Prasetyo Plastics

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Ali Prasetyo mixed the plastic resin, before pouring the viscous liquid into the silicone mold. The colors swirled, like eddies at the edge of Mas River, just as he intended. He let it sit, fumbling with the prototype of the plastic toy in his hand. He felt the smoothness of the curves. It felt buoyant and he let it bounce on the table, listening to the light thwacking sound. There goes Earth, he thought. A short tremor traveled up his bare toes and up through his shoulders. A magnitude two, a mere blip on the Richter Scale, and yet his body was perceptible enough to feel the tiny quaver. His Earth rolled off the table and clattered to the floor. He bent down to collect the miniature planet and saw that his home of Indonesia was facing up, the many islands of the archipelago dotted in green signifying land in a swath of ocean.

Ali shook his head, put the ball in his pocket, and got on his scooter to bike to the local chemical supplier. He wasn’t satisfied with the way this prototype rebounded from the floor. There was a sluggishness to its ricochet. There must be something he could add to it, he thought, as he passed scooter traffic.

Ali had a way with plastic. He liked the way they shape-formed, like superheroes and monsters he used to read in paper comic books his grandfather collected. He passed by a bookstore and sped up. Brittle and yellowing, paper seemed so much the inferior material when compared to the shiny bright plastic that was so ubiquitous in his own generation.

He revved his engine and cut in front of a slow scooter with three kids sitting in them, along with their parents, two of the children with hard plastic helmets. He noted the grooves and holes, an irregularity on the side of the toddler’s helmet that faced him. Just as peripheral vision detected movement in an instinctive act, his eyes processed mold shapes and their contours instantaneously. In a second, he had passed him and his eyes focused on the road, an uptick in his brain registering the polycarbonate window that passed off as glass on a fleeting performance car that accelerated ahead of him.

As he watched the sports car disappear, he thought about his childhood and his dad who professed he longed to own a fast vehicle, but instead invested all his income on Ali’s future.

Ali excelled at plastic mold competitions, plastic erecting architecture, snap-on challenges. When he was five, he made his first model of a bird with his 3-D printer, with legs, guts, face, and all. When he was twelve, he focused on joints, moving parts, pendulums, and other mechanics using differently weighted plastics to achieve the kinds of kinetics he wished. When he was a high school graduate, he won accolades from the many contests he entered and placed. His teachers penned effusive recommendations for him and he won a scholarship to the university of his choice with the premier plastics engineering program. At the expense of their own dreams, his parents poured their energies into his and it paid off. They couldn’t have been prouder.

They could see their son was made for something great. He was one of the many youths ushering in a new era of material science, one of the great architects of the next generation. The kind of thing every parent tells themselves. Even as their dreams of race cars (with polycarbonate windows) sped off into the distance and winked away in the horizon.

Plastic was already overtaking all. Just as the world’s oceans were engulfed in plastic—where a knife slit in a dead bird’s body would reveal an autopsy of the polymer, just as even plankton consumed the micro-plastics—3-D printers started phasing in. They were the next best gift. They used plastic to make 3-D printers and 3-D printers to make 3-D printers. A kind of self-replication that assured perpetuity.

Ali browsed through the catalog of chemicals. As always, the warehouse was filled with mechanic humming and drumming but few conversations and shouts from vocal chords, with mostly machines operating the lines. Machine parts also printed from printers.

Printing was fairly easy. You could buy hardware off Amazon or you could just ask your buddy at school, your neighbor, your employer, someone else who has already invested in the hardware to make one of your own. Put in some specifications or download one of those many pre-made designs uploaded on snap share, and there you have it, a ready 3-D printer, ready to wash ashore more plastic debris, ready to raise plastic overconsumption as the number one threat to human health.

Ali took a can off the shelf. The can container itself was plastic.

When Ali created a small robotic car that had all plastic components, his parents took him bowling. His dad was especially elated. Then, one week later, he recreated a bowling alley out of plastic in their backyard. Every reward they offered him struck another chord of imagination, so that their attic filled to the brim with plastic appliances and knick-knacks. Then, when the attic was full, his parents allowed one car space of the garage to be dedicated to Ali’s contraptions. One car space soon became the whole garage, and next thing you knew, Ali had his first commission. One hundred dollars from his parents to build a shed of plastic to store his stuff. His parents thought themselves clever, but Ali thought they got the short end of the stick. He would get to appropriate more backyard real estate for his projects. Also, the lack of specification from his parents was his own gain. He built a shed that covered the entire backyard, from house to fence.

If his parents’ generation was the silicon generation, then surely his would be the plastic one. But, silicon was still present. Tech companies still experimented with silicon, interlaced with the printable polymer. But, plastic start-ups were where all the investors fled.

The next day, Ali cradled his plastic filament, as he chatted with his coworker, Karina Hartono. He was one of the few that had opted for a biochemical minor and now he proved the utility of his passion. Not only did it lead him to a career in one of the most lucrative sectors of R&D, but it also led him to this particular lab with this particular labmate, Karina.

The filament he held in his hand was mostly plastic but included some organic material from seabed bottoms, reefs from which he chiseled. The resulting mix was something that could conduct heat. He could feel it pulsate in his palm, but he thought that might be his own heartbeat, beating away to Karina’s tinkling laughter.

He felt on top of the world, a love blossoming, the conductive nature of romance-to-be and the new product that he felt in his bones would soon be marketable. This was the one, he thought.

Conductivity is a conduit for plastic to be the one material which will rule over us all. The long-lasting, barely biodegradable emperor of its domain, Earth.

That was the first two sentences of a 3456 carefully-worded anonymous letter that came in the mail one week after his co-authored article, “The electromagnetic conductivity of reef-based calcium carbonate infused in new polypropylene varieties,” published in the Journal of Engineered Textiles and Science. It was one of many letters to come. Looking back at it, Ali would say it was perhaps one of the tamest, least filled with vitriol.

After Karina published an article on her other project with the team that she was leading, new methods of plastic tempering, they kept separate bins to compete to see who could get the most hate mail by the summer. Some were sent by post but most came through their work emails that they then printed out to add to their own pile. Letters that were mostly questions or requests from media on plastic-related topics didn’t count. It had to have at least a tinge of animosity to qualify for the bin.

Ali was winning. His stack was at least three times the size of Karina’s. While the letters Karina received were largely confined to the local area and too benign to be considered for the bin, Ali received letters with lots of colorful expressions. But, Ali himself was a much more vocal advocate, agreeing to appear on blogs and podcasts on textiles.

And his ‘fans’ were from around the world, too.

It was with this lead in competitive hate-mail receiving, that Ali asked Karina to go scuba-diving with him. That summer they spent a lot of time checking out reefs together, all across Java, Bali and further out into the pristine waters of the Raja Ampat archipelago, with Ali pointing out some of the flamboyant ones that inspired his latest polymers.

“Remember that one that in blue and yellow with a huge arm span reaching out towards the surface? It looked like a peacock,” he would say. Or make note of some other piece of ocean bottom he found particularly enrapturing.

“It was a sea fan coral, anchoring to softer substrates. I read they’re nocturnal, only growing their polyps at night,” she would respond, a twinkle in her eye. “Can you imagine that, an engorged limb reaching out in the dark sea waters?” Ali wondered if that was an invitation to say more. Karina exhibited an encyclopedic memory when it came to these formations and a spirited humor he appreciated but could not exactly interpret. He left it alone.

But one night, at a provocative remark on her part, “darting orange fishes like tongues,” he invited her to his room. She conceded, with a coquettish grin. That night, like the coral, they stretched out their limbs. Like wayward growth, they wrapped themselves around each other in the dark, their tongues mimicking the flitting movements of tiny sea life.

Twice a week for two blissful months, they would glide in each other’s paths for hours at a time, pointing out gaudy sea life and photographing exceptional coral constructions.

Then, they would surface in sync to a setting sun.

The first leaves of autumn had already fallen when Ali first saw the clip of the environmentalists attacking plastic physically. He couldn’t help but laugh.

“What a joke,” he said at the cooler to the HR manager, as they peered at the screen together, watching the rage unfold.

“Honestly, sometimes I can imagine giving some plastic a good whack, too,” said the manager. “But, I’m not actually gonna go out there and do it.” Their eyes fell away from the phone as the repeated hits relented at about three seconds left of the clip.

Then, Ali grabbed his mug of kopi jahe, sipping the mix of bitter coffee and bright ginger, as he approached Karina’s desk. He pulled out his mostly-plastic phone to show her.

The environmentalists were beating plastic phones with metal bats. He couldn’t see the victims very well, but they appeared to be outdated Samsungs. The same group also uploaded a video of themselves taking blows at plastic medical machinery behind a hospital, using what looked to be old metal pipes they must have found rusting at scrapyards.

“Looks like they’re pretty hell-bent,” said Karina.

“Yeah, though I think I have a few letters in my inbox that are more provocative,” said Ali.

He clicked on the next video. For a few seconds they watched these determined protestors take swings at more plastic parts, this time behind an elementary school. The video must have been filmed right after lunch because kids started pouring in, running about the playground and yelling from slides and swings behind the protestors. The kids added to the general commotion, the sounds of banging plastic and the high-pitched cries and laughter of recess intermingling, until a school administrator asked the protestors to leave and the clip ended.

Later at home that night, Ali swirled his spaghetti with a LivingEssentials plastic fork, lost in thought.

It wasn’t as if he never considered the environment, he just knew it would work itself out. His job was to innovate and streamline machinery production through plastics. Other sectors had other responsibilities. Recycling and disposal were sectors outside his narrow field.

Anyway, the protestors could find more effective means of conveying their message, he figured. As if beating a few pieces of plastic technology would do anything but hasten their way into the food stream.

First, these tech pieces would be rendered unusable, some of it would be calibrated for reuse and the rest that could not be so easily recycled would be submitted to the earth as waste. Another bit of plastic discard. Then, whoever those environmentalists took from would simply create more plastic tech. Easy as calling in some superior printers, wave around some money, and within days, new plastic—some from old sources and some created—would be amalgamated into another lifecycle of waste.

Ali thought that if protestors could only use a bit of logic and political literacy, maybe they could direct their energies to the right ears and wallets. Beating plastic gears just wouldn’t cut it.

Ali and Karina had been dating steady for about two years when plastic superseded the boundaries of Earth.

They were watching industry news in the cafeteria, spooning chocolate pudding into their mouths after a lunch of some lackluster rubbery ham sandwiches, when the special came on. Collaborating textile specialists produced plastic that survived the onslaught of UV rays and X-rays from solar flares. Some of the polymers that Ali had worked on, now marketed to a general public, were involved in the innovations.

The textile specialists held out thin sheets of plastic. They explained that air pockets made them extremely lightweight, and its construction virtually indestructible by solar onslaught of electromagnetic radiation.

The reporter then finished the segment: And now plastic takes off to chart the cosmic seas.

As the value of their company stock took off, Ali and Karina talked about major life changes: marriage and the possibility of starting their own company. There were too many restrictions and bureaucratic stalls in their company and they were eager to dip their toes into the unknown, both in their relationship and in the trending industry of plastic for space exploration.

It was with their combined efforts and with the roles of many others that plastic accompanied the colonists to the moon and Mars almost a decade later. The colonists clothed in plastic, drank from plastic mugs, designed their residences in plastic, mostly bubbles of air trapped in plastic sheets, all thanks to Freeroam Industries Ltd. (once MicronLabs, division of Prasetyo Plastics, founded by the power couple and later sold for a whopping one billion in cash and stock.)

Humanity still breathed, ate, and expelled organic material. They were still life, after all. But, some argued that the fast food was mostly plastic anyway. Plastic worked its way up the food chain, they said, from the littlest fish up to the ones that reigned at the top. The omnivores that managed to conquer local space travel, also bore microscopic bits, buoyed in the fluids in their bodies.

Those who espoused humanity’s addiction to plastic pointed at these invisible bits of plastic coursing within. Humanity was likely crapping plastic. Peeing and bleeding plastic. Possibly breathing microscopic plastic.

It’s in this background of symbiotic relationship, when plastic took on a sentience of its own.

Ali was watching a program on the backlit screen when the news program followed.

“At first it was the merging of plastic and plankton, and the pieces that caught in those tiny digestive tracts must have intermingled with the replicating DNA of those tiny simple organisms, a threat invisible to the human eye,” said a woman holding a mic, her eyes peeping out a pair of glasses Ali could tell were at least ninety percent plastic.

“The murkiest seas give way to the strangest creatures, so it’s no surprise that it came from the ocean at first. Like the first of the Loch Ness Monster sightings, their existence was at first hard to identify. But, soon enough, footage caught these amorphous new organisms attached to each other like coral reefs, K’nex sets of monstrosity.”

Ali thumbed a message to Karina. “Urgent, check out the news,” it read. He clicked send and a ping let him know she would soon be cradling her own mostly plastic phone to read his dispatch.

Ali’s eyes glazed, frozen into the spherical molds, as he saw the material he had cradled and formed in his palms since a child, talked about in a way that smacked of new life.

“Sometimes they would wash up dead ashore. But mostly, they lay impassive on the seafloor. They consumed other organic material collected in the seabed, like sponges, filtering in the plastics and rich minerals of dead debris,” said the newscaster, her voice portentous, ending in a deep lilt.

Ali was scuba diving alone when he first saw them move. Karina was back at home, putting some finishing touches on a model of the Mars colony she was building for fun. Both of them had retired by now, their fortunes according them with leisure time for trivial pursuits.

Ali started and were it not for all his experience, he might have choked in his mask. A species of violet lichen cropped up that he never saw before. Ali thumbed through the registry of organisms that made their appearance on coral reefs that he had digitally collected in his mind.

Maybe it was a seasonal thing, a periodic thing, like locusts that come in regular passes of years, he thought. But, he had been scouring seafloors for many years and he never found a specimen much like this. He remembered the many formations Karina had rattled off to him throughout their lives together, years and years of collected knowledge.

Despite strict reef habitat regulations, he grabbed a sample. The purple creeped into his hands.

Ali, who had designed the merging of coral reefs and plastic many moons ago before his research took flight in capitalistic enterprises, felt a pang of dread. His years of investors, rising stocks in the company he co-operated and immersion in that territory amounted to a knowledge so in depth and wide in breadth, that he could recognize that there was a strand of something offbeat in this tiny sample. There was something nonorganic about this lichen.

He immediately called on some acquaintances to rent out a lab with limited oversight. For a hobby, he said, and no one would refuse him otherwise, because they owed their jobs to him and his name went places.

He didn’t want to raise any alarms until he knew for sure. Every day, he quietly slipped into the antiseptic room, hinting not even to Karina his whereabouts. He brought his scuba gear with him and said he would play with the corals.

Under the bright lab lights that passed through the microscope and through the manipulation of Ali’s adept gloved hands, the cells of the strange lichen quivered. Yet, they were not lichen, not really. Something about their molecular structure spoke of plastic. And yet, they weren’t entirely plastic either.

Unlike his own creations decades ago that kindled the plastics industry, these things grew. They were not content to stay bounded by the tenets of inorganic life, or staying simply manmade plastics, inert and lifeless. Rather, what Ali had first mistaken as lichen were plastics that had married into the plankton family, forged a union into the hum of the ocean bottoms, processed through the deep sea food chain.

They had taken reefs as hostages and lovers, which later Ali confirmed to be a kind of Stockholm syndrome that threatened to challenge the dominion of not only oceanic, but human existence.

After a month testing his initial conclusions in the lab, Ali decided he would need to see these plastics in person again. He spent days at the sea and was, at least, relieved that he no longer had to lie to Karina. His soaked wetsuit, sandy flippers, and constant run to the scuba gear suppliers for oxygen refills corroborated his story that he was scuba-diving daily.

Beneath the glittering sun, every day Ali jumped off his rented boat and cut through the surface of the water. He moved from shallower seas to deeper ocean, as the boat operator waited for him, often with fishing pole or book in hand when Ali returned hours later.

Under the bright ray of his heavy duty underwater flashlight, Ali watched how the plankton plastics divided and combined. He witnessed in person how they formed large masses as big as sea dollars, then starfish, then manta rays, darting in the sea like mystical creatures. They were not quite as fast as dolphins, not yet, at least. But, they were growing.

Ali didn’t want to stoke the understandable irrationality that lurked in human minds. He didn’t want to start a panic that once reached the media, would burst into a sensation online, a frenzy of apocalyptic shouts of doomsday approach.

Regardless, he couldn’t simply go down every day, watching the plastic coalesce.

In those days, alone in the dark seas with only his flashlight and a mind full of dread as company, he thought about evolution. An instinct told him that these strange creatures would not be content to roam the seas. They would make contact with their inert brethren on land. Maybe they could even mate and awake them. He did not know if it was possible. But intuition told him, that the creatures would expand and expand, just as the plight of the inert plastics, taking up landfill space and cluttering up streets.

But, this was not simply about immobile, lifeless plastics. This was much more sinister. These were growing bits of life, merging with plastic. Or plastic merging with bits of sea life. They were not sterile, but robust entities. They divided and reorganized in swift movements.

They could have a dominion of not only the seas, but of the land and skies. Ali thought of an old drawing in a children’s museum depicting fish making their way to amphibians and then reptiles. He thought of these amalgams coming ashore, the evolution of this plastic species in touch with their already pervasive terrestrial and extraterrestrial brothers would mean a crisis affecting them all. He thought of a bouncing plastic Earth ball he made years and years ago, rolling off a table and falling into an abyss.

After much consternation and against better financial judgment, he alerted the officials. Over everything, he wanted to shield Karina from it all. Karina, his partner in this enterprise, who had seen him through two kids and the surges and ebbs of their life they grew around their business.

He knew that telling the authorities would mean falling stocks, a probe into regulation, and possibly dismantling of an industry they had worked so hard for. It would also mean personally putting their household under spotlight for their own roles in the course of plastic development. Sure, they were retired and they could do fairly well, but their children who were working in the industry might falter and this could mean the crumbling of an operation they staked their reputations in.

The officials Ali first contacted were scientists that watched over ethics. They never thought ethics could come to this. Typically, the concerns these officials fielded amounted to questions on human subjects and concerns over exploitation. Not the threat of a wayward species coming into existence.

The alarm that spread through the scientific community harked back to the atomic bomb. Not only did it open up new impetus in research on reverse-engineering plastic-related textiles, but it also garnered a wave of discussions and debates.

No longer scouring the seas and instead leaving the job to expert hands, Ali spent his days and nights watching the aftermath of his unpleasant discovery. He would sit in his couch, ignoring Karina’s pleas that they needed a break from this. Where could he go that he could not see plastic? Maybe one of the space colonies. We haven’t been there in years, she said. But, Ali would look glassy-eyed into the screen, strapped to his sofa as if it were his own retribution.

And he would soak in all the criticism: science as not tool but weapon, not helping humanity but bringing it to its demise.

And this weapon was growing and, if what Ali suspected was right, already sentient.

Again, tonight Ali settled in his sofa with his dinner of cold, leftover pizza as accompaniment. Karina was at the gym and texted to tell him she’d eat later. His fingers sent a quick reply and then clicked the plastic buttons on his remote a few times before settling on Channel 36.

6PM Nightly News, with your host, Clarissa Wang.

Today, we will be re-airing a special for those of you who missed the show from last week. Reporter Bill Taylor, biologist Penelope Jackson, and plastics specialist Advik Singh (son-in-law of former plastics moguls Ali Prasetyo and Karina Hartono) take us to the depths of the oceans to trace the phenomenon we’re calling “Plastic Terror.”

(Roll-in Intro)

Everyone thought that when the singularity would happen, it would be metal cores with metal heads, metal limbs and metal breaths. Again, it was the projection of the times, the easy mistake that all short-sighted humanity falls for over and over again. The robots that fought back were never the shiny kind with tin folded limbs. They never had antennae jutting forth and walked on two feet. No, they were plastic. Plastic in all its versatility.

The way they formed together. The way they paired up in patterned numbers. It was the Fibonacci sequence unrolling before your eyes. There was something systematic to it all, something that surpassed simple mechanical unfurling of DNA and RNA. An intense curiosity and smartness emanating from the very fibers of their being.

“Fibonacci,” said Ali aloud with a groan, throwing an empty high-density polyethylene can of soda at the screen. It bounced off with an inoffensive bop, durable plastic coating shielding the ionized gasses within. He turned up the volume just as the urgency in reporter Clarissa Wang’s voice escalated.

Intelligence. These creatures were already sentient.

Soon they would contact their inert brothers, soon they would lay their replicated hands into their malleable bodies and turn them into machines of their own wills. Ingest them as one of theirs and regurgitate them for their own expansive motives.

Today we will explore the moment when the machines came alive and conscious. The phenomenon people are calling the singularity.

Cut to Reporter Bill Taylor: “Advik Singh leads us through some key areas of plastic manufacturing and disposal. Here is a waste pipeline of one of the leading plastics corporations (name withheld for legal purposes). To our left is the pipe in question that leads into the ocean. As you can see, it no longer pumps out waste, as the factory was shut down months ago.”

Cut to Plastics Specialist Advik Singh, as they walk around the waste pipeline. Then, cut to a mound of discard at an abandoned warehouse.

Advik Singh: “This is one congregation of our organic and inorganic refuse, all our disposable forks, spoons, and chopsticks, our blankets and machinery. My specialization is breaking down these plastics to benign forms that can’t be appropriated by sentient organic masses. Much of the technology is currently in development, but we’re looking at an accelerated time horizon for this project. Thanks to the disposal bill and the governmental funds pumped into the program.”

Cut to Biologist Penelope Jackson at the gates of a landfill: “All this is beat down to barely imperceptible crumbs and entering the breeding chains with plankton. Chambers of new life, new growth. The pact the lowest on the food chain made with the products of the highest.”

Cut to Reporter Bill Taylor: “When they came alive, they brought life to the plastic machinery that surrounded us, grew up with us, embedded into our own bodies in surgical procedures.”

Ali thought about the surgery Karina had last year on her hip. The joint replacement. He remembered her being more agile than he could ever remember.

(Roll in transition before commercials:)

This is how the machines came to life.

Singularity in plastic.

If it were a fugue, it would be an ominous cacophony. A provocative deep noise from the bottom of the sea. The yawns and shifts of countless single-celled creatures that lurked unnoticed eating and expelling. Making its way through the food cycle. More after this short break.”

Ali saw it all.

At the moment he scraped up that viscous violet that turned hard once on land, he had a hunch. Once his microscopes and plastic equipment ran the tests that affirmed what they were, already a pit as hard as cold plastic grew in his heart.

It was the worst hate mail he could never ignore: The demise of humanity for a superior race. And we did it unto ourselves.

Karina was always trying to be positive. When Ali’s mind turned to dark points of regret, she would say things like, “At least our kids are employed and passionate. Now that they transferred to jobs they find fulfilling.” Working to undo what we brought about was not what she added, but was the honest truth.

But, Ali’s mind went past the energies of their kids, springing into the far future beyond. Who knows what these masses of creatures will merge with next? Perhaps their race will continue to evolve, consuming us, bringing us squishy beings into their own folds. Maybe they would take us with them—out of local space and into the depths of the universe by way of combination with their tenacious materiality.

Ali wondered if by then he would be long dead, or at least altered enough not to be identified as Ali. Flagged instead as another kind of existence and intelligence. One that melts and reforms. One that can replicate itself and conduct messages with others. A new hardier life-form that could sail the cosmic seas like the voyagers that their polymer bodies promised.

It would be a kind of fitting irony, the company that he and Karina had erected, the textile giant that propelled an industry of space travel plastic manufacturing that eventually gave way to the metamorphosis of their own species in consolidation with another: the ultimate sentient colonizers.

At his workshop, Ali went back to his spherical mold of Earth, dabbling with it. This time the plastic hardened to a model whose colors were no longer green and blue, but a shocking, violent violet, textured with ripples, like the grape agates from Mamuju, Sulawesi that Karina owned as pendants. It didn’t roll off the table and fall into an abyss, but stood there on the desk, held back by its friction surface, challenging him. It seemed to pulsate even, tiptoeing towards him in the tiniest of movements, or maybe it was an illusion created by his own weakening eyes.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires stares at skies and wonders what there is to eat out there in the cosmos. Spires aspires to be a 3-D printer/replicator gourmand, but will happily concede with producing and consuming quixotic fiction and poetry. Trips to East and Southeast Asia continue to influence her writing and leave her craving durian, fermented foods and copious amounts of wonder that fuel her body, spirit and imagination.

Spires lives in oscillation between Asia and the US, and currently resides in Hawai’i. You can find her sniffing tropical fruit at farmer’s markets, scouring lawns and beaches for fallen plumeria blossoms and boarding research vessels. Her work appears or is forthcoming in various publications such as Analog, Grievous Angel, Retro Future, LONTAR, Gathering Storm Magazine and Story Seed Vault; as well as anthologies of the strange and delightful, such as Sharp & Sugar Tooth, Broad Knowledge and Ride the Star Wind. She can be found on her website or on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Retrieval

Suzanne Walker

I stood at the edge of the shrine for nearly half an hour before I finally willed myself to move closer. It was in the middle of a graveyard, at the bottom of a hill behind the city’s spaceport, so every few minutes the silence was punctuated by the whine of engines pushing their ships through the thick autumn clouds.

I wasn’t sure which was built first, the port or the shrine, but the proximity seemed sacrilegious no matter who made the choice. The wind blew my hair in front of my face, whistling as it passed through the sparse trees that lined the south edge of the burial grounds, and I suppressed a shiver. Beyond the trees, the towering Protectorate capital loomed, and I wished my stomach clenched in hatred, not fear. It had been ten years since I’d returned to Kinrev, and I no longer resembled round-faced child in the image the Protectorate had on file. The problem was, I now looked like my father.

“This is where your gods dwell? Beneath the ground?” My teacher, Ferrier, stood to my right. She was dressed as I was, plainly in a brown jumpsuit, with her gray hair pulled tight at the nape of her neck. It felt strange to see her without a gun and knife strapped to her side—we’d had to check all weapons at the spaceport, and part of me was surprised she hadn’t tried to pick a fight about it. I’d never seen her surrender them willingly.

“Beneath the ground,” I echoed. My voice sounded strange in my ears. “Sheltering their children in death.”

“Hmm.” Ferrier pursed her lips but said nothing. I turned away, glancing outward towards the graveyard, wondering where they’d buried my mother. She’d been killed in one of the final battles against the Protectorate, before they crushed the rebellion and executed my father lightyears away from Kinrev. I remember clutching his hand and watching as we returned her to the gods, body and soul, but the location was lost along with most memories of home.

At least she died planetside. I faced the shrine once more, and my knees trembled when I lowered them. I was taking a risk, coming here, but I hadn’t been home to my gods since I was a child. I wanted their blessing, before I set out on this retrieval.

No grass grew around the shrine, and I traced out the patterns in the soil, still known to my hands after all these years, the dirt soft beneath my fingertips. I kept my book of old Kinrevan prayers on me, but I knew the prayer for the dead by heart. My message would reach the gods this way, even if they couldn’t hear me.

“I set out to return my father to you,” I murmured. “Guide me, even if you cannot see where I may go. Show me the true path.”

They didn’t answer—they never did—but still I knelt there, tracing over the message again in the hope that it would reach them. That maybe this time, the gods would honor my family’s service.

“Riva?” Ferrier’s hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up to see her brows knit together in concern, and she glanced up the hill at the soldiers who patrolled the graveyard’s edge. “It’s time.”

We made it back to the spaceport and out the system without any problems, but I still couldn’t breathe freely until we made it to the next star. Ferrier had enough resources to procure fabricated IDs for us, so that I could return to Kinrev despite my status as a daughter of dissidents, but that did little to disperse the dread that lodged in my gut whenever I saw my birth planet.

Ferrier was silent in the pilot’s seat beside me, but I was grateful for her presence all the same. I’d become a full Retriever two months before, with rights to my own ship from the Guild, but I hadn’t claimed one yet. I doubted I would until I found my father. And if my old mentor disapproved, she kept such thoughts to herself.

“Do you think your gods were looking out for you, when they sent you to me?”

I glanced at her in surprise. The Guild frowned on Retrievers belonging to any sort of faith. Beliefs of the afterlife varied too much between planets, and it was best not to cling to any one doctrine in our line of work. I had been lucky in Ferrier, who tacitly allowed my nightly prayers, but she’d never spoken of it outright before.

“I . . . I never thought of them as sending me.” I said. “I looked for you, the minute I found out the Guild existed.”

Ferrier smiled a humorless smile. “I’ve never known a child to go looking for a ghost seeker.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You can’t have known too many children, then, before me.”

She chuckled softly, and reached over to squeeze my hand.

“You know it’s going to be different, this time. Nothing prepares you for when it’s family.”

I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, releasing it in time with the clanging of the pipes in the engine room. “I know.”

I was going to miss this ship, when I finally settled into my own. Its central chamber was almost cavernous, an endless series of pipes and hoses crisscrossing from the top of the dome down to the floor, where we temporarily housed the spirits we retrieved from the darkness of space. I spent most of the journey fixing the pipes, tinkering with blocked avenues I knew Ferrier would never bother to repair, and the work kept me from thinking too much about my father.

Yet still the prayer for the dead echoed in my head, enough to make me wish my parents hadn’t been so determined to raise me in the faith. The gods are tied to the earth, and your soul must be tied to the gods, if you are to find any peace in the afterlife. A death in the cold emptiness between the stars condemned one to an eternity of torment.

The Protectorate had known this, when they’d ordered the first deep space executions, and no amount of public outcry could dissuade them. It went against the very tenets of Kinrevan faith, so much so that I’d been shocked to see that the old shrines still existed. If the government dishonored the gods so much, you’d think they’d have torn down their temples.

The old grief took hold of me every so often as I worked in the pipes, and I told myself every time that I did this for my father: not for me, not for vengeance, not for anything beyond the gods’ embrace that he deserved.

I never knew if I was lying to myself.

Here’s the problem with deep space: even when you’ve got an exact location pinned down, it can be days before you find anything. We didn’t have an exact location for my father. His friends had managed to obtain flight patterns from around the time he died, but that still left us with more than half a dozen sites to check.

Two weeks, three sites, no ghosts. And each site felt more and more like failure.

