A World to Die For

Tobias S. Buckell

Your hunting party of repurposed, cobbled together and barely-repaired pre-Collapse electric vehicles sweeps across the alkaline rich dust flats of old farm land. The outriders are kicking up rooster tails of dust into the air behind them, their bikes scudding over the dirt and slamming hard into every divot and furrow. Pennants whip about in the air.

You’re glad to be on the top of a pickup with suspension, ass in a sling, feet shoved hard against the baseplate of the machine gun mounted right up against the back of the cab. You’ve been an outrider before, trying to balance a shotgun on the handlebars of the bike without wiping out. You didn’t like it.

The outriders might get more respect, but there’s a reason they wear all those heavy leathers, padding, faded old football helmets, and other chunks of scavenged gear.

“There she is!” Miko leans out from the passenger-side door and bangs on the roof of the cab to get your attention away from the outriders and pointed front. “Get ready.”

Up ahead, through the bitter clouds of dirt that seep around the edges of your respirator, is the black line of the old Chicago tollway. You reach forward and yank a latch on the machine gun, pulling one of the large-caliber bullets into the chamber with a satisfying ratchet sound.

The seventy-year-old gun has been lovingly maintained since the Collapse. It has seen action in the Sack of Indianapolis, spat fury down upon the Plains Raiders, and helped in the defense of the Appalachian Line. You look down the sights, ignoring the massive ox horns and assorted animal skulls bolted onto your truck’s hood.

Your quarry is ahead. A convoy of trucks pulling hard for places out further East. Their large, underinflated balloon tires fill the potholes and scars of the old expressway as they trundle on at a dangerous thirty-five miles an hour. It’s axle-breaking speed, a sprint across the country in hopes that they can smash any MidWest Alliance blockades without paying import/export duties.

Fuckers. As if they could just roll across a state for free. Now they’ll pay a lot more than just a ten percent transit fee.

“Cheetah cluster: right flank,” Miko screams over the screech of old suspension and the rumble of tires. He is still hanging out of the door, and he points and throws command signs at other drivers. He’s ripped his respirator off and left it to dangle around his neck. “Dragon cluster, left. Cougars for the front.”

Your cluster of vehicles splits off to swing behind the convoy’s dust trail, the world turning into a fog of black dirt and amber highlights, and you fall in on the right like a vulture. Enemy outriders split off from the convoy to harass the impending clusters, but they are outnumbered. Shotguns crack through the air, people scream.

In moments the security around the convoy peels off, uninterested in paying for cargo with any further lives. They’ve done their paid duty—they can head back in honor to whoever hired them.

“Do it,” Miko orders you. He pulls his respirator back on, and now he’s all green eyes and blonde hair over the edge of the cracked rubber. He’s the commander. You’ve risen far following in his footsteps. Maybe one day you’ll run a cluster, give commands to your own outriders. You’ve been tasting ambition like that, of late.

To survive, you need to find the right people to follow. Miko has created a strong pack. The fees you pull from what little cross-country traffic still trickles over the road keeps you all fed, the respirators fixed, and batteries in stock.

You lean back and pull the trigger.

The old Browning destroys the world with its explosive howl. You rake the tires of the trucks as Ann, the driver, moves the pickup along the convoy in an explosion of acceleration.

All three of the oversized vehicles shudder to a halt. Ann brings the pickup to a sliding stop, dirt and chunks of the old highway rattling up to kick the undersides of the old vehicle.

Miko steps out, shotgun casually slung over his shoulder.

Everyone’s expecting the drivers to come out of the truck cabs with hands up. But instead there’s a loud groan from the trailers. Miko swings the shotgun down into his hands and aims it up at the sound.

The sides of the middle trailer fall open and slam to the ground. Houz Shäd shock troops in their all-black armor are crouched behind sandbags and a pair of fifty-caliber machine guns.

You’re all dead.

But instead of getting ripped apart by carrot-sized bullets, one of the Shäd shouts through a loudspeaker, “We seek information from you, and only information. Drop your weapons and live. You’ll even be allowed to keep them. In fact, give us what we seek and your cluster can take the entire shipment of solar panels in trucks one and three.”

Miko drops his shotgun.

You push away from the machine gun, hands in the air, wondering what happens next.

The Shäd jump down from the trailer, greatcoats flaring out behind them. Their deep-black machine guns seem to soak up the amber light. There’s a storm brewing up north, you can tell. You will all need to run before it, get down underground before the tornados touch down and begin ravaging everything.

“Remove your ventilators,” the nearest Shäd gestures. “Kneel in a row.”

Your mouth is dry. This is an execution line and you know it. Bullshit promises aside. People like the merchant riders of Shäd view the continent as a place they should be able to trade across. They view clusters as “raiders” and not the customs agents you know yourselves to be.

But instead of walking behind you, the Shäd spread out in front of the line, moving from member to member. They’re holding out photographs in their gloved hands, looking closely at each member of our cluster through mirrored visors.

The nearest Shäd approaches. Those ventilators they wear are not just the usual air purifiers, you realize. They’re connected to oxygen bottles on their hips. You’ve never been close enough to see that before. “We are looking for someone,” the Shäd says through his mask.

The fuck? All this over an MIA? People go missing in the middle countries all the time.

“This is her picture. We have been told she may be called Chenra, or Chenray. Have you seen her?”

You glance left, blood going cold, because that’s your name. Miko stares at the ground and shakes his head. Ann, her long black hair tangled up in ventilator straps, shrugs. Cheetah cluster won’t rat you out.

But why the hell are shock troopers from Hauz Shäd hunting you? You’ve been on a few nondescript battery raids, run the outlander position on some basic convoy stops, but you’re not officer class. Just a runner and a gunner from nowhere.

You’d be sick from fear if you even understood any of this.

You’re mainly confused.

The toxic air is rasping at the back of your throat. The ever-present dust is making your eyes water.

It has to be some kind of mistake. Whoever they are truly hunting has used your name, or has a similar name, and these very dangerous private security troops ended up crossing the midlands to find you.

“Anyone who gets us this woman can have the solar panels in the trailers here,” the man repeats, pushing the photo at you.

“Yeah, let’s have a see,” you mutter, leaning forward on your knees.

He steps closer and you take a look.

It’s you. There’s no mistake.

But you know for sure you’ve never had your hair cut up above the ears like that. Or so flat.

The teeth are all wrong. White. Like someone has painted them. Different positions, too. Shit, do you have a long-lost twin sister or something like that? The woman in the picture does look eerily like you.

But it can’t be.

A whole shipment of solar panels. If they’re telling the truth . . .

You stand up. “Are you serious about those solar panels?”

A helmeted nod in response.

“What’s your business with that woman?” You jerk your chin at the photo.

“A client needs to talk to her.”

“That’s it?”

“Just a conversation.”

You take a deep breath. Cheetah has given you food and lodging. Given you a trade. You were thirteen when they found you trudging across a dune up in the lower peninsula of the Holy Michigan Empire. They treated you well. Better than you’d feared when you saw the motorcycles roaring across the sand toward you.

Even if you get shot, or kidnapped, a solar shipment would help all the clusters here. And if there’s one thing you are, it’s loyal to the people who show you the way forward to a better life.

“Then I’m Chenra, Cheetah cluster. I claim the reward of the solar panels.”

“Che! I’ll follow you!” Miko tries to stand, but one of the Shäd casually kicks him back down with a boot to the shoulder.

“You can’t come where we’re going,” the mercenary laughs through her respirator.

Hauz Shäd has a strong reputation for following contracts to the letter, so you’re not overly worried anyone will get screwed over here. All that crap about them eating the flesh of people they’ve killed is just rumor. Collapse jitters.

Sure enough, as you’re taken up toward the head vehicle, the trailers are being disconnected from the trucks. Several cluster members climb aboard, open the rear doors, and shout in delight. Outriders watch you go by and nod in respect.

You don’t see Miko anywhere. He’s a ghost when he needs to be. He’s not going to be happy about his gunner getting kidnapped.

Clusters don’t carve promises into skin and swear blood oaths to protect each other to death as a meaningless gesture. They’re planning to watch and follow you, to have your back. So you’re going to play along, see what comes of this bizarre attempt to kidnap you.

If you manage to get out of this and back to the clusters, they’ll all owe you big. Maybe even get you a promotion. You could end up a driver inside the shielded cockpit of an attack pickup. Maybe even get some scrip for hydroponic fruit from down near Fort Wayne.

The truck at the head of the convoy has an extended cab over the battery frame. The up-armored doors hiss open and the Shäd on either side of you point inside. Other Shäd are putting new tires on the truck because your Browning has torn them up.

You clamber up and into a sumptuous small office.

The door shuts behind you, and you wait a split second for your eyes to adjust.

Inside it is like something out of an old pre-Collapse magazine. On some small level, when perched on a shitter and leafing through the faded pages, you’d convinced yourself that those photos were fantasies and fakes. But the interior of the back of this truck cab is all clean white leather, glossy polished wood, and black electronics.

There are no spliced wires, jury-rigged equipment, or bolted-on extras. Everything in the interior screams newly manufactured. And the air. It’s crisp, cold, and doesn’t burn with pre-Collapse irritants. The filters in here have to be brand new, not salvaged or refurbished. This all has to be from one of the city enclaves, you think. Because no one makes stuff anymore. Or maybe things are turning around somewhere on the continent and this truck has been manufactured, not reclaimed.

You remain standing, suddenly hyperaware that bucket seats like the ones around the table back here don’t get sat on by dusty road agents like yourself. But the man sitting on the other side, framed by a pair of flickering flat screens showing long lists of data and charts, waves a hand for you to sit.

So you sit.

“I think I know who you are,” you say, a little tentatively.

The man, brown hair thinning at the top and showing some gray, his blue eyes slightly faded with time or sun, nods back at you. “We have met.”

“You’re the gold trader. From the Toledo Bazaar. Armand.”

You remember that he’d been overly interested in you when you’d come in to trade gold for solar equipment. At the time you’d written it off as him perving out. You’d stepped back to let Miko handle the weighing of the jewelry, confiscated from various folk attempting to run the toll road without paying.

“I am Armand.” The gold trader does still seem interested in you, but he isn’t leering. He looks concerned when he leans forward across the table.

“So what’s all this about?” you ask.

“Someone is trying to kill you.” The truck lurches into motion. You stand up, fear and anger stumbling over themselves as you grab the door handle. It’s locked, of course.

“What the fuck are you doing?” You reach for the knife in your boot, something that the Hauz Shäd goons didn’t bother to pat you down for. Maybe because they didn’t think a woman would have one, or maybe they didn’t care. That seemed more likely.

“As I said: someone is trying to kill you,” the gold trader says, looking at the knife in your hand but not looking alarmed. “I’m rescuing you before they do.”

“Didn’t ask to be rescued.” You twitch the knife at him. “Take care of myself well enough, thanks.”

“But you actually did ask me,” the man says. He slides the photo, the one that the Shäd had showed everyone on their knees in the line, across the table.

“I don’t—” you start to say.

“You did ask me to rescue you. The you that I’m staring at right now.”

You stare at the photo. “Nothing you just said makes any sense to me.”

“I know.” He taps a command out on the nearest screen. Readouts that you don’t understand flicker on, replacing the text. Bars representing power levels. Complex math scrolls across other screens. Hieroglyphs you don’t understand.

“This will feel weird,” he says, and slides his finger up one of the screens.

The world outside the windows inverts. Not upside down, but inside out. It’s an impossibility that causes your stomach to lurch and your mind to scream as reality, for the briefest moment, ceases to make sense.

A loud explosion rocks the trailer behind the cab. The truck shudders to a stop. Smoke trickles in through the office. This could have been something Miko did, now that the trucks are all far enough away that the clusters are safely running off with the panels.

When you grab the door, it thankfully opens. “Go!” Armand shouts, choking on the smoke.

You stagger down out onto the road, coughing and then retching.

You take a last shuddering breath and straighten up, frowning. The road you puked all over is a seamless expanse of newly poured asphalt. It’s faded, the lines are patchy, but there are no major potholes. Or, there were places that had been potholes, but were filled in.

The truck has pulled over to the side of the highway, onto a gravelly shoulder. There’s smoke pouring out of the trailer and Shäd are running around, likely trying to stop the fire.

But you hardly pay attention to that. You’re staring down the highway, where a car is screaming down toward the group at high speed.

Shit, shit, shit you think. You’re all under attack.

But no one pays it any attention.

It whips past, the wind shoving at you, and then with a whine it’s gone.

Armand the gold trader is watching you closely. “What else do you notice?” he asks, smiling slightly.

“The air is filtered,” you say.

But that doesn’t make any sense.

You turn and spot the green. Some kind of short plant covers the dirt, miles and miles of it. You think back to books and magazines you’ve scavenged in the past.

“Soybean?”

“Genetically modified to handle these levels of carbon and a variety of pollutants, yes,” Armand says.

“Did we travel back in time?” you ask, trembling and thinking back to the moment the world outside the cab’s windows inverted. About half of Cheetah cluster can’t read, but you’ve pored over moldy, yellowing pre-Collapse novels. They’re not as valuable as the textbooks, encyclopedias, and practical nonfiction that are near currency, but you’ve read some freaky shit and this is the first thing your mind throws up as a possibility.

The wind is cool on your exposed skin. You all wear leathers, but that’s for protection against falls and the acid rain if you get caught outside. You’re always sweating in them. The cool wind makes you want to strip down and let it play across your skin.

The gold trader smiles. “Well, the air is more breathable here. It’s like the air where you were eighty years ago. But it’s not time travel. It’s a middle RCP world.”

“What?”

Armand’s faded blue eyes tighten. “RCP: representative concentration pathways. It’s a name given to scenarios given to how much greenhouse gas is dumped into the atmosphere. This world right here, it never hit the Collapse. Every world has a different value, based on how they handled things.”

You look around the fields, the smooth highway, and look up at the blue sky. No haze. No impending thunderstorms. A low RCP world. No, middle, he had said. You can’t imagine anything nicer than this. It looks so glossy and early-2000s. “You’re like the fucking ghost of What Christmas Could Have Been.”

Now you have a faint suspicion of how he could just give away a trailer of solar panels without blinking. This place you’re standing in, whatever it is, is a rich paradise compared to the dust bowl of the midlands.

You’re half-convinced he drugged you and and took you to some sort of promised land, but there are no gaps in your memory. Some of the outriders talk about Edens like this. But they’re usually under a dome of some sort. A green, air-filtered paradise in a dust-pocked hellhole of algae farmers and people running around with respirators.

And lots of perimeter security.

Or sometimes they’re rumored to be built deep underground, the light all artificial.

Some of the eggheads predict that eventually humanity will just . . . fade away. The heavy amounts of carbon our forefathers dumped into the air had long since hit greenhouse runaway. The heat being trapped causes more clouds to build up, which in turn causes more heat. Eventually we won’t be able to breathe outside. We’ll go full Venus.

Maybe after that, it will just be assholes in domes, and everyone outside dead.

But all this is no dome. Not this big. And you are definitely not underground. You’re outside.

Another car rushes down the freaking highway like it’s no big deal. One of the Shäd approaches Armand. “It was one of the capacitors. We have enough spare for the next incursion but we should really hit up the depot on the other side, or make the trip to a depot here.”

“Oxygen?” Armand asks, his face twitching with annoyance.

“Enough to pass through.”

“Let’s do it. We’re on a tight schedule.”

You’ve taken several steps away from the quick meeting. Armand notices and focuses his attention back on you, switching back from a commanding presence to something softer. You instinctively feel defensive. Manipulated.

He smiles at you. “This is going to be a lot to take in, but we don’t have much time and there is a great deal at stake. I know you can absorb this all quickly. I’ve seen you do it before.”

Phrases like that, his familiarity with you, are starting to fuck with your head. “Talk,” you say, and jut your chin forward a bit. He can play all friendly, but you have an invisible wall up.

Good God this air is fresh and sweet. You could almost drink it.

“If I know you, and we go way back, you and us, you’ve gotten your hands on anything you can read. Even in that shitty dust bowl we were just in. That was a universe, right next to this one that we’re in right now.”

It’s the sort of thing you talk about to a buddy, lying on the hood of a truck and pushing cannabis through a respirator while staring up at the stars. Imagining that this universe is inside of an atom inside of a cell of a blade of grass inside another universe and on and on. It’s great stuff when you’re high. The idea that a better, different universe could be an impossible razor’s width away if you could vibrate over there in just the right way.

But Armand is trying to pitch that it’s real. That he’s taken you over into an alternate reality. An alternate history. And looking at the rolling fields of farmland, growing crops, you think it has to be true.

You listen to his explanation and ask, “And you cross over with a truck and trailer?”

“Self-contained mobile operations center,” he says.

And you’re going to ask why it needs to be mobile when gunfire rips through the Shäd milling about the edge of the road. The fearsome mercenaries are taken completely by surprise as ashen-faced Cheetah cluster warriors advance from underneath the trailer and wherever else they’d been hiding.

This isn’t the first shipment Cheetah cluster has slipped aboard to fuck up later. Revenge, hijacking, or otherwise.

Shäd fall, shot in the back, and others are tossed from the top of the one trailer behind the massive truck, bodies limp. Armand spins around to take in the ambush, and you take the moment to slip behind him, press a knife against his throat.

“Jesus Christ, Che, this is not a good time,” he whines.

Miko jumps down from between the trailer and cab, road dust caking his road leathers. He raises a hand in greeting as you shove Armand forward.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asks. “And what’s wrong with the air?”

For a moment, you think about it. Would any of what Armand said make sense to a man like Miko? He only sees what is right in front of him. Profit now means good living now.

You need to find out more about what’s going on before you can try managing upwards. “Let’s get into the trailer.”

Miko smiles. “See the salvage?”

There might not be any. Not if there’s some universe-crossing engine there.

But you can’t imagine that someone would be packing Shäd and crossing worlds with a long trailer hauled behind them if they were just coming to pick you up. There’s got to be something else going on. You want to see for yourself.

You prod Armand’s throat with the knife enough to draw blood when you reach the rear of the trailer, eyeing the thick doors and the security keypad down at the bottom of the door. “Time to open up.”

“This is a huge mistake,” Armand says. “We need to be moving along.”

His voice cracks slightly, so you believe he’s nervous about something. Whether it’s about what you and Miko are going to see in a second or something else, you’re not sure.

“Open up, or we slit your throat. Then we leave you here and take the truck anyway,” Miko says.

Armand swallows nervously. “Che, you know this is a bad idea. Kill me, and you’re stuck here.”

“Stop calling me Che,” you tell him. “That’s not my name. It’s Chenra.”

“You usually like being called Che, it’s something of a joke for you,” Armand says.

You don’t see you and Armand being buddies, no matter what world or alternate reality you were ever both in. “Open up or maybe I take my chances being stuck here. I like the air,” you hiss at him.

It’s not a lie. Armand can hear that in your voice.

He taps out a code, simple numbers that you memorize, and the doors slowly fall open toward the ground to make a ramp. Miko moves in ahead, pistol in the air and his road leathers creaking slightly as he walks carefully into the dimness of the trailer. You follow, pushing Armand ahead of you.

Your eyes adjust. To the front of the trailer there’s machinery. Pipes and wiring. Shit-tons of wiring. Readouts glowing in the dark. A pair of Shäd are waiting, weapons aimed right at you. But Armand shakes his head at them, despite the knife you’re keeping by his throat.

This is apparently not a place he wants gunfire inside. The outside must have been armored, as he hadn’t worried about using the trailer as a lure for an initial attack. But inside . . .

“Drop them and kick them over,” Miko shouts.

They do so, and walk out, leaving the three of you alone.

All along the walls leading to the engine are storage lockers.

You recognize the glint of precious metals piled in plastic bins. So does Miko. He’s laughing happily, kicking the cage doors open and shaking the bins. “Fucking mother lode,” he says. No one in the countryside gives a shit about gold and diamonds. Gold doesn’t give you power from the sun, doesn’t feed you, doesn’t crack out the pollutants from the air. But the traders like Armand in the cities are always looking for it. In exchange they’ll give out solar panels or batteries, even food.

Miko stops in front of cage with old, yellowing paintings. “What’s this? These fat-faced people in black clothes.”

“Nothing,” Armand says from between clenched teeth.

“No.” You recognize one of the stacked paintings. “That’s a Rembrandt.”

Miko takes a closer look at the yellow and black hues. “This is bunker shit.” He turns back to you and Armand. “You have contact with bunkers?”

The greed makes Miko’s face twitch. Dome folk, they know they need perimeter security. Bunker folk tend to get lazy. Think that being underground and hidden makes them safe. Ready for runaway atmosphere with their scrubbers and technology.

But even now they’re already having to trade for essentials. Turns out trying to build a balanced ecosystem is a bitch in close quarters.

“I can’t give away client locations,” Armand mutters.

“Oh, but you will. Eventually,” Miko says with a small hint of glee in his voice. The clusters are going to be fat with spoils, and he can taste a new, bountiful future. One that isn’t scraps from the old roads.

“You can be much richer, much better off, than that,” Armand says to you, almost begs of you. “Think smarter. I told you where we are. He’s still thinking of what is important to your world.”

Sure, you think. But if this stuff wasn’t important to these worlds, why is Armand taking it from yours? The paintings must be valuable. The gold.

“Whoa,” Miko says, and Armand’s shoulders slump slightly. “What do we have here?”

The last two lockers before the complicated engine and wiring contain people. Two women and a man, shackled together to the wall and wearing gags. They’re out cold, small plastic tubes running from their arms up to a device in the wall.

“Slaves,” you say bitterly. “You’re running slaves.”

It’s a fate you avoided by joining Cheetah cluster. Why you fight hard. Because things can go grim out in the dust. The country you lived in was born on the blood of slaves so many hundred years ago before the golden age. After the Collapse, it had turned, ever so easily you think, right back to it.

“These are famous people in the other timelines,” Armand says quickly. “People pay a literal fortune to have a personal servant who is also the president. Only the mega-rich can afford it. These are not slaves, they’ll be given more than they can imagine. They’ll come around. They always do, when they see the higher RCP worlds. Better to be a servant in paradise than a ruler in a hell like yours.”

“What are you talking about? What’s an RCP?” Miko shouts back at you. He’s standing in front of the bulk of the machinery, gun in hand, not sure what to make of all the wires and readouts. He’s fixed a lot of engines in his time, but this is like showing an electric motor in the wheel-hubs of his pickup to a monkey.

“Was that going to be my fate?” you ask. You aren’t able to take your eyes off the bodies behind the doors.

Armand’s eyes widen. “No, I swear it.”

He’s holding something back. You can smell it. Armand twists away from you and you sneer at him. “Is that what it is? Am I someone famous on the other side?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he whimpers, seeing the rage take light in your eyes. You can’t hold it back; you want to gut him and watch him bleed out.

Miko senses this; he’s been the on blunt end of your anger before. He grins and slides up behind Armand, his dirty leathers a brown-stained contrast to Armand’s tailored black suit and shiny shoes. “I’ll kill him slow for you,” Miko whispers.

He’s just messing with Armand. Miko will fight, but only fair. He’s a soldier, not a murderer. But he’s ridden with you long enough, commanded you long enough, that he can read you. In that brief moment, your long list of ways Miko can annoy you fades: the innuendo, the grabby hands, the little gifts after raids. You know he wants you, over any of the other warren-girls who would throw themselves at a commander. He thinks it would be hot to fuck the gunner, and he’s been obsessed with that for nearly three months.

“You’re a genius,” Armand babbles. “You’re a genius.”

Miko makes a face. You think he’s being a little bit of an asshole. But you essentially agree. You’re a good gunner, but you’re no genius.

But you feel like, thanks to Miko being a bit murdery, that something may have been dislodged from Armand’s slimy mouth. “A genius?”

“On one of the other sides, a little further down the line,” Armand says. “I don’t just transport servants. Or priceless art, cultural artifacts. I also move priceless minds. Think about it: there are minds that are brilliant but trapped by the circumstances of their timelines. They’re handicapped from the moment of birth, no matter how great they become in one of the stronger worlds, because somewhere like yours they’re fighting just to breathe. They don’t have time for their greatest inventions, or to achieve their great works. So we rescue them to bring them over.”

“Yo, commander, we got problems,” one of the Cheetah cluster outriders shouted from the ramp. You squint. It’s Binni. “They got cars with lights on them pulling up and they got guns.”

Armand looked past my shoulder to the outrider. “Don’t shoot back!”

“Don’t worry trader, we got it. We’ll push them back.” Binni grins.

“That isn’t . . . they have resources here,” Armand grits out.

The familiar crack of gunfire fills the air outside. Everyone crouches and moves to the doors. It’s there you see the cars, like something from old glossy pages. Smartly painted vehicles, livery matching the official black uniforms the enforcers are wearing.

These are . . . police. Like internal security, but for keeping law and order on a scale that seemed like a fairy-tale when you read about them.

They’re not hardened soldiers but civilian peacekeepers, crouched behind their vehicles as Cheetah keeps them at bay. Binni is right. “Those uniforms can’t match Cheetah,” you say to Miko as you jump down and get Armand to shut the doors.

“Yeah.” Miko agrees, but he’s looking more and more pained. All of the things that don’t make sense are starting to get to him, you can see. “Who the fuck are they?”

“They’re called police,” you tell him.

Miko’s looking around, more now than before.

Armand all but tries to shove the two of you up toward the cab. “We can’t stay. It won’t be safe. There are rules to all this.”

“Shut up.” Miko cracks the side of Armand’s head with the back of his metal-studded leather gloves.

Armand staggers, blood dripping down onto his immaculate suit.

“Look,” you say to Miko, pointing at the sky.

An aircraft is banking over the farmland toward the road. The blades blur through the air and a distinct whump reaches you.

Miko’s attention is fixated on the helicopter, as is yours.

No one has had the spare fuel to launch aircraft in your memory. Batteries don’t keep them up for long enough.

Then a second and third helicopter join in.

Further above, you suddenly realize the long stringy lines of clouds are aircraft, jets high up in the sky, and you can’t help but stare.

Armand slams the door to the cab shut.

“Shit.” You and Miko jump onto the side of the cab. Miko puts his gun up to the glass of the cab. “Open the fuck up or I start shooting.”

Armand ignores you both, tapping at his screens. The trailer hums as the massive device buried in its front half kicks on. Miko steps back and fires. The glass doesn’t crack, and pieces of the bullet ricochet, clipping him on the shoulder.

You ignore all the shouting from further back. “Miko, don’t get off the truck.”

He glances over at you. “What?”

You lean back to shout the same warning at Cheetahs scattered around the trailer and road, along with their Shäd prisoners and dead.

Before the words are even formed, the world turns inside out.

You know to expect the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that causes you to lean away from your grip on the door handle and think about vomiting. But you hold it in. You have to.

But now that you’ve handled that, a searing stinging in your eyes blears your vision. You didn’t expect the crawling pain on your exposed skin, and the thick muddy clouds all around you. Wind whips murky clouds around overhead.

The world around you is hell. From the choking heat to swirling, searing moisture.

And you can’t inhale the air. You realize that the moment you’re exposed. You’re holding that last breath of sweet air from the other world, or universe, as Miko stares at you in complete and utter horror. He’s choking.

You take a moment to orient yourself, squinting and blinking, then scuttle along the side of the cab. All Armand has to do wrench the steering wheel to slew the truck about and you’ll fly off the side. You dig your shoes into the lip under the doors and reach for any purchase on the side.

Then you swing around behind the extended area of the cab and fall onto the dead Shäd wedged in the hoses between the trailer and cab. You rip the facemask from the body and take a deep breath. Miko’s boots strike metal behind you.

You take a last deep huff of bottled air and pass the mask over.

Vomit streams from Miko’s chin and he fumbles for the mask, unable to see anything with reddened eyes. He breathes from the mask as you wait for your turn.

When you get it, the sour smell triggers a second round of stomach clenching.

You pass the mask back and forth as the truck grinds its way over a dirt road for an hour. Sometimes you think you see structures, tall and lurking in the distance. But their edges are shattered, and many of them are slumping over. You might be passing through the edges of a city. In your world there isn’t anything here for another couple hours, but this is a dramatically different reality.

The storm you were dropped into subsides. Maybe it’s the buildings blocking the wind, or maybe it blew itself out. You’re no longer getting pelted with small pebbles. The ochre clouds overhead still scud by impossibly fast.

Miko’s eyes are wide. You’re not going to be able to explain science fiction ideas about variant universes overlapping each other while passing a mask back and forth. He looks weak. He inhaled too much of this soupy shit. And the heat is going to drop both of you soon.

This, you think, is a high RCP world. This is what your world will look like at some point. Hothouse runaway, the heat-trapping clouds overhead creating more heat as the whole ecosystem cycled toward something sinister and hellish. Only here they got to it sooner. They burned more fossil fuel and burned it faster, dumped heat into the atmosphere faster. Got here well before you.

And in the other world you were just in, they didn’t. Their ancestors somehow restrained themselves.

What did that look like? That restraint?

Could you have done it? Miko? No. He only thought about his next meal, his next fuck, his next raid.

Miko retches hard, his eyes bugging as he cries tears of blood. You give him the mask, even though you’re faint yourself. There’s dark blood all over his shoulders from the bullet fragments rebounding when he shot the armored glass.

How long will it take for Armand to get to the next jump? He seems to be driving with purpose, trying to find a distinct spot.

Will Miko even make it?

You rummage around the Shäd’s body, looking for the bottle of air the mask is connected to. It’s dangling by his hip. The gauge is at half.

If the man had a full tank when you jumped, and had enough air to be safe during a transit, then you and Miko are going to suck through it before you’re halfway across this side. Right?

Miko shoves the mask at you and tries to lean closer. “I’m sorry,” he rasps.

“Save your damn breath,” you tell him.

“I shouldn’t have let you go with him,” Miko struggles to say, trying to push the mask back at you and turning his face away from it when you give it back to him. He takes a shuddering gasp of the hellish, hot air.

“No!” You try to force the mask over his face and he weakly grabs at your forearm to try and stop you.

The truck and trailer judder to a sudden stop.

You snap your head around, then take a few deep hits from the mask and move around Miko to look down the length of the cab.

There are shadowy forms lurking in the brown mist. Armand hits the lights, and you see that a crowd of a hundred or so people in the middle of the dirt road. They are on the other side of barriers made of pitted concrete and rusted rebar.

They’re all wearing tattered rubber ponchos, faces obscured by gas masks. Many of them are carrying crude guns, others are holding spears or bottles of fluid with rags hanging from the tops.

Armand must not have any Shäd in the cab to drive, as he spends a long set of moments lurching the trailer and truck into reverse and trying to correct the trailer from sliding to the side. But he stops again, and you see that barriers have been rolled across the road. Sharp rebar is pounded into the ground to hem the truck in.

You recognize the tactic. You’ve been the one pushing barriers across a road before.

Miko has slumped over and pushed the mask away. You take a few pulls from it, and try to get it back on his face. But he’s not responding.

Figures surround the truck, surging through the muck floating over the ground. You’re trying to pull Miko down when they grab you and pull you forward. The large crowd parts as a figure walks confidently to the front of the truck with a massive rocket launcher over one shoulder.

