A Vastness

Bo Balder

Yoshi scythes the lotus seedpod with orange-slickered arms and tosses them in the harvesting bag on her back. The blue sky overhead reflects ominously in the still ponds below. She reaches out and cuts the same perfect pod again. This means she’s in the dream. Any moment now. Dream-Yoshi can’t stop her hands cutting that damn seedpod once more. There it is.

The waters ripple and become still again. Yoshi staggers as the ground below rises up, and up, the water streaming off the new hill. Her legs won’t move although she’s screaming at them to run. Earth and sky tumble over each other. A vast rumbling booms painfully through every bone in her body. She screams but no sound comes out. The world flickers orange and green, and frighteningly, black. Where is the sky? The air slams out of her body and she touches that terrible black hide no it touches her—

“Professor, we need you on the bridge.” Her phone.

Dream-Yoshi wants to answer the phone, but she has no hands, and no pockets. Her hands cycle uselessly in the air, finding nothing.

Yoshi opened gummy eyes. She’d fallen asleep in her desk chair. Unlike the chair, her bed was programmed to wake her up when her vitals became agitated, so no wonder the dream had gone on for so long. She closed her mouth and wiped off drool. Had she been shouting?

Her breath came in gasps and her armpits were drenched. Jesus. Would it never stop? That awful memory of being dragged along by the Guardian monster still made her feel that helpless panic again. No amount of therapy had helped, and it was thirty-five years ago now.

She imagined her grad students hovering over her, expressions of disgust or concern on their faces. But she was the only one judging herself for this, she remembered this from therapy. Get back in the moment. The past was in the past, it had no power over her.

Yoshi lurched out of her cabin, stumbling because her left leg had gone to sleep. She entered the crowded bridge, blinking to make sense of what she saw. Her four grad students hovered behind the semi-circle of the bridge crew seated behind their nav screens.

“Professor A.? You all right? The Guardians are getting away,” Elivera said.

The spaceship’s comm showed the path the school of Guardians was taking in purple. It led away from the galaxy into the void between the stars. The Guardians were speeding up, getting away from the research vessel, into black map-space only sprinkled with galaxies at the edge. Or wait, it was the ship that had slowed down.

Yoshi gestured at the fading spoor.

“That’s where we are going, captain. Set us on an intercept course.”

Captain Makeba bared her teeth. “Professor, please note my objections to this course of action. We are not equipped for speeds like that, and where we’re going there is no one to help us if we get into trouble.”

Finding out about the Guardians, their biology, their ecology, their sentience and culture, if they had it, was Yoshi’s life’s goal. Couldn’t the captain see she was enabling the escape of the most enigmatic aliens humanity had ever met?

“Captain, this vessel’s goal is to follow and study the Guardians. You agreed to that when we rented the ship.”

The captain sighed. “Yes, I did. May I remind you of the waiver you signed for personal compensation in case of mishap? This is dangerous. Also, it could cost your university a lot of money.”

“Fine, fine, you’ve re-dotted a line you already dotted. Can we please continue now?” Yoshi said, reluctant to tear her eyes away from the purple spoor.

The captain nodded to the navigator. “Return to the original settings for the Guardian school. Get us back on track.”

Yoshi tried to follow the grids and statistics and charts, but she didn’t have the hard science background. She stepped back among her students.

“Wiwing?”

Wiwing was the student with the astrophysics and navigation knowledge. She nodded. “That should work. It will get us back onto our original course and ping when we reattach to the school.”

Yoshi wrung her hands. “If we lose them, I’m going to throttle that coward of a captain. We had them.”

Elivera scrunched up her face. “Don’t stress out over it yet, professor. Time enough for that if it happens.”

Yoshi snorted. She was a few decades older than the grad students, and although together they had the skills to follow her course, she suspected that without her they would lack the drive, or maybe she should call it the insanity, to continue their research into the depths of space.

Yoshi had grown up on a planet inhabited by Guardians, immense beings that casually burrowed through human settlements if they wanted to. The defining experience of Yoshi, then a sixteen-year-old boy, had been getting caught up in the slipstream of a Guardian’s travel, ripped out of the lotus field he’d been harvesting. At first she’d dreamed the event every night.

After Yoshi had got away from Libertà to study on Earth and change gender, her fascination with the Guardians had remained. What drove the giant creatures? Why did they stay on a planet for decades, only to abandon it and travel enormous distances? Were they even intelligent, was it play, did it have purpose?

Thirty years later, humanity still knew so little about Guardians that even the size of their population was in question. Some theories about their appearances and sightings speculated that they might have a population of only twenty-three members, others that they might number in the millions or trillions. They had been spotted traveling through wormholes, through time, being in two places at once. For the Guardians, even that didn’t seem out of the question.

Yoshi had barely sat down at her work station when an alarm blared.

“They’ve moved up a space layer. We can see individuals!” Anna said.

Yoshi looked over the navigator’s shoulder at the big screen and whooped with excitement. The subspace image, all blues and grays against a black background, showed a dozen or so stingray-like shapes undulating languidly through space.

“They’re magnificent,” Yoshi breathed. “Amazing. Thirteen?”

“Thirteen,” Wiwing said. “Should we get closer? They’ve got a course ready.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Yoshi said. She raked a hand through her cropped hair. “We need to observe them 24/7.”

“Yes, sir,” Elivera said with a mock salute.

The grad pod settled back down at their stations, shifting in their seats with little frowns of concentration. At the navigation consoles, the crew went on their business of running the ship.

Yoshi took up Oluwe’s station and familiarized herself with the controls. Her hands typed and swiped faster, images called up and assessed in a microsecond. She felt sharper and faster since the realization that this was really happening. She was following a school of Guardians. Maybe ‘school’ was not grandiose enough, now that she thought about it. The Guardians weren’t fish. Throng, maybe, or gathering. No, too dull.

Vastness. A Vastness of Guardians. Though Guardians itself was a misnomer, a name coined by a superstitious populace eager to believe. She’d been one of them, believing like her mother that the Guardians were gods. Until that etched-in day that the boy Yoshi had his close encounter with their dreadful integument. Then she’d known they weren’t benevolent guardians but monsters.

But Guardians was the name under which they’d strayed into human research and it would have to stay for now. They were certainly immense and awesome, even if they turned out not to be intelligent. But then again, maybe humans couldn’t really measure the intelligence of an alien, let alone one this seemingly untethered from physical limits.

Focus, Yoshi.

Data streamed in about the Guardians’ distortion of space. It seemed the Guardians were physical creatures, of some kind of flesh and blood as ordinary searches returned physical information, but at the same time they were able to bend space and time in a way the spaceship’s instruments just weren’t registering.

“We need so much more than just our grad pod!” Wiwing said, slumping forwards and banging her forehead on her station. “We need AIs, experimental and theoretical physicists to devise new instruments. We can’t measure something if we don’t know what we’re measuring.”

Yoshi ignored Wiwing’s little moment. She was right, of course, but wishing wouldn’t change their situation. They should focus on what they could do right now.

She grunted in dismay. “This projection shows they’ll be going out of range in twenty-four hours. They’re just too fast. And that’s best-case scenario. If they decide to go universe-skipping, we can’t follow anyway. Wiwing, check my calculations?”

The concentration returned to Wiwing’s face, smoothing it out and making her look younger than her late twenties. She chewed her full bottom lip. “You’re right, Professor. We’re gradually falling back. We have to gather as much data as we can.”

“Twenty-four hours is not enough. We need months, years.” Yoshi dragged at her hair in frustration, but the space-shorn locks were too short to give a good yank on. The most she could achieve was hedgehog. “We have to do something.”

“But what?”

“We could shoot off a probe,” Anna said. “We can give it an extra boost so it can stay abreast of the Guardians, and then when it’s exhausted, the ship can pick it up.”

Yoshi whipped her head around. “I like that, Anna. And we can do more. What if we let the probe land on one of the Guardians? Take a sample of its flesh?”

The four of them looked shocked.

“Professor, what if they’re sentient? It seems disrespectful.”

Yoshi shrugged. “Mosquitoes sting us all the time. We don’t like it, but it’s just one of those things.”

“Maybe on Libertà,” Elivera said, a snap in her voice. “On Earth they’re now unable to sting humans anymore. It’s gross and invasive.”

Her Earth-born grad students had obviously received genetic engineering she hadn’t, on her struggling colony planet. But the exchange gave her another idea. “If we’re sticking a sentient being at all, why not stick in something a little bit deeper so we can latch on to it? They’d pull us along in their wake, and the weakness of our engines will no longer be a factor.”

She thought the grad students looked appalled, but she was never sure about facial expressions. “Well? I think it’s a great idea. XO, can you help us think of a way to change the probe so it not only probes but also turns into a hook?”

Oluwe shook her head. “Professor, this is wrong. We want to study these creatures, not hunt them and boil them for oil.”

“You’re taking the whale analogy a bit too far,” Yoshi said. “My mosquito simile was more accurate, and we’re even smaller compared to it than the mosquitoes are to us.”

“That’s a rationalization,” Oluwe said.

“What if we end up marooned in outer space because we were unable to cut ourselves loose from the giant space creature that may or may not be able to create its own wormholes?” the XO asked.

Yoshi held the XO’s eyes and stared back. She knew the woman wouldn’t disobey the captain’s orders, no matter her spluttering.

“And the integrity of the body!” Elivera said.

“You’ve had your genes sampled, haven’t you? A little scrape with a plastic spoon?” Yoshi said.

Why were they were ganging up on her? She must be imagining things. Tiredness and stress. She had to make it happen, persuade them again. “Let’s stand our ground, people, and not keep second guessing ourselves. We committed to this.”

A moment of silence hung in the air, but the balance tipped and fell in Yoshi’s favor.

The grad students and the XO started on their new tasks. Yoshi exhaled a long breath, soundlessly so as not to alert the women. She had to push through now. She wasn’t a fool. If this didn’t work, she wasn’t going to be able to persuade them a third time.

The XO walked them to the probe hatches. The probe bay was a narrow hallway with gleaming chrome doors, one probe behind each almost mirror-like panel. The XO decanted one so they could have a look at it.

It was hard to keep from jostling each other and still get a peek at the probe. It looked like an elongated egg, featureless white, about as long and wide as a coffin.

“Professor, the probe seems fairly limited,” Oluwe said. She was the informatics grad.

“Can’t we expand on its normal instructions? We need it to be able to respond to unexpected circumstances.”

Oluwe shook no. “It has a tiny brain, they really went the cheap route.”

“We put in a bigger brain?” It seemed obvious to Yoshi.

“No, we don’t have enough time to grow a big enough brain. So we’ll only be able to get a few straightforward samples. Turns out it was originally designed for a geology mission,” Oluwe said.

Nothing was going as it was supposed to. Yoshi tugged her hair again. It didn’t help. “Is there room for a person inside that probe?”

Oluwe frowned back. “What? No. I don’t think so. And that would be suicide. It’s a one-way throwaway probe.”

“What other options have we got? Does this ship have lifeboats or shuttles or something?”

The XO turned and stared at Yoshi. The woman had very beautiful light green eyes, gorgeous against her brown skin. Yoshi had never noticed before. It felt like she was in some kind of enhanced state, as if right before a liminal moment. Change was coming, but she didn’t know what kind.

“We do have a shuttle, obviously. You came on board in it.”

“Well, good. Let’s use that instead. It has room for all of us, right?”

“A probe is not like a shuttle. We wanted to use a probe because we can give it a huge acceleration boost. We can’t shoot off the shuttle like that,” Oluwe said.

“We need those bio samples. I don’t care what the solution is, I need speed to reach a Guardian, flexible programming slash a human passenger to get the right samples, something to use as a hook. Get on it.”

They did. Yoshi wiped sweat off her forehead. She’d only have followed orders like that if she really believed in the professor in question or their goals. Maybe her grad students did believe in her. But she didn’t get them. They were all younger, fitter, smarter, better educated than she, gene-edited, therapied to the max. What did they see in this flawed, older model? Maybe because Yoshi had had to fight for everything, for advanced studies, getting off the planet on a grant, getting her gender change. Well, if that was it, they were right. She was going to fight for this expedition, make it count, make it deliver.

Yoshi instructed the XO to open up the probe. As she’d suspected, there was hardly any space between the brains and what looked like propulsion systems. A small person might fit in there if that bundle of tubes was moved to the left, and those spaghettied wires tightened up a bit.

“What if we took out all that tube stuff?”

The XO looked at Yoshi as if she was mad. “You’ve got to be kidding. Those are vital telemetry and cooling systems. And even if you could fit a small person in there, they’d need a spacesuit. Air. A beacon so she could be picked back up.”

Yoshi was a small woman. Her heart thrilled at the idea of riding out at the forefront of science, personally securing cutting-edge discoveries.

“Sure. Let’s try it out! There’s got to be a way.”

The XO shook her head. “You’re insane.”

Yoshi ignored her.

It took nonstop work for 24 hours, while the Guardians crept ever farther out of reach, but finally the probe was ready for testing. Its gleaming white nose peeked out of the bay like the snout of a curious dolphin. The people in their drab coveralls seemed underexposed beside it.

Yoshi wouldn’t be going after all. Reluctantly, she’d realized in order to acquire that Nobel prize, she’d have to be the person publishing the research, not the one dying in the attempt.

Wiwing was the smallest of the grad students. Outfitted with two oxygen tanks and a newly hatched air maker, suited up, she just fit inside the probe. But one look at her green face and quivering mouth told Yoshi enough. She ordered the girl to be lifted out.

Wiwing stood shaking and crying in front of Yoshi. “I’m sorry professor, but I can’t. I just can’t. I’m going to throw up and die.”

She was right to be so afraid, Yoshi knew. It was risky. She might die. And if she was too afraid to function, she almost certainly would fail.

Before Elivera, as the next smallest grad student, could offer to be next, Yoshi spoke out. Never mind the risks, never mind the publication in Nature. She couldn’t not do this.

“I’m doing it. I’m smaller than Elivera.”

Elivera chewed her lip. “You’re older than us. You’ll be at more risk from the acceleration and the cramped position. You should have a medical checkup first.”

The autodoc could do one in less than an hour. But what if it found something? Yoshi was almost sixty, and never had any gene-therapy except the gender change. Her mother had had high blood pressure and had died fairly young. She couldn’t remember about her father, who’d left the family early, but this wasn’t the moment to find out about any risk factors.

“No. The clock is ticking. I’m doing this now. This is the best chance we’ve ever had of getting close to the Guardians. I’m not going to waste it.”

“It’s not worth it, Professor,” Elivera said. “Even if you manage to get a tissue sample.”

“It’s worth trying to stay with them for as long as we can,” Yoshi said. “Think of the data we’ll gather! We need something tangible when they’re out of reach.”

She took her clothes off, feeling slightly ashamed of her aging body in front of these glowing, taut young people, but she shook the thought off. She had something they didn’t. The guts to go for it. She stepped into the spacesuit, still faintly warm from Wiwing’s body, and waited while the XO and Elivera put on the external apparatus and ticked off the checklist.

It was time to climb into her white box. The inside of the helmet smelled like newly printed plastic with overtones of stark fear.

The probe was a tight fit, and uncomfortable from the first moment. Maybe Elivera had been right. If it was this cramped now, she’d have numb extremities in a few minutes, and if her circulation became compromised . . . She didn’t care. She could still publish the definitive paper on Guardians with a few toes missing. Fame and recognition beckoned.

The grad pod waved awkward goodbyes in the opening of the hatch before it slammed shut. The probe moved through the tube to launch position. After that Yoshi heard only her heartbeat, isolated from the outside world by vacuum. A display popped up in her vision, counting down to take off.

A giant foot stomped down on her and flattened her so hard she couldn’t breathe. The display unhelpfully showed the amount of gees her body was withstanding. She wanted to shut it off, it only made her panic increase, but she couldn’t blink or move her tongue.

The foot went away and for a while Yoshi did nothing but breathe, so grateful to be alive. She focused back on the pop-up, that hadn’t stopped flashing stats and updates since the takeoff.

Ten minutes until impact, it said. Already? She called up time passed. Eighteen minutes? It had seemed like two or three. She must have been out of it for a bit. Okay, she’d lain there panting and zoned out, but not that long, right?

She just managed to wrench herself back from zoning out about zoning out. She had stuff to do. Check her vitals. Adrenaline, blood pressure worrying, rest okay. No time to meditate as the app advised.

Hook: ready to be deployed. Biological sampler: ready to be deployed. It was up to her which to do first. Shit. She thought they’d decided that already. How could she make the best decision in her cramped, compressed, mid-level panicked state?

Hook first? But then if the Guardians reacted to it, maybe she’d end up without the tissue sample. Or if she took the tissue sample first, the Guardians might react and they’d lose the school. The vastness.

One minute left. All right, sample first. Even if they lost the vastness, at least they’d have something.

Right on time, the sample taker launched. Yoshi followed its progress on her pop-up screen. The probe’s camera showed unhelpful footage of empty space. She might be hovering only meters away from a Guardian, but she couldn’t see it. If only they’d had more time! She searched in vain through menus to see if she could move the probe’s camera around. Everybody aboard the fucking ship could watch what was happening except her.

Something pinged. The sample had been taken successfully. She ordered it to use its last fuel to take off and hang in space, sending out location data so the ship could pick it up. Time to deploy the hook. The barb.

The harpoon. Ha.

A shock went through the probe. That was excellent. Too bad the probe didn’t have a feedback loop for the hook, because it had been such a hasty improvisation. She sent out a query to her crew. No answer. She couldn’t be out of telemetry range already. That wouldn’t happen so soon, would it?

Elapsed time: 00:999 hours.

Yoshi blinked her eyes. No, it had only been moments.

Elapsed time: 00:3021 hours. That couldn’t be right.

How many hours of oxygen did she have left? She wanted to stretch to relieve the cold, stiff feeling in her limbs, not that she had much room to do that, but she could manage a finger roll and some grimacing.

If only she could move her shoulders. Her neck was killing her. She imagined rolling her shoulders, long and luxurious, back and forth.

The world shattered into shards of glass, piercing her everywhere. Colors speared her heart, sounds made her teeth bleed, and a mix of love and hate painted burning swirls on her skin. Instead of milky white plastics and gray fixings, she saw blackness stippled with light, like the silk blouse she’d once borrowed from her mother. It had freaked her mother out because then she’d been a boy.

Part of her came wide awake. This wasn’t a hallucination, this wasn’t normal. She could see right through the walls of the probe.

She was entering a wormhole without the protection of a ship.

Her intestines sprang free from her body and unwound into a long, writhing loop. She tried blinking, but she couldn’t feel her eyes. One of them must have floated away from her body, because she could see herself. What was left of herself. Part unraveling human, part probe, something clinging to the skin of a Guardian like a leech. How was she even thinking this? Something that broken up couldn’t be alive. Here, an arm fused with gray circuitry, there a belly mosaicked with white probe shards.

Maybe if she lifted her left arm, which still sort of looked like it used to. She willed her hand to move. Instead the world tilted and spun, and when she could see again she seemed to be surrounded by large bodies. Her tail—her tail?—was doing something to space so that it flowed her by like a stream split by a rock, only she was the stream and space the rock.

She felt welcome. She’d never had that before. Was this what that felt like, warmth, and being known and accepted for who she was? But who was she, then? Or what?

A trail of living matter clung to someone’s hide, almost too small for her to perceive. Although hide wasn’t the word, or skin, or integument, or armor. It was more like a self-chosen limit, by a being that wanted to be itself for a little while longer and so kept itself apart from the universe. It could dissolve if it wanted to, but it didn’t.

She twisted to look at the particle of humanity, but her whole body went along. She had no neck anymore. Wait, what was a neck? What was humanity? It was not of her. She shivered her outer layer through three universes at once and dislodged what was not hers. There. Done. She was whole, perfect, unique. Alone.

But a kernel of curiosity lingered. She hadn’t always been this self. A trail stretched out through time, backwards, with the enticing lilac scent of the past. She twisted and plaited the universe until she could follow the trail, back, back, burning red.

She burrowed through another squirming blot of multiple humanity, back, zooming past gravity wells and winking suns, back, until she found the origin. Of herself. It was fascinating. A being that had never existed before appeared out of nowhere. She looped around it in time, before it, during it, after it. It was so small she found it almost impossible to get close enough. She tried again. The planet billowed around her, trying to prevent her from disturbing its integrity. She didn’t care.

There. She managed to touch the new being with the outer shells of herself, universes layered around her so tightly they were almost physical. The tiny thing, that had been her once, tumbled through the air, its color close to the burning red of traveling back in time.

It was done. She’d insured her future. The past lost its allure. She let herself drift on the pulsing tide of the universe’s expanding core. Soon it would contract again. She waited for it.

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.

Not Now

Chelsea Muzar

There’s a gaping cavity on the second floor. Drywall dangles like rotting teeth, and the charred posters on my wall look apocalyptic. The faces of kittens and J-Pop idols have been burned away, and singed wallpaper drifts off on the smallest of breezes like black snow. Of all the rooms in our house the only one damaged when the giant robot arm fell from space was mine.

I unzip my backpack and dig out a canvas banner. It’s big and glossy and red and it says Fighting Ladybugs in scrawling yellow type. It belongs to the school, but I found it rotting in dust-coated storage. I plan on hanging it in front of the hole until someone comes to fix my room. The poster will keep winter weather out, since sprinklings of real snow have coated the black floorboards twice in the past three days. It’ll also block out the gawkers outside.

Dad says it’s a reflection of the times that the government takes so damn long to clean up these goddamn messes, and these superstitious townies can’t be bothered to bring us some over-baked casseroles during daylight hours. They abandoned them on our back porch in the middle of the night, and raccoons eat out the creamy centers, so we wake up to charred edges. It’s a goddamn common courtesy, Dad says. Doesn’t anyone have morals anymore? He likes to call our town an “oglerville” full of anti-robot fanatics. Once, on the bus, I saw a woman get her Pro-Ro hat ripped right off. The fuming lady who had done it screamed that Asian robots have ruined our economy. They’ve taken away jobs and spoiled family ideals, whatever that means. Mom was with me when the angry woman’s face turned a veiny red. Mom took hold of my hand and kept her eyes on the window, staring out at the passing cars and humming, as if there was nothing more interesting than the zip of color that sped by.

Sunlight seeps into my room and paints everything like a movie set. I imagine that the title is something like Girl Alone and it’s about how everyone else has vanished, leaving me and my room as the leftover crumbs. I already asked Mom if I could buy the wiry plastic vines sold at the craft stores for decorations. That way it would look insanely creepy. (My best friend Amy uses insanely to describe everything now. This bracelet is insanely cute. Those guys are insanely ratchet. That hole is insanely huge. Stuff like that.) But Mom says it’s a dumb idea and a waste of money.

Outside, reporters stand with their camera crews. A massive van with the Channel 5 news logo looms in our driveway. They’re doing more follow-up stories on the loss of the robot arm and the impact it’s had on the community. I wave my arms at them and mouth “go away, go away,” but they continue to adjust their silver reflectors. One cameraman sits down on our lawn, tears open a paper-wrapped sandwich and tosses his trash on the ground.

Next to the reporters, gawkers linger. They snap pictures with their phones and post them on their blogs. They obsessively check their follower count and pat themselves on the back when they come up with some clever tagline.

This family sure needs a hand.

They don’t look like they’re having a HOLE lot of fun.

At school, my classmates show me the best ones as they slap their thighs and laugh and laugh. They pull at the skin of their eyes and speak in gibberish. “I’m a Japanese Robot!” they chant as they run in circles.

I pick up a scorched square of wood and toss it out the window. It lands close to a gawker. Everyone looks up, their mouths open like turkeys in the rain. “Get away from here!” I shout, but they don’t listen. The reporter waves to his cameraman. Pictures are taken.

I won’t have to look at them for much longer. Once the banner goes up, I’ll finally have my room back, and the reporter won’t have anything to film. Everyone will have to go home and our house will become our house again.

My posters may have turned into delicate ash paper, but they’ve still protected the sticky tack that holds them in place. I peel the blue putty from the walls, roll it into a giant ball, and carry it with me to the part of my room where my bed once was. If I close my eyes, I can still see the pink and yellow sheets, my star-shaped pillow and my oversized plush bunny with its missing eye. Dad says I used to carry it around everywhere, but I don’t remember that.

The poster goo clings to my fingers as I struggle to press it against the drywall. It sticks like snotty hot glue, thinning itself out every time I try to wipe it off. People shout at me, pointless words I can’t hear over the thrilling sound of my heartbeat. Even the slightest tilt to the side and I’d fall straight to the ground. It’s scary. It’s exciting.

I pancake the wad of blue putty flat against the tired wood, then press a corner of the banner into it. It feels like I’m casting a magic spell. When this thick canvas is in position, my whole room will sparkle back to normal or maybe even better, like when the fairy godmother turned Cinderella’s old ripped up dress brand new.

The banner stays stuck to the wall for a few seconds, then the end curls back and it falls away. I can’t catch it before it tumbles out of the hole and toward the screaming people below.

The robot arm was gone by the time I was brought home. Big trucks were called in, the kind that haul space shuttle parts. Cable wires and pulleys and firemen and the military were used to ease it from my house like a stubborn splinter. They spirited it away to some secret place to study its working parts or dismantle it.

From the trending pictures I’ve seen online and the ones mom took, the arm was about the size of a minivan, and a rusted purple color with three missing fingers. Those were later found cratered in a parking lot some five miles away, each one about the length of my arm.

A national magazine asked me to pose with the fingers for a hundred dollars. I said not gonna happen, so they rushed to find someone else with my black hair and dark eyes. Three shades lighter than me and a few inches taller, but even my friends were fooled, asking if it was scary, asking if the fingers moved on their own. My friends also wanted to come over, to stand in my dead room. Classmates who’d never spoken to me started asking too. And teachers. Everyone wanted a chance to see the damage up close.

In our dining room, Mom sits with a foam ball between her legs. It’s the size of a softball and wrapped in white string. Several pins stick out of the sides at odd angles. Mom reminds me of the waiting people at the mall, the ones who hover by doors, pacing or swaying, constantly checking their phones, worrying that the person they’re waiting for will never come. Their impatience and fear hardens around them like a thin chocolate coating. It makes them unapproachable.

Mom jabs the ball with her needle. This is her eighth or ninth attempt at making a Temari, a Japanese embroidered ball. They are said to bring good luck and happiness. A finished Temari looks like a quilt of string. Bright colors twirl into beautiful triangles and octagons and swirling spirals. Mom’s Temari looks like a tangled mess. Her failures are piled up by her feet. She presses her toes against one and cracks the Styrofoam in half.

“Did Granny Mae make those before she died?” My voice wobbles around the room like a disoriented fly tapping against a windowpane.

“No, dear,” Mom says, though she pauses her work to stare at the wall behind my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Did you go to work today?”

“No, dear.” She struggles to get a spindly piece of purple thread through the needle head. “I’m taking time off until we get the house fixed up; you know that.” The government is supposed to fix my room. That’s what the official on TV said, before advertising a link where official donations could be made to the family. Dad likes to yell about how we haven’t seen a cent. “It’s 1984!” he says, squeezing the neck of a beer bottle. “Even Orwell couldn’t make this crap up.” I want to tell him it’s not 1984—the robot arm didn’t send us back in time—but I hate when he yells.

I hold onto the doorframe and swing my body back and forth. I can hear water sloshing in my stomach. I feel restless and shout, “I know how to fix my room!”

I dig my nails into the wood of the doorframe. I imagine a massive crack in the wall behind Mom. It speeds toward the ceiling like a snake slithering in tall grass. Its many arms branch out around Mom in dark rays, the opposite of the Holy Mother. The drywall crackles, like frozen branches snapped in half. The entire front of our house collapses and the people outside start smiling. Their faces don’t have noses or eyes, only large, empty grins. Their cameras flash over and over, creating a sea of clicking light.

It doesn’t matter how soft or loud my voice is, or if my words destroy walls, Mom keeps working on her Temari. Her tongue pokes out as she successfully threads the needle.

“Will you help me fix my room?”

“No, dear.”

“But I need more hands than mine.” I hop back and forth on one foot. “Maybe not four hands exactly, but at least three. Just some fingers even.” She doesn’t say anything. It wouldn’t be hard for her to use just one hand, but she’s keeping them both to herself, for her stupid Temari project. “You never help me with anything anymore,” I say.

She looks up from her work and her mouth is an angry line. She holds her arms out, releasing the needle. It swings freely like a shining pendulum. “Are you blind?” she snaps. “It’s because I’m busy.” Mom looks down at the messy thread piles on the floor, then back at me. “Do you understand how much time this takes?” She shakes her head, disappointed. “I’ll help you with your project after dinner.” She lifts up her white thread ball and adjusts one of the loose pins.

“Will you really?” I ask.

She hums a response and loops her needle around the pin, yanking the bright purple thread along. I watch it, transfixed. I open my mouth to say the purple makes it ugly, but purple used to be my favorite color and she might think it’s weird that now it makes my head hurt.

When the giant robot arm fell from the sky and crashed into my bedroom, I was at the mall. I remember the little details, like the florescent lights irritating my eyes, and how I scuffed the toe of my brand new flats, and the smells of pretzel butter and muddy tile. I remember my best friend, Amy, and her older brother Avery arguing about going home early as I wandered to the sale racks in the back, where I found the most beautiful skirt, a purple one with gold flowers.

I don’t remember the drive home or Avery pulling up to my house or me jumping out of the back seat of the car. I don’t remember kneeling on the wet pavement, as my ripped tights soaked in dirty water or screaming until my face looked like an overripe cherry. I don’t remember Mom throwing a blanket over my head and dragging me away. Even though I’ve watched the videos, I don’t remember.

Over the past week, the videos have played nonstop on every news station in town, feeding people’s dislike of us. I’ve seen what they’ve written online about us.

Pro-Ro are terrorists.

Lucky it fell on a Pro-Ro house.

The Mom’s a MILF, bet she’s into that robot kink, nasty!

If they were true Antis, this never would’ve happened.

Pro-Ros should kill themselves.

I don’t understand. How could it be our fault? The robot arm fell on our house. We didn’t ask a foreign government to run a test over our town. We didn’t dismantle the robot, the atmosphere did. We didn’t predict the future and build our house in this exact spot, fill my room with all my valuables, including the friendship bracelet from my best friend Amy; my Mickey Mouse ears from our vacation; and the painting I did in art class of a crane that Mr. Crotty said was excellent, even though I messed up the beak and feathers, just to have it all burn up.

We keep the TV off now, because Mom and I would sit in front of it and watch the interviews of people who didn’t know us, but hated us. Even the local reporters told everyone that this was a plan that backfired. That Dad was entangled in a Pro-Ro strategy to invade every single home in the country. It was an act of God that the robot arm destroyed my room.

“Does the government like robots?” I asked Mom once.

“It’s complicated,” she said, flipping to another news channel.

“But not every robot is bad.” I picked a scab off my knee. “Just like not all boys are gross.”

“People don’t like change and they don’t like different.”

“Then they’d like the robots better if they got to know them? How come the government doesn’t make them here? Then people would see them every day and it wouldn’t be different. It’d be normal.”

Mom sighed and muted the TV. “Do you know what the government’s job is?”

I shook my head. I’m sure I’d learned about it in school, but it got muddied up with all my other learning.

“Its job is to make people feel safe. When something scares the majority, the government takes action. That’s why we have Robotics Restriction Laws.” She gave me a look that said no more questions. I don’t know how Mom knows when I’m filled to the brim with questions. That night, huddled on the sofa, I hugged a decorative pillow close and whispered, why?

Dad is in the living room with his rum. He holds the glass against his bottom lip and taps it with his teeth. In his other hand, he’s got a book, splayed apart with his thumb and pinky.

“Dad. Where’s the stapler gun?”

He doesn’t say anything. He takes another drink. The ice cubes clink together and a drop of water falls from the bottom of the glass. He struggles to turn the page in his book, flicking the corner as if it were a lighter. The pages are stuck together though, and he has to put his glass down in order to move forward.

“Dad,” I say again, this time louder. “The stapler gun. I need it.”

He turns the page, picks up his glass, and makes the same humming noise that Mom did.  Sometimes I can’t stomach it, the way they hum at me, like my voice is the distant strum of guitar strings, and all they hear is the melody, not my words.

I march over to his chair and smack the book out of his hand. It spins three times in the air before it crashes into the ground, bending half its pages.

His eyes flame with anger, until he realizes that it’s me, then they settle down into something dull and distant. “That wasn’t very nice you know,” he says, bending forward to retrieve his book.

“Where’s the stapler gun?” I ask for the millionth time.

“You mean a staple gun?” He takes a long drink, then rises from his chair. “We don’t have one. Why?” He walks to a shelf where a bunch of bottles sit in a neat line. My art teacher has bottles like that, only they’re all different colors and they’re empty, and he blows in them to make cool sounds.

“I need it,” I say.

He uncorks one of the bottles and fills his glass. He chugs it, gulping the way kids do when they press their mouths to the water fountain, then he fills it again. “Just use a regular old stapler.” He returns to his seat, slouches down, and bends the spine of his book.

“There are people outside,” I say. “And I don’t know where Mom keeps the regular old stapler.”

He doesn’t say anything, just licks his thumb and turns the page of his book. The cover looks boring. All white with big red letters that are smashed together. I think they say something like Can Things Turn Back to Normal After a Giant Robot Arm Destroys Your Bedroom? but I can’t really tell because the handwriting is really bad and his fat thumb is in the way.

I grab the arm of his chair and lean back. My face feels like shoes filled with water. “Dad!” I shout, “Listen to me!”

“What?” He glares down at me. “What do you need?”

“There are people outside,” I say, letting go of the chair and crashing headfirst into the ground. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t feel like anything. “They have signs with them.”

“Really?” He closes his book around his finger. “And what do their signs say?”

“Something bad, probably.”

He shrugs and settles back into his chair. “They’ll go away eventually. Next week there will be some other family in the news for them to harass. Don’t worry about it.”

I sigh and press my forehead to the leg of the chair. Sometimes adults can be so dumb. Why does he care about next week, when the people are there now?

“What’s for dinner?”

“Ask your mom,” he says, and he’s already gone, fading back into the pages of his book.

I know one of the people outside. I can see her through the skinny window beside our front door. It’s my best friend Amy.

She couldn’t have driven here by herself. Her brother is probably nearby. Avery is in high school and he knows how to drive a car already, so that means he has to take Amy and me to the mall. He drops us off at the front, then swings back by two hours later for pick up. I used to think Avery was handsome, because he was tall and because of his car. But up close, he has all of these pimples on his skin and his teeth are tinted brown around the gums.

“Hello,” I say, opening the door.

Amy wears a dark, oversized hoodie—her brother’s—and sweatpants. The hood is up, tight over her face, and her long hair dangles from the opening like tangled yarn.

“Long time, no see,” I say, even though it’s not true. We see each other at school, mostly in the hallways now. She spends a lot of time in the counselor’s office, and during lunch she eats in the classroom.

She doesn’t say anything, just stands there like a ghost. Sometimes, at sleepovers, we’d joke about having robot boyfriends. Androids with silver skin and pop star hair. I always called mine Jeffrey, but Amy could never settle on a name.

“I need to get my banner,” I say. The news people have unfolded it already. Their reporter stands in front of it as she speaks into the camera. She points to the Fighting Ladybugs scrawl and nods solemnly.

Amy reaches into the pockets of her brother’s jacket. She scoops out handfuls of wrinkled paper and drops them at my feet. They flutter, these paper bird wings, and some pop open to reveal their scribbled insides. I already know what’s written on them. I throw my own collection of notes in the trash every day after school.

There’s a mess of people surrounding the banner, touching the corners of it with their greasy hands. Some of them are gawkers, trying to wiggle in close so they can get their faces on TV. My chest feels full of pillow stuffing. I need that banner or else my room can’t get fixed.

“Look at what you’ve done to me,” Amy says, so I look. She’s the same Amy as last week, only tired. Plus, it sounds like she stole that line from a midafternoon TV drama, the kind her mother likes.

“I can’t go out today, I’ve got work to do.” Above my head, looms the hole of my room. I can’t see it from here, but it’s there. “Will you get that banner for me?” I ask. “I’m not supposed to talk to any reporters without my parents.”

Amy stands taller and several gawkers on our lawn examine her. My belly fills up with minnows, swimming around and tickling my sides. Amy and I have been friends since kindergarten. We used to call ourselves the Super Girls, until two years ago when Amy dubbed it insanely immature. We share lip gloss and homework, and during lunch we play M.A.S.H. to decide our futures. Mansion, apartment, shack, house, what kind of car will you drive, how many pets will you own, who’s gonna love you? We circle the answers with purple ink.

“Thank you,” I say, even though she hasn’t moved. I know she’ll go to the reporters for me. I know she’ll take my sign back, and we’ll rush to my room and smash it onto the broken wall. The Super Girls save the day!

Something wet splatters my shirt and chills my skin.

An egg.

Amy throws another one and it explodes on my shoulder. Pieces of shell slip down my arm. The reporters clammer closer, hunched forward with their cameras and microphones.

“Go away, Pro-Ros, go!” Amy shouts, but her voice sounds small underneath the noise of people surging closer.

“Hey girls, look here!”

Flashes of light as bright as the sun.

“Another twist to this shocking story. An act of violence . . . ”

Camera lenses circle my porch like starved zombies.