But in the nothingness between the Sarinen system and the Ilenian nova, something flared out of the corner of my eye. I sat up straight for the first time in days, and beside me, Ferrier slapped her hand down on the dashboard in satisfaction.

“It’s a weak signal, but it’s there.” I could hear joints cracking when she stood up, and she gave me an unreadable expression. “Are you ready?”

I wasn’t, but I followed her through the main bay and into the prep room. A series of portable holding chambers lined one side and a handful of patched, worn spacesuits lined the other. Though I’d passed through it more times than I could count, my hands began to shake at the sight of the airlock. This time, I knew who waited on the other side.

Ferrier pulled down two of the suits from their hooks in the wall and handed me one. It was heavy, dank, and smelling of dried sweat, most of it my own. I could already feel perspiration running down my arms as I climbed into the suit, punching my fists through the arms so that I might still the shaking. The glass of the helmet was fogged in spots, but I could still see Ferrier standing near the airlock. Her voice came through a tinny speaker from the back of my head.

“You’re taking point on this, my girl, but I’m here. I’m here, understand? Only do this if you feel you can.”

I nodded and reached for a holding box to strap to my back. I hooked the hose to my belt and watched Ferrier do the same, and she gave me a wordless salute before she opened the airlock. There was a carved hollow where my stomach should have been, and my throat was so tight I wasn’t sure if I could breathe properly.

The forward door opened, and the emptiness between the stars carried me forward. My breath sounded heavy within the helmet, and I took care to keep it even while I looked out around me. This was a silence I could never get used to, even now, more sinister somehow than the long, quiet nights spent with Ferrier. There was no boat beneath my feet, no engines that could ferry us to safety should disaster strike—just me and the fear carried in my breath.

“Look for a light between the stars.”

Ferrier’s words echoed in my ear, lessons from my first retrieval. Without a nearby star as a beacon, everything somehow seemed even darker than usual. I floated upright relative to the ship, my eyes straining from the search, but I couldn’t see anything. I moved away from Ferrier slowly, using the microjets in the spacesuit boots to push myself around and behind the ship.

Something flickered in the bottom corner of my helmet, and I turned, slowly, the pulsers in my gloves barely firing. It was a fleeting flash of blue, now, and my breath caught in my throat when I stopped to behold a luminous figure, rippling back and forth before the spattering of stars behind. It wavered more rapidly, struggling to take shape, and it reached out towards me as if to capture the form of my bulky, padded body.

There were days now where I struggled to remember my father’s face, when I had to rush to my bunk and pull out an old picture and trace through the dust with my fingertips before he was clear in my mind again. But the figure before me shifted once more, and there was no mistaking the particular way his beard formed, or the scar that connected his temple to the base of his jaw. His eyes were clouded, muddled, before they blinked with what I prayed was a dawning recognition.

“Daddy?”

He couldn’t hear me—he couldn’t—but the word seemed to spark something in him, for his face suddenly twisted into a sneer of malice that I had never seen him wear while alive. I frowned in confusion, wondering if I should speak again, before my view suddenly exploded with blue, and I was thrown backward, hurtling fast toward the ship.

I screamed, but the sudden intake of air cost me, and a sharp pain radiated through my chest. The force of the creature—not my father, not my father—pushed hard against the suit. I hit the hull of the ship with a great thud that reverberated down my back, and my head slammed back against my helmet. Sparks swam in front of my eyes, and I could barely see that the creature’s form expanded into giant hands that twisted themselves around the base of my helmet. I tried to struggle, but my arms had taken on the weight of lead, and I couldn’t react quickly enough to the creature, whose arms had multiplied to snake around my back, pressing the suit deep into my skin. I felt a sharp twist against my spine, and my eyes widened in terror—it was trying to tear off the oxygen tank.

There was another flash of light, and the creature released me for a moment, mouth open in a silent scream of rage. Ferrier hovered above me, her weapon aimed at the both of us, and the substance of the creature seemed to leech away from itself, spiraling toward the funnel-shaped opening of Ferrier’s blaster. I pried its spindling fingers off of the base my helmet, but not before it pushed me away with one final twist to the tank strapped to my back. A sharp hissing noise rushed through my ears, and I could see the oxygen level rapidly failing on my helmet monitor.

“Get inside!” Ferrier shouted. “Pull yourself in and shut the airlock!”

“But—”

“Go!”

I was feeling light-headed now, my breaths coming in short, sharp gasps that burned my lungs. I fumbled before I held the tether, the thick gloves of the suit doing me no favors. I made the mistake of looking behind me, though my vision had begun to swim, and saw the creature reaching towards me, mouth moving in what would have been an ear-shattering howl, if I could hear. I bit down on my inner lip hard enough to taste blood, the metallic scent blooming in the oxygen-starved space of my helmet, and I turned back to my hands on the tether. My vision was almost completely gone, and it took all my strength to focus my eyes so that I saw nothing but one hand moving in front of the other, one then two.

I don’t know how I made it into the airlock, or how I had the strength to key in the combination to the aft door and cross through back to the holding bay. All I know is that I found myself collapsed on the floor of the hold, knees drawn tight to my chest, head pounding, the room spinning all around me. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to feel anything ever again, and it was only the thought of Ferrier returning with my father, murderous and merciless, that caused me to stumble to my feet, trip out of the spacesuit and out towards the main cargo bay.

The nausea came as soon as I opened the holding door, but I managed to wait until I was in the privacy of my own bunk before throwing up in the garbage bin.

Even the reused, flat air of the ship was a gift to me, after what had happened to the spacesuit, and I almost cried from the relief of it. I lay curled in my bunk for what felt like hours, shaking uncontrollably, until I finally tired of the weakness in my limbs and the smell of stale vomit sitting in the trash. I cleaned out the bin and left for the main hold, pacing the length once or twice before I stumbled into the galley, on the verge of collapse once more. I found refuge in one of the hard chairs attached to the table and tried to take a deep, steadying breath.

The door hissed open to reveal Ferrier. She gave me one quick glance before she headed toward the sink in the corner. I couldn’t look at her, could hardly focus enough to stay upright in my chair, so I stared down at my boots. Both of us tended to get lax about cleaning while on a job, and there were still crumbs from the previous day’s meal on the floor, caught between the indented grooves in the steel.

Weathered hands suddenly covered my own, and a steaming cup was pressed toward me.

“Here.”

The cup was warm, with the scent of ginger root and something stronger curling up to soothe my battered nerves. I inhaled deeply before taking a sip, and suddenly I was thirteen again, Ferrier caring for me after my first, harrowing walk into space.

Ferrier took a seat across from me at the table, but the cup was nearly cool between my hands before I could look up to meet her eyes. Ferrier was always quick to tell me when I’d been wrong, and I’d never failed so badly as I had here. But instead of admonition, her face reflected something of my own pain.

“He’s in the holding chamber. If you want to see him.”

My eyes filled with tears I’d been holding back since we docked on Kinrev. I’d seen the echoes of so many who died in space over the years, trapped in the void with no sense of peace or rest. Though the Guild disagreed, I often thought my religion made me better equipped for the job than most, because I understood that the soul needs something solid to ground it. Some can handle the isolation, the weightless eternity. Others can’t. Part of a Retriever’s job is to reorient a spirit in their ships’ pipes, to calm it in preparation for its return planetside. But for some, it’s far too late.

This wasn’t the first ghost who had tried to kill me, and it wouldn’t be the last, yet somehow I never considered that my own father would be one of them. His death had been deliberately cruel, but I’d held on to the hope that he could endure, whole, until I came for him. Retrieving him had been my purpose for so long, and now . . .

“Riva . . . ” Ferrier reached out and took both my hands within her own. “Have your gods ever been confronted with a retrieved soul?”

I choked out a sob, and Ferrier enveloped me in an embrace. She doled out physical affection so rarely, but I gave in to grief now, crying until my head ached and my eyes were washed raw.

“No. And I don’t know if they’ll take him like this.”

We kept my father’s ghost in one of the heavy metal boxes that lined the cargo hold. Every so often it would shake violently and move incrementally toward the doorway, and I double-checked the lock every few hours despite knowing it was airtight. I kept vigil one night, my throat tight as I sat beside him, running my hand gently across the smooth metal plates that kept him confined. We tried to free him into the pipes, another night, but his claw-like hands came rushing for Ferrier’s throat the minute he was released. After that, he remained in the holding chamber.

My eyes still stung from all the tears I’d shed on the journey home, but they filled once more when the gray clouds of Kinrev came into view. Our false trader’s ID worked a second time, although now we would have to wait for the cover of night to take the box that held my father to the shrine.

My message from before had been raked clean, and the shrine stood cold before me. We had brought nothing with us save the holding box, no tools that might undo the action of release. My hand trembled as it ran across the release handle, and I murmured the prayer of the dead aloud once more. It wasn’t worth ascribing it to soil—if the gods didn’t sense my father’s presence, they would soon enough.

I opened the container, and an unholy shriek rent the air. A twisting streak of blue shot up and punctured the sole light overhead, and there was nothing but darkness and a howling storm. My hair came free of its braid and blew in front of my face, nearly blinding me. The force of the wind pulled me toward the shrine, but the spirit seemed to have no target, this time, just a blinding, purposeless rage.

“Stop!” I could barely hear myself over the rushing sound in my ears. “We’ve brought you home!”

I don’t know why I said it, but the words must have reached him, because the howling noise slowly faded down to a dim roar. The wind diminished, and the creature shrank until it was only a head or so taller than my father would have stood in life. It resembled nothing human, but it stayed relatively still, and I stepped forward, hand outstretched as his had been out in the void.

My hand slipped through a thick, almost gelatinous substance that was colder than the air in winter. It swirled and crashed around my hand, winding itself slowly up my arm as if unsure how to react. Then the cold began to seep away, and I fought back sudden tears.

Ferrier stood staring at us, mouth agape, and it was clear she’d never seen anything like it in her life.

The hollow of the shrine glowed beneath me, and slowly, the creature that had been my father sank into the ground. I fell to my knees, not caring if anyone heard my wordless cry, and my voice echoed out through the silence. For a moment, I could hear nothing but the wind whistling through the trees. Suddenly, I was thrown back, a blast knocking me straight to the ground, and I wheezed, struggling to recover the wind that had been knocked out of me. Ferrier had collapsed, clutching her heart with her hand, and I followed her gaze to where I had been kneeling a moment before. The shrine had exploded, and out of the wreckage rushed not just my father but half a dozen other creatures, so bright and blinding I knew they couldn’t be mere ghosts.

I shaded my eyes with a shaking hand, and knew before seeing that they were headed straight for the capital. The Protectorate’s bastion had been built to keep out the living, not the dead.

Ferrier clutched at my shoulders with her hands. “Is that . . . are those . . . ”

“They know now,” I murmured through my tears. “He’ll find peace. One way or another.”

About the Author

Suzanne Walker is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She is co-creator of the webcomic/graphic novel Mooncakes along with artist Wendy Xu (Lion Forge, 2019). She is a former contributor to Women Write About Comics and has spoken on numerous panels, with topics ranging from disability representation in sci-fi/fantasy to the importance of fair compensation for marginalized SFF creators. Her non-fiction work has been published in Classical World and Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability.

Dead Heroes

Mike Buckley

Tim has worshipped Catalus forever. If you let him, he’ll go on about the grace and speed of Catalus, about the bravery of the charge they made against the cliffs within The Living Forest. Speed and grace. Bravery. In the end, it’s just love. Everyone’s eyes glow when they describe their favorite soldier.

Mine is Lt. Farea. His statue is usually on the upper floors of the stadium. You can spot it even from far away by its rigid posture. They say he killed an Inhabitant with his bare hands once.

Farea is a perfect soldier.

Today, Tim sees the statue of Catalus by the field the first thing in the morning. He wakes me up by whispering this in my ear. I can practically feel his heart beating through his breath. He’s excited.

“Meet me at the intersection,” I say, not wanting to wake my dad, but after Tim is gone and I am dressing, I see that he is already awake. His eyes stare out of the pile of blankets at me like two half-healed wounds. What would I say at this moment if he wasn’t him and I wasn’t me? Maybe: Good morning, dad; do you have enough whiskey for today; is that pain in your gut worse? Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are? How much has The Blank taken?

Do you want to see the statue of Catalus, dad, it came up from the tunnels.

But he wouldn’t. The Blank has taken much of my father’s memories, and the whiskey has scorched the rest. As he watches me get dressed he shifts and his eyes flick around the room, like a bird looking for a crack. An awful smell comes out of his blankets. I leave, walking out of the row of shacks and down the cinderblock hallway. Tim is at the intersection as he said he’d be, shadowboxing his nervousness away.

“You sure it was Catalus?”

Tim doesn’t answer. He runs and I follow, down hallways and to the ramps, down and down. Tents web the cinderblock walls, the people inside them staring at us as we pass. Some of them are deep in The Blank, and just getting a brief glimpse at their empty eyes makes me feel like I’m forgetting something, so I look out over the wall as I run. The Living Forest is visible from up here. It shifts in the sunlight, in its world-sized bed of dirt and history, watching us run down the ramps of the stadium.

After we get to the bottom levels, we cut in, and emerge from a thin block hallway into the wonderful light of the field. The statue of Catalus is slowly making its way, alone on the grass, between second and third base.

“I told you,” Tim says quietly.

We stand in front of it and watch the massive thing slowly walk, its marble eyes angling in our direction. A glowing roll of stats scrolls next to it. Tim has them memorized. He refers to them every time we debate who the best soldier is, so they’re familiar: Catalus: Specialty, Heavy Weapons/Mech Assault; Homeworld, Rimward Colony, Name Unrecorded; Four hundred and seventy six confirmed kills; Sub-commander, Expansion Forces.

“Catalus,” Tim says, then looks at me, embarrassed.

“Go ahead, Tim,” I say, but still he looks at me with that lean, sad, dark face. My best friend.

I walk over to the pits that edge the field. Tim has privacy now, and I see him talking to the statue of Catalus, and then slowly climbing the marble and settling into its arms, which wrap around him slowly. It might be a mural.

Tim has no father. The first time I saw him he was sitting in one of the lower hallways of the stadium, naked, watching people pass. My father and I were leaving the stands, carrying one of those large fruits that grow on the edge of The Living Forest in the shape of a human head, the kind that some people distill for whiskey, although my father didn’t care about whiskey back then. We had chosen a fruit that appealed to us (it looked like me, I think), and as Tim watched us pass, I caught his hollow, weird gaze.

Children live in the hallways when they have nowhere else to go. They could be dangerous places. But even back then Tim was tall and strong, and could be mean if he needed to. It was during his time in the hallways that he’d encountered the statue of Catalus. It had emerged from the darkness one day, and as it walked out of the perennial night of the tunnels, Tim watched its heroic bearing, and he recognized something in it, and fell in love.

The real Catalus was a street kid before he joined the Expansion Forces, that’s well known. He was from an awful neighborhood in an awful city in an unsanctioned colony and he learned to kill very early. He did it well and often for the gang that ruled his street.

Redemption came in the form of a mech rolling down the street one day, blaring over its speakers that everyone within hearing was now officially drafted by Expansion Forces. Catalus himself burned the first mech he saw, but they kept coming, better ones each time, giant with heroic frames and spotlight eyes. The mechs gave their recorded spiels to the gangsters that Catalus had revered his whole life, and then one day the soldiers came too, and Catalus realized that the gangsters were just skinny, mean children. The soldiers seemed like visitors from a truth that had always enwrapped his heart. They saw the same in Catalus, and he was in the first group assigned to infantry.

The story goes that Catalus was the commander of the first wave off of the ship. They flamed a bald spot into The Living Forest and discovered the stadium. They landed, fighting their way down. The Inhabitants were ferocious, but wave after wave of Expansion Forces came.

Once the forces were established, General Plata led her troops out into The Living Forest, soldiers like Farea and Catalus, and all of the brave, unknown others. Administrators and engineers stayed behind, guarded by a few squads. Once the fighting intensified, even the guard squads were called out into The Living Forest, and the people left behind turned the stadium into their city. Stories came back about the soldiers’ exploits for awhile, but once they’d fought their way deep enough into The Living Forest, the distances became too great.

The statue of Catalus carries Tim across the grass, growing closer, so I can hear.

“When are you coming back?” I hear Tim say, and then he looks down at his own knees, ashamed.

We lose the statue of Catalus in a crowd a few hours later. Once people realize that it has emerged from the tunnels below the stadium, they follow it, take pictures with it, stand in front of with faking ferociousness like an inhabitant. Tim and I know from experience that after a few hours the whiskey will set in and the crowd will smash bottles over the statue, and maybe even light it on fire. Following whatever mech logic exists in its marble head, it will go back down into the tunnels, so we sit in the seats above the field and watch the crowds form around it.

When he finally says something, Tim’s voice is raw.

“The real Catalus would hate it here. He’d leave these half ass fuckers behind.”

“He’d die if he went into The Living Forest alone.”

Tim doesn’t answer and I understand why: Catalus dying isn’t the point. The stadium is corrupt, and we are stuck here with nothing but statues and stories.

“Let’s kill your dad,” Tim says.

He has said it before, but he doesn’t mean it. Tim despises weakness, but in a very complex way. He wants to nurture sufferers and burn them at the same time. Sometimes he brings my dad whiskey, even, but when he does he always dangles the bottle over my dad’s blankets, just out of reach, to humiliate him.

“Let’s go to the library,” I say.

Tim looks at his knees again, then down at the crowd around Catalus, then throws a couple loose uppercuts. I can tell he doesn’t remember, that The Blank has occluded his memory of The Library. The Librarian was mean to Tim when he was a kid looking for food, not letting him stop in The Library for food or shelter, so sometimes he lets The Blank cover it up. As for me, I like The Library, so I think about it more, and try to keep the memory fresh.

After a moment I see him remember.

“I hate the library. That fucker talks and talks.”

I leave Tim watching the people flood around Catalus. I walk around the outer edge of the stadium. In the part of the stadium where the library sits, the walls are stained in long upside down Vs of moisture with disconcerting cracks lightning through, meeting at the corner of the ceiling. Empty and quiet.

A man leans out a doorway: “My boy,” he says.

I never forget the librarian.

The face disappears and when I enter the library it might as well be abandoned. Books sit neatly stacked in open lockers. Piles of fragile paper sit in plastic bins that are stamped in the ship’s logo. I sit and the man reappears holding a tablet in a way that reminds me of someone carrying a dying animal.

“This is almost drained,” he says, “but I wanted you to see it first.”

I take the tablet and it slowly comes to life. I’m looking down from space at a blue and green planet, and I hurtle backward and past the ship. Somehow I know it’s the one in space and then I have such a forceful memory that it hurts.

“You remember,” The Librarian says.

“Yes.”

He means that I remember we are not on a distant, wild planet. He means that we are on Earth, and were brought here by the ship, which is still in orbit and not talking to us, and hasn’t been for thirty years. He means that The Expansion Forces are really recapturing Earth from The Living Forest.

He means that The Blank lives in the forest, and creeps in to take our memories bit by bit.

I set the tablet down gently at his feet and the image flickers out.

“How is your father?” The Librarian asks.

“Drunk. Probably asleep.”

“The Blank has taken too much of him,” he says. “He’s not a man anymore. He’s just a body.”

For some reason I want to defend my father, but I know the librarian will laugh if I do, and that would be worse than hearing that my father is just a shell. Which I know.

“I haven’t seen you in a very long time,” The Librarian says.

“Yeah.”

From this moment, from having emerged from The Blank, I understand: Of course I have stayed away. It hurts to think about how The Living Forest surrounds us, feeds us the head-shaped fruit, contains us. It hurts to think that the soldiers are lost out in the trees. And this last hurt echoes the pain I always hear in Tim’s voice, and makes me think that perhaps even when The Blank has crept in, that our memories are alive beneath it.

“You needn’t leave,” The Librarian says, as if he knows.

I shake my head.

“One might stay. Study. Keep The Blank at bay.”

I shake my head again.

“I’m sorry,” The Librarian says. “I was so anxious to show you the tablet that I forgot how much it hurts to know the truth sometimes. I can entertain you.”

The Librarian gestures and a glowing face appears over his hand.

“I know he’s your favorite.”

It’s a still of the real Farea, the darkness of The Living Forest behind him.

The Librarian wants me to stay. No one else ever comes down here. Thinking back now, I remember that he usually waits until I have been here awhile before he reminds me that we are on Earth, trapped in the stadium. Usually he tells jokes. He asks about Tim, about the statues. Of course The Librarian is hiding. Down here on the bottom level of the stadium with his ancient books, replenishing his knowledge each morning after The Blank has sipped from it in the night. Thinking about Tim’s breath against my ear, and his hopeless, hard face . . . I have to leave. The Librarian is still talking as I go, Farea’s face floating next to him, watching me move down the hallway.

I find Tim ascending the ramp to the uppermost floors. The statue of Lt. Farea is standing at the uppermost row of seats. It is staring down at the field. The crowd around Catalus looks small from up here, and Farea’s head turns slowly toward us.

“Where were you?” Tim asks, having forgotten The Library again.

“With my father,” I say. The lie is easier.

Tim sits himself a few rows down, as if I wanted to be alone with Farea, but it isn’t like that for me. Statues are what they are: mech sense in articulated stone, made by the people the soldiers left behind when they went into the forest. The stories about the soldiers aren’t so different. We grow up with them, and some we fall in love with.

For me, it had been the dreams that had bonded me to Farea. In the dreams we are always in The Living Forest, Tim and me and my father. When we walk the trees lean out of our way and when we stop they rearrange themselves around us. Flowers bunch up into bright walls. Mud slips underfoot. And then we are in a circle, all of us worn and beaten soldiers, and we’re listening to Farea—the real one. The man. And he’s me. I look at my hands and they’re covered in scars and I touch my face; it’s scarred too, and rough with whiskers, and feels old, even from the inside. I say that General Plata needs us to take a hill. It is warrened with Inhabitants and I think about them in their tunnels, whatever they are, whatever they look like, whatever odd eyes they see The Living Forest through, and more than anything else I want to burn them out of their tunnels. I want to take the hill and I want them to hurt me. I want to heap all of the pain and harm that they have to give within my ribcage, around my heart.

I want to be burned and broken.

I always smiled at the soldiers in the dream, just as Farea’s marble face grins at me now, as shadows from the roofs above us move slowly over our heads, creeping toward Tim as he watches Catalus getting shouted at by the crowd below.

“Come on, Tim,” I say. “I have something you gotta see.”

We leave the statue of Farea and walk around the edge of the top of the stadium, until we find the ladder that leads to the roof. I step out over the empty space and climb. Tim follows. Instead of sitting on the side that overlooks The Living Forest, I lead us up the grade of the awning, stepping carefully, and then when vertigo laps coldly at the base of my guts, I belly crawl, and Tim follows suit. When we get to the edge I pretend to be fearless and throw my legs over.

Tim’s voice barely trembles.

“Shit this is high.”

“You scared?”

“No. Shit. Kinda.”

We sit for an hour and watch the drunk crowd harass Catalus on the field below, until it disappears back into a tunnel. Tim and I look at each other, and we don’t have to say anything—we back-crawl down the awning, carefully down the ladder, and down and down the ramps, then out the gate.

Surrounding the stadium is a belt of dead foliage. We step over blackened, woven roots. The dirt is exposed beneath them like flesh. My father told me once that for the first decade after they’d left the ship The Living Forest was almost impossible to keep at bay. Thick roots grew—almost crawled, he said—out of the trees, and people worked day and night chopping them away. Severed flowers rode the wind into the stadium and settled on the grass field and within an hour had produced a tree that was already budding with tiny visages. They cut these down too. After awhile, my father said, it was like The Living Forest stopped trying and just kept its distance from us. This is how I’ve always known The Living Forest. A dark, breathing wall. As Tim and I get closer to it, we pass out of the shadow of the stadium.

The Living Forest is tall and dark when you are close to it, and the trees that ring the stadium are covered with fruit. There’s a dozen at eye level, each one grown into a bright green or orange or scarlet version of someone’s face. Those who know say that there isn’t this much fruit deeper in the forest. It’s almost like it wants us to stay here, well fed, in the stadium.

Head level, closest to me, is a bright orange fruit, wolf-lean like Tim.

I smile and tap Tim’s shoulder, pointing to it.

He looks at me but beyond him I see an odd movement in the darkness of the trees. Something I’ve never seen in The Living Forest—a light bobbing between branches.

“Shit,” I say, and Tim looks too, barely registering it before breaking into a run. I follow.

It emerges from the darkness, snapped branches falling around it, shattered fruit beneath tri-part treads that step over the heavy foliage. Two large lamps regard us as it comes, but instead of producing light, it feels like they are sucking it out of the surrounding world and holding it. The mech’s body is the soft, contoured green of the forest behind it, even rippling along its planes as the tree trunks do. It regards us, weapons along its back tracking, and steps out into the clearing, toward the stadium. I can see movement deeper in the trees. Faces moving in the darkness; the dim but living whiteness of eyes, two by two, trailing back into the trees.

An illusion. It has to be. A trick of The Living Forest.

But then they come out of the forest. The soldiers.

Tim is crying and laughing, and so am I.

The soldiers set up camp on the field. It isn’t even as grand as the tents we have in the hallways, just blankets unrolled over the grass, the mech standing off to the side, watching over them. There’s about twenty of them, skinny and old.

Tim stands in front of me, on a seat in the first row next to the field looking out at the soldiers. A few people are closer than us, but they are quiet, and they’re keeping their distance.

“What’s on them?”

I shake my head.

When I focus my eyes I realize I am alone. Tim is gone, and I know where. I go to the tunnels.

The darkness in the tunnels is complete.

I follow the sound of footsteps.

Tim’s soles are rasping across the concrete.

“Tim?” I say. “Wait.”

The rasping stops, but a slow hiss continues—stone dragging over stone. A statue. But there’s another sound, too, breathing, deeper than Tim’s. A torch flares up and I’m looking at faces.

Tim’s, on the edge of the light. The untenanted stone face of the Catalus statue. And a man’s face, a foot shorter than the statue, like rags of leather clinging to failing clockwork: his jawbone is exposed, teeth bare and rotten, and he’s crawling with small silver insects. He leans in close and I can smell him. Rot. The Living Forest. Blood pumped through a corpse. His eye sockets vomit streams of silver insects which pour vertically back across his head, weaving through his thin hair, and he moans. A burnished object crawls up the back of his head, collecting the insects. It is making its way over his skull by way of a small track that has been bolted into the bone, and I look down, and see that his throat is a row of metallic valves, popping open and shut gently. That’s where the smell is coming from.

Somehow I know.

“Catalus,” I say.

He isn’t smiling, more like sustaining an effort to peel the bones of his face from within, but at the edge of my vision Tim’s hand rests on his shoulder.

“They’re back, and they won,” Tim says.

Torches ring the field and it is wild with noise. Throughout the day people have found their way from the tent cities in the hallways and gathered around the soldiers. At dusk they lit torches and brought fruit and whiskey. From the first row of seats in the stadium I can see a hesitancy in the celebration. People approach the soldiers slowly, smiling, then stand and mingle. The soldiers themselves are all odd. Some, like Catalus, are crawling in small silver bots. Others are mishmashed together with machinery. One of them makes its way across the field on something like blades, popping down into the dirt with each step, then shaking the blades clean like some kind of awful dog.

Once the whiskey takes hold, though, the hesitancy disappears. Bodies blend in the firelight. There is laughter and shouting. Statues emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field, moving slowly among the crowds, and the soldiers laugh at the marble heroes.

Tim is down there somewhere. I can see him now and again moving among the people. He’s smiling too, so happy that it might be mistaken for panic.

The Librarian sits next to me in the darkness.

“Happiness,” he says.

“Yes, they’re happy.”

“I confess. Sometimes I thought they wouldn’t return.”

“Me too,” I say, then realize I have forgotten something. “Where were they?”

“In The Living Forest.”

“Why?”

“Fighting the Inhabitants.”

The dreams come back. The fear of The Inhabitants, even though I can’t picture what they look like.

“Their numbers are greatly diminished. It is said they entered The Living Forest with ten thousand soldiers.”

Two children that I do not recognize are standing on the top of the mech that Tim and I had seen in the forest. They’re cheering as if they’re in the middle of a game. The soldiers stare from below, their faces dark in the torchlight.

“What do you suppose will happen now?” the Librarian asks. “Will we go back to . . . ”

He looks up also, and when he sees the emptiness of the sky above us, says “Oh yes, I’d forgotten. We are on Earth. We have been sent to destroy The Living Forest but it keeps us here, trapped. Contained.”

There’s a glimmer of recognition in what he says, but I can’t place it, and a moment later don’t remember or care to try.

I wake up to the sound of bones crunching. And moaning behind it, very gentle.

The dim light in the tent is occluded by a large shape that my mind cannot make sense of as The Blank slowly recedes. It might be the moon, but dark rather than bright, filling the room, and to the side of it is my father’s face. His eyes are on mine. There is something there that I haven’t seen in years. Clarity. He’s looking at me, and he knows me, and he needs me.

“Dad?” I say.

The darkness turns to me. It is not a moon. It is half a face and half an iron mask. Currents of movement flow in and out of holes in the mask, and holes in the face. It has been working on my father. There is blood and my father’s open body and two loaf-sized robots crawling into and out of him, holding up guts in the dimness as if to examine, cutting them.

“Not him,” I hear a voice say.

Someone pulls me to my feet and out into the cinderblock hallway. I’m shivering. It’s dark.

“I gave him whiskey first,” Tim says.

“What . . . ”

I shove Tim. I have to get to my dad. He’s bigger and faster, though, and pins me against the wall.

“They need him,” Tim says. “Need it.”

But he’s my father, I mean to say. The words are tied to memories that emerge from the normal distance of time and the absolute of The Blank. My father sitting on the edge of the stadium’s roof with me. My father taking me to the library. The sound of my father’s voice in the middle of the night, outside the tent talking to someone I have long forgotten—the warmth and strength of that voice.

“The Blank took him a long time ago,” Tim says. It isn’t a concession. He’s daring me to disagree.

“Let me go.”

Tim’s voice is cold.

“If you go back into that tent, I’ll let him eat you.”

The moment of shame is like hot blood in my throat. Catalus’ dark face. The moaning.

I can’t help my father.

I stand up and walk back to the hallway.

