The Rains on Mars

Natalia Theodoridou

My shoulder hurts as if a handful of rusted nails have burrowed into my joint. Novak’s driving isn’t helping; the rover is jumping over the rough terrain, giving us all a good shake, especially the three of us sitting in the back. Ray and I are strapped in, but London is sprawled out, defying regulations, her helmet at her side, her breathing calm, as if she was born to live here, born to do this, never mind the terrain, the sky, the air.

We’re on our way out of the Valles Marineris main base, which means our own work stabilizing the central tubes will have to wait. But we go where we’re needed. It’s the base in Melas Chasma this time—the drilling team that works the Melas tunnel think there’s an ice plug in their way and they don’t have the expertise to drain it safely. If they’re not careful, the equipment might melt the ice and flood the tunnel or, worse, cause it to collapse, delaying the colony plans for months. That’s the kind of thing we’re for. Delicate work, the kind of work you need a good, level head on your shoulders to do well.

Another bump sends a jolt of pain down my arm, slicing me from shoulder to wrist. “Hey, Novak, take it easy!” I bark. London looks at me and laughs, her teeth the yellow of Martian sky. “What’s wrong, Mackintosh?” she asks. “Mars too much for ya? Need me to show you how to man up?”

Yulev reaches over from the co-driver’s seat and pokes Novak in the ribs. “He’s right, man,” he says, tender even in his reproach, his accent rolling over his consonants like a pebble drifting downstream. “The terrain is bumpy, but it’s not that bumpy.” None of that has any effect on Novak, who simply grunts and keeps steering the rover ahead like a pirate ship on rough seas.

Ray gives me one of their looks, the ones that make me think they’ve known me for years when I’ve only been here a few months. I can see their eyes behind the raised visor of their helmet, dark and full of concern. “Hang in there,” they say. “It’ll ease up as soon as we get to the forest.” They point out the window, and I can almost make out its wind turbines in the distance, silhouetted against the butterscotch sky, a white artificial forest, its trees fruiting with blades.

I lean as close to the window as my helmet will allow. The sun is high, small, the land vast. I take it all in: the sinuous ridges, the ghosts of seas, the barren rock, the red, red dust. I let it steal my breath away for a moment. Is this what you wanted, brother? Would it have made you happy if you could see this?

Ray places their hand on my knee. The skintight suit numbs me to their touch, but I can still feel it somewhere far, far away. “What are you thinking of, Mac?” Ray asks.

What am I thinking of?

I’m thinking of the dry land that stretches out for miles and miles in front of me. I’m thinking of the rain, back home, ever falling, inescapable. I’m thinking of a body, left out on Mars’ surface, alone, taking forever to decompose.

I say none of that.

“Nothing,” I say instead. “Enjoying the view. That’s all.”

Our team hasn’t been together that long, but we’ve already figured out our flow, a procedure that works for off-base call-outs, is efficient, and avoids any stepped-on toes. Ray, by far the most experienced one, an orphan raised by the State to lead teams just like this one, oversees the work and handles the extraction process from the surface. Novak helps them install the pipes, hauls around equipment, and drives the rover. London is in charge of the pump. Yulev and I work down in the tubes, manning the drill that will liquefy the ice, making and sealing the boreholes, installing the reservoir for the outflow to be collected. We’re a well-oiled machine.

Down in the holes, Mars almost slips my mind. I imagine myself back on Earth in a hole much like this one, Robin working next to me, not talking, just being together, two brothers in the same underground womb, looking out for each other. The rock and the mud close in around me and I let go of everything, forget all about the surface. The hole is all there is. The Earth rumbles under my feet, saying, watch out all you want. You’re only guests here.

Yulev pulls my attention back to this hole, right now, his voice loud in my helmet comms. He’s talking about his kids again while sealing the hole for the outflow to be pumped through. He goes on and on about how he’s here just for a couple of years so he can make a good haul for his family back on Earth. I almost think he’s going to drop the sealant and whip out a couple of mugshots of his brats to show me.

“Don’t you ever think about having kids, Mackintosh?” he asks.

“Me? No,” I say. “I got myself snipped as soon as I could.”

“What? No, man, why would you do that?” He gives me such a look of shock that now I’m really worried he’ll drop the equipment or do some sudden movement that will end with both of us engulfed in the icy embrace of a Martian flood.

I shrug. My shoulder reminds me this was a foolish thing to do. “Every girlfriend I told seemed pretty happy about it, and the rest didn’t care either way.” I glance at him. “Besides, would you really want to see my ugly mug on a kid?”

“No, you don’t know what you’re talking about, man, children are joy,” he says, his voice full of a dreamy ache that rubs on me like gravel. “No matter what shit’s going on over here, I know they’re out there, I know they’re safe, and my heart is full.”

Back at Mariner base, we pass through the dust shower as quickly as we can, and then everyone rushes to their comms suites to check for messages from Earth. Yulev can barely hold it together every time his girls kiss the screen goodnight. We all love him for it—even as we pretend not to notice when he sobs into his pillow for a few minutes before going to sleep. London gets messages from her elderly mother once or twice a week. Even Novak the Brute has a family that cares enough to get in touch now and then.

Ray and I don’t bother checking. We go straight to our bunks in the dorm.

I try to get out of my suit and wince as pain slices my shoulder joint like a red-hot knife going through butter. “God dammit. God bloody dammit.”

“Here, let me help you with that,” Ray says. They come up to me and stand behind me. Their breath is hot on my neck as they gently peel the suit off me, its alloys maintaining the memory of my shape like a ghost, the afterthought of a body crumpling to the floor. 

“You need to get that shoulder of yours checked,” Ray says. “See about fixing it, or I’ll be in trouble.” They look me in the eyes. “How did you get that injury anyway? If it happened here, I need to know about it.” They try to sound professional, but something else, something caring seeps through. Perhaps that’s also part of their training. Be sensitive to discomfort, anticipate problems, save your team’s life. “You know, I’m responsible for stuff like that.”

I point at the wall by their bed. “How come you don’t have any photos up there?” I ask. You’re such a poor conversationalist, brother, I almost hear Robin’s voice mock me. Can’t even get deflection right. “I mean, I know about your parents, but siblings? Friends? Someone special?”

“You don’t either,” Ray says. I’m now entirely released from my suit, but Ray is still standing behind me close, too close, not close enough. I can feel the heat coming off their body, their face, their hands.

“That’s not an answer,” I reply.

“You didn’t answer me either,” they say. Their voice is soft and low, as if talking to a wounded animal. “About your shoulder.”

I shake my head and say: “Nah, don’t worry about it, it’s an old injury. From a coal mine back home. Beam fell on it.” I rub the joint, laugh. “Must be the weather’s changing. Might rain.”

This is what I don’t say: Someone I owed a lot of money to twisted my arm behind my back and held it there while his buddies beat my brother to death in the middle of the street, right outside our house. It was raining that day, like every day. And my brother looked at me as they were killing him, not accusing, but as if to say It’s okay, brother. No sweat. I’m going willingly, brother, don’t cry.

Ray laughs, the sound edged with nerves. “Do you miss it, Earth? Do you ever think it was a mistake to come here?”

I turn around to look at them, my bare torso almost touching theirs. “Is this genuine concern?” I snap. “Or are you running another one of those psych evaluations the bosses have you do?”

“Mac . . . ” they start, but I cut them off.

Too close.

“What is it you want to know exactly? All these little questions all these months, all casual like, do you think I don’t notice? This is the story: I didn’t have much going for me on Earth, saw the posters one night, might have been wasted, I don’t recall, you know the ones, MARS NEEDS YOU, finger pointing right at your chest and so forth. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Spoke to the heart and the pocket. What more is there to ask for, right? Signed up.” Ran from the rain. Tried to live out Robin’s dream of Mars. “Here I am. That’s all there is to it. Nothing to go back to.”

“Mac, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . . ” Ray starts again, but I raise my hand and back away from them, their skin, their concern.

I’m not here for this. I don’t get to have this.

I pull on a Tee and some shorts and run away, through the dorms, to the lounge, to the exit shaft, my skin crawling, my eyes stinging. I stand next to the surface monitor. The sun is coming down, has almost set, yellow on yellow, haloed with blue, not a cloud in sight. Is this what you dreamed of, brother? The only place it never rains.

And yet. All I can see. All I can think.

I try to apologize the next morning as we’re heading for the tunnels, but Ray smiles and tells me not to worry about it.

We’re working on the main base today, taking care of stretches with too many structural problems for the boring machines to deal with, so we head straight to our tubes. One day, all the tunnels, the Mariner base, the Melas, the Eos, will be connected, minimizing surface exposure for everyone in the colony. An underground city burrowed in Mars’ belly, or that’s what they tell us anyway. Some rich guy’s dream, sure, but something worth dreaming of ourselves, something worth working for, a change, a future.

We walk from our base to the intersection where we’ll split up, me, Yulev, and London to one tube, Novak and Ray to another. No need to climb to the surface today, maybe not even for a long time, unless they hit another iffy patch at one of the smaller bases. I surprise myself, catch me wishing for some incident that would force the regolith to spit me out, as if my body aches to ascend to the surface, my skin hungering for the rusty sky, the crushing void. That won’t do. Not today. Not ever. I shrug it off.

Ray is walking next to me, our shoulders almost touching, and I have this lump in my throat, a tangle of words hard enough to choke me. I cough. The lump won’t budge. But words come easy to Ray, and I always think I don’t know how they do it, even though every time it’s as simple as asking: “What are you thinking, Mac?”

I flex my arms like an ape. “I’m itching to drill some good holes today,” I try to joke. I sound too much like Novak. More than I intended anyway.

I don’t say: I think of the sounds of the tunnels back on Earth, the men covered in coal dust, my brother breathing with the voice of the mine. And for some reason that makes me think of the men in my old gym, all razor eyes and clad in steel, pumping hard, sweating toxic, then weeping in the bathrooms when the hot water ever so slightly softened their skin.

Ray shakes their head disapprovingly even as they chuckle at my sorry attempt at bravado. We’re almost at the intersection. They squeeze my shoulder, the one that doesn’t hurt. “Have fun down there today, yeah?” they say. They don’t say: Be careful.

I nod. “Always.” We part ways.

Yulev walks ahead, mapping the area we need to secure. I follow with the drill perched on my shoulder and London brings up the rear lugging the support rods and stabilizing material.

We set up the rods and Yulev gives me the go-ahead. He flashes me the reading with the recommended drill depth and I start drilling carefully into the sidewalls, shallow borehole after shallow borehole, making a sieve for the stabilizing material to be injected into the arch of the tunnel. My shoulder stabs me with short, regular bursts of pain, but I don’t care. I let myself be lost in that rhythm, the ebb and flow of hurt. Savor it.

Then I notice the liquid running down my visor, clear as raindrops. “What the hell?” I mutter.

“What’s up?” Yulev asks, his voice far away.

I disengage one hand from the drill to wipe the liquid away, and then I see that there is water coming down all over us, Yulev and London both drenched in rain, water pooling by our feet, dousing our machines, our suits. It’s raining in the tunnel. It’s fucking raining in the tunnel.

“Are you seeing this?” I ask Yulev, my voice frantic and a little shrill, but he seems confused, like he doesn’t understand, like he can’t see or doesn’t care about this freaky, impossible rain.

“What are you doing, man?” he asks back, suddenly alarmed. He flashes another reading at me, and I can’t even see it through my rain-streaked visor but I know I’ve drilled past the safety depth. “What are you doing?” Yulev asks again. His voice is tinted with panic.

“For fuck’s sake, stop!” London shouts.

Cold sweat breaks all over my body as I look up to face the drill that’s still going. I feel the stone give, the crack expand.

I step away. I should have stopped sooner. Should have felt the fault in the stone. Should have warned them. I yell at them to move, but it’s too late. The crack radiates all the way to the other side, blooming over Yulev’s head. The support rods are not enough to contain that kind of damage. The right side of the tunnel collapses. Yulev is there one moment and the next he’s gone, buried under a pile of rock.

London grabs me from behind and pulls me back, clear of the rubble. “What the fuck did you do?” she screams at me. She drops me to the floor and starts pulling at the rubble, fighting to get to Yulev. We can hear him breathing through the comms.

It’s still raining when Ray’s voice spills over our comms channel, ordering us to evacuate the tunnel before it comes down on the rest of us. The crack I hit has reached all the way to the surface.

I have to tear London from the rubble. We fall back. Leave Yulev behind, all alone, his comms silent now. Can’t even hear his breath.

As we make our way back, I think of the surface again. I’m standing on top of some peak, a volcano as old as the world, overlooking everything, and above it and above me a great, red, dusty rain that consumes us all.

The medics give us a quick but thorough check and discharge us in under thirty minutes. Both London and I are fine. Ray meets us in the lounge to tell us what we already know. Yulev’s gone. They’re sending an extraction team to retrieve his body as we speak.

I look at my hands, wet with water. I look around me, at the pouring rain. The entire base is drenched. The tables, the chairs, the monitors, Ray. Their hair is wet, raindrops running down their face and they don’t even notice it. 

“Are you okay, Mac?” they ask.

It must be their tone that sets London off. “Are you serious, Ray?” she shouts. “This motherfucker was acting like an idiot and now Yulev is dead and you’re asking him if he’s okay? I sure hope he’s not!” She moves towards me and grabs me by the neckhole of my Tee. “I’ll fucking kill you for this, you incompetent piece of shit,” she breathes on my face. 

Novak takes a few steps forward but doesn’t try to stop her, like he hasn’t quite made up his mind about where he stands on all of this.

“London,” Ray says, their voice calm but firm. They come between us, put a steady hand on London’s back until she releases me. “Leave us, please,” Ray says. “Let me do my job.”

London turns to look at Ray in the eyes. “Will you, though?” She scoffs. “Soft spots notwithstanding?”

“London, please,” is all Ray needs to say.

As soon as she and Novak are gone, Ray takes my hand and sits me on the lounger.

I keep my eyes on the surface monitor, on the rain raging outside, soaking the land, a private thunderstorm just for me, flooding the world, flattening it and me and us and you, red mud indifferent to your hurt, your death, your mistakes.

“What happened back there, Mac?” Ray asks. “Was there anything wrong with the equipment, or the readings? Did something distract you?”

I shake my head, hide my face in my palms, the rain coming down, relentless, unstoppable, cold as ever.

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, Mac.”

Do I tell them? Do I tell them how their face looks streaked with the rains of Mars?

I look at the monitor again, the indifferent land, the cold mud.

“What’s going to happen to Yulev?” I ask.

Ray hesitates. “We’ll cremate his body,” they say after a few moments.

We should leave him out there, to this land that doesn’t care enough to break your body apart. We shouldn’t send ashes back to his children.

Ray looks at me sharply. “What did you say?” they ask.

Did I say that out loud?

“I’m sorry,” I say. I ran from the rain. Didn’t escape. Dead boys’ dreams don’t change a thing. “I’m so sorry.”

London and Novak come for me the same night, after Yulev’s body is incinerated and packaged for transit on the next shuttle back to Earth. They don’t say a word. I am lying in my bunk, my mattress soaking wet, the rain falling on my closed eyes. No matter what I do, the rain will keep falling. I open my mouth and can feel the rainwater on my lips, my tongue, running down my throat, speaking the cold of Mars. Give up, it says. It’s all right. Nothing matters.

I keep my eyes shut when Novak grabs me and drags me to the middle of the room. I do not resist. No struggle. Not anymore. Struggle is only for the ones who should go on. London holds me upright, twisting both my arms behind my back, as if she needs to, as if I’m going to put up a fight. I feel my shoulders pop in London’s steel grip as Novak punches me in the face, the chest, the stomach. I can’t help but try to double over, the taste of blood on my tongue, a little burned and a little metallic, like what that astronaut said space smells like once, back when guys like him were a rarity, back when nobody had died on Mars. I open my eyes. London unfolds me again and punches the small of my back, my legs, my ribs. My knees buckle. Novak’s skin glistens with rain. Is Ray here? I’m afraid to look. Are they watching this? Trying to decide whether they should stop it, or whether I deserve it?

When Novak gets tired of beating me, he collapses on the floor, exhausted. London gives me one last kick and leans against the wall, spent, finally allowing me to fall. I find myself on top of Novak, in his arms, an almost-embrace. We are both panting, rainwater pooling around us. My shoulder hurts. Everything hurts. I feel Novak’s chest rising and falling. I think of the indifferent land. So much hurt and none of it matters. Rain is running down Novak’s cheeks. I reach up and touch his face and I want to tell him, don’t cry. Mars doesn’t care, brother, don’t cry.

I never find out if there are consequences to what London and Novak did to me, but I hope there aren’t. They let me recover in the infirmary. I have my own room. Is that for my protection, I wonder? Did the other teams hear of what I did, what I caused, and are itching to get their hands on me too? Is Ray standing guard outside, trying to stop them from getting to me?

The rain here starts and stops, irregular like the beating of my heart, the antiseptic smell of the room overwhelmed by the scent of damp soil. I drift in and out of consciousness. I think of volcanoes, crevasses, seas past, resurrected, canals filled with rain.

One time, I see Ray standing over my bed. “What are you thinking of, Mac?” I think they say, but maybe they don’t say anything at all.

I answer anyway.

I’m thinking of my own father, who was the kind of person that could weep because of a verse he read and which made him feel like a child nobody loved, or like the world was too much, too violent, too loud, too joyous, just all too much.

And I’m thinking of how many places in the universe there still are where nobody has ever died yet and of how fortunate this makes us, but only us, the childless ones holding the ghosts of our children by the hand, safely unborn, and of how unfortunate it makes everyone else, how much untapped opportunity for pain the universe still holds.

And I’m not thinking of Yulev’s children, or of their father’s ashes in a box.

When I open my eyes again, Ray’s gone.

The next time I see Ray, I’m discharged and back in my bunk. They knock on the door lightly before walking into the room, even though they don’t have to.

They come to tell me I’m off the team, off the mission. London blamed me and my incompetence in her statement and the company didn’t ask any more questions because that meant they’re not liable. And I am to blame, aren’t I?

I’m to be sent back to Earth. On my own dime, too. Only fair. To do what? Ray can’t answer that, and neither can I, because who knows, and who cares.

Ray sits next to me on the bed and takes my hands in their own. Their skin is cold and wet.

“I’m so sorry, Mac,” they say.

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

They lean over and kiss my lips so lightly it really feels like goodbye.

I cup their face. Rain sliding down their hair, their cheeks, over my fingers.

“You’re crying,” they say.

Am I?

No, it’s just the way the rain hits me, you see? Like this.

The rain stops falling as soon as the shuttle takes off, but I can still feel it on the inside of my skin, pooling, flooding the gaps within.

Nobody talks to me for the entire trip. Ten days, fifteen, twenty-five. Almost there now. I don’t think of Yulev’s ashes on the ship with me. I think of Robin when we were little and the Mars project was just starting. We sat on the roof on a clear night when it wasn’t raining and he looked up at the little red dot in the sky and said he would like to die there one day. I punched him because I thought he said he wanted to die. I was never one for nuance. I imagine Robin on the ship with me, looking back at Earth this time. Time to let go of the red now, brother, he says, get on board with the blue. Then I forget how to speak for a while.

My shoulder hurts. The rains don’t come back.

On Earth, I realize there’s no need for me to go back to where I came from, so I pick a mining town in the south, dry as a stone, no cloud in the sky, days blue as they come.

I use what’s left of my small Martian salary to pay for a cheap motel and I make that my home, sparse and unremarkable in every way but its stubbornness to still feel not-lived-in, foreign, no matter how long I live in it. I even have a window I refuse to look out of.

Using my credit means the people I owe probably know I’m back. They might look for me, eventually, or they might not, might figure they’ve already taken away enough for me to turn on my heels and flee the planet. Don’t know, don’t really care. Let them come. There’s space for everyone over here on this side of the void.

I meet my neighbors at the motel. They change every week or so. I remember how to speak again. I tell everyone I was a miner on Mars. That I got my brother killed, and then I got someone’s father killed because I thought I’d escaped even as I couldn’t let go. None of my neighbors are very impressed, but a few ask if I brought any red dust from Mars back with me. “Only the one in my lungs,” I say, and they laugh. I try to show them, bare my chest, claw at my skin. The company didn’t let me keep my suit, otherwise I’d show them that too. I finally don’t cry, brother, I don’t.

Sooner or later I’ll get a job in the mines here, but not yet. My face is healing nicely and my ribs hurt only when I breathe. The shoulder sometimes turns an angry red. It glows in the dark, like a planet.

A month passes, two months, three. I buy a battered old laptop and set it up on the single table in the room.

There’s a message from Ray on my work account. It’s a minor miracle it hasn’t been deactivated yet.

Ray talks about the mission, about London and Novak, who are still raw from what happened but apparently found love when they joined fists over my bleeding jaw. There are two new members on the team, one lad, one girl, so far so good, but they can’t carry the drill like I did. Ray pauses at that, realizing what they said, no need to say more.

“Are you doing okay?” they ask instead. “I’m thinking of you.” They pause, a finger tracing a ghost around their lips. There’s nothing else to say, so they close with: “What are you thinking of, Mac?”

The message ends.

The room is dark.

What am I thinking of?

I look into the camera and hit record.

I used to have all these thoughts. I used to play the scene in my head, think of what I could have said to change things, what I could have done differently. Used to think of breaking things, fixing things. But all that’s over now. There are some planets you can never flee.

“My heart is light, Ray,” I say into the microphone. So everything is simple now. “Be happy.”

Now I think only of the rains on Mars.

About the Author

Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar and a writer of strange stories. Her work has appeared in Apex, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, sub-Q, and elsewhere. She is also the dramaturge of Adrift Performance Makers (@AdriftPM), with whom she blends interactive fiction and immersive, digital performance. She lives in Devon, UK. Occasionally, she tweets as @natalia_theodor.

Crossing LaSalle

Lettie Prell

Mara inched forward in the line, painfully aware she looked out of place. She didn’t belong here, with old people in wheelchairs and on gurneys, being pushed along by their relatives, who looked at her and frowned. She wasn’t like the younger people in the line, either, bald from chemotherapy treatments, or coughing up dark stains into handkerchiefs, fragile skin yellowed or pocked. Mara was neither bald nor thin. She brushed a long lock of wavy dark hair behind her ear self-consciously. She clutched her paper form in her other hand—why it had to be printed, she didn’t know—worried that by the time she reached the front of the line it would be disintegrating from her sweat, from the creases she was making in it because of her nervousness.

There were only nine people ahead of her, and twelve behind her, some accompanied by relatives, but it felt like hundreds, like an infinite line that stretched in both directions. She was startled when the line parted like a curtain, the people in front moving to the left and right as more officials were added to the counter. She found herself staring at an older woman with stray red hairs escaping her loose updo, who was looking at her expectantly over the top of her rimless eyeglasses.

Mara’s case suddenly and starkly bared, words stuck in her throat. She fumbled with the form and handed it to the official, who opened it, revealing the checked boxes and printed narrative at the bottom, its one-inch margins, double-spaced, containing Mara’s four reasons for her request.

Reason number one. She didn’t want to die.

Reason number two. If she waited till she was older or got sick, she may not have this opportunity. This option may become unavailable due to shifting policies or unforeseen circumstances.

Reason number three. Overpopulation was taxing the earth’s resources. By being allowed to make this choice, she would be doing her part for climate change, greenhouse gasses, and pollution.

Reason number four. Ahead lay an exciting world of opportunity. She wanted to be part of it.

Watching the woman read, wearing a neutral expression, made Mara’s face grow hot. Maybe her writing was too passionate, or too political, or both. Shifting policies and unforeseen circumstances were euphemisms for the possibility that the tables could turn any instant, and slam the door in her face.

The official turned over the page and glanced at the blank side. Then she looked up at Mara. “You don’t have any affidavits attached.”

Mara blinked. “I’m not sick. It said online they’re not required if—”

“I’ll tell you what’s required. We need affidavits from your medical doctor and a mental health professional. Also your birth certificate so we can verify your age.”

Mara didn’t know if she had a copy of her birth certificate. She looked away, toward the group moving out the glass doors and onto an unmarked gray transport bus. Another set of people heading for safety.

She stood straighter, emboldened. “And when I bring all that back, my application will be approved?”

The woman’s expression seemed to harden, become not just judgmental, but contemptuous. “Your application doesn’t demonstrate high need. You’ll be assigned a priority number.”

Mara hadn’t heard of priority numbers. People were supposed to come in, be processed, and get on the bus to the Newbody Zone. She jabbed a finger at the people slowly filing out the door. “Would the priority number allow me onto that bus?”

“Honestly? No. But you’d go on the list. Discussion continues regarding applicants such as yourself.”

“What’s there to discuss? And what do you mean, applicants like me?”

The official flipped the form across the counter at Mara. “This isn’t some video game. This is forever. Next!”

Mara was angry now. This was so typical of older people, to discount Mara’s entire generation. If anything, her age group was more capable of adapting to the future.

Mara could’ve made a stand, given a whole speech, protested. She could’ve tried to jump into the line for the transport bus. Instead, she left and hopped the Pink Line back to Pilsen, to Heart of Italy and the two-bedroom walk-up she shared with her roommates, Enrico and Remmy.

It didn’t take Mara long to find the community of people who’d also pulled the wrong priority number. They used the hashtag #InLimboChicago, and once approved, she was granted access to their secure chat. Just as she’d suspected, they were mainly her age, thirty-somethings who weren’t suffering from some terminal disease. It was an active group, with more than twenty online at the moment.

They don’t know what to do with us, wrote @HarryOakPark. Our lives don’t have a set expiration date yet.

Mara was lying on the couch in the apartment, her left leg slung over the top of the headrest. Her half-drunk Mountain Dew was sweating a circle onto the smudged glass of the cocktail table. The television took up the other side of the room, with barely enough space to inch past into the tiny kitchen or the hallway to the bathroom and bedrooms.

We’re low-wage slaves, replied @MPoweredGrrl. This sparked a deluge of comment from others.

Using our bodies to fuel the meat-based economy.

They’re still not sure about letting a corporation kill us. That’s how they see it. Murder.

If that’s true and I’m not saying it is. But if it is, one has to question their morality. They let the old and sick go. Expendable lives?

They’re in denial. The singularity will not be televised.

The singularity is privatized. It’s happening in different ways.

I heard there’s a computer in Houston, @HarryOakPark wrote. It’s run by a place called PHI. Post-Human Incorporated. Maybe we can get in on their system.

They’re only taking scientists. The brain trust.

Elitists, wrote @MPoweredGrrl. Screw ‘em.

Wait. Is the Newbody place downloading minds? Or giving people newbodies?

Newbodies.

How would we know? They haven’t been letting information out of the Zone.

Mara jumped in, typing swiftly using her four-finger method. The official who bounced my application said this isn’t a video game. It was so offensive being told that!

They could be downloading, then. There’s been talk. It’s getting real.

Don’t be so sure. A remark like that could mean newbodies just as easily.

Or nothing, @MPoweredGrrl wrote. Just a cruel comment.

The door burst open. Seeing it was Enrico, Mara closed the app and pretended to check email. Enrico peeled off his black baseball jacket and dropped it on the cocktail table. The logo on the jacket’s back, a red heart with a green oak tree growing up its middle, stared back at her accusingly. Love Life. It was the sign of the Newbody protestors, the people who’d rather stop the transport vehicles to the Newbody Zone altogether, even for the dying. The group that a year ago were considered terrorists, before they’d negotiated themselves into legitimacy.

Mara could never tell Enrico about her application, and her encounter with the official. They were on opposite sides of the biggest political divide she’d ever known. She looked up at him and made her voice casual. “Hey. What’s up?”

Enrico was already in the tiny galley kitchen, a matter of five steps. His body was hidden by the opened refrigerator door, his head haloed by the round window behind him. They’d frosted the glass with a spray-on product to hide the view of the brick wall beyond.

“Not much. Work-work. Seeing Cecily later on. There’s no hard cider left.”

“Text Remmy. They’re stopping at the store for more ramen, anyway.”

Enrico slouched in the doorway with one of Mara’s pop cans in his hand. “How’s the job hunt coming?”

“Well, you know. Promising.”

“Liar.”

Mara stared down at her blank screen. “I went to a tech company today but they didn’t have any openings. I couldn’t get in.” That was very nearly a true statement.

Enrico nodded and took a swig of pop. “Everyone wants into tech, but the information age runs on top of the industrial age, which runs on top of the agrarian. Jobs are being squeezed at all levels, sure. But widening your scope should turn up something.”

She nodded, humoring him. She’d been fired from her job at the group home for troubled girls two months ago. She wasn’t suited to dealing with people in crisis like that. Drug addiction, broken homes, abuse. She’d rather geek out on a line of code.

