But, Still, I Smile

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

When my baby flowed away from me, I thought of it as coursing away through a river, far and far away, and perhaps journeying through the great Silver River (the Milky Way) and towards some other exoplanet unseen and unknown. I thought it might be carried away by that great band of light, so faint but populated by so many stars, all doing its part to lift her, tiny little fingers bringing her towards a future that still held bright.

In reality, the system took the miscarriage remains and sucked it through tubes, yes, tubes unseen, but sterile tubes: no faint stars, no coursing through the galaxies, no distant land where she might be raised in the opposing angles of diffused rays of a dual star system. Despite the number of miscarriages, I was never sure where those tubes ended, maybe it went across the Earth, across the atmosphere. Maybe it jettisoned my baby into outer space itself, her body crystallized and preserved, in the half-born state it came into the world.

I vowed never to have a kid again. Or at least I pretended to, in my infinite duress. What was the point? She was the closest to term, and yet, still failure.

But, in my heart, I looked out into the vast unknown, thinking that somewhere my child was there, calling out for her mom.

Mapping out for SETI was a natural course of an occupation for me. Maybe it was destined, as my name was Dengwen 登文, where deng means climb but also means record like in a registry. And wen meant literature but also could mean civilization. So, here I was, reinventing my name in my own way, recording the possibility of new civilizations in my mundane everyday work. I would spend days sifting through data. Finding extraterrestrial life was ambitious, grandiose, and romantic in theory, but rather tedious in practice. I didn’t mind. Tedium suited me. I could spend days numbly parsing through radio and light signals, any ripple of a signature that would suggest something other than the natural movement of cosmic gears turning came under my meticulous gaze.

The Drake Equation always bothered me. Sure, it listed all the factors outright in diminishing fractions: birthrate of stars, stars with planets, life-sustaining planets, planets with life spawned, intelligence within those planets with life spawned, technological capability of the intelligence of the life spawned, and the span of years of a technological society. Sure, it made sense, ruling out candidates, like the piling discards dumped by sea trawlers of the past. But, when I stepped back and thought about it, the kernel that was left—it seemed improbable, almost impossible, despite my devotion to the project. Where were these places, these elusive hosts of life? It was like those old nursery rhymes where one thing compiled on the next compiled on the next and became a monstrous sentence with qualifiers abound. Given such a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, ad infinitum, the reduction of all the seemingly infinite stars out there, was there a space really for organic life to blossom and reach out to us and make contact?

In my office, I rubbed my abdomen as the data flickered on charts before me. The data might be impassive, but my body wasn’t. It hurt. I was too embarrassed to get postnatal care, if it could be called postnatal. No, it wasn’t embarrassment. It was a blip of numbness, or of delusion, of not wanting to face the truth. I had bled out, that rare instance of life fostered inside of me that lasted to such an advanced stage, in the face of the countless attempts at conception, and obliterated by some tacit violence in the universe.

Finding life out there seemed futile; the universe was as sterile as my womb. Cold, detached, anesthetized. It made one attempt at life and, well, we had royally messed it up. Destroyed ourselves and pretty much wrecked our home, Earth, along with it, thanks to petty disputes, constant competition over scarce resources getting scarcer. To think that another being might be out there and signal at us was like catching my fetus through the tubes and breathing life back into it. We were too far gone and we were hoping for a miracle.

It was while thinking this—experiencing a flash of pain glide through my lower back and swallowing grief I might never dispel—that the strange anomaly caught my breath.

An anomalous pattern of radio signals. It wasn’t like anything I’ve seen before.

I pressed my face against the screen, feeling its cold glass. I looked closely, wondering if the pixels were shifting on me.

They weren’t.

I sat up, despite all the groans of my body.

“Dengwen, you’re lucky you found the blip of possible life.” The nurse pressed the gauge against my cheek, taking my temperature and vitals. She didn’t seem too moved by the idea of imminent communication with extraterrestrials.

“Yes, there’s hope for humanity yet,” I said.

She dabbed a bit of anesthetic fumes behind my ear. My nose wrinkled at the smell, as I winced. I hated hospitals.

“No, you’re lucky, for your own sake,” she said, wiping my arms down with the cleaning cloth. She gave me a stare I couldn’t decipher and shook her head at me, black hair whipping her chin. Then she tied the blue massage fabric to my arms and back. “Otherwise, you might not have ever come to me. How long has it been since the miscarriage?”

“A week . . . ” My words tapered off as I tilted my head back so she checked my tonsils. I stared into the bright lights of the white ceiling. I still wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for.

“And you’re passing enough blood clots to make this an event worth flagging.” She tapped on my chart on the thin screen beside her. It didn’t say anything in that vein. I wondered how she knew.

Blood clots.

They freaked me out. I would flush them down the tubes, but they would return, day after day, ejected from my body, haunting me, detritus in lieu of life.

Yet, they were comforting in their own way; evidence that she did exist, even if it was just a semblance of life, almost-life that short-circuited. Yearning for motherhood possessed me, no matter how much I tried to push it away. I closed my eyes, let my head swim as the massage fabric worked its way, stimulating my muscles, relieving my incessant pain. It couldn’t soothe the ache in my loins.

Maybe they’ll deliver us some well-needed tech. Something to turn the tides, lower the CO2, bring down the rising sea levels. I wonder what they would look like, corporeal beings or evanescent bands of light? Would they speak with tongues and spit saliva? Or would they hover and float? There was so much we didn’t know. So much that couldn’t be inferred from the little data we had.

The nurse must have turned the knob up higher, since I felt a pulse travel through my arms. The massage fabric sent me a buzz right under my chest. I put my hand there, thinking of how my breasts had gotten smaller, receded in the wake of the miscarriage, as if it, too, like all my nurturing prowess, decided to go into hibernation. Not yet, I had whispered. I had stopped cooking hearty broths for myself, stopped caring about my health, and instead zapped hydrobar dinners every day. I was numb, but deep within, I still hoped I could.

I was woken up by the feeling of the nurse pressing a few thin pads to my hands. At first, I thought they were for the bleeding, but she said in a hushed voice, “Hemoglobin adhesives. It’ll pump some iron back into you. It’s cutting-edge tech that I swiped from the gift bag of a higher-up at a conference for military medical innovations.”

It felt light in my hands, almost weightless.

She pressed one against her skin, not opening it, but simply demonstrating. “Once you put it on, some of your blood will flow into its lattice fabric and align itself to avoid a hemolytic reaction. Then, once calibrated, the patch will shift iron out of its fabric, pitch the ferrous nutrients so it traverses air and skin and into your body.” She passed the one she was using as demonstration to me as well.

“It’s not on the market yet and I don’t have many. I don’t give them out to my patients. But, you look like you could use some. Besides, it’s not every day I have a patient rocketing into space.”

I thanked her, pocketed the stickers fast like they were contraband and we were about to be busted. The door opened just then and the nurse plastered a benign smile on her face as she finished up my checkup. She let the bots work around her, picking up extra supplies, checking the inventory, as she indicated to me with a finger that my time here was up. As we left, she handed me some more contraband: a whole box of hemoglobin adhesives and a dozen reviving sticks.

“In case you run into the ETs,” she said in a whisper. “No one wants to say they might be violent. But, who knows. You might need them to save yourself.” She gestured slapping one on herself. She turned around, spinning on her heels, and left, curt with no goodbye, as if our appointment never happened.

They wanted me out there with the scientists, exploring space. I mentioned I was only one of the data analysts. Why me? Shouldn’t they choose a xenoanthropologist, someone who had spent years dedicated to the role?

“We’re not just sending you, Dengwen. Of course we’ll have a xenoanthropologist on board, plus a linguist, plus an army of data crunching AI. Botanists, geologists, everything we’ve got. But, who knows what kind of tech they might have? What if their connection fries our AIs? We can’t rely on AI to data analyze, we’ll need a human touch. Someone who might see a blip out of some inexplicable instinct where an AI might rationalize it away.”

My supervisor sent me a pack of rations and told me to practice getting used to them. My stomach might first object, so better to deal with the ramifications while still on Earth. I tore off one of the packets and chewed. It tasted like dirt mixed with honey.

The nurse must have watching over me, rooting for me. She didn’t mention to anyone else about the miscarriage, which might have disqualified me for the trip. She had simply logged in the necessary checkups, which flashed across my supervisor’s eyes during our meeting. I still had her medical supplies stashed away for the trip, pushing away the idea of violence that she had suggested, and instead banking on hope.

I looked out of the giant window of my supervisor’s 22nd floor; she had the whole floor to herself and her data-crunching machines. For a moment, together we marveled at the skies that now held so much promise.

“If only FTL drives were invented,” I said. “Then we course through to the outskirts of the universe and seek out more lives. If there is one, other than us that is, there must be more.”

“Just be lucky we have even enough power to get to Proxima Centauri. So much of our energy put into keeping the seas at bay and the skies barely breathable enough to live. We’re really hanging on a thread. Your discovery came just in time.”

I said what I thought she wanted to hear:

“We need to unwind a new thread. A thread that’ll guide us to another species. Or guide them back to us. We’ll . . . ” My voice of optimism croaked to a halt as I shifted my feet. A cramp subsided. They should diminish and eventually go away, the nurse had said. It felt sad, being wistful for pain. It was the remnant of what was, life that hadn’t come to be. If only I could conceive . . .

We never uttered those words that ran around in gossip circles and circulated the digital filigree. The ones that the nurse had whispered so directly into my ear. The possibility that “hope” was a trap. That they were malevolent. That there was no winning. That they would conquer us.

It didn’t matter, for those of us who did the calculations. What if they were malevolent? Either way we die. The Earth was perishing before our eyes, given the rate of our global bickering. We didn’t have quite the mutual coordination to seed a big enough space station for a future generation. Mismanagement and bare sustenance were draining us of all our resources, leaving other recourses dead ends. Despite the hollers of the everyday citizens, deafening calls in our ears to stop and stay away from the aliens, in our raised towers high above their shouts, we knew that we only had one way: forward. And hope.

We turned our faces against the protests.

I spent a decade on board, waiting to get there. What if we got the calculations wrong? What if we missed our mark?

This would be the ultimate mission, one of daring pleas and of desperation. We had torn apart our space programs, poured all our funding into saving the Earth, but our beloved planet had been careening into a vicious cycle, irregularities that became more magnified. We were lucky there was even enough push to get this spaceship out there, just enough of coming together and pinching and saving to bring us the fuel and resources needed, though mostly it was weighed down by constant fighting.

Hope was the drug that temporarily anesthetized humanity from the stark matter of its imminent unfortunate end. Scientists put their all into it; the diminished SETI team overclocked their bodies, their machinery, put their lives on hold, to get us off the ground. People scrounged, collected, connected to get their hands on remote equipment.

And then—the takeoff. The most beautiful sight on Earth and the Heavens so they called it. Our tiny ship. Millions of eyes following us, whispering, praying. The oceans receding, the blackness engulfing us, until we were one with the infinite stars.

And then the wait.

While I sat on board growing hair, growing wrinkles, my nails getting longer and clipped, longer and clipped, humanity struggled again, relentless quarreling as they faced the collapse of its own empire as the seas threatened to engulf residences and land and the skies loomed with noxious gas. We thought of the fragments of catastrophe while trying to pass time calmly—hurricanes, vacillating temperatures, underwater cities. We were restless. It wasn’t just me, but the whole of the crew. It was going to be a long marriage; a sense of domesticity in the midst of the ever-present faint hum of anticipation, as well as constraining doom, that made all of us a little stir crazy.

My womb went from bleeding to productive again to obsolescence. While we flirted, made love, maintained our distances, fought, cohabited and uncohabited, interacted with one another in various ways in ten years, enough drama of seven people to last a lifetime, all the while I kept trying to conceive, my reproductive system made its way to its decline, until menopause took away its main utility. It was an empty cabin, probably the only empty cabin in the spaceship.

This isn’t the way everyone looks at their bodies. It was how I looked at it. I had longed for a child, but I feared that it was all futile. Even implantations didn’t work. Ovulation wasn’t something that I could just trigger. It wasn’t a pistol that I could direct and point and shoot. Even having her take root and quicken was miracle enough. But, she was lost. So, with all my entanglements, I had hoped, but couldn’t count on, for more. A heartbeat. A sperm latching on to my egg. It wasn’t really like we were supposed to have children on board. But, could you blame me for being a little bit careless? For “forgetting” my birth control injections? I knew we had food and air enough, even if it was tight, should a little being make its way here.

I didn’t want to think about what my future generation might face. That they might see the demise of Earth. But, there was hope, and with hope there was a chance that my hypothetical child could make it and live on.

We were hopeful about the aliens, tracking them down, and so close to our solar system. Hints of a technology that could provide for our future, but it was a cautioned hope, one that had adjuncts and attributes enough to render the hope barely anything but human vanity. How were we any better than any of the other species that have collapsed? When it was our doing that had nearly undone the Earth? The question became moral. Why should we get to live, thrive, and beget?

Would the aliens ask themselves the same things?

These were the philosophical inquiries that harangued our crew for the ten years of trekking, as we made our way towards the red dwarf, the diminutive fifth wheel attached to the Centauri couple.

Proxima b had been ruled out for life, despite the early possibility of water, but the new Proxima c glinted like a jewel. It was from there that the anomalous activity was detected—signals that could not be explained away with a whisk of the hand.

The meteorite came from left field. If there was a left field in space—it certainly felt like there was. It struck through the cabin quarters of our Captain, through his uniformed chest, through his soft tissues and coming out the other side, dragging blood behind it.

Years ago, lying naked in the Captain’s cabin, I had hoped he could father my child. I even shared with him my dirty secret of shirking birth control in an emotional flood of bonding. I thought he would eject me into outer space right there and then, punishment for my deception and transgression, but no, strangely, he smiled. He said yes, let’s do it. But nothing came of it.

The possibility extinguished.

We are nothing but bags of blood, I was reminded, and the leak was too potent.

At the time of the meteorite, I was with the Captain, but not in a carnal way. Those days had been long gone, when after so many attempts, nothing came to fruit and the constant stress, mostly from my end, made us drift apart. It was utilitarian for me; his anatomy wasn’t living up to his end of the bargain, so we parted physically, but were still collegial.

It was in this setting of collegiality that we were having a meeting, going over datasets. I saw the tiny bead of doom puncture through, in and out, as swift as a needle through fabric. His body torn up and a blood trail followed. It took me a fraction of a second to realize what was happening and another fraction for sheer horror to dawn upon me, but the moment felt stretched out like an eternity.

I ran, then floated toward the hole of the ship as our gravitation system failed in the midst of the accident. I was being sucked in. My chest heaved, panic started to push to the brink of my systems. Okay, okay, I thought, grabbing anything around me. I felt something round and hard. It turned out to be a helmet. I pushed it towards the hole.

With an audible whooshing noise, the helmet’s smooth surface made contact with the perforation and it got vacuumed up. Pressure adhered it there. Not the best fix but it was better than my own head.

I swam-floated through blood droplets abound. Someone had sealed the exit hole of the meteorite with an ETA suit. A matching outfit—helmet and shoulders buffered by the whole of the cabin. There was overall confusion, as we tried to avoid the bobbing spheres of scarlet liquid mess. Lifeforce drained away.

He was dead.

When gravity came back, I smacked the ground with my hip and cursed for a good minute before getting up. I had heard the collective thumps of everything falling, but the pain made my senses register nothing but my own visceral agony.

Once the feeling passed, I looked around. Some of us were pretty banged up. The captain’s body had fallen to the ground and bounced, with all his blood jostling and pooling. Blood was everywhere, staining us, staining the ship, staining the mission. It took us a week to get all the blood soaked up and discarded. We kept finding bits clinging to equipment, to clothes, to the walls.

We gave him a proper funeral and ejected him into the coldness of space. The ritual of commemorating his death made us feel lost at sea. Our navigator cast off and I watched him crystallize and disappear, reminding me of thoughts long ago I wanted to excise.

There were six of us now, distributing the roles of the Captain. Some we allocated to the AI systems and some we tried to keep for ourselves, if anything but to honor his service. Most of it went to the now-acting-Captain, and still geologist, Anjali, who had training in interstellar navigation alongside her geological interests. They gave me his objectives of reviewing safety measures.

Every day, I would go to a different part of the ship with the sensor and test for structural integrity. It was redundancy; one of the AI systems had the same role. But, nobody felt safe anymore. Besides, there were some uncertainties given the effects of the meteorites. Sometimes, in the midst of a scan of a corner or door, I still would find blood and wonder how it got there.

The twin lights of Alpha Centauri blinked at us like cat eyes while the diminutive third to which we were heading always seemed to be orbiting around the two, trying to fit in. It looked like Mars, always cast with a faint orange tint, or like it was always a sun constantly setting. If there was more of an apropos metaphor for human decline, this would be it. The image of a constantly setting star, but just there, hanging in the sky.

But, no, this was hope. And when we found Proxima c, we found this hope to be dimmer and less filled with water than we had expected, at least that was what our scans said. We drew in closer, sent missives to Earth, now four-plus lightyears away. By the time it got to them, my hair would be streaked with silver, like the Milky Way.

The ship crash-landed. We did a quick save, salvaging most of it, but lost a good deal of food and water in a contained fire put out by its safety systems. The ship also needed major repairs and we dispatched the drones to assess and reconstruct. We were already coming into our mission jaded and in despair.

I stepped out onto the regolith, my five comrades, ex-lovers, confidants, quarrelers, sufferers, and risk-takers with me. The land felt strangely hard, dense and unbalanced. The gravity was two-thirds of Earth, so we bounded in our suits, our scanners propped onto thin fishing poles—loose tethers that would straighten and shoot forth at any sign of life.

We kept tripping over what looked like unevenly accumulated slates, with ragged ends. We had to be careful not to rip a hole into our suits. We searched this land, but it seemed barren of life; there was no water, but maybe these alien creatures didn’t need water? They seemed so present, so real in our imaginations, that when no communication passed through, I felt a sense of defeat so acute it almost left me paralyzed. Only Gloria, who was the longest of my flames on board in the ten years, who consoled me when I had cried over my barren womb, kept me honest and helped me to my feet when abject bleakness took away all will that evening.

The next day, when the light of Proxima Centauri cast its strange diffuse shadows, we got up and walked this land again. The one thing that we could agree on: there was a low-level sound, a kind of white noise that seemed to follow us. It wasn’t on any of the sensors, but there it was, as we peeked under yet another slate of the slate-strewn land—that we found was neither rock nor metal.

The AIs could not tell us what the sound was, nor even locate the presence of a sound or a source. Nor could they say what material the planet was made of. The core was liquid, that we knew, but what about all these slabs we were constantly negotiating with in our boots?

We split into teams. I packed my things, throwing in a few of the hemoglobin adhesives, a hydrobar, and a scanner into the compartments of my utility belt. Gloria came with me. It only made sense, since she was the most chipper and brazen, and I was likely the most morose. I didn’t care. I didn’t need a badge of merit as “best attitude for an explorer.” I just needed support. Her xenoanthropology background made her a prime candidate for finding the supposed aliens, who were looking to be more remote as the hours went by. Why go through the trouble of sending out signals, if you weren’t going to take calls? If you weren’t going to check in? But, it had been years since they sent them out and maybe now the calls were silent.

She sent out various kinds of “messages”—audio, motion, smell, pheromonic, etc.—unleashed a concoction of labels that would say, “I’m here, please come out!” I helped her seal and stabilize these messages. She sent these out on drones, who would be able to cover more ground than our bounding steps alone.

As we traversed, we came up to a mountain. It wasn’t made of slabs, unlike all the spaces that haphazardly made up this alien landscape. It was a veritable mountain of diverse objects of the same material of all different sizes. It loomed over us, breathtaking in its majesty, like approaching pyramids in the midst of desert sand. This definitely had to be the hand of intelligence right there.

There was very little natural light in this area, almost none. We had to blast out our LEDs from our helmets so we could see, stark white light that made everything look eerie. The air felt strangely dense, though there were no readings in our scans that would suggest why. We wondered if it was this air, like an invisible cloud, that occluded Proxima Centauri’s rouge luminosity.

With the projected light from our helmets, we took many scans, photos, and videos. We documented the different formations, discrete pieces that had flat planes and roundness to their attributes. There was a kind of Gaudí characteristic to the overall look of the mountain, not sharp, pointed and triangular like the Rockies, Everest, or any mountain on Earth, but a kind of rounded curvature to the overall heft of it. It was not a smooth landscape; it was an assemblage. I could tell that it was heaped on. That there must have been some machinery or guiding hand that had collected this and stacked it here. Was it a garbage dump? Ruins? A monument? Was it some kind of sign that we had to decipher?

I was way over my head. I could not process this kind of data. It wasn’t radio waves or light. Whatever triggered that radio signal anomaly years ago must have scattered away, departed into the abyss somewhere out there, or have retreated somewhere undetected. What was left was material we could not determine, amassed in a means we could not understand the nature of. We could use an archeologist, xeno or not. We could probably use the consulting powers of all our Terran people. But, there was only the two of us, and our messages could not pass through the thick blockage of this atmosphere enough to get to the others before night.

We poked around, trying to disturb as little as possible. I felt like a grave robber. Was I destroying the sanctity of this site by stepping in it? Luckily, given the gravity, our footsteps were relatively light and our boots left few tracks on this strange, shiny gray material.

Two hours later and we had covered the whole of this mountain and documented almost all the parts. We couldn’t avoid disturbing some of the material, but agitated as little as we could. If anything, the air felt even thicker, it took some muscling to simply walk, even though the amount of gravity was on our side.

I followed Gloria, who was giving out upbeat looks. Her buoyant stride and can-do attitude were starting to wear on me. After descending down the mountain, I got sick of stalking around in heaviness.

I couldn’t take it anymore. A fit of total inanity and childishness overcame me. But, it was more than that. I thought I saw the tiniest hand, a little closed fist as an imprint on one of the rocks. Something I had seen in ultrasound photos.

I knew I must have imagined it, because in a moment the image was gone. I stared at the rock, pushed my hand against it, despite our objective of not disturbing anything. But, nothing. It was like it was never there. Like my fetus never existed.

I couldn’t bear it. My frustration skyrocketed. I kicked the slab hard where my phantom impression had projected. My leg got caught. A sharp edge hooked onto my suit and tore the fabric at my knee.

I still don’t know why I did it. It’s not easy to explain. A presence bore down on me, teased me with an image, filled me with a wave of complete hopelessness, and I just needed to act out.

Oxygen rushed out of my suit and I cursed loud. Gloria calmed me down through the comm from her end and hurried over. I was bleeding.

I was such an idiot.

I threw on two hemoglobin adhesives over the rip. They gave off a green light once activated, drinking a sample from my blood, drawing it through my vessels and skin, and calibrating. I calmed down, knowing it was feeding nutrients back into me. I stared at the green patch of light reflecting onto the strange material, a ray that bounced out onto the corner of an alien slab. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Gloria follow my gaze. I held my stare; something was keeping me from moving my eyes.

There. That was what it was. The green light, it was dissipating, stretching out, moving of its accord. For a moment, I thought it made the nebulous shape of that fetal fist again, but it soon shifted and perhaps it was only my imagination.

Then everything started quaking.

A gush rose from the mountain. I gasped.

Oh no, this wasn’t a mountain. It was a volcano.

We clambered far away. A pool of red, so crimson and bloodlike, spilled out of this landmass and chased after us. It wasn’t just after us, it was pooling in all directions, but it seemed like we were one of the targets of its lava tendrils.

But, it wasn’t sizzling the land at all. It wasn’t destroying everything in its wake. The Gaudí pieces seemed to separate themselves, as if coming alive. They slip-slid against each other, coating in the liquid. They were being lubricated, oiled. They were moving.

In my head, things were starting to piece together. Maybe it was from the frustration of the kick and the panic that overcame me. But, as we bounded away, Gloria and I, hoping that the oils wouldn’t reach our ship, I had a flash of insight.

The rush of blood, the lifeforce oozing away, this was it: the blood, the lifeforce. The hand, my kin. The expulsion of the entity from my womb, half-grown not quite yet a baby. Blood clots, stuck, something that fastened and wouldn’t let go. Not yet.

It was about reproduction, or about production, at least. I could tell. Call it a moment of eureka, a maternal instinct, a pulse of realization—though I was no mother, only yearning, desperate to be one.

We hid out in our ship. All of us came back alive, except one. There were five of us gathered now. Kiki was out there, we hoped, and we sent probes and sent out two of our team, but even after exhaustive searches we could not find her. The red blood, the lubricant, continued to spill forth. It took some adjusting but the AI systems got the scanners to detect and monitor this planetary broth from afar. And we watched as it continued to paw through the land, with its liquid lick.

I had dreams, of seeing blood, of tubes pulling out the body of my not-yet child. Of loss. I saw production, or the capacity for life. A tiny fist, strength in will.

Then the volcano, and the spilling of red, all over. Red gush from the Captain. The rolling hill of his head to his chest to waist. Red gush from Gaudí assemblage. The rolling hill of its slapped together parts. My eyes burned in rouge. I was swimming past the scarlet globules, raging in front of the spill, hoping its crimson touch would not get me.

And then I would awake, thinking of gears and machinery. Of waterways and circuitry. The machinery, it was coming alive, the light of our tech, activated by our blood—searing past the sealed-off density of the strange air and giving it propulsion.

The sleeping giant awakes.

Some of the red rivers, the gush of red current, had receded and we took the chance to step into those receded “banks” and push forth to see the Gaudí assemblage mountain again. Where did the red go to? We thought it was lubricating, absorbed into whatever this planet was made of. That was the most likely scenario crunched by the AIs.

We still hadn’t found Kiki.

The assemblage was double its size, the mountain not just looming, but threatening, like a god that had risen up from the land itself. How did it get to be this big?

Was it like a plant that thirsted for water and once fed, burst to life, erect, upright, pulled back to life?

There was nothing that indicated it was organic, but perhaps organic was always a Terran term that could not be transplanted here.

When we looked closer, three of us this time, acting-Captain Anjali from the back, Gloria and I pressing forward, we could see that it was replicating. Layer by layer, as if being 3-D printed. We watched as the landforms pulled up from our feet, raising us, a centimeter at a time, jarring our balance.

Caution prevailed over our curiosity and we returned back before we would be pushed so high we couldn’t climb back down. It didn’t seem probable, but we couldn’t yet calculate the rate of its growth. I avoided all the blood splatters, the oozing of the red, remembering the lubricant that had escaped my womb. The hand that never got to be.

“It’s so high, it’s past sky-high. I don’t know what to call it. It must be rising up like a skyscraper,” I said. Back on our ship, we were a distance away, but I wouldn’t say safe. Not exactly.

“It’s not just happening there, the land is being pushed up, new slabs are forming,” said Anjali, as she consulted her geological literature. “There’s nothing like this I’ve seen. It’s not exactly tectonic plates, it’s not just rock formation. This is too fast, too regulated, too . . . everything.”

“Too freakin’ weird,” said Gloria.

The rest of our team convened. Kiki had been found, wedged between two slabs, the material growing out of her knee. The biologist and medic, Ramon, tried treating her best he could, keeping her in an isolated space. But Kiki was light-headed and we didn’t know if she would live. She was oozing red, part blood, part the liquid of this land, and I couldn’t bear seeing more blood here. I took a look at her once from outside the chamber and vowed not to go in. Medic Ramon kept a drone ferrying this liquid out of our domain, in case it would gush forth and cause the material in her to multiply. We couldn’t contaminate our ship-turned-habitat. It was only our space of safety and our way out of here.

I hated to admit it, but a dark part of me wished they hadn’t brought her back.

They knew I had hemo stickies, and reluctantly, I gave some over for Kiki’s convalescence. I only divvied out two. I didn’t trust its interaction with anything with this land, but I knew there was also something else. Deep inside me I had an instinct.

I also forked over two reviving sticks. I made a big show of having none left after that.

I regretted kicking the slab, regretted getting cut, regretted slapping on the medical adhesive. It was that light that had been stretched out in strange ways. How could I have known?

And yet, there was some growing comprehension in me. That I was supposed to kick it. That I was supposed to dream up that tiny fist. That it was supposed to bleed out. And as two more days passed, while the crew and I worked on repairs with the few replacements and makeshift resourceful cobbling together we exacted, the comprehension gnawed at me. It ballooned as I sealed the doors with repurposed silicone drinking packages and reinforced the walls with climate-conditioning spray. It stuck to my throat, like the lemony scent of the spritzer.

It crept onto me, begging me, a pulsing sense of motherhood deep in my loins, until I went to see Kiki the day before we were set to leave. This was the reckoning, the final day I could do something about the compelling notion I felt so acutely from within.

I was going to do something about it.

Her body was still, obviously unconscious, the slab in her knee growing, even as Ramon continued to cut and discard the material to the outdoors via drone ferry. It was like keratin, like our fingernails and toes; she had the armor of this land coming out of her joint. She had it excised periodically, but it would come again.

I brought to her the lighted stickies and removed the safety wrap. I was fully covered in a hazmat suit, no way I would be contaminated, but fear still pricked me. I knew something would happen, but I wasn’t sure what.

Caution enveloped me, but a greater impulse brought my hand forth to cover her leg with the stickies. Five of them. One after another, with swift movements, before I could stop myself.

The light bent around her knee in strange ways. It was irregular. Blood came pouring out—or was it the dark crimson of this land? I yelped, called for a drone, but there was so much of the liquid, coming out and cascading.

The drone wasn’t big enough.

I called out for another and tried to gather the blood. We couldn’t let it get everywhere. Who knew what it would it do to our beloved ship and shelter?

I pulled Kiki into the drone, packing her limbs into the small vehicle as best I could, and then stuffed all the stained medical slurpcloths that had absorbed the blood into any available crevice in the mobile. I dumped a whole box of slurpcloths out and let it pull out the strange viscous fluid from her knee. I injected her with all my remaining reviving sticks that I had been saving for an emergency.

They didn’t seem to do a thing. I improvised, going for the emerg pack. I set a small field around her—one we didn’t use often since it was such a power drain—so she would be protected from the land. There was just enough juice to last for a few hours.

We rode while I directed the drones to the mountain. It took an hour on the highest speed, and I wondered what everyone else back at the spaceship was doing. Probably sleeping. Maybe Gloria was awake. She was always a night owl.

It was dark, the rays from the helmet and the green eerie hue of the adhesives lighting the way. The adhesive light bent strangely when it interacted with the land, the green glimmer tossed around, zipping forth from slab to slab on the ground.

Perhaps it was the interaction of organic and the growth of this land, whatever it was, one of the scanners started to pick up something, an anomaly, a kind of radio signal that I had remembered from so long ago. The blip that gave me reason to think there was life on this land. The signal that brought us here.