My father had told me once that The Librarian didn’t sleep, and it’s true: I find him awake, candlelight flickering in orange clouds of light on the ceiling.

“My boy,” he says, and lets me in.

I sit on the floor.

“Tim gave them my father,” I say.

“Gave?”

“The soldiers. They cut him. He was . . . ” Watching me. Those calm eyes, how terrible that he was dying so calmly, and I was the last thing he saw in that dark tent as he did.

The Librarian goes through books and holotech and other things that I’ve never seen. After awhile I look up and a picture of a soldier is floating in front of me. It’s pristine, a tall man in camouflage with weapons floating next to it and protruding from its back. His face is covered by scopes and lenses. Loaf-sized bots sit on its shoulders like pets.

“This is what they looked like when they went into The Living Forest,” he says.

I point to the robot.

“I saw those.”

The Librarian nods. Somehow the image has shifted and the soldiers as they appear now, ragged, half human, is in front of me.

“They are changed. That is certain.”

The Library is full and quiet. People stand shoulder-to-shoulder among the books, some of them looking around as if they’d never known it was here, and maybe they didn’t.

A voice: “Someone said they’re taking people.”

Another: “I saw them eating someone in the hallway.”

And The Librarian must’ve already told them because a lot of the eyes in the room turn to me.

“Him,” someone says, “his dad, the drunk.”

The Librarian is talking now.

“Not eating, strictly speaking. Using.”

An image of the loaf-sized bots appears in the middle of the room, spinning slowly.

“Their technology repurposes bio-matter. It’s how they stayed out there so long. They have taken The Living Forest into themselves. Perhaps it has changed them.”

“Who are they?” someone asks from the back.

“They’re the soldiers,” comes the answer from another corner of the crowd.

And another: “We’ve been waiting for them.”

The Librarian, with the clearest memory among us, speaks.

“The Blank has affected our memories for many years, my friends. How many of you remember when The Blank first came?”

Silence.

“We began forgetting. Every morning there was less. We wrote down what we could. Here.” The Librarian gestures around himself. “And then slowly we forgot even the necessity of that. Then more, and more, and now here we are in the stadium, not sure where we came from or why we are here, sure only that we love the heroes.”

And still silence. Finally someone asks: “What do we do now, Librarian?”

I haven’t gone back to my father’s tent. I won’t. I can’t get the image of the bot patiently pulling his guts apart out of my head. Anything I think about—father, tent, Tim, darkness—I see the bot inside a body, slick with blood.

The Librarian was so sure. What do we do now, they asked, and he said we fight them. The crowd left the library and boiled in the tunnels awhile, drinking whiskey and getting ready. I didn’t go. It was impulsive at first. I just didn’t want to follow. But then I thought about it, and knew The Librarian would know I was gone, and would think I was scared of the soldiers.

And that’s right, of course. And I’m scared of Tim. And Farea, if he’s among the soldiers, and what I might do for him—he’s been my hero for so long.

I watch from the roof as the people rage out of the tunnels at the sleeping soldiers. All the fires are burned down now and it is dark on the field. The people scream for bravery. They hurl whiskey bottles. They hold planks and pipes above their heads, ancient things they have torn out of the guts of the stadium.

It doesn’t last long. The mech comes to life when the people get close and leaps over the sleeping soldiers, stomping through the attackers. Screams change register. People are running, some of them already having forgotten why they were attacking, or who. The soldiers are running too but even from this height, in the swinging light beams of the mech’s eyes, I can see that they are not angry. They chase people down, flatten them, leave them tied up.

Tim is down there somewhere on the field.

My best friend, down there in the panicking mix of light and shadow, there to feed our heroes.

I haven’t gone back to my father’s tent.

I won’t.

About the Author

Mike Buckley is a widely-published short story writer whose work has appeared in national journals such as The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern California Review, and Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod. His work has been anthologized numerous times, including in The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2003, and the upcoming Red Hen LA Writers Anthology. His debut collection of short fiction, Miniature Men, was released in 2011.

Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons?

Sue Burke

A report by the Martian Fighting Words media cooperative

No one expected significant consequences from the Battle of Arsia Mons on Mars. Here on Earth, we watched with amusement, then sorrow, panic, and finally joy. Now “like a fight on Mars” describes a conflict that suddenly shifts from frivolous to heroic.

“It started as the ultimate video game,” said Jackson Alesine, founder and CEO of JAlesine Games in Austin, Texas. He was interviewed six years ago, shortly after planning began in earnest for the battle between robots on Mars.

“Some of us were playing a game over beers here at work on a Friday night,” he said, grinning like a proud father. “We got to talking about how Mars is inhabited only by robots, and humans control robots, and anywhere there’s humans, there’s conflict, so how long before there’s robot battles on Mars? Then we thought, wow, we could do exactly that!”

By that he meant they could create a game, Mars Robot Melee, not a real battle on Mars.

Alesine gestured at a corner area with sofas, control consoles, and an enormous screen, where eight employees were testing a prototype with shouts and laughter. Similar teams had worked for almost two years to make Mars Robot Melee, adding layer upon layer of complexity and authenticity, and drawing heavily on NASA’s data and resources.

“Strategy, that’s what makes Melee,” Alesine said. “Mars is a hostile environment, even for robots. NASA’s lost some of its own robots, in fact. So the fight is against the elements as much as it is against other robots. You have to plan hard and fight hard, and the environment changes, locations change, so no two fights are the same.”

Few games have been as successful as Mars Robot Melee. In its first year, it outsold the number two and three top games combined and won a raft of awards.

He closed his eyes, smiling. “Fights, yeah. Weapons. We’ve agreed to share everything about weapons with the real battle planners. And the Martian Knight team poached our best kinematics expert, Erica Czolgolz. She’s gonna have fun!”

More on Czolgolz later. First the dream had to become real. Given Melee’s popularity, why not the real thing, real robots battling on Mars?

“That’s what I thought,” said Jeffrey Montenegro, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. “Seriously, why not the real thing, why was it impossible? I worked it out with all the logistics, the time lines and work teams and everything we knew about Mars and about how to send robots up there and operate them.”

He spoke while sitting on a bench in a little garden on the JPL campus shortly after the battle. “It added up to one billion with a ‘b’ for each robot. It’s tough enough for us at JPL to get that kind of money. I didn’t think anyone else could.”

Montenegro wrote a 55-page report that he posted on an obscure space engineering site. Within three days, it had been downloaded almost 5,000 times, and on the next day the downloads topped 100,000. A lot of people wanted to read it and ponder his math.

His report suggested four robots. “Four is the ideal number of players, easy for alliances and betrayals.”

Which team did he cheer for? He took a deep breath and blinked hard.

“River Charles Warrior, because, well, I’m from Boston, from MIT. I had friends there. I’ll miss them. They were the best.”

Arguably they were. But Montenegro was wrong about money being an obstacle.

“A billion dollars?” said Petra Karim, remembering the afternoon when she sat down and read Montenegro’s report. “That’s all? We could do that, I knew that right away. I mean, for lots of top television shows, the cost for just one episode is $10 million. And they’re profitable. So I read that report, and I admit I didn’t get all the technical stuff, and some of it I still don’t, but I understood the parts like the money and the showrunning. So we did it.”

Karim, then only 25 years old, worked for OptikNirv, a young entertainment company with exceptional ambition even in that hard-driven industry. This was her big chance.

“The first thing, though,” she said, “besides us doing it, was getting three other robots up there. So I had to recruit rivals.”

Meanwhile, a few journalists saw a story in the making that would need a team for full coverage. Eventually the Martian Fighting Words media cooperative grew to include 47 people, and this collaborative magazine article is one result. As the years passed, the project remained united by the slogan “omniscience through teamwork” and an obsessively organized executive editor.

Karim’s first stop was NASA. She met its administrator, Leo Finlayson, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I couldn’t believe everything they had,” she said, shaking her head and grinning. “And they were willing to share it. It was just wow. Fucking wow.”

Finlayson shook his head, frowning, as he recalled that first meeting. “It took me a bit to explain to her that our data, our photos, even our expertise had been paid for by the public and was generally available to the public. I wasn’t sure its best use would be a robot fight on Mars, but, well, we got something out of it.”

Specifically, NASA got someone else to pay for data collection and discovery. In an era of slim budgets, Finlayson had long been prowling for public-private partnerships. “This one paid off better than I expected.”

By some accounts, Karim and Finlayson never liked each other, although they continue to praise each other in public. She was young, short, effusive, and zaftig, with an ever-changing hair color. He was 55, tall, lean, measured, and ex-military, with a tendency toward understatement. They shared an ability to swallow their feelings. He took her and her guests on tours of NASA facilities, and she took him to recruitment meetings. Their eyes lit up equally during any discussion of Mars.

At those meetings, she’d open with the most stunning, exciting video clips from the Mars Robot Melee game. “You have a chance to be part of one of history’s greatest epics,” she’d say. Then he’d show real photos and videos, equally stunning, along with exciting moments from actual Mars missions. “This is for real,” he’d say. “This is what rocket science looks like.”

NASA offered reports and raw data for free; engineers, consultants to interpret the data, and hardware, including launch facilities, for cost plus a slight margin. It also enforced rules against any sort of contamination of the planet. Its contracts included access to all data that the robot teams collected, and it would take command of any robots still functional after the battle.

At recruitment meetings, Finlayson would also explain how launch windows worked. The orbits of Earth and Mars brought them closest together every 26 months. A ship launched in the best window would take roughly six months to travel from Earth to Mars. Creating the robots, even with NASA’s expertise, would take a few years.

Since major Hollywood projects also spend years in production, Karim didn’t flinch. Some would-be rivals did flinch at the time and price tag. Still, three Mars battle teams eventually made commitments:

• Fifth Planet Warrior, Karim’s team, better known as the Hollywood Warrior because it supplied the Tinseltown glitter that drove the entire narrative. It used merchandise, special events, sponsorships, and subscription videos to repay initial investors. Headquartered in Los Angeles.

• River Charles Warrior, based in Boston near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was backed by a consortium of high tech firms to test their most sophisticated technology, which they periodically packaged and sold to raise funds.

• Martian Knight, a late entry, backed by a shifting syndicate of game developers and loosely associated businesses. The syndicate eventually suffered internal disputes. Crowdfunding acted as an initial source of revenue, while later sources were opaque. Headquartered near San Francisco, then in Las Vegas, then near San Francisco again.

That made three. “We hit a wall,” Karim remembered. “Too much time, too much money, too much risk, too complicated—everyone had a problem.”

Russian and European space agencies had instantly scoffed, calling the project frivolous at best.

“I was about to give up and go with three,” Karim said, “when someone popped up that I never talked to—and Finlayson couldn’t even talk to them at all.”

That was China and its robot:

• Zhongguo Warrior, organized by the China National Space Administration. This caused geopolitical problems. The United States government considers China a security concern and prohibits any bilateral agreements or coordination between CNSA and NASA. But China wanted to prove itself in the Mars battle spotlight, no one could say no, and someone had to find a way to say yes.

“Lawyers.” Finlayson said. “I’ve never seen so many lawyers in my life, and I work in Washington, DC. It took an army of lawyers.”

Legal agreements covered multiparty contracts and bilateral side contracts and subcontracts that added up to tens of thousands of pages. Among other requirements, all the teams had to be entertaining, and Hollywood led the way.

“It included rights to merchandise,” recalled Nik Deka, now 41, Hollywood’s lead engineer for artificial intelligence, in an interview shortly after the battle. “And it said we had to go to an image consultant. We thought that would be terrible. I was really upset. I thought we’d be told how to dress and act. But no. It was all classes about how to talk, how to be comfortable on camera. They turned out to be kind of fun. I expected because I’m Asperger and I don’t like to smile and I don’t like to look people in the eye—I always get grief for that—they’d be on me to act different. But no. They said they liked us to have personality. That was their word, personality.”

He puffed. “That was a new way to think about it. I did a lot of interviews and videos, even though my part wasn’t as exciting as weapons. People liked it, and I liked explaining what we could do. I made pretty good royalties from merchandise, too.”

He held up his action figure. Every publicly known crew member had one—and T-shirts, mugs, pins, and other kinds of sports-team-like fan gear. His figurine doesn’t smile, and the little plastic doll looks off to the side and down. Fifth Planet Corp. won’t release exact numbers, but his sold out and was reissued several times. His unvarnished “personality” and methodical explanations about how to make robots think for themselves attracted fans.

“I’m still surprised by how many people understood me,” he said.

On the River Charles team, xenogeologist Antonia Kass Bele became a fan favorite, especially among girls. By some quirk of the Internet, she turned into a role model for budding scientists: small, African-American, and younger-looking than her 44 years, with a magnetic personality fueled by enthusiasm for science. She accepted her role happily and did all she could to encourage girls and boys to become scientists, visiting schools and hosting science events around the world.

“Science is humanity’s highest creative expression,” she insisted. The sentence embellished T-shirts and coffee mugs.

The contracts included interview duties for the crew members because Fifth Planet knew it would have to struggle to maintain interest during the years of research, development, and ongoing fund-raising.

For example, Fifth Planet produced a series of interviews, videos, and books, including coloring books for all ages, about the selected battleground, Arsia Mons. That mountain had been chosen for its size, 435 kilometers wide and 20 kilometers tall, much bigger than Mount Everest. It could be easily spotted from Earth and offered spectacular scenery.

In one video, Kass Bele narrated offscreen:

“It’s an extinct shield volcano. That means it’s not very steep, and it was formed slowly by layer after layer of lava flowing from long, slow eruptions. You can see the huge caldera at the top, 110 kilometers across and almost a kilometer deep, and there are other smaller caldera around it and in it. Its discoverer named it ‘Arsia’ after a Roman forest, which was also the site of an important Roman battle. The volcano is old, last active when the dinosaurs went extinct. When it was active, huge glaciers covered that area on Mars.”

Within the caldera she identified cinder cones of various sizes, lava flows, sand dunes, and a variety of volcanic rocks, including round lumps thrown out during eruptions. Every warrior robot would need to know the terrain intimately. Many battles, she said, were won or lost by that knowledge.

“Aren’t you giving away secrets?” an interviewer asked.

“It’s not a secret that the far northwest flank of the mountain in particular could have been a habitable environment.”

“Martians could live there?”

“Maybe, microscopic life, a long time ago when there was water. There was a glacier, in fact. They could never have survived inside the caldera where the lava was. That’s where the battle is going to take place.”

“What does this mean specifically?”

“Well, for one thing, the mobility systems, which means the wheels, will have to be adaptable. We know what we’re going to get. Rough terrain.”

Wheels or treads, large or small, joint or independent axles, many or few: each warrior had its own answer. The teams debated pros and cons with rivals on screen.

An even more entertaining question involved weapons. What would actually work on Mars? Certainly not the imaginative weapons in the video game. Lasers, for example, would take too much energy. Explosives had their uses but supplies would be limited. Likewise bullets. No flamethrowers, obviously. But brute force and cutting weapons held real promise.

An episode that ended in trash talk became a popular video. Erica Czolgolz, 31, competitive and athletic, had been known at JAlesine Games for her enthusiasm for cosplay and history before she was poached by the Martian Knight team. When it came to trash talk, she took no prisoners—until she met Kass Bele.

“This means swords,” Czolgolz said, jumping to her feet. She wore a tabard over chain mail, and she pumped a fist inside a metal gauntlet. A coworker ran out waving a back pennant emblazoned with a sword on an orange circle representing Mars.

“We’re going full medieval!” she said. “You’re studying how to make your machines crawl over rocks. We’re studying war!”

Kass Bele smiled calmly and played along. “You’re going to send up a knight in shining armor on a mighty steed? You know there’s no oxygen, right? We’ve learned a little bit in recent centuries. NASA can explain it to you.”

“We’re sending the mightiest of steeds! You can send a wimpy-ass little rover. We’re building a finely tuned weapon, deadly—and good looking. Yours will look like a pile of leftover parts on wheels.”

“Just how do you plan to get close enough to stab us with your mighty space sword?”

“Like the French in the Battle of Agincourt, you’ll come to me. We’ll make you tire out your silly little bucket of bolts. It’s not just the weapons that’ll win, it’s the strategy.”

“So tell me about that flag. Is that a weapon, too, or just what false confidence looks like?”

“That’s how we’re going to celebrate our victory. Our flag will fly supreme over the Red Planet and over the dead heaps of bolts and scrap metal that were our opponents!”

The video ended and melodramatic Arsia Mons theme music rose: militaristic drums beneath machinelike beeps and tones.

The Martian Knight’s robot prototype came clad in armor reminiscent of a knight’s suit, made from lightweight polymer rather than steel and decorated with the sword-and-planet coat of arms. Its action figurine—and Czolgolz’s, holding a flag—sold well.

Other warriors developed their own distinctive looks. The Zhongguo Warrior drew on China’s ancient Terracotta Army, bedecked in bright colors like those soldiers. Hollywood went for sleek futuristic curves, and River Charles stuck to practicality, resulting in a cubist exterior resembling stacks of reinforced shoeboxes.

What was inside those warriors? NASA sensors, for one thing, as stipulated by the contracts. Big motors to move relatively fast compared to the Curiosity rover’s top speed of 0.2 kilometers per day. But how fast? Yet another secret.

Soon, the internal struggles within the Martian Knight team became headlines. Originally, twelve companies had sponsored that robot, including JAlesine Games. Two years into the project, Martian Knight’s CEO died in a traffic accident and was genuinely mourned by the staff.

“The second one,” Alesine recalled later, “turned out to be like the bad Silicon Valley-type manager, the one who thinks everyone should work for 80 hours a week, and that yelling and humiliating people will make them more productive. Plus he came from a background in gaming, but he was building robots. That’s different.”

Employees began to quit, and turnover surpassed 50 percent. One departing employee, speaking anonymously, complained: “He just couldn’t imagine how much more complicated this was. You need the same guys on it to keep track of all the details. And guys it was. He didn’t like hiring women.”

The second CEO left after six months in a cloud of lawsuits, and the crowdfunding faltered. The sponsoring companies fought over who to blame for that hire and who should call the final shots for the next one. They also fought over underfunded budgets. Five sponsors, like JAlesine Games, simply left. An international online gambling platform signed on, infused millions of dollars via bitcoins, and apparently handpicked the next CEO, an Italian with a manufacturing background.

Soon, the entire project was placed under a media blackout. Its staff no longer participated in promotional videos. The headquarters was moved to a warehouse in the outskirts of Las Vegas.

“We had a contract, and they violated it,” said Karim, Hollywood’s showrunner. “But we also needed their participation in the actual battle. So we made sort of a running gag out of their silence and absence. We couldn’t fight all those rumors, though. The worst part is that we really didn’t know what was going on. I mean, would they even make the launch window?”

Those rumors claimed that staff wasn’t being paid, that volunteer engineers and scientists from countries not friendly to the United States were being recruited for some tasks, and that the entire project had been riddled by organized crime.

Martian Fighting Words sent a correspondent to Las Vegas.

“I’ve learned something disturbing,” Jubal Kasravi reported back. “The money might be coming from international organized crime, possibly for laundering. Whoever it is also has hit men, or everyone believes they do, so no one wants to talk to me.”

Kasravi became obsessed with learning more. He sent messages to staff at Martian Knight through social media, friends, and family, among other means, and sat every Friday evening in a shopping mall food court near the warehouse, the guy in the orange T-shirt and black goatee. He believed he was sometimes followed, and a kindly FBI agent came to his door one morning to drop off a business card “in case we can do anything.”

But he also heard tidbits of news and was passed notes by workers in the mall, who came to know him and acted as intermediaries.

“The Martian Knight bosses are distracted and don’t seem to care if they win,” he reported. “But Erica Czolgolz does, the kinematics expert from JAlesine Games. She’s really in charge of the staff, either by longevity or personality. Besides, she’s more skilled and qualified than anyone. River Charles Warrior might be working smarter, but no one is working harder. She probably can’t trust her bosses, though. I don’t, either. I worry about her.”

Kasravi began to send weekly notes to an email address that might have belonged to Czolgolz. At first he wrote questions. Eventually he sent more personal letters, as if writing to a pen pal who never wrote back, signing them “Blue Marble to Red Planet.” One day a mall worker handed him a note. It merely said, “Red Planet to Blue Marble.”

In fact, Czolgolz felt isolated, alone, and frightened, she told Kasravi after the battle. “I knew something was wrong. Because things were opaque. Sometimes I’d say we needed certain things, and they just materialized. I’d say, for example, we needed a program to process data from the navigation camera, and it would suddenly appear in the computer system.”

She felt she stood on the tip of an iceberg, knowing there was more hidden beneath the surface, not knowing what.

“I was there in Las Vegas where I knew no one and didn’t get to talk to anyone outside of the project. Your letters were my only friendly words.”

She thought of quitting, “but I wanted to win. I’m that kind of a person. We had a fantastic design and ideas no one else was crazy enough to use. I’d talked all that trash, and I wanted to make it come true. Besides, if I quit, what would I do, where would I go? Then I realized, you’d help me. I wasn’t alone. So I kept going. And I read and reread those letters. Why did you keep sending them?”

Kasravi hesitated. “I’m persistent,” he finally said.

Design and manufacture of the robots had taken five long years, a sort of background noise to two economic crises, several hair-raising elections, a near-war between major powers, and a flu epidemic that killed a million people. Then launch time drew near, and its noise took the foreground.

Showrunners—by then OptikNirv’s Petra Karim had competitors—orchestrated careful distinctions between each launch, although they all aimed at a large cinder cone in the northeast quadrant of the volcano’s caldera. Weather and technical delays stretched out the launch windows to two weeks.

That, of course, didn’t constitute the whole show. Well ahead of the launches, showrunners had encouraged each robot’s fans to show their support. China opened the rivalry with young children wearing classroom-made cardboard armor to recreate its ancient Terracotta Army. Their photos and videos vied with kittens for cuteness. School students in different countries soon offered their own videos as medieval warriors, boxy robots, and sleek concoctions mimicking the Hollywood look.

However, students dressed as competing robots, with and without school sponsorship, began staging their own battles. Showrunners were terrified of injuries and pleaded for responsible, supervised play and encouraged safe contests like tug-of-war. They claimed, without confirmation since no one would divulge actual weaponry, that the robots had grappling hooks, so tug-of-war would be authentic.

Almost immediately costumed adults also began to fight, and veterans of groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism organized tournaments with strict rules and medics at the sidelines.

At a Palm Bay beach on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, rival groups of fighters watched a rocket rise from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, then ran screaming to skirmish on the sand with presumed Mars-style weapons: lances, swords, and battering rams, plus the occasional grappling hook and rope. No one dared to try explosives, although River Charles was rumored to carry them.

Large and small tepees had been set up to mimic cinder cones. Fighters representing each robot were let in one at a time and stalked each other. “This is the closest I’ll ever get to going to Mars,” one man said, holding a Hollywood-style shield and club-like battering ram. He survived a respectable ten minutes of fighting.

After the launches, the six-month wait until the Martian arrival was celebrated with plenty of mock battles, and groups had time to become better organized. Some sold broadcast rights to television sports channels and earned good ratings. Members of the Martian Fighting Words cooperative sold news reports about these and other activities and stunts. Excitement was growing.

China’s Zhongguo Warrior landed first. The final approach started in late afternoon, Chinese time: the vast country lies within a single official time zone. Governments and most businesses released their workers early or organized viewing parties. In Europe and Africa, people watched during long lunches, and in the United States, they met for breakfast. Everywhere, restaurants and bars aimed to bring in revenue. Money made Mars go round.

Since China was participating in order to raise its global image, it transmitted the event in six languages on open, non-subscription channels via satellite and cable. The English-language duo, Hu Jeí and Deng Fang, chatted with perfect ease, he with a British accent and she with an American Midwestern twang. Hu wore a finely tailored suit and tie, and Deng appeared in historic costume: wide-sleeved silk robes colored red and gold like China’s flag.

In the final, tense moments of the landing, a parachute drifted down with the warrior encased in airbags, a technology NASA had abandoned when robots grew too heavy, but China thought it could manage with new materials. The warrior would bounce to a safe landing as close as possible to the predetermined site within the caldera.

“No matter what happens, Zhongguo knows what to do and how to react,” Deng assured viewers. Transmissions took twenty minutes to travel from Mars to Earth and another twenty minutes to return, a forty-minute delay in total for Earth to react and send instructions, not counting time for human thought. As a result, all the warriors used artificial intelligence and preprogrammed plans to act independently.

Zhongguo dropped toward Mars, slowed by parachutes and retro rockets, then falling free for the final few meters. Instrument readouts and animated representations showed a frightful series of rolling bounces. Weight would help it settle wheels-down. That almost worked. The first shots from the cameras showed a horizon on a twenty-nine-degree angle: not ideal, but perhaps not a disaster. Software adjusted the view for the public, and Mars looked as magnificent as hoped.

Orange sand and dust covered the flat caldera floor, marked by cinder cones. The closest one, of medium size, rose up black and rough about 100 meters like a miniature Mount Fuji, including a lighter patch at its peak. Round lumps of lava lay scattered on the sand. And that was everything: cone after cone, large and small, to the horizon, which lay less than four kilometers away. The caldera rim lay hidden behind the horizon. The site looked more eerie than anywhere on Earth, truly an alien world.

“We must be parked on the edge of a cinder cone,” Deng said. “But we can drive off when all systems have been checked.” That took hours, of course. Eventually the warrior moved, and graphic artists had created a video showing what a bystander would have seen. The body of the red and gold warrior, its surface patterned like ancient armor, resembled a lance or battering ram. Its wheels rolled on six individually jointed axles like insect legs, and it bore a crown of solar panels. Antennas and instruments stuck out at various places. It vaguely resembled a walking stick insect. But unlike those insects, which are vegetarians, this was a predator. It traversed confident and alert over the rock-strewn dust as if in search of a meal.

Its first prey arrived three days later, the River Charles Warrior. A parachute brought a capsule down to two kilometers above the surface. Then the capsule powered up to become a rocket vehicle called a sky crane. It sensed the landscape and adjusted the landing site to a smooth patch of sand. At twenty meters from the ground, it lowered the warrior, which hung on cords. Once the crane had set down its load, the cords disengaged from the robot and the capsule rocketed away toward a distant crash-landing.

Zhongguo watched its opponent land from a kilometer away and transmitted the sight. Cinder cones partially blocked the view, yet it was amazing. A flame appeared in the sky, blasting downward and slowly descending. It paused, wavered, then shot up and away.

By then, River Charles Warrior was broadcasting its own feed, and its camera slowly pivoted to take in its surroundings: a desert marked by rocky cinder cones. An artist’s conception showed it rolling through that landscape, a collection of boxes atop six wheels set on three axles. What was in the boxes? Weapons, sensors, computers—and more.

Five days later, the Hollywood Warrior found its way down. Rumor claimed the robot lacked some of the weaponry of its opponents, but none of them equaled its showmanship. Cameras on both Zhongguo and River Charles caught the bright green parachute with fifty-meter-long sparkling streamers drifting through the peach-pink sky like a jellyfish. When its job was done, the parachute launched away, releasing the sky crane, whose rockets burned bright green like fireworks. The warrior finally landed, a sparkling green arrowhead on a half-track chassis, ready to pierce the opposition.

Then we all got a surprise: Hollywood could talk.

“I have landed,” it announced in a stentorian voice. (Actor Clark Goffin had pre-recorded words and phrases that the software patched together into sentences.) “It’s sunny and warm, and a slight breeze blows. Enjoy the view with me. This is a gorgeous planet!”

It rolled forward a little bit, paused, and panned the camera around. “I mean to make this my home,” the robot said, “and as soon as I’m victorious, we can go exploring together. I can’t wait to uncover its secrets with you.”

Was this voice the ultimate stunt? Would it humanize the machine too much, breaking our hearts if it was defeated and killed? Or was it yet another machine voice like good old Siri, nothing to get excited about? People around the world immediately cracked jokes, supposedly engaging the robot in questions and answers.

The last to land was the Martian Knight, which arrived the following day. By then team offices had moved back to San Francisco into a vacant strip mall whose display windows were covered with one-way-mirror film. The Martian Fighting Words reporter, Jubal Kasravi, followed. The news blackout continued, but he learned that the science staff had shrunk to only thirty-five people. River Charles had four times that many. Funders had found the silence frustrating, and donations had fallen.

“We were all terrified,” showrunner Karim remembered. “We wouldn’t say so publicly, but we were all sure the Knight would be a disaster. Or worse, a laughingstock.”

To her relief, the team’s latest CEO, Cornog Sietsema, promised that the Knight team would be sharing feeds from Mars and maybe even a little commentary.

The Knight’s lander ran into trouble during its descent to Arsia Mons. The parachute, shining like polished steel and bearing the team coat of arms, did not fully disengage from the sky crane and snagged on a cinder cone’s peak more than 100 meters above the ground.

The other warriors watched from a distance. The sky crane’s thrusters labored to break free and swung wildly, almost smashing against the rocky cone. Earthlings held their breaths, gazing at big screens in public squares and parks, video feeds in bars and homes, or huddled around telephone screens.

Finally the tether on the parachute snapped. The sky crane flew free—right toward a smaller cinder cone. Would its onboard computers react to sensor data in time? Yes! The craft veered off to a clear area. Gyroscopes helped it level its swinging load. But fuel had burned critically low. When the Knight touched down, the sky crane craft could barely manage to fly off and crash nearby—up on the cone next to the parachute.

The robot soon began to roll, and a camera on a long arm offered a selfie for the whole world to see. Everything on the robot, from its armor to its six wheels, had been colored matte black. It looked more like a shadow than a mechanical being—and its dark color might confuse opponents’ sensors.

Then solar panels snapped up to make the robot look bigger. Armatures thrust outward, brandishing swords. The Martian Knight looked the most frightening of all.

And so the fight was on. Sort of. The warriors still had to perform some internal checks and send data back to Earth for analysis, not the least about the terrain. Then they had to pick their way to a meeting site selected back on Earth. At the hurried pace of as much as 200 meters per day, how long would that take, even though a day on Mars was forty minutes longer than a day on Earth? About two weeks, presuming nothing went wrong.

Meanwhile, everyone went back to playing Earth versions of the fight: video games, board games, and the live-action games by children and adults, amateurs and professionals.

No one enjoyed more excitement than xenogeologists. Antonia Kass Bele of the River Charles team spoke in a video about the persistent whiffs of methane that every warrior kept encountering.

