that way. Why? It’s how they’re wired. If this isn’t right for you, it isn’t right! (How do you know if it isn’t right for you? Yeah, this gets complicated fast. Back to the thinking cave! I promise the place has a beer fridge.)

No writing advice—no anykinda advice, really—is one size fits all.

Other times, in my classes, someone asks me a new question. The latest wasn’t should you go from stories to novels. It was: how do you do it?

How indeed?

Memory is unreliable. I pondered, vaguely recalling my past self writing books, sending them to beta readers, then knocking off a few short stories before returning to the book rewrite, notes in hand. There are four trunk novels, going back to my teens, interspersed with my first fiction sales. There wasn’t, I realized, a nice clean line from one form to the other. I wrote both forms, but finished stories and sent them out. They sold even as I wrestled with books, eventually finishing Indigo Springs. My bibliography doesn’t reflect my chronological output. The binary answer isn’t the answer at all. Shocker, right?

One of the little glints that advice nugget from Ottawa sparked up is that when you suggest a course of action to someone who’s looking for guidance, when you advise someone, you’re giving them a possible roadmap. The goal isn’t really for them to do as you say, or do as you did. It’s for them to conceive the first step on the path they’re going to ultimately forge for themselves. Advice is an offer of something that makes it possible to try. The thing that makes me breathe fire about one-size-fits-all prescriptions are that they only illuminate one possible path.

With that in mind, here’s some of what I tried telling that student who already writes short stories, about how to get to a novel:

Pretend the creative process is orderly.

I would suggest that you write short stories, most under 5,000 words, because if we’re going to be unrealistic, we might as well commit. Imagine writing shorts until you mastered all sorts of fundamentals: nuanced characterization, rising action, character conflict, scene writing, gracefully moving people and objects around your fictional stage, playing with language, understanding metaphor and sophisticated imagery, and writing complex, subtext-laden dialogue.

Because this is fiction of the fantastic, there’s another skillset to explore: establishing the world, showing off the future technology, whipping up lots of dreadful for the horror stories, designing workable magic systems. Using the otherworldly to illuminate our reality. Exploring the human condition through the lens of the unreal. I would have you write stories until you felt somewhat competent at these things.

Next, in this imaginary world where you have been writing and submitting these stories and I am some kind of weird all-powerful mentor, I would have you go from the 5,000-word format to the 7,500 to the 10,000. At 15,000 words, I’d say I want to see at least one subplot in this!

Remember, this is unrealism: you have all the time, no shortage of ideas, and some compelling reason to obey me. Maybe, in true dragon style, I’ve locked your sentient collectible Sailor Moon figurine in my beer fridge.

In this fantasy universe, when you get a novel idea that is indisputably too big in scope for a short story, you know it. There are no doubts. Would it be cool to live in that world?

So, you write things that are shorter than novels, but they get longer, more complex. Some of the stories start to take place in worlds you developed in previous stories. Characters start rampaging through multiple pieces, charging through ever-lengthening storylines. Chapters emerge in the novella with a subplot. And now your inner voice is screaming that it is time. Here’s the idea! Bust out 80,000 words and don’t come back without a Hugo. (Always honor those inner screams! Unless they’re suggesting things that will get you hospitalized or arrested.) The thing is, you’ve been developing the skill of going longer, getting more complex. Keep applying that lesson.

I think storywriters underestimate the significance of longer. Think about sprints versus marathons. Getting stitches versus open heart surgery. Honeymoons, not quickies. A novel has at least ten times as much space in it for beauty and surprises, for emotion, for people. That’s ten times as much character development, ten times as much description, ten times as much story. It’s longer—that’s obvious!—it’s also deeper and wider. Bigger stage, bigger cast, bigger complications.

I say this because one of the most significant issues I notice, when accomplished writers of short fiction tackle their first novel, is that they slam into the story like they’ve got a jackhammer and twenty pages in which to get the job done. What if what I’ve suggested so far doesn’t spark any excitement?