When we came to the mountain, it reached so far out into the heavens, I could not see its apex. All the land had risen up. It was foolish of me to come here alone. I should’ve brought a team of drones, backup in case I slipped. I could feel the land still jittering under me, elevating on its own accord.

The light of the hemoglobin adhesive danced about, stretched out like taffy then rebounded, jumping from discrete item to item in this alien assembly.

Blood. I offer you blood, I thought. Blood and technology.

The green light interacted with the mountain in an excited frenzy. It swung about, dancing on every piece of the assembly, in a synchronous intertwining waltz.

I gaped, mouth hung open, breathing in the dry air of my suit.

Kiki stirred. I reached my glove through the field, pulled off the drenched slurpcloths and then the pieces of the invading slab off her knee, which fell to brittle outside the field. The brittle recollected itself and a jet of the red ooze spurt forth and lubricated it before it was incorporated into the land.

I pulled out a half dozen green stickies from my utility belt, peeled off the safety and activated them with Kiki’s used slurpcloths and threw them up in the air. They lifted up and were “grabbed” by the mountain detritus. I pulled out ones that I had used days ago from the rock tear still stuffed in another compartment in my belt, their tech infused with my blood, traces of the concoction of manufactured hemoglobin and my DNA left behind, and threw them over as well. I didn’t dare stay to see what happened.

I commanded the drones to race away. We fled, moving swiftly over the strange terrain on our vehicles. A rumble shook the land and with a quivering voice, I commanded the drones to go faster.

When I got back to the spaceship, Proxima Centauri was already peeking out its shy gaze. It was morning. The strange orange haze once again lit up the onyx surface of our ship. The rumbles had stopped.

We were expected to leave today. We had received word that Earth might make it after all, that treaties were signed—must have been signed four plus years ago—that the worrywarts spreading hate of potential ET colonizers prevailed and part of the multilateral pact was for our crew to avoid alerting any aliens of our existence, a reversal of decisions past. It was just like politics, to swing one way and then back. We had the choice to stay here or go back if we wished, but if we stayed we were ordered to avoid foreign contact and would have to retreat to Proxima b, where there was no sign of life. In light of this, the crew had voted majority on leaving, to get off this eerie, unaccommodating, intelligent-less bust of a place and the dangers it spelled and make our return home. We didn’t have enough food or water to stay here much longer anyway. We left a few drones to keep watch.

We took off with samples rendered inert by the moat of air that surrounded it, all contained in specimen vessels.

From the spaceship window, I watched as we took off, all of us holding our breaths, hoping this spaceship would survive the launch. We were so much higher in elevation than we were weeks ago when we arrived. The planet becoming much bigger than it once was. It was still shifting. We could see it replicating, or doing whatever it was doing, layer by layer, adding onto itself.

The spaceship shook as it blasted off, waking Kiki with its violent tremors.

“It’s more than a geological anomaly,” she said, rubbing her knee. “It’s something far stranger.”

It was only decades later, when we had returned to Earth—when the material sample had been probed, tested, placed into the highest levels of security on an orbiting space station—that we discovered what it was.

I already knew long ago, but I kept it to myself.

In our absence, humanity had realized that given an objective, it could collectivize and aim towards the goal. They had done it sending us into space. And they would do it again to at least try fixing our Earth and bringing a lab into orbit.

They completed both those tasks, scrounging and cobbling best they could.

We came back to a more hopeful Earth, even if the news we brought back was less than hopeful. No intelligent beings to bring us better tech. No trading for our salvation. But, at least our people had tried our best, we would hope to prevail, come what may.

Only the strange material from Proxima c land and its fluids suggested otherwise.

The tests concluded it was machinery left behind, oiled by the liquid of the land. It did implicate a higher intelligent being, but one that had fled long ago.

Blood, I whispered to myself.

The machinery that had covered Proxima c was rendered inert by the thickness of the atmosphere, a chemical stop button poured onto the massive engine. But, given blood, or rather, some tech version of it, hemoglobin infusion, activated through mingling with traces of human blood that calibrated the transfusion, it came on, powered up, and its interactions intensified and magnified, begetting and begetting.

It was a self-replicating machine. Perhaps it had some purpose in the past, one that sent out those anomalous signals—to create some material resource that was useful. But, now, it seemed to run on its own accord.

It stank of the fatalism of the paperclip maximizing AIs, of tech run amok, of instructions given and then abandoned—sealed off with the dense additives to the atmosphere as a stop-measure.

I never really told anyone that it was my maternal impulse that turned it back on. That I had activated the hemoglobin stickies with blood from Kiki and I. Giving it lifeforce, or something to that end. All the scientific data converged, with experts agreeing it was the disturbance that had turned it back on. They surmised it was the pheromonic stink of our flesh and blood—and some thought it was simply a product of time. But, I knew and perhaps deep inside Gloria and Kiki knew, too.

It was the hemoglobin tech, induced into activation by synchronization with our blood, the interaction I propelled that jarred the machinery awake.

The machinery was an existential threat to our universe. One distant and not entirely pressing. But, once reactivated, the engine of production showed no signs of stopping. It was self-perpetuating, replicating, and would only get bigger and bigger. Its internal oils, that thick red, seemed also to reproduce itself. A command that had gone haywire, perhaps, with a quick-fix plug, a cursory halt, and an escape by the civilization that had left it behind.

And I had pulled out that plug, let the spigot run.

Blood, nourishing blood.

It would take millions of years before the machinery-exoplanet grew big enough to do harm to us, but who knew what harm it would do to the fabric of space-time? Who knew the repercussions to the neighbors we had at Alpha Centauri? If it would wipe out those persistent cat eyes? If it would obliterate its associates? Perhaps it was the aberrant fifth wheel finally rampaging in its romantic neglect.

Earth coalitions were already mobilizing a team to go stop it. To figure out a way to reproduce the atmospheric chemical that might shut it off and contain it.

But, I? Well, I smile sometimes in my sleep.

I know, it’s terrible, I unleashed a monster into this world. A mechanical monster, all tech and no reason. One that grows and grows and gobbles everything in its path. A sleeping giant awakened, and burgeoning, budding, layering up in its mass.

But, still, I smile.

In my womb, I feel the pulse of life. It resonates with the emptiness of space, the cavernous peal that beats in my flesh. It’s not one of my own DNA, but one that lives because of it. Mechanical, menacing, inorganic, and possibly a death sentence to us all.

But, it was my hand that had brought it to life. It was the chemical reaction of my sanguine fluid, my hemoglobin stickies, my touch, and my action—my beautiful, horrendous, abominable baby.

With a pounding fist of fury.

Bound to me by blood and growing up so fast.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge.

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

When Home, No Need to Cry

Erin K. Wagner

She had never slept so well as when she was in space. Even when she dreamed that gray, dome-headed aliens were tapping at the windows of the shuttle.

Karen sat up in the bed when she heard the bot coming, though it took some painful effort. The bot entered the room with little scuttling noises, its belt and wheels rasping against the linoleum. It moved slowly between the clutter of furniture, a small blue light blinking on what served for its head. The silhouette of it vaguely resembled a cat: sloped back, head tucked tight into chest, a wisp of a tail trailing behind. The doctors had modeled its main function on that of a feline, and the design of the shell had followed.

“It smells death,” Karen had said, bluntly, when her sister came to visit. They were twins, and the pain in her sister’s face made Karen think that she should feel the same.

“It can smell? It can’t,” her sister half-scolded, half-asked, focusing on anything but the point.

“Near enough,” she answered.

Her sister glanced around, though there wasn’t much to draw the eye. White linens, white curtains, white stucco walls and ceiling, almost untouched by the colorful afghans and overstuffed chair she had moved into the space. “We could still take you home,” she said, but Karen could sense it still, the reluctance, the guilt.

“No, Sara. It’s good here mostly.”

In the predawn light, though, watching the bot pause ever so briefly at the foot of her bed, Karen wondered about the extent of her lie. Her time in space had given her two centimeters on her sister. But the radiation had stolen something more. The doctors called it a mass, a tumor, something that took up space and energy, but it felt always to her like a hollow there behind her right breast, a nothingness that threatened everything. It was as if her body anticipated the surgery that would never come.

The bot clicked forward, beeped on some register almost beyond human hearing. It paused at the foot of her bed and she stared at it, daring it to send its silent alarm to the residents on call. They stared at each other a moment, if Karen could call the blue light something akin to an eyeball. There was a hesitation and then a miniscule shifting of the wheels that she interpreted as a tacit truce. Not today. And in the matter-of-fact activity of the bot—which acknowledged her enfeebled state, recognized that she was waiting here for death—there was an odd sort of comfort, she supposed. Skirting the truth took too much energy.

Her vitals reported and updated constantly on a small transparent tile embedded in the foot of the bed. The text read backwards for her since it was oriented for the doctors’ eyes. It was a habit of hers, once the bot had shoved off, to study that tile, challenging herself to puzzle out even the most convoluted of medical terms, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes as she refused to blink. Blinking was a concession, a small defeat she accepted every day. She wiped her eyes, rubbed the tears into her cheeks, and lay her head back on the pillow. She listened to the pulse of the blood rustling, thumping, in her ears.

And that made up the early morning hours. Only twelve more hours until one could reasonably tuck one’s feet under the blankets and call it bedtime.

“I’ll be alright,” Karen said, but the words felt weak, even to her own ears.

The director shook his head, dug his finger into his ear, and grumbled something under his breath.

“What was that?” She didn’t know what else to ask to move the conversation forward.

“We’re a research foundation,” he said. And now he looked almost shamefaced. “Not Make-A-Wish. Do you know how much money we lay out for each launch?”

“Yes.” Was it something about the way she stood now, hunched over her waist a bit, curling inwards, that caused people to forget that she had been an astronaut first? An astronaut before a cancer patient?

“Of course you do, Karen.” Conciliatory. “You were one of the best. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying that.”

“You are,” she said. “You are denying that if you can’t trust my own assessment of the situation. I can do this mission. Look. Look at your objectives.” She shoved the paper at him again. “Another experiment on plant growth in zero-g. I think I can handle a BRIC canister, even in my condition.”

He took the paper, did not look at it, crumpled it as he folded it. “Let’s face reality here.” And then he paused, as if he could not do as asked.

“Yes, let’s,” she answered. But she felt the sinking, plummeting sensation of coming disappointment. She wanted to believe in the confidence of her own voice.

“What would we do?” he asked. Finally. And he had the good grace to meet her eyes. “What would we do if you died up there?”

And when he said it, she realized there was nothing she wanted more. She licked her lips.

“Right.” She reached out a hand for the back of the chair facing the director’s desk. “That’s the issue.”

“Why don’t you sit down, Karen?” There was the pain in the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the discomfort in watching her.

“I’m fine,” she said. She was grasping for an argument, something that would make her case for her. Sitting down and admitting how tired she was even now, just watching him shuffle papers nervously on his desk, that would not be it.

“You’ve sent out automated missions,” she finally said, tentatively, as if feeling her way forward in the dark. “You’ve done it before. You could retrieve the shuttle.”

He sighed, leaning forward, resting his arms on the desk. “Karen,” the ever-so-slight pause before the admonition, “you should be taking care of yourself. You should be thinking about recovery.”

“Recovery?” The slight choking, the cough in the base of her throat. “This is my recovery.” She jabbed her finger, once, twice for emphasis, into the cushion of the chair back. “You let me go up, that’s the only help for me.” And again, she realized how true it was only as she said it. The revelations were quiet and desperate.

“You’re going to force me to be the bad guy here?” And now he pushed back from the desk, bracing his shoulders, setting his mouth.

The anger was hot behind her eyes. “I guess so.”

And she saw it, the spark of hate in the way he scooted back his chair, stood up, arms braced against the desk.

“No.” The pause. “And stop asking.”

Karen brushed her teeth with deliberate care, still almost surprised, after all these years of being grounded, that she could use water freely in rinsing and spitting. There was an ache, a small sharp pain, in one of her back molars. The staff, if they found out about it, would insist on a visit to the dentist, and she had no desire to see him, nor was the health of her teeth high on her list of priorities.

She stumbled, leaving the bathroom, barely catching herself on the foot of the nearest bed before she took a spill. She cursed, loudly, rousing the resident from his sleep.

“Sorry,” she waved her hand, motioning him to ignore her, to go back to sleep. “Sorry, I tripped.” And she wondered, briefly, how space had wrecked his body and why he was here for the residents to study. He rolled his eyes, red and bloodshot, and turned over in the bed.

She reached her own bed, hated how relieved she was to sink down onto the mattress, to take a full breath. Space, as a private capitalist venture, had pushed bodies to breaking. She knew this and she had criticized—in podcasts, in televised interviews, in the last of the print papers—the corporations who had funded her own missions. And yet now, feeling her skin like a body-wide bruise, she could think of nothing else but launching again. Even if the bone-crushing press of acceleration were the last thing she felt.

The bot assigned to her unit, differentiated by the color of the stripes on the mound of its back, rolled into the room, accompanying a resident back to her bed. The blue light of its eyeball strobed towards Karen, and scanned her over. She could feel it happening, though there couldn’t possibly be anything that she could feel.

“Screw you, kitty-cat,” she said and lay down. She could think of no other way to kill the time before lunch.

“I’ll be alright,” Karen said. But, inside, in a deep corner she didn’t dare acknowledge, she hated how alive Terry looked. He couldn’t be more than one or two years younger than her.

“What the director says, goes.” He had kept his hair cut to regulation length, even though he was ground-control now.

“What does he know?” She tried to speak casually, tried to remember what it was like to joke with Terry the night before a launch. Everything was funnier though, everything brighter, with the nervous anticipatory butterflies in the stomach. “He’s never been up himself.”

Terry shook his head, don’t get me in trouble now as subtext.

“Terry.” Maybe he would understand. She moved an inch closer. “I can’t die down here. Not in that place.”

He filled her glass again and pushed it across the table, creating a bit of distance between them.

“They’ll take good care of you.”

She stared down at the beer, the foam spilling over. “Peddling their crap now?”

He had the courtesy to look hurt and a little affronted.

“It’s fuckin’ plants, Terry. The shuttle’s no bigger than my grandpa’s minivan.”

He held up a hand, authoritative, someone’s boss now. “You and the hyperbole. I can’t help you, Karen.” He dipped his chin and avoided her eyes. “And I don’t know that I would if I could. You’re my friend. I don’t want to see you suffer.”

“You look really broken up.”

He looked up, lines around his mouth, jaw taut. “This is what we’ve come to? After what happened?”

She could feel her body tightening, squeezing up around that hole behind her breast, trying to press into that vacuum.

“See where that got us,” she whispered.

And they refused to talk anymore about it, about the night when they had both woken from dead sleep to what they thought were lights flashing and alarms ringing from the shuttle’s console. But it had been quiet, the noise an illusion. They had felt unsettled for the next day and the day after that until the unease had settled into routine, a nervous jumpiness at the back of the brain, the base of the skull. It was both something and nothing, nothing to be reported.

“One more, for old times’ sake?” Terry held up the pitcher. There was hardly enough for one left.

“They’ll scold me if I come back drunk,” she said. He laughed, then smiled uncomfortably when her expression didn’t shift. “The bots can tell just by looking at you.”

“A little alcohol never hurt anyone.”

“Chemo and alcohol don’t mix.”

Terry grunted and nodded his head, though it was probably the first he’d heard of it. When she caught his eyes again, they were wet, sparkling in the dim light.

“I didn’t realize it was that bad.” He cleared his throat. “Old school, chemo.”

“I blame space,” she said, letting him off the hook, leaning back into the booth. “Bad for the body,” she joked.

He was still tense, his arms resting too quiet on the table. “Why do you want to go back then?”

She swallowed and wished she could find her anger again. “Good for the soul.” It was cheesy and she wasn’t sure what she actually thought about souls. But space seemed a good place to find out. Especially at the end.

“Help a friend out.”

He didn’t say no right away.

Karen felt for the cards in the bedside table without looking, smoothing out a playing space on the bedspread at the same time. She shuffled with practiced ease and laid out the cards for solitaire. One slipped off the bed, twisting in midair. She sighed and then, suddenly angry, wiped all the cards away. They hit the floor tiles with a soft patter. A man across the room craned his head off the pillows.

“Sorry.” She waved her hand in apology. “Sorry.” She shifted off the bed with effort and collected the cards. Her fingers trembled, almost impossible to see. But the bot passed by, and she was sure that it had somehow sensed her hesitation, her near-drop of the ace of spades.

She dumped the cards in the drawer without replacing them in the box. She felt nauseous after that morning’s round of chemo. The doctors had ruled out radiation and gene therapy early on for reasons that Karen could have, but had refused to, follow. The chemo made her feel ill, but at least it was something. When the doctors had told her the cancer was rare and unresearched, she was worried they might ask her to sacrifice that too, her life to science.

She peeled back the foil lid on the jello she had taken for lunch from the cafeteria. It was bright red. She let it sit on her tongue, the flavor so bright it was almost acidic. As she swallowed, she glanced at her email. Nothing from Terry. But there was a new crossword of the day. She opened it, setting the jello aside, and swiped her finger across the screen of her phone to construct words from selected letters. The little black squares, the empty spaces between answers, danced in front of her eyes, even she when closed them. Black dots wandered across the red at the back of her eyelids.

And so she spent the early afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep.

Karen woke to the sound of alarms, ones that imitated the noise of klaxons and three-bell emergencies. The urgency she felt was almost out of place, as if she expected to be on the deck of a ship at open sea, the waves crashing down on the plank or rearing up tall in front.

“Terry,” she said. She threw off the sheet, her feet drifting, the force of her motion propelling her towards the control panel before she had time to consciously decide on any action.

He was not far behind her, and she saw the fear in his eyes, momentary but there. It was only when she looked at him that she realized there was no sound, that his fear seemed absurd in the silence.

“What did you hear?” She performed a mental survey of the panel as she asked. There were no abnormal readings, no blinking lights. Her hand still reached out, looking for something to fix or alter. He didn’t answer. He scratched his neck below his ear.

“I thought we were in trouble,” she said, finally, when the silence had stretched out too long.

“So did I.” But he did not seem convinced that the trouble had passed.

“Check the hatch doors, I guess.” She tried to steer them back into a routine. The pressure was on her, she felt, to reassert normalcy.

“I felt like I was drowning,” he whispered. “Like a kid at the beach, head pushed down under the waves. Unable to find my way up.”

It was the same panic she had felt, down to the memory of salt water in her nose. “It’s alright, Terry.”

He shrugged, his face clearing a bit. “I imagine we won’t know. Not until twenty years from now and we look back and we realize what we lost tonight. What we misplaced while sleeping.”

Karen tried to write her sister a letter. It was hard to remember how to form some of the letters in cursive. She felt infantile struggling with the loop of the capital G.

“They stole it!” One of the other patients was struggling to get out of his chair, yelling at the aide. “Five quarters, all there. Set oldest to newest.” He pointed with a trembling finger. His jaw was slack, tongue lolling while he tried to catch his breath. The aide moved with long-suffering patience to help him walk to his bed.

Karen shook her head clear and refocused on the letter. Her chest hurt, but the doctors told her this particular pain was likely psychosomatic. You didn’t necessarily feel the cancer where it was eating at you.

She wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t sound hollow or dull. Small talk didn’t translate well to cursive. She amused herself to think that some later researcher might find her letters stuffed in a forgotten box at an archive, the letters of one of the first privately-employed astronauts. She imagined the researcher with a handheld light, hair glowing soft in that light, eyes lit up with curiosity.

She glanced back at the paper. Her sister would probably throw it out, unaware it was Karen’s only will and testament. And paper seemed antique, now that she thought of it. Perhaps an email would do just as well. She couldn’t seem to find the energy right then, though. And it was important she rest. She folded the paper up once and then again, until it was a small, tight square. She slipped it into the drawer of the bedside table with the playing cards.

She sat on the side of the bed, unlatching her watch and taking out her lenses. She curled under the weighted blanket and thought how good it felt, to be so heavy, to leave an imprint on the mattress.

She slept until it was dark.

The dark was disorienting, because no one in the ward had turned on any lights. Karen fumbled for her watch and glanced at the time. It was almost nine. She could hear the gentle click of the nurses’ shoes in the hallway, the flicker of the night lights. Terry would be waiting.

“It will be my ass,” he said as the waiter cleared their table. “There’s no way they’ll think you snuck in by yourself. Or that they won’t find the false weights I signed off on.”

“You’re decorated. You’re a hero. What can they do to you?” He snorted, because they both knew the answer to that.

“I won’t compromise the mission,” she followed up softly. “It was only automated anyways.”

“Only.” He stood up and straightened his jacket. “And then they deal with your corpse.” And he bit his lip as if the words had hurt him coming out.

She didn’t say anything, ducked her head as she zipped up her coat.

“I don’t understand,” he said again. “I never wanted to go back. Not afterwards.”

“It’s all I can think of now,” she answered. She couldn’t tell him why. She couldn’t tell herself.

Outside the institution, as she waited on the sidewalk and tried to hail a cab, Karen looked up at the night. It was expansive, stars winking between the spires of buildings. She placed a hand over her chest and tried to dull the pain there.

She had not taken any of her medicine with her. She’d taken hardly anything but her old ID and a card to pay the cab.

The air was warm on her cheek. She breathed in as deeply as she could and refused to cough. She glanced back, but no one was running after to fetch her back. It was not, after all, in theory, an involuntary facility.

“I never want to go back,” she whispered to herself, and she meant it as fully as Terry had. The place was, if anything, too well known. And it scared her, more than anything else. It was a slow panic, and it did not come with klaxons and bells, but it was panic she felt, looking back at the shadows between the columns, the lights at the windows. A panic as steady as her own heartbeat.

“Where you going?” The cabdriver rolled down his window.

She gave him the address to her old workplace.

They threatened to abort the mission when they found out. But the amount of money already spent, the orbit achieved, the data streaming in from the ship’s computations, made the threat hollow. Karen knew their priorities. She was not one of them.

She woke up to the eternal twilight of the shuttle’s dim lights. Beneath their own heliotropic lamps, small leafed plants nodded at her. They were so bright a green it hurt her to look at them.

She swung her legs out of bed and they drifted ahead of her. It took a little bit more effort each day to catch on to something, to pull her pants on, to find and cook some of the emergency rations stowed on the shuttle.

Karen stopped, as part of her morning routine, at the shuttle’s small window. It was made of thick, layered, silicate glass, and she could sense the distance it created between her and the vast hollow of space. She put one hand on the glass and pressed as hard as she could as if she might break through. She knew that it pressed back, the darkness and the light of it, the alien life of it. It was nothing and it was everything.

She did not cry, though the instinct was there. She was home, and there was no need to.

About the Author

Erin K. Wagner is a speculative fiction writer, interested in examining how the human responds to the inhuman. She grew up in southeast Ohio on the border of Appalachia, but now lives in central New York, where she hikes in the Catskills and listens for ghostly games of nine-pins. She holds her Ph.D. in medieval literature and teaches literature and writing in the SUNY system. She splits her time between academic research, investigating how medieval English writers navigated their own religious identities, and creative writing. Her stories have appeared in a variety of publications, from Apex to Luna Station Quarterly, and her novella The Green and Growing is available from Aqueduct Press.

Death of an Air Salesman

Rich Larson

Towering cliffs topped with bright lush greenery. Cold clean waves crashing against the stone below, sleek gray clouds swirling through the unbound sky above. A woman dances along the edge, her long hair and scarf whipped wild by the wind. Her bare face is enraptured, eyelids fluttering, nostrils flared, as she draws in breath after breath of Apex Air.

Maya watches longingly until the holopackaging loops, then returns the air bottle to her refrigerated bag, slotting it beside the others. Sitting cross-legged, she stretches as best she can—straightening her back makes her head graze the hard plastic roof of the sleepstack. She has a sharp spiny kink in her neck from always stooping.

It’s easier to just lie down. The sleepstack’s bottom is padded soft, though it sometimes leaks a sticky gel from unseen lacerations. The rest of the interior is all plastic-coated screen, gouged with graffiti here and there by bored renters.

More often than she sleeps, Maya just lies there, staring up at the free entertainment a foot from her face, watching goretoons or sex feeds for hours and hours until her eyes are shrunken and stinging. Sometimes she pays for crashing waves and wide skies, like the ones in the Apex Air holo, but she can rarely afford it.

A soft electronic chime: her rental expires in two minutes, thirty seconds. The number slides around her in circles, glowing a pale soothing blue that will turn red when the countdown hits zero. After that the chime turns into a yammering alarm, and they say five minutes after that teargas gets autopumped through the vent. Maya has never stayed inside long enough to find out.

She finishes dressing, pulling on her patched black gloves, attaching her face mask. The weather display appears in the corner of her goggles. Cold. Smog. Lower visibility than yesterday, lower oxygen. A good day to sell. The bottles’ luminous blue-green holopackaging will make them look like life preservers bobbing in the dark.

One minute, zero seconds. Maya puts on her tattered black coat and straps the bag to her shoulders. It hums against her back, the tiny refrigerator coil strumming her spine. She taps her finger against the side of the sleepstack and clears her viewing history.

The sleepstacks are meant to do that themselves, but some of these older units are glitchy. Once the old woman who rents the unit’s other ten hours gave Maya a look as they were passing and tugged an imaginary cock, made a mewling sound. Maya thought about it for days afterward, dissecting it in her head, suddenly paranoid that she had watched too many sex feeds, or the wrong sorts, and that the woman knew somehow. Since then she has been careful to clear the history, and keeps her head turned away when they pass each other in the queue.

The glow turns garish red and the sleepstack hisses open. Maya clambers out onto the narrow metal catwalk. Even through her coat, she feels the damp chill instantly. Her face mask filters what it can, but she still tastes the chemical haze. Countless sleepstacks tower into the dark sky over her head, row after row shifting and revolving as renters come and go. Neon purple vacancies slash through the brown smog.

Maya joins the ragged queue of renters heading towards the Sun Street exit. She watches for the old woman and her grease-stained yellow coat and her face mask, which is a cheery cartoon rabbit left with jagged nubs where she sliced its wobbly plastic ears off. But she sees someone else.

His scarf is bright bright red, somehow untouched by the soot and smog, wrapped like a pulsing artery around his neck. He walks slowly, a little stiffly. Tired from whatever variety of night work needs his long slender fingers and furrowed brow. When he pulls back his hood to scratch at his forehead, he has thick dark hair like from a transplant ad.

Someone jostles her from behind. Maya bobs her head apologetically, then pins herself to the side of the catwalk to let people pass, making herself as small as possible. She has to keep watching him for as long as she can. There’s a goretoon where Dex swallows Bogey’s favorite toy, and Bogey slices him open to find it, pulling out his shiny pink entrails by the handful while Dex’s eyes bulge.

Maya’s guts feel like that now, and she is sure her eyes are bulging, too, so it’s lucky her goggles are tinted. She watches him move hesitantly along the row of sleepstacks, checking against a holo on the palm of his glove. Her heart thumps hard as he slows down. She barely dares to believe it. He stops at unit 389—her unit—and levers himself inside.

The sleepstack clicks shut and Maya stays there a moment longer, imagining him stripping off his clothes and stuffing them into the cubby, maybe ordering a dry shower. She feels guilty picturing his naked body, so instead she pictures him walking along the edge of the cliff, red scarf whipping wild in the wind, and she’s there too, both of them unmasked and laughing.

She doesn’t know what her laugh sounds like. She would need to practice it first. Maybe she’ll practice today.

The refrigerated bag hums against her shoulder blades and Maya finally remembers there’s work to do. Time to start slinging air.

The city streets are a maze of neon and smog. Harsh blue LEDs slide through the pavement, guiding masked and hooded pedestrians along, turning red to stop them from stepping into the ghostly rush of automated traffic. Maya goes to the corner of Sun Street and searches for her first customer.

There’s no use trying to sell to the richest ones, the ones with swarms of tiny filter droids swirling around their heads, with swathes of perfect skin left near-exposed, coated only in membrane. They get their air by drone delivery, not from street hawkers. She can’t sell to the poorest ones, either, who stump along in old model masks that make their breathing rasp and echo.

Instead, Maya watches for a certain kind of in-betweener. The ones with bent heads and slumped shoulders who look like they’re on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. Scurrying between microjobs, perspiration fogging their goggles, anxiety building and keening in their throats. Maya can spot them because she knows the feeling exactly.

They shouldn’t be buying designer air. They should save their bitcred, wait for their dole. But when they buy the bottle, plugging it directly into their masks and sucking down the cold clean rush of nitrogen-oxygen-argon, they buy two minutes of not feeling desperate. Instead they are twirling free along the edge of a seaside cliff.

Maya is good at her job. She can tell which ones need the bottle shoved into their arms before they can think too long, which ones need it passed subtly underhand with a conspirator’s nod, and which ones need to see her turned away, distracted, the blue-green bottle trailing carelessly in her hand, so they can feel like they’ve come up with the idea themselves.

She makes her way down Sun Street and onto the Flux, moving in a circuit through her usual sell spots, keeping her eyes peeled for the regular or semi-regular buyers she knows by mask or by body language. She used to monitor her efficiency stats and sell maps religiously, but she’s been slinging long enough now that she does it mostly by feel.

Sometimes she sees other air salesmen, hawking dull black canisters of OxyPlus or the brightly-colored Lucky Lungful sacs that look so cheap to her. Maya is polite to them, but never stops to talk or share the dregs of a caffeine spray. Instead, she plans her route so she arrives near a food vendor right as her gurgling stomach is about to eat itself, then allows herself five minutes to choose a technicolored foil packet and dine in a standing booth where the recycled air tastes like old grease.

After that, back to work.

On good days she empties her bag and refills it twice at the Apex Air station that carefully scans her wrist implant before it deposits the fresh bottles into her bag one by one. Today, because of the boy with the red scarf, she is less focused. She only refills once, but once is still enough to keep her on top of the leaderboard and enough to put her name into the lotto again.

Every week, the top Apex Air seller has their name put into the travel lotto, to go to the air farms. Maya has been dreaming of winning ever since she saw the promotional images: wide gray skies, rolling green hills dotted with bright white air tanks, clean-clothed employees checking the pressure displays with contented smiles on their bare faces. It can’t be far from the cliff where they recorded the holopackaging.

The only strange thing about the lotto is that it offers two spots to the winner. Two seats on the suborbital, two hospitality passes. Strange, but then again, Apex Air is an international company. Maybe there are air salesmen in other cities who live in commune bubbles and have people to take with them.

Maya assumed she would leave the second seat empty and go alone, but now she has another idea moving in the back of her mind.