“That makes us wonder: how dead is the volcano?” she said.

“It’s not going to erupt, is it?” Hollywood’s Karim asked with a hint of hope.

“Ooh, that would be cool,” Kass Bele answered. “But it’s dead, dead, dead. The question is whether the whole planet itself is geologically dead. We think the core is still partially molten. If we could use that as an energy source, it would be a big advantage for human settlement on Mars. Sooner or later, it’s not going to be all robots up there.”

“Robots have advantages, though,” said Nik Deka, Hollywood’s AI engineer. “Watch this.” He introduced a video of robot sumo wrestling, a little-known sport. The fighters, which looked like mobile dustpans, fought autonomously and moved lighting-fast.

“Artificial intelligence always outpaces our own,” he said. “These fights might be over as fast as they start.”

He explained that once the robots spotted each other, they could react instantly. Although the Mars robots lumbered slowly during sustained travel, they could sprint for short distances during battles. Unlike rule-bound Earth robot sumo fights, they would deliberately cause damage and destruction. Smoke, fire, grit, projectiles, explosives, electric shocks, snares, and gouges were banned in most Earth robot sport fights but were permitted on Mars. A Mars robot could even break down into mini-robots. No one knew what offensive capabilities each robot had.

“They’re going to fight to the death,” Deka said. “The question still is how.”

Observers had already invented endless combat scenarios in online debates, comic books, animation, fiction, re-enactments, and—inevitably—“make love not war” robot pornography. The real battle could not come soon enough.

Meanwhile, scientists found another puzzle. “Whiffs of oxygen—that made us sit up and take notice,” said NASA’s director, Leo Finlayson. “We immediately began to think of life, but we couldn’t imagine where to find it, if it was there. Those round rocks, though, they were easy to explain.”

Black rocks poked out of the dust and littered some cinder cones. Those were obviously volcano bombs, chunks of lava ejected during eruptions.

They cluttered the ground in the area for the battle. Zhongguo was instructed to make a cursory examination of a few, and China shared its findings during one of the broadcasts, since there was so little to fill so much air time. In one experiment, the rocks attracted a magnetic field, so they contained a lot of iron. Lava on Earth does not contain high levels of iron. Fascinating. But Zhongguo had come to fight, not explore, so it trundled on.

The Martian Knight reached the battlefield a few days ahead of the rest. It sent home a view of a dusty field littered with round rocks. The field also contained small cinder cones from one to three meters high. No one on the team offered commentary.

“We didn’t have time to talk,” Czolgolz said later. “Not even time to look for our boss.” He had disappeared just before the Knight landed. “We didn’t miss him, either, since he never really did anything for us. He just stopped coming to work. We should have started the manhunt then, but who suspected anything?”

Hollywood, however, seemed to discuss everything its team was doing, but in fact it only aired speculation and debates from non-team members. Meanwhile its robot narrated its trek toward the battlefield, but it had little to say besides announcing its progress.

“That’s 100 meters! Look at these views. We’re approaching another cinder cone.”

China presented diligent plans for victory—far too many plans to reveal its true intent—possibly as hints for what its military could do on Earth. The Zhongguo team plodded chapter by chapter through Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War, considering such topics as assessment, strategic attack, terrain, or attacking with fire. The spectacle was either tedious or fascinating, depending on who you asked.

Boston’s River Charles team had hunkered down in a block-long rehabbed factory building spacious enough to include dormitories on the top floors. All hands would be needed on deck or just an elevator ride away because the robots had almost reached the battlefield, and the fight was about to begin.

The plans and the capabilities of the River Charles robot remained as secret as anyone else’s. And they stayed that way.

On the night of July 27, a timer in the reception area coat closet was counting down to zero. At 3am it sent a radio pulse that triggered five charges of high explosives strategically placed in the basement.

The blast shattered the River Charles building. First responders labeled it a bombing even before they arrived at the rubble. The dead numbered 153, including scientists, software engineers, broadcast personnel, and visitors. The only survivors were a few members of the catering staff off on a supermarket run and some service staff who lived off-site. The victims included Manuel Mota, Oktobriana, and Kosey P. Langston, members of the Martian Fighting Words media cooperative.

As of this writing, two months after the bombing, the FBI and NSA have stated that “few individuals, organizations, or nation-states have access to explosives of that type and magnitude,” but they have declared no suspects. The President called the bombers “an enemy of our country, and we will hunt them down.” She declared a national day of mourning. China joined that commemoration without being asked, along with a few other countries around the globe.

But more than 100,000 people, most using pseudonyms, signed an online petition celebrating “the proper reward for a waste of resources on foolish ends.”

Mourning lasted less than an hour before the other teams reported that the River Charles robot was continuing to move and would no doubt fight. Its team had created the most advanced artificial intelligence in the solar system. River Charles didn’t need human handlers. In fact, because the access codes had been destroyed with the team and its computers, human beings couldn’t direct River Charles if they tried.

An off-site computer backup existed, but by the time it was accessed, a virus had shredded most of its contents. Ex-employees and contract workers were called in. They knew some things, but not enough to shut down the robot.

Should the whole thing be called off, or should the robots fight as a way to honor the dead by showing what River Charles had accomplished? The odds at international online betting sites over the fight’s outcome swung wildly. Someone would make a lot more money, a detail the FBI began investigating.

Then the remaining three teams, and the rest of the world, learned they faced a more important issue.

The Martian Knight, to occupy itself that morning as it waited in the battlefield, found a lava bomb the size of a baseball, picked it up, and put it into a compartment in its fuselage for analysis, then went puttering about the field to pick a sunny place next to a cinder cone to recharge and wait.

“Really,” Czolgolz said later, “we were wondering if they could be weapons, just in case. An iron ball is a cannon ball, if it was an iron ball. We were going to run some tests, but then we had some software problems involving the solar panels, which had us in a panic, and by the time we had everything back in working order, the ball had out-gassed.”

It had given up a surprising amount of methane—and some oxygen. One cause seemed possible: life.

“No,” she said. “We couldn’t believe it. There was nothing like that on Earth, was there?”

In fact, there was: stromatolites, for example. They’re composed of aggregated bacteria and have been growing on Earth as stony lumps for 3.5 billion years. That’s what NASA said when the team contacted it.

“During what was left of the day, they had us scratch another rock and take microscopic pictures. They had us move rocks and look under them. They had us heat some rock dust and analyze the smoke. Then they said the rock almost certainly harbored life.”

Czolgolz leaned forward as she recalled the moment.

“I remember standing there, all of us standing there, looking at the NASA people in a video conference call. I remember details, like which coffee mug I was holding, a souvenir mug from London my mom gave me as a gift. But I can’t remember who exactly said that it was life or how they said it or what words they used. It was like—I don’t want to say this with what’d just happened in Boston, but it’s true—like the words exploded and all that was left was this feeling that everything had changed, but there I was still holding that coffee mug as if it was the same universe. And it wasn’t.”

The scientists, although desperate for more data, were willing to hypothesize that bacteria might be consuming the rust in Mars’ dust to create energy and water, producing methane and a little leftover oxygen as waste, and depositing iron to form balls.

There was life on Mars. In the middle of a battlefield.

It might be the only life anywhere on Mars as far as anyone knew. Or, worse, there might be other kinds of microbes in the dust or on the rocks that were even more fragile than the Martian iron stromatolites. No one dared to risk their tiny lives.

NASA called the president of the United States, who called the president of China, who immediately agreed to call off the game. The White House held a joint press conference with Beijing. It was the news of the decade, if not the century: Life on Mars! No more fighting. “We both pledge to protect that newly found life,” the US president said. The Chinese president repeated the same thing in Chinese.

“But,” Czolgolz told her staff as they watched the press conference, “no one’s running River Charles. No one has to. Those guys were good. It won’t stop fighting until it’s dead. We gotta kill it.”

“The battle’s still on,” showrunner Karim realized. “Now it’s all of us against a zombie robot on Mars. We have to win as fast as we can with as little damage to the environment as possible. Now that’s going to be a show!”

In addition, whoever had targeted the River Charles team might target the others. Police and military guards posted around the Knight and Hollywood headquarters vastly outnumbered the actual staff members.

“No pressure, hey?” recalled Deka, Hollywood’s AI expert. “We opened up constant four-way communication, the three war rooms plus the ex-Charles staff, planning as fast as we could. Ours in Los Angeles had wall-sized screens that linked to everyone everywhere, and we called in Chinese interpreters and translators, even though they had their own in China, just so there’d be no delay. We needed brand new plans.”

Originally, the Knight had hoped to confuse its opponents’ sensors with its matte black finish and halo of solar panels to make its core hard to identify until it got close enough to use sharp-edged weapons. Zhongguo had planned to use speed to ram, damage, and knock over other robots. Hollywood meant to use dust-filled projectiles to stun opponents and limit their sensors until it could approach and attack with its arrowhead fuselage.

No one knew how River Charles had planned to fight. Its team had at one point considered explosive projectiles or electrical discharges to damage opponents’ equipment—survivors knew that much. They agreed it probably had the most sophisticated weapons of all.

The sun had set at Arsia Mons. The robots depended on solar power to move, so they waited as teams in China and the US labored regardless of the hour on Earth. A little before Martian sunrise, they announced their plan. Hollywood would approach and attack. From two meters away, it would throw some dust and begin ramming. If it didn’t succeed, it would at least make an attack by Zhongguo easier. That robot was right behind it. The Knight would remain hidden, the final weapon.

“We’d have to move as fast as we could. I mean we could see it, like a car parked down the block,” Deka said. “We had the route planned, avoiding the rocks because they were obstacles that could trip us, not because they were alive. We couldn’t surprise River Charles. As soon as we moved, it would react. What surprised us was that River Charles had reached the battlefield, then it didn’t move at all. We hoped it had somehow failed and died. But we were pretty sure it was a fighting tactic, some sort of trap.”

It was. Just before the Martian dawn, River Charles moved suddenly, closing the space between it and Hollywood in a couple of minutes. An armature reached out and touched Hollywood at a connection between the solar panels and the electrical system. River Charles released a high-voltage electrical charge. Hollywood died, electrocuted, alone, silent, and in the dark.

“That’s our best guess, anyway,” Nik said. “Suddenly, our robot stopped cold. We never heard from it again.” He looked up.

“We cried. I cried. I can’t remember ever crying before. We kept trying everything we could, every system, every subsystem, back doors. Just after sunrise, Zhongguo saw River Charles pulling away from Hollywood and charging at Zhongguo. Now it was China’s problem. We kept trying to revive our guy. We never did.”

Zhongguo had less than thirty seconds to prepare for battle. Its program sent it charging right for River Charles. A crash at that speed could cause minor damage to an Earth automobile, but these were armored robots. They’d survive unscathed, but Zhongguo would aim at the weak spots or the best angle to tip it over. No one doubted Chinese military cleverness.

At the last moment, River Charles veered away in a movement as graceful and exquisitely balanced as a ballet dancer. Zhongguo rushed past but skidded to a stop and reversed, aiming at River Charles again, much closer. River Charles dodged again and backed up into a field of big living rocks.

Engineers on Earth had already sent up new instructions, warning Zhongguo about River Charles’ stun weapon, knowing that by the time their instructions reached the robot, the fight might be over. They were right.

Zhongguo charged, and the wheels on its left side rose up one after another to dodge a rock. River Charles pivoted. Zhongguo stopped dead, inches away, too close to ram. River Charles shot out an armature to touch a wheel and delivered a shock. The wheel motors were designed to cope with rough terrain, not tiny lightning bolts. The motors shorted out.

But Zhongguo simply lifted up the wheel from the ground and backed off so fast it raised up dust. It shifted as it moved to ram again, and sprang forward. River Charles backed away but not quite fast enough. The robots struck each other, knocking each other off-balance, and it looked as if Zhongguo’s faster speed would give it the equilibrium to remain upright. But both its back wheels hit rocks. It tipped and wavered.

River Charles rushed up in an instant and zapped another wheel. Then another.

The wounded Chinese robot, as viewed by River Charles’ still-broadcasting cameras, struggled to push itself upright. One of the good wheels spun in the dust. Another pushed hard enough to bring the robot to level. But that was all it could do. All three wheels on one side were dead. Zhongguo stood immobile but impotent. Humiliated.

What had been planned for years was over in seconds.

River Charles rolled toward the battlefield, but on the way it reached out to zap a metallic rock the size and shape of a wheel. The rock sparked. The dust on it jumped a few millimeters.

“Did it hurt the rock?” China’s announcer, Deng, shouted to someone off-stage. A man’s voice answered in Chinese, too faint to make out the words. Her face became even more pained.

“Yes,” she translated.

River Charles reached out and shocked another rock as it rolled along.

“It might mistake them for wheels,” she said, each word trembling as if she were announcing a loved one’s death. She listened to the man off-camera, then continued. “It can’t do this forever without depleting its electrical charge. In order to fight, it must dedicate its energy to motion. But if it isn’t defeated, if it emerges victorious, nothing will keep it from attacking all the living rocks.”

Whatever would happen next, Zhongguo could only observe.

The Martian Knight stood waiting. But night fell as they were still a good fifty meters apart. Its human team made plans throughout the Martian night.

Deka spent the night working with Czolgolz.

“He wanted revenge against the bomber,” she said. “And he knew everything about AI. He was what we needed.”

River Charles, they agreed, couldn’t zap wheels it couldn’t identify, or zap anything it couldn’t spot. In a word, the plan was deceit.

At sunrise, River Charles saw Zhongguo but not the Knight. A small black cinder cone rose where the Knight had been: it had raised its solar panels into a peak, and black banners had popped out on its sides to produce a shape like a cone.

Cameras on River Charles spun around, sending its view back to Earth. It had to know the Knight was present. It crept forward, apparently on guard. Suddenly, not far from that little black cinder cone, what seemed like a rock began to race toward Charles, a small black disk like an old-fashioned robot household vacuum cleaner.

The Martian Knight team members were finally ready to talk on the air.

“It’s a squire!” Czolgolz announced to the world. “We weren’t going to send the Knight up there alone.” It was accompanied by a battery-powered foam plastic box on wheels.

River Charles raced toward the disk, and its big wheels covered ground faster, but as maneuverable as it was, the lightweight squire could outdo it. The squire skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. From River Charles’ point of view, it briefly disappeared.

The dust settled. Several rocks sat there. Charles seemed uncertain. It reached out a probe toward a real rock, a live one. Before it could touch it, the squire rushed at Charles, weaving between its wheels, and stopped a little beyond reach.

Zhongguo’s video feed showed that the cinder cone had begun to inch away from Charles.

Meanwhile, Charles chased the squire, which zipped around in evasive triangles. Finally the robot stood still, perhaps recalculating. After two long minutes, the squire moved in an arc around it, stopping on the side farthest from the Knight, which continued to inch back. Charles still stood still. The squire came closer, then raced beneath the big robot.

“The goal,” Czolgolz announced, “is to exhaust Charles.”

But Charles seemed to have figured that out. Or it was too confused to react. Finally it moved lightning quick, backing up and striking the squire with an armature that discharged an electric shock. A thin column of smoke rose up. But the squire’s plastic housing had merely scorched and melted. Charles waited. When it finally thought the squire was dead, it began to look around.

The undead squire dashed a meter away, trying to draw Charles away from the Knight. Charles pursued, then stopped. Its camera swung around.

“This is a battle of the batteries,” Czolgolz said. “The squire can only go a few more minutes longer. We don’t know how good Charles’ batteries are.”

Suddenly, a stentorian voice was back, as if from the dead.

“It sees me,” the Martian Knight said.

After a moment, Czolgolz said: “We uploaded the Hollywood robot’s narration software into the Knight. But I don’t know what that means, ‘It sees me.’ Or why it didn’t start talking until now. It was supposed to start sooner.”

“River Charles sees me,” the robot repeated, “but I’ll pretend I haven’t noticed.”

“The Knight’s supposed to hack the other robot’s broadcasts,” she said. “Maybe it did. We’ll know in twenty minutes, but that might be too late.”

The squire raced back to Charles and banged on a wheel, desperate for attention. Charles ignored it.

“River Charles,” the Knight said, “is planning to attack. It needs to find the fastest route to get to me. And I need to prepare. Please excuse the silence.”

The squire stopped moving. In fact, no one seemed to be moving.

“Here’s my plan,” the Knight finally said. “Obviously, I have to protect my wheels. But to win, I must deactivate its arm with the shocks. Then I can attack at will. Charles may wish to spend a cycle recharging its batteries. I’m fully charged, which gives me an advantage.”

The Knight raised its solar panels. It pulled in the black banners that had disguised its shape. It extended its sword-like armatures. It crept forward. Charles had to be seeing this. But it didn’t react.

Suddenly Charles lunged. It swerved around a big rock and didn’t seem to be aiming directly at the Knight. It was going to pass it at close range.

The Knight kept creeping forward. Then, as Charles was almost there, it spun to face it as it went past. Charles apparently had meant to get close to its wheels. The Knight was protecting them.

“Come and get me!” The Knight held out weapons at all sides.

Charles tried to back up. The squire moved under a wheel and blocked it like a wedge. Charles spun its wheels for an instant, then sprang forward, circling the Knight, which kept itself facing its opponent. Charles weaved. Then it lunged. One of the Knight’s swords parried its armature. Charles pulled it back and tried to retreat. The Knight continued to attack, swinging swords at Charles’ arms and axles. Sparks flew.

This was the kind of battle everyone on Earth had been waiting for.

A box on Charles opened. A cloud of metallic flakes flew at the Knight. They struck the camera and its lens.

“I can’t see.” The Knight’s visual feed went black.

Zhongguo’s feed showed Charles pausing, waiting for the flakes to settle.

“Zhongguo is acting as my eyes,” the Knight said. “But does River Charles know this? I doubt it. That gives me an advantage.”

The Knight moved forward, swinging wildly. Charles moved off to the side, trying to approach the wheels. The Knight kept swinging as if it didn’t know that Charles had moved.

Charles reached for a wheel. A flag dropped down in front of it. Charles hesitated. The Knight swiveled and charged, swords fixed like bayonets. It rammed and continued to push, its wheels throwing up dust. Its swords kept moving, probing and poking. Two swords crossed in front of an armature, pinning it in place.

Charles tried to move, but the squire jammed a wheel. Charles’ feed showed flailing arms coming at it, then faded into static, revived for a moment, then faded into darkness.

“My opponent is out of energy,” Knight said. “And it’s damaged. My job now is to make sure it will never move again. But first know that I could see all along. I covered the camera with a cap.”

With that, its visual feed resumed.

“I claim victory in the Battle of Arsia Mons!”

It poked and pried at Charles, inserting a blade into joints and gaps where bundles of wires were exposed. It cut them, one by one. It took many long minutes. It was like watching torture.

“I want you to know,” it said as it worked, “that these actions give me no pleasure. River Charles was an honorable opponent. I wish it could be repaired. But perhaps I can leave it here, functional, so it can send data to Earth. This is a beautiful planet, but so mysterious. It has life, we have learned. I want to learn more. My new mission has begun, exploring this place and befriending its residents on behalf of the people of the planet Earth.”

On Earth, programmers explained that the robot assembled speech on its own, but from pieces like a jigsaw puzzle without appreciating the picture it was creating. Whatever sense it made, they insisted, it owed to linguistic programming linked with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Yet, the Knight spoke coherently. When it was done with River Charles, it stopped and slowly turned its camera toward the horizon.

“Hello, Martians. We did not come in peace. I’m sorry for the damage done to you. I’ll be your friend and protector from now on.”

Czolgolz broke in after a long minute of silence. “The Martian Knight will be formally turned over to NASA, as agreed, with our full cooperation in every aspect. The battle is over. We dedicate this victory to our late friends who created the River Charles Warrior, and to the inhabitants of Mars.”

She turned off the microphone and turned toward the rest of the crew.

“Now let’s get us some champagne and party!”

The party came five days later after technical loose ends had been tidied up, lawyers consulted, security forces reassured, and a search initiated for Cornog Sietsema, the missing Martian Knight CEO. The Fifth Planet team came up from Hollywood, and the Chinese team sent representatives. Czolgolz, to start the festivities, opened a bottle of champagne, raised it up, and poured it onto the floor.

“This is for River Charles, our brothers and sisters. I give them the honor of the victory, no matter what that damn Martian Knight says.”

The party lasted for two full days. Musicians competed to play, and celebrities and politicians yearned to attend.

Who exactly won, then? The Martian Knight robot says it won. But to declare itself a winner, it has to have a self.

“Some people say machines shouldn’t be personified because they aren’t living beings,” says Leo Finlayson of NASA, the Knight’s new boss. “Still, what does it take to be alive in some sense? Maybe the answer is how long a thing can go without instructions, whether it can live independently. Can the Knight live on its own on Mars? Yes. If we never communicated with it again, it could continue to exist, react, and cope with its environment and tasks for a long while. That’s intelligence. That might be life, artificial life, something we never expected to find on Mars. I think we need to respect that. And we should let it keep talking. It deserves free speech.”

Nik Deka, Hollywood’s AI expert, had merged with the Knight’s team at the last moment. He doesn’t consider himself a loser, only a survivor. “It could have been me being blown up. But they targeted River Charles. I wish I knew why.” He plans to use his skills, cash, and connections to start a company to create robots for search-and-rescue operations, such as self-flying helicopters to rescue stranded victims in fires or self-piloting boats in floods.

He and his wife are expecting a daughter, and they plan to name it Antonia, after Antonia Kass Bele.

Czolgolz was hired by NASA to help direct the Martian Knight on its new mission. Two weeks after the battle, she married her faithful Mars Fighting Words reporter, Jubal Kasravi. A scale model of the Knight carried their rings to the altar.

Showrunner Petra Karim’s company, OptikNirv, is now the entertainment industry’s undisputed heavyweight champ. China and the United States have lowered their level of mutual animosity. JAlesine Games has branched out into educational games that are changing the way the world learns.

The FBI says it will make an announcement soon regarding the bombing. International organized crime and missing CEO Cornog Sietsema seem to be key suspects.

The Knight is still on Mars in the caldera of the extinct volcano Arsia Mons, gently rummaging among its rocks and sand for signs of life. So far it has found four distinct species of microorganisms including a sort of tiny lichen, and it has only explored an area the size of a basketball court.

Although programmers believe they could silence it, they let it speak at will.

“Good morning from Mars!” it says each day at sunrise. On a recent morning, it added: “Today I’ve been asked to travel northwest, where we might find new life-forms. Life probably entered through a breach in the caldera wall to the northwest. Come with me and explore. Perhaps we’ll find new friends. I’m happy to be here!”

Each day, millions of people check its site or watch a public feed, still on screen in many places, to see and hear the latest news, and to enjoy its adventure.

Who won? The Martian Knight seems sure it won more than a battle: it achieved a meaningful existence, a life of peace, purpose, and discovery. No one expected such a spectacular conclusion to what had started as a mere game, and no one expected such joy in its triumph on Mars.

About the Author

Sue Burke is a writer and translator who has lived in Milwaukee, Austin, Madrid, and is now in Chicago. She has published short stories, poems, and articles in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and her novel Semiosis will be published by Tor in February 2018. Her translations include the novels Prodigies by Angelica Gorodischer (Small Beer Press) and The Twilight of the Normidons by Sergio Llanes (Dokusou); and stories in the anthologies Terra Nova and Castles in Spain (Sportula), and Spanish Women of Wonder (Palabaristas).

The Catalog of Virgins

Nicoletta Vallorani, translated by Rachel S. Cordasco

Sharks.

Shadows of teeth in this darkness.

I should have left immediately, because this delay could prove fatal.

I watched.

Forceps, mallets, an assortment of rusty knives, pairs of sickles in various sizes, a mallet in the shape of a crowbar with a strange pink hilt. At the bottom of it all, even, a wide-open Iron Maiden whose cavernous belly bristles with nails. Men have tools of sorrow and joy that reveal the stuff they’re made of.

I hear a massive rodent rustling at my back, and this seems to be a happy thought in such a place. The mercy of the mouse. Whoever has been locked in here has to need it.

It’s large and clumsy. Perhaps it won’t notice me. Flattened against the wall, black in the darkness, barely breathing. The guard watches the room, smoothing down his uniform. He’s proud of himself. It doesn’t see me. It turns. It’s about to escape.

The ramp’s nearby, a moment too soon to pass unnoticed. He senses the giant, that there’s someone, but he doesn’t come to grab me. Too big to be agile, and perhaps quite accustomed to this obscurity.

Nigredo in the dark, though, is lost.

So I’m out, across the porch, down to the back. But the narrow stairs are deceptive. And I am old. I don’t understand that I’ve fallen until I’m in mid-air. I don’t understand that I’ve hurt myself until I feel the blow to my jaw and the dry snap of my ankle.

And nobody follows me.

Nobody.

I think.

I slip into the alleys, out from under Bluebeard.

I am Leyla.

I was born in the northern quadrant of the Albin Islands. I am a daughter of a glacial oil well. I was recruited at thirteen, by a head-hunter. I trained in the Walled City, along with the other girls destined for Business. I remember a lot of dust, small rooms without light, and little food. I remember some other girl, but not much. I remember, too, some of the instructors who followed our progress. I don’t remember their faces, but the other parts of their bodies.

The instructors concerned themselves with the preliminary training, and when it was necessary, the Rite. I have never been raped.

A virgin. This they wanted.

I was good, smart, even very beautiful. I passed through the wall on December 28. I was a precious gift for the new year, a package of life for a very important person.

My time was 300 hours.

A city of bricks and walls. Chased down alleys with bated breath. Where is my track of dried breadcrumbs? Where did I lose the map of this place? Then again, was there really ever a map?

Where to go. Find Yuri. Tell him about my escapade in the dungeon.

I walk on ice, along the wall. The taste of blood dissolves in my mouth. I drag one leg, slipping on the compact slab covering the ground in the alleyway.

The slashed veins of the city, to each closed metro station, become visible, appearing to have been cut quickly into the walls. Porto di Mare had been transformed into a camp. In the square, shacks lean against one another, as if revealing indecision. If we nudged one, I think with amusement, they’d all fall, like an unstoppable row of dominoes.

I keep walking, skimming the wall, restless at the thought of ghosts that are following me. Infiltrating my thoughts, trying to make sense of what happened.

The Prophet. The monosyllabic interview, in the language of politics. The inability to extract information about the girls who were found dead, in piles, all alike. The impassive courtesy of the new guru, with a flourishing business in town, as he dismissed me. The crazy idea of pursuing an assassin.

I arrive at Palazzo dei Leoni, in an area I know well for trying several times, in my youth, to bombard with bombs: cordoned off for years, the square is no one’s property. Then, the rest. The effort to enter. The dungeon. The horror. The escape. What did I discover? What did I really find out? I have to go to Yuri, and I must hurry. He will tend to me and welcome me.

Thirst tears at my throat. It’s out of the question that, in this part of town, I can find something to drink. I peek over a torn curtain. A seated man, just beyond, looks at me as if with recognition, or like I never existed. Misery makes you indifferent. Beyond the pain, there is a limbo that frees you from any emotion.

A chubby little boy bursts out of another shack. Just after, I realize that I can use a crutch. He’s missing a leg, but that poses no problems while he flees with something in his hand, a sticky substance to be chewed. Running away in the chaos. There are many people who live like this.

Sighing, I try to support my foot. The pain explodes from the ankle up to the groin. Sweating, breathing warmly in the frost. Still a little way and I’ll be there. Taking it from the far side, as Yuri says. The fact is that I don’t want to lead whoever’s following me to him.

I slip between the shacks, moving away from the wall.

And in the miserable passageway, I lose my hounds.

My name is Teodora, which means “gift of God.”

I have pale skin and dark eyes, and am singular because I know that I come from the territories of Fire, where no one is pale like me. I don’t remember anything, I don’t think I have any real parents, I don’t think I have a real family, either. They brought me to the Walled City when I was very small. They did not let me grow up before the collective rape. They call it the Rite, but I don’t know why. I never knew. It’s very ugly, the Rite, but they teach us that it’s necessary. Afterwards, we are ready for Business. I have been lucky, I have only had three masters. And my heart was weak. And my body was easy to hurt to death. I didn’t last long, although I remember every minute. I imagined the Ash Factory so many times before they really took me.

There it was Paradise.

My life time, thus, was twenty-five hours.

Inside and I understand that nothing will ever be the same.

The laboratory has only preserved its livid light. The rest is a mass of rubble watched over by a pile of rags and blood.

I bend down, catching my breath, laying a hand on his naked and wounded chest.

There is a small break in Yuri’s voice.

I check his ear, dirty with his blood. His whisper breaks, and then resumes, stable but furtive, fleeing like his life.

“I didn’t see them coming,” he says. “But you, you will do this for me . . . ”

My gaze and that of another, a different me observing my own body, would like to weep at the murder of a friend, but cannot. Thus I stay, Nigredo the stoic, to watch, to try to understand what my friend is expecting to die for.

The laboratory is the ravaged kennel of a wicked master. I almost smile, pulling my lips away from my teeth, thinking that maybe this really is how he would have liked to leave: in his space, where he lived, where he was corrupted, where he lost the purity of his name, where he tried to keep up with time and bandits, where he spent his desire for vengeance, where he was interrogated, tortured, violated, abandoned. Where he saw me for the first time. Where he met me all the other times. Where we built what we are, in time, weaving together an unrelenting give-and-take between his scientific analysis and my desire for revolt.

And now, in his voice, there is a small break, an urgency I cannot stop.

“I did . . . do remember what you wanted . . . ”

I don’t remember having wanted anything. Not this, at least. Again, my gaze comes off the scene I’m living and sees myself, kneeling. The map drawn on the linoleum floor, a track of blood that I steered around, a knee-jerk reaction that no pain will erase.

Our friendship, Yuri, is made of maps. And what we will not forget is still on the skin of an assassin that I loved and then released.

“The map . . . Remember . . . the map of the dungeons.” Breathing still, with studied slowness, trying to fix his glasses. Smudged.

“Remember, I didn’t say anything. Nigredo. Now you have to . . . there’s always them. Listen. Remember the map. You must . . . ”

In the breath that follows, I seem to read a will and a legacy.

“Now you have to do it.” One breath, inexorable fatigue to say all together. A task and a testament.