Amy chucks another egg, but it bounces off my chest and cracks on the ground. Yolk oozes around my toes. I want to pull her hair or slap her face, but I just stand there, sticky and wet.

“Somebody should call someone!”

Mom steps onto the porch and brushes past me. “Get out of here!” she screams, throwing the lopsided Terami she’s made. “You can’t be on my lawn. This is private property!” The cameramen turns their lenses toward her. “It’s private!”

Dad is behind her. He puts a hand on her shoulder, trying to lead her back into the house. “That’s enough,” he says.

“We’re good people. A terrible thing happened to us, but we’re still good people! So leave us alone! Who gives a damn about robots anyway!”

Amy jumps off the porch, but people surge around her. They peck with their questions: Did you have this planned? What are your thoughts about Pro-Ros? Have you always hated robots? Who are you?

They’re locusts, swarming around each other to get to Amy. A reporter trips and knocks over a cameraman. Protesters hoist their signs higher and shout at the hole in my room.

“Come on.” Dad turns Mom toward the house and drags her back through the threshold. “You too,” he says to me. “And don’t open this door again without my permission.”

Inside, Dad releases Mom. She drops to her knees, cradling her hands against her chest. “So what if a robot smashed our house? We’re still good people,” she sobs. The people outside grow louder.

“What the hell were you doing?” Dad doesn’t look at me. He sways and catches the wall with his shoulder. “I told you they’d go away. You can’t give them attention or else they multiply. Go upstairs and get cleaned up.”

“We should move out of this place,” Mom says.

“We can’t afford it.”

“But the city said they’d pay for the damages, didn’t they? Why hasn’t anyone come to help us?”

I look at my parents, Mom on the floor, Dad sagging against the wall. They look so hopeless, like my old dolls who are sealed up in a plastic bin, waiting for the day when I decide to play with them again.

Okay, I tell myself. Okay.

I can’t use the banner, since the news people have hoarded it, but our house has bedsheets, blankets, and towels. I don’t know where the stapler is hidden, but I can hammer Mom’s sewing needles into what’s left of the wall.

My feet bounce up the stairs as my mind twirls like gold thread on a spinning wheel. If the needles don’t work, there’s always Dad’s books. I can create massive stacks of them, twice my height, and build a new wall.

Something thumps against the side of the house.

Maybe the robot will come back. Maybe it’ll soar over our house again and drop its other arm—not on my room, but on our lawn. It crushes the signs and cameras underneath its massive weight, turning them to ash. The people who survive place hands over their hearts and thank God for their lives.

This time, the robot arm is fully functioning. It stands on its fingers and stumbles this way and that, struggling to get its bearings. I’ll call to it, from the hole in my room, and tell it everything. The robot arm will look at me with its elbow, and after a long silence, it’ll shed the metal skin from its forearm. It’ll pick it off the ground, awkwardly at first, but better with a little practice, and cover the gaping hole in my room. We’ll build a new room made of metal, safe for robots and me, safe from eggs and cameras and Mom’s angry mouth and Dad’s whiskey glass.

Standing in front of my old room, which is filled with the last bits of sunlight, I can already see the change. The scorched pieces of wall are open, inviting, like a blank canvas waiting for fresh paint, like the crowded lawn ready for the second robot arm to fall.

About the Author

Chelsea Muzar recently graduated from the University of Nebraska Omaha with her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She’s been writing since high school, where she received her first award from the Prairie Land Writing Project. Published in print and on the stage, Chelsea’s fiction merges the uncanny with the familiar. She volunteers on the board of Whispering Prairie Press. She’s currently drafting her debut novel.

Fleeing Oslyge

Sally Gwylan

When I wake this time, I smell that dawn is close. I remember the scent of it from childhood, sweet and brisk and metallic like new grasses crushed together with aniseed. Dawn smells better than the inside of this dead soldier’s sleepbag, yet I’d choose to bury my nose and aching belly and aching mind until full light if I dared.

But Pir would come and drag me out, and take angry pleasure in it. I do my best to avoid his attentions.

I wriggle out of the bag, my clothes twisted and clammy, and shiver when the air takes my warmth. The sore on my neck chafes where my sweater rubs. I pull up the neckband of my city woman’s blouse—filthy, but softer than wool—to ease it. Around us the night mist still drifts. Young Koben seems on watch in a sea of unshaped ghosts.

Better this miserable dawning than the daylight apparitions of Oslyge, nightmares with booming voices that prowled the city’s streets: vargar and snake-armed women out of old tales; immense children-of-Fion, the skittering, many-legged crawlers a thousand times natural size. All of them shadowless, yet seeming flesh-solid in the afternoon sun, though a rock someone—not I—dared to throw touched nothing until it clattered on the paving stones.

We ran from them in terror; I ran, knowing they couldn’t be real. I ran until the fear-stinking press of bodies shoved me aside into a gap between buildings, where I hid. Later the guards in their padded armor came to round up us strays. The dead and maimed lay on the worn stones, victims of the panic. I stepped around them, over them, not permitted to stop. The cries, the growing stench assured me these were not illusion.

Better the cold mist and these days of hunger and endless walking than trying to hide in broken Oslyge. Better this than letting myself be taken to the camps the Tysthänder, the Peace Hands, claim are for our safety.  Our safety in this time of transition; that’s what their bulletins said. No one is sure whether the invaders—“project administrators” as they call themselves—are of human stock, as we are, or are alien.

Their guards are human enough.

My mouth tastes foul. I will never get rid of that taste.

Hands shaking, I build a tiny fire under the curved shield of reeds and marsh mud that Arvål—thin-faced, clever—rigged to distribute the heat signature over a larger area. Our bodies put off heat too, of course. The Tysthand orbiters could track us by that, Gunter says, but then they’d have to look at every large animal, the elk and snava deer and the clumsy, barrel-plump danskgris the centuries have adapted for life in the willow marshes.

The mist hides the smoke, gray in gray. I steep the resinous buds of bog-tea until the liquid is strong and green, and my hands at least get warm. Gunter, the kapten, watches me from his sleepbag like the supervisor from Odven Mill did when I first started work there, a cold, assessing stare. Gunter’s older than the others, with lines in his face that don’t show in this light. I think he fears I’ll slow them or give them away. I’m afraid of his power over me, though he’s offered me no harm.

I take a mug of tea to Koben. The shy boy grunts his thanks and wraps his knobby, fine-skinned hands around the insulated cup. He’s no older than my youngest brother, too young to be a soldier. I have another cup poured for Gunter but find he has withdrawn into his bag again.

I try to make myself as useful as I can.

When I turn back to the fire, Pir is there, squatting close to its heat. He’s a strong young man with broad cheekbones; no older than I. His eyes are flat as he studies me.

I take a careful sip from the cup I hold, and go to roll up my sleepbag. My hands are shaking again. That makes me angry but not enough to go back over to the fire.

“You shouldn’t let him intimidate you, Senne,” Arvål says, his voice rough still from sleep. His head pokes out from the straw-yellow folds of the bag next to mine. The dark, gold-set stone in his earlobe reflects firelight as he moves.

I concentrate on rolling the bag into a tight bundle. “I know,” I say. I know, but I can’t seem to help cringing from the man. With careful attention I strap the bag in its place on the pack I carry.

The sleepbag, the pack, the sharp knife at my belt, the boots and trousers I wear, and the soft field cap that keeps my long hair out of my eyes all came from a dead soldier on the outskirts of Oslyge. I’d picked up his rifle as well, but Gunter took the ammunition out and bent the barrel between two boulders. He said I didn’t know how to use it, which is true.

Firing a gun is a good way to attract Tysthand attention anyway, so none of the men have dared use theirs since I met up with them. Which means no hunting, except for Pir’s snares, and they’ve caught nothing. The year’s long fall isn’t a season for snares. We should have bows, like most country people do. Bows are easier to make than rifles, and silent. I used to be good with a bow.

The sweater I wear was always mine, the gift of a lover. It used to be blue and white.

I gulp down the rest of the bog-tea, lukewarm now and very bitter, then go rinse my face at the small lake’s edge. The cold water dripping from my hands gives back a muffled plink. The light is growing. I can see the thick, pale shoots of nickelvass at the lake’s edge, extending a long way into the mist. I hear a distant splashing, and a gray elk ghosts into view, rippling the rusty surface of the water.

If I had a bow, I would wait until it left the water, and shoot it. I turn back to camp, ready to go.

In the afternoon we find the homestead. We stop on a hilltop overlooking the small cluster of buildings: a stone house surrounded by a few rough sheds and windbreaks of poplar and feathery native skjovan. Skjovan is scrubby but long-lived. All other trees on NyHem are descended from stock our ancestors brought with them seven hundred years ago, though changed, as everything non-native must change to survive the metal-rich soil.

Pir throws himself down next to me and sends a hard glance my way, as though it’s me he wants to fling himself on.

My anger is in my mind only, cold and without strength. I find myself trembling. Light-headed, I slip back down the hill the way we came, finding a boulder to squat behind, as though I need to relieve myself. When I come back I choose a spot as far from Pir as I can get.

Gunter holds us back for a long, careful hour, watching the homestead from our hilltop. The road’s too close to suit him, and anyway, the Tysthänder will have mapped every dwelling from their orbiters. But we need food. We tried boiling grass and it made us ill. We’re not as adapted as the elk and danskgris.

Nothing moves below but wind in the trees and the building’s shadow as minutes pass; the house is no illusion. The people who lived there have fled or been picked up. The Tysthänder offer refuge for everyone and amnesty for our soldiers, an offer they allow no one to refuse. This region of marsh and rocky hills has always been sparsely settled, but now there are no people at all, except us and other fleeing soldiers.

Gunter says there’s a hidden base some two days walk further west. He says the survivors from Oslyge will be heading there; he doesn’t mean civilians like me, but soldiers. I’d go home to the village I was born in, but I’m afraid to see it, afraid it would be one more trap. Afraid to travel alone. I don’t know what I will do at this base of Gunter’s; brew tea perhaps.

Still nothing moves, and Gunter sends Arvål and Koben down to reconnoiter.

I don’t think Gunter likes Arvål much. Pir fought in Gunter’s company before Oslyge and is devoted to his kapten. Koben and Arvål are both from other companies, but who could object to quiet Koben? Arvål is also the only one strong and smart enough to challenge Gunter’s leadership, though he seems careful not to.

Probably I am not understanding how the army works.

Of the four soldiers, I feel easiest with Arvål. He’s tall and white-haired and thin-faced like my next oldest brother, with an earring similar to Isak’s. Arvål has told Pir twice to leave me alone, though that may mean nothing.

I lie on my belly in the coarse autumn grasses, rubbing the swollen place on my neck, waiting. I stink. All of us stink. Looking down the hill I think with longing of a pantry full of food, but also of the sauna the homestead below us will have.

Preparing a sauna takes a lot of time, more than we can spare. I know this. I’ll settle for the food.

Koben and Arvål disappear from sight as they circle the house, one to either side. After a few minutes Arvål waves his rifle from the shadow of the doorway: all clear. Gunter leads us sprinting down the hill, like dogs, he says. A dog pack might well approach an empty homestead. Once we’re beneath it the slabbed stone roof, baking in the sun, will hide our heat signatures, which aren’t very strong on a warm afternoon anyway.

There’s food in the pantry of the neat, thick-walled house, potatoes, black-skinned onions, and dried beans in bins, and shelves of gleaming canned produce. And dried läder peaches, a whole winter’s store of them sealed in a paper-lined clay crock. Pir finds them. I look up at his cry of excitement, and see his eyes transformed. The four of us, Gunter, Pir, Arvål, and I, jostle like children to grab handfuls of them, the tension of hiding momentarily forgotten. The mingled food scents are intoxicating. I don’t worry that Pir is close.

Koben comes in from the back, the west side we couldn’t see from our hilltop. He radiates warmth in the dim, cool pantry. His grimy field tunic is pulled out and up to make a carry-sling, the way a farm wife uses her apron. Inside it are heaped tomatoes, yellow-striped gurkor and handfuls of downy peapods. In one hand he holds a half-eaten tomato. Juice runs down his downy chin. “Look!” he calls out to us.

Gunter, massive but quick as a cat in his movements, turns and sees the boy. I watch as something very like despair flashes across his face. “Spit it out!” he orders.

Koben freezes, baffled. After a second, he spits, but there’s no red pulp. His light eyes are full of fear and questions.

“They sprayed the gardens,” Gunter says, crossing the flagstone floor. “Didn’t your kapten warn you?! They sprayed them all.” He hustles the boy over to an empty bin and dumps the produce in. Some of the tomatoes split when they land. They smell heady, like summer and fermenting wine.

Gunter pushes Koben down on his knees and crams a finger down his throat. The boy gags. Something freezes up inside my mind. I can’t watch this. I find the taste and smell of the turncoat Tysthand guard fouling my mouth once more, and my throat closes. I turn away and stumble out of the room, trying to breathe and not breathe at the same time.

The big kitchen is no refuge; I can still hear Koben gagging. A vase of wilted blue flax sits on the wickerwork table. It catches my eye but isn’t enough to hold me. Across the room I see the door to the laundry shed, half open, and, desperate to think of anything but the sound behind me, I remember what my aunt did the morning her youngest drank disinfectant paint.

On a shelf above the deep laundry sink I find this family’s supplies, bottles and cartons and a wide-mouthed jar of white pellets. I snatch this down and hurry back to the pantry, twisting off the lid as I go.

Koben’s still retching, but to little effect. Gunter bends over him, cursing. Pir still has one forgotten hand in the peach crock, but his other hand, like his face, is knotted with apprehension. Arvål leans back against a bin, pale beneath his tan. Frightened, I think. He is, oddly, watching me.

I yank on Gunter’s sleeve. “Here!” I say. “Back of the throat, as far down as you can get them.” I dump a small pile of the pellets into Gunter’s big hand. He forces poor Koben’s mouth open again.

The sal soda works well enough. Koben has nothing left in his stomach but bile when he’s done. I don’t know what they spray the gardens with. I don’t know if we acted fast enough to protect him.

Gunter drives us to fill our packs with food then. Koben just sits on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head while we load up with all we can carry—flatbröd, the one rope of dry sausage, cracked grains, and other things. We take a few of the heavy jars for tonight. Although my appetite’s gone I stuff pockets and empty corners with the tough little peaches. If they aren’t safe, it won’t matter. I’ve already eaten several.

We search for bows. The only one we find is snapped in half, but Arvål puts the bowstring in his pocket. Gunter stops me from washing my hands and face at the sink when I pass it. He says just touching this water could make me very sick. I wonder what the Tysthänder plan is: Do they intend people to go home? How will the people live if their water’s undrinkable?

Tonight we’re still among the upland hills, and there is no mist. This means no fire and no cloud roof to hold in the day’s warmth. Familiar stars provide us a faint light. We sit beneath them by a jumble of ore-studded boulders; we eat a careful, cold feast of canned venison stew and pickled beets.

Some of the stars above us are not familiar; some of them are traitors.

Arvål is cheerful, drawing Pir and even Koben into talk about their homes. Gunter says little. He eats steadily and keeps an eye on Koben. He watches Arvål too, with distrust.

Arvål asks me about my home then. I’d rather be just another shape in the darkness, though I understand his intent is to make me a real person to Pir. I can’t see Pir’s pale eyes from where I sit, so I say a few things: that I grew up in a homestead like the one this afternoon, not far from a long-settled village north of Oslyge. The people of my village make baskets and furniture from the fine black willow that has adapted well to the nearby marshes.

Arvål asks about my family. I don’t want to think about where my parents and sisters and youngest brother might be now, or about my two older brothers who are soldiers, so I hesitate.

And then it happens. Koben pitches forward, spewing dark liquid that taints the chill air with the stink of sweet iron and bile. Gunter is already beside him, supporting the boy by his upper arms before he can fall on his face. Koben stares down, despairing, at the stuff that’s gotten on his hands. His normally pale skin is a luminous white in the faint light, except where his mouth is stained. Another paroxysm takes him, this time of choking. I watch, unable to move, as more dark liquid trickles in strings from the corners of his mouth, from his nose. Koben’s gaze turns inward, an intense concentration as he struggles to draw breath.

He jerks again and then he’s gone, slumped boneless in Gunter’s grasp like an arrow-shot bird, like the dead of Oslyge.

I know what is due the dead of one’s household, but there’s little we can do for Koben. The ground is hard here, and the light poor, and we have no mattocks. After a period of stunned silence Gunter drags Koben over to the biggest boulder, to stretch him out beside its shelter. Pir hurries to help him. We gather stones to cover the body, stumbling around to find them.

“Enough,” Gunter says at last. I lay the rock I’m holding on top of the pile, and step back. The smell of the death is still strong around us.

Gunter’s voice is heavy and flat when he speaks. “What killed him is something the Tysthänder call ‘engineered bacteria.’”

I’ve never heard these two words linked together this way, but I take them to mean a sickness that’s somehow designed the way a weapon is, a perverse thought but no stranger than creating apparitions to drive people mad with fear. Perhaps we had knowledge of these things when we came to NyHem. If so, I’m not sorry we lost it.

Gunter pauses only for breath. “They sprayed all crops in the settled regions with it, all but those in Holberthe, where the people welcomed them.” Contempt edges his words, though he doesn’t revile them as I would. At least one of the guards who drove us was from Holberthe; I heard it in his voice. “The Tysthänder say they work to harness what they call our world’s full adaptive potential, that this is but a first step. So I was told.” He pauses and looks down towards his feet. “They tried to win the army’s help by telling us of the danger. Thus I knew, and my duty was to see that you all were warned.”

Gunter takes off his officer’s cap and holds it in his big hands. All of us follow suit.

“Koben, your death is on my head,” Gunter says, hoarse.

Pir shakes his head angrily. “They killed him, Kapten, as they killed all the others.” The words burst out of him. “I will see that they pay, Koben, I swear it.”

I wonder how he’ll do that, but he’s right that Koben’s death—yet another one—is on the Tysthänder, the Peace Hands who say they don’t use violence. I echo Pir: “They killed him.”

Gunter doesn’t acknowledge our words.

You should speak good of the dead at a funeral, not merely curse their killers. I find something to say, though it seems inadequate. I didn’t really know him; he was so quiet. “Koben, you reminded me of my youngest brother, whom I love. Gud keep your spirit.”

“Rest in peace, Koben,” Arvål says softly. He stands off by himself a little, as he often does. His expression, as much as I can see it, is weary and sad, and his hands’ grip is tight on his cap. The stone in his ear winks as it catches the starlight.

I wonder what peace means now.

Without saying anything more, Gunter shoulders both his pack and rifle, and Koben’s, and walks away from the makeshift grave. It’s foolhardy to travel at night if you don’t have to, but I don’t want to sleep here either.

I wish I had a stick to feel the way before me.

I don’t know how long we stumble onward, or how far we travel in that time. At first we go single file, letting Gunter pick our path, but as exhaustion takes its toll, we straggle more, and wander off to one side or the other. Or at least I straggle.

At one point this begins to seem funny to me. I see an image of myself as a pup trying to keep up with its mother, when the mother isn’t paying any attention to it. I guess it’s thinking of Gunter as a bitch with pups that strikes me as funny.

Certainly Gunter seems unaware of us.

On a particularly rough hillside I lose sight of everyone before I reach the top. I’m groggy enough by now that this is slow to sink in. Then it hits me that I might end up out here on the broad uplands alone, and I’m wide awake again. I scramble up the slope without watching as I ought, but I don’t fall.

At the crest I pause, listening and straining my eyes for a sign of the men. I can’t see anything I’m sure of—is that dark shape one of them?; is it moving?—but after a moment I hear a thump and a muttered curse close by. Relief trickles in, and I make my way toward the sound with a little more care.

Not care enough. When I’m a little ways downslope, picking my way through a thicket of brush, my left foot snags, then both feet are tangled up with something too solid to be a shrub and too yielding to be a boulder; I can’t keep myself from falling.

Pir yelps.

The smell should’ve warned me I was close to one of the others, I think as I fall, as I land hard on top of Pir. It’s a useless thought, shaken out of me when he shoves me off him. The weight of the pack pulls me over on my back. The rock ledge he likely tripped on digs into my hip as I try to squirm further away, onto my side.

“Djävul take it!” Pir snaps out of the darkness, his voice raw with exhaustion. “Can’t you watch where you’re going?” Burdened by his own pack, he rolls half on top of me as he struggles to get up once again.

Then Pir feels who I am. I know when he knows, cold in my guts, a prickling ache spreading in my limbs.

A hand, Pir’s hand, knocks off my cap and knots itself hard in my tangled hair, while his other arm flails, getting free from his pack strap. His face is a wide-eyed blur. I have no leverage, held down by the weight strapped to my back, his knee already pinning one leg, his panting harsh in my ears; I am trapped; I am trapped. I think to yell. Days on the run, where silence is part of safety, slows the impulse, and his mouth is hard on mine, his weight presses the breath out of me. The musk of skin smothers me in past terror, while my body struggles with the present, his body shoving against mine. At least with him above me now I have something to push against, a strange sort of anchor.

The smell, the taste in my mouth is not the Tysthand guard. The breath rasping in my ears sounds more desperate than triumphant. I can fight back.

I bite Pir, hard. He jerks away, crying out, and I fumble for the knife I remember I have, that I didn’t have then, in Oslyge.

Then someone drags Pir off me. Pir kicks me in the process, but there’s not much force behind it. I manage this time to roll to my side and then onto my hands and knees so I can get up. Arvål is pummeling Pir a few feet away. Pir, on the bottom this time, is trying to defend himself.

“Stop.” Gunter stands a little ways downslope, his face like stone. He’s not a tall man—no taller than I—but he has a large presence. Arvål freezes, his right arm cocked back for another blow. Then he lets go a deep breath and gets off Pir.

Pir scrambles to his feet, panting, unsteady. His mouth is bleeding, either where I bit him or from one of Arvål’s blows. He opens his mouth—to explain, perhaps; to accuse—but Gunter halts him with a cold glare. Then Gunter looks at Arvål, who lifts his chin a little, defiant.

And Gunter looks at me. His eyes are angry. I look back. I see the pain sketched around his mouth and eyes, beneath the anger. I find I’m no longer afraid of him.

“We’ll camp down below,” he says, and turns away.

I recover my cap.

After a day and a half more of hard travel, some of it wading through knee-deep water, we’re once again working our way up into the yellow hills. The sky is clear, but there’s a cold edge to the breeze that whips the tall grasses.

As we climb I feel the absence of Koben. His not-presence is always somewhere in my mind. Four people don’t travel with the same rhythm as five.

Gunter and Pir are up ahead, both silent. Gunter seems to have more energy this afternoon. He looks around, an alert eagerness in the angle of his head and the set of his shoulders. I think we’re nearing the base he spoke of.

Pir keeps his eyes on the ground. His lip is still swollen. He hasn’t talked much since the fight, and he no longer stares at me. He seems shamed, though I find that hard to credit.

Arvål walks beside me now, asking questions about the mill where I worked in Oslyge, about life in the city. This isn’t the first time he’s chosen to hang back with me. I’m grateful to him for yanking Pir off me that night. Realizing I could pull my knife and actually using it were two different things. I wouldn’t want to have killed Pir, even if I’d been able to. But Arvål’s attentions make me wary.

I tire of talking about the city. Oslyge was a beautiful place, but my memory of it is tainted by what happened. If this conflict was over, I’d choose to go home to the willow marshes, or to live in a place like that homestead.

“Why didn’t you go to the camps with the other civilians, Senne?” Arvål asks, taking me by surprise. “You would’ve been safe there. Out here you could be killed.”

Or raped. Or both. But he doesn’t say these things. I find I’m angry at him for asking; does he believe the Tysthand lies? I stop walking, although I shouldn’t. We’ll fall behind.

“Oh ja, safety!” My voice is louder than I intended. “That’s what they promised on the radio and in those pamphlets they showered on our heads. They use force only in self-defense; it’s their Code or some such thing.” Everyone had thought the broadcasts hoaxes until the air-cars came. Arvål, a few steps ahead, half turns to listen to me. “Then they sent down apparitions that drove the whole city mad with fear. How many died then, Arvål?” He meets my eyes. He’s listening, intent, but I can’t read his response.

“And when their guards, the turncoats, rounded us up, they beat the slow ones, the old people. With my own eyes I saw this! Some of them cut a woman who was near me out of the crowd, just like dogs do with sheep. They took her off into an alley. I heard her screaming.” I stop speaking, to try to catch my breath, to slow my heartbeat. I don’t like to remember that sound, but it’s like the taste in my mouth; it goes on forever. I was so frightened then of the same thing happening to me, and shamed by my fear and paralysis.

It’s hard to continue, but I do. “I didn’t see her come back.” Arvål’s looking shocked, almost hurt. For a soldier he seems naïve. “If that’s safety, Arvål, I’m no worse off out here. And here they can’t make me into whatever cursed thing they’ve planned for us all—a good, obedient flock of citizen-sheep.”

I turn away and start walking again. My socks are still damp from wading; my blisters protest. Gunter and Pir are far ahead of us.

Arvål follows. He looks down at the yellow dirt and the tall scalegrass as he walks. When he does speak, his voice is hesitant. “It doesn’t make sense, Senne, them hurting civilians. They need the people here to cooperate with them eventually, or they can’t make a profit with this world in a way that fits with their rules, the Code they talk about. I don’t understand why they’d let their men do that.”

I don’t answer. They need us frightened, I think, angry at his reliance on our enemy’s logical motives. Something about the thought catches my attention as though it’s important. Then it just seems obvious: They need us frightened so we won’t resist.

“Perhaps they’ll punish the men who did those things,” Arvål offers, tentative. “As we punish such men in the army.”

I snap at him, “They lie, Arvål, and you can’t trust anything they say. If any of them break this Code of theirs, it will always be our fault we’re dead.” I walk on very fast, ignoring my blisters.

We gain a little on Gunter and Pir.

After a while Arvål speaks again, desolation in his voice. “I’ve hoped they weren’t lying about the camps, that my uncle would be out of danger there. He isn’t young.”

I shrug, still upset. “Well, maybe if he moves fast and does everything they want, and he’s lucky, he’ll be fine.” And maybe they’ll reward him then, and win his loyalty. Maybe that’s exactly what they plan, with the rapes and beating deaths useful tactics in their program.

“I hope so.” He frowns in thought, treading with caution through a stretch of loose stones. “You got away from them,” he says, and it’s a question.

For a heartbeat I feel like throwing up; I feel the guard’s grip on the back of my head, the ache from kneeling on paving stones, and the sharper pain in my neck as one of his nails dug in. I’m dizzy with it, but I keep walking, driven. “I bribed a guard.” I hear my own voice, very harsh. I suppose it’s true, though I had no choice about the coin. I got a better deal than the woman in the alley.

Bitterness fills me, and I let it spill out. “They offer amnesty for the army. Why haven’t you surrendered if you believe them, Arvål?” I’m sorry as soon as I say the words. None of this is his fault.

His frown deepens into a scowl. “I’m a soldier. This is my duty.” He pauses and then mutters. “Doesn’t matter if we have no chance against them.”

After a while, to break the silence, I ask about his uncle.

“He’s a teacher, in Pesgjevving. He raised me. He was strict, but very good to me.” Arvål isn’t thinking about his answer. It sounds automatic, like he’s said that and nothing more many times.

I nod. I don’t know much about Pesgjevving, except that it’s a grim, gray sort of place near the border with Holberthe, the center of the mountain region as Oslyge is of the upland plains. A university is there. “I thought maybe you’d gone to more than a village school. You sound like it sometimes. Different.”

Arvål glances at me, wariness in his eyes. Their dark irises seem the same color as the stone in his earlobe. “Ja, I went to the university for a short while,” he answers, and then shuts up. Perhaps he is self-conscious. An educated foot soldier can’t have an easy time of it, not if it shows. I decide I won’t ask him more questions now. We seem to both be poking at the other’s sore spots.

Up ahead Gunter pauses just shy of the hill’s crest, to survey the land on the other side. Between one breath and another he drops flat, signaling us down. His rifle is no longer slung from his shoulder, but in his hands.

When I hit the grass the pack I carry knocks the air from my lungs, though it’s lighter than it was two days ago. This close, the grass smells of hay and alkali dust. Tiny springes, brown insects a scant centimeter long, leap away. I follow Arvål’s worn boot soles as he crawls upslope to join Gunter and Pir.

Gunter points down to our left. Some distance along the long, shallow valley below is a group of men, twenty or more, all dressed in the same dirty-straw color we wear. Other survivors from the Oslyge regiment that Gunter hoped for, or a trap.

We watch them for a while. They cast proper shadows, and travel away from us, westward, at a footsore pace.

“I’ll go check them out, Kapten,” Pir says into the silence. He’s already poised to move.

Gunter looks at Pir for a long moment, calculating the odds maybe. Then he nods acceptance.

Pir scuttles backward until he’s far enough below the hill’s crest to run bent over without being seen. When he’s some distance away from us Pir straightens and walks over the crest. His rifle’s in his hands, the muzzle down. After a minute or so he whistles like a danskgris, an unlikely sound up here in the hills, but safer than a shout, I suppose.

The signal carries well. The men in the valley scatter, and flatten themselves in the grass. Sunlight gleams on the barrels of their weapons. The grass provides scant cover from anyone up at our height, but spread apart like that, they make a more difficult target. I hear Gunter muttering in approval.

Pir waves his rifle. The tiny men below don’t respond. I see their heads turning as they survey the crests of the hills around them. We hold very still. The swelling on my neck throbs in the sun’s heat. Now I remember how I got it—the guard’s fingernails. The traitor with his shirt hem of that jacquard linen they favor in Holberthe, pulled loose from the opening in his padded armor.

I suppose the sore will heal eventually. Washing with soap and hot water would help.

Pir sets off at a steady lope towards the soldiers, holding his rifle horizontally above his head. At a distance from them no greater than the length of a wealthy farmer’s barn, Pir stops. Two of the soldiers scramble to their feet, sling their rifles back over their shoulders, and come toward him, their arms open. The others relax their guard, stand up, or sit back with their hands loose. One of the two approaching Pir grabs him in a hug.

A moment later Pir turns and waves us down.

Twenty-eight travel with a much different rhythm than four or five. The leader of this group, Överste Rimestad, sends pairs of scouts ahead to guard against surprises. They come and go at intervals, running, while the rest of us keep a steady pace.

I stay close to Gunter at first. I know nothing of these new soldiers. But here Gunter is Kapten Prett, and he walks with the överste, listening respectfully when the skinny officer talks. This morning I was part of Gunter’s group, whatever the tensions between me and Pir. Once again I’m nobody.

Pir stays close to his friends, the man who hugged him and the other one. Most of these soldiers are from Pir and Gunter’s company. Arvål travels at the rear of this group, not talking much to anyone. After a while I fall back to walk near him.

Arvål’s dark eyes hold a nervous spark. He nods at me, though his mind seems elsewhere.

The sun is very low; still we climb and descend hills. At the moment we are climbing. I ask, “Do you think we’re getting close to this base, Arvål?”

“I am sure of it,” he answers, but says nothing more.

A sunburned infantryman ahead slows his pace until he’s walking beside me. After a bit he offers his name: “Raulf.”

“Senne,” I answer. There seems no harm in him; he’s only curious.

“Ah, you’re not enlisted, as we are?” The soldier flushes, which makes his whole face red, instead of just his cheeks and nose. It’s a foolish question—women don’t join the army—and a good question as well. I travel with soldiers and wear most of the uniform. What’s he to think? I hope wearily that I’m too grimy for him to conclude I’m some kind of prostitute.

“No, I worked in a clothing mill in Oslyge,” I tell him, hoping to leave the matter there. The hill’s getting steeper. I concentrate on my footing among the stones.

“Oslyge,” he repeats, and his eyes look bleak. “That was a bad time.”

We’re catching up with the others. Scouts have returned and the group halts while the överste listens to their report.

The officer is smiling. Gunter is smiling. I hear someone say one of the entrances to the base has been spotted. I find I’m excited and fearful in equal measure.

Överste Rimestad gives the hand sign to move out. Eager, the men hurry upward. I see Gunter’s—Kapten Prett’s—broad back ahead, Koben’s rifle stuck through the ties of his pack. I see Pir and his friends disappear over the crest.

At last, panting, I reach the top. The sunburned soldier has gone on ahead. Arvål stands on the crest, resting, looking down, his shadow long behind him. Across a shallow bowl of yellow grass is an outcropping of rock, not very impressive, though a few dark openings in the rock indicate caves. Boulders litter the slope before the rock face. The sun is setting beyond the hills, and the sky is clear gold and peach and green.

Arvål glances at me. I think he’s about to say something, so I pause. He holds his silence, and I start down.

Arvål follows, the last of us. As if he’s just become aware of this, he plunges by me, down into the shadowed grass.

I don’t want to fall completely behind but I don’t need to be first to the cave, either. I trot downslope, being careful of my footing. My pack jounces on my back.

Aided by the slope, Arvål has already reached the cluster of soldiers around Överste Rimestad and Gunter. I see Rimestad put out a hand to stop Arvål, and the two of them stand talking as the others pass them by. Arvål salutes as though given an order, and the officer continues on.

Arvål goes on too, after a moment, no longer eager. He’s got some unpleasant duty, I think. That would be Gunter’s doing.

I catch up to the sunburned soldier and several others down on the flat. With the sun gone the breeze is much colder, though there’s still plenty of light. I shiver and hurry onward, eager now to be inside before full dark.

Another soldier comes up level with me, not too close. I hadn’t thought anyone was behind. I glance over at him as he picks his way through the grass. A gangly youth, a little ragged, with knobby knuckles beneath too-long sleeves. Koben.

Koben. It cannot be Koben. The grass at his feet doesn’t bend. He has no shadow.

None of us have shadows; the sun’s down.

There are too many men ahead of us. Around us.

My heart pounds in my chest like fever, like terror. I open my mouth to shout.

And they come. The Tysthänder come very fast over the hilltops, riding black sleds a half meter or so above the ground as though this were midwinter and the grass buried deep in the copper-hued snow. They are armored in gleaming black, and their weapons spit light.

I hit the ground.

Men scream. Men scatter and their rifles crack like drover’s whips, like so many ice-burdened branches snapping. Bullets whine and the rifles of the soldiers near me strike like hammer blows on my eardrums, ringing steel.

The cool ground contains the pounding of my heart so that it shakes my rib cage. My head feels very light. Sound ceases to hold any meaning other than pain. I don’t want to die staring at a tiny rust-red bug climbing the scales on a stem of grass.

I risk raising my head. The field is chaos to my eyes at first, running, burning soldiers and streaks of light and a few of the sleds. Not many. Shot down, or abandoned now the enemy’s reached us?

There are far too many men. Some look like Koben.

I see Pir and then Gunter among the runners, though Gunter’s pace is slower, his familiar dog-pack lope. A sled and its black-armored rider sweeps between us, so for a moment I can’t see him. And then a big piece of the sled’s gone, like a slice out of a Hâl cake. The sled flies on as though nothing’s wrong, and then it’s whole again. It’s not a trick of my eyes.

Men burn and the grass doesn’t catch fire.

There is no attack. There’s nothing but their damned apparitions projected from . . . where? I twist round to stare upwards: nothing but a sky the deep color of evening, dotted with tiny puffs of cloud.

Oslyge’s sky was cloudless, that terrible day.

It’s from one of their orbiters these images come, if that’s even possible. But how did the Tysthänder find this base?

And Koben. How could they have his image, dirty and too thin as I knew him? Unless he was one of them—but then he wouldn’t have eaten anything from the garden.

One of us gave them his image.

Arvål, always a little apart from the rest. The stone in his earlobe dark and translucent like his eyes.

Arvål, from the mountains on the Holberthe border. Ordered just now to a task that didn’t fit his plans.

I’m up and pounding toward the cave. I ignore the sleds. I don’t think the light weapons can harm me, though stray bullets might. I pass the sunburned soldier and one other. They don’t shoot at me. I think there’s less gunfire, but I’m not sure. All I hear is a ringing confusion.

Someone’s lying on his belly in the grass ahead. I dodge, hoping again to not get shot, but the man’s arms are wide-flung, the ground dark red beneath his chest. Officer’s cap, skinny. I stumble on the överste’s rifle, but don’t fall.

Off to one side I see an odd-looking soldier, clean-shaven, in a dirty sweater, with long, light hair stuffed up under his cap. Her cap. I slow in bewilderment. Light envelops her, and her body contorts in agony as she burns.

Something hits me from the side, brings me down flat. Gunter, but how is he back here? He’s beside me down in the grass, angry and yelling in my face but I can’t make out what he says. I see that he has bits of wool in his ears. The barrel of his rifle lies almost under my nose. It smells hot.

I clap my hands to my ears, then pull them away. “Arvål,” I gasp, the name a gabble inside my head. “Traitor,” I try to say.

He nods; he knows already. His eyes are the blue of deep ice, his face fissured stone. He holds out a hand, stiff, the palm towards me: wait. Cautious, he raises his head and looks around. Then he grabs my sleeve and yanks me into a crouching run. We finish up on the far side of a boulder. It’s too small for sure cover, but better than grass.

Again the hand signal to wait. Gunter reaches back and pulls his extra rifle, Koben’s rifle, from his pack. He puts it in my hands.