The person stops and pulls their mask away from their face to shout up at the driver’s side window.

“Armand: get the fuck out of the truck or I’ll fire this right at the window.”

You stare.

The face. There’s a long scar across the cheek to the nose. The hair is shaved down except for a slight tuft near the front. It looks older, more weathered.

But damn it, it’s your face.

“Hello sister,” the woman holding the rocket launcher says, never taking her eyes off the truck. “I’ll talk to you in a few. I’m in the middle of something with that rat-bastard up behind the wheel.”

You open your mouth to talk, but one of the poncho-wearing warriors to your side jams a mask over your face. You breathe the clean air in deeply and gratefully, then let them lead you around to the back of the truck.

There’s a gun pointed at you, and they force you to sit near Miko. He’s not moving, but they’ve pulled the Shäd mask on over his face so he can breathe. If he’s still alive.

Four peel off and pull out what look like jury-rigged explosives that they start taping onto the doors.

You peel the borrowed mask away. “Hey! You don’t have to do that.”

They pause and stare back at you, bug-eyed in the gas masks and startled at the interruption.

“I know the code,” you tell them.

They look at each other, then shrug. Four guns are trained on you as you stand up and slowly walk over. You punch in the combination you memorized when watching Armand, and the door slides down to become a ramp once again.

They swarm in, weapons up, to secure the back.

You hold onto Miko and watch them break open the cages. Miko would be devastated: all that loot’s going to end up in the hands of these raiders.

Raiders run by someone with your face.

Another universe. High RCP, you tell yourself. You’re in something like shock. Is it the air?

Your self-labeled “sister” arrives, pushing Armand in front of her. He’s holding his breath, eyes wide and blood running down his temple. You’re not sure who’s having a worse day: you or him.

You get waved up the ramp, along with Armand. Someone helps you pull Miko up into the trailer, and the door shuts behind you. Air pumps run for a second, and then everyone starts removing their masks.

This other version of you, clearly the leader here, clearly in control of this strange situation, looks you up and down and doesn’t seem to come to any sort of conclusion one way or another. “I call myself Che. It’s a little bit of a joke, if you read history.”

“I’m Chenra. Full Chenra.”

“Good for you.” She is unimpressed. “Armand explain the smuggling he does?”

“Some of my people rode the trailer, ended up in another world, tried to take the truck,” you tell her, not answering her question but trying to explain who you are. And why Armand is your enemy. Can you make friends with yourself if you both hate Armand? “We didn’t really understand what was happening, and he took the moment to jump us over here. We didn’t have bottled air.”

Your doppelgänger looks down at Miko and nods, a riddle solved. “He’s in a bad way. How long did he inhale the soup?”

“Long enough. Has something in his shoulder from trying to shoot the window.” You nod at the art and valuables being dragged out toward the back of the trailer. “That all yours now? I’m not trying to lay claim to it or get in your way.”

“What do you think, Armand? Should I keep all this shit?” Che kicks your captor, who is lying on the floor, spitting bile. He wipes his chin with a dirty suit sleeve and glares at her. “He tell you how special you were?”

You lock eyes with yourself and shiver slightly. “Yeah. He said I was a genius.”

“It’s not all bullshit.” Che pokes Miko with the tip of her boot. “You want to try and get him home to your own universe, to help him, right?”

You nod. No sense in trying to lie to yourself, right?

“You two screwing? I’ve never seen him before,” she says. “Not really our type, is he?”

“No. But he’s part of my cluster. I owe him.” Cheetah cluster for life, right?

“What’s your world like? High or low RCP?”

“I think it’s high?” you say. “It’s not as bad as this, but it wasn’t nice like the last place. The air was good. No storms, or heavy wind. Clear. You could see—”

“A nine or so is considered high, two or three is utopia,” Che interrupts. “That’s where you get all your horrible shit under control and can keep a living world. The eggheads tag all the worlds we can access with various RCP levels. The nerds used to think the points of divergence would all be about national borders and great people. Like, suppose Hitler lived, or the Soviet Union collapsed. Shit like that. But the looming threat, the thread that runs through all these realities that makes the big changes that people like you and I give a shit about, is simply how the atmosphere and oceans were managed. Usually there’s an accord. Paris, DC, they try to imitate the same thing they use to stop acid rain. Caps and trades. But sometimes they never even get to that point. Right now, this variation we’re in, it’s one of the worst scenarios.”

You think about all the cool, breathable air in the world just before this one. “Then I’m in definitely in a higher RCP world. People are scared of the runaway effect. A lot of people are bunkering underground, or in domes. I use a respirator outside. We’re not using fuel anymore. It all got used up in the Collapse.”

“Sounds like a shithole. But, you’re a sister me. If you feel you need to go back, I can get you some weapons. You can try to find another Armand going the other way. But trips like that are fairly infrequent. I’ve been waiting to trap Armand here for almost a month.”

“Can’t you take me?” you ask. If she is doing favors and all. You feel somewhat paralyzed, because this is a situation so far outside of normal—how can you make a decision? This familiar face, however, knows more than you. You feel an instant desire for her help, her guidance.

Che shakes her head. “This truck’s got one more jump in her, and we’re going somewhere specific. And you can’t take your buddy back there if you want him to live. You need to go forward.”

“To a better world?” You’re starting to get the hang of this. “Lower RCP?”

“The lowest,” Che says. “You talk about bunkers and domes. This whole area was a massive dome, once. This world ate itself alive. Kept putting leaders up that focused on chewing through resources, promising jobs over stewardship. And when the carbon from burning things filled the oceans, the pH meant huge die-offs. One collapse led to another.”

“Sounds familiar,” you mutter. And you think of that cool breeze on your skin and shiver. Something inside you almost aches when you consider trying to get back to what is familiar.

“But this world had resources, scientists working on keeping them alive as the air soured. When they cracked the veil between worlds they found a garden world. An Eden. They built massive complexes to shuttle people over, thinking no one was on the other side. But they made a mistake. There were people, and those gardens were maintained carefully by people who had spent generations on wilding projects.”

Che pulls out that same picture that the Shäd showed you. It’s the clean, flattened-hair version of you, wearing a suit similar to Armand’s. Che taps it.

“Which version of us is that?” you ask.

“This picture is a sister of ours that led her people from this high RCP world we’re in right now to the garden world,” Che says. “I killed her. That was my job. The garden world was my world, before I came over here to hide. It’s where the invaders would never think to look for me. They think those of us from the garden world are soft.”

But this sister of yours doesn’t look soft, despite growing up in an Edenic world. She looks forged. Just like you have been. And even the sister in the picture looks forged. The leader of an invasion force that had to leave their dying world, or die themselves. Making hard choices.

“Those invaders to my world are the ones paying Armand anything he wants in order to get one of us, sister,” Che says to you. “It’s so that they can string us up in public for their people and have a good show as they execute us. Bread and circuses.”

“Not true,” Armand hisses. “The people I work for, they would take you in for training. They want insight, they need help to run the fight against these terrorists who have attacked us. They want to tap your genius.”

Che shakes her head. “He’s lying.”

“And in exchange for your insight into fighting your terrorist double, they would make you richer than you could imagine,” Armand says. “Join her, and you will be the enemy. An insurgent. On a list of enemies against humanity. And not just in the world she wants to go to, but any world that has trade with my people.”

“No matter where he is born, he is always trash,” Che says, and throws him into one of the cages. She locks it after him.

You stare at Armand for a long moment. “These better worlds. They can help Miko?”

“Yes.”

“If I don’t go to Armand’s people, I’ll be hunted. Because of something you did.”

Che nods. “You’ll be a criminal. A terrorist.”

I look over at the three raiders who are done piling the goods up against the back of the trailer. “Why are you going over, now? What are you doing with all that?”

You’re imagining that she’ll tell you something about funding a revolution. How her people on the other side, invaded by the people from this world, need those things to fight their fight.

Che smiles. “They left so many here to keep suffering, once they got across, because the energy required to pierce through is nearly unimaginable. Each of those smuggler’s trucks requires shareholders, backers, venture capital. Cross-world travel is rare. So I’m taking as many as I can get over. Count yourself lucky there’s a spot for you.”

You think about the treasures Armand has hoarded. They’re all priceless things that the insanely rich obsess over. Portable cultural artifacts.

“I’ll cross with you,” you say, your voice breaking slightly as you realize this likely means you won’t ever see your world again. But then, you’ve left it all behind before. Running across the desert in your bare feet, your hands covered in blood and hair hacked off, those manacles burning the skin of your wrists.

Five hundred miles away, your feet bloody, Cheetah cluster took you in and away.

Che pulls her mask back on, and you follow suit. The back door slides back down into a ramp, and there are hundreds of forms waiting in the dark brown mist. Children.

People roughly shove the priceless art and precious metals off the back of the trailer onto the rocky ground.

Armand shouts from inside his cage, but the anger turns to coughing as the hot, acidic air roils into the trailer.

You’ve always gone forward.

This is the first time you’ve known what you’re heading toward. An Edenic world without climate collapse. A world where invaders are fighting the people who lived there before them. Invaders who abandoned millions of their own to a dead world.

These starving refugees are packed into the back of the trailer or strapped onto the top with bottles of air. They are all taking the risk of death, or worse, when you all break through to that other universe. Che has been driving for several hours, hoping to get as far from core invader territory as she can, but air will be running out soon and a decision to jump over has to be made shortly or people will start dying.

You sit next to Che, shoved up together near the controls. Miko is by your feet. Refugees cram in everywhere inside the cab, some of them controlling the computer that Armand had, others just packed in to make the crossing. You’d watched the pile of pictures and all that glittered fall away behind the trailer in the mirrors. The old canvases curled up in the harsh air as you slid away. Acid rain began to drizzle on them.

“There are many more, on many different worlds, that need help,” Che had said. “Even though their brothers invaded mine, I couldn’t leave them back there to slowly choke to death. It wasn’t their fault, it was their forefathers who did this to them.”

You’re never going to be a gunner again, chasing after convoys.

“Will it make a difference, a couple hundred?” I asked.

“We’re just getting started,” Che said. “I can save more.”

But you wonder what all these new bodies will do to that Edenic new world? Will these descendants of a people who destroyed an entire world be able to make a change? Or would they understand how to treasure it, knowing how precious it was?

The world flips inside out and you gasp.

When your vision comes back to you, you look up to see a forest choking the dirt road around the truck.

People rip off their masks as Che rolls the windows down. There are flowers. The distant chatter of animals. Scents on the breeze that fill the cab. A gentle wind.

She’s taken you back to where this all started, geographically. But there is no toll road here. No farms. No dusty plains and electric cars with skulls and machine guns mounted on them. Just lush green and lungfuls of sweet air.

“Are you okay?” Che asks.

You wipe the tear from your cheek.

“This is what it could have been, where I come from,” you whisper. “We could have done it.”

Che stops the truck, as it’s shuddering and smoke has begun to leak out of the machinery in the front of the trailer. People are banging and shouting for her attention.

Afterwards, she climbs on the hood as people gather before her.

“I give you my world,” she says. “I ask only that you care for it as you would your child. Do that, and it will care for you as well. Now go.”

The two of you sit for a while later near Miko.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I hoped he would make it. We could have helped.”

You shake your head. “I’ve seen worse deaths.” It was no worse a death than clashing with duty-evaders on a toll road. He had never understood what was actually happening though, and you feel bad about that.

When you stand, after burying him under the cool shade of a magnificent pine tree that makes you almost weep again, you move to Che’s side.

“Take me with you.”

“I don’t know what my next move is. I snuck over to their world to see what it was like and hide from her death squads. I didn’t really believe them when they said it was so bad. I didn’t know so many were suffering. Armand and his ilk, they get financing to go and fetch the greatest minds from the remains of high RCP worlds. Or get ‘servants’ of famous people. But these are regular folk that needed saving, that no one wants. They deserve to live.”

You nod.

You’ve been watching this version of yourself. And you’ve learned something. This isn’t a confident, dangerous you like you first assumed when you saw her with the rocket launcher. No, this is a version of you that cares deeply. She put herself in front of the truck because she felt strongly.

She didn’t know what would come next when she rescued these people. She just did it.

This version of you isn’t calculating.

This version of you isn’t looking for the next move.

This version of you came from ancestors who managed a planet successfully, not like your own failed ones.

You’ve been taught to take, to be strong, to run with a strong pack. Miko has taught you well. Having studied this Che for hours, you know you could break her. She hasn’t spent a lifetime in the hot sand.

But the forests.

Her people let that be. And that is a different lesson. You need to follow her people. You need to help them protect what they’ve built.

And what you know, and have learned for an entire life, is survival. How to create fighters.

“You need to grow your army,” you say to Che. “You need to bring more people over. More refugees from the other worlds. We can find more Armands to trade with, right, if there are many worlds and many copies of us in them?”

Che nods at you. “More death.”

You smile crookedly. “And maybe more life. I think we bring things over to the other places that help them. And then we bring fighters, loyal fighters, from there to here. We can do this better. I can show you how to finish what you’ve started. Let me help you.”

“It’ll be dangerous.” Che raises an eyebrow.

You know. But you know danger better than she does. All you’ve lived is danger.

Besides, is it better to be a king of a sandy hell, or a servant in a lush paradise? Her people had created something so special, you know that being one of their soldiers is the way to climb. You can taste ambition again.

This, you think as you move through sun-dappled forest, is a world to die for.

A world to fight for.

About the Author

Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work.

His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over fifty stories, his works have been translated into eighteen different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will “give you the shivers.”

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs.

Say it Low, then Loud

Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Efosa always dreams of absolutes. A whole integer leaping through the spaces of his subconscious. A positive value an everlasting constant in sleep, where there should be no place for negativity. No space for fractions.

A half thought mind is the breeding ground for enemies, his mother says, in sleep too. She is long gone, as her ancestors have called her. They beckoned her, and now Efosa does not have enough cultural ties, relatives—never enough, space is not your ties, not your fatherland, not your once colonialist objective.

He misses her proverbial wisdoms. All the words that twisted in on themselves, often silly but always true. Upon pondering on these sayings, they always grew more interesting and revealing, layers and layers of knowledge. They were like food to the tongue, and he usually needed seconds. These secrets she knew were passed down to keep the history, the culture.

Culture is not an absolute. Not to him, at least, in its values, as it is never complete, not perfection. Not a whole. There’s always a disconnect, a barrier preventing his identity from being his everything, always . . . rough numbers not causing him to fall to slumber.

Efosa’s mother refused to share more secrets with him after he announced his role in the war. She screamed and rose in temperament when he told her. She shook her head in all her disapproval and folded her arms in betrayal. Finally, she became a negative equation, then turned silent. She made the family shut him out. She cursed his breath before perishing. She placed all the special values in a space he could not reach, with family members who will never tell.

Everything that’s valuable is told orally, kept within the locks of the mouth, and all his earth country’s popular history and properties that’s found in bits and bytes have been appropriated, rendered meaningless.

There is nothing without context, specifics.

When he thinks on these things, sleep is once again a thing that cannot be savored, an accomplishment destroyed, a war that makes him wonder what’s worth fighting for, who he is, who he is meant to be.

Efosa and his war general both love values, but his war general’s love is to the point that she thinks words should be obsolete. Efosa never agreed to this, and upon hearing the woman proclaim it the first time, his lips curled to a frown. He obsessed over it, this concept that words should be nothing. It disturbed his sleep, the general’s belief, the one thing he values.

When Efosa told the general he didn’t agree with this opinion, that numbers are indeed great things but words control the world, the woman nodded, but shifted away from him after that. Always made excuses when Efosa asked if she wanted to solve equations with him in the great library hall. Avoided him, like she couldn’t stand his thought process.

He had to do his late hours calculating in the hall with all the strangers that have eyes on him; on his soldier badge, to be specific. The young Indian tech whiz that has an insult for Efosa under their breath. The Igbo college student with the bulging muscles and towering height, who is rejecting him at every step, every feet. The Black woman and her two grandbabies that spit at Efosa’s feet. Most people he sees, knows don’t like the war; they know enough about it and how much it costs. How much it takes. Efosa wonders how much he needs to do to push these people to the point that they take action, destroy his work and livelihood. This colonial evil.

When none of them do anything, his thoughts go back to words and purpose.

The annual code-naming day that came in the winter consisted of General 1019 listing her numbers to all officials, like she was counting out a census. The soldiers’ war names, for future reference, forever and ever. For Efosa, she stopped, peered at him. 1019 assessed him, before she stepped really close to him, like old times, and named him Whisper.

Whisper: Because you should always be silent and respect your superiors. Because your culture even has a foundation of greeting and the young < old, not =, not anything other than what they gave you. Because you must not always speak, disagree, when there are wars to be fought.

Because maybe if you calculated more—estimating expenditures, equating soldiers to figures when filing strategic placement—instead of thinking, you would finally find rest.

1019 never told him what Whisper meant, but he couldn’t deal with all the different interpretations going on in his mind, so Efosa made a constant to soothe his dreams.

Whisper: Because your flying is soundless and your limitations are boundless and you are a valuable asset to winning a war assumed worth fighting for.

Like horseback, like carriage, like airships, like drones, past and future all together, over the planets and stars, Efosa goes to fight his enemies and conquer the land.

His enemies. The war should be personal, even though he couldn’t further disassociate from this. Even when he’s sure everyone is tired of it, and some don’t even know about it, and it’s just reducing the empire to poverty, closed hands that cannot give, but now the war has just become a habit to pillage and take, as that’s the constant.

The difference between him and the war: The war never heard of the concept of rest. Never wants to stop. Never wants to fall down and die, empty itself and all its emotions. The war’s identity is Western.

The politicians call the war small-scale missions on broadcast missions everywhere. The government doesn’t provide enough equipment, funding. Despite all this, it doesn’t end. War never pauses, because it’s easy to know where to go when it’s only to destroy.

He’s always been taught to love anything, everything—engineer, doctor; let minorities take space and make themselves majority; his mother once said—so he can still feel active and find work meaningless. Because of this, he doesn’t think Mama should have been all that surprised when he told her where he was going in life, but at least it told him that there are wrong options, bad choices.

What can he do if not the war?

He frowns today, deep scowls scarring thought of any kind, which he would have appreciated if he was in sleep. 1019 once offered him a cryo-freeze pass if he ever wanted to take a little break and get like, well, 1,000,000+ hours in slumber, give or take. She estimated that when he got up they would still be fighting the war and gaining territory for humans to expand to new places (colonialism; it’s colonialism) without much opposition.

If there is opposition, then there is death.

Efosa frowns because the calculations for the speed of the drone he rides today and its level of operation is at a fractional level. He tried and tried and tried the night before, calculating repeatedly for different result, but math is firm. He tore out his curly black hair in clumps, easier to do after last year when he removed his dreadlocks. He can’t even approximate the properties because increasing values for drone operations almost made him crash into the spaceship of a parasite species that had spindly blue appendages once, when 1019 was going to try out her special attack formation that day, which would have been structured to look like a foot from a distance when all the drones came together. His punishment was even worse, in the form of helping amend the budget for his crash, taking away the money from public health centers, because at the end of the day everybody suffers.

He has to ride out a decimal and all its bumps in the air. The giant metal disc he sits on has invisible barriers all around it for oxygen and weapons control, but it’s mostly seen as just a circular flexible magnet that has rectangular slots to aim at the enemies. The machines aren’t as strong as they used to be.

He has to ride his ship through the dull natural light of space, since protests by NGOs came down hard on all the soldiers for encouraging light pollution through the artificial brightness of the ships. It was a huge scandal.

He never sees those protest numbers when it comes to the colonialist issues in invading peaceful planets through hostile takeover; but he’s still a hypocrite and not really changing anything, only grinding his teeth about inconsistent values.

Efosa has never had his priorities right. Maybe it would be better if someone stopped him, said cease and desist. Somehow, he hopes that cultural secrets and the past of his ancestors will help him with his mistakes, show him the way to go—see how perfect his siblings and relations are; na the same Mama raise them—but the family’s shut him out, and they’re anti-war, and they’re withholding secrets like children and parts of his identity he needs now more than ever.

Efosa doesn’t know how to say he’s at a standstill.

He’s not exactly pro-war, but, meh, this has good health benefits. And security, too. He’s going to have a full life. In the future, maybe, where he sleeps with peace . . .

The formation work is sloppy and disgraceful. The ships were supposed to form a balloon but they look already popped in their construction; full of defeat. He moves the fastest and without sound but he still wobbles his way through his drone like he’s never done an operation before. Efosa almost crashes. He doesn’t do anything to show he’s in control, doesn’t feign pulling the reigns of the drone he rides like his acquaintance 2348 does (there are no friends in war; just those that live and die with you, fight side by side with you, that flash before your eyes then disappear like memories), and 1019 makes him go to the back of the line.

The back of the formation is filled with interns and trainees that just bump into him every five seconds. They’re sloppy too, a mixture of who 1019 and officials are testing and who they don’t want and who have to stay because of potential lawsuits. He can hear the spoils of war—genocide, destruction, the sides, as well as the annoying sounds of excited first years trying to get an interview with him while they’re on a mission. Neither of them he really appreciates.

“My monthly average is going to be so bad,” he mutters under his breath, while the noises of activity go on all around him.

For a minute, this feels like rest, but . . . no, it can’t be. No. Efosa will not accept it. This moment feels like a crushing weight beneath his windpipe, an ache between his eyes, and it is not what he wants. Not what he’s been looking for. Efosa will literally throw himself down from his drone and calculate his speed to the absolute infinity so he can burn up as the waste of oozing flesh and muscle that he is if he finds out that rest means giving up spirit, mind still whirring when the war takes and takes and takes, and he is left with nothing.

The family is always watching.

Efosa’s ties are supposed to be far away on Omega-17, places where kin can continue to shut him out and distance conversation. Leave him in isolation, as being cursed before death carries a shame full of stink that never leaves. The elite all lay on home planet, bound to tradition and every old way. Efosa has never interacted with an Elder there since joining the war, and they would rather die than talk to him. Efosa’s great-grand-uncle even has pictures where the man dances with serrated, long legged parasites, his uncle and the being forever memorialized in a tap dance. Whenever Efosa’s great-grand-uncle sees him, the man screams “criminal” like bloody murder. Once, the man convinced the family to put Efosa in a cage when he was visiting, citing appropriate punishment for his war crimes.

His elders’ existence is a mere revelation, a look into his heritage, but they will never give him the privilege of even a smidge of more identity.

Maybe one day, Efosa thinks, he can gain these secrets without their approval. Perhaps if they ever digitize this information he can calculate a hack into it.

The family members with the wandering spirits are not Omega-17, but rather all over the galaxy, in places like solar huts and climate-protecting holes. But he knows his nuclear relatives are only here, near the war region’s current station, spying on him.

They aren’t subtle with it. Every once in a while he sees Ede, his sister, reading from an archival memory tab then peering up at him every minute or so in the great library hall. He always waves, but she looks alarmed, her eyes widened whenever Efosa spots her, and quickly runs away. It gives him a good laugh.

Still, he’s glad they’re here. Their home is steadied at a forever value of ninety on each side, a perfect right angle which makes the place never lopsided, even with its terrible location near asteroid clusters.

He only goes to visit when those that hate him most aren’t around to chase him out, like today, when his war-hating uncles have gone for their annual visit to homeworld. His skin feels disgusting on him and he hates himself a little bit, so that’s also another reason for visiting.

He’s not sure what caused a trigger in his sleep last night: family or fragments or . . . the war, that’s a new one. It occurs in violent flashes—the blood that’s not literally on his hands but in sleep, he can taste it on his lips; the flavor and song of extinction (silence, then pandemonium); the cry of what lives and what breathes, before it’s in the aim of a beam and then . . . gone.

It explains hating his skin. It explains visiting the family that will stress him more. As Efosa enters, past his family’s security system that’s finished scanning him, he can hear the sound of his sister, Osama, sleeping, while his other sister Ede is humming the lyrics to “Black Sheep.” Joke’s on her, since he’s already eaten the chocolates he brought for them.

Ede, of course, is wearing an Ankara print wrapper and head scarf on her head. The smell of Jollof rice wafts through the kitchen, followed by a hearty selection of stewed chicken that’s been left to marinate in spicy tomato sauce and stir-fry. Dodo is laid out in celebration: rose platters, cubes, sculptural designs, while the children snack hungrily. Ede must be trying to prove something, still, with all this: Efosa delights in knowing she hasn’t yet reached anything close to satisfaction. He sees her in markets and shops, and each time he comes to visit, it’s always more food, clothes, traditional songs she never learned.

Culture she’s trying to expand like plants that never grew. He does not know how she plans to go higher when she doesn’t have all the seeds.

The cultural secrets awakened her, Ede tells everyone each year at family gatherings on home planet, and those who’ve been told, nod. Efosa finds himself drinking more at those events.

“How is the genocide campaign?” Ede speaks, like every minute she expects to burst into a flurry of old languages. It doesn’t help that The Grant is always on her mind, the prize for the family member that can first deliver a Bini speech not influenced with any other language or imperialist power (no pidgin, fellas).

Never enough, space is not your ties, not your fatherland, not your once colonialist objective.

“How are your children?” Efosa diverts, and he immediately sees her eyes perk up, leave the lines of contempt and betrayal. Ede tries her hardest to be strict but is ultimately willing to discuss the easier thing, instead, which is why she’s Efosa’s favorite sibling.

In the next generation he is nothing but an uncle. There are less complications to the family dynamic with his youngest relatives; they don’t know what to hate him for yet. They don’t know what to keep from him. Slowly, though, when their values and loyalties come to them, he knows his days of objective love are numbered.

“Ugh, just look at this one, Efosa! I can see it in his eyes, he’s shining,” Ede screams, causing her son, Ghare, to look up from his drawing and glare at her, before focusing back on his work.

“Look at that concentration. His face dey scan informate! Ah, see the—”

Efosa scratches his head and sighs, all of Ede’s words muddled in his brain. “Can you . . . not speak to me in pidgin?”

“Why not?” Ede pouts, Osama’s snore almost clouding their conversation.

I understand it less and less with each passing moment.

“It’s disgusting. It’s dirty,” he speaks, waves her off.

Ede pauses to look at him. Her eyebrows are raised, and her face is a sweaty mixture of surprise and slow remembrance, so she adjusts her tone accordingly.

“Ok, well, I’m not disgusting. And neither are all the—”

“Oh, for—stop jumping to conclusions! I didn’t mean it like that. Quit trying to antagonize me. You’re always doing this!”

Ede laughs, her voice as bitter as the green tea she likes to drink. “Antagonize? I don’t think I could do any more of that.”

“Ede, I can’t deal with this. You need to stop over—”

“I’m over? Over-what? No, you know what? I think I’ve been letting you get too comfortable,” Ede replies, and Efosa’s eyes widen. He didn’t expect this from her. “I think you should get out.”

Efosa’s face pales, and he runs to another side of the room before Ede can insist again. He knows if she sees him getting along with Ghare she won’t speak anymore. He just has to avoid her path, not step on her toes so he can enjoy the family he has left.

He deserves it, he knows, the scorn and contempt, and all the consequences that are surely coming his way (he won’t leave the war without a scar, a bruise, a broken promise, a shattered life), but Ede is ruining his mood.

Out of his pack of chocolates, he places a triple-coated milk delight near Ghare, watching his nephew’s sketches. The pencil work’s faint, but grows broad and more defined with each passing moment, like the boy is finally jumping higher, towards the sun with each stroke.

“That’s cool,” Efosa says to Ghare after a pause. He knows what the boy’s drawing, but he always enjoys hearing people’s excitement dance off their voices when they talk about their work. “What is it?”

“It’s a generation ship. For animals!” He says, outlining a globe with his pencil midair as he skyrockets out his seat. “We’re moving more towards history educationally, and the computer and art teachers have been droning on about the topic forever. I’m inspired.”

The vessel Ghare sketched takes up the page, and it resembles a giant fan the way he modeled it. Efosa loves symbolism, imagery, even the ones he can’t understand.

“The heaviest animals are on the bottom floor, and there are cold and underwater regions for things like polar bears and fishies,” Ghare continues, visibly effervescent.

“Who’s gonna slow roast that chicken in the picture for generations to come?” Efosa teases, pokes Ghare in the chest.

“Mummy and Aunty asked this same question two days ago. There are no humans on this ship! Oh my goodness, why do you all love food so much?”

Efosa shouts and points the accusatory finger at his nephew. “That was a good amount of dodo I saw you enjoying earlier, child.”

“I was prepping my energy!” Ghare screams defensively.

“Nah, no food shaming here. You should be fat in peace,” Efosa jokes.

Ghare shrugs. “That’s fair. But there’s everything on my ship: there’s places for bugs and mosquitoes and elephants and all the things that go moo and that fly and that sing. All the things that swim and breathe. But no humans.”

“He’s a poet, too,” Ede says, then bursts out crying, stretching out her hands to the heavens.

“I love the construction of this!” Efosa says, throwing his hands in the air and then placing them on his nephew. “I don’t think this was intentional, but this work is at a perfect sixty. That’s a pretty good estimate for flying the galaxy. You know, where I work, I do a lot of this kind of thing, and the math, I must say—”

“Um, Uncle Efosa, I hate to interrupt, but your hands shaking while on top of me is really uncomfortable.”

“What?”

“Your hands—they were fine before but then you started talking about where you work and they just started shaking all of a sudden.”

“Oh.” His hands leave his nephew’s slowly like that’s his last latch onto the universe, and pretty soon the world is crashing over him. The entire concept of existence falls on top of him. He has drowned in a sea of equations too complex for him. He can’t raise his leg out of the rubble.

He can’t leave that house fast enough.

Whisper: But your sounds are not quiet when you wake up screaming at night, disturbed, enraged, hungry. Everywhere you make a sound. Everywhere you are whining and hopeless, lost in a desert of windy sighs that have blown you into no direction. No direction. Not even magnitude.

Whisper: Maybe your name is a farce, a mockery, a snicker behind your back. There’s something behind your back. There’s a monster behind your shadow or is that just . . . you? You reflect you. What are you, if you can’t even be a constant, solid then differentiated to be at zero, at rest?

Hey, now: A constant is consistent except only when it’s content.

A whisper: You won’t sleep fulfilled. You won’t live fulfilled. You won’t be—

Efosa opens his eyes and sits up in bed and looks for a recording. He wasn’t sleeping. He wipes his eyes and makes some instant onion noodles over low heat while he scrolls through old videos. It is ancient, but the recording is clear to mind when he cannot sleep, as most things are.

All his internal conflicts saved for the night hours.

It is a tape that’s like a checklist. It reminds him of Mama, yet it offers no sage advice, no cultural specificity. It is as bland as white rice and that is why he can’t connect to it.

He plays the recording.

We know that soldiers are doing good work, and we’re here to aid with your needs! And we’re ready to tackle your mental health problems with our all-new Sound for Help system. Say it loud into your room and be free, so we can help fight this battle TOGETHER.

The room listens, amplifies through static because this function has never been used before by Efosa, like a rat expecting the steps of a new human before it can move.