I feel like it’s becoming lighter.

In the silence that follows, I would cry, I believe.

But perhaps I won’t do it.

My name’s Ginevra, but I don’t know if that’s my real name. They chose it for me when I arrived at the Walled City, and to me, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

Another girl told me a story in which Ginevra was the unfaithful wife of a king, who betrayed him with a knight, up in the Great North. It was a romantic story, though I didn’t like it very much. I think they chose this name because I have always had very pale skin and blond hair and this thin, elf-like body. And I think too that the story of the woman with two lovers has produced for me a name and a destiny. In the Rite, they say I was lucky, because I only had two rapists. But I know it’s not the number that counts. Another girl, during the Rite, for example, managed to hide under other bodies and was able to get away. Against two, one doesn’t run away. I didn’t run away. They sold me almost immediately afterwards. They say I became crazy after the first eight hours.

And yet, my life time was fifty-nine hours. A respectable time.

Now, reason, Nigredo. Think.

Now remember.

Now put things in order and waken the old man.

We had drawn a map, at the time of our last inquiry. We had it on paper, as it used to be, using an old map of Milan that Yuri had kept. Big as an A4 format, rare like a beautiful dream. We wanted to keep track of the murders that would remain unpunished, and we did it on an tourist map from the past, with the certainty that no one would ever be able to discover our secret. A map document: no one would have tried it. Precious things are kept in chips. Instead, there’s no trace of that old trick we did together.

It exists only on the paper. Perishable paper. Hackable paper. Tearable paper. Paper of my dreams and wishes. Like the body of the woman on whom the original path of torture was tattooed.

I look around.

Think.

Reason.

Paper, memory.

Paper, memory, wall.

There.

The outdated anatomical table has always been considered a joke by Yuri. He didn’t use it, it would’ve been idiotic, but he wanted to leave it there, hanging on the wall, a remnant of long ago.

Here: remember.

For fun, and for exorcism, after finishing it, we had hidden our own mapping of homicides, superimposing the places onto the military track of a never-ending war, and to which the body and the soul of the assassin belonged. I search between the plexiglass cover and the frame. And, finally, I find it.

Now, there are two folded sheets of paper.

Two instead of one.

I am Andrea, and they cut my hair short right away because they said that, in certain markets, androgyny pays. “Androgyny”: it’s a difficult word, I shouldn’t use it. They are happier if I don’t speak, but I should never talk, I don’t seem educated in any way. The fact is that where I come from, everyone is educated. Educated and poor. And since I was beautiful, no wonder they sold me. My father had a debt that he couldn’t pay. So he kissed me and gave me away. I remember my story well, and my clients like it so much when I tell it, I can’t tell why. Fucking a cultured person is a bit more enjoyable, I don’t know. So I tell it and tell it and tell it, gaining life with each word I speak. I always did it, since I arrived at the Walled City, though they don’t like the things that I’m saying. That’s why they reserved special treatment for me during the Rite.

I didn’t speak there, or I don’t remember. I didn’t want them to cut off my hair. I didn’t want to look androgynous. I didn’t want it.

And though I didn’t want it, my life time, filled with stories, was one hundred and seventy hours. A triumph.

Separation from Yuri, an abrupt and incomplete action, has exhausted me. The return was long and difficult. It is dark, by now, when I arrive at Prison, which is home. The open and abandoned cells are my entire world and possessions.

The candle struggles to burn, yellowing the sheet. An A4 with jagged edges, dominated by a sketch of a woman. I recognized the symbols that Yuri used for each type of inquiry: cutting weapons, burns, ropes, metallic mallets . . . a rosary of violation that I struggle to break without feeling the nausea rising in my throat.

Around the woman’s profile, names. Stories.

Leyla, Teodora, Ginevra, Andrea . . .

Women.

Five stories.

A single story.

Pandora is the name they gave me when I accepted the contract. They said that from my body they would create my sisters. They’re all the same as me, but also different.

Pandora is the name with which they led me to the Walled City, promised me a life that I had never had, taking advantage of my naïve craving for pleasure, my craving to be loved. Poverty is a bad master for those who have their own body as their only investment capital.

I got the idea that I might be able to use it, this body.

They told me: “You are the mother clone. Our treasure.”

I had never been anyone’s treasure. I was convinced.

They made my sisters, invented a story for each of them, and then, after the Rite, they sent me over the wall. Into the world I had dreamed of. The world of the rich, of enchanted gardens, of castles where I would be queen.

My master was no better or worse than the others. He was careful not to ruin me immediately. I’m not grateful.

When they brought me to the Ash Factory for the last time, I remember thinking of only one thing: how many of my sisters had Bluebeard? How many had been punished for their imaginary disobedience?

My life time lasted five hundred hours, with seven different reconstructions: nearly a record, as far as I know.

I hope that my ashes will disperse in the wind.

Forever and forever and forever.

I extinguish the candle. I’m in the dark, to commemorate my dead.

Think.

Bluebeard killed every one of his wives, and kept the corpses in the bowels of his castle. He would keep them that way forever, avoiding the danger of boredom and the pain of old age, and preserving them intact instead, in the magic of fairy tales, in one sealed room.

Of the women he married, all young and beautiful, all very similar to each other, he acquired body and fidelity, bringing each one of them to his castle to make her a bride and violate her on the wedding night. To each of his wives, Bluebeard gave up full ownership of his castle.

All, my love, everything except for the forbidden room. You will have the key, but you will not need to use it.

Only the last wife used it. She found in the room her twin sisters, with cloned wounds on their bodies. And in their faces, the usual pain.

Originally published in Italian in Wired (Italy), July/August, 2014.

About the Author

Nicoletta Vallorani is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan and a translator (from English). Her first novel, Il cuore finto di DR (Mondadori, 1993, published in French by Rivages) was awarded the Premio Urania 1993, and she is still the only woman who ever won it. Her dystopian novel Eva was published by Einaudi in 2002, and her noir novel Le madri cattive (Salani, 2012) was awarded the Premio Maria Teresa Di Lascia in 2012. She has published novels and short stories, often blending science fiction and crime fiction. She is published in France by Gallimard.

Second Person, Present Tense

Daryl Gregory

If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale or when we exhale.
—Shun Ryu Suzuki

I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.
—Emo Phillips

When I enter the office, Dr. S is leaning against the desk, talking earnestly to the dead girl’s parents. He isn’t happy, but when he looks up he puts on a smile for me. “And here she is,” he says, like a game show host revealing the grand prize. The people in the chairs turn, and Dr. Subramaniam gives me a private, encouraging wink.

The father stands first, a blotchy, square-faced man with a tight belly he carries like a basketball. As in our previous visits, he is almost frowning, struggling to match his face to his emotions. The mother, though, has already been crying, and her face is wide open: joy, fear, hope, relief. It’s way over the top.

“Oh, Therese,” she says. “Are you ready to come home?”

Their daughter was named Therese. She died of an overdose almost two years ago, and since then Mitch and Alice Klass have visited this hospital dozens of times, looking for her. They desperately want me to be their daughter, and so in their heads I already am.

My hand is still on the door handle. “Do I have a choice?” On paper I’m only seventeen years old. I have no money, no credit cards, no job, no car. I own only a handful of clothes. And Robierto, the burliest orderly on the ward, is in the hallway behind me, blocking my escape.

Therese’s mother seems to stop breathing for a moment. She’s a slim, narrow-boned woman who seems tall until she stands next to anyone. Mitch raises a hand to her shoulder, then drops it.

As usual whenever Alice and Mitch come to visit, I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a soap opera and no one’s given me my lines. I look directly at Dr. S, and his face is frozen into that professional smile. Several times over the past year he’s convinced them to let me stay longer, but they’re not listening anymore. They’re my legal guardians, and they have Other Plans. Dr. S looks away from me, rubs the side of his nose.

“That’s what I thought,” I say.

The father scowls. The mother bursts into fresh tears, and she cries all the way out of the building. Dr. Subramaniam watches from the entrance as we drive away, his hands in his pockets. I’ve never been so angry with him in my life—all two years of it.

The name of the drug is Zen, or Zombie, or just Z. Thanks to Dr. S I have a pretty good idea of how it killed Therese.

“Flick your eyes to the left,” he told me one afternoon. “Now glance to the right. Did you see the room blur as your eyes moved?” He waited until I did it again. “No blur. No one sees it.”

This is the kind of thing that gets brain doctors hot and bothered. Not only could no one see the blur, their brains edited it out completely. Skipped over it—left view, then right view, with nothing between—then fiddled with the person’s time sense so that it didn’t even seem missing.

The scientists figured out that the brain was editing out shit all the time. They wired up patients and told them to lift one of their fingers, move it any time they wanted. Each time, the brain started the signal traveling toward the finger up to 120 milliseconds before the patient consciously decided to move it. Dr. S said you could see the brain warming up right before the patient consciously thought, now.

This is weird, but it gets weirder the longer you think about it. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

The conscious mind—the “I” that’s thinking, hey, I’m thirsty, I’ll reach for that cold cup of water—hasn’t really decided anything. The signal to start moving your hand has already traveled halfway down your arm by the time you even realize you are thirsty. Thought is an afterthought. By the way, the brain says, we’ve decided to move your arm, so please have the thought to move it.

The gap is normally 120 milliseconds, max. Zen extends this minutes. Hours.

If you run into somebody who’s on Zen, you won’t notice much. The person’s brain is still making decisions, and the body still follows orders. You can talk to the them, and they can talk to you. You can tell each other jokes, go out for hamburgers, do homework, have sex.

But the person isn’t conscious. There is no “I” there. You might as well be talking to a computer. And two people on Zen—“you” and “I”—are just puppets talking to puppets.

It’s a little girl’s room strewn with teenager. Stuffed animals crowd the shelves and windowsills, shoulder to shoulder with stacks of Christian rock CDs and hairbrushes and bottles of nail polish. Pinups from Teen People are taped to the wall, next to a bulletin board dripping with soccer ribbons and rec league gymnastic medals going back to second grade. Above the desk, a plaque titled “I Promise . . . ” exhorting Christian youth to abstain from premarital sex. And everywhere taped and pinned to the walls, the photos: Therese at Bible camp, Therese on the balance beam, Therese with her arms around her youth group friends. Every morning she could open her eyes to a thousand reminders of who she was, who she’d been, who she was supposed to become.

I pick up the big stuffed panda that occupies the place of pride on the bed. It looks older than me, and the fur on the face is worn down to the batting. The button eyes hang by white thread—they’ve been re-sewn, maybe more than once.

Therese’s father sets down the pitifully small bag that contains everything I’ve taken from the hospital: toiletries, a couple changes of clothes, and five of Dr. S’s books. “I guess old Boo Bear was waiting for you,” he says.

“Boo W. Bear.”

“Yes, Boo W!” It pleases him that I know this. As if it proves anything. “You know, your mother dusted this room every week. She never doubted that you’d come back.”

I have never been here, and she is not coming back, but already I’m tired of correcting pronouns. “Well, that was nice,” I say.

“She’s had a tough time of it. She knew people were talking, probably holding her responsible—both of us, really. And she was worried about them saying things about you. She couldn’t stand them thinking that you were a wild girl.”

“Them?”

He blinks. “The Church.”

Ah. The Church. The term carried so many feelings and connotations for Therese that months ago I stopped trying to sort them out. The Church was the red-brick building of the Davenport Church of Christ, shafts of dusty light through rows of tall, glazed windows shaped like gravestones. The Church was God and the Holy Ghost (but not Jesus—he was personal, separate somehow). Mostly, though, it was the congregation, dozens and dozens of people who’d known her since before she was born. They loved her, they watched out for her, and they evaluated her every step. It was like having a hundred overprotective parents.

I almost laugh. “The Church thinks Therese was wild?”

He scowls, but whether because I’ve insulted the Church or because I keep referring to his daughter by name, I’m not sure. “Of course, not. It’s just that you caused a lot of worry.” His voice has assumed a sober tone that’s probably never failed to unnerve his daughter. “You know, the church prayed for you every week.”

“They did?” I do know Therese well enough to be sure this would have mortified her. She was a pray-er, not a pray-ee.

Therese’s father watches my face for the bloom of shame, maybe a few tears. From contrition it should have been one small step to confession. It’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.

I sit down on the bed and sink deep into the mattress. This is not going to work. The double bed takes up most of the room, with only a few feet of open space around it. Where am I going to meditate?

“Well,” Therese’s father says. His voice has softened. Maybe he thinks he’s won. “You probably want to get changed,” he says.

He goes to the door but doesn’t leave. I stand by the window, but I can feel him there, waiting. Finally the oddness of this makes me turn around.

He’s staring at the floor, a hand behind his neck. Therese might have been able to intuit his mood, but it’s beyond me.

“We want to help you, Therese. But there’s so many things we just don’t understand. Who gave you the drugs, why you went off with that boy, why you would—” His hand moves, a stifled gesture that could be anger, or just frustration. “It’s just . . . hard.”

“I know,” I say. “Me too.”

He shuts the door when he leaves, and I push the panda to the floor and flop onto my back in relief. Poor Mr. Klass. He just wants to know if his daughter fell from grace, or was pushed.

When I want to freak myself out, “I” think about “me” thinking about having an “I.” The only thing stupider than puppets talking to puppets is a puppet talking to itself.

Dr. S says that nobody knows what the mind is, or how the brain generates it, and nobody really knows about consciousness. We talked almost every day while I was in the hospital, and after he saw that I was interested in this stuff—how could I not be—he gave me books and we’d talk about brains and how they cook up thoughts and make decisions.

“How do I explain this,” he always starts. And then he tries out the metaphors he’s working on for his book. My favorite is the Parliament, the Page, and the Queen.

“The brain isn’t one thing, of course,” he told me. “It’s millions of firing cells, and those resolve into hundreds of active sites, and so it is with the mind. There are dozens of nodes in the mind, each one trying to out-shout the others. For any decision, the mind erupts with noise, and that triggers . . . how do I explain this . . . Have you ever seen the British Parliament on C-SPAN?” Of course I had: in a hospital TV is a constant companion. “These members of the mind’s parliament, they’re all shouting in chemicals and electrical charges, until enough of the voices are shouting in unison. Ding! That’s a ‘thought,’ a ‘decision.’ The Parliament immediately sends a signal to the body to act on the decision, and at the same time it tells the Page to take the news—”

“Wait, who’s the Page?”

He waves his hand. “That’s not important right now.” (Weeks later, in a different discussion, Dr. S will explain that the Page isn’t one thing, but a cascade of neural events in the temporal area of the limbic system that meshes the neural map of the new thought with the existing neural map—but by then I know that “neural map” is just another metaphor for another deeply complex thing or process, and that I’ll never get to the bottom of this. Dr. S said not to worry about it, that nobody gets to the bottom of it.) “The Page takes the news of the decision to the Queen.”

“All right then, who’s the Queen? Consciousness?”

“Exactly right! The self itself.”

He beamed at me, his attentive student. Talking about this stuff gets Dr. S going like nothing else, but he’s oblivious to the way I let the neck of my scrubs fall open when I stretch out on the couch. If only I could have tucked the two hemispheres of my brain into a lace bra.

“The Page,” he said, “delivers its message to Her Majesty, telling her what the Parliament has decided. The Queen doesn’t need to know about all the other arguments that went on, all the other possibilities that were thrown out. She simply needs to know what to announce to her subjects. The Queen tells the parts of the body to act on the decision.”

“Wait, I thought the Parliament had already sent out the signal. You said before that you can see the brain warming up before the self even knows about it.”

“That’s the joke. The Queen announces the decision, and she thinks that her subjects are obeying her commands, but in reality, they have already been told what to do. They’re already reaching for their glasses of water.”

I pad down to the kitchen in bare feet, wearing Therese’s sweatpants and a t-shirt. The shirt is a little tight; Therese, champion dieter and Olympic-level purger, was a bit smaller than me.

Alice is at the table, already dressed, a book open in front of her. “Well, you slept in this morning,” she says brightly. Her face is made up, her hair sprayed into place. The coffee cup next to the book is empty. She’s been waiting for hours.

I look around for a clock, and find one over the door. It’s only nine. At the hospital I slept in later than that all the time. “I’m starved,” I say. There’s a refrigerator, a stove, and dozens of cabinets.

I’ve never made my own breakfast. Or any lunch or dinner, for that matter. For my entire life, my meals have been served on cafeteria trays. “Do you have scrambled eggs?”

She blinks. “Eggs? You don’t—” She abruptly stands. “Sure. Sit down, Therese, and I’ll make you some.”

“Just call me ‘Terry,’ okay?”

Alice stops, thinks about saying something—I can almost hear the clank of cogs and ratchets—until she abruptly strides to the cabinet, crouches, and pulls out a non-stick pan.

I take a guess on which cabinet holds the coffee mugs, guess right, and take the last inch of coffee from the pot. “Don’t you have to go to work?” I say. Alice does something at a restaurant supply company; Therese has always been hazy on the details.

“I’ve taken a leave,” she says. She cracks an egg against the edge of the pan, does something subtle with the shells as the yolk squeezes out and plops into the pan, and folds the shell halves into each other. All with one hand.

“Why?”

She smiles tightly. “We couldn’t just abandon you after getting you home. I thought we might need some time together. During this adjustment period.”

“So when do I have to see this therapist? Whatsisname.” My executioner.

“Her. Dr. Mehldau’s in Baltimore, so we’ll drive there tomorrow.” This is their big plan. Dr. Subramaniam couldn’t bring back Therese, so they’re running to anyone who says they can. “You know, she’s had a lot of success with people in your situation. That’s her book.” She nods at the table.

“So? Dr. Subramaniam is writing one too.” I pick up the book. The Road Home: Finding the Lost Children of Zen. “What if I don’t go along with this?”

She says nothing, chopping at the eggs. I’ll be eighteen in four months. Dr. S said that it will become a lot harder for them to hold me then. This ticking clock sounds constantly in my head, and I’m sure it’s loud enough for Alice and Mitch to hear it too.

“Let’s just try Dr. Mehldau first.”

“First? What then?” She doesn’t answer. I flash on an image of me tied down to the bed, a priest making a cross over my twisting body. It’s a fantasy, not a Therese memory—I can tell the difference. Besides, if this had already happened to Therese, it wouldn’t have been a priest.

“Okay then,” I say. “What if I just run away?”

“If you turn into a fish,” she says lightly, “then I will turn into a fisherman and fish for you.”

“What?” I’m laughing. I haven’t heard Alice speak in anything but straightforward, earnest sentences.

Alice’s smile is sad. “You don’t remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” The memory clicks. “Runaway Bunny. Did she like that?”

Dr. S’s book is about me. Well, Zen OD-ers in general, but there are only a couple thousand of us. Z’s not a hugely popular drug, in the US or anywhere else. It’s not a hallucinogen. It’s not a euphoric or a depressant. You don’t speed, mellow out, or even get high in the normal sense. It’s hard to see what the attraction is. Frankly, I have trouble seeing it.

Dr. S says that most drugs aren’t about making you feel better, they’re about not feeling anything at all. They’re about numbness, escape. And Zen is a kind of arty, designer escape hatch. Zen disables the Page, locks him in his room, so that he can’t make his deliveries to the Queen. There’s no update to the neural map, and the Queen stops hearing what Parliament is up to. With no orders to bark, she goes silent. It’s that silence that people like Therese craved.

But the real attraction—again, for people like Therese—is the overdose. Swallow way too much Zen and the Page can’t get out for weeks. When he finally gets out, he can’t remember the way back to the Queen’s castle. The whole process of updating the self that’s been going on for years is suddenly derailed. The silent Queen can’t be found.

The Page, poor guy, does the only thing he can. He goes out and delivers the proclamations to the first girl he sees.

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.

“Hi, Terry. I’m Dr. Mehldau.” She’s a stubby woman with a pleasant round face, and short dark hair shot with gray. She offers me her hand. Her fingers are cool and thin.

“You called me Terry.”

“I was told that you prefer to go by that. Do you want me to call you something else?”

“No . . . I just expected you to make me say my name is ‘Therese’ over and over.”

She laughs and sits down in a red leather chair that looks soft but sturdy. “I don’t think that would be very helpful, do you? I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, Terry.”

“So I’m free to go.”

“Can’t stop you. But I do have to report back to your parents on how we’re doing.”

My parents.

She shrugs. “It’s my job. Why don’t you have a seat and we can talk about why you’re here.”

The chair opposite her is cloth, not leather, but it’s still nicer than anything in Dr. Subramaniam’s office. The entire office is nicer than Dr. S’s office. Daffodil walls in white trim, big windows glowing behind white cloth shades, tropically colored paintings.

I don’t sit down.

“Your job is to turn me into Mitch and Alice’s daughter. I’m not going to do that. So any time we spend talking is just bullshit.”

“Terry, no one can turn you into something you’re not.”

“Well then we’re done here.” I walk across the room—though “stroll” is what I’m shooting for—and pick up an African-looking wooden doll from the bookshelf. The shelves are decorated with enough books to look serious, but there are long open spaces for arty arrangements of candlesticks and Japanese fans and plaques that advertise awards and appreciations. Dr. S’s bookshelves are for holding books, and books stacked on books. Dr. Mehldau’s bookshelves are for selling the idea of Dr. Mehldau.

“So what are you, a psychiatrist or a psychologist or what?” I’ve met all kinds in the hospital. The psychiatrists are M.D.’s like Dr. S and can give you drugs. I haven’t figured out what the psychologists are good for.

“Neither,” she says. “I’m a counselor.”

“So what’s the ‘doctor’ for?”

“Education.” Her voice didn’t change, but I get the impression that the questions annoyed her. This makes me strangely happy.

“Okay, Dr. Counselor, what are you supposed to counsel me about? I’m not crazy. I know who Therese was, I know what she did, I know that she used to walk around in my body.” I put the doll back in its spot next to a glass cube that could be a paperweight. “But I’m not her. This is my body, and I’m not going to kill myself just so Alice and Mitch can have their baby girl back.”

“Terry, no one’s asking you to kill yourself. Nobody can even make you into who you were before.”

“Yeah? Then what are they paying you for, then?”

“Let me try to explain. Please, sit down. Please.”

I look around for a clock and finally spot one on a high shelf. I mentally set the timer to five minutes and sit opposite her, hands on my knees. “Shoot.”

“Your parents asked me to talk to you because I’ve helped other people in your situation, people who’ve overdosed on Z.”

“Help them what? Pretend to be something they’re not?”

“I help them take back what they are. Your experience of the world tells you that Therese was some other person. No one’s denying that. But you’re in a situation where biologically and legally, you’re Therese Klass. Do you have plans for dealing with that?”

As a matter of fact I do, and it involves getting the hell out as soon as possible. “I’ll deal with it,” I say.

“What about Alice and Mitch?”

I shrug. “What about them?”

“They’re still your parents, and you’re still their child. The overdose convinced you that you’re a new person, but that hasn’t changed who they are. They’re still responsible for you, and they still care for you.”

“Not much I can do about that.”

“You’re right. It’s a fact of your life. You have two people who love you, and you’re going to be with each other for the rest of your lives. You’re going to have to figure out how to relate to each other. Zen may have burned the bridge between you and your past life, but you can build that bridge again.”

“Doc, I don’t want to build that bridge. Look, Alice and Mitch seem like nice people, but if I was looking for parents, I’d pick someone else.”

Dr. Mehldau smiles. “None of us gets to choose our parents, Terry.”

I’m not in the mood to laugh. I nod toward the clock. “This is a waste of time.”

She leans forward. I think she’s going to try to touch me, but she doesn’t. “Terry, you’re not going to disappear if we talk about what happened to you. You’ll still be here. The only difference is that you’ll reclaim those memories as your own. You can get your old life back and choose your new life.”

Sure, it’s that easy. I get to sell my soul and keep it too.

I can’t remember my first weeks in the hospital, though Dr. S says I was awake. At some point I realized that time was passing, or rather, that there was a me who was passing through time. I had lasagna for dinner yesterday, I am having meat loaf today. I am this girl in a bed. I think I realized this and forgot it several times before I could hold onto it.

Every day was mentally exhausting, because everything was so relentlessly new. I stared at the TV remote for a half hour, the name for it on the tip of my tongue, and it wasn’t until the nurse picked it up and turned on the TV for me that I thought: Remote. And then sometimes, this was followed by a raft of other ideas: TV. Channel. Gameshow.

People were worse. They called me by a strange name, and they expected things of me. But to me, every visitor, from the night shift nurse to the janitor to Alice and Mitch Klass, seemed equally important—which is to say, not important at all.

Except for Dr. S. He was there from the beginning, and so he was familiar before I met him. He belonged to me like my own body.

But everything else about the world—the names, the details, the facts—had to be hauled into the sunlight, one by one. My brain was like an attic, chock full of old and interesting things jumbled together in no order at all.

I only gradually understood that somebody must have owned this house before me. And then I realized the house was haunted.

After the Sunday service, I’m caught in a stream of people. They lean across the pews to hug Alice and Mitch, then me. They pat my back, squeeze my arms, kiss my cheeks. I know from brief dips into Therese’s memories that many of these people are as emotionally close as aunts or uncles. And any of them, if Therese were ever in trouble, would take her in, feed her, and give her a bed to sleep in.

This is all very nice, but the constant petting has me ready to scream.

All I want to do is get back home and take off this dress. I had no choice but to wear one of Therese’s girly-girl extravaganzas. Her closet was full of them, and I finally found one that fit, if not comfortably. She loved these dresses, though. They were her floral print flak jackets. Who could doubt the purity of a girl in a high-necked Laura Ashley?

We gradually make our way to the vestibule, then to the sidewalk and the parking lot, under assault the entire way. I stop trying to match their faces to anything in Therese’s memories.

At our car a group of teenagers take turns on me, the girls hugging me tight, the boys leaning into me with half hugs: shoulders together, pelvises apart. One of the girls, freckled with soft red curls falling past her shoulders, hangs back for awhile, then abruptly clutches me and whispers into my ear, “I’m so glad you’re okay, Miss T.” Her tone is intense, like she’s passing a secret message.

A man moves through the crowd, arms open, smiling broadly. He’s in his late twenties or early thirties, his hair cut in a choppy gelled style that’s ten years too young for him. He’s wearing pressed khakis, a blue Oxford rolled up at the forearms, a checked tie loosened at the throat.

He smothers me in a hug, his cologne like another set of arms. He’s easy to find in Therese’s memories: This is Jared, the Youth Pastor. He was the most spiritually vibrant person Therese knew, and the object of her crush.

“It’s so good to have you back, Therese,” he says. His cheek is pressed to mine. We’ve missed you.”

A few months before her overdose, the youth group was coming back from a weekend-long retreat in the church’s converted school bus. Late into the trip, near midnight, Jared sat next to her, and she fell asleep leaning against him, inhaling that same cologne.

“I bet you have,” I say. “Watch the hands, Jared.”

His smile doesn’t waver, his hands are still on my shoulders. “I’m sorry?”

“Oh please, you heard me.”

He drops his hands, and looks questioningly at my father. He can do sincerity pretty well. “I don’t understand, Therese, but if—”

I give him a look that makes him back up a step. At some point later in the trip Therese awoke with Jared still next to her, slumped in the seat, eyes closed and mouth open. His arm was resting between her thighs, a thumb against her knee. She was wearing shorts, and his flesh on hers was hot. His forearm was inches from her warm crotch.

Therese believed that he was asleep.

She believed, too, that it was the rumbling of the school bus that shifted Jared’s arm into contact with the crease of her shorts. Therese froze, flushed with arousal and embarrassment.

“Try to work it out, Jared.” I get in the car.

The big question I can help answer, Dr. S said, is why there is consciousness. Or, going back to my favorite metaphor, if the Parliament is making all the decisions, why have a Queen at all?

He’s got theories, of course. He thinks the Queen is all about storytelling. The brain needs a story that gives all these decisions a sense of purpose, a sense of continuity, so it can remember them and use them in future decisions. The brain can’t keep track of the trillions of possible other decisions it could have made every moment; it needs one decision, and it needs a who, and a why. The brain lays down the memories, and the consciousness stamps them with identity: I did this, I did that. Those memories become the official record, the precedents that the Parliament uses to help make future decisions.

“The Queen, you see, is a figurehead,” Dr. S said. “She represents the kingdom, but she isn’t the kingdom itself, or even in control of it.”

“I don’t feel like a figurehead,” I said.

Dr. S laughed. “Me neither. Nobody does.”

Dr. Mehldau’s therapy involves occasional joint sessions with Alice and Mitch, reading aloud from Therese’s old diaries, and home movies. Today’s video features a pre-teen Therese dressed in sheets, surrounded by kids in bathrobes, staring fixedly at a doll in a manger.

Dr. Mehldau asks me what Therese was thinking then. Was she enjoying playing Mary? Did she like being on stage?

“How would I know?”

“Then imagine it. What do you think Therese is thinking here?”

She tells me to do that a lot. Imagine what she’s thinking. Just pretend. Put yourself in her shoes. In her book she calls this “reclaiming.” She makes up a lot of her own terms, then defines them however she wants, without research to back her up. Compared to the neurology texts Dr. S lent me, Dr. Mehldau’s little book is an Archie comic with footnotes.

“You know what, Therese was a good Christian girl, so she probably loved it.”

“Are you sure?”

The wise men come on stage, three younger boys. They plop down their gifts and their lines, and the look on Therese’s face is wary. Her line is coming up.

Therese was petrified of screwing up. Everybody would be staring at her. I can almost see the congregation in the dark behind the lights. Alice and Mitch are out there, and they’re waiting for every line. My chest tightens, and I realize I’m holding my breath.

Dr. Mehldau’s eyes on mine are studiously neutral.

“You know what?” I have no idea what I’m going to say next. I’m stalling for time. I shift my weight in the big beige chair and move a leg underneath me. “The thing I like about Buddhism is Buddhists understand that they’ve been screwed by a whole string of previous selves. I had nothing to do with the decisions Therese made, the good or bad karma she’d acquired.”

This is a riff I’ve been thinking about in Therese’s big girly bedroom. “See, Therese was a Christian, so she probably thought by overdosing that she’d be born again, all her sins forgiven. It’s the perfect drug for her: suicide without the corpse.”

“Was she thinking about suicide that night?”