The last few hours of her shift pass too slowly. She starts gravitating back toward the sleepstacks early. She knows the boy with the red scarf might not be there. He might have only needed a couple hours of rest. But today, for some inscrutable reason, Maya feels lucky. So when she sees him slip out of unit 389 she is not surprised, and she is only slightly terrified.

She moves to intercept him, all of the words she was planning to say to him breaking and colliding in her head, turning into nonsense. “Excuse me,” she says, but only mouthing it—no sound comes out and he’s already past her, walking loose now, spine straight. He’s as tall as she is; he must get the same ache in his neck.

She flags. She should go back to the sleepstack. Her rental is beginning. She’s wasting clean air from the vent. But she has the image again, of his red scarf flapping in the wind, of both of them dancing.

With her heart pounding, she hurries after him and taps his elbow. He turns around.

“Excuse me,” he says.

“Excuse me,” Maya says, echoing the words right back because she hadn’t thought of what to do if he said it first. His goggles are still down around his neck and his eyes are a brilliant pale blue. “Three-eight-nine?” she manages, nodding back towards the sleepstacks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yes.”

Her mouth is so dry that her tongue and teeth seem to scrape like metal parts. If she can’t say the right thing, he will turn and keep walking and the next time they pass each other he will keep his gaze carefully averted how she does to the old woman.

“The cushion leaks,” she says.

His eyes crinkle, and she can tell—she can hope—that he is smiling under the filter mask. “I lay down the wrong way,” he says, illustrating with his slender hands. “Got it in my hair.”

“You have to lie headfirst,” Maya says. “I mean. Head that way.” Feeling bold, she reaches up and reverses his hands in the air.

He looks at them, then nods. “I have to go,” he says. “My name’s Dima, though. I have to go to work. Is what I mean.”

“I’m Maya,” Maya says. She pulls down her goggles, so he can see her eyes, too, and hopefully tell that she is smiling under her mask.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you again, maybe. In the morning.”

He walks away, and Maya walks back toward the sleepstack, each step lighter than the last like there is a helium pump inside her, filling her up. She climbs inside the unit and sheds her coat, her gloves, her mask, folding them up into the cubby.

Dima did not wipe the sleepstack screen before he left, and as Maya suspected, the sleepstack failed to reset on its own. But there is no frozen sex feed or netgame above her head. Instead, he was using one of the most basic options, turning the screen into a blank white page and his finger into a paintbrush.

She lies back and stares up at a smeary yellow orb cresting a bright green hill. Across the bottom of the hill, in sharp crackling black, there’s a series of jagged scribbles. It takes her a moment to realize it’s text, but not in the way she knows it. Here each letter is misshapen and unique. He must have used his fingertip to do it.

Maya pulls up a little alphabet box, so she can compare the letters and puzzle out the words.

Once upon a time, there was a sun. It was warm. Probably.

She thinks it’s the longest and most beautiful thing she has ever read in text. She can imagine Dima reaching up and tracing out each messy letter, slow and solemn. He couldn’t have known she was going to read it, but he must have hoped someone would. Otherwise he would have wiped the screen himself.

Maya saves the screen as is and slides it into her own files where it can stay pristine, untouched. Then, with a trembling finger, she selects the paintbrush.

She finishes her paintbrushing with plenty of time left over to sleep, but when the lights flick on to wake her it looks so ugly and silly, she wants to delete it. Dima might not like it, or not understand it, or the sleepstack might shuffle his rental and instead the old woman will see it. Maya would hate that.

She spends so long debating that the countdown is red before she has her coat and mask on. She barely beats the alarm, and it’s such a rush to get out of the sleepstack that in the end she forgets to wave her hand and wipe the screen. By the time she’s heading towards the Sun Street exit, it’s too late.

Dima’s red scarf makes him easy to extract from the stream of night workers coming in to sleep. At first it seems like he will walk past her without slowing, and she wonders if she should do the same, but then his head swivels and he pulls down his goggles. His eyes are bloodshot now, but still blue.

Maya pulls down her own goggles. “Excuse me,” she says. “Where do you work?”

“Courier,” he says, and she notices his pebbly geckowrap shoes for the first time, one of them held together with a webbing of glue. “Where do you work? You have a bag.”

Maya retrieves a bottle of air and balances it on her finger, a trick she does sometimes to make it look like the bottle is hovering, like the air inside is so pure it could float up and away. “Apex Air,” she says. “Breathe the best.”

He makes a sound that she assumes is coughing at first, but there’s no phlegm or throat in it. Then he passes her, heading towards the sleepstacks, and Maya lets herself get caught up in the crowd exiting on Sun Street. Once upon a time, she thinks.

She’s already sold three bottles by the time she realizes he was laughing. She finally practices her own as she walks down the Flux, quietly at first, then a little louder.

She tries it out on one of her customers when she hands him the bottle: “What a beautiful day. Ha, ha, ha.”

He hesitates, then taps his ribs, the sign for how-are-your-lungs. “Filter okay?” he asks.

Maya grimaces behind her mask. “Filter okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

She is thinking about Dima when she refills her bag at the Apex Air dispenser. She is thinking about him when she eats, slipping the greasy calzone from its foil and kneading it so the still-frozen parts meet the too-hot parts and thaw. She is thinking about him when she rides the tube uptown, scuttling from one piss-smelling compartment to the next, bottle balanced on her finger.

But today it doesn’t slow her down. Instead, she sells faster than ever, livewired with a nervous energy. When it’s finally late enough to return to the sleepstack, her stomach feels full of wiggling fingers. For the past hour she has been trying to guess what the lower part of Dima’s face might look like, the slope of his nose, the width of his mouth, the shape of his chin.

She arrives back too early. Unit 389 is still sealed up. She waits further down the catwalk, fidgeting foot to foot, wondering if she should leave and come back, to not look as if she’s waiting, but then what if she misses him?

The quick-slow glide of hydraulics startles her. Unit 389 is opening. She takes such a sharp breath that her filter mask whines at her; her heart hammers.

The old woman comes out, adjusting her rabbit mask, and Maya feels her whole body slump in on itself. Dima did not take the full-time allotment. And since he is a courier, he probably roves all over the city. He probably rents sleepstacks in every sector. He probably never rents the same one three times in a row.

Or worse, he saw her message and it made him decide to switch.

The old woman stares at her for a moment, head cocked to one side, then starts to walk. Maya scrambles after her. She has never spoken to the old woman, but now she needs to.

“Excuse me,” she gasps. “Was there anything on the screen when you went inside?”

The old woman keeps walking. Maya follows.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” she repeats. “I need to know about the screen. In the unit. In our unit. In three-eight-nine.” She reaches gingerly for the old woman’s arm and gets slapped away, but at least it makes her stop and turn.

“Oh, now you talk to me,” the old woman says, in a high raspy voice, distorted through an old filter.

“Yes,” Maya says. “The screen? Was there anything on the screen when you went inside?”

“I wiped it,” the old woman says.

“But before you wiped it, what did it say?” Maya pleads.

The old woman pulls down her mask and Maya sees discolored skin, scabbed lips peeled back off a wide grin. Her teeth are bright artificial white, stained coolant blue in places. The smile doesn’t crinkle her eyes. The old woman clicks her mask back into place and keeps walking.

Maya sways there for a moment, feeling confused, feeling lost even though she knows exactly where she is in the city. Then she goes back to the sleepstack. As soon as she’s inside, she collapses. She scrabbles her mask off with both hands and breathes in, but the clean air doesn’t help, especially since Dima was breathing it only hours ago. It was so stupid of her to run after him and tap his elbow. Stupid of her to spend hours on the clumsy picture of them on the clifftop, his scarf a tiny daub of red.

The screen above her is blanked to a black mirror, showing her mouth grimacing, her eyes swelling with tears. She reaches a hand up to cover her blurred reflection, hating it. Her fingers brush an unfamiliar divot in the plastic coating.

Maya swallows her sob. She turns the screen white and drags out the paintbrush, selects black. With one trembling finger, she traces the divots in the ceiling, staying inside the carved furrows as best she can as letters and numbers start to emerge.

Maya 083143 384 Dima.

Maya is reminded of another goretoon, the one where Dex falls down and down an electric staircase, bouncing from one step to the next, except she feels like she is falling up and up instead. She pulls up a hologram keyboard so she can transcribe Dima’s contact code, punching each digit into the air with a triumphant fist.

They meet three days later in Theta Plaza, where there are still the husks of dried-out vines and shrubs spilling from cracked concrete planters. When she was younger, Maya used to switch a green filter over her goggles and pretend they were still alive, a little jungle of her own. Today she barely notices them. She only notices Dima.

As they walk through the maze of dead plants, she can’t stop looking at him, watching the way he moves his arms, the way he holds his head. At first the conversation is uncoordinated, stilted, with stretches of silence where she forgets whose turn it is to talk. But they fall eventually into a rhythm. His blue eyes always rove left when he speaks, but they always slide back to hers when she replies.

Maya has never spoken so much in her life; it starts to ache her jaw.

They talk about small things, about their favorite feeds to watch in the sleepstack and which food vendors sometimes glitch the right way to give out an extra drink pouch. Neither of them know their parents since both of them were born exosomatic, post-plague, but Dima says he has a gene brother on the other side of the city.

He tells her about the things he transports in the night—food and alcohol sprays and sometimes intravenous sacks to people who are wired up in virtual reality or who just don’t want to leave their sleepstacks. Sometimes packets of amphetamine, and once a biogun, the kind that fires calcium spikes and dissolves after a few hours so it leaves no evidence behind.

He tells her how powdered chalk and coolant mix to make a soft blue paste, and how he paints with it in the part of the metro tunnels where the autocleaners can’t climb, but not so much anymore because his wrists are always aching.

She tells him about the work lotto and the leaderboard, and she says, without quite being able to meet his eyes, that they invite two people to the air farms, even though only one person wins it.

“Can I come?” Dima asks plainly, and Maya feels so happy she might burst like Dex the time Dex accidentally climbed inside the pressure pot.

They walk from the plaza down Cloud Street, and the backs of their gloved hands keep brushing against each other, but neither of them step away to keep it from happening. When his fingers reach out and clumsily wrap themselves into hers, her breathing quickens. She can feel the tension in his arm and imagine it all through his body.

She can feel herself getting flushed, how she sometimes gets watching the sex feeds, and when they stop at a row of privacy pods she only hesitates for an instant before she puts her wrist to the scanner. He does the same on his side. Bitcred trickles away, and the outer door shutters open.

Her heart is fluttering all around her rib cage as they step inside and the door seals shut behind them. They take off one item of clothing at a time, making it into a sort of game, and Maya finds she is trembling. She peels off her gloves, her coat, just as if she’s in the sleepstack—except here they can stand, and instead of a gel cushion there’s a sort of couch. She took a dry shower before she left the sleepstack, but now she can smell herself, her sweat and her sex.

With each removal, she sees Dima a little clearer. Without his coat she sees the geometry of his torso, how his trunk connects his narrow hips to his rib cage, which pumps in and out, in and out, as his breathing quickens. Without his gloves she sees the bony length of his fingers that weave through hers like puzzle pieces. Without his mask she sees his face, the inchoate smile on his chapped lips and the warm black eyes half-hidden by heavy lids.

She thinks he is more perfect than any real or simulated person she has ever seen on a sex feed. That in turn makes her wonder how many people are watching them from the sleepstacks, all those glazed eyes only inches from their naked bodies. It feels surreal. She knows there is a privacy option, if you pay an extra fee, but Dima has not mentioned it so she won’t either.

They stumble into each other on the way to the couch, and the feeling of their bare skin colliding goes through her like live current. They fall entangled; Maya is grabbing at his back, his front, driven by a need she’s never felt before, as if her skin is coated in a million tiny hands grasping for a million tiny counterparts on his.

A gasping sob runs all the way through her, but this time it’s sheer happiness, too much happiness, so much it might atomize her. The whole universe is Dima’s body and hers.

Maya uses her position on the leaderboard to get Dima his first Apex Air contract. She worries that he will miss courier work, roving all over the city, seeing small slices of other people’s lives, but he says slinging air is easier on his joints and he would rather see all of her than a hundred little pieces of other people. They coordinate their sell shifts and start to rent a double-wide sleepstack.

At first her numbers take a hit, because she sleeps even less than usual with the bony geometry of Dima’s body pushed up against her, but eventually she finds comfortable places for her head and her hands and his breathing becomes her lullaby. She wakes warm from his body heat. They help each other gear up and when they leave the stack they walk close, so their arms brush with bursts of joyful static.

Once she sees the old woman with the rabbit mask, but she doesn’t seem to recognize her, maybe because lately Maya scurries less and walks more like Dima does, with long smooth steps. He sells to one end of the Flux and she sells to the other; they work their way toward each other in the middle and sometimes stage tiny arguments about whose zone is whose, which always make a few curious people stop and buy.

Inside the sleepstack they lie wrapped around each other, sometimes imitating what they see on the sex feeds, sometimes watching goretoons. One night Dima paints crude versions of Bogey and Dex on the screen, but instead of dismembering each other they are holding hands. He calls them Bogey-Maya and Dima-Dex. Maya saves it.

One night after they’ve each sold two full bags each, they celebrate with amphetamine tabs and visit the transit tunnel where Dima used to put his blue chalk-and-coolant drawings. In the lamplight she can see the ghostly murals up on the cracked concrete, swirling faces and millefleur limbs, and she holds Dima by his hip bones and tells him it’s beautiful and she hopes the autocleaners never, ever find it.

They sell well together, hovering near the top of the leaderboard, sometimes Dima leading, usually Maya. Neither of them win the lotto, but eventually they save enough bitcred to make the trip on their own. The air farms don’t exist—instead they visit a squat gray cube in a city not so different from theirs, touring an air factory where the glowing bottles are manufactured by the millions.

They live happily ever after, probably.

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.

Dreams Strung like Pearls Between War and Peace

Nin Harris

Serolar existed in a state of curfew and of anticipation. Steam-powered mini-dirigibles issuing directives from the Governor’s Palace traveled from quarter to quarter every afternoon. Every seventh-day or so, klaxons wailed while the dirigibles advised them it was a test. Despite this, stray pockets of celebration happened every now and then but it was hard to tell if celebrants were for or against the central Dvenri government. Even the Governor was busy holding her own balls and soirees.

“This war will not be fought on battlefields,” Liannell the florist said to Raneka, even as they argued about whether yellow or white peacock flowers would best augment the calla lilies selected for Raneka’s dinner party.

“Why would we need to fight a war at all, and if not on a battlefield, how will the war be fought? With floral arrangements?” Raneka had asked in bemusement.

“Perhaps,” said Liannell with sparkling eyes, even as she perused the seating charts Raneka had provided her.

Liannell had wanted of Raneka the same thing that the candlemaker had wanted, and the table-linen merchant, and the wine-merchant. It had been a difficult day in which Raneka had received far more information than she’d expected, from the remnants of an insurrectionist’s past that she had left behind. It was made far more difficult by the muted atmosphere of panic and a near-manic euphoria. She’d seen a couple rutting in a laneway, oblivious to bystanders placing ribald bets in tin cups filled with paper money. She’d seen two men shoot each other in the head. On her way back, she had observed in shock as another man flung himself from the clock tower of the University down towards the cobblestoned pavement below. He had shouted to a horrified audience that the world was ending because the war was coming. And then he had spread his arms as though to fly.

Shaken, Raneka had fled the scene, her heart beating like a caged bird as she half-ran towards the Upper Residential Quarter where sunlight scraped the undersides of buildings as the day ebbed into a night of no moon. Her shoulder blades itched with the presentiment that she was being followed. Her heart skipped several beats, causing a breathlessness that had become a part of her life for too long. Nevertheless, she had remained unmolested. She made a note to send a factor out the next day in search of a bodyguard or two. They were right—she was in need of protection, and she hated that thought.

The smoothly swooping road of the cul-de-sac was becoming a familiar sight. She sobbed with relief at the sight of the four-storeyed negligible refuge of her grandfather’s house. Her house now. This house was not a house best suited for one who had been living in an apartment in the Civil Quarters of the city—a small two-room affair that could barely fit into one of the closets in her grandfather’s house. Here, the furniture loomed like huge teakwood machines that had been carved with painful precision. They all seemed rather painfully anthropomorphic as though they would be able to walk across the room at any given moment to tap her on the shoulder. It reminded her that her grandfather had run away from this very house to live in a hut put together out of woven and treated ganggas leaves. A hut her parents had left her in when they’d run away to join the counterrevolutionary rebellion in the North. A hut in which she learned she had been orphaned and that her parents were warriors, or criminals depending on who you asked.

During her university days she’d been wrought with fear that the infamous dark-robed inquisitors of the Governor’s secret cabinet would pull her away for questioning. Every now and then she thought she’d spotted them in crowded lecture halls. Phantasms and fears born of anxiety, she’d assured herself over the years. To be safe, she put away every single thought of hers that was even a modicum of revolutionary. She stopped visiting her grandfather. She renounced his rebellion. She joined first the government training scheme after graduation and then became a civil servant in the Dvenri government. She thought it would keep her safe. And so it did. But she didn’t feel so safe now. And so she spent money like it was water, and acted like a newly anointed heiress was expected to behave. Members of her more respectable family might view her excesses with scorn but she suspected they were also relieved that she was so colorless, and that she seemed more inclined towards spending her grandfather’s accumulated and untouched wealth rather than following in her grandfather’s footsteps.

The doorbell rang. “Shall I get that, Dahshani?” asked Jarold, the footman.

“Please. Send them away, whoever they are. I have a headache,” she said.

She moved towards the chaise lounge and started opening the piles of sealed letters that had been on the side table in the marbled foyer of the town house. From the front door she heard the sound of masculine voices raised in argument. Then there was a scuffling sound. Then silence. Raneka frowned, and stood up. The door to her drawing room slammed open and three black-robed government inquisitors walked in. They looked oddly familiar. Correction. They looked entirely too familiar. Her head started to throb.

They had been with her for years.

“Dahshani Raneka. I believe you know who we are. You’ve been very good for years, a very good little mouse. You’ve been so very good, right up till today.”

Hand raised to her throat, Raneka said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’ve been consorting with known dissidents, Dahshani.”

“I’ve merely been buying flowers, draperies, silverware, and other accoutrements for my dinner party,” she said.

“Yes, we’ve taken into account that they accosted you, rather than the other way round. Which is why there’s a way out of your current predicament, Dahshani,” said the third man.

“And what would that way out be?” asked Raneka.

“Write us an invitation to your dinner party. All three of us. We will monitor what is happening, and all you need to do is be a good hostess,” said the third man who looked her up and down in a very familiar manner. “And we’ve a list of other merchants you need to visit tomorrow.”

“Very well. I will have extra food ordered,” said Raneka, who faked a calm she did not feel as the rest of what they were saying seemed to float in the air beyond her ability to comprehend.

She strode to her wall-desk, pulling out more gilt-edged invitations. “If I may get your names to write three invitations?”

“Please, do not waste resources on our food. We don’t eat much—we don’t need to,” said the third man whose eyes gleamed in that same alien way that told her they didn’t need much that most humans did. There’d been rumors about these secret cabinet members for years. Rumors whispered about at night to frighten children. That they were not human, but one of the beta tribes who’d been crossbred by Dvenri alchemists to create the ultimate government agents. Not as strong as purebred Llen, and far more biddable to the Dvenri cause.

“And you can make out just one invitation card to Messrs, Red, Brown, and White.”

Raneka gave all three of them dubious looks, but did as they’d asked. “I assume you’re Mr. White, then?” she asked of the third man.

He laughed. “Actually, Mr. Brown. As usual, you will not remember we’ve conversed after we’ve left.”

Mr. Brown palmed the invitation and gently grazed the back of her hand. She shuddered in reflex. How many times had this happened? How many times had she forgotten them?

“Oh, and Jarold will be as good as new in the morning. As always. We always reset our mice,” said the second black-robed man.

“Don’t look so petrified, Dahshani. We’ve never touched you beyond this,” said Mr. Brown as his finger grazed her skin once more. “Our employer would be very displeased if we manhandled even nobility who have indulged in counterinsurgencies. And you’ve been so very good. Too good, very obedient,” he said.

There was much that was implicit. It was a gentle threat that caused her skin to crawl. She resisted the urge to gag.

They pulled her toward the chaise lounge and placed her there. “You will be very sleepy now, my dear. When you wake up, you may return to your preparations for the biggest dinner party of the season. You now know who you should visit, don’t you? You will be so very good, once you’re reset. A list of people to visit will be on your desk,” said the first man, the one she now drowsily remembered was Mr. White.

“Yes, she will be far more useful to us now that she’s quit from the government,” said Mr. Red.

“That was a brilliant masterstroke, suggesting she’d resign,” answered Mr. Brown.

“She’s always been so very obedient, this little mouse of us,” laughed one of them, or was it all of them?

“Too obedient. No chance for sport,” said Mr. Brown again.

If she ever had a chance, she’d rip his face off with a fork, she thought.

Oblivion claimed her.

The Braided Lion Cloth Emporium was run by a family who had received the Imperial Writ from the Governors of Serolar for decades. Their fame showed in the elaborate architecture of the storefront with its ornate carved panels, floral mosaicked tiles and the wood carvings on the main doors. Within, the textiles that hung from the wall of the shop flowed like a waterfall of colors from some railings while others in earthy hues dangled like lianas from branches of fern-encrusted trees that thrust upwards from the undergrowth of the Serol Forest. At the memory of the forest, of another lifetime from this one, Raneka choked in sudden grief as she meandered through aisles crammed with boles of cloth like colorful tree trunks. Vibrant reds, blues that shimmered like the Tere-Ora Ocean, ambers, greens and textured gold like the mage-lions of Serolar. Raneka caressed rich silk embroidered with silver stars and spirals that soothed the eyes with her dark golden brown fingers, rubbing her calluses over the stars, feeling the imprint as though she was trying to bring constellations into her being. She inhaled the scent of fresh textiles that seemed to bring her back to her youth when she’d climbed the trees of the Serol Forest to collect the fungi that lived in a parasitical relationship with the raincaller trees. Her grandfather would use the fungi to brew a drink that allowed rogue neithyrs to confer with other neithyrs through means that were not crystal-bestowed. In her youth, the forest was the safest place for her, while hostilities raged between the order of Holy Neithyrs and the armies of the Dvenri Empire.

Sometimes, she thought of the heedless opulence she had stockpiled for the dinner party, and she cringed inwardly. Crystal glasses had been bought, the best porcelain from the Ruma’i isles, Lusini butter—not celestial and not as deadly as those whispered about in folklore and horror stories. Meat from Mirozkh sheep farms, and vegetables harvested from underwater farms deep within Lake Llendrys, adjuncts to the underwater kingdom of the aquatic Llen. And now here she was, in search of the perfect cloth to make an evening gown fit for an unexpected heiress. Except, the party was tomorrow night, and she did not know if it was even possible to make a gown within a day. Oh grandfather, Raneka whispered to herself as she had on too many occasions. Why did you not tell me? Why did you lead me to discover and inherit all this only now, when I have no idea what to do with this legacy of yours?

She choked back on unwelcome feelings as she palmed a rich, velvet fabric with a tapestry weave of deep burgundy, bronze, and navy blue. It was exquisite.

“This is lovely but won’t be comfortable in our weather,” advised a soignee woman who swooped in from beneath a curtain of fabric to address her. She was large, both in frame and in height; her abundant curves were enhanced rather than concealed by the stark lines of the dramatically elegant gown she wore.

“Why do you think so?” challenged Raneka, sure that the woman assumed that she couldn’t afford the fabric. She bristled the defensive bristle of one who had worn cheap synthetic weaves from Dvenri textile machines for the entirety of her adult life in the city.

“Because I made a caftan from another bolt and it was so itchy my skin broke out in rashes?” asked the woman.

Her grin, Raneka decided, was so affable it would have melted the most dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon.

The woman held out her hand to Raneka, “I’m Dahshani Infarre. I see you’re not attended. Come to the back and I’ll show you some of the newer material!”

Raneka took Infarre’s hand and shook it, drawn to the woman’s confident warmth. “Fine, I’ll follow you. Do you own this emporium?” she asked.

Infarre chuckled. “My family owns the company that runs this chain of emporiums, yes. As for me, I merely manage the main branch.”

There were volumes that Infarre managed to convey in her statement as she walked in aggressive yet intrinsically feminine strides across the emporium. Raneka touched bolts of cloth as they walked through the showroom. Silk, satin, gossamer, georgette, woolen weaves from Mirozkh, and more exotic printed cloth from the archipelagos. Once, she could only dream of affording these textiles.

Towards the back of the vast showroom, Infarre beckoned her through the open doorway, wide enough that five Verconian palanquins could park side-by-side. An exquisitely garbed man ambled towards them. Tall and lanky, he was dressed in tights embroidered in fractal loops, and a heavily bejeweled bolero that left his torso bare. Modesty did not seem this man’s suit. His hair was puffed up upon his head, his face clean-shaven and his spectacle frames bejeweled to match his bolero.

“Aaah, the new heiress herself!” he exclaimed with mock pomp as he executed a bow.

“Shush, Acquasar, don’t tease her,” said Infarre with a warning look at the man.

Raneka was immediately defensive, the fear that had dogged her since she gained her inheritance doubling, causing her to pale. She made to run, but the all-too-familiar breathlessness gave her pause. One skipped beat. Two, three. And then her heart settled on a regular rhythm again. She breathed in air like she’d never breathed it before. She counted to ten.

“Are you quite alright, love?” asked Infarre with some concern.

“Anxiety, I think,” said Acquasar. “I recognize it well.”

“Yes, I know you do,” Infarre said with a soft voice. They exchanged glances. She said. “Let’s bring her to my office. She could be dehydrated. And we can talk there in peace.”

Raneka stiffened again at the volumes Infarre managed to lace into her words. It was a skill she would have to pick up, she thought. The elite of the city played too many political games and she’d managed to sidestep at least two dozen since it became known that she was a Mirozhi heiress.

“I hope we’re just looking at textiles,” Raneka said.

“Well, mostly textiles,” Infarre qualified as they walked into her spacious office with fine mahogany furniture.

Acquasar walked directly to a carved wooden door with the confidence of familiarity, opening it to reveal a cooling box, the contents lit up by the cooling crystals that lined the sides and top of the box. He pulled out a glass bottle filled with water and a bowl of fresh strawberries.

“Where’d you put the lemons, Infarre?” he asked as he stuck his head in the icebox.

“Behind the chocolates,” Infarre said as she led Raneka to a comfortable chaise lounge.

“You must forgive Dahshan Acquasar, he can be so very gauche despite his station. But as you may have already discerned, we were quite pleased you decided to visit one of our shops. We would have met with you at some point, but this is far more efficacious. We have.” Infarre paused, hesitated even.

“We have things to discuss. About your grandfather.”

Raneka knew what both Acquasar and Infarre wanted from her. It seemed like almost all the merchants she’d visited had been insurrectionists who’d been trained by her grandfather. She wondered why.

“No,” Raneka said in even tones that brooked no nonsense. Authority was new to her but she had learned to be comfortable with it, like a ball gown that was ill-fitting at first but which sagged and softened into one’s curves and angles as the night wore on.

Infarre and Acquasar exchanged glances. “We haven’t even said anything yet.”

“I am not my grandfather; and I will not help you,” she said firmly.

“We thought that after you resigned from your government job you would surely . . . ” began Acquasar but then he stopped, disappointment etched on his patrician features.

“Your stupid resistance has cost me my parents, my grandfather, and everything I loved. The Dvenri were hostages for centuries. Centuries! Of your glorious Yroi Empire. Why should I help you? For that matter, why should I care for either of you? I’m Mirozhi—and I’m not as idealistic as my grandfather was,” said Raneka, heat entering her voice—surprising and alarming herself.

“Is that what you think?” Infarre asked.

Her tones were mild while her eyes contemplated Raneka like she was a new bolt of cloth with a perplexing pattern. “Do you think we all do this because of idealism? I’m Dvenri—in case you haven’t noticed. As is Acquasar. We’ve nary enough Dvenri blood between us to make a gruesome cocktail for blood-drinkers.”

“Besides, bloody cocktails are far too cavalier for my taste,” said Acquasar, who expertly measured and decanted liquors into three tall glasses before adding chopped fruits and herbs. He handed her a cocktail decorated with strawberry wedges she’d watch him chop daintily on Infarre’s sideboard, the ice cubes clinking in the tall glass.

Raneka shrugged as she accepted the drink, “It’s none of my business.”

She sipped on the drink with some relief as the cool liquid slid down her throat.

“Are you sure? Are you sure you do not want to know how corrupt and how—disturbed our current Governor is? Never mind the entire Empire. Just consider our little city-state. Pay attention today. Pay attention tomorrow night as you host your little soiree. To which we’re invited, in case you hadn’t realized.”

Raneka inhaled. Of course. They were of two of the most prominent Dvenri families in the city—of course they’d been invited.

“Can you promise us that much?” asked Acquasar with a gentleness that Raneka found intimidating rather than reassuring.

“I can’t promise what I don’t understand,” said Raneka, defensive once again.

“We’ll tell you if the need arises. Now,” Infarre said, briskly. “What was it you wanted for your dinner party?”

“Cloth to be turned into a gown,” said Raneka, nervous and abashed at her confession.

“Darling, your party is tomorrow! Who do you think would be able to make a gown within a day?” Acquasar stared at her with a kind of horrified fascination as though she’d declared she’d be daubing herself with cow dung as raiment.

“I’d completely forgotten about the gown until this morning,” Raneka pulled the confession out, something that had embarrassed her to no end when she woke up that morning.

Infarre said, “Would you be content with one-of-a-kind ready-made gowns that no one has seen, let alone worn?”

“Ready-made gowns that no one has seen? How is this possible?” asked Raneka.

“Designing is a . . . well, some would say it’s a hobby of mine, but I’ve never really shown anyone apart from Acquasar,” Infarre answered, her tone matter-of-fact rather than shy.

“And they’re brilliant. I keep telling her she should sell them, but no, it’s art! You should take her up on the offer—it’s the first time she’s allowed it,” said Acquasar, who sounded very proud of Infarre, and ridiculously fond.

Raneka said, “Yes, I’d love to see your designs.”

Infarre’s eyes warmed as though she’d been given a gift. As they walked into another room, Raneka’s eyes were agog at the exquisite creations hanging from the wall.

“They’re marvelous,” breathed Raneka in wonder.

“She’s marvelous,” said Acquasar in a tone of unmasked adoration.

“Stop it, both of you,” said Infarre with profound embarrassment. “Here, I know you wanted us to say nothing else but could you amuse me for at least two nights with this?”