Mental health problems . . . together.

He can feel his insides moving—slowly pumping, beating. He can feel the knot in his throat.

Together.

He hesitates. He can’t find the words. They can barely come out of him. His vocal cords are tightened, still.

“I, Efosa “Whisper” . . . I’ll be fine. Turn it off. Turn it off.”

Friday at dawn at the station, where he is still full of sleep. Of thoughts. Repining restlessness and frustration while the alarms ring. Efosa screams at the room’s control systems to shut off the noise, which doesn’t work, so he breathes, then asks nicely, which does.

There is silence.

Dressing is nothing; the same selection of clothes from a time when the war used to be stylish and sponsored, what caught everyone’s eye. He could opt for a wrap shirt that he could pin to his shoulders, but he takes something simple, ordinary.

Yet he runs up to training and finds stunning hilarity.

It actually makes him belly laugh, makes him stop jogging. Makes him stop thinking. Is this him? He’s falling out of routine. The world’s in chaos. A war. His war. His comrades scratch their heads and even jump the air to catch the drones, but the machines move out of grasp. 1019 huffs and puffs like she’s about to blow the whole charade down but even her anger doesn’t do jack to the scene in front of her.

The drones—they fly, majestic, like they’ve never gone higher before. They sway, side to side, plunge dive, then move in little shifts again. The low humming of the engines feels like singing, something baritone and sweet and beyond boundaries. This is . . . a whole different complexity. A whole new sound. A new world that’s pumping through his veins. It’s excellent. Efosa can’t even fathom it.

Could he ever imagine with his eyes that he would see his drone sing? The way it flies, so perfect, its calculation better than he’s ever done in his lifetime; it must be at infinity, at a glorious absolute. What is this?

No. No, it’s a chirp, the humming sound. It’s a flock. It’s a murder. It’s the sky, the whole group, the—

Birds! The drones mimic birds. Crows, cattle egrets, pigeons, gannets. Pretty soon they’re cannibalistic, like mud catfish, circling each other round like an orbit then striking, machines clashing like an uppercut. Tearing and knocking off each other’s properties to make a nest. Must be birds again, he cheers. What are the drones’ young but scraps they sculpted themselves, a guttural whirring as the “adults” cough out parts out of engine slots to feed their babies. It’s nonsensical and yet so glorious. When the humming sound goes higher to a piercing shrill, he knows the species has changed; perhaps a three-wattled bellbird. 1019 shouts higher than ever as she calls operations to come fix this crap. He can’t stop laughing.

The general glares at him.

“I’m very depressed,” Efosa diverts her attention, continuing to cackle. This whole thing is almost a mockery of the war.

“We’ve been haaacked!” The general whines on all her holo-devices, and he falls to the floor of the general station while bursting into hysterics. When he looks up at her, she is fuming.

“PTSD, too, probably.” With each word, his chest feels lighter. He feels . . . not better, but at least human for saying it. It’s progress, even if it’s to stop the general from killing him with her stare. His confessions are real this time, like his joy has finally made him know what to say: the right thing.

He never lied.

Operations has to come and assess the situation and do damages, so the soldiers get the day off. His war has never been so ridiculous. Efosa uses one of those promo-tabs to binge comedy shows—he gets war discounts. His mind is at the kind of rest that he wants it to be—not out of defeat but out of joy. There is something to be happy over, and he didn’t get it entirely from moving forward, as he thought he would. From progressing. From getting cultural secrets. He’s alright so far, not forever, but he’ll live.

Life is not so much a simple equation, because you get no firm answers.

Well, he does for some things. Like when he meets the math-techs from operations who are just finishing up looking at some lines of code relating to the unstable machinery.

“It seems a pretty easy fix. Just a routine hack, nothing special. The figures are even numbers and are pretty whole at all ends, so it was a quick reverse. Drones kind of suck but aren’t beyond repair, though,” Mohammed, an operator, speaks.

“What kind of elaborate plan of attack was that?” One of the other operators asks, scratching their head.

“Just trying to cause anarchy. Probably trying to spoil everything at once. No finesse to this attack,” Mohammed spits.

“This can never happen again,” 1019 stutters, cold to the touch.

“We’ll give your personnel better calculations for their rides and try to expand protection. Best we can do.”

“Can’t we take out money from other sectors for more options?!”

The two operators stare at her with concerned faces full of furrowed brows. “Not with a good conscience. Or government approval, and to be honest, this is not that big a deal to grab their attention. It’s quite humorous.”

As the operators leave, Efosa wants to say how the hack looked like birds to him, up in the sky, moving through the galaxy, but he doesn’t. People don’t need to know the source of his joy; that’s how the war takes and takes and takes. That’s how it feasts, on information, and there is nothing without context. Somehow, this message feels special to him, or maybe it’s because he’s seen the generation ship Ghare drew, that all these animals just came back to life with the drones.

Everything snaps into place with his thoughts, and he gets out of rest.

Efosa doesn’t sleep. When the night comes, he is alive and concentrated, his thoughts working on a goal, a satisfaction in the recklessness. Maximizing potential.

The great library hall never closes, and the lights are always on, so he spends his time drawing architectural designs of different shapes and sizes.

1019 gave him a mental health record, which mentions the installation of some aid-bots in the coming months to his room, as well as some adjustments. Therapy sessions. Detailed assessments every quarter, as well as helping him figure out his triggers. They will be watching him closely.

Archival tabs of biological information lay on the table, as well as some physics records, like a new world right in front of him. He only stops humming when he starts chirping, tapping his feet on the floor.

Something’s different.

He likes a setting at -113.7385, where with just enough weight, it can make a drone feel like an elephant’s leg just about to hit the earth. Except you can’t really hit anything if space is just that: space.

He moves forward with a pencil stroke that makes him go from youth to age, all the while a grin on his face.

Absolutes are always easy: whole and perfect. Too perfect, even; too seen. Simplified. They’re easy to catch. They’re easy to fix. Easy to resolve. It’s a one-way street but his tracks are always divided. But a complete value can never be possible for a drone that wants to fly and moo and sing and jump without getting caught. Drones that want to self destroy every once in a while to make a war inoperable. A war at rest. Him at peace.

Thinking about it, his code name works, as do other things in his life right now. But there is nothing without context, specifics, the detailed image of who he is and who he wants to be.

So, Whisper: Because your limitations are boundless and your revolution is silence, but you know that everywhere you go, you make a sound.

About the Author

Osahon Ize-Iyamu lives in Nigeria, where he writes speculative fiction. He is a recent graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop for young SFFH Writers and teens. He has fiction in The Dark, as well as Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. You can find him online @osahon4545.

Sour Milk Girls

Erin Roberts

The new girl showed up to the Agency on a Sunday, looking like an old dishrag and smelling like sour milk. Not that I could really smell her from three floors up through the mesh and bars, but there’s only three types of girls here, and she was definitely the sour milk kind. Her head hung down like it was too much work to raise it, and her long black hair flopped around so you couldn’t see her face. I’d have bet a week’s credits she had big ol’ scaredy-cat eyes, but she never bothered to look up, just let Miss Miranda lead her by the elbow through the front doors. Didn’t even try to run. Sour milk all the way.

Even sour milk new girls were good, though; anything new was good. The last one, Hope, might have been dull as old paint, but at least she’d been something different to talk about. I’d even won a day’s credits from Flash by betting the girl wouldn’t make it to fourteen without some foster trying her out and keeping her. Anyone could tell Hope smelled like cinnamon and honey, same as those babies on the first floor and the second-floor girls with their pigtails and missing-tooth smiles. Sure enough, only took six months before the Reynolds came and took Hope off to their nice house with the big beds and the white fence and those stupid yapping dogs, leaving just me and Whispers and Flash to stare at each other and count all the months and years ’til we’d finally turn eighteen. Flash should’ve known it would go that way—cinnamon and honey’s something fosters can’t resist.

Whispers said this new girl was officially called Brenda, but that was just as stupid as all the other Agency names, and the girl wouldn’t remember it after Processing anyway. At first I said we should call her Dishrag or Milkbreath, but even Flash thought that was too mean, and Flash is as nasty as hot sauce and lye. She’s the one who named me Ghost, on account of I’m small and shadow-dark and she thinks I creep around too much in the night. She got her name ’cause that’s how fast fosters send her back after their cat turns up dead and they realize the devil has blond hair and dimples.

“What’s in her file?” I asked Whispers, who was still leaned up against the wall by the window. She never bothered to look out anymore. Not even for new girls.

“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” she said. “Files are confidential.”

“Must be good if you’re holding back,” said Flash, blowing out air as she tried to whistle.

“Maybe,” Whispers said, with a lopsided shrug. Then she murmured something nobody could hear while staring down at her shoes. That meant we weren’t getting any more from her for at least an hour, not even if Flash threatened to throw her out the window or hang her with the sheets from one of the empty beds. No use pushing her ’til she started banshee-screaming, so Flash just practiced whistling and I played around some with our crap computers and we let Whispers go all sour milk and talk to her invisible friends.

By the time Flash got a half-whistle half-spit sound to come out of her mouth and I’d finished up my hack of the first-floor baby cams for when things got boring, new girl was being led off the elevator by Miss Miranda, head still down. Flash and I lined up in front of the room same as always—hands behind our backs, chests up and out, heads forward, eyes wide. Even Whispers came out of her murmuring and straightened up against the wall. Agency folks didn’t care about much as far as us third-floors were concerned, but they were total nuts for protocol.

Miss Miranda started by doing her normal speech-troduction. This is Brenda, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s going to stay with us for a while. These are the girls, they’re all trying to get new homes too. And we just know it’ll work out for you all any day now. When she said that last bit, her voice always got real high, like someone talking after they took a gulp of air from a circus balloon.

We ask you to stay on the third floor when you’re in the building unless you’re doing chores downstairs or get called to the office. But don’t worry—there’s so much to do up here, you won’t even notice. Her voice went even higher for that part, ’cause even an idiot could see there wasn’t anything on the floor but twenty empty beds, two long white lunch tables, a couple of old computers on splintery desks covered with the names of old third-floors, and the door to the world’s grimiest bathroom.

As long as you maintain good grades and proper behavior in school, you’re free to come and go as you please until seven PM curfew. You’ll get a few credits each day for transit and meals. If you need additional learning help or assistance with your homework, the computers in the back row have plenty to offer. Age-appropriate stuff only, of course. She looked straight at me when she said it, like it was my fault the security on the things was shit and I’d figured out a way to order vapes and liquor pops and get R-rated videos.

Now you girls get along, and try not to kill each other. She looked at Flash for that one, even though Flash hadn’t really tried to kill anyone for at least a year. She’d barely even talked to Hope. Either she was getting soft now that we were in high school, or she was gonna burn the whole place down someday. Maybe both.

As soon as she got the last words out of her mouth, Miss Miranda spun around on her high heels and got out of there as fast as she could. I thought the new girl would fall over as soon as Miss Miranda left, but she put her hands behind her back and stuck her chest out same as the rest of us. Her eyes weren’t nearly as scaredy-cat as I thought they’d be. She smelled like sour milk for sure, but hot sauce and honey a little bit too.

“I’m Brenda,” she said. “Brenda Nevins.”

“That’s a stupid name,” said Flash.

“It’s what my daddy called me,” said new girl, thrusting her chest out even more, like it would cover the way her voice got all wobbly.

“Yeah? Well where’s your daddy now?” Flash asked. The new girl’s head dropped forward. We hadn’t made a bet on whether someone could make her cry, but there were some things Flash would do for free.

“She doesn’t remember,” I told Flash. “You know that.”

“I remember fine,” said the new girl. “It’s just that . . . it just happened. He just died, I mean.”

Flash rolled her eyes.

“No way you remember that shit,” she said. “Not anymore.” She put on her best Miss Miranda impression, high pitched and piercing. “Your memories of your time before joining the Agency are being held for safekeeping until you reach adulthood and can properly integrate them into your daily life.”

“What are you talking about?” new girl said. “I remember my dad. He was a—”

“Spare me the bullshit,” Flash said, voice back low. “Miss Miranda tell you how in your file it says your daddy was a famous reccer? Or a Wall Street corp? Or a doctor? Bet if you looked in the ’grams she took from you, you’d find out he left you chained up in the basement. Or he liked to beat on your mama. Or maybe you ain’t never had no daddy at all.”

I felt my eyes get hot, just a little, but new girl didn’t blink.

“My daddy was a good man,” she said. “Not my fault if yours wasn’t worth shit.”

I backed up two steps so as not to get hit when the fists started flying. A fight was gonna mean discipline and lights-out and early curfew for at least two weeks. Nothing worse than that and having a black eye. But Flash just laughed.

“Damn, girl,” she said. “You got balls. Gonna be hard coming up with a name for you.”

“My dad—”

“Your dad won’t know any different.” I tried to stare some sense into the girl before Flash flipped back to serious and threw her across the room, or started working out how to smother her in the middle of the night. “Leave his name for him and ours for us. I’m Ghost. She’s Flash. That’s Whispers. We’ll figure something out for you.”

It took two weeks, but in the end, we called her Princess. Flash said it was from some fairy-tale book she’d read as a little kid, but I’d been to the Reynolds’ for a tryout same as she had, and Princess was the name of the dumb fat poodle they all fed under the table. Plus Flash said it like a curse, with a sparkle in her eye that any idiot could tell meant trouble. I told Princess not to worry, though; I’d watch her back. Not sure why. Maybe ’cause if Princess turned up dead it was back to just Whispers and Flash to talk to. Maybe ’cause I used to be a bit of a sour milk girl too.

Me and Princess almost pinky-swore on the whole thing, but I told her that was just for little kids and losers. Even if you were too poor to get wired up soon as you turned fourteen so you could swap ’grams of every stupid thing you did with all your besties in the school cafeteria, anybody could put together the credits for a memory share at one of the public booths. Sure, all the MemCorps signs said with adult supervision only, ’cause fooling around in your head like that could mess you up when your brain was still growing, but I just told the guy at the front we were over eighteen and gave him a two-cred tip. And Princess let him look down her shirt a little when he asked to see our pretty little smiles.

We got hooked up to our chairs in one of the side-by-sides. They were sticky, but it felt like old candy, not blood or anything, so I locked in. I had to show Princess how, but she caught on quick—straps on, headset up, earpieces in. I didn’t get into all the MemCorps does this and your brain cells do that and then you see the memory clear as if it happened to you part, ’cause Princess might have been a little sad looking, but she didn’t seem dumb.

“Your session has begun,” said the booth voice, all high and cool, like if Miss Miranda had turned into a robot.

I started first, since I knew how to work the thing. Shared my memory of the time I pulled some stupid rich girl’s chair out at school and she fell back and her legs went one way and her arms went another and her mouth made a big O shape and I laughed for about an hour. Princess giggled right along with me, but there was no way to tell how much of that was real and how much was the machine—easy enough to get swept away in a share without halfway trying.

“That’s all you got, Ghost?” she said, when we were finished laughing. “Some girl falling over?”

“It’s funny.”

“Yeah, but you said we’re supposed to be swapping something real.”

“It’s a memory booth, dumbass,” I said, smiling so she knew I didn’t mean something by it like Flash would. “Of course it’s real.” And it was, even if I didn’t share the part where Miss Miranda found out and made my head ache for a week. I liked Princess fine, but you couldn’t give everything to some new girl in one go.

“Not real like true,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Real like important. Like my daddy.”

“I’m sick of hearing about your damn daddy all the time.”

“That’s ’cause you didn’t know him the way I did,” she said. “He was real.”

And then she shared him with me—one ’gram after another. The way he half-smiled when she walked in the house, how it sounded when he called her Brenda, how she found him dead in his rocking chair and didn’t tell anyone for a whole day even though it started to stink. The public booths were old and ragged, but I could still smell the rotten and taste the tang of garbage in my mouth and feel the pound pound of her heart thinking it was the Agency every time a car drove by. Whole thing made my eyes sting and my throat itch.

“Real like that,” Princess said, voice all whispery. I just shook my head. No thinking about what my daddy could’ve looked like and what he might’ve called me. Needed to clear everything out and get back on even ground.

“’Cmon. Just show me something,” she said, and for a second, I wished Flash was there, just to tell her to shut the hell up and leave me alone.

“Maybe next time,” I said instead, taking the straps off of my legs clip by clip, telling my hands not to shake. “We’re out of time anyways.”

Princess flipped her hair back with her hand, turned her head, and looked me straight in the eyes. “You think that guy out there’s gonna mind if we go over?”

“No. I just . . . ”

“Don’t want to share something real,” she said, ripping her straps off and throwing her goggles back on the shelf, acting like sour milk and hot sauce had a baby. “I get it.”

“You really fucking don’t,” I said. “Me, Flash, Whispers . . . we don’t have something real to share. All those cute, sweet memories of being a kid? Snatched off us when we got to the Agency and locked away where we can’t get ’em. All we know is school and the third floor and a few fosters who couldn’t be bothered to keep us. That’s it. That’s all we fucking got.”

Princess stared at me for a second, eyes wide, then walked out, saying I didn’t know and Sorry under her breath like she was doing a Whispers impression. I stayed for a while, playing back the couple of half-decent memories I did have, like the day I figured out how to get the computers in the back to do what I wanted, like a real hacker, or the times the Agency let us go down to the first floor and play with the babies, and then the ones that made my neck shiver, like all the times fosters sent me back ’cause I didn’t fit into any of the smiling family photos—too old, too dark, too “hard to handle.”

But none of my memories were real the way Princess wanted. They didn’t make my blood jump or my hands get all shaky or my mouth go dry. Not even the bad ones. Not the Reynolds’ dog Butch chasing me ’round their big house, growling and smelling like death and scaring me more than Flash ever had. Not little Bitsy Reynolds laughing and telling me how I seemed nice enough for a dark girl, but Butch hated who he hated and you couldn’t tell a dog any different. Not Mrs. Reynolds looking anywhere but at my face when she brought me back to the Agency, telling Miss Miranda she’d tried but I didn’t know how to fit in and I was riling up the animals and after all, they’d been there first. Not even the day I woke up in the Agency with a throbbing skull and a big ol’ hole of nothing in my head and Miss Miranda telling me I was eight years old and my parents were dead but I’d get a new family by the time I turned ten if I just tried hard enough. Not one goddamned thing.

I got back after curfew. Miss Miranda gave me a lecture about rules and responsibilities over the pounding in my head—a small physical reminder of the way we expect you to behave here, she said, smiling down at me. I hope I won’t have to speak to you about this again.

At least the pain made it easy enough to ignore everyone once I was off the elevator. Flash rushed up to find out where I went off to and if I did anything fun, Whispers told stories about my day to her make-believe friends, and Princess acted like the back wall was the most interesting thing in the room. Took her half an hour to slink her way over to where I sat on the edge of my bed in the fourth row, swinging my feet in the air and ignoring every one of Flash’s ten thousand questions. Her hair hung down in her face again, like on her very first day, and she looked like one of those trained puppies the homeless men use for begging, ready to pant and collapse at your feet the minute you look like you’ve got a few credits to spare.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She sat on the floor in front of my feet like she thought I wouldn’t kick her. “Didn’t realize the way things went around here.”

I shrugged and said, “It’s okay, you’re new.” Even though it wasn’t. Anything to get her to shut it and go away. But of course Princess was too sour milk to get any hints, just kept sitting there and staring and asking stupid things.

“How long you been here, anyway?”

“Six years. More or less. Agency said they got a bunch of us after the last big quake.”

“A bunch? They on another floor we can’t go to?”

“Nah. They all got kept by fosters whose kids got smashed up or killed same as our parents,” Flash said. “Everybody but us lifers and the lucky ones.”

“Lucky ones?” Princess’ face stayed scrunched.

“The ones who got old and got out. Hit eighteen, got their memories, never looked back.”

“Got their memories from where?” Princess asked. Flash rolled her eyes.

“From wherever they fucking keep them after Processing,” she said. “Hurts like a bitch when they rip the ’grams out, too. Like someone stabbing you through your eye. ’Course they let you remember that part. Fucking Agency.”

“It only hurts for a minute, wuss,” I said, sticking my tongue out at Flash. Normally I wouldn’t dare, but one of the good things about the way she looked at Princess, like some puppy she half-wanted to cuddle, half-wanted to kick, was that she didn’t have so much nasty left for the rest of us.

“So how come I remember everything?” Princess asked, like there was any way we’d know.

“They probably screwed up,” Flash said. “Or you’re an Agency spy. Or your brain’s so weak that it would mind-wipe you altogether.” She pointed over at Whispers, who was playing with her fingers like she’d never seen them before.

“You wish,” said Princess, flipping her hair in Flash’s general direction like she was trying to get killed. Flash ignored it. She really was getting soft.

“Only way to find out is to get into Miss Miranda’s files,” Flash said. “She’s got ’em all locked up down in the office on cube drives or something. Right, Whispers?”

“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” Whispers said, to nobody in particular.

“Fine.” Flash walked over to Whispers’ corner of the room to get her attention. “Simple question. You ever see a whole bunch of little glowy cubes in a drawer or something?”

“Leave her be, Flash,” I said. My head still hurt from Miss Miranda’s warning, and nothing got Whispers shrieking louder than getting too comfortable over in her corner of the room. The first time, she’d hollered for a good hour ’til the Agency folks figured she wasn’t gonna stop, but even now it took about ten minutes before she got dragged down to the medic and brought back passed out cold.

“I’m just asking a question, Ghost,” Flash said, leaning against the wall near Whispers’ bed. “C’mon, Whispers. I promise I’ll leave you alone if you tell.”

“The memories aren’t in the office,” Whispers said. “They’re in the cloud.” I felt my cheeks get a little hot. Stupid. I was supposed to be the big bad hacker; I should’ve guessed.

“That means we can get ’em with the computers up here, right Ghost?” Flash asked. “Like you did when you got the booze-flavored candy?”

“That was before they added all kinds of security,” I said.

“So you can’t get in?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Then shut up and do it already,” Flash said. “I want to know why she gets to hold on to all her stupid little ’grams and they won’t let us remember shit ’til we get out of here.”

“Can’t tonight,” I said. “They’re gonna be watching the floor.”

“Yeah, ’cause you decided you had to come in late, and for no good reason either. Didn’t even bring us shit.”

“It’s not her fault,” Princess said, still lounging on the floor near my bed. “I—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They’re gonna be looking close for a couple days. We’ll have to try another time.”

“Or we could just distract ’em,” Flash said. Then she went and sat down, right on the edge of Whispers’ bed.

It took fifteen minutes of screams that I could feel all the way back behind my eyeballs, but eventually one of the overnight Agency guys, the one Flash thought had nice hair, came up and dragged Whispers away.

“You shouldn’t have—” I started.

“Yeah yeah,” Flash said, shrugging. “Just do it already. Before they finish drugging her up.”

I looked at Princess, but she just flipped her hair again and walked over to the computers. She had a little more hot sauce in her than I thought. Couldn’t tell yet if that was a good thing.

“Go ’head,” Flash said. “Thought you were supposed to be some kind of super-hacker.”

My head was still throbbing, worse than ever, and I knew Flash was just trying to get to me, but truth was truth. I sat down and got to typing—no way the Agency would spring for touch screens or one of those fancy robot lady voices—and was in quicker than I thought. Miss Miranda had locked down all the “bad influence” stuff pretty tight, but getting the Agency files wasn’t much harder than getting the cam feed from downstairs and watching the babies play. 

“Brenda Nevins,” I read from the screen. “Resident at the Agency for the Care of Unassociated Female Minors.”

“Blah blah blah,” said Flash from across the room. She was on lookout by the elevator for when Mr. Nice Hair came back with Whispers. “Get to the good stuff.”

“It doesn’t say anything really,” I said. “Just a bunch of big words.” The whole thing was reports and warnings and psychology mumbo-jumbo. Nothing ’til I got down to the engrams section. It was a list of ’grams with titles like Discovery of Father’s Body and Trip to Percy Park on May 7th. I recognized a couple from in the booth earlier, but most I’d never even heard of, and just about all of them had the same big bold flashing letters on the far right. Not to Be Removed. See Explanation.

“‘Explanation,’” Princess read from over my shoulder, finger tracing along the screen like some little kid trying to figure out how words work. “‘To date, Miss Nevins has shown none of the aberrant or destructive behavior of many of the Agency’s other older residents. As the trauma from the loss of her father has not led her to behave negatively, we recommend that she be able to keep the majority of her memories at this time. Moreover, it can be noted that Agency resident Becky Ann Ross has shown no significant behavioral improvement since memory removal, and it is possible that the procedure itself had a negative impact on the development of Samantha Lee, leaving her prone to delusions and outbursts. While Destiny Ward has demonstrated some positive behavior changes and remains difficult to place primarily due an unfortunate lack of demand, a better form of control therapy than memory removal may need to be implemented in the future.’” Princess faked her way through most of the big words and probably wasn’t saying half of them right, but I knew what “lack of demand” meant.

“Destiny? That’s you?” Princess asked. I shut down the machine and pushed her out of my way as I headed back to my bed. She followed. Of course.

“You’re Destiny Ward,” she said again, right behind my ear. “Right?”

“I’m Ghost, you fucking idiot,” I said. Ghost who was too old and too ugly to be in demand. Ghost who didn’t smile right, who dogs couldn’t help but want to kill. Ghost who had a hole in her mind instead of whatever it was that would get Princess and all those little first-floor babies and second-floor sweethearts tried out and kept by fosters, far away from the damn third floor. Ghost who knew how to fix it.

I got up from the bed so fast that Princess jumped back a good foot. Even Flash flinched a little bit over by the elevator. Fuck the Agency; I could find my ’grams right now, maybe even get them put back in early. There were people who would do that if you paid them well enough. I was a hacker; I could figure it out.

I got back into my file and scrolled down. Visit to the Ferris Wheel with Parents, Earthquake and Aftermath, Petty Larceny #1,2,3.

And in the rightmost column of each—Permanently Deleted. Not held for safe-keeping until you can integrate them into adult life. Not get them back when you turn eighteen. Just gone. Totally and forever gone.

I picked up the stupid machine to throw it down on the floor, break it open like a water balloon, but Princess caught my arm.

“You don’t want to—”

“You don’t know what the hell I want,” I said, brushing her off and heading over to the elevator. “Agency lied to us, Flash. They fucking lied. They took all our memories and said they were giving them back but they—”

“Shut it,” Flash said. “They’re coming up.”

She was right. I could hear the whirring of the gears as the elevator climbed. This time of night, Agency bastards would want us all lying down. Proper bedtime protocol and all that bullshit. Leave us flat on our backs while they told us their lies.

I got back to my bed just in time for Mr. Nice Hair to step off, carrying Whispers in his arms. He put her down on the closest bed, nowhere near her little corner, which was how I knew she was really knocked out. Otherwise she would’ve started screaming all over again. Then he turned around and left without a word. Just like Miss Miranda. No time for the third-floor rejects. We probably wouldn’t remember it anyway.

“Let’s move her back,” said Flash. Nobody moved. “You want her to start up again when she wakes up?”

I didn’t care what the hell happened when she woke up, but I didn’t feel like fighting. I grabbed her bony ankles while Flash took hold of her arms and Princess kept a hand under her back. Once she was passed out on her own bed, legs sprawled one way and arms another, mouth hanging open like she was a clown in a carnival game, Flash patted me on the arm. If it had been Princess, I probably would have slapped her in the face, but instead I turned my face away.

“They really wipe our stuff completely?” she asked. I nodded. “No way to hack it back?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry,” Princess said. When I didn’t answer, she crept over to her bed and laid down, her head thudding onto the hard pillow. Flash didn’t move. Just leaned in close so her mouth was right by my ear.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. Her voice turned from whisper to giggle.

I could almost smell the hot sauce in the air.

“Wanna go to the booth again?” I asked Princess a few days later, after school. She looked at me and nodded like I’d asked if she wanted a million bucks. With me giving her the silent treatment, all she’d had to talk to was Flash and Whispers, and that wasn’t much to live on.

“Is it gonna make you mad again?” she asked, her face back in that little half-scrunch.

“Nah, I’m over it,” I said. “Plus, I figured out how to share something real. You’re looking at an A-plus hacker, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” She smiled bright for the rest of the walk over to the booth. I nodded at the front desk guy as we came in, sent a whole mess of credits his way.

“Break time, right?” I said. He just raised his chin in a half-nod, then looked over at Princess’s shirt like he could see through the fabric. She caught on quick and bent over again, enough for him to smile and head off. Then she went straight for the side-by-sides.

“You coming, right?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead and strap in. I have to hack something back here for this to work.”

“Okay.” Princess put on the headphones and straps and all that. The goggles covered her eyes up tight, but I turned the booth lights off too, made sure she couldn’t see Flash tiptoeing in.

I called up one of the memories on the list I’d pulled from the Agency. Brenda and her Father at her fifth birthday.

“Hey,” Princess said, “Something’s off. This is one of mine.”

“Not anymore,” I said. Her body jerked up as my code hit the booth and she clutched her head like someone was knifing her in the eye. Princess screamed and tried to tear the straps off, to run away, but Flash held her arms down, giggling under her breath. I’d offered her a few credits to help out, but some things Flash would do for free.

“Don’t worry.” Flash’s hands tightened against Princess’ arms as Princess’ hair flipped back and forth. “It only hurts for a minute. You’ll barely remember.”

When the twitching and moaning stopped, we unhooked Princess from the booth and Flash walked her out, steadying her like she was an old drunk. I told Flash I’d be along soon, that I needed to check everything was clear so we wouldn’t get caught. But after she was out of sight, I went in for a half hour in my own booth instead. Any good thief’s gotta check the merchandise. Plus I didn’t like looking at Princess all limp and sad, worse than sour milk even. That was more of a Flash kinda thing. She’d said I should erase every memory Princess had forever, put us all on even ground, but I didn’t want to be that way about it. I was gonna give Princess the memories back at eighteen anyway. Sooner, maybe. Once I was living with a foster in some big house with nice kids and no dogs.

Princess was long-haired and cinnamon pretty; she’d find a foster with her memories or not. Just like Hope and the rest. Just like I was gonna. With Princess’ memories filling up that hole in my head, I’d be set. I’d know just how to smile with the fosters and laugh and make ’em like me—even if I didn’t fit in the pictures, I’d know how to be part of a family. I’d smell like cinnamon and honey and babies and home.

I cued up the first string of memories in watch mode, so I wouldn’t get too caught up in the share ’til I found the right ones. I could tell Princess was a little girl right away ’cause of how big everyone looked through her eyes, like friendly giants. There were tons of them, coming and going and bringing her things, but only two were really important—Mom and Dad, happy and smiling. I tried smiling back, giggling like she giggled when Dad picked her up to pretend fly or when Mom played peekaboo. But I couldn’t get the feel of it right without going all the way in. I could hear myself through the earplugs, a high-pitched cross between a scream and the hiccups. I needed something better.

I skipped through the memories, playing a few seconds if something looked good and then moving on, looking for something like the ones that Princess had showed me before, the ones that made my hand shake and my breath skip.