When I saw Gunter running for the cave, he carried only one rifle. Indeed, Arvål gave them all our images.

The weapon’s heavy. I don’t know how to use this thing.

Gunter launches himself back into the center of the chaos, zigzagging, diving for cover when a sled comes near. He hasn’t figured out that they’re illusion; I should have told him. Beyond him I see his quarry: Arvål sprinting for an opening in the rock face.

Arvål in a clean uniform. I open my mouth to yell.

The bullet takes Gunter somewhere in the back. I can’t tell where. All I see is the puff of dust as it hits his pack, and then him tumbling forward. Perhaps I cry out loud enough to be heard; I can’t tell.

A second Arvål appears from behind a boulder, rifle in hand, dashing toward the place where Gunter fell. This one’s clothes are streaked with mud and sweat as I remember them. I put the stock of Koben’s rifle to my shoulder, sight along the barrel. I don’t think about killing him, just that I must stop him. I squeeze the trigger. It doesn’t take much force.

The gun slams back into my shoulder, and my right ear is hammered once again. Dazed, I find Arvål still running, unharmed, only a few meters separating him from Gunter now. Is he too only an image?

I’m scrambling across the rough field before I know what I’m doing. Someone—a panicked soldier—crashes into me, knocking me sideways. I use the rifle to keep myself from falling. The air burns my lungs and Arvål’s on top of Gunter now, his bowstring around the kapten’s throat, real enough to kill him.

Two steps more. I swing the rifle butt down at the back of Arvål’s head like a mattock, but I’m not steady as one must be to drive a mattock’s blade into hardpan. The rifle butt glances off the top of his pack and bounces from my grasp; I’m overbalanced, falling forward. Arvål twists to face me, snarling. I see the knife in his right hand, the shining knifepoint I fall toward. Terrified, I throw myself to the side, drawing my own knife, my left arm out to shield me.

The heavy pack yanks me over, giving added force to my instinctive thrust. My knife drives through the fabric of his tunic, up into his chest, easy as cutting cheese.

His mouth is round, his eyes are round. His eyes say my name, ask a question I can’t answer. Warm liquid, dark red, soaks my right hand and his tunic.

His knife’s in the dirt, the blade stained.

There’s blood on my left arm as well.

People shouldn’t be so easy to cut.

Grunting, I turn Gunter over. He’s alive, bleeding from a small hole near his shoulder. I can’t tell which blood is his, which is Arvål’s, or mine. It seems to matter.

I look around. Light is draining from the sky. The Tysthand sleds have disappeared and the field is near empty of men. I see maybe five of them, standing, their rifles dangling from their hands. I hope the rest are inside, and not dead, hidden by the long scalegrass.

Arvål’s eyes are dull now, though his ear-stone still gleams. If the gem is what serves as their eye, they’ll have a good view of his killer.

Gunter’s too heavy for me to carry. As I start to drag him to the cave Pir comes to help me, and then others come as well.

We’re deep inside the maze of caves and passages and treacherous cracks, in an irregular room lit by oil lamps—safe enough for the moment now that the side entrance we came through has been blocked by an explosive charge. The lamps warm the room some as well as light it, but still it’s cold. The place smells of damp stone and oil smoke and stale fear sweat. I’ve heard that caves can be beautiful, but this one isn’t.

I shiver, and the sunburned soldier—I don’t remember his name—brings me a sleepbag. He tells me I should lie down, that I’m in shock. My ears still ring, but I can hear him. The soldier’s face is very pale beneath the sunburn, and his eyes look bruised.

Including Överste Rimestad, we lost four men. Four men and Arvål, whom I killed with my knife. All the others were shot. The injuries I see around me look like gunshot wounds and broken bones or sprains, except for mine. No one was burned.

I didn’t need to kill Arvål. I feel sick, thinking this. I could have held the muzzle of the rifle to his head to stop him; he didn’t know I’d used the bullet in it. I console myself that he wouldn’t have lived long, with four dead men to avenge.

I’ve asked about Gunter’s—Kapten Prett’s—condition, and no one seems to know.

I’ve asked what duty it was that Arvål was given, and no one is sure of that either. None of the soldiers near me, anyway. Possibly he was to stand watch at the entrance, with some of the men already there, rather than go down with the rest of us. The överste had ordered three other men to that duty.

An injured man screams as the doctor works on him. Another man near me cries softly.

The doctor gets to me after a while. He’s an older man, not a soldier. He looks ill-tempered, but his hands are quick and sure as they unwrap the torn shirt from my forearm. He pours disinfectant over the slash and I break out in a sweat. The edges of the cut are neat with the blood washed away, skin and fat and fine-textured dark muscle beneath. My head feels light.

The doctor sponges something else, icy cold, on my skin, and after a little begins to sew up the slash. I turn my head away.

When he’s done and the arm wrapped again, he says, “Hold still.” He leans forward and touches the swelling on my neck. He smells strongly like the disinfectant. “Where did you get this?” His voice is harsh.

My breath gets trapped in my chest for a moment. “Oslyge,” I whisper. “A Tysthand guard.” The guard’s hands grip me once more; the taste chokes me. I’ll learn to live with this.

“Hold still,” he says again, and wipes something over the skin there. Before I know what he’s planning, he slices into the swelling. I cry out; I’d thought the pain was over. I feel more liquid on my neck, but he wipes it away. He holds the cloth to my neck for a minute, then pulls it away and shows me: what you’d expect, blood and some yellowish stuff, but also a small round thing like a mustard seed.

He scowls. “A tag. With luck we’re under too much rock for them to be able to trace it.” He pulls an instrument out of his bag that looks like a small pair of pliers, and uses them to crush it. “Just the same we won’t stay here long.”

When he goes I lay back on my sleepbag. I’m exhausted, too tired to sleep, and tears leak from the corners of my eyes. The bargain the Tysthand guard offered me was a lie, as is everything the Tysthänder say. I could’ve led the enemy to us, as surely as Arvål did.

Was it him? Am I sure? Maybe he’d only gone to help Gunter. Maybe his earring was nothing more than a red stone. I feel again the knife sliding up into his flesh. If I had just held the gun on him, I might know the answers by now. I close my eyes, and tears soak into my hair.

I hear someone come up beside me, feet shuffling in the loose dirt of the floor. “Hey,” Pir says, touching my arm. “The kapten wanted me to tell you that he’ll be all right.”

I start to wipe my sleeve across my face, but it’s stiff with dried blood. There’s nothing to do but face Pir with tears on my face.

“Good,” I manage to say.

Pir looks as haggard as the sunburned soldier did earlier, his face pinched with exhaustion. “He lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says the bullet mostly tore up muscle.”

I suppose this is good news. “Did he say—do you know what order the överste gave Arvål?” If I knew this, I could be sure about what I did. A spy would’ve needed to go in with the rest.

Pir looks puzzled, but as he considers Arvål his expression hardens. He looks like the soldier I was so frightened of before, except his anger isn’t at me. “I don’t know about any orders,” he says. “But Knut found a reddish powder in his pack that the doctor says is what they use to make water undrinkable. And other stuff, worse than that. He would’ve driven us out for the Tysthänder to slaughter.”

Or to tame, and which is worse? I shiver, thinking of Arvål walking beside me, asking questions. Protecting me from Pir’s hostility. “I don’t understand him,” I whisper. I stare up at the ceiling.

Pir shrugs. I see this out of the corner of my eye. Understanding Arvål holds no interest for him. After a minute he says, “The kapten also wanted me to tell you he’ll teach you to shoot.” He smiles a little at this, pleased to be bringing me a reward. I can be a soldier too.

My ears and head ache, and the tears sting again. I remember the crack of the rifles. I remember the air-sleds spitting light; the woman in the dirty sweater, burning; Oslyge. The bodies in the grass. The blood.

“Who is it I would shoot, if Gunter taught me?” I ask Pir. He looks confused again, beginning to be irritated. “All they send against us are illusions and our own traitors, Pir.”

His face closes. He doesn’t want to remember whose bullets killed the men today. “Think about it,” he says, and leaves me.

I think. Most of the oil lamps are out, leaving their stink behind. The cave’s full of shadows. Unable to sleep, I think.

Rifles kill living things, not lies and illusion. We can’t touch them with rifles. What else is left?

Arvål said it, and I thought him a fool: Their profit. Cooperation. If we won’t be bullied and wooed into working for them, we deny them profit. If they don’t profit, they fail.

I think our battle is in the Tysthand camps, for the will of our people, not out here—if we haven’t already lost. Exhaustion and the throbbing of my arm and neck bind me tight in despair. How many days has it been since they rounded up the people of Oslyge, of the whole region? Will the soldiers around me be willing to fight with other weapons?

I don’t want to put myself within the grasp of the Tysthänder. I want to be a dog out in the hills and eat scavenged food and drink from lakes like the danskgris.

I don’t want to go to them, but I will.

About the Author

Sally Gwylan was born in Texas and raised all over the South. She now resides in New Mexico in a small, handmade, off-the-grid house a half hour west of Albuquerque, where the wind blows more often than not. A graduate of the 1985 Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Ms. Gwylan works part-time at a law firm to allow time for writing, singing, gardening, and building stuff.

Farewell, Doraemon

A Que, translated by Emily Jin and Ken Liu

I escaped the city and returned home on a winter’s day. A vast gloomy sky, whitish-gray as the belly of a dead fish, stretched out in front of me. Sparrows flapped their wings as they hopped on and off the dead branches trembling in the ferocious wind, unable to perch.

I shivered and tucked my neck into my collar, pulling my suitcase after me as I trudged along the road to the village of my distant memories.

Father came to pick me up and took the suitcase from my hand. We remained silent for the duration of the walk home. My aunt had taken me away from the village after I graduated from elementary school. The only other time I came back to visit, I was in a hurry as well. For all these years, silence had been the most effective form of communication between my father and me. Yet, from the way he stood up taller when he greeted other villagers on the way, I could tell he was happy. Everyone’s eyes glistened with awe as they looked me up and down. “Is it really Zhouzhou? It’s been years since he last came back. Look how he’s grown! I heard he’s in an office in Beijing now, doing little work for big money. Now that’s what I call success!”

Father immediately objected, “It’s not like he just sits around all day! They work him hard over there.”

It was obvious how much my quiet father had been praising me to the other villagers. I wondered if he would still feel as proud if he knew that I only came back because I fell apart after I caught my girlfriend cheating, lost my job since I was sitting around all day listlessly, broke my lease, and deleted everyone’s number from my phone.

Looking at these weatherworn faces, I was struck simultaneously by a sense of familiarity and estrangement. I grew up amongst those people’s laughter and curses, complaints and whispers. I remembered all of their faces, but I could not recall their names, as if a glass wall battered by time was stuck in between my past and my present. All I could do was smile and nod.

We arrived at home. A two-story house stood in place of the bungalow from my memories, but this house wasn’t exactly new, either. The plaster was cracked and peeled from years of frigid wind. A concrete platform spread out before the house, its blue-gray color a reflection of the gloomy sky. My parents laid out the sun-dried millet and cotton here. In summers, they moved the dinner table out here and dined in the setting sun, and Father would sip his habitual cup of huangjiu.

In the kitchen, right across from the concrete platform, Mother had cooked dinner. A sooty apron wrapped around her body, she rubbed her hands together as she gazed at me. I found myself choking back tears. I had been away from her for way too long.

“You’re back,” she exclaimed. “Come, let’s eat first.”

Father did not speak during the meal, quietly sipping his wine in between mouthfuls of food. Mother kept the conversation flowing by filling me in on all the little things that had happened over the last few years: my uncle’s son became a street thug after he retired from the army, then was sent to prison after stealing a necklace; our neighbors, although older than most parents, were blessed with a baby girl, but she turned out to be mentally retarded—at the age of five, she still spent her days sitting by the door, grinning and drooling at every passerby; Lao Tang married off his daughter at last, but the groom, dissatisfied with the amount of “tea money” offered by the father of the bride, flipped the table during their wedding . . .

“Lao Tang?” I laid down my chopsticks and looked up at Mother. “Is that the family that lives by the entrance to the village?”

“Yes, that’s the one—I thought you’d forgotten. Do you still remember how you and Lao Tang’s daughter used to play together?”

I chewed my food and said nothing.

“She’s been married for three years or so, although her man is nothing but trouble. He gets wasted every single day—and after he’s drunk, he doesn’t just yell at her, but also smashes things. They’ve already replaced their TV several times. A few days ago he kicked his motorcycle and broke it . . . thousands of yuan gone right there.” Mother sighed as she poked the stove fire.

All of a sudden, my mother’s voice seemed to fade away, and I couldn’t focus on her venting anymore. I gobbled down the rest of the food and stood up to go wash the dishes, but Mother shooed me away.

Night arrived early in winter. By six, the village was already shrouded in darkness. After a day spent transferring between planes, trains, buses, and even tractors to get back here from Beijing, the exhaustion made me crawl into bed early.

I found myself dangling right above a river, a whirlpool under my feet. The entire distorted world was crashing right down into the river, quickly swallowed by the swirling water. Inch by inch, I was sinking too, and no matter how much I fought and struggled, I couldn’t free myself. All I could do was watch the whirlpool consume my legs and crush them; then came my waist, my stomach, my chest, and my head at last . . .

I woke up with a start. I stared blankly into the darkness, my chest heaving heavily. This nightmare had haunted me at midnight for years. It was an indelible scar left by my home village.

I reached for my phone and saw that it was only twelve o’clock. The rising night wind beat against the window as I tossed and turned in my bed. Unable to fall back to sleep, I decided to get up.

I turned on the lights. A beam from the filament lamp ripped through the darkness, illuminating a dusty wooden chest in the corner of the room. I remembered Mother telling me that she had kept all of my childhood things in that chest, and curiosity urged me to peek inside.

To my disappointment, there were no toys, no notebooks, no letters. The chest contained only a few textbooks from elementary school and a weird-looking gadget. It had a round metal top, seamlessly attached to a crystal cube. I couldn’t remember how it had ended up in my hands—probably some trash that I picked up as a child—so I tossed it aside. Nothing else in the chest appeared interesting. However, just when I was about to close the lid, I noticed a few VCDs hidden beneath those old textbooks. The discs had the same label, written in fading, neat characters: Doraemon.

The night was still young. The laptop I carried back with me had a built-in CD drive, so I powered it up and inserted one of those VCDs after wiping off the dust.

“It’s all the same every day, but sometimes dreams may come our way, as long as there is Doraemon, happiness will always stay . . . ”

I nearly jumped at the familiar tune that reverberated through the cramped, silent room. I fumbled to lower the volume. The images on screen were blurry and flecked with noise, and flashing blue stripes interrupted the scenes once in a while as a result of the scratched CD surface.

The robot cat opened its mouth, and another robot cat was sitting on its tongue; that one opened its mouth as well, and there was another inside . . .

I watched Nobi and his robot cat dance around in those long-forgotten scenes as I leaned against my headboard with the laptop on my blanket. After a while, the lovely Shizuka joined them as well. With limited storage capacity, a single VCD could only hold five episodes—about thirty minutes total. After the episodes ran out, the spinning CD drive came to a halt. The screen flashed bright blue. I felt my muddled head clearing up slowly in the cool night air.

Doraemon. Doraemon. Doraemon.

Those four syllables made up the magic key to my locked memories.

My childhood was utterly uninteresting until Doraemon came along.

In many people’s memories—especially memories about living in the countryside—childhood was filled with fun. They never had to worry about anything. They wandered through the fiery sunlight of summertime, caught crayfish at the lake, played marbles by the door, and swam in the river . . . the memories often brought a wistful smile. But in reality, back then, not a single child actually enjoyed that kind of life. To them, childhood was as sluggish and boring as a snail that crawled along under a scorching sun, and every summer never seemed to end. Everyone wished to grow up as fast as possible and escape from that sticky mess of a childhood, just like how adults longed to escape from the emptiness and meaninglessness of their routines.

Particularly me.

As a kid, I never fit in. Be it tree climbing or swimming, melon stealing or fishing—none of these activities interested me. When other boys chased after each other with long bamboo sticks and played games of war, I always strolled alone, passing by the golden canola flowers, brushing past snow-white cotton blossoms, and weaving my way through rippling fields of wheat.

Sometimes I would run into my parents working in the fields as I roamed about. Alarmed by this pointless—even somewhat creepy—habit of mine, they ordered me to go back home and play with the neighbors’ children. I agreed, but nonetheless continued with my meanders. Perhaps I wandered even farther, out of their view.

My wanderings came to a stop when Yang Fangwei’s family bought a VCD player. Yang Fangwei’s father, who everyone in the village called Cripple Yang, owned a brewery. He was notorious for making a fortune from diluting the liquor with water. After he got wealthier, he bought the VCD player for his son. Back then, only a few families in the village could afford to own a TV. And even if someone owned one, it was the old-fashioned kind that had two knobs on the right upper corner. Since the signal here was so weak, the TVs could only receive a few local channels. But the Yang family had a huge color TV that went with the VCD player. With the help of some occasional movie discs rented from the nearby town, that VCD player was easily the most popular gadget in our entire village.

Every evening, villagers of every age gathered in the Yang family’s yard and demanded a movie. At first, Cripple Yang ignored everyone, but the raucous would-be audience seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of persistence, sometimes hanging around until midnight. Due to their noise, Cripple Yang couldn’t even sleep with his wife, so he finally gave in and set the TV and the VCD player up outside to play movies, swearing loudly as he went.

The crowd filled the yard. Everyone brought their own stool and focused all of their attention on the TV screen. Despite the heat and the swarming mosquitos, people stayed until the very end of the movie.

The Yang household was particularly packed on Sundays, because everyone knew that Cripple Yang delivered his liquor to town every Sunday, and he would always return with a new batch of VCDs. Once, his father brought Yang Fangwei with him to town. After browsing through the new arrivals in the VCD store, he chose ten VCDs with a round-shaped robot cat printed on the cover.

That Sunday, instead of the familiar Shaolin Kung Fu monks, the TV showed scenes from a vibrant cartoon. People started to complain: “Lao Yang, what kind of show is this? Cartoons are boring. Play something else!”

“Who put you in charge? Each disc cost me thirty fen to rent. Did you pay for that?” said Cripple Yang.

The villagers booed. “Don’t be so petty, boss! You make more than thirty fen with the water you mix into a half-kilogram of your booze. Play another movie!”

“Nah, Weiwei rented this one. It’s his favorite.”

So everyone had to watch the cartoon. But the childishly exaggerated scenes couldn’t hold their interest. After a while, the adults began to file out.

But the children stayed, fascinated by the show.

I sat among the children, deeply engrossed in the world of this magical robot cat. It had come to Nobi all the way from the future to stay by his side. Its pocket seemed to never run out of miraculous treasures. It could take Nobi through heaven and earth, through time and space. Most importantly, it was there to cheer Nobi on when he befriended the beautiful Shizuka. Lost in the cartoon, I didn’t even notice the mosquito bites on my leg.

After we went through two more VCDs, Yang Fangwei stood up: “Still here? You’ve seen ten episodes already! Go home, and come back tomorrow.”

“Same time?” I asked.

“You can show up earlier tomorrow. It will be harder for you lot to get home if it’s too late, anyways.” He turned his head and acknowledged someone on my left. “Lulu, you live farther out, don’t you? Be careful on the way back.”

Until then, I hadn’t even noticed the girl sitting next to me. With the TV switched off, I couldn’t make out her face, but I could see her hair, tied back into a ponytail, swaying in the darkness.

We stood up to go home, and soon everyone parted ways. In the summer, the fields were never too dark, because starlight and fireflies illuminated the path. The road I took passed by a vast paddy field. I was very familiar with that road, thanks to all my laborious explorations of the village. However, as I strolled along, I realized that someone was following me—that girl. A firefly flitted past her shoulder in the enveloping darkness, casting a glow against her right cheek for a brief second, revealing her pale face and glistening black eyes. But when I was about to take a closer look, the firefly took off.

She halted as well.

I suddenly understood her reason for following me. The paddy field was right in the center of a graveyard, where all the village’s dead were buried. The desolate night wind whistled among the tombs. On the other side of the burial ground was a flowing river; the waves clip-clopped as if someone was treading on the water’s surface.

The girl was scared to walk alone. That was why she had kept close to me, carefully maintaining a distance of five or six meters.

So I slowed down. That was the summer after fifth grade. We were short, and our steps were small; it would take ten minutes for us to cross this paddy field. I remembered the opening song from the cartoon and I hummed softly: “It’s all the same every day, but sometimes dreams may come our way . . . ”

The stars brightened and a gentle wind rose up, flowing around us. My steps felt light and I was fearless, even when we passed by the grotesque house standing at the border between the graveyard and the paddy field.

Out of the paddy field we went, and straight into the village. Half a mile away, dozens of windows glowed warmly.

“Thank you.”

I thought I heard her speak, but I wasn’t sure. Those two words were as soft as the ripples left by a feather landing on placid water. The wind grew heavier. I turned and saw the girl turning onto a small street, her head kept low. A house stood a little ways down that street. I remembered that whenever Father passed by, he would call out a greeting to Lao Tang—the village’s notorious alcoholic and gambler.

She entered the house.

I never saw her face that night.

I leaped off my bed and rummaged through the chest. There were only books and VCD discs; that photo was missing.

I rushed downstairs and woke Mother. She sat up, sleepy-eyed, and looked at me with confusion.

“Mom, where’s my photo?”

“Photo . . . what photo?”

“That class photo from my elementary school graduation. I put it away with the textbooks. Where did you leave it?”

Mother squinted against the bright lamp. After a while, she said: “I can’t remember. That was more than ten years ago. Why do you need it?”

Belatedly, I realized that I had impulsively woken my mother in the middle of the night. I shook my head and walked back to my room. Outside the window, the night was as thick and impenetrable as iron, and the wind sliced through that iron with a terrifying squeal. Just when I was about to close the lid of the chest, a sudden idea struck me. I took out the worn literature textbook and tried bending it; sure enough, I felt something hard tucked between the soft pages. I flipped the book open, and a photo lay right there between two pages.

Hidden in the book for all these years, the photo had not faded. The paper, however, felt brittle and rough against my fingers.

I scanned the image. Three teachers sat together in the first row, with a sullen old woman in the middle. Her eyes were even grimmer than her expression. They seemed to be staring straight at me, piercing through the dozen-odd years between us.

My eyes brushed past her face and found myself in the corner. Beside me was a girl. I finally saw her face—the delicate features resembled the strokes of an ink-wash painting. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her lips were curled up at the corners. I couldn’t tell if it was a smile, or if the photo was simply distorted. Behind her was a poplar forest; her hair danced among the falling leaves, drifting in the wind.

Tang Lu . . . I whispered her name before a tide of memory overwhelmed me.

That torrid summer, my meaningless wanderings came to an end. Every day, after breakfast, I went over to Yang Fangwei’s house and hung out there with the other kids. He was a good sport—whenever we ran out of VCDs to watch, he would ask his father to bring more back from the town.

The Yang family was quite well off. They were the first in the village to install a tile floor. In the sizzling heat of summer, sitting on the cool floor was delightful.

Whoever came to the Yang house to buy liquor marveled at the scene: a bunch of otherwise rowdy children sitting quietly in Yang Fangwei’s yard, gathered around a TV.

One day, a skinny man came to the yard. When he saw us, he raised his voice at someone sitting in the corner. “Lulu, go get me a half-kilogram of liquor.”

Tang Lu stood up and took the empty bottle from him. She walked toward the Yang family’s liquor cellar with her head lowered.

I needed to go to the bathroom, so I followed her. I saw Tang Lu walk to Cripple Yang and heard her speak in a pleading voice, “Uncle Yang, I would like to get a half-kilogram of liquor for my dad.”

Cripple Yang glared at her, a cigarette sticking out between his teeth. “Did Lao Tang give you money?”

Tang Lu shook her head.

“Heh, the man’s tab is so overdue that he’s too embarrassed to see my face, so he sends his little girl here for more. Go tell your dad, I’m not running a charity here, and he needs to pay up.”

Tang Lu didn’t budge. She lowered her head and choked out, “My dad is going to beat me if I don’t return with his liquor.”

“What a monster! Karma is going to catch up with him one day.” Cripple Yang stomped on the cigarette butt. “Tell your dad, this is the last time!”

Afraid of missing out on the cartoon, I rushed back to the room after going to the bathroom. All the children were focused on the TV. Lao Tang sat to the side, baring his blackened teeth as he spouted off. “What’s the fun in this cartoon? I heard Cripple Yang’s got some foreign stuff, but he watches it all by himself, in secret. Eh, Yang Fangwei, do you know where your dad hides those discs? Pull them out and play them instead. I’ll show you kiddies what real women look like. They are much better than this cartoon!”

Yang Fangwei frowned and ignored him. Everyone else looked disgusted as well, but Lao Tang blabbered on, careless of the frigid reception he was getting.

Thankfully Tang Lu came in soon, and handed Lao Tang the bottle. Lao Tang grinned, took the bottle, and went away. Tang Lu went back to her corner, but everyone around her scooted away immediately, leaving an awkward gap.

She hung her head in shame, and didn’t look up for a very long time. I caught a glimpse of a teardrop gliding down her cheek, and it soon disappeared into her cotton dress. It wasn’t until ten minutes later, when Nobi let out a dramatic scream because of Gian and Suneo’s teasing, that she finally looked up. Her face was still lined with tear trails, but she started to giggle at Nobi’s ordeal.

Her expression held a beauty mixed with melancholy. After that, whenever I saw flowers in the rain, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Tang Lu’s face, caught between tears and laughter.

“How many episodes are there of Doraemon?” Wang Xiaolei, who had a runny nose, piped up. “This cartoon is so great—what are we going to do if we finish it?”

Yang Fangwei made an assuring gesture. “Don’t worry. I saw a huge pile of these discs when I went to the rental shop. The owner told me there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of episodes, and the creators keep on drawing more. This cartoon will never end!”

Yang Fangwei was in my class, but he was taller than the rest of us. When he talked, he had a charisma that was rare among the village people. Everyone nodded as he spoke. After all, since he was responsible for the cartoon showing, he was basically our leader.

This cartoon will never end.

To me, his words were an enchanting spell. In this world, the most vibrant flowers eventually wilted and the most stunning beauty faded away. Nothing lasted forever. No matter how much we loved people and things, time eventually took them all away.

But Doraemon was different. Yang Fangwei said that Doraemon would never end, just like how the robot cat would always stay by Nobi’s side. I almost burst into tears.

“Does that mean we can watch on until we’re as old as our grandparents?” I blurted out.

Another voice joined me. “I want to always keep on watching.”

The speaker and I looked at each other. It was Tang Lu, the girl who had followed me home yesterday. Her pale cheeks flushed pink. Her features were so delicate that I was afraid to hold my gaze. I lowered my eyes.

“Why are you turning so red?” Yang Fangwei looked at me, confused. He turned to the girl and said, “Don’t worry, Lulu. You’ll always be able to watch Doraemon at my place.”

But Yang Fangwei didn’t keep his promise. Soon after, Cripple Yang bought him a video game console. This was the most top-notch gadget ever—after connecting it to the TV and inserting a game cartridge, you could control Bill Rizer with a joystick and go on adventures in a 2D world. All the boys were enthralled by this new toy. Yang Fangwei always took one of the controllers, and the other boys took turns with the other one. Even the ones who didn’t get a chance to touch the controller enjoyed watching the others play.

All the kids were thrilled except for Tang Lu and me. Yang Fangwei had returned the rented Doraemon VCDs and exchanged them for bundles of game cartridges. For a few minutes, we stood behind the children who were excitedly peering at the screen, then left together in silence.

I walked home with Tang Lu following me like usual. But this time, when we passed by her house, she lingered and stayed behind me.

“Why aren’t you going home?” I asked.

She pointed at her house and whispered: “My dad . . . ”

I realized what she meant. I sighed.

We stood together. Wind rose and brushed against her bangs. It was a gloomy afternoon, and neither of us had anywhere to go.

Mired in those memories, I fell into a deep slumber. It was bright out by the time I opened my eyes again. With no central heating, wintertime in my home village was always cold and damp. I curled up under the blanket, unwilling to get up. But after my mother came to the room to call on me a few times, I had no choice but to grudgingly inch out of bed.

It was almost Spring Festival, and our family was about to do our regular Chinese New Year shopping. Usually, my father would catch a ride on someone’s motor tricycle—one of those with a large cargo bed in the back—to go shopping in town. But his legs, weakened and stiff with old age, slipped, and he almost fell off the back of the tricycle. I stopped him and offered to go in his stead.

Wordlessly, my father went into the house and brought out a coat.

“It’s windy. You must cover up your head and hands when you’re on the tricycle,” he said.

The coat was old and ragged. Even holding it made me turn my nose, and I was reluctant to wrap it over my hands at first. Yet, once the tricycle took off, the blistering wind immediately turned into daggers that slashed across every inch of exposed skin. I pulled up the hood of my down jacket at once, turned around to keep my back toward the wind, and finally folded my hands in the sleeves of that old coat.

The tricycle bounced along the rocky road, puttering past the scraggly poplar trees with their dangling leafless branches. The village in wintertime was veiled in gray—gray sky, gray fields, gray roads, and houses—as if the desolate season had washed out every vibrant shade.

The village was so far from the town that getting all the holiday goods for New Year’s was a chore for the villagers. Usually, a tricycle would take multiple families on each trip and ask each family to pay ten yuan. The tricycle detoured around the village for a while, stopping at different houses until it was packed with five passengers, all squatting on the tricycle’s cargo bed.

One of the young men had a familiar face. As I wondered who he was, he spoke to me first. “You’re Hu Zhou, right?”

His face quickly merged with the memory of the face of that charismatic boy. I smiled. “Long time no see, Yang Fangwei.”

“It has been a while! I haven’t seen you since we graduated from elementary school.”

It was true that we had lost touch after I moved to Shanxi with my aunt. But his comment wasn’t exactly the truth, either. I had been back once before. The village was so small that we couldn’t possibly have avoided each other on that visit. But our relationship was a little awkward, such that though we had spotted each other from afar, we didn’t wave or say hi. Now, we were both stuck on the back of a tricycle, huddled up in our coats. Not talking would be awkward, but even with the ice broken, neither of us knew how to continue the conversation.

The freezing wind howled in our ears. After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “Where do you work now?”

“I used to teach in Chongqing, but as you know”—he grinned at me, though there was some bitterness behind his pale, frozen-lipped smile—“teaching doesn’t pay much. So, I probably won’t be going back after New Year.”

“Where would you go then?”

“Perhaps Shenzhen. I’ll look for a job there.”

“Shenzhen is such a stressful place, though.”

He gave me a look. “How is that different from anywhere else?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Can’t get away from the rat race.”

“I can’t hold a candle to you, though.” He smiled again. “I heard that you live in Beijing. Don’t you draw cartoons or something?”

I actually make comic books—I wanted to explain, but then realized the futility of it. Instead, I only gave a nod.

“My wife’s giving birth soon. With another mouth to feed, I need to make more money. My dad’s brewery is in so much debt . . . ” His shoulders sagged forward. “Your dad said that you make ten thousand yuan a month. That’s like my salary for five months. You see, you’re living while I’m just enduring. You’re educated—that’s the difference, you know?”

“Everyone endures. I’m not doing so well, either.”

He obviously didn’t believe me. He smiled again and said nothing further.

For the rest of the trip, we remained silent. The tricycle whizzed through the cold wind and more withered trees zoomed past us. Gradually, the lone houses that we occasionally passed by turned into busy streets, crowds of pedestrians, and endless shops overflowing with goods.

“We’re here. Go do your shopping while I go get some medicine.” Uncle Zhao, who had pedaled us here, yelled with a cigarette in his mouth, “Let’s meet back here at twelve.”

Our legs were numb from all the squatting, and we had to shake them out after getting off the tricycle. Yang Fangwei stomped his feet while he smoked. He finished a cigarette in a few puffs, crushed the butt with his heel and started to leave. I called his name.

“Do you know . . . how Tang Lu is doing?”

He halted and turned around to look at me.

A sudden pang of embarrassment urged me to explain myself, “I heard from my mom that she isn’t doing so well.”

Yang Fangwei’s hand reflexively reached for another cigarette. He finished half of it in one long drag.

“No, she isn’t doing well.” His expression was hidden behind a thin veil of smoke. “She’s doing terribly.”

Without Doraemon, I resumed my old habits of wandering aimlessly. However, there was one small difference—Tang Lu followed me around through the rest of that summer.

We weaved through the fields, past the budding cotton flowers, and between the crisscrossing village roads. When adults saw us together, they teased us. “Zhouzhou, did you get a sidekick?” Whenever this happened, I strode past them haughtily, my head held high; Tang Lu, on the other hand, always blushed and lowered her head, then sheepishly ran to catch up with me.

During those long walks, I told Tang Lu all the secrets that I had discovered about the village: Yang Fangwei’s father was crippled because someone had beaten him up for watering down the liquor; Zhao Laogui, who lived in the back of the village, would surreptitiously lead other people’s cows away and hide them in the fields during the night, then take them back the next morning to receive ten yuan from each duped (but grateful) owner.

Tang Lu was enchanted by my stories. In her eyes, the familiar village had suddenly taken on a new aspect.

“You know so many secrets,” she said.

The sparkle in her eyes made me slap my chest and exclaim, “These secrets are nothing. There’s a bigger mystery that I haven’t told you yet!”

I took her to the river, the lifeline of our village. I was told it was a secondary tributary of the Yangtze River, and we relied on it heavily for irrigation. It flowed through the paddy fields and curled around the graveyard. There were many terrifying legends about the section of the river next to the tombs. Wang Sansha, who lived next door to me, swore that he once heard a strange buzzing noise coming from underground when he passed by the river at night.

“I couldn’t tell if it was just the river, or if a corpse was turning in its coffin . . . ” He sniffled, his voice eerie as he told the story.

There were many more ghost stories about that part of the river: a water buffalo’s head suddenly disappeared while it was grazing by the riverbank, and the blood sprayed over ten meters on the ground; before the founding of the People’s Republic, someone fell into the river and returned more than a decade later, looking exactly the same as the day he vanished . . . Adults used these ghost stories to stop us from straying too far, but I never believed in them. Tang Lu never did, either, although the stories still frightened her a little bit.

We trotted gingerly along the river, passing one grave after another on our left. Tang Lu followed close behind, shivering and whispering apologies to all of the tombstones.

We reached a secluded spot along the riverbank, hidden behind two neglected graves. A crooked tree by the river leaned over the surface, almost parallel with the water. I steadied myself by holding onto the trunk, then pointed at the river and asked: “Do you see anything strange about the water?”

After observing the water for a while, Tang Lu shook her head, still shivering.

“Keep your eyes on this.” I picked up a twig from the ground and tossed it to the middle of the river. The twig drifted along the current, but just as it was about to reach me, it sank abruptly without making a sound, as if something beneath the surface had pulled it in.

“Hmm?” Tang Lu was stunned. She picked up another twig and tried to repeat the experiment, but the result was the same every time—no matter how smoothly the twig floated along the river, it always sank as soon as it entered a certain part of the surface.

“Not only twigs, but also foam boards, a backpack, balls . . . I’ve tried all of them already. See, I told you this was the biggest mystery of the village!”

“How did you discover this?”

“A while ago I made a small boat out of wood and let it float down the river, while I followed along on shore. I wanted to see if it would eventually reach the ocean, but as soon as we got here, it sank all at once.”

“Have you told anyone else?” Tang Lu lifted her chin as she spoke, the twilight painting her visage a striking shade of orange.

I shook my head. “I told my dad and tried to take him here, but he slapped me instead. Now I’ve only told you. This is a secret between you and me—don’t tell anyone else!”

“I won’t!” Tang Lu raised her hand solemnly to give an oath. Then she asked, “But do you know why things sink when they reach there?”

I shook my head.

Tang Lu dropped her gaze to the river, and looked into my eyes again. “I think this might be Doraemon’s pocket that can hold everything in the world. Maybe there is a robot cat hiding in the river!”

She looked so adorable that a mischievousness rose in my heart. I lowered my voice. “Maybe there are dead people hiding in the river instead. Remember what Wang Sansha said? They’ll drag whoever is on the surface down with them!”

Like a terrified bunny, Tang Lu grasped my sleeve, and I could tell that she was on the verge of tears. I felt guilty about my prank. We walked back home along the river, through the graveyard, and back to the paddy field, with Tang Lu still clinging to my arm. The setting sun hung low over the horizon, casting a golden gleam all over the village. The river shimmered.

Just as we were about to exit the paddy field, I heard an unexpected squeak. The door to the lone house between the tombs and the paddy field opened, and a gloomy looking old woman stepped out onto the doorstep, staring right at us. Her face was covered in wrinkles and age spots. Although she looked about fifty years old, her eyes were icicles frozen for thousands of years. A momentary glance at her eyes was enough to chill my whole body.

I fled in the direction of home, dragging Tang Lu with me, but I could still feel the chill running down my spine.

I have seen her eyes in a million nightmares since that day.

It was half past eleven by the time I finished my New Year shopping. The wind was uncannily fierce. I dropped the packages at my feet, curled up, and stared into the dead gray sky.

Uncle Zhao plodded out of the pharmacy and tossed a few boxes of medicine into the tricycle’s cargo bed, swearing loudly. I skimmed casually through them, and saw that they were all DMARDs and enteric tablets. “Uncle Zhao, are these for the elders in your family?” I asked.