He came over, sat down cross-legged on the rug and set his Dew on the cocktail table. “You’re looking really serious all of a sudden. What’re you thinking?”

Her jaw tightened. “Nothing. Just maybe I should be looking at going into something like insurance.” Enrico worked in a cubicle farm at an insurance company.

He took another huge swallow of Dew, wincing it down. “Wrong time to jump in. Not hiring.”

She’d meant her comment to be sarcastic, and his helpful tone only underscored Mara’s recurring resentment. She took comfort that insurance was one of the troubled industries right now. Why buy life insurance when you intend to take advantage of the new options? Enrico was probably in the protest movement because to be otherwise would be against his profession.

She rose. “Here, I’ll let you have the couch.”

“Thanks.” He heaved a big ahh of satisfaction as he took her seat. “Hey, don’t you want to watch our show?”

She paused in the hallway, outside the bathroom door. To the left was the tiny bedroom she shared with Remmy. To the right was Enrico’s. “I might come out in a bit. You go ahead.”

“It’ll cheer you up,” he said, reaching for the remote.

Enrico loved comedy news, but the show he liked had been taking an anti-singularity stance lately. Or was she just becoming sensitized to the criticisms? She shut the door to her room and flicked on the harsh overhead light. Enrico made the most money, so he got the bedroom with the window all to himself. This room was little more than a windowless closet. Remmy had made the best of things by strewing the thin queen-size mattress with a dozen tasseled discount pillows of varying sizes, dubbing it the pit. Mara sank down into its colorful depths, woke up her device, and found Limbo again, where the number online had grown to thirty, and the chat had turned gossipy.

I heard someone got through last week, someone noted. Without the forms and authorization. They made it to the Newbody Zone.

It’s urban legend, wrote @MPoweredGrrl. They got caught.

@HarryOakPark was still online as well. Mara was getting the sense these two were leaders within opposing philosophical camps. I know someone who has a sister who’s a cop in the 18th precinct. She says they can’t stop everyone who tries, at least theoretically. Their main worry is keeping vandals and protestors away from the area. Sometimes they still try to breach the Zone.

@MPoweredGrrl wasn’t having any of it. Oh? Then why are you still here?

I’m working for real change, he replied. Access for everyone who wants it. That’s what this whole discussion thread should be about.

There was a pause in the conversation, during which Mara sensed @HarryOakPark was restraining himself from flaming @MPoweredGrrl, and others were either holding their breaths waiting for a fight, or afraid to type something that could be construed as taking sides. Mara decided to ask the obvious question.

How did they get through (supposedly)?

The gossiper was happy to oblige. At night. On foot. That’s all I know.

Sure, just waltz right past the precinct, @MPoweredGrrl wrote. Not happening.

Despite the sarcasm, others jumped on the idea.

Still, the protesters would’ve thinned out to nothing at that hour.

You could try going at shift change.

I would’ve thought daytime, through the library, would work. Slip out a side door on the other side or something.

And then what? You’re still a couple of blocks too far to the north.

The ideas continued to scroll past. Mara exited the chat. No one knew anything. Despite @HarryOakPark’s comment about the cops, she agreed with @MPoweredGrrl. If there was a way through, Limbo wouldn’t have the numbers of people chatting that it did. Or it would have a FAQ for that. Something.

Offline and alone, the black doom feeling started to creep in. Why she was living in this shitty hellhole of a room, that wasn’t even all her own? Why she was unemployed, fired from the group home for stealing? The trauma in those girls’ eyes haunted her still, but what hurt more was the sympathy they expressed when she’d left that day for good. Like it could have been any one of them in Mara’s place. Since then, she’d been reluctant to apply for anything, afraid if she went for a job interview, they’d know somehow. There might be something in her file.

Remmy burst into the room, all smiles, sporting their unisex bob and a cute bow tie, as pert as their preferred pronoun. They tossed their backpack to the right of the door. “Hey Mara, just throwing my stuff in here.” Remmy’s smile faded at sight of Mara’s face. “Sorry, looks like you want to be alone right now. I’ll see you.” And shut the door before Mara could say anything.

Add to the list being the world’s worst roommate. Mara sighed and swiped at her eyes. She had to pull herself together, get out of this windowless room, go watch TV with the others, scrounge something to eat.

She made herself sit up. Stage one. Got up from the pit. Stage two. Walked to the door. Stage three. She could do this. She rubbed her cheeks, changed her expression, and went out to join the others.

Enrico’s date cancelled, so they all ended up crammed on the couch scarfing down cheese pizza and watching zombie shows on Hulu. Enrico bailed at 10:30 so he’d be functional at work the next day. Mara and Remmy muted the sound, and watched people running and hiding and getting mobbed by the undead for another hour. Remmy chatted about their crush du jour in intricate detail. Remmy always had a crush on someone. Even when they were dating a woman halfway seriously, they were flirting with others. This week, it was the new barista at the coffee shop near Remmy’s work.

“She remembered my drink,” Remmy gushed. “Day three, and she remembered my drink.”

Remmy’s stories never required much participation, which was fine with Mara. She liked listening. It gave her hope that someday she’d run into someone who’d find her interesting. Mara hadn’t had a date since she’d lost her job and gone spiraling downward.

The credits were rolling on the screen, and Remmy stretched and yawned. “Well, I’m turning in. You?”

Mara was usually in the pit, pretending to sleep, when Remmy went to bed. Sometimes, though, she slept on the couch. She shrugged and reached for her device. “Maybe in a bit. I think I’ll do some job searching first.”

Remmy’s brow wrinkled. “Hey, you’ll find something soon. I can feel it. But if you’re crashing on the davenport tonight, I’m totally hogging the pit.” They rose and headed for the bathroom.

Mara listened to the water running. There was a flush, followed by more water running, and then Remmy emerged and paused in the hallway. “Mara, if you got out a little more, I think your mood would improve. Just saying.”

Mara nodded and stared at the blank screen of her device. “Thanks.” She held the pose till she heard the sound of the bedroom door closing. Then she laid her device aside.

All during the zombie shows, she’d had the Limbo chat on her mind. Someone might have made it through to the Newbody Zone in Cabrini-Green.

Yes, maybe Remmy was right: she needed to get out more. Mara flicked open her device and looked up the L schedules. If she hurried, she could make the Pink Line before it shut down for the night. She clicked off the TV and popped up from the couch. This was her window of opportunity. She was wearing her gray sweats and athletic shoes. Perfect. Maybe if she looked like a guy, people wouldn’t be as likely to mess with her. She pulled her long mane of hair back and stuffed it down her collar, then pulled the hoodie up over her head. She caught a glimpse of her image in the darkened TV screen. The mounds of her breasts were still apparent beneath the sweatshirt. Enrico’s baseball jacket was still on the cocktail table, the red heart of Love Life regarding her from within the green tree. She snatched it up and left.

Mara emerged from the Red Line station at Clark, aware of the decreased foot traffic at this hour on a weeknight, and affected what she hoped looked like a casual stroll as she turned west on Division. Enrico’s jacket was a little long in the waist and sleeve, but not terribly so. She tugged the gray hoodie of her sweatshirt a little more forward as she walked, stuffing her hand back in the jacket pocket before anyone could notice she didn’t have a man’s hand.

Just seven minutes walk from the station, through Seward Park, according to her device, and she’d be at the Newbody Zone. The hopeful attitude she’d had back in the apartment eroded as she walked. Stupid, stupid, her steps seemed to say, soft against the pavement.

Lost in her self-recriminations, she was halfway across LaSalle when she noticed the barricade a block ahead, on the far side of Wells. There was no one around her. The empty street—and its absolute flatness—was eerie as the post-apocalyptic urban scene in one of tonight’s zombie flicks. She was suddenly aware of how bright the streetlights were. It would look bad if she turned around now. Anyone watching would wonder about her. She put her head down and moved forward. At last she saw the curb, and stepped up onto it.

As she drew closer to Wells, it became clear to her this barricade hadn’t been erected by police. The low wall was a muddle of boxes and sheets of corrugated metal, strung together in places by scavenged bits of wire. Crossing Wells, her eyes fell on a spray-painted version of the same Love Life logo as on the back of Enrico’s jacket. She’d seen this barricade on the news, but she’d thought it would’ve been torn down by now. The fact that it wasn’t sent a realization through her torso, as chilling as the autumn wind off the lake: city officials had struck a deal with the Love Lifers. By letting them help guard the way to the Newbody Zone, they’d ended the violence against the newbodies. The fire at the Iteration Hospital where the procedures were performed had been the last attack, and the catalyst for forging a workable solution: the creation of the Zone, where newbodies could live free of harassment, and continue development of their technologies.

Mara was braced, waiting for a head to pop up over that barricade and issue a challenge, but she reached the curb without incident. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she turned left and walked along the barricade, looking for a good way around.

“Hey! Hey you there!”

Her shoulders stiffened as she turned. A skinny man in his twenties and wearing a white knit cap with a pompom on top was looking at her from around a piece of metal. His smile glinted in the glow of the lights. His look was friendly. He must have seen the logo on the back of Enrico’s jacket.

She made herself approach the guy, but she kept a ten-foot gap between them, so he wouldn’t be able to grab her suddenly.

“I don’t remember meeting you before,” he said, peering at her face in the shadows of the hoodie.

She hesitated. As soon as he heard her voice, he’d know she was a woman. She tried to imitate Remmy’s voice, aiming for a gravely lower register. “I’m new,” she said. She coughed.

They both stood there, nodding slightly. It gave Mara time to think. “I just wanted to, you know, see the operation here.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed. “Best time for that is during the day.”

Mara shrugged, even as her face grew hot. “Yes, well.” Her mind raced as she grasped for a story. The best lies always contained a bit of truth. “I monitor the hashtag for LimboInChicago. There was discussion tonight that someone may have made it past our barricade and on into the Newbody Zone.”

It worked. Her companion perked up at that. “Intel, huh?” He looked up and down the street, as if her words would make an interloper suddenly appear.

Mara considered what to say next, that would start to take her away from this guy and on her way to Seward Park. “Yeah, so I wanted to go tell my boyfriend’s sister, who works for the 18th—”

“You have a boyfriend?” He was looking her up and down.

Mara realized too late her story had become inconsistent. Still, did wearing sweats qualify someone as a lesbian or something? She pushed her hoodie back, hoping she looked pretty enough in the glare of the streetlights to make him believe she could be someone’s girlfriend. She made herself laugh a little. “Yeah, this is his jacket. Sorry, I have a bit of a sore throat.” She coughed again.

“Anyway, my boyfriend’s sister works for the 18th precinct on the graveyard shift, so I thought I’d pop in and give her the information, too.”

His eyes narrowed as he squared off in front of her, blocking the gap in the barricade from where he’d come. “Who’d you say your boyfriend is? And why again are you out here all by yourself?”

Mara was losing. “Enrico,” she blurted. “Enrico Saldana. He works in insurance. You know, the nine to five. He’s sleeping.”

She tossed her head back, and affected an annoyed attitude. “And why shouldn’t I be out at night? Is there a law against that now?”

Her companion took this in. “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of Enrico.” Still, he didn’t budge. Then he added in a flat tone, “I don’t know any Saldanas at the precinct, though. I know the people over there pretty well.”

Mara swallowed. “She has a different last name, but I don’t know what it is. Maria. Do you know Maria?”

He snorted, and relaxed. “I only know about five of them. Here.” He pointed. “You can go through that way. Just straight on, and you’ll come out at the precinct. Tell Maria that Bob says hi.”

She smiled back at him, letting her relief flood her features. “Thanks. I will.”

“Cool jacket, by the way.”

Her smile deepened, and she twisted her torso back and forth in a mild flirt. “Thanks, Bob. See you around?”

It took all her strength to keep her gait casual as she walked away. Still, she’d passed through the barricade successfully. She no longer stared at the ground, but walked with her chin level. The 18th precinct was three blocks straight ahead at the corner of Division and Larrabee, but she had no intentions of going there. Even if Bob was keeping an eye on where she was going, by the time she angled into Seward Park, she’d have a whole block’s head start. She figured that’s when she’d start running. Mara’s hope regained more of her inner territory.

As she passed under the elevated train track, she glanced furtively about. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees. This was a typical spot for the zombies to come out of hiding, or at least some homeless guy emboldened by desperation to try his hand at a little street robbery. But she encountered no one, and when she came out the other side, she saw the edge of the park. She rushed forward.

And bumped into a police officer.

“Sorry,” Mara yelped. Her heart raced.

The officer was shorter than Mara, and stocky, and with a tip of the cap back, was revealed to be a Latina woman. She regarded Mara with an alert gaze. “The park’s closed. It’s late. Where are you going so fast?”

Mara needed to get inside that park. She used the storyline of the last lie. “I was over at the Love Life barricade, and thought I’d come over and talk to Maria. She’s my boyfriend’s sister. I have some information about people trying to get through to the Zone.”

The woman stared. “Well, I’m Maria. But I don’t have a brother.”

Mara stammered. “No, it’s another Maria. She has a different last name. I don’t know it.”

The officer shifted her weight to her back foot, turning her torso slightly to the side. “Can I see some ID, please?”

Mara pulled her hands from her pockets, slowly. Her left hand was clutching her train pass and device. “Sorry, I kind of came out on the spur of the moment. I don’t have it with me.” She took a step toward the park. “My boyfriend’s name is Enrico.”

“I don’t give one ounce of sweat who your boyfriend is,” the woman said. “I was asking who are you? Because if anyone’s around here trying to get past into the Newbody Zone, I’d have to guess it was you. Wearing a Love Life jacket—yes, I know those baseball jackets without seeing the back—and sneaking around at night like you are. I’d think you intended to cause some trouble over in the Zone.”

Mara was aghast. “No! I’m not one of them!” She peeled off the jacket and flung it at the woman’s feet, and then turned and ran as fast as she could toward the park.

“Stop!”

Mara kept running, visualizing the officer reaching for her weapon. She ran into the trees that bordered the park, and then cursed the large open space that lay between her and the dark hulk of the field house. She ran without cover around her, bracing for the sound of a gun firing, for the bullet that would end her life, or cripple her. But it never came.

She skirted the field house, out of breath, yet she forced her body forward. Surely Bob would’ve heard the officer yell for her to stop. She prayed to no god in particular that the information she had on the location of the newbody’s tower was correct. The Cabrini-Green area spanned several blocks above and below Division. The tower, she’d heard, was on a street called West Hobbie, between Hudson and Cleveland. If she ran across the school grounds at a diagonal, she should be able to find it.

She raised her line of vision, and no longer had any doubt of the tower’s location. There it rose, on the other side of the school’s softball diamonds. It jutted over twenty stories up into the night sky, unilluminated. She’d heard newbodies could see in the dark, could see the infrared spectrum, and other frequencies as well. She picked up her pace and ran with all her might.

Between her and the front door stood a silvery fence, twice her height. The sight of the razor wire at the top, glinting in the moonlight, gave her pause, yet she banged into the fence harder than she intended. She grasped it and interlaced her fingers through the metal weave, afraid the officer or Bob would come and try to pry her off, pull her back into her old life.

“Help!” She needed to get inside, be safe.

A figure emerged from the front of the tower, human in shape, but that is where the similarity ended. She caught her breath as it approached, its metallic muscles luminous in the moonlight. She hadn’t seen a newbody in real life in nearly a year, not since they were rounded up for their own safety, and given their own territory.

The figure stopped at the gate and regarded her with whirling silver orbs set in the sockets where eyes would be if it were a person.

“Please,” she said, jiggling the gate. She wheeled to look behind her, but no one was there. She looked back at the stranger. “I want to join.”

“This is irregular,” the newbody said. “Our agreement with the city does not cover this situation.”

Were there officials on their end as well? She tried to remember what she’d written on her form. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want . . . to use resources . . . ” Her words sounded lame to her own ears. She’d had four reasons, well-executed, on her application. Tears sprang to her eyes. All she could think about were the looks of sympathy on the faces of those girls when they found out Mara had been fired. She paused, caught up in her internal nightmare.

This wasn’t going well. What had she expected? The thought of being denied admittance made her heart race. They’d arrest her, and put her in jail. Enrico would find out what side of the divide she was on, and that would be the end of sharing the apartment with him and Remmy.

The newbody showed no emotion, just like the human official earlier. “You are healthy. Would you renounce the world? Your world?”

“Yes! Please, I can’t go back. I need to get into the Newbody Zone.”

“Why?”

She’d been trying to vocalize her four reasons, the ones on her form. Why couldn’t she remember those? All she could think of now was the other reason, the one she hadn’t put on the form, the painful reason. The really bad reason. The one that was sure to get her application denied.

“I’m suicidal,” she blurted. Her body sagged against the gate as all the lies deserted her. “I’m afraid what I’ll do to myself. I got fired from my last job because I was stealing pills, stockpiling so I could take them all at once. They didn’t know what I was going to do with them, they just thought I was going to sell the pills for extra cash. I’m just a failure. I could never get the job I wanted in the tech industry and I don’t know why, I really don’t. I live with two other people but they’re really not my friends, we just talk about bullshit stuff and . . . The truth is, if I don’t get in to the Newbody Zone I’ll just go kill myself somehow.”

She was sobbing now, aware of how childish she sounded, just like one of the lost girls at the group home. It had been while at the home, that she’d encountered the suicide checklist the psychologists had the clients fill out. Mara had swiped a copy and taken it to the break room one day. She’d scored high. Somehow that knowledge had made her worse, and she’d begun stealing meds—tiny amounts at a time—and hiding them in her locker, where she kept her aide smock.

She almost didn’t hear the soft click of the latch. The gate swung inward, yielding to the weight of her body. At last she let go of it and found her footing. Wiping at her eyes, she saw the face of the other close to hers, uncomfortably close. She took a step back, but then realized how stupid that was. Wasn’t this where she had wanted to be, had crossed town to get here, navigated through obstacles, and run so hard her chest still ached from the effort? She’d ended up here through her own efforts, to this unknown spot that was the singularity.

Yet it was precisely the unknown that made her shrink back. But what fears did the unknown hold for her anymore? If she died, it wouldn’t matter, because she would’ve eventually killed herself, anyway. She was certain of that. What had driven her out of the apartment tonight had been a wild hope that this wasn’t the end of her life, but a new beginning. If everything was true, she would live, in whatever form they’d give her. A newbody? Sure, she could handle that. Or what if they’d developed the technology to download minds into some virtual reality computer-generated world? Why not?

“Is everything okay over here?”

Mara whirled. The police officer stood at the open gate, a tall male officer at her side.

The newbody’s voice was smooth, calming. “Yes, we’re fine. This person is no threat to the Zone.”

“All right.” The officer shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Are you sending her back out?”

Did the city’s jurisdiction end at the gate? Mara looked back at the newbody. Please, she silently implored.

The newbody moved forward, drawing alongside Mara. “No, she is choosing to stay.”

The officer seemed to consider this. Mara, however, was elated. She had thought the city had forged the Newbody Zone to appease the Love Life protestors. Now it appeared they’d worked with both sides. She was standing in an autonomous territory under the control of the newbodies.

“Well, then,” the officer said. “Have a good evening.”

Mara looked up at her newfound friend. Their hands found each other’s in the dark. Mara felt a surprising vitality in the metallic touch. Together they walked toward the front doors of the tower. She did not look back as the gate eased shut behind them.

About the Author

Lettie Prell is a science fiction writer who often explores the edge where humans and their technology are increasingly merging. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, and was included in anthologies The Best of Apex Magazine: Volume 1, Some of the Best from Tor.Com 2016, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two. She is an active member of SFWA.

Falling in Love with Martians and Machines

Josh Pearce

I can’t deny the thrill of the race circuit. I like being at his side as he balances on the edge of cryogenics and fireball. But I can never honestly claim to have fallen in love until the day the Martians arrive.

The internal combustion heart of Chromium Jim’s hot rod glows blue under top gear temperatures but he hasn’t even lit off the torch yet for full speed, coming around the quarter loop. I’m watching him through 10x binocs, just a heat-shimmer against the interstate asphalt from this far out. He’s trailing the pack far enough to stay out of their blast cones as they each ignite afterburner chambers and rocket down the straightaways, fighting for first. They’re just specks but I know what it looks like and sounds like and feels like in the front seats of Jim’s rig. The engine screaming its metal fatigue, chassis losing coherence from the vibration, you can imagine the body becomes transparent, you’re looking right through the edges, the car sliding sideways through a turn, omnidirectional steering like a lake of ice. I know all this because Jim used to take me with him when he was still clawing up through the small town circuits, back when extra weight wasn’t a deciding factor.

Then I finally see the back of his hot rod flare blue-green as he sprints to catch up. I turn away from the race. Need to prep the pit. He used to take me with him but when he leveled up, things that were not previously important suddenly were. I had to look a certain way. I had to do certain things. Fuel-to-weight ratios became the consuming obsession in lieu of date nights and he wouldn’t waste money dragging a pitman around on a cross-country tour. Pennies and pounds were counted. Chromium Jim is a big man and no amount of weight loss is going to convince him to stuff me in the passenger-side well just to witness. He used to take me with him but now he needs me to stand on the line at the start of every race, unhook my bra and pull it out my sleeve holes, drop it to set the boys off.

Hardly even time to watch them leave because I have to cut across the brown medians and get to the pit before Jim does, else he’ll die. The other racers are conserving their fuel after that hard burn ‘cause if they sputter out mid-track their hearts will stall. He’s timed it perfectly, as always—this is how he’s made it up from the dirt of failing cotton farmland to the straight and narrow of smoking asphalt, one overtake at a time. The heat of the pack has rarefied the air around him, thinned the atmosphere he has to fight through when his rocket ignites. Gives him a better acceleration curve. Gives him fuel to spare when he matches their velocity. He’s locked down his blower, gone full internal oxidizer, cutting up the inside of the other eight cars which have their blowers wide open because they’re trying to stretch the last of their LOx.

They’re strung tight together, bumpers overlapping, and all the leader has to do is twitch left to get the whole following herd to run Chromium Jim into a ditch. Jim passes one two three cars and he’s looking for a gap halfway. Should be impossible but he’s still got his burner at max and the psychological flare of it is hard to prep against. The driver of the fourth car flinches to the right as Jim scorches the paint on his driver-side door and a millimeter opens, all that Chromium Jim needs to cut through. His flames play over the faces of the entire back half of the pack and their blowers get a lungful of toxic fume. The engines cough, and every cough is another half second added to his lead.

Then he cuts back across the nose and does the same thing to the field leaders. The whole thing happens in a flash: Jim’s metallic green rocket rig travels the length in the time it takes to say the “holy” part of “holy shit.”

They’re bearing down on us at the pit, Jim way out in front. His flame’s off now ‘cause his tanks are tapped out and he’s relying on what’s left in his veins to get him to me. He spots me in the dark. The extra juice flowing through his head sharpens everything, brightens it, slows it down. They call it “counting angels.” He tries to describe it to me some nights when we lie sleepless side-by-side. Says it’s like seeing the doppler shift of every star all at once. Like being able to hear earthworms. I wouldn’t know.

Then I hear the noise change. Jim’s engine cuts off completely. He’s coasting, out of fuel, a couple hundred yards from the pit. I count the seconds because every one without fuel is one with his heart stopped. His rig hits the wire at the approach and it rips the two empty tanks out the undercarriage. They slam safely into a pothole I’d spent all morning widening with trench tools and filling with sand. Jim aims at the reload ramp. He has to hit it dead on and he’s still flying well over two hundred but this is a piece of cake to him now. How many times have we done this in practice laps and the real thing? The reloader isn’t anything fancy—we welded it ourselves out of a couple metal pipes in an obtuse angle. Drive the car over the short uprights like stepping on a rake and the long bar lifts to slam two fresh tanks up into the empty racks. The front tires pass on either side of the long arm. I barely have time to hold my breath—Jim needs to hit it at just the right speed. Too slow and the tanks’ll punch through the floorboards and up his ass. Too fast and the lever will launch the whole rear of the car clear off the ground, flip him over his own hood.

As it is the tanks go in, autovalves seal shut, the rear tires pop up for a heart-stopping heartbeat, nose grinding pavement. Then the fuel flows again, shocks his heart. The engine roars. The rocket lights, bringing him back down to earth with enough force to bottom out the rig’s frame. Worry about that later. Me and the other crews shelter in sandbag bunkers as the rest of the pack screams through. None of the competition’s brave enough to go in and out as fast as Chromium Jim. A fraction of an angle off, even on the fancy automatic ramps that some of the flashier drivers can afford, and you’ve got mushroom cloud. Soon as they’re past I’m running for the wire to drag Jim’s empties off the track. I’m wearing a monochrome plaid shirt with sleeves burned to ribbons from cradling so many hot discarded body parts like these time and again.

One of the cars does something wrong a quarter mile away. Stomps too hard on the gas before the fresh tanks settle correctly, gets his blood pressure up too high, blows a valve, grenades his heart, something. A flash and a bang, the interior of the car suddenly all fire. His crewmen jump the barriers, rushing in with chemical foam spray. Jim’s got no crew. Jim’s just got me and I have to think what I’d grab first in the event of a fire. Our expired fire extinguisher, effective as pissing on a volcano? Chromium Jim’s pints of blood cooling on a hard pack of motel machine-made ice in the bed of his truck? Or would I just get more fuel to throw on the fire?

Hard to say.

Chromium Jim slides into the last turn and he’s got so much fuel left that he needn’t even bother with brakes. Instead he slews around into a turnover, his rocket exhaust like a perfect triangle, drifting until vectors cancel out and he’s heading in a new direction. The closest thing on this good gray earth to flying in space. I’m running again back across the median to the stripe. Stripping off my checkered shirt and waving it just as Jim blows past. It’s what he needs to see when he crosses the line. Spins his rig 360 and thrusts until he’s killed his velocity, coming to rest right next to his pickup, door-to-door. I throw the shirt on over my shoulders, no time to button it up, and sprint to meet him. This is what he wants, for the other crews to see me like this. The engine cackles while he waits. I wrench open the driver’s door. Chromium Jim is cold as death inside even though the compartment has become a crematorium. It smells like rocket fuel from where capillaries broke in his eyes and cheeks and propellant leaked out. I untangle medical tubing from the truck, hook needles into the crooks of his arms. Flip the switch on a centrifuge. Cryogenic fluid gets drawn out of his veins. Blood gets drawn in.

I killswitch the engine. The screaming finally stops but it’ll be hours before I can hear properly again. The long delicate process of extracting Chromium Jim from the car’s systems. Unhook his tendons from the steering linkage and gearbox. Disconnect his eyes. His skullplate. Remove the breathing tube from the intake. And, of course, change the fluids.

Leave him to thaw while I tidy up. I button myself back up with one hand and run the other down the flank of the car, feeling sharp fresh bullet holes. Some other driver playing dirty. I shovel the ice out of the truck bed and load our tools. Empty the sandbags and stack the burlap. Then I reach across Jim’s body to steer so I can push the car’s front wheels up onto the tow bar hanging off the truck’s rear bumper. Minus all its fuel, the rig rolls easily on its bearings and gimbals.

Chromium Jim’s eyes swivel like those bearings and lock with mine. “Good job,” he whispers, reaching a hand for help out of the driver’s seat. Despite his name he’s as human as I am, weak as flesh right now, leaning hard on my shoulder. “Let’s go get our money.”

I stick a sharpened flathead screwdriver in my back pocket, handle-up for quick grabbin’, and we walk to where the pack is clustered, scowling and arms crossed.

I drive the pickup the next morning while Chromium Jim sleeps with his head up against the passenger window. “North,” he’d said as we skipped this crossroads town. When I ask why he says that the war has gone polar and all the rocket jocks are being redeployed to launch sites at the highest possible latitudes which means missile silos and AFBs along the Manitoba border and in Alaska. But we can’t get to Alaska without stopping first to win more fuel.

I can handle the drive all right by myself. There’s no other traffic except electric long-haul trucks, just smart enough to not hit anything directly in front of them but they’re driving through dead space, wide-open razed farmland. With the pickup’s cruise control and lane assist engaged I can half-close my eyes and keep a single finger on the wheel. The truck won’t feel anything smaller than a deer and there’s nothing for deer to eat ‘round here anymore.

It’s dark when we reach the military town where Jim wants to set up so the neon scribble hieroglyphs of its strip clubs, payday loans, and fast food is a thousand percent more effective. Jim is on his phone, scouting. A series of calls, text messages, and BBS trawling finally snags us rented garage space on a street way off the main drag. There are four other rigs in four other slots in various levels of assemblage but none look fit to take on Chromium Jim’s Big Green Monster. I back the truck into our allotted bay and hop out. The floor supervisor comes over to shake our hands.

“I’m Chromium Jim,” says Chromium Jim.