Here’s a different roadmap: read the first chapters of ten or more novels. Divide them evenly between books you adore and a bunch of compelling new ones. Go for variety, and notice the pace. Notice how the main character and the problem probably get set out within your book’s early chapter, but they don’t necessarily bang along very far into the plot.

Get a sense of the speed at which you’ll be driving. See where the authors use their words. Look for stuff you’d never include if you had to bring it in at 5,000 words. Then imagine chapter one of your book.

Alternately, have a go at one of these: draft a piece of your prospective book in a way that makes you feel like you’re moving at that slower pace. Try drafting the opening chapter of a book you never intend to write. Take an unfinished work of yours—surely one of those stories imaginary me made you write to save Sailor Moon didn’t come off—and try to expand the first two pages into twelve. Make them ridiculously long. What do you add? How much of it is worth having?

I have peered down all of these roads, and taken some. I’ve gotten lost a couple of times. I can find more, if they all look like they lead to swampy ground. The real hope is that—within all that copious pondering—I’ve laid the stone for someone’s first step.

About the Author

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fifth, The Nature of a Pirate, is up for the 2017 Prix Aurora. She is the author of over forty short stories, appearing in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She teaches at UTSC and through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Alyx is married to fellow Aurora winner Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal, in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same sex couples. Since her last Clarkesworld article was about queens, she figured this one should talk about dragons.

Editor’s Desk:
Things are Always Worse in the Dark

Neil Clarke

Sometimes life gets complicated. For the last five years, I’ve been dealing with the fallout from my heart attack. In the end, it caused me to change my life for the better, but it does come with some baggage. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that fear drove a lot of those changes. Fear that I might not get a chance to accomplish certain things, like seeing my children grow up, made it incredibly easy to suddenly change my diet and accept that my old career was a major source of unnecessary stress in my life. Surviving also comes with a healthy dose of gratitude and appreciation for what you have and in the good times, that keeps everything in balance.

September was a little off-balance. During my most recent visit to the cardiologist, they heard a bruit in my carotid artery. Typically, this is caused by an abnormal narrowing of an artery and given my history, it was something worth investigating. There was no need to rush, so it was scheduled for a few weeks later. The logical part of my mind knows that when a doctor schedules a test that far out, they don’t consider it immediately life-threatening. Relax. Meanwhile, the fear-driven monkey in my brain is bouncing around causing all sorts of commotion.

I spent the rest of the month with those two halves slugging it out. I found it difficult to focus on projects that were due, emails that were piling up, or stories that needed to be read. It was like having a fly constantly buzzing around your head, annoying, but not seriously so. Heavier projects were put to the side, pleasant distractions were introduced, and I made it to my test earlier this week.

Cardiac office waiting rooms can be like therapy centers. We’re all in the same boat and once someone starts talking, it just all pours out. Politics, race, religion . . . it doesn’t matter. We’re an odd family. This time, I was the veteran, with my five years being more than any of the others, but I was also, once again, the kid, the youngest in the room.

The woman in the seat next to me was new to all this and a bit worried about a test I had taken several times before. I spent a few minutes chatting with her and providing some sense of what to expect from the next couple of hours. It then comes out that she’s just had the test I’m worried about, so it’s her turn to share. Others chime in about their tests and the collective blood pressure of the room goes down.

Twenty minutes later, I head in for my test, more relaxed than I had been in days. The technician has me lie down and they ultrasound both sides of my neck. I have some idea of what I was seeing on her screen and was fascinated watching as the test progressed. When we were done, she looked at me like she expected a question and then said, “I can’t tell you anything about your results, but I am letting you go home, which means I saw nothing that requires the doctor’s immediate attention.”

I still haven’t heard from my doctor, but the not knowing isn’t as bad. Maybe it’s because I’ll know soon. Maybe it was that I just needed to talk things through. Maybe being sent home was enough. Things always seem worse in the dark.

Happy Halloween.

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: T.

Marianna Stelmach

About the Artist

Find more of Marianna’s work at mariannastelmach.wixsite.com/imponderabilia.