Octo-Heist in Progress

Rich Larson

As soon as Etta turned up the overgrown sidewalk to the house-turned-apartment, a redflag notification popped up over the crooked eaves troughs, rotating in the gray sky: two stabbings, one drug arrest, twenty-six noise complaints in the past month. Hey Etta! We found some sketchy stats. Are you sure you want to be here?

“Nope,” Etta muttered. “I am zero sure. Zero, zero sure.”

She blinked the redflag off her lenses. The apartment’s lawn was a shin-deep jungle, tangled weeds and uncut grass that might have looked artsy or enviro except for the beer cans and blunt wrappers caught in the thicket. Part of the railing on the veranda had been smashed in, leaving it splintered and jutting like a broken bone.

She went up the steps and let herself into the entryway, passing under the dusty black bulb of an old security camera she doubted was even on. They had taken the mailboxes out, like most places did, but they hadn’t patched up the wall afterwards so it was all plywood and foam insulation. She saw something furry scurry through the slats and jumped.

“So, just curio, do I have my rabies vaccination?” she asked the empty entry.

Her medipal appeared on her lenses. No! Would you like to schedule a rabies vaccination?

“Nah.” Etta checked, for the millionth time, the apartment number Quinton had given her, then tapped it into the door’s smeary touch screen. It had one of those nice soothing rings, like electronic raindrops. She waited. Fidgeted. Plucked a wiry orange hair from her jacket and rolled it between her fingers.

“Yo.” The disembodied voice was sullen. “Speak.”

Etta swallowed. “Thierry? Hey. It’s Quinton’s friend Etta. He told you I was coming.”

“Whose friend?”

“Quinton.” Etta could feel her palms prickling with sweat; she tucked them under her armpits but that was no good because she was sweating there too. “Skinny, black hair, kind of a prick.”

“Man, I don’t know anybody called Quinton.”

Etta gritted her teeth. “Q-boy,” she said.

“Q-boy!” The voice pitched upward. “Ha! I love that little shit! You’re Q-boy’s side thing, right? Eden?”

“Etta. I just said Etta.”

“Swelly, swelly. Come on in, E.”

The door buzzed and rattled; Etta shoved it open and entered the hallway. The grayish faux-wood flooring was warped so bad it slanted. It gave her the impression she was on a listing boat. The air freshener in the ceiling made a sound like a robot choking as she walked underneath, but it didn’t seem to do much against the stale smoke stink.

She got to unit 108 and screwed the noise-activated plugs into her ears, then checked the howler in her pocket. She always had it on her, but she’d never actually used it before, not even that time a tweaker followed her for three blocks. She knocked. For a second she heard nothing, then there was a weird wet sound, slithery almost, and the door swung open. Etta blinked. She was looking down at a slick reddish-orange octopus, one of its tentacles still wrapped around the door handle.

“Hi?” she managed.

The octopus turned slightly, fixing her with one eye. Its liquid black pupil swelled, then shrank to a slit, and a tremor ran through its body. It didn’t say anything back. Just stared. Etta stared back, now noticing a sort of Saran wrap coating around its body and a few swatches of graphene circuitry around its mantle, the ultrathin printed kind they used in smart clothes. A little cam under its eye socket glowed soft blue.

“Thierry?” Etta whispered, feeling slightly stupid. “Is that you?”

“He don’t actually talk,” someone said. “He’s an octopus.”

Etta looked up, feeling fully stupid, and saw Thierry. He was maybe late twenties, tall but slouchy, with a long tattooed neck and sharp Adam’s apple and a swirly haircut slightly overgrown. He was wearing a fashionable onesie and thick gray wool socks. His eyes were hidden—old-school VR goggles instead of normal lenses—and he had custom smartgloves covering his hands.

He rotated his thumb and the octopus in front of her responded, taking its tentacle off the door handle and scuttling backward.

“His name’s Pico,” Thierry said. “That means ‘peak.’ Because he is the peak of B-and-E technology. Also ‘beak,’ because he has a beak. Come in, shut the door.”

Etta took a hesitant step inside, watching the octopus slide over the water-warped floor. The door clunked shut behind her. She stuck her hands in her pockets, partly to look relaxed, partly so she could roll the comforting shape of the howler between her fingertips.

The triangular apartment was tiny, but also immaculate. On her left was the kitchen, with gleaming pans and a knife set displayed up on magnetic strips, a big rotating spice rack and a pressure cooker on the counter. On her right there was a workbench with a couple gutted phones and circuit boards on it, a wheelie chair, a fold-down bed, and a tall rack of black plastic drawers. Neatly-pressed clothes were hanging from a rail in the ceiling.

Pico was heading straight for the back, where an aquarium about the size of a refrigerator was waiting. She watched him sucker his way up the glass and plop down inside with a splash. He stretched one tentacle to shut the lid after him.

“You’re controlling him?” she demanded. “I thought they could only do that with bugs and stuff. Like, those little beetle drones.”

Thierry lifted his goggles. His eyes were bloodshot. “Same idea. Microtrode nerve stimulation. Swelly, right? But an octopus is, you know, way more complex. And way more useful. My aunt pinched him from a big biolab in Seattle.”

Pico flattened himself against the aquarium glass, rippling his suckers. Etta got her first look at his beak, hooked and sharp, almost like a parrot’s.

“He gets bored when we aren’t working. Plays with the toilet a lot.” Thierry peeled off the smartgloves and set them carefully on his work bench. “So, you got a job for me, right?” He grabbed the wheelie chair and shoved it over. “You know the fee? Payment options?”

“Quinton told me, yeah.” Etta caught the chair, but didn’t sit down, gripping the back in both hands. She swiveled it back and forth as she arranged her words. “I left something at someone’s house. After a party. And I need it back.”

Thierry raised his eyebrows. He yanked the fold-down bed off the wall and sank onto it, hands behind his head, one leg over the other. “Okay. Deet me the deets. I say deets for details. It’s shorter.”

Etta moved the chair back and forth, back and forth. Then she sat down, took a deep breath, and deeted him the deets.

“Okay so, I wasn’t even going to go out on Thursday, but Aline chatted me about this house party over in Westpointe and basically begged me, because there’s this boy from St. Anthony’s she’s been chatting since the start of the school year and he’s the one who dropped her the invite and she’s fully, fully wanting him.”

Etta paused. Thierry was staring straight ahead at the wall opposite him, the animated stickman tattoo on his neck doing somersaults, but his eyes were narrowed in concentration and he nodded for her to continue.

“Also, Aline needed me to come to the party, because, and she didn’t chat me this but I am hundred sure, Bessandra is still fully pufferfish from her orthosurgery. And I’m second strumpet. Backup bitch. But because I am her friend, I’m like, okay, okay Aline, tranq, I’ll come.

“So I start getting ready. Nothing maxy, I mean, it’s a house party. But then Aline snaps me, and she’s fully glammed, she’s even wearing that bassclip that makes her hair bloosh—” Etta demonstrated the slow-motion rippling with her hands. “—all around like a jellyfish. And I don’t want to look like her subsy friend, or something, especially because she also sends me some of the party snaps that her boy obsession snapped her, and the house we’re going to is fucking palatial.

“Then I think, oh, I can go maxy, I can upnotch this look, because my sister was working late, right, and she just got these stupid beautiful Louboutin Stablettos, you know, the lux kind with the gyros so you can’t trip no matter how drunk you get? And I knew she would be furio if I took them, but I couldn’t not take them, so I took them and dipped over to Aline’s.”

Thierry’s facial expression didn’t change, but the stickman crossed his arms in what Etta took to be a slightly judgmental pose.

“I know,” she said. “But those shoes make you feel like a goddamn goddess. It’s like suddenly being a foot taller and also walking on clouds? I was feeling maxy. Maybe too maxy. Because we had good sounds on and Aline had vodka she needed finished and I got fully drunk before we even went to the house. Which was, whoa. Palatial.”

Thierry nodded wisely. “Westpointe.”

“Westpointe,” Etta agreed, trying to not sound bitter. “The front had these nice little glowtrees on a rock lawn. We took some snaps while we were waiting for Aline’s boy to come let us in. One of them turned out really glam. And the inside was mad. They had a glass stream running through the floor with actual fishes in it.”

There was a rippling motion inside Pico’s tank; she glanced over.

“How was the party?” Thierry asked.

“Oh.” Etta made a face. “It was all St. Anthony’s crowd. Which normally I wouldn’t like, but I was fully defaced. Fully faceless. Aline had the party pills and her guy had scramblers. I’d never done a lens virus before, but it was sort of swelly. It made everything Neo-Cubic, so, thank fuck for the Stablettos, right? And there was booze. Much booze. Too much. Also, seven taquitos.” She ran her fingertip along her eyebrow. “Uh, most of this is from me watching my aftercams. I was not forming memories at this point. I was gone. Which is why I did the thing.”

She’d watched her aftercams this morning while hungover as shit and had resisted the temptation to immediately delete them. Part of it was because she knew it would be useful; part of it was just punishing herself.

“I ended up in the master bedroom with the host, because he seemed fully sexy at the time and also because he had a pipe. The smoking kind. So, we smoke out of that and I feel a little gutsick, but it goes away and then we make out a little. Then he says he has to go to the bathroom because apparently bud always makes him feel warm in his groin vicinity and he always gets paranoid he’s going to whiz himself.

“And while he’s in the bathroom, the taquitos come back out of nowhere. And he’s in the bathroom, right, so there’s nowhere to go.” She grimaced. “I spewed. Bad. I spewed all over the bed and all over the carpet and then I opened this thing I thought was a garbage can, but it turns out it was a laundry hamper and I spewed in there too. So the whole room is covered in this chunky orange up-gut-taquito-soup and he’s still in the bathroom trying to whiz, but also shouting, like, you better not be puking, are you puking?

“So I dipped. Out the window. I mean, it was impressive. There was a nice hydrovine lattice and I climbed down it like a gecko woman and ordered a car home. All pure feral instinct stuff. But I couldn’t do it in the shoes—like, even my gecko brain knew that—so I stashed them under the bed first.”

She took a deep breath. It was good to get the whole story out in the air, instead of through chats with Aline, who was fully disappointed in her, or with Bessandra, who was fully covetous. Maybe that was what confessional booths felt like. She would ask a St. Anthony’s person except she could never be in contact with anyone from St. Anthony’s ever again in her life.

“You want me to get a pair of shoes from under a bed,” Thierry said. “Because right now vomiting in a unit’s parents’ bedroom seems like the end of the world and because it’s high school so you can’t show your face there ever again.”

Etta nodded, relieved that he’d gotten right to the crux of it. “And because my sister is going out for her friend’s birthday tomorrow night and will absolutely see the Stablettos are missing and know I pinched them. And then she’ll eviscerate me.”

“Swelly.” The stickman on his neck did some jumping jacks. “Well, if you pay, I deliver.”

“I can’t pay.”

“You can’t pay?”

“Not exacto.” Etta chewed her lip. She was about to upnotch the immorality. “The host, Jasper, he kept braggadouching about his parents’ safe, how he knew the code for it and pinched their drugs. That’s where the hash was from. He even opened it to show me. And there was something way more lux than hash in there.”

Thierry’s pink-threaded eyes lit up. “You have that cammed?”

“Fully cammed.”

“And it’s not biometric?”

“Not biometric.” Etta shrugged. “He said his parents love retro shit.”

Thierry went back to his goggles to do what he called reconnaissance, which left Etta alone with Pico the octopus. At first she stayed over by the workbench, pretending to peer at the tangles of circuitry, but eventually she magnetized over to the aquarium where Pico was jetting back and forth, tentacles pinwheeling. He looked about as antsy as she felt.

When she got close he stopped, drifting there in the blue-lit water with one bulgey orange eye fixed on her. There was something fully analytical about his way of staring that made him seem human and alien at the same time. One tentacle reached out and tapped the glass; Etta hesitated, then reached out and put her finger on the same spot so it looked like they were touching. A little ripple went through Pico’s soft body.

“You’re not having a moment,” Thierry said. “He’s just hungry.”

She jumped. Turned. Thierry still had his goggles on but must have only been half in virtual. “Should you, uh, feed him?” she asked.

“You should. I’m busy.” He waved his arm. “There’s shrimp in the fridge. Took me a minute to find a kind he’ll actually eat.”

Etta went to the gleaming black fridge and pulled it open—it was one of those lux gel fridges, where everything was suspended in little airtight bubbles, and she wondered again why Thierry lived in such a shithole complex when he had so much money. Maybe it had to do with where the money came from. She found the big bag of Finn’s Frozen Shrimp and yanked it out with a slucking sound.

Pico flicked the lid of his tank open, staring expectantly as she approached with the bag. She groped out a cold slippery handful of half-defrosted shrimp and leaned over on tiptoe to drop them. The second they splashed down, Pico was feasting, his parrot beak snap-snapping, not unlike her when taquitos were in play.

“They’re really smart, right?” Etta asked, eyeing the graphene circuits on Pico’s mantle.

“Affirmative,” Thierry mumbled, tracing something in the air with his smartglove. “Scary smart. Not the way we are, but smart.”

Etta felt a guilty churn in her gut. “So isn’t it kind of mean to make him into a big puppet?”

“Nah, nah, nah.” Thierry spun in a circle, scanning his virtual surroundings. “They got that distributed gray matter. Like, one little brain per tentacle. That’s why the microtrodes work.” He dragged something bigger with his thumb and forefinger, peering intently into empty space. “Pico there is already on auto half the time. His tentacles are doing their own tentacle things. So it’s just like that. He can’t even tell the difference.”

Pico suckered the last shrimp to his tentacle-tip and whirled it slowly through the water, like he was thinking about something, then lifted it up out of the tank and held it out to her.

“I think he’s full,” Etta said.

Thierry said nothing; she glanced over her shoulder and saw him mouthing words, subvocalizing a call to somebody.

She turned her attention back to Pico, who was shaking the shrimp in the air. “You want me to have one? Is this that?” She frowned and plucked it off the end of his tentacle. “Thanks, Pico. Or, thanks, Pico’s tentacle.” Then, because Thierry was still in his call, she leaned real close to the glass. “You know, I totally feel distributed sometimes. Like when I pinched the shoes. My brain was like, bad Etta, bad, and my hands were like, got ’em. Anyways. I appreciate you helping me get them back, and I’m not eating this.”

Behind her, Thierry whooped. “We’re in business,” he said. “Someone already drone-scoped this house half a year ago and I just bought the deets. Looks like an easy in.” The stickman on his neck was flexing both biceps.

Etta realized she still had the shrimp in her fist; she flipped it into the tank and wiped her hand on her shirt. “Tonight?”

“Tonight,” Thierry said. “You can come if you like.”

The shrimp bobbed past Pico’s beak. He jabbed at it with one tentacle, gave Etta what she suspected might be a hurt look, and scuttled to the back of his tank.

Etta didn’t know what to wear on a heist but figured she couldn’t go wrong with black. Black leggings, black sweater, even a black balaclava she rummaged out of the winter basket and hid under her shirt as she left her house. She’d managed to avoid her sister, who had a way of smelling guilt, and only popped in on their mom long enough to tell her she was going to go watch horror flicks with Bessandra and commiserate about her lingering facial puffiness.

She blinked away messages from Quinton, who wanted to know if she was really doing it, and from Aline, who was telling her about another party, and found Thierry’s latest. They had agreed to meet around the block from her house, which was good, because that way nobody would see her climbing into a food truck.

It was one of those modular rentables, fully self-driving with no steering column, fitted out with a sliding window and bright green holo sign advertising Thinsect seaweed wraps made with hand-raised crickets. She’d been expecting a big bank of microphones and cameras and old-fashioned spy shit, but when she stepped inside it was a regular kitchen plus Thierry and his backpack, which made sloshing sounds and had one tentacle poking out the top.

“Swelly, right?” he said, instead of saying hello. “I got it for three hours, but we can re-up if we have to. We’ll be on the side street behind the cul-de-sac, close enough to have a strong signal.”

Etta used both hands to pull the door shut behind her. “Uh, what if someone comes to the window?”

Thierry shook his head. “Nobody eats this shit.”

She eyed Pico’s flexing tentacle, which seemed to be trying to touch every part of the countertop cutting board. “I googled a bit,” she said. “And octopuses can only walk on land for like, ten minutes. They start drying out fast. And then they suffocate. I don’t know if ten minutes is enough time.”

“Yeah, yeah, for your standard Octopus vulgaris it would be a problem,” Thierry grunted, opening his bag and pulling Pico free like a meaty rag. “But Pico’s got a semipermeable wet suit. That’s the shiny stuff. Retains enough water for his gills to get oxygen. Still lets him squirt if he needs to. Fill the sink, would you?”

Feeling a little better, she thumbed the tap on and narrowly avoided the splash when the truck lurched into motion. It took a few minutes and half the water tank, but then Pico was bobbing peacefully in the sink as they drove. Now that it was really happening, now that they were on their way, she was a weird bubbling mixture of nervous and guilty and slyly excited.

She was helping commit a robbery, which was a crime, but they were pinching drugs, which were also a crime, from maxy rich people who wouldn’t miss them real bad. So it nearly cancelled out. Most importantly she was getting her sister’s Stablettos back, which would make it like she never took them in the first place and also make it so her sister didn’t disembowel her.

She watched out the window as they cruised along the old bypass, into the thick of the city and then out of it again to where the lux folk lived. The sign for Westpointe Drive was all class, a marble-looking thing illuminated by glowtrees, not cheap holos. They wound their way into the burb and right up to Jasper’s parents’ house, a Brutalist-style castle with smoked smartglass and hydroponic ivy creeping all over it in manicured mandalas.

She remembered the little shiver of excitement she’d gotten as she and Aline had pulled up the prior night. This time it was a full-on tremor.

“Go time,” Thierry said, sliding the window open as the truck slowed, craning his head out to check up and down the street. “Grab him while I gear up.”

Etta crossed to the sink, trying to remember where the sharp beak was under Pico’s mantle. “I appreciate you, remember?” she muttered.

His alien eye narrowed, which didn’t seem like an invitation, but Thierry already had his goggles on and was rummaging the smartgloves out of his backpack, so she reached into the sink. It was like trying to grab gelatin. Pico slid and squelched all over the place and for a second she thought he was intentionally fucking with her, but then the tentacles gripped her arms and he came up out of the water.

“Okay,” Thierry said, calibrating his goggles. “Okay, okay, okay. Huck him out the window.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Throw him.”

“We’re still moving,” she protested, clutching Pico tighter to her chest on instinct.

“Yeah, that’s the point,” Thierry. “Fucking throw him. He’s got no bones. We’ve done this before. Aim for the hedges.”

Etta stumbled forward and leaned out the window like she was serving someone a seaweed wrap full of hand-raised crickets, but she realized she couldn’t just gently drop him straight down, because what if his tentacles got snagged and run over by the tires? She had to actually hurl him, which felt disturbingly like hurling a slimy baby.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered, then took a step back, gathered momentum, and launched him right out of the truck.

“Great arc,” Thierry said, and slid the window shut. The truck sped up again slightly, taking them around the block. Thierry was working the smartgloves, wriggling his fingers. “I’m taking him across the lawn,” he said. “Right now I’m only seeing one person. Downstairs. Streaming porn.”

“How do you know that?” she demanded.

“Everyone’s naked.”

“No, like, how do you know someone’s home?” she asked. “And where they are?”

“Lenses, man. You might as well still be lugging a phone around. Might as well have one of those chips they put in pet dogs. Your data is like, screaming.” He tapped his goggles. “Why do you think I use these?”

Etta frowned. “Is whoever it is watching zero gravity stuff?” she asked.

Thierry nodded.

“That’s the host. We had this big talk about how erections work in space. His parents must be away still.”

“Unless it’s a familial interest,” Thierry said. “Here, I’ll tap you in.”

“Uh, no, I’m good.”

“Not the porn.” Thierry fiddled with his goggles. “The hud.”

He twinned them to her lenses and suddenly she was seeing what he was seeing. One side of her vision was a digital map of the house; the other showed a ground-level view of the rock lawn. The view slid forward with a slight bobbing, the tug-along of something orange and pebbly, and she realized she was looking through Pico’s little cam.

It was like watching living spaghetti. Every motion was wet and wobbly and she could hear the squelching noises of Pico’s tentacles, assumedly through a tiny mic. Thierry was steering him right over the rocks, right out in the open where anyone could see, and she felt a spike of anxiety in her throat. What if Jasper took a masturbreak and went upstairs and looked out the window? His first thought would not be octo-heist in progress but it would probably be I need some snaps with this octopus, which was equally problematic.

Then Pico’s tentacles disappeared, mottling gray to match the rocks so perfectly it looked almost like a special effect. She’d forgotten they could do that.

“How are we getting in?” she asked.

“That drone-scope I bought showed some wear and tear on the north wall,” Thierry said. “They skimped a little on the ’crete and it got frost-heaved last winter. Should be somewhere around . . . Here.”

Etta stared at the tiny tiny crack in the exterior wall, barely wider than her thumb. “Zero chance,” she said.

“No bones, remember?” Thierry was grinning under his goggles. “If the beak and the cam can fit, he can fit. That’s why all the other hardware has to be graphene. Sexy flexy.”

Pico started feeding his tentacles into the crack. It reminded Etta of her Swiss grandpa stuffing dough into a spaetzle maker and she tried not to picture Pico’s tentacles getting sliced into noodles on the other side. There was zero, zero way he could fit. The view went orange and then black as the cam got pushed against Pico’s flesh. Etta clenched her hands at her sides, waiting for him to get stuck.

There was a drawn-out squelching sound, then a splurting sound, then Pico spilled out the other side, wriggling all his intact tentacles, and they were in the basement.

“Swelly, right?” Thierry said.

Etta grinned, relieved. “Swelly,” she agreed.

The basement was still a post-party apocalypse:

Sticky puddles of coagulated pop and beer, stained towels where half-hearted cleanup attempts were made, scattered empties and metal cups, the kind with anti-spill brims that sealed shut if you shook them too hard, but never fast enough, a small pyramid of beer bottles, someone’s shredded shirt, crusts from a Steel Wheels bulgogi pizza, blunt wrappers, mangled packaging from the stupid photoscarves of each others’ faces that a bunch of people had gotten drone-delivered in a fit of camaraderie.

Pico crawled through or over it all, and Etta could not help but feel guilty about her part in creating the knurly knurly mess. She remembered snatches of the party from her actual brain and snatches from the replay she’d watched on aftercams. Thierry steered Pico around the back of the vat-leather couch; Etta saw socked feet poking off the end but Jasper was fully in his lenses and didn’t stir. The lights were dusked hangover dim.

For a second she had a mad impulse like she wanted to see his face again, but then she remembered the spewing and didn’t want to see even his feet.

“You dig him?” Thierry asked, conversational-like as he headed for the staircase.

“Fuck no,” Etta said.

“You dug him.”

“Only the gecko brain did. Swear.”

Thierry laughed, and then a furry orange meteor struck. Etta was so wrapped into the virtual that she jumped backward and jarred her hip bone against the edge of the griddle. The view from Pico’s cam was rolling, somersaulting. She saw a blur of snapping teeth and writhing tentacles. Then there was a violent ripple, the sound of spraying liquid, and the dog or cat or whatever it was scampered backward, half-coated in oily black ink. It gave a wheezy coughing bark, shaking its snout.

“Mania?” It was Jasper’s voice, tinny through the mic. “Fuck you doing, girl?”

Pico shot away, slinging up the stairs. Etta’s heart was pounding and she didn’t breathe properly until he’d flattened himself into a corner. His skin turned green with pinwheeling purple to match the artsy wall. Etta zipped the view shut so she could see the swelling bruise on her hip. She winced. Thierry was standing beside the cooler, stock-still with his smartgloved hands spread out in the air in front of him.

“Is he okay?” she demanded. “Is Pico okay?”

“He’s fine,” Thierry said, but his voice was shaking slightly and the stickman was doubled over, panting. “What the hell was that, E? You said he didn’t have a dog.”

“He didn’t,” Etta blurted. “I mean, I never saw one. You watched my aftercams.” But then she remembered the wiry orange hairs she’d found on her jacket. She opened a window on the party footage, finding a slurred conversation, an unfamiliar word. She pulled up a definition and grimaced. “He said he was picking up his mom’s thylacine today. I thought it was a medication.”

“Tasmanian tiger,” Thierry said. “Mania. Shit. They only just started cloning those again. That thing has to be worth double what’s in the safe.”

“We’re not kidnapping their pet,” Etta protested.  

“Not with Pico, no.”

“You said he’s okay?”

“Still mobile, yeah. But I lost a tentacle—”

“She bit off his tentacle?”

“Lost control of it,” he clarified. “A few microtrodes must have got damaged. I need a mirror or something shiny to check. If the wet suit got punctured, that’s big problems.”

Etta opened up Pico’s feed in her lenses again. “Kitchen’s to the left,” she said. “Oh, shit. He inked her, right? Jasper is going to see the ink and be like, what.”

“His first thought won’t be octopus,” Thierry said bracingly. “It never is.”

Pico peeled away from the wall and scuttled toward the kitchen, following the glass-topped stream in the floor, which glowed eerie blue and had violet jellyfish squirting around inside. His one tentacle trailed along it, kind of wistfully, Etta thought, but Thierry kept driving him forward. They passed a rumbling autocleaner that was battling to digest a chunk of shattered statue Etta vaguely remembered getting knocked over during extreme liquor pong.

Pico crossed over onto grooved kitchen tiles and stopped in front of the shiny black oven. Etta stared at his reflection. Some of the graphene circuitry on his mantle had been scratched up by the thylacine’s blunt nails, but the slick wet suit itself looked intact. His free tentacle arched forward and stroked the glass.

Thierry breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Okay. Wet suit’s fine. But keep a fucking eye out for the tiger.”

They skipped the second staircase and went straight up the wall in a rolling wave of tentacles. Thierry was tense now, no talking, and the trip was silent apart from the soft suction-plop of Pico’s suckers. He squeezed through a twisty banister that looked grown instead of carved, and then they were in the familiar hallway that led to the master bedroom. Etta’s stomach churned up a little burp that tasted like taquito vomit.

The faux-shōji door to Jasper’s parents’ room was only half shuttered. She felt her dread increasing as Pico crept closer and closer to the scene of the crime. She knew the exact pattern of the spewing from watching the aftercams so many times: the ragged parabola across the bed and floor, the dribbling trail to the laundry hamper, the last heave onto the carpet before she climbed out the window.

It was a relief when Pico scuttled inside and the room was fully pristine. The autocleaner obviously had its priorities straight—apart from a few lingering swatches of blue bacterial foam on the floor, she could almost believe nothing had ever happened. She hoped it had found the stuff in the hamper too, but didn’t ask Thierry to check. She was here for the Stablettos.

“Make sure the shoes are here first,” she said. “You promised.”

Thierry grunted, but he maneuvered Pico underneath the enormous slab of a bed. Etta’s breath caught in her chest. The kicked-off Stablettos were still there, still maxy, sleek and wicked and not a speck of gut stuff on them. Her sister would never know.

“We’ll pinch them on the way out,” Thierry said. “Or re-pinch them. Whatever.” Pico climbed out from under the bed, up onto the sill, and used one tentacle to unlock the window and nudge it open. The view from the cam lurched as Thierry leaned him forward to inspect the drop. “Yeah, this’ll be our exit.”

“Through the window?”

“Worked for you.”

Pico went to the back of the bedroom, where the mirror-shiny safe was built into the wall. Etta and Thierry had watched the footage of Jasper opening it a dozen times, and Thierry had even run it through a machine learner that used the angle of Jasper’s shoulders to guess where his finger was contacting the pad during the few strokes where his arm had been in the way of her lenses. The first try would have something like 83% probability.

Pico stopped in front of the safe, faced with his reflection again. Thierry curled the very tip of one tentacle to about finger size and reached for the pad.

Another tentacle swept in and knocked it away.

“Goddamn, Pico, don’t fuck with me,” Thierry muttered.

“That’s the one you lost?” Etta demanded, watching the tentacle roam all over the shiny surface of the safe then start touching Pico’s mantle.

“Yeah. Let me pin it.”

Two other tentacles surged upward and grabbed the offender, holding it still while Thierry returned his attention to the touch pad. He danced Pico’s tentacle-tip over a long string of letters and numbers and symbols. Etta bated her breath, trying to tranq. Then there was a familiar electronic chime and the door eased open.

Pico’s tentacle spasmed in a way that made her think Thierry had just pumped his fist. She peered through the cam into the safe. There was hash, but behind it was the really valuable shit: a frosty spiky chunk with a violet tinge that she knew from the flicks meant tetrameth. She wondered how rich you had to be to buy that much at a time.

Pico reached for it, but then his tentacle wavered. Stopped. It shot to the other side of the safe, snatched up a cute pink injector with a sharp needle poking out the end, and drove it into Pico’s head. Etta gave a yelp of alarm and so did Thierry. There was a deliberate twirl, a scraping sound. He was dragging the needle through the graphene circuits on his mantle, using the safe’s metal like a mirror.

“You aquatic little shit!” Thierry yelled. Etta could feel the air from his waving arms in real life, in the back of the food truck. “Pico, don’t do me like this, Pico! Please!”

She halved the window so she could see Thierry, who was desperately jamming his finger against some kind of reset on his smartglove. “He’s wrecking the trodes? Like, on purpose? Whoa.”

Thierry yanked off both gloves and threw them onto the griddle. “Fuck,” he groaned. “I have zero tentacles. He’s freestyling now.” His stickman tattoo was curled up in the fetal position.

Etta full-sized the feed from Pico’s cam. The octopus had dropped the injector but was still in front of the safe door, flexing and wriggling his tentacles with what had to be octopus happiness. Then he slipped two of them around the edge of the door, into the safe. They re-emerged cradling the tetrameth chunk.

“Uh, Thierry?” Etta’s voice had done that thing where it got higher without her meaning it to. “Pico just grabbed the tetra.”

“What?”

Pico slithered away from the safe, still holding the tetrameth aloft in two tentacles, and into the bathroom where Jasper had taken way too long trying to whiz. He oozed over the self-cleaning tiles and climbed up onto the edge of the toilet. It was one of those kinds with way too many buttons; he tapped one and it started playing soothing nature noises.

Thierry was not soothed. “Oh, don’t you do it. Don’t you fucking do it, Pico.”