She held out what looked like an intricate silver brooch with an emerald cabochon in the middle of it.

“What is this?” asked Raneka suspiciously.

“It’s a memory recorder. Wear it on you until the next time we meet. Just put it on now, then press on the cabochon three times. If ever you feel in doubt of your memories, twist the cabochon anticlockwise. Then, come to see us. If you’re scared to do it—don’t twist the cabochon alone. Come see us, and we’ll review your memories together.”

Infarre gave Raneka the brooch and then squeezed her shoulders comfortingly.

“I don’t understand,” Raneka said.

“Have you been feeling frightened your whole life?”

“No, just since . . . ” Raneka looked up, her face blank.

Infarre and Acquasar gave each other significant looks.

“This meeting doesn’t feel random,” said Raneka. None of the meetings felt random. It felt as though she’d been given a list of merchants to visit.

“Only think, how did you know to come to this Emporium?” asked Infarre.

“I don’t know . . . , I’ve heard of your textiles, I suppose.”

“It wasn’t us; I can tell you that. But things are escalating, and we’re on the verge of war—so the shenanigans by the Government increase,” said Acquasar.

“If you think I’m a spy, why are you talking to me anyway?” asked Raneka.

“Because you’re an innocent—and because we loved your grandfather. Besides, most of us know you. Don’t you remember us? You were a little girl running about in your grandfather’s hut when he was training both of us,” said Acquasar.

“There is so much I don’t remember,” Raneka said, her voice slow. “So many gaps in how I perceive things. I don’t know when I was last a whole person.”

Acquasar said, “Hard to say how much of that is who you are, and how much of that is what’s been done to you.”

“What’s been . . . done to me?” asked Raneka.

“You’re not the only one,” Acquasar said, the words dragged out of him like marsh-sludge. “I was a threat, and so they—reset me more than once. Until your grandfather saved me. So now, let us return the favor. They’ll be wanting to trap us at your dinner party. But we have a little trap of our own planned.”

“I’m sorry,” Raneka said. “I’m sorry.”

Raneka decided then that it was time she started to trust people. It didn’t seem such a bad thing to start with these two strangers.

Two hours later, Raneka lurched out of the Emporium, half-dizzy with the weight of an obligation she did not want but still tugged by the camaraderie that had grown between the three of them after an afternoon of trying on gowns. She had finally settled on an elegant creation of dove-gray and soft hues of peach, studded with seed-pearls. She had listened to all that Infarre had told her in urgent tones. She fingered the new brooch she now wore affixed to her day gown. The weight of their expectation placed a pall even on what seemed to be a budding friendship. The weight of what she’d been told? Even more so.

She grew up on conversations of revolution, of strategies for offensives happening in the passes of the Southern Crescent range. Many caravans of the Dvenri were relieved of hostages and goods. Many indentured laborers were subsumed into the underground network created by the neithyrs. Raneka however, had learned her histories. Her grandfather had been a Professor of Lusini history before he decamped for the Serol Forest, leaving his holdings and his business to family members to run.

She ran back to the city after her last explosive fight with her grandfather. She did not want any of what he was doing. Not a revolution. She wanted a quiet life. She knew from the history books that the Dvenri had been victimized for years by the Yroi. She did not understand why they should side with a dead Empire who had been brutes to all of them: Dvenri, Mirozhi, Lusini.

“That was past history, but the evil the Dvenri are creating in the here and now needs to be ended,” her grandfather had said during that final confrontation.

“I think you’ve become susceptible to neithyr propaganda. I’m not sure what evil you’re talking about. The city’s entirely civilized,” Raneka had replied.

“I knew it was a mistake sending you to study at the University of Serolar. I should have sent you to Vontessa!” Her grandfather had shaken his fist in the air.

“I made that decision, grandfather, remember? I made that decision—and the money came from the funds my parents set aside for my studies. Not yours,” she had said, before she’d walked out of his life. And then her grandfather had died and had left her everything. She supposed that was his final volley. One that had taken her into a life she’d left behind.

She choked back tears at the memory of her grandfather. But she could handle the grief. What she had trouble managing was the rising tide of anxiety that shortened her breath with the niggling sense that there was something that lay just beyond the periphery of her accessible memories as she walked through the familiar streets of the Merchant’s Quarter before she took the Intermediary Avenue towards the Upper Residential Quarter.

Raneka woke up with a start on her chaise lounge. Something had awakened her, but she was not sure what. She felt a pain on the side of her neck. She sat up. What had happened? She had a migraine, she remembered that much. She had been walking towards her town house. The familiar cul-de-sac greeted her. What happened next?

Raneka touched the memory recorder, still affixed to the collar of her day gown. Slowly, she forced herself to stand. Infarre said not to turn it alone if she was afraid. She walked over to her desk, and put a hand on the small telecommunications crystal. But was it safe to pass a message through her crystal? The next time she saw Infarre and Acquasar would be at the dinner party. She yawned once, and then three times. She trudged out of her drawing room, towards the staircase, still barely feeling awake. She frightened two of the maids who were slowly turning down the lights.

“Dahshani! We thought you’d sleep through till the morning,” they said.

“I’m awake, I fear,” she said. “Can I have a hot chocolate brought to my room, please?”

“With marshmallows, Dahshani?” asked the younger maid, Litta.

She smiled, “That would be marvelous, Litta.”

In her room, she pulled the brooch off from her day gown before affixing it to her nightgown. She was supposed to hire a lady’s maid to help her dress—that was what the best families did. But Raneka had grown up in a hut, tending to herself in the bushes and cleansing herself in the river. The thought of someone dressing and washing her filled her with revulsion. Ultimately, it was that revulsion that caused her to turn the cabochon anticlockwise.

The entire night’s encounter returned to her memory. They had accosted her outside of her house, and had walked in with her. Instructions had been given for the delivery of weapons and for the placement of guards.

She did not have time to process those memories, because the memory recorder had dug itself in deeper into her consciousness. She recalled not just the events of that night. She relived every single encounter with Messrs Red, White, and Brown since she first enrolled in the University of Serolar. She remembered it all. Every session. Every torture. Never anything that left marks. But they had broken her with their Llen tricks. For that was what they were. They were the lake-dwelling Alpha nonhumans who could glide from shape to shape. They’d existed in childhood nightmares and horror stories told to keep them good, amongst a panoply of other bogeys. But they had broken her with their Llen tricks. The Llen were never seen. At least the Arlishya allowed themselves to be sighted. They had been employed by the shadow cabinets of first the Yroi and now the Dvenri because they were so efficient at what they did. They were less likely to perform the misdemeanors humans placed in their position would perform. Small mercies, Raneka thought with a shudder. Small mercies indeed.

“Press me clockwise,” whispered the crystal to her mind.

She pressed the crystal until it clicked, and then rotated it clockwise. She felt the healing light of its central crystal flooding her being. She also felt what she’d been avoiding for near two decades. The Great Complect enfolded her consciousness. Infarre was waiting in her astral form, as were other figures that looked all too familiar. Creondi, Thegen, the figures of insurrectionists from her childhood.

“Are you alright?” was the first concerned question.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be alright again,” said Raneka.

The astral forms gently guided her towards the thrumming crystal that sat at the apex of their Quadrant of the Great Complect, that grid line of crystalline energy that ran from Living Crystal to Living Crystal. She recognized this glowing golden crystal they called the Grand Lady. Her astral form knelt before it. She allowed the golden energy to enter her. This was not a healing that the thrumming crystal gave her. What it did to her—she would muse later—reconstituted her insides. Some of those memories would never return to her, but she was given other augmentations instead.

“Tell us what you know,” the glowing figure of Infarre said to her.

“It will be war, won’t it?” asked Raneka with deep sorrow.

“It was always going to be war, because it is what they’ve been pushing,” said Thegen, the old man of the woods.

Raneka told them what she knew.

Raneka was garbed for war in a near-luminous dove-gray gown that left one shoulder bare, with several whisper-thin layers cascading to the ground over her bared back. This was not the gown she had chosen when she had been a mouse. This gown was illuminated by an algae-based substance and the illuminations were augmented by the delicately geometric embroidery made with threads dyed with a condensed unguent made of the same algae. The memory recorder and preserver was pinned carefully to the strap that held up her asymmetrical gown on the other shoulder. Within a handbag beaded with weaponized crystals was a bronze fork that she’d spent nearly two hours sharpening.

Her anxiety had ironically receded on this day, this most dangerous day. She’d been run off her feet chasing different members of the insurrection—watching as they gagged and bundled away agents of the shadow cabinets, watching as bloodstains were efficiently wiped from the floorboards and as walls were quietly painted over. Not a tear did she shed. And her heartbeat remained as regular as the presence of the Grand Lady in her head.

It had been a difficult day in the household as they had carefully unearthed the weapons that had been brought in while they had all been knocked out by Llen devices. Three dozen efficient members of the catering company walked around, making table arrangements. The florists marched in to place trellises around the room, following Liannell’s precise instructions. She knew what those floral arrangements contained. She knew what had been removed—both the weapons and the members of the staff that had been appointed by the Llen inquisitors.

“They’re planning on taking out all of the main players of the insurrection contained within the Dvenri society,” Raneka had told Infarre, Thegen, and the rest of her neithyr network the night before.

“Well, if it’s fireworks they want, we’ll be more than happy to supply. Apparently the great massacre at the crossroads was not enough for them,” Thegen said, nearly spitting out the words.

“Try not to destroy my town house too much,” Raneka had responded.

Now, she watched as her ballroom was transformed into a pristine white wonderland with glistening ice swans and chandeliers with myriad sentient crystals that sang. Calla lilies were woven onto the trellises that soared above carefully positioned tables while crystalline bird-mobiles flew from table to table with dainty hors d’oeuvres, using the same steam-powered technology that powered the Governor’s mini-dirigibles.

The tables were soon filled with elegant guests while a clockwork string quartet played the Sonatas of the Seven Moons.

The table next to the windows remained empty. Raneka wondered if her tormenters had decided not to show up in a place with so many witnesses after all. She wondered if they knew how far their plans had been overturned. Her surmise was proven wrong when an hour later, the three dark-robed inquisitors of the shadow cabinet entered. Their presence afflicted the people whom they passed. Eyes grew glassy, lips suddenly required copious amounts of cocktails which the servitors poured liberally. She steeled herself but felt the golden glow of the Grand Lady bolstering her and amplifying her senses from within.

Raneka touched her memory preserver before she walked up to her tormentors.

“Welcome,” she said. “Messrs. Red, White, and Brown, I assume? You’re the only names not crossed out on the guest list.”

“You assume correctly. How very kind of you to invite us,” said Mr. Brown.

“Please, allow my ushers to seat you. You’re just in time for the first course. During the third course, entertainments begin,” Raneka said with a hospitable smile which fairly reeked fakery.

Mr. Brown threw her a sharp look. “Might I say you look rather resplendent tonight, Dahshani Raneka.”

“Thank you, Mr.—have we met?” asked Raneka before one of the ushers waved at her in well-timed execution. “You must excuse me, I am needed. Please, do enjoy the food. There won’t be fireworks because we’re in a state of emergency, but the entertainments will be very satisfying, I hope.”

Mr. Brown threw her a piercing look that turned her knees into gelatin.

She walked away until she reached a smartly attired servitor. It was Ravesh Kaligil, a curly-haired Kattani warrior who had been trained by her grandfather.

“Are you fine, Raneka?” she asked.

“I’m trying to be fine,” Raneka murmured, willing her hands not to shake. But even now, even now her heart did not skip a beat and was insistently normal in its measured, rapid rhythm.

“You did well, as you did well in allowing the Complect to weave you back in. But be safe, Raneka. Those three . . . those three are incredibly dangerous.”

“You’re telling me,” Raneka said with a bitter laugh.

“Go now, you’re needed in the foyer,” said Ravesh. “More organizing.”

Raneka nodded and left the ballroom with some relief. More familiar faces met her at the foyer, dressed in the uniforms provided by the new caterers.

“Is there something wrong with the food delivery?” she asked them.

“No, everything is going according to plan, Dahshani,” said Creondi. “But we need your consent for certain . . . arrangements.”

“Walk me through it then,” she said. “Perhaps in the kitchen?”

She strode towards the kitchens without waiting to see if they followed her. Earlier, the caterers had set up their cooking stations and their implements. It was also there that more resistant servitors placed by the Inquisitors had been dispatched rather ungently.

“There’s no turning back now, Raneka,” said Creondi.

“I know—but you still need my consent, it would seem,” said Raneka, injecting the dark amusement she’d been feeling all night.

“For this, yes. Do you consent for us to enact the final act for the night?”

“If you’d asked me yesterday afternoon, I would have said no. Tonight? I’ll say—go for it, even if unnecessary. Final act for the night, but opening act for the war, is it not?”

Creondi gave her a searching look, “You’re still not recovered from learning what they’ve done to you. We have not recovered. If we’d known much earlier, we’d have tried to extract you.”

“It’s a good thing Infarre had that hunch, then,” said Raneka.

“We should have had that hunch earlier,” said Creondi.

“Well, you didn’t. Infarre did. Give her credit for it,” said Acquasar.

They both turned to find him lounging against the doorframe. “However, I am here to tell you the Governor’s officials have arrived. When do the games begin?”

“Between the second and third course,” Raneka said decisively.

Behind her, a man moaned in grief. “Can you all not wait till after they’ve enjoyed all the courses?”

“Mahruk, we’ve gone through this. We told you not to cook your best,” said Acquasar as he swatted at the head chef’s arm.

“How can I not cook my best?”

“Relax. Just don’t serve all the courses—later they can be portioned out to people who really deserve them,” said Creondi sharply. He then turned towards Raneka, “Another thing, Raneka. Some of our own are also Llen. We need your consent for that too—after what you’ve been through.”

Raneka inhaled. “I can’t blame all Llen for the actions of those who work with the Dvenri. But I can’t be comfortable with them either. But if the Llen are as deadly as they appear to be then it makes sense to make things more fairly matched.”

“We will do our best not to startle or frighten you too much,” said one of the kitchen helpers, who looked up as she finished speaking.

A certain familiarity to the set of her eyes told Raneka everything she needed to know.

“Amongst the catering team?” asked Raneka.

“I . . . only found out just now,” Creondi said apologetically.

“This is such an unholy mess,” groaned Acquasar. “Raneka, are you fine?”

“I’ll probably need to be in a dark room for a week or two after this is over. If we survive this,” said Raneka.

“Alright then. Ready for the next phase?” asked Acquasar.

“This is just the beginning,” Creondi said to them both. “We will all need much fortitude. But this first act is not just happening here. The war will begin properly tonight in the Governor’s Palace.

Raneka took Acquasar’s arm as they strolled towards the ballroom, thinking of the trajectory that took her from clothes shopping yesterday to actively participating in the initiation of the war from within the city.

It defied belief, but she knew that wars had started over less.

Outside, the klaxons began to wail. This time, it was not a test.

Within, the floral arrangements disintegrated as tiny brass cannons popped out of the arrangements, shooting crystalline pellets set to stun or maim members of the Dvenri government who were present. It was messy and it was very unkind. Soon, prisoners and hostages were taken. The ballroom was emptied of nearly all of Raneka’s guests.

Raneka took particular pleasure in standing before Messrs Red, Brown, and White who were being immobilized by Llen insurrectionists.

“Our Llen allies I’m told, have not been crossbred by Dvenri alchemists and are therefore stronger than you,” Raneka told her tormenters as she took out her brass fork. “They’ll keep you in place while I . . . make some modifications. You seem to forget that even mice have teeth, my morbid pussycats.”

Their eyes widened as she approached.

“Fortunately for you, I’m quite efficient with a fork. My grandfather trained me well,” she said as she turned her attention upon Mr. Brown first. “This won’t take too long. While I’d love to protract your suffering—we’ve got bigger fish to fry and far too little time.”

Outside, the sound of cannon-fire punctuated their screams.

As Liannell had predicted, the Great War that Serolar had been poised for did not happen on battlefields, or even in the streets of their segregated city. It began in ballrooms, in drawing rooms and across the two-dozen odd soirees that happened on the night of the Lion Moon.

About the Author

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include: Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed. Nin is currently seeking representation for Watermyth, the first novel of the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms mythic clockpunk fantasy sequence.

Treasure Diving

Kai Hudson

There is a word in Ku’uti for the swallowing darkness that can only be found here, in the deepest parts of the sea. Ruhava. Alone.

Ilana breathes in the silence. The water tastes dull and flat, not salty like toptide or sweet-tangy like her home estuary. A faint aftertaste of metal blossoms in the folds of her rear gill-flaps. Ick. The pressure suit’s filters must be malfunctioning again.

The thin layer of woven exosteel sits awkward and tight against her skin, irritating the cilia. She’s going to come out with suit rash, she just knows it. Jeshri had better have some ointment left.

As if on cue, the suit’s commpiece vibrates and her sister’s voice crackles in her ear, tinny and distant. “Ila-vei? You pick up the signature yet?” Jeshri speaks with that high, forced steadiness that tells Ilana she’s trying not to sound worried.

“Not yet, Jesh-ta’u. It’s really dark down here.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, your suit has lights, so.” Ilana smiles. Jeshri acts as if this is her first treasure dive. Her sister must be really nervous.

Then she remembers why Jeshri is nervous, and the smile fades. “Scanning now. Gimme a minute.”

A quick gesture with her left hand activates the suit’s haptic controls. A low hum starts up as the sensors engage, seeking the telltale frequency of hypera, the shiny, jewellike material she is down here to find. The lights, of course, have been on since she first hit depth and the darkness closed in around her. Ilana is no stranger to treasure dives.

They’re called that because, a long time ago, queens used to decorate their dorsal fins with bits of hypera, stitching them on in elaborate, sparkling webs even though all it did was increase drag. Still, it wasn’t like queens did much swimming back then, so it was fine, especially because the stuff looked so pretty, winking a thousand iridescent colors in the sunlight.

Of course, it was only after several queens sickened and died and whole hives were lost that people discovered the enchanting trinkets also emitted an odd radiation that turned poison over prolonged exposure. That got rid of the fashion statement, but then it turned out the radiation was actually an easy source of light and energy. Thus, the dives for hypera continued. Still treasure, just in a different way.

She looks around as the suit continues its scan. They’re about sixteen osh’dun from the nearest estuary, right smack in the middle of the Sunlit Sea. Even so, this far down, none of the light penetrates. Everywhere she turns, darkness devours the light from her suit, snatching and swallowing it so greedily she can barely make out a couple arm-lengths in front of her. What she can see is hardly worth writing home about: blue-black water all around, with floating bits of sand-like particles wherever the light shines. This far down, there is no life. Ruhava.

She’s close to the ruins, that much is for sure. She and Jeshri spent months mapping this area from toptide, slowly building a sonar topography of the seafloor. It looks to be the remains of a satellite settlement, just a few crumbling foundations, tiny compared to the vast, sprawling cities discovered in other areas.

But it’s theirs. The bigger ruins crawl with other divers along with researchers and historians, trying to learn more about this ancient, forgotten civilization that left nothing of themselves but these structures and the hypera. Impossible pickings for two young workers. That’s why they got so excited when they discovered this little place. With luck, it might just net them enough hypera to get their own chamber, away from the farms and larval nurseries and, most importantly, the glowheart.

Every hive has one: a hypera reactor powering everything from the lights to the water pumps to the nutrient farms. Without glowhearts, they’d be back to the days of darkness and starvation, each estuary only able to support one or two hives, everyone scrabbling for food and warmth. Queens would still be nothing but swollen egg-laying machines, female workers like Ilana and Jeshri slaving away to make sure she stayed fed and fat and producing. Without glowhearts, there would be no leisure, no opportunities to look beyond the day-to-day survival of the hive. She would not be here now, a half-osh’dun beneath the surface in a special-made pressure suit, diving for long-forgotten bits of light. Glowhearts grant them technology, science, freedom.

But they come with a cost. Such a cost. Hypera radiation can’t be shielded with their current tech; the best protective housings still let through low-grade particles. And if you can’t afford one of the outer-layer chambers, if you end up living too close to hive center for too many years . . .

Ilana’s hearts clench in sudden ache. The casting was six days ago.

The suit beeps: the sensors have picked up something. “Ila-vei?” Jeshri asks. She’s not even bothering to hide her worry anymore.

Ilana clears her throat. “I’ve got a signature. Triangulating.” The suit homes in and produces a blinking waypoint on her display, a bright dot due south. “Got it.”

She pumps her legs and shoots off. The suit makes swimming difficult, turns her usual smooth, undulating movements into clumsy, slow jerks. It can’t be helped. The exosteel has to cover even the webbing on her hands and feet, otherwise the pressure here would crush any exposed part of her. Thankfully, she’s in no hurry.

A few minutes later, the suit’s lights illuminate the first ruin. It’s the outer wall of the settlement, maybe two osh’ni tall. What did the people who built this place fear so much that they needed a defensive perimeter around their home? Whatever it is, it’s long dead along with everything else down here.

The waypoint is getting closer. Ilana swims around the remains of a dark stone tower, the beeping of the sensors growing louder and louder. She should be able to see something by now. Even the tiniest speck of hypera glows bright, and in this all-consuming darkness, it shouldn’t be hard to—

Ah. There.

Tiny lights glimmer from the stone. Ilana swims quickly forward and bends down for a closer look. Centuries of sand and sediment have nearly buried the tower, but the uncovered portions are not completely black—miniscule sparkles wink here and there in indefinable patterns, as if the ruins are trying to communicate with her through alien code. It’s not much—a couple grams, tops—but it’s better than she and Jeshri had hoped for.

She unhooks the drill and turns it on. The suit filters out all outside noise, but the vibrations ring up her arm, humming like the walls of their chamber back home, so close to the glowheart. Mother tried her best growing up, told them it was the hive singing them a lullaby, but even though Jeshri believed her, Ilana never did. Her earliest memory of Mother is coming upon her at the refuse chute, coughing blood quietly into the pressurized opening, smoky red ribbons trailing from her gills to the greedy swallowing mouth in the wall. She’d smiled at Ilana, but there was no hiding the pain in her face. The glowheart slowly killing her, even back then.

The first piece of hypera dislodges from the stone. It’s about the size of a seed, pulsing a soft, ever-changing mix of colors, and she can’t help the churning in her stomach as she drops it into the shielded canister at her hip. She makes a living from mining her mother’s murderer.

“How much longer?” Jeshri’s voice crashes in through the quiet and Ilana nearly drops the drill. Focus! Mother wouldn’t want her losing her head down here. Not when it’s just her and Jeshri now.

“A few more minutes, ta’u.” She’s true to her word: it doesn’t take long to finish transferring the bits of hypera to her suit. She shuts the drill off and re-clips it. “Okay. I’m coming back up.”

“Prepping for depressurization,” Jeshri answers, with obvious relief.

Ilana turns and begins to swim upward. Even though she’s only a couple of grams heavier, she imagines the weight of the hypera pulling her back down, heavy with guilt. She shouldn’t be here so soon after the casting, but Jeshri couldn’t stop crying for three days and Ilana knew they needed some sort of distraction, anything to scrub their minds of that last image of Mother, trying her best to smile as the pain wracked her body, until finally her eyes glazed over and the water grew heavy with the stench of death. Ilana can still taste it in her gill-flaps, bitter and cold. Home will never be sweet to her again.

The darkness creeps in, total and complete. It’s only been an hour since she left toptide, but already she misses the sun, its bright, dappled rays shimmering magically through the water. She misses lazy afternoons with Jeshri, twisting and playing in the shallows. She misses Mother’s smile as she watched their games. She misses Mother.

The water lightens around her, jerking her from her thoughts. She can’t be at toptide already? Ilana pauses, blinks all around. The light . . . it’s not from the sun approaching above. It’s . . . coming from somewhere behind her?

She turns and squints into the dark, and she’s not crazy. A strange light glows among the ruins she just left. She can’t see the source from here, but it’s bright enough to see the buildings by. What is that?

“Vei, what’re you doing?” Jeshri’s voice comes suddenly from very far away. “Why are you changing course?”

Ilana ignores her and swims toward the light. She was right: it does have a source, and as she gets closer she sees that the light has a weird shimmer to it, shining alternately yellow and white and somewhere in between as it reflects off the ruins. She grips the edge of the nearest wall and pokes her head out for a peek.

And gasps.

It’s a Ku’uti. The figure hovers in the middle of a space between the stone buildings, and she can tell it’s a female, a worker like herself from the wide hips and the curve of the dorsal fin. There’s no sign of exosteel. How can someone be all the way down here without a pressure suit?

“Hello?” she calls, readjusting her lights to fall on the figure, who turns to face her. And all the breath leaves Ilana in a rush.

It’s Mother. She can’t believe it, it’s impossible, but it’s true: the figure glows like a pale ghost, flickering with the movements of the surrounding water, but it’s her. Ilana knows those soft webbed hands, that gentle face she last glimpsed contorted in agony. Mother smiles at her, and everything else fades away.

How can she be here? They cast her to the sky six days ago, hurling her polished bones out onto the sandy beach as far up as they could. Ilana’s arms ached for hours afterward, and not just from the brief sun exposure drying the cilia. Mother is now where she could never go while alive: frolicking on dry land, warm and laughing in the sun.

Yet here she is, floating among the ruins, giving Ilana that small, knowing smile like she’s just told a joke and she’s waiting for Ilana to get the punch line. But there’s nothing funny about this. There never has been.

“Mother?” she whispers, and barely registers Jeshri’s gasp. She swims slowly forward. Mother doesn’t move, but her smile grows wider, more welcoming. She’s been here all this time, waiting for Ilana.

Her eyes prickle with tears. Ilana swallows. “Mother, I . . . I’ve missed you so much.”

Mother doesn’t say anything, and when Ilana reaches out, she only turns and floats away a few feet. There’s something wrong with the movement: it’s too jerky, too quick. Is Mother sick? Injured? Oh, streaking stars, is she dying all over again?

“Mother!” She swims closer, but Mother moves again. Ilana follows and she’s crying now, she can feel the thick, glutinous tears gelling the edges of her eyes. She wants Mother to hold her, to wipe the tears away. She wants Mother to smile and sing her all the old songs, to calm Jeshri when she has night terrors, to be here and alive and not a scatter of pale-white bones on some faraway beach.

Still Mother says nothing. She’s stopped now, floating serenely next to the tall remains of a building. She seems to beckon Ilana with her eyes, and Ilana goes, helpless. A sudden ripple churns the water, but she ignores it. Mother is here. Mother is alive. Breathless with relief, Ilana swims up to her and reaches out.

Her hand touches the curve of Mother’s shoulder—and alarms in the suit instantly go off in screeching, high-pitched panic. Ilana cries out and jerks her hand back. In front of her, Mother’s smile melts and warps into an alien shape: a glowing, wriggling cylinder of light about Ilana’s height, that twists and turns and shines a thousand different colors.

She has just enough time to think Hypera! before a giant black shape rises from the darkness. The fish is enormous, towering easily over the ruins, attached to the lure by a thick, veinous appendage protruding from its forehead. Ghost-white eyes the size of hive chambers hover above a mouth lined with oversized, razor-sharp teeth, a mouth that is opening, looming, even now rushing forward to swallow and devour—

Ilana screams and scrambles sideways. The shockwave from the monster’s mouth snapping shut knocks her into a spin but that’s a good thing, it means it didn’t get her, she can still escape! She twists toward the surface and pumps her legs, but everything is clunky and slow inside the suit, it’s holding her down, slowing her, turning her into prey—

A flicker of movement and she reacts on instinct, wrenching her body sideways, and not a second too soon as the monster’s giant teeth miss her leg but hit her suit. Pain explodes in her side as the exosteel buckles and pressure punches in. Ilana cries out and clamps her hand down on the breach, diving to avoid another pass by the monster. Everywhere is a mess of darkness and bubbles and crazy lights, her suit and the creature’s lure creating nothing but blobs and blurs in the water and she has to go up, she must reach the sunlight, it can’t follow her into the sunlight!

The suit’s alarms wail in her ears—pressure, surface damage, depth warnings—but she tunes it all out, gritting her teeth as she shoots upward as fast as she can. Behind her she feels the monster’s vibrating roar, doesn’t need to look to know it’s in hot pursuit. Streaking stars, she can’t swim in this sky-damned suit—it’s gaining on her, she can feel it in the water: the stink of its breath, the scent of rotting things. It’s going to snatch her and eat her, and then who will look after Jeshri?

It’s getting brighter, but the sun is still a mere twinkling pinpoint high above. She’s not going to make it. She glances back to see the creature only a few feet away, giant maw gaping open. The lure darts up and down as it rushes her, still glowing with hypera, and she doesn’t think. Right here, right now, only one thing makes sense.

The lure when she seizes it, feels squishy and warm and slick with mucus. Ilana almost loses her grip but she forces herself to hold on as it flicks back on reflex, jerking her up with it—and out of the way of the creature’s mouth. Long teeth clamp down on empty water and the creature howls in fury. She doesn’t have long; already it knows where she is, is preparing to flick the lure downward to bring her right into its waiting jaws.

She grips the lure as hard as she can, grits her teeth, and yanks.

With a sudden riiiip! she feels all the way down her arm, the lure tears from the end of its line in a cloud of blood and ragged flesh. The creature screams—she feels the punch of it through her hearts, and in the next instant it’s gone, vanished back down into the depths. Only a trail of bubbles and a few floating scales remain. And the lure, still grasped in Ilana’s hand.

She struggles for breath in the sudden quiet. The suit is still giving off alarms, high-pitched wails that bounce about painfully inside her skull. She quiets them with a hand gesture, but not before noting that the pressure warning is gone. Her side still feels like someone slashed it with a hammersaw, but when she lifts her hand carefully from the wound, it’s to see a fresh patch of shiny exosteel sealing the breach.

She’s alive. She found a monster in the deep and it tried to eat her and she’s still here. Ilana laughs, high and thin, and tries to get her hands to stop shaking. It seems the depths of the sea aren’t as dead as they thought.

In her hand, the creature’s lure gives one last, shuddering wriggle and goes limp. Ilana lifts it up, squinting for a better look in the faint light. She was right before: beneath the soft, rubbery surface, she can make out the telltale glow of hypera, what looks like patches of it all clumped together, pulsing in a million different colors. That must have been how it generated the illusion. That, and Ilana’s own grief.

But this . . . this means something. This creature didn’t just happen to come across the pretty stuff and decide to scrape it into a lure. No. The way the hypera blends seamlessly into the flesh: this speaks of co-development, of evolution. This fish was born with the ability to absorb hypera and use it without being harmed.

What does that mean for her own people, who are slaves to the hypera now?

Static bursts in her ear. “Vei?” Jeshri’s voice is high and panicked, taut with terror. “Vei!”