“Blargh! Not for my family! It’s Chen, that old bastard. She begs me to buy her medicine all the time.” Uncle Zhao lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, then blew out fumes of white smoke from his mouth and nostrils.

“Chen?” My pulse quickened.

Uncle Zhao took another puff. “It’s Chen, the teacher. She taught you back in elementary school, didn’t she?”

I said nothing. The pair of eyes from my nightmare reappeared before me, giving me a chill.

Everyone was back by noon. The tricycle’s motor sputtered as it wound its way back. As we reached the entrance to the village, Uncle Zhao took a detour around the paddy field. A carpet of withered yellow grass spread across the field, the dry blades shivering in the blistering wind. Graves littered the land, mound after mound, extending to the horizon like a stretch of hills. A few of them remained neatly preserved, embellished by tombstones, but most of them were neglected. Among the clumps of rampant weeds, those graves looked utterly abandoned.

Between the cemetery and the paddy field, that house still stood alone. It looked even more worn down than in my memories. The red brick walls were so stained that they were now a muddy yellow. Parts of the roof were covered in hay where the tiles had gone missing. I couldn’t even imagine how one could survive a harsh winter in a house like this.

Uncle Zhao pulled over to the side of the road. Without getting off the tricycle, he yelled “Medicine’s here!” at the house, dropped the boxes from the pharmacy at the front door, and drove on.

“That’s it?” I asked, confused by the abrupt departure.

Uncle Zhao didn’t even look back. He stomped hard on the rusty clutch. “That house is unlucky. What else do you want me to do? Go in? You know nothing. She lives all by herself, right next to this graveyard, and no one knows what she’s up to. A while ago, a cigarette factory owner from the county wanted to buy this piece of land and make it into a family burial ground. He offered her over a hundred thousand—think about how many people would kill for that price!—but Chen wouldn’t hear it. When the buyer came to visit her, she refused to even let him in the door!—Hey, what are you doing?”

I had hopped off the cargo bed. I shouted at Uncle Zhao to deliver my purchases home, then I turned around and walked back toward the dilapidated house. The hay sheltering the roof flapped noisily in the wind, but there was no sound of any activity from within. It seemed like the inside of the house was even more devoid of signs of habitation than its exterior.

I picked up the boxes of medicine and called out. No one responded, so I pushed on the worm-rotten wooden doors. The loud squeak set my teeth on edge. I went in. To my surprise, even though the room was dark and sparsely furnished, all the simple furniture was kept spotless and neat. In the very back of the room, an old woman lay on a bed. With the blanket pulled all the way up to her chin, I could just make out her gray hair.

She stirred from a light sleep, then cast her gaze on me. She spoke before I could open my mouth, her face an amorphous blur in the murky light.

“Hu Zhou, is it really you?” she said. “My eyesight has worsened—come closer. You’ve grown so much.”

I started to tremble. The medicine boxes fell from my hands and landed with a thud.

I once resented this woman so much that I had imagined a thousand times how to seek revenge. I had come inside to deliver the medicines to her in order to witness for myself how terrible her life had become. Yet, when she lay in front of me, old, weary, and vulnerable—when I saw how time had relentlessly destroyed her—all I felt was a sense of absurdity and helplessness.

She struggled to sit up and smiled at me.

“You still remember me?” I picked up the boxes of medicine and placed them on her bedside table. She glanced over at them, but quickly turned her gaze back to my face.

“How could I forget you? Out of all my students, you and Tang Lu have impressed me the most. Besides, you are the only one to ever discover my secret.”

“Secret?” I was taken by surprise at first, but then I realized what she was referring to. I tapped the wooden floor with my feet. “You mean what’s down there?”

She didn’t respond. She fell back into the sheets again, wheezing heavily, as if those few simple words had drained all the energy from her body. The room was too dim for me to see her expressions clearly. Wind gushed in from the cracks in the window, nipping at her wispy, tangled hair.

My elementary school was built right next to the entrance to our village. It used to be a bustling place: students came from several nearby villages; every grade level consisted of over a hundred people, distributed into three or four classes. However, the year I entered sixth grade, it suddenly became popular for everyone to seek their fortune in Guangdong Province. Adults who labored in the workshops could earn up to a hundred and twenty yuan a day, and even children who discreetly sewed garments behind closed doors could make at least thirty. This was much more effective as a way to make a living than trying to harvest rice from the fields. Some factory owners from Guangzhou even sent buses to our village just to bring people over to work, and every day entire families boarded the buses, lured by dreams of riches. Bus by bus, our village gradually emptied out.

Back then, one teacher from the elementary school would always stand on guard by the village’s entrance, attempting to stop the adults who tried to bring their children along on the gold digging journey.

“If you want to go, you can go, but please leave your children here!” she said. “The children need to study. Education is the only way out for them! How will they make their way in the world without schooling?”

Annoyed, the adults would push her out of their way. But she would stubbornly hold on to their sleeves. “Don’t take the children away. They are the future. They have to stay in school.”

“How will your books teach them to make money?” The adults would throw this question in her face. She had no answer for it.

The adults pried their sleeves from her fingers and boarded the bus, pulling their children behind. The children kept their heads down, unable to look their teacher in the eye.

After the interminable summer break, in roughly two months’ time, the number of students in the sixth grade dropped from more than one hundred to thirty-odd. A lot of the teachers were gone, too. So, what used to be three different classes were merged into one, and three remaining teachers were put in charge.

Our politics teacher was Mr. Ding, an old man who always rushed into the classroom after his farm duties, read aloud the assigned passages in the textbook in front of us, and then hurried back to plow his fields; our literature teacher was a young man who frequently became so captivated by his card games that he forgot to come to class, and sometimes, he would even drop the textbook and run out during class when friends swung by to invite him to join the teahouse parties.

All the other subjects were taught by a woman surnamed Chen. Around fifty years of age, she lived alone. Allegedly, she was the one who had patrolled the village entrance and tried to stop those bus boarders.

A chill seized my heart the moment I saw Ms. Chen—I could never forget those cold, piercing eyes of hers from that time during summer break, when we had stumbled by her house next to the graveyard.

Luckily, my fear didn’t persist for too long, because I saw Tang Lu. She and I had been in separate classes before, when there were many more students, but we were now together in the same merged class.

That was when I found out that this girl, despite the timid and lonesome look that she exuded all the time, had always been a top-ranked student. The only student who had better grades was a boy who had disappeared to Guangdong, probably threading and sewing in some dark room. Since she was the head of the class, Ms. Chen sat her in the very first row, which was half a classroom away from where I was seated.

Right after the first class of the day ended, I dashed up to the front of the classroom. Yet, my footsteps reflexively slowed down as I was about to approach her. A kind of shyness—particular to children of that age—crept up in me. No one was watching me at all, but somehow I felt I was at the center of a web of judgment and scrutiny.

Absorbed in her notebook, she didn’t look up. I plodded past her in silence and exited. When I returned to the classroom, she glanced up at me, but quickly went back to studying again.

We hadn’t spoken in two months, and all the time that we had spent together like each other’s shadow way back in summer had faded into a blur in my mind. Maybe she had forgotten already.

All the other boys started to notice Tang Lu as well. Once, Snotty Liu got assigned to sit next to her. He spent the entire day looking at Tang Lu with an idiotic grin on his face, so ecstatic that even his snotty nose ceased to dribble. Much to Ms. Chen’s chagrin, she couldn’t make him stop even after pulling on his ear several times, so she had to switch him to a different seat. When Fatty Zhang, the notorious class bully, saw Tang Lu playing hopscotch with some other girls, instead of sneering and taunting them, as was his wont, he asked to join the girls’ game and begged Tang Lu to teach him. He even nodded along rhythmically as Tang Lu lectured him on the fine points of hopscotch technique in her soft voice, as if he were some kind of model student.

Ms. Chen shooed him away when she saw this. “Why haven’t I seen you devote yourself like this to schoolwork?” she demanded.

Ms. Chen was so protective of Tang Lu that no one was able to approach her. I suspected that in her eyes, everyone else was ignorant and lazy, a mere continuation of our uncouth ancestors, doomed to waste our lives away in this muddy, grimy little village—except for Tang Lu.

She arranged our seats strictly according to our grades, sticking all the students with bad grades in the very back of the classroom so we wouldn’t be a bad influence. Cripple Yang once visited Ms. Chen’s house carrying a few kilograms of pork rump in an attempt to convince her to move Yang Fangwei to the front row as well, but Ms. Chen drove him out of her house without hesitation. The next day in class, she picked on Yang Fangwei to solve problems. After Yang Fangwei hemmed and hawed for a while, unable to produce an answer, she hissed at him, “Get your ass off the toilet if you aren’t going to shit. Go tell your dad that!” We howled with laughter; Yang Fangwei turned beet red.

For a while, Ms. Chen had high hopes for me as well. She summoned me to her office and tried to convince me to put in more academic effort. However, she was amazed to find out I was only interested in literature and paid no attention to math or the sciences.

“Why are you interested in literature, the most useless subject of all? Only science—only quantum and space physics—can change the world. How would reciting poems do you any good?”

She went on in that vein, and her speech was peppered with lots of words that I had never heard before. All I could do was keep my eyes lowered to the ground. Eventually, she realized that she wasn’t getting anywhere with me, so she sighed and dismissed me with a wave.

Before leaving, something on Ms. Chen’s desk caught my eye—carved out of pagoda wood, it was a small, rather childish-looking boat. I stared at it, somewhat stunned. It took me a moment to realize that it was very similar to my wooden toy boat, which had been swallowed by the river over summer break. Even the shape of the arched awning and the scratch marks on the wood seemed identical. Yet, as I took a closer look at it, I noticed differences. Judging from the darker color and the rotten bits, this wooden boat had been around for at least seven or eight years, but my wooden boat had only been lost for a few months.

“Still here?” Ms. Chen murmured as she drew checkmarks and crosses on the homework she was grading.

I pointed at the wooden boat. “Ms. Chen, this boat . . . ”

Ms. Chen looked up and her eyes narrowed. “What about it?”

“How long has it been here?”

“More than a decade, I think.”

“Oh.” I turned around, ready to leave, but Ms. Chen stopped me. “What do you know about this boat?”

The bell for the next class rang, so I shook my head. “Nothing.”

After that, my grades got worse and worse, and I began to spend all my time with Yang Fangwei and the other boys—passing notes during class and stealing from the orange orchard behind our school. Ms. Chen usually ignored us—until our shenanigans got out of control, at which point she resorted to her usual repertoire of punishments: standing in the corner, caning, and so on. All of us hated her guts.

I never got a chance to speak to Tang Lu, either. The classroom wasn’t exactly spacious, but it was enough to be an unbridgeable gulf between us. Surrounded by my new buddies, I continued with all the mischief. As a result, my seat moved farther and farther toward the back, until I hit the back wall.

Just before the end of the fall semester, Ms. Chen wrote down five math problems on the blackboard and asked us to come up and write out the answer. Whoever failed to produce the correct answer received smacks in the palm. None of the first five students called up could solve their assigned problem. Lips trembling with anger, Ms. Chen whacked their palms so hard that she even snapped her bamboo ruler in half. Fatty Zhang started to sniffle after three or four hits. Panic-stricken from witnessing this scene, all of us prayed hard that our names wouldn’t be called.

Ms. Chen pointed her finger directly at the back row. “Hu Zhou, Yang Fangwei, Peng Hao, Snotty Liu, and Zhang Ma—the five of you, get up here now. I swear, I’ll whack your palms until they break in half if you can’t solve these!”

She hesitated for a second, and added, “You know what—Zhang Ma, go back and sit down. Tang Lu will replace him. I’m going to show you all that someone in this room can actually solve these problems!”

We rose from our seats, glum and scowling, dragging our feet. Zhang Ma, who had been granted a last-minute reprieve, looked exaggeratedly relieved. He made faces at us as we made our way over to the blackboard.

There were five word problems. Tang Lu was assigned to problem four, and I to problem five. To the left of Tang Lu stood Snotty Liu with his perpetual lines of snot over his lip.

Even now, I could still clearly recall problem five: Xiao Ming reads a storybook. He finishes 1/9 of the book on the first day, and 24 pages on the second day. The ratio between the pages he read over the two days and the pages left is 1:4. How many pages are there in total in the book? As I stood in front of the blackboard, no matter how much I racked my brain, those words remained a huge tangled mess.

Ms. Chen loomed right behind me, bamboo ruler in hand. A drop of cold sweat slid down my spine. My hand, clutching the chalk until my knuckles were white, hovered before the blackboard, but I could think of nothing to write. My legs started to tremble.

No one else could solve their problem either, except for Tang Lu, who was inscribing her solution on the blackboard, line after neat line. I was struck by the sight of her. Deeply absorbed by the intellectual challenge, her face was lit up from the side by the bright sun through the window, a combination of soft lines and curves like the young willow branches that sprouted in early spring.

Years later, when I was learning to draw, I noticed a certain pattern in my illustrations. It was my habit to draw a face in profile, outlined with a few simple strokes, and then filled in with strong, contrasting shadows and highlights. For a long time I wondered where I had acquired this quirk. The answer turned out to be this seed buried in my memory. Whenever I picked up a pencil, the memory would begin to sprout and unfurl, until it had blossomed into Tang Lu’s face on my sketchpad.

“What are you looking at?” Ms. Chen’s scolding interrupted my drifting thoughts. I felt a whack on my head from the bamboo ruler. “Work on your problem. If you can’t solve it, come and receive your punishment.”

I shook my head in defeat. However, just when I was about to drop the chalk and accept my fate, I heard a soft whisper: “Make x the total number of book pages.”

I halted; so did Snotty Liu. We both turned in Tang Lu’s direction. Still conscientiously writing down her answer, Tang Lu murmured under her breath, her lips barely parting, “Don’t look at me. The teacher will notice.”

Both of us snapped our heads forward at once. Snotty Liu glared at his assigned problem and muttered, “I’m supposed to solve for flour and sugar. There’s nothing about a book—”

“Not you. I was talking to Hu Zhou.”

Snotty Liu slumped. Snot gushed from his nostrils, dribbling down his chin.

I quickly wrote down “Let x = total pages” on the blackboard and whispered: “And then?”

Ms. Chen hissed, “Quiet!”

After a long pause, Tang Lu whispered back, “1/9 times x plus 24 is equal to x divided by open paren 1 plus 4 close paren. Solve for x.”

I copied down the equation and swiftly worked out the answer. During this whole time, Snotty Liu kept on goggling at Tang Lu with pleading eyes, holding back tears as well as snot. Tang Lu ignored him, put down her chalk, and turned around to face our teacher. “Ms. Chen, I’m done.”

Ms. Chen nodded. “That’s correct. You see, these problems aren’t difficult at all. Aren’t you four ashamed of yourselves? Now come up for your—wait, Hu Zhou, step aside.”

I scooted to the side so that Ms. Chen could see the blackboard. She gave my solution a quick once-over, pushed her glasses up her nose, looked again, and turned her gaze back to me. “Well, well, well—look what we have here! The sun has risen from the west. Hu Zhou, you may sit down.”

She pointed at the other three people, all scratching their heads in helpless confusion. “You three! Come here now.”

Dazed with relief, I started to walk back to my seat in the back corner. Tang Lu had sat down in her seat already, her back upright. I glanced at her, and noticed that a strand of hair was plastered against her cheek. She looked beautiful, with an expression both earnest and serene, as though she were intensely focusing on the textbook.

I was sure that I saw her wink her right eye.

With the New Year shopping done, the celebrations leading up to Spring Festival began in earnest. The teahouse bustled with young people who had returned home after working thousands of miles away during the year so that the whole family could be together for Spring Festival. Everyone passed the time by playing Mahjong. Out of boredom, I went to join them. In the cramped brick room that was the teahouse, a heady brew of swears, malodorous bodies, and cigarette smoke soon made me dizzy. Time slipped through my fingers like Mahjong tiles and cash.

The day before Spring Festival, I arrived at the teahouse late, and there was only one empty table left. Three other young men soon came in and sat down at my table. I knew two of them, but the third face was unfamiliar.

The stranger who took the seat right across from me was short and scrawny. As soon as he sat down, he passed a pack of cigarettes around the table. I frowned and refused the offer.

“Not good enough for you, eh?” He lit his cigarette, and puffed smoke. “I don’t think we’ve met. Are you someone’s distant relative?”

“Da Lu, you should be embarrassed, offering these Honghe cigarettes that probably only cost you five yuan per pack!” someone interjected. “This man here is a big deal—he works in Beijing, making cartoons. Tens of thousands in his pocket every month!”

“Cartoons? Ha, my wife used to love cartoons.” Da Lu reached for the Mahjong tiles, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Come, let’s play.”

Irritated, I kept on making bad plays. Within half an hour, Da Lu had won the pot several times in a row. His grinning face annoyed me even more—not just because of the money I lost or the yellowed teeth he bared at me, but because of the mockery I sensed behind his smirk.

Da Lu burned through cigarette after cigarette. I felt like I was about to suffocate from the malodorous, musky air. After losing another game, I pushed the money away and said, “Let’s call it a day.”

Da Lu spat on the ground and wiped the spittle from his lips with his sleeves. As he collected his winnings, he said, “It’s not even noon yet. Don’t be such a bad sport! You’ve only lost a few hundred; that’s nothing for a big shot like you from the capital! Let’s play a few more games.”

I ignored him and got up, heading for the door. Just then, a woman came into the teahouse and walked directly up to Da Lu. In a pleading voice, she said, “It’s New Year tomorrow. Please come home and help me tidy up the house. I really can’t manage it alone.”

Da Lu glared at the woman.

“Can’t you see I’m busy? Go get your dad instead!”

“My dad . . . you know he can’t . . . ” The woman’s voice lowered.

“Right, your dad is useless with his one leg.” Da Lu snickered and shook his head. “Whatever—leave me alone. It’s just washing some sheets and dusting the walls. You can finish the work in a day if you don’t dilly-dally. Fortune is smiling on me today. Can’t you see I’m winning bread for our family?”

Although the woman’s pleas were futile, she stubbornly refused to leave.

“Stop standing here, it’s going to bring me bad luck! I was winning just now. See how he’s not playing anymore as soon as you showed up?” Da Lu gave the woman a threatening look, then turned his eyes to me. “Hey, are you gonna play or not? I’ll go find someone else if you’re out.”

My eyes had been glued to the woman’s face the entire time. Da Lu’s call snapped me back into the reality. I averted my eyes quickly as I mumbled, “Yeah . . . yeah, let’s play some more.”

After that, I was even more absentminded. My sight was so blurry that I almost couldn’t tell the Mahjong tiles apart. I lost so many games that reaching for more money became a nearly mechanical movement. Da Lu, on the other hand, was ecstatic from winning. He must have thought me a fool.

And this fool could not stop himself from staring at the woman next to Da Lu.

Her draping hair appeared grayish through the smoke. A wrinkly red down coat hung loosely about her. As she shifted about, those wrinkles stiffened like hundreds of pursed lips. The clumsy misspelled logo told me it was a knockoff.

Again and again, I told myself she couldn’t be Tang Lu, yet everything—from her profile to the hair that gently brushed against her cheeks—screamed to me that she was.

I had imagined my reunion with Tang Lu a thousands times over, but I never expected we’d meet this way, in a stinky noisy goddamn teahouse.

My throat felt dry; it wasn’t from the smoke.

Finally, Tang Lu realized that there was no moving Da Lu. She turned around to leave. As she exited the teahouse, I stood up and said to the table, “I need to use the toilet.”

I caught up with her a half block away.

“Tang Lu.” I hadn’t said her name aloud for so long it sounded strange.

She turned back. Her eyes brimming with confusion.

“It’s me.”

She hesitated, and then shook her head. “I don’t know you.”

I pressed. “Do you remember that notebook with Doraemon in it?”

“Doraemon?”

I shook my head, unable to hide my disappointment. “Forget it.”

I could feel Tang Lu studying me carefully. When she saw that I was done talking, she turned around to leave, her shoulders hunched against the cold wind.

I felt like a lifeless robot as I plodded back into the teahouse and reached for more Mahjong tiles. Once again I was plunged back into a vortex of rowdy curses, clinking tiles, and slamming fists. The noise around me oscillated: sometimes further away, leaving me in a lonely void; sometimes close by, pounding my eardrums until they threatened to tear. Smoke fumed from everyone’s noses and mouths, and thickened until I was on the verge of suffocation. I sprang up, rushed out of this revolting hellhole, bent over by the side of the road and dry heaved.

After the incident with the math problems, my friendship with Tang Lu resumed. It was as if the ice between us over the past few months had melted in an instant. Every day, after school, she would leave first while I tarried, waiting for the others to go on their own way. She’d linger at a particular crossroad until I caught up, and then we’d walk back home together.

By then, my home had turned into a war zone. My father’s affair with the neighbor’s wife had been discovered; the husband stormed over to our house, and my mother was humiliated. My parents fought, and then lived as two strangers who happened to share the same house, never speaking to each other. My aunt made a trip home to mediate, but it did no good. All she could do was pat my head and sigh.

Every evening, I came back to a dead house. It got so bad that no one even cooked dinner anymore. We made do with leftovers found in the pantry.

As for Tang Lu, her father’s alcoholism got worse. He was often seen drunk in broad daylight; sometimes he would beat Tang Lu for no reason at all.

As a result, both of us dreaded going home. Carrying our backpacks, we trudged as slow as possible along the road, keeping each other company. After all these years, the details of the memories of those conversations had faded. I’d like to think it also had something to do with how cold it was: when we spoke, our words froze and crystallized in the chilly air, fluttering down like snowflakes.

Our walks lasted for a very long time, long enough for twilight to fade into nightfall. The veil of darkness would fall upon the village, and the lanterns glowing along the banks would transform the river into a bright ribbon zigzagging through earth. Then, we would drop her off at her home, and I would continue down the path to my home.

All that I could recall of our conversations was that we discussed Doraemon. She still remembered those dozens of episodes of Doraemon that we watched together during the summer, and she said with a sigh to me, “It would be so great if we could keep on watching.” Her cheeks trembled in the cold wind.

Hot blood rushed through my veins. I patted my chest and promised, “Don’t worry, I’ll draw more for you!”

Therefore, before winter break, I emptied my savings and used the only four yuan I had in the world to purchase crayons and a notebook. The notebook was not the half-yuan sort that was supposed to protect students’ vision with yellow pages, but the thick kind with elegant ink-wash painting embellishments along the edges that cost three yuan. A luxury like that wasn’t available in our village’s little general store, so I had to ride my bike in the freezing wind all the way to the stationary store up in town. I didn’t have enough money for the crayons and the notebook, but I begged and pleaded and refused to leave until the shop owner finally gave in.

All winter break, I stayed cooped up in my room, earnestly working on my project. I imagined that an ancient dinosaur had kidnapped Shizuka. With the help of Doraemon, Nobi traveled through time to the age of the dinosaurs. After a series of heart-stopping adventures, he finally saved Shizuka.

That winter was especially dry and cold. Although the skin on my hands was chapped and cracking, I kept on drawing. Those colorful scenes poured out onto the pages as if the crayons had come to life and guided my hands instead of the other way around. That was the first time ever in my life when I truly felt the joy of creating. I had to dab at my eye when I illustrated Nobi standing before Shizuka to shield her from the bloody jaws of three ferocious dinosaurs, and I could not hold back a grin when I depicted Shizuka planting a quick kiss on Nobi’s cheek after both of them were safe again.

After I finished everything, I wrote the following on the first page of the notebook with due solemnity:

For every lonely childhood, there is a Doraemon.
To Tang Lu—My Shizuka

When classes resumed after the break, I brought the thick notebook with me to school, hoping to find an opportunity to hand it to Tang Lu. However, the moment I pulled it out of my backpack, Fatty Zhang ripped it from my hand and yelled, “What do we have here? Don’t tell me that you actually finished your winter break homework!” He got ready to flip open the pages.

Since Fatty Zhang was such a bully, usually I kept my distance. But not this time. I leaped at him, grabbed the notebook with one hand, and pushed at his chest with the other, my eyes red with fury. Fatty Zhang, who was much bigger, easily shoved me away, crashing me into a desk. But I got up immediately, let out a roar, and threw myself at him again.

Fatty Zhang was startled. He was not expecting that I would fight back so fiercely. However, in front of all our classmates, there was no way he could hand back the notebook without a fight.

We wrestled each other, but I was no match for him. Soon, Fatty Zhang was sitting on my chest as he panted. He bent down and picked up the notebook. “Now I’ve got to see what’s—Ah! Let go!”

I bit into his hand and clamped down my teeth until I tasted blood. The sharp pain made Fatty Zhang tear up, and he had no choice but to let go of the notebook and drop it next to my head. As soon as I loosened my jaw, however, he grabbed the notebook back and threw a hard punch in my face.

The blow stunned me. After Fatty Zhang struggled to his feet, I remained on the ground, unable to get up. Notebook in hand, he taunted me, “Who do you think you are, bastard? Watch me rip your shitty notebook into pieces—”

He saw several other students flinching and whipped about.

Ms. Chen was standing at the door to the classroom.

After hearing about what had happened, Ms. Chen helped me up from the floor and asked if I was hurt. I felt dizzy, but I shook my head. She slapped Fatty Zhang’s palms ten times, so hard that Fatty Zhang’s eyes watered. She picked up the notebook and flipped through it. As soon as she saw the words I wrote on the first page, she smirked. “You are much too young to have such thoughts on your mind. Why, you’re as shameless as your dad! I’m not going to punish you, but I am confiscating this notebook. I have to stop you from being a bad influence on your classmate.”

Since I had always harbored an instinctual fear of Ms. Chen, I could only watch helplessly as she left the classroom with my treasure. Disheartened, I walked back to my seat, hanging my head. When I passed by Tang Lu, she gave me a questioning look, but I only shook my head and brushed past.

I spent the entire day unsettled and full of regret, unwilling to let all the effort I made during winter break go to waste. After school, Tang Lu began down the road home slowly, as usual. I gritted my teeth and muttered to her, “Wait for me; I’ll be back!”

I turned around and dashed back to the school. First I went to Ms. Chen’s office. I searched on her desk, but didn’t see the notebook. After thinking for a second, I scurried in the direction of the paddy field.

After a snowless winter, we got our first snowstorm that day. By dusk, the air was full of fluttering snowflakes. I sprinted across the paddy field so fast that the whirling cold wind and snow gushed into my collar and down my neck. However, neither the cold nor the eeriness of the graveyard could stop me from getting to Ms. Chen’s house.

I knew I had a lucky break when I saw the huge bronze lock hanging in front of Ms. Chen’s door—she had come home and left again. I circled her house, and found that both the door and the windows were secured. The chimney was the only way in. I climbed onto the roof, and scooted down-chimney until my feet hit the ground. It was dark inside, but I didn’t dare turn on the lights. I kept my eyes wide open and felt my way through the house.

My heart thumped as though someone were beating a drum in my chest. My fear, however, did not stem from the graves around the house. In fact, I’d rather be surrounded by thousands of shrieking walking corpses than be caught red-handed by Ms. Chen. I couldn’t even imagine her wrath if she found out that I had snuck into her house.

I searched the house thoroughly, but found no sign of my notebook. I didn’t want to give up yet, so I examined the furniture piece by piece. Just as I made my way to the bed, I felt something odd underfoot—one of the wooden planks next to the bed was loose. I gave it a tug, and it popped up.

Beneath the wooden plank wasn’t a muddy earth floor, but a deep tunnel. A set of stairs spiraled into the darkness.

I inched down the stairs, feeling for each step with the tip of my toes. I thought it would be even darker underground, but surprisingly, as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw light at the end of the tunnel.

The tunnel was only three or four meters long. I crept through and discovered a door on the other side; the light I saw was spilling from the door seam. I pressed my ear against the door. After confirming that it was completely silent inside, I took a deep breath and pushed the door open. At once, the tunnel was flooded with amber light.

I was utterly stupefied by what lay before my eyes.

For a thousand times after, when I recalled that moment, I would still doubt whether my memory was playing a trick on me—the sight that greeted me was enough to overturn my entire perception of the impoverished village. Sometimes I wondered if I had dreamed the scene, and the fantasy had then invaded my memory, corrupting it.

I saw machines. Rows and rows of machines that I could not name.

The basement was about twenty square meters in size. Both the walls and the floor were cast out of a smooth, gray-brownish metal. The ceiling was dotted with lights that illuminated every corner of the room, leaving no trace of shadows. Blocky machines with red, yellow, and green blinking lights filled the space, and electric cords snaked over every inch of the floor.

In the center of the room was a large platform supported by three columns. On the platform was a cubical glass case, about the width of my palms held together. At first glance, the glass case was empty, but I thought I saw faint electric sparks fizzle now and then in the air trapped within the case.

I probably would have stood there for hours, dumbfounded by these enormous, intricate machines. Fortunately, I soon spotted my notebook, placed right at the edge of the platform. I grabbed it and stuffed it under my jacket.

I was about to leave when a heap of objects in one corner of the basement caught my eye. I saw a few branches, a shabby backpack, and deflated balls with faded colors. The collection probably would have appeared random to anyone else, but to me they weren’t random at all: all of them belonged to me. During the summer, I had watched all of them sink into the river through the ominous whirlpool that I had discovered.

I rummaged through the items and noticed that every one had a label. The labels had turned yellow with age, but the handwriting was still legible.

“Date: July 13th, 1982. Net Weight: 243g. Origin: Unknown.” This was on the label attached to the ball. The branches, however, were dated back to 1985 and 1992. Every label had a different date, and the dates covered a wide range.

I examined the labels one by one, but they confused me even more. But since I had found what I came here for, I dropped the mystery. I left the basement, exited the house from the chimney, then dashed across the paddy field, my clothes covered in soot. As I ran away, I saw a lonely figure crossing between the graveyard and the paddy field, stopping at that mysterious house.

It was Ms. Chen. Thank heavens that I had gotten out of there in time.

I sprinted along the roads. The snow had gotten heavier; tiny white specks fell from the dark blue sky and fluttered around me. My heart started to race: It was late, what if Tang Lu had already left and gone home?

She was still there. She had been waiting at the crossroad this whole time, her petite figure indistinct, as if she would melt into the snow flurries at any moment.

“Here, this is for you.” I ran over and carefully pulled the notebook out from under my jacket. Although I was covered in chimney ashes, I made sure that not even a speck of dust landed on the notebook.

“Did you get into a fight with Fatty Zhang today because of this?” Tang Lu took the notebook. Her cheeks were bright and flushed from the cold, but glowed with the warmth of her smile.

“Yeah, it’s a new episode of Doraemon I drew for you. Took me the whole winter break! No one is allowed to see it except you.”

She flipped to the first page and her eyes fell on the two sentences that I wrote for her. She lifted her eyes to the starry sky; after a long silence, she said, “Hey, do you think Doraemon really exists?”

“Yes,” I nodded, my face serious. “Of course Doraemon exists!”

“Why have I never met one before?”

I contemplated the question, and then blurted out, “Because I am your Doraemon!”

Tang Lu giggled at my embarrassed expression. “Are you my Nobi, or my Doraemon?”

“I am . . . I am both of them! Don’t worry, you are our Shizuka, and we’ll always be here to protect you from anything trying to hurt you in the world.”

“You’re amazing!” All of a sudden, she stood on tiptoes and planted a soft kiss on my right cheek, pulling away immediately.

I stiffened as if a lighting bolt had struck me.

I tried to relive that moment, but her lips were too soft and cold, the sensation melting away as quickly as snow. When I touched my cheek, I felt a tinge of wetness on my fingertips, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the kiss from her lips or the kiss from a snowflake.

Tang Lu closed the notebook, held it against her chest, and turned around to leave. Shaking off my shock, I caught up to her. Our usual walk home seemed especially long that night. We remained silent for the rest of the journey, quietly treading through the flurries of snow.

We walked until the snow had turned our hair white—as though we had grown old together.

The weather was especially dry and cold on New Year’s Eve. The difficult year was finally coming to an end. After the family reunion lunch, Mother washed and dried all the old laundry in the household, and then took me to the graveyard to pray to our ancestors.

As we reached the crossroad, we saw a small crowd gathered before a house. It sounded like the family living there was having a fight, because some in the crowd were trying to intervene while others spouted their opinions. I glanced at the house and realized it was where Tang Lu lived.

Indeed, as soon as my mother and I pushed our way through the crowd, we saw Tang Lu sitting on the ground, her hair loose and unkempt. She still wore the same red down coat, but parts of it had been torn. A slipper hung loose from one foot; her other foot was bare and dirty, turning blue from the cold.

She was crying, and her cheeks were red and swollen. She mumbled something with a glazed look on her face. I couldn’t make out her words clearly with all the noise surrounding us, but I caught enough to understand that she was saying that she couldn’t take it anymore.

Mother said: “Heavens! What a shame. Didn’t they make peace just now? And here they are fighting again. On New Year’s Eve, too!”

Someone answered, “Well, this time it’s worse. Da Lu gambled away eighty thousand yuan yesterday. Tsk, I heard that his eyes turned bloodshot from losing so much.”

Mother sighed. “Lulu wanted to build a new house with that money.”

My eyes were fixed on the woman sitting on the ground. She wailed and murmured, and all I could see was her naked foot. The sight seemed bleak in the piercing wind.

The air suddenly stank of alcohol. Da Lu rushed out from the house and slapped Tang Lu across the face, hard. The crisp sound, like a dry branch snapping in half, made my skin crawl. Blood gushed from Tang Lu’s nose. The short, scrawny man had turned into a frenzied leopard: he huffed and puffed, his face beet red. He screamed at her, “To hell with you! All I did was lose some money, but look at you wailing out here with everyone watching—have you no shame? Your dad is a goddamn cripple, and you are a fucking jinx!”

I realized that Lao Tang, Tang Lu’s father, was standing at the door as well. With one leg left, he could only lean on his walking stick, shuddering in fear and humiliation. He seemed to want to stop Da Lu somehow, but he just stayed where he was, lips trembling and eyes darting around.

No one in the crowd intervened either. I saw Yang Fangwei standing among the others and smoking, his face expressionless. I wanted to take a step forward, but my mother grabbed me by the arm. She shook her head.

After a few more punches, Da Lu tried to get Tang Lu back into the house, but a few tugs weren’t enough to lift her up. So he grabbed her by the back collar of her coat and dragged her along the ground instead.

Tang Lu’s hair and face dragged in the dirt as they crossed the road. I saw a drop of blood fall, but it was soon lost behind a cloud of dust.

On the way to the graveyard, Mother told me, “It wasn’t that no one wanted to help. We’ve tried before, but it always turned out worse for her. Da Lu is a real monster—he has spent time in prison. Sure, if we had intervened just now, we could have stopped him, but we can’t stick around at his house forever. He would have beaten Tang Lu within an inch of her life when he got the chance.”

“Why did Tang Lu marry him?” My voice was muffled.

Mother frowned as if digging through her memories. “You left the village after elementary school. There are a lot of things that you don’t know.”

I gradually got Tang Lu’s story out of Mother. The summer after we graduated elementary school, Lao Tang broke his leg. The Tang family emptied all their savings to pay the cost of hospitalizing him. As a result, one semester into middle school, Tang Lu had to quit school to support the family. She started off as the apprentice of a tailor; a year after, she went to work in a clothing factory in a town nearby. There, she spent ten hours a day in a closed-off underground workshop, hunched over the sewing machine as she struggled to piece together cloths of terrible quality in the dim light. After work, she returned to her dormitory, cramped quarters packed with other workers, all girls her age, and tried to get some rest. However, soon that factory was reported for hiring underage workers, and Tang Lu was sent home. The local police station boasted their victory of busting the factory and the story made headlines in the newspaper; yet, for Tang Lu’s crumbling family, it only added to their growing misery.

After a week at home, Tang Lu could no longer stand her father’s cold, disappointed gaze from his sickbed. She begged Auntie Shen, who was about to leave the village for the fabled riches of Guangdong, to take her along. Auntie Shen didn’t want more trouble at first, but Tang Lu knelt in front of her house for a whole night, giving up only as the sun rose.

The morning of Auntie Shen’s departure came. She got on the bus, packed and ready to go. Yet, as the bus pulled out of the village, and the roadside poplar trees swept by the windows, Auntie Shen jumped up from her seat, swore loudly, and demanded that the driver stop the bus. She walked back to Lao Tang’s house, grabbed Tang Lu, and stormed out. She cursed at Lao Tang, “It’s fine if you’re going to hell, but spare your child!”

Tang Lu followed Auntie Shen to Guangdong, and they found work together. At first, they worked as seamstresses, but the entire industry declined as automation spread. Hundreds of thousands of garment factory workers in Guangdong lost their jobs as a consequence. During that New Year season, Auntie Shen obtained a fake ID for Tang Lu that added two more years to her age, so that she could work legally. After New Year, Tang Lu moved to Shanghai, then to Shenzhen, and finally landed in Beijing. By the time she settled in Beijing, I had graduated from university and been hired by the comic book company.

We were both alone in a strange land. During that year, we might have even crossed paths—in the subway, the streets, or convenience stores. Among the streets and buildings of Beijing, crowded with thousands of expressionless faces, we wouldn’t have recognized each other even if we brushed shoulders.