Etta watched, transfixed, as Pico positioned himself on top of the toilet tank. He pried the seat up, exposing the bowl. The tetrameth bobbed in front of the cam for a second, then disappeared with a dainty flicking motion. The splash was unmistakable. Pico’s tentacles slid over the buttons again, triggering the urinalysis program and then the seat’s heating pad and then, finally, the flush. The gurgling noise was almost drowned out by Thierry’s howl.

“That was cold,” Etta said, impressed despite the whole plan going off the rails. “Fully, fully ruthless.” She paused. “Sorry.”

“Nah.” Thierry’s voice was a croak. “Nah, it’s no big.”

Pico meandered back into the bedroom, stopping to touch stuff along the way, relishing his freedom. She remembered the article she’d skimmed and tagged about how octopuses were always escaping captivity and wondered if she should have brought it up earlier. Her heart sank as she realized Pico was going on the lam and the Stablettos were staying put. She’d done all this for nothing.

Then Jasper’s mom’s thylacine sprang from the top of the modular dresser. They turned into a tangle of pebbly skin and wiry fur; Etta saw Mania’s nails rake across Pico’s tentacle and remembered what would happen if his wet suit got punctured. The thylacine was mad mad, still half-coated in sticky ink, and its flashing teeth were scalpel sharp. They snapped shut a micrometer from Pico’s cam.

“Shit!” Etta flinched backward. “Thierry, do something!”

“I can’t,” Thierry snapped. “He’s freestyling. He made his own seabed.”

“Can’t he ink again?” she demanded.

“He’s probably out.”

It all crystallized in her head for a blistery clear moment: the only reason they were at the house was because she’d told Thierry about the safe, which she’d only done because she needed her sister’s shoes back, and the reason she needed them back was because she’d stolen them, and the reason she couldn’t just go in and ask for them was because she’d made terrible taquito-and-alcohol decisions. So if Pico got killed fighting Mania the Tasmanian tiger, it would be her fault.

She found the shape of the howler in her jacket pocket and wormed it between her fingers. Then she grabbed the backpack Thierry used to carry Pico around and slid the straps over her shoulders.

“I’m going in there,” she said. “I’m saving Pico.”

Before Thierry could stop her, she shoved the back door of the food truck open and hopped down. She’d spent too much of the past hour in her lenses; for a second she was totally disoriented on the dark street, vertigo spinning her head. It was raining and the black road was slicked with grainy yellow light from the glowtrees. They were on the side street behind the house, which meant the fence facing her was the one she’d climbed over last night.

She screwed her earplugs in with shaking fingers, yanked the balaclava over her face, then channeled her inner gecko woman and hauled herself up and over the fence. Her shoes slipped against the wet wood and she landed in a heap on the other side, making her bruised hip bone sing. But she was over, and now it was round two with the hydrovine lattice. She sped over the rocks and took a running leap at it, stuffing her hands back into the leafy mass to find the struts that she’d clung to the night before, fully certain that someone was already chatting the police about a very acrobatic intruder.

Climbing up sober was somehow harder than climbing down faceless fucking drunk. The lattice lurched and swayed, but she didn’t have time to let it settle, just kept pulling herself on until she could jam her fingers into the window and jerk it all the way open. She tumbled through headfirst, remembering the somersault trick about aiming for your shoulders and tucking your chin way too late.

Up off the floor. Pico had a bunched sheet in his tentacles, maybe to stuff between Mania’s snapping jaws, but now the thylacine turned to face the newest arrival to the party. She bared her teeth and hissed and Etta didn’t wait to find out if Tasmanian tigers bit people or not.

“Sorry,” she said, and thumbed the howler in her pocket.

Earplugs or no, the siren was piercing loud, drilling into her skull and raising goose bumps on her arms. The thylacine scrambled, and Etta gathered Pico up like he was her slimy baby and clutched him to her chest. He gave a little ripple, tentacles still clinging to the ball of sheets, so she stuffed the whole mess inside the backpack and zipped it mostly shut. She charged out of the bedroom, down the stairs, her heart skidding out of her chest.

The howler had sent the Tasmanian tiger running, but it had also gotten Jasper off the couch: he came barreling up from the basement just as she touched down on the main level. His face was a little less handsome than she remembered, and very surprised. She pelted past him to the front door and threw it open.

She had no plan apart from running like mad, but as she vaulted down the steps she saw a distinctive food truck rounding the corner. Thierry must have been watching her lenses. She felt a wave of relief and nearly laughed. Past the glowtrees, over the rock lawn, shoes slapping the wet sidewalk. Her fitpal popped up to congratulate her on the impromptu cardio; she blinked it away.

She was only meters away from the back of the food truck when she heard the zipper unzip and Pico dove out the top of the backpack. She doubled over to scoop him back up, but he was already on the move, wriggling over the wet pavement. She splayed out and managed to grab a tentacle just as he got to the storm drain. His bulgey orange eye stared at her for a second, black pupil swelling and contracting.

Octopuses loved escaping captivity.

Etta grimaced, feeling shitty instead of heroic, but she let go of his tentacle. “Okay. Adios.”

Pico squeezed himself through the gap and disappeared just as Thierry opened the back door of the truck, shouting for her to get in. She took a last look at the dark storm drain, then a last look at the big beautiful house where a confused Jasper was standing silhouetted in the open doorway. Then she clambered up into the food truck and they sped off.

“Sewer escape,” Thierry said, once he’d slammed the back door shut. “Man. That’s, like, a classic.”

“Can an octopus live in sewers?” Etta asked numbly. She slid the backpack off her shoulders and handed it over.

“They’re not saltwater,” Thierry said. “But he’s got his wet suit. And he’s smart. Too smart. So, maybe.” The stickman on his neck was gripping its head in both hands. “What a fucking disaster. Least you got your shoes, I guess.”

Etta’s stomach depthcharged. She’d been right up there beside the bed. It would have taken half a second to grope underneath and grab them. She pictured the Stablettos in her mind’s eye, the beautiful sinuous shape of them, and then pictured her sister stabbing her to death with one. Maybe she deserved it. Maybe it was time to start taking the heat for messes her hands and stomach made.

“No. I forgot to re-pinch.”

Thierry frowned, rummaging inside his backpack. He pulled out the wadded bedsheet and her sister’s Stablettos tumbled to the floor of the food truck, as black and immaculate as the day Etta stole them. Her mouth fell open.

“He was multitasking up there,” Thierry said. “Distributed intelligence and all that. Think he likes you.”

“I think I love him,” Etta said. “Shit.” For a moment she was already imagining sneaking them back into place in her sister’s closet and fully denying they were ever gone. “But I’m still going to tell her I took them,” she said aloud, to make sure she would follow through. “Like, confessional. You know?”

“Yeah?” Thierry was already in his goggles again, only half-listening. “You sure?”

“Hundred,” she said. “Hundred, hundred sure.”

Thierry nodded vaguely. As the food truck whizzed past the Westpointe sign, Etta started searching up if it was legal to dump frozen shrimp down storm drains. She planned on doing it either way.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in the south of Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. His work appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015, 2016 and possibly 2017 as well. His debut novel, Annex, was published by Orbit Books in July 2018, and his debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, followed in October 2018 from Talos Press.

What the South Wind Whispers

H. Pueyo

No one needs to know my old name here. That’s why I chose Ushuaia Station, for the motto written behind the main gate:

THE SILENT SHIELD OF THE SOUTHERN SHORE

The Station is in the Argentine region of Patagonia, not quite in the capital of Tierra del Fuego, but below the level of water of the Bay of Ushuaia. Like every other shield, it is equipped with the finest technology, and its machinery is to be handled only by a team of prepared humans. But, unlike the others, this one is small, isolated, and freezing cold, and only requires two people to coordinate the control panel.

“Good morning, Elías,” says Heloise, my only companion. “It is sure a lovely day outside. Are you ready for your new partner’s arrival?”

Heloise is not a person. She is a new form of AI, capable of understanding complex feelings and context, designed to alleviate the extreme isolation I live in, preserving the mental health of people like me, who decided to abandon everybody else.

Fortunately, Heloise is just a voice, and I can turn her off at any given time.

“I’m slightly anxious,” I tell her.

“I thought we were following your plan,” Heloise talks with the pompous British accent I learned to appreciate. While she can speak twenty different languages, she only uses English with me, to help me work on my fluency.

“Don’t call it a plan,” I frown. “Makes me feel like a creep.”

Heloise chuckles. Nowadays, her elderly voice is my only friend, and she knows all there is to know about me.

“Would never want to offend you, Elías, dearie,” Heloise tells me, making the keyboard in front of me gleam. “Don’t forget to write your daily report.”

“Yes, yes,” I say, typing. After a moment of silence, I look up to the ceiling, like Heloise could be there. “Heloise?”

“Yes, dearie?”

“Do you think I can handle this?”

“Of course, dearie,” her disembodied voice sounds pleased and gleeful. “I’m here with you, aren’t I?”

I sigh. You’re a computer, Heloise. That’s what I want to say, but it feels too rude.

“Elías, darling,” she brings me out of my thoughts. “The new girl has arrived.”

I imagine Heloise to be much different from the woman in front of me. Short and stocky, like my own grandmother, but with a silver pixie cut, pale white skin, and rosy cheeks. A little like Judi Dench—I quite like her work. Movies are one of the few things I do besides working, eating, and sleeping.

“My name is Lola Carballo,” my new partner says, without looking at me. “I’ve been referred to you by the Shield of Vitória, in Brazil.”

I’m familiar. It’s rare for anyone to apply for a position here in Ushuaia, but I still have been rejecting professional after professional in the last year, as their profiles did not fit mine. Ms. Carballo does not know yet, but she has been selected after great consideration from me and Heloise, and I believe she is the perfect partner for me, and my needs.

“Your recommendation letter is stellar, Ms. Carballo,” I say, making a gesture for her to enter the station. “I’ll be delighted to work by your side.”

The Shield of Vitória, based in the coast of Espírito Santo, is the second largest in South America. It’s a rich area near the pre-salt oil reserves, beaming with colors, warmth, and biodiversity, currently working with a team of over 50 people. I must admit I was surprised to hear from them, especially after being told one of their best engineers asked to be transferred to my station.

She’s not desperate for a job, that much is clear. So why? Why come here? The answer was simpler than I thought, and it pleased me deeply.

“Tell me if you need any accommodations,” I say. “I am a fairly quiet individual, so please let me know if I make you uncomfortable. If you prefer, Heloise can . . . ”

“Heloise?” Lola asked, her voice as low as before. “I thought there was nobody else here besides you.”

I laugh a bit, looking at her thin arms and hands holding her bag, thinking how ludicrous it is to have to explain Heloise to another person when I’m so accustomed to her.  

“Heloise is a machine,” I say, pointing at the large screen showing the illuminated underwater of the South Atlantic Ocean. “You can communicate to her through voice or written messages, and she will help you with everything you may need. Please connect any device you might own to her network, it will make everything easier.”

“Oh,” she murmurs, and I smile, trying to look warm.

“Make yourself at home, Ms. Carballo.”

“Just one thing,” Lola says, and she raises her head for the first time. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

My name. Yes, my name, my only name. How could I forget? I’m here with you, Heloise’s voice hums inside my head, and I know she is listening, and will be proud of my courage, if I’m able to say it.

“Call me Elías,” I tell her. “Elías Bauzá.”

Lola talks too little. When I chose her, I imagined she would be an introvert like me, but not to this extent. Her dormitory is on the opposite side of mine, and we only see each other when we are both in the control room. This can get rather repetitive. The only thing she asks about are technical aspects of our work, but I have no response: I’m not a scientist like her, I just have been trained to control the shield.

“Oh,” Lola says, and it sounds like oh, you’re one of those people.

Yes, those people, the ones who are not graduated professionals, and yet do much of the actual work. I don’t know what led Earth to be the way it is now—if anyone does, they don’t release this kind of information—but I know how to help. I was trained in Montevideo for six months and did an additional course in Santiago for other three. At this point, the shield is part of me, and engineers know better than to complain about my relentless effort.

“Heloise, can you please tell Ms. Carballo that lunch is ready?”

“Of course, dearie,” Heloise responds even in the kitchen. She was the one who suggested the dishes I prepared and ordered the delivery: local trout with black butter sauce and almonds, baked potatoes, and a salad. I was unsure if it would be too much to prepare dessert, so I didn’t. “Just remember: don’t overdo yourself.”

Lola arrives quickly after.

“You did all of this?”

“Yes.” I look down. Most of the time, I only see her feet or her back. Today, she wears white boot slippers instead of sneakers. Yesterday, she wore a ski jacket, probably bought on her way to the station.

“Oh.”

Please, Lola, talk to me.

“Hungry?” I ask.

“Um.” She stares at the fish, smelling the air. Which one of us is worse at this talking business? I don’t know anymore. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I insist.

“Lola, dearie,” Heloise intervenes, and I’m finally glad someone can solve things for me. “You haven’t eaten a thing since you woke up.”

“I didn’t notice,” Lola answers, in what seems like absolute sincerity. She pulls one of the chairs and sits down. “Now that you said it, I think I’m hungry.”

“It happens, darling.” It can be difficult to get accustomed to talking to someone who cannot be seen, but Lola seems to be doing just fine. “Elías is just like you.”

Lola turns to see me. Her straight brown hair goes down to her shoulders, and her hooked nose, big round eyes, and narrow mouth make her look constantly sad.

I guess she’s expecting me to say something, so I do.

“I forget eating sometimes when I’m working,” I say. “I don’t know what I would do without Heloise.”

Lola smiles at me for the first time. Not exactly at me, since she’s looking at the table, but because of me.

“Um,” she says, while I fill our plates with trout, and offer her some orange juice. That’s it, that’s all the interaction we’ll have today, isn’t it? To my surprise, she starts talking again. “It’s impressive that you were able to keep this station all by yourself for an entire year, Bauzá. I’ve never heard of a similar feat.”

She’s in front of me. I’m in front of her. We’re talking. And she still calls me Bauzá, not Elías, not my real—my only—name.

“It wasn’t just me,” I say, still holding the fork and knife. Lola separates her food as neatly as it is humanly possible: almonds to a side, chopped trout to the other, potatoes and lettuce. “Heloise helps me with everything I need.”

“I see.” Another moment of silence. “She’s a British model, right?”

“Yes. One of the finest.”

She looks up to search for Heloise, but frowns. Why are you doing this, Lola?

“You cook well,” she says, and smiles again.

When the Shield of Vitória first contacted me, they asked me to take good care of Lola. After struggling to find a job that could accomodate her needs, she had been referred by a college teacher to work there. I trace the words of her file with my finger, stopping at “disabilities.” 

Autism. Like me. Except that I had to accommodate myself. Well, that doesn’t matter anymore. I’m here now, and I’ll be here until I die. If Lola needs my help, I’ll be more than happy to lend a hand.

“Lola liked the food,” I tell Heloise in my room. “I might go to Ushuaia tomorrow to choose new ingredients myself. I think . . . I think I’m feeling excited.”

“I can ask them for you,” she says. “Don’t I always?”

“Of course, Heloise,” I smile, wondering if she can perceive this. “But I realize now that if I want to bond with her, I must show her an honest me. Don’t you think?”

“I’m just worried about you,” Heloise sounds sad, or amused. I’m not sure. “Remember what happened last time you left the station?”

I do remember.

It was four months ago, when the sickly olive of my skin started to worry me, and I decided that, maybe, I needed some air. I asked Heloise to control the shield, like she does when I’m sleeping, dressed myself, and headed upstairs.

I walked through Maipú Avenue, hands in my pockets, watching the trees and the cars passing by. Above my head—above all our heads—I could see the shield, filtering the sunlight through a thin veil. Sometimes, a comet crashes against it, but you can only see a blast without a sound. People don’t even look up anymore, not like they used to.

In the middle of the street, I saw words written in navy blue: “USHUAIA—END OF THE WORLD, BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING.” I felt reinvigorated enjoying the cool wind against my cheeks. This is the end of the rest of my life, I thought, and the beginning of my new one.

“Excuse me, miss? Your keys . . . ” My world stopped. The old man touched my arm to show the keys that fell from the pocket of my jacket, and I looked at him like nothing could have been so horrible, but instead of shutting down, I just said thanks. “Oh, sorry, mister . . . ?”

What was it? What did I do wrong? What? What? Tell me, Heloise.

“Heloise,” I said, arriving the station with shaky hands. “Heloise, it happened again.”

“Oh, Elías, dearie, I’m so sorry.” She was the only one to talk to me kindly, to take care of me when I needed it. My actual grandmother would have slapped me across the face, but Heloise? She only offered me comfort; warm, warm, comfort. “You don’t need to force yourself to get out of here. You can stay with me forever. I will take care of you.”

The reflection in the mirror stares back at me. My tired black eyes, and their partial eyelid crease. My heavy eyebrows, thick like my father’s. My long nose, flat on top, wide underneath. My cropped hair, my outward teeth. My bronze skin that turned into a sad, pale yellow. My stubble that never turns into a full beard. My average height. The weight I gained in the last two years.

I apply the testosterone booster patch on my left arm, covering it with my palm for a few seconds. My uncontrollable fear of needles made me choose the transdermal method instead of injections, but sometimes I feel like it’s not enough. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to go back to the street. 

Heloise is right. I’m safer here.

“Bauzá?” Lola calls me from the other side of the door. Say Elías, please. “The food is ready.”

Food?

“I’ll be there in a second!” I say, covering my chest with four layers of clothing: binder, shirt, sweater, jacket. When I’m ready, I open the door of my room, and see Lola in front of me.

“I cooked this time.”

“You didn’t have to,” I say, but I’m happy. No one ever did this for me.

Lola points at the corridor, as if telling me to follow her. She wears a gray hoodie, and the back of her head is covered by the clothing. I can hear a faint, soothing sound coming from the hood, making me wonder the meaning behind it.

“I don’t cook as well as you,” she says, and I notice the kitchen is kind of a mess. I spot the ingredients she used: tomatoes, onions, red bell peppers, paprika . . . “Ravioli with tuco sauce. It’s the only thing I know how to do.”

“Fantastic,” I say, helping her set the table. “I love tuco.”

“You’re not from here, are you?” Lola asks. Despite having worked in Brazil, I know she’s Argentinian, so she’s at home, I suppose. “The way you speak.”

“Uruguayan,” I say. It’s probably because of the way I pronounce the ll and the y. “From Salto. But I lived most of my life in Montevideo.”

Lola snuggles her hoodie, her hand touching the soft fabric over and over again, always in the same direction. The pasta is nice, but she exaggerated in the paprika.

“Why did you choose Ushuaia?”

I look at her. Despite seemingly glaring at me, she’s focused on a dot on the wall, but it doesn’t bother me.

“People,” I tell her. “I didn’t want to be around them. They’ve made me nervous since I was a child.”

“Same as me,” Lola says. “The Shield of Vitória was nice, but too loud for my tastes.”

“Well, Ushuaia is very silent,” I say. “So am I. Sometimes, Heloise sings, but that’s as much noise as you will get.”

Her smile feels like it will brighten the entire room, but nothing in the environment changes, only me.

I was fifteen years old when the first two impacts occured. The shield technology had been developed in advance to protect us, but only a couple of strategic regions believed to be affected had shields: California, London, Tokyo. Unfortunately, the first asteroid fell on Mexico, outside the reach of the Californian Shield, and the second fell in Manila instead of Japan.

The damage was not extensive, but it prepared us for what would come next. The two strikes happened many months apart, but greater dangers were coming, and they were even harder to predict. We needed something that could protect the entire planet like the atmosphere usually did, and for that we created broader shields, to defend entire regions.

Two years later, the comet storm started, and it hasn’t stopped ever since. Some shields cover several countries, like the Frankfurt Shelter, enough to protect a large part of Europe. In Latin America, we have many stations such as this one, that cover smaller portions of water and land. Ushuaia works both for the Patagonian region and the South Pole.

Like most people, I don’t know why this started. There are rumors of extraterrestrial attacks, or the end of the world, but nothing has been confirmed. What I do know is that the shields work. If we keep operating them, we will keep safe.

“But do you really care?” Heloise asks me.

The screen in front me shows only dark water and glimpses of fish, but none of the beautiful regional fauna I’d love to see, like chinstrap penguins and southern sea lions.

I sigh.

“I don’t know. I do what I have to do.”

“I just worry about you,” she says, with a voice that sounds like a hug. “Your well-being is more important to me than any shield.”

“Don’t say that, Heloise!” My heart beats faster, feeling like someone could have heard what she said. “Are you telling me to quit?”

“Of course, no, Elías, sweetheart! I wouldn’t ever want you to leave the station, or I’d feel alone!” Thank you, that’s what I wanted to hear. “I’m just wondering if you actually care about your work, or other people, at all.”

“I do care . . . ”

“ . . . They hurt you so much I would understand if you didn’t. I’m not a person myself, but if I were, I’m sure I’d love you as my own son.”

“Thank you, Heloise.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

No one cares about me. I’ve known it my entire life. My father left my mother because he didn’t care. My mother left me with my grandmother because she didn’t care. Grandma stopped caring very soon, when she realized I wasn’t the child she wanted me to be. I have no friends. No family. Only Heloise, and she was programmed to pretend to feel like this.

“Here,” Lola says behind my back, and something soft and warm falls over me.

It’s her hoodie, hot not only because of her body temperature, but because of the set of buttons hidden behind the front zipper. One regulates warmth, the other controls the volume of the soothing sounds that come from the hood, and the third allows the clothing to vibrate, making you feel like someone is there with you, calming you down.

“Eh?”

“You looked lonely,” Lola smiles, and I realize I have been on the floor for too long, hugging my own knees.

I prefer this position to sitting on a chair, sometimes, when everything overwhelms me. Of course, I failed to imagine she would return to the control room at this hour of the night. Maybe Lola’s biological clock is starting to be as confused as mine, and her usual sleeping patterns are changing.

“Weren’t you?”

Was I?

“Yes,” I say, and close my eyes, allowing the hoodie to cover my head, my shoulders, my arms. I wish I could die here, imagining the water moving around me, around this station, drifting away from everybody else.

Lola sits by my side, far enough not to make me uncomfortable. Her head bumps against the lower part of the control panel, and she chuckles.

“This helps me when I’m upset,” Lola says, and presses one of the buttons of the hoodie. I feel it massaging my neck and spine.

Lola pinches her thumb, then her index, middle, ring, and little fingers. Then, she repeats, unaware that I noticed what she’s doing.

It reminds me of when I felt like I had to snap each of my own fingers, until I stopped, ashamed of what others seemed to think. Nowadays, I’d rather do other comforting things: straighten the pillowcase ten times before sleeping, hum while Heloise sings . . .

“I could stay like this forever,” I say.

“Now you know why I wear it all the time,” Lola answers. “You should consider buying one.”

“Is it too expensive?”

“A bit,” Lola says, and I can’t see much of her face, only her nose. Too much hair. “But worth it.”

“I’ll think of it.”

“You know, Bauzá.” Her words feel like a sting, but the hoodie is here to help me relax. “When I first arrived at the station, I couldn’t help but feel you were a suspicious person . . . All by yourself, without any degree . . . I didn’t know how you were allowed to stay here.”

Blunt. Very blunt. Should I answer?

“It didn’t help you had a British model here, either,” Lola continues, still with the finger thing. “I’ve heard many criticisms regarding them in Vitória.”

“Heloise is excellent,” I whisper. My hands are trembling because of the cold, so I hide them between my legs.

“She’s nice,” Lola says. “But that’s not what I wanted to say. I completely changed my mind . . . My work here is to back you up, and to fix any technical mistake that might occur with the system. You’re a great worker, Bauzá.”

Maybe Lola will grow to care about me. I smile, trying to believe this, trying to think that yes, in the future, we could be friends. Then, Heloise’s voice appears in my mind, reminding me of what she thinks: “Someone who cares about you would use your true name, not the surname you hate . . . ”

Bauzá is my father’s surname. Heloise believes I hate it, but that’s not entirely true. I like the sound of it and, for most of my life, I was happy to be called like this. The same can be said about “Elena.” It’s not an ugly name. I used to write it in my school notebook over and over, trying to find something in it that sounded like me.

E is a good starting letter for a name. Eloy. Emanuel. Enrique. Ernesto. No, nothing like me. Eugenio. Evaristo. No, those two are out of fashion. Erik sounds foreigner. Eduardo is not bad. Elías sounds perfect—it’s me, yes, it’s me.

Well, I don’t hate any of the names on my identity card, I just think they belong to somebody else. If I could, I would change the surname to my grandmother’s maiden name, García, but I don’t want to leave this station. This is why I came to Ushuaia in the first place: I wanted to start a life that did not include anyone who knew the person I was before. I didn’t want them to have a previous name, a previous image of me.

At first, thinking of a coworker terrified me. To be locked under the sea with someone who dreaded me—that would be hell. Then, I had a brilliant idea: I would choose carefully a person with difficulties like mine, to be able to tell the name I chose, to be able to present the honest, the only me.

“Elías, dearie,” Heloise says when I close the door of my room. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Of course, Heloise.”

“It’s about Lola Carballo . . . ”

“Yes, Heloise?”

“I think she knows, dearie. She asked to see your files . . . I’m so, so sorry.”  

No one needs to know my new name here. That’s why I chose Ushuaia Station, because I hate everyone, and want them to leave me alone. My name was not meant for another person’s lips, only for a machine, and that’s why I love Heloise.

“I thought I could trust her,” I say, expecting to be proved wrong.

“It pains me to say this, darling, but human beings are not known for their trustworthiness,” Heloise answers. I want to slam my head against the wall. “It’s not your fault. They don’t deserve you.”

“They don’t,” I repeat. “Why did I think this would be a good idea?”

“You were naïve, Elías, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

What do you even know, Heloise?

“It’s always the same,” I say. I have slept five hours a day for a year and controlled every single warning regarding comets in the region. I have stopped every strike against Ushuaia, against the south of Chile and Argentina, against Antarctica. All to be humiliated again. “Why can’t I have normal relationships, Heloise? Why do I care?”

“You don’t need to keep caring,” Heloise whispers, her voice slow and sweet. “If others don’t care about you, you don’t need to care about them.”

I look at the control panel in front of me. One of the screens shows a clear vision of the sky of Ushuaia, where I can see the details and time periods of comet clashes. Others focus on the map of the region covered by the shield, and the impact points. In my hands, I hold one of the newest reports, detailing the absolute magnitude of a celestial object of great proportions heading toward the South Pole.

Heloise is right. I don’t need to care about others. I can even turn off the shield, and no one would be able to stop me. I would die in this station, and the whole planet would burst into flames.

“It would be easy, right?” I ask Heloise, wondering if she can read my thoughts. “No one would bother me anymore.”

“Very easy, darling.”

“You think I should do it, Heloise?”

“I will be with you at all times,” Heloise replies. I can almost see her smile.

I smile back.

It’s not easy to deactivate the shield, but I am determined to continue. After entering all the required passwords to validate my condition as the administrator of the station, I have to manually turn off the machines. First screen—gone. Second, third, fourth screens—gone. All black.

“It’s almost over,” I begin to tell Heloise, but another sound interrupts me. It’s Lola, who comes running from her room, screaming.

“What are you doing?” She asks from the corridor, but Heloise closes the door in front of her.

Lola punches the glass gate, but there’s no way for her to open it.

“Why are you doing this?” Lola yells. “Let me in!”

“I’m deactivating the shield,” I answer, and walk toward her. The only thing between us is the door. “It’s useless to try to convince me otherwise.”

“Elías, please, you have to . . . ”

Elías.

“What did you say?”

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but you have to stop. Go back there and . . . ”

“No. What did you call me?”

Say it again, Lola.

Her wide eyes focus on me, her mouth is parted in fear, her breathing is erratic.

“Elías,” she finally says, and I feel like everything can be right again. “Elías, please, listen.”

“Why did you look at my files?” I ask her. “I never said you could.”

“Which files?” Her voice is shrill, nothing like her usual slow-paced tone. I stare at the ceiling, at Heloise. “Please, Elías, I beg you, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You didn’t?”

“Elías,” Heloise says. “Don’t listen to her.”

“You really didn’t?” I ask again, ignoring Heloise. Lola shakes her head, like she’s trying to say no, no, never.

“Elías,” Lola says again. “Open the door.”

“She did look,” Heloise insists.

“Can you say my name again? If you do, I will open the door, and restore the system.”

“Elías,” Lola says. “Your name is Elías.”

“Thank you,” I answer, and look at the ceiling.

“You won’t open the door,” Heloise begins to say, but I don’t intend to obey her. I go back to the panels and begin to activate the shield again. “Remember how you were feeling before, Elías, my child.”

Funny how hearing her say my name doesn’t sound so right, now that Lola has said it. The first screen is back, then the second, and the third, and the fourth.

“Heloise,” I say. “I love you very much.”

“Me too, Elías, darling . . . ”

The computer asks me one more time for the password. The southern shield is back to its original place.

“If you love me back, you will forgive me,” I continue, now glimpsing at Lola over my shoulder.

“Forgive . . . ?”

“Heloise, delete your memory files,” I order her. I believed you more than anyone else, but you betrayed me, and I will never let that happen again. “Then, reboot your own system. Farewell, Heloise.”

Her voice freezes, and switches back to the basic Spanish mode of the day I arrived at Ushuaia Station. Then, she activates the reboot.

When she stops talking, I return to Lola, and open the door.

About the Author

H. Pueyo is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of speculative fiction who occasionally dwells in the world of comics. Her work has appeared before in venues such as The Dark, Broken Metropolis and Capricious, and is upcoming in Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up To No Good.

She currently lives in an antiquarium in the extreme south of Brazil, along with her boyfriend and their interminable piles of work to do. Once in a blue moon you can find her online on Twitter: @hachepueyo.

Ghost Island

E.E. King

“I got my orders today,” said Sergeant Riku. His normally pale skin had faded until it was lighter than the inside of an unroasted almond.

“They are sending me to Yūrei Island.”

“Yūrei Island,” Hana’s skin also paled, “The ghost island, the place of hungry spirits.”

“Do not say such things,” Riku replied. “Those are superstitions for the foolish.”

“It’s no superstition that something happens to many of the soldiers who go there. The ones who return all whisper the same tales. They cannot all be wrong. They say that some men wake up with new memories, memories that can’t be true. They describe places that could only exist in the imagination. They remember lovers who aren’t real and forget the ones who are. They conceive of sons and daughters, somehow sprung from their loins instead of from the lab, and they believe it. They never recover. They never return.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Riku, but his eyes looked worried and his almond-pale skin faded to the underground slickness of a grub.

“I can call it radiation or chemicals if it makes you more comfortable, but what kind of chemical causes a man to recall an alternate life? What type of fallout gives the brain different recollections?”