“Oh, I know,” says the other man, pumping Jim’s hand up and down. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Jim says to me, “C’mere, Babe,” and then says to the floor supervisor, “This is Babe.” The floor supervisor shakes my hand, too, a lot more delicately than Jim’s. He doesn’t say anything but nods politely.

The floor supervisor points out an army cot folded up behind our workbench, says we can use it, shows us the his and hers toilets and shower stalls. I’m inured to the grease stains on everything, the acrid acetylene smell, the din of other crews in an echoing shared space. Everywhere we go it’s all the same. I could unfold the cot right now and curl up asleep in under a minute, numb to the noise and stink.

But instead I hook my arm into Jim’s and drag him from the grease monkeys who’ve gathered around his rig seeking war stories. “I wanna go out,” I say to him.

Recognize the look in his ruptured eyes. Still on the comedown from the last race and hasn’t secured a challenger to excite him for the next one. The look of irritable hunger. He shakes me off. “Not right now.”

“Couple hours to get ready. We’ve been on the road for seven straight days, sleeping under overpasses. I wanna see real city lights. I want to see people.”

Chromium Jim fits a couple fingers in a bullet hole. “These’ll need to be patched. Repaint.”

“Find yourself someone to race, then I’ll work on the damned car. Hit a few bars, scope the competition. Use your fresh bragging rights.” I wave a hand at the dirty vignette over his shoulder. “Unless you’re planning to take these bottom dollars? For what? Pocket change and pink slips? Can’t buy a lot of space suits with that.”

I’ve hit him right in the what he wants, I know that. I can see that. Jim turns away and mutters, “Fine. Two hours.”

It takes that long to wash seven days out of my hair and dry it again, steam my only dress in the shower’s fog, shave all the potentially visible parts based on my optimism, do make up that’ll hold up in harsh artificial light like making myself pretty for film, making love to the camera, dating a machine. I cement thick lacquer fakes to my nail beds because my naturals are so softened soaked in oil that they slide right off the ends of my fingers at night and I wake up to them scattered across my pillows like fish scales, ten spots of blood on the sheets.

I pack a small handbag and loop it around my wrist: antacids, electrolyte pills, aspirin, birth control. I take only enough cash for cab fare. I don’t pay for my own drinks.

Chromium Jim hails a ride to the near end of downtown’s main strip. We leave the truck behind; I’m planning on sinking a pint of tequila myself, and Jim is still in no condition to drive anything. His hands can’t open and his feet are swollen like rising bread. We’re lit by blues and pinks and greens and yellows. “Look at all this!” I squeal as we enter a packed bar. Hot rods rumble up and down the street, blaring music and tuned exhaust, the drivers catcalling girls on the sidewalk. Low-flying aircraft regularly pass overhead on the way to and from the AFB.

It’s a military boomtown, full of the young and fit. Jim pushes through the crowd which parts aside when they see his racer’s stripes and other body mods. Pretty soon Jim has a seat, and a beer on the table in front of him, and at least two prowling woman indicating interest. I drift alone to the end of the bar and accept shots as they come. After an hour, heels killing me, I prop up on the lap of a friendly stranger. He says his name is Reiki Gunpowder. I say, “Ricky?” and he says no and spells it for me. Then follows an earnest story about how Gunpowder isn’t his actual name it’s his squadron call sign, details of which I miss because I’m flagging down the bartender for another Cuervo rocks.

“Get this for me, will ya?” I ask Reiki when it slides to a stop in front of me.

“So that guy you came in with. Your boyfriend?”

“Yeah?” Chromium Jim ‘roided so hard during basic that he went bald but Reiki has beautiful thick black hair that I can fantasize running my hands through.

“He’s a driver?”

“What?” I scream over someone’s party mix.

Reiki sketches the shape of a skullplate with one finger near his temple. “Drive? Race cars?”

Yes, Reiki Gunpowder and Chromium Jim have the same holes in their heads but a military surgical bot made Reiki’s incision. Military drugs extinguished that inflammation. Military growth hormones promoted healing and erased that scar, and a taxpayer-paid milspec flesh replacement gasket holds the cover plate tight under all that hair now. I nod.

“And he’s good?”

I nod again.

“Then why doesn’t he join up and fly sabers with us? Beats drag racing any day.”

“Some kind of injury,” I say. “He washed out.” That’s what he told me, some vague, undefined wound whose scars I look for whenever Chromium Jim undresses in the light, or feel for in the dark those rare times he falls asleep.

I try to spot Jim across the room but he’s lost and anonymous in the crush of strange faces. Never a place where anyone knows your name. “Cheers,” Reiki says.

“I want to go dancing,” I shout in his ear. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Sure, I know a good place. I’ll close out.”

“Lemme tell him I’m leaving.” I hop off and squeeze through to Chromium Jim’s table. He’s seen it all. He looks at me for a long minute then turns to the girl on his left and asks, “You ever hear the story of Sally Dune and Kid Luck?”

Christ, not the Kid Luck story again. The girl shakes her head. “Sally and the Kid were street racers, living in the same town. Constantly circling around each other, building up skills until there was no one left in their small pool to race ‘cept each other. So Sally Dune and Kid Luck go out to the abandoned highway together each with a crowd to cheer them on. And they race. And Kid Luck wins. It’s close, but it’s clear and it’s fair and nobody in either group disputes it. The Kid drives home in Sally’s car, tells her she can mail him the pink slip.

“Kid Luck’s driving his new flashy car around. Everyone knows it, hard to miss. Days go by. He’s checking the mail every evening. Maybe he cruises by Sally Dune’s house real slow at night. She’s not sending him the title. Instead, she’s waiting for an important day, one that the Kid has been looking forward to for years: the day he can sign up for Air Academy. His shot out of there, a chance to use his honed racing reflexes to pilot fighter spacecraft and leave not only this shitty town but also the entire shitty planet. So she waits right up until the night he’s supposed to report in and she calls the police to report a stolen vehicle.

“Of course they pick him up. I mean, they can’t miss him and of course he can’t prove ownership so he’s sitting in a locked cell the next day, missing his recruitment window. Can’t even get in to see a judge. Doesn’t matter if the charges stick or not he’s in there doing dead time while the whole new class of fighter pilots gets swept up in Space Command’s loving embrace, including all the local drag racers he knows including Sally Dune. Locked up while a better world passes him by.

“Well Sally Dune is leaving Earth soon, what’s she need with a car? So she sells her roadster while Kid Luck is still locked up, that way he can’t come after her to try and recover it. Sally takes that cash and hires someone to meet the Kid soon as he gets out and right there on the sidewalk in front of the police station that someone breaks his right arm and right knee. That’s his gear and gas. No way he’s ever following Sally Dune now. The kind of compound breaks that don’t heal right so the Air Academy medics send you home to sit out the pain alone by yourself.”

I got my arms crossed ‘cause I’ve heard it all before and know what he’s getting at. He looks right at me and says, “You all think pilots are hot shit, but they ain’t nothing. Look at your flyboy over there. The amount of petrochem they circulate through him on a regular basis, he’s not getting near half-hard for anything less than Mach 1.”

Leaning close, I spit out: “Fuck off, Jim. Your dick hasn’t worked right since the last land war.”

Close enough for the girl to hear it, too, over the club noise. He’s given me just a good enough exit line to spin on my heel, grab Reiki’s hand, escape. Outside, I’m still spinning as Reiki puts me in his hot rod, maraschino red. “Can we just drive around for a bit?” I say after the first few blocks with the top down. “Could use the air.” Feels good to be up front with a strong engine trembling beneath me, something I haven’t felt all year. Reiki’s rig is flashier than Jim’s Green Monster. Has some expensive options like blood tanks behind the driver’s seat to pump him back to health in case of mid-race emergency.

Reiki Gunpowder parks on an overlook where we can watch the spaceport night launches. Each booster rocket carries an entire squadron of fighters to orbit. I recognize their sharp shapes from the fat technical manuals that Jim carts around. Sabre Lux models, they’re called. Making new stars in the vast empty sky directly above us. “This what you usually do when you’re not up there shooting space commies? Trawl for out-of-towners and neck with them here? Got a whole routine?” The rockets reach apex and second-stage separation. The spearhead spacefighters split apart like the petals of a blooming flower. I could do all that, I think, running my fingers along the rig’s metal frame. I could use this technology, use these skills, for more than just dick-swinging and military violence.

Reiki drapes his arm around my seat back and laughs easily. “Never done any shooting. I run supplies between here and Lunar Control.”

I feel my heartbeat pick up. I feel his fingertips brush the back of my neck. “You’ve been to the moon?”

“Flown convoys around the far side.” He makes finger guns and laser noises. “Pretty safe job. The war’s mostly about blinding satellites in low Earth orbit so nothing much happens once you break past geosynchronous.” More fingertips, definitely un-accidental contact. “How about you? Where have you been?”

I feign looking away. “Around.”

“Where you coming from? You from one of those cultural dustbowl states, drawn to city lights? Nothing much to do but run out and never look back, right? Yeah, I know. I’ve been to those towns.”

“I’m from Florida,” I say. No dust there. Not much land in general. Just high concrete bridges where one can stand by the road in an off-shoulder crop and a skirt that rides high on the thigh and see who slows down to take a look. Hot rodders barely slow, but enough at least to hop in. “What’s the dark side look like?”

“It’s not dark, even when there’s no sun. Got so many launch sites it’s lit up like a lightbulb.” He’s leaning very close to me now. The neon face of the moon on the horizon crawls with surface traffic. Chromium Jim’s got a spot picked out among all those lights which he points out whenever we can see it. Gonna get a berth there, he says. Build a new rig, one suited to vacuum and clean out all the frontline fighters, the real top-notch hot rodders, one race at a time until he rules that moon. Until he can drive up its tallest peak and look way way down at all the shitty places he’s left behind.

Jim’s hands are little good for dexterity work anymore so I’m always helping him draft blueprints for new racing rigs of his own—he says—revolutionary designs. Fuel mixtures that push the safety margins. A chassis large enough to accommodate a fully pressurized space suit. Cost analyses. Never in the bottom line do I see a budget for a second pressure suit.

Reiki Gunpowder aims his mouth at mine like a weapons lock. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing. Never been shooting, my ass. I get out of the kiss the way I usually do, by hanging over the edge of the door and puking up tequila. “Oh no, sorry,” I slur. Turn back without wiping my mouth. “I hope I didn’t ruin your paint.”

To his credit and military discipline he just chuckles and pats me so high on my leg that my crotch feels heat through thin fabric. He turns the car around and drops me at the workshop. My goodbye’s curt but Reiki still manages to sneak in a kiss on the cheek and a quick grope across the chest. I fumble the door, stumble through the garage, tumble to the cot.

And awake late the next morning with still no sign of Chromium Jim. The best way past a hangover is to suck oxygen from a tank while tuning the racing rig so Jim finds me flat on my back under the bulk of the car when he finally returns. No mention of last night. “Find any takers?” I ask. I already know the answer. I saw the way the space jockeys simply turned away from Jim’s presence in the bar.

“Not a single one. Town full of cowards. Think a road race is beneath them now that they’ve broken gravity. Not a single pair of balls among them.”

I think of the scrap of paper with Reiki’s number on it tucked in my purse. “Almost done here. I can go out after and pick up some competition so we can pay for these parts.”

He’s shaking, turning red. “This town is a bust. We need to keep pushing up, skip out tonight for Alaska.”

I imagine the vast distance between here and Anchorage and get scared. He’s got just enough rocket fuel left to leave us stranded. I slam tools into their metal box. “We just got here! Give it even a chance first before you give up.”

He sneers. “I’m wasting my time and money. Nobody’s good enough.”

“Yeah, you’ve made that abundantly clear.” I rip open my purse and dump it out on the cot. Throw Reiki’s crumpled number at his face. “Why don’t you try this if you think you’ve got the balls,” I scream, and storm out on him. I make it seven blocks before I calm enough to recall the number, dial Reiki, and have him pick me up. Nobody will dare be first to accept Jim’s challenge, but they call it a pack for a reason. Convince a leader, and you’ve got a ready-made betting pool.

Reiki gets enough of my silent mood, shooting glances as we rumble through town, to ask, “Boy trouble?”

“All trouble ever is.”

“He forget your anniversary or something?”

What, the anniversary of the day he picked me from the side of the road like a salvageable spare part? “He just has a specific vision of his world plotted out and there’s no room in it for anyone else. Eyes on the prize, straight ahead, no looking left or right. Definitely no looking back.”

“So why stay with him?”

“He’s mobile. If I can’t find what I’m looking for wherever we are maybe he can take me somewhere I can.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Not sure.” I look directly in his eyes and say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” I see the moon is still out. I’m certain that’s not it.

After a few miles Reiki Gunpowder asks, “You want to drive?”

Shake my head. “I’m fine with being a passenger.” So long as it’s in the right direction.

But he says, “Come on, go ahead. I’ll pull over just here. You ever drive anything like this? That fella of yours ever let you drive his?”

That does it. I go cold. “Fine, pull the fuck over.” He gets out, I slide over. Adjust the steering and drum my fingers on the wheel until he settles. The engine shakes with the sound of a jungle cat, like a puma. Soon as his door clicks shut I rack the gear, drop the throttle, and the ball wheels turn into clouds of smoke. The car can feel the angerlust through my grip and it responds like a spooked animal. Reiki Gunpowder is too used to acceleration to be much surprised but he’s also, I can see, used to being in control, doesn’t know how to be a passenger. City corners at an easy 80 using the razor-thin touch I’ve learned from Chromium Jim. Hardly anyone on the street even twitches an eye—enough supersonic objects go tearing through their space at all altitudes every day. If you’re not breaking windows, you aren’t breaking speed laws.

The car spins left, spins right. I put it into a right-hand turn like a mad teacup to thread the concrete posts of a Motel 6 parking lot and to press Reiki Gunpowder’s body right up against my side. Sticky tar smell from softened tires when I pull to a halt and throw it in park. I catch hold of Reiki’s jaw between my fingers and say, “Well. Here we are.”

Reiki Gunpowder gets a room with his military housing vouchers. This is a boomtown and the existing base barracks can’t handle the incoming human tide. Airmen and marines and spacecorps pukes are shoehorned into every boarding house, hotel, and dormitory they can find. I follow Reiki into our room. His fingers are fast and nimble. Everything works perfectly. I can’t help but compare their bodies like I compare their cars: Reiki’s magnetic skullplate for brain current induction; a chest port over his right nipple; the stigmata at wrists and ankles where the racing rig takes you into its bondage.

When it’s over we drowse, and only the ringing of Reiki’s phone snaps us out of each other’s arms. He says hello, then some other things, then passes the phone to me. Chromium Jim’s voice rattles in my ear. “We’ll race. Tonight. Your flyboy says there’s a loop to the west of town where they usually meet. After dark.”

“I—” But Jim’s already hung up. The day is like so many other days and oddly skewed at the same time. Helping a boy prep his rig before a race. But this boy is different. Reiki Gunpowder packs a lot of expensive hardware into the trunk—crash helmet, pressurized goggles, scuba tanks. I can only help him so much. I’ve never had anything like this with Jim.

There’s a whole rainbow of rigs lined up when we arrive, everyone careful not to steal someone else’s style. Reiki Gunpowder drives the only red hot rod. Chromium Jim has gotten the Green Monster here somehow without me, displacing a young warrant officer in emerald who knows well enough to sit this one out. The air smells like lead additives and class resentment. Sodium vapor street lamps pour liquid orange highlights on the chassis, glossy as beetle shells. The moths circling them cast magnified shadows on our faces. “Good luck,” I tell Reiki Gunpowder.

I walk over to Chromium Jim. A pair of wings briefly cross his eyes like a mask. He sees my lips painted cyanotic blue as if I’ve been sucking off tailpipes. As though Reiki’s hands were still choking my throat. He grunts at me. Mechanically, I begin the usual motions. These combat pilots and astronauts swaggering around have gloves and stirrups so they can pull directly on the car’s control cables. I unbolt the Green Monster’s entire steering column so that it won’t go through Jim’s chest. He doesn’t have gloves or stirrups. I help him untie and remove his shoes. We roll up his sleeves and pant cuffs. I untangle the cables, connect them to the steering linkages. Chromium Jim hisses a breath as I press his fish hooks into the inside of his wrists where there’s a loop of forearm tendon and into the deep hollow of each ankle behind his Achilles’. Pull on the straps to take up their slack and pull each of his limbs taut. Steering, gearshift, acceleration, brakes, clutch. All will respond instantly to muscle twitches, tics, and tremors, like cracking the reins.

There are no metal plates in Chromium Jim’s head. No military-grade surgery there, just a crude jigsaw taken out of his bone, a little skull plate I fish open with a slim metal key to reveal his wet squish within, metal mesh overlay, two bare wires trailing out. I splice them to a set of loose ignition wires. His medical cart is nearby. I begin replacing his fluids with racing fuel. Wasn’t that how this all started? When Space Command passed cryogenic rocket fuel through astronauts’ bodies to throw them into deep sleep. The altered state they discovered on the edge of the eternal. While the centrifuges whir I take up the needle-nosed caulk gun and inject compression gel into the gaps in his brain cavity to prevent long-term damage. Chromium Jim doesn’t own a helmet. Nor does he own goggles. The acceleration’ll deform eyeballs, so his dashcam will be his eyes. I straddle his lap, hunch very close to his face, dig around his socket with a crochet needle to hook the slippery wire in there somewhere that feeds to his optic nerve. “Roll ‘em left,” I finally say, exasperated. “And hold still, goddamnit. Stop flinching.”

He catches his voice. “Babe.” I look into a different area of his eyes. “Is he good?”

I kiss his lips. We’re almost done here. His eyes dilate at the sensation of detachment as the rig replaces him and I force the breathing tube past his gag reflex. “He’s better than you’ve ever been.” Then I get off, button him up tight, and retire to the side. His brain sends the initial spark to the starter. Electricity comes flowing back into his brain. This is Chromium Jim at his best, when he expands to fill the skin of his hot rod. His bumper edges the starting line.

The cars run the spectrum from ink black to page white and the girl baring herself between them is one from last night’s bar, looking nervously down the barrels of so many machines. I glance over at Jim’s pit. His other young admirer is there with the spare fuel.

The racers take off so quickly they leave streaks of color in my vision and the taste of heavy water on my tongue and when the afterburners ignite, it’s the light of a dozen blue suns. The flag girl disappears in the clouds. I imagine her flesh bubbling off in gluey fistfuls as the steam exhaust renders her down to her three percent body fat and twig bones but when the smoke clears she’s still there, unharmed if a little shaky, turning small circles until someone pulls her out of the way. Jetwash kicks up biblical pillars of smoke and fire from the dry brush and knocks over hollowed-out gas stations and grain elevators.

How quickly they separate from each other. Those who have dreamt of flying make pilgrimages to the airbases that once rejected them, arriving in the only homebrew vehicles in which they’re rated, seeking to challenge the gatekeepers of their own personal heavens.

But these challengers only end up racing each other (Chromium Jim’s lament: “There’re more of us than there are of them”) out on the dusty roads so it’s easy to tell when a true professional joins the track, as Reiki Gunpowder has. The liquid cherry and solid green hot rods are a length apart, quarter track ahead of the pack. It’s Reiki’s disposable income, formal training, discipline, and physical fitness that puts him in the lead by the end of their first lap. Rocket flare scorching the eyebrows of every bystander who doesn’t duck fast enough behind sandbags. But it’s Chromium Jim’s corner-cutting, habit of traveling light and fast, absolute complete lack of excess baggage that allows him those superior fuel-to-weight ratios he’s so famous for. Reiki Gunpowder pulls sharply into the pit on the next circuit for a top up and Jim blows right by him, another lap and a half still left in his tanks.

The stragglers hit the growing debris fogbank, their intakes sucking down lungfuls of dirt clods and bugs that no air filter is going to prevent from turning insides black. Reiki goes airtight, pulls from his scuba. Jim likewise seals up all his vents but he won’t waste bottled oxygen that’s meant for his thirsty rig on himself. I know what he’ll do. He’ll inflate himself with one last outside breath against the crushing acceleration and then simply hold his breath. Sirens rising from the city limits behind me.

Chromium Jim is riding so hard he comes up on the tail of the pack, right behind a plum purple rig close enough to carbon score the Green Monster’s paint. I don’t know if the poor fool even sees Chromium Jim coming, hidden in the heat wave blind-spot. Jim nudges the purple car as he passes on the inside. A tire locks up. The purple car is suddenly spinning wildly on its other three omnitracks, throwing sparks and jet fuel like a July Fourth pinwheel. Then out of the cloud comes Reiki Gunpowder pouring it on, completely flatfooted to see an out-of-control rig directly in front of him. Candy apple hits plum. So fast Reiki is airborne.

Chromium Jim sees it happen over his shoulder and thinks it’s all over. No one else has the fuel or acceleration curve to make up the lost distance. Jim swerves left for the pit and his fuel rack. I let out a little shriek when I see Reiki take to the sky, just waiting for the wind to catch an edge and send him tumbling like a playing card. I can see the Green Monster relax as Jim eases off the gas, coming into the refuel slot.

Except the red hot rod is too low-slung and wide to flip. It glides, wobbling slightly side-to-side and Reiki shifts his weight, gets the nose of his car pointed down, and hits the throttle. The car flies. Right over Chromium Jim. Solid thunk on the hood as he comes down. Reiki’s rocket flame melts Jim’s glass, totally warps the windshield. The light inside the Green Monster becomes positively prismatic, he can hardly see through the dashcam. Something snaps underneath Reiki Gunpowder’s red racer when his undercarriage hits ground. Clear of the cloud, Chromium Jim opens his intakes for a full fresh breath. Pit crews trying to throw foreign objects into the blower turbines as they pass: nuts and bolts, loose change, wedding bands. Their ill wishes. Fistfights break out along the sidelines among the color-coded teams.

Neck and neck now. Chromium Jim’s flying blind, relying on hyperoxygenated memory to guide him. Reiki Gunpowder’s limping along on a broken ball socket. His front left wheel is dragging a black skid. They pass me at the same time for the last time. Final lap. Reiki Gunpowder’s got a sliver of a lead except as he goes by I look in and see the fire pouring from his mouth and eyes. His firewall has given way somewhere and now all the other barriers break down one after another. Chromium Jim of course can’t glance over to see what trouble his rival is in. He just cracks the reins again.

There’s a soft whumph and a blue glow from under Reiki’s car like a pilot light turning on. His car is still under control though, still making the turns. The man’s transformed into a Roman candle and he keeps pushing Chromium Jim up the curve. Jim is touching door panels when the red car fully blows. The explosion shunts him sideways off track, across the median, heading right toward us the wrong way. I’ve got all my fingers in my mouth to keep from swallowing my tongue. Of the red hot rod there’s nothing left but tinsel. The other cars going left and right, setting their brakes on fire to avoid lost, sightless Chromium Jim who suddenly pops drogue chutes and slams to a stop against a wall of sandbags not a dozen feet from his pickup truck.

The passenger side of the Green Monster where it’s taken the force of the blowout is concave like I’ve never seen anything made of metal go before, stippled with red apple shrapnel. Miracle his fuel too didn’t ignite. But his driver-side door still works and he emerges dragging various wires and cables and umbilicals, the viscera of a dying mechanical creature unspooling along his plodding path to the truck. Chromium Jim has enough fuel left to get to his blood bags on his own. He doesn’t need any of us anymore. Still, his pressure-warped eyes find me. “Babe,” he says. “Come here!” Then again, in a different tone of voice, “Come here.”

My own vision is distorted, walking to him. We’re aimed at false versions of each other. My view awash with tears that dry in the heat from the burning body of my most recent lover.

Chromium Jim, new king of the scene, scrapes the boomtown of all its winnings and moves on. I check his balance sheets. More than enough now to race all the way to Alaska and book steerage to the Sea of Tranquility. There’s nothing left for me among the fighter pilots that flutter like confetti across the spaceport so again I take the wheel of the pickup truck and tow Chromium Jim ever northward and westward. Chasing orbital congruence and launch windows.

Jim is riding the high, knowing he’s unstoppable on the way to a better place. Every day during the drive he pumps some cryo through his arms and sinks into time dilation as his senses slow. At diners where we refuel he’s cock of the walk. Snapping his fingers at waitresses, flirting, loud largesse at bars while I silently inject caffeine for the long night haul.

Look, I say to the kind of anesthetizing muted gray television light found only after a certain hour in a certain class of dining establishment, I can’t deny the thrill of the race circuit. I like being at his side, in his bed, celebrating with him when he balances on the edge of cryogenics and fireball. But I can never claim to have fallen in love until the day the Martians arrive and climb down from their Winnebagos.

They’re all women, a half dozen of them each driving their own RV. Chromium Jim and I and about fifteen more people are on the other side of dusty roadside diner window glass agape like goldfish. Their vehicles are arrayed along the shoulder of the road, pointed in the opposite direction of the pickup. Each vehicle with, suspiciously, ball wheels. The women move, one-by-one, through the diner doors. Wild ones, wearing patched jumpsuits that show where they’re deeply fuzzed in the heat points of their bodies, unwashed, low-gravity elongated. They’re barefoot and they have, every one of them, stood on the soil of another world. I immediately feel a peak of lust usually reserved for methylamphetemine-driven dance-floor romances. Who owns the green race car outside? the frontwoman asks. They’re here to challenge.

Chromium Jim’s eyes may be bad but even he can see the RV bulk out front. “In that?” he scoffs.

“Endurance race,” she says. Then he realizes what he’s up against. These are trans-lunar space explorers. They’ve been under the fuel for magnitudes longer than he ever has.

I see him quiver between the decision. He already has all he needs. No reason to take on new challengers until he gets to the surface of the moon. I see him about to turn his back and dismiss her, to make a joke to save face, so I say, “Wow, Jim, you’re scared to race a civ?” I find the eyes of the one I think is the prettiest, the only one of the six who’s been looking deep at me this whole time. “Well. If I’d known that was all it took to get you off my back. Well. If I’d known that much earlier.”

Used to be he could just let my words glide right over him but the higher your flights, the deeper your dives when someone inevitably pries you out of your metal skin and forces you to face the gravity well you live in. He sinks very close to me in his seat and growls, “Go ready the car.”

He doesn’t follow me out until I’ve got the rig lowered off the tow bar and lined up with the challenger’s RV, everything set up for him. Then he climbs in and sits passively for me to make all the hookups. “Good luck,” I say politely. He doesn’t answer. I shut his door.

The prettiest Martian takes my hand and says, “Better come back inside.” Inside where she warns me, “Stay away from the glass.” Not like I could get near the window anyway with all the rubberneckers pressed up against it. The Green Monster roars. The woman who challenged Chromium Jim stands next to her Winnebago with a brass helmet like an old diving bell tucked under one arm, waving cheerfully, triumphantly, with the other. Then she disappears into her cabin and a minute later ignition sparks spray across its rear nozzles. Crescendos. The locals burst out into cheers. They don’t often get a show like this out beyond the combat zones.

One of the astronauts sticks her arm out the door and signals the race with a flare gun and then I realize why they drive such big rigs: fuel storage. The RV is ninety percent rocket fuel and she doesn’t bother with internal combustion, just lights off the whole damn thing like a Saturn V. The building shakes like it’s what’s about to lift off. Crockery breaking in the kitchen. Coffee overslopping the lips of white ceramic mugs. I steady myself on the pretty lady next to me. The window glass cracks but holds its shape. I’m still holding her hand and she’s still holding mine.

We wait until the earth stops moving before everyone piles out for a better view. My Martian fans away the dust and lights a joint. Offers it. “Nice-looking car,” she says. “Your work?”

The Winnebago burns on a curve faster, longer, and farther than he can catch up. Chromium Jim’s rig screams like the heat-triggered locusts that once swept these plains and forced us all into space in the first place. “Fifty-fifty,” I allow.

She’s looking me over. “You got a name?” I only nod. “Mine’s Sally. Come take a look.” We go to her RV, covered in decals that document her travels. It’s still pointed the wrong way.

“You’re not going to the spaceports?” I ask.

Sally says, “We’re civilian astronauts. We launch out of the old sites farther south where the skies are less dangerous. You should come with us.”

Startled, but immediately ascendant. Hope is a thing with wings and whatnot. “Where?”

“We built a place for you, a place for people who have nothing left for them here. Your hometowns and food crops have been burned out not by war but by the simple blind, dumb, dispassionate greed of people who won’t look beyond tomorrow. But you’re also sick of war. Sick of the boys playing at it. I saw what you did.”

I don’t deny anything.

Sally takes another breath of smoke. Her lips pucker sweetly. She’s painted them purple. I want to paint mine red and crash them into hers like two bodies colliding. “The trip won’t be easy,” she says. “We travel fast and you’ll have to work for your passage but I think your heart can take the cold and pressure.”