But all I saw was how, each time I stopped, there were half as many people, that the presents were gone and then the toys too, that the rooms were smaller and dingier, that Mom left on a rainy day and never came back, that Princess didn’t seem to care. She still had her Daddy and he always always held her tightly, close enough that even on watch I could smell the liquor on his breath—just like those booze pops I’d ordered. I still felt a little of the way she’d felt when he called her Brenda, all lit up from inside like candles on a birthday cake, but this time I wasn’t swept up in the share—she was just some sad little girl wearing grimy clothes, living in a dirty room with an old man who finally died in a rocking chair. Some girl who leaned over and let a perv at a front counter see down her shirt. Some girl too dumb to figure out her own stupid memories.

I left the booth before the half hour was up, still trying to get the stink of Princess’ dirty life out of my nose. Pervy was back on duty and waved me over from the front counter as I passed by.

“Your friend gonna be alright?” he said. “Seems like a sweet girl.” He licked his skinny lips and I had to try not to shiver. Princess would end up swapping more than ’grams with him one of these days.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“I’m just a concerned citizen.” He lifted a bushy eyebrow in a way that was probably supposed to make me feel something. “Maybe I should be concerned about what you were doing during my break.”

“Just making a back up,” I said. “In case there’s another quake or she gets hit by a truck or something.” Pervy leaned forward a little.

“I’ve got an extra,” I said. “You want it?”

Pervy had his hands out before I could blink. They looked pale and clammy, like a piece of gum stuck under a chair too long. I fished the cube with Princess’ memories out of my pocket. It was the only one I had, but she’d be better off without it. Who wants to find out at eighteen that their life has been so fucking pathetic? Screw having something real.

“I give you this, you leave her alone, alright?”

Pervy nodded. I handed the cube over, making sure not to touch his sweaty hands. Fifty-fifty chance he’d try to pull some double-cross, but if I needed to, I could take care of his memories as easy as I had Princess’, so I just smiled and walked out. Can’t hurt somebody you can’t remember.

This time, I made curfew. I could tell by the way Miss Miranda stared me down that she couldn’t wait to have some reason to give me punishment, but she was gonna have to. I smiled right at her and headed up to the third floor like I had a mouth full of cotton candy. Soon as I got off the elevator I saw Princess lying in the bed she liked, hair spread out on the pillow like a pool of old soda. Flash sprang up soon as she saw me, with that big smile she got like she was either gonna hug you or eat you.

“It’s all gone,” she said. “All that shit about her daddy and her perfect life? Wiped just like if the Agency got her.”

I smiled back, but it felt weird, like baring fangs.

“I thought you were bullshitting about the hacking part, but you give good, Ghost,” Flash said. “Maybe next you can reboot Whispers so she won’t talk so damn much, right? Or creep up on Miss Miranda and take everything she’s got?” She laughed hard, and I knew not to tell her anything about how it really was with Princess, ’cause then she’d be mad I gave all the good stuff away.

“The rest of her okay?” I said, like I didn’t care too much really.

“Yeah, she’s good. Not like Whispers or anything. Just less annoying. Cuter too.” Flash glanced over at Princess like she was sizing her up in a prize booth at a fair.

“Yeah, but fosters’ll probably get her soon.” She’d be fine. Just like Hope. Better than her memories.

“Maybe,” Flash said, “If she figures out how to keep her mouth shut.”

“Fifty credits says she’s gone in a month.”

Flash shook her head. “She’s not that cute.”

“You said that with Hope.” I shrugged and hoped my palms wouldn’t be too sweaty.

“Fine.” Flash grabbed my hand tight with her cold one. “But make it sixty. And when she starts blabbermouthing again, I’m gonna laugh at the both of you.”

“We’ll see,” I said, and started over for Princess. I thought Flash might follow, but she just went back to practicing whistles like always. Princess wasn’t doing much, didn’t even look at me as I walked over and sat down right by her ear. Just stared up at the ceiling like any other new girl who got wiped and dumped on the third floor. Sour milk squared. But that was okay. You didn’t have to stay a sour milk girl forever.

“I’m Ghost,” I said, low and quiet so only she could hear. “You know Flash and Whispers. And we call you Princess, but your daddy, he called you Brenda.”

About the Author

Erin Roberts is a writer and communications consultant who somehow found a way to be a storyteller when she grew up. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Podcastle and The Dark, and her non-fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com and People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and Stonecoast MFA program, an Associate Editor for Escape Pod, and the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers Grants. She can be found on Twitter at @nirele.

A Cigarette Burn In Your Memory

Bo Balder

Gouda’s clients have always lost someone, even if it takes them a while to work up to it. This man has lost a daughter. His kind, round face is grooved with sadness. She likes him at once, which isn’t her usual MO. “She was taken two years ago,” he says. “Me and the wife had gone shopping, and when we came back, she was gone.”

Gouda glances down at the information he brought, as requested. Photos, birth certificate, council registration. The latter form is curiously blank. She checks anyway.

“Where was home?”

The man stutters and it takes him several tries to answer. “Dordrecht.”

“It’s not on the registration.”

He paws his briefcase and provides his home address. He’s only lived there eighteen months. Gouda licks her lips. This is one of those strange cases she’s been getting the past two years. Missing children, missing parents, missing grandparents.

“Tell me about the day she went missing,” Gouda says. The man, Jansen is his name, starts talking in his monotonous, broken voice. Gouda has no children, but she now knows everything about what the loss does to parents. The past two years have been one unending stream of the bereaved.

Something must have happened two years ago. On her map, she has circled the names of cities that come up the most. Dordrecht, The Hague, Delft, Zoetermeer, Ridderkerk. If you circle them, the center of that circle is in the middle of the sea. So far, she hasn’t been able to find anyone of this kind of missing person. Still the clients keep coming, maybe because she located a few ordinary runaways. It’s a lot harder now that the Internet has stopped working.

“ . . . And then we called her, as we always do when we’re away, and the phone number didn’t exist anymore. We got one of those prerecorded messages, you know?”

Gouda nods. She knows.

“How could the phone number to our own . . . ” Jansen stutters, regroups. “To our house? That’s just silly.”

“So it was a landline?”

“What else could it be?”

Gouda wants to ask a follow-up question, but she too finds that her tongue flaps in her mouth, not knowing what to say. Her eyes drift to the baby tablet on the table, a great little device to play solitaire and Sudoku on, but nothing like a phone. No hook, no numbers.

“How old was your daughter at the time of her disappearance?”

“Sixteen.”

“Old enough to leave her on her own for a night, then.”

Jansen tries to say something, but nothing comes out. It’s hard to talk about the missing. Everybody knows that. Evening TV is full of reality shows about the missing. And not just Dutch TV, it’s happening all over the world. So if your heart aches for a child you can’t quite remember, you can wallow in other people’s grief all night long.

Jansen pays Gouda’s retainer and leaves with a follow-up appointment in two weeks. Gouda writes up his case and adds it to her take home pile. She likes to sit in front of the TV. Her building has a working TV antenna, which makes her very popular with friends and colleagues. Before the cable stopped working she watched shows from America, mostly. They still get broadcast, but the delay has grown long. Shows have to be printed on reels, shipped across the Atlantic, recaptured on digital and broadcast via the old antenna network.

Gouda knows she has visited America once, but the weird thing is she can’t remember which city she went to. But if she closes her eyes, she can hear the sirens on the streets, the honking cabs, the friendly greetings of faceless sales assistants, and the scent of hot dogs with sauerkraut. The pillows in her hotel room. Pointless stuff like that. There’s just no visual to go with these sensations.

She walks home. She could take the tram but it clears her mind if she has her face in the wind for a bit. The sunset over the Amsterdam canals makes her feel that life has meaning. They are lined with houses that have stood for centuries, which have been lived in by people who gave the stairs their hollowed out look, the railings their patina. History does exist. Some people do know their parents, their childhood homes. It gives her the courage to plow on, even though she has this big gap in her memory and doesn’t even know her real name, or who her parents were. She shares that with thousands of people, and that makes her believe that someday she will find out what happened that day, two years ago.

It’s like there’s a crater in her brain, with curling, cauterized edges, which has obliterated her memories. She probably can’t get them back, burned things don’t get unburned, but she would like to know what caused the impact.

No, that’s not true. She wants to know about her childhood.

When she comes home she files Jansen’s information while she heats yesterday’s Chinese. There’s many entries in the J folder. She browses through them while the microwave buzzes. They’re all the same, except the date.

That’s so strange. Mr. Jansen has been by many times with the same story. Gouda never finds his daughter. He pays the bill, she closes the file. And then the same things happens again and again. Is that why Jansen’s unremarkable round face looks so familiar? She wonders why he keeps finding the same private detective, her, every time. The microwave pings and she puts the old files back and the new one on the table.

Gouda stands still, hands spread in a forgotten gesture. Thoughts slide away from her. The smell of food and the growling of her stomach bring her back to the present. Dinner time.

She sits down with the plate on her lap and picks up the stack of old picture books she got on the Sunday market. She opens them where she left off last evening and looks at photographs of Dutch towns. She has one memory of her childhood. An old man and an old woman walk with her at the edge of a small canal, not in Amsterdam or she would know it, and they smile at the camera.

If she looks at picture books long enough, someday she will find the town. As she turns page after brittle, yellowed page, she combats the nagging feeling that at one point she could have found out about this faster, but she can’t remember how.

She almost turns the page, mechanically, before she registers the picture properly. A canal, gabled houses, but tiny, like a miniature Amsterdam. Balk, Friesland, the picture heading reads. This is it. This is her childhood memory. She strokes the shiny, heavy page. It’s real. She exists. Holding the book against her face, she inhales deeply. But of course the old paper doesn’t smell like the canal did in her memory. Like stagnant water, hot brick, sticky remnants of ice cream on her little chubby hand.

Gouda puts the book back on the stack, then realizes what she’s doing, and puts it in a place of honor on the chimney mantle. She eyes the teetering towers of old books on the floor. Now she won’t have to go through them anymore. Her Sundays are now free. But this can’t be it. She needs to do more. She’ll go to that place, Balk. Maybe she can find her family. Although the probability of that happening is still small, as she doesn’t know their names. Maybe her grandparents were just visiting Balk on holiday. And they’re probably dead by now as well.

The momentary elation evaporates. She makes a pot of tea and opens the Jansen file. She’s going to sketch out a plan for tomorrow before her bedtime reading schedule. One day she’ll read a book she knows already. That too, could be a clue.

Gouda retraces the route the Jansen family remembers taking to arrive in Amsterdam. She travels to Pynacker. Mr. Jansen doesn’t quite remember getting on the train there, but where else could he have come from? As she gets off in Pynacker Station, she can see where the rails end in a double stop. Pynacker is a terminal station, trains cannot go through.

In front of the train station, a fan of directions greet her. Library, City Hall, shopping center. There is one little pointer that has been scratched out and stickered over so many times she can’t read what it says. That must be the one that leads her to the Edge.

She buys a cup of coffee, her one indulgence today. Coffee has gotten a lot more expensive because the airplanes don’t work anymore. On the other hand, the world has become warmer and in some places wetter, so coffee plantations in Spain and France are slated to reproduce the good stuff in a couple of years. It’s as weird as the thought of Dutch vineyards. Polar bears must be turning in their graves, poor things.

As she digs in her purse for change, a sheaf of ticket stubs falls out. She checks them idly before tossing them in the trash. They are all tickets to Pynacker. She’s been here before, many times. But why? And worse, why doesn’t she remember?

She notes the mystery down in her little notebook and re-pockets the ticket stubs. There’s a reason she kept them. Maybe this little nugget of information will help her forward in her search.

She follows the tourists to the edge of the water. It’s busier than she expected; cranes and boats are laying the foundations for levees. There’s a reason that nobody built any dikes before, but it escapes her for now. She moves away a little from the work crews and the staring tourists. Since the last time she was here, a path has been beaten out besides the water, and small groups of hikers are coming and going.

She walks up to one of them, his high-end hiking gear mud-spattered and sun-bleached. Clothes aren’t getting made as much as before, and cash to pay for them is hard to come by.

“Hey, I’m Gouda Smid, private detective. Have you walked the whole Circle?”

The hiker turns to her, smiling, crow-footed blue eyes in a tan face. “I do a half-circle every season. Why?”

“I look for missing persons, mostly. I’m sure you’ve seen on TV that they’re mostly from towns along the Edge. Have you ever spotted anything odd or different?”

He gazes away over the choppy water of the Hollands Diep. “Yes and no. I never see anything funny. It’s more the things I don’t see that make me wonder.”

This is more interesting than Gouda was expecting from a routine chat. “How’s that?”

“The Netherlands have very few terminal stations, yet all around Circle Bay we have track railway lines ending at the edge of the water. Same with highways. Why build an eight-lane highway to a tiny little town at the edge of the water?”

Gouda thinks she’s maybe been watching the wrong shows. This sounds like National Geographic or History Channel material. “What do you do for a living?”

His mouth quirks into something less pleasant. “I used to be a city planner.”

“You used to be? For what city?”

“Good question. I can’t remember. Or I never had a job, in spite of my training and advanced age.”

He nods at her and walks on. He looks a lean and smart late thirties, not the kind of guy who’s been out of a job since college.

Gouda runs after him and gives him her phone number. “Call me sometime? I’m wondering what this has to do with my missing persons cases. Things just don’t add up.”

The man doesn’t commit but tucks her card away in one of his many zippered pockets.

Gouda sits down on a stray bollard, overlooking a paved square with faint markings indicating this was once a parking spot. She does have memories of cars, traffic jams, parking lots. But they are hard to match with this empty lot, which could have housed like sixty cars or more. There are still old cars running, of course, the ones without—her thoughts stutter. She takes out her notebook and writes the stutter moment down. It’s nearly full. She leafs through it. On the pages are words like “Netflix”—she found that one in an old calendar. “Chips”—those taste great, but can also cause prolonged stuttering, seizures, and even comas.

Parking lots, she writes down. Why do old cars still run? They still run because—and maybe because writing down the words make the stutter worse, she watches her hands flutter and clench over the notebook. The pencil breaks. The sun shines down on her face.

She closes her eyes and across the redness she sees icebergs floating past, tugged by boats. Icebergs are something polar. The polar ice is melting. Was melting. Is it still?

She opens her eyes and finds herself supine on pitted asphalt. The paving is warm because it’s a sunny day, so she’s not that uncomfortable. But her knuckles are grazed and her tailbone aches. She clambers back up, groaning from more aches and stings. A notebook is lying on the ground. She picks it up, and her name is on it. That’s weird.

She browses the notebook, and it’s full of incomprehensible notes. Bring it or toss it? No, it’s hers; she must bring it, even though there’s something repulsive about it.

When Gouda gets home and wants to put the notebook away for later perusal, she discovers she has several more of those she’d completely forgotten about. On her computer there’s even a mind map of all the words, complete with date. Just to be sure, she finds the last entry in the found notebook, which has no date, and puts today’s in.

But it’s disturbing, all the same. What other work has she done she has forgotten about? Her eye finds a full noticeboard on the wall. It looks like a serial killer’s wish list, complete with red cord and pins. But it’s not about serial killing; it’s full of clippings from magazines and newspapers, photos and yellow Post-its.

She reads one. “Where did the ice asteroids go? Recent astronomical data compared with centuries-old maps indicate that the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter have gaps in them that can’t be explained. It’s mostly ice planets, although heavy metals are also showing peculiar missings. On par with the vanished satellites.”

Missing ice planets. Missing people. Floating icebergs in her dream. No such thing as a coincidence someone once said, although Gouda is no longer surprised that she can’t remember who.

She needs a dictionary. What’s a satellite? But while she has many letters of the alphabet in both Dutch and English encyclopedias, yellow, moldering volumes, she doesn’t have the Oxford English Dictionary’s Rob-Sequyle. To the library it is. The last time she was there the library had become dusty and abandoned, with only a few rejected books on the sagging shelves. But encyclopedias are heavy and she’s almost sure she saw a few.

She unlocks her bicycle and starts cycling the short distance to the library. The building still retains some licks of its once colorful paint, but the lower floor has had to be abandoned due to the rising water. But it’s lit up, the door opens, and she hears the buzz of many people present and talking. It’s a wonderful sound, bringing back memories that never really surface, but create ripples of their impending arrival in her mind. Better than nothing.

She walks into the big central space. It’s indeed full of people sitting at desks, writing and doing work-like things. She steps close to one of the workers, an elderly lady, and sees she’s writing a lined index card.

The activity suddenly makes sense. They’re re-cataloging the library! By hand, because the computer systems were all lost. There’s someone bent over an enormous machine she doesn’t know the function of, a bit like a microscope but not quite. And so many books have returned! Hundreds line the shelves; more are stacked on carts sitting beside the cataloguers.

The sight fills Gouda with joy. Humanity is fighting back against missing persons, misfortune, and climate ravagery, one book at a time. She even sees a new-looking book. She picks it up. A strong odor emanates from it, chemical and strong, but satisfying. The scent of a newly printed book. The pages are crisp, the type a bit smudged but strongly black. A new book. Someone has found an old mechanical printing press.

She asks for directions to the encyclopedias and is given stern warning not to take any volumes home. She offers to bring the ones she has at home. It wouldn’t be right to hoard that knowledge for herself alone.

She lugs the heavy dictionary volume, dated 1998, and leafs through the heavy pages. There it is. Satellite: natural object (moon) or spacecraft (artificial satellite) orbiting a larger astronomical body. Most known natural satellites orbit planets; the Earth’s Moon is the most obvious example. Artificial satellites can be either unmanned (robotic) or manned . . .

The words “communication” and “space shuttle” hurt her brain. She looks away quickly, leery of the buzzing sensation in her head, like a sinus headache. She wants to transcribe this important information, but she’s afraid that if she reads them again, the sentences will start up that painful buzz or worse.

She tricks her brain by copying the article out starting at the bottom, with the last word in the last sentence. This way no meaning forms in her head and it’s even possible to write whole words. As a last resort she would have written the words out letter by letter, starting with the last letter of a word and ending with the first, but that doesn’t seem necessary.

Should she share this trick with the librarians? She decides not to. They are happy, having found a way to rebuild some of the knowledge lost in the computer crash. They don’t need to find out, like her, that some knowledge is painful, and some of it can’t be retained.

As Gouda exits the library she walks past a blocky machine that triggers a faint memory. It’s a copier. She’s used them in high school. Maybe it still works. Yes, the electricity is on and it hums. She puts her notebook facedown on the lit plate—funny how she remembered how to do that—and presses the copy button. The copy slides out. Wow, they even had some blank paper left.

She lifts the paper to her face and smells. She closes her eyes. Memories rise, but they seem a bit stale and flat. There is no clue there. Why? The machine looks old and scuffed, its beige plastic brittle and discolored. Maybe this technology is too old to have meaning for her quest.

She pockets the page and heads home. She’s no closer to solving her mystery, but her heart is lighter. Life will get better again, it just needs cooperation and dedication. She could be part of the library renewal if she wanted. Maybe it would be more rewarding than looking for people that have never been found yet.

When she opens her door and climbs the four sets of stairs to her small apartment, a ringing sound shreds the air. Only when she sees the squat gray object emitting the sounds, she remembers it’s a phone. Which can be answered. She picks up the horn-shaped object, hesitant about what to do. It’s been so long.

“Hi, is this Gouda?” A male voice says. “It’s Joe from Pynacker? I’m in town. I’ve got something for you.”

Gouda doesn’t remember any Joe from Pynacker. Has she even ever been there? Her left hand fishes up train ticket stubs that, strangely enough, all appear to be to and from Pynacker. One of them is from yesterday.

The idea she went somewhere yesterday and doesn’t remember it gives her such a weird feeling. She looks around the living room. Everything seems to be the same as before, no gray spots. If she went to Pynacker, it was for a reason, probably a case. She tells him where she lives.

She buzzes him in only ten minutes later. He’s a tall guy in his early forties with a weather-beaten face and sun-bleached hair.

“Hi Gouda,” he says. “Nice to meet you again.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says. “Joe, right?”

His gaze sharpens. “You forgot?”

She holds up the ticket stubs. “I guess I went to Pynacker yesterday, but I don’t remember. There’s a page in my notebook as well. This has never happened to me before.”

Joe spots the kitchen and zooms in on the teapot. “Mint? Can I have a cup? I miss coffee, don’t you?”

“I’ve read about it,” Gouda answers.

Slurping his tea, Joe peruses her wall of clippings and pictures and pins. “I see you’ve found many of things I have. Satellites, huh? I’ve been zooming in on things we used to eat and drink but no longer do, because we flew them in on planes.” He taps a picture of a plane for emphasis. Or maybe he just wants to make sure Gouda knows what a plane is. “Coffee, bananas, spices. I wonder if someone in a faraway country is trying to reorganize shipping those things. They must be in as bad an economic slump as we are.”

He sits down at her table and gestures her over to him. Gouda’s almost irked by his casual possession of her space, but decides to let it go. She gets another mug of tea and sits down next to him.

He rolls up his sleeves. His forearms are surprisingly smooth and creamy pale, years younger than his weatherworn face. Gouda blushes and finds it hard to lift her eyes from those strong, muscled arms. There’s nobody in her life right now. Has there ever been?

He’s speaking and she’s missed the start. She takes a quick look at his face, which hasn’t changed, so he hasn’t noticed her moment of confusion. A sip of tea helps her get back to normal.

Instead she sneezes. It takes her by surprise.

Joe frowns. “Exactly. Humanity has a virus. We’re all infected. We can’t even . . . ” His eyes glaze, he starts to stutter.

Gouda watches with inexplicable dread. Something awful is going to happen. The light outside seems to darken, the room shrinks inward as the moment hangs in the air, pregnant with horror. But Joe draws his hands over his eyes, looks aside, shakes his head.

The moment is gone. The sun is still shining. But Gouda’s heart still races, evidence that something almost happened.

“What happened? What did you just . . . ?” Gouda doesn’t dare be more specific, for fear of calling back the awful dread.

Joe’s eyes roll up and aside, searching for an innocuous answer. “You have to approach the square through a side street, not full on. And if you accidentally luck onto a big thoroughfare, distract yourself by thinking of trees or scoot into an alley. Right?”

Gouda nods and jots down a quick note. She needs to remember this moment. It will help her with her case. She can’t quite remember what it was about, only that’s it’s important.

Joe clears his throat. “It seems to me that there are strangers in town. And that at night, they demolish houses and break up streets, so that we can’t find our way home the next day. They are raiding our larder.”

Gouda leans forward. “They like ice cream.” Icebergs. “And the people living in those broken-up streets forget their names and where they lived—”

She chokes up. Too close. Across the table, Joe’s face turns purple and he makes hacking, desperate sounds. Their hands meet and she clutches his for one long moment, callused palm, warm fingers, blood rushing to meet hers.

Gouda blinks and starts at the stranger sitting at her coffee table. Her left hand has pale stripes over the back, as if someone just gripped her hand hard. As she watches, they fill with blood and disappear. As if it never happened.

The stranger stands up. “I’m sorry, Miss, um, I have to go.” He looks around wildly, as if he doesn’t remember what he’s doing here either.

Gouda gets up to escort him to the door. There’s a strange backpack in the hallway. She gestures at it. “This must be yours.”

He hesitates. “Are you sure? I don’t know . . . ”

She hands it to him, firmly. “I’m sure. It’s not mine.”

“Okay. Thank you. Goodbye.”

He hesitates in the door opening as if there’s more to say, but there isn’t. Gouda shuts the door behind him and waits until she hears him clomping down the stairs.

She returns to the table and her mug of peppermint tea. There’s an open notebook on the table. “Don’t look into the sun,” someone has written down in her handwriting.

As if anyone would.

She looks out of the window and watches a stranger with the flapping coat and the sun-bleached hair walk away. It fills her with inexplicable sadness.

About the Author

Bo Balder is the first Dutch author to have been published in Clarkesworld and F&SF. Her short fiction has also appeared in Escape Pod and other places. Her SF novel The Wan was recently published by Pink Narcissus Press.

The Lighthouse Girl

Bao Shu, translated by Andy Dudak

March 12, 2027

My name is Ling Rourou . . . right Papa? Yes, I am Ling Rourou. Today I am seven years old. Papa’s name is Ling Dong. He gave me this mini laptop as my birthday present. Papa says all I have to do is open it and speak into it, and everything I say will be saved into the diary. So now I will tell about today. Today Papa took me to Disneyland for the whole day. It was so fun! I played in a fairy-tale world, and I even flew a plane. Then Papa took me to eat a very big cake. I had a very wonderful birthday. I promise that Rourou will be with Papa forever!

May 8, 2027

Today Papa took me to my first piano lesson. There were many kids my age to make friends with. I was a little scared at first, but I do not know why. When I sat down I played well. I was better than all the other kids. The teacher asked me if I studied piano, but I really cannot remember studying music before. The teacher said I play better than all the other students, even those who study. He said I could take the advanced course. Papa praised me and said I was his little prodigy. After class he took me to eat ice cream. I really love my Papa!

September 1, 2027

Today I will go to primary school. I do not want to go, but Papa says there are many kids there to be friends with and play with.

At school, all the other kids came with their moms and dads. Why do I have no mom to come with me? The kids on TV have moms too. I ask Papa about this sometimes, but he never tells me where my mom is. Once I asked him and he got a bad look in his eyes and he said I do not have a mom. Why am I the only kid with no mom? I want to ask Papa, but I think it will make him unhappy. I do not dare ask. Actually, it is not so bad, not having a mom. Having my Papa is good enough.

September 6, 2027

Today is Sunday. Papa took me to a place with many stone things sticking out of the ground. Papa said everyone goes to sleep under stones like those, eventually. I was surprised. It seemed like it would be really boring, sleeping there. Papa took me to one of the stone things and we stood before it. Papa said my mom was lying below it. I saw her picture on the stone, and she was more beautiful than any of the other children’s moms. I was so happy. I told Papa to wake Mom up, so I could talk with her. Papa cried. He told me Mom could not talk anymore. But he said she will be with me forever, going wherever I go. I do not understand. Papa cried more. I felt very bad. My heart felt like it would break, so I cried too.

September 20, 2027

Today was the first day of English class. The teacher taught us to sing the letters of the alphabet. I was singing along, and suddenly an English sentence came out of my mouth. I said, “My name is Jessica. What’s your name?” The teacher asked if I had studied English in kindergarten. But I couldn’t remember if I had been to kindergarten. I couldn’t remember anything before I was five years old. The teacher said my English is very good, like a native speaker’s. She suggested I participate in an English competition for children and early teens. I was so happy. The teacher said she will call me Jessica from now on, since I already have an English name. I asked Papa about this when I got home. He just said I’m his little genius, but I don’t understand. There’s so much I don’t remember, so how can I be a genius?

March 12, 2028

Today was my birthday, and Papa took me to the seaside. We rode on a fancy yacht and ate delicious food. Papa gave me one of those walking, talking robot dolls I always see on TV. I love my Papa! Too bad Mom couldn’t be there with us. I wanted to go to that place from last year and see her, but Papa said Mom’s soul is always with us, so there’s no need visit her stone. I asked Papa what Mom’s name was. He said she didn’t have a name. I asked how she couldn’t have a name. “You’re named Ling Dong,” I said. “I’m Ling Rourou. Mom must also have a name.” At last Papa told me her name was Susu. Such a pretty name!

April 5, 2032

Today is Tomb Sweeping Festival. I lied to Dad, saying my Lili toy had wandered off again, but actually I went to see Mom. The last time I saw her was five years ago. I still remembered the place clearly, even though Dad had never brought me back for a second visit. It must be too difficult for him to see the grave, a trigger for his grief. But now I’m grown up. I can go on my own, and I did. I had to see Mom. There was so much I wanted to say to her. But when I arrived at the cemetery I was dumbstruck. The place was much bigger than I remembered it. There were so many gravestones, and I didn’t know how I was going to find Mom. I wandered, crossing the grounds several times. I was about ready to give up, but I finally saw the picture, Mom’s face in the stone, just as I remembered. She must have guided me to her grave, watching from up in heaven. She looked so young in the image, no more than twenty. So beautiful. She kind of looked like me.

Below the image it said, ‘Grave of Chen Susu.’ It had been erected by Mom’s parents, my maternal grandfather and grandmother. When did Mom pass away? The gravestone didn’t say, which was strange. The cemetery seemed old. The surrounding graves were all dated, and were thirty to forty years old. Mom couldn’t have died that long ago. I’m only thirteen. When exactly did she die?

Now it’s night and I’m back, and Dad is still in his study, sitting at his computer, trading stocks and so on. I want to ask him about Mom, but it’s bound to make him unhappy. Better to let it go.

April 7, 2032

Dad went out shopping tonight. I seized the opportunity to search through all the photos in the house. I couldn’t find any of Mom, but I did discover something strange: There are plenty of photos of me after five or six years old, but before that, absolutely nothing. None of me as an infant, and of course none of Mom and I. How can this be? For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about my life before age five. I’ve never recalled anything specific, but there are traces, vague impressions of living in a foreign country, speaking English every day, and being named Jessica. And other friends. Who am I? Where am I from? I hide in my blankets and ask myself questions, and suddenly I feel very afraid.  

April 13, 2032

I ran into an old couple today, travelers who asked me for directions. They were amiable and doting old folks. I suddenly had a strange feeling that they were my parents. This was frightening. The husband was short, round-faced, and bald, nothing like Dad. Why did I feel like this man was my father? If I close my eyes it’s like I can recall this other couple, my real parents. This feeling is so scary.

May 16, 2032

I told Lili about my fears. She thought for a bit, then said, “I figured it out! Your father isn’t your biological father.” This seems quite plausible. So, at one time I had other parents, and I lived abroad. Okay, but why did Dad . . . Ling Dong . . . adopt me when I was four or five? There are no old photos of me. I’ve been able to play piano and speak English since I was a kid. I must have learned these things in my previous country. Then Chen Susu is probably not my biological mother. Maybe Dad just chose a gravestone at random, to deceive me. My biological parents, are you still alive? If you’re alive, where are you? Do you know I’m living in a foreign land, following a new father through life?

May 19, 2032

It turns out I’m the world’s silliest fool. Today I reached my breaking point. I charged into Dad’s study and said, “Am I really your daughter? Where are my biological parents?”

Dad was angry at first, but as he heard me out, he began to smile. “You and Lili watch too much TV,” he said. We had spun fantasies based on serial drama plots, he claimed. “We did live in America,” he admitted, “and your English pet name back then was Jessica. When you were four you had a high fever, so you can’t remember your early childhood.”

“But why don’t you have photos of me from then?” I said.

“No photos?” he said, incredulous. He turned on his computer, and sure enough there were my baby photos. Dad said he took many photos back then, but during the move he lost some hard copy albums. But there were still many photos in the computer. I saw a family portrait of me, Mom, and Dad. Mom was hugging me, happily snuggled against Dad’s side.

“If she’s not your mother,” Dad said, “why do you two look so alike?”

I couldn’t deny it. And Dad was so good to me. How could I not be his daughter?

“She fell ill and died that year,” Dad said. “You were still very small.” He choked, sobbing. I told him to stop talking, and I hugged him. I really am such a fool!