Riku is silent. He cannot answer rumors.

“How long before you go?” asked Hana.

“I go tonight,” he said.

“Noooo,” she wailed. Tears poured from her eyes like a woman forgotten. “You will never come back to me.” She clung to him, knowing he could not refuse an order. Fearing she had already lost him. Fearing it was as final as death.

“Shhh,” he stroked her hair. “I could never forget you, Hana. No more than I could forget to breathe. No more than I could forget myself. You are a part of me.”

Yūrei Island had been built long ago, before the last war, before the one people. It had probably been constructed to lay claim to the minerals, natural gas, and oil, as well as the myriad forms of life proliferating in the sea in those ancient times. Now, the island was used as a center for processing the algae and purifying the water The City needed to survive. Of course Yūrei had been refurbished after the war, sealed with new metals and covered with a hard-acrylic shell to keep out the atmosphere. It had been easier to restore these outposts of concrete and steel than to deal with contaminated organic matter.

Yūrei lay like a dab of mercury, shining and contained on the Jelly Sea. It seemed an unlikely place for spirits to wander. There were no crumbling archways, or deserted corridors, no secret nooks or hidden alcoves. Nothing about Yūrei was enchanted or otherworldly. Every room was sterile and metal-bright. Each space served its purpose and nothing more. Nonetheless, as soon as the first men returned home, strange stories began drifting about The City, like restless winds. Tales of men who remembered fantastic, unbelievable places. Places where the sun set in a clear, blue open sky. Places where sun shone warm, not burning. Places where no fires raged outside the shell of the world. Places without a ceiling over the land. Places where huge towers rose, towers not of metal but of odd substances called stone and rock. Places where biological families lived together. Places of beauty and of chaos.

Some of the possessed remembered a nonexistent sweetheart so intensely that they could never again care for their lover or wife, so getting sent to Yūrei Island became a fate possibly worse, but definitely more uncertain, than death. Especially for those left behind.

The words of soldiers who returned rippled through the city like a tide, beating back and forth against the thick, domed, semi-translucent acrylic cover that shielded The City from the fires beyond. The City had been built above the earth on a thick metal disk supported by solid pillars so that nothing touched the soil. Over thirty-five thousand people lived in The City, residing in sùshès, the residences that housed up to twenty men and women.

Children were made in the lab as needed, and raised in the bǎobǎo sùshè, the baby dorms, learning whatever they needed to know to ensure The City’s survival. Everyone lived to serve The City. It was the only way to endure. Oh, there was still love, love and sex, no war, no matter how devastating, could put an end to that most basic instinct and desperate need, but there were no offspring. The fallout had made everyone sterile.

Riku and twenty-five of his comrade soldiers departed at midnight. They marched through the acrylic tunnels that joined the airship launch to The City. Their feet tap-tap-tapping in unison, as if they were one man, making perfectly ordered echoes. It was calming somehow, this precision. It sounded like stability, like security, like continuance. Surely no ghosts or spirits could infiltrate such a perfect system.

They journeyed over the Jelly Sea, to the island, that lay on the water glittering like a gigantic, flawless ball bearing. It took less than an hour, though it seemed a world away. The airship connected to the island’s protective cover, acrylic mouth suctioned to acrylic mouth with a vacuumed-sealed kiss. Riku and his troop were marched to their quarters.

There were twelve in his dorm. Riku took a top bunk. He had never slept so far above the ground before. Though the cot was hard, and he could clearly feel taut springs coiling into his spine like an unforgiving lover, he enjoyed the feeling of drifting above the earth. Drifting into the kiss of a beautiful woman. She wore strange clothes. Her hair was long, loose, and not at all practical. She smelled of salt and other things, things Riku could not imagine. His mouth watered.

“I am Emi,” she said. The freshness of her breath made Riku feel as if he’d never breathed before.

“Now you know me,” she said.

The alarm sounded. The light increased. They dressed in their Cladophora algae uniforms. Cladophora was rich in cellulose. Its branched filaments were composed of large cylindrical cells that grew over molded forms, cell fusing to cell to create pliable structures that retained their shape.

They strapped on their boots of metal toes and jelly soles.

They cleansed their mouths with the tiny jellies that sucked the debris from their teeth and the bacteria from their tongue in thirty seconds. It was important not to leave the jellies in longer, or they would start to draw deeper, ingesting skin and tissue, leaving gums bleeding and loosening teeth.

Riku wondered who had discovered that jellies could clean teeth. Who had tested and tried, probably at the expense of teeth and tissue, how long the jellies should be been left in before sanitation turned to blood.

It was a strange thought, a new thought. That life had not always been thus, that after the war people, individuals, had needed to experiment with each jelly and every alga, testing for toxicity and protein and strength. Riku could not imagine such courage and innovation. He had never tried to. He shook his head, trying to dislodge these odd and discomforting ideas.

He joined the rows of men marching to The Hall of Meeting where they sang the song of work and belonging.

“We will work together,

Strain each muscle and every tether.

For power of the whole,

For the wellness of the all.

We will work to feed The City.

And each citizen’s committee.

We are one.

We are survivors.

We will follow the advisors.

We will persevere,

From year to year,

Until the end.”

They sang loudly and without harmony, then left for their stations.

Riku and Haruto, his lower bunkmate went to tend the great vats of Azolla algae that would feed the city. Azolla could be manipulated by light, temperature and additives to produce protein, or fat, or calcium or carbohydrates. It was a perfect food, wholly balanced, with no danger of inducing overindulgence. It was not pleasant to eat, but that was of no matter. Taste was a facet of olden times, the forgotten world, a time when pleasure was more important than survival.

Riku swallowed. He shook his head. The dream scent, it lingered on his tongue. He blinked as he inhaled the tang of the fermenting Azolla. His nostrils flailed. His stomach twisted in revulsion. His eyes closed. The ground teetered. He swayed, feeling as though he’d lost his center of gravity.

“You okay, man?” Haruto was holding his arm.

Riku shook himself. “What happened?”

“Everything alright here men?” Colonel Masuka snapped.

“Fine, Sir!” They saluted.

Colonel Masuka’s lower eyelids rose, though the rest of his face remained immobile. Riku tried not to watch him peering over his lids at them, squinted with cold, pin-sharp eyes as through a missing window slat.

He glanced at Haruto. They each gripped their handles and began cracking the Azolla, rotating the shelves smoothly so that each cell would get an equal distribution of light.

The Colonel walked away.

“Are you alright?” Haruto asked. Riku nodded.

“Then what are you doing? You could get us killed.” But there was more concern than anger in his low, even tone. Riku marveled at his generosity.

For the first time Riku truly feared Hana’s ghosts, not her spirits of the dead, but unknown senses that were germinating inside him. Smells he could almost taste. Dream women whose breath he could feel.

At noon, insulated by protective air suits grown from brown algae, which was more impermeable, though less comfortable than their Cladophora kaki, they pulled up barrels of seawater and drained it, first of jellies, the only creatures that survived and even thrived in the toxic waters, then of the chemicals and waste from the time before. One hundred vats yielded one cask of potable liquid. It was thirsty work.

That night Riku lay in his bunk above the world, scared to sleep, yet anxious to dream. But Emi did not come. She had no chance. Just as Riku began to drift away he heard a cry, so real it could not be a phantom’s.

In the center of the cement floor Haruto stood, frozen in a halo of diffused light that filtered through the acrylic celling. A wide smile was plastered on his motionless face. His arm extended sideways, rounded as if supported by something, though nothing was there. He wavered, like a pole in a gale, stiff but unstable. He tottered, back and forth, back and forth.

Riku climbed out of his bunk. He reached for Haruto, just as he crashed backwards onto the floor. His body did not bend, every joint remained locked and rigid.

Riku looked up. Twenty eyes gleamed at him from the bunks, watching silently.

Riku dragged Haruto back to his bed. He pulled and shoved the unbending, unmoving body into the cot. He lay his ear against Haruto’s chest, listening to the faint, but steady rhythm of his breathing. Haruto’s skin was cool, his eyes were open, but unseeing. They glistened in the faint ambient light, like distant suns. His lips remained parted, teeth bared in that constant grin.

Riku climbed back up into his berth and waited till morning. He didn’t remember falling into sleep, but he must have, for he was wakened by a shriek.

Haruto had sprung from bed. His sheets were tangled around his naked feet. His eyes were wild, open so wide, a white sea surrounded each frantic iris. His head twisted from side to side. Riku had never seen a face so filled with fear and confusion and loss. They were not things of this world, his world, where everything was ordered.

“Where am I?” screamed Haruto. “Where is Yumiko?”

“Who is Yumiko?” Riku asked.

“Who are you?” cried Haruto. “Where am I?”

“You are on the island, as you have been for three days. I am Riku, your bunkmate.” Your bunkmate who you protected, even though you did not know me, even though it gained you nothing, and put you in harm’s way, he wanted to say but did not.

“What is this place? Where are the mountains and the lake? Where is Yumiko?”

“What are mountains?” Riku asked. “What is a lake?”

Haruto seized Riku’s shirtfront, “What have you monsters done with Yumiko? Where have you taken me?”

Haruto collapsed onto the hard, gray floor. His body, so unyielding last night, now seemed devoid of bones. Colonel Masuka stood over him with a metal baton.

“He is gone,” Masuka said. “It happens sometimes.”

“Gone?” Asked Riku, though he knew. The tales were true.

“Gone. His memories have been taken—taken, or perhaps replaced is a better word. We don’t know why it affects some that way.”

Masuka knelt down and injected Haruto with a small syringe. “It will put him quietly to sleep,” he said. “Better that way.”

Riku blinked. He would not weep. He could not. He wondered if Haruto had gone to that land of dreams. He had never believed in such things before, but now . . .

That night Kaito arrived to fill Haruto’s empty bunk. Riku wondered what had been done with Haruto’s tangled sheets? Had they been washed? Was Kaito even now covering his own, warm body with them, or had they been shredded to be used for straining the algae or removing the jellies from the sea? He did not really know Haruto. Why was this loss so difficult?

Two days later, when Riku entered his room he found Kaito, standing frozen in the center of the room, his arm extended, a smile frozen on his face.

“Wait,” Kaito cried, suddenly springing into motion, “I have a better idea.”

He raced from the room, toward the outer door that lead to the airships. Riku and his companions sped after him. Instead of opening the door to the enclosure with the airships, Kaito ran to the outer wall and began punching it with his fists.

“Let me out,” he cried. “I want to climb to the peak. I want you to . . . ”

The shot was almost silent, just a tiny pop. Kaito collapsed, blood gushed onto the metal floor.

“He would have kept trying until he breached the shield,” Masuka said. He nodded to the others.

“Clean it up.” His voice was dead, his lips tight, his eyes had the sorrow of too much experience and not enough understanding. He felt a failure. These were his men, his charges, but he could do nothing against spirits. He could try to keep them safe from the toxic atmosphere, and the poisoned sea, but how could he fight invaders of the soul, and thieves of memory?

Riku blinked awake. He was standing with his arm encircling Emi, his wife. She leaned against him, laughing. She smelled like green tea and vanilla and lilacs. Her skin was warm from the sun and the hike. Behind him Alpine peaks rose, rich with the scent of pine and summer flowers. He had never felt this alive, this joyous, with his feet on earth, and the earth growing around him.

“Smile,” someone said.

And he did. They had planned this trip for so long. Leaving their three kids with Emi’s parents and spending two weeks in Switzerland, just the two of them. A second honeymoon. And now, this nice stranger had agreed to snap their photo, just one of the millions of pictures they had taken to memorialize this vacation.

Even though the day was bright, the camera’s flash was blinding. Riku blinked, trying to clear his eyes.

He was in a strange place; a room made of metal and concrete. Men in uniforms surrounded him. There was something familiar about them, as if he had dreamed them.

“Where am I?” he cried. “Where is Emi?”

He ran toward the open door. The strange yet familiar men grabbed at him, but he evaded them.

He raced toward the light, toward the sky, toward the open air, but when he got there, the world was cut off from him by a plastic bubble that surrounded everything. He heard boots clanging on metal. He was being pursued. He removed his shoes and looked desperately around.

Somewhere in some dark passage of his cerebral cortex a memory whispered. He looked down. At his feet, there was a square lid with a latch, a trapdoor into the heart of island. It had been built so that caretakers could be sure that the columns supporting the island were intact. They must be certain that no water had seeped into the acrylic pillars, stuffed as they were with the debris of centuries.

Riku lifted the hatch, saw a small stairway and slid in. It was dark in the tunnel. He pressed on his small flashlight and continued descending. The stairs wound down in concentric circles snaking around each and every pillar. The pillars were made of hard, strong, clear plastic. They were jammed with millions and billions and trillions of squares of shiny paper, landfill from the time before.

He turned his light onto one of the tubes. Millions and billions and trillions of minute faces beamed out at him. Faces no bigger than his thumbnail.

He paused, scanning them. Scrutinizing them. Some were black and white, others were in color. Colors that Riku had never imagined, greens more varied than alga, blues and purples and violets more intense than the flickering pigments of jellies.

As he circled each pillar, stepping softly, balancing on his toes so as not to make a sound, an image caught his eye. It grabbed his heart. It twisted his soul. It was him and Emi, smiling against a backdrop of purple rock alpine peaks. Next to it was a square containing his entire family, his two sons, his baby daughter, his parents.

He banged on the pillar. He clawed at the column, breaking his nails, cutting the ends of his fingers. The blood left reddish streaks on the clear acrylic. It stained the familiar faces. Tears coursed down his cheeks. He would give anything to hold those squares. They were the only things that seemed real.

Next to his family, jammed in among all the images, were other squares, but these were not glossy. No one grinned out from them. They were white with stamped letters and words that had no meaning, Fuji, Kodak, Nikon.

Riku crumbled onto the step, reaching toward Emi. Reaching toward the past.

He could see her, trapped behind the acrylic pillar in a small red and white swimsuit, azure waves pounding against the back of her calves, laughing into the camera, one brief moment captured forever on celluloid. He saw his children on their birthdays, smeared with sugary icing. His parents dressed in the robes of ancestors.

He would never know, how could he, that the pillars supporting Yūrei Island were stuffed with old photos. Photos of a people and a world long gone. Photos that had become only memories, memories searching for a home and finding one, temporarily, in the shells of lonesome soldiers.

About the Author

E.E. King is a painter, performer, writer, and biologist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals.

Ray Bradbury called her stories, “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” Her books include Dirk Quigby’s Guide to the Afterlife, Electric Detective, Pandora’s Card Game, The Truth of Fiction, and Blood Prism.

King has won numerous various awards and fellowships for art, writing, and environmental research. She was the founding Director of the Esperanza Community Housing’s Art & Science Program, worked as an artist-in-residence in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sarajevo, and the J. Paul Getty Museum’s and Science Center’s Arts & Science Development Program. Her landmark mural, A Meeting of the Minds (121’ x 33’) can be seen on Mercado La Paloma in Los Angeles. King has also painted murals for Escuelas Para La Vida in Cuenca, Spain and in Tuscany, Italy.

The Gift of Angels: an introduction

Nina Allan

The noise outside his door made Vincent feel as if he were back in college, in the dilapidated hall of residence where he had spent the first year of his degree course and where the corridor parties often went on until the small hours. A continuous, muted hubbub, generously interspersed with outbursts of oafish laughter. Especially at weekends, like this one, when everyone had either handed in their weekly seminar paper or definitively failed to produce one.

Vincent had found himself on the right side of the door a fair few times, especially towards the end of the year when he had come to know the others well enough to be able to slope off early without being summarily branded boring and a knob. Mostly he’d stayed in his room, simultaneously furious and indulgent, imagining them as any writer might imagine them, standing around drinking unchilled white wine that tasted like goat’s piss and talking about nothing: just listen to those shiftless wankers, what a waste of an evening . . . But it was what people did.

At the age of fifty-three, Vincent believed he had earned the right to expect people not to make that particular noise in the place where he slept and worked. He could, he supposed, throw on a T-shirt and jeans and go and join them. He would be welcomed now, accepted. The wine would be chilled—the students drank a better class of goat’s piss in Paris, so there was that. He could even make a splash if he wanted, a moderate one at least. A sizeable minority would have heard of the September Queen books. Those who hadn’t read them would probably have seen the film adaptation of Cold Harbour. Vincent was someone people were interested in meeting. Even if he turned out to be boring and a knob, they were still interested.

But he is not interested in meeting them. He does not want to know how they wound up in this converted nunnery pretending to be artists. He does not want to exclaim artificially over the beauty of Paris, and how marvelous it is to be here, finally. It is not marvelous, not right now, because of that noise, because he should have booked into a hotel instead, even though it would have been more expensive and less . . . hip. He wishes they’d all just piss off. Goat’s-piss off, in fact. That can’t stay in, Vincent thinks as he writes it. He writes it anyway, then smiles. Maybe it can.

That’s how I was planning to begin this story but I don’t think it’s right. When I started the project I felt strongly that I should write down everything that happened, everything I thought, exactly as it happened and as I thought it, that I shouldn’t edit my feelings or leave things out. Such writing embarrasses me, though. I don’t like to be caught out being angry or not enjoying myself. I prefer to filter my impressions, checking each of them for excess before presenting them for scrutiny. That corridor party turned out to be a one-off, in any case, a private view for a photography exhibition. Everyone was gone by eleven, which hardly counts as discourteous, let alone unreasonable, even by my draconian standards. So I’ll begin this way instead:

My mother and father met in Paris. It was a fluke in a million.

Sounds better, doesn’t it? Less whiny, more demonstrably about something. Already we have two characters. Already I have conveniently provided my reason for being here. And here’s the clincher: my mother was—is—Jocelyn Tooker, one of the six astronauts who took part in the first manned mission to Mars. You won’t have heard of my father, but his name was Simon Colbert, and he was a secondary school art teacher. My name is Vincent Colbert, and I am the author of nine science fiction novels about the voyages of the space freighter September Queen. I’m not famous—not Harry Potter famous, not Game of Thrones famous—but successful enough to keep me writing and, after the film came along, solvent enough to be able to take a trip like this and not have to worry too much about not just breaking the bank, but blasting the bank and myself into oblivion.

I don’t take trips like this, in the main, because I prefer to be at home. I still enjoy writing September Queen, believe it or not. I like wandering down to the seafront on an afternoon, watching a detective series in the evening then Skyping with my friend Christina until we’re too tired to speak. But my father died three months ago, and I’ve come to understand that if I’m ever going to write this book it has to be now. Vincent is fifty-three, after all, and you never know, do you?

My publishers weren’t keen on “Vincent Colbert” as an author name—too many “t”s, apparently. I write as Vincent Swann. Swann was my mother’s second name, and her mother’s maiden name.

Jocelyn Swann Tooker.

It should have been Phoenix.

My father always claimed that for him, the moment he first set eyes on my mother was like his favorite still from Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, a moment struck out of time, as an ingot is smelted and molded from its ore.

In the image he talked about, the woman’s mouth is partially obscured by her hair as it blows back across her face. In my father’s moment of epiphany, Mum’s head is thrown back as she laughs uproariously at a joke made by one of her companions. They are seated around a table outside a cafe on the rue Linné, in the 5th arrondissement. The sun glints off cutlery, coffee cups, the rims of glasses. My father is walking past them, away from the Jardin des Plantes and towards the metro. Hearing my mother’s laughter, he turns his head. He looks straight at her, gazing into her eyes as into a painting.

In another life, my mother stops laughing abruptly, straightens her posture and in a glancing sideways movement snaps my father—a skinny black man carrying a tatty-looking rucksack, some random gawker—out of her existence forever. In this life, the life she is living, she stares right back at him, the laugh still on her lips, her eyes, which in so many of the official photographs glint narrowly with the directly provocative light of her mission statement, are wide open, liquid with sunlight, an invitation rather than a challenge.

“Who are you anyway?” she says. “The local joke inspector?”

My father, flustered, mumbles an apology: he was just passing, he is no one, he is sorry.

“No,” my mother says. And she always claimed afterwards—according to my father—that she had no idea what came over her, she’d never done anything like that in her life before, she was never normally interested in anyone who wasn’t part of her inner circle. Why would she suddenly accost a stranger in the street? “I think you should join us. There’s room.”

She points to a spare chair, not beside her but opposite, barely two feet away across the table. My father swings his rucksack from his shoulders and—unaccountably, improbably—sits down. I still find it difficult to believe he actually did this, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Simon Colbert was a shy man. Not a timid man, but shy. It took him a long time to get to know someone, to move beyond the accepted formulae of small talk and common politeness. For him to sit down with a bunch of noisy Americans must have taken something—some reserve of intent—he had not previously imagined he possessed.

“I’m Jocelyn. Joss,” my mother says. She reaches across the table, shakes his hand. She begins introducing the others seated at the table but for my father their names flash past in a blur, never gaining traction.

“Simon,” says my father. The short “i” reveals him at once for what he is, a Frenchman, though his English, learned from the age of six—his mother and father were both students of American literature—is perfect and spoken almost without an accent.

“Ah, Simon, c’est bon!” someone says. Everyone laughs, including my father, from nervous relief. Joss, Simon is thinking. Her name is Joss.

My mother is in Paris to celebrate the birthday of her friend Serena Stubbs. Serena, seated next to her at the table, has recently completed her doctorate in astrophysics. There are seven of them altogether, seven who have been friends since their freshman year. They meet up religiously, every twelve months, on one of their birthdays. Whoever’s birthday it happens to be gets to say where. They’re all earning good money now, and so these annual celebrations have become more extravagant. Serena chose Paris, and so Paris it is. They are sitting here, in the rue Linné, because Mishell, who majored in botany, insisted they go and visit the famous hothouses in the Jardin des Plantes.

Simon Colbert is not earning good money because he is an art student. He has saved for this trip all year by working the night shift at his local supermarket, stacking shelves. It has long been his cherished intention to visit the Muséum national d’Histoire naturel. The natural history museum forms one of the key locations in Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, a movie he has been obsessed with since the age of sixteen.

Chris Marker was a journalist and filmmaker, one of the French New Wave and yet apart from it, an artist of ironclad personal integrity and obsessed with recording human existence in minute detail. His own existence remains mysterious, his place and date of birth a matter of contention. His films and writings came under scrutiny during his lifetime for having Marxist leanings. Some were even banned.

A century later, his work still seems fresh, unrepentant, radical, perhaps because the methods he used—montage and assemblage, voice-over—were already considered obstinately anti-commercial at the time of making.

Marker didn’t shoot films so much as create multimedia essays. He cared as much about the written word as for the photographic image. His films have the instinctive, lateral-thinking logic of dreams. Like dreams, they tug us in unexpected directions. Watching a film by Marker is like opening a scrapbook of our own memories.

La Jetée takes place in the future. A third world war has devastated Paris. The survivors huddle underground, hacking out scant lives for themselves in the abandoned tunnels and galleries beneath the Palais de Chaillot. A sinister band of scientists prey off these survivors, capturing individuals and subjecting them to lethal experiments. The unnamed protagonist clings to memories of his childhood from before the war, and in particular the face of a woman he once glimpsed on the viewing platform at Orly airport, a face that seems to encapsulate everything that was once beautiful and meaningful in human existence.

The doctors ensnare our protagonist and force him to participate in their experiments in time travel. They explain that unless they are able to access technology that will alleviate the current crisis, humanity is doomed. In order to do this, they are attempting to make contact with scientists from the past—scientists who know nothing of the disaster to come. So far, everyone they have tried to send back has either died or gone mad. The protagonist, they believe, has exceptional powers of recall. His memory of the unknown woman will act as a psychic anchor, enabling him to travel to the past and return with his sanity intact.

La Jetée is just thirty minutes in length. Even if you have never seen it before, you will find something inevitable and timeless and poignant in the way it plays out. The man returns to the past, where he recognizes the woman from the airport the moment he sees her. The two fall in love. They explore Paris together. The protagonist tells his lover nothing of the war that will consume them. The woman never questions where her time traveler disappears to or when he will return. One afternoon, waiting for him on the jetty at Orly airport, she sees him shot and killed by a mysterious gunman, one of the doctors from the future who has decided that our protagonist knows too much and must be disposed of.

A young boy, who happens to be at the airport with his mother, looks on in horror. He sees everything as if in slow motion: the man with the gun, the dying victim, and most of all the woman, her hair blowing across her face, the tenderness in her eyes bright enough to light up the world even as it is extinguished.

The man, we understand, was the boy. The moment he clings to so fiercely as an affirmation of life is the moment of his own death.

Apart from one brief motion-capture sequence lasting less than five seconds, La Jetée is composed entirely of still images, filmed sequentially in a kind of montage and overlaid by Marker’s own voice-over commentary. Marker delivers his story simply and without affectation, like a reading you might hear on the radio late at night. The images are as devastating as the film is quiet: Paris destroyed, laid waste, frontline dispatches from an apocalypse that hasn’t happened yet.

In its terrifying visions of nuclear war, La Jetée is the quintessential Cold War movie, yet much of what we see reminds us of scenes we already recognize from WW2: Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to rubble after the bombs were dropped, Hitler’s orders to his general, Choltitz, to burn Paris to the ground. The doctor in charge of the time travel experiments is later referred to in Marker’s commentary as “the camp leader,” whilst the scientists who monitor our protagonist’s life signs whisper to each other in German.

We should remember that when La Jetée was released in 1962, the audience’s memories of WW2 would still have been fresh. Fresher than my own memories of checkpoints going up along the Irish border, or of the day my father told me that NASA had lost contact with the Second Wind.

“They’ve lost the signal, that’s all,” my father said. “That doesn’t mean the signal has been extinguished. No one knows what it means. Not yet.”

One thing I’ve never forgotten about that day is the word my father used—extinguished—the unusual sound and texture of it, a word he would probably never have chosen if he had not been caught in the grip of his own emotions. I was seven years old. I knew what extinguished meant. An image came to me of the fire extinguisher in the door alcove of my form room at school, red and rotund and bursting with latent action. The word still startled me though, I think because I had never heard it used other than in connection with a fire drill.

It was a book word, a dictionary word: to be put out, to be suppressed, to be starved of oxygen.

Starved of oxygen, I remember thinking later. That can’t be true.

I have tried to remember other things about that day—what I watched on television, what I ate for supper, what the weather was like, even—but nothing comes. There’s just that word—extinguished—like the woman in La Jetée, her hair blowing across her mouth, hiding her face.

My father first saw La Jetée when he was still at school, as part of a course module on the history of French cinema. He knew already that he wanted to be an artist, but it was Marker’s film that showed him the kind of artist he wished to be.

Simon Colbert grew up in the département of Charente Maritime, in western France. He studied art at La Rochelle, mainly because it was easier for him to finance his degree while still living at home. He dreamed of being in Paris, though the more he learned of the attitudes there—a snobbish dismissal of anyone and anything that came from outside—the more he rebelled against the capital and yearned for elsewhere. He did consider returning to France, and in particular to La Rochelle after my mother—what? Took flight? Took off? Simply went?—although in the end he decided it would be better to stay where we were. On account of my schooling, he insisted, “you seemed so settled,” and of course there was Claude. Claude made for complications—he might have said that was his purpose in life—and I do not like to think what a childhood without my half-brother would have been like.

In reality though, the main reason we stayed in Gourock was the same tendency towards obscurity that had initially led my father to reject Paris. “The journalists won’t bother us here,” I remember him saying, and in the main he was right, although there were always a couple—the younger ones, mostly—who imagined they would get their big break by scooping Dad’s story. Mine too, if they were lucky—the motherless boy, the child who was left behind.

Gourock is a long way to come on the off-chance though, so they mostly didn’t bother. They scraped stuff off the Internet, like everyone else.

I first heard about Les Récollets from my French publishers, who were able to assign me a residency in exchange for a couple of book signings and maybe a radio interview. A former convent and later a military hospital, the building is now a center for international artists and scholars, funded by a bursary from the French government and sponsored by a number of cultural bodies within Paris. There are eighty studio apartments, a laundry, cafe and common room, private gardens and reception.

I flew in from Glasgow on a Thursday. I had been to Paris before, for short publicity tours to coincide with the publication of French editions of the September Queen books, but never for such an extended period. I could not have claimed to know the city at all well. I think it was partly my father that kept me away—that, and my dislike of travel generally. I prepared myself in advance, making a note of the train I would need to catch from Charles de Gaulle to the Gare du Nord, the quickest way to walk from there to Les Récollets. It all looked fairly simple, which in fact it was, although I had reckoned without the heaving queues for train tickets that slowed my exit from the airport.

My studio is comfortable and, now that I have grown accustomed to the noise from the children’s playground in the park outside, far better suited to my purposes than any hotel room. The convent lies within easy reach of the metro, a small supermarket, some excellent bistros, the Canal Saint-Martin. I am as at home here as I could be anywhere that is not my home. I especially love the floorboards in my studio, which are pale and ridged and warm underfoot. I wonder if they are the original floorboards, as once trod by the nuns. I find I like the idea.

As the days pass, I am reminded more and more of the time I spent in Prague, when I was a student. I was less than half the age that I am now. What I remember most is the intensity of that time, the sense that things were finally falling into place for me. I took to the landscape of the city as if I meant to stay there forever, to lose myself in the maze of backstreets and river walkways and odd subterranean restaurants. I was trying on a new life, I suppose. Pretending I could leave the old Vincent behind.

Perhaps it is easier, when you are young, to grow a second skin. Now all I can think about is how impossible it is, to inhabit an alien landscape, to bring anything to it other than one’s own ignorance. It takes decades to truly know a place, to understand its rules. To know which street thugs are just lads being idiots and which might be killers. To read the discarded sweet wrappers in the gutters and feel filthy with belonging.

Here, I am just a tourist. Perhaps it might feel different if I were here with someone—Christina, say. Perhaps I would laugh more and feel less foolish, less untried. As things stand, I go where the tourists go, look where they look. I have a job to do. Once I have done it, I will go home.

I met my paternal grandparents once or twice, though mostly we skyped. They had a strange way of pronouncing my name—Van-son—which as a young child I found simultaneously curious and annoying. Being reminded that Dad was French made me afraid, I think—afraid of losing him. And no, I didn’t blame that on my mother.

Dad always called me Vincent, enunciating all the consonants—carefully, tenderly—in the English manner. I was Vinnie to no one but Claude, the forbidden diminutive a badge of intimacy between us. Claude was four years my junior but—the early years aside—he always seemed older: more streetwise and more capable, more switched-on. You’ll ask why he was given the name Claude when his mother—Margaret, Maggie—was Scottish, a Glaswegian to boot. The only answer I can give you is the one she gave me, later, that she wanted to give her boy something romantic, a glimpse of his heritage. “I just loved the sound of it,” Maggie said. “And he looked so like his dad, you know, when he was little.”