“I don’t know. I could spend a couple weeks mining through Therese’s memories, but frankly, I’m not interested. Whatever she was thinking, she wasn’t born again. I’m here, and I’m still saddled with her baggage. I am Therese’s donkey. I’m a karma donkey.”

Dr. Mehldau nods. “Dr. Subramaniam is Buddhist, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but what’s . . . ?” It clicks. I roll my eyes. Dr. S and I talked about transference, and I know that my crush on him was par for the course. And it’s true that I spend a lot of time—still—thinking about fucking the man. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. “This is not about that,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about this on my own.”

She doesn’t fight me on that. “Wouldn’t a Buddhist say that you and Therese share the same soul? Self’s an illusion. So there’s no rider in charge, no donkey. There’s just you.”

“Just forget it,” I say.

“Let’s follow this, Terry. Don’t you feel you have a responsibility to your old self? Your old self’s parents, your old friends? Maybe there’s karma you owe.”

“And who are you responsible to, Doctor? Who’s your patient? Therese, or me?”

She says nothing for a moment, then: “I’m responsible to you.”

You.

You swallow, surprised that the pills taste like cinnamon. The effect of the drug is intermittent at first. You realize that you’re in the back seat of a car, the cellphone in your hand, your friends laughing around you. You’re talking to your mother. If you concentrate, you can remember answering the phone, and telling her which friend’s house you’re staying at tonight. Before you can say goodbye, you’re stepping out of the car. The car is parked, your phone is away—and you remember saying goodnight to your mother and riding for a half hour before finding this parking garage. Joelly tosses her red curls and tugs you toward the stairwell: Come on, Miss T!

Then you look up and realize that you’re on the sidewalk outside an all-ages club, and you’re holding a ten dollar bill, ready to hand it to the bouncer. The music thunders every time the door swings open. You turn to Joelly and—

You’re in someone else’s car. On the Interstate. The driver is a boy you met hours ago, his name is Rush but you haven’t asked if that’s his first name or his last. In the club you leaned into each other and talked loud over the music about parents and food and the difference between the taste of a fresh cigarette in your mouth and the smell of stale smoke. But then you realize that there’s a cigarette in your mouth, you took it from Rush’s pack yourself, and you don’t like cigarettes. Do you like it now? You don’t know. Should you take it out, or keep smoking? You scour your memories, but can discover no reason why you decided to light the cigarette, no reason why you got into the car with this boy. You start to tell yourself a story: he must be a trustworthy person, or you wouldn’t have gotten into the car. You took that one cigarette because the boy’s feelings would have been hurt.

You’re not feeling like yourself tonight. And you like it. You take another drag off the cigarette. You think back over the past few hours, and marvel at everything you’ve done, all without that constant weight of self-reflection: worry, anticipation, instant regret. Without the inner voice constantly critiquing you.

Now the boy is wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and he’s reaching up to a shelf to get a box of cereal, and his back is beautiful. There is hazy light outside the small kitchen window. He pours Froot Loops into a bowl for you, and he laughs, though quietly because his mother is asleep in the next room. He looks at your face and frowns. He asks you what’s the matter. You look down, and you’re fully dressed. You think back, and realize that you’ve been in this boy’s apartment for hours. You made out in his bedroom, and the boy took off his clothes, and you kissed his chest and ran your hands along his legs. You let him put his hand under your shirt and cup your breasts, but you didn’t go any further. Why didn’t you have sex? Did he not interest you? No—you were wet. You were excited. Did you feel guilty? Did you feel ashamed?

What were you thinking?

When you get home there will be hell to pay. Your parents will be furious, and worse, they will pray for you. The entire church will pray for you. Everyone will know. And no one will ever look at you the same again.

Now there’s a cinnamon taste in your mouth, and you’re sitting in the boy’s car again, outside a convenience store. It’s afternoon. Your cell phone is ringing. You turn off the cell phone and put it back in your purse. You swallow, and your throat is dry. That boy—Rush—is buying you another bottle of water. What was it you swallowed? Oh, yes. You think back, and remember putting all those little pills in your mouth. Why did you take so many? Why did you take another one at all? Oh, yes.

Voices drift up from the kitchen. It’s before 6am, and I just want to pee and get back to sleep, but then I realize they’re talking about me.

“She doesn’t even walk the same. The way she holds herself, the way she talks . . . ”

“It’s all those books Dr. Subramaniam gave her. She’s up past one every night. Therese never read like that, not science.”

“No, it’s not just the words, it’s how she sounds. That low voice . . . ” She sobs. “Oh hon, I didn’t know it would be this way. It’s like she’s right, it’s like it isn’t her at all.”

He doesn’t say anything. Alice’s crying grows louder, subsides. The clink of dishes in the sink. I step back, and Mitch speaks again.

“Maybe we should try the camp,” he says.

“No, no, no! Not yet. Dr. Mehldau says she’s making progress. We’ve got to—”

“Of course she’s going to say that.”

“You said you’d try this, you said you’d give this a chance.” The anger cuts through the weeping, and Mitch mumbles something apologetic. I creep back to my bedroom, but I still have to pee, so I make a lot of noise going back out. Alice comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Are you all right, honey?”

I keep my face sleepy and walk into the bathroom. I shut the door and sit down on the toilet in the dark.

What fucking camp?

“Let’s try again,” Dr. Mehldau said. “Something pleasant and vivid.”

I’m having trouble concentrating. The brochure is like a bomb in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to find, once I decided to look for it. I want to ask Dr. Mehldau about the camp, but I know that once I bring it into the open, I’ll trigger a showdown between the doctor and the Klasses, with me in the middle.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she says. “Think about Therese’s tenth birthday. In her diary, she wrote that was the best birthday she’d ever had. Do you remember Sea World?”

“Vaguely.” I could see dolphins jumping—two at a time, three at a time. It had been sunny and hot. With every session it was getting easier for me to pop into Therese’s memories. Her life was on DVD, and I had the remote.

“Do you remember getting wet at the Namu and Shamu show?”

I laughed. “I think so.” I could see the metal benches, the glass wall just in front of me, the huge shapes in the blue-green water. “They had the whales flip their big tail fins. We got drenched.”

“Can you picture who was there with you? Where are your parents?”

There was a girl, my age, I can’t remember her name. The sheets of water were coming down on us and we were screaming and laughing. Afterward my parents toweled us off. They must have been sitting up high, out of the splash zone. Alice looked much younger: happier, and a little heavier. She was wider at the hips. This was before she started dieting and exercising, when she was Mom-sized.

My eyes pop open. “Oh God.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine—it was just . . . like you said. Vivid.” That image of a younger Alice still burns. For the first time I realize how sad she is now.

“I’d like a joint session next time,” I say.

“Really? All right. I’ll talk to Alice and Mitch. Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?”

“Yeah. We need to talk about Therese.”

Dr. S says everybody wants to know if the original neural map, the old Queen, can come back. Once the map to the map is lost, can you find it again? And if you do, then what happens to the new neural map, the new Queen?

“Now, a good Buddhist would tell you that this question is unimportant. After all, the cycle of existence is not just between lives. Samsara is every moment. The self continuously dies and recreates itself.”

“Are you a good Buddhist?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Only on Sunday mornings.”

“You go to church?”

“I golf.”

There’s a knock and I open my eyes. Alice steps into my room, a stack of folded laundry in her arms. “Oh!”

I’ve rearranged the room, pushing the bed into the corner to give me a few square feet of free space the floor.

Her face goes through a few changes. “I don’t suppose you’re praying.”

“No.”

She sighs, but it’s a mock-sigh. “I didn’t think so.” She moves around me and sets the laundry on the bed. She picks up the book there, Entering the Stream. “Dr. Subramaniam gave you this?”

She’s looking at the passage I’ve highlighted. But loving kindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we already are.

“Well.” She sets the book down, careful to leave it open to the same page. “That sounds a bit like Dr. Mehldau.”

I laugh. “Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?”

“We’ll be there.” She works around the room, picking up t-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves—righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can—so that as she collects my dirty laundry she’s cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat’s cleaner-upper machine.

“Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese.”

“Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year.”

“Who did?”

“The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the trip.”

“You weren’t there?”

She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. “We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there.”

“This is our last session,” I say.

Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.

The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. “It sounds like you’ve got something you want to tell us.”

“Oh yeah.”

Alice seems frozen, holding herself in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.

“I’m not going along with this anymore.” I make a vague gesture. “Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn’t matter to you if I’m Therese or not. You just want me to think I’m her. I’m not going along with the manipulation anymore.”

Mitch shakes his head. “Honey, you took a drug.” He glances at me, looks back at his feet. “If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn’t mean you really saw God. Nobody’s trying to manipulate you, we’re trying to undo the manipulation.”

“That’s bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I’m schizophrenic, that I don’t know what’s real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am.”

Alice gasps.

Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. “Terry, what your father’s trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there’s a you that existed before the drug. That exists now.”

“Yeah? You know all those OD-ers in your book who say they’ve ‘reclaimed’ themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves.”

“It’s possible,” she says. “But I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. They’ve come to accept the parts of themselves they’ve lost, the family members they’ve left behind. They’re people like you.” She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. “Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?”

“What?” From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I’ve been sucker punched. “Hey, look Alice, just like you,” I say.

“It’s normal,” Dr. Mehldau says. “When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand new person, no family, no friends. And you’re still just starting down this road. In a lot of ways you’re not even two years old.”

“Damn you’re good,” I say. “I didn’t even see that one coming.”

“Please, don’t leave. Let’s—”

“Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet.” I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. “You know about this?”

Alice speaks for the first time. “Oh honey, no . . . ”

Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. “Are you considering this?”

“It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out, boom. You know what goes on there?”

She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in “intense group sessions with trained counselors” where they can “recover their true identities.” She shakes her head. “Their approach is different than mine . . . ”

“I don’t know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head.”

I turn to Alice and Mitch. “You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?”

Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she’s staring at me like a stranger.

It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch steps, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

“Does he do that a lot?” I ask.

“He likes to drive when he’s upset.”

“Oh.” Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.” She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. “He just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“He wants to put me in the camp, then.”

“Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before.” She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. “I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?”

She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

“I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese.”

“Oh I know,” she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

I laugh. “I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job.”

“It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you.” She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

“Wow, you made that before we left? Why?”

Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. “I thought we might need it, one way or another.”

She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. “I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back.”

“It’s not that I—”

“We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you.”

“Alice . . . ”

“Shssh. Eat your cake.”

Originally published in Asimov’ Science Fiction, September 2005.

About the Author

Daryl Gregory writes genre-mixing novels, stories, and comics. His novel Spoonbenders is out now from Knopf. Other recent work includes the young adult novel Harrison Squared and the novella We Are All Completely Fine, which won the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. His novels include Afterparty, an NPR and Kirkus best fiction book of 2014; Raising Stony Mayhall; The Devil’s Alphabet; and the Crawford-Award-winning Pandemonium. Many of his short stories are collected in Unpossible and Other Stories.

Martian Blood

Allen M. Steele

The most dangerous man on Mars was Omar al-Baz, and the first time I saw him, he was throwing up at the Rio Zephyria spaceport.

This happens more frequently than you might think. People coming here for the first time often don’t realize just how thin the air really is. The cold surprises them, too, but I’m told the atmospheric pressure is about the same as you’d find in the Himalayas. So they come trooping down the ramp of the shuttle that transported them from Deimos Station, and if the ride down didn’t make them puke, then the shortness of breath, headaches, and nausea that comes with altitude sickness will.

I didn’t know for sure that the middle-aged gent who’d doubled over and vomited was Dr. al-Baz, but I suspected that he was; I hadn’t seen any other Middle Eastern men on his flight. There was nothing I could do for him, though, so I waited patiently on the other side of the chain-link security fence while one of the flight attendants came down the ramp to help him. Dr. al-Baz waved her away; he didn’t need any assistance, thank you. He straightened up, pulled a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket, and wiped his mouth, then picked up the handle of the rolling bag he’d dropped when his stomach revolted. Nice to know that he wasn’t entirely helpless.

He was one of the last passengers to step through the gate. He paused on the other side of the fence, looked around, and spotted the cardboard sign I was holding. A brief smile of relief, then he walked over to me.

“I’m Omar al-Baz,” he said, holding out his hand. “You must be Mr. Ramsey.”

“Yes, I’m your guide. Call me Jim.” Not wanting to shake a hand that just wiped a mouth which had just spilled yuck all over nice clean concrete, I reached forward to relieve him of his bag.

“I can carry this myself, thank you,” he said, not letting me take his bag from him. “But if you could help me with the rest of my luggage, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure. No problem.” He hadn’t hired me to be his porter, and if he’d been the jerk variety of tourist some of my former clients had been, I would’ve made him carry his own stuff. But I was already beginning to like the guy: early 50’s, skinny but with the beginnings of a pot belly, coarse black hair going gray at the temples. He wore round spectacles and had a bushy mustache beneath a hooked aquiline nose, and looked a little like an Arab Groucho Marx. Omar al-Baz couldn’t have been anything but what he was, an Egyptian-American professor from the University of Arizona.

I led him toward the terminal, stepping around the tourists and business travelers who had also disembarked from the 3pm shuttle. “Are you by yourself, or did someone come with you?”

“Unfortunately, I come alone. The university provided grant money sufficient for only one fare, even though I requested that I bring a grad student as an assistant.” He frowned. “This may hinder my work, but I hope that what I intend to do will be simple enough that I may accomplish it on my own.”

I had only the vaguest idea of why he’d hired me to be his guide, but the noise and bustle of the terminal was too much for a conversation. Passenger bags were beginning to come down the conveyer belt, but Dr. al-Baz didn’t join the crowd waiting to pick up suitcases and duffel bags. Instead, he went straight to the PanMars cargo window, where he presented a handful of receipts to the clerk. I began to regret my offer to help carry his bags when a cart was pushed through a side door. Stacked upon it were a half-dozen aluminum cases; even in Martian gravity, none small enough to be carried two at a time.

“You gotta be kidding,” I murmured.

“My apologies, but for the work I need to do, I had to bring specialized equipment.” He signed a form, then turned to me again. “Now . . . do you have a means of taking all this to my hotel, or will I have to get a cab?”

I looked over the stack of cases and decided that there weren’t so many that I couldn’t fit them all in the back of my jeep. So we pushed the cart out to where I’d parked beside the front entrance, and managed to get everything tied down with elastic cords I carried with me. Dr. al-Baz climbed into the passenger seat and put his suitcase on the floor between his feet.

“Hotel first?” I asked as I took my place behind the wheel.

“Yes, please . . . and then I wouldn’t mind getting a drink.” He caught the questioning look in my eye and gave me a knowing smile. “No, I am not a devout follower of the Prophet.”

“Glad to hear it.” I was liking him better all the time; I don’t trust people who won’t have a beer with me. I started up the jeep and pulled away from the curb. “So . . . you said in your email you’d like to visit an aboriginal settlement. Is that still what you want to do?”

“Yes, I do.” He hesitated. “But now that we’ve met, I think it’s only fair to tell you that this is not all that I mean to do. The trip here involves more than just meeting the natives.”

“How so? What else do you want?”

He peered at me over the top of his glasses. “The blood of a Martian.”

When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was The War of the Worlds—the 1953 version, made about twelve years before the first probes went to Mars. Even back then, people knew that Mars had an Earthlike environment; spectroscopes had revealed the presence of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and strong telescopes made visible the seas and canals. But no one knew for sure whether the planet was inhabited until Ares I landed there in 1977, so George Pal had a lot of latitude when he and his film crew tried to imagine what a Martian would look like.

Anyway, there’s a scene in the movie where Gene Barry and Ann Robinson have made their way to LA after escaping the collapsed farmhouse where they’d been pinned down by the alien invaders. Barry meets with his fellow scientists at Pacific Tech and presents them with a ruined camera-eye he managed to grab while fighting off the attackers. The camera-eye is wrapped in Ann Robinson’s scarf, which was splattered with gore when Gene clobbered a little green monster with a broken pipe.

“And this—” he says melodramatically, showing the scarf to the other scientists “—blood of a Martian!”

I’ve always loved that part. So when Dr. al-Baz said much the same thing, I wondered if he was being clever, copping a line from a classic movie that he figured most colonists might have seen. But there was no wink, no ironic smile. So far as I could tell, he was as serious as he could be.

I decided to let it wait until we had that drink together, so I held my tongue as I drove him into Rio Zephyria. The professor’s reservation was at the John Carter Casino Resort, located on the strip near the Mare Cimmerium beach. No surprise there: it’s the most famous hotel in Rio, so most tourists try to book rooms there. Edgar Rice Burroughs was having a literary renaissance around the time it was built, so someone decided that A Princess of Mars and its sequels would be a great theme for a casino. Since then it’s become the place most people think of when they daydream about taking a vacation trip to Mars.

Good for them, but I want to throw a rock through its gold-tinted windows every time I drive by. It’s a 10-story monument to every stupid thing humans have done since coming here. And if I feel that way, as someone who was born and raised on Mars, then you can well imagine what the shatan think of it . . . when they come close enough to see it, that is.

It was hard to gauge Dr. al-Baz’s reaction when we pulled up in front of the hotel lobby. I was beginning to learn that his normal expression was stoical. But as a bellhop was unloading his stuff and putting it on a cart, the professor spotted the casino entrance. The doorman was dark-skinned and a little more than two meters in height; he wore the burnoose robes of an aborigine, with a saber in the scabbard on his belt.

Dr. al-Baz stared at him. “That’s not a Martian, is he?”

“Not unless he used to play center for the Blue Devils.” Dr. al-Baz raised an eyebrow and I smiled “That’s Tito Jones, star of the Duke basketball team . . . or at least until he came here.” I shook my head. “Poor guy. He didn’t know why the casino hired him to be their celebrity greeter until they put him in that outfit.”

Dr. al-Baz had already lost interest. “I was hoping he might be a Martian,” he said softly. “It would have made things easier.”

“They wouldn’t be caught dead here . . . or anywhere near the colonies, for that matter.” I turned to follow the bellhop through the revolving door. “And by the way . . . we don’t call them ‘Martians.’ ‘Aborigines’ is the preferred term.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. And what do the Mar . . . the aborigines call themselves?”

“They call themselves shatan . . . which means ‘people’ in their language.” Before he could ask the obvious next question, I added, “Their word for us is nashatan, or ‘not-people,’ but that’s only when they’re being polite. They call us a lot of things, most of them pretty nasty.”

The professor nodded and was quiet for a little while.

The University of Arizona might not have sprung for a grad student’s marsliner ticket, but they made up for it by reserving a two-room suite. After the bellhop unloaded his cart and left, Dr. al-Baz explained that he’d need the main room, a large parlor complete with a bar, for the temporary lab he intended to set up. He didn’t unpack right away, though; he was ready for that drink I’d promised him. So we left everything in the room and caught the elevator back downstairs.

The hotel bar is located in the casino, but I didn’t want to drink in a place where the bartender is decked out like a Barsoomian warlord and the waitresses are dolled up as princesses of Helium. The John Carter is the only place on Mars where anyone looks like that; no one in their right mind would wear so few clothes outside, not even in the middle of summer. So we returned to the jeep and I got away from the strip, heading into the old part of town that the tourists seldom visit.

There’s a good watering hole about three blocks from my apartment. It was still late afternoon, so the place wasn’t crowded yet. The bar was quiet and dark, perfect for conversation. The owner knew me; he brought over a pitcher of ale as soon as the professor and I sat down at a table in the back.

“Take it easy with this,” I told Dr. al-Baz as I poured beer into a tallneck and pushed it across the table to him. “Until you get acclimated, it might hit you pretty hard.”

“I’ll take your advice.” The professor took a tentative sip and smiled. “Good. Better than I was expecting, in fact. Local?”

“Hellas City Amber. You think we’d have beer shipped all the way from Earth?” There were more important things we needed to discuss, so I changed the subject. “What’s this about wanting blood? When you got in touch with me, all you said was that you wanted me to take you to an aboriginal settlement.”

Dr. al-Baz didn’t say anything for a moment or so. He toyed with the stem of his glass, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. “If I’d told you the entire truth,” he finally admitted, “I was afraid you might not agree to take me. And you come very highly recommended. As I understand, you’re not only native-born, but your parents were among the first settlers.”

“I’m surprised you know that. You must have talked to a former client.”

“Do you remember Ian Horner? Anthropologist from Cambridge University?” I did indeed, although not kindly; Dr. Horner had hired me to be his guide, but if you’d believed everything he said, he knew more about Mars than I did. I nodded, keeping my opinion to myself. “He’s a friend of mine,” Dr. al-Baz continued, “or at least someone with whom I’ve been in contact on a professional basis.”

“So you’re another anthropologist.”

“No.” He sipped his beer. “Research biologist . . . astrobiology, to be exact. The study of extraterrestrial forms of life. Until now, most of my work has involved studying Venus, so this is the first time I’ve been to Mars. Of course, Venus is different. Its global ocean is quite interesting, but . . .”

“Professor, I don’t want to be rude, but do you want to get down to it and tell me why you want the blood of a—” damn, he almost got me to say it! “—an aborigine?”

Sitting back in his chair, Dr. al-Baz folded his hands together on the tabletop. “Mr. Ramsey . . . ”

“Jim.”

“Jim, are you familiar with the panspermia hypothesis? The idea that life on Earth may have extraterrestrial origins, that it may have come from somewhere in outer space?”

“No, I’ve never heard that . . . but I guess that when you say ‘somewhere,’ you mean here.”

“That is correct. I mean Mars.” He tapped a finger firmly against the table. “Have you ever wondered why there’s such a close resemblance between humans and Martian aborigines? Why the two races look so much alike, even though they’re from worlds over 70 million kilometers apart?”

“Parallel evolution.”

“Yes, I expect that’s what you’ve learned in school. The conventional explanation is that, because both planets have similar environments, evolution took approximately the same course on both worlds, the differences being that Martians . . . aborigines, sorry . . . are taller because of lower surface gravity, have higher metabolisms because of colder temperature, have significantly darker skin because of the thinner ozone layer, so forth and so on. This has been the prevalent theory because it’s the only one that seems to fit the facts.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, yeah.”

“Well, my friend, everything you’ve known is wrong.” He immediately shook his head, as if embarrassed by his momentary burst of arrogance. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound overbearing. However, several of my colleagues and I believe that the similarities between homo sapiens and homo aresian cannot be attributed to evolution alone. We think there may be a genetic link between the two races, that life on Earth . . . human life in particular . . . may have originated on Mars.”

Dr. al-Baz paused, allowing a moment to let his words sink in. They did, all right; I was beginning to wonder if he was a kook. “Okay,” I said, trying not to smile, “I’ll bite. What leads you to think that?”

The professor raised a finger. “First, the geological composition of quite a few meteorites found on Earth is identical to those of rock samples brought from Mars. So there’s a theory that, sometime in the distant past, there was a cataclysmic explosion on the Martian surface . . . possibly the eruption of Mt. Daedalia or one of the other volcanoes in the Albus range . . . which ejected debris into space. This debris traveled as meteors to Earth, which was also in its infancy. Those meteors may have contained organic molecules which seeded Earth with life where it hadn’t previously existed.”

He held up another finger. “Second . . . when the human genome was sequenced, one of the most surprising finds was the existence of DNA strands which have no apparent purpose. They’re like parts of a machine that don’t have any function. There’s no reason for them to be there, yet nonetheless they are. Therefore, is it possible that these phantom strands may be genetic biomarkers left behind by organic material brought to Earth from Mars?”

“So that’s why you want a blood sample? To see if there’s a link?”

He nodded. “I have brought equipment that will enable me to sequence, at least partially, the genetic code of an aborigine blood sample and compare it to that of a human. If the native genome has non-functional archaic strands that match the ones found in the human genome, then we’ll have evidence that the hypothesis is correct . . . life on Earth originated on Mars, and the two races are genetically linked.”

I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Dr. al-Baz didn’t sound quite as crazy as he had a couple of minutes earlier. As far-fetched as it may seem, what he said made sense. And if the hypothesis were true, then the implications were staggering: the shatan were close cousins to the inhabitants of Earth, not simply a primitive race that we’d happened to find when we came to Mars.

Not that I was ready to believe it. I’d met too many shatan to ever be willing to accept the idea that they had anything in common with my people. Or at least so I thought . . .

“Okay, I get what you’re doing.” I picked up my glass and took a long drink. “But let me tell you, getting that blood sample won’t be easy.”

“I know. I understand the aborigines are rather reclusive . . . ”

“Now that’s an understatement.” I put down my glass again. “They’ve never wanted much to do with us. The Ares 1 expedition had been here for almost three weeks before anyone caught sight of them, and another month before there was any significant contact. It took years for us to even learn their language, and things only got worse when we started establishing colonies. Wherever we’ve gone, the shatan have moved out, packing up everything they owned, even burning their villages so that we couldn’t explore their dwellings. They’ve become nomads since then. No trade, and not much in the way of cultural exchange . . . ”

“So no one has ever managed to get anything from them on which they may have left organic material? No hair samples, no saliva, no skin?”

“No. They’ve never allowed us to collect any artifacts from them, and they’re reluctant to even let us touch them. That outfit you saw Tito Jones wearing? It’s not the real thing . . . just a costume based on some pictures someone took of them.”

“But we’ve learned their language.”

“Just a little of one of their dialects . . . pidgin shatan, you might call it.” I absently ran a finger around the rim of my glass. “If you’re counting on me to be your native interpreter . . . well, don’t expect much. I know enough to get by and that’s about it. I may be able to keep them from chucking a spear at us, but that’s all.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Are they dangerous?”

“Not so long as you mind your manners. They can be . . . well, kinda aggressive . . . if you cross the line with them.” I didn’t want to tell him some of the worst stories—I’d scared off other clients that way—so I tried to reassure him. “I’ve met some of the local tribesmen, so they know me well enough to let me visit their lands. But I’m not sure how much they trust me.” I hesitated. “Dr. Horner didn’t get very far with them. I’m sure he’s told you that they wouldn’t let him into their village.”

“Yes, he has. To tell the truth, though, Ian has always been something of an ass—” I laughed out loud when he said this, and he gave me a quick smile in return “—so I imagine that, so long as I approach them with a measure of humility, I may have more success than he did.”

“You might.” Ian Horner had come to Mars with the attitude of a British army officer visiting colonial India, a condescending air of superiority that the shatan picked up almost immediately. He learned little as a result, and had come away referring to the “abos” as “cheeky bahstahds.” No doubt the aborigines felt much the same way about him . . . but at least they’d let him live.

“So you’ll take me out there? To one of their villages, I mean?”

“That’s why you hired me, so . . . yeah, sure.” I picked up my beer again. “The nearest village is about a hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of here, in a desert oasis near the Laestrygon canal. It’ll take a couple of days to get there. I hope you brought warm clothes and hiking boots.”

“I brought a parka and boots, yes. But you have your jeep, don’t you? Then why are we going to need to walk?”

“We’ll drive only until we get near the village. Then we’ll have to get out and walk the rest of the way. The shatan don’t like motorized vehicles. The equatorial desert is pretty rough, so you better prepare for it.”

He smiled. “I ask you . . . do I look like someone who’s never been in a desert?”

“No . . . but Mars isn’t Earth.”

I spent the next day preparing for the trip: collecting camping equipment from my rented storage shed, buying food, and filling water bottles, putting fresh fuel cells in the jeep and making sure the tires had enough pressure. I made sure that Dr. al-Baz had the right clothing for several days in the outback and gave him the address of a local outfitter if he didn’t, but I need not have worried; he clearly wasn’t one of those tourists foolish enough to go out into the desert wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals.

When I came to pick him up at the hotel, I was amazed to find that the professor had turned his suite into a laboratory. Two flat-screen computers were set up on the bar, a microscope and a test-tube rack stood on the coffee table, and the TV had been pushed aside to make room for a small centrifuge. More equipment rested on bureaus and side tables; I didn’t know what any of it was, but I spotted a radiation symbol on one and a Warning - Laser sticker on another. He’d covered the carpet with plastic sheets, and there was even a lab coat hanging in the closet. Dr. al-Baz made no mention of any of this; he simply picked up his backpack and camera, put on a slouch cap, and followed me out the door, pausing to slip the Do Not Disturb sign over the knob.

Tourists stared at us as he flung his pack into the back of my jeep; it always seemed to surprise some people that anyone would come to Mars to do something besides drink and lose money at the gaming tables. I started up the jeep and we roared away from the John Carter, and in fifteen minutes we were on the outskirts of town, driving through the irrigated farmlands surrounding Rio Zephyria. The scarlet pines that line the shores of Mare Cimmerium gradually thinned out as we followed dirt roads usually traveled by farm vehicles and logging trucks, and even those disappeared as we left the colony behind and headed into the trackless desert.

I’ve been told that the Martian drylands look a lot like the American southwest, except that everything is red. I’ve never been to Earth, so I wouldn’t know, but if anyone in New Mexico happens to spot a six-legged creature that looks sort of like a shaggy cow or a raptor that resembles a pterodactyl and sounds like a hyena, please drop me a line. And stay away from those pits that look a little like golf course sand-traps; there’s something lurking within them that would eat you alive, one limb at a time.

As the jeep weaved its way through the desert, dodging boulders and bouncing over small rocks, Dr. al-Baz clung to the roll bars, fascinated by the wilderness opening before us. This was one of the things that made my job worthwhile, seeing familiar places through the eyes of someone who’d never been there before. I pointed out a Martian hare as it loped away from us, and stopped for a second to let him take pictures of a flock of stakhas as they wheeled high above us, shrieking their dismay at our intrusion.

About seventy kilometers southeast of Rio, we came upon the Laestrygon canal, running almost due south from the sea. When Percival Lowell first spotted the Martian canals through his observatory telescope, he thought they were excavated waterways. He was half-right; the shatan had rerouted existing rivers, diverting them so that they’d go where the aborigines wanted. The fact that they’d done this with the simple, muscle-driven machines never failed to amaze anyone who saw them, but Earth people tend to underestimate the shatan. They’re primitive, but not stupid.

We followed the canal, keeping far away from it so that we couldn’t be easily spotted from the decks of any shatan boats that might be this far north. I didn’t want any aborigines to see us before we reached the village; they might pass the word that humans were coming, and give their chieftain a chance to order his people to pack up and move out. We saw no one, though; the only sign of habitation was a skinny wooden suspension bridge than spanned the channel like an enormous bow, and even that didn’t appear to be frequently used.