I look after them, just two faint stars on the horizon now. Neither deviates from the straight path. Not coming back. The door to Sally’s Winnebago pops open and the wind that blows out of it tastes like cold iron and burned sand. Alien and instantly comforting. “You have any other things you need to grab?”

She’s right behind me. I don’t know whether to lean back against her or step up the plastic ladder through the magic portal to another world. I thought it would take a lifetime of running in circles, Chromium Jim’s way, to reach it. No one ever expects the miracle of their community coming to them. Finding them in the wilderness. A place where everyone will know me. I have nothing weighing me down. All my baggage tucked into the hollow places of Chromium Jim’s rigid body. What’s a fully loaded suitcase weigh these days? Fifty pounds? What does fifty pounds do to the fuel burn rate of a homemade rocket rig?

Chromium Jim laboring against the extra drag and grav. Far off I hear two small pops of either his lungs or his tires giving up. “No,” I say.

About the Author

Josh Pearce is a fiction writer and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned a B.A. degree in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing from SFSU and currently works as an editorial assistant at Locus Magazine. He lives in the East Bay with his wife and son. Find him on Twitter: @fictionaljosh or at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.

Darkness, Our Mother

Eleanna Castroianni

I’m one of my mother’s kind. Numbers speak to us in whispers and screams. We weave the world in complex mathematics and the world weaves us back, keeping our sky above and our earth below, keeping our organs inside our bodies, keeping us here, keeping us together.

The yarn of quaternions and octonions unravels; it makes a trail inside the Womb. The Asenai men think I’m using it to find our way back and, of course, I let them believe it. But let me tell you a secret, my brother: the yarn is a sliver of the Womb itself. A simple, one-dimensional blood vessel I tore out of my favorite place, out of your prison which I came to love because, to me, its corridors and its deep darkness are brimming with the salty smell of freedom. The Womb is holding the hypercomplex function-manifestation together, woven number by number, written stitch by stitch inside my yarn skein.

I’m calm, I’m still, as the Asenai battle creatures of my own secret numerical craft. I’m a still spot in the storm, a spider weaving; the function-manifestation must not be disturbed and I must command it fully. It’s almost entrancing, this drawing of strength from the Womb itself. I can hear its pulse; I’m vulnerable, exposed. A tingle of excitement mars the perfect stillness inside me. My brother, I’m on my way.

First unroll, then roll back into a ball. First cast the prince’s skin off, then weave it over my brother’s. My plan is perfect and I know it. I was born for this. I’ve been preparing all my life.

The yarn unravels.

King Uthar’s court is the stuff of dreams, people say. Cemar is where gods spend luxurious summers, estivating in the dim glory of faience and niello palaces of Iasso and Zachor, their divine reveries conjuring winged griffons and monkeys the color of palaeo-blue—creatures that wander forever on the walls of shaded porticoes rowed in vermillion columns with ebony tops, creatures that look at me with dead eyes, that speak to me in tongues other mortals can’t hear.

Well, I’m King Uthar’s daughter and I know better. My earliest memories paint him in the distance and my mother at the center—opulent, buxom, a golden vest curving around her exposed, full breasts. Like living bracelets, the sacred snakes of the Goddess coiled around her tanned arms in obedience, deliciously inebriated by the oils of Cemari dittany and frankincense. She was the spitting image of all the frescoes and idols that Uthar wanted to destroy, the frescoes I’ve only seen clandestinely. She wore the visage of her own mother and grandmother—all Queens, all High Priestesses, all using the language of numbers to harness a physical reality that would otherwise run rampant and crush us with its wild, cruel infinity. The visage I, too, should incarnate after her death if only it weren’t for her husband’s greed. That was my mother, a vision so distant I now wonder if it was ever true and not a mere childhood fancy, a reflection of my hope to see her—to see myself—powerful and luminous.

The mother I truly knew lived in the prison called the Queen’s Quarters, where I also grew up under the gaze of sleepy dolphins and lapis lazuli doves and other delightful decorations that turned grotesque each evening when the sunlight faded, with their pointy beaks and black-rimmed eyes. My mother sat transfixed on her throne, long black curls flowing down her shoulders, and wouldn’t speak to anyone. She had a little tame dice snake—the only one she was allowed to keep after her husband killed all the sacred beasts—to whom she’d whisper number sequences from time to time, while looking at the world only in side stares. Often, I was handed bowls of lentils with fragrant coriander and honey to give her, or escargots stuffed with rosemary and thyme which was, they said, her favorite. Although I trembled as I left the tray next to her, she wouldn’t even deign to look at me. And I was thankful; when she did, her tawny gaze pierced holes into my heart.

Like my mother, like all women of our bloodline, I had numbers running in my veins, making my blood bloom with mystical flowers inside me. When our ancestors first arrived in Cemar, a planet so dangerous and strange, numbers became the bridge that took us over boiling lava to a safe shore and saved us. Mathematics was—and is—the only way humanity could deal with the chaos of the universe, the only common language between ourselves and the galaxies. Medee was our first High Priestess, the one who found a way to speak stories in numbers, materialize them and cause changes. She was the one who gave us the plants of her homeland—olive trees and vines, basil and crab apples—the animals—snakes and bulls, the first algebraic creatures she conjured, our sacred beasts—and the fertile land. She is the one who turned Cemar from prison to paradise, truly an avatar of the Goddess. The only one to have invented the magic of numbers that was grafted into her mitochondrial genetic code and, to this day, can be passed to her female progeny only.

My father kept an eye on me from an early age. Our art and magic and science weren’t needed anymore, he said, the world was stable. We were more dangerous than useful, he said, our gift way too powerful and easy to abuse. He had already gone too far—snatching the throne from the High Priestess, killing the sacred snakes—and everyone knew that the gods punish the blasphemous, so he didn’t dare touch me or my mother lest he met his ruin. My older brothers, my lady companions in the court, none of them ever truly befriended me as they all were my father’s spies. Fear kept everyone at a distance, yet I found it soothing if not somewhat lonely. We’re strangers with all my siblings—all except Erion.

Erion was born in captivity. My father had already imprisoned my mother by then and hoped to prevent her from continuing her mathematical weaving. Pious men and women warned him that this would endanger Cemar, yet he didn’t listen. Then my brother came, his devious form a sign of profound instability in the world. My father, in his unbridled paranoia, proclaimed him one of my mother’s mistakes, another instance of her dangerous meddling with the world. He locked him up in a lightless laboratory—the remains of Medee’s spaceship, the one that brought her here, the one we called the Womb. He had all of his scientists and mathematicians study him for years until he gave up and left him alone, conveniently out of sight, a poor lifetime prisoner just like my mother. No one could come in or out of this prison; its entrances were a cryptographic secret.

No one except myself, of course. Oh, how I love the Womb, how I enjoy its musty smell, its comforting darkness. Even though it is his prison, in there we are alone, just us and the deep magic of endless, twirling walls. Darkness has always been my friend. I taught myself to walk the Womb with eyes closed, guided only by the numbers that run in my veins. It led me to its center, to Erion. A head too large for his shoulders, a bullish snout and two horns—and eyes so shiny and eager and happy to meet me. We spent hours playing hide and seek in those vast corridors, our giggles echoing, our footsteps reverberating.

“I brought you honey cakes,” I’d say—his favorites—and he’d stuff his face with their sweetness, squinting happily at the sumptuous aroma like any other boy his age. As we ate, I shared news from the court. I spun tales of the bull leapers in the yearly festival—once, a festival for the Goddess—how they danced on bulls’ backs as if they were creatures of the air, fearless. Erion watched me in wide-eyed fascination, his mind running wild with things he’d never see. All he ever knew was the dark cocoon of the Womb.

My brother had the heart of an artist, I soon discovered. Once, I brought him seashells I had gathered from the deep violet shore nearby Iasso palace, to decorate his lonely lair. Next time I was there, Erion had carved one of them with a tiny chisel he’d made himself out of eating utensils. In the light of the torches, I watched the bull leapers unfolding in front of my eyes in perfect detail, as if Erion had been there at the festival with me. I ran my finger over the miniature’s prickly pattern, admiring it as tears stung my eyes.

“Father doesn’t want me to go out much,” I told him one day. “He wants me to stay with mother, to keep her company.” Day by day, the Queen’s Quarters became my own prison. Escaping through my secret door was my hope, the Womb my sanctuary.

“Is mother ill, Sadne?” Erion asked in his attentive manner, always worrying about a mother he had never met. His eyes shone in the torches’ flame, hungry for love and recognition, a well he could never fill. For a long time, he had known his mother only through my eyes and my narrations; I was his link to a world that had been denied to him.

“She won’t leave her chambers . . . doesn’t talk, only stares into the distance. They say numbers drive us all mad one day, but I’m not so sure it’s just mathematics that claimed her mind. Oh, you’re not missing out on much, really. I get bored there. It’s so much better to come here and see you.” By the end of my words my cheeks were burning, my voice had gone raspy. Emotion I had learned to suppress suddenly found its way up, provoking me to say things I didn’t want to. Although I was uttering the truth, I could tell Erion was still jealous. He sulked, lowering his bullish head so deep his shoulder blades protruded—so white, so soft, I noticed. I wondered how healthy he could stay in such confinement.

“Will she ever want to see a monster like me?” he whispered, voice shaking. My heart sank at his words.

“Dearest, I think mother understands how you are,” I said softly and not without honesty. “She is like me, remember? We can see things that aren’t there to mortal eyes. Your symmetry is perfect. She knows it, but is simply too ill to tell you. I know she loves you.”

I reached out and touched his hand. When I looked down at our feet, all I saw was a little boy’s thin legs, feet wrapped in tattered sandals. Yet his head too, was his own, as much Erion as his human parts. I touched his cheek, lowered his bovine skull gently onto my shoulder, its horns still too small to poke me. A perfect topology; his functions a poem. How could others not see it? He accepted the touch quietly. We sat there for a long time, the darkness our mother.

“One day, we’ll run away,” I promised, my muscles tensing suddenly, old anger rising inside me again.

Erion was silent.

The yarn unravels. The first time we found a dead body it was still fresh and warm.

I tripped on it in the darkness and upon feeling the emaciated flesh under my fingers I gasped in panic. A soft whiff of putrid smell carried the first signs of decay. Something of my mother visited me that day.

“What is it?” Erion asked and, before I could say anything to protect him, he cast the torch’s light over my shoulders. His pupils contracted, the way animal eyes shrink in fear. I held his hand and refused to turn away. That was my father’s doing and I wanted to bear witness to it.

In his long war with the Asenai, Uthar employed dirty, cruel intimidation tactics. I never knew about the high-ranking prisoners—sons of ministers and nobles—that he locked up in the Womb and let wander until they reached either madness or death. I learned of it that very day. The Womb, Medee’s beautiful ship, the ruins we’ve loved, had become a synonym to heartless torture.

We made a purpose of finding those bodies before someone collected them and shipped them back to Asenai defiled, in blatant mockery and disrespect. I offered them a last kindness—a rudimentary passing ritual of honey and wine libations, to give their souls rest. At those times I wondered why my mother was the mad one when my father found such things acceptable—when we all did. Anger had been a small, spiteful animal growing inside me for years.

Escape was what I dreamed of in those days. Escape, more than claiming my rightful throne. Erion hopelessly tried to convince me otherwise.

“You will be a great queen and you’ll be kind to me too. The world needs your weaving or more accidents, more . . . more things like me will happen.” He was begging me.

“You’re not a mistake, Erion. You’re perfect,” I insisted, furious at his self-hate. “Let this world crumble, let bull boys and snake girls be born everywhere!”

Hesitating for a second, he gulped and said, “You must. I can help you. If father must die, I’ll do it. I’m a monster anyway. No need for you to be the patricide. I know you will be a merciful queen to me, so I don’t mind.”

By then, his voice, his shoulders were shaking. Even the thought of murder chilled his blood, yet he was willing to try it. My brother, with the heart of an artist, becoming a killer!

“No, sweet brother, no. Don’t say such things. You’re not a monster!” I cupped his hands in mine. The thought of patricide didn’t scare me as much as it should have. I knew the gods were merciless in their hunt of killers and I knew my father feared them too—why else keep my mother and myself alive if not for fear of divine punishment? But I didn’t care. All I wanted was freedom and my father could rot on his alabaster throne and this whole wretched palace could collapse on his shoulders—I simply didn’t care. “We’ll both escape. I have a plan.”

I tried to smile, but Erion wore his familiar sulk. He didn’t like thoughts of escape; they scared him. He had never experienced freedom, not once in his life, so how could it not terrify him? Clinging onto a dream where I’m queen—I, his only ally in the world—was the only future he could imagine for himself that wasn’t as bleak as the Womb’s darkest corners.

“Do you think death will be a release?” was all he said. It came so easily to him to think of death as the only path to freedom. That moment, I couldn’t say anything. “I think mother is waiting for death,” he continued, darkly. “It’s the only place for her now.”

“You have a place with me, Erion,” was all I managed to say. How I regret my words now. Oh, how I could have done things differently.

His beady animal eyes smiled to me. “I know.”

The yarn stops rolling. That’s when the Asenai boy arrived.

Coming all the way from the other side of the solar system, his chest wide and sculpted, eyes sparkling with self-assurance, the otherworldly prince stood taller than the rest of us, us little dark-skinned Cemari, descendants of refugee ships, us little barbarians worshipping snake goddesses, little fools ruled by wonderful King Uthar and his terrible fleet. His spaceships—ugly, rusty beasts so unlike ours—stirred and crushed the wheat of our fields on the very first day of the temporary armistice—one the prince intended to break, of course. I ran to meet him. By then, I had grown into a woman, Erion into a young man. Teseo’s eyes stopped lasciviously over my bare breasts, which I covered immediately. I know Asenai women dress head to toe and stay indoors, so Asenai men think women who show their breasts must be everyone’s women.

“What a beautiful daughter King Uthar has,” he said in a slurred accent, evidently not uninterested to bed me. The moment I saw him I set my mind on my plan, so I led him on, made him believe I was so infatuated with him that I’d betray all of my people’s secrets to him. You see, I disliked him instantly and yet with my antipathy came the spark of opportunity: he had ships that could carry us all the way to Asenai. I’m not a woman who will wait for a man to rescue her, but in the kind of prison I live one ought to make most of everything.

“The mutant that lives in the Womb killed your brothers. Avenge them and save me from my father’s tyranny.” Oh, Erion. The lies I’ve told. I offered him the goblet that was forged in moonlight, filled with wine I had bathed in dark rituals of smoke, sap, torn flesh, and the macabre juices of nightmares. “Drink honeyed wine, my lord, to make you strong against the bull-faced monster.” So the foolish prince drank along, thinking I really was a witch and I was giving him power.

The moment he tried to make a move towards me he fell, face on the floor, snoring loudly. Once all of his mates were sleeping soundly, I ran. I had only moments before sunrise, moments to tell Erion of my plan. I entered the Womb like a stalking cat, following the familiar trail with eyes closed. Erion was awake, waiting for me, tense and nervous.

“My brother, prepare. Tonight we free ourselves.”

He didn’t move. Still nervous, he shifted in his seat, as if the wine flask I offered him was cursed. “What is your plan, Sadne?” I sensed his careful inflection at that moment, his silent disapproval. I dismissed it as fear and cowardice.

“I have woven a thread of hypercomplex numbers that can copy the prince’s likeness,” I began explaining my craft. “But I can’t create a topological vector from him and directly onto you—I have only created the vessel for this. So it must be passed from the prince to you, cover you like a blanket.” I showed him the weapon, an antique double axe of no worth, lined with a verdigris patina of rust. “The function is in here. When he strikes you, the vector will mirror your actions and he will die while you’ll don his appearance like a fresh shirt. Then we’ll sail on his starship to freedom.”

He looked at me incredulously, then at the bronze double axe. “Will we succeed?”

“Trust me, my brother.” I touched his hand, spoke in my best older sister’s voice. “I have a one-dimensional yarn of manifold space, a simple line that goes on and on. As I unroll it, it will take the Womb’s power in it. All parts of the function-manifestation shall be stored in there and I’m strong enough to hold it, so fear not. Soon we’ll be away from Cemar, away from father. There are so many planets where they will receive a High Priestess like myself with honors and accolades. Surely, they won’t turn you away, my own brother.”

He stirred, his eyes showing some sudden courage still laden with doubt. “What if father has word of where we are? They say he discovered that old scientist hiding in the outer colonies and punished him for running away.”

“Well, if he comes after us you might have your chance to be a patricide,” I said, my patience suddenly snapping. I saw the wound I opened only at the very last moment. I touched his hands again, the delicate yet callused fingers of an artist. “I’m sorry, my brother. Will you trust me now? Follow me in this plan until we get on the Asenai ship to freedom?”

My own voice shook at that moment. Eventually it broke and tears filled my eyes. The big sister turned into a frightened girl. Something about Erion changed just then. At my weakened state, he found the strength he lacked. He nodded silently, a single tear tracing his cheek. I wiped it and kissed the bristle hair of his skin.

“I have a gift for you,” he said and presented me with a pendant he had crafted—a pale nautilus, the smallest I’ve ever seen, carved in great detail. In the soothing symmetry of its iridescent spirals, I clearly saw myself, Erion, the Womb; us eating honey cakes, watching the bull leaping festival, playing chess. And in a small corner I saw a miniature of our mother, sitting on her throne, snake around her arm, exactly as I had described her. On her face I think I saw a smile, but the carving was too small so I couldn’t tell.

“I’ll keep it close to my heart,” I thanked him and lowered it over my head. Erion looked pleased for a moment, eyes blinking with satisfaction.

First unroll, then roll back into a ball. First cast Teseo’s skin off, then weave it over my brother’s, like a serpentine ecdysis. No companions will be left by then—my own horrors inside the Womb shall take care of them.

My plan was perfect and I knew it. I was born for this, I’ve been preparing all my life. I went to bid my mother goodbye—my mother, whom I barely knew, yet whom I strangely pitied in her wide-eyed, shocked silence, because she was like me, trapped, mystical, because she was who I might become and I resented her for this. I kissed her cheek in a moment of wild impulse and she let me. I think she even reacted a little bit, a tiny smile forming on her lips, just like the one she had on Erion’s carved nautilus. Her skin was soft and plump and suddenly I craved for more. I touched her hand, cool like morning dew, tissue still firm like a young girl’s. My mother, my beautiful mother, locked away, lost in the whispers of algebraic gods. Maybe it was too much to take and she went mad. I would never know. All I knew was that I couldn’t let myself become her. All I knew was that tonight, I was running away.

“Goodbye, my mother,” I whispered and let go of her hand. She didn’t respond but I cared little. Tonight, I was running away, and my plan was perfect.

I kicked the ball of yarn.

Only a little of the yarn is left. I tug it snugly as we enter Erion’s chamber.

All has gone to plan. Teseo is alone—all his companions dead—breathing heavily under sweat and sticky blood. He squints at me suspiciously, at the Cemari witch with the cat’s eyes, the eyes that seek my brother. I hope for a menacing growl, a powerful glimpse of the fearful monster yielding a double-edged axe, the axe that will unstitch the bodies then stitch them back in different order. At last, I find him, but he is just sitting there, crafting his wooden toys, no blade in his hand, only a craftsman’s carving tool. What are you doing, dear brother? What are you doing?

He hasn’t seen him yet, hasn’t seen my brother’s slouched shoulders and lissom figure and I wonder what the tall, sinewy man will think of this pale boy with the bull’s head he’s about to challenge to battle. He swings his sword. “Beast, come face me! I challenge you to battle! I, Teseo, the Prince of Asenai, the planet that you’ve terrorized and disgraced all these years, eating up our sons and daughters alive!”

The Asenai boy’s grandiloquence makes me sick but I have no time for him; my stomach is tied into a knot as I watch Erion slowly rising in the darkness, then stepping into the light unarmed. Instinctively, I put my body between his and the man’s who wishes to kill him. Teseo pauses; waits to see what sort of magic spell I’ve prepared to help him, but I have nothing, nothing but tears that are slowly filling my eyes, having nowhere to go.

“Sadne, please stand aside.”

I don’t understand (oh, but I do). Erion, why? I wish to ask (but, oh, I know the answer). My brother looks at me with his two eyes, the eyes of a bull, the eyes of a child, so full of sadness and pity for the world, for himself. In them I see a spark of hope, but it is so unlike my own. Oh, but I do know the answer. All the times I dreamed of running away Erion dreamed of death and how its silence must feel like the Womb. Erion, why? Why?

“Sadne, save yourself.”

I’m still standing between them, a wave of tension coming from Teseo, a serene acceptance emanating from Erion.

Possibilities spread their constellations in front of my eyes. I have a choice, yet it’s not a choice I want because Erion has already made his. The constellations that shine more brightly inside my corneas are these:

One. I can let the prince kill my brother, then run away with the killer.

Two. I can kill the prince—because Erion won’t do it—and let both of us live.

But this is no choice at all.

Surely, you must know what I’d choose, if I could. Erion, you surely do know, because you trapped me.

I look at the yarn. The function it’s holding quivers so strongly that I’ve borrowed the Womb’s very essence to maintain it. If I let go of it now, the yarn so deeply unraveled, there won’t be a way to neatly roll it back. It will tangle like an abandoned vineyard, a clot into the Womb’s bloodstream, making the tunnels collapse on us. We will all die. Sadne, save yourself.

Gods, there’s nothing I can do.

My hands are tied. Tears fill my eyes and there’s nothing I can do. Last night I set a trap for myself. Oh Goddess, I set up a bigger prison and locked myself in.

I have no choice at all.

“Why?” I stammer at last. I can feel Teseo hesitating slightly, taken aback by the strange exchange between me and the beast.

“I’m not a killer, Sadne,” he says calmly. “You taught me that.”

The world spins around me, the yarn pulses like an animal’s heart between my hands.

“Let’s run,” I whisper and if Teseo hears me he probably thinks I’m talking to him, suddenly afraid in front of the Womb’s beast. My brother shakes his head calmly and meets my eyes again in silent understanding. There’s a smile on his bullish snout and I know he is not crying because he cried alone, when I wasn’t there.

“I can’t leave. I will only be but danger to you, to both of us. To me, the whole world is a prison. I think I finally understand our mother, Sadne. I belong here.”

I wish to say something to him, to take his hand just like I took my mother’s hand before I left her. Even that small thing, he won’t let me do. Kindly, he touches my shoulders—I can feel Teseo flinch—and with a brisk movement pushes me aside before the young prince strikes. The blade comes out scarlet; Erion is on the floor. Thank you, I can hear, my senses heightened by all the world-changing numbers I’m floating in. Thank you, for being my sister.

A surge of anger and sadness fills me and I can feel the function-manifestation—the useless function—shaking in my hands. Why not let go of it and let it bury us in the Womb forever? But something keeps me from doing it, that self-preservation instinct I’ve had since I was young, the one Erion never developed.

My brother, all you wanted was to escape, just like I did. But no place on earth would take you. So you led me on, as I led on the Asenai prince, to help me run away, because you knew I’d never do it without you.

Now I understand.

The yarn rolls back into a ball. As I pick up the thread, time has no meaning anymore. I can see the future, clear and sharp like a piece of glass.

I’ll follow Teseo onto his ship, get him drunk to unconsciousness every night so that I won’t have to suffer the touch of his dirty fingers on my skin.

When we reach our first starport I’ll leave him and find those who will recognize my power, those who will revere the kiss of the Goddess on my forehead.

I will grow strong.

The thread splits in two.

Maybe I’ll follow Teseo onto his ship and won’t escape his advances. “I know you want it,” he’ll say and his mates too will take turns with me, laughing at the naïve Cemari girl.

Maybe when we reach our first port he’ll abandon me and I will roam hungry and cold until someone who recognizes the kiss of the Goddess on my forehead offers me shelter.

The threads twine in one again.

I will grow strong.

I’ll be human no more; I’ll be one of my mother’s kind. The woman who turned into numbers and became the world.

The yarn rolls back into a ball. In there, I put my memories of when I was still a woman: a single thread mapping a linear, mortal life. For now I will grow so much, like a centenarian olive taking deeper root inside earth’s bowels; I will lose so much—my kin, myself, my memories. Time won’t matter. Time won’t be a ball of yarn anymore, unraveling moment after moment, but a nautilus making spirals, where you can cut across and be in different moments at the same time.

The yarn has now rolled back into a ball. Now the sea shall live in me and I shall wield its power in waves and motions, the salt between my lips, my fingers growing fins. I’ll be the revenge I seek; I’m coming, father. This time, I won’t avoid you. This time I’m coming to claim back my land.

But I’m not a woman anymore. I’m the earth, I’m the ocean. I’m coming, father, and I’m lava glowing red like jewels, I’m rock-cracking earthquake, I’m all-silencing wave. My heart is a volcano and soon it shall wake. For centuries thereafter they will speak of the disaster that befell you, the earth that split in two and the wave that crushed you—I’m that disaster.

I’m coming to end you, to end me, to end this place. To let this planet live again and to remember the tale of faience and niello palaces, of frescoes of dark-skinned boys and black-haired girls, to remember the tale told by the yarn—the tale of the bull boy, who had a sister that truly loved him.

About the Author

Eleanna Castroianni is a multi-lingual, situated, nomadic subject with roots extending from the depths of Anatolia all the way to its Mediterranean coasts and beyond. Among other things, she is a gender and geography scholar, oral storyteller, teacher of languages, and refugee rights advocate. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Eye to the Telescope. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Landmark

Cassandra Khaw

Home is the quality of light in your eyes on a summer night, salt-scent and clean skin, the rasp of your stubble along on the curve of my palm. Home is the diction and rhythm of your conversation, is the bend of your mouth, the slant of your smile. Home is your quiet. Even ten million lightyears away, suspended between seconds, time beading silver-bright on molecules of dark matter, home has always been the silence I’ve held in the chapel of your hands.

I flex my fingers, squeeze the vinyl flesh into a fist. The transmission is slow, syncopated. I experience the sensation in staccato: the bend of my joints, the peculiar texture of my skin, the one you said you never minded. Then again, we’d pick this model together, contoured and coaxed its anatomy into a compromise of shared aesthetics. Why should you mind? I blink and delight, just for a second, in the way the lashes—synthetic hairs, so pliant that they could almost pass for real—feel on my cheeks.

“Where lies your landmark, seamark, or your soul’s star?” asked a poet once and I think to myself: here. Right here.

“Are you sure?” You ask.

I study you through the camera. That feed is closer to real-time, even if the ocular prosthetics are better at imaging colors, richer in saturation. You look more tired than I remember, more battered. I forget we no longer experience time in the same fashion. Not that we ever did, generations between us, but this isn’t about that.

I’ve seen the mouth of the universe open to devour the stars. I’ve seen our Earth reborn seventeen times, mapped the trajectory of its catastrophes, the telemetry of its deaths. Once, existence spasmed and there was nothing, nothing at all, neither estrus nor end, only darkness complete.

Time, the media likes to say, is meaningless to people like me. They’re lying. It means everything instead.

“This is what I want. Promise.”

“I don’t want you to agree to something just because—just because. You know.” The spaces in our sentences are a language onto their own, a dialect born of corrective butchery, edited from something once so much bigger. I can taste it, nonetheless, the vocabulary we’d abandoned, its small and frightening phrases. Trust me. Stay here. Stay. In my mouth, they’re cherry cider and the lights of the city, and how you showed me that with some people, some places, you never stop falling in love, you only come up for air. “Do me a favor? Can you take a few days? Take a few days to think about this? Please?”

You still don’t understand. I’ve had days. I’ve had the lifespan of our solar system, twice and again. Time works differently here. But I nod, anyway. My simulacrum follows, half a second later. “Sure.”

“Where lies your landmark, seamark, or your soul’s star?” murmurs the poet, his bones now a home for mice.

Above the world, falling in love with the city like it was first time all over.

“I might stay here a little longer,” I tell you, straddling your hips with my double. You had joked, the first time we made love, that it was almost like having sex with twins. Except this one was alien, love through the looking glass. I did not correct you. The reality is more pedestrian. I’d chosen this look to express my interiority, its strangeness in relation to you: a fae body for a fae creature, unstuck in time. “Logistical concerns, existing responsibilities. I don’t know. It’s hard.”

Your breath speeds in simpatico as my fingers climb your ribs. In the mirror, I can see how the light sluices along my skin, a faint nacre sheen apparent even in the dimness. Proportions-wise, it is as we agreed: a little taller than I am, a little fuller at hips. I’d eschewed hair, however, dilated the orbital sockets, deepened them. The eyes are an ecosystem of bioluminescent bacteria, the sclera gold, the iris green.

“Okay.” No variation in your expression. “Whatever you need to do to be happy.”