Ilana breathes out, groans as the wound in her side protests. “I’m here, ta’u. I’m okay.”

“Oh, thank the streaking stars!” Jeshri begins to cry.

Ilana doesn’t bother making comforting noises at her. Jeshri won’t believe it anyway, not until she’s able to see Ilana alive and whole for herself. Instead, she tightens her grip on the lure.

She needs to get a move on; there are smoky trails of blood in the water, and moonsharks will smell it from an osh’dun away. Even so, Ilana takes a moment for a breath and a smile as she looks down at the long, rubbery thing, still glowing faintly with hypera. Jeshri is in for a surprise. They all are.

This won’t save them. It won’t replace glowhearts, or keep other Mothers from wasting away, leaving their children alone in a vast, unforgiving sea. But it’s clear evidence: with enough time and perseverance, they can do what the fish did. They can use hypera without getting sick. They can evolve.

There is a word in Ku’uti for that moment after a violent storm, when the crashing waves finally subside and one glimpses the first glimmer of sunlight. Na’wei. Hope.

Something warm and beautiful unfurls in her chest, brighter than any glowheart. Ilana smiles, grips her treasure tight, and heads up toward the sun.

About the Author

Kai Hudson lives in sunny California where she writes, hikes, and spends entirely too much time daydreaming of far-off fantasy worlds. Her work has appeared in Anathema: Spec from the Margins and Metaphorosis, among others.

The Thing with the Helmets

Emily C. Skaftun

You couldn’t talk about the Helmets, which looked pretty ordinary displayed in a glass case in the lobby of the Smash Pad, the converted mattress warehouse where we practiced. They sparkled in all the colors of the rainbow, embossed with punny names and covered in glitter like any well-loved derby helmet, and the only hint of the eldritch Thing that happened (which no one would speak of) was a serious dent in the spider-web-patterned one on the bottom row. Well, that and the heavy-duty iron cage welded around the glass of the display case.

When the Thing happened, I was already skating at the Smash Pad basically all the time on the juniors team, and even a self-obsessed high schooler is going to notice when fifteen members of the league all “move away” or get injured or quit derby in the same month (spoiler alert: they died). The Smash Brats lost a lot of good coaches to the Thing with the Helmets.

Still, it was nothing like the rollerbugs.

Let me back up:

When I was eight years old my dad looked me up and down and declared that I was getting pudgy and needed a sport to keep me trim. Thanks, Dad, for the eating disorder.

But he’s dead now, so whatever. I guess I have the rollerbugs to thank for that.

First we tried basketball, but I couldn’t catch a ball to save my pathetic life. The same was true for soccer—who’d-a thought catching a ball with your feet wouldn’t be easier than with your hands? I did like kicking the fuck out of the ball, but there was no place for such a one-hit wonder on a team.

I always liked rollerskating, so Mom thought I’d make a great figure-skater. The failure of that one was entirely my own stubbornness—I hated the cold and threw epic tantrums to get out of those classes. As part of my bargain with her I agreed to try ballet. I sort of liked it, but Dad said ballet was for sissies, and as much as I hate to admit it now, at that point I still cared about his opinion. I did my very best impersonation of a bull in a china shop, tripping the other girls whenever I could, stepping on their toes, and even kicking them with my purposely out of control pirouettes. Besides, ballet class was doing nothing good for my budding body dysmorphia. You think nine years old is too young for bulimia? Then you’ve never been to a ballet class.

The ballet studio asked me to leave. Mom wasn’t mad. She was just disappointed. Although (sigh), she wasn’t really that surprised that I’d managed to screw up again.

Finally, like a dream come true, came roller derby. Despite the tights, it was definitely not for sissies. And it was rollerskating, which I was pretty good at. And, though kicking and tripping were against the rules, sending another girl flying across the track with my “pudgy” hips was encouraged. I was in heaven.

Eleven years, two broken ankles, and about a million failed diets later, I was a proud blocker for the Smash Sisters. Mom no longer made comments about my weight because my blue hair, tattoo (happy 18th birthday to myself!), and facial piercings bothered her a lot more than the extra seventy pounds of fat and muscle I carried around under them. Dad concern-trolled me all the time, “warning” me about becoming diabetic like Aunt Peg and scowling when I ate cookies or ice cream. When he was home, that is. Which wasn’t much.

It’s funny how you can lose sight of the wider world sometimes. Inside Roll-a-Way rink we were in our own microcosm; music blaring and fans cheering and the yells of players and coaches echoing and whistles screeching and the bark and chatter of wheels on the wood floor were all deafening. A nuclear bomb could have gone off down in the city, and we would have missed it.

As it turns out that’s kind of what happened.

The rollerbugs didn’t set off a nuclear bomb. After all, they intended to live on this shiny blue planet they’d found. But they did not intend to share it with us.

Their ships tore into the sky, claws hanging from giant metal wings as they ripped their way through the city like a toddler on Christmas morning. They tore the tops off buildings and shook them until all the people toppled out. They rooted through neighborhoods like a bear tearing into a honeycomb, watching us scatter like totally pissed-off bees. Except that they were the ones flying. And stinging. They shot laser weapons that burned flesh instantly to dust.

In short, they were sci-fi fucking monsters. They had decidedly not come in peace.

Between the second half of the Beating Brontës v. Wicked Stepsisters bout and the first few jams of my team’s bout against the DashWheels, my hometown was more or less obliterated.

Our first clue that something was wrong was when Roll-a-Way’s roof was ripped clean off. Sunlight spilled in along with great chunks of ceiling tile and lighting fixtures. I was in the sin bin when it happened, and a head-sized bomb of debris crashed right into the NSO timing my penalty, killing him. Missed me by two feet. Dust drifted down through the slanting sunlight like snow, and through it a rollerbug craft descended.

People ran every which way, of course, like ants around a hill. Wails and cries could be heard over the music that now poured thinly out of only a few still-functioning speakers. The exits were jammed. On the track, enough debris had fallen to make skating impossible, and those skaters had all gone down.

They came up now, as I had from the box, as the women on the bench had, as the refs had, standing and staring at the new arrival with confusion and wonder.

Other alien craft were busy blasting all the scrambling people with their death rays, colored beams visible in the air like effects at a rock concert. But the first ship just stared back. After a moment it wobbled to the rink floor like a falling leaf, a ramp dropped out of it like a tongue, and we got our first glimpse of the rollerbugs.

The more astute of you might already have guessed what the aliens looked like from the moniker we gave them. We thought they were in costumes at first, because they made no damn sense—wheels for feet, knobby joints, crazy pincher hands on their withery arms, big, bulbous heads and goggle eyes. There was something vaguely insectoid about them, but at the same time it was like looking in a mirror.

They rolled out of their ship onto the track, five of them. They were smaller than us, on average, but intimidating. We assumed the toy-looking weapons in their claws would atomize us.

We stood there, mesmerized. We’d clumped together, we humans, but our curiosity—and theirs—was a bit stronger than our fear. Our team captain, Scara Thrace, picked her way forward until she was mere feet from the nearest rollerbug, who was also sidling toward us. Was Scara about to become the first ambassador from Earth to another species?

Maybe that was why she did it—maybe it was like taking your hat off for the National Anthem. Scara pulled out her mouthguard and stashed it under her left bra strap, then she unclasped her helmet and pulled it off.

The rollerbugs’ reaction was instant. They jumped back as though startled, started squawking to each other in a cacophony of sharp sounds, and the weapon in that forwardmost alien hand fired.

Scara rained down to the track with all the other particles of dust.

We ran for it like scaredy chickens. What else could we do? Skates made it harder to navigate the rubble and ruin of the city, but we didn’t dare stop to change as we scattered toward our various homes. My home was kind of still there, the basement part anyway, and I found Mom hiding in it with neighbor Bruce and his two little kids, watching the end of the world on their phones.

Thank all the Gods I don’t believe in that it was Mom’s day off. The hospital she worked at had been completely destroyed, and the only thing keeping her from running out to the nearest standing hospital to pitch in—and probably get her own self killed in the process—was keeping Bruce from going out after Kel and abandoning their kids. Thanks, Bruce, sincerely, for your lack of chill. Mom can get under my skin, but I’d go crazy if she got herself vaporized.

Who knows where Dad had been when the attack started. He never came home and neither me nor Mom really minded.

Things looked bad for humanity. We four spent the night down there in the basement, in a fort made of scavenged couch cushions and bedding, listening to water gushing from the house’s severed pipes and waiting for the rollerbugs to find us.

The next day some actual news started to come in through our remaining smartphones, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t part of it. It seems someone had remained in the rink with us when we almost made first contact, someone with the presence of mind to record the proceedings. It had gone epically viral—like I bet every human being left on the planet with access to a still-working phone and some couple bars of signal had seen it. And it was pretty clear to them, as it had been to us, that the safest way to approach the rollerbugs was to do so wearing derby gear.

So we all watched, all of us humans, as an international diplomatic team skated hesitantly out onto the tarmac of some airport like a bunch of Bambis on ice, dressed in their brand-new knee and elbow pads, wristguards, and a rainbow of round helmets. Often, they’d fall. With rare exceptions they looked foolish. It was a sad day for human dignity.

But it worked, at least somewhat.

A ship of rollerbugs spotted them and landed, and the aliens emerged like before, and this time no one took off their helmet and they hesitantly—oh so hesitantly—began the work of first contact.

It took months for the aliens and the humans to learn how to talk to each other. I can’t remotely understand how they figured it out, but humans have been learning unfamiliar languages from each other for millennia, so I guess it’s only a little more of a stretch to pick up a few phrases of rollerbug.

The upside was that in the meantime they stopped murderizing us. We understood that the peace might not last, but for the meantime we were free to attempt surviving in our demolished cities without getting disintegrated. Which was nice. They were hard months, but humans pulled together to restore things like supermarkets—which were more like farmers’ markets now—and we huddled together in whatever shelters still had a few sides left to keep the weather out. Folks rigged electricity and sewers as best they could.

Mom and I scavenged what we could from the house, which had been thrown into the backyard by one of those pterodactyl-clawed ships, and left the whole shebang alone. Mom wanted us to move into the shelter that had been set up at a local church, but I said Hell no. I pulled Mom along with me to the Smash Pad. It was entirely intact, one of the few buildings in town that was, and my teammates were already hard at work carrying sofas and mattresses and whatever else could be slept on over the torn-up streets to make a shelter of our track and lobby.

Mom’s face practically turned inside out when she saw the place, but I lied and said it had been cleaner before the attack.

The lobby is where I found Skaty McSkateface, one of the meanest girls in our league, just kind of . . . staring. It burned me up to see her standing there, not working, when she was always the one squawking loudly about other girls not “pulling their weight” while giving me side-eye, as if this fathlete wasn’t always the first blocker her skinny ass looked to for offense on the track.

“Hey,” I said. “Barb needs help with the generator, and there’s two different scavenging crews headed out now.”

Her body turned toward me, but not her eyes. Those were glued to the Helmet that had belonged to Stabrina the Teenage Bitch, the star jammer from the team that had succumbed to the Thing with the Helmets two years ago. “It was my fault,” Skaty said, a bare whisper.

She turned to me. “But I can fix it,” she whispered. Her eyes were like ice cubes, if ice cubes could stare right through you.

“Cool,” I said, and went out to schlep mattresses.

None of us had been big news-watchers before the rollerbugs attacked, but once Science Barbie got the generator working reliably, we allocated one hour’s worth of power each night to projecting television news on the screen we used to use for a scoreboard. It used less power than trying to charge everyone’s cell phones, which most of the time had no bars anyway.

As the weeks passed, it seemed that our nation’s best minds were making progress on negotiating with the rollerbugs. Usually about half the hour’s news would be footage from the actual conversations, linguists in helmets trilling the phrases they’d learned with subtitles that only occasionally seemed likely to match. Things like: “potatoes are high in fiber and grow in poor soil,” and “humans cannot live without oxygen.” They never did seem to get around to “I’m going to remove this helmet; please do not vaporize me.”

Life went on. Roller derby did not. We were still a family of sorts—more so even, since now we lived together—but now we were all committee work, no skating. How could we play, with cots on our practice track and Roll-a-Way flattened? Teamwork, drilled into us on the track, turned out to be less effective at solving problems like ants in the kitchen or taking turns at toilet maintenance.

It turns out that, like a family I guess, a lot of us didn’t really like each other, or have much in common once our sport was removed.

One night, the news didn’t come on.

On the scoreboard screen we saw a test pattern. No one even knew what it was except for Try Sarah Topps’s grandma, who immediately started singing that it was “Howdy Doody Time.” Whatever that is.

We semi-stampeded out the warehouse doors. We were a few miles from the city’s mostly already destroyed downtown, but we could see the rollerbugs’ ships out there again, tearing it up.

“Fuck,” was all I could say. Mom was at the city’s nearest semi-functional hospital, so no one remarked on my language.

“I don’t think it’s Howdy Doody Time,” Sarah said, while Keiko mused, “I guess negotiations hit a rough patch.”

But Skaty’s ice-cold voice cut through all the various ironic or panicky responses.

“Get me the cutting torch,” she said.

Skaty was the one who—two years ago now—pulled the spellbook out of a box destined for the Smash Sisters’ rummage sale. But it was Stabrina who understood what it was. The glittery spiral-bound notebook looked like something in which one of the Smash Sisters’ little sisters would have written bad poetry about boys or taken half-assed chemistry notes while doodling cartoon faces. But when Skaty started reading from it, sounding out what she thought were nonsense syllables, Stabrina actually covered her mouth. Like someone in a movie. Even for people who’d rubbed their sweaty skin on each other’s in practice, pushing and pulling each other and accidentally copping all kinds of feels, that felt like a violation to Skaty. She licked Stabrina’s palm.

Stabrina pulled her hand away, and the notebook too.

“Next time use your words,” Skaty said.

“Words, right,” Stabrina muttered, flipping through the sparkly notebook. “We’re not selling this.”

“A used notebook? You’re right, we’re not.”

The rummage sale pulled in almost a grand for the league, but Skaty never knew where the money went. Maybe that’s where the travel team’s new helmets came from. None of the home teams had separate helmets just for bouting. And no one else had been invited to the decorating party in which they’d lovingly glittered up their new headgear. Skaty told herself they deserved it, pushing herself harder than ever in hopes of making the travel team.

At first, everything was great. The travel team could not lose. Their walls were unbreakable, their jammers unstoppable, and it was almost like they could read each other’s minds. They did it all without saying a word. And without laughing. Or smiling. Or sweating

Or—maybe Stabrina was sweating a little. Anyway, her face looked odd . . .

The bout was over. The team pulled their Helmets off and, after a brief moment of blank confusion, finally shouted and hugged and laughed and cried out all the emotions they’d been holding in.

That was the first time.

By the penultimate game of the season, their faces started to look really weird. Had they painted them before the bout? Maybe their makeup was running, smearing, and that was why—

They had no faces. Photographs from the bout confirm it, showing nothing but uncanny holes in reality where their eyes and mouths should have been. The Smash Sisters’ photographer chose to believe it was a film error (despite shooting with digital).

It took a lot longer that time for them to remove their Helmets. Skaty went in to hug one of the blockers—she couldn’t remember who it had been, if she’d even known—but the blocker dug low and drove her shoulder right into Skaty’s sternum. Skaty tumbled onto her ass, breathless and gasping.

When she managed to look up again, Carey Barely was offering her a hand, while other members of the travel team were chasing one of their jammers, Quick Asa Bunny. Asa was quivering, juking her teammates like a thing possessed. She seemed to have more than four limbs, they moved so fast. 

And then she was gone.

One last shout echoed through the Smash Pad, but the loudest sound in the world was Asa’a now-empty Helmet clattering to the concrete floor.

Asa’s Helmet was the leftmost one on the top shelf of the steel-caged display cabinet that Skaty was now cutting into. Its glitter was two-toned pink, a suggestion of bunny ears on either side.

We remaining Smash Sisters gathered around Skaty, watching while not watching (hello, cutting torch) so we all looked either bored and restless with shifty gazes, or despondent, with hands covering our eyes, or reverent, eyes downcast.

The only one not covering her eyes was T. Ann Keiko Death, who stood behind Skaty facing the rest of us. “But they still had to make it through Champs,” she said. “Of course they all said they weren’t going to wear the Helmets, that the risk was too high . . . But during the first half of their wild card bout, against some team who shouldn’t have even been at Champs, Santa Fe or—”

“Albuquerque,” someone interjected.

There was a loud clunk as part of the cage gave way. Skaty moved the torch to a different bar.

“Whatever, anyway, they were getting creamed, so at halftime they put them on. And duh, they won.

“Fast-forward to the final game of Champs, for the trophy. Those poor refs. There aren’t enough penalties in the rulebook for the shit they were doing. Forget WFTDA, they were in violation of physics. I remember Stabrina just sort of phased through the other team’s blockers and appeared on the other side. They called an Official Review and decided she must have cut the track. Fluke Cage touched the other team’s jammer—just touched her with one finger—and the jammer fell asleep right there on the track. They sent Fluke to the box for a forearm.”

With a huge clunk, the front of the cage slipped off the display case. Skaty choked the torch off and flipped her welding mask up, stepping back to let the metal grid fall forward dramatically into the lobby.

“Your summary was too long, Keiko. Here are the bullet points: we have fifteen Helmets coated in evil magic glitter. Wearing them makes you strong, more or less invulnerable, and gives you superpowers. But only for a little while before it takes over and you die in spectacular and unexpected ways. Does that pretty much cover it?”

“Ballistic Missy exploded,” Keiko added.

“Right,” Skaty said. “So what are you waiting for? The first fifteen get to fight the rollerbugs.”

Is it weird that my first thought was to be proud that I was in the top fifteen for once? I stepped right up, grabbing a green mottled helmet that had belonged to Liz Ard and absently trying it on for size.

I vaguely noticed Skaty trying to stop me, but by then the Helmet’s power had kicked in and it was hard to focus on what Skaty was saying because she looked like a skeleton. I squinted at the bony arm with its five segmented digits held up in my face and the flesh of muscles and tendons and finally skin built themselves around her bones, and I heard her saying, “Wait. Not until—” but I also heard a mouse nosing along inside the wall of the lobby and wind in the trees outside and the emergency alert system bleating from a radio in a house two blocks away and, far above us, the click and trill of the rollerbugs talking in one of their ships.

I had the urge to jump all the way up into the sky, right through the ceiling, and get fighting. I had the urge to grab Skaty’s barely protected bones and grind them to dust.

With great effort, I pulled off the Helmet.

My teammates were looking at me with fear and worry, and just a hint of the scorn/pity mix I got from the skinny bitches anytime I looked tired. So I steadied myself, hiding a headrush bordering on migraine territory, and just said, “Fits great. This one’s mine.”

And then the lobby’s windows exploded and a pair of rollerbugs skittered into the Smash Pad.

We fought. I had my Helmet on in an instant and that creepy x-ray vision returned, but this time with, like, subtitles. It was like how I imagine being a killer robot would be. It was this infostream that told me the first rollerbug was about to fire her disintegration weapon at Skaty, but I guess she saw it too because she ducked her head like a charging bull and the beam glanced harmlessly off her Helmet. She tackled the first rollerbug so hard they both flew out through the shattered windows.

On the far side of her, Keiko phased out to avoid the second rollerbug’s disintegration blast, phasing back in to clobber it and take its weapon. It twitched on the floor, but I could see its internal injuries and a projection popped up that told me it would be terminated in 10, 9, 8 . . . Meanwhile, Keiko darted out the shattered window in a blur.

I bounded out the gap after them, spinning in the air like a cartoon superhero, bouncing once before giving in to that urge I’d had earlier to fly. Okay, so it wasn’t really flying, but I did manage to jump all the way up to grab onto one of the rollerbug ship’s swinging claw thingies.

Out of the corners of my eyes—and from some directions in which I don’t have eyes; thanks, magic evil Helmet!—I saw all the other Smash Sisters springing into action alongside me, flipping cars onto rollerbugs, ripping their heads off, taking their fancy atom guns and turning them back on the space invaders.

I could practically hear what they were thinking.

Or wait, I could hear what they were thinking.

A second rollerbug ship swooped down alongside the one I was swinging from, and my datastream vision told me it was aiming its giant atomizer cannon at me. So I did the only thing you can do in a situation like that, and jumped up onto the main body of the rollerbug ship. The cannon followed me and fired, but I’d already launched myself onto that second ship by the time the first one started crackling out of existence like burning cotton candy.

Sarah was already there, gripping the ship and banging into its hull with her Helmet. One, two, three hits and she was in. I followed.

It went on like that, but not for long. With the astonishing power of helmet glitter on our side, the rollerbugs had no chance. We rid our city of them before the evening news.

But we didn’t make it back to the Smash Pad in time for the evening news.

The war may have been quick as interplanetary struggles for independence go, but it was still longer than your standard roller derby bout, and therefore longer than anyone had ever worn the possessed Helmets before. It’s a beautiful feeling, wearing the Helmet, one I cannot really explain. But I’ll try.

Here’s the thing. When I put on the Helmet I was twenty years old. Fat. Weird looking. Rocking the community college approach to not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up while still living at home with judgy parents who were unimpressed with my life choices. The only thing I’d ever been pretty good at was roller derby, and as you may have surmised, I wasn’t even that great at derby. I’d aged out of the Smash Brats two years ago and even with the fifteen best players in the league dead (as I now knew), it still took me over a year to get drafted to the travel team. I wasn’t convinced my teammates actually liked me.

But with the Helmets on, it was different. With the Helmet on, I felt like the best in the world, and furthermore, with all of us wearing them I felt I really, truly belonged. Sure, each of us went off on her own to take out rollerbugs in individual feats of glory, but even more often we worked together, coming at them from all angles with vicious, beautiful combo moves.

When it was over, we landed in unison on a rooftop with only a few holes in it. We faced each other, and if there was a moment we could have taken off the Helmets it was right then, our mission complete, having won our bout.

A piece of information pinged in my head, lighting it up like a flare in a cave: stragglers. Rollerbugs, a handful of them, alive in the city.

We didn’t even need to look at each other before off we went.

Our Helmets told us where to go. They told us everything we needed to know: how many there were (five), where they were (outside Hillside Hospital), and whether they were armed (they weren’t). We swarmed that parking lot like hungry lions, cutting through a crowd of injured people to reach our prey.

Everything else was muted. I could see everything, inside and out, in extreme close-up or backed out to an impossibly wide view. But none of it was important save the glowing bones of the rollerbugs. We would smash them into dust.

But other bones came into my x-ray view, human bones, suggestions of beings that were, inexplicably, protecting the rollerbugs. They said words to us in their human language, words like not a threat, injured, help, but we were so far beyond human that we could hardly understand them. We had squad goals. Destroy. Win.

We broke into an offensive formation, screening and hitting our way through the blockers between us and those alien jammers. Nothing could stop us. Except—

“Helga Prudence Syvertson!”

The syllables were familiar. They got inside my head like an itch. I blinked, looking at the bipedal form whose mouth had shaped them. It too was familiar. I blinked again.

Bigger than the itch was the hum of my teammates, urging me on. We had each other, and needed nothing more. I kept going, through the squawking being. “What is wrong with you?” it said.

And that, even more than the other syllables, was familiar. I recognized that as a question this being had asked me many times, over many years. A question I had asked myself. Those . . . words . . . brought a kind of . . . feelings-pain . . .

Nothing is wrong with you, my teammates seemed to say. The Helmet seemed to say.

And oh, oh how I wanted to believe it. But as strong as the pull of camaraderie was on me was, what is wrong with me pulled harder. The datafeed slowed, my x-ray vision got blurry, flickered colors, the real-world vision flickered colors. I heard a wail of mourning coming out of a mouth that was in my face. I reached my hands up to blot out that sound and found the buckle of a chinstrap. Those hands—my hands—pressed into my face and up and up and the pain was so intense I thought my head—my head!—would explode. Ballistic Missy exploded, Keiko’s voice in my head helpfully told me, and then it was all their voices, the whole team, and oh, they were so disappointed in me, and the pain! My head was ripping in two!

I blacked out. Luckily.

But I vaguely remember hearing one last voice as I did. “I’m proud of you,” it told me.

She told me. The nurse. Mom.

I don’t actually know what happened to Skaty and Sarah and Keiko and Barbie and all the rest of them after I lost consciousness, because Mom won’t tell me. She says I don’t need to trouble myself with such ugliness, which of course just makes me want to know more. Did they kill those injured rollerbugs? Did they explode?

I never saw them again.

All Mom will say, over and over again, is that she always knew those roller girls were a bad influence.

“We did save the world, you know,” I tell her, and she just tsks. Honestly, I think to her the world-saving just barely makes up for our foul language. She hasn’t told me again that she’s proud. Just the opposite: she nags me about going back to school (it’s not even rebuilt yet) and taking up a new hobby to keep active. Something safe, wholesome.

Maybe cheerleading, she says.

About the Author

Emily C. Skaftun is Editor in Chief of The Norwegian American, America’s only Norwegian newspaper, and writes about love and monsters in her spare time. Emily is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Daily Science Fiction, and more. If Emily had a magic Helmet, she’d use it against traffic, chewing gum, and rain. Despite the inability (yet!) to vanquish rain, she lives just north of Seattle with her husband the mad scientist and two mini-tigers. She plays roller derby recreationally as V. Lucy Raptor.

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss

Kij Johnson

1.

Aimee’s big trick is that she makes 26 monkeys vanish on stage.

2.

She pushes out a claw-foot bathtub and asks audience members to come up and inspect it. The people climb in and look underneath, touch the white enamel, run their hands along the little lion’s feet. When they’re done, four chains are lowered from the proscenium stage’s fly space. Aimee secures them to holes drilled along the tub’s lip, gives a signal, and the bathtub is hoisted ten feet into the air.

She sets a stepladder next to it. She claps her hands and the 26 monkeys on stage run up the ladder one after the other and jump into the bathtub. The bathtub shakes as each monkey thuds in among the others. The audience can see heads, legs, tails; but eventually every monkey settles and the bathtub is still again. Zeb is always the last monkey up the ladder. As he climbs into the bathtub, he makes a humming boom deep in his chest. It fills the stage.

And then there’s a flash of light, two of the chains fall off, and the bathtub swings down to expose its interior.

Empty.

3.

They turn up later, back at the tour bus. There’s a smallish dog door, and in the hours before morning, the monkeys let themselves in, alone or in small groups, and get themselves glasses of water from the tap. If more than one returns at the same time, they murmur a bit among themselves, like college students meeting in the dorm halls after bar time. A few sleep on the sofa, and at least one likes to be on the bed, but most of them wander back to their cages. There’s a little grunting as they rearrange their blankets and soft toys, and then sighs and snoring. Aimee doesn’t really sleep until she hears them all come in.

Aimee has no idea what happens to them in the bathtub, or where they go, or what they do before the soft click of the dog door opening. This bothers her a lot.

4.

Aimee has had the act for three years now. She was living in a month-by-month furnished apartment under a flight path for the Salt Lake City airport. She was hollow, as if something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected.

There was a monkey act at the Utah State Fair. She felt a sudden and totally out-of-character urge to see it, and afterward, with no idea why, she walked up to the owner and said, “I have to buy this.”

He nodded. He sold it to her for a dollar, which he told her was the price he had paid four years before.

Later, when the paperwork was filled out, she asked him, “How can you leave them? Won’t they miss you?”

“You’ll see, they’re pretty autonomous,” he said. “Yeah, they’ll miss me and I’ll miss them. But it’s time, they know that.”

He smiled at his new wife, a small woman with laugh lines and a vervet hanging from one hand. “We’re ready to have a garden,” she said.

He was right. The monkeys missed him. But they also welcomed her, each monkey politely shaking her hand as she walked into what was now her bus.

5.

Aimee has: a 19-year-old tour bus packed with cages that range in size from parrot-sized (for the vervets) to something about the size of a pickup bed (for all the macaques); a stack of books on monkeys ranging from All About Monkeys to Evolution and Ecology of Baboon Societies; some sequined show costumes, a sewing machine, and a bunch of Carhartts and tees; a stack of show posters from a few years back that say 24 MONKEYS! FACE THE ABYSS; a battered sofa in a virulent green plaid; and a boyfriend who helps with the monkeys.

She cannot tell you why she has any of these, not even the boyfriend, whose name is Geof, whom she met in Billings seven months ago. Aimee has no idea where anything comes from anymore: she no longer believes that anything makes sense, even though she can’t stop hoping.

The bus smells about as you’d expect a bus full of monkeys to smell; though after a show, after the bathtub trick but before the monkeys all return, it also smells of cinnamon, which is the tea Aimee sometimes drinks.

6.

For the act, the monkeys do tricks, or dress up in outfits and act out hit movies—The Matrix is very popular, as is anything where the monkeys dress up like little orcs. The maned monkeys, the lion-tails and the colobuses, have a lion-tamer act, with the old capuchin female, Pango, dressed in a red jacket and carrying a whip and a small chair. The chimpanzee (whose name is Mimi, and no, she is not a monkey) can do actual sleight-of-hand; she’s not very good, but she’s the best Chimp Pulling A Coin From Someone’s Ear in the world.

The monkeys also can build a suspension bridge out of wood chairs and rope, make a four-tier champagne fountain, and write their names on a whiteboard.

The monkey show is very popular, with a schedule of 127 shows this year at fairs and festivals across the Midwest and Great Plains. Aimee could do more, but she likes to let everyone have a couple months off at Christmas.

7.

This is the bathtub act:

Aimee wears a glittering purple-black dress designed to look like a scanty magician’s robe. She stands in front of a scrim lit deep blue and scattered with stars. The monkeys are ranged in front of her. As she speaks they undress and fold their clothes into neat piles. Zeb sits on his stool to one side, a white spotlight shining straight down to give him a shadowed look.

She raises her hands.

“These monkeys have made you laugh, and made you gasp. They have created wonders for you and performed mysteries. But there is a final mystery they offer you—the strangest, the greatest of all.”

She parts her hands suddenly, and the scrim goes transparent and is lifted away, revealing the bathtub on a raised dais. She walks around it, running her hand along the tub’s curves.

“It’s a simple thing, this bathtub. Ordinary in every way, mundane as breakfast. In a moment I will invite members of the audience up to let you prove this for yourselves.

“But for the monkeys it is also a magical object. It allows them to travel—no one can say where. Not even I—”she pauses “—can tell you this. Only the monkeys know, and they share no secrets.

“Where do they go? Into heaven, foreign lands, other worlds—or some dark abyss? We cannot follow. They will vanish before our eyes, vanish from this most ordinary of things.”