While I was securing my place in Beijing, Tang Lu was growing tired of this meaningless wandering. Exhausted, she returned home at last. For a village girl, the age of twenty-three was past the prime for marriage, but no one in the village wanted to approach her—whoever married Tang Lu had to take in the crippled, alcoholic Lao Tang as well. Allegedly, Yang Fangwei had talked to his family about marrying her, since the Yang Brewery was doing well. However, the Yang Brewery went bankrupt, and the idea died on the vines. Fate had slammed the door shut on perhaps the last opportunity for Tang Lu to find some happiness.

In the end, a matchmaker came to Tang Lu’s home with Da Lu, who was from the neighboring village. Tang Lu did not like him at first, but after dinner, Da Lu walked over to her as she was flipping through channels on the TV, unable to focus on anything. She stopped at the children’s channel.

“Do you like watching cartoons?” asked Da Lu.

Tang Lu nodded.

“Well, me too.” Said Da Lu.

“Which one?”

Da Lu scratched his head and thought long and hard. Finally, he responded: “Dora . . . Doraemon.”

Tang Lu turned to regard the scrawny young man. He didn’t seem as crude and pugnacious as other people believed.

But Da Lu’s real nature was only revealed after the wedding. Tang Lu moved in with Da Lu’s family and lived with a few of his other female relatives. Not even a month into the marriage, Da Lu got drunk, and came back home to beat her. All of her in-laws only stood and watched. Da Lu also had the habit of smashing things during his drunken rage. The furniture, the TV, the motorcycle . . . with a cacophony of screams and sounds of things breaking, this already indigent family became even more impoverished.

Tang Lu tried to help with the finances by trading in town: A/V equipment, noodles, cheap clothing . . . she tried her hand at selling anything that was popular, but her businesses never lasted long. Every few days, Da Lu hounded her for money so he could gamble or drink. Even so, she had managed to save up a little, dreaming that one day she could build a new house for herself and Da Lu and finally leave those cold, bitter in-laws behind.

But now, thanks to Da Lu’s gambling, the eighty thousand yuan that she had saved over the past five years were all gone.

Mother’s narrative was garrulous and rambling. My mind drifted as I listened to her in the sobbing wind. Darkness descended. Fresh candles illuminated many tombs in the graveyard, and those tiny flames flickered in the wind like scattered stars. The last day of the year was about to slip away in frigidity and desolation.

When we passed by Ms. Chen’s home, I asked about her background. Mother shook her head and said, “I only know that she wasn’t originally from the village. People said that she used to be part of the military base here, but then the army left, leaving only her behind. She became an elementary school teacher because she was educated. Then, the school closed because there weren’t enough pupils, but she still lived here.”

Under a gloomy sky dark as the sooty bottom of a pot, the shabby house looked as if it were covered in rust. I glanced at it and didn’t ask more questions.

I stayed up late with my father that night, and killed time by watching the uninspired Spring Festival Gala on TV as we took turns yawning. When it was almost midnight, I took out the firecrackers and prepared to light them during the midnight countdown.

A clamor ripped through the silent night. Someone was shouting. I leaped up and dashed toward the river.

“Come quickly! That Tang girl is going to jump into the river!”

I and the other villagers got to the river, where we saw a figure standing by the bridgehead. Cautiously, we gathered around her, the beams from our flashlights ripping through the darkness to reveal the face of Tang Lu. She was sobbing, tear trails crossing the scars on her face.

“Calm down!” we shouted at her. “Don’t do it!”

Abruptly, Tang Lu turned to me. She smiled. “Didn’t you say that everyone has a Doraemon as their guardian?”

The smile quickly dissolved in tears. “Why have I never—never—met mine?”

I was shaken.

Everyone looked at me. I opened my mouth, ready to say something, but all I could produce were some incoherent syllables.

A splash. Her figure disappeared from the bridgehead.

People rushed toward the bridge. But I couldn’t move, and the crowd passed me by like a surging tide. All I could think of was how she had remembered everything after all.

I huddled in my coat, lost and cold.

The string of loud pops from firecrackers almost made me jump. I turned around and saw that the night had been shredded by the bright explosions, like some Impressionist painting.

The new year had arrived, too late for some.

Due to the lack of students, the school closed down the summer after my sixth grade. We became the last graduating class. When we took our graduation class photo, everyone knew that Ms. Chen’s eyes were puffy and red, even though she wore her unchanging glum expression. After the photo, she stayed in her chair and wouldn’t get up.

To me, however, graduation meant that six years of imprisonment had finally come to an end. My only worry was how to keep myself entertained for the three months of summer break, when the interminable days were punctuated only by the chirping of cicadas.

My family purchased a VCD player as well, so that my father could watch opera. That reignited my passion for Doraemon. However, after asking around for a while, all I managed to borrow from others were a few scattered discs. Even the labels on the discs were faded, so Tang Lu wrote “Doraemon” neatly on every one of them. Clearly, these discs were not enough to sustain us for the whole summer.

“Do you still want to watch Doraemon?” I asked Tang Lu.

She nodded eagerly.

If I could find an entire set of Doraemon on VCD somewhere, then I could spend every day of this summer break with Tang Lu at my side, engrossed in the fantastical adventures of Nobi and Shizuka.

The full set of Doraemon, Ooyama version, consisted of a thousand plus episodes. Even if I could rent the VCDs, it would cost me a hundred and twenty yuan in total. This figure was beyond my imagination. I gathered all of my old textbooks and exercise books and stuffed them into a sack, carried the sack into town, and sold them to the old man at the recycling station. I was given a little over ten yuan in return. To see my six years of schooling reduced to these wrinkled bills made me sad on my parents’ behalf.

“Books aren’t worth much.” The old man emptied the books from the sack and kicked them into the corner of the room. “Metal, on the other hand, is valuable. Look for yourself on the wall.”

Sure enough, there was a price chart on the wall. I studied it. Three soda cans were worth 0.1 yuan; books were 0.15 yuan per half-kilogram; scrap iron was 1.2 yuan per half-kilogram . . . I sighed, and headed off.

And then, my father got into a fight with Tang Lu’s father. Allegedly, my father heard Lao Tang whispering about his affair to someone when they were working in the fields. Enraged, my father leaped at him and the two of them soon became entangled in a blur of punches and kicks.

Due to this incident, neither Tang Lu nor I wanted to be at home. Our aimless, melancholic meandering continued on. When we strolled along the river at sunset, two reflections appeared on the river surface as well.

“Who are they?” I asked Tang Lu, “They’ve been following us.”

“Shhh.” Tang Lu held a finger against her lips. “These are water people, and they are cautiously observing us, strangers to them. Don’t talk so loud—you’ll frighten them.”

So the four of us carried on. The sinking sun lengthened our reflections, and they faded as the light dimmed. Just when the reflections were about to disappear, Tang Lu and I stopped at the special part of the river that always swallowed everything.

“I’ve always been curious about this,” said Tang Lu. “If the river sucks everything in, then can we take things out from the river as well?”

“How would we know if we don’t give it a try?” I took off my shirt and prepared to dive, but Tang Lu stopped me.

“What if you disappear as well, like everything else? No one would play with me then . . . ”

“Don’t worry. I won’t ever leave you!” I slapped my chest.

What Tang Lu suggested, however, was a valid concern. My eyes landed on the crooked tree next to the riverbank, with its branches drooping so low that they almost touched the water. I had an idea.

I climbed onto the tree, wrapped my arms and legs around the branch closest to the water, and carefully inched my body forward. That branch was only about as thick as my arm. As soon as I shifted my weight onto the branch, it sank even lower, finally bringing me closer to the river surface. I took a deep breath, about to reach my hand into the water.

“Watch out!” Tang Lu watched me nervously from the riverbank.

I dipped my hand toward the river. I imagined a giant snake baring its teeth or a fiery hell beneath this mysterious region of water. Yet, as my fingertips finally touched the water, nothing happened at all—the water was cool, not even hot from the scorching sun.

I tried to wave my arm in the river. The water felt much more viscous here than elsewhere, and I felt a lot of resistance against my arm. I extended my hand slowly, and my fingertips finally brushed against something hard and metallic. I grasped it and pulled it up until I saw it through the clear surface.

It was a square-shaped iron lid with a pattern of holes. It seemed familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it before.

I pulled the iron lid out of the water. It weighed six or seven kilograms and now felt much heavier in my hand than it had in water. The branch I clung to shook as if it would snap in half at any moment.

I got another idea. Slowly, I backed up the bough, holding onto the iron lid with one hand. After I steadied myself against the thick trunk, I shouted to Tang Lu, “Step back!”

Tang Lu did as I asked. I dropped the iron lid to the ground and said, “Look after this! I’ll go fish for more.”

“What is it for?”

“You can make so much money from selling scrap iron! The old guy at the station told me that he paid 1.2 yuan every half-kilogram. We could sell this lid for at least ten yuan. It’s even better than selling a sack of books.”

Tang Lu hesitated. “We don’t know if this lid belongs to someone. We can’t steal.”

“Does this river have an owner?” I shot back.

“Probably . . . not?”

“See? Whatever I find in the river should belong to us then. It’s just like fishing. Stop worrying!”

It was already dark, and I could see the lit windows of faraway houses. I could even hear my mother calling out for me in the distance. I had to hurry. Using the same method as before, I fished out a couple more iron pieces. All of them looked different: lids and boxes, cylinders and brackets, adding up to about forty kilograms of scrap metal. At this pace, I needed to find just one more object to have enough money to rent the entire Doraemon series on VCD.

The last object was bigger than I expected.

I had to feel around it for a while before finding something resembling a handle. I grasped it, and tried to lift the whole thing up. The tree branch groaned under the weight. An iron box with round corners emerged. Small holes peppered its sides, through which I could see many layers of thin metal “cards” embedded inside. The box was about the size of a television, but significantly denser. On one of the sides of the box was a round protuberance. Small openings that looked like sockets of some kind were found on the other sides.

I grabbed the handle with both hands and yanked the box up. As soon as it left the water, I heard a distinct pop in the air. Suddenly, the shimmering windows in the distance winked out, and darkness swallowed the whole village.

Tang Lu looked into the distance. “A power outage?”

“It’s been years since we last had a power outage . . . ” The sight confused me as well. However, we didn’t have much time to spare—it was already too late for us to be out. If we lingered any longer, our parents would surely come looking. I gritted my teeth and kept on pulling at the box.

I heard a sharp screech and felt myself drop. The branch chose that very moment to snap in half. Still holding on to the box, I plunged into the river.

A terrifying thought flashed through my mind: the water here had devoured countless things—deflated balls, twigs, and foam boards—that were supposed to float. I would go down as well and never see Tang Lu again. I struggled to catch a last glance at Tang Lu, but I splashed into the river before I could turn my head.

The lukewarm water swallowed me whole.

I thrashed my limbs in despair. However, to my surprise, my feet quickly felt the bottom of the river. I stood up rather sheepishly. So close to the bank, the water only went up to the height of my chest.

The broken branch floated on the calm water, showing no sign of sinking either.

Tang Lu was just about to let out a scream when she saw me standing up in the water. She pointed at me and stuttered, “What happened!? Didn’t you . . . didn’t you . . . ”

“How on earth did all those things sink in if the water here is so shallow?” A breeze chilled me as I waddled toward the shore with the iron box dragging behind.

With her eyes fixed on the strange iron box, Tang Lu nodded in agreement. “Good question. And where could all those things you just pulled out have been hiding?”

I warmed up a little after putting my clothes back on. I had an idea. “I know why!”

“Why? Tell me!”

“There’s an Anywhere Door under the river that connects to another space and time. That has to be it!”

Tang Lu giggled. “That’s impossible.”

“Of course it’s possible! Remember how Doraemon’s pocket is an Anywhere Door, and you can find everything you need in it?” The more I explained my theory, the more plausible it sounded. I nodded solemnly. “It’s in Doraemon, so it has to be real. I think there’s a robot cat living in the river. It knew that we wanted to rent the VCDs, which is why it gave us the scrap iron to help. It all makes sense!”

“Then why doesn’t it just give us the VCDs directly?”

“Um . . . ”

Tang Lu helped me out with a smile. “I believe what you said! It has to be Doraemon coming to our rescue. Didn’t you tell me before that there is a Doraemon for every childhood? Our childhood is coming to an end soon, and this Doraemon is here to offer us its final gift.”

“Yeah!” The mystery no longer bothered me.

We collected a total of over fifty kilograms of scrap iron, and there was no way for me to take all the pieces away tonight. I dragged all those metal components under the tree and covered them with branches, so that I could carry them off into the town tomorrow.

The next day was again gloomy. Heavy clouds veiled the sunlight, but the rain that everyone expected refused to fall. When I woke up in the morning, I felt a bit of a headache—I had probably caught a cold after falling into the river. But the joyful anticipation for Doraemon infused my body. I told Tang Lu that I was going to sell the scrap iron and get the VCDs, and that she should wait for me at home until I came back in the afternoon.

“Sure!” I could tell that Tang Lu was excited too.

I rode the bike to the riverbank first and retrieved the scrap iron. I crammed all the strange items into a sack, and placed the sack on the bike’s back seat. When I reached for the iron box, I noticed the round protuberance at its side again, and I tugged at it. Without too much effort, I broke it off of the box. Beneath the round bulge, there was a semitransparent crystal cube about five centimeters wide on each side. The crystal cube had been plugged into the box, revealing only a metallic, round cap. The shape of the crystal looked interesting, so I stuffed it into my pocket, thinking that I would give it to Tang Lu as a present later.

The bike was an old fashioned model with 28-inch wheels. The frame was longer than I was tall. My feet couldn’t even reach the pedals if I sat on the saddle properly, so I had to straddle the seat tube and hang on awkwardly. The ill-fitting bike did have one virtue: it was sturdy enough to easily carry a cargo load of over fifty kilograms. I strained and managed to pedal it along.

It took two hours to get to the town from the village by bike. In the muggy, hot summer weather, I was soon drenched in sweat. But the thought of the VCDs urged me on. Although my legs felt as though they were weighed down by lead, I pedaled faster and faster. In the sticky air, even the poplar trees next to the road drooped their heads in a spiritless silence.

After making a turn at the end of the cement road, I had to cross a bridge to arrive at the town.

I never made it.

The problem wasn’t the bicycle’s endurance or my stamina, but the sack. After two hours of clinking and grinding, the iron pieces had finally worn through the coarse fabric. With a loud clang, the sack tore. All the iron items tumbled out at once and clinked against the bridge.

“Hey, you little bastard, where did you steal all this from?”

A familiar voice approached as I scrambled to pick up the iron pieces. I turned around and saw a red-faced Lao Tang wobbling in my direction. He kicked the iron box.

“I didn’t steal them!” I grabbed on to the box and shot back at him, “I fished them out of the river!”

“Who are you trying to fool? There’s no way you got them out of the river; there isn’t even any rust on them.” Lao Tang puffed, breath stinking of alcohol. “What a family you have there! Your dad’s a cheater, and you’re a thief! I’m taking you to the police office.”

I recalled that Lao Tang had lost the fistfight with my father and had been bitter about it since. He was too skinny to win against my father in a real fight, but now, by catching me red-handed in thievery, he could get his revenge.

Anxious and frustrated, I yelled at him: “I swear that everything came from the river! If you don’t believe me, then go ask Tang Lu! She was there with me!”

Lao Tang sneered: “Lulu? I’ve told Lulu a thousand times to stop hanging out with you, but that little brat wouldn’t listen. Now, now—stop with all the nonsense and come with me!”

I fought him hard, but Lao Tang was much stronger. He grabbed me by the collar and started to drag me off the bridge.

“Damn you, Lao Tang!” I fastened my arms around the railing. “My dad will kill you!”

This infuriated Lao Tang even more. Blood rushed into his cheeks and he gave me a hard kick. “But he’s not here now, is he? Well, even if he’s right here in front of me, I’ll still make you pay for your crime!” He tugged at my arm again, but I wouldn’t budge a centimeter. Daring not to injure me, he let go and turned around, cursing loudly. “Fine! If you don’t come with me, I’ll turn in the things that you stole as evidence.”

He refilled the sack with the iron gadgets, tied the sack securely to the rack beneath the saddle, picked up the bike, and finally sped off the bridge. He made a turn and disappeared into the streets of the town.

I staggered behind and gave chase, but he was long gone. Despondent, I stood at the bridge and sobbed. Everyone passing by gave me strange looks. Exhausted at last, my head heavy and befuddled, I turned around to trudge home.

Thunder rumbled in the murky sky. I was not even halfway through the journey when the rain started, evolving quickly from a few drizzling drops to a ferocious downpour.

Drenched and still sobbing, I returned to the village after walking the whole afternoon. When I passed by Tang Lu’s house, I saw that the doors were closed. I knocked and no one answered.

Tang Lu had promised to wait right here, for me to bring Doraemon back. I knew that I failed my mission. But she should’ve been here.

The heavy rain crashed down to earth like cascading waterfalls and the water mingled into a river on the ground. I felt so drowsy that I had to sit down right next to Tang Lu’s door and rest my head against the wall.

Tang Lu never showed.

Holding a funeral right after New Year was considered unlucky; Lao Tang’s alcoholism and bad temper didn’t help either. Barely anyone showed up at the funeral.

It was drizzling on the day of Tang Lu’s burial. In the rain, even the funeral music played by the suona sounded exceedingly forlorn. I walked among the slow funeral procession, no more than a dozen people, my face numb from the rain.

Lao Tang sat in front of Tang Lu’s grave, with a white sack bound to his neck and dangling in front of his chest. He looked stunned, his single leg stretched out straight. It was an awful sight. We walked up to him one by one, tossing money wrapped in white cloth, a token of our bereavement, into that sack before leaving.

A quivering old woman stood before me in line. It was only after she turned around to leave that I recognized her.

“Ms. Chen?”

She stared at me, a look of deep pathos on her wrinkled face, a combination of weariness of the world and sorrow. Her shriveled lips trembled as she spoke, “So you’re here as well, here for Tang Lu’s funeral . . . Tang Lu was my best student, but she’s had the worst life of you all. Now she’s gone, even before me. It’s all because of you. You.”

That took me by surprise. Maybe Ms. Chen was confused in her old age. I shook my head. “I never saw her again after we graduated.”

Ms. Chen didn’t answer. In the cold winter rain, with her back hunched over, she slowly waddled back to her shabby house.

Although she was gone, her final words to me cast an ominous shadow. I pulled on my hood, snuggled up in my down coat, and went home.

Mother was warming herself by the stove fire. “Did you give Lao Tang the bereavement money?”

I nodded. “How did Lao Tang break his leg in the first place?” I asked.

Mother squinted as she tried to recall. Her hands, which were stoking the stove, slowed down. The fire dimmed to deep red color, and a pale gray smoke began to rise.

“It’s been years, but I do remember what happened,” she said, “The day Lao Tang got into a car accident was the same day you fell ill. Remember that time when you got incredibly sick after you were caught in the rain?”

Of course I remembered. That day, after I lost the scrap metal, I went over to Tang Lu’s house in the rain and waited at her door until I fell asleep. When passersby tried to wake me, they discovered that I had lost consciousness. They got my parents to take me to the hospital.

Looking back, there had been warning signs. The day before, I’d caught a cold from falling into the river, and I had a headache in the morning. Oblivious to those early signs, I strained myself on the long bike trip and then walked back in the rain. A high fever hit me right after.

It was the most ill that I had ever been. Due to the delay in treatment, I developed a cerebral edema that resulted in respiratory failure. I spent almost two months in the hospital barely conscious before I started to get better. Upon hearing about my illness, my aunt who lived up North hurried home, scolded my parents for their neglect, and then decided to take me away to live with her as soon as I left the hospital. When the day came for me to wave the village goodbye, I passed by Tang Lu’s house, but the doors were shut, as usual.

“I heard that Lao Tang went to sell the scrap iron riding our family bike, but he was drunk at the time, and he ran into a car,” said Mother.

I nodded. So Lao Tang didn’t turn the iron over to the police as he threatened, but instead wanted to sell them for his own profit. Of course Lao Tang would do that.

Ms. Chen had been right: Lao Tang and I crossed paths, as I was on my way to sell that scrap iron. By seizing the iron and the bike for himself, he got into the car accident that took his leg. The Tang family lost their source of income, and the course of Tang Lu’s life took a sharp turn for the worse. She had broken her promise to wait for me because of Lao Tang’s accident—she was probably rushing to the hospital.

The guilt was not mine to bear since none of this had occurred from my intent, but the undeniable truth was that my actions had directly led to the turn in Tang Lu’s fate and pushed her down the abyss of despair and desolation.

I turned around at once and walked toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Mother called. “It’s cold outside, put on your coat.”

Raindrops pricked at every inch of my bare skin like needles. I pulled my coat on as I ran all the way to Ms. Chen’s house. When I pushed the door open, there was no one on the bed. Taken by surprise at first, I quickly realized where she had gone and went to remove the loose wooden plank right next to the bed.

Again, I entered that deep, dark tunnel. As expected, I spotted Ms. Chen in that room full of strange machines. Her unkempt hair was a clump of weeds under the glaring lights.

“It’s you.” She didn’t turn around to look at me. Her fingers continued to flutter over those complex panels full of buttons. “I knew you would come back here. Tang Lu was my best student and you were her best friend. We are all responsible for her death. We all played a role in her fate.”

“But . . . ” My voice was hoarse. I stepped back involuntarily, feeling the corner of the table press into my lower back, “I didn’t do it on purpose . . . ”

As Ms. Chen continued to operate the machines, a buzzing sound started in the room, growing louder and louder every second. Then, as Ms. Chen pushed one last button, the machines gave a final sigh, and the room returned to silence. She exhaled softly and turned to face me. “Do you understand the nature of time?”

“What?” I was bewildered.

“Time is a river in which we are all struggling to stay afloat. And fate . . . the fate of each individual is as insignificant as a small eddy on the surface of the water. As the eddies of all our fates merge and disperse, everyone becomes the hand that determines the fate of someone else. Intentional or unintentional, every small action changes the course of all the eddies on the river of time. But Hu Zhou, this is exactly what makes time both charming and cruel.”

Her words echoed in the room. I gaped at this old woman I thought I knew. Did Ms. Chen—that elementary school teacher who had always been so glum and cranky in my memories—finally begin to reflect on time and fate near the end of her life?

“But time can’t be altered,” I protested. “Even if I had caused her tragedy, there is no way . . . ”

Ms. Chen gazed at me, her eyes as murky and heavy as pools of aged wine. After a while, she shook her head. “No. Time is changeable. Many sections along this river contain closed loops.”

That comment confused me even more. Ms. Chen raised a bony finger and pointed at our surroundings. “Do you know what this room is for?”

I couldn’t even begin to venture a guess. Ms. Chen revealed the answer: “It’s a laboratory.”

I looked around. With all the wires and machines, it did look like some kind of experiment was going on, but I couldn’t imagine what would be worth studying in this poor little village.

“The lab was founded by the military,” said Ms. Chen, as she petted the machines. “I can’t say much more than that. Even though they’ve given up on this project and haven’t contacted me in more than thirty years, there are still many things that must be kept secret. But I can tell you that we built this laboratory to study closed time loops.”

“What?” I thought I had misheard. “Closed time loops?”

“When the lab was created, researchers were moved here from all over the country; none of us knew what was going on. But . . . but during that special period in the history of our country, all we could do was to follow orders.

“This site was chosen because it has the highest Fan Index number in the whole country. Oh, right, you don’t know what the Fan Index is—it’s named after Lao Fan, who gave his life for science. The upper half of his body is buried out there in the graveyard.”

A chill ran down my spine. “Why only the upper half?”

“Because we couldn’t find the lower half. It took more than ten years for us to succeed in creating an artificial closed time loop. Lao Fan offered himself as the subject of the first human experiment. However, when he got halfway through the river, the unstable closed time loop collapsed. The lower half of his body disappeared into another time and space. The whole river turned red from his blood.”

“The river? You mean the section of the river next to that crooked tree?”

Ms. Chen nodded. “The closed time loop intersects with space in two stable locations: this laboratory and a circular section of the river with a diameter of 1.42 meters. However, time coordinates at the intersection points are completely random. When things floating along the river reach that point of intersection, they are immediately transported to this laboratory.”

“So you labeled all of them?” I pointed at the corner of the room, remembering what I saw when I snuck in here many years ago. The deflated balls and the foam boards were still piled there.

“Yes. I know you’ve been in here before, to retrieve your notebook. But since you never mentioned it to anyone else, I said nothing to you either.” Ms. Chen seemed to have exhausted her stamina from all the talking. Slowly, she lowed herself into a chair and continued. “Despite all the resources and energy poured into them, our experiments made little progress. The experiment was terminated. All the researchers wanted to go home after being caged in this laboratory for so long. But I alone wanted to stay and begged the people in authority to preserve the laboratory.”

“Why didn’t you want to go home?”

“Because I didn’t have one.” Ms. Chen’s lips curled up into a sad smile. “Do you know who Lao Fan was? He was my husband. My home is wherever he’s buried.”

I could only give a small sympathetic nod.

“For the sake of Lao Fan, they kept the machines here, but crossed my name off the official register. In China, back then, there were too many incomplete experiments like this one for people to pay attention to a widow who disappeared into a secluded village.” She smiled bitterly. “I’ve stayed on to complete the experiment in Lao Fan’s honor.”

“When you told me that time could be changed, does that mean you finally succeeded in your experiment?”

She broke into a fit of coughing. She pressed a handkerchief at her mouth, but the handkerchief was soon splattered with blood. I rushed to support her so she wouldn’t fall down. Then, I had her climb onto my back, and I carried her out of the basement laboratory. She was as light as a single leaf.

I tucked her into bed, poured some hot water, and fed her the medicine. She panted for a while before finally catching her breath. “I was so close to success . . . I went over the data and worked through the theory a thousand times, making sure everything was perfect. I was sure that one more try would vindicate Lao Fan and myself. But just as I was about to launch the experimental run, I discovered that a few key pieces of equipment had gone missing from the lab.”

“When was that?”

“Perhaps two or three years after the elementary school had closed down.”

I sighed in acknowledgement. I understood what had happened—Ms. Chen said that the time coordinates at the intersection points on the closed loop were random. When I pulled out those iron gadgets from the river, I must have reached into the laboratory three years later along the timeline. So, it wasn’t until long after I had left the village that Ms. Chen discovered my theft of her instruments.

“I tried to rebuild those missing pieces of equipment, but the Super Crystal Stabilizer could not be duplicated. Its design was too intricate and the raw material too rare. On my own, it was impossible to make another one. Even though I never could prove it experimentally, I assure you that time could be changed.” Her eyelids drooped, a teardrop falling from the corner of her eye and sliding across her wrinkles. “I’m only one step away from realizing Lao Fan’s dreams, but it’s a step I’ll never take . . . ”

All of the burial mounds in the graveyard shivered in the cold shower. I staggered past these old, abandoned graves and stopped at a fresh one. The funeral procession had already dispersed. An empty silence that not even the rain could penetrate was all that was left behind. The white papercraft used at the funeral, soaked from the rain, were scattered on the ground and melded with the earth.

I saw a yellowed picture on the tombstone, a picture of a young girl. She wore her hair in a ponytail and smiled into the camera. I heard that Lao Tang had searched everywhere at home for a picture of Tang Lu, but all he could find was the elementary school graduation photo for her class. He was going to affix the whole photo on the tombstone, but the families of the other students in the photo had stopped him since it would be bad luck. So, he had to crop Tang Lu from the photo and used that as her funeral portrait. With his shaky hands, Lao Tang had not cut cleanly—slivers of my face still remained beside Tang Lu.

I looked at the young Tang Lu and she looked back at me as well. I reached forward, and my fingertips touched her face.

The last time I saw Tang Lu wasn’t the summer after elementary school, but the winter break of my high school junior year.

By then, I had lived in the city for many years. As a seventeen year old, I listened to pop music, played basketball, longed for a pair of Nikes, and had a crush on that girl with long hair from the classroom next door. I hated the way that my home village appeared in my memories: poor and provincial.

However, after all the years away from family, my aunt decided to visit home during Spring Festival. I was again under the same roof with my parents, but I felt like an outsider. Everyone and everything in the village seemed to me filthy and outdated. During the visit, my parents mentioned to my aunt that they wanted me back home since taking care of me was such a burden on her. My aunt turned them down, saying that I needed better education. I sat with them while this conversation happened, and heaved a sigh of relief after my aunt had spoken.

Finally, it was the sixth day after New Year, and my aunt and I were going back to her home. We took Uncle Chen’s tractor into the town, where we were supposed to take the bus to the city and then get on the train back to Shanxi. However, as we arrived in town, we found the bus had already left. It took half an hour to find a car that was going to the city. The driver wanted a hundred for us to hitch a ride; my aunt bargained him down to fifty.

Just as we were about to get in the car, we heard a timid, shaky voice behind us. “Are you going into the city?”

I turned around and saw a girl, about fifteen or sixteen. She looked tiny compared to the huge sacks on her back and in her hands. It was as if those sacks mattered even more to her than herself.

“Yeah.” I said.

“May I catch a ride as well? I want to go to the city too . . . but I missed the bus.”

She looked familiar, so I nodded. “It should be fine.”

The driver poked his head out from the window and muttered grouchily. “If you’re adding another person, then you have to pay more. Sixty yuan or no deal!”

My aunt gave him a death glare, then she looked at the girl. “We’ll pay forty and you can pay twenty. Is that all right?”

The girl hesitated. The driver impatiently tooted the horn a few times. She nodded. Just as I helped her stuff her luggage into the trunk, I blurted out, “Tang Lu?”

“Long time no see.” She smiled at me, but she didn’t seem too surprised. “Hu Zhou, you’re taller now.”

“Where are you going?” I tried to cover up the awkwardness of not recognizing her earlier.

“Shanghai. You?”

“I’m going back to Shanxi with my aunt. School is starting soon. Are you going to school as well in Shanghai?”

I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth—with all that luggage and the way she was dressed, she obviously wasn’t going to school.

Tang Lu smiled again. “I’m going to work.”

My aunt in the front seat turned around to give Tang Lu an appraising look, and then turned back again.

“What kind of work?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll see when I get there.” She paused, and then added, “There must be something out there for me to do.”

We fell silent. I watched a white bird sweep over the river as the car sped across the bridge. The train station was on the other side, where my aunt and I would board the train to Shanxi.

Tang Lu spoke up all of a sudden, “Do you still watch Doraemon?”

“No, not for a while now. Why?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. Her voice sounded a bit muffled, as though she were congested.

The car got off the bridge and inched slowly among the traffic. Surrounded by a chorus of tooting horns, I could see the worn-out train station up ahead, with hundreds of people milling at its door.

“I’ve been watching all this time, but everyone says the show already has an ending.” She looked past me to somewhere far, far away. “I heard that Nobi turned out to be mentally ill. All the stories happened only in his own imagination; they were hallucinations. There never was a Doraemon . . . ”

I thought myself too sophisticated for cartoons by then, and all my memories of Doraemon had blurred. I forced myself to continue the conversation. “Who told you about this ending?”

“I saw it on the Internet. If so many people think it’s true, then it probably is.” Tang Lu lowered her head. “But you told me, for every lonely childhood, there is a . . . ”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence because the car came to a stop in front of the train station. “We’re here,” said the driver.

Tang Lu opened the door and got out. I unloaded the luggage from the trunk, and my aunt handed sixty yuan to the driver. Tang Lu pulled out a plain cloth wallet, counted out twenty yuan in loose change and handed the money over to my aunt.

“No, no.” My aunt looked at me, and then waved her hand at Tang Lu. “Keep it.”

Tang Lu insisted. Unwilling to embarrass Tang Lu any further, my aunt grabbed my hand and headed toward the ticket office. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tang Lu standing there with that huge backpack over her shoulders, still holding the money. Her eyes were red, as if she wanted to say something.

We merged into the surging crowd in the station, rushing, swirling, eddying every which way. When I looked back again, Tang Lu was gone. I craned my neck and stood on my toes, but I couldn’t find her in the sea of strangers.

A cold raindrop slid down my neck, making me shiver. I ran home. I rummaged through the wooden chest that held my childhood and found the metal gadget with a cubical crystal attached to its cap. Looking at it now, I thought it resembled an ancient-looking USB drive.

I tucked it into my pocket and dashed out again. Mother stopped me. “It’s so late; where are you going?”

I looked at my mother. I looked at my father, who stood at her side and rarely spoke. My heart ached, for they had no language to express how they felt about their son.

I stepped up and gave both of them a hug. Mother looked confused, and Father, unused to such intimacy, just looked awkward.

“I’ll be back soon.” I said.

“When?” asked Mother.

“Not tonight.”

No flashlight was needed. I easily found my way back to Ms. Chen’s house by following the road that I had walked so many times as a child.

I took out the crystal. “Is this it?”

Ms. Chen had gone to bed already, but at the sight of the crystal, she struggled to sit up straight, her voice trembling as she spoke, “Yes, yes, the Super Crystal Stabilizer . . . Where did you find it?”

Instead of answering, I asked another question, “With this, can you send me back to the past?”

Ms. Chen tilted her head up abruptly. “Are you sure you want to return to the past?”

I nodded.

“You have a good life. Are you sure you want to give it up?”

“Good? The reason I came home in the first place was because Beijing has scarred me.”

“Are you hoping to travel back in time to relive nostalgia because the present isn’t as wonderful as you memories? Remember, the past is meant to be remembered, not repeated. In your imagination the past may be better than your present, but once you really enter the past, you may feel very differently. You need to be very sure of this decision.”

“No need to worry. I’m not doing this to escape from the present or to repeat the past.” I took a step forward and gazed into Ms. Chen’s eyes. “I’m going to change something.”

“To change what?”

“According to your theory, I was the cause of Tang Lu’s misfortune. I must then be the one to correct this mistake. I need to be a real Doraemon.”

“You will never be able to come back after you go; do you understand?”

I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ll grow up again, won’t I?”

I helped Ms. Chen to the underground tunnel and went into the laboratory with her. She replaced the Stabilizer and started to operate those complex buttons, deftly punching in commands. Electric sparks flashed in the glass box on the middle table, growing in intensity every second until they merged into a ring of light.

“I’ve studied the time coordinates of the intersection points of the closed loop for more than a decade. Theoretically, I can control the time at the intersection points with precision,” said Ms. Chen. “Which day would you like to return to?”

I entered the date.

The ring of light expanded and projected outside of the glass box, floating in midair. Ms. Chen nodded, her eyes sparkling. “It seems like my calculations are correct.” She pressed some more buttons, and the ring of light turned perpendicular to the ground, like an oval door.

“I’m going to ask you one last time: are you sure?”

I didn’t need to answer that question anymore. I took a deep breath and stepped up to the ring of light. It glistened. The glow projected onto my face grew brighter, and the buzzing of currents echoed in the room. Tears suddenly filled my eyes. I walked into the ring of light.

Light. Stickiness. Coldness.

After regaining consciousness, those were the only three sensations I remembered.

I opened my eyes. I was still in the laboratory, except Ms. Chen had disappeared. Did we fail? Confused, I climbed up the underground tunnel and pushed open the door to Ms. Chen’s house. The murky heat of summer enveloped me at once.

It was that gloomy summer morning!

I didn’t have time to be surprised. I rushed to the road and saw a boy on an old bicycle, riding toward the town with a sack over his cargo rack.

“Wait! Don’t go yet.” I stopped him.

The boy halted. A look of bewilderment flashed across his face as he held the bicycle. “Who are you?”

“Never mind that. Your sack isn’t sturdy; the things inside will fall out if you keep pedaling. Here, let me redo it for you.” I took off my down coat and wrapped it around the sack, then tied the sleeves to the bicycle’s frame. “Okay, this will do. Also, when you go into town, don’t take the bridge, but go through that little side street instead. Do you understand?”

The boy had been looking at me in confusion. He nodded, hesitantly.

“Go.” I waved my hand at him. “And come back soon. Tang Lu is still waiting for you.”

“How did you know—”

“Right—after you sell the scrap metal, borrow a rain jacket from that old guy. There will be a storm on your way back. You mustn’t get wet.”

The boy got back on his bicycle. Before leaving, he looked me up and down. “You look a lot like my dad. Are you a relative or something?”

I smiled. “Just remember what I told you. Now go!”

The boy’s figure soon disappeared among the shadows of the trees. I lingered around for a while, and then headed to Tang Lu’s house. However, instead of going in, I stood right across the road from the house, sat down, and waited.

The afternoon crawled by slowly, but I had all the patience in the world. I waited and waited. People passing by looked me up and down with judgmental eyes, but I did not budge. Then, when the drizzles began, I went over to Tang Lu’s house so that the eaves could shelter me from the rain.

A girl peered out. When she saw me, a look of disappointment flashed across her delicate face. Yet, she smiled at me. “Would you like some water?”

“No, I’m just waiting for the rain to stop—but thank you,” I said.

“Oh.” Tang Lu’s face disappeared. A moment later, she came out of the house with two stools and handed me one. She sat down right next to me, her gaze fixed on the curtain of rain that seemed to extend all the way to the horizon.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked.

Tang Lu nodded. “I’m waiting for Doraemon.”

“You mean the cartoon?”

“No. It’s a person.” She didn’t turn to look at me, but I caught a glimpse of the side of her face—a sight too familiar.