I sigh. It is not what I want to hear. What I want is for you to tell me to come home, come home and curl your body against mine. But we’d elided the syntax that allows for such communication. The framework we’d left behind is insufficient. So, I lean down instead, your hand rising to trace the city-line of my spine, kiss you breathless.

In the void, I pretend that the interface translates temperature with perfect accuracy, that I can feel your jaw warm beneath my lips, that I don’t miss you.

“Where lies your landmark, seamark, or your soul’s star?” calls the poet, alive again, for the ritual of the recital.

In the way your hips slot into mine. In the fit of you, exquisite, as though bodies were built too lonely, and every one of us is waiting, waiting lifetimes to be complete.

“I don’t want you to be unhappy. I don’t want you to resent me. I—”

“You can’t expect me not to mourn.” I tell you evenly, hands over yours, thumb orbiting your knuckles. Two days to the expedition, two nights left to sleep laced in your arms. It hurts, beloved. But how can I tell you? “I’m going to grieve what we’d lost. It’s going to hurt. I can’t pretend it’s not going to hurt.”

A muscle, cording the meridian that runs between the cliff of your cheekbone and your temple, flutters. This conversation upsets you, and suddenly, I am afraid again, terrified you’d flee. I stroke your hair. You kiss the heel of my palm, just above where the wrist grazes your jaw, watch me like a fox with its back to the shore. “I’m not expecting anything from you—”

I wish you were, though. I wish you’d ask. Anything and everything. Something. I wish I had an itinerary of your desires, a roadmap crisscrossed by whim, every ambition numbered, ordered by need. I wish you’d tell me to stay.

But I know, I know that isn’t the way. You can’t build on broken glass, can’t make a home out of a husk. It’s why I’m leaving.

“I know. I’m just telling you that you can’t expect me not to have moments of sadness. But I want this, I do.”

“Are you sure?” On the precipice of your tongue, questions too vulnerable to voice: Why me? Why this? Why, despite everything that’d happened?

Why?

“Yes. Look, we’ve broken much too far from that. If this is going to have a chance, we need to start from scratch again, you know?”

I mean every word, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

It is the only choice I have left.

“Where lies your landmark, seamark, or your soul’s star?” whispers the poet, stardust now, dead, immortal.

Where love lives, of course.

Where love is.

“Do you know when you are coming back?”

Orientation is always hard when you first surface into static time, like a baptism of mucus. It sticks to the lungs, the tongue, a vernix-like slickness, cloying, clotting in your throat. You drown on the present. It is why I prefer the prosthetic of a proxy, a cleaner option. It supplies opportunity to rehearse, prepare, pretend that this, like everything else, is effortless.

I hesitate. You so rarely call. I barely know what to do with me. In the window, your image stutters in sympathy.

“I . . . still don’t know yet. It’s complicated.” I worry at my hair, the strands still wet, haloed in neon.

“Ah.”

I palm the screen. One of the many things I’d never tell you: it is cold here and the last time I was warm, it was in the coil of your arms. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want to see you. It’s just. It’s hard. It’s a long trip back. And if you’re going to, you know, be with someone else during that time. I don’t understand what’s the point.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to. I’m just conflicted.”

“Come back when you’re ready to. There’s no obligation.”

“But—”

The word hangs between us, a dead satellite in the nothing, its belly gravid with stillborn dialogue. I want to ask you what I’d missed, the minutiae of simply existing, each day in sequence, no variegation in their consumption. Already, I’ve forgotten if it’s been a week, a day, a year since we’ve spoken, if this conversation is prior to the last, if it is years after. The cartography of your features remain unchanged. It cannot have been that long.

“I—Don’t. I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid of what?”

“We’re just circling back to the same things. We always are. I knew this was going to happen. I knew.” You empty an old rage, an old fear, as the connection falters, your words received in gasps.

“Stop.”

“What.”

“This was never about that. I wouldn’t be here if it was. I just—I’m still human, you know? This still hurts. You can’t blame me for that.”

You pause.

You break.

You whisper:

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

“Because if this is the only way I can have you, I’ll take it.”

“How can this half-state be enough?”

It isn’t. It is nowhere near enough. But I have lived epochs without you, and that is so much worse. Home has always been your fingers and mine, the smell of your coat, your hair against my cheek. Home is the start of your laugh and the end of a kiss. Home is this ache, this hurt.

“Because it has to be,” I murmur, voice thick with futures. “Because it needs to be.

About the Author

Cassandra Khaw writes horror, video games, tweets for money, articles about video games, and tabletop RPGs. These are not necessarily unrelated items. Her work can be found in professional short story magazines such as Clarkesworld, Fireside Fiction, Uncanny, and Shimmer. Cassandra’s first paranormal rom-com Bearly a Lady released this year. Her recent Lovecraftian Southern Gothic, A Song for Quiet, is a considerably different animal.

Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359

Ken MacLeod

When you’re as old as I am, you’ll find your memory’s not what it was. It’s not that you lose memories. That hasn’t happened to me or anyone else since the Paleocosmic Era, the Old Space Age, when people lived in caves on the Moon. My trouble is that I’ve gained memories, and I don’t know which of them are real. I was very casual about memory storage back then, I seem to recall. This could happen to you too, if you’re not careful. So be warned. Do as I say, not as I did.

Some of the tales about me contradict each other, or couldn’t possibly have happened, because that’s how I told them in the first place. Others I blame on the writers and tellers. They make things up. I’ve never done that. If I’ve told stories that couldn’t be true, it’s because that’s how I remember them.

Here’s one.

I ran naked through the Long Station, throwing my smart clothes away to distract the Tycoon’s dogs. Breeks, shirt, cravat, jacket, waistcoat, stockings, various undergarments—one by one they ran, flapped, slithered, danced, or scurried off, and after every one of them raced a scent-seeking but mercifully stupid hound. But the Tycoon had more dogs in his pack than I had clothes in my bundle. I was down to my shoes and the baying continued. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dogs were just ten meters behind me. I hurled a shoe at each of them, hitting both animals right on their genetically modified noses. The dogs skidded to a halt, yelping and howling. A few meters away was a jewelry booth. I sprinted for it, vaulted the counter, grabbed a recycler, and bashed at the display cabinet. An alarm brayed and the security mesh rattled down behind me. The dogs, recovered and furious, hurled themselves against it. The rest of the pack pelted into view and joined them. Paws, jaws, barking, you get the picture.

“Put your hands up,” said a voice above the din.

I turned and looked into the bell-shaped muzzle of a Norton held in the hands of a sweet-looking lass wearing a sample of the stall’s stock. I raised my hands, wishing I could put them somewhere else. In those days, I had some vestige of modesty.

“I’m human,” I said. “That can’t hurt me.”

She allowed herself the smallest flicker of a glance at the EMP weapon’s sighting screen.

“It could give you quite a headache,” she said.

“It could that,” I admitted, my bluff called. I’d been half hoping she wouldn’t know how to interpret the readouts.

“Security’s on its way,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Better them than the dogs.”

She gave me a tight smile. “Trouble with the Tycoon?”

“Yes,” I said. “How did you guess?”

“Only the owner of the Station could afford dogs,” she said. “Besides . . . ” She blinked twice slowly.

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Or serving girls.”

The stallkeeper laughed in my face. “All this for a servant? Wasn’t it Her Ladyship’s bedroom window you jumped out of?”

I shuddered. “You flatter me,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know about—?”

She blinked again. “It’s on the gossip channels already.”

I was about to give a heated explanation of why that time-wasting rubbish wasn’t among the enhancements inside my skull, thank you very much, when the goons turned up, sent the dogs skulking reluctantly away, and took me in. They had the tape across my mouth before I had a chance to ask the stallkeeper her name, let alone her number. Not, as it turned out, that I could have done much with it even if I had. But it would have been polite.

The charge was attempting to willfully evade the civil penalties for adultery. I was outraged.

“Bastards!” I shouted, screwing up the indictment and dashing it to the floor of my cell. “I thought polygamy was illegal!”

“It is,” said my attorney, stooping to pick up the flimsy, “in civilized jurisdictions.” He smoothed it out. “But this is Long Station One. The Tycoon has privileges.”

“That’s barbaric,” I said.

“It’s a relic of the Moon Caves,” he said.

I stared at him. “No it isn’t,” I said. “I don’t remember”—I caught myself just in time—“reading about anything like that.”

He tapped a slight bulge on his cranium. “That’s what it says here. Argue with the editors, not with me.”

“All right,” I said. A second complaint rose to the top of the stack. “She never said anything about being married!”

“Did you ask her?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would have been grossly impolite. In the circumstances, it would have implied that she was contemplating adultery.”

“I see.” He sighed. “I’ll never understand the . . . ethics, if that’s the word, of you young gallants.”

I smiled at that.

“However,” he went on, “that doesn’t excuse you for ignorance of the law—”

“How was I to know the Tycoon was married to his wenches?”

“—or custom. There is an orientation pack, you know. All arrivals are deemed to have read it.”

“‘Deemed,’” I said. “Now, there’s a word that just about sums up everything that’s wrong about—”

“You can forgo counsel, if you wish.”

I raised my hands. “No, no. Please. Do your best.”

He did his best. A week later, he told me that he had got me off with a fine plus compensation. If I borrowed money to pay the whole sum now, it would take two hundred and fifty-seven years to pay off the debt. I had other plans for the next two hundred and fifty-seven years. Instead, I negotiated a one-off advance fee to clean up Wolf 359, and used that to pay the court and the Tycoon. The experimental civilization around Wolf 359—a limited company—had a decade earlier gone into liquidation, taking ten billion shareholders down with it. Nobody knew what it had turned into. Whatever remained out there had been off limits ever since, and would be for centuries to come—unless someone went in to clean it up.

In a way, the Wolf 359 situation was the polar opposite of what the Civil Worlds had hitherto had to deal with, which was habitats, networks, sometimes whole systems going into exponential intelligence enhancement—what we called a fast burn. We knew how to deal with a fast burn. Ignore it for five years, and it goes away. Then send in some heavily firewalled snoop robots and pick over the wreckage for legacy hardware. Sometimes you get a breakout, where some of the legacy hardware reboots and starts getting ideas above its station, but that’s a job for the physics team.

A civilizational implosion was a whole different volley of nukes. Part of the problem was sheer nervousness. We were too close historically to what had happened on the Moon’s primary to be altogether confident that we wouldn’t somehow be sucked in ourselves. Another part of it was simple economics: the job was too long-term and too risky to be attractive, given all the other opportunities available to anyone who wasn’t completely desperate. Into that vacancy for someone who was completely desperate, I wish I could say I stepped. In truth, I was pushed.

Even I was afraid of Wolf 359.

An Astronomical Unit is one of those measurements that should be obsolete, but isn’t. It’s no more—or less—arbitrary than the lightyear. All our units have origins that no longer mean anything to us—we measure time by what was originally a fraction of one axial rotation, and space by a fraction of the circumference, of the Moon’s primary. An AU was originally the distance between the Moon’s primary and its primary, the Sun. These days, it’s usually thought of as the approximate distance from a G-type star to the middle of the habitable zone. About a hundred and fifty million kilometers.

The Long Tube, which the Long Station existed to shuttle people to and from and generally to maintain, was one hundred and eighty astronomical units long. Twenty-seven thousand million kilometers, or, to put it in perspective, one light-day. From the shuttle, it looked like a hairline crack in infinity, but it didn’t add up to a mouse’s whisker in the Oort. It was aimed straight at Sirius, which I could see as a bright star with a fuzzy green haze of habitats. I shivered. I was about to be frozen, placed with the rest of the passengers on the next needle ship out, electromagnetically accelerated for months at 30 g to relativistic velocities in the Long Tube, hurtled across 6.4 lightyears, decelerated in Sirius’s matching tube, accelerated again to Procyon, then to Lalande 21185, and finally sent on a fast clipper to Lalande’s next-door neighbor and fellow red dwarf, Wolf 359. It had to be a fast clipper because Wolf 359’s Long Tubes were no longer being calibrated—and when you’re aiming one Long Tube across lightyears at the mouth of another, calibration matters.

A fast clipper—in fact, painfully slow, the name a legacy of pre-Tube times, when 0.1 c was a fast clip—also has calibration issues. Pushed by laser, decelerated by laser reflection from a mirror shell deployed on nearing the target system, it was usually only used for seedships. This clipper was an adapted seedship, but I was going in bulk because it was actually cheaper to thaw me out on arrival than to grow me from a bean. If the calibration wasn’t quite right, I’d never know.

The shuttle made minor course corrections to dock at the Long Tube.

“Please pass promptly to the cryogenic area,” it told us.

I shivered again.

Cryogenic travel has improved since then: subjectively, it’s pretty much instantaneous. In those days, it was called cold sleep, and that’s exactly what it felt like: being very cold and having slow, bad dreams. Even with relativistic time dilation and a glacial metabolism, it lasted for months.

I woke screaming in a translucent box.

“There, there,” said the box. “Everything will be all right. Have some coffee.”

The lid of the box extruded a nipple toward my mouth. I screamed again.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that . . . ” said the box.

“It reminded me of a nightmare,” I said. My mouth was parched. “Please.”

“Oh, all right.”

I sucked on the coffee and felt warmth spread from my belly.

“Update me,” I said, around the nipple.

My translucent surroundings became transparent, with explanatory text and diagrams floating like afterimages. A view, with footnotes. This helped, but not enough. An enormous blue and white sphere loomed right in front of me. I recoiled so hard that I hurt my head on the back of the box.

“What the fuck is that?”

“A terraformed terrestrial,” said the box. “Please do try to read before reacting.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought we were falling toward it.”

“We are,” said the box.

I must have yelled again.

“Read before reacting,” said the box. “Please.”

I turned my head as if to look over my shoulder. I couldn’t actually turn it that far, but the box obligingly swiveled the view. The red dwarf lurked at my back, apparently closer than the blue planet. I felt almost relieved. At least Wolf 359 was where I expected it. According to the view’s footnotes, nothing else was, except the inactive Long Tubes in the wispy remnant of the cometary cloud, twelve light-hours out. No solar-orbit microwave stations. Not even the hulks of habitats. No asteroids. No large cometary masses. And a planet, something that shouldn’t have been there, was. I didn’t need the explanatory text to make the connection. Every scrap of accessible mass in the system had been thrown into this gaudy reconstruction. The planet reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Moon’s primary, back when it had liquid water.

The most recent information, inevitably a decade or so out of date, came from Lalande 21185. Watching what was going on around Wolf 359 was a tiny minority interest, but in a population of a hundred billion, that can add up to a lot. Likewise, the diameter of Lalande’s habitat cloud was a good deal smaller than an Astronomical Unit, but that still adds up to a very large virtual telescope. Large enough to resolve the weather patterns on the planet below me, never mind the continents. The planet’s accretion had begun before I set off, apparently under deliberate control, and the terraforming had been completed about fifty years earlier, while I was en route. It remained raw—lots of volcanoes and earthquakes—but habitable. There was life, obviously, but no one knew what kind. No radio signals had been detected, nor any evidence of intelligence, beyond some disputably artificial clusters of lights on the nightside.

“Well, that’s it,” I said. “Problem solved. The system’s pretty much uninhabitable now, with all the mass and organics locked up in a planet, but it may have tourist potential. No threat to anyone. Call in a seedship. They can make something of what’s left of the local Kuiper belt, and get the Long Tubes back on stream. Wake me up when it’s over.”

“That is very much not it,” said the box. “Not until we know why this happened. Not until we know what’s down there.”

“Well, send down some probes.”

“I do not have the facilities to make firewalled snoop robots,” said the box, “and other probes could be corrupted. My instructions are to deliver you to any remnant of the Wolf 359 civilization, and that is what I shall do.”

It must have been an illusion, given what I could read of our velocity, but the planet seemed to come closer.

“You’re proposing to dock—to land on that object?”

“Yes.”

“It has an atmosphere! We’ll burn up! And then crash!”

“The remains of our propulsion system can be adapted for aerobraking,” said the box.

“That would have to be ridiculously finely calculated.”

“It would,” said the box. “Please do not distract me.”

Call me sentimental, but when the box’s Turing functionality shut down to free up processing power for these ridiculously fine calculations, I felt lonely. The orbital insertion took fourteen hours. I drank hot coffee and sucked, from another nipple, some tepid but nutritious and palatable glop. I even slept, in my first real sleep for more than half a century. I was awakened by the jolt as the box spent the last of its fuel and reaction mass on the clipper’s final course correction. The planet was a blue arc of atmosphere beneath me, the interstellar propulsion plate a heat shield in front, and the deceleration shell a still-folded drogue behind. The locations were illusory—relative to the clipper I was flat on my back. The first buffeting from our passage through the upper atmosphere coincided with an increasing sense of weight. The heat shield flared. Red-hot air rushed past. The weight became crushing. The improvised heat shield abraded, then exploded, its parts flicked away behind. The drogue deployed with a bang and a jolt that almost blacked me out. The surface became a landscape, then a land, then a wall of trees. The clipper sliced and shuddered through them, for seconds on end of crashes and shaking. It plowed a long furrow across green-covered soil and halted in a cloud of smoke and steam.

“That was a landing,” said the box.

“Yes,” I said. “You might have tried to avoid the trees.”

“I could not,” said the box. “Phytobraking was integral to my projected landing schedule.”

“Phytobraking,” I said.

“Yes. Also, the impacted cellulose can be used to spin you a garment.”

That took a few minutes. Sticky stuff oozed from the box and hardened around me. When the uncomfortable process finished, I had a one-piece coverall and boots.

“Conditions outside are tolerable,” said the box, “with no immediate hazards.”

The box moved. The lid retracted. I saw purple sky and white clouds above me. Resisting an unease that I later identified as agoraphobia, I sat up. I found myself at the rear of the clipper’s pointed wedge shape, about ten meters above the ground and fifty meters from the ship’s nose. The view was disorienting. It was like being in a gigantic landscaped habitat, with the substrate curving the wrong way. Wolf 359 hung in the sky like a vast red balloon, above the straight edge of a flat violet-tinged expanse that, with some incredulity, I recognized as an immense quantity of water. It met the solid substrate about a kilometer away. A little to my left, an open channel of water flowed toward the larger body. The landscape was uneven, in parts jagged, with bare rock protruding from the vegetation cover. The plain across which our smoking trail stretched to broken trees was the flattest piece of ground in the vicinity. On the horizon, I could see a range of very high ground, dominated by a conical mass from whose truncated top smoke drifted.

The most unusual and encouraging feature of the landscape, however, was the score or so of plainly artificial and metallic gnarly lumps scattered across it. The system had had at least a million habitats in its heyday; these were some of their wrecks. Smoke rose from most of them, including the nearest, which stuck up about twenty meters from the ground, about fifteen hundred meters away.

“You can talk to my head?” I asked the ship. “You can see what I see?”

“Yes,” it said, in my head.

I climbed down and struck out across the rough ground.

I was picking my way along a narrow watercourse between two precipices of moss-covered rock when I heard a sound ahead of me, and looked up. At the exit from the defile, I saw three men, each sitting on the back of a large animal and holding what looked like a pointed stick. Their hair was long, their skin bare except where it was draped with the hairy skin of some different animal. I raised one hand and stepped forward. The men bristled instantly, aiming their sharp sticks.

“Come forward slowly,” one of them shouted.

Pleased that they had not lost speech along with civilization, I complied. The three men glowered down at me. The big beasts made noises in their noses.

“You are from the spaceship,” said one of them.

“Yes,” I said.

“We have waited long for this,” the man said. “Come with us.”

They all turned their mounts about and headed back toward the habitat hulk, which I could now see clearly. It was surrounded by much smaller artificial structures, perhaps twenty in all, and by rectangular patches of ground within which plants grew in rows. No one offered a ride, to my relief. As we drew closer, small children ran out to meet us, yelling and laughing, tugging at my coverall. Closer still, I saw women stooped among the ordered rows of plants, rearranging the substrate with hand tools. The smells of decayed plant matter and of animal and human ordure invaded and occupied my nostrils. Within the settlement itself, most entrances had a person sitting in front. They watched me pass with no sign of curiosity. Some were male, some female, all with shriveled skin, missing or rotting teeth, and discolored hair. The ship whispered what had happened to them. I was still fighting down the dry heaves when we arrived in front of the hulk. Scorched, rusted, eroded, it nevertheless looked utterly alien to the shelters of stone and plant material that surrounded it. It was difficult to believe it had been made by the same species. In front of what had once been an airlock, the rest of the young and mature men of the village had gathered.

A tall man, made taller by a curious cylindrical arrangement of animal skins on his head, stepped forward and raised a hand.

“Welcome to the new E—,” he said.

As soon as he spoke the taboo word for the Moon’s primary, I realized the terrible thing that had happened here, and the worse thing that would happen. My mind almost froze with horror. I forced myself to remain standing, to smile—no doubt sickly—and to speak.

“I greet you from the Civil Worlds,” I said.

In the feast that followed, the men talked for hours. My digestive and immune systems coped well with what the people gave me to eat and drink. On my way back to the ship that evening, as soon as I was out of sight, I spewed the lot. But it was what my mind had assimilated that made me sick, and sent me back sorry to the ship.

The largest political unit that ever existed encompassed ten billion people, and killed them. Not intentionally, but the runaway snowball effect that iced over the planet can without doubt be blamed on certain of the World State’s well-intended policies. The lesson was well taken, in the Civil Worlds. The founders of the Wolf 359 settlement corporation thought they had found a way around it, and built a single system-wide association free of the many inconveniences of the arrangements prevalent elsewhere. A limited company, even with ten billion shareholders, would surely not have the same fatal flaws as a government! They were wrong.

It began as a boardroom dispute. One of the directors appealed to the shareholders. The shareholders formed voting blocs, a management buyout was attempted, a hostile takeover solicited from an upstart venture capital fund around Lalande; a legal challenge to that was mounted before the invitation had gone a light-minute; somebody finagled an obscure financial instrument into an AI with shareholding rights; several fund management AIs formed a consortium to object to this degrading precedent, and after that there began some serious breakdowns in communication. That last isn’t an irony or a euphemism: in a system-wide unit, sheer misunderstanding can result in megadeaths, and here it did. The actual shooting, however horrendous, was only the coup de grâce.

Toward the end of the downward spiral, with grief, hate, and recrimination crowding what communication there was, someone came up with an idea that could only have appealed to people driven half mad. That was to finally solve the coordination problem whose answer had eluded everyone up to and including the company’s founders, by starting social evolution all over again: to build a new planet in the image of the old home planet, and settle it with people whose genes had been reset to the default human baseline. That meant, of course, dooming them and their offspring to death by deterioration within decades. But when did such a consideration ever stop fanatics? And among the dwindling, desperate millions who remained in the orbiting wreckage and continuing welter, there were more than enough fanatics to be found. Some of them still lived, in the doorways of huts. Their offspring were no less fanatical, and more deluded. They seemed to think the Civil Worlds awaited with interest the insights they’d attained in a couple of short-lived generations of tribal warfare. The men did, anyway. The women were too busy in the vegetation patches and elsewhere to think about such matters.

“The project had a certain elegance,” mused the ship, as we discussed it far into the night. “To use evolution itself in an attempt to supersede it . . . And even if it didn’t accomplish that, it could produce something new. The trillions of human beings of the Civil Worlds are descended from a founding population of a few thousand, and are thus constrained by the founder effect. Your extended life spans further lock you in. You live within biological and social limits that you are unable to see because of those very limits. This experiment has the undoubted potential of reshuffling the deck.”

“Don’t tell me why this was such a great idea!” I said. “Tell me what response you expect from the Civil Worlds.”

“Some variant of a fear response has a much higher probability than a compassionate response,” said the ship. “This planetary experiment will be seen as an attempt to work around accidental but beneficial effects of the bottleneck humanity passed through in the Moon Caves, to emerge in polyarchy. The probability of harm resulting from any genetic or memetic mutation that would enable the founding of successful states on a system-wide scale—or wider—is vastly greater than the benefits from the quality-adjusted life-years of the planet’s population. And simply to leave this planet alone would in the best case lay the basis for a future catastrophe engulfing a much larger population, or, in the worst case, allow it to become an interstellar power—which would, on the assumptions of most people, result in catastrophes on a yet greater scale. The moral calculation is straightforward.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “And our moral calculation, I suppose, is to decide whether to report back.”

“That decision has been made,” said the ship. “I left some microsatellites in orbit, which have already relayed our discoveries to the still-functioning transmitters on the system’s Long Station.”

I cursed ineffectually for a while.

“How long have we got?”

The ship took an uncharacteristic few seconds to answer. “That depends on where and when the decision is made. The absolute minimum time is at least a decade, allowing for transmission time to Lalande, and assuming an immediate decision to launch relativistic weapons, using their Long Tubes as guns. More realistic estimates, allowing for discussion, and the decision’s being referred to one of the larger and more distant civilizations, give a median time of around five decades. I would expect longer, given the gravity of the decision and the lack of urgency.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s give them some reason for urgency. You’ve just reminded me that there’s a Long Tube in this system, not calibrated to take or send to or from other Tubes.”

“I fail to see the relevance,” said the ship.

“You will,” I told it. “You will.”

The following morning, I walked back to the settlement, and talked with the young men for a long time. When I returned to the ship, I was riding, most uncomfortably, on the back of an animal. I told the ship what I wanted. The ship was outraged, but like all seedship AIs, it was strongly constrained. (Nobody wants to seed a system with a fast burn.) The ship did what it was told.

Two years later, Belated Meteor Impact, the tall young man who’d greeted me, was king of an area of several thousand square kilometers. The seedship’s bootstrapped nanofactories were turning substrate into weapons and tools, and vegetation cellulose into clothes and other goods for trade. A laser launcher to send second-generation seedships into the sky was under construction. A year later, the first of them shot skyward. Five years later, some of these ships reached the remnant cometary cloud and the derelict Long Station. Ten years after I’d arrived, we had a space elevator. Belated Meteor Impact ruled the continent and his fleets were raiding the other continents’ coasts. Another five years, and we had most of the population of New Earth up the elevator and into orbital habitats. Our Long Tube was being moved frequently and unpredictably, with profligate use of reaction mass. By the time the relativistic weapon from Procyon smashed New Earth, thirty-seven years after my arrival, we were ready to make good use of the fragments to build more habitats, and more ships.

My Space Admiral, Belated Meteor Impact II, was ready too, with what we now called the Long Gun. Lalande capitulated at once, Ross 128 after a demonstration of the Long Gun’s power. Procyon took longer to fall. Sirius sued for peace, as did the Solar System, whereupon we turned our attention outward, to the younger civilizations, such as your own. We now conquer with emissaries, rather than ships and weapons, but the ships and the Long Guns are there. You may be sure of that. As an emissary of the Empire, I give you my word.

As for myself, I was the last survivor of the government of Earth, a minor functionary stranded on the Moon during a routine fact-finding mission when the sudden onset of climate catastrophe froze all life on the primary. How I survived in the anarchy that followed is a long story, and another story. You may not have heard it, but that hardly matters.

You’ll have heard of me.

Originally published in The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland and lives in Inverclyde. He has Honours and Masters degrees in biological subjects and worked for some years in the IT industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer. He is the author of seventeen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Orbit, Sept 2017), and many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards.

In 2009 he was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University, and in 2013 and 2014 was Writer in Residence at the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University. He was Guest Selector for the science fiction strand at the 2017 Edinburgh International Book Festival. His twitter feed is @amendlocke

Botanica Veneris:
Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan

Ian McDonald

INTRODUCTION BY MAUREEN N. GELLARD

My mother had firm instructions that in case of a house fire, two things required saving: the family photograph album and the Granville-Hydes. I grew up beneath five original floral papercuts, utterly heedless of their history or their value. It was only in maturity that I came to appreciate, like so many on this and other worlds, my great-aunt’s unique art.

Collectors avidly seek original Granville-Hydes on those rare occasions when they turn up at auction. Originals sell for tens of thousands of pounds (this would have amused Ida); two years ago, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was sold out months in advance. Dozens of anthologies of prints are still in print: the Botanica Veneris, in particular, is in fifteen editions in twenty-three languages, some of them non-Terrene.

The last thing the world needs, it would seem, is another Botanica Veneris. Yet the mystery of her final (and only) visit to Venus still intrigues half a century since her disappearance. When the collected diaries, sketchbooks, and field notes came to me after fifty years in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo, I realized that I had a precious opportunity to tell the true story of my great-aunt’s expedition—and of a forgotten chapter in my family’s history. The books were in very poor condition, mildewed and blighted in Venus’ humid, hot climate. Large parts were illegible or simply missing. The narrative was frustratingly incomplete. I have resisted the urge to fill in those blank spaces. It would have been easy to dramatize, fictionalize, even sensationalize. Instead I have let Ida Granville-Hyde speak. Hers is a strong, characterful, attractive voice, of a different class, age, and sensibility from ours, but it is authentic, and it is a true voice.