April 7, 2035

Something wonderful and intriguing happened today.

A new teacher came to my middle school, 28 or 29 years old, dressed in ostentatious Western fashion. She didn’t teach my class, but when she saw me in the office, she unexpectedly blurted out, “Jessica!” Then she seemed to remember herself. She smiled and said, “Sorry” in English, then in Chinese, “I made a mistake. I thought you were . . . but it’s impossible.”

My heart raced. I said, “What a coincidence. My English name is Jessica.”

This amazed her, and we struck up a conversation. It turns out she’s named Elle. She’s an English teacher from Los Angeles, of Chinese ancestry. She explained that the Jessica she’d been thinking of had been a childhood playmate, a year older than her. They’d grown up together. But Jessica moved when she turned fifteen. That was ten years ago. Obviously, I can’t be Elle’s Jessica.

“So why did you call me by her name?” I asked.

“Because you look so much like her. Like my memory of her, I mean. Like two peas in a pod. But you must be twelve or thirteen years younger than her. So, there’s no way . . . you can be her.”

I’m still baffled and amazed. Although I can’t possibly be Elle’s Jessica, this was such a strange encounter. I asked Elle if she had an old photo of Jessica. Elle said she did, on her computer. She said she will bring it tomorrow for me to see.

April 8, 2035

I’m ill. High fever of forty degrees. No school for me today. Went to the hospital, doctor couldn’t say what was wrong with me. All he could do was reduce my fever to help me convalesce. I might not be able to go to school tomorrow either. I really want to meet Elle again. I still haven’t seen Jessica’s photo.

April 24, 2035

My illness has lasted two weeks. Dad hasn’t let me go to school. I asked him if I’m fatally ill, and he said it is curable, but it will take a long time. Maybe I can return to school next term, but I’m still scared. I feel like he’s holding something back. Would he lie to me? Maybe I’m going to die.

June 16, 2035

That last entry was all pointless worrying. I’m feeling much better. This past month, anyway, I’ve had no problems. I asked Dad if I can return to school, but he said that since I’ve already deferred my studies for two months, I wouldn’t be able to catch up. He wants to take me to Australia for a vacation, to relieve the boredom, and next semester transfer me to an elite private school. When I heard I was going to Australia I was very excited. But I hate to part with my classmates and teachers. Xixi, Mingming, and also teacher Elle. I was just getting to know her, but I feel like we’re kindred spirits. I said I want to return to school next semester, that I can make up my missed classwork. Dad said I could go and ask my teachers, but I think he’s just trying to keep me happy.

September 11, 2035

#private mode#

I want this part of my diary hidden. I need privacy. I . . . don’t know whom I should believe.

We just got back from Australia, and today I got a message from Elle. She found me on the class chat group. She’d heard about my illness and wanted to know how I’m doing. I told her I’m fully recovered. She sent me some photos of she and Jessica. In one they were standing on a suburban lawn, smiling, expressions bright. Elle hadn’t been exaggerating. Jessica looked like my twin!

Behind them was a steepled church. It seemed familiar, though I couldn’t say why. Suddenly a name echoed in my mind: St. Michael. I asked Elle if the church was named St. Michael’s, and she started. “God,” she said, “how did you know that?”

I don’t know how I knew, but coincidence can’t explain it. Jessica and I are somehow deeply connected. Maybe she’s my older sister. My biological mother? Neither of those seem right. I want to ask Dad what’s going on, but then I wonder: How did I recover from that serious illness so suddenly? Does Dad not want me to meet Elle? Was he feeding me some drug or poison on the sly? But how could he have known about Elle? I never told him. Maybe he’s been secretly reading my diary. Maybe he’s been reading it all along. Three years ago, when Lili told me Dad was not my biological father, he knew I would start asking questions, and he showed me those photos to quell my doubts. If he was able to prepare beforehand, fabricating some digital photos would be easy. If Dad has been lying to me all along . . . The thought of it could drive me mad!

September 12, 2035

#private mode#

I couldn’t get to sleep all night. I didn’t fall asleep until dawn, and then I was up at nine.

In the afternoon, Elle and I continued our voice chat. “Do you know who your father is?” she said. I didn’t know how to answer this. Dad was . . . Dad, my father.

“I mean, do you know about his work?”

Dad never goes to work. I know there’s a big computer in his study, but I don’t know what he busies himself with. On the screen, all kinds of data and diagrams constantly stream and pulse. He says he trades in stocks and foreign currencies. I’ve always been impressed with his ability to provide for us by just sitting in his study and trading. As far as I can remember, our little family has never wanted for money.

I summarized all this for Elle. She asked if I had a photo of Dad. Of course, I have many. I opened my hand device and opened a batch. Most were of he and I together. I sent a few to Elle. She immediately looked surprised.

“What?” I said.

“I’ve met your father. He’s . . . he’s Jessica’s father!”

What I felt then was like vertigo. Gasping for breath, I said, “How is that possible?”

“Back then he was about forty years old,” Elle said, “still kind of handsome. He worked in biological research, as far as I know. He was reclusive, didn’t mix with neighbors. I only ran into him twice, when Jessica brought me to her house to play.”

Although Elle doesn’t have a photo of Jessica’s father from that time, her description of him goes a long way toward making me believe. Ultimately the question is . . . what are Jessica and I to each other? Is she really my big sister? Even if we’re sisters, our resemblance is uncanny, especially because we can’t be twins. And how or why did we end up with the same name?

Elle continued asking me about Dad, but I had no answers. It surprised me how little I knew about the most important person in my life. Where is he from? What exactly does he do every day? How did he make me? I know nothing.

Elle said, “Are you sure he’s your biological father? Honestly, you two don’t resemble each other very much.”

My heart pounded in my chest. This was a doubt I’d harbored for years. I was like someone who wakes from a horrific nightmare, discovers everything is back to normal, passes years in comfort, but at last discovers that reality is the dream, and the nightmare is real . . .

Elle wants me to find a way to get a few of Dad’s hairs. A DNA test could determine if we are blood-related.

September 15, 2035

#private mode#

Dad is very against me going back to school. He wants to take me to Paris to live for a few years. Paris! Once upon a time, this news would’ve driven me mad with joy. But now it just leaves me cold. Why does Dad want to flee China? Is he afraid I’ll discover something? Or does he want to take me abroad for some dreadful purpose I can’t imagine?

Although Dad is Chinese (I think?), he doesn’t seem to have relatives here. And he has very little contact with the people around us in our daily life. Is he an escaped convict? A spy? Or he could be a homicidal maniac . . . If I keep obsessing on this, I’ll go crazy.

If I can snatch a few hairs off his pillow, if that can just go smoothly, I will get them to Elle. And I’ll have an answer soon enough. But I already have a premonition . . . that the answer is something I’ll regret knowing.

September 27, 2035

#private mode#

After what seemed like a century, the DNA test results finally arrived. Elle transferred them to me via her hand device. The results confirmed my worst doubts: Dad and I are not blood-related whatsoever. I hid in the bathroom and cried for a while. If Dad asks what’s wrong, I’ll say I’m sad to leave my Chinese friends.

Elle says she’s found a private investigator to look into Dad’s background. But this means I must endure, and worry, and obsess in secret, because I don’t want to alert Dad. He’ll take me to France next month. If we get there and there are things I still haven’t discovered about him, what should I do then?

October 9, 2035

#private mode#

Elle wants to meet with me today. She says she has something important to tell me.

We met in a cafe. Elle produced a thick folder of data, and with a grave expression handed it over. The top page was the CV of someone named Ling Yong. I wondered what this had to do with Dad. Elle sensed my misgivings, and explained:

“Ling Yong is Ling Dong, your . . . father. Or perhaps it’s better to say your foster father. He changed his name. He’s lived in a few different countries, not easy to track. But he left behind traces, allowing the detective to learn his identity.”

“Originally named Ling Yong, born in the 1970s. In 1991 he entered Yanjing University in Beijing, School of Life Sciences. In 1995 he went to the US to study at the University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in biology. He got his doctorate in 2001. Later, at the National University of Mexico, he did postdoctoral research, investigating the DNA of a Caribbean jellyfish species . . . ”

I looked through incomprehensible pages of data. The whole thing seemed to be this Ling Yong person’s dissertation, mostly written in a foreign language. Was this Dad? He seemed like a total stranger.

But a familiar name emerged soon enough.

“When he was at Yanjing University, he met a female student named Chen Susu. Yes, this was your so-called mother. They fell in love quickly, and after graduation they got engaged.”

Dad had never lied about this, at least. Chen Susu was his wife. But was she my mother? Maybe she was, and someone else was my father? After that engagement, almost twenty years passed before I was born. What had gone on in those years?

Elle continued: “Chen Susu did not go abroad with Ling Yong. She stayed in China and continued her studies. This was the 1990s. Internet and hand devices were still in their infancy. It wasn’t easy for these young lovers to maintain contact, which strained their relationship. It’s been over thirty years, so we don’t know exactly what happened. All we know for sure is that Chen Susu was courted by the scion of a rich family. Eventually she chose to break up with Ling Yong, who hurried back to China to save the relationship. They were heard quarreling. Ling Yong then returned to America. Not long after, Chen Susu was reported missing.”

I was forgetting to breathe. My own thoughts were making me sick.

“The police suspected Ling Yong in connection with Susu’s disappearance. Immigration records revealed that he returned to China right when she went missing. Then he quickly left again. Police suspected his love turned to hate, that he kidnapped her, and that Chen Susu had probably been murdered.”

“No!” I blurted. “No matter what they say, Dad’s not capable of murder!”

“If only that were true,” Elle said with a sigh. “Police suspected him, but he was out of the country. Summoning him for interrogation would have been difficult, and there was no conclusive evidence to get him extradited. At last the matter was dropped. Ling Yong might’ve had a guilty conscience, or at least a fear of justice. At any rate, he didn’t return to China for many years. Chen Susu remained missing. Three years later, a hiker in a remote mountain forest discovered the remains of a body. Scattered remains. The body had been . . . dismembered. The head was missing. I’m sorry, Rourou, these details are horrible. Some clothes were found nearby, and they were confirmed to be Chen Susu’s. DNA tests later confirmed the remains were Chen Susu’s. She’d been murdered three years before.”

It was like I’d fallen into an ice cave. Unable to control my shivering, I said, “You can’t mean to say that my Dad . . . that he . . . ”

“I don’t know. The investigation didn’t turn up definitive proof. Chen Susu’s parents naturally suffered and grieved. Her remains were cremated, and then interred . . . in that cemetery plot you visited. Strangely enough, Ling Yong, a few years later, was witnessed bringing a seven- or eight-year-old girl to visit the grave. A Chinese girl, it was reported.”

“Jessica?” I was pretty sure of this guess.

But I’d guessed wrong. “No, this was in 2005 or so. Jessica hadn’t been born yet. This child was named Karla. We did everything possible to find pictures of her, and came up with just one. Look. She and Jessica, and you . . . identical!”

I felt like I was looking at my own childhood face. I felt like I was suffocating.

“Rourou, I have an awful theory. Please try to remain calm. I think you and Jessica and Karla are clones of Chen Susu. Cloning technology emerged a long time ago. Although human cloning has always been forbidden, for a competent biologist like Ling Dong, it would not be difficult.”

“Human clones . . . ” I only understood a bit of this concept from science fiction movies. “You mean to say that my father . . . Ling Dong . . . Ling Yong . . . took cells from Chen Susu, and used them to create us? Why would he do this?”

“He was obsessed with Chen Susu, to a sick degree. She betrayed him, or he felt she had, so he killed her. But he couldn’t stand being parted from her, so he used her cells to create children that looked just like her.”

I couldn’t process this. I struggled to untangle my confusion. “If you’re right about him, one clone would be enough. Why make three of us?”

Elle seemed even more uncomfortable. She lowered her voice. “This is what I wanted to tell you in particular, Rourou. You’re in danger! Karla and Jessica both went missing, one after another. They both went missing at sixteen. Ling Dong moved to a new country each time. The people who knew Karla and Jessica thought they moved with him, of course, but that’s not the case! Only Ling Dong knows what happened to them.”

I shivered. “He says he wants to take me to France. Could it be that . . . ”

“We can’t rule out the possibility.”

“What should I do? Report to the police?”

Elle considered, then grudgingly shook her head. “Approaching the police would be useless. At the moment, it’s all conjecture. There’s no concrete proof. The police would never believe such a bizarre story. But you can’t go home either. So how about this . . . for the time being, you come with me. You should have an American passport. I can take you to the States. Ling Dong won’t be able to find you, guaranteed.”

I hesitated. This was Elle’s side of the story. Maybe Dad was wrongly accused. Maybe there was more information. For instance, if I was a clone, why did I seem to have some of Jessica’s memories?

“I still want to think it over,” I said. “I need to be sure.”

Elle didn’t press me. “Then please be careful. Prepare for the worst. If anything happens, contact me immediately.”

October 10, 2035

My home was starting to seem unfamiliar and sinister. But I was determined to be strong, to act as if nothing had happened, feign nonchalance, and keep Dad in the dark. No, to keep Ling Dong in the dark. Today, the aunty who usually cooks for us asked for leave. Dad busied himself in his study all day. At dinnertime I suggested we go out, so we ended up at a nearby restaurant. We sat down and heard the man and woman at the next table arguing. It was hard to understand, but it seemed a long-distance relationship had led to the young woman being unfaithful. She’d been caught, and now wanted to break up. The young man slapped her in the face, and the girl ran out crying.

Of course, this reminded me of Ling Dong and Chen Susu, and their long-ago romance. I struggled to maintain my composure. Ling Dong had supposedly murdered Chen Susu over a dispute like the one we’d just seen. I thought maybe I could sound him out. “Dad,” I said, “can you believe that girl? How can she be so . . . Cheating, lying, deceiving, it’s pathetic. I think deceivers deserve to die.”

He pounded the table. “Yes,” he said, voice low and forceful, “they really do. So why haven’t I . . . ” He stopped himself, trembling. I’d clearly provoked him. This seemed to confirm Elle’s suspicion: he really was harboring deep-seated hostility toward Chen Susu.

I was shocked, angry, and scared. Was he capable of violence here and now? I had to force a smile. “Never mind Dad. Why get so riled up over other people’s problems? Come on, lets drink a toast.”

Ling Dong sighed and started drinking with me. I tried to lead him out of his foul mood, chatting about our usual father-daughter things, former birthday celebrations, where we’d gone together for fun, the mischievous pranks I’d played on him. All this did was remind me how many warm memories we shared. These weighed on me in our grim new context. The memories were the same, but he had changed.

Ling Dong couldn’t seem to recover. He looked to be stewing in a vile temper. He was drinking rice liquor as if his life depended on it, cup after cup. When we finally left he was three sheets to the wind, so we took a taxi home. He went straight to the sofa and collapsed on it, and began to snore thunderously.

I considered Elle’s theory more or less confirmed. Being back in this house was only increasing my danger. I sent Elle a message, then went upstairs and got my passport, and some cash and clothes, wanting to quietly slip away. But when I passed by the study door, I saw it had been left unlocked. Inside, the computer was still on. I couldn’t help pausing there, one foot in the door. Ling Dong spent every day in there. What was he up to? Was he really just speculating in stocks and currencies? What secrets might be concealed in there?

I glanced toward the living room. Ling Dong was still snoring, well intoxicated. I guessed he’d be asleep until tomorrow morning. I summoned my courage and entered the study, and examined the computer, but just now the machine was locked. A dialog box requested a password. I tried several—Ling Yong, Susu, Jessica—all to no effect. I was forced to give up. I examined the desk, and one corner was indeed occupied by financial records, and books on the stock market, but they looked ignored, the books pristine. Spread out in the center of the desk were papers in English. I paged through a few. It all seemed biology-related. I could barely understand, but one strange word recurred throughout all the papers: Turritopsis dohrnii.

I opened my hand device and looked up the translation. The Chinese word that popped up was dengta shuimu, 灯塔水母, ‘the lighthouse jellyfish.’ A photo of the bioluminescent creature illuminated this name. In English it was ‘the immortal jellyfish.’ A brief introduction was attached: “A species of jellyfish four to five millimeters in size, after sexual maturity they are capable of returning to their sexually immature colonial polyp stage, and they can repeat this cycle indefinitely.”

I didn’t really understand this, only gathering that it was an odd species of jellyfish. Could all these treatises be about one species? I recalled something Elle said yesterday. Ling Dong was indeed a researcher of jellyfish. That part of the investigation report was true. But he hadn’t been a biologist for many years, so why was he still reading these kinds of papers?

I kept paging through the material. I gleaned that it concerned this jellyfish’s physiology and genetics, but I didn’t understand the purpose. The rest of the study yielded no more clues, and I considered giving up. But then my gaze fell upon the computer screen again, and the password field. I sat down in front of the computer, and typed in Turritopsis dohrnii, but once more got an error message. I had just decided to leave when another idea struck. I typed in the same species name, but in all capital letters, and as one word: TURRITOPSISDOHRNII.

To my surprise, the computer unlocked!

I leaned in close and saw the software Ling Dong had been using all these years. I couldn’t really understand it, but it obviously had nothing to do with stocks. I studied it for quite a while, until I recognized organic molecule structures, and simulations of chemical reactions. It all had something to with the lighthouse jellyfish, but I couldn’t understand the specifics.   

I minimized the program, and searched the computer. This time I quickly found what I was seeking: four folders labeled S, K, J, and R.

Four names wheeled in my mind: Susu, Karla, Jessica, and . . . Rourou.

I opened S first, my heart hammering away. There were many pictures and videos, all from around forty years ago, taken during the time of Chen Susu and Ling Dong’s romance. The K file documented the growth and life of a small girl into her teens. She looked just like me, though she wore different clothes and hairstyles, and lived in another country. This was Karla. Jessica’s file was similar, but she grew up years after Karla.

I wondered if we were really clones. I got lost in a fever dream, struggling not to lose hope, to keep from drowning.

I opened a video. Jessica was seven or eight years old, celebrating her birthday with Ling Dong—very similar to my own childhood. Only this was twenty years ago. Another video showed Jessica dancing in a school performance. Another showed she and Ling Dong fishing.

I didn’t want to see any more of these fragments of daily life. I’d decided to stop when I found a large batch of videos that seemed different. I opened one marked January 8, 2024, and found something horrific:

Jessica’s naked sixteen-year-old body on a bed, in a place resembling a laboratory. She was apparently unconscious. Ling Dong approached her with a syringe. Jessica woke, struggled a bit, shouted something, but Ling Dong restrained her. She couldn’t overpower him. After the injection, the girl curled into a ball, and sank back into sleep. Ling Dong left soon after. The video was uneventful for a long time. I opened the next video, and saw that Jessica was still unconscious. Rashes of some kind had erupted on her skin. I skipped several videos, and the rashes had become strange mucous membranes, layers covering Jessica’s body.

Days passed, and the transformation grew more extreme. Jessica was no longer human-shaped. The layered membranes had become a sort of cocoon. Her head and face were no longer visible. Ling Dong came every day to observe. About a month later, March 12 as it happened, the cocoon split open, and thick blood plasma—and god knows what other viscous substances—flowed out. A small head emerged. Ling Dong heard the ripping sounds, entered the scene, tore away the cocoon, and picked up a blood-covered child. It looked four or five years old.

“Susu,” Ling Dong said. I couldn’t tell if his tone was sad or joyous. “You really are reborn. What’s a good name for you this time? How about the name of the kitten we raised together . . . Rourou . . . ”

Susu . . . Rourou?

There I was, short of breath yet again. I don’t know how long I stood there dumbfounded. Gazing down at the papers spread on the desk, the words Turritopsis dohrnii again caught my eye.

“ . . . after sexual maturity, they are capable of returning to their sexually immature colonial polyp stage, and they can repeat this cycle indefinitely.”

I finally understood the meaning of this sentence. The lighthouse jellyfish could return to infancy from maturity, and it could do so indefinitely, cycling between the two states, living forever.

I realized I was not a clone.

I was Chen Susu, and Karla, and Jessica.

Ling Dong, in order to punish Chen Susu, made her—me—into a lighthouse jellyfish. His injection caused her to revert to a four or five year old. Then she grew up again, until she was nearly full-grown, and then back she went. Back I went. Forever under his control and influence. With each new incarnation, I’d lost my memories, allowing him to treat me as a daughter. Until the kidnap victim finally rose up to understand the truth.

I was alive, but forever unable to become an adult. I had died, and then I’d returned to the world, and lived with a deranged demon. This was Ling Dong’s penalty for “my” betrayal of him. The world’s most horrific punishment.

I was shaking, could barely stand. I took a few steps back from the desk, and bumped into someone behind me. I turned and found myself looking right into Ling Dong’s gloomy face.

“How did you get in here?” he said, glancing at the video still playing on the computer. His panicked expression twisted into something monstrous.

I pushed him with all my might, and ran out of the study.

“Rourou,” he said, grabbing me. “Listen!” I snatched a humidifier off a table and smashed him in the head with it. He went down, but didn’t lose consciousness like they do in movies. He was struggling to get up.

I fled recklessly outside. Turning a corner at an intersection, I saw Elle’s car. She’d been waiting there a long time. I got into the car and Elle started it. “To the airport,” she said.

“No,” I said. “A police station. I found proof. I want that criminal to pay for everything he’s done to me.”

October 12, 2035

Elle and I reported to the police yesterday. The officers rushed to my former home, but Ling Dong had destroyed the incriminating evidence. Everything on the computer was deleted. Ling Dong tried to paint my claims as the wild fantasy of a young girl. He nearly succeeded. The police didn’t believe my bizarre story.

But Ling Dong was the Ling Yong of years ago, a suspect in Chen Susu’s death. And I was not his biological daughter. The police refused to hand me over to him, instead sending me to a domestic violence shelter. They’ve begun to investigate Ling Dong’s background. He’s finished!

October 15, 2035

Ling Dong has gone missing. The police say he might seek me out for revenge. They’ve advised me to be careful and vigilant. Elle says she can soon take me to America, where, she believes, Ling Dong will never be able to find me. But I’m still very scared. Scared that someday, once more, I will fall under his control. The police had better hurry up and find him!

October 24, 2035

Ling Dong is dead . . .

His body was discovered at sea, already dead many days. He probably killed himself the day he went missing.

When I heard the news I cried, loud and long. Just a month ago, I couldn’t have imagined any of this. This grim end for him. Now he was dead, a demon that would fade away. But he’d been my Dad, my Papa. Like the demon, my father would never return.

The police believe Ling Dong, obsessed with Chen Susu, kidnapped a girl of unclear origin and background, to fill the void. Of course, there are many things they can’t explain, but with Ling Dong dead, the case is effectively closed.

There are journalists with clever noses snooping around behind the scenes. Elle urged me not to tell anyone about the lighthouse jellyfish. If the world believed it, I might be taken away by some agency for scientific experimentation. I would certainly be reduced to a media object, sensationalized and slandered for a lifetime. I feel Elle is right about all this. Actually, I’m starting to doubt myself, to wonder if the video I saw that night was real.

Elle wants a fresh start for me in America. I don’t want to spend her money, but she says she’s got a lot of it, so it doesn’t matter. “Let me help you,” she said. “We’ve been friends for a long time, after all.”

So, I acquiesced. I can only hope that a new start is possible for me.

Sender: Turritopsisling@Kmail.com
Time: October 20, 2035 (00:00:00 AM)
Recipient: Elle.Li2010@Starmail.com

Dear Elle:

This is a scheduled, automatic delivery email. By the time you read this, my body should be at the bottom of the sea, becoming part of the ecosphere’s perpetual cycle. You and I, everyone in fact, must end this way.

Except for Susu.

It seems you already know about her, about Rourou. As for me, it’s time to die. Otherwise the police would soon discover that Rourou’s identity is forged, and investigate my past. They could eventually discover the truth, and Susu would become experimental material for a mob of eager scientists. Or she would be exposed for the world to gawk at, enduring their scrutiny, a freak on display. Either of these outcomes would destroy her. Only my death can end the police investigation.

The truth is not what you and Susu think. There’s another side to the story you can’t even imagine.

35 years ago, I was abroad doing research. I was looking forward to a happy life with my girlfriend. Then Susu suddenly wanted to break up with me. I couldn’t accept this. I abandoned everything and returned to China. Susu had become thin and pallid, withered, and she wouldn’t budge on breaking up. We quarreled, but I couldn’t change her mind. I left in anger, resolved to make a clean break with her. But as soon as I returned to America, I received a phone call from her mother, and learned the truth, which was tenfold worse than a break-up. It turned out Susu had lymphoma. It was already late-stage and terminal when discovered. Incurable. She had kept me in the dark, fabricated a reason to break up with me, to spare me real bereavement. It just happened that someone was pursuing her, a fu er dai, the heir of a nouveau riche family that made its fortune during Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening of the 1980s. But this young scion hadn’t won Susu’s heart. She led him on, using him as part of her act for me.     

After learning the truth, I had only one goal: to save Susu by any means possible. Cancer is a cellular change, unbridled cell division and growth, unstoppable, that finally uses up the body’s resources. There was no feasible way to contain this horrific disease, but I had a crazy idea.

I was researching the lighthouse jellyfish. This species can, after sexual maturity, reverse its growth, a radical cellular change, the body becoming a polyp again. Young lighthouse jellyfish emerge from the polyp, and grow up all over again. Through this unceasing cycle, natural death is avoided. I was making headway in my research at the time. I’d found the gene that controls lighthouse jellyfish growth reversal. I hoped this power could check the proliferation of cancer cells.

I extracted the gene and put it in a retrovirus, which would act as a courier. I smuggled a small bottle of my elixir into China. Susu was already critically ill at this point, on her last breath, unconscious, so during our final visit there were no words.

I convinced her desperate parents to try my crazy solution. I injected her. Very soon the cocooning process began, the process Rourou saw on the video. Susu became a strange meat cocoon. Seven days later, the cocoon split open. Inside was a five-year-old girl. She looked like Susu as a child, but she didn’t have Susu’s memories. This was Karla, the product of Susu’s bodily restructuring. Only a core part of the brain was retained, and this too had degenerated.

Inside of the cocoon there was leftover human tissue and bone. I buried these remains in a desolate place where I thought they would never be found. But they were found, of course, years later, after some of them became exposed due to erosion or some other process. They were taken to be the remains of Susu’s dismembered body. This gave rise to the homicide case.

At that time, Susu’s parents and I knew we had to conceal Karla’s existence. Otherwise she would suffer the scrutiny of the world. We sent her to an orphanage, so that Susu’s parents could adopt her and make everything look official. But this presented a problem. Susu hadn’t been found, living or dead. That suiter of hers couldn’t find her. He went to the police in a rage, and I became the number one suspect. Luckily, I’d already returned to my life abroad, leaving the police with no options. I continued my lighthouse jellyfish research in Mexico, but I couldn’t replicate what I’d done to Susu. All my mammalian subjects came out of their cocoons dead. I suspected that Susu’s cancer cells had integrated with the lighthouse genes in some special way, giving rise to a miraculous result. But I couldn’t verify this.

However, those years of research yielded a by-product, an enzyme preparation derived from the lighthouse jellyfish. It invigorates human cells, promoting longevity. Although the effects are negligible compared with true lighthouse immortality, it is useful. I applied for a patent, trusting in tens of millions in profit, decades of financial security for Susu and I.

During these years, I stayed in touch with Susu’s parents. Although Karla came into the world knowing nothing, she still had some life skills and language ability. She quickly developed a four- or five-year-old mentality, even recovering some fragmented memories. Susu’s parents were getting old. Their energy was low, and Karla was coming to resemble Susu. Neighbors and old friends were beginning to talk. After I’d earned some money, I brought Karla to Mexico, so I could look after her. Karla was like a daughter to me at this point. My love for Susu had changed, but hadn’t lessened at all. I vowed to ensure her well-being.

I believed that what had survived of Susu could live on. What was left of her in Karla could persist, and grow once more to adulthood. But at sixteen (or twelve, as it were), she went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Her skin erupted with glutinous membranes that became a cocoon. This confirmed my most horrific conjecture: Susu’s lighthouse genes would continue to express their phenotype. After reaching maturity, she would revert to infancy, and this cycle could not be broken.

I arrived in America and resumed my research, attempting to free Susu—now she was Jessica—from the lighthouse cycle. Eleven years before, when Karla had first evinced signs of cocooning, I’d injected her with my newly-developed elixir, hoping it would suspend the lighthouse process, and I filmed this for research purposes. This was the video that terrified Rourou. All I did was postpone her reversion to childhood. I couldn’t stop it. And then Jessica, in her turn, also underwent rebirth, becoming Rourou . . .

Jessica’s disappearance and Rourou’s emergence caused me plenty of trouble. I was forced to return to China. What happened after that, you two both know. I continued via computer simulation to research lighthouse jellyfish genes and their effect on the human body, but to no avail. Many years passed. Now I’m old. My mental capacity is not sufficient for cutting-edge research. I know I can’t stop the next iteration of the cycle. I must let go, and count myself lucky to have been with Susu. Twelve years from now, when the next cycle begins, I will be too old to play the part of her father. What’s to be done then?

Luckily, she has come across you. Maybe I don’t need to worry about her any more.

Elle, I know you’re a kind-hearted woman. I have no choice but to entrust Susu to your care. She will probably begin the reversion in half a year or so. She will again become a child with no memories or identity. She will know nothing of any of this. Susu’s parents long ago passed away. You are the only one who can help her. Perhaps you can be the mother she always wanted. There’s about twenty million US dollars in her name: savings, real estate, and stocks. After I’m gone, it all belongs to you. The means of accessing it are attached to this email. The funds are more than enough for you to live comfortably, and take care of Susu.

I struggled for a long time with whether to tell Rourou the truth. I finally decided against it. Back when Susu concealed her illness from me, when she preferred my hate to my grief, perhaps her frame of mind was much like mine now. Before she lies dormant again, she may enjoy, for a while, the thought of growing to adulthood. She may hope to begin a normal human life, and dream. And then she will forget. She can live with you, her mother. She can be carefree and never know worry. Isn’t that a kind of happiness?

Regardless of her outer form, it is her happiness that counts.

Last words of Ling Yong.

Originally published in Chinese in Zui Mook, vol 2, April 2017.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Bao Shu is a Chinese SF writer living in Xi’an. He began his writing career since 2010, and has published two collections and four novels since, including Three body Problem X: the Redemption of Time and Ruins of Time. His shorter works are often published by magazines like Science Fiction World, ZUI Fiction, Knowledge is Power, and People’s Literature. He has won several major awards for Chinese SF. Several of his works are now available in English, published by F&SF and Clarkesworld.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree Jr.

—Deliverance quickens, catapults him into his boots on mountain gravel, his mittened hand on the rusty 1935 International truck. Cold rushes into his young lungs, his eyelashes are knots of ice as he peers down at the lake below the pass. He is in a bare bleak bowl of mountains just showing rusty in the dawn; not one scrap of cover anywhere, not a tree, not a rock.