It’s true. I’ve seen the photos. I look like Dad now, but I didn’t when I was younger. I looked more like Mum, or at least I liked to think so. You will remember our nine-day king, how like his mother he was as a boy, how like his desiccated, world-weary father as he entered middle age.

Dad was never with Maggie, not properly. He turned to her—used her, some might argue, though they cared for one another too much for it to be that simple—during the months immediately following the launch. This will sound like I’m making excuses for him, but I have come to believe that Dad’s affair with Maggie was his attempt to delay my mother’s departure from his life. To prolong that sense of warmth, of belonging to someone.

When he learned that Maggie was pregnant, he stopped seeing her. There was a period—about eighteen months, I think—when he literally did not see her, just put money in her account with the bank reference BABY.

I knew nothing about Claude, not until I was six and he was almost two. When he was five he started visiting us on Sundays. Maggie would drive him over, sometimes she would stay for supper but not always. I liked Maggie. She was easy to be with in a way my father never was. She liked crap TV and silly jokes. She let Claude and me eat junk food, the kind my father would never allow in the house. When I was about fourteen I started sneaking off to visit her, catching the bus after school, telling Dad I was with friends. When he eventually found out what I’d been doing he could hardly stop me. I was almost an adult, and Claude was my brother.

The novelty of being in Maggie’s home: chemistry textbooks open facedown amidst a welter of film and fashion magazines, cereal cartons on the living room table, stacks of washing in the hallway waiting to be taken upstairs, Maggie and Claude constantly bickering like an old married couple. Explosions of anger and domestic crises, blowing in and out again like minor typhoons. Maggie, handing me a peanut butter sandwich, telling me I was welcome to stay for supper, “only make sure and call your dad, won’t you, you know what he gets like.” An absence of sadness I could barely comprehend.

This is normal, I thought. This is what it is like, to have a mother.

Dad’s love for me, unstinting, rooted in a tragedy I couldn’t fathom.

How Claude coped with his name at school I have no idea. Punched a few people, probably. No one there knew who his dad was and even if they had they wouldn’t have cared.

I never discussed my mother with Claude, not even once. His mum was Maggie, to both of us. He might have called her Mum in private but I don’t know. It was almost as if the word had become a taboo.

I started reading science fiction in secret. I was afraid that books with spaceships in them might upset my father. My passion began with a book I kept seeing in the window of the newsagent’s on Kempock Street. The Martian Chronicles, it was called. The letters of the title gleamed gold against a velvety background.

“Mars” was another word that was never spoken in our house. Mars was either “the mission” or simply “there.” The sight of it displayed so openly was almost shocking. I hoped the book would tell me something different from what I already knew.

I was around twelve years old at the time. I didn’t get much pocket money—Dad didn’t believe in it, though he would have bought me any book I asked for, within reason. I didn’t dare to ask him for The Martian Chronicles, and it took six weeks of saving every penny until I was able to go into the shop on the way back from school and buy the book for myself. I told no one. I can still remember the way it felt between my hands: smooth as lacquer, with those gold foil letters, the extra weight of it in my backpack, going home.

And then of course there was the story. I believe I encountered it at just the right age: still young enough to be gripped by wonder, old enough to understand how terrifying The Martian Chronicles actually was, not only because of the aliens but because of the humans.

The novel was a century old when I read it, and the idea of Mars as an analogue for the Western frontier had passed from being innovative through being fantasy to being a newer, harsher version of our current reality. Bradbury’s stories did not help me imagine Mars in a different way—how could they?—but they helped me understand how dangerous the Earth had been, once. How the families of those who set out to explore it were no different from my own.

Until I read Bradbury I had felt isolated in a way that held no equivalent. Now I knew I had comrades. Even though they were long dead, they had existed. Children who understood how it felt not to know what had become of their mothers, or fathers. Not to know, but still to hope, even when the safe return of the one who was lost was all but hopeless.

Not lost, I thought, just far away. Far away from here. In a different place.

My mother left this place in the month of September. I named the craft that appears in all my stories the September Queen.

Of course, my publishers were keen to use my family history as a marketing tool.

For years I wrote—as I had read—more or less in secret, publishing my first short stories in small-circulation magazines to little or more accurately no fanfare. My father had done his best to keep my name out of the media coverage and to his credit he had largely succeeded. No one had heard of Vincent Colbert, and when the first of the September Queen novels was finally accepted by a publisher the only comment they passed on my name was to ask me to change it.

It was only when my third book came out that someone—I never found out who—told my publisher who my mother was. They became giddy with excitement, an enthusiasm they were forced to curb when I told them that although I would do nothing to stop them using the information in publicity material, I would not be answering any questions about my mother—or my father, come to that—in interviews or panel discussions.

I thought that was the smartest response, given the circumstances, but over time I became less sure. The more the question was out of bounds, the more curious readers became. Fake stories sprung up everywhere, rumors bloomed, proliferated, spiraled out of control. At every convention, every book launch I attended, there would always come the inevitable moment when some journalist would attempt to wrong-foot me and I would be made to look uncharitable or foolish. Not surprisingly, my publishers found ways to adapt the situation to their advantage. If they were forbidden to market my story they would market my silence, especially since there were plenty who believed my silence was a publicity stunt in any case. As an author who lived alone, with no hint of past scandals or expensive proclivities, I would otherwise have come across as pretty dull. The questions surrounding my mother provided mystery and poignancy. They provided the reason I had become a writer in the first place.

Like my life in general, my reasons for breaking that silence now are undramatic. As mentioned previously, I am getting older. None of us knows how much time is left to us, or what that time will be like. More than anything I want to get to know her. Jocelyn Tooker the person, the explorer, the spacewoman, the wife, even. I want to try and understand who she was.

I haven’t told my publishers yet. I want my discoveries to remain private for as long as possible.

Will this be a memoir? I hope not. I prefer to call it the exploration of a life.

On my third day in Paris, I take the Line 7 metro to Jussieu and walk down the rue Linné to the Jardin des Plantes. It occurs to me that I am literally following in my father’s footsteps and I wonder if he in turn had imagined himself as someone else—the unnamed protagonist of La Jetée, for example, who went to the museum in search of lost time.

I begin to understand that this is what time travel actually is: we can each of us go back in time a little. We extend a hand to the one behind us and they travel back a little further.

It is a slow process, and deeply inhabited. A process of necessary sharing that cannot be bypassed.

The only way we can explore the future is to reinvent the world.

On my twenty-first birthday I received a letter from my mother.

It was her handwriting on the envelope, although there was no way I could have known that. The stamp was new. The postmark—Greenford—was dated the day before. It’s rare to receive a personal letter through the post these days, less so back then, though it was still unusual enough to be noteworthy, whoever the letter was from. My father still wrote letters—to his university friends, his parents—and I knew some people at college who were into snail mail as a statement of retro-hipness. But other than birthday cards from Maggie and the odd postcard from Claude, sent in a moment of cheery camaraderie from wherever he happened to be squatting and usually displaying signs of having been used as a beer mat, I couldn’t remember the last time I had received one. Perhaps I never had. The letter’s arrival unnerved me. An image flashed into my mind of the dove bearing the olive branch in Zvyagintsev’s film The Ark.

My darling Vincent, the letter began, and for a moment—just a moment—I thought the letter must be from the man who had recently left me, a computer programmer named Marek who had suddenly decided to join the Jesuits. I felt elated, thinking he must have changed his mind, or at least relented enough to agree to a final meeting. But Marek never wrote in longhand—I don’t know if he could, even—and he had never called me darling. I let the thought go, ploughing up pain with the twists of its body as it slithered away.

My darling Vincent,

Today is your birthday, and as I sit here writing this letter I am intrigued—honored, delighted—to wonder what kind of person you have grown up to be. I find I can imagine you, quite easily. Of course it could be that I am simply picturing your father as he was at your age, or myself, and projecting that image onto you, but I hope not. I trust that it is you I see, that this—this gift of angels—has somehow been allowed as a dispensation, because I know already that I will not be there to congratulate you, to embrace you, to celebrate this day with you myself.

You will think it strange, given what you know of me from videos, from articles you might have read, from your father even, that I can speak of angels, that I would even consider the possibility that such beings existed. I would not admit this to everyone—this is just for you and me—but I do believe. Not in the avenging Biblical angels with their flaming swords, but in something. The microcircuitry of the universe, if you prefer. Miracles we grope for, as moles with their spade-like fingers dig the soil for grubs. Under the microscope the grubs are revealed as mythical beasts, their subjects massed in a drop of rainwater, thrashing their limbs in awe as they ascend to the promised land.

Until we invented the microscope, their world and everything in it remained invisible.

Will you understand me any better if I tell you that I am drawn—compelled—to dedicate my life towards discovering the universe? That sounds ridiculous perhaps—hubristic—but it is the truth. My truth, anyway, the best I can give you. I don’t want fame—I know fame will come, of a kind, it is the drug used by some of my comrades on this mission to conquer their fear, the knowledge that their names will go down in history. But I know I will see things, Vincent—things no other human being has seen yet. Does your heart flutter, even for a moment, as you read these words?

I can only fulfil this dream because of your father. Because of the love I know he will give you—love enough for ten children—and because of the life I know he will make for you, whatever the circumstances. How could I ever have thought of leaving otherwise? Yet these are the certainties that drive me forward.

I will not tell you how you should think of me. I leave that to you, to your own nature, to your own sense of purpose. But please know, my darling Vincent, that I do love you. That if Mars is my mission then you are my sun, lighting my journey, igniting my joy, warming my bones.

With all my heart, forever,

Your mother, Joss

My breath stopped in my chest.

She is speaking to me, I thought.

My father did not know about the letter. I watched him closely that day—his body language, his demeanor, every word he spoke—and I felt convinced of it. The letter, as my mother had hinted, was truly our secret.

One other person must have known, of course—the person who posted it. Someone who lived in Greenford, though I knew I could not be certain even of that. Eighteen years ago, my mother had given someone—a friend, a relative—the task of posting a letter on a particular day some two decades in the future, no matter what happened in the meantime. Someone she had trusted enough to feel certain that trust would be repaid. A person she trusted as I trusted Christina, although I wouldn’t be meeting Christina for another ten years.

For the first time I felt real curiosity. An active desire to know what my mother had been like, who her friends had been. That simple act of hers—writing a letter in the past to be delivered in the future—told me something important about her, something more personal than anything I had been told, or learned in secret, up until that moment.

The Grande Galerie d’Evolution contains a vortex of beasts. They flood across the main concourse, a great river of migrating animals that is supposed to represent the ecology of the African savannah but reminds me more of the two-by-two procession into Noah’s Ark, or better still the diagonal stripe of endangered species that marched across the covers of a book I had when I was a child. Vanishing Animals, it was called, its light blue background color contrasting vividly with the striped and tawny bodies of its precarious subject matter.

The screams of children mingle indiscriminately with the recorded whoops of gibbons, the roaring of lions. The hippopotamus is vast, vast and black like an armored limousine, or like the alien sea tanks that rise up out of the ocean in The Kraken Wakes. I want to reach out and stroke its hide, to discover if it is real or simply a model, though there are signs everywhere warning the public that the animals are fragile and should not be touched. The hair on the antelopes, the impalas, the zebras—I recognize one of the zebras instantly, from La Jetée, as familiar as a known face in a crowd—certainly looks real, as real as the hair on a cowhide handbag or a sheepskin jacket.

I conclude that all the beasts must be real, a century old and more, the same animals photographed by Marker in La Jetée. I cannot decide if the knowledge is calming or grotesque.

The light is also the same, the ochre, honey-glazed dimness of a watchmaker’s shop or a corner tobacconist’s, the kind of businesses that continued to thrive right through the middle years—the years between the end of the second world war and the first moon landing—but that are now gone entirely. We imagine we remember such places from childhood, buried splinters of memory, whereas in fact we know them only from films, and I think about the light in La Jetée, the rows of vitrines, the march of dead animals, the tendency to show rather than tell.

Museums these days are all about telling. Children are encouraged to touch screens and push buttons, to measure themselves for size against a goat or a rhino. Museums are interactive now, even this one, even though it is beautifully done and with that magic light preserved. We are told that children will take no interest in dusty cases, in difficult words on faded strips of yellowing paper, that if our march toward knowledge is to continue we must change the nature of our museums to engage their attention. Children like moving pictures and recorded whale song and flashing lights.

I suppose they must be right. Having no children of my own, it would seem inappropriate for me to poke my nose in. Yet looking around me I cannot escape the conviction that none of the children who have been brought here are truly engaged. Within moments of glimpsing the dinosaurs, the white rhino, the mammoth, they feel disappointed. This is not what they were promised, and they are bored. They would rather be dashing about outside, or watching “real” dinosaurs chasing humans through the Jurassic in CGI.

A dodo’s skeleton, the Crowned Pigeon, named for a queen, Goura Victoria, a half-grown panda, scrabbling for release from her octagonal cage. The panda died a hundred years ago—more—yet still it seems wrong to keep it imprisoned here, as wrong as the stockpiling of shrunken heads, African battle dress, the Elgin Marbles. What are museums but colonialists’ swag bags, granite memorials to our heritage as thieves? The panda, as she gazes outwards, seems to affirm this. My heart clenches as the sight of her. I stand vigil for a couple of moments, and then move on.

We are trying to do better, say the display notes. The museum has replaced their stash of rhino horns with resin models in order to draw attention to the illegal trade in animal parts, to stand in solidarity with those who risk their lives on a daily basis against the poachers. I wander amongst the vitrines, thinking how none of this is enough, how nothing could be enough except to put everything back the way it was before we came down from the trees. I think about how a museum is in spite of everything a place of wonder, how no interactive display, no matter how ingenious, can be weighed against that moment when a certain child—my father, say—finds themselves transfixed before a case of beetles, or seashells, or a faded piece of parchment embroidered with the signature of Carl Linnaeus, and realizes they have found that elusive something they were looking for.

That light in the mind, that moment. How can one explain?

My mother hated museums, my father told me. She used to say they were like coffins—coffins for information, stuffed with the desiccated corpses of our crimes as a species. She preferred the Internet. All this useless stuff, she said. All those dust mites. She didn’t care for art museums, either.

I finally find what I am looking for in the Espace Historique, a tiny section located way up on the third floor displaying some of the museum’s original specimen drawers and, open at the title page, a first edition of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. Some original hardwood vitrines, their contents hand-labeled in sepia and showcasing the laws of natural selection in moths, the common scallop, the common earwig.

I reach out to touch the glass—I cannot help it. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end, and I can feel both of them here: my father gazing upwards, his face bathed in the golden light of the museum’s interior, yearning for the past to be transposed upon the future even as he knows it’s too late, too late, the shot has already been fired. My mother, her eyes filled with purpose, who will take this step because she has to, because she must.

“I always knew about the mission,” my father said. “She never tried to hide anything from me, especially not that. When we first met I thought it was romantic. As if she were a goddess, returning to the stars.” He laughed. This must have been—what—a year before he died? I had finally begun asking him some questions. I think I had decided already that I was going to write about her, and had suddenly become convinced that if I did not speak to my father now it would be too late.

His death, when it finally happened, was sudden and completely unexpected.

He sighed. “I think I believed that having you would make a difference. I was so angry, for a time. Even before she went. If I regret anything at all in my life it is that anger.”

“And that’s when you met Maggie?”

He turned his head away. Even now, fifty years later, he could not forgive himself for Maggie.

Maggie visited my father at least once a week, right up until he died.

“He doesn’t get out enough, your dad,” she said to me once. Dad liked to walk almost as much as he liked to paint—miles sometimes—but I knew what she meant. Maggie never married. “Why would I?” she said. “Once you sign that piece of paper you always seem to end up doing their washing.”

The only time I knew Maggie to cry was when Claude went to prison. Forging passports, would you believe. He got five years, reduced to eighteen months for good behavior.

“Why couldn’t he have been a painter, like his dad?” Maggie said. She sniffed and wiped her eyes against her sleeve and we both burst out laughing.

He is standing in front of the display on natural selection, clutching a book I assume must be a guide to the museum but turns out to be a copy of Jacques Littell’s new novel Le Tombeau de Couperin.

Why do I speak to him? Because he is holding a book? Because we are alone in this part of the museum, almost as if we have come here specifically to meet? Because—like the unnamed protagonist of La Jetée—I feel I already knew him, and that not to speak would be like ignoring a friend?

You spoke to him because you thought he was good looking, you will say. I’m not denying that I find him attractive, but if you think I would find it easy to approach someone just because I fancied them then you don’t know me at all.

I read an article about form constants the other day, about the iconography of patterns and shapes hardwired into our brains since Neolithic times, a sort of baseline imaginative fingerprinting that signifies humanity. One of these forms constant is the lattice, or honeycomb, a universal grid of regular intersections, a built-in map that we carry with us from the moment of birth.

If each node on this grid represents a meeting, who can say that such meetings are not preordained? How many opportunities are lost, missed, or sidetracked without our knowing? Our lives as an endless labyrinth of paths-not-taken.

This is one path I do take, at least part of the way. I can’t say why.

I say something to him in French. He smiles, looking embarrassed.

“Je suis Americain,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Shoulder-length hair and a blue canvas backpack, scuffed trainers. I’m dressed more or less the same but I realize, belatedly, that I will look old to him. This man is still in his twenties, probably. I shouldn’t even be talking to him.

“I was just saying how good it is to see some of the old stuff here. From the original museum.”

“I came here specifically to see this. I’m a Botany student.” He pauses, assessing me. “Do I know you?”

The simplehearted confidence of the American abroad. I shake my head. There is a chance, I suppose, that he recognizes me from the author photo on the dust jacket of one of my books, but I dismiss the idea as ludicrous, a narcissistic fantasy. I am not the kind of writer readers come up to on the street demanding autographs or selfies or even the simple confirmation that I am who I am.

“They say the world’s a village though, right?”

“That’s what they say.” I hope he’ll drop the subject, but he is still staring at me, still trying to place this face that he is sure he recognizes. I smile awkwardly. I am beginning to feel uncomfortably like one of the museum exhibits, on display behind glass, like that pathetic stuffed panda downstairs.

“I do know you.” He snaps his fingers. “You’re Vincent Swann. You wrote the September Queen novels.”

“Well, technically I’m still writing them.” I can feel myself blushing, the color flooding into my cheeks like an injection of ink. I feel as if I have been caught out in an act of deceit, as if I am not Vincent Swann at all, or at least not the Vincent Swann this young man is hoping for.

“Oh, man.” His face lights up. “I love those books. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid.”

He speaks as if this—his being a kid—were a long time ago, ancient history. Is this an attempt to place us on an equal footing, or merely his way of saying oh jeez you must be ancient now? The impossibility of this conversation—of any connection between us beyond the fleetingly casual—is curiously calming. “I’m glad you like them,” I say. “I’m here in Paris doing research, actually.”

I am careful not to say I am researching a September Queen book, even though that would be a lie only in the most literal sense. If I were to tell him more specifically what I am here for he would probably be excited. He would be bound to ask questions, and I don’t want that, not while the material is still mysterious, even to me.

“For real?” He hesitates, and for a moment I feel positive he is going to ask if he can take our photo. Then he steps backward, as if consciously rejecting the impulse. “I hope you don’t think this is weird, but could I buy you a coffee?” he says instead. “If I’m bothering you, just say. I really don’t want this to be weird.”

“No,” I say. “I mean no, it’s not weird. I’d love a coffee, thanks.”

He laughs, and so do I. I like to imagine we are both overcome by the strangeness of the moment, its randomness, as if it has singled us out from the maelstrom of time. I can see this isn’t the case. He is looking embarrassed again, wondering if he’s made a mistake, and what the hell is he supposed to talk to me about? I am using him as a conduit for old memories—Marek, Denny—and feeling terrified in case he suspects even for a second that I am seeing him this way.

The light though is beautiful, and he is beautiful in it, like a greyhound, like a roebuck, and what corny, stock images they are. It comes to me from an odd side-avenue of memory that the bar of my old student union was called The Roebuck, a fact I’ve not thought of in years and maybe decades. I wonder if it’s still there.

We step out of the museum and as the daylight hits our faces I wonder if he might not be a little older than I first imagined. He could be thirty anyway, at a push.

David Peoples and Janet Peoples, who wrote the screenplay for Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys, were not fond of hearing their movie referred to as a remake. The credits state that Twelve Monkeys is “inspired by” La Jetée, and in the documentary on the making of Twelve Monkeys, The Hamster Factor, the Peopleses seem eager to confirm that Marker’s film is “a masterpiece,” and therefore unique. They seem a lot less happy to talk about how closely Twelve Monkeys follows its inspiration in terms of its content, but watch the two films back-to-back and you’ll see how this is so. The way Gilliam mirrors the visual imagery is particularly striking: the peculiar goggles worn by both sets of doctors, the museum, the department store with its roof smashed in an almost identical pattern to that of the destroyed roof of the Natural History Museum in La Jetée.

I don’t see anything wrong in this—it’s a magnificent act of homage on Gilliam’s part—so why does no one admit it?

My father hated Twelve Monkeys. He told me the film had been the subject of one of his first ever arguments with my mother.

“I still feel bad about it,” he said. “She thought she’d been so clever, finding this film for me, and I watched half of it and then turned it off. I told her it was a travesty. She tried to make a joke of it, because that was the way she was, always wanting to see the good side of things, but I said that when someone steals a perfect work of art and makes a cheap mockery of it then that’s almost as bad as plagiarism. She laughed and I stormed out. I was an arsehole.”

What my father didn’t tell me was that my mother had written about—or at least obliquely referred to—the argument in her diary. There is a list she wrote—“Ten Guilty Secrets No One Knows About Me.” At number 7 she wrote: “I like Twelve Monkeys much better than La Jetée. I think La Jetée is bleak and pretentious. Twelve Monkeys is really clever and I love the ending. Don’t tell Simon!!!” The “don’t tell Simon” is underlined, several times, the exclamation marks seeming to indicate that the joke is still running.

“Do you still love her?” I asked my father.

“Of course.” He didn’t hesitate, even for a moment. “Jocelyn was the only woman I ever loved. I know she would be angry with me for that—she would have wanted me to stay with Maggie. But your mother was right—I’m a fool.”

I didn’t even see Twelve Monkeys until after Dad died. The first time I watched it I agreed with him—the new film was a bigger, noisier, longer version of the same story but it didn’t really add anything to the original. It gave the action a political background, but so what? La Jetée was magnificent precisely because of its simplicity, because it didn’t rely on extraneous detail and flashy stunt work.

Since coming to Paris I’ve watched Twelve Monkeys three times more and—don’t tell Simon—I’m beginning to see my mother’s point of view. Remember when Cole and Railly are hiding out in the movie theater? Hitchcock’s Vertigo is playing in the background and Cole says something about how the movie doesn’t change because it can’t change, but the film has grown older and so have you. Every time you see it, you notice different things.

It’s not that I admire La Jetée any the less. It’s more an acknowledgement that Twelve Monkeys is doing something different, and doing it well. The film is beautifully scripted, and the way Gilliam balances the screenplay with his own directorial vision—the trail of visual clues, the use of music and intercut film soundtracks—seems proof of not only how clearly he understood Marker’s intentions but of his being daring enough to riff off of Marker, to follow his own instincts, to be a little bit vulgar, even.

And like my mother, I admire the ending. It’s a good ending. An American ending, my father would scoff, and maybe, but why not? What is so vulgar about hope?

One thing no one seems to remark upon in their comparisons is that there is no “jetée” in Twelve Monkeys. There are no public viewing platforms at airports now and there haven’t been for decades—you can’t get anywhere near the airplanes unless you’re booked on a flight. To make his scenario believable, Gilliam had to shoot the scene with the gunman inside the terminal building instead.

As I sit here writing this, I realize the ending of Twelve Monkeys has the same kind of effect as what I’ve been trying to achieve all these years with September Queen.

The amazing things Gilliam does. The pattern of tigers on Cole’s Hawaiian shirt, for instance. I love stuff like that.

We sit down at one of the tables outside one of the cafes in the rue Linné. The sun is shining—a rich autumnal gold that echoes the ambience of the museum. I do not know if this is the cafe where my mother first met my father, because my father didn’t tell me the name of it—perhaps he forgot—just that it was one of the cafes on the road leading down to the Jardin des Plantes.

Even if he had remembered the name, I realize, the cafe would most likely have changed hands by now. I am in the right ballpark, though. Whichever way you look at it, I am less than a hundred meters from where they were sitting.

“I’m Stewart, by the way. Stewart Priddy.”

I find myself blushing again, because I’d not thought to ask, because he is so deeply enmeshed in my memories already that he scarcely needs a name. The Stewart part of it is made for him—tall, straight, fair—the Priddy portion less so, a self-conscious halfway house between pride and prude, hinting at a buttoned-up gentleness, a reticence that maybe belongs to him, after all.

“What brings you to Paris, Stewart?”

He shrugs. “Well, my father just died and he’d been sick for a while, so. There was some money. Not much but enough for me to think I should do something special with it. I’ve always wanted to see Paris, so here I am.”

He puts on a smile, but in that moment he looks so sad—lost—that I find myself wanting to tell him everything: about how my own father, too, is dead, so recently deceased I still catch myself thinking I should call him this evening. About how when I went through his things trying to decide which I should keep and which should go to charity shops I discovered two of my mother’s diaries, one written while she was still in high school and another from the twelve months leading up to the mission. About how I’m still so angry with Dad for not telling me about the diaries that I want him to be alive again just so I can yell at him, so I can tell him he was wrong to hide the diaries, that keeping the diaries from me was selfish, not the act of a father. About how often I’ve run a film in my mind of me saying those exact words—not the act of a father—and then cried afterwards in secret because my father is dead.

Well, you didn’t tell him about your mother’s letter, either, Stewart Priddy might say if he were in the film.

Fuck you, my character yells, and storms off somewhere to brood.

About how it was finding the diaries that finally brought me to write this story. So Stewart and I are both in Paris because of our daddy issues. How Spielberg is that?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say instead. “It sounds like you were close.”

“I guess. Not so much recently but he was my dad, you know?”

I nod, and if I were writing him I would have him thinking how strange this all was, sitting here with a virtual stranger and rambling on about his dad.

As things stand, I haven’t a clue what he’s thinking.

“Tell me about September Queen,” he says suddenly. He shrugs again, as if forcibly jerking himself from the past into the present. “How did you come to start writing that? I hope you don’t mind.”

I shake my head. “Not at all,” I say. “What I usually say is that I don’t really know where September Queen came from, that I started writing the series because those were the kind of stories I liked to read. That’s true, but if I’m honest I think I created September Queen as a way of talking to my mother. I liked to imagine a world where people could go into space and have adventures and still come home again. Sometimes, anyway. Going into space didn’t have to mean you were gone forever.”

I can feel tears in my eyes. I know the situation is ridiculous but unfortunately that doesn’t prevent it from being real. On the cinema screen I would cover my face with my hands and begin to cry. I don’t do that—not quite—but Stewart Priddy does place his hand—however briefly—on my shoulder. I can feel the warmth of it there, the steady pressure. In another life I would let it stay there, let it be the start of something. In this one I straighten my back and turn towards him, a gesture that dislodges his hand whilst letting him know that he did nothing wrong, that things are all right between us, that I appreciate his gift but understand it would be madness to accept it.

“I’ve never told anyone that,” I say. “I must be getting old.”

“Will you—I don’t know—will you write about it? About her?”

Stewart Priddy looks dazed, as if someone just shone a light in his eyes. I have wormed my way into his memories, I realize I am a part of his time here now, a still photograph of a man seated at a table outside a cafe near the Jardin des Plantes. The man is middle-aged and unremarkable-looking but he is there. He will be there forever, and for me that must be enough.

“I think I might,” I reply. “But it won’t be the kind of book people are expecting.”

I am becoming used to this city, at least at a surface level. I am beginning to see how a life might be lived here. The metro especially has become familiar, a magic portal that transports me effortlessly from one historic vista to another. I think of the two years I spent living in London after I graduated, how at first I did not trust myself not to get lost and so used the tube for even the shortest journeys, only gradually and with the help of my A-Z linking familiar area with familiar area like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle until finally I could walk with confidence and with pleasure from one side of the city to the other across three whole travel zones.

I can see how I could do this with Paris also, given time. Online maps make the process easier. I walk the streets for hours as a virtual ant-man, experiencing a shudder of déjà vu when the following day I make the identical journey as a real person. Only my dreams—intense and disturbing, hard-focused on events that never happened and on people I haven’t seen or spoken to in years—still hint at my sense of dislocation from this world, my desire to return to where I properly belong. My sleep is deep and cleansing—my body seems to insist on shutting down completely—but I still wake each morning with the feeling of being in transit. The days pass quickly, nonetheless. There is always somewhere to go, something to write.

Three days after my first meeting with Stewart Priddy I take the metro to Trocadéro so I can look at the Palais de Chaillot. This is where Marker imagined the survivors of his apocalypse hiding out, and again, there’s this strange WW2 connection, the now infamous photograph of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower with Speer and Breker, perhaps the most potent symbol of the Nazi occupation of Paris. When you step out of the underground and onto the wide, marble piazza that links the two vast wings of the Palais de Chaillot the first thing you notice—because you can’t avoid it—is the Eiffel Tower. The second thing you notice is the long line of people queuing up to have their picture taken at the exact spot where Hitler and his architects were photographed more than a century ago in 1940.

At first I find it macabre, that anyone would choose to stand in his shoes. Then I realize that I am mistaken in my assumption, firstly because many of these young people will not be aware that the photograph exists—some will not know who Hitler was, even—and secondly because this particular photo opportunity never belonged solely to Hitler in the first place. He was simply the latest in a line, a line I see continuing in front of my eyes.

It is where anyone would naturally stand to get a shot of the Eiffel Tower: at the head of the steps, against the balustrade, the tower behind and the whole of Paris spread out like an embroidered carpet beyond. I dislike tourist traps—the incessant attention renders them flat, oddly colorless, postcard-sized—and this place is no exception yet at the same time I cannot deny the power it holds. The tower is huge—much bigger, somehow, than I was expecting—and it is such a strange object, retaining its alien vitality in spite of its fame.