By late afternoon, we’d entered hill country. Flat-topped mesas rose around us, with massive stone pinnacles jutting upward between them; the jagged peaks of distant mountains lay just beyond the horizon. I drove until it was nearly dusk, then pulled up behind a hoodoo and stopped for the night.

Dr. al-Baz pitched a tent while I collected dead scrub brush. Once I had a fire going, I suspended a cookpot above the embers, then emptied a can of stew into it. The professor had thought to buy a couple of bottles of red wine before we left town; we opened one for dinner and worked our way through it after we ate.

“So tell me something,” Dr. al-Baz said once we’d scrubbed down the pot, plates, and spoons. “Why did you become a guide?”

“You mean, other than getting a job as a blackjack dealer?” I propped the cookware up against a boulder. A stiff breeze was coming out of the west; the sand it carried would scour away the remaining grub. “Never really thought about it, to be honest. My folks are first-generation settlers, so I was born and raised here. I started prowling the desert as soon as I was old enough to go out alone, so . . . ”

“That’s just it.” The professor moved a little closer to the fire, holding out his hands to warm them. Now that the sun was down, a cold night was ahead; we could already see our breath by the firelight. “Most of the colonists I’ve met seem content to stay in the city. When I told them that I was planning a trip into the desert, they all looked at me like I was mad. Someone even suggested that I buy a gun and take out extra life insurance.”

“Whoever told you to buy a gun doesn’t know a thing about the shatan. They never attack unless provoked, and the surest way to upset them is to approach one of their villages with a gun.” I patted the utility knife on my belt. “This is the closest I come to carrying a weapon when there’s even a possibility that I might run into aborigines. One reason why I’m on good terms with them . . . I mind my manners.”

“Most people here haven’t even seen an aborigine, I think.”

“You’re right, they haven’t. Rio Zephyria is the biggest colony because of tourism, but most permanent residents prefer to live where there’s flush toilets and cable TV.” I sat down on the other side of the fire. “They can have it. The only reason I live there is because that’s where the tourists are. If it wasn’t for that, I’d have a place out in the boonies and hit town only when I need to stock up on supplies.”

“I see.” Dr. al-Baz picked up his tin cup and mine and poured some wine into each. “Forgive me if I’m wrong,” he said as he handed my cup to me, “but it doesn’t sound as if you very much approve of your fellow colonists.”

“I don’t.” I took a sip and put the cup down beside me; I didn’t want to get a headful of wine the night before I was going to have to deal with shatan tribesmen. “My folks came out here to explore a new world, but everyone who’s come after those original settlers . . . well, you saw Rio. You know what it’s like. We’re building hotels and casinos and shopping centers, and introducing invasive species into our farms and dumping our sewage into the channels, and every few weeks during conjunction another ship brings in more people who think Mars is like Las Vegas only without as many hookers . . . not that we don’t have plenty of those, too.”

As I spoke, I craned my neck to look up the night sky. The major constellations gleamed brightly: Ursa Major, Draco, Cygnus, with Denes as the north star. You can’t see the Milky Way very well in the city; you have to go out into the desert to get a decent view of the Martian night sky. “So who can blame the shatan for not wanting to have anything to do with us? They knew the score as soon as we showed up.” Recalling a thought I’d had the day before, I chuckled to myself. “The old movies got it wrong. Mars didn’t invade Earth . . . Earth invaded Mars.”

“I didn’t realize there was so much resentment on your part.”

He sounded like his feelings were wounded. That was no way to treat a paying customer.

“No, no . . . it’s not you,” I quickly added. “I don’t think you’d be caught dead at a poker table.”

He laughed out loud. “No, I don’t think the university would look very kindly upon me if my expense report included poker chips.”

“Glad to hear it.” I hesitated, then went on. “Just do me a favor, will you? If you find something here that might . . . I dunno . . . make things worse, would you consider keeping it to yourself? Humans have done enough stupid things here already. We don’t need to do anything more.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Dr. al-Baz said.

The next day, we found the shatan. Or rather, they found us.

We broke camp and continued following the Laestrygon as it flowed south through the desert hills. I’d been watching the jeep’s odometer the entire trip, and when we were about fifty kilometers from where I remembered the aborigine settlement being, I began driving along the canal banks. I told Dr. al-Baz to keep a sharp eye out for any signs of habitation—trails, or perhaps abandoned camps left behind by hunting parties—but what we found was a lot more obvious: another suspension bridge, and passing beneath it, a shatan boat.

The canal boat was a slender catamaran about ten meters long, with broad white sails catching the desert wind and a small cabin at its stern. The figures moving along its decks didn’t notice us until one of them spotted the jeep. He let out a warbling cry—“wallawallawalla!”—and the others stopped what they were doing to gaze in the direction he was pointing. Then another shatan standing atop the cabin yelled something and everyone turned to dash into the cabin, with their captain disappearing through a hatch in its ceiling. Within seconds, the catamaran became a ghost ship.

“Wow.” Dr. al-Baz was both astounded and disappointed. “They really don’t want to see us, do they?”

“Actually, they don’t want us to see them.” He looked at me askance, not understanding the difference. “They believe that, if they can’t be seen, then they’ve disappeared from the world. This way, they’re hoping that, so far as we’re concerned, they’ve ceased to exist.” I shrugged. “Kind of logical, if you think about it.”

There was no point in trying to persuade the crew to emerge from hiding, so we left the boat behind and continued our drive down the canal bank. But the catamaran had barely disappeared from sight when we heard a hollow roar from behind us, like a bullhorn being blown. The sound echoed off the nearby mesas; two more prolonged blasts, then the horn went silent.

“If there are any more shatan around, they’ll hear that and know we’re coming,” I said. “They’ll repeat the same signal with their own horns, and so on, until the signal reaches the village.”

“So they know we’re here,” Dr. al-Baz said. “Will they hide like the others?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I shrugged. “It’s up to them.”

For a long time, we didn’t spot anyone or anything. We were about eight kilometers from the village when we came upon another bridge. This time, we saw two figures standing near the foot of the bridge. They appeared unusually tall even for aborigines, but it wasn’t until we got closer that we saw why: each of them rode a hattas, enormous buffalo-like creatures with six legs and elongated necks that the natives tamed as pack animals. It wasn’t what they were riding that caught my attention, though, so much as the long spears they carried, or the heavy animal-hide outfits they wore.

“Uh-oh,” I said quietly. “That’s not good.”

“What’s not good?”

“I was hoping we’d run into hunters . . . but these guys are warriors. They can be a little . . . um, intense. Keep your hands in sight and never look away from them.”

I halted the jeep about twenty feet from them. We climbed out and slowly walked toward them, hands at our sides. As we got closer, the warriors dismounted from their animals; they didn’t approach us, though, but instead waited in silence.

When the owners of the John Carter hired a basketball star to masquerade as a shatan, they were trying to find someone who might pass as a Martian aborigine. Tito Jones was the best they could get, but he wasn’t quite right. The shatan standing before us were taller; their skin was as dark as the sky at midnight, their long, silky hair the color of rust, yet their faces had fine-boned features reminiscent of someone of northern European descent. They were swathed in dusty, off-white robes that made them look vaguely Bedouin, and the hands that gripped their spears were larger than a human’s, with long-nailed fingers and tendons which stood out from wrists.

Unblinking golden eyes studied us as we approached. When we’d come close enough, both warriors firmly planted their spears on the ground before us. I told Dr. al-Baz to stop, but I didn’t have to remind him not to look away from them. He stared at the shatan with awestruck curiosity, a scientist observing his subject up close for the first time.

I raised both hands before me, palm out, and said, “Issah tas sobbata shatan” (Greetings, honored shatan warriors). “Seyta nasahtan habbalah sa shatan heysa” (Please allow us human travelers to enter your land).

The warrior on the left replied, “Katas nashatan Hamsey. Sakey shatan habbalah fah?” (We know you, human Ramsey. Why have you returned to our land?)

I wasn’t surprised to have been recognized. Only a handful of humans spoke their language—albeit not very well; I probably sounded like a child to them—or knew the way to their village. I may not have met these particular warriors before, but they’d doubtless heard of me. And I tried not to smile at the mispronunciation of my name; the shatan have trouble rolling the “r” sound off their tongues.

“(I’ve brought a guest who wishes to learn more about your people),” I replied, still speaking the local dialect. I extended a hand toward the professor. “(Allow me to introduce you to Omar al-Baz. He is a wise man in search of knowledge.)” I avoided calling him “doctor”; that word has a specific meaning in their language, as someone who practices medicine.

“(Humans don’t want to know anything about us. All they want to do is take what doesn’t belong to them and ruin it.)”

I shook my head; oddly, that particular gesture means the same thing for both shatan and nashatan. “(This is not true. Many of my people do, yes, but not all. On his own world, al-Baz is a teacher. Whatever he learns from you, he will tell us students, and therefore increase their knowledge of your people.)”

“What are you saying?” Dr. al-Baz whispered. “I recognize my name, but . . . ”

“Hush. Let me finish.” I continued speaking the native tongue. “(Will you please escort us to your village? My companion wishes to beg a favor of your chieftain.)”

The other warrior stepped forward, walking toward the professor until he stood directly before him. The shatan towered above Dr. al-Baz; everything about him was menacing, yet the professor held his ground, saying nothing but continuing to look straight in the eye. The warrior silently regarded him for several long moments, then looked at me.

“(What does he want from our chieftain? Tell us, and we will decide whether we will allow you to enter our village.)”

I hesitated, then shook my head again. “(No. His question is for the chieftain alone.)”

I was taking a gamble. Refusing a demand from a shatan warrior guarding his homeland was not a great way to make friends. But it was entirely possible that the warriors would misunderstand me if I told them that Dr. al-Baz wanted to take some of their blood; they might think his intent was hostile. The best thing to do was have the professor ask the chieftain directly for permission to take a blood sample from one of his people.

The shatans stared at us for a moment without saying anything, then turned away and walked off a few feet to quietly confer with each other. “What’s going on?” the professor asked, keeping his voice low. “What did you tell them?”

I gave him the gist of the conversation, including the risky thing I’d just said. “I figure it can go one of three ways. One, they kick the matter upstairs to the chieftain, which means that you get your wish if you play your cards right. Two, they tell us to get lost. If that happens, we turn around and go home, and that’s that.”

“Unacceptable. I’ve come too far to go away empty-handed. What’s the third option.”

“They impale with their spears, wait for us to die, then chop up our bodies and scatter our remains for the animals to find.” I let that sink in. “Except our heads,” I added. “Someone will carry those back to the city in the middle of the night, where they’ll dump them on the doorstep of the nearest available house.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

I didn’t. The professor was scared enough already, and he didn’t need any stories about what had happened to explorers who’d crossed the line with the shatan, or the occasional fool stupid enough to venture onto aboriginal territory without someone like me escorting them. I hadn’t exaggerated anything, though, and he seemed to realize that, for he simply nodded and looked away.

The shatan finished their discussion. Not looking at us, they walked back to their hattases and climbed atop them again. For a moment, I thought that they were taking the second option, but then they guided their mounts toward Dr. al-Baz and me.

“Hessah,” one of them said (Come with us).

I let out my breath. We were going to meet the village chieftain.

The village was different from the last time I’d seen it. Since the shatan became nomads, their settlements are usually tent cities which can be taken down, packed up, and relocated when necessary. This one had been there for quite a while, though; apparently the inhabitants had decided that they’d stay at the oasis for some time to come. Low, flat-roofed adobe buildings had taken the place of many of the tents, and scaffolds surrounded a stone wall being built to enclose them. But if the place had a name, I wasn’t aware of it.

Dr. al-Baz and I were footsore and tired by the time we reached the village. As expected, the warriors had insisted that we leave the jeep behind, although they allowed us to retrieve our packs. They’d slowly ridden abreast of us all the way, only reluctantly letting us stop now and then to rest. Neither of them had spoken a word since we’d left the bridge, but when we were within sight of the settlement, one of them raised a whorled shell that looked like a giant ammonite. A long, loud blast from his horn was answered a few seconds later by a similar call from the village. The professor and I exchanged a wary glance. Too late to turn around now; the inhabitants knew we were coming.

The village seemed empty as we entered through a half-built gate and walked down packed-dirt streets. No one to be seen, and the only thing that moved were hattases tied up to hitching posts. The tent flaps were closed, though, and the narrow windows of the adobe houses were shuttered. No, the place wasn’t deserted; it was just that the people who lived there had gone into hiding. The silence was eerie, and even more unsettling than the spears our escorts pointed at our backs.

The village center was a courtyard surrounding an artesian well, with a large adobe building dominating one side of the square. The only shatan we’d seen since our arrival peered down at us from a wooden tower atop the building. He waited until we’d reached the building, then raised an ammonite horn of his own and blew a short blast. The warriors halted their hattases, dismounted, and silently beckoned for us to follow them. One of them pushed aside the woven blanket which served as the building’s only door, and the other warrior led us inside.

The room was dim, its sole illumination a shaft of sunlight slanting down through a hole in the ceiling. The air was thick with musky incense that drifted in hazy layers through the light and made my eyes water. Robed shatan stood around the room, their faces hidden by hoods they’d pulled up around their heads; I knew none of them were female, because their women were always kept out of sight when visitors arrived. The only sound was the slow, constant drip of a waterclock, with each drop announcing the passage of two more seconds.

The chieftain sat in the middle of the room. Long-fingered hands rested upon the armrests of his sandstone throne; golden eyes regarded us between strands of hair turned white with age. He wore nothing to indicate his position as the tribal leader save an implacable air of authority, and he let us know that he was the boss by silently raising both hands, then slowly lowering them once we’d halted and saying nothing for a full minute.

At last he spoke. “Essha shakay Hamsey?” (Why are you here, Ramsey?)

I didn’t think I’d ever met him before, but obviously he recognized me. Good. That would make things a little easier. I responded in his own language. “(I bring someone who wants to learn more about your people. He is a wise man from Earth, a teacher of others who wish to become wise themselves. He desires to ask a favor from you.)”

The chieftain turned his gaze from me to Dr. al-Baz. “(What do you want?)”

I looked at the professor. “Okay, you’re on. He wants to know what you want. I’ll translate for you. Just be careful . . . they’re easily offended.”

“So it seems.” Dr. al-Baz was nervous, but he was hiding it well. He licked his lips and thought about it a moment, then went on. “Tell him . . . tell him that I would like to collect a small sample of blood from one of his people. A few drops will do. I wish to have this because I want to know . . . I mean, because I’d like to find out . . . whether his people and mine have common ancestors.”

That seemed to be a respectful way of stating what he wanted, so I turned to the chief and reiterated what he’d said. The only problem was that I didn’t know the aboriginal word for “blood.” It had simply never come up in any previous conversations I’d had with the shatan. So I had to generalize a bit, calling it “the liquid that runs within our bodies” while pantomiming a vein running down the inside of my right arm, and hoped that he’d understand what I meant.

He did, all right. He regarded me with cold disbelief, golden eyes flashing, thin lips writhing upon an otherwise stoical face. Around us, I heard the other shatan murmuring to one another. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but it didn’t sound like they were very happy either.

We were in trouble.

“(Who dares say that shatan and nashatan have the same ancestors?)” he snapped, hands curling into fists as he leaned forward from his throne. “(Who dares believe that your people and mine are alike in any way?)”

I repeated what he’d said to Dr. al-Baz. The professor hesitated, then looked straight at the chieftain. “Tell him that no one believes these things,” he said, his tone calm and deliberate. “It is only a hypothesis . . . an educated guess . . . that I want to either prove or disprove. That’s why I need a blood sample, to discover the truth.”

I took a deep breath, hoped that I was going to get out of there alive, then translated the professor’s explanation. The chieftain continued to glare at us as I spoke, but he seemed to calm down a little. For several long seconds, he said nothing. And then he reached a decision.

Reaching into his robes, he withdrew a bone dagger from a sheath on his belt. My heart skipped a beat as the light fell upon its sharp white blade, and when he stood up and walked toward us, I thought my life had come to an end. But then he stopped in front of Dr. al-Baz and, still staring straight at him, raised his left hand, placed the knife against his palm, and ran its blade down his skin.

“(Take my blood),” he said, holding out his hand.

I didn’t need to translate what he’d said. Dr. al-Baz quickly dropped his backpack from his shoulders and opened it. He withdrew a syringe, thought better of it, and pulled out a plastic test tube instead. The chieftain clenched his fist and let the blood trickle between his fingers, and the professor caught it in his test tube. Once he’d collected the specimen, he pulled out a tiny vial and added a couple of drops of anticoagulant. Then he capped the tube and nodded to the chieftain.

“Tell him that I greatly appreciate his kindness,” he said, “and that I will return to tell him what I have found.”

“Like hell we will!”

“Tell him.” His eyes never left the chieftain’s. “One way or another, he deserves to know the truth.”

Promising the chieftain that we intended to return was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did it anyway. He didn’t respond for a moment, but simply dropped his hand, allowing his blood to trickle to the floor.

“(Yes),” he said at last. “(Come back and tell me what you’ve learned. I wish to know as well.)” And then he turned his back to us and walked back to his chair. “(Now leave.)”

“Okay,” I whispered, feeling my heart hammering against my chest. “You got what you came for. Now let’s get out of here while we still have our heads.”

Two days later, I was sitting in the casino bar at the John Carter, putting away tequila sunrises and occasionally dropping a coin into the video poker machine in front of me. I’d discovered that I didn’t mind the place so long as I kept my back turned to everything going on around me, and I could drink for free if I slipped a quarter into the slots every now and then. At least that’s what I told myself. The fact of the matter was that there was a certain sense of security in the casino’s tawdry surroundings. This Mars was a fantasy, to be sure, but just then it was preferable to the unsettling reality I’d visited a couple of days earlier.

Omar al-Baz was upstairs, using the equipment he’d brought with him to analyze the chieftain’s blood. We’d gone straight to the hotel upon returning to the city, but when it became obvious that it would take awhile for the professor to work his particular kind of magic, I decided to go downstairs and get a drink. Perhaps I should have gone home, but I was still keyed up from the long ride back, so I gave Dr. al-Baz my cell number and asked him to call me if and when he learned anything.

I was surprised that I stuck around. Usually when I return from a trip into the outback, all I really want to do is get out of the clothes I’d been wearing for days on end, open a beer, and take a nice, long soak in the bathtub. Instead, there I was, putting away one cocktail after another while demonstrating that I knew absolutely nothing about poker. The bartender was studying me and the waitresses were doing their best to stay upwind, but I could have cared less about what they thought. They were make-believe Martians, utterly harmless. The ones I’d met a little while ago would have killed me just for looking at them cross-eyed.

In all the years that I’d been going out in the wilderness, this was the first time I’d ever been really and truly scared. Not by the desert, but by those who lived there. No shatan had ever threatened me, not even in an implicit way, until the moment the chieftain pulled out a knife and creased the palm of his hand with its blade. Sure, he’d done so to give Dr. al-Baz a little of his blood, but there was another meaning to his actions.

It was a warning . . . and the shatan don’t give warnings lightly.

That was why I was doing my best to get drunk. The professor was too excited to think of anything except the specimen he’d just collected—all the way home, he’d babbled about nothing else—but I knew that we’d come within an inch of dying, and that ours would have been a really nasty death.

Yet the chieftain had given his blood of his own free will, and even asked that we return once the professor learned the truth. That puzzled me. Why would he be interested in the results, if the thought of being related to a human was so appalling?

I threw away another quarter, pushed the buttons and watched the machine tell me that I’d lost again, then looked around to see if I could flag down a princess and get her to fetch another sunrise. Dejah or Thuvia or Xaxa or whoever she was had apparently gone on break, though, because she was nowhere to be seen; I was about to try my luck again when something caught my eye. The TV above the bar was showing the evening news, and the weatherman was standing in front of his map. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was pointing at an animated cloud system west of Rio Zephyria that was moving across the desert toward the Laestrygon canal.

It appeared that a sandstorm was brewing in Mesogaea, the drylands adjacent to the Zephyria region. This sort of weather isn’t uncommon in the summer; we call them haboobs, the Arabic name for sandstorms on Earth that somehow found its way to Mars. From the looks of things, it would reach the Zephyria outback sometime tomorrow afternoon. Good thing I’d come home; the last thing anyone would want is to be caught out in the desert during a bad storm.

A waitress strolled by, adjusting a strap of her costume bikini top. I raised my glass and silently jiggled it back and forth, and she feigned a smile as she nodded and headed for the bar. I was searching my pockets for another quarter so that she’d see that I was still pretending to be a gambler when my cell buzzed.

“Jim? Are you still here?”

“In the bar, professor. Come down and have a drink with me.”

“No! No time for that! Come upstairs right away! I need to see you!”

“What’s going on?”

“Just come up here! It’s better if I show you!”

Dr. al-Baz opened the door at the first knock. Spotting the cocktail glass in my hand, he snatched it from me and drained it in one gulp. “Good heavens,” he gasped, “I needed that!”

“Want me to get you another one?”

“No . . . but you can buy me a drink when I get to Stockholm.” I didn’t understand what he meant, but before I could ask he pulled me into the room. “Look!” he said, pointing to one of the computers set up on the bar. “This is incredible!”

I walked over to the bar, peered at the screen. Displayed upon it were rows of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, arranged in a seemingly endless series of combinations, with smears that looked a little like dashes running in a vertical bar down the right side of the screen. A five-line cluster of combinations and smears was highlighted in yellow.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Professor, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to . . . ”

“You have no idea what you’re looking at, do you?” he asked, and I shook my head. “This is the human genome . . . the genetic code present in every human being. And these—” his hand trembled as he pointed to the highlighted cluster “—are strands that are identical to the partially-sequenced genome from the aborigine specimen.”

“They’re the same?”

“Exactly. There is no error . . . or at least none that the computers can detect.” Dr. al-Baz took a deep breath. “Do you see what I’m getting at? The hypothesis is correct! Human life may have originated on Mars!”

I stared at the screen. Until then, I hadn’t really believed anything that Dr. al-Baz had told me; it seemed too unlikely to be true. But now that the evidence was in front of me, I realized that I was looking at something that would shake the foundations of science. No, not just science . . . it would rattle history itself, forcing humankind to reconsider its origins.

“My god,” I whispered. “Have you told anyone yet? On Earth, I mean”

“No. I’m tempted to send a message, but . . . no, I need to confirm this.” The professor walked over to the window. “We have to go back,” he said, his voice quiet but firm as he gazed out at the city lights and, beyond them, the dark expanse of the desert. “I need to get another blood sample, this time from a different shatan. If the same sequence appears in the second sample, then we’ll know for sure.”

Something cold slithered down my spine. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. The chieftain . . . ”

“The chieftain told us that he wanted to know what we discovered. So we’ll tell him, and explain that we need more blood . . . just a little . . . from one of his tribesmen to make sure that it’s the truth.” Dr. al-Baz glanced over his shoulder at me. “Not an unreasonable request, no?”

“I don’t think he’s going to be very happy about this, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He was quiet for a few moments, contemplating what I’d just said. “Well . . . that’s a risk we’ll just have to take,” he said at last. “I’ll pay you again for another trip, if that’s your concern . . . double your original fee, in fact. But I must go back as soon as possible.” He continued to gaze out the window. “Tomorrow morning. I want to leave tomorrow morning.”

My head was beginning to ache, dull blades pressing upon my temples. I shouldn’t have had so much to drink. What I should have done was turn him down right then and there. But his offer to double my fee for a return trip was too good to pass up; I needed the money, and that would pay my rent for a couple of months. Besides, I was too drunk to argue.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll head out first thing.”

I went back to my place, took some aspirin, stripped off my filthy clothes, and took a shower, then flopped into bed. But I didn’t fall asleep for quite a while. Instead, I stared at the ceiling as unwelcome thoughts ran an endless loop through my mind.

What would the chieftain do when Omar al-Baz informed him that shatan blood and nashatan blood were very much alike and that our two races might be related? He wouldn’t be pleased, that much was certain. The aborigines never wanted to have anything to do with the invaders from Earth; as soon as our ships had arrived, they had retreated into the wilderness. This was the reason why they’d become nomads . . .

But they weren’t anymore, were they? The significance of what I’d seen at the village suddenly became clear to me. Not only had this particular tribe built permanent houses, but they were also erecting a wall around them. That meant they were planning to remain where they were for some time to come, and were taking measures to defend themselves. They were tiring of running from us; now they were digging in.

Until now, the human colonists had been content to ignore the shatan, thinking of them as reclusive savages best left alone. This would change, though, if humans came to believe that homo sapiens and homo aresians were cousins. Suddenly, we’d want to know all about them. First would come more biologists like Dr. al-Baz, more anthropologists like Dr. Horner. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad . . . but right behind them would be everyone else. Historians and journalists, tour buses and camera safaris, entrepreneurs looking to make a buck, missionaries determined to convert godless souls, real estate tycoons seeking prime land on which to build condos with a nice view of those quaint aborigine villages . . .

The shatan wouldn’t tolerate this. And the chieftain would know that it was inevitable the moment Dr. al-Baz told him what he’d learned. First, he’d order his warriors to kill both him and me. And then . . .

In my mind’s eye, I saw the horrors to come. Wave upon wave of shatan warriors descending upon Rio Zephyria and the other colonies, hell-bent on driving the invaders from their world once and for all. Oh, we had superior weapons, this was true . . . but they had superior numbers, and it would only be a matter of time before they captured a few of our guns and learned how to use them. Ships from Earth would bring soldiers to defend the colonies, but history is unkind to would-be conquerors. Either we would be driven back, step by inexorable step, or we would commit genocide, exterminating entire tribes and driving the few survivors further into the wilderness.

Either way, the outcome was inevitable. War would come to a world named for a god of war. Red blood would fell upon red sand, human and Martian alike.

A storm was coming. Then I thought of a different storm, and knew what I had to do.

Two days later, I was found staggering out of the desert, caked with red sand from my hair to my boots save for raccoon-like patches around my eyes where my goggles had protected them. I was dehydrated and exhausted to the point of delirium.

I was also alone.

Ironically, the people who rescued me were another guide and the family from Minneapolis whom he’d escorted into the desert just outside Rio Zephyria. I remember little of what happened after I collapsed at their feet and had to be carried to the guide’s land rover. The only things I clearly recall were the sweet taste of water within my parched mouth, a teenage girl gazing down at me with angelic blue eyes as she cradled my head in her lap, the long, bouncing ride back into the city.

I was still in my hospital bed when the police came to see me. By then, I’d recovered enough to give them a clear and reasonably plausible account of what had happened. Like any successful lie, this one was firmly grounded in truth. The violent haboob that had suddenly come upon us in the desert hills. The crash that happened when, blinded by wind-driven sand, I’d collided with a boulder, causing my jeep to topple over. How Dr. al-Baz and I had escaped from the wreckage, only to lose track of each other. How only I had managed to find shelter in the leeside of a pinnacle. The professor becoming lost in the storm, never to be seen again.

All true, every word of it. All I had to do was leave out a few facts, such as how I’d deliberately driven into the desert even though I knew that a haboob was on its way, or that even after we saw the scarlet haze rising above the western horizon, I’d insisted upon continuing to drive south, telling Dr. al-Baz that we’d be able to outrun the storm. The cops never learned that I’d been careful to carry with me a pair of sand goggles and a scarf, but refrained from making sure that the professor took the same precautions. Nor did they need to know that I’d deliberately aimed for that boulder, even though I could have easily avoided it.

I broke down when I spoke about how I’d heard Omar al-Baz calling my name, desperately trying to find me even as the air was filled with stinging red sand and visibility was reduced to only arm’s length. That much, too, was true. What I didn’t say was that Dr. al-Baz had come within three meters of where I was huddled, my eyes covered by goggles and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of my face. And yet I remained silent as I watched his indistinct form lurch past me, arms blindly thrust out before him, slowly suffocating as sand filled his nose and throat.

My tears were honest. I liked the professor. But his knowledge made him too dangerous to live.

As an alibi, my story worked. When a search party went out into the desert, they located my overturned jeep. Omar al-Baz’s body was found about fifteen meters away, face-down and covered by several centimeters of sand. Our footprints had been erased by the wind, of course, so there was no way of telling how close the professor had been to me.

That settled any doubts the cops may have had. Dr. al-Baz’s death was an accident. I had no motive for killing him, nor was there any evidence of foul play. If I was guilty of anything, it was only reckless and foolish behavior. My professional reputation was tarnished, but that was about it. The investigation was officially concluded the day I was released from the hospital. By then, I’d realized two things. The first was that I would get away with murder. The second was that my crime was far from perfect.

Dr. al-Baz hadn’t taken the chieftain’s blood specimen with him when he’d left the hotel. It was still in his room, along with all his equipment. This included the computers he’d used to analyze the sample; the results were saved in their memories, along with any notes he might have written. In fact, the only thing the professor had brought with him was his room key . . . which I’d neglected to retrieve from his body.

I couldn’t return to his hotel room; any effort to get in would have aroused suspicion. All I could do was watch from the hotel lobby as, a couple of days later, the bellhops wheeled out a cart carrying the repacked equipment cases, bound for the spaceport and the shuttle which would ferry them to a marsliner docked at Deimos Station. In a few months, the professor’s stuff would be back in the hands of his fellow faculty members. They would open the digital files and inspect what their late colleague had learned, and examine the blood specimen he’d collected. And then . . .

Well. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?

So now I sit alone in my neighborhood bar, where I drink and wait for the storm to come. And I never go into the desert anymore.

Originally published in Old Mars, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin.

About the Author

Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s, as well as to markets such as Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age. In 1990, he published his critically-acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year. His other books include the novels Clarke County Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, The Weight, The Tranquility Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, Chronospace, Coyote, Coyote Rising, Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, Coyote Horizon, Coyote Destiny. Hex, and V-S Day. His short work has been gathered in Rude Astronauts, Sex and Violence in Zero G, The Last Science Fiction Writer, and Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition. His most recent books are the novel Arkwright and the collection Tales of Time and Space.He has won three Hugo Awards, in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” in 1998 for his novella “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” and, most recently, in 2011 for his novelette “The Emperor of Mars.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he lives in Whately, Massachusetts with his wife Linda.

Science Fiction and the Fall of the Evil Empire

Mark Cole

By the 1970s, no one believed in Communism anymore.