The lake below shines emptily, its wide rim of ice silvered by the setting moon. It looks small, everything looks small from up here. Is that scar on the edge his boat? Yes—it’s there, it’s all okay! The black path snaking out from the boat to the patch of tulegrass is the waterway he broke last night. Joy rises in him, hammers his heart. This is it. This—is—it.

He squints his lashes, can just make out the black threads of the tules. Black knots among them—sleeping ducks. Just you wait! His grin crackles the ice in his nose. The tules will be his cover—that perfect patch out there. About eighty yards, too far to hit from shore. That’s where he’ll be when the dawn flight comes over. Old Tom said he was loco. Loco Petey. Just you wait. Loco Tom.

The pickup’s motor clanks, cooling, in the huge silence. No echo here, too dry. No wind. Petey listens intently: a thin wailing in the peaks overhead, a tiny croak from the lake below. Waking up. He scrapes back his frozen canvas cuff over the birthday watch, is oddly, fleetingly puzzled by his own knobby fourteen-year-old wrist. Twenty-five—no, twenty-four minutes to the duck season. Opening day! Excitement ripples down his stomach, jumps his dick against his scratchy longjohns. Gentlemen don’t beat the gun. He reaches into the pickup, reverently lifts out the brand-new Fox CE double-barrel twelve-gauge.

The barrels strike cold right through his mitts. He’ll have to take one off to shoot, too: it’ll be fierce. Petey wipes his nose with his cuff, pokes three fingers through his cut mitten and breaks the gun. Ice in the sight. He checks his impulse to blow it out, dabs clumsily. Shouldn’t have taken it in his sleeping bag. He fumbles two heavy sixes from his shell pocket, loads the sweet blue bores, is hardly able to breathe for joy. He is holding a zillion dumb bags of the Albuquerque Herald, a whole summer of laying adobe for Mr. Noff—all transmuted into this: his perfect, agonizingly chosen OWN GUN. No more borrowing old Tom’s stinky over-and-under with the busted sight. His own gun with his initials on the silver stock-plate.

Exaltation floods him, rises perilously. Holding his gun, Petey takes one more look around at the enormous barren slopes. Empty, only himself and his boat and the ducks. The sky has gone cold gas-pink. He is standing on a cusp of the Great Divide at ten thousand feet, the main pass of the western flyway. At dawn on opening day . . . What if Apaches came around now? Mescalero Apaches own these mountains, but he’s never seen one out here. His father says they all have TB or something. In the old days, did they come here on horses? They’d look tiny; the other side is ten miles at least.

Petey squints at a fuzzy place on the far shore, decides it’s only sagebrush, but gets the keys and the ax out of the pickup just in case. Holding the ax away from his gun, he starts down to the lake. His chest is banging, his knees wobble, he can barely feel his feet skidding down the rocks. The whole world seems to be brimming up with tension.

He tells himself to calm down, blinking to get rid of a funny blackness behind his eyes. He stumbles, catches himself, has to stop to rub at his eyes. As he does so everything flashes black-white—the moon jumps out of a black sky like a locomotive headlight, he is sliding on darkness with a weird humming all around. Oh, Jeeze—mustn’t get an altitude blackout, not now! And he makes himself breathe deeply, goes on down with his boots crunching hard like rhythmic ski turns, the heavy shell pockets banging his legs, down, going quicker now, down to the waiting boat.

As he gets closer he sees the open water-path has iced over a little during the night. Good job he has the ax. Some ducks are swimming slow circles right by the ice. One of them rears up and quack-flaps, showing the big raked head: canvasback!

“Ah, you beauty,” Petey says aloud, starting to run now, skidding, his heart pumping love, on fire for that first boom and rush. “I wouldn’t shoot a sitting duck.” His nose-drip has frozen, he is seeing himself hidden in those tules when the flights come over the pass, thinking of old Tom squatting in the rocks back by camp. Knocking back his brandy with his old gums slobbering, dreaming of dawns on World War I airdromes, dreaming of shooting a goose, dying of TB. Crazy old fool. Just you wait. Petey sees his plywood boat heaped with the great pearly breasts and the red-black Roman noses of the canvasbacks bloodied and stiff, the virgin twelve-gauge lying across them, fulfilled.

And suddenly he’s beside the boat, still blinking away a curious unreal feeling. Mysterious to see his own footprints here. The midget boat and the four frosted decoys are okay, but there’s ice in the waterway, all right. He lays the gun and ax inside and pushes the boat out from the shore. It sticks, bangs, rides up over the new ice.

Jeeze, it’s really thick! Last night he’d kicked through it easily and poled free by gouging in the paddle. Now he stamps out a couple of yards, pulling the boat. The ice doesn’t give. Darn! He takes a few more cautious steps—and suddenly hears the whew-whew, whew-whew of ducks coming in. Coming in—and he’s out here in the open! He drops beside the boat, peers into the bright white sky over the pass.

Oh Jeeze—there they are! Ninety miles an hour, coming downwind, a big flight! And he hugs his gun to hide the glitter, seeing the hurtling birds set their wings, become bloodcurdling black crescent-shapes, webs dangling, dropping like dive-bombers—but they’ve seen him, they veer in a great circle out beyond the tules, all quacking now, away and down. He hears the far rip of water and stands up aching toward them. You wait. Just wait till I get this dumb boat out there!

He starts yanking the boat out over the creaking ice in the brightening light, cold biting at his face and neck. The ice snaps, shivers, is still hard. Better push the boat around ahead of him so he can fall in it when it goes. He does so, makes another two yards, three—and then the whole sheet tilts and slides under with him floundering, and grounds on gravel. Water slops over his boot tops, burns inside his three pairs of socks.

But it’s shallow. He stamps forward, bashing ice, slipping and staggering. A yard, a yard, a yard more—he can’t feel his feet, he can’t get purchase. Crap darn, this is too slow! He grabs the boat, squats, throws himself ahead and in with all his might. The boat rams forward like an icebreaker. Again! He’ll be out of the ice soon now. Another lunge! And again!

But this time the boat recoils, doesn’t ram. Darn shit, the crappy ice is so thick! How could it get this thick when it was open water last night?
‘Cause the wind stopped, that’s why, and it’s ten above zero. Old Tom knew, darn him to hell. But there’s only about thirty yards left to go to open water, only a few yards between him and the promised land. Get there. Get over it or under it or through it, go!

He grabs the ax, wades out ahead of the boat, and starts hitting ice, trying to make cracks. A piece breaks, he hits harder. But it doesn’t want to crack, the ax-head keeps going in, thunk. He has to work it out of the black holes. And it’s getting deep, he’s way over his boots now. So what? Thunk! Work it loose. Thunk!

But some remaining sanity reminds him he really will freeze out here if he gets his clothes soaked. Shee-it! He stops, stands panting, staring at the ducks, which are now tipping up, feeding peacefully well out of range, chuckling paducah, paducah at him and his rage.

Twenty more yards, shit darn, God-darn. He utters a caw of fury and hunger and at that moment hears a tiny distant crack. Old Tom, firing. Crack!

Petey jumps into the boat, jerking off his canvas coat, peeling off the two sweaters, pants, the gray longjohns. His fingers can barely open the icy knots of his bootlaces, but his body is radiant with heat, it sizzles the air, only his balls are trying to climb back inside as he stands up naked. Twenty yards!

He yanks the sodden boots back on and crashes out into the ice, whacking with the ax-handle, butting whole sheets aside. He’s making it! Ten more feet, twenty! He rams with the boat, bangs it up and down like a sledgehammer. Another yard! Another! His teeth are clattering, his shins are bleeding, and it’s cutting his thighs now, but he feels nothing, only joy, joy!—until suddenly he is slewing full-length under water with the incredible cold going up his ass and into his armpits like skewers and ice cutting his nose.

His hands find the edge, and he hauls himself up on the side of the boat. The bottom has gone completely. His ax—his ax is gone.

The ice is still there.

A black hand grabs him inside, he can’t breathe. He kicks and flails, dragging himself up into the boat to kneel bleeding, trying to make his ribs work and his jaws stop banging. The first sunray slicks him with ice and incredible goose bumps; he gets a breath and can see ahead, see the gleaming ducks. So close!

The paddle. He seizes it and stabs at the ice in front of the boat. It clatters, rebounds, the boat goes backward. With all his force he flails the ice, but it’s too thick, the paddle stem is cracking. No bottom to brace on. Crack! And the paddle blade skitters away across the ice. He has nothing left.

He can’t make it.

Rage, helpless rage, vomits through him, his eyes are crying hot ice down his face. So close! So close! And sick with fury he sees them come—whew-whew! whew-whew-whew-whew!—a torrent of whistling wings in the bright air, the ducks are pouring over the pass. Ten thousand noble canvasbacks hurtling down the sky at him silver and black, the sky is wings beating above him, but too high, too high—they know the range, oh, yes!

He has never seen so many, he will never see it again—and he is standing up in the boat now, a naked bleeding loco ice-boy, raging, sweeping the virgin twelve-gauge, firing—BAM-BAM! both barrels at nothing, at the ice, at the sky, spilling out the shells, ramming them in with tearing frozen hands. A drake bullets toward him, nearer—it has to be near enough! BAM! BAM!

But it isn’t, it isn’t, and the air-riders, the magic bodies of his love beat over him yelling—canvasback, teal, wigeon, pintails, redheads, every duck in the world rising now, he is in a ten-mile swirl of birds, firing, firing, a weeping maniac under the flashing wings, white-black, black-white. And among the flashing he sees not only ducks but geese, cranes, every great bird that ever rode this wind: hawks, eagles, condors, pterodactyls—BAM! BAM! BAM-BAM!! in the crazy air, in the gale of rage and tears exploding in great black pulses—black! light! black!—whirling unbearably, rushing him up—

—And he surfaces suddenly into total calm and dimness, another self with all fury shrunk to a tiny knot below his mind and his eyes feasting in the open throat of a girl’s white shirt. He is in a room, a cool cave humming with secret promise. Behind the girl the windows are curtained with sheer white stuff against the glare outside.

“Your mother said you went to Santa Fe.” He hears his throat threaten soprano and digs his fists into the pockets of his Levi’s.

The girl Pilar—Pee-lar, crazy-name-Pilar—bends to pick at her tanned ankle, feathery brown bob swinging across her cheek and throat.

“Um-m.” She is totally absorbed in a thin gold chain around her ankle, crouching on a big red leather thing her parents got in where, Morocco—Pilar of the urgently slender waist curving into her white Levi’s, the shirt so softly holding swelling softness; everything so white against her golden tan, smelling of soap and flowers and girl. So clean. She has to be a virgin, his heart knows it; a marvelous slow-motion happiness is brimming up in the room. She likes me. She’s so shy, even if she’s a year older, nearly seventeen, she’s like a baby. The pathos of her vulnerable body swells in him, he balls his fists to hide the bulge by his fly. Oh, Jeeze, I mean Jesus, let her not look, Pilar. But she does look up then, brushing her misty hair back, smiling dreamily up at him.

“I was at the La Fonda, I had a dinner date with René.”

“Who’s René?”

“I told you, Pe-ter.” Not looking at him, she uncurls from the hassock, drifts like a child to the window, one hand rubbing her arm. “He’s my cousin. He’s old, he’s twenty-five or thirty. He’s a lieutenant now.”

“Oh.”

“An older man.” She makes a face, grins secretly, peeking out through the white curtains.

His heart fizzes with relief, with the exultance rising in the room. She’s a virgin, all right. From the bright hot world outside comes the sound of a car starting. A horse whickers faintly down at the club stables, answered by the double wheeze of a donkey. They both giggle. Peter flexes his shoulders, opens and grips his hand around an imaginary mallet.

“Does your father know you were out with him?”

“Oh, yes.” She’s cuddling her cheek against her shoulder, pushing the immaculate collar, letting him see the creamy mounds. She wants me, Peter thinks. His guts jump. She’s going to let me do it to her. And all at once he is calm, richly calm like that first morning at the corral, watching his mare come to him; knowing.

“Pa-pa doesn’t care, it’s nineteen forty-four. René is my cousin.”

Her parents are so terribly sophisticated; he knows her father is some kind of secret war scientist: they are all here because of the war, something over at Los Alamos. And her mother talking French, talking about weird places like Dee-jon and Tan-jay. His own mother doesn’t know French, his father teaches high school, he never would be going around with these sophisticated strangers except they need him for their sandlot polo. And he can play rings around them all, too, Peter thinks, grinning, all those smooth sweating old young men—even with his one mare for four chukkers and her tendons like big hot balloons, even with his spliced mallet he can cut it over their heads! If he could only get an official rating. Three goals, sure. Maybe four, he muses, seeing himself riding through that twerp Drexel with his four remounts, seeing Pilar smile, not looking at him. She’s shy. That time he let her ride the mare she was really frightened, incredibly awkward; he could feel her thighs tremble when he boosted her up.

His own thighs tremble, remembering the weak tenderness of her in his hands. Always before your voice my soul is as some smooth and awkward foal—it doesn’t sound so wet now, his mother’s nutty line. His foal, his velvety vulnerable baby mare. Compared to her he’s a gorilla, even if he’s technically a virgin too, men are different. And he understands suddenly that weird Havelock Ellis book in her father’s den. Gentle. He must be gentle. Not like—a what?—a baboon playing a violin.

“You shouldn’t fool around with older men,” he says and is gratified by the gruffness. “You don’t know.”

She’s watching him now under the fall of her hair, coming close, still hugging herself with her hand going slowly up and down her arm, caressing it. A warm soap smell fills his nose, a sharp muskiness under it. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, he thinks choking, she doesn’t know about men. And he grunts something like “Don’t,” or “Can it,” trying to hold down the leaping heat between them, but is confused by her voice whispering.

“It hurts, Pe-ter.”

“What, your arm?”

“Here, do-pee,” and his hand is suddenly taken hold of by cool small fingers pulling it not to her arm but in wonder to her side, pressed in the rustling shirt under which he feels at first nothing and then shockingly too far in not his own wide ribs but the warm stem of her, and as his paralyzed hand fumbles, clasps, she half turns around so that his ignited hand rides onto a searing soft unnatural swelling—her breast—and the room blanks out, whirls up on a brimming, drumming tide as if all the dead buffalo were pounding back. And the window blinks once with lemon light shooting around their two bodies where her hip is butting into his thigh making it wholly impossible to continue standing there with his hands gentle on her tits.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, Pilar. Don’t be a dope, your mother—”

“She’s a-way now.” And there is a confused interval of mouths and hands trying to be gentle, trying to hold her away from his fly, trying to stuff her into himself in total joy, if he had six hands he couldn’t cope with the electric all of her—until suddenly she pulls back, is asking inanely, “Pe-ter, don’t you have a friend?”

The subtle difference in her voice makes him blink, answering stupidly, “Sure, Tom Ring,” while her small nose wrinkles.

“Dopee Pe-ter, I mean a boyfriend. Somebody smooth.”

He stands trying to pant dignifiedly, thinking Jeeze, I mean Christ, she knows I don’t have any smooth friends; if it’s for a picnic maybe Diego Martine? But before he can suggest this she has leaned into the window bay, cuddling the silky curtain around her, peeking at him so that his hands go pawing in the cloth.

“René has a friend.”

“Uh.”

“He’s older too, he’s twen-tee,” she breathes teasingly. “Lieutenant Shar-lo. That’s Charles to you, see?” And she turns around full into his arms, curtain and all, and from the press of silk and giggles comes a small voice saying forever, “And Re-né and Shar-lo and Pee-lar all went to bed together and they played with me, oh, for hours and hours, Pe-ter, it was too marvelous. I will ne-ver do it with just one boy again.”

Everything drops then except her face before him horribly heavy and exalted and alien, and just as his heart knows it’s dead and an evil so generalized he can hardly recognize it as fury starts tearing emptily at him inside, her hand comes up over her mouth and she is running doubled over past him.

“I’m going to be sick, Peter help me!”

And he stumbles after down the dim cool hall to find her crumpled down, her brown hair flowing into the toilet as she retches, retches, whimpering, convulses unbearably. The white shirt has ridden up to expose her pathetically narrow back, soft knobs of her spine curving down into her pants, her tender buttocks bumping his knees as he stands helplessly strangling a sopping towel instead of her neck, trying to swab at her hidden forehead. His own gullet is retching too, his face feels doughy, and water is running down into his open mouth while one of her hands grips his, shaking him with her spasms there in the dim hospital-like bathroom. The world is groaning, he is seeing not her father’s bay rum bottle but the big tiled La Fonda bedroom, the three bodies writhing on the bed, performing unknown horrors. Playing with her . . .

His stomach heaves, only what it is, he is coming in his Levi’s in a dreadful slow unrelieving ooze like a red-hot wire dragging through his crotch, while he stands by her uselessly as he will stand helplessly by in some near future he can’t imagine or remember—and the tension keeps building, pounding, the light flickers—a storm is coming or maybe his eyes are going bad, but he can see below him her pure profile resting spent on the edge of the toilet, oblivious to his furious towel; in the flashing dimness sees the incomprehensible letters S-E-P-T-I-C A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N snaking shadowy down the spine of his virgin love, while the universe beats Black! Flash! Black! Drumming with hooves harsher than any storm—hurling him through lightning-claps of blinding darkness to a thrumming stasis in which what exists of him senses—something—but is instantly shot away on unimaginable energies—

—And achieves condensement, blooms into the green and open sunlight of another world, into a mellow springtime self—in which a quite different girl is jostling his hip.

“Molly,” he hears his older voice say vaguely, seeing with joy how the willow fronds trail in the friendly, dirty Potomac. The bars and caduceus on his collar are pricking his neck.

“Yes, sir, Doctor sir.” She spins around, kneels down in the scruffy grass to open Howard Johnson boxes. “Oh, god, the coffee.” Handing him up a hot dog, swinging back her fair hair. Her arm is so female with its tender pale armpit, her whole body is edible, even her dress is like lemonade so fresh and clean—no, radiant, he corrects himself. That’s the word, radiant. His radiant woman. He shrugs away a tiny darkness, thinking of her hair sliding on his body in the Roger Smith hotel bedroom.

“C’mon sit, Pete. It’s only a little dirty.”

“Nothing’s dirty anymore.” He flops down beside her, one arm finding its natural way around the opulence of her buttocks on the grass. She chuckles down at him, shaking her head.

“You’re a hard case, Pete.” She takes a big bite of hot dog with such lips that he considers flinging himself upon her then and there, barely remembers the cars tearing by above them. “I swear,” she says, chewing, “I don’t think you ever screwed anybody you were friends with before.”

“Something like that.” He puts his hot dog down to loosen his GI tie.

“Thirty days to civvies, you’ll be in Baltimore.” She licks her fingers happily. “Oh, wow, Pete, I’m so glad you got your fellowship. Try the coleslaw, it’s all right. Will you remember us poor slaves when you’re a big old pathologist?”

“I’ll remember.” To distract himself he pokes in the boxes, spills coleslaw on a book. “What you reading?”

“Oh, Whately Carington.”

“Whatly what?”

“No, Whate-ly. Carington. A Limey. Psychical research man, they do that veddy seddiously, the Limies.”

“Uh?” He beams at the river, blinks to get rid of a flicker in the back of his eyes. Amphetamine withdrawal, after six months?

“He has this theory, about K-objects. Whatever thing you feel most intense about, part of you lives on—Pete, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

But the flicker won’t quit, it is suddenly worse; through it he can just make out her face turned nurse-wary, coming close, and he tries to hang on through a world flashing black—green—BLACK!—is trapped for unbreathing timelessness in dark nowhere, a phantom landscape of gray tumbled ash under a hard black sky, seeing without eyes a distant tangle of wreckage on the plain so menacing that his un-bodied voice screams at the shadow of a metal scrap beside him in the ashes, 2004 the ghostly unmeaning numbers—STOP IT!—And he is back by the river under Molly’s springtime eyes, his hands gripping into the bones of her body.

“Hey-y-y, honey, the war’s over.” Sweet sensual pixie-smile now watchful, her nurse’s hand inside his shirt. “Korea’s ten thousand miles away, you’re in good old DC, Doctor.”

“I know. I saw a license plate.” He laughs unconvincingly, makes his hands relax. Will the ghosts of Seoul never let him go? And his body guiltily intact, no piece of him in the stained waste cans into which he has—Stop it! Think of Molly. I like Ike. Johns Hopkins research fellowship. Some men simply aren’t cut out for surgical practice.

“I’m a gutless wonder, Molly. Research.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Pete,” she says with total warmth, nurse-hand satisfied, changing to lover’s on his chest. “We’ve been over all that.”

And of course they have, he knows it and only mutters, “My Dad wanted me to be an Indian doctor,” which they have been over too; and the brimming gladness is back now, buoyantly he seizes the coleslaw, demands entertainment, demonstrating reality-grasp.

“So what about Whatly?”

“It’s serious-s-s,” she protests, snickering, and is mercurially almost serious too. “I mean, I’m an atheist, Pete, I don’t believe there’s anything afterward, but this theory . . . ” And she rattles on about K-objects and the pool of time, intense energic structures of the mind undying—sweet beddable girl in the springtime who has taught him unclaiming love. His friend. Liberated him.

He stretches luxuriously, relishes a coleslaw belch. Free male beside a willing woman. No problems. What is it man in woman doth require? The lineaments of gratified desire. The radiance of her. He has gratified her. Will gratify her again . . .

“It’s kind of spooky, though.” She flings the box at the river with tremendous effort, it flies twenty feet. “Damn! But think of parts of yourself whirling around forever sticking to whatever you loved!” She settles against the willow, watching the box float away. “I wonder if part of me is going to spend eternity hanging around a dumb cat. I loved that old cat. Henry. He died, though.”

The ghost of a twelve-gauge fires soundlessly across his mind, a mare whickers. He sneezes and rolls over onto her lap with his nose in her warm scented thighs. She peers dreamily down at him over her breasts, is almost beautiful.

“Whatever you love, forever. Be careful what you love.” She squints wickedly. “Only with you I think it’d be whatever you were maddest at—no, that’s a horrible thought. Love has to be the most intense.”

He doubts it but is willing to be convinced, rooting in her lap while she pretends to pound on him and then squirms, stretching up her arms, giving herself to the air, to him, to life.

“I want to spend eternity whirling around you.” He heaves up to capture her, no longer giving a damn about the cars, and as the sweet familiar body comes pliantly under him he realizes it’s true, he’s known it for some time. Not friendship at all, or rather, the best of friendships. The real one. “I love you, Molly. We love.”

“Ooh, Pete.”

“You’re coming to Baltimore with me. We’ll get married,” he tells her warm neck, feeling the flesh under her skirt heavy in his hand, feeling also an odd stillness that makes him draw back to where he can see her face, see her lips whispering, “I was afraid of that.”

“Afraid?” His heart jumps with relief, jumps so hard that the flicker comes back in the air, through which he sees her lying too composed under his urgency. “Don’t be afraid, Molly. I love you.”

But she is saying softly, “Oh, damn, damn, Pete, I’m so sorry, it’s a lousy thing women do. I was just so happy, because . . . ” She swallows, goes on in an absurd voice. “Because someone very dear to me is coming home. He called me this morning from Honolulu.”

This he cannot, will not, understand among the flashing pulses, but repeats patiently, “You love me, Molly. I love you. We’ll get married in Baltimore,” while she fights gently away from him, saying, “Oh, I do, Pete, I do, but it’s not the same.”

“You’ll be happy with me. You love me.”

They are both up crouching now in the blinking, pounding sunlight.

“No, Pete, I never said. I didn’t—” Her hands are out seeking him, like knives.

“I can’t marry you, honey. I’m going to marry a man called Charlie McMahon.”

McMahon—Maaa—honn—aa—on-n-n the idiot sound flaps through the universe, his carotids are hammering, the air is drumming with his hurt and rage as he stands foolishly wounded, unable to believe the treachery of everything-which is now strobing in great blows of blackness as his voice shouts “Whore!” shouts “Bitch-bitch-bitch . . . ” into a dwindling, flashing chaos—

—And explodes silently into a nonbeing which is almost familiar, is happening this time more slowly as if huge energy is tiding to its crest so slowly that some structure of himself endures to form in what is no longer a brain the fear that he is indeed dead and damned to live forever in furious fragments. And against this horror his essence strains to protest But I did love! at a horizon of desolation—a plain of endless, lifeless rubble under a cold black sky, in which he or some pattern of energies senses once more that distant presence: wreckage, machines, huge structures incomprehensibly operative, radiating dark force in the nightmare world, the force which now surges—

—To incorporate him anew within familiar walls, with the words “But I did love” meaninglessly on his lips. He leans back in his familiarly unoiled swivel chair, savoring content. Somewhere within him weak darkness stirs, has power only to send his gaze to the three-di portraits behind the pile of printouts on his desk.

Molly smiles back at him over the computer sheets, her arm around their eldest daughter. For the first time in years the thought of poor Charlie McMahon crosses his mind, triggers the automatic incantation: Molly-never-would-have-been-happy-with-him. They had a bad time around there, but it worked out. Funny how vividly he recalls that day by the river, in spite of all the good years since. But I did love, his mind murmurs uneasily, as his eyes go lovingly to the computer printouts.

The lovely, elegant results. All confirmed eight ways now, the variance all pinned down. Even better than he’d hoped. The journal paper can go in the mail tomorrow. Of course the pub-lag is nearly three years now; never mind: the AAAS panel comes next week. That’s the important thing. Lucky timing, couldn’t be neater. The press is bound to play it up . . . Going to be hard not to watch Gilliam’s face, Peter muses, his own face ten years younger, sparkling, all lines upturned.

“I do love it, that’s what counts,” he thinks, a jumble of the years of off-hours drudgery in his mind . . . Coffee-ringed clipboards, the new centrifuge, the animal mess, a girl’s open lab coat, arguments with Ferris in Analysis, arguments about space, about equipment, about costs—and arching over it like a laser-grid, the luminous order of his hypothesis. His proven—no, mustn’t say it—his meticulously tested hypothesis. The lucky lifetime break. The beauty one. Never do it again, he hasn’t another one like this left in him; no matter! This is it, the peak. Just in time. Don’t think of what Nathan said, don’t think the word. (Nobel)—That’s stupid. (Nobel) Think of the work itself, the explanatory power, the clarity.

His hand has been wandering toward the in-basket under the printouts where his mail has been growing moss (he’ll get a secretary out of this, that’s for sure!), but the idea of light turns him to the window. The room feels tense, brimming with a tide of energy. Too much coffee, he thinks, too much joy. I’m not used to it. Too much of a loner. From here in I share. Spread it around, encourage younger men. Herds of assistants now . . .

Across his view of tired Bethesda suburbs around the NIH Annex floats the train of multiple-author papers, his name as senior, a genial myth; sponsoring everybody’s maiden publication. A fixture in the mainstream . . . Kids playing down there, he sees, shooting baskets by a garage, will some of them live to have a myeloma cured by the implications of his grubby years up here? If the crystallization can be made easier. Bound to come. But not by me, he thinks, trying to focus on the running figures through a faint stroboscopic blink which seems to arise from the streets below, although he knows it must be in his retinae.

Really too much caffeine, he warns himself. Let’s not have a hypertensive episode, not now, for god’s sake. Exultation is almost tangible in the room, it’s not distracting but integrative; as if he were achieving some higher level of vitality, a norepinephrine-like effect. Maybe I really will live on a higher level, he muses, rubbing the bridge of his nose between two fingers to get rid of a black afterimage which seems almost like an Apollo moonscape behind his eyes, a trifle unpleasant.

Too much doom, he tells himself, vigorously polishing his glasses, too much bomb-scare, ecology-scare, fascism-scare, race-war-scare, death-of-everything scare. He jerks his jaw to stop the tinnitus thrumming in his inner ear, glancing at the big 1984 desk calendar with its scrawled joke: If everything’s okay why are we whispering? Right. Let’s get at it and get home. To Molly and Sue and little Pete, their late-born.

He grins, thinking of the kid running to him, and thrusts his hand under the printouts to his packet of stale mail—and as his hand touches it an icicle rams into his heart.

For an instant he thinks he really is having a coronary. But it isn’t his real heart, it’s a horrible cold current of knowledge striking from his fingers to his soul, from that hideous sleazy tan-covered foreign journal which he now pulls slowly out to see the penciled note clipped to the cover, the personally delivered damned journal which has been lying under there like a time bomb, for how long? Weeks?

Pete, you better look at this. Sorry as hell.

But he doesn’t need to look, riffling through the wretchedly printed pages with fingers grown big and cold as clubs; he already knows what he’ll find inside there published so neatly, so sweetly, and completely, with the confirmation even stronger and more elegant, the implication he hadn’t thought of—and all so modest and terse. So young. Despair takes him as the page opens. Djakarta University for Jesus Christ’s sake? And some Hindu’s bloody paradigm—

Sick fury fulminates, bile and ashes rain through his soul as his hands fumble the pages, the gray unreal unreadable pages which are now strobing—Flash! Black! Flash! Black!—swallowing the world, roaring him in or up or out on a phantom whirlwind—

—’Til unsensation crescendos past all limit, bursts finally into the silence of pure energy, where he—or what is left of him, or momentarily reconstituted of him—integrates to terrified insight, achieves actual deathly awareness of its extinct self immaterially spinning in the dust of an eons-gone NIH Annex on a destroyed planet. And comprehends with agonized lucidity the real death of everything that lived—excepting only that in himself which he would most desperately wish to be dead.

What happened? He does not know, can never know, which of the dooms or some other had finally overtaken them, nor when; only that he is registering eternity, not time, that all that lived here has been gone so long that even time is still. Gone, all gone; centuries or millennia gone, all gone to ashes under pulseless stars in the icy dark, gone forever. Saving him alone and his trivial pain.

He alone . . . But as the mercilessly reifying force floods higher there wakes in him a dim uncomforting sense of presence; a bodiless disquiet in the dust tells him he is companioned, is but a node in a ghostly film of dead life shrouding the cold rock-ball. Unreachable, isolate—he strains for contact and is incorporeally stricken by new dread. Are they too in pain? Was pain indeed the fiercest fire in our nerves, alone able to sustain its flame through death? What of love, of joy? . . . There are none here.

He wails voicelessly as conviction invades him, he who had believed in nothing before. All the agonies of Earth, uncanceled? Are broken ghosts limping forever from Stalingrad and Salamis, from Gettysburg and Thebes and Dunkirk and Khartoum? Do the butchers’ blows still fall at Ravensbrück and Wounded Knee? Are the dead of Carthage and Hiroshima and Cusco burning yet? Have ghostly women waked again only to re-suffer violation, only to watch again their babies slain? Is every nameless slave still feeling the iron bite, is every bomb, every bullet and arrow and stone that ever flew, still finding its screaming mark—atrocity without end or comfort, forever?

Molly. The name forms in his canceled heart. She who was love. He tries to know that she or some fragment of her is warm among her children, but can summon only the image of her crawling forever through wreckage to Charlie McMahon’s bloody head.

Let it not be! He would shriek defiance at the wastes, finding himself more real as the strange energy densens; he struggles bodilessly, flails perished non-limbs to conjure love out of extinction to shield him against hell, calling with all his obliterated soul on the ultimate talisman: the sound of his little son’s laugh, the child running to him, clasping his leg in welcome home.