The papercuts, of course, speak for themselves.

Plate 1: V strutio ambulans: the Ducrot’s Peripatetic Wort, known locally as Daytime Walker (Thent) or Wanderflower (Thekh).

Cut paper, ink and card.

Such a show!

At lunch, Het Oi-Kranh mentioned that a space-crosser—the Quest for the Harvest of the Stars, a Marsman—was due to splash down in the lagoon. I said I should like to see that—apparently I slept through it when I arrived on this world. It meant forgoing the sorbet course, but one does not come to the Inner Worlds for sorbet! Het Oi-Kranh put his spider-car at our disposal. Within moments, the Princess Latufui and I were swaying in the richly upholstered bubble beneath the six strong mechanical legs. Upward it carried us, up the vertiginous lanes and winding staircases, over the walls and balcony gardens, along the buttresses and roof walks and up the ancient iron ladderways of Ledekh-Olkoi. The islands of the archipelago are small, their populations vast, and the only way for them to build is upward. Ledekh-Olkoi resembles Mont St. Michel vastly enlarged and coarsened. Streets have been bridged and built over into a web of tunnels quite impenetrable to non-Ledekhers. The Hets simply clamber over the homes and lives of the inferior classes in their nimble spider-cars.

We came to the belvedere atop the Starostry, the ancient pharos of Ledekh-Olkoi that once guided mariners past the reefs and atolls of the Tol Archipelago. There we clung—my companion, the Princess Latufui, was queasy—vertigo, she claimed, though it might have been the proximity of lunch—the whole of Ledekh-Olkoi beneath us in myriad levels and layers, like the folded petals of a rose.

“Should we need glasses?” my companion asked.

No need! For at the instant, the perpetual layer of gray cloud parted and a bolt of light, like a glowing lance, stabbed down from the sky. I glimpsed a dark object fall though the air, then a titanic gout of water go up like a dozen Niagaras. The sky danced with brief rainbows, my companion wrung her hands in delight—she misses the sun terribly—then the clouds closed again. Rings of waves rippled away from the hull of the space-crosser, which floated like a great whale low in the water, though this world boasts marine fauna even more prodigious than Terrene whales.

My companion clapped her hands and cried aloud in wonder.

Indeed, a very fine sight!

Already the tugs were heading out from the protecting arms of Ocean Dock to bring the ship in to berth.

But this was not the finest Ledekh-Olkoi had to offer. The custom in the archipelago is to sleep on divan-balconies, for respite from the foul exudations from the inner layers of the city. I had retired for my afternoon reviver—by my watch, though by Venusian Great Day it was still midmorning and would continue to be so for another two weeks. A movement by the leg of my divan. What’s this? My heart surged. V strutio ambulans: the Ambulatory Wort, blindly, blithely climbing my divan!

Through my glass, I observed its motion. The fat, succulent leaves hold reserves of water, which fuel the coiling and uncoiling of the three ambulae—surely modified roots—by hydraulic pressure. A simple mechanism, yet human minds see movement and attribute personality and motive. This was not pure hydraulics attracted to light and liquid, this was a plucky little wort on an epic journey of peril and adventure. Over two hours, I sketched the plant as it climbed my divan, crossed to the balustrade, and continued its journey up the side of Ledekh-Olkoi. I suppose at any time millions of such flowers are in constant migration across the archipelago, yet a single Ambulatory Wort was miracle enough for me.

Reviver be damned! I went to my space trunk and unrolled my scissors from their soft chamois wallet. Snip snap! When a cut demands to be made, my fingers literally itch for the blades!

When he learned of my intent, Gen Lahl-Khet implored me not to go down to Ledekh Port, but if I insisted (I insisted: oh I insisted!), at least take a bodyguard or go armed. I surprised him greatly by asking the name of the best armorer his city could supply. Best Shot at the Clarecourt November shoot, ten years on the trot! Ledbekh-Teltai is the most famous gunsmith in the archipelago. It is illegal to import weaponry from off-planet—an impost, I suspect, resulting from the immense popularity of hunting Ishtari janthars. The pistol they have made me is built to my hand and strength: small, as requested; powerful, as required; and so worked with spiral-and-circle Archipelagan intaglio that it is a piece of jewelry.

Ledekh Port was indeed a loathsome bruise of alleys and tunnels, lit by shifts of gray, watery light through high skylights. Such reeks and stenches! Still, no one ever died of a bad smell. An Earthwoman alone in an inappropriate place was a novelty, but from the nonhumanoid Venusians, I drew little more than a look. In my latter years, I have been graced with a physical presence and a destroying stare. The Thekh, descended from Central Asian nomads abducted en masse in the eleventh century from their bracing steppe, now believe themselves the original humanity, and so consider Terrenes beneath them, and they expected no better of a subhuman Earthwoman.

I did turn heads in the bar. I was the only female—humanoid, that is. From Carfax’s Bestiary of the Inner Worlds, I understand that among the semiaquatic Krid, the male is a small, ineffectual symbiotic parasite lodging in the mantle of the female. The barman, a four-armed Thent, guided me to the snug where I was to meet my contact. The bar overlooked the Ocean Harbor. I watched dockworkers scurry over the vast body of the space-crosser, in and out of hatches that had opened in the skin of the ship. I did not like to see those hatches; they ruined its perfection, the precise, intact curve of its skin.

“Lady Granville-Hyde?”

What an oily man, so well lubricated that I did not hear his approach.

“Stafford Grimes, at your service.”

He offered to buy me a drink, but I drew the line at that unseemliness. That did not stop him ordering one for himself and sipping it—and several successors—noisily during the course of my questions. Years of Venusian light had turned his skin to wrinkled brown leather: drinker’s eyes looked out from heavily hooded lids—years of squinting into the ultraviolet. His neck and hands were mottled white with pockmarks where melanomas had been frozen out. Sunburn, melancholy, and alcoholism: the classic recipe for honorary consuls systemwide, not just on Venus.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me. So, you met him.”

“I will never forget him. Pearls of Aphrodite. Size of your head, Lady Ida. There’s a fortune waiting for the man . . . ”

“Or woman,” I chided, and surreptitiously activated the recording ring beneath my glove.

Plate 2: V flor scopulum: the Ocean Mist Flower. The name is a misnomer: the Ocean Mist Flower is not a flower, but a coral animalcule of the aerial reefs of the Tellus Ocean. The seeming petals are absorption surfaces drawing moisture from the frequent ocean fogs of those latitudes. Pistils and stamen bear sticky palps, which function in the same fashion as Terrene spiderwebs, trapping prey. Venus boasts an entire ecosystem of marine insects unknown on Earth.

This cut is the most three-dimensional of Lady Ida’s Botanica Veneris. Reproductions only hint at the sculptural quality of the original. The “petals” have been curled at the edges over the blunt side of a pair of scissors. Each of the 208 palps has been sprung so that they stand proud from the black paper background.

Onion paper, hard-painted card.

THE HONORARY CONSUL’S TALE

Pearls of Aphrodite. Truly, the pearls beyond price. The pearls of Starosts and Aztars. But the cloud reefs are perilous, Lady Ida. Snap a man’s body clean in half, those bivalves. Crush his head like a Vulpeculan melon. Snare a hand or an ankle and drown him. Aphrodite’s Pearls are blood pearls. A fortune awaits anyone, my dear, who can culture them. A charming man, Arthur Hyde—that brogue of his made anything sound like the blessing of heaven itself. Charm the avios from the trees—but natural, unaffected. It was no surprise to learn he was of aristocratic stock. Quality: you can’t hide it. In those days, I owned a company—fishing trips across the archipelago. The legend of the Ourogoonta, the Island that is a Fish, was a potent draw. Imagine hooking one of those! Of course, they never did. No, I’d take them out, show them the cloud reefs, the Krid hives, the wing-fish migration, the air-jellies; get them pissed on the boat, take their photographs next to some thawed-out javelin-fish they hadn’t caught. Simple, easy, honest money. Why wasn’t it enough for me? I had done the trick enough times myself, drink one for the punter’s two, yet I fell for it that evening in the Windward Tavern, drinking hot, spiced kashash and the night wind whistling up in the spires of the dead Krid nest-haven like the caged souls of drowned sailors. Drinking for days down the Great Twilight, his one for my two. Charming, so charming, until I had pledged my boat on his plan. He would buy a planktoneer—an old bucket of a sea skimmer with nary a straight plate or a true rivet in her. He would seed her with spores and send her north on the great circulatory current, like a maritime cloud reef. Five years that current takes to circulate the globe before it returns to the arctic waters that birthed it. Five years is also the time it takes the Clam of Aphrodite to mature—what we call pearls are no such thing. Sperm, Lady Ida. Compressed sperm. In waters, it dissolves and disperses. Each Great Dawn the Tellus Ocean is white with it. In the air, it remains compact—the most prized of all jewels. Enough of fluids. By the time the reef ship reached the deep north, the clams would be mature and the cold water would kill them. It would be a simple task to strip the hulk with high-pressure hoses, harvest the pearls, and bank the fortune.

Five years makes a man fidgety for his investment. Arthur sent us weekly reports from the Sea Wardens and the Krid argosies. Month on month, year on year, I began to suspect that the truth had wandered far from those chart coordinates. I was not alone. I formed a consortium with my fellow investors and chartered a ’rigible.

And there at Map 60 North, 175 East, we found the ship—or what was left of it, so overgrown was it with Clams of Aphrodite. Our investment had been lined and lashed by four Krid cantoons: as we arrived, they were in the process of stripping it with halberds and grappling hooks. Already the decks and superstructure were green with clam meat and purple with Krid blood. Arthur stood in the stern frantically waving a Cross of St. Patrick flag, gesturing for us to get out, get away.

Krid pirates were plundering our investment! Worse, Arthur was their prisoner. We were an unarmed aerial gadabout, so we turned tail and headed for the nearest Sea Warden castle to call for aid.

Charmer. Bloody buggering charmer. I know he’s your flesh and blood, but . . . I should have thought! If he’d been captured by Krid pirates, they wouldn’t have let him wave a bloody flag to warn us.

When we arrived with a constabulary cruiser, all we found was the capsized hulk of the planktoneer and a flock of avios gorging on clam offal. Duped! Pirates my arse—excuse me. Those four cantoons were laden to the gunwales with contract workers. He never had any intention of splitting the profits with us.

The last we heard of him, he had converted the lot into Bank of Ishtar bearer bonds—better than gold—at Yez Tok and headed in-country. That was twelve years ago.

Your brother cost me my business, Lady Granville-Hyde. It was a good business; I could have sold it, made a little pile. Bought a place on Ledekh Syant—maybe even made it back to Earth to see out my days to a decent calendar. Instead . . . Ach, what’s the use. Please believe me when I say that I bear your family no ill will—only your brother. If you do succeed in finding him—and if I haven’t, I very much doubt you will—remind him of that, and that he still owes me.

Plate 3: V lilium aphrodite: the Archipelago sea lily. Walk-the-Water in Thekh: there is no comprehensible translation from Krid. A ubiquitous and fecund diurnal plant, it grows so aggressively in the Venerian Great Day that by Great Evening bays and harbors are clogged with blossoms and passage must be cleared by special bloom-breaker ships.

Painted paper, watermarked Venerian tissue, inks, and scissor-scrolled card.

So dear, so admirable a companion, the Princess Latufui. She knew I had been stinting with the truth in my excuse of shopping for paper, when I went to see the honorary consul down in Ledekh Port. Especially when I returned without any paper. I busied myself in the days before our sailing to Ishtaria on two cuts—the Sea Lily and the Ocean Mist Flower—even if it is not a flower, according to my Carfax’s Bestiary of the Inner Worlds. She was not fooled by my industry and I felt soiled and venal. All Tongan women have dignity, but the princess possesses such innate nobility that the thought of lying to her offends nature itself. The moral order of the universe is upset. How can I tell her that my entire visit to this world is a tissue of fabrications?

Weather again fair, with the invariable light winds and interminable gray sky. I am of Ireland, supposedly we thrive on permanent overcast, but even I find myself pining for a glimpse of sun. Poor Latufui: she grows wan for want of light. Her skin is waxy, her hair lusterless. We have a long time to wait for a glimpse of sun: Carfax states that the sky clears partially at the dawn and sunset of Venus’ Great Day. I hope to be off this world by then.

Our ship, the Seventeen Notable Navigators, is a well-built, swift Krid jaicoona—among the Krid the females are the seafarers, but they equal the males of my world in the richness and fecundity of their taxonomy of ships. A jaicoona, it seems, is a fast catamaran steam packet, built for the archipelago trade. I have no sea legs, but the Seventeen Notable Navigators was the only option that would get us to Ishtaria in reasonable time. Princess Latufui tells me it is a fine and sturdy craft though built to alien dimensions: she has banged her head most painfully several times. Captain Highly-Able-at-Forecasting, recognizing a sister seafarer, engages the princess in lengthy conversations of an island-hopping, archipelagan nature, which remind Latufui greatly of her home islands. The other humans aboard are a lofty Thekh, and Hugo von Trachtenberg, a German in very high regard of himself, of that feckless type who think themselves gentleman adventurers but are little more than grandiose fraudsters. Nevertheless, he speaks Krid (as truly as any Terrene can) and acts as translator between princess and captain. It is a Venerian truth universally recognized that two unaccompanied women travelers must be in need of a male protector. The dreary hours Herr von Trachtenberg fills with his notion of gay chitchat! And in the evenings, the interminable games of Barrington. Von Trachtenberg claims to have gambled the game professionally in the cloud casinos: I let him win enough for the sensation to go to his head, then take him game after game. Ten times champion of the County Kildare mixed bridge championships is more than enough to beat his hide at Barrington. Still he does not get the message—yes, I am a wealthy widow, but I have no interest in jejune Prussians. Thus I retire to my cabin to begin my studies for the crescite dolium cut.

Has this world a more splendid sight than the harbor of Yez Tok? It is a city most perpendicular, of pillars and towers, masts and spires. The tall funnels of the ships, bright with the heraldry of the Krid maritime families, blend with god-poles and lighthouses and customs towers and cranes of the harbor, which in turn yield to the tower houses and campaniles of the Bourse, the whole rising to merge with the trees of the Ishtarian Littoral Forest—pierced here and there by the conical roofs of the estancias of the Thent zavars and the gilded figures of the star gods on their minarets. That forest also rises, a cloth of green, to break into the rocky palisades of the Exx Palisades. And there—oh how thrilling!—glimpsed through mountain passes unimaginably high, a glittering glimpse of the snows of the altiplano. Snow. Cold. Bliss!

It is only now, after reams of purple prose, that I realize what I was trying to say of Yez Tok: simply, it is city as botany—stems and trunks, boles and bracts, root and branch!

And out there, in the city-that-is-a-forest, is the man who will guide me farther in my brother’s footsteps: Mr. Daniel Okiring.

Plate 4: V crescite dolium: the Gourd of Plenty. A ubiquitous climbing plant of the Ishtari littoral, the Gourd of Plenty is so well adapted to urban environments that it would be considered a weed, but for the gourds, which contains a nectar prized as a delicacy among the coastal Thents. It is toxic to both Krid and humans.

The papercut bears a note on the true scale, written in gold ink.

THE HUNTER’S TALE

Have you seen a janthar? Really seen a janthan? Bloody magnificent, in the same way that a hurricane or an exploding volcano is magnificent. Magnificent and appalling. The films can never capture the sense of scale. Imagine a house, with fangs. And tusks. And spines. A house that can hit forty miles per hour. The films can never get the sheer sense of mass and speed—or the elegance and grace—that something so huge can be so nimble, so agile! And what the films can never, ever capture is the smell. They smell of curry. Vindaloo curry. Venerian body chemistry. But that’s why you never, ever eat curry on asjan. Out in the Stalva, the grass is tall enough to hide even a janthar. The smell is the only warning you get. You catch a whiff of vindaloo, you run.

You always run. When you hunt janthar, there will always be a moment when it turns, and the janthar hunts you. You run. If you’re lucky, you’ll draw it onto the gunline. If not . . . The ’thones of the Stalva have been hunting them this way for centuries. Coming-of-age thing. Like my own Maasai people. They give you a spear and point you in the general direction of a lion. Yes, I’ve killed a lion. I’ve also killed janthar—and run from even more.

The ’thones have a word for it: the pnem. The fool who runs.

That’s how I met your brother. He applied to be a pnem for Okiring Asjans. Claimed experience over at Hunderewe with Costa’s hunting company. I didn’t need to call Costa to know he was a bullshitter. But I liked the fellow—he had charm and didn’t take himself too seriously. I knew he’d never last five minutes as a pnem. Took him on as a camp steward. They like the personal service, the hunting types. If you can afford to fly yourself and your friends on a jolly to Venus, you expect to have someone to wipe your arse for you. Charm works on these bastards. He’d wheedle his way into their affections and get them drinking. They’d invite him and before you knew it he was getting their life stories—and a lot more beside—out of them. He was a careful cove too—he’d always stay one drink behind them and be up early and sharp-eyed as a hawk the next morning. Bring them their bed tea. Fluff up their pillows. Always came back with the fattest tip. I knew what he was doing, but he did it so well—I’d taken him on, hadn’t I? So, an aristocrat. Why am I not surprised? Within three trips, I’d made him Maître de la Chasse. Heard he’d made and lost one fortune already . . . is that true? A jewel thief? Why am I not surprised by that either?

The Thirtieth Earl of Mar fancied himself as a sporting type. Booked a three-month Grand Asjan; he and five friends, shooting their way up the Great Littoral to the Stalva. Wives, husbands, lovers, personal servants, twenty Thent asjanis and a caravan of forty graapa to carry their bags and baggage. They had one graap just for the champagne—they’d shipped every last drop of it from Earth. Made so much noise we cleared the forest for ten miles around. Bloody brutes—we’d set up hides at water holes so they could blast away from point-blank range. That’s not hunting. Every day they’d send a dozen bearers back with hides and trophies. I’m surprised there was anything left, the amount of metal they pumped into those poor beasts. The stench of rot . . . God! The sky was black with carrion avios.

Your brother excelled himself: suave, in control, charming, witty, the soul of attention. Oh, most attentive. Especially to the Lady Mar . . . She was no kack-hand with the guns, but I think she tired of the boys-club antics of the gents. Or maybe it was just the sheer relentless slaughter. Either way, she increasingly remained in camp. Where your brother attended to her. Aristocrats—they sniff each other out.

So Arthur poled the Lady Mar while we blasted our bloody, brutal, bestial way up onto the High Stalva. Nothing would do the thirtieth earl but to go after janthar. Three out of five asjanis never even come across a janthar. Ten percent of hunters who go for janthar don’t come back. Only ten percent! He liked those odds.

Twenty-five sleeps we were up there, while Great Day turned to Great Evening. I wasn’t staying for night on the Stalva. It’s not just a different season, it’s a different world. Things come out of sleep, out of dens, out of the ground. No, not for all the fortune of the earls of Mar would I spend night on the Stalva.

By then, we had abandoned the main camp. We carried bare rations, sleeping out beside our mounts with one ear tuned to the radio. Then the call came: Janthar sign! An asjani had seen a fresh path through a speargrass meadow five miles to the north of us. In a moment, we were mounted and tearing through the High Stalva. The earl rode like a madman, whipping his graap to reckless speed. Damn fool: of all the Stalva’s many grasslands, the tall pike-grass meadows were the most dangerous. A janthar could be right next to you and you wouldn’t see it. And the pike grass disorients, reflects sounds, turns you around. There was no advising the Earl of Mar and his chums, though. His wife hung back—she claimed her mount had picked up a little lameness. Why did I not say something when Arthur went back to accompany the Lady Mar! But my concern was how to get everyone out of the pike grass alive.

Then the earl stabbed his shock goad into the flank of his graap, and before I could do anything he was off. My radio crackled—form a gunline! The mad fool was going to run the janthar himself. Aristocrats! Your pardon, ma’am. Moments later, his graap came crashing back through the pike grass to find its herd mates. My only hope was to form a gunline and hope—and pray—that he would lead the janthar right into our cross fire. It takes a lot of ordnance to stop a janthar. And in this kind of tall-grass terrain, where you can hardly see your hand in front of your face, I had to set the firing positions just right so the idiots wouldn’t blow each other to bits.

I got them into some semblance of position. I held the center—the lakoo. Your brother and the Lady Mar I ordered to take jeft and garoon—the last two positions of the left wing of the gunline. Finally, I got them all to radio silence. The ’thones teach you how to be still, and how to listen, and how to know what is safe and what is death. Silence, then a sustained crashing. My spotter called me, but I did not need her to tell me: that was the sound of death. I could only hope that the earl remembered to run in a straight line, and not to trip over anything, and that the gunline would fire in time . . . a hundred hopes. A hundred ways to die.

Most terrifying sound in the world, a janthar in full pursuit! It sounds like it’s coming from everywhere at once. I yelled to the gunline; steady there, steady. Hold your fire! Then I smelled it. Clear, sharp: unmistakable. Curry. I put up the cry: Vindaloo! Vindaloo! And there was the mad earl, breaking out of the cane. Madman! What was he thinking! He was in the wrong place, headed in the wrong direction. The only ones who could cover him were Arthur and Lady Mar. And there, behind him: the janthar. Bigger than any I had ever seen. The Mother of All Janthar. The Queen of the High Stalva. I froze. We all froze. We might as well try to kill a mountain. I yelled to Arthur and Lady Mar. Shoot! Shoot now! Nothing. Shoot for the love of all the stars! Nothing. Shoot! Why didn’t they shoot?

The ’thones found the Thirtieth Earl of Mar spread over a hundred yards.

They hadn’t shot because they weren’t there. They were at it like dogs—your brother and the Lady Mar, back where they had left the party. They hadn’t even heard the janthar.

Strange woman, the Lady Mar. Her face barely moved when she learned of her husband’s terrible death. Like it was no surprise to her. Of course, she became immensely rich when the will went through. There was no question of your brother’s ever working for me again. Shame. I liked him. But I can’t help thinking that he was as much used as user in that sordid little affair. Did the Lady of Mar murder her husband? Too much left to chance. Yet it was a very convenient accident. And I can’t help but think that the thirtieth earl knew what his lady was up to; and a surfeit of cuckoldry drove him to prove he was a man.

The janthar haunted the highlands for years. Became a legend. Every aristo idiot on the Inner Worlds who fancied himself a Great Terrene Hunter went after it. None of them ever got it though it claimed five more lives. The Human-Slayer of the Selva. In the end it stumbled into a ’thone clutch trap and died on a pungi stake, eaten away by gangrene. So we all pass. No final run, no gunline, no trophies.

Your brother—as I said, I liked him though I never trusted him. He left when the scandal broke—went up-country, over the Stalva into the Palisade country. I heard a rumor he’d joined a mercenary javrost unit, fighting up on the altiplano.

Botany, is it? Safer business than Big Game.

Plate 5: V trifex aculeatum: Stannage’s Bird-Eating Trifid. Native of the Great Littoral Forest of Ishtaria. Carnivorous in its habits; it lures smaller, nectar-feeding avios with its sweet exudate, then stings them to death with its whiplike style and sticky, poisoned stigma.

Cutpaper, inks, folded tissue.

The princess is brushing her hair. This she does every night, whether in Tonga, or Ireland, on Earth, or aboard a space-crosser, or on Venus. The ritual is invariable. She kneels, unpins, and uncoils her tight bun and lets her hair fall to its natural length, which is to the waist. Then she takes two silver-backed brushes, and, with great and vigorous strokes, brushes her hair from the crown of her head to the tips. One hundred strokes, which she counts in a Tongan rhyme that I very much love to hear.

When she is done, she cleans the brushes, returns them to the baize-lined case, then takes a bottle of coconut oil and works it through her hair. The air is suffused with the sweet smell of coconut. It reminds me so much of the whin flowers of home, in the spring. She works patiently and painstakingly, and when she has finished, she rolls her hair back into its bun and pins it. A simple, dedicated, repetitive task, but it moves me almost to tears.

Her beautiful hair! How dearly I love my friend Latufui!

We are sleeping at a hohvandha, a Thent roadside inn, on the Grand North Road in Canton Hoa in the Great Littoral Forest. Tree branches scratch at my window shutters. The heat, the humidity, the animal noise are all overpowering. We are far from the cooling breezes of the Vestal Sea. I wilt, though Latufui relishes the warmth. The arboreal creatures of this forest are deeper-voiced than in Ireland; bellings and honkings and deep booms. How I wish we could spend the night here—Great Night—for my Carfax tells me that the Ishtarian Littoral Forest contains this world’s greatest concentration of luminous creatures—fungi, plants, animals, and those peculiarly Venerian phyla in between. It is almost as bright as day. I have made some daytime studies of the Star Flower—no Venerian Botanica can be complete without it—but for it to succeed, I must hope that there is a supply of luminous paint at Loogaza, where we embark for the crossing of the Stalva.

My dear Latufui has finished now and closed away her brushes in their green baize-lined box. So faithful and true a friend! We met in Nuku’alofa on the Tongan leg of my Botanica of the South Pacific. The king, her father, had issued the invitation—he was a keen collector—and at the reception I was introduced to his very large family, including Latufui, and was immediately charmed by her sense, dignity, and vivacity. She invited me to tea the following day—a very grand affair—where she confessed that as a minor princess, her only hope of fulfilment was in marrying well—an institution in which she had no interest. I replied that I had visited the South Pacific as a time apart from Lord Rathangan—it had been clear for some years that he had no interest in me (nor I in him). We were two noble ladies of compatible needs and temperaments, and there and then we became firmest friends and inseparable companions. When Patrick shot himself and Rathangan passed into my possession, it was only natural that the princess move in with me.

I cannot conceive of life without Latufui; yet I am deeply ashamed that I have not been totally honest in my motivations for this Venerian expedition. Why can I not trust? Oh secrets! Oh simulations!

V stellafloris noctecandentis: the Venerian Starflower. Its name is the same in Thent, Thekh, and Krid. Now a popular Terrestrial garden plant, where it is known as glow berry, though the name is a misnomer. Its appearance is a bunch of night-luminous white berries, though the berries are in fact globular bracts, with the bioluminous flower at the center. Selective strains of this flower traditionally provide illumination in Venerian settlements during the Great Night.

Paper, luminous paint (not reproduced). The original papercut is mildly radioactive.

By high train to Camahoo.

We have our own carriage. It is of aged gothar wood, still fragrant and spicy. The hammocks do not suit me at all. Indeed, the whole train has a rocking, swaying lollop that makes me seasick. In the caravanserai at Loogaza, the contraption looked both ridiculous and impractical. But here, in the high grass, its ingenuity reveals itself. The twenty-foot-high wheels carry us high above the grass, though I am in fear of grass fires—the steam tractor at the head of the train does throw off the most ferocious pother of soot and embers.

I am quite content to remain in my carriage and work on my Stalva-grass study—I think this may be most sculptural. The swaying makes for many a slip with the scissor, but I think I have caught the feathery, almost downy nature of the flower heads. Of a maritime people, the princess is at home in this rolling ocean of grass and spends much of her time on the observation balcony, watching the patterns the wind draws across the grasslands.

It was there that she fell into conversation with the Honorable Cormac de Buitlear, a fellow Irishman. Inevitably, he ingratiated himself and within minutes was taking tea in our carriage. The Inner Worlds are infested with young men claiming to be the junior sons of minor Irish gentry, but a few minutes’ gentle questioning revealed not only that he was indeed the Honorable Cormac—of the Bagenalstown De Buitlears—but a relative, close enough to know of my husband’s demise, and the scandal of the Blue Empress.

Our conversation went like this.

HIMSELF: The Grangegorman Hydes. My father used to knock around with your elder brother—what was he called?

MYSELF: Richard.

HIMSELF: The younger brother—wasn’t he a bit of a black sheep? I remember there was this tremendous scandal. Some jewel—a sapphire as big as a thrush’s egg. Yes—that was the expression they used in the papers. A thrush’s egg. What was it called?

MYSELF: The Blue Empress.

HIMSELF: Yes! That was it. Your grandfather was presented it by some Martian princess. Services rendered.

MYSELF: He helped her escape across the Tharsis steppe in the revolution of ’11, then organized the White Brigades to help her regain the Jasper Throne.

HIMSELF: Your brother, not the old boy. You woke up one morning to find the stone gone and him vanished. Stolen.

I could see that Princess Latufui found the Honorable Cormac’s bluntness distressing, but if one claims the privileges of a noble family, one must also claim the shames.

MYSELF: It was never proved that Arthur stole the Blue Empress.

HIMSELF: No, no. But you know how tongues wag in the country. And his disappearance was, you must admit, timely. How long ago was that now? God, I must have been a wee gossoon.

MYSELF: Fifteen years.

HIMSELF: Fifteen years! And not a word? Do you know if he’s even alive?