We sat shoulder to shoulder beneath the roof.

The silhouette of a boy on a bicycle appeared in the rain. Covered head to toe by a rain jacket, he pedaled hard. The girl leaped to her feet at once, tipping her stool over, but she didn’t seem to notice at all.

The boy sped over. He leaned the bicycle against the wall and yelled, “Lulu, I have it!” He was surprised to see me, but he said nothing. He took off his rain jacket, pulled out a thick stack of VCDs and handed them over to Tang Lu.

“Great!” Tang Lu reached for them with a look of joy.

I stood up and stepped into the rain. Behind me, I heard the girl telling the boy, “Thank you, Doraemon!”

And then they started to sing, their hands held together tightly.

It’s all the same every day,

But sometimes dreams may come our way,

As long as there is Doraemon,

Happiness will always stay . . .

Their lively song pierced through the rain and echoed in the village. I didn’t turn around, so I would never know whether the song was for me, or simply for themselves. But that wasn’t important anymore. From this moment onward, fate had changed its course, and the swirls on the river of time would now begin to reform. These two children will set out on a brand new journey. Just like Nobita Nobi and Minamoto Shizuka, they would grow, day by day.

Doraemon had completed its mission.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, August 2016.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

A Que was born in 1990 in Hubei province, and now lives in Beijing. His work is regularly published in top magazines like Science Fiction World. He has won both Chinese Nebula and Galaxy Awards for his short fiction. His collection Travel With My Dear Android was published in 2015.

Cold Comfort

Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty

I stood in the center of the frozen Arctic lake, chipping at the ice with an ice chisel, a sharp-edged piece of steel attached to a five-foot-long handle. It was the middle of May, and the ice was still about a meter thick. I made an indentation large enough to hold a bundle of six explosive cartridges.

One cartridge in the bundle was primed with a number 6 electric blasting cap. I attached the lead wires to the cap, placed the cartridges in the crater I had made, then scraped the ice chips back into the hole to cover them. The afternoon sun would warm the surface and melt the snow a little. In the chill of the evening, it would refreeze, sealing the charge in place.

I walked north on the ice, unrolling the lead wires. The spruce trees that surrounded the lake tilted this way and that, leaning on each other like drunks at closing time. A drunken forest. The trees had grown in the permafrost, the permanently frozen soil of the Arctic Circle, and their roots were shallow. As the frozen soil had melted, the trees had abandoned their upright posture, beginning a slow motion fall toward the ground. As the permafrost melted, it released methane, the main component of natural gas.

I stopped to brush snow off the ice and chip another crater. Beneath the black ice I could see thousands of white blobs, as numerous as stars in the sky. Some were as big as my hand; some as big as my head. Each one was a bubble of methane released by the melting permafrost and trapped beneath the ice.

I looked up when I heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow. My friend Anaaya grinned at me. “You’re slow, Doctor Maggie. I’ve already finished the other side of the lake.”

Anaaya was the only person who insisted on the honorific. She was an old friend. We had been roommates in our freshman year at University of Alaska. She had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering; I had gone on to get a doctorate.

“Of course you’re faster,” I told her. “You actually know what you’re doing.”

“I’ll help you out, Doctor Slowpoke.”

It was a small lake, but it took us three hours working together to plant all the charges. When we were done, we surveyed our work from the lakeshore. The afternoon breeze was already blowing snow across the lake, erasing our footprints. The charges and the connecting wire were invisible beneath the snow and ice.

“No sign that we were ever here,” I said.

“We were never here,” she said. “Who would ever stop at this lake? No one. No fishing here, no hunting—no reason to stop. You’re on your way to check on a methane monitoring station; I’m looking into some reports of illegal trapping for my aunt.” Anaaya’s aunt was involved in tribal management. “All official business.”

Looking out over the lake at the drunken forest, tilted trees as far as the eye could see, I didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

We returned to our snowmobiles and headed north to accomplish our official business.

Two weeks later, the lake exploded. Our charges had cracked the ice and ignited the rising methane.

I wasn’t there to see it happen. No one was. But three satellites were perfectly positioned to capture the show. Two aerospace engineers—friends of friends who could not be traced to me—had independently calculated the orbits and set the ideal time for the explosion. They had done a good job. The satellite images were spectacular. A very impressive mushroom cloud. Trees for miles around the lake were blasted with ice shards.

An ecoterrorist, JollyGreen, took credit for the explosion, releasing a lengthy manifesto about the melting of the permafrost and the release of methane. JollyGreen was a sock puppet, of course. Not my sock puppet. The sock puppet of a friend of a friend of a friend with no connections back to me.

JollyGreen’s basic message was this: Earth’s average global surface temperature was increasing and the Arctic was heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The permafrost was melting and releasing methane, which was twenty times better at trapping the sun’s heat than carbon dioxide. More methane meant more warming. That meant more permafrost melting, which meant more methane and more warming . . . and so on in a positive feedback loop with negative consequences.

“The human race is already screwed because of climate change,” he wrote. “There’ll be flooding, famine, drought, and more. Too late to turn all that around, but it can get worse. If all the permafrost melts, we are royally screwed. Mass extinctions, mass die-off of phytoplankton and disruption of the ocean’s ecosystems, wildfires on land. Nowhere to run; nowhere to hide.”

For the next few days, news programs featured Arctic researchers explaining the consequences of climate change north of the Arctic Circle. Some of my former colleagues at the University of Alaska were quizzed on camera about the permafrost and methane in Arctic lakes. Several cited my work. Yes, they said, the permafrost was melting, methane constantly bubbled up under Arctic lakes. None of this was secret information.

I was not among the scientists interviewed. I heard that a couple of reporters trying to find a way to contact me put pressure on the PR department at the university, but no one gave me up. They just said I was no longer affiliated with the university.

A month later, after the explosion had faded from the news cycle, the National Science Foundation called me. I was about 100 miles away from the exploding lake, making coffee over a driftwood fire in Ivvavik National Park, Canada’s least visited national park. I had spent the month living in a qarmaq, a sod-roofed hut built decades before by an Inuit family to serve as a winter camp. It was just large enough for me, Claire, and Marina—grad students who had elected to spend the summer getting a little field experience working with me. The qarmaq was conveniently situated right beside the one-acre plot where I was testing a unique method of capturing methane released by melting permafrost.

Here there were no spruce trees to betray the softening of the soil beneath the surface. Low grasses and shrubs grew in a boggy landscape. Nestled among the plants were carbon fiber tubes, woven together to make a very loose mat. In some areas, the fibers had been trampled into the soil by a passing herd of reindeer.

A year before, I had submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation about this pilot project. I had called this tangle of carbon fiber tubes a ‘methane sequestering mat.’ When NSF turned down my grant proposal, I had posted the project on a crowdfunding site, where I referred to it as a ‘fart catcher.’ Crowdfunding had financed my one-acre pilot project.

It was a warm day by Arctic standards—slightly above freezing. I wore hiking boots with two pairs of wool socks, rather than the large white bunny boots—rubber inside and out with thick insulation between the waterproof layers—that were necessary in the winter. I could breathe without a filter to warm the air before it reached my lungs. Practically balmy.

I was talking with Claire and Marina about plans for the day when the satellite phone rang. The call was from an NSF program officer, the same guy who had turned down my grant proposal. But that had been before the lake exploded, before permafrost became—ever so briefly—the star of the 24/7 news cycle, before some members of Congress began calling for zero methane emissions in the Arctic.

NSF was adding a new initiative that focused on methane emission from the melting permafrost. The program officer had called my house in Fairbanks and persuaded the house sitter to give him the number of my satellite phone. He wanted to discuss my proposal for a methane-sequestering mat.

Sitting on a camp stool by the driftwood fire, looking out over the tundra and the tangle of carbon fibers, I told the program officer about results to date from my crowdfunded prototype. Knowing that this program officer had an engineering background, I focused on how the project made use of recent innovations in nanotechnology—the carbon fiber tubes, the low pressure methane-hydrate storage tank made possible by advances in carbon nanotube technology. I recited numbers—emission rates, kilograms of methane recovered. It was a cordial and productive conversation.

Nine months later, I landed at Franklin Research Station. Built of recycled shipping containers and located on the coastal tundra just outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the station was a low rust-colored box surrounded by ice. To the north, the Beaufort Sea—a plain of ice stretching away to meet the blue sky. To the south, the Brooks Range—mountains that looked as if they had been sculpted from snow, not just covered by it. I had been lucky to fly in during a calm spell. March was the start of the Arctic research season, but the weather was always dicey.

“Welcome to your home away from home,” the pilot called out as he turned the plane’s nose into the wind and brought it down smoothly on the ice-covered runway.

“Happy to be here,” I said sincerely.

A few hours later, after unpacking my gear, I repeated that sentiment as I met with Jackson Hanks, the head of operations at the station. I had done my research on the man. He was twenty years my senior. A biologist by training, but he had been head of operations here for more than a decade, while station managers had come and gone.

A former colleague from my university days who had spent a summer at Franklin Station provided me with more detailed information than Google ever could: “That guy? He’ll never go rogue. He knows how to work the system. He’s never the leader but always in charge. He keeps his head down and knows where all the bodies are buried.”

Oki, the head cook at Franklin Station, was a distant cousin of my friend Anaaya. He had provided even more important information: what Jackson Hanks liked to drink.

I arrived in Jackson’s office with a bottle of bourbon. “A gift from the south,” I said, as I set it on his desk. “My sources say it’s your favorite brand.”

Jackson smiled, opened the bottle, and brought two glasses out of a drawer. “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Lindsey.”

“Maggie,” I said. “Nobody calls me doctor.” I accepted a glass of bourbon and sat across the desk from him. We engaged in the usual small talk of the Arctic, discussing the weather, the state of the sea ice, my good luck in getting in before the wind picked up. At that moment the wind was blasting the triple-paned office window with ice crystals and making the station vibrate with a steady hum.

Jackson sipped his bourbon, then told me they’d been having problems with polar bears of late. That led to a story about a grad student who had come to the station to study the population decline of polar bears. “He thought they were cute until he got trapped in a remote observation blind for three days when a couple of young bears decided he’d make a good snack. After that, he switched to studying the decline of the parrotfish population in coral reefs off the coast of the Yucatan.”

“He could have switched to Arctic foxes,” I suggested. “They’re plenty cute and not at all menacing unless you’re a lemming.”

Jackson shook his head. “He’s better off in the tropics. He didn’t belong up here.”

“So you condemned him to sweltering on the beach and watching the sea level rise.”

“Drinking warm beer because there’s no ice. Battening down for hurricanes. Battling giant tropical spiders.”

We lifted our glasses and toasted the guy who couldn’t cut it in our environment of choice.

“When I found out you were coming to the station, I asked a few sources of my own about you,” he told me.

“Find out anything interesting?”

“The station manager at McMurdo says you passed his test, and that’s good.”

When I was in grad school, I’d spent a summer at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, helping with a study of the microbiome of Antarctic soils.

“What test was that?” I asked. I didn’t remember a test.

“He watches what people do in the cafeteria. He looks for people who are just as comfortable in a group discussion as they are sitting by themselves. You passed.”

I nodded. “I get along with people,” I said. “And I can get along alone.”

He leaned back in his chair, studying me. “Tell me—why did you leave the university? You were teaching, doing research, on a tenure track.”

“One too many committee meetings,” I said lightly. He laughed, and I added, “I like to get things done.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “So tell me about this methane sequestering mat of yours. Or do you prefer ‘fart catcher’?”

I shrugged. “Either one.” Since Jackson was a biologist, I launched into an explanation of the biology of the system. “The mat’s made of carbon fiber tubes, but what makes it work is the colony of bacteria in those tubes.”

It turned out that Jackson knew quite a bit about Methylomirabilis oxyfera, the bacteria that made the mat work. Amazing critters those—they thrive in stinking black mud without light or oxygen, digesting methane and nitrogen oxides for their energy. In the tubes of the mat, they consumed enough methane to create a concentration gradient that kept the methane flowing into the tubes and rising into a storage tank.

“A biological methane pump?” he said. “That’s clever. And you want to cover a square mile with this fart catcher? That’s ambitious.”

“A square mile is just a start. We have to move fast, you know. With the current rate of methane emission . . . ”

He held up a hand to stop me. “Hold on. I don’t need to hear another manifesto on Arctic warming. I live here, remember?”

“Sorry.”

“Having that lake blow up gave your permafrost research quite a boost, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did.”

“I can understand the motives of whoever did it. No one pays any attention to what happens up here unless it’s involves something cataclysmic or cute. Polar bears get press; permafrost usually doesn’t.”

I didn’t say anything. I just waited.

He studied me, then smiled, ever so slightly. “I assume that safety protocols will ensure that there will be no explosions associated with your project.”

I nodded quickly. “I can assure you of that.”

He poured another glass. “I’ll give you a crew to lay out this fart catcher of yours. I trust you’ll supervise the work.”

I did more than supervise. I worked alongside the crew that rolled out the fart catcher. It was nasty tedious work. The crew described it as hellacious, and I had to agree.

My test plot in Ivvavik National Park had been a flat grassy area. It had been easy to push the carbon tubes down so they made contact with the soil. On the coastal plain surrounding Franklin Station, the land was flat, but the vegetation was less cooperative. The fart catcher had to lie flat against the soil, so we had to clear away tough shrubs—willow and Labrador tea. We had to pound down dense tussocks formed by sedges and grasses. In a month and a half, we managed to install less than a quarter of the projected area.

I contacted some friends about the problem. It takes a team to save the world, after all. I had many friends and they had friends and their friends had friends. Social media was wonderful that way. My friends (and their friends) often had creative solutions. Some people talk about thinking outside the box. Many of my friends had never seen the box. They were unaware that the box existed. I sent out the word and waited to see what would happen.

A month later, as the crew and I were clearing yet another patch of willow, I heard someone call to me. I looked up to see a herd of shaggy beasts lumbering over the tundra toward us.

Muskoxen—Pleistocene megafauna at its most charismatic. They’re called oxen, but they’re actually more closely related to goats. Their ancestors had survived the mass extinction event that occurred during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. The herd stopped at the edge of the carbon tube carpet, eying me myopically as they stood shoulder to shoulder, ready to dispatch any predator with their large pointy horns.

“Hello!” Someone in a lavender parka came around the side of the herd and waved to me. “We’re here at last.”

That was Jenna, leader of the muskoxen herders. There were five muskoxen herders, two Royal Canadian Mounties, and a dozen cows and six calves. They had traveled from a muskoxen farm some 150 miles to the south.

I escorted the people and their shaggy charges to Franklin Station. While the ox herders found a patch of good grazing for the beasts, the Mounties met with Jackson and presented him with the official paperwork. Apparently, a Canadian muskoxen farm had donated the animals to Franklin Station—a donation approved by a top level official in the US agency responsible for polar research. It was unclear where the request for this donation had originated.

While Jackson chatted with the Mounties about their journey, I helped his assistant research the situation. The path of official approvals was an insane tangle, involving at least three agencies on the US side and the same number on the Canadian side. But in the end, it didn’t really matter who had approved what. The muskoxen were an official gift from Canada to the US. Officials on the US side made it quite clear that sending the muskoxen away would cause an international incident.

Besides, news of the gift was already trending on all news feeds—it was the warm and fuzzy story of the day. A muskox calf is not nearly as cute as an Arctic fox, but they do have a certain charm. In those days of doom and gloom and climate change, cheery stories associated with polar science were hard to come by.

So Franklin Station gained a herd of muskoxen. Jackson found temporary quarters for the Mounties and the ox herders and arranged for a crew to set up a paddock for the beasts. To help out, I volunteered to take charge of the care of the muskoxen, mentioning that they could be an asset to my project. Muskoxen would happily devour tundra shrubs. Their hooves would break up and flatten the lumps and bumps in the soil, making it easier to roll out the fart catcher.

When the visitors headed to their quarters, Jackson asked me to stay. “So tell me,” he said. “How did you make this happen?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t make it happen.” After a moment’s pause, I went on. “I talked about the problems we’ve been having with laying out the fart catcher with a friend who studies muskoxen. He reminded me that large ruminants were great at modifying the environment. I did say that it was a pity I didn’t happen to have any of those. He must have mentioned it to someone who decided to help out.”

Jackson shook his head, looking incredulous.

“I’ve found that if you put the word out to enough people, useful stuff happens. You never know what it’s going to be. But sometimes, it’s just what you need.”

“That’s nuts. That’s no way to manage a project.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “Those beasts will make a big difference to how much mat we can install before winter. And you know this project is important. You’ve seen the changes in the Arctic over the last decade.”

“Of course I have.”

“Reduction in the sea ice. Steadily increasing temperature. Changes in wildlife patterns. Changes in weather patterns. When will the climate reach the tipping point? How long do you think we have? Another decade or two? Then what?”

“You think you’ll save the world with a square mile of fart catcher and a dozen muskoxen?”

I shrugged. “It’s a start. Baby steps, but it’s a beginning. I promise there’ll be no explosions. I’ll take care of the herd. They won’t bother you a bit.”

Over the next few weeks I worked with the ox herders to learn the ways of the shaggy beasts. The herd grazed in the area around the station, returning to their paddock at night for special muskox treats—carrots mostly. A muskox will follow you anywhere for a carrot.

The head of PR at the station shot photos and video: muskoxen grazing with the research station in the background, muskoxen in their newly built paddock, muskox calves sleeping by their muskox mamas. It was great PR for the station, and that earned Jackson some points with the administration. All good.

After a couple of weeks, the ox herders headed back to their farm, promising to return in the spring to comb out the qiviut, the muskoxen’s underwool. It was a great cash crop, eight times warmer than wool and softer than cashmere. As a farewell gift, the ox herders gave me a set of long johns knit from qiviut—the warmest, softest, and most expensive underwear I’ve ever owned.

So that was my first summer at the station—laying carpet, bringing in some muskoxen, collecting some 30 metric tons of methane. Calculations for required storage had been spot on—the storage tanks were almost full. It was a good start, but it was time to move on to the next phase, one that was not covered in my grant application: disposing of the methane without adding it to the atmosphere and in the process funding a significant increase in the methane harvest.

In the Fall, I left the station to get some business done in the lower forty-eight. I presented a paper at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco and met with a few research teams from Siberia, Norway, Greenland, and Canada who were engaged in similar projects. While I was there, I also met with a German research group that was working on methane cracking.

Here’s a quick chemistry lesson. Methane is made of carbon and hydrogen. In methane cracking, hydrogen is separated from carbon to make hydrogen gas and carbon. Hydrogen is a great fuel. Think of the Hindenburg: a big bag of hydrogen and a major explosion. If you burn hydrogen, you get water. No carbon dioxide, no greenhouse gas problem.

And here’s a bonus. What’s left when you take away the hydrogen is pure carbon. Perfect for making more carbon tubes to capture and store methane and valuable on the commodities market for use in manufacturing. Many companies from car makers to aircraft builders were switching from steel to lighter stronger carbon fiber to make their products. You can see why I was interested in methane cracking.

I met the Germans at a restaurant in Drowntown. That was the name San Franciscans had given to the area of downtown that flooded when the tide was high, a result of rising sea levels. It was low tide that evening. The streets were dry, but there was a whiff of salt and seaweed in the air.

The lead German researcher was Katrin, an earnest woman who asked—politely but with a slightly baffled tone—about the American politicians’ continued stress on carbon emission targets. “All research has indicated that stopping emissions will not stop the change in climate,” she said earnestly. “Even if we stopped today, the world’s temperature will continue to increase for half a century. They do not seem to understand that.”

“Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” I said. “It’s a popular pastime in political circles. I’m seen as the voice of doom and gloom because I recognize that the permafrost is melting at an increasing rate and that methane capture should be a top priority.”

“And you are successfully capturing methane. What is your current capture rate?”

We drank beer and made calculations. Katrin estimated expenses on the back of a napkin as we worked out a plan for a pilot project involving methane cracking. During the Arctic summer, I could use solar power to crack the methane, and then cool and compress the hydrogen gas. I hoped to find a manufacturer to process the carbon into more carpet. Katrin had some ideas there—and some excellent contacts in the German manufacturing community.

“I understand that NSF regulations require you to purchase your materials in the US,” she said.

I waved a hand, dismissing the problem. “I have private funding as well,” I explained. The presence of the muskoxen had been an enormous help in crowdfunding efforts. Charismatic megafauna has its uses.

“Very good,” she said. “Then I think I can assist you.”

That was the first stop in a long winter of hunting and gathering. So many technical problems to solve, with little time and not enough money.

The hive mind found me a way to store the hydrogen that my pilot project would produce: a decommissioned tank from NASA, originally built to contain liquid hydrogen fuel for the space shuttle. It had never been used. For decades, it had been stored at NASA’s New Orleans manufacturing facility on the far eastern edge of New Orleans—still above water, but just barely. The facility was being decommissioned—the last hurricane had come close to wiping it out—and they were happy to find a home for the fuel tank.

I set up a relationship with a German manufacturing plant that would make some of my pure carbon into fart catcher carpet and methane hydrate storage. I’d compensate them for their service with the rest of the carbon, which they could use or sell for a fat profit.

The rest of my time was spent retrofitting the hydrogen fuel tank for my needs and arranging for transport. Everywhere I went, I could see the effects of the changing climate. But people were doing what people always do—complaining about the weather and adapting to it where they could. Many politicians still doubted that change was underway even as some religious leaders were preaching about the end times.

I was happy to return to the Arctic for another summer of work. The carpet from the previous year was functioning beautifully. Arctic grasses and other plants were growing through the loose weave of the mat, making it a part of the landscape. Trampling by the muskoxen had smoothed out the cursed tussocks and laying the next section of carpet was considerably easier than the first section had been.

Of course, there were problems. On top of the usual sleet storms and blizzards, we had to be alert to changes caused by warmer temperatures. Whenever we were outside the station, we were armed against starving polar bears that thought Arctic researchers might substitute for their usual diet of walrus and seal. We almost lost part of the carpet-laying crew when a sinkhole opened up in the area where we were working. Fortunately, the fart catcher carpet was strong enough to act as a safety net. It supported us and let us climb back up out of the hole.

I won’t pretend there weren’t difficulties with the hydrogen tank (delivered a month late) and the pilot methane cracker. But we got it all working eventually.

I also expanded the research station’s greenhouse, something that I’d discussed with Oki and kitchen crew the summer before. The original greenhouse was quite small—just big enough to grow a few vegetables. But with the hydrogen I was producing, I had energy to burn—so to speak. In my scavenging at the NASA manufacturing facility in New Orleans, I had run across a prototype greenhouse designed for Mars. The warehouse supervisor gave me a great deal on it. He said it would be abandoned within the month along with anything else left in the facility.

I set the Martian greenhouse up as an extension of the existing greenhouse. A hydrogen-powered heater allowed me to warm the air with no impact on the station energy budget and a cushion of carbon nanotubes insulated the permafrost from the greenhouse and collected the methane that outgassed.

Down in the lower forty-eight, things were getting worse faster than anyone had expected. Changes in polar temperatures had caused perturbations in the polar jet stream that wreaked havoc with global weather patterns. There was drought and wildfire in the western US, severe flooding in the South, historic blizzards along the eastern seaboard, and tornadoes where tornadoes had never been before.

By the end of the summer, I had quadrupled the land covered with fart catcher and I’d made plans to cover ten times that area in the following year. The research teams in Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and Norway were also having success.

That winter, my efforts focused on acquiring hydrogen transport and figuring out how to roll out more carpet with the same crew.

Well, not exactly the same crew. I had been in touch with a robotics team that worked in an abandoned warehouse in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

They called themselves the Ant Factory, a non-profit collective of entrepreneurial engineers. Well . . . some of them were engineers. Some of them were artists. All of them were scavengers, retrofitters, people who knew how to make do, people who simultaneously thought in the long term and the short term. My kind of people.

“We’re old school,” the head engineer told me. At least, he seemed to be in charge. His name was Renaldo and he had a seemingly infinite supply of black T-shirts emblazoned with cryptic sayings. My favorite read ‘Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.’

Renaldo claimed that was the best approach to projects like mine. “You know how the US space program works,” he said. “They triple check everything and build safeguards into their safeguards and redundancies onto their redundancies. We’re the opposite of that.”

In the warehouse parking lot, the Ant Factory had created an obstacle course where they held robot trials. Some parts of the course were constant—broken pavement, loose rocks, a pile of sand that could bury a bot in an avalanche. Other parts changed every day—the team was constantly adding booby traps and barriers. A slick of ice, a small mountain of melting snow, a sticky patch of some sort of goo—I thought it might be something toxic, but it turned out to be molasses.

The Ant Factory built me a robot that could traverse the course while rolling out fart catcher carpet. Actually, they built me a hundred robots—Renaldo called them “pequeninos peidos”—Little Farts. With a hundred robots, he said, it wouldn’t matter if a few of them failed. “Power in numbers,” he said.

Powered by hydrogen fuel cells, designed for rough terrain—originally the Little Farts were agribots designed to roll over just about any lump, bump, or tussock.

On my last night at the Ant Factory, I sat on the old loading dock and watched a dozen Little Farts navigate the course, towing and unrolling a large carpet that Renaldo assured me was heavier than the fart catcher. The team was celebrating. I had sprung for pizza and beer—a pilsner from a local brewery called Drown Your Sorrows. The label showed an ocean wave washing down Sao Paulo’s main street.

“I don’t know how I can thank you for all this” I told Renaldo as we watched one bot climb the slush mountain, trailing black carbon fibers. I wasn’t paying the Ant Factory much. I’d almost exhausted my crowdsourced funding.

He sipped his beer, surveying the rubble-filled yard. “You know those Hollywood movies where a few people save the world. We’re those people. We’ll make a difference.”

I nodded.

Renaldo knew someone who knew Katrin, so he already knew about my success with methane cracking. “What are you doing with the hydrogen you’re producing?” he asked me. “I have a friend who would be happy to purchase it.”

“Technically, I can’t actually sell the products of my work,” I told him. “That’s against NSF regulations.”

He nodded. “I understand. I am confident my friend would accept any hydrogen you chose to give him. He would offer goods and services in exchange.”

“That could work. Of course, there is the problem of transportation.”

“No problem. My friend Hehu lives in the Raft. He can take care of transportation.”

The Raft was a seasteading community, a loose affiliation of over a hundred vessels that had been converted to floating farms and cities by climate refugees from small island nations that had been wiped out by rising waters.

“Let me contact him on your behalf.”

I returned to the Arctic with Renaldo’s bots. Jackson didn’t ask questions about where I got them. He and I had developed a fine working relationship. He was glad that I needed a smaller work crew. The muskoxen were spooked by the bots at first, but they got used to them.

Renaldo’s friend Hehu came through. He reached the research station with two ships—a former Arctic cruise ship, now modified as a floating farm and residence for a few dozen people, and a former navy ship, now modified for hydrogen transport.

Hehu was from Woleai Atoll, the first island group to be swamped by the rising sea. I liked his team of engineers—the head of the group was from JPL and he knew one of the aerospace engineers who had calculated the satellite orbits for me. He had, like me, gone rogue, and we had a fine time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of leaving the confines of the university.

It was a fabulous summer. There were the usual problems with sinkholes and sleet storms and polar bears, but the robots worked well and I successfully expanded the area covered with the fart catcher to about twenty square miles. As autumn approached, it was all going very well. Until it all went very wrong.

I should have paid more attention to the news. While I’d been setting up partnerships and laying carpet and dodging polar bears, there had been a presidential election, a major change in congress, and a shift in national priorities. Hurricanes had wiped out New Orleans and a few other southern cities. Storm-driven waves were eroding beach bluffs and flooding US cities. Funding was being diverted to disaster relief. Franklin Station would shut down at the end of the season.

And somehow my work had come to the attention of new political appointees in charge of climate research. They were upset by my dealings with Renaldo and the Germans and Hehu and . . . oh, just about everybody who had been helping me out. Some of my partners were apparently on terrorist watch lists.

At least, that was one story. Some of my friends suggested that the concern about terrorism was a cover. What had really pissed people off was the success of my methane cracking—steel manufacturers did not like the possibilities offered by cheap availability of pure carbon.

Whatever the cause, I was in trouble. Jackson told me that navy personnel who came to close down the station would be taking me into custody and charging me with a list of offenses including theft of government property and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. Jackson had been ordered to confine me to the station.

The day before the Navy ship was due to arrive, I left. At my request, Oki had packed a box of supplies—including all of the fresh carrots that were left in the greenhouse. Before hugging me goodbye, he quizzed me on my equipment. He listened carefully to a long list: silk long johns, qiviut underwear, a layer of wool, windproof coat and pants, parka, bunny boots, hat, hood, air filter to warm the air before it entered my lungs, rifle for the polar bears, a pop-up shelter, and on and on.

“All right,” he said at last. “Stay warm, stay dry. Don’t get dehydrated and eat as many calories as you can stuff in your face—and you’ll be fine.” He hugged me goodbye.

It was a sunny day with a light wind. Two Little Farts accompanied me, dragging my gear on an improvised sled made of a plastic pallet I had found on the beach among the driftwood. In addition to the food and gear I had listed for Oki, I had a fiberglass kayak that had been left in the station’s storage by a seal researcher.

I took no satellite phone, no GPS, no electronics that might be used to find me. Such a strange feeling, leaving all that behind.

The muskoxen followed me—not out of affection, but in return for carrots that I dropped along the way. Their hooves completely obliterated my tracks and the marks left by my improvised sled and the Little Farts.

The hike to the shore was about a mile. When I reached the shore, I reset the Little Farts to return to the station. The muskoxen followed them, hoping for more carrots.

I abandoned the plastic pallet on the beach where I had found it, loaded the kayak, slid it into the water, and headed west for a place I knew.

A few years back, I had decided to retrace the steps of my favorite Arctic explorer, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a guy who never got a lot of press. Everyone paid attention to Peary and Amundsen and Scott. Big voyages, big funding. Leffingwell never had much funding and didn’t give a damn about reaching the North Pole.

He came up here in 1901 and fell in love with the Arctic. He spent nine summers and six winters up here, traveling around, making observations, keeping meticulous records. No fancy equipment—he had Inuit guides; he used dog sleds and small boats. He made the first map of the coastline worth looking at. He was the first person to explain ice wedges and the very first to pay any attention to the permafrost.

A few years back, I spent the better part of a summer retracing his journeys in this area. On that trip, I spent a week in an old prospector’s house where Leffingwell had wintered. Half sod-hut, half log cabin, it was still in pretty good shape. Good shelter, well-concealed, near the coast, and so obscure that only a dedicated permafrost researcher would know about it.

The wind was with me, but even so it was a long paddle down the coast to the small inlet where the cabin was located. I beached the kayak and dragged it and all my gear into the cabin. The wind had picked up and I knew it would erase my tracks.

Inside, out of the wind, I made myself at home and waited for the search to come and go. It was a long wait. When weather was calm, I could hear the search helicopters from miles away—the distinctive whup, whup, whup of their rotors warned me to take cover so searchers couldn’t spot me.

When the wind was blowing, the helicopters didn’t fly. Then I would listen to the wind. Sometimes a gust would make the hut shudder so the boards creaked and groaned. More often a steady wind would make the walls vibrate, so I felt like I was shivering even when I wasn’t. The wind had been trying to tear the hut down for more than a hundred years.

In the first week, a bear found my hiding place, but I had my rifle. Bear meat, while not fine dining, is a good source of protein.

The nights grew longer and longer until the sun never rose. When the sun was just below the horizon, it wasn’t completely dark. It was like that time right after the sun sets, when the sky is the deepest possible blue. Imagine that deep blue moment stretching on and on. The blue light colored the entire world, reflecting from the snow and the water. I felt like I was swimming in the sky.

For me, that was the important moment. Not the brilliant golden flash of the lake’s explosion, but rather the cool, blue, liminal light where nothing seemed real and I was not sure what would become of the world.

I had to wait a long time for the searchers to give up and leave, but eventually I stopped hearing helicopters. I returned to the station for the winter, a long paddle followed by a long walk over the pack ice. It was so cold that I could feel the mucus freeze in my nose when I took a breath without my air filter on. The very act of breathing put me at risk of dehydration—since every bit of water vapor froze instantly, the air was bone dry.

The station had been stripped down, but my friends had left behind everything I needed. There was a stash of canned food in the kitchen. The hydrogen-powered generator in the greenhouse was still there.

The winter was cold and long and lonely. I grew potatoes under improvised grow-lights. I set up a still and perfected the finest hooch ever made in the Arctic Circle. Arctic Fire, I called it.

Satellite communication had been shut down when they closed the station, but I rigged a ham radio. When the ionosphere cooperated, I could catch news broadcasts. The news was never good: heat waves, drought, hurricanes, flooding, famine, disease.

I managed to contact a few friends and I told them I was all right. They told me that the Navy team had searched for me in all the safety huts and all known emergency shelters. They fixated on the largest of the sinkholes—the one that almost swallowed my crew. They spotted some marks at the edge that could have been made by a rope and figured a sinkhole offered a great hiding place. Down there, there’d be no wind, no bears.

It had taken their team a week to stage an expedition to the bottom to look for me. I’m glad they all got in and out all right. Dangerous place, a methane sinkhole. Not somewhere I’d like to spend a lot of time.

Come spring, finding me was no longer a priority for the US government. The Arctic winter was summer in the Antarctic, and there had been some major developments down south. The Western Antarctic ice sheet, which scientists had thought would remain stable for several more decades, had started collapsing in a most spectacular fashion. The top layers of the sheet had been melting each summer, exposing long-buried crevasses. One of those crevasses broke through the bottom of the ice shelf, and an iceberg the size of Connecticut broke loose. A few weeks later, another one, just as big, broke free. Then another.

The icebergs were dramatic, but they weren’t the real problem. The Western ice shelf held back the glaciers on the Antarctic continent. Without it, those glaciers would flow into the sea. All told, that could add 30 million cubic kilometers of water, give or take a few million, to the world’s oceans. Faced with this threat, politicians were turning their attention to immediate construction projects to hold back the sea. A rogue scientist eating potatoes and polar bear meat in a closed research station was way down on anyone’s list of concerns.

With the return of the spring, Hehu arrived with ships laden with fart catcher net, methane cracking equipment, and empty tanks to be filled with hydrogen. That was thirty years ago.

Now we have the world as it is.

I sit in Jackson’s office. I still think of it as his, though he hasn’t been here for thirty years. I use it as my office now.

Hehu sits in the chair on the other side of the desk. It’s spring again and he has sailed north just as he has each spring for the last thirty years. But he hasn’t come alone. Each spring, a fleet of ships comes north to spend the summer in the Beaufort Sea. It is a ragtag fleet of cruise ships and barges and freighters and navy ships, all repurposed for this new world, all laden with food and supplies for the station, all carrying folks eager to work on the annual methane harvest.

Some ships are equipped with methane cracking facilities; others carry empty hydrogen tanks or empty holds. Each ship has its own unique community and culture—some grow tanks of algae; others grow forests; some grow pot farms. Some are environmentally-based communities with overtones of Native American cultures; some are party boats with overtones of Burning-Man culture.

They call themselves the Sunseekers. I call them the summer people. The winter doesn’t exist for them—not really. It is always summer where they are.

I pour Hehu a glass of my Arctic Fire. “You make the best hooch in the Arctic Circle,” he says.

I smile. I didn’t make this hooch by myself. The station staff, all of them young and smart, do the hard work to keep the station running, monitoring the fart catcher, tending the muskoxen and reindeer, making high octane booze, and preparing for the Sunseeker fleet’s arrival.

When the ships arrive in the Arctic, there is a great celebration with much singing and dancing. They celebrate the summer methane harvest and they treat me like a hero.

All summer long, the Sunseeker ships crisscross the ice-free Arctic ocean, visiting fart-catcher projects in Norway, Greenland, Siberia, Canada. Each autumn, the ships take away tanks of hydrogen and holds filled with pure powdered carbon.

The Sunseekers are a cheerful lot. And why wouldn’t they be? This is a fine new world, a utopian future, a happy ending. As the permafrost melts, they capture the methane. As the oceans rises, they build more ships.

To them, it seems so natural that half the world’s remaining population lives in nomadic floating colonies. Most of them didn’t know any of the people who died in droughts and floods, heat waves and blizzards. They didn’t know all those who suffered disease and famine.

Jackson died of dengue fever when disease-carrying mosquitoes brought that disease to the American South, a shift made possible by warmer temperatures and increased rain. Katrin starved in the European famine—caused by unseasonable snowstorms resulting from the slowing of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, ocean currents that kept Europe warm. Renaldo drowned in a flood that wiped out Sao Paulo, the result of a monster storm. Just one extreme weather event among hundreds.

They all died. Billions of people died. Not millions—billions. It took all those deaths to bring the world population down to a more sustainable level and let us reach this happy ending.

This isn’t the way I thought it would work out when I set out to save the world. All those square-jawed heroes of the old science fiction stories had it wrong. You can’t save the world as we know it. I did what I could, and I did some good in the world. But you can’t save the world without changing it.

“A toast,” Hehu said, lifting his glass. “To the future.”

I nodded and lifted my glass. “To the future. There’s no stopping it.”