For an instant he thinks he has it—he can see the small face turn up, the mouth open—but as he tries to grasp, the ghost-child fades, frays out, leaving in his destroyed heart only another echo of hurt—I want Mommy, Mommy, my Mommy. And he perceives that what he had taken for its head are forms. Presences intrusive, alien as the smooth, bleak regard of sharks met under water.

They move, process obscurely—they exist here on this time-lost plain! And he understands with loathing that it is from them or those—machines or beings, he cannot tell—that the sustaining energy flows. It is their dark potency which has raised him from the patterns of the dust.

Hating them he hungers, would sway after them to suck his death-life, as a billion other remnants are yearning, dead sunflowers thirsting toward their black sun—but finds he cannot, can only crave helplessly as they recede.

They move, he perceives, toward those black distant cenotaphs, skeletal and alien, which alone break the dead horizon. What these can be, engines or edifices, is beyond his knowing. He strains sightlessly, sensing now a convergence, an inflowing as of departure like ants into no earthly nest. And at this he understands that the energy up-buoying him is sinking, is starting to ebb. The alien radiance that raised him is going, and he is guttering out. Do you know? he voicelessly cries after them, Do you know? Do you move oblivious among our agonies?

But he receives no answer, will never receive one; and as his tenuous structure fails he has consciousness only to wonder briefly what unimaginable errand brought such beings here to his dead cinder. Emissaries, he wonders, dwindling; explorers, engineers? Or is it possible that they are only sightseers? Idling among our ruins, perhaps even cognizant of the ghosts they raise to wail—turning us on, recreating our dead-show for their entertainment?

Shriveling, he watches them go in, taking with them his lacerating life, returning him to the void. Will they return? Or—his waning self forms one last desolation—have they returned already on their millennial tours? Has this recurred, to recur and recur again? Must he and all dead life be borne back each time helplessly to suffer, to jerk anew on the same knives and die again until another energy exhumes him for the next performance?

Let us die! But his decaying identity can no longer sustain protest, knows only that it is true, is unbearably all true, has all been done to him before and is all to do again and again and again without mercy forever.

And as he sinks back through the collapsing levels he can keep hold only of despair, touching again the deadly limp brown journal—Djakarta University? Flash—and he no longer knows the cause of the terror in his soul as he crumbles through lost springtime—I don’t love you that way, Pete—and is betrayed to aching joy as his hand closes over the young breast within her white shirt—Pe-ter, don’t you have a friend?—while his being shreds out, disperses among a myriad draining ghosts of anguish as the alien life deserts them, strands them lower and lower toward the final dark—until with uncomprehending grief he finds himself, or a configuration that was himself, for a last instant real—his boots on gravel in the dawn, his hand on a rusty pickup truck.

A joy he cannot bear rises in his fourteen-year-old heart as he peers down at the magic ducks, sees his boat safe by the path he’s cut; not understanding why the wind shrieks pain through the peaks above as he starts leaping down the rocks holding his ax and his first own gun, down to the dark lake under the cold stars, forever.

Originally published in Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg.

About the Author

Multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist and former member of the American intelligence community who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers of our times. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls From the Air, and nine short-story collections: Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the definitive posthumous retrospective collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again

Michael Swanwick

Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
      Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte chairité
Come ant daunce with me
      In Irlaunde.
(Anon.)

The bullet scars were still visible on the pillars of the General Post Office in Dublin, almost two centuries after the 1916 uprising. That moved me more than I had expected. But what moved me even more was standing at the exact same spot, not two blocks away, where my great-great-grandfather saw Gerry Adams strolling down O’Connell Street on Easter morning of ’96, the eightieth anniversary of that event, returning from a political rally with a single bodyguard to one side of him and a local politico to the other. It gave me a direct and simple connection to the tangled history of that tragic land.

I never knew my great-great-grandfather, but my grandfather told me that story once and I’ve never forgotten it, though my grandfather died when I was still a boy. If I squeeze my eyes tight shut, I can see his face, liquid and wavy as if glimpsed through candle flames, as he lay dying under a great feather comforter in his New York City railroad flat, his smile weak and his hair forming a halo around him as white as a dandelion waiting for the wind to purse its lips and blow.

“It was doomed from the start,” Mary told me later. “The German guns had been intercepted and the republicans were outnumbered fourteen to one. The British cannons fired on Dublin indiscriminately. The city was afire and there was no food to be had. The survivors were booed as they were marched off to prison and execution, for the common folk did not support them. By any conventional standard it was a fiasco. But once it happened, our independence was assured. We lose and we lose and we lose, but because we never accept it, every defeat and humiliation only leads us closer to victory.”

Her eyes blazed.

I suppose I should tell you about Mary’s eyes, if you’re to understand this story. But if I’m to tell you about her eyes, first I have to tell you about the holy well.

There is a holy well in the Burren that, according to superstition, will cure a toothache. The Burren is a great upwelling of limestone in the west of County Clare, and it is unlike anyplace else on Earth. There is almost no soil. The ground is stony and the stone is weathered in a network of fissures and cracks, called grykes, within which grow a province of plants you will not find in such abundance elsewhere. There are caves in great number to the south and the east, and like everywhere else in that beautiful land, a plenitude of cairns and other antiquities to be found.

The holy well is one such antiquity, though it is only a round hole, perhaps a foot across, filled with water and bright green algae. The altar over it is of recent construction, built by unknown hands from the long slender stones formed by the natural weathering of the limestone between the grykes, which makes the local stone walls so distinctive and the walking so treacherous. You could tear it down and scatter its component parts and never hear a word spoken about your deed. But if you returned a year later you’d find it rebuilt and your vandalism unmade as if it had never happened. People have been visiting the well for a long, long time. The Christian overlay—the holy medals and broken statues of saints that are sometimes left as offerings, along with the prescription bottles, nails, and coins—is a recent and perhaps a transient phenomenon.

But the important thing to know, and the reason people keep coming back to it, is that the holy well works. Some holy wells don’t. You can locate them on old maps, but when you go to have a look, there aren’t any offerings there. Something happened long ago—they were cursed by a saint or defiled by a sinner or simply ran out of mojo—and the magic stopped happening, and the believers went away and never returned. This well, however, is charged with holy power. It gives you shivers just to stand by it.

Mary’s eyes were like that. As green as the water in that well, and as full of dangerous magic.

I knew about the holy well because I’d won big and gotten a ticket off-planet, and so before I went, I took a year off in order to see all the places on Earth I would never return to, ending up with a final month to spend wandering about the land of my ancestors. It was my first time in Ireland and I loved everything about it, and I couldn’t help fantasizing that maybe I’d do so well in the Outsider worlds that someday I’d be rich enough to return and maybe retire there.

I was a fool and, worse, I didn’t know it.

We met in the Fiddler’s Elbow, a pub in that part of the West which the Bord Fáilte calls Yeats Country. I hadn’t come in for music but only to get out of the rain and have a hot whiskey. I was sitting by a small peat fire, savoring the warmth and the sweet smell of it, when somebody opened a door at the back of the room and started collecting admission. There was a sudden rush of people into the pub and so I carried my glass to the bar and asked, “What’s going on?”

“It’s Maire na Raghallach,” the publican said, pronouncing the last name like Reilly. “At the end of a tour she likes to pop in someplace small and give an unadvertised concert. You want to hear, you’d best buy a ticket now. They’re not going to last.”

I didn’t know Maire na Raghallach from Eve. But I’d seen the posters around town and I figured what the hell. I paid and went in.

Maire na Raghallach sang without a backup band and only an amp-and-finger-rings air guitar for instrumentation. Her music was . . . well, either you’ve heard her and know or you haven’t and if you haven’t, words won’t help. But I was mesmerized, ravished, rapt. So much so that midway through the concert, as she was singing “Deirdre’s Lament,” my head swam and a buzzing sensation lifted me up out of my body into a waking dream or hallucination or maybe vision is the word I’m looking for. All the world went away. There were only the two of us facing each other across a vast plain of bones. The sky was black and the bones were white as chalk. The wind was icy cold. We stared at each other. Her eyes pierced me like a spear. They looked right through me, and I was lost, lost, lost. I must have been half in love with her already. All it took was her noticing my existence to send me right over the edge.

Her lips moved. She was saying something and somehow I knew it was vastly important. But the wind whipped her words away unheard. It was howling like a banshee with all the follies of the world laid out before it. It screamed like an electric guitar. When I tried to walk toward her, I discovered I was paralyzed. Though I strained every muscle until I thought I would splinter my bones trying to get closer, trying to hear, I could not move nor make out the least fraction of what she was telling me.

Then I was myself again, panting and sweating and filled with terror. Up on the low stage, Mary (as I later learned to call her) was talking between songs. She grinned cockily and with a nod toward me said, “This one’s for the American in the front row.”

And then, as I trembled in shock and bewilderment, she launched into what I later learned was one of her own songs, “Come Home, the Wild Geese.” The Wild Geese were originally the soldiers who left Ireland, which could no longer support them, to fight for foreign masters in foreign armies everywhere. But over the centuries the term came to be applied to everyone of Irish descent living elsewhere, the children and grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren of those unhappy emigrants whose luck was so bad they couldn’t even manage to hold onto their own country and who had passed the guilt of that down through the generations, to be cherished and brooded over by their descendants forever.

“This one’s for the American,” she’d said.

But how had she known?

The thing was that, shortly after hitting the island, I’d bought a new set of clothes locally and dumped all my American things in a charity recycling-device. Plus, I’d bought one of those cheap neuroprogramming pendants that actors use to temporarily redo their accents. Because I’d quickly learned that in Ireland, as soon as you’re pegged for an American, the question comes out: “Looking for your roots, then, are ye?”

“No, it’s just that this is such a beautiful country and I wanted to see it.”

Skeptically, then: “But you do have Irish ancestors, surely?”

“Well, yes, but . . . ”

“Ahhhh.” Hoisting a pint preparatory to draining its lees. “You’re looking for your roots, then. I thought as much.”

But if there’s one thing I wasn’t looking for, it was my fucking roots. I was eighth-generation American Irish and my roots were all about old men in dark little Boston pubs killing themselves a shot glass at a time, and the ladies of Noraid goose-stepping down the street on Saint Patrick’s Day in short black skirts, their heels crashing against the street, a terrifying irruption of fascism into a day that was otherwise all kitsch and false sentiment, and corrupt cops, and young thugs who loved sports and hated school and blamed the niggers and affirmative action for the lousy construction worker jobs they never managed to keep long. I’d come to this country to get away from all that, and a thousand things more that the Irish didn’t know a scrap about. The cartoon leprechauns and the sentimental songs and the cute sayings printed on cheap tea towels somehow all adding up to a sense that you’ve lost before you’ve even begun, that it doesn’t matter what you do or who you become, because you’ll never achieve or amount to shit. The thing that sits like a demon in the dark pit of the soul. That Irish darkness.

 So how had she known I was an American?

Maybe it was only an excuse to meet her. If so, it was as good an excuse as any. I hung around after the show, waiting for Mary to emerge from whatever dingy space they’d given her for a dressing room, so I could ask.

When she finally emerged and saw me waiting for her, her mouth turned up in a way that as good as said, “Gotcha!” Without waiting for the question, she said, “I had only to look at you to see that you had prenatal genework. The Outsiders shared it with the States first, for siding with them in the war. There’s no way a young man your age with everything about you perfect could be anything else.”

Then she took me by the arm and led me away to her room.

We were together how long? Three weeks? Forever?  

Time enough for Mary to take me everywhere in that green and haunted island. She had the entirety of its history at her fingertips, and she told me all and showed me everything and I, in turn, learned nothing. One day we visited the Portcoon sea cave, a gothic wave-thunderous place that was once occupied by a hermit who had vowed to fast and pray there for the rest of his life and never accept food from human hands. Women swam in on the tides, offering him sustenance, but he refused it. “Or so the story goes,” Mary said. As he was dying, a seal brought him fish and, the seal not being human and having no hands, he ate. Every day it returned and so kept him alive for years. “But what the truth may be,” Mary concluded, “is anyone’s guess.”

Afterwards, we walked ten minutes up the coast to the Giant’s Causeway. There we found a pale blue, four-armed alien in a cotton smock and wide straw hat painting a watercolor of the basalt columns rising and falling like stairs into the air and down to the sea. She held a brush in one right hand and another in a left hand, and plied them simultaneously.

“Soft day,” Mary said pleasantly.

“Oh! Hello!” The alien put down her brushes, turned from her one-legged easel. She did not offer her name, which in her kind—I recognized the species—was never spoken aloud. “Are you local?”

I started to shake my head but, “That we be,” Mary said. It seemed to me that her brogue was much more pronounced than it had been. “Enjoying our island, are ye?”

“Oh, yes. This is such a beautiful country. I’ve never seen such greens!” The alien gestured widely with all four arms. “So many shades of green, and all so intense they make one’s eyes ache.”

“It’s a lovely land,” Mary agreed. “But it can be a dirty one as well. You’ve taken in all the sights, then?”

“I’ve been everywhere—to Tara, and the Cliffs of Moher, and Newgrange, and the Ring of Kerry. I’ve even kissed the Blarney Stone.” The alien lowered her voice and made a complicated gesture that I’m guessing was the equivalent of a giggle. “I was hoping to see one of the little people. But maybe it’s just as well I didn’t. It might have carried me off to a fairy mound and then after a night of feasting and music I’d emerge to find that centuries had gone by and everybody I knew was dead.”

I stiffened, knowing that Mary found this kind of thing offensive. But she only smiled and said, “It’s not the wee folk you have to worry about. It’s the boys.”

“The boys?”

“Aye. Ireland is a hotbed of nativist resistance, you know. During the day, it’s safe enough. But the night belongs to the boys.” She touched her lips to indicate that she wouldn’t speak the organization’s name out loud. “They’ll target a lone Outsider to be killed as an example to others. The landlord gives them the key to her room. They have ropes and guns and filthy big knifes. Then it’s a short jaunt out to the bogs, and what happens there . . . Well, they’re simple, brutal men. It’s all over by dawn and there are never any witnesses. Nobody sees a thing.”

The alien’s arms thrashed. “The tourist officials didn’t say anything about this!”

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?”

“What do you mean?” the alien asked.

Mary said nothing. She only stood there, staring insolently, waiting for the alien to catch on to what she was saying.

After a time, the alien folded all four of her arms protectively against her thorax. When she did, Mary spoke at last. “Sometimes they’ll give you a warning. A friendly local will come up to you and suggest that the climate is less healthy than you thought, and you might want to leave before nightfall.”

Very carefully, the alien said, “Is that what’s happening here?”

“No, of course not.” Mary’s face was hard and unreadable. “Only, I hear Australia’s lovely this time of year.”

Abruptly, she whirled about and strode away so rapidly that I had to run to catch up to her. When we were well out of earshot of the alien, I grabbed her arm and angrily said, “What the fuck did you do that for?”

“I really don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“Let’s just pretend that it is. Why?”

“To spread fear among the Outsiders,” she said, quiet and fierce. “To remind them that Earth is sacred ground to us and always will be. To let them know that while they may temporarily hold the whip, this isn’t their planet and never will be.”

Then, out of nowhere, she laughed. “Did you see the expression on that skinny blue bitch’s face? She practically turned green!”

“Who are you, Mary O’Reilly?” I asked her that night, when we were lying naked and sweaty among the tangled sheets. I’d spent the day thinking, and realized how little she’d told me about herself. I knew her body far better than I did her mind. “What are your likes and dislikes? What do you hope and what do you fear? What made you a musician, and what do you want to be when you grow up?” I was trying to keep it light, seriously though I meant it all.

“I always had the music, and thank God for that. Music was my salvation.”

“How so?”

“My parents died in the last days of the war. I was only an infant, so I was put into an orphanage. The orphanages were funded with American and Outsider money, part of the campaign to win the hearts and minds of the conquered peoples. We were raised to be denationalized citizens of the universe. Not a word of Irish touched our ears, nor any hint of our history or culture. It was all Greece and Rome and the Aldebaran Unity. Thank Christ for our music! They couldn’t keep that out, though they tried hard to convince us it was all harmless deedle-deedle jigs and reels. But we knew it was subversive. We knew it carried truth. Our minds escaped long before our bodies could.”

We, she’d said, and us and our. “That’s not who you are, Mary. That’s a political speech. I want to know what you’re really like. As a person, I mean.”

Her face was like stone. “I’m what I am. An Irishwoman. A musician. A patriot. Cooze for an American playboy.”

I kept my smile, though I felt as if she’d slapped me. “That’s unfair.”

It’s an evil thing to have a naked woman look at you the way Mary did me. “Is it? Are you not abandoning your planet in two days? Maybe you’re thinking of taking me along. Tell me, exactly how does that work?”

I reached for the whiskey bottle on the table by the bed. We’d drunk it almost empty, but there was still a little left. “If we’re not close, then how is that my fault? You’ve known from the start that I’m mad about you. But you won’t even—oh, fuck it!” I drained the bottle. “Just what the hell do you want from me? Tell me! I don’t think you can.”

Mary grabbed me angrily by the arms and I dropped the bottle and broke her hold and seized her by the wrists. She bit my shoulder so hard it bled and when I tried to push her away, toppled me over on my back and clambered up on top of me.

We did not so much resolve our argument as fuck it into oblivion.

It took me forever to fall asleep that night. Not Mary. She simply decided to sleep and sleep came at her bidding. I, however, sat up for hours staring at her face in the moonlight. It was all hard planes and determination. A strong face but not one given to compromise. I’d definitely fallen in love with the wrong woman. Worse, I was leaving for distant worlds the day after tomorrow. All my life had been shaped toward that end. I had no Plan B.

In the little time I had left, I could never sort out my feelings for Mary, much less hers for me. I loved her, of course, that went without saying. But I hated her bullying ways, her hectoring manner of speech, her arrogant assurance that I would do whatever she wanted me to do. Much as I desired her, I wanted nothing more than to never see her again. I had all the wealth and wonders of the universe ahead of me. My future was guaranteed.

And, God help me, if she’d only asked me to stay, I would have thrown it all away for her in an instant.

In the morning, we took a hyperrapid to Galway and toured its vitrified ruins. “Resistance was stiffest in the West,” Mary said. “One by one all the nations of the earth sued for peace, and even in Dublin there was talk of accommodation. Yet we fought on. So the Outsiders hung a warship in geostationary orbit and turned their strange weapons on us. This beautiful port city was turned to glass. The ships were blown against the shore and broke on the cobbles. The cathedral collapsed under its own weight. Nobody has lived here since.”

The rain spattered to a stop and there was a brief respite from the squalls which in that part of the country come off the Atlantic in waves. The sun dazzled from a hundred crystalline planes. The sudden silence was like a heavy hand laid unexpectedly upon my shoulder. “At least they didn’t kill anyone,” I said weakly. I was of a generation that saw the occupation of the Outsiders as being, ultimately, a good thing. We were healthier, richer, happier, than our parents had been. Nobody worried about environmental degradation or running out of resources anymore. There was no denying we were physically better off for their intervention.

“It was a false mercy that spared the citizens of Galway from immediate death and sent them out into the countryside with no more than the clothes on their backs. How were they supposed to survive? They were doctors and lawyers and accountants. Some of them reverted to brigandry and violence, to be sure. But most simply kept walking until they lay down by the side of the road and died. I can show you as many thousand hours of recordings of the Great Starvation as you can bring yourself to stomach. There was no food to be had, but thanks to the trinkets the Outsiders had used to collapse the economy, everybody had cameras feeding right off their optic nerves, saving all the golden memories of watching their children die.”

Mary was being unfair—the economic troubles hadn’t been the Outsiders’ doing. I knew because I’d taken economics in college. History, too, so I also knew that the war had, in part, been forced upon them. But though I wanted to, I could not adequately answer her. I had no passion that was the equal of hers.

“Things have gotten better,” I said weakly. “Look at all they’ve done for . . . ”

“The benevolence of the conqueror, scattering coins for the peasants to scrabble in the dust after. They’re all smiles when we’re down on our knees before them. But see what happens if one of us stands up on his hind legs and tells them to sod off.”

We stopped in a pub for lunch and then took a hopper to Gartan Lough. There we bicycled into the countryside. Mary led me deep into land that had never been greatly populated and was still dotted with the ruins of houses abandoned a quarter-century before. The roads were poorly paved or else dirt, and the land was so beautiful as to make you weep. It was a perfect afternoon, all blue skies and fluffy clouds. We labored up a hillside to a small stone chapel that had lost its roof centuries ago. It was surrounded by graves, untended and overgrown with wildflowers.

Lying on the ground by the entrance to the graveyard was the Stone of Loneliness.

The Stone of Loneliness was a fallen menhir or standing stone, something not at all uncommon throughout the British Isles. They’d been reared by unknown people for reasons still not understood in Megalithic times, sometimes arranged in circles, and other times as solitary monuments. There were faded cup-and-ring lines carved into what had been the stone’s upper end. And it was broad enough that a grown man could lie down on it. “What should I do?” I asked.

“Lie down on it,” Mary said.

So I did.

I lay down upon the Stone of Loneliness and closed my eyes. Bees hummed lazily in the air. And, standing at a distance, Mary began to sing:

The lions of the hills are gone
          And I am left alone, alone . . .

It was “Deirdre’s Lament,” which I’d first heard her sing in the Fiddler’s Elbow. In Irish legend, Deirdre was promised from infancy to Conchobar, the king of Ulster. But, as happens, she fell in love with and married another, younger man. Naoise, her husband, and his brothers Ardan and Ainnle, the sons of Uisnech, fled with her to Scotland, where they lived in contentment. But the humiliated and vengeful old king lured them back to Ireland with promises of amnesty. Once they were in his hands, he treacherously killed the three sons of Uisnech and took Deirdre to his bed.

The Falcons of the Wood are flown
          And I am left alone, alone . . .

Deirdre of the Sorrows, as she is often called, has become a symbol for Ireland herself—beautiful, suffering from injustice, and possessed of a happy past that looks likely to never return. Of the real Deirdre, the living and breathing woman upon whom the stories were piled like so many stones on a cairn, we know nothing. The legendary Deirdre’s story, however, does not end with her suicide, for in the aftermath of Conchobar’s treachery wars were fought, the injustices of which led to further wars. Which wars continue to this very day. It all fits together suspiciously tidily.

It was no coincidence that Deirdre’s father was the king’s storyteller.

The dragons of the rock are sleeping
          Sleep that wakes not for our weeping . . .

All this, however, I tell you after the fact. At the time, I was not thinking of the legend at all. For the instant I lay down upon the cold stone, I felt all the misery of Ireland flowing into my body. The Stone of Loneliness was charmed, like the well in the Burren. Sleeping on it was said to be a cure for homesickness. So, during the Famine, emigrants would spend their last night atop it before leaving Ireland forever. It seemed to me, prone upon the menhir, that all the sorrow they had shed was flowing into my body. I felt each loss as if it were my own. Helplessly, I started to weep and then to cry openly. I lost track of what Mary was singing, though her voice went on and on. Until finally she sang

Dig the grave both wide and deep
          Sick I am, and fain would sleep
          Dig the grave and make it ready
          Lay me on my true Love’s body

and stopped. Leaving a silence that echoed on and on forever.

Then Mary said, “There’s someone I think you’re ready to meet.”

Mary took me to a nondescript cinder block building, the location of which I will take with me to the grave. She led the way in. I followed nervously. The interior was so dim I stumbled on the threshold. Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw that I was in a bar. Not a pub, which is a warm and welcoming public space where families gather to socialize, the adults over a pint and the kiddies drinking their soft drinks, but a bar—a place where men go to get drunk. It smelled of poitín and stale beer. Somebody had ripped the door to the bog off its hinges and no one had bothered to replace it. Presumably Mary was the only woman to set foot in the place for a long, long time.

There were three or four men sitting at small tables in the gloom, their backs to the door, and a lean man with a bad complexion at the bar. “Here you are then,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Don’t mind Liam,” Mary said to me. Then, to Liam, “Have you anything fit for drinking?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s not why we came anyway.” Mary jerked her head toward me. “Here’s the recruit.”

“He doesn’t look like much.”

“Recruit for what?” I said. It struck me suddenly that Liam was keeping his hands below the bar, out of sight. Down where a hard man will keep a weapon, such as a cudgel or a gun.

“Don’t let his American teeth put you off. They’re part of the reason we wanted him in the first place.”

“So you’re a patriot, are you, lad?” Liam said in a voice that indicated he knew good and well that I was not.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Liam glanced quickly at Mary and curled his lip in a sneer. “Ahh, he’s just in it for the crack.” In Irish craic means “fun” or “kicks.” But the filthy pun was obviously intended. My face hardened and I balled up my fists. Liam didn’t look concerned.

“Hush, you!” Mary said. Then, turning to me, “And I’ll thank you to control yourself as well. This is serious business. Liam, I’ll vouch for the man. Give him the package.”

Liam’s hands appeared at last. They held something the size of a biscuit tin. It was wrapped in white paper and tied up with string. He slid it across the bar.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a device,” Liam said. “Properly deployed, it can implode the entire administrative complex at Shannon Starport without harming a single civilian.”

My flesh ran cold.

“So you want me to plant this in the ’port, do yez?” I said. For the first time in weeks, I became aware of the falseness of my accent. Impulsively, I pulled the neuropendant from beneath my shirt, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. Whatever I said here, I would say it as myself. “You want me to go in there and fucking blow myself up?”

“No, of course not,” Mary said. “We have a soldier in place for that. But he—”

“Or she,” Liam amended.

“—or she isn’t in a position to smuggle this in. Human employees aren’t allowed to bring in so much as a pencil. That’s how little the Outsiders think of us. You, however, can. Just take the device through their machines—it’s rigged to read as a box of cigars—in your carry-on. Once you’re inside, somebody will come up to you and ask if you remembered to bring something for granny. Hand it over.”

“That’s all,” Liam said.

“You’ll be halfway to Jupiter before anything happens.”

They both looked at me steadily. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not killing any innocent people for you.”

“Not people. Aliens.”

“They’re still innocent.”

“They wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t seized the planet. So they’re not innocent.”

“You’re a nation of fucking werewolves!” I cried. Thinking that would put an end to the conversation.

But Mary wasn’t fazed. “That we are,” she agreed. “Day by day, we present our harmless, domestic selves to the world, until one night the beast comes out to feed. But at least we’re not sheep, bleating complacently in the face of the butcher’s knife. Which are you, my heart’s beloved? A sheep? Or could there be a wolf lurking deep within?”

“He can’t do the job,” Liam said. “He’s as weak as watered milk.”

“Shut it. You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Mary fixed me with those amazing eyes of hers, as green as the living heart of Ireland, and I was helpless before them. “It’s not weakness that makes you hesitate,” she said, “but a foolish and misinformed conscience. I’ve thought about this far longer than you have, my treasure. I’ve thought about it all my life. It’s a holy and noble thing that I’m asking of you.”

“I—”

“Night after night, you’ve sworn you’d do anything for me—not with words, I’ll grant you, but with looks, with murmurs, with your soul. Did you think I could not hear the words you dared not say aloud? Now I’m calling you on all those unspoken promises. Do this one thing—if not for the sake of your planet, then for me.”

All the time we’d been talking, the men sitting at their little tables hadn’t made a noise. Nor had any of them turned to face us. They simply sat hunched in place—not drinking, not smoking, not speaking. Just listening. It came to me then how large they were, and how still. How alert. It came to me then that if I turned Mary down, I’d not leave this room alive.

So, really, I had no choice.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “And God damn you for asking me to.”

Mary went to hug me and I pushed her roughly away. “No! I’m doing this thing for you, and that puts us quits. I never want to see you or think of you again.”

For a long, still moment, Mary studied me calmly. I was lying, for I’d never wanted her so much as I did in that instant. I could see that she knew I was lying, too. If she’d let the least sign of that knowledge show, I believe I would have hit her. But she did not. “Very well,” she said. “So long as you keep your word.”

She turned and left and I knew I would never see her again.

Liam walked me to the door. “Be careful with the package outside in the rain,” he said, handing me an umbrella. “It won’t work if you let it get damp.”

I was standing in Shannon Starport, when Homeworld Security closed in on me. Two burly men in ITSA uniforms appeared to my either side and their alien superior said, “Would you please come with us, sir.” It was not a question.

Oh, Mary, I thought sadly. You have a traitor in your organization. Other than me, I meant. “Can I bring my bag?”

“We’ll see to that, sir.”

I was taken to their interrogation room.

Five hours later I got onto the lighter. They couldn’t hold me because there wasn’t anything illegal in my possession. I’d soaked the package Liam gave me in the hotel room sink overnight and then gotten up early and booted it down a storm drain when no one was looking. It was a quick trip to orbit where there waited a ship larger than a skyscraper and rarer than almost anything you could name, for it wouldn’t return to this planet for centuries. I floated on board knowing that for me there’d be no turning back. Earth would be a story I told my children, and a pack of sentimental lies they would tell theirs.

My homeworld shrank behind me and disappeared. I looked out the great black glass walls into a universe thronged with stars and galaxies and had no idea where I was or where I thought I was going. It seemed to me then that we were each and every one of us ships without a harbor, sailors lost on land.

I used to say that only Ireland and my family could make me cry. I cried when my mother died and I cried when Dad had his heart attack the very next year. My baby sister failed to survive the same birth that killed my mother, so some of my tears were for her as well. Then my brother Bill was hit by a drunk driver and I cried and that was the end of my family. Now there’s only Ireland.

But that’s enough.

Originally published in Asimov’ Science Fiction, August 2011.

About the Author

Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-one years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels In The Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of SF. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing With Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

Why Science Fiction Detective Stories Aren’t Impossible

Mark Cole

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been as bad without all the buildup.

Episode after episode, Doctor Who regaled us with stories about Madame Vastra, a reptilian Silurian living in Victorian England, and her prodigious detective skills: The police always went to her with their difficult cases. She was the basis for all those stories about Sherlock Holmes.

And after several seasons of being told about her talents, the moment finally came when the police called her in and we got to see her incredible Holmesian deductive skills at work.

She pulled a gadget out of her bag and it told her everything she needed to know except the villain’s phone number.

That faint rumbling sound you could hear in the background was Isaac Asimov rolling in his grave.

This all started with someone telling Asimov that he couldn’t do something.

A lot of things start that way. Nothing spurs creativity so much as telling someone that a thing is impossible.

But at the time, it certainly looked that way. You could find science fictional versions of classic types of stories like adventure, romance, and even sports, but you couldn’t find any science fiction mystery stories. And, what’s more, it was generally agreed that they wouldn’t work.

As he put it in his introduction to Asimov’s Mysteries (1968), “Back in the late forties, this was finally explained to me. I was told that ‘by its very nature’ science fiction would not play fair with the reader . . . the detective could say ‘But as you know, Watson, ever since 2175, when all Spaniards learned to speak French, Spanish has been a dead language. How came Juan Lopez, then, to speak those significant words in Spanish?’”

“Or he could have his detective whip out an odd device and say ‘As you know, Watson, my pocket-frannistan is perfectly capable of finding the missing jewel in a trice.’”