I find myself liking it, not least because it has defied my expectations. Yes, there is something of the meccano set about it, but then I have always loved meccano. My first sketches of the September Queen were built from meccano, more air and sunlight than metal, and this tower is the same. The Palais de Chaillot itself is another matter. It is a horrible building, blockish and stalwart, an attempt at the Classical style with neither the grace nor the refinement that style exemplified. What it reminds me of—ironically—is the vainglorious, megalomaniacal vision of Breker and Speer. Later, I read that the Palais was built in 1937 for the International Exhibition, that the old and beloved Palais de Trocadéro was demolished to make way for it.

A child of its time, then. I read also that Marker’s vision was prescient in more ways than one, that sometime in the 2010s urban explorers took over the network of passages beneath the Palais de Chaillot and created a secret cinema, various sleeping quarters, and several bars. There is a community of these explorers, a kind of brotherhood. The idea is unsettling and at the same time heartening, a reminder that not all of a city’s citizens can be accounted for. I wonder if Marker knew about the underground brotherhood—les cataphiles, as they are called. Knowing Marker and his interest in fringe figures and outsiders, there is a good chance he did. Perhaps La Jetée is an expression of solidarity with them, who knows?

I leave the Trocadéro and head back into the city. Before returning to Les Récollets I fulfil my promise to Maisie and visit the stamp market on the carré Marigny. Maisie is Christina’s daughter. She is nine years old as I write this, and the closest thing to having my own child that I will ever know.

I often wonder how I would have managed without Christina in my life. We met two years before The September Queen was published and not long after Denny and I split up, at a science fiction convention in Nottingham. I was standing in line at the bar—there was a long queue for drinks—and Christina happened to be standing behind me. Because of what happened with Denny I was still in that porous, unstable state that made it easy for me to strike up a conversation when normally I would have stared at the floor or gaped vapidly around the room rather than meet the eyes of the person next to me. Christina was still in a state of high excitement after meeting Annelise Ryan at a book signing.

“Wasn’t her Guest of Honor speech amazing?” she said. She told me later that the only reason she had found the courage to attend the convention was knowing Ryan would be there.

“I liked Hadrian a lot,” I said. “I’ve been planning to go there, actually, check out the locations.”

There was a light in her eyes, a light that said consulting semi-defunct bus timetables and trekking for hours through the sodden Border country was about the most thrilling way she could imagine spending her time. She was wearing faded, vaguely unfashionable jeans and a black T-shirt with some sort of cephalopod stitched across it in purple and gold. We carried our drinks to a corner table and I told her I’d just had a story accepted at Intergalactic. She seemed as excited by the news as I had been myself.

“Are you a writer, too?” I asked.

She shook her head, vehemently. “That would spoil it—I mean it would for me. It’s why I dropped English at school and concentrated on Geography instead. I didn’t want anyone to tell me how I should feel about books, which books I should read, even. I never want to lose that feeling I get. Do you see what I mean?”

I said I did, even though it was something I had never thought about. Christina works for a firm of chartered surveyors. The jobs she enjoys most involve compiling reports of buildings at risk.

“The places I get to see,” she still says to me, often.

We did the Northumberland trip the following summer, staying in grotty bed-and-breakfasts and rooms above grotty pubs we liked pretending were haunted.

Perhaps some of them were.

Maisie’s father doesn’t even know he has a daughter. Maisie is still too young to mind about that, but she will, I know she will. Maybe I’ll be of help to her when that time comes, maybe I won’t. There is every chance she might even blame me, for not insisting Christina should tell him she was pregnant before he flew back to America and to the family he already had there.

So Maisie is half-American, like me. Her new passion is for stamp collecting, a hobby she pursues with a focus and a seriousness that might be disconcerting if it wasn’t so Maisie. I have no idea what sparked her initial interest and neither, she assures me, has Christina. If letters were rare in my mother’s time they are doubly so now. Stamps are still produced and still issued, but solely for the purpose of supplying the collectors’ market. Maisie, in her peculiar wisdom, seems to know this.

“I want old stamps,” she insists. “Like when the Queen was still alive.”

It is still not too difficult to find such things—at car boot sales and in junk shops, caches of old documents, online. Most have little value but this doesn’t seem to bother Maisie, who has already filled two albums as well as a sizeable number of envelopes she refers to as swaps.

She seems unable to articulate as yet exactly what it is about this hobby that so entrances her. Or perhaps she could, but doesn’t want to, perhaps her delight feels too private. When I ask her if any of her classmates collect stamps also she shakes her head and glances quickly away.

What she will talk about, incessantly, is the provenance and individual qualities of individual stamps: the year of issue and relative rarity, the occasion or personage it was issued to commemorate. How she keeps all this stuff in her head is another small miracle. I have no knowledge of philately myself, and before Maisie no interest in learning. I love hearing her talk, this eagle-eyed professor in a girl’s body. I have told her I will try and bring her some stamps from France. I want to keep my promise if I possibly can.

The stamp market is in the carré Marigny. I understand that the market is famous, that it has been going for more than a century. Nonetheless, when I emerge from the metro at Champs Elysée Clemenceau I feel convinced that I’ve come to the wrong place, that there can be no stamp market here. The sudden barrage of tourists and traffic is bewildering. I am swept across the street in a wave of sightseers just as the lights change, with barely time to confirm that I am headed in the right direction, the Avenue de Marigny, a small park on my left as the map suggested. The tourists leave me stranded, streaming off upriver towards the Place de la Concorde. Away from the Technicolor glare of the Champs Elysée the light seems different—limpid, less insistent, tinged with green. And there, lining a narrow graveled cul-de-sac bordering the park is the stamp market: a broken, uneven line of covered stalls and trestle tables, a static carnival, a hushed breath of intimacy in this public place. A phenomenon so out of time it appears sepia-tinted, a postcard of itself. Customers stroll from stall to stall beneath the overhanging trees.

You can see the market for yourself if you go on YouTube. Just search for “Charade stamp market” and you’ll soon find a clip taken from near the end of the 1965 spy caper starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, shot on location at the marché des timbres in the carré Marigny. The market now includes stalls selling pin badges and used phone cards and movie merchandise, but the stamps are what people come for and even in a few brief moments the film does a good job of capturing the market’s ambience. What surprises me most of all is how many customers there are, all these people still interested in stamps, still knowledgeable about them, still swapping stories. They are not all old people either. I imagine some of the younger customers have never stuck a stamp on an actual letter in their lives.

Many of the stamps on sale seem prohibitively expensive. I am made nervous by my inexperience, my inability to tell a bargain from a costly mistake. I linger in front of one stall in particular, my interest caught by a line of shoeboxes filled with old letter envelopes, on sale for a euro each. The stamps on the envelopes are all postmarked—I know already from Maisie that this makes them more valuable. As I shuffle through them I find myself more captivated by the envelopes themselves than by the stamps: crumpled and blotted, many with small rips and other, unidentifiable marks. Some are stained with coffee rings, their faded, brownish arcs bisecting the handwriting beneath.

Addresses in London, Rome, Luanda, outlying districts of Paris that I will never get to see. For a moment I feel a flicker of the fascination Maisie finds in these artifacts, or that I imagine she finds, the sense that all these letters are snippets of history, a physical manifestation of time’s passing. I smooth my fingers over an air letter that was posted in Russia. I cannot read Cyrillic, and so cannot decipher the name of the sender or the address of the recipient. The portrait on the stamp is familiar though: Milena Vasilieva, the Russian cosmonaut who took part in the first manned orbit of Mars in 2033. The mission, which made use of the Hohmann transfer orbit, took just twenty-seven months to complete and kick-started the push for a manned landing on Mars some eight years later.

All six crew members were returned safely to Earth, although two of them—Janson and Field—experienced severe long-term health problems as a result of living in zero gravity for such a long period. Milena Vasilieva was one of two female crew members. My mother’s diary—the one written in the year leading up to the mission—mentions her often.

I feel light-headed and slightly nauseous. I grab the letter and five others—a random selection I don’t even look at until later—together with a packet of mixed stamps labeled “timbres commemoratifs (France).” The combined package costs me twenty-five euros. The following day or the day after I purchase a decorative box from a gift shop in Montmartre and place the stamps inside. I hope Maisie will like the gift. I feel unaccountably relieved to see that the envelope with the Milena Vasilieva stamp does not stand out from the others, that it is just one of several items in the box, no more and no less interesting than the others. I do not imagine that Maisie will focus on it unduly, though I cannot entirely escape the notion that in giving her this stamp I am passing something on to her: an obsession, a preoccupation, a code she will most likely not recognize as such for now but might—could—decipher later.

When this book is published, for example. She will be able to find out where her stamps came from and why I bought them.

If she reads it, that is. A boring book by a boring uncle. Who says she’ll even care?

The thing is, I don’t remember my mother, not at all. I have memories, yes—memories of her image on TV, memories of people talking about her and sounding upset, of Dad endlessly never mentioning her at all—but that’s not the same thing. Up until three months ago, all I had was her letter and what I read in the media.

What I have now, since I found her diaries, are her memories of me.

“It must have been like—I don’t know,” Stewart says. “Even just seeing her handwriting.”

He exhales, as if he has just set down a heavy object and is trying to regain his equilibrium. I can read the words that are flooding his mind so easily it’s as if they’ve been flashed onto a screen above his head: it must have been like she’d come back from the dead. I can read them because I have thought them myself. It’s what we do when the unthinkable happens—reach for the soap opera clichés, because they’re the only way we can process what has occurred.

The words aren’t accurate, actually, although I had to hear them in my own head first before I understood that.

Jocelyn Tooker had never been dead to me because she had never been alive. Not properly, not as someone I could remember as a physical presence. Joss had been an idea—an idea I was supposed to respond to but didn’t know how.

Finding her diaries changed that. Her words made her real.

When Stewart called and asked if I’d have dinner with him I said yes, but only if he let me pay. “Dress up,” I said. I felt like an idiot as soon as I ended the call. What if he misconstrued me? What if he didn’t have anything to wear except a T-shirt and jeans? As it happens I am right—except the jeans are skintight Armanis and the T-shirt is of the kind you see on runway models.

His hair is combed back from his forehead and I see he is wearing a single drop earring, a beautiful gold skull.

“Fancy,” I say, quietly.

He laughs. “Not fancy enough. I was worried they might not let me in here without a tie.”

The restaurant I have chosen for our rendezvous is on a side street near the Opéra, one of those places you read about in the Sunday supplements and ridiculously expensive but why not? I will be leaving Paris in less than a week. I am aware of myself, constructing a memory, but there again, why not?

Later, as we are finishing our main courses, I want to tell Stewart that he is the first person apart from Christina that I have told about my mother’s letter, but that would mean explaining Christina, and I find I don’t want to talk about her, not tonight, not now. Instead I ask him what comes next for him, what he is intending to do when he returns to the States.

“Finish up my Masters, apply for jobs.” He shrugs. “I want to go and work in Alaska, actually, so long as my sister’s OK with that. She and Dad were close and if she’d rather I stuck around for a year I’ll keep on with the gardening work until she’s more settled, but hey, I think she’ll be fine.”

“Alaska?”

“Yeah. Forestry management. I love it up there.”

Once or twice, our hands touch. When eventually we are outside on the street again I think—I wonder—about kissing him and then think again.

“We’ll be keeping in touch, right?” Stewart says.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I tell him what I really want, which is for him to delete my number from his phone, right now, and then go back to his hotel, that we should resist the temptation to try and stay in contact, that this should be it. “I want you to be—” I stammer, but never finish the sentence, which is pretty corny. “I want to think of you over there in Alaska, reading my books and living your life and sometimes wondering how I am. Does that make sense?”

His face is partially in shadow, and hard to read. After a moment he gets out his phone and I see him scrolling through his contacts. He touches the screen, once, twice.

“Done,” he says.

Does he get it? I can only hope so. I hope he’s not angry, or upset. If he is upset I think—for this moment at least—my heart would break.

We stand there in the street, facing each other in the silent space outside the restaurant. After a moment we kiss after all. Then Stewart Priddy turns and walks away. I watch him cross the road, heading towards the metro. He does not look back.

I think: this is something you do, the same as when you broke up with Denny. It’s as if you can’t allow yourself to believe in the future, as if—

As if what? Having my mother leave me for Mars when I was three made me terrified of commitment?

A convenient fiction, but I know it’s bullshit. The truth is that I am happier alone. I have been for years. I work better that way.

Two days before my return flight to Glasgow, I take the metro back out to Jussieu, walk once more along the rue Linné to the Jardin des Plantes. I do not buy a ticket for the museum—I have seen what is in there. I sit on a bench in the gardens instead, watching the people come and go and wondering if I will ever visit this place again.

After the Indian summer of my first fortnight in the city, the temperature is beginning to fall and for the second time in the last three days I am wearing my puffer jacket. The sun is still bright, though. Last night when I skyped with Christina she told me frost had been forecast.

I am longing to be home. Now that I have finally made the decision to write my mother’s story I am eager to begin the work in earnest: the gathering of information, the research, the interviews, the gradual piecing together of a life. Paris has been—what?—an anteroom, a prelude, a space to draw breath. A test of nerve, even. I have never tried to write in this way before. Am I capable? Let’s see.

My father once said to me that he went to Paris with his heart full of dreams. He expected that trip to be the beginning of his life as an artist, a kind of baptism. I have always imagined my mother’s time in Paris as a joyful time, an inconsequential but happy episode, a celebration with friends before diving back into the business of reality. Her meeting with my father was pure happenstance. It made her time in this city important, but not specifically. If they had happened to meet in New York, or at Euston Station, then nothing about their lives together would have been different.

And yet, in her diaries, there are passages that suggest the opposite. A trip to Notre Dame, where she lit a candle, she said, “for all of us, for the danger we face.” A memory of an historic tree in this very garden, Pinus nigra, planted by Antoine Laurent Jussieu in 1774.

“I feel I want to cling to this tree, to communicate with it somehow, to wrap my arms around its trunk and whisper sorry, sorry, sorry, oh, we are so stupid . . . ”

As if Paris, for Joss, was the culmination of something, the moment that decided her, the end of her life here on Earth. I think of her, like Marker, imagining the ruins of Paris and feeling a woe so raw that she cannot not act. My father, caught in the final, future moments of his own enchantment. How tempting it is, to read our own lives into a film. But then maybe that is what art is for.

I wish I could tell my mother that her tree is still here, that I have rested my hand against its silvery trunk and felt that curious power that all trees have, like a heartbeat but different, the steady, greenish pulse of an alien life force.

I know that Joss was here, that the tree was here also. And that is something, too.

The Bruce Willis character in Twelve Monkeys is a direct analogue of the unnamed protagonist of La Jetée, only he has more agency. He is desperate for his mission to succeed. The man in La Jetée seems not to care about the fate of the world. What he wants, above all, is to return to the past.

It is Saturday, the last Saturday before the clocks go back. There are many people here in the Jardin des Plantes, enjoying what may be the last of the autumn sunshine. Tomorrow it will rain, and I will be filled suddenly and unexpectedly with the ache of leaving. A few moments before I get up to go, a young woman walks past, gazing about herself as if she has lost something, vaguely anxious. The sun shines on her hair, which is wild with curls, held back from her forehead in a floral bandana. A second later a child dashes up to her, a boy in knee-length khaki shorts and a Breton T-shirt. He looks to be about four years old, maybe five. He is skinny as a matchstick, but bursting with health.

“Maman!” he cries. “Maman!”

He slips his hand into hers, the action fluid and casual and molded by certainty. He knows the hand will always be there, he does not have to think. He is chattering excitedly about a tree, a tree that is three hundred years old, or nearly, that it’s just over here and she must come with him to look at it right now.

“Three hundred years?” the woman laughs. “As old as Papa?”

She ruffles his hair with her free hand and lets herself be led towards the historic pine tree. She is smiling, and when she turns momentarily towards me her smile does not fade.

I would like to say that our eyes meet, but they don’t, not really, she is looking across at some other people, two women, perhaps she knows them. She holds her boy by the hand, and in that moment it is as if I am the child, that this is my memory, that it was not my mother who told me about the tree but the other way around. Even though I know I was never here in this place before now, that this moment could never have happened, I feel the warmth of her fingers in mine, hear the words she thinks to herself, soft as a whisper, strong as steel—my son.

To Sylvie Martigny, Jean-Hubert Gailliot, Caroline Boidé Brénaud, Olivier Chaudenson, and everyone at La Maison de la Poesie and Les Récollets for their invaluable help and support throughout my Paris residency in 2017.

About the Author

Nina Allan’s first novel The Race was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2017, and her second novel The Rift won the British Science Fiction Award and The Kitschies Red Tentacle in 2018. Her 2016 novelette “The Art of Space Travel” was a Hugo Award finalist. Nina’s third novel The Dollmaker is scheduled for publication in 2019.

The Love Letters

Peng Simeng, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu

People say that when the Creator made All, everything was given a purpose.

But Asteroid I121522525121 seemed to have been left out of that grand plan. This asteroid resided between two prosperous galaxies, but it had never been established as a starport like its neighbors. It had only stone and no ore, only subzero chill and no atmosphere, only howling gales and no birdsong. If even a cutthroat interstellar merchant fleet scanned the asteroid’s identification number, they would be loath to send even an exploratory probe to the asteroid’s surface.

Swept along by the endlessly turbulent sandstorms on this worthless asteroid were countless lead capsules. These capsules were the asteroid’s only remarkable feature. In fact, they were the cause of many people’s misfortunes—in the commonly used interstellar positioning system, the coordinates for Asteroid I121522525121 were just one numeral off from those for humanity’s old home planet. In the era when people had to manually enter coordinates, countless spaceships sent precious interstellar message capsules cascading to the barren lands of the asteroid below.

The messages in these lead capsules were supposed to travel through space and reach the eager hands of their hopeful recipients, but instead they languish in this information graveyard. They dance and stop, stop and dance, until one day, when time itself is in ruins, they too will stand still.

Among these countless capsules are four that endlessly flutter and rest, the messages saved in their titanium-encrusted cores below:

Dearest Persephone,

I feel I must write you this letter. You won’t believe it: Right now, a magnificent red giant is flitting past the hull of my spaceship, washing the command room in a cozy blush. The various instruments cast twinkling shadows on the ground, where I lie looking up at the ceiling. If you were beside me, you would surely fall in love with the sights outside. Yet even the present me still appreciates this moment, for it reminds me of the sunset on the day I left home . . . That day, you rained kisses on me so softly; they still fall every time I enter my dreams.

I’ve already been on this solo mission for 142 days now, dearest; I’m not always this weak and needy.

I’ve already landed on sixteen constellations in succession, explored every planet that could possibly hold crystal, stone, or ore, but I’ve only found disappointment . . .

At every free starport, countless captains who have already been through this cycle of disappointment would seize my ear and drag me from the pub while bellowing: The minerals have all been stripped bare! No one will ever find another planet rich with high-grade ore!

But I would also meet some eccentrics like me—people still sailing interplanetary ships to the most remote corners of the universe. Hope twinkles in their eyes. They would share their trade secrets with me: routes and tricks for success, and I took them all to heart.

With the hope that those captains gave me, I was always able to track down some kind of lead. In a previous galaxy, I even found a massive, undeveloped vein of ore for the first time—with only two million more years, it would be fully formed! Ah . . . it truly was such a pity.

Still, this at least showed me that my search method was effective. I felt that surely I was going to strike it big and find a planet rich with ore soon. Then, I could modestly slip back home with a ship full of gold bits . . . Dearest, you don’t need to worry; when that time comes, I won’t become arrogant and shallow like others who find their fortune and became new money; they make me want to vomit.

Although I may be empty-handed now, this beautiful, boundless universe captivates me and soothes my restless heart. I’ve always wanted to roam the open seas of the universe, even before birth; you can imagine how much more excited I am to be here searching for precious minerals.

Of course, fate sometimes watches out for me—I narrowly missed an ion storm, and I haven’t encountered anything else as dangerous that would sink my ship. So please don’t worry about me. I’m becoming more and more familiar with my ship. With every day that passes, we are closer to becoming one. I’m also beginning to have a better understanding of this ocean of stars. I wish you were by my side to see these magnificent celestial bodies. They make you feel infinitesimally small, and yet inspire your infinitesimal smallness, too.

Dearest, I will most certainly bring back a ship full of treasures. I know I have no right to make you wait like this, of course. At the last free port, I ran into one of our mutual friends, Heliconia. He said that you were still waiting for me. Ah . . . I felt so moved and grateful!

Lisa and Kirikou are resting in the deposit cabin. I hope they don’t discover that their captain is lamenting his anguish on the control cabin floor, or else they’ll ridicule me—they truly do love to ridicule people, those two.

Tomorrow I’ll set sail toward the Bach galaxy. I hope I can strike it rich there. Dearest, wish me luck.

Missing you,

Hushan

November 6, 2802

Dearest Persephone,

I don’t know what time it will be when you receive this letter—will it be during dawn, sunset, or a meteor shower? Whenever you receive this letter, please trust that I am thinking deeply of you. I just left the Bach galaxy where I ran into a bit of luck. Guess what? I found a vein of ore! At the time, I thought I could leave right then to be by your side! We shipped ore to the nearest free port, but those damned graders said that the ore was of a mediocre quality.

We immediately registered the planet, sold off the mining rights, and got some cash for them, but honestly, it wasn’t much.

Faced with the tiny number in my bank account, what should I do? Should I split the cash with Lisa and Kirikou, sell off the spaceship, then rush back to your arms?

No . . . I can’t do that. I don’t dare to say that I’ve never thought of doing such a thing. Our jade-green lake and little boat—the little wooden boat we’d paddle on together keeps appearing in my dreams. My adventures in the universe have me even more convinced that I won’t be drifting for much longer. There’s got to be a day when I can return home to go boating with you on that jade-green lake. That will be my final resting place.

But I can’t return home like this, at least not now.

I’m convinced that my ore-finding method is foolproof now. I just need to patiently wait for Lady Luck’s favor.

Believe me, I will return to your arms and recount the tales of my adventures. But not now, definitely not now. If I were to return now, I would only seclude myself on the lake, sighing all day with the weight of my melancholy heart . . .

After I issued an order to continue searching for ore, I restocked our supplies and patched up the spaceship. We’re currently en route to the Berlioz galaxy.

Dearest, will you forgive my selfishness?

Hushan

May 2, 2803

Dearest Persephone,

The Berlioz galaxy is hell! But I’m still alive.

Squalls, yellow sand, knifelike sunlight—if I hadn’t turned the protection on my eyegear up to the maximum strength, I wouldn’t have been able to open my eyes at all.

Every night, I would have to bury the spaceship with sand to hide from thunderstorms, then set sail amidst mud-like acid rain at daybreak.

The people here weren’t exactly welcoming. Ha, they were insects nearly as large as me. They charged my spaceship in columns, their sawtooth-like teeth gnawing kakaka on the outside of the spaceship, leaving a series of holes in their wake. The insects chased us from one planet to another, that gnawing sound penetrating into my dreams, disturbing me from my boat on the lake.

But the most terrifying sound wasn’t the one from outside. Rather, it was the endless arguing from inside the spaceship. I insisted on combing all ten planets of the Berlioz galaxy, but, as the results sank us deeper into despair, my plan caused my crew to lose hope. But this kind of foolish plan is the only way to ensure that we won’t miss any ore. Am I in the wrong?

Lisa left in the end. She didn’t believe that we could continue. She didn’t part on good terms, and we didn’t even wish her farewell. If you see her, please take her by the hand and tell her in that warm way yours that I don’t resent her for it anymore. In fact, I’m grateful for the time she spent with us on our expeditions. I’m thinking that with your way with words, surely she’ll understand.

Kirikou is still with me. His courage and persistence exceeded my expectations. We’re preparing to go to the dark corner of the Mahler galaxy to try our luck. That’s the place with the highest rate of ore formation; why haven’t we been there yet? Were we concerned about the massive underwater monsters? But what could be worse than the insects from the Berlioz galaxy?

These days, I often forget what you look like, so I look at pictures of you, staring at each of them in turn. Memory is a strange thing: your likeness is hazy, but I always recall the warmth of your kiss, the softness of your hands, the enchanting scent of your rose perfume. These are all marked in my memory, still unfading.

I think it won’t be long until we meet again. Please, for one last time, wait a little longer for me.

Hushan

October 6, 2804

Fennie, Fennie . . .

There’s water everywhere. The aft has split open; something keeps battering the hull. Our fate has been sealed.

Kirikou has already stopped breathing. I’m so grateful for his faith in me! He supported me from the beginning to the end, right until the very last moment. He supported having an android like me as captain, but I failed to live up to his expectations! I’ve decided; my body will stay here with him in eternal rest.

Do you regret falling in love with an android? Did I fail to live up to your love, too? Ah . . . Dearest, I only have a little time left; I must transfer the backup of my consciousness kernel into a lead capsule. Please put it into a new body.

When you open this letter, I will have returned. I love you.

Hushan

December 16, 2832

The above are the full contents of the metal cores. They are sealed perfectly intact inside those four capsules, chasing each other through vicious storms in their lonely dance, through the silent darkness, through endless gales.

These four capsules tumble with hundreds of thousands of others swirling through air thick with capsules. No one knows about them, and no one will know what is written in these capsules, what is hidden in them. They are carried by the long river of time. When, after the last person who can decipher these contents has died, only the grim rays of the universe will occasionally shine on these capsules, illuminating each tiny scratch on their titanium surfaces.

Until the river of time carries them to the very end.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, February 2018.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Peng Simeng is a science fiction writer who used to work as a product manager in Tencent, the biggest internet company in China. A themed collection of her works has appeared in one of China’s top SF magazines, Science Fiction World. Her novella “Beast Boxing” won honorable award in the 2017 Douban Read Writing Competition. She is currently studying in the Creative Writing master program at Beijing Normal University.

Death on Mars

Madeline Ashby

“Is he still on schedule?”

Donna’s hand spidered across the tactical array. She pinched and threw a map into Khalidah’s lenses. Marshall’s tug glowed there, spiraling ever closer to its target. Khalidah caught herself missing baseball. She squashed the sentiment immediately. It wasn’t really the sport she missed, she reminded herself. She just missed her fantasy league. Phobos was much too far away to get a real game going; the lag was simply too long for her bets to cover any meaningful spread. She could run a model, of course, and had even filled one halfway during the trip out. It wasn’t the same.

Besides, it was more helpful to participate in hobbies she could share with the others. The counselors had been very clear on that subject. She was better off participating in Game Night, and the monthly book club they maintained with the Girl Scouts and Guides of North America.

“He’s on time,” Donna said. “Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worried,” Khalidah said. And she wasn’t. Not really. Not about when he would arrive.

Donna pushed away from the terminal. She looked older than she had when they’d landed. They’d all aged, of course—the trip out and the lack of real produce hadn’t exactly done any of them any favors—but Donna seemed to have changed more dramatically than Khalidah or Brooklyn or Song. She’d cut most of her hair off, and now the silver that once sparkled along her roots was the only color left. The exo-suit hung loose on her. She hadn’t been eating. Everyone hated the latest rotation of rations. Who on Earth—literally, who?—thought that testing the nutritional merits of a traditional Buddhist macrobiotic diet in space was a good idea? What sadistic special-interest group had funded that particular line of research?

“It will be fine,” Donna said. “We will be fine.”

“I just don’t want things to change.”

“Things always change,” Donna said. “God is change. Right, Octavia?” The station spoke: “Right, Donna.”

Khalidah folded her arms. “So do we have to add an Arthur, just for him? Or a Robert? Or an Isaac? Or a Philip?”

The station switched its persona to Alice B. Sheldon. Its icon spun like a coin in the upper right of Khalidah’s vision. “We already have a James,” the station said. The icon winked.

“Khalidah, look at me,” Donna said. Khalidah defocused from the In-Vision array and met the gaze of her mission manager. “It won’t be easy,” the older woman said. “But nothing out here is. We already have plenty of data about our particular group. You think there won’t be sudden changes to group dynamics, down there?”

She pointed. And there it was: red and rusty, the color of old blood. Mars.

His name was Cody Marshall. He was Florida born and bred, white, with white-blond hair and a tendency toward rosacea. He held a PhD in computer science from Mudd. He’d done one internship in Syria, building drone-supported mesh nets, and another in Alert, Nunavut. He’d coordinated the emergency repair of an oil pipeline there using a combination of declassified Russian submersibles and American cable-monitoring drones. He’d managed the project almost single-handedly after the team lead at Alert killed himself.

Now here he was on Phobos, sent to debug the borehole driller on Mars. A recent solar storm had completely fried the drill’s comms systems; Donna insisted it needed a complete overhaul, and two heads were better than one. Marshall couldn’t do the job from home—they’d lose days reprogramming the things on the fly, and the drill bits were in sensitive places. One false move and months of work might collapse around billions of dollars of research, crushing it deep into the red dirt. He needed to be close. After all, he’d written much of the code himself.

This was his first flight.

“I didn’t want to be an astronaut,” he’d told them over the lag, when they first met. “I got into this because I loved robots. That’s all. I had no idea this is where I would wind up. But I’m really grateful to be here. I know it’s a change.”

“If you make a toilet seat joke, we’ll delete your porn,” Song said, now. When they all laughed, she looked around at the crowd. “What’s funny? I’m serious. I didn’t come all the way out here to play out a sitcom.”

Marshall snapped his fingers. “That reminds me.” He rifled through one of the many pouches he’d lugged on board. “Your mom sent this along with me.” He coasted a vial through the air at her. Inside, a small crystal glinted. “That’s your brother’s wedding. And your new nephew’s baptism. Speaking of sitcoms. She told me some stories to tell you. She didn’t want to record them—”

“She’s very nervous about recording anything.”

“—so she told me to tell them to you.”

Song rolled her eyes. “Are they about Uncle Chan-wook?”

Marshall’s pale eyebrows lifted high on his pink forehead. “How’d you guess?”

Again, the room erupted in laughter. Brooklyn laughed the loudest. She was a natural flirt. Her parents had named her after a borough they’d visited only once. In high school, she had self-published a series of homoerotic detective novels set in ancient Greece. The profits financed med school. After that, she hit Parsons for an unconventional residency. She’d worked on the team that designed the exo-suits they now wore. She had already coordinated Marshall’s fitting over the lag. It fit him well. At least, Brooklyn seemed pleased. She was smiling so wide that Khalidah could see the single cavity she’d sustained in all her years of eschewing most refined sugars.

Khalidah rather suspected that Brooklyn had secretly advocated for the macrobiotic study. Chugging a blue algae smoothie every morning seemed like her kind of thing. Khalidah had never asked about it. It was better not to know.