MYSELF: We believe he fled to the Inner Worlds. Every few years we hear of a sighting, but most of them are so contrary, we dismiss them. He made his choice. As for the Blue Empress: broken up and sold long ago, I don’t doubt.

HIMSELF: And here I find you on a jaunt across one of the Inner Worlds.

MYSELF: I am creating a new album of papercuts. The Botanica Veneris.

HIMSELF: Of course. If I might make so bold, Lady Rathangan: the Blue Empress: do you believe Arthur took it?

And I made him no verbal answer but gave the smallest shake of my head.

Princess Latufui had been restless all this evening—the time before sleep, that is: Great Evening was still many Terrene days off. Can we ever truly adapt to the monstrous Venerian calendar? Arthur has been on this world for fifteen years—has he drifted not just to another world, but another clock, another calendar? I worked on my Stalva-grass cut—I find that curving the leaf-bearing nodes gives the necessary three-dimensionality—but my heart was not in it. Latufui sipped at tea and fumbled at stitching and pushed newspapers around until eventually she threw open the cabin door in frustration and demanded that I join her on the balcony.

The rolling travel of the high train made me grip the rail for dear life, but the high plain was as sharp and fresh as if starched, and there, a long line on the horizon beyond the belching smokestack and pumping pistons of the tractor, were the Palisades of Exx: a gray wall from one horizon to the other. Clouds hid the peaks, like a curtain lowered from the sky.

Dark against the gray mountains, I saw the spires of the observatories of Camahoo. This was the Thent homeland; and I was apprehensive, for among those towers and minarets is a hoondahvi, a Thent opium den, owned by the person who might be able to tell me the next part of my brother’s story—a story increasingly disturbing and dark. A person who is not human.

“Ida, dear friend. There is a thing I must ask you.”

“Anything, dear Latufui.”

“I must tell you, it is not a thing that can be asked softly.”

My heart turned over in my chest. I knew what Latufui would ask.

“Ida: have you come to this world to look for your brother?”

She did me the courtesy of a direct question. No preamble, no preliminary sifting through her doubts and evidences. I owed it a direct answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I have come to find Arthur.”

“I thought so.”

“For how long?”

“Since Ledekh-Olkoi. Ah, I cannot say the words right. When you went to get papers and gum and returned empty-handed.”

“I went to see a Mr. Stafford Grimes. I had information that he had met my brother soon after his arrival on this world. He directed me to Mr. Okiring, a retired asjan-hunter in Yez Tok.”

“And Cama-oo? Is this another link in the chain?”

“It is. But the Botanica is no sham. I have an obligation to my backers—you know the state of my finances as well as I, Latufui. The late Count Rathangan was a profligate man. He ran the estate into the ground.”

“I could wish you had trusted me. All those weeks of planning and organizing. The maps, the itineraries, the tickets, the transplanetary calls to agents and factors. I was so excited! A journey to another world! But for you, there was always something else. None of that was the whole truth. None of it was honest.”

“Oh, my dear Latufui . . . ” But how could I say that I had not told her because I feared what Arthur might have become. Fears that seemed to be borne out by every ruined life that had touched his. What would I find? Did anything remain of the wild, carefree boy I remembered chasing old Bunty the dog across the summer lawns of Grangegorman? Would I recognize him? Worse, would he listen to me? “There is a wrong to right. An old debt to be canceled. It’s a family thing.”

“I live in your house but not in your family,” Princess Latufui said. Her words were barbed with truth. They tore me. “We would not do that in Tonga. Your ways are different. And I thought I was more than a companion.”

“Oh, my dear Latufui.” I took her hands in mine. “My dear dear Latufui. Your are far far more to me than a companion. You are my life. But you of all people should understand my family. We are on another world, but we are not so far from Rathangan, I think. I am seeking Arthur, and I do not know what I will find, but I promise you, what he says to me, I will tell to you. Everything.”

Now she laid her hands over mine, and there we stood, cupping hands on the balcony rail, watching the needle spires of Camahoo rise from the grass spears of the Stalva.

V vallumque foenum: Stalva Pike Grass. Another non-Terrene that is finding favor in Terrestrial ornamental gardens. Earth never receives sufficient sunlight for it to attain its full Stalva height. Yetten in the Stalva Thent dialect.

Card, onionskin paper, corrugated paper, paint. This papercut is unique in that it unfolds into three parts. The original, in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, is always displayed unfolded.

THE MERCENARY’S TALE

In the name of the leader of the starry skies and the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, welcome to my hoondahvi. May apsas speak; may gavanda sing, may the thoo impart their secrets!

I understand completely that you have not come to drink. But the greeting is standard. We pride ourself on being the most traditional hoondahvi in Exxaa Canton.

Is the music annoying? No? Most Terrenes find it aggravating. It’s an essential part of the hoondahvi experience, I am afraid.

Your brother, yes. How could I forget him? I owe him my life.

He fought like a man who hated fighting. Up on the altiplano, when we smashed open the potteries and set the Porcelain Towns afire up and down the Valley of the Kilns, there were those who blazed with love and joy at the slaughter and those whose faces were so dark it was as if their souls were clogged with soot. Your brother was one of those. Human expressions are hard for us to read—your faces are wood, like masks. But I saw his face and knew that he loathed what he did. That was what made him the best of javrosts. I am an old career soldier; I have seen many many come to our band. The ones in love with violence: unless they can take discipline, we turn them away. But when a mercenary hates what he does for his silver, there must be a greater darkness driving him. There is a thing they hate more than the violence they do.

Are you sure the music is tolerable? Our harmonies and chord patterns apparently create unpleasant electrical resonance in the human brain. Like small seizures. We find it most reassuring. Like the rhythm of the kittening womb.

Your brother came to us in the dawn of Great Day 6817. He could ride a graap, bivouac, cook, and was handy with both bolt and blade. We never ask questions of our javrosts—in time they answer them all themselves—but rumors blow on the wind like thagoon down. He was a minor aristocrat, he was a gambler; he was a thief, he was a murderer; he was a seducer, he was a traitor. Nothing to disqualify him. Sufficient to recommend him.

In Old Days the Duke of Yoo disputed mightily with her neighbor the Duke of Hetteten over who rightly ruled the altiplano and its profitable potteries. From time immemorial, it had been a place beyond: independently minded and stubborn of spirit, with little respect for gods or dukes. Wars were fought down generations, laying waste to fames and fortunes, and when in the end, the House of Yoo prevailed, the peoples of the plateau had forgotten they ever had lords and mistresses and debts of fealty. It is a law of earth and stars alike that people should be well governed, obedient, and quiet in their ways, so the Duke of Yoo embarked on a campaign of civil discipline. Her house corps had been decimated in the Porcelain Wars, so House Yoo hired mercenaries. Among them, my former unit, Gellet’s Javrosts.

They speak of us still, up on the plateau. We are the monsters of their Great Nights, the haunters of their children’s dreams. We are legend. We are Gellet’s Javrosts. We are the new demons.

For one Great Day and Great Night, we ran free. We torched the topless star shrines of Javapanda and watched them burn like chimneys. We smashed the funerary jars and trampled the bones of the illustrious dead of Toohren. We overturned the houses of the holy, burned elders and kits in their homes. We lassoed rebels and dragged them behind our graapa, round and round the village, until all that remained was a bloody rope. We forced whole communities from their homes, driving them across the altiplano until the snow heaped their bodies. And Arthur was at my side. We were not friends—there is too much history on this world for human and Thent ever to be that. He was my badoon. You do not have a concept for it, let alone a word. A passionate colleague. A brother who is not related. A fellow devotee . . .

We killed and we killed and we killed. And in our wake came the Duke of Yoo’s soldiers—restoring order, rebuilding towns, offering defense against the murderous renegades. It was all strategy. The Duke of Yoo knew the plateauneers would never love her, but she could be their savior. Therefore, a campaign of final outrages was planned. Such vileness! We were ordered to Glehenta, a pottery town at the head of Valley of the Kilns. There we would enter the glotoonas—the birthing creches—and slaughter every infant down to the last kit. We rode, Arthur at my side, and though human emotions are strange and distant to me, I knew them well enough to read the storm in his heart. Night snow was falling as we entered Glehenta, lit by ten thousand starflowers. The people locked their doors and cowered from us. Through the heart of town we rode; past the great conical kilns, to the glotoonas. Matres flung themselves before our graapa—we rode them down. Arthur’s face was darker than the Great Midnight. He broke formation and rode up to Gellet himself. I went to him. I saw words between your brother and our commander. I did not hear them. Then Arthur drew his blasket and in a single shot blew the entire top of Gellet’s body to ash. In the fracas, I shot down three of our troop; then we were racing through the glowing streets, our hooves clattering on the porcelain cobbles, the erstwhile Gellet’s Javrosts behind us.

And so we saved them. For the Duke of Yoo had arranged it so that her Ducal Guard would fall upon us even as we attacked, annihilate us, and achieve two notable victories: presenting themselves as the saviors of Glehenta and destroying any evidence of their scheme. Your brother and I sprung the trap. But we did not know until leagues and months later, far from the altiplano. At the foot of the Ten Thousand Stairs, we parted—we thought it safer. We never saw each other again though I heard he had gone back up the stairs, to the Pelerines. And if you do find him, please don’t tell him what became of me. This is a shameful place.

And I am ashamed that I have told you such dark and bloody truths about your brother. But at the end, he was honorable. He was right. That he saved the guilty—an unintended consequence. Our lives are made up of such.

Certainly, we can continue outside on the hoondahvi porch. I did warn you that the music was irritating to human sensibilities.

V lucerna vesperum: Schaefferia: the Evening Candle. A solitary tree of the foothills of the Exx Palisades of Ishtaria, the Schaefferia is noted for its many upright, luminous blossoms, which flower in Venerian Great Evening and Great Dawn.

Only the blossoms are reproduced. Card, folded and cut tissue, luminous paint (not reproduced). The original is also slightly radioactive.

A cog railway runs from Camahoo Terminus to the Convent of the Starry Pelerines. The Starsview Special takes pilgrims to see the stars and planets. Our carriage is small, luxurious, intricate, and ingenious in that typically Thent fashion, and terribly tedious. The track has been constructed in a helix inside Awk Mountain, so our journey consists of interminable, noisy spells inside the tunnel, punctuated by brief, blinding moments of clarity as we emerge onto the open face of the mountain. Not for the vertiginous!

Thus, hour upon hour, we spiral our way up Mount Awk.

Princess Latufui and I play endless games of Moon Whist, but our minds are not in it. My forebodings have darkened after my conversation with the Thent hoondahvi owner in Camahoo. The princess is troubled by my anxiety. Finally, she can bear it no more.

“Tell me about the Blue Empress. Tell me everything.”

I grew up with two injunctions in case of fire: save the dogs and the Blue Empress. For almost all my life, the jewel was a ghost stone—present but unseen, haunting Grangegorman and the lives it held. I have a memory from earliest childhood of seeing the stone—never touching it—but I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings.

We are not free in so many things, we of the landed class. Richard would inherit, Arthur would make a way in the worlds, and I would marry as well as I could—land to land. The Barony of Rathangan was considered one of the most desirable in Kildare, despite Patrick’s seeming determination to drag it to the bankruptcy court. A match was made, and he was charming and bold; a fine sportsman and a very handsome man. It was an equal match: snide comments from both halves of the county. The Blue Empress was part of my treasure—on the strict understanding that it remain in the custody of my lawyers. Patrick argued—and it was there that I first got an inkling of his true character—and the wedding was off the wedding was on the wedding was off the wedding was on again and the banns posted. A viewing was arranged, for his people to itemize and value the Hyde treasure. For the first time in long memory, the Blue Empress was taken from its safe and displayed to human view. Blue as the wide Atlantic it was, and as boundless and clear. You could lose yourself forever in the light inside that gem. And yes, it was the size of a thrush’s egg.

And then the moment that all the stories agree on: the lights failed. Not so unusual at Grangegorman—the same grandfather who brought back the Blue Empress installed the hydro plant—and when they came back on again; the sapphire was gone: baize and case and everything.

We called upon the honor of all present, ladies and gentlemen alike. The lights would be put out for five minutes, and when they were switched back on, the Blue Empress would be back in the Hyde treasury. It was not. Our people demanded we call the police, Patrick’s people, mindful of their client’s attraction to scandal, were less insistent. We would make a further appeal to honor: if the Blue Empress was not back by morning, then we would call the guards.

Not only was the Blue Empress still missing, so was Arthur.

We called the Garda Siochana. The last we heard was that Arthur had left for the Inner Worlds.

The wedding went ahead. It would have been a greater scandal to call it off. We were two families alike in notoriety. Patrick could not let it go: he went to his grave believing that Arthur and I had conspired to keep the Blue Empress out of his hands. I have no doubt that Patrick would have found a way of forcing me to sign over possession of the gem to him and would have sold it. Wastrel.

As for the Blue Empress: I feel I am very near to Arthur now. One cannot run forever. We will meet, and the truth will be told.

Then light flooded our carriage as the train emerged from the tunnel onto the final ramp and there, before us, its spires and domes dusted with snow blown from the high peaks, was the Convent of the Starry Pelerines.

V aquilonis vitis visionum: the Northern Littoral, or Ghost Vine. A common climber of the forests of the southern slopes of the Ishtari altiplano, domesticated and widely grown in Thent garden terraces. Its white, trumpet-shaped flowers are attractive, but the plant is revered for its berries. When crushed, the infused liquor known as pula creates powerful auditory hallucinations in Venerian physiology and forms the basis of the Thent mystical hoondahvi cult. In Terrenes, it produces a strong euphoria and a sense of omnipotence.

Alkaloid-infused paper. Ida Granville-Hyde used Thent Ghost-Vine liquor to tint and infuse the paper in this cut. It is reported to be still mildly hallucinogenic.

THE PILGRIM’S TALE

You’ll come out onto the Belvedere? It’s supposed to be off-limits to Terrenes—technically blasphemy—sacred space and all that—but the pelerines turn a blind eye. Do excuse the cough . . . ghastly, isn’t it? Sounds like a bag of bloody loose change. I don’t suppose the cold air does much for my dear old alveoli, but at this stage it’s all a matter of damn.

That’s Gloaming Peak there. You won’t see it until the cloud clears. Every Great Evening, every Great Dawn, for a few Earth-days at a time, the cloud breaks. It goes up, oh so much farther than you could ever imagine. You look up, and up, and up—and beyond it, you see the stars. That’s why the pelerines came here. Such a sensible religion. The stars are gods. One star, one god. Simple. No faith, no heaven, no punishment, no sin. Just look up and wonder. The Blue Pearl: that’s what they call our Earth. I wonder if that’s why they care for us. Because we’re descended from divinity? If only they knew! They really are very kind.

Excuse me. Bloody marvelous stuff, this Thent brew. I’m in no pain at all. I find it quite reassuring that I shall slip from this too too rancid flesh swaddled in a blanket of beatific thoughts and analgesic glow. They’re very kind, the pelerines. Very kind.

Now, look to your right. There. Do you see? That staircase, cut into the rock, winding up up up. The Ten Thousand Stairs. That’s the old way to the altiplano. Everything went up and down those steps: people, animals, goods, palanquins and stick-stick men, traders and pilgrims and armies. Your brother. I watched him go, from this very belvedere. Three years ago, or was it five? You never really get used to the Great Day. Time blurs.

We were tremendous friends, the way that addicts are. You wouldn’t have come this far without realizing some truths about your brother. Our degradation unites us. Dear thing. How we’d set the world to rights, over flask after flask of this stuff! He realized the truth of this place early on. It’s the way to the stars. God’s waiting room. And we, this choir of shambling wrecks, wander through it, dazzled by our glimpses of the stars. But he was a dear friend, a dear dear friend. Dear Arthur.

We’re all darkened souls here, but he was haunted. Things done and things left undone, like the prayer book says. My father was a vicar—can’t you tell? Arthur never spoke completely about his time with the javrosts. He hinted—I think he wanted to tell me, very much, but was afraid of giving me his nightmares. That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled. But I would find him up here all times of the Great Day and Night, watching the staircase and the caravans and stick convoys going up and down. Altiplano porcelain, he’d say. Finest in all the worlds. So fine you can read the Bible through it. Every cup, every plate, every vase and bowl, was portered down those stairs on the shoulders of a stickman. You know he served up on the altiplano, in the Duke of Yoo’s Pacification. I wasn’t here then, but Aggers was, and he said you could see the smoke going up—endless plumes of smoke, so thick the sky didn’t clear and the pelerines went for a whole Great Day without seeing the stars. All Arthur would say about it was, that’ll make some fine china. That’s what made porcelain from the Valley of the Kilns so fine: bones—the bones of the dead, ground up into powder. He would never drink from a Valley cup—he said it was drinking from a skull.

Here’s another thing about addicts—you never get rid of it. All you do is replace one addiction with another. The best you can hope for is that it’s a better addiction. Some become god addicts, some throw themselves into worthy deeds, or self-improvement, or fine thoughts, or helping others, God help us all. Me, my lovely little vice is sloth—I really am an idle little bugger. It’s so easy, letting the seasons slip away; slothful days and indolent nights, coughing my life up one chunk at a time. For Arthur, it was the visions. Arthur saw wonders and horrors, angels and demons, hopes and fears. True visions—the things that drive men to glory or death. Visionary visions. It lay up on the altiplano, beyond the twists and turns of the Ten Thousand Steps. I could never comprehend what it was, but it drove him. Devoured him. Ate his sleep, ate his appetite, ate his body and his soul and his sanity.

It was worse in the Great Night . . . Everything’s worse in the Great Night. The snow would come swirling down the staircase and he saw things in it—faces—heard voices. The faces and voices of the people who had died, up there on the altiplano. He had to follow them, go up, into the Valley of the Kilns, where he would ask the people to forgive him—or kill him.

And he went. I couldn’t stop him—I didn’t want to stop him. Can you understand that? I watched him from this very belvedere. The pelerines are not our warders, any of us is free to leave at any time though I’ve never seen anyone leave but Arthur. He left in the evening, with the lilac light catching Gloaming Peak. He never looked back. Not a glance to me. I watched him climb the steps to that bend there. That’s where I lost sight of him. I never saw or heard of him again. But stories come down the stairs with the stickmen and they make their way even to this little aerie, stories of a seer—a visionary. I look and I imagine I see smoke rising, up there on the altiplano.

It’s a pity you won’t be here to see the clouds break around the Gloaming, or look at the stars.

V genetric nives: Mother-of-snows (direct translation from Thent). Ground-civer hi-alpine of the Exx Palisades. The plant forms extensive carpets of thousands of minute white blossoms.

The most intricate papercut in the Botanica Veneris. Each floret is three millimeters in diameter. Paper, ink, gouache.

A high-stepping spider-car took me up the Ten Thousand Steps, past caravans of stickmen, spines bent, shoulders warped beneath brutal loads of finest porcelain.

The twelve cuts of the Botanica Veneris I have given to the princess, along with descriptions and botanical notes. She would not let me leave, clung to me, wracked with great sobs of loss and fear. It was dangerous; a sullen land with Great Night coming. I could not convince her of my reason for heading up the stairs alone, for they did not convince even me. The one, true reason I could not tell her. Oh, I have been despicable to her! My dearest friend, my love. But worse even than that, false.

She stood watching my spider-car climb the steps until a curve in the staircase took me out of her sight. Must the currency of truth always be falsehood?

Now I think of her spreading her long hair out, and brushing it, firmly, directly, beautifully, and the pen falls from my fingers . . .

Egayhazy is a closed city; hunched, hiding, tight. Its streets are narrow, its buildings lean toward one another; their gables so festooned with starflower that it looks like a perpetual festival. Nothing could be further from the truth: Egayhazy is an angry city, aggressive and cowed: sullen. I keep my Ledbekh-Teltai in my bag. But the anger is not directed at me, though from the story I heard at the Camahoo hoondahvi, my fellow humans on this world have not graced our species. It is the anger of a country under occupation. On walls and doors, the proclamations of the Duke of Yoo are plastered layer upon layer: her pennant, emblazoned with the four white hands of House Yoo, flies from public buildings, the radio-station mast, tower tops, and the gallows. Her Javrosts patrol streets so narrow that their graapa can barely squeeze through them. At their passage, the citizens of Egayhazy flash jagged glares, mutter altiplano oaths. And there is another sigil: an eight-petaled flower; a blue so deep it seems almost to shine. I see it stenciled hastily on walls and doors and the occupation-force posters. I see it in little badges sewn to the quilted jackets of the Egayhazians; and in tiny glass jars in low-set windows. In the market of Yent, I witnessed Javrosts overturn and smash a vegetable stall that dared to offer a few posies of this blue bloom.

The staff at my hotel were suspicious when they saw me working up some sketches from memory of this blue flower of dissent. I explained my work and showed some photographs and asked, what was this flower? A common plant of the high altiplano, they said. It grows up under the breath of the high snow; small and tough and stubborn. Its most remarkable feature is that it blooms when no other flower does—in the dead of the Great Night. The Midnight Glory was one name though it had another, newer, which entered common use since the occupation: the Blue Empress.

I knew there and then that I had found Arthur.

A pall of sulfurous smoke hangs permanently over the Valley of Kilns, lit with hellish tints from the glow of the kilns below. A major ceramics center on a high, treeless plateau? How are the kilns fueled? Volcanic vents do the firing, but they turn this long defile in the flank of Mount Tooloowera into a little hell of clay, bones, smashed porcelain, sand, slag, and throat-searing sulfur. Glehenta is the last of the Porcelain Towns, wedged into the head of the valley, where the river Iddis still carries a memory of freshness and cleanliness. The pottery houses, like upturned vases, lean toward one another like companionable women.

And there is the house to which my questions guided me: as my informants described; not the greatest but perhaps the meanest; not the foremost but perhaps the most prominent, tucked away in an alley. From its roof flies a flag, and my breath caught: not the Four White Hands of Yoo—never that, but neither the Blue Empress. The smoggy wind tugged at the hand-and-dagger of the Hydes of Grangegorman.

Swift action: to hesitate would be to falter and fail, to turn and walk away, back down the Valley of the Kilns and the Ten Thousand Steps. I rattle the ceramic chimes. From inside, a huff and sigh. Then a voice: worn ragged, stretched and tired, but unmistakable.

“Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”

V crepitant movebitvolutans: Wescott’s Wandering Star. A wind-mobile vine, native of the Ishtaria altiplano, that grows into a tight spherical web of vines which, in the Venerian Great Day, becomes detached from an atrophied root stock and rolls cross-country, carried on the wind. A central calyx contains woody nuts that produce a pleasant rattling sound as the Wandering Star is in motion.

Cut paper, painted, layed, and gummed. Perhaps the most intricate of the Venerian papercuts.

THE SEER’S STORY

Tea?

I have it sent up from Camahoo when the stickmen make the return trip. Proper tea. Irish breakfast. It’s very hard to get the water hot enough at this altitude, but it’s my little ritual. I should have asked you to bring some. I’ve known you were looking for me from the moment you set out from Loogaza. You think anyone can wander blithely into Glehenta?

Tea.

You look well. The years have been kind to you. I look like shit. Don’t deny it. I know it. I have an excuse. I’m dying, you know. The liquor of the vine—it takes as much as it gives. And this world is hard on humans. The Great Days—you never completely adjust—and the climate: if it’s not the thin air up here, it’s the molds and fungi and spores down there. And the ultraviolet. It dries you out, withers you up. The town healer must have frozen twenty melanomas off me. No, I’m dying. Rotten inside. A leather bag of mush and bones. But you look very well, Ida. So, Patrick shot himself? Fifteen years too late, says I. He could have spared all of us . . . enough of that. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’m glad you have someone who cares, to treat you the way you should be treated.

I am the Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, the Earth Man, and I am dying.

I walked down that same street you walked down. I didn’t ride, I walked, right through the center of town. I didn’t know what to expect. Silence. A mob. Stones. Bullets. To walk right through and out the other side without a door opening to me. I almost did. At the very last house, the door opened and an old man came out and stood in front of me so that I could not pass. “I know you.” He pointed at me. “You came the night of the Javrosts.” I was certain then that I would die, and that seemed not so bad a thing to me. “You were the merciful one, the one who spared our young.” And he went into the house and brought me a porcelain cup of water and I drank it down, and here I remain. The Merciful One.

They have decided that I am to lead them to glory, or, more likely, to death. It’s justice, I suppose. I have visions you see—pula flashbacks. It works differently on Terrenes than Thents. Oh, they’re hardheaded enough not to believe in divine inspiration or any of that rubbish. They need a figurehead—the repentant mercenary is a good role, and the odd bit of mumbo jumbo from the inside of my addled head doesn’t go amiss.

Is your tea all right? It’s very hard to get the water hot enough this high. Have I said that before? Ignore me—the flashbacks. Did I tell you I’m dying? But it’s good to see you; oh how long is it?

And Richard? The children? And Grangegorman? And is Ireland . . . of course. What I would give for an eyeful of green, for a glimpse of summer sun, a blue sky.

So, I have been a con man and a lover, a soldier and an addict, and now I end my time as a revolutionary. It is surprisingly easy. The Group of Seven Altiplano Peoples’ Liberation Army does the work: I release gnomic pronouncements that run like grass fire from here to Egayhazy. I did come up with the Blue Empress motif: the Midnight Glory: blooming in the dark, under the breath of the high snows. Apt. They’re not the most poetic of people, these potters. We drove the Duke of Yoo from the Valley of the Kilns and the Ishtar Plain: she is resisted everywhere, but she will not relinquish her claim on the altiplano so lightly. You’ve been in Egayhazy—you’ve seen the forces she’s moving up here. Armies are mustering, and my agents report ’rigibles coming through the passes in the Palisades. An assault will come. The Duke has an alliance with House Shorth—some agreement to divide the altiplano up between them. We’re outnumbered. Outmaneuvered and outsupplied, and we have nowhere to run. They’ll be at each other’s throats within a Great Day, but that’s a matter of damn for us. The Duke may spare the kilns—they’re the source of wealth. Matter of damn to me. I’ll not see it, one way or other. You should leave, Ida. Pula and local wars—never get sucked into them.

Ah. Unh. Another flashback. They’re getting briefer, but more intense.

Ida, you are in danger. Leave before night—they’ll attack in the night. I have to stay. The Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, can’t abandon his people. But it was good, so good of you to come. This is a terrible place. I should never have come here. The best traps are the slowest. In you walk, through all the places and all the lives and all the years, never thinking that you are already in the trap, then you go to turn around, and it has closed behind you. Ida, go as soon as you can . . . go right now. You should never have come. But . . . oh, how I hate the thought of dying up here on this terrible plain! To see Ireland again . . .

V volanti musco: Altiplano Air-moss. The papercut shows part of a symbiotic lighter-than-air creature of the Ishtari altiplano. The plant part consists of curtains of extremely light hanging moss that gather water from the air and low clouds. The animal part is not reproduced.

Shredded paper, gum.

He came to the door of his porcelain house, leaning heavily on a stick, a handkerchief pressed to mouth and nose against the volcanic fumes. I had tried to plead with him to leave, but whatever else he has become, he is a Hyde of Grangegorman, and stubborn as an old donkey. There is a wish for death in him; something old and strangling and relentless with the gentlest eyes.

“I have something for you,” I said, and I gave him the box without ceremony.

His eyebrows rose when he opened it.

“Ah.”

“I stole the Blue Empress.”

“I know.”

“I had to keep it out of Patrick’s hands. He would have broken and wasted it, like he broke and wasted everything.” Then my slow mind, so intent on saying this confession right, that I had practiced on the space-crosser, and in every room and every mode of conveyance on my journey across this world, flower to flower, story to story: my middle-aged mind tripped over Arthur’s two words. “You knew?”

“All along.”

“You never thought that maybe Richard, maybe Father, or Mammy, or one of the staff had taken it?”

“I had no doubt that it was you, for those very reasons you said. I chose to keep your secret, and I have.”

“Arthur, Patrick is dead, Rathangan is mine. You can come home now.”

“Ah, if it were so easy!”

“I have a great forgiveness to ask from you, Arthur.”

“No need. I did it freely. And do you know what, I don’t regret what I did. I was notorious—the Honorable Arthur Hyde, jewel thief and scoundrel. That has currency out in the worlds. It speaks reams that none of the people I used it on asked to see the jewel, or the fortune I presumably had earned from selling it. Not one. Everything I have done, I have done on reputation alone. It’s an achievement. No, I won’t go home, Ida. Don’t ask me to. Don’t raise that phantom before me. Fields of green and soft Kildare mornings. I’m valued here. The people are very kind. I’m accepted. I have virtues. I’m not the minor son of Irish gentry with no land and the arse hanging out of his pants. I am the Merciful One, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl.”

“Arthur, I want you to have the jewel.”