Originally published in Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Pat Murphy writes fiction that inhabits the borderland between genres, where life is interesting and the rules are slippery. She is very grateful that science fiction exists, since it has provided a happy home for seven of her eight novels and many of her short stories. Her work has won numerous awards, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Her novels include The Falling Woman, The City Not Long After, Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell. Her short stories are collected in Points of Departure and Women Up To No Good. With Karen Joy Fowler, she co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. In her day job, she is the resident Evil Genius at MysteryScience.com, where she creates science activities to inspire and amaze elementary school students.

The late Paul Doherty was a physicist, author, teacher, and mountaineer. As part of his job as a senior scientist at the Exploratorium, he worked as a scientist/writer at McMurdo station Antarctica. There he joined a group of scientists doing research on the rim of Mt. Erebus, an active volcano, and learned firsthand about surviving in the extreme cold. In collaboration with Pat Murphy, Paul wrote a science column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He wrote many nonfiction science books, including the Explorabook, which came with the tools for doing the experiments it described. He is the winner of the Faraday Award for Excellence in Science Teaching from the National Science Teachers Association. A long-time science fiction reader, Paul worked out the equations for the navigation of a relativistic spacecraft back in 1979, which landed him a mention in Fredrick Pohl’s novel Starburst.

In Panic Town, on the Backward Moon

Michael F. Flynn

The man who slipped into the Second Dog that day was thin and pinch-faced and crossed the room with a half-scared, furtive look. Willy cut off in the middle of a sentence and said, “I wonder what that Gof wants?” The rest of us at the table turned to watch. An Authority cop at the next table, busy not noticing how strong the near-beer was, slipped his hand into his pocket, and VJ loosened the knife in his ankle scabbard. Robbery was rare in Panic Town—making the getaway a major hurdle—but it was not unknown.

Hot Dog sucked the nipple of his beer bottle. “He has something.”

“Something he values,” suggested Willy.

VJ chuckled. “That a man values something is no assurance that the thing is valuable. It might be a picture of his sainted grandmother.” But he didn’t think so, and neither did anyone else in the Dog.

All this happened a long time ago. Mars was the happening place back then. Magnetic sails had brought transit times down to one month, and costs had dropped with them, so the place was filling up with dreamers and scamps and dogs of all kinds, out to siphon a buck from the desert or from the pockets of those who did. There were zeppelin pilots and water miners, air-squeezers and terraformers. Half the industry supported the parasol-makers of course, but they needed construction, maintenance, teamsters, and rocket-jocks, and throughout history whenever there was a man and a dollar there was another man willing to separate them.

We were friends, the four of us hooching that day; but the kind of friends who rarely saw one another except across a bottle. Hot Dog’s name was Rusty Johnson, but he eschewed that for a gonzo nickname. He flew ballistics for Iron Planet, taking passengers and cargo up to the Dogs or around to the antipodes. He had the glam, and women lined up and took numbers, even though he wasn’t much to look at and even less to listen to. Maybe it was the cute freckles.

VJ’s name was Viktor Djeh and it was fairly easy to figure how he’d gotten his nickname. He did maintenance on PP&L’s converter out by Reldresel, where they pulled oxygen and other useful crap from the ilmenite. His job was not nearly as glamorous as Hot Dog’s, but he made it up in morphy-star good looks. He was a joker, and always ready with a favor. He had saved my ass once when I was on a job in Reldresel and the high-pressure line sprang a leak, so I always paid his freight when we crossed paths at the Dog.

Willy’s name, to complete the trifecta, was actually Johann Sebastian Früh, but a childhood friend had given him the moniker from an old movie and it stuck. Willy clerked for the Authority, so he had neither good looks nor glamour, but he got by on a willingness to listen. His earnest expression invited confidences, a circumstance that provided him with a steady, if clandestine income.

Pinch-face crossed to the bar, where Pondo was serving. Dogs move in microgravity like they’re underwater—in slow, gliding steps and grip shoes. I once saw Jen Wuli chase Squint-Eye Terry M’Govern down the Shklovsky-Lagado tubeway and it was the funniest damn thing I ever did see.

Pondo and the stranger traded whispers, then sidled into the office. Everyone relaxed, and the Authority cop took his hand out of his pocket. A few minutes later, they reemerged from the office with smiles all over their teeth.

“Who was that muffer?” someone at another table asked when the stranger was gone.

“I seen him around, down below. Works outta Port Rosario.”

Willy smiled when he overheard this, and VJ gave a thoughtful nod. Hot Dog pulled his handi from his coverall pocket and checked his schedule. “I’m dropping down to chair a Guild meeting in a couple days,” he told us. “Pig Hanson has a run out to Marineris and I have to sub. I’ll ask around.”

That’s how it started, though at the time we didn’t know it.

The next day I called Aurora Sails in Under-Gulliver, where they ran an assembly hanger. The superconductor loop sets up a magnetic field that acts as a sail and takes up momentum from the solar wind. It doesn’t harvest much acceleration, but the velocity keeps building, and you don’t have to carry fuel. By adjusting the loops you can change the size and shape of the field and sail damn near anywhere at respectable speeds. When you kick amps into a superloop, the current keeps going like a bunny with a drum until you quench it.

The problem the client had at the time was that some of their sails wouldn’t kick amps. They thought there might be something wrong with the kicker, but they didn’t know how to prove it. So the Authority tasked me to settle matters because the bickering under Gulliver was growing intense and nothing soothes internal squabbles like an external consultant.

Technically, I work for the Ares Consortium, an alliance of corporations formed to run the Martian parasol business. Aurora strings the parasols and Pegasus ferries them to the target asteroid, where Sisyphus rigs the harnesses in place. My ultimate boss was actually old man Bryce van Huyten, but Phobos Port Authority coordinates the local action, so I carry an Authority troubleshooter’s badge.

I told Aurora to set up two loops in the test beds: one that worked and one that didn’t. They balked because any loop that worked was immediately installed on a parasol and packaged for transit, while the defective ones were salvaged for parts. Parasols were urgent, high-priority work, and they couldn’t let loops sit around for me to play with, and blah-blah-blah. The usual. So I told them to call me back when they were ready to get serious and I cut the link.

It took them two days while they pondered what the Authority would say if they blew me off. Then I got a call from Antonelli, the sail prep boss. He had two loops set aside, he told me, “but hustle your ass out here because Logistics is giving me the stink-eye.”

Antonelli and his engineers managed to conceal their delight when my ass arrived. They floated at a respectable distance. Everybody wanted to be close enough to the problem to count coup in case I succeeded, but not so close that they’d get cooties if I failed.

I forgot their names as soon as they were introduced, except for one fellow from Logistics named Moynihan Truth, both because of his unusual name and because I saw him again later. He was ten years old, but that’s in dog years; double it for Earth-equivalent. He’d been born in Golden Flats on Mars, where they have the monument to the first Rover. You’ve probably seen images of Farzi Baroomand’s famous statue, the one that shows all the aliens lined up behind the Rover where the camera can’t see them, laughing themselves silly. Everyone there takes the last name Truth to honor the Rover. The Kid was the only one in the locker smiling and I remember wondering what the big joke was.

Four test beds took up most of the horizontal space. Hobartium loops were tethered to beds A and B. I pointed to A and said, “This one’s not working?” Nods all around. The neon-yellow Hold tag was my clue. “And that one works?” More bobbleheads. It was green-tagged. “And you think it might be the kicker?” Grudging assents, but dissenters mentioned other components, assembly errors, you-name-it. Paralysis of analysis. Smart people with a dozen smart ideas, but not smart enough to try any for fear of being wrong.

But the first rule of troubleshooting is: Start Somewhere. When you don’t know crap, whatever you learn moves you ahead. “Take this kicker,” I pointed, “and install it on that loop; and take that kicker and install it on this loop.”

When the switcheroo was finished I told them to kick amps, and the superconductor on A began to circularize from the hoop stress, while the one on B now remained flaccid. I nodded.

“Yep. It’s the kicker, all right.”

Antonelli swelled up. “For that, we pay Port Authority two ounces troy per diem? We could have done that ourselves!”

“No you couldn’t,” I reminded him. “You couldn’t even get the two hoops set up without my prodding.”

“Big deal,” said one of the engineers. “We already thought it was the kicker.” No matter what the solution turns out to be, there will always be someone to say I told you so.

“Sure,” I said. “But now you know. Now take the top assembly off this kicker and switch it with the top assembly on the other. If nothing changes, the problem’s in the bottom half. If A fails but B works, the problem’s in the top half.”

Antonelli sucked lemons. “What if they both start working?”

“Then it gets interesting.”

The secret of my success doesn’t come from knowing all the answers, but in knowing how to ask the questions. Disassembly-and-reassembly successively narrows the search zone for the cause. Three iterations homed in on the damper circuit subassembly. After that, it was a matter of screening the other kickers in stock and finding the ones with defective dampers. Antonelli wrote a Stern Letter to the Earthside parts manufacturer, which let him wrap things up on a suitably righteous note of indignation. Nothing makes a man happier than the prospect of blaming someone else.

When I returned to my rooms toward shift-end, I found a message from Pondo asking me to stop by the Second Dog as soon as I could. I finished repacking my go-bag for my next assignment, then took the towline up Dilman’s Bore, where I found Pondo waiting just inside the Dog.

Small as Phobos was, you’d think an illicit bar would be a tough thing to hide. Scientists back in the day had known that Phobos was partly hollow and that puzzled them some. They also realized that the moonlet resembled a Main Belt asteroid, but they couldn’t figure how Mars could capture an asteroid, circularize its eccentric orbit, and rope it onto the Martian equatorial plane—not until they discovered that the Visitors had been tricking it out back in the day. About a third of the interior had been gutted by the Visitors, and the rooms, warrens, and passageways they dug totaled two-thousand cubic kilometers usable volume. But volumes can be made operationally larger when people look the other way, and the pocket under Kepler’s Ridge had somehow escaped notice when volume was platted out.

Koso Bassendi, the owner, was a hard man to cross and was big enough to make it harder still if you did manage it. I never heard of anyone crossing him twice. Come retirement, he and brother Pondo took their bonus money and started the Second Dog. They served beer stronger than the wretched double-deuce that the Prague Convention allowed, but they served an honest measure. You can’t ask more than that of any man.

“Mickey,” Pondo said, “I understand yer going Mars-side tomorrow.”

I didn’t ask him how he knew. My schedule was not exactly classified, and the Authority likes to rotate its employees into gravity wells to keep up their muscle tone and bone calcium.

“Maybe you’ll have time to do my brother and me a little favor.”

Doing favors for the Bassendis was risky. So was refusing. I figured they wanted me to smuggle up some potables in my Authority packet, so I said, “Sure.” Technically, Phobos is “outer space” and Mars “planetary surface,” so the Prague Convention covers one, but not the other. Go figure.

Pondo guided me into the office, where Koso bobbed with his arms crossed and his scowl directed toward the thick, open door of an Eismann and Hertzog safe.

“Somebody got into our vault,” Pondo explained, in case I couldn’t figure it out. Koso said nothing, but his face tightened like a hangman’s knot.

“You call the cops?”

Both brothers looked at me and I let it go. “So, what’d you lose? Money, securities?”

They shook their heads. “Not even the Bassendi Brothers Benevolent Fund was touched,” said Koso.

I didn’t ask who the Fund was intended to benefit.

Pondo said, “Remember that fellow, Jaroslav Bytchkov, what give us something to keep for him the other day? Well, it’s gone.”

Which meant that whatever that packet contained, it was worth a great deal more than what was left untouched. At least now I knew Pinch-Face’s name.

“And what was it?”

“How would we know?” Pondo said. “My brother and me sell trust. Who would trust us with their keepsakes if we stuck our noses into them?”

The brothers might be shady, but they had a code. “What you want me to do?” I said, though I could already guess.

“Yer a troubleshooter,” said Pondo. “Find what caused our trouble.”

Koso spoke. “We take care of the other part.”

The brothers figured the taker had been in the bar the night Bytchkov had brought his precious. Who else would have known it was there? I reminded them that I had been there and Koso smiled. “The vault software was tickled during the day, when all decent men are sleeping. You was out to Gulliver the whole time.”

So I had an alibi, which was comforting; but the Bassendis wanted me to work for them, which was not so comforting. We went over the surveillance videos and identified everyone present, weeded out those too honest or too inept, and they asked me to investigate the ones who had dropped Mars-side.

That included Hot Dog, of course, who had that guild meeting to run. And Willy’s job, like mine, required periodic commutes. But VJ had also dropped, taking some personal days to “bone up” at a calcium spa. Among the handful of Martians in the bar, a petite ice-miner—Gloria “Iceman,” from Rosario—had already gone home.

“And we’d appreciate it, Mickey, if ye’d look up our depositor and find out what he given us.”

Koso said, “And it shows up for sale, we might trace the taker.”

“But we’d rather you not tell him it’s been stolen.”

“Bad for business.”

I had a private notion that Bytchkov already knew it was stolen. He just didn’t know it had been stolen from him.

Port Rosario sits in Arabia, a densely cratered, heavily eroded upland in the Northern Territories. Despite its name, it sits over some of the richest ice-bearing strata on Mars. Old water-canyons wind through the terrain and onto the lowlands, an ancient ocean bed. The dome is set in a deep crater and protected by hobartium loops that deflect incoming cosmic radiation. Mars is a hardscrabble world and attracts hardscrabble folk. No one would go there, weren’t for the archeology and the asteroid-capture program.

Everybody needs a hobby, and the Visitors’ hobby had been throwing rocks at Earth. They had booby-trapped a mess of Main Belt asteroids to drop earthward if we ever got too nosy. If it was some kind of sociopathic IQ test, like some folks thought, we had passed. We had bridled scores of ’stroids with magnetic sails and tacked them into GEO for mining and smelting. And if you’re going to bridle asteroids, Mars is the go-to place. You need less delta-vee going up and down from Mars than hopping rock to rock. That’s why the Visitors come to Mars back when Man was squatting in the forest primeval; and that’s why we’re there now.

Port Rosario always looked down-at-the-heels. There was dust everywhere. I don’t care how good the precipitators are. They say you can never see Venus because clouds hide the surface. The same is true of Mars, except everything is covered with dust. You need a broom to see the true surface. The Martian wind is not very fierce—the air’s too thin—but it’s persistent. A dust storm can develop in hours, cover the planet in days, and last for weeks. Some of it gets inside the domes in spite of all, and gives everything a rough, gritty look.

Rosarians were also rough and gritty, miners and teamsters being far from genteel, so it was well to walk careful. I tried to look dangerous whenever I strolled around town and carried enough mass to make it convincing and a set of brass knuckles in case it wasn’t.

The town is laid out on a simple spoke-and-wheel street-plan. I arrived toward local sunset and took a room in Coughlin House in the northern quadrant with a nice view of the lowlands. Nothing but the best for the Authority. I tossed my gear in the room and headed for Centre Square, which was located exactly where you’d expect.

Local custom says everyone goes there first and shakes hands with the statue of Jacinta Rosario. She’s portrayed without a helmet, which is historically inaccurate but artistically necessary. The statue is surrounded by grass and wildflowers and the only open trickle-fountain on Mars. Periodically, someone worries about “wasting water,” but since Rosario is a closed system, the water doesn’t really get wasted, and the size of the “Fossil Aquifer” underneath the town is good for a great long time. It’s not like Martians are profligate, but like they’ll tell you: “Anything for Jacinta.”

Pilot House is out the end of Mercado Radial by the ATC tower. That’s where zeppelin pilots check in. I stuck my head in the Chief Pilot’s office and asked if Jaroslav Bytchkov was in town and he checked the logs and told me to try Dominick’s Tavern at Mercado and Fourth. That was the heart of the Groin, where the merchant association had chipped in to hire a marshal to patrol the streets and break up fights. The neighborhood was called the Groin because it was a bad place to get your kicks.

Dominick’s proved a three-story duroplast building facing inward from the Dome. Apartments were on the second and third floors. No fine views for them. I found a café across the street—One-Ball Murphy’s—with a view of the entrance and waited for Bytchkov to show. I ordered a drink of “whiskey,” though it wouldn’t pass muster in Scotland or Kentucky. I think One-Ball boiled it out back in an old radiator.

I noticed Gloria Iceman at another table, also watching Dominick’s. That was interesting, so I clicked a pix with my handi and made a note. Ice miners generally hung out in the south quadrant, around the mine elevators, not here near the aerodrome. I don’t think she recognized me, but the next time I looked, she was gone and I hadn’t seen her leave.

It was 2100 when I saw Bytchkov exit Dominick’s right under the streetlamp. It must have been Old Home Week, because he was in animated conversation with Moynihan Truth. The young man had not been in the Dog the night Bytchkov squirreled his precious, but here he was chatting him up like an aged uncle with a legacy. I took a few more pix—and became suddenly aware that the other two seats at my table had acquired occupants.

On my right sat a pale, hard-faced woman with the indefinable glam of a rocket jock. She smiled at me, but it wasn’t a friendly smile and she didn’t say anything. On my left, a dusky man with obsidian eyes held a quarterstaff in his right hand. I nodded to him.

“Morning, marshal,” I said.

It was Tiki Ferrer. “Morning, Mickey. What’s a respectable Phobic like you doing in the Groin at night?”

“Just getting my land legs back,” I told him. “Came down from the Dogs at sunset.”

“And snapping pix like a muffing tourist,” he marveled. “Fourth and Merc’ isn’t a noted tourist spot. Why the interest?”

I’m pretty good at arithmetic, and added one and one. “Which are you watching, Bytchkov or Truth?”

“What is Truth?” he asked me. “That the young guy? Tell me about him.”

That meant Bytchkov was the marshal’s target and he was taking an interest in anyone who took an interest. That included Moynihan. It also included me. It was no skin off my nose, so I told him what I knew about the Truther.

Tiki introduced the woman as Genie Satterwaithe, a courier on the Red Ball laying over on Mars while her loop was refurbished and stocked up for the Green Ball to Earth. She had earlier flown ballistics and orbitals around the homeworld, which accounted for her implicit swagger even sitting down.

“I’m trying to talk her into signing on with Iron Planet,” Tiki told me.

“What’s your interest in Bytchkov?” I asked him. When the marshal demurred I flashed my badge. I wasn’t on Authority business, but Tiki didn’t have to know that.

“That’s a Port Authority badge, Mickey. It doesn’t push much mass down here.”

“Look, marshal, this ain’t for broadcast, but Bytchkov deposited something for safekeeping up in Panic Town and it’s been stolen. I’m trying to find out what it was without tipping him off.” That was the truth, if not the whole truth.

Bytchkov turned and reentered his rooming house. Moynihan made an obscene gesture to his back. Tiki sighed. “One more name for the list of people less than pleased with Jaroslav Bytchkov. Why doesn’t that list ever get shorter?”

Satterwaithe said, “It’s a gift he has.”

Tiki showed me a holo of a tall, lean woman. “This is Despina Edathanal,” he said. “Recognize her?”

I shook my head. She had the lanky physique of the spaceborn. She hadn’t been in the Dog. “She’s a tall drink of water,” I said. “I’d’ve noticed her.”

“She’s digmaster out at Cassini,” Tiki said. “She filed a complaint against Bytchkov, claiming that he’s filched Visitor artifacts.”

Much was thereby explained. The Visitors were a long time gone, but they had left some trash behind. A Visitor artifact could fetch enough troy ounces Earth-side to make snatching the Bassendi Brothers Benevolent Fund look like chump change and not worth the risk. The trick would be getting the artifact from Mars to Earth, and I began to see how that might have been arranged.

“A couple days ago,” Tiki continued, “Edathanal braced him right here in Murphy’s and told him if he didn’t return the goods she would tear off his left arm and beat him to death with it.”

“His left arm?”

“Yeah, she was being nice. Bytchkov’s right-handed. Anyhow, Bytchkov lifted for Phobos the next day. Want to tell me who he left the packet with?”

I shook my head. “Wouldn’t be a health-conscious choice.”

Tiki grunted. “So. Tell Koso hello when you see him.”

“I’m starting to think Pondo has the brains in the family.”

“Someone has to. Jaroslav’s had some in-your-face time with a half dozen people these past two days. Words were exchanged, as they say, and fists a couple times. Now he’ll only meet with one person at a time and only at a time and place of his choosing.” Tiki laid out a series of holos on the table, each the size and shape of a standard playing card. “Tell me if you know any of these people.”

One was the archeologist from the dig; another, the ice miner I had seen in the Dog. There were three guys I’d never laid eyes on; but the other three were Hot Dog, VJ, and Willy. I told him who they were.

“Bytchkov had fights with all eight of these?” I said.

“Let’s say spirited discussions. I guess I should add that fellow Moynihan. I have a feeling he’s the one smuggling the stolen artifacts off Phobos.”

“The yellow-tagged loops,” I said, and explained about the defective kickers. “Moynihan’s in Logistics. He could’ve rigged those defects in the first place, then instead of salvaging the parts, hung the loops out with the contraband. Since the parts are already accounted for, they won’t be noticed until Corporate runs a material balance.”

Satterwaithe spoke up. “Makes sense. You can program those parasols to hold station in the solar wind and a courier like me can snag it on the fly.”

Tiki smiled. “Maybe I should add you to the suspects.”

“That’s why Moynihan was grinning,” I said. “He wasn’t amused; he was nervous.”

The marshal nodded. “And you accidentally cut off their channel. Phobos-Mars radio is too public, so he came down to tell Jaroslav on the QT, probably phoned from the terminal as soon as he hit dirt. That was . . . ” Tiki did a quick search over his handi and said, “He grounded Mars-side at 1830 in Roustabout. Easy enough to call from there.” He closed the dust cover on his device. “Half an hour later Jaroslav made a call to a tosser cell. He told whoever answered that he had ‘a big one’ if the price was right and set up a meet at Dominick’s for 2200. I bet he’s trying to unload his latest acquisition. Genie and I were waiting to see who shows up, catch them passing the contraband.”

“Which now he doesn’t have.”

Tiki checked his watch. “Almost time, but I haven’t seen anyone enter the boarding house.”

“You have someone watching the back?” I asked, and he gave me a teach-your-grandmother look.

“I got posse-men watching everyone on my list. These three . . . ” He pointed to the ones I didn’t know. “ . . . they got rounded up an hour ago when the Minetown marshal busted a gambling den over the other side of town.”

I glanced at the roster of miscreants. In Phobos, no one cared if you gambled away your life savings, but Martians were different. They don’t approve of people who take foolish chances. Fast Paddy Murchison, Kenny ben Hauser, Johnny Free, Piglet Lieskovsky, Lucy Diamonds, Flo Miraziz, Rahim Hadfi, Manoj Patel, Big-O Saukkonen, and my old pal Squint-Eye Terry M’Govern. Fast Paddy, Big-O, and Lucy Diamonds had gotten into public altercations with Jaroslav within the past few days.

I handed him back the list. “Where were the others?”

“I should tell you because . . . ?”

I shrugged. “Because one of them may have guessed what Bytchkov took to Phobos and arranged to steal it. I’m looking into the Phobos theft for my, ah, patron.”

Tiki conceded the point. He thumbed up his reports on his handi. “Posse touched base around 1930. Dr. Edathanal, they lost track of.” He scowled at me. “They’re volunteers, not professionals. . . . Let’s see. Hot Dog was at a meeting. Gloria was here at Murphy’s. Your buddy VJ was at Susie Xiao’s Social Club getting himself greased. And your other buddy Willy was ‘networking.’” He shook his head over the foibles of humanity. “Any of them could have received the call.”

I didn’t correct him. “And Moynihan Truth would have been in inbound processing. He could’ve got the call, too.”

“But as of right now . . . ” Tiki made a sound of disgust. “ . . . we don’t know where any of them are.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Dinnertime for most of my posse. I told you, they’re not pros.”

“Hell, Tiki, I don’t even have a posse.”

“Yeah? You’re a troubleshooter, not a lawman.”

Satterwaithe spoke up and said, “It’s time. Shouldn’t we close in?”

I wanted to say, You’re a courier, not a lawman, but I sensed Tiki had his reasons for keeping her around.

“No one’s gone in yet,” said Tiki, but he opened his link. “Bill? We’re going to close in.” He listened, then said sweetly, “Well, I sure hope it was bone,” and broke the link. He looked at Genie. “Martha called him home, told him supper was getting cold.”

I waited a beat and said, “So, the entire Rosario Marching Band could have gone in the back way and you wouldn’t have seen them.”

Tiki glowered.

“On the positive side,” I added cheerfully, “we probably would have heard them.”

“I swear, Mickey, I’m gonna hit up the Association for a deputy. I can’t get by with part-time amateurs. You want the job? You meet a better class of people than you do in industrial troubleshooting.”

I told him I was happy where I was, but he gave me a posse badge anyway, “for the interim,” and took me with him when we exited Murphy’s. He told me to cover the back in case Jaroslav bolted. “You heavy?”

“I could stand to lose a few pounds.”

“I mean are you armed?” He twirled his quarterstaff. Firearms are illegal in Port Rosario. The Dome was supposed to be bulletproof, but not even the criminals want to field test the theory. I showed him the knuckles and that seemed to satisfy him. Satterwaithe carried a baton.

Just then we saw someone scrambling from behind Dominick’s. The streetlamp there was out and the figure was indistinct in the pale glow of its more distant cousins. The building on Fifth, right behind Dominick’s, had overhanging balconies and the figure ran under the balcony and vanished in the shadows.

“Don’t like that,” said Tiki and we hurried across the street. I circled behind the building as planned and Satterwaithe sprinted up Mercado to try to catch the runner on the next block. Tiki went in the front.

Just as well, for I had a bad feeling about this.

Drifting sand had accumulated around the base of the tavern and just below one of the windows there was a very nice footprint. Someone had jumped from the second or third floor. This is an easier feat on Mars than on Earth. I knelt and inspected it, measuring its depth. I looked up and saw Tiki leaning out the second floor window. That gave me the height of the jump.

“Bytchkov’s dead,” I guessed.

“Deader’n Dizzy’s mouse,” Tiki said.

“Knifed?”

He scowled. “How’d you know?”

“It’s fast and to the point. I may know who did it.” I entered the figures into my handi and the results told me that the jumper had likely weighed over 70 kilos earthweight. I crossed the rear lot to the building on the next street and measured the height of the balcony. One-seventy centimeters. I closed the tape measure and put it in my pouch. Then I made a few notations on my handi.

I felt immeasurably sad.

Tiki had sealed Bytchkov’s apartment and made his way down to where I stood. He studied the rear of the tavern. “Not an impossible jump,” he agreed.

Satterwaithe came loping back from Fifth Circle, cutting between the two apartment blocks and ducking under the balcony. “He ran off the other way, toward Sulbertson. I found a witness, though.” She touched her handi. “The runner had a white overshirt and tan overpants. Unless the shirt was yellow and the pants brown.” She grimaced. “He’s not sure. Looked about mid-thirties. Maybe one-seventy height.”

Tiki annotated his handi, snapped the sand-shield closed, and reinserted the stylus in its sheath. “I guess we should round up the usual suspects. My money’s on Edathanal. Bytchkov was going to sell the artifact back to her because he couldn’t hang it out for pickup. When he couldn’t produce it, Edathanal lost her temper and . . . You’re shaking your head, Mickey?”

“It wasn’t her.”

“How do you know? She was the only one we don’t know where she was at 1900 when Bytchkov made the appointment with his killer.”

I sighed. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible you won’t always like what’s left.”

Tiki put a hold on the morning lift, and brought Despina and Gloria to join the others in the departure lounge. Hot Dog had been doing the preflight checklist and Tiki assured him that Iron Planet had bumped back the official lift time. “This won’t take long,” he said. “It’s not like Phobos doesn’t make two passes every day.” Indeed, it swept the Martian sky faster than Mars himself rotated, and so rose in the west and set in the east.

Tiki placed me by the entry from the main terminal while Satterwaithe stood by the tubeway out to the shuttle. I’m not sure where Tiki thought the killer would try to run, but it’s in the nature of the guilty to flee even if no man pursueth. In moments like that a man might not think clearly. Willy gave me a quizzical glance because he had caught the posse badge on my coveralls and the knuckle-bar on my right fist. He dealt in information, and the amount of information is proportional to its surprise.

“I think it is fair to say,” Tiki began, “that all of you knew that Jaroslav Bytchkov had stolen something valuable and you all wanted to get your hands on it.”

Despina Edathanal protested. “It belongs to the Visitor Project!”

Tiki nodded and said, “Why don’t you describe the artifact that Bytchkov filched.”

Five pairs of eyes turned toward her. I knew damn well one of the group already knew, but I saw no overt sign. Well, Tiki had his purpose and I had mine.

“It was a truncated pyramid of sandstone,” Edathanal said, “about the size of my two hands. In the right lighting, you can see the hints of a face. Three eyes, arranged as a triangle; a suggestion of structure scoured by untold centuries of gentle Martian sandblasting. It’s the only artifact we’ve ever found that hints at what the Visitors looked like. The weird thing is, the face doesn’t seem to stay put. It’s on one side, then it’s on another. So we think there’s also some very subtle micro- or nano-tech going on with the stone.”

I spoke up. “You’ll provide a detailed sketch? I’ll make sure Goods Outbound gets a copy up on the Dogs. Aurora and Pegasus, too.” This was within my purview as an agent of the Port Authority. I wanted the thief to know that moving the contraband off-Mars would not be easy. Moynihan Truth shifted in his seat, probably wondering how much we knew.

Tiki turned to me. “Mickey, you want to tell them the next bit?”

Everyone scrooched around in his seat, except Hot Dog, who was leaning against the wall by the departure tube with his arms crossed, and Gloria Iceman, who sat to the side where she could see everyone.

“Jaroslav had one very hot potato and bounced to Phobos before the word could get out to deposit the statue for safekeeping until his partner could smuggle it out. Unfortunately, that channel was cut off a couple days later.” Moynihan’s smile had grown so broad I thought it might split his face in two.

Tiki took up the narrative once more. “Each of you either wanted to lay hands on the contraband or at least find out what it was. And each of you had a very public argument with Bytchkov. In some cases, knockdown fights.”

VJ laughed. “That wasn’t no fight. We played catch. He threw a punch; I caught it; threw it back.” Willy and Hot Dog laughed with him.

Moynihan said, “He’s not the easiest guy to get along with.”

VJ said, “He was a prick.”

Tiki cautioned them, “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”

That got their attention. I had been waiting for the line and had been watching their faces. Tiki’s announcement should be a surprise to all but one. I caught the tell where I was expecting it and a glance at Tiki and Satterwaithe showed that they had caught it, too.

“At first, Dr. Edathanal seemed a good suspect,” Tiki said. “She had the best motive. The statuette had been stolen from her. She had a fight with Bytchkov in which he slapped her across the face, a public humiliation. And no one knew where she was at the crucial times. But the killer was seen running under the balcony of the neighboring building. Genie over there had to duck when she chased after. The good doctor is too tall. She would have scalped herself.”

“And the rest of us?” demanded Hot Dog, so red in the face that his freckles had disappeared.

“I also wondered about Gloria, here,” Tiki continued. “She was seen in One-Ball Murphy’s keeping a sharp eye on the rooming house, but disappeared just before. But the killer jumped from the second floor window, and she’s too light to have made the resulting footprint.”

Moynihan Truth perked up. “Me, too?”

Tiki shook his head. “No, you weigh enough. Your motive . . . Thieves falling out, perhaps—oh, yes, we know about your end of the smuggling operation. You came down to tell Bytchkov that your game with the parasols was busted. But the witness on the next block saw the killer from a distance, and you would never be mistaken for the age he figured.”

VJ wiped his brow dramatically. “People always say my good looks make me seem young.”

“You wish,” said Hot Dog. But an unease had fallen over him because he had noticed that only three suspects were left. He noticed Tiki watching him and protested, “I got an alibi for the whole day. I was at the Guild meeting!”

“The Guild meeting broke up at 2100,” said Eugenie Satterwaithe. “I talked to some Guild comrades. That would have left plenty of time to get over to the Groin.”

“But Bytchkov made a call at 1900,” I explained, “and made an appointment to see the man who killed him. You were still in the meeting.”

“So what?” asked VJ. “I seen lots of people on their handis in meetings.”

“’Cept I was running the muffing meeting,” Hot Dog said with evident relief. “I was sitting up on the muffing dais right in front of God and twenty-three muffing comrades, banging a muffing gavel. You can ask them!”

“I did,” said Satterwaithe. “You didn’t receive the call.”

During this exchange, Willy had grown more and more pale, and he had begun to ease away from the others. VJ noticed this and whispered, “Better make a break for it.” Tiki and I both heard it, and so did Hot Dog.

“Willy?” he said. “I don’t believe it!”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “Willy has the best alibi of all. He was in custody in Minetown when Bytchkov was killed, same as three other suspects. If you’d told the arresting officer your name was Willy, it would’ve been obvious. But your legal name is Johann Früh, and it got recorded as Johnny Free on the booking sheet.”

The arithmetic was simple enough now that everyone could see the remainder. VJ gave me a pained look and said, “Geez, Mickey. This is freeping Mars! You know what they do to you here?” Then he bolted for the exit where I stood, hoping I wouldn’t have the heart to deck him. And I remembered how he had shoved me out of the way of that leaking pipe.

Tiki Ferrer’s hands barely twitched and his quarterstaff tangled VJ’s legs and he sprawled out. Satterwaithe was by his side with her baton ready, but there was no fight in him.

“Victor E. Djeh,” Tiki told him formally, “you are detained on the authority of the City of Port Rosario and the Groin Merchants’ Association.”

“You don’t like to hear it,” I told Tiki afterward, when Satterwaithe had marched VJ off to the cells. “You think you know people; but you never do, and sometimes you find out just how much you don’t know them.” I shook my head. “I hope it was just a fight that got out of hand. I hate to think VJ went in there planning to knife the guy.”

VJ was never the sharpest tool in the box. He’d been smart enough to wash his knife, but not smart enough to throw it away. It later proved to have Jaroslav’s blood in the space between the blade and the handle. Just goes to show the importance of cleanup.

Tiki turned to me. “But he had nothing to do with stealing the artifact?”

“No, and I’ll make sure Pondo understands that. I owe VJ that much at least. At least he never crossed the Bassendis.”

The next day, I tracked Gloria Iceman to a Minetown bar. She was hooching with friends, but when she saw me she separated herself and came to sit in my booth.

“Iceman isn’t your actual name,” I told her without preamble. “It’s Eismann, and someone transcribed it incorrectly when you applied for a Martian visa.”

The miner smiled at me. “I liked the sound of it. It’s a good nickname for an ice miner.”

“It is that,” I agreed. “But I think if I dig a little bit, I’ll find out that you belong to the Eismann family that makes the vaults. Eismann and Hertzog. It’s enough to make me wonder if someone at the company built a trapdoor into their products’ software.”

Gloria Iceman gave me a wide-eyed look. “That sounds awfully precocious.”

“I even wonder who convinced Bytchkov to leave his precious with the Bassendis in the first place.”

“Well, he had to hide it until the heat died down. The statue wasn’t just another link or valve or other bit of trash from a technological midden heap. It was important. Best to hide it somewhere secure.”

“But Edathanal knew who had taken it, and a dozen dogs knew he had brought something to the Second Dog. The Bassendis are shady, but they would not have defied a Port Authority warrant.”

Gloria nodded. “It’s harder to find something if no one knows where it actually is—or who actually took it.”

“You don’t want the Bassendis mad at you.”

“At me? Why would they be mad at me? Where’s the evidence I took it, beside a similarity of names?”

“The Bassendis aren’t anal about evidence.”

“You wouldn’t put a flea in their ear on such flimsy suppositions.”

“You’ll never get the statue off Phobos. Every cubic of luggage will be scanned at the most minute levels.”

Gloria frowned and pursed her lips. “I think that whoever has the statue will wait a long time before trying to move it off-world. Long after the hoo-rah has died down, long after the inspectors have forgotten what they were looking for. All that extra effort . . . You can’t keep that up for very long.”

Then she clapped me on the shoulder and walked lightly through the barroom and exited into the streets of Port Rosario. I never saw her again.

All that was many years ago and they’re all gone now. Hot Dog smeared himself across a hectare of Martian desert when his ballistic failed to reenter properly. Willy went down for blackmail. Satterwaithe left Mars after the baby she had with Tiki died; and Tiki was never the same after that.

Tiki found enough evidence in Bytchkov’s apartment for the Port Authority to arrest Moynihan Truth when he stepped off the shuttle in Panic Town. He was exiled to Ceres.

The Martian Board of Actuaries sentenced VJ to slavery on the thermal decompositors out by Mt. Olympus for the remainder of Jaroslav Bytchkov’s natural lifetime. I did what I could for him by arguing to the Board that Bytchkov’s chosen profession of smuggler and thief put his lifespan at the low end of the confidence interval. That shortened VJ’s sentence, but he never got around to thanking me for it.

Gloria “Iceman” Eismann was killed three months later when the tunnel collapsed in Ice Mine <#>23. I don’t think the Bassendis had anything to do with it. I never told them my suspicions. Wherever she squirreled the statuette remains unknown, and it has never been found to this day.

Edathanal never found another artifact like it, and after a time everyone assumed she had been mistaken about the whole thing.

A writer back on Luna named Myles Hertzog possesses a replica, probably made from Edathanal’s sketches, and has achieved a modest success with exciting stories about aliens he calls “the People of Sand and Iron.”

Originally published in Mission: Tomorrow, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt.