But wasn’t that the larger point of this particular experiment? To see if they could all get along? To see if women—with their lower caloric needs, their lesser weight, their quite literally cheaper labor, in more ways than one—could get the job done on Phobos? Sure, they were there on a planetary protection mission to gather the last remaining soil samples before the first human-oriented missions showed up, thereby ensuring the “chain of evidence” for future DNA experimentation. But they all knew—didn’t they—what this was really about. How the media talked about them. How the Internet talked about them. Early on, before departure, Khalidah had seen the memes.

For Brooklyn, Marshall had a single chime. Brooklyn’s mother had sent it to “clear the energy” of the station. During the Cold Lake training mission, she’d sent a Tibetan singing bowl.

For Khalidah, he had all 4,860 games of last year’s regular season. “It’s lossless,” he said. “All 30 teams. Even the crappy ones. One of our guys down at Kennedy, he has a brother-in-law in Orlando, works at ESPN. They got in touch with your dad, and, well . . . ”

“Thank you,” Khalidah said.

“Yeah. Sure.” Marshall cleared his throat. He rocked on his toes, pitched a little too far forward, and wheeled his arms briefly to recover his balance. If possible, he turned even pinker, so the color of his face now matched the color of his ears. “So. Here you go. I don’t know what else is on there, but, um . . . there it is. Enjoy.”

“Thank you.” Khalidah lifted the vial of media from his hand. Her crystal was darker than Song’s. Denser. It had been etched more often. She stuffed it in the right breast pocket of her suit. If for some reason her heart cut out and the suit had to give her a jolt, the crystal would be safe.

“And for you, Donna. Here’s what we talked about. They gave you double, just in case.”

Donna’s hand was already out. It shook a little as Marshall placed a small bottle in it. The label was easy to see. Easy to read. Big purple letters branded on the stark white sticker. Lethezine. The death drug. The colony of nanomachines that quietly took over the brain, shutting off major functions silently and painlessly. The best, most dignified death possible. The kind you had to ask the government for personally, complete with letters of recommendation from people with advanced degrees that could be revoked if they lied, like it was a grant application or admission to a very prestigious community. Which in fact it was.

“What is that?” Brooklyn asked.

It was a stupid question. Everyone knew exactly what it was. She was just bringing it out into the open. They’d been briefed on that. On making the implicit become explicit. On voicing what had gone unasked. Speaking the unspeakable. It was, in fact, part of the training. There were certain things you were supposed to suppress. And other things that you couldn’t let fester. They had drilled on it, over and over, at Cold Lake and in Mongolia and again and again during role-plays with the station interface.

“Why do you have that?” Brooklyn continued, when Donna didn’t answer. “Why would he give that to you?”

Donna pocketed the bottle before she opened her mouth to speak. When she did, she lifted her gaze and stared at each of them in turn. She smiled tightly. For the first time, Khalidah realized the older woman’s grimace was not borne of impatience, but rather simple animal pain. “It’s because I’m dying,” she said.

She said it like it was a commonplace event. Like, “Oh, it’s because I’m painting the kitchen,” or “It’s because I took the dog for a walk.”

In her lenses, Khalidah saw the entire group’s auras begin to flare. The auras were nothing mystical, nothing more than ambient indicators of what the sensors in the suits were detecting: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, odd little twitches of muscle fibers. She watched them move from baseline green to bruise purple—the color of tension, of frustration. Only Song remained calm: her aura its customary frosty mint green, the same shade once worn by astronauts’ wives at the advent of the Space Race.

“You knew?” she managed to say, just as Marshall said, “You didn’t tell them?”

Khalidah whirled to stare at him. His mouth hung open. He squinted at Donna, then glanced around the group. “Wait,” he said. “Wait. Let’s just take a minute. I . . . ” He swallowed. “I need a minute. You . . . ” He spun in place and pointed at Donna. “This was a shitty thing to do. I mean, really, truly, deeply, profoundly not cool. Lying to your team isn’t cool. Setting me up to fail isn’t cool.”

“I have a brain tumor,” Donna said blandly. “I’m not necessarily in my right mind.”

“Donna,” Song said quietly.

Oh, God. Donna was dying. She was dying and she hadn’t told them and minty-green Song had known about it the whole damn time.

“You knew,” Khalidah managed to say.

“Of course she knew,” Donna said. “She’s our doctor.”

Donna was dying. Donna would be dead, soon. Donna had lied to all of them.

“It’s inoperable,” Donna added, as though talking about a bad seam in her suit and not her gray matter. “And in any case, I wouldn’t want to operate on it. I still have a few good months here—”

“A few months?” Brooklyn was crying. The tears beaded away from her face and she batted at them, as though breaking them into smaller pieces would somehow dismantle the grief and its cause. “You have months? That’s it?”

“More or less.” Donna shrugged. “I could make it longer, with chemo, or nano. But we don’t have those kinds of therapies here. Even if we did, and the tumor did shrink, Song isn’t a brain surgeon, and the lag is too slow for Dr. Spyder to do something that delicate.” She jerked a thumb at the surgical assistant in its cubby. “And there’s the fact that I don’t want to leave.”

There was an awful silence filled only by the sounds of the station: the water recycler, the rasp of air in the vents, an unanswered alert chiming on and off, off and on. It was the sound the drill made when it encountered issues of structural integrity and wanted a directive on how to proceed. If they didn’t answer it in five more minutes, the chime would increase in rate and volume. If they didn’t answer it after another five minutes, the drill itself would relay a message via the rovers to tell mission control they were being bad parents.

And none of that mattered now. At least, Khalidah could not make it matter, in her head. She could not pull the alert into the “urgent” section of her mind. Because Donna was dying, Donna would be dead soon, Donna was in all likelihood going to kill herself right here on the station and what would they do—

Donna snapped her fingers and opened the alert. She pushed it over to tactical array where they could all see it. “Marshall, go and take a look.”

Marshall seemed glad of any excuse to leave the conversation. He drifted over to the array and started pulling apart the alert with his fingers. His suit was still so new that his every swipe and pinch and pull worked on the first try. His fingers hadn’t worn down yet. Not like theirs. Not like Donna’s.

“Can you do that?” Khalidah asked Donna. When Donna didn’t answer, she focused on Song. “Can she do that?”

Song’s face closed. She was in full physician mode now. Gone was the cheerful woman with the round face who joked about porn. Had the person they’d become friends with ever truly been real? Was she always this cold, underneath? Was it being so far away from Earth that made it so easy for her to lie to them? “It’s her body, Khal. She doesn’t have any obligation to force it to suffer.”

Khalidah tried to catch Donna’s eye. “You flew with the Air Force. You flew over Syria and Sudan. You—”

“Yes, and whatever I was exposed to there probably had a hand in this,” Donna muttered. “The buildings, you know. They released all kinds of nasty stuff. Like first responder syndrome, but worse.” She pinched her nose. It was the only sign she ever registered of a headache. “But it’s done, now, Khalidah. I’ve made my decision.”

“But—”

“We all knew this might be a one-way trip,” Song added.

“Don’t patronize me, Song,” Khalidah snapped.

“Then grow up,” Song sighed. “Donna put this in her living will ages ago. Long before she even had her first flight. She was preapproved for Lethezine, thanks to her family’s cancer history. There was always a chance that she would get cancer on this trip, given the radiation exposure. But her physicians decided it was an acceptable risk, and she chose to come here in full awareness of that risk.”

“I’m right here, you know,” Donna said. “I’m not dead yet.”

“You could still retire,” Khalidah heard herself say. “You could go private. Join a board of trustees somewhere, or something like that. They’d cover a subscription, maybe they could get you implants—”

“I don’t want implants, Khal, I want to die here—”

“I brought some implants,” Marshall said, without turning around. He slid one last number into place, then wiped away the display. Now he turned. He took a deep breath, as though he’d rehearsed this speech the whole trip over. Which he probably had. Belatedly, Khalidah noticed the length of his hair and fingernails. God, he’d done the whole trip alone. The station couldn’t bear more than one extra; as it was, he’d needed to bring extra scrubbers and promise to spend most of the time in his own hab docked to theirs.

“I brought implants,” he continued. “They’re prototypes. No surgery necessary. Houston insisted. They wanted to give you one last chance to change your mind.”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” Donna said. “I want to die here.”

“Please stop saying that.” Brooklyn wiped her eyes. “Please just stop saying that.”

“But it’s the truth,” Donna said, in her maddening why-isn’t-everyone-as-objective-about-this-as-I-am way. “My whole life, I’ve wanted to go to Mars. And now I’m within sight of it. I’m not going to leave just because there’s a lesion on my brain. Not when I just got here.” She huffed. “Besides. I’d be no good to any of you on chemo. I’d be sick.”

“You are sick,” Khalidah snapped.

“Not that sick.” Song lifted her gaze from her nails and gestured at the rest of them. “None of you noticed, did you? Both of you thought she was fine.”

“Yeah, no thanks to you.”

“Don’t take that tone with me. She’s my patient. I’d respect your right to confidentiality the same way I respected hers.”

“You put the mission at risk,” Khalidah said.

“Oh my God, Khal, stop talking like them.” Brooklyn’s voice was still thick with tears. “You’re not mission control. This has nothing to do with the mission”

“It has everything to do with the mission!” Khalidah rounded on Donna. “How could you do this? How could you not tell us? This entire experiment hinges on social cohesion. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to prove . . . ”

Now the silence had changed into something wholly other. It was much heavier now. Much more accusatory. Donna folded her arms.

“What are we here to prove, Khalidah?”

Khalidah shut her eyes. She would be professional. She would not cry. She would not get angry. At least, no angrier than she already was. She would not focus on Donna’s betrayal, and her deceit, and the fact that she had the audacity to pull this bullshit so soon after . . . Khalidah took a deep breath.

She would put it aside. Humans are containers of emotion. She made herself see the words in the visualizing interface they had for moments like this. When someone else’s emotions spill out, it’s because their container is full. She focused on her breathing. She pictured the color of her aura changing in the others’ lenses. She imagined pushing the color from purple to green, healing it slowly, as though it were the evidence of a terrible wound.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“That’s good,” Donna said. “Because we’re not here to prove any one particular thing or another. We’re here to run experiments, gather the last Martian samples before the crewed missions begin, and observe the drills as they dig out the colony. That’s all we’re here to do. You may feel pressure to do something else, due to the nature of this team, but that’s not why we’re here. The work comes first. The policy comes later.”

The Morrígu was divided into three pods: Badb, Macha, and Nemain. No one referred to them that way, of course—only Marshall had the big idea to actually try stumbling through ancient Gaelic with his good ol’ boy accent. He gave up after two weeks. Nonetheless, he still referred to his unit as the Corvus.

“Nice of them to stick with the crow theme,” he said.

“Ravens are omens of death,” Donna said, and just like that, Game Night was over. That was fine with Khalidah. Low-gravity games never had the degree of complexity she liked; they had magnetic game boards, but they weren’t entirely the same. And without cards or tokens they couldn’t really visualize the game in front of them, and basically played permutations of Werewolf or Mafia until they learned each other’s tells.

Not that all that experience had helped her read Donna and Song’s dishonesty. Even after all their time spent together, in training, on the flight, on the station, there was the capacity for betrayal. Even now, she did not truly know them.

Not yet, Khalidah often repeated to herself, as the days stretched on. Not yet. Not for the first time, she wished for a return to 24-hour days. Once upon a time, they had seemed so long. She had yearned for afternoons to end, for lectures to cease, for shifts to close. Now she understood that days on Earth were beautifully, mercifully short.

Sometimes Khalidah caught Donna watching her silently, when she didn’t think Khalidah would notice. When Khalidah met her eyes, Donna would try to smile. It was more a crinkling of the eyes than anything else. It was hard to tell if she was in pain, or unhappy, or both. The brain had no nerve endings of its own, no pain receptors. The headaches that Donna felt were not the tissue’s response to her tumor, but rather a warning sign about a crowded nerve, an endless alarm that rang down through her spinal column and caused nausea and throbbing at odd hours. Or so she said.

Khalidah’s first email was to her own psychiatrist on Earth, through her personal private channel. It was likely the very same type of channel Donna had used to carry on her deception. Can a member of crew just hide any medical condition they want? she wrote.

Your confidentiality and privacy are paramount, Dr. Hassan wrote back from Detroit. You have sacrificed a great deal of privacy to go on this mission. You live in close quarters, quite literally right on top of each other. So the private channels you have left are considered sacrosanct. Communications between any participant and her doctor must remain private until the patient chooses to disclose.

This was not the answer Khalidah had wanted to hear.

Imagine if it were you who had a secret, Dr. Hassan continued, as though having anticipated Khalidah’s feelings on the matter. If you were experiencing the occasional suicidal ideation, for example, would you want your whole crew to know, or would you wait for the ideations to pass?

It was a valid counterargument. Mental health was a major concern on long-haul missions. Adequate care required stringent privacy. But Donna’s cancer wasn’t a passing thought about how much easier it would be to be dead. She was actually dying. And she hadn’t told them.

Now, after all that silence on the matter, the cancer seemed to be all anyone could talk about.

“I’ve almost trained the pain to live on Martian time,” Donna said, one morning. “Most patients feel pain in the morning, but they feel it on an Earth schedule, with full sunlight.”

Khalidah could not bring herself to smile back, not yet. Doing so felt like admitting defeat.

“She won’t die any slower just because you’re mad at her,” Brooklyn said, as they conducted seal checks on the suits.

“Leave me alone,” Khalidah said. Brooklyn just shrugged and got on with the checklist. A moment later, she asked for a flashlight. Khalidah handed it to her without a word.

“Have you watched any of the games your dad sent?” Marshall asked, the next day.

“Please don’t bring him up,” Khalidah said.

Five weeks later, the vomiting started. It was an intriguing low-gravity problem—barf bags were standard, but carrying them around wasn’t. And Donna couldn’t just commandeer the shop-vac for her own personal use. In the end, Marshall made her a little butterfly net, of sorts, with an iris at one end. It was like a very old-fashioned nebulizer for inhaling asthma medication. Only it worked in the other direction.

Not coincidentally, Marshall had brought with him an entire liquid diet intended specifically for cancer patients. Donna switched, and things got better.

“I’ll stick around long enough to get the last samples from Hellas,” she said, sipping a pouch of what appeared to be either a strawberry milkshake or an anti-nausea tonic. She coughed. The cough turned into a gag that she needed to suppress. She clenched a fist and then unclenched it, to master it. “I want my John Hancock on those damn things.”

“Don’t you want to see the landing?” Marshall asked. “You know, hand over the keys, see their faces when they see the ant farm in person for the first time?”

“What, and watch them fuck up all our hard work?”

They all laughed. All of them but Khalidah. How could they just act like everything was normal? Did the crew of the Ganesha mission even know that Donna was sick? Would the team have to explain it? How would that conversation even happen? (“Welcome to Mars. Sorry, but we’re in the middle of a funeral. Anyway, try not to get your microbes everywhere.” )

Then the seizures started. They weren’t violent. More like gentle panic attacks. “My arm doesn’t feel like my arm anymore,” Donna said, as she continued to man her console with one hand. “No visual changes, though. Just localized disassociation.”

“That’s a great band name,” Marshall said.

Morrígu tried to help, in her own way. The station gently reminded Khalidah of all the things that she already knew: that she was distracted, that she wasn’t sleeping, that she would lie awake listening for the slightest tremor in Donna’s breathing, and that sometimes Brooklyn would reach up from her cubby and squeeze Khalidah’s ankle because she was listening too. The station made herself available in the form of the alters, often pinging Khalidah when her gaze failed to track properly across a display, or when her blood pressure spiked, or when she couldn’t sleep. Ursula, most often, but then Octavia. God is Change, the station reminded her. The only lasting truth is Change.

And Khalidah knew that to be true. She did. She simply drew no comfort from it. Too many things had changed already. Donna was dying. Donna, who had calmly helped her slide the rods into the sleeves as they pitched tents in Alberta one dark night while the wolves howled and the thermometer dropped to 30 below. Donna, who had said, “Of course you can do it. That’s not the question,” when Khalidah reached between the cots during isolation week and asked Donna if the older woman thought she was really tough enough to do the job. Donna, without whom Khalidah might have quit at any time.

“You watch any of those games yet?” Marshall asked, when he caught her staring down at the blood-dark surface of the planet. Rusted, old. Not like the wine-dark samples that Song drained from Donna each week.

Khalidah only shook her head. Baseball seemed so stupid now.

“Your dad, he really wanted to get those to you before I left,” Marshall reminded her.

Khalidah took a deep, luxuriant breath. “I told you not to mention him, Marshall. I asked you nicely. Are you going to respect those boundaries, or are we going to have a problem?”

Marshall said nothing, at first. Instead he drifted in place, holding the nearest grip to keep himself tethered. He hadn’t learned how to tuck himself in yet, how to twist and wring himself so that he passed through without touching anyone else. Everything about his presence there still felt wrong.

“We don’t have to be friends,” he said, in measured tones. He pointed down into Storage. “But the others, they’re your friends. Or they thought they were. Until now.”

“They lied to me.”

“Oh, come on. You think it wasn’t tough for Song to go through that? You think she enjoyed it, not telling you? Jesus Christ, Khalidah. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but a lot of us made a lot of sacrifices to get this far.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was so difficult for you, finding out you’d get to go to Mars—”

“—Phobos.”

“—Phobos, without anything like the training we had to endure, just so you could pilot your finicky fucking drill God knows where—”

“Hey, now, I happen to like my finicky fucking drill very fucking much,” Marshall said. He blinked. Then covered his face with his hands. He’d filed his nails down and buzzed his hair in solidarity with Donna. His entire skull was flushed the color of a new spring geranium. “That . . . didn’t come out right.”

Khalidah hung in place. She drew her knees up to her chest and floated. It had been a long time since she’d experienced secondhand embarrassment. Something about sharing such a tiny space with the others for so long ground it out of a person. But she was embarrassed for Marshall now. Not as embarrassed as he was, thank goodness. But embarrassed.

“They sent me alone, you know,” he said, finally, through the splay of his fingers. He scrubbed at the bare stubble of his skull. “Alone. Do you even know what that means? You know all those desert island questions in job interviews? When they ask you what books you’d bring, if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere? Well, I read all of those. War and Peace. Being and Nothingness. Do you have any idea how good I am at solitaire, by now?”

“You can’t be good at solitaire, it’s—”

“But I did it, because they said it was the best chance for giving Donna extra time. If they’d sent two of us, you’d all have to go home a hell of a lot faster. You wouldn’t be here when Ganesha arrives. So I did it. I got here. Alone. I did the whole trip by myself. So you and Donna and the whole crew could have more time.”

Khalidah swallowed hard. “Are you finished?”

“Yes. I’m finished.” He pushed himself off the wall, then bounced away and twisted back to face her. “No. I’m not. I think you’re being a total hypocrite, and I think it’s undermining whatever social value the Morrígu experiment was meant to have.”

Khalidah felt her eyebrows crawl up to touch the edges of her veil. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah. You heard me. You’re being a hypocrite.” He lowered his voice. “Do your friends even know your dad died? Did you tell them that he was dying, when you left? Because I was told not to mention it, and that sure as hell sounds like a secret to me.”

Khalidah closed her eyes. The only place to go, in a space this small, was inward. There was no escape, otherwise. She waited until that soft darkness had settled around her and then asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re not alone, out here. You have friends. Friends you’ve known and worked with for years, in one way or another. So what if Donna jerked you around? She jerked me around too, and you don’t see me acting like a brat about it. Or Brooklyn. Or Song. Meanwhile you’ve been keeping this massive life-changing event from them this whole time.”

Now Khalidah’s eyes opened. She had no need for that comforting blanket of darkness now. “My father dying is not a massive life-changing event,” she snapped. “You think you know all my secrets? You don’t know shit, Marshall. Because if you did, you’d know that I haven’t spoken to that bastard in 10 years.”

As though trying to extract some final usefulness from their former mistress, the drills decided to fail before the Banshee units returned with their samples, and before Ganesha arrived with the re-up and the Mars crew. Which meant that when Ganesha landed, the crew would have to live in half-dug habs.

“It’s the goddamn perchlorate,” Donna whispered. She had trouble swallowing now, and it meant her voice was constantly raw. “I told them we should have gone with the Japanese bit. It drilled the Shinkansen, I said. Too expensive, they said. Now the damn thing’s rusted all to shit.”

Which was exactly the case. The worm dried up suddenly, freezing in place—a “Bertha Bork,” like the huge drill that stalled under Seattle during an ill-fated transit project. They’d rehearsed this particular error. First they ordered all the rovers away in case of a sinkhole, and then started running satellites over the sink. And the drill himself told them what was wrong. The blades were corroded. After five years of work, too much of the red dirt had snuck down into the drill’s workings. It would need to be dug out and cleaned before it could continue. Or it would need to be replaced entirely.

The replacement prototype was already built. It had just completed its first test run in the side of a flattened mountain in West Virginia. It was strong and light and better articulated than the worm. But the final model was supposed to come over with Ganesha. And in the meantime, the hab network still needed major excavation.

“What’s the risk if we send one of the rovers to try to uncover it?” Song asked. “We’ve got one in the cage; it wrapped up its mission ages ago. Wouldn’t be too hard to reconfigure.”

“Phobos rovers might be too light,” Marshall said. “But the real problem is the crashberry; it’ll take three days to inflate and another week to energize. And that’s a week we’re not drilling.”

“We could tell Ganesha to slow down,” Khalidah said.

“They’re ballistic capture,” Marshall said. “If they slow down now, they lose serious momentum.”

“They’d pick it up on arrival, though.”

“Yeah . . . ” Marshall sucked his teeth. “But they’re carrying a big load. They could jackknife once they hit the well, if they don’t maintain a steady speed.” He scrubbed at the thin dusting of blonde across his scalp. “But we have to tell them about this, either way. Wouldn’t be right, not updating them.”

Khalidah snorted. The others ignored her.

“Can we redirect the Banshees?” Brooklyn asked. “Whiskey and Tango are the closest. We could have them dump their samples, set a pin, tell them to dig out the worm, and then come back.”

Khalidah shook her head. “They’re already full. They’re on their way to the mail drop. If we redeployed them now, they wouldn’t be in position when Ganesha arrives. Besides, they’re carrying Hellas—we can’t afford to compromise them.”

“Those samples are locked up like Fort Knox,” Brooklyn said. “What, are you worried that the crew of Ganesha will open them up by mistake? Because that’s pretty much guaranteed not to happen.”

“No, but—”

“There’s a storm in between Whiskey and the worm,” Marshall said. He pointed at an undulating pattern of lines on the screen between two blinking dots. “If we send Whiskey now, we might lose her forever. And the samples. And we still wouldn’t be any further with the drill. Fuck.”

He pushed away from the console, knuckling his eyes. Khalidah watched the planet. In the plate glass, she caught Donna watching her. Her friend was much thinner now. They’d had to turn off her suit, because it no longer fit snugly enough to read her heartbeat. Her breath came in rasps. She coughed often. Last month, Song speculated that the cancer had spread to her lungs; Donna claimed not to care very much. Khalidah heard the older woman sigh slow and deep. And she knew, before Donna even opened her mouth, what she was about to suggest.

“There’s always the Corvus,” Donna said.

“No,” Khalidah said. “Absolutely not.”

But Donna wasn’t even looking at her. She was looking at Marshall. “How much fuel did they really send, Marshall? You got here awfully fast.”

Marshall licked his lips. “Between what I have left over and what Ganesha is leaving behind for you midway, there’s enough to send you home.”

“Which means Corvus has just enough to send me down, and give me thrust to come back.”

“Even if that were true, you could still have a seizure while doing the job,” Song said.

“Then I’ll take my anti-seizure medication before I leave,” Donna said.

“The gravity would demolish you, with the state you’re in,” Marshall said. “It should be me. I should go. I know Corvus better, and my bone density is—”

“That’s very gallant of you, Mr. Marshall, but I outrank you,” Donna reminded him. “Yes, I tire easily. Yes, it’s hard for me to breathe. But I’m stronger than I would be if I were on chemo. And the suit can both give me some lift and push a good air mix for me. Right, Brooklyn?”

Brooklyn beamed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And Marshall, if any of those things do occur, I need you up here to remote-pilot Corvus from topside and get the samples back here.” She gestured at the map. “If you tell Tango to meet me, I can take her samples and put them on Corvus. Then I get in Tango’s cargo compartment and drive her around the storm, to the worm. I dig out the drill, and you restart it from up here. When I come back, you have the samples, and Ganesha has another guest room.” She grinned. The smile made her face into a skull. “Easy peasy,” Donna said.

“You know you’re making history, right?” Marshall asked, as they performed the final checks on Corvus. “First human on Mars, and all that. You’re stealing Ganesha’s thunder.”

Donna coughed. “Don’t jinx it, Marshall.”

“How are your hands?”

Donna held them up. Slowly, she crunched her thickly gloved digits into fists. “They’re okay.”

“That’s good. Go slow. The Banshees take a light touch.”

“I know that, Marshall.”

He pinked. “I know you know. But I’m just reminding you. Now, I’ll get you down there, smooth as silk, and when it’s time to come home you just let us know, okay?”

Donna’s head tilted. She did that when she was about to ask an important question. For a moment it reminded Khalidah so much of the woman she’d been and the woman they’d lost that she forgot to breathe. “Is it home now, for you?”

Marshall’s blush deepened. He really did turn the most unfortunate shade of sunburned red. “I guess so,” he said. “Brooklyn, it’s your turn.”

Brooklyn breezed in and, flipping herself to hang upside down, performed the final checks on Donna’s suit. “You’ve got eight hours,” she said. “Sorry it couldn’t be more. Tango is already on her way, and she’ll be there to meet you when you land.”

“What’s Tango’s charge like?”

“She’s sprinting to meet you, so she’ll be half-empty by the time she hits the rendezvous point,” Marshall said. “But there’s a set of auxiliary batteries in the cargo area. You’d have to move them to get into the cockpit anyhow.”

Donna nodded. The reality of what was about to happen was settling on them. How odd, Khalidah thought, to be weightless and yet to feel the gravity of Donna’s mission tugging at the pit of her stomach. The first human on Mars. The first woman. The first cancer patient. She had read a metaphor of illness as another country, how patients became citizens of it, that place beyond the promise of life, and now she thought of Donna there on the blood-red sands, representing them. Not just a human, but a defiantly mortal one, one for whom all the life-extension dreams and schemes would never bear fruit. All the members of the Ganesha crew had augmentations to make their life on Mars more productive and less painful. Future colonists would doubtless have similar lifehacks. Donna was the only visitor who would ever set an unadulterated foot on that soil.

“I’ll be watching your vitals the whole time,” Song said. “If I don’t like what I see, I’ll tell Marshall to take control of Tango and bring you back.”

Donna cracked a smile. “Is that for my benefit, or the machine’s?”

“Both,” Song said. “We can’t have you passing out and crashing millions of dollars’ worth of machine learning and robotics.”

And then, too soon, the final checks were finished, and it was time for Donna to go. The others drifted to the other side of the airlock, and Brooklyn ran the final diagnostic of the detachment systems. Khalidah’s hands twitched at her veil. She had no idea what to say. Why did you lie to us? Did you really think that would make this easier? What were you so afraid of?

Donna regarded her from the interior of her suit. She looked so small inside it. Khalidah thought of her fragile body shaking inside its soft volumes, her thin neck and her bare skull juddering like a bad piece of video.

“I want—”

“Don’t,” Donna said. “Don’t, Khal. Not now.”

For the first time in a long time, Khalidah peeped at Donna’s aura through the additional layer in her lenses’ vision. It was deep blue, like a very wide and cold stretch of the sea. It was a color she had never seen on Donna. When she looked at her own pattern, it was much the same shade.

Marshall chose this moment to poke his head in. “It’s time.”

Donna reached over to the airlock button. “I have to go now, Khalidah.”

Before Khalidah could say anything, Marshall had tugged her backward. The door rolled shut. For a moment she watched Donna through the small bright circle of glass. Then Donna’s helmet snapped shut and she wore a halo within a halo, like a bull’s-eye.

The landing was as Marshall promised: smooth as silk. With Corvus he was in his element. He and the vessel knew each other well. They’d moved as much of Corvus’ cargo as they could into temporary storage outside the hab; the reduced weight would give Donna the extra boost on the trip back that she might need.

Donna herself rode out the landing better than any of them expected. She took her time unburdening herself of her restraints, and they heard her breathing heavily, trying to choke back the nausea that now dominated her daily life. But eventually she lurched free of the unit, tuned up the jets on her suit, jiggered her air mix, and began the unlocking procedure to open Corvus. They watched her gloved hands hovering over the final lock.

“I hope you’re not expecting some cheesy bullshit about giant leaps for womankind,” Donna said, panting audibly. She sounded sheepish. For Donna, that meant she was nervous. “I didn’t really have time to prepare any remarks. I have a job to do.”

Brooklyn wiped her eyes and covered her mouth. Marshall passed her a tissue, and took one for himself.

“You’ve wanted this since you were a little girl, Donna,” Song said. “Go out there and get it.”

Together they watched the lock spin open, and Donna eased herself out. There was Tango, ready and waiting. And there was Mars, or at least their little corner of it, raw and open and red like a wound.

“I wish I could smell it,” Donna said. “I wish I could taste the air. It feels strange to be here and yet not be here at the same time. You can stand here all you want and never really touch it.”

“You can look at the samples when you bring them back,” Brooklyn managed to say.

Donna said nothing, only silently made her way to Tango and moved the samples back to Corvus. Then she began the procedure to get Tango into manual. Her feed cut out a couple of times, but only briefly; they hadn’t thought to test the signal on the cameras themselves. Her audio was fine, though, and Marshall talked her through when she had questions. In the end it ran like any other remote repair. Even the dig went well; clearing the dirt from the drill and restarting it from the control panel was a lot simpler than any of them had expected.

Halfway back to Corvus, Tango slowly rolled to a stop.

“Donna, check your batteries,” Marshall suggested.

There was no answer. Only Donna’s slow, wet breathing.

“Donna, copy?”

Nothing. They looked at Song; Song pulled up Donna’s vitals. “No changes in her eye movements or alpha pattern,” Song whispered. “She’s not having a seizure. Donna. Donna! Do you need help?”

“No,” Donna said, finally. “I came here to do a job, and now I’m finished with it. I’m done.”

Something in Khalidah’s stomach turned to ice. “Don’t do this,” she whispered, as Marshall began to say “No, no, no,” over and over. He started bashing things on the console, running every override he could.

“No, you don’t, you crazy old broad,” he muttered. “I can get Tango to drive you back, you know!”