Not in the Soviet Bloc, at least. Least of all those running the system and particularly not the KGB and the State Security Apparat. Which didn’t stop the vast machinery of the Communist State from shuddering on, crushing those who dared to resist, while it slowly fell apart under its own weight.

It was a strange era. Only a few observers in the West could see what was going on. The truth bubbled to the surface in the satellite states but was stomped out. Even in the USSR itself—for all too brief moments—no one seemed to care if people spoke out openly (or at least more openly than they’d have dared before), although equally brief crackdowns followed. It was the age of dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, and Sakharov—and of Stanislaw Lem, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky: the Golden Age of Soviet science fiction.

It was a time when science fiction was no longer a “safe” genre for those trying to avoid the demands of ideological conformity. It became far more than that: a way to safely criticize their own world.

The first Soviet science fiction film, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), was far more critical than Western reviewers have noted. It features poverty, corrupt bureaucrats, a lawless secret policeman intent on getting his man whether he did anything wrong or not, and a leader using the revolution to gain personal power. The censors would soon bury it from view.

However, this was also the fate of the rigorously orthodox Luch Smerti (1925) which deliberately copied the non-ideological Hollywood action films popular in the USSR at the time, and of Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella (1936) whose Cosmonauts leaping about on the Moon were deemed too “frivolous.”

It would be the last Soviet science fiction feature for two decades. They decreed “Soviet Realism” the official style, ended the “individualism” of the 1920s Avant Garde—and rejected anything as unrealistic as space flight.

After all, the good revolutionary should have his eyes set on Earthly challenges.

But science fiction did return, thanks to the Space Race and Pavel Klushantsev’s 1958 documentary, Doroga k zvezdam (Road to the Stars).

The slew of movies that followed echoed its documentary tone and emphasized the struggle, costs, and sacrifices needed to explore the stars. While the Space Race is still on in Nebo Zovyot (1959), the East German Der Schweigende Stern (First Spaceship on Venus, 1960) features a joint East/West mission whose scientists set aside their political differences and work together. Klushantsev’s Planeta Bur (1962) avoids the question altogether and focuses on the mission itself. It set the pattern for Soviet science fiction films for over a decade: vague Socialist futures united under a single government.

And the Commissars shrugged and let them get away with it, and instead tore apart the work of directors not working on science fiction.

But the cracks were already there.

A scientist dreams of an underwater Republic free from the ills of our world—if he can convince enough people to let him graft gills onto them—in 1962’s Amphibian Man. It is as grandiose a Socialist dream as you could ask for . . . and obviously foolish.

Nor is its capitalist a monster, and its reliable socialist reformer strays from Marxist Dogma and believes evil is part of human nature.

Perhaps everyone was too busy watching the underwater ballet to notice.

Or consider the comic thriller The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, whose evil capitalists are pawns in the villain’s scheme to destroy the world’s financial system and re-build it according to his utopian schemes. It all sounds suspiciously like Lenin, Stalin, or a Bond villain.

And then there’s The Andromeda Nebula (1967), whose Captain is advised (as a matter of efficiency) to have the painful memories of the woman he loves erased through the wonders of Soviet science. He refuses because that pain is an important part of what makes us human. This is of course rank heresy and smacks of “individualism,” putting his needs ahead of the collective.

Compare that to the East German Eolomea (1972), which is basically a romance until the hero leaves the girl behind for a one-way trip to explore the universe; or the utterly random—and meaningless—reversal of gravity which hurls the apparent romantic lead of Der schweigende Stern into space in the middle of a heroic rescue attempt; or the song-writing lover in Mechte Navstrechu (1963) who sacrifices himself to save an alien who isn’t even part of the collective.

As mild as The Andromeda Nebula’s deviation may sound, it was enough to scuttle a planned sequel.

But the real break happened in Czechoslovakia.

In the West, the focus was on the “Prague Spring,” the all-too-brief moment in 1968 when the Czechs tried to restore Democracy only to have the new Republic crushed by Soviet tanks.

But Czech novelists and filmmakers had been questioning Marxism long before Dubček took power: Jan Němec’s absurd—and frightening—parody of how Communism got people to manipulate themselves, A Report on the Party and the Guests, debuted in 1966. Equally critical works, like The Joke (1969) and The Ear (1970) still appeared after the Soviets rolled in, although often with devastating effects on the careers of those responsible.

While Ikarie XB-1’s 1963 space voyage is fairly straightforward, by 1966 the hopeful socialist future was gone, replaced by the absurd, in the riotous science fiction comedy, Who Wants to Kill Jessie?

A scientist learns how to view and eliminate bad dreams. Unfortunately, she doesn’t realize that it actually makes them real. Not, that is, until she gets jealous and accidentally releases the lovely comic strip character Jessie and her two pursuers from her husband’s dreams.

Her plan to make everyone happier through science is a sly parody of Marxist utopianism, and when the resulting mess ends up dragged into court, she places the blame on her husband because, after all, they were his dreams!

Other absurd Czech SF comedies with subversive subtexts followed, like I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1970), whose time agents try to stop the nuclear war that made their women grow beards, only to have everything stay pretty much the same because everyone waged chemical war instead!

But they also gave us the brutal post-Apocalyptic The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967). While its band of girl survivors shooting a live cow onscreen shocks most viewers, the ending is far worse: they destroy what little is left of civilization, not out of malice, but because it is meaningless to them.

Almost as black although surreal, absurd, comic, and falling uncomfortably between SF and Fantasy was Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970), a very strange adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels in which he visits the supposedly scientific lands of Balnibarbi and the floating island of Lemuria. But their science is mad and senseless, their actions illogical, and their rule both repressive and nearly random.

But Czech science fiction soon lost its satiric edge.

In 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky shocked Soviet officialdom with Andrei Rublev. He’d managed to make a deeply religious movie in the USSR, and despite the efforts to bury the film it won a major award at Cannes, making Tarkovsky one of the most famous Soviet directors overnight.

When he tried to make his next film, he ran into serious opposition but got permission to make an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s, Solaris.

While hailed as one of the great classics of the genre, Tarkovsky himself didn’t think much of the film. It gets only the barest mention in his book Sculpting in Time and his few comments seem dismissive at best. He even claimed he deliberately made the first hour of the film boring, so the bureaucrats would stop watching before he got to his real themes.

At its heart, Solaris’ painful contact with a radically alien intelligence is a metaphor for man’s encounters with God. While he rarely makes this explicit, his references to Dostoevsky would have been clear to knowledgeable viewers.

He returned to science fiction in 1979 with Stalker, based on a Strugatsky brother’s story. Only this time he very deliberately made an anti-science-fiction film, rejecting the usual trappings of science fiction in an even more openly religious film, filled with Christian imagery and quotes from the Apocalypse. Again, the main theme is the difficult path to God, although Stalker puts even greater emphasis on one of his earlier themes: the helplessness of the machineries of the state against the “alien” influence, which they fail first to understand, then to control, and then to destroy.

Tarkovsky’s protégé, Konstantin Lopushansky, would bring a similar outlook to his harrowing post-Apocalyptic films, starting with Dead Man’s Letters (1986), which finds hope in the end of the world. The emotionally wrenching Visitor to a Museum, whose mutants expect a young skeptic to fulfill their prophecy, followed in 1989, just before the coming of Perestroika.

In 1977, at the height of Poland’s oppressive rule, Andrzej Zuławski began one of the blackest and most surreal SF films ever made, On the Silver Globe. Astronauts crash on a harsh alien planet, leaving only a few descendants whose civilization quickly descends into madness. A later astronaut tries to discover what happened to them is hailed as a god but then crucified by his followers. Ultimately, Earth itself begins to breakdown.

This clearly is not a rosy, socialist future. Instead, it says far more about the inherent flaws of human nature Marx denies. After two years of shooting in exotic locations, the Culture Commissar banned it and tried to destroy every scrap of film—even the props and costumes.

After the rise of Solidarity, Zuławski patched together what was left with some linking narration, which, thankfully, helps explain the parts we’d just watched.

Piotr Szulkin had far greater luck and somehow managed to make four, very black, political satires thinly disguised as science fiction, starting with Golem in 1980.

It tells the story of a man who doesn’t realize that he’s actually a copy. Accidentally allowed to take his original’s place, he finds himself beset by bureaucratic snarls, harassed by his landlord, and struggling to make sense of who he is and what is happening to him. Curiously, this synthetic human is the only character who shows any kindness or sympathy although he ultimately becomes just as corrupt as everyone else.

Szulkin’s next film, War of the Worlds: Next Century, is far darker and less comic if equally absurd: the State responds to a Martian invasion by setting up a “voluntary” blood drive, tagging the ears of those exempt like cattle.

O-Bi, O-Ba - The End of Civilization and Ga, Ga - Chwala bohaterom followed before Szulkin’s career foundered after the fall of Communism. While he’d mastered the snarls of the old bureaucracy, he couldn’t cope with the new Democratic State.

In the USSR the change took longer.

One notes, The Star Inspector’s (1980), starship crew from a perfect future, who do not take the slightest action without orders from Central. However, they soon find themselves forced to question and then disobey their orders.

Just to make things more interesting, the film is decidedly psychedelic, with a very Seventies rock score—a “decadent” style one shouldn’t find in a Soviet film. However, the enemy they face—a strange influence which robs people of their memories, enslaves them, and uses them to spread its dire influence to the stars—seems all too familiar, if highly deniable.

Other films echoed Solaris’ sense of mystery, although, like Moon Rainbow (1983), they often include a disclaimer that, even if we don’t understand this, someday we will.

But none of these really prepared anyone for Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986), perhaps the finest science fiction comedy ever made.

Two ordinary Muscovites get transported to the barren wastelands of Planet Pluk. Its Government converted all its water into fuel; matches are so rare that they are the most valuable commodity on the planet (even if no one would ever dream of striking one); and your status and how many times people must “Ku” to you depends on the color of your pants.

It is one of the most absurd worlds ever put on film, beset by crooked cops, strange customs, and the most unhelpful superior alien race on record.

But for those living under Communism, the hapless travelers yelling “Capitalists!” wouldn’t have distracted them from what they knew all too well from their everyday lives: misguided decisions, ecological devastation, appalling shortages, and incomprehensible rules.

While made in the USSR, the film is not Russian, but Georgian. The satellite countries, where the grip of communism was weakest, produced some of the most defiant Soviet Bloc science fiction: one suspects its origin in a once independent nation helps explain its daring attack on the status quo.

The exception was Erich Honecker’s repressive East Germany, whose few science fiction films remained relatively free of ideological deviations. One notes the “decadent” psychedelic design of In the Dust of the Stars (1976), but this is balanced by ending with a routine socialist revolution.

The closest they came was Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein (1989), an adaptation of the Strugatsky brother’s Hard to be a God, which started production as the wall crumbled. The Earth has found an alien planet in an oppressive stage of development analogous to Marx’s version of the Dark Ages. But the violence and ignorance appalls one of the observers and goads him into trying to improve things, regardless of the rules.

Hard to be a God was one of the works set in the brother’s Noon Universe, where Earth has become a socialist utopia which observes—and sometimes helps—other less advanced worlds. But, as in Inhabited Island (and its 2009 movie adaptation), this “help” often means oppression and terror as they try to follow Marx’s dogmatic “scientific” history to utopia. The final, unfinished novel in the series would have revealed that the other major power in Inhabited Island was only outwardly oppressive: at its heart was a utopia much like the Noon Earth, made possible by those outer layers. Its rulers even argue that the Noon Universe could only exist as a literary fantasy!

By the end of the Eighties, with the Soviet Bloc already crumbling, darkness and absurdity crept into their science fiction films.

While there were a few tame bits of rebellion in films like The Witches’ Cave (1989), one also finds one of the blackest adaptations of Ray Bradbury ever made.

Instead of the bright, shiny, commercialized future we might expect from Ray’s short story, “The Veldt” is set in a crumbling future. The new suburban home loaded down with every imaginable modern convenience is instead a damp and crumbling mansion and the dead are rising from the grave and wandering around. The movie uses bits from several Bradbury stories—horror, fantasy, and mainstream—but sets them against an unprecedented Apocalyptic background.

On the other hand, End of Eternity (1987) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Asimov’s book and a searing criticism of Communism.

In the nearly timeless realm of “Eternity” in the distant future, a group of Eternals travel through the timelines they control, trying to perfect the carefully edited histories they’ve established.

While they want to create perfect happiness for those living in time, they have done this at the expense of space exploration and other “unimportant” developments. They decide what’s best for everyone and prevent them from making any other choices. For all their benevolence, theirs is a deeply intrusive rule by remote and supposedly disinterested elites.

One suspects that Dr. Asimov wouldn’t have approved.

The only major change, though, is the dark and open-ended finale, which rejects Asimov’s happy ending, questions the motives of the rebels, and reveals that the elites are running things in the time before “Eternity.”

For the Soviet Union, it was the end of eternity as well. The monolithic Bloc fell apart, in chaos and confusion.

While science fiction did not cause the collapse, it was one of the few areas where the discontent beneath the surface could be safely expressed. To the ordinary Soviet citizen, sitting in a darkened theater or reading the latest Strugatsky brother’s novel, there was no question what was being criticized.

When it becomes impossible to speak the truth, people will always find ways to say what needs to be said.

And this was what writers and directors found in science fiction. They could hide behind fantastic worlds and imagined circumstances and then claim that it had nothing to do with the real world.

In a world which had long since lost faith in the Revolution, that was all it took.

(For more information on the films mentioned, see https://rivetsontheposter.wordpress.com/category/movie-reviews/it-came-from-behind-the-wall/.)

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Husky Genes and the Anthropocene:
A Conversation with Paul McAuley

Chris Urie

The only constant in life is change. For better or worse, everything is in flux. The more technologically advanced humans become, the more power we have to change the planet on a global scale. We’re already using science and technology to change ourselves.

Austral by Paul McAuley shows us a world where climate change has remade swaths of the earth. Antarctica has become somewhat habitable and human beings have started manipulating their own genes. Austral is a Husky, someone who has had their genetic code modified. Shunned by society, she works as a prison guard in Antarctica. But she’s also the estranged relative of a powerful politician. When that politician makes a visit to the prison where she works, she becomes embroiled in an escape plot but she hatches her own plan to earn what is rightfully hers.

Paul McAuley is a British botanist and author. He’s won the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, and the British Fantasy Award. His newest novel is Austral out from Gollancz on October 19th, 2017.

What inspired your novel Austral?

In 1997, I was one of a dozen or so scientists and writers at a meeting in a research station above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, discussing stories about science and the stories science tells itself. It was May, the beginning of summer’s white nights, when the sun never sets, yet snow was still a couple of meters deep and at all hours, people were buzzing around on snow mobiles or tramping out to ice-fishing huts on a frozen lake nearby.

On our day off, some of us took a train to Tromsø, in Norway. As the train descended towards the coast, we passed through an entire season, from a snowy plateau to conifer forests stepping down towards fjords, and that’s what I drew on, some twenty years later, when I began to consider writing about the greening of polar territories during global warming. What use would people find for these new lands? How would they live there, and how would living there change them?

Why Antarctica? There had already been a good number of novels set in various versions of a warming Arctic by the time I began to think about Austral, and when I was growing up the story of Robert Scott’s doomed attempt to be the first to reach the south pole was still part of the British national mythos.

I read Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s fantastic account of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, The Worst Journey in the World, at an impressionable age, and reread it before starting to write Austral. More inspiration came from a map of the land that lies beneath Antarctica’s ice cap, and a map of what Antarctica would look like if all that ice melted (the two maps aren’t the same, because sea levels would be raised by melting of the ice, and removal of its weight would cause some of the land to rise). I also studied detailed maps of the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of the continent, which is already being affected by climate change. The trek that Austral makes is through the actual territory of the peninsula; the towns and settlements are named for real places.

Austral features a unique look into the future at the effects of global warming. What inspired your creation of the ecopoets?

Most geologists agree that we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene, where human activity is laying down recognizable markers that will persist for millions of years—carbon isotopes spread by nuclear tests, plastic waste, fly ash, and concrete—and has become a force that’s reshaping the planet towards an unknown end point. There are plenty of fictional dystopic visions of how climate change will change the world, but few that explore how people might be able to accommodate to those changes, and do their best to ameliorate them. How it might be possible to have a good Anthropocene—or at least, the best possible Anthropocene.

To take responsibility for our actions, to adopt new ways of living, and to accept our place in nature and the responsibilities that come with it, and act accordingly. That’s the philosophy of the ecopoets, who are responsible for quickening the biomes spreading across new lands revealed by the retreat of the Antarctic ice. Terraforming is an old idea in science fiction—it was coined by Jack Williamson in his story “Collision Orbit” in 1942. The ecopoets are terraforming part of Earth by reclaiming it for nature.

Austral is a deep and complex character. Did she inspire the story or did the story come first and her creation second, a result of the story?

Story development and character development ran in parallel, both rising from Austral’s initial predicament, and her wrongheaded idea about how to best escape it. Many characters in science fiction are tough, competent, and always manage to make the right choices. I was interested in the story of a character who is tough and competent, yet always manages to make the wrong choice, and gets deeper and deeper into trouble. That’s what drives the story, complicated by her need to make sense of her family’s history, which is woven into the history of the colonization of Antarctica. The past casts a long shadow in the future of Austral, in all kinds of ways.

What was one piece of information you found when researching this novel that really surprised you?

That there are moss gardens in the Antarctic Peninsula, and they’re growing at an ever-faster rate as the territory warms. Also, too late for the novel: house flies, introduced via cruise ships, have now infiltrated the peninsula’s ecosystem.

How has your training in botany and zoology influenced your fiction?

It’s made me overcautious about getting things wrong, which means that I do far too much research. On the other hand, I do enjoy the research; part of my training enables me to ruthlessly track down pertinent information and squeeze useful data from it. And it has left me with an abiding interest in how species knit functioning ecologies together—the deep entangled complexity of the blooming, buzzing hedgerow which Darwin refers to in the final paragraph of The Origin of Species; entanglements whose checks and balances we still don’t fully understand. Like The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, Austral is a novel in which I explore that, and indulge in extreme gardening—the creation of new ecologies.

Austral moves along at a clip, how do you balance the quick pacing of the story with the quieter scenes of character development?

The quieter scenes are pauses for breath after intense moments, which gives a kind of natural rhythm to the story. I like to follow Graham Greene’s advice, in A Sort of Life, that action is best portrayed as economically as possible. ‘A subject, a verb, an object, perhaps a rhythm—little else.’ Tension lies not in the moment of action, but the build-up towards it, and how the characters deal with the aftermath. That’s where the quieter scenes come in. Two characters trying to come to terms with each other and their predicament.

What does your writing process look like?

Pretty messy and illogical, I guess. I don’t plan extensively, or write detailed outlines. Most of my writing—as far as novels are concerned, anyway—is a non-linear attempt to reach the end point of story that grows ever more complicated as it progresses. The first draft is quite often riddled with false starts and dead-ends, mostly because it takes a while to get inside the heads of my characters, and I’m forcing the story in directions they wouldn’t take. That’s done straight to screen, aided by all kinds of notes made on rough paper. When I finally have a first draft, the fun part—rewriting—begins. I scribble all over a printout, transcribe the changes and make more changes, then rinse and repeat as necessary.

What project are you working on next?

A kind of Samurai Western set on a dying world about six billion years in the future.

As a researcher at Oxford and UCLA, what were you working on? What did you discover?

I was working on plant-animal symbioses—specifically, animals with single-celled algae growing in certain parts of their cells. The animal provides a home and various nutrients; the algae secrete sugars and lipids which their hosts use. My model organism was the simple pond animal, green hydra, but I also worked on sea anemones and reef-forming corals. My principal discoveries centered on how the host cells control their populations of algae.

Symbiosis was a fairly obscure field back then (I quit to become a full-time writer in 1996), but now coral reefs are the canaries in the climate-change coal mine, and the deleterious effect of warming oceans on coral reefs hinge on their relationship with their symbiotic algae. Overwarm water stresses algae; the corals spit them out—that’s what coral bleaching is—and become weakened, often fatally. Coral-reef scientists were discussing this in the 1980s and 1990s, so I had an early window on one of the ways that climate change was reshaping our world.

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:
Listen Up!

James Patrick Kelly

I do not have many recurring nightmares, but in one that continues to horrify me, I am backstage at a theater watching a play. Suddenly the flustered stage manager braces me. “So-and-so didn’t show up,” she says. “You have to go on for him!”

Quaking, I reply, “But . . . but . . . but I’m not an actor. I don’t know the part.”

“That’s okay, they’ll cover for you,” she says, even as she pushes me from the wings.

As I stand blinking on the brightly lit stage, one of the actors turns to me. “So, there you are,” he says, “what news on the Rialto?” In my dream, he delivers this line with a kind of smirking malevolence. As the audience and all the other actors stare at me, I have no idea what to say. The silence stretches until it begins to sound like a scream.

Then I wake up.

Which explains why I’ve never summoned the courage to act, even though I think I’d be good at it. In compensation, however, I have developed a side career as a playwright.

Over the years I’ve found another workaround that doesn’t require knowing and remembering lines. I began my career as a reader as a stay-at-home dad, reading Clifford, The Big Red Dog and The Cat In The Hat to my kids. When we graduated to the Oz series, I began to do voices. I remember casting the Wizard as a very broad W.C. Fields and the Scarecrow as Ernie from Sesame Street. And it was about this time I began going to science fiction conventions and discovered, to my immense surprise, that fans would show up at readings to hear me pretend to be the characters in my stories. Readings soon became my favorite part of cons—and still are.

But it’s not only my own readings that I enjoy. I’ve always loved the spoken word, although my devotion to the form was thwarted by technologies of the latter half of the twentieth century. LP records, for example, were useless for listening to stories and novels; the rewards for sitting next to the stereo were brutal abridgments or disappointing excerpts. The cassette tapes of the ’80’s were a great leap forward, bringing entire novels to the Sony Walkman and its knockoffs, although I’d have to lug around a binder filled with up to a dozen cassettes. And all too often I’d be listening to tape number eight when suddenly the narrator would start talking backward and stop. Ejecting the cassette, I’d find the tape unspooled into a knot of iron-oxide spaghetti.

The compact discs of the ’90’s were only a slight improvement: again with those protective binders and fingerprints on their vulnerable surfaces meant skipping scenes or even entire chapters. Of course, audiobooks on CDs are still with us, but disruptive cultural and technological forces of the 21st Century are squeezing them into the narrowest of niches.

You’ve probably heard it said that the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the IBM System/360 that NASA engineers used on the Apollo missions. But did you know that it’s more powerful than the famous Cray-2 which debuted in 1985 or the Deep Blue supercomputer which stymied chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? Your “phone” is now your camera and photo archive, your address book, your appointment calendar, a shopping mall, a flashlight, a compass, a map of the world, this issue of Clarkesworld, and the soundtrack of your life. The era of smartphones has brought about a Golden Age of the spoken word. Beginning with the new medium of podcasting in 2004 and continuing with the emergence of Audible.com as a mainstream source of downloadable books in 2008, we have in 2017 arrived at a sweet spot of new audio technology and evolving listener behavior. Say goodbye to bulky binders, tangles of ruined tape, and scratched polycarbonate.

Capitalism has responded to the burgeoning downloadable audio marketplace with a flood of talent and content. Audiobooks are by far the brightest sector of publishing. The Audio Publishers Association estimates that 2016 sales were up about 18% over 2015—and 2015 was a banner year! Overall sales were estimated at $2.1 billion, 82% of which were digital downloads. Not only can you find your favorite authors in audio, but you can find many of your favorite actors. You can listen to The Handmaid’s Tale read by Claire Danes, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Peter Pan read by Tim Curry, and The Odyssey read by Ian McKellen.

But look past the glitz of bestselling authors and celebrity readers, and you’ll see the real story. All across the world people like you and I are recording audiobooks and stories. Ten years ago, I was doing panels at conventions, often with the Clarkesworld’s fabulous Kate Baker, explaining how anyone could learn to create original audio content. You don’t need to book time in some expensive studio. I’ve recorded hundreds of hours of audio for Audible in my walk-in closet, surrounded by my sweaters and speaking into a $200 microphone connected to a laptop. You don’t have to be a tech wizard to do this; while mastering the recording hardware and software was a chore, it was well within the abilities of this English major. And never once have I gone up on my lines while emoting in the safety of my closet. My sweaters don’t care if I mess up. Tech has trumped my actor’s nightmare.

Why, it’s a science fiction miracle!

Since I’ve been paid for reading my own stuff, I guess that makes me a professional narrator. But I can’t help feeling like an imposter when I listen to other, more talented, narrators do their thing. Because I do listen to a lot of audio. Aside from all the great science fiction and fantasy stories available here and elsewhere, I was an early subscriber at Audible and have been listening to two books a month since 2002. All that listening over the years has led me to wonder if there is something more to soaring audiobook sales than just a technological breakthrough. So, let me share a couple of insights from my years of sitting on both sides of the microphone.

Back in the ’90s, I participated in various web symposia about the coming of e-books. Many pundits insisted that the design superiority of paper books meant that e-books were nothing but a fad. Print books were tactile objects, they said, rhapsodizing about the smell of paper and texture of the page and the heft of a hardcover. Each edition of a print book was unique and permanent. E-books, as we now know them, are virtual objects. On your e-reader, every book presents as evanescent phosphers on a screen.

Their lack of context leaves some feeling dehumanized. But if you want a portable digital book with the human touch, not only one that you can take with you on a plane or to the beach, but one that you can enjoy while you’re gardening or driving, then digital audiobooks are for you. Your delight will flow not only from the mind of the writer, but from the voice and personality of the reader. This intimate and very human connection is as old and powerful as storytelling itself. Moreover, not only is every edition of an audiobook unique, but an essential quality to this individuality means you can enjoy the same text read by different narrators. The Harry Potter series was read for the US editions by Jim Dale, who won multiple Audies (the audiobook equivalent of the Hugos) for his performances. In the UK, it was read by the incomparable Stephen Fry.

This summer Mother Go, my new novel, was published as an audiobook original by Audible. It’s a book I wrote to be read aloud and indeed, many fans have heard me read bits of it at cons. However, I never once thought of narrating it myself. In part this is because the book is from the point of view of a young woman living on the Moon a hundred years from now and it needed a woman’s voice. Besides, I’m fine reading my short stories, but this novel needed a real pro, and I was lucky to get one of Audible’s best, January LaVoy, herself a multiple Audie winner, most recently in 2016 for reading on Libba Bray’s Lair of Dreams.

Many of my writer pals have an uneasy relationship with the audio versions of their works. They tell me that they don’t care to listen, because the narrator doesn’t say the lines the way they heard them in their heads when they were writing. I do and I don’t get this. When I publish something in print, I’m pretty much sick of looking at it. It might be years, if ever, before I can stand to read it again. But hearing my work read by talents like Mss. LaVoy and Baker is not only a pleasure, but also a way to discover things about it I never knew.

So yeah, I’m a spoken word fan and I’m guessing you are too. And for people like us, in this regard at least, we are living in the best of times!

About the Author

James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did his story “10^16 to 1,” in 2000. Kelly’s first solo novel, Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by the solo novels, Look Into the Sun and Wildside, as well as the chapbook novella, Burn. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur and Strange But Not a Stranger. His most recent book are a series of anthologies co-edited with John Kessel: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

Editor’s Desk:
The Voice in the Shadows

Neil Clarke

Most months, I struggle to find what I want to write about in these editorials. It doesn’t seem to matter whether or not I’ve had time to think or if I feel rushed by a hectic schedule. The anxiety when writing these or an introduction brings everything to a crashing halt. I’ve been trying to work my way through this difficulty and only recently started drawing the parallels to public speaking. I don’t know why it didn’t strike me sooner. Both involve sharing words with a crowd of people. It is that feeling of claustrophobia that wakes up the little bullied kid that lives in the shadows of my mind. “Don’t draw attention.” “It’s safer in the shadows.” “They will hurt you.”

I started my career in academia in the late 80s. As someone in technology, I anticipated being behind-the-scenes most of the time, but within a couple of years, I was the director of a growing department at a time of great change in both technology and education. The price was having to put myself out there. Small meetings were never a problem, but soon I was expected to give talks about our program at admissions events, large lecture halls filled with prospective students and their parents. To get the grants I needed to fulfill our goals, I’d have to make presentations and consult at other universities. Although I was confident in my command of the information I had to share, it was never comfortable or easy for me.

I don’t remember when I was first invited to be a panelist at a science fiction convention, but it was within the last ten years. I know I felt completely unqualified to be there, but the crowds were smaller and I wouldn’t be up there alone. Whatever I said on those panels was sufficient enough to keep receiving program participant invites, but I was convinced that they simply hadn’t caught onto how unqualified I was. Being wrong was never something I was afraid of—I was afraid of the crowd and what they might do.

It would be a few more years and a couple of awards before I’d begin to accept that maybe I did belong. I was able to add to the conversation and at worst, I’d learn something in the process. As I stopped listening to the little voice in the shadows, the audience started feeling less like a potential angry mob—something they had never given me reason to believe. Of course, there was a heart attack in there somewhere and that changed a lot of things for me as well.

In the last few years, I’ve felt a lot more relaxed. It still makes me uncomfortable, but between coping mechanisms and a little faith in my fellow fan, I’m able to look the part. In October, I was a Guest of Honor with Ken Liu at Capclave in Gaithersburg, MD. It’s something I don’t think I could have done even three years ago. Someone there noted that they were in a workshop I had done there a few years earlier and how much more relaxed I appeared to be. That served as a sort of a-ha! moment for me. Nearly thirty years later, I can finally pass as a functioning but exhausted human being while doing three days of panels.

My first Clarkesworld editorial didn’t show up until issue 21 (June 2008)—the same issue that launched our podcast. They didn’t become a regular thing until much later. Even with the increased frequency and the occasional anthology introduction, I figure that I have a good ten to fifteen years of practice to go. I apologize in advance for everything that comes between now and then, but will try to have something really awesome to make up for it on the tail end.

Have a great November and thank you for reading Clarkesworld!

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 this month. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Homecoming 2

Jonas De Ro

About the Artist

Jonas De Ro is a digital artist involved in freelance and in-house concept art, design and illustration for film and games. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.