About the Author

Michael Flynn began selling science fiction in 1984 with the short story “Slan Libh.” His first novel, In the Country of the Blind, appeared in 1990. He has since sold seventy or more stories to Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He is best know for the Hugo-nominated Eifelheim and his Tales of the Spiral Arm sequence, which includes The January Dancer, Up Jim River, In the Lion’s Mouth, and On Razor’s Edge. His most recent book is the collection Captive Dreams. He is currently working on a novel, The Shipwrecks of Time, set in the alien world of 1965.

Metallic Mayhem in the Movies:
Giant Mecha, Then and Now

Mark Cole

It’s hard to explain that moment . . .

Something moved in the hazy distance of a vast white plain, and an army of machines emerged from the mist. And for an instant, it was no longer The Last Jedi. It was 1981 and the Imperial Walkers had begun their assault on Hoth.

It was—and years later, still is—an unforgettable moment. Like so much of Star Wars, it was something we had dreamed of for years but never seen: realistic giant walking machines.

The heroes of Jules Verne’s The Steam House travel across India aboard carriages drawn by the first such machine, an oversized steam-powered elephant. More sinister machines appeared in The War of the Worlds. Later ones included Kimball Kinnison’s battle suit in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Galactic Patrol (1950), and Starship Troopers’ (1958) Mobile Infantry suits.

Robots and giant machines appeared in book illustrations, pulp magazine covers, and especially the comics. The Blackhawks fought the Nazi “War Wheel,” twelve mystery men held the secret control key to Electro, and the Captain America copy “Flag Man” fought giant Nazi robots. But the robot superhero, Bozo the Iron Man (1939), was a true mecha, with Hugh Hazzard riding in its hollow chest.

While “mecha” immediately brings Japan to mind—their first giant robot, Tetsujin 28-go, didn’t appear until 1956 and was remote controlled. They had to wait until 1972 and Go Nagai’s Mazinger Z, which, in his words, “you could drive, like a car.” It would spawn countless armies of mecha in manga, anime, and the toy stores; in both science fiction and fantasy; war-machines and construction vehicles; some as big as planets or even an entire galaxy; and in lots of subgenres, from the nearly magical “Super Robots” to the mass-produced and machine-like “Real Robots.”

However, giant robots, piloted or not, have rarely appeared in the movies. This is largely because of the sheer technical difficulty. When Republic Pictures director William Witney asked for something better than the crude “Water Heater” robots from Undersea Kingdom for Mysterious Dr. Satan, his special effects crew offered to build one that was twenty feet tall, ran on treads, and could crash through walls. But it would have cost him twenty thousand dollars. Whitney replied, “Give me the damn water heater.”

The oldest surviving robot film, 1921’s L’Uomo Meccanico, features a remote-controlled robot which, if we’re feeling generous, might be described as “giant.” Its size is hard to estimate but it is much taller than the actors, perhaps nine or ten feet tall. Like most early movie robots, it’s just a man in a suit. The movie ends with the first giant robot battle in film history, as a second inventor takes on the Mechanical Man with his own creation.

Animation would seem the natural medium for a giant robot (particularly when we recall the endless stream of “robotto” anime) but even there they were rare, with the Superman Cartoon, The Mechanical Monsters, about the only example before the Fifties (although they are only about twelve feet tall).

The truly giant robots wouldn’t appear on film until 1957.

The actual nature of the first one is far from clear. Kronos is unquestionably a giant, big enough to smash its way through cities: literally Godzilla sized (and only a year behind its American release).

However, it isn’t anthropomorphic: it is a stack of metal boxes. While obviously mechanical, with its huge pistons, metallic construction, and working components inside, it grows as it absorbs energy. Whether it is a machine or a mechanoid life-form is far from clear. Nor, while we learn aliens sent it to gather energy, are we told whether it is piloted, remote controlled—or intelligent. It is a model in most shots, but the piston legs are mostly cel animated.

The other giant robot of 1957 came from Japan. A year after Tetsujin 28-go debuted, The Mysterians featured aliens trying to take over the Earth with the help of the monstrous M.O.G.U.E.R.A. As with most of the Toho monsters of the era, it is a man in a suit destroying miniature sets.

Toho would not return to giant robots for a decade, when the mysterious villain, Dr. Who, would battle King Kong with his giant robot ape in King Kong Escapes (1967). In 1973, Jet Jaguar (who looks suspiciously like Ultraman) helps Godzilla, and in 1974, the big lizard fights a giant alien robot—and not just any robot, but his mechanical copy:  Mechagodzilla. It would return the next year.

For its 1993 revival, it became a mecha built on Earth (and a new M.O.G.U.E.R.A. would be built from its wreckage). However, in 2002 and 2003, it became more or less a cyborg, built on the bones of the 1954 Godzilla and somehow infected with his spirit.

And that’s about where the giant robot stood in 1981. They had appeared in children’s cartoon shows (including imports like Gigantor), with Johnny Quest’s spider robots perhaps the best remembered. They came to Tokusatsu children’s shows in 1960 with a live action Tetsujin 28-go, although few of these made it to the West. The “robottu” subgenre of anime was flourishing but would not come to the US until Robotech in 1985. But on the big screen only a pile of boxes and a few men in suits stomping through miniatures had prepared us for The Empire Strikes Back.

That first appearance remains iconic: they appear as tiny dots on the horizon, and then are gradually revealed, in a slow, close-up tracking shot. It is beautifully staged, suspenseful, and the Walkers have a tremendous feeling of mass and size—and just the right hint of awkwardness.

Curiously, their inspiration came not from science fiction, but from an advertising art portfolio. According to Joe Johnston, “The snow walkers were from a brochure by Syd Mead for US Steel of these walking trucks going through the snow—we turned them into walking tanks.”

Yet it wasn’t the first big screen appearance of a walking machine. Not quite. A young woman in a crab-like maintenance vehicle had battled a big security robot in 1978. Unfortunately, only a handful of Mormon dentists got to see it.

They wanted to invest in a movie and a young truck driver convinced them to give him $20,000 to create a demo for his proposed film, Xenogenesis. Unfortunately, they didn’t think it was enough like Star Wars and refused to back him.

It did, however, persuade Roger Corman to give James Cameron a job. The footage would remain unseen for years until Cameron released it as part of the Avatar plagiarism lawsuit, but eight years later, he created a startlingly similar sequence for Aliens.

Once again, a young woman in a big machine battled a much larger adversary, although Ripley had a “Power Loader” exoskeleton rather than a crab machine, as Cameron didn’t want people to think he’d copied it from George Lucas. This time he filmed the battle with practical effects, with both the Loader and the Alien Queen full-sized “puppets.”

The post-Star Wars special effects revolution gave new life to big robots. They didn’t have to be a man in a suit anymore, and more and more of them showed up in science fiction films: Robocop fought David Allen’s stop-motion animated ED-209 robot (1987); practical effects brought the vicious “Warbeast,” to life in the brutal killer robot movie Death Machine (1994); the alien invaders of Independence Day (1996) had organic exosuits; and even Stallone’s Judge Dredd (1995) fought a massive Warrior Robot.

It was a good time for the truly giant ones as well, starting in 1989 with two movies crammed full of monster robots: Gunhed’s origins were decidedly strange: Toho Studios ran a contest to choose a story for a Godzilla 1985 sequel. While Jim Bannon’s script, in which the big G takes on a giant computer, attracted a lot of attention it ultimately lost to Godzilla vs. Biollante, and a fight with a giant rose.

However, Toho liked the idea so much they turned the script over to Masato Harada. He hacked out the Godzilla references and Gunhed is what was left. The end result, while uneven, was a dense, atmospheric cyberpunk adventure film and one of James Cameron’s favorite B-Movies.

The massive supercomputer Kyron-5 tried to wipe out the human race. It was stopped but remains dormant deep in its island fortress. A group of scavengers break in, in search of its extremely rare and valuable microchips. Unfortunately, Kyron-5 is alive and well and planning its revenge. It lets loose its arsenal of automatic defenses, leading to a brutal battle between its deadly Aerobot and an abandoned Gunhed mecha the survivors manage to get running. The film features intricate miniatures of the fortress and fighting machines. As in the Godzilla films, the vehicles are worked by offscreen operators or powered by motors—and years of experience give them an epic feel of mass and size.

The other, Robot Jox, was actually made earlier, but got caught in the collapse of Charles Band’s Empire Pictures. Stuart Gordon, who directed Re-Animator, helmed one of the low budget company’s most extravagant features. It featured incredible miniatures and a series of massive robot-on-robot battles created by David Allen. The assembly room and huge elevators look as if they might have been used on the weekend for Mechagodzilla, while the robot battles feel ponderous and weighty.

Based on a story by Joe Haldeman (who reportedly wasn’t happy with the film), it takes place in a future where war has been eliminated, and International disputes are resolved by gladiatorial battles in giant robots. Only the best, highly trained, genetically-engineered young men (and one woman) get to pilot the big machines, so, naturally, much of the film revolves around their traumas and training (which are much cheaper to film). Band would produce three more giant robot movies although none of them are as impressive.

The first, Crash and Burn (Robot Jox 2 in Europe), is seriously strange, perhaps as much because of its tiny budget as the fact that it is ripping off an impressive collection of incompatible films. A group of strangers take shelter from a solar storm in an old television station. A murderous cyborg starts killing them one by one.

A giant construction robot stands abandoned outside: for most of the film it just sits there but in one of the most lopsided giant robot battles ever, they get it running just in time to fight the terminator copy. It hardly looks fair when your moves include stomping on the enemy.

Band must have found more money by the time he made the third, Robot Wars (1993), which is also known as Robot Jox 2. It features a scorpion war robot that doubles as a passenger bus, a giant robot bursting out of the ground, and a final robot-on-robot battle. However, it is far from clear that this is a sequel as its two major Blocs are at peace and the Mega Robots almost extinct.

Unfortunately, while the robots are well done, most of the film takes place in tiny sets or a resort town “restored” to look as it did in the 1990s. The final film, Robo Warriors (1996, aka, Robot Jox 3) is an adventure thriller with a single robot battle at the end. What’s worse, the robots are just men in suits.

Sadly, one of the more interesting giant mecha films of the era, Sentinel 2099, is virtually lost. In Michael McGee’s handcrafted film, walking tanks battle alien invaders. He built the miniatures himself, and filmed some 300 miniature shots, some with in-camera effects. While he released it to video in 1995, copies are nearly impossible to find.

However, McGee has completed a Special Edition of the film, which is more of a remake—or sequel—to the original film, although it reuses some original effects footage. No release date has yet been announced.

The problem is that models and practical effects are expensive. Despite the post-Robotech boom in Japanimation, giant robots had mostly vanished by the mid-Nineties. Traditional stop-motion effects became increasingly rare, and usually relegated to the direct-to-video market and dedicated craftsmen like B-Movie Maestro, Brett Piper. He created a big junkyard mecha for his 2005 anthology film, Shock-O-Rama, and scorpion-like walkers for his most recent film, Outpost Earth.

CGI may have killed off traditional model work, but the first digital giant robots took a while to show up. Perhaps the Japanese were first with films like Returner (2002) which features alien walking machines and the surprise appearance of a transforming robot. Others included an adult reenvisioning of Casshern (2004); and a live action Tetsujin 28 (2005) with surprisingly crude animation.

While the Attack of the Clones threw a few small walking vehicles on the screen in the middle of a confused battle, it took the Wachowskis to create a truly epic robot battle: dozens of heavily armed APUs (which the Japanese would call a wearable robot) fought vast swarms of squid-like Sentinels in The Matrix Revolutions (2003).

But big robots quickly became more common. Steven Spielberg gave us a War of the Worlds with actual alien tripods (2005); the Transformers have starred in an endless series of films since 2007; and The Day the Earth Stood Still’s familiar alien robot, Gort, turned into a pile of CGI nanomachines the size of the Statue of Liberty for the 2008 remake.  James Cameron revisited his past efforts when he created whole armies of combat mechs for Avatar (2009), while the secret weapons stash held by refugee aliens in District 9 included a heavily-armed battle suit.

Even Direct-To-Video efforts could now afford digital robots, like the cartoony battle suits in 2008’s Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, or the countless big alien robots in the “Mockbusters” produced by The Asylum and others. At least one Hong Kong Chopsocky film—Metallic Attraction: Kungfu Cyborg (2009)—had a giant robot, while the Russian blockbuster Attraction (2017) featured an alien exosuit.

They have also proved particularly popular in superhero movies where we find not only X-Men-hunting Sentinels and the magically animated Destroyer but characters with massive battle suits, including the Silver Samurai, the Rhino, and even Iron Man’s awesome Hulkbuster.

A giant robot even found its way into a documentary, although admittedly a very strange, metafictional one: legendary director Mamoru Oshii created a Tetsujin 28 stage play, complete with twenty-foot practical robot, then filmed an odd quasi-documentary, 28 1/2 Mousou No Kyojin, about it. Somehow, though, seeing a real giant robot in a real field fire its rockets in a cloud of real flame is something CGI can never match.

Casual viewers probably missed the significance of the giant machine attacking Tokyo in 20th Century Boys 1: Beginning of the End (2008). When the hero fights his way aboard past tank treads hidden by big phony “feet,” he is stunned to learn that it is a fake, with a cloth-covered framework like a big dirigible.

But those who had read Naoki Urasawa’s original manga understood: the robotics expert kidnapped to create it told his captors that the traditional giant anime robot was physically impossible. Something that big wouldn’t be able to lift its feet. However, even Urasawa was unhappy with his fake robot, and introduced a more traditional one in the later chapters (and the final film, Redemption).

Perhaps the giant robot’s finest moment came in 2013, when Pacific Rim gave countless fans what they’d been waiting for since the first metal giants strode across the comics pages. Guillermo del Toro’s stylish blockbuster pitted an awe-inspiring mecha army against an unstoppable horde of alien Kaiju, in a series of beautifully staged battles. In one absolutely unforgettable moment, a “Jaeger” picks up a freighter from the harbor and uses it as a club.

Absurd? Yes. Physically impossible? Of course. And yet awe-inspiring at the same time. Which is exactly what we expect of a giant monsters vs. giant robots movie.

One is left wondering, though, whether we have reached the saturation point of gee whiz excitement from these massive mechanical creations. Somehow, the arrival of the The Last Jedi’s gargantuan Heavy Assault Walkers was not a moment of awe, but of old moments relived. While bigger and more heavily armed, they could not top that unforgettable first moment. For that matter, has Pacific Rim: Uprising matched the absurd thrills of the first film? Or has it merely drowned us in excess after excess, as so many blockbuster films have?

But, if it gives us the thrill of seeing monster machines wrestling with impossibly huge foes and maintains the sense of fun we expect from something that is inherently bigger than life (and basically impossible), then perhaps it will keep the giant robot alive a little longer.

You never know.

Visit rivetsontheposter.wordpress.com/category/movie-reviews/robots-really-really-big-ones for more information on many of these movies.

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.

Spies, Radios, and the Afterlife:
A Conversation with Hannu Rajaniemi

Chris Urie

The afterlife has long been a source of fascination for storytellers. Ancient myths describe golden fields or a place in the clouds. But what if the afterlife and technology are closely linked? Hannu Rajaniemi explores an afterlife that allows for communication via radio waves in his new novel.

In Summerland, it’s the 1930’s. The east and the west are at odds and people in the afterlife can chat with the living via a radio link. This makes the afterlife a key part of any country’s secret intelligence plan. The British Secret Service have extended their reach into Summerland, a giant ethereal city of the recently deceased. In classic espionage fashion, the Soviet Union has also infiltrated Summerland and it’s up to SIS Agent Rachel White to catch a mole within the cadre of agents floating around in the afterlife. With signature ingenuity and excitement, Rajaniemi provides a whole new twist on the familiar spy genre.

Rajaniemi is the author of numerous novels and short stories. He’s won a number of awards for his Jean le Flambeur series of novels. Summerland, is out this June from Tor Books.

The following interview was transcribed and edited for clarity.

When did you realize that you wanted to write science fiction?

I realized I wanted to start writing when I moved to Edinburgh to do my PhD. I had this background of doing tabletop and live-action role-playing games in Finland and then lost touch with that community when I moved to the UK to work on my thesis.

I wanted to do something creative so initially, I tried theater and played a French psychopath in a student production. Then, I ended up going to a reading featuring a number of writers and recognized author, Charlie Stross. He wasn’t quite as famous back then, but I’d read his story “Lobsters.” The whole group that performed turned out to be quite excellent and I thought that writing short stories could be kind of interesting. I ended up joining the group.

You write both in English and Finnish. How has this impacted your storytelling?

Actually, I don’t write much in Finnish anymore although I would like to. Because I started writing fiction in Edinburgh, it was all in English. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to get feedback from the writers’ group. In a way, that sort of helped me initially because even though I didn’t have an instinctive mastery or fluency of a native speaker, it somehow made it easier to accept criticism. Having that one degree of distance from the text actually made it easier to edit and accept feedback, which I found somewhat helpful.

A bit later, I did write a couple of short stories in Finnish and it was a different process. Certain things did come more naturally but I also found myself a lot sloppier in Finnish and I had to edit more. Finnish and English are just very, very different languages. In Finnish, it’s easy to make up new words and string them together to make compound words, which makes it a nice language for science fiction and fantasy. Whereas in English, you probably have the exact right word already out there because the vocabulary is so vast. I somehow lost that attention to detail writing fiction in Finnish.

I also had the opportunity to translate those stories into English and some stories from English into Finnish. There are different textures and the ways to use words, especially in the science fictional context. Right now, because of time demands, I mainly do write for the English-speaking market.

I’ve also had the weird experience of having my books translated into Finnish by somebody other than me, which has been a fascinating process. I’ve been lucky enough to have great translators. Reading those translations was definitely a strange experience. I think there’s a lot of ourselves defined by the language we speak and quite a lot of multilingual people describe their English-speaking self and native-language self as different. I think there’s something to that. My Finnish-speaking self is the friends and family self, whereas in all professional settings I’m one hundred percent English speaking. It was a bit strange to see those two domains mixing.

How has architecture blogger Geoff Manaugh influenced your writing?

That mostly applies to the Jean le Flambeur books. There are a lot of little individual ideas that came from his blogs. For example: there was an article featuring algorithmically generated sculptures. I ended up using that idea of transforming digital data into a physical space. He has this fascination with cities and architecture as this physical expression of ideas.

He also has quite a vivid writing style and does write in speculative mode about imaginary and large-scale architectures. All the Jean le Flambeur books and Summerland do feature strange cities and strange urban environments. The way Geoff thinks about weird space and how those spaces can embody cultural ideas I found helpful.

How has it been departing from the Jean le Flambeur novels and venturing out into something new?

It’s been great! It took a while because I had a break from novels coming out for a few years. Summerland definitely went through quite a few iterations and it took some time to get into an entirely different world, mind-set, and set of ideas. It was refreshing and, in a way, it taught me quite a lot about writing novels. Structurally, the three Jean le Flambeur books were one big novel. Writing Summerland required me to think hard about what actually goes into a novel and made me think about how to write a different kind of novel. It was a challenge, but quite an exciting one.

Why do you think the afterlife is such an alluring topic for writers?

It is one of those universal human obsessions. It features not just in fiction but in mythology and in many actual belief systems and religions. What fascinates me is how our relationship with technology and science has changed our view of the afterlife. You can see that very vividly right now in Silicon Valley where you have many tech companies actively working on life extension, with many people seriously trying to figure out how to transfer our brains into digital form. That sort of recasting the afterlife in technological terms has happened before.

The last time it happened in an interesting way was in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The initial impulse was Darwinism, removing humans from the center of the universe and giving intellectuals serious doubt about the existence of god and the afterlife and having to grapple with the fact that if there’s no afterlife then what do we do with morality if there’s no stick and carrot to encourage people to behave properly.

A lot of people seized upon spiritualism as a starting point to build some kind of scientifically comprehensive afterlife. They pulled in a lot of the ideas that were floating around in physics at the time like aether, the fourth dimension, the radio, and X-rays. Different thinkers went in different directions with it, but there is this clear phenomenon of people saying there might be a scientific way of explaining the afterlife.

Sir Oliver Lodge was one of the pioneers of radio together with Marconi who speculated that with sufficiently advanced radio technology, he could actually speak to his dead son in the afterlife. I think what’s fascinating for me are the connections between technology and the afterlife. That’s the starting point for Summerland. We get an afterlife that allows us to talk to the dead via radio and that has fairly well defined scientific cosmology.

You have a knack for describing complex and often ethereal ideas in your stories with structure and clarity. Did you find it difficult articulating your vision of the afterlife in this novel?

There was a certain amount of iteration and deliberate worldbuilding there. In fiction you have this constraint of trying to craft a speculative element in such a way that it enhances the story or allows you to tell new kinds of stories. I think one of the key points in figuring out how to articulate the afterlife was realizing that it had to be a spy story. In a spy story you inherently have the notion that the world is full of secrets and we don’t know everything about the world and we don’t entirely understand how the world works. There are unseen forces at play and you can’t necessarily trust anybody. It’s a natural narrative framework to create that ethereal realm.

Why does the Soviet Union always make the perfect adversary for a spy story?

In Summerland, the Soviet Union is quite different from the real life Soviet Union. I chose it in the context of Summerland because the earlier revolution of Russia was deeply weird. You have this entire country deciding collectively that none of the old rules apply anymore, that we’re going to build this new society from scratch and anything goes.

In real history, you had this group of revolutionaries that are called the God-Builders that decided that in order to keep the Soviet Union cohesive there needed to be some kind of religion. They set out to create this artificial religion where Lenin was a figurehead. Then they were planning to use replicas of Lenin’s tomb as a religious object in people’s homes. I used the Soviet Union in my novel because of those weird ideas from early revolutionary Russia.

I think for spy stories in general it makes for a good monolithic mysterious adversary. There’s the Iron Curtain and you don’t know what’s behind it or necessarily know how these people think.

How do you balance your scientific work, writing, and a mathematics company? Does it feel like you’re switching between disparate parts of your brain or does it all somehow weave together?

My scientific work, such as it is, is in the context of a startup. I do contribute on the synthetic biology side of things. The two areas definitely feed into each other. Given that the current fiction project is biology based, there’s a strong connection between the two. It’s nice to treat writing as this meditative space in the morning that allows me to get away from the stress of the day job for a little bit. It acts as a mental cleansing space.

What projects are you working on next?

I’ve jumped right into another story closer to my day job and hard science based. The next project has the working title of Dark Ome, which is a near future story about biohackers. A teenage girl joins an underground biohacker community to cure her little brother’s cancer and various strange things happen the more deeply she gets involved. It’s been interesting to talk to real life biohackers in the Bay Area who are experimenting with everything from genomic medicine to vaccines. One can see early seeds of the future unfolding here.

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:
Chinese Science Fiction Going Abroad—A Brief History of Translation

Regina Kanyu Wang

Readers who pay attention to science fiction in translation may have noticed a steady growth of the number of works written in Chinese and translated into other languages in recent years. An ongoing collaboration that started in 2015 between Clarkesworld Magazine and Storycom continues to make a significant contribution in presenting over thirty Chinese science fiction works to English readers.

It is time for us to look back at the history of the translation of Chinese science fiction and see what lead us here as well as where we are heading in the future.

Before 21st Century

Although foreign science fiction began to be translated into Chinese as early as 1900, with the first one being Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (translated by Chen Shoupeng and Xue Shaohui from its English translation), Chinese science fiction wasn’t translated into other languages until decades later.

Lao She’s Cat Country, translated by James E. Dew and published in Chinese in 1932, welcomed its first foreign translation in English in 1964, and saw continuous success with translation into both Japanese in 1980 and French in 1981. Wei Yahua’s “Conjugal Happiness in the Arms of Morpheus,” on the other hand, was the first short piece translated from Chinese into English and was published in Amazing Stories in September 1984. Two years later, two more English anthologies selected Chinese stories, Tales from the Planet Earth (ed. Frederik Pohl and Elizabeth Anne Hull, St. Martin’s Press) and The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction (ed. Brian Wilson Aldiss and Sam J. Lundwall, Penguin) and included works from Ye Yonglie, Tong Enzheng, and Zheng Wenguang.

Another anthology, Science Fiction from China (ed. Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy, Praeger, 1989), was filled with Chinese science fiction and introduced a few more authors like Jiang Yunsheng and Wang Xiaoda. Unfortunately, nothing significant and new from China came to the English world in 1990s.

Notably, the first Chinese science fictions translated into Japanese were two stories written by Chi Shuchang (“The Elephant without Nose” and “The Whale Farm”) and were published in 1972. Other early Chinese works translated into Japanese in addition to the above mentioned, Cat Country, were Tong Enzheng’s “Death-Ray on Coral Island” in 1980, Ye Yonglie’s “The One Flying to the Pluto” in 1980, Zheng Wenguang’s “The Earth in the Mirror” in 1981, and Chi Shuchang’s “The Story of No-mind and Computer” in 1982. Translation into Japanese continued through the 1990s, with more works appearing in anthologies, magazines, or as stand-alone novels.

Traveling further west, the anthology SF aus China (ed. Ye Yonglie and Charlotte Dunsing, Goldmann, 1984) translated the first batch of Chinese science fiction into German language. Shortly after, Ye Yonglie’s The Shadow of the Spies on the Island of Green Jade was translated into French and Italian and published in 1986 and 1989.

Early 21st Century

The English world once again regained interest in Chinese science fiction in the new century. Translated works from Chinese can be found on various platforms and the largest input came from magazines. Wu Yan’s “Mouse Pad,” translated by Han Song, became the first short story from China published in English in 2000s. It was included in InterNova 1: Unexplored Territories (2005).

An excerpt from Liu Cixin’s novel Ball Lightning, “From Ball Lightening,” translated by Joel Martinsen was published in Words Without Borders in 2009, with the complete work expected later this year. Zhao Haihong translated her own story, “Exuviation,” and had it published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet in 2010.

In 2011, Ken Liu finished his first translation from Chinese to English with Chen Qiufan’s “The Fish of Lijiang,” which turned out to be the first Chinese science fiction published in Clarkesworld. Liu followed up with a second piece, just a year later, with Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight.” Keeping busy, Liu went on to translate stories for Interzone, Apex, Lightspeed, and The Magazine of F&SF which published stories by Chen Qiufan, Tang Fei, Hao Jingfang, and Chen Qiufan.

Worth noting, the magazines Peregrine (an English Companion to Chutzpah Magazine), Pathlight (an English magazine produced by Paper Republic and People’s Literature Magazine), and Renditions (an English Journal published by the Research Centre for Translation of The Chinese University of Hong Kong) also highlighted Chinese science fiction. Between 2011 and 2013, Peregrine published three pieces, Pathlight came in second with ten works and Renditions led the way with twelve Chinese stories.

Anthology-wise, The Apex Book of World SF (ed. Lavie Tidhar, Apex), included two stories from China in its first volume in 2009, Han Song’s “The Wheel of Samsara” and Yang Ping’s “Wizard World.” The following volumes continued to include Chinese science fiction, Chen Qiufan’s “The Tomb” in volume 2 (2012), Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” and Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” in volume 3 (2014), and Tang Fei’s “Pepe” in volume 4 (2015).

As for other languages, the Japanese magazine S-F Magazine published a few short stories by Chinese authors and dedicated a special issue on Chinese SF in 2008, including stories from Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Jiang Bo. Italian anthology Urania published two volumes dedicated to Chinese science fiction, with “L’onda misteriosa” (2006) and “Shi Kong 时空: China Futures” (2010), each including eight or nine stories. Featured together with stories published in other Italian anthologies, Italian became the language with the most pieces of translated Chinese science fiction during this period. Also worth noting, is that Chinese science fiction was also first translated into Polish and Swedish in 2012 and 2013.

The Three-Body Trilogy, The Shimmer Program and the Post-Hugo Era

Arguably, the most influential Chinese science fiction up till now is Liu Cixin’s, The Three-Body Trilogy, the first volume winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2014 and attracting celebrity fans such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Former US President Barack Obama. The trilogy was first serialized in China’s largest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World, and then published in book format in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

The first foreign language version of the first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, was actually the Korean version (2013). The English version of the first book, translated by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books, came out in 2014, followed by The Dark Forest translated by Joel Martinsen in 2015 and Death’s End translated by Ken Liu in 2016. 2015 saw Turkish publication followed by German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Vietnamese in 2016. In 2017, the work was additionally made available in Thai, Polish, Greek, Czech and Italian. The trilogy has sold over seven million copies of its Chinese version and 760,000 copies of its English version, making it the No.1 Bestseller of Chinese science fiction worldwide.

Other English translation novels to look for in 2018/2019 include, Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, Bao Shu’s The Redemption of Time, and Hao Jingfang’s Stray Skies. Additionally, the anthology, The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction, is planned in September 2018 (ed. Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters, Columbia University Press).

As for other anthologies and collections, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation (ed. Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2016) is notable for Chinese science fiction lovers. Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage: 2016) included short stories by Liu Cixin and Han Song as representatives from China. Geng Song and Qingxiang Yang’s The Sound of Salt Forming: Short Stories by the Post-80s Generation in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016) selected Chen Qiufan’s, Fei Dao’s, and Hao Jingfang’s stories as representatives of science fiction genre.

Chinese science fiction was also featured in other anthologies such as Carbide Tipped Pens (ed. Ben Bova and Eric Choi, Tor Books, 2014), Upgraded (ed. Neil Clarke, Wyrm Publishing, 2014), Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest (ed. Bryan Hurt, Catapult, 2015), Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction & Fantasy (ed. Lucas K. Law and Derwin Mak, Laska, 2016), various Year’s Best anthologies, and others. Head of Zeus published Liu Cixin’s personal collection, The Wandering Earth, in 2016, including eleven stories that had been translated and sold on Amazon back in 2012.

Quite a number of magazines, blogs, or websites served a taste of Chinese science fiction for their readers, including but not limited to Lightspeed, Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, The Magazine of F&SF, Uncanny, Daily Science Fiction, Paper Republic, SQ Mag, Tor.com, Terraform, and The Anthill. For the first time, Chinese science fiction short stories were published in magazines in Finnish (2015), Czech (2015), and Russian (2015).

However, none of the above has been as dedicated to Chinese science fiction as Clarkesworld, publishing four pieces of Chinese science fiction in 2014, and over thirty in the four years that followed. This partnership has established an ongoing platform to introduce established authors such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as a younger generation of leading figures such as Xia Jia, Zhang Ran, and A Que, in a quest to show the diversity of contemporary Chinese science fiction.

Storycom, a Chinese story commercialization agency focusing on the science fiction genre, knows well about the importance of international communication. Under the guidance of its nonprofit project, the Shimmer Program, Storycom supports the translation of Chinese science fiction into other languages.

Touchable Unreality, the first English-Chinese bilingual anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction was published in China in 2016. A new anthology is planned for this year, and this time, it will be published in both China and the United States. The Italian-Chinese bilingual anthologies Nebula and Sinosfera are also supported under the same scheme.

The Shimmer Program is also committed to sharing Chinese science fiction stories, fandom news and in-depth articles via its Facebook page and Twitter account. Efforts have been made to introduce Chinese science fiction to other languages like Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian as well.

It has been over fifty years since the first Chinese science fiction was translated into a foreign language and we are glad to see the many achievements that have been made with a hopeful eye towards the future.

Thanks to Feng Zhang, Chen Qiufan, Yao Haijun, Wu Yan, and Touya Tachihara for sharing information helpful in the creation of this article.

About the Author

Born in 1990, Regina Kanyu Wang is a bilingual writer from Shanghai, member of Shanghai Writers’ Association, Shanghai Popular Science Writers’ Association, and World Chinese Science Fiction Association. She has been invited as a guest for Shanghai-Taipei Literary camp, Melon HK, Shanghai International Literary Week and Euro-Asia Economic Forum. She is a multi-winner of Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese SF. Her stories and articles can be found in Mengya, Science Fiction World, Southern People Weekly, ELLEMEN, UNITAS a literary monthly, Mithila Review, Galaxy’s Edge, and more. She has published a science fiction story collection and a book on traditional Chinese cuisine. She is a co-founder of SF AppleCore and is now working as International PR Manager for Storycom.

Editor’s Desk:
Come One, Come All

Neil Clarke

I once again took to Twitter to find a source of inspiration for this month’s editorial and received several interesting suggestions. I could think of quick responses to several of them, but when I came across this one, it spoke to me.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a science fiction fan: early on through TV—Lost in Space and yes, I’m enjoying the reboot—and later through books, film, and games. Overall, it’s been a very positive force in my life and an escape when I needed it the most, everything from being bullied for years as a child to dealing with a brush with death as an adult. The community surrounding it all, well, that’s been a more complicated relationship.

I didn’t even know fandom existed until college. Before then, I only knew one or two people that even admitted to reading the same things I did. The more aware among my college friends organized a group trip to a local convention. I think there were seven or eight of us crammed into that hotel room—a situation that would normally have put me on edge—but I had a great time. I saw some of my favorite authors, found books I had been searching for for years, and was impressed that there were so many of us. I continued to go for a while after graduation, but it wasn’t the same without my friends and I didn’t feel particularly welcome without them. Disillusioned, I stopped going to conventions for nearly ten years.

Despite this, my enjoyment of SF/F was never undermined. I had the advantage of feeling included in SF/F works from the very beginning. I could completely relate to Lost in Space’s Will Robinson and wanted very much to have a robot friend like he did. The characters in stories, books, games, etc. that shaped my connection to the genre for the first fifteen years mostly looked like me: white, male, with similar values and cultural references—even if those values and cultures were challenged. I even have the same last name—but not even a distant relation—to one of the biggest names in history of the genre. I can see how it might be different for someone who didn’t often, or ever, see themselves in the works they were exposed to.

I then graduated from college with a degree in computer science and ultimately ended up working in higher education, where I had to play at being a futurist. It’s easy for me to connect the dots between my science fiction reading and the way I embraced that career. On the side, I started a small online science fiction bookstore and inadvertently began making new friends in the community from all over the country and even beyond. Eventually, I was convinced to give conventions another try. It seemed better than before, so I stuck around, but that uneasiness has always remained in the back of my mind. As the bookstore faded and the magazine rose, I earned something of a standing in the community, which means that people treat me differently than before. That uneasiness, however, has led to an awareness.

But what does all this have to do with the original tweet?

Science fiction has been very good to me on so many different levels. Why wouldn’t I want that for everyone else? This sentiment and the awareness I mentioned come with a responsibility to not be like those that made me feel unwelcome. It might be as simple as opening a circle—it’s common for a circle of people to form at conventions—and making room for a stranger to join in the conversation or holding the elevator door. The more socially-outgoing might even notice the stragglers at the edge of a party and engaging with them. (Admittedly, this has never been a strong suit of mine.) Casting the net beyond the local, it might mean writing an editorial about your own history or answering a question (politely) on social media, email, or a forum. It might even be as simple as supporting something like John Picacio’s MexicanX initiative to help bring MexicanX authors/artists/fans to the 2018 Worldcon. Little things add up.

As an editor, the responsibility extends to making sure that people know they are more than welcome to submit stories and that they will always have a fair shot at being published here. It’s not always obvious how to do that or even when that work is needed, but as that tweet indicates, it is. Cover letters and submissions don’t often include demographic information, so sometimes you have to count on some common sense or the nudge from a third party. Some editors don’t take kindly to being nudged and some people don’t know how to nudge gently, but I have no control over those people. I need to focus on keeping my own house in order and if I end up with the best stories by keeping that door open, you can be sure that others will follow.

And from experience, I can say that a lot of people feel left out or underrepresented, particularly in what gets published. There are benefits to breaking that pattern though. Our efforts in translation, for example, have always been met with a sustained increase in readers and submissions from regions represented by a story we’ve published. I’m sure the same goes for other communities as well, it’s just harder to confirm. It does say that they feel a bit more welcome, which is a good thing.

A sad truth, however, in all this is that one cannot simply say they are open to everyone and expect that to be sufficient to change things. You can’t even say, “hey we’d love more submissions from LatinX and/or queer authors” (and this is very much true) and not have to follow it up with “and everyone else is still welcome too” because some will wrongly assume your statement indicates favoritism. I’ve heard this one a lot as I’ve targeted increasing our international submissions, which has, I’ll point out, resulted in an increase in the number of foreign writers in our pages. No special treatment for the stories, just an encouragement to submit. In the end, they earned their place against all the rest. Oh and I know some will say, “but that is not enough.” Maybe it isn’t, but it is progress. At times, it can feel like no one is allowed to have nice things, so I’ll gladly take each small victory and keep moving forward.

Simply put, to find the best stories, you have to cast the widest possible net and sometimes that requires outreach—behind the scenes or from a soapbox. The job is never done. You never know where the next great story or writer will come from. No one group has a monopoly on quality. Why would I want to limit my options to people just like me? Why wouldn’t I want those writers, stories, and readers to not have a home in Clarkesworld or even in the broader community? And why wouldn’t I want everyone to have the same opportunities and enjoyment I’ve had?

Or, as my trusted robot friend says, “Does not compute!”

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 most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three. was published in April. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: Meeting

Arthur Haas

About the Artist

Arthur Haas (1969) is a concept artist from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specializes in environment design and concept art for the entertainment industry and has a passion for science fiction. Arthur works as a freelance artist for major Hollywood film studios and international book publishers.