And after the bathtub is inspected and she has told the audience that there will be no final spectacle in the show—“It will be hours before they return from their secret travels”—and called for applause for them, she gives the cue.

8.

Aimee’s monkeys:

2 siamangs, a mated couple

2 squirrel monkeys, though they’re so active they might as well be twice as many

2 vervets

a guenon, who is probably pregnant, though it’s still too early to tell for sure. Aimee has no idea how this happened

3 rhesus monkeys. They juggle a little

an older capuchin female named Pango

a crested macaque, 3 snow monkeys (one quite young), and a Java macaque. Despite the differences, they have formed a small troop and like to sleep together

a chimpanzee, who is not actually a monkey

a surly gibbon

2 marmosets

a golden tamarin; a cotton-top tamarin

a proboscis monkey

red and black colubuses

Zeb

9.

Aimee thinks Zeb might be a de Brazza’s guenon, except that he’s so old that he has lost almost all his hair. She worries about his health but he insists on staying in the act. By now all he’s really up for is the final rush to the bathtub, and for him it is more of a stroll. The rest of the time, he sits on a stool that is painted orange and silver and watches the other monkeys, looking like an aging impresario watching his Swan Lake from the wings. Sometimes she gives him things to hold, such as a silver hoop through which the squirrel monkeys jump.

10.

No one knows how the monkeys vanish or where they go. Sometimes they return holding foreign coins or durian fruit, or wearing pointed Moroccan slippers. Every so often one returns pregnant. The number of monkeys is not constant.

“I just don’t get it,” Aimee keeps asking Geof, as if he has any idea. Aimee never knows anything anymore. She’s been living without any certainties, and this one thing—well, the whole thing, the fact the monkeys get along so well and know how to do card tricks and just turned up in her life and vanish from the bathtub; everything—she coasts with that most of the time, but every so often, when she feels her life is wheeling without brakes down a long hill, she starts poking at this again.

Geof trusts the universe a lot more than Aimee does, trusts that things make sense and that people can love, and therefore he doesn’t need the same proofs. “You could ask them,” he says.

11.

Aimee’s boyfriend:

Geof is not at all what Aimee expected from a boyfriend. For one thing, he’s fifteen years younger than Aimee, 28 to her 43. For another, he’s sort of quiet. For a third, he’s gorgeous, silky thick hair pulled into a shoulder-length ponytail, shaved sides showing off his strong jawline. He smiles a lot, but he doesn’t laugh very often.

Geof has a degree in history, which means that he was working in a bike-repair shop when she met him at the Montana Fair. Aimee never has much to do right after the show, so when he offered to buy her a beer she said yes. And then it was 4 AM and they were kissing in the bus, monkeys letting themselves in and getting ready for bed; and Aimee and Geof made love.

In the morning over breakfast, the monkeys came up one by one and shook his hand solemnly, and then he was with the band, so to speak. She helped him pick up his cameras and clothes and the surfboard his sister had painted for him one year as a Christmas present. There’s no room for the surfboard so it’s suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes the squirrel monkeys hang out there and peek over the side.

Aimee and Geof never talk about love.

Geof has a class-C driver’s license, but this is just lagniappe.

12.

Zeb is dying.

Generally speaking, the monkeys are remarkably healthy and Aimee can handle their occasional sinus infections and gastrointestinal ailments. For anything more difficult, she’s found a couple of communities online and some helpful specialists.

But Zeb’s coughing some, and the last of his fur is falling out. He moves very slowly and sometimes has trouble remembering simple tasks. When the show was up in St. Paul six months ago, a Como Zoo biologist came to visit the monkeys, complimented her on their general health and well-being, and at her request looked Zeb over.

“How old is he?” the biologist, Gina, asked.

“I don’t know,” Aimee said. The man she bought the show from hadn’t known either.

“I’ll tell you then,” Gina said. “He’s old. I mean, seriously old.”

Senile dementia, arthritis, a heart murmur. No telling when, Gina said. “He’s a happy monkey,” she said. “He’ll go when he goes.”

13.

Aimee thinks a lot about this. What happens to the act when Zeb’s dead? Through each show he sits calm and poised on his bright stool. She feels he is somehow at the heart of the monkeys’ amiability and cleverness. She keeps thinking that he is somehow the reason the monkeys all vanish and return.

Because there’s always a reason for everything, isn’t there? Because if there isn’t a reason for even one thing, like how you can get sick, or your husband stop loving you, or people you love die—then there’s no reason for anything. So there must be reasons. Zeb’s as good a guess as any.

14.

What Aimee likes about this life:

It doesn’t mean anything. She doesn’t live anywhere. Her world is 38 feet and 127 shows long and currently 26 monkeys deep. This is manageable.

Fairs don’t mean anything, either. Her tiny world travels within a slightly larger world, the identical, interchangeable fairs. Sometimes the only things that cue Aimee to the town she’s in are the nighttime temperatures and the shape of the horizon: badlands, mountains, plains, or skyline.

Fairs are as artificial as titanium knees: the carnival, the animal barns, the stock-car races, the concerts, the smell of burned sugar and funnel cakes and animal bedding. Everything is an overly bright symbol for something real, food or pets or hanging out with friends. None of this has anything to do with the world Aimee used to live in, the world from which these people visit.

She has decided that Geof is like the rest of it: temporary, meaningless. Not for loving.

15.

These are some ways Aimee’s life might have come apart:

She might have broken her ankle a few years ago, and gotten a bone infection that left her on crutches for ten months, and in pain for longer.

Her husband might have fallen in love with his admin and left her.

She might have been fired from her job in the same week she found out her sister had colon cancer.

She might have gone insane for a time and made a series of questionable choices that left her alone in a furnished apartment in a city she picked out of the atlas.

Nothing is certain. You can lose everything. Eventually, even at your luckiest, you will die and then you will lose it all. When you are a certain age or when you have lost certain things and people, Aimee’s crippling grief will make a terrible poisoned dark sense.

16.

Aimee has read up a lot, so she knows how strange all this is.

There aren’t any locks on the cages. The monkeys use them as bedrooms, places to store their special possessions and get away from the others when they want some privacy. Much of the time, however, they are loose in the bus or poking around in the worn grass around it.

Right now, three monkeys are sitting on the bed playing a game where they match colored balls. Others are playing with skeins of bright wool, or rolling around on the floor, or poking at a piece of wood with a screwdriver, or climbing on Aimee and Geof and the battered sofa. Some of the monkeys are crowded around the computer watching kitten videos on a pirated wireless connection.

The black colubus is stacking children’s wooden blocks on the kitchenette’s table. He brought them back one night a couple of weeks ago, and since then he’s been trying to make an arch. After two weeks and Aimee’s showing him repeatedly how a keystone works, he still hasn’t figured it out, but he’s still patiently trying.

Geof’s reading a novel out loud to the capuchin Pango, who watches the pages as if she’s reading along. Sometimes she points to a word and looks up at him with her bright eyes, and he repeats it to her, smiling, and then spells it out.

Zeb is sleeping in his cage: he crept in there at dusk, fluffed up his toys and his blanket, and pulled the door closed behind him. He does this a lot lately.

17.

Aimee’s going to lose Zeb, and then what? What happens to the other monkeys? 26 monkeys is a lot of monkeys, but they all like each other. No one except maybe a zoo or a circus can keep that many monkeys, and she doesn’t think anyone else will let them sleep wherever they like or watch kitten videos. And if Zeb’s not there, where will they go, those nights when they can no longer drop through the bathtub and into their mystery? And she doesn’t even know whether it is Zeb, whether he is the cause of this, or that’s just her flailing for reasons again.

And Aimee? She’ll lose her safe artificial world: the bus, the identical fairs, the meaningless boyfriend. The monkeys. And then what?

18.

Just a few months after she bought the act, when she didn’t care much about whether she lived or died, she followed the monkeys up the ladder in the closing act. Zeb raced up the ladder, stepped into the bathtub and stood, lungs filling for his great call. And she ran up after him. She glimpsed the bathtub’s interior, the monkeys tidily sardined in, scrambling to get out of her way as they realized what she was doing. She hopped into the hole they made for her, curled up tight.

This only took an instant. Zeb finished his breath, boomed it out. There was a flash of light, she heard the chains release, and felt the bathtub swing down, monkeys shifting around her.

She fell the ten feet alone. Her ankle twisted when she hit the stage but she managed to stay upright. The monkeys were gone again.

There was an awkward silence. It wasn’t one of her more successful performances.

19.

Aimee and Geof walk through the midway at the Salina Fair. She’s hungry and doesn’t want to cook, so they’re looking for somewhere that sells $4.50 hotdogs and $3.25 Cokes, and suddenly Geof turns to Aimee and says, “This is bullshit. Why don’t we go into town? Have real food. Act like normal people.”

So they do: pasta and wine at a place called Irina’s Villa. “You’re always asking why they go,” Geof says, a bottle and a half in. His eyes are an indeterminate blue-gray, but in this light they look black and very warm. “See, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out what happens. But I don’t think that’s the real question, anyway. Maybe the question is, why do they come back?”

Aimee thinks of the foreign coins, the wood blocks, the wonderful things they bring home. “I don’t know,” she says. “Why do they come back?”

Later that night, back at the bus, Geof says, “Wherever they go, yeah, it’s cool. But see, here’s my theory.” He gestures to the crowded bus with its clutter of toys and tools. The two tamarins have just come in, and they’re sitting on the kitchenette counter, heads close as they examine some new small thing. “They like visiting wherever it is, sure. But this is their home. Everyone likes to come home sooner or later.”

“If they have a home,” Aimee says.

“Everyone has a home, even if they don’t believe in it,” Geof says.

20.

That night, when Geof’s asleep curled up around one of the macaques, Aimee kneels by Zeb’s cage. “Can you at least show me?” she asks. “Please? Before you go?”

Zeb is an indeterminate lump under his baby-blue blanket, but he gives a little sigh and climbs slowly out of his cage. He takes her hand with his own hot leathery paw, and they walk out the door into the night.

The back lot where all the trailers and buses are parked is quiet, only a few voices still audible from behind curtained windows. The sky is blue-black and scattered with stars. The moon shines straight down on them, leaving Zeb’s face shadowed. His eyes when he looks up seem bottomless.

The bathtub is backstage, already on its wheeled dais waiting for the next show. The space is nearly pitch-dark, lit by some red EXIT signs, and a single sodium-vapor away off to one side. Zeb walks her up to the tub, lets her run her hands along its cold curves and the lion’s paws, and shows her the dimly lit interior.

And then he heaves himself onto the dais and over the tub lip. She stands beside him, looking down. He lifts himself upright and gives his great boom. And then he drops flat and the bathtub is empty.

She saw it, him vanishing. He was there and then he was gone. But there was nothing to see, no gate, no flickering reality or soft pop as air snapped in to fill the vacated space. It still doesn’t make sense, but it’s the answer that Zeb has.

He’s already back at the bus when she gets there, already buried under his blanket and wheezing in his sleep.

21.

Then one day:

Everyone is backstage. Aimee is finishing her makeup, and Geof is double-checking everything. The monkeys are sitting neatly in a circle in the dressing room, as if trying to keep their bright vests and skirts from creasing. Zeb sits in the middle, beside Pango in her little green sequined outfit. They grunt a bit, then lean back. One after the other, the rest of the monkeys crawl forward and shake his hand, and then hers. She nods, like a small queen at a flower show.

That night, Zeb doesn’t run up the ladder. He stays on his stool and it’s Pango who is the last monkey up the ladder, who climbs into the bathtub and gives a screech. Aimee has been wrong that it is Zeb who is still the heart of what is happening with the monkeys, but she was so sure of it that she missed all the cues. But Geof didn’t miss a thing, so when Pango screeches, he hits the flash powder. The flash, the empty bathtub.

Zeb stands on his stool, bowing like an impresario called on stage for the curtain call. When the curtain drops for the last time, he reaches up to be lifted. Aimee cuddles him as they walk back to the bus, Geof’s arm around them both.

Zeb falls asleep with them that night, between them in the bed. When she wakes up in the morning, he’s back in his cage with his favorite toy. He doesn’t wake up. The monkeys cluster at the bars peeking in.

Aimee cries all day. “It’s okay,” Geof says.

“It’s not about Zeb,” she sobs.

“I know,” he says.

22.

Here’s the trick to the bathtub trick. There is no trick. The monkeys pour across the stage and up the ladder and into the bathtub and they settle in and then they vanish. The world is full of strange things, things that make no sense, and maybe this is one of them. Maybe the monkeys choose not to share, that’s cool, who can blame them.

Maybe this is the monkeys’ mystery, how they found other monkeys that ask questions and try things, and figured out a way to all be together to share it. Maybe Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys’ world: they are there for a while and then they leave.

23.

Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He’s short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. She knows the look.

“I need to buy this,” he says.

Aimee nods. “I know you do.”

She sells it to him for a dollar.

24.

Three months later, Aimee and Geof get their first houseguest in their apartment in Bellingham. They hear the refrigerator close and come out to the kitchen to find Pango pouring orange juice from a carton.

They send her home with a pinochle deck.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2008.

About the Author

Kij Johnson is the author of several novels, including The Fox Woman and Fudoki, and a short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, and has also won the Hugo, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Crawford Awards. In the past she has worked in publishing, edited cryptic crosswords, waitressed in a strip bar, identified Napa cabernets by winery and year while blindfolded, and climbed an occasional V-5. These days, she teaches at the University of Kansas, where she is associate director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

The Future is Blue

Catherynne M. Valente

1. NIHILIST

My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears.

But he doesn’t visit anymore.

When we were little, Maruchan and I always asked each other the same question before bed. Every night, we crawled into the Us-Fort together—an impregnable stronghold of a bed which we had nailed up ourselves out of the carcasses of several hacked apart bassinets, prams, and cradles. It took up the whole of our bedroom. No one could see us in there, once we closed the porthole (a manhole cover I swiped from Scrapmetal Abbey stamped with stars, a crescent moon, and the magic words New Orleans Water Meter), and we felt certain no one could hear us either. We lay together under our canopy of moldy green lace and shredded buggy-hoods and mobiles with only one shattered fairy fish remaining. Sometimes I asked first and sometimes he did, but we never gave the same answer twice.

“Maruchan, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

He would give it a serious think. Once, I remember, he whispered:

“When I grow up I want to be the Thames!”

“Whatever for?” I giggled.

“Because the Thames got so big and so bossy and so strong that it ate London all up in one go! Nobody tells a Thames what to do or who to eat. A Thames tells you. Imagine having a whole city to eat, and not having to share any! Also there were millions of eels in the Thames and I only get to eat eels at Easter which isn’t fair when I want to eat them all the time.”

And he pretended to bite me and eat me all up. “Very well, you shall be the Thames and I shall be the Mississippi and together we shall eat up the whole world.”

Then we’d go to sleep and dream the same dream. We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.

After that, whenever we were hungry, which was always all the time and forever, we’d say we’re bound for London-town! until we drove our parents so mad that they forbade the word London in the house, but you can’t forbid a word, so there.

Every morning I wake up to find words painted on my door like toadstools popping up in the night.

Today it says NIHILIST in big black letters. That’s not so bad! It’s almost sweet! Big Bargains flumps toward me on her fat seal-belly while I light the wicks on my beeswax door and we watch them burn together until the word melts away.

“I don’t think I’m a nihilist, Big Bargains. Do you?”

She rolled over onto my matchbox stash so that I would rub her stomach. Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism.

Yesterday, an old man hobbled up over a ridge of rusted bicycles and punched me so hard he broke my nose. By law, I had to let him. I had to say: Thank you, Grandfather, for my instruction. I had to stand there and wait in case he wanted to do something else to me. Anything but kill me, those were his rights. But he didn’t want more, he just wanted to cry and ask me why I did it and the law doesn’t say I have to answer that, so I just stared at him until he went away. Once a gang of schoolgirls shaved off all my hair and wrote CUNT in blue marker on the back of my skull. Thank you, sisters, for my instruction. The schoolboys do worse. After graduation they come round and eat my food and hold me down and try to make me cry, which I never do. It’s their rite of passage. Thank you, brothers, for my instruction.

But other than that, I’m really a very happy person! I’m awfully lucky when you think about it. Garbagetown is the most wonderful place anybody has ever lived in the history of the world, even if you count the Pyramids and New York City and Camelot. I have Grape Crush and Big Bargains and my hibiscus flower and I can fish like I’ve got bait for a heart so I hardly ever go hungry and once I found a ruby ring and a New Mexico license plate inside a bluefin tuna. Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it’s a lie. Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of Tetley began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until it swallowed me whole.

Maruchan and I were born fifty years after the Great Sorting, which is another lucky thing that’s happened to me. After all, I could have been born a Fuckwit and gotten drowned with all the rest of them, or I could have grown up on a Misery Boat, sailing around hopelessly looking for land, or one of the first to realize people could live on a patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean the size of the place that used to be called Texas, or I could have been a Sorter and spent my whole life moving rubbish from one end of the patch to the other so that a pile of crap could turn into a country and babies could be born in places like Candle Hole or Scrapmetal Abbey or Pill Hill or Toyside or Teagate.

Candle Hole is the most beautiful place in Garbagetown, which is the most beautiful place in the world. All the stubs of candles the Fuckwits threw out piled up into hills and mountains and caverns and dells, votive candles and taper candles and tea lights and birthday candles and big fat colorful pillar candles, stacked and somewhat melted into a great crumbling gorgeous warren of wicks and wax. All the houses are little cozy honeycombs melted into the hillside, with smooth round windows and low golden ceilings. At night, from far away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows, it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender, and Fresh Linen Scent, and New Car Smell.

2. THE TERRIBLE POWER OF FUCKWIT CAKE

Our parents’ names are Life and Time. Time lay down on her Fresh Linen Scent wax bed and I came out of her first, then Maruchan. But even though I got here first, I came out blue as the ocean, not breathing, with the umbilical cord wrapped round my neck and Maruchan wailing, still squeezing onto my noose with his tiny fist, like he was trying to get me free. Doctor Pimms unstrangled and unblued me and put me in a Hawaiian Fantasies-scented wax hollow in our living room. I lay there alone, too startled by living to cry, until the sun came up and Life and Time remembered I had survived. Maruchan was so healthy and sweet-natured and strong and, even though Garbagetown is the most beautiful place in the world, many children don’t live past a year or two. We don’t even get names until we turn ten. (Before that, we answer happily to Girl or Boy or Child or Darling.) Better to focus on the one that will grow up rather than get attached to the sickly poor beast who hasn’t got a chance.

I was born already a ghost. But I was a very noisy ghost. I screamed and wept at all hours while Life and Time waited for me to die. I only nursed when my brother was full, I only played with toys he forgot, I only spoke after he had spoken. Maruchan said his first word at the supper table: please. What a lovely, polite word for a lovely, polite child! After they finished cooing over him, I very calmly turned to my mother and said: Mama, may I have a scoop of mackerel roe? It is my favorite. I thought they would be so proud! After all, I made twelve more words than my brother. This was my moment, the wonderful moment when they would realize that they did love me and I wasn’t going to die and I was special and good. But everyone got very quiet. They were not happy that the ghost could talk. I had been able to for ages, but everything in my world said to wait for my brother before I could do anything at all. No, you may not have mackerel roe, because you are a deceitful wicked little show-off child.

When we turned ten, we went to fetch our names. This is just the most terribly exciting thing for a Garbagetown kid. At ten, you are a real person. At ten, people want to know you. At ten, you will probably live for a good while yet. This is how you catch a name: wake up to the fabulous new world of being ten and greet your birthday Frankencake (a hodgepodge of well-preserved Fuckwit snack cakes filled with various crèmes and jellies). Choose a slice, with much fanfare. Inside, your adoring and/or neglectful mother will have hidden various small objects—an aluminum pull tab, a medicine bottle cap, a broken earring, a coffee bean, a wee striped capacitor, a tiny plastic rocking horse, maybe a postage stamp. Remove item from your mouth without cutting yourself or eating it. Now, walk in the direction of your prize. Toward Aluminumopolis or Pill Hill or Spanglestoke or Teagate or Electric City or Toyside or Lost Post Gulch. Walk and walk and walk. Never once brush yourself off or wash in the ocean, even after camping on a pile of magazines or wishbones or pregnancy tests or wrapping paper with glitter reindeer on it. Walk until nobody knows you. When, finally, a stranger hollers at you to get out of the way or go back where you came from or stop stealing the good rubbish, they will, without even realizing, call you by your true name, and you can begin to pick and stumble your way home.

My brother grabbed a chocolate snack cake with a curlicue of white icing on it. I chose a pink and red tigery striped hunk of cake filled with gooshy crème de something. The sugar hit our brains like twin tsunamis. He spat out a little gold earring with the post broken off. I felt a smooth, hard gelcap lozenge in my mouth. Pill Hill it was then, and the great mountain of Fuckwit anxiety medication. But when I carefully pulled the thing out, it was a little beige capacitor with red stripes instead. Electric City! I’d never been half so far. Richies lived in Electric City. Richies and brightboys and dazzlegirls and kerosene kings. My brother was off in the opposite direction, toward Spanglestoke and the desert of engagement rings.

Maybe none of it would have happened if I’d gone to Spanglestoke for my name instead. If I’d never seen the gasoline gardens of Engine Row. If I’d gone home straightaway after finding my name. If I’d never met Goodnight Moon in the brambles of Hazmat Heath with all the garbage stars rotting gorgeously overhead. Such is the terrible power of Fuckwit Cake.

I walked cheerfully out of Candle Hole with my St. Oscar backpack strapped on tight and didn’t look back once. Why should I? St. Oscar had my back. I’m not really that religious nowadays. But everyone’s religious when they’re ten. St. Oscar was a fuzzy green Fuckwit man who lived in a garbage can just like me, and frowned a lot just like me. He understood me and loved me and knew how to bring civilization out of trash and I loved him back even though he was a Fuckwit. Nobody chooses how they get born. Not even Oscar.

So I scrambled up over the wax ridges of my home and into the world with Oscar on my back. The Matchbox Forest rose up around me: towers of EZ Strike matchbooks and boxes from impossible, magical places like the Coronado Hotel, Becky’s Diner, the Fox and Hound Pub. Garbagetowners picked through heaps and cairns of blackened, used matchsticks looking for the precious ones that still had their red and blue heads intact. But I knew all those pickers. They couldn’t give me a name. I waved at the hotheads. I climbed up Flintwheel Hill, my feet slipping and sliding on the mountain of spent butane lighters, until I could see out over all of Garbagetown just as the broiling cough-drop red sun was setting over Far Boozeaway, hitting the crystal bluffs of stockpiled whiskey and gin bottles and exploding into a billion billion rubies tumbling down into the hungry sea.

I sang a song from school to the sun and the matchsticks. It’s an ask-and-answer song, so I had to sing both parts myself, which feels very odd when you have always had a twin to do the asking or the answering, but I didn’t mind.

Who liked it hot and hated snow?
The Fuckwits did! The Fuckwits did!
Who ate up every thing that grows?
The Fuckwits did! The Fuckwits did!
Who drowned the world in oceans blue?
The Fuckwits did! The Fuckwits did!
Who took the land from me and you?
The Fuckwits did, we know it’s true!
Are you Fuckwits, children dear?
We’re GARBAGETOWNERS, free and clear!
But who made the garbage, rich and rank?
The Fuckwits did, and we give thanks.

The Lawn stretched out below me, full of the grass clippings and autumn leaves and fallen branches and banana peels and weeds and gnawed bones and eggshells of the fertile Fuckwit world, slowly turning into the gold of Garbagetown: soil. Real earth. Terra bloody firma. We can already grow rice in the dells. And here and there, big, blowsy flowers bang up out of the rot: hibiscus, African tulips, bitter gourds, a couple of purple lotuses floating in the damp mucky bits. I slept next to a blue-and-white orchid that looked like my brother’s face.

“Orchid, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I whispered to it. In real life, it didn’t say anything back. It just fluttered a little in the moonlight and the sea wind. But when I got around to dreaming, I dreamed about the orchid, and it said: a farm.

3. MURDERCUNT

In Garbagetown, you think real hard about what you’re gonna eat next, where the fresh water’s at, and where you’re gonna sleep. Once all that’s settled you can whack your mind on nicer stuff, like gannets and elephant seals and what to write next on the Bitch of Candle Hole’s door. (This morning I melted MURDERCUNT off the back wall of my house. Big Bargains flopped down next to me and watched the blocky red painted letters swirl and fade into the Buttercream Birthday Cake wax. Maybe I’ll name my hibiscus flower Murdercunt. It has a nice big sound.)

When I remember hunting my name, I mostly remember the places I slept. It’s a real dog to find good spots. Someplace sheltered from the wind, without too much seawater seep, where no-one’ll yell at you for wastreling on their patch or try to stick it in you in the middle of the night just because you’re all alone and it looks like you probably don’t have a knife.

I always have a knife.

So I slept with St. Oscar the Grouch for my pillow, in the shadow of a mountain of black chess pieces in Gamegrange, under a thicket of tabloids and Wall Street Journals and remaindered novels with their covers torn off in Bookbury, snuggled into a spaghetti-pile of unspooled cassette ribbon on the outskirts of the Sound Downs, on the lee side of a little soggy Earl Grey hillock in Teagate. In the morning I sucked on a few of the tea bags and the dew on them tasted like the loveliest cuppa any Fuckwit ever poured his stupid self. I said my prayers on beds of old microwaves and moldy photographs of girls with perfect hair kissing at the camera. St. Oscar, keep your mighty lid closed over me. Look grouchily but kindly upon me and protect me as I travel through the infinite trash can of your world. Show me the beautiful usefulness of your Blessed Rubbish. Let me not be Taken Out before I find my destiny.

But my destiny didn’t seem to want to find me. As far as I walked, I still saw people I knew. Mr. Zhu raking his mushroom garden, nestled in a windbreak of broken milk bottles. Miss Amancharia gave me one of the coconut crabs out of her nets, which was very nice of her, but hardly a name. Even as far away as Teagate, I saw Tropicana Sita welding a refrigerator door to a hull-metal shack. She flipped up her mask and waved at me. Dammit! She was Allsorts Sita’s cousin, and Allsorts drank with my mother every Thursday at the Black Wick.

By the time I walked out of Teagate I’d been gone eight days. I was getting pretty ripe. Bits and pieces of Garbagetown were stuck all over my clothes, but no tidying up. Them’s the rules. I could see the blue crackle of Electric City sparkling up out of the richie-rich Coffee Bean ’Burbs. Teetering towers of batteries rose up like desert hoodoo spires—AA, AAA, 12 Volt, DD, car, solar, lithium, anything you like. Parrots and pelicans screamed down the battery canyons, their talons kicking off sprays of AAAs that tumbled down the heights like rockslides. Sleepy banks of generators rumbled pleasantly along a river of wires and extension cords and HDMI cables. Fields of delicate lightbulbs wind-chimed in the breeze. Anything that had a working engine lived here. Anything that still had juice. If Garbagetown had a heart, it was Electric City. Electric City pumped power. Power and privilege.

In Electric City, the lights of the Fuckwit world were still on.

4. GOODNIGHT GARBAGETOWN

“Oi, Tetley! Fuck off back home to your darkhole! We’re full up on little cunts here!”

And that’s how I got my name. Barely past the battery spires of Electric City, a fat gas-huffing fucksack voltage jockey called me a little cunt. But he also called me Tetley. He brayed it down from a pyramid of telephones and his friends all laughed and drank home brew out of a glass jug and went back to not working. I looked down—among the many scraps of rubbish clinging to my shirt and pants and backpack and hair was a bright blue tea bag wrapper with TETLEY CLASSIC BLEND BLACK TEA written on it in cheerful white letters, clinging to my chest.

I tried to feel the power of my new name. The me-ness of it. I tried to imagine my mother and father when they were young, waking up with some torn out page of Life or Time magazine stuck to their rears, not even noticing until someone barked out their whole lives for a laugh. But I couldn’t feel anything while the volt-humpers kept on staring at me like I was nothing but a used-up potato battery. I didn’t even know then that the worst swear word in Electric City was dark. I didn’t know they were waiting to see how mad I’d get ’cause they called my home a darkhole. I didn’t care. They were wrong and stupid. Except for the hole part. Candle Hole never met a dark it couldn’t burn down.

Maybe I should have gone home right then. I had my name! Time to hoof it back over the river and through the woods, girl. But I’d never seen Electric City and it was morning and if I stayed gone awhile longer maybe they’d miss me. Maybe they’d worry. And maybe now they’d love me, now that I was a person with a name. Maybe I could even filch a couple of batteries or a cup of gasoline and turn up at my parents’ door in turbo-powered triumph. I’d tell my brother all my adventures and he’d look at me like I was magic on a stick and everything would be good forever and ever amen.

So I wandered. I gawped. It was like being in school and learning the Fuckwit song only I was walking around inside the Fuckwit song and it was all still happening right now everywhere. Electric City burbled and bubbled and clanged and belched and smoked just like the bad old world before it all turned blue. Everyone had such fine things! I saw a girl wearing a ball gown out of a fairy book, green and glitter and miles of ruffles and she wasn’t even going anywhere. She was just tending her gasoline garden out the back of her little cottage, which wasn’t made out of candles or picture-books or cat food cans, but real cottage parts! Mostly doors and shutters and really rather a lot of windows, but they fit together like they never even needed the other parts of a house in the first place. And the girl in her green-glitter dress carried a big red watering can around her garden, sprinkling fuel stabilizer into her tidy rows of petrol barrels and gas cans with their graceful spouts pointed toward the sun. Why not wear that dress all the time? Just a wineglass full of what she was growing in her garden would buy almost anything else in Garbagetown. She smiled shyly at me. I hated her. And I wanted to be her.

By afternoon I was bound for London-town, so hungry I could’ve slurped up every eel the Thames ever had. There’s no food lying around in Electric City. In Candle Hole I could’ve grabbed candy or a rice ball or jerky off any old midden heap. But here everybody owned their piece and kept it real neat, mercilessly neat, and they didn’t share. I sat down on a rusty Toyota transmission and fished around in my backpack for crumbs. My engine sat on one side of a huge cyclone fence. I’d never seen one all put together before. Sure, you find torn-off shreds of wire fences, but this one was all grown up, with proper locks and chain wire all over it. It meant to Keep You Out. Inside, like hungry dogs, endless barrels and freezers and cylinders and vats went on and on, with angry writing on them that said HAZMAT or BIOHAZARD or RADIOACTIVE or WARNING or DANGER or CLASSIFIED.

“Got anything good in there?” said a boy’s voice. I looked round and saw a kid my own age, with wavy black hair and big brown eyes and three little moles on his forehead. He was wearing the nicest clothes I ever saw on a boy—a blue suit that almost, almost fit him. With a tie.