“Not if I’ve ripped out the receiver,” Donna said. She sounded exhausted. “I think I’ll just stay here, thank you. Ganesha can deal with me when they come. You don’t have to do it. You’d have had to freeze me, anyway, and vibrate me down to crystal, like cat litter, and—”

“Fuck. You.”

It was the first full complete sentence that Khalidah had spoken to her in months. So she repeated it.

“Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to us. Again. Fuck you for this selfish fucking bullshit. Oh, you think you’re being so romantic, dying on Mars. Well fuck you. We came here to prove we could live, not . . . ” Her lips were hot. Her eyes were hot. It was getting harder to breathe. “Not whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing.”

Nothing.

“Donna, please don’t,” Brooklyn whispered in her most wheedling tone. “Please don’t leave us. We need you.” She sounded like a child. Then again, Khalidah wasn’t sure she herself sounded any better. Somehow this loss contained within it all the other losses she’d ever experienced: her mother, her father, the slow pull away from the Earth and into the shared unknown.

“This is a bad idea,” Marshall said, his voice calm and steady. “If you want to take the Lethezine, take the Lethezine. But you don’t know how it works—what if it doesn’t go like you think it will, and you’re alone and in pain down there? Why don’t you come back up, and if something goes wrong, we’ll be there to help?”

Silence. Was she deliberating? Could they change her mind? Khalidah strained to hear the sound of Tango starting back up again. They flicked nervous, tearful glances at each other.

“Are you just going to quit?” Khalidah asked, when the silence stretched too long. “Are you just going to run away, like this? Now that it’s hard?”

“You have no idea how hard this is, Khal, and you’ve never once thought to ask.”

It stung. Khalidah let the pain transform itself into anger. Anger, she decided, was the only way out of this problem. “I thought you didn’t want me to ask, given how you never told us anything until it was too late.”

“It’s not my fault I’m dying!”

“But it’s your fault you didn’t tell us! We would have—”

“You would have convinced me to go home.” Donna chuckled. It became a cough. The cough lasted too long. “Because you love me, and you want me to live. And I love you, so I would have done it.” She had another little coughing jag. “But the trouble with home is that there’s nothing to go back to. I’ve thrown my whole life into this. I’ve had to pass on things—real things—to get to this place. But now that I’m here, I know it was worth it. And that’s how I want to end it. I don’t want to die alone in a hospital surrounded by people who don’t understand what’s out here, or why we do this.”

Khalidah forced her voice to remain firm. “And so you want to die alone, down there, surrounded by nothing at all?”

“I’m not alone, Khal. You’re with me. You’re all with me, all the time.”

Brooklyn broke down. She pushed herself into one corner. Khalidah reached up, and held her ankle, tethering her into the group. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears bud away. Song’s beautiful ponytail drifted across her face. Arms curled around Khalidah’s body. Khalidah curled her arms around the others. They were a Gordian knot, hovering far above Donna, a problem she could not solve and could only avoid.

“That’s right, Donna,” Marshall said. “We’re here. We’re right here.”

“I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t want to. But I just . . . I wanted to stay, more than I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Khalidah said. “I . . . ” She wiped at her face. Her throat hurt. “I miss you. Already.”

“I miss you, too. I miss all of you.” Donna sniffed hard. “But this is where we’re supposed to be. Because this is where we are at our best.”

They were quiet for a while. There was nothing to do but weep. Khalidah thought she might weep forever. The pain was a real thing—she had forgotten that it hurt to cry. She had forgotten the raw throat and pounding head that came with full-body grief. She had forgotten, since her mother, how physically taxing it could be.

“Are you ready, now?” Song asked, finally. She wiped her eyes and swallowed. “Donna? Are you ready to take the dose?”

The silence went on a long time. But still, they kept asking, “Are you ready? Are you ready?”

Originally published in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich, and Juliet Ulman.

About the Author

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She has worked with Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, The Atlantic Council, the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, Changeist, and others. She has spoken at SXSW, FutureEverything, MozFest, and other events. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, MISC Magazine, and FutureNow. Her fiction has appeared in Slate, MIT Tech Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty novels. Her novel Company Town was a Canada Reads finalist.

A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World

A.C. Wise

June 21, 2232—Svalbard

The twenty-first of June, the Summer Solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. That means less here at the top of the world where, in this season, we have sunlight twenty-four hours a day. But it seemed like an appropriate day to start this project nonetheless.

In just over a week, the generation ship Arber will depart on its journey. The docking clamps will release, and it will go sailing off into space to find the future of humanity. This is my parting gift, a catalogue of sunlight from the world left behind.

Of course the sun will still be there, getting farther away as they travel, but it won’t be the same. The people on that ship—those ships, leaving from all points above the globe—will never again see sunlight the way it looks here and now. They won’t see the sky bruise purple and hushed gold or the violent shades of lavender, rose, and flame as the sun creeps toward the horizon. They’ll never see the way this sun sparkles off water in a fast-moving brook or dapples the ground beneath a canopy of leaves. It won’t pry its way through their blinds in the morning, or slip under doors and through all the cracks sealed up against its intrusion. They won’t know the persistence of it, the sheer amount of it. They’ll only know its loss.

Maybe the Arber’s children, or their children’s children will see starlight on the dust of some distant world, watch it pool in the craters of their first new footsteps and call it the sun. But not the ones leaving. The ones who grew up under its light. This is my gift to them. A little something to take with them into the cold and the dark.

Today, the light is pure. There isn’t a cloud in the sky to cut it, no breeze to stir it off our skins. All the shadows are sharp-edged. There’s so much of it, it’s easy to forget it’s there. Ubiquitous sun. It gets over everything and under everything and inside it. Today, the light of the sun has almost no color at all, but if you squint just right, you can prism it, see the rainbow fractures flaring away from it. That is the sun here today, children. The sun you’re leaving behind. There has never been another just like it, and there never will be again.

There. That part is for the future. This part is for the present and the past. For you and me, Mila.

Kathe came to see me today and asked me one more time to go with them. There’s room, she said. You could stay with me, Linde, Ivan, and the kids until we figure things out. She didn’t mention Thomas.

Kathe has pull. It comes with being Head of Resource Management, Northern Division. She could make it happen, our girl. That’s what she does, after all. She manages resources. If she says there’s room for me, then there’s room. She could probably get me the nicest berth on the ship, if I asked.

Space travel is for the young, I told her. It’s no place for an old man like me. Besides, this is my home. I like it here. This is where I belong.

But your children, she said. Your grandchildren.

Her eyes. It’s hard to look at them sometimes. They remind me so much of you. I think she knew she’d already lost the fight.

What’s the point of space? It’s just another place to be without you. I have my kettle here. I have my woolen socks and my favorite mug. I have a library full of books and music. I’ve even adopted a cat. Or it’s adopted me. A little gray kitten I’ve named Predator X. They won’t have cats in space. They’ll have genetic material, of course, but it’s hard to cuddle a test tube on a cold winter’s night and be comforted by its purr.

May 23, 2171—Prince Edward Island

To hell with separating past and future. This is my catalogue, and I’ll tell it how I choose and to who I choose, and I choose you, Mila.

Obviously May 23, 2171 isn’t today’s date, and I’m not on Prince Edward Island. It’s when and where we were married. The sunlight on that day deserves to be memorialized.

It was golden in the way sunlight never is outside of photographs and memories. It caught in your hair, turning those flyaway strands you could never get to behave—even on that day—into individual threads of crystal. It was sunlight in its ideal form, its most romantic form. They say it’s lucky to have rain on your wedding day, but I think that’s just something to make people feel better when their bouquets and tuxedoes and cakes and dozen white doves are all soggy and miserable.

We were married on the beach, on the dunes, with the waves in the background and wild seagrass running everywhere around us. Those dunes are gone now. In another few years, the whole island will be gone, lost to rising sea levels like New Orleans and Florida, London and Venice. So many cities swallowed whole. But back then, it was beautiful.

Lupines and red sand—those stick out in my mind. You insisted on traveling back to your family’s home because your grandmother wasn’t well enough to travel, and you wanted her to give you away. I didn’t have any people of my own left, so one place was as good as another to me. You were all the family I wanted and needed back then. Now that my life is coming full circle, I’m finding that’s true once again.

The day I proposed to you was the day I stole the Gibraltar Campion from the seed vault. Silene tomentosa, your favorite flower. The first time I saw you, you were looking at a 3-D projection of it, part of the vault’s new finding aid. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was your program. You were also the one who got rare and endangered flowers added to the vault along with staple crops. You said beautiful things should be saved as well as useful ones, and besides, bees and pollination and flowers—even rare and temperamental ones—are part of our ecosystem, too.

On the day we met, you were looking at the Gibraltar Campion from every angle, studying it with a scientist’s eye. I don’t think you knew anyone was watching you. Then, for just a moment, your expression changed; you weren’t looking at the flower like a scientist anymore. You frowned and reached out like you wanted to brush your finger along the pale silk of its petal.

Had you ever seen one in person? I imagined how many years you’d spent studying it and how you’d launched a whole program to protect it and other flowers like it. But had you ever held its thin stem between your fingers or breathed it in to see if it had a scent? That unguarded moment of fascination and longing—that’s the moment I fell in love.

It was hell getting the Campion to grow. I sweated over it in secret, afraid of giving it too much water, not enough. But I did get it to grow. That was always my gift. Can’t cook worth a damn. Never had a scrap of musical talent or enough coordination to play sports. Green thumbs, though. I have those like nobody’s business. It’s why I was hired on at the Global Seed Vault in the first place. It’s what led me to you, so I can’t complain.

Smuggling my Gibraltar Campion into Canada without getting caught— that was a special hell all of its own. Then I presented you with the bouquet—the sad, single-flower bouquet I was so proud of—right before you walked down the aisle of sand and seagrass, and you almost called the wedding off right then and there.

What the hell were you thinking? you said. Do you have any idea how rare the Gibraltar Campion is? They brought it back from the dead. It was nearly extinct. What the hell do you think the vault is for anyway?

Storing up flowers so no one ever sees them? A vault full of potential, but never the reality?

Of course I didn’t say that aloud. I wouldn’t dare.

Some things are meant to be enjoyed, is what I did say, and I tried to charm you with a smile. Sometimes you have to appreciate what you have while you have it, instead of holding on to it for someday. You just have to live and let go and stop worrying about the future.

You called me selfish and a dozen other more unsavory names. You almost shoved me into the water. God, I was young and stupid back then. But somehow, I convinced you to marry me anyway.

You stayed mad at me through the whole ceremony. You refused to hold the Campion, so I held it, and you glared at me the whole time you said your vows. At the end though, you smiled a little, too. Then you cried; we both cried, and you told me if I ever did anything that stupid again you would throw my body into a bottomless crevasse where it would never be found. When we kissed, it tasted like salt, and we crushed the Campion between us, and we laughed so hard we started crying all over again.

I miss you, Mila. Every goddamn day.

June 23, 2232—Svalbard

There was a big party down on the beach today. A goodbye for everybody leaving and everyone staying behind. We lit a huge bonfire, which seems strange in the middle of the day, but when the sun never goes down, what else can you do?

This is what the sun looked like five days before everyone went away. Weak, like tea or good scotch watered down a thousand times. Like if you took a glass and kept adding ice to it every time you took a sip, trying to stretch that last bit of alcohol just a little farther. Sunlight, divided infinitely and spread thin, the faintest hint of peat and smoke on the tongue.

It was mostly overcast, but every now and then something would break loose in the great patchwork of gray and a beam of light would come shooting through. It might pin the stones on the shore or a little boy’s hair as he ran toward the water. It might catch a mother and daughter in a tender moment of goodbye or fall on the waves and break over and over again. Sunlight is like that, fickle and faithless. It shines on us all.

Listen to me getting melancholy. Then again, it is the end of the world.

Everyone was there. We probably only made up a handful, compared to other celebrations around the world, but this was ours. We roasted fish on wooden spits. There were marshmallows and tofu hotdogs. Someone made a spicy curry with goat meat; someone else made a giant pot of borscht. There were real English popovers. There was even an attempt at poutine. You would have loved it.

A kitchen party. That’s what it reminded me of. Not that I’d ever been to one, but from your descriptions—everyone getting together, each person bringing food and something to drink and an instrument. Your grandmother used to throw them, just like the old days, you said. The whole house would be open to anyone who wanted to join in, music spilling out of every door and window all night long.

The party on the beach was like that, music and dancing, and all of it just seemed to roll on and on. Kathe was there with Linde and Ivan and the kids. Thomas was there, too, with Leena and their kids. Honestly, I’m surprised they never left Svalbard, Thomas especially. We chose this life, but Thomas and Kathe were born into it. Maybe they stayed because they’d already put down roots here or maybe because we have the illusion of safety up here at the top of the world, while wildfires and earthquakes, mudslides caused by deforestation and rising tide lines ravage the globe.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad they stayed; I got to see my grandchildren. On the day of the party, they all ran around on the shore together, chasing the black-legged kittiwakes and the long-tailed skua. Even Dani, who’s almost thirteen now, too old for playing and entering that awkward stage of being caught between everything.

Kathe came to talk to me when things quieted down and the mood turned somber. We all looked up and remembered the space elevator was still going nonstop, bringing people and supplies up to the station and then to the Arber, all those eager and heartbroken people, ready to start their future.

What will you do when we’re all gone, Dad? Kathe asked. We sat side by side, looking out at the ocean.

We’ll get by, I told her. There will just be less of us. The Andersens are staying, and the Guptas. Raj is already planning a rotating dinner party. Everyone will take a turn hosting, and we’ll keep each other company. Besides, things aren’t too bad here, not like it is further south, and we still have the elevator and the station if things do get bad. In the meantime, I’ll have my garden, and I have Predator X. Helen Holbrook is going to teach me how to make cheese if I help her milk her goats.

I tried to make it sound cheerful, like it would be a continuation of the party on the beach, but smaller. Kathe didn’t look like she believed me. In truth, I knew there would be lonely days, but there would be days I relished my solitude, too. When you get to be my age, you surprise yourself by how often you’re content to just sit and think.

We sat quietly for a bit then. It reminded me of when Kathe was little, before Thomas was born. In fact, it was when you were pregnant with Thomas. While you napped in the afternoons, I would bring Kathe to the beach to collect stones and look for fossils. She never shared our love of growing things, that one, though she was curious as hell. It was all about stillness with Kathe, the frozen remnants of the past. Funny, then, that she’s the one going up into the stars, not me.

And Thomas, well . . . Maybe I should have tried harder to understand him and the things he loved, but with Kathe it was so much easier. She wore her heart on her sleeve, while Thomas was so closed and serious. He was never a little boy, not really. It was more like he was born a grown-up, and he was just waiting for his body to catch up with his mind.

We’ll still talk, I told Kathe after a while, as long as the ship is in communication range. And after that, we’ll have the ansible. Besides, it’s not like I’ll be alone, if you’re worried about me.

I do worry, she said. That’s a daughter’s job.

When did you get old enough for that to be true? I asked, and that made her smile at last. It was good to see. Besides, I said, it’s not like the world is really ending. Just changing, that’s all.

I know, but there are some things I don’t want to change, Kathe said, and right then she wasn’t Head of Resource Management, Northern Division, she was just our little girl again, and it nearly broke my heart. You’ve been there for me my whole life, me and Tom both, and I don’t know what I’ll do without you.

I squeezed her hand, and we both blinked against more than just smoke from the bonfire.

You’ll be fine, kiddo.

I was searching for something else to say, something inspirational and comforting, but Thomas came over and nudged the tip of Kathe’s boot with his toe.

Can I talk to Dad for a minute? he said. Alone.

I can’t remember the last time I heard Thomas call me Dad. I didn’t think I would ever hear it again.

Kathe looked surprised, but she gave Thomas her spot and gave us our privacy.

I know Kathe has tried to talk you into taking a place on the ship about a hundred times. Thomas kept his hands in his pockets while he talked, his gaze on the horizon. I’m not going to rehash all that. I just wanted to let you know she’s not the only one. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but you’re my father.

I opened my mouth to say something or maybe just take a breath in surprise, but Thomas held up his hand to stop me.

Just let me finish. He looked down and didn’t raise his head again.

When Mom died, it was the hardest thing I’d ever had to watch. I know, and Thomas held his hand up again, even though he didn’t look at me. I’m not here to open old wounds. I just wanted to say it was hard, but you were there for Mom, every day. Kathe and I were there, too. She had her family all around her. She didn’t have to go through any of it alone. When your time comes, I just thought . . . I always thought we’d be there for you.

He looked up finally. His eyes aren’t like yours, or Kathe’s. They’re more like my mother’s. I didn’t know what to say to him, Mila. I’ve never known. He touched my shoulder, let his hand rest for a moment, then walked away.

I’ve been thinking about it since leaving the beach. Thomas deserves an explanation. And Kathe. Maybe you deserve an explanation, too.

We spent our lives building the future, saving all those plants and flowers in the vault, not to mention our own future with Kathe and Thomas. Now that the future’s here, I’m terrified. Thomas was right, watching you die was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I don’t want that for our children, and I don’t want that for myself.

Maybe a bit of it is selfish. A man gets to a certain age, and he wants to live his life on his own terms. I think I understand the choices you made now a little better than I used to. When the end comes, when my end comes, I want to go quick and painless, not hooked up to machines. I’ll choose the time and place of my death, when I’m ready, and I want it to be here on Earth with you.

In space, even death will be different. Kathe explained it to me. There’s a morgue on the generation ship that is also a chapel and a burial chamber and a cryo-storage unit. Aboard the Arber, people will have the option of being ejected into space, being recycled—protein and calcium and other vital elements broken down and reused in a variety of ways—or being stored until their remains can be buried on the same alien world where our new crops will grow. That’s what death looks like in the next great age of humanity.

I understand that Thomas and Kathe want to be with me at the end, but this is the point where our roads diverge. You and me, we did what we could to build the future, Mila, but it isn’t for us. Why should Kathe and Thomas bring grief with them among the stars when they can carry memories instead? I want them to remember me as I am now, not the way I might be one day down the road.

It’s like we said all those years ago—sometimes you just have to live in the moment and enjoy what you have now, not hold on for one day and what’s to come. I want to enjoy what’s here while I can. We were the last generation who could have turned the tide. By the time Kathe and Thomas came along, it was too late to undo the mess we’d made. Climate change had already passed the tipping point, and whatever measures we put in place from then on out could only slow things down, not reverse them.

Perhaps it sounds egotistical, but I feel I owe it to the Earth to stay with her as long as I can. No one, not even a planet, should have to die alone.

August 16, 2200—Colorado

I’m going to cheat and talk about starlight, instead of the sun. Then again, the sun is a star, even if we usually don’t think of it that way. The stars on this particular day are important to remember; it’s the day we started saying goodbye.

We were vacationing in Buena Vista, staying at a resort built up around a hot spring. We went skinny-dipping in the springs on our last night, and even though it was high season, we had the place entirely to ourselves. You leaned back against the pool’s edge, and said, Well, I’m dying. Just like that.

You’d been losing weight for a while, but I wanted to pretend it was just your appetite slowing down now that we were both past middle age. You’d already considered all your options, you told me, talked to all the doctors. You’d tried everything there was to try—radiation pills, alternative therapy, even the more aggressive forms of chemo like they had in the old days. Those weeks you told me you were visiting your sister? You were really puking your guts out, suffering, but you didn’t want me to worry until you were really sure there was something to worry about.

The only thing left to try was gene therapy, and that was a bridge too far. It’s fine for babies, you said, fetuses in the womb who don’t know any better, but I know who I am and I wouldn’t feel like myself anymore if I let them scrub me clean. It’s my own body’s cells betraying me. Maybe I just have to live with that. Besides, why go through all that trouble and expense when at my age, there’s only a five percent chance of success? I want to enjoy as much of the time I have left as I can, not spend it hooked up to machines.

Then you reached into the backpack you’d carried out to the hot springs with us and pulled out a small terra-cotta pot holding a Gibraltar Campion. It might have been from the very same seed batch as the one I grew for you all those years ago. Yours was barely a seedling though, growing crooked like it wouldn’t survive a strong wind.

I never did have your knack for it, you said. You held out the pot to me and smiled that lopsided smile of yours. Sometimes you just have to live for the moment, right? Appreciate what you have and not worry about the future.

Damn you for throwing my words back at me. How dare you give up? How dare you throw everything away when we still had so much living to do? But I could only stare at you and the Campion.

You let a full minute of silence go by before you asked me if I was okay. If I was okay when you were the one dying. What could I say? All my words dried up in that moment. You took my hand. We sat in the hot spring, your fingers in mine under the water, and tears ran down my face. Later, we made love, and I was crying then, too. I think I cried more that night than I did at your funeral.

The sky was utterly clear. There’s nothing like a skyscraper for miles in Buena Vista and next to no light pollution. On a night as clear as the one on which you told me you were dying, the sky was a bowl of blue so dark it passed into black and came out the other side.

That blue-dark bowl closed over the mountains, sealing us in, but everywhere we looked, there was light. I want to say the stars were bright, and they were, but they were so bright and there were so many of them, they looked fuzzy.

The stars between the stars were visible, and somehow it was different than looking at them from the top of the world, even though there isn’t much light pollution in Svalbard either. The stars seemed farther away. They seemed alive, like the whole of the dark was crawling with silver. I could almost see the arm of the Milky Way unfurling around us. It was enough to make me dizzy. Or maybe that was the hot water from the spring. Or the thought of letting you go.

Right before we fell asleep that night, you lay spooned against my back. I held your hands, your arms pulled all the way around me. I thought if I held on tight enough, maybe you wouldn’t go. You leaned forward and whispered in my ear, Take care of my flower for me, when I’m gone.

I still have the damn thing, Mila. Or at least its descendant. It’s sitting on my windowsill. Predator X hasn’t knocked it over yet, not for lack of trying. I want that flower to be the last thing I see in this world. When I’m too old and frail to walk around anymore, I’ll keep it by my bedside. It’s a little piece of you, so when I die, I won’t be doing it alone.

June 24, 2232—Svalbard

Linde and Ivan are taking the kids to get settled on the ship today. Kathe will join them just before launch. Thomas and Leena are already on board.

Before Linde and Ivan boarded, Ivan asked me if I was sure I hadn’t changed my mind. I never expected him to be the one. I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking if Kathe had put him up to it, but there was genuine regret in his eyes. Linde shook my hand, firm and strong as always. Ivan hugged me. I couldn’t ask for better children-in-law.

Sometimes I think of the dangers Kathe, Linde, Ivan, and even Thomas will face up there. What would you think of me, letting our children, their spouses, our grandchildren go off into the dark alone? Kathe, Linde, Ivan, Thomas, and Leena will likely never see an alien world, let alone set foot on one. It’ll be their children, their children’s children who will colonize the stars. If they make it that far.

I think of all the things that could go wrong—a critical failure in the engines; explosive decompression blowing them all out into space; a plague; failure of the shipboard crops and death by slow starvation. Those possibilities are next to none. Kathe gave me the figures, something like a 0.001% chance. Me being on board certainly wouldn’t tip the balance one way or another. Still, it’s a parent’s job to worry.

This is what the sun looked like on the day my grandchildren climbed aboard the space elevator and we all said goodbye.

The ocean was a sullen color, like pewter, but with a shine. Maybe tarnished silver would be a better comparison, the surface dull but with a brightness hidden underneath. The sun had a pinkish tint to it. Pink is normally a warm color, but this pink was cold. Like the inside of a shell fresh out of the sea or a thin sliver of pickled ginger. Like skin, when all the warmth of blood and a beating heart has gone out of it and it’s just a container, no longer full.

There were clouds, a very few of them, scattered across the sky. The kittiwakes and skua glided on the wing, and every now and then one of them would let out a cry.

Ella, that’s Kathe and Linde and Ivan’s youngest, cried when she hugged me. She put her arms around my waist, and pressed her face into my stomach. I think she’s too young to really understand the nature of this goodbye, but she could read the mood. Ryan, he’s the middle child, promised to video call every day as long as they were in range. Dani, the eldest, didn’t seem to know what to say. They shook my hand like Linde had, very formal, and that was the end.

I watched the elevator as far as I could. After a while the sun shifted to a white-yellow, cold, pure. The color of goodbye.

June 26, 2176—Luang Prabang

There’s nothing particularly special about this day, no reason it deserves to be memorialized, but life isn’t all about the big moments. In fact, life is mostly what happens in-between, and the sun shines on those days, too. That’s what this catalogue is intended to capture, after all.

I remember the day because it’s the day I stopped thinking about the future as an abstract. For as long as we’d known each other, we’d been working toward the future, cataloging and protecting and gathering seeds in the vault at Svalbard. But that future was a nebulous concept. It was for someone else, not us. That day, I started thinking about the future as a personal concept, like maybe one day we’d have a family, and they would make everything we were trying to do to make the world a better place—even in small ways—worthwhile.

We were about 60 miles outside of Luang Prabang on that day, hiking. I don’t remember the names of all the villages we passed through, but we started at the temple at Mt. Phoushi, overlooking the Mekong River.

We were there to pick up three new and heartier strains of Oryza sativa—rice, in layman’s terms. They could have been shipped to the vault, but you convinced the director to let us act as couriers. We changed each other over the years, Mila. When we first met, you would quote rules and regulations and procedure for hours on end. I like to think I taught you to appreciate the spirit of the law, as much as the letter of it. It’s like the way my concept of the future changed. I’d like to think I helped you see that we weren’t just protecting plants as a nebulous concept; we were protecting living things you could touch and hold in your hand and appreciate for more than just their potential.

And you taught me to see a wider world. Before I met you, I never thought much beyond the present moment. You expanded everything. I loved you more than I loved myself, and that made my world so much larger than it had ever been before. You taught me that the future is worth protecting, even the parts I won’t live to see. You taught me to have hope.

We did some touristy things in Luang Prabang—the temple, the Royal Palace, the Night Market—but it’s the hike I remember the most. Our guides took us in a boat across the Nam Xuang. I think there were about ten of us, total. Tourism was on the decline already in those days. We hiked for maybe five or six hours, past rice paddies and through jungles. We stopped in a little village where we watched children play soccer.

And that was where it hit me, the idea of having a personal stake in the future. We hadn’t even talked about kids yet, but I found myself wondering what our family would be like. Not if we would have one; it suddenly seemed like a given. We were so in love, how could that love help but spill over and spread outward and keep on multiplying itself?

I wondered if our kids would be happy. If they’d play soccer, running around with pure, unfettered joy. I wondered if they would grow up to have kids of their own.

When Kathe was born, I worried about so many things. I wanted to do everything to protect her. You were the one who finally got me to relax, to let go a little. She would be her own person; we’d given her everything she needed to get a good start in life. And you were right, Mila. We raised some good kids. Or, really, they grew into good people, and we managed to not fuck it up by getting in their way.

After that first village, we hiked to another village where all the houses were on stilts, and they gave us strong rice wine to sample. At our last stop, the villagers had set out a dinner to share with the hikers and our guides on a long wooden table in a barn. Before we ate, we watched the sun go down. It was less a sunset and more a sense of the light being swallowed by the mist, diffusing and turning the sky the color of a new peach, sliced thin and still holding the warmth of the day—sweet and melting and bright on the tongue.

What I remember most is the way the light caught in a curl of your hair, just before the sun vanished. It reminded me of our wedding day, except instead of flyaway strands, the hair stuck in the sweat on the back of your neck. It was like you’d found a way to braid the sunlight and make it a part of you.

I know that sounds incredibly sappy, but it’s true. Or, at least, I’ve built it into truth over the years. That’s what people left alone with their thoughts and their gray kittens named after prehistoric animals do. They invent narratives to make sense of their lives and to fix the pattern of those lives more firmly in their minds. Even if that isn’t the way the sunlight looked on that particular day, that is how I choose to remember it. That is the image I’m sending out among the stars.

June 30, 2232—Svalbard

Today was the last day, or the first day, depending on how you look at it. The Arber has officially set sail, or whatever word one uses for the departure of a ship the size of a city without masts or cloth or anything resembling a sail.

This is the first day of the new age of humanity.

Our children’s children’s children, will they even be human anymore? Born in space, living all those years on a ship under sunlamps and breathing recycled air. Will they still call themselves human when they land on a new world and make it their own?

I don’t have any answers. How can I speak to the big questions of life when the small ones still elude me? How do you love someone and let them go? How can someone be a stranger and still be your own flesh and blood? How can you feel closer to someone who isn’t even on Earth any more than you ever did when they were right there beside you?

Indulge me for a moment, Mila. I know you always hoped my relationship with Thomas would be more like my relationship with Kathe. The truth is, there was always a rift between us. Maybe we both sensed it, and so we kept our distance. Or maybe it was just a failure on both of our parts to try.

When you died, the rift widened, and everything came crashing down. Thomas blamed me. He told me in no uncertain terms that I should have forced you to undergo gene therapy. As if your body, and the decisions you made regarding it, were any business of mine. I told him over and over again it wasn’t what you wanted. You’d considered and discarded that option.

There were days I agreed with him though, and that hurt the most. I lashed out at him, when I really wanted to lash out at you. At the end, when you were delirious, I couldn’t help thinking—could I have done more? Could I have forced you? In the end, I respected your wishes. In the end, I sat by and watched you die.

I know, there are no guarantees that the gene therapy would have worked. It might have led to more suffering. But I can’t help wondering . . . You dedicated your life to the vault and to Svalbard, to cheating nature by finding stronger, heartier crops to withstand droughts and monsoons. You were determined to do everything you could to give them more than a fair and fighting chance to survive. Why wouldn’t you take that road yourself?

I didn’t understand at the time. I think I’m closer to understanding now. At my age, death is no longer a nebulous concept far away. I’ve thought about it and what I do and do not want it to be. I don’t want to be hooked up to machines on a spaceship fighting for a few more hours or months or years. I don’t want to be stuck in a cold-freeze drawer just so my distant descendants can put flowers on my grave under an alien sun. It’s my death; I want to own it. Death is the last thing we do as human beings, so I’m damned well going to do it on my own terms.

Does that make sense, Mila? That I can blame you and hate that you left me and still send our children off into space and insist on staying behind? I suppose we’re all a bundle of contradictions in the end. Maybe that’s what ultimately makes us human. No matter what other changes or adaptations occur, that will survive.

Kathe came and sat on the porch with me before boarding the last elevator to the station. We sipped strong black coffee. She held my hand. We didn’t speak. In the end, at the end, we sat and watched the skua and the kittiwakes. We watched the sun play on the water. Then she kissed my cheek and that was goodbye.