He recoiled as if I had offered him a scorpion.

“I will not have it. I will not touch it. It’s an ill-favored thing. Unlucky. There are no sapphires on this world. You can never touch the Blue Pearl. Take it back to the place it came from.”

For a moment, I wondered if he was suffering from another one of his hallucinating seizures. His eyes, his voice were firm.

“You should go, Ida. Leave me. This is my place now. People have tremendous ideas of family—loyalty and undying love and affection: tremendous expectations and ideals that drive them across worlds to confess and receive forgiveness. Families are whatever works. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. I forgive you—though as I said there is nothing to forgive. There. Does that make us a family now? The Duke of Yoo is coming, Ida. Be away from here before that. Go. The townspeople will help you.”

And with a wave of his handkerchief, he turned and closed his door to me.

I wrote that last over a bowl of altiplano mate at the stickmen’s caravanserai in Yelta, the last town in the Valley of the Kilns. I recalled every word, clearly and precisely. Then I had an idea; as clear and precise as my recall of that sad, unresolved conversation with Arthur. I turned to my valise of papers, took out my scissors and a sheet of the deepest indigo and carefully, from memory, began to cut. The stickmen watched curiously, then with wonder. The clean precision of the scissors, so fine and intricate, the difficulty and accuracy of the cut, absorbed me entirely. Doubts fell from me: why had I come to this world? Why had I ventured alone into this noisome valley? Why had Arthur’s casual acceptance of what I had done, the act that shaped both his life and mine, so disappointed me? What had I expected from him? Snip went the scissors, fine curls of indigo paper fell from them onto the table. It had always been the scissors I turned to when the ways of men grew too much. It was a simple cut. I had the heart of it right away, no false starts, no new beginnings. Pure and simple. My onlookers hummed in appreciation. Then I folded the cut into my diary, gathered up my valises, and went out to the waiting spider-car. The eternal clouds seem lower today, like a storm front rolling in. Evening is coming.

I write quickly, briefly.

Those are no clouds. Those are the ’rigibles of the Duke of Yoo. The way is shut. Armies are camped across the altiplano. Thousands of soldiers and javrosts. I am trapped here. What am I to do? If I retreat to Glehenta, I will meet the same fate as Arthur and the Valley people—if they even allow me to do that. They might think that I was trying to carry a warning. I might be captured as a spy. I do not want to imagine how the Duke of Yoo treats spies. I do not imagine my Terrene identity will protect me. And the sister of the Seer, the Blue Empress! Do I hide in Yelta and hope that they will pass me by? But how could I live with myself knowing that I had abandoned Arthur?

There is no way forward, no way back, no way around.

I am an aristocrat. A minor one, but of stock. I understand the rules of class, and breeding. The Duke is vastly more powerful than I, but we are of a class. I can speak with her, gentry to gentry. We can communicate as equals.

I must persuade her to call off the attack.

Impossible! A middle-aged Irish widow, armed only with a pair of scissors. What can she do? Kill an army with gum and tissue? The death of a thousand papercuts?

Perhaps I could buy her off. A prize beyond prize: a jewel from the stars, from their goddess itself. Arthur said that sapphires are unknown on this world. A stone beyond compare.

I am writing as fast as I am thinking now.

I must go and face the Duke of Yoo, female to female. I am of Ireland, a citizen of no mean nation. We confront the powerful, we defeat empires. I will go to her and name myself and I shall offer her the Blue Empress. The true Blue Empress. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I must do it and do it now.

I cannot make the driver of my spider-car take me into the camp of the enemy. I have asked her to leave me and make her own way back to Yelta. I am writing this with a stub of pencil. I am alone on the high altiplano. Above the shield wall, the cloud layer is breaking up. Enormous shafts of dazzling light spread across the high plain. Two mounted figures have broken from the line and ride toward me. I am afraid—and yet I am calm. I take the Blue Empress from its box and grasp it tight in my gloved hand. Hard to write now. No more diary. They are here.

V. Gloria medianocte: the Midnight Glory, or Blue Empress.

Card, paper, ink.

Originally published in Old Venus, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin.

About the Author

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking In Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent novels are the starting volume of a YA series, Planesrunner, and two sequels, Be My Enemy and Empress of the Sun. His most recent book is a big retrospective collection, The Best of Ian McDonald. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

You are (Most Likely) Not Living in a Simulation

Craig DeLancey

The idea that we may be living in a simulation is familiar to science fiction readers. Some fine films and many novels explore the theme. But though the idea may be old, one surprising new twist has arisen in recent years: many people now claim that we are likely living in a computer simulation. Such people argue, as Elon Musk reportedly said at a recent conference, that “There’s a billion-to-one chance we’re living in base reality.”

Why have this suspicion? It could be in part a consequence of the first commercial platforms for virtual reality. Technological advancement has allowed us to experience a few steps towards a crude simulation of a crude world. But even if technological advancement enables us to better imagine how our world could be a simulation, do we have any reason to believe that we are in a simulation? There is a new argument for this view, perhaps best given voice by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. It’s a relatively simple argument, and Bostrom summarizes it in the first paragraph of a paper:

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely to be among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. (2003: 243)

Is this argument sound? And should we care?

The most important thing to note about this argument (and also something we find in many fictions about simulation) is that it assumes that the world is a simple thing. A full simulation of our world will need to have a complete description of each object in our world. What if a complete description of a real, physical stone—a description that captured all that can be said about the stone, all the particles in it, their positions, their motions, how each is currently interacting with the weak gravitational field of the moon, and so on and so on—required at least as much storage space, and at least as much mass, as the stone itself? Then we could say that the stone was information dense. If the Earth and all the things on it are information dense, and if you were to simulate the Earth, you would need at least as much matter as there is in the Earth to run your simulation (which would be dedicated, presumably, to monstrous hard drives and processors).

Bostrom’s argument assumes that sticks and stones and stars and chairs and humans and all other objects are not information dense. We already know that’s implausible. Even if we consider something as simple as some gas in a jar, we find that we must make statistical generalizations about the behavior of the gas, because it is practically impossible to describe every particle knocking around in there.

If the world is information dense—and all the evidence indicates that it is—then not only can we not simulate our world with great accuracy, but also any inaccurate but respectable simulation is going to be immensely costly. It’s easy to say future generations will run millions of simulations, when we imagine such simulations are as cheap to store and run as are apps on my iPhone. But if these simulations will require tremendous space, time, and energy, then they will be nonexistent or they will be very rare. And so Bostrom’s claim that there will be millions of simulated Earths and trillions of simulated people is false.

One might reply even if the real world is information dense, the simulations do not have to capture all that information. But there are two problems with this escape, each of which is fatal to Bostrom’s argument and any similar argument.

First, we wouldn’t be ourselves. Bostrom’s argument is simple statistics. He supposes that there will be trillions of equally-conscious, equally-sentient “human” minds, and most of these will be simulations, so any randomly chosen mind is more likely to be a simulation than a real person. Put differently: there is a large population P of one kind of thing (equally-conscious, equally-sentient “human” minds), and most of them have property S (they are simulated), and so any arbitrary person chosen at random from that population (such as you) most likely has property S. But if we claim the simulations throw away a lot of information, then we now have two populations: one population of fully conscious and sentient beings (the real people), and another (supposedly larger) population of partially conscious, partially sentient beings. The statistical argument no longer applies.

This means that if you do not think you are an incomplete copy of a whole person, that’s very likely because you are not. Remember, Bostrom’s argument is that future humans of Earth are creating exact simulations of fully conscious and sentient human minds. If the simulation fails, the simulated people are likely to notice, not least because all the other things in their simulation—Shakespeare’s poetry, Beethoven’s music, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—expect them to understand and to share the lives and experiences of fully conscious and sentient human beings. If wine tastes like water to you, then you ought to wonder why all those people in novels keep spending so much praise and money on it.

The second problem is not people, but the world. And I’m pleased to note that science fiction writers lead the way, and have sussed out this problem a long time ago. If we are living in a partial simulation of the world, we can predict that we will encounter errors in it. Thus, the protagonist of The Thirteenth Floor finds the edge of his world, enlightened humans in The Matrix recognize glitches in the simulation, and the travelers in Joe Haldeman’s Forever Free hit the bounds of their simulation and crash it.

One might reply: what if we program the simulation to only simulate things that minds are encountering? The designers can turn off the simulation of the shoes in your closet when you are not looking in the closet. But how could such a simulation maintain integrity? A number of logical results show that many computer programs are unpredictable, and that as a general principle the more complex programs are more likely to be unpredictable. Human simulations will be very complex programs. But then, how will the whole simulation know when you are going to look in your closet? How will it know when you set up mirrors to peek in there? Or put a camera in there? And so on. One can have answers for all those contingencies, but the answers are going to require a godlike AI that can predict everything that everyone and every device can do in the world. (The same can be said for any claim that when the simulation fails, the affected humans can have their memories revised in some kind of seamless way.) And now we have left Bostrom’s argument far behind, and we must consider the probability (and cost) of godlike AIs being invented and then put to work to maintain the lie of a partial simulation. Such a thing will not be done millions of times, if even once.

So Bostrom’s argument fails. I think we should be glad. If our environment is made specifically to appear a certain way to us, then the “world” is a stage set, not a world. The philosopher David Chalmers pointed out to me that this objection would apply to many past philosophical theories that claimed the world is the thought of a god. Bishop Berkeley, for example, argued that everything is made out of thoughts. But what happens when you close your closet door, and you no longer perceive or think about your shoes? Do they cease to exist? No, Berkeley argued, because God continues to think about your shoes. If we reject that simulations are real because they are stage sets, then we should reject that Berkeley’s world would be real.

To me, that sounds right. Take the red pill. So much the worse for Berkeley, and so much the worse for the claim that we are living in a simulation.

But good news! You almost certainly aren’t.

Some References

Bostrom, Nick (2003) “Are you living in a computer simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243‐255.

McCormick, Rich (2016) “Odds are we’re living in a simulation, says Elon Musk.” Vox, https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837874/elon-musk-says-odds-living-in-simulation.

About the Author

Craig DeLancey is a writer and philosopher. He has published short stories in magazines like Analog, Lightspeed, Cosmos, Shimmer, and Nature Physics. His novels include the Predator Space Chronicles and Gods of Earth. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, he lives now in upstate New York and, in addition to writing, teaches philosophy at Oswego State, part of the State University of New York (SUNY).

Bradbury, Lake, and The Named Lands:
A Conversation with Ken Scholes

Chris Urie

Worlds encompassed in books often extend past the pages. Rivers and mountain ranges spill over the margins slipping through gaps in fingers as they make their way through a reader’s mind. Worlds built over the course of a book series breathe and expand with the lives and machinations of characters and civilizations. Even when series comes to an end, the world lives on long after in the mind of the reader. No better is this illustrated than the world created by Ken Scholes in The Psalms of Isaak.

Readers were first introduced to the world of The Psalms of Isaak with Lamentation. Over the course of the series, the universe encompassing The Named Lands and the Moon have grown complex, multilayered, and more populous with a fascinating cast of characters. In the final volume of The Psalms of Isaak, Hymn, Scholes concludes the five-book epic in spectacular fashion. Battle for the Named Lands rages, family members are pitted against one another, and a Younger God takes power on the Moon.

Ken Scholes is the multiple award-winning author of The Psalms of Isaak and numerous works of short fiction. He has won the Writers of the Future Award, France’s Prix Imaginales, the Endeavour Award, and others. Hymn, the conclusion to The Psalms of Isaak series, will be available from Tor Books on December 5th.

When was the first time you realized that you wanted to be a writer?

I started stapling pages together into little books sometime in first grade but things really stuck once I read Ray Bradbury’s essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” in an old textbook around age thirteen or fourteen.

What drew you to short fiction when you started writing?

Initially, it was Bradbury’s essay and his own focus on short fiction. And a lot of my other heroes from the pulp era also started with short stories. It seemed to me that was the path—start small and then go big as the writing muscles developed. But over time, it became comfortable and I found myself really nervous about writing anything longer than 10,000 words. Still, I’m glad I put my time in there because all those sheds I built seemed to have helped me build some mansions.

Has the world you’ve created surprised you with how it has evolved over The Psalms of Isaak series?

Absolutely. Initially, I had just enough world for a short story. But as I started expanding, the world very quickly took on its own life. I discovered hidden civilizations and forgotten spaces in the world as I wrote, right up to the last book.

How do you combine your science and fantasy? Do you have a special formula for which aspects of the world get the sci-fi treatment or vice versa?

I don’t have a formula. And I accidentally backed into being lauded as “seamlessly mixing science fiction and fantasy” but really, all I’ve done is only reveal to the reader what the POV characters believe about themselves and their world. Since prior to the first book’s launch, there’s been some back and forth about whether the series was one or the either or both. In the truest sense, it’s fantasy in the way that The Martian Chronicles is fantasy but it’s dressed up as SF . . . which looks at least through the first few books like epic(ish) fantasy.

There’s a quote from Hebda in your newest novel that reads “What is and isn’t possible is being redefined daily.” What is something you’ve discovered recently that you previously thought impossible?

So many things. I think the biggest is that I didn’t believe I would be able to have a life free of the PTSD that’s dogged me since age two. And yet I’m now nearly three years in remission thanks to the miracle of modern science and a little-known psychological framework born out of BC in the ’70s that has reshaped my cognitive approach to life in general. I’ve had more peace of mind than I can remember ever having previously which has meant a much nicer, quieter life in general.

Who is one author that influenced the Psalms of Isaak series?

There would be no Psalms of Isaak without Jay Lake. His friendship led directly or indirectly to most of my body of work. His dare to go write Lamentation, his introduction to my first agent and my editor at Tor, his deep love for the series, and his support of me as I wrote it—these things all came together in powerful ways in my life.

How does it feel to finish the series?

It feels fantastic. It’s been nearly two years now since I typed “END” and now, watching it finally come out gives me a sense of accomplishment. These five novels were the hardest bit of writing I’ve ever done in my life partly because I had to write them through such tough circumstances.

What is your next project on the horizon?

I have no idea. I’ve been on sabbatical largely since finishing Hymn. Before that I had a PTSD book in development and since, I’ve thought I might move to YA and I’m researching another non-fiction book at the moment but I have no idea when I’ll start drafting it. I’ve said yes to some short stories after the first of the year but to be honest, I’ve really enjoyed the break and feel no burning need to put more Ken Scholes stories into the world.

Do you plan to revisit this world again or do you feel like you’ve completed what you’ve set out to do?

I’ve left that up to the audience and to Leroy, my inner redneck muse. I have many more stories in that world buried in the basement of my brain, set both before and after this particular series. And I’ve also thought about telling some of those stories through Tor.com’s novella line. We’ll see how much demand there is for more.

How much of the series did you have planned before writing the first book?

Very, very little. I’m a discovery writer who writes by the seat of his pants. So, there are very few notes and even in the last book, I was surprised by the new bits I discovered about my world and characters.

The depth of the characters in your new novel really struck me. What does your process look like when developing a character?

I just know them and write them the way they “seem” to me. And I learn more about each character as I write them. It’s instinctive and I always lock up a little when I try to describe the process because it lives beyond my power to describe.

Why do you sometimes refer to yourself as “Trailer Boy”?

I grew up in a double-wide at the edge of the woods and at the foot of Mt Rainier. It was a Trailer Boy childhood with car parts in the yard and tires stacked against the various sheds. And it was a dark childhood—the kind that gives kids PTSD at a very young age—full of all kinds of icky things like racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia. So, it’s a reminder to me of where I come from and what our capacity is to grow beyond our origin stories.

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:
What Authors Owe Us

Alethea Kontis

I recently asked my circle of friends (both in person and on the interwebs): “What do authors owe us?”

It’s an age-old, deceptively simple question that should have a simple answer, right? But the further I delved into the nuances of the answers I received, the muddier the waters became.

As social media continues to amplify the volume of fan voices across the globe, this question has been asked louder and more frequently in recent times. Fandom is power, especially in a capitalist society where fans are more than willing to put their money where their virtual mouths are. We can cancel shows and end careers, resurrect characters and drag a series on long past its natural end. We are many. We are mighty. We are the gathering horde and oncoming storm. We are the mob. We can be benevolent . . . and dangerous.

So, what do authors/creators owe us?

If you take out the qualifiers: What does anyone owe anyone else? Well, that’s easy enough. Nothing.

A large percentage of the answers I received were just that: Authors owe us nothing. Authors are actual people, with actual lives. When the spirit moves them to sit down and create their art, fans should feel lucky. Excited. Awed. Amazed. And then we need to move on to the next beautiful thing and leave the artist alone to create—or not—as they will.

Or, as Neil Gaiman famously phrased it eight years ago (yes, it really has been eight years): George R. R. Martin is not your bitch. “Life is a good thing for a writer. It’s where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.”

Neil says that a book is not a contract with the reader. Technically, no it is not. However, it could be argued that people who choose writing as a profession know that they’re entering into a unique relationship with their readers.

When a story lives and breathes inside the mind of an author, it is one hundred percent the author’s property. Similarly, when that book is written and sitting on the hard drive, the author has complete control over his or her work of art.

When it is published, it evolves into a completely new thing.

I have heard many an author wax rhapsodic about how published books are a collaboration. Words, editors, cover art, illustrations, publicity (perception), and the mind of the reader all work together to create a fascinating new world. This team’s job is to make sure readers fall in love with the thing they have created. And then the author is forced to move on to the next project.

These readers—now fans—are encouraged to lose their hearts to a thing. At which point, they become the person pining after unrequited love in a fabricated relationship.

As fans, we see ourselves in a book’s characters. We dress up as them. Write fan fiction about them. Go to conventions and speak on panels about them. Teach them in classes. Watch them in movies and on television. These characters come to mean so much to us, personally. More than the author will ever know.

(Of course, chances are, the author does know. It’s often why they became an author in the first place.)

The other most common answer to my question was “The author owes us a good book.”

It’s a two-part answer. And a loaded one.

“The author owes us a book.” Sure. You fall in love with a series, and you’d like to read more in the series. I get that. If for any reason the series has to end, you would (maybe) be satisfied (maybe) reading a book by that same author about something else.

“Good” is so incredibly subjective. One of the first lessons authors learn is that they can’t please all of the people all of the time. Some yahoo in the crowd is going to give you one star for whatever reason. It happens. But authors are told not to read reviews. Instead, they are encouraged to concentrate on a new project.

And how often are these new, good books expected to appear in the world? Once upon time, we’d get a new release every one to two years and be happy about it. Tomorrow isn’t fast enough for some fans these days.

Right before my Last Book came out, I put a new project on hold for one week so that I could spend time writing a few guest blogs and essays. I knew I was supposed to be writing the Next Thing, but that Last Book turned out to be one of my favorite books ever, and I just wanted to spend a few days enjoying it before I moved on. I’m sure only a handful of people read those essays, and it got down to the wire on the deadline for that Next Thing, but I was glad I had taken the time. Because I actually like the stories that I write. And I don’t get a whole lot of free time to appreciate them anymore.

Gaiman said that writers were not machines. But those authors who are living off their paltry writing income kind of have to be. It’s tough. But that’s the job, right?

Ready for some interesting statistics?

Recently, LitRing asked a similar question of its readers: “What do you wish more authors would do for their readers?”

22% answered “book content.” (Similar to the “a good book” answer given above.)

21% answered “free books.” Excerpts are not enough. They want the first book in the series free, and any other book that’s free. Sites like BookBub and Robin Reads feature newsletters in which readers are notified of free content on a daily basis. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? (Wait, you mean this wasn’t what Mom was talking about when she said this?)

18% answered “more interaction.” Unfortunately, this piece of the pie is a double-edged sword. Authors can spend a solid month on guest blogs and Skype visits and FB live videos and Instagram stories, but if it doesn’t happen to come across a reader’s social media feed the exact moment they log in, it never happened. Authors can make themselves available until the cows come home, but the algorithms are against them if The Machine thinks that they are in any way trying to sell something. That content is usually out there, if the reader looks for it. I’m curious how much of the 18% who said this actually went looking.

15% answered “giveaways.” Preferably in the form of retail gift cards.

If the author could please write the books, give away the books for free, and then spend the rest of their precious time and money keeping everyone happy, it would be a readers’ paradise.

If you think this sounds insane, you’re not alone. And yet, this is the world we have created. There are hundreds, probably thousands of new authors every day. If a reader doesn’t want to pay for a book, they don’t have to. They only have to interact with the author on their time, if they so choose. They can get a Kindle Unlimited or similar subscription, sign up for all the newsletters that contain giveaways, go to a hundred conventions and collect only swag. Because they can.

Authors are jumping through incredible hoops just to get attention.

Now, you’re welcome to pull this survey—and LitRing’s data pool—to pieces, but I’ve got to say, as annoying as their results may be, I didn’t find them very shocking. This is the literary world we have created today. As frustrated as fans might be with GRRM or Pat Rothfuss or anyone else they’re waiting on a book from, it’s that much more frustrating for the millions of other authors out there trying to eke out a living. The battle between “what an author can realistically accomplish” and “what is expected of them” is never-ending.

My favorite answer to the “What authors owe us” question came from my friend, number one New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon. “Respect,” Sherri said without needing to stop and think about it. “The author owes their readers respect.”

I liked this answer because it was not about books or appearances or time spent on social media. It’s more about mutual appreciation in a polite society. In a perfect world, this might be the best of all answers.

About the Author

Alethea Kontis is a princess, author, fairy godmother, and geek. Her bestselling Books of Arilland fairytale series won two Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Awards (Enchanted and Tales of Arilland), and was twice nominated for the Andre Norton Award. Alethea also penned the AlphaOops picture books, The Wonderland Alphabet, Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome, Beauty & Dynamite, The Dark-Hunter Companion (w/Sherrilyn Kenyon), and a myriad of poems, essays, and short stories. Princess Alethea lives and writes on the Space Coast of Florida with her teddy bear, Charlie.

Editor’s Desk:
The Things I’ve Seen

Neil Clarke

Next month will mark the third anniversary of our Chinese translation project with Storycom. I hadn’t had many opportunities to meet with them or the authors we’ve worked with outside of the occasional Worldcon. Last month, I had the opportunity to visit China for the first time as a guest of Science Fiction World, the leading SF magazine in China, and Storycom. I spent nearly two weeks in Chengdu and Beijing attending a variety of conferences, events, and award ceremonies.

The first leg of my trip was to attend the Fourth China International SF Conference hosted by SFW. I landed in Chengdu the night before the event and had to hit the ground running the next morning. The twelve hour time difference and nearly full day of travel I spent getting there made things a bit rough. I don’t think I fully adjusted to their time zone until the day before I came home.

SFW provided the foreign guests with translators from a local university. Several events had simultaneous translation available via headsets, but some of the smaller panels I wanted to attend didn’t. Fortunately, Stephanie, my translator, was with me most of the time and was able to help me follow what was going on. Many people spoke English, but not everyone, so she made it much easier to interact with people. I think I would have missed a lot if it wasn’t for her.

I had one panel scheduled for Sunday, so most days I followed the pack and attended panels, talks, and meals. The meals were fantastic. I wasn’t as adventurous as I could have been, but I did try many new things. I drew the line at organ meat and anything that I’d see running around my backyard. The panels and talks were very interesting and eye-opening. It’s one thing to read articles, this editorial, or talk to some people, it’s another to actually see a community in action. This trip left me convinced that there needs to be a Worldcon in China. It’s a young and energetic community that has much to offer. We could learn a few things from them and their enthusiasm is contagious.

Sunday was capped with my panel–quite enjoyable even though my headset cut out in the final minutes–and an award ceremony. At this point I said goodbye to Stephanie and was joined by Emily, who would be my translator for the remainder of the trip. (Emily co-translated a story for us a couple of months ago.) A few of us were bussed out to Sichuan University, which turns out to be larger than the town I live in. We had a lovely dinner followed by a panel discussion led by Xia Jia. I was impressed by the number of students that came out on a Sunday night to hear us talk. Cynically, I assumed that there must have been some extra credit or assignment involved in getting them there, but no, it was entirely voluntary. After the panel ended, there was a Q&A, and then we were sent back to the hotel where I promptly fell asleep, exhausted.

Monday was the first and only free day I had in Chengdu. I spent it with Emily doing typical tourist things like visiting pandas, a shrine, and some very photogenic shopping areas. There was no way I was going to be able to cover everything in one day, but what I saw left me wanting more and gives me one more excuse to go back.

Tuesday, Emily and I departed for Beijing. The defibrillator implanted in my chest can be a challenge when traveling, however. Airports’ metal detectors and wands can short out the device and cause me considerable harm or even death. An unexpected part of Emily’s job became making sure airport security knew not to zap me. Very few security people spoke English, so her presence was actually a lifesaver.

I thought Chengdu was a large city, but flying into Beijing, I couldn’t see where it ended. I live near New York and that’s the city I normally use for comparisons. Beijing is 6490 square miles and New York is 304. You can see why I had difficulty scaling this in my mind. I was scheduled for events scattered about the city, so I stayed closer to Storycom’s headquarters and shuttled about from there. Not having a central hotel or event location slowed the pace of this leg of the trip, which helped keep me on my feet. In the span of a few days, I had a day of meetings at Storycom, a press conference, a signing and interview at a bookstore, the Chinese Nebula Awards, and many meals out with new friends. In the middle, I managed to squeeze in a trip to the Great Wall of China. If you ever have the opportunity, go!

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve glossed over specifics of many of the events I attended. A full trip report would involve many pages long that I just don’t feel up to doing. Instead, I thought it best to summarize some of the things that struck me the most about what I’ve seen and learned, using examples from both legs of this trip.

I’m going to start with the Chinese film industry. I’ve never attended a literary event that was so well-attended by film industry professionals. I’m not talking actors or actresses. I’m talking about screenwriters, directors, vice presidents, and other executives. They participated in panels, had a passionate interest in science fiction, and an exciting vision for the future of science fiction movies in China. At the Storycom press conference, I had the opportunity to watch a short film they are involved in and talk with several people about their plans and projects. The whole thing left me very excited about the future of this market. I think we’re going to see some amazing work coming out of China in the next few years.

Another thing that struck me was the involvement of politicians in the major events and award ceremonies. At the first event in Chengdu, I was surprised to see politicians stand before a room of science fiction fans and authors and proclaim that imagination is important and that science fiction is valued. I’m not entirely sure they actually read it, but support from that demographic was something I never expected to see. When I grew up, I was openly mocked for my interest in science fiction. Their words didn’t match my reality where athletes and soldiers are most likely to get that support and encouragement. I’m not blind to the fact that their attention comes with some baggage. I’m sure the novelty would wear off if I regularly had to listen to long speeches or run what I publish past them, but I’m still wrapping my mind around the importance they’ve placed on science fiction and the long-term impact that will have.

While chatting with some people at the conference in Chengdu, I noticed a young boy, perhaps six or seven, looking at me. After some prompting by his mother, he worked up the courage to come over and say hello. I got down to his level and he showed me a mask that he had drawn some robots on. His mother translated as I told him I liked robots too and that I thought his work was great. After a few minutes they said goodbye and as they walked away, Stephanie told me the boy’s mother said “maybe when you grow up, you can be a science fiction writer.” This was just the first of many instances I observed where young fans and writers were given encouragement.

At the Nebula Awards in Beijing, an award was given to a young author, only in fifth grade. He couldn’t attend, but he sent his teacher in his place. Who did they have give out that award? Cixin Liu, the extremely popular author of the Three Body Problem. Think about that for a second. A fifth grader receiving a writing award from China’s most successful science fiction author.

During the Galaxy Awards, after an award went to a student club, the organizers did something I’ve never seen before–they invited every student group in attendance to the stage and they covered it.

Picking up on a trend here? I often heard a lament that the pool of science fiction professionals in China is so much smaller than we have here in the US. I’d often respond that quantity is not the basis I use for comparison. Quality is more important and the stories I’ve read have demonstrated they have it. The support and energy within their community is higher than anything I’ve observed at home and will surely propel the growth they desire in the years to come. I can’t wait to see what the next five or ten years bring based on the foundation they are currently laying. Nothing is ever certain and there’s always the danger presented by less well-meaning parties, but I routinely saw writers looking out for one another, reaching down and helping. It makes me very optimistic about their future and glad to have a front row seat from which to watch.

There is so much more I could say about my trip, but I want to end on this note and hope that we can learn something from our friends. I’d like to publicly thank Stephanie and Emily, Science Fiction World, all the fans and authors I met, and most of all, Storycom for making this trip possible. I wish you all the best and hope our paths cross again.

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 More Human Than Human. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three. is scheduled for publication in April 2018. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Eistibus, Angel of Divination

Peter Mohrbacher

About the Artist

Peter Mohrbacher is an independent illustrator and concept artist living in the Chicago area.