“Naw,” I answered. “Just a dry sweater, an empty can of Cheez Whiz, and Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97. It’s my good luck charm.” I showed him my beloved mixtape. Madeline Brix made all the dots on her i’s into hearts. It was a totally Fuckwit thing to do and I loved her for it even though she was dead and didn’t care if I loved her or not.

“Cool,” the boy said, and I could tell he meant it. He didn’t even call me a little cunt or anything. He pushed his thick hair out of his face. “Listen, you really shouldn’t be here. No one’s gonna say anything because you’re not Electrified, but it’s so completely dangerous. They put all that stuff in one place so it couldn’t get out and hurt anyone.”

“Electrified?”

“One of us. Local.” He had the decency to look embarrassed. “Anyway, I saw you and I thought that if some crazy darkgirl is gonna have a picnic on Hazmat Heath, I could at least help her not die while she’s doing it.”

The boy held out his hand. He was holding a gas mask. He showed me how to fasten it under my hair. The sun started to set rosily behind a tangled briar of motherboards. Everything turned pink and gold and slow and sleepy. I climbed down from my engine tuffet and lay under the fence next to the boy in the suit. He’d brought a mask for himself too. We looked at each other through the eyeholes.

“My name’s Goodnight Moon,” he said.

“Mine’s . . . ” And I did feel my new name swirling up inside me then, like good tea, like cream and sugar cubes, like the most essential me. “Tetley.”

“I’m sorry I called you a darkgirl, Tetley.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a nice thing to call someone.”

“I like it. It sounds pretty.”

“It isn’t. I promise. Do you forgive me?”

I tugged on the hose of my gas mask. The air coming through tasted like nickels. “Sure. I’m aces at forgiving. Been practicing all my life. Besides . . . ” My turn to go red in the face. “At the Black Wick they’d probably call you a brightboy and that’s not as pretty as it sounds, either.”

Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes stared out at me from behind thick glass. It was the closest I’d ever been to a boy who wasn’t my twin. Goodnight Moon didn’t feel like a twin. He felt like the opposite of a twin. We never shared a womb, but on the other end of it all, we might still share a grave. His tie was burgundy with green swirls in it. He hadn’t tied it very well, so I could see the skin of his throat, which was very clean and probably very soft.

“Hey,” he said, “do you want to hear your tape?”

“What do you mean hear it? It’s not for hearing, it’s for luck.”

Goodnight Moon laughed. His laugh burst all over me like butterfly bombs. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thick black rectangle. I handed him Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 and he hit a button on the side of the rectangle. It popped open; Goodnight Moon slotted in my tape and handed me one end of a long wire.

“Put it in your ear,” he said, and I did.

A man’s voice filled up my head from my jawbone up to the plates of my skull. The most beautiful and saddest voice that ever was. A voice like Candle Hole all lit up at twilight. A voice like the whole old world calling up from the bottom of the sea. The man on Madeline Brix’s tape was saying he was happy, and he hoped I was happy, too.

Goodnight Moon reached out to hold my hand just as the sky went black and starry. I was crying. He was, too. Our tears dripped out of our gas masks onto the rusty road of Electric City.

When the tape ended, I dug in my backpack for a match and a stump of candle: dark red, Holiday Memories scent. I lit it at the same moment that Goodnight Moon pulled a little flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. We held our glowings between us. We were the same.

5. BRIGHTBITCH

Allsorts Sita came to visit me today. Clicked my knocker early in the morning, early enough that I could be sure she’d never slept in the first place. I opened for her, as I am required to do. She looked up at me with eyes like bullet holes, leaning on my waxy hinges, against the T in BRIGHTBITCH, thoughtfully scrawled in what appeared to be human shit across the front of my hut. BRIGHTBITCH smelled, but Allsorts Sita smelled worse. Her breath punched me in the nose before she did. I got a lungful of what Diet Sprite down at the Black Wick optimistically called “cognac”: the thick pinkish booze you could get by extracting the fragrance oil and preservatives out of candles and mixing it with wood alcohol the kids over in Furnitureford boiled out of dining sets and china cabinets. Smells like flowers vomited all over a New Car and then killed a badger in the back seat. Allsorts Sita looked like she’d drunk so much cognac you could light one strand of her hair and she’d burn for eight days.

“You fucking whore,” she slurred.

“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I answered quietly.

I have a place I go to in my mind when I have visitors who aren’t seals or gannet birds or hibiscus flowers. A little house made all of doors and windows, where I wear a green-glitter dress every day and water my gas can garden and read by electric light.

“I hate you. I hate you. How could you do it? We raised you and fed you and this is how you repay it all. You ungrateful bitch.”

“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction.”

In my head I ran my fingers along a cyclone fence and all the barrels on the other side read LIFE and LOVE and FORGIVENESS and UNDERSTANDING.

“You’ve killed us all,” Allsorts Sita moaned. She puked up magenta cognac on my stoop. When she was done puking she hit me over and over with closed fists. It didn’t hurt too much. Allsorts is a small woman. But it hurt when she clawed my face and my breasts with her fingernails. Blood came up like wax spilling and when she finished she passed out cold, halfway in my house, halfway out.

“Thank you, Auntie, for my instruction,” I said to her sleeping body. My blood dripped onto her, but in my head I was lying on my roof made of two big church doors in a gas mask listening to a man sing to me that he’s never done bad things and he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy, he hopes I’m happy.

Big Bargains moaned mournfully and the lovely roof melted away like words on a door. My elephant seal friend flopped and fretted. When they’ve gone for my face she can’t quite recognize me and it troubles her seal-soul something awful. Grape Crush, my gannet bird, never worries about silly things like facial wounds. He just brings me fish and pretty rocks. When I found him, he had a plastic six-pack round his neck with one can still stuck in the thing, dragging along behind him like a ball and chain. Big Bargains was choking on an ad insert. She’d probably smelled some ancient fish and chips grease lurking in the headlines. They only love me because I saved them. That doesn’t always work. I saved everyone else, too, and all I got back was blood and shit and loneliness.

6. REVLON SUPER LUSTROUS 919: RED RUIN

I went home with my new name fastened on tight. Darkgirls can’t stay in Electric City. Can’t live there unless you’re born there and I was only ten anyway. Goodnight Moon kissed me before I left. He still had his gas mask on so mainly our breathing hoses wound around each other like gentle elephants but I still call it a kiss. He smelled like scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope.

A few months later, Electric City put up a fence around the whole place. Hung up an old rusty shop sign that said EXCUSE OUR MESS WHILE WE RENOVATE. No one could go in or out except to trade and that had to get itself done on the dark side of the fence.

My mother and father didn’t start loving me when I got back even though I brought six AA batteries out of the back of Goodnight Moon’s tape player. My brother had got a ramen flavor packet stuck in his hair somewhere outside the Grocery Isle and was every inch of him Maruchan. A few years later I heard Life and Time telling some cousin how their marvelous and industrious and thoughtful boy had gone out in search of a name and brought back six silver batteries, enough to power anything they could dream of. What a child! What a son! So fuck them, I guess.

But Maruchan did bring something back. It just wasn’t for our parents. When we crawled into the Us-Fort that first night back, we lay uncomfortably against each other. We were the same, but we weren’t. We’d had separate adventures for the first time, and Maruchan could never understand why I wanted to sleep with a gas mask on now.

“Tetley, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Maruchan whispered in the dark of our pram-maze.

“Electrified,” I whispered back. “What do you want to be?”

“Safe,” he said. Things had happened to Maruchan, too, and I couldn’t share them anymore than he could hear Madeline Brix’s songs.

My twin pulled something out of his pocket and pushed it into my hand till my fingers closed round it reflexively. It was hard and plastic and warm.

“I love you, Tetley. Happy Birthday.”

I opened my fist. Maruchan had stolen lipstick for me. Revlon Super Lustrous 919: Red Ruin, worn almost all the way down to the nub by some dead woman’s lips.

After that, a lot of years went by but they weren’t anything special.

7. IF GOD TURNED UP FOR SUPPER

I was seventeen years old when Brighton Pier came to Garbagetown. I was tall and my hair was the color of an oil spill; I sang pretty good and did figures in my head and I could make a candle out of damn near anything. People wanted to marry me here and there but I didn’t want to marry them back so they thought I was stuck up. Who wouldn’t want to get hitched to handsome Candyland Ocampo and ditch Candle Hole for a clean, fresh life in Soapthorpe where bubbles popped all day long like diamonds in your hair? Well, I didn’t, because he had never kissed me with a gas mask on and he smelled like Pine Fresh cleaning solutions and not like scorched ozone at all.

Life and Time turned into little kids right in front of us. They giggled and whispered and Mum washed her hair in the sea about nine times and then soaked it in oil until it shone. Papa tucked a candle stump that had melted just right and looked like a perfect rose into her big no fancy hairdo and then, like it was a completely normal thing to do, put on a cloak sewn out of about a hundred different neckties. They looked like a prince and a princess.

“Brighton Pier came last when I was a girl, before I even had my name,” Time told us, still giggling and blushing like she wasn’t anyone’s mother. “It’s the most wonderful thing that can ever happen in the world.”

“If God turned up for supper and brought all the dry land back for dessert, it wouldn’t be half as good as one day on Brighton Pier,” Life crowed. He picked me up in his arms and twirled me around in the air. He’d never done that before, not once, and he had his heart strapped on so tight he didn’t even stop and realize what he’d done and go vacant-eyed and find something else to look at for a long while. He just squeezed me and kissed me like I came from somewhere and I didn’t know what the hell a Brighton Pier was but I loved it already.

“What is it? What is it?” Maruchan and I squealed, because you can catch happiness like a plague.

“It’s better the first time if you don’t know,” Mum assured us. “It’s meant to dock in Electric City on Friday.”

“So it’s a ship, then?” Maruchan said. But Papa just twinkled his eyes at us and put his finger over his lips to keep the secret in.

The Pier meant to dock in Electric City. My heart fell into my stomach, got all digested up, and sizzled out into the rest of me all at once. Of course, of course it would, Electric City had the best docks, the sturdiest, the prettiest. But it seemed to me like life was happening to me on purpose, and Electric City couldn’t keep a darkgirl out anymore. They had to share like the rest of us.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Maruchan?” I said to my twin in the dark the night before we set off to see what was better than God. Maruchan’s eyes gleamed with the Christmas thrill of it all.

“Brighton Pier,” he whispered.

“Me, too,” I sighed, and we both dreamed we were beautiful Fuckwits running through a forest of real pines, laughing and stopping to eat apples and running again and only right before we woke up did we notice that something was chasing us, something huge and electric and bound for London-town.

8. CITIZENS OF MUTATION NATION

I looked for Goodnight Moon everywhere from the moment we crossed into Electric City. The fence had gone and Garbagetown poured in and nothing was different than it had been when I got my name off the battery spires, even though the sign had said for so long that Electric City was renovating. I played a terrible game with every person that shoved past, every face in a window, every shadow juddering down an alley and the game was: are you him? But I lost all the hands. The only time I stopped playing was when I first saw Brighton Pier.

I couldn’t get my eyes around it. It was a terrible, gorgeous whale of light and colors and music and otherness. All along a boardwalk jugglers danced and singers sang and horns horned and accordions squeezed and under it all some demonic engine screamed and wheezed. Great glass domes and towers and flags and tents glowed in the sunset but Brighton Pier made the sunset look plain-faced and unloveable. A huge wheel full of pink and emerald electric lights turned slowly in the warm wind but went nowhere. People leapt and turned somersaults and stood on each other’s shoulders and they all wore such soft, vivid costumes, like they’d all been cut out of a picture-book too fine for anyone like me to read. The tumblers lashed the pier to the Electric City docks and cut the engines and after that it was nothing but music so thick and good you could eat it out of the air.

Life and Time hugged Maruchan and cheered with the rest of Garbagetown. Tears ran down their faces. Everyone’s faces.

“When the ice melted and the rivers revolted and the Fuckwit world went under the seas,” Papa whispered through his weeping, “a great mob hacked Brighton Pier off of Brighton and strapped engines to it and set sail across the blue. They’ve been going ever since. They go around the world and around again, to the places where there’s still people, and trade their beauty for food and fuel. There’s a place on Brighton Pier where if you look just right, it’s like nothing ever drowned.”

A beautiful man wearing a hat of every color and several bells stepped up on a pedestal and held a long pale cone to his mouth. The mayor of Electric City embraced him with two meaty arms and asked his terrible, stupid, unforgivable question: “Have you seen dry land?”

And the beautiful man answered him: “With my own eyes.”

A roar went up like angels dying. I covered my ears. The mayor covered his mouth with his hands, speechless, weeping. The beautiful man patted him awkwardly on the back. Then he turned to us.

“Hello, Garbagetown!” he cried out and his voice sounded like everyone’s most secret heart.

We screamed so loud every bird in Garbagetown fled to the heavens and we clapped like mad and some people fell onto the ground and buried their faces in old batteries.

“My name is Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh and I am the Master of Brighton Pier! We will be performing Twelfth Night on the great stage tonight at seven o’clock, followed by The Duchess of Malfi at ten (which has werewolves) and a midnight acrobatic display! Come one, come all! Let Madame Limelight tell your FORTUNE! TEST your strength with the Hammer of the Witches! SEE the wonders of the Fuckwit World in our Memory Palace! Get letters and news from the LAST HUMAN OUTPOSTS around the globe! GASP at the citizens of Mutation Nation in the Freak Tent! Sample a FULL MINUTE of real television, still high definition after all these years! Concerts begin in the Crystal Courtyard in fifteen minutes! Our Peep Shows feature only the FINEST actresses reading aloud from GENUINE Fuckwit historical records! Garbagetown, we are here to DAZZLE you!”

A groan went up from the crowds like each Garbagetowner was just then bedding their own great lost love and they heaved toward the lights, the colors, the horns and the voices, the silk and the electricity and the life floating down there, knotted to the edge of our little pile of trash.

Someone grabbed my hand and held me back while my parents, my twin, my world streamed away from me down to the Pier. No one looked back.

“Are you her?” said Goodnight Moon. He looked longer and leaner but not really older. He had on his tie.

“Yes,” I said, and nothing was different than it had been when I got my name except now neither of us had masks and our kisses weren’t like gentle elephants but like a boy and a girl and I forgot all about my strength and my fortune and the wonderful wheel of light turning around and around and going nowhere.

9. TERRORWHORE

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is: we can get the old world back again.

My door said TERRORWHORE this morning. I looked after my potato plants and my hibiscus and thought about whether or not I would ever get to have sex again. Seemed unlikely. Big Bargains concurred.

Goodnight Moon and I lost our virginities in the Peep Show tent while a lady in green fishnet stockings and a lavender garter read to us from the dinner menu of the Dorchester Hotel circa 2005.

“Whole Berkshire roasted chicken stuffed with black truffles, walnuts, duck confit, and dauphinoise potatoes,” the lady purred. Goodnight Moon devoured my throat with kisses, bites, need. “Drizzled with a balsamic reduction and rosemary honey.”

“What’s honey?” I gasped. We could see her but she couldn’t see us, which was for the best. The glass in the window only went one way.

“Beats me, kid,” she shrugged, re-crossing her legs the other way. “Something you drizzle.” She went on. “Sticky toffee pudding with lashings of cream and salted caramel, passion fruit soufflé topped with orbs of pistachio ice cream . . . ”

Goodnight Moon smelled just as I remembered. Scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope and when he was inside me it was like hearing my name for the first time. I couldn’t escape the me-ness of it, the us-ness of it, the sound and the shape of ourselves turning into our future.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered into my breast. “I can’t believe this is us.”

The lady’s voice drifted over my head. “Lamb cutlets on a bed of spiced butternut squash, wilted greens, and delicate hand-harvested mushrooms served with goat cheese in clouds of pastry . . . ”

Goodnight Moon kissed my hair, my ears, my eyelids. “And now that the land’s come back Electric City’s gonna save us all. We can go home together, you and me, and build a house and we’ll have a candle in every window so you always feel at home . . . ”

The Dorchester dinner menu stopped abruptly. The lady dropped to her fishnetted knees and peered at us through the glass, her brilliant glossy red hair tumbling down, her spangled eyes searching for us beyond the glass.

“Whoa, sweetie, slow down,” she said. “You’re liable to scare a girl off that way.”

All I could see in the world was Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes and the sweat drying on his brown chest. Brown like the earth and all its promises. “I don’t care,” he said. “You scared, Tetley?” I shook my head. “Nothing can scare us now. Emperor Shakespeare said he’s seen land, real dry land, and we have a plan and we’re gonna get everything back again and be fat happy Fuckwits like we were always supposed to be.”

The Peep Show girl’s glittering eyes filled up with tears. She put her hand on the glass. “Oh . . . oh, baby . . . that’s just something we say. We always say it. To everyone. It’s our best show. Gives people hope, you know? But there’s nothing out there, sugar. Nothing but ocean and more ocean and a handful of drifty lifeboat cities like yours circling the world like horses on a broken-down carousel. Nothing but blue.”

10. WE ARE SO LUCKY

It would be nice for me if you could just say you understand. I want to hear that just once. Goodnight Moon didn’t. He didn’t believe her and he didn’t believe me and he sold me out in the end in spite of gas masks and kissing and Madeline Brix and the man crooning in our ears that he was happy because all he could hear was Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh singing out his big lie. RESURRECTION! REDEMPTION! REVIVIFICATION! LAND HO!

“No, because, see,” my sweetheart wept on the boardwalk while the wheel spun dizzily behind his head like an electric candy crown, “we have a plan. We’ve worked so hard. It has to happen. The mayor said as soon as we had news of dry land, the minute we knew, we’d turn it on and we’d get there first and the continents would be ours, Garbagetowners, we’d inherit the Earth. He’s gonna tell everyone when the Pier leaves. At the farewell party.”

“Turn what on?”

Resurrection. Redemption. Renovation. All those years behind the fence Electric City had been so busy. Disassembling all those engines they hoarded so they could make a bigger one, the biggest one. Pooling fuel in great vast stills. Practicing ignition sequences. Carving up a countryside they’d never even seen between the brightboys and brightgirls and we could have some, too, if we were good.

“You want to turn Garbagetown into a Misery Boat,” I told him. “So we can just steam on ahead into nothing and go mad and use up all the gas and batteries that could keep us happy in mixtapes for another century here in one hot minute.”

“The Emperor said . . . ”

“He said his name was Duke Orsino of Illyria, too. And then Roderigo when they did the werewolf play. Do you believe that? If they’d found land, don’t you think they’d have stayed there?”

But he couldn’t hear me. Neither could Maruchan when I tried to tell him the truth in the Peep Show. All they could see was green. Green leafy trees and green grass and green ivy in some park that was lying at the bottom of the sea. We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.

Say you understand. I had to. I’m not a nihilist or a murdercunt or a terrorwhore. They were gonna use up every last drop of Garbagetown’s power to go nowhere and do nothing and instead of measuring out teaspoons of good, honest gas, so that it lasts and we last all together, no single thing on the patch would ever turn on again, and we’d go dark, really dark, forever. Dark like the bottom of a hole. They had no right. They don’t understand. This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.

I waited until Brighton Pier cast off, headed to the next rickety harbor of floating foolboats, filled with players and horns and glittering wheels and Dorchester menus and fresh mountains of letters we wouldn’t read the answers to for another twenty years. I waited until everyone was sleeping so nobody would get hurt except the awful engine growling and panting to deliver us into the dark salt nothing of an empty hellpromise.

It isn’t hard to build a bomb in Electric City. It’s all just laying around behind that fence where a boy held my hand for the first time. All you need is a match.

11. WHAT YOU CAME FOR

It’s such a beautiful day out. My hibiscus is just gigantic, red as the hair on a Peep Show dancer. If you want to wait, Big Bargains will be round later for her afternoon nap. Grape Crush usually brings a herring by in the evening. But I understand if you’ve got other places to be.

It’s okay. You can hit me now. If you want to. It’s what you came for. I barely feel it anymore.

Thank you for my instruction.

Originally published in Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

The Magician’s Garden

Paul Riddell

It’s a very old trope in fantasy stories and games: the wizard or healer who needs an incredibly rare, delicate, or deadly flower, leaf, root, or bark for a critical bit of magic, and the plant from which it grows may only be found an inconvenient distance away. It may be that the spell is so rarely used that nobody keeps a stockpile, or the plant’s location or guardians are so dangerous that the spell’s infrequent use makes sense in retrospect.

Either way, it has to be done now, as the wizard or healer doesn’t have other options, so it’s time to gather a motley crew to get the plant before time runs out. In between, the party will most likely deal with brigands, monsters, or competing wizards who want to stymie the spellslinger’s intentions or steal the plant for themselves. Or they may run into competing gathering parties who will race to the plant and lay waste to its only native habitat, or kings and governors who want their cut. By the end of the quest, everyone’s exhausted but happy, and one enterprising character thought to bring back seeds in order to grow more. And it’s all happily ever after, right?

If only that were the case.

Starting those seeds requires lots of specialized knowledge and skills that the wizard may or may not have the time or inclination to learn, which means they are going to need assistants and a growing area. Any wizard with a regular demand for that specific plant figures that other magically valuable herbs and trees are worth growing, and the wizard now has a garden. That requires both general and specialized gardeners who are used to dealing with specific plant growing conditions and pests, and apprentices set with the tasks of watering and fertilizing.

There’s knowing what kind of water is best, what growing medium works, at what time seeds or spores are ready to plant and how they need to be treated beforehand, and which plants will respond to different propagation methods. There are the plants with seeds that only germinate when exposed to smoke and flame, and the ones that have to be overwintered in colder and darker conditions than what is commonly available in the immediate area if they’re going to bloom in spring. 

Even if the plants grow and thrive, there’s preparation, preservation, and storage of the final crop, and knowledge concerning whether the plant dies at the end of the season, dies after going to seed, or comes back every year with appropriate care.

Figuring on the cost of staff, land, and incidentals, as well as the time taken to mess with weeding and watering that the wizard could better use for study or spellcasting, it makes sense why so many wizards in fiction work for kings and sovereigns, because royals might be the only people with the money and authority to make any of this happen. (It also explains why so many wizards get out of their towers for quests and adventures: as any garden center manager will tell you, Gandalf’s motivation in The Hobbit was centered on the idea that getting a significant chunk of Smaug’s hoard was the only way he could afford his orchid habit.)

Alternately, and this is barely touched upon in fiction, at what point does an unlikely pro- or antagonist realize just how much money is bouncing around the wizarding community from plundered crypts and grateful dragon-spared cities where they decide to do all of the hard work instead?

A sorcerer’s garden business in a fantasy setting has a lot of reasons for its establishment, and the history of kitchen and medicinal gardens in reality and fiction is instructive. 

For instance, Ellis Peters’ Cadfael Chronicles mystery novels went into detail on how the monk grew opium poppies in England. By growing them against a stone wall that both reflected heat during the day and slowly released that energy at night, that method fulfilled the poppies’ love of warmth and thereby extended the poppies’ growing season.

This is an extreme example, but look at chef and bartender gardens used to grow commercially unavailable herbs for specific recipes, producing everything from lime leaves to Bhut Jolokia peppers. Basic medicinal gardens depend upon the needs of the individual or the community, but tend to concentrate on plants either eaten fresh, steeped as tea or soaked in vinegar or alcohol as a tincture, or applied as a poultice, along with plants with pest-repelling or antiparasitic properties.

In some wizard’s gardens, some plants will go together more readily than others. Throughout Mesoamerica, cacao beans were simultaneously a religious symbol (as an aside—the word “chocolate” is a corruption of the original word “xocolatl,” which means “blood of the gods”) and a currency, with the rich being able to demonstrate their faith by literally drinking their wealth. The limited shelf life of cacao beans and the fact that they were regularly consumed discouraged both inflation and counterfeiting.

Until DNA analysis of wild cacao trees in 2018, cacao was thought to be indigenous to Mexico and Central America, but the trees were originally native to South America, meaning that cacao beans were transported and deliberately planted throughout their current range. This may be tied to the fact that vanilla orchids are native to Mexico. Until the invention of artificial pollination for vanilla orchids, vanilla seedpods would only be available within a limited area, and vanilla was an essential flavoring in traditional xocolatl pretty much from the beginning. Even today, chocolate and vanilla go together so well that “pure” chocolate still contains a significant amount of vanilla for a truly memorable flavor.

And on the subject of vanilla, another precedent for the importance of sorcerer’s gardens comes from that example’s propagation outside Mexico. The native insect pollinators of vanilla orchids are still widely disputed, so vanilla orchids were grown throughout the world purely as ornamental plants until a slave on the French-occupied island of Réunion discovered how to pollinate them by hand. To this day, almost all of the world’s supply of vanilla flavoring comes from orchid blooms pollinated by hand and must happen under a very tight time frame as the blooms only remain viable for hours after opening—with 95 percent of today’s total vanilla production coming from Madagascar. Additionally, so-called “French vanilla” refers to vanilla produced from orchids grown on Réunion and the Comoro Islands, and Tahitian vanilla comes from a naturally occurring hybrid orchid that was transported from western Mexico to Tahiti for unclear reasons. This doesn’t even get into the proper drying, curing, and extraction of vanilla flavoring from the resultant seedpods or “beans” in order to get the best flavor.

Fun fact: when people refer to “just vanilla,” they’re usually talking about the horribly overused component vanillin, which can be extracted from a multitude of plants and even from cow manure. The magic of real vanilla flavoring comes from the other chemical components of vanilla flavor, most of which either evaporate or are destroyed by heat.

A factor for a particular location or locale for a wizard’s garden may also involve the French wine-making term “terroir,” which officially refers to the climate and soil in an area that contributes to a wine’s taste and aroma. Commonly used for wine grape production—with plenty of discussion on soil trace elements and wind patterns through valleys contributing toward making a particular grape variety jump from average to spectacular—terroir is used for crops as diverse as tobacco (thus explaining the particular appeal of Cuban and Nicaraguan cigars to smoking enthusiasts), chocolate, and apples. While some debates about terroir may be subjective, others are blatantly obvious, with clones of the same grapevine producing drastically different wine when grown in adjoining valleys. 

Now, there’s always the possibility that an introduced plant may do better in propagation than it would in the wild, or even thrive among the smoke and disturbance of urban civilization.

An excellent example is the ginkgo tree: Ginkgo biloba was the last species of a once wide-ranging family of trees with worldwide distribution, and its survival was partly due to Chinese monks who raised the trees for its edible and medicinal nuts. G. biloba is a very popular urban tree as it survives high levels of air pollution that normally kills other trees, and grows straight and tall. (About the only issue with it involves using female instead of male trees for landscaping, as the smell of ripe ginkgo fruit is best described as “cat shit on a stem.”) 

Some species may become weeds or even invasive: the angel trumpet (Datura stramonium), has spread so far by humans on both sides of the Pacific Ocean that their area of origin is highly debated, and it readily grows atop rubbish piles and in vacant lots throughout the world. Some of these introduced plants become established because they’re no longer subject to pests and diseases, and some just because growing conditions are better in the new locale than in their original habitat. The obvious examples of these in commercial applications are pineapple (Ananas spp.) and red and white dragon fruit (Hylocoerus spp.) —two Central American natives that grow larger and more enthusiastically in Hawaii and Vietnam respectively.

Datura species also illustrate the problems with drug strength and intensity. All parts of a Datura plant contain the hallucinogen scopolamine, which is intensely toxic. Through the American Southwest, D. wrightii was traditionally a shamanistic drug intended to produce intense visions; in India, the seeds of D. stramonium were mixed into meals to incapacitate and rob travelers; in Haiti, D. stramonium and its cousin D. metel are commonly described as “zombie cucumber,” where the seeds were fed to zombies to keep them in a constant disassociated state.

Even though despite of or possibly because of Datura’s reputation for bad trips (Charles Manson advocated its use among his cult in the California desert because he wanted them all to be in a state of perpetual fear), it still attracts drug explorers. But parts on one plant that provide a reasonable experience (because there’s apparently no such thing as a “good” experience on Datura) can be lethal on a neighboring plant. As with opium poppies and morning glories, though, D. stramonium is a common garden flower, albeit with warnings about keeping children and pets away, because of its gigantic white flowers and its disease resistance.

A wizard garden involves a specialized skill that gets nowhere near enough respect in our world: grafting. Grafting involves attaching branch segments (known as scions) or buds to an established plant or rootstock and then protecting the incision until the cambium, the layer of bark that transfers nutrients and water, merges.

Grafting’s most commonly known application is with roses and fruit trees, where disease-resistant rootstocks are grafted to scions without that disease resistance, or to propagate trees and varieties that cannot be grown from seed. (For example, the Buddha’s Hand citron, Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis, produces a distinctive cephalopod-shaped fruit commonly nicknamed “Cthulhufruit,” and since the fruit never produce seeds, the only way to grow more is through grafts and cuttings.) 

Now, rootstock grafts are common through the citrus industry and almost essential with most vineyards. European and Asian wine grapes are susceptible to an American grape root disease accidentally introduced in the 19th century, and pretty much all of the vineyards in Europe today use grapevines grafted to American grape rootstocks.

This method is also very popular with propagating cactus as well. Garden centers and nurseries often sell brilliantly colored cactus grafted onto long cactus stems: the coloring is natural, as these are mutants that don’t produce chlorophyll, and grafting them to a standard cactus stem allows them to survive off nutrients provided by the stem.

Grafting is also done purely for aesthetics, with the most famous example being “The Tree Circus” of Axel Erlandson, containing trees shaped over decades into exotic and unnatural forms. Some grafters even experiment with repeated grafts of more and more distantly related trees: the “fruit cocktail trees” offered by horticulture catalogs are trees with apple, pear, cherry, peach, and even grapefruit scions grafted onto one trunk. Grafting can be performed with nonwoody plants as well: tomato grafting has a long history, and hot pepper grafting is catching up. 

While grafting has centuries of beneficial use, it still has dangers. With the aforementioned tomato grafting, it should be noted that tomatoes easily graft onto rootstocks from other members of the family Solanaceae, which include potatoes, eggplant, and nightshade.

The Solanaceae also include our old friend Datura, and Datura roots are often grafted onto tomato plants for composites that grow well in alkaline soils. The danger is in making absolutely sure that the Datura portion is kept from light and any root offshoots are cut off immediately: such grafted plants concentrate scopolamine in the tomato fruit, and searching through horticulture literature for cases of gardeners incapacitated or even killed by eating inadvertently poisonous tomatoes is both instructive and terrifying. 