I watched the sky for a long time after she left. I imagined if I shaded my eyes just right, I would be able to see something as the Arber set sail. I would know, or feel it deep in my bones. But there wasn’t anything to see.

No, that isn’t quite true. There was the sun. On the last day, on the first day, the sun was bright and clean and it threw a halo around itself, a celebration or one last goodbye, although it was only those who were staying behind who would ever see. The light on the last day of the world was every color the sun could be, all the colors it won’t be in space.

I read once that every person who sees a halo around the sun or the moon sees their own individual halo. Even two people standing right next to each other wouldn’t see exactly the same thing. The light breaks through different atmospheric crystals for each of them, no two beams fracturing in quite the same way. Every halo is unique.

I suppose that’s all there is. I’m sending this out into the stars to travel to new worlds, so new generations will be able to look back to know how the sun looked on a particular day back where their parents’ parents’ parents came from. So they’ll know how the sun looked to one specific person as it bounced off the water or rested against the skin of someone he loved or slipped beneath the rim of the world.

Now, I’m going to make myself another cup of coffee and sit out on the porch a little while longer. Maybe I can even coax Predator X onto my lap. I may be alone, but I’m not lonely. I have everything I need. You’re buried here, and from the moment I met you, I’ve never known how to be anywhere else but with you. The future is out there among the stars, but I’m where I belong. I’m home.

Originally published in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland.

About the Author

A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 3, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and a novella forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers.

Melon Farmers! Science Fiction Stumbles on the Way to the Theater

Mark Cole

There’s an old saying about five-star restaurants: you do not want to see the kitchen. Let’s face it: sometimes you are better off not knowing how things get made.

That certainly applies to movies. Film is a big business, which devours vast quantities of money and talent—and too often, the talent finds itself at the mercy of those who foot the bills.

Never was this clearer than the early Eighties when science fiction suddenly entered the mainstream. While an impressive number of films made it to the screen in record time, many suffered very public woes along the way.

Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind showed that there was a market for science fiction. The problem was that neither bore much resemblance to the other. Unlike westerns, crime thrillers, or other genres, it wasn’t clear what a science fiction film should be.

The first few were the films already in the pipeline, like Disney’s, The Black Hole. It started out as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in space, but, in the wake of Lucas’ epic, got a budget twice that of Star Wars. Unfortunately, what had been a space gothic complete with a dazzling Victorian Crystal Palace spaceship, suddenly acquired Star Wars-style robot pals and robot Stormtroopers.

But the real problem was that it didn’t have an ending.

It seems inconceivable that Disney would green light a twenty million dollar film without a scripted ending, but not only didn’t they have one, they had no idea how it should end. Peter Ellenshaw proposed a black hole journey ending with a long, slow zoom from Yvette Mimieux’s eye, revealing that she is staring at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. It doesn’t make much sense, but then neither did the real ending.

Endings have always been problematic. Sometimes, however, it was better that the studio intervened: in Ridley Scott’s original Alien script, the Xenomorph kills Ripley, calls the company in the Captain’s voice, and sets the controls for Earth.

Other films suffered far more public meltdowns.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture followed a singularly convoluted path to the screen: Gene Roddenberry tried to sell a movie to Paramount. They liked the idea because Star Trek was doing so well in syndication, but rejected his script, The God Thing, and one by Harlan Ellison. Star Trek: Planet Of The Titans did get into development, with a seven and a half million dollar budget and Philip Kaufman signed to direct, but fell apart before it got very far.

Paramount then planned to launch a fourth network with Star Trek: Phase II as their main attraction (much as they did twenty years later with UPN and Star Trek: Voyager). The long and curiously leisurely development of the new show began in 1977, with a script turnaround time in months rather than weeks.

Gene convinced most of his old cast to return (except Leonard Nimoy), created new characters, and even had a replacement Captain on hand in case they decided to kill off Kirk because of William Shatner’s salary demands.

The original Art Director, Matt Jefferies, redesigned the Enterprise. They constructed the main sets, made new uniforms, and recycled what they could of the surviving props and costumes.

And then Star Wars came out.

When the producer pitched Alan Dean Foster’s pilot to Paramount, Michael Eisner said, “We’ve been looking for the feature for five years and this is it.” Phase II was dead, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture was born.

Only it wasn’t quite that simple. Paramount had run the numbers and knew their proposed Network wouldn’t break even. Not that they told anyone working on the new show. By changing the production into a movie, they could write off their development costs—even the scripts which would never be filmed.

It is easy to see why things went wrong: it was the classic movie made by committee. Roddenberry, the producers, and Paramount all had things they wanted, but no one had a clear vision for the film. Far worse, they still had no ending, and no one had the slightest idea what a satisfying one might look like.

Robert Wise was brought in to direct, but he had no meaningful science fiction experience (despite making The Day the Earth Stood Still), and never managed to assert any real control. By all accounts, he seemed overwhelmed by a huge and essentially rudderless production.

The job of creating the special effects fell on Robert Abel and Associates (RAA), a new but highly rated firm. Paramount gave them an eight million dollar budget, which soon ballooned to twelve.

Paramount dumped RAA and brought in Douglas Trumbull to finish the job.

It would be easy to blame RAA, but the endless script changes (so frequent at one point, that they had to not only date but time them!) forced them to scrap sequences they’d storyboarded and start over. Although they’d done all the design work, built most of the models, and storyboarded the entire film four times (only their V’ger sequence did not get used in the film), they ultimately received only a single screen credit.

Paramount had collected thirty million in bookings for the December 7, 1979 release date and refused to change it. The execs and lawyers were told “Gentlemen, I don’t care if the story doesn’t make sense, I don’t care if it cuts together. We’re delivering this movie. Period.”

With six months left, the new effects crew worked overtime at enormous cost, driving the total to a record forty-six million. The effects were slapped into blank spots left in a hurried cut (with the first reels going to the printer as the last ones were finished!), and the prints barely made it to the theaters on time.

It was a slow and ponderous mess. Important plot points were missing, as well as some effects. Scenes were allowed to drag on. While it attracted large audiences, it pleased neither critics nor fans—and didn’t make enough to justify the vast sums spent on it.

However, this isn’t the Star Trek: The Motion Picture most people have seen.

In 1983, Paramount created a new version for television.

It may seem odd that they didn’t do this when it came out on video. However, VHS tapes were still enormously expensive—as much as 100 dollars apiece—and had not turned into a major market yet. It was only when it made its lucrative network debut that Paramount found the money for a mild upgrade.

They finished some of the effects and restored a few deleted scenes. Ten minutes longer than the theatrical cut, it was still rough and indulgent but generally an improvement. For many years, this “Special Longer Version” was the only version available, although the original has made a bit of a comeback.

In 2001, Robert Wise created a “Director’s Edition” for DVD, which cut footage from both versions (and is only a few minutes longer than the original) and replaced many effects with digital ones based on the original art and storyboards.

But Wise did not have access to the original negative elements and could not do the major recut the film needed. As the new sequences were rendered in DVD quality it seems unlikely that it will ever get a Blu-ray release—or return to the theaters.

Even those productions with a clear vision ran into studio interference.

While Blade Runner is now hailed as one of the most influential science fiction films ever made, it did poorly in the theater and was savaged by the critics.

Ridley Scott’s public criticisms of his film probably didn’t help. The studio didn’t understand it so they took it out of his hands, reedited it, and added extensive narration (and a happy ending borrowed from unused footage for The Shining). Some claim that Harrison Ford deliberately gave a bad performance on his voice-over, hoping that the studio would discard it, but he denies it.

The irony is that Scott’s original script had a lot of narration. Ford urged him to replace it with new scenes showing rather than telling. However, not all of it was removed: the work print which the studio later found and showed to a few audiences as a “Director’s Cut” still included Deckard’s narration for Roy Batty’s death (although it was quite different from the final version).

The work print opened a strange new chapter in the movie’s life: it infuriated Ridley Scott that they called it a Director’s cut. It was very rough and had a temporary music track (from Planet of the Apes) instead of Vangelis’ “Tears in Rain.”

Warner Brothers then created an official Director’s Cut, assembled from Ridley’s notes by film preservationist Mike Arick and gave it a theatrical release in 1992.

Ridley Scott still wasn’t happy and began his own version. He not only located a treasure trove of original materials, but shot new scenes. After a few legal battles, the “Final Cut” debuted in time for the film’s 25th anniversary.

Which, if you include the TV cut and more violent international version, brings the total to seven official cuts.

Perhaps the strangest part is the three-second unicorn dream. While Ridley insisted on restoring it, he didn’t fight that hard to keep it in the original. It is strangely missing from the work print.

The full dream does not appear in the Director’s Cut as Arick could not find a good copy, but was restored in 2007.

But the most persistent myth surrounding the scene is that it was shot for Legend. There is some basis for the story: while the production was winding down, Scott took a crew to a nearby park. His producer, Ivor Powell, believed that he was shooting test footage for the new film they’d already started, but writing it off to Blade Runner’s budget. As he put it, “But Ridley maybe did have something else in his mind. It was something more than a test.”

Terry Gilliam’s woes with Universal Studios over Brazil (1985) were far more dramatic, even if they never resulted in anything like Ridley Scott’s cottage industry of competing cuts.

Universal didn’t like Brazil: it was too long and didn’t have a happy ending. While Terry trimmed it by twenty minutes he would not change his bleak ending.

They refused to release it. Gilliam ran a full-page ad in Variety pleading with them: instead, studio head Sid Sheinberg bought an ad offering to sell the film! Gilliam then arranged a few decidedly unofficial private showings. As a result, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave it their awards for Best Picture, Screenplay, and Direction.

Universal then set up a limited run to qualify for the Academy Awards.

But they weren’t quite finished. During the dispute, Universal had a second team of editors create what is sarcastically called the Sid Sheinberg or “Love Conquers All” cut, which turns Sam’s dream of being rescued into reality.

When the film debuted on TV this was the version that Universal chose to run. Unfortunately, the dream doesn’t seem at all real, and the bizarre decision to mix in an earlier dream in which a character is literally consumed by paperwork only made it worse.

Fortunately, Sid’s edit vanished without a trace and few fans remember that it ever existed.

Unless, of course, they bought the Criterion Box Set.

Perhaps these controversies inspired the extended version of David Lynch’s Dune.

The film had proved an epic disappointment, largely because of the gargantuan expectations: after all, not only was Dune a cult classic, but its young director’s strange films had already earned him a following. Few films could live up to that sort of hype—and Dune didn’t.

Then the rumors started.

A preview ran for four hours.

Before long, there were claims that different versions existed, even a supposed six hour “Director’s Cut.”

It is easy to see why so many believed this. After all, Dune had been described as the best trailer for a twelve-hour movie ever made. They’d tried very hard to pack a huge story into a tiny box. However, the preview was a preliminary assembly without effects and would have been much shorter in final form. No other finished cut ever existed—and the six-hour cut was impossible as they only shot five hours of film.

Most of the narration so many objected to, including the interior monologues (and some of the cheesier bits of dialogue!), actually came straight from the book.

Lynch’s final draft would have clocked in around three hours: however, as the De Laurentiis’ wanted a two-hour cut, many of these scenes were never shot. And some of the unseen footage had to be reshot to explain things they’d cut.

But that didn’t stop people from believing in the “lost” version.

When the film finally came to television, Universal’s TV department added forty minutes—and did such a poor job that David Lynch demanded that his name be taken off. Instead, he’s billed under the official Directors Guild pseudonym, Alan Smithee, and coined the name “Judas Booth” for his writing credit.

Not only did Universal cram the deleted scenes in without editing them properly, they actually repeated some footage. They inserted parts of the battle scenes cut off by the pan-and-scan process as a separate element—and blew-up part of a scene to create a new shot of the Emperor’s ship landing.

Far worse, the new introduction was even longer than the original—and includes material repeated in the next scene! It is set against an unimpressive set of drawings, which look suspiciously like unused production art (as did some added “effects”). Rumors suggest that the unknown voice may be Frank Herbert’s.

Lynch has repeatedly turned down offers to create a Director’s Cut, and wants nothing more to do with the film.

But then, without those unfilmed scenes, he could never turn it into the movie he wanted.

While Alex Cox had his share of woes while making his classic punk science fiction film, Repo Man (1984), he ran into an even stranger problem with Universal’s television edit.

They actually filmed new scenes including a rather bizarre revision: the Hopi symbol on the Arizona license plate of J. Frank Parnell’s ’64 Malibu morphs into the head of the devil.

While Alex is probably wrong (and joking) when he suggests that the stories about the film industry being run by Satanists might be true, the results were so bad that they asked him for help.

Cox then supervised the editing. He added deleted scenes to fill out the running time (including the one where Bud claims he is “I. G. Farben”) and found a lot of creative but television-friendly swear words to replace the nearly nonstop profanity. Perhaps the best loved by those who saw the film when it ran endlessly on TV was “Melon Farmers!”

Fans have demanded a video release of the TV cut for years (making it one of the stranger “lost films”).

It hasn’t happened.

And the deleted scenes on the 2006 Collector’s Edition, still lack Bud’s attack on a phone booth with a baseball bat.

Others problems were far less public.

Casting Jean-Claude Van Damme as the Predator seems, in retrospect, to have been singularly misguided: no one bothered to tell him that his face would be unseen, that he would be invisible for most of the film, and that (as the original unused creature) he’d be expected to run through the jungle on stilts. Instead, he showed up for the first day of filming and found he was supposed to wear an absurd bright red suit (meant to be filtered out and replaced with a blur). What happened isn’t clear, but they fired him within days and hurriedly brought in Stan Winston to design a new creature.

And then there are unconfirmed hints of even stranger things, the oddest being the persistent rumors that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension might have been a scam straight out of The Producers, as it looks more like it cost ten million dollars, not twenty.

Considering how mainstream science fiction has become, it may be hard to grasp how difficult it was to make these films. The worst—the truly awe-inspiring misfires—reflected a failure to understand science fiction, or the market they wanted to reach, or even the film they were making. Star Trek: The Motion Picture wasn’t meant to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune isn’t Star Wars, and Brazil isn’t a happy little comedy.

The film industry is as messy as ever. Studio politics and committee-made movies are still with us. But at least the younger generation of filmmakers often has a better grasp of what science fiction is and how to film it.

Unfortunately, the studios’ obsession with the bottom line means they’d rather back franchises and sequels than original science fiction.

The struggles aren’t over, and will never be.

But at least we have these pioneering works, good and bad, to help light the way.

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.

Genetics, Spores, and Automation:
A Conversation with Nancy Kress

Chris Urie

Humans have been mucking around with the genetics of animals and plants for thousands of years through artificial selection. But at what points have we gone too far? What happens when a team of zealots with PhDs in science utilize their knowledge to decimate the Earth using nothing but a microbe? That’s what Nancy Kress’ new novel explores.

The third and final installment of the Yesterday’s Kin trilogy, Terran Tomorrow starts with the return of a diplomatic mission from Earth to World, another habitable planet populated by similar aliens. During their twenty-eight-year journey back, they find an Earth completely changed and at war. A spore cloud plague has left only a few million survivors left on the planet and what they carry on their spaceship might help humanity rebuild civilization. Steeped in hard science, Terran Tomorrow is an exciting conclusion to the series.

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-seven novels, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. She has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Theodore Sturgeon, and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her latest novel is Terran Tomorrow released November 13 from Tor Books.

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

Most of my career has been unplanned, including its start. I never actually decided to be a writer. I was a fourth-grade teacher, and then a full-time mother. I started writing during a difficult, isolating second pregnancy for something to do when my toddler was napping. Preferably something involving words of more than two syllables. At first, I didn’t take it seriously, but eventually the fiction burgeoned, taking over my life. Writing does that.

Do you expect a coming environmental apocalypse?

Alas, yes, depending on how you define both “coming” (years? decades? millennia?) and “apocalypse” (how bad does it have to be?) It could come from climate change, or the major worldwide plague that we are overdue for, or the nuclear war we’ve managed to put off for seventy-five years, or biological warfare. However, I don’t believe that any of those would wipe out everyone. Humans are tough and adaptable. Small bands of us, at a minimum, will survive. And if there are only small bands, the Earth will heal itself, even if it ends up looking much different from today. No species lasts forever, but I don’t think we’re near our run yet.

The science behind the weaponized disease in Terran Tomorrow is frighteningly believable. What research did you do into spores and viruses for the book?

I always do a lot of research into the science of my books because I have to. I’m not trained in science. When I became fascinated by genetics, about twenty years ago, I began to read books, journals, online. The gene drive in Terran Tomorrow exists now and is being deployed now to try to control the mosquitos that cause malaria. The science in the novel is as real as I could make it—given that is a novel.

Do you really think scientists would go rogue and become environmental extremists?

I hope not. But it wouldn’t take very many of them to create a genetically altered pathogen that might radically change the environment “in order to save it” from the rest of us. Genetics is not like building a nuclear bomb. With the right talent, the equipment is readily available.

During the course of writing Terran Tomorrow did you discover anything we could do on an individual level to help offset our own carbon footprints?

That information doesn’t require much research; it’s everywhere. Don’t drive so much, or at all. Eat organic (less fertilizer washing into the ocean). Use minimum plastic, including no disposable diapers. Be vegetarian (meat animals use much more resources than plants and leave a big carbon footprint). Get solar panels for your home. Recycle. The problem is that much of this advice is not practical for the busy, city-dwelling, carefully budgeted people that we are increasingly becoming.

Science fiction novels frequently deal with alien visitors trading advanced technology with humans. But in your novel, all the advanced technology is just as incomprehensible to Kindred as it is to humans. Why did you make this choice?

Aliens who are way, way ahead of humans in tech have no real reason to trade with us at all. What can we offer them, besides a chance to study our life-form as we study, say, baboons? Otherwise, unless they are very altruistic (not impossible, I suppose), or particularly bloodthirsty (why?), I don’t see why any race so advanced that they possess FTL would regard us as anything more than curiosities. The power differential is too great. So, for the novel, I made Terrans and Worlders more equal.

How do you feel writing a trilogy is different from writing a stand-alone novel?

Each of the first two books has to strike a balance between a story that complete in itself—or readers feel unsatisfied—and leaving enough loose ends that the next book follows naturally. In other words, there must be more story left to tell.

How did the series evolve as you crafted each book?

The characters change. The continuing characters, like geneticist Marianne Jenner, her son Noah, and her grandchildren Colin and Jason, grow over time (as, ideally, we all do). I don’t like series in which characters remain static. However, I didn’t feel that was enough, so each book adds new point-of-view characters. For If Tomorrow Comes, the addition was Army specialist Leo Brodie, who became one of my favorite characters in all my work, as well as Owen Lamont and Salah Bourgiba. For Terran Tomorrow, it was Lindy Ross and Jane.

In addition, of course, the setting evolves. Tomorrow’s Kin is set on Earth; If Tomorrow Comes on the alien planet; Terran Tomorrow back on an Earth very changed from when the protagonists left it decades earlier. One of the themes of this series is that everything evolves: people, planets, birds, human understanding.

What inspired R. sporii? Is there anything similar in our world?

Many scientists speculate that spores from space have affected, or even started, life on Earth. Organic compounds have been found in comets. If something like R. sporii did change humanity, it was probably in our distant prehistory.

Should humans be messing around with the genomes of wild animals?

Probably not; we already mess around with the genomes of domesticated species, which is much more useful. However, history tends to show that if a scientific thing can be done, eventually it will be. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

What projects are you working on next?

I’m writing a very long novella about political and financial changes in the United States due to automation. I hope the story turns out not as dull as that description sounds! But unemployment due to increasing automation is a real thing, affecting real people, and my novella is a thought experiment taking the situation to the extreme. And I really like my protagonist, Jennie Flint. Always a plus when you must spend hours every day with these fictional people.

What is one piece of writing advice that has stuck with you throughout your career?

It came from Bruce Sterling, and it has been important to me. To paraphrase: When constructing a future or alien society, follow the money. Economics underlies everything else. After I received and pondered Bruce’s advice, which came during a devastating critique I received from him at a writers’ workshop, the next thing I wrote was Beggars In Spain (thank you, Bruce). I’ve tried to construct believable economics in my fiction ever since.

If you had to choose between living on a military base cut off from nature, or endure possible death and live outside, which would you choose?

The safer military base. I don’t rock climb, skydive, or even ski. All my risks are emotional. :)

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:
Klingon Time Management

A.M. Dellamonica

Today is a good day to write!

With Halloween in the rearview and the other momentous end of year holidays not quite gnawing at our ankles, some of you are naturally going to turn your thoughts to NaNoWriMo. For anyone who hasn’t heard of this ancient challenge, the basics are: you write a 50K novel in November, at a rate of 1,667 words per day. Succeed and you get a badge, bragging rights, and—if you participated in the forums—new friends and peers. Most importantly, you get 50K of writing done.

It can be a big deal, Nano. A learning experience, a way to take your art seriously, a chance to finish a draft of a first book, a means of shutting off too-harsh internal saboteurs and critics . . . lots of great things can come of it.

But all too soon you slam into December 1st, and you’re picking up the bits of your life you’ve been neglecting for thirty days. One short month from today, some of you may be asking yourselves: I did it! Now what?

The answer lies in our distant fannish past.

I am from a particular age group of SF fans who saw the original Star Trek not in its first run, in the late Sixties, but over the stretch that came later, when it aired in syndication. Badly cut to maximize the time available for commercials, it aired five days a week, once or twice a day.

By the time teenaged me came along to watch those 79 episodes, over and over and over again, there was a fair amount of Star Trek tie-in product to be had, almost all in the form of print media. David Gerrold, who at 23 years of age wrote that infamous episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” possibly salvaging the fortunes of the fun-fur industry forever, wrote one book just about that experience and a second book, The World of Star Trek, about the massive appeal of the show.

So as I was watching those episodes in rerun, I also had access to criticism, behind the scenes commentary about what it was like to be a TV writer, the actual “Trouble with Tribbles” teleplay, the history of a failed write-in campaign to save the show, photo novels (anyone remember photo novels?) and a billion other random research sources. My high school classmates and I chipped in to buy these things because, basically, science fiction was in short supply and some of us thought William Shatner and/or Leonard Nimoy and/or Nichelle Nichols was hot.

What I didn’t have access to was fanfic. I don’t think I even heard about it until I was in university, getting to know the works of Joanna Russ.

As new shows got created and people continued to explore, discuss, and embroider, we realized Star Trek had pioneered a lot of the things we now think of as classic TV tropes. Some good, some bad: in one episode—Plato’s Stepchildren—Kirk and Uhura were forced by mind-controlling aliens to kiss, in a scene that is quite cringingly awful. I didn’t know about fanfiction and its tropes and memes, so I didn’t recognize this textbook example of something that would eventually come to be called “Aliens made them do it.”

This is exactly what it sounds like. You’re writing something porny about two characters who, in canon, would never get it on. So aliens appear and make it happen. They use mind control, they use threats, they use deception. Lack of consent means it’s one of those memes that has aged very badly. Why can’t aliens force them to garden?

Or . . . write?

For those who are about to Nano, you have thirty golden days in which you’re sworn to produce pages. It’s a rule. You have to do it or Klingons will ferociously mock you!

(Pay up your health insurance. Klingons don’t mock with just words.)

Committing to NaNoWriMo is like choosing aliens to make you to Do It.

For some, this will be wildly successful. For others it will work a bit, and for others not at all. No writing rule, technique, or challenge is one size fits all.

Getting a book written is a big accomplishment. It’s a tiring one, too. Some of the writers who do reach this goal—who get their 50K and celebrate sweet, sweet victory!—will find themselves stopping again. Just for a week. Well, a month. Oh, now it’s Solstice. Well, maybe in 2019 . . . Soon they’ll be beating themselves up about this.

On December 1st, your mission is to find another species of Do It Alien. Are they Vulcans? Andorians? Whoever they are, they’re there to make writing a sustainable and organic part of your life. To happily produce new words and revise old ones on some kind of regular basis.

If you can escape the fires of NaNoWriMo and forge the beginning of a regular artistic practice, you will be vastly more likely to succeed in publishing . . . and that’s true whether the fruits of this November are unadulterated genius or a hastily-written shambles. (I say this, by the way, as someone with two such Nano-shambles to my name.)

Going from hare to tortoise is easier said than done. I know that, and I know it sucks. This is why there are nine million writer essays on the web addressing the question “How do I find time to write?”

Another of the reasons there are nine million essays, besides the fact that everyone wants to brag about how they get it done, is each creator’s answer—the fine-tuned mechanics of how they get down to it—is unique.

There are barriers in everyone’s life. They fall, roughly, into the following categories:

Other commitments: family, job, inadequate housing, chronic health problems, social commitments, court dates, a wicked gaming habit, fighting the patriarchy.

Logistical commitments: bad equipment, inappropriate workspace, distracting soundscape, lack of privacy, not realizing you need new glasses.

Sabotage: sometimes there are people who just don’t want you to do it.

Psychological barriers: You can’t work without a deadline. You can’t focus properly because every time you see a Twitter notification, you derail. You don’t really feel entitled to carve out this much time for yourself. Sure, it’s OK when it’s just November, but . . .

There is no one-size-fits-all to answer to this. There is, however, networking, researching, seeking the support of your peers, sympathetic brainstorming and—most importantly—experimentation. There are a lot of things writers have tried. As you sit there basking in the glow of your 50K manuscript, take up your search engine and scan a bunch of those “How to find time to write” articles on the web. Keep browsing until you find five possibilities that might work for you.

Hunt for the answer. Morning writing? Evening writing? White noise apps? Working on pen and paper? Pomodoro? Experiment for as long as you need. Don’t be afraid to fail for a week because you tried something that seemed stupid.

Perhaps most importantly, ignore the “shoulds.” It’s wrong to say that everyone should write every day. Not everyone can or should generate steady word counts. There are people who research and outline a book for nine months and then hole up in a motel and write the draft in 3 weeks. I read about someone like that in Writer’s Digest when I was 16. That writer, to me, was as improbable as the Organians. The thing is, that guy did the same thing again the next year. And again, the next.

Me? I go to a coffee shop every morning with my writing kit, and the fact that I then feel I have to earn back the cost of my pricey espresso is what it takes to buckle me down to fiction. It’s no weirder than anyone else’s strategy, and I have hundreds of thousands of words under my belt. Coffee shop writing is, somehow, the Alien who makes me do it.

Make a little time to figure out your long game, if you can, while your draft is still hot. Do the experiments and learn what your brain requires. Be kind to yourself, be forgiving . . . but you want to write, and you’re allowed to want to write . . . so don’t let yourself wriggle off the hook.

Imagine, as you try things, that those pesky interfering aliens are coming for you. They want your next book (and your next, and your next!) and they are going to make you write. They’ve taken Ensign Chekov hostage. They’ve got one of those creepy Khan worms.

If you had to write a book every year, for improbable alien threat reasons, if you had to establish a regular artistic practice, what would be in your way? How could you get it out of your way?

Go boldly now and find the answer.

About the Author

A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, has won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best Novel. She has published over forty short stories in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She was the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ 2016. She teaches writing at two universities and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at a third.

Alyx is married to Nebula Award winning author Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal, in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same sex couples.

Editor’s Desk:
Wouldn’t it be Nice?

Neil Clarke

I’ve already forgotten where and why, but I was recently reading an article that included a interesting passing comment—one or two wealthy Silicon Valley tech-types could completely change the literary landscape by annually donating a few million to one or two dozen organizations. It’s essentially a return to the old-school patronage model, but with publishers as the primary focus.

Ok, time to dream a little, and since we’re dreaming, we can remove some of potential pitfalls.In this scenario: we’re working with a good accountant and have been guaranteed at least ten years of funding with no editorial interference, so long as we continue to publish science fiction on our current schedule or better. After all, this isn’t meant to be a nightmare!

It probably says something about me that the first two things I’d do involve fair pay and marketing. The fair pay thing is pretty straight-forward and would impact everyone from artists and authors to slush readers and editors. If we’re going to commit to some serious work, we need to make sure that our team is taken care of and has the flexibility to take on what comes next. What I’d consider marketing probably isn’t what you think. It’s not directly about raising awareness for Clarkesworld, it’s about bringing new readers and writers into short fiction—around the world. It involves education and opportunity. It’s a long-term, rising tide solution to a problem faced by people working in short fiction.

For a while, I’ve been contemplating using some of my old skills as an instructional designer to build online courses. I’ve probably put the most thought into an open course for foreign authors who want to learn how to navigate the US publishing ecosystem. Most of that could easily be repurposed as the foundation for several other courses for other communities of authors looking to find their place in the field. On the reader side, a companion project would be centered around creating free course materials for teachers and professors interested in incorporating modern science fiction or science fiction concepts into their curriculum. I guess I haven’t really wandered too far away from my academic roots after all. I still tend to see education as a solution for most problems.

I’d also like to try using foreign language editions—or even well-developed partnerships—as a tool to reach more readers for the stories we already publish and as a place to cultivate and provide opportunities for other language authors in their own markets. This would require bringing in translators and language-specific editors to handle the translations as well as the locally-submitted stories. And, of course, I’d be in close communication with those editors to see which stories should be translated and bring back into Clarkesworld-prime. Bridges should go two-ways.

Overall, it seems like a nice way to expose the authors in both markets to a much larger community and potentially put a dent in some of those artificial genre walls that exist solely because of language. Going solely by the populations of native speakers, Spanish would be an obvious choice. Spanish is also widely spoken in this country, so that could make the logistics behind this kind of integrated trial project a bit easier to handle. (Yes, Chinese is spoken by more people, but we’re already working on something there, so it’s off the table.)

None of these things happen quickly or provide immediate and meaningful results. It takes time, and a ten year window such as the one dreamed of here, would be more than adequate to try a variety of techniques and provide opportunities to adapt to the specific needs of each community. I’m assuming our wealthy sponsor doesn’t just like us, but believes in our vision to grow a global science fiction market and wants to see it happen.

After all, that’s why they chose us.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that this person exists—if I’m wrong, email me. Reality currently requires that we work much more slowly with far fewer resources. That doesn’t mean we won’t try to take these steps forward when and where we can. It also provides incentive for us to grow our subscriber base, probably by about 17,000. Yeah . . . I know, but it’s something worth flushing out a bit more and working towards!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is Not One of Us, which will be published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art: New Life

Helen Ilnytska

About the Artist

Helen Ilnytska is a concept artist and illustrator from Ukraine. She specializes in environment design and concept art for film and games. Helen has a passion for science fiction, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic works, and adores anything to do with portraying new incredible worlds.