However, none of this was exactly new. Practically from the first, unguessable clues and deus ex machina solutions had appeared in mystery stories (including a few by the best writers out there). Nor was there a shortage of supposedly scientific detectives, like R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, or the endless, pulpy adventures of Craig Kennedy. The real question was whether an author was willing to play fair with his audience. If he provided whatever information about his future world that the reader needed to solve the puzzle and made sure that he detailed any necessary scientific information unknown to the general reader then Asimov could see no reason it was impossible.

So, in 1953, he set out to prove everyone wrong.

The result was The Caves of Steel (1953), a novel set in an overcrowded underground city in Earth’s future. A scientist from one of the outer colonies has been murdered and Lije Bailey has been assigned to the case with a new partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, from the victim’s home planet. Only Daneel is an android, in a society that hates robots.

Lije goes about his work like any fictional detective, gathering clues and questioning witnesses. We have a familiar odd couple partnership, mildly skewed by the fact that one of them is a robot. As strange as the society in which the crime takes place may be, the suspects have familiar motivations and passions. And, while the killer’s motive is one that has much to do with the fictional time and circumstances, it is still familiar enough to be believable.

The critics loved it. It won praise both as an excellent science fiction novel and a well-written mystery. It sold well, too, and remains one of Asimov’s most highly regarded novels. In 1957, he released a sequel, The Naked Sun, just to prove his first attempt wasn’t a fluke. This time, Lije travels to the colonies, to solve a mystery on a supposedly “perfect” world, where the human population lives isolated from each other, tended by a far larger number of robot servants.

Asimov wanted to write another novel at the time, which would have taken Lije to Daneel’s home world, where man and robots lived in balance. But he wrote other things instead, and didn’t return to Lije and Daneel for twenty-six years.

However, Caves of Steel wasn’t the first novel to mix science fiction with detection. In January of 1952, Alfred Bester began serializing The Demolished Man in Galaxy Magazine: book publication followed a year later, as Asimov was writing The Caves of Steel. It went on to win the first Hugo award for best novel.

How do you get away with murder in a society where they can read your mind?

Science has learned how to recognize innate psychic talents, which can be developed with proper training. Business, industry, and government all hire telepaths—“Espers”—for sensitive and confidential jobs. However, Espers must obey the rules of their Guild, which forbids reading the thoughts of those around them indiscriminately, although those working for the police have far more latitude.

Ben Reich tries to find a way to eliminate his largest rival, knowing that he will be demolished if caught. The detective investigating the crime suspects him immediately, but can’t prove it.

The inverted detective story, where the audience knows from the start who is guilty, and the suspense lays in whether or not the detective will catch him—and how—wasn’t invented by Columbo. It had been around for forty years at the time Bester’s novel came out. However, Bester made it far more complex, as Reich not only has to screen his thoughts from the “peepers,” but also act spontaneously without premeditation.

Yet there is an even earlier science fiction detective novel: Hal Clement’s Needle (1950) is told from the perspective of an alien symbiote cop, who crash-lands on Earth while chasing a similar creature. We watch while he finds a new host and learns how to communicate with him. Then the two must figure out how to identify which one of the many people living on their island is unwittingly carrying the dangerous fugitive.

Ironically, it has almost the same origin as The Caves of Steel (and considering that Asimov doesn’t say who told him he couldn’t write a science fiction mystery, perhaps the same): in a 1953 letter, the legendary editor of Astounding Magazine, John W. Campbell told Hal, “Once upon a time I told you ‘Science Fiction detective stories don’t work—you can’t write a good one.’ So you proved that I was wrong in that, and wrote Needle.”

But perhaps that wasn’t the first science fiction detective story either. In 1948, Jack Vance began a series about Magnus Ridolph, the first of his many “effectuator” characters. Part private detective, part troubleshooter, part con man, many of the stories about Ridolph fall under the general heading of detective stories, starting with the second, “The Unspeakable McInch” (1948). Another half dozen stories about Ridolph followed.

Whoever you chose to blame, there was no longer any doubt: the two genres could combine—and with interesting results.

While Bester never returned to the science fiction detective story, Asimov also created an “armchair detective,” Wendell Urth, for a series of short stories. He continued writing mystery stories, both future and present, throughout his career. He would eventually write the long-promised third Lije Bailey novel, The Robots of Dawn (1983) as the first of many sequels to his better-known books. However, it seemed to lack something, perhaps because Daneel—who had been portrayed as nearly human in the original novels—was now more of a machine, thanks in part to a new telepathic robot character (the sixty-three-year-old Asimov also spent an inordinate amount of space describing the bathrooms!).

The sequel, Robots and Empire (1985), connected it to the Foundation series, but wasn’t a mystery.

Hal Clement didn’t write many other science fiction mysteries, but his 1978 sequel, Through the Eye of a Needle, does eventually turn into a detective story.

Jack Vance continued to combine detective, crime, and mystery elements with many of his stories, not only in the adventures of effectuators like Ridolph and Miro Hetzel, but in many of his other stories and series. One notes, for example, IPCC agent Glawen Clattuc in the Cadwall series, and that Kirth Gersen frequently has to act as a detective in his epic quest for revenge in the Demon Princes novels.

Vance set himself some truly difficult and unique challenges in many of these stories: perhaps the most memorable was “The Moon Moth”, where a detective must find an escaped murderer in a society whose natives never show their faces, covering them with ceremonial masks chosen to reflect both their mood and status. His final novel, Lurulu (2004) includes a mystery among its many plot threads. It seems a fitting end for a long and distinguished career.

However, other authors soon picked up the challenge. One of the first was Randall Garrett. While he isn’t as well remembered as his friends Asimov and Robert Silverberg, Garrett was one of the leading genre short story writers of the era. His breakthrough 1954 story, “The Hunting Lodge” was a spy thriller with mystery elements. He would fuse detection with many of his stories, including several that he wrote with Silverberg as “Robert Randall.”

He combined detection with the Asimovian robot story in his 1962 novel, Unwise Child, which hinges on one of the most unusual science fiction notions ever conceived: a book of theology. Garrett followed it with a series by “Mark Phillips” (with Laurence M. Janifer) about “The Queens Own FBI.” These featured the screwball adventures of hard-drinking FBI agent Kenneth J. Malone (based on Craig Rice’s John J. Malone) who had to deal with telepaths, teleporting criminals, and a boss who thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth. The books are brisk and funny, but at the same time well-written mysteries which catch Rice’s unique voice.

It was another challenge—this time by Isaac Asimov himself—that led to the creation of Garrett’s most famous detective: when Asimov declared that it was impossible to write a mystery set in a fantasy world dominated by magic, Garrett wrote Too Many Magicians. It features Lord Darcy, a dashing, John Dickson Carr hero from an alternate Earth where they discovered the rules of magic instead of science.

Sadly, though, his final, unfinished novel (completed by his wife) resorts to previously undisclosed psychic powers to explain its locked room mystery.

In 1957, Lloyd Biggle Jr. entered the field with one of his first published stories, “Chronus of the D.F.C.” New York City’s newly established “Department of Future Crime” has a machine which lets them see future events. But can they use it to stop a murder before it happens? (the story bears a strong resemblance to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, enough to suggest Dick may have read it).

He then launched a series starring a character who may have been the first recurring Detective hero in science fiction novels: Jan Darzek. Jan was New York City-based Private Detective, whose latest case in All the Colors of Darkness (1963) involves passengers who have vanished from an experimental teleporter and visitors from other worlds. His second case, Watchers of the Dark (1966) takes him from Earth to solve a mystery for the Galactic Government.

His cases, however, in the three books that followed gradually move further from a straightforward mystery story, and Jan does Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan one better and becomes the President of the Galaxy.

While the first version of his story, “ARM,” was one of the earliest stories Larry Niven wrote, it took him a decade of writing SF stories involving crime and detection before he could finish it. Gil Hamilton, an agent of the elite global police force, ARM, is a hard-boiled cop from an overcrowded future with a telekinetic “third arm.” He first appeared in print in 1968, but despite the fact that he is one of Niven’s favorite characters, he has only starred in four short stories and a novel, The Patchwork Girl. As he put it in the introduction to his collection Flatlander: “If I like him so freezing much, why not write more stories? Because following two sets of rules is hard work, that’s why.”

It wasn’t just the SF magazines that published these stories: many appeared in mystery magazines. A few editors, like Frederic Dannay and Hans Stefan Santesson, seemed particularly open to them.

To date, however, only one science fiction novel, Ron Goulart’s After Things Fell Apart, has been nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America annual award, the Edgar. It is set in a chaotic future where the United States has come completely apart at the seams and Jim Haley, a PI, has to navigate the absurd obstacles of the many enclaves ruling the San Francisco Bay Area while trying to solve a series of murders. The incredibly prolific Goulart, one of the great absurdists, has gleefully combined science fiction, mystery and comedy in most of his books (It is interesting to note that he also ghosted William Shatner’s Private Eye series, Tek War).

Gradually more and more authors attempted the combination: among others John Brunner (Enigma from Tantalus), Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Glen Cook, William Gibson and Gene Wolfe. There was even a hard-boiled detective paperback original series (Mack Swain) by Mike McQuay (He also wrote a mystery about a man murdered in a city of three-laws robots for Asimov’s Robot City series).

Fantasy efforts included Avram Davidson’s The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and Cook’s hard-boiled Garrett, PI series.

The idea has become common enough one hardly notices it anymore. Not even when a major mystery writer, Nora Roberts, launched a mystery series in the near future under her J. D. Robb pseudonym, and marketed them as mainstream detective stories.

But then something changed in the world of the mystery.

Or perhaps it was two things.

On the one hand, there was a general shift in the market. Fewer and fewer mysteries relied heavily on detection. Carefully constructed puzzles, logical deduction, and devious clues gave way to thrillers, mysterious informants, and heroes who stumbled on the answer by the end of the book.

On the other, there is the rise of CSI and its host of imitators, with their emphasis on forensic technology. While this might seem at first glance a return to the older, deduction-heavy approach, mixed with a bit of science, in practice it turned out rather differently. The forensic scientists on CSI could somehow enhance pictures beyond the point where they were reduced to individual pixels. Only a few of the largest research institutes in the world had the equipment they just happened to have in their tiny labs. They could produce incredibly detailed results from the most absurdly minimal samples. In one episode of NCIS, Abby, the resident lab genius, proves a man was murdered on the basis of some tiny specks of foreign material visible on the nano level. Let’s see that hold up in court!

It was the greatest excuse for lazy mystery writing ever.

And exactly like what the naysayers had said about science fiction in the forties.

Far worse, this image of incredible technical prowess had some very negative effects on the real world, where juries ignored perfectly good scientific evidence because it wasn’t as incredible as what they’d seen on last week’s CSI—and where convictions have been overturned because juries have been dazzled by highly dubious forensic evidence.

One almost suspects that for the average viewer, there is no difference between real science and that pocket-frannistan.

The irony here is that a character who was the real inspiration for Sherlock Holmes should be a lazy writer’s dream. After all, Conan Doyle provided us with nine books worth of Holmesian deductions, which could easily be repurposed, rewritten—or even stolen wholesale—for Vastra’s adventures (which we would naturally expect to resemble Doyle’s “fictionalized” versions).

But, even for those willing to work hard at it, the challenge remains a difficult one.

John H. Campbell would often take a position he didn’t hold just to force his writers to think. One suspects that he deliberately set out to inspire Hal Clement (and perhaps Asimov and others in his stable of writers as well) to explore something that would be extremely difficult to pull off—but quite interesting if they succeeded.

The result was a rich addition to science fiction literature, full of new and unexplored possibilities. However poor the results might be in the hands of the lazy.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top...” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Clever Plants, Generations, and Translations:
A Conversation with Sue Burke

Chris Urie

It’s inevitable that we’ll take to the stars to spread humanity beyond the confines of our blue and green orb. With new discoveries every month, planets not unlike our own are becoming more common. Unable to look closer, we can only speculate as to what we’ll encounter when we finally send a ship deep into the outer reaches of our galaxy to explore our new homes. Science fiction authors have long taken a crack at imagining what we might find. Antlered creatures with advanced sonic technology. Desolate desert planets. Aliens who only want a bit of candy. The ideas are as unique as the authors themselves.

Sue Burke’s novel Semiosis follows the generational development of a society on a faraway planet from their initial landing and far into their future. A group of people journey to a planet called Pax to try and make themselves a new home without repeating humanity’s mistakes. After arriving on Pax, they realize that they may not be the highest intelligence on the planet. The biology around them shifts, moves, and reacts more quickly with more complexity than they could ever have imagined. In order to survive, they have to find their niche in an ecosystem or else perish at the vines of highly intelligent plant-life. Over generations of settlers, we get to experience the alternate evolution of a planet’s ecology and also of a human society. It’s a book about the complexities of biology, ecology, communication, and how people find their way on a new planet.

The author of numerous stories and translations, Sue Burke has also worked as a journalist, editor, and poet. She’s won the 2016 Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation. Her novel Semiosis will be released by Tor Books February 6, 2018.

What was it about your houseplants that first inspired you to write Semiosis?

Years ago in my own living room, I discovered that plants are murderous. A pothos wrapped around a little podocarpus, starved it for light, and killed it. At first, I blamed myself for not noticing earlier and intervening. Soon after that, a monstera deliciosa philodendron tried to sink roots into a nephthytis, so I did some research and learned that plants are vicious. Especially philodendrons. Watch out for them.

The research became an essay I eventually published in a science fiction magazine, which you can read here.

Then in 1996, I attended the Clarion Workshop, and one of the instructors, Gregory Frost, gave us an exercise about a specific kind of wall. I thought: what if there were two camps of vicious plants, and suddenly (by plant standards) a human colony appeared and became the wall between them? And what if these plants could think, at least a little?

Was Ursula K. Le Guin an influence on Semiosis? If so, how?

She wasn’t a direct influence, but you might hear her in the tone of the novel. The characters think deeply and take what they do seriously. I admire that in her work, and that admiration no doubt seeped through into mine.

The state of the Earth in your novel has it in such disrepair that a group of people sought refuge among the stars. Do you think the Earth is beyond repair with everything happening concerning climate change?

I expect some sort of life will continue until the Sun goes nova, at least bacteria. As for humans, we’re resourceful and adaptable—but history tells us we avoid change until we have no choice. I’m sure our species will survive, but I’m not sure how many of us.

Feeding ourselves might become a big problem. I grew up in Wisconsin, and its best farmland was in Waukesha County. Centuries of natural processes are needed to create rich topsoil. That soil now sprouts subdivisions, strip malls, and highways. It’s lost to agriculture for good. When we destroy agricultural land, we’re destroying our own habitat.

The ecology also depends on a wide variety of plants and animals. We’re destroying a lot of them, too, a process exacerbated by climate change. We face rough times ahead, but in the long-term, nature will find a new balance. The drawback is that “long-term” might be very long, we might not find the new balance easy for us.

The steps the refugees take on the new planet Pax are thorough and logical. They figure out how to survive in what is essentially an unknown wilderness. Did you research living off-the-grid or bushcraft while writing this novel?

I’m a city kid who takes occasional trips into the countryside, but I try to pay attention when I do. The research included A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, and I hiked around Wisconsin seeing the land with his deep love of nature. I also researched how to forage and to practice subsistence agriculture, which is what the Pax colonists aspired to do. I learned that farming requires not just hard work but deep knowledge. On this planet, even with the help and advice of the First Nations, European colonists in the Americas often failed, starved, and died. The colonists on Pax in chapter two are on the brink of failure. For all their planning, they will need outside help to survive.

The biology of Pax is fascinating. Do any of the plants or animals have analogues or inspirations here on earth?

Poop plants are real. A couple of species of Euphorbia, especially decaryi, look like little piles of old dried-up dung during their resting periods. They grow in deserts, where it can be helpful to look unappetizing. Decades ago, I saw that plant in the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory in Milwaukee, mistook it for a pile of poop until I read the label, and vowed to use it somehow in my writing.

Was there a process when you developed the biology of the Glassmakers?

In many ways, they’re ants, especially their scent communication, and like Earth ants, Glassmakers can be kind of stinky. Unlike Earth ants, they don’t chirp. Yes, some ants chirp (stridulate) by rubbing certain parts of their abdomen. I couldn’t work that into the story, alas. Even still, the Glassmakers are noisy.

What was one piece of scientific information you came across while researching this novel that surprised you?

Plants are not merely active, they’re aggressive and impatient. Just watch how fast things sprout and bloom in spring. This aggression and impatience formed the backbone of the story. Plants are slow by our reckoning, but ours is not the only measure in nature.

Do you think climate change will eventually force humans into space?

I’m in favor of going to space and I’m sure we will expand beyond Earth, but I think it will still be necessary to deal with the effects of climate change on Earth. We can’t move even just a billion or so of us off-world. As a species, we’ve never faced a crisis that big, and true to human nature, we won’t act a moment too soon. That moment—“too soon”—has already passed. I’m 62, and at times I think I’m lucky because I won’t live long enough to see exactly how difficult and contentious it’s going to be. Agriculture—to return to that—will have to deal with new rainfall patterns, more extreme weather, aquifer exhaustion, soil exhaustion, monoculture failures, and a growing number of mouths to feed, all at once. We have cursed our future with interesting times.

Do you think the flaws of humans present themselves more readily as a society grows?

History tells us that we can be both intelligent and stupid, but I believe that both intelligence and stupidity can compound themselves. When I was born, fewer than 3 billion people lived on the Earth. Now the population is about 7.6 billion and still climbing. We can be stupid on a much larger scale.

Toward the end of Semiosis, someone says this about the history of Pax: “I could start with what I knew and what I could learn so our story could survive, so we could discover our true selves. Our future would be another discovery—or, if we understood how we had arrived at where we were, it could be a choice.” I think that’s true for Earth, too. We know a lot about ourselves, and we have a choice. Will we choose wisely?

In the book, the settlers have the Constitution of Pax. Is this constitution inspired by any historical government documents here on Earth?

For some of the technical parts of the Constitution, such as quorums, committee operations, and meeting notices, I copied and simplified the constitution of a religious denomination that was kind enough to post it online. For Article II, where the colonists declare their purposes and principles, I let them speak. The original colonists, the Parents, had a dream and a vision that sustained them through adversity—although they could not make it come true. Their descendants and their descendants’ friends and allies made Pax into the community that the Parents had aspired to.

Years and generations go by between the sections in your novel. What made you decide to do this?

Plants are slow. A tree can live for centuries. I needed to give the plants time to react, and after pondering how, I decided to create a roman-fleuve, a kind of novel that flows across several generations (of humans). Then I had to make each generation’s chapter exciting and at the same time progress toward the motivating question of the novel: what can thinking plants do in a crisis?

What are the challenges of writing from the perspective of an intelligent plant?

I only had to think: What do plants want? What does this particular plant want? But, like writing any “other,” you have to understand that other’s life. I did all the research I could, and I’m still learning. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben tells us about all the hard decisions trees here on Earth have to make—yes, they make life-or-death decisions, and like us, they must make them with incomplete knowledge. Also like us, any given intelligent plant would have its own combination of triumphs and failures, confidence and fear, and abundance and hunger.

Why is Mundos en la Eternidad one of the best space operas you’ve ever read?

Besides an exciting, intricate plot and a well thought-out setting, that novel from Spain features “juggernauts,” which are an enormous interstellar life-form. Investigating them leads to one surprise after another. The novel was written by Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal, and Redal was trained in biology and medicine. I think his understanding of life sciences made those surprises both perfectly logical and astounding. Incidentally, the juggernauts strongly resemble the interstellar object 1I/2017 U1, also called ’Oumuamua, which is swinging through our solar system right now. Coincidence?

The novel won major awards in Spain and resulted in several spin-offs. It also inspired other writers to create additional works in that universe, which Aguilera and Redal have generously encouraged. Years after I fell in love with Mundos en la Eternidad, I got to translate one of those works, an outstanding novella called “The Texture of Words” by Felicidad Martínez, for the anthology Terra Nova. It explores what the stay-at-home females of one of its spacefaring peoples were doing to survive.

That’s what a great novel can do: inspire both readers and writers.

Having translated numerous books, do you have a favorite Spanish colloquialism?

I lived in Spain for seventeen years, and there they sometimes say, “No tienes abuela.” It means: “You don’t have a grandmother.” It really means: “You blow your own horn.” She’s supposed to do that for you.

What is one piece of advice you’d like to share with aspiring writers?

If you see something remarkable like a poop plant, remember it. Memorable details make for memorable writing.

What other projects do you have in the works?

I’ve written the sequel to Semiosis, and I’m writing the third book now. After that, I plan to move on to another series of novels. I’m also working—as always—on translations and on shorter works.

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:
Luke Versus Han: An Approach to Characterization

Kelly Robson

I’ll always be grateful to Steven Barnes. At Orycon 2012, he passed on advice that made a huge difference to my writing. Steven said, when we get a story idea, we usually know either the character or the problem. To develop the story, we can ask ourselves the following questions:

If we know the character, ask, “What is the worst thing that can happen to this character—and better yet, how can they do it to themselves?”

If we know the problem, ask, “Who is the worst person to give this problem to?”

This was the exact piece of information I needed in that moment. I’d been struggling through early drafts of my novella “Waters of Versailles.” The story wasn’t working. I knew where the plot was going, but I couldn’t seem to get it moving. Suddenly, I knew why.

When I asked myself—“Who is the worst person to give this problem to?”—the trouble became clear. I’d given the problem to the wrong person. My original protagonist could easily have solved the problem by page six. If the story was going to work, I had to give the problem to the wrong person.

I started from scratch with a new protagonist. After a lot of work and with lot of luck, the story was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and won the Aurora Award. A story stuck in the mud became an award-winner. Thank you, Steven Barnes, you dear, generous person. And thanks, Orycon.

(To be clear, Steven didn’t claim ownership of the advice. I don’t know if it’s original to him or whether he was passing it on. He did mention that “how can they do it to themselves?” was Lois McMaster Bujold’s innovation. And it’s a darned brilliant one. Thank you, Lois.)

Fast-forward five years. I apply Steven’s advice regularly and have passed it on to many other writers. I also posted it on my blog, hoping it would help other writers as dramatically as it helped me, but I haven’t heard anyone report back. Not surprising. Not all advice works for all people. That’s why we need so much of it.

Good writing advice isn’t hard to find. It’s everywhere. You can read books by luminaries, like Ursula K.Le Guin’s Steering the Craft and Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook which provide detailed guidance from admired pros. Blogs, articles, and YouTube videos about the craft of writing are so numerous you couldn’t possibly consume them all. The stream of writing advice never goes dry, and we need every drop because no two humans think the same. We all struggle with different problems at different times, and use unique frameworks to organize our thoughts.

As for me, I really like simple questions that lead to complex answers.

Steven Barnes’ two simple questions help explore dramatic tension, develop conflict, and put characters and plots in context. But they’re not a magic wand that fixes every broken story. Though incredibly effective with “Waters of Versailles,” they’re not quite as useful for my current story-in-progress, where the problem is much more subtle and personal. But they still provide a terrific framework for thinking about the mechanics of the story as a whole.

Recently, I’ve been struggling with characterization. The advice I’ve found doesn’t resonate; it’s too ephemeral. So, I came up with my own simple concept that—for me, at least—lays bare the bones of a story and clears the way for effective surgery. (This is where Luke and Han come into it. Sorry for making you wait.)

Here it is: A character should either know who they are or what they’re doing.

Like the two questions above, this concept examines the relationship between character and plot, with a focus on character behavior. It’s about what a character does in the story. It’s about agency, how a character expresses their will in the world, and makes their presence felt.

A character who knows what they’re doing, but not who they are, has goals and is actively looking for a route to a clear outcome. A character who knows who they are, but not what they’re doing, still makes their presence felt because every interaction is informed by their strong sense of self.

For example, take Luke Skywalker. At the beginning of A New Hope, Luke has no idea who he is, but he knows what he’s doing—he’ll save that princess or die trying. In contrast, Han Solo has no idea what’s he’s doing but he knows exactly who he is—badass captain of the Millennium Falcon and don’t you forget it.

Two classic characters with polar opposite psychological outlooks on life. At the end of A New Hope, Luke is beginning to find out who he is, and Han is finding his purpose.

The problem with simple questions that lead to complex answers is, if you look at them for too long, you start to get vertigo. Deep breath. Okay.

Let’s try that again: A character should know one of two things: Who they are, or what they’re doing.

You can pick one, but not both. A character who knows what they’re doing will find out who they are by the end of the story, for good or ill. A character who knows who they are will find their purpose.

But is that true? What if a character knows neither who they are, nor what they’re doing?

This character is going nowhere. That can be a problem. They’re passive, reacting to outside forces, getting kicked though the story by the plot. This can work if the conflict is intensely internal, but takes a steady hand to pull off. A lot of domestic realism takes this stance, and an example in our genre might be Maureen McHugh’s deft China Mountain Zhang. In this case, the prose has to be exceptionally beautiful and incisive.

What about a character who knows both who they are and what they’re doing?

This character has nowhere to go; they’re already there. But we see it done successfully when the conflict is intensely external. Many series adventures and mysteries fall into this category. Think, for example, of James Bond. He absolutely knows who he is and what he’s doing. In this kind of story, plot is everything; character development doesn’t really come into it. We might be able to put Lois McMaster Bujold’s much-beloved Vorkosigan books into this category, though the wonderful Miles does develop as a character, brilliantly, over many books. In this case, the plotting has to be exceptionally strong.

Once again: A character should know one of two things: Who they are, or what they’re doing.

Sometimes a character thinks they know who they are, but they find out the truth in the end. Sometimes they reject that truth.

Frodo Baggins is the perfect example. He thinks he knows who he is (a simple Hobbit) and he knows what he’s doing (destroying the One Ring). In the end, we know that he’s a great hero. But Frodo rejects that view of himself. He will never consider himself a hero, and has been broken by his ordeal.

An opposite example is Jane Eyre. Young, orphaned, rootless, she doesn’t particularly know who she is, nor what she’s doing; she’s simply taking the only route available. But when pushed to extremes, Jane’s strong personality surfaces, with her radical spiritual outlook. She has always known who she is. Jane learns to impose her will on the world and is rewarded with happiness.

This isn’t a recipe or formula to solve every story problem. It’s just a way of thinking about character and story. In my current story-in-progress, my main character Jules is over a hundred years old. At that age, it’d be sad if she didn’t know who she is or what she’s doing. But when I examine Jules in this way, the key to her character becomes clear: She’s been avoiding something her whole life. For her story to have meaning, she’ll have to face up to that reality.

Again, not all advice works for all writers. But the next time you’re at sea with a story, especially if the problem seems to be character, try asking yourself: Does my character know who they are, or do they know what they’re doing? If they know neither, then it’s time to pump up the incisive beauty of your prose. If they know both, then your plotting game has to be spectacular. But if they know one and not the other, then you’ve got a character with places to go and a story to tell about them.

About the Author

Kelly Robson’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and multiple year’s best anthologies. Her book “Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach” will be published this March from Tor.com Publishing. In 2017, she was a finalist for the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and was a finalist for both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

Editor’s Desk:
Stepping into a New Year

Neil Clarke

December is, as always, a mad dash of a month for me and it almost seems as though I can never get organized enough to avoid the post-holiday crunch. Issues of Clarkesworld and Forever need to be put to bed, my Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology needs to be turned into the publisher, and various other delayed projects need to be cleared from my desk. None of this was helped by the crisis Patreon, one of our major sources of income, manufactured—all on their own—earlier in the month. Ultimately, that situation was resolved, but not before it caused some damage to our bottom line—something I really didn’t need with the massive increase 2018 will bring to my health insurance premiums.

It may seem like I should be happy that 2017 is finally over, but there were a few high points like leaving my day job and all the interesting events I had the opportunity to participate in, including the two week trip to China I talked about in last month’s editorial. That said, I am looking forward to starting the new year with a slightly cleaner slate. While all that travel was quite enjoyable, it will be nice to have a few months at home, catching up on my to-do list, and spending more time with my family.

One of the things I’m celebrating this month is the third anniversary of our relationship with Storycom. Together, we’ve managed to bring a nice assortment of Chinese science fiction to the pages of Clarkesworld. It’s been a lot of fun and while I was in China, we spent some time discussing what we can do to build upon this nice foundation we’ve built. Last year, Storycom published Touchable Unreality, a bilingual (Chinese/English) anthology of the stories from the first year of our project. It’s only available in China and we had originally hoped to bring it here, but the market for bilingual books is too thin to be practical. Instead, we’ve decided to publish an anthology featuring the best of our first three years and use it to fund additional Chinese translation projects. I won’t tip much more of our hand at this time, but all will be revealed soon!

Speaking of special projects, one of last year’s experiments was to run a novella in Clarkesworld. Juliette Wade, the author of “Sunwake in the Land of Teeth”—last year’s novella—will return with another in a few months. I already have it in hand, it’s just a matter of finding the right stories to pair it with. When we run a novella, we need to have a few shorter works to pair it with. Being an online magazine we don’t have to worry about page limitations, but we do have to watch our budget. We aren’t revising our guidelines just yet, but that door will be swinging open sometime in 2018.

By the time you read this, I will have turned in the manuscripts for two 2018 anthologies: Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three and The Final Frontier. In the next couple of months, I’ll begin reading stories for reprint in Not One of Us, my third 2018 anthology, which will be published late in the year. This one focuses on aliens on Earth and covers refugees, invaders, and tourists. An open call will follow my preliminary reading and be announced on neil-clarke.com.

I haven’t forgotten those Clarkesworld annuals either. Year Nine had to be tabled due to the end-of-year travel, but gets back into production later this month. Year Ten is in the preliminary stages and could follow a few months later. As I’ve mentioned before, these are two-book volumes now, so it’s taking a bit more work than originally expected.

As for travel, at this point, I only have a few things on my calendar:

ICFA (Florida) in March

Balticon (Maryland) in May

Readercon (Massachusetts) in July

Worldcon (California) in August

Capclave (Maryland) in October

I suspect there will be a few local events added and who knows what other opportunities will arise as the year goes on. Maybe I’ll see some of you at one or more of them!

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

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: Vukileyo!

Artur Sadlos

About the Artist

Artur has been a concept artist, illustrator, and art director for almost fifteen years. He designs for the video game industry, animation, and film. Due to the broad and passionate interest in the entire process of creation, he never limited himself to one creative field. In his career, he has occupied many positions and roles sharpening a wide range of skills. He works both in traditional and digital media, striving for their synergy in serving the ultimate end-result. For several years has been developing the project “Mooeti.” A rich, ever-expanding world based on the ideas of travel and exploration of the unknown. His portfolio contains titles such as For Honor, Witcher 3, Hitman, Halo 5, Batman, Total War: Warhammer, Dead Island, and Call Of Juarez. He has worked with well-known studios such as Framestore, MPC, Platige Image, Techland and Ars Thanea. Frequent award-winner in the field of art direction, concept design and illustration. His works were published many times in prestigious publications such as Spectrum, ImagineFX, Exotiqe, and Expose.