With all of this in mind, things get even more complicated when adding magic. Which seeds will germinate only after being left in a bonfire, and which ones require passing through a dragon’s gizzard first? Will grafting two magical plants cancel each other out, intensify the intended results, or produce something completely unexpected? Does that plant absolutely require Pegasus manure for fertilizer, will cheaper analogue get the job done, and will spells go awry if someone slips in hippogriff manure by mistake?

What about herbs that repel beneficial animals or attract harmful ones, including ones big enough to eat cities? Which plants require specially gathered or blessed water, and which ones could be planted directly atop an outhouse? What liability does the garden staff have if triffid or Pink Bunkadoo seeds get out and the resultant pests decimate the countryside? Is the garden staff loyal only to a direct employer, loyal to the community or country in which they reside, or loyal only to the plants?

Considering the deleterious effects of some of the plants in the garden if they were to get out, what kind of protection and defense does the garden have should someone decide to help themselves? What happens when that prize orchid or mint was once pilfered from someone else, possibly centuries before, and the original owners don’t take kindly to cultural appropriation and blatant theft? Also considering the effects of other plants, what happens if one of the staff decides to go horticultural Robin Hood and grow hidden patches of particularly beneficial or useful plants that just anybody can use, thereby undercutting their perceived rarity?

With all of this to think about, it’s no wonder so few wizards talk about their horticultural proclivities: if they’re smart, they’ll let someone else do all of the work and send in orders via catalog.

As for the plant hunters, growers, processors, and accountants necessary to get all this together, good luck to them. They’re looking at years of wannabe Elrics and Ningaubles screaming at them “250 florins for a black orchid? Why don’t you just yell ‘Stand and Deliver’ when you bring the bill?”

About the Author

Through the 1990s, Paul Riddell contributed articles and essays to a wide range of now-long-forgotten science fiction magazines before quitting professional writing in 2002. Yes, this is a relapse. He currently owns and operates the Texas Triffid Ranch (www.txtriffidranch.com), Dallas’s pretty much only carnivorous plant gallery. The author wishes to thank Saladin Ahmed and Ernest Hogan for vital inspiration in developing this concept, and anybody else who decides to run with the concepts presented herein.

High Seas, Multiple Selves, and Unspoken Songs:
A Conversation with Sarah Pinsker

Chris Urie

A single-author collection of short stories allows for a unique peek into the mind of the writer. You get to explore worlds that have developed through different mind-sets and times. Whereas a novel is a singular coherent work of storytelling, it can only reflect one small piece of the many universes swirling around within an author’s brain. Exploring the depth and breadth of what an author can do is the sole domain of a short fiction collection.

For over seven years, Sarah Pinsker has been wowing readers with tales of music, technology, and history. Her first collection of short stories, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea contains tales of generation ships flying through space, the windy high seas, and the occasional murder house. These thirteen fantastical stories feature the very best of her previously published work as well as a story wholly unique to the collection.

Sarah’s fiction has been published in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, and Uncanny and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, Accessing the Future, and numerous year’s bests. Sarah has also won the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon awards. Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea will be available from Small Beer Press on March 19th.

How does it feel having your stories collected into one volume?

Amazing! I adore Small Beer Press, and I’ve always adored single-author collections in general. This is just the hugest honor.

How did you choose which stories to feature?

It was really difficult choosing the stories. A few were obvious to me, but deciding between others was really difficult. It involved a color-coded spreadsheet and recipe cards and a lot of deep analysis. I tried to spread out the magazine choices and choose stories with different feels that would still work well together. I wanted to pick the stories people had responded to most strongly, but also to make sure there were pieces that would be new to most readers. My hope is that even if someone has read a lot of the stories, reading them in this order and this context may bring something new to the experience.

Has living in Baltimore influenced your writing? How?

I love this city. There are so many wonderful things about Baltimore, including an amazing arts scene and a whole lot of people who put their hearts and souls into the things they love to do, whether that’s fiction or jazz or punk or community water ballet. There’s a great SFF writer community here, with a critique group and a reading series and a whole lot of dedicated, talented authors. Living here, there are also questions about race and class and systemic inequality and transportation and housing, none of which have easy answers. I think all of those things find their way into my fiction.

You’ve noted that you got into science fiction partially because your father subscribed to a number of magazines. Which ones caught your eye as a kid?

The subscription that followed us everywhere we moved was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but we also had stacks of Asimov’s and Analog. I remember individual issues of OMNI, Science Fiction Age, and a few others. And all of the year’s bests—Dozois, Datlow & Windling, etc.

Instead of songs, did you ever write fiction while touring for your albums?

No. I wrote fiction from middle school through college, then basically quit completely during the time I was focused on making music. I didn’t notice I had stopped until I started again a few years later.

When researching the original story in this collection, what is one fascinating fact you want to share?

I researched every roadside attraction on Route 70. Some I remembered, but there are a few I wasn’t aware of. The Kaskaskia Dragon, in Vandalia, Illinois, is a 35-foot metal dragon that breathes propane fire. It’s coin-operated, and you buy the coins from the liquor store across the street. A few miles down the road, in Genoa, Colorado, is the World’s Wonder Tower, which in the 1930s was the highest point between New York and Denver, and claimed you could see six states from the top. The original owner would reportedly stand at the top with a megaphone and call drivers in off the highway. It closed a few years ago when the owner died, but it spent ninety years as a tourist attraction. It’s still standing, and there’s a preservation group trying to restore it.

How does writing fiction and song lyrics differ? How have they influenced each other in your work?

They’re both storytelling, just different modes. There’s a different challenge in boiling a story down to its essence in that way—you can tell the same stories, but the focus changes. You have less space in a song, obviously. You can be a little more on the nose.

I think the skills I learned songwriting transfer over to fiction as well. Word choices, the internal cadences of sentences. After you’ve tried to tell a story in three verses, a thousand words is a lot of space.

What does your writing process look like?

My writing process is in flux right now. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be a novelist as well as a short fiction writer. That said, I do my best work without an empty page looming. I spend a lot of my non-writing time thinking out the things that would stop me if I was sitting in front of a blank screen. I work out the knotty stuff while I’m walking the dog or running or driving, so that by the time I get to sit down with the piece I’m excited and ready to move forward. Some days I don’t write much or anything, and some (rare) days I can write eight or ten thousand words in a sitting. Beyond that, different stories have different paths, depending on what I need to research, what I need to think about.

What project are you working on next?

I have four stories waiting patiently to be written, and I’m gearing up for the release of my first novel in September (A Song for a New Day, Berkley, 9/10/19). A Song for a New Day is related to my Nebula-winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” and explores the lives of two characters in a near-future where people have been scared into staying home—one who remembers the time before, and one who has never known anything else.

Right now, I’m drafting my second novel, which is another near future story that explores a technology and its repercussions, positive and negative.

Songs and stories have long been inspired by the sea. What inspired you to write “Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea”?

The germ of the story came from sitting around with Scott Andrews from Beneath Ceaseless Skies at the Dogfish Head Brewpub. I don’t remember what preceded it, but I said “the rock star washed ashore,” and he said something like, “you need to write that story, and unfortunately it won’t be a BCS story.” I think I spent five minutes trying to write it as a story about a bard so it could go to him, but it was clearly meant to be contemporary/near future. The next image that came to my mind was a bunch of seas converging at impossible angles, which I took and used in a story for Asimov’s, “Clearance.” Once I had Bay’s voice, it all solidified; she was tremendously fun to write. I like soft apocalypses, where people retain their humanity in the face of hardship.

Why will we never speak of the song “Hellbound Train?” Sounds like the title for a good story!

Ha! You have done a deep dive into my biography. At the time (middle school) I thought bands who had a song with the same name as the band were the height of cool. I was wrong. I’m not sure we were really in a position to pull off either a song or a band of that name. The lyrics started with “We’ve set the world on fire/with our music and our songs” which may have been a little, um, presumptuous.

Where do you hide the multitude of Sarah Pinskers when they’re not appearing in one of your stories?

As far as I know, they all go back to their own realities.

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.

Electronic Music, Science Fiction, and AIs:
A Conversation with Jean-Michel Jarre

Neil Clarke

For some, science fiction has a sound. A notion of which I was reminded when an opportunity to meet French electronic music pioneer, Jean-Michel Jarre, presented itself in December. It can be argued that no other genre of music better represents what I hear in my mind as the soundtrack for space, science fiction, and the future. How could I say no?

In 1976, Jean-Michel Jarre’s album, Oxygène (1976), became an enormous commercial hit, bringing with it international acclaim while simultaneously elevating the synthesizer’s popularity in modern music. The albums that followed would go on to redefine electronic music and greatly influence artists both inside and beyond the genre. Ever embracing new technology, it should come as no surprise that his concerts have likewise pushed audiovisual experience, further extending his impact on music.

Internationally renowned, his 1993 concert for the 850th Anniversary of Moscow was attended by 3.5 million fans and remains tied for the largest concert of all time. He was also the first Western artist to be invited to play in China.

Jarre’s follow-up to Oxygène, Equinoxe (1978), also featured cover art by French artist Michel Granger, and introduced the visual concept of “the Watchers.” Now, forty years later, Jean-Michel has returned to the Watchers with a new album, Equinoxe Infinity.

What do you see as the relationship between your music and science fiction?

When I started in the late ’60s—’70s, I was actually opening doors on virgin territories because it was the beginning of electronic music. Electronic music, for me, belied nothing—my influences were from movies and books. Movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey have really been a major source of inspiration to me as a musician and as an artist. It was released at a moment when we had a rather positive vision of the future. We had a kind of liquid sci-fi, the kind of vision of the future that after the year 2000 everything would fly.

I was also influenced by Asimov and Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and of course Arthur C. Clarke. When 2001 was released, I remember that I watched it every day for a week going back to the same theater. From then on, my music has been linked with science fiction probably because of the explosion of using technology in music. There’s a link between the evolution of pop culture and the evolution of technology. We also went to the moon for the first time while all of the pop culture exploded in the ’60s. After that, electronic music would then be called space music, linked strongly to science fiction.

I think that we lived the end of the 20th century like the beginning of an era and the beginning of the 21st century as the end of an era. What I mean by this is that in the ’70s—’80s we had a greedy appetite for the future. We decided that everything would be possible. It became part of day-to-day life and you can see it in movies, music, and in NASA programs. I did this concert in Houston celebrating the 25th anniversary of NASA and that was a true sci-fi project. We had an astronaut playing a saxophone in the weightlessness of space with me live in Houston. That was a sci-fi short story in and of itself. I mention this because the concert became one of the biggest in America at the time, with 1.3 million people watching.

Then the Challenger crashed.

That was a turning point in space exploration. Everything stopped. For the first time, mankind began to slow its progress. The end of Concorde for example. In the past, I could travel to New York in 3 hours 20 minutes. Today, it takes me more than eight hours.

In the past ten years, we’ve gone back to the future again with people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos thinking of colonizing the moon and exploring Mars. This kind of vision of the future can be seen in movies like First Man and Ghost in the Shell. At the beginning of the 20th century, the vision for the young millionaires was based on very vintage sci-fi heroes. It’s only very recently that we’re still restoring a kind of idea of what science fiction is.

Science fiction is not only dreaming the future but most of the time it’s also dreaming about the way it is going to happen. Arthur C. Clarke became a fan when he wrote the sequel 2010 and I was amazed to see my name in the acknowledgments. He was saying my music was a huge influence when he was writing the sequel. We became quite close friends. It’s very interesting that science fiction is also, in a sense, describing the world waiting for us tomorrow.

Do you have a favorite story about Arthur?

Yes, I have lots of different interesting stories. I stayed with him for a few days and he showed me the sky. He had great telescopes on the roof of his house. I discovered that in the last days of his life, he was consulting with both the US and Russia regarding astronauts.

We also had this project to do the Royal Albert Hall together in London. I would push him onto the stage in his wheelchair and have a Q&A session with the audience. Then, I would improvise with synthesizers and things, illustrating what he was saying with music.

Another time he said, let’s imagine the gravity was a hundred times or fifty times heavier than what we have on Earth. What would be our environment? Buildings would be three meters high. Trees would be like grass, very thick and wide. But if the gravity was 100 times less than Earth, then we would have trees of two or three miles high. For instance, we would have tentacles like an octopus and each step would be three kilometers. He had this idea of shifting slightly one parameter of our environment and that would change everything. I really loved that in him.

Equinoxe came out in 1978 and you’ve returned to it with Equinoxe Infinity forty years later. What made you return to tell the next chapter now?

I started from the artwork on the cover. For me, it is one of the most iconic covers of the vinyl era with these strange creatures watching us. I said, “Who are they, these Watchers, created by this great French painter Michel Gondry?” And then I asked myself what happened to them today and in the future? Before recording, I wanted to conceive two different covers (by Filip Hodas) symbolizing two different futures—one more peaceful, green, and blue and one dystopian and more apocalyptic.

I imagined whistleblowers for environment and the evolution of technology symbolizing the evolution of technology. Since I started making music, machines have been learning from us. Look at smartphones and tablets. They are watching, studying us to sell us products that we don’t really need. Going into our private lives to process data. It’s the dawn of our artificial intelligence. The relationship between machine and man is closer and closer.

Human beings have a pessimistic view of the future. Generation after generation, we have this kind of attitude that yesterday was better and tomorrow is going to be worse, but this is not true. We’re going to be here to talk to each other and we should never forget that two centuries ago, forty years old was the max life expectancy. We could die of the flu or cold without antibiotics and 90% of the people on the planet were starving. So even if it’s not perfect, our world today, it is far better than two centuries ago.

The inspiration for Equinoxe Infinity was done by creating a bridge with the first album and mixing in sounds of the environment like the rain, thunder, and wind, but I recreated this with software synthesizers. This album was a soundtrack to two futures. You have brighter and darker sonic moments and I always liked the idea of this almost oxymoron between dystopian types of moods and brighter and sunny types of moments.

So “the Watchers” (the creatures from the cover art) have been in the back of your mind for awhile now?

Yeah, I think I realized recently that I probably spent more time with machines than with human beings. I’ve specifically thought about people living their lives with elephants or dolphins. After awhile they develop a special relationship and I think I’ve developed a special relationship with machines. In a sense I’m trying to tame them. Humans have developed a kind of interesting relationship with AI, and the collaboration becomes more and more deep in a sense. It’s a richer collaboration.

This album was issued with two covers depicting very different outcomes between man and machine. Some of the people you’ve mentioned, most notably Hawking and Musk, have a very negative view towards artificial intelligence. What do you think of this?

It’s interesting because I don’t agree with them. I have huge admiration for Stephen Hawking. He said that we may have to leave Earth by the end of the 21st century to colonize other planets because the conditions to live on Earth will not be possible anymore. Again you have two ways of thinking. If I had the choice, I would prefer to stay on Earth but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to colonize other planets and explore space. I think this is a fitting evolution of mankind. I don’t think it is necessarily dystopian or dark.

These days we should be more optimistic. We are surrounded by dark thoughts and a dark future. The fission of the atom, the other side has allowed us to make giant advancements in energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and other things. By definition, the progress of technology is neutral. It’s all in how you use it. You can’t be afraid of AI because it has such huge potential for humanity. I think it will help us to create, solve, and contain the threats of environmental issues. I truly think we should sooner than later, through education and in schools, integrate AI existence or content to be studied.

In your own work, you’ve employed some rudimentary AI tools. How would you describe the state of the technology?

When I started Equinoxe Infinity I wanted to have two collaborations for the last part of the music with AI and with an algorithm but I think it was a bit too soon. Next time, within the next few months, it will be possible to achieve the true collaboration I had in mind.

I wanted a situation where you feed a melody of your own into an algorithm and the AI and you have variations of what you’ve done in various styles like Bach. Technology was almost able to do what I wanted it to do. In other words, my choice last year was to either go with an algorithm or an AI able to imitate a Beatles song or a Michael Jackson song. There’s a reason for this—lots of developers and engineers are mad fans of Bach. He had a very mathematical approach to music. Since Bach, we’ve needed to integrate groove and other limits. It’s not a technical problem. It’s more because so many developers approach music in a mathematical way.

I think that next stage will be possible in the next few months and I’m sure within the next few years AI will be able to create original music, original paintings, and original stories. And we should not necessarily be afraid of that. We will have to, as usual, reposition ourselves as creators to deal with these new challenges.

Music often has an emotional component. Do you see this as a potential problem for art created by AI?

I have one track on the album called “Robots Don’t Cry.” I should have called this track “Robots Don’t Cry (So Far).” For centuries we thought clouds were smoke and a random phenomenon. Then one day, someone came along and found they could be explained by science. The universe is made of chemical reactions and a mixture of different elements. Our body is also a complex equation with carbon and hydrogen and all that. In the future, emotion could be explained by complex equations. Then it will be possible to create emotions for machines in a convincing way.

For me it’s like cinema. It’s the industry standard of 24 frames per second. When you see it, you don’t see individual frames, you see continuous movement. You can say that this movement is part of the equation, but a few centuries ago, people would have said it’s not possible. If you divide with enough details, each second of a movement, it is still not a movement. It is a series of still photographs. The same with zero and one a binary system. Even more with quantum physics. This is the reason why I think robots will emote.

AI isn’t the only technology you’re interested in. You’ve recently announced a partnership with TheWaveVR. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, I’m very excited! TheWaveVR is a very exciting group in Los Angeles creating a VR world. Amongst them is a very talented artist called Sutu. He’s been involved with the special effects for Ready Player One and he’s creating an entire world based on Equinoxe Infinity. One of the goals is to perform live in a VR world in which DJs would be able to go inside and remix the album.

After, I will do a second performance and a Q&A with some musicians and DJs. It’s actually quite funny, I will have my avatar inside the world to answer questions from the other avatars of other musicians and DJs involved. I think it’s going to be the first press conference in a virtual world. Then for three months, people will be able to go into this virtual world and create their own graphic environment based on what we have done, with my music remixing some of the parts. It’s a combination of science fiction movies and video games.

I’m very interested in this avatar idea. When we talk about mortality and people wanting to be frozen for the future, one way of being immortal is living through an avatar which by definition could be timeless.

How do you integrate telling a story into your music when you’re working solely with instrumentals?

For Equinoxe Infinity, I mixed sounds of the environment instead of just sampling some of the wind and rain like I did with the first album. This time, I really tried to recreate them, thunder, wind, and rain, with algorithms and synthesizers. From a musical standpoint, it’s this mixture of the sounds of the environment with immediate vital space with something technological, something digital. This mixture is how I’ve been able to convey what I want in the studio.

I like that I’m making the soundtrack to the story you can create in your own imagination. It’s the reverse of a song. With a song, you tell a story through your lyrics. With this music, it’s something that the listener is free to create, his or her own story or her own storyboard. That’s exactly what Equinoxe Infinity is.

In days where lots of people now are able to watch all the episodes of Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, or Black Mirror over one weekend without sleeping, I wish that this album would be consumed as an episode of a serial or a movie. Like they are listening to this music as if they are watching a movie.

So the order of the tracks is equally important?

Technology can sometimes be a negative thing. On some platforms and also with this shuffle type of playing a list, you have to have tracks. I hate this because it’s like reading a book with a random order of chapters. Most books would make no sense. Some of them maybe? But most of them would make no sense. In my case, I split it up into parts like chapters of a book, but I would hope that people would listen to them in the right order.

When you’re on stage, you add a lot of other elements. How do you adapt your music for performance?

I have almost a dogmatic principle when recording an album in studio, that I never think about the performance or stage work because I think it’s a trap. I only did this for Rendez-Vous with Houston because it was really linked to the project. I didn’t think how to stage the watchers and all that. Otherwise, I think you’re limiting yourself to some extent when writing the music.

It’s very personal. It’s the way I feel. I like to find out what the performance is all about. Visuals are very important because acoustic instruments have been devised to perform and share music with other people. With synthesizers, it’s the exact opposite. These are instruments devised in studios and laboratories. How do you put them on a stage? That was the problem that I started with because it’s not the most sexy thing or exciting thing to stand two hours behind a laptop or synthesizer.

I went to visual elements to try to convey emotions within the realm of electronic music. I’ve been the first one to use giant images to project on buildings. These days, any kind of show, even in the rock world, are using these kinds of elements. When they started, the Rolling Stones or U2 were just a band using a few lights. Then after my first shows, rock bands started to have more visuals. For me these days when I look at all these EDM festivals, it looks like what I was doing thirty years ago.

For my last stage project, I went into it with a science fictional approach. I always am involved with 3-D and I wanted to use the tricks coming from traditional theater with layers of screens. The screens could be done semitransparently to create 3-D effects without glasses. This is the reason why this last tour was such a great success and why Coachella was well-received by the US media and the audience. It was different from what you see on the stage all the time.

I try to push the boundaries of technology. When I’m on stage, I try to have a type of Minority Report glass where I can do this interface to create sounds on this transparent glass.

Is there something on the horizon that you’d really like to incorporate into your recording or stage performances?

Artificial intelligence. Holograms. Holograms on stage don’t exist yet. Right now, you have fake video in 3-D but it’s not really holograms. It would be very interesting to perform a show in space but virtually, with holograms. The sky’s the limit for space exploration but also for performances. There’s also surround-sound full view, 3-D. It’s something I’m exploring at the moment and there’s also the VR world which I’m also passionate about. I think that field is a new way of performing.

Anything you’d like to pass along to our audience?

Yeah, I’d like people to follow TheWaveVR collaboration with my work. I’m also in contact with this company, RED, who developed these first 4K cameras used by James Cameron for Avatar and Gladiator. They’ve moved on to 8K. This month they’re actually releasing smartphones in the US and their smartphone is going to be the first with a 3-D screen without glasses. You will be able to look at movies from your smartphone and film in 3-D. It’s not science fiction. It’s today. I’m going to have a 3-D version of the graphics for Equinoxe Infinity involved in this project. When you believe you can have a device in your pocket that can film in 3-D without glasses, even Arthur C. Clarke didn’t predict that.

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 most recent anthology, Not One of Us, was published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Another Word:
A Flock of Crows in a Swan Suit

Fran Wilde

rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
~ Juvenal

Modern Translation: Whelp, I sure didn’t see that coming.

Recently at a convention, my friend Paul di Filippo moderated a panel where he asked several of us about writing near-future science fiction. Paul invoked Charles Stross’ “World building 404: The unknown unknowns” regarding worldbuilding, especially in near-future science fiction. For a few moments, the panel talked about known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns in fiction, both of which Charlie addresses. And then, moments later, discussion turned to “black swan” events—Charlie never called them by that name—which is a term used by many people in different fields to describe unexpected, and highly-impactful low-probability events.

While the Roman poet Juvenal spoke of black swans in his Satires (early 2nd century, AD), calling something “as rare upon the earth as a black swan,” the term was codified for the modern era by the randomness and probability scholar Nassim Taleb.

In his highly respected 2007 book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb declared many things to be impossible to predict—from runaway hit books to Wall Street crashes—both in terms of timing and in terms of impact. And as such, these kinds of events are intriguing, even tantalizing for a number of professions, from the military and intelligence sectors, to writers of numerous genres, including science fiction.

Here’s why some in the military and intelligence fields love black swans: they keep the job high-risk, hot-wired, and the professionals themselves relevant—at least for the postgame. As a good friend says, “people love responding to crisis far more than they like anticipating and preventing crisis.”

Here’s why science fiction writers sometimes love black swans: they allow for massive plot shifts, sudden upheavals, and many characters in crisis. The moon-situation in Seveneves could be interpreted as a black swan plot device. Failure to prepare for or respond quickly after a black swan event can be the kickoff for an entire media empire, as seen in The Stand.

But.

In the way that no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, and no one ever thought black swans could exist in the wild, these events and plot items and the swans themselves do exist, we just weren’t looking for them. Or if we were, we figured they weren’t central to the worldview we were selling.

This has ramifications in all sorts of fields, including writing.

The original black swans—the birds themselves—weren’t known-unknowns or unknown-unknowns, they were moments in time where we’d developed an inability to look for something; where we were technologically limited in what we could see; or where we’d decided not to see, because we’d assumed a different premise was true. Some call this a failure of imagination. Some call it hubris.

On occasion, I like to call it a pile of crows dressed up in a swan suit.

Why crows? Because while they’re not hard to see, crows are so quotidian that they often go unseen, until they accumulate into something more dramatic. The collective nouns for crows are multiple themselves: most well known is “murder,” but “horde” and “wake” also apply. As such, a group of crows can be loud and unruly, and they can disappear just about anything they put their minds to (even a body). But from a distance, what they look like is a single dark entity. And the reverse is also true—a single dark entity (for instance, a black swan) can sometimes be revealed to be composed of smaller things.

Because in this highly technical world, as black swan events become cited more frequently (making them as a species even more statistically probable, right?) what we are often not seeing is small errors cascading into big ones. The funny two-digit dating-standard some programmer deployed to save a few keystrokes, or some program memory. The line of code that no one really understood but hey, Bob wrote the original and Bob was a really good guy so we’re leaving it. The dump-cache that accidentally never clears, which is then discovered by hackers.

Each of these items is an error, whether small or large. A black mark, a crow. A pile of them together, cascading over time—left untended by a series of burned-out coders in dead-end jobs with managers urging them to produce widgets faster and better—can look like a swan. But it’s not.

In fiction, as in life, while the appearance of one crow may not be statistically significant, the arrival of many crows begins to have a weighty effect. And the process of that influx, especially when built as a subtle reward for astute readers, can create a powerful sense of suspense and mystery. Will people see the signs in time? Will they respond?

Moreover, the crows-in-a-swan-suit analogy underscores another important issue: accumulation. Often, errors are made by different people at different times, often with differing motivations. Sometimes, they only become events when they accumulate, compound, and combine to create a dangerous situation.

Crows represent those multiple potentials accumulating, unnoticed, except occasionally by the astute reader, until such time as they emerge fully formed in their swan suit. In these instances, a writer is freed from the problem of the too-stupid-to-live protagonist who didn’t notice the one thing that could have saved everyone, because not many people notice small errors.

I’d add something to the worldbuilding kit, and something to the idea of a black swan, which is this: keep an eye out for crows.

A great, upcoming, example of this can be found in Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, out this summer from Penguin Random House. For some in the book, the kickoff event does feel like an unknown-unknown, but Wendig does an amazing job showing both the accumulation of errors small and large and the societal cost to those who try to fix small problems before they become big ones.

In reality, errors such as a weak line of code or a missing cache-delete may be initially too statistically small to notice. People have been educated to focus on the big, known quantities—on the white swans, for instance. And the hard truth often faced in real life, is that it is very costly to chase down all the small errors in case they may cause a bigger one—especially when done properly, an exhaustive investigative effort keeps a large, catastrophic event from happening. Many then question the nature of the actual emergency, and whether prevention was needed in the first place.

So, there’s a strange societal reward built into reality for allowing small problems to accumulate—progress is happening—don’t sweat the small stuff! And there’s not much of a reward for chasing down those errors until too many gather. At that point, a fix is much harder—and much more heroism is required.

But the “I didn’t see that coming” caveat applies, especially in fiction—when a narrative misses obvious errors accumulating and grabs for a black swan event instead, the risk is flipped. Black swans can feel too sudden, too overwhelmingly impossible, without at least a few feathers appearing earlier in the plot.

For writers especially, it is well worth considering that increasingly often, some black swan events—while being impossible to predict in timing and impact—are visible in the wild when you understand that they can be made up of lots of smaller errors.

It’s the awareness of the small errors, rather than the plot-twist level appearance of a black swan (or ninjas, a rogue moon explosion, any Inquisition, your choices are vast) which can and should be a part of your worldbuilding practice.

Those things that go unobserved? Find them and use them. They just may add up to a satisfying conclusion in a much different way than the sudden appearance of a swan, where the swan always was.

About the Author

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for three Nebula awards, two Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. They include her Andre Norton- and Compton Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor, 2015); its sequels, Cloudbound and Horizon; the middle-grade novel Riverland (forthcoming from Abrams in April 2019); and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary.” Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and her website.

Editor’s Desk:
A Celebration of Many Things

Neil Clarke

Our annual Reader’s Poll came to a close last month as six finalists for our best cover and story of 2018 competed against one another in a second round of voting. Each and every one of these works would have been a worthy winner.

Finalists for Best Story

“Dandelion” by Elly Bangs (September)

“The Anchorite Wakes” by R.S.A. Garcia (August)

“Umbernight” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (February)

“When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller (October)

“Octo-Heist in Progress” by Rich Larson (November)

“Sour Milk Girls” by Erin Roberts (January)

Finalists for Best Cover Art

“Islamic Universe 2” by Luis Carlos Barragán (July)

“Belt 71” by Pascal Blanché (December)

“New Life” by Helen Ilnytska (November)

“The Storkfriars” by Sean Murray (June)

“Postcards from Asia: The Floodplain” by Pat Presley (October)

“Vukileyo!” by Artur Sadlos (January)

Our 2018 winners are:

Best Story
 “When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller (October)

and

Best Cover Art
“The Storkfriars” by Sean Murray (June)

Congratulations to Simone, Sean, and all our finalists!

Last month was also the Kickstarter campaign for Xia Jia’s first English language collection. I am pleased to announce that not only will Clarkesworld Books be publishing A Summer Beyond Your Reach: Stories by Xia Jia, but it also unlocked three stretch goals:

An original story by Xia Jia written specifically for her collection.

An US edition of Touchable Unreality Volume One, a bilingual anthology I edited which has only previously been available in China.

New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, a mini-anthology featuring up-and-coming Chinese writers that have never been previously published in English.

That last goal was originally supposed to be 25,000 words, but we’ve dedicated everything earned over the target of that stretch goal to making it even larger. I’m writing this editorial just ahead of the campaign closing, but it looks like it will be at least 36,000 words thanks to the amazing support we’ve received from so many backers.

I have to say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well this campaign has gone. I wasn’t entirely sure how people would react to an imprint that would be entirely focused on translated works and I’ve been completely blown away by the results we’ve seen. Now the hard work of putting these three projects together begins, but it will be so worth it.

In related news, in last month’s editorial I mentioned that the magazine has received a grant to publish more translations. I couldn’t go into details at the time, but just in case you haven’t seen the updates on my blog, the grant is from LTI Korea to publish nine Korean science fiction stories in our 2019 line-up. These stories will replace reprints in future issues and it’s entirely possible that this will connect to a 2020 Clarkesworld Books project.

So one last thank you for supporting our authors with your votes, by backing the campaign, and your subscriptions too (how else would we pay them for all those amazing tales?) over the last year and into the future.

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 most recent anthology, Not One of Us, was published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Alien Abstract VI

Arthur Haas

About the Artist

Arthur Haas (1969) is a concept artist from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specializes in environment design and concept art for the entertainment industry and has a passion for science fiction. Arthur works as a freelance artist for major Hollywood film studios and international